Word: faunas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...someone's eyes snapping open. Journeying to the year 2154, moviegoers everywhere have embraced the film - surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in moving pictures - as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience. The planet Pandora is a wonder world of flora and fauna: a rainforest (where it rarely rains) of gigantic trees and phosphorescent plants, of flying steeds, panther dogs and hammerhead dinosaurs. Audiences are just as beguiled by Pandora's humanish tribe, the Na'vi - the lean, 10-ft.-tall, blue-striped people with yellow eyes. They are what humans might have...
...least that's the advice of the jungle- hardened rangers who patrol just one corner of this 1.9 million - acre (7,700 sq km) wilderness. They are trained by the London-based conservation group Fauna and Flora International (FFI) to protect Ulu Masen from illegal loggers and poachers, who greedily eye its valuable hardwoods and teeming wildlife: elephants, gibbons, tigers, leopards, bears, pythons and scaly anteaters. The rangers' work might seem remote from the modern world, but it has implications far beyond Ulu Masen's frontiers - from Africa and the Amazon, which along with Indonesia are home to what...
...vacation in Honduras can conjure up visions of spectacular destinations: the Mayan ruins of Copán, cloud forest after cloud forest filled with exotic flora and fauna, the gorgeous beaches and the dolphin-filled waters off the island of Roatán. But that's not what tourist-industry reporters saw when the country's Minister of Tourism, Ricardo Martínez, presented a video at a recent convention in neighboring El Salvador. With a sound track of revolutionary music, it showed supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya clashing with riot police in the streets of the capital...
...Along the way Langdon bags all kinds of exotic symbological fauna, decoding his specimens on the fly with an inexhaustible sense of wonderment (No, it can't be! Oh, but it can, Professor Langdon). His inner struggle is between his own native academic skepticism and the ever mounting evidence that the world contains something miraculous that said skepticism can't account for. "You, like many educated people, live trapped between worlds," a wise priest (he's also a Mason!) tells him. "One foot in the spiritual, one foot in the physical. Your heart yearns to believe ... but your intellect refuses...
...diplomatic sojourn, Zhou's patchy account reads at times like an official dossier instead of an exotic travelogue about a perfumed and misty land. He lists Cambodia's trade goods (kingfisher feathers, rosewood and beeswax in return for Chinese pewter, celadon and combs), stripping its flora and fauna of the romance of place in a manner more reminiscent of a CIA Factbook entry than Polo's Il Milione. "For vegetables," he writes, "they have onions, mustard, chives, eggplants, watermelons, winter gourds, snake gourds, and amaranth. They do not have radishes, lettuce, chicory, or spinach...