title: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

text: On January 10, 2013, Sevier County Chancellor Telford Forgety ruled that the 2012 liquor-by-the-drink referendum would be invalidated due to its questionable results. The chancellor ordered that a new vote be held within 45 to 60 days.


title: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

text: On March 13, 2013, liquor-by-the drink passed in Pigeon Forge by a vote of 952 to 798. As a result, authorized businesses can now obtain on-premise consumption licenses to sell and dispense beverages with an alcohol content greater than 8%. This includes liquors as well as high-alcohol content beers and wines.


title: Paddlefish

text: Paddlefish (family Polyodontidae) are a family of ray-finned fish belonging to order Acipenseriformes, and one of two living groups of the order alongside sturgeons (Acipenseridae). They are distinguished from other fish by their titular elonglated rostrums, which are thought to enhance electroreception to detect prey. Paddlefish have been referred to as "primitive fish" because Acipenseriformes are amongst the earliest diverging lineages of ray-finned fish, having diverged from all other living groups over 300 million years ago. Paddlefish are almost exclusively North American and Chinese, both extant and in the fossil record.


title: Paddlefish

text: There are six known species: four extinct species known only from fossil remains (three from western North America, one from China), one extant species, the American paddlefish ("Polyodon spathula") which is native to the Mississippi River basin in the U.S., and the Chinese paddlefish ("Psephurus gladius"), declared extinct in 2022 following a 2019 recommendation that it be declared extinct. The species was last sighted in 2003 in the Yangtze River Basin in China. Chinese paddlefish are also commonly referred to as "Chinese swordfish", or "elephant fish". The earliest known species is "Protopsephurus" from the Early Cretaceous (Aptian) of China, dating to around 120 million years ago.


title: Paddlefish

text: Paddlefish populations have declined dramatically throughout their historic range as a result of overfishing, pollution, and the encroachment of human development, including the construction of dams that have blocked their seasonal upward migration to ancestral spawning grounds. Other detrimental effects include alterations of rivers which have changed natural flows resulting in the loss of spawning habitat and nursery areas.


title: Paddlefish

text: Paddlefish as a group are one of the few organisms that retain a notochord past the embryonic stage. Paddlefish have very few bones and their bodies mostly consist of cartilage with the notochord functioning as a soft spine. During the initial stages of development from embryo to fry, paddlefish have no rostrum (snout). It begins to form shortly after hatching. The rostrum of the Chinese paddlefish was narrow and sword-like whereas the rostrum of the American paddlefish is broad and paddle-like. Some common morphological characteristics of paddlefish include a spindle-shaped, smooth-skinned scaleless body, heterocercal tail, and small poorly developed eyes. Unlike the filter-feeding American paddlefish, Chinese paddlefish were piscivores, and highly predatory. Their jaws were more forward pointing which suggested they foraged primarily on small fishes in the water column, and occasionally on shrimp, benthic fishes, and crabs. The jaws of the American paddlefish are distinctly adapted for filter feeding only. They are ram suspension filter feeders with a diet that consists primarily of zooplankton, and occasionally small insects, insect larvae, and small fish.


title: Paddlefish

text: The largest Chinese paddlefish on record measured in length, and was estimated to weigh a few thousand pounds. They commonly reached and . Although the American paddlefish is one of the largest freshwater fishes in North America, their recorded lengths and weights fall short in comparison to the larger Chinese paddlefish. American paddlefish commonly reach or more in length and can weigh more than . The largest American paddlefish on record was caught in 1916 in Okoboji Lake, Iowa. The fish was taken with a spear, and measured long and in the girth. A report published by J.R. Harlan and E.B. Speaker in "Iowa Fish and Fishing" (1969) said the fish weighed over . The world record paddlefish caught on rod and reel weighed and was long. The fish was caught by Clinton Boldridge in a 5-acre pond in Atchison County, Kansas on May 5, 2004. However, the record would be broken an additional two times in 2020. On June 28, 2020, an Oklahoma man caught a 146-pounder in Keystone Lake, west of Tulsa. Later on July 23, 2020, the record was broken again when another Oklahoma man caught a 151-pound, nearly 6-foot long Paddlefish in the same lake.


title: Paddlefish

text: Scientists once believed paddlefish used their rostrums to excavate bottom substrate, but have since determined with the aid of electron microscopy that paddlefish rostrums are covered in electroreceptors called ampullae. These ampullae are densely packed within star-shaped bone projections that branch out from the rostrum. The electroreceptors can detect weak electrical fields which not only signal the presence of prey items in the water column, such as zooplankton which is the primary diet of the American paddlefish, but they can also detect the individual feeding and swimming movements of zooplankton's appendages. Paddlefish have poorly developed eyes, and rely on their electroreceptors for foraging. However, the rostrum is not the paddlefish's sole means of food detection. Some reports incorrectly suggest that a damaged rostrum would render paddlefish less capable of foraging efficiently to maintain good health. Laboratory experiments, and field research indicate otherwise. In addition to electroreceptors on the rostrum, paddlefish also have sensory pores covering nearly half of the skin surface extending from the rostrum to the top of the head down to the tips of the operculum (gill flaps). Therefore, paddlefish with damaged or abbreviated rostrums are still able to forage and maintain good health.


title: Paddlefish

text: Over the past half century, paddlefish populations have been on the decline. Attributable causes are overfishing, pollution, and the encroachment of human development, including the construction of dams which block their seasonal upward migration to ancestral spawning grounds. Other detrimental effects include alterations of rivers which have changed the natural flow, and resulted in the loss of spawning habitat and nursery areas. American paddlefish have been extirpated from much of their Northern peripheral range, including the Great Lakes and Canada, New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. There is growing concern about their populations in other states.


title: Paddlefish

text: The Chinese paddlefish was considered anadromous with upstream migration, however little is known about their migration habits and population structure. They were endemic to the Yangtze River Basin in China where they lived primarily in the broad surfaced main stem rivers and shoal zones along the East China Sea. Research suggests they preferred to navigate the middle and lower layers of the water column, and occasionally swam into large lakes. There have been no sightings of Chinese paddlefish since 2003, and were declared extinct in 2019. Past attempts of artificial propagation for restoration purposes failed because of difficulties encountered in keeping captive fish alive.


title: Paddlefish

text: American paddlefish are native to the Mississippi River basin from New York to Montana and south to the Gulf of Mexico. They have been found in several Gulf Slope drainages in medium to large rivers with long, deep sluggish pools, as well as in backwater lakes and bayous. In Texas, paddlefish occurred historically in the Angelina River, Big Cypress Bayou, Neches River, Red River tributaries, Sabine River, San Jacinto River, Sulphur River, and Trinity River. Their historical range also included occurrences in Canada in Lake Huron and Lake Helen, and in 26–27 states in the United States. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources listed the paddlefish as extirpated from Ontario, Canada under their Endangered Species Act. The IUCN Red List lists the Canadian populations of paddlefish as extirpated, noting there have been no Canadian records since the early 1900s and distribution in Canada was highly peripheral. As a species, the American paddlefish is classified as vulnerable (VU) on the IUCN Red List, and its international trade has been restricted since June 1992 under Appendix II of the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, or CITES.


title: Paddlefish

text: Paddlefish are long-lived, and sexually late maturing. Females do not begin spawning until they are six to twelve years old, some even as late as sixteen to eighteen years old. Males begin spawning around age four to seven, some as late as nine or ten years of age. Paddlefish spawn in late spring provided the proper combination of events occur, including water flow, temperature, photoperiod, and availability of gravel substrates suitable for spawning. If all the conditions are not met, paddlefish will not spawn. Research suggests females do not spawn every year, rather they spawn every second or third year while males spawn more frequently, typically every year or every other year.


title: Paddlefish

text: Paddlefish migrate upstream to spawn, and prefer silt-free gravel bars that would otherwise be exposed to air, or covered by very shallow water were it not for the rises in the river from snow melt and annual spring rains that cause flooding. They are broadcast spawners, also referred to as mass spawners or synchronous spawners. Gravid females release their eggs into the water over bare rocks or gravel at the same time males release their sperm. Fertilization occurs externally. The eggs are adhesive and stick to the rocky substrate. The young are swept downstream after hatching and grow to adulthood in deep freshwater pools.


title: Paddlefish

text: The advancements in biotechnology in paddlefish propagation and rearing of captive stock indicate significant improvements in reproduction success, adaptation and survival rates of paddlefish cultured for broodstock development and stock rehabilitation. Such improvements have led to successful practices in reservoir ranching and pond rearing, creating an increasing interest in the global market for paddlefish polyculture.


title: Paddlefish

text: In a cooperative scientific effort in the early 1970s between the US Fish & Wildlife Service and its former USSR counterpart, American paddlefish were imported into the former USSR for aquaculture, beginning with five-thousand hatched larvae from Missouri hatcheries in the United States. They were introduced into several rivers in Europe and Asia, and provided the first broodstock that were successfully reproduced in 1984–1986 in Russia. Paddlefish are now being raised in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the Plovdiv and Vidin regions in Bulgaria. Reproduction was successful in 1988 and 1989, and resulted in the exportation of juvenile paddlefish to Romania and Hungary. In May 2006, specimens of different sizes and weights were caught by professional fisherman near Prahovo in the Serbian part of the Danube River.


title: Paddlefish

text: In 1988, fertilized paddlefish eggs and larvae from Missouri hatcheries were first introduced into China. Since that time, China imports approximately 4.5 million fertilized eggs and larvae every year from hatcheries in Russia, and the United States. Some of the paddlefish are polycultured in carp ponds, and sold to restaurants while others are cultured for brood stock and caviar production. China has also exported paddlefish to Cuba, where they are farmed for caviar production.


title: Paddlefish

text: There is one currently extant genus in this family, one recently extinct and three extinct genera known exclusively from fossils:


title: Henry Moseley

text: Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. This remains the accepted model today.


title: Henry Moseley

text: When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Army. Moseley was assigned to the force of British Empire soldiers that invaded the region of Gallipoli, Turkey, in April 1915, as a telecommunications officer. Moseley was shot and killed during the Battle of Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Henry G. J. Moseley, known to his friends as Harry, was born in Weymouth in Dorset in 1887. His father Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844–1891), who died when Moseley was quite young, was a biologist and also a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford, who had been a member of the "Challenger" Expedition. Moseley's mother was Amabel Gwyn Jeffreys, the daughter of the Welsh biologist and conchologist John Gwyn Jeffreys. She was also the British women's champion of chess in 1913.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Moseley had been a very promising schoolboy at Summer Fields School (where one of the four "leagues" is named after him), and he was awarded a King's scholarship to attend Eton College. In 1906 he won the chemistry and physics prizes at Eton. In 1906, Moseley entered Trinity College of the University of Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree. While an undergraduate at Oxford, Moseley joined the Apollo University Lodge. Immediately after graduation from Oxford in 1910, Moseley became a demonstrator in physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford. During Moseley's first year at Manchester, he had a teaching load as a graduate teaching assistant, but following that first year, he was reassigned from his teaching duties to work as a graduate research assistant. He declined a fellowship offered by Rutherford, preferring to move back to Oxford, in November 1913, where he was given laboratory facilities but no support.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Experimenting with the energy of beta particles in 1912, Moseley showed that high potentials were attainable from a radioactive source of radium, thereby inventing the first atomic battery, though he was unable to produce the 1MeV necessary to stop the particles.


title: Henry Moseley

text: In 1913, Moseley observed and measured the X-ray spectra of various chemical elements (mostly metals) that were found by the method of diffraction through crystals. This was a pioneering use of the method of X-ray spectroscopy in physics, using Bragg's diffraction law to determine the X-ray wavelengths. Moseley discovered a systematic mathematical relationship between the wavelengths of the X-rays produced and the atomic numbers of the metals that were used as the targets in X-ray tubes. This has become known as Moseley's law.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Before Moseley's discovery, the atomic numbers (or elemental number) of an element had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary sequential number, based on the sequence of atomic masses, but modified somewhat where chemists found this modification to be desirable, such as by the Russian chemist, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In his invention of the Periodic Table of the Elements, Mendeleev had interchanged the orders of a few pairs of elements in order to put them in more appropriate places in this table of the elements. For example, the metals cobalt and nickel had been assigned the atomic numbers 27 and 28, respectively, based on their known chemical and physical properties, even though they have nearly the same atomic masses. In fact, the atomic mass of cobalt is slightly larger than that of nickel, which would have placed them in backwards order if they had been placed in the Periodic Table blindly according to atomic mass. Moseley's experiments in X-ray spectroscopy showed directly from their physics that cobalt and nickel have the different atomic numbers, 27 and 28, and that they are placed in the Periodic Table correctly by Moseley's objective measurements of their atomic numbers. Hence, Moseley's discovery demonstrated that the atomic numbers of elements are not just rather arbitrary numbers based on chemistry and the intuition of chemists, but rather, they have a firm experimental basis from the physics of their X-ray spectra.


title: Henry Moseley

text: In addition, Moseley showed that there were gaps in the atomic number sequence at numbers 43, 61, 72, and 75. These spaces are now known, respectively, to be the places of the radioactive synthetic elements technetium and promethium, and also the last two quite rare naturally occurring stable elements hafnium (discovered 1923) and rhenium (discovered 1925). Nothing was known about these four elements in Moseley's lifetime, not even their very existence. Based on the intuition of a very experienced chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted the existence of a missing element in the Periodic Table, which was later found to be filled by technetium, and Bohuslav Brauner had predicted the existence of another missing element in this Table, which was later found to be filled by promethium. Henry Moseley's experiments confirmed these predictions, by showing exactly what the missing atomic numbers were, 43 and 61. In addition, Moseley predicted the existence of two more undiscovered elements, those with the atomic numbers 72 and 75, and gave very strong evidence that there were no other gaps in the Periodic Table between the elements aluminium (atomic number 13) and gold (atomic number 79).


title: Henry Moseley

text: This latter question about the possibility of more undiscovered ("missing") elements had been a standing problem among the chemists of the world, particularly given the existence of the large family of the lanthanide series of rare earth elements. Moseley was able to demonstrate that these lanthanide elements, i.e. lanthanum through lutetium, must have exactly 15 members – no more and no less. The number of elements in the lanthanides had been a question that was very far from being settled by the chemists of the early 20th Century. They could not yet produce pure samples of all the rare-earth elements, even in the form of their salts, and in some cases they were unable to distinguish between mixtures of two very similar (adjacent) rare-earth elements from the nearby pure metals in the Periodic Table. For example, there was a so-called "element" that was even given the chemical name of "didymium". "Didymium" was found some years later to be simply a mixture of two genuine rare-earth elements, and these were given the names neodymium and praseodymium, meaning "new twin" and "green twin". Also, the method of separating the rare-earth elements by the method of ion exchange had not been invented yet in Moseley's time.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Moseley's method in early X-ray spectroscopy was able to sort out the above chemical problems promptly, some of which had occupied chemists for a number of years. Moseley also predicted the existence of element 61, a lanthanide whose existence was previously unsuspected. Quite a few years later, this element 61 was created artificially in nuclear reactors and was named promethium.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Before Moseley and his law, atomic numbers had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary ordering number, vaguely increasing with atomic weight but not strictly defined by it. Moseley's discovery showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrarily assigned, but rather, they have a definite physical basis. Moseley postulated that each successive element has a nuclear charge exactly one unit greater than its predecessor. Moseley redefined the idea of atomic numbers from its previous status as an "ad hoc" numerical tag to help sorting the elements into an exact sequence of ascending atomic numbers that made the Periodic Table exact. (This was later to be the basis of the Aufbau principle in atomic studies.) As noted by Bohr, Moseley's law provided a reasonably complete experimental set of data that supported the (new from 1911) conception by Ernest Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek of the atom, with a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons in which the atomic number is understood to be the exact physical number of positive charges (later discovered and called protons) in the central atomic nuclei of the elements. Moseley mentioned the two scientists above in his research paper, but he did not actually mention Bohr, who was rather new on the scene then. Simple modifications of Rydberg's and Bohr's formulas were found to give a theoretical justification for Moseley's empirically derived law for determining atomic numbers.


title: Henry Moseley

text: X-ray spectrometers are the foundation-stones of X-ray crystallography. The X-ray spectrometers as Moseley knew them worked as follows. A glass-bulb electron tube was used, similar to that held by Moseley in the photo here. Inside the evacuated tube, electrons were fired at a metallic substance (i.e. a sample of pure element in Moseley's work), causing the ionization of electrons from the inner electron shells of the element. The rebound of electrons into these holes in the inner shells next causes the emission of X-ray photons that were led out of the tube in a semi-beam, through an opening in the external X-ray shielding. These are next diffracted by a standardized salt crystal, with angular results read out as photographic lines by the exposure of an X-ray film fixed at the outside the vacuum tube at a known distance. Application of Bragg's law (after some initial guesswork of the mean distances between atoms in the metallic crystal, based on its density) next allowed the wavelength of the emitted X-rays to be calculated.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Moseley participated in the design and development of early X-ray spectrometry equipment, learning some techniques from William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg at the University of Leeds, and developing others himself. Many of the techniques of X-ray spectroscopy were inspired by the methods that are used with visible light spectroscopes and spectrograms, by substituting crystals, ionization chambers, and photographic plates for their analogs in light spectroscopy. In some cases, Moseley found it necessary to modify his equipment to detect particularly soft (lower frequency) X-rays that could not penetrate either air or paper, by working with his instruments in a vacuum chamber.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Sometime in the first half of 1914, Moseley resigned from his position at Manchester, with plans to return to Oxford and continue his physics research there. However, World War I broke out in August 1914, and Moseley turned down this job offer to instead enlist with the Royal Engineers of the British Army. His family and friends tried to persuade him not to join, but he thought it was his duty. Moseley served as a technical officer in communications during the Battle of Gallipoli, in Turkey, beginning in April 1915, where he was killed by a sniper on 10 August 1915.


title: Henry Moseley

text: Only twenty-seven years old at the time of his death, Moseley could, in the opinion of some scientists, have contributed much to the knowledge of atomic structure had he survived. Niels Bohr said in 1962 that Rutherford's work "was not taken seriously at all" and that the "great change came from Moseley."


title: Henry Moseley

text: Robert Millikan wrote, "In a research which is destined to rank as one of the dozen most brilliant in conception, skillful in execution, and illuminating in results in the history of science, a young man twenty-six years old threw open the windows through which we can glimpse the sub-atomic world with a definiteness and certainty never dreamed of before. Had the European War had no other result than the snuffing out of this young life, that alone would make it one of the most hideous and most irreparable crimes in history."


title: Henry Moseley

text: George Sarton wrote, "His fame was already established on such a secure foundation that his memory will be green forever. He is one of the immortals of science, and though he would have made many other additions to our knowledge if his life had been spared, the contributions already credited to him were of such fundamental significance, that the probability of his surpassing himself was extremely small. It is very probable that however long his life, he would have been chiefly remembered because of the 'Moseley law' which he published at the age of twenty-six."


title: Henry Moseley

text: Isaac Asimov wrote, "In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished … his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally."


title: Henry Moseley

text: Rutherford believed that Mosely's work would have earned him the Nobel Prize (which however is never awarded posthumously).


title: Henry Moseley

text: Memorial plaques to Moseley were installed at Manchester and Eton, and a Royal Society scholarship, established by his will, had as its second recipient the physicist P. M. S. Blackett, who later became president of the Society.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Late Devonian extinction consisted of several extinction events in the Late Devonian Epoch, which collectively represent one of the five largest mass extinction events in the history of life on Earth. The term primarily refers to a major extinction, the Kellwasser event (also known as the Frasnian-Famennian extinction), which occurred around 372 million years ago, at the boundary between the Frasnian stage and the Famennian stage, the last stage in the Devonian Period. Overall, 19% of all families and 50% of all genera became extinct. A second mass extinction, the Hangenberg event (also known as the end-Devonian extinction), occurred 359 million years ago, bringing an end to the Famennian and Devonian, as the world transitioned into the Carboniferous Period.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Although it is well established that there was a massive loss of biodiversity in the Late Devonian, the timespan of this event is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 25 million years, extending from the mid-Givetian to the end-Famennian. Some consider the extinction to be as many as seven distinct events, spread over about 25 million years, with notable extinctions at the ends of the Givetian, Frasnian, and Famennian stages.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: By the Late Devonian, the land had been colonized by plants and insects. In the oceans, massive reefs were built by corals and stromatoporoids. Euramerica and Gondwana were beginning to converge into what would become Pangaea. The extinction seems to have only affected marine life. Hard-hit groups include brachiopods, trilobites, and reef-building organisms; the latter almost completely disappeared. The causes of these extinctions are unclear. Leading hypotheses include changes in sea level and ocean anoxia, possibly triggered by global cooling or oceanic volcanism. The impact of a comet or another extraterrestrial body has also been suggested, such as the Siljan Ring event in Sweden. Some statistical analysis suggests that the decrease in diversity was caused more by a decrease in speciation than by an increase in extinctions. This might have been caused by invasions of cosmopolitan species, rather than by any single event. Placoderms were hit hard by the Kellwasser event and completely died out in the Hangenberg event, but most other jawed vertebrates were less strongly impacted. Agnathans (jawless fish) were in decline long before the end of the Frasnian and were nearly wiped out by the extinctions.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The extinction events were accompanied by widespread oceanic anoxia; that is, a lack of oxygen, prohibiting decay and allowing the preservation of organic matter. This, combined with the ability of porous reef rocks to hold oil, has led to Devonian rocks being an important source of oil, especially in the United States.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: During the Late Devonian, the continents were arranged differently from today, with a supercontinent, Gondwana, covering much of the Southern Hemisphere. The continent of Siberia occupied the Northern Hemisphere, while an equatorial continent, Laurussia (formed by the collision of Baltica and Laurentia), was drifting towards Gondwana, closing the Rheic Ocean. The Caledonian mountains were also growing across what is now the Scottish Highlands and Scandinavia, while the Appalachians rose over America.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The biota was also very different. Plants, which had been on land in forms similar to mosses and liverworts since the Ordovician, had just developed roots, seeds, and water transport systems that allowed them to survive away from places that were constantly wet—and so grew huge forests on the highlands. Several clades had developed a shrubby or tree-like habitat by the Late Givetian, including the cladoxylalean ferns, lepidosigillarioid lycopsids, and aneurophyte and archaeopterid progymnosperms. Fish were also undergoing a huge radiation, and tetrapodomorphs, such as the Frasnian-age "Tiktaalik", were beginning to evolve leg-like structures.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Kellwasser event and most other Later Devonian pulses primarily affected the marine community, and had a greater effect on shallow warm-water organisms than on cool-water organisms. The Kellwasser event's effects were also stronger at low latitudes than high ones.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The most hard-hit biological category affected by the Kellwasser event were the calcite-based reef-builders of the great Devonian reef-systems, including the stromatoporoid sponges and the rugose and tabulate corals. After the Kellwasser event, reefs of the Famennian were primarily dominated by siliceous sponges and calcifying bacteria, producing structures such as oncolites and stromatolites. The collapse of the reef system was so stark that it would take until the Mesozoic for reefs to recover their Middle Devonian extent. Mesozoic and modern reefs are based on scleractinian ("stony") corals, which would not evolve until the Triassic period. Devonian reef-builders are entirely extinct in the modern day: Stromatoporoids died out in the end-Devonian Hangenberg event, while rugose and tabulate corals went extinct at the Permian-Triassic extinction.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Further taxa to be starkly affected include the brachiopods, trilobites, ammonites, conodonts, acritarch and graptolites. Cystoids disappeared during this event. The surviving taxa show morphological trends through the event. Trilobites evolved smaller eyes in the run-up to the Kellwasser event, with eye size increasing again afterwards. This suggests vision was less important around the event, perhaps due to increasing water depth or turbidity. The brims of trilobites (i.e. the rims of their heads) also expanded across this period. The brims are thought to have served a respiratory purpose, and the increasing anoxia of waters led to an increase in their brim area in response. The shape of conodonts' feeding apparatus varied with the oxygen isotope ratio, and thus with the sea water temperature; this may relate to their occupying different trophic levels as nutrient input changed. As with most extinction events, specialist taxa occupying small niches were harder hit than generalists.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Vertebrates were not strongly-affected by the Kellwasser event, but still experienced some diversity loss. Around half of placoderm families died out, primarily species-poor bottom-feeding groups. More diverse placoderm families survived the event only to succumb in the Hangenberg event at the end of the Devonian. Most lingering agnathan (jawless fish) groups, such as osteostracans, galeaspids, and heterostracans, also went extinct by the end of the Frasnian. The jawless thelodonts only barely survived, succumbing early in the Famennian. Among freshwater and shallow marine tetrapodomorph fish, the tetrapod-like elpistostegalians (such as "Tiktaalik") disappeared at the Frasnian-Famennian boundary. True tetrapods (defined as four-limbed vertebrates with digits) apparently survived, though their fossils are rare until the mid-to-late Famennian.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Hangenberg event was much more impactful on vertebrate evolution, affecting both marine and freshwater communities. It is linked to the extinction of 44% of high-level vertebrate clades, including all placoderms and most sarcopterygians, and the complete turnover of the vertebrate biota. Over 96% of vertebrate species disappeared, with only smaller forms surviving. After the event only sharks less than a meter and most fishes and tetrapods less than 10 centimeters remained, and it would take 40 million years before they started to increase in size again. This led to the establishment of the modern vertebrate fauna in the Carboniferous, consisting mostly of actinopterygians, chondrichthyans, and tetrapods. Romer's gap, a 15 million-year hiatus in the early Carboniferous tetrapod record, has been linked to this event. Also, the poor Famennian record for marine vertebrates suggests that some of the losses attributed to the Kellwasser event likely actually occurred during the Hangenberg extinction.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The late Devonian crash in biodiversity was more drastic than the familiar extinction event that closed the Cretaceous. A recent survey (McGhee 1996) estimates that 22% of all the 'families' of marine animals (largely invertebrates) were eliminated. The family is a great unit, and to lose so many signifies a deep loss of ecosystem diversity. On a smaller scale, 57% of genera and at least 75% of species did not survive into the Carboniferous. These latter estimates need to be treated with a degree of caution, as the estimates of species loss depend on surveys of Devonian marine taxa that are perhaps not well enough known to assess their true rate of losses, so it is difficult to estimate the effects of differential preservation and sampling biases during the Devonian.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Extinction rates appear to have been higher than the background rate, for an extended interval covering the last 20–25 million years of the Devonian. During this time, about eight to ten distinct events can be seen, of which two stand out as particularly severe. The Kellwasser event was preceded by a longer period of prolonged biodiversity loss. The fossil record of the first 15 million years of the Carboniferous period which followed is largely void of terrestrial animal fossils, likely related to losses during the end-Devonian Hangenberg event. This period is known as Romer's gap.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Kellwasser event, named for its type locality, the Kellwassertal in Lower Saxony, Germany, is the term given to the extinction pulse that occurred near the Frasnian–Famennian boundary (372.2 ± 1.6 Ma). Most references to the "Late Devonian extinction" are in fact referring to the Kellwasser, which was the first event to be detected based on marine invertebrate record. There may in fact have been two closely spaced events here, as shown by the presence of two distinct anoxic shale layers.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Hangenberg event occurred at or shortly before the Devonian–Carboniferous boundary (358.9 ± 0.4 Ma) and marks the last spike in the period of extinction. It is marked by an anoxic black shale layer and an overlying sandstone deposit. Unlike the Kellwasser event, the Hangenberg event affected both marine and terrestrial habitats.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Since the Kellwasser-related extinctions occurred over such a long time, it is difficult to assign a single cause, and indeed to separate cause from effect. The sedimentary record shows that the late Devonian was a time of environmental change, which directly affected organisms and caused extinction. What caused these changes is somewhat more open to debate.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: From the end of the Middle Devonian (382.7 ± 1.6 Ma), into the Late Devonian (382.7 ± 1.6-358.9 ± 0.4 Ma), several environmental changes can be detected from the sedimentary record. Evidence exists of widespread anoxia in oceanic bottom waters; the rate of carbon burial shot up, and benthic organisms were devastated, especially in the tropics, and especially reef communities. Good evidence has been found for high-frequency sea-level changes around the Frasnian–Famennian Kellwasser event, with one sea-level rise associated with the onset of anoxic deposits. The Hangenberg event has been associated with sea-level rise followed swiftly by glaciation-related sea-level fall.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: During the Devonian, land plants underwent a hugely significant phase of evolution. Their maximum height went from 30 cm at the start of the Devonian, to archaeopterids, at the end of the period. This increase in height was made possible by the evolution of advanced vascular systems, which permitted the growth of complex branching and rooting systems. In conjunction with this, the evolution of seeds permitted reproduction and dispersal in areas which were not waterlogged, allowing plants to colonise previously inhospitable inland and upland areas. The two factors combined to greatly magnify the role of plants on the global scale. In particular, "Archaeopteris" forests expanded rapidly during the closing stages of the Devonian.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: These tall trees required deep rooting systems to acquire water and nutrients, and provide anchorage. These systems broke up the upper layers of bedrock and stabilized a deep layer of soil, which would have been of the order of metres thick. In contrast, early Devonian plants bore only rhizoids and rhizomes that could penetrate no more than a few centimeters. The mobilization of a large portion of soil had a huge effect: soil promotes weathering, the chemical breakdown of rocks, releasing ions which are nutrients for plants and algae. The relatively sudden input of nutrients into river water may have caused eutrophication and subsequent anoxia. For example, during an algal bloom, organic material formed at the surface can sink at such a rate that decomposing organisms use up all available oxygen by decaying them, creating anoxic conditions and suffocating bottom-dwelling fish. The fossil reefs of the Frasnian were dominated by stromatoporoids and (to a lesser degree) corals—organisms which only thrive in low-nutrient conditions. Therefore, the postulated influx of high levels of nutrients may have caused an extinction. Anoxic conditions correlate better with biotic crises than phases of cooling, suggesting anoxia may have played the dominant role in extinction.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The "greening" of the continents occurred during the Devonian. The covering of the planet's continents with massive photosynthesizing land plants in the first forests may have reduced CO levels in the atmosphere. Since is a greenhouse gas, reduced levels might have helped produce a chillier climate. Evidence such as glacial deposits in northern Brazil (near the Devonian South Pole) suggests widespread glaciation at the end of the Devonian, as a broad continental mass covered the polar region. A cause of the extinctions may have been an episode of global cooling, following the mild climate of the Devonian period. The Hangenberg event has also been linked to glaciation in the tropics equivalent to that of the Pleistocene ice age.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The weathering of silicate rocks also draws down CO from the atmosphere. This acted together with the burial of organic matter to decrease atmospheric CO concentrations from about 15 to three times present levels. Carbon in the form of plant matter would be produced on prodigious scales, and given the right conditions, could be stored and buried, eventually producing vast coal measures (e.g. in China) which locked the carbon out of the atmosphere and into the lithosphere. This reduction in atmospheric would have caused global cooling and resulted in at least one period of late Devonian glaciation (and subsequent sea level fall), probably fluctuating in intensity alongside the 40ka Milankovic cycle. The continued drawdown of organic carbon eventually pulled the Earth out of its Greenhouse Earth state into the Icehouse that continued throughout the Carboniferous and Permian.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Magmatism was suggested as a cause of the Late Devonian extinction in 2002. The end of the Devonian Period had extremely widespread trap magmatism and rifting in the Russian and Siberian platforms, which were situated above the hot mantle plumes and suggested as a cause of the Frasnian / Famennian and end-Devonian extinctions. The Viluy and Pripyat-Dnieper-Donets large igneous provinces were suggested to correlate with the Frasnian / Famennian extinction and the Kola and Timan-Pechora magmatism was suggested to correspond to the end Devonian-Carboniferous extinction.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Most recently, scientists have confirmed a correlation between Viluy traps (in the Vilyuysk region) on the Siberian Craton and the Kellwasser extinction by Ar/Ar dating.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: The Viluy Large igneous province covers most of the present day north-eastern margin of the Siberian Platform. The triple-junction rift system was formed during the Devonian Period; the Viluy rift is the western remaining branch of the system and two other branches form the modern margin of the Siberian Platform. Volcanic rocks are covered with post Late Devonian–Early Carboniferous sediments.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Volcanic rocks, dyke belts, and sills that cover more than 320,000 km, and a gigantic amount of magmatic material (more than 1 million km) formed in the Viluy branch.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Ages show that the two volcanic phase hypotheses are well supported and the weighted mean ages of each volcanic phase are and  Ma, or and  Ma, which the first volcanic phase is in agreement with the age of  Ma proposed for the Kellwasser event. However, the second volcanic phase is slightly older than Hangenberg event which place at  Ma. Viluy magmatism may have injected enough and into the atmosphere to have generated a destabilised greenhouse and ecosystem, causing rapid global cooling, sea-level falls and marine anoxia occur during Kellwasser black shale deposition.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Another overlooked contributor could be the now extinct Cerberean Caldera which was active in the Late Devonian period and thought to have undergone a supereruption approximately 374 million years ago. Remains of this caldera can be found in the modern day state of Victoria, Australia.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Other mechanisms put forward to explain the extinctions include tectonic-driven climate change, sea-level change, and oceanic overturning. These have all been discounted because they are unable to explain the duration, selectivity, and periodicity of the extinctions.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: Bolide impacts can be dramatic triggers of mass extinctions. An asteroid impact was proposed as the prime cause of this faunal turnover. The impact that created the Siljan Ring either was just before the Kellwasser event or coincided with it. Most impact craters, such as the Kellwasser-aged Alamo and the Hangenberg-aged Woodleigh, cannot generally be dated with sufficient precision to link them to the event; others dated precisely are not contemporaneous with the extinction. Although some minor features of meteoric impact have been observed in places (iridium anomalies and microspherules), these were probably caused by other factors.


title: Late Devonian extinction

text: A more recent explanation suggests that a nearby supernova explosion was the cause for the specific Hangenberg event, which marks the boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, or even for a sequence of events covering several millions of years towards the end of the Devonian period. This could offer a possible explanation for the dramatic drop in atmospheric ozone that could have permitted massive ultraviolet damage to the genetic material of lifeforms, triggering a mass extinction. Recent research offers evidence of ultraviolet damage to pollen and spores over many thousands of years during this event as observed in the fossil record and that, in turn, points to a possible long-term destruction of the ozone layer. A supernova explosion is an alternative explanation to global temperature rise, that could account for the drop in atmospheric ozone. Detecting either of the long-lived, extra-terrestrial radioisotopes Sm or Pu in one or more end-Devonian extinction strata would confirm a supernova origin. However, there is currently no direct evidence for this hypothesis.


title: Great grey owl

text: The great grey owl (Strix nebulosa) (also great gray owl in American English) is a very large owl, documented as the world's largest species of owl by length. It is distributed across the Northern Hemisphere, and it is the only species in the genus "Strix" found in both Eastern and Western Hemispheres. In some areas it is also called Phantom of the North, cinereous owl, spectral owl, Lapland owl, spruce owl, bearded owl, and sooty owl.


title: Great grey owl

text: Adults have a large rounded head with a grey face and yellow eyes with darker circles around them. The underparts are light with dark streaks; the upper parts are grey with pale bars. This owl does not have ear tufts and has the largest facial disc of any raptor. There is a white collar or "bow tie" just below the beak. The long tail tapers to a rounded end.


title: Great grey owl

text: In terms of length, the great grey owl is believed to exceed the Eurasian eagle-owl and the Blakiston's fish owl as the world's largest owl. The great grey is outweighed by those two species as well as several others, including most of the genus "Bubo". Much of its size is deceptive, since this species' fluffy feathers, large head and the longest tail of any extant owl obscure a body lighter than that of most other large owls. The length ranges from , averaging for females and for males. The wingspan can exceed , but averages for females and for males. The adult weight ranges from , averaging for females and for males. The males are usually smaller than females, as with most owl species.


title: Great grey owl

text: The call of the adult is a series of very deep, rhythmic 'who's, which is usually given in correlation to their territories or in interactions with their offspring. At other times, adults are normally silent. The young may chatter, shriek, or hiss. Tame owls may produce higher-pitched hoots when given food by humans.


title: Great grey owl

text: In northern areas their breeding habitat is often the dense coniferous forests of the taiga, near open areas, such as meadows or bogs. In Oregon and California this owl has been found nesting in mixed oak woodlands. Once believed to require a cold climate, it is now known that this bird survives in a few areas where summer temperatures exceed .


title: Great grey owl

text: They breed in North America from as far east as Quebec to the Pacific coast and Alaska, and from Finland and Estonia across northern Asia. They are permanent residents, although northerly populations may move south and southeast when food is scarce. In Europe they are found breeding in Norway and Sweden and more numerously through Finland and Russia. Even though the species occurs in Europe, the first great grey owl recognized by science was found in Canada in the late 18th century.


title: Great grey owl

text: There are sedentary populations in the Pacific states of California, Oregon, and Washington. The great grey owl in this region is found in disjunct areas of appropriate habitat. In winter these birds do not move far but may go downslope to escape deep snow as they must capture their prey on the ground.


title: Great grey owl

text: In Oregon, the great grey owl breeding range is scattered from the Siskiyou Mountains in the southwest to the Blue Mountains in the northeast. Two bird festivals each May feature field trips to try to see the species: the Ladd Marsh Festival in La Grande, OR and the Mountain Bird Festival in Ashland, OR.


title: Great grey owl

text: A 2015 study in California estimated there were fewer than 300 birds in the state at the time. The species is listed as Endangered under the California Endangered Species Act. The California range for the species includes a small extension of the Oregon population, north of Alturas. In addition breeding has been confirmed in the Tahoe National Forest east of Nevada City; in the Sierra Nevada foothills south of I-80 at around elevation; and for the population clustered around Yosemite. In Yosemite is where the first nest south of Canada was found in 1914. A study of the Yosemite owls shows that this population has been genetically isolated from populations in Oregon and farther north for more than 25,000 years. Biologists working on that study suggest that the Yosemite population should be considered a separate sub-species ("Strix nebulosa yosemitensis"). Nearby populations at lower elevations were not tested.


title: Great grey owl

text: In Washington state, great grey owls are found in the southeast where mountains extend up from Oregon and in the Colville National Forest. Only a handful of great grey owl nests have ever been found in Washington state.


title: Great grey owl

text: Farther east in the western United States, great grey owls breed in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, as far south as the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks.


title: Great grey owl

text: In northeastern North America, the owls are found year-round in southern Quebec and Ontario, but individuals will sometimes move further south in winter into New York and New England, apparently in pursuit of more abundant prey. Great grey owls are rarely sighted as far south as Pennsylvania and Long Island, New York. In winter 2017, the birds were recorded in northern New York in Robert Moses State Park and central Maine.


title: Great grey owl

text: Great grey owls do not build nests, so they typically use nests previously used by a large bird, such as a raptor. They will also nest in broken-topped trees and cavities in large trees. In southwestern and northeastern Oregon, the great grey owl has been using man-made platforms for nest sites since the 1980s. The erection of nest platforms for great grey owls was pioneered by Robert Nero in central Canada in the 1970s. Nesting may occur from March to May. Unlike, for example, osprey or white storks, the great grey owl does not predictably re-use nest sites over consecutive years. Four eggs are the usual clutch size. Eggs average wide and long. The incubation period is about 30 days, ranging from 28 to 36 days. Brooding lasts 2 to 3 weeks, after which the female starts roosting on a tree near nests. The young jump or fall from the nest at 3 to 4 weeks, and start to fly 1 to 2 weeks after this. Immediately after fledging, the white, fuzzy young must use beak and feet to climb back into trees. The female is on guard at this time and may be aggressive toward potential predators. Most offspring remain near their natal sites for many months after fledging. Normally the male hunts for his mate and the young throughout the nesting period. Once the young begin the fly, the female typically withdraws and the male continues to feed the young until they can hunt on their own in the autumn. The young owls go off on their own by winter.


title: Great grey owl

text: The abundance of food in the area usually affects the number of eggs a female lays, a feature quite common in northern owl species. In years when small mammal populations are very low the great grey owl may not attempt nesting; thus their reproduction is connected to the sometimes extreme fluctuations of small mammal populations. Also, great grey owls may not nest in years of drought. If food is scarce, they may travel a fair distance to find more prey, with considerable movements by large numbers in some years of particularly scarce prey. Though they do not migrate, many are at least somewhat nomadic.


title: Great grey owl

text: One alert landowner in northeast Oregon, Andy Huber, helped a female great grey owl raise her four nestlings after a great horned owl killed the male. Huber live-trapped small mammals and then released them at the nest site, and the female took these to the nestlings. As the owlets matured and began flying they came for the prey on their own. Huber and the mother owl raised all four owlets successfully.


title: Great grey owl

text: These birds wait, listen, and watch for prey, then swoop down; they also may fly low through open areas in search of prey. They frequently hunt from a low listening post which can be a stump, low tree limb, fence post, or road sign. Their large facial disks, also known as "ruffs", focus sound, and the asymmetrical placement of their ears assists them in locating prey, because of the lack of light during the late and early hours in which they hunt. On the nesting grounds, they mainly hunt at night and near dawn and dusk; at other times, they are active mostly during the night.


title: Great grey owl

text: They have excellent hearing, and may locate (and then capture) prey moving beneath of snow in a series of tunnels solely with that sense. They then can crash to a snow depth roughly equal to their own body size to grab their prey. Only this species and, more infrequently, other fairly large owls from the genus "Strix" are known to "snow-plunge" for prey, a habit that is thought to require superb hearing not possessed by all types of owls.


title: Great grey owl

text: Unlike the more versatile eagle and horned owls, great grey owls rely almost fully upon small rodents. What species they eat depends on which small mammals are most abundant and available. In northern Canada and other parts of Scandinavia, they eat lemmings primarily. In dry parts of California's Sierra Nevada they eat mostly pocket gophers. In some areas voles are the predominant prey. Locally, alternative prey animals (usually comprising less than 20% of prey intake) include hares, moles, shrews, weasels, thrushes, grouse, Canada jays, mountain quail, small hawks and ducks. This species is not known to scavenge or steal from other predators. In mated pairs, the male is the primary hunter who provides food for the entire family while the female guards and broods the eggs, nestlings, and flightless fledglings.


title: Great grey owl

text: The harvest of timber from the great grey owl's habitat is, perhaps, the greatest threat to this species. Intensified timber management typically reduces live and dead large-diameter trees used for nesting, leaning trees used by juveniles for roosting before they can fly, and dense canopy closures in stands used by juveniles for cover and protection. If perches are not left in clearcuts, great grey owls cannot readily hunt in them. Although human-made structures (made specifically for use by this species) have been utilized by these owls, the species is far more common in areas protected from logging. Livestock grazing in meadows also adversely affects great grey owls, by reducing habitat for preferred prey species.


title: Great grey owl

text: Other dangers to great grey owls include rodenticides, collisions with vehicles, and the West Nile Virus. The West Nile virus is likely to become more prevalent with climate change. In Ontario and northeastern Oregon there are confirmed great grey owl deaths from the virus. Testing of owls in the Yosemite area since 2005 has found evidence of the virus in that population.


title: Great grey owl

text: Due to their large size, great grey owls have few natural predators. Great horned owls, various small carnivores, and black bears have been documented preying on young, but such predators rarely threaten adults, and owls have been known to fend off animals as large as black bears when defending their nests. The only known predator of adult great grey owls is the Eurasian eagle-owl ("Bubo bubo"), which occasionally preys on the former in parts of Europe.


title: Great grey owl

text: The great grey owl is not as aggressive as most other alpha predators. They are less likely to attack each other or potential threats than are other large predatory birds. They do not protect a large nesting territory, nor do they defend hunting territories through aggression. As an exception, the female is aggressive in protecting eggs and owlets. She is especially alert and aggressive when fledglings first leave the nest but cannot yet fly, and thus are extremely vulnerable.


title: Great grey owl

text: This lack of territorial aggressiveness makes the great grey owl difficult to find in the field. Most owls respond to their own species calls if played back in a nesting territory. Great grey owls will often ignore such calls. They also do not flush every time a human approaches or drives past. The great grey owl often remains still even if a human is nearby and therefore they are often overlooked or unnoticed.


title: Great grey owl

text: As of 2016, there are four great grey owls captive in Oregon and California. Two live at Blue Mountain Wildlife near Pendleton, Oregon, a third lives at Lindsay Museum in Walnut Creek, California, and the fourth lives at CuriOdyssey in San Mateo, California.


title: Great grey owl

text: A captive wild injured great grey owl, Boris, resides at the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka, Alaska. Boris was found north of Anchorage with a trauma to his right wrist, leaving him flightless.


title: Brad James

text: Brad James (born July 7, 1981) is an American actor. James is best known for his role as Todd in the sitcom "Tyler Perry's For Better or Worse".


title: Brad James

text: James was raised by his maternal grandparents. He spent four years as a U.S. Marine serving in combat units. Although known for being athletic and performing his own stunts in films, James is working with an ankle that never healed properly after he broke it in late 2000, while serving in the US Marine Corps. During his time of service, he studied the hand-to-hand combat, line-training and Brazilian ju-jitsu.


title: Brad James

text: James has appeared in many commercials for national brands including Walmart, AutoTrader.com and BlackBerry. In his first credited speaking role on-screen, he played the lead role of John Merser in Maverick Entertainment's Champion Road. In 2013, James won the Georgia's "Best Actor" award at the Georgia Entertainment Gala. In 2013, he was cast to portray the role of Adam in the movie "Marry Me for Christmas".


title: Brad James

text: James and actress Keshia Knight Pulliam were married in an intimate ceremony in September 2021. The two began dating in 2019 after meeting on the set of the TV movie "Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta". In late 2022, it was announced they were expecting their first child together. Additionally, James is the stepfather to Ella (b. 2017), Knight Pulliam's daughter with ex-husband, retired National Football League player Edgerton Hartwell.


title: North West (South African province)

text: North West is a province of South Africa. Its capital is Mahikeng. The province is located to the west of the major population centre of Gauteng and south of Botswana.


title: North West (South African province)

text: North West was incorporated after the end of Apartheid in 1994, and includes parts of the former Transvaal Province and Cape Province, as well as most of the former bantustan of Bophuthatswana. It was the scene of political violence in Khutsong, Merafong City Local Municipality in 2006 and 2007, after cross-province municipalities were abolished and Merafong Municipality was transferred entirely to North West. Merafong has since been transferred to Gauteng province in 2009.


title: North West (South African province)

text: This province is the birthplace of prominent political figures: Lucas Mangope, Moses Kotane, Ahmed Kathrada, Abram Onkgopotse Tiro, Ruth Mompati, J. B. Marks, Aziz Pahad, Essop Pahad and others.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The provincial government consists of a premier, an executive council of ten ministers, and a legislature. The provincial assembly and premier are elected for five-year terms, or until the next national election. Political parties are awarded assembly seats based on the percentage of votes each party receives in the province during the national elections. The assembly elects a premier, who then appoints the members of the executive council.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The premier of North West Province as of 7 September 2021 is Bushy Maape of the African National Congress. He replaced Job Mokgoro as premier after Mokgoro resigned in August 2021.


title: North West (South African province)

text: Much of the province consists of flat areas of scattered trees and grassland. The Magaliesberg mountain range in the northeast extends about 130 km (about 80 miles) from Pretoria to Rustenburg. The Vaal River flows along the southern border of the province.


title: North West (South African province)

text: Temperatures range from 17° to 31 °C (62° to 88 °F) in the summer and from 3° to 21 °C (37° to 70 °F) in the winter. Annual rainfall totals about 360 mm (about 14 in), with almost all of it falling during the summer months, between October and April.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The North West Province is divided into four district municipalities. The district municipalities are in turn divided into 18 local municipalities:


title: North West (South African province)

text: The mainstay of the economy of North West Province is mining, which generates more than half of the province's gross domestic product and provides jobs for a quarter of its workforce. The chief minerals are gold, mined at Orkney and Klerksdorp; uranium, mined at Klerksdorp; platinum, mined at Rustenburg and Brits; and diamonds, mined at Lichtenburg, Christiana, and Bloemhof. About 85% of all money-making activities take place between Klerksdorp and Potchefstroom. The economic heart of the province is Klerksdorp. The northern and western parts of the province have many sheep farms and cattle and game ranches. The eastern and southern parts are crop-growing regions that produce maize (corn), sunflowers, tobacco, cotton, and citrus fruits. The entertainment and casino complex at Sun City and Lost City also contributes to the provincial economy.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The majority of the province's residents are Tswana people who speak Tswana, as in neighbouring Botswana. Smaller groups include Afrikaans, Sotho, and Xhosa speaking people. English is spoken primarily as a second language. Most of the population belong to Christian denominations. (Figures according to Census 2001 released in July 2003).


title: North West (South African province)

text: According to the 2007 community survey 90.8% of the province's population was Black (mostly Tswana-speaking), 7.2% as White (mostly Afrikaans speaking), 1.6% as Coloured and 0.4% as Asian. The 2007 community survey showed the province had a population of just over 3 million. The province's white population is very unevenly distributed. In the southern and eastern municipalities, the white percentage in double figures such as the Tlokwe and Matlosana where the white percentages were 27% and 12% respectively.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The province has the lowest number of people aged 35 years and older (5.9%) who have received higher education. Since 1994 the number of people receiving higher education has increased. After the disbanding of the bantustans, many people migrated to the economic centres of Cape Town and Gauteng.


title: North West (South African province)

text: The province had two universities: the University of North West, which was formerly called the University of Bophuthatswana (founded in 1979), in Mmabatho; and Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (founded in 1869; became a constituent college of the University of South Africa in 1921 and an independent university in 1951). These two universities have now merged and the new institution is called North-West University.


title: North West (South African province)

text: As part of the Department of Education's proposed plans for higher education, the existing four higher learning institutions will be merged to form two. During 2003, as part of the Year of Further Education and Training project, three mega institutions, Taletso, ORBIT and Vuselela, were established to provide technical and vocational training to the youth. These institutions have been incorporated into many of the former education and technical colleges and manpower centres.


title: Cong TV

text: Lincoln Cortez Velasquez (born October 27, 1991), better known as Cong TV, is a Filipino YouTuber, comedian, musician, vlogger, and online streamer. He is known for his comedy videos on YouTube.


title: Cong TV

text: Cong TV began uploading videos to YouTube in 2008. He started out as a vlogger and rose to fame in the Philippines by uploading comedy skits and parodies to YouTube. He also played the role of Moby in the 2016 Philippine television series "My Super D".


title: Cong TV

text: Aside from being a vlogger, Cong TV is also a live streamer and a musician. Cong TV is the lead vocalist and guitarist of the band Coln, which he formed in 2018. They released their first music video in the same year as well on Cong TV's YouTube channel. On December 3, 2020, Cong TV was included and ranked third on the list of top YouTube ph creators of 2020.


title: Cong TV

text: Cong TV has three siblings, two of whom are YouTubers as well: Marlon Velasquez, also known as Junnie Boy, and Patricia Velasquez, also known as Neneng Lamig, who have both surpassed one million subscribers on YouTube.


title: Cong TV

text: In December 2020, Cong TV and his girlfriend and fellow vlogger, Viy Cortez, lost their baby just days after learning of the pregnancy. In December 2021, a year later, Cortez announced on her vlog that she and Cong TV are expecting another baby. On July 5, 2022, Viy Cortez gave Birth to Zeus Emmanuel "Kidlat" Velasquez.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Francis Dayle "Chick" Hearn (November 27, 1916 – August 5, 2002) was an American sportscaster who was the play-by-play announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association for 41 years. Hearn is remembered for his rapid fire, staccato broadcasting style, associated with colorful phrases such as "slam dunk", "air ball", and "no harm, no foul" that have become common basketball vernacular. Hearn broadcast 3,338 consecutive Lakers games starting on November 21, 1965.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Most of Hearn's games in the television era were simulcast on both radio and television, even after most teams chose to use different announcers for the different media.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn was born in Buda, Illinois and raised in Aurora, Illinois, in west suburban Chicago, and attended high school at Marmion Academy and college at Bradley University. He earned the nickname "Chick" while an Amateur Athletic Union basketball player at Bradley, when teammates played a prank on him: giving him a shoebox to see his surprised reaction when he opened it and found not sneakers inside, but instead a dead chicken.


title: Chick Hearn

text: He and his wife Marge were married August 13, 1938. They had two children, a son, Gary, and a daughter, Samantha, both of whom predeceased Hearn. Marge Hearn died January 30, 2016, at the age of 98.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn's broadcasting streak began on November 21, 1965. Hearn missed the Lakers' game the previous night after having been stranded in Fayetteville, Arkansas, by inclement weather after having announced a game between Arkansas and Texas Tech. Even that was only Hearn's second missed assignment for the Lakers since he had become the team's broadcaster in March 1961. He would not miss another until December 16, 2001. Over the course of the streak, Hearn was paired with several different color commentators, including ”Hot” Rod Hundley, Pat Riley, Keith Erickson, Dick Schad, Lynn Shackelford and Stu Lantz.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn's streak of 3,338 consecutive Lakers games came to an end on December 16, 2001, in order to undergo scheduled cardiac bypass surgery. Hearn recovered from his surgery, but in February 2002, he suffered a broken hip after falling at a gas station, which further delayed his expected return to the Lakers broadcast booth. Hearn recovered from both issues and resumed broadcasting on April 9, 2002, receiving a standing ovation from the Staples Center crowd upon his return. His final broadcast was for the Lakers' radio feed of Game 4 of the 2002 NBA Finals where the Lakers defeated the New Jersey Nets to win their third consecutive NBA championship. His final Lakers-affiliated appearance was as the emcee of the team's 2002 championship parade in June.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn was the long-time host of "Bowling for Dollars" on KTLA (1972–1976); KHJ-TV (now KCAL-TV) (1978). He called the closed-circuit television broadcast of the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971. He also did boxing commentary for Forum boxing fights in Inglewood in the 1980s, usually appearing alongside former featherweight contender Ruben Castillo. Hearn also contributed to KCAL-TV's coverage of the U.S. Open golf tournament from 1957 to 1964. At the time, Hearn handled the sports desk of the local news program on Los Angeles' NBC affiliate, KRCA (now KNBC). Hearn announced USC football and basketball games from 1956 to 1961, and also served as the play-by-play broadcaster for USC football games on tape-delayed, syndicated telecasts during the 1973 season. Hearn called UNLV Runnin' Rebels basketball games on KHJ/KCAL with Ross Porter from 1986 to 1990. During the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Hearn called the play-by-play for USA Men's Basketball games on the pay per view Olympics Triplecast "Red" channel.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn can be heard on the Pink Floyd album "The Wall" (at the 4:07 mark of the song "Don't Leave Me Now" as "Pink" flips through television channels just before destroying his television set leading into the song "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 3"). This clip of Hearn appears to have been taken from an actual game between the Lakers and Bulls which was probably recorded during the 1978–79 season.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Before the playoffs in the 1986 season, Hearn released a 12-inch rap single "Rap-Around". The song features Hearn in the studio re-creating many of his most famous 'Chickisms' and was distributed by Macola Records (who distributed an early Dr. Dre/Ice Cube group "World Class Wreckin' Cru"). The song was played on Los Angeles TV and radio stations, including the Lakers' televised games .


title: Chick Hearn

text: During the summer of 2002, Hearn suffered a fall at his home in Encino, California, and struck his head causing serious injury. Three days later, on August 5, 2002, he died of his injury. He was 85. He was interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, next to his son Gary and his daughter Samantha. Chick and Marge would have celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary on August 13, 2002.


title: Chick Hearn

text: On May 9, 1991, Hearn became the third broadcaster to win the Gowdy Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. He later became the first broadcaster elected to the Hall in 2003. In 1995, he was voted to be the 20th member of the American Sportscaster Hall of Fame by his fellow sportscasters. He was inducted by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in 1997.


title: Chick Hearn

text: In honor of his contributions to the Los Angeles Lakers, both the Lakers and the city of Los Angeles renamed a portion of West 11th Street between Figueroa Street and Georgia Street (now L.A. Live Way) to Chick Hearn Court. This street currently runs alongside Crypto.com Arena's main entrance. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority further honored the broadcaster by changing the name of the nearby Blue and Expo Line station to Pico-Chick Hearn (this name change has since been reverted). His name was later hung from the rafters of the Staples Center, alongside the retired numbers of past Lakers players, though with a microphone in place of a number.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in radio. Hearn's star is located at 6755 Hollywood Blvd.


title: Chick Hearn

text: On April 27, 2010, Hearn was honored with a bronze statue at Star Plaza outside Staples Center. A chair next to Hearn's statue behind the desk with the Lakers' logo is a part of the statue so his fans can sit down to have their pictures taken.


title: Chick Hearn

text: Hearn was notable for his focus on calling play-by-play. He did not chitchat while the game was in motion. He was able to report clearly and rapidly, which he considered a gift. This style was especially well-suited for his notable simulcasts of Lakers games on television and radio, which were a tradition during his 40-plus year tenure. He was especially appreciated on radio because listening to the broadcast was almost like watching the game. Shortly after Hearn's departure, the simulcasts were ended, with some listeners complaining that his successor, Paul Sunderland, was difficult to follow for radio listeners. Sometimes this style made it difficult for his partners to get a word in edgewise; his seven-year color commentator, Keith Erickson, fondly reminisced at a ceremony commemorating Hearn: "Not being able to talk for eight years [as his partner], I thought this was a great opportunity to share a bit". He was formal, always referring to the Lakers' former owner as "Mr. Cooke" and the owner for much of his tenure, Jerry Buss by his full title – Dr. Jerry Buss or Dr. Buss.


title: Chick Hearn

text: The particular phrases that Hearn used during his broadcasts were labeled "Chickisms". Many are staples of basketball. When a book of his memoirs was published in 2004, it included an audio CD with the calls as well as a "Chick Hearn Rap-Around" rap song created with the samples.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali is an Indian Hindi-language television drama series that premiered on 15 February 2021 on StarPlus. It is loosely based on the Star Maa's Telugu series "Gorintaku". Produced by SOL Productions and Sandiip Films, it stars Shivangi Khedkar and Sai Ketan Rao.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: The story revolves around a hardworking widowed woman named Pallavi who loves her in-laws very much and sacrifices everything to fulfill all their needs.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: Widowed Pallavi is devoted to her in-laws while loner Raghav, a business magnate, is devoted to money. One day, these polar opposites meet and fall in love. Pallavi was widowed at a young age, while Raghav was cheated out of love. Raghav lives a lonely life because of his bitter experience with love, but his belief in love doesn’t end completely. Pallavi isn’t ready to accept anyone in her life so soon, but she finds Raghav charming despite his arrogant personality. Raghav appears strict but is actually soft-hearted and honest, which wins Pallavi’s heart, and the two get married. How they manage their marital life against all odds forms the crux of the story.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: Shivangi Khedkar said, "My character is of a Maharashtrian girl, Pallavi. Since our whole team is Marathi, everyone helps me in speaking words in their language. Even I am working hard on myself".


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: Based on the backdrop of Hyderabad, the series is mainly filmed at sets in Kolhapur in Maharashtra while some initial sequences were shot in Hyderabad in early February 2021.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: On 13 April 2021, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray announced a sudden curfew due to increased COVID-19 cases, and the production halted on 14 April 2021. The series team decided to temporarily move their shooting location to Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad until the next hearing.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: It premiered on 15 February 2021 at the 6:30 PM on StarPlus. However, on 11 October 2021, it was shifted to the early-evening slot of 5:30 PM to accommodate upcoming show, Vidrohi.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: Producer Sandiip Sickand said, "Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali is quite different from Gorintaku, maybe the basic plot is the same but the screenplay, the storytelling & the characters are a lot different." "Gorintaku (గోరింటాకు)", the Telugu show, aired from 29 July 2019 to 24 April 2021 on Star Maa.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: In UK, the series launched on 15 February 2021 with 74.6 thousand viewers being the third most watched Indian television series. On 30 March 2021, it was the most watched series with a viewership of 38.2 thousand. Then on the week ending on the 12 April 2021, it was the second most watched series (98.3 thousand viewers). The show became popular once again, as the most-watched series on the 17 April 2021, then become the second most watched series during the week ending on 13 June 2021.


title: Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali

text: The title song "Mehndi Hai Rachne Waali" was composed by Shubham Sundaram, written by Aditya Chakravarty, and sung by Anweshaa.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Austin Osman Spare (30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956) was an English artist and occultist who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter. Influenced by symbolism and art nouveau his art was known for its clear use of line, and its depiction of monstrous and sexual imagery. In an occult capacity, he developed magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Born into a working-class family in Snow Hill in London, Spare grew up in Smithfield and then Kennington, taking an early interest in art. Gaining a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, he trained as a draughtsman, while also taking a personal interest in Theosophy and Occultism, becoming briefly involved with Aleister Crowley and his A∴A∴. Developing his own personal occult philosophy, he wrote a series of occult grimoires, namely "Earth Inferno" (1905), "The Book of Pleasure" (1913) and "The Focus of Life" (1921). Alongside a string of personal exhibitions, he also achieved much press attention for being the youngest entrant at the 1904 Royal Academy summer exhibition.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: After publishing two short-lived art magazines, "Form" and "The Golden Hind", during the First World War he was conscripted into the armed forces and worked as an official war artist. Moving to various working class areas of South London over the following decades, Spare lived in poverty, but continued exhibiting his work to varying degrees of success. With the arrival of surrealism onto the London art scene during the 1930s, critics and the press once more took an interest in his work, seeing it as an early precursor to surrealist imagery. Losing his home during the Blitz, he fell into relative obscurity following the Second World War, although he continued exhibiting till his death in 1956.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Spare's spiritualist legacy was largely maintained by his friend, the Thelemite author Kenneth Grant in the latter part of the 20th century, and his beliefs regarding sigils provided a key influence on the chaos magic movement and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Spare's art once more began to receive attention in the 1970s, due to a renewed interest in "art nouveau" in Britain, with several retrospective exhibitions being held in London.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Austin's father, Philip Newton Spare, was born in Yorkshire in 1857, and moved to London, where he gained employment with the City of London Police in 1878, being stationed at Snow Hill Police Station. Austin's mother, Eliza Osman, was born in Devon, the daughter of a Royal Marine, and married Philip Newton Spare at St Bride's Church in Fleet Street in December 1879. The Spare's first child to survive was John Newton Spare, born in 1882, with William Herbert Spare following in 1883 and then Susan Ann Spare in 1885.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: The couple's fourth surviving child, Austin Osman Spare was born shortly after four o'clock on the morning of 30 December 1886. Spare attended St. Agnes School, attached to a prominent High Anglican church, and as a child he was brought up within the Anglican denomination of Christianity. Taking an interest in drawing, from about the age of 12, he began taking evening classes at Lambeth School of Art under the tutorship of Philip Connard.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In 1900, Spare began working as a designer at Powell's glass-working business in Whitefriars Street, which had links to the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris. In the evenings he attended the Lambeth School of Art. Two visitors to Powell's, Sir William Blake Richmond and FH Richmond RBA, came across some of Spare's drawings, and impressed, they recommended him for a scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) in South Kensington. He achieved further attention when his drawings were exhibited in the British Art Section of the St. Louis Exposition and the Paris International Exhibition, and in 1903 he won a silver medal at the National Competition of Schools of Art, where the judges, who included Walter Crane and Byam Shaw, praised his "remarkable sense of colour and great vigour of conception."


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Soon, he began studying at the RCA, but was dissatisfied with the teaching he received there, becoming a truant and being disciplined by his tutors as a result. Influenced by the work of Charles Ricketts, Edmund Sullivan, George Frederic Watts and Aubrey Beardsley, his artistic style focused on clear lines, which was in stark contrast to the College's emphasis on shading. Still living in his parents' home, he began dressing in unconventional and flamboyant garb, and became popular with other students at the college, with a particularly strong friendship developing between Spare and Sylvia Pankhurst, a prominent Suffragette and leftist campaigner.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: After becoming a practising occultist, he wrote and illustrated his first grimoire, "Earth Inferno" (1905), in which he took as his premise Blavatsky's idea that Earth already was Hell. The work exhibited a variety of influences, including Theosophy, the Bible, Omar Khayyám, Dante's "Inferno" and his own mystical ideas regarding Zos and Kia.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In May 1904, Spare held his first public art exhibition in the foyer of the Newington Public Library in Walworth Road. Here, his paintings illustrated many of the themes that would continue to inspire him throughout his life, including his mystical views about Zos and Kia. His father then surreptitiously submitted two of Spare's drawings to the Royal Academy, one of which, a design for a bookplate, was accepted for exhibition at that year's prestigious summer exhibition. Journalists from the British press took a particular interest in his work, highlighting the fact that, at seventeen years of age, he was the youngest artist in the exhibition, with some erroneously claiming that he was the youngest artist to ever exhibit at the show. In 1905, he left the RCA without having received any qualifications.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Having left higher education, Spare became employed as a bookplate designer and illustrator, with his first book commission being for Ethel Rolt Wheeler's "Behind the Veil", published by the company David Nutt in 1906. In ensuing years he would also illustrate such texts as Charles Grindrod's "The Shadow of the Raggedstone" (1909) and Justice Darling's "On the Oxford Circuit and other Verses" (1909). In 1905, he once more exhibited at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition, having submitted a drawing known as "The Resurrection of Zoroaster", featuring beaked serpents swirling around the figure of the ancient Persian philosopher who founded Zoroastrianism. Diversifying his employment, In 1906, Spare published his first political cartoon, a satire on the use of Chinese wage slave labourers in British South Africa, which appeared in the pages of "The Morning Leader" newspaper. When not involved in these jobs, he devoted much of his time to illustrating a second publication, "A Book of Satyrs", which consisted of a series of nine satirical images lampooning such institutions as politics and the clergy. The volume contained a number of self-portraits; he also filled many of the images with illustrations of bric-a-brac, of which he was a great collector. The book was finished off with an introduction authored by Scottish painter James Guthrie. Proud of his son's achievement, Spare's father would later inquire as to whether the publisher John Lane of Bodley Head would be interested in re-printing "A Book of Satyrs", leading to the release of an expanded second edition in 1909. Meanwhile, in 1907 Spare produced one of his most significant illustrations, a drawing titled "Portrait of the Artist", featuring himself sitting behind a table covered in assorted bric-a-brac.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In October 1907 Spare held his first major exhibition, titled simply "Black and White Drawings by Austin O Spare", at the Bruton Gallery in London's West End. Attracting widespread interest and sensational views in the press, he was widely compared to Aubrey Beardsley, with reviewers commenting on what they saw as the eccentric and grotesque nature of his work. "The World" commented that "his inventive faculty is stupendous and terrifying in its creative flow of impossible horrors", while "The Observer" noted that "Mr. Spare's art is abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible".


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: One of those attracted to Spare's work was Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), an occultist who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904, taking as its basis Crowley's "The Book of the Law". Crowley introduced himself to Spare, becoming a patron and champion of his art, which he proclaimed to be a message from the Divine. Spare subsequently submitted several drawings for publication in Crowley's Thelemite journal, "The Equinox", receiving payment in the form of an expensive ritual robe. Spare would also be invited to join Crowley's new Thelemite magical order, the A∴A∴ or "Argenteum Astrum", which had been co-founded with George Cecil Jones in 1907. Becoming the seventh member of the order in July 1907, where he used the magical name of "Yihovaeum", it was through doing so that he befriended the occultist Victor Neuburg, but although he remained in A∴A∴ until 1912, ultimately Spare never became a full member, disliking Crowley's emphasis on strict hierarchy and organisation and becoming heavily critical of the practice of ceremonial magic. In turn, Crowley would claim that Spare was only interested in "black magic" and for that reason had kept him back from fully entering the Order.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Spare's major patron during this period was the wealthy property developer Pickford Waller, although other admirers included Desmond Coke, Ralph Strauss, Lord Howard de Walden and Charles Ricketts. Spare became popular among "avant-garde" homosexual circles in Edwardian London, with several known gay men becoming patrons of his work. In particular he became good friends with the same-sex couple Marc-André Raffalovich and John Gray, with Spare later characterising the latter as "the most wonderful man I have ever met." Gray would introduce Spare to the Irish novelist George Moore, whom he would subsequently befriend. The actual nature of Spare's sexuality at the time remains debated; his friend Frank Brangwyn would later claim that he was "strongly" homosexual but had suppressed these leanings. In contrast to this, in later life Spare would refer to a wide variety of heterosexual encounters that took place at this time, including with an intersex person, a dwarf with a protuberant forehead and a Welsh maid.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: On one occasion, Spare met a middle-aged woman named Mrs Shaw in a pub in Mayfair. Eager to marry off her daughter, who already had one child from an earlier relationship, Mrs Shaw soon introduced Spare to her child, Eily Gertrude Shaw (1888-1938). Spare fell in love, producing a number of portraits of Eily, before marrying her on 4 September 1911. However, the relationship between Spare and his wife was strained; unlike him, she was "unintellectual and materialistic", and disliked many of his friends, particularly the younger males, asking him to cease his association with them.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Around 1910, Spare illustrated "The Starlit Mire", a book of epigrams written by two doctors, James Bertram and F. Russell, in which his illustrations once more displayed his interest in the abnormal and the grotesque. Another notable work from this period was an illustration known as "A Fantasy", which included a self-portrait of Spare surrounded by a variety of horned animals and a horned hermaphrodite creature, visually depicting his belief in the innate mental connection between humanity and our non-human ancestors.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Over a period of several years, Spare began work on his third tome, "The Book of Pleasure (Self Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy", which he self-published in 1913. Exploring his own mystical ideas regarding the human being and their unconscious mind, it also discussed magic and the use of sigils. "Conceived initially as a pictorial allegory the book quickly evolved into a much deeper work, drawing inspiration from Taoism and Buddhism, but primarily from his experiences as an artist." The book sold poorly, and received a mixed review from the "Times Literary Supplement", which while accepting Spare's "technical mastery", was more critical of much of the content.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In 1914, Spare was involved in a newly launched popular art magazine known as "Colour", which was edited in Victoria Street, submitting a number of contributions to its early issues. He soon developed the idea of founding his own art magazine, suggesting the idea to the publisher John Lane, who had formerly produced "The Yellow Book", an influential periodical that had appeared between 1894 to 1897. Envisioning his new venture, titled "Form", as a successor to "The Yellow Book", he was joined as co-editor by the etcher Frederick Carter, who used the pseudonym of Francis Marsden. The first issue appeared in the summer of 1916, containing contributions from Edmund Joseph Sullivan, Walter de la Mare, Frank Brangwyn, W.H. Davies, J.C. Squire, Ricketts and Shannon. Spare and Carter co-wrote an article discussing automatic writing, arguing that it allowed the unconscious part of the mind to produce art, a theme that Spare had previously dealt with in "The Book of Pleasure". Generally, "Form" was poorly received by the critics and the public, being described as a "very horrible publication" by George Bernard Shaw, who proclaimed its design and layout to be "ancient Morrisian" and thereby out of fashion.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In 1917, with the First World War still raging, Spare was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he worked as a medical orderly. Later, he was appointed to the position of Acting Staff-Sergeant, and given the task of illustrating the conflict along with other artists based in a studio at 76 Fulham Road.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Spare was demobilized in 1919. Although they never gained a divorce, Spare had separated from his wife Eily, who had begun a relationship with another man. Focusing on the writing and illustration of a new book, 1921 saw the publication of "The Focus of Life The Mutterings of AOS" by Morland Press. Edited and introduced by Frederick Carter, the book once more dealt with Spare's mystical ideas, continuing many of the themes explored in "The Book of Pleasure". The success of this book led Spare to decide to revive "Form", with the first issue appearing in a new format in October 1921, edited by Spare and his friend W.H. Davies. Intended to be populist in tone, contributions came from Sidney Sime, Robert Graves, Herbert Furst, Laura Knight, Frank Brangwyn, Glyn Philpot, Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, J.F.C. Fuller and Havelock Ellis. However, Spare discontinued the magazine after the third issue, which was published in January 1922. He then moved on the production of another art journal, "The Golden Hind", co-edited with Clifford Bax and published by Chapman and Hall. The first issue appeared in October 1922, featuring a lithograph from Spare titled "The New Eden." Faced with problems, the journal eventually decreasing in size from a folio to a quarto, and in 1924 it folded after eight issues.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: The summer of 1924 saw Spare produce a sketchbook of "automatic drawings" titled "The Book of Ugly Ecstasy", which contained a series of grotesque creatures; the sole copy of the book would be purchased by the art historian Gerald Reitlinger. The spring of 1925 then saw the production of a similar sketchbook, "A Book of Automatic Drawings", and then a further suite of pictures, titled "The Valley of Fear". He also began work on a new book, a piece of automatic writing titled "The Anathema of Zos: The Sermon to the Hypocrites", which served as a criticism of British society influenced by the ideas of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Spare would self-publish it in an edition of 100 copies from his sister's house in Goodmayes, Essex, in 1927.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Spare held exhibitions of his work at the St. George's Gallery in Hanover Square in 1927, and then at the Lefevre Gallery in 1929, but his work received little praise in the press or attention from the public. Living in poverty and with his work becoming unpopular in the mainstream London art scene, Spare contemplated suicide. He then undertook a series of anamorphic portraits, predominantly of young women, which he termed the "Experiments in Reality". Influenced by the work of El Greco, they were exhibited at the Godfrey Phillips Galleries in St James's, Central London in November 1930, an exhibit that proved to be Spare's last in London's West End.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Surrealism took an interest in automatism and the unconscious, and the reporter Hubert Nicholson ran a story on Spare titled "Father of Surrealism – He's a Cockney!". Jumping onto this new craze for surrealism, Spare released a set of what he described as "SURREALIST Racing Forecast Cards" for use in divination. The renewed interest benefited him, with his 1936, 1937 and 1938 exhibitions in Walworth Road proving a success, and he began teaching students at his studio in what he called his Austin Spare School of Draughtsmanship.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: When the Second World War broke out against Nazi Germany in 1939, Spare, an ardent anti-Nazi, tried to enlist into the army, but was deemed too old. In the ensuing Blitz of London by the German Luftwaffe, Spare's flat and all the artwork in it was destroyed by a bomb on 10 May 1941, leaving him temporarily homeless.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Following the culmination of the war, Spare held a comeback show in November 1947 at the Archer Gallery. A commercial success, the works on display showed the increasing influence of Spiritualism on his thought, and included a number of portraits of prominent Spiritualists like Arthur Conan Doyle and Kate Fox-Jencken. He also featured a number of portraits of famous movie stars in the exhibit, leading him to later gain the moniker of "the first British Pop Artist".


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: In the spring of 1949, a recently married woman named Steffi Grant introduced herself to Spare. She introduced him to her husband Kenneth Grant (1924–2011). Spare and the Grants became great friends, frequenting a number of London pubs together and sharing books on the subject of the esoteric.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: The Grants' influence led Spare to begin writing several new occult manuscripts, the "Logomachy of Zos" and the "Zoetic Grimoire of Zos". Under Grant's influence, Spare began to show an increasing interest in witchcraft and the witches' sabbath, producing artworks with titles such as "Witchery", "Walpurgis Vampire" and "Satiated Succubi" and claiming that on a bus he had encountered a group of female witches on their way to the Sabbath.


title: Austin Osman Spare

text: Spare held his first pub show at the Temple Bar in Walworth Road in late 1949, which again proved successful, earning Spare 250 guineas. One of those who had seen the show was publisher Michael Hall, and impressed by Spare's work, he commissioned him to help provide illustrations for his new periodical, "The London Mystery Magazine". The fifth issue, for August–September 1950, contained an article on Spare and his work, while the sixth contained an article written by Algernon Blackwood that was illustrated by Spare.