Word: platypus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Penelope Platypus was one of those saucy females who like to keep a male on a string. Cecil Platypus is one of those males. They lived mid the pleasures of their own platypusary in New York's Bronx Zoo, where each had its own little swimming pool and private burrows. And though there was a wooden barrier built between them, Cecil knew how to get around-an achievement fostered by zoo authorities-in season. For outside Tasmania and Australia, these two furry mammals were the only platypuses in captivity, and everybody hoped that one day Cecil and Penelope would...
Cecil tried. Back in 1953 Penelope fooled everybody with a false pregnancy. But the zoo never gave up hope. Neither did Cecil. Last month platypus observers noted that something was up in the platypusary. True enough, Cecil and Penelope never varied in their basic routine: they slept by day (with an hour's break for visitors), came out at night for dinner (25 to 35 live crayfish, 200 to 300 worms, one frog, several scrambled eggs, add mud and stir). But beyond that, instead of just waddling about his own business, Cecil began to court Penelope. He grabbed...
Birth Pains. Compared to most citadels of high finance, Eugene Black's World Bank is as odd as a platypus in a poultry yard. In its slabsided headquarters in Washington, D.C., it does not even have a vault. Once, when money was left lying around-$30,000 in travel funds-it was promptly stolen by a thief who made a clean getaway. The World Bank was born at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference,*almost as an afterthought to its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, set up to deal with the temporary "disequilibrium" in world currency-exchange rates...
...Like the platypus who cannot decide whether he is flesh or fowl, a new secies has in recent years appeared in the zoo of critical writing. This is the work--basically an outgrowth of feature journalism--which hovers indeterminately between straight biography and straight criticism without fulfilling the requirements of either form. The Private World of William Fauikner, by Robert Coughlan, is one of these books...
...July 9 Penelope retired to her burrow and did not appear again for six days. She ate an enormous meal and popped back again. The curators hovered around, smiling at one another like fond godfathers. All the signs pointed to platypus eggs, perhaps even hairless platypus infants wriggling in the nest...