Word: pokes
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...another futuristic fantasy, people leave their own bodies and enter at will any one of a stockpile of more attractive bodies. It is a ludicrous extension of the current preoccupation with heart and other body-part replacements, and Vonnegut uses it to poke fun at the idea that social and emotional problems occur only because humanity is locked in decaying protoplasmic prisons. The author is even more pointed in his attack on the notion that if all humans are not born equal, the good society will equalize them. Consequently, in his story Harrison Bergeron, a "Handicapper General" cripples people mentally...
Well here's a poke...
Fragile and finely-balanced machines usually get unthinking respect from us poor humans, but who has not dreamed sometimes of impulsively jamming a crowbar into the glassy cool facade of a computer? Watching Peter Townshend furiously poke his guitar with a gleaming steel microphone stand was strangely uplifting. Perhaps this is the mystical turn-on that violence is said to give. One can reasonably hope that such exhibitions as the Who's will only serve as emotional releases and not create a taste for violence for its own sake...
...deep should well-amused readers poke beneath the jaunty black humor and Joycean wordplay? This remains a perennial Burgess puzzle. He is a composer and music critic, a one-time lecturer in phonetics, a learned, lapsed Catholic, and-not the least-a superb writer. Unlike Graham Greene, he does not separate his "serious" novels from his "entertainments." Rather, he tries to make them all two-for-one propositions...
...Washington Streets. It attracts a varied audience. With a film like its Christmas attraction, Valley of the Dolls, the Tremont side draws from the slightly vulgar matrons. Not Boston's grandes dames, mind you, but the displaced suburbanites who just love to come into The City. After they poke around in the nylons at Stern's and buy half a Bavarian cheese cake for a buck-twenty at S.S. Pierce, while they are still foaming at the corners of their reconstructed mouths with the salivary marshmallow of their Bailey's sundaes, they decide to duck into a movie so they...