Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...outlaw shot & killed Deputy Sheriff William E. Tibbett, father of Baritone Lawrence Tibbett. He earned pocket money as a newsboy, later as a cub reporter for the Bakersfield Californian. In high school he spent summers as a call-boy waking up railroaders for the S.P., did odd jobs as a freight hustler and farm hand, learned to play the clarinet in the school band. He still carries a card in the musicians' union...
Every month in the U.S., almost 20,000,000 avid readers pore over 20-odd periodicals devoted to the greater glamor of Hollywood's stars. But in recent months the readers have seemed less avid. Movie magazine sales, which rose more than 400% in the 15 years before 1946, slipped sharply when the movie box office slumped last fall and the studios canceled 60% of their movie-magazine advertising...
...Republic), after assuring you of your sanity in a well-advised prologue (with a glimpse of Producer Ken Murray and a couple of other human beings), settles down to its real business and drifts serenely out of this world. The actors and extras, in this astounding film are 200-odd birds - mostly midget parrots. The bird actors whistle, or appear to whistle, jazz obbligati. They wear bow ties and little hats, operate a streetcar, a taxi and a hook-&-ladder. They live, it is painful to report, in a town called Chirpendale, whose main intersection is Birdway and 42nd Street...
...most incredible things about this incredible film is the fact that it isn't nearly as terrible as it sounds. In an odd sort of way, it is fun. Much of the laborious cuteness, questionable bit by bit, is so wildly preposterous that the total effect is cheerfully insane-a little as if it were possible to have a happy, harmless case of the d.t.s. The movie will undoubtedly bore some people, disgust some and delight others; but on its novelty value alone, it may make a lot of money. The mere thought of the human and subhuman labor...
...saved by what Edmund Wilson calls Mencken's genial and acrid relish for the flavor of American life. Even more helpful are the odd anecdotes scattered through it, possessing the sort of owlish, stubborn humor that comes from wringing a subject dry and then wringing it some more. "In late years," says Mencken, "it is me has even got support from eminent statesmen. When, just before Roosevelt II's inauguration day in 1933, the first New Deal martyr, the Hon. Anton J. Cermak, was shot ... he turned to Roosevelt and said, 'I'm glad...