title: Raven (wrestler)

text: He next feuded with Abyss and Brother Runt, losing to the former in a Hangman's Horror match on Impact after the latter turned on him. Subsequent to this, his coverage in major televised angles has dropped considerably. While he was off-air, an alliance was teased between Kazarian, Johnny Devine, and Matt Bentley. On the TNA Primetime Special before Genesis, the three came out in goth, addressing a new movement in TNA. After a loss at Genesis, sporting a new look (often with a mask), Raven revealed himself as their leader, caning the loser of the match. This stable became known as Serotonin. The direction of this stable was very hard to place, although they lost the majority of their televised matches. Regardless of the outcome, Raven would hit the Serotonin competitor with a cane. After a long hiatus, Raven returned to the ring, losing to Christopher Daniels in a First Blood Invitational then losing to Chris Harris after interference from Kaz. On Impact, Raven came out after Kaz's win over Havok and Martyr and hit Kaz in the back with a Kendo Stick, breaking it over Kaz's back. Raven, Havok, and Martyr then attacked Kaz with kendo sticks. On the July 19 episode of Impact!, Raven and the rest of Serotonin took on the reuniting Triple X. Raven had very little time in the match and Serotonin lost after Skipper hit a diving leg drop, Daniels hit a Best Moonsault Ever, and Senshi hit a Warrior's Way on Havok.


title: Raven (wrestler)

text: Raven won a House of Fun match, on the August 9 episode of Impact!. He teamed with Robert Roode and James Storm against the team of Chris Harris, Rhino, and Kazarian. Raven lost to Kaz, who had rebelled against him, at Hard Justice despite having the remaining members of Serotonin involve themselves in the match. He then issued a challenge to Abyss and Rhino at Bound for Glory. Abyss later had Black Reign added to the match and made it a Monsters Ball. Raven briefly formed an alliance with Havok, Black Reign, Judas Mesias, and James Mitchell with the purpose of defeating Abyss. At Bound for glory, Raven would go on to lose the match after Abyss gave him a black hole slam on to tacks and glass. On the November 15 episode of Impact, Havok was revealed to be Team 3D's X Division traitor, effectively ending Serotonin. At Turning Point, Raven substituted for Rhino in the "Match of 10,000 Thumbtacks" and teamed with Abyss to defeat Black Reign and Rellik. Raven was officially released from TNA, and his profile was removed from the roster on March 7, 2008.


title: Raven (wrestler)

text: Raven returned to television four months later on the June 24 episode of Impact! showing signs of a face turn, appearing in the Impact! Zone crowd beside Stevie Richards and Tommy Dreamer. The following week the three were joined by Rhino. On the July 15 episode of Impact! Raven, Dreamer, Richards, Rhino, Brother Devon, Pat Kenney and Al Snow, led by Mick Foley, aligned themselves with the TNA World Heavyweight Champion Rob Van Dam by attacking Abyss and the rest of the TNA locker room. The following week, TNA president Dixie Carter agreed to give the ECW alumni their own reunion pay–per–view event, Hardcore Justice: The Last Stand, as a celebration of hardcore wrestling and a final farewell to the company. On the July 29 episode of Impact! Raven re–ignited his old feud with Dreamer by turning on him, after his match with Abyss, and laying him out with a DDT on a chair and in doing so, turned heel. The following week, Raven explained his turn by saying that he had not forgotten how Dreamer had "stolen", and later married, his girlfriend Beulah McGillicutty, who turned on Raven back in 1996 during his and Dreamer's initial feud. On August 8 at Hardcore Justice Raven defeated Dreamer in a "Final Showdown" match refereed by Mick Foley. On the following episode of Impact!, the ECW alumni, known collectively as Extreme, Version 2.0 (EV 2.0), were assaulted by A.J. Styles, Kazarian, Robert Roode, James Storm, Douglas Williams and Matt Morgan of Ric Flair's Fourtune stable, who thought they didn't deserve to be in TNA, thus once again turning Raven face. At Bound for Glory, Raven, Dreamer, Rhino, Richards and Sabu defeated Fourtune members Styles, Kazarian, Morgan, Roode and Storm in a Lethal Lockdown match. At Turning Point, EV 2.0 faced Fortune in a ten-man tag team match, where each member of EV 2.0 put their TNA careers on the line. In the end, EV 2.0 lost the match and Sabu was released from TNA. Two weeks later on Impact!, Raven was forced to put his TNA future on the line in a match against the TNA World Heavyweight Champion Jeff Hardy. Hardy won the match and as a result Raven was released from TNA. His release from the company was legitimate. Raven worked one last match for the promotion on November 12, 2010, defeating TNA Television Champion A.J. Styles in a non–title match at the Farewell at the Asylum live event.


title: Raven (wrestler)

text: In 2008, Raven appeared in Juggalo Championship Wrestling (JCW) for Season 2 of SlamTV!. In the main event of the second episode, JCW Heavyweight Champion Corporal Robinson put his title on the line against Sexy Slim Goody. When Robinson attempted to hit the Boot Camp, the lights shut off in the arena. When they turned back on, Raven appeared in the ring and hit Robinson with his Evenflow DDT, before stealing the JCW Heavyweight Championship belt. In the third episode, Raven introduced Sexy Slim Goody as his newest lackey. When Robinson ran out to the ring to take his title back, Sexy Slim Goody (kayfabe) knocked him out with a steel chair shot, and Raven began to shave Robinson's afro. Sabu appeared from out of the crowd and scared Raven off, leaving Robinson with a half shaved afro. The tag team of Raven and Sexy Slim Goody had a match against Corporal Robinson and Sabu in the following episode. Raven walked out on the match with the stolen championship belt, fleeing from Sabu. At Bloodymania II, Raven lost to Corporal Robinson in a "Loser leaves JCW" Ladder match. However, Raven returned to the company at Bloodymania III in a losing effort against his old nemesis Sabu in a Raven's Rules match.


title: Raven (wrestler)

text: In the early part of 2013, Raven toured Europe wrestling for various promotions in various countries including Germany and the Netherlands. On May 24, Raven reunited with Perry Saturn in a tag team Raven's Rules match for Billy Corgan's Resistance Pro Wrestling, defeating Brady Pierce and Mad Man Pondo. Raven had spent 2014 in Nigeria and South Africa. He defeated Fury in a singles match at a house show in Lagos, Nigeria on November 7, 2014. He won the WWP Tag Team Championship with Venus on November 24, which they lost December 22 at house show in Abuja, Nigeria. Raven signed with NWF and made his debut on the main event defeating Strong Bone in a Hardcore match on December 23. He teamed with The Steiner Brothers where they defeated Sabu and The Wolves in a Christmas house show in Lagos. He won the NWF World Heavyweight Championship on December 27, defeating Kamjarlio in steel cage match. He earned his first title defense on December 29, by defeating Sabu on a live event in Cairo. He retained again in six-man battle royal on December 30, in a house show in Newark, New Jersey.


title: Chinese ideals of female beauty

text: In Taoist thought, women with masculine voices make poor sexual partners, because this trait suggests an excess of qi that inhibits the attainment of sexual harmony. In her article "Female Bodily Aesthetics, Politics, and Feminine Ideals of Beauty," Eva Kit Wah Man articulates how Confucianism and Taoism played essential roles in the creation of Chinese beauty ideals: "In the Chinese tradition, as in other cultures, both the external sexual and inner moral dimensions determine the beauty of a woman…The notion of female beauty comes from both (Taoism and Confucianism)." "Femininity" does not refer to an aspect of a dichotomy between mind and body, as there is no such dichotomy in Chinese philosophy. Women in China also expands on these ideals, delving into the impact women have in Chinese society. Thus, historically, the religious influences on Chinese beauty ideals closely tied outer beauty to inner beauty. Historically, an oval face, willow leaf eyebrows, long thin eyes, small lips, and a slim, fragile-looking body were preferred during the Tang dynasty.


title: Chinese ideals of female beauty

text: Modern Chinese society is highly influenced by Western capitalist and Marxist thoughts. The Chinese would not describe themselves as a completely capitalist country, nor a purely Marxist country. They fundamentally ignore this type of question about the essence of its political position, and develop their economy, politics, culture and feminism in their own way. They call themselves a socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics. The rise of Chinese feminist development is highly influenced by the claims of the "new " China (since the early 19th century) and its government that it would save the Chinese woman from the "old society" and set women's minds free . An article published in the widely circulated journal Dushu uses an earlier nativist satire to argue that women themselves voluntarily desired the beauty of small feet (footbinding) into the first decades of the twentieth century, despite the elite, male-dominated discourse of liberation and equality that assailed the practice, claiming, "during the long historical period when foot binding became common women's way of life, foot binding was just considered the most natural physical behavior for girls. Foot binding was as common as eating and dressing. Foot binding was also a way for women to seek physical beauty."


title: Carifiesta

text: Carifiesta (French: Carifête) is an annual Caribbean Carnival held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It was established in 1974, and is held in July. The parade was cancelled in the 1990s due to conflict and firearm-related crime. As the situation progressed most of the participants moved to Toronto Caribana. In 2010 the parade was called off due to a legal battle between promoters Henry Antoine and Everiste Blaize , the city of Montreal. This resulted in many groups pulling out and a struggle to maintain a street parade. The organization put in place in 2019 a new liaison: Jason Forbes, who resigned in 2021 because of profit and organization issues. In 2023 The parade was cancelled. The city of Montreal denied funding the parade. The event is coordinated by the Caribbean Cultural Festivities Association, a nonprofit organization. Carifiesta was established prior to some Carnivals that take place in the Caribbean, for example, Cayman Carnival Batabano. Carifiesta has also been named the largest North-American running Caribbean Street Parade.


title: TNBC

text: As early as 1988, NBC had been openly contemplating replacing its Saturday morning cartoon programming block of children's animation with less expensive, in-house programming oriented towards older audiences, such as talk shows and travel-themed programs, due to increasing competition from weekday afternoon cartoons airing in first-run syndication. The idea for a block specifically oriented towards a teenage demographic sprang from the popularity of the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell, which centered on a group of six students attending the fictional Bayside High School in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. Debuting on the network's Saturday morning lineup in September 1989, Saved by the Bell was a re-imagining of the sitcom Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which originated on The Disney Channel, a pay-TV channel in 1988 (the predecessor series served as a starring vehicle for Hayley Mills, who unlike fellow series regulars Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Dennis Haskins, Lark Voorhies and Dustin Diamond, did not return for the retooled series).


title: Eaton Green

text: Fleeing Jamaica on murder charges, he emigrated to the United Kingdom and eventually settled in Brixton in February 1991 where he began dealing crack and cocaine. Within three months, he had been arrested on drugs and weapons charges and recruited by Steve Barker to become an informant soon after his arrest. His arrest on 8 July 1993, for the armed robbery of 150 people during a blues party in Nottingham the previous month, one of the largest committed in British history, would cause a scandal for the Home Office as Green had been a paid informant at the time of his arrest. His "handler", immigration officer Steve Barker, allegedly attempted to protect Green from prosecution by Nottingham authorities. In September 1995, he pleaded guilty and was convicted of armed robbery, possession of firearms and unlawful wounding by the Leeds Crown Court. He had shot one of the male guests in the foot during the robbery, allegedly to allay suspicions that he was an informer, but his sentence was reduced due to cooperating with the prosecution in a previous trial.


title: Nicolae Xenopol

text: Already as a Junimea participant, Nicolae Xenopol cut a liberal and rebellious figure. Historian Alex Drace-Francis refers to him as a culture critic "from the liberal, progressive wing of Junimea". Among the Junimist intellectuals, Xenopol and George Panu stood out for being fully committed to the Positivism of Auguste Comte—the others were more interested in German idealism, evolutionism or metaphysical naturalism. Unlike the elitists and the misanthropists, he believed that "crowd psychology" was generally a constructive factor in the course of human civilization. Xenopol's ideas were also more permeated by new trends in literary theory—according to cultural historian Zigu Ornea, he was "exasperated" by "the ossification of the Junimist aesthetic doctrine". Constantin Cubleșan refers to Xenopol as not just a realist writer, but also "a fine analyst" of the realist current, citing his ideas on Ioan Slavici: "It is enough for a novel to be about national life, whatever the character types . The essential is that those types should be truthful, and, as far as the events are unfolded, never stray from reality".


title: Nicolae Xenopol

text: Ornea suggests that Xenopol's rebellion against first-generation Junimism and Maiorescu was first evident in 1878, when the young man came into direct contact with contemporary French literature. The resulting conflict with the Junimists was bitter and spiteful. Eminescu attacked in him the "superimposed stratum" of foreign intruders, calling him "Mr. N. Xenopoulos", and cautioning him that the "defects of one's race" were showing in Xenopol's praise of urban literature. Xenopol replied in kind. According to his account (also taken up by the liberal poet Alexandru Macedonski at Literatorul magazine), Eminescu was of Bulgarian origin, and therefore not of pure Romanian stock. His own 1882 portrait of Mihai Eminescu (whom he called by his birth name, Eminovici) was purposefully grotesque and inflammatory, but, as Cubleșan notes, particularly colorful. It reads: " an odd head with four edges, such as Bucharesters have surely seen among Bulgarian laborers . This individual wears purple trousers, a borrowed black frock and a large black hat, exactly like those of Germans who walk about with the street organs on their backs; he is always covered in mud and his face and hands carry countless traces of purple ink".


title: Nicolae Xenopol

text: Brazi și putregai is seen by Cubleșan as more ambitious, more rigorous and more meticulous project, in effect "a faithful mirror of late 19th-century Romanian society", midway between the proto-realism of Nicolae Filimon and the complex narratives of Duiliu Zamfirescu or Mihail Sadoveanu. At its core, Brazi și putregai is about the downfall of an aristocratic (boyar) family, unable to maintain its status in a modernized society. The central character, Alecu Negradi, is a sternly patriarchal boyar who has rebuilt his family's fortune, and who attempts to break in his rebellious son Iorgu by forcing him to manage an isolated mountain estate. From this point on, Alecu Nagradi's entire universe falls apart: his son finds new ways to disobey him, his wife commits adultery, and his peasants rise up in revolt; Iorgu's sister, Maria, bequeathed to a much older man, elopes. She escapes the manor just as the buildings go up in flames, without realizing that the peasants have murdered her father.


title: Nicolae Xenopol

text: Xenopol's dispute with Eminescu was revisited in a 2002 book by critic Alexandru Dobrescu: Detractorii lui Eminescu . Poet and Convorbiri Literare book critic Emilian Marcu notes: " are in fact intellectuals of great amplitude, who express opinions that are somewhat in contraction with those imposed officially. book gives us a chance to rediscover texts by authors who are at least honorable, over which, alas, the dust of oblivion has set. Their return into an intellectual circuit can only be beneficial for all those who truly wish to know more about the great Eminescu". Similarly, critic Bogdan Crețu notes that Dobrescu managed to overturn the "poltroonish" classification of Xenopol and others as "detractors": "the new anthology an honest exercise in the reevaluation of an epoch that is much more nuanced and rich than the books of literary history or the dictionaries will have us know". Contrarily, other experts routinely list Xenopol as mainly an anti-Eminescian—his has an entry among the "detractors of Eminescu" in Săluc Horvat's dictionary of Eminescu exegetes .


title: Franz von Roques

text: In March 1941, Roques was appointed commander of Army Group North Rear Area; he assumed the post in July 1941. Notably, his cousin Karl von Roques served as commander of Army Group Centre Rear Area. Roques was not enthusiastic about Adolf Hitler's concept of waging a racial war. In late June and early July 1941, Roques informed his superior Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb of the massacres of Jews by Einsatzgruppe A, Lithuanian auxiliaries and the men of the 16th Army outside of Kaunas. He expressed opposition to the mass shootings, stating that this was not the right way to solve the Jewish question. Leeb claimed that he could not do anything about these incidents, and the two soldiers eventually agreed it might be "more humane" to sterilise the Jewish men. Neither took any action to prevent further massacres. Historian Johannes Hürter argued that the exchange between Roques and Leeb showcased that the officers might've had weak moral concerns, but ultimately condoned the mass murder by excusing their inaction with claims of powerlessness.


title: Haunted Summer

text: In 1971, Daily Variety announced a film on the subject, based on a 12-page treatment by Anne Edwards, but it was not made: instead, Edwards turned her outline into a young adult novel, published in 1972. This in turn was optioned by MGM, to be directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Frederic Raphael, but the film had still not been made by the time the option lapsed in 1984. Producer Martin Poll bought the rights and hired Lewis John Carlino to adapt. In 1986, Variety reported that John Huston had agreed to direct and was insisting on the casting of largely unknown British actors (including Alice Krige, actually born in South Africa, as Mary), but Huston's declining health subsequently forced him to drop out; Czech director Ivan Passer took on the project. Unlike Huston, Passer preferred American actors, and recast the roles of Percy and Claire with Eric Stoltz and Laura Dern. Hollywood Reporter announced that Rupert Everett was to play Byron, but Philip Anglim replaced him shortly before filming started.


title: Percy Grainger

text: John Grainger was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later gained worldwide fame as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. John's claims to have "discovered" her are unfounded, although he may have offered her encouragement. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose learned after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before coming to Australia. His promiscuity placed deep strains upon the relationship. Rose discovered shortly after Percy's birth that she had contracted a form of syphilis from her husband. Despite this, the Graingers stayed together until 1890, when John went to England for medical treatment. After his return to Australia, they lived apart. Rose took over the work of raising Percy, while John pursued his career as chief architect to the Western Australian Department of Public Works. He had some private work, designing Nellie Melba's home, Coombe Cottage, at Coldstream.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Except for three months' formal schooling as a 12-year-old, during which he was bullied and ridiculed by his classmates, Percy was educated at home. Rose, an autodidact with a dominating presence, supervised his music and literature studies and engaged other tutors for languages, art and drama. From his earliest lessons, Percy developed a lifelong fascination with Nordic culture; writing late in life, he said that the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong was "the strongest single artistic influence on my life". As well as showing precocious musical talents, he displayed considerable early gifts as an artist, to the extent that his tutors thought his future might lie in art rather than music. At the age of 10 he began studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German-born graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, Melbourne's leading piano teacher. Grainger's first known composition, "A Birthday Gift to Mother", is dated 1893. Pabst arranged Grainger's first public concert appearances, at Melbourne's Masonic Hall in July and September 1894. The boy played works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Scarlatti, and was warmly complimented in the Melbourne press.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In February 1902 Grainger made his first appearance as a piano soloist with an orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra. In October of that year he toured Britain in a concert party with Adelina Patti, the Italian-born opera singer. Patti was greatly taken by the young pianist and prophesied a glorious career for him. The following year he met the German-Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni. Initially the two men were on cordial terms (Busoni offered to give Grainger lessons free of charge) and, as a result, Grainger spent part of the 1903 summer in Berlin as Busoni's pupil. However, the visit was not a success; as Bird notes, Busoni had expected "a willing slave and adoring disciple", a role Grainger was not willing to fulfil. Grainger returned to London in July 1903; almost immediately he departed with Rose on a 10-month tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as a member of a party organised by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Before going to London Grainger had composed numerous Kipling settings, and his first mature orchestral pieces. In London, when he found time he continued to compose; a letter to Balfour Gardiner dated 21 July 1901 indicates that he was working on his Marching Song of Democracy (a Walt Whitman setting), and had made good progress with the experimental works Train Music and Charging Irishrey. In his early London years he also composed Hill Song Number 1 , an instrumental piece much admired by Busoni. In 1905, inspired by a lecture given by the pioneer folk-song historian Lucy Broadwood, Grainger began to collect original folk songs. Starting at Brigg in Lincolnshire, over the next five years he gathered and transcribed more than 300 songs from all over the country, including much material that had never been written down before. From 1906 Grainger used a phonograph, one of the first collectors to do so, and by this means he assembled more than 200 Edison cylinder recordings of native folk singers. These activities coincided with what Bird calls "the halcyon days of the 'First English Folksong Revival'".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger first met Edvard Grieg at the home of the London financier Sir Edgar Speyer, in May 1906. As a student, Grainger had learned to appreciate the Norwegian's harmonic originality, and by 1906 had several Grieg pieces in his concert repertoire, including the piano concerto. Grieg was greatly impressed with Grainger's playing, and wrote: "I have written Norwegian Peasant Dances that no one in my country can play, and here comes this Australian who plays them as they ought to be played! He is a genius that we Scandinavians cannot do other than love." During 1906–07 the two maintained a mutually complimentary correspondence, which culminated in Grainger's ten-day visit in July 1907 to the composer's Norwegian home, "Troldhaugen" near Bergen. Here the two spent much time revising and rehearsing the piano concerto in preparation for that year's Leeds Festival. Plans for a long-term working relationship were ended by Grieg's sudden death in September 1907; nevertheless, this relatively brief acquaintance had a considerable impact on Grainger, and he championed Grieg's music for the rest of his life.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In April 1914 Grainger gave his first performance of Delius's piano concerto, at a music festival in Torquay. Thomas Beecham, who was one of the festival's guest conductors, reported to Delius that "Percy was good in the forte passages, but made far too much noise in the quieter bits". Grainger was receiving increasing recognition as a composer; leading musicians and orchestras were adding his works to their repertoires. His decision to leave England for America in early September 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, damaged his reputation among his patriotically minded British friends. Grainger wrote that the reason for this abrupt departure was "to give mother a change" – she had been unwell for years. However, according to Bird, Grainger often explained that his reason for leaving London was that "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and to have laid himself open to the possibility of being killed would have rendered his goal unattainable". The Daily Telegraph music critic Robin Legge accused him of cowardice, and told him not to expect a welcome in England after the war, words that hurt Grainger deeply.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In April 1921 Grainger moved with his mother to a large house in White Plains, New York in what is now known as the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. This was his home for the remainder of his life. From the beginning of 1922 Rose's health deteriorated sharply; she was suffering from delusions and nightmares, and became fearful that her illness would harm her son's career. Because of the closeness of the bond between the two, there had long been rumours that their relationship was incestuous; in April 1922 Rose was directly challenged over this issue by her friend Lotta Hough. From her last letter to Grainger, dated 29 April, it seems that this confrontation unbalanced Rose; on 30 April, while Grainger was touring on the West Coast, she jumped to her death from an office window on the 18th floor of the Aeolian Building in New York City. The letter, which began "I am out of my mind and cannot think properly", asked Grainger if he had ever spoken to Lotta of "improper love". She signed the letter: "Your poor insane mother".


title: Percy Grainger

text: From the late 1920s and early 1930s Grainger became involved increasingly with educational work in schools and colleges, and in late 1931 accepted a year's appointment for 1932–33 as professor of music at New York University (NYU). In this role he delivered a series of lectures under the heading "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music", which introduced his students to a wide range of ancient and modern works. On 25 October 1932 his lecture was illustrated by Duke Ellington and his band, who appeared in person; Grainger admired Ellington's music, seeing harmonic similarities with Delius. On the whole, however, Grainger did not enjoy his tenure at NYU; he disliked the institutional formality, and found the university generally unreceptive to his ideas. Despite many offers he never accepted another formal academic appointment, and refused all offers of honorary degrees. His New York lectures became the basis for a series of radio talks which he gave for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1934–35; these were later summarised and published as Music: A Commonsense View of All Types. In 1937 Grainger began an association with the Interlochen National Music Camp, and taught regularly at its summer schools until 1944.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger was a musical democrat; he believed that in a performance each player's role should be of equal importance. His elastic scoring technique was developed to enable groups of all sizes and combinations of instruments to give effective performances of his music. Experimentation is evident in Grainger's earliest works; irregular rhythms based on rapid changes of time signature were employed in Love Verses from "The Song of Solomon" , and Train Music , long before Stravinsky adopted this practice. In search of specific sounds Grainger employed unconventional instruments and techniques: solovoxes, theremins, marimbas, musical glasses, harmoniums, banjos, and ukuleles. In one early concert of folk music, Quilter and Scott were conscripted as performers, to whistle various parts. In "Random Round" , inspired by the communal music-making he had heard in the Pacific Islands on his second Australasian tour, Grainger introduced an element of chance into performances; individual vocalists and instrumentalists could make random choices from a menu of variations. This experiment in aleatoric composition presaged by many decades the use of similar procedures by avant-garde composers such as Berio and Stockhausen.


title: Percy Grainger

text: The brief "Sea Song" of 1907 was an early attempt by Grainger to write "beatless" music. This work, initially set over 14 irregular bars and occupying about 15 seconds of performing time, was a forerunner of Grainger's free-music experiments of the 1930s. Grainger wrote: "It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying, and yet not be able to execute tonal glides and curves." The idea of tonal freedom, he said, had been in his head since as a boy of eleven or twelve he had observed the wave-movements in the sea. "Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching "free" (non-harmonic) combinations of tones; yet we are unable to take up these beauties… into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony." In a 1941 letter to Scott, Grainger acknowledged that he had failed to produce any large-scale works in the manner of a Bach oratorio, a Wagner opera, or a Brahms symphony, but excused this failure on the grounds that all his works before the mid-1930s had been mere preparations for his free music.


title: Percy Grainger

text: Grainger considered himself an Australian composer who, he said, wrote music "in the hopes of bringing honor and fame to my native land". However, much of Grainger's working life was spent elsewhere, and the extent to which he influenced Australian music, within his lifetime and thereafter, is debatable. His efforts to educate the Australian musical public in the mid-1930s were indifferently received, and did not attract disciples; writing in 2010, the academic and critic Roger Covell identifies only one significant contemporary Australian musician – the English-born horn player, pianist and conductor David Stanhope – working in the Grainger idiom. In 1956, the suggestion by the composer Keith Humble that Grainger be invited to write music for the opening of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne was rejected by the organisers of the Games. A "Percy Grainger Festival" was held in London in 1970, organised by Australian expatriates Bryan Fairfax and William McKie and supported financially by the Australian government.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In Britain, Grainger's main legacy is the revival of interest in folk music. His pioneering work in the recording and setting of folk songs greatly influenced the following generation of English composers; Benjamin Britten acknowledged the Australian as his master in this respect. After hearing a broadcast of some Grainger settings, Britten declared that these " all the Vaughan Williams and R. O. Morris arrangements into a cocked hat". In the United States, Grainger left a strong educational legacy through his involvement, over 40 years, with high school, summer school and college students. Likewise, his innovative approaches to instrumentation and scoring have left their mark on modern American band music; Timothy Reynish, a conductor and teacher of band music in Europe and America, has described him as "the only composer of stature to consider military bands the equal, if not the superior, in expressive potential to symphony orchestras." Grainger's attempts to produce "free music" by mechanical and later electronic means, which he considered his most important work, produced no follow-up; they were quickly overtaken and nullified by new technological advances. Covell nevertheless remarks that in this endeavour, Grainger's dogged resourcefulness and ingenious use of available materials demonstrate a particularly Australian aspect of the composer's character – one of which Grainger would have been proud.


title: Percy Grainger

text: In 1945, Grainger devised an informal ratings system for composers and musical styles, based on criteria that included originality, complexity and beauty. Of 40 composers and styles, he ranked himself equal ninth – behind Wagner and Delius, but well ahead of Grieg and Tchaikovsky. Nevertheless, in his later years he frequently denigrated his career, for example writing to Scott: "I have never been a true musician or true artist". His failure to be recognised as a composer for anything beyond his popular folk-song arrangements was a source of frustration and disappointment; for years after his death the bulk of his output remained largely unperformed. From the 1990s, an increase in the number of Grainger recordings has brought a revival of interest in his works, and has enhanced his reputation as a composer. An unsigned tribute published on the Gramophone website in February 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Grainger's death opined that "though he would never be put on a pedestal to join the pantheon of immortals, he is unorthodox, original and deserves better than to be dismissed by the more snooty arbiters of musical taste".


title: Percy Grainger

text: Of Grainger the pianist, The New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that his unique style was expressed with "amazing skill, personality and vigor". The early enthusiasm which had greeted his concert appearances became muted in later years, and reviews of his performances during the final ten years of his life were often harsh. However, Britten regarded Grainger's late recording of the Grieg concerto, from a live performance at Aarhus in 1957, as "one of the noblest ever committed to record" – despite the suppression of the disc for many years, because of the proliferation of wrong notes and other faults. Brian Allison from the Grainger Museum, referring to Grainger's early displays of artistic skills, has speculated that had John Grainger's influence not been removed, "Percy Aldridge Grainger may today be remembered as one of Australia's leading painters and designers, who just happened to have a latent talent as a pianist and composer". The ethnomusicologist John Blacking, while acknowledging Grainger's contribution to social and cultural aspects of music, nevertheless writes that if the continental foundation of Grainger's musical education had not been "undermined by dilettantism and the disastrous influence of his mother, I am sure that his ultimate contribution to the world of music would have been much greater".


title: Culver, Kansas

text: Culver was laid out in about 1878. It was named after George Washington Culver who was living in Ottawa County, Kansas in August 1868 when he was recruited to be a scout for Col. George Forsyth, following the first Spillman-Bacon Creek Indian raid. At daybreak on September 17, 1868 Forsyth's band of 50 civilian scouts was attacked by about 1,000 of Roman Nose's dog soldier warriors in northeastern Colorado Territory. This was known as Beecher Island. They took cover on a small sandy island in the middle of the Arickaree fork of the Republican river about 17 miles south of present-day Wray, Colorado. The next three days were spent fighting and by the time the fighting ended, the scouts were out of rations and living on horse and mule meat. About half of the scouts were wounded at the outbreak of the fighting. Culver was one of five scouts killed or mortally wounded. Culver was buried at the battleground, later moved to Fort Wallace Cemetery and eventually to Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery. Before Beecher Island, during the Civil war he served as 2nd Lt, Co E, Second Colorado Cavalry. Following the Civil War, he worked for a time as a watchmaker in Junction City, Kansas, and shortly before his death was elected to public office in Ottawa County, Kansas. The town and township of Culver were named in honor of him.


title: Maria Maddalena Rossi

text: At the beginning of the 1950s, the Italian Communist Party took charge of denouncing the living conditions in the Cassino region in southern Italy, which were still difficult even several years after the end of the Second World War. The Associazione donne del Cassinate was created in order to defend women who had suffered sexual violence during the war – especially the Moroccanate – and to bring before Parliament specific directives for the social and economic rights of these women. On 7 April 1952 in Rome, Maria Maddalena Rossi, accompanied by a delegation of five hundred women, to make changes to the compensation due to victims of war crimes committed by Allied soldiers during the Second World War. This militant action has created a political, ideological and cultural divide: women victims of sexual violence have been able to break with the social shame of the sexual crimes they have suffered, which engenders a form of emancipation in the face of a patriarchal society in a return to traditional norms to compensate for the social and gender transformations due to the war. The specificity of sexual violence has become established on the political scene, which has given impetus to the idea that this violence is a collective issue and not the responsibility of the victims. During this evening session in the Chamber of Deputies, Maria Maddalena Rossi said:


title: Maria Maddalena Rossi

text: "But on another aspect of the problem I want to dwell on it for a few minutes. The honorable Secretary of State did not want - at least I understood this - to commit himself to any changes to the existing law. He says that he does not even see the need to outline what could be a change in the existing law, the limits of which we are well aware. Now, if the honorable Secretary considers that the torture inflicted on these women by Moroccan troops is in any way comparable to any other misfortune that war can bring, however great it may be (and I say this having here next to me a colleague who had the misfortune of losing her son in the war), If he believes that this misfortune is comparable to any other mourning or pain that war causes, he shows that he does not have an ounce of sensitivity, he shows that he does not even know how to pause for a moment to consider the fact that chance and nothing else has willed that these women and not those of his family, those who are dearest to him, should have to suffer this harsh fate.


title: Maria Maddalena Rossi

text: Do you think that the lives of these women would be affected to the same extent if they had lost one of their loved ones in the war? No, it's not the same. We know the mothers who have lost their children, the wives who have lost their husbands: we love them, we honor them, we show them our full solidarity, so that they sometimes find a kind of comfort in knowing that their mourning is shared, that the memory of their departed loved ones is sacred to millions of citizens. But these women don't! For these there is no possible comfort. They have to hide, as if they felt morally infected as well! These women would like to be forbidden to speak of their misfortune, to assemble, to complain, in the name of public morality! Moreover, she compared this misfortune to that of a person who loses a relative in a car accident or I don't know what others. Mr Under-Secretary, if you will allow me, you should not have said that. This misfortune must not be compared with others, whether small or large, nor should it be placed in the category of "accidents". Otherwise, it is no longer enough to talk about insensitivity, because that would be cynicism.".


title: Robert Runcie

text: During the Second World War he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Scots Guards on 21 November 1942, and was given the service number 251985. He served with the regiment's 3rd (Tank) Battalion, then part of the 6th Guards Tank Brigade, as a tank commander, landing in Normandy with his unit as part of Operation Overlord in July 1944, a few weeks after the D-Day landings on 6 June, and fought with the battalion throughout the entire North West Europe Campaign until Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) in May 1945. Towards the end of the war, he earned the Military Cross (MC) for two feats of bravery in March 1945: he rescued one of his men from a crippled tank under heavy enemy fire, and the next day took his own tank into an exceptionally exposed position in order to knock out three anti-tank guns. As a result, he is unique among modern archbishops of Canterbury in having fought for his country. In May 1945, he was among the first British soldiers to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.


title: Angie Pontani

text: Pontani was the co-producer and star of This Is Burlesque at the now-defunct Corio Supper Club. She performs around the world solo and with the Pontani Sisters, and was a creator of the DVD series, Go-Go Robics and Go-Go Dance with Angie Pontani produced by World Dance New York. Angie produces and stars in the Burlesque-A-Pades touring production and is the co-producer of the New York Burlesque Festival, an event that happens annually and brings together hundreds of burlesque performers from around the world for four nights of performance. Angie has modeled for several designers, including Mode Merr Clothing as well as Dirty Dolls Lingerie and has shot with renowned photographers like Ellen von Unwerth, Josh Gosfield and Brian Smith. Pontani hosts Ed The Pontani Pages, a monthly talk show format podcast produced by JL Aronson in NYC. She also hosted "The Bump n Grind" Podcast 2020-2021, produced by Tenderloins, it focused on burlesque and is available on all streaming platforms. In 2015, she was featured in a photo shoot for CR Fashion Book nude at seven-months pregnant, alongside Lady Gaga shot by Bruce Weber.


title: Angie Pontani

text: Angie was crowned Miss Cyclone in 2007 in honor of the historic roller coaster the Coney Island Cyclone. As a Coney Island resident, she has been very active in the fight to save them from rezoning that would jeopardize the amusement district. Angie was crowned "The Reigning Queen of Burlesque, the winner of the Miss Exotic World Pageant in 2008" at the Burlesque Hall of Fame reunion at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas. Other awards include, "The Best Body in Burlesque" - 2007 New York Burlesque Festival, "#1 Burlesque Attraction in the Nation" - AOL.com, "Best NY Based Dance Company" - Show Business, "Hottest Burlesque Troupe" - Village Voice. She was recently featured on the PBS Great Performances series with Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett for their release of Cheek to Cheek and has collaborated with retailer Secrets in Lace to release a collection of vintage inspired dresses. She has performed burlesque at the Dolby Theater in Las Vegas as part of Lady GaGa's Jazz and Piano residency in 2023.


title: Cooperative principle

text: Grice's theory is often disputed by arguing that cooperative conversation, like most social behaviour, is culturally determined, and therefore the Gricean maxims and the cooperative principle do not universally apply because of cultural differences. Keenan claims, for example, that the Malagasy people follow a completely opposite cooperative principle to achieve conversational cooperation. In their culture, speakers are reluctant to share information and flout the maxim of quantity by evading direct questions and replying on incomplete answers because of the risk of losing face by committing oneself to the truth of the information, as well as the fact that having information is a form of prestige. To push back on this point, Harnish points out that Grice only claims his maxims hold in conversations where the cooperative principle is in effect. The Malagasy speakers choose not to be cooperative, valuing the prestige of information ownership more highly. (It could also be said in this case that this is a less cooperative communication system, since less information is shared.)


title: Ogooué-Ivindo Province

text: The principal rivers of the province are the Ogooué and the Ivindo. In the southwest is Ivindo National Park, established in 2002, which contains the Koungou, Mingouli and Djidji waterfalls. Lopé National Park, also in the southwest of the province, covering an area of 5,360 square kilometres (2,070 sq mi), lies to the north of the Chaillu Mountains and east of the Mingoué River. It is highly biologically rich, with over 1500 recorded plant species, 412 out of 700 species of bird found in Gabon, and large populations of mandrills, gorillas and chimpanzees. The Station D'Etudes des Gorilles et Chimpanzes, co-managed by the CIRMF and CWS, is a monitoring facility at Lopé. In the eastern part of the province is Mwagna National Park, which contains dense rainforest and is virtually uninhabited by humans but is biologically rich. The Lodié and the Louayé rivers flow through Mwagna National Park. Mount Bélinga contains resources of iron in the vicinity, which the government are planning on exploiting.


title: Estonian Red Riflemen

text: The Estonian Riflemen actively participated in the Russian Civil War and the Estonian War of Independence. The Riflemen took an active part in the suppression of anti-Bolshevik uprisings in Moscow and Yaroslavl in 1918. The Estonian Riflemen were instrumental in the attempt to establish the Commune of the Working People of Estonia while the elections to the Estonian Constituent Assembly in April 1919 demonstrated the victory of the independent nation state alternative. Simultaneously, the success of the Estonian Social Democratic Workers' Party served to demonstrate the lingering attractiveness of a social revolution within the national framework. Although the Estonian Army had attained control over the territory of Estonia by May 1919, its Estonian Red Army counterpart still active and the High Command of the Estonian Army decided to push their defence lines across the border into the Pskov region. The offensive of the Petseri Battle Group began on May 13. The operation destroyed the Estonian Red Army, and captured Pskov on May 25, 1919. Re-formed in the rear, they fought against Anton Ivanovich Denikin, Nikolay Yudenich, and Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel.


title: Estonian Red Riflemen

text: All through February, 1920 the Makhnovshchina was inundated with Red troops, including the 42nd Rifle Division and the Latvian & Estonian Division – in total at least 20,000 soldiers. After the souring and dissolution of Nestor Makhno's Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine's alliance with the Bolsheviks, captured Red commanders and commissars were summarily executed. However, Makhno usually preferred to release the disarmed enlisted men that were captured, as "proletarian brothers", with a choice of joining his army or returning home, after all commanding officers were executed. This happened to an Estonian Red Army unit that surrendered to Makhno in 1920. Viktor Bilash noted that even in the worst time for the revolutionary army, namely at the beginning of 1920, "In the majority of cases rank-and-file Red Army soldiers were set free". Of course Bilash, as a colleague of Makhno's, was likely to idealize the punishment policies of the Batko. However, the facts bear witness that Makhno really did release "in all four directions" captured Red Army soldiers. This is what happened at the beginning of February 1920, when the insurgents disarmed the 10,000-strong Estonian Division in Huliaipole. To this it must be added that the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine included a choir of Estonian musicians. The problem was further compounded by the alienation of the Estonians by Anton Denikin's inflexible Russian chauvinism and their refusal to fight with Nikolai Yudenich.


title: Knot garden

text: This period saw the widespread use of knot gardens throughout England which established the knot garden as an element of formal English gardening. The garden book, A Most Briefe and Pleasaunt Treatyse, written by Thomas Hill in about 1558, preserves the first depiction of a Tudor garden.: 44–48 The garden features a knot pattern as the center-piece to a larger, symmetrical square garden that is enclosed on all sides by a trellis fence. This indicates that knot gardens were being used as garden features within a larger design as well being the sole feature of the garden as seen on other contemporary images. This is the first reference to singular knot patterns acting as compartments alongside other garden compartments. Hill's later book, The Gardener's Labyrinth, provides twelve knot designs for copying in gardens and its frequent republishing over the course of the century indicates the popularity of establishing knot gardens during this period.: 46–48 The knot patterns surviving in text and archaeological records from this period could be highly complex and they were always symmetrical and set within a square frame.


title: Constructivist architecture

text: Collective housing projects that were built included Ivan Nikolaev's Communal House of the Textile Institute , and Ginzburg's Moscow Gosstrakh flats and, most famously, his Narkomfin Building. Flats were built in a Constructivist idiom in Kharkiv, Moscow and Leningrad and in smaller towns. Ginzburg also designed a government building in Alma-Ata, while the Vesnin brothers designed a School of Film Actors in Moscow. Ginzburg critiqued the idea of building in the new society being the same as in the old: "treating workers' housing in the same way as they would bourgeois apartments...the Constructivists however approach the same problem with maximum consideration for those shifts and changes in our everyday life...our goal is the collaboration with the proletariat in creating a new way of life". OSA published a magazine, SA or Contemporary Architecture from 1926 to 1930. The leading rationalist Ladovsky designed his own, rather different kind of mass housing, completing a Moscow apartment block in 1929. A particularly extravagant example is the 'Chekists Village' in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) designed by Ivan Antonov, Veniamin Sokolov and Arseny Tumbasov, a hammer and sickle shaped collective housing complex for staff of the People's Commissariat for the Internal Affairs (NKVD), which currently serves as a hotel.


title: Constructivist architecture

text: Many of the Constructivists hoped to see their ambitions realised during the 'Cultural Revolution' that accompanied the first five-year plan. At this point the Constructivists were divided between urbanists and disurbanists who favoured a garden city or linear city model. The Linear City was propagandised by the head of the Finance Commissariat Nikolay Milyutin in his book Sozgorod, aka Sotsgorod . This was taken to a more extreme level by the OSA theorist Mikhail Okhitovich. His disurbanism proposed a system of one-person or one-family buildings connected by linear transport networks, spread over a huge area that traversed the boundaries between the urban and agricultural, in which it resembled a socialist equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. The disurbanists and urbanists proposed projects for new cities such as Magnitogorsk were often rejected in favour of the more pragmatic German architects fleeing Nazism, such as 'May Brigade' (Ernst May, Mart Stam, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky), the 'Bauhaus Brigade' led by Hannes Meyer, and Bruno Taut.


title: Constructivist architecture

text: The 1932 competition for the Palace of the Soviets, a grandiose project to rival the Empire State Building, featured entries from all the major Constructivists as well as Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier. However, this coincided with widespread criticism of Modernism, which was always difficult to sustain in a still mostly agrarian country. There was also the critique that the style merely copied the forms of technology while using fairly routine construction methods. The winning entry by Boris Iofan marked the start of eclectic historicism of Stalinist Architecture, a style which bears similarities to Post-Modernism in that it reacted against modernist architecture's cosmopolitanism, alleged ugliness and inhumanity with a pick and mix of historical styles, sometimes achieved with new technology. Housing projects like the Narkomfin were designed for the attempts to reform everyday life in the 1920s, such as collectivisation of facilities, equality of the sexes and collective raising of children, all of which fell out of favour as Stalinism revived family values. The styles of the old world were also revived, with the Moscow Metro in particular popularising the idea of 'workers' palaces'.


title: Constructivist architecture

text: Due in part to its political commitment—and its replacement by Stalinist architecture—the mechanistic, dynamic forms of Constructivism were not part of the calm Platonism of the International Style as it was defined by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Their book included only one building from the USSR, an electrical laboratory by a government team led by Nikolaev. During the 1960s Constructivism was rehabilitated to a certain extent, and both the wilder experimental buildings of the era (such as the Globus Theatre or the Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building) and the unornamented Khrushchyovka apartments are in a sense a continuation of the aborted experiment, although under very different conditions. Outside the USSR, Constructivism has often been seen as an alternative, more radical modernism, and its legacy can be seen in designers as diverse as Team 10, Archigram and Kenzo Tange, as well as in much Brutalist work. Their integration of the avant-garde and everyday life has parallels with the Situationists, particularly the New Babylon project of Guy Debord and Constant Nieuwenhuys.


title: Noah

text: The righteousness of Noah is the subject of much discussion among rabbis. The description of Noah as "righteous in his generation" implied to some that his perfection was only relative: In his generation of wicked people, he could be considered righteous, but in the generation of a tzadik like Abraham, he would not be considered so righteous. They point out that Noah did not pray to God on behalf of those about to be destroyed, as Abraham prayed for the wicked of Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, Noah is never seen to speak; he simply listens to God and acts on his orders. This led some commentators to offer the figure of Noah as "the righteous man in a fur coat," who ensured his own comfort while ignoring his neighbour. Others, such as the medieval commentator Rashi, held on the contrary that the building of the Ark was stretched over 120 years, deliberately in order to give sinners time to repent. Rashi interprets his father's statement of the naming of Noah (in Hebrew – Noaħ נֹחַ) "This one will comfort us (in Hebrew– yeNaĦamenu יְנַחֲמֵנו) in our work and in the toil of our hands, which come from the ground that the Lord had cursed", by saying Noah heralded a new era of prosperity, when there was easing (in Hebrew – naħah – נחה) from the curse from the time of Adam when the Earth produced thorns and thistles even where men sowed wheat and that Noah then introduced the plow.


title: Noah

text: The Quran focuses on several instances from Noah's life more than others, and one of the most significant events is the Flood. God makes a covenant with Noah just as he did with Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad later on (33:7). Noah is later reviled by his people and reproached by them for being a mere human messenger and not an angel (10:72-74). Moreover, the people mock Noah's words and call him a liar (7:62), and they even suggest that Noah is possessed by a devil when the prophet ceases to preach (54:9). Only the lowest of classes in the community join Noah in believing in God's message (11:29), and Noah's narrative further describes him preaching both in private and public. The Quran narrates that Noah received a revelation to build an Ark, after his people refused to believe in his message and hear the warning. The narrative goes on to describe that waters poured forth from both the earth and the Heavens, destroying all the sinners. Even one of his sons disbelieved him, stayed behind, and was drowned. After the Flood ended, the Ark rested atop Mount Judi (Quran 11:44).


title: Noah

text: The earliest written flood myth is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh texts. The Encyclopædia Britannica says "These mythologies are the source of such features of the biblical Flood story as the building and provisioning of the ark, its flotation, and the subsidence of the waters, as well as the part played by the human protagonist." The Encyclopedia Judaica adds that there is a strong suggestion that "an intermediate agent was active. The people most likely to have fulfilled this role are the Hurrians, whose territory included the city of Harran, where the Patriarch Abraham had his roots. The Hurrians inherited the Flood story from Babylonia". The encyclopedia mentions another similarity between the stories: Noah is the tenth patriarch and Berossus notes that "the hero of the great flood was Babylonia's tenth antediluvian king." However, there is a discrepancy in the ages of the heroes. For the Mesopotamian antecedents, "the reigns of the antediluvian kings range from 18,600 to nearly 65,000 years." In the Bible, the lifespans "fall far short of the briefest reign mentioned in the related Mesopotamian texts." Also, the name of the hero differs between the traditions: "The earliest Mesopotamian flood account, written in the Sumerian language, calls the deluge hero Ziusudra."


title: Noah

text: Yi Samuel Chen, analyzing various texts from the Early Dynastic III Period to the Old Babylonian Period, argues that the flood narrative was only added in texts written during the latter Old Babylonian Period. Observations by experts indicate that the portions of the Sumerian King List which mention the time before the flood are stylistically different from the King List Proper. Chen writes that Old Babylonian copies tend to show a separate pre-flood tradition which is apart from the King List. Further, the Ur III copy of the King List as well as similar documents indicate that the King List Proper once existed independent of a flood narrative or a pre-flood tradition. Chen provides evidence that the sections of the Sumerian King List that mention references to the flood were all later additions added during the Old Babylonian Period through later updates and edits. The Flood as a watershed in early history of the world was probably a new historiographical concept emerging in the Mesopotamian literary traditions during the Old Babylonian Period, as evident by the fact that the flood motif didn't show up in the Ur III copy and that the earliest chronographical sources related to the flood show up in the Old Babylonian Period. Chen concludes that the name of Ziusudra as a flood hero, as well as any hinted references of a flood, in the Old Babylonian Version of the Instructions of Shuruppak were later developments during the Old Babylonian Period, originating from updated information added to the text from the burgeoning Antediluvian Tradition.


title: Roby Young

text: As Captain of the Israeli National Soccer Team during its golden age, Young paced the Israeli team to its best-ever finish in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City (where he was the flag bearer for Israel), and led Israel to qualify for the FIFA World Cup . Young and his Israeli team are also the unlucky answers to a soccer trivia question: which is the LAST team to lose a World Cup or Olympics playoff game by "choosing lots" before FIFA changed the rules to introduce penalty kicks to decide games. In the 1968 Olympics, the Israeli soccer team Israeli National Soccer Team qualified for the quarter-finals from Group C 1968 Olympic Games. Israel faced Bulgaria and played them to a 1–1 draw after regulation and overtime. With no Penalty Kicks rule in place, the game would be decided by drawing names out of a hat—with Young, as Captain of the Israeli team, at midfield with the Bulgarian Captain (Dimitrov) and the officials. Israel was unlucky to lose that game, as Bulgaria prevailed and took home the silver medal.


title: Roby Young

text: Young became a household name in Israel when, on 15 October 1961, at age 19, he scored a brilliant goal against powerhouse Italy in a 1962 World Cup Qualifier to give Israel a 2–0 lead. While Israel went on to lose 4–2, the goal, in which he dribbled past Italy captain Cesare Maldini (father of Paolo Maldini) and blasted a long-range shot past Italy legend Lorenzo Buffon (uncle of Gigi Buffon), helping put Israel on the soccer map. This goal (and Young himself) captured the hearts and imaginations of Israelis young and old. Young later captained Israel to its Asia Cup title in 1964. Young also captained the team against a mighty England squad that would later win the 1966 World Cup. Young's Israeli squad eventually qualified for the 1970 World Cup (its only appearance to date) and tied Italy, Sweden and Uruguay in the group stage. At the time of his retirement from international soccer, Young was the most capped player to play for Israel, earning 50 caps from age 18–27, after which he moved his family to the United States to play for the famed New York Cosmos.


title: Roby Young

text: After retiring from international soccer and leaving Hapoel Haifa, Young enrolled at Adelphi University in the United States where he received his Bachelor of Science degree and Masters in Health Education. Young led his Adelphi soccer team to a 10-2-3 record (after a 5-10-1 record the year before his arrival), and was inducted into the Adelphi Sports Hall of Fame in 2000. Upon his arrival in the United States, Young was signed by the historic New York Cosmos soccer team in the North American Soccer League (NASL), where his team won the 1972 NASL Championship and were semi-finalists in 1973. Roby played left wing for the Cosmos and was a pivotal member of the championship squad. Young's coach with the New York Cosmos, Gordon Bradley, would later coach Young's middle son, Irad Young, at George Mason University, where Irad was an All-South and honorable All-American soccer player. Young retired from professional soccer at age 31 in 1973, after which he returned to Israel for several years to coach professionally at Macabbi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Haifa.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Battles are randomly occurring and turn-based. When encountering an enemy, the game switches to a battle scene with the enemies facing the party where characters from both sides take turns attacking each other. These battle scenes have visually changed dramatically from earlier games in the series, yet retain a similar text based menu system for battles. In the earlier games, battles were shown from a first-person perspective. For this installment, the battles are shown in a first-person perspective while choosing what to do, but the view then shifts to a third-person perspective with all of the members of the Hero's party shown on the screen along with the enemies. During battle, each character in the party has the ability to attack, use items, or use magic and skills. Dragon Quest VIII also introduced the tension system, which allows the player to choose the "Psyche Up" command for a character during battle. This command allows the player to skip a character's turn in order to build "tension", making that character's next attack stronger. By using it multiple times in succession, the character's attack will do more damage. Another new feature, the Alchemy Pot allows players to mix items in order to create new, stronger items. This can be done while walking on the world map. There is also a monster capturing feature, but it is not as fundamental to the gameplay as it was in Dragon Quest V. The player may find enemies visible on the world map that can be recruited if defeated and used during the Monster Arena mini-game and during battle.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Jessica later returns, possessed by the staff and battles the remaining party members in an attempt to murder a young man. After the party releases Jessica from her possession, Jessica tells them that the scepter contains the spirit of Rhapthorne, the Lord of Darkness, who was imprisoned in the scepter long ago by seven sages. He seeks to escape from his prison by killing the descendants of the sages. She proceeds to speculate that it is Rhapthorne, and not Dhoulmagus, who maintains the curse on Trodain: therefore, Rhapthorne must be defeated if the curse is to be broken. When Jessica explains this, the scepter takes control of a magician's dog, Sir Leopold, and kills the magician's assistant, who was one of the descendants of the sages. The party attempts to seek out and defend the remaining descendants, but Leopold manages to murder another descendant of the sages. Eventually, the scepter comes into the possession of Marcello, Angelo's power hungry half-brother. Marcello kills the last remaining descendant of the sages, but manages to contain Rhapthorne for a time. Eventually, the party engages Marcello and exhaust him to the point of losing control and releasing Rhapthorne. The party, aided by the godbird Empyrea, faces Rhapthorne and defeats him. With Rhapthorne dead, King Trode, Princess Medea, and the people of Trodain are returned to normal. Months later, the protagonist escorts Medea to Savella Cathedral for her arranged marriage to the spoiled Prince Charmles of Argonia, but before the ceremony can take place, the protagonist and Medea escape from Savella Cathedral and live happily together. In an unlockable extended ending, it is discovered that the protagonist is the lost prince of Argonia, and upon this revelation, the King of Argonia decides to allow the protagonist to marry Medea. In the 3DS version, the player can choose to instead begin a romance with Jessica. In the traditional ending the hero goes traveling the world with Jessica while in the unlockable ending the hero can choose to marry Jessica instead of Medea.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Dragon Quest VIII focuses on four main characters, each joining the battle party early in the game. The main protagonist of the game, an eighteen-year-old royal guard of Trodain and the only person present in the castle to escape Dhoulmagus' wrath unscathed, is a silent hero, and named by the player. He is the most balanced party member, able to equip swords, spears, boomerangs and use magic. He is immune to all curses. His special attribute is courage. He is accompanied by Yangus, a former thief and friend of the Hero's who owes the Hero a life debt after the Hero rescues him from the side of a cliff. Yangus is a physically strong character and speaks with a Cockney accent in the English versions, and wields axes, clubs, and scythes. His special attribute is humanity. Jessica Albert, the only woman to join the party, is a sorceress from the town of Alexandria who seeks to avenge her murdered brother, Alistair. She uses magic but can also equip whips and knives, and she can stun enemies with her special attribute Sex Appeal skills. She is also the only character who can change her appearance in battle through various costumes, with the exception of one costume for the Hero. Angelo is a womanizing noble who was raised in a monastery following both his parents' deaths by a plague. He is a member of the Knights Templar and decides to battle against Dhoulmagus when the villain sets fire to his abbey and kills the abbot. In battle, he can use both magic and physical attacks effectively and has the most healing spells. He can wield swords, bows, or staffs. His special attribute is charisma.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Two non-player characters journey with the protagonists: Trode, the titular cursed king who rules over Trodain but was transformed into a toad-like creature by Dhoulmagus; and Medea, Trode's daughter, who is the same age as the Hero. Medea was transformed into a horse by Dhoulmagus and has a romantic interest in the Hero. Munchie, the Hero's pet mouse, becomes temporarily playable under certain circumstances. Other important non-player characters include Empyrea, a powerful god-like bird; Marcello, Angelo's illegitimate half-brother and the Captain of the Templars; Red, a female bandit and former colleague of Yangus' with whom she shares a rivalry; and Morrie, the proprietor of an underground monster-fighting arena. The antagonist of Dragon Quest VIII is Dhoulmagus, a jester who steals an ancient scepter from Trodain Castle and uses its power to curse the inhabitants of the castle, setting the game's events in motion. He proceeds to embark on a murder spree as the protagonists chase him. Dhoulmagus is eventually revealed to be a pawn of Rhapthorne, a demonic lord and the game's true antagonist, who is manipulating the jester in an attempt to free himself from the scepter inside of which he has been imprisoned.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Unlike the original Japanese version, the North American and European localizations of the game mark a departure from previous Dragon Quest titles due to the inclusion of voice acting in certain parts of the adventure pertaining to the advancement of the storyline. The game retains the series' tradition of allowing the player to name the lead character, reconciling the two by having the voice acting script skip incidences of the Hero's name, (e.g. the line "Okay, Hero, my boy..." appears on-screen, while the voice acting says, "Okay, my boy...") and occasionally replacing the name with Yangus' nickname for him, "guv" (as in "governor", pronounced with a Cockney accent). Unlike some earlier games in the series, which were censored during localization for North America, Dragon Quest VIII had no such censorship. The English translation is credited to Plus Alpha Translations and AltJapan Co., Ltd. Richard Honeywood, of Square Enix's localization office and famous for his work with Final Fantasy VIII and Chocobo Racing, was the main force behind the game's English localization. The iOS and Android version removed the voice acting, akin to the original Japanese PS2 version due to hardware limitations at the time.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Released for the PlayStation 2 on November 27, 2004, in Japan, Dragon Quest VIII sold 2,167,072 units in two days, 3 million in three days, and more than 3 million within a week, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation 2 title in Japan. By September 2008, total worldwide shipments of Dragon Quest VIII surpassed 4.9 million copies, of which over 430,000 were from the North American release. Dragon Quest VIII is the biggest selling game ever for the PlayStation 2 in Japan. It was the first Dragon Quest game to receive a score of 39 out of 40 from Famitsu. It won both 1UP.com's and GameSpy's "Best RPG of E3 2005" award, ahead of runner-up Kingdom Hearts II. During the 9th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards (now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards), Dragon Quest VIII received a nomination for "Role-Playing Game of the Year". The iOS version became the 2nd top-seller of Japan AppStore in the debut half day, highlighting the influence of the series. The Nintendo 3DS version was nominated for "Handheld/Mobile Game of the Year" at the Golden Joystick Awards, for "Best Portable Game" at Destructoid's Game of the Year Awards 2017, and for "Handheld Game of the Year" at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. In 2023, Time Extension included the game on their "Best JRPGs of All Time" list.


title: Dragon Quest VIII

text: Characters from the game have made appearances in other Square Enix properties. Jessica and Yangus are playable characters in Dragon Quest Heroes. In the sequel Dragon Quest Heroes II, Jessica is instead accompanied by Angelo. Dragon Quest Yangus, a roguelike Mystery Dungeon game by Cavia for the PlayStation 2, follows the storyline of a young Yangus. It was released in Japan in 2006. Jessica, Angelo, and Yangus also appear opposite other Dragon Quest characters, as well as Final Fantasy and Mario characters in titles of the Itadaki Street franchise, a cross-over board game spanning multiple platforms. Appearances include Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Portable for the PlayStation Portable, Itadaki Street DS for the Nintendo DS and Itadaki Street Wii/Fortune Street, an enhanced remake of Itadaki Street DS for the Wii. Dragon Quest VIII characters also make appearances in Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies: Jessica, Angelo, and King Trode appear as special Wi-Fi guests in the Quester's Rest inn in Stornway, Dhoulmagus and Rhapthorne appear as optional legacy bosses, and the player can acquire a "Trodain Royal Guard" costume to dress as VIII's Hero.


title: Raymond Carver

text: With his B-minus average, exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors, ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully adjust to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree. Although program director Paul Engle awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the University of Iowa at the end of the semester. According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, Carver falsely claimed to have received an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966 on later curricula vitae. Maryann, who postponed completing her education to support her husband's educational and literary endeavors, eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977. After completing graduate work at Stanford, she briefly enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara's English doctoral program when Carver taught at the institution as a visiting lecturer in 1974.


title: Job Shattuck

text: Crippled by debt in the aftermath of the revolution, the state of Massachusetts levied upon its towns and citizens tax burdens higher than had been in place during British rule. Those who suddenly found themselves in arrears to the state quickly discovered that their land, livelihood and possibly even their freedom were at stake. Many who could not assuage their debts faced the unpleasant prospect of serving time in a debtors' prison. The high tax burden, combined with the demand that it be paid in specie and the high-handed control of the government by merchant interests, transformed rural resentment into a full-blown agrarian revolt. The rebellion was waged primarily by debt-ridden western farmers and landowners who banded together and captured shire town courthouses in Massachusetts, closing them to all proceedings. Violence was threatened and enacted against many officials who would not stand down. On a national scale, the rebellion was viewed with intense interest by citizens and public officials of all of the confederated former colonies because it "tested the precarious institutions of the new republic." To officials in Boston, Job Shattuck became, perhaps even more than Daniel Shays, the leader of the agrarians in the western part of the state, a leading firebrand and empathetic advocate of the soldier–farmer who had risked life, limb, and land for the cause of the revolution only to return from the war to find injustice and foreclosure still looming.


title: Jang Jin

text: In January 1995, Jang entered newspaper daily The Chosun Ilbo's annual literary contest with Cheonho-dong Crossroad, his first full-fledged script. Using three characters which would feature in most of his theater plays and early films (Hwa-yi, Dal-soo and Deok-bae), his new and creative brand of storytelling won over the judges, who awarded him the top prize. He wrote his first stage play Heotang ("labor in vain") at the age of 21 while serving his military duty, and his followup Clumsy People, not only granted him much praise, but was also a big success, and allowed actress Song Chae-hwan to win the Best Actress Award at the Seoul Theater Festival. At the same time, he was helping adapt Song Jae-hee's original into what became A Hot Roof, a feminist comedy where a group of women from all walks of life protest their position in society from the roof of a building, while their husbands and the rest of the city try to cope with all that in the midst of one of the hottest summers Korea had ever seen.


title: Kakashi (album)

text: "Suiren", the album's opening track, begins with what Padua describes as "a sampled loop that suggests an electronic meow" which then transitions into an "easy-going martial rhythm". Resident Advisor has called the track "jaunty jazz pop". Padua compares the title track to Japanese folk music, noting its "dreamy marimba" and "minimal rhythms" which "set up a foundation for brassy jazz figures and dissonant background fills". In a review of the album for Record Collector, Paul Bowler notes Shimizu's use of insect sounds. He highlights the use of "synthetic, cicada-like sounds" which "provide scattershot background for Eno-esque piano runs" on "Kono Yoni Yomeri (Sono 1)". Bowler also notes that these sounds return "in real form" on "Kono Yoni Yomeri (Sono 2)", on which Shimizu "melds calm sax lines to the sound of summer-night bugs." Both Resident Advisor and Bowler consider "Semi Tori No Hi" a highlight of the album; the former notes the track "alternates between placid new age vibes—shimmering chimes, strummed harps—and soulful horn bursts."


title: Philippe Samyn

text: In 1978, Philippe Samyn established his first personal office in the house he had just built on Avenue Hyppolite Boulenger in Uccle. Two years later, in 1980, he founded Samyn and Partners. During the early years, his engineering expertise honed his knowledge while establishing a reputation for seriousness and reliability in the industrial world. Simultaneously, he developed his career as an architect through more personal projects, refining his approach. He avidly followed architectural publications and journals, especially those from English-speaking countries, as well as German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and others. He was interested in the Arup group and the architecture of Louis Kahn, whose influence could be seen in some of his works at the time. However, it was primarily Christian Van Deuren, his friend, architect, and associate, who helped him structure his architectural thinking. From this period, notable projects include the Royal Athenaeum of Waterloo , the Athenaeum of Leuze-en-Hainaut , the primary section of the Royal Athenaeum of Athus , and the Shell Research Centre in Louvain-la-Neuve , which marked a significant milestone for Samyn et Associés. Shell was indeed an essential step for Philippe Samyn, demonstrating his agency's capabilities to successfully manage large-scale and highly technical projects. Other industrial commissions allowed him to formalize his research, applying his engineering knowledge to create rational yet aesthetic architecture. The works from this period were distinguished by a thorough study of geometry, notably in the Athenaeum of Athus, where rigor, calculation, economy, and geometry came together to create a humanistic space.


title: 2015 GT50

text: It is one a small number of detached objects with perihelion distances of 30 AU or more, and semi-major axes of 250 AU or more. Such objects cannot reach such orbits without some perturbing object, which has led to the Planet Nine hypothesis, that a massive trans-Neptunian planet is the perturber. However 2015 GT50 is an interesting outlier of these trans-Neptunian objects that make one of the lines of evidence for Planet Nine. Unlike the others, the shape of whose orbits (longitudes of perihelion) either cluster in anti-alignment with the modeled orbit of Planet Nine or cluster in alignment with it, 2015 GT50's major axis is almost at a right angle to that of the putative planet. Konstantin Batygin of Caltech suggests that this is only a cosmetic disagreement with his and Mike Brown's predictions for the positions of these bodies. In fact, he notes that without having to change the putative orbit of Planet Nine, 2015 GT50 falls into one of the predicted resonant orbits. This, he notes, may be a coincidence. This conclusion, however, is not unanimous, and others have instead suggested that the existence of a population of objects with orbital characteristics similar to those of 2015 GT50 may be at odds with the Planet Nine hypothesis.


title: Shaker communities

text: The Shakers are a sect of Christianity which practices celibacy, communal living, confession of sin, egalitarianism, and pacifism. After starting in England, it is thought that these communities spread into the cotton towns of North West England, with the football team of Bury taking on the Shaker name to acknowledge the Shaker community of Bury. The Shakers left England for the English colonies in North America in 1774. As they gained converts, the Shakers established numerous communities in the late-18th century through the entire 19th century. The first villages organized in Upstate New York and the New England states, and, through Shaker missionary efforts, Shaker communities appeared in the Midwestern states. Communities of Shakers were governed by area bishoprics and within the communities individuals were grouped into "family" units and worked together to manage daily activities. By 1836 eighteen major, long-term societies were founded, comprising some sixty families, along with a failed commune in Indiana. Many smaller, short-lived communities were established over the course of the 19th century, including two failed ventures into the Southeastern United States and an urban community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Shakers peaked in population by the 1840s and early 1850s, with a membership between 4,000 and 9,000. Growth in membership began to stagnate by the mid 1850s. In the turmoil of the American Civil War and subsequent Industrial Revolution, Shakerism went into severe decline. As the number of living Shakers diminished, Shaker communes were disbanded or otherwise ceased to exist. Some of their buildings and sites have become museums, and many are historic districts under the National Register of Historic Places. The only active community is Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, which is composed of at least three active members.


title: Shaker communities

text: A Shaker village was divided into groups or "families." The leading group in each village was the Church Family, and it was surrounded by satellite families that were often named for points on the compass rose. Managing each family was a leadership team consisting of two Elders and two Eldresses. Shakers lived together as brothers and sisters. Each house was divided so that men and women did most things separately. They used different staircases and doors. They sat on opposite sides of the room in worship, at meals, and in "union meetings" held to provide supervised socialization between the sexes. However, the daily business of a Shaker village required the brethren and sisters to interact, as did the dancing and other vigorous activity of their worship services. Though there was a division of labor between men and women, they also cooperated in carrying out many tasks, such as harvesting apples, food production, laundry, and gathering firewood. Every family was designed to be self-supporting with its own farm and businesses, but in times of hardship, other parts of the village, or even other Shaker villages, pitched in to help the afflicted.


title: Radegast

text: Radegast is situated at the margin of the Köthen culture plain. Here it ascends from the Fuhne valley, so the difference in height is about 6 metres (20 ft) on a short distance. The town is situated right in the middle of a former swampland. The upper level of this swamp has been quite fertile for a long time. The official Radegast Chronicle says, "the lower level of the soil in this area is not bad, but its value is lowered because it is too damp." The upper level to a depth of about 0.3 m (1 ft) is meadowland with a lush vegetation of grasses and swampland, which is very fertile and became very calcareous, too because of the stagnant water. This is followed by peat, which was cut for being used as peat coal in former times. The upper level is bordered by an impermeable stratum of clay. At shallow depth large boulders can be found from ice age deposits. The quality of the soil became a lot better because of its agricultural use. It offers perfect conditions for cultivating sugar beets and wheat.


title: Achaemenid coinage

text: Darius introduced the reformed currency system from about 510-500 BC, consisting of gold Darics and silver Sigloi. The rate of exchange was 1 Daric = 20 Siglos. A Daric was between 8.10 and 8.50 grams in weight, based on the Babylonian shekel of 8.33 grams, slightly heavier than the Croesus standard of 8.06 grams. The purity of gold was between 98 and 99%. 1 Daric = 25 Attic Drachmae. It represented initially about 1 month of a soldier's wage. This new coin became popular throughout all of the ancient world for more than 150 years. Around 395 BC, the Achaemenids, led by Satrap Pharnabazes, bribed Greek states by paying them tens of thousands of Darics in order to attack Sparta, which was then waging a campaign of destruction in Asia Minor under Agesilaus. This started the Corinthian War. According to Plutarch, Agesilaus, the Spartan king, said upon leaving Asia "I have been driven out by 10,000 Persian archers", a reference to "Archers" (Toxotai) the Greek nickname for the Darics from their obverse design, because that much money had been paid to politicians in Athens and Thebes in order to start a war against Sparta.


title: Achaemenid coinage

text: The "archer" type used in Achaemenid coinage may have been derived from similar and contemporary images on Greek coinage, in particular those of Herakles shooting arrows. The adaptation of this design for the illustration of the Achaemenid king or hero on the obverse may have been meant as a way to glorify the king, in way a which was easily understandable to the Hellenized people in the Western areas of the Achaemenid Empire, who minted the Achaemenid coinage and to whom this coinage was mainly destined as a currency. Other depictions of the king as an archer (for example shooting from his charriot) are also known from Sumerian art, so this representation would also have been natural to subjects in the Achaemenid realm as well. The "archer" type of Type II, less hieratic and rigid than the traditional Achaemenid illustration of the bust of the king on Type I, may represent the fusion of the Eastern conception of the King as a royal hunter, and the Western conception of the King as a hero, and designed to represent the Achaemenid king as an Olympian contestant in a propaganda effort towards the West. These depictions also imply that the Achaemenids were the first ever to illustrate the person of their king on coinage.


title: Achaemenid coinage

text: Although many of the first coins of Antiquity were illustrated with the images of various gods or symbols, the first ever portraiture of actual rulers appears with these Achaemenid satrapal issues in the 5th century BC, in particular with the coinage of Lycia. The Achaemenids had been the first to illustrate the person of their king or a hero in a stereotypical manner, showing a bust or the full body, but never an actual portrait, on their Sigloi and Daric coinage from circa 500 BC. Before the Lycian coins with dynastic portraits, a slightly earlier candidate for the first portrait is Themistocles, the Athenian general who became a Governor of Magnesia on the Meander for the Achaemenid Empire circa 465-459 BC, although there is some doubt that his coins may have represented Zeus rather than himself. Themistocles may have been in a unique position in which he could transfer the notion of individual portraiture, already current in the Greek world, and at the same time wield the dynastic power of an Achaemenid dynast who could issue his own coins and illustrate them as he wished. From the time of Alexander the Great, portraiture of the issuing ruler would then become a standard, generalized, feature of coinage.


title: Brooke Lynn Hytes

text: As a drag queen, Hayhoe initially tried out the names Jackie D, Carmen and Bianca. After moving back to Toronto to pursue drag full-time, he was adopted by local queen Farra N. Hyte, who named her new drag daughter Brooke Lynn Hytes. Shortly after returning to Toronto, Brooke Lynn Hytes won a local drag pageant called Queen of Halloween, and quickly began to attract attention in the Toronto drag scene. Brooke Lynn Hytes began to regularly compete on the drag pageant circuit. In 2013, she won Miss Gay Toronto, Derby City Entertainer of the Year, and Miss Michigan Continental, and placed as first alternate in the National Entertainer of the Year and Miss Continental pageants on first entry. In 2014, Brooke Lynn Hytes won the prestigious Miss Continental title. In 2015, Brooke Lynn Hytes accepted a residency as a performer in PLAY Dance Bar in Nashville, Tennessee. She auditioned for the ninth and tenth seasons of RuPaul's Drag Race, but was unable to join either season as she did not yet have a green card.


title: Old Mother Riley in Society

text: Old Mother Riley does the laundry for the dancers in the pantomime "Aladdin", where her daughter Kitty works as a chorus girl. Sneaking a peek at the show one day, Mother Riley accidentally pops up through a trap door onto the stage. Accosted by the angry star, Mother Riley's belligerent responses have the audience in stitches. Outraged, the star walks out, leaving Kitty to take over the leading role, to great success. Kitty is congratulated after the show by wealthy high society boy Tony Morgan, and the couple start to fall in love. Tony and Kitty eventually marry and move into the Morgan family mansion, taking Mother Riley with them, as Kitty's personal maid. During a swanky party to introduce Kitty to Tony's upper class friends, rumours start up about Kitty's former stage career. Kitty is about to confess her past, but Mother Riley — fearing this will have damaging effect on her daughter's social standing — causes a disruption, then leaves a goodbye note and vanishes. Kitty tells Tony the truth, and the couple hire a detective to trace Mother Riley, but without success. Mother Riley works her way through a variety of dead end jobs after separating from Kitty, and ends up living in a dingey hostel and picking up degrading casual work as a dishwasher. A chance encounter with old friend Tug Mulligan results in her reunion with Kitty; Tony's family explains they're not "high society" after all, merely "nouveau riche". "We made our money in sausages", declares Lady Morgan; "then we're all friends together", replies Mother Riley.


title: Jacques the Fatalist

text: The critical reception of the book has been mixed. French critics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dismissed it as derivative of Rabelais and Laurence Sterne, as well as unnecessarily bawdy. It made a better impression on the German Romantics, who had had the opportunity to read it before their French counterparts did. Schiller held it in high regard and recommended it strongly to Goethe, who read Jacques in a single sitting. Friedrich Schlegel referred to it positively in his critical fragments (3, 15) and in the Athenaeum fragments (201). It formed something of an ideal of Schlegel's concept of wit. Stendhal, while acknowledging flaws in Jacques, nevertheless considered it a superior and exemplary work. In the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Spitzer and J. Robert Loy tended to see Jacques as a key work in the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais, focused on celebrating diversity rather than providing clear answers to philosophical problems. As this was contrary to the Catholic Church's point of view, the novel got banned, being listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.


title: Youngest Toba eruption

text: The exact year of the eruption is unknown, but the pattern of ash deposits suggests that it occurred during the northern summer because only the summer monsoon could have deposited Toba ashfall in the South China Sea. The eruption lasted perhaps 9 to 14 days. The most recent two high-precision argon–argon datings dated the eruption to 73,880 ± 320 and 73,700 ± 300 years ago. Five distinct magma bodies were activated within a few centuries before the eruption. The eruption commenced with small and limited air-fall and was directly followed by the main phase of ignimbrite flows. The ignimbrite phase is characterized by low eruption fountain, but co-ignimbrite column developed on top of pyroclastic flows reached a height of 32 km (20 mi). Petrological constraints on sulfur emission yielded a wide range from 1×1013 to 1×1015 g, depending on the existence of separate sulfur gas in the Toba magma chamber. The lower end of estimate is due to the low solubility of sulfur in the magma. Ice core records estimate the sulfur emission on the order of 1×1014 g.


title: Youngest Toba eruption

text: Bill Rose and Craig Chesner of Michigan Technological University have estimated that the total amount of material released in the eruption was at least 2,800 km3 (670 cu mi)—about 2,000 km3 (480 cu mi) of ignimbrite that flowed over the ground, and approximately 800 km3 (190 cu mi) that fell as ash mostly to the west. However, as more outcrops become available, the most recent estimate of eruptive volume is 3,800 km3 (910 cu mi) dense-rock equivalent (DRE), of which 1,800 km3 (430 cu mi) was deposited as ash fall and 2,000 km3 (480 cu mi) as ignimbrite, making this eruption the largest during the Quaternary period. Previous volume estimates have ranged from 2,000 km3 (480 cu mi) to 6,000 km3 (1,400 cu mi). Inside the caldera, the maximum thickness of pyroclastic flows is over 600 m (2,000 ft). The outflow sheet originally covered an area of 20,000–30,000 km2 (7,700–11,600 sq mi) with thickness nearly 100 m (330 ft), likely reaching into the Indian Ocean and the Straits of Malacca. The air-fall of this eruption blanketed the Indian subcontinent in a layer of 5 cm (2.0 in) ash, the Arabian Sea in 1 mm (0.039 in), the South China Sea in 3.5 cm (1.4 in), and Central Indian Ocean Basin in 10 cm (3.9 in). Its horizon of ashfall covered an area of more than 38,000,000 km2 (15,000,000 sq mi) in 1 cm (0.39 in) or more thickness. In Sub-Saharan Africa, microscopic glass shards from this eruption are also discovered on the south coast of South Africa, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, in Lake Malawi, and in Lake Chala. In South China, Toba tephras is found in Huguangyan Maar Lake.


title: Youngest Toba eruption

text: Greenland stadial 20 (GS20) is a millennium-long cold event in the north Atlantic ocean that started around the time of Toba eruption. The timing of the initiation of GS20 is dated to 74.0–74.2 kyr, and the entire event lasted about 1,500 years. It is the stadial part of Dansgaard–Oeschger event 20 (DO20), commonly explained by an abrupt reduction in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Weaker AMOC caused warming in Southern Ocean and Antarctica, and this asynchrony is known as bipolar seesaw. The start of GS20 cooling event corresponds to the start of Antarctic Isotope Maxima 19 (AIM19) warming event. GS20 was associated with iceberg discharges into the North Atlantic, thus it was also named Heinrich stadial 7a. Heinrich events tend to be longer, colder and with weaker AMOC in the Atlantic ocean than other DO stadials. From 74 to 58 kyr, Earth transitioned from interglacial marine isotope stage (MIS) 5 to glacial MIS 4, experiencing cooling and glacial expansion. This transition is a part of Pleistocene interglacial-glacial cycle driven by variations in the earth's orbit. Ocean temperature cooled by 0.9 °C (1.6 °F). Sea level fell 60 m (200 ft). Northern Hemisphere ice sheets embarked on significant expansion and surpassed the extent of Last Glacial Maximum in eastern Europe, Northeast Asia and the North American Cordillera. Southern Hemisphere glaciation grew to its maximum extent during MIS 4. Australasian region, Africa and Europe were characterized by increasingly cold and arid environment.