Word: rataplan
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...manner of change-ringers, each one hooting his single note in turn. The Babira Negroes of the Ituri Forest punctuate the high-pitched gargling of their soloist with aggressive whoops. The Watusi Drummers hammer an intense counterpoint of rhythms more complicated than Gene Krupa's randiest rataplan...
With a whinnying of trumpets and a rolling rataplan of drums, the curtains at Manhattan's Shubert Theatre parted this week to disclose two apparently naked gods reclining on a cloud, their bare bottoms perked toward the heavens, their amorous gaze fixed on the somewhat startled audience. The bare bottoms were moulded of impersonal papier-mache, but the silver-bearded Jovian head on the left was unmistakably that of Alfred Lunt. Theatre Guild subscribers, present for the Manhattan opening of Amphitryon 38, settled back expectantly in their seats. They realized that Jupiter Lunt's eyes were not feasting...
...agent, impressed, hired her as ballerina for a theatrical troupe. Her family thought a convent would be better for her. After two years in Our Lady of the Lake, at San Antonio, Tex., she went back to Mexico to dance. She was in Monterey with a musical comedy called Rataplan when someone from Hollywood saw her and took her north. She worked for a month in Hal Roach comedies, then as Douglas Fair-banks's leading lady in The Gaucho. Brunette, she is five feet high, weighs 105 pounds, can play the ukelele, likes dancing best...
...After the christening ceremony the engines on the larger plane were started for the first time since they left Wright factory. They responded to the starter with a rataplan of cylinder explosions that soon mellowed into a roar. The mechanics said they were satisfied. Captain Wilkins announced he would not attempt any more ambitious tests, such as taxiing across the field, until the crowd had dispersed...
...Pittsburgh, 30 years ago, a strapping battler named James McCoy stood up to John L. Sullivan and endured, for a few rounds, the rataplan of fists as hard and heavy as stove-lids. John L. Sullivan is dead. Battler McCoy is an old man. Last week he was shuffling home from work through a lonely park when he was set upon by three weasel-faced fellows-men who, in soggy swaddling-clothes, were mewing for their mothers when McCoy was trading cuffs with the hardest hitter who ever put on a glove-thin rogues whom, in the days...