Word: sourpuss
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Died. Ned Sparks (real name: Edward A. Sparkman), 73, sulphur-voiced, sourpuss cynicomedian (Lady for a Day, Imitation of Life), who once asked Lloyd's of London for $100,000 insurance against having a picture taken of him grinning ("I didn't get this wooden face by accident. It's been my trademark, and it's paid me well"); of an intestinal block; in Victorville, Calif...
...Casmurro is the narrator-hero's nickname, and it translates, roughly, as Lord Sourpuss. The story he has to tell is a kind of epitaph of a big loser, a man who, through his wife's infidelity, loses her, his best friend...
...Casmurro's real name is Bento, and he does not start out a sourpuss. At the age of 15, Bento's head is full of great but nebulous expectations: "After Napoleon, lieutenant and emperor, all destinies are possible in this century." His heart throbs for Capitu, a dark-haired Juliet with "eyes like the tide when the undertow is strong." Bento's mother had dedicated him to the church at birth, but the seminary is not for Bento. He wins his release along with a seminarist friend named Ezekiel, and goes off to law school. Then...
What can one say, however, in the face of the latest denunciation of Claus by a leadind church man? The Archbishop of Seville, though he is probably the world's champion ecclesiastical sourpuss, is a man of not inconsiderable influence in Spain. When he calls Claus "put of a Protestant maneuver to undermine the deepest Christian meaning, of our tradition" and says that he conceals" a sectarian aim hidden under the red grab of an Old Man who seems native but who has spent many hours of his life as a knave." (The New York Times, December...
...course of this investigation Adams made himself an American historian of absolutely first rank, a shrewd political observer, and an old sourpuss. Democracy, republished this week for the first time in a quarter-century, is one of the two novels Adams wrote in his lifelong expostulation with a nation that failed to give him his birthright. Though the U.S. has achieved success and power far beyond Adams' gloomy dreams,* Democracy, first published anonymously in 1879, is still just about the best satire ever written about the Government of the U.S. "The Prairie Giant." The business of the book...