Word: combings
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...Comb Land. The rest of the voyage to Callao was easy. As Dr. Davis neared the Peruvian coast, he recalled an old tale of the islands. A Polynesian expedition under Chief Maui Marumamao, says the legend, sailed east from Easter Island and came to "a land with ridges like a comb." The Peruvian coast is like that, with steep, barren ridges running down to the sea. There the Polynesians built a temple, but they did not stay long because they did not find what they needed: fertile land near the sea. This description also matches Peru, for most...
...died in an automobile accident last December while serving in the Army. And six times during those nine years Louis left the house long enough to make an inconspicuous trip to a local barbershop. (In between visits to the barber, Louis trimmed his own hair with a cutting comb.) One thing he didn't bother to do, however, was register for the draft. Constance Patton, an ardent believer in astrology, never felt the stars were quite right for this step...
Grey Lady. The Rudges soon discovered that the country people held pudding stones in a kind of veneration, calling them "growing stones" or "motherstones." Superstitions had gathered around them. In Oxfordshire they were shunned after dark; a weird lady was supposed to sit on them at midnight to comb her grey hair. One stone built into a church carried a strange local legend. A farmer told Mrs. Rudge that the people who built the church brought the pudding stone down from a hill, and three times the devil carried the stone back to its lone hilltop. So the church...
Britain has bird watchers for every hedgerow, but most of them do not scratch the surface of the bird world. The closest bird watchers in Britain are the learned Misses Miriam Rothschild and Teresa Clay, who comb the feathers of birds, probe their body openings, search through their nests with microscopes. They are looking for the lice, fleas, ticks, mites, flies, worms and other parasites which swarm over all birds. After many years of study, the Misses Rothschild and Clay have published a lively book, Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos (Collins, London; 21 s.), packed with detailed information about the fascinating...
Charles Osborne's Dry Comb the entry in the second group is far more successful. Osborne employs the "beating the system" technique used to great advantage by Stephen Potter. The trick here is to discover a way of showing one's superiority over either people or institutions. Osborne has picked on the barbers. Like many others he dislikes the conversation that inevitably accompanies a haircut. His method of silencing barbers is both amusing and plausible...