Word: humdrums
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...Editor I. O. Evans, because they are riddled with inaccuracies. Moreover, a story like Round the Moon cannot even be relished for its fantasy value, because to modern "readers of 'space-opera,' a mere flight round the moon, culminating in a drop into the Pacific, seems almost humdrum...
Probably NIMH's biggest boner was in trying to ignore the tranquilizing drugs. Its top brass are accused of being too Freudian ("Analytically oriented," as they put it) and scarcely interested in anything so humdrum as drugs for the mind. Instead of setting up rigidly controlled studies to evaluate the drugs, they appointed committees that belittled them. Last year Congress rammed $2,000,000 down NIMH's throat and ordered it to get going on a comprehensive tranquilizer evaluation. The work is hopefully scheduled to begin in July-only three years late...
...introspection, build up to the effect aimed at--an appearance of depravity. Cantabrigians under the spell of Continentalism would join the desperate people in Sartre's stories and the creatures of Camus in their state of elevated wretchedness--a vilifying yet inexpensive estrangement that sets them off from their humdrum fellows. They have in their minds' eye the limbo of clandestine disbelief they think is occupied by post-war, or just post-nineteenth century, European intellectual degenerates. Needless to say, they fall short, and usually end up feeling what they imagine French poets feel or at least what philosophy students...
...Pagliacci. Most critics agreed that Olivier, with real virtuosity and superb support, had disproved the footlight adage that actors can be no better than their material. But Playwright Osborne was not disparaged too severely. Of all theatrical talents, perhaps the uncanniest is an ability to write the sort of humdrum drama that great actors can instinctively exalt. On this bittersweet basis, John Osborne got his share of the applause. But the tears, including those of Actor Olivier's wife Vivien Leigh, were strictly accorded to Sir Laurence...
Enter, Caesar. Born in 1880, one of six children, Ivar Kreuger enjoyed a comfortable, humdrum boyhood in the forest-encircled town of Kalmar, Sweden. After cheating his way through school, and with an engineer's diploma in his pocket, Ivar began ricocheting around the globe. He did wiring jobs on Manhattan's Plaza and St. Regis Hotels, operated a restaurant -in Johannesburg. Back in Stockholm in 1908, he co-founded the building firm of Kreuger & Toll. Then he took over his family's three match factories, was shortly gobbling up competitors and building his giant Swedish match...