Word: weevils
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...were to pick the least likely Senator to help Barack Obama win a major legislative victory, Alabama's Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, would be a fine choice. Once a "boll weevil" Democratic opponent of Bill Clinton, Shelby became a Republican in November 1994, helping the GOP cement its hold on the Senate at a crucial moment. He has had a near perfect record of conservatism on social and foreign-policy issues since then. The tall, drawling former prosecutor questioned Obama's citizenship this past February, and when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner first unveiled...
...cable box, this meant that for the week it took to get a replacement, my TV was dead as well. This would be a tragic circumstance for most Americans. But for a TV critic, it was a blow to my livelihood. I was like a cotton farmer after a weevil infestation. I was cut off from the main pipeline of American media life...
...knowledge. This emphasis not on a common base of reference but a common set of “approaches” leaves Harvard students seeking to fulfill the Core with the choice between rigorous introductory courses geared towards prospective concentrators and unbelievably abstruse Core classes about topics like Boll Weevils in 1680s Holland. Few survey courses remain that offer a comprehensive view for students not planning to pursue further studies in given subjects. This phenomenon has the bizarre result that, often, only concentrators can put their knowledge in context. Most non-concentrators are marooned on islands of specific knowledge...
Generalizations about intelligence have often been tied to assumptions about racism, and while High and others believe that few people still subscribe to the idea of the bigoted southerner, Spivey thinks that the notion hasn’t quite gone the way of the boll weevil...
...same flaws (you need only note the $2 billion in losses caused by the Sobig worm to understand). Critics point to parallels in the natural world to explain what happens when life becomes too dependent on a single source. "The Irish potato famine killed a country. The boll weevil killed an economy," Geer said. "It is self-evident that the desktops of the world are clones ripe for the slaughter"--unless they are Macs or run the open-source Linux software, both underdogs that hackers are less likely to subvert. The latter's ability to be guarded and upgraded...