This is Chris Dodd (D-CT), the powerful member of the Senate Banking Committee, who threatened filibuster after filibuster over additional regulation of the mortgage market (while accepting funds and sweetheart mortgages from the very organizations he was supposed to be regulating).

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, 'Prologue') is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunire staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunire collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative.

Native North Americans took an active and sophisticated role in management of acorn resources through the use of fire, which increased the production of acorns and made them easier to collect. The deliberate setting of light ground fires killed the larvae of acorn moths and acorn weevils that have the potential to infest and consume more than 95% of an oak's acorns, by burning them during their dormancy period in the soil. Fires released the nutrients bound in dead leaves and other plant debris into the soil, thus fertilizing oak trees while clearing the ground to make acorn collection faster and easier. Most North American oaks tolerate light fires, especially when consistent burning has eliminated woody fuel accumulation around their trunks. Consistent burning encouraged oak growth at the expense of other trees that are less tolerant of fire, thus keeping landscapes in a state in which oaks dominated. Since oaks produce more acorns when they are not in close competition with other oaks for sunlight, water and soil nutrients, eliminating young oaks more vulnerable to fire than old oaks created open oak savannahs with trees ideally spaced to maximize acorn production. Finally, frequent fires prevented accumulation of flammable debris, which reduced the risk of destructive canopy fires that destroyed oak trees. After a century during which North American landscapes have not been managed by indigenous peoples, disastrous fires have ravaged crowded, fuel-laden forests. Land managers have realized that they can learn much from indigenous resource management techniques, such as controlled burning, widely practiced by Native Americans to enhance such resources as acorns.