Word: scratches
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Died. Pio Baroja y Nessi, 83, famed old dragon of Spanish literature (The Struggle for Life, Youth and Egolatry), whose bitter, free-thinking attacks on church and state kept him in hot water, and whose hard-scratch realism in more than 100 novels made him a candidate (1946) for the Nobel Prize; in Madrid. A lifelong bachelor (he thought Spanish women were churchbound, thus intellectually inferior), Don Pio practiced medicine less than two years, ran a bakery with his brother, job-hunted across Europe, finally took up writing ("a means of living without a livelihood"). His harsh, simply written novels...
...thinks of every aspect of what he is talking on and then he covers it with ease, wit, and stylistic brilliance," a friend said. Before a Faculty meeting or in his paper-filled office, he listens to a speaker abstractly, ruling perfectly straight lines at close intervals on a scratch pad. And generally his explication is as precise as his doodling. "For the first time that I can remember," a senior professor said "the details of appropriations are carefully and understandably explained in Faculty meetings...
...difficult to say just what Penn will scratch off as it reappraises itself. Certainly not the fraternities, although possibly their restrictive clauses. Probably not the second-class status of its commuting multitudes, but possibly the low caste of coeds. Big time football is gone, and fraternity blasts are going fast...
...play has little action; it merely follows the four through one day in their lives and, in a series of conversations, lets then reveal to each other and to the audience just how wretched and hopeless they are. But as they continually scratch each other raw then draw back to apologize, the main thing that becomes clear is that none of them is really responsible for his actions. The father's miserliness is the result of an incredibly impoverished childhood, the mother's dope addiction is due to the stupidity of a quack doctor, and the sons' faults are blamed...
During the years that followed, many a former German in the land of General Bolle came to prefer his benevolent rule to that of the fatherland. But great nations must follow their own great destinies regardless of personal preferences, and last week, with the scratch of a pen in Brussels, the kingdom of General Bolle was signed out of existence...