Word: odder
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Among the odder jobs in the U.S. these days is one held by a man in northern Colorado who spends hours following a pronghorn antelope, watching it feed, and then whispering into a tape recorder. Absurd? Hardly. By such surveillance, ecologists are learning the animal's precise relationship to its environment-the grasslands of the American West. In time, the habits of the antelope and countless other creatures will be stored in the data banks of computers. Scientists will then be able to ask a computer what really happens when man changes the grasslands environment by farming, building roads...
...entry, reprinted here) survivor of nearly every 19th century military disaster from the Siege of Lucknow to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he is as appalling and implausible a scoundrel as has ever shambled through the purlieus of the past. All the odder then that since this first volume of his purported "memoirs" was published recently in the U.S., all decked out with notes and glossary, no fewer than ten out of 42 reviewers-one of them a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University -have been gulled into taking Flashman seriously as a real historical character. Being wholly unreal...
...that she took her children out for a drive in Key Biscayne, Fla., one night last June to mail some letters at the odd hour of 1 a.m. Instead of returning home, she says, she suffered a migraine headache and went to a hospital. During her absence, something even odder happened to her millionaire husband, Miami and Houston Financier Jacques Mossier, 69. He was bludgeoned and stabbed 39 times. The results were fatal. According to Miami police, Mossier left a note: "If Mel and Candace don't kill me first, I'll kill them." While Candace fled...
...workers at a Los Angeles aerospace plant, Herbert Hill seemed odder and odder. The angry exmarine, a purchasing expediter, refused to speak, neglected his work, shoved his chair at passersby, rejected all psychiatric help. Last month Hill's boss ap pealed to a special psychiatric court in the county general hospital. Hill was arrested, examined by two court psychiatrists, and diagnosed as a potentially dangerous schizophrenic. After an informal hearing, at which he was rep resented by a public defender, the court sent Hill to Camarillo State Hospital and scheduled a jury trial to review his commitment. But Hill...
...odder figure ever guided the destinies of the Holy Roman Empire than the Emperor Julian Augustus (circa 331-363), known as Julian the Apostate. Here was a recluse and a scholar who became a great military leader, an ascetic who preached the life of the senses, a fatalist who believed he would remake the world. More important, here was a man who did his best to write an end to Christianity before it had fairly begun. As the subject of biography he is endlessly fascinating. As the subject of fiction he has one major defect: he was an utterly irrational...