Word: scorpion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ascetic in Reverse. He had been one of the world's best talkers, in all the major tongues of the West. Whistler's butterfly with the scorpion tail perfectly described Berenson's conversation: light, colorful, quick, acid. His books (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Rumor and Reflection, etc.) are comparatively second-drawer Berenson, but they will live. They reveal an elaborate, prickly mind, of melancholy cast. Berenson's chief object was to lose himself in what he saw and liked. Brought up on Walter Pater and inspired by Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard, he practiced...
...York Herald. In 1908, over double drinks in a Manhattan bar, he struck up a partnership with Henry Louis Mencken* that was to last through two decades and make Nathan's byline famed on Main Street as well as on Broadway. Together they became the scorpion-tossing twins of Jazz Age journalism. On Nathan's Smart Set (1914-23), Mencken's old American Mercury (1924-33), and the short-lived American Spectator (1932-35), the slim, elegant Nathan and hulking, tousled Mencken battered at boneheads and "dingdoodles" (Nathan's pet epithet for self-satisfied know-nothings...
...Jimmy Ratio's Little Iodine, its characters are disingenuous and uncute. Charlie, whose peanut-bald head is surmounted by a single dispirited curl, is a junior-grade Walter Mitty, whose highflying dreams of popularity crash in endless ignominies. Charlie's characteristic lament: "Good grief!" The chief scorpion in his child's garden of reverses is a promising young termagant named Lucy, who, with apprentice-shrews Violet and Patty, sharpens her talons on Charlie's ego. "Good Ol' Charlie Brown," purrs Violet as Charlie passes. "Nobody hates him, everybody likes him . . . What a wishy-washy character...
...Waco, subscriptions soon deluged him in the currency of a dozen lands. The 16-page Iconoclast was a potpourri of flamboyant comment on all things, laced with spleen, belly laughs, erudition, ribaldry and scorpion satire. Often intemperate, rarely constructive, Brann could be-and was-accused of doing more harm than good. But it was hard to fault his eloquence. On the approaching marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, he mocked: "The fiancé of Miss Vanderbilt is descended...through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty...
Three miles up in the bright blue Nevada sky, a slim rocket rigged to the underside of an F-89H twin-jet Scorpion came to fiery life, thrust loose from the speeding (around 600 m.p.h.) plane and streaked forward, far faster than sound. The F-89H banked sharply to the left to escape the coming blast. Four seconds later, a fireball flashed in the sky. It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun, then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud...