Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are a trifle too many Chekhovian tableaux artily arranged by Director Tony Giordano - these are distinctly not those "sisters" - but Ladyhouse Blues is the sort of play Chekhov might have liked...
...sort of thing you expect by now in a Woody Allen flick. Allen is sitting in this restaurant in Manhattan, see, when up walks a kid with big eyes and braces who looks just like Allen might have at 13. "Hello," says the kid. "Can I have your autograph?" Allen writes, not his name, but a note: "Hi. I'm casting for my new major motion picture. Would you like to come for a screen test?" Naturally the kid passes the test, gets a part and grows up to become a big movie star. Except that Anthony DePaola...
...partial price for his apostasy: sneers, vilification, few invitations to literary parties. Those who attacked him assumed an attitude of moral superiority. In an atmosphere of growing intellectual conformity, rational debate became irrelevant. During a discussion among antiwar protesters, for example, one participant expressed fear that the Communists might take over Viet Nam if the U.S. withdrew. Jason Epstein, who helped launch the New York Review of Books, scornfully responded: "So you like to see little babies napalmed." End of discussion...
...grains of sand the universe could contain (1051, he said). Today, however, mind-walloping numbers are no longer oddities; they are the stuffing of ordinary news and public discourse. While even the biggest figures no doubt possess meaning, it is impossible not to suspect that many casually circulated numbers might as well be the music of the spheres...
Indeed, the googol might be a good symbol for a time when the world is under the sway of technology, when it has no choice, as Jacques Ellul says in The Technological Society, but to "don mathematical vestments." The googol is the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros (see above). It was made famous, or infamous, in the 1930s by Mathematician Edward Kasner. He also offered the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros - so many zeros, said Kasner, that no matter how tiny they could not all be written on a piece of paper as wide...