Word: whaled
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...thought we were done with the bicentennial for a while, but the planetarium at the Museum of Science's new show is entitled "The Star Spangled Sky." The new exhibit in the museum itself is called "In Celebration of the Living Whale," a disappearing species well worth honoring...
...Yorker into shape. Thurber's portrait remains definitive, but Gill adds amusing embellishments. Once Gill included the Tennysonian phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" in a "Talk of the Town" item. Ross's notorious innocence in literary matters ("Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?") prompted him to change the reference to "nature, red in claw and tooth." Gill explains as best he can: "His literal-mindedness being what it was, I suspect that he must have worried it out that an animal seizing its prey would bloody its claws before it got around to bloodying...
Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in doing nothing...
...What whales and their dolphin kin will not declare, this extraordinary book celebrates. It is a collection, really an orchestration, of appreciative views of the great creatures. Sober scientific articles and elegiac poems, naturalists' reports and scholars' musings, pencil drawings and underwater photographs jumble together, but all gently point to the possibility that whales are geniuses. The conclusion, of course, is unproved, yet most readers are likely to be convinced of its plausibility. Those with a mystical bent may even end up agreeing with Melville that if God ever returns to this planet, he would come...
...They find food and avoid most dangers easily, have leisure, know rapture. Their history goes back 50 million years (v. 5 million for man) to the time the first cetaceans abandoned the land and took to the waters. Of the 87 species still extant, the biggest is the blue whale, whose tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant. Most highly developed is Orcinus orca, the "killer whale," which may be the only higher animal on earth that knows no fear. Then there is the humpback whale, renowned for its intricate but remarkably precise "songs," and the river dolphins that...