Word: torch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What wasn't presaged by even the most knowing, most inside, most keen-nosed Olympics hound was that, more than three years before any torch lighting, the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee--a fine Mormon he was--would be brought down by a spousal-abuse charge, and his successor and others would fall in a huge, still widening bribery scandal. Salt Lake City wanted to hot up its image for the Olympics, and today it has no worries...
Meanwhile, the torch of Y2K awareness passed to a new generation. In the fall of 1977, a young Canadian named Peter de Jager signed on as a computer operator at IBM. His first task was to boot up a nationwide banking system run on an IBM 370. When the machine whirred into life, it asked for the date. As De Jager, a mathematics major straight out of college, entered the number 77, a thought occurred to him. Did this machine care what century it was? With the impetuousness of youth, he marched off to his manager and informed...
...went on to say, "It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in the troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of all mankind. This miracle of engineering skill which one day will bring the world to the home also brings a new American industry to serve man's material welfare...
...wizardry, Gates blundered in displaying the same attitude that doomed certain robber barons. As writer Ambrose Bierce once gibed of Hearst, "Nobody but God loves him, and he knows it." Likewise, Gates' Xanadu has helped transform the boyishly charming geek into the Microsoft Monster, who is being chased by torch-bearing mobs brandishing antitrust suits. Nowhere in Gates' overwired palace is there a program to inform him how to act in the nation he lives in: the U.S. of A., in which throngs cheered the heavy-metal band Motorhead when it performed Eat the Rich and where Garth Brooks became...
...like the Olympic torch," he says. "It never drops to the ground...