Word: vliet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fact, a chief criticism of lotteries is that they prey on the hopes, and wallets, of the poor. "I always felt that it was an insidious way to re-collect our welfare dollars," says Republican State Representative Tony Van Vliet of Oregon. Lottery enthusiasts, however, contend that different games attract different players. New York's high-stakes Lotto seems to be the pick of the upper and middle classes, while three-and four-digit numbers games appeal to a more downscale market. In Arizona, a state-funded study found that lottery regulars are predominantly white males with a median...
Tourists visiting the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida sometimes discover not only Alligator mississippiensis in the swim. A Homo sapiens named Kent Vliet, 26, may have waded in too. With a cypress pole in hand, the University of Florida doctoral candidate in zoology usually takes the plunge in the late afternoons during the mating season. "In the morning they're a little crotchety and don't want to be bothered," he says...
...whole, the 150 gators in the farm's breeder lake rarely seem to mind his intrusion; and after three years of cataloguing by computer some 800 courtship sequences and isolating about 40 specific behavioral acts, Vliet has come to have more sympathy for the creatures. If it is difficult for a nonspecialist to tell male gators from females, it can apparently be hard for the gators too. To examine prospective mates, they slowly bump nose-to-nose or nose-to-head-and-neck, or else try submerging each other in a lugubrious contest of love. "I can swim...
...Vliet's Water and Stone is a deceptively quiet collection of near, image-rich work, largely what might be described as observations ("In a Photograph by Brady") or apercus ("The Shade," "Girls on Saddleless Horses"). There is also, incidentally, some particularly chilling cancer imagery in various places ("...cobalt's/basilisk stare, the destroyed blood"; "the crab/under the heart, the thickening node"); and the death-soaked title work, a sort of Japanese No drama, is frighteningly memorable...