Word: balloonful
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These five quiet words last week couched an amazing event. Far faster than even the sanguine British had imagined possible, eastern Libya had collapsed. In exactly two months Italy's colonial ambitions of 15 years had collapsed like a pricked balloon...
...stomach tantalized him. He could feel it writhing, could hear it rumble, could even measure its contractions (by swallowing a balloon, inflating it, and hitching the tube that protruded from his mouth to a delicate recording machine). But he could not see into it. He longed for a second Alexis St. Martin...
...scientists have known that blinded bats could fly without collisions, but that deafened bats could not. To get exact data on the bat technique, Biologists Robert Galambos and Donald Griffin collected specimens from caves in the Berkshires, put them through their paces in rooms hung with wires like a balloon barrage, with special supersonic recorders. In finding out what prevents bat crackups, the scientists did not mutilate the creatures, used blindfolds, ear plugs, mouth gags. Last week Galambos & Griffin reported that the pitch of the bat signal is around 50,000 vibrations a second.* Flying in free space, the bats...
...anything except cows were hit by British bombs, a wag wrote to one of the papers urging the erection of a monument to "Goebbels' Unknown Cow." After German airplanes and anti-aircraft batteries had worked over The Netherlands for two hours to bring down a runaway British barrage balloon, somebody cracked: "The poor thing finally burst from laughter...
Like the newspaper series from which it was compiled, Ingersoll's book shoots most of its news bolt in the beginning. Its best quality is its wide-eyed observation of ordinary details: how it feels to wait in line for a food-rations book, how London's balloon barrage looks from the ground (". . . all the balloons point in the same direction, as cows do in a field on a windy...