Word: aesop
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Since the great day when Aesop's tortoise nosed out the over-confident hare, turtle racing had come a long way. Last week a 25-year-old terrapin named Arkansas Express ran away with Loyola University's first turtle derby. He was bought in a fish market a month ago, and trained by pre-med students, who used Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex. Main feature: the "gait-straightener"-a practice track with a picture of a heron on one side, a pike on the other (both are natural enemies of the turtle...
...popular music (current hit: a romantic tune, Song of the Apple), comedy shows and precisely timed modern, democratic plays (John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln). The most popular storyteller, sad-faced, bowlegged Musei, dropped the tale of Sugato Sanshiro, the legendary judo champ, and picked up the Arabian Nights, Aesop's Fables, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. He even did a five-night version of Gone With the Wind...
...origin lost in the misty beginnings of all folklore, rapscallion Reynard's tale has been told and retold in a score of tongues. His name, his cunning, and the basis of some of his adventures are discernible in Aesop's fables and in the Hindu myths from which those fables came. In the 19th Century, philologist and fairytale-teller Jacob Grimm republished the story with all the gusty lustiness of earlier tellings; in a politer version Goethe made an epic poem of it. No less than 27 episodes of Le Roman de Renard were penned in medieval France...
...decades the 42,000 square miles of the Valley of the Tennessee were ill-faring land. Floods devastated the lowlands and rains eroded the deforested hills. There was little industry. The malaria-ridden people were as impoverished as the soil. Like Aesop's fabled dog in the manger, Tennessee's paunchy, vituperative Senator Kenneth McKellar championed the land and the people; he wanted no improvements without patronage. When the vast, experimental Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933 he set out to force the spoils system upon...
...Modern Aesop. George Ade was born a year after the Civil War; his major period of writing stopped in 1914, when a doctor reminded him that he would be unable to collect royalties in a cemetery. There were plenty of royalties-from his succession of Broadway hits (The College Widow, The Sultan of Sulu), and from his famed Fables in Slang. In the Fables, wit-coated little tales told in capital letters, an American generation found a peculiar charm, for George Ade reworked the goody-goody stories of his time through a screen of Big City sophistication, making them...