How long do reindeer live?

As long as they can.

flehmen [flay-mun]

the raising of the head and the curling of the lip as a behavior in response to stimuli, especially sex pheromones. It seems that cats and horses do it, but not so much the traditional birds and bees (nor educated fleas).
From a German word that means ‘curling the lip in sexual excitement.’

The Cassadaga propaganda

Un missionnaire du moyen age raconte qu'il avait trouvele point ou le ciel et la Terre se touchent

Illus. in: L'atmosphere; meteorologie populaire / Camille Flammarion.
Paris : Librairie Hachette et cie, 1888
loc

This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever...
The attraction is known as the Casimir Effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly.
APOD 17.Dec.06
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Some of us are wont perforce to wonder what it is the universe is expanding into

Finbarr O'Reilly

Sheldon said they cook 28 hogs the day before Mother's and Father's Day weekend and Easter.
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There are 4 cities directly under the central government, 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions and 2 administrative regions in China, as well as more than 3,000 cities and towns under them.

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."

Elbert Hubbard

It was thought that he had forgotten to fasten his seat belt.
John Purroy Mitchel bio at wikipedia
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The Boy Mayor of New York City at loc

nimptopsical [nim-tops-ih-kul]

drunk. This word is one of more than 200 synonyms for ‘drunk’ compiled by Benjamin Franklin; some of the others included cherry-merry, lappy, and “been too free with Sir Richard.”

Also:

myomancy [mye-uh-man-see]: divination by the movements of mice. Modern scientists probably study the movements of mice as much or more than the ancient myomancers did, and for ends that are not dissimilar

snollygoster [snah-lee-gahs-ter]: a dishonest politician

spanghew [spang-hyoo]; to cause a frog or toad to fly into the air.

chamade [shuh-mahd]: a signal inviting someone to a parley (usually a drumbeat or a trumpet sounding). Now perhaps useful to those who carry beepers. "Sorry, have to go, it's a chamade."

Vofuhreffekt [vor-fyur-ef-ket]: a German word, literally 'presentation effect' which describes a problem, usually with a computer, that doesn't happen when other people try to replicate it (such as, say, the Help Desk guy you called for).

Erin's Weird and Wonderful Word of the Day

...as a person might watch schools of minnows swimming in a brook beneath a bridge
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...it rivals the find in South Africa and Indonesia of the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish previously known only through fossils
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...the bird averaged a surprising 350 km daily. In some cases, a breeding pair made the entire journey together.
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The single cell of this fragile new species of Xenophyophore, found at 4,300 m depth, is enclosed within a plate-like shell, 1 cm in diameter, composed of mineral grains.

Census of Marine Life

One does what one can.

Alexander Graham Bell and others at ground breaking for the Volta Bureau building in Washington, D.C. (detail):

among those present are, in the front row from left: Elsie May Bell, Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller, and Marion "Daisy" Bell

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Another view:
Why Some Deaf People Hold AGB in Contempt

Ward Hill Lamon

He often slept on the floor
outside Lincoln's bedroom door,
wrapped in a blanket and armed to the teeth.

Elijah Cox
Portraits of African American ex-slaves
from the U.S. Works Progress Administration,
Federal Writers' Project slave narratives collections
Library of Congress

Betty Powers, ex-slave, Ft. Worth Texas September 14, 1937
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Patsy Moses, ex-slave, Waco Texas November 15, 1937
also here
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Ellen Polk, ex-slave
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Virginia Newman, ex-slave, Beaumont Texas June 11, 1937

previous citation here, here

The "B" may well be for Boynton, for all we know

vatic
then nothing for more than 100 pages then
grifas
then, in Nochecita, in the scene with Reef and the schoolmarm Linnet Dawes
plagal (first misremembered as pagil)
there are two typographical errors, symmetrically positioned, on facing pages, so that they meet in the closed book, somewhere in the first 40 pages of the hard-cover US Penguin edition; another, an instance of word redundancy, around p.200 - but that low an incidental frequency is outside our present scope of interest.
Favorite phrase in the book so far:

flesh-eating sheep sailed over the fence between dreams and the day

never more than 5 milliseconds off the tight beat

Time was, I'd've identified with the naked man; nowadays though, it's the 'gator.

David Byrne's got gospel up