Word: thumb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...schedule or time-table of sexual intimacy. Like Napoleon, who could tell at any given moment what was being taught in the schools of France, the masters and deans can estimate at certain designated hours the activities going on in a fair proportion of Harvard Houses. The rule of thumb by which the masters calculate the number of parietal hours belongs more appropriately in a novel by Jonathan Swift. Are they saying that below a certain number per week the morality and virtue of the student body is being safeguarded, and that above that number dissipation and reduced efficiency...
...dangdest bunch of lobbyists anyone ever laid eyes on-a five-man Arkansas jug band appearing before a Senate subcommittee on behalf of Green Thumb, a Government project that gives old folks jobs beautifying Arkansas roadsides. As the jug band sawed away, someone passed out Green Thumb hard hats (worn as protection against falling tree branches). One of the hats wound up atop that dour Arkansan John McClellan, 71. Without a change in his grim expression, McClellan stood up and began dancing a jig to the Arkansas Traveler, all the while slapping at the hat to keep it in place...
...father, a "pretty fair country picker." By 17, he had begun serious listening to such country-music greats as Guitarist Merle Travis, and had duplicated Travis' individualistic finger-picking style, in which the forefinger touches the strings directly and plucks out the tune while the thumb plunks out a moving bass. Country music in those days offered slim pickings to a newcomer, and Watson earned his first pay as lead guitarist in a local pop band. But in 1960, he was suddenly picked out of the band by Talent Scout Ralph Rinzler, packed off in a station wagon loaded...
...Drifter is a thumb-time hitchhiker and full-time vagabond. Known only as Alan, he sleeps on strange streets and familiar beds, wandering from woman to woman, ending all his relationships with an easygoing "Ciao, baby." Except for that, he has little to say, and less to laugh about. His idea of humor is to retell the ancient jape of the man who asked his mistress, "Do you smoke after?", and received the answer, "I don't know. I'll look next time." Alan, whose ordinariness is well portrayed by Off-Broadway Veteran John Tracy, meanders from Manhattan...
...compassion is evident in even the most minor cases-many of which inevitably involve race. In one, a white man had allegedly hired four Negroes to help him steal peanuts from a federal warehouse. The jury acquitted the white man, convicted the Negroes. Poker-faced, Johnson dropped a balancing thumb onto the scales of Alabama justice as he handed down the Negroes' sentence: 30 minutes in the custody of the U.S. marshal...