Word: staling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...agitation on the border claims. Said Hassan's closest political confidant, Cabinet Director Ahmed Reda Guedira, after the purge: "The King had to get rid of the grains of sand which always kept the state machinery out of order ... the leaders and platforms of the old parties are stale, like empty eggshells...
...Jimmy Durante has shriveled away till he looks like a mere appendage of that incomparable proboscis, long may it wave. But age cannot wither nor custom stale his infinite sameness. In 1962 he is essentially what he was in 1950, when he made his last movie. He is Jimmy, a quite ordinary little fellow who looks slightly confused and absurdly belligerent, as though in total darkness he had stepped on the teeth of a rake, and the handle had popped up and hit him in the nose, and there he stands, punching wildly and wondering...
...work often suggests stale Disney sprinkled with Kitty Litter, but at one point the picture wittily displays Mewsette as she might have been painted by Monet, Van Gogh, Seurat et al. Judy Garland, as the voice of Mewsette, yowls enchantingly. And even those who think that the plot is a very old sardine may admit that it is often amewsing, in a clever script by Dorothy and Chuck Jones, to read between the felines...
...ominously metallic rattle, a dumbwaiter suddenly reveals itself behind a false panel in the wall. On it is an order for "two braised steak and chips, two teas without sugar," followed by a demand for "macaroni pastitsio." In a nervous swivet, Ben and Gus pile on their own stale snacks. But the machine is insatiable, asking for "one Char Siu and bean-sprouts." The men shout through a decrepit speaking tube that they have no more. Gus leaves for a drink of water, and the speaking tube instructs Ben to shoot the next man who enters the room...
Presenting himself as proof that the universe is foul, Burroughs achieves the somewhat irrelevant honesty of hysteria as he writes of a malevolent world of users and pushers, of a mad conspiracy of spider-eyed manipulators who sell each other "adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale antivenom, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats." All pity is mockery ("Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife's artificial kidney. They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung"). All degradations are cherished: a coroner named Autopsy Ahmed makes a fortune peddling an Egyptian worm...