Word: screech
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Shoichi Yokoi, 57, the Japanese Imperial Army corporal who only last January emerged from his World War II hiding place in the jungle of Guam, found the contemporary world rather unsettling. Modern women, particularly, struck him as "monsters" who "screech like apes." Now, apparently, he has found an old-fashioned girl to marry: Mihoko Hatashin, 44, a war widow. Said Mihoko: "We can now communicate with each other by eyes, though we don't talk to each other much." The couple's expected honeymoon site: Guam...
With a quick swerve to the right reminiscent of Steve McQueen in "Bullit," I took the ramp at a brisk 65 mph. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was going too fast. Screech, I drove my foot down on the brakes. Lulled into a false sense of security, my two friends awoke to find the car skidding and spinning out of control between the two guard rails. After one and a quarter exciting revolutions the car came to a stop that left us straddling the ramp, and, needless to say, a bit shaken...
...childhood crush of Flip's, a little girl in the grimy ghetto streets of Jersey City. The personality owes something to Sapphire, the endearingly bossy housewife on the Amos 'n' Andy radio show of the 1930s and '40s. The voice is derived from the Delta screech of Butterfly McQueen, the eye-rolling, stereotyped black maid in Gone With the Wind, and of so many other Hollywood oldies. What is different and up-to-date about Geraldine, says Flip, is that "she demands respect. She is not a loose woman. She always has some meaningful employment...
...romantic ballad that could almost be sung by Crooner Johnny Mathis: "Drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops/On a life-boat/Sailin' for your love/Sailin'home." Big-beat songs like Freedom and Nightbird Flyin' do hark back to the past, yet for once, there is no screech or reverberation to get in the way of the music. For the uninitiated-or for those who turned off when Jimi turned on before an audience like a black Elvis Presley-The Cry of Love should be sufficient proof that there was indeed heart beneath his mod show-business veneer...
...desirable. "Air-supported buildings must leak," explains English Architecture Critic Reyner Banham. "They are living things. They must breathe." If they are not allowed to breathe, strange things happen: the blowers that constantly pump air into the enclosed space cause pressure to build up, and the building begins to screech, pull and tug. To those within the bubble, says Banham, "it's like being inside a toad...