Word: raft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Galileo's 17th century use of the telescope to study the heavens spawned a host of moon stories. The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandoff, and published in 1638, offered a hero who was carried to his destination on a frail raft pulled by swans. Unaware of the vacuum in space, the traveler had no difficulty breathing on the trip, but he did find that his weight lessened as he left the earth. That remarkable scientific insight by Godwin preceded Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity by many years...
...ever takes as many chances as they do in their first film, but mostly because the movies that represent the current professional product in America take no chances at all. Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By... recalls that Ramon Novarro and Frank Currier doing the raft scene in Ben-Hur (1926) exposed themselves for three days to freezing winds and icy water at four hour stretches, narrowly avoiding pneumonia. But, when Wyler remade Ben-Hur in 1959 when technical proficiency could have compensated for weather variables, the scene was poorly synthesized in the studio with absurd process photography...
...Aside from his talent hunt, Nixon's foremost chore for the next nine weeks is making plans to revise the fiscal 1970 budget that Johnson's men are already preparing. In his last State of the Union message, the President may well ask Congress to enact a raft of domestic programs of Johnsonian scope. Nixon's inaugural speech will have to offer constructive alternatives. For that reason, the President-elect must soon devote considerable attention to specific legislation and budgetary requests...
...immobility is attributed to the entire female constitution by analogy with the supposed immobility of the ovum.... In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition,...an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd...
...JONATHAN WINTERS SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Guests are Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ella Fitzgerald and George Raft...