Word: flame
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Your opinion of the Olympic-torch relay - which kicked off Oct. 22 with a traditional flame-lighting ceremony in Greece - is likely to reflect your opinion of the Olympics themselves. If international cooperation and glory keep you misty-eyed from the opening ceremony through the last television montage, then you'll love the heady symbolism of the torch relay, a "journey of harmony" in which a succession of runners transports a flame lit by the sun's rays from the Games' ancient birthplace to the host site - in 2010, that's Vancouver - over...
...roots lie in Nazi Germany. Carl Diem, the secretary-general of the 1936 Berlin Games, pitched the event as a way to infuse the Games with pageantry and buff the mythic image of the Third Reich. That year, on its way from Greece to Germany, the flame passed through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia - all of which would be annexed or occupied within a few years. (See a timeline of the 2008 Olympic-torch relay...
Runners are the torch's primary means of transportation, though in recent years the flame has also been carried by boat (Mexico City, 1968; Barcelona, 1992; Atlanta, 1996), horseback (Stockholm, 1956; Atlanta), parachute (Lillehammer, Norway, 1994), snowmobile (Calgary, Canada, 1988) and camel (Sydney, 2000). During its journey to the Atlanta Olympics, astronauts took the torch (though not the flame) into space; a few years later, it dove into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef on its way to Sydney...
Take Atlas Sound’s first album, “Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel,” overdose it on Adderall, add an actual beat, and put it over an open flame, and you get “Legos,” the newest psychedelic pop-rock album from Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox under his solo project moniker. Fusing acoustic guitar chords, haze-like ambient synth, trippy electronic beats, and a yin-yang of light and dark tones, Atlas Sound succeeds in escaping the ill effects of the dreaded sophomore...
...while seeming to douse one flame, the opening of an officially recognized channel for reverting to Roman Catholicism could spark other conflagrations within Anglicanism, both from conservatives and progressives who are suspicious that Rome is poaching their faithful. Indeed, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's outgoing chief of ecumenical, or intra-Christian, affairs, used a press conference last week to try to curb such fears, insisting that Rome was "not fishing in the Anglican lake...