Word: toying
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...problem puzzled General Electric's Dr. Theodore Marton until one evening when he was playing with his son's stand-mounted toy dog made of beads. When the bottom of the stand was pressed up, the string threaded through the beads relaxed and the dog collapsed; when it was released, the strung-together dog was pulled into shape again. Why not use the same simple principle in a tether? So Marton built a new space line of interlocking aluminum balls and collars, all strung on a central cable. When the cable is loose, the tether is completely flexible...
...Toy, Too. This finding alone was enough to interest the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But ever since making the first one, Dr. Marton has been thinking of more applications for his discovery. Two of the flexi-firm tethers, attached to either side of an astronaut's belt, could be clamped anywhere on the spacecraft, effectively fixing him in position and thereby giving him work stability and leverage. Thicker, stronger versions could be used as construction parts in space and on the moon. Shipped aloft coiled, they could then be set permanently in any needed position by turning...
...those grueling stretches when Blitman has to amuse himself. We'll leave him to his fun until four when he makes his way along Mt. Auburn Street to Hazen's. There is something unsettling entrance about Hazen's. The impersonal turnstile entrance with its clanging bell. The antiseptic toy counters. The lippiputian nursery school stools. The place oozes sterility. Creeping Brighamism is permeating the Square...
...redeem itself further, the movie implements Frank Loesser's score with inventive arrangements by Nelson Riddle, and augments the chorus with a bevy of twittering birds who assure the executives that A Secretary Is Not a Toy. Equally good is the staff of ulcerated businessmen who inch their way along the top of the company as they pinch their way around the bottoms of their secretaries. Comically caught in the act, unfaithfully married and unhappily harried, they are reminders that How to Succeed was good show business because the structure of its satire rested, however slightly, upon a grain...
...highly original and wryly appealing style joins wood sculpture, drawing and painting (not to mention carpentry) in a unique combination. The components of her portraits may be odd -a box, a block, a barrel-but they perceptively convey likeness as well as character. "Her art is that of a toy-maker," wrote TIME'S art critic in 1963, "designed to appeal to that part of the mind in which fantasy and reality seem identical. The only difference is that a toy can be outgrown; it seems doubtful that the same will soon be said of the work of Marisol...