Word: mistakenness
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...life comes from watching television. What might happen, Kosinski wonders, if such a man were suddenly forced to leave home and become a citizen of the real world? The answer to that question is Being There's single joke: no sooner does Chance venture out than he is mistaken for a philosopher, a sex symbol and a potential presidential candidate. The secret of his success is TV. Having been nurtured by the medium, Chance has all the attributes of a perfect TV star; he is bland, nonthreatening and always cheery. It is Kosinski's conceit that even...
This point is brought home in a series of scenes built around the timeless farcical device of mistaken identity. For the gag to work repeatedly, the audience must believe that Chance is so completely blank that he could indeed seem to be all things to all the people he meets. Peter Sellers' meticulously controlled performance brings off this seemingly impossible task; as he proved in Lolita, he is a master at adapting the surreal characters of modern fiction to the naturalistic demands of movies. His Chance is sexless, affectless and guileless to a fault. His face shows no emotion...
While the number of hostages was being argued, the crisis took yet another bizarre twist, this time in Qum. There Khomeini met with six U.S. ministers, apparently under the mistaken impression that they included the three Americans who had visited the embassy. He delivered a tirade against the failings of Christian clergymen and of Pope John Paul II, who has urged that the hostages be released. Asked Khomeini: "Do you know that, with his economic blockade, Mr. Carter intends to let 35 million people die of starvation? Does the Pope know about all this and yet condemn...
...Tooby's characterization of our depiction of hundreds of sociobiologists as "racist, sexist Nazis" is simply untrue and indicates that he has never read our literature or heard us speak. This might account for many of his other mistaken impressions of our position as well. As Nature (Nov. 22, 1979) noted in a full-page article about our forum: "Members of the Group (SftP) emphasized that they were not branding all those who write about sociobiology as extremists--but were drawing attention to the potentially dangerous connections between ideas expressed by scientists and the social and political climate in which...
...believable." One way that Davies makes the Bible come alive during his sermons is by gesturing, mimicking and acting out roles with the skill of a Marcel Marceau. But he finds it "appalling and tragic" that present-day idiom itself sometimes becomes the Gospel, as when "sensitivity training is mistaken for the work of the Holy Spirit." Davies' rich and mostly middle-aged congregation regard him as a star performer and a provocative mind. For his part, he likes to quote Karl Earth, who once described preaching as "an attempt to give God's answers to the questions...