Word: twains
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...when the hopping began, the two aliens, sponsored by animal importer Andy Koffman, managed nothing better than a puny 7-ft. 10-in. leap in the finals -- even though one of them jumped twice. Winner of the spirited annual commemoration of Mark Twain's yarn The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: Help Mr. Wizard, a homegrown Concord, Calif., bullfrog who jumped a quite respectable 19 ft. 3 in. The prize for the best alibi went to Koffman, who insisted that his big frogs, accustomed to the equatorial tropics, just got cold feet. Said he: "They're not used...
...than his skill with a brush. Influenced by the supple lines and Asian touches of the art nouveau movement, he did better with fabric and furniture. As an interior decorator, he brought exotic warmth to the drafty drawing rooms of Vanderbilts and Mellons. He added Moorish spice to Mark Twain's study, and in the 1880s swathed the public rooms of the Chester A. Arthur White House with such exuberance that one critic compared the ambiance to "steamboats and barrooms." (Theodore Roosevelt later restored colonial austerity...
...Maybe you understand frogs and maybe you don't understand 'em," says Smiley in Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. "Maybe you've had experience and maybe you ain't only an amature, as it were." Seattle animal importer Andy Koffman ain't no amateur. In 1986, while visiting the African nation of Cameroon, Koffman watched a 10-lb. Goliath frog leap 30 ft. across a river, and jumped to a conclusion. "The first thing I thought was, 'Wouldn't it be fun to win the Calaveras contest?' " recalls Koffman...
...Goliaths could easily shatter the world frog-jumping record of 21 ft. 5 3/4 in. (set in three hops in 1986 by Rosie the Ribbiter, a 1-lb. bullfrog), Koffman entered three of them in this May's 62nd annual Jumping Frog Jubilee at Angels Camp, Calif., site of Twain's tale. Though the California department of fish and game temporarily barred the superfrogs from the state as "undesirable," Koffman will try to convince the bureaucrats that the Goliaths pose no danger -- except perhaps to the pip-squeak American competitors in the Calaveras jump...
...Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes as realistic novelists (Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck), by the '60s young writers and intellectuals regarded their kind of realism...