Word: moth
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Episodes from a late-night horror flick? Not at all. More like cinema verite. Once again, the Northeast has been infested by gypsy-moth caterpillars in record numbers. Last year the bugs chomped so voraciously through more than 5 million acres of woodland that the usually lush summer landscape looked as leafless as in late fall. This year's damage, patchily extending from northern Maine to Maryland and beyond, is far worse: an estimated 11 million acres of forest, an area larger than all of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island...
Only 2 in. to 3 in. long when fully grown, the gypsy-moth caterpillar looks harmless enough: a brownish, multilegged strip of fur with telltale pairs of red and blue spots running down its back. But looks are deceptive. Ever since 1869, when it was inadvertently turned loose in Massachusetts by a misguided French naturalist who wanted to cross the European gypsy with the silkworm to produce a disease-resistant hybrid that would eat virtually anything, it has been munching its way across the Northeast. As many as 30,000 caterpillars can infest a single tree, and each of them...
After the first big outbreak, in Medford. Mass., in the late 19th century, New Englanders began battling the gypsy moth by putting out arsenic, soaking egg masses in creosote, burning down whole trees. But the bugs kept spreading. Wafted by winds, hitchhiking on cars and campers, they slowly migrated to at least 21 states, including Florida and California, although so far only pockets of serious infestation have occurred west or south of West Virginia. In the 1950s, scientists thought they finally had the moths under control with DDT. But the pesticide caused so much ecological havoc, including the death...
...poker and chess. The movement of fire-breathing, life-annihilating pawns on a global board of a spinning planet." At another point he says, "the news accounts of congressional travel plans rubbed like shards of glass in an oozing wound." His fear of losing his campaign is "a gray moth of doubt that had ballooned into a terrifying pterodactyl whose razored jaws were shredding what remained of my confidence...
...Super-Saver had a key-making machine and computerized check-out. It sold everything from its own brand of moth balls to picnic tables, from gag mugs to ratchet sets. A sign in the window warned customers all summer that Coke and Super-Saver aspirin were on sale only until the end of the week...