Word: move
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Arok's lips move when he speaks, or rather, when Skora speaks through him. Slip a preprogrammed tape cassette into a slot in Arok's back and he will perform a medley of his domestic hits: bend over, rotate his head 180°, shake your hand, tell bad jokes: "You can be replaced by a robot because robots never make mistakes, mistakes, mistakes...
...MOVE can be traced back to 1971, when Vincent Leaphart, a black handyman, took the name of John Africa and established the Movement Toward a More Christian Life, an antitechnology group, which is dedicated to giving America back to the Indians and abolishing all governments "from here to Moscow and Peking." His followers, most of them black, all adopted the surname Africa, bought the house for $4,800 and moved in with their children and dogs...
From across the street, the police are watching, as they have been doing for 16 months, after city officials had decided that the house was a public nuisance and began trying to evict its residents. All belong to a self-styled back-to-nature cult called MOVE (according to members, the name does not stand for anything). Last week the odd state of siege-which has cost Philadelphia some $1.2 million for round-the-clock police surveillance-approached a showdown when a city judge issued warrants for the arrest of 21 MOVE members...
...communal group's lifestyle soon brought objections from neighbors. Members refuse to bathe with soap, and many wear their hair in unkempt dreadlocks. They "recycle" their refuse by dumping it in the yard, a practice that attracts hordes of rats. MOVE mothers give birth naturally, biting off their babies' umbilical cords. Their children do not attend school and usually go naked-even in winter. Members also reject burial; at one point they showed reporters the shriveled corpse of a month-old baby who had died from undisclosed causes...
...MOVE members threatened to kill their own children if city health officials attempted to inspect the house. Later, brandishing M-l rifles, automatic pistols and sawed-off shotguns, they refused to admit building and fire inspectors...