Word: toad
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...That bottled spider," Shakespeare called the last Plantagenet. "That pois'nous bunch-back'd toad." Other Tudor chroniclers-variously declaring that he arranged the murder of his brother, poisoned his own wife, usurped the throne from his two young nephews and ordered them to be smothered in the Tower of London -have made Richard III Britain's very own Ivan the Terrible...
...wrote Shakespeare of the great Queen Cleopatra, "it beggar'd all description." Right, says Edward C. Rochette, editor of the Numismatist. It beggared all description because it was so ugly. His evidence: coins struck during Cleopatra's reign and bearing her image. "Cleo was homely as a toad," claims Rochette. "Do you think a queen of her stature would permit issuance of coins depicting her as homely, if she were a raving beauty...
...Christian) and the geniuses in silver ties. Her pages are blistered with portraits in epithet. Zanuck has his "beaver's teeth pronged into a cigar." Skouras is merely an "oxlike package, voice like a child's rattle." Louella Parsons is kissed off as "The Queen Mother at Toad Hall." Marilyn Monroe, "a child with short legs and a fat bottom," wonders innocently: "Who is Thomas Mann...
...Inside a Toad. For some, the urge to try to pop the bubbles is all but irresistible. Twice since 1968, would-be deflators have pierced Harvard's bubble−but an alarm system brought maintenance crews on the double. Actually, a certain amount of leakage is desirable. "Air-supported buildings must leak," explains English Architecture Critic Reyner Banham. "They are living things. They must breathe." If they are not allowed to breathe, strange things happen: the blowers that constantly pump air into the enclosed space cause pressure to build up, and the building begins to screech, pull...
John Bonham's drum solo, "Moby Dick," is another failure. It will inevitably be compared, probably extremely unfavorably, with Ginger Baker's "Toad," which must be recognized as the finest rock drum solo. Baker's ability to develop rhythmically redefining motives over a beat which is itself reforming is beyond the demonstrated capacities of any other drummer. No drummer has ever carried a bad song with such unfailing strength as Baker did with "White Room." Yet Bonham proceeds primarily by a method of complementary rhythmic motives which, at least in "Good Times Bad Times" and "Ramble On," are the equal...