Word: cricketer
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Gehlen turned the gentleman's avocation of spying - Sir John Master man still compares it to cricket - into big business. But Hohne and Zolling argue that, despite all his thermos-flask cameras and secret, secret ink, he still couldn't keep up with the times. Forced into retirement in 1968, he sat in his study on Lake Starnberg with a death mask of Frederick the Great looking down and wrote his memoirs (due out later this year) rather like Buffalo Bill after the frontier went thataway. For spying, like everything else, has gone automated...
...Rabbit is always out of step with (perhaps, ahead of) his times. The culture permeating society in 1969 no longer shares his new assumptions. Even in Rabbit's running days, America was not a land where the individual counted all that much, but there was still Jiminy Cricket to sing that "you couldn't ask a waterfall to be a tree." In Redux, when Rabbit and Nelson watch television, the Lone Ranger is mocked, and even Tonto involved in general degradation. To Rabbit, "America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream as a face of God. Wherever America...
...trouble was that the crickets kept coming, and they were twice the size of the common cricket found in the U.S. At night, the patter of crickets landing on roof tiles was like the sound of rain, which the town had seldom heard in recent years. Turning out the mercury vapor lamps helped little; the crickets invaded lighted houses instead. Turning out indoor lights meant a darkness in which crickets suddenly lit on eyes or mouths or necks. Worst of all was the sickening crunch of crickets underfoot and the unending chirp-chirp-chirp of their monotonous serenade...
Some Coincidence. Pondering all this, Padre Pedro Solano, the town's priest, fell back on what he called "the weapons of faith." He decreed a daily penitential procession in which townspeople shouldered a statue of St. Sebastian, the guardian against plague, and asked him to deliver them from crickets. After the initial procession of 500 hopeful believers, the insect horde slackened. After the third came a torrential rain that helpfully washed away countless cricket corpses and held down further attacks...
Studying the situation last week, Brazilian entomologists pointed out that crickets are controlled by toads, each of which can devour 300 cricket nymphs a night. But for four years in Brazil's Northeast, toads have been hunted for skins, which sell well in the U.S. to make purses, belts and watchbands. Without toads, the cricket population exploded. Until the two get into equilibrium again, St. Sebastian has his work...