Word: rodent
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Through the years a parade of repellent characters have spat, scratched and scowled through the panels of Cartoonist Chester Gould's comic strip, Dick Tracy. There was Pruneface, a dead ringer for an exhumed cadaver; the Mole, a homicidal man-sized rodent who lived in a burrow; Itchy, who never stopped scratching; Measles, whose complexion resembled an aerial view of the Badlands; and, of course, that bottomless well of chaw juice, B. O. Plenty. Latest entry is Flyface, whose face is always surrounded by flies-and who has a mother and a nephew similarly convoyed. Last week this unsavory...
...inspector, from house to house on Baltimore's Reisterstown Road until he came to the home of one Aaron D. Frank. One quick look showed the Frank house to be in "an extreme state of decay," and disclosed-as health-department officialese put it-a backyard pile of "rodent feces mixed with straw and trash and debris to approximately half a ton." But Aaron Frank refused to let the inspector in the house without a warrant. After Inspector Gentry was kept out a second time, Householder Frank was fined $20, under a 158-year-old city ordinance giving health...
...refer to unemployed people as a redundancy of workers? Do you refer to a moving van as a pantechnicon?" All too true, said his lordship, and added sadly that Britain's ratcatchers-"a most admirable set of men"-have decided it would be more dignified to be called rodent operators...
Efficient Killer. Prometheus, Dart concludes, must have been a prodigious hunter, because around his bones are scattered fragments of the antelope, giraffe, buffalo, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. He also fished the streams for water turtles and robbed the nest of the shrike. Giant rodent moles, wart hogs and porcupines were staples of his diet. No creature except modern man has ever been such an efficient killer, says Dr. Dart...
When Kansas State College hired Freddie Hisaw as an assistant professor of zoology and mammalogist in 1919, he "didn't even know what a mammalogist was. It turned out to be a fancy name for rodent exterminator," says Frederick Lee Hisaw, now 64, "and one of the rodents I was to exterminate was the pocket gopher. But I soon became more interested in live pocket gophers than in dead ones...