Word: madagascars
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...animistic people of Madagascar, death is considered just another step in life. The dead are buried, but they are regarded as active family members, and their souls are believed to reside in the northeast corners of the houses in which they lived. Every four or five years, depending on the forecast of the family astrologer, their descendants dig up their bones, dress them in shiny new funeral silks and parade them around town in taxis. They introduce the dead to new members of the family, tell them the latest jokes, hire bands to play them the current hit songs...
VOILÀ," said Philibert Tsirinana, the only president Madagascar has had since it won independence from France and became the Malagasy Republic in 1958. "So you are going to drive to Tamatave? Voila. You will find the road is bad. I will tell you why. First, because we do not have money to do all things at once. Second, because if we improved the road, people would use it and the profits of our railroad would be reduced. Third, because the sooner we improved it, the sooner it would be torn up and the sooner we would have to improve...
...satellite makes fifteen to twenty ground station contacts each day, Davis added, and it sends as many as 18 pictures in a single transmission. The five stations now used by Project Celescope are located in North Carolina, Madagascar, Chile, Ecuador, and Australia...
...Russian language at Wellesley, with side jobs as a lepidopterist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (plus a few more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly because Nabokov, having lost everything once, has absolutely no interest in acquiring physical possessions...
...UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "Whales." The world-famed French oceanographer explores the depths off the coast of Madagascar in search of finback, sperm and killer whales...