Word: senselessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Only deserves credit for a sensitive exposition of what goes on during pledge period at a frat college. It traces the course of a student through the multiple senseless humiliations and 'stunts' of "hell Week," culminating in "Hell Night." Blindfolded and dressed in sacks, the initiates are led to a sacred spot where they go through the standard candle-light mumbo-jumbo routines. Then as a final test of his worthiness, one pledge is asked to sacrifice a dog. He refuses, and subsequently starts a campus revolt against "Hell Week" with the aid of a sympathetic professor (Paul Henreid). Those...
...third world war? Ryan went secretly to work (only a few Collier's staffers knew what was going on), traveling to Europe and around the U.S., collecting material, lining up writers. Pulitzer Prizewinner Robert E. Sherwood wrote the lead piece on history's "most unnecessary, most senseless and deadliest" war. The A.P.'s Hal Boyle reported the Russian A-bombing of Washington (which had "destroyed the heart of the city"), Edward R. Murrow, the A-bombing of Moscow. Lowell Thomas watched U.N. paratroopers "chute into the Urals" and destroy the Soviets' A-bomb stockpile, and Hanson...
Mostly, Webster pictures the radio & TV audience at its moments of greatest strain: clubbed senseless by commercials, drowned in the soap-opera flood, lacerated by thrillers, held slack-jawed and limp before the endless, banal assault on ear and eye and mind. When his characters are caught with their sets off, they exhibit every nuance of the Walter Mitty syndrome: grandmothers speak to one another with the accents of private eyes; moppets dry-gulch their parents from behind the furniture; housewives confront "their startled husbands with all the teary grandeur of John's Other Wife...
...closing in on the British-Iranian oil wrangle. He had won a few weeks' respite, brought both sides together and given both a chance to try a second round of negotiations. But despite endless talk, the situation last week again took on its old air of senseless inevitability...
...albums to sheath the records. Latest pickings: offbeat instrumentations, e.g., harpsichord background for Clooney, French horns for Crooner Guy Mitchell. Says Miller: "You've got to work out a gimmick that'll get people's attention and hold it. You need that sense of communication." One senseless communication: a Dinah Shore vocal backed by six caterwauling bagpipes. Admits Miller...