Word: twigs
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...Accommodation. Common folk still sought a king's touch as the cure for scrofula, still believed that the twitching of a hazel twig betrayed the nearness of criminals, still looked to omens and cabalistic signs as a guide to the future. The Swedish poet Georg Stiernhielm was accused of witchcraft for burning a peasant's beard with a magnifying glass, and witches would continue to stalk the lands of Europe for as long as King Louis lived (Durant reports that in Scotland the last one was sent to the stake in 1722). But at the same time, Hooke...
Even in an age of sexual laxity, the marquis was often in prison for sexual offenses. In a frolic in Marseille, four prostitutes took turns flailing De Sade with a twig broom (they had refused to use his favorite whip studded with nails). Then De Sade fed a girl candies which she claimed were poisoned, but which De Sade insisted were only aphrodisiacs. The girl became so ill she went to the police. De Sade, who skipped town in the nick of time, was condemned to death in absentia and burned in effigy. When he ran off with his wife...
...Estoril?" New Middle Class. Whoever runs Spain next will inherit a country slowly, painfully outgrowing the isolation and poverty of centuries. In old Castile, land of santos y cantos (saints and songs), village steeples are inhabited by storks, the near-sacred birds of Spain, standing high in their twig nests and fanning their young with great wings. The gypsies were on the road last week, trekking north for the summer. In hot. sunny squares, cavernous cathedrals waited, filled with cool air and the dusty odor of saintly bones in silver boxes...
...trouble comes when the female lays her eggs. She picks a tender twig, saws a slit in it with a rasplike ovipositor on her stern, lays her eggs in the slit, and soon dies. The weakened limbs may break or die too. After several weeks the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl out and drop down on the ground where they bury themselves for 16 years, 10½ months. Then, on the first hot day of May, they climb out of the ground, shed their shells, sprout wings and start a plague...
Novelist John C. Hawkes '47, too, should help to strengthen the pro-Miller leanings of the panel. Known for his literary psycho-sexual fantasies, Hawkes has written, among others, the much- heralded The Cannibal and, most recently, The Lime Twig...