Word: dino
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...ANYONE EVER CARE LESS about being in show business than Dean Martin? Singing, acting, hosting a TV program, headlining in Las Vegas--these were just things people paid Dino to do when he wasn't on the links. His old partner Jerry Lewis said that in preparing for their '50s TV show, "we had this great arrangement: he played golf and I worked." There, and in movies, and on the long-running Dean Martin Show, the drill was the same. He would show up when the camera had to roll. Rehearsal was for wimps. To practice meant you cared...
...start, he was a traditional crooner who learned intonation from Crosby and salesmanship from Jolson. Yet there was a hint in his gestures (eyes closed in ecstasy, arms stretched out imploringly) that he was parodying the very idea of crooner; he was a mellow modernist. You could also peg Dino as an anachronism, a Joe E. Lewis saloon-lush type, the party animal in a tux. Or maybe he was the first slacker, elevating sloth to a Zen art. The stupefaction he radiated on his TV show--the Golddiggers dancing around him as wildly as Jer used to, Dean standing...
Take Crichton's dinos: unlike the dumb, drab, ponderous monsters that once graced the textbooks, his animals are smart, nimble and decked out in designer colors. The wily, vicious velociraptors are green with tiger stripes of bright red. Tyrannosaurus rex is the hue of dried blood. And a dino called Carnotaurus sastrei is a superchameleon, its skin capable of taking on the look of anything--a leafy branch, a stone wall or even a chain-link fence...
Dinosaur babies figure prominently in The Lost World, just as they do in much current paleontological research. The recent discovery of a number of well-preserved dino nests in the western U.S. and Mongolia has convinced scientists that the terrible lizards were actually nurturing parents, watching lovingly over their hatchlings and bringing them tidbits of food, like robins tending their chicks. Crichton's creatures do the same, to the horror of at least one tidbit...
...slightest change in conditions. That, according to some experts, could explain why the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. According to this notion, the popular theory that the cause was a comet crash is only half right: the comet did crash, but its effect was to destabilize dino behavior, rendering the creatures unable to compete with mammals, those hairy little animals with big ambitions. This is just the sort of behavioral disruption (induced by disease rather than a comet impact) that leads to a disintegration of the dino social structure in The Lost World. It gives the book...