Word: insects
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Midway in the war, little Jones is browsing happily around in Astyparaean, a language no one has spoken for 50 centuries. There he encounters an old god, name of Zotz, who confers on him a weird and deadly power. Any insect, beast or man that Jones points at falls in a hideous faint; if he both points and says "Zotz!" the pointee drops horribly dead. Jones naively goes to Washington to offer this handy power to the Armed Forces. The rest of the book and war he spends being shuttlecocked from plyboard office to plyboard office, receiving but failing...
After a week of eager expectations, the President, his family and official party were set for the 4,700-mile flight to Rio. The sleek new presidential DC-6, Independence, had been stocked with rubber life rafts, machetes, canned rations, rifles, insect repellents and parachutes-just in case of trouble...
...tick, a remote cousin of the spider, is no true insect. Ticks and spiders have eight legs; bona fide insects have only six, the legal limit set by science. The tick's extra pair of legs serves him well. When a tick senses an approaching meal, he hangs on to a low bush by his two hind legs and gropes hopefully with the other six. If, animal or man brushes past the bush, the tick grabs on with all eight legs, makes for the skin. Having attached himself, the tick bores in with his hard snout and begins...
...reptiles from London, including twelve adders, three asps, four viperine snakes, 50 slowworms and two sandboas. On another plane from the Philippines, en route to The Bronx Zoo, came eleven tree shrews, three monkey-eating eagles, 14 giant cloud rats and 30 tarsiers. The tarsier (TIME, March 3), an insect-eating cousin of the monkey, is smaller than a squirrel, weighs only half a pound, has long fingers tipped by adhesive discs. Banjo-eyed is no word for a tarsier; its brown orbs suggest bass drums, at least...
...were given the choice between the gas chamber and continuing to live indefinitely in this insect-ridden place, eating two bowls of soup a day and not even having plumbing, I would choose the gas chamber." Like a Teutonic Lysistrata, she offered a general recipe for ending war: "Women should inform the men that if war comes they will refuse to conceive any more children...