Word: hummingbirds
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Near the dusty cattle town of Liberia in Costa Rica, members of the Civil Guard are listlessly chasing a stray hummingbird through their armory. "Actually, most of these guns are for the birds," jokes Colonel José Ramón Montero, a rice farmer who prefers T shirts to camouflage and diligently observes banker's hours. "These M-1s could have seen service at Normandy, and most of these weapons would be more valuable in Hollywood." His company's mission, however, is no scriptwriter's flight of fancy: his men are serving as a first line...
...page parody? Yes indeed, for Oates needs the space, as she explains: "Alas, how shall we describe the trajectory of Romance? How shall we, obliged to toil in mere words, seek to illume the fleet, fluttering, gossamer sensations, elusive as the hummingbird, that course along the veins, and swell the captive heart, of the credulous...
...most of the objects not on display will be moved to a $28 million warehouse and conservation laboratory being built in Suitland, Md., six miles from the Smithsonian's main museums on the Mall near the Capitol. A new computer system will be capable of locating anything from hummingbird eggs to George Washington's egg poacher within an hour; now it takes days to find items, if they can be found...
...nearly 6,000 entries and 1,675 photographs and drawings in this striking tome. Terres wrote all the entries himself, a labor of 21 years, balancing the scientific and the popular, to please novice and expert alike. He updates ornithological subjects like mating. Some findings: scientists now call the hummingbird's brief passion "promiscuous"; birds fly by instinct, not parental instruction; a robin's natural life span can be as long as 11½ years, but its life expectancy, because of power lines and pesticides, is little more than one year...
...bound by any need to satisfy directors or shareholders, Carlson moves freely. Like a hummingbird, he darts from company to company, quickly moving in to focus attention on one aspect of his operations, then moving on to the next. A magnet for minutiae, he once dropped in on one of his hotels unannounced and wrote a lengthy memo to the manager on the impropriety of serving mashed potatoes with an omelet; according to Carlson, the accompaniment should have been French fries...