Word: skulled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Oddly enough, King's unsettling plots rarely work on film, perhaps because occult scenarios are best played in the Skull Cinema. On a real screen his lethally gifted children often turn out to be amateurish performers; the floodlighted hotel is about as frightening as the set of a Fred Astaire musical; and the rabid Saint Bernard seems only a benign cartoon of the Hound of the Baskervilles. King professes to be satisfied with many of the movie adaptations, except for The Shining ("Stanley Kubrick's stated purpose was to make a horror picture, and I don't think he understood...
...they enter the medieval abbey, William and Adso are first approached by an aged, Peter Lorre-type monk (William Hickey), who looks at Adso with his half-blind, lustful eyes and tells him that there is something "diabolical, even feminine" about the monastery. Even the gargoyles are creepy, with skull images where stalagmites once were...
Inevitably, the antidrug crusade is producing some ludicrous results. A best-selling toy in the U.S. is Madballs, a set of eight rubber balls adorned with gross names and faces. One of the more grotesque Madballs, depicting a creature whose skull has been split wide open, was called Crack Head. Fearful that this charming toy might be accused of glorifying drug use, the toymakers last month changed the name to Bash Brain...
Last summer Walker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, was looking for baboon fossils, when he spotted the skull fragment. By studying volcanic ash and other bones nearby, his colleagues determined the skull's age. Its pedigree was trickier. It has the structure of a late australopithecine: wide palate, huge rear molars, enormous cheekbones and a pronounced crest of bone running along the top of the skull. But other features -- a for- ward-thrusting muzzle, an orangutan-size brain and an apelike jaw structure -- are primitive. Leakey believes this mosaic suggests, as he has argued for years...
...This skull is the most exciting find since Lucy," says Eric Delson, an anthropologist at the City University of New York's Lehman College. "Relationships among australopithecines will need to be somewhat revised." That will not surprise anthropologists. Although the current diagram of humanity's family tree is based on thousands of specimens, most of them are frustratingly incomplete. Walker's fossil may force a revision in the textbooks, but it is not likely to be the last...