Word: playpen
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...most practical invention since the zipper. It goes almost everywhere, and it does almost anything. It never touches a drop of water, and sips gasoline daintily, as if through a straw. It is a durable first car, a dependable second car, a disposable station car, a playpen for the kids, and a kennel for the family dog. Now the Volkswagen has a new, bolder occupation: it is off to the race track-squealing brakes, crashing gears, smoking tires...
Such a book cannot be dismissed by a shrug of criticism. But perhaps the best thing to do would be to remember the real children and forget the book's theological homunculi in their barbed-wire playpen...
Invented in 1944 for his daughter Debbie, Skinner's box is a combination crib-playpen that a baby can call home for as long as two years. It has Plexiglas windows, and inside, the temperature is kept at 80° or so and the humidity at 50%. The baby is free of confining clothes and "prisonlike" crib bars. He wears only a diaper, sleeps on a trampoline-like plastic mesh that drains away any leakage. The idea is to let him thrash about, play better and develop faster. Pop saves on baby clothes, and with less lifting, laundry...
Having broken all the toys in his theatrical playpen, Critic Steiner feels a twinge of remorse. He closes his book with the memory of a great tragic moment in the modern theater. It was a performance by Helene Weigel, widow of Bertolt Brecht, in Brecht's Mother Courage. Mother Courage has just been forced to look at her dead soldier son twice without permitting herself a sign of recognition: "As the body was carried off, Weigel looked the other way and tore her mouth wide open. The shape of the gesture was that of the screaming horse in Picasso...
...courtyard is full of rosebushes, boxwoods, a grape arbor, and mirrors on an inland wall that reflect the sea. A statue of St. Francis stands in the center in a filled-in pond that once, in another era, brimmed with gallons of champagne. At one end is a playpen big enough for a growing mastiff, but it only contains one tiny Kerr...