Word: rubes
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...testing," Audience Research will use the Hopkins Televote Machine, a Rube Goldbergian contrivance originally designed to chart audience reaction to movies (TIME, July 22, 1946). By turning a rheostat, hand-picked audiences indicate their degree of amusement from "very dull" to "like very much." Promising movies have a high "Want-to-See." Radio shows will get a "Want-to-Hear" rating...
...Manhattan night court was enough to jerk a tear from any baseball fan's eye. Of the 18 bleary Bowery bums charged with loitering "while apparently intoxicated," one gave the name of Marquard. The judge had tenderly inquired: "Aren't you the famous 'Rube?'" Yes, the prisoner croaked, he was "Ol' Rube," who won 19 straight games for the Giants back in 1912. The record had never been broken, but "Rube" was broke. "The magistrate," said an A.P. dispatch, "took a $5 bill from his billfold, handed it to Marquard, shook hands with him, wished...
Next day, when the press found time for a second look, reporters found the real Rube Marquard. He was far from the Bowery. He had a perfectly good job as a pari-mutuel ticket-seller at the $50 window at a New Jersey race track, and insisted indignantly that the $50 window was a post no drinking man could hold. He had spent the previous evening playing pinochle with his wife and the neighbors...
...again the following day. The New York Sun, which had not printed the original phony, quoted the real Marquard as saying, "You'd think those things would be checked more closely, wouldn't you?" The gullible Mirror quoted Marquard in slightly different words. According to the Mirror, Rube said: "You'd think a judge would be more careful...
...into them keys like a thousand of brick. He give 'em no rest, day or night. He set every living joint in me agoing, and not being able to stand it no longer, I jumped spang into my seat and jest hollered: 'Go it, my Rube!' Every blamed man, woman and child in the house riz on me, and shouted...