Word: surfeits
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...education was suffering last week from a surfeit of numbers...
Since John Steinbeck thus described it in Cannery Row two years ago, California's famed fishing town of Monterey (130 miles south of San Francisco) has had a surfeit of quiet and magic. By last week, the fishing fleet in the sardine center of the U.S. had dwindled from 85 to 55 boats. Hardly any whistles blew along Cannery Row. "We just keep open," said the owner of one of its 59 plants, "hoping for a few fish to dirty up our canneries." But fish had mysteriously gone from their haunts off Monterey...
Best anti-lamprey measure would be to drum up commercial demand. Lampreys were once a popular delicacy: Henry I of England is reputed to have died from a surfeit of them. Dr. Van Oosten is checking a rumor that Italians in Bessemer, Pa. are lamprey enthusiasts. If a market can be found, enterprising Great Lakes fishermen will gladly exterminate the lampreys free of charge...
...less massive and less ambitious mold than some of his other works. But here were the familiar urbanity and affability, and the unadventurous continuation of Romantic tradition, strikingly fused with a wholly contemporary, classical economy, and the accompanying sense of fitness and of the exact point of surfeit...
Last week Henri Laurent, a hardware clerk on Paris' fusty southern edge, unburdened his mind. "Voyez vous," said Laurent, "for five long years I stood here and watched the Boche walking arrogantly around my quarter. In those days I never thought I could ever again have a surfeit of democracy. To get out of bed on Sunday morning and walk to the polling booth does not seem a very heavy price to pay for freedom, but the French people are wearying of the process...