Word: random
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rioting, 35 died, 900 were injured. In 1966, the Cleveland ghetto of Hough erupted when a white bartender denied a glass of ice water to a Negro patron. And in Newark, N.J., a trumpet-playing Negro cab driver by the name of John Smith last week became the random spark that ignited the latest-and one of the most violent-of U.S. race riots...
Perhaps the most persuasive theory is advanced by Sociologist Erving Goffman, who worked for a year in Las Vegas as a dealer. He describes gambling as a "meaning machine that grinds out random decisions very rapidly. Betting on the outcome transfers mere random decisions into fateful ones. This provides an essentially meaningless but exciting situation that allows people to read into the action whatever fantasies they want, to groove, to go crazy in an intensely personal way." In other words, gambling becomes life itself, made into whatever one wants...
Although that sounds like a pipe-dream, it conveys the unreality that permeates hippiedom, a cult whose mystique derives essentially from the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. The hippies have popularized a new word, psychedelic, which the Random House...
...Square Park, chanting "What is dog spelled backward?" Other New York hippies raised $2,100 for a bail fund to rescue "busted" (arrested) buddies. At California's Seal Beach, 2,500 devotees gathered for a sunny "love-in" that throbbed to the rhythm of trash-can drums and random flutes. In Dallas, 100 "flower children" gathered in Stone Place Mall, the public hippiedrome, to protest an ordinance that would prohibit gatherings there. A dozen hippies paraded barefoot through the White House, then promised to return for a July 4 "smoke-in" to lobby for legalized marijuana...
...houses of "The Hashbury," shrouding the shapes of hirsute, shoeless hippies huddled in doorways, smoking pot, "rapping" (achieving rapport with random talk), or banging beer cans in time to ubiquitous jukebox rhythms. The tinkle of Indian elephant bells echoes from passing "seekers"; along the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, hollow-cheeked flower children queue up for a plateful of stew, dispensed from the busy buses of the Diggers, a band of hippie do-gooders. Last week the sidewalks and doorways were filling with new arrivals-hippies and would-be hippies with suitcases and sleeping bags, just...