Word: humdrums
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...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...
...HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. This adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel turns most of the author's poetry to humdrum visual prose, but Alan Arkin as the gentle, selfless mute John Singer lifts the film out of the ordinary...
...example, is a novel about three characters. Warren, Arthur and Junie, who set up platonic housekeeping together, squabble amiably, seek work, vacation at the seashore and, in various ways, find love. Presumably, such a book would have to be filled with novelistic bravado to lift it above the humdrum. But since Warren is a paraplegic, Arthur a near-spastic and Junie a hideously deformed victim of an acid attack, the atmosphere is already painfully tense. The challenge for the author is to keep everybody's emotions-his own, his protagonists' and the reader's-from getting...
...death row, or in the terror of a seven-year-old Negro child in an adult ward for the mentally ill, or in what Norman Mailer said or did not say to the college students in Austin." Unabashedly liberal and outspoken, the weekly was often exasperating, sometimes wrong, never humdrum or stale...
Horse-show habits are so humdrum these days-all jodhpurs and jackets and little black caps. But the equestrian quadrille calls for costumes as well as class, and Britain's Princess Anne, 17, was making the most of it prettily dressed in a grey brocade Georgian coat, lace jabot, tricorn hat and wig. To the strains of Strauss, she and three chums put their mounts through the paces, and when the day's events were over, young Anne had won the Senior Individual and Training Cup, a nice surprise to take home to her horse-loving parents...