Word: magdalene
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Best college that never went to a basketball player: Magdalen, Oxford...
...surfeit of snobbism and a poverty of research. The professors treat their audience like a class of life's freshmen. They offer no criteria, arbitrarily choosing the Best Book of the Bible (Job), the World's Best Restaurant (France's Pyramide), the Best College at Oxford (Magdalen), the Best Flavor of Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream (Mandarin Chocolate). Such judgments are ideal for those who would rather sample the wine label than the wine. But even these insecure customers can find little solace in The Best. Many of its items are mere common sense (the Best Chess Player...
Baldini's staff has made startling discoveries as successive layers of earlier restoration and overpainting come off. Donatello's wooden carving of Mary Magdalen, which stood in the Baptistry in Florence, was described for years as an almost expressionist work. It had the blind eyeballs of old age and severe monochrome brown skin. These features turn out to be the work of later hands. On cleaning, the Magdalen's lively painted eyes, light skin and polychrome garments were restored. Thus its whole content has changed...
...animals beyond St. Peter's rooster and a fly perched on a blind beggar's hurdy-gurdy; the sole object of his scrutiny was man and woman and their intimate possessions - the texture and sheen of velvet, the transparency of a glass, or (as in the Wrightsman Magdalen) the exact difference in the highlights that a tallow flame creates on the bone of a skull and on the grayed sea luster of a pearl. But La Tour was not a painter of still lifes with figures. A phrase like "the human condition," though worn...
...however crudely it does demonstrate how this particular comedy often goes. Certainly, the most hilarious bits (and they embrace a whole gamut of comedy) belong to Joan Tolentino, as Miss Gilchrist, a social worker who "takes insults in the name of our insulted saviour." Since she's more Mary Magdalen than Virgin Mary, she ends up having to take a good many, too--which is all to the better, since she lets go with the most wonderful shriek everytime someone in the cast tries to feel...