Word: loon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ancient and bruised Boston Whaler was coughing across one of the prettiest lakes in New Hampshire−Squam Lake, called Golden Pond in Henry Fonda's last picture−when a loon swam out of a birch-lined cove. "It has a chick, said Jeff Fair, slowing the boat and putting the glasses on the bird. "No, two chicks. One is riding on the adult's back." To Janis Minor, sitting in the bow, Jeff said, "You've got your work cut out. Go around and warn the homeowners...
Jeff is director of the Loon Preservation Committee of New Hampshire. Janis, who had checked the nest in this cove just an hour earlier, is a summer fieldworker. "They must have just been hatched," she said...
...city's commissioner of deeds resigned to become a singer-songwriter. Some years later, a circus geek called Oofty Goofty became a sidewalk S-M entrepreneur: he let passers-by cane him for a quarter or hit him with a baseball bat for four bits. When another local loon, the self-appointed Norton I, Emperor of North America and Protector of Mexico, died in 1880, 30,000 people (out of a population of 234,000) went to the funeral. A century later, a punk rocker named Jello Biafra ran for mayor and finished fourth among ten candidates. Rudyard Kipling...
...does not sound like promising materal for comedy. But Fo has turned the event into fine and unlikely totalitarian farce. The central character is a sort of derelict loon who is a professional impostor. Fo took the part himself in the original Italian production, and, obviously, the Fool is essentially Fo. As wonderfully played at the Arena by Richard Bauer, the Fool behaves like Karl Marx masquerading as Dr. Hugo Hackenbush. He is what the Russians call a yurodivy, an elaborately disguised truth seeker, an anarchist-individualist working under deep cover...
Even the scientists are portrayed with an astonishing diversity of styles; at different times Van Loon pictures Francis Crick and James Watson, discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, as Bat. In addition, the comic book format in the only one in which the arcane and often ridiculous jargon of molecular biology makes sense...