Word: trivial
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week's self-mutilators told the investigators that they had been driven to their madness by the brutality of prison bosses. Some told of being blackjacked, beaten with sticks, thrown into solitary confinement for trivial offenses. Said one wheel-chaired prisoner, his eyes blazing with hate: "The onliest thing we ask for is that the beatings and cussing stop...
...ballplayers' credit, they have also slowly learned to gab in their own behalf while still in uniform. Though they have never really joined organized labor-four separate unions have flopped, and they have never managed a successful strike-each team has its player representative. If trivial requests have failed (one Philadelphia muscleman thought dugout benches needed foam-rubber cushions), earnest efforts to improve conditions have built the pension system and boosted minimum salaries...
Amid all his other problems, Charlie Wilson chose last week to surpass himself in the art of getting into needless trouble over an essentially trivial matter. From the Defense Secretary's office came an order requiring military officers with Washington desk jobs to wear civilian clothes to work. Ignoring officers' complaints that they would have to spend substantial sums of their own money for such clothes, Wilson airily explained to newsmen: "We don't think at the seat of Government it is a good thing to put on the military...
...beside such stark drama, the rest of the TV week had a trivial look. NBC's Producers' Showcase offered the 12-year-old Bloomer Girl. Like many Broadway musicals transferred to TV, it had some pleasant tunes and a deplorably outdated plot. At week's end CBS tried to cheer up viewers with its own musical version of John Hersey's A Bell for Adano. Some of the lyrics were unfortunate ("We think more of the bell than the belly . . ."); the chorus of happy villagers was led by a blonde Anna Maria Alberghetti while Barry Sullivan...
Turgenev's story, laid in the 1840s, portrays the life, or lack of life, on a nourishing Russian landowner's estate. The landowner's wife, Natalia, with her bright, trivial, citified mind and self-indulgent nature, is bored by her husband, and more entertained than aroused by her sophisticated neighbor. When her son acquires an attractive young tutor, she half tumbles, half pushes herself into love. Discovering that her young ward is also drawn to the tutor, Natalia jealously tries to marry her off elsewhere. Though all this gives the heartfree tutor's ego a great...