Word: pets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...routines have been seen before on American TV. Fortunately, they are unkillably hilarious even in repetition. Since the performers understandably need to catch their breath, film clips share equal billing with the live players' stage antics. When John Cleese delivers a diatribe to a shyster pet-shop owner while flogging the dead parrot that has been sold to him, the funning is lethally potent. So is the spoof on TV wrestling, in which the solo performer, Graham Chapman, is finger-jabbed and pretzel-twisted by an invisible opponent...
...child, says his father, "he was always hanging off things." He was-and is-also always dreaming up new things to hang from: the Gyro-Wheel was inspired by a double Ferris wheel he saw in a carnival and the cage toy his son has for his pet hamster. As for his safety, Bale eschews nets but never forgets a cardinal rule: "If you start taking things for granted, you get hurt. It's dangerous not to maintain an edge of fear...
...actual psychological roots of anorexia, there is a great deal of disagreement from hospital to hospital. Each institution compares its anorexic patients, studies their case histories, and occasionally prepares reports on them. Each has a pet theory about the causes of the disease. Each seems to look specifically for its own pet causes in new anorexic patients, so the theories only become reinforced...
Virginia's correspondence eased her loneliness. Much of it seems to have been written only to get letters in return. Desperate for affection, often in the most childish way, she created pet names for all her correspondents. Her cousin Emma Vaughan was variously "Toad", "Todkins", and "Toadlebinks"; her sister Vanessa was "Dolphin", "Sheepdog" or just "Nessa"; her brother Thoby was "Gribbs", "Grim", "Herbert", or "Thobs"; and she signed herself just about anything: "Billy Goat", "Goat", "Goatus Esq.", "Wallaby", "Kangaroo", "Apes", and so forth. Over half the letters in this volume are addressed to Violet Dickinson, a six foot two spinster...
Updike, like us all, has his pet bemusements. The most obvious and protracted is sexuality ("the monstrous and gummy organs of sex, which look like wounds"), with particular respect to women...