Word: sparrow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with flying, and she married a publisher, G.P. Putnam. He manipulated the press to create an international celebrity. Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. But if she was an eagle aloft, she remained a sparrow on the ground. Lovell, biographer of the British pilot Beryl Markham, can do little to romanticize her taciturn subject. It is only when Earhart climbs into the cockpit that The Sound of Wings truly takes...
...sparrow of a man who always had trouble sleeping and could never sit still, Berlin worked at a furious pace. During a production conference for Annie Get Your Gun, it was decided that the show needed another song, so the composer rushed home. Six minutes later, the show's director got a phone call. "Listen to this," said Berlin, who launched into the first verse of Anything You Can Do. He had written it in the taxi...
Delving further into the sparrow toll, which accounted for 16% of the total feline catch, the scientists concluded that from a third to a half of all sparrow deaths were attributable to cats. Extrapolating these figures, they estimated that cats kill at least 20 million birds a year in Britain. "Yet," write the authors indignantly, "we are supposed to be a nation of bird lovers, many of whom keep cats but still castigate bird hunters and trappers on the continent of Europe...
...biblical times, the mandrake root spelled sexual power, possibly because it resembled the male reproductive organs. Early Arabic authors created a veritable Aphrodisiac-of-the-Month Club. The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Delectation, by a 15th century sheik named Nefzawi, recommended sparrow's ! tongue and, at bedtime, a glassful of honey, 20 almonds and 100 grains of the pine tree. Indian experts prescribed a powder made from the bones of a peacock. Europeans in the Middle Ages preferred the testes or urine of all sorts of animals. One Frenchman favored the flesh of a crocodile ground into powder...
...pack of pomegranate pith, so we disguise our pursuit of Aphrodite in more acceptable forms: the pulse-racing perfume, the sexy dress, the dirty dancing, even the lofty status. No less a personage than Henry Kissinger asserted that view in the '70s. "Power," he said, perhaps with sparrow's tongue in cheek, "is the great aphrodisiac...