Word: platypuses
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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...
...years the earnest curators of New York's Bronx Zoo have busied themselves with the delicate problem of platypus family life. Platypus reproduction is a baffling business, for platypuses are not quite mammals. Their blood is warm and they have mammal-like fur, but they lay soft, reptile-type eggs about ¾ in. long. From the eggs hatch blind, hairless little "larvae" that nurse by licking milk from their mother's mammary pores. Only after several months do they frisk out of their burrow as furry platykittens...
Even in their native Australia, only one platypus couple (Jack and Jill) have bred in captivity, and they produced only one offspring. But the Bronx curators were not discouraged. When they got three live platypuses in 1947 (TIME, June 9, 1947), they devised elaborate plans for breeding the two females. One of the three, Betty, died of a cold. But Penelope and Cecil, the male, seemed to adjust themselves gradually to the alien Bronx. Penelope and Cecil were fed extravagantly on worms, insect larvae, frogs and water plants. In summer each had an outdoor private swimming pool, and in winter...
...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...