Word: excremention
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Marton says he didn't think about the meaning of the war until he was in the hospital--he almost lost a leg when he stepped on a Pungi stick, a piece of bamboo reed sharpened on both ends and immersed in excrement as poison. After endless "nights when you'd hear guys sobbing in their beds--and I did it too--who were letting themselves feel the things they were repressing in combat," he began to think Vietnam was a mistake...
...York City health department, reported that a nursing home had failed to notify officials of a serious diarrhea epidemic. A surprise inspection of the home's kitchen revealed that patients were being given milk that should have been used at least a week earlier. This same inspection found excrement on the floors in patients' rooms and other equally unsanitary conditions...
What makes the prospect especially hazardous is that one of the molecular biologists' favorite tools is the bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite...
Thus Peter Martyr, a Habsburg court chronicler and diplomat, greeted the Old World's first exaction upon the New: a stupendous hoard of ornaments, masks and ritual objects cast and hammered from teocuitlatl, "the gods' excrement"-as the Aztecs called gold-which Montezuma had given to the insatiable Cortes. It was shown in Europe in 1519, and nothing from it survives today. Like nearly all the gold artifacts that Spain dragged from the New World, it was melted down for bullion...
...figure that the image of cold, yet capricious New York is built around. He communicates by shock. Flattering several matrons in an elevator by immediately identifying them as members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Christian informs them that one of them has certainly stepped in dog excrement. In the park, he systematically picks out obese women to ask them if they want to fornicate...