Word: grains
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...William Vollmann displays the exasperating immaturities of a precocious teenager. He is a self-mythologizer who refers to himself with heavy irony as "William the Blind." He is utterly and humorlessly self-absorbed and believes his own sensibility to be unique. He rolls out for display every nut and grain that he has squirreled...
Even as De Klerk impressed the world with his reforms, some in South Africa feared that the process of change might one day run up against the unwillingness of whites to cede power to blacks. Reform, says Cape Town novelist Andre Brink, went against De Klerk's grain but was forced upon him by circumstances -- black uprisings, international isolation, economic rot. "Now, at the first sign of things not going his way," says Brink, "his real colors are beginning to show -- his conservatism and belief in force as the only way of getting out of a dilemma...
...from standpoint truly oppositional to most mainstream thought. She tirelessly interrogates the institutions most people take for granted. As she writes in her introduction, these essays are "gestures of defiance...find[ing] words that express what I see, especially when I am looking in ways that move against the grain, when I seeing things that most folks want to simply believe are not there...
...sponges," explains consumer advocate Ellen Haas of Public Voice for Food and Health Policy. "They are highly susceptible to absorbing contaminants in water." Fish is the only major food group that lives and feeds in the wild. And compared with beef cattle and chickens, which eat mainly grasses and grain, many fish are high up in the food chain. In a process called biomagnification, tiny fish pick up contaminants from the plankton they feed on in polluted waters, concentrating heavy metals like methylmercury in their organs. The little fish in turn are eaten by larger fish, further concentrating the toxins...
When this message is delivered and read by a stigma in a flower of the same species, the fertilization process begins. But when the grain lodges in the mucous membrane of a person susceptible to allergies, its protein message is heeded by the human immune system, which confuses it with a menacing invader. Alarmed, the system immediately begins churning out legions of IgE (for immunoglobulin E) antibodies, stationing them on "mast cells," which patrol the body's tissues...