Word: twains
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...pictures used to seem exaggerations-they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough. They have not told half the story." So wrote Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, carried away as he was by the exotic sights of Morocco in 1867. Whether Twain was right or not, whether the reality of life in the Islamic world was more fanciful than its images in 19th century art, there could be no doubt that the popular pictures of the day exuded a fictive sensuality: the odalisque, her breasts exposed, her belly barely covered by harem...
...designing for the human frame-is confirming what some people suspected long ago: the mind seems to work better when the body is firmly and comfortably supported in a reclining position. Thomas Jefferson liked to read and write while taking his ease on a specially adapted chaise longue. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill often worked lying back, their heads supported, facing their books or writing pads at eye level. In such a position, they were able to prevent many a pain in the neck...
...Lieut. Eddie Murphy is demonstrating a dubiously designed tank to dubiously inclined Arab buyers. The West is California, two years earlier, where Dudley Moore plays an engineer who gets into trouble by failing to give his undivided attention to making Eddie's lemon grow. And, yes, never the twain shall meet. But the poet's point is a poor comic premise. Though Best Defense provides both stars a few funny moments and offers some promising satirical ideas, its binary construction imposes a fatal jumpiness on it. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who co-wrote American Graffiti and Indiana...
Reddi-Wip Fog. Though July is one of the hottest months of the year for most of California, temperatures in San Francisco reach an average high of only 64° and fall to a dank and chilly low of 53°. Mark Twain, who lived in the city in the 1860s, is said to have remarked that "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." The reason is a stratum of fog that blankets the city for part of nearly every day, dropping temperatures as much as 15°. Many San Franciscans dress in layers...
...final scenes, as if to emphasize the ironic conclusion: Job's "tragedy was that of the happy ending." That sort of throwaway irony seems worthier of an Oscar Wilde epigram than a meditation on a profound theme. The Book of Job has haunted writings as disparate as Mark Twain's novel The Mysterious Stranger, Robert Frost's verse drama A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. It requires more than bursts of wit and flashes of illumination...