Word: sort
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...They support each other in a strange sort of way: One goes through the same stages--you get an idea, and you use your education or your experience to test it," he notes. Both good science and good writing demand imagination, McMahon says, but "the ideas come for nothing, or as a gift." The work comes in testing the ideas: "The ideas themselves aren't worth anything, until they are proved true or false. Just as experiments or theories test scientific ideas, a fictional idea can be proved workable or useless by trying...
...usually do something that people perceive they really need. Most people think they have enough books. Some people think they have enough science, too. But I am an applied scientist, making some sort to use out of fundamental ideas in science...
Sagan has a history of this sort of dabbling. First swept into the public eye on the coat-tails of the Viking missions to Mars as one of the expedition's moving minds, his impudence, optimism, and imagination, won him national attention. Johnny Carson has toasted him. The New Yorker has profiled him, countless universities have ensnared him as their graduation speaker. He made movies with Francis Ford Coppola, chaired the National Book Awards, and rubbed elbows with celebrities of every ilk. He is, if you will, the shooting star of the astronomical profession...
...competition for yuks, as the Lampoon has done. The resultant brand of humor, inevitably perhaps, irritates--no, it offends. And by this I don't mean to carp on racism and sexism, although I think these elements are well in evidence in On the Lam. Rather, I mean the sort of comedy that points down, from an affected stance of intellectual or cultural superiority, lacking any sort of humanism or fellow feeling, without any hint that the Lampoon itself, and its members, might be just as amenable to satiric deflation as, say, protesters at Seabrook. I mean a comedy that...
...after all, only a dollar, which makes it, at worst, the cheapest two hours of punishment in Boston, There's Chris Clemenson: talent sometimes peeks its head out of the quicksand. You know you'll laugh and you know you'll sleep, and I advise you to ingest the sort of central nervous depressants that enhance both. Besides, who knows? Maybe John Simon will be there with his Luger...