Word: gopher
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...playing polo. Polk had a two-goal rating, which is good. Spurrier, a star, had a five-goal rating when the Army, on Feb. 28, 1943, at last took his cavalry unit's horses away. The two watch indulgently as local enthusiasts play a polo match at Riley. "Gopher killing," says Polk, as a player whacks the ground with his mallet, missing the ball entirely. Spurrier, a horseman whose face shows ancestry that is part Osage Indian, gently instructs an observer who has thought polo a game for prosperous fops. Yes, he says, you could call it a risk sport...
Having been directly involved in research on the posteruptive soils of Mount St. Helens ((ENVIRONMENT, June 15)), I was interested in your observation that the burrowing of pocket gophers has helped mix and enrich the soil. The "bulldozer" effect of the pocket gophers and other small mammals should not be emphasized as or assumed to be the primary reason for the rapid soil development in the area. After the soils were buried by thick layers of pyroclastic flows and debris, complex physical and chemical processes began, aided mainly by the naturally produced acid rain resulting from gases emitted...
That progress encompasses both flora and fauna. Inside the boundaries of the monument, where by law people are not allowed to assist regeneration, a mammalian equivalent of the bulldozer has been the pocket gopher. Colonies of these tiny industrious burrowers have helped mix the nutrient-poor ash and pumice with rich, pre-eruptive soil, creating a more hospitable turf for windblown seeds. Deer mice, ants and beetles have also assisted in the regeneration of the soil. Flowering lupine, with root nodules that convert nitrogen into compounds necessary for plant growth, has seized a foothold on the pumice plain, along with...
Rotisserians are drawn, as the cliche goes, from all walks of life. Iowa Congressman Fred Grandy, who played Gopher Smith on the TV show The Love Boat, is a player; so are former Major League Pitcher Jim Kaat and Today-show Host Bryant Gumbel. The American Dreams, the second oldest league in existence and the first to play the game with American League ballplayers, consists mostly of New York City journalists and writers. Tony Lukas of the Palukas has won Pulitzers both for his reporting for the New York Times and for his recent book on Boston race relations, Common...
...example of their potential usefulness: the Warsaw Pact presently enjoys a marked superiority in tanks. Rather than trying to match the Ruskies tank for tank, we should be more innovative. Not even the most advanced Soviet tank, the T-80, could get through an area thoroughly undermined with gopher tunnels dug by RATS (Rodent Anti-Tank Squadrons...