Word: squid
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When the gypsy music stopped, the host rose from the table and began to tell his guests of the virtues of squid with mayonnaise. "It exerts a favorable influence on metabolism," he said, "and is prescribed for persons with heart problems." The setting was Kuala Lumpur's Hotel Mirama, and the host was a man from Prodintorg, the Soviet agency in charge of food exports. He was promoting Russian seafood, but the sales luncheon was neither a gastronomic nor a commercial success. Oily sardines were served with Georgian brandy so medicinal-tasting that it is sometimes known as "Stalin...
...close as any. For the whale has no "natural" enemies, in the sense of larger animals that habitually feed on him. Only when young or when attacked by his own kind does he need to flee. Though scarred by the sucking disks of the octopus, bitten by the squid, carrying the buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons will succumb to what Dr. Scheffer suggests are their real enemies: "The small, erosive, unimpressive costs of living . . . broken...
...simply spotting a broadbill on any given day are 10 to 1. Even then the odds against hooking the fish are 15 to 1. Swordfish have to be coddled into taking a bait; with a full stomach only the most dessert-happy sword can be tempted by mackerel or squid. Fishermen have been known to make ten or more passes before a lazing giant without achieving so much as a blink from those cold blue eyes. On the wildly illogical assumption that he does swallow the bait, the battle is generally lost then and there; the only soft part...
...hogwash. About half the time the surgeon is telling dirty jokes with the fixed intent of embarrassing the scrub nurse. The rest of the time there is bickering, or gossip, or talk about how things were last winter in Palm Springs, or how many suction cups on a squid's tentacles, or whether a woman has an orgasm at the instant she is hanged. Of course, there are times when you just shut up and work...
...personal insult flourishes. A zilch is a total loss, and so is a wimp, dimp, dipley nerdly, lizard, gink, barf, scuzz, skag, Jane, lunchbucket, or anyone whose mind is in the soil bank. At the University of North Carolina, last year's fink is this year's squid, cull, troll or nerd. The perennial rat fink is R.F. in Southern California and mouse fink or straight arrow (a combination pill and moral paragon) in the Harvard Yard. But though a tool in Florida is a dullard, a tool in the academic machinery of M.I.T. is merely a diligent...