Word: pendulum
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...Relaxed Standards. The Supreme Court, though, is well aware of public cries that "the pendulum has swung too far in favor of criminals." And to redress the balance, the court may devise more relaxed standards. As the court said in 1960: "What the Constitution forbids is not all searches and seizures, but unreasonable searches and seizures." As an instance, the court in 1963 upheld the right of California police to make an arrest and search after they entered a narcotics peddler's room with a passkey but without a warrant...
...Pendulum. Summoned to the parlor of her modest London home, Mrs. Groomkirby finds that Mr. Groomkirby has transformed it into a replica of an Old Bailey courtroom. "I thought as much," she says bemusedly, then steps into the dock to testify in her son's trial for murder. He has slain 34-or perhaps 43-people by striking them down while they laughed at his jokes. Complaints have been lodged, the judge informs her. And drat it, the lad wears only black...
Obviously the Groomkirby household is no ordinary one. This whole sappy movie may, in fact, be too extraordinary for its own good. Based on N. F. Simpson's London play and billed as England's jackknife dive into the Cinema of the Absurd, Pendulum shuns nearly every requisite for success. It shows little film sense, for its revue-style humor is more verbal than visual. It is often sophomoric, just as often wickedly funny, and has no plot whatever. To U.S. audiences its best-known players are Veteran Actress Mona Washbourne, as a pixilated aunt, and Writer-Actor...
Surprisingly, behind Pendulum's sometimes tidy, sometimes tiresome chaos, Writer Simpson has planted one or two ideas that swing. The Groom-kirbys, on the surface, behave like any middle-class family, and after a while their absurd rituals and lunatic discourse begin to seem alarmingly close to the norm. And as they blithely beat words to a pulp in their do-it-yourself Old Bailey, they somehow suggest that one way to solve the angst-ridden question of communication among men is to kill the language in self-defense...
Have you lost something? A dowser, with the help of a small pendulum and a map, will find it for you. Do you want happiness, success, power? Go see any of the voyants advertised in three astrological monthlies. Are you doubtful of your lover? Visit Professor E. L. Erus, who provides an "infallible life guide in the problems of the heart," and for 20 francs and a handwriting sample will reveal "knowledge of the loved one, his personality and his fidelity...