Word: canings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...less buttoned down. San Francisco's mild but flighty climate must nurture eccentrics. In 1849, the city's commissioner of deeds resigned to become a singer-songwriter. Some years later, a circus geek called Oofty Goofty became a sidewalk S-M entrepreneur: he let passers-by cane him for a quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later...
...uses an aluminum wrist cane to walk across the expansive living room of his Mercer Island, Wash., home. He walks surprisingly quickly, despite the ar thritis and 22 operations that have left his left leg 1 Yi in. shorter than his right. He cannot stand for more than seven minutes at a time without great pain. Says...
...Remember, young man," he told me, as I am sure he had told hundreds of aspiring writers before me, "Writing is an excellent cane--but a very poor crutch...
...forced General Henri Navarre, the French commander in chief in Indochina, to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu. "Why were we successful?" he asks. "President Ho Chi Minh found a path: the combination of the struggle for national independence and the struggle for socialism." In a nearby sugar-cane field, close to where hundreds of French soldiers are said to be buried, the Vietnamese are erecting a modest monument to their foes: a plain white cross inside a bamboo fence...
...ancient Greece, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx: "What is it that goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?" Answer: Man. (First he appears as a crawling baby, then upright in maturity, then in old age with a cane.) The Old Testament yields some difficult puzzles and praises those who solve them, like the prophet Daniel: "A notable spirit, with . .. the gift of interpreting dreams, explaining riddles and unbinding spells...