Word: manias
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...title. The Day Nothing Happened telegraphs the gentle punch that Humorist Corey Ford (Has Anybody Seen Me Lately? Never Say Diet) has aimed at the current publishing mania for Day books. He parodies the pompous epiphenomena that accompany such ventures, including the introductory note of martyred scholarship, the bow of punctilio to humble assistants ("My thanks to Mr. F. L. Peters at the Information Booth at Grand Central"). And there is the jacket blurb from a fellow authority in the field: "'The most exciting twenty-four hours since the day I shot Jim Bishop'-A. Lincoln...
...Abelman, though, as Muni portrays him, is magnificent. A sort of lower Flatbush Thoreau, he has spent most of his 68 years fighting the 'galoots' ("people who take, and give nothing in return"), and proving that he, at least, is uncorrupted by the 20th century mania for money. Played by an ordinary actor, Dr. Abelman might have appeared a caricature of some wistful or long dead ideal. But Muni in perfect; he never wastes a gesture or an expression, the timbre of his voice is always exactly appropriate to the speech he is delivering...
...America's pet hobbies is "pledging." The average American gives little thought to signing a pledge, and so this process of extracting promises has become a much abused one. The pledge-making mania has not stopped with the Boy Scouts and Sunday School but has found its way into prospective legislation in the form of a bill now before the New York Assembly which proposes that public school teachers be required to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. The purpose of the bill is to eliminate communistic and other extreme propaganda threatening our present system of government. Harvard...
...only Jack likes Victoriana. Of similar affections are rats, for whom Jack has no affection. Indeed, he has a mania, one might say. Where Jack's mania takes him is hard to tell. When at last an exterminator succeeds in catching a few rats, the rats start killing themselves off by eating gold leaf, becoming $100 rats...
...slow to arrive at decisions, he partly made up for it by a relentless, austere capacity for hard work. Even at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, Pope Pius had a mania about wasting a second. Sitting under a red umbrella in the shade of a huge ilex tree (he could not bear strong sunlight), or walking briskly in his shaded garden, he kept his nose buried in documents he was studying. During his solitary, silent and frugal meals, Pius listened to the news broadcasts, but so chary was he of an unnecessary word that once when he sneezed...