Word: rubes
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Away from Monkey Business. Last week the hunt for animals was again in full cry. U.S. zoos had lost an estimated 25 to 30% of their animals and birds during the war, now would spend millions to replace them. Heinz Rube's first postwar shipment was on its way to New York from Calcutta. His closest competitor, Henry Trefflich, whose warehouse was not far away, had landed his first shipment of 66 demoiselle cranes, worth about $200 a pair...
...invention looks like a Rube Gold berg contraption, somewhat streamlined. But apparently it works, often catching as many as 24 rats a night. The manufacturer claims that he has paying customers for all the traps he can make...
...their work the tourists watch a Mexican peasant wedding and several pieces of professional entertainment, notably by Miss Brazil (Louise Burnett), who can span three octaves without turning a hair, and Cuba's dionysian Miguelito Valdes, who suggests a three-power compromise between Cab Galloway, Orson Welles and Rube Bandleader Spike Jones...
...innocently used the term "G.I. Joe." Then from Santa Barbara, Calif., came a report that soldiers resented it, thought it patronizing. Hearst Columnist Damon Runyon gave his old-soldier version of the name: "For over 40 years a Joe has meant a Jasper, a Joskin, a yokel, a hey-rube, a hick, a clodhopper, a sucker." Runyon remembered that in the last war G.I. (i.e., "government issue") meant "the big galvanized iron garbage and ash can in the back of each company barracks...
Britain mourned last week one of its best-loved comic artists. He was William Heath Robinson, England's Rube Goldberg, whose drawings of outrageously improbable contraptions have tickled his countrymen for 30 years. Bespectacled, mustached, 72 -year-old Robinson died of heart disease at his London home...