Word: weightlessness
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...Weightless Beauty. Which is why J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) amounted to such a calumny on fairies. Barrie wrote, "Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead." He thus upended the truth (people need fairies) and propagated a late Victorian myth (fairies need people) that must have grounded Puck and Ariel. The rest of the century was no kinder. Thanks to Peter Pan's continuing popularity and Disneyfication, Tinker Bell & Co. were ultimately reduced to trademarks or synonyms for homosexuals...
...what about the time Huey Long met Ina Ray Hutton? Moments like this-of which there are many in Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?-may not change history, but they can bring it close as no transcript or statistic can. It is the unproclaimed thesis of this breezy, weightless chronicle of the Depression that time is the sum of events great and small, and that the footnotes to history usually make better reading than the main text...
...Frank Sinatra-juxtaposed with a mini-history of the atomic bomb. In the spinning mind of the reader, the Bay of Pigs and the Edsel seem to loom as equal disasters. The Cliquot Club Eskimos and the Chicago Seven, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Howdy Doody-one is no more weightless than the other in such a time-capsule vacuum...
...complicated machinery, and he also has an amusing imagination. He concludes that bras will not be necessary in space: "Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally." ·Robert Sherrod
Momentarily forgetting that he was no longer living in the weightless environment of spaceflight, returned Skylab 3 Astronaut Ed Gibson put his blood pressure kit out in front of him and turned away; he was startled when the kit crashed to the floor. His fellow space traveler, Gerald Carr, was so astonished by the sound of tumbling ice cubes in his refrigerator that he nearly jumped out of his seat. His wife reassured...