Word: spacemen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meant to weed out the less-than-flawless. Chinese astronauts cannot suffer from chronic sore throats or runny noses. They mustn't have food restrictions, strong regional accents, ringworm, cavities or scars. Bad breath, body odor and a snoring problem are all immediate disqualifiers. And if China's spacemen are expected to satisfy an unlikely string of qualifications, so too are its new spacewomen - with two notable additional criteria. China's first two female reserve astronauts, selected earlier this month from a pool of 15 female fighter pilots, were required to be wives and mothers...
...policy demonstrates the nation's ongoing commitment to curbing - not encouraging - population growth. Beijing, it seems, is not so much concerned with disrupting family planning - if it were, it might consider astronaut applications from women who are certain they do not want children or broaden the prerequisite to include spacemen - but with the image of the women it recruits to represent it on the galactic stage. In China, being a married mother is, arguably, as much a mark of excellence as sweet-smelling breath or a cavity-free dental X-ray. "Chinese culture defines women by their maternity," says...
...Meltdown did in its first three. It didn't help that Dawn of the Dinosaurs was the summer's fifth movie whose cast of characters included at least one prehistoric beast. (Can you name the other four?*) It may be time for Hollywood to go back to spacemen...
When kids play games, they pretend to be adults: soldiers, spacemen, cops and robbers or, for the more precocious, doctors and nurses. The theme is, Be what you want to be. Then when they grow up, go to Hollywood and make movies, they often create characters that are emotional adolescents, infants, kids. The credo of so many action films and comedies is, Be what you used to be or what you still, secretly, are. This tendency could be the film industry's wise acknowledgment that inside every adult is a backward child ruled by fears and cravings. Or it could...
...Soon after Siegel and Shuster's Superman appeared, and a year later, Bob Kane's Batman - and, perhaps not coincidentally, right after the first science-fiction convention where Forrest J. Ackerman came dressed as a spacemen, thus inaugurating the pulp tribute costume - a group of citizens donned masks and gaudy couture and called themselves the Minutemen. Not so much groupies as avatars of the fictional superheroes, they spent World War II getting off on doing their truth-justice-and-the-American-way thing. Disbanded in 1944, they reconvened with some new personnel, and by the '60s were important factors...