Word: navels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Japan has long had a special regard for the navel. The shape of the umbilicus of a newborn baby would be discussed at length, and if it happened to point downward, the parents would brace themselves for a weakling child who would bring them woe. The thunder god Raijin, with his terrifying drums, his great horns and long tusks, was said to have an insatiable appetite for young navels, and mothers had constantly to nag their youngsters to keep themselves well covered up. But for all the national preoccupation with it, the navel in Japan never quite achieved the status...
...once sickly child ("At the time, my navel was down-beamed"), Murata became fascinated as a young man with health fads, began delving into the Spartan training of the Zen Buddhist priests. By 1951, at the age of 55, he had built up a whole philosophy around the navel's influence on health. He started the Hesoten (literally, Navel Heaven) Society, swooped down upon factory and-office to proclaim that "the heaven-pointed navel receives blessings therefrom." The navel, he told his growing audiences, is "a medal of culture with which every person is born. Polish it. Value...
...years passed, more and more pallid clerks and exhausted executives began taking Murata's advice by exercising their navels twice a day. The master himself, who looks 15 years younger than he is, climbed down into coal mines to spread the word. He spoke over the radio, taught the maids in the hotels he stayed at how to use their navels while cleaning and scrubbing.*His crusade got results. Executives found themselves less tense, employees more eager, and the phrase "Your navel isn't in it" is now a part of the Japanese language. Today 160 firms...
This One Is the Toni (Toni Carroll; M-G-M LP). Songstress Carroll, billed as a onetime Miss Missouri, belongs to the whisper-from-the-navel school. Her incendiary reading of such ballads as I'm in the Mood for Love and I Only Have Eyes for You will bump the pulse, the album guarantees, "of any red-blooded American man." Toni's signature song (Call Toni) sets the pitch: "I'm all yours and ready to do/ Anything you want me to/ Just dial TONI oh-five-six-eight-three...
...their rather touching desire to make the customers happy, Mr. Abbott and the authors have found a niche in their operations for the well-known strip-teaser Sherry Britton. Though Miss Briton displays an agreeably athletic navel in some belly-dancing sequences, her presence in the cast is the final proof that the proprietors of this enterprise are not austerely high-minded. But a good low-minded farce has delights all its own, and Drink to Me Only may turn into a winner...