Word: septic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. ERMA BOMBECK, 69, humorist; following a kidney transplant; in San Francisco. The titles of her books spoke volumes about her view of motherhood, housewifery and life: I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression; The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. Starting at $3 a column in 1964, she composed ruefully real depictions of domestic America that found a national audience among women who saw little of themselves in June Cleaver. Bombeck eventually appeared in 600 papers, but still lived the unpretentious life she wrote of, laughing through travail...
...twice a week in over 700 newspapers. She was a correspondent on ABC's "Good Morning America" for 11 years and starred in the brief sitcom "Maggie" which lasted for only eight episodes. Bombeck was also the author of several books including "The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank," "I lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression," and "When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home." Bombeck suffered kidney failure in 1992 shortly after undergoing a mastectomy. Just as she raised the spirits of housewives across the U.S., Erma Bombeck kept her own spirits...
...find was just the pick-me-up I needed. Bounding up the stairs to the circulation desk. I began to wonder who actually subscribed to these magazines--fairly well-designed, professional looking publications, not the sort of thing one imagines lying around on the floor of the neighbors' backyard septic tank turned nuclear shelter...
...Well of Horniness, as the wise-cracking narrator puts it, is an exploration of the "septic tank of the soul." After this assertion there comes the loud sound of a toilet flushing, signaling the recklessly self-reflexive nature of this play. Practically every utterance is a sparkling one-liner, but the play juxtaposes the epigrams with other sly puns and double entendres so that the entire work is funny...
...hero of his umbrous novel Novemberfest (Knopf; 386 pages; $24) is Glen Cady, a 50-year-old professor of German whose young wife Paige goes septic after he is rejected for tenure at his New Hampshire university. Glen is a decent fellow. He was an assembly-line worker in Detroit as a young man, before he quit and revived an interest in the German language begun when he was a soldier in Europe. Paige is petulant and self-absorbed. She disapproves of his besotted love for their four-year-old daughter ("so working class") and grumps when...