Word: outwitting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Twilight Zone (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Playwright-Producer Rod Serling's exercise in fantasy. This one brings back that old pitchman Ed Wynn to play an old pitchman trying to outwit "Mr. Death...
...setting, Paul Davenant's will to die often seems stronger than his will to live, and more than once, suicide seems preferable to treatment. What makes life tolerable is his love affair with a girl patient, whose courage surpasses his; her simple presence makes it seem necessary to outwit and outfight the disease. For the first time in his life, he knows love, but he knows it only because it is framed in suffering...
...Germans were also very nasty about anti-handling booby traps. One type of fuse was supersensitized after the bomb hit the ground, with a switch so delicate that it could operate if the bomb shell was tapped with a pencil. Hartley's men learned to outwit some mechanisms by injecting a quick-setting plastic. If the bomb is too difficult to defuse, they drill holes in its casing and melt out the explosive with live steam...
Sometimes the British even outwit themselves. Last month electricians of the Yorkshire Electricity Board set about installing a new transformer for the small, 30-house village of Carlecotes (pop. 105). When the current was turned on, it lasted exactly 50 seconds. In that time, 72 light bulbs burst in their sockets. Three village street lamps blazed like searchlights and then burned out. TV and radio sets smoked like burning leaves. Electric motors for milking machines and a bottling plant sizzled. Water heaters exploded. The fireworks over, Carlecotes was plunged back into darkness...
...then gingerly deposited in a pillowcase. Dassies (shrill-voiced, rabbity creatures, distantly related to the elephant) and porcupines are deliberately driven into the water since, despite their small size, dassies bite when cornered and porcupines are armed with quills. Even in the water, it takes three men to outwit a porcupine...