Word: splat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...measuring up, after only a few days of vacation. She writhes, and writes, and makes a rare sort of contact. "I swear to you, I don't write fiction," she says. Bill Bombeck and their endlessly libeled children swear she does. No matter; when the jokes splat on the page like strained spinach flung by somebody's centrifugal suburban baby, they are true to life. Bombeck's mail shows that. Women, mostly, write to her about husbands who haven't blinked since the football season started or convict sons or babies put out for adoption. Usually...
...first anvil hint is dropped in the opening scene: in a dormitory of Miss Hannigan's Dickensian orphanage, the eldest of six orphans jumps from bed to bed-and one galumphing foot lands splat! on the forehead of a younger girl. It's no wonder that when Annie (Aileen Quinn) gets the chance to live with Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney), she promptly forgets her orphan camaraderie. But then the entire movie is a series of plot strands twisted, then discarded...
...forgiven us," marvels the Detroit manager. "Baseball has to be the luckiest business in the world. Whatever we do to louse it up, we can't." Johnny Pesky is chewing tobacco. Everything Sparky says, the wrynecked coach of the Boston Red Sox endorses with a streamer and a splat. "Baseball," Sparky says, "is bigger than the people running...
...most robust-looking character in the exhibition is Robert Arneson, 51, whose favorite subject is his own head, blown up to more than Roman proportions and subjected to various odd indignities. In Splat, 1978, it has taken a bucketful of liquid white clay full in the face, like a vaudevillian copping a pie; a disembodied brown finger wipes the gunk away from his right eye socket. Arneson's mocking self-monuments are carried through with vast gusto and panache, and his technical resources seem limitless; besides, his formal ambitions are clear enough, below the funky surface. Even...