Word: pyre
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...sleepy fishing port of Phanthiet, 100 miles east of Saigon, a 21-year-old novice Buddhist monk named Nguyen Huong poured gasoline over his robes, then lit a match and turned himself into a human pyre. He was the second Buddhist priest to burn himself to death in protest against the authoritarian regime of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem and his ruling family...
...burn. Joan of Arc's heart is said to have survived her burning at the stake and been thrown into the Seine. When Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off Italy in 1822, three literary friends -Lord Byron, Edward John Trelawny and Leigh Hunt-cremated the corpse on a pyre of driftwood. The job almost done, Trelawny suddenly thrust in his arm and snatched out the heart, which, although fiery hot, was strangely unconsumed. In Oscar Wilde's fairy tale, The Happy Prince, the statue's broken heart fails to melt in the furnace...
...floor of the prison cell, the cockroach struggles frantically to escape its burning bed of straw. "Confess you're not a saint," shouts one convict hovering over the minuscule pyre, "or else the fire of heaven will consume your flesh amid hideous sufferings." Cries another: "Confess that the Prince of Evil has appeared to you and seduced you, but that you see the light and that repentance floods your heart." But the roach says nothing and goes up in flames. "She's damned. God forgive...
Moscow often had tried rocket diplomacy of sorts in the past. Khrushchev once told Greece that he would rain nuclear destruction on the Acropolis, and he as good as promised Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that West Germany would become a "funeral pyre." But these were only what diplomats have come to call "missile letters." Never before had the Kremlin risked using missiles themselves to push its policies. It had not permitted Warsaw Pact allies to have offensive missiles, and had never, in fact, dared allow them off the soil of the Soviet Union. Why had Khrushchev done...
Verdi: "Di quella pira" from Il Trovatore (Tap). This album, as its cover proudly proclaims, presents one aria rendered by 40 tenors, containing 80 high Cs. As written by Verdi, Di quella pira ("From that pyre"), from the third act of Il Trovatore, had not a single high C in it, but Tenor Enrico Tamberlik (1820-89) started inserting one in the middle and one at the end-and they have been there ever since. The 40 tenors sing in six languages, and generally bleat, screech, bawl and scream in a manner calculated to make any listener sympathize with Rossini...