Meave Leakey of the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, says, "They are a remarkable find" and thinks the species is an australopithecine, while William Kimbel of Arizona State University, Tempe, thinks they are "very lovely specimens" and they are a species of Homo.
Both of these lovely specimens of warty wonder have let the situation get completely out of hand.
Matchstick fries would be much better, and no matter what the shape, these lovely speckled specimens cry out for a pungent dipping sauce, which should not be hard to come up with on a Vietnamese menu.
He picked a lovely pale lavender specimen commonly called a blewit.
He is an excellent physical specimen, a lovely natural footballer who would seem to have every gift required – cool head included – to play top-level football.
With characteristic tact, he told me that my specimen was "very lovely".
Despite how they look, however, hake is in fact a beautiful, firm-fleshed fish that makes for a lovely, fresh main course – and these were prime specimens.
Summarised thus, the stories may seem unpromising, even silly, but Cunningham is a superb writer and Specimen Days is full of the same lovely prose and generous spirit that distinguished his previous novels.
SO COLD THE RIVER (Little, Brown, $24.99), by Michael Koryta, is a superior specimen, with its eerie tale of a lovely valley in Indiana where at one time an elixir known as Pluto Water bubbled up from the underground springs.
One night, a shrimp curry came with three jumbo specimens in a bright coconut-milk-tomato sauce, which, in spite of being lovely, couldn't hide the fact that the shrimp tasted like they were raised in a tank.
