Word: thumbings
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...less authentic country singers), and 2) the employment of a five-string banjo technique known affectionately as "pickin' scruggs." This technique, which moved one astigmatic observer to compare Scruggs's achievement on the banjo to Paganini's on the violin, involves a clawlike motion with thumb and two fingers that serves to transform the banjo player from a plunk-plunking accompanist into a virtuoso soloist. Nobody has heard anything to equal it, says one folk expert, since the glorious days of Fisher Hendley and his Aristocratic Pigs, famed hillbillies of the early...
Harrison Pendleton Bresee Jr., 30, whose father raises Herefords near tiny Orange, Va. Bresee is an ex-G.I. who got his forestry degree from the University of the South in 1956, then "just took off" to thumb and hike his way through much of Africa, Asia and Europe for four years. He used a beard, a bit of French and a cast-iron stomach to impress African tribesmen, figures he already knows the secret of getting along in Tanganyika (which he visited): "They accept you if you sit down and eat with them." Fond of Africans and their wildlife...
Handicappers & Treasure Hunters. The library can tell a harried mother what to feed her daughter's new pet eel, or help wives to trace runaway husbands and illegitimate sons to find their fathers. FBI agents constantly thumb the library's foreign and domestic phone directories from 2,700 cities, and many a barroom argument is settled with a quick call to the sober Information Division. About the only thing that ever flustered the library was New York's rage a few years ago over the Herald Tribune's "Tangle Town" puzzle contests. To stem brawls...
...chores required to keep money transactions straight, Ramo argues, are "as unsuitable for the human intellect as pulling huge stones to build the Pyramids was for human muscles. Some day, currency and coins will be only for the rural areas. If you buy a necktie or a house, your thumb before an electronic scanner will identify you, and the network will debit your account and credit the seller...
...embassies, legations, consulates and special missions around the world, nothing is more likely to cause hot blood and cold sweat than mention of Brooklyn's Democratic Congressman John J. Rooney. As chairman of the House subcommittee on State Department appropriations, Rooney keeps a harsh eye and a hard thumb on what he calls "booze allowances for cooky pushers"-the representation allowance diplomats get for official entertaining. Last week the department's representation allowance request for fiscal 1962 was up before the parent House Appropriations Committee. Pared to meet Rooney's tastes, the $953,000 budget was well...