Word: martianize
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...Mercutio in Katharine Cornell's version of Romeo and Juliet; 20 when he wowed New York by staging an all-black Macbeth; 22 when he became the celebrated radio voice of Lamont Cranston ("The Shadow knows!"); 23 when he touched off a national panic with his broadcast of a Martian invasion in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Invited to Hollywood to do pretty much as he pleased, he started out by creating one of the best films ever made, Citizen Kane, which he starred in, directed and partly wrote before he was 26. Ever since, for nearly half...
...first glance the pages hold pure nonsense: two small boys watch a television set; below them is the legend "R T-M S B-N B-10." But when the letters and number are pronounced, young readers can crack the code: "Our team is bein' beaten." A Martian has descended from a spaceship. The line explains, "N-M-E L-E-N." A doctor holds aloft a test tube and announces, "I F D Q-R!" The whimsical drawings and ingenious punch lines are M-U-S-N from the beginning...
...architect Alvar Aalto, bless him, was always slightly out of it. He never lingered at the hothouse of Germany's Bauhaus; instead he spent the '20s in provincial Finland, designing for towns. His buildings are modern all right, sleek and sensible and just a bit Martian, but Aalto never took the final vows of modernism. Strict symmetry and monoliths left him cold. Rather, an Aalto building is apt to swell or zigzag confoundingly, to have lines and textures that seem more botanical and geological than geometrical. Ahead of his time, he declined to enforce the brittlest dogmas...
Sagan used the findings of the 1971 "Mariner 9" space mission to Mars to illustrate the after effects of nuclear war. Particles in the Martian atmosphere stirred up by dust storms formed a cloud over the surface of the planet, he said, raising the upper atmospheric temperature while lowering surface temperatures and creating an artificial winter...
Most humor has a target, and no one (even a Martian) completely enjoys being the butt of a joke. But unless Americans come to terms with the realities of human nature and of life within a chromatic culture, they will simply stifle a rich source of national humor without promoting a genuine and good natured appreciation of human differences...