Word: scrimshaws
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Jackie Kennedy likes to give her sea-loving husband things that are nautical and nice. So for Christmas she gave the President a fine piece of scrimshaw to add to his growing collection. It was a sperm whale's tooth. 9½ in. long and 4½ in. in diameter. "This wasn't just an ordinary whale's tooth,'' marveled a White House aide. "I guess it is supposed to be the biggest damn whale's tooth ever found...
...stumbled toward catastrophe, poetry blundered deeper into obscurity and ambiguity, into the talented but precious minutiae of Wallace Stevens and William Empson, whose poems often suggest esthetic scrimshaw, a cathedral carved in a cherry pit. Poetry became a world unto itself, a self-sealing vacuum in which poets engaged in a conspiracy of mutual approval, safe from the embarrassing questions of the bewildered public, safe from what Poet Stefan George called "the indignity of being understood...
...with grotesquely protruding bellies, infected livers, horny thickening of the palms of their hands. Such symptoms are the result of the starchy foods (yams, corn meal, potatoes, plantains, rice) that make up a child's daily fare throughout large areas of Latin America. But last week Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw of the U.S. proudly exhibited a greyish meal that offered a promise of real help...
Nine years in the developing, Mixture Eight was the discovery of Scrimshaw and two other nutrition scientists, Dr. Robert L. Squibb of Rutgers University and Dr. Moises Behar, a Guatemalan pediatrician. It contains 50% corn meal, 35% high-protein sesame meal, 9% cottonseed meal, 3% Kikuyu grass (for vitamin A) and 3% nonfermenting yeast. The mixture cooks into a tasty porridge or a cake that tastes like the familiar tortilla. Last year Scrimshaw tried it on a test group of Guatemalan children. Said Scrimshaw: "The children had swollen bellies, black skin, open sores, were apathetic, suffered from lack of appetite...
...only natural that a whaling museum should have grown here. We have added to it constantly so that now it has as fine a collection of things pertaining to whaling as is to be found anywhere in the world. All kinds of paraphernalia, log-books, pictures, and scrimshaw, which was the artistic work of the sailors, in engraving and carving whale ivory, have found their way into the museum. The prize of the collection, however, is a model of a whaling bark, built on half-scale, which is large enough to allow people to walk about on her decks...