Word: standings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whoever rules Cambodia in the foreseeable future will reign over a devastated land. According to refugees who have escaped into Thailand, the once lush province of Battambang in Western Cambodia is bare of all fruit and bereft of most of its people. In eerily deserted villages, papaya trees stand like bean poles, their fruit, then their leaves, having been torn off by starving peasants. According to the British Foreign Office study, since 1975 an estimated 2 million Cambodians have died of starvation and disease as a result of a campaign to drive city dwellers into the countryside, where there...
Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population, 80% of the nation's professional comedians are Jewish. Why such domination of American humor? New York City Psychologist Samuel Janus, who once did a yearlong stint as a stand-up comic, thinks that he has the answer: Jewish humor is born of depression and alienation from the general culture. For Jewish comedians, he told the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, "comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others...
...lips with rice." Mr. Rogers, a takeoff on the dim-but-lovable kiddie show host, says: "Welcome to my neighborhood. Let's put Mr. Hamster in the microwave oven. O.K.? Pop goes the weasel!" Other bit players include Ernest Sincere, a redneck used-car dealer; Joey Stalin, a Russian stand-up comic; Little Sherman, a perverse little boy; and Walt Buzzy, a gay director. Grandpa Funk, based on an old wino Williams once saw in San Francisco, always appears at the end of the show. Clicking his gums and speaking in a raspy high-pitched voice, the old codger explains...
Being a peripatetic President is tiring, so Cuba's Fidel Castro decided to take five-on a reviewing stand in Ethiopia's Revolution Square. As Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia's head of state, chatted away, Castro slumped in his chair and watched a parade. Back in the days of Emperor Haile Selassie such behavior would not have passed muster. But as it happened, Castro was in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, to help the country's Marxist rulers celebrate the fourth anniversary of the overthrow of the late Emperor. Despite his fatigue, he managed...
...appetit, consumers. Help is on the way. That inescapable roadside institution, McDonald's, has been fined $5,000 for mislabeling frozen orange juice as freshly squeezed, and calling a concoction "maple syrup" that had nowhere enough maple to stand up to the name. In addition to folks at the Golden Arches, Baskin-Robbins, the International House of Pancakes and Hamburger Hamlets have all been foiled by a Los Angeles campaign to enforce honesty in eateries: it is now against the law, for example, to describe a nondairy product as "cream," or lower-grade beef as "prime." Like truth inadvertising...