Word: pythonic
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...Achebe writes of Ibo civilization as something not simply to be supplanted and forgotten. The story centers on a religious chief, virtually a god to his tribe, whose most potent magic is achieved through a sacred python. Though he distrusts Christianity, he allows an earnest, not more than ordinarily obtuse district officer to send one of his sons to a mission school. To the chief's horror, the Christianized boy zealously imprisons the sacred python in a box. "An abomination has happened," cries one tribesman. "Today I shall kill the boy with my own hands," says the chief...
...tipped "petting sticks," which are gradually reduced in length until an attendant can, for instance, tickle the thorax of a tarantula with his fingers. In "secondary school," the animals are put through an obstacle course in preparation for such script demands as having monkeys cross a chasm using a python as a bridge. For fight scenes, the critters simply wrestle playfully, and the battle noises are dubbed in later; some of the big cats are so tame that they have to be given snarling lessons...
...animals, the less he thinks of man. "There are no natural enemies," he likes to say, "except man and woman." To prove that a peaceable kingdom is a possibility-at least on his 260-acre preserve near Los Angeles-he has combined such unlikely pen-mates as a python and a chimpanzee, a lion and an elephant and, most unlikely combination of all, a tiger and a fawn. "We humans live a phony existence," he insists. "We have fallen out of rhythm with nature...
...Teddy bear that weeps tears the size of a quarter. A little girl stabs a pig. A little boy urinates. Sixty white gloves run run run across a table. Bits of broken plaster abruptly assemble themselves into a bust of Dante. An egg cracks and marbles tumble out. A python oozes lazily around a large transparent bowl in which a child is huddled. Beside a giant telescope stands an old man, his ears blazing like light bulbs. On a narrow cot, a nude woman sits giggling and jiggling while an enormous, sinister horseshoe crab...
...manned orbital flight. After three hours of tethered orbiting, Conrad flipped a switch that jettisoned Gemini's docking bar, freeing the spacecraft from the connecting rope. As Gemini drifted away, the tether-now attached only to the Agena-slowly wrapped itself around the target vehicle like a python around its prey...