Word: snails
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Commencement address, Brundtland told Harvard graduates that "decisions leading to sustainable development will be illusionary if we can only move forward at a snail's pace decided by the most reluctant movers...
...BEGAN AS A SCAM. SEVERAL CRATES, ALL INNOcently marked "Reptiles," were flown from Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S. Their secret cargo: 1,000 Giant African Snails, considered by experts to be the most dangerous land snail in the world. By the time authorities knew they were in the country, the gastropods had slipped out to animal dealers in 25 states from Florida to Montana...
...right owner they provide sensitive, undemanding companionship. But if any of the Giant Africans are the same species that terrorized Florida for several years during the 1970s, they can also cause disaster on a biblical scale. Sexually mature at the age of five months, a single pregnant, hermaphroditic snail can, if it escapes to the wild, give rise to as many as 16 quadrillion descendants in five years. Armed with 80,000 rasping teeth and weighing up to a pound, each of these offspring can wade through an entire head of lettuce at one sitting. "It eats anything," says University...
Some have critters on them -- a snail crawling round the base, or a worried- looking frog leaning backward; one piece, Blind Sea Turtle Cup, 1968, is borne on the back of a turtle laboriously crawling its way across a sandbox. Yet curiously enough, they look mysterious rather than cute. Victorian potters like Mintons produced a plethora of whimsical, curate's-joke animal majolica, laden with cows and sheep and bees and other homely creatures; the surface of earlier French Palissy ware was encrusted with reptiles and insects to the point where the plate became an unusable plaque...
Such lofty ruminations were a long way from the thoughts of the typical visitor as he swung around his 14th switchback in 10 minutes, in a bus that labored painfully up the mountain curves like a slaloming snail, its driver consulting a map as he lurched along on the two-hour trip from Albertville to such distant sites as Courchevel and Val d'Isere. Any time not spent in a bus in the days before the Games seemed to be spent in a line for a bus. And on the epic rides along treacherous, icy roads, the passenger could...