Word: flame
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Chanting in the dusky gloom before a battle, a robed figure stoops and ignites a circle of blue flame in the red clay soil around him. With one quick twist, a woman fluffs her white veil into swaddling and so conjures up a baby in arms. Horns blare as a crowd of celebrants, resplendent in red, holds aloft a richly caparisoned tent for the wedding of a blind king. A master of military arts orders a disciple to cut off his right thumb and thereby lose his strength and skill. "It is not cruelty," the teacher explains. "It is foresight...
...dark, deserted sandlot behind the elementary school, I fumbled with a match, burning my fingers on the first try, dropping it on the second. I finally connected flame to fuse, trembling in anticipation of a blow-up in my face. BOOM. A flaming pink ball shot out. I could feel the explosive force as I clenched the "Thunder Buster" roman candle tube, and I began to aim thundering blasts of white, green and pink at the battalion of surrounding trees--my own sandlot Star Wars...
...California's Stanislaus National Forest, the area of destruction from blazes doubled, to 90,000 acres, in less than a day. Four thousand residents of nearby Tuolumne County were forced to flee from the 50-foot walls of flame. In all, some 9,000 people were ordered to evacuate their homes in a dozen mountain settlements. More than 20,000 fire fighters were enlisted to help. With no rain in the forecast, they were braced for a long battle...
...business bought 95 $1 stamps at the McLean, Va., post office. The image on the stamps was an austere candlestick; the inscription read AMERICA'S LIGHT FUELED BY TRUTH AND REASON. At CIA headquarters in Langley, a clerk , noticed that an orange halo that should have surrounded the candle flame was instead printed in the lower right-hand corner. The curiosity was shown to several co-workers; one of them was a philatelist who realized that the misprints were collectors' items...
...candlestick goof apparently occurred on a single sheet of 400 stamps. The orange glow of the candle flame was printed first through a photo-offset process. After a random quality-control inspection, the sheet was reversed so that the candlestick and the words surrounding it were printed upside down. Of 100 erroneous stamps sent to the McLean post office, five are believed to have been sold to the public before the CIA purchase. The whereabouts of those five stamps remains unknown...