Word: minding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What can be the "obvious attraction" for a woman, Freudian or otherwise, in "battling a steel ball at targets, into holes, and through chutes"? The writer's explicit association of this description of pinball with sex indicates an abhorrent link in his mind between sex and violence toward women. Mr. Attanasio is not selective, though, in displaying sexual prejudice. He also exhibits racial arrogance in depicting Tommy's Armenian restaurant-owner who emits word-like syllables between "aargh's and grzhth's" and a pinball-playing "short Canuck in a bogus leather jacket." Another writer claims that, "For entertainment, "Whorehouse...
...unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the creations and endeavors." He was supremely self-confident; if prevailing opinion was that a device could not be invented, that only made Edison more convinced that it could. And Conot depicts a man who was totally open...
Edison had habits of mind that can still be useful to would-be inventors and their bosses. One was simple-but incredible-persistence. It was Edison who said that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." No matter that he hired assistants to do the sweating while he provided the spark; nearly all his inventions came after thousands of experiments that failed but taught him something. The only device that worked on the first try was the phonograph. It was a piece of serendipity; Edison had been trying to invent a device that would permit telephone messages to be sent...
...with their brains. He plastered his labs with a quotation from Sir Joshua Reynolds: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking," to which Edison added one of his own: "The man who doesn't make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasures in life." A most unorthodox and in many ways unattractive thinker, Edison nonetheless multiplied the pleasures of life for everyone who listens to a record, watches a movie or flips a light switch...
...Spanish were stunned by the sophistication of Aztec culture and desperately needed justification for destroying it. After the Aztecs were destroyed and the slave trade dried up, both the cannibalism theme and the slave trade turned to Africa. "As one group of cannibals disappeared," Arens writes, "the European mind conveniently invented another...