Word: thumbings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Navy Department (which includes the Marine Corps) undertook to censor his civilian writings. For answer he got a weaseling memo, finding in one paragraph that as an inactive reservist he was not subject to control, in the next that by "custom and usage" he was under the Navy thumb. Replied Al Williams: "I tender my resignation quietly and without publication. . . . My services will always be at the command of the U. S. Marine Corps. And in case of emergency I shall bring with me my two standard single-seater fighting planes . . . and they shall be donated without cost...
Chicago was a pioneer with the "standby" system, by which outside union men playing in its radio stations must either join the union local or pay a thumb-twiddling local musician to stand by. Jimmie Petrillo forbade Chicago men to make phonograph records which might be broadcast. He saw to it that political campaign trucks resound with live musicians, not recordings. When a giant panda was to be welcomed by a troop of Chinese Boy Scout buglers, Petrillo demanded that eight union men be hired as well. Italian as were his sympathies, he hit the ceiling when the Italian Consul...
Crane's rhapsody to Brooklyn Bridge was an unscientific, rummy rodomontade. They considered Brooklyn Bridge an antique, remarkable for its historical associations (it was built by rule of thumb), esthetically redeemed only by its brute strength...
...last week calculated publicly. Some idea of possible requirements could be got from the fact that, if the U. S. ever has 50,000 warplanes in actual service, it will have to have around 75,000 pilots and 750,000 men on the ground (at the rule of thumb of ten men on the ground to keep one man in the air) for its air force alone...
...need Yeats's mind to work them: they will not work at all for the majority who will find Yeats's synthetic occultism repellent. The book remains, nevertheless, a remarkable integration of Yeats's feel of himself with his knowledge of mankind. By its rules of thumb he was enabled to sharpen the edges of his knifelike insights into men's personalities, to face the conflicts of his own nature with increased resolve, and to go on writing, up to his death, poems that presented what both his art and his life were aimed to present...