Word: spading
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...football fan who doesn't call a spade a concave instrument for delving or flensing whale blubber knows that the New York Giants and Jets are sleep-walking through the NFL season and show little sign of regaining consciousness...
Drawing freely from the classic characters of the whodunnit genre, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marples, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan are refurbished by Simon and his all-star cast, and introduced as Miss Marples (Elsa Lanchester), Milo Perrier (James Coco), Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith) and Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers). These, "the world's greatest detectives" have been brought together under one roof at the invitation of Mr. Lionel Twain, a fiendishly eccentric, rich, and rather repulsive...
Throughout Rationale, Legman is concerned with a transcendent purity every bit as excessive and unattainable as the perfect body cleanliness of the deodorant-happy culture he abhors. His views on the psychological roots of dirty jokes, while delivered with ingenuity, verve and color (Legman will always call a spade a goddam shovel), belong to the Freudian orthodoxy as laid down by the master in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious...
Died. James Robertson Justice, 70, doughty, spade-bearded Scottish actor; following a series of strokes; in King's Somborne, England. Gruff-voiced and massive (270 lbs.), Justice appeared in more than 40 films, among them Moby Dick, Les Misérables and The Guns of Navarone. He was best known as the irascible surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt in the British Doctor comedy series of the 1950s...
...author, "will complain that the quotes in this book cannot be accurate, and this is probably true." The problem is not one of accuracy but of familiarity. Benchley's frail chronicle offers the standard stories of Hollywood's old rebel, who pursued independence the way Sam Spade sought the Maltese falcon. Defining the difference between himself and most everybody else, Bogart used to claim that the world was about two drinks behind. Benchley, with his arch collage of pictures and incidents, is a lot farther back than that...