Word: dung
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that night, a shower of stones fell on the roof of an isolated police station just across the dung-strewn road from Can Town, and within seconds the police were inundated by Arab rioters. "They appeared as if by magic," said one of the eight policemen on duty, "out of the ground, from holes in the wall. It was unbelievable. One minute the street was deserted. The next minute it was filled with a horde of madmen screaming for blood." The police fired at short range killing some 20 Arabs...
Highland Home. Above the slopes, where derby-hatted women miners pick and sort the greyish-blue lumps for milling, are Huanuni's strings of company-built miners' homes. Over a cow-dung fire, Sabino Perez' wife cooks the evening meal of potatoes; because of the low boiling point at 12,800 feet they come out of the pan almost as raw and hard as they went in. Blue-cheeked children huddle inside the windowless, dirt-floored, one-room hut to escape the biting mountain wind. Within are a bed, two chairs, and a four-inch figure...
...Charlotte's Web, The New Yorker's E. B. White retires, as all city intellectuals should, to a roomy barn on a large farm. Here, on a cosy dung heap, he sets Wilbur, a runt that is never likely to make much of a pig-a sort of porcine Cinderella, in fact. But thanks to bottle feeding by a little girl, Wilbur waxes so stout that he is a cinch to become the farmer's Christmas dinner. Wilbur's hard plight-considered first too puny, then too appetizing to live-excites the pity of a spider...
...Creation" is easy to read because Gamow is skillful at finding simple, apt illustrations for complex ideas. One good method for determining the age of rocks is based on the transmutation of heavier radioactive into isotopes of lead. Gamow likens the lead accumulations to dung deposits in a corral full of cattle: the cattle represent the radio-actives, the corral--rocks, and "primordial dung"--lead present before the transmission began. Then, he says, by considering the rate of dung-deposition of the cattle (or the half-life of the radioactive elements), we can tell when the cattle entered the corral...
Conscience & Cow Dung. Only 17 miles from the city of Madras (pop. 1,000,000) is the village of Alamadi (pop. 1,500); until this year, Alamadi had no medical service at all. Then some students of Stanley Medical College picked Alamadi as a place to set up a Sunday clinic. Said one: "We thought it quixotic that there should be so much cutthroat competition among city doctors, while a few miles away peasants died of tetanus because they thought cow dung would cure an abscess...