Word: butchers
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...mobster, whose sister had been married to the late Crime Chief Carlo Gambino, was reviled by his fellow dons. They mocked him as a dainty executive who had served only one short jail sentence (for armed robbery) and had never bloodied his hands except when he trained as a butcher in his youth. They also suspected that Castellano had been the source of information for the Government's case against the Commission, through an FBI bug planted in his neoclassical Staten Island home. The leaders were probably convinced that they had a greater likelihood of getting off without Castellano around...
...plan. But does nature "know" this, or is a grand design the projection of the human brain? The relationship between quirkiness and meaning is the book's dominant theme, perhaps best appreciated in Gould's retelling of the joke about a woman shopping for a large chicken. The butcher puts a two-pounder, his last bird, on the scale. "Not big enough," says the woman. Pretending to weigh a larger one, the butcher presses his thumb on the scale until it reads three pounds. "Fine," says the customer, "I'll take them both...
...looked down, and it was a 20-ft. drop to solid rock. I figured a fall would butcher me up or kill me one. I just laid down on the side, right on the edge and just hung on. The train went on by, and I walked back to find my dog, and there he lay across that rail. It sure was a sad night...
...miraculously, see exactly what is going on in front of his eyes, he can begin the truly important part of his mission: "Extending this knowledge to the entire universe." So he goes on watching: a pair of mating tortoises, giraffes in a zoo, the cuts of meat in a butcher shop, the ruins of a Toltec shrine in Mexico, the flight of migrant starlings in his native Rome. Even while tending the grounds of his summer home, he feels the key to cosmic understanding within his reach: "He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe...
...said about his dying was true of his life. It was only as a verb, that is, as a warrior, that he found focus. Grant had an animal sense of moment and motion. Mary Lincoln thought for a time during the siege of Richmond that Grant was a mere "butcher," and most of the North agreed. But he was a far better soldier than that. He could march strategies across a landscape the way a cat can walk across a dressing table laden with perfume bottles, never looking at his hind legs and never spilling a drop. That...