Word: flickerings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hunters in the slave markets of Rome submitted prospective purchases to a trial as nerve-racking as watching a badly adjusted picture tube. Before a slave was bought and paid for, he was forced to stare at a potter's wheel rotating rapidly in bright sunlight. If the flicker caused the slave to keel over, the deal was off. Seizures before the spinning potter's wheel were taken as a sign of "the falling sickness," the Roman name for epilepsy...
Though the slave markets are long gone, flicker epilepsy has returned-a byproduct of modern electronics. The jittering of an out-of-kilter picture tube can cause severe epileptic seizures. In the past two years, two British doctors have seen 14 children with epileptic seizures induced by television flicker. The condition, they think, is more common than most physicians realize. Most striking is the fact that nine of the 14 patients had convulsions only while watching TV; only five of them were known to be susceptible because they had had similar attacks in other circumstances...
...Sellers is remarkably cunning about his funning: even when he's trying to get a laugh, he never really seems to be trying, so when he fails he never really seems to have failed. Which may explain why, in this 25-minute snicker at the usual British gumshoe flicker, a miss is as good as a smile...
...Chicago, Negro Paul Crump, 32, read from the Bible and Socrates, watched the lights of his Cook County cell flicker as officials tested the electric chair behind a green steel door just 20 steps away. He was waiting, as he had been through nine years and 14 reprieves, to die for the holdup-slaying of a Chicago industrial guard...
...sale, Wilson pored over the catalogue, noting in his private code bids already phoned in and the reserve price below which Maugham would not sell. From his opening announcement-"Lot No. 1. Roderick O'Conor's Still Life with Vegetables"-he presided over the sale without a flicker of nervousness, apart from shooting a cuff now and then. The 35 paintings went for $1,466,864, including $244,000-the highest price ever paid at auction for a living artist-for a Picasso curiosity that showed The Death of Harlequin on one side and Woman Seated...