Word: woes
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Japan has long had a special regard for the navel. The shape of the umbilicus of a newborn baby would be discussed at length, and if it happened to point downward, the parents would brace themselves for a weakling child who would bring them woe. The thunder god Raijin, with his terrifying drums, his great horns and long tusks, was said to have an insatiable appetite for young navels, and mothers had constantly to nag their youngsters to keep themselves well covered up. But for all the national preoccupation with it, the navel in Japan never quite achieved the status...
Even at the worst of the recession, there was no overall pattern of woe. New England, with its troubled textile industry and heavy manufacturing, was sorely tried. Many of the Midwest's one-industry towns had some rough months. In Peoria, Ill., where Caterpillar Tractor is not just a barometer of business but the whole weather bureau, 9,000 men were out of work until Cat worked off its big inventory of bulldozers and earth movers. But at the same time, South Dakota's farmers were so thick in clover that tax receipts ran 10% higher...
There is a good deal of homiletics and political woe-crying in his later letters, but Belloc was seldom a bore. With his grave devotion to his religion went a fanatical belief in wine, which he liked to drink "to the Glory of God and the confusion of my enemies." He was not halfhearted in his piety toward the stuff. Off and on, over 20 years, he polished a poem in praise of wine. He found it a symbol of the good things of life denied by Puritan religions or by "Islam, furtive enemy of the soul." He said...
...first act were also technical, and secondarily dramatic. Shaw's Pygmalion contains five short and concise acts. This structure was deemed inconvenient by the Wellesley group, and so the play was aborted into one long act and two short ones. The effect of this was to drag out the woe-filled first act to the point of boredom. The Players tried to make up for this in a superbly done second act, and thought to leave the audience with a good going-home impression with the third. A favorable word should be added, though, for the adroit and clever setting...
...surprising because before hearing him read you'd think he was jumping all over the place while writing his stuff. The choice of poems on the record is a good one, largely because he leans on the chuckle-chuckle side and forgets this country's inevitable American woe. All of the "Limericks" are included, and they sound just as good, and maybe better, than they read...