Word: cardiff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Harvey Jacobs' American Goliath (St. Martin's; 346 pages; $24.95) celebrates the long and glorious tradition of deception with an inspired novel based on the 1869 Cardiff Giant hoax...
...Happily for Hull, the imaginative minister was fond of scriptural quotes like, "There were giants in the earth in those days." So the tobacconist hired a shady Chicago sculptor to turn a block of gypsum into a 10-ft. Goliath, which was shipped to a relative's farm in Cardiff, N.Y., for burial. After a year of underground seasoning, the figure was "discovered," and Cousin Stubby's farm became a combination Lourdes and sideshow. Suckers and scholars (not always distinguishable) lined up to pay a dollar a peek...
...record: The original Cardiff Giant is on permanent display at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. That fact contains an extra-literary, though no less poetic, irony. Across town, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, there is a plaque that sheepishly admits Abner Doubleday did not invent the game. At the same time, its text seems to suggest that a little mythology is not a bad thing. Just don't pay too much for too little...
DIED. VISCOUNT TONY-PANDY, 88, silver-tongued Speaker of the British House of Commons from 1976 to 1983, whose Welsh-accented "Order! Order!" set the tone for parliamentary debate; in Cardiff, Wales...
When Terfel emerged five years later, newly married to his childhood sweetheart and with a contract from the Welsh National Opera, he bought a house in Cardiff, thinking that he and his wife Lesley would spend their life there. But the house is already sold, and the Terfels now live in London -- that is, when they are not on the road. They always travel together, joined as of four months ago by baby Tomos...