Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...make possible the grim humor with which the Marines accept their defensive watch. Atop Major Froncek's bunker stands a six-foot-high handmade catapult, which he smilingly explains is "a last-ditch weapon in case we are overrun." Not far away stands a siren that is no joke. Should the base ever be overrun, it will scream a signal to everyone to burrow deep down inside their bunkers. Then all the other U.S. artillery bases within range will wheel their guns around to fire on Gio Linh itself in an attempt to blast the North Vietnamese right...
...Eunuch from Munich. It is perhaps because of their humorous content that limericks have never been a popular art form with women, who, as a class, do not enjoy a joke about sex unless they are perfectly sure that it is not a joke against sex. They cannot take with tea and sympathy the sexual troubles of the bobby from Nottingham Junction, or fertile Myrtle, or the eunuch from Munich, or the young man of St. John's. Or the fellow named Brett...
...literature nowadays, it is fashionable to joke raucously about death or use it as an existential symbol rather than write quietly and seriously about it. An Antique Man is an old-fashioned book. In this seemingly autobiographical first novel, the author solemnly chronicles the death of a nice man, cut down by cancer in his middle 50s. Unfortunately, the work falls considerably short of A Death in the Family, James Agee's classic in this genre...
...exhaust gases, consisting largely of carbon dioxide, are put to work. From the heat exchanger, they are pumped through a scrubber, which rids them of harmful sulfur dioxide, and into the greenhouses, where they provide the proper level of carbon dioxide for ideal plant growth. "Like the old joke about the efficiency of meat-packing plants," says Hodges, "we are even using the squeal of the pig by tapping every beneficial aspect of this engine...
...song--yells, bravos, laughter, and exit the Beatles, their musical over. Except for their most triumphant and theatrical bit of all--an epilogue which wipes the grin off the face of a wildly contented audience and sends them home with the willies. A "Day in the Life" is no joke; all the buoyant comic comment finally gives way to a flood of tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness...