Word: fats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...roly-poly, with human heads and torsos but no sexual markings. Standing majestically in the town plaza of La Democracia (pop. 2,000) in southern Guatemala, the dozen pre-Columbian statues were excavated from a nearby ceremonial site and are a favorite target of tourist cameras. Now the "Fat Boys," as they are called, are becoming objects of scientific curiosity as well...
...Fat Boys are apparently of pre-Olmec origin, sculptured by predecessors of the earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica, who dwelt in a region around Izapa, an ancient priestly center just across the border in Mexico. The gifted artisans did not insert magnetic rocks into the figures, but apparently carved them around natural magnetic poles in the original basaltic boulders. But how did they discover this magnetism? Mesoamerica's oldest known lodestone, or primitive compass, a 2.5-cm (1-in.) bar made of magnetic rock, dates back only to 1000 B.C., a millennium younger than the Fat Boys and some...
...magnetism may have been the magical power by which sea turtles found their way across great expanses of ocean. (He also suggests that the magnetic turtle may hint of Olmec contacts with the Chinese, since they also made their early compasses in the shape of turtles.) As for the Fat Boys, Malmstrom says, their magnetism may represent the life force, with the navel symbolizing birth, and the temple consciousness or knowledge...
...Keaton's comedies did not show the profits of Chaplin's or of Harold Lloyd's, and he became vulnerable to a takeover. His career was not killed by the advent of the talkies, as is often assumed. It began to die when he signed a fat contract ($3,000 a week) at MGM and became answerable to accountants and better business methods...
...investment in a ticket, they find it easiest to review a performance with their feet: they keep on walking. Hence a by-God spontaneous response is the street musicians' sweetest reward. A Seattle group called Brandywine (violin, hammer dulcimer, guitar, bass) will always cherish the moment during the Fat Tuesday celebration when its galloping rendition of the William Tell Overture so inflamed a woman bystander that she bounded up onto a horse behind a mounted policeman. Hi-ho, Rossini...