title: Metroid (video game)

text: Reviewing the original NES game, AllGame awarded "Metroid" with the highest rating of five stars. The review praised the game above "" and "Super Metroid", stating that ""Metroid"s not just a classic because of its astounding graphics, cinematic sound effects, accurate control, and fresh gameplay, but also because of its staying power". Reviewing the "Classic NES Series" version of the game, GameSpot noted that 18 years after its initial release, "Metroid" "just doesn't measure up to today's action adventure standards", giving the game a rating of 5.2 out of 10, for "mediocre". For the Wii Virtual Console version, IGN commented that the game's presentation, graphics, and sound were basic. However, they were still pleased with "Metroid"s "impressive" gameplay, rating the game 8.0 out of 10, for "great", and giving it an Editor's Choice award. The review stated that the game was "still impressive in scope" and that the price was "a deal for this adventure" while criticizing the number of times it has been re-released and noting that it takes "patience" to get past the high initial difficulty curve. In GameSpot's review of the Virtual Console version, they criticized its "frustrating room layouts" and "constantly flickering graphics". In particular, the website was disappointed that Nintendo did not make any changes to the game, specifically criticizing the lack of a save feature.


title: Metroid (video game)

text: "Metroid"s gameplay, focusing on exploration and searching for power-ups to reach new areas, influenced other series, mostly the "Castlevania" series. The revelation of Samus being a woman was lauded as innovative, and GameTrailers remarked that this "blew the norm of women in pieces, at a time when female video game characters were forced into the role of dutiful queen or kidnapped princess, missile-blasting the way for other characters like Chun-Li [from the "Street Fighter" series] and Lara Croft [from the "Tomb Raider" series]".


title: Metroid (video game)

text: In his book "Maestro Mario: How Nintendo Transformed Videogame Music into an Art", videogame scholar Andrew Schartmann notes the possible influence of Jerry Goldsmith's "Alien" score on Tanaka's music—a hypothesis supported by Sakamoto's acknowledgement of "Alien"s influence on the game's development. He also noted that the game emphasises on the silence to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. Schartmann further argues that Tanaka's emphasis on silence was revolutionary to videogame composition:


title: Metroid (video game)

text: This view is echoed by GameSpot's "History of Metroid", which notes how the "[game's music] superbly evoked the proper feelings of solitude and loneliness one would expect while infiltrating a hostile alien planet alone".


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: The western diamondback rattlesnake or Texas diamond-back ("Crotalus atrox") is a rattlesnake species and member of the viper family, found in the southwestern United States and Mexico. Like all other rattlesnakes and all other vipers, it is venomous. It is likely responsible for the majority of snakebite fatalities in northern Mexico and the greatest number of snakebites in the U.S. No subspecies are currently recognized.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: It lives in elevations from below sea level up to . This species ranges throughout the Southwestern United States and northern half of Mexico. Currently, western diamondback rattlesnakes are not threatened or endangered.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Other common names for this species include western diamond-backed rattlesnake, adobe snake, Arizona diamond rattlesnake, coon tail, desert diamond-back, desert diamond rattlesnake, fierce rattlesnake, spitting rattlesnake, buzz tail, Texan rattlesnake, Texas diamond-back, and Texas rattler.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Adults commonly grow to in length. Specimens over are infrequently encountered, while those over are very rare, and the largest reported length considered to be reliable is . Males become much larger than females, although this difference in size does not occur until after they have reached sexual maturity. Rattlesnakes of this species considered medium-sized weigh up to , while very large specimens can reportedly weigh up to . Overall, it is probably the second largest-bodied species of rattlesnake, behind only its close cousin the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, and is also the second largest of North American venomous snakes (the bushmasters, which attain probably similar weights and greater total length, occur up as far as Nicaragua).


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: The color pattern generally consists of a dusty-looking gray-brown ground color, but it may also be pinkish-brown, brick red, yellowish, pinkish, or chalky white. This ground color is overlaid dorsally with a series of 23-45 (mean, 36) dorsal body blotches that are dark gray-brown to brown in color. The first of these may be a pair of short stripes that extend backwards to eventually merge. Some of the first few blotches may be somewhat rectangular, but then become more hexagonal and eventually take on a distinctive diamond shape, hence the name "diamondback rattlesnake". The tail has two to eight (usually four to six) black bands separated by ash white or pale gray interspaces; this led to the nickname of "coon tail", though other species (e.g., Mojave rattlesnake) have similarly banded tails. Its postocular stripe is smoky gray or dark gray-brown and extends diagonally from the lower edge of the eye across the side of the head. This stripe is usually bordered below by a white stripe running from the upper preocular scale down to the supralabial scales just below and behind the eye. Its off-white belly is usually unmarked, its anal scale is undivided, and its dorsal scales are extremely keeled, often in rows of 25 to 27 near the midbody.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: The wide range of this species overlaps, or is close to, that of many others. It may be confused with them, but differences exist. The Mojave rattlesnake ("C. scutulatus"), also has tail rings, but the black rings are narrow relative to the pale ones. The timber rattlesnake ("C. horridus"), has no tail rings. In the western rattlesnake ("C. oreganus"), the pale tail rings are the same color as the ground. The tail of the black-tailed rattlesnake ("C. molossus"), is a uniform black, or has indistinct tail rings. The Mexican west coast rattlesnake ("C. basiliscus"), also has a mostly dark tail with obscure or absent rings. The tiger rattlesnake, ("C. tigris"), has a relatively small head and large rattle along with a dorsal pattern consisting more of crossbands. The Middle American rattlesnake ("C. simus"), has a generally uniform gray tail without any rings, as well as a pair of distinctive paravertebral stripes running down the neck. Members of the genus "Sistrurus" lack tail rings and have enlarged head plates.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: It is found in the United States from central Arkansas to southeastern and Central California, south into Mexico as far as northern Sinaloa, Hidalgo and northern Veracruz. Disjunct populations exist in southern Veracruz and southeastern Oaxaca. The type locality given is "Indianola" (Indianola, Calhoun County, Texas).


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: In the United States, it occurs in central and western Arkansas, Oklahoma excluding the northeast, north-central region and the panhandle, Texas excluding the northern panhandle and the east, southern and central New Mexico and Arizona, extreme southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and in southeastern California on either side of the Chocolate Mountains. Records from extreme southern Kansas (Cowley and Sumner Counties) may be based on a natural occurrence of the species, while multiple records from near Kanopolis Reservoir in Ellsworth County seem to indicate a viable (although isolated) population.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: In Mexico, it occurs in Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, extreme northeastern Baja California, northern Sinaloa, northeastern Durango, Zacatecas, most of San Luis Potosí, northern Veracruz, Hidalgo, and Querétaro. Specimens have been collected in the mountains northwest of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, on numerous occasions, but have not been reported there since the 1940s.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: This species has also been reported on a number of islands in the Gulf of California, including San Pedro Mártir, Santa María (Sinaloa), Tíburon and the Turner Islands.The Tortuga Island diamond rattlesnake is also a subspecies.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Its habitats range from flat coastal plains to steep rocky canyons and hillsides; it is associated with many different vegetation types, including desert, sandy creosote areas, mesquite grassland, desert scrub, and pine-oak forests. It is common to see the western diamondback on rural blacktop roads in early evening, because of the heat retention of these surfaces, as ambient temperatures drops.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: "C. atrox" is solitary except during the mating season. Usually inactive between late October and early March, these ectotherms occasionally may be seen basking in the sun on warm winter days. In the winter, they hibernate or brumate in caves or burrows, sometimes with many other species of snakes. Life expectancy is more than 20 years.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: They are poor climbers. Natural predators include raptors such as hawks and eagles, roadrunners, wild hogs, and other snakes. When threatened, they usually coil and rattle to warn aggressors. They are one of the more aggressive rattlesnake species in the US in the way that they stand their ground when confronted by a foe. If rattling does not work, then the snake will strike in defense.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: A comprehensive study by Beavers (1976) on the prey of "C. atrox" in Texas showed, by weight, 94.8% of their prey consisted of small mammals. According to Pisani and Stephenson (1991), who conducted a study of the stomach contents of "C. atrox" in the fall and spring of Oklahoma, mammalian prey included prairie dogs ("Cynomys ludovicianus"), kangaroo rats ("Dipodomys ordii"), pocket gophers ("Geomys bursarius" and "Cratogeomys castanops"), voles ("Microtus ochrogaster"), woodrats ("Neotoma floridana"), pocket mice ("Perognathus hispidus" and "P. flavescens"), white-footed mice ("Peromyscus leucopus" and "P. maniculatus"), Old World rats and mice ("Rattus norvegicus" and "Mus" ssp.), harvest mice ("Reithrodontomys megalotis"), fox squirrels ("Sciurus niger"), cotton rats ("Sigmodon hispidus"), ground squirrels ("Spermophilus spilosoma"), rabbits ("Sylvilagus floridanus"), jackrabbits ("Lepus californicus"), and an unidentified mole species. Klauber mentioned large specimens are capable of swallowing adult cottontail rabbits and even adult jackrabbits, although he figured the latter required confirmation.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Birds, lizards, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and mice are also preyed upon, with lizards mostly being eaten by young snakes. Avian prey include mockingbirds ("Mimidae"), quail, a nearly full-grown Gambel's quail, a burrowing owl ("Athene cunicularia"), a fledgling horned lark ("Eremophila alpestris") a black-throated sparrow ("Amphispiza bilineata"), and an eastern meadowlark ("Sturnella magna"). Lizard prey include a whiptail lizard ("Cnemidophorus"), spiny lizards ("Sceloporus"), a Texas banded gecko ("Coleonyx brevis"), and a side-blotched lizard ("Uta palmeri"). One case reported by Vorhies (1948) involved a juvenile specimen that had attempted to eat a horned lizard ("Phrynosoma solare"), but died after the lizard's horns had punctured its esophagus, leaving the lizard stuck there.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Hermann (1950) reported "C. atrox" also feeds on lubber grasshoppers ("Brachystola magna"). Klauber (1972) once found a single specimen in which the stomach contents included grasshoppers, beetles, and ants. However, mammal hairs and an iguanid lizard were also found in the same stomach, which made it more likely that the insects had first been eaten by the mammal or the lizard before they had been eaten by the snake.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: These snakes can go for up to two years without food in the wild. A -month starvation study showed the snakes reduced energy expenditures by an average of 80% over the length of the study. The snakes also feed from within on energy-rich lipid stores. The most interesting finding was the snakes grew during the study, indicating while the snake's mass was shrinking, it was putting its resources into skeletal muscles and bone.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: A key participant in the food chain, it is an important predator of many small rodents, rabbits, and birds. In turn, it is preyed upon by a variety of larger mammals and birds, such as coyotes, foxes, hawks, and owls. "Crotalus atrox" can be active at any time of the day or night when conditions are favorable. It is primarily diurnal and crepuscular in spring and fall and becomes primarily nocturnal and crepuscular during the hot summer months.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Like most other American pit vipers, the venom contains proteolytic enzymes. Proteolytic venoms are concentrated secretions that destroy structural tissues and proteins via catabolism, which help in disabling prey. The venom of "C. atrox" is primarily hemotoxic, affecting mainly the blood vessels, blood cells and the heart. The venom contains hemorrhagic components called zinc metalloproteinases. The venom also contains cytotoxins and myotoxins which destroy cells and muscles, adding to the damage to the cardiovascular system. In addition to hemorrhage, venom metalloproteinases induce myonecrosis (skeletal muscle damage), which seems to be secondary to the ischemia that ensues in muscle tissue as a consequence of bleeding and reduced perfusion. Microvascular disruption by metalloproteinases also impairs skeletal muscle regeneration, being thereby responsible for fibrosis and permanent tissue loss. General local effects include pain, heavy internal bleeding, severe swelling, severe muscle damage, bruising, blistering, and necrosis; systemic effects are variable and not specific, but may include headache, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, dizziness, and convulsions. Bleeding caused by hemorrhagins is a major clinical effect that can be fatal.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: This species has values of 2.72 mg/kg intravenous, 20 mg/kg intramuscular and 18.5 mg/kg subcutaneous, which is far less toxic than many other rattlesnakes. However, because of its large venom glands and specialized fangs, the western diamondback rattlesnake can deliver a large amount of venom in a single bite. The average venom yield per bite is usually between 250 and 350 mg, with a maximum of 700–800 mg. Severe envenomation is rare but possible, and can be lethal. Mortality rate of untreated bites is between 10 and 20%.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: Rattlesnakes, including "C. atrox", are viviparous. Gestation lasts six or seven months, and broods average about a dozen young. However, the young stay with the mother for only a few hours before they set off on their own to hunt and find cover, so that the mortality rate is very high. Mating occurs in the fall, and the females give birth to as many as 25 young, which may be as long as . The young are fully capable of delivering a venomous bite from the moment they are born.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: This species is classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (v3.1, 2001). Species are listed as such due to their wide distribution or presumed large population, or because they are unlikely to be declining fast enough to qualify for listing in a more threatened category. The population trend was stable when assessed in 2007.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: They are also heavily collected from the wild, frequently being drawn out of their hiding places with gasoline and used in rattlesnake roundups, where they are killed for food, skins and entertainment.


title: Western diamondback rattlesnake

text: This Western diamondback rattlesnake may be the most common rattlesnake species found in homes and in direct conflict with human development in the American Southwest, in particularly in the rapidly expanding metro areas of Phoenix and Tucson. Relocation of animals is seen as a sometimes controversial management solution.


title: Stunt performer

text: A stunt performer, often called a stuntman or stuntwoman and occasionally stuntperson or stunt-person, is a trained professional who performs daring acts, often as a career. Stunt performers usually appear in films or on television, as opposed to a daredevil, who performs for a live audience. When they take the place of another actor, they are known as stunt doubles.


title: Stunt performer

text: A stuntman or stuntwoman typically performs stunts intended for use in a film or dramatized television. Stunts seen in films and television include car crashes, falls from great height, drags (for example, behind a horse), and explosions.


title: Stunt performer

text: There is an inherent risk in the performance of all stunt work. There is maximum risk when the stunts are performed in front of a live audience. In filmed performances, visible safety mechanisms can be removed by editing. In live performances the audience can see more clearly if the performer is genuinely doing what they claim or appear to do. To reduce the risk of injury or death, most often stunts are choreographed or mechanically rigged so that, while they look dangerous, safety mechanisms are built into the performance. Despite their well-choreographed appearance, stunts are still very dangerous and physically testing exercises.


title: Stunt performer

text: From its inception as a professional skill in the early 1900s to the 1960s, stunts were most often performed by professionals who had trained in that discipline prior to entering the movie industry. Current film and television stunt performers must be trained in a variety of disciplines, including martial arts and stage combat, and must be a certified trained member of a professional stunt performers organisation first in order to obtain the necessary insurance to perform on the stage or screen. This allows them to better break down and plan an action sequence, physically prepare themselves, and incorporate both the safety and risk factors in their performances. However, even when executed perfectly, there is still strain and performing stunts often results in unplanned injury to the body.


title: Stunt performer

text: Daredevils are distinct from stunt performers and stunt doubles; their performance is of the stunt itself, without the context of a film or television show. Daredevils often perform for an audience. Live stunt performers include escape artists, sword swallowers, glass walkers, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and many other sideshow and circus arts. They also include motorcycle display teams and the once popular Wall of Death. The "Jackass" films and television series are well-known and prominent recorded examples of the act in modern cinematography.


title: Stunt performer

text: Some people act as both stunt performers and daredevils at various parts of their career. Examples include Buster Keaton, Harry Houdini, Hong Kong action film stars Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, and Moon Lee, Indian film actors Jayan, Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff, and Pawan Kalyan, Thai actor Tony Jaa, and Indonesian film actor Iko Uwais.


title: Stunt performer

text: The earliest stunt performers were travelling entertainers and circus performers, particularly trained gymnasts and acrobats. The origin of the original name, the French word "cascadeur", derivates from "cascade" which is an archaic French term for "fall" (from French cascade, from Italian cascata, from cascare “to fall”).


title: Stunt performer

text: Later, in the German and Dutch circus use of the word "Kaskadeur", it meant performing a sequential series of daring leaps and jumps without injury to the performer. This acrobatic discipline required long training in the ring and perfect body control to present a sensational performance to the public.


title: Stunt performer

text: The word "stunt" was more formally adopted during the 19th-century travelling vaudeville performances of the early Wild West shows, in North America and Europe. The first and prototypical Wild West show was Buffalo Bill's, formed in 1883 and lasting until 1913. The shows, which involved simulated battles with the associated firing of both guns and arrows, were a romanticized version of the American Old West.


title: Stunt performer

text: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, stage combat scenes of swordplay in touring theatrical productions throughout Europe, the Commonwealth of Nations and North America were typically created by combining several widely known, generic routines known as "standard combats". During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fencing masters in Europe began to research and experiment with historical fencing techniques, with weapons such as the two-handed sword, rapier, and smallsword, and to instruct actors in their use.


title: Stunt performer

text: Notable among these revivalist instructors were George Dubois, a fight director and martial artist from Paris who created performance fencing styles based on gladiatorial combat as well as Renaissance rapier and dagger fencing. Egerton Castle and Captain Alfred Hutton were part of a wider Victorian era group based in London, involved in reviving historical fencing systems. Circa 1899–1902, Hutton taught stage fencing classes for actors via the Bartitsu Club, where he also served on the Board of Directors and learned the basics of jujutsu and the Vigny method of stick fighting from his fellow instructors.


title: Stunt performer

text: By the early 1900s, the motion picture industry was starting to fire-up on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but had no need for professional stunt performers. First, motion pictures were so new that even if the producer had a budget for performers, there were more than enough applicants willing to do the scene for free. For instance, if you needed a shot of someone on a steel beam up on a New York skyscraper, then there was always some willing to do the scene for real, and often for free. Second, the Spanish–American War had just ended, and there were many young men who were physically fit and trained in the handling of firearms looking for some work. Thirdly, the former wild west was now not only tamed, but also starting to be fenced in, greatly reducing the need for and pay of the former cowboys.


title: Stunt performer

text: The first picture which used a dedicated stunt performer is highly debated, but occurred somewhere between 1903 and 1910. The first possible appearance of a stunt-double was Frank Hanaway in "The Great Train Robbery", shot in 1903 in Milltown, New Jersey. The first auditable paid stunt was in the 1908 film "The Count of Monte Cristo", with $5 paid by the director to the acrobat who had to jump upside down from a cliff into the sea.


title: Stunt performer

text: Professional daredevil, Rodman Law, was a trick parachutist known to thousands for climbing the side of buildings and parachuting out aeroplanes and off of tall base objects like the Statue of Liberty. Some of his stunts were filmed by newsreel cameras and media still photographers. Law was brought into movies in 1912 to perform some of his stunts as the hero.


title: Stunt performer

text: As the industry developed in the West Coast around Hollywood, California, the first accepted professional stuntmen were clowns and comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops. The reason for this was that staple diet of the early films was an almost continual roll call of pratfalls, high dives and comedy car wrecks – the basic ingredients of a circus clown's routine. But much like their circus-based predecessors, these actors/stuntmen were not specifically trained to perform stunts, but instead learned through trial and error.


title: Stunt performer

text: From 1910 onwards, American audiences developed a taste for action films, which were replicated into successful serials. These mostly western-themed scripts required a lot of extras, such as for a galloping cavalry, a band of Indians or a fast-riding sheriff's posse; all of whom needed to proficiently ride, shoot and look right on camera.


title: Stunt performer

text: Producers also kept pushing the directors calling for riskier stunts using a recurring cast, necessitating the use of dedicated stunt doubles for most movie stars. The directors turned to the current rodeo stars for inspiration for their action scenes, and employed former cowboys as extras who not only brought with themselves the right look and style, but also rodeo techniques that included safe and replicable horse falls.


title: Stunt performer

text: Early recruits included Tom Mix, who after winning the 1909 National Riding and Rodeo Championship, worked for the Selig Polyscope Company in Edendale. Mix made his first appearance in "The Cowboy Millionaire" in October 1909, and then as himself in the short documentary film titled "Ranch Life in the Great Southwest" in which he displayed his skills as a cattle wrangler. Mix eventually performed in over 160 cowboy matinee movies during the 1920s, and is considered by many as the first matinee cowboy idol.


title: Stunt performer

text: The recruitment venture was aided in 1911 by the collapse of the Miller-Arlington rodeo show, which left many rodeo performers stranded in Venice, California. One of them was the young Rose August Wenger, who married and was later billed as Helen Gibson, recognised as the first American professional stunt woman. Thomas H. Ince, who was producing for the New York Motion Picture Company, hired the entire show's cast for the winter at $2,500 a week. The performers were paid $8 a week and boarded in Venice, where the horses were stabled. They then rode the each day to work in Topanga Canyon, where the films were being shot. In 1912, Helen made $15 a week for her first billed role as Ruth Roland's sister in "Ranch Girls on a Rampage". After marrying Edmund Richard "Hoot" Gibson in June 1913, the couple continued working rodeos in the summer and as stunt doubles in the winter in California, most often for Kalem Studios in Glendale, California. In April 1915 while on the Kalem payroll doubling for Helen Holmes in "The Hazards of Helen" adventure film series, Helen performed what is thought to be her most dangerous stunt: a leap from the roof of a station onto the top of a moving train in the "A Girl’s Grit" episode. The distance between station roof and train top was accurately measured, and she practiced the jump with the train standing still. In the actual shoot, with the train's accelerating velocity timed to the second, she leapt without hesitation and landed correctly, but with forward motion she rolled forward, saving herself from injury and improving the shot by catching hold of an air vent and dangling over the edge. She suffered only a few bruises.


title: Stunt performer

text: Eventually, the out of work cowboys and out of season rodeo riders, and the directors/producers, figured out a system for the supply of extras. A speakeasy called "The Watering Hole" was located close to a Los Angeles located corral called the Sunset Corral. Every morning, the cowboys would congregate at "The Watering Hole", where the directors would send over their assistants to hire for the following day. The cowboys would then dress in their normal riding clothes (unless told otherwise, for which they were paid extra), and ride to the set, most of which were located to the north in the vicinity of the San Fernando Valley. These "riding extras" jobs paid $10 per day plus a box lunch, and most were only hired on a per day basis. These early cowboy actors eventually gained the nickname "The Gower Gulch Gang", as many of the small studios cranking out westerns were located on Gower Avenue.


title: Stunt performer

text: Subsequently, a number of rodeo stars entered the movie industry on a full-time basis, with many "riding extras" eventually becoming movie stars themselves, including: Hank Bell (300 films, between 1920 and 1952); Bill Gillis; Buck Jones; Jack Montgomery (initially worked as Tom Mix's body-double); and Jack Padjeon (first appeared in 1923, played Wild Bill Hickok in the John Ford directed "The Iron Horse" in 1924). But the best known stuntman turned star was probably Yakima Canutt, who with his apprentices - who included John Wayne - devised during the 1930s new safety devices, including: the 'L' stirrup which allowed a rider to fall off a horse without getting hung in the stirrup; and cabling equipment to cause spectacular wagon crashes, while releasing the team. A focus on replicable and safe stunts saved producers money and prevented lost down-time for directors through reduced accidents and injury to performers. Stuntmen were now an integral part of a films drawing power, helping to fill cinemas with thrill seeking patrons anxious to see the new Saturday matinee.


title: Stunt performer

text: Producer/actor Harold Lloyd's film "Safety Last!" of 1923, is often considered one of the first to deploy thought-through safety devices and pre-planning in the execution of its filming and stunts. In the script, Lloyd's "country boy" character goes to the city to be a success, and ends up climbing a tall building as a stunt. Critics at the time claimed it to be the most spectacular daredevil thrill comedy.


title: Stunt performer

text: The entire stunt sequence was shot on location at the Atlantic Hotel on the Broadway in Los Angeles (demolished 1957), at actual heights. But the films directors Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor planned into two safety features:


title: Stunt performer

text: Producer Hal Roach and Lloyd had been forced into the costs of planning and construction of these safety devices, as simply without them the city commissioners had refused the production a film permit. Lloyd, ever curious, decided after filming had completed to use a life-size cotton-filled dummy to see what the effect of an accident would have been should they have needed to use the required safety devices. On seeing the results, he didn't film another production without them.


title: Stunt performer

text: In 1983 in his personal homage to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd called "Project A", Jackie Chan repeats some of the most famous scenes from the early film era, including Lloyd's clock scene from "Safety Last!" While Lloyd only hanged from the tower, Chan took it a step further and actually fell from the tower.


title: Stunt performer

text: Swashbuckler films were a unique genre of action movies, utilising the earlier developed art of cinematic fencing, a combination of stage combat and fencing. The most famous of these were the films of Douglas Fairbanks, which defined the genre. The stories came from romantic costume novels, particularly those of Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini, and included triumphant, thrilling music. There were three great cycles of swashbuckler films: the Douglas Fairbanks period from 1920 to 1929; the Errol Flynn period from 1935 to 1941; and a period in the 1950s heralded by films, including "Ivanhoe" (1952) and "The Master of Ballantrae" (1953), and the popularity of the British television series "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1955–1959).


title: Stunt performer

text: The preference to employ ready existing professionals from outside the film industry, either as performers or doubles, continued in the period both up to and beyond World War II, when again the industry was awash with young, fit men looking for work. However, in 1958 "Thunder Road" starring Robert Mitchum, with stunt coordinator was Carey Loftin and a stunt team including Ray Austin, Neil Castes Sr., Robert Hoy, and Dale Van Sickel, introduced the era of the car chase movie. With the later development of modern action movie, the accident rate of both stunt performers and movie stars started to quickly increase. The stunt performers took action to professionalise their industry, with the creation of new stunt performer run registration, training, certification, and booking agencies.


title: Stunt performer

text: In the 1960s, modern stunt technology was developed, including air rams, air bags, and bullet squibs. Dar Robinson invented the decelerator during this period, which used dragline cables rather than airbags for stunts that called for a jump from high places. The co-development of this technology and professional performance training continues to evolve to the present, brought about through the need to not only create more visual impact on screen in the modern action movie era. It also provides a safe platform to a new breed of trained professional stunt performers, including Bill Hickman, Terry Richards, and motorcycle greats Bud Ekins and Evel Knievel. These new professionals were not only driven to create visual impact, but also perform seemingly impossible feats in a safe and repeatable manner. Latterly came the fast action Martial arts movies as a distinct genre, originating for western consumption mainly from Hong Kong from the 1940s, choreographed and later acted in by stunt performers turned stars including Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba from the 1960s, Kent Norman "Superkentman" Elofson, and latterly Jackie Chan.


title: Stunt performer

text: In 1982, Jackie Chan began experimenting with elaborate stunt action sequences in "Dragon Lord", which featured a pyramid fight scene that holds the record for the most takes required for a single scene, with 2900 takes, and the final fight scene where he performs various stunts, including one where he does a back flip off a loft and falls to the lower ground. In 1983, "Project A" saw the official formation of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and typical slapstick humor (at one point, Chan falls from the top of a clock tower through a series of fabric canopies).


title: Stunt performer

text: "Police Story" (1985) contained many large-scale action scenes, including an opening sequence featuring a car chase through a shanty town, Chan stopping a double-decker bus with his service revolver and a climactic fight scene in a shopping center. This final scene earned the film the nickname "Glass Story" by the crew, due to the huge number of panes of sugar glass that were broken. During a stunt in this last scene, in which Chan slides down a pole from several stories up, the lights covering the pole had heated it considerably, resulting in Chan suffering second-degree burns, particularly to his hands, as well as a back injury and dislocation of his pelvis upon landing. Chan performed similarly elaborate stunts in numerous other films, such as several "Police Story" sequels, "Project A Part II", the "Armor of God" series, "Dragons Forever", "Drunken Master II", "Rumble in the Bronx", and the "Rush Hour" series, among others.


title: Stunt performer

text: Other Hong Kong action movie stars who became known for performing elaborate stunts include Chan's Peking Opera School friends Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, as well as "girls with guns" stars such as Michelle Yeoh and Moon Lee. Other Asian cinema stars also known for performing elaborate stunts including Thai actor Tony Jaa, Indonesian actors Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, and Indian actors Jayan, Ajith Kumar, Akshay Kumar, Puneeth Rajkumar, Vidyut Jammwal and Tiger Shroff.


title: Stunt performer

text: Many stunt professionals believe that modern computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology will reduce the industry to a mere shadow of its former self. However currently the costs of CGI on most films and for most scenes is prohibitive. While CGI allows directors to create stunts that would be very expensive, dangerous or simply impossible to perform with real stunt people, the backlash has resulted in a new genre of "real" movies marketed on the basis that the scenes are real and that no CGI has been used to create the final production.


title: Stunt performer

text: There is no Oscar category for stunt performance, but in 1967, Yakima Canutt was awarded an honorary Oscar for his stunt career. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awards an Emmy for stunt coordinators.


title: Stunt performer

text: The Taurus World Stunt Awards gives stunt people their own annual awards, but also through its foundation offers financial support to stunt men around the world who have been injured while on the job.


title: Stunt performer

text: Although the stories that stuntmen died while filming "Ben Hur" and "Where Eagles Dare" are apocryphal myths, life-threatening injuries and deaths are not uncommon. Contracts often stipulate that the footage may be used if the performer is injured or dies during filming, and some filmmakers including Jackie Chan consider it disrespectful not to do so.


title: Stunt performer

text: A University of Illinois study from the 1980s lists accidents and fatalities from films during that era, concluding that it seemed probable that the tendency of film audiences to be interested by ever bigger, badder and more dangerous film stunts had not decreased the fatality rate.


title: Macadam

text: Macadam is a type of road construction, pioneered by Scottish engineer John Loudon McAdam around 1820, in which crushed stone is placed in shallow, convex layers and compacted thoroughly. A binding layer of stone dust (crushed stone from the original material) may form; it may also, after rolling, be covered with a cement or bituminous binder to keep dust and stones together. The method simplified what had been considered state-of-the-art at that point.


title: Macadam

text: Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet is sometimes considered the first person to bring post-Roman science to road building. A Frenchman from an engineering family, he worked paving roads in Paris from 1757 to 1764. As chief engineer of road construction of Limoges, he had opportunity to develop a better and cheaper method of road construction. In 1775, Tresaguet became engineer-general and presented his answer for road improvement in France, which soon became standard practice there.


title: Macadam

text: Trésaguet had recommended a roadway consisting of three layers of stones laid on a crowned subgrade with side ditches for drainage. The first two layers consisted of angular hand-broken aggregate, maximum size , to a depth of about . The third layer was about thick with a maximum aggregate size of . This top level surface permitted a smoother shape and protected the larger stones in the road structure from iron wheels and horse hooves. To keep the running surface level with the countryside, this road was put in a trench, which created drainage problems. These problems were addressed by changes that included digging deep side ditches, making the surface as solid as possible, and constructing the road with a difference in elevation (height) between the two edges, that difference being referred to interchangeably as the road's camber or cross slope.


title: Macadam

text: Thomas Telford, born in Dumfriesshire Scotland, was a surveyor and engineer who applied Tresaguet's road building theories. In 1801 Telford worked for the Commission of Highland Roads and Bridges. He became director of the Holyhead Road Commission between 1815 and 1830. Telford extended Tresaguet's theories, but emphasized high-quality stone. He recognized that some of the road problems of the French could be avoided by using cubical stone blocks.


title: Macadam

text: Telford used roughly partially shaped paving stones (pitchers), with a slight flat face on the bottom surface. He turned the other faces more vertically than Tresaguet's method. The longest edge was arranged crossways to the traffic direction, and the joints were broken in the method of conventional brickwork, but with the smallest faces of the pitcher forming the upper and lower surfaces.


title: Macadam

text: Broken stone was wedged into the spaces between the tapered perpendicular faces to provide the layer with good lateral control. Telford kept the natural formation level and used masons to camber the upper surface of the blocks. He placed a layer of stone no bigger than on top of the rock foundation. To finish the road surface he covered the stones with a mixture of gravel and broken stone. This structure came to be known as "Telford pitching." Telford's road depended on a resistant structure to prevent water from collecting and corroding the strength of the pavement. Telford raised the pavement structure above ground level whenever possible.


title: Macadam

text: Where the structure could not be raised, Telford drained the area surrounding the roadside. Previous road builders in Britain ignored drainage problems and Telford's rediscovery of drainage principles was a major contribution to road construction. Notably, around the same time, John Metcalf strongly advocated that drainage was in fact an important factor in road construction, and astonished colleagues by building dry roads even through marshland. He accomplished this by incorporating a layer of brushwood and heather.


title: Macadam

text: John Loudon McAdam was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1756. In 1787, he became a trustee of the Ayrshire Turnpike in the Scottish Lowlands and during the next seven years his hobby became an obsession. He moved to Bristol, England, in 1802 and became a Commissioner for Paving in 1806. On 15 January 1816, he was elected surveyor-general of roads for the Bristol turnpike trust and was now responsible for 149 miles of road. He then put his ideas about road construction into practice, the first 'macadamised' stretch of road being Marsh Road at Ashton Gate, Bristol. He also began to actively propagate his ideas in two booklets called "Remarks (or Observations) on the Present System of Roadmaking", (which ran nine editions between 1816 and 1827) and "A Practical Essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Public Roads," published in 1819.


title: Macadam

text: McAdam's method was simpler, yet more effective at protecting roadways: he discovered that massive foundations of rock upon rock were unnecessary, and asserted that native soil alone would support the road and traffic upon it, as long as it was covered by a road crust that would protect the soil underneath from water and wear.


title: Macadam

text: Unlike Telford and other road builders of the time, McAdam laid his roads as level as possible. His road required only a rise of from the edges to the centre. Cambering and elevation of the road above the water table enabled rain water to run off into ditches on either side.


title: Macadam

text: Size of stones was central to the McAdam's road building theory. The lower road thickness was restricted to stones no larger than . The upper layer of stones was limited to stones in diameter; these were checked by supervisors who carried scales. A workman could check the stone size himself by seeing if the stone would fit into his mouth. The importance of the 2 cm stone size was that the stones needed to be much smaller than the width of the iron carriage tyres that travelled on the road.


title: Macadam

text: McAdam believed that the "proper method" of breaking stones for utility and rapidity was accomplished by people sitting down and using small hammers, breaking the stones so that none of them was larger than in weight. He also wrote that the quality of the road would depend on how carefully the stones were spread on the surface over a sizeable space, one shovelful at a time.


title: Macadam

text: McAdam directed that no substance that would absorb water and affect the road by frost should be incorporated into the road. Neither was anything to be laid on the clean stone to bind the road. The action of the road traffic would cause the broken stone to combine with its own angles, merging into a level, solid surface that would withstand weather or traffic.


title: Macadam

text: Through his road-building experience, McAdam had learned that a layer of broken angular stones would act as a solid mass and would not require the large stone layer previously used to build roads. Keeping the surface stones smaller than the tyre width made a good running surface for traffic. The small surface stones also provided low stress on the road, so long as it could be kept reasonably dry.


title: Macadam

text: The first macadam road built in the United States was constructed between Hagerstown and Boonsboro, Maryland, and was named at the time Boonsborough Turnpike Road. This was the last section of unimproved road between Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay to Wheeling on the Ohio River. Stagecoaches traveling the Hagerstown to Boonsboro road in the winter took 5 to 7 hours to cover the stretch. This road was completed in 1823, using McAdam's road techniques, except that the finished road was compacted with a cast-iron roller instead of relying on road traffic for compaction. The second American road built using McAdam principles was the Cumberland Road which was long and was completed in 1830 after five years of work.


title: Macadam

text: McAdam's renown is due to his effective and economical construction, which was a great improvement over the methods used by his generation. He emphasized that roads could be constructed for any kind of traffic, and he helped to alleviate the resentment travelers felt toward increasing traffic on the roads. His legacy lies in his advocacy of effective road maintenance and management. He advocated a central road authority with trained professional officials who could be paid a salary that would keep them from corruption. These professionals could give their entire time to these duties and be held responsible for their actions.


title: Macadam

text: McAdam's road building technology was applied to roads by other engineers. One of these engineers was Richard Edgeworth, who filled the gaps between the surface stones with a mixture of stone dust and water, providing a smoother surface for the increased traffic using the roads. This basic method of construction is sometimes known as water-bound macadam. Although this method required a great deal of manual labour, it resulted in a strong and free-draining pavement. Roads constructed in this manner were described as "macadamized."


title: Macadam

text: With the advent of motor vehicles, dust became a serious problem on macadam roads. The area of low air pressure created under fast-moving vehicles sucked dust from the road surface, creating dust clouds and a gradual unraveling of the road material. This problem was approached by spraying tar on the surface to create tar-bound macadam. In 1902 a Swiss doctor, Ernest Guglielminetti, came upon the idea of using tar from Monaco's gasworks for binding the dust. Later a mixture of coal tar and ironworks slag, patented by Edgar Purnell Hooley as tarmac, was introduced.


title: Macadam

text: A more durable road surface (modern mixed asphalt pavement) sometimes referred to in the US as blacktop, was introduced in the 1920s. This pavement method mixed the aggregates into the asphalt with the binding material before they were laid. The macadam surface method laid the stone and sand aggregates on the road and then sprayed it with the binding material. While macadam roads have now been resurfaced in most developed countries, some are preserved along stretches of roads such as the United States' National Road.


title: Macadam

text: Because of the historic use of macadam as a road surface, roads in some parts of the United States (such as parts of Pennsylvania) are often referred to as macadam, even though they might be made of asphalt or concrete. Similarly, the term "tarmac" is sometimes colloquially applied to asphalt roads or aircraft runways.


title: Frigidaire

text: Frigidaire Appliance Company is the American consumer and commercial home appliances brand subsidiary of multinational company Electrolux.


title: Frigidaire

text: Frigidaire was founded as the Guardian Frigerator Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and developed the first self-contained refrigerator, invented by Nathaniel B. Wales and Alfred Mellowes in 1916. In 1918, William C. Durant, a founder of General Motors, personally invested in the company and in 1919, it adopted the name Frigidaire.


title: Frigidaire

text: The brand was so well known in the refrigeration field in the early-to-mid-1900s, that many Americans called any refrigerator a "Frigidaire" regardless of brand. In France, Canada, and some other French-speaking countries or areas, the word "Frigidaire" is often in use as a synonym today. The name Frigidaire or its antecedent Frigerator may be the origin of the widely used English word "fridge", although more likely simply an abbreviation of refrigerator which is a word known to have been used as early as 1611.


title: Frigidaire

text: From 1919 to 1979, the company was owned by General Motors. During that period, it was first a subsidiary of Delco-Light and was later an independent division based in Dayton, Ohio. The division also manufactured the compressors for GM's cars that were equipped with air conditioning. While the company was owned by General Motors, its logo featured the phrase "Product of General Motors", and later renamed to "Home Environment Division of General Motors".


title: Frigidaire

text: Frigidaire was sold to the White Sewing Machine Company in 1979, which in 1986 was purchased by Electrolux, its current parent.


title: Frigidaire

text: During the years that Frigidaire was owned by General Motors, it was very competitive in the automatic clothes-washing-machine business. Frigidaire engineer Kenneth Sisson, also credited with the design of the incrementing timer used on clothes washers and dishwashers for years to come, designed the Frigidaire automatic washer with the Unimatic mechanism in the late 1930s. Production of the first Frigidaire automatic clothes washers was halted due to World War II and therefore the machine was not formally introduced until 1947. The washing action of a Frigidaire automatic was unique in that the agitator pulsated up and down, a unique departure from the traditional oscillating type. The Frigidaire washers were commonly named for their mechanisms, which underwent frequent changes over the years. The Unimatic was in production the longest, for any single Frigidaire mechanism, from 1947 to 1958 for home automatic washers and through 1963 for coin-operated commercial washers for self-service laundromats. The Pulsamatic mechanism, unique in that it pulsated 630 times per minute, was introduced in 1955 for the lower-end models. This became the foundation for the Multimatic, introduced for the 1959 model year. The Multimatic lasted through 1964, as the Rollermatic was brought out for the 1965 lineup. The Rollermatic was unique in that instead of using an oil-filled gearcase, metal and urethane rollers transferred the power within the mechanism. This underwent a slight revision in 1970 for the new eighteen-pound capacity 1-18, which kept the same basic mechanism but differed in that it was belt-driven off of the motor and added a recirculating pump. Besides the unique action, another notable feature of these older washers was the final, high-speed spin cycle (nicknamed "Rapidry"), 1140 revolutions per minute in the Unimatic, 850 in the Multimatic, and 1010 in the high-end Rollermatic models.


title: Frigidaire

text: When Frigidaire was acquired by White Consolidated Industries in 1979, it abandoned the General Motors design in favor of the Westinghouse-produced top-loading design, as White-Westinghouse was already among its house brands by this time.


title: Frigidaire

text: Frigidaire also produces a wide variety of refrigerators and freezers for the consumer market. Their model line-up includes refrigerator freezer units of several different types. The selection they offer includes traditional Top Freezer models, as well as more modern Side-By-Side and French Door styles.


title: Frigidaire

text: In 2016, Frigidaire partnered with Ryder and Embark, an autonomous trucking firm, to deliver refrigerators from Texas to California. Level 2 autonomous trucks are used. They have a driver behind the wheel at all times. The reason for experimenting with autonomous vehicles is a looming shortage of drivers. In 2015, the American Trucking Association predicted that there would be a shortage of 175,000 drivers by 2024.


title: Frigidaire

text: In addition to manufacturing room air conditioners, Frigidaire also provided the factory air conditioning systems for General Motors (GM) automobiles. From the 1950s through the 1970s, these units developed a reputation for providing powerful air conditioning systems on virtually all GM cars and trucks from the largest Cadillacs to the small Chevrolet Vega. GM also sold Frigidaire auto air conditioning compressors to British Leyland for Jaguar and to Rolls-Royce for Rolls-Royce and Bentley branded cars.


title: Frigidaire

text: A new cooktop manufacturing facility opened in the Frank C. Pidgeon Industrial park, southwest of Memphis. The facility is built to LEED certification standards. Workers will manufacture the company's Electrolux ICON, Electrolux and Frigidaire product lines, including drop-in/slide-in ranges, wall ovens, specialty free standing ranges and cook tops. The $190 million, 750,000 square foot Memphis manufacturing plant began production of stoves and ranges in 2013. The plant's research and development center includes the technology and machinery to simulate a stove's lifetime usage and performance expectations and can test more than 300 products at one time.


title: Frigidaire

text: Electrolux/Frigidaire also operates a manufacturing facility for free standing gas and electric ranges in Springfield, Tennessee. The Springfield facility currently employs about 2,900 people.


title: Contactor

text: A contactor is an electrically-controlled switch used for switching an electrical power circuit. A contactor is typically controlled by a circuit which has a much lower power level than the switched circuit, such as a 24-volt coil electromagnet controlling a 230-volt motor switch.


title: Contactor

text: Unlike general-purpose relays, contactors are designed to be directly connected to high-current load devices. Relays tend to be of lower capacity and are usually designed for both "normally closed" and "normally open" applications. Devices switching more than 15 amperes or in circuits rated more than a few kilowatts are usually called contactors. Apart from optional auxiliary low-current contacts, contactors are almost exclusively fitted with normally open ("form A") contacts. Unlike relays, contactors are designed with features to control and suppress the arc produced when interrupting heavy motor currents.


title: Contactor

text: Contactors come in many forms with varying capacities and features. Unlike a circuit breaker, a contactor is not intended to interrupt a short circuit current. Contactors range from those having a breaking current of several amperes to thousands of amperes and 24 V DC to many kilovolts. The physical size of contactors ranges from a device small enough to pick up with one hand, to large devices approximately a meter (yard) on a side.


title: Contactor

text: Contactors are used to control electric motors, lighting, heating, capacitor banks, thermal evaporators, and other electrical loads.


title: Contactor

text: A contactor has three components. The "contacts" are the current-carrying part of the contactor. This includes power contacts, auxiliary contacts, and contact springs. Contact material is chosen for high electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and stability under arcing and oxidation. Commonly used metals include alloys of tungsten, molybdenum, copper, and others. For example, motor circuit contactors may use contacts made of silver with cadmium oxide added to improved durability and arc resistance. The "electromagnet" (or ""coil"") provides the driving force to close the contacts. The "enclosure" is a frame housing the contacts and the electromagnet. Enclosures are made of insulating materials such as Bakelite, Nylon 6, and thermosetting plastics to protect and insulate the contacts and to provide some measure of protection against personnel touching the contacts. Open-frame contactors may have a further enclosure to protect against dust, oil, explosion hazards and weather.


title: Contactor

text: "Magnetic blowouts" use blowout coils to lengthen and move the electric arc. These are especially useful in DC power circuits. AC arcs have periods of low current, during which the arc can be extinguished with relative ease, but DC arcs have continuous high current, so blowing them out requires the arc to be stretched further than an AC arc of the same current. The magnetic blowouts in the pictured Albright contactor (which is designed for DC currents) more than double the current the contactor can break, increasing it from 600 A to 1,500 A.


title: Contactor

text: Sometimes an economizer circuit is also installed to reduce the power required to keep a contactor closed; an auxiliary contact reduces coil current after the contactor closes. A somewhat greater amount of power is required to initially close a contactor than is required to keep it closed. Such a circuit can save a substantial amount of power and allow the energized coil to stay cooler. Economizer circuits are nearly always applied on direct-current contactor coils and on large alternating current contactor coils.


title: Contactor

text: A basic contactor will have a coil input (which may be driven by either an AC or DC supply depending on the contactor design). Universal coils (driven by AC as well as DC) are also available in the market today. The coil may be energized at the same voltage as a motor the contactor is controlling, or may be separately controlled with a lower coil voltage better suited to control by programmable controllers and lower-voltage pilot devices. Certain contactors have series coils connected in the motor circuit; these are used, for example, for automatic acceleration control, where the next stage of resistance is not cut out until the motor current has dropped.


title: Contactor

text: When current passes through the electromagnet, a magnetic field is produced, which attracts the moving core of the contactor. The electromagnet coil draws more current initially, until its inductance increases when the metal core enters the coil. The moving contact is propelled by the moving core; the force developed by the electromagnet holds the moving and fixed contacts together. When the contactor coil is de-energized, gravity or a spring returns the electromagnet core to its initial position and opens the contacts.


title: Contactor

text: For contactors energized with alternating current, a small part of the core is surrounded with a shading coil, which slightly delays the magnetic flux in the core. The effect is to average out the alternating pull of the magnetic field and so prevent the core from buzzing at twice line frequency.


title: Contactor

text: Because arcing and consequent damage occurs just as the contacts are opening or closing, contactors are designed to open and close very rapidly; there is often an internal tipping point mechanism to ensure rapid action.


title: Contactor

text: Rapid closing can, however, lead to increase contact bounce which causes additional unwanted open-close cycles. One solution is to have bifurcated contacts to minimize contact bounce; two contacts designed to close simultaneously, but bounce at different times so the circuit will not be briefly disconnected and cause an arc.


title: Contactor

text: A slight variant has multiple contacts designed to engage in rapid succession. The first to make contact and last to break will experience the greatest contact wear and will form a high-resistance connection that would cause excessive heating inside the contactor. However, in doing so, it will protect the primary contact from arcing, so a low contact resistance will be established a millisecond later. This technique is only effective if the contactors disengage in reverse order that they engaged. Otherwise the damaging effect of arcing will be split evenly across both contactors.


title: Contactor

text: Another technique for improving the life of contactors is contact wipe; the contacts move past each other after initial contact in order to wipe off any contamination.


title: Contactor

text: Without adequate contact protection, the occurrence of electric current arcing causes significant degradation of the contacts, which suffer significant damage. An electrical arc occurs between the two contact points (electrodes) when they transition from a closed to an open (break arc) or from an open to a closed (make arc). The break arc is typically more energetic and thus more destructive.


title: Contactor

text: The heat developed by the resulting electrical arc is very high, ultimately causing the metal on the contact to migrate with the current. The extremely high temperature of the arc (tens of thousands of degrees Celsius) cracks the surrounding gas molecules creating ozone, carbon monoxide, and other compounds. The arc energy slowly destroys the contact metal, causing some material to escape into the air as fine particulate matter. This activity causes the material in the contacts to degrade over time, ultimately resulting in device failure. For example, a properly applied contactor will have a life span of 10,000 to 100,000 operations when run under power; which is significantly less than the mechanical (non-powered) life of the same device which can be in excess of 20 million operations.


title: Contactor

text: Most motor control contactors at low voltages (600 volts and less) are air break contactors; air at atmospheric pressure surrounds the contacts and extinguishes the arc when interrupting the circuit. Modern medium-voltage AC motor controllers use vacuum contactors. High voltage AC contactors (greater than 1,000 volts) may use vacuum or an inert gas around the contacts. High voltage DC contactors (greater than 600 V) still rely on air within specially designed arc-chutes to break the arc energy. High-voltage electric locomotives may be isolated from their overhead supply by roof-mounted circuit breakers actuated by compressed air; the same air supply may be used to "blow out" any arc that forms.


title: Contactor

text: Contactors are rated by designed load current per contact (pole), maximum fault withstand current, duty cycle, design life expectancy, voltage, and coil voltage. A general purpose motor control contactor may be suitable for heavy starting duty on large motors; so-called "definite purpose" contactors are carefully adapted to such applications as air-conditioning compressor motor starting. North American and European ratings for contactors follow different philosophies, with North American general purpose machine tool contactors generally emphasizing simplicity of application while definite purpose and European rating philosophy emphasizes design for the intended life cycle of the application.


title: Contactor

text: The current rating of the contactor depends on utilization category. Example IEC categories in standard 60947 are described as:


title: Contactor

text: NEMA contactors for low-voltage motors (less than 1,000 volts) are rated according to NEMA size, which gives a maximum continuous current rating and a rating by horsepower for attached induction motors. NEMA standard contactor sizes are designated 00, 0, 1, 2, 3 to 9.


title: Contactor

text: The horsepower ratings are based on voltage and on typical induction motor characteristics and duty cycle as stated in NEMA standard ICS2. Exceptional duty cycles or specialized motor types may require a different NEMA starter size than the nominal rating. Manufacturer's literature is used to guide selection for non-motor loads, for example, incandescent lighting or power factor correction capacitors. Contactors for medium-voltage motors (greater than 1,000 volts) are rated by voltage and current capacity.


title: Contactor

text: Auxiliary contacts of contactors are used in control circuits and are rated with NEMA contact ratings for the pilot circuit duty required. Normally these contacts are not used in motor circuits. The nomenclature is a letter followed by a three-digit number, the letter designates the current rating of the contacts and the current type (i.e., AC or DC) and the number designates the maximum voltage design values.


title: Contactor

text: Contactors are often used to provide central control of large lighting installations, such as an office building or retail building. To reduce power consumption in the contactor coils, latching contactors are used, which have two operating coils. One coil, momentarily energized, closes the power circuit contacts, which are then mechanically held closed; the second coil opens the contacts.


title: Contactor

text: A magnetic starter is a device designed to provide power to electric motors. It includes a contactor as an essential component, while also providing power-cutoff, under-voltage, and overload protection.


title: Contactor

text: Vacuum contactors utilize vacuum bottle encapsulated contacts to suppress the arc. This arc suppression allows the contacts to be much smaller and use less space than air break contacts at higher currents. As the contacts are encapsulated, vacuum contactors are used fairly extensively in dirty applications, such as mining. Vacuum contactors are also widely used at medium voltages from 1000-5000 volts, effectively displacing oil-filled circuit breakers in many applications.


title: Contactor

text: Vacuum contactors are only applicable for use in AC systems. The AC arc generated upon opening of the contacts will self-extinguish at the zero-crossing of the current waveform, with the vacuum preventing a re-strike of the arc across the open contacts. Vacuum contactors are therefore very efficient at disrupting the energy of an electric arc and are used when relatively fast switching is required, as the maximum break time is determined by the periodicity of the AC waveform. In the case of 60 Hz power (North American standard), the power will discontinue within 1/120 of a second (8.3ms).


title: Contactor

text: A mercury relay, sometimes called a mercury displacement relay, or, mercury contactor, is a relay that uses the liquid metal mercury in an insulated sealed container as the switching element.


title: Contactor

text: A mercury-wetted relay is a form of relay, usually a reed relay, in which the contacts are wetted with mercury. These are not considered contactors because they are not intended for currents above 15 amps.


title: Contactor

text: When a series of contactors is to be operated in sequence, this may be done by a camshaft instead of by individual electromagnets. The camshaft may be driven by an electric motor or a pneumatic cylinder. Before the advent of solid-state electronics, the camshaft system was commonly used for speed control in electric locomotives.


title: Contactor

text: In addition to their current ratings and rating for motor circuit control, contactors often have other construction details not found in relays. Unlike lower-powered relays, contactors generally have special structures for arc-suppression to allow them to interrupt heavy currents, such as motor starting inrush current. Contactors usually have provision for installation of additional contact blocks, rated for pilot duty, used in motor control circuits.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Ahmad Jamal (born Frederick Russell Jones, July 2, 1930) is an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader and educator. For six decades, he has been one of the most successful small-group leaders in jazz.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1930. He began playing piano at the age of three, when his uncle Lawrence challenged him to duplicate what he was doing on the piano. Jamal began formal piano training at the age of seven with Mary Cardwell Dawson, whom he describes as greatly influencing him. His Pittsburgh roots have remained an important part of his identity ("Pittsburgh meant everything to me and it still does," he said in 2001) and it was there that he was immersed in the influence of jazz artists such as Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner. Jamal also studied with pianist James Miller and began playing piano professionally at the age of fourteen, at which point he was recognized as a "coming great" by the pianist Art Tatum. When asked about his practice habits by a critic from "The New York Times", Jamal commented that, "I used to practice and practice with the door open, hoping someone would come by and discover me. I was never the practitioner in the sense of twelve hours a day, but I always thought about music. I think about music all the time."


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Jamal began touring with George Hudson's Orchestra after graduating from George Westinghouse High School in 1948. He joined another touring group known as The Four Strings, which disbanded when violinist Joe Kennedy Jr. left. In 1950 he moved to Chicago and performed intermittently with local musicians Von Freeman and Claude McLin, and solo at the Palm Tavern, occasionally joined by drummer Ike Day.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Born to Baptist parents, Jamal discovered Islam in his early 20s. While touring in Detroit, where there was a sizable Muslim community in the 1940s and 1950s, he became interested in Islam and Islamic culture. He converted to Islam and changed his name to Ahmad Jamal in 1950. In an interview with "The New York Times" a few years later, he said his decision to change his name stemmed from a desire to "re-establish my original name." Shortly after his conversion to Islam, he explained to "The New York Times" that he "says Muslim prayers five times a day and arises in time to say his first prayers at 5 am. He says them in Arabic in keeping with the Muslim tradition."


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: He made his first records in 1951 for the Okeh label with The Three Strings (which would later also be called the Ahmad Jamal Trio, although Jamal himself prefers not to use the term "trio"): the other members were guitarist Ray Crawford and a bassist, at different times Eddie Calhoun (1950–52), Richard Davis (1953–54), and Israel Crosby (from 1954). The Three Strings arranged an extended engagement at Chicago's Blue Note, but leapt to fame after performing at the Embers in New York City where John Hammond saw the band play and signed them to Okeh Records. Hammond, a record producer who discovered the talents and enhanced the fame of musicians like Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie, also helped Jamal's trio attract critical acclaim. Jamal subsequently recorded for Parrot (1953–55) and Epic (1955) using the piano-guitar-bass lineup.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: The trio's sound changed significantly when Crawford was replaced with drummer Vernel Fournier in 1957, and the group worked as the "House Trio" at Chicago's Pershing Hotel. The trio released the live album, "", which stayed on the Ten Best-selling charts for 108 weeks. Jamal's recording of the well known song "Poinciana" was first released on this album.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Perhaps Jamal's most famous recording, "", was recorded at the Pershing Hotel in Chicago in 1958; it brought him popularity in the late 1950s and into the 1960s jazz age. Jamal played the set with bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier. The set list expressed a diverse collection of tunes, including "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from the musical "Oklahoma!" and Jamal's arrangement of the jazz standard "Poinciana". Jazz musicians and listeners alike found inspiration in the "At the Pershing" recording, and Jamal's trio was recognized as an integral new building block in the history of jazz. Evident were his unusually minimalist style and his extended vamps, according to reviewer John Morthland. "If you're looking for an argument that pleasurable mainstream art can assume radical status at the same time, Jamal is your guide," said "The New York Times" contributor Ben Ratliff in a review of the album.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: After the recording of the best-selling album "But Not For Me", Jamal's music grew in popularity throughout the 1950s, and he attracted media coverage for his investment decisions pertaining to his "rising fortune". In 1959, he took a tour of North Africa to explore investment options in Africa. Jamal, who was twenty-nine at the time, said he had a curiosity about the homeland of his ancestors, highly influenced by his conversion to the Muslim faith. He also said his religion had brought him peace of mind about his race, which accounted for his "growth in the field of music that has proved very lucrative for me." Upon his return to the U.S. after a tour of North Africa, the financial success of "Live at the Pershing: But Not For Me" allowed Jamal to open a restaurant and club called The Alhambra in Chicago. In 1962, The Three Strings disbanded and Jamal moved to New York City, where, at the age of 32, he took a three-year hiatus from his musical career.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: In 1964, Jamal resumed touring and recording, this time with the bassist Jamil Nasser and recorded a new album, "Extensions", in 1965. Jamal and Nasser continued to play and record together from 1964 to 1972. He also joined forces with Fournier (again, but only for about a year) and drummer Frank Gant (1966–76), among others. Until 1970, he played acoustic piano exclusively. The final album on which he played acoustic piano in the regular sequence was "The Awakening". In the 1970s, he played electric piano as well; one such recording was an instrumental recording of "Suicide is Painless," the theme song from the 1970 film "MASH", which was released on a 1973 reissue of the film's soundtrack album, replacing the original vocal version of the song by The Mash. It was rumored that the Rhodes piano was a gift from someone in Switzerland. He continued to play throughout the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in trios with piano, bass and drums, but he occasionally expanded the group to include guitar. One of his most long-standing gigs was as the band for the New Year's Eve celebrations at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., from 1979 through the 1990s.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Clint Eastwood featured two recordings from Jamal's "But Not For Me" album — "Music, Music, Music" and "Poinciana" — in the 1995 movie "The Bridges of Madison County".


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: In his eighties, Jamal continued to make numerous tours and recordings, including albums such as "Saturday Morning" (2013), the CD/DVD release "Ahmad Jamal Featuring Yusef Lateef Live at L'Olympia" (2014), and "Marseille" (2017), which features vocals in French.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Trained in both traditional jazz ("American classical music", as he prefers to call it) and European classical style, Ahmad Jamal has been praised as one of the greatest jazz innovators over his exceptionally long career. Following bebop greats like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Jamal entered the world of jazz at a time when speed and virtuosic improvisation were central to the success of jazz musicians as artists. Jamal, however, took steps in the direction of a new movement, later coined "cool jazz" – an effort to move jazz in the direction of popular music. He emphasized space and time in his musical compositions and interpretations instead of focusing on the blinding speed of bebop.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Because of this style, Jamal was "often dismissed by jazz writers as no more than a cocktail pianist, a player so given to fluff that his work shouldn't be considered seriously in any artistic sense". Stanley Crouch, author of "Considering Genius", offers a very different reaction to Jamal's music, claiming that, like the highly influential Thelonious Monk, Jamal was a true innovator of the jazz tradition and is second in importance in the development of jazz after 1945 only to Parker. His unique musical style stemmed from many individual characteristics, including his use of orchestral effects and his ability to control the beat of songs. These stylistic choices resulted in a unique and new sound for the piano trio: "Through the use of space and changes of rhythm and tempo", writes Crouch, "Jamal invented a group sound that had all the surprise and dynamic variation of an imaginatively ordered big band." Jamal explored the texture of riffs, timbres, and phrases rather than the quantity or speed of notes in any given improvisation. Speaking about Jamal, A. B. Spellman of the National Endowment of the Arts said: "Nobody except Thelonious Monk used space better, and nobody ever applied the artistic device of tension and release better." These (at the time) unconventional techniques that Jamal gleaned from both traditional classical and contemporary jazz musicians helped pave the way for later jazz greats like Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Though Jamal is often overlooked by jazz critics and historians, he is frequently credited with having a great influence on Miles Davis. Davis is quoted as saying that he was impressed by Jamal's rhythmic sense and his "concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement". Jamal characterizes what he thought Davis admired about his music as: "my discipline as opposed to my space." Jamal and Davis became friends in the 1950s, and Davis continued to support Jamal as a fellow musician, often playing versions of Jamal's own songs ("Ahmad's Blues", "New Rhumba") until he died in 1991.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Jamal, speaking about his own work, says, "I like doing ballads. They're hard to play. It takes years of living, really, to read them properly." From an early age, Jamal developed an appreciation for the lyrics of the songs he learned: "I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad. All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, 'Why did you stop, Ben?' He said, 'I forgot the lyrics.'" Jamal attributes the variety in his musical taste to the fact that he grew up in several eras: the big band era, the bebop years, and the electronic age. He says his style evolved from drawing on the techniques and music produced in these three eras. In 1985, Jamal agreed to do an interview and recording session with his fellow jazz pianist, Marian McPartland on her NPR show "Piano Jazz". Jamal, who said he rarely plays "But Not For Me" due to its popularity since his 1958 recording, played an improvised version of the tune – though only after noting that he has moved on to making ninety percent of his repertoire his own compositions. He said that when he grew in popularity from the "Live at the Pershing" album, he was severely criticized afterwards for not playing any of his own compositions.


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: In more recent years, Jamal has embraced the electronic influences affecting the genre of jazz. He has also occasionally expanded his usual small ensemble of three to include a tenor saxophone (George Coleman) and a violin. A jazz fan interviewed by "Down Beat" magazine about Jamal in 2010 described his development as "more aggressive and improvisational these days. The word I used to use is avant garde; that might not be right. Whatever you call it, the way he plays is the essence of what jazz is."


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Saxophonist Ted Nash described his experience with Jamal's style in an interview with "Down Beat" magazine: "The way he comped wasn't the generic way that lots of pianists play with chords in the middle of the keyboard, just filling things up. He gave lots of single line responses. He'd come back and throw things out at you, directly from what you played. It was really interesting because it made you stop, and allowed him to respond, and then you felt like playing something else – that's something I don't feel with a lot of piano players. It's really quite engaging. I guess that's another reason people focus in on him. He makes them hone in [sic]."


title: Ahmad Jamal

text: Jamal has recorded with the voices of the Howard A. Roberts Chorale on "The Bright, the Blue and the Beautiful" and "Cry Young"; with vibraphonist Gary Burton on "In Concert"; with brass, reeds, and strings celebrating his hometown of "Pittsburgh"; with "The Assai Quartet"; and with saxophonist George Coleman on the album "The Essence".


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: The Man from Earth: Holocene is an American science fiction drama film directed by Richard Schenkman and written by Richard Schenkman and Emerson Bixby, based on characters created by Bixby's father, science fiction writer Jerome Bixby. It is a sequel to the film "The Man from Earth" (2007). David Lee Smith returns as the "John Oldman" character, the protagonist from the original film, although going by a different name. The marketing of the film was notable for leveraging a full spectrum of both conventional and "pirate" channels to maximize visibility and distribution.


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: The plot focuses on university professor John Oldman, now calling himself John Young, who is secretly a Cro-Magnon man (or Magdalenian caveman) who has survived for more than 14,000 years. However, despite all those years of immortality, John has found that he has begun to age and he no longer heals as quickly as he used to. Meanwhile, four of his students have begun to suspect the truth about him and contact Art Jenkins, whose career fell apart after publishing a book about John's story.


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: "People have been asking for this since the first movie became a viral phenomenon. Over the years, I've spent time developing this property with the ultimate goal of creating a long-form series. I've had a lot of help from a number of really talented people, and stunning support from fans all over the world. It's been a long road, but now that we're about to start shooting, I could not be more excited."


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: From 1 to 16 June 2016, principal photography for the film took place. Editing was completed on 21 September 2016. The producers have stated on Facebook that it could be the first in a series.


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: On 16 January 2018, the creators themselves uploaded this film to The Pirate Bay for completely legal download.


title: The Man from Earth: Holocene

text: Other partners have included MovieSaints.com (effective as of 19 January 2018), where fans were able pay to see the film but would receive a full refund if they did not enjoy it.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: Potassium sorbate is the potassium salt of sorbic acid, chemical formula CHCH=CH−CH=CH−COK. It is a white salt that is very soluble in water (58.2% at 20 °C). It is primarily used as a food preservative (E number 202). Potassium sorbate is effective in a variety of applications including food, wine, and personal-care products. While sorbic acid occurs naturally in rowan berries, virtually all of the world's supply of sorbic acid, from which potassium sorbate is derived, is manufactured synthetically.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: Potassium sorbate is produced industrially by neutralizing sorbic acid with potassium hydroxide. The precursor sorbic acid is produced in a two-step process via the condensation of crotonaldehyde and ketene.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: Potassium sorbate is used to inhibit molds and yeasts in many foods, such as cheese, wine, yogurt, dried meats, apple cider, dehydrated fruits, soft drinks and fruit drinks, and baked goods. It is used in the preparation of items such as hotcake syrup and milkshakes served by fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's. It can also be found in the ingredients list of many dried fruit products. In addition, herbal dietary supplement products generally contain potassium sorbate, which acts to prevent mold and microbes and to increase shelf life. It is used in quantities at which no adverse health effects are known, over short periods of time. Labeling of this preservative on ingredient statements reads as "potassium sorbate" or "E202". Also, it is used in many personal-care products to inhibit the development of microorganisms for shelf stability. Some manufacturers are using this preservative as a replacement for parabens. Tube feeding of potassium sorbate reduces the gastric burden of pathogenic bacteria.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: Also known as "wine stabilizer", potassium sorbate produces sorbic acid when added to wine. It serves two purposes. When active fermentation has ceased and the wine is racked for the final time after clearing, potassium sorbate renders any surviving yeast incapable of multiplying. Yeast living at that moment can continue fermenting any residual sugar into CO and alcohol, but when they die, no new yeast will be present to cause future fermentation. When a wine is sweetened before bottling, potassium sorbate is used to prevent refermentation when used in conjunction with potassium metabisulfite. It is primarily used with sweet wines, sparkling wines, and some hard ciders, but may be added to table wines, which exhibit difficulty in maintaining clarity after fining.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: Some molds (notably some "Trichoderma" and "Penicillium" strains) and yeasts are able to detoxify sorbates by decarboxylation, producing piperylene (1,3-pentadiene). The pentadiene manifests as a typical odor of kerosene or petroleum.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: In pure form, potassium sorbate is a skin, eye, and respiratory irritant. Concentrations up to 0.5% are not significant skin irritants.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: As a food additive, potassium sorbate is used as a preservative in concentrations of 0.025–0.100%, which in a 100 g serving yields an intake of 25–100 mg. In the United States, no more than 0.1% is allowed in fruit butters, jellies, preserves, and related products. Up to 0.4% has been studied in low-salt, naturally-fermented pickles, and when combined with calcium chloride, 0.2% made "good quality pickles." Potassium sorbate has about 74% of sorbic acid's anti-microbial activity. When calculated as sorbic acid, 0.3% is allowed in "cold pack cheese food." The upper pH limit for effectiveness is 6.5.


title: Potassium sorbate

text: The maximal acceptable daily intake for human consumption is 25 mg/kg, or 1750 mg daily for an average adult (70 kg). Under some conditions, particularly at high concentrations or when combined with nitrites, potassium sorbate has shown genotoxic activity in vitro.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: Joshua Ian Schwartz (born August 6, 1976) is an American screenwriter and television producer. Schwartz is best known for creating and executive producing the Fox teen drama series "The O.C." which ran for 4 seasons. Schwartz is also known for developing The CW's series "Gossip Girl" based on the book of the same name and for co-creating NBC's action-comedy-spy series, "Chuck".


title: Josh Schwartz

text: At 26, he became one of the youngest people in network history to create a series and run its day-to-day production when he ran "The O.C."


title: Josh Schwartz

text: Schwartz was born to a Jewish family in 1976 in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Steve and Honey Schwartz. His parents were both toy inventors at Hasbro, working on the development of toys such as Transformers and My Little Pony, until they went on to start their own company. Schwartz grew up on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island with a younger brother, Danny, and a younger sister, Katie. Schwartz always had ambitions of being a writer since early childhood.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: When Schwartz was seven years old, he won an essay-writing contest at sleep-away camp for a review of the recently released movie "Gremlins"; the opening line was "Spielberg has done it again" and stood out amongst the pile of essays from the other kids. He even had a subscription to the entertainment industry newspaper "Variety" at age twelve.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: He attended Providence's private Wheeler School, a coeducational independent day school, for 11 years, graduating with the class of 1994.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In 1995, Schwartz attended film school to study screen and television writing at the University of Southern California (USC). He became a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, as well as president of the chapter, and got to see what it's like "behind the gated communities and big mansions" of Southern California which would later provide fodder for his pilot "The O.C."


title: Josh Schwartz

text: While at USC, Schwartz tried out stand-up comedy at a talent show in front of five hundred people but was "disabused of [the] notion very quickly."


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In his sophomore year he wrote an autobiographical screenplay about his senior year in high school called "Providence" as a homework assignment for school. He entered his screenplay into a contest for the prestigious Nicholson Award in Screenwriting, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates, and won. Unfortunately, the prize was quickly revoked; to be eligible he had to be in his junior year at the time. Schwartz says "I dropped it in a box – I was a sophomore. And I got a call over the summer saying I'd won, and I'd won five thousand dollars. I was like, 'This is awesome!' Then they called back, like, the next day and said you had to be a junior to enter and not a sophomore, so they were rescinding it. I was pretty pissed." Nevertheless, with help from connections through his fraternity, he generated interest in Hollywood to buy his screenplay. In 1997, Sony's TriStar Pictures bought his first screenplay in a bidding war for a deal guaranteeing $550,000 and worth up to $1 million while he was still a junior in college. It was never made.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: Schwartz got an agent and subsequently wrote a TV pilot called "Brookfield" for ABC/Disney while he was still studying at USC. It was a boarding school drama about wealthy kids in New England and was his first TV pilot script; it sold only a few months after he had sold his first feature film script. "Brookfield" was produced starring Amy Smart and Eric Balfour but never aired. Schwartz then dropped out of USC to work full-time and wrote another pilot called "Wall to Wall Records", a drama about working in a music store for Warner Bros. TV that was also produced but never aired.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In 2003, Schwartz wrote a pilot called "The O.C." for Warner Bros. TV and Wonderland Sound and Vision which was produced with him as creator and executive producer. At 26 he was the youngest ever creator of a TV show, which did not sit well with Fox executives who sent a series of seasoned pros armed with conventional ideas about how to steer the show and a bitterness about sharing control with someone so young. That changed when Bob DeLaurentis signed on, a TV veteran who proved to be a nurturing presence on the show. Schwartz and Bob DeLaurentis collaborated on supervising and approving the editors' work on each episode in post-production.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: "The O.C." became an instant teen favorite when it debuted on the Fox Network in August 2003. The show popularized its setting, Orange County, and led to copycats like MTV's reality show "" and the Bravo documentary series "The Real Housewives of Orange County". The show became well known for its music, chosen by Schwartz according to his own musical tastes and designed to reflect who the characters were, bringing the general public an awareness of indie rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie, Bloc Party and Rooney. He has said that he partially based "The O.C." character Seth Cohen on his own Jewish upbringing. Schwartz was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for the pilot as well as a People's Choice Award. "The O.C." was named "Guilty Pleasure of the Year" by VH1. In 2007, after 4 seasons "The O.C." was canceled due to a significant ratings drop.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: Schwartz has stayed in touch with his alma maters: The Wheeler School and USC. In 2005, he endowed USC with its first television writing scholarship: The Josh Schwartz Scholarship. The scholarship is intended to be awarded annually to a student or students concentrating on writing for television and in need of financial assistance, who have completed a TV pilot script and first season synopsis. Although Schwartz never graduated from USC he has since worked with many USC alumni. In 2005 he gave a commencement speech to The Wheeler School.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: Schwartz has worked on his share of stalled projects. In 2004, he worked as a script doctor on the J. J. Abrams "Superman" screenplay that Warner Bros. eventually tossed. He sold a pilot to Fox called "Alphabet City", a drama about a New York tabloid but it was never produced. He also worked on a drama for Fox called "Athens" described as an "OC" companion but it was never produced.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In 2005, Paramount signed Schwartz to adapt and direct John Green's young adult novel "Looking for Alaska" with producer Mark Waters.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: It was revealed in late August 2006 that Schwartz would develop and executive produce a drama pilot for The CW, based on the popular book series "Gossip Girl" by Cecily von Ziegesar. Similar to "The O.C.", "Gossip Girl" is a satirical approach of teenagers in a wealthy upbringing. "Gossip Girl" has become a very popular show for The CW.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In 2007, Schwartz signed a three-year, seven-figure overall deal with Warner Bros. TV to write and exec produce with Chris Fedak an hourlong high-concept action comedy called "Chuck" for NBC about twenty-something spies and was described in press releases as "in the vein of "Grosse Pointe Blank"". The plot revolves around a normal guy who downloads the entire CIA and NSA databases into his head.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In May 2008, Schwartz joined Zak Penn's "" project. Schwartz announced that he will write the script for "X-Men: First Class", a prequel to the "X-Men" movies that focuses on the adventures of teen Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Professor X, Beast, Iceman, and Angel. However, his script was later jettisoned.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In Spring 2009, Schwartz launched "Rockville CA", a web-series on TheWB.com that follows young 20-somethings at a fictional rock club in Los Angeles. There are twenty indie band performances in the episodes, including Lykke Li, The Kooks and Kaiser Chiefs.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: It was also announced that Schwartz would write and direct "Bright Lights, Big City" for MGM, based on the iconic debut novel by Jay McInerney. Stephanie Savage was also announced as producer.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In February 2011, The CW ordered a pilot of his new project titled "Hart of Dixie". The show is co-produced with longtime creative partner Stephanie Savage and stars former "O.C." castmember and personal friend of Schwartz, Rachel Bilson. The show was picked up in May 2011 and premiered in fall 2011. At the same time, Schwartz has also been working on a "Georgetown" pilot for ABC However, ABC did not pick the series for its 2011 - 2012 schedule.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In September 2011, it was announced by The CW that Schwartz and Stephanie Savage had been selected to develop the television adaption of Candace Bushnell's "The Carrie Diaries", a prequel to the original "Sex and the City" television series. The series, set in the 1980s, will follow character Carrie Bradshaw during her years in high school.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: In January 2012, it was announced The CW had ordered a pilot for new drama titled "Cult", result of collaboration with Stephanie Savage and Len Goldstein. This is Schwartz and Savage's fourth series on the network.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: He also developed several adaptations of popular properties, such as "Runaways" for Marvel, a reboot of "Dynasty" and "Nancy Drew" for CW.


title: Josh Schwartz

text: On September 20, 2008, Schwartz married Jill Stonerock in Santa Barbara, California. Actress Rachel Bilson, who portrayed Summer Roberts on Schwartz's show "The O.C.", was the maid of honor at the wedding. They have two daughters, of whom Bilson is the godmother.


title: Tokugawa clan

text: The is a Japanese dynasty that was formerly a powerful "daimyō" family. They nominally descended from Emperor Seiwa (850–880) and were a branch of the Minamoto clan (Seiwa Genji) through the Matsudaira clan. The early history of this clan remains a mystery. Members of the clan ruled Japan as "shōguns" during the Edo Period from 1603 to 1867.


title: Tokugawa clan

text: Minamoto no Yoshishige (1135–1202), grandson of Minamoto no Yoshiie (1041–1108), was the first to take the name of Nitta. He sided with his cousin Minamoto no Yoritomo against the Taira clan (1180) and accompanied him to Kamakura. Nitta Yoshisue, 4th son of Yoshishige, settled at Tokugawa (Kozuke province) and took the name of that place. Their provincial history book did not mention Minamoto clan or Nitta clan.