Word: pests
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...politics, war and religion moiled in the mortar of imagination. Helen of Troy is basically a story of hot pants in high places. The hero, accordingly, is not "godlike Hector" or "great Achilles" but "soft Paris," whom even Helen called a coward. As the part is written, the "pest of Troy" can actually fight like a Trojan, and, as it is played by Jacques Sernas, the "form divine" is so gorgeously muscular that everybody will understand why that prissy old maid, Athena, flew into such a snit about...
Much of the $10 million the U.S. citrus industry spends annually on pest control goes toward fighting the Helix aspersa, a common orchard variety of snail. The Helix feeds indiscriminately on leaves, twigs and fruit. Up to now, the industry has relied on expensive chemical dusts and sprays; unfortunately, they must be applied almost constantly and they are only moderately effective. Last week Curtis P. Clausen of the University of California's Department of Biological Control announced plans to fight the Helix with one of its own kind: the Gonaxis kibweziensis, commonly known as the cannibal snail...
...Marianas, the Gonaxis destroyed within two years nearly a million of the 5,000,000 African snails whose ancestors were brought in as emergency food by the Japanese during World War II. When Clausen heard that 5,000 Gonaxis snails had been rounded up on Agiguan for anti-pest assignments on other islands, he put in a bid for a consignment of 200. Currently being fed on a diet of Helix snails in the university laboratories, they will be turned loose in the spring in selected orange and lemon groves from Santa Barbara to San Diego...
...mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force . . . He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable-and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in a street full...
Thus Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), gave a prophetic portrait of that now familiar pest of the West-the Communist espionage agent...