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Plastic Skin. About 4% of accidents in brain arteries are episodes of bleeding from an aneurysm-a ballooned-out, weak section of an artery. Aneurysms are usually congenital in origin. When they grow large or rupture, they may cause serious brain damage or death. The mortality rate in untreated cases is about...
Philosophical Conundrum. For those who came in late, it should be explained that The Music of Time is narrated by Nick Jenkins, who, like Powell, is of Welsh origin, with family connections with Army and "County," went to Eton and Oxford, and is currently engaged in literary criticism. Previous installments have taken Nick through school and university, and have looked fixedly at English high life and business. The current episode concerns that curious interbellum miscegenation between Society and the Arts dealt with so brilliantly in the satiric masterpiece of Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God. Its period is that Slough...
...origin of man, says Huxley, "the assertion of Roman Catholic theology that all mankind is descended from a single couple, instead of from a slowly evolving population, is certainly untrue; and its claim that, though natural evolution can only account for man's body, God is needed to account for his soul. is quite unjustified...
...Hook. Johnson's unexpected presence on the Kennedy-Democratic ticket upset a basic assumption of Nixon's campaign strategy. To offset advantages that Kennedy's New England origin and Roman Catholicism will give him in the East, Nixon had hoped to win a clutch of electoral votes in the South, capturing at least the four states-Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia-that Dwight Eisenhower carried in both 1952 and 1956. By dimming Nixon's prospects in the South, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket confronted him with a tough problem in electoral-vote arithmetic. Even if Nixon...
Sitzfleisch & Fen. Inevitably, the book has faults. The authors might have been more critical of some sources and more revealing in etymology. For instance, no attempt is made to trace the origin of that wonder word "viggerish." There are other omissions; how did they ever miss such expressions as on the q.t., go pound sand (meaning "The hell with you, bub"), sitzfleisch (perseverance), penobscot (falsie), fen (well known to every boy who ever played marbles), screech (rotgut), or that masterpiece of imaginative profanity, the blivit (a term of personal description usually defined...