Word: tweakings
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Brittle good intentions glare out from the bright pages of this year's children's books, but most are sad failures, lacking equally in anything resembling either joy or pain. Publishers are like elderly relatives who come to visit-they coo, they tweak too many cheeks. Worse than relatives, they also play up to parents by dropping names, and they charge high prices to do it: this year's list includes several books for very small children that cost upwards of $3, putting an unnaturally high price on a child's natural impulse for destruction...
Less gymnastic than their title would suggest, Erik Satie's Trois Gymnopedies (1888) are pastoral melodies with an extremely simple accompaniment of strings and harp. But even in his most restrained mood, Satie could not resist a final playful tweak: the three pieces end on the "wrong" chord (subdominant); but nobody notices this joke any more, and the Trois Gymnopedies pass, to Satie's undoubted horror, as incorrigibly romantic...
...disseminating vulgarity throughout the rest of the West: "If it fails to resist it, [Europe] must look to its own weaknesses and its own form of spiritual flabbiness. Now you are catching up with us! All Europe is drunk with the same poison!" Up stepped Gamesman Potter to tweak Uncle Sam's nose amidst general merriment. He quoted from a manual for U.S. cemetery-plot salesmen: "It's better to have a plot and no need for it than to need it and not have one." He sneered at a claim of California winegrowers that they have never...
...Home & Known. With such home-state support, Fred Schaus (rhymes with spouse) has built the most successful team in college basketball out of a band of boys from West Virginia and neighboring Pennsylvania. In other years, Schaus's boys from back home too often panicked at the first tweak of big-time pressure; last year, for example, West Virginia collapsed in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. But this year the Mountaineers went at it with slick skill, won the high-pressure Kentucky Invitational tournament by snapping the winning streak (at 37) of North Carolina, last year...
...Atlantic ("Actually the pilot has nothing to do, so you can help him count the comets'') with 37 pieces of luggage, including two cans of kippers. Once in Paris, Eloise finds the possibilities unlimited, and her range may be gathered from this memorable confession: "I toujours tweak the Apollo Belvedere whenever I leave the Louvre...