Word: whale
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...user-generated content (to employ a phrase that just won't die) is the humble comment. Web publishers have begun to offer commenting on everything--posts, videos, pictures, whatever--like it was a kind of interactive condiment. Now practically anything on the Web collects comments the way a whale collects barnacles...
...course, there are optimists who think that somehow the unicorns managed to survive, morphing, slowly over the years into the bizarre but documented flesh-and-blood narwhal, a member of the porpoise and whale family that does indeed have a single, twisty tooth which it uses for mating and to pick holes through the ice. Indeed, perhaps that's what became of the unicorns that never made it onto the ark. They took to the sea. Throughtout the centuries, the narwahl's long, corkscrewing tooth was sold as a unicorn's horn, proof that the most elusive of creatures existed...
...whiskey barrels after striking their first gushers. Before U.S. drilling began in 1859, "rock oil" (to differentiate it from vegetable oil or animal fat) was sopped up with rags, wrung out and peddled as a cure for everything from headaches to deafness. Spurred by demand for lamp fuel as whale blubber grew scarce, derricks popped up all over Pennsylvania's oil region in the 1860s--although subsequent overproduction drove prices so far down that at one point, a wooden barrel was worth twice as much as the oil it contained, according to Daniel Yergin's definitive tome...
Through Gore's defeat, Recount hints at the emergence of the Democrats of 2008. Clinton and Obama have each argued that they know the post-Florida way to win: Obama by embracing the grass roots, Clinton by promising to whale on the Republicans. But with those lessons came a zeitgeist that views elections as dirty unless proved otherwise. How to marshal the spirit of '00 rather than be destroyed by it will be the challenge for whichever candidate wins. And I apologize in advance for using that verb...
...easy to ignore Watson’s courage. In 1981 he secretly entered Siberia to document a Soviet facility converting illegally hunted whale meat into feed for animals at a fur farm, evading the KGB and the Soviet Navy in his subsequent escape. Actor Martin Sheen calls him “one of the gutsiest guys on the planet” and the Dalai Lama has gifted him a statue of Hayagriva, a wrathful Hindu deity who strikes down his evil foes...