Word: squat
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...toads, introduced to the continent 50 years ago in a failed attempt to control the sugar cane-eating beetle, were all over the paths around camp on rainy nights. The squat, green creatures have multiplied out of control, and they are often systematically killed by motorists and biologists...
...They are, in their own way, as much a part of TV history as Lucy, Uncle Miltie and the Great One. Their names were Pinky, Blinky, Inky and Clyde, but most people knew them simply as the squat, ghostlike monsters who scurried around a maze trying to gobble you up in the most popular video game of all time, Pac-Man. Remember the tinkly computer tune that signaled the start of each game? The "power pellets" that changed the monsters' color to blue and turned the chasers into the chased? The animated "half-time show" that appeared after two mazes...
When officers entered the darkness of the 15-by-25-ft. shack, they found a squat iron kettle whose contents suggested that more than just a band of ruthless killers had been at work. Inside the pot, resting in dried blood, were a charred human brain and a roasted turtle. Other containers held a witch's brew of human hair, a goat's head and chicken parts. After arresting and questioning four suspects, the Mexican police pieced together a horrific tale of a voodoo-practicing cult of drug smugglers who believed that orgies of human sacrifice would win satanic protection...
...younger artists squat. Some work in crumbling tenements scheduled for $ demolition, dank shells with tangles of extension cords carrying bootleg electricity up their gapped stairwells. Here they agonize about the "spiritual crisis" with which glasnost has confronted Soviet artists -- the sudden conversion of "dissident" art from a talisman to a commodity. One hears 28-year-olds, too young to remember the '60s, waxing nostalgic over the "purity" induced among artists by former repression...
...Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho, the 18th century "mob," a many-headed beast capable of every atrocity and stupidity as well as sublime moments of collective courage...