Word: pokes
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That lifestyle can't last--at least not without some adaptation. The dated caravan is running up against the changes that come with the modernity overtaking Brazil. Huge American Caterpillar bulldozers are ripping through the jungle, and the "fishbones" of TV antennas poke up everywhere. In one hamlet, Gypsy and Salome explore the apparently deserted town, wondering whether to present their show, only to find the entire community sitting in churchlike attendance on a single, tiny TV screen glowing with disco action from the dance floor of "American Bandstand." Searching for towns where progress has not yet stolen their audience...
When they poke fun at Hollywood (a tough target!) in "Glamor Profession," they debase their argument by setting the lyrics to L.A.-mellow music. And this isn't clever melodic satire, because "My Rival" is much of the same, setting funk back a few decades. The vocal tracks removed, "My Rival" could play over airport sound systems...
...easy to poke fun at Granville, though. He's dropped the banker's blue and briefcase in favor of Biblical garb and balloons, and his following has shown that the investment crowd, or at least large portions of it, are just as loony and irrational as anybody else. The next time some Ec 10 section leader explains about the inescapable logic of the market, about the incontrovertible laws of supply and demand, ask him about Granville...
Some of the words poke fun at party leaders, others at the political situation itself. In camp jargon, the word for the Soviet Union means "big zone." "The prison camps are usually called zones, since if you try to go on or off them, you are usually shot at," Uspensky explains. "This word just means that the whole country is a big prison...
...Just as the computer itself derives, however, from the simple proposition that all mathematical logic can be reduced to various combinations of zero and one, these revolutionary upheavals in human society are clearly vis ible in the distance. Indeed, they can be seen already in the birdlike contraptions that poke their fiery beaks into the un finished steel frames at the Jefferson plant in East Detroit...