Word: odd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Guard. The rise of the TV era in Hollywood has placed the movie people, themselves long cast as parvenus, in the odd role of the social old guard. Social Arbiter Mike Romanoff, the town's leading restaurateur, sniffs at the "dirty shirt" school that he finds prevalent among TV performers as well as newcomers to films. Says he: "The TV actors can afford to eat here, but they haven't progressed beyond the drugstore counter. They think differently, behave differently, live differently. The dirty shirt is a form of snobbery, you know. We're snobs...
...quiet times between parties, the Sultan has found time to keep his household stocked with the requisite number of permissible wives; they have borne him 20-odd children. Wife No. 1, the "official consort," is the daughter of a neighboring sultan, but Wife No. 4 found her way to the Sultan's side via the dance halls of Kuala Lumpur. As the mother of the Sultan's latest-born son, she has been generally considered the royal favorite...
Better Chemists. Weiss and Shipman dried the clam flesh, reduced it to ash and dissolved the ash in dilute acid. The solution showed characteristic gamma rays that could come only from cobalt 60. This was odd, they thought; cobalt 60 is not a fission product, and it had not been found in other radioactive material, even in samples from much closer to Ground Zero. To make doubly sure. Weiss and Shipman ran a careful analysis. One clam proved to contain one-tenth of a microcurie of cobalt 60; the other had one-third of a microcurie...
Beneath this outer skin there is no set costume: anything dowdy and off-beat enough to be considered European will do. Such outfits as wide-welt corduroy suits cut in odd shapes seem popular, but ordinarily Continentalism can be spotted in smaller, more specific articles of dress. Foulard scarves and desert boots are, admittedly, more British than European, but they should be counted. Dark-colored shirts are being worn too much by the Cantabrigian Gentleman types now, with tweeds, to be much good to Continentalism; and grey-and khaki-colored work shirts are part of the bigger, people-yes movement...
Rick's Cafe Americain, whose proprietor wears a white dinner jacket, speaks with a faint lisp, and drinks a great deal when unhappy, sports an odd assortment of minor characters; they are bit parts, from which the actors have squeezed everything. Fat Sidney Greenstreet, with fez, is Farrari, the jovial "leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca." Peter Lorre is a funny, intense worm who sells blackmarket visas to refugees stranded in the unoccupied French city; the producers could afford to lead him off screaming after fifteen minutes: but in that time he created a lasting figure...