title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame, the BC Lions Wall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, and the University of California Athletic Hall of Fame. Kapp's #22 jersey is one of eight numbers retired by the Lions. In November 2006, Kapp was voted to the Honour Roll of the CFL's top 50 players of the league's modern era by Canadian sports network TSN. "Sports Illustrated" once called him "The Toughest Chicano." Kapp is the only player to play quarterback in the Super Bowl, Rose Bowl, and the Grey Cup.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kapp's mother (Florence García) was of Mexican-American heritage, his father of German descent. Raised in California in the San Fernando Valley and Salinas, he played quarterback for Hart High School in Newhall, now a part of Santa Clarita.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp played college football at the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the Golden Bears to a Pacific Coast Conference championship in 1958 and the Rose Bowl, where they lost to Iowa. This remains California's most recent Rose Bowl appearance. Kapp was named an All-American, and was also awarded the W. J. Voit Memorial Trophy in 1958 as the outstanding football player on the Pacific Coast. A two-sport athlete and fraternity member of Kappa Alpha Order in college, he also played on the basketball team and was a member of the 1956–57 and 1957–58 squads that won the Pacific Coast Conference championships. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physical education from the university in 1959.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp was selected in the 18th round of the 1959 NFL Draft by the Washington Redskins, who owned his rights to play professional football in the United States. After the draft, Washington did not contact him, so his only choice was to accept the offer from Jim Finks, the general manager of the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League (CFL).


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp joined the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL for his rookie season in 1959. The following year, Kapp led Calgary to their first playoff appearance in years. The season was a difficult one, because he injured his knee against the Toronto Argonauts early in the season, but did not miss any games, because he played heavily taped.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In 1961, the BC Lions, then the CFL's newest franchise, traded four starting players to the Calgary Stampeders for Joe Kapp. The move paid off for the Lions when Kapp led the team to a Grey Cup appearance in 1963. The following season, Kapp led the Lions to their first Grey Cup victory in 1964. However, the Lions proved unable to defend their championship in 1965.


title: Joe Kapp

text: By that time, Kapp had proven he was an elite quarterback, and also developed the reputation of being a tough player and a great leader. While most quarterbacks dislike being hit, Kapp was the opposite. He loved to hit and when he took off on a run he'd try to run over defenders.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Before the 1967 CFL season, Kapp made the decision to return to the U.S. to play pro football. The AFL's Oakland Raiders, San Diego Chargers, and Houston Oilers were heavily pursuing him.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp ended up signing with the NFL's Minnesota Vikings in a multi-player "trade" between the CFL and NFL teams, one of the very few transactions to ever occur between the two leagues.


title: Joe Kapp

text: The Minnesota Vikings in 1965 had drafted running back Jim Young out of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He had spent the 1965 and 1966 seasons with the Vikings, but wanted to return to Canada. The BC Lions were very interested in acquiring Young, but the Toronto Argonauts had his CFL rights.


title: Joe Kapp

text: The Minnesota Vikings general manager was Jim Finks, who had brought Kapp to Canada in 1959, and their head coach was Bud Grant, who had faced Kapp while coaching the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Both Finks and Grant thought Joe Kapp would be the best replacement for Fran Tarkenton, who had been traded to the New York Giants. To make this transaction possible, the BC Lions traded all-star defensive lineman Dick Fouts, and future Canadian Football Hall of Fame running back Bill Symons to Toronto for the CFL rights to future Canadian Football Hall of Fame wide receiver Jim Young. They then managed to get Kapp waived out of the CFL. The Vikings managed to get Jim Young waived out of the NFL, which allowed the BC Lions to sign him. The expansion New Orleans Saints wanted Young and it took some work from Finks to keep them from claiming Young. Kapp, now waived from the CFL, was free to sign with the Vikings, who had previously claimed his NFL playing rights from Washington.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In 1967, Kapp's first season in the NFL, he started 11 of 14 games for the Vikings, compiling an unusual record of 3 wins, 5 losses and 3 ties. Kapp completed only 47 percent of his pass attempts with 8 touchdowns and 17 interceptions. Kapp also scored two rushing touchdowns. Of note, the team was winless without Kapp starting at quarterback. The Green Bay Packers won the division (and the Super Bowl).


title: Joe Kapp

text: In 1968, Kapp led Minnesota to their first ever playoff appearance, losing to the favored Baltimore Colts, 24–14. The Colts were upset a few weeks later by the New York Jets in Super Bowl III.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Early in the 1969 season, Kapp tied an all-time record when he threw for seven touchdown passes against the defending NFL champion Colts on . He is tied with seven other players (Sid Luckman, Adrian Burk, George Blanda, Y. A. Tittle, Nick Foles, Peyton Manning, and Drew Brees). Kapp led the Vikings to a 12–2 record, and a berth in Super Bowl IV after defeating the Los Angeles Rams 23–20 in the Western Conference championship game, and the Cleveland Browns 27–7 in the last NFL Championship game ever played. However, he was unable to lead the team to victory in the Super Bowl, as the Vikings lost 23–7 to the Kansas City Chiefs. In , the NFL and AFL consummated the merger that had been agreed to in , and the NFL Championship game was retired after 37 editions and 50 years of NFL competition. On July 20, 1970, "Sports Illustrated" dubbed Kapp "The Toughest Chicano" on the cover of its weekly magazine. He received the team MVP, but refused the team MVP award, saying, "There is no one most valuable Viking. There are 40 most valuable Vikings."


title: Joe Kapp

text: Prior to the 1969 season, the Vikings had exercised the option clause of his contract, so Kapp had played the entire season without a new contract. It was unusual for teams to use the team's option and not to offer a new contract prior to a season.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Despite Kapp being a Super Bowl quarterback, no team in the NFL made contact with him until after the start of the 1970 regular season,


title: Joe Kapp

text: The Patriots of 1970 were a poor-performing team and the late-arriving Kapp played poorly himself that season, leading the team to the 26-team league's worst record at 2–12. When the year ended, Rozelle demanded that Kapp sign a standard player contract. After conferring with his lawyer and the NFL Players Association, Kapp refused to sign.


title: Joe Kapp

text: With the top pick in the 1971 NFL Draft, the Patriots selected quarterback Jim Plunkett of Stanford, the winner of the Heisman Trophy. Kapp reported to the newly-renamed New England Patriots' training camp in 1971, refused to sign a standard contract, and departed. The headlines in the Boston papers read "KAPP QUITS!". After this incident Kapp never played again; his 12-year career as a professional football player was over.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp started an anti-trust lawsuit vs. the NFL, claiming the standard NFL contract was unconstitutional and a restraint of trade. He won the summary judgment after four years. The court had ruled that Kapp's trade was indeed restrained. It was two years later (April 1, 1976) in the trial for damages, that the jury decided that Kapp was not damaged.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Although Kapp was not awarded any damages, in 1977 the rules at issue in the Kapp case were later revised, a new system was instituted, and a multimillion-dollar settlement was made between the NFL and the NFL Players Association.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In the 1970s and early 1980s, Kapp appeared in several television programs as well as theatrical film titles. In most cases, the character roles were minor. Programs included "Ironside", "The Six Million Dollar Man", "Adam-12", "Emergency!", "Police Woman", "Captains and the Kings", and "Medical Center". Movies included "Climb An Angry Mountain" (1972), "The World's Greatest Athlete" (1973), "The Longest Yard" (1974), "Breakheart Pass" (1975), "Two-Minute Warning" (1976), "Smash-Up on Interstate 5" (1976), "Semi-Tough" (1977), "The Frisco Kid" (1979), and "Off Sides (Pigs vs. Freaks)" (1984).


title: Joe Kapp

text: In 1982, Kapp was hired as the head football coach at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. He had never coached before. In his first year as head coach, he was voted the Pacific-10 Conference Coach of the Year.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In December 1981, Kapp made a promise to the football team that he would not consume any of his favorite alcoholic beverage, tequila, until the Golden Bears reached the Rose Bowl, which they did not under Kapp; indeed, as of 2020, the Golden Bears have yet to return to the Rose Bowl – they were Pac-10 co-champions in 2006 but a loss to USC sent them to the Holiday Bowl instead (in a 1994 interview, Kapp stated that he had resorted to drinking rum instead).


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp had several philosophies while coaching at Cal. He called his special teams the "special forces." He told his players to play "One hundred percent for 60 minutes." He also wanted the players to have fun. On Sundays, he would have his players play a game of "garbazz", described as a mix of basketball and football where the only objective is to pass the ball downfield. There are no football rules such as offsides or forward passes.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp's first season as head coach in 1982 concluded with The Play, the famous five-lateral kickoff return by Cal to score the winning touchdown on the final play of the Big Game against archrival Stanford.


title: Joe Kapp

text: During the 1986 season, the Bears lost to Boston College, defeated Washington State, then lost to San Jose State. Following an embarrassing 50–18 loss at Washington on October 4, Kapp expressed frustration unzipping his pants in front of the Seattle media. He was notified that he would be released after the Big Game, played in Berkeley. The Bears responded to the student section's pre-game chants of "Win one for the zipper" by beating the Gator Bowl-bound #16 Cardinal 17–11, which gave Kapp a 3–2 record in the Big Game. He was carried off the field by his players, amid chanting from the student section, "We want Kapp!" echoing a cheer from his playing days with the Boston Patriots.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In an effort to recapture their past glory, the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League (CFL) hired Kapp as the team's new general manager in 1990. Kapp's tenure was marked by his tendency to recruit ex-NFL players such as Mark Gastineau whose best football days had passed. Kapp was fired eleven games into the Lions' schedule, his most valuable legacy was the signing of quarterback Doug Flutie, who would blossom into a star in the CFL during the 1990s.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In 1992, Kapp was named the head coach of the Arena Football League's Los Angeles Wings, but the franchise never came into existence in Los Angeles, and moved to Sacramento as the Attack. The franchise went 4–6 under Kapp, losing in the first round of the playoffs to the Detroit Drive. After the season, the franchise moved to Miami, Florida.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp lives in Los Gatos, California, and makes himself available as a guest speaker. He has a wife and four children and four grandchildren. He was one of the owners of Kapp's Pizza Bar & Grill in Mountain View, California, which contained memorabilia from his career and closed in 2015. His son, Will, followed in his footsteps as a fullback at UC Berkeley. In 2015, grandson Frank Kapp, continued the Cal football tradition as a freshman tight end with the Golden Bears.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Kapp and fellow Canadian Football Hall of Fame player Angelo Mosca came to blows at a 2011 Canadian Football League Alumni luncheon. The source of the bad blood between Kapp and Mosca is a hit Mosca made on Kapp's teammate Willie Fleming in the 1963 Grey Cup game. The hit, which Kapp and many others considered dirty, forced Fleming out of the game. Mosca's Tiger-Cats defeated Kapp's Lions 21–10 for the 1963 championship.


title: Joe Kapp

text: In February 2016, the "San Jose Mercury News" reported that Kapp was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.


title: Joe Kapp

text: Until 2021, Kapp held the UC Berkeley record for most rushing yards by a quarterback. This was broken by Chase Garbers.


title: Stanley Tang

text: Stanley Tang (born 1992) is a Hong Kong billionaire tech entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at DoorDash, which he started along with Tony Xu, Andy Fang and Evan Moore in 2013.


title: Stanley Tang

text: DoorDash had its IPO in December 2020 making Tang's net worth an estimated $2.2 billion as of December 2020.


title: Stanley Tang

text: Tang has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. He grew up in Hong Kong and now resides in San Francisco, California.


title: Rupert Young

text: Rupert Francis Young (born 16 May 1978) is an English actor from Lambeth, London. He portrayed Sir Leon in the BBC drama series "Merlin". Young's television work includes episodes of "Doc Martin", "Foyle's War", "Hotel Babylon", "The White Queen", "Doctor Who" and other work. His films include "Dirty Filthy Love", a 2004 television film alongside Michael Sheen, and "Writers Retreat", released in 2015. In 2019 he portrayed Larry Murphy in the "West End" debut of the stage show "Dear Evan Hansen" at the Noël Coward Theatre. In 2020, Young was nominated for Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical for "Dear Evan Hansen" at the Laurence Olivier Awards.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (known as Sly Raccoon in PAL territories) is a 2002 stealth platform video game developed by Sucker Punch Productions and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2. It is the first installment of the "Sly Cooper" series. The game was followed by three sequels, "", "" and "". On November 9, 2010, "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus", as well as its first two sequels, were released together as "The Sly Collection", a remastered port of all three games on a single Blu-ray as a Classics HD title for the PlayStation 3.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: The game focuses on master thief Sly Cooper and his gang, Bentley the Turtle and Murray the Hippo, as they seek out the Fiendish Five to recover his family's "Thievius Raccoonus," a book with the accumulation of all of Sly's ancestors' thieving moves. The game was praised for using a variation on cel-shading rendering, which is used to create a film noir feel, while still rendered as a hand-drawn animated movie, though criticized for being too short.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: "Sly Cooper" is a third person platforming video game which incorporates stealth elements; as noted by an "Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine" retrospective, the game "tries to mix one-hit-kill arcade action with "Splinter Cell" sneaking". The player controls Sly Cooper, the title character, as he moves between each uniquely themed lair of the Fiendish Five and the sub-sections of those lairs, avoiding security systems and the watchful eyes of enemies. While Sly is equipped with a cane to attack his foes, he can be defeated with a single hit, and so the player is urged to use stealth maneuvers and the environment to evade or silently neutralize potential threats.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: To assist in these stealth moves, the environment contains special areas colored with blue sparkles of light, identified in the game as Sly's "thief senses." The player can trigger context-sensitive actions in these areas, such as shimmying along a narrow ledge or wall, landing on a pointed object such as an antenna or streetlight, climbing along the length of a narrow pole or pipe or using the cane to grapple onto something. The player must avoid detection by security systems and enemies, otherwise, an alarm will sound and the player will either have to destroy the alarm, avoid or defeat foes alerted by the alarm or hide for several seconds until the alarm resets. The game uses a dynamic music system that changes depending on the state of alarm in the area: the music will increase in volume and pacing when Sly attacks or is detected, and then will quiet down as the disturbance goes away.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Each sub-section of a lair contains a number of clue bottles that, when collected, allow Sly to access a safe in the level that contains a page from the Thievius Raccoonus. These pages grant Sly new moves to aid in movement, stealth, or combat, such as creating a decoy or dropping an explosive hat. Defeating each of the bosses also gives Sly moves, and these abilities are typically necessary to pass later levels. Coins are scattered about the levels and are also generated by defeating enemies or destroying objects. For every 100 coins collected, Sly gains a lucky horseshoe that is the color blue and when you have two horseshoes, it turns to gold. It will allow him to take extra hits, or if he currently has one, an extra life. If Sly collapses and loses a life, the current sub-level will be restarted or at a special "repeater" that acts as a checkpoint; if the player loses all of Sly's lives, they must restart that bosses' lair from the beginning. Besides the regular gameplay, there are mini-games that include driving levels (based on Murray), shooting levels to protect Murray as he ascends certain levels, and a cyber-tank game representing a hacking attempt by Bentley. One notable boss battle includes a rhythm-based sequence similar to "Dance Dance Revolution".


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Levels can be returned to at any time to gain additional coins or to seek out special moves. When a level is completed, all of the clue bottles are collected and the secret move is found, the player can then attempt a "Master Sprint", a timed sprint through the level to try to beat a set time. The player can unlock additional artistic content by completing all the levels in this fashion. For each level that has the "Master Sprint" completed, a developers commentary for that level is unlocked.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Sly Cooper comes from a long line of master thieves (the Cooper Clan) who only steal from other criminals, thus making them vigilantes. The Cooper family's heirloom, an ancient book named "The Thievius Raccoonus", records all the secret moves and techniques of every Cooper clan member. On his 8th birthday, Sly was supposed to inherit the book and learn all his family's ancient secrets, which was supposed to help him become a master thief. However, a group of thugs called "The Fiendish Five" (led by Clockwerk, the arch-nemesis of the family clan) attacked the Cooper household, killed Sly's parents, and stole all the pages from the "Thievius Raccoonus". After that, the ruthless gang goes their separate ways to commit dastardly crimes worldwide. Sly is sent to an orphanage where he meets and forms a gang with two boys who become his lifelong best friends: Bentley, a turtle technician, inventor, and talented mathematical hacker with encyclopedic knowledge who plays the role of the brains of the gang, and Murray, a huge hippopotamus with a ginormous appetite who plays the role as the brawns and the getaway driver of the gang. The three leave the orphanage together at age 16 to start their lives becoming international vigilante criminals, naming themselves "The Cooper Gang." Sly swears one day to avenge his family and track down the Fiendish Five and steal back the "Thievius Raccoonus". 2 years later, the Cooper Gang heads to Paris, France, to infiltrate Interpol headquarters to find the secret police file which stores details and information about the Fiendish Five. During the heist, they are ambushed by Inspector Carmelita Fox (towards whom Sly develops a romantic attraction), an Interpol police officer who is after the Cooper Gang. The gang manages to steal the police file and successfully escapes from her and the rest of the cops. With the secret police file finally in their hands, the Cooper Gang manages to track down the Fiendish Five.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Their first target is Sir Raleigh, a greedy aristocratic bullfrog who uses his mechanical skills to prey on sunken ships and steal buried treasures throughout the islands of Wales. After bringing down Raleigh and leaving him to be arrested by Interpol, the gang then heads to Mesa City, Utah, where Raleigh's old friend Muggshot, a muscular bulldog, has taken over the city center for his personal gambling empire and street crimes. Once Muggshot and his gangsters are dealt with, the gang heads to their third target in the Hatian jungle; Mz. Ruby, a voodoo priestess alligator, who plans to create an army of ghosts to terrorize those who rejected her as a child. The fourth target, the mysterious Panda King, resides in the Kunlun Mountains of China, where he terrorizes nearby villages by burying them in avalanches triggered by his fireworks. With four of the five members of the Fiendish Five dealt with and locked up by the police, Sly analyzes the collected pages of the "Thievius Raccoonus" and determines that the final target is Clockwerk, the leader of the Fiendish Five who killed Sly's parents and stole the "Thievius Raccoonus". The gang soon discovers that Clockwerk has always stalked the Cooper Clan since its earliest days. Bentley traces the metal used in some of the Fiendish Five's vehicles to a remote volcano in Russia, where the gang heads next.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Using special upgrades to the team van, the gang breaches Clockwerk's lair only to discover that Carmelita has been captured. Sly tries to save her but gets gassed by one of Clockwerk's traps. Bentley manages to save him by hacking into Clockwerk's security algorithm and shutting down the gas, saving Sly, and allowing him to rescue Carmelita and break her free from the dome cell she was trapped in. Despite their professional differences and the fact they are on opposing sides of the law, Sly and Carmelita agree to team up to stop Clockwerk and end his dastardly deeds. Sly manages to get past Clockwerk's death ray base and destroys it by trapping it to sink and finds a jetpack and uses it, allowing him to confront Clockwerk once and for all. Sly and Clockwerk engage in aerial combat, with Clockwerk revealing that he has always been jealous of the Coopers and that he turned himself into an immortal machine fueled by his jealousy and hatred toward the clan. Clockwerk recruited the Fiendish Five for the sole purpose of destroying the Cooper family's legacy. Clockwerk also revealed that the reason why he and the Fiendish Five left Sly alive after they killed his parents was to prove that since the "Thievius Raccoonus" was stolen, Sly would be useless and weak without it, as Clockwerk wanted to prove that the Cooper Line was nothing without their family heirloom. Sly replies that the "Thievius Raccoonus" doesn't create great thieves and that it only takes great thieves to create the "Thievius Raccoonus" and proceeds to destroy Clockwerk's body and head. After the battle is over and Clockwerk is defeated, Carmelita moves to arrest Sly now that their temporary truce is done with but agrees to give him a ten-second head start. Sly kisses her at the last second while also handcuffing her to a rail, running off with his gang in celebration as Carmelita angrily swears to hunt him down. Sly, Bentley, and Murray make it back to their hideout and manage to reassemble and restore the "Thievius Raccoonus" with all the complete pages they recovered, with Sly finally completing his life-long goal to avenge his family line and steal back his birthright. The gang remains together and pulls off new heists with the now-recovered "Thievius Raccoonus".


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" was developed by Sucker Punch Productions, being the 2nd game created by them following "" for the Nintendo 64.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Brian Flemming of Sucker Punch called the rendering style as "Toon-shading", comparing the detailed backgrounds with cel-shading foregrounds to that of animated movies. An interview with the Sucker Punch development team identified that they took this route because "We wanted Sly and his world to look illustrated, but one step away from a flattened graphic style." To prevent slowdowns with framerates, the team "had at least one engineer working on nothing but performance for the entire development of Sly." The game art team "collected hundreds of photos and drawings of areas that looked like the worlds <nowiki>[they]</nowiki> wanted to create" to generate the backgrounds. The characters themselves underwent up to "six or eight major revisions" before the designs were finalized.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: The music was inspired by the artwork from the game; Ashif Hakik, composer of the game's music, stated that "Stylistic influences came from a combination of instrument choices and musical character defined and inspired by the locales in the game, and similar composer works like Yoko Kanno and her work on "Cowboy Bebop", Henry Mancini, and Carl Stalling." He continued to note that "the interactive music engine we used made us consider the gameplay for each specific level a sort of starting point that would influence the way the music would be written."


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: Sales of "Sly Cooper" were initially poor, overshadowed by two other PlayStation 2 platformers published around 2002, "Ratchet & Clank" and "". It was a nominee for "GameSpot"s 2002 "Best Game No One Played on PlayStation 2" award. This, however, did not prevent the game from achieving at least 400,000 in sales a year since release to allow it to be included in Sony's "Greatest Hits" line, republishing it in 2003 and at a lower price. By July 2006, "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" had sold 800,000 copies and earned $21 million in the United States. "Next Generation" ranked it as the 78th highest-selling game launched for the PlayStation 2, Xbox or GameCube between January 2000 and July 2006 in that country. Combined sales of the "Sly Cooper" series reached 2.2 million units in the United States by July 2006.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: "Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus" was well received by the video game media. Most reviewers praised the unique look of the game. GameSpot noted that "The game has a fantastic sense of style to its design that is reflected in everything from the animation to the unique use of the peaking fad, cel-shaded polygons." Many reviews also appreciated the ease of learning the controls and gameplay; IGN stated that "Sly is incredibly responsive, and though his size seems a little large at times due to his long arms and legs and the cane he carries, skillfully jumping and hitting enemies with precision is a quick study." Several reviewers appreciated the fluidity of the game between actual play, cutscenes, and other features. The game was also praised for being a game that was accessible to both adults and children.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: A common detraction of the game was its length; as commented by GameSpot's review, "The main problem is that just as you're getting into a groove and really enjoying the variety seen throughout the different levels, the game ends." The length was defended by Sucker Punch's developers; Brian Flemming noted that there was additional content to be unlocked at several levels, including "for each <nowiki>[Master Sprint]</nowiki> you complete, you get bonus commentary from the designers, artists and programmers here at Sucker Punch, something that people have reacted to really positively." The game was also cited as being too easy, with GameSpot stating that "The game's relative ease combined with a very short length prevents Sly Cooper from becoming the next big platformer. But it's great while it lasts." However, "Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine" noted that in regards to the difficulty "There's a pleasant old-school feel to Thievius Raccoonus; the enemies are merciless but a bit stupid, and the platforming challenges come on strong and ramp up steadily in difficulty as the levels go by." Reviewers also noted some framerate slowdowns in latter levels of the game, as well as some camera control issues.


title: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

text: GameSpy considered "Sly Cooper" to be the 5th most underrated game of all time in a 2003 listing. The game has since yielded three sequels, "" (2004), "" (2005) and "" (2013). "Sly Cooper" won "Best New Character" and nominated for "Excellence in Visual Arts" at the 2003 Game Developer's Conference for 2002. Furthermore, the character of Sly Cooper has also been come to be considered as a mascot for the PlayStation systems, alongside both Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter. This has further led to collaboration between the development teams for all three series, Sucker Punch, Insomniac Games, and Naughty Dog, leading to subtle inclusion of some elements of "Sly Cooper" within the other titles. For example, a brief gameplay clip of "Sly Cooper" plays among several for "Ratchet & Clank 1&2", "Jak and Daxter", and "Jak II" during the start menu for "".


title: Debbie Dingell

text: Deborah Ann Dingell (; ; November 23, 1953) is an American politician and member of the Democratic Party who has been the U.S. representative for Michigan's 12th congressional district since 2015. She is the widow of John Dingell, her predecessor in the seat, who holds the record as the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history. She worked as a consultant to the American Automobile Policy Council. She was a superdelegate for the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: Dingell is active in several Michigan and Washington, D.C., charities and serves on a number of charitable boards. She is a founder and past chair of the National Women's Health Resource Center and the Children's Inn at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is also a member of the board of directors for Vital Voices Global Partnership. She is a 1975 graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: Descended from one of the Fisher brothers, owners of Fisher Body, from 1919 a part of General Motors, she has served as president of the General Motors Foundation and as executive director of Global Community Relations and Government Relations at GM.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: She married Representative John Dingell, 27 years her senior, in 1981; she was his second wife. She had grown up as a Republican, but became a Democrat soon after marrying Dingell. Their marriage lasted 38 years until her husband's death on February 7, 2019, at the age of 92.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: She is a member of the Democratic National Committee from Michigan and chaired Vice President Al Gore's campaign in Michigan in 2000. In 2004, she also helped secure the Michigan Democratic primary and general election vote for John Kerry in Michigan.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: Dingell and Senator Carl Levin were proponents of moving up Michigan's presidential primary before February 5 in an attempt to garner greater political influence for Michigan during the 2008 Democratic primaries. This resulted in Michigan almost losing its delegates' votes in the Democratic National Convention.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: When Carl Levin announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate at the end of his term in 2015, Dingell indicated that she was interested in running for his seat. When former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm declined to run for the seat, a "Politico" writer declared Dingell to be one of the front-runners for the Democratic nomination, alongside Representative Gary Peters. She chose not to run, and Peters won the seat.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: Dingell indicated that she planned to run for her husband's congressional seat after he announced his retirement. On August 5, she won the Democratic primary. On November 4, she won the general election, defeating Republican Terry Bowman. When Dingell was sworn in, she became the first U.S. non-widowed woman in Congress to succeed her husband. His father, John Dingell Sr., held Michigan's 12th district for 22 years before his son won it. Altogether, the Dingells have represented this district and its predecessors for 89 consecutive years as of 2021. The district was numbered as the 15th from 1933 to 1965, the 16th from 1965 to 2003, the 15th again from 2003 to 2013, and has been the 12th since 2013.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: In 2018, Dingell introduced a law that would give the Consumer Product Safety Commission the authority to recall defective firearms. John Dingell was a key lawmaker who initially granted the firearms industry this exemption from the 1972 Consumer Product Safety Act that created the Consumer Product Safety Commission.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: In July 2019, Dingell voted against a House resolution introduced by Representative Brad Schneider opposing efforts to boycott the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. The resolution passed 398–17.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: In April 2021, Dingell introduced the Recovering America's Wildlife Act of 2021, a bill that would provide funding for conserving and protecting endangered and threatened species, strategies to do so, and wildlife-related recreational activities. The bill passed the House by 230–190 on June 14, 2022.


title: Debbie Dingell

text: After Dingell voted to impeach President Donald Trump, Trump attacked Dingell during a campaign rally in Battle Creek, musing that her late husband, might be in hell, saying of him, "Maybe he's looking up, I don't know, I don't know, maybe, maybe. But let's assume he's looking down." She was attending a bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus gathering when she was told of Trump's remarks. Numerous members of both parties came to Dingell's defense. In her response to the incident, Dingell called for a return to civility, saying, "some things should be off limits." In her 2022 book , "New York Times" reporter Maggie Haberman wrote that Dingell received a call from a man claiming to be a reporter who asked whether she was "looking for an apology from Trump". According to Haberman, "Dingell couldn't shake the idea that his voice sounded like that of the forty-fifth president."


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: Atlas is a name for a family of modern inline piston engines for trucks from General Motors, used in the GMT355 and GMT360 platforms. The series debuted in 2002 with the Oldsmobile Bravada, and is also used in the Buick Rainier, the Chevrolet TrailBlazer and Colorado, the GMC Envoy and Canyon, the Hummer H3, Isuzu Ascender and i-370, and the Saab 9-7X. The engines use GM's Vortec name, and Straight-4, Straight-5, and Straight-6 engines are all part of the same family, sharing the same manufacturing equipment, rods, pistons, valves, and other parts. They feature coil-on-plug ignition systems, variable valve timing on the exhaust side, electronic throttle control, and a special oil pan with a pass-through for the half shafts in four-wheel drive vehicles. The inclusion of VVT on the exhaust camshaft side allows the Atlas series to meet emissions standards without the use of EGR, simplifying the engine design and increasing power for a broad power curve. The LL8 shares 75% of its components with the LK5 and L52; while the LK5 and L52 share 89% of their components.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The Atlas engines feature aluminum cylinder blocks and heads, with the cylinder bores featuring replaceable steel cylinder liners.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The Atlas program began in 1995 along with the planning for GM's next-generation mid-size SUVs and pickup trucks. These vehicles were designed around the I6 engine. The I6 version was used in a Baja 1000 racing truck, winning its first race in a class that also included V8 engines. Another I6-powered truck won the truck class at the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The Atlas engines were produced at the Flint Engine South plant in Flint, Michigan, while the I4 and I5 versions were produced at the Tonawanda Engine plant in Tonawanda, New York, near Buffalo.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The LL8 (or Vortec 4200), is a straight-6 gasoline engine produced from 2002 to 2009. It was the first Atlas engine, and was introduced in 2002 for the Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, and Oldsmobile Bravada. The engine was also used in the Buick Rainier, Saab 9-7X, and Isuzu Ascender.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: It displaces , with a bore and stroke. It has four valves per cylinder, utilizes dual-overhead cams (DOHC) design, and features variable valve timing on the exhaust cam, a first for GM inline engines. When introduced, this engine's power was at 6,000 rpm and torque was at 3,600 rpm. 2003 saw a slight bump in power to , while torque was unchanged. For 2006, power was increased to at 6,000 rpm and torque to ) at 4800 rpm with the addition of a MAF and a complete internal redesign of the engine; however, due to the new SAE rating procedures, ratings can vary slightly between years. The engine redline is 6,300 rpm. The LL8 was on the Ward's 10 Best Engines list for 2002 through 2005 and was the basis for all the other Atlas engines. With the closure of the Moraine, Ohio, plant and the discontinuation of the GMT360 platform (Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, etc.), production of the LL8 also ended.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The L52 (also called Vortec 3500), is a straight-5 DOHC engine produced from 2004 through 2006. It displaces , with a bore and stroke. Dynoed at the flywheel it produces at 5,600 rpm and at 2,800 rpm. The engine redline is 6,300 rpm.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The LLR (also called Vortec 3700), is a straight-5 DOHC engine with dual balance shafts produced from 2007 through 2012. It displaces , courtesy of a larger bore while keeping the stroke. The LLR also corrected the head issue found in the "L52". It produces at 5,600 rpm and at 4,600 rpm. The engine redline is 6,300 rpm. This five-cylinder engine achieves better fuel economy and performance than the six-cylinder, but with more power and torque than the four-cylinder.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The LK5 (also called the Vortec 2800) is a straight-4 DOHC engine produced between 2004 and 2006, with a bore and stroke. It produces at 5,600 rpm and of torque at 2,800 rpm. The engine redline is 6,300 rpm.


title: General Motors Atlas engine

text: The LLV (also called Vortec 2900) is a straight-4 DOHC engine produced between 2007 and 2012, with a bore and a stroke. It replaced the LK5 and produced at 5,600 rpm and of torque at 2,800 rpm. The engine redline is 6,300 rpm.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Samurai Pizza Cats is an American animated television adaptation of the anime series "Kyatto Ninden Teyandee" ("Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee"), produced by Tatsunoko Productions and Sotsu Agency. The series originally aired in Japan on TV Tokyo from February 1, 1990 to February 12, 1991 for a total of 54 episodes. Saban Entertainment picked up the North American rights to the series in 1991 and produced a 52-episode English adaptation.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: When Saban licensed the English version, proper translations of and information about the original Japanese episodes were either of poor quality or non-existent. It was decided to write completely original dialogue for the English dub, playing the show as a wacky, Animaniacs-esque comedy in contrast to the less farcical original. The English-language version became a cult hit among anime fans due to its rapid-fire pop-culture references and farcical nature.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Saban's distribution rights to the series expired on November 12, 2000. Discotek Media currently holds the North American home video license to the series in North America, while Madman Entertainment holds the license for Australia and New Zealand.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Crunchyroll began streaming the series on December 27, 2015. The series became available for streaming to Amazon Prime subscribers in late 2018. In 2020, it became available on Tubi. In 2021, it became available on Peacock.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: The series is set in Little Tokyo, a mechanical city which fuses feudal Japanese culture with contemporary culture, and is populated by cybernetic anthropomorphic animals. The city is nominally led by Emperor Fred, a doddering eccentric. The city's actual leadership lies in the hands of the city council and the emperor's daughter, Princess Violet. The council is headed by ambitious Prime Minister Seymour "The Big" Cheese, a rat who constantly plots to overthrow the Emperor. Big Cheese is aided by his inept minions: trusted adviser Jerry Atric and Bad Bird, the leader of an army of ninja crows.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Unknown to the prime minister, council member and palace guard commander "Big Al" Dente has learned of his designs on leadership, but is unable to prosecute him for treason because of the plausible deniability he maintains. Instead, Al Dente enlists the services of Speedy Cerviche, Polly Esther, and Guido Anchovy, three cyborg cat samurai who work in the city's pizzeria, along with their operator Francine. Known collectively as the Samurai Pizza Cats, the three are assigned to stop Big Cheese and his evil henchmen's plans to take over Little Tokyo.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: When Saban Entertainment licensed "Kyatto Ninden Teyandee", 52 of the 54 episodes that were produced in Japan were translated into English. The two untranslated episodes were clip shows that did little to further the series' plot. Some episodes of the dubbed version were never aired in the United States, due to censorship issues.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: The music in the English dub (replacing the original Japanese music) was by Shuki Levy and Haim Saban (credited as Kussa Mahchi). In keeping with the parodic nature of the show, the lyrics of the new theme song make a number of references to American pop culture.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Michael Airington, a writer for the series, also sang the theme song (using a voice very similar to actor Paul Lynde), being credited as "Singing Sensation: Googie Gomez". According to the producer Andy Thomas, Airington had a few drinks before the recording session for the song started, and as a result, accidentally stuttered on one line ("this cat gets "down down" with a love hangover"); that mistake was kept in the final version of the theme.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: The English version of the series first aired in the United Kingdom on ITV on August 31, 1991, with repeats continuing until 1995. In Canada, the series first appeared in 1992, on YTV, and in 1996, in the United States, on first-run syndication. The series was broadcast on Australian television on the weekday Seven Network morning kid's wrapper programme "Agro's Cartoon Connection", from April 1992. A repeat run occurred in the same time slot in early 1994.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: "Samurai Pizza Cats" has been broadcast in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Colombia, India, Spain, Finland, Trinidad and Tobago, France, Italy, Poland, Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Chile, Peru, Panama, Hong Kong, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sweden, Armenia, the Philippines, the United States, Portugal, Nigeria, and Russia from 1991 onwards.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Discotek Media released the show in both the original Japanese-language version and the North American English-language version dubbed by Saban. DVDs were released in region 1 format, with the Japanese version in Dolby Stereo 2.0 and English version in Dolby Digital Mono. The "Kyatto-Ninden Teyandee: Complete Uncut Japanese Language Collection" was released on April 30, 2013 and the English-dubbed version, "Samurai Pizza Cats: Complete English Language TV Series Collection – 8 Disc Set", was released on July 30, 2013. The "Kyatto-Ninden Teyandee: Complete Uncut Japanese Language Collection" set includes all of the 54 original episodes (including the two clip-show episodes that were never dubbed into English) while the "Samurai Pizza Cats: Complete English Language TV Series Collection" set includes all 52 English-dubbed episodes. A French-language version, titled "Samouraï Pizza Cats", which features a French dub adapted from the English dub, was released on DVD in France by Declic Images across two 5-disc box sets (26 episodes per set) in 2004.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Madman Entertainment released the show on DVD for Australia initially in two collections, with four discs in each set. Collection 1, containing episodes 1–26, was released on October 16, 2013; collection 2 containing episodes 27–52, was released on December 4, 2013. A box set of the complete series was released by Madman on April 6, 2016.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Discotek Media released the "Samurai Pizza Cats: The Complete Collection" on Blu-ray on January 19, 2016. This release featured every episode in standard definition on a single disk.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: Various toys and model kits were released in both Japan and Europe by Bandai, the latter usually being reboxed versions of the prior. Action figures for the Samurai Pizza Cats and the Rescue Team (the Japanese originals came as model kits comparable to today's Gundam toys, while the European figures came pre-assembled). There were also both large and small (Gachapon-sized) rubber-like figures and playsets for the smaller figures, including the Great Catatonic and the pizza parlor.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: In 1991, Tecmo published a platform video game based on "Kyatto Ninden Teyandee" for the Famicom (NES) in Japan.


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: The main characters of the series were also intended at one point to appear in the Wii fighting game "". The game's producer, Ryota Niitsuma, was quoted in an interview as saying, "One of the main anime we got more requests for than any others was "Samurai Pizza Cats"... I wanted to see that, but we couldn't reach an agreement."


title: Samurai Pizza Cats

text: "Samurai Pizza Cats" comics were released as back-up stories in "Saban Powerhouse" (published by Valiant/Acclaim) which ran for two issues in 1997.


title: Executive Order 14067

text: Executive Order 14067, officially titled Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets, was signed on March 9, 2022 and is the 83rd executive order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden. The telos of the order is to develop digital assets in a responsible manner. The executive order addresses the potential national security implications of cryptocurrencies.


title: Executive Order 14067

text: The executive order aims to develop a digital assets policy plan and organize federal regulators' efforts in this area. The order outlines five main goals, which includes protection of consumers and investors, monetary stability, decreasing financial and national security risks, economic competitiveness, and responsible innovation. It also asks for more work to be done into developing a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).


title: Executive Order 14067

text: Companies in the digital asset field will likely see policy changes in the form of regulation and enforcement, but it might also give the market and its participants more clarity. The order instructs federal agencies to conduct a wide assessment of existing policies relating to digital assets and to submit reports recommending regulatory and legislative reforms.


title: Executive Order 14067

text: The order does not change the way digital assets are governed immediately; nevertheless, it marks the start of a process to develop a regulatory framework that addresses all elements of digital assets. It demonstrates the United States' acknowledgment of the importance of digital assets and blockchain technology in the global financial system, as well as its intention to remain a leader in the global financial system through responsible payment innovation and digital asset development.


title: Regillio Simons

text: Regillio Simons (born 28 June 1973) is a Dutch former professional footballer who played as a striker. He is the father of Xavi Simons.


title: Regillio Simons

text: Simons started playing football at FC Amstelland. He played for SC Telstar, Fortuna Sittard, NAC, Willem II, Kyoto Purple Sanga (Japan), ADO Den Haag and TOP Oss. In his best time he was employed by Fortuna Sittard. In the 1998–99 season he had a big contribution with two goals in the 1–3 victory over Ajax in Amsterdam Arena. In that same year he scored four times in the 6–4 home win against PSV Eindhoven. After his professional career he defended several years the colors of FC Türkiyemspor, an Amsterdam amateur club playing in the top Sunday league. From summer 2008 he played for the AFC Ajax (amateurs) for two years.


title: Regillio Simons

text: Since 2005 he also started his coaching career and became a head coach at various clubs. This season he is a head coach of one of the Ajax Youth Academy teams. Since 2010 Simons is in the possession of the Coaching degree UEFA Pro Licence.


title: Regillio Simons

text: Born in the Netherlands, Simons is of Surinamese descent. Regillio Simons now lives in Spain, while one of his two sons, Xavi Simons, is a player for Dutch club PSV Eindhoven.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is a non-fiction novel written by Daniel James Brown and published on June 4, 2013.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The Boys in the Boat is a true story based on the struggles and sacrifices made by the University of Washington rowing team to compete at the highest possible level, rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics – Men's eight. Joseph Sutton-Holcomb from The Seattle Times mentions that Brown got the idea to write this book when his neighbor Judy Willman walked into his home in Redmond, Washington. She said that her father on hospice, Joe Rantz, was a fan of his works and wanted to have a conversation with the author. That encounter with Judy ignited a conversation with Joe Rantz about life during the Great Depression, which led to an in-depth chat about his time as a rower at the University of Washington. Growing up, Joe felt ostracized by his father and stepmother and was seen as disposable, which correlates to how many people during that time felt. The Depression brought about so much uncertainty, and people felt as if they did not have any control over their own lives.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: In an interview with Joseph Sutton-Holcomb from The Seattle Times, Brown emphasized that the reason he spent so much time on the build up to this important race is because he thought “it's much more meaningful if you know the nine guys involved on some kind of personal level, and if you knew what the German boys wearing swastikas on their chests represented, that they weren't just another bunch of kids in a boat.”


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The Boys in the Boat is about the University of Washington eight-oared rowing crew that represented the United States in rowing at the 1936 Summer Olympics – Men's eight in Berlin, and narrowly beat out Italy and Germany to win the gold medal. The main character is Joe Rantz.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: There are two backstories. One illustrates how all nine members of the Washington team came from lower-middle-class families and had to struggle to earn their way through school during the depths of the Depression. Along with the chronicle of their victories and defeats in domestic competition, the reader learns the importance of the synchronization of the eight rowers as they respond to the commands of the coxswain and his communications with the stroke, consistent pacing, and sprint to the finish.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The second backstory begins with a depiction of Hitler decreeing construction of the spectacular German venues at which the Games would take place. Along the way, the book also describes how the Nazis successfully covered up the evidence of their harsh and inhumane treatment of the Jews so as to win worldwide applause for the Games, duping the United States Olympic Committee among others.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: All comes together with a description of the final race. During the 1930s, rowing was a popular sport with millions following the action on the radio. The victorious Olympians became national heroes. In accordance with the strictures of amateur athletics, the boys sank into relative obscurity after their victory but were still better off than their parents, and for the rest of their lives proud of their accomplishment. After their win, they would come together every few years to row again.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The Delhi Press asserts that The Boys in the Boat, published by Penguin Books, was one of the best selling books after it was released. "Timothy Egan of The New York Times" writes, "Against all odds, Brown’s book has become a global phenomenon. “The Boys in the Boat” is about who we used to be. And who we still could be. Like the best history, it’s then and now wow factor is both embarrassing (to the present) and inspiring (to the future)." Laurence Raw, from The Journal of American Culture, addressed this book as being researched beautifully and highlights the woes and triumphs experienced during the Great Depression. Along with the book’s praise, the book received many rewards including the 2014 Washington State Book Award.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: Overall, the book received positive reactions. "The Guardian" states", "The US rowing team's victory at Hitler's 1936 Olympics is charted in a dramatic Depression-era account destined for Hollywood."" "The News Journal" (Wilmington) includes a positive review from John Schoonver, a coxswain at St. Andrews School in 1959, who claimed that "It [the book] shows a remarkable story about the perseverance of young rowers.” In July 2014, The Delhi Press addressed that “One of the protagonists is Joe Rantz, a poor boy, whose determination to overcome odds makes him an ideal hero. The author learned the details of Rantz's brilliant rowing career from the athlete himself.” According to The Delhi Press, the author worked hard to create a book to inspire many generations. The Smithsonian Magazine has highlighted how it's not a surprise that this novel has been brought to cinematic development. The figurative language and imagery Brown utilizes allows the audience to feel what the rowers are experiencing.  Joseph Sutton-Holcomb from The Seattle Times claims that this book  is more than a heartfelt coming-of-age sports saga because it exemplifies what can be accomplished when people come together.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: On March 3, 2011, The Weinstein Company acquired the film rights to The Boys in the Boat with Kenneth Branagh directing and Donna Gigliotti producing. In October 2018, Lantern Entertainment (the successor of The Weinstein Company) contracted with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to distribute the film worldwide. In March 2020, it was announced that actor George Clooney would direct the film.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: In February 2022, it was announced that Joel Edgerton, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Luke Slattery, Tom Varey, Thomas Elms, Wil Coban, Bruce Herbelin-Earle, and Hadley Robinson were cast.


title: The Boys in the Boat

text: The story of the gold medal-winning crew also inspired a 2016 PBS American Experience documentary "The Boys of ’36".


title: Siju Wilson

text: Wilson Joseph (born 22 November 1984), professionally credited as Siju Wilson, is an Indian actor and producer, who works in Malayalam films. He won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Film for his debut production "Vasanthi" (2019).


title: Siju Wilson

text: Siju attained recognition through his role as Roy Issac (Royichan) in the show "Just fun Chumma" telecast on Amrita TV. Later, he appeared in films, of which notable of them are "Neram" (2013), "Premam" (2015), "Happy Wedding" (2016), "Kattappanayile Rithwik Roshan" (2016), "Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela" (2017), and "Aadhi" (2018). Wilson produced and acted the film "Vasanthi", that won the 2019 Kerala State Film Award for Best Film.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa was an early advocate for reform in Japan. His ideas about the organization of government and the structure of social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji period. He appears on the current 10,000-Japanese yen banknote.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa Yukichi was born into an impoverished low-ranking samurai (military nobility) family of the Okudaira Clan of Nakatsu Domain (present-day Ōita, Kyushu) in 1835. His family lived in Osaka, the main trading center for Japan at the time. His family was poor following the early death of his father, who was also a Confucian scholar. At the age of 5 he started Han learning, and by the time he turned 14, he had studied major writings such as the "Analects", "Tao Te Ching", "Zuo Zhuan" and "Zhuangzi". Fukuzawa was greatly influenced by his lifelong teacher, Shōzan Shiraishi, who was a scholar of Confucianism and Han learning. Yukichi turned 19 in 1854, shortly after the Perry Expedition's arrival in Japan marking the beginning of the opening of Japan to trade via Gunboat diplomacy. As the family patriarch Fukuzawa's brother asked him to travel to Nagasaki, where the Dutch colony at Dejima was located, in order to enter a school of Dutch studies "(rangaku). " He instructed Yukichi to learn Dutch so that he might study European cannon designs and gunnery.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa’s early life consisted of the dull and backbreaking work typical of a lower-level samurai in Japan during the Tokugawa period. Although Fukuzawa did travel to Nagasaki, his stay was brief as he quickly began to outshine his host in Nagasaki, Okudaira Iki. Okudaira planned to get rid of Fukuzawa by writing a letter saying that Fukuzawa's mother was ill. Seeing through the fake letter Fukuzawa planned to travel to Edo and continue his studies there since he would be unable to in his home domain, Nakatsu, but upon his return to Osaka, his brother persuaded him to stay and enroll at the Tekijuku school run by physician and "rangaku" scholar Ogata Kōan. Fukuzawa studied at Tekijuku for three years and became fully proficient in the Dutch language. In 1858, he was appointed the official Dutch teacher of his family's domain, Nakatsu, and was sent to Edo to teach the family's vassals there.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: The following year, Japan opened up three of its ports to American and European ships, and Fukuzawa, intrigued with Western civilization, traveled to Kanagawa to see them. When he arrived, he discovered that virtually all of the European merchants there were speaking English rather than Dutch. He then began to study English, but at that time, English-Japanese interpreters were rare and dictionaries nonexistent, so his studies were slow.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: In 1859, the Tokugawa shogunate sent the first diplomatic mission to the United States. Fukuzawa volunteered his services to Admiral Kimura Yoshitake. Kimura's ship, the "Kanrin Maru", arrived in San Francisco, California, in 1860. The delegation stayed in the city for a month, during which time Fukuzawa had himself photographed with an American girl, and also found a "Webster's Dictionary", from which he began serious study of the English language.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Upon his return in 1860, Fukuzawa became an official translator for the Tokugawa shogunate. Shortly afterwards he brought out his first publication, an English-Japanese dictionary which he called "Kaei Tsūgo" (translated from a Chinese-English dictionary) which was a beginning for his series of later books. In 1862, he visited Europe as one of the two English translators in the First Japanese Embassy to Europe. During its year in Europe, the Embassy conducted negotiations with France, England, the Netherlands, Prussia, and finally Russia. In Russia, the embassy attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate for the southern end of Sakhalin (in Japanese Karafuto), a long-standing source of dispute between the two countries.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: The information collected during these travels resulted in his famous work "Seiyō Jijō" (, ), which he published in ten volumes in 1867, 1868 and 1870. The books describe western culture and institutions in simple, easy to understand terms, and they became immediate best-sellers. Fukuzawa was soon regarded as the foremost expert on western civilization, leading him to conclude that his mission in life was to educate his countrymen in new ways of thinking in order to enable Japan to resist European imperialism.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: In 1868 he changed the name of the school he had established to teach Dutch to Keio Gijuku, and from then on devoted all his time to education. He also added Public speaking to the educational system's curriculum. While Keiō's initial identity was that of a private school of Western studies (Keio-gijuku), it expanded and established its first university faculty in 1890. Under the name Keio-Gijuku University, it became a leader in Japanese higher education.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa was also a strong advocate for women’s rights. He often spoke up in favor of equality between husbands and wives, the education of girls as well as boys, and the equal love of daughters and sons. At the same time, he called attention to harmful practices such as women’s inability to own property in their own name and the familial distress that took place when married men took mistresses. However, even Fukuzawa was not willing to propose completely equal rights for men and women; only for husbands and wives. He also stated in his 1899 book "New Greater Learning for Women" that a good marriage was always the best outcome for a young woman, and according to some of Fukuzawa's personal letters, he discouraged his friends from sending their daughters on to higher education so that they would not become less desirable marriage candidates. While some of Yukichi’s other proposed reforms, such as education reforms, found an eager audience, his ideas about women received a less enthusiastic reception.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: After suffering a stroke on January 25, 1901, Fukuzawa Yukichi died on February 3. He was buried at Zenpuku-ji, in the Azabu area of Tokyo. Alumni of Keio-Gijuku University hold a ceremony there every year on February 3.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa's writings may have been the foremost of the Edo period and Meiji period. They played a large role in the introduction of Western culture into Japan.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: In 1860, he published "English-Japanese Dictionary" ("Zōtei Kaei Tsūgo"). It was his first publication. He bought "English-Chinese Dictionary" ("Kaei Tsūgo") in San Francisco in 1860. He translated it to Japanese and he added the Japanese translations to the original textbook. In his book, he invented the new Japanese characters VU () to represent the pronunciation of VU, and VA () to represent the pronunciation of VA. For example, the name Beethoven is written as in modern Japanese.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: His famous textbook "Sekai Kunizukushi" ("All the Countries of the World, for Children Written in Verse", 1869) became a best seller and was used as an official school textbook. His inspiration for writing the books came when he tried to teach world geography to his sons. At the time there were no textbooks on the subject, so he decided to write one himself. He started by buying a few Japanese geography books for children, named "Miyakoji" ("City roads") and "Edo hōgaku" ("Tokyo maps"), and practiced reading them aloud. He then wrote "Sekai Kunizukushi" in six volumes in the same lyrical style. The first volume covered Asia, the second Africa, the third Europe, the fourth South America, and the fifth both North America and Australia. The sixth volume was an appendix that gave an introduction to world geography.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Influenced by the 1835 and 1856 editions of "Elements of Moral Science" by Brown University President Francis Wayland, from 1872-76 Fukuzawa published 17 volumes of "Gakumon no Susume" (, or more idiomatically "On Studying"). Through these writings, Fukuzawa develops his views on the importance of equality of opportunity as a principle, explores his understanding of the principle, and stresses that education is the key to taking best advantage of


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: the principle and achieving greatness. For these reasons, he was an avid supporter of public schools and believed in a firm mental foundation through learning and studiousness. Fukuzawa also advocated in these writings his most lasting motto, "national independence through personal independence." By creating a self-determining social morality for a Japan still reeling from both the political upheavals wrought by the unwanted end to its isolationism and the cultural upheavals caused by the inundation of so much novelty in products, methods, and ideas, Fukuzawa hoped to instill a sense of personal strength among the people of Japan so they could build a nation to rival all others. To his understanding, Western nations had become more powerful than other regions because their societies fostered education, individualism (independence), competition and exchange of ideas.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa published many influential essays and critical works. A particularly prominent example is "Bunmeiron no Gairyaku" (, ) published in 1875, in which he details his own theory of civilization. It was influenced by "Histoire de la civilisation en Europe" (1828; Eng. trans in 1846) by François Guizot and "History of Civilization in England" (1872–1873, 2nd London ed.) by Henry Thomas Buckle. According to Fukuzawa, civilization is relative to time and circumstance, as well in comparison. For example, at the time China was relatively civilized in comparison to some African colonies, and European nations were the most civilized of all.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Colleagues in the Meirokusha intellectual society shared many of Fukuzawa's views, which he published in his contributions to "Meiroku zasshi" (Meiji Six Magazine), a scholarly journal he helped publish. In his books and journals, he often wrote about the word "civilization" and what it meant. He advocated a move toward "civilization", by which he meant material and spiritual well-being, which elevated human life to a "higher plane". Because material and spiritual well-being corresponded to knowledge and "virtue", to "move toward civilization" was to advance and pursue knowledge and virtue themselves. He contended that people could find the answer to their life or their present situation from "civilization." Furthermore, the difference between the weak and the powerful and large and small was just a matter of difference between their knowledge and education.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: He argued that Japan should not import guns and materials. Instead it should support the acquisition of knowledge, which would eventually take care of the material necessities. He talked of the Japanese concept of being practical or pragmatic (実学, "jitsugaku") and the building of things that are basic and useful to other people. In short, to Fukuzawa, "civilization" essentially meant the furthering of knowledge and education.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa's most important contribution to the reformation effort, though, came in the form of a newspaper called (, "Current Events"), which he started in 1882, after being prompted by Inoue Kaoru, Ōkuma Shigenobu, and Itō Hirobumi to establish a strong influence among the people, and in particular to transmit to the public the government's views on the projected national assembly, and as reforms began, Fukuzawa, whose fame was already unquestionable, began production of "Jiji Shinpo", which received wide circulation, encouraging the people to enlighten themselves and to adopt a moderate political attitude towards the change that was being engineered within the social and political structures of Japan. He translated many books and journals into Japanese on a wide variety of subjects, including chemistry, the arts, military and society, and published many books (in multiple volumes) and journals himself describing Western society, his own philosophy and change, etc.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa was one of the most influential people ever that helped Japan modernize into the country it is today. He never accepted any high position and remained a normal Japanese citizen for his whole life. By the time of his death, he was revered as one of the founders of modern Japan. All of his work was written and was released at a critical juncture in the Japanese society and uncertainty for the Japanese people about their future after the signing of the Unequal treaties, their realization in the weakness of the Japanese government at the time (Tokugawa Shogunate) and its inability to repel the American and European influence. It should also be noted that there were bands of samurai that forcefully opposed the Americans and Europeans and their friends through murder and destruction. Fukuzawa was in danger of his life as a samurai group killed one of his colleagues for advocating policies like those of Fukuzawa. Fukuzawa wrote at a time when the Japanese people were undecided on whether they should be bitter about the American and European forced treaties and imperialism, or to understand the West and move forward. Fukuzawa greatly aided the ultimate success of the pro-modernization forces.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Fukuzawa appears on the current 10,000-yen banknote and has been compared to Benjamin Franklin in the United States. Franklin appears on the similarly-valued $100 bill. Although all other figures appearing on Japanese banknotes changed when the recent redesign was released, Fukuzawa remained on the 10,000-yen note.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Yukichi Fukuzawa's former residence in the city of Nakatsu in Ōita Prefecture is a Nationally Designated Cultural Asset. The house and the Yukichi Fukuzawa Memorial Hall are the major tourist attractions of this city.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: Yukichi Fukuzawa was a firm believer that Western education surpassed Japan's. However, he did not like the idea of parliamentary debates. As early as 1860, Yukichi Fukuzawa traveled to Europe and the United States. He believed that the problem in Japan was the undervalued mathematics and science. Also, these suffered from a "lack of the idea of independence". The Japanese conservatives were not happy about Fukuzawa's view of Western education. Since he was a family friend of conservatives, he took their stand to heart. Fukuzawa later came to state that he went a little too far.


title: Fukuzawa Yukichi

text: One word sums up his entire theme and that is "independence". Yukichi Fukuzawa believed that national independence was the framework to society in the West. However, to achieve this independence, as well as personal independence, Fukuzawa advocated Western learning. He believed that public virtue would increase as people became more educated.


title: Anton Webern

text: Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School.


title: Anton Webern

text: Little known in the earlier part of his life, mostly as a student and follower of Schoenberg, but also as a peripatetic and often unhappy theater music director with a mixed reputation as an exacting conductor, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher during Red Vienna. With Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts (and with the benefit of a publication agreement secured through Universal Edition), Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, independence, and scale during the latter half of the 1920s—his mature chamber and orchestral works, music that, perhaps more than his earlier expressionist works, would later decisively influence a generation of composers. Amid Austrofascism, Nazism, and World War II, Webern remained nevertheless committed to taking the "path to the new music", as he styled it in a series of private lectures delivered in 1932–1933 (but unpublished until 1960). He continued writing some of his most mature and later celebrated music while increasingly ostracized from official musical life as a "cultural Bolshevist", taking occasional copyist jobs from his publisher as he lost students and his conducting career.


title: Anton Webern

text: Following his death shortly after World War II, Webern became more widely celebrated and influential than ever before, albeit initially through pedagogy often lacking full context, and the thread of his work was taken by composers in directions far beyond any residual post-Romanticism and expressionism that had remained in his style. His gradual innovations in schematic organization of pitch, rhythm, register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, and melodic contour; his later adaptation and generalization of imitative contrapuntal techniques such as canon and fugue; and his inclination toward athematicism, abstraction, and lyricism variously informed and oriented European, typically serial or avant-garde composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and György Ligeti. Later, both Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann also found much in Webern on the way to complexity in the case of the former and "musique concrète instrumentale" in the case of the latter, engaging particularly with his atonal works by some contrast to earlier post-Webernism. Less so in the United States, his music attracted the interest of Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland, whose critical ambivalence was marked by a certain enthusiasm and fascination nonetheless; Milton Babbitt, who ultimately derived more inspiration from Schoenberg's twelve-tone practice than that of Webern; and particularly Igor Stravinsky, to whom it was very fruitfully reintroduced by Robert Craft, and without which Stravinsky's late works might have taken different shape. Indeed, Stravinsky staked his contract with Columbia Records to see that Webern's "complete" music was first both recorded and widely distributed. Among the more interdisciplinary New York School, John Cage and Morton Feldman both cited the staggering effect of its "sound" on their own music, first meeting at a performance of the Symphony, Op. 21, and even singing the praises of Christian Wolff distinctly as "our Webern". A richer and more historically informed understanding of Webern and his music began to emerge during the latter half of the 20th century onward in the work of Kathryn Bailey Puffett, Julian Johnson, Felix Meyer, and Anne Shreffler as archivists, biographers, and musicologists, most importantly Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, gained access to sketches, letters, lectures, audio recordings, and other articles of or associated with Webern's estate.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern was born in Vienna, then in Austria-Hungary. He was the only surviving son of Carl von Webern, a descendent of , high-ranking civil servant, mining engineer, and owner of the Lamprechtsberg copper mine in the Koralpe; and Amalie (née Geer), a competent pianist, accomplished singer, and possibly the only obvious source of the future composer's talent.


title: Anton Webern

text: He lived in Graz and Klagenfurt for much of his youth. But his distinct and lasting sense of "Heimat" was shaped by readings of Peter Rosegger; and moreover by frequent and extended retreats with his parents, sisters, and cousins to his family's country estate, the Preglhof, which Webern's father had inherited upon the death of Webern's grandfather in 1889.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern memorialized the Preglhof in a diary poem "An der Preglhof" and in the tone poem "Im Sommerwind" (1904), both after Bruno Wille's idyll. Once Webern's father sold the estate in 1912, Webern referred to it nostalgically as a "lost paradise". He continued to revisit the Preglhof, the family grave at the cemetery in Schwabegg, and the surrounding landscape for the rest of his life; and he clearly associated the area, which he took as his home, very closely with the memory of his mother Amelie, who had died in 1906 and whose loss also profoundly affected Webern for decades.


title: Anton Webern

text: In 1902, Webern began attending classes at Vienna University. There he studied musicology with Guido Adler, writing his thesis on the "Choralis Constantinus" of Heinrich Isaac. This interest in early music would greatly influence his compositional technique in later years, especially in terms of his use of palindromic form on both the micro- and macro-scale and the economical use of musical materials.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's cousin Ernst Dietz, an art historian studying in Graz, may have introduced Webern to the work of the painters Arnold Böcklin and Giovanni Segantini, whom Webern came to admire. Segantini's work was a likely inspiration for Webern's 1905 single-movement string quartet.


title: Anton Webern

text: Young Webern was enthusiastic about the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert ("so genuinely Viennese"), Hugo Wolf, and Richard Wagner, visiting Bayreuth in 1902. He also enjoyed the music of Hector Berlioz and Georges Bizet. In 1903, besides describing some of Alexander Scriabin's music as "languishing junk," Webern wrote of Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 4 that it was "boring," that Carl Maria von Weber's "Konzertstück" in F minor was passé, and that he found Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 3 (which struck Eduard Hanslick as "artistically the most nearly perfect") "cold and without particular inspiration, ... badly orchestrated—grey on grey." Writing about an all-Russian concert program, Webern praised one of Alexander Glazunov's symphonies as "not particularly Russian" in contrast to some of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's music, of which he thought less.


title: Anton Webern

text: In 1904, he approached Hans Pfitzner for composition lessons but left angrily after hearing criticism of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. It may have been at Guido Adler's advice that he paid Schoenberg for composition lessons. Webern progressed quickly under Schoenberg's tutelage, publishing his Passacaglia, Op. 1, as his graduation piece in 1908. He also met Berg, then another of Schoenberg's pupils. These two relationships would be the most important in his life in shaping his own musical direction.


title: Anton Webern

text: With the help of friends and colleagues, Webern later began working peripatetically as a conductor and musical coach in various towns and cities, among them Ischl, Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic), Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), and Prague, before finally moving back to Vienna. He conducted some of Debussy's music in 1911, having written rapturously to Schoenberg about Claude Debussy's opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" in 1908.


title: Anton Webern

text: From 1918 to 1921, Webern helped organize and operate the Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave concerts of then recent or new music by Béla Bartók, Berg, Ferruccio Busoni, Debussy, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Max Reger, Erik Satie, Strauss, Stravinsky, and Webern himself. After their Society performances in 1919 (and while working on his own Opp. 14–15), Webern wrote to Berg that Stravinsky's "Berceuses du chat" "[move] me completely beyond belief," describing them as "indescribably touching," and that Stravinsky's "Pribaoutki" were "something really glorious"; like the "Berceuses du chat", Webern's subsequent "Five Canons", Op. 16, were only several measures long each and scored for vocalist accompanied by clarinets (or in the case of Nos. 2 and 4, a clarinet).


title: Anton Webern

text: After the dissolution of the Society amid catastrophic hyperinflation in 1921, Webern obtained work as director not only of the , but also, from 1922 until the dissolution of these institutions after the failed February Uprising, of the mixed-voice amateur and the through his relationship with DJ Bach, Director of the . His performances in this capacity were aired on "Österreichischer Rundfunk" no fewer than twenty times starting in 1927. In 1933 he engaged Erich Leinsdorf as rehearsal and solo pianist for the , who later reflected on the experience as of "utmost value to my musical and critical development"; together they gave a performance of Stravinsky's dance cantata on folk idioms "Les Noces", of which the "popevki"-like 3-7A cell and its 4–10 variant are not altogether unlike the rhythmized trichords of Webern's Op. 24 from the following year (1934) or the Op. 30 tetrachords (which Stravinsky later admired) apart from Stravinsky's tendency to anhemitony in marked contrast to Webern's hemitonicism. In 1926, Webern noted his voluntary resignation as chorusmaster of the Mödling , a paid position, in controversy over his hiring of a Jewish singer, Greta Wilheim, to replace a sick one. Letters document their correspondence in many subsequent years, and she (among others) would in turn provide him with facilities to teach private lessons as a convenience to Webern, his family, and his students.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's music began to be performed more widely during and after the 1920s, yet he found no great success such as Berg enjoyed with "Wozzeck" nor even as Schoenberg did, to a lesser extent, with "Pierrot lunaire" or in time with "Verklärte Nacht". His Symphony, Op. 21, was performed in New York through the League of Composers in 1929 and again in Oxford at the ninth festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and he was later awarded Music Prize of the City of Vienna. By the early 1930s, he had become President of the Vienna section of the ISCM and was developing a close working friendship with Krenek, alongside whom Webern lectured, whose music (taking a twelve-tone turn) Webern conducted, and with whom Webern shared certain affinities during what was again becoming an increasingly difficult time for both. As Stefan Zweig wrote before his suicide in 1942, "the short decade between 1924 and 1933, from the end of German inflation to Hitler's seizure of power, represents—in spite of all—an intermission in the catastrophic sequence of events whose witnesses and victims our generation has been since 1914."


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's music, along with that of Berg, Křenek, Schoenberg, and others, was denounced as cultural Bolshevism and proscribed as "Entartete Kunst" by the Nazi Party in Germany, and its publication and performance were forbidden, although neither did it fare well under Austrofascism. An Austrian "gauleiter" on "Bayerischer Rundfunk" labeled both Berg and Webern as Jewish composers in 1933, and Berg wrote to Adorno of prior instances. Amid the rise of fascism in the 1930s, both found it harder to earn a living; Webern lost a promising conducting career which might have otherwise been more noted and recorded and had to take on work as an editor and proofreader for his publishers, UE. In 1933, Webern attacked Nazi cultural policies in private lectures; publication "would have exposed Webern to serious consequences."


title: Anton Webern

text: Violinist Louis Krasner described Webern as naive and idealistic but not entirely without his wits, shame, or conscience, contextualizing Webern as a member of Austrian society at the time, one departed by Schoenberg and one in which the already pro-Nazi Vienna Philharmonic had even refused to play the late Berg's Violin Concerto. Krasner was particularly troubled by a 1936 conversation with Webern about the Jews, in which Webern expressed his vague but unambiguously anti-Semitic opinion that "Even Schoenberg, had he not been a Jew, would have been quite different!" Krasner remembered that "Jews ... were at the center of the difficulty. Those who wanted to, put the blame for all this calamity, for all this depraved condition, on the Jews who had brought it with them—along with a lot of radical ideas—from the East. People blamed the Jews for their financial worries. The Jews were, at the same time, the poverty-stricken people who came with nothing, and the capitalists who controlled everything."


title: Anton Webern

text: When the Nazis invaded Austria, Krasner was visiting Webern in Maria Enzersdorf; Webern, uncannily seeming to anticipate the timing down to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, turned on the radio to hear this news and immediately warned Krasner, urging him to flee, whereupon he did (first to Vienna). Whether this was for Krasner's safety or to save Webern the embarrassment of Krasner's presence during a time of possible celebration in the pro-Nazi Webern family (or indeed in most of pro-Nazi Mödling, by Krasner's description as well as one even more vivid of Arnold Greissle-Schönberg), Krasner was ambivalent and uncertain, withholding judgment. Krasner revisited frequently, hoping to convince friends (e.g., Schoenberg's daughter Gertrude and her husband Felix Greissle) to emigrate before time ran out. Krasner eventually left more permanently, after a 1941 incident wherein he felt only his US passport saved him from both locals and police. Only later did Krasner himself realize how self-admittedly "foolhardy" he had been and in what danger he had placed himself, revealing an ignorance perhaps shared by Webern, who wrote to Humplik and Jone on the day of the Anschluss to be left alone: "I am totally immersed in my work [composing] and cannot, cannot be disturbed." Krasner's presence could have been a disturbance to Webern for this reason, and Bailey Puffett speculates that this may indeed be why he was rushed off by Webern.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's attitude towards Nazism has been variously described. This may reflect Webern's own vacillations, ambivalence, or cognitive dissonance no less than the different contexts in which, or the audiences to whom, his views were expressed: a very wide variety of differences were represented in his friends, family, and colleagues, from active members of the Nazi Party within his family to the Zionist Schoenberg, who emigrated; the left-leaning Berg, who died in 1935; and others of their Social Democratic milieu in previously "red" Vienna, most of whom fled. Nazism itself, "not a coherent doctrine or body of systemically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer worldview made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term 'ideology,'" has been variously described.


title: Anton Webern

text: There is, moreover, political complexity to complicate individual culpability. After World War I, the center-left Social Democrats had governed with the right-wing Social Christians in increasingly tenuous coalition, with the emergence of paramilitaries and disorder culminating in civil war. As a matter of "Realpolitik" and self-determination, prominent Austromarxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, among other Social Democrats, endured in their support of a German-Austrian Anschluss, unanimously passed by the Provisional National Assembly in 1918 as an answer to the "Grossdeutsche Lösung" before the peace treaty-imposed post-Habsburg rump state (""ce qui reste, c'est l'Autriche""). With their party outlawed and some members interned under Austrofascism, some Social Democrats, at least initially, viewed National Socialists as no worse than what had become of Social Christians, merged by Engelbert Dollfuss into the clericofascist Vaterländische Front in concert with appeals to Austrians' Catholic identity and imperial history in order to maintain independence of Nazi Germany through alliance with Fascist Italy and Hungary; thus Bauer, Renner, and others supported the Anschluss referendum even under Nazi occupation following years of deteriorating German-Austrian relations and Austrian weakening, including the failed Austrian Nazi coup d'état and continuing economic warfare and destruction of infrastructure. Likewise, as an expression more of pan-nationalism and populism than frank Nazism, many Austrians hoped for post-Anschluss political stability and prosperity. Bailey Puffett wrote that Webern may well have hoped to be able again to conduct and to be better able to secure a future for his family under a new regime that proclaimed itself "socialist" no less than nationalist.


title: Anton Webern

text: In broad terms, Webern's attitude seems to have first warmed to a degree of characteristic fervor and later, in conjunction with widespread German disillusionment, cooled to Hitler and the Nazis to such an extent that by 1945 he had resolved to emigrate to England. Webern's patriotism led him to endorse the Nazi regime in a series of letters to Joseph Hueber, who was serving in the army and himself held such views. On 2 May 1940, Webern described Hitler as "this unique man" who created "the new state" of Germany; thus Alex Ross characterizes him as "an unashamed Hitler enthusiast".


title: Anton Webern

text: Following , Webern checked on and aided Jewish colleagues DJ Bach, Otto Jokl, Josef Polnauer, and Hugo Winter. Polnauer, a fellow early Schoenberg pupil, historian, and librarian for whom Schoenberg was unable to secure passage to the US, managed to survive the Holocaust as an albino and later edited a 1959 publication by UE of Webern's correspondence from this time with , Webern's then lyricist and collaborator, and her husband, sculptor Josef Humplik.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's financial situation deteriorated until, by August 1940, his personal records reflected no monthly income. He attended the 1943 Winterthur première of his Op. 30 only with the diplomatic intervention and financial support of Werner Reinhart, its dedicatee.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's 1944–1945 correspondence is strewn with references to bombings, deaths, destruction, privation, and the disintegration of local order; but also noted are the births of several grandchildren. At the age of sixty (i.e., in Dec. 1943), Webern wrote that he was living in a barrack away from home and working from 6 am to 5 pm, compelled by the state in a time of war to serve as an air-raid protection police officer. On 3 March 1945, news was relayed to Webern that his only son, Peter, died on 14 February of wounds suffered in a strafing attack on a military train two days earlier.


title: Anton Webern

text: Toward the end of the war, the Weberns provided Schoenberg's first son Görgi and his family, for whom Schoenberg was unable to secure their passage to the US despite many attempts, food and shelter in a Mödling apartment belonging to their son-in-law. With the Red Army approaching, the Weberns fled on foot to Mittersill, about 75 km. away; there, Amalie, one of Webern's daughters, wrote of "17 persons pressed together in the smallest possible space." Görgi and his family stayed behind for their safety, but due to the Nazi munitions and propaganda in the apartment's storeroom, Görgi was held and nearly executed as a Nazi spy when he was discovered. He was able to convince a Jewish, German-speaking officer that he was not, drawing attention to his clothes, sewn with the yellow Star of David. Görgi and his family continued to live in this apartment with this family until 1969.


title: Anton Webern

text: On 15 September 1945, following the arrest of his son-in-law for black-market activities, Webern was smoking a cigar outside his home so as not to disturb his sleeping grandchildren about one hour before curfew when he was shot and killed by US Army cook PFC Raymond Norwood Bell of North Carolina, who, overcome by remorse, died of alcoholism in 1955.


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's wife Wilhelmine "Minna" Mörtl was buried with him when she died in 1949. Her last years were marred by grief, illness, loneliness (as friends and family continued to emigrate), and continuing poverty and consequent embarrassment. She worked to get his 1907 Piano Quintet finally published by Bomart via Kurt List and Opp. 17, 24–25, and 29–31 published by UE at the behest of , who solicited her urgently, with the abolition of the "Entartete Kunst" ban, for Webern's manuscripts hidden in Vienna. News of performances abroad made her wish that Webern had lived to experience more successes, and her grief was compounded by the lack of commemoration in Vienna: she asked Jone in 1948, "Should Anton have already been forgotten? Or is it the fault of the dreadful time in which we live?" In 1947 she wrote to Dietz, who had emigrated to the US, that "during the summer of 1945 [Webern] became convinced that he could not live here [in Austria] any more. He was firmly resolved to go to England and he would have carried it out, too"; likewise, in 1946, she wrote to DJ Bach, who had emigrated to London: "How difficult the last eight years had been for him. [He] was so embittered that he had only the one wish: to flee from this country. But one was caught, without a will of one's own. ... It was close to the limit of endurance what we had to suffer."


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern's works are concise, distilled, and select; when Boulez, for a second time, recorded all of his then published compositions, including some of those without opus numbers, the results fit on just six CDs. Not all of his works were or could be published in his lifetime, especially after 1934. His music is often considered inaccessible by listeners and difficult by performers alike; Babbitt observed that during Webern's life it "was regarded (to the very limited extent that it was regarded at all) as the ultimate in hermetic, specialized, and idiosyncratic composition." Though his "œuvre" comprises stylistic shifts, it is typified by spartan textures, in which every note can be heard; carefully chosen timbres, often resulting in very detailed instructions to the performers and use of extended instrumental techniques (flutter tonguing, col legno, and so on); wide-ranging melodic lines, often with leaps greater than an octave or more; and brevity: the Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9, (1913), for instance, last about three minutes in total. The concerns and techniques of his music were cohesive, interrelated, and only very gradually transformed with the overlap of old and new, particularly in the case of his middle-period lieder (for example, his first use of twelve-tone technique in Op. 17, Nos. 2 and 3, was not especially stylistically significant and only eventually became realized as otherwise so in later works).


title: Anton Webern

text: A very general feature of Webern's music, as much of Schoenberg's, is a predilection toward the use of minor seconds, major sevenths, and minor ninths, as noted with some insight in 1934 by microtonalist Alois Hába, writing of his and his students' affinities with Schoenberg in particular, and later by both Valentina Kholopova and Yuri Kholopov in formulations more specific to Webern and with a more unifying emphasis on the semitone in the context of axial inversional symmetry and octave equivalence (i.e., interval class 1, or ic1), approaching Allen Forte's more generalizing pitch-class set analysis. Webern's consistent and distinctive use of ic1 in particular within small subsets of other intervals, sometimes derived from a given twelve-tone row in his later practice, was well noted. Webern often musically expresses ic1 as a major seventh, minor ninth, or even wider interval. Webern's intervallic practices may be more globally understood as the outcome of a inversionally symmetrical treatment of pitch in a manner comparable to other modernists, including Berg, Bartók, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, or more nascently even Liszt and Wagner, but often far more strictly and increasingly in schemes with other parameters (e.g., fixed or "frozen" register, the association of articulations and dynamics with specific pitches).


title: Anton Webern

text: Webern published little of his early work in particular; like Brahms, Webern was meticulous and revised extensively. Many juvenilia remained unknown until the work and findings of the Moldenhauers in the 1960s, effectively obscuring and undermining formative facets of Webern's musical identity. Thus when Boulez "first" oversaw a project to record "all" of Webern's music, not including the juvenilia, the results fit on three rather than six CDs.