Word: slipping
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Seldom does Cooke slip into his genre's pitfall: bad amateur anthropology. Their wit not withstanding, his comments on the effect of air conditioning on New York family life do fall into this class, as they become contrived expositions of trivia. He is safer--and much more entertaining--when he sticks to the looser descriptive style of which he is a master...
...black flag of anarchy," a "red flag" and a "Viet Cong flag." Some witnesses state it was a suit of red underwear or a red armband or a rag. On films of the incident, it appears to be "a knotted red cloth or a girl's bright red slip." Police, after a hard fight, pulled down the object, but not even the cops know what it was or what happened...
Then a schmaltzy song that tones things down a little. Elvis begins to slip away from us--ten more years, Elvis? As you play with your model airplanes in Graceland and sip Pepsis, while we're off somewhere, thirty or so? The last few minutes of the program are a rerun of the first few. "I'm Evil" again. You started it, Elvis. The liberator. The martyr to our increased sophistication. Grand old man. He's exactly the same as he was ten years ago, exactly. He started it. We love you, Elvis...
...humor-in-microcosm ("Brackley...worked long and hard on certain aspects of the dissection of a fetal pig"), but overall the joke is strained. In the story, Brackley carves up his girl's face, but she becomes a model. Grotesque? Yes ("Camillia emerged from the bathroom wearing a slip and having a long, thin nose, a deep cleft serving as an eyebrow, one eye resting where her cheek bone formerly was ..."). Funny? Not really...
...nightmare of man being destroyed by a creature of his own making has always been with us. The first robot in literature was the Golem, a clay man made by the High Rabbi Lev Ben Bezalel of Prague in the 16th century. Animated by a slip of paper bearing the name of God, it murdered the Rabbi when he made it work on the Sabbath. The Biblical analog is the Tower of Babel, the presumptuous construction that called down God's wrath on man. But the Golem and the Tower of Babel are myths. Computers are real...