Word: hippos
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...wasn't a bad upbringing that sweetened Happy's temper. Although his parents were immigrants from Central Africa, Happy himself was born in the exclusive Fairmount Park district of Philadelphia on July 7, 1918. He came to Boston on a wave of hippo enthusiasm led by the Post, which collected subscriptions for him. On June 24, 1922 he arrived at Franklin Park, was dubbed "Happy" by Mrs. James Curley and then ceremoniously installed in what is now the seal tank of the Zoo. Since that triumphant day, though, his path trailed steadily downward. When he first came, photographers from...
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, saw the Roman Empire falling about him. A few months after he died (430 A.D.), the invading Vandals took Hippo, then a major North African strongpoint. In the ages that followed, the great cities of man crumbled, but their citizens found a spiritual home in Saint Augustine's City of God. To this day, Christian churches of all denominations draw upon the theological system that Augustine tirelessly nailed down before the storm broke. Yet the 20th century is haunted by a question: Is Christian civilization going the way of the Roman Empire? Perhaps, say prophets...
Altogether, Christianity could be seen as still a long way from the disintegration which Dr. Hromadka saw just around the corner. Before and since the Vandals sacked Hippo, Christianity survived many agonies. But the Vandals inside and outside the city in A.D. 1954 were a different breed from any who had come before. No Christian, 1,600 years after Saint Augustine's birth, could say with full confidence that the churches were winning the fight against them...
Soft Noses Are Best. Dempster was a farmer's son, born and bred in the province of Natal. He was eight years old when his father shot a hippo in the Zambezi River and tethered it to the bank as crocodile bait. That night, creeping to within a yard's distance, Bryan Dempster shot his first croc...
Dempster took to the Zambezi a service rifle. 4,000 rounds of war-surplus ammunition and a wooden dinghy with an outboard motor. He soon met an indignant bull-hippo, who immediately seized both the dinghy and the Zulu helmsman and tore them to pieces. Dempster also found that his hard-nosed service bullets were useless: they ricocheted off a croc's bumpy hide. But the worst snag was the crocodile-birds, a species of African plover. The crocodile's "dental service" is provided by his plovers ("a mating pair ... to each crocodile"), who fly fearlessly into...