Word: flea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Suspecting that Australian mosquitoes now carry a relatively harmless strain of myxomatosis virus that imparts immunity to more deadly strains in the rabbits it infects, the geneticist has been seeking-another virus carrier. But his search has been plagued by misfortune. Impressed by the European flea, which has successfully spread myxomatosis over the Continent, he had some 12,000 fleas shipped to Australia. Only nine of the little pests withstood the trip...
...Professor Osborne Bennett ("O.B.") Hardison Jr., 37, wears scuffed shoes, drooping socks and chalk-streaked jacket, goes everywhere accompanied by a kindly dog named Poppo, and makes literature an urgent affair. O.B. revels in Joyce, turns Kant dramatic, convulses his class by acting out John Donne's poem The Flea. Hummingly in tune with the student wave length, he translates the oracle's prediction in Arcadia ("An uncouth love which Nature hateth most") as meaning that, "put bluntly, the king's youngest daughter will become a lesbian." With a lyrical voice and a surging style, he also conveys his conviction...
...trick at all for a large African grasshopper to catch and kill a mouse, and giant water bugs commonly capture and devour small snakes. Almost any beetle can lift 850 times its own weight; to do as much, a man would have to lift 62 tons. And the common flea, which measures one-tenth of an inch, can jump twelve inches, or 120 times its own length; to do as much, a man would have to jump 720 feet...
...charging rogue flea...
Harvard baseball is as unpredictable as--what? Pick your simile. As unpredictable as the spring weather? As a baseball? As a charging rogue elephant? As a charging rogue flea...