Word: taut
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Walt Disney, who made a mouse enter taining, last week made a mousetrap educational. To illustrate an atomic chain reaction for Our Friend the Atom on ABC's Disneyland, Disney moviemakers crowded 200 mousetraps together, each with a pair of pingpong balls poised on its taut spring. When Physicist Heinz Haber, the show's narrator, tossed a single pingpong ball into the arena of massed traps-so that each sprung trap would fire two balls to spring two more traps-the screen erupted into a chaos of snaps, pings and pongs. The mousetraps were the brightest touch...
...patient whose heart is about to be bared and repaired is Mr. Arcularis, originally the sad, gentle hero of a taut, understated Conrad Aiken short story which first appeared in T. S. Eliot's Criterion in 1932. Fourteen years later, dramatized with the help of British Actress-Writer Diana Hamilton, it achieved a four-week run in London. Now, still haunted by what the play might have been, Pulitzer Prizewinner Aiken has performed the dramatizing operation all over again, this time singlehanded, and with excellent results...
...amphibious groups that can put ashore a reinforced Marine battalion that will soon be equipped with atomic rocket weapons. Task Force 66, recently detached, but on constant call, is a submarine hunter-killer group led by Antietam, a 30,000-ton attack carrier with 80 planes. All together, this taut and lethal fleet consumes more than 50,000 tons of fuel per month. Although NATO supply bases are available for emergencies, the U.S. Navy expects that they will be easy enemy targets in wartime; the Sixth Fleet, therefore, brings most of its supplies all the way over from the Eastern...
...room, a thin, taut refugee and his handsome wife sat before an immigration inspector. The man answered questions rapidly. He was a skilled instrument maker. He had belonged to a union-but never to the Communist Party (membership in the Communist Party is the one sin that the inspectors, under the McCarran-Walter Act, can never forgive). What was his religion? The man and his wife paled with fear. "We are Jews," he whispered. The inspector nodded. Down went his hand-to stamp approval on their entry papers. Speechless, the man and wife arose, reached for their children and hugged...
Monsarrat's narrative is as taut as a bush tent in the rainy season. As for his conclusions, he will not please those with spurs to polish or assagais to grind. Blame, he says, lies on both sides of the color bar. Monsarrat has settled for the honest and general indignation of the 'philosophical dictum that a man born into the world with a sense of smell has a duty to cry "stinking fish...