Word: ostrichism
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Death & the Elephant. Based on a 19th century lottery to boost attendance at the Rio zoo, the animal game is no ordinary numbers racket. It starts off with 25 animals, each of which is assigned four consecutive numbers (from 01-04 for the ostrich to 97-00 for the cow). Odds for a straight animal bet are 20 to 1, but few bettors stop there. They can get 70 to 1 for guessing the last two figures of the winning number, 700 to 1 for the last three figures, 6,000 to 1 for getting all four figures right. They...
Affixed to a wall, the marble belly but ton, an omphalos with oomph, looks like a poached ostrich egg with the yel low plucked out. Leaflets shaped like navels showered from rooftops. As the crowd finally repaired to a popular café for disrepair, the mayor turned to a bystander and whispered: "I just don't understand why this thing had so much success...
...into the city, Jay stows away Sunshine in the back of the family truck. The cat ends up in a cramped zoo, where Jay becomes errand boy just long enough to snitch Keeper Andy Devine's keys and set loose lions, tigers, bears, apes, zebras, snakes, elephants, an ostrich and Sunshine upon a terrified populace...
Well, not too terrified. The ostrich swallows a transistor radio and becomes a feathered walkie-talkie, the elephant slurps up a gentleman's bath, and the zebra turns domestic. On balance, the kid himself might seem the worst behaved, but Zebra isn't that kind of bestiary. Producer-Director Ivan Tors, who made Rhino! and the Flipper series, views all fauna through globs of sentiment. In a rich and foamy climax...
...operation. With a scalpel attached to a 6-ft. pole, and a pair of pincers that looked like the gadget used to pluck a cereal box off the top shelf of a grocery store, Surgeon Humphreys was going to reach through the opening in the wall and remove an ostrich-egg-sized lump from the back of a Vietnamese farmer...