Word: lice
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More than 50 years have passed since Father Andres first came to Granada to take over his parish of gypsies. In those days they were a wild, lice-ridden lot, and their children were growing up to be exactly the same. Father Andres tried to get them to come to the school he had set up in his sacristy, but the children, rebelling at being cooped up, refused to stay. Then, one morning while riding up the hill, Father Andres came across an old woman ex-convict named Maestra Migas leading a group of chanting children through their catechism...
Levine focuses, with the rapt attention of a G.I. picking lice out of his clothes, on the seamy side of American life. Born and raised in Boston's South End slums, he knows the harsh, scrabbling lives of the poor, and he brings their hurt faces alive in his canvases. The stock characters in Levine's more preachy pictures-fat capitalists, leering politicians and sneering cops-always look like more than types; he paints them with real anger and a genius for caricature...
Fleas, say Authors Rothschild and Clay, are comparative novices in the bird-pestering business. They hop on & off as if they had a life of their own. But lice have been bird parasites as long as birds have been birds. They probably sucked the blood of reptiles from which birds developed. When reptiles' scales turned into birds' feathers, the lice learned to graze and flourish on the new crop...
...world now has about 8,500 species of birds and 25,500 species of feather-eating lice. Nearly every bird has a few lice, and some have thousands. Benjamin Franklin, the Misses Rothschild and Clay report, regretted the choice of the bald eagle as the emblem of America "as he is generally poor and often very lousy." As soon as infant birds climb out of their eggs, the waiting lice set upon them, chewing their feathers and nibbling their skins. They crawl into the throat pouches of pelicans and cormorants. One species feeds exclusively on the tears of swifts...
Along with lice and fleas, many other kinds of parasites swarm through the bird world. Ticks suck the blood of their hosts; mites live inside their feathers or even inside the bodies of their fleas...