Word: skittered
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Farther down the corridor is the computer room, which controls the "audio-animatronic" displays: banks of thick cassettes slotted into a blinking steel wall, 14-track tape loops piling and swishing inside their moon-shaped Plexiglas boxes, running across the heads like sepia fettucine. Every second, millions of impulses skitter down the cables, linking the Real-world beneath the podium to the Magic Kingdom: the Bear Jamboree plunks and toots, holographic phantoms squeak and gibber among the cobwebs of the Haunted Mansion, and in the antechamber of the Moon Rocket in Tomorrowland, a robot scientist holds a conversation with...
...time is some uncertain date in the 1990s, and the sign of the cross has become an anachronism. A Third and Fourth Vatican Council have come and gone. The Vatican, now thoroughly embroiled in a highly ecumenical superchurch, dutifully processes assignments through World Ecumen Council headquarters in Amsterdam. Priests skitter about the world in gray-green denim fatigues, carrying musette bags and spreading a gospel of social revolution. The father general of an old monastic order called the Albanesians is preparing to preside over the first phases of a new ecumenical breakthrough: dialogue with the Buddhists...
Eventually the party is joined by "Harry," a sadistic lesbian who, amid threats of murder, leads her partners round and round the couple, slapping and screaming at the victims. Without warning, the tormentors abruptly skitter out the door, never to return. By now, the real estate man's cowardice and his girl's latent nymphomania have surfaced. Shattered by the ordeal and its revelations, they cannot bear to talk to each other and end their affair...
...suspect that it is a put-on. Who ever heard of the long-nosed bandicoot? Or the brolgas, which break into a wild, wing-flapping dance at the sound of a bell? How about the racquet-tailed drongo, and the mudskipper, a hippopotamus-shaped fish that likes to skitter across mud flats and climb mangrove roots? Or the mallee fowl, which assiduously builds an incubator for its eggs and keeps the temperature inside at a steady 95°, come rain or shine? Curious specimens these, but Naturalist Gerald Durrell is only reporting what he sees, and reporting it with grace...
Snowmobiles offer more than utility service. They are capable of speeds up to 35 m.p.h., and a skillful driver can skitter and skid them through the turns of a slalom course. Versatile body English is needed on the sharper curves, and in case of a spill the engine is equipped with a deadman throttle that shuts it off and keeps the doodlebug from roaring off empty down the hill. Snowmobile rallies will be held this month in Tuftonboro, N.H., Tomahawk, Wis., Forest Lake, Minn., Skowhegan, Me., and Boonville, N.Y., with prizes for slalom racing, hill climbing, speed runs and cross...