Word: octopus
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Once the world's largest talent agency and more recently Hollywood's leading TV film producer, the Music Corp. of America has long been known in show-business circles as "The Octopus." The sobriquet still stands, even though the company (now called MCA Inc.) stopped handling talent in 1962 under threat of a Justice Department antitrust suit. Besides TV production, MCA has major interests in moviemaking (Universal Pictures), recording (Decca Records) and real estate (Universal City). Last week it agreed to link tentacles with Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corp., itself no small fish when it comes to diversification...
Perched behind the massive console in the audio booth of NBC's Studio No. 4 in Burbank, Calif., Sound Engineer Bill Cole looked a little like an octopus playing the organ. As Singer Andy Williams eased into the opening bars of an up-tempo number, Cole scanned a bewildering battery of gauges and began twiddling and tweaking some of the console's 250 multicolored knobs and switches that are linked to a forest of microphones in the studio. One knob channeled Williams' voice through an echo chamber; others-muffled or brightened various sections of the orchestra...
...title character, Hyman Kaplan (Tom Bosley), is likable even though he is an outrageous showoff. To him and to the other immigrants attending a night-school class in Americanization, the English language is a terrifying octopus at which they slash, tentacle by tentacle, in a melee of dialect comedy and amusing linguistic boners. Kaplan is in a one-man class by himself. If the teacher, an earnest young Ivy League graduate named Mr. Parkhill (Gary Krawford) rebukes him, Kaplan rebukes right back. Kaplan answers twice as many questions as are ever asked, and holds the attention of his fellow class...
...welded metal sculptures of Richard Hunt, 32, currently the subject of a major exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Center. They seem deliberately designed to elude description. Some are needly and spiky, reminiscent of a mosquito-or perhaps a reconstructed set of blood vessels. Others are bloated, like an octopus with tentacles waving, a man-eating plant, or an anchor squiggling into a second life as a giant sting ray. Still others are stalklike, stiffly articulated into a stack of tibias, and one hangs off the wall-looking for all the world like a pterodactyl. Or then again, maybe a stuffed...
...year and retirement at full pay as early as 55. Theaters in cosmopolitan Montevideo offer such lively fare as Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy and Strindberg's Miss Julia; in the city's quiet little tearooms, a cup of coffee brings free pastries, potato salad, sausages, octopus, pickled cauliflower and caramel pies. At the pleasant seaside resort of Punte del Este, thousands of high-living tourists spread money around like so many beach blankets. In fact, Uruguay's main problem is that it has too much of a good thing...