Word: uprighteous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...paleontological gatherings. Startled laughter greeted the unveiling of oddball Opabinia, with its five eyes and fire-hose-like proboscis. Credibility was strained by Hallucigenia, when Conway Morris depicted it as dancing along on needle-sharp legs, and also by Wiwaxia, a whimsical armored slug with two rows of upright scales. And then there was Anomalocaris, a fearsome predator that caught its victims with spiny appendages and crushed them between jaws that closed like the shutter of a camera. "Weird wonders," Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called them in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life, which celebrated the strangeness...
...mordantly juvenile ditty circulating in Nelson Rockefeller's campaign headquarters in 1968 insulted every hopeful in sight: "Scranton's a sissy,/ Nixon's a prick./ Romney's a moron,/ Goldwater's sick./ Nelson's your best man,/ Able and quick./ But who is our candidate?/ Upright Dick!" After Nixon's Inauguration, even the Washington Post's cartoonist Herblock gave him a shave (erasing the famously sinister Milhousian stubble shadow). Whatever else Nixon may have become in the years before his forced retirement, he was deemed for an instant to be presidential. Every President, including Bill Clinton, has a hard fight...
...with heart problems, BORIS YELTSIN sure is frisky. As he arrived at what was supposed to be a press conference regarding his coming summit meeting with President Clinton, Yeltsin playfully tweaked two female secretaries. One woman, startled by this gesture of fellowship, sat bolt upright and spun around; the other barely reacted. The oddball presidential games over, the gathering got serious. Yeltsin announced that he was firing his Foreign Minister; the following day he changed his mind...
Finally, it is an opportunity, in what has been a catastrophic year for race relations, for the general American public to see black men as responsible, upright and involved citizens. There is no doubt that it would have been much simpler if a generally well-respected person had planned a demonstration for blacks to recommit themselves to caring for the community and securing the family...
...Turkana word for lake), is yet another reason why paleontologists are reconsidering some of their ideas about why the earliest humans stood up. According to one theory, as a change in climate transformed Africa's moist forests into drier grasslands, evolution favored hom inids that could stand upright in order to spot predators lurking in the tall grasses. Other researchers argue that an upright posture lessened the heat the animals absorbed from the fierce tropical sun. Still others believe bipedalism freed the hands for carrying food or children over long distances. Such explanations appear to share a common flaw...