The modern use of the Olympic Flame began in 1936. It coincided with the advent of a long relay of runners carrying torches to bring the flame from Olympia to the site of the games. Once there, the torch is used to light a cauldron that remains lit until it is extinguished in the Closing Ceremony. http://www.infoplease.com/sports/olympics/history-olympic-torch.html

Passing the Torch: An Evolution of Form, the design history of the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present day.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/01/sports/20080802_TORCH_GRAPHIC.html#

The 2010 Winter Olympics will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The opening ceremonies are on February 12, 2010; the closing ceremonies are on February 28, 2010. Over 80 countries will send a total of over 5,500 athletes to the competitions. This is the third Olympics held in Canada (the other Canadian Olympics were the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary). The motto of the 21st Vancouver Olympics is With glowing hearts / Des plus brillants exploits, excerpts from the English and French versions of the Canadian national anthem, O Canada!. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/olympics/

What are combining forms? You can think of them as the Legos of language. As the name indicates, a combining form is a linguistic atom that occurs only in combination with some other form which could be a word, another combining form, or an affix (unlike a combining form, an affix can't attach to another affix). A.Word.A.Day features five words this week made using these combining forms: theo- (god), oligo- (few), artio- (even number), helio- (sun), hagio- (saint) and -gony (origin), -poly (selling), -dactyl (toes or fingers), -latry (worship), -graphy (writing).
Using one combining form from each of the above two groups you could make 25 words. Whether all those words make sense is another matter. In fact, theoretically you could construct billions of words with just these 10 Lego blocks as a word can have more than one combining forms. Consider pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
What words can you come up with using the building blocks of this week's words? Share your constructions and their definitions on the bulletin board Wordsmith Talk or by email (words at wordsmith.org). Example:
theogony (thee-OG-uh-nee) noun
The origin of gods or an account of this.
From Greek theo- (god) + -gony (origin). A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

January to June in many languages
http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/months1.php

Explore alphabets, writing systems, articles, and phrases in many languages:
http://www.omniglot.com/ Songs, puzzles and artwork are also offered.

Barry Manilow has written or sung in nine commercial jingles. Probably the one for State Farm Insurance is known the best. See list at:
http://www.barrynethomepage.com/commercialjingles.html

Legal researchers: There’s a battle about to break out on your computer screen. On the third floor of West’s sprawling corporate headquarters outside Minneapolis, a veritable army of professionals has been working for nearly five years to create a revamped Westlaw. They are changing everything from the interface users see on their PC screens to all the technology that makes it work behind the scenes. Known as WestlawNext, the new platform will debut February 1. On its own suburban campus near Dayton, Ohio, LexisNexis—the other half of the duopoly that has ruled online legal research for almost 40 years (some call it “Wexis”)—is planning its own revamped platform. Referred to internally as New Lexis, it is slated to roll out publicly later this year on a date yet to be determined. Both companies claim to be creating a legal research experience that will mimic the ease of use their customers have come to expect from the leading Internet search engine, Google. The updated services come not a moment too soon, since the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine has just gotten into the legal research business. In November, the company announced that its Scholar search engine now contains more than 80 years of U.S. case law from federal and state courts, as well as U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1791—all of it free. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/exclusive_inside_the_new_westlaw_lexis_bloomberg_platforms/#ecamp=t-n322