Word: vileness
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Turf Accountants. Trying to regulate gambling is a centuries-old story in Britain. Henry III ordered his clergy to forgo dicing and chess playing "on pain of durance vile," but he lost so often to his barons at those very games that he was unable to come through with all the money he had pledged for the completion of Westminster Abbey. In feudal times, incorrigible gamblers had their hands whacked off. Henry VIII, who diced for the chapel bells of old St. Paul's-and lost-decreed the less painful punishment of fines in the Unlawful Games...
...fairly hard to take seriously. That's not a new quality for the workings of the Selective Service System. It has always been difficult to realize than that system took its male youth to fight and die for interests that were incomprehensible or vile to many of them. The distance of this mighty bureaucracy and its indifference to what its recruits thought or wanted never quite ?bed with what we were taught to think as "American...
Roberta Maxwell misses little in her portrayal of Andrey's fiancee and, later, cuckolding wife Natasha, a vile and vulgar creature who ends up holding all the reins, and who insists on pretentiously flaunting her inadequate knowledge of French. Few scenes in all drama are as chillingly cruel as the one in which Natasha upbrades the loyal octogenarian nanny Anfisa and proceeds to advocate kicking her out because the old woman can't work enough, both does not convey sufficient age. (It occurs to me that director Kahn might have improved his production by switching the roles of Misses Maxwell...
Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: "She needs open-heart surgery-and they should go in through her feet." Director Blake Edwards charges that "Haber's writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case...
...with the exemption of college students which, in connection with the war in Vietnam, is behind so much of the student unrest. For example, if I am exempt from service when others are not, I can live in peace with myself only if I am convinced this is a vile...