Word: sperm
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Against a dark background, a pinkish ovarian follicle swells until an egg bursts forth and sails along the convoluted lining of the fallopian tube like a miniature moon over a mountain range. Sperm, their tails thrashing, cluster together like salmon awaiting a signal to leap a waterfall. Cells, pulsing with life, divide and reproduce. Finally, in a scene reminiscent of the fadeout of 2001, a fetus, its already human form visible through a transparent amniotic sac, fills the screen. These spectacular images (see following pages) are not the products of a Hollywood special effects department. They are frames from...
...March 4, 1973, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had their breakfast interrupted by sperm whale, which rammed their twin-keel sloop Auralyn about 250 miles northeast of the Galapagos Islands. The boat suffered a fatal portside hole below the waterline. Within an hour, the couple-who had been on their way from native England to New Zealand-embarked on a spectacular survival adventure in a round, covered rubber raft roped to a nine-foot dinghy. The publisher claims that the Baileys set a record-117 days*-for time adrift following a shipwreck. Though each lost about 40 pounds, suffered vitamin deficiencies...
...marijuana (but no other drugs) at least four times a week for six months. At the end of that period the testosterone levels among the pot smokers were an average of 43% lower than they were in a group of nonsmoking controls. Six of the marijuana users had lowered sperm counts, and two of them reported that they had become impotent. After abstaining from marijuana for two weeks, several subjects regained normal hormone levels and sexual function. One preferred the pleasures of pot to those of the pad. Despite a potency problem, he declined to give up marijuana...
...almost as ridiculous as in Last Tango. Any suggestions that Marlon Brando alone was responsible for writing his speech about going "through the ass of death, right up into the womb of fear" are dispelled by Partner, where Clementi speaks of life as an "echo resounding between the sperm and the shit of the world...
...futuristic mode has popped up in Allen's work before, as in the pilot-to-copilot routine in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex..., where the human body is a compartmentalized bureaucratic machine gone away, and Allen plays a sperm cell. Allen likes the tension between the human and the mechanical--there's a natural humor of incompetence in it. But in Sleeper the technocratic setting takes over, framing--maybe dominating--his talent, underlining the classic Allenesque plight of the weak human with simple (if overwhelming) personal problems against a strong, impersonal society...