Word: hippos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...prize specimen, they acknowledge, is a partial skeleton found by Berkeley graduate student Yohannes Haile-Selassie (no relation to the Emperor). Alas, the back of the skull is badly crushed. A hippo or elephant probably trampled it soon after the creature died. "It looks like roadkill," quips White. Given the small skulls of A. afarensis and other later australopithecines, however, this specimen undoubtedly had a pint-size brain. At this point in evolution, says White, "we're in the minor leagues of brain development...
...rampant sports mania. At the height of the empire, the stadium was the centerpiece of every Roman town, dwarfing mere housing and temples. Loyalty to the chariot-racing leagues, with their colorful banners, eclipsed all political passions. When the barbarians attacked the gates of the Roman city of Hippo, no one much noticed because the groans of the dying soldiers on the wall were almost drowned out by the roar from the stadium...
NORFOLK, Virginia: Nyla, the Virginia Zoo's only hippopotamus, died of a bowel blockage on Sunday after she ate a racquetball tossed into her pen by a visitor. Zookeepers were mystified by Nyla's death until an autopsy of the 4,300-pound hippo showed that she had a 2-inch rubber ball blocking her intestinal passageway. Though authorities knew the hippo was suffering some kind of obstruction, they did not perform surgery, fearing she would die during the procedure. Nyla, 31, had lived at the zoo for more than 20 years after spending her youth as part...
Wallace is the novel's Hippo, so nicknamed decades before as an undergraduate (the reference is to T.S. Eliot's doggerel, "The hippopotamus' day/ Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;/ God works in a mysterious way-/ The Church can sleep and feed at once ..."). Wallace was a drama critic for one of the seedier London newspapers until he arose during an idiotic stage performance and screamed curses. At liberty, he is asked by a terminally ill goddaughter to find out whether a moody 15-year-old boy, Wallace's godson, really has a powerful healing gift...
...opportunity disdainer. New Zealanders are shabby and provincial, he complains. Aussies are rude, foulmouthed and drink too much. Tongans are lazy, quarrelsome and mean to their children. Samoans are greedy, hostile and obese, perhaps because their junk-food diet consists mostly of "Cheez Balls" and corned beef saturated with hippo fat. (Did their liking for the latter, Theroux wonders, derive from their ancestors' enjoyment of "long pig" -- that is, human flesh?) And almost everywhere he found God-swanking missionaries, usually Mormons or Methodists, who seemed mesmerized by the thought of preaching the gospel to islanders who were once notorious...