Word: oed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...O'Casey derives his humor from bare-faced lying, brazen self-contradiction and other forms of impudence, chutzpah, and general damned cheek on the part of his characters. These are old theatrical devices; O'Casey handles them crudely, and Mr. Stein can think of no improvements...
...spectacle of poor, hard-working Juno Boyle slaving away to support her husband, a strutting "paycock" who spends his days carousing with his crony in the pub. But there isn't. The story of Juno's daughter, Mary, who impregnates and then deserts her, raises the possibility that O'Casey is the arrantest disher-up of unrefurbished cliche who ever presumed to deal in "serious" drama. Only in the account of Juno's son, Johnny, the unwilling informer, do O'Casey and his faithful amanuensis ever succeed in evoking sympathy...
Proceeding, perhaps, on the tenable theory that what they had in hand was a revival of O'Casey's play with occasional interpolated musical numbers, the producers engaged Melvyn Douglas and Shirley Booth to play Captain and Mrs. Boyle. Nothing in their performances compensates for their egregious violation of the rule that he who can't sing, shouldn't. Mr. Douglas at least does a good gruff job on what emerges as a thoroughly nasty character, but Miss Booth, in what should be a congenial role, seems almost uncomfortable; her famous infectious warm-heartedness is unaccountably missing, as well...
...children. Rounding Cape Farewell, the southernmost tip of the island, known as the "worst in the north" for storms, the Hans Hedtoft struggled against the Arctic currents, icy polar winds and mountainous, 20-ft. seas. Next morning at 11:54 the Hans Hedtoft's radio crackled an S O S: "Collision with iceberg." Less than an hour later came word that the engine room was filling fast from a gash in the riveted steel hull...
...earth is generally considered a slightly flattened sphere, its flatness at the poles resulting from plastic response to its spinning motion. Last week Dr. John A. O'Keefe, assistant director of the Theoretical Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, gave evidence before the American Physical Society that the earth is very slightly pear shaped. If its continents are evened out and its spin-flattening allowed for, it has a faint bulge around the North Pole, a faint depression around the South Pole, and a depressed ring in the north mid-latitudes (see diagram...