Word: bit
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...afternoon Congressional from Washington bumped to a halt in a gloomy cavern beneath Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station one evening last week. Amid the crowd that surged out onto the platform, indistinguishable from his fellow passengers except for an extra bit of height (6 ft. 1 in.) and an extra gleam in his eye, walked a middle-aged man with a battered suitcase in his hand and his coat collar turned up against the wintry drafts. As he made his way through the station to the snow-blanketed street to hail himself a taxi, nobody recognized...
...Kilauea Iki's cone on the steaming crust of the lava pool. Using compressed air as a coolant, they drilled a 3½-in. hole into the crust at the tedious rate of 1½ ft. every eight hours. The 1,652° heat damaged the diamond bits and jammed pipe threads, forcing a switch to powdered graphite as a lubricant. At nearly 17 ft., Rawson and Higgins added water to the compressed air, found that this speeded their drilling up to the rate of a foot an hour. Finally, at 19½ ft. the bit sank into molten...
...GOOD LIGHT, by Karl Bjarnhof. A sequel to the blind Danish author's autobiographical novel of boyhood (The Stars Grow Pale) that is every bit as good as the first. The walls imposed by sightlessness and the desperate efforts to break through to contact with the life of the seeing are described with candor and beauty, without sentimentality or self-pity...
Miss Delaney's play is a philosophical accomplishment, for she wrings a bit of optimism out of sooty reality; but it is even more significant as theater. Aided by brilliant performances from Angela Lansbury as the mother, and Joan Plowright as Jo, the author manages to present the person she is condemning sympathetically (and thus, fairly). She sets forth the accusation against her with restraint and humor rather than fury, while the informal use of jazz reinforces the author's directive that "the time is today...
There are other plays worth seeing in New York. Brendan Behan's The Hostage is every bit as funny as Miss Delaney's play, and also takes a look at such human insanities as patriotism, the brink, and men who take themselves too seriously. High hopes are held for Brecht's Jungle of the Cities, which is opening now. Unfortunately, this is far from the poet's finest work, though New York seems ready for good Brecht. The Wall, by Millard Lampell, is a good reminder of the Nazi atrocities, but it is too reminiscent of Diary of Anne Frank...