Word: desmond
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Reckless Waltzes. The evening does have some amusing nonsense and high spirits. The sets and costumes by Desmond Heeley are not only clever but look notably fresh. The music, ar ranged and conducted by John Lanch-berry, sounds like a serious ensemble rather than the pickup assortment that often accompanies dance. The Australians are a very handsome company. The girls are among the prettiest dancers around; the men are tall and athletic. John Meehan, who plays Count Danilo, the rich widow's reluctant lover, is positively coltish. He carries off the evening with blithe bravado, swinging Dame Margot around...
Dinosaurs are generally regarded as overgrown lizards-pea-brained, coldblooded creatures that spent most of their lives hulking sluggishly in the sun. This image is unfair, argues Adrian Des mond, 28, an English-born doctoral candidate at Harvard University. Desmond, who studied vertebrate paleontology at London University, has spent the past several years reviewing the latest research on the huge creatures that ruled the earth for 140 million years. In a new book titled The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs (Dial Press; $12.95), he contends that some dinosaurs and their kin were warm-blooded, complex and far more intelligent than some...
...Cold. Desmond bases his argument on a comparison of dinosaurs and modern-day reptiles like the lizard. Cold-blooded animals, whose bodies are small by comparison with most mammals, control their body temperatures by moving into or out of the sun. If dinosaurs were coldblooded, maintains Desmond, they would not have been able to do this because of their size (a brontosaur, for example, weighed around 30 tons); a dinosaur whose body temperature dropped just one degree below the warmth necessary for it to be active would have to bask in the sun for at least several hours to bring...
...Desmond also supports an explanation of the dinosaurs' sudden disappearance that is compatible with the warmblooded theory: at the end of the Cretaceous era, about 70 million years ago, the earth's climate rapidly cooled. Cold-blooded reptiles, such as turtles and crocodiles, were able to find cozy nooks and survive the winters by hibernating; small, fur-covered mammals built warm nests. Dinosaurs could not. Too big to find protective caves or burrows in which to hibernate, they stayed out in the cold and died...
...there was nothing unprecedented about Rizzo's attempt to stop the Inquirer from running columnist Desmond Ryan's piece entitled "Our Mayor Speaks" a few days before its publication. The one-page article, billed as a hypothetical interview with the mayor in the table of contents of the Inquirer's "Today Magazine," portrayed Rizzo making derogatory comments about ethnic groups and homosexuals, and parodied his style of speech. The following excerpt with translation for those unattuned to Philadelphia's politics, shows how deep Ryan plunged...