Word: cowed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many of the culprits, especially in economically depressed Texas, are small- time operators who may grab one cow at a time and load it into a trailer. Says Steve Westbrook, one of 32 private field inspectors hired by the state: "Used to be cowboy types would steal cattle. Now it's everyone, from a person trying to support a drug habit to an unemployed person who is behind on house and car payments." The victims of many of the Texas thefts are city dwellers who have weekend "ranchettes" of about 15 acres, where they relax and keep a few cows...
Others worry about the animals themselves. Yale Lecturer Gul Agha, founder of a watchdog group called the Cambridge Committee for Responsible Research, is concerned about the quality of life for the new breeds. Producing a cow that gives three times as much milk as a normal Guernsey, he notes, could mean producing a cow that lives in acute discomfort. Says he: "We have the prospect of creating animals that may be in continual agony." Others fret that the release of genetically engineered animals, such as fatter mice or more aggressive game fish, might result in ecological disaster...
...paint green leaves on trees. Monuments are scrubbed with Yugoslav shampoo, and telephone lines cut by the Germans in World War II are at last repaired. Since Gorbachev was once party secretary responsible for agriculture, a committee of scientific experts is convened to consider "How many nipples on a cow's udder?" The answer: "It appears that there are four, although the cow was given a plan for five." Hard-to-get consumer goods arrive in shops overnight, goods that "we thought were entered in the Red Book," a Soviet compendium of rare and extinct plant and animal species...
...grabs a church and paints with the church," wrote a poet of the cubist era, Blaise Cendrars. "He grabs a cow and paints with the cow . . . He paints with an oxtail/ With all the dirty passion of a little Jewish town/ With all the exacerbated sexuality of provincial Russia." Soutine? Strangely enough, no: Marc Chagall...
...flooded interiors from the U.N. headquarters in New York City to Reims Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment. His quasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time, would serve (with adjustments: drop the flying cow, put in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from the Holocaust to the self-celebration of a bank. When he died last week at the age of 97 at his home near Nice, Chagall's career had spanned more than three-quarters of a century of unremittingly active artmaking...