Word: blading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...makes everyone queasy. But performance trumps sentiment. The sport of speed skating is at one of those pivotal junctures, with good old tradition being upended by a Dutch contraption called the clap skate. Unlike the conventional skate heel, the heel of the clap skate's boot detaches from the blade like a one-way seesaw. The skater's heel lifts off the blade, lengthening the blade's contact time on the ice, then the blade snaps back to its original position with a noisy "clap." The result: 16 world records fell in a two-month period--some by more than...
...U.S.A. by two others who can smile in the face of gravity and adversity: Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek. All have been national champions. And, yes, they are all veterans, even Lipinski at 15, of juggling skating careers with public adoration, of living life on the edge of a blade and calculating victory or defeat in the split second it takes to leap from the ice. Don't let the sequins and lace and the perfect coifs fool you; these ice princesses could kick a hole in the Titanic. And Kwan is perhaps the toughest of them...
Once it's time to take to the ice, new doubts and distractions set in. No one skates the same program exactly the same way twice. Each performance is an evolving dynamic that takes shape only as blade hits ice. Underneath the show smiles whir constant questions: "Is there enough speed for this jump? Can I make three revolutions or just two? Since I missed the first jump, should I throw another one in?" Yet skaters must not fall for the easy temptation of deep analysis. Lipinski, a wizardly technician on the ice, says that during her long program, lasting...
...main work he does as an actor," says Billy Bob Thornton, whose Sling Blade was partly inspired by Boo Radley, and who plays a pivotal cameo in The Apostle. "He observes characters." Screenwriter Horton Foote (Mockingbird, Tender Mercies), who recommended that Duvall play Boo Radley, praises his "eye and ear for specifics of character. He has a feel for the Southern idiom, but he brings variations to it. For Tender Mercies he tape-recorded people, then studied the accent till he got it right...
...paper airplanes around heating vents that we all started to worry. So, naturally, I was a little defensive. "It is educational," I rejoined, nervously surveying the games I had picked out to seed what I hoped might someday grow into an extensive video-game library: SoulBlade, Tekkan 2, Bushido Blade and Crash Bandicoot 2. The Sony PlayStation plays more than 300 games, which is why I bought it. And that's just here. In Japan, PlayStation owners can choose from among 800 games. Which gave me an idea...