Word: ratting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marais and Miranda sing a song called Chow, Willy which he reconstructed from a South African song about a rat, a mouse and a frog. Columbia Records' pop artists & repertory chief, Mitch Miller, decided it would be just the thing for Jo Stafford and Frankie Laine. Marais invented a man named Willy and changed the song's animals to people. "It would not be nice to bill Mr. Laine as a rat and Miss Stafford as a mouse," says Marais. Moreover, as Columbia Records could have told him, and perhaps did, the jukebox trade seldom gets excited about...
Amid the usual bacteriologist's clutter on Dr. Frederick G. Novy's laboratory bench at Ann Arbor was an unidentified virus which killed rats swiftly. Dr. Novy knew little more about it, but he had 25 test tubes of the virus, flourishing in rat blood. Then he moved his work from one lab to another and the test tubes vanished. That was in 1920, and ever since, Dr. Novy has longed to know what happened to the virus. As the years passed, he was more & more sure of one thing: if the tubes were ever found, the virus...
Through the years, even the name went through strange evolutions. Simla Vulpina (fox-monkey), after Martyr's description, turned out to be the Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum...
...Sparreholm, Sweden, Emil Elmvall, determined to chase a rat out from behind his car's upholstery, filled the car with acetylene gas, caused an explosion which blew the car top over a two-story house, shattered 300 windowpanes and injured...
...impressed by these magic signs that he spares Wilbur, who lives fattily ever after. Author White (who lives on his own Maine farm) also does a fine job on farmyard life as seen through the eyes of geese and sheep, and reaches his peak with a scurrilous rat named Templeton who, like Satan in Paradise Lost, pretty nearly steals the show...