Word: puffins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That was the year that the then Lord of Lundy, Martin Coles Harman, who had bought the island for $80,000, was ignominiously charged by Britain with violating the Coinage Act. In 1929 he had begun issuing his own stamps, his own puffin and half-puffin coins, and putting his own face on the front of the coins instead of that of George V. After the trial Harman was forced to withdraw his puffins and to have British stamps on Lundy mail along with his own. But the puffins remain profitable tourist items, and neither Martin Harman...
...when the cruel sea calms and the weather mellows, the population of Lundy swells from seven to 80 or so. Then the bluebottles flock to the island by the thousands to marvel at the ice-age cabbage that now grows nowhere else, or to catch a glimpse of a puffin, an auk, a rare peregrine falcon, or any other of the 145 kinds of birds found on Lundy. But as much as anything else, the bluebottles seem to come to spend a little time-and a few puffins-in a place with no taxes, no license laws, no schools...
Died. Dr. Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, 61, popular philosopher, author (The Book of Joad, The Testament of Joad and 46 other serious-to-potboiling books), University of London professor; of cancer; in London. Puffin-shaped, goat-bearded and brilliantly voluble ("I can explain anything to anybody"), C. E. M. Joad was variously a socialist, pacifist, patriot, agnostic, advocate of free love, polygamy, euthanasia, suicide and easy divorce, and a professional carper. On scientific progress: "The superman made the plane, but the ape has got hold of it." On religion: "Why, if God so loves us, does He give us such...
...dragger or purse seiner, and she was known as the City of San Pedro. In 1936 the Navy bought her and 20 sister boats, gave them each a 3-in. gun, gear to catch something more deadly than tuna, and names from the birds, such as Bunting, Crossbill, Crow, Puffin and Heath Hen. They all had wooden hulls, so thin that a dummy torpedo dropped in practice from a plane once sank one. Still, the Magpie and her sisters, not without casualties, served in World War II, sweeping up enemy mines off Palau, Okinawa, the Philippines and Normandy...
Professor Wiener is a stormy petrel (he looks more like a stormy puffin) of mathematics and adjacent territory. A rarity among scientists, he is willing & able to talk intelligently on almost any subject. Wiener got interested in computing machines while doing war work on gun-pointing mechanisms. His wide-ranging interests (too widely ranging, some of his detractors think) saw in them qualities and possibilities that more practical men had missed...