Word: hops
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bolshoi and Tchaikovsky theaters are only a stout walk from each other in Moscow, but at first glance their respective products seem to be versts apart. The Bolshoi's stage glitters with the familiar, stylized formulations of the classic ballet; the Tchaikovsky's shivers to the explosive hop-stomp-and-run of the folk dance. Most Westerners have glimpsed some reflections of the Russian classical style; 'few have sampled the exuberant dance language of Russia's full folklore. Next week the U.S. will get its first good look at that language when the Moiseyev Dance Company...
...sight of his wife huddled in the rocking chair she has not left for almost 20 years, Stanislaw drinks himself blind. In a wild rage against man and God, he fulfills his obsession. That incestuous obsession concerns Stella-and, by the story's end, it explains her desperate hop into the hearse...
...zoologist, the leap of the grasshopper is one of the wonders of the world. An adult grasshopper can leap ten times its length in the high jump, 20 times its length in the broad jump. A man up to a grasshopper's hop-to-length standards could clear a five-story building, or bound the length of a football field in three jumps...
...science and the sheer fun of it, Zoologist Graham Hoyle of the University of Glasgow set about learning what puts the hop in the grasshopper. Writing in Scientific American, Hoyle tells how he used a slow-motion camera to analyze how the insect cocks its rear legs "by squatting with the femurs (thighs) doubled against the tibiae (shins)," rears up and takes off with a velocity of about 10 ft. per second. The jumping muscle of the grasshopper, which weighs only one twenty-fifth of a gram, develops "the astounding power of some 20,000 grams per gram...
...when it is hopping mad, the grasshopper sends down a nervous impulse that "inhibits the slow nerve fiber and puts it out of action." All further impulses go on the fast-action fiber. How far the grasshopper leaps depends on the number of impulses it sends its leg muscles: one impulse produces a hop; two a "moderate jump"; three an all-out effort. Somehow the grasshopper gets all this done in one-thirtieth of a second. Marvels Grasshopperman Hoyle: "A superb example of natural economy...