Word: whirlings
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Question: What competitive event would pit a running back (Earl Campbell), a race-car driver (A.J. Foyt) and an astronaut (Air Force Colonel Joe Engle) against a high-strung team armed only with cellos, violins, one harp and a collection of horns? No, not ABC's Wide Whirl of Junk Sports. Real answer: the 1984 Houston Symphony Olympics, a cacophonous assembly of nine celebrity guest conductors who showed up last week for a publicity-stunt contest that generated more than 1,500 new subscribers for the symphony season. All conducted themselves admirably-and the suffering orchestra less well...
...times last week it seemed as if the campaign's speedy whirl might reduce all the candidates to caricatures of themselves. Mondale struggled to make a virtue of his pure liberalism. "I don't know what else to do," he said. "What you see is what you get." In Florida, standing in a grove of winter-ravaged oranges, Mondale conceded that Senator Edward Kennedy had refused to endorse him; at that moment, the once invincible candidate seemed an authentic underdog. Hart, meanwhile, was using the words "future" and "new" over and over again. The candidate of youth...
Which may account for a basic appeal of these sports: their headlong assault on the weather. Or maybe it is the controlled craziness of the events. On surfaces difficult enough to walk on upright do these people race, leap, whirl, swerve, and then add an extra unnatural measure of defiance by going airborne. Fanatics. Only a spill proves them mortal. So reckless is their attitude that, watching them, one barely believes in the danger. Then someone's momentum is shattered, and a kid lies piled up in his skis like a broken bird. Silence replaces wonder...
WATCHING Gorky Park is like taking a long walk though an endless forest on a cold wintry day as the snow and ice-leaden branches slap our faces. Based on the superb spy thriller by Martin Cruz Smith, this film hypnotizes us with its briskly paced plot, providing a whirl-wind tour of Moscow, snow-covered country estates, and Russian espionage organizations. The novel Gorky Park rivals John Le Carre's Smiley's People and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with a systematic, psychological unravelling of a bizarre mystery. Like Robert Ludlum's intricate tales, including Parsifal Mosaic, each minute...
Glenn unquestionably fares better on celluloid than in Tom Wolfe's book, published to high acclaim in 1979. As caught in the whambang whirl of Wolfe's prose, the young astronaut seemed more of a Presbyterian prude, a sort of born-again Sky King. While Wolfe poked fun at Glenn the boy policing the language of his school chums, the film focuses only on Glenn the adult. Other digs are neatly skipped over. Wolfe, for example, implies that Glenn sought out NASA officials to discuss replacing Alan Shephard on the first flight, but not a hint of that...