Word: witlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fact that its normal best in the cold war is no longer good enough. The U.S. satellite test vehicle, reaching for the sky and falling flat on its pad, was a symbol of the old standards: a hurry-up effort to answer moons with a moon, klaxons of witless pressagentry and, after the flop, yelps of anguish (cried Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson: "How long, how long, O God, how long will it take us to catch up with Russia's two satellites?"). Yet even if Vanguard had been successful in its first try, even...
...CRITIC'S WIFE: "The producer feels that the mere physical presence of a wife depresses the critic, lowers his spirits, clogs his areas of good will, and leaves his head rattling with phrases like 'witless,' 'tasteless,' and 'below the level of the professional theatre' . . . 'What if a doctor had to bring his wife along when he performed an operation?' the producer will ask you. 'Can't you see her sitting there murmuring, 'Here's a nice suture, dear, and why don't you try this clamp...
...ineffectually to solve hopeless problems (e.g., while struggling to get a grand piano over a narrow suspension bridge across a horrifying chasm between two Alpine peaks, they would encounter, midway, a gorilla). Hardy was the master of mime and the bowler-bouncing doubletake, and, faced with Laurel's witless works, the withering glare. But it was brink-of-tears Laurel (who has also suffered a stroke) who somehow, always looking miserable, saved them...
...Home, its 3½-year-old, hour-long "service" show, in August. NBC is also mercifully scrapping the Tonight format and reverting to the freewheeling foolishness of the old Ernie Kovacs-Steve Allen days, with slouchy, sentimental Jack Paar picking up the pieces left by this season's witless nightclub gossipists. For the first time in its ten years. Kraft TV Theater will maintain its $50,000 winter budget despite polls that indicate a viewer decline in summer. Tentatively set for Thursday as NBC's biggest summer show is a new "low highbrow'' quiz called High...
Tomtomfoolery. From Horatio Alger, Satirist West moved on to Hollywood, where he had worked as a script writer. Apart from the usual film-colony grotesques, The Day of the Locust parades witless cowboys, actors, emotional cripples, dwarfs and a memorably mindless, chrome-pated sexpot. It ends in madness and violence, like the others-a mob at a Hollywood premiere tramples an artist, who is carried offstage screaming...