Word: abracadabra
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...First Family of Magicians," they grew out of the family trade and into TV writing, until they heard about the planned demolition of the old house on the hill. They bought the place, then spent a year refurbishing it with bits of vanished Victorian homes and pieces of spooky abracadabra. Opened less than three years ago with 64 members, the club has conjured up a membership of 1,300, a third of them amateur or professional magicians. The rest are just writers, businessmen, professional people and a few show business sorts who like the idea. Guest privileges are liberal...
...Tricks & Dogs. There was evidently enough abracadabra in last year's Bewitched formula to inspire three new ghosts to walk. In NBC's My Mother the Car, Ann Sothern has died but returns as the disembodied voice of a car Jerry Van Dyke buys. The Smothers Brothers (CBS), who used to be a funny-folk duo, will impersonate a junior executive and his deceased brother who returns as an angel, I Dream of Jeannie (NBC) tells the imaginative story of an aspirant astronaut and Jeannie, a genie (it's a big year for clever names). As played...
Stokowski is making his debut in Phase4 Stereo, a recording technique involving, among other abracadabra, 20 mikes and a 20-channel mixer. The effects are sensuous, sonically exhilarating and unnatural. The listener feels as if he were floating almost as close to the solo violin as the bow itself, while Phase 5, the last stage of the mixing, goes on between his ears...
...Abracadabra! The Evil One relieves Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) of his atrocious eternal torment, seduction without satisfaction, and restores him to life with infernal instructions: lance that sty. The Great Lover-whom Bergman wittily conceives as the typical hero of a hair-oil ad, the sort of won't-you-be-my-Valentino every schoolgirl at some point adores-arrives at the rendezvous to find his ladylove smeared with housepaint and dressed in blue jeans. He stares in dismay. What...
...divinity can only address humanity in opaque hints and fragmentary revelations, since a mortal mind is no more capable of comprehending the divine plan than an infant is of understanding Shakespeare. Lewis advances this argument less through his stiff allegorical characters than through nimble theological dialectics, plus such gaudy abracadabra as temple harlots and garish bird masks that Ungit's priests don during blood sacrifices. But if the proper use of reason is to know where reason ends, Lewis' myth-making serves its purpose well, for the book carries the mind to the craggy limits of rationality where...