Word: known
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...five-mile crescent of Copacabana and the other Rio beaches blazed with the ritual candles of some 600,000 devotees of Brazil's fastest-growing cult: "spiritism." Altars were set up everywhere in the sand, heaped with fetishes and food offerings, bottles of beer and the rotgut alcohol known as cachaça. Around the altars, while drums pounded faster and faster, men, women and children danced and shouted, stomped and babbled. Yemanjá, goddess of the sea, was the special object of honor; poor families from Rio's slums and evening-clad nightclub patrons waded into...
...census some 900,000 Brazilians declared themselves spiritists, but best estimates are that about 10 million of Brazil's 61 million population now indulge in the cults. One, the Confederação Espirita da Umbanda, claims, in Rio alone, more than 1,000 centers, known as terreiros (earth places...
Ever since the Russians launched their Sputnik III on May 15, 1958, rocket experts have known that they had the potential ability to toss a good-sized bird out of the earth's gravitational field. To put a satellite on a nearby orbit around the earth takes only about 25% less speed than the escape velocity (25,000 m.p.h.) that will free it from the earth. All the Russians needed to do was to increase slightly the power of Sputnik Ill's launching rockets or to reduce its final weight. U.S. failure to reach the moon was mainly...
...Alastair Sim bear small resemblance to the characters Shaw had in mind, but in company with John Robinson and Felix Aylmer they make a ludicrously Aristophanic chorus of sawbones. On the serious side, Director Asquith has had more surprising success. Dirk Bogarde (Doctor in the House, et seq.), best known in the U.S. as a sort of British Robert Wagner, turns in a remarkably subtle and mature performance as the heroic villain. As for the heroine, any competent judge of film flesh might confidently have ranked Leslie (Gigi) Caron a little lower than Jayne Mansfield on any list of Girls...
...major contribution of Potter's new handbook is the appearance of a bearded character known only as The Lawrenceman. It was never certain that he had ever actually read the works of D. H. Lawrence, but he had got hold of a few phrases and made brilliant use of them. There was, for instance, the occasion when a tweedy iconoclast named Cornelius Sticking loudly criticized a county family for putting on their best clothes to go to church on Sundays. The Lawrenceman merely looked out over his beard and asked mildly: "Is that a badness?" Sticking only managed...