Word: rubes
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...guiltiest smog makers. Nothing might appear more hopeless than the quandary of an Italian couple in "The Argentine Ant," whose baby is overrun by marching ants, against whom all antidotes fail. But the minor characters of this crawly little fable -like Captain Brauni with his Rube Goldberg ant traps-have a jaunty energy that enables them to survive not only their plague but the plague of their author: dark moralizing. It is as if Calvino's people, exuberant for absolutely no good reason, are on their way to liberating him from the cursed logic of his pessimism. Stand...
...stretched some cities to the edge of bankruptcy; some states are being forced to choose between the poor and the public schools or other essential services. Moreover, the U.S. is distributing aid through an administrative system that might have been designed in a demented collaboration between Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg. Federal, state and local regulations regularly overlap, producing a punch-card maze from which escape seems impossible. The situation is, as the President said in his State of the Union address, "a monstrous, consuming outrage...
Regardless of fame, few people find their names enshrined in Webster's Dictionary as an adjective for a method or contraption. Rube Goldberg, who died in New York last week of cancer at 87, saw his name entered in Webster's: a rube goldberg contrivance, says the Third New International edition, accomplishes "by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply...
...Died. Rube Goldberg, 87, the most imaginative inventor since Leonardo (see THE PRESS...
CONSIDER what is dead. DeGaulle is dead, the sixties are dead, Rube Goldberg is dead, the peace movement is dead, the Paris peace talks are dead. You could go on and on. Hell, for all we know Howard Hughes may be dead. In any case death is in the air. After the jubilant, lively, jumping-up-and-down sixties (the Age of Aquarius, I believe), here we are stuck with the Secanal seventies. It is a good time to take...