Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum. Perhaps because Jones has caught lobsters, sold boats, worked on newspapers and taught school, his showy invasion of the private terrors that lurk just below the surface of apparently calm minds seems somehow fresh-and far removed from the structural, Stygian, self-conscious atrocities of the black comedians with whom...
Other, less perilous problems could turn Apollo 8 from a space spectacular into a humdrum engineering flight. Allowing for such contingencies as the failure of a backup system, an inadvertent early cutoff of the S-4B rocket while it is blasting Apollo toward the moon or unusually intense radiation from the sun, NASA has devised a number of alternative flight plans. Thus, Apollo 8 might merely remain in earth orbit, duplicating Apollo 7's eleven-day flight. It could also loop out as far as 25,000 miles from the earth and then descend into a low earth orbit...
PEOPLE, artists and non-artists alike, have tended to look on artists and their work as something very special, something very much out of the ordinary humdrum existence most of us lead. In truth, artistic creation is no more mystical or magical an experience than setting up equations, and almost as easy to understand. The subject matter--and perhaps even more important, the artistic process--is intrinsically bound to everyday life. The relationship between life and art should be a symbiotic one--art feeding on life and vice versa. This realization, philosophy professor Nelson Goodman argues, is essential, and essentially...
...muscles weakened by inactivity, the three space travelers were in good health -and in better humor than they had been for most of the week. The irritability that they had displayed during exchanges with ground controllers, said the doctors, was a natural consequence of long confinement, a rather humdrum flight and troublesome head colds. NASA's Paul Haney had another explanation: "Something happens to a man when he grows a beard," he quipped. "Right away he wants to protest...
...whirled through orbit after orbit around the earth last week, the growing monotony of the mission was a major measure of its success. Presented with little challenge from the well-functioning spacecraft, Astronauts Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele fought off ennui as they plodded through the humdrum housekeeping and engineering duties necessary to prove their craft moonworthy. They fired and refired the ship's big rocket engine and practiced sighting stars through a sextant; they tested their computers and cooling system, and transmitted to a ground station the same sort of signals a lunar module would send...