Word: locusts
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...could blame them? Grossinger's was once the capital of the Borscht Belt, a loose confederation of some 1,000 Catskill Mountain resorts, so named in honor of the East European Jewish clientele who filled the rooms, wandered the greenery, searched for mates, did a locust number on the four Lucullan meals a day (including a midnight snack) and cheered the tummlers, a Yiddish word for exuberant entertainers. The performers themselves were a nation of immigrants: David Daniel Kaminski, Aaron Chwatt, Jacob Pincus Perelmuth, Morris Miller, Eugene Klass, Joseph Levitch, Milton Berlinger, Joseph Gottlieb. All are better known under their...
...rains that finally came last year to relieve famine-stricken Africa from drought prepared the ground for another natural disaster: an invasion of locusts. For the first time in 60 years, infestations of four different locust species are occurring at the same time. Together with swarms of grasshoppers, the voracious and sky-blackening insects are devouring crops in west, central and southern Africa. Currently under severe attack are large portions of Chad and Sudan, parts of Mauritania on the Atlantic coast and virtually all of Botswana in the south...
There is a breathless scene in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust when the hero is caught in a street riot and is carried every way the mob heaves: "He was the spearhead of a flying wedge when it collided with a mass going in the opposite direction. The impact turned him around. As the two forces ground against each other, he was turned again and again, like a grain between millstones. This didn't stop until he became part of the opposing force...
Condescension informs much of the literature about Los Angeles, or something darker (The Day of the Locust). It seems to beget in the outsider the tendency to be snide, to say, for example, that if Houston is the buckle on the Sunbelt, L.A. is the melanoma. "Double Dubuque," H.L. Mencken called it. Westbrook Pegler proposed that the city be declared incompetent and placed in the charge of a guardian...
...according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, was first discussed after work one night last October at New York City's Renaissance-style Racquet & Tennis Club on Park Avenue. It was refined a few days later at a private home and golf club in the posh community of Locust Valley on Long Island's fashionable North Shore. Present: Peter Brant, 31, the handsome, polo-playing stockbroker who was one of Kidder Peabody's top salesmen, and Wall Street Journal Reporter R. Foster Winans, 35, one of the writers of the Journal's "Heard on the Street...