Word: hippos
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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...
...bulbs that trace the spine of every ornate gable and cupola. The capacious lobby, with its 40-ft. ceiling, beckons you to collapse into its deep sofas and get toasty at the mammoth fireplace. In the guest rooms, a sculpture of Tinkerbell graces the highboy; in the bathrooms, Hyacinth Hippo, in her Fantasia tutu, cavorts in various poses on the bathtub tile...
...this 1,600th anniversary year, few tourists in Milan notice the halfconcealed cathedral doorway leading to the remains of the baptistry where a naked Augustine was immersed by St. Ambrose. In Annaba, Algeria, near the site of ancient Hippo, where Augustine served as priest and bishop, the occasion is being largely ignored. But in other places around the world, numerous conferences on Augustine's thought are marking the anniversary, including last week's assemblage of 500 scholars from 19 nations at the Rome headquarters of the Augustinian order. One notable in attendance, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer...
Augustine began work on The City of God, said to be the first philosophy of history ever written, in response to the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in A.D. 410. By the time other barbarians, the Vandals, had vanquished Hippo in A.D. 430, its august bishop was already dead at age 75. The hordes destroyed the city but preserved Augustine's library of writings. It was as if they sensed that the West might need to rely on his words for sustenance as the ancient world died away...