Word: octopus
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...Octopus. He heartily dislikes actors and always insists that musicians get the lower berths when traveling with dramatic troupes. He hates the greens on golf courses, and when playing, simply skips them. He is eternally suspicious of lawyers. He believes "they can steal without getting put in jail" and habitually greets them with the cry of "Burglar!" He is against John L. Lewis, amateurs of all kinds, and the custom of eating lunch. He is convinced that the legislative process was conceived for only one purpose-grilling Petrillo like a frankfurter. When annoyed by an opponent, he screams: "Tell...
Last week, in his efforts to stave off this eventuality, Petrillo had tangled himself up in the works of the canned-music business with the bellicose ingenuity of an octopus in a pea thresher...
...After police had searched two days for Actor Joseph Cotten's car, reported stolen, Cotten found it and called Ilsley's men to retrieve it, from his pool. Another time, they fished a live deer out of Joan Fontaine's pool. Jack Benny, who had an octopus molded into the bottom of his tank for laughs, called the maintenance men to gouge out the octopus' eyes; they scared his children...
...nation's music box-offices, and consequently on the lives of musicians. One suggested solution--musicians should be amateurs, and earn their bread by other means. Another--to decentralize American music in various ways, instituting more purely local artists, thereby cutting some tentacles off the New York critic-octopus. There were also countless proposals for improved criticism, for broadened criticism, for more criticism, and for less criticism...
...problems are sensibly solved by subsidiaries on the scene. This is partly due to the Standard dictum: first get efficient and then get big. And it is partly due to the trust-busting days of 1911, when John D. Rockefeller's Jersey Standard octopus had its tentacles cut up into 34 pieces. Though most of the pieces have grown bigger than the old trust, none has garnered a big enough share of the U.S. oil business to raise the scare of monopoly. And now that the Rockefellers have sold out the bulk of their holdings, no individual stock interest...