Word: offbeaters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Since the price of military hardware is rocketing (e.g., a B58 costs $8,000,000, the projected B70 "chemical bomber" may cost as much as $20 million), where can cuts best be taken? One favored answer: in manpower, by cutting active forces, reserves and National Guard contingents. One offbeat item that could cut the budget to the tune of $10 billion: an efficient reconnaissance satellite that would keep the U.S. so well posted on the movements of any potential enemy that it might be able to trim its estimates of the losses to be suffered in surprise attacks...
...through seminary fastest and guarantee the best posts-"the 'how-to' courses which will make them the skilled technicians and craftsmen for whom the best market waits." The unmarried student, on the other hand, has more freedom to grow in breadth and depth by ranging through the offbeat areas and collateral readings. "Is there not some danger," asks the Century, "that men who spend seminary time learning to be homemakers are thereafter too apt to be at home in the church as it is and to let the church be at home in the world...
...vision fogs, the boy cultivates a world of offbeat characters where the ironies of life are less barbed and the humor less sardonic. There is a tramp who lives on baked potatoes and slugs of brandy. There is an alcoholic street singer, a kind of turn-of-the-century Bing Crosby ("Boo-boobooboo-boo"). And there is Grandma from Sweden who chews pipe dottle and comes to Denmark fully intending to die, but lives on to plague and embarrass the boy's mother with her unhousebroken back-country habits...
...offbeat nightclubs and twice a week on NBC Radio's Nightline (Tues. and Thurs. 9:10 p.m., E.S.T.), Comic Sahl has been convulsing audiences with his chip-on-shoulder, seemingly ad-libbed yuks. Not everyone has been convulsed. A bitter, nervous type, Sahl talked himself right out of two TV contracts by tactlessly placed sallies, offended network brass by opening one NBC spot with: "Well, kids, if we're good today, General Sarnoff might like us, and if he likes us he'll go to Charles Van Doren and get us more money...
...memories. Yet with them she managed to fashion a book whose style owes nothing to other writers, whose substance is the stuff of a faraway East Indies setting both languorous and violent. In translation, Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is an uncommon reading experience, an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend. Sybille Bedford, another late-starting, first-rate first novelist (TIME, Feb. n, 1957), has put it well: "Someone who knows something worth knowing has written this book...