Word: flower
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Last week Nehru, whose tough 1948 policy has been weakened by buttery handshaking with China's Comrade Mao, proved again that on home territory he knows very well what the Communists are up to. Visiting Hyderabad's Communist-dominated Warangal district, he spoke under great flower-draped portraits of himself and Gandhi, telling cheering crowds that the Communists "are a party of murder, arson and loot, not of progress." Nehru plainly considered Hyderabad a crucial test in schooling his people in democracy...
Bourgeois Weakness. In Budapest, Hungary, after two factory nursery-school directors tried to buy chamber pots at a government store and were told that only unsuitable Japanese flower vases would be available until next year, the trade-union paper Nepszava angrily commented: "The small children of the nursery are in no position at all to wait until January for the pots...
...story called Green Thoughts, for instance, a flower fancier is devoured by his pet orchid and converted into a huge blossom in his own likeness. In his new shape, he is recognized by a resentful nephew, and efficiently hacked to pieces by the lout, who rather enjoys the flower's screams. In Thus I Refute Beelzy, a father refuses to believe his six-year-old son's story that he has a secret friend named Mr. Beelzy, who won't let anybody hurt him ("He said he'd come like a lion, with wings...
From a plant's point of view, its flowers are only a means to an end. Their purpose is to attract pollen-carrying insects. Once the ovules are fertilized, the plant devotes its energies to nurturing the infant seeds and so does not produce as many flowers as it might. This is good for the plant's posterity, but bad for flower lovers...
Last week Dr. Herbert L. Everett of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station told about a frustrated petunia that remains forever virgin and so goes right on flowering. Dr. Everett crossed two widely different varieties of petunia. One of the offspring was sterile; the flowers had proper female ovules but no fertile male pollen. By crossing and recrossing, Dr. Everett can now make most kinds of petunias sterile. They flaunt their flowers hopefully, inviting bees to visit them. The bees come as usual, but the flowers cannot dust them with fertilizing pollen. So the desperate virgin, to its own frustration...