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Cannone navale da 381/40

The Cannone navale da 381/40 was an Italian naval gun intended to equip the dreadnought battleships of the Francesco Caracciolo class. The ships were cancelled in 1916 and their guns were diverted to other uses. Four of the seven turned over to the Esercito Italiano (Italian Army) became railroad guns, six were used as coast-defense guns and the rest were used on monitors to provide naval gunfire support for the Army. Most of the monitors were disarmed after World War I and their guns were transferred to coast-defense batteries which were used throughout World War II. ## Development Italy planned a class of four dreadnought battleships to succeed the two ships of the Andrea Doria class to be armed with 381 mm (15 in) guns to match the British Queen Elizabeth class. The Italians ordered thirty guns in 1913, ten each from Ansaldo-Schneider, Armstrong-Pozzuoli, and Vickers-Terni. The guns had identical ballistic performance, but differed in construction. The government favored the English design and ordered another ten in 1914 from Armstrong-Pozzuoli despite the fact that the Ansaldo guns weighed only 63 long tons (64 t) compared to the Armstrong's 83.56 long tons (85 t). The Cannone navale da 381/40 had an overall length of 15.74 meters (51 ft 8 in) and its 40-caliber barrel was 15.24 meters (50 ft) long. The propellant for the projectiles weighed either 148 or 150 kilograms (326 or 331 lb). The rate of fire varied for each type of mount, but did not exceed one round per minute in the naval mount. ## Ammunition ## Service The Francesco Caracciolo-class ships were laid down in 1914–1915, but material shortages and the Italian declaration of war on Austria-Hungary in 1915 forced the Regia Marina to suspend construction in favor of higher-priority programs. This freed up their guns to be used for other purposes. By this time Armstrong-Pozzuoli had started work on a dozen guns, the last of which were finished around 1922, Ansaldo-Schneider had finished one proving gun and nine production weapons and Vickers-Terni had built around three guns. ### Coast-defense guns One twin-gun turret was built as Batteria Amalfi on the Cavallino coast (northeast of Venice). Construction began in September 1915 and took 17 months to complete. Equipped with a pair of Vickers-Terni guns, the turret was installed on the roof of a concrete bunker that contained the ammunition, and the sleeping quarters for the artillerymen manning the turret. Electrical generators and the hydraulic pumps were in separate structures connected to the main bunker by tunnels. At their thickest point the bunker's walls were 9 meters (29 ft 6 in) deep and its roof was 3 meters (9 ft 10 in) thick. The frontal armor of the turret was 400 millimeters (15.7 in) thick, its sides were protected by 300-millimeter (11.8 in) armor and it had a roof 150 millimeters (5.9 in) thick. The guns in the turret had a maximum elevation of +20°. The turret could revolve 360°, which allowed it to provide fire support for the Italian forces within range during the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918. Two other twin-gun turrets were installed near Brindisi: Batteries Benedetto Brin and Fratelli Bandiera. Construction of both began in 1916, but only the former was completed during the war, test-firing its Armstrong-Pozzuoli guns in September 1917. The latter was originally planned to be equipped with 305-millimeter (12 in) guns, but it was modified to suit a pair of Armstrong-Pozzuoli guns in 1917; construction was suspended later that year, before it was finally completed in 1923. These bunkers were almost identical to Amalfi, except that they were entirely self-contained. Although three other twin-gun turrets were planned during the 1930s, only one (Batteria Capo S. Panagia) north of Augusta, Sicily, was actually built, completed in 1934 with Armstrong-Pozzuoli guns. This turret was different than the earlier ones as its ammunition was loaded through doors in the rear of the turret, rather than the naval-type hoists previous used. Its gun could elevate to +30°. After the Italian declaration of war on France and Britain in June and the British bombardment of Genoa in early 1941, two turrets were built near the port: Batteria Monte Moro in Quinto al Mare-Genoa and Batteria Punta S. Martino in Arenzano-Genoa. Both were completed in mid-1942 and they were the same type as the turret installed in Sicily. After Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in mid-1943, Batteria Capo S. Panagia was demolished by its garrison before they surrendered. The two batteries at Brindisi never fired their guns in anger and were captured by the Allies in good condition. The two Genoese batteries and Batteria Amalfi were captured by the Germans after the Italian armistice in September 1943, being operated by them and the forces of the puppet Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic) for the rest of the war. Batteria Monte Moro was besieged by partisans for several days before surrendering to the American 92nd Infantry Division on 29 April 1945 while Batteria Punta S. Martino was damaged by the Germans before the end of the war. Batteria Amalfi was surrendered by the Germans at the end of the war. ### Railroad guns Seven of the Schneider-Ansaldo guns were transferred to the Army although only four were turned into Cannone da 381/40 AVS railroad guns. On its mount, the gun weighed 212 tonnes (209 long tons; 234 short tons) and was 24.5 metres (80 ft) long. The gun could elevate to a maximum of 25° and it could traverse 2° on its mount. It fired high explosive shells weighing 730 kg (1,609 lb) and 876 kg (1,931 lb) to ranges of 33.6 km (21 mi) and 30 km (19 mi) respectively. It also fired a 884.5 kg (1,950 lb) armor-piercing shell to a range of 30 km (19 mi). The guns were delivered during 1917 and supported Italian operations along the Isonzo and in the Trentino. They were placed in reserve after the war and remained in storage at La Spezia for the duration of World War II. ### Coastal monitors Two Ansaldo guns were mounted on the monitor Faà di Bruno which was completed in 1917. She played a small role in the 11th Battle of the Isonzo supporting Italian troops, but was blown ashore in a storm in November. The monitor was not refloated until shortly before the end of the war and was decommissioned in 1924. Renamed GM 194 when she was reactivated in 1939 in preparation for World War II, she was towed to Genoa to bolster its defenses. Her guns were quickly disabled when an electric cable was cut during the British bombardment of Genoa. She was captured by the Germans after the Italian armistice and was turned over to the puppet Marina Nazionale Repubblicana (National Republican Navy). GM 194 was scuttled in Savona at the end of the war and was subsequently scrapped. The monitor Alfredo Cappellini was converted from a floating crane and fitted with two Armstrong-Pozzuoli guns in a turret in 1916. Her guns had a maximum elevation of +20° and could only traverse 15° to either side. The ship also participated in the 11th Battle of the Isonzo before she foundered during a storm off Ancona, Italy, in November 1917. Two captured Austro-Hungarian self-propelled barges (Monte Santo and Sabotino) were rebuilt and fitted with one gun apiece. They were completed in July and September 1918 respectively and used to support Italian forces near Venice in the last few months of the war. Earlier that year, a group of four monitors, the Monte Grappa class, were laid down at the Regio Cantiere di Castellammare di Stabia shipyard in Naples, each armed with a single Cannone navale da 381/40, but they were not completed until 1919–1920. All of the monitors except Faà di Bruno were disarmed in 1924 and converted to other uses. ## Gallery ## See also - BL 15 inch Mk I naval gun: British naval equivalent - 38 cm SK L/45 "Max": German naval and land equivalent

Tropical Storm Bavi (2015)

Pacific tropical storm in 2015

Tropical Storm Bavi, known in the Philippines as Tropical Storm Betty, influenced the trade winds over the Pacific Ocean and was partially responsible for one of the strongest trade wind reversals ever observed. The system was first noted as a tropical disturbance during March 8, 2015, while it was located to the southeast of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Over the next couple of days the system moved north-westwards through the Marshall Islands, before it was classified as a tropical depression during March 10. The system subsequently moved north-westwards and continued to develop further, before it was classified as the third tropical storm of the 2015 Pacific typhoon season and named Bavi by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) during March 11. After continuing its north-westwards movement, the system peaked as a tropical storm during March 14, before it started to weaken as it approached the Mariana Islands. The system subsequently passed over Guam during the next day, before continuing its west-northwestwards movement as it gradually weakened over the next few days. The system entered the Philippine area of responsibility, where it was named Betty by PAGASA during March 17 as the system weakened into a tropical depression. The system was subsequently last noted during March 21, as it dissipated over the Philippines. Bavi and its precursor tropical disturbance impacted eastern Micronesia, with strong to gale-force winds of between 45–65 km/h (30–40 mph), reported on various atolls in the Marshall Islands. Considerable damage was reported on the islet of Ebeye, on the main atoll of Kwajalein, a small amount of tree damage was reported, while several old steel structures were made too dangerous to use. Overall damages in the Marshall Islands were estimated at US\$2.1 million, while a fishing vessel and its crew of nine were reported missing during March 12. Bavi and its precursor also had severe impacts in Kiribati. After impacting Eastern Micronesia, Bavi approached the Mariana Islands, with its circulation passing over Guam during March 15, where it caused the highest waves to be recorded on the island in a decade. Bavi also impacted the Northern Mariana Islands of Rota, Tinian and Saipan, where power outages were reported and five houses were destroyed. Total property damages within the Mariana Islands were estimated at around US\$150 thousand. ## Meteorological history During the opening days of March 2015, a major westerly wind burst occurred, which subsequently contributed to the development of the 2014-16 El Nino event and the development of twin tropical cyclones in the Pacific Ocean on both sides of the equator. The first tropical cyclone became Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam within the South Pacific Ocean and impacted various parts of Melanesia including the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The second tropical cyclone was first noted by the United States Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) as a tropical disturbance during March 8, while it was located about 500 km (310 mi) to the southeast of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The disturbance consisted of a large area of atmospheric convection, which was starting to wrap into the system's developing low level circulation centre. The disturbance was also thought to be in a favourable environment for further development at this time, with low vertical wind shear and a good outflow towards the equator. Over the next couple of days the system moved north-westwards through the Marshall Islands and into a marginal environment for further development, with moderate vertical wind shear being partially offset by the system's outflow. During March 10, the Japan Meteorological Agency subsequently started monitoring the disturbance as a tropical depression, while it was located about 330 km (205 mi) to the northeast of Bairiki in Kiribati. Over the next day, the system moved north-westwards and gradually developed further, before the JMA reported that the system had developed into a tropical storm and named it Bavi during March 11. Later that day as the system's low level circulation centre continued to consolidated and deep convection wrapped into it, the JTWC initiated advisories and designated the system as 03W. The system subsequently continued to gradually intensify as it moved westwards, around the southern periphery of a subtropical ridge of high pressure located to the northwest of the system. During March 14, the system peaked as a tropical storm with the JMA reporting 10-minute sustained winds of 85 km/h (50 mph), while the JTWC reported 1-minute sustained winds of 95 km/h (60 mph). By this time the system was approaching the Mariana islands and had started to weaken, with system's low level circulation becoming partially exposed and displaced from the atmospheric convection. As a result of this the system's low level circulation passed over Guam during March 15, while convection associated with the system passed over the Northern Mariana islands. Over the next couple of days the system moved westwards and continued to weaken, before it weakened into a tropical depression during March 17, as it moved into the Philippine area of responsibility where it was named Betty by PAGASA. The JTWC stopped monitoring Bavi during March 19, after the system had weakened into a tropical disturbance, however, the JMA continued to monitor the system as a tropical depression, until it dissipated within the Philippines, during March 21. ## Preparations and impact Tropical Storm Bavi and its precursor were reported to have caused severe impacts in Kiribati. Tropical Storm Bavi impacted various atolls within Micronesia, while the system's large wind field generated large waves, which were problematic in the Marshall Islands and the Mariana islands. The system also influenced the Pacific trade winds and with Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam, caused one of the strongest trade wind reversals that had been observed on record. Bavi and its precursor tropical disturbance impacted eastern Micronesia between March 9–13, with gusty winds and high seas reported throughout the Marshall Islands. A pressure gradient between Bavi and an area of high pressure, generated strong to gale-force winds of between 45–65 km/h (30–40 mph) on various atolls. As a result, various tropical storm watches and warnings were issued for parts of the Marshall Islands, including the coral atolls of Ujae and Ailinglaplap. On the 15 islands that make up the atoll of Ujae, a significant period of strong winds were reported, which lead to breadfruit trees being destroyed and several houses blown over. Across the Kwajalein Atoll, total damages amounted to over US\$1 million, with considerable damage reported on the islet of Ebeye. On the main island of Kwajalein, a small amount of tree damage was reported, while several old steel structures were made too dangerous to use. At the missile defense test range on the island, a 3-day rainfall total of 10.65 in (271 mm) was reported between March 9–11. On the islet of Ebeye located about 3 km (1.9 mi) to the north of Kwajalein, high surf caused some coastal flooding while gale-force winds damaged structures with tin roofs and plywood walls. Bavis's large waves combined with the high tide caused flooding on various islets of the atoll of Majuro. Within the atoll a yacht struck a reef during March 10, while the fishing vessel Clearwater 2 and its crew of nine were reported missing during March 12, after they became overdue at their destination port. A search and rescue mission was subsequently launched with various good samaritan vessels and two aircraft from the United States Coast Guard and Navy helping to look for the vessel. The search effort subsequently found debris from the ship in various locations along the track taken by Bavi, including to the east of Majuro and southeast of Kwajalein. Total damages to property within the Marshall Islands were estimated at US\$2.1 million, while the total crop damage was estimated at US\$100 thousand. After leaving Eastern Micronesia, Bavi continued to move westwardsand threatened to impact the Mariana Islands as a typhoon. As a result, the Guam Weather Forecast Office issued a typhoon watch and a tropical storm warning for Guam, Rota, Tinian and Saipan during March 13. The islands were also placed in Tropical Cyclone Condition of Readiness 1 by Governors Eddie Calvo, Eloy Inos and Rear Admiral Bette Bolivar. The Guam Waterworks Authority advised residents on the island stock up on water ahead of the system, in case Bavi disrupted the island's water service. United Airlines, Cape Air and United Express all cancelled flights that departed from Guam, while schools were shut on the island during March 15. However, as Bavi approached the islands, upper level wind shear caused the system to decouple and start to gradually weaken. Bavi's circulation subsequently passed over Guam during March 15, with winds on the island barely reaching gale force on the island. Within Guam, sporadic power outages and minor tree damage were reported, while waves on the uninhabited northeastern coast of Guam reached 20–30 ft (5–10 m) and were the highest waves recorded on the island in a decade. A band of showers associated with the system and a pressure gradient, between Bavi and an area of high pressure, brought winds of up to 105 km/h (65 mph) to Saipan and Tinian. As a result, several trees and power lines were brought down across the islands, which resulted in Saipan having sporadic power outages and temporarily losing all electric. Around 65 homes which were primarily constructed with wood and tin were affected by the winds, with 5 destroyed while a further 52 sustained some damage. The local Red Cross chapter subsequently provided tarpaulins, cleaning materials and over \$25,000 in assistance to 252 people, while total property damages within the Mariana Islands were estimated at around US\$150 thousand. ## See also - Typhoon Dolphin (2008) - Typhoon Pamela (1982)

Constitution Square Historic Site

Open-air museum in Danville, Kentucky

Constitution Square Historic Site is a 3-acre (0.012 km²) park and open-air museum in Danville, Kentucky. From 1937 to 2012, it was a part of the Kentucky state park system and operated by the Kentucky Department of Parks. When dedicated in 1942, it was known as John G. Weisiger Memorial State Park, honoring the brother of Emma Weisiger, who donated the land for the park. Later, it was known as Constitution Square State Shrine and then Constitution Square State Historic Site. On March 6, 2012, the Department of Parks ceded control of the site to the county government of Boyle County, Kentucky, and its name was then changed to Constitution Square Historic Site. The park celebrates the early political history of the U.S. state of Kentucky. It features replicas of three buildings that stood on the original city square, including the courthouse that housed ten constitutional conventions between 1785 and 1792; these conventions ultimately led to Kentucky's separation from Virginia. It also includes the original building that housed the first U.S. post office west of the Allegheny Mountains and several other early 19th century buildings of historical import. The site comprises the majority of the Constitution Square Historic District which was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 2, 1976. Among the annual events held at the site are the Great American Brass Band Festival and the Kentucky State Barbecue Festival. ## History In 1774, a group of pioneers led by James Harrod constructed Fort Harrod (now Harrodsburg, Kentucky), the first permanent settlement in Kentucky. Three of these settlers – Thomas Harrod, John Crow, and James Brown – claimed the land in and around the present-day city of Danville, Kentucky, soon after. In 1784, Crow deeded 76 acres (0.31 km²) of land to Walker Daniel – Danville's namesake – to form the city proper. The city square was designated on a portion of this plot near its eastern end – not near the center, as was typical of other cities at the time. This location, about 500 feet (150 m) from John Crow's Station, provided an escape route in the event of an Indian attack. The Virginia General Assembly created the Judicial District of Kentucky in 1783. Harrodsburg was designated as the district's first seat of justice, but because of inadequate facilities in Harrodsburg, the Supreme Court for the District of Kentucky moved its next session to Crow's Station and ordered the construction of a courthouse there. The courthouse was built on what is now Constitution Square in March 1785, and the court convened there regularly until its dissolution when Kentucky gained statehood in 1792. The square fell into disuse after the district court disbanded, and, in 1817, the city's trustees sold half of the city square to raise money for the establishment of an educational institution known as Danville Academy. The money was to be used to buy at least 1 acre (0.0040 km²) of land within 0.5 miles (0.80 km) of the square on which to locate the academy. On February 13, 1818, the trustees voted to sell the other half of the square and allocate the money to the same purpose. There is no record that Danville Academy was ever established, however; advocates of the academy's establishment apparently combined their efforts with those of the individuals who established Centre College in Danville, and the funds that had been designated for the founding of Danville Academy were re-allocated to Centre. Danville's trustees also voted to give free use of the courthouse in the square to a group of Freemasons in 1817. The trustees sold another portion of the square near Main Street for the construction of private residences in 1823, and the Freemasons purchased the courthouse and the land it occupied in 1828. A group of Methodists purchased the land from the Freemasons in 1834, and they subsequently sold it to a Reverend Adams the following year. Adams purchased two adjacent plots and founded an all-female academy which ultimately failed. In 1854, the Danville Theological Seminary moved from the campus of Centre College to Constitution Square, occupying many of the buildings there. The brick courthouse became the main building of the seminary, and during the Civil War, it was used as a hospital to treat wounded soldiers – both Union and Confederate – in the aftermath of the Battle of Perryville. Danville Theological Seminary remained in operation until 1878. After its closure, the main building deteriorated and was eventually razed. ### Creation of the park On October 15, 1937, Danville resident Emma Weisiger donated the land that comprises Constitution Square Historic Site to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in memory of her brother, John. The state made the land into a state park; it was originally called Old Public Square, then Constitutional Square. Using a combination of state and local funds, the Danville Chamber of Commerce and the local chapter of the American Legion began constructing replicas of the jail, courthouse, and meetinghouse that originally occupied the square. At the time of the park's dedication on April 20, 1942, it was dubbed the John G. Weisiger Memorial State Park. Later, the name was changed to Constitution Square State Shrine. At the time of the dedication ceremony, all non-essential construction projects in the U.S. had been halted by the War Production Board due to the country's entry into World War II, and renovations to the park's attractions had consequently ceased. Dedication speeches by Governor Keen Johnson and Centre College president Robert L. McLeod, Jr. contained reminders of the ongoing war and praise for the ideals of democracy. In addition, a plaque honoring the framers of the first Kentucky Constitution was dedicated by Louisville judge Lafon Allen and unveiled by Johnson's daughter, Judith, and Louise McDowell, a descendant of Judge Samuel McDowell, who presided over all ten constitutional conventions that took place in the original Constitution Square courthouse. After the war ended with the defeat of Japan in 1945, the ban on nonessential construction was lifted, and the state restarted construction and restoration activities in Constitution Square in 1948. These activities included restoring and re-roofing the buildings, adding furniture to the buildings, constructing walkways, erecting signs, and adding landscaping to the park. The restorations were completed in 1955. From 1960 to 1968, the state added a fence around the site, installed a new lighting and diorama system, constructed a replica of the square's original pillory, and renovated several buildings, including an early 19th-century brick schoolhouse which became the caretaker's residence. In the 1970s, Centre College president Thomas A. Spragens began a series of urban renewal projects in Danville using grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. One such project was the expansion of Constitution Square and the restoration of some of its key features. Part of First Street was closed to accommodate the expansion, and the African-American business district, which lay on Constitution Square facing the Ephraim McDowell House, was razed. Grayson's Tavern, Fisher's row houses, the Goldsmith House, and the brick schoolhouse were renovated, and the Governor's Circle was added to the site. A bronze statue depicting two men shaking hands, a symbol taken from the state seal, stands in the middle of the Governor's Circle. Plaques that honor each governor of the state encircle the statue. The entirety of the Governor's Circle honors Isaac Shelby, Kentucky's first and fifth governor. Shelby is believed to be responsible for Kentucky's adoption of the motto "United we stand, divided we fall", which also appears on the state seal. The landscaping around the circle is maintained by the Garden Club of Danville. In June 2011, the Kentucky Department of Parks began discussions with Boyle County officials concerning the possibility of transferring control of Constitution Square to the county government, and the transfer was completed March 6, 2012. In the interim, the county received a \$500,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to renovate many of the site's properties, turning Constitution Square into an economic hub for the area. Improvements to the site will include making the first floors of all buildings compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, upgrading the electrical and phone systems in many of the buildings, and installing a wireless network to turn the entire site into a Wi-Fi hotspot. The grant required that an archeological study of the area be completed prior to beginning these improvements; commencement of the study was delayed due to the vice-presidential debate hosted at nearby Centre College in October 2012. In February 2013, the Kentucky Historical Society erected a historical marker in the park to commemorate the African-Americans who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. In May 1864, the group of 250 men – mostly slaves, but including some freedmen – marched from Danville to nearby Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, where Colonel Andrew Clark allowed them to enlist after some initial hesitation. Arriving with wounds inflicted upon them in route, this group was the first to enlist at this site, where 10,000 United States Colored Troops trained. On September 10, 2013, the Boyle County Fiscal Court voted to endow \$100,000 with the Louisville-based Wilderness Trace Community Foundation for maintenance of the park. The fiscal court receives 4% of the endowment annually to spend on park maintenance. ## Buildings Constitution Square lies between Main Street and Walnut Street on the north and south, respectively, and between First Street and Second Street on the east and west, respectively. It contains one original building – the post office – and replicas of the original courthouse, jail, and meetinghouse, which were constructed as authentically as possible based on available records. ### Post office The post office which lies at the north end of Constitution Square is an original structure. It was constructed sometime prior to 1792 and was the first U.S. post office built west of the Allegheny Mountains. Thomas Barbee, a member of a prominent early family in Danville, was commissioned as its first postmaster on August 20, 1792. The first mail was delivered to the post office on November 3, 1792. Originally located on Walnut Street, it was moved to its present location in 1950 by the Danville and Boyle County Historical Society and was dedicated to the Commonwealth of Kentucky on August 20, 1951. ### Courthouse and jail The District of Kentucky and the Supreme Court of the District of Kentucky were both created in 1783. When the court moved to Danville in 1785, it ordered that two men determine the cost of constructing the buildings it needed to function, including a courthouse and jail. The report called for assessments to be made on the district's four counties for the construction of the buildings; Jefferson County was assessed £431, Nelson County £49, Fayette County £86, and Lincoln County £122. Isaac Hite was chosen to construct the buildings, which were finished in 1785. The jail was built in the center of the square, and the courthouse was situated between the jail and Walnut Street. The district court held its first session in Hite's courthouse on March 14, 1785, and continued meeting there until its dissolution in 1792. Additionally, the Kentucky Council of War used the courthouse as its meeting place, and between 1785 and 1792, a series of ten constitutional conventions were held there. These conventions ultimately produced the first Kentucky Constitution, which was adopted in 1792. Soon after, the original courthouse was replaced with a two-story brick courthouse. Little is known of the jail originally built by Isaac Hite. Court records show that it was to be built of hewn logs no less than 9 inches (23 cm) thick and have at least two cells. The replica courthouse that now stands in Constitution Square was completed in 1942. It houses several personal items belonging to Kentucky's first governor, Isaac Shelby, including his hunting bag, powder flask, surveyor's instruments, and the chair in which he died. The courthouse also contains a portrait of Shelby and some Native American artifacts found in the vicinity. ### Presbyterian meetinghouse Tradition holds that John Crow constructed a meetinghouse on the square in Danville prior to 1784, but the first meetinghouse described in surviving records was constructed in mid-1784 for use by Presbyterian minister David Rice. A replica of this meetinghouse was constructed in Constitution Square in 1942. The single-story log structure has a small bell tower on top. Rice's original meetinghouse was first used by the newly formed Concorde Presbyterian Congregation, the first Presbyterian congregation in what is now Kentucky. James Crawford and Tereh Templin, the first two Presbyterian ministers in Kentucky, were ordained at this meetinghouse on November 10, 1785. ### Grayson's Tavern Benjamin Grayson constructed Grayson's Tavern in Danville sometime around 1785. The asymmetrical, ell-shaped building faces south onto Walnut Street with a front entrance on the south and a side entrance on the west, which opens onto Constitution Square. The Mary Akin Memorial Herb Garden, located behind Grayson's Tavern, features a variety of herbs that were commonly cultivated in the area during the late 18th and early 19th century, including chives, fennel, honeysuckle, lavender, rosemary, sage, and thyme. The garden is maintained by the Garden Club of Danville and named for one of its long-time members. The Danville Political Club, a debating society which existed between 1786 and 1790, frequently held its meetings at the tavern. Many members of this society went on to become prominent political leaders at the state and national levels. Eleven of the Club's thirty members would participate in at least one of the ten constitutional conventions that helped separate Kentucky from Virginia. Among the members were Kentucky's first Secretary of State (and future U.S. Senator from Louisiana), James Brown; its third governor, Christopher Greenup; chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, George Muter; federal judges Harry Innes, William McClung, and Samuel McDowell; Congressmen Willis Green, Stephen Ormsby, Thomas Speed, David Walker, and Matthew Walton; U.S. Senator John Brown; and Thomas Todd, a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The existence of the club was lost to history until Speed's grandson, Thomas Speed II, discovered extensive minutes of its meetings that his grandfather, the club secretary, had taken and stored in a desk drawer. The younger Speed later published these minutes with his own commentary about the club, in which he opined that "Full and complete biographies of some of the members would present a history of Kentucky from the beginning of its settlement past the first quarter of the ensuing century." One of the few extant references to the Club outside Speed's meeting minutes is an entry in the journal of a U.S. Army paymaster named Major Beatty; while staying overnight at Grayson's Tavern, Beatty recorded that he and his companions were "very much disturbed by a Political Club which met in the next house where we slept and kept us awake till 12 or 1 o'clock." In 1787, Benjamin Grayson sold the tavern to Robert Craddock, who subsequently converted it into his private residence. The replica that stands in Constitution Square houses the offices of the Convention and Tourism Bureau and The Great American Brass Band Festival. When Boyle County took over Constitution Square, the fiscal court agreed to waive the rent paid by the Convention and Tourism Bureau in exchange for its in-kind services managing the park jointly with the Boyle County Industrial Foundation. Danville Mayor Bernie Hunstad opposed the arrangement, fearing that park management would dilute both organizations' primary missions of bringing jobs to the area. In March 2013, Hunstad resigned his ex-officio membership on the Boyle County Industrial Foundation in protest. ### Schoolhouse Little is known of the brick schoolhouse that faces west onto Constitution Square and stands between the Watts-Bell House and Grayson's Tavern. Local tradition holds that it dates to approximately the same time as the buildings near it and that it housed a private school. According to the Danville-Boyle County Convention and Visitors Bureau, it was constructed around 1820 and was the first brick schoolhouse west of the Allegheny Mountains. The single-story, two-room edifice is built upon a fieldstone foundation with brick laid in common bond and an off-center entrance with a transom above. While Constitution Square was a part of the state park system, the park manager lived in the schoolhouse. After the park's transfer to Boyle County, the schoolhouse was converted into a conference center with meeting space. ### Fisher's Row Houses Jeremiah Fisher constructed two row houses, joined by a common wall and constructed of brick laid in a Flemish bond, near the city square in 1817. These houses lay on Second Street and face west onto Constitution Square. Fisher owned and rented these houses until 1850, but after he sold them they were used as tenements until at least the 1940s. The Wilderness Trace Art League and Boyle County Historical Society Museum occupied the row houses, before the park's purchase by the county. It now houses the Danville-Boyle County Chamber of Commerce, the Arts Commission of Danville-Boyle County, and the communications department of the Danville Boyle-County Economic Development Partnership. ### Watts–Bell House The Watts–Bell House was originally constructed by William Watts for local merchant David Bell in 1816. It appears to have originally been constructed for some public use. Bell's son, future legislator and Lieutenant Governor Joshua Fry Bell, was reared in the house. It lies between Fisher's Row Houses and Grayson's Tavern on Second Street and also faces west onto Constitution Square. The two-story, asymmetrical house is laid in Flemish bond with queen closers. Beginning in 1839, the Danville Literary and Social Club met in the house. Before its dissolution about 2010, the Danville/Boyle County Historical Society Museum was headquartered here. It now contains executive offices and a conference room used by the Danville-Boyle County Economic Development Partnership. ### Alban Goldsmith House The Alban Goldsmith House was constructed sometime prior to 1820. The story-and-a-half brick edifice is laid in common bond with a Flemish bond facade on the front. Three gabled windows were added to the facade many years after its construction. Interior chimneys with corbels on top adorn each end of the house. It faces west onto Second Street, away from Constitution Square, and opposite the Ephraim McDowell House across the street. The house was owned by Dr. Alban Goldsmith, who studied medicine with Ephraim McDowell. When McDowell performed the first ovariotomy, Goldsmith acted as his assistant. Goldsmith would later help found the Louisville Medical Institute. In 1827, Goldsmith sold the house to Jefferson Polk, then a newspaper publisher, but later a doctor who practiced briefly in Danville before moving to Perryville, Kentucky. The Alban Goldsmith House contains the Constitution Square Museum Store and the Heart of Danville, a local economic development organization. ## Events In April 1987, Danville's local newspaper, the Danville Advocate-Messenger, sponsored the first Rally on the Square, a political rally where candidates for statewide office can make speeches and meet area voters. Since then, the rally has been held every four years in April, in advance of the statewide primary elections in May. The first Rally on the Square featured a brass band from nearby Centre College, which inspired the city to hold the first Great American Brass Band Festival in 1990. The festival has been held annually in June ever since. Constitution Square is one of the locales used for outdoor performances during the festival. The first Constitution Square Festival was held at Constitution Square State Historic Site in 1979. The event was held annually on the third weekend in September and featured historical reenactments, crafts, food, and music. In February 2009, the Kentucky Department of Parks announced that the festival would be suspended due to budget cuts prompted by the economic recession. Shortly after the announcement, three community organizations – the Heart of Danville, the Danville-Boyle County Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Community Arts Center – volunteered to coordinate the festival without state funds. These groups gave the festival a more arts-centric focus and renamed it the Constitution Square Arts Festival. The event continued until 2011, but was suspended in 2012. Constitution Square has hosted an annual charity run every year since 1978. After the opening of Danville's Community Arts Center in 2004, Ernst Crown-Weber, a local businessman, renamed the event Constitution Square 5K Run for the Arts and began organizing it as a way to raise money for the center. A local artist, Alison Craig, designs original awards to be presented to the winners. In November 2011, the first Kentucky State Barbecue Festival was held in Constitution Square. The event, conceived just ten weeks prior by a local couple, proved very popular, and the following year the festival was moved to the September weekend previously reserved for the suspended Constitution Square Arts Festival. The Southeast Tourism Society named the festival one of its Top 20 Events in the Southeast for September 2013.

Yatton railway station

Railway station near Bristol, England

Yatton railway station, on the Bristol to Exeter line, is in the village of Yatton in North Somerset, England. It is 12 miles (19 km) west of Bristol Temple Meads railway station, and 130 miles (209 km) from London Paddington. Its three-letter station code is YAT. It was opened in 1841 by the Bristol and Exeter Railway, and served as a junction station for trains to Clevedon and Cheddar, but these lines closed in the 1960s. The station, which has two platforms, is managed by Great Western Railway, the seventh company to be responsible for the station, and the third franchise since privatisation in 1997. They provide all train services at the station, mainly hourly services between Bristol Parkway and Weston-super-Mare, and between Cardiff Central and Taunton. The line is not currently electrified, and there is local support for electrification as an extension of the Great Western Main Line upgrade programme. A community centre and café was opened at the station in 2011. ## Description The station is located in the north end of the village of Yatton, North Somerset, just west of the B3133 road between Clevedon and Congresbury. The station is on the Bristol to Exeter line, 130 miles 28 chains (209.78 km) from London Paddington and 11 miles 77 chains (19.25 km) from Bristol Temple Meads. It is the fourth station along the line from Bristol. The station is oriented along an axis at 57 degrees to the meridian. There are two platforms, on either side of the two tracks through the station. The southern platform, platform 1, is 162 metres (177 yd) long and serves westbound trains (towards Weston-super-Mare); the northern platform, platform 2, is 121 metres (132 yd) long and serves eastbound trains (towards Bristol). The line through the station has a speed limit of 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). Access to the two platforms is step-free from car parks on each side of the station, accessible via short roads from the B3133. There is an uncovered footbridge between the two platforms, but disabled passengers must go the long way round via the B3133. A ticket office is provided on platform 2, staffed every morning except Sundays. Ticket machines are available, allowing the buying of tickets for on-the-day travel, and collection of pre-bought tickets. There are waiting rooms on both platforms, with toilets on platform 2, but none suitable for wheelchairs. "Next train" dot matrix displays and an automated public-address system announce approaching services. There is a pay and display car park on each side of the station, with a total of 114 spaces. There are bus stops nearby on the B3133. Cycle storage is available on the access roads. The station is the start point for the Strawberry Line, a foot and cyclepath built mostly on old railway land to Axbridge. The start of the path is marked by a 6-metre-high (20 ft) arch. The Strawberry Line Café, run by a local community group, is located on platform 1, and is open most days from 8:00 am to serve commuters. Just beyond the station, to the west, are a pair of relief lines to allow slower trains to be overtaken. There are also some cross-over points, allowing trains to terminate on the westbound relief line and then return eastwards. ## Services The station is managed by Great Western Railway, who also operate all rail services from the station. The basic service consists of two trains in each direction per hour. One is the Severn Beach to Weston-super-Mare service, calling at all stations; the second is the faster Cardiff Central to Taunton service, non-stop between Bristol Temple Meads and Nailsea & Backwell. Most westbound services are extended to Plymouth or Penzance. The typical journey time to Bristol Temple Meads is 16–20 minutes. The local services described above are formed using , , and diesel multiple-unit trains. Services between London Paddington and Weston-super-Mare call at Yatton in the early morning and evening, running non-stop between Bristol Temple Meads and Nailsea and Backwell. All such services also stop at Nailsea and Backwell, but not always at Worle or Weston Milton. From Monday to Friday there are five morning services and one evening service to London, with seven services from London, all in the evening. Saturday sees three services to London, all in the morning, and four services from London, all in the evening. There are seven services to and six from London on Sundays, spread throughout the day. These intercity services are formed of Class 800s, which are longer than the station, so passengers in the front carriage have to move to a different carriage to get out. Passengers are prevented from getting out onto the tracks by a selective door-opening system. The typical journey time to London is 2 hours 10 minutes. In 2008, one morning northbound CrossCountry service would make a stop at Yatton to serve as a morning peak service, but this operation has ceased. CrossCountry services still pass through the station, but do not stop. Occasional Great Western Railway intercity services between London and Weston-super-Mare or Taunton and Exeter also pass through non-stop. ## History The first section of the Bristol and Exeter Railway's (B&ER) main line opened on 14 June 1841 between Bristol and Bridgwater. "Clevedon Road" (as it was then known) was for a while the second station on the line west of Bristol, the first being Nailsea. The line, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was built as broad-gauge. The platform buildings at Yatton are of Brunel style, and it is widely believed Brunel himself designed the buildings. There were significant goods facilities, with a large goods yard and shed to the south of the station. A hotel was provided adjacent to the eastbound platform for people travelling to Clevedon. The station buildings themselves included a ticket office and station master's office on the eastbound platform. A bookstall was in operation from 1888. Services were initially operated by the Great Western Railway (GWR) on behalf of the Bristol & Exeter. ### Junction station The station was originally built, as the original name suggests, to serve passengers for Clevedon, who would travel on by road. On 28 July 1847, the B&ER opened a branch line between Yatton and Clevedon, and so renamed Clevedon Road station as Yatton. A bay platform was built on the north side of the station to accommodate branch traffic, with an unusual canopy which covered the entire bay, as well as the eastbound platform. The canopy included louvre ventilation. There was also a connection from the main line, albeit at a 10 miles per hour (16 km/h) speed limit, for the few direct trains from Bristol. This too was built to broad gauge. There were five services each weekday, and two on Sundays. These services were also operated by the Great Western Railway, until 1849 when the Bristol & Exeter took over its own workings. By 1869 the number of weekday services had increased to nine. From 1867, Yatton was also served by coal trains for the local gasworks. Yatton became even more important on 3 August 1869 when the Bristol & Exeter opened the broad-gauge Cheddar Valley Railway, which became famous for the transport of strawberries from stations such as Axbridge and Cheddar. The line was extended to Wells on 5 April 1870, where it joined with the East Somerset Railway line from Witham, and through services from Yatton to Witham became normal for this line, with between five and seven services daily. To accommodate this new traffic, another bay platform was built, this time on the south side of the station. A canopy similar to the one for Clevedon trains was built for this bay, and for passengers at the end of the westbound platform. On 1 January 1876, the Bristol & Exeter was amalgamated into the GWR, who took over the running of the station and services. In 1879, the Clevedon branch was converted to standard gauge. This followed a scheme throughout the GWR to convert its tracks from broad gauge to mixed gauge. The last GWR broad-gauge train operated on 20 May 1892, after which all tracks were converted to standard gauge. The conversion of the Clevedon line coincided with the opening of an engine shed for branch traffic. A turntable for Cheddar Valley trains was built at around the same time. In 1889, there were 12 weekday trains along the Clevedon branch, and three on Sundays. ### Heyday and decline By around 1900, there were between five and seven services operating daily along the Cheddar Valley Line, with a mixed mail train on Sundays. Traffic was to increase from 1901 with the opening of the Wrington Vale Light Railway. Although this line joined the Cheddar Valley Line at Congresbury, most services continued to Yatton. In 1901 there were four passenger trains per day and one goods train, which increased to five passenger trains per day by 1903. The line was known for the transport of mushrooms. By 1910, there were 18 daily services along the Clevedon branch, four on Sundays. A GWR pagoda hut was built in the 1910s at the east end of the eastbound platform, but this was removed some ten years later. By the 1920s Yatton had 40 staff employed, including a boy selling chocolate and cigarettes, and issued almost 60,000 tickets. Traffic on the Clevedon branch was still climbing, now up to 21 services on weekdays and five on Sundays. However, despite this success, there were some problems. Better road transport was reducing traffic along the Wrington line, and the main line was stretched to capacity. To combat this latter problem, goods loops were laid either side of the station – east for 1.25 miles to Claverham from 6 April 1925 and west for 1.75 miles to Huish level crossing on 26 May 1925. The station itself however remained a two-track pinch point. The Wrington Vale line closed in 1931, with traffic having dropped to only two trains per day with no Sunday service. In 1938 coal traffic to the gas works ended, though there was some through coal traffic along the Clevedon branch. The Cheddar line was not faring well either: the number of tickets sold along the line had decreased dramatically since the early 1900s, although there was still a significant flow of strawberries, milk and cheese to London. The railways were nationalised in 1948, with the GWR becoming the Western Region of British Railways, but this did not halt the decline. The line was closed to passengers in 1963, with the only traffic to serve a private siding near Cheddar, but this too closed in 1969. The Clevedon branch was seeing increased passenger traffic, up to 26 trains daily and 10 on Sundays by 1958, and in 1956 the unusual canopy was taken down, replaced by a second-hand canopy from Dauntsey railway station. However, this uptick was not to last: coal traffic along the line ended in 1951, and by 1963 there were no longer any freight workings. The line closed completely on 3 October 1966, taking the station's bookstall with it. The Claverham loops had been closed on 6 September 1964, and the goods yard at Yatton was closed on 29 November 1965. The now-redundant bay platforms were converted into car parks, and the canopy on the westbound platform removed along with the two water towers. On 24 January 1972, the passing loops to the west of the station were cut back to 0.5 miles (0.80 km), and the station's signal box, which had had 129 levers, closed on 31 January the same year. ### Modern times British Rail was split into business-led sectors in the 1980s, at which time operations at Yatton passed to Regional Railways. In the 1990s, a stop was added at Yatton for a Royal Mail train to provide a more direct link to Bristol Airport. The service was ended in 2004 when the post office stopped transporting mail by train. When the railways were privatised in 1997, local services at Yatton were franchised to Wales & West, which was in turn succeeded by Wessex Trains, an arm of National Express, in 2001. The Wessex franchise was amalgamated with the Great Western franchise into the Greater Western franchise from 2006, and responsibility passed to First Great Western, which was rebranded as Great Western Railway in 2015. There was somewhat of a revival of fortunes for the Cheddar Valley Line, which has been converted into a foot and cycle path. A 6-metre-high (20 ft) metal arch was erected in 2000 to mark the start of walk. The station buildings on the westbound platform have now been converted into the Strawberry Line Café, which opened in 2011, providing employment and training for people with learning disabilities, as well as snacks for commuters, walkers and local residents. The café suffered two break-ins in 2017, with significant damage caused. In March 2005, Wessex Trains, the company managing the station at the time, introduced car parking charges. It was noted that this resulted in less use of the car parks, more local street parking and caused people to drive to Nailsea and Backwell railway station, where parking was still free. Following local pressure, the charges were reduced in July 2005. The eastbound platform buildings were refurbished in 2005 to guard against rising damp. A year later, in 2006, replica Great Western Railway benches were provided by the National Trust. Hanging baskets were brought to the station in 2011 as a joint effort between the Severnside Community Rail Partnership, Cleve Nurseries and the station's garden group. ## Incidents On 7 May 1842, a steam locomotive ran away from its train without a driver whilst briefly decoupled at Yatton. The locomotive eventually came to a stop when it ran out of fuel approaching Bridgwater. ## Future Yatton is on the Weston-super-Mare/Yate corridor, one of the main axes of the Greater Bristol Metro, a rail transport plan which aims to enhance transport capacity in the Bristol area. The group Friends of Suburban Bristol Railways supports the electrification of the line through Nailsea & Backwell, as does MP for Weston-super-Mare John Penrose. Yatton Parish Council has stated that adding a roof to the station footbridge is one of their priorities.

The Springfield Files

"The Springfield Files" is the tenth episode of the eighth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 12, 1997. In the episode, Homer believes he has discovered an alien in Springfield. It was written by Reid Harrison and directed by Steven Dean Moore. Leonard Nimoy guest stars as himself and David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson guest star as agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, their respective characters on The X-Files. The episode serves as a crossover with The X-Files and features numerous references to the series. The story came from former showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who returned to produce this episode while under contract with The Walt Disney Company. It received positive reviews from critics; Jean and Reiss won an Annie Award for producing it. ## Plot In a framing story, Leonard Nimoy is hosting a program about alien encounters, and begins the episode by talking about an "encounter" that occurred in Springfield. Homer tells Lenny and Carl that they should sneak out of work early and start drinking beer. Homer puts in an old tape of them working into the security camera. That night at Moe's, after drinking over 10 beers, a drunken Homer is forced to walk home after taking a breathalyzer test, but takes a wrong path and ends up in the woods. In a clearing, he encounters a glowing, thin-boned alien. Although the alien tells him, "Don't be afraid," Homer panics and runs home screaming. The rest of the family do not believe Homer's story, and his attempts to report the alien sighting to the police are dismissed by Chief Wiggum. Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of the FBI hear of the sighting and go to investigate. After receiving no results from their psychological tests of him, Homer fails to provide any proof that he actually saw an alien. Homer is ridiculed by most of the neighborhood; even Marge refuses to believe in his claims, but Bart admits that he believes Homer. The next Friday night, the pair camp out in the forest. The alien arrives and promises peace, but Homer scares it away when he accidentally steps on their campfire and screams in pain. Bart captures the entire incident on tape. Nimoy bids the audience goodnight. He is then reminded that the show still has ten minutes left by an off-screen Squeaky-Voiced Teen, at which point he runs to his car and leaves. The Squeaky-Voiced Teen takes over narrating duties. Following the successful capture of the alien's existence, Homer and Bart present it to the media. Everyone in town finally believes Homer, even knocking on his door and asking Homer questions. During a church lecture, Reverend Lovejoy gets emotional talking about the character E.T. Meanwhile, Lisa maintains that there must be a logical explanation for the alien. Friday comes again and everyone (including Nimoy) goes to the forest. The alien appears, promising love, but the townspeople begin to riot, and charge at the alien. Lisa and Smithers stop them just in time, showing that the "alien" is actually Mr. Burns. Smithers explains that Burns receives longevity treatment once a week in order to cheat death; this includes intense chiropractic, administering eye drops and painkillers, as well as a vocal cord scraping. The ordeal leaves Burns in a state of disorientation, and with a soft, high-pitched voice. Back to his normal self, Burns reveals that his "healthy" green glow is due to many years of working in his nuclear plant (which has also left him impotent). After threatening to bring "fear, famine [and] pestilence" instead of peace and love to the people of Springfield, he is given another booster injection from Dr. Nick. Reverting to his "alien" self, he begins to sing "Good Morning Starshine", with the entire crowd, including Nimoy, and a returned Mulder and Scully (who is wearing a "Homer is a dope" t-shirt), joining in. The Squeaky-Voiced Teen closes the episode by reminding the viewers to "keep watching the skis! I mean skies." ## Production The episode was produced by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who had served as showrunners of seasons three and four. They returned to the show to produce this and several other episodes while under contract with The Walt Disney Company. The episode was written by Reid Harrison and directed by Steven Dean Moore. It had one of the longest episode gaps between its conception to the time it was finished. The idea was first conceived at a story retreat. Jean found a copy of TV Guide while in the bathroom, with The X-Files on the cover. Feeling a crossover would be a good idea, he came back into the room, told Reiss his idea, and the pair pitched it. None of the other staff wanted to do it, so Reiss and Jean decided to do it themselves. Before the episode was produced, the script was sent to Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, who said that it was an "honor" to be satirized by The Simpsons. Jean was worried that the episode was not funny, as at the table reading there were only a few of the writers present and as such, the script got no laughs at all. It took a long time to come up with an ending, and an explanation for the alien. Originally, it was just going to be left as a mystery. Mulder and Scully's office was designed to be exactly the same as the one used in The X-Files. After it had been finished, Fox sent the episode out for a critical review, which was "really great". The scene with the "Homer is a dope" T-shirts originally had an extra line: "I told you, we're sold out!", thus filling in the plot error in the actual episode in which Homer asks for some T-shirts, despite just being told that they were sold out. The scene after Homer's first encounter with the alien, in which he runs through a field writing "Yahhh!" in the grass, was written by David M. Stern, and added in after the original read-through. ## Cultural references - The Nimoy segments are a send-up of the paranormal documentary series In Search of..., which Nimoy hosted. - In addition to the appearances of Mulder and Scully, the episode features several other references to The X-Files. - Mulder's FBI badge has a picture of himself only wearing a speedo; this is a reference to a scene in The X-Files episode "Duane Barry", in which Duchovny wore just a speedo. - In the scene where Scully gives Homer a lie detector test, The Smoking Man is in the background. - When Homer sees the alien, The X-Files theme is played. - The Budweiser Frogs appear in the swamp, chanting their names, "Bud... Weis... Er." They are then eaten by an alligator who growls "Coors!". - J. Edgar Hoover is wearing a dress in the photo in the X-files office, a reference to his rumored transvestism. - The scales in the breathalyzer test Homer takes are Tipsy, Soused, Stinkin' and Boris Yeltsin. - Homer's suggestion that he and Bart fake an alien encounter and sell it to the Fox network is an allusion to the Alien Autopsy hoax. - As Homer recounts his experience to Chief Wiggum, he recalls the alien having a sweet, heavenly voice and appearing every Friday night "like Urkel", from the ABC/CBS sitcom Family Matters. There are also numerous film references. - Marvin the Martian, Gort, Chewbacca, ALF, and either Kang or Kodos comprise the FBI line-up. - The narration sequences are based on the 1959 Ed Wood film Plan 9 from Outer Space. - The music played by the Springfield Philharmonic comes from the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho. - In one chapter title, the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" being printed out ad infinitum is a reference to the 1980 film The Shining. - Mr. Largo conducts five of his students in playing the famous five-note tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. - Jimbo Jones is seen displaying a sign that reads "Alien dude: Need two tickets to Pearl Jam", a reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. - Milhouse plays a Kevin Costner's Waterworld arcade game, in which he needs to insert forty quarters for each credit played (losing his first credit after taking a few steps), a reference to the budget overrun on Kevin Costner's 1995 film Waterworld. - Homer explains that he got the idea of looping security camera footage from "a movie about a bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over 50, and if its speed dropped, it would explode" in reference to the 1994 action film Speed, although Homer mistakenly believes it was called "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down". - The Squeaky-Voiced Teen's ending comment to "Keep watching the skis... uh, skies," is a reference to the final line of dialogue from the 1951 film The Thing from Another World. ## Release and reception In its original broadcast, "The Springfield Files" finished 26th in ratings for the week of January 6–12, 1997, with a Nielsen rating of 11.7, equivalent to approximately 11.3 million viewing households. It was the third-highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, following The X-Files and the series premiere of King of the Hill, which aired immediately after the episode. On the original airing of the episode, King of the Hill'''s main character Hank Hill talks over the credits, naming a list of things which will never be seen on his show. Al Jean and Mike Reiss won the Annie Award for Best Individual Achievement: Producing in a TV Production for their work on the episode. The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, said that it was "a very clever episode, with the line-up one of the best visual gags in ages". Skeptical Inquirer reviewed the episode positively, stating that "It's rare that a popular, prime-time network television show turns out to be a "slam dunk" for skeptics." Critic Chris Knight speculated that if The X-Files is one day forgotten, those who see this episode will probably still appreciate the scene with ALF, Chewbacca, and Marvin the Martian. IGN ranked Leonard Nimoy's performance in this episode, and "Marge vs. the Monorail", as the 11th-best guest appearance in the show's history. Total Film's Nathan Ditum ranked Duchovny and Anderson's performances as the fourth-best guest appearances in the show's history. In 2017, British site Digital Spy ranked it 15th on their list of "The 29 all-time greatest Simpsons episodes ever", while in 2019 Australian publication Junkee placed it seventh on their list of the 30 best episodes of The Simpsons. In 2021, Variety also placed it seventh on their list of the 30 best episodes. It is currently the 11th highest rated episode of The Simpsons'' on IMDb, with a 9.0 rating.

1953 World Professional Match-play Championship

Snooker tournament

The 1953 World Professional Match-play Championship was a professional snooker tournament, the second edition of the World Professional Match-play Championship, held from 10 November 1952 to 28 March 1953. The event was held across several venues in the United Kingdom, with the final held at the Leicester Square Hall in London, England. Fred Davis was the defending champion, after winning the 1952 event, with a 38–35 win over Walter Donaldson. The same players contested the 1953 final, with Davis defeating Donaldson 37–34 in the 71- final. The highest break of 133 was made by John Pulman in his semi-final loss to Davis. ## Overview The World Professional Match-play Championship was created in 1952 as an alternative to the Billiards Association and Control Council (BA&CC) professional World Snooker Championship, which was retrospectively recognised as a world championship. However, founder and 15-time champion Joe Davis of the BA&CC's events did not participate in the Match-play Championships. The defending champion of the event was Davis' brother Fred Davis, who had won the World Snooker Championship as the BA&CC authorised event, and the match-play championship in 1952. Davis won his second World title by defeating Walter Donaldson 38–35 in the final. ### Format The 1953 World Professional Match-play Championship was held over several months between 10 November 1952 to 28 March 1953. The final was held at Leicester Square Hall in London, England from 23 to 28 March 1953. The event featured eight participants. The rounds were played at different locations in the United Kingdom over different match lengths. Matches were played as the best-of-61 in the quarter and semi-finals, and a best-of-73 frames final. ### Schedule Below is the list of venues and dates for the matches during the championships. ## Summary The qualifying section was held at Leicester Square Hall from 25 August to 6 September 1952. 66-year-old Willie Smith met Jim Lees from 25 to 27 August. Smith led 16–8 after two days and won 21–14. The match between Kingsley Kennerley and Rex Williams was played from 28 to 30 August. Kennerley led 16–8 after two days and won 25–12. Smith and Kennerley met from 1 to 6 September in the six-day final. Kennerley led 27–21 after four days and took a winning 36–24 lead after the fifth day, winning all six of the evening session frames. The final score was 42–29. Albert Brown and Alec Brown met in the first quarter-final, played in Slough, played over 6 days. Albert Brown took a 7–3 lead on the first day but Alec Brown had levelled the match at 15–15 after day 3. Albert Brown won all 5 frames on the fourth afternoon session and led 23–17 after four days. Alec Brown reduced Albert Brown's lead to 26–24 after day 5 but won only 2 frames on the last day as Albert secured a 35–26 win. Defending champion Fred Davis played John Barrie at the Mechanics Institute in Derby. Davis led 20–16 after three days, making a break of 121 on day 3, but Barrie levelled the match at 24–24 on the fourth day, where he made a century break. On the final day, Davis led 28–26 after the afternoon session, despite a break of 125 by Barrie, and Davis eventually won 32–29. John Pulman met Jackie Rea in the five-day match played at the RAOB Hall, Belfast. This was the first World Championship match to be played in Ireland. Pulman had the best of the first four days and led 29–19, needing just two frames on the final day for victory. Pulman won the match by taking a 31–21 after winning the fourth afternoon frame on the final day. The match ended with Pulman completing a 36–25 victory. Walter Donaldson met Kingsley Kennerley, the winner of the qualifying competition, in the final quarter-final played in Bolton. Donaldson dominated the match, leading 27–8 after the fourth afternoon session. Kennerley won all five frames in the evening session, but Donaldson took a winning lead of 31–14 after the fifth afternoon. The match ended with Donaldson 42–19 ahead. Fred Davis met John Pulman in the first semi-final played at the Wrekin Hall in Wellington, Shropshire. Davis tok a winning 31–17 lead after the fourth day. The final score was 36–25. In the final afternoon session Davis made a break of 101 while Pulman made a 105 break and the highest break of the championship - a 133 - in the evening, and finished 36–25. Albert Brown withdrew from his semi-final match against Walter Donaldson in Liverpool before the second day's play, on medical advice, but was trailing 1-9 after the first day. The final was held at Leicester Square Hall for the first time since 1949, the last time the final was held there and was held over 71 frames. The match was level at 6–6 after the first day but Donaldson took a 13–11 lead after day 2, despite a break of 107 by Davis. Donaldson led 20–16 after day 3 but Davis tied the match at 24–24 after the fourth day which included another Davis century, this time of 102. David led 28–26 after the fifth afternoon session but Donaldson took a 31–29 lead at the end of the fifth day. The match was again level at 33–33 after the final afternoon session but Davis crept ahead in the evening session to win 37–34. ## Main draw The draw for the competition is below. Players in bold denote match winners. ## Qualifying The draw for the qualifying competition is below. Players in bold denote match winners.

Seaborgium

Seaborgium is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Sg and atomic number 106. It is named after the American nuclear chemist Glenn T. Seaborg. As a synthetic element, it can be created in a laboratory but is not found in nature. It is also radioactive; the most stable known isotope, ²⁶⁹Sg, has a half-life of approximately 14 minutes. In the periodic table of the elements, it is a d-block transactinide element. It is a member of the 7th period and belongs to the group 6 elements as the fourth member of the 6d series of transition metals. Chemistry experiments have confirmed that seaborgium behaves as the heavier homologue to tungsten in group 6. The chemical properties of seaborgium are characterized only partly, but they compare well with the chemistry of the other group 6 elements. In 1974, a few atoms of seaborgium were produced in laboratories in the Soviet Union and in the United States. The priority of the discovery and therefore the naming of the element was disputed between Soviet and American scientists, and it was not until 1997 that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) established seaborgium as the official name for the element. It is one of only two elements named after a living person at the time of naming, the other being oganesson, element 118. ## Introduction ## History Following claims of the observation of elements 104 and 105 in 1970 by Albert Ghiorso et al. at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a search for element 106 using oxygen-18 projectiles and the previously used californium-249 target was conducted. Several 9.1 MeV alpha decays were reported and are now thought to originate from element 106, though this was not confirmed at the time. In 1972, the HILAC accelerator received equipment upgrades, preventing the team from repeating the experiment, and data analysis was not done during the shutdown. This reaction was tried again several years later, in 1974, and the Berkeley team realized that their new data agreed with their 1971 data, to the astonishment of Ghiorso. Hence, element 106 could have actually been discovered in 1971 if the original data was analyzed more carefully. Two groups claimed discovery of the element. Unambiguous evidence of element 106 was first reported in 1974 by a Russian research team in Dubna led by Yuri Oganessian, in which targets of lead-208 and lead-207 were bombarded with accelerated ions of chromium-54. In total, fifty-one spontaneous fission events were observed with a half-life between four and ten milliseconds. After having ruled out nucleon transfer reactions as a cause for these activities, the team concluded that the most likely cause of the activities was the spontaneous fission of isotopes of element 106. The isotope in question was first suggested to be seaborgium-259, but was later corrected to seaborgium-260. ²⁰⁸ ₈₂Pb + ⁵⁴ ₂₄Cr → ²⁶⁰ ₁₀₆Sg + 2 ²⁰⁷ ₈₂Pb + ⁵⁴ ₂₄Cr → ²⁶⁰ ₁₀₆Sg + A few months later in 1974, researchers including Glenn T. Seaborg, Carol Alonso and Albert Ghiorso at the University of California, Berkeley, and E. Kenneth Hulet from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also synthesized the element by bombarding a californium-249 target with oxygen-18 ions, using equipment similar to that which had been used for the synthesis of element 104 five years earlier, observing at least seventy alpha decays, seemingly from the isotope seaborgium-263m with a half-life of 0.9±0.2 seconds. The alpha daughter rutherfordium-259 and granddaughter nobelium-255 had previously been synthesised and the properties observed here matched with those previously known, as did the intensity of their production. The cross-section of the reaction observed, 0.3 nanobarns, also agreed well with theoretical predictions. These bolstered the assignment of the alpha decay events to seaborgium-263m. ²⁴⁹ ₉₈Cf + ¹⁸ ₈O → ^263m ₁₀₆Sg + 4 → ²⁵⁹ ₁₀₄Rf + → ²⁵⁵ ₁₀₂No + A dispute thus arose from the initial competing claims of discovery, though unlike the case of the synthetic elements up to element 105, neither team of discoverers chose to announce proposed names for the new elements, thus averting an element naming controversy temporarily. The dispute on discovery, however, dragged on until 1992, when the IUPAC/IUPAP Transfermium Working Group (TWG), formed to put an end to the controversy by making conclusions regarding discovery claims for elements 101 to 112, concluded that the Soviet synthesis of seaborgium-260 was not convincing enough, "lacking as it is in yield curves and angular selection results", whereas the American synthesis of seaborgium-263 was convincing due to its being firmly anchored to known daughter nuclei. As such, the TWG recognised the Berkeley team as official discoverers in their 1993 report. Seaborg had previously suggested to the TWG that if Berkeley was recognised as the official discoverer of elements 104 and 105, they might propose the name kurchatovium (symbol Kt) for element 106 to honour the Dubna team, which had proposed this name for element 104 after Igor Kurchatov, the former head of the Soviet nuclear research programme. However, due to the worsening relations between the competing teams after the publication of the TWG report (because the Berkeley team vehemently disagreed with the TWG's conclusions, especially regarding element 104), this proposal was dropped from consideration by the Berkeley team. After being recognized as official discoverers, the Berkeley team started deciding on a name in earnest: > ...we were given credit for the discovery and the accompanying right to name the new element. The eight members of the Ghiorso group suggested a wide range of names honoring Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Ferdinand Magellan, the mythical Ulysses, George Washington, and Finland, the native land of a member of the team. There was no focus and no front-runner for a long period. > Then one day Al [Ghiorso] walked into my office and asked what I thought of naming element 106 "seaborgium." I was floored. Seaborg's son Eric remembered the naming process as follows: > With eight scientists involved in the discovery suggesting so many good possibilities, Ghiorso despaired of reaching consensus, until he awoke one night with an idea. He approached the team members one by one, until seven of them had agreed. He then told his friend and colleague of 50 years: "We have seven votes in favor of naming element 106 seaborgium. Will you give your consent?" My father was flabbergasted, and, after consulting my mother, agreed. The name seaborgium and symbol Sg were announced at the 207th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in March 1994 by Kenneth Hulet, one of the co-discovers. However, IUPAC resolved in August 1994 that an element could not be named after a living person, and Seaborg was still alive at the time. Thus, in September 1994, IUPAC recommended a set of names in which the names proposed by the three laboratories (the third being the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany) with competing claims to the discovery for elements 104 to 109 were shifted to various other elements, in which rutherfordium (Rf), the Berkeley proposal for element 104, was shifted to element 106, with seaborgium being dropped entirely as a name. This decision ignited a firestorm of worldwide protest for disregarding the historic discoverer's right to name new elements, and against the new retroactive rule against naming elements after living persons; the American Chemical Society stood firmly behind the name seaborgium for element 106, together with all the other American and German naming proposals for elements 104 to 109, approving these names for its journals in defiance of IUPAC. At first, IUPAC defended itself, with an American member of its committee writing: "Discoverers don't have a right to name an element. They have a right to suggest a name. And, of course, we didn't infringe on that at all." However, Seaborg responded: > This would be the first time in history that the acknowledged and uncontested discoverers of an element are denied the privilege of naming it. Bowing to public pressure, IUPAC proposed a different compromise in August 1995, in which the name seaborgium was reinstated for element 106 in exchange for the removal of all but one of the other American proposals, which met an even worse response. Finally, IUPAC rescinded these previous compromises and made a final, new recommendation in August 1997, in which the American and German proposals for elements 104 to 109 were all adopted, including seaborgium for element 106, with the single exception of element 105, named dubnium to recognise the contributions of the Dubna team to the experimental procedures of transactinide synthesis. This list was finally accepted by the American Chemical Society, which wrote: > In the interest of international harmony, the Committee reluctantly accepted the name 'dubnium' for element 105 in place of 'hahnium' [the American proposal], which has had long-standing use in literature. We are pleased to note that 'seaborgium' is now the internationally approved name for element 106. Seaborg commented regarding the naming: > I am, needless to say, proud that U.S. chemists recommended that element 106, which is placed under tungsten (74), be called 'seaborgium.' I was looking forward to the day when chemical investigators will refer to such compounds as seaborgous chloride, seaborgic nitrate, and perhaps, sodium seaborgate. > This is the greatest honor ever bestowed upon me—even better, I think, than winning the Nobel Prize. Future students of chemistry, in learning about the periodic table, may have reason to ask why the element was named for me, and thereby learn more about my work. Seaborg died a year and a half later, on 25 February 1999, at the age of 86. ## Isotopes Superheavy elements such as seaborgium are produced by bombarding lighter elements in particle accelerators that induces fusion reactions. Whereas most of the isotopes of seaborgium can be synthesized directly this way, some heavier ones have only been observed as decay products of elements with higher atomic numbers. Depending on the energies involved, fusion reactions that generate superheavy elements are separated into "hot" and "cold". In hot fusion reactions, very light, high-energy projectiles are accelerated toward very heavy targets (actinides), giving rise to compound nuclei at high excitation energy (\~40–50 MeV) that may either fission or evaporate several (3 to 5) neutrons. In cold fusion reactions, the produced fused nuclei have a relatively low excitation energy (\~10–20 MeV), which decreases the probability that these products will undergo fission reactions. As the fused nuclei cool to the ground state, they require emission of only one or two neutrons, and thus, allows for the generation of more neutron-rich products. The latter is a distinct concept from that of where nuclear fusion claimed to be achieved at room temperature conditions (see cold fusion). Seaborgium has no stable or naturally occurring isotopes. Several radioactive isotopes have been synthesized in the laboratory, either by fusing two atoms or by observing the decay of heavier elements. Thirteen different isotopes of seaborgium have been reported with mass numbers 258–269 and 271, three of which, seaborgium-261, 263, and 265, have known metastable states. All of these decay only through alpha decay and spontaneous fission, with the single exception of seaborgium-261 that can also undergo electron capture to dubnium-261. There is a trend toward increasing half-lives for the heavier isotopes, though even–odd isotopes are generally more stable than their neighboring even–even isotopes, because the odd neutron leads to increased hindrance of spontaneous fission; among known seaborgium isotopes, alpha decay is the predominant decay mode in even–odd nuclei whereas fission dominates in even–even nuclei. Three of the heaviest known isotopes, ²⁶⁷Sg, ²⁶⁹Sg, and ²⁷¹Sg, are also the longest-lived, having half-lives on the order of 1 minute. Some other isotopes in this region are predicted to have comparable or even longer half-lives. Additionally, ²⁶³Sg, ²⁶⁵Sg, ^265mSg, and ²⁶⁸Sg have half-lives measured in seconds. All the remaining isotopes have half-lives measured in milliseconds, with the exception of the shortest-lived isotope, ^261mSg, with a half-life of only 92 microseconds. The proton-rich isotopes from ²⁵⁸Sg to ²⁶¹Sg were directly produced by cold fusion; all heavier isotopes were produced from the repeated alpha decay of the heavier elements hassium, darmstadtium, and flerovium, with the exceptions of the isotopes ^263mSg, ²⁶⁴Sg, ²⁶⁵Sg, and ^265mSg, which were directly produced by hot fusion through irradiation of actinide targets. The twelve isotopes of seaborgium have half-lives ranging from 92 microseconds for ^261mSg to 14 minutes for ²⁶⁹Sg. ## Predicted properties Very few properties of seaborgium or its compounds have been measured; this is due to its extremely limited and expensive production and the fact that seaborgium (and its parents) decays very quickly. A few singular chemistry-related properties have been measured, but properties of seaborgium metal remain unknown and only predictions are available. ### Physical Seaborgium is expected to be a solid under normal conditions and assume a body-centered cubic crystal structure, similar to its lighter congener tungsten. Early predictions estimated that it should be a very heavy metal with density around 35.0 g/cm³, but calculations in 2011 and 2013 predicted a somewhat lower value of 23–24 g/cm³. ### Chemical Seaborgium is the fourth member of the 6d series of transition metals and the heaviest member of group 6 in the periodic table, below chromium, molybdenum, and tungsten. All the members of the group form a diversity of oxoanions. They readily portray their group oxidation state of +6, although this is highly oxidising in the case of chromium, and this state becomes more and more stable to reduction as the group is descended: indeed, tungsten is the last of the 5d transition metals where all four 5d electrons participate in metallic bonding. As such, seaborgium should have +6 as its most stable oxidation state, both in the gas phase and in aqueous solution, and this is the only oxidation state that is experimentally known for it; the +5 and +4 states should be less stable, and the +3 state, the most common for chromium, would be the least stable for seaborgium. This stabilisation of the highest oxidation state occurs in the early 6d elements because of the similarity between the energies of the 6d and 7s orbitals, since the 7s orbitals are relativistically stabilised and the 6d orbitals are relativistically destabilised. This effect is so large in the seventh period that seaborgium is expected to lose its 6d electrons before its 7s electrons (Sg, [Rn]5f¹⁴6d⁴7s²; Sg⁺, [Rn]5f¹⁴6d³7s²; Sg²⁺, [Rn]5f¹⁴6d³7s¹; Sg⁴⁺, [Rn]5f¹⁴6d²; Sg⁶⁺, [Rn]5f¹⁴). Because of the great destabilisation of the 7s orbital, Sg^IV should be even more unstable than W^IV and should be very readily oxidised to Sg^VI. The predicted ionic radius of the hexacoordinate Sg⁶⁺ ion is 65 pm, while the predicted atomic radius of seaborgium is 128 pm. Nevertheless, the stability of the highest oxidation state is still expected to decrease as Lr^III \> Rf^IV \> Db^V \> Sg^VI. Some predicted standard reduction potentials for seaborgium ions in aqueous acidic solution are as follows: {\| \|- \| 2 SgO₃ + 2 H⁺ + 2 e⁻ \|\| Sg₂O₅ + H₂O \|\| E⁰ = −0.046 V \|- \| Sg₂O₅ + 2 H⁺ + 2 e⁻ \|\| 2 SgO₂ + H₂O \|\| E⁰ = +0.11 V \|- \| SgO₂ + 4 H⁺ + e⁻ \|\| Sg³⁺ + 2 H₂O \|\| E⁰ = −1.34 V \|- \| Sg³⁺ + e⁻ \|\| Sg²⁺ \|\| E⁰ = −0.11 V \|- \| Sg³⁺ + 3 e⁻ \|\| Sg \|\| E⁰ = +0.27 V Seaborgium should form a very volatile hexafluoride (SgF₆) as well as a moderately volatile hexachloride (SgCl₆), pentachloride (SgCl₅), and oxychlorides SgO₂Cl₂ and SgOCl₄. SgO₂Cl₂ is expected to be the most stable of the seaborgium oxychlorides and to be the least volatile of the group 6 oxychlorides, with the sequence MoO₂Cl₂ \> WO₂Cl₂ \> SgO₂Cl₂. The volatile seaborgium(VI) compounds SgCl₆ and SgOCl₄ are expected to be unstable to decomposition to seaborgium(V) compounds at high temperatures, analogous to MoCl₆ and MoOCl₄; this should not happen for SgO₂Cl₂ due to the much higher energy gap between the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals, despite the similar Sg–Cl bond strengths (similarly to molybdenum and tungsten). Molybdenum and tungsten are very similar to each other and show important differences to the smaller chromium, and seaborgium is expected to follow the chemistry of tungsten and molybdenum quite closely, forming an even greater variety of oxoanions, the simplest among them being seaborgate, SgO²⁻ ₄, which would form from the rapid hydrolysis of Sg(H ₂O)⁶⁺ ₆, although this would take place less readily than with molybdenum and tungsten as expected from seaborgium's greater size. Seaborgium should hydrolyse less readily than tungsten in hydrofluoric acid at low concentrations, but more readily at high concentrations, also forming complexes such as SgO₃F⁻ and SgOF⁻ ₅: complex formation competes with hydrolysis in hydrofluoric acid. ## Experimental chemistry Experimental chemical investigation of seaborgium has been hampered due to the need to produce it one atom at a time, its short half-life, and the resulting necessary harshness of the experimental conditions. The isotope ²⁶⁵Sg and its isomer ^265mSg are advantageous for radiochemistry: they are produced in the ²⁴⁸Cm(²²Ne,5n) reaction. In the first experimental chemical studies of seaborgium in 1995 and 1996, seaborgium atoms were produced in the reaction ²⁴⁸Cm(²²Ne,4n)²⁶⁶Sg, thermalised, and reacted with an O₂/HCl mixture. The adsorption properties of the resulting oxychloride were measured and compared with those of molybdenum and tungsten compounds. The results indicated that seaborgium formed a volatile oxychloride akin to those of the other group 6 elements, and confirmed the decreasing trend of oxychloride volatility down group 6: Sg + O ₂ + 2 HCl → SgO ₂Cl ₂ + H ₂ In 2001, a team continued the study of the gas phase chemistry of seaborgium by reacting the element with O₂ in a H₂O environment. In a manner similar to the formation of the oxychloride, the results of the experiment indicated the formation of seaborgium oxide hydroxide, a reaction well known among the lighter group 6 homologues as well as the pseudohomologue uranium. 2 Sg + 3 O ₂ → 2 SgO ₃ SgO ₃ + H ₂O → SgO ₂(OH) ₂ Predictions on the aqueous chemistry of seaborgium have largely been confirmed. In experiments conducted in 1997 and 1998, seaborgium was eluted from cation-exchange resin using a HNO₃/HF solution, most likely as neutral SgO₂F₂ or the anionic complex ion [SgO₂F₃]⁻ rather than SgO²⁻ ₄. In contrast, in 0.1 M nitric acid, seaborgium does not elute, unlike molybdenum and tungsten, indicating that the hydrolysis of [Sg(H₂O)₆]⁶⁺ only proceeds as far as the cationic complex [Sg(OH)₄(H₂O)]²⁺ or [SgO(OH)₃(H₂O)₂]⁺, while that of molybdenum and tungsten proceed to neutral [MO₂(OH)₂]. The only other oxidation state known for seaborgium other than the group oxidation state of +6 is the zero oxidation state. Similarly to its three lighter congeners, forming chromium hexacarbonyl, molybdenum hexacarbonyl, and tungsten hexacarbonyl, seaborgium has been shown in 2014 to also form seaborgium hexacarbonyl, Sg(CO)₆. Like its molybdenum and tungsten homologues, seaborgium hexacarbonyl is a volatile compound that reacts readily with silicon dioxide. ## Absence in nature Searches for long-lived primordial nuclides of seaborgium in nature have all yielded negative results. One 2022 study estimated the concentration of seaborgium atoms in natural tungsten (its chemical homolog) is less than 5.1×10⁻¹⁵ atom(Sg)/atom(W).

Tropical Storm Bret (1981)

Atlantic tropical storm in 1981

Tropical Storm Bret made a rare landfall on the Delmarva Peninsula in June 1981. The sixth tropical cyclone, third designated tropical depression, and second named storm of the season, Bret developed as a subtropical storm from a large area of frontal clouds near Bermuda on June 29. Moving westward, the subtropical storm intensified while producing deep convection, and was consequently reclassified as a tropical storm early on June 30. Around that time, Bret peaked with sustained winds of 70 mph (110 km/h). The storm then began weakening and struck near Oyster, Virginia as a minimal tropical storm early on July 1. Upon moving inland, Bret weakened to a tropical depression and subsequently accelerated prior to dissipating over northern Virginia that same day. In its early stages, Bret dropped light rainfall on Bermuda, peaking at 3.34 inches (85 mm). Impact in the United States was generally minor. In Virginia, the storm produced up to 4.48 inches (114 mm) of rain in Big Meadows section of Shenandoah National Park. Along the coast, minor beach erosion occurred due to tides up to 0.9 feet (0.27 m) above normal. In western Pennsylvania, locally heavy rainfall flooded some streets and basements. Elsewhere, Bret dropped 1 to 3 inches (25 to 76 mm) of precipitation to several states. One fatality was confirmed after a woman was killed by rip currents at Nags Head, North Carolina. ## Meteorological history A large band of frontal clouds became situated over the northwestern Atlantic Ocean on June 27. By the following day, satellite imagery indicated that a low-pressure area began developing northwest of Bermuda, along the northwest periphery of the frontal cloud band. Substantial amounts of deep convection eventually formed north and west of the low center. Thus, the system was designated as a subtropical storm at 1200 UTC on June 29, while centered approximately 575 miles (925 km) east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The system continued to gain convection and intensify while tracking westward toward the Mid-Atlantic states at a forward speed of 20 mph (32 km/h). Early on June 30, a well-defined atmospheric circulation became apparent on infrared satellite imagery. As a result, subtropical storm transitioned into Tropical Storm Bret later that day at 0600 UTC. Upon becoming a tropical cyclone early on June 30, Bret attained maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 km/h). About six hours later, at 1200 UTC, the storm also attained its minimum barometric pressure of 996 mbar (29.4 inHg). Around 2200 UTC on June 30, a reconnaissance aircraft flight observed hurricane-force winds, though Bret was not upgraded to a hurricane because the minimum barometric pressure was considered too high. About an hour later, the National Hurricane Center noted that Bret was moving westward toward Virginia at 20 mph (25 km/h) and entering a region of colder sea surface temperatures, causing further intensification to become unlikely. Subsequently, the storm curved west-northwestward and rapidly weakened. At 0500 UTC on July 1, Bret made landfall near Oyster, Virginia on the Delmarva Peninsula as a minimal tropical storm. About an hour later, the storm emerged into the Chesapeake Bay and weakened to a tropical depression. Later on July 1, Bret moved inland over mainland Virginia and continued to weaken, until dissipating over the northern portion of the state. ## Preparations and impact In its early stages, the subtropical precursor of Bret tracked north of Bermuda and dropped light rainfall on the island, peaking at 3.34 inches (85 mm). While Bret was approaching the East Coast of the United States, various National Weather Service offices issued gale warnings. At 2000 UTC on June 30, a gale-force warning was issued for a portion of the North Carolina coastline extending from Cape Hatteras northward, including Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. Simultaneously, another gale warning was issued for areas along the Chesapeake Bay south of the Patuxent River in Maryland and on the east coast from Ocean City, Maryland to Virginia Beach, Virginia. Around 0300 UTC on July 1, all gale warnings were discontinued in North Carolina, while the remaining warnings in Maryland and Virginia were canceled about five hours later. Additionally, a small craft advisory was also posted for the North Carolina and Virginia coastlines. Officials in North Carolina closed off beaches at Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, and Kill Devil Hills from swimmers due to rip currents and tides. After Bret dissipated, the small craft warning remained in effect and mariners were told to remain in port until the weather calmed. In Virginia, Bret produced relatively light rainfall, peaking at 4.48 inches (114 mm) in Big Meadows, a section of Shenandoah National Park. At the time of Bret's landfall, portions of the Mid-Atlantic states were experiencing a strong drought, though the amounts of precipitation were not enough for farmers in Virginia to save their crops. In Virginia Beach, local street flooding and a brief tornado were reported. Minor beach erosion occurred in the area due to tides reaching about 0.9 feet (0.27 m) above normal. One fatality was confirmed in North Carolina when a woman was killed after getting stuck in rip currents at Nags Head. Offshore, two boats lost contact with the Coast Guard during the approach to land, one of which washed up at Cape May, New Jersey and the other on the Virginia coast. The Coast Guard began cleanup of an oil spill at Nags Head caused by Bret off the coast. About 8 miles (13 km) of the shoreline was filled with oil, little of which polluted the water. Most of the oil was thin and easily cleanup private contractor. Locally heavy rainfall in western Pennsylvania flooded streets and basements in some areas, with up to 4 inches (100 mm) of precipitation in Brookville. Elsewhere, Bret dropped 1 to 3 inches (25 to 76 mm) of precipitation in several states. Overall, no considerable damage was reported. ## See also - Tropical Storm Dean (1983) and Tropical Storm Danielle (1992) – made similarly rare landfalls on the Delmarva Peninsula - Other storms of the same name - List of North Carolina hurricanes (1980–1999)

6:02 AM EST

"6:02 AM EST" is the 20th episode of the third season of the American science fiction drama television series Fringe, and the 63rd episode overall. The narrative follows the activation of the doomsday device by the parallel universe, and the subsequent devastating consequences experienced by our world. David Wilcox, Josh Singer, and Graham Roland co-wrote the episode, while Jeannot Szwarc directed it. Guest star Kevin Corrigan returned as the mysterious Sam Weiss. Actor John Noble and executive producer Jeff Pinkner have referred to "6:02 AM EST" as the start of an "epic trilogy", as it and the following two episodes would be "linked in one continuous story arc". The episode received generally positive reviews; many critics noted its purpose was meant to set the stage for the season finale. ## Plot In the parallel universe, Walternate has been able to use the blood sample from Fauxlivia's child to create a serum made up of half of Peter Bishop's DNA. He uses this serum to activate his doomsday machine at 6:02 am. In the prime universe, this results in a series of unusual events, including the formation of a vortex that wipes out a long swath of land in rural New York state, including a herd of sheep and two of their shepherds. The Fringe division learns that their version of the machine activated at 6:02 am on its own, and Walter suspects the two machines are tied by quantum entanglement, with their version of the machine destroying their world to stabilize the parallel one. Unknown to the prime universe, Walternate's experiment has not affected the stability of their world. In the prime universe, Nina Sharp helps to set up Massive Dynamic's resources to track these occurrences, preparing to deploy limited supplies of the amber substance to contain them if needed. Nina advises Olivia to find Sam Weiss, a man that William Bell had trusted and instructed Nina to also listen to. However, Sam has disappeared and cannot be found. Walter and Peter, along with Massive Dynamic staff, debate how to disable the machine, but Peter realizes that he himself is the only option. Walter comes to recognize that the Observer's efforts from earlier ("The Firefly") were to prepare him to lose Peter. After preparing himself, Peter goes to touch the machine, but is sent flying by an electrical spark, wounding him and knocking him unconscious. At the hospital chapel, Walter tries to find repentance from God for his actions, while Olivia arrives after hearing the news. She steps outside to observe the sunset when Sam Weiss runs up to her and demands to be taken to the machine to stop what is already happening. In the parallel universe, Walternate's machine has been detected by the Fringe division and Fauxlivia and her team go to investigate. When Walternate tells them to stand down, Fauxilivia asks him about her recent mission to the prime universe and the part that she recovered. Walternate admits to her that the machine has been activated, having sacrificed his own son Peter to allow Fauxlivia's son to live. Fauxlivia becomes distressed at Walternate's actions, and later returns to Liberty Island to obtain the devices to allow her to cross to the prime universe, but is caught before she can use them. Walternate locks her away, seeing her as a traitor to his cause. ## Production "6:02 AM EST" was written by co-executive producers David Wilcox and Josh Singer, and executive story editor Graham Roland; filmmaker Jeannot Szwarc directed it. Though the season 3 finale was scheduled to be just an hour long, executive producer Jeff Pinkner confirmed that the last three episodes would be "linked in one continuous story arc". This was a reflection of Pinkner and fellow executive producer J.H. Wyman's intent to have the last three episodes of every season seem like "you're turning the last page of a chapter in a novel. And usually in a good novel, the last pages [of a chapter] compels you forward with a new understanding of what the subject matter is and you get deeper and you can't wait to turn that page." Some media outlets have referred to the episodes as a "three-part third-season finale". During a conference call with journalists, actor John Noble called "6:02 AM EST" and the next two episodes of the third season an "epic trilogy". He elaborated "All year we've been heading toward the fact that there seems to be an inevitable conflict between the two universes. And we've gotten to know the people on both sides now, so we now bring it to a conclusion starting with '6:02.' By the next episode we start to deal with the issue because our earth starts to deteriorate. Events start to happen here which indicate that our world is degrading. And so everyone has to move into another gear and say, 'Okay, this problem is not going to go away. It's now affecting our side. We do have a machine which we believe can assist in the resolution of this problem.' And so the episode basically deals with the lead-up in the first part of that trilogy, leading up to the use of that machine." In the same interview, Noble called the episode's title very critical to the series, stating "That time frame plays through the three episodes. Very important to remember as we get to the finale, that time frame." In March 2011, TVLine's Michael Ausiello exclusively confirmed that previous guest actor Kevin Corrigan would be returning for the twentieth and twenty-first episodes of the season. Corrigan last appeared in the season's twelfth episode "Concentrate and Ask Again"; his role in "6:02 AM EST" and the following week's episode "The Last Sam Weiss" marked his sixth and seventh appearances on Fringe, respectively. As with other Fringe episodes, Fox released a science lesson plan in collaboration with Science Olympiad for grade school children, focusing on the science seen in "6:02 AM EST", with the intention of having "students learn about weather forecasting." ## Reception ### Ratings On its initial broadcast in the United States, the episode was watched by an estimated 3.51 million viewers, with a 1.2/4 ratings share for those aged 18–49. It was seen by 14 percent fewer viewers than the previous week, though several other series airing that night were also down in viewers. The 1.2 ratings share resulted in a series low for Fringe. ### Reviews The A.V. Club's Noel Murray graded the episode with an A−, explaining that though he did not want to give a full review until the season finale aired, he was "enjoying how Fringe's third season is wrapping up", such as "the cross-cutting between Earth-1 and Earth-2, and the sense of imminent doom." Murray continued that he "especially liked... that in the midst of all this end-times rush, it pauses periodically to check in with the various characters in short one-on-one scenes, strengthening our sense of what these relationships mean. (It's something that Fringe has gotten good at in the past year-and-a-half, and something I wouldn't have predicted for the show back in season one.)" Writing for the Los Angeles Times, critic Andrew Hanson noted Fringe is preparing for the finale, calling "6:02 AM EST" a "movement episode [that] give[s] an opportunity to get everyone into place for the big climax" in a vein similar to the television series Lost. Hanson enjoyed the two "sleights of hand", explaining he was surprised by Fauxlivia's universe-crossing device failing and what happened to Peter after touching the machine. IGN's Ramsey Isler rated the episode 7.5/10, writing "This week's episode wasn't an edge-of-your seat masterpiece, but it scores high marks for character development and putting the pieces in place for a great season finale." Like Hanson, Isler loved the outcome of Peter and the machine, calling it a "nice plot twist"; he also praised Blair Brown as "one of the many under-appreciated elements of the series." Writing for Mania.com, critic Kurt Anthony Krug acknowledged the episode "had a tough act to follow" after the previous week's episode, but stated "it's still pretty good". Sarah Stegall from SFScope was happy to see Peter "taking a more active role" with the machine plotline, but disliked the episode's religious elements, believing that Walter's scene in the church "felt forced". Stegall concluded her review noting "This episode felt like the first part of a chess game, as the pieces are arranged on the board. The big move is coming up, the endgame that will decide who wins and who loses".

Star Trek: The God Thing

Star Trek: The God Thing is an unproduced film script written by Star Trek series creator Gene Roddenberry. Following the success of Star Trek in broadcast syndication during the early 1970s, Paramount Pictures sought to produce a feature film based on the property. The film's plot follows the Enterprise crew after the events of The Original Series: when an alien entity declares itself God and begins travel to Earth, Admiral James T. Kirk reunites the crew, who send it back to its own dimension. Roddenberry completed the story on June 30, 1976, but Paramount rejected the script for reasons Roddenberry attributed to the religious views of company executives. Story elements were used in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. After Paramount rejected the film, Roddenberry sought to produce The God Thing as a novel in the late 1970s. He signed a deal with Bantam Books to publish it, but was given extensions because of his work; first on Phase II and then The Motion Picture. During this period, Star Trek actor Walter Koenig helped Roddenberry expand the novel. In 1991, shortly before Roddenberry's death, his assistant Susan Sackett rediscovered the work on the novel. She contacted Pocket Books, which wanted to publish it; discussions to hire Sackett and Fred Bronson to expand it to novel length were held, but negotiations stopped after Roddenberry's death and Sackett's dismissal from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Michael Jan Friedman was later engaged to expand the work but it went unpublished. ## Background NBC canceled Star Trek following the third season in 1969, but the episodes were released into broadcast syndication where they were successful. Because of this success and fans' responses at science-fiction conventions held in honor of the series, Paramount Pictures soon sought to create a movie based on the series. By March 1972, series creator Gene Roddenberry said there was interest in a Star Trek feature film, and that the series could return to television on NBC. ## Plot The five-year mission of Star Trek has finished and the crew has moved on from their postings on the starship Enterprise. Captain James T. Kirk has been promoted to Admiral, Doctor Leonard McCoy has left Starfleet to become a veterinarian, and other crew members have been given desk jobs. Engineer Montgomery Scott has become an alcoholic through boredom. Spock has returned to his home planet, Vulcan, where he was seeking to control the human half of his persona. After an alien entity declaring itself to be God destroys spacecraft en route to Earth, the Enterprise is launched under the command of Admiral Kirk to engage the vessel. He re-assembles the former crew, including Spock, and sets out to intercept the alien. As they approach the entity, it transports a humanoid probe on board the Enterprise that takes a variety of forms—including that of Jesus. The crew determine that the being and its craft are from an alternate dimension and have been responsible for the creation of religion of numerous planets to teach their inhabitants its laws in a manner understandable at their points in development. The being is malfunctioning; the crew repair it and send it back to its own dimension. ## Production In May 1975, Roddenberry entered a development deal with Paramount, with principal photography intended to start on July 15, 1976, and a budget of \$5 million. He started work on treatments; his first involved the formation of the Enterprise crew, including their training at Starfleet Academy and the formation of Starfleet, but this idea was never submitted to Paramount. His first major submitted script was The God Thing. A scene involving a discussion in which Spock's tutors describe religion on Earth worried the studio. The tutor says, "We have never really understood your Earth legend of gods. Particularly in that so many of your gods have said, 'You have to bow down on your bellies every seven days and worship me'. This seems to us like they are very insecure gods." Roddenberry completed the script on June 30; Paramount rejected it the following month. The studio was also unhappy with, and rejected, scripts by Robert Silverberg, Chris Knopt, Dick Simmons, and Theodore Sturgeon. Roddenberry blamed religious Paramount executives including Barry Diller for turning down The God Thing, a story that writer Jon Povill summarized as "God was a malfunctioning spaceship". The production start date for the film was postponed to 1977, and Paramount brought in new staff. Jerry Isenberg was hired as executive producer, who hired British writers Bryant and Scott in September 1976 to begin work on a new treatment that became known as Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. After that failed, Roddenberry planned to take Star Trek back to television as the series Star Trek: Phase II, redeveloping The God Thing into the pilot episode of the series, "In Thy Image". After this too was canceled, the story was again redeveloped to become the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. ### Novelization Following the rejection of the script, Roddenberry planned to convert his treatment into a novel. After his assistant Susan Sackett showed him the manuscript of a novel that actor Walter Koenig had asked her to type, Roddenberry sought Koenig's collaboration on The God Thing. Roddenberry had already produced 68 pages after working on it for a month when he handed it to Koenig, who added another 83 in two months. Roddenberry received the changes enthusiastically, but a few weeks later Sackett informed Koenig that the project had been abandoned. In his 1997 autobiography Warped Factors, Koenig stated that he still had copies of the work he had completed on the book. In the January 1977 issue of Starlog, Roddenberry said he was not sure when the novel would be complete, but confirmed that it would discuss the meaning of God. By March 1978, the novel was said to be half-completed. Publisher Bantam Books told Roddenberry it would wait until he finished production on Phase II to resume work on the novel. When later in 1978 that production turned into The Motion Picture, Bantam gave Roddenberry an extension because the novelization was thought to be a full-time effort. In 1991, Sackett discovered a partly-completed manuscript while she researched documents for her book Inside Trek. This prompted her to suggest sending it to Pocket Books, which held the rights to Star Trek novels at the time, despite the prior agreement with Bantam. Roddenberry was not enthusiastic about the idea, but editor David Stern at Pocket Books was interested and wanted to know whether Sackett and fellow writer Fred Bronson would be able to expand and complete it. Contract negotiations for the work began in April 1991, during which time Sackett had a version re-typed because no electronic versions were available and the type on the existing printout was faint in places. The writers were dealing with Roddenberry's lawyer Leonard Maizlish, but discussions lasted over six months. Two days after Roddenberry's death on October 24, they were informed that work on the novel would not continue. Sackett said this may have been linked to her dismissal from the Star Trek: The Next Generation television series following Roddenberry's death. Pocket Books brought in Michael Jan Friedman to finish the work, but it was never published. ## Reception and legacy The God Thing remains known to Star Trek fans because of comparisons to other works, such as the aforementioned Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which an entity calling itself V'ger enters Federation space in search of its "creator," and the later Star Trek V: The Final Frontier where the crew encounter a messianic figure and an entity masquerading as God. Roddenberry opposed the plot of The Final Frontier, not wanting the film to be part of the overall canon for the franchise. Roddenberry's themes of interaction with religion and God have appeared elsewhere in the franchise. Edward Gross described Roddenberry's rejection of The Final Frontier as "ironic" because of the similarity between that film and The God Thing. In his book, Jewish Themes in Star Trek, Rabbi Yonassan Gershom compared the two plots, saying they were different in their approaches. He said Roddenberry wanted to disprove God's existence in The God Thing, whereas William Shatner, who directed The Final Frontier, sought to take God seriously. This was partly due to the novelization of The Final Frontier, in which the original version of the scene was to show all manner of religious expression on the final showdown with the God-like figure in Sha-Ka-Ree. However, this scene was simplified for the film due to budget constraints. ## See also - Star Trek (film series)

Frontier Central School District

School district in Hamburg, New York, U.S.

The Frontier Central School District is the primary public school district serving the town of Hamburg, New York. The district serves most of the area surrounding the village of Hamburg and is an independent public entity. With authority from the State of New York, Frontier's seven-member Board of Education governs the district and selects the superintendent. The district's offices are at the Frontier Educational Center in Wanakah. Frontier was formed in June 1951 as a consolidation of eight smaller school districts along Hamburg's lakeshore. Today, the district has six schools, including four elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. It has about 4,520 students, spends an average of \$16,749 per pupil and maintains a student-to-teacher ratio of 13:1 (the national averages in 2020 were \$12,654 and 16:1 respectively). The district is a member of the Erie 1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) system. In 2020, Buffalo Business First ranked Frontier as the fifteenth-best performing school district in the Western New York region. The Hamburg, West Seneca and Orchard Park central school districts serve the village and small portions of the town. ## History Before the formation of the district, students in the hamlets and communities throughout the town of Hamburg were served by smaller school districts dating to the late 19th century. These included the Amsdell, Athol Springs, Big Tree, Blasdell, Lake View (Pinehurst), Shaleton, Wanakah (Cloverbank), and Woodlawn school districts. The Frontier Central School District took its name after the local phone exchange when a naming contest failed to produce suitable ones. The district was officially formed on June 28, 1951, as a consolidation of these districts and would therefore serve as the main school district along the lake shore of the town. Growing at a rapid pace and fueled by suburbanization, the new district was deemed too small to accommodate all of its students, and as a result a 112-acre (45 ha) high school campus and a new elementary school were approved for construction in 1953. Ground was broken for the Frontier Junior-Senior High School on January 23, 1953, with a low bid of \$3.2 million (\$ in ) for construction. Both the high school and Pinehurst in Lake View opened in 1955. Two additional schools, Cloverbank Elementary and Blasdell Elementary, opened in 1959, and a high school in Blasdell was reworked to accommodate some secondary school students. In the early 1960s, the district believed it would have at least 7,000 students by the next decade. Residents approved the construction of a new middle school in 1963; the Amsdell Heights Junior High School opened in 1965. District officials saw the need to build more schools in the 1970s; however, district enrollment began declining after 1972, and voters rejected the school proposal. The lack of newer school buildings and renovations to the older ones caused a strain on the district's operations in the 1980s and early 1990s. With this came the closure of older schools, including the former Woodlawn Elementary School. The district's proposed sale of the school in 1994 to the Deobandi school Darul Uloom Al-Madania faced community opposition and was blocked by a community referendum that January. With stable enrollments, the approval of a \$17.6 million (\$ in ) capital program in 1990 led to the renovations and expansions of the existing schools. In addition, a new primary school adjacent to the high school, Big Tree Elementary, was constructed in 1993. By 1998, the high school alone had \$34 million (\$ in ) invested into it over the previous ten years. Fiber-optic networking was installed district-wide beginning in 1999. The district's former community center, the Frontier Community Learning Center, was constructed along Southwestern Boulevard in 2002. The Frontier Community Learning Center featured classrooms, offered seasonal courses, and later, a gymnasium. The district sold the community center in 2015 to the town of Hamburg, which now operates it as a senior services center. The district shifted away from overhead projectors to SMART Boards around the 2007–2008 school year. In 2019, Frontier secured funding from then-State Senator Chris Jacobs for a turf field replacement and scoreboard installation behind the high school, which was completed in 2020. ### COVID-19 pandemic adjustments As with other school districts across the United States, Frontier took measures to implement distance learning at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to prevent the spread of the virus. Initially, students attended school remotely in March 2020. In the fall of 2020, the district opened the year with a transition to a hybrid in-person and virtual learning model, which necessitated hiring additional instructors. During this time, seventeen students and teachers contracted the virus, prompting the district to switch back to an all-virtual instruction model, as it had the highest number of positive COVID-19 cases in the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area. The district remained in the virtual phase from November 2 until reopening on January 4, 2021, returning to a flip-flop, hybrid model. ## General information ### Location and area The Frontier Central School District covers about 39 square miles (101.0 km²) of land in the town of Hamburg, from the village of Blasdell in the north to the hamlet of Lake View in the southwest. Portions of the town of Hamburg not covered by the school district include areas adjacent to the village and other neighboring towns; the Hamburg, West Seneca, and Orchard Park central school districts serve these areas. ### Instruction In 2020, Buffalo Business First ranked Frontier as the fifteenth-best performing school district in the Western New York region. The district employed 363 teachers for the 2019–2020 school year, providing educational services to children and students from pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) through twelfth grade. Two elementary schools and a local child care center offer daily Pre-K and Head Start sessions. Students are administered yearly math and English Language Arts (ELA) assessments by the New York State Education Department from grades three through eight. In grades four and eight, students take a science-based exam which includes a lab component. At the middle and high school levels, ten counselors offer guidance to students throughout the school year. Students take their Regents Exams, which are required to receive a diploma, in high school. 91% of 345 students graduated from Frontier High School in 2020, with 64% receiving an Advanced Regents Diploma. In 2016, the district began implementing its own independent educational standards alongside the Common Core State Standards Initiative and the state's Board of Regents standards. Frontier supplies students with Chromebook laptops and iPads, transitioning from the iMac computers previously in use. In addition, the district uses Google Apps for Education for student email and document storage and SchoolTool for student record-keeping. ### Budget and administration The Frontier Educational Center (FEC) is on Orchard Avenue in the hamlet of Wanakah, where it serves as the administrative and business head of the district. The FEC was previously home to the Wanakah School, which admitted first- and second-grade students until it was shuttered in 1993. Located within the FEC is the district's Board of Education, which selects the superintendent of schools, sets district policies, and oversees the budget, personnel, facilities and curriculum. Seven members serve four-year terms on the school board. The board began holding virtual meetings in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The school district's current superintendent is Christopher J. Swiatek. Frontier spends an average of \$16,749 per pupil; its student–teacher ratio is 13:1 (the national averages in 2020 were \$12,654 and 16:1 respectively), and as of 2021, the district's budget was \$89,486,591. ### Demographics In the 2019–20 school year, the Frontier Central School District enrolled approximately 4,612 students; of which 1,470 (32%) were considered economically disadvantaged or eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The student body is 51% male and 49% female. 17% of students have reported disabilities. ## Schools ### Big Tree Elementary School Big Tree Elementary School is on Bayview Road, adjacent to Frontier High School. The school serves students in the town roughly between the areas of Blasdell and Wanakah, where Cloverbank Elementary is located. Two wings support classrooms for students from kindergarten through fifth grade. Before the construction of the present elementary school, several schools were constructed in the Big Tree area, beginning with a small schoolhouse in 1850. At least three additional schoolhouses were built, expanded or moved for the Big Tree district between 1870 and 1961, later reduced to a sole building on South Park Avenue after consolidation into the Frontier district. With its capacity of under 200 in the 1980s, students in the aging K-3 school were sent to the Wanakah, Blasdell and Woodlawn schools until the new Big Tree Elementary opened on September 11, 1993. Joanne C. Saniewski was principal of the school for seventeen years, during which it earned a Blue Ribbon Award in 2009. When the school surpassed a parent teacher association (PTA) goal by reading over 2.5 million minutes in 2006, Saniewski read a book from a hot-air balloon to the school's students. ### Blasdell Elementary School Blasdell Elementary School, on South Park Avenue, serves students in the village of Blasdell and the surrounding area, including the hamlet of Woodlawn. The school traces its history back to 1843, when the first schoolhouse was built near present-day Mile Strip Road. Population shifts slightly to the north saw Blasdell High School open in 1894, and other schools open in Woodlawn to the west. Functioning as a primary and secondary school throughout its time, the opening of the high school and continued district growth lead to the construction of the current school. The new Blasdell Elementary opened as an expansion for 781 elementary students on September 9, 1959, along with Cloverbank Elementary; the previous school became the Blasdell Annex. District reorganization and school closures over the subsequent decades saw the annex close and the current school expand to a K-5 grade structure. Capital improvements introduced an addition in 1998 which added thirteen classrooms. The school is bordered to the north and east by the Lackawanna, West Seneca and Orchard Park school districts, and to the south by Big Tree Elementary. ### Cloverbank Elementary School Cloverbank Elementary School is on Cloverbank Road near the hamlets of Wanakah, Clifton Heights, and Locksley Park. Student attendance extends along the lakeshore between Pinehurst Elementary in the southwest and Big Tree Elementary to the northeast. Before its construction, other schools serving students in the area included Athol Springs No. 10 (1920), the Wanakah School No. 5, and the Amsdell School No. 9. As the district grew, Cloverbank Elementary was planned and constructed as an expansion school. It was built in 1958 and opened along with Blasdell Elementary to 824 students on September 9, 1959. An expansion in 1998 added thirteen classrooms. The school houses students from kindergarten through fifth grade. ### Pinehurst Elementary School Pinehurst Elementary School, on Fairway Court in Lake View, is the original elementary school in the district. The school serves students in the area of the town roughly between Eighteen Mile Creek and Cloverbank Elementary. The next school to the southwest is Highland Elementary of the Lake Shore Central School District, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) away in the hamlet of Derby. Before its construction, at least five schools existed in the area from 1795 to 1921, including a log cabin. Along with the high school, Pinehurst opened in 1955 with grades K–6, taking in students from other schools such as Wanakah up to grade eight. In 1993, the school expanded: sixteen classrooms, a kitchen and cafeteria were added to the school. Today, students from kindergarten through fifth grade attend Pinehurst. ### Frontier Middle School Frontier Middle School opened on September 8, 1965, with 1,327 students as Amsdell Heights Junior High School. The school's current name dates from 1993, while shifting from grades 7–9 to grades 6–8. At the middle school, students begin their foreign language courses and have the opportunity to enroll in advanced math. An expansion in the late 1990s added a music room and a second gym; a second expansion in early 2000s added a two-story wing with several classrooms. Located on Amsdell Road in the southwest portion of the town, students in grades 6–8 attend the middle school. The school had 96 teachers in 2020. As of the 2019–20 school year, enrollment was 1,142 students. #### Student body The student body consists primarily of incoming students from Big Tree, Blasdell, Cloverbank and Pinehurst Elementary schools. About 32% of students are considered economically disadvantaged and may qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The demographics of the school are 87% White (non-Hispanic), 2% Black or African American, 1% Asian, 6% Hispanic or Latino, and 4% multiracial. Its student-teacher ratio is 12:1. In 2008, 1,450 middle school teachers, staff and students participated in a large outdoor group photo, forming a 100-foot (30 m) wide red, white and blue eagle. Subsequent photos were taken at other schools in the district and elsewhere in the country. Each November, the school's student council organizes its annual fundraiser Bald for Bucks, which raises thousands of dollars to benefit Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. The school has a chapter of the National Junior Honor Society. ### Frontier High School Frontier Central High School is on Bayview Road in the north-central area of the district. It replaced Blasdell High School on Madison Avenue in 1955, which had been in operation as such since 1894. Students from the ninth through twelfth grades attend the school. The school has 1,363 students and a 12:1 student-to-teacher ratio. At the high school, students are offered the opportunity to take ten Advanced Placement classes, courses from SUNY Erie, Hilbert College and Niagara County Community College (NCCC), and vocational classes with Erie 1 BOCES in nearby West Seneca. The school offers over two dozen clubs and activities and over 64 varsity sports teams and began operating a student-run food truck in 2019. The high school has expanded three times. The first expansion was in 1993 with an eight-room foreign language education wing and secondary gymnasium and the second in 1998 with 23 classrooms. The third expansion came in 2013, when capital improvements saw the addition of a new library media center and secured vestibule. The renovations were completed in 2014. ## Transportation School buses are operated by the district; the bus garage is next to the high school on Bayview Road. There are 86 buses in the fleet as of April 2021. Each neighborhood is assigned an attendance zone and corresponding elementary school by the Board of Education for efficiency of operations. In 2019, the district began deployment of a system for parents to track their child's bus. ## See also - List of Buffalo metropolitan area schools - List of school districts in New York

Hasta Que Me Olvides

1993 song by Luis Miguel

"Hasta Que Me Olvides" (transl. "Until You Forget Me") is a song by Mexican singer Luis Miguel from his ninth studio album, Aries (1993). The song was composed by Dominican Republic singer-songwriter Juan Luis Guerra with Miguel and Kiko Cibrian handling the production. It was released as the album's second single in August 1993 by WEA Latina. A sentimental ballad, the song narrates the protagonist who insists on loving his partner until he is forgotten. The ballad received positive reactions from music critics, who listed it among Miguel's best songs. "Hasta Que Me Olvides" was nominated in the category of Pop Song of the Year at the 1994 Lo Nuestro Awards and was a recipient of the Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) Latin Award in 1995. Commercially, it became his ninth number one song on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart in the United States. The song was covered by Mexican entertainer Diego Boneta for the soundtrack of Luis Miguel: The Series (2018). ## Background and composition In 1991 Miguel released his eighth studio album Romance, a collection of classic boleros. The album, which was produced by Armando Manzanero and arranged by Bebu Silvetti, was a commercial success in Latin America and sold over seven million copies worldwide. It revived interest in the bolero genre and was the first record by a Spanish-speaking artist to be certified gold in Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. In spite of the album's success, Miguel did not want to release a follow-up record that was similar to Romance. When asked why he chose not to record more boleros, he replied, "I wanted to try my music, just forgetting a little bit about those boleros that everyone knows." The singer began working with the composers for the album a year before recording in a studio in 1992; in Miguel's words, he wanted to "discuss the works, the themes, and melodies; ... The creation of an album has to be part of me or else I would not be able to interpret it, or sing in it." On 24 August 1992, El Siglo de Torreón reported that Miguel had begun collaborating with David Foster and Juan Carlos Calderón on some compositions, along with English-speaking composers, and selecting cover versions for the album. Due to difficulty finding a suitable producer for the record, he decided to co-produce the album with his long-time associate Kiko Cibrian. A chance meeting with Dominican Republic singer-songwriter Juan Luis Guerra in Mexico, led to him writing "Hasta Que Me Olvides" in a napkin for Miguel which the artist recorded for Aries (1993). Composed by Guerra, it is a sentimental ballad in which the protagonist "will insist until his partner forgets him, so he waits for an opportunity to recover his love, but if he realizes that she no longer feels anything for him, he will make the decision to leave". ## Promotion and reception "Hasta Que Me Olvides" was released as the album's second single in August 1993 by WEA Latina. The song was later included on his greatest hits album Grandes Éxitos (2005). A live version of the song was featured on his live album El Concierto (1995) (which was recorded from his Segundo Romance Tour in August 1994), and was released as a promotional single in Spain in the same year. On the review of the album, the Sun-Sentinel's John Lannert praised Miguel for "crooning seductively on Juan Luis Guerra\`s emotion-drenched love ode". La Prensa de San Antonio author Diana Raquel commended the track, along with "Tu y Yo", for exerting "eternal poetry". The track was listed among "10 Luis Miguel Songs You Should Know" by Emily Paulín on Sonica and "20 Best Luis Miguel Songs to Listen on YouTube Music" by an editor for El Comercio. "Hasta Que Me Olvides" was nominated in the category of Pop Song of the Year at the 6th Annual Lo Nuestro Awards in 1994, but ultimately lost to "Nunca Voy a Olvidarte" by Cristian Castro. It was acknowledged as an award-winning song at the 1995 BMI Latin Awards. Commercially, it topped the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart in the US, becoming his ninth number one single on the chart. In 2021, Mexican entertainer Diego Boneta covered "Hasta Que Me Olvides" on the soundtrack for the second season of Luis Miguel: The Series (2018). ## Personnel Adapted from the Aries liner notes: Performance credits - Randy Kerber – keyboards, arranger - John Robinson – drums - Paul Jackson Jr. – rhythmic guitar - Dean Parks – acoustic guitar - Paulinho da Costa – percussion - Neil Stubenhaus – bass - The Hollywood String Ensemble – orchestra - Ezra Kliger – concertmaster, violin - Paul C. Shure – violin - Shari Zippert – violin - Roman Volodarsky – violin - Barbara J. Porter – violin - Vladimir Polimatidi – violin - Cordon H. Marron – violin - Charles H. Everett – violin - Norman J. Hughes – violin - Joel Derouin – violin - Sid Page – violin - Linda Rose – violin - R.F. Peterson – violin - John J. Wittenberg – violin - Leslie J. Woodbury – violin - Endre Granat – violin - Alexander Horvath – violin - Israel Baker – violin - Herschel P. Wiserenita Koven – viola - Raymond J. Tisher II – viola - James J. Ross – viola - John T. Acevedo – viola - Cynthia Morrow – viola - Larry Corbett – cello - Daniel W. Smith – cello - Nancy Stein – cello - Roger Lebow – cello - Steve G. Edelman – contrabass - Jon C. Clarke – English horn, oboe - Joseph Meyer – French horn - Calvin Smith – French horn - Michael A. Englander – percussion Technical credits - Luis Miguel – producer - Kiko Cibrian – co-producer - Mauricio Abaroa – executive producer - Julio Saenz – executive producer - Benny Faccone – engineer, mixing - Jim Champagne – assistant engineer, mixing assistant - Noel Hazen – assistant engineer, mixing assistant - Bernie Grundman – mastering - Alfredo Gatica – artistic coordination - Ezra Kliger – production coordination - Jose Quintana – production coordination ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## See also - List of number-one hits of 1993 (Mexico) - List of number-one Billboard Hot Latin Tracks of 1993

Hurricane Inga

Category 2 Atlantic hurricane in 1969

Hurricane Inga is the third longest-lived Atlantic hurricane on record. The 11th tropical cyclone and 9th named storm of the 1969 Atlantic hurricane season, Inga developed on September 20 in the central Atlantic and tracked westward. After attaining tropical storm status, the system deteriorated into a depression, but once again intensified several days later. The storm eventually peaked in strength on October 5, with winds corresponding to Category 2 on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale. Throughout its path, Inga underwent several changes in direction and oscillations in strength, before dissipating on October 15, 25 days after it formed. Despite its duration, Inga caused little damage, and mostly remained over open waters. ## Meteorological history On September 20, a tropical disturbance in the Atlantic Ocean developed into a tropical depression. On the next morning, the National Hurricane Center reported that the system became a tropical storm while centered about 930 mi (1,500 km) east-southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico. At the time, the storm was moving towards the west at 14 mph (23 km/h). At the time, Inga was a very small tropical cyclone; gale-force winds extended less than 100 mi (160 km) from the center. However, by September 23, the storm had become disorganized and sprawling. Later that day, Inga weakened back into a tropical depression. The depression continued west-northwestward, passing north of the Leeward Islands, before drifting northwestward. It once again attained tropical storm status on September 28, while situated well to the east of the Bahamas. Inga continued to intensify, and achieved hurricane status at 0000 UTC on September 30, at which point it turned northeastward. The storm then abruptly, yet gradually, turned towards the south, and ultimately completed a counter-clockwise loop as it bent back westward. Steering currents were weak, and the hurricane continued to proceed slowly. Late on October 3, it turned to the northwest, still as a Category 1 hurricane on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale. The storm then curved northeastward and intensified to Category 2 status at 0000 UTC on October 5. Inga accelerated somewhat as it passed to the southeast of Bermuda. By the morning hours of October 5, it was determined that the hurricane posed no significant threat to the island. At 1200 UTC, the storm's lowest known barometric pressure of 964 millibars was recorded. Shortly thereafter, it briefly strengthened to Category 3 status; the cyclone peaked with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 km/h). As it moved towards the open waters of the Atlantic and entered a cooler environment, it deteriorated to Category 1 intensity on October 6. The hurricane slowed again, and as cold air became entrained into its circulation, it began to lose tropical characteristics. However, Inga once again intensified and reattained Category 2 intensity on October 7. At this point, the hurricane was drifting generally eastward. However, in time the storm turned towards the south and began to weaken. Operationally, the storm was believed to have downgraded to a tropical storm on October 8 and regained hurricane status thereafter, but instead it likely maintained Category 1 intensity steadily until October 10. After the storm finally degenerated into a tropical storm, it curved southwestward. The storm's center became ill-defined and elongated at the storm continued to lose strength. Heading westward, Inga was downgraded to a tropical depression before dissipating fully on October 15, about 290 mi (470 km) from where it initially attained hurricane status. ## Impact and records Hurricane Inga lasted for nearly 25 days between September 20 and October 15. This made it the third longest-tracked Atlantic hurricane on record, behind the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane and Hurricane Ginger in September–October 1971. The fourth, fifth, and sixth longest-lived storms are Hurricane Nadine in 2012, Hurricane Kyle in 2002, and Hurricane Four in 1926. At the time of its existence, however, Inga was believed to have been the longest-lived Atlantic tropical cyclone on record. The National Hurricane Center issued 72 total advisories on the storm. While Inga remained predominately over the open ocean, its outer fringes produced 80 mph (130 km/h) wind gusts on Bermuda. The strong winds caused power failures, which were promptly restored. Residents were advised to monitor the storm in case of sudden changes in direction. ## See also - 1969 Atlantic hurricane season - List of Bermuda hurricanes

Rhinanthus minor

Species of flowering plant in the broomrape family Orobanchaceae

Rhinanthus minor, known as yellow rattle, is a herbaceous wildflower in the genus Rhinanthus in the family Orobanchaceae (the broomrapes). It has circumpolar distribution in Europe, Russia, western Asia, and northern North America. An annual plant, yellow rattle grows up to 10–50 centimetres (3.9–19.7 in) tall, with upright stems and opposite, simple leaves. The fruit is a dry capsule, with loose, rattling seeds. The preferred habitat of Rhinanthus minor is dry fields or meadows; it tolerates a wide range of soil types. It flowers in the summer between May and September. It is hemiparasitic, notably on Poaceae (grasses) and Fabaceae (legumes), and farmers consider it to be a pest, as it reduces grass growth. Yellow rattle is used to create or restore wildflower meadows, where it maintains species diversity by suppressing dominant grasses and the recycling of soil nutrients. The seed is sown thinly onto grassland from August to November—to germinate the following spring, the seeds need to remain in the soil throughout the winter months. ## Description Yellow rattle is a herbaceous annual plant that resembles the larger greater yellow rattle (Rhinanthus angustifolius). The plant grows to up to 10–50 centimetres (3.9–19.7 in) tall, with opposite, simple leaves measuring 20–30 millimetres (0.79–1.18 in) × 5–8 millimetres (0.20–0.31 in). The leaves are sessile (they grow directly from the stem), somewhat heart-shaped at the base, otherwise ovate (oval-shaped) to lanceolate (shaped like a lance tip), dentate (toothed) and scabrid (a little rough to the touch). The stem, which stands upright, can be simple or branched, is four-angled and often streaked or spotted black. The yellow flowers are 13 to 15 millimetres (0.51 to 0.59 in) across and have a straight tube for the petals. The silvery-coloured fruit is a dry capsule, which contains loose, rattling seeds when ripe that give the plant one of its common names. The herbalist Nicholas Culpeper, in his The English Physician (first published in 1652), wrote of yellow rattle as being "good for cough, or dimness of sight". The plant has a reputation of being toxic to animals. The seeds contain iridoids which cause them to have a bitter taste. ## Taxonomy Rhinanthus minor is a flowering plant in the genus Rhinanthus in the family Orobanchaceae. It was described by the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in volume 3 of Amoenitates Academici (1756). The species name is derived from Ancient Greek and means 'nose flower', which is in reference to the shape of the upper lip of the corolla. Minor means 'smaller'. Synonyms include: - Alectorolophus minor (Dumort) - Fistularia minor Kuntze - Rhinanthus crista-galli L., the name Linnaeus gave the species - Rhinanthus crista-galli var. fallax (Wimm. & Grab.) Druce - Rhinanthus rigidus Chabert - Rhinanthus stenophyllus (Schur) Schinz & Thell - Rhinanthus crista-galli var. fallax (Wimm. & Grab.) Druce - Rhinanthus kyrollae Chabert - Rhinanthus borealis subsp. kyrollae (Chabert) Pennell ## Distribution and ecology Rhinanthus minor is found in Europe, western Russia, western Siberia, northern USA and throughout Canada. The preferred habitat of Rhinanthus minor is dry fields or meadows, where its flowering period is in the summer between May and September, but it can thrive with semi-natural species-rich water-meadows. It can tolerate a wide range of soil types but does not grow where the soil has a pH less than 5.0. Yellow rattle flowers are pollinated by bumblebees during the summer months; the plant is also capable of self-fertilization. Yellow rattle is an annual wildflower. It is hemiparasitic, in that it can gain its nutrients by penetrating the roots of neighbouring green plants with its own roots, but is a facultative parasite, in that it acts opportunistically when in contact with a root. The hemiparasitic nature of yellow rattle can result in stunted, unbranched individual specimens. The plant can associate with many different host species, notably Poaceae (grasses) and Fabaceae (legumes). In Ireland and Scotland, yellow rattle is often associated with Machair habitat, which consists of coastal grassland. The seeds are spread effectively by traditional hay-making practices. Farmers seek to remove it since it affects yields by weakening grass; it is an indicator of poor grassland. ### Effects on plant community structure Yellow rattle can change the structure of plant communities through its parasitism. Vulnerability to attack varies across host taxa, with forbs developing lignified barriers to obstruct the parasite. Research, including that at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has shown that encouraging it to grow in hay meadows greatly increases biodiversity, by restricting grass growth and thereby allowing other species to thrive. As of 2021 a majority of studies had found positive or neutral effects of the introduction of Rhinanthus spp. on grassland species richness and diversity, with most finding a negative effect on grasses. ### Conservation status Rhinanthus minor is found in low-lying fields with poor quality soil. It is currently not under threat; as such it is rated as of Least Concern (LC). Being an annual, it is not found in regularly mown or grazed grassland where the seeds are not provided with an opportunity to spread over the ground. The lack of a seed bank for yellow rattle means that it depends on seed produced from plants during the previous year. ### Pasture and hay field infestation In the northeastern United States, yellow rattle is considered a pest, as it decreases crop yields of grass and hay. Where the plant is found to have infested farmland it has to be suppressed; non-herbicidal strategies for removing it include the application of wood ash and sawdust on affected pastures. ## Uses and cultivation Yellow rattle is used to proactively create or restore wildflower meadows. It is used to reduce the dominance of grasses, when more expensive methods, such as removing the nutrient-rich topsoil, or impractical methods, such as changing the timing and intensity of grazing, cannot be used. This improves the chances of other species of flowers becoming established. According to Natural England, the optimum density of yellow rattle plants needed to enable other species to be introduced is 100 to 200 per m². Studies have shown that the plant's role in maintaining species diversity is through differential growth suppression effects and enhanced soil nutrient recycling. The yellow rattle seed is sown thinly onto grassland where gaps have been created, or where all the grass has been cut back and the clippings removed. Seeds can be also be introduced by the spreading of green hay. The grass should be kept short until the beginning of March, after which the seedlings become established. After the yellow rattle plants have germinated and matured, the fruits shed their seeds. The meadow hay is cut and removed to encourage the growth introduced wild flowers. The seed, which is short-lived, is sown in the autumn, using seed harvested that year. The seeds have to remain on or under the ground throughout the cold months of winter in order to germinate in the spring.

Eisenhower National Historic Site

National Historic Site of the United States in Pennsylvania

Eisenhower National Historic Site preserves the home and farm of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, and its surrounding property of 690.5 acres (279.4 ha). It is located in Cumberland Township, Adams County, Pennsylvania, just outside Gettysburg. Purchased by then-General Eisenhower and his wife Mamie in 1950, the farm served as a weekend retreat for the President and a meeting place for world leaders, and became the Eisenhowers' home after they left the White House in 1961. With its putting green, skeet range, and view of South Mountain and the Gettysburg Battlefield, it offered President Eisenhower a much-needed respite from the pressures of Washington. It was also a successful cattle operation, with a show herd of black Angus cattle. Some of the more notable of Eisenhower's guests were Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, President Charles de Gaulle of France, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, and Governor Ronald Reagan of California (who later became President himself). ## History Dwight D. ("Ike") Eisenhower had a long history with the Gettysburg area. His graduating class from West Point had visited the battlefield in 1915. In 1918, he was assigned to nearby Camp Colt in his first independent command as an army officer, commanding a tank training unit; he and Mamie Eisenhower were newly married. Throughout his long army career, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife never had a house to call their own, with the couple moving from army post to army post. After he became Columbia University's president in 1948, Mamie requested that they finally have a place to call their own. A married couple who were friends with the Eisenhowers, George and Mary Allen, had recently purchased a small farm around Gettysburg, and recommended the area. In 1950, the Eisenhowers found a "run-down farm" on the outskirts of Gettysburg, and purchased the farm and its 189 acres (76 ha) for \$40,000 (equal to \$ today) from one Allen Redding, who had owned the farm since 1921. Eisenhower stated that he could feel the "forgotten heroisms" that occurred on the grounds as the Battle of Gettysburg. When purchased, the 189 acres (76 ha) included 600 chickens, 25 cows, and many dilapidated buildings dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Renovation of the property was delayed when Eisenhower became supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1951. After he had attained the presidency of the United States in 1953, Mamie had him rebuild the old house. Much of the original building had to be torn down, due to its deterioration. The total cost of renovation was \$250,000 (equal to \$ today). This large expense was due partly to Mamie's whims, but also to Eisenhower's employment of union labor; he spent \$65,000 (equal to \$ today) for union workmen who came each day from Washington, D.C. (75 miles (121 km) away) to work on the farmhouse. On their 1955 wedding anniversary, the Eisenhowers held a party to celebrate completion of the work. The entire staff of the White House were invited, attending in two shifts, so that the White House would not be unstaffed. The staff were forever grateful to the Eisenhowers for including them in the festivities. From its completion in 1955 to the end of Eisenhower's second term on January 20, 1961, the President spent 365 days total on the Gettysburg farm. The longest of these stays was 38 days in late 1955, while recovering from a heart attack he had suffered that September. After 1955, the Eisenhowers spent most weekends and summer vacations at the Gettysburg farm. They sometimes went to both the Gettysburg farm and Camp David, prompting one person to call Camp David "an annex to Gettysburg". The Gettysburg farm provided a few headaches. Democrats chose the amount of time the Eisenhowers spent at the Gettysburg farm as another way to attack him. Paul M. Butler, head of the Democratic National Committee, called him a part-time president due to his many stays in Gettysburg. When his World War II colleague Bernard Montgomery visited the farm, Eisenhower commented to Montgomery (speaking as military commander to military commander) that he would have fired a subordinate that would initiate Pickett's Charge. Many Southerners saw this as disrespect toward Robert E. Lee, and protested. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the farm in September 1959, and was "grandfathery" to the Eisenhower grandchildren. David Eisenhower said that Khrushchev was such a nice guy, he (David) could become a communist if he did not know better, causing much embarrassment to the Eisenhowers. The Eisenhowers donated their home and farm (230 acres (93 ha) total at the time) to the National Park Service in 1967, with lifetime living rights for the former president. Two years later, Eisenhower died at the age of 78. Mamie Eisenhower rejected the idea of moving to Washington to be closer to family and friends and, with federal permission, lived on the farm until her death in 1979, although the living area for Mamie was reduced to 14 acres (5.7 ha). The National Park Service opened the site in 1980. ## Grounds The plans for decoration and construction of the house were dictated by Mamie Eisenhower. At one point, Eisenhower told the contractor "For God's sakes, just give her what she wants and send me the bill." His main concern was personally mixing the paint to recolor the barn, which had a red coat he thought was hideous, so he painted it a light gray green. Mamie, meanwhile, was delighted in being able to use everything they always had in storage, and decorated more for sentimentality than for aesthetics. Cattle were raised at the farm. Eisenhower would often poke the rump of a bull with his shotgun to show what quality of steak the animal would eventually produce, alarming the Secret Service agents who were protecting him. Once, while barbecuing (something he loved to do on the farm), he made the mistake of announcing which cow he was cooking. As it had been the favorite cow of his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, she was brought to tears. A row of fifty Norway spruce trees lines the main driveway leading to the farm. These trees represent the fifty U.S. states, and were given to Eisenhower as birthday presents from each of the state Republican Party chairmen in 1955. The furthest one from the house was the tree representing Texas, and it was seen as a mark of Eisenhower's recovery that he was able to walk that far after his heart attack. The Eisenhowers (especially Dwight in the beginning) spent most of their time in a glass-covered porch overlooking Seminary Ridge. Reading and playing cards with friends were popular pastimes on the porch; it was said that he would sit for hours reflecting on his life and legacy. ## Today The Eisenhower National Historic Site is open daily from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. The home, grounds, barns and cattle operation are available for public tours. Visitors may reach the site via a shuttle bus which departs from the Gettysburg National Military Park Visitor Center. The total land area is 690 acres (280 ha). There are two films about the grounds and President Eisenhower's life. ## See also - List of residences of presidents of the United States - Presidential memorials in the United States

Dragon Age: Inquisition

2014 video game

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a 2014 action role-playing video game developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts. The third major game in the Dragon Age franchise, Inquisition is the sequel to Dragon Age II (2011). The story follows a player character known as the Inquisitor on a journey to settle the civil unrest in the continent of Thedas and close a mysterious tear in the sky called the "Breach", which is unleashing dangerous demons upon the world. Dragon Age: Inquisition's gameplay is similar to its predecessors, although it consists of several semi-open worlds for players to explore. Players control the Inquisitor or their companions mainly from a third-person perspective, although a traditional role-playing game top-down camera angle is also available. The release of Dragon Age II was met with a mixed reception from players who lamented the loss of the complexity of the first game, Dragon Age: Origins (2009). BioWare sought to address player feedback for Dragon Age II as a major goal, which influenced the design decisions of its sequel. Ultimately, BioWare wanted the third Dragon Age game to combine the elements of the first two games in the series. Having begun development in 2011, BioWare used EA DICE's Frostbite 3 engine to power the game, though this created many development challenges for the team. They had to crunch extensively during development, and because of hardware limitations on older generation consoles several gameplay features had to be cut. Trevor Morris composed the game's soundtrack, replacing Inon Zur, the composer used for the previous games. Officially announced in September 2012 as Dragon Age III: Inquisition, the game was released worldwide in November 2014 for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. Upon release, the game received critical acclaim, with critics praising its exploration gameplay, combat, visuals, writing, characters and customization. The game received some criticism for its filler content, technical issues, tactical view, and aspects of its narrative. Commercially, it was one of the most successful games released by BioWare. It was awarded numerous accolades and nominated for more, including Game of the Year by several gaming publications. Several narrative downloadable content (DLC) packs were released to support Inquisition. A sequel, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, is currently in development. ## Gameplay Dragon Age: Inquisition is an action role-playing game similar to its predecessors. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses a race for their player character: human, dwarf, elf, or Qunari, a playable race for the first time in the series. Players customize the Inquisitor's physical appearance and gender, among other things. Players can access a cloud-based online interactive story creator called Dragon Age Keep, and detail the major plots of the previous two Dragon Age games and import a world state in Inquisition without requiring replay of the initial games. The game has a semi-open world structure, as the world is broken up into several sections, which players can freely explore. To allow players to navigate the game's world faster, mounts, creatures players can ride, are introduced. The various regions that make up the game world do not scale in level, meaning players can be too weak or strong for the enemies found in a region. In each hub world, players can complete side activities such as sealing Fade rifts and capturing keeps or forts, establish camps, which are used to provide fast travel and resupply points. Performing these acts will grant players resource points in Influence, which can be used to unlock global upgrades for the Inquisition named Inquisition perk, and Power, which is required for progressing the story and unlocking new areas. In addition, the player can complete side missions, fetch quests, collect magical shards, and solve Astrarium puzzles. Players can also collect codex entries, allowing them to have a deeper understanding about the world of Thedas. At Skyhold, the Inquisition's base of operations, players can access the war table to unlock locations, receive rewards, gain influence and/or progress the story. As the Inquisitor, players deploy agents and troops of the Inquisition to complete various text-based operations through their primary advisers, which influences the rewards and time requirements of the effort undertaken. In Inquisition, players can interact with numerous non-playable characters, some of whom can be recruited as agents for the Inquisition. A dialogue wheel offers several dialogue options for the player to select. Depending on the Inquisitor's race and class, additional dialogue options are available for players to select. Throughout the game, the Inquisitor needs to make important decisions that might change the state of Thedas and have long-lasting consequences. Companions will sometimes approve or disapprove of the Inquisitor's decision. At Skyhold, the Inquisitor can talk to their companions and learn more about their backstory, and initiate their personal quests. Among the nine companions, who assist players in battle and three advisers, eight can be romanced. Some of these party members can decide whether to fall in love with the Inquisitor based on their gender and race. In addition, the Inquisitor can "judge" certain people on their actions and decide their fate at Skyhold. ### Combat Players choose from three classes: warrior, mage, and rogue. Warriors are sword and heavy weapon wielders who can absorb a lot of damage from hostiles; rogues are equipped with either daggers or bows and arrows; and mages are practitioners of magic that can cast spells on enemies. Each class has their own stats and attributes. For instance, rogues may favor dexterity for critical hits, while strength is more important to warriors for inflicting powerful damage. Stamina or mana governs the use of active abilities. As the player character attacks hostile opponents, the whole team gains Focus, which can be used to unleash special abilities. Combat in Inquisition focuses on the player's ability to form a cohesive team with their party members. During combat, players can switch to control other party members, while artificial intelligence (AI) will take control of the Inquisitor and the remaining members in the party. This action-oriented system follows the player in a typical over-the-shoulder third-person style. Players can access the Tactics menu to modify the behaviors of the AI companions during combat. The player can also access Tactical View, which allows them to pause the game, assign locations and orders to the party members and then resume the game to see it played out. During the use of this combat system, the camera will be closer to that of a top-down perspective. Killing enemies and completing quests earn players experience points (XP). Once the players have enough XP, the inquisitor will level up, which increases the player character's health and stats, and gives players skill points they can use to unlock new talents. Players can specialize their character further, which grants them specific abilities. At Skyhold's Undercroft, players can craft and customize armor or weapons from crafting recipes using the materials they have collected; rarer materials give the particular weapon or armor piece better attributes. Weapons and armor can be upgraded with accessories and enchanted with runes, which introduce new properties to the weapon on which they are inscribed. The inquisitor and party members can be equipped with accessories such as rings, amulets and belts, which can further alter the character's stats. Research items can be given to Skyhold's researchers, which can then provide players an XP and damage boost against the researched enemies. Players can customize their keeps, such as rebuilding a garden as a Chantry church or a herb garden. These upgrades have minor effects on the Inquisitions espionage, commerce or military capabilities. Dragon Age: Inquisition introduces multiplayer, which BioWare describes as a "dungeon crawling experience". The game features a co-operative multiplayer mode which tasks players to play as an Agent of the Inquisition. Players have to play through levels, and fight against increasingly difficult AI. The mode can be played with three other players, or be completed solo. At launch, the game features three multiplayer campaigns and nine playable characters. The mode is completely separated from the main campaign. As a result, the progress made by the player in the multiplayer mode does not carry over to the campaign. Players can upgrade and craft items and unlock new characters in the multiplayer mode. Players can purchase an in-game currency called Platinum to speed up unlocking new characters. Two multiplayer DLC's introduced additional features: Destruction added new routes to existing multiplayer maps, armor sets, and wild creatures that roam the battlefield and attack both friend and foe; while Dragonslayer adds the Fereldan Castle multiplayer map, High Dragons as enemies, and three new characters, including Isabela, a companion from Dragon Age II. ## Synopsis ### Setting Following the explosion of the Kirkwall Chantry in Dragon Age II and the events of the 2011 novel Dragon Age: Asunder, the Circle of Magi has gone rogue and the Templar Order seceded from the Chantry to wage their own war on the world's mages. The Mage-Templar war is temporarily halted by a Conclave near the village of Haven in the Kingdom of Ferelden, where Divine Justinia V, leader of the Chantry, has orchestrated a peace conference prior to the events of the game. The 2014 tie-in prequel novel to Inquisition, Dragon Age: The Masked Empire by the game's writing team member Patrick Weekes, details the civil war which broke out in Ferelden's neighbouring country of Orlais between the loyalists of the ruling Empress Celene and a powerful noble faction led by her cousin Grand Duke Gaspard de Chalons, as well as the rise of a neutral elven faction led by Celene's handmaiden Briala. Returning characters from the previous games include Cullen and Leliana serving as the Inquisition's military commander and spymaster, respectively, and Cassandra Pentaghast and Varric who serve as party companions. New companions introduced in the game include Solas, an elven apostate mage well-versed in the Fade and its spirit denizens; Blackwall, a lone Free Marcher Grey Warden; Sera, an elven thief and member of a secret society called the Friends of Red Jenny; The Iron Bull, a Qunari warrior leading a mercenary company called the Bull's Chargers, and agent of the Ben-Hassrath; Vivienne, the official enchanter to the Imperial Court of Orlais; Dorian Pavus, a mage from the Tevinter Imperium; and Cole, a mysterious being who is first introduced in Asunder. Josephine Montilyet, an Antivan noblewoman and diplomat, serves as the Inquisition's ambassador. Hawke, the protagonist of Dragon Age II, and Morrigan, a companion from Dragon Age: Origins, serve as important allies to the Inquisitor. ### Plot A massive explosion destroys the Conclave and creates a hole in the Veil — the metaphysical boundary between the physical world and the Fade, the world of spirits and demons — referred to as the "Breach". The only survivor of the blast is the player character, who emerges with a mark on their hand capable of closing rifts in the Veil that have sprung up in the Breach's wake, but who retains no memory of what happened. Witnesses claim the player character was ushered out of the Fade by a mysterious female figure, rumored to be the prophet Andraste, the historical Bride of the Maker. After closing several rifts, the player character begins to be referred to as the "Herald of Andraste". With the Chantry effectively leaderless, Leliana and Cassandra Pentaghast invoke one of the Divine's last orders to re-establish the Inquisition, an organization originally formed to defend against the dangers of magic and heretics. After closing the Breach with help from rebel mages or remnants of the Templar Order, Haven is attacked by a force led by Corypheus, an ancient Darkspawn mage, who was responsible for opening the Breach. Aided by a dragon, Corypheus overcomes Haven's defences and confronts the Herald. Corypheus refers to the mark as "the Anchor", which he means to use to physically enter the Fade, with the goal of attaining apotheosis for himself. He attempts to remove the Anchor with a magical orb-shaped elven artifact, but the Herald sets off an avalanche, burying Haven and decimating Corypheus's army. Solas leads the survivors to the abandoned fortress of Skyhold, which becomes the Inquisition's new base of operations. The Herald is appointed as the Inquisitor, leader of the Inquisition. With Hawke's assistance, the Inquisitor investigates the disappearance of the Grey Wardens and discovers they are being manipulated by Corypheus into raising an army of demons. During a battle against the Wardens, the Inquisitor enters the Fade and regains their memories, discovering that they obtained the Anchor at the Conclave after stumbling onto a ritual being carried out on Divine Justinia V by Corypheus, and then coming into contact with the orb. Either Hawke or their Grey Warden ally sacrifice themselves to help the others escape the Fade, after which the Inquisitor must either exile or recruit the remaining Wardens. The Inquisitor also attends a ball at the Winter Palace in an attempt to resolve the ongoing Orlesian civil war and gain the assistance of Orlesian forces. Afterwards, the Empress' arcane advisor, Morrigan, joins the Inquisition as an Imperial liaison. She directs the Inquisitor to the Temple of Mythal to stop Corypheus from obtaining an Eluvian, an artifact which could enable him to enter the Fade. Inside the temple, either the Inquisitor or Morrigan gains the powers of the Well of Sorrows, a store of magical energies tied to the elven goddess Mythal. The party escapes Corypheus through the Eluvian, which shatters behind them. Mythal is later revealed to be Morrigan's mother, Flemeth; whoever drinks from the Well of Sorrows is the recipient of wisdom from previous servants of Mythal, but also binds them to her will. They discover that Corypheus' dragon is the key to stopping him, then confront Corypheus as he reopens the Breach and defeat him and his dragon, resealing the Breach permanently. In the process, the orb carried by Corypheus is irreversibly damaged. The Inquisition returns to Skyhold to celebrate their victory, while a dismayed Solas vanishes after recovering the device. An epilogue narrated by Morrigan details the outcomes of the Inquisitor's major decisions. A post-credits scene shows a meeting between Flemeth and Solas, who is in fact the Dread Wolf Fen'Harel, a previously inactive deity figure and the original owner of the orb. Their conversation reveals that Solas is indirectly responsible for the events of Inquisition, as he had allowed the artifact to come into Corypheus' possession so that it could be unlocked on his behalf. He petrifies Flemeth and seemingly absorbs Mythal's power. ## Development Development for Dragon Age: Inquisition began in 2011. BioWare's biggest single-player video game at the time of its release, development for the project revolved around five core "design pillars": "story", "characters", "open world", "choices", and "personalise". The central idea for the game, namely that there would be an institution inspired by the historical Inquisition and the player character would be its leader, was intended originally to be the follow-up to Dragon Age: Origins, though its progress was halted completely when EA forced BioWare to rush the development of Dragon Age II. Conception of the game began in 2011; production began in 2012. Initially, the team had the choice to revisit Jade Empire (2006), or create a new intellectual property (IP). However, they were content to develop a new installment in the Dragon Age franchise as they believed it had more "pull" and consumer "awareness" than Jade Empire, and recognized that creating a new IP would be too large an undertaking. David Gaider returned as the game's lead writer, while Mike Laidlaw and Mark Darrah served as its creative director and executive producer, respectively. Jeremie Voillot and Michael Kent served as joint audio directors of Inquisition, reprising their similar roles from Dragon Age II. ### Technology While previous Dragon Age games used BioWare's own Eclipse game engine, it was not designed to handle features such as open world and multiplayer, and its renderer was not powerful enough to create great visuals. Publisher Electronic Arts also had a vision to use the same game engine for all its games. As a result, BioWare approached its sister studio DICE and used their Frostbite 3 engine, which was previously used to power the Battlefield games. As the BioWare team had never created games with the engine before, it began experimenting with its features with a multiplayer-based Dragon Age project named Blackfoot. Transitioning into Frostbite was a huge project for BioWare, and it had to cancel Exalted March, the last downloadable content pack originally planned for II in order to better manage its resources and manpower. As the team began working on Inquisition, they faced many development troubles because of the technical limitations of DICE's engine. Frostbite was initially designed for making first-person video games. It did not have features that could accommodate stats, game saving, conversations, and cutscenes, all of which are elements commonly found in a role-playing video game, and the team had to update the engine extensively to incorporate these features in Inquisition. It also cannot animate custom characters and quadrupeds. Many designers reported having a frustrating experience working with the Frostbite engine. John Epler, Inquisition's designer, called it "the worst tools experience" he had during his tenure at BioWare. The issue was made worse when DICE began incorporating new features on its own, meaning that the development build BioWare was working on was often not updated, causing it to become unstable. While BioWare intended to release the game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, EA worried that the popularity of mobile gaming would hinder game console sales, and forced BioWare to release the game for older hardware including PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The technical limitations of these older consoles created many development challenges. Many features that worked on more advanced platforms had to be removed as Laidlaw and Darrah wanted the game to be consistent across the five platforms. Laidlaw and Darrah demonstrated these features in a game demo at PAX Prime 2013. They included environmental destructibility and a war simulation system which tasked players to maintain the military strength around the Inquisition's strongholds. Laidlaw added these features were removed because they "were not fleshed out and proven enough" and might interrupt the flow of gameplay. In the book Blood, Sweat & Pixels by journalist Jason Schreier, Laidlaw and Darrah admitted that the gameplay in the PAX Prime demo was not real, and its sole purpose was to show transparency in light of Dragon Age II's divisive reception. The technical challenges meant the game's development was behind schedule. Art director Matthew Goldman said of development, "basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we've ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did, with tools that don't exist". The game was unplayable during the first several years of development. Darrah later asked EA to delay the game for a year because of these development troubles, on the condition that BioWare incorporated more features into the game, such as multiple playable races. The problem was alleviated during the game's later stages of development, as BioWare and DICE managed to cooperate better, resulting in faster progress in 2014. However, the development team did not have sufficient time for development because the game had to ship in late 2014. As II was internally considered a misfire, Inquisition had to be a success to win back alienated fans. The team resorted to crunching extensively in late 2014. The Frostbite engine helped the art team significantly in terms of productivity, as they were able to create a large variety of environments in a short time using the engine's art tools. Nevertheless, Director of Art and Animation Neil Thompson drew a comparison between BioWare's artists coming to grips with the intricacies of the Frostbite engine to European artists learning to master the challenges of realistic oil painting during the Northern Renaissance period when reflecting on his experiences leading the art direction for Inquisition. Ultimately, the adoption of new systems and technologies provided visual benchmarking for the game's iterations on next generation consoles. The project's game artists and animators drew inspiration from traditional art media, film, photography and architecture; at the same time, thematic consistency had to be maintained when dealing with multiple character factions due to the need to stay true to the intellectual property. For Inquisition, where the game systems and tools had to be completely rebuilt as a result of the change to the Frostbite engine, BioWare had to construct an AI system that would work well in the larger combat environments of an open-world game; AI is typically iterated on between titles in multi-game franchises to provide a sense of continuity in development. According to gameplay engineer Sebastian Hanlon, BioWare leveraged the modular approach for constructing creature AI. The transition into an open world system for Inquisition not only necessitated rethinking an approach to enemy AI by Hanlon's team, they also had to ensure that players retain control over the flow of combat by refining the AI for the party members who are not directly controlled by the player to keep up with the action. ### Gameplay Dragon Age II received a lot of criticism for reusing environments, as the game was set almost entirely in the city-state of Kirkwall. To address the issue, BioWare management decided that Inquisition would have more open environments. BioWare added games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which the team was "checking out aggressively", would influence Inquisition. Darrah also remarked that BioWare games since Baldur's Gate II "have been getting progressively smaller", and that the goal for Inquisition was to bring back scale and exploration. The developers' goal for the project was to generate anywhere between 20 and 200 hours of gameplay for Inquisition. The design team were split into various specialist groups, each handling an aspect of game design, which was a departure from BioWare's previous approach to development when team members used to function as generalist designers. Instead of having one gigantic world, Inquisition features multiple hub worlds instead. Laidlaw added that by having multiple locations, the team can increase the game's visual variety and "give the player a break from the visual fatigue of seeing the same thing over and over again". The hub worlds had a more linear design than Skyrim's open world in that their content would eventually be fully exhausted. This was done to ensure players would return to their home base and either re-engage with the story or unlock new area. While the game features open spaces, the objectives within the world were often of little significance. This was largely because the team could not playtest the game because of troubles with the engine; it was too late for the team to change when they realised the problem. In hindsight, Laidlaw recognized the quest design was "a little hollow", and that Inquisition had a pacing problem for completionist players. Following players' negative reaction to Dragon Age II and the ending controversy of Mass Effect 3, another BioWare's tentpole title, the Inquisition team looked at players' feedback and asked on the BioWare forum what players would like to see in the game. After two consecutive games with significant fan backlash, the team strove to create a game that would cater to the series' fans. Laidlaw added the team "wanted Inquisition to be the one which people would point to and say, 'they've found their feet. They've finally nailed down what this series is about'". According to BioWare founder Ray Muzyka, Inquisition was a "mixture of both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II" . Darrah said the return of the tactical view, the higher difficulty, and the more extensive customization system, were direct responses to criticisms of Dragon Age II and their attempt to bring Inquisition closer to that of Origins, which had a slower and more deliberate combat system. Players can also select the Inquisitor's race, an option re-introduced in Inquisition after players complained of being unable to choose a background for Hawke in II. Responding to criticisms that Dragon Age II was compromised to support console players, the user interface for the game's PC version was designed to be unique and different from that of the console versions. ### Story BioWare faced the challenge of seeding story content in the largest single-player game world it had created at the time with relatively few design staff. The developmental team decided to split up and experimented with disparate techniques in order to achieve the desired content scope and density. The narrative design team's goal was to generate discrete narrative content, while the technical design team wanted to implement standalone, dynamic systems. The end result was that the narrative designers discovered that the content they wrote had scaled poorly, whereas the technical team found that their work had a disconnected impact. During their presentation at the GDC in 2015, narrative designer Kaelin Lavallee and technical designer Mark Wilson explained that their respective teams decided to meet somewhere in the middle and work out a collaborative approach in order to build a large fantasy world that could properly scale in design. Examples of gameplay features given by Lavallee and Wilson which combine storytelling and level design include interactive objects that litter gameplay levels like the Astrarium puzzles and Ocularum artifacts which detect "shards", as well as a dynamic banter system which superseded banter system from previous games in the series which were triggered at specific locations in the game world. Lavallee and Wilson suggested that the teams were able to overcome some of the challenges of populating the large game world of Inquisition by combining story and systems, and concluded that the game's story content was a responsibility for everyone involved regardless of their defined role in the developmental cycle. The development team recognised that Hawke's story lacked "clarity" and was "convoluted" and identified it as the main reason why Dragon Age II did not resonate with some players. This was because the story does not have an overarching villain and mainly explores how major events in the world influence Hawke's life. As a result, the storytelling for Inquisition aligned closer to that of Origins, and the Inquisitor was a more active hero than Hawke as they influence the world through their actions. While the critical path follows the Inquisition's attempts to foil Corypheus' plan to achieve apotheosis, the story also focuses on how players can actively turn the Inquisition into an important organization in Thedas through exploration and engaging in activities such as closing rifts and helping other non-playable characters. The writing team implemented changes to the conversation system. Additional dialogues are now hidden behind an option called "investigate"; the team wanted to allow players to pace the story on their own. The tone icons from Dragon Age II were pared back in Inquisition, as some players reported being confused by these icons in II causing them to make wrong choices. However, the team expanded the number of emotional response options available to choose from when these tone icons show up. The writing team felt it was essential to let players to react to the important events in the story and express themselves. Inquisition saw the return of many characters from the previous two installments. Laidlaw said they only chose characters who would "add something, emotionally, to the texture of the game". The team worked to ensure that the game's cast had a balance in gender, race, and gameplay class. Characters who can be killed off in Origins and II would have a less significant role in Inquisition because not every player would have them in their world states. Gaider cited Varric as an easy inclusion because he was always going to survive Dragon Age II, and he had important roles to play in both II and Inquisition. Including characters from the previous games also allowed players to understand the significance of their choices in those games. While Hawke returns in Inquisition, the Warden from Origins does not make an appearance because they were not voiced in Origins. The team feared that voicing the Warden in Inquisition might detach players from them. The team hired a former crime reporter whose role was to inspect every piece of Dragon Age media to ensure Inquisition had not deviated from the lore established. An internal wikia was created so that the team could keep track of the status of all the characters. Unlike previous games in the series, Inquisition removed the gift system for party companions to make friendship and romance more organic. The companions would now react to game's events as they unfold and respond to the players differently. Gifts could no longer be exploited to gain or regain approval. The approval bar were removed, and players have to gauge how their companions perceive them based on subtle clues like how they greet the Inquisitor. Persona 4, The Darkness and The Last of Us inspired the new relationship system. Unlike Dragon Age II where nearly all romance options are bisexual by orientation, the romanceable characters in Inquisition have different sexual orientations. Dorian Pavus, for instance, is BioWare's first "fully gay" male companion. ### Sound Voillot was primarily responsible for technical matters, while Kent focused on the creative side. They delegated many distinct audio areas to individual employees who took ownership of the tasks they were assigned responsibility for. Voillot and Kent noted that the creative and technical vision for Inquisition, as well as relevant audio guidelines, were defined very early in pre-production. A large amount of content had been created at this stage, often with mere pictures as inspiration. Some of the important decisions they made include choosing the type of microphone that would achieve their desired dialogue direction, or locking down a composer. The decision to have Trevor Morris compose the game's original soundtracks was an intentional change, as Voillot and Kent wanted to introduce to the franchise a new emotional flavour. For Kent and Voillot, the key challenges for Inquisition were centered on creating high quality audio across the enormous scale of content the player encounters, while at the same time creating a "dynamic, believable soundscape" to immerse them in the setting of Thedas. Voillot also liaised with audio programmers in harnessing the audio functionality of the Frostbite engine for a role-playing game, which he said differs greatly from first-person shooters in terms of technical requirements. Voillot pushed for the removal of key rote tasks including tagging animations or the placement of sound emitters so that the programmers can concentrate on producing high quality sounds. Semi-procedural systems were adopted, though audio programmers had to manually hand-script key story moments. Raney Shockne composed a series of songs which are performed by a non-player character named Maryden Halewell, voiced by singer Elizaveta Khripounova, at a tavern in the player's base of operations. Elizaveta described the recording process for a video game as somewhat secretive, and controlled without any scope for collaboration or input from the performer as clients usually know exactly what they want and specifically request for it. Instructed to do a "folky ballad, Celtic troubadours-style", she received the instrumentals and lyrics from Shockne and recorded the songs in her bedroom with only a microphone to her laptop. Because the pronunciation for the tavern songs was meant to be very specific, she had to re-record on a number of occasions. The tavern songs and song sheets were collected into Dragon Age Inquisition: The Bard Songs, which are separate from the digital original soundtrack (OST) included with the game's Deluxe Edition. Due to popular demand, The Bard Songs were made free to download from January 26, 2015, to February 9, 2015, by BioWare, after which they were offered for sale on various digital platforms. ## Marketing and release Publisher Electronic Arts first announced the game as Dragon Age III: Inquisition in September 2012. It was revealed that Inquisition was a collaboration between BioWare studios in Edmonton and Montreal. The game was initially targeting a late 2013 release date, until it was revealed at E3 2013 it was delayed to late 2014. EA dropped III from the game's title because it was an "all-new chapter inside of the Dragon Age universe", rather than a straightforward follow-up to Dragon Age II. Originally scheduled for release on October 7, 2014, the game was delayed for six weeks as the team needed additional time to polish the game. BioWare confirmed on October 31, 2014, that Inquisition had declared gold, indicating it was being prepared for duplication and release. Electronic Arts released the game on November 18 in North America and November 21 in Europe. The game was not released in India to "avoid a breach of local content laws". EA released Dragon Age Keep, a "companion web experience", which allows players to customize the state of the world before beginning a playthrough of Inquisition. Within Dragon Age Keep, players can access Dragon Age: The Last Court, a companion game developed by Failbetter Games, although EA deactivated it in late 2020. BioWare offered a mini-game titled "Quest for the Red Lyrium Reapers" on the official Dragon Age: Inquisition website, which unlocked red lyrium-themed weapons as promotional rewards upon completion of the mini-game. This was later made available to all players in a "special delivery chest" as of Patch 11 released in October 2015. The Golden Nug statue was introduced in Patch 10 to allow players who already completed at least one playthrough to synchronize their previous collections of collectible items, recipes and schematics. In addition to the standard version, other editions of Inquisition were made available for purchase. The Digital Deluxe Edition and Inquisitor's Editions come bundled with a digital copy of the game's OST as well as multiple in-game bonus items, such as a throne made out of a dragon's skull for Skyhold, mount skins, and the Flames of the Inquisition equipment series. The multiplayer DLC packs Destruction and Dragonslayer were released in December 2014 and May 2015 respectively, and both were available free of charge. New playable agents were also added in post-launch patches. The first single-player DLC Jaws of Hakkon was released on March 24, 2015, for PC and Xbox 360 and May 26, 2015, for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Xbox 360. It focuses on the previous Inquisition and the fate of the Inquisitor's predecessor, and introduces a new open area called the Frostback Basin. The Black Emporium, released on May 5, 2015, and available free of charge, adds a new vendor that sells exclusive items, and the "Mirror of Transformation", which allow players to change the appearance of their Inquisitor as many times as they want. On July 6, 2015, BioWare announced that they intended to cease support for the remaining downloadable content of Inquisition for the seventh generation of video game consoles, though players can transfer their saved games to the newer hardwares. Spoils of the Avvar, which adds new in-game items, schematics, and customization options, was the last content pack released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 9, 2015, while Spoils of the Qunari was the first content pack released exclusively for the eighth generation of video game consoles on July 22, 2015. The second single-player DLC, The Descent, developed by BioWare's Austin studio, was released on August 11, 2015. It brings the Inquisitor to the Deep Roads, where recurrent earthquakes threaten the worldwide lyrium trade, and potentially Thedas as a whole. The last single-player DLC, Trespasser, was released on September 8, 2015, set two years after the defeat of Corypheus. It expands upon the ending of Inquisition and concludes multiple story threads set up by the main game. EA released a Game of the Year edition of the game, which bundled the base game and all post-launch additional content, on October 6, 2015. ## Reception ### Critical reception Dragon Age: Inquisition received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Many critics regarded it as a significant improvement over Dragon Age II, and helped revitalize the series. Chris Carter of Destructoid liked the new combat system for its successful integration of the fast gameplay in Dragon Age II and the more tactical combat in Origins. In particular, he applauded the return of the tactical view. Polygon's Phillip Kollar agreed, saying that Inquisition "finds the best of both worlds with this system". Writing for Eurogamer, Richard Cobbett believed that the overhauled combat system was not entirely successful, and the repetitive battles disappointed him. He added none of the enemy encounters were tactically interesting. Joe Juba of Game Informer praised the combat as "satisfying" and felt it tasked players to "manage the flow of battle" during tense encounters. However, he criticized the tactical camera for being "unreliable". Kevin VanOrd described the combat system as "fun" and "colorful", though he too lamented the clumsiness of the tactical view, and believed that tactics and strategy were not required in most enemy encounters. GamesRadar's Maxwell McGee praised the expanded customization options and wrote that the combat system was further elevated by the game's vibrant and colorful visuals. Several critics noted the game's technical issues in their reviews. Phil Savage of PC Gamer enjoyed the main campaign writing that "each mission is distinct, memorable, and significantly moves the story along". He enjoyed how the game showed Inquisition's growth as an organisation. Carter appreciated the writing for the companions, singling out Varric and Dorian. However, he felt the script was weak in the early portion of the game, and that the story was "by-the-books fantasy" and "less nuanced than Origins". Cobbett felt the story was uninspiring, though he noted it eventually gained momentum. The portrayal of returning characters whose personalities were completely changed in Inquisition disappointed him. Juba lamented that many important story beats were poorly told, writing that "many of the would-be defining events feel abrupt or poorly explained", but he enjoyed interacting with the game's cast of characters and praised BioWare for reflecting player choices in Origins and II in Inquisition. Vince Ingenito, writing for IGN, also criticized the central plot, calling it "frustratingly vague", saying it "[lacked] the heart and pathos of BioWare’s best games". While Cobbett was disappointed that the choices were not as impactful as he had hoped, Joystiq's Alexander Sliwinski wrote many choices were significant and that they brought both immediate and long-lasting impacts. Savage also wrote the main campaign is filled with "tough, world-shifting decisions". VanOrd liked the cast and enjoyed hearing the party banter, calling it "one of Inquisition's highlights". McGee described the characters as "eclectic" and "interesting", but wrote newcomers to the series may feel easily overwhelmed by the game's extensive lore, which was told mainly through codex entries scattered in the world. Robert Purchese of Eurogamer lauded the tarot cards used to depict the world and the characters in the game's menus, which changed based on how players interact with them. Thedas, as presented in Inquisition, was often highlighted for being a realized world. Carter called the world "gigantic", and applauded Frostbite for its graphical prowess. He also appreciated the inclusion of optional dungeons and bosses in the game, which made exploring the hub world a rewarding experience. Juba liked the large open worlds, calling them and largest and best surprise for series fans. VanOrd added that travelling the world was "an absolute delight", though he felt that collecting crafting materials interrupted the game's pacing. While Savage enjoyed the large open worlds, the lack of a city hub like Kirkwall in II disappointed him, since the large open areas in Inquisition were set mainly in the wilderness and were not dense enough. Cobbett praised the inclusion of large open areas and believed it reflected BioWare's ambition and scale for the game, though he expressed disappointment with the mission design, compared to quests from MMOs. Many critics liked how the game's side activities are tied to Power as a gameplay mechanic. Critics considered the involvement of the Inquisitor in the politics of Thedas as one of the game's standout elements. The War Table missions were singled out by Kollar for further exploring the world and the various groups and factions inhabiting it. While the abundance of content was widely praised, Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku noted the game had a lot of filler content that was not meaningful or interesting, and it had an "overabundance of fluff". Hernandez urged players to leave the Hinterlands, one of the game's starting zone, as soon as possible. Lisa Granshaw from Syfy praised a pivotal musical cutscene in the narrative of Inquisition, where the members of the Inquisition join together and sing a song called “The Dawn Will Come”, as "one of the more unforgettable moments and pieces of music" in the series. Elijah Beahm from The Escapist noted that the game's tavern songs were made special by Elizaveta's "ethereal" voice and became unexpectedly popular. ### Sales Dragon Age: Inquisition debuted at No. 5 in UK in its first launch week. According to retail monitor Chart-Track, it had sold almost the exact amount of launch week copies as 2011's Dragon Age II. According to Electronic Arts' fiscal 2015 third quarter earnings report, Dragon Age: Inquisition is the most successful launch in BioWare history based on units sold. ### Accolades In addition to winning several awards at major events and ceremonies, it was selected by IGN, Ars Technica, Game Informer, Polygon, and Electronic Gaming Monthly as their Game of the Year in 2014. ## Sequel Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, a direct sequel to Inquisition, is currently under development. Solas is featured prominently in the marketing and promotional material for the upcoming sequel.

Abu Mansur Wahsudan

Amir of Azerbaijan from the Kurdish Rawadid dynasty (11th century AD)

Abu Mansur Wahsudan (also spelled Vahsudan; Persian: ابو منصور وهسودان) was the penultimate Rawadid amir (ruler) of Azarbaijan from 1025 to 1058/59. He is considered the most prominent ruler of his dynasty. With the assistance of his Kurdish neighbours, he initially contained the attacks of migrating Turkmen tribes, but was eventually forced to acknowledge the authority of the Seljuk ruler Tughril (r. 1037–1063) in 1054. He was succeeded by his son Abu Nasr Mamlan II (r. 1058/59–1070). ## Background Wahsudan was a son of the Rawadid amir (ruler) Abu'l-Hayja Mamlan I. Wahsudan's accession date and early reign are uncertain. According to the contemporary Armenian historian, Stephen of Taron, Abu'l-Hayja Mamlan I died in 988/89, however, he most likely confused him with another Abu'l-Hayja, who was from the Sallarid dynasty. The Ottoman historian Münejjim Bashi (d. 1702), who based his work on the now lost 12th century Ta'rikh al-Bab wa'l-Abwab, reports that Abu'l-Hayja Mamlan I died in 1001. However, coinage struck in the name of Muhammad ibn Husayn Rawad (another name of Abu'l-Hayja Mamlan I) appeared in 1002, 1009 and 1014, which indicates that he ruled for longer than reported. Another theory is that another ruler of the same name minted the coins. Münejjim Bashi further reports that Abu'l-Hayja Mamlan I was succeeded by his son Abu Nasr Husayn II, who ruled till his death in 1025. This likewise contradicts coin findings, with one struck in Wahsudan's name in 1016, which suggests that he became ruler between 1014–1016. The modern historian Andrew Peacock suggests that the Rawadid kingdom was divided between Wahsudan and Abu Nasr Husayn II, or that the latter's reign was shortlived. He adds Wahsudan may even have succeeded his father directly. ## Reign In contrast to the other relatively obscure Rawadid amirs, Wahsudan's reign is better attested because of the preservation of the sixty panegyric qasidas (a form of poetry) composed by the Persian poet Qatran Tabrizi. Nevertheless, details of his early reign are almost unknown. At an unspecified date, Wahsudan sent a large force led by his son Abu Nasr Mamlan, who was accompanied by Qatran, against the Ispahbadh of Mughan. The latter was defeated and forced to acknowledge Rawadid authority. Abu Nasr Mamlan subsequently built a fortress in the town of Ardabil. It was during the reign of Wahsudan that Azarbaijan experienced incursions by migrating Turkmen tribes, known as the Iraqiya. Former followers of the Seljuk leader Arslan Isra'il, the Ghaznavids had driven them out of the eastern Iranian region of Khurasan, while their leader was imprisoned, dying in c. 1034. The first group of Iraqiya reached Azarbaijan in c. 1029, comprising around 2,000 tents. They were well received by Wahsudan, who made a marriage alliance with them to use them against his rivals, such as the Armenians. Wahsudan had an uneasy relationship with his sister's son Abu'l-Hayja ibn Rabib al-Dawla, who was the leader of the Hadhabani tribe, as well as the ruler of Urmia and the fortress of Barkari. In 1033/4, the Byzantine Empire captured the fortress at Wahsudan's urging. The Abbasid caliph al-Qa'im (r. 1031–1075) convinced the Rawadids to band together and recapture Barkari; they briefly reoccupied it until losing it permanently to the Byzantines. In 1037/38, a second and much stronger wave of Iraqiya led by the chiefs Buqa, Goktash, Mansur and Dana reached Azarbaijan. The Iraqiya soon began to plunder the country, sacking the city of Maragha in 1039. In retaliation, Wahsudan and Abu'l-Hayja ibn Rabib al-Dawla defeated the Iraqiya, who were scattered into different groups which went to Ray, Isfahan and Hamadan. Regardless, the Iraqiya continued to pose a threat to the Rawadids, as Wahsudan invited them to a banquet where he massacred them and had forty of their leaders arrested in 1040/41. As a result, most of the Iraqiya subsequently withdrew to Hakkari. In 1041/42, another group of Iraqiya reached Azarbaijan from Ray, where they had fled from the Seljuk commander Ibrahim Inal. They engaged Wahsudan in a number of battles, including one near Sarab where they suffered a heavy defeat. The Wahsudan ultimately expelled them. The eviction of the Iraqiya from Azarbaijan gave Wahsudan the opportunity to improve his relations with the neighbouring Shaddadids, as he went to their capital of Ganja in person and visited their ruler Abu'l-Hasan Lashkari (r. 1034–1049). In 1042/43, an earthquake devastated much of the capital of Tabriz, including its citadel, walls, houses, markets and most of the Rawadid palace. The Persian poet Nasir Khusraw, who visited the city four years later, reports that 40,000 inhabitants died, but that the place still continued to prosper. The later historian Ibn al-Athir (died 1232/33) reports 50,000 casualties. Wahsudan only survived the incident as he was in a garden, probably outside the city. In 1044, around 5,000 Iraqiya arrived in Mesopotamia from Azarbaijan, where they seized the town of Khuy. Between 1048–1049, the area around Tabriz was devastated by the Turkmen chieftain Hasan, who was seemingly a nephew of the Seljuk ruler Tughril (r. 1037–1063). In 1054, Wahsudan was forced to submit to Tughril, who went to Tabriz in person. Tughril's name was placed in the khutba (Friday prayer), while a son of Wahsudan, possibly Abu'l-Hayja Manuchihr, was sent as a Seljuk hostage to Khurasan. The circumstances of the transition of power between Wahsudan and his son Abu Nasr Mamlan are uncertain. According to Münejjim Bashi, Wahsudan died in 1059, but Ibn al-Athir reports that Abu Nasr Mamlan was recognised by Tughril as the ruler of Azarbaijan in 1058/59. Wahsudan also had a third son named Abu'l-Qasim Ibrahim, but nothing is known about him. ## Culture The Rawwadids were promoters of Persian culture demonstrated by Wahsudan and Mamlan II's patronage of Qatran.

New Jersey Route 120

State highway in Bergen County, New Jersey, US

Route 120 is a state highway located in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. It extends 2.65 mi (4.26 km) from an interchange with Route 3 in East Rutherford to another interchange with Route 17 in Carlstadt, where it continues to the west as County Route 120. Route 120 serves the Meadowlands Sports Complex - which consists of MetLife Stadium, Meadowlands Racetrack, and the Meadowlands Arena - and the American Dream shopping and entertainment complex. It heads north from Route 3 as a six-lane freeway through the sports complex to an interchange with the southern terminus of County Route 503. From here, Route 120 heads northwest along the northern edge of the sports complex as a four-lane divided at-grade Paterson Plank Road, passing through industrial and commercial areas. In 1927, Route 3 was legislated along the Paterson Plank Road portion of present-day Route 120. It was eventually designated along the entire portion of current Route 120. In 1953, Route 3 was moved to its current freeway alignment, replacing Route S3, and a portion of Route 20 was designated to run from current Route 3 north to Paterson Plank Road while Paterson Plank Road was removed from the state highway system. The portion of Paterson Plank Road that lost its state highway status in 1953 gained it back in 1972, when it became an extension of Route 20 as a result of the construction of the Meadowlands Sports Complex. As this route was not connected to the mainline of Route 20, it was designated Route 120 by the 1990s. As a result of the construction of American Dream, the interchange between Route 3 and Route 120 was improved. An overpass between eastbound Route 3 and northbound Route 120 was completed in 2009 and a flyover from southbound Route 120 to eastbound Route 3 was completed in 2010. ## Route description Route 120 begins at an interchange with Route 3 in East Rutherford, heading north-northeast on a six-lane freeway through the Meadowlands Sports Complex. Here, MetLife Stadium, home field of the New York Giants and New York Jets of the National Football League, and the Meadowlands station at the terminus of NJ Transit's Meadowlands Rail Line is on the west side of the road, while the closed Meadowlands Arena and the American Dream shopping and entertainment complex are on the east side of the road. There is an exit for an access road to the complex. The freeway comes to an end at an interchange where the road continues northeast into Moonachie as County Route 503 (Washington Avenue), while Route 120 exits onto the Paterson Plank Road and heads northwest as a four-lane divided surface road along the border of Carlstadt to the northeast and East Rutherford to the southwest. Route 120 passes one of Meadowlands Racetrack's grandstands and parallels NJ Transit's Meadowlands Rail Line on the East Rutherford side of the road, while commercial and industrial development dominates the Carlstadt side of the road, intersecting with Gotham Parkway. The route has a southbound exit and entrance to the Meadowlands Sports Complex before it crosses Berrys Creek. Upon crossing the creek, Route 120 continues northwest through more commercial and industrial development, intersecting with Murray Hill Parkway towards East Rutherford and 20th Street towards Carlstadt. A short distance past this intersection, the road becomes a four-lane undivided road that crosses over NJ Transit’s Pascack Valley Line before coming to an interchange with Route 17. Here, Route 120 terminates and County Route 120 continues to the west as Paterson Avenue. ### County Route 120 After crossing the Passaic River into Bergen County, the road is called Paterson Avenue and designated as County Route 120, in Wallington, in a residential and light-density commercial area. The road becomes the border between Wallington to the north and East Rutherford to the south. At the end of Wallington, Paterson Avenue is the border between Carlstadt and East Rutherford for a short distance but then the road dips into East Rutherford to avoid a hill (the bypass, which goes over the hill, is called Hoboken Road). The road returns to the Carlstadt/East Rutherford border at Route 17 which it crosses over via an overpass, and is then designated as Route 120 and Paterson Plank Road for a distance. ## History In the 1927 New Jersey state highway renumbering, Route 3 was legislated to run along the Paterson Plank Road portion of today’s Route 120 as part of its route between Secaucus and Greenwood Lake. By 1947, Route 3 had been designated along the entire alignment of current Route 120. When New Jersey renumbered its state highways in 1953, Route 3 was moved to a new freeway alignment that was Route S3. As a result of this realignment, the portion of the route between modern Route 3 and Paterson Plank Road became a portion of Route 20 while the section along Paterson Plank Road was removed from the state highway system. Paterson Plank Road between County Route 503 and Route 17 joined the state highway system again as an extension of this portion of Route 20 in 1972 when the Meadowlands Sports Complex was slated to be built. At this point, Route 20 had consisted of three disconnected segments. Since none of these segments were connected, this portion of road was redesignated Route 120 by the 1990s. With the construction of American Dream, several improvements to Route 120 took place. The interchange with Route 3 was reconstructed with an overpass between eastbound Route 3 and northbound Route 120 that was completed in May 2009 at a cost of \$38.1 million. Also, a flyover from southbound Route 120 to eastbound Route 3 was completed in early 2010 at a cost of \$13 million. By Joint Resolution No. 6, approved September 9, 1997, the New Jersey Legislature designated Route 120 in East Rutherford, where it runs through the Meadowlands Sports Complex, as the Larry Doby Highway. Former Paterson resident Larry Doby, a professional baseball player with the Newark Eagles of the Negro leagues, later played in the Cleveland Indians and was the first African American to break the color barrier in the American League. ## Major intersections ## See also

Uncharted: Golden Abyss

2011 video game

Uncharted: Golden Abyss is a 2011 action-adventure game developed by Bend Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment as a launch title for the PlayStation Vita. A spin-off of the Uncharted series, the game was released in Japan in 2011, and in other regions in 2012. Golden Abyss is a prequel to the series, taking place before the events of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. The story revolves around adventurer-treasure hunter Nathan Drake as he becomes involved in a search for the lost city of Quivira and is aided by fellow treasure hunter Marisa Chase. Gameplay combines action-adventure with platforming elements, with players solving puzzles and fighting enemies using cover-based third-person shooting. Concept work for Golden Abyss began in 2008, when Sony asked Bend Studio to develop a new Uncharted as a console launch title. Due to the changing specifications of the Vita, much of the early development was done using PlayStation 3 hardware. The entire project was overseen by original developer Naughty Dog, with Bend Studio receiving assets from the first two Uncharted titles and getting access to their motion capture facilities. John Garvin was both director and scriptwriter, the latter under the supervision of main series writer Amy Hennig. Hennig also ensured the return of Nolan North as Drake. The game was revealed in January 2011 alongside the Vita. Golden Abyss debuted to strong sales and generally positive critical reception. Journalists praised its graphics, voice performances, and recreation of Uncharted gameplay on the platform. Criticism focused on its storyline and implementation of Vita-specific controls. To date, the game remains exclusive to the platform, as it was left out of the PlayStation 4's Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection due to the standalone nature of its narrative. ## Gameplay Uncharted: Golden Abyss is an action-adventure game played from a third-person perspective, with platforming and puzzle elements. The player controls Uncharted series protagonist Nathan Drake. Progressing through a series of linear levels, Nathan explores a variety of environments including jungles, temple ruins, caverns and encampments. During platforming, Nathan climbs along ledges and jumps between platforms created by the environments. Some levels include multiple paths and hidden areas with collectible treasures. During some sections, Nathan also swims through bodies of water, and rows a canoe down a river. In combat, Nathan can use stealthy takedowns, and engage in cover-based third-person shooting against groups of enemies. Shooting can either be done with precise aiming or blind firing. Nathan can pick up and use a variety of weapons, including pistols, machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and grenades. The game's controls use a combination of traditional joystick and button commands, and the PlayStation Vita's motion and touch control functions. The motion controls play into aiming Nathan's weapons or balancing during crossing on a tightrope while swiping on the touchscreen can both be used to guide Nathan through and around the environment and are mandatory when performing melee attacks. Some melee sections play out in a similar manner to quick time events. Some puzzles involve using the touch screen to reveal clues or adjust mechanisms. The back touch functions allow the player to zoom in with the weapon camera view, and take pictures within the environment. ## Plot The events of Golden Abyss take place before Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Adventurer Nathan Drake accompanies old friend Jason Dante to a Panama dig site headed by the mistrustful Marisa Chase. At the site, they find the bodies of poisoned Spanish conquistadors and a grave marker with a Visigoth symbol. After Dante has to leave due to a phone call, Marisa shows Drake an amulet she hid from Dante, inherited from her grandfather Vincent Perez and they agree to team up. Nathan and Marisa are then attacked and captured by Dante's real partner, warlord Roberto Guerro, but the pair escape. They go to Perez's house, who hired Dante to continue his research after a terminal cancer diagnosis; Dante paid off Guerro for access to the site in return for a share of the treasure that Guerro will use to fund his conflict, while Marisa went there to finish her family's work. The pair learn that the marker referred to the Sete Cidades, an ancient Christian sect dedicated to finding the Seven Cities of Gold. Friar Marcos de Niza, a member of the sect, had been part of a failed expedition led by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to find the city of Quivira. Following further clues, one referring to a "Sword of Stephen", Nathan and Marisa follow Perez's trail to a ruined Sete Cidades retreat. They find Perez, who succumbed to his illness, as well as evidence that leads Nathan to suspect that de Niza deliberately misled Coronado. Nathan follows the ruins to a crypt that contains the Sword of Stephen—the personal sword of Esteban, de Niza's guide; however, they are interrupted by Dante and Guerro. Guerro takes the sword and Marisa after pushing Dante off a balcony for insulting him. Nathan and Dante reluctantly ally to escape the ruins and Guerro's army but are unable to stop Guerro from escaping with Marisa. Dante hires his mercenary army to avenge himself on Guerro, and Nathan leaves after they argue. Encountering his friend Victor "Sully" Sullivan, Nathan convinces him to help rescue Marisa and finish Perez's work. The two follow a map made from the charcoal rubbings of symbols found on the sword to a temple complex believed to house the entrance to Quivira. There they witness and fight through a battle between Dante's mercenaries and Guerro's men. Sully is injured in a fall, forcing Drake to continue by himself. Nathan survives a rocket attack from Dante's mercenaries and enters Quivira where he rescues Marisa from survivors of Guerro's army. Using Marisa's amulet, they enter Quivira, discovering the "Golden Abyss", a gold-lined cavern linked by an underground lake. There they discover Esteban's corpse and a Geiger counter stowed in Chase's backpack revealing the gold to be irradiated from nearby uranium deposits. The people of Quivira slowly died out from radiation poisoning, and de Niza killed Esteban and his scouting party before deliberately misleading Coronado to keep the irradiated gold from being looted. Dante arrives, intending to sell the irradiated gold regardless, and Nathan beats him in a fistfight and escapes with Marisa. Marisa seals the Golden Abyss with explosives, trapping Dante inside, and Nathan has a last fight with Guerro which ends with Guerro falling through a damaged bridge to his death with the Sword of Stephen. Nathan and Marisa escape with Sully's help, and before leaving on a stolen helicopter Marisa throws away her amulet, saying it belongs "in hell" with the rest of Quivira. ## Development Uncharted: Golden Abyss was developed by Bend Studio, a first-party production studio under Sony Computer Entertainment best known for creating the Syphon Filter series. Bend Studio was among the first studios to receive inside information about the Vita. As they were wrapping up production on Resistance: Retribution in 2008, the team decided they wanted to develop a new entry in the Uncharted series; at the time, the only released title was Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and had not gained the large industry presence it would. Bend Studio was chosen partly because of their long record of production quality titles for the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Bend Studio originally had a nine-person team working on the game, eventually expanding to 55 people. In addition to Bend Studio, several other studios collaborated on the title. Notable studios included MK Productions, which helped design some of the larger setpieces; Scratch Image, which handled lip-synching and facial animation; and the Visual Arts and Services Group, which polished the motion capture work. The music was composed by Clint Bajakian, who had previously worked as a music manager and minor composer on the other Uncharted titles. The sound and music design was outsourced to Sony's music staff, with thirty people assigned to the task. Production ran in parallel to the final production stages of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and the development of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. The title was supervised by Uncharted studio Naughty Dog. While Sony was immediately willing for Bend Studio to create an Uncharted Vita title, Naughty Dog needed a lot more assurance and communication during pre-production. It was the studio's first launch title for a console, something that put extra pressure on the team during production. During the first year of production, the project was untitled, alternately using the working titles Uncharted X and Uncharted: Dark Secrets. The game's crunch period lasted from January to December 2011, putting a great deal of strain on the production team as they needed to give up weekends and holidays to finish the game on time. This had a debilitating impact on the team's morale, prompting the studio to put in solid work and overtime guidelines for future projects. An alpha build, technically playable from beginning to end, was completed in September, with play and focus testing enabling the team to adjust the playtime and streamline some elements. ### Design The early prototype builds used PlayStation 3 (PS3) hardware up until the final year of production, with a dedicated game engine only appearing during that time. It was the first time Bend Studio had handled the hardware, as their previous work had transitioned straight from PlayStation 2 to PSP. One of the early design prototypes had the game taking place around an open world hub with quests, but the team had no experience with open-world design and combined with story problems this version was scrapped. During production, Bend Studio was in constant and detailed contact with Sony regarding the Vita, giving them a deep insight into how the console worked. This open communication was part of Sony's shift in console production following difficulties with the PSP, wanting input and feedback before release from associated game studios. It was also key to keeping production going in the wake of hardware breakdowns. Part of the production was creating a rough working prototype of an early level so the team could understand the Vita's functions. The locked narrative, necessary for production to begin, proved an issue as several gameplay segments had to be kept despite negatively impacting pacing and characterisation. The length of the game was also an issue, with Garvin later feeling they had been overly ambitious. A key inclusion was the Vita's touch-based control functions, as Garvin felt the team would have failed if the controls were similar to the PS3 entries. While there was speculation that Sony forced Bend Studio not to include other control options for elements like melee attacks, Garvin clarified that Bend Studio made the call. A recurrent issue was that the hardware specifications were changing all the time, with new information coming in every three months or so and their single Vita development kit being "the size of a PC". When motion controls were agreed upon, the team had to improvise using a PS3 Sixaxis controller, and until the introduction of the OLED screen, making the touch controls work was a constant struggle as their test model used the standard PSP screen. Getting motion controls to work alongside traditional controls while keeping the Uncharted gameplay style intact was one of the biggest challenges during development. The canoe section, which made extensive use of touch commands, was trimmed down based on negative feedback from test players. When designing the game's levels and visuals, the team was given access to the source code and texture library for the first two Uncharted titles. The Vita's hardware meant that the graphics could potentially match those used on the PS3, allowing the team to pursue the visual quality of Uncharted 2, which had then entered beta testing and wowed them with its graphics. The team wanted to match the production values of the PS3 games, but they had a leaner polygon limit and so had to carefully combine polygonal models and painted backgrounds to emulate the style. To simplify the level design, around 80% of levels used stock geometry compared to 20% unique architecture. Compared to Resistance: Retribution, which displayed 50,000 polygons per frame, Golden Abyss featured around 260,000 per frame. ### Story and characters The scenario was written by Garvin, reprising his dual role as director and scenarist from the Syphon Filter series. During the early production, Garvin met with main series writer Amy Hennig and Naughty Dog president Evan Wells, going through brainstorming sessions and having several early concepts "shot down". Hennig also vetted Garvin's scripts. The game's jungle setting, and Drake's search for Quivira, were present from the early presentations. The storyline and script was the very first element to begin production, with the story and key scenes being locked in place before any gameplay assets were completed. Nathan's characterization was described as cockier than the main trilogy and being led around by others rather than leading the way, with the events of Golden Abyss being his first life-threatening challenge as an adventurer. When Garvin began writing, he thought it would be simple due to his previous scenario work, but found the series' story and character formula very challenging; > "To start, the franchise formula is challenging. You have to find a compelling historical mystery with "gaps" that can be filled creatively; the history needs to be real and researched; you need a MacGuffin that is valuable, that people may have heard of, and that is potentially cursed; settings and plots need to be realistic, fantastic elements need to be reasonable in an X-Files sort of way; the tone should be mostly light in a summer blockbuster style; settings have to be traversable, exotic, romantic, and, well, uncharted in some way; there needs to be an army of bad guys to kill; the story has to lend itself to puzzles, twists, turns, surprises; bad guys have to be interesting, powerful, but not clichéd... and you have to do all this without repeating what has already been done in Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 (not to mention avoiding overused tropes from genre film franchises). I severely underestimated the amount of work this was going to be." Garvin created the narrative hook surrounding Marcos de Niza very early in production, but the characters and story beats were in flux during most of 2010. During the early draft, the two villains were Guerro and a rival called Salazar. Hennig was worried that it would be too similar to the villain dynamics of the first Uncharted. The story was stuck at this point until Garvin created the character of Dante, which provided an additional and more original foil for Nathan. The early story plan involved "grave robbing in Mesa Verde, lost temples in the Louisiana swamps, a museum heist during a hurricane in New Orleans and a boat chase through the Grand Canyon". The entire concept, aside from the basic narrative hook and jungle setting, was completely rewritten following input and criticism from Hennig. The second version was based around the open-world hub design, but this was dropped due to their lack of experience and the clash between Nathan's character and his necessary role as a mercenary type. The current story was constructed from salvageable sections from both drafts. Marisa went through several changes due to test player feedback; she was originally written as a character who complained a lot and got herself into situations where she had to be rescued by Nathan, compared negatively to the status of Princess Peach in the Mario series. To remedy this, she was given a more forceful personality, and the gameplay sequences had Nathan assisting her escapes rather than saving her directly. During the concept development, several plot and scene details were changed or cut. During early production, the game was to be set between the first and second games featuring a role for recurring heroine Elena Fisher, along with showing some of Nathan's origin story. The narrative eventually settled into being a standalone prequel to the first game. A planned chapter would have explored the previous relationship between Nathan and Uncharted 2 antagonist Harry Flynn. They were also going to follow the series' recurring theme of supernatural elements by having Quivira's radiation-mutated people—dubbed Chindi—inhabiting the ruins. Both these concepts, and a section featuring exploration through a highland temple, were scrapped. The origin story concept was removed due to Naughty Dog already developing that element in Uncharted 3, while the Chindi were both a challenge to program and seen as too similar to the Descendants from the first game. In addition, the lack of supernatural elements helped distinguish the game from the main series. A mudslide set piece was cut after production began due to potential negative associations with the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. The locked script, while necessary, ended up negatively impacting production and pacing within the game. ### Casting Hennig was key to securing Nolan North to reprise his role as Nathan Drake. She also vetted the new cast members. Richard McGonagle reprised his role as recurring supporting character Victor Sullivan. Two notable newcomers were veteran voice actor Jason Spisak as Dante, and Christine Lakin as Marisa Chase. Garvin recalled that Hennig commented that good actors could rescue even bad dialogue. Lakin called her experience acting a role in the Uncharted series as the fruition of a childhood dream of acting in an Indiana Jones-type action story. Chase's character was partially developed during voice recording through Lakin's delivery and ad-libbing. North in turn played off Lakin and added his ad-libs, creating unplanned but desirable chemistry between the pair. As with previous Uncharted titles, cutscenes were shot in Naughty Dog's Culver City studio, with actions and dialogue being recorded at the same time, an approach Bend Studio had never used before. Naughty Dog gave Bend Studio access to all their motion capture library from the first two Uncharted games, which cut a considerable amount of time from development. It was Lakin's first motion capture role, making her anxious not to make any mistakes. She found the experience relatively easy due to her extensive theater work, as the motion capture studio compared by her to black box theater. She had a positive experience working alongside North and liked McGonagle though she never acted with him as they shared no scenes together. Motion capture filming took place across six three-day shoots between January and May 2011. This tight schedule was possible due to the overarching story being fixed, although smaller scenes and dialogue rewrites were still happening. ## Release Rumors of the existence of Golden Abyss was leaked from an early stage, as Bend Studio shared information on the Vita and consequently their project for it with other interested studios. It was officially announced alongside the Vita in January 2011. A few weeks prior to the reveal, Bend Studio had to put together a demo level approaching the polish of their planned final product; their efforts to create the demo helped solidify a production pipeline for the rest of the game. Its official title was revealed in June of that year. In all regions, the game was a console launch title. In Japan, the game was released on December 17, 2011. The Japanese dub took its cue from the English original, with the Japanese localization taking care to portray Nathan's immaturity and interactions with more experienced characters. Hiroki Tōchi reprised his role as Nathan's Japanese voice. In Japan, the game was given a new subtitle, translated as The Mapless Adventure Begins. The title was a reference to it being Nathan's first major adventure. After its Japanese release, Bend Studio were able to perform further polishing and prepare new features that were available at launch in the West. Golden Abyss later released on February 15, 2012 in North America; February 22 in Europe; and February 23 in Australia. It was also one of the debut titles when the Vita joined Sony's PlayStation Plus service on November 20 of that year. The Treasure Map downloadable content (DLC) added a treasure map for each chapter to help players easily locate all the collectibles in a chapter. The 1.01 update released in February added "Black Market", an in-game store enabling players to trade and receive bounty items that are collected in the game with other Vita players using the PS Vita's "NEAR" application. Patch 1.02, released in May, included fixes and solved an issue raised by players where the game automatically disconnected the game from PlayStation Network upon start-up. The final patch 1.03 featured more adjustments, and implemented a gameplay collectable related to the spin-off title Uncharted: Fight for Fortune. To date, Golden Abyss remains exclusive to the Vita. When the PlayStation 4 collection Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection was being developed by Bluepoint Games, Naughty Dog considered including the game. Its standalone narrative meant it was considered non-essential for inclusion as the collection was meant to prime players for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. ## Reception ### Critical response Golden Abyss met with "generally favorable reviews", earning a score of 80 out of 100 on review aggregate site Metacritic based on 80 critic reviews. It was the 14th best-rated Vita title of 2012. Jeremy Parish, writing for 1Up.com, described the story as "playing out like something straight from a serial adventure", noting the amount of historical research. Edge Magazine found the storyline intriguing and praised North's performance, but felt there was too much exposition. Japanese magazine Famitsu enjoyed the narrative, with one reviewer calling its mystery elements stronger than the main series. Ray Carsillo of Electronic Gaming Monthly enjoyed the storyline, saying it was a worthy entry into the series and supported by strong voice performances. Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell felt the narrative was weakest when it became lost in its use of legends, enjoying the story better when it focused on familiar characters. Rob Manual of G4 enjoyed the characters but cited problems with the storytelling and pacing; and Matt Hegelson, writing for Game Informer, faulted the dialogue and lack of connection to the main series. Sebastian Moss of Game Revolution praised Garvin's attempt to capture the series's style and the coherent story, while GameSpot's Mark Walton was unimpressed and said the narrative was "like a decent bit of fan fiction". GamesRadar said the story lacked strength, but its standalone style lent itself to being the start of similar spin-off titles, and GameTrailers noted that the mixture of stylistic elements, ranging from adventure to exploration, prevented the narrative becoming boring. IGN's Greg Miller was not impressed with the narrative. Parish praised the graphics, saying they raised the bar for portable hardware and were stronger than a number of contemporary home console titles. Edge was amazed by the graphics on display, a sentiment shared by one of the four Famitsu reviewers. Carsillo referred to the graphics as being "console-quality". Bramwell praised the developer's efforts on the Vita hardware despite the graphics being lacking compared to games following the first Uncharted. While he noted some simplified graphics, Manuel praised the graphics as worthy of the series. Helgeson lauded the title as the best-looking handheld title ever made, Moss praised the close-up graphics while faulting the backgrounds as low quality. Both GamesRadar and Watson praised the graphics but had little commentary, and GameTrailers cited the graphics as "far beyond anything we’ve ever seen on a handheld". Miller cited the graphics as being equal to the first Uncharted. Parish enjoyed the gameplay despite noting the continued dissonance between Nathan's residence about killing named characters and taking out standard enemies and praising their smooth implementation within the hardware's gimmicks. Edge found the gameplay solid, but faulted the lack of innovations found in later home console Uncharted titles. Famitsu lauded the gameplay apart from some frustration completing touch screen puzzles. Carsillo was mixed about the gameplay, noting its solid base but finding the Vita-specific elements too intrusive. Bramwell enjoyed the gameplay, noting the extra freedom given to players compared to the heavily-scripted home console entries. Manuel had a mixed experience with the gameplay due to the implementation of Vita functions, while Moss noted a lack of content and replayability compared to the home console series. Watson said the gameplay made up for deficiencies in the narrative despite problematic enemy AI. GamesRadar enjoyed the basic gameplay, but panned several pieces of inconsistent or confusing level design. GameTrailers noted a lack of large setpieces compared to the home console entries. Miller praised the gameplay as generally on the same level as the main series. The touch and motion controls saw mixed reactions; a few critics praised their implementation, while others found them either awkward to use or poorly implemented. Other reviewers felt the developers were too keen to show them off, putting too many compulsory uses for the new functions into the game. Edge had a divided response, praising the motion-based aiming, but found the touch response unreliable. ### Sales Upon release in Japan, Golden Abyss debuted in sales charts in 8th place, according to sales data collector Media Create. With opening sales of over 48,000 units, it was the second best-selling Vita title of the week after Everybody's Golf 6. During February, according to the NPD Group, the game reached the top 20 best-selling video games, being the best-selling Vita title during that period. In 2018, Golden Abyss was revealed as the best-selling Vita title in the United States. In the UK, the game reached the top of the game charts during its debut week. The game was also the best-selling PlayStation Network title during its month of release. ### Awards

Roscoe Charles Wilson

United States Air Force general

Roscoe Charles Wilson (June 11, 1905 – August 21, 1986) was a United States Air Force general who was Commandant of the Air War College from 1951 to 1954 and Deputy Chief of Staff, Development, from 1958 to 1961. A 1928 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Wilson was commissioned into the United States Army as a second lieutenant in the field artillery but underwent flying training and, on receiving his pilot's wings, transferred to the United States Army Air Corps in 1929. He attended the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio and was assigned to the Aircraft Design Section of the Aircraft Laboratory there, where he worked on the development of the XB-15, B-17 and XB-19. During World War II, Wilson was Chief of Development Engineering at United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) headquarters, and was the USAAF liaison officer to the Manhattan Project. In December 1944 he became Chief of Staff of the 316th Bombardment Wing. Its B-29s deployed to Okinawa in June 1945, and he participated in the last air raids on Japan. After the war ended he was involved in a survey of the damage done by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1947, he became one of the Deputy Chiefs of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. From October 1951 to May 1954 Wilson was Commandant of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He then became commander of the Third Air Force in the United Kingdom. He was promoted to lieutenant general on July 1, 1958, when he became Deputy Chief of Staff, Development. He retired from the Air Force in 1961 and became president and chairman of Allied Research. ## Early life and career Roscoe Charles Wilson was born in Centralia, Pennsylvania, on June 11, 1905, the son of an Army officer, Colonel Everett R. Wilson. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point as a cadet on July 1, 1924, and graduated 48th in the class of 1928. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the field artillery on June 9, 1928, but on September 8 he commenced flight training at Brooks Field, Texas. After further training at the Advanced Flying School at Kelly Field, Texas he received his pilot's wings, and transferred to the United States Army Air Corps on November 21, 1929. Wilson's first posting was to the 1st Observation Squadron at Mitchel Field, New York. In 1929 he married Elizabeth Robinson, a Vassar College graduate from Harrods Creek, Louisville, Kentucky in a ceremony at Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville. Their son Charles E. Wilson would also attend West Point, graduating with the class of 1954. Wilson attended the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio from July 1932 to June 1933. After graduating, he was assigned to the Aircraft Design Section of the Aircraft Laboratory there, where he worked on the development of the P-39, XB-15, B-17 and XB-19. He was promoted to first lieutenant on February 1, 1934, and was Director of the Special Research and Test Laboratory and Director of Accessory Design and Test Laboratory. Wilson came back to West Point in July 1937 as an instructor in the Department of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, as the Science Department was then known. He was promoted to captain on July 9, 1938. From May to August 1939, he attended the Air Corps Tactical School, after which he returned to West Point as an assistant professor. While there he built a wind tunnel, and wrote a book, entitled Preliminary Airplane Design, which was published in 1941. ## World War II In June 1940, Wilson was posted back to Wright Field as Assistant Chief of the Air Laboratory of the Air Materiel Command, where he was promoted to major on January 31, 1941, lieutenant colonel on February 1, 1942, and colonel on March 1, 1942. He became Assistant Chief of Development Engineering at United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Headquarters in Washington, DC, on May 1, 1942, and then its Chief on June 2, 1943. As such, he reported to Major General Oliver P. Echols, the head of the Air Materiel Command. The Chief of USAAF, General Henry H. Arnold, designated Echols as the USAAF liaison with the Manhattan Project. In turn, Echols designated Wilson as his alternative, and it was Wilson who became Manhattan Project's main USAAF contact. The director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves later wrote that: > [Wilson] was a most fortunate choice, for his personality and professional competence ensured the smooth co-operation essential to our success. Through his efforts, the necessary air support was always provided by the subordinate Air Force commands, if not willingly, at least without delay. > > While I can say the same of every other Air Force officer with whom I had any dealings in the project, I have always felt particularly grateful to Wilson, for he had to bear the brunt of all our many minor problems with the Air Force as well as a major responsibility for a number of our principal activities. I am sure that he must have had many difficult moments with his Air Force colleagues, as he denied them, for security reasons, information they considered essential to understand the reasons for his requests. Wilson was posted to Britain from March to April 1944, where he was involved in an exchange of technical information with the Royal Air Force. In December 1944 he became Chief of Staff of the 316th Bombardment Wing, which was then based at Colorado Springs, Colorado, but soon moved to Topeka, Kansas. Its B-29s deployed to Okinawa in June 1945, and he participated in the last air raids on Japan. After the war ended he was involved in a survey of the damage done by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ## Cold War After the war, Wilson served in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Materiel and Supply, the Office of the Deputy Commander of the Army Air Force, and Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development. On July 26, 1947, he became one of the deputy chiefs of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, with the rank of brigadier general from April 1948. He also served on the Military Liaison Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He became Deputy Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, operations, for Atomic Energy, in July 1948, and Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations, for Atomic Energy, in February 1950, although he remained on the Military Liaison Committee. He was promoted to major general on August 11, 1950. From October 1951 to May 1954 Wolson was Commandant of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. He then became commander of the Third Air Force in the United Kingdom, also becoming head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group for the United Kingdom on November 1, 1956. At the time, the Third Air Force was responsible for the only tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, so Wilson was a logical choice as commander. After returning to the United States in July 1957, he became the Air Force member of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development. He was promoted to lieutenant general on July 1, 1958, when he became Deputy Chief of Staff, Development. In a reorganization of the area on July 1, 1961, he became Deputy Chief of Staff, Research and Technology. Wilson retired from the Air Force on November 1, 1961. His decorations included the Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters. He became president and chairman of Allied Research in Concord, Massachusetts, a defense contractor, but retired in 1963, and moved to Harrods Creek, Louisville, Kentucky. He died on August 21, 1986, and was buried in Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville.

USS Thetis Bay

Casablanca-class escort carrier of the U.S. Navy

USS Thetis Bay (CVE-90) was the thirty-sixth of fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers built for the United States Navy during World War II. She was launched in March 1944, commissioned in April, and served as a transport carrier in the Pacific, as well as a replenishment carrier supporting the Allied bombardment of Tokyo and the Main Islands. Postwar, she participated in Operation Magic Carpet, before being decommissioned in August 1946, being mothballed in the Pacific Reserve Fleet. She was reactivated in July 1956, and converted to a helicopter transport carrier, serving in relief operations in Taiwan and Haiti. Ultimately, she was broken up in 1966, the last Casablanca-class hull to be scrapped. ## Design and description Thetis Bay was a Casablanca-class escort carrier, the most numerous type of aircraft carrier ever built, and was designed specifically to be rapidly mass-produced using prefabricated sections, in order to replace heavy early-war losses. By the end of their production run, the time taken between laying down the hull and launching the ship had been cut down to nearly one month. Standardized with her sister ships, she was 512 ft 3 in (156.13 m) long overall, had a beam of 65 ft 2 in (19.86 m), and a draft of 20 ft 9 in (6.32 m). She displaced 8,188 long tons (8,319 t) standard and 10,902 long tons (11,077 t) with a full load. She had a 257 ft (78 m) long hangar deck and a 477 ft (145 m) long flight deck. She was powered with two Skinner Unaflow reciprocating steam engines, which drove two shafts, providing 9,000 horsepower (6,700 kW), thus enabling her to make . The ship had a cruising range of 10,240 nautical miles (18,960 km; 11,780 mi) at a speed of 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph). Her compact size limited the length of the flight deck and necessitated the installment of an aircraft catapult at her bow, and there were two aircraft elevators to facilitate movement of aircraft between the flight and hangar deck: one each fore and aft. One 5 in (127 mm)/38 caliber dual-purpose gun was mounted on the stern. Anti-aircraft defense was provided by eight Bofors 40 mm (1.6 in) anti-aircraft guns in single mounts, as well as twelve Oerlikon 20 mm (0.79 in) cannons, which were mounted around the perimeter of the deck. By the end of the war, Casablanca-class carriers had been modified to carry thirty 20 mm (0.79 in) cannons, and the amount of Bofors 40 mm (1.6 in) guns had been doubled to 16, by putting them into twin mounts. These modifications were in response to increasing casualties due to kamikaze attacks. Although Casablanca-class escort carriers were designed to function with a crew of 860 and an embarked squadron of 50 to 56, the exigencies of wartime often necessitated the inflation of the crew count. Casablanca-class escort carriers were designed to carry 27 aircraft, but the hangar deck could accommodate more, which was often necessary during transport or especially training missions, due to the constant turnover of pilots and aircraft. Following her conversion into a helicopter assault carrier, she was 512 ft 3 in (156.13 m) long overall, had a beam of 65 ft 2 in (19.86 m), and a draft of 22 ft 6 in (6.86 m). She displaced 7,800 long tons (7,900 t) standard and 11,000 long tons (11,000 t) with a full load, and could make 19.3 knots (35.7 km/h; 22.2 mph) at full speed. She had a designed complement of 900 crew and 938 troops, was armed with four twin 40 mm (1.6 in) anti-aircraft guns, and carried twenty helicopters. ## Construction Her construction was awarded to Kaiser Shipbuilding Company, Vancouver, Washington, under a United States Maritime Commission contract, on 18 June 1942. The escort carrier was laid down on 22 December 1943 under the name Thetis Bay, located within Kuiu Island, as part of a tradition which named escort carriers after bays or sounds in Alaska. The bay itself was named by the United States National Geodetic Suvery in 1928 after the United States Revenue Cutter Service cutter Thetis, which in turn was named after the sea nymph Thetis, the daughter of Nereus and the mother of Achilles in Greek mythology. She was laid down as MC hull 1127, the thirty-sixth of a series of fifty Casablanca-class escort carriers. She therefore received the classification symbol CVE-90, indicating that she was the ninetieth escort carrier to be commissioned into the United States Navy. She was launched on 16 March 1944; sponsored by Mrs. Rico Botta, the wife of Captain Botta, the Assembly and Repair Officer overseeing Naval Air Station North Island; transferred to the Navy and commissioned on 12 April 1944, with Captain Donald Edmund Wilcox in command. Notably, actress Claudette Colbert's husband, Joel Pressman, a lieutenant commander in the Medical Corps served as the first medical officer at the time of the commissioning. ## Service history ### World War II Upon being commissioned, Thetis Bay undergone a shakedown cruise down the West Coast to San Diego, California. Upon finishing, she was assigned to transport duty, and proceeded north towards San Pedro to take on a load of aircraft and passengers. She put out to sea on 5 June, stopped at Pearl Harbor on 11 June, and headed out, via Makin Island of the Gilberts Islands and Majuro of the Marshall Islands, to Kwajalein. There, she took on the 50th Engineer Combat Battalion of the United States Army, which she deposited back at Pearl Harbor on 5 July. On 7 July, Thetis Bay got underway for Alameda ferrying 41 aircraft that required repairs. She steamed into port on 13 July, and after unloading her cargo, headed for Terminal Island, Los Angeles for a three-week overhaul. Finishing in August, she resumed transport duties on 11 August, delivering spare parts, replacement aircraft, and military passengers from the West Coast to bases in Hawaii and the Marshalls. After completing her first transport tour on 13 September, she made five more round-trip missions, spanning September 1944 to mid-April 1945, ferrying supplies from the United States to a variety of destinations in the Pacific, ranging from Pearl Harbor to Finschhafen, New Guinea. During this period, Captain Benjamin Eugene Moore Jr. raised his flag over the ship on 21 January 1945. On 12 June, Thetis Bay steamed into Pearl Harbor carrying a load of aircraft, having departed from San Diego. There, she was assigned to become a replenishment carrier as a part of Task Group 50.8.4, the mobile replenishment group supporting the frontline Fast Carrier Task Force. Replenishment escort carriers such as Thetis Bay enabled the frontline carriers to replace battle losses, and to stay at sea for longer durations of time. She first headed to Apra Harbor in Guam of the Mariana Islands, arriving on 25 June. Then, she headed westwards, making her first rendezvous with the fast carriers on 12 July, when she transferred 40 of her replenishment aircraft. She returned to Guam on 22 July to take on more aircraft, before she departed on 24 July, making another rendezvous on 31 July. She then replenished at Guam, before heading out once again, resupplying the frontline carriers from 14 August to 8 September. As she began her replenishment mission, news broke of the Japanese surrender, and her replenishment aircraft were used to support the initial landings in the Occupation of Japan. ### Post-war Upon finishing her replenishment mission, Thetis Bay returned to the United States via Guam, arriving at Alameda on 7 September. There, she joined the "Magic Carpet" fleet, which repatriated U.S. servicemen from throughout the Pacific. She cruised around the Pacific, making stops and returning U.S. servicemen back to the mainland. During one of her stops, Captain Allen Smith Jr. took over command of the vessel on 19 October. She completed her "Magic Carpet" duties, and was discharged in January 1946. Inactivation work was conducted in the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility at Bremerton, Washington. Upon the completion of that work, she was decommissioned and mothballed on 7 August 1946, joining the Tacoma group of the Pacific Reserve Fleet. In May 1955, Thetis Bay was withdrawn from the Pacific Reserve Fleet and towed to the San Francisco Naval Shipyard under project SCB 122, where she began conversion into the Navy's first assault helicopter aircraft carrier. On 1 July, she was redesignated as such, receiving the hull symbol CVHA-1. Ships of her type were expected to act as a complement to attack transports, providing them with vertical assault capabilities. She was recommissioned on 20 July 1956, with Captain Thomas Winfield South, II, in command. Her conversion was finally completed six weeks later on 1 September, with a portion of the aft section of her flight deck having been cut away. Thetis Bay then proceeded southwards towards her new home part, arriving at Long Beach on 20 September. There, she took on the helicopters of Marine Corps Test Unit No. 1, based at Camp Pendleton, who demonstrated landing and take-off techniques on this novel type of ship. She then participated in amphibious training exercises off of the California coast, evaluating her planned complementary role, before deploying to the Far East on 10 July 1957. Having completed a short tour of duty, she returned to Long Beach on 11 December, where she resumed local operations. During 1958 and 1959, she conducted a variety of operations, including vertical envelopment exercises off of Luzon, the Philippines, throughout February 1958. On 28 May 1959, she was reclassified as a landing platform helicopter amphibious assault ship, and thus, received the hull symbol LPH-6. In August 1959, severe flooding, starting on 7 August, exacerbated by Typhoon Billie, which had earlier struck in July, killed more than a thousand people in Taiwan. Thus, Thetis Bay, which was serving with the Seventh Fleet at the time, was dispatched from Hong Kong on 12 August, proceeding to Taiwan to conduct relief operations. There, she used her 21 Marine Corps Sikorsky H-34s of Marine Helicopter Transport Squadron (Light) 261 (HMR(L)-261) to ferry aid and transport stranded civilians. She completed her mission on the noon of 20 August, at which point the helicopters had delivered a total of 1,600,540 lb (725,990 kg) of aid. In addition, the helicopters had ferried 850 passengers throughout the operation. Thetis Bay, in May 1960, took part in a training night assault landing at Camp Pendleton. During the operation, her helicopters carried 1,300 troops and 30 t (30 long tons; 33 short tons) of cargo to the objective area. This practice operation represented the first large-scale night landing of ground forces by helicopters based on board a carrier. She deployed to the western Pacific for the spring of 1961, and upon completing her tour and returning to Long Beach, she was transferred to the United States Atlantic Fleet. She arrived at Norfolk, Virginia, her new home port, in early December 1961. For the next three years, Thetis Bay operated along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean. In October 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, she proceeded into the naval "quarantine" area along with her helicopter contingent and a marine landing team, standing by for potential actions. In the spring of 1963, she ferried special aircraft required for President John F. Kennedy's planned visit to West Germany to Hamburg. In September 1963, she headed to Haiti, which had been affected by Hurricane Flora. She anchored off Port-au-Prince and launched Marine helicopters carrying medical aid and food supplies. Thetis Bay left Norfolk on 5 January 1964, heading to the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for inactivation work, arriving there on 6 January. There, she was decommissioned, once again, joining the Philadelphia group of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 March 1964, and she was sold for scrapping in December 1964 to Peck Iron & Metal Co., Inc., headquartered at Portsmouth, Virginia. She was proposed to be transferred to the Spanish Navy, but the Independence-class light aircraft carrier Cabot was sent in her place. She was ultimately broken up in 1966. Thetis Bay received one battle star for her World War II service. Her name plate is on display at Freedom Park, Omaha, Nebraska.

2019 Treviso Open

International pool tournament, held May 2019

The 2019 Treviso Open (sometimes known as the 2019 Dynamic Billard Italian Open) was a nine-ball pool tournament, and the second Euro Tour event of the 2019 season. The event was held from 8 to 11 May 2019, at the Best Western Premier BHR Treviso Hotel in Treviso, Italy. The event had a total prize pool of €38,000 with the winner of each event receiving €4,500. The event followed the Leende Open, and preceded the Austria Open. The event was won by Polish player Konrad Juszczyszyn who defeated the Netherlands' Ivar Saris in the final 9–6. The defending champion was Fedor Gorst from the Netherlands, who defeated Mateusz Śniegocki 9–7 in the 2018 Treviso Open final. However, Gorst failed to progress to the knockout round. Russia's Kristina Tkach was the defending champion of the women's event, having defeated Oliwia Czupryńska in the 2018 final 7–0. Tkach successfully defended the championship, defeating Marharyta Fefilava in the final 7–5. ## Tournament format The men's event was held from 8 to 11 May, and the Women's took place between 9 and 11 May. Both events were first played as a double-elimination tournament. It was held at the Best Western Premier BHR Treviso Hotel in Treviso, Italy. The men's event became a single-elimination bracket at the round-of-32, while the women's event remained a double-elimination tournament until the round-of-16. All men's matches were played as -to-nine , whilst the women's matches were race-to-seven racks. The men's defending champion was Netherlands' Fedor Gorst, who defeated Mateusz Śniegocki 9–7 in the 2018 Treviso Open final. Russia's Kristina Tkach was the defending champion of the women's event, having defeated Oliwia Czupryńska in the previous year's final 7–0. ### Prize fund Both the men's and women's event's prize fund was similar to those of other Euro Tour events, totalling , with being awarded to the winners of the event. ## Tournament Summary ### Men's event 208 participants entered the men's event held from 8 to 11 May. Mike Massey, the 72-year-old World Trickshot Champion competed at his first Euro Tour event. Massey lost both of his games to Bruno Ernst and Juan Antonio Pina-Hidalgo. Albin Ouschan lost his initial match 9–4 against Casper Matikainen. Ouschan won the next two matches, before he lost to Vitaliy Patsura 9–6, and failed to progress. Defending champion Fedor Gorst also failed to progress, he lost two of his three matches, to Konstantinos Koukiadakis and Ruslan Chinachov. In the single-elimination round, six-time winner Mark Gray defeated Sebastian Staab 9–8 in the last-32 stage. Gray led 4–2, but Staab won four consecutive racks to lead 6–4. The pair shared the next four racks with Staab leading 8–6. Gray won the next three racks to win the match. Post-match, Gray commented he was mystified as to how he won the game. Francisco Sánchez Ruíz and Mario He also finished on a . Sánchez Ruíz won the match, despite not leading before that point. Polish player Konrad Juszczyszyn reached his second Tour final, defeating Alexander Kazakis, Casper Matikainen, and Pijus Labutis. His opponent was Ivar Saris, who was playing in his first Euro Tour final, after defeating David Alcaide, Ruslan Chinachov, and Mateusz Śniegocki. Neither player had won a Tour event prior. The final was played, and had an increased number of , with Juszczyszyn leading throughout. He led at 4–3 and 6–4 before Saris won the next two to tie the match at 6–6. Juszczyszyn won the next three racks to win his first Euro Tour event 9–6. ### Women's event A total of 44 participants played in the women's event between 9 and 11 May. This was the first event of the 2019 season for the women, as the Leende Open had no women's division. Number one ranked Kristina Tkach defeated Sara Rocha 7–2 and Veronika Ivanovskaia to progress to the single-elimination round. Second ranked Jasmin Ouschan had to win two deciding racks to progress, after defeating both Kristina Jaeger and Veronika Hubrtova 7–6. Euro Tour third ranked player Marharyta Fefilava completed a whitewash of Nathalie Seichter, before a 7–4 win over Poland's Iza Lacka. Ana Gradišnik played Turkey's Eylul Kibaroglu in the qualification round. Kibaroglu led 6–3, and had two balls to pot to win the match. She accidentally herself behind the . Gradišnik took advantage and won the following four racks to claim a victory and progress to the single-elimination rounds. In the last-16 stage, Ouschan lost to Ivanovskaia 7–4, resulting in Tkach being guaranteed to remain as the highest ranked player after the event. The 2018 runner-up Oliwia Czuprynska also lost at this stage, being defeated by Natalia Seroshtan 7–4. The semi-final lineup was made up of Tkach, Gradišnik, Fefilava and Kateryna Polovinchuk. The first semi-final had Gradišnik leading 6–5 over Tkach; she made errors in both the 12th and 13th racks to allow Tkach to win 6–7. Fefilava defeated Polovinchuk 7–1. The final was contested between the first and third ranked players on the Tour, with Tkach taking an early 5–1 lead. Fefilava took four of the next five racks to trail at 6–5, before Tkach won the next rack to retain the championship. ## Results ### Men's competition The results for the men's knockout round is shown below. Players in bold denote match winners. ### Women's event The following results are from the knockout stages following the round of 16. Players in bold denote match winners:

Billy Sing

Australian soldier in World War I

William Edward Sing, DCM (3 March 1886 – 19 May 1943), known as Billy Sing, was an Australian soldier of Chinese and English descent who served in the Australian Imperial Force during World War I, best known as a sniper during the Gallipoli Campaign. He took at least 150 confirmed kills during that campaign, and may have had over 200 kills in total. However, contemporary evidence puts his tally at close to 300 kills. Towards the end of the war, Sing married a Scottish woman, but the relationship did not last long. Following work in sheep farming and gold mining, he died in relative poverty and obscurity in Brisbane during World War II. ## Early life Sing was born on 3 March 1886 in Clermont, Queensland, Australia, the son of a Chinese father and an English mother. His parents were John Sing (c. 1842–1921), a drover from Shanghai, China, and Mary Ann Sing (née Pugh; c. 1857–unknown), a nurse from Kingswinford, Staffordshire, England. Sing's mother had given birth to a daughter named Mary Ann Elizabeth Pugh on 28 May 1883, less than two months before marrying Sing's father on 4 July 1883. It is unclear whether this child was John Sing's daughter as well. A daughter, Beatrice Sing, was later born into the family on 12 July 1893. The three children grew up together on the farm run by the Sings, and all three performed well academically. There was considerable anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia at this time. As a boy, Sing was well known for his shooting skill, but was the subject of racial prejudice due to his ancestry. He began work hauling timber as a youth, and later worked as a stockman and a sugarcane cutter. Sing became well known for his marksmanship, both as a kangaroo shooter and as a competitive target shooter. In the latter role, he was a member of the Proserpine Rifle Club (one of the many rifle clubs in Queensland that were partially sponsored by the Queensland and Australian defence forces to develop shooting skills). He regularly won prizes for his shooting, and also played cricket with skill. On 24 October 1914, two months after the outbreak of war, Sing enlisted as a trooper in the Australian 5th Light Horse Regiment of the Australian Imperial Force. His Certificate of Medical Examination at the time showed that he stood at 5 ft 5 in (165 cm) and weighed 141 pounds (64 kg). According to John Laws and Christopher Stewart, he was accepted into the army only after a recruitment officer chose to disregard the fact that Sing was part Chinese; at the time, only those of European ancestry were generally considered suitable for Australian military service. ## Military service ### Gallipoli Campaign Sing began his military career as part of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) forces in the Gallipoli Campaign in modern day Turkey. Biographer John Hamilton described the Turkish terrain thus: "It is a country made for snipers. The Anzac and Turkish positions often overlooked each other. Each side sent out marksmen to hunt and stalk and snipe, to wait and shoot and kill, creeping with stealth through the green and brown shrubbery ..." Sing partnered with spotters Ion 'Jack' Idriess and, later, Tom Sheehan. The spotter's task was to observe (spot) the surrounding terrain and alert the sniper to potential targets. Idriess described Sing as "a little chap, very dark, with a jet black moustache and goatee beard. A picturesque looking mankiller. He is the crack shot of the Anzacs." Chatham's Post, a position named after a Light Horse officer, was Sing's first sniping post. Biographer Brian Tate wrote, "It was here that Billy Sing began in earnest his lethal occupation." He set about his task with a Lee–Enfield .303 rifle. An account by Private Frank Reed, a fellow Australian soldier, states that Sing was so close to the Turkish lines that enemy artillery rarely troubled him. His comrades left three particular enemy positions to his attention: a trench at 350 yards (320 m) from his post, a communication sap at 500 yards (460 m), and a track in a gully at 1,000 yards (910 m). According to Reed, "Every time Billy Sing felt sorry for the poor Turks, he remembered how their snipers picked off the Australian officers in the early days of the landing, and he hardened his heart. But he never fired at a stretcher-bearer or any of the soldiers who were trying to rescue wounded Turks." In contrast, Hamilton said in a 2008 interview, "We have an anecdote where, after spotting an injured Turk, he said 'I'll put that poor cuss out of his agony' and just shot him. He was a very tough man." Sing's reputation resulted in a champion Turkish sniper, nicknamed 'Abdul the Terrible' by the Allied side, being assigned to deal with him. Tate alleges that the Turks were largely able to distinguish Sing's sniping from that of other ANZAC soldiers, and that only the reports of incidents believed to be Sing's work were passed on to Abdul. Through analysis of the victims' actions and wounds, Abdul concluded that Sing's position was at Chatham's Post. After several days, Sing's spotter alerted him to a potential target, and he took aim, only to find the target—Abdul—looking in his direction. Sing prepared to fire, trying not to reveal his position, but the Turkish sniper noticed him and began his own firing sequence. Sing fired first and killed Abdul. Very shortly thereafter, the Turkish artillery fired on Sing's position—he and his spotter barely managed to evacuate from Chatham's Post alive. Near the beginning of August 1915, Sing was hospitalised for four days with influenza. That same month, an enemy sniper's bullet struck Sheehan's spotting telescope, injuring his hands and face, and then hit Sing's shoulder, but the latter was back in action after a week's recuperation. Sheehan was more severely wounded, and was shipped back to Australia. This was reportedly the only time that Sing was injured at Gallipoli. He would not fare so well later on in the war. ### Sniping record Sing's marksmanship at Gallipoli saw him dubbed 'The Assassin' or 'The Murderer' by his comrades. He reportedly acquired the latter nickname due to his callous attitude towards the enemy. By early September 1915, he had taken 119 kills, according to Brigadier-General Granville Ryrie, commanding officer of the 2nd Australian Light Horse Brigade. Regimental records list Sing as having taken 150 confirmed kills, but on 23 October 1915, General William Birdwood, commander of ANZAC forces, issued an order complimenting him on his 201 unconfirmed kills. Historian Bob Courtney noted that an official kill was recorded only if the spotter saw the target fall. If the first shot missed the target, it was very risky to take a second shot, as this could give away the sniper team's position. Major Stephen Midgely estimated Sing's tally at close to 300 kills. Midgely had brought him to the attention of Birdwood, who in turn had told Lord Kitchener that "if his troops could match the capacity of the Queensland sniper the allied forces would soon be in Constantinople." Birdwood had reportedly joined Sing as his spotter on one occasion, and had the opportunity to witness his marksmanship first hand. In February 1916, Sing was Mentioned in Despatches by General Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. This was the first official recognition of his service. On 10 March 1916, he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, with a related entry in military records reading: "For conspicuous gallantry from May to September, 1915, at Anzac, as a sniper. His courage and skill were most marked, and he was responsible for a very large number of casualties among the enemy, no risk being too great for him to take." Apart from the recognition he received from his superiors, Sing's exploits were also reported in British and American newspapers of the time. ### Western Front At the end of November 1915, Sing suffered from myalgia and was confined to the hospital ship HMHS Gloucester Castle for almost two weeks. During this time, he was conveyed to Malta, then Ismaïlia, Egypt. While in Egypt, he was also hospitalised with parotitis and mumps, but rejoined his unit at the end of March 1916. Australian soldiers stationed in Egypt including Billy Sing were major customers of Egyptian prostitutes in the local red light districts and brothels. High prices by the prostitutes led to the Wasser red light area becoming the scene of a major riot by New Zealand and Australian soldiers on Good Friday in 1915. Sing transferred to the 31st Infantry Battalion on 27 July 1916 at Tel-el-Kibir and sailed to England the following month. Following a brief period of training in England, he sailed for France and entered action on the Western Front in January 1917. He was wounded in action several times, and commended many times in reports by Allied commanders. In March 1917, he was wounded in the left leg and hospitalised in England. In May 1917, while recovering in Scotland, he met waitress Elizabeth A. Stewart (c. 1896–unknown), who was the daughter of Royal Navy cook George Stewart. The two were married on 29 June 1917 in Edinburgh. In July 1917, Elizabeth Sing's address was noted in records as 6 Spring Gardens, Stockbridge, Edinburgh. After a month with his new wife, Sing returned to the trenches in France in August 1917, but was in very poor health due to his battle wounds and the effects of gas poisoning. It is not clear whether he operated as a sniper on the Western Front, but in September 1917, he led a unit in the Battle of Polygon Wood in counter-sniper operations. For this action, he was awarded the Oorlogskruis (Belgian Croix de Guerre) in 1918, and was also recommended for the Military Medal—but never received it. In November 1917, he was confined to hospital again due to problems with his previously wounded leg. In mid-February 1918, he was hospitalised due to a gunshot wound in the back. Sing suffered lung disease from his exposure to gas, and it soon brought his military career to an end. ## Return to civilian life Sing returned to Australia on submarine guard duty in late July 1918. An army medical report from 23 November 1918 noted that he had gunshot wounds in the left shoulder, back, and left leg, and had suffered gas poisoning. The report stated that his general health was 'good' but that he complained of coughing upon exertion. It recognised that Sing's disability were the result of service, was permanent, and recommended that he be discharged as permanently unfit for service. Following his departure from the army, he briefly turned his hand to sheep farming, but the land he was given was of poor quality. He then worked as a gold miner. According to some accounts, Sing and his wife were honoured by the local community when they arrived in Proserpine, Queensland, in late 1918. Other accounts, however, state that although Sing arranged for passage from Scotland to Australia for his wife, there was no evidence that she made the journey. If Sing's wife did come to Australia, it appears that she left her husband after a few years; Tate suggests that the "transition from the green hills and ancient culture of Edinburgh to the dust and rough life of the mining district around Clermont must have been traumatic for Elizabeth Sing" and might have been a reason for her departure. Recent research has shown that Elizabeth remained in Edinburgh. She had had a daughter (Mary) in 1919 and a son (Theo) in 1924, to different fathers (neither of whom was Billy Sing). She travelled to Australia during 1925 with her two children, and settled in Paddington, NSW. She adopted the surname of her son's father. She lived in New South Wales with her son's father until her death in Wollongong in the 1970s. It is not known whether she had any contact with Billy after her arrival in Australia. ## Later life and death In later life, Sing reported chest, back, and heart pain. His final days were spent in relative poverty and obscurity. His elder sister or half-sister, Mary Ann Elizabeth, had died in childbirth in 1915. In 1942, Sing moved from Miclere to Brisbane, telling his surviving sister Beatrice that it was cheaper to live there. His final occupation was as a labourer. Sing died alone in his room in a boarding house in West End, Brisbane, on 19 May 1943. The cause of death was a ruptured aorta. His only significant possessions were a hut (worth around £20) on a mining claim and a mere 5 shillings found with him in his room. There was no sign of his medals from World War I, and his employers owed him around £6 in wages. Sing was buried in the Lutwyche War Cemetery, in Kedron, a northern suburb of Brisbane. His grave is now part of the lawn cemetery section of the Lutwyche Cemetery, and the inscription on his bronze plaque reads: > AT REST > WILLIAM EDWARD (BILLY) SING (DCM) > Born Clermont Qld. 2–3–1886 — 19–5–1943 > Reg. No. 355 Australian Fifth Light Horse Regiment and later the 31st Infantry Battalion > Son of JOHN SING (bn. SHANGHAI) and MARY ANN (nee PUGH bn. ENGLAND) > AND MARRIED FOR A TIME TO ELIZABETH (STEWART) IN EDINBURGH 29–6–1917 > A man of all trades, Pte. Sing was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for conspicuous gallantry, the Belgian Croux [sic] De Guerre and mentioned often in despatches. Serving at Gallipoli and in France from 1915–1918, he became known as Australia's most effective marksman/sniper accounting for more than 150 of the opposing forces. > His incredible accuracy contributed greatly to the preservation of the lives of those with whom he served during a war always remembered for countless acts of valour and tragic carnage. ## Legacy The Queensland Military Historical Society set up a bronze plaque at 304 Montague Road, South Brisbane, where Sing had died. In 1995, a statue of Sing was unveiled with honour in his home town of Clermont. In 2004, an Australian Army sniper team in Baghdad named their post the 'Billy Sing Bar & Grill.' On 19 May 2009, the 66th anniversary of Sing's death, the Chinese Consul-General, Ren Gongping, along with Returned and Services League of Australia officers and community leaders, laid wreaths at his grave. Ren said, "Billy Sing is a symbol of the long history of Chinese in Australia, and the great role they have played in your nation's past ... It also reminds us that China and Australia were allies through both world wars, and that we have a long and proud shared past." Sing's life was recounted in a chapter of Laws and Stewart's book, There's always more to the story (2006), and in greater depth by Hamilton in his book, Gallipoli Sniper: The life of Billy Sing (2008). Hamilton's book includes a detailed account of how snipers worked at Gallipoli and their contribution to the progress of the campaign. Reviewer John Wadsley wrote that "Hamilton is able to bring together a range of sources to create the story, and while at times, you get the feeling he is padding it out to make up for the lack of direct material about Billy Sing, the book works." A television mini-series, The Legend of Billy Sing, was in post-production as of 2010. Despite some reports that it was based on Hamilton's book, the author maintained that he was never contacted by the film makers. Although Sing and his father were partly Chinese and fully Chinese, respectively, the mini-series portrayed them with actors of European ancestry. The director, Geoff Davis, was criticised for this decision. Politician Bill O'Chee, a member of the Billy Sing Commemorative Committee, said, "When a person dies, all that is left is their story, and you can’t take a person’s name and not tell the truth about their story." Davis has said, "Whatever [Sing's] genetic background, his culture was Australian. To me, he's very representative of every Australian whose parents were not born here. ... A lot of people are sitting at the back of this bus attacking the driver. A lot of people feel they own the story of Billy Sing. But they've probably got more resources than me—if they want to tell that story, then tell it." Hamilton characterised Sing as "a cold-blooded killer ... [yet] a man with a sense of humour ... the Anzac angel of death," and Laws and Stewart described him simply as "one of many Australians of Chinese descent who served with distinction in the Australian forces during World War I." Around 400 people of Chinese descent served in Australia's military forces during the 20th century. For the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Gallipoli landings, a monument was erected to Sing in the Lutwyche Cemetery in Brisbane, near his grave stone, by the 31st Battalion Association Brisbane Branch, in conjunction with Kedron Wavell RSL, Chermside & Didtrict Historical Society & Chinese Association of Qld. It was officially unveiled on the anniversary of his death. Each year on the weekend immediately before Anzac Day (25 April), the William 'Billy' Sing Memorial Shooting Competition is held at the North Arm Rifle Range on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland using the Lee Enfield military service rifle. The competition is held over several hundred meters worth of stages with the highest scorer awarded the William 'Billy' Sing Memorial Trophy. ## See also - Caleb Shang - History of Chinese Australians - White Australia policy

Sukhoi Su-35

Upgraded series of the Su-27 fighter aircraft

The Sukhoi Su-35 (Russian: Сухой Су-35; NATO reporting name: Flanker-E) is the designation for two improved derivatives of the Su-27 air-defence fighter. They are single-seat, twin-engine, supermaneuverable air superiority fighters, designed by the Sukhoi Design Bureau and built by Sukhoi. The type was originally developed by the Soviet Union from the Su-27 and was known as the Su-27M. It incorporated canards and a multi-function radar giving it multi-role capabilities. The first prototype made its maiden flight in June 1988. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union Sukhoi re-designated it as the Su-35 to attract export orders. Fourteen aircraft were produced and used for tests and demonstrations; one example had thrust-vectoring engines and was in turn redesignated the Su-37. A sole Su-35UB two-seat trainer was also built in the late 1990s that resembled the Su-30MK family. In 2003, Sukhoi embarked on a second modernization of the Su-27 to serve as an interim aircraft awaiting the development of the Sukhoi PAK FA (Su-57) program. Also known as the Su-35, this version has a redesigned cockpit and weapons-control system and features thrust-vectoring engines in place of the canards. The type made its first flight in February 2008. Although it was designed for export, the Russian Air Force became the launch customer in 2009, with the production version designated Su-35S. China's People's Liberation Army Air Force has also placed orders. ## Design and development ### Upgraded Su-27 The first aircraft design to receive the Su-35 designation had its origins in the early 1980s, at a time when the Su-27 was being introduced into service with the Soviet Armed Forces. The definitive production version of the Su-27, which had the factory code of T-10S, started mass ("serial") production with the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Production Association (KnAAPO) in 1983. The following year, this Su-27 version reached initial operational readiness with the Soviet Air Defence Forces. Having begun work on an upgraded Su-27 variant in 1982, the Sukhoi Design Bureau was instructed in December 1983 by the Soviet Council of Ministers to use the Su-27 as the basis for the development of the Su-27M (T-10M). Nikolay Nikitin would lead the design effort throughout much of the project's existence, under the oversight of General Director Mikhail Simonov, who had been the chief designer of the Su-27 along with Mikhail Pogosyan. While sharing broadly the blended wing-body design of the Su-27, the Su-27M is visibly distinguished from the basic version by the addition of canards, which are small lifting surfaces, ahead of the wings. First tested in 1985 using an experimental aircraft, the canards, in complement with the reshaped wing leading-edge extension, redirected the airflow in such a way so as to eliminate buffeting at high angles of attack and allowed the airframe to sustain 10-g manoeuvres (as opposed to 9 g on the Su-27) without additional structural reinforcement. More importantly, when working with the relaxed-stability design and the accompanying fly-by-wire flight-control system, the aerodynamic layout improved the aircraft's manoeuvrability and enabled it to briefly fly with its nose past the vertical while maintaining forward momentum. Because of this, theoretically, during combat the pilot could pitch the Su-27M up 120 degrees in under two seconds and fire missiles at the target. Other notable visible changes compared to the T-10S design included taller vertical tails, provisions for in-flight refuelling and the use of two-wheel nose undercarriage to support the heavier airframe. Besides the increase in manoeuvrability, another feature that distinguished the Su-27M from the original design was the new weapons-control system. The centrepiece of this system was the multi-function N011 Bars (literally "Leopard") phased-array radar with pulse-Doppler tracking that allowed it to detect targets below the horizon. First installed on the third prototype, the radar transformed the Su-27M from simply being an air-defence fighter into a multi-role aircraft capable of attacking ground targets. Compared to the N001 Myech ("Sword") radar of the Su-27, which could track 10 targets and only direct two missiles towards one target at a time, the new radar could track fifteen targets and direct missiles towards six of them simultaneously. The extra weight of the N011 radar at the front of the aircraft necessitated the addition of the canards; engineers would only later discover the aerodynamic advantages of these devices. In addition, an N012 self-defence radar was housed in the rearward-projecting tail boom, making the aircraft the first in the world to have such a radar. Other changes to the aircraft included the use of uprated turbofan engines, as well as the increased use of lightweight composites and aluminium-lithium alloys in the aircraft's structure. ### Testing and demonstration In 1987, Sukhoi started converting the first prototype (designated T10M-1) from a T-10S airframe at its experimental plant in Moscow. Although it had canards, the first prototype, like several subsequent aircraft, lacked the many physical alterations of the new design. It made its first flight after conversion on 28 June 1988, piloted by Oleg Tsoi, followed by the second prototype in January 1989. Following the conversions of the two Su-27M prototypes, the actual production of the aircraft was transferred to the country's Far East where it was carried out by KnAAPO. The third aircraft (T10M-3), which was the first new-built Su-27M and first to be constructed by KnAAPO, made its first flight in April 1992. By then, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, and the ensuing economic crisis in Russia throughout the 1990s meant that the original plan to mass-produce the aircraft between 1996 and 2005 was abandoned, with the aircraft to serve as experimental test-beds to validate the canards, the flight-control system and thrust-vectoring technology. In total, two prototypes, nine flying pre-production and three production aircraft were constructed by 1995; the production aircraft were delivered in 1996 to the Russian Air Force for weapons testing. By the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Sukhoi had been demonstrating the Su-27M to senior defence and government officials. With its debut to a Western audience at the 1992 Farnborough Airshow, the company redesignated the aircraft as Su-35. The aircraft subsequently made flying demonstrations overseas in an effort to attract export orders, starting in November 1993 with Dubai, where Viktor Pugachev flew it in a mock aerial engagement with an Su-30MK in front of spectators. The aircraft thereafter flew in Berlin and Paris, and would be a regular feature at Moscow's MAKS Air Show. The Russian government cleared the aircraft for export during Sukhoi's unsuccessful sales campaign in South Korea during the late 1990s and early 2000s; the company also marketed the aircraft to Brazil, China and the United Arab Emirates. As the flight-test programme of the Su-27M proceeded, engineers discovered that the pilot failed to maintain active control of the aircraft during certain manoeuvres, such as the Pugachev's Cobra. The eleventh Su-27M (T10M-11) was therefore equipped with thrust-vectoring engine nozzles in 1995, and the resultant Su-37 technology demonstrator made its first flight on 2 April 1996. It also tested the enhanced N011M radar, as did the twelfth developmental Su-27M. The Su-37's ability to maintain a high angle of attack while flying at close to zero airspeed attracted considerable press attention. It later received different engines and updated fly-by-wire controls and cockpit systems for evaluation. Apart from the single-seat design, a two-seat aircraft was also constructed. Working in cooperation with Sukhoi, KnAAPO's own engineers designed the Su-35UB so as to combine thrust-vectoring engines with features of the Su-27M. Modified from an Su-30MKK airframe, the aircraft made its first flight on 7 August 2000, and afterwards served as an avionics test-bed. While the original Su-27M never entered mass production due to a lack of funding, Sukhoi refined the Su-27M's use of canards and the Su-37's thrust-vectoring technology and later applied them to the Su-30MKI two-seat fighter for the Indian Air Force. The tenth Su-27M (T10M-10) also served as a test-bed for the Saturn AL-41FS engine that is intended for the Sukhoi Su-57 (previously known under the acronym "PAK FA") jet fighter. ### Modernization With the need to update Russia's aging fleet of Su-27 aircraft, Sukhoi and KnAAPO in 2002 started integrating glass cockpits and improved weapons-control systems (to accommodate a greater variety of weapons) to existing air force aircraft. The Su-27SM, as the modified aircraft is called, made its first flight in December 2002. The initial success of this project led Sukhoi in December 2003 to proceed with a follow-up modernization programme. Known internally as T-10BM, the programme was aimed at a more thorough redesign of the airframe to narrow the qualitative gap between Russian aircraft and foreign fourth-generation aircraft. The resultant design, also designated Su-35, would serve as an interim solution pending the introduction of the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter, many features of which the aircraft would incorporate. Additionally, the aircraft was to be a single-seat alternative to the two-seat Su-30MK on the export market. In many respects, the T-10BM design outwardly resembles the Su-27 more than the Su-27M. During tests of the thrust-vectoring engines and the Su-27M's aerodynamic layout, Sukhoi had concluded that the loss of manoeuvrability due to the removal of the canards – the design of which imposed a weight penalty on the airframe – could be compensated for by the addition of thrust-vectoring nozzles. Industry progress in the fields of avionics and radars have also reduced the weight and size of such components, which shifted the centre of gravity of an aircraft rearward. Therefore, designers removed the canards (and the dorsal air brake) found on the Su-27M; the size of the vertical tails, aft-cockpit hump and tail boom were also reduced. With such changes, as well as the increased use of aluminium and titanium alloys and composites, designers had reduced the empty weight of the aircraft, while maintaining a similar maximum take-off weight to the Su-27M. While the Su-27M design had the avionics to give the aircraft the nominal designation as a multi-role fighter, flight tests with the Russian Air Force revealed difficulties in efficiently deploying the aircraft's armament. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, air force pilots described weapons trials with the aircraft in Akhtubinsk and Lipetsk as a "negative experience", with a particular emphasis on the layout of the cockpit and its adverse impact on the workload of the single pilot. Designers, test pilots and avionics software specialists therefore worked together to redesign the cockpit and its attendant systems and improve the human-machine interface. The information management system of aircraft's avionics suite had been changed so that it now has two digital computers which process information from the flight- and weapons-control systems. The information is then displayed on two 9 in × 12 in (23 cm × 30 cm) multi-function liquid crystal displays, which replaced the smaller multi-function cathode-ray tube displays found on the Su-27M. The pilot can also view critical flight information on the head-up display, and is equipped with Hands On Throttle-And-Stick (HOTAS) controls. The Su-35 employs the N035 Irbis-E ("Snow Leopard") passive electronically scanned array (PESA) radar, which is a further development of the N011M radar that had been evaluated on Su-27M test-beds and constitutes the core of the Su-35's weapons-control system. It is capable of detecting an aerial target up to 400 km (250 mi; 220 nmi) away, and can track thirty airborne targets and engage eight of them simultaneously; in addition, the multi-function radar is capable of providing high-resolution images of the ground using synthetic aperture mode. The aircraft is equipped with an OLS-35 optoelectronic targeting system ahead of the cockpit to provide other forms of tracking including infra-red search and track. For defences against enemy tracking, the Su-35 is equipped with the L175M Khibiny-M electronic countermeasure system, while engineers have applied radar-absorbent materials to the engine inlets and front stages of the engine compressor to halve the Su-35's frontal radar cross-section and minimise the detection range of enemy radars. The multi-role Su-35 can deploy air-to-air missiles of up to 300-kilometre (190 mi) range, and can carry the heavy Oniks anti-ship cruise missile, as well as the multitude of air-to-ground weaponry. The Su-35 is powered by a pair of Saturn AL-41F1S turbofan engines, formerly known as izdeliye (Product) 117S. A highly upgraded variant of the AL-31F, the AL-41F1S is related to the Su-57's Saturn AL-41F1 (izdeliye 117), differing primarily in the engine control system. The engines are equipped with thrust-vectoring nozzles, which have their rotational axes canted at an angle; the nozzles operate in one plane for pitch, but the canting allows the aircraft to produce both roll and yaw by vectoring each engine nozzle differently; this configuration was first implemented on the Su-30MKI and is also used on the Su-57. The Su-35's thrust-vectoring system and integrated flight- and propulsion-control systems allow the aircraft to attain "supermaneuverability", enabling it to perform post-stall manoeuvres at low speeds. This differs from Western air combat doctrine, which emphasises the maintenance of a fighter aircraft's kinetic energy. The engine gives the Su-35 the limited ability to sustain supersonic speed without the use of afterburners. According to Carlo Kopp of the think tank Air Power Australia, such a "supercruise" feature allows the Su-35 to engage an opponent at a greater speed and altitude and increases the range of its long-range missiles by 30–40 percent. He cites the aircraft's mature airframe and carefully balanced combination of advanced technology as allowing the Su-35 to achieve a favourable exchange rate against the F-35 stealth fighter. The US Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin had refuted criticisms of the F-35, saying that it is 400 percent more effective in air-to-air combat than any aircraft other than the F-22. ### Testing and production Following the completion of design work, KnAAPO constructed the first prototype, which was finished in mid-2007. The prototype, Su-35-1, was then transferred to the Gromov Flight Research Institute at Zhukovsky Airfield, in preparation for its maiden flight. On 19 February 2008, Sergey Bogdan took the aircraft aloft for its 55-minute first flight from Zhukovsky. Bogdan later piloted the second prototype on its maiden flight on 2 October from KnAAPO's Dzyomgi Airport. The flight-test programme was expected to involve three flying prototypes, but on 26 April 2009, a day before its scheduled maiden flight, the fourth Su-35 (there's a static test aircraft) crashed during a taxi run at Dzyomgi Airport. The aircraft struck a barrier at the end of the runway and was destroyed by fire; the pilot ejected and sustained burn injuries. The cause of the accident was the failure of the engine management system, as a result of which the afterburner was not turned off. The Su-35 project was aimed primarily at the export market. During the early stages of the flight-test programme, Sukhoi estimated that there was such a market for 160 aircraft, with a particular emphasis on Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Some of the candidate countries, such as Algeria, Malaysia, and India, were already operators of the Su-30MK family. As the aircraft was to be available for export starting in 2010, the actual launch order for 48 Su-35S aircraft was placed by the Russian Defence Ministry at the 2009 MAKS Air Show (as part of a larger deal worth US\$2.5 billion for 64 fighter aircraft). During the type's international debut at the 2013 Paris Air Show, Mikhail Pogosyan, General Director of Sukhoi's parent company United Aircraft Corporation, stated that there was an estimated demand for 200 aircraft, split evenly between the domestic and export markets. It was not until the end of 2015 when the first export contract was signed with China; by then, the Russian government had placed a follow-up order for 50 aircraft. Apart from the launch order at the 2009 MAKS Air Show, the Russian government and the state-owned VEB development bank agreed to provide Sukhoi with capital for the aircraft's production. In November 2009, KnAAPO (which was renamed KnAAZ in 2013 after it became part of the Sukhoi Company) started manufacturing the first production aircraft, the general assembly of which was completed in October 2010; by then, pilots and engineers had successfully completed preliminary tests of the aircraft's systems. The first Su-35S took its maiden flight in May 2011, and would be delivered (along with other aircraft) to Akhtubinsk to start state joint tests with the Defence Ministry to prepare the aircraft for service. Because production of the Su-35S occurred alongside trials, some early-production aircraft were later modified as a result of such tests. In December 2018, United Aircraft Corporation has reported 100th serial Su-35S was produced at the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant. ## Operational history ### Russia In 1996, three production Su-27Ms were delivered to the air force's 929th State Flight Test Centre named for V. P. Chkalov (GLITs) at Vladimirovka air base [ru], Akhtubinsk, to perform weapons trials. In 2001, the air force decided to transfer several Su-27Ms to re-equip the Russian Knights aerobatics team, and so the team's pilots took familiarisation flights with the aircraft. The three production and two other pre-production Su-27Ms arrived at the team's Kubinka air base near Moscow in 2003. However, they were used as a source of spare parts for other aircraft in the demonstration fleet. Initially, one static and three flyable prototypes (bort no. 901, 902, 904) were built between 2007 and 2009. The third one (bort no. 904) was later destroyed when it crashed into a barrier during its taxi runs. The first contract for 48 production aircraft was signed at the 2009 MAKS Air show in Moscow. In May 2011, Sukhoi delivered the first Su-35S to Akhtubinsk to conduct state joint tests with the Defence Ministry to prepare for operational service. The first of two stages of the trials commenced in August 2011. By March 2012, the two prototypes and four production aircraft were conducting flights to test the type's technical characteristics, which were assessed by the end of that year to have generally complied with requirements. A batch of six production aircraft was handed over in December 2012. In February 2013, five of these at the Gromov Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky started the second stage of the trials, focusing on the Su-35's weapons and combat maneuverability. Twelve production Su-35Ss were delivered in December 2013, followed by another twelve production aircraft in February 2014, ten of which were handed over to the 23rd Fighter Aviation Regiment stationed in the Far East with the remaining two tasked with carrying out the final phase of state joint tests. The handover marked its official entry into operational service. Several Su-35Ss were later transferred to Lipetsk to further develop combat tactics and to train service personnel. The Russia's Su-35Ss are also permanently based at Besovets air base near the Finnish border, and at Centralnaya Uglovaya air base near Vladivostok. The introduction of the Su-35S into the service with the Russian Aerospace Forces is a part of the Russia's state armament programme for 2011–2020 that was formulated following the war with Georgia in 2008 with an aim to significantly increase the number of modern military equipment in the Russian Armed Forces. The aircraft is delivered alongside the Su-30M2 and Su-30SM and the heavier Su-34 strike aircraft. The first two are domestic variants of KnAAPO's Su-30MK2 and Irkut's Su-30MKI two-seat export aircraft. According to reports, the simultaneous acquisition of three fighter derivatives of the original Su-27 was to support the two aircraft manufacturers amidst a slump in export orders. The Su-30M2 serves as a trainer aircraft for the Su-35. The Su-35S attained full operational capability (FOC) in late 2018. In July 2020, the Russian Knights aerobatic team received eight new Su-35Ss as an addition to its previously acquired Su-30SM aircraft. The 185th Combat Training and Combat Application Center, also known as an aggressor squadron of the Russian Aerospace Forces, has received three new Su-35S on 9 September 2022. #### 2015 Russian military intervention in Syria In January 2016, Russia made the first combat deployment of the Su-35S when it sent four aircraft to Syria. This occurred following the increased tensions between Russia and Turkey as result of reported incursions by Russian aircraft into the Turkish airspace and the shooting down of a Russian Su-24 bomber by a Turkish F-16 fighter in November 2015. The Su-35Ss deployed to Syria are to provide air cover for Su-30SMs flying combat air patrols as well as for other Russian aircraft when on bombing missions. Its combat deployment to Syria helped to find and subsequently resolve number of problems, for example with the aircraft avionics. Su-35s in Syria have been seen carrying unguided bombs, with Russian sources claiming that the Su-35 has carried out strikes against ground targets using guided weapons. On 20 August 2019, two Russian Aerospace Forces Su-35Ss, operating from the Khmeimim Air Base, intercepted two Turkish Air Force F-16s over the southern Idlib and forced them to leave the Syrian airspace. Russian Su-35Ss again intercepted several Israeli aircraft over southern Syria on 10 September 2019 and prevented them from carrying out airstrikes. Another interception allegedly occurred on 19 September 2019, when two Russian Su-35Ss intercepted Israeli aircraft preparing to attack suburbs of Damascus. On 15 October 2019, a Turkish F-16 fighter was intercepted by Russian Su-35Ss and forced to retreat as it was attempting to bomb the Syrian Democratic Forces's headquarters in Manbij. On 12 November 2019, Russian Su-35Ss intercepted an Israeli fighter during airstrikes on Damascus. On 7 December 2019, several Israeli aircraft were intercepted by Russian Su-35Ss and forced to retreat during an attempt to bomb the T-4 Airbase. #### 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Russian Su-30SM and Su-35S fighters were used for air superiority missions during the war. At least seven air-to-air victories were reported over Ukrainian jet aircraft and one over a Ukrainian Naval Aviation Mil Mi-14. On 3 April 2022, a Russian Su-35S was shot down by Ukrainian forces, with the pilot ejecting and being captured; the pilot stated that his Su-35S was shot down near Izyum while battling Ukrainian air defenses. On 9 May, the Ukraine Defence Ministry confirmed that Colonel Ihor Bedzay, the deputy head of the Ukrainian Navy Aviation Office, was killed in action. His Mi-14PS was shot down by a Russian Su-35. On 19 July, the Ukrainian Air Force command claimed that a Su-35 was shot down by Ukrainian air defences near Kakhovka, but at the time there were no photos confirming the loss. In early February 2023, photos of the crash site emerged, confirming the crashed plane was an Su-35S. ### China During the early 1990s, sales arrangements for the Su-27M were discussed with China. In 1995, Sukhoi officials announced a co-production proposal contingent on Beijing's agreement to purchase 120 aircraft. However, the Russian Foreign Ministry allegedly blocked the sale of the Su-27M and Tupolev Tu-22M bomber over concerns about the arrangements for Chinese production of the Su-27 derivatives. In November 2015, China became the Su-35's first export customer when the Russian and Chinese governments signed a contract worth \$2 billion to buy 24 aircraft for the People's Liberation Army Air Force. This deal drew international commentaries due to its significance. David Ochmanek of RAND Corporation called the deal "serves both countries", as Russia relied on foreign sales to maintain its military production capacity, while China sought to enhance its military capabilities through the advanced weapon platforms such as the Su-35. However, the low number of purchases also signified that the deal was symbolic in nature, as the two countries are still competing over influence in Central Asia, according to Moritz Rudolf of Mercator Institute for China Studies. Ben Moores of IHS believed the Su-35 deal would be the last major order from China, as the Sino-Russian military cooperation saw "very little action or real substance. China doesn't need Russia as much as Russia needs China." Chinese officials had reportedly first shown interest in the Su-35 in 2006, it was not until Zhuhai Airshow 2010 that Alexander Mikheyev of the Rosoboronexport, the Russian state agency responsible for the export and import of defence products, signified that Russia was ready to start talks with China over the Su-35. Russian officials publicly confirmed that talks had been going on in 2012, when a protocol agreement on the purchase was signed. There were subsequent reports of the two countries signing a contract and of imminent deliveries, but negotiations would not actually conclude until 2015. Sales discussions were protracted due to intellectual property rights concerns. China had reverse engineered the Su-27SK and Su-33 to create the J-11B and J-15, respectively, there were fears of China copying the airframe and offer the copied design on the export market. At one stage, Rosoboronexport demanded that China issue a legally binding guarantee against copying. Chinese industry was reportedly interested in the AL-41FS1 engine and Irbis-E radar. According to The Diplomat, China held a specific interest in the Su-35's engine, and was already test-flying the J-11D, which reportedly has less range, payload, and maneuverability than the Su-35 but has an active electronically scanned array radar instead of the less advanced PESA radar of the Su-35. Rosoboronexport insisted on China purchasing a minimum of 48 aircraft to offset risks of copying; after the Kremlin intervened in 2012, the minimum quantity was lowered to 24. Another problem was China's insistence that the Su-35 include Chinese-made components and avionics. The Kremlin again intervened and conceded to this demand, allowed the deal to proceed; it was viewed as a major concession since the sales of such components are reportedly lucrative. The contract did not include any technology transfer. The Chinese military received the first four aircraft in December 2016. Followed by the first delivery, the People's Liberation Army's website opined that with the J-20's commissioning, Russia understood that the Su-35 would "lose its value on the Chinese market in the near future...we hope very much that Su-35 will be the last (combat) aircraft China imports." China has received a second batch of ten aircraft in 2017, and another ten in 2018. The Su-35S entered service with PLAAF in April 2018, and are based in Guangdong province in southeast China. In June 2019, Russia offered China a second batch of Su-35s. According to Asia Times, Chinese source remarked further purchase of Su-35 is not feasible as Russian jet offers little value over the Chinese J-16, due to the latter having superior radar, avionics and other equipment. On 20 September 2018, the U.S. imposed sanctions on China's Equipment Development Department and its director, Li Shangfu, for engaging in ′′significant transactions′′ with Rosoboronexport, specifically naming China's purchase of ten Su-35s in 2017 as well as S-400 surface-to-air missile system-related equipment in 2018. ### Potential operators #### United Arab Emirates In the mid-1990s, the United Arab Emirates evaluated the Su-27M, but later acquired the Mirage 2000 due to the country's close relationship with France. In February 2017, the country was to sign a preliminary agreement for the Su-35 purchase and also signed an agreement with Rostec, Russia's state-owned corporation responsible for the development of advanced industrial products, to develop a fifth-generation aircraft based on the MiG-29. #### India India has been reluctant to order the Sukhoi/HAL FGFA due to high cost, and it has been reported that India and Russia are studying an upgrade to the Su-35 with stealth technology (similar to the F-15 Silent Eagle) as a more affordable alternative to the FGFA (Su-57). The aircraft is competing with 7 other aircraft in a fresh tender which is referred as MMRCA 2.0 in the Indian media, for the procurement of 114 multi-role combat aircraft. #### Algeria According to Kommersant, the Algerian military had requested a Su-35 for testing in February 2016; it was reported the country was satisfied with the fighter's flight characteristics and so Moscow is waiting for a formal application. On 27 December 2019, Algeria has reportedly signed a contract for 14 aircraft as part of large military deal that also includes purchase of Su-34 and Su-57 fighters. However, neither Russian nor Algerian governments ever confirmed that such deal exists. #### Turkey In July 2019, Russia offered the Su-35 to Turkey after it was removed from the F-35 programme by United States due to the purchase of S-400 missile system. CEO of Rostec Sergey Chemezov, said, "If our Turkish colleagues express a desire, we are ready to work out the deliveries of Su-35 fighter jets". Previously in May 2019, Sergey Chemezov had said that Russia was ready to cooperate with Turkey on the export and local production of the Su-57. #### Iran Following the Russian purchase of Iranian suicide drones during the invasion in Ukraine, the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) is reportedly considering the procurement of the Sukhoi Su-35 in exchange for further delivery of ammunition, drones and ballistic missiles to the Russian Armed Forces, according to US officials. It was also reported that training of Iranian pilots has begun in spring 2022 and that the aircraft may be delivered in 2023. The deal may include 24 Su-35 jets originally built for Egypt, that have not been handed over so far. The deal was confirmed by Iranian state-owned media Tasnim news agency on 28 December 2022 and on 15 January 2023 by an Iranian MP who said that supplies will begin in the spring and also said that Iran has ordered from Russia air defense and missile systems as well as helicopters. However, in July 2023, there have been implications that Iran's Su-35 acquisition has "collapsed" due to various explanations and allegations. #### Others Following the deployment to Syria of several new Russian military systems, various countries had reportedly expressed interest in the Su-35. These countries included Algeria, Egypt, and Vietnam. Other countries that had also expressed interest in the aircraft include Kazakhstan, North Korea, and Pakistan although a Russian official denied that the country was in talks with the latter about the Su-35. Sudan has reportedly also expressed an interest in acquiring of the Su-35 fighters during the Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir's visitation of Moscow in November 2017. ### Failed bids #### Brazil In the mid-1990s, Brazilian and Russian authorities conducted talks on the possible acquisition of the Su-27M. In 2001, the Brazilian government launched the F-X tender, the objective of which was to procure at least 12 aircraft to replace the Brazilian Air Force's ageing aircraft, primarily the Mirage IIIs. Since the Brazilian government was also looking to develop the country's aerospace and defence industries, Sukhoi partnered with the Brazilian defence contractor Avibras during the tender. The two companies submitted the Su-27M to the US\$700-million tender, and included an offset agreement wherein the Brazilian industry would have participated in the manufacturing of certain aircraft equipment. The tender was suspended in 2003 because of domestic political issues and then scrapped in 2005, pending the availability of new fighters. The Su-27M was preferred over the next favourite, the Mirage 2000BR; had the aircraft been purchased, it would have been the first heavy fighter delivered to Latin America. With the tender relaunched in 2007 as the F-X2 competition, the Brazilian Defence Ministry looked to purchase at least 36 aircraft – with a potential for 84 additional aircraft – to replace the country's A-1Ms, F-5BRs, and Mirage IIIs. Among the participants were the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, F-16BR, JAS Gripen NG, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon and the modernized Su-35. Although the Brazilian government eliminated the Su-35 in 2008, Rosoboronexport subsequently offered to sell the country 120 aircraft with full technology transfer, as well as participation in the PAK FA programme. In December 2013, the Gripen NG light fighter was selected because of its low cost and the transfer of technology to the Brazilian industry. #### Egypt In March 2019, it was reported that Egypt would procure "over two dozen" Su-35s from Russia in a deal valued about \$US2 billion, finalized in late 2018. Deliveries were expected to begin as early as 2020 or 2021. Deputy head of the Rosoboronexport Sergei Kornev denied the signing of any contract to supply Su-35s to Egypt. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Egypt against buying Su-35s, saying "if those systems were to be purchased, the CAATSA statute would require sanctions on the regime." On 19 May 2020, Russia began Su-35 production for Egypt, and first five production aircraft took off from the KnAAZ plant on 28 July 2020. By June 2021, in total 17 aircraft were produced for Egypt. Egyptian newspaper Arabo reported on 5 January 2022, Egypt, Algeria and Indonesia announced that they would cancel their Su-35 orders with Russia. In March 2022, an agreement with the US to sell variants of F-15Es to the Egyptian Air Force was announced which confirms that Egypt either abandoned or cancelled the Su-35 deal and the planes originally produced for Egypt will be delivered to Iran instead. A contract needs to be finalized after price and delivery date are determined. #### Indonesia In 2014, Russia offered the Su-35 to Indonesia to replace its ageing F-5E Tiger II fleet. The following year, the Indonesian Ministry of Defense selected the Su-35 ahead of the Eurofighter Typhoon, Dassault Rafale, F-16, and Saab JAS 39 Gripen; the Defense Ministry cited the Indonesian Air Force's familiarity with the Su-27SK and Su-30MK2 as the reason for its selection. By 2017, negotiations between the two parties over the Su-35 had reached an advanced stage, with the Indonesian government later agreed in principle to conduct a barter trade of agricultural products for a reported eleven aircraft. In February 2018, Russia and Indonesia finalised a contract for 11 aircraft, worth \$1.14 billion. The first delivery was expected in October 2018, but was delayed to 2019. On 12 March 2020, Bloomberg reported that Indonesia canceled the deal due to the US pressure and is instead looking to negotiate an order for F-35s. On 18 March 2020, Indonesia's Deputy Defense Minister Sakti Wahyu Trenggono confirmed that the government had not revoked the procurement despite facing unnamed "obstacles". On 8 July 2020, Russian Ambassador to Indonesia, Lyudmila Vorobieva stated that Indonesia's plan to buy 11 Su-35s from Russia is still continuing. In February 2021, the Chief of Staff of the Indonesian Air Force Air Chief Marshal Fadjar Prasetyo unveiled plans to purchase new aircraft such as F-15EX and Dassault Rafale while not mentioning the current status of the Su-35 order. However On 22 December 2021 during a Press Tour and Media Gathering, Fadjar Prasetyo has confirmed that the Su-35 purchase will not go ahead. Regarding the planned purchase of the Sukhoi Su-35, Fadjar said it would be abandoned. In June 2023 during a Ministry of Defense press conference it was stated that the Su-35 program has been constrained by the threat of CAATSA and OFAC sanctions list from the United States. #### Others In 1996, Russia submitted the Su-27M and Su-37 for South Korea's F-X programme, which sought a 40-aircraft replacement for the Republic of Korea Air Force's F-4D/Es, RF-4Cs and F-5E/Fs. The two Russian designs competed against the Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, and F-15K Slam Eagle. Sukhoi proposed a design which featured a phased-grid radar and thrust-vectoring engines, and offered full technology transfer as well as final assembly in South Korea. The US\$5 billion contract would have been partially financed through a debt-reduction deal on money Russia owed to South Korea. However, the Su-27M was eliminated early in the competition, which was won by the F-15K. A country that had been reported to be a likely early export customer for the modernized Su-35 was Venezuela. The Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez in July 2006 placed an order for 24 Su-30MK2s to replace its fleet of F-16s that were subjected to a US arms embargo. The aircraft were delivered to the Venezuelan Air Force from 2006 to 2008. The country was expected to follow up with a second order for the same type, or make a purchase of the Su-35. Despite subsequent reports that the Venezuelan government were interested in the aircraft and had placed an order for the Su-35, Libya was also expected to be an early export customer for 12 to 15 Su-35s along with other Russian weapons; however, the civil war in Libya and the resulting military intervention cancelled such plans. Russia has also offered the modernized Su-35 to India, Malaysia, and Greece; no firm contracts have materialised, with the first two countries having been occupied with other fighter projects and unlikely to procure the modernized Su-35. ## Variants Su-27M/Su-35: Single-seat fighter design with a factory code of T-10M (Modernizerovany, "Upgraded"). The first two prototypes had a new forward fuselage, canards and updated fly-by-wire flight-control systems. Like three of KNAAPO's nine flying pre-production aircraft (T10M-5, T10M-6 and T10M-7), they were converted from Su-27 airframes. The third aircraft (T10M-3) was the first of seven pre-production aircraft to have the taller vertical tails, two-wheel nose undercarriage and in-flight refuel capability. The Su-27M was powered by AL-31FM turbofan engines. Two prototypes, nine pre-production and three production aircraft were constructed by 1995; two static-test aircraft was also constructed (T10M-0 and T10M-4). The aircraft did not enter mass production. Su-37: Technology demonstrator, converted from the eleventh developmental Su-27M (T10M-11). The Su-37 featured a digital fly-by-wire flight-control system, a glass cockpit, the N011M radar, and AL-31FP engines with thrust-vectoring nozzles. The aircraft was later fitted with standard-production AL-31F engines, and had its flight-control system and cockpit systems revised. Su-35UB: Two-seat trainer designed and built by KnAAPO. The single aircraft (T-10UBM-1) featured the canards and taller vertical tails of the Su-27M and a forward fuselage similar to the Su-30MKK. The Su-35UB also shared the avionics suite of the Su-30MKK, although it had a different fly-by-wire flight-control system to accommodate the canards. The aircraft was powered by AL-31FP engines with thrust-vectoring nozzles. Although a training aircraft, the Su-35UB was designed to be fully combat-capable. Su-35BM: Single-seat fighter that is a major redesign of the original Su-27. The type features significant modifications to the airframe, including the removal of canards and dorsal air brake as found on the Su-27M. It features the updated N035 Irbis-E radar and a redesigned cockpit. The aircraft is powered by thrust-vectoring AL-41F1S turbofan engines that are capable of supercruise. Also known as T-10BM (Bolshaya Modernizatsiya, "Major Modernization"), Su-35BM is not the actual designation used by Sukhoi, who markets the aircraft as "Su-35". Su-35S: Su-35S is the production designator for the T-10BM design for the Russian Aerospace Forces. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, "S" stands for Stroyevoy ("Combatant"). NATO reporting name Flanker-M. The Flanker M is the latest version of the Sukhoi Su-35, known internally as the Su-35BM (bolshaya modernizatsiya – big modernization), and is an advanced capability multirole air superiority fighter developed from the Su-27. The aircraft has high maneuverability (+9g) with a high angle of attack, and is equipped with high-capability weapon systems that contribute to the new aircraft’s exceptional dogfighting capability. The Russian Air Force ordered 48 Sukhoi Su-35S jets in August 2009 with deliveries scheduled to run until 2015. Sukhoi began producing the components required for assembly of the aircraft in November 2009. An information management system integrated with onboard subsystems and a new phased array radar system with long-range aerial target detection have been installed in the aircraft. The first Su-35S aircraft was handed over to the 929th State Flight Test Centre (GLITS) for flight tests in August 2011. The Russian Ministry of Defence received six Su-35S production aircraft from Sukhoi in December 2012. In 2015, China ordered 24 Su-35S aircraft for China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Indonesian Air Force placed an order for 11 Su-35S fighter jets in February 2018. ## Operators China - People's Liberation Army Air Force – 24 aircraft in inventory. - 6th Aviation Brigade – Suixi air base, Guangdong Russia - Russian Aerospace Forces – 110 aircraft in inventory as of December 2022. New deliveries conducted in June and July 2023. The third order for 30 aircraft finalised in August 2020 is to increase the total number to 128. - 23rd Fighter Aviation Regiment – Dzyomgi Airport, Khabarovsk Krai - 22nd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment – Centralnaya Uglovaya Air Base, Primorsky Krai - 159th Fighter Aviation Regiment – Besovets Air Base, Republic of Karelia - 790th Fighter Aviation Regiment – Borisovsky Khotilovo Air Base, Tver Oblast - 4th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining of Personnel – Lipetsk Air Base, Lipetsk Oblast - 929th State Flight-Test Centre – Vladimirovka Air Base, Astrakhan Oblast - Khmeimim Air Base, Latakia, Syria ## Notable accidents The fourth Su-35BM prototype was destroyed in a high-speed taxi run on 26 April 2009 due to brake failure. The aircraft crashed into the barrier at the end of the runway and was destroyed. The pilot ejected and sustained burn injuries. On 31 July 2021, a Su-35S fighter crashed after suffering an engine failure during a routine training mission in the Khabarovsk Territory in Russia, according to statement from the Russian Defence Ministry. According to a preliminary investigation reported by the Russian newspaper Top War, the Su-35 suffered technical malfunctions in the environment control systems that indicate heating and cooling functions. ## Specifications (Su-35S) ## Notable appearances in media ## See also

Action of 26 April 1797

Minor naval engagement during the French Revolutionary Wars

The action of 26 April 1797 was a minor naval engagement during the French Revolutionary Wars in which a Spanish convoy of two frigates was trapped and defeated off the Spanish town of Conil de la Frontera by British ships of the Cadiz blockade. The British vessels, the ship of the line HMS Irresistible and the Fifth-rate frigate HMS Emerald, were significantly more powerful than the Spanish frigates, which were on the last stage of a voyage carrying treasure from Havana, Cuba, to the Spanish fleet base of Cadiz. The British commander, Captain George Martin, succeeded in chasing the Spanish vessels into the rocky Conil Bay, where they surrendered after a brief engagement in which the Spanish suffered significantly higher casualties than the British. One of the Spanish ships, the Santa Elena, was subsequently wrecked on the shore, while the other, the Ninfa, was captured and later recommissioned into the Royal Navy. The treasure carried on board the frigates, however, had been removed by a Spanish fishing boat before the battle and so did not fall into British hands. ## Background In late 1796, with the French Revolutionary Wars three years old, a major shift occurred in the conflict when the Kingdom of Spain, until that point an enemy of the French Republic, abruptly changed sides following the signing of the Treaty of San Ildefonso. This reversal forced the British Royal Navy to retire from the Mediterranean Sea to preserve its lines of communication, falling back to the mouth of the Tagus River near Lisbon. From the Tagus, pressure was placed on the Spanish Navy by the erstwhile British Mediterranean Fleet under Vice-Admiral Sir John Jervis, who organised a blockade of the main Spanish fleet base at Cádiz on the country's Southern Atlantic coast. This resulted in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent on 14 February 1797, when Jervis inflicted a stinging defeat on the Spanish fleet. The surviving Spanish ships limped back to Cádiz after the battle, and to ensure that they could not sail again without risking a repeat action, Jervis arranged a close blockade of the port so that by April there were 21 British ships of the line and numerous frigates watching the Spanish fleet at anchor. The blockade of Cádiz was designed not only to contain the main Spanish fleet, but also to disrupt Spanish communications and transport. Cádiz was the principal port of Southern Spain and thus an important destination for shipping from across the Spanish Empire. This included numerous so-called "treasure ships", heavily armed warships that convoyed the gold and silver from the Spanish colonies in the Americas to the Spanish mainland. For centuries, Spanish treasure ships had been the ultimate prize for Royal Navy captains, and the sums of prize money involved were enormous. In October 1799 for example, a Spanish treasure convoy was captured off Vigo and the British captains alone were awarded £40,730 each (the equivalent of £ as of 2023). ## Battle At 06:00 on 26 April 1797, the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Irresistible under Captain George Martin and the 36-gun frigate HMS Emerald under Captain Velterers Cornewall Berkeley were sailing at the southern edge of Jervis' (now known as Earl St. Vincent) fleet. While cruising close to the Spanish coast two unknown ships were sighted. Martin immediately ordered his ships to give chase and the strangers fled with Martin's vessels in pursuit. The new arrivals were two Spanish 34-gun frigates, the Santa Elena and Ninfa, bound to Cádiz from Havana with a cargo of silver specie. The captains of these Spanish ships had unwittingly sailed into the midst of the blockade fleet the previous night, but had had a fortunate encounter with a Spanish fishing vessel which had warned them of the danger. Acting quickly, the captains off-loaded their treasure into the fishing boat with instructions to carry it safely into Cádiz. The Spanish captains, recognising that they were outmatched by the larger British vessels, attempted to shelter in Conil Bay, a rocky stretch of coastline near the village of Conil de la Frontera to the north of Cape Trafalgar. At 14:30 they were discovered by Martin's ships, which had to carefully negotiate a large rock formation known as the Laja de Cape Rocha which protected the head of the bay. With this obstacle successfully behind them, Irresistible and Emerald attacked the anchored Spanish frigates broadside to broadside. The action lasted an hour and a half, with the Spanish ships taking much the worst of the damage. At 16:00, both battered Spanish vessels surrendered, although as the British ships launched boats to take possession of their prizes, the crew of Santa Elena hacked through the anchor cables and allowed their ship to drift onto the rocky shoreline where they disembarked and escaped inland. ## Aftermath Martin ordered Ninfa to be secured by his men and Santa Elena to be towed off the rocks with the intention of salvaging the vessel. The tow succeeded in freeing the wrecked ship, but she sank soon afterwards in the deeper water of Conil Bay. All of the treasure which the Spanish frigates had carried was subsequently safely transported into Cadiz by the fishing boat whose secret cargo was not suspected by the British blockade forces. Spanish losses in the engagement amounted to 18 killed and 30 wounded, the British losing one man killed and one wounded on Irresistible. Ninfa was subsequently purchased by the Royal Navy and commissioned as the 36-gun frigate HMS Hamadryad. In his dispatch to the Admiralty regarding the action, Earl St. Vincent noted that the action was "one of the most notable that had ever come under my observation". The blockade of Cadiz remained in force with varying degrees of intensity for the remainder of the year, with the British fleet retiring to the Tagus during the winter.

Kandahar massacre

2012 murders by a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan

The Kandahar massacre, also called the Panjwai massacre, was a mass murder that occurred in the early hours of 11 March 2012, when United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales murdered 16 Afghan civilians and wounded six others in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Nine of his victims were children, and 11 of the dead were from the same family. Some of the corpses were partially burned. Bales was taken into custody later that morning when he told authorities, "I did it". The U.S. and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) authorities apologized for the deaths. Afghan authorities condemned the act, describing it as "intentional murder". The National Assembly of Afghanistan passed a resolution demanding a public trial in Afghanistan. Still, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the soldier would be tried under U.S. military law. Bales pleaded guilty on 5 June 2013 to 16 counts of premeditated murder in exchange for the prosecution not seeking a death sentence. At the time of the plea, he said he did not know why he committed the murders. On 23 August 2013, Bales was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. United States authorities concluded that the killings were the act of a single individual. On 15 March 2012, an Afghan parliamentary probe team consisting of several members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan had speculated that up to 20 U.S. soldiers were involved in the killings. The team later said they could not confirm claims that multiple soldiers participated in the massacre. ## Background ### "Surge" in southern Afghanistan Panjwai is the birthplace of the Taliban movement and has traditionally been a stronghold of the Taliban. It has been an area of heavy fighting and was the focus of a military surge in 2010, which brought a more than two-fold increase in airstrikes, night raids into Afghan homes, insurgent casualties, and a six-fold increase in special forces operations throughout Afghanistan. Fighting in Panjwai and adjacent Zhari, Arghandab, and Kandahar districts was particularly intense. The conflict between the civilian population and U.S. forces was exacerbated by the wholesale destruction of some villages by U.S. forces, mass arrests, murder of civilians by rogue units, and high casualties from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). One of the families targeted in the Kandahar massacre returned to the area in 2011 after being displaced by the surge. Fearing the Taliban but encouraged by the U.S. government, the Army, and the Afghan government, they settled near the U.S. military base because they thought it would be a safe place to live. Approximately three weeks before the incidents, Afghan–U.S. relations were strained by an incident where copies of the Quran were burnt at the Bagram Air Base. A couple of months before the shootings, U.S. Marines were videorecorded urinating on dead Taliban fighters. ### Allegations of issues at Fort Lewis The shooter, Robert Bales, was based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM). The primary medical treatment facility at the base, Madigan Army Medical Center, has come under investigation for downgrading diagnoses of soldiers with PTSD to lesser ailments. Military support groups around the base have alleged that base commanders did not give returning troops sufficient time to recover before sending them on further deployments and that the base's medical unit was understaffed and overwhelmed by the numbers of returning veterans with deployment-related physical and psychological trauma. Soldiers from the base have been linked to other atrocities and crimes. The 2010 Maywand District murders involved JBLM-based soldiers. Also in 2010, a recently discharged AWOL soldier from JBLM shot a police officer in Salt Lake City. In April 2011, a JBLM soldier killed his wife and 5-year-old son before killing himself. In January 2012, a JBLM soldier murdered a Mount Rainier National Park ranger. In two separate incidents, unrelated JBLM soldiers have been charged with waterboarding their children. Jorge Gonzalez, executive director of a veterans resource center near Fort Lewis, said that the Kandahar killings offer more proof that the base was dysfunctional: "This was not a rogue soldier. JBLM is a rogue base, with a severe leadership problem", he said in a statement. Base officials responded, saying that the crimes committed by its soldiers were isolated events which do not "reflect on the work and dedication of all service members." Robert H. Scales, a retired U.S. Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College, suggested that the major factor in the shootings was the overuse of infantry personnel in the last ten years for close combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. ### 8 March roadside bombing Residents of Mokhoyan, a village about 500 metres east of Camp Belamby, stated that a bomb had exploded in their vicinity on 8 March, destroying an armored vehicle and wounding several U.S. soldiers. They recounted that U.S. soldiers afterwards lined many of the male villagers against a wall, threatening to "get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people", and threatening that "you and your children will pay for this". One Mokhoyan resident told The Associated Press "It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid." U.S. officials from The Pentagon declared that they had "no evidence" that villagers had been lined up against a wall and threatened in Mokhoyan. U.S. officials refused to confirm or deny that U.S. soldiers were wounded outside the village on 8 March. Bales' lawyer, John Henry Browne, later stated that his client was upset because a fellow soldier had lost a leg in an explosion on 9 March. It is unclear whether the bombing cited by Browne was the same as the one described by the villagers. ## Incident ### Killings According to official reports, Bales left combat outpost Camp Belamby at 3:00 a.m. local time wearing night vision goggles. Bales was wearing traditional Afghan clothing over his ACU. According to government officials with knowledge of the investigation, the killings were carried out in two phases, with Bales returning to base in between. An Afghan guard reported a soldier returning to base at 1:30 am, and another guard reported a soldier leaving at 2:30 am. Bales is believed to have first gone to Alkozai, about 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) north of Camp Belambay, then to Najiban (called Balandi in earlier reports), located 1+1⁄2 miles (2.4 km) south of the base. Four people were killed and six wounded in Alkozai, and twelve people were killed in Najiban. U.S. sentries at the base heard gunshots in Alkozai but did not take action besides attempting to view Alkozai from their post inside the base. Until 22 March, U.S. authorities recognized sixteen people killed, including nine children, four men, and three women. On 22 March that number was revised to seventeen, but later reduced back to sixteen. It was initially reported that five others were injured, and that number was eventually increased to six. Four members of the same family were killed in Alkozai. According to a 16-year-old boy who was shot in the leg, Bales woke up his family members before shooting them. Another witness said she saw the man drag a woman out of her house and repeatedly hit her head against a wall. The first victim in Najiban appears to have been Mohammad Dawood. According to Dawood's brother, Bales shot Dawood in the head but spared Dawood's wife and six children after the wife screamed at him. Eleven members of Abdul Samad's family were killed in a house in Najiban village, including his wife, four girls between the ages of two and six, four boys between eight and twelve, and two other relatives. According to a witness, "he dragged the boys by their hair and shot them in the mouth". At least three of the child victims were killed by a single shot to the head of each. Their bodies were then set on fire. Another civilian, Mohammad Dawoud, age 55, was then killed in another village house. Witnesses reported that Bales was wearing a headlamp and/or a spotlight attached to his weapon. Bales burned some of the victims' bodies. Witnesses said the eleven corpses from one family were shot in the head, stabbed, gathered into one room, and set on fire. A pile of ashes was found on the floor of one victims' house; at least one child's body was found partially charred. A reporter for The New York Times inspected the children's bodies taken to a nearby American military base and reported seeing burns on some of the legs and heads. ### Surrender and confession Following the events at Alkozai and Balandi, Bales handed himself over into ISAF custody. Afghan forces spotted him leaving his outpost before the killings and U.S. commanders on base assembled their troops for a head count when it was discovered that a soldier was missing. A patrol was dispatched to find the missing soldier but did not find him before he returned to base after the killings. He was reportedly taken into custody without incident. No military operations were being conducted in the area at the time of the shootings. The surveillance video from the base reportedly shows "the soldier walking up to his base covered in a traditional Afghan shawl. The soldier removes the shawl and lays his weapon on the ground, then raises his arms in surrender." The video has not been released to the public. U.S. investigators suspect Bales may have departed the base before midnight, committed the murders in Alkozai, then returned to the base around 1:30 a.m. Bales may have then departed the base at 2:30 a.m. and committed the murders in Najiban. Apparently, the second departure caused the alert and the commencement of the patrol to locate the missing soldier. According to U.S. defense officials, upon his return to the base, Bales said: "I did it" and then told individuals what happened. Later he retained a lawyer and refused to speak further with investigators. The U.S. flew Bales out of Afghanistan to Kuwait on 14 March 2012, then to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas on 16 March. A Pentagon spokesman said the move was made because of a "legal recommendation". ### Number of assailants According to U.S. authorities, a single soldier – Staff Sergeant Robert Bales – conducted the attack. The U.S. military showed Afghan authorities the footage from the surveillance video at the base as proof that there was only one perpetrator of the shootings. According to Reuters, some neighbors and relatives of the dead saw a group of U.S. soldiers arrive at their village at about 2 a.m., enter homes and open fire. "They were all drunk and shooting all over the place," said neighbor Agha Lala. According to The New York Times, one of the attack's survivors and "at least five other villagers" described seeing several soldiers, while some other Afghan residents described seeing only one gunman. Some elected officials said that they believed the attack was planned, claiming that one soldier could not have carried out such an act without help. On 15 March 2012, an Afghan parliamentary probe team made up of several members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan announced that up to 20 American soldiers were involved in the killings, with support from two helicopters. They had spent two days in the province on-site, interviewing the survivors and collecting evidence. One of the probe team members, Hamizai Lali, said: "We closely examined the site of the incident, talked to the families who lost their beloved ones, the injured people and tribal elders... The villages are one and a half kilometer from the U.S. military base. We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour... [the victims] have been killed by the two groups." Lali asked the Afghan government, the United Nations, and the international community to ensure the perpetrators were punished in Afghanistan. While visiting one of the affected villages, Hamid Karzai pointed to one of the villagers and said: "In his family, in four rooms people were killed – children and women were killed – and then they were all brought together in one room and then set on fire. That, one man cannot do." However, the team later said they could not confirm that multiple soldiers took part in the killings. ### Financial payments to victims' families On 25 March 2012, at the office of the governor of Kandahar province, the United States gave the equivalent of US\$860,000 to the victims' families, allocated as \$50,000 for each person killed and \$10,000 for each person injured. The official who disbursed payments to the families said the money was not compensation but the U.S. government's offering to help the victims and their families. A member of the Kandahar provincial council described the payments as assistance, but not as the kind of legal compensation that would absolve the accused. ## Robert Bales The Army concluded that Robert Bales, a 38-year-old U.S. Army staff sergeant stationed at Camp Belambay, was the only person responsible for the shootings. According to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, immediately after being captured, Bales acknowledged the killings and "told individuals what happened". He then asked for an attorney and refused to speak with investigators about his motivations. According to officials, Bales may have been having marital problems, and the investigation of the shootings is looking into the possibility that an e-mail about marriage problems might have provoked Bales. His wife wrote on her blog about her disappointment after he was passed over for a promotion to Sergeant First Class (E-7). The family was also struggling with finances, and three days before the shootings Bales' wife put their home up for sale, as they had fallen behind with mortgage payments. On 23 March 2012, the U.S. government charged Bales with 17 counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, and six counts of assault. On 24 March 2012, American investigators said they believe Bales split the killings in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai into two attacks, returning to Camp Belamby after the first attack before slipping out again an hour later. No other U.S. military personnel were disciplined for having any role in the incident. On 22 August 2013, Bales pleaded guilty at his General Court-martial, apologized for his killing spree, and described the massacre as an "act of cowardice." The plea spared Bales from the death penalty. On 23 August 2013, Bales was sentenced to life in prison without parole by the court. He was also demoted to Private (E-1), the lowest possible rank, dishonorably discharged, and ordered to forfeit all pay and allowances. A commanding general overseeing the court-martial has the option of reducing the sentence to life with the possibility of parole. Afghan villagers and the families of Bales' victims were upset by the decision, saying he deserved death. After several months of interviews in prison in 2015, Bales revealed in depth his recollection of his actions step by step the night of the murders and why he believed he acted the way he did to reporter Brendan Vaughan in an article published in GQ magazine on 21 October 2015. ## Reactions ### Reaction from family members and Afghan society A woman who lost four family members in the incident said, "We don't know why this foreign soldier came and killed our innocent family members. Either he was drunk or he enjoyed killing civilians." Abdul Samad, a 60-year-old farmer who lost eleven family members, eight of whom were children, spoke about the incident: "I don't know why they killed them. Our government told us to come back to the village, and then they let the Americans kill us." One grieving mother, holding a dead baby in her arms, said, "They killed a child, was this child the Taliban? Believe me, I haven't seen a two-year-old member of the Taliban yet." "I don't want any compensation. I don't want money, I don't want a trip to Mecca, I don't want a house. I want nothing. But what I absolutely want is the punishment of the Americans. This is my demand, my demand, my demand and my demand," said one villager whose brother was killed. More than 300 Panjwai locals gathered around the military base to protest the killings. Some brought burned blankets to represent those killed. In one house, an elderly woman screamed: "May God kill the only son of Karzai, so he feels what we feel." On 13 March, hundreds of university students protested in Afghanistan's eastern city of Jalalabad, shouting "Death to America – Death to Obama" and burning effigies of the U.S. president and a Christian cross. On 15 March about 2,000 people took part in another protest, in the southern province of Zabul. After the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, some Afghans said this and other massacres increased support for the Taliban. Haji Muhammad Wazir, whose family was massacred by Bales, said he gave the Taliban financial and other support as a result. ### Reaction from Afghan authorities The President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, called the incident "intentional murder" and stated, "this [was] an assassination, an intentional killing of innocent civilians and cannot be forgiven." He said the United States must now pull back its troops from village areas and allow Afghan security forces to take the lead to reduce civilian deaths. On 16 March, Karzai said the U.S. was not fully cooperating with a probe into the killings. He also said the problem of civilian casualties at the hands of NATO forces "has been going on for too long ... It is by all means the end of the rope here". A spokesperson for the Afghan Interior Ministry condemned the act "in the strongest possible terms." Afghan politicians wanted Bales to face an Afghan court. The National Assembly of Afghanistan insisted that the U.S. soldier be put on public trial in Afghanistan: "We seriously demand and expect that the government of the United States punish the culprits and try them in a public trial before the people of Afghanistan." It also condemned the killings as "brutal and inhuman" and declared that "people are running out of patience over the ignorance of foreign forces." Abdul Rahim Ayobi, a member of parliament from Kandahar, said the shooting "gives us the message that now the American soldiers are out of the control of their generals." Kamal Safai, a member from Kunduz, said that while it was the act of a single man, "the public reaction will blame the government of America, not the soldier." ### Reaction from U.S. and NATO American and ISAF forces apologized and promised a full investigation, with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stating that the soldier "will be brought to justice and be held accountable" and that the death penalty "could be a consideration." U.S. president Barack Obama called the incident "absolutely tragic and heartbreaking" but noted that he was "proud generally" of what U.S. troops have accomplished in Afghanistan. Obama said the incident did not represent the "exceptional character" of the American military and the respect that the United States had for the people of Afghanistan. On 13 March, he said, "the United States takes this as seriously as if it were our own citizens and our own children who were murdered. We're heartbroken over the loss of innocent life. The killing of innocent civilians is outrageous and it's unacceptable." In response to a reporter asking whether the killings could be likened to the 1968 My Lai massacre of civilians by U.S. forces in South Vietnam, Obama replied, "It's not comparable. It appeared you had a lone gunman who acted on his own." General John R. Allen, commander of the ISAF, issued an apology as well. Adrian Bradshaw, the deputy commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, apologized "I wish to convey my profound regrets and dismay... I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts, but they were in no way part of authorized ISAF military activity." A "rapid and thorough" inquiry was promised. U.S. officials said the killings would not affect their strategies in the area. ### Response from the Taliban The Taliban said in a statement on its website that "sick-minded American savages committed the blood-soaked and inhumane crime." The insurgent group promised the families of the victims that it would take revenge "for every single martyr". The Taliban also accused Afghan security officials of being complicit in the attack. The insurgent group called off peace talks in the wake of the deadly rampage. On 13 March, the Taliban launched an attack on an Afghan government delegation visiting the site of the killings, killing one government soldier and injuring three. ## See also - Khosrow Sofla (Afghanistan, 2010) - Maywand District murders (Afghanistan, 2010) - List of massacres in Afghanistan - List of rampage killers (religious, political, or ethnic crimes) - War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)

Undisputed Attitude

Undisputed Attitude is the seventh studio album by American thrash metal band Slayer, released on May 28, 1996, by American Recordings. The album consists almost entirely of covers of punk rock and hardcore punk songs, and also includes two tracks written by guitarist Jeff Hanneman in 1984 and 1985 for a side project called Pap Smear; its closing track, "Gemini", is the only original track. The cover songs on the album were originally recorded by the bands the Stooges, Minor Threat, T.S.O.L., D.R.I., D.I., Dr. Know, and Verbal Abuse, whose work was prominently featured with the inclusion of cover versions of three of their songs. Undisputed Attitude peaked at number 34 on the US Billboard 200. ## Recording Undisputed Attitude was recorded at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy as producer and Reign in Blood producer Rick Rubin as executive producer. Recorded in three to four weeks, the album was largely the brainchild of guitarist Kerry King, who stated that the songs chosen were from highly influential bands who "made Slayer what it is". The album was initially to feature material from classic heavy metal artists such as Judas Priest, UFO and Deep Purple. However, after several rehearsals "things didn't pan out" according to King, so the band instead elected to cover punk songs. Slayer considered covering 1960s psychedelic rock band the Doors as they were an influence to vocalist and bassist Tom Araya. When asked which track they considered recording, Araya responded, "Maybe 'When the Music's Over', 'Five to One', something like that." A cover of Black Flag's "Rise Above" was suggested by Rubin, although was shelved after the band was not sure how to arrange it musically. Guitarist Jeff Hanneman had written four unreleased songs in 1984–1985 while in the side project Pap Smear with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and Suicidal Tendencies guitarist Rocky George. The band chose the best two, namely "Ddamm (Drunk Drivers Against Mad Mothers)" and "Can't Stand You". "Gemini" was written by King and Araya several months before entering the recording studio. King asserts it is the only Slayer song on the album. The song begins as a sludge/doom number, before becoming a more typical Slayer song. The band's cover of Minor Threat's "Guilty of Being White" raised questions about a possible message of white supremacy. The controversy involved the changing of the refrain "guilty of being white" to "guilty of being right", at the song's ending. This incensed Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, who stated "that is so offensive to me". King said the lyric was altered for "tongue-in-cheek" humor, saying that the band thought racism was "ridiculous" at the time. ## Reception Undisputed Attitude was released on May 28, 1996, and peaked at number 34 on the Billboard 200 album chart. Paul Kott of AllMusic commented that "Undisputed Attitude, while not perfect, is a fitting tribute to the bands that inspired Slayer to break from the traditional metal mould." Sandy Masuo of Rolling Stone reasoned: "some punk purists will undoubtedly cry foul, but when the dust settles it's hard to argue with Slayer's mettle." Entertainment Weekly's Chuck Eddy dubbed Slayer's cover interpretations "generic hardcore-punk", and observed that the group "seem to think that playing as fast and rigidly as possible makes for harder rock -- but it's just lazy shtick." Reviewing 2003 Slayer box set Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, Adrien Begrand of PopMatters dismissed the effort as "easily the weakest album in the Slayer catalogue", while Westword Online's Michael Roberts dubbed the record their "biggest mistake." Araya has since stated that he "knew it wouldn't do very well, people want to hear Slayer! The real die-hards picked up on it and that was expected." ## Track listing ## Personnel ### Slayer - Tom Araya – bass, vocals - Kerry King – guitars - Jeff Hanneman – guitars - Paul Bostaph – drums ### Production and artwork - Dave Sardy – producer, mixing - Rick Rubin – executive producer - Greg Gordon – engineer - Ralph Cacciurri; Bryan Davis; Jim Giddens; Bill Smith – assistant engineers - Stephen Marcussen – mastering - Wes Benscoter – artwork, illustrations - Dennis Keeley – photography - Michael Lavine – front cover photo, photography - Dirk Walter – art direction, design ## Charts

Mary Isenhour

American political strategist

Mary Isenhour is an American political strategist, campaign manager, and government official. She was the Chief of Staff for Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. Prior to the Wolf administration, Isenhour served executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, was state director of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and assisted with the successful campaigns of U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. She now serves with the firm Rooney Novak Isenhour, LLC and is a member of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Isenhour also previously worked as executive director of the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee, and started a political consulting firm with former state party chairman T.J. Rooney. In 2010, PoliticsPA called her "one of the top consultants in the state", and said, "few can move between the strategy of campaigning and its mechanics with the ease that she does". Starting her career working on the Kansas House of Representatives staff, Isenhour eventually becoming chief of staff to House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer, and then director of the Democratic Party's Kansas Coordinated Campaign for legislative races. She worked as the national political director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee before starting her Pennsylvania political career in 1999. ## Early career A Kansas native, Isenhour attended the University of Kansas. She began her political career as a staffer in the Kansas House of Representatives. In 1990 she worked as a legislative aide to House Minority Leader Marvin Barkis, and the following year was an administrative assistant to House Majority Leader Donna Whiteman. From 1991 to 1995, Isenhour served as Chief of Staff to House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer, where she worked with Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike to advance legislation, served as a liaison between Sawyer and other officials, and worked with members of leadership and committees to develop legislative strategies and build coalitions. In 1992, Isenhour was the director of the Democratic Party's Kansas Coordinated Campaign for legislative races, both in the state House and Senate. Those races included more than three dozen candidates by July 1992. From 1995 to 1999, Isenhour served as the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee's national political director, based in Washington D.C. In that capacity, she worked with legislative leaders and caucus campaign staff in more 15 states to help win or preserve Democratic majorities in state legislatures. In 1996, she worked in Iowa to help orchestrate the Democratic legislative campaigns in that the Iowa General Assembly, partnering with Iowa Senate Majority Leader Wally Horn and other key legislative Democrats to improving the party's position. She described it as an attempt to avoid a repeat of 1994 elections, in which Democrats suffered major losses in both federal and state offices during the Republican Revolution. Isenhour said of those elections: > We were off track. We let the Republicans define what the message was, and they had the same message from top to bottom. ... Now it's our turn, and we're talking about what Democrats have always been about: that we stick up for the little guy. We've gone on the offensive instead of the defensive. Isenhour also managed Sawyer's campaign for the bid for Kansas governor in 1998. Sawyer won the Democratic nomination, but ultimately lost in a landslide to the popular Republican incumbent, Bill Graves. ## Pennsylvania career Isenhour began her Pennsylvania political career in 1999, when she became executive director of the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee, helping to get Democratic candidates elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She held the position until 2003. Isenhour assisted with Bob Casey, Jr.'s successful 2006 campaign against Republican incumbent Rick Santorum, served as political adviser to state House Democratic Leader Frank Dermody, and ran Governor Ed Rendell's successful 2006 re-election campaign against challenger Lynn Swann, after which she helped plan Rendell's 2007 inauguration. Rendell appointed her to the Pennsylvania Community Service Advisory Board. Isenhour worked for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, serving as an aide and political adviser to T.J. Rooney, the state party chairman. In 2007, she became executive director of the party, replacing Don Morabito, who took a position in the Rendell administration. The party enjoyed much success during her time there, controlling the Governor's office, three of four statewide row offices, two U.S. Senators, a majority in the State House, and picking up five seats in the Congressional delegation. She served as director of PA Victory, a statewide coordinated campaign effort. Isenhour was also chosen as the Pennsylvania state director for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, after Rendell recommended her for the position. There was talk of Isenhour continuing to work with the Clinton administration after the primary, but she instead returned to her position with the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. In 2008, Isenhour and Rooney met with MSNBC news commentator Chris Matthews to discuss the possibility of Matthews running against Republican U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, although he ultimately did not run. Also that year, Isenhour and her Republican counterpart Luke Bernstein, executive director of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, together taught a class about presidential elections at the Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Isenhour and Bernstein both believed it was the first class of its type, and said the two had a very cordial relationship despite representing opposite political parties. Isenhour also taught about electoral politics at other educational institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Central Penn College and The Washington Center. In July 2010, after more than seven years leading the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, Isenhour and Rooney started the political consulting firm Isenhour Rooney Strategies, which later became Isenhour Rooney and Carey. Also in 2010, Isenhour was the only woman named to the PoliticsPA's Pennsylvania Top 10 Influencers List by Campaigns and Elections, PoliticsPA also called her "one of the top consultants in the state", and said "few can move between the strategy of campaigning and its mechanics with the ease that she does". Among the candidates she advised was Rob Teplitz in his successful campaign for Pennsylvania State Senate in 2012. Eisenhour served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania. ## Governor Wolf administration Isenhour was an early supporter of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf, and became Wolf's senior campaign adviser during his 2014 campaign, at a time when state Representative Allyson Schwartz and state Treasurer Rob McCord were considered to have better chances of winning. Isenhour, who had long been acquainted with Wolf, had not intended to become involved with a lengthy and work-intensive gubernatorial campaign, but said she was convinced to do so after an hour-long phone conversation with Wolf in 2013, after which she was convinced he was the right man for the job: "I've been in politics 30 years and I've never had a candidate like this." Isenhour maintained other clients during his campaign, but said Wolf was "my main focus for the next year and a half". After Wolf's successful election, Isenhour co-chaired his inaugural committee, then worked as his Secretary of Legislative Affairs, serving as a liaison during negotiating sessions at the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and providing key planning during the governor's budget strategy. Political reporter John L. Micek wrote of Isenhour: "She is in the unique position of having to work with Republicans she once ran campaigns against." Her annual salary in the position was \$145,018. Isenhour developed a reputation for communicating and building relationships with legislative leaders and staff members from both parties. In July 2015, Isenhour replaced Katie McGinty as Wolf's Chief of Staff, after McGinty resigned six months into her tenure to pursue a campaign for U.S. Senate. Wolf called Isenhour "one of my closest advisors" and "a valuable part of my administration", and said she "really understands how the politics of this place actually works." The selection was praised by both parties, including House and Senate Republicans, who expressed hope she would be less adversarial than McGinty. The Butler Eagle wrote an editorial criticizing the appointment due to her position on the Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania board, in light of a national controversy over undercover videos about the group's alleged sale of aborted fetal body parts. Isenhour came into the Chief of Staff position more than three weeks into a budget impasse between Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly. In October 2015, four months into the state budget impasse, Isenhour issued a memo notifying Wolf's administration of a hiring freeze and travel ban. On February 3, 2016, Isenhour notified the state Public Employee Retirement Commission that, under Wolf's orders, all employment of its staff would be discontinued. State Representatives Stephen Bloom of Cumberland County and Seth Grove of York County have filed a lawsuit against Wolf challenging that action, arguing the governor lacks the power to dissolve the commission and acted contrary to the Pennsylvania Constitution. On February 15, 2019, Governor Wolf nominated Isenhour to a seat on the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. She was confirmed by the state Senate on June 19, 2019 and became the first female to serve on the board. ## Personal life Isenhour is married to Bill Patton, former chief of staff to Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Dennis M. O'Brien. They reside in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She has a cat named Hank and enjoys cooking.

WASP-44

Star in the constellation Cetus

WASP-44 is a G-type star in the constellation Cetus that is orbited by the Jupiter-size planet WASP-44b. The star is slightly less massive and slightly smaller than the Sun; it is also slightly cooler, but is more metal-rich. The star was observed by SuperWASP, an organization searching for exoplanets, starting in 2009; manual follow-up observations used WASP-44's spectrum and measurements of its radial velocity led to the discovery of the transiting planet WASP-44b. The planet and its star were presented along with WASP-45b and WASP-46b on May 17, 2011 by a team of scientists testing the idea that hot Jupiters tend to have circular orbits, an assumption that is made when the orbital eccentricity of such planets are not well-constrained. ## Observational history WASP-44 was observed between July and November 2009 by WASP-South, a station of the SuperWASP planet-searching program based at the South African Astronomical Observatory. Observations of the star revealed a periodic decrease in its brightness. WASP-South, along with the SuperWASP-North station at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary Islands, collected 15,755 photometric observations, allowing scientists to produce a more accurate light curve. Another set of observations yielded a 6,000 point photometric data set, but the light curve was prepared late and was not considered in the discovery paper. In 2010, a European science team investigated the star using the CORALIE spectrograph and collected seventeen spectra of WASP-44. From the spectra, radial velocity measurements were extrapolated. Analysis of collected CORALIE data ruled out the possibility that the detected radial velocity was caused by the blended spectrum of a spectroscopic binary star, supporting the possibility that the body orbiting WASP-44 was indeed a planet, designated WASP-44b. The Leonhard Euler Telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile was used to follow up on the planet circling WASP-44, searching for a point at which the planet transited, or crossed in front of, its host star. One transit was detected. WASP-44, its recently discovered planet, the planets orbiting WASP-45 and WASP-46, and a discussion exploring the validity of the common assumption amongst scientists that closely orbiting hot Jupiter planets have highly circular orbits unless proven otherwise, were reported in a single discovery paper that was published on May 17, 2011 by the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper was submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on May 16, 2011. ## Characteristics WASP-44 is a G-type star (the same class of star as the Sun) that is located in the Cetus constellation. WASP-44 has a mass that is 0.951 times that of the Sun. In terms of size, WASP-44 has a radius that is 0.927 times that of the Sun. WASP-44 has an effective temperature of 5410 K (cooler than the Sun). However, the star is metal-rich with relation to the Sun. Its measured metallicity is [Fe/H] = 0.06, or 1.148 times that the amount of iron found in the Sun. WASP-44's chromosphere (outermost layer) is not active. The star also does not rotate at a high velocity. The star has an apparent magnitude of 12.9. It cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. ## Planetary system There is one known planet in the orbit of WASP-44: WASP-44b. The planet is a Hot Jupiter with a mass of 0.889 Jupiters. Its radius is 1.14 times that of Jupiter. WASP-44b orbits its host star every 2.4238039 days at a distance of 0.03473 AU, approximately 3.47% the mean distance between the Earth and Sun. With an orbital inclination of 86.02o, WASP-44b has an orbit that exists almost edge-on to its host star with respect to Earth. WASPA-44b's orbital eccentricity is fit to 0.036, indicating a mostly circular orbit. An analysis of transit timing variations to search for additional planets was negative.

Myth: The Xenogears Orchestral Album

Myth: The Xenogears Orchestral Album is an arranged soundtrack to Square Enix's role-playing video game Xenogears. It is the third soundtrack to the game, after Xenogears Original Soundtrack and Creid, another arranged album, both released in 1998. Myth was composed by the game's composer Yasunori Mitsuda and arranged by Mitsuda, Youki Yamamoto, Sachiko Miyano, and Natsumi Kameoka. The album contains 14 tracks, including a song performed by the Irish singer Joanne Hogg, and has a length of 51:33. The orchestration was performed by the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Yamamoto. The album was announced in October 2010, and was released on February 23, 2011 by Square Enix. A vinyl record version of the album was released on April 1, 2011, consisting of six tracks from the full album. Reviewers were consistent in their praises and criticism of the album. They noted the high production values and the quality of the original compositions and the performance of the orchestra. They also felt that the later tracks in the album were notably weaker than the early tracks, that the arrangements in general did not stray far from the source material, and that several of the track choices did not seem to fit as well as orchestral renditions as others. ## Creation Xenogears composer Yasunori Mitsuda announced plans to create an album of orchestral arrangements of music from that game on October 6, 2010, via his Twitter account. Mitsuda had previously released two albums of music from the game, both in 1998, the year the game was released—Xenogears Original Soundtrack, a soundtrack album for the game, and Creid, an album of arranged music inspired by Celtic folk music and Japanese rock. He has said that he decided to make the album due to the emotions that he and fans still felt about the game 13 years after its release, which led him to want to commemorate that. The music of Xenogears is particularly close to Mitsuda, as it was the last soundtrack that he worked on for Square Enix—the first video game company he worked for—and he knew that he would be leaving when he composed the soundtrack for the game. He has said that he had been considering the idea of a Xenogears orchestral album for six or seven years prior to starting on it, but until then did not have both the opportunity to work on the project and the confidence in his own abilities as an orchestrator to make the album sound as he wished. When the album was announced, Square Enix opened a poll for members of their fan club to vote on tracks that they would like to see in the album. The poll was closed on October 20 and in December the top ten results were published. Eight of these were eventually included in the final album—"Crimson Knight" and "Awakening" were excluded. Although Mitsuda tried to put as many of the suggestions into the album as he felt were appropriate, he only included the top three "without thinking". He was limited in his track selection due to many of the original tunes sharing common themes, while he wanted only one instance of a given theme to be present on Myth. The track list was initially set to feature ten tracks, but was later expanded to fourteen. The album was recorded with the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra in Bulgaria and was mixed in London in December, 2010. Of the fourteen tracks, Mitsuda only arranged one for orchestration; Youki Yamamoto, who also conducted the orchestra, arranged three, Sachiko Miyano arranged two, and Natsumi Kameoka of Mitsuda's Procyon Studio arranged seven. Joanne Hogg reprised her role as the vocalist for "Small Two of Pieces"; however, the lyrics were not re-recorded. Instead, her original performance from the game's soundtrack was used. The title "Myth" was chosen by Mitsuda so that "this work may become everyone’s myth", as he wanted the music to remind listeners of "fond memories and thoughts of the world of" the original game and soundtrack. The album was released on February 23, 2011. It contains 14 tracks with a total length of 51:33. The album was published by Square Enix and has a catalog number of SQEX-10230. The physical release of the album was only in Japan, though it was additionally released digitally on iTunes outside of the country. Additionally, on April 1, 2011, Square Enix published a vinyl record version of the album. This version contains six tracks, corresponding to tracks 1, 3, 4, 8, 12, and 13 from the full album. It has a length of 28:33 and the catalog number SE-M0004. Ringtones for "Village Pride", "A Distant Promise", "Dark Dawn" and "Small Two of Pieces" were released on January 28, 2011. Mitsuda noted that there might be a second orchestral album in the future if the first was successful; he described himself as "very keen on the idea of producing the second album". ## Reception In his review of the album, Connary Fagen of Original Sound Version concluded that it was "part masterpiece, part phone-in." He felt that the majority of the album, especially the first two-thirds, was composed of strong, high-quality tracks. However, he felt that a few pieces, in particular the final three tracks, were "underwhelming". He described the overall effect as "a row of books with only one bookend" as the album in his opinion did not have a strong or defined ending. Ben Schweitzer of Square Enix Music Online said that while "the album as a whole is worthwhile", that it was "in some ways like a wasted opportunity." He felt that the majority of the tracks were short orchestrations that did not attempt to stray from the original material, which in his opinion meant that they were left to stand on the merits of the original compositions rather than their own merits. He did note that the quality of the orchestra was high, and called out "Cage of Remorse and Relief" and "Soaring" as especially well done. Myth was reviewed by two separate critics from RPGFan. Eric Farand praised the album, saying that half of the songs were great and the other half were "pretty good"; he called out "Village Pride" as one of the best. Like Fagen he felt that the second half of the album contained several tracks that were "forgettable, phoned-in or a poor song selection for this album". He agreed with Schweitzer that the majority of the arrangements did not deviate much from the original compositions, but said that it was what he expected and wanted from an orchestral arrangement album. Stephen Meyerink, in his review, was less receptive to the album, saying that "It's good. It's not great." He praised the technical quality of the performances, especially those of the string section of the orchestra, but criticized the lack of originality in the arrangements. He noted "Soaring" and "Bonds of Sea and Flames" as some of the few tracks he felt brought something unique to the arrangement. He felt that while the original compositions were strong, that the album felt "rushed" and "phoned-in" with poor track selection, made more to tie in with the release of Xenogears on the PlayStation Network that year than for the love of the music. ## Track listing For many of the tracks, the English names used in the iTunes release are different from the literal translation of the Japanese names, which were used for the original soundtrack. When the literal translation differs, it is marked after the Japanese name. ## Personnel - Yasunori Mitsuda – composer, arranger, orchestrator, producer - Youki Yamamoto – arranger, orchestrator, conductor - Sachiko Miyano – arranger, orchestrator - Natsumi Kameoka – arranger, orchestrator - The Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra – orchestra - Joanne Hogg – vocals on "Small Two of Pieces" - Tetsuya Takahashi – lyrics on "The Beginning and the End" - Masato Kato – lyrics on "Small Two of Pieces"

Sale el Sol

Sale el Sol (English: The Sun Comes Out) is the ninth studio album by Colombian singer and songwriter Shakira, released on 19 October 2010, by Epic Records. The album marks a return to Shakira's signature Latin pop sound after the electropop record She Wolf (2009). The singer split the album into three musical "directions": a romantic side, a "rock and roll" side, and a "Latino, tropical" side. The latter two "directions" experiment with rock and merengue music, respectively. As co-producer, Shakira enlisted collaborators including Josh Abraham, El Cata, Gustavo Cerati, John Hill, Lester Mendez, and Residente from Calle 13. Five singles were released from Sale el Sol. The lead single "Loca" peaked atop the record charts of Italy, Spain, and Switzerland and the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart in the United States. The third single, "Rabiosa," reached top ten positions in Austria, Belgium, Italy and Spain. The other singles achieved moderate chart success in Hispanic regions. Shakira embarked on The Sun Comes Out World Tour in late-2010 to promote the album. At the 2011 Latin Grammy Awards ceremony, Sale el Sol won the award for Best Female Pop Vocal Album and was also nominated for Album of the Year. A success throughout Europe and Latin America, the album reached number one on the charts in Belgium, France, Italy, Mexico, Portugal and Spain. In the United States, it debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200 chart and at number one on both the Top Latin Albums and Latin Pop Albums charts. Sale el Sol attained numerous record certifications in several regions across the globe, including multi-platinum certifications in Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland and Poland, and diamond certifications in Brazil, France, Colombia and United States (Latin). ## Background In October 2009, Shakira released her eighth studio album, She Wolf. The composition of the record shifted from her more traditional Latin pop and pop rock styles, and was primarily an electropop album with combined elements of world and dancehall. The album was positively received by most music critics and was praised for its distinguished nature and Shakira's experimentation with electropop. Commercially, She Wolf was a success and topped charts and attained gold and platinum certifications in several South American and European territories. In May 2010, she wrote and recorded "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)", the official song of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which became a worldwide hit. ## Production Following the worldwide success of "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)", Shakira soon began work on her ninth studio album Sale el Sol. She decided to experiment with merengue music on the album, saying "I grew up listening to merengue—that was a big part of my life, and I was missing it." Merengue is recognized as the national music of the Dominican Republic and the singer travelled to the country to work with Dominican songwriter and record producer El Cata, resulting in songs like "Loca" and "Rabiosa". Shakira said that the recording of the two songs took place in "this tiny studio in the middle of nowhere", and that "it wasn't planned, I was just following my instincts. So this album is very genuine, and very personal as well". Other collaborators on the album include American rapper and songwriter Armando Pérez, better known by his stage name Pitbull, Shakira's friend and frequent collaborator Luis Fernando Ochoa, René Pérez Joglar, better known by his stage name "Residente Calle 13", John Hill, Lester Mendez, Albert Menéndez, Tim Mitchell and Jorge Drexler. Shakira co-wrote and co-produced every track on the album, with the exception of "Islands". The recording of the album took place at locations such as The Bahamas, London, Barcelona and the Dominican Republic, and was engineered by Andros Rodriguez. Armando Pérez, who co-wrote the tracks "Loca" and "Rabiosa", talked about Shakira's previous album She Wolf, saying "on the last album they tried to Americanize Shakira by giving her the big producers. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just not her". Talking about his collaboration with Shakira, El Cata revealed that she told him "You have something that makes me move". Cata responded by telling Shakira that "it was the percussion" and "Those sounds that you want, I have them in my studio.", which led to a recording session between the two. He appears as a featured artist on the Spanish version of "Loca". René Pérez Joglar, who performs as the lead singer of Puerto Rican alternative hip hop band under the name of Residente, appears as a featured artist on the track "Gordita". He explained the conception of the song, in which he raps about the fact that "he liked Shakira better when – early in her career: she was chubbier, had dark hair and was a rock chick", by saying that "I told her (Shakira) it was a good idea to make fun of yourself. That way the haters can't say anything, because you already said it". British rapper Dizzee Rascal appears as a featured artist on the English version of "Loca". He said that he felt "honoured" that Shakira chose him for the song, by saying that "She's a bit of a trendsetter -- she does loads of different things on a major scale. You'd expect her to use an American rapper (for the song), but she chose me. It meant a lot". ## Music and lyrics Sale el Sol is considered to be Shakira's return to her "roots" and is a "fusion between rock and pop heavily influenced from Latino and Colombian music". Shakira said there are three "directions" of Sale el Sol: a romantic one, a "very rock and roll" one, and a "Latino, tropical" one. Explaining the romantic "direction" of the album, she said that it was something "which I hadn't tapped into for the past three years, but it suddenly came to me and I couldn't hold it back. So it’s [the album has] got songs that are very intense, very romantic [sic]". Examples include ballads like "Antes de las Seis" ("Before Six O'Clock") and "Lo Que Mas" ("The Most"); in the former Shakira delivers "sad, emotional, and heartfelt vocals," while in the latter she sings over a piano and string-supplemented melody. About the rock and roll "direction" of the album, Shakira said "I started my career as a rock artist and then I kind of crossed over into pop, so it’s been fun to re-encounter that side of my artistic personality". > It’s like I found myself again. You get influenced by everything you hear on the radio, or maybe by what you feel that other people’s expectations are. But then you suddenly realize that everything you need to write about is what’s inside of you – to not look outside but inside. The title track is an acoustic guitar-driven alternative rock and Latin pop-infused song, while "Devoción" ("Devotion") is a techno-influenced alternative rock track in which Shakira "beats all U2-inspired arena rockers at their own game," according to AllMusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine. The "sultry, energetic, bass-laden" "Tu Boca" ("Your Mouth") finds influences from new wave music. "Islands" is a cover of the original song of the same name by English indie pop band The xx. Shakira adds a few house music elements to the original art pop song. The "Latino" and tropical side of the album is prominently influenced by merengue music. The genre is characterized by the use of the accordion and the percussion instrument tambora. "Loca" ("Crazy"), is Shakira's interpretation of El Cata's song "Loca Con Su Tiguere", and is composed of horn-heavy merengue beats set over techno dance percussion beats. Similarly, "Rabiosa" ("Rabid") is Shakira's interpretation of El Cata's song "La Rabiosa", and is a fast-paced merengue-influenced dance track. In addition to merengue, songs like "Addicted to You", which features "bilingual lyrics, a very 70's chorus and Copacabana sounds", are influenced by reggaeton music. "Gordita" ("Chubby"), a duet between Residente Calle 13 and Shakira, is a cumbia and Latin rap hybrid. Talking about the album's lyrical content, Shakira said that there are some songs "that are just to dance to in a club, that don’t have a big transcendence". In "Rabiosa", Shakira sings about her partner's sex appeal. "Loca" expresses Shakira's erratic and obsessive behaviour towards her lover, more so than his other leading lady. However, Shakira also said that there are some songs which "will remain in people’s hearts and people’s consciousness, sometimes forever". She described these tracks as "songs that have the power to feed people’s relationships and states of mind and states of spirit". According to Billboard, the title track is composed of "evocative and hopeful" lyrics which are dedicated to Argentine singer-songwriter and Shakira's friend Gustavo Cerati, who had been in a coma around the time of the release of the album. "Antes de las Seis" deals with issues of longing, regrets and loneliness. Shakira said these songs are written "in such a personal and intimate way that at that moment. I'm not really thinking much. I'm just letting it all out". ## Release and promotion Sale el Sol was released worldwide on 19 October 2010. The album was made available for digital downloading on the iTunes Store on the same day. An English titled version of the album, The Sun Comes Out, was also released and contains exactly the same track list; the only difference being in the running order as the Spanish versions of "Loca" and "Rabiosa", featuring El Cata, are included as bonus tracks, while the English versions, featuring Dizzee Rascal and Pitbull, respectively, are included on the main track list. ### Singles "Loca" was chosen as the lead single from the album; the Spanish version, featuring El Cata, was released on 10 September 2010, while the English version, featuring Dizzee Rascal, was released on 13 September 2010. It became an international success. It peaked atop the charts of countries like France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. In the United States, the song peaked at number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and also topped the Hot Latin Songs, Latin Pop Airplay, and Tropical Songs charts. "Loca" was certified double-platinum in Mexico and Spain by the Mexican Association of Phonograph Producers and the Producers of Spanish Music. It also attained platinum certifications in Italy and Switzerland. The accompanying music video for "Loca", directed by Jaume de Laiguana, was filmed in Barcelona, Spain, and features Shakira interacting with a beach crowd, and dancing in front of the sea wearing a golden bikini. "Sale el Sol", the title track of the album, was released as the second single on 4 January 2011. The song charted very limitedly but managed to perform well in Mexico and Spain, peaking at numbers one and eight on the Monitor Latino and Spanish Singles Chart, respectively. It was certified gold in both countries. "Sale el Sol" peaked at numbers 10 and two on the US Billboard Hot Latin Songs and Latin Pop Airplay charts, respectively. The accompanying music video was directed by Jaume de Laiguana, and contains scenes of Shakira finding her way out of large maze and finally emerging outside to a sunny garden. "Rabiosa" was chosen to be the third single off the album; both the Spanish and English versions of the song, featuring El Cata and Pitbull, respectively, were released on 8 April 2011. A commercial success, it topped the chart of Spain, and reached top ten positions in countries like Austria, Belgium, and Italy. A success on the Latin record charts in the United States, it peaked at number eight on both the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart and Latin Pop Airplay chart, and also peaked at number 13 on the Tropical Songs chart. The song was certified double-platinum in Mexico, and platinum in Spain and Italy. The accompanying music video for the single, directed by Jaume De Laiguana, features Shakira enjoying an underground party while sporting a brown bob-cut wig; it also contains scenes of her poledancing while sporting her normal long blonde hair. "Antes de las Seis" was released as the fourth single on 21 October 2011. It wasn't successful on singles chart but performed moderately well on airplay charts, topping the airplay chart in Spain and peaking at number four on the US Billboard Latin Pop Airplay chart. It is the only song from the album to miss the top 10 of the US Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart. In 2013, "Antes de las Seis" was certified gold in Mexico. The live recording of Shakira's performance of the song during the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy concert show of The Sun Comes Out World Tour, taken from the live album Live from Paris, served as the accompanying music video for the single. "Addicted to You" was released as the fifth and final single off Sale el Sol, on 13 March 2012. It became a success in Mexico, where it received a platinum certification, and Poland, where it topped the airplay chart. In the United States, it peaked at number nine on the US Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart, and at number three on both the Latin Pop Airplay and Tropical Songs charts. The accompanying music video for "Addicted to You" was directed by Anthony Mandler, and features Shakira dancing in various locations, such as an "old Spanish style" town, a cathedral-like room, and a bathtub, while sporting different "high fashion" outfits. ### Tour To promote Sale el Sol, as well as She Wolf, Shakira embarked on The Sun Comes Out World Tour in late-2010. Shakira's official website first announced the three initial venues of the North American leg of the tour, on 3 May 2010,\< and subsequently 22 more venues were listed. After a special tour preview show held in Montreal, Canada, on 15 September 2010, the North American leg of the tour commenced at Uncasville, Connecticut, on 17 September, and closed at Rosemont, Illinois, on 29 October 2010. The initial dates for the European leg of the tour were announced on 28 June 2010, and subsequently 22 more shows were listed. The European leg of the tour was planned to commence at Lyon, France, on 16 November, and end in London, England, on 20 December 2010. The tickets for the initial dates of the European leg were soon sold out, and Shakira extended the tour into 2011, beginning by announcing a show at Paris, France; venues at countries such as Croatia, Russia, Spain and Switzerland were soon added. The Latin American leg of the tour was a part of the Pop Festival, which was heralded as an initiative to bring international music stars to Latin America. Initial tour dates for the leg were announced on 3 December 2010, and soon venues at countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico were added to the tour dates. The setlist of the tour was primarily composed of songs from Sale el Sol: "Antes de las Seis", "Gordita", "Loca", "Sale el Sol" and "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)". The stage was shaped like the letter "T" to enable the maximum number of viewers to see Shakira easily. A large screen was set behind the stage, on which various visuals, designed by entertainment branding agency Loyalkaspar, were projected. For the performances, Shakira mainly wore a mesh gold crop top coupled with skin-tight leather pants. Other attires Shakira wore during the concert shows included a hooded pink gown, a flamenco-skirt, and a feathery blue dress. The concert shows were well-received by critics, many of whom praised the charisma Shakira displayed during the performances. Commercially, the tour was a success. It ranked at number 40 on Pollstar's 2010 year-end "Top 50 North American Tours" list as it grossed a total of \$16.9 million in the continent, with total ticket sales amounting up to 524,723. In North America, the tour sold an average of 9,335 tickets, and a total of 205,271 tickets. The tour was a bigger success worldwide, ranking at number 20 on Pollstar's 2011 "Top 25 Worldwide Tours". Its total gross during its worldwide dates was of \$53.2 million and ticket sales amounted up to 692,064. A live album of the show held at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy in Paris, France, was released as Shakira: Live from Paris, on 5 December 2011. ## Critical reception At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, Sale el Sol received an average score of 89 based on 5 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic gave it a very positive review, complimenting Shakira's versatility in her "pan-global approach", and praising the album's simple and "breezy" nature, saying it "never once sounds disparate or overworked -- it's sunny and easy, its natural buoyancy disguising Shakira's range and skill -- but listen closely and it becomes apparent that nobody makes better pop records in the new millennium than she does". The Billboard review of the album was also extremely positive, noting that its composition is "infinitely more memorable and unique than the singer's baffling 2009 set, She Wolf", and that it "manages to bridge the divide between the old and new Shakira with a spark that keeps you listening to the very end". Michelle Morgante from Boston.com chose the merengue-influenced songs of Sale el Sol as "some of its strongest moments", and noted that the album is a "truer representation of the Shakira who has excited Latin America and propelled her onto the world stage". James Reed from The Boston Globe felt that while Sale el Sol "isn't as heady as She Wolf", it proves to be "another step forward for an artist who rarely looks back". Mikael Good from Entertainment Weekly termed Sale el Sol as a demonstration of "Shakira's boldly global mindset" and awarded it a perfect "A" grade. Jesus Yanez-Reyes from Northern Arizona News favoured the album's rock-influenced tracks and concluding that Sale el Sol "is one of Shakira’s best releases, with songs sure to become classics within the next year". Mikel Toombs from Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that the album features Shakira "at her most upbeat". Jennifer Schaffer from Stanford Daily called Sale el Sol a "fantastically diverse album with some awesome collaborations and a truly impressive range of emotions", and commended Shakira's vocal delivery, saying "the sheer power of Shakira's vocal chords is clearly the focus of the album". Allison Stewart felt the album was a showcase for Shakira's "remarkable" voice, and concluded that while Sale el Sol is not "necessarily adventurous", it "provides a better showcase for Shakira's countless charms than its predecessors ever did". Carlos Macias from Terra USA, however, gave the album a mixed review and said it "delivers half the goods". ### Accolades and recognition Sale el Sol was included in AllMusic's "Favorite Albums of 2010" and "Favorite Latin Albums of 2010" year-end lists. At the 2011 Latin Grammy Awards ceremony, Sale el Sol was nominated for "Album of the Year" and "Best Female Pop Vocal Album", winning the award in the latter category. At the 2011 Billboard Music Awards Sale el Sol was nominated for "Top Latin Album", but lost it to Spanish singer-songwriter Enrique Iglesias's album Euphoria. At the 2011 Latin Billboard Music Awards, the album won the award for "Latin Digital Album of the Year", and Shakira won the award for "Top Latin Albums Artist of the Year, Female". At the 2011 Premios Juventud awards ceremony, the album was nominated for "Lo Toco Todo. CD Favorito" ("Your Favorite CD"). At the 2011 Premios Shock awards ceremony, it was nominated Album of the Year. At the 2012 Premios Lo Nuestro awards ceremony, Sale el Sol won the award for "Pop Album of the Year". At the 2012 Premios Oye! awards ceremony, it was nominated for "Spanish Album of the Year". At the 2012 Premios Nuestra Tierra award ceremony, it was nominated "Best Album of the Year". In December 2019, Allmusic included the album in their list of the decade's 200 best albums. Billboard included Sale El Sol among the 50 best Latin albums of the 2010s decade, stating that with this album "Shakira showed that gender did not define success in any genre". ## Commercial performance The album was a success in Europe. In Austria, Sale el Sol entered and peaked at number three on the Austrian Albums Chart, spending a total of 44 weeks on the chart. In this region, it was certified platinum by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) for selling 20,000 units. The album debuted at number 15 on the Ultratop chart in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium and jumped to its peak position of number eight the following week. It entered the chart at the same debut position in the French-speaking Wallonia region of the country but saw more success as it later peaked at number one, displacing French pop rock duo AaRON's album Birds in the Storm from the top spot. Sale el Sol became Shakira's first studio album to reach at number one in the region. In Flanders and Wallonia, the album charted for 55 and 54 weeks, respectively. The Belgian Entertainment Association (BEA) certified the album platinum for sales of 20,000 units. After entering the French Albums Chart at number two, Sale el Sol peaked at number one for two consecutive weeks, propelled by the success of the lead single "Loca" in the country. It spent 17 consecutive weeks inside the top 10 and 113 weeks in the top 200, making it Shakira's longest charting album in the country. It finished as the 13th best-selling album of 2010 in France, with sales of 236,616 units. The album additionally sold 198,000 units in 2011, appearing at number 10 on the year-end chart and bringing its total sales to 425,000 units. In addition to being her first album to top the French Albums chart, Sale el Sol is also Shakira's highest-certified album in the country as it was certified diamond by the Syndicat National de l'Édition Phonographique (SNEP) for sales of 500,000 units. It is one of the best-selling albums in France. By contrast, Sale el Sol became the singer's lowest charting studio-album in Germany, peaking at number six on the Media Control Charts. However, it achieved high sales in the country and was certified platinum by The Federal Association of Music Industry (BVMI) for having shipped 200,000 units in Germany. The album was certified platinum by the Association of Hungarian Record Companies for sales of 10,000 units. In Italy, it debuted at number three on the FIMI Albums chart and ascended to number one the following week. Sale el Sol was Shakira's second consecutive album to peak atop the Italian albums chart, after She Wolf topped the chart in 2009. Its stay inside the top 20 lasted for 19 weeks. The Federazione Industria Musicale Italiana (FIMI) certified the album platinum for sales of 60,000 units. Sale el Sol debuted atop the Portuguese Albums Chart — Shakira's first album to accomplish the feat in the country – and spent two weeks at number one. It was able to stay within the top 10 for 23 consecutive weeks. It was certified platinum by the Associação Fonográfica Portuguesa (AFP) for selling 15,000 units in Portugal. Sale el Sol was Shakira's first studio album since Fijación Oral, Vol. 1 (2005) to peak at number one on the Spanish Albums chart after it debuted at the top position. It spent a total of 63 weeks on the chart and was certified double-platinum by the Producers of Spanish Music (PROMUSICAE) for shipments of 80,000 units. Sale el Sol entered and peaked at number two on the Swiss Albums Chart, where it charted for 49 weeks in total. It was certified double-platinum by for selling 40,000 units in the country. The album alsp saw success in South America. In Shakira's native country Colombia, it sold in excess of 200,000 units and was certified diamond by the Colombian Association of Phonograph Producers (ASINCOL). In Mexico, Sale el Sol debuted at number one on the Mexican Albums Chart, becoming the singer's second consecutive studio album to enter the chart at the top position. It also became her longest-charting album in the country, spending a total of 50 weeks. In this region, it was certified platinum and gold by the Mexican Association of Phonograph Producers (AMPROFON) for shipments of 90,000 units. In Canada, the album peaked at number 11 on the Canadian Albums Chart, spending a total of two weeks on the chart. In Peru, it was the seventh best selling album of the year in 2011. In the United States, Sale el Sol debuted and peaked at number seven on the Billboard 200 issue dated 6 November 2010. On the Latin Albums chart, Sale el Sol debuted at number one with first-week sales amounting up to 52,000 units, as compiled by Nielson SoundScan. It marked the highest debut for a Latin album for the year and was Shakira's fifth album to peak at number one. According to Billboard, 35% of its first-week sales were credited to strong digital sales. In total, Sale el Sol spent 207 weeks on the Top Latin Albums chart. On the Latin Pop Albums chart, it again peaked at number one and spent 425 weeks (more than eight years) on the chart in total, the most among all albums in the chart's history. The album was certified Diamond in the Latin field in 2018 by the Recording Industry Association of America signifying 600,000 album-equivalent units sold. Sale El Sol ranks at No. 14 among the most successful Latin albums of the 2010s decade in the United States. ## Track listing Notes - signifies a co-producer - signifies an additional producer ## Credits and personnel Credits adapted from AllMusic. - Shakira – art direction, composer, design, lyricist, producer, vocal arrangement, vocals (background) - Josh Abraham – producer - Eduardo Bergallo – engineer - Michael Brauer – mixing - Will Briere – mixing assistant - Lukas Burton – producer - Míguel Bustamante – assistant engineer - Calle 13 – composer - El Cata – composer, producer - Gustavo Celis – engineer, mixing - Gustavo Cerati – producer - Olgui Chirino – vocal arrangement, vocals (background) - Dave Clauss – engineer, mixing - Dalmata – guest appearance - Diplo – additional production - Dizzee Rascal – composer - Lindiwe Dlamini – vocals (background) - Thomas Dyani – vocals (background) - Ryan Gilligan – mixing assistant - John Hill – additional production, composer, producer - Mike Horner – mixing assistant - James McGorman – vocals (background) - Jim Jonsin – additional production - Nonhlanhla Kheswa – vocals (background) - Emile Kojidie – composer - Jaume Laiguana – art direction, design, photography - Alex Leader – engineer - Stephen Marcussen – mastering - Lester Mendez – composer, mixing, producer - Albert Menéndez – producer - Brenda Mhlongo – vocals (background) - T. Mitchell – composer - Mark Needham – mixing - Nejo – guest appearance - Jessica Nolan – A&R, project supervisor - Joel Numa – engineer, mixing - Luis Fernando Ochoa – arranger, producer - Oligee – producer - Ze Bell Jean Paul – composer - Pitbull – composer - Residente of Calle 13 – producer - Andros Rodriguez – engineer - Jonathan Shakhovskoy – additional production, engineer, mixing, vocal arrangement - Dooh Belly Eugene Victor – composer - Gucci Vump – additional production - Ed Williams – engineer ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ### Decade-end charts ## Certifications and sales ## See also - 2010 in Latin music - List of best-selling albums in France - List of best-selling Latin albums - List of number-one Billboard Latin Albums from the 2010s - List of number-one Billboard Latin Pop Albums of 2010 - List of number-one hits of 2010 (France) - List of number-one hits of 2010 (Italy) - List of number-one albums of 2010 (Mexico) - List of number-one albums of 2010 (Spain)

Vermont Public

Public broadcaster in Vermont, U.S.

Vermont Public Co. is the public broadcaster serving the U.S. state of Vermont. Its headquarters, newsroom, and radio studios are located in Colchester, with television studios in Winooski. It operates two statewide radio services aligned with NPR, offering news and classical music, and the state's PBS service. It was formed by the 2021 merger of what had been previously separate organizations, Vermont Public Radio and Vermont Public Television, which were both renamed Vermont Public in 2022. The services were separate organizations prior to 2021. The first to be founded was Vermont Educational Television (Vermont ETV), originally a service of the University of Vermont, in 1967; the network's four main transmitters were completed in March 1968. Originally mostly funded by the state of Vermont, Vermont ETV began fundraising in the community and developed a substantial audience in the Canadian province of Quebec, which has historically accounted for a significant portion of viewer donations and where a related charity once operated to process Canadian viewers' donations. Vermont ETV was separated from the university in 1989 and later renamed Vermont Public Television and Vermont PBS. In addition to public television programming from PBS and other distributors, Vermont Public produces TV programs of local interest. Vermont Public's radio operation began broadcasting in 1977 as Vermont Public Radio (VPR). The first transmitter served southern Vermont; coverage of the northern half of the state was added in 1980 and extended by the construction of new stations as well as the acquisition of several existing commercial radio stations. Beginning in the 2000s, VPR established a second radio programming service with a classical music format, which also now has statewide coverage; the existing programming was shifted to an all-talk format with shows from NPR and other public radio distributors as well as local programming focusing on Vermont issues and musical artists. ## History of the Vermont Public Co. In September 2020, the Vermont Public Co. was formed; it became active on June 30, 2021, with the merger of Vermont PBS and Vermont Public Radio, which had been separate entities. The move brought together the 57 full-time VPR employees with 42 at Vermont PBS to create the state's largest news organization, with \$90 million in assets. The name Vermont Public was unveiled on June 23, 2022. ## Television ### History The television service was established by an act of the Vermont General Assembly in 1966 as Vermont Educational Television (Vermont ETV), a service operated by the University of Vermont on behalf of all educational interests in the state. This culminated six years of efforts to set up the service, including two defeats in the 1963 and 1965 sessions of the General Assembly. Broadcasting began on October 16, 1967, from WETK (channel 33) atop Mount Mansfield. Three more transmitters went on air in the months that followed: WVTB (channel 20) on Burke Mountain, serving St. Johnsbury, WVTA (channel 41) on Mount Ascutney, to serve Windsor and southern Vermont, and WVER, broadcasting from Grandpa's Knob to serve Rutland. Delays in completing WVTA, which did not start until March 18, 1968, also held up the activation of WVER. In 1975, the network began fundraising from the community, having been initially financed 90 percent by the state and later also receiving federal funds. 1979 saw a 57-day strike by production personnel; the next year, the St. Johnsbury and Rutland transmitters narrowly avoided closure when the university voted to allow the installation of remote control equipment, allowing operators to control the facilities from the Mount Ascutney site. The 1989 session of the General Assembly authorized Vermont ETV's separation from the university. However, funding continued to be a concern. In 1996, the Vermont Senate Appropriations Committee proposed cutting ETV's state funding to \$1; ETV eventually was able to restore some of its allocation but still lost about half of its state grant. This was in contrast to Vermont Public Radio, which was not funded by the state and had more corporate contributors. In 1997, Vermont ETV began 24-hour broadcasting; the name was changed to Vermont Public Television on January 1, 1998, and again to Vermont PBS in 2014. On February 17, 2009, the four main Vermont Public Television transmitters converted to digital broadcasting; in converting early, they joined most of the state's major commercial stations. On February 17, 2017, Vermont PBS announced that it had sold the WVTA broadcast license for \$56 million in the FCC's spectrum auction. In a statement, the network said that its other signals would be upgraded to cover the area served by WVTA. The WVTA license, which continued on the WVER multiplex, was then surrendered for cancellation on November 23, 2022. \$52 million of the auction proceeds constitute the majority of Vermont Public's endowment, which stood at \$71.9 million in 2021. Shortly before the merger with Vermont Public Radio, Vermont PBS relocated from Fort Ethan Allen, where both organizations had maintained separate offices, to facilities in Winooski. ### Local programming The flagship local television program from Vermont Public is the weekly Vermont This Week, which features a rotating panel of Vermont political reporters. Another regular local program is the outdoors program Outdoor Journal. ### Support in Canada Public television in Vermont has had a long history with viewers in Montreal, where its signal is received and widely distributed on cable and has been since April 1968. The large audience in Greater Montreal has been a major source of donations: in 1979, Vermont ETV received 60 percent of its donations from Quebec. In 1989, Vidéotron, one of Montreal's major cable providers, removed Vermont ETV from its channel lineup and replaced it with WCFE in nearby Plattsburgh, New York, to save on copyright fees; at the time, WCFE did not run the entire PBS schedule in order to provide a differentiated service from Vermont ETV. However, the move threatened the financial viability of Vermont ETV because, at the time, as many of 15,000 of the 40,000 Vermont ETV contributors were Montreal-area Vidéotron customers who represented 25 percent of the network's fundraising revenue. Donations to Vermont ETV's March 1990 fundraising drive fell 27 percent. Vidéotron restored Vermont ETV to its lineup in 1991 after a year's absence. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) revoked the status of the Public Television Association of Quebec, a charitable organization in Canada that had supported Vermont PBS's Canadian efforts, in 2013. The CRA decision was unsuccessfully appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal, which ruled in 2015 that the association had "failed to maintain direction and control over its resources as it did not devote all its resources to its own charitable activities" and was only used to generate charitable tax receipts for Canadian donors. ### Technical information #### Transmitters Vermont Public holds three full-service television station licenses, one of which (WVER) is broadcast as a four-site distributed transmission system. WVER also has two separately licensed translators in Manchester and Pownal. #### Subchannels All transmitters broadcast the same four subchannels. #### Network map ## Radio ### History In 1975, two groups—the Champlain Valley Educational Radio Association and Vermont Public Radio—were formed by local residents to seek funds to plan a new non-commercial radio station for Vermont. The Champlain Valley group proposed starting with one station in Burlington, while the Vermont Public Radio application focused on statewide coverage, in order to meet requirements from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for minimum population thresholds. In October, Vermont Public Radio received a \$25,000 CPB grant, and two months later, the University of Vermont, which at the time administered Vermont ETV, approved the group to share some of its facilities. The existing public television system also shared a founder with the radio network: Raymond V. Phillips, who was considered "the father of public television in Vermont". While Phillips had long expressed interest in public radio, funding did not come until three local ministers objected to a local station's switch to a rock format; one of them later joined the Vermont Public Radio board. The first transmitter to go on air was WVPA-FM 89.5, licensed to Windsor and broadcasting from Mount Ascutney, on August 13, 1977. Serving northern Vermont took longer because Vermont Public Radio's application was placed into comparative hearing with several commercial applicants, having filed for the non-reserved frequency of 107.9 MHz. The FCC approved VPR's request to move the frequency from Newport to Burlington despite opposition from a commercial broadcaster in Newport, and WVPS atop Mount Mansfield was activated on October 31, 1980. The Mount Ascutney and Mount Mansfield transmitters gave VPR coverage of 92 percent of the population—greater than Vermont ETV's reach at the time—as well as in northeastern New York, New Hampshire, and Montreal. Over the years, Vermont Public Radio added transmitters by construction as well as purchases of former commercial stations. WBTN-FM in Bennington was acquired as part of a package with its AM counterpart, WBTN, in 2000; the AM station briefly simulcast VPR programming with local news inserts and death notices until being sold and returned to commercial use. In 2006, VPR purchased the former WJAN in Sunderland, transmitting from Mount Equinox; it is now WVTQ. In 2004, VPR started WNCH in Norwich, its first dedicated classical music station, and in 2007, it completed its split into two program services. After VPR entered into discussions to purchase WWPV-FM in Colchester from Saint Michael's College in 2007, resistance from student and community groups led to the college refusing to sell. Instead, VPR purchased WAVX, a Christian radio station licensed to Schuyler Falls, New York, and relaunched it as WOXR. When Saint Michael's obtained a low-power station construction permit in 2015, it then sold the high-power WWPV-FM facility to VPR for integration into the classical network as WVTX. The VPR studios at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester were expanded in 2015, nearly doubling the size of the facility. \$8 million was raised to finance the addition, which included a newsroom three times the size of the previous space—a converted storage attic—and a studio large enough to accommodate an audience. In December 2022, Vermont Public announced it would acquire WWLR, which had been the student-run station at Northern Vermont University's Lyndonville campus, for integration into the classical network. Trustees of the university had been attempting to sell the license for months and nearly surrendered it in 2021. The purchase, at a price of \$80,000, was consummated on April 25, 2023, and the station was taken silent. A report by VTDigger suggested that the university may not have been legally empowered to sell WWLR without General Assembly consent. The statute in question was repealed weeks later by governor Phil Scott; in early August, the assembly's Joint Fiscal Committee granted the Vermont State Colleges system, to which Northern Vermont University belonged, retroactive approval to sell WWLR and for the 2019 closure of WIUV at Castleton University. ### Programs The news service airs major public radio news programs from NPR and other producers, including All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. Four days a week, Vermont Public produces its flagship radio program, Vermont Edition; currently hosted by Connor Cyrus and Mikaela Lefrak, the show was hosted by Jane Lindholm from 2007 to 2021. The classical service offers blocks of classical music, some with local hosts and others from Classical 24. ### Transmitters Transmitters are arranged alphabetically by call sign. All full-power transmitters broadcast in HD Radio, carrying the News and Classical services and the BBC World Service as subchannels. A blue background indicates a low-power translator of the full-power transmitter preceding it or, at the end of the table, an HD Radio subchannel of a transmitter in the other network. #### Vermont Public News #### Vermont Public Classical #### Network maps

Polish October

1956 Polish period of liberalisation and destalinisation

Polish October (Polish: Polski październik), also known as October 1956, Polish thaw, or Gomułka's thaw, marked a change in the politics of Poland in the second half of 1956. Some social scientists term it the Polish October Revolution, which was less dramatic than the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 but may have had an even deeper impact on the Eastern Bloc and on the Soviet Union's relationship to its satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe. For the Polish People's Republic, 1956 was a year of transition. The international situation significantly weakened the hardline Stalinist faction in Poland, especially after the Polish communist leader Bolesław Bierut died in March. Three years had passed since Joseph Stalin's death and his successor at the Soviet Union's helm, First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him in February. Protests by Poznań workers in June had highlighted the people's dissatisfaction with their situation. In October, the events resulted in the rise in power of the reformers' faction, led by Władysław Gomułka. After brief but tense negotiations, the Soviets gave permission for Gomułka to stay in control and made several other concessions, resulting in greater autonomy for the Polish government. For Poland, that meant a temporary liberalisation, but eventually, hopes for a full liberalisation were proven false, as Gomułka's regime gradually became more oppressive. Nonetheless, the era of Stalinism in Poland had ended. ## Background Gomułka's thaw was caused by several factors. The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the resulting destalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw prompted debates about fundamental issues throughout the entire Eastern Bloc. In the summer of 1955, the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students was held in Warsaw. Designed to be a vast propaganda exercise and a meeting place for Eastern European communists and their comrades from Western Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, the event brought hundreds of thousands of Polish spectators to Warsaw for the five days to watch dancing, theatre and other attractions. However, the real attractions for the Polish people were the foreigners, many of whom were from Western Europe and contrasted starkly with local Poles because they shared a similar culture but were much richer and more open. Deeply stricken, many Poles realised that a decade's worth of anti-Western rhetoric had been false. Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and others from the Communist bloc actively socialised with one another. With the more exotic visitors, Poles also socialised in private apartments all around the city. College students even held debating meetings with foreigners, many of whom turned out not to be communists. In February 1956, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev delivered the Secret Speech (officially titled On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences) with wide implications for the Soviet Union and other communist countries. In Poland, in addition to criticism of the cult of personality, popular topics of debate centered on the right to steer a more independent course of "local, national socialism", instead of following the Soviet model in every detail. For example, many members of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) criticised Stalin's execution of older Polish communists during the Great Purge. Several other factors contributed to the destabilisation of Poland, such as the widely publicised defection in 1953 of high-ranking Polish intelligence agent Józef Światło, which resulted in the weakening of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland, the secret police. In addition, the unexpected death in Moscow in 1956 of Bolesław Bierut, the PZPR First Secretary (known as the "Stalin of Poland"), led to increased rivalry between various factions of Polish communists and to growing tensions in Polish society, which culminated in the Poznań 1956 protests (also known as June '56). The PZPR Secretariat decided that Khrushchev's speech should have wide circulation in Poland, a unique decision in the Eastern Bloc. Bierut's successors seized on Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalinist policy as an opportunity to prove their reformist democratic credentials and their willingness to break with the Stalinist legacy. ## Protests and riots In late March and early April 1956, thousands of Party meetings were held all over Poland, with the blessing of the Politburo and the Secretariat. Tens of thousands took part in such meetings. The Secretariat's plan succeeded beyond what it had expected. The political atmosphere in Poland shifted as questions were increasingly asked about taboo subjects like the Polish communists' legitimacy; responsibility for Stalin's crimes; the arrest of the increasingly-popular Władysław Gomułka, and issues in Soviet–Polish relations, such as the continued Soviet military presence in Poland, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre and the Soviet failure to support the Warsaw Uprising. A new Party Congress was demanded, as were a greater role for the Sejm and a guarantee of personal liberties. Alarmed by the process, the Party Secretariat decided to withhold the speech from the general public. In June, there was an insurrection in Poznań. The workers rioted to protest shortages of food and consumer goods, bad housing, the decline in real income, trade relations with the Soviet Union and the poor management of the economy. The Polish government initially responded by branding the rioters as "provocateurs, counterrevolutionaries and imperialist agents". Between 57 and 78 people, mostly protesters, were killed, and hundreds were wounded and arrested. Soon, however, the party hierarchy recognised that the riots had awakened a nationalist movement and reversed their opinion. Wages were raised by 50%, and economic and political change was promised. The Poznań protests, although the largest, were not unique in Poland, where social protest resumed its fury that autumn. On November 18, rioters destroyed the militia headquarters and radio jamming equipment in Bydgoszcz, and on 10 December a crowd in Szczecin attacked public buildings, including a prison, the state prosecutor's office, militia headquarters and the Soviet consulate. People across the country criticised the security police and asked for the dissolution of the public security committee and the punishment of its most guilty functionaries. Demands were made for the exposure of secret police collaborators, and suspected collaborators were frequently assaulted. In many localities, crowds gathered outside the secret police headquarters, shouted hostile slogans and broke windows. Public meetings, demonstrations and street marches took place in hundreds of towns across Poland. The meetings were usually organized by local party cells, local authorities and trade unions. However, official organisers tended to lose control as the political content exceeded their original agenda. Crowds often took radical action, which often resulted in unrest on the streets and clashes with police and other law enforcement agencies. Street activity peaked during and immediately after the 19–21 October "VIII Plenum" meeting of the Central Committee of the PZPR but continued until late in the year. A concurrent upsurge in religious and clerical sentiment took place. Hymns were sung, and the release of Stefan Wyszyński and the reinstatement of suppressed bishops were demanded. Nationalism was the cement of mass mobilisation and dominated public meetings during which people sang the national anthem and other patriotic songs, demanded the return of the white eagle to the flag and traditional army uniforms and attacked Poland's dependence on the Soviet Union and its military. They demanded the return of the eastern territories, an explanation for the Katyn massacre and the elimination of the Russian language from the educational curriculum. In the last ten days of October, monuments to the Red Army, despised by Poles, were attacked; red stars were pulled down from roofs of houses, factories and schools; red flags were destroyed; and portraits of Konstantin Rokossovsky, the military commander in charge of operations that drove the Nazi German forces from Poland, were defaced. Attempts were made to force entries into the homes of Soviet citizens, mostly in Lower Silesia, which was home to many Soviet troops. However, unlike the protesters in Hungary and Poznań, activists limited their political demands and behaviour, which were not purely opposed to the communist system. The communist authorities were not openly and unequivocally challenged, as they had been in June, and anticommunist slogans, which had been prevalent in the June uprising, such as "We want free elections", "Down with Communist dictatorship" or "Down with the Party", were much less prevalent. Also, party committees were not attacked. ## Change in the political leadership In October, Edward Ochab, the First Secretary of the Party and the Polish Prime Minister, proposed Władysław Gomułka for election for the First Secretary of the Party during the 8th Plenum meeting. Gomułka was a moderate who had been the First Secretary of the Party from 1943 to 1948 and had been ousted and in 1951 imprisoned after he had been accused of "right-wing nationalist deviation" by Stalinist hardliners, along with Bierut. Gomułka proved to be acceptable to both factions of Polish communists: the reformers, who were arguing for liberalization of the system, and the hardliners, who realised that they needed to compromise. Gomułka insisted on being given real powers to implement reforms. One specific condition that he set was that Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, who had mobilized troops against the Poznań workers, be removed from the Polish Politburo and Defence Ministry, to which Ochab agreed. The majority of the Polish leadership, backed by both the army and the Internal Security Corps, brought Gomułka and several associates into the Politburo and designated Gomułka as First Secretary. Untouched by the scandals of Stalinism, Gomułka was acceptable to the Polish masses but at first was viewed with much suspicion by Moscow. The Soviet leadership viewed events in Poland with alarm. Destalinisation was underway in the Soviet Union as well, but the Soviet leadership did not view the democratic reform that the Polish public desired as an acceptable solution. In Moscow, the belief was that any liberalisation in one country could lead to the destruction of communism and the ruin of Soviet influence in the region as a whole. The Soviet Union was not worried about only the political implications of reform but also its economic implications. Economically, the Soviet Union heavily invested in much of the Eastern Bloc and was striving for integration of its economies. The Soviet Union had financed Polish industry and was Poland's main trading partner. The Soviet Union directed the products that Poland manufactured, bought the products and exported goods to Poland that were no longer produced in it. That integration meant any reform, be it political or economic, in one country would have a great impact on the other. Because Poland was inextricably connected to the Soviet Union economically, the thought of an independent Polish economy was unrealistic. The country had been forced to rely on the Soviets for so long that breaking away completely would prove disastrous. Thus, both countries held crucial power in different facets. Poland could threaten Soviet strength and power in Eastern Europe politically, and the Soviet Union could essentially destroy the Polish economy. Therefore, any reform in the Polish government would have to concede to some Soviet demands, but the Soviets concurrently would have to concede to a vital partner. A high-level delegation of the Soviet Central Committee flew to Poland in an attempt to block removing pro-Soviet members of Politburo, mainly Soviet and Polish Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky. The Soviet delegation was led by Nikita Khrushchev and included Anastas Mikoyan, Nikolai Bulganin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Ivan Konev. The negotiations were tense; both Polish and Soviet troops were put on alert and engaged in "manoeuvres" that were used as thinly-veiled threats. Even before the Soviet delegation arrived, Soviet armed forces stationed in Poland (including two armored divisions) left their bases and started moving towards Warsaw. When ordered to halt their advance, they were only 100 km from the Polish national capital. The Polish leadership made it clear that the face of communism had to become more nationalised and that the Soviets could no longer directly control the Polish people. Khrushchev's speech worked against him. During Stalinism, the Soviet Union had placed Moscow-friendly Poles or Russians themselves in important political positions in Poland. After denouncing Stalinism so vehemently in his speech, Khrushchev could not regress to the Stalinist position by forcing more Russians into the Polish leadership. The Poles, in recognising the cries of the public, needed to keep the Soviets from direct control but could not raise their demands to a point that endangered their relationships in the bloc. Gomułka demanded increased autonomy and permission to carry out some reforms but also reassured the Soviets that the reforms were internal matters and that Poland had no intention of abandoning communism or its treaties with the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also pressured by the Chinese to accommodate the Polish demands and were increasingly distracted by the events in Hungary. Eventually, when Khrushchev was reassured that Gomułka would not alter the basic foundations of Polish communism, he withdrew the invasion threat and agreed to compromise, and Gomułka was confirmed in his new position. According to the account Khrushchev gives in his memoirs, he ordered the Soviet troops to halt in place after he was personally confronted by Gomułka who, according to Khrushchev, was in a state of agitation and "demanded" that the troops return to their bases, or "something terrible and irreversible will happen." Khrushchev claims that he was never against appointing Gomułka at the helm of PZPR and had expected him to be elevated to the top post ever since he was released from prison. The leadership's stance contributed to the relatively-moderate political dimension of social protest in October. Also crucial were the impacts of nationalism and nationalist emotions. They spurred social protest in June but dampened it in October, when the threat of Soviet invasion against Gomułka and his supporters transformed the social image of Polish communists. In June, they were still treated as puppets and servants of alien, anti-Polish interests and excluded from the national community. In October, they became a part of the nation opposing Soviet domination. Gomułka was enthusiastically supported by the great majority of society not primarily as a communist leader but as a leader of a nation who, by resisting Soviet demands, embodied a national longing for independence and sovereignty. His name was chanted, along with anti-Soviet slogans, at thousands of meetings: "Go home Rokossovsky", "Down with the Russians," "Long live Gomułka" and "We want a free Poland". Gomułka's anti-Soviet image was exaggerated but was justified in the popular imagination by his anti-Stalinist line in 1948 and years of subsequent internment. Thus, Polish communists found themselves unexpectedly at the head of a national liberation movement. The enthusiastic public support offered to Gomułka contributed to the legitimisation of communist rule in Poland, which incorporated mass nationalist, anti-Soviet feelings into the prevailing power structures. In Hungary, social protest destroyed the political system, but in Poland, it was absorbed into it. ## Aftermath Information about events in Poland reached the people of Hungary via Radio Free Europe's news and commentary services between 19 October and 22 October 1956. A student demonstration in Budapest in support of Gomułka, asking for similar reforms in Hungary, was one of the events that sparked the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The events of the Hungarian November also helped distract the Soviets and ensure the success of the Polish October. Gomułka, in his public speeches, criticized the hardships of Stalinism and promised reforms to democratize the country; this was received with much enthusiasm by Polish society. By mid-November, Gomułka had secured substantive gains in his negotiations with the Soviets: the cancellation of Poland's existing debts, new preferential trade terms, abandonment of the unpopular Soviet-imposed collectivization of Polish agriculture, and permission to liberalize policy towards the Roman Catholic Church. In December, the status of Soviet forces in Poland, the Northern Group of Forces, was finally regulated. In the aftermath of the October events, Rokossovsky and many other Soviet "advisers" left Poland, signaling that Moscow was willing to grant Polish communists slightly more independence. The Polish government rehabilitated many victims of the Stalinist era, and many political prisoners were set free. Among them was cardinal Stefan Wyszyński. The Polish legislative election of 1957 was much more liberal than that of 1952 although still not considered free by Western standards. Gomułka, however, could not and did not want to reject communism or Soviet domination; he could only steer Poland towards increased independence and "Polish national communism". Because of these restricted ambitions, which were recognized by the Soviets, the limited Polish revolution succeeded where the radical Hungarian one did not. Norman Davies sums up the effect as a transformation of Poland from puppet state to client state; Raymond Pearson similarly states that Poland changed from a Soviet colony to a dominion. Gomułka's pledge to follow a "Polish road to socialism" more in harmony with national traditions and preferences caused many Poles to interpret the dramatic confrontation of 1956 as a sign that the end of the dictatorship was in sight. Initially very popular for his reforms, which were optimistically referred to at the time as "Gomułka's thaw", Gomułka gradually softened his opposition to Soviet pressures, and the late-1950s hopes for major political change in Poland were replaced with growing disillusionment in the 1960s. In the end, Gomułka failed in his goal to salvage communism—or socialism—in Poland. Society became more liberal (as seen, for instance, in the achievements of the Polish Film School and the creation of such controversial movies as Ashes and Diamonds), and a civil society started to develop, but half-hearted democratization was not enough to satisfy the Polish public. By the time of the March 1968 events, Gomułka's thaw would be long over, and increasing economic problems and popular discontent would end up removing Gomułka from power in 1970—ironically, in a situation similar to the protests that once had propelled him to power. Nonetheless, some social scientists, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Frank Gibney, refer to these changes as a revolution, one less dramatic than its Hungarian counterpart but one which may have had an even more profound impact on the Eastern Bloc. Timothy Garton Ash calls the Polish October the most significant event in the post-war history of Poland until the rise of Solidarity. History professor Iván T. Berend claims that while the effects of the Polish October on the Eastern Bloc may be disputed, it set the course for the eventual fall of communism in the Polish People's Republic. In China, some leaders viewed the events in Poland, together with the Hungarian protests, as demonstrating the danger of overemphasizing heavy industry while paying insufficient attention to people's livelihoods.

Tropical Storm Erika

Atlantic tropical storm in 2015

Tropical Storm Erika was one of the deadliest and most destructive natural disasters in Dominica since Hurricane David in 1979. The fifth named storm of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season, Erika developed from a westward-moving tropical wave while well east of the Lesser Antilles. Hostile conditions, including dry air and wind shear, inhibited significant development, and Erika failed to acquire sustained winds beyond 50 mph (80 km/h). Contrary to predictions of a northwesterly recurvature, the cyclone persisted on a westerly course and passed through the Leeward Islands and emerged over the Caribbean Sea on August 27. Erika succumbed to adverse conditions the following day, dissipating as a tropical cyclone near the Dominican Republic. The remnant system persisted for several more days, moving into the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, before dissipating over Georgia on September 3. Several islands experienced heavy rainfall during the passage of Erika, especially Dominica. The storm's asymmetric structure, coupled with the mountainous terrain of the island and ample moisture aloft, led to rainfall accumulations up to 33 in (850 mm). With grounds already saturated from antecedent rainfall, tremendous runoff quickly overwhelmed river basins and triggered catastrophic floods. Accompanying mudslides worsened the situation, temporarily damming the rivers before collapsing. Hundreds of homes were left uninhabitable and thousands of people were displaced; the entire town of Petite Savanne was evacuated and subsequently abandoned as a result of the storm. All told, 30 people died across the island in the nation's worst disaster since Hurricane David. The storm's devastating effects in Dominica prompted an influx of international assistance. Aid from multiple nations and intergovernmental organizations poured in to assist victims of the storm. Thousands of homes needed to be built or repaired, including 500–1,000 for the relocation of all of Petite Savanne's residents. Recovery in Dominica was halted in September 2017 by Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 hurricane that wrought far greater devastation on the island. In Guadeloupe, heavy rainfall in the vicinity of Basse-Terre caused flooding and mudslides, forcing roads to temporarily close. Approximately 250,000 people in Puerto Rico were left without electricity. The island experienced US\$17.37 million in agricultural damage. In the Dominican Republic, a weather station in Barahona measured 24.26 in (616 mm) of rain, including 8.8 in (220 mm) in a single hour. About 823 homes suffered damage and 7,345 people were displaced. Five people died in Haiti, four from a weather-related traffic accident and one from a landslide. Total damage from Erika is estimated to be over US\$500 million, with US\$482.8 million in Dominica alone. ## Meteorological history On August 20, 2015, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) began monitoring a tropical wave over western Africa, near the Atlantic shore. The disorganized system emerged over the Atlantic Ocean several hundred miles southeast of the Cape Verde Islands the following day. Moving quickly west, the system bypassed the Cape Verde Islands to the south on August 22, but remained largely disorganized. A sharp trough developed within expanding deep convection on August 23, though a well-defined circulation did not consolidate. Organization of the low improved throughout the day as environmental conditions favored tropical cyclogenesis. The trough acquired gale-force winds the following day and finally developed a closed circulation by 18:00 UTC. The formation of a closed low marked the transition into a tropical cyclone; accordingly, the system was classified as Tropical Storm Erika, the fifth named storm of the annual hurricane season. Upon its designation, Erika was situated roughly 1,035 mi (1,665 km) east of the Lesser Antilles. The storm maintained a brisk westward trajectory, steered by a subtropical ridge to the north. At the time of Erika's classification, forecast models diverged significantly on the potential future of Erika. Statistical guidance and the HWRF depicted a hurricane while the ECMWF and GFS showed a weaker system due to increasing wind shear. The models that intensified the storm indicated a more northerly track while those that kept it weaker had the system continuing along a westward course. Accordingly, the NHC noted low confidence in their five-day forecast for Erika. This uncertainty ultimately reflected in above-average forecast errors when compared to all tropical cyclones, but roughly average for weak, poorly organized systems. Throughout August 25 and into early August 26, the convective organization of Erika fluctuated due to wind shear and entrainment of dry air, periodically leaving the center of circulation devoid of convection. Early on August 27, Erika managed to intensify slightly, attaining its peak intensity with maximum sustained winds of 50 mph (80 km/h) and a barometric pressure of 1,001 mbar (29.6 inHg). Around 09:00 UTC, the disorganized center of Erika passed near the northern tip of Guadeloupe, before emerging over the eastern Caribbean Sea. Convection remained poorly-organized and mostly confined to eastern portions of the cyclone, as it traversed the eastern Caribbean Sea. Multiple circulation centers were noted during the overnight of August 27–28, all rotating around a broad general center. One such center moved over St. Croix and produced gale-force gusts. Environmental conditions ahead of the storm became increasingly hostile, and forecasters at the NHC continued to note unusually high uncertainty in their forecasts. Further structural degradation ensued on August 28 as Erika approached the Dominican Republic. Based on data from Hurricane Hunters, Erika degenerated into a broad area of low pressure—no longer meeting the definition of a tropical cyclone—shortly after 12:00 UTC, near the southeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. Operationally, the NHC maintained advisories on Erika until 13:30 UTC on August 29. It was also noted during those advisories that the center was completely devoid of convection, and whatever convection remained was reduced to the eastern half of the system. Around 21:00 UTC on August 28, the remnants of Erika made landfall along the southeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. The disheveled system emerged over the Windward Passage early on August 29. Thereafter, the system skirted the northern coast of Cuba and entered the Gulf of Mexico on August 31. Turning northward, the disturbance eventually crossed northern Florida on September 2, before dissipating over Georgia on the following day. ## Preparations ### Caribbean Various local governments issued tropical storm watches and warnings for their respective nations throughout the duration of Erika. Watches and warnings covered the Lesser Antilles from Guadeloupe northward, almost the entirety of the Greater Antilles, and the Bahamas. The Red Cross opened four shelters to the public across the United States Virgin Islands. The local Health Department also opened special needs shelters on St. Croix and St. Thomas. All non-essential government personnel were given administrative leave on August 27. Owing to rough seas, local ports temporarily closed. Although airports remained open, several airlines cancelled flights. A territory-wide curfew was imposed until the afternoon of August 28. Schools, ports, and beaches were closed across the Dominican Republic. The Army of the Dominican Republic deployed 275 soldiers and alongside the nation's Air Force, assisted with the evacuation of residents. The Navy was placed on standby for potential search and rescue operations. Officials in Haiti suspended air service, banned highway travel between departments, and ordered small watercraft to remain at port. Evacuation shelters were opened across all departments and 254 prisoners were relocated from Gonaïves to three other facilities. ### Florida On August 28, Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency. Despite the storm dissipating shortly thereafter, Scott kept the emergency declaration in place and stated, "This storm has been completely unpredictable the whole time...we will still get a lot of rain and a lot of flooding." Thirty members of the Florida National Guard were positioned while another 8,000 were placed on standby. A collective 17 flights were cancelled at Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport on August 28. Schools in Hendry County preemptively closed for August 31, with officials citing flooding concerns. Sandbags were distributed to residents in Doral, Hallandale Beach, Hollywood, and Sweetwater. The last hurricane to impact the state was Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Since that time, the state's population grew by 2 million with many presumed to have never experienced a hurricane before. Some newer residents remained apathetic over the storm, dismissing it as "another excuse to skip work or school or to party." ## Impact ### Caribbean In Guadeloupe, rain totals reached 100 mm (3.9 in) in Basse-Terre while gusts peaked at 100 km/h (62 mph) on La Désirade. Some landslides and flooding were reported, with roads in Basse-Terre temporarily closed. Électricité de France reported that 1,600 customers lost power during the storm. Rough seas in Martinique grounded boats. Landslides and felled trees blocked several roadways across the island. Elsewhere in the Lesser Antilles, effects from Erika were negligible. The outer bands of Erika brought much needed rain to drought-stricken Puerto Rico; a station in Adjuntas recorded 4.45 in (113 mm) of rain. Tropical storm-force wind gusts, peaking at 59 mph (95 km/h) in Maricao, caused substantial disruption to the power grid, leaving approximately 250,000 people without electricity. Thirty-six homes sustained roof damage across interior locations of the territory and agriculture sustained US\$17.37 million in damage. A weather station in Barahona, Dominican Republic, measured 24.26 in (616 mm) of rain during Erika's passage, including 8.8 in (220 mm) in a single hour. Surrounding areas reported significantly less rain, however. Throughout the country, 823 homes suffered damage and 7,345 people were displaced. Erika blocked over 400 roads and left many power outages. Winds gusts of 50 mph (80 km/h) in Azua caused at least RD\$400 million (US\$8.91 million) in damage to the banana crop. Heavy rainfall also impacted Haiti, which was still recovering from a catastrophic earthquake in 2010; an estimated 60,000 people remained in emergency housing. Four persons died and eleven others were hospitalized in Léogâne, when a truck crashed into a bus on rain-slicked roads and exploded. A fifth death occurred during a landslide in Port-au-Prince. Two people in the area were injured after a house collapsed. The remnants of Erika later brought much needed rains to Cuba, which was suffering from its worst drought since 1901. ### United States Later, Erika's remnants dropped locally heavy rainfall across Florida, particularly in the Miami Metropolitan Area. A station northwest of Sweetwater observed 9 in (230 mm) of rain. Minor flash flooding left streets in Wynwood impassable. Farther north in Flagler County, scattered thunderstorms produced isolated instances of heavy rain; 2.2 in (56 mm) fell within one hour in Palm Coast. In the greater Jacksonville area, lightning struck the Sally B. Mathis Elementary School, resulting in damage to the air conditioning unit and evacuation of students. In neighboring Georgia, moisture from Erika's remnants fueled scattered severe thunderstorms. Large hail caused US\$2.3 million in damage near Woodstock. Strong winds gusting up to 60 mph (97 km/h) accompanied these storms, downing trees and power lines in Cherokee, Polk, and Troup counties. Additional rainfall extended north through the Carolinas. ## Effects in Dominica Although Erika passed well to the north of Dominica as a weak tropical storm, torrential rain associated with the storm impacted the country. Unusually high precipitable water values of 2.6 in (67 mm) were present over the island as Erika moved through. Orographic influence exacerbated rainfall rates, and this was further compounded with the formation of a temporary mesoscale low over the island as the primary circulation of Erika continued west. More than 8 in (200 mm) of rain fell across the entire island in less than 48 hours, with an island-wide average of 24 in (610 mm). During the period of heaviest rain, average rainfall across the entire island exceeded 3.5 in (90 mm) per hour. Rates along the Macoucherie River reached 11 in (270 mm) per hour. The heaviest rain was concentrated around the nation's tallest mountain, Morne Diablotins, where an estimated 31 to 33 in (800 to 850 mm) fell. Rainfall across Morne Diablotin National Park generally exceeded 24 in (600 mm). A secondary peak accumulation of 26 to 28 in (650 to 700 mm) occurred in the southeastern part of the island around Morne Trois Pitons. Observed accumulations include 17 in (430 mm) at Gleau Gommier, 12.62 in (321 mm) at Canefield Airport, and 8.74 in (222 mm) at Douglas–Charles Airport. With grounds already saturated from nearly two weeks of rain prior to Erika, much of the precipitation did not penetrate the surface; in multiple watersheds, runoff exceeded 60 percent of accumulations. Catastrophic flash flooding and mudslides ensued across the island, resulting in Dominica's worst natural disaster since Hurricane David in 1979. Across the island's rugged terrain, the mudslides temporarily dammed overflowing rivers creating a buildup of water. These earthen dams subsequently collapsed, leading to amplified flooding downstream. Flow rates in these localized events vastly exceeded values expected by International Commission on Large Dams modeling. A post-storm study of 16 rivers on the island revealed peak discharge values in excess of 1,000 m³/s along 5 rivers, with a maximum of 2,876 m³/s along the Malabuka River. Nearly 17,000 of the nation's 71,293 people were severely impacted by the storm. A total of 30 people were killed, 20 others were injured, and 574 people were left homeless. More than 890 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Infrastructure suffered tremendous damage: 6 percent of bridges and 17 percent of roads were wiped out. Furthermore, half of the nation's bridges and a quarter of its roads were damaged. Total losses amounted to EC\$1.3 billion (US\$482.8 million), roughly 90 percent of Dominica's gross domestic product. Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit stated in a national announcement on August 28 that, "The visual damage I saw today, I fear, may have set our development process back by 20 years". Flooding crippled transportation and communication, with eight bridges severely damaged or destroyed, leaving many areas of the island isolated. Boetica and Delices remained cut-off by ground for more than three weeks. More than 12 major rivers topped their banks. Approximately 45 percent of residents lost electricity, and almost the entirety of the water supply network was damaged. Additionally, 50 percent of telephone service was lost. Both Canefield and Douglas–Charles airports were flooded, with water rising above a small airplane at the latter. Douglas–Charles Airport sustained more than EC\$39.5 million (US\$14.6 million) in damage and was closed until September 18. The main river running through Roseau, the nation's capital, burst its banks during the overnight of August 26–27, flooding surrounding areas. One person was killed during a mudslide and one building collapsed in the city. The small community of Petite Savanne was virtually destroyed, with 217 homes leveled and all residents forced to evacuate. Twenty people died or were presumed dead in the village, accounting for two-thirds of the deaths attributed to Erika in Dominica. Residents dug through mud and debris, often with their bare hands, to rescue those trapped and in many cases did so with nearby homes on the verge of collapse. The village was isolated for several days and residents buried victims before help arrived. ### Local response Immediately following Erika's devastating impact in Dominica on August 27, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States convened to determine an assessment plan. The Government of Dominica declared nine areas special disaster areas: Petite Savanne, Pichelin, Good Hope, Bath Estate, Dubique, Campbell, Coulibistrie, San Sauveur, and Petite Soufriere. The National Emergency Operations Centre was activated and worked in conjunction with various local agencies to conduct relief missions. Approximately 100 personnel were deployed for various relief measures, including search and rescue. The Dominica Spa Health and Wellness Association worked in conjunction with the Trinidad-based Centre for Human Development to provide psychological support to victims; eight trauma specialists were sent to Dominica. The psychiatric unit of Princess Margaret Hospital conducted field assessments and provided emotional support to residents. In a report on September 18, they noted that residents in Coulibistrie remained in a state of shock for weeks after Erika, with many struggling to begin the recovery process. The Ministry of Health highlighted concerns over post-storm diseases, particularly from mosquitoes, due to a major increase in the usage of water storage containers. An outbreak of Gastroenteritis ensued in the weeks following Erika, with 153 cases confirmed by September 22. Cases were primarily in Portsmouth, Saint Joseph, and Roseau. A unique means of supplying food and water the communities of Boetica and Delices, only accessible by air due to a gorge 260 ft (80 m) wide and 200 ft (61 m) deep, was established in the form of a zip-line in late-September. This served as the primary means of aid until a 98 ft (30 m) Bailey bridge was constructed. By April 2016, the cost of infrastructure rehabilitation projects reached EC\$7 million (US\$3 million). Supplementing reconstruction efforts by China and the United Kingdom, the nation's government allocated a further EC\$30 million (US\$11 million) to enhancing road safety. The Food and Agriculture Organization allocated EC\$300,000 (US\$110,000) for farmers in October. Through June 2016, the government provided victims with EC\$5–6 million (US\$1.8–2.2 million), primarily to cover shelters and food. ### International assistance Within 48 hours of the storm, Governments of Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and various intergovernmental organizations under the United Nations—such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), UNICEF, and United Nations Development Programme—pledged aid; Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago provided support teams—firefighters, police, search and rescue, and military personnel—and established supply routes with Dominica. The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) pledged assistance to Dominica, offering two helicopters with supplies and medics from Trinidad. Support teams from the CDEMA arrived in Dominica on August 28. The Regional Security System deployed 83 personnel whom conducted search and rescue operations and assisted in the evacuation of hundreds of residents. China and the Caribbean Development Bank offered US\$300,000 and US\$200,000 in aid, respectively, to the nation. China later provided an additional US\$200,000 in October. The Government of Venezuela airlifted 2,000 tons of food and supplies to Dominica and pledged to provide a helicopter carrier ship on August 29. Supplies from Venezuela were bolstered to 10 tons by September 1, and the ship PDV Marina was deployed that day with an additional 13 tons worth fuel, machinery, and other supplies. Further assistance was provided by the Governments of Cuba, Grenada, and St. Kitts and Nevis by August 31, the latter of which donated EC\$1 million (US\$368,000). The British-flagged RFA Lyme Bay arrived in Dominica on September 2, carrying medical supplies, marines, and a Lynx Mk.8 helicopter. The helicopter flew 25 flights over a period of five days to isolated communities, providing them with 2 tonnes of supplies daily. More than 20 tonnes of water and 5.3 tonnes of food were provided by RFA Lyme Bay. The Governments of the British Virgin Islands and Taiwan each pledged US\$100,000 in funds. Digicel and LIME coordinated restoration efforts to the nation's fiber-optic networks. The former requested donations from 32 countries while the latter assisted in establishing supply routes to isolated communities. Digical also partnered with the Dominican Red Cross, paying for transportation so relief teams could access isolated towns. The Government of the Cayman Islands donated US\$500,000 and requested residents of the territory to donate supplies. Japan's government provided US\$100,000-worth of generators, water purifiers, and water tanks through the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Japan later signed a US1.6 million grant for disaster resilience supplies in January 2016. A further TT\$5 million (US\$784,000) was provided by Trinidad and Tobago. The Government of Guyana provided a shipment of 68 tonnes of rice collected through public and private donations, three times more than targeted. Through its Excess Rainfall Programme, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility provided €6.5 million (US\$2.4 million) to the Government of Dominica—the maximum payout allowable. Thousands of school supplies, including books and writing utensils, were collected by the Caribbean Community. The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), All Hands Volunteers, Convoy of Hope, ChildFund, and the Organization of American States also provided assistance. The initial response from UNICEF included the distribution of over 600 hygiene kits and 4,000 water purification tablets. Logistical support, namely satellite phones, solar chargers, and laptops, were provided by the International Telecommunication Union. Four tonnes of medical supplies provided by the PAHO arrived on September 9, and the Government of Brazil supplied additional medical items in October. After an initial release of funds on September 3, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched an emergency appeal on September 10 for approximately US\$1 million to assist 12,000 people. The society's relief operation lasted until April 10, 2016, and provided 12,382 people with life-saving assistance. The IFRC's primary goal was to restore access to clean water; more than half a million litres of water was provided during the seven-month operation. In regards to health, psychosocial support was made available to 873 people, roughly half of the original goal. Hygiene awareness and distribution of kits proved successful, with all 1,000 kits supplied to those in need. The Dominican Red Cross mass-promoted the Red Cross First Aid mobile app to 8,000 phones, though only 399 people downloaded it. Cash grants of US\$334—by way of Visa debit cards—were provided to 279 families to cover lost property. A total of 1,000 mattresses were provided to survivors and a request for additional beds was made; however, limited funds prevented fulfillment. In March 2017, the CDEMA approved a €9.6 million (US\$10.5 million) plan to address gaps in Dominica's disaster response legislation uncovered during the response to Erika. ### Reconstruction The destruction of Petite Savanne forced the evacuation of 823 people; the village was later deemed uninhabitable and a new town needed to be built elsewhere. Many were temporarily relocated to the Dominica Grammar School in Roseau; however, members of the public looked upon the evacuees with scorn and insulted them for disrupting their daily lives. Parliamentary Representative Kenneth Darroux pleaded with residents to be understanding and patient with those whom were displaced. Plans for a new settlement were established in February 2016, with plans to build 500–1,000 homes. The government provided displaced residents with EC\$1,000 per family to handle rent. Similarly, all residents of Dubique were forced to evacuate; they were relocated to temporary homes in Grand Bay provided by Venezuela. Ten two- and three-bedroom homes were provided by the ADRA. Costs for resettlement and reconstruction exceeded EC\$91 million (US\$14.3 million). Power was restored to all areas of the nation, except for Petite Savanne and Dubique, by September 28. Restoration to the nation's water system was completed in January 2016; however, permanent systems were still to be constructed. French organizations provided €70,000 (US\$77,000) for the reconstruction of two schools. Repair of Douglas–Charles airport was deemed a priority, though the first phase of rehabilitation for runways and aprons took more than a year to complete. In addition to repairs, greater flood defense systems were implemented, including dredging, flood walls, and river training. Construction of 25 planned homes by the ADRA began in February 2016, with projected completion in 2017; 50 volunteers were involved in the project. In April 2016, a library built in 1902 was converted into the "Post Erika Reconstruction Center", spearheaded by Baroness Patricia Scotland. Contracts for roadway repairs between St. Joseph and Layou were signed that month. In November 2016, Dominica signed an agreement with the European Union for an €8.9 million (US\$9.6 million) rehabilitation project. In a join Dominica–United Kingdom project, a new road from Loubiere to Bagatelle in southeastern Dominica was announced in March 2017. The EC\$100 million (US\$37 million) plan would ensure the road could handle heavy rain events, with 12–14 culverts and 3 bridges. Furthermore, road edge failure issues were to be addressed. On September 18–19, 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Dominica as a Category 5 hurricane, the first such storm of that intensity on record in the nation. An estimated 98 percent of the island's structures were damaged or destroyed and agriculture was devastated. The Assessment Capacities Project estimated total losses of EC\$3.69 billion (US\$1.37 billion), equal to 226 percent of Dominica's 2016 GDP. A total of 65 fatalities have been confirmed across the island, including 34 who are missing and presumed to be dead. ## Retirement Owing to the disastrous effects on Dominica, on April 25, 2016, the name Erika was retired, and will never again be used for an Atlantic tropical cyclone. It was replaced with Elsa for the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season. Erika is the second Atlantic tropical cyclone that did not become a hurricane to have its name retired, the other being Allison in 2001. ## See also - List of wettest tropical cyclones by country - Tropical Storm Dorothy (1970) - Tropical Storm Cindy (1993) - Tropical Storm Debby (1994) - Tropical Storm Erika (2009) - Hurricane Isaias (2020)

Cane Beds, Arizona

Cane Beds is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Mohave County, Arizona, United States. It lies 4 miles (6 km) south of the border with Utah in the Arizona Strip, and is supported by services in Utah as well as some in Nevada. The population was 466 at the 2020 census. The community is historically Mormon, and presently also includes several families from breakaway Mormon groups. It has a small tourism industry because of nearby scenic hiking trails. ## Etymology The name of the town refers to cane that grows natively in the area. In Will C. Barnes' book of Arizona place names, Barnes quoted a letter received from a resident, Annie W. Wilkinson, in his explanation of the name of Cane Beds: "When settlers first came here they found beds of wild cane growing in the district. Some can still be found, hence the name." The name has historically been recorded as "Cain Patch". Cane Patch Creek/Cane Beds Spring has the same etymology. The Southern Paiute name, Paɣáŋq\`wton<sup>Ɛ</sup>nįnto\`, translates to "cane valley". Edward Sapir identified a Paiute location romanized as "Paganktonic" as likely being Cane Beds. ## History Until the 20th century, the land was occupied by Southern Paiute people; it is seen within Paiute territory on maps from 1934, which had receded north and was completely absent in Arizona by 1986. There are Paiute, Archaic, and Anasazi sites in the area. As the Arizona Strip was largely ignored by the government, the Cane Beds land was first explored by settlers during early pioneering expeditions of Mormons in northern Arizona, by John D. Lee, J. C. L. (John Calvin Lazelle) Smith, and Jesse Pierce Steele in June 1852. In 1858, a similar expedition also landed the pioneers in Cane Beds. Lee's party may have known Cane Beds as "Virgin Bottoms", being a valley near the Virgin River. The town was established in 1868 and was fully settled by Mormons by 1876, shortly before the first Mormon temple in Utah was finished. It lay along the trail from Lees Ferry to the new temple, traversed by Mormon settlers. The post office was established on June 15, 1917, with Cora H. Cox as postmistress. Cox was born Cora Haight, and had married into the Cox Mormon family. She had moved to Cane Beds with her young family on March 11, 1917. A group of the Church of the Firstborn (a form of Mormonism), led by Ross LeBaron Jr., is based in Cane Beds. When the nearby Short Creek Community of fundamentalist Mormons broke up following the imprisonment of leader Warren Jeffs, several families moved to Cane Beds; others had been exiled there by Jeffs for not following his doctrine. Benjamin Bistline, Short Creek historian, moved to Cane Beds in his later years after renouncing fundamentalism. Polygamy persisted in the area in the 20th century due to its isolation, despite the practice being discontinued by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. By 2009, most residents of Cane Beds were non-polygamous, though some still had connections with Colorado City. ## Geography Cane Beds is located in northeastern Mohave County at (36.934154, −112.911788). According to the United States Geological Survey, the CDP has a total area of 8.28 square miles (21.4 km²), all land. It is in the Arizona Strip, 4 miles (6 km) south of the Arizona–Utah border, 7 miles (11 km) southeast of Colorado City, just south and west of the Vermilion Cliffs and Kaibab Indian Reservation, and about an hour and a half northwest of the Grand Canyon. It is close to the St. George, Utah metropolitan area and borders Cottonwood Point Wilderness. The Vermilion Cliffs at Cane Beds rise more than over 1,000 feet (300 m) above the community, to elevations of 6,210 and 6,443 feet (1,893 and 1,964 m) above sea level. Land in Cane Beds includes that which is suitable for agriculture. Native fauna includes pronghorns and mule deer. There are a variety of rock types in the strata at Cane Beds, including the Moenkopi Formation, Chinle Formation, and Shinarump Conglomerate. The town was studied in the Wheeler Survey. ## Demographics As of the 2010 census, there were 448 people living in the CDP: 231 male and 217 female. 171 were 19 years old or younger, 78 were ages 20–34, 65 were between the ages of 35 and 49, 66 were between 50 and 64, and the remaining 68 were aged 65 and above. The median age was 29.2 years. The racial makeup of the CDP was 94.4% White, 2.2% Native American, 0.7% Black or African American, 0.2% from Asian, and 1.3% from two or more races. 2% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 142 households in the CDP, 106 family households (74.6%) and 36 non-family households (25.4%), with an average household size of 3.15. Of the family households, there were 84 married couples living together, 13 single fathers, and 9 single mothers. Of the non-family households, 31 were a single person living alone, 16 male and 15 female. The CDP contained 168 housing units, of which 142 were occupied and 26 were vacant. ## Tourism It is a popular hiking spot, with nearby scenic border trails. In 2016, a nurse who was hiking alone in Cane Beds fell 100 feet (30 m) and was not rescued for over a day, having landed in a canyon. Mountain and air rescue teams found her after the owners of her hotel noticed her absence and called the county sheriff, and she recovered in three months. She was initially treated at a regional medical center in Utah, before being transferred to the Mayo Clinic, where she worked. In 2014, a teenager from St. George fell 100 feet into a canyon on a hike with family, and died. The Cane Beds Corral is a glamping and log cabin rental service in the town. ## Education It is divided between Fredonia-Moccasin Unified School District, in nearby Coconino County, and Colorado City Unified School District, principally serving the former Short Creek Community. For four years in the 2000s, the Colorado City Unified School District was placed under state intervention because of the high rates of polygamy practiced in Colorado City and Hildale, Utah, the other towns in the district. Cane Beds students originally began to be educated in the Short Creek school district as there were only five students from the town, and districts needed eight students to justify a school, so the districts had been merged. ## Infrastructure ### Transport The nearest airport is Colorado City Municipal Airport; the nearest airport in regular service is St. George Regional Airport in St. George, Utah, approximately an hour away. The nearest international airport is Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. A two-mile stretch of Yellowstone Road in the Cane Beds area was renamed for LaVoy Finicum in 2017; while residents supported the motion, believing local man Finicum died defending his beliefs, the Mohave County Planning and Zoning Department only passed it 3–2, with the two opposing votes citing Finicum's lawlessness. Those who voted in favor said the move would celebrate the long history of Finicum's family in the area, not his armed activism. Reportedly, Finicum had previously requested that the stretch of road be named for him. It goes from Arizona State Route 389 (SR 389) to Cane Beds. In 1950, there were efforts in the area to promote improvement of roads and infrastructure, and on March 14 that year a town hall-style meeting was held and an organization formed to better the community of Cane Beds and others nearby. Cane Beds Road is a stretch of county road 91 (former U.S. Route 91), and has a confluence with Interstate 15 (I-15) for about a mile. I-15 connects the town to Utah and Nevada. A railroad used to follow U.S. Route 89/89A where it passes by the town. SR 389 also passes close to Cane Beds. ### Services Cane Beds is supported by the Mohave County Sheriff's Office, as well as the Kane County Sheriff's Office in southern Utah. Major hospitals serving Cane Beds residents are in Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Local medical facilities are at the Creek Valley Health Clinic in Colorado City and Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George. The Cox Family Cemetery, also known as the Cane Beds Cemetery, is in the town. The town receives most of its local television from translators of Utah stations serving Hildale, with the exception of one Mohave County-owned translator of KSAZ-TV, the Fox station in Phoenix. ## Notable residents - Benjamin Bistline, historian - LaVoy Finicum, militant - Grove Karl Gilbert, during his geologic expedition - John D. Lee, pioneer, helped settle the area

Irreemplazable

Irreemplazable (English: Irreplaceable) is the first extended play (EP) by American singer Beyoncé. It was released on August 27, 2007, by Columbia Records and Music World Entertainment. Comprising Spanish re-recordings and remixes of songs from her second studio album B'Day (2006), it was initially featured as a bonus disc for the North American deluxe edition of B'Day in April 2007. The EP was produced by Cuban-American musician Rudy Pérez, who also helped with writing the songs in Spanish. Irreemplazable received mixed reviews from music critics, who criticized its lack of content and the fact that it was released several months after the deluxe edition of B'Day. The EP peaked at number 105 on the US Billboard 200, and has sold 57,000 copies in the United States. "Bello Embustero", the Spanish version of "Beautiful Liar", was nominated for Record of the Year at the 8th Annual Latin Grammy Awards (2007). ## Background Growing up in Houston, Texas, Beyoncé was surrounded by the Spanish language, and learned some Spanish as a child, which she later forgot. When re-recording songs for Irreemplazable, Beyoncé's vocal coach provided the Spanish lyrics phonetically, and each line was recorded up to four times for the EP. Beyoncé has stated that she intends to take up Spanish lessons in the future. She said of the EP's recording, "This is such an honor for me to be able to connect with all my fans. I had so much fun singing in Spanish. It reminded me of growing up in Houston". The Denver Post's John Wenzel interpreted the release of Irreemplazable as "an effort to meet the exploding market for Spanish language music". ## Release and promotion Irreemplazable was released as the bonus disc on the deluxe edition of B'Day in the United States on April 3, 2007, before being released separately through Columbia Records and Music World Entertainment on August 28, 2007. iTunes Store began selling the EP on August 27, 2007. However, a remix of "Get Me Bodied" was available only on the individual release of Irreemplazable. Beyoncé appeared on Tr3s' television show Mi TRL on August 2, 2007 and showed a behind-the-scenes special, "Making of the Spanish EP". An exclusive DVD accompanied the EP in Walmart stores, containing behind-the-scenes footage and taped performances from The Beyoncé Experience and Beyoncé's appearance on The Early Show, as well as a documentary named "La Evolución Latina de Beyoncé" ("The Latin Evolution of Beyoncé"). ## Music and lyrics Irreemplazable is primarily an R&B and Latin pop album. The Spanish-language songs from the EP were written by Cuban American composer Rudy Pérez and he wrote the lyrics phonetically to help Beyoncé perform the songs in Spanish. "We spent hours and hours working on it. She wanted to make it perfect. She worked hard. That's why people are saying it sounds like she's fluent in Spanish", Perez added. Pérez changed some of the words in Spanish as he felt it they "didn't fit the music" and "doesn't make sense". He assisted with Beyoncé on pronouncing her r's in Spanish. Irreemplazable opens with "Amor Gitano", a duet with Alejandro Fernández originally from Fernández' fifteenth studio album, Viento a Favor. "Listen", a theme song from Dreamgirls, in which Beyoncé appears, was re-recorded under the title "Oye". The EP's title track is a Spanish version of "Irreplaceable", a song that was highly successful in its English recording. Three recordings of "Beautiful Liar" appear on Irreemplazable: a Spanish version (titled "Bello Embustero"), a remixed English version and a Spanglish version. A norteña remix of "Irreemplazable" is the EP's seventh track, while Timbaland's remix of "Get Me Bodied", which features vocals from Voltio, closes Irreemplazable. ## Critical reception Giving it two and a half stars, Andy Kellman of AllMusic said that "there's not that much to the disc," and alleged that it was unnecessary, concluding "if you're a die-hard Beyoncé fan, you'll probably feel jerked around a bit — especially if you bought B'Day when it came out in September 2006 and bought the deluxe edition seven months later, only to find out that the bonus material would later come out on its own (with a track not on the second disc of the deluxe edition!)." Kellman selected "Amor Gitano", "Irreemplazable" and the "Get Me Bodied" remix as the highlights of the EP. The EP led to Beyoncé receiving a nomination for Pop New Artist of the Year at the 2008 Lo Nuestro Awards, and "Bello Embustero" was nominated for Record of the Year at the 8th Annual Latin Grammy Awards. ## Accolades ## Commercial performance Irreemplazable debuted on the US Billboard 200 at number one-hundred-and-five on the chart dated September 15, 2007, selling over 6,000 copies that week. It remained on the chart for three weeks. On the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, the EP made its entry at number forty-one the same week, and spent five weeks on the chart. Irreemplazable performed better on the Latin charts, debuting at number three on the Top Latin Albums and number two on the Latin Pop Albums. The EP stayed on the charts for twelve and thirteen weeks, respectively. As of October 6, 2010, Irreemplazable had sold 57,000 copies in the United States. ## Track listing Notes - signifies a vocal producer - signifies a co-producer - signifies a Spanish-language vocal producer - signifies a producer and vocal producer - signifies an additional producer - signifies a remixer ## Personnel Credits adapted from AllMusic and Irreemplazable's liner notes. - April Baldwin – artists and repertoire - Aaron Brougher – artists and repertoire - Eduardo Cabra – production - Olgui Chirino – vocal production - Max Gousse – artists and repertoire - Juli Knapp – artists and repertoire - Beyoncé – executive production, production, vocal production - Mathew Knowles – artists and repertoire, executive production, management - Ne-Yo – production - Rudy Pérez – production, remix production, vocal production - Timbaland – production, remixing - The Underdogs – production ## Charts

Post-lineage yoga

Contemporary form of yoga

Post-lineage yoga, also called non-lineage yoga, is a contemporary form of yoga practised outside any major school or guru's lineage. The term was introduced by the ethnographer and scholar-practitioner Theodora Wildcroft. She stated that with the deaths of the pioneering gurus of modern yoga such as B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, yoga teachers, especially women, have been reclaiming their practice through their yoga communities, resisting commercialization as well as lineage. Scholars and yoga teachers have commented that post-lineage yoga has evolved in reaction to the image of contemporary yoga as an idealized, fit, young, white female body. They note that the practice is non-denominational, non-hierarchical, and non-authoritarian, matching the contemporary concern for authentic religious experience that works for the individual. ## Definition The ethnographer and yoga scholar-practitioner Theodora Wildcroft of SOAS University of London introduced the term "post-lineage yoga" to describe a contemporary form of yoga practised outside any major school or guru's lineage. She defined it as follows: > [Post-lineage yoga] rejects the idea that any individual yogic text or modern alignment paradigm can hold complete universal truth, and rejects unquestioning allegiance to a single deity in the form of a living or historical figure. It rejects the common practice of attributing any harm caused within the practice to defects in the practitioner, and seeks to re-situate the practice in community, and socio-political contexts. Post-lineage yoga is a re-evaluation of the authority to determine practice, and a privileging of peer networks over pedagogical hierarchies, or saṃghas (communities) over guru-śiṣya (teacher-adept) relationships. ## Practice Wildcroft cited the yoga teacher and author Matthew Remski. He noted that the pioneering gurus of modern yoga as exercise, such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, B. K. S. Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois, have now died. With their passing, individual yoga teachers, often women, are reclaiming the practice through their communities, and resisting commercialisation and modernity more generally. Wildcroft described the people she observes as "unusually dedicated, even obsessively reflexive about the practice of yoga" compared to the casual practitioners who go to a weekly yoga class for exercise and social contact. Wildcroft mentioned Angela Farmer as an instance of such a radical practitioner. Farmer trained in Iyengar Yoga, moving away from it to become "one of the most influential" teachers of the "divine feminine" approach to yoga. On the way, Farmer invented the yoga mat; she has taught for over 50 years. Wildcroft has seen Farmer's relative lack of media coverage as a sign of the wider overlooking of the parts of yoga culture that lie outside the defined lineages. Remski noted that the "giants of the modernist age of yogic entrepreneurial globalization are now all departed, debilitated, or disgraced, including Bikram Choudhury. More generally, in his view, a "great man's" death "erodes the Great Man Story, leaving space through which more hidden stories may emerge". Remski gave the example of Vanda Scaravelli, whom he described as one of Iyengar's few female pupils who were not intimidated by him. Remski wrote that Scaravelli taught few students, "one at a time", and that all of them have "gone on to influence yoga for decades without grandiose institutes, certification programmes, or even websites". Wildcroft comments that abuse by yoga gurus, combined with the revelation that modern asana practice was a 20th century recasting of yoga, have encouraged people towards a post-lineage approach. The scholars Agi Wittich and Patrick McCartney wrote that the image of contemporary yoga is the idealized, fit, young, slim, white, female yoga body, commercialized on the covers of glossy magazines such as Yoga Journal, and that non-lineage yoga evolved in reaction against that image. Amanda Lucia, a scholar of religion, located the post-lineage yoga movement in the contemporary anxiety with the authenticity of religious experience, part of a search for a practice that works for the individual, sometimes by using elements of premodern spirituality, sometimes by taking on religious or ascetic practices such as yoga. The scholar Helen Collard described her own "severe disillusionment" with Pattabhi Jois in her practice of his Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, and "more broadly with top-down, patriarchal yoga forms". She stated that she had come to consider her practice as "post lineage" in Wildcroft's terms. The yoga teacher Charlotta Martinus, writing in Om Magazine, stated that many leading yoga teachers in Britain were women who trained in a lineage, but "have circumvented the egoic and authoritarian ways of 60's yoga idols to create a haven of peace, tranquility, sisterhood and a creative yoga lifestyle — accessible and inclusive to everyone of all abilities, gender and race." She wrote that the women who run these post-lineage yoga groups "dominate the scene with their fiery, insightful and inspiring teachings". The yoga therapist Uma Dinsmore-Tuli stated that she could "come out and say I'm proudly post-lineage", something that Wildcroft made possible. She noted that her Glastonbury yoga camp of 13 years' standing was one of Wildcroft's study subjects, and that the research looked at how the various yoga camps fitted neither into modern commercialized yoga, nor into the traditional kind: the not-for-profit camps have welcomed people of all denominations and none. In Dinsmore-Tuli's view, Wildcroft concluded that everyone there was post-lineage, which was neither anti-lineage nor non-lineage. People had often been with a lineage for a long period, "and have come ... out the other side." Dinsmore-Tuli stated that the way yoga therapists can avoid the mistakes and abuses of the past is by avoiding the old hierarchical structures, running things instead through council leadership, "humble webs of empowerment". The teacher of accessible yoga Jivana Heyman considered that the community was "enter[ing] a time of post-lineage yoga", stating that he sees practitioners "step[ping] forward to hold the teachings" and the community "learning how to support itself". He commented that he was taught yoga by Swami Satchidananda, who came from a long "monastic yoga lineage", remarking at once that all the lineages seem to have suffered from scandals of abuse. Without a guru, in Heyman's view, practitioners will "have to do a better job of sharing and supporting each other". ## Reception Wildcroft's book, Post-Lineage Yoga: From Guru to \#MeToo, has been warmly received by scholars. Christopher Miller wrote in the Journal of Contemporary Religion that the work was "richly detailed and specific, giving scholars an insider perspective of an understudied cultural phenomenon in Britain." Laurah Klepinger, writing in Race and Yoga journal, comments that the book "reads transnational yoga through the lens of social justice work and theory", being inclusive and resisting "patriarchal structures of power and charismatic leadership". Klepinger, noting that she personally experienced "grief and disillusionment" at the exposure of Pattabhi Jois in the "transnational institution [Ashtanga vinyasa yoga] that has been my spiritual home for more than two decades", writes "I find hope and inspiration in the post-lineage yoga Wildcroft writes about and embodies here." In her view, Wildcroft's analysis offers the potential for yoga scholar-practitioners to "more fully realize the liberatory potential" of yoga. She writes that the book "provides a wonderful audit of the diverse practices imagined within post-lineage yoga." Susannah Crockford, in Nova Religio, writes that Wildcroft is effectively replying to Andrea Jain's 2020 Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality. In Crockford's view, Wildcroft is criticising yoga studies that focus on "the most superficial practitioners who go to popular studios that teach primarily lineage yoga" and who "wear Spiritual Gangster sweatshirts". Post-lineage students, Crockford notes, practise without a guru, without patents, without nationalism, diversely and with a rich network of connections.

James Turner Morehead (Kentucky politician)

American politician and lawyer (1797–1854)

James Turner Morehead (May 24, 1797 – December 28, 1854) was a United States Senator and the 12th Governor of Kentucky. He was the first native-born Kentuckian to hold the governorship of the state. A member of Henry Clay's National Republican Party, Morehead entered politics just as his party was beginning to challenge the Democratic Party's dominance in the state. Morehead was nominated for lieutenant governor at his party's nominating convention in Baltimore, Maryland in 1831, and was elected on a split ticket with Democratic governor John Breathitt. He ascended to the governorship upon Breathitt's death in 1834. Saddled with a shortened term, Morehead was not able to formulate a significant legislative agenda, and stuck to the politically safe issue of internal improvements during his term. When his party changed its name to the Whig Party and wrested control of the General Assembly from the Democrats in the summer of 1834, Morehead hosted the new party's first nominating convention in Frankfort. Following his term as governor, Morehead returned to the state legislature. An opponent of abolitionism, he accompanied John Speed Smith to Ohio to secure the return of slaves owned by Kentuckians. He was later appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he remained a close ally of Clay's. In 1847, he retired to Covington, Kentucky, practicing law until his death in 1854. The city of Morehead, Kentucky, is named in honor of Governor Morehead. ## Early life and career James Turner Morehead was born on May 24, 1797, near Shepherdsville, Kentucky, in Bullitt County. His parents, Armistead and Lucy (Latham) Morehead, moved to Russellville, Kentucky, when he was very young, and he was educated at the public schools in that city. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, from 1813 to 1815. He then returned to Russellville, where he studied law under circuit court judge H. P. Broadnax and John J. Crittenden. He was admitted to the bar in 1818, and commenced practice in Bowling Green, Kentucky. On May 1, 1823, Morehead married Susan A. Roberts; the couple had two children. He was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives representing Warren County from 1828 to 1831. While there, he served on the Committee on Internal Improvements, and reported a bill for state subscription to the Maysville-Lexington Turnpike Company in 1831. ## Governor of Kentucky In 1831, Morehead was also a delegate to the National Republican Party Convention in Baltimore, Maryland that nominated Henry Clay for president. During the convention, he was nominated for the office of lieutenant governor. Though his National Republican running mate, Richard A. Buckner, was defeated by Democrat John Breathitt, Morehead was elected the ninth Lieutenant Governor. Governor Breathitt died of tuberculosis on February 21, 1834, and Morehead was sworn in as governor the following day. The replacement of a Democratic governor with one from the rival National Republican party caused a great deal of angst among Democrats, but the ascendancy of Democrat James Guthrie to president of the state senate and Morehead's willingness to retain Breathitt's secretary of state, Lewis Saunders, did much to allay their fears. Later that year, the National Republican party began to re-brand itself as the Whig Party, a name that first appeared in the Lexington Intelligencer on April 25, 1834. On July 4, 1834, Governor Morehead hosted the party's first convention in Frankfort. Kentuckians flocked to the "new" party en masse, and the legislative elections of August 1834 saw the party garner majorities in both houses of the state legislature. Flexing their political muscles, the majority party ousted Guthrie from his post as president of the Senate and by a vote of 90–40, and sent John J. Crittenden instead of Guthrie to the U.S. Senate in 1835. In his first address to the legislature, Morehead recommended a plan of expanded internal improvements, including improvements along the state's rivers. The legislature responded by creating a state board of internal improvements, and named Morehead the ex-officio president of the board. In this role, he authorized many surveys of Kentucky's rivers and formulated several plans for improvements, but most of them were blocked by the Panic of 1837. One improvement that did proceed was construction of the Lexington and Ohio Railroad, which was completed in 1835. Though education was not a high priority for Governor Morehead, the Kentucky Common School Society and the Kentucky Association of Professional Teachers were formed during his term. ## Later career Following his service as governor, Morehead resumed his legal practice in Frankfort, Kentucky. In March 1837, he was commissioned by Governor James Clark to act as an agent for the state, selling bonds to fund internal improvements. He returned to the state House from 1837 to 1838, representing Franklin County. He was president of the Kentucky Board of Internal Improvements from 1838 to 1841, and in 1839, he and John Speed Smith were chosen as commissioners to the state of Ohio to secure the return of Kentucky-owned slaves as property of their masters. They were successful in this endeavor. Learned in Kentucky history, Morehead published An Address in Commemoration of the First Settlement of Kentucky, which contained original information regarding the early settlement of Boonesborough, Kentucky, in 1840. In 1846, he published another book, Practice in Civil Actions and Proceedings at Law. In 1841, Morehead was elected to the U.S. Senate and served from March 4, 1841, to March 3, 1847. There he was chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and the Committee on Retrenchment. During his service in the Senate, he defended a federal bank bill and opposed the annexation of Texas, though he supported the U.S.-Mexican War after it began. He was also a staunch supporter of fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay. After his time in Congress, he continued the practice of law in Covington, Kentucky, until his death. He was interred in the State lot of Frankfort Cemetery, Frankfort, Kentucky. The city of Morehead, Kentucky, was named after him.

Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Rally in Washington DC led by Jon Stewart

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was a gathering that took place on October 30, 2010, at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The rally was led by Jon Stewart, host of the satirical news program The Daily Show, and Stephen Colbert, in-character as a conservative political pundit, as on his program The Colbert Report, both then seen on Comedy Central. About 215,000 people attended the rally, according to aerial photography analysis by AirPhotosLive.com for CBS News. The rally was a combination of what initially were announced as separate events: Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Colbert's counterpart, the "March to Keep Fear Alive." Its stated purpose was to provide a venue for attendees to be heard above what Stewart described as the more vocal and extreme 15–20% of Americans who "control the conversation" of American politics, the argument being that these extremes demonize each other and engage in counterproductive actions, with a return to sanity intended to promote reasoned discussion. Despite news reports' description of the rally as a spoof of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally and Al Sharpton's Reclaim the Dream rally, and the logo's striking similarity to that of the Restoring Honor rally, Stewart insisted the contrary. ## Origins ### Response to Restoring Honor rally On August 28, 2010, the Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck held a "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial. On the same day, Al Sharpton led a countermarch, called Reclaim the Dream, to mark the 47th anniversary of the historic Great March on Washington. According to New York Magazine, discussion for a satirical public event in response took place behind the scenes at Stewart's The Daily Show as early as August 12. Stewart has stated that the rally was never intended to be a means to counter Glenn Beck, but was simply another format for his and Colbert's style of humor, saying "We saw [the Restoring Honor rally] and thought, 'What a beautiful outline. What a beautiful structure to fill with what we want to express in live form, festival form.'" Before any public discussion by Stewart, Colbert, or their staffs, members of the social news website Reddit independently began to discuss the possibility of a Colbert-led rally, often referred to as a "Restoring Truthiness Rally". After the rallies were announced, some news articles credited Reddit for the idea. The rally was produced by Stewart's Busboy Productions. ### Announcement Stewart first hinted at the event on the September 7 episode of The Daily Show by declaring that "[he would] have an announcement sometime in the near to not so near future." Colbert, in that night's episode of The Report (which aired immediately following The Daily Show), said that he, too, had an announcement to make. In the following days, Stewart and Colbert used their shows to hype their respective announcements, competing over whose would be more significant. The banter finally culminated with Stewart formally announcing the "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the September 16, 2010 episode of The Daily Show; Colbert followed by announcing the "March to Keep Fear Alive" on the subsequent episode of The Colbert Report. Stewart declared that his rally was intended for the majority of Americans, "the 70–80 percenters," who do not hold extreme political views and lack a voice in the media. To illustrate the point, he unveiled a mock motto for the rally: "Take it down a notch for America." A series of protest sign designs were proposed on the Daily Show featuring messages such as "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler." Colbert responded to Stewart's proposal by challenging the theme of Stewart's rally and justifying his own "March to Keep Fear Alive." Noting that this was not the time to be reasonable, Colbert declared, "Now is the time for all good men to freak out for freedom!" Oprah Winfrey appeared on The Daily Show via video on October 14, 2010, to award the attending audience free airfare to the rally. The plane tickets were hidden under the audience members' seats in the same fashion as she has given away prizes to her own audience members on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In the episode of the Colbert Report airing immediately afterward, Stephen Colbert also offered tickets to his rally. Without Oprah's support to provide airfare, Colbert instead distributed vouchers for the low-cost Chinatown bus from New York City to Washington, D.C. During the show, Colbert also revealed to Stewart that he did not possess a permit to legally organize the "March to Keep Fear Alive," leading Stewart to propose combining the two events into the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" that would feature a new combined logo. ### Response to the announcement On the night following the announcement, the pledged number of attendees to the event reached 69,000 on Facebook. This number far exceeded the 25,000 that the rally organizers had indicated as the estimated number of attendees on the National Park Service application for a rally permit. The demand for hotels during the period of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear outpaced that of the "Restoring Honor" rally. The rally spawned several grassroots websites and Facebook groups for organizing and discussion, some with more than 10,000 followers. Proposals were made for dozens of sister rallies in other major cities, such as Seattle, Chicago, Austin, and Los Angeles to take place on the same day as the demonstration in Washington, D.C. On September 28, Arianna Huffington announced on The Daily Show that The Huffington Post would provide "as many buses as people to fill them" at a specified meeting place in Manhattan, although her plans were later scaled back and preregistration was imposed. The Wall Street Journal characterized the Rally as a "send-up" of the Washington Restoring Honor rally led by Glenn Beck and the "Reclaim the Dream" commemorative march led by Al Sharpton on August 28, 2010. The Canadian Press called the Stewart/Colbert rallies a "not-so-gentle" swipe at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally. During a town hall event on September 29, President Obama cited the forthcoming rally as representing those people who are concerned with more than just the political beliefs of others, in contrast to "provocative" cable news programs. Many news organizations sought media credentials to cover the rally. Anticipating staff interest in attending for non-professional purposes, NPR barred staffers from attending the rally in a memo that stated: "NPR journalists may not participate in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers, nor should they sign petitions or otherwise lend their name to such causes, or contribute money to them. This restriction applies to the upcoming Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rallies." NBC and several other media outlets followed suit. Some barred employees from attending the rally outright, while others such as The Washington Post offered more latitude, telling newsroom managers to differentiate between "participating" and "observing." ### Charity drive Prior to the announcement of the joint rally, supporters of the movement for a Colbert-led march had begun a drive to raise money for educational charities through DonorsChoose.org, a charitable organization of which Colbert is a member of the Board of Directors. In the first 24 hours, supporters raised over \$100,000. In the days that followed, that total increased to over \$250,000, and by the day of the rally over \$500,000 had been contributed. Jon Stewart promoted the Trust for the National Mall, urging his viewers to make donations on behalf of the rally. As of October 31, 2010, over \$188,000 had been donated to the Trust. ## Rally ### Setting As the number of expected participants grew, the rally was moved from the grounds of the Washington Monument to the east end of the Mall facing the Capitol. The stage was on the east side of the rally with an open back, allowing the Capitol building to provide the backdrop for the performances. In order to meet the public safety requirements of the National Park Service permit, the Mall between the Capitol and 14th Street was divided into sections, with access aisles lined by portable fences. Speakers and jumbotron television screens were placed along both the north and south edges to encourage the crowd to spread out rather than press against the main stage. Portable toilets and first aid stations were also provided. Because the rally was held the day before the previously scheduled Marine Corps Marathon, the rally planners originally requested to share the portable toilets planned for the marathon runners. The marathon organizers refused, so a second set of portable toilets was ordered. ### Guests While both Colbert and Stewart were tight-lipped as to the event's schedule and guests, Metromix's Washington DC website published a tentative schedule on October 27, with guest performers said to be confirmed for the event including musicians Sheryl Crow, The Roots and Jeff Tweedy with Mavis Staples along with actors Don Novello (appearing as Father Guido Sarducci) and Sam Waterston. Other guests included 4troops, Yusuf Islam – formerly known as Cat Stevens, Ozzy Osbourne, The O'Jays, John Legend, Kid Rock, Tony Bennett, Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and R2-D2. ### Comedy Satirical comedy was woven throughout the rally with Colbert expressing, in parody, that fear was superior to Stewart's reasonableness. The theme started with Colbert—costumed like Evel Knievel—emerging from his "fear bunker" in a capsule reminiscent of the 2010 Chilean miners' rescue. Thereafter, Colbert challenged Stewart point by point, usually claiming victory. One of their battles was waged over three songs about trains. Stewart started with Yusuf Islam singing "Peace Train," which was interrupted continually by Colbert-backed Ozzy Osbourne singing "Crazy Train." The audience held up peace signs for "Peace Train" and horn signs for "Crazy Train." Finally, Stewart and Colbert compromised singing "Love Train" with The O'Jays. Later, Stewart and Colbert donned matching American flag coats and sang an original song "The Greatest, Strongest Country in the World" with lyrics that reflected common liberal and conservative stereotypes, such as "I love NASCAR halftime shows with tons of TNT. ... My hybrid electric scooter does 100 m-p-g. From gay men who like football ... to straight men who like Glee ..." In the finale, a giant papier-mâché puppet of Colbert ("Fearzilla") was brought on stage to symbolize his superiority. Peter Pan—played by John Oliver—then appeared and led the crowd in a chant that caused Colbert and his puppet to melt into the stage, thereby handing final victory to Stewart. ### Medals Stewart gave out "Medals of Reasonableness" cast in bronze with an image of an owl and the Latin motto Sit vis nobiscum, liberally translated by Stewart as "May the Force be with you," to: - Armando Galarraga for his calm response to the blown call that cost him a perfect game. - Mick Foley for his contributions outside of wrestling, including his defense of a child mocked for being seen as gay. - Velma Hart for her reasoned critical questions delivered to President Barack Obama at a town hall. - Jacob Isom for preventing an evangelist from burning a Qur'an. Colbert awarded "Medals of Fear" cast with an image of a naked man running with scissors and the Latin motto Cave ne cadmium sit, which Colbert translated as "Warning: May contain Cadmium," to: - Several news media outlets, collectively, for barring employees from attending the rally on their own time. - A "tight black T-shirt" that Colbert said belonged to CNN's Anderson Cooper, for always appearing during natural disasters reported on by Cooper. - Mark Zuckerberg for making Facebook increase fear with regard to Internet privacy. Zuckerberg's award was presented in absentia. The media outlets' award was accepted on their behalf by "someone with more courage—a seven-year-old girl." Also, videotaped messages were shown of Steven Slater, known from the 2010 JetBlue flight attendant incident, and reality TV star Teresa Giudice, both apologizing for public acts of "unreasonableness." ### "A Moment of Sincerity" speech After defeating Colbert's "Fearzilla", Stewart closed the rally with a "moment ... for some sincerity" to explain his intentions for the rally: > This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. He criticized the role the press plays in polarizing political debates, stating that the media—which he described as "the country's 24-hour politico–pundit perpetual panic 'conflict-inator'"—only amplifies problems and no longer makes a distinction between "hav[ing] animus" and "be[ing] enemies." He warned that demonizing opponents and accepting propaganda makes people "less safe, not more" and that "it is an insult, not only to those people, but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate." Much of the speech was devoted to the idea that "[m]ost Americans don't live their lives solely as Democrats, Republicans, liberals or conservatives." He spoke on the subject of "reasonable compromises" that happen "every day" between persons of different beliefs, citing as an example traffic merging at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel connecting New York City and Jersey City. ### Crowd size and television broadcast An aerial photography analysis commissioned by CBS News and carried out by AirPhotosLive.com estimated the crowd at 215,000 people, plus or minus 10%. In comparison, their estimate for the Restoring Honor rally made using the same methods was 87,000 people, plus or minus 9,000. USA Today, Voice of America and ABC News all referred to the crowd as tens of thousands of people, with Voice of America noting, "the crowd filled the Mall, from almost in front of the Capitol to the Washington Monument." According to local news outlet TBD TV, "Massive turnout for Saturday's rally quickly overwhelmed the Mall, forcing thousands of people into nearby streets and, eventually, just giving up and leaving." The PA system was criticized for being inadequate for those farther back to hear, with the crowd chanting "louder" several times. Jon Stewart, speaking from the stage, jokingly said there were over 10 million people there, and Stephen Colbert satirically tweeted an estimate of 6 billion. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which maintained its normal Saturday service schedule, announced that Metrorail ridership set a Saturday record of 825,437 trips, as compared to about 350,000 on a normal Saturday, and beating out the previous record set in 1991 of 786,358 trips during the Desert Storm National Victory Celebration. The record would last more than 6 six years, until it was broken by the 2017 Women's March. The rally was broadcast live on Comedy Central and C-SPAN. The Comedy Central live broadcast reportedly drew 2,000,000 total viewers, with an additional 570,000 live video streams on the Internet. ## Response to rally Keith Olbermann was prominently featured in a video montage shown at the rally that focused on the anger present in cable news. On November 2, Olbermann announced that he would suspend his "Worst Person in the World" segment on Countdown with Keith Olbermann in the interest of turning down the volume and anger. However, he defended the content of his show by claiming that MSNBC (the network that hosted Countdown at the time) differs from Fox News in that "sticking up for the powerless is not the moral equivalent of sticking up for the powerful." After tallying an online vote among his viewers, Olbermann announced that the segment would return on the November 17 broadcast as the "Not Really Worst Persons in the World." Between the two announcements, Olbermann was suspended by MSNBC on November 5 and re-instated on November 9 over his violation of network policy regarding political donations; the contract between Olbermann and MSNBC would be terminated two months later in January 2011. Olbermann would launch an identically named show with the same segment on Current TV beginning from June 2011, but was terminated again in March 2012. On Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill Maher criticized the rally, saying that while Stewart and Colbert meant well, the message of the rally promoted a false equivalency between the left and the right, noting, "the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake. That the Left is just as violent and cruel as the Right ... there's a difference between a mad man and a madman." On November 11, Stewart appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and clarified the message he intended to convey at the rally: that too many have "bought into the idea that the conflict [in America] is left versus right" when the conflict is actually "corruption versus not-corruption" and that "both sides have their ways of shutting down debate." Several websites, such as The Huffington Post, dedicated a page to collecting "the funniest signs from the rally." In 2012 Stewart said that at the time that he had invited Yusuf Islam to perform at the rally, he did not know that Yusuf Islam had expressed support for a Fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie. Upon learning about it, Stewart tried to get clarifications from Islam, but the conversation he had with Islam left Stewart unsatisfied. ### 2020 anniversary On October 30, 2020, Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the event. Colbert apologized after Stewart said his rally to restore fear "won" in a "shutout." Tony Bennett also appeared to sing "America the Beautiful" but was cut off by Stewart. ## Awards and nominations The rally was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards: - Outstanding Special Class Special - Outstanding Special Class Writing - Outstanding Achievement in Technical Direction/Electronic Camera/Video Control - Outstanding Achievement in Live & Direct To Tape Sound Mixing ## See also - List of political rallies on the National Mall - National Endowment for the Humanities' Civility Tour - One Nation Working Together rally - Pluralistic Rationalism - List of protest marches on Washington, D.C.

Fear of Flying (The Simpsons)

"Fear of Flying" is the eleventh episode of the sixth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on December 18, 1994. In the episode, the family attempts to go on a vacation but soon discovers that Marge is afraid of flying. The episode was written by David Sacks and directed by Mark Kirkland. It features numerous guest stars, including Anne Bancroft as Dr. Zweig. Additionally, Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman, John Ratzenberger, and George Wendt appear as their characters from Cheers. It received a positive reception from television critics, and acquired a Nielsen rating of 9.6. The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide commented positively on the episode, as did reviews from DVD Verdict and DVD Movie Guide. ## Plot At Moe's Tavern, the patrons pull a series of hazardous pranks on Moe which he laughs off. After pulling a harmless one, Homer is disproportionately banned for life and must find another bar. He is asked to leave a refined cocktail bar, and rejects both Cheers and a lesbian one (owing to their karaoke nights and lack of fire exits, respectively). Homer eventually settles for an airline pilots' bar, where he is mistaken for a pilot and despite his vehement protests is put in the cockpit of an airplane, which he promptly wrecks. In exchange for his silence about their mistake, the airline gives the Simpson family free tickets to any of the lower forty-eight states. The idea of plane travel fills Marge with anxiety because she has a fear of flying. After several failed attempts to avoid the trip, she has a panic attack on the plane and the trip is postponed, whilst Grampa is left behind on the plane. To conquer Marge's phobia, Homer rents fiction films with airplane themes. This backfires when one film shows the survivors of a plane crash surviving by eating the dead crew and passengers. When Marge shows signs of lingering flight-related trauma, manifesting as compulsions to perform household chores either at night or to an excessive degree, Lisa convinces her to undergo psychotherapy with Dr. Zweig. Homer is highly paranoid of this, believing that Dr. Zweig will identify him as a problem and convince Marge to leave him. She uncovers the roots of Marge's fear: the moment she discovered her father was not a pilot, but a flight attendant. Her shame is eased when Zweig assures her that male flight attendants are now very common, and that her father could be considered a pioneer. Marge also remembers other flying-related accidents that caused her fear, which include getting accidentally hit in the eye with an "airplane" spoon by her grandmother as an infant, riding an airplane scooter that caught fire, and being taken to a cornfield where she and her mother were attacked by a plane. Thinking she has finally conquered her fear of flying, Marge boards a plane with Homer. The plane skids off the runway and lands in a body of water. ## Production "Fear of Flying" was directed by Mark Kirkland, and written by David Sacks. The story of the episode came about when Sacks came into the writers' room with an idea for an episode where Marge goes to a therapist "for one reason or another". Sacks and the other writers then structured the rest of the plot around that storyline. Anne Bancroft was called in to voice Zweig. Before Bancroft recorded her part, the animators based Zweig's design on a temp track from cast member Tress MacNeille as the therapist. After Bancroft had recorded her part, Zweig was redesigned to fit with Bancroft's voice. They added split glasses and a streak of silver in her hair to give her a more mature look. Bancroft's husband Mel Brooks followed her to the studio, with Bancroft telling show runner David Mirkin "I can't get rid of him." Brooks, who also sat next to Mirkin when Bancroft played her role and also sought to advise Mirkin, would go on to guest star the same season in "Homer vs. Patty and Selma." The staff were able to get the central cast of the American sitcom Cheers, with the exception of Kelsey Grammer, to reunite and guest star in the episode. The staff could not arrange the script to allow time in the episode for Grammer, who already had a recurring role on The Simpsons as Sideshow Bob, to voice Frasier Crane (although the character does have a non speaking cameo in the episode). Ted Danson guest starred as Sam, Woody Harrelson as Woody, Rhea Perlman as Carla, John Ratzenberger as Cliff, and George Wendt as Norm. Due to the episode running short in length, it features the long title sequence which ends with various characters performing a dance routine for the couch gag. ## Cultural references Homer enters the Cheers bar in a scene, which is a parody of a typical episode of the comedy series Cheers. All of the speaking characters are voiced by the actors who played them in Cheers. Ironically, Frasier Crane remains silent despite being played by The Simpsons veteran Kelsey Grammer, the voice of Sideshow Bob. Marge's dream sees her in the role of Maureen Robinson from Lost in Space, while Homer plays Dr. Zachary Smith and Lisa plays the Robot. The scene where Marge and Jacqueline Bouvier run away when a biplane shoots at them in a cornfield is a parody of Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest. Homer's Mount Lushmore caricature resembles Eustace Tilley, the mascot of The New Yorker. Homer's line about getting out of Springfield is lifted from It's a Wonderful Life, while Homer's all-time favorite song is revealed to be "It's Raining Men" by The Weather Girls. Marge referring to Dr. Zweig as "Lowenstein" is a reference to the 1991 film The Prince of Tides. ## Reception ### Critical reception Since airing, the episode has received many positive reviews from fans and television critics. In July 2007, Simon Crerar of The Times listed the Cheers cast's performance as one of the thirty-three funniest cameos in the history of the show. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, the authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, said it was "a good Marge-centric episode with plenty of clever set pieces – the tributes to Cheers and Lost in Space are fantastic", and noted that "Marge's father looks suspiciously like Moe". Ryan Keefer at DVD Verdict said that "with the cast of Cheers appearing (except for Grammer, ironically) and a funny spoof of North by Northwest, the episode is much better than you would expect", and gave it a B+. Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide said in a review of the sixth season DVD that it was "another show I didn't recall fondly but that works exceedingly well. I hadn't realized how many quotes I’ve stolen from this one: the name 'Guy Incognito', the dog with the puffy tail, 'a burden coupled with a hassle'. The show makes little sense in regard to continuity since Marge has flown during prior shows, but it's consistently very funny and entertaining." The Phoenix named Anne Bancroft one of the twenty best guest stars to appear on the show. ### Ratings In its original broadcast, "Fear of Flying" finished 48th (tied with Dateline NBC) in the ratings for the week of December 12 to December 18, 1994, with a Nielsen rating of 9.6. The episode was the third highest rated show on the Fox network that week, beaten only by Beverly Hills, 90210, and Married... with Children. ## Merchandise The episode was selected for release in a 1999 video collection of selected episodes titled: The Simpsons Go To Hollywood. Other episodes included in the collection set were "Flaming Moe's", "Krusty Gets Kancelled", and "Homer to the Max". "Fear of Flying" was again included in the 2003 DVD release of the same set. It was included in The Simpsons season 6 DVD set, which was released on August 16, 2005, as The Simpsons – The Complete Sixth Season.

The Son Also Draws

"The Son Also Draws" is the sixth episode of the first season of the animated comedy series Family Guy. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on May 9, 1999. The episode follows Chris as he is ejected from the Youth Scouts, and Peter drives the family to Scout headquarters to get him readmitted. During a rest stop at a Native American casino, Lois gambles away the family car. Peter pretends to be a member of the tribe in an attempt to get it back, and is sent on a vision quest to prove his heritage, giving him and Chris an opportunity to bond. "The Son Also Draws" was written by Ricky Blitt and directed by Neil Affleck, both working on their first Family Guy episode. The episode guest starred actors Suzie Plakson, Kevin Michael Richardson, Fred Tatasciore and Wally Wingert. Recurring guest voice actors included writer and animator Butch Hartman and actor Patrick Bristow. Much of the episode's humor is structured around cutaway sequences that parody popular culture, including references to Speed Racer, Happy Days, Nova, One Day at a Time, and The More You Know. Critical reception for the episode was favorable; certain critics believed the episode was not an "instant classic" in contrast to the other episodes of the season but called it "memorable" and "brilliant" nevertheless, while others regarded it as the black sheep of the season. The episode caused controversy in Canada for the episode's final gag, in which Peter states that "Canada sucks." Ricky Blitt, the episode's writer, is himself Canadian. ## Plot Chris hates being in the Youth Scouts and wants to quit, but is afraid to tell his father Peter. Chris is finally kicked out when he runs over the troop leader during a Soap Box Derby. Peter insists on driving Chris and the rest of the family (Peter's wife Lois, their daughter Meg and their infant Stewie) to the Youth Scout headquarters, in Manhattan, to get Chris readmitted. While they are gone, their talking dog Brian is watching Nova just as the show is interrupted to show several episodes of the sitcom One Day at a Time. He tries to change the channel, but is unable to do so (nor can he turn the TV off), losing his intelligence shortly after watching a few episodes. The family stops at a Native American casino as Peter needs to use the bathroom, Lois quickly becomes addicted to gambling and loses the family car. After hearing that Lois has gambled the car away, Peter tries to get it back by claiming to be Native American. The doubtful Indian elders demand that he go on a vision quest to prove his heritage. Chris accompanies Peter into the wilderness, hoping to tell him that he only wants to draw instead of being in the Scouts. Delirious from hunger, Peter begins talking to anthropomorphic trees and sees a vision of his spiritual guide, Fonzie. After hearing Fonzie's advice Peter finally listens to Chris's complaints and realizes his son is a talented artist. Peter and Chris return to the casino and reclaim the car. The episode ends with Lois, Stewie, and Meg counteracting stereotypes about Native Americans, Mexicans, and Swedes, respectively, before Peter comments that "Canada sucks." ## Production "The Son Also Draws" was written by Ricky Blitt, his first episode in the Family Guy series, and directed by former Simpsons director Neil Affleck, also in his first Family Guy episode. Peter Shin and Roy Allen Smith, who have since supervised other episodes of Family Guy, both acted as supervising directors on this episode. Alex Borstein, the voice of Lois, helped write this episode, making her the first female member in the Family Guy writing staff; show creator Seth MacFarlane mentioned that her input on the character of Lois was particularly helpful. Andrew Gormley and voice actor Mike Henry acted as staff writers for this episode, while Ricky Blitt, Neil Goldman and Chris Sheridan worked as the story editors. The subplot of "The Son Also Draws" that involved Lois losing the car was based on the 1985 comedy film Lost in America. The part where Peter pretends to be an Indian to get the family car back was inspired by real-life instances of people who were "1/64th" Native American receiving money from wealthy casino tribes. In addition to the regular cast, "The Son Also Draws" featured the voices of actors Suzie Plakson, Kevin Michael Richardson, Fred Tatasciore and Wally Wingert. Recurring guest voice actors included writer and animator Butch Hartman and actor Patrick Bristow. ## Cultural references The television show the family is watching near the beginning of the show is an episode from the 1974 ABC sitcom Happy Days. When the rest of the family is gone on the trip to Manhattan, Brian watches an episode of Nova, which is interrupted by a PBS announcement that they will be showing various episodes of One Day at a Time. Speed and Pops from Speed Racer make an appearance at the Soap Box Derby starting line and again when the Griffins prepare to leave for Manhattan. When Peter has to search for his spiritual guide, it turns out to be Fonzie from Happy Days. The song sung by trees is Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin. The end of the episode features a parody of the series of public service announcements The More You Know. ## Reception Reviews for "The Son Also Draws" were mixed to favorable. In a 2008 review, Ahsan Haque of IGN rated the episode an 8/10, stating that while the episode is not an "instant classic", it is "still quite strong" and has "more than a few clever moments". He also notes that the cutaways are "kept to a minimum", and much of the humor comes from the storyline. He commented that the episode did not have as many laugh-out-loud moments as other episodes, but stated that it had bolder humor than the show would later be known for. In his review of the first volume DVD collection of Family Guy, Aaron Beierle of DVD Talk listed "The Son Also Draws" as one of the series' "most brilliant moments", praising the spiritual vision sequence and naming the conversation between Peter and Brian among the best moments of the series, calling the conversation "rolling-on-the-floor funny." Robin Pierson of The TV Critic, however, was far more hostile towards the episode, giving it the lowest rating of the season, a 44 out of 100. Pierson believed the episode was "very poor" and called the storyline "lame" and "unfocussed [sic]," with "a bunch of jokes to match." The gag at the end of the episode, in which Peter states that "Canada sucks", inspired anger from Canadian viewers of the show, which led them to send letters to the show's producers. Ricky Blitt, the writer of the episode and the person responsible for the controversial gag, is Canadian. ## Home media "The Son Also Draws" and the complete first and second seasons of the series were released under the title Family Guy Volume One; this standard four-disc DVD box set debuted in Region 1 on April 15, 2003, three months before the premiere of the third season. Distributed by 20th Century Fox Television, it included several DVD extras such as episode commentaries, behind-the-scenes footage, and online promo spots. The same episodes, without the special features, were released in Region 2 on November 12, 2001 and in Region 4 on October 20, 2003.

2015 24 Hours of Le Mans

83th 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race

The 83rd 24 Hours of Le Mans (French: 83^e 24 Heures du Mans) was an 24-hour automobile endurance event for teams of three drivers each entering Le Mans Prototype and Le Mans Grand Touring Endurance cars held from 10 to 14 June 2015 at the Circuit de la Sarthe, close to Le Mans, France. It was the 83rd running of the 24 Hour race organised by the Automobile Club de l'Ouest as well as the third round of the 2015 FIA World Endurance Championship. A test day was held two weeks prior to the race on 31 May. A record-breaking 263,500 people attended the event. A Porsche 919 Hybrid driven by Neel Jani, Romain Dumas, and Marc Lieb started from pole position after Jani broke the circuit's lap record in qualifying. The race was won by the sister Porsche of Nick Tandy and Le Mans rookies Earl Bamber and Nico Hülkenberg, followed a lap behind by a third Porsche shared by Mark Webber, Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard. Audi's best car, driven by the title defenders Benoît Tréluyer, Marcel Fässler, and André Lotterer, finished third, a further lap behind the two Porsche vehicles. This was the seventeenth overall victory for Porsche, and their first since . The LMP2 category was won by the KCMG Oreca-Nissan driven by Richard Bradley, Matthew Howson, and Nicolas Lapierre. The trio led all but nine laps of the race but only held a 48-second lead over the Jota Sport Gibson-Nissan at the race's end. Corvette Racing won their first class victory since despite one of their two cars being withdrawn after an accident in qualifying. Oliver Gavin, Tommy Milner, and Jordan Taylor held a five-lap margin in LMGTE Pro over the AF Corse Ferrari in second, after breaking away from the rest of the field in the second half of the race. The LMGTE Am class was led for most of the time by the No. 98 Aston Martin until driver Paul Dalla Lana crashed in the Ford Chicane in the final hour of the race, handing the victory to the SMP Racing Ferrari of Viktor Shaytar, Aleksey Basov, and Andrea Bertolini. The result meant Lotterer, Tréluyer and Fässler remained the leaders of the Drivers' Championship on 80 points, 20 ahead of Tandy, and a further two in front of his co-drivers Bamber and Hülkenberg. Dumas, Jani and Lieb dropped from second to fourth and Bernhard, Hartley and Webber stood in fifth place. Porsche became the new leaders of the Manufacturers' Championship with 140 points; Audi were 16 points behind their nearest rivals with Toyota 69 points adrift in third with five races left in the season. ## Schedule and pre-championship standings The 2015 Le Mans schedule was confirmed in an FIA World Motor Sport Council meeting in Munich on 26 June 2014. It was the 83rd running of the event, and the third of eight scheduled rounds of the 2015 FIA World Endurance Championship. Before the race Audi Sport Team Joest drivers André Lotterer, Benoît Tréluyer and Marcel Fässler led the Drivers' Championship with 50 points, 14 ahead of their nearest rivals Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb and a further 14 in front of third-placed Mike Conway, Stéphane Sarrazin and Alexander Wurz. Anthony Davidson and Sébastien Buemi were fourth on 19 points, and Timo Bernhard, Brendon Hartley and Mark Webber stood in fifth place with 17 points. Audi were leading the Manufacturers' Championship with 70 points, 17 ahead of their rival Porsche in second; the third-place manufacturer Toyota had scored 47 points. Audi had so far dominated the season by winning the first two races of the campaign. Dumas, Jani and Lieb had twice finished in second while Davidson and Buemi along with Bernhard, Hartley and Webber had achieved third-place results. ## Circuit and regulation changes Following the introduction of slow zones during the 2014 24 Hours of Le Mans, the race's organiser, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) revised the system for 2015. The limited speed in the zones was increased from 60 km/h (37 mph) to 80 km/h (50 mph). The number of zones around the circuit had also increased from 19 to 35, with a new lighting system to assist marshals added to each zone. Le Mans Prototype (LMP) teams were also required to carry additional flashing rain lights from Le Mans onward following a collision between two prototype cars in the rain at 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps caused by low visibility. Modifications were made to the circuit from Mulsanne Corner to the Corvette Curves. The circuit was widened on the road connecting Mulsanne to Indianapolis, and again from Indianapolis to the Porsche Curves, although the kerbs remained in their previous locations. The first corner of the Porsche Curves had a larger run-off area on the outside while SAFER barriers had been installed on the inside wall. The Corvette corner also now featured a gravel run-off. ## Entries ### Automatic invitations Automatic entry invitations were earned by teams that won their class in the previous running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, or won championships in other Le Mans-based series such as the IMSA SportsCar Championship (IMSA), the European Le Mans Series (ELMS), and the Asian Le Mans Series (ALMS). Some championship runners-up were also granted automatic invitations in certain series. All current FIA World Endurance Championship (FIA WEC) full-season entries also automatically earned invitations. As invitations were granted to teams, they were allowed to change their cars from the previous year to the next, but not allowed to change their category. In the ELMS, the "Le Mans" Grand Touring Endurance (LMGTE) class champion and runner-up were allowed to choose between the Pro and Am categories, while the GTC class champion was limited solely to an Am entry. The ALMS GTC competitors were also limited to the LMGTE Am class. The ACO announced its initial list of automatic entries on 15 December 2014. ### Entry list In conjunction with the announcement of entries for the 2015 FIA WEC and the ELMS seasons, the ACO announced the full 56 car entry list for Le Mans, plus seven reserves. In addition to the 35 guaranteed entries from the FIA WEC, 13 entries came from the ELMS, three from IMSA, two from the ALMS, while the rest of the field was filled with one-off entries only competing at Le Mans. ### Reserves Seven reserves were initially nominated by the ACO, limited to the LMP2 and LMGTE Am categories. Algarve Pro Racing withdrew their reserve LMP2 entry, while Riley Motorsports was promoted from the reserve list when the second SARD-Morand entry withdrew from the FIA WEC. Five reserves remained on the list: A second KCMG LMP2, a second Ibañez LMP2, a third Proton Porsche, and the Formula Racing Ferrari and Gulf Racing Porsche. ## Testing and practice A pre-Le Mans testing day was held at the circuit on 31 May, involving all 56 entries as well as the KCMG Oreca-Nissan, Ibañez Oreca-Nissan, Gulf Racing Porsche, and Formula Racing Ferrari reserve entries. Two LMP3 class Ginetta vehicles and two additional AF Corse Ferrari cars also participated. The two four-hour sessions were held under mixed weather conditions as rain swept through the area several times. Neel Jani set the fastest time in the early session with a three minutes and 21.945 seconds for the No. 18 Porsche, but Hartley improved to a three minutes and 21.061 seconds in the sister No. 17 Porsche. Audi's best time was a three minutes and 22.307 seconds for Marco Bonanomi in the No. 9 car, while Toyota could only muster a three minutes and 25.321 seconds lap. Laurens Vanthoor was the fastest LMP2 driver in the No. 34 OAK Ligier-Honda. Darren Turner's No. 97 Aston Martin was quickest in LMGTE Pro while Pedro Lamy helped Aston Martin also lead in LMGTE Am. The session served as the first appearance for the trio of Nissan GT-R LM Nismo amongst its World Endurance Championship competitors, although the cars were not on pace with the LMP1 field. After the test several prototype teams, including all Audi, Porsche, Toyota and Nissan cars participated in an unofficial test on the shorter Bugatti Circuit the following day to ensure car components were working efficiently before the race. Four hours of practice were held for the field on Wednesday afternoon, but again suffered from variable wet-weather throughout. The No. 17 Porsche once again led the session although Webber was the fastest driver to set the three minutes and 21.362 seconds lap time. Audi closed to within half a second with Loïc Duval's three minutes and 21.950 seconds lap. The LMP2 category had only a single car manage a lap under three minutes and 40 seconds when Richard Bradley set a three minutes and 39.897 seconds lap, a full second ahead of the No. 34 OAK Ligier-Honda. The KCMG car had earlier caused the session to be red flagged when the car came to a stop at the first Mulsanne Straight chicane. The Murphy Prototypes Oreca-Nissan later caused a second stoppage when Mark Patterson spun in the Porsche Curves entry and heavily impacted the safety barrier. Patterson was unhurt. The LMGTE Pro category was again led by Aston Martin, Richie Stanaway's No. 99 car setting a three minutes and 55.895 seconds lap, followed by the No. 64 Corvette and the No. 97 Aston Martin. Mathias Lauda kept the No. 98 Aston Martin ahead in LMGTE Am, nearly two seconds ahead of the two Proton Porsche cars. ## Qualifying The first dry session of the week occurred on Wednesday night in the first of three qualifying sessions to set the race's starting order with the fastest lap times set by each team's quickest driver. The first timed laps of the session immediately saw the qualifying record for the track, in its current configuration, broken. Bernhard's first timed lap of three minutes and 17.767 seconds in the No. 17 Porsche broke the record by nearly a second, only to be followed by Jani in the No. 18 Porsche with a three minutes and 16.887 seconds lap time. Neither driver improved their times over the rest of the session, giving the No. 18 Porsche provisional pole position, followed in third by the remaining Porsche 919. The Audi trio followed, with Duval leading the group but nearly three seconds off the pole pace. Toyota's best effort came from Sarrazin in the No. 2 car, nearly two seconds adrift of the Audi's lap times. Nissan's lap times improved to a three minutes and 38.468 seconds, but were over twenty seconds off the pole position time. The fastest LMP2 lap time was also set early in the session, with Richard Bradley recording a three minutes and 38.032 seconds time in the KCMG Oreca-Nissan, nearly a full second ahead of the Greaves Motorsport Gibson-Nissan. The Greaves car, driven by rookie Gaëtan Paletou, later caused the session's only stoppage when it collided with the safety barriers at Mulsanne Corner and had to be towed back to the garage. Aston Martin dominated the LMGTE categories in the first qualifying session, with four of their five entries leading the overall positions in the category. Stanaway set the fastest time of three minutes and 54.928 seconds in the No. 99 car, while Pedro Lamy was the fastest Amateur category entry with a three minutes and 55.102 seconds lap to be second fastest among all LMGTE cars. Gianmaria Bruni's AF Corse Ferrari was third amongst LMGTEs before ACO officials disallowed their fastest lap times for going beyond the track limits, demoting the car down the grid. The two remaining LMGTE Pro Aston Martin drivers followed the dual class pole sitters, with Corvette the first car from another marque. Initial weather forecasts predicted rain for the Thursday qualifying sessions, but it failed to materialise. The teams had two full sessions of clear but hot and humid weather. Nick Tandy's Porsche led the session with a three minutes and 18.862 seconds lap, but remained in third position on the provisional grid. Audi No. 7 was the only other car to put in an improved lap time amongst the top ten cars. TDS Racing was the fastest LMP2 car in the session with a three minutes and 40.441 seconds yet still over two seconds behind the pole time of KCMG. The LMGTE categories also remained much the same, as Aston Martin still occupied the top four qualifying positions. Twice the session was stopped for heavy accidents, first for the No. 55 AF Corse Ferrari of Duncan Cameron who became stuck in a gravel trap for about fifteen minutes. The second stoppage occurred when Jan Magnussen suffered a mechanical failure in his No. 63 Chevrolet Corvette C7.R and hit the barriers twice in the Porsche Curves. Repairs to the barriers forced the cancellation of the remainder of the session, although half an hour was added to the final qualifying session. Magnussen was transported to the track's medical centre for a check-up and later released by the race organiser's medical staff. The Corvette was unable to be repaired and the team was forced to withdraw from the race because they did not bring a spare chassis to Le Mans. As temperatures cooled in the final qualifying session, over a third of the field improved their fastest laps, but Jani's pole position time was unchallenged. Audi No. 7 led the session with a three minutes and 20.967 seconds lap time, still over four seconds shy of pole position. Nissan improved all three of their cars during the session, closing to within a second of the closest LMP1 competitor. The No. 26 G-Drive Ligier-Nissan closed to within a second of KCMG to take the second grid position in LMP2, while Greaves remained in third. In LMGTE Pro the No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari rebounded from the loss of their qualifying times in the first session to lead the final session and come within a tenth of a second of Aston Martin. The sister AF Corse Ferrari also improved to fourth in the category to split the top of the grid in the class amongst the two manufacturers. The lead in LMGTE Am remained with the No. 98 Aston Martin, a second and a half ahead of the No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari. SMP Racing improved their time by leading both of the day's qualifying sessions to take second place on the grid, splitting the Aston Martin cars. The No. 67 AAI Porsche suffered a fire during the session which halted qualifying for nearly half an hour. Porsche's pole position was their sixth consecutive in the FIA World Endurance Championship, extending back to the 2014 6 Hours of Shanghai. It was also the company's first pole position at Le Mans since . ### Qualifying results Provisional pole positions in each class are denoted in bold. The fastest time set by each entry is denoted with a grey background. ## Warm-up The cars took to the circuit on Saturday morning for a 45-minute warm-up session in dry and clear weather. The No. 9 Audi driven by Filipe Albuquerque set the fastest time with a lap of three minutes and 19.423 seconds. The sister Audi cars of Jarvis and Fässler were second and third overall. Dumas was fourth-fastest. His teammate Bernhard was fifth quickest and had the fastest lap before Albuquerque set his time. The fastest LMP2 lap was set by Mitch Evans with a time of three minutes and 39.559 seconds. Stefan Mücke, driving the No. 97 Aston Martin, was the quickest driver in the LMGTE Pro category with the No. 88 Proton Porsche driven by Klaus Bachler the fastest of the LMGTE Am drivers. Gianluca Roda damaged the front-right corner of his No. 50 Larbre Compétition Corvette in a heavy crash at the Porsche Curves. ## Race ### Start The conditions on the grid were dry and sunny before the race with an air temperature between 19 and 22 °C (66 and 72 °F) and a track temperature ranging from 23 to 25 °C (73 to 77 °F). A record-breaking 263,500 people attended the race. The French tricolour was waved at 15:00 Central European Summer Time (UTC+02:00), by the executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company Bill Ford to start the race, led by starting pole sitter Jani. Fifty five cars planned to take the start following the withdrawal of the No. 63 Chevrolet Corvette, but the No. 23 Nissan missed the opening laps while undergoing repairs to its clutch. Bernhard overtook Jani on the first lap while the trio of Audi cars were able to pass the No. 19 Porsche by the end of the second lap. The top six cars remained within a few seconds of each other as the group pulled away from the Toyota drivers. Duval lost third place to teammate Lotterer after battling with Jani through traffic for second position. The first hour of the race ended with the first retirement as the No. 92 Manthey Porsche began leaking oil and spun at the first chicane of the Mulsanne Straight. Despite resuming driver Patrick Pilet pulled to the side of the track further down the Mulsanne Straight as the engine compartment soon caught fire. The No. 42 Strakka Dome-Nissan of Jonny Kane and Alexandre Imperatori in the No. 13 Rebellion car were caught off guard by Pilet's oil and collided with one another in the chicane, stranding the Rebellion in the gravel trap while the Dome returned to the pit lane for repairs. The safety cars were deployed to slow the race as marshals worked for twenty-two minutes to dry the spilled oil along the Mulsanne Straight. As the safety cars were recalled, Lotterer in the No. 7 Audi used slower traffic to pass both Porsche drivers in front of him and take over the race lead, just as Nico Hülkenberg moved to fourth place by passing the remaining Audi cars. In the LMP2 category the safety car had split the field up, leaving the TDS Racing and KCMG Oreca-Nissan cars forty seconds ahead of their class rivals. Richard Bradley for KCMG was able to fight with TDS Racing's Tristan Gommendy on the restart and eventually retake the class lead it had lost at the race start. Lotterer was later forced to give up the race lead as a puncture on one of the No. 7's tyres required an extra pit stop, allowing Hartley's No. 17 Porsche to the front of the race. Duval was caught on an approach to a slow zone (which was enforced to allow a marshal to retrieve debris at Indianapolis) by a group of slowed LMGTE cars and took avoiding action by steering right into the grass off track. The No. 8 Audi clipped the No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari's (Giancarlo Fisichella) right-hand section and was thrown back sideways across the track, impacting the outside barriers head on heavily driving into Indianapolis corner and ripping the car's front bodywork off. Safety cars were required once again as the barriers needed lengthy repairs, while Duval was able to drive the damaged Audi back to the garage. Repairs took less than five minutes and the car resumed in eighth place. Several cars suffered issues during the second safety car period. Nicki Thiim brought the No. 95 Aston Martin from the LMGTE Pro lead straight to the team's garage with a leaking power steering system, handing the class lead to its sister No. 99 Aston Martin driven by Fernando Rees. Christian Ried in the No. 88 Proton Porsche suffered an engine fire in the second Mulsanne Straight chicane, extending the safety car period as it was tended to. KCMG retained their LMP2 class lead ahead of the TDS Racing car while behind the safety car, while the sole Corvette, No. 71 AF Corse Ferrari, and two circulating Aston Martin vehicles were nose to tail in LMGTE Pro, continuing their battle after the safety car period ended. Oliver Gavin's Corvette eventually pulled away from the rest of the LMGTE Pro field. The Riley Viper relinquished its lead in LMGTE Am to the No. 98 Aston Martin of Paul Dalla Lana and the SMP Ferrari driven by François Perrodo. As the safety car period ended the No. 17 Porsche of Hartley held the race lead, but Albuquerque was in pursuit in the No. 9 Audi, breaking the Le Mans lap record with a time of three minutes and 17.647 seconds. The No. 9 Audi was able to mount a better challenge to the leading Porsche, and René Rast was able to take the race lead after pit stops. ### Night and morning During the sixth hour of the race Gary Hirsch lost power in his Greaves Gibson-Nissan through the Esses and came to a halt; the car would later be abandoned after Hirsch was unable to repair a broken battery terminal. The No. 71 Ferrari was forced to the garage to fix starter motor problems, bowing out of its battle with Corvette and Aston Martin in LMGTE Pro. As dusk settled on the circuit, the No. 18 Porsche of Dumas braked too late for Mulsanne Corner and hit a tyre barrier. The car was able to return to the pit lane, only requiring new front bodywork, but the car fell to fifth position. Not long after Paul-Loup Chatin crashed his Signatech Alpine at Mulsanne Corner, bringing the safety cars out for the third time of the race. During this slow period Rob Bell pulled the No. 97 Aston Martin off course and onto the inside run-off area at the Mulsanne Straight and retired. When racing resumed, Hülkenberg was able to attack the leaders, first overtaking Webber's Porsche around the outside on the opening lap then passing Rast when he made a scheduled pit stop. Webber was later given a one-minute stop and go penalty for passing in a yellow flag zone, dropping him to fourth place. Nissan lost one of their three LMP1 entries when Tsugio Matsuda's No. 21 car stopped at Arnage with a suspension failure that caused its front-left wheel to detach from the vehicle and was unable to continue. The No. 22 Nissan also suffered a setback when it hit a loose wheel out on the Mulsanne Straight at 299 km/h (186 mph) and required a lengthy repair to its front-end. As the race approached its halfway point, Lotterer gained on the No. 9 Audi and moved into second place, becoming Audi's lead challenger to Porsche. Several LMGTE cars took the opportunity to change brake discs at this point in the morning, including Rees in the No. 99 Aston Martin. Returning to the track Rees' car failed to stop in time for the first Mulsanne Straight chicane and hit the rear of the TDS Racing Oreca-Nissan of Gommendy. The Oreca, which had held second place in the LMP2 category, was abandoned in the gravel at the chicane while Rees limped the damaged Aston Martin back to the garage for repairs to its front-left corner. The No. 26 G-Drive Ligier took over second place in LMP2, although still a lap behind the leading KCMG Oreca while the lead in LMGTE Pro was now left to Jordan Taylor's No. 64 Corvette and the No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari of Bruni on the same lap. After leaving the pit lane, Pierre Ragues's No. 43 Morand car billowed smoke because of an oil pressure sensor failure and his vehicle caught fire, causing him to retire at Arnage corner. In the early morning the No. 7 Audi's hold on second place was relinquished when the right-rear bodywork of the car came apart on the circuit and littered debris at the Porsche Curves, requiring a seven-minute stop for repairs and dropping the car down the race order. Roald Goethe was caught off guard as Hülkenberg lapped his No. 96 Aston Martin in Corvette Corner, causing Goethe to spin and heavily impact a concrete barrier leaving the turn. Goethe was conscious but needed aid in getting out of the Aston Martin requiring the intervention of a fourth safety car period. He was transported to a local hospital where he remained for several days and underwent surgery to two vertebra which had been fractured. Oliver Turvey had been the fastest driver in LMP2 at the time, bringing the Jota Gibson-Nissan into third place. The No. 64 Corvette of Gavin came to the pit lane during the safety car period to change brakes, but was unable to get back out of pit lane in time before the exit was closed, forfeiting the class lead to Toni Vilander's No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari. When racing resumed Webber was able to attack the No. 9 Audi after driving through traffic and take second position. Nick Leventis' No. 42 Strakka Dome pulled off the track on the front stretch with gearbox issues and fluids leaked from his car, requiring a local slow zone. The No. 7 Audi of Lotterer made contact with Tandy's leading Porsche while both cars were in the slow zone, earning Lotterer a drive-through penalty. Viktor Shaytar overran the Indianapolis corner and became stuck in the gravel, losing two laps as it was extracted by recovery vehicles and went into the pit lane but remaining in second place in LMGTE Am. The No. 9 Audi began to fall off the race pace after multiple visits to the garage for repairs to its hybrid system, but the No. 7 Audi kept fighting as Lotterer reset the fastest lap of the race with a three minutes and 17.476 seconds time. KCMG had an anxious moment when Lapierre missed the Indianapolis corner, but recovered with marshal assistance without losing the LMP2 class lead. The No. 51 AF Corse Ferrari slowed on course and came to the garage with gearbox issues, handing the LMGTE Pro lead back to Corvette and allowing the No. 71 AF Corse Ferrari to climb to second place after recovering from its earlier issues. Vanthoor drove his car into his pitbox with gearbox problems but his team were unable to repair it before the race's conclusion and retired. Jann Mardenborough's Nissan came to a halt at the Porsche Curves after smoke bellowed out of the front of the car as the gearbox failed, leaving Nissan with a single car left circulating. Light rain began to fall on portions of the circuit in the final hour, but it was not heavy enough to affect the race. Dalla Lana, having led the previous 125 laps in LMGTE Am and within forty five minutes of the race finish, went straight on at the Ford Chicane and crashed heavily into an outside tyre barrier, ending the car's run and promoting the SMP Ferrari to the class lead which it held to the finish. Dalla Lana was unhurt. ### Finish Unhindered in the final hours of the race, Hülkenberg took the chequered flag for the No. 19 Porsche, a lap ahead of Hartley's No. 17 Porsche. Audi, in only their third defeat at Le Mans since , were a further lap behind in third place with the No. 7 car. Toyota, unable to match the pace of Audi and Porsche, were twelve laps behind for a seventh-place finish, while debutants Nissan successfully finished the race with one of their cars, although it failed to complete enough laps for classification. Hülkenberg became the first active Formula One driver to win Le Mans since Johnny Herbert and Bertrand Gachot in and the first rookie to clinch overall victory since Laurent Aïello in . Tandy became the 32nd British driver to win the event as well as the first Englishman since Guy Smith in , and co-driver Earl Bamber was the third New Zealander after Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon to achieve the overall win. It was also Porsche's seventeenth overall victory in the 24-hour race. KCMG, unchallenged since the early hours of the race, were victorious in the LMP2 class, while Jota Sport was able to take second place from G-Drive Racing in the final hours. Corvette Racing held their five lap lead in LMGTE Pro, earning Gavin his fifth class victory, while AF Corse completed the class podium with the No. 71 ahead of No. 51. Following the loss of the No. 98 Aston Martin in the final hour, actor Patrick Dempsey's team moved into second place behind the winning SMP Ferrari, while Scuderia Corsa, in their first appearance at Le Mans, finished third. There were 28 outright lead changes during the race; four cars reached the front of the field. The No. 19 Porsche led seven times for a total of 243 laps, more than any other car. ## Post-race The top three finishers in all four categories appeared on the podium to collect their trophies and in a later press conference. Hülkenberg revealed that Porsche's objective was to have one car featured on the podium and was astonished over the team's first and second-place results. He said that he was proud and delighted at his team's achievement: "We had a flawless race with a great pace and we didn't make any mistake. The last lap was a bit weird because it was drizzling and people got nervous in the garage. After the finish line, it is amazing to see thousands and thousands of people cheering up." Bamber stated that the win was "beyond my dreams" and hoped to return to the event in future years with Porsche. Tandy described his success as "surreal": "I can't think of two better people to share the car with. We haven't put a wheel wrong all race and we've just won the biggest race in the world." Webber did not believe that his one-minute stop and go penalty prevented him from winning the event, saying he was not fast enough but praised the race victors on their success. Hartley stated it felt special to stand on the Le Mans podium and felt it would be a day that would be looked back in New Zealand motor racing history. Bernhard said that while the overall victory was his dream, he was proud of the Porsche team, and felt it was motor racing at the highest quality. Hülkenberg's success attracted praise from fellow Formula One drivers. During the Thursday pre-race press conference at the Austrian Grand Prix held one week later, Red Bull Racing driver Daniel Ricciardo thought Hülkenberg's victory made it more possible for Formula One participants to compete in other forms of motor racing and believed that they would receive praise for taking part in such events. Four-time World Champion Sebastian Vettel said that the driver made the victory "look easy" and it was a positive in improving the reputation of Formula One drivers. The result meant Lotterer, Tréluyer and Fässler remained the leaders of the Drivers' Championship with 80 points, 20 ahead of second-placed Tandy, who in turn, was a further two in front of his co-drivers Bamber and Hülkenberg in third. Dumas, Jani and Lieb's performance saw them fall from second to fourth place and Bernhard, Hartley and Webber's second-place result allowed them to move into fifth on 53 points. Porsche were the new leaders in the Manufacturers' Championship with 140 points; Audi were 16 points behind their nearest rivals and Toyota maintained third place on 71 points with five races left in the season. ## Race results The minimum number of laps for classification (70 per cent of the overall winning car's race distance) was 276 laps. Class winners are denoted in bold. ## Standings after the race - Note: Only the top five positions are included for the Drivers' Championship standings.

Anunnaki

Group of ancient Mesopotamian deities

The Anunnaki (Sumerian: , also transcribed as Anunaki, Annunaki, Anunna, Ananaki and other variations) are a group of deities of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which come from the Post-Akkadian period, the Anunnaki are deities in the pantheon, descendants of An and Ki, the god of the heavens and the goddess of earth, and their primary function was to decree the fates of humanity. They should not be confused with the Apkallu. ## Etymology The name Anunnaki is derived from An, the Sumerian god of the sky. The name is variously written "^da-nuna", "^da-nuna-ke₄-ne", or "^da-nun-na", meaning "princely offspring" or "offspring of An". The Anunnaki were believed to be the offspring of An and his consort, the earth goddess Ki. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag, stating that they were originally the same figure. The oldest of the Anunnaki was Enlil, the god of air and chief god of the Sumerian pantheon. The Sumerians believed that, until Enlil was born, heaven and earth were inseparable. Then, Enlil split heaven and earth in two and carried away the earth while his father An carried away the sky. ## Worship and iconography The Anunnaki are chiefly mentioned in literary texts and very little evidence to support the existence of any cult of them has yet been unearthed. This is likely due to the fact that each member of the Anunnaki had his or her own individual cult, separate from the others. Similarly, no representations of the Anunnaki as a complete group have yet been discovered, although a few depictions of two or three individual members together have been identified. Deities in ancient Mesopotamia were almost exclusively anthropomorphic. They were thought to possess extraordinary powers and were often envisioned as being of tremendous physical size. The deities typically wore melam, an ambiguous substance which "covered them in terrifying splendor". Melam could also be worn by heroes, kings, giants, and even demons. The effect that seeing a deity's melam has on a human is described as ni, a word for the physical tingling of the flesh. Deities were almost always depicted wearing horned caps, consisting of up to seven superimposed pairs of ox-horns. They were also sometimes depicted wearing clothes with elaborate decorative gold and silver ornaments sewn into them. The ancient Mesopotamians believed that their deities lived in Heaven, after an earlier history of visiting earth in the mythological texts, and that a god's statue was a physical embodiment of the god himself. As such, cult statues were given constant care and attention and a set of priests was assigned to tend to them. These priests would clothe the statues and place feasts before them so they could "eat". A deity's temple was believed to be that deity's literal place of residence. The gods had boats, full-sized barges which were normally stored inside their temples and were used to transport their cult statues along waterways during various religious festivals. The gods also had chariots, which were used for transporting their cult statues by land. Sometimes a deity's cult statue would be transported to the location of a battle so that the deity could watch the battle unfold. The major deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon, which included the Anunnaki, were believed to participate in the "assembly of the gods", through which the gods made all of their decisions. This assembly was seen as a divine counterpart to the semi-democratic legislative system that existed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BC – c. 2004 BC). ## Mythology ### Sumerian The earliest known usages of the term Anunnaki come from inscriptions written during the reign of Gudea (c. 2144–2124 BC) and the Third Dynasty of Ur. In the earliest texts, the term is applied to the most powerful and important deities in the Sumerian pantheon: the descendants of the sky-god An.This group of deities probably included the "seven gods who decree": An, Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag, Nanna, Utu, and Inanna. Although certain deities are described as members of the Anunnaki, no complete list of the names of all the Anunnaki has survived and they are usually only referred to as a cohesive group in literary texts. Furthermore, Sumerian texts describe the Anunnaki inconsistently and do not agree on how many Anunnaki there were, or what their divine function was. Originally, the Anunnaki appear to have been heavenly deities with immense powers. In the poem Enki and the World Order, the Anunnaki "do homage" to Enki, sing hymns of praise in his honor, and "take up their dwellings" among the people of Sumer. The same composition twice states that the Anunnaki "decree the fates of mankind". Virtually every major deity in the Sumerian pantheon was regarded as the patron of a specific city and was expected to protect that city's interests. The deity was believed to permanently reside within that city's temple. One text mentions as many as fifty Anunnaki associated with the city of Eridu. In Inanna's Descent into the Netherworld, there are only seven Anunnaki, who reside within the Underworld and serve as judges. Inanna stands trial before them for her attempt to take over the Underworld; they deem her guilty of hubris and condemn her to death. Major deities in Sumerian mythology were associated with specific celestial bodies. Inanna was believed to be the planet Venus. Utu was believed to be the sun. Nanna was the moon. An was identified with all the stars of the equatorial sky, Enlil with those of the northern sky, and Enki with those of the southern sky. The path of Enlil's celestial orbit was a continuous, symmetrical circle around the north celestial pole, but those of An and Enki were believed to intersect at various points. ### Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian Akkadian texts of the second millennium BC follow similar portrayals of the Anunnaki from Inanna's Descent into the Netherworld, depicting them as chthonic Underworld deities. In an abbreviated Akkadian version of Inanna's Descent written in the early second millennium, Ereshkigal, the queen of the Underworld, comments that she "drink[s] water with the Anunnaki". Later in the same poem, Ereshkigal orders her servant Namtar to fetch the Anunnaki from Egalgina, to "decorate the threshold steps with coral", and to "seat them on golden thrones". During the Old Babylonian Period (c. 1830 BC – c. 1531 BC), a new set of deities known as the Igigi are introduced. The relationship between the Anunnaki and the Igigi is unclear. On some occasions, the categories appear to be used synonymously, but in other writings, such as The Poem of Erra, there is a clear distinction between the two. In the late Akkadian Atra-Hasis epic, the Igigi are the sixth generation of the gods who are forced to perform labor for the Anunnaki. After forty days, the Igigi rebel and the god Enki, one of the Anunnaki, creates humans to replace them. From the Middle Babylonian Period (c. 1592 – 1155 BC) onward, the name Anunnaki was applied generally to the deities of the underworld; whereas the name Igigi was applied to the heavenly deities. During this period, the underworld deities Damkina, Nergal, and Madānu are listed as the most powerful among the Anunnaki, alongside Marduk, the national god of ancient Babylon. In the standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1200 BC) Utnapishtim, the immortal survivor of the Great Flood, describes the Anunnaki as seven judges of the Underworld, who set the land aflame as the storm approaches. Later, when the flood comes, Ishtar (the East Semitic equivalent to Inanna) and the Anunnaki mourn over the destruction of humanity. In the Babylonian Enûma Eliš, Marduk assigns the Anunnaki their positions. A late Babylonian version of the epic mentions 600 Anunnaki of the underworld, but only 300 Anunnaki of heaven, indicating the existence of a complex underworld cosmology. In gratitude, the Anunnaki, the "Great Gods", build Esagila, a "splendid" temple dedicated to Marduk, Ea, and Ellil. In the eighth-century BC Poem of Erra, the Anunnaki are described as the brothers of the god Nergal and are depicted as antagonistic towards humanity. A badly damaged text from the Neo-Assyrian Period (911 – 612 BC) describes Marduk leading his army of Anunnaki into the sacred city of Nippur and causing a disturbance. The disturbance causes a flood, which forces the resident gods of Nippur to take shelter in the Eshumesha temple to Ninurta. Enlil is enraged at Marduk's transgression and orders the gods of Eshumesha to take Marduk and the other Anunnaki as prisoners. The Anunnaki are captured, but Marduk appoints his front-runner Mushteshirhablim to lead a revolt against the gods of Eshumesha and sends his messenger Neretagmil to alert Nabu, the god of literacy. When the Eshumesha gods hear Nabu speak, they come out of their temple to search for him. Marduk defeats the Eshumesha gods and takes 360 of them as prisoners of war, including Enlil himself. Enlil protests that the Eshumesha gods are innocent, so Marduk puts them on trial before the Anunnaki. The text ends with a warning from Damkianna (another name for Ninhursag) to the gods and to humanity, pleading them not to repeat the war between the Anunnaki and the gods of Eshumesha. ### Hurrian and Hittite In the mythologies of the Hurrians and Hittites (which flourished in the mid to late second millennium BC), the oldest generation of gods was believed to have been banished by the younger gods to the Underworld, where they were ruled by the goddess Lelwani. Hittite scribes identified these deities with the Anunnaki. In ancient Hurrian, the Anunnaki are referred to as karuileš šiuneš, which means "former ancient gods", or kattereš šiuneš, which means "gods of the earth". Hittite and Hurrian treaties were often sworn by the old gods in order to ensure that the oaths would be kept. In one myth, the gods are threatened by the stone giant Ullikummi, so Ea (the later name for Enki) commands the Former Gods to find the weapon that was used to separate the heavens from the earth. They find it and use it to cut off Ullikummi's feet. Although the names of the Anunnaki in Hurrian and Hittite texts frequently vary, they are always eight in number. In one Hittite ritual, the names of the old gods are listed as: "Aduntarri the diviner, Zulki the dream interpretess, Irpitia Lord of the Earth, Narā, Namšarā, Minki, Amunki, and Āpi." The old gods had no identifiable cult in the Hurrio-Hittite religion; instead, the Hurrians and Hittites sought to communicate with the old gods through the ritual sacrifice of a piglet in a pit dug in the ground. The old gods were often invoked to perform ritual purifications. The Hittite account of the old gods' banishment to the Underworld is closely related with the Greek poet Hesiod's narrative of the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians in his Theogony. The Greek sky-god Ouranos (whose name means "Heaven") is the father of the Titans and is derived from the Hittite version of Anu. In Hesiod's account, Ouranos is castrated by his son Cronus, just as Anu was castrated by his son Kumarbi in the Hittite story. ## Pseudoarchaeology and conspiracy theories Over a series of published books (starting with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968), pseudoarcheologist Erich von Däniken claimed that extraterrestrial "ancient astronauts" had visited a prehistoric Earth. Däniken explains the origins of religions as reactions to contact with an alien race, and offers interpretations of Sumerian texts and the Old Testament as evidence. In his 1976 book The Twelfth Planet, author Zecharia Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were actually an advanced humanoid extraterrestrial species from the undiscovered planet Nibiru, who came to Earth around 500,000 years ago and constructed a base of operations in order to mine gold after discovering that the planet was rich in the precious metal. According to Sitchin, the Anunnaki hybridized their species and Homo erectus via in vitro fertilization in order to create humans as a slave species of miners. Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were forced to temporarily leave Earth's surface and orbit the planet when Antarctic glaciers melted, causing the Great Flood, which also destroyed the Anunnaki's bases on Earth. These had to be rebuilt, and the Anunnaki, needing more humans to help in this massive effort, taught mankind agriculture. Ronald H. Fritze writes that, according to Sitchin, "the Annunaki built the pyramids and all the other monumental structures from around the ancient world that ancient astronaut theorists consider so impossible to build without highly advanced technologies." Sitchin expanded on this mythology in later works, including The Stairway to Heaven (1980) and The Wars of Gods and Men (1985). In The End of Days: Armageddon and the Prophecy of the Return (2007), Sitchin predicted that the Anunnaki would return to earth, possibly as soon as 2012, corresponding to the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Sitchin's writings have been universally rejected by mainstream historians, who have labelled his books as pseudoarchaeology, asserting that Sitchin seems to deliberately misrepresent Sumerian texts by quoting them out of context, truncating quotations, and mistranslating Sumerian words to give them radically different meanings from their accepted definitions. David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist who popularised the reptilian conspiracy theory, has claimed that the reptilian overlords of his theory are in fact the Anunnaki. Clearly influenced by Sitchin's writings, Icke adapts them "in favor of his own New Age and conspiratorial agenda". Icke's speculation on the Anunnaki incorporates far-right views on history, positing an Aryan master race descended by blood from the Anunnaki. It also incorporates dragons, Dracula, and draconian laws, these three elements apparently linked only by superficial linguistic similarity. He formulated his views on the Anunnaki in the 1990s and has written several books about his theory. In his 2001 documentary about Icke, Jon Ronson cited a cartoon, "Rothschild" (1898), by Charles Léandre, arguing that Jews have long been depicted as lizard-like creatures who are out to control the world. ## See also - Ancient Mesopotamian religion - Elohim - Hutena

Lysurus periphragmoides

Species of fungus

Lysurus periphragmoides, commonly known as the stalked lattice stinkhorn or chambered stinkhorn, is a species of fungus in the stinkhorn family. It was originally described as Simblum periphragmoides in 1831, and has been known as many different names before being transferred to Lysurus in 1980. The saprobic fungus has a pantropical distribution, and has been found in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas, where it grows on fertile ground and on mulch. The fruit body, which can extend up to 15 cm (5.9 in) tall, consists of a reddish latticed head (a receptaculum) placed on top of a long stalk. A dark olive-green spore mass, the gleba, fills the interior of the lattice and extends outwards between the arms. Like other members of the family Phallaceae, the gleba has a fetid odor that attracts flies and other insects to help disperse its spores. The immature "egg" form of the fungus is considered edible. ## Taxonomy and naming The basionym for this species is Simblum periphragmoides, first described by German mycologist Johann Friedrich Klotzsch in 1831, based on specimens collected in Bois Chéry in Mauritius. Klotzsch designated it as the type species of Simblum, a genus differentiated from the similar genus Lysurus by having the fruit body ending in a spherical, chambered head, with gleba developing within the depressions of the chambers. Lysurus periphragmoides is a morphologically variable species; as a result, it has acquired an extensive number of synonyms, as various authors have decided that the different forms warranted being designated as new species. Donald Malcolm Dring's 1980 monograph on the Clathraceae (a family that has since been subsumed into the Phallaceae) transferred the taxon to Lysurus, explaining "a distinction between "Simblum" and Lysurus in the original restricted sense cannot be easily maintained because there are examples of intermediates states", and he lumped 18 synonyms under L. periphragmoides. In one noted example of an author being too eager to assign a new name, in 1902 George Francis Atkinson described a specimen he found in Texas, otherwise similar to Simblum but with a loose net drooping from the head; he initiated the new genus Dictybole to include his "new" species D. texense. The species was, according to mycologist Curtis Gates Lloyd, merely a decomposing or insect-damaged specimen of L. periphragmoides that had been preserved in alcohol. Lloyd criticized Atkinson's poor judgment in his self-published journal Mycological Notes, and later, humiliated him under the pen name N.J. McGinty. William H. Long later (1907) transferred Atkinson's taxon to the genus Simblum, claiming that the yellow arms and longer spores were sufficiently distinct to consider it distinct from L. periphragmoides (then known as Simblum sphaerocephalum); however, according to Dring, D. texense should also be considered a synonym of L. periphragmoides. Despite Dring's renaming, and the subsequent acceptance of his subsuming of the genus Simblum into Lysurus, the species is still occasionally referred to Simblum sphaerocephalum. The specific epithet periphragmoides means "fenced in all around", and refers to the latticed structure of the cap. The fungus is commonly known as the "stalked lattice stinkhorn" or "chambered stinkhorn". ## Description Immature fruiting bodies of L. periphragmoides start as round or oval "eggs" that may be up to 5 cm (2.0 in) in diameter. On the underside of the egg are whitish rhizomorphs that anchor it to the substrate. The peridium is white to buff-colored on the external surface, and has a gelatinous layer inside. An egg cut in half lengthwise reveals internal layers, including a tough white outer peridium, and a thick layer of firm, translucent, gelatinous matter transversed by strands (trabeculae) of denser white tissue. The strands are anastomosing partitions, connecting with the peridium externally and with the bars of the receptaculum within. The gelatinous layer is therefore divided up into many irregular longitudinal chambers. The egg eventually ruptures as the stalk expands and breaks through, creating a volva at the base of the stipe. In maturity, the fruit bodies, are up to 15 cm (5.9 in) tall, with a latticed spherical cap (the receptaculum) atop a long yellow or reddish stipe. In general, Old World specimens tend to be yellow, while New World specimens are reddish, although exceptions have been noted in the literature. The receptaculum is typically 1.5–3.5 cm (0.6–1.4 in) in diameter and forms a red or orange lattice, or mesh. There are typically between 20 and 100 small pentagonal to hexagonal meshes in the receptaculum; the arms of the mesh have sharp ridges on the outer surface, corrugations on the sides, and are flat to weakly ridged on the inner surface. The internal surfaces of the receptaculum are covered with an olive-green spore-bearing gleba, which sometimes seeps through the mesh holes. Like most stinkhorn species, the gleba has a foul odor, comparable to rotten meat, but it is "less-offensive" than most. The smell of fresh, newly exposed gleba has been reported to be sweet, similar to amyl acetate; the foul odor forming only after it has been exposed to air for some time. The stipe is 5–15 cm (2.0–5.9 in) by 0.8–3 cm (0.3–1.2 in) thick, and is hollow and spongy. The walls of the stipe are made of an inner layer of large tubes and two or three outer layers of small tubes. Specimens may occasionally be found with fused heads on two separate stipes arising from a single volva. A variety with a white fruit body is known, Lysurus periphragmoides var. albidum (originally described as Simblum texense var. albidum by Long). It was reported growing from sandy alkaline soil in semi-arid regions of New Mexico, but has not been reported again since Long's collections in 1941. Spores are elliptical or oblong in shape, smooth, inamyloid, and have dimensions of 3.5–4.5 by 1.5–2.5 μm. The use of scanning electron microscopy has revealed that L. periphragmoides (in addition to several other Phallales species) has a hilar scar—a small indentation in the surface of the spore where it was previously connected to the basidium via the sterigma. Like many of the stinkhorns, L. periphragmoides is generally considered only edible when in its immature "egg" form. ### Similar species Lysurus periphragmoides is morphologically distinct, and unlikely to be confused with any other species. Within the genus Lysurus, L. mokusin has an angular stipe and a receptacle of four to five clasped arms, contoured like the stipe with alternating ribs and furrows. L. cruciatus has a rounder stipe with receptacle arms that are not clasped together at maturity. The receptacle of L. gardneri, found in southeast Asia, India, and Africa, is made of five to seven reddish-brown fingers that are initially pressed together before separating. ## Habitat and distribution This species is typically found growing solitary or in groups on lawns, mulch, pastures, and open woods. A North American field guide notes an association with apple orchards and cornfields. Lysurus periphragmoides has a pantropical distribution. The fungus has been reported from Africa (Mauritius, Tanzania), Asia (Jilin Province, China, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia), Australasia (New Guinea), North America (Bahamas, Dominica, Mexico), Central America (Nicaragua) and South America (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela). The distribution extends north to the Ryukyu Islands in Asia. It is fairly common in South America, but is usually restricts its appearance to periods of wet weather in southern North America.

Benjamin Church House (Bristol, Rhode Island)

Historic house in Rhode Island, United States

Benjamin Church House (also known as Benjamin Church Home for the Aged) is a Colonial Revival house at 1014 Hope Street in Bristol, Rhode Island, U.S.A. It opened in 1909 as the "Benjamin Church Home for Aged Men" as stipulated by Benjamin Church's will. Beginning in 1934, during the Great Depression, it admitted women. The house was closed in 1968 and became a National Register of Historic Places listing in 1971. The non-profit Benjamin Church Senior Center was incorporated in June 1972 and opened on September 1, 1972. It continues to operate as a senior center. ## Benjamin Church Benjamin Church was born on February 20, 1842, to Elizabeth Luther and Samuel Church, a wealthy grain and flour merchant. Benjamin was raised with his 12 siblings on Mount Hope Farm and the old family farm on Poppasquash. His two brothers built houses in the Poppasquash Farms Historic District. In 1900, Benjamin Church drafted a will to provide for the construction of a home for elderly men. It opened in 1909 as the "Benjamin Church Home for Aged Men". ## Design The Benjamin Church House is a two-story clapboarded Colonial Revival topped with a hipped roof that has four pedimented dormers. Constructed between 1908 and 1909 from designs by Clarke, Howe & Homer, architects, the building cost \$21,000. The front of the house faces west towards Hope Street and is 18 by 30 feet (5.5 by 9.1 m) and has an ell on the rear side that measures 18 by 24 feet (5.5 by 7.3 m). The front facade has a symmetrical five bay facade with the main entrance in the center, the door has sidelights and a semi-elliptical fanlight. The front windows are typical 20th-century windows with six-over-one sash and have splayed wooden lintels and those on the first floor have raised center keystones. Projecting out from the hipped roof are two dormers with shingled sides. The front facade has a one-story porch that runs the length of the face with a half-hipped roof. The porch is supported by six Doric columns that frame the bays and has a wooden frieze with a triglyph above each column. The porch has a simple wooden rail that runs the length of the porch and down the front and side steps, the newel posts are capped by small wooden urns. The corners of the main part of the house have wooden quoins. In the southeast corner of the building is an internal porch covered by a quarter-hipped roof. The rear roof are two pedimented dormers, one on each side of the ell's roof and the third chimney which rises through the roof of the main building. The house has a stone foundation, which extends to a full story due to the sloping land and has a doorway in the rear. The porch is supported by brick piers. The interior of the house is designed around a central hall with a narrow stairway with turned balusters and newel that goes to the third floor. On both sides of the hall are two large front reception rooms, each 14 by 19 feet (4.3 by 5.8 m) and having 9 feet (2.7 m) tall ceilings. The rear of the south front room is the former dining room that is connected by a pantry to the kitchen in the ell. Two small rooms are located beyond the northern reception room. The second floor maintains the central hall and extends into the ell, but is bisected by a lateral hallway. Each "quadrant" housed two rooms for the residents with additional rooms in the ell and the third floor has four additional bedrooms with the dormer windows. The third floor of the ell was used as attic storage space. At the time of nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, the alterations that had been made to the house were described as "minor and inconspicuous, consisting mainly of alterations to windows and dormers to provide egress to necessary fire-escapes." The porch is believed to be a part of the original design, but it was noted that if it was a later addition it would likely have been done before 1920. In 1969, the clapboarded outbuilding to the southeast was torn down to construct newer housing for the elderly. ## Service The Benjamin Church House was ready to open on March 15, 1909, and served as elderly housing for only aged men. In 1934, during the Great Depression, the board of trustees decided to admit women to the house. Samuel P. Colt would bequeath \$25,000 to the home upon his death in 1921. The house was closed from 1968 until 1973 and vandalized during the period, but was also submitted and approved to the National Register of Historic Places. Sometime in 1972, the National Park Service approved a grant of \$5,000 to refurbish the house. In June 1972, "[t]he Benjamin Church Senior Center was incorporated as a non-profit organization that was housed in [t]he Benjamin Church Home" and opened for occupancy on September 1, 1972. According to the Benjamin Church Senior Center, the house is used as a senior center and is run by volunteers and board members. ## Importance The Benjamin Church House is historically significant as a "very pure example" of the Colonial Revival style by noted local architects Clarke, Howe & Homer. The house also serves as an important asset to the Bristol environment as an elderly home, noted during its vacancy at the time of its nomination. The nomination states "[i]t is because of the environmental and architectural importance of this house and its significance in the greater context of the Bristol-Warren historic districts that it is thought to be worthy of National Register status and protection." It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 22, 1971. ## See also - National Register of Historic Places listings in Bristol County, Rhode Island - National Register of Historic Places listings in Rhode Island

Shannon Leto

American drummer (born 1970)

Shannon Leto (/lɛtoʊ/; born March 9, 1970) is an American musician best known as the drummer of rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars. He co-founded the group in 1998 in Los Angeles, California, with his younger brother Jared. Their debut album, 30 Seconds to Mars (2002), was released to positive reviews but only to limited success. The band achieved worldwide fame with the release of their second album A Beautiful Lie (2005). Their following releases, This Is War (2009) and Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams (2013), received further critical and commercial success. As of September 2014, the band has sold over 15 million albums worldwide. Leto has worked on several side projects during his career, including a collaboration with Antoine Becks, a recording with the short-lived supergroup The Wondergirls, and performing on occasional dates with Street Drum Corps. His creative contribution to music has received praise from musicians and critics. He is noted for his dynamic drumming style and his energetic live performances. ## Early life Shannon Leto was born in Bossier City, Louisiana, to Constance Leto (née Metrejon). His mother has Cajun ancestry. "Leto" is his stepfather's surname. His parents divorced when he was a child, and he and his younger brother, Jared, lived with their mother and their maternal grandparents, William Lee Metrejon and Ruby Russell. His father remarried and committed suicide when Shannon was ten years old. Leto moved frequently with his family from his native Louisiana around the country. He has two younger half-brothers from his father's second marriage. Leto's mother joined the hippie movement and encouraged her sons to get involved in the arts. Leto became interested in percussion from the moment he and his brother started playing music together at early age, and his models were artists of many different mediums. "I come from a pretty artistic family," he explained, "There were canvases and paint everywhere, instruments, and all sorts of stuff. It just kind of made sense. I started playing on pots and pans at a very early age, so I just kind of flowed into it. It was just a natural progression." He received his first drum kit when he was ten years old and began teaching himself, developing his own style. Shannon Leto has described his adolescence as a troubled time, in which he used drugs and dropped out of school. He said, "I was in a mess, I felt I didn't belong anywhere", calling himself as an "outsider" who hated conformity and rules, and "took any opportunity to break them." Ultimately, Jared helped him recover from drugs. ## Music career Leto formed the rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars in 1998 in Los Angeles, California with his brother Jared. Their debut album had been in the works for a couple of years and was recorded in rural Wyoming during 2001 and early 2002. Their work led to a number of record labels being interested in signing Thirty Seconds to Mars, which eventually signed to Immortal Records. The band worked with producers Bob Ezrin and Brian Virtue on their debut album 30 Seconds to Mars, which was released on August 27, 2002, in the United States through Immortal and Virgin. It reached number 107 on the US Billboard 200 and number one on the US Top Heatseekers. Upon its release, 30 Seconds to Mars was met with mostly positive reviews; music critic Megan O'Toole felt that the band has "managed to carve out a unique niche for themselves in the rock realm." The album was a slow-burning success, and eventually sold two million copies worldwide as of March 2011. It took two years to record their next release A Beautiful Lie, with the band traveling to four different continents to accommodate Jared Leto's acting career. A Beautiful Lie was released on August 30, 2005, in the United States. It has since been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and has reached platinum and gold status in several countries, with a sales total of over four million. The band heavily toured in support of the album and played at several major festivals, including Roskilde, Pinkpop, Rock am Ring, and Download. In August 2008, during the recording process of the band's third studio album, Thirty Seconds to Mars attempted to sign with a new label, prompting EMI (the parent label of Virgin), to file a \$30 million breach of contract lawsuit. After nearly a year of legal battles, the band announced on April 28, 2009, that the suit had been settled following a defence based on the De Havilland Law. Thirty Seconds to Mars then signed a new contract with EMI and released their third album This Is War in December 2009 to critical acclaim. This Is War reached the top ten of several national album charts and earned numerous music awards. The band began their Into the Wild Tour in February 2010 and was among the hardest-working touring artists of the year. In December 2011, they entered the Guinness World Records for most live shows during a single album cycle, with 300 shows. In September 2012, Leto released a remixed version of "Night of the Hunter", a track featured on This Is War. The musician explained that he wanted to "reinvent" the song, to "shed a different light on it by bringing a dance element to it." Thirty Seconds to Mars released their fourth album, Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams, in May 2013 through Universal. It received generally positive reviews and reached the top ten in more than fifteen countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States. The band promoted the album by embarking on their Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams Tour and the Carnivores Tour, co-headlining with Linkin Park. In April 2014, Thirty Seconds to Mars announced that they have parted from Virgin Records after tumultuous years with the label. ## Artistry Leto is known for his energetic live performances and his ability to blend traditional and experimental drum techniques. During the production of Thirty Seconds to Mars first studio album, he played almost exclusively electronic drums and drew influence from bands such as Pink Floyd, The Cure, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, which he considers "mostly big conceptional bands; bands that had depth; bands that were dynamic." Bob Ezrin, producer of the album, felt that Leto is "one of the most inventive drummers I've worked with. He isn't satisfied with simply adding a beat; his drum parts are an integral part of the orchestration of the record. He's also a great live drummer who is lots of fun to watch, with a presence and energy level that are mesmerizing." Leto switched to a mostly acoustic set-up on the band's next release A Beautiful Lie. His equipment consists of a hybrid kit that combines both acoustic and electric elements. His drum technician Joseph Ciccone, better known as Kentucky, stated that Leto's "sound is his technique. He's an animal behind that kit, so I love giving him tons of things to beat up." During the production of This Is War, Leto widened his style with an abundance of electronic sounds and synth textures created by himself. He wrote the instrumental track "L490" and played every instrument on it, including all guitars and a singing bowl. He experimented with different instruments and drew influences from a varied range of styles in Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams. Steve Lillywhite, who co-produced two band's albums, felt that Leto treats drumming "unlike most drummers do in rock bands. His cross rhythms explode in a guttural way ... very musical, extremely unique." Leto was largely an autodidact on drums; "I've always wanted to find my way of doing things," he explained, "Discovering what I can contribute with my own voice. There were so many styles that I was into at a young age. I didn't want to get locked into just one thing." During his youth, Leto had been a devoted fan of progressive rock and blues music, listening to artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Boz Scaggs. He is inspired by electronic music, including Depeche Mode and The Cure. His major influences also include jazz band Steely Dan, as well as heavy metal groups Mountain, Iron Maiden and Kiss. According to Leto, these artists were commercially viable but also respected for their statements and contributions. He explained that he "never focused on the drummers," saying that he felt more connected to music than a particular drummer. When Thirty Seconds to Mars first started, the Leto brothers experimented to try and create a specific sound, whose process was described as "very organic". They were attempting to produce a "feeling" rather than a sound, in order to recreate the sense of community that marked their childhood. Leto also stated that the band's concerts are a direct reflection of that period of his early life. Journalist Kelly King, a long-time contributor with Drumhead magazine, opined that Leto is "energy and grace behind the drums, stoking the fire that drives his band." He commented that the musician is both confident and aggressive on his kit, and felt that "his drive to push himself to the limit, to create and explore his own artistic capabilities is paramount." Ryan Jones, writing for Alternative Addiction, described Leto as one of rock's most dynamic drummers of present day. He received the Indie Drummer Award at the 2012 Drummies Awards. He was also nominated for Alternative Drummer in 2009 and 2011. ## Other work In 1994, Leto found a minor role on the television series My So-Called Life, in which his brother starred. He later appeared in the films Prefontaine (1997), Sol Goode (2001), and Highway (2002). Leto recorded the songs "Drop That Baby" and "Let's Go All the Way" with the short-lived supergroup The Wondergirls in 1999, which members included Scott Weiland, Mark McGrath, and Ian Astbury, among others. Since 2007, Leto has performed on occasional dates with American percussion band Street Drum Corps. In June 2008, he joined Habitat for Humanity to work with Thirty Seconds to Mars on a home being repaired and renovated through the Greater Los Angeles Area's "A Brush With Kindness" programme. Leto began producing American electronic band CB7 after meeting musician Antoine Becks in 2009. CB7 later supported Thirty Seconds to Mars on the North American leg of their Into the Wild Tour in 2011. The same year, Leto created a side project with Becks and toured worldwide with him until the summer of 2012, when the duo split. In 2014, Leto launched Black Fuel Trading Company, a lifestyle brand primarily focusing on responsibly sourced, direct-trade coffee. ## Discography Thirty Seconds to Mars studio albums - 30 Seconds to Mars (2002) - A Beautiful Lie (2005) - This Is War (2009) - Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams (2013) - America (2018)

The Cornfield

Painting by John Constable

The Cornfield is an oil painting by the English artist John Constable, completed from January to March 1826 in the artist’s studio. The painting shows a lane leading from East Bergholt toward Dedham, Essex, and depicts a young shepherd boy drinking from a pool in the heat of summer. The location is along Fen Lane, which the artist knew well. Constable referred to the piece as The Drinking Boy. On the advice of Constable's friend, the botanist Henry Phillips, The Cornfield was painted with the trees and plants depicted as accurately as possible. Constable commissioned the engraver David Lucas to produce the plates of the painting for a book, Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery, first published in July 1830. The art historian Anthony Bailey considers The Cornfield to have "opened the gate through which a great number of people were to pass into Constable's country". It was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in April 1826, under the title Landscape: Noon, and shown in Paris from early November to the spring of 1828. The painting was praised but Constable did not find a buyer. After the artist’s death, funds were raised to purchase the work for the National Gallery. ## Background John Constable was born in 1776 in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt, to Golding Constable and his wife Ann. His father was a corn merchant, who owned Flatford Mill in the village and a mill in Dedham, Essex; Constable was expected to succeed his father in the business. After his education at schools in Lavenham and Dedham, Constable worked in his father's corn business, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills. In 1799, the 19-year-old Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue a career in art, and Golding granted him a small allowance to allow him to train. He entered the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer. Following his marriage to Maria Bicknell In 1816, Constable lived in Bloomsbury in central London, before his family settled in Hampstead, where they lived permanently from 1827 onwards. The year The Cornfield was painted, Constable was 50 and had not yet been accepted as a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts, despite having sought election since the early 1820s. ## Composition Constable's painting The Cornfield, painted in oil on canvas, depicts a young shepherd. The boy, wearing a red waistcoat, is drinking from a pool as he rests from his work at noon in the heat of summer. He has removed his hat. The painting is a view of Fen Lane, which Constable knew well. As a schoolboy he had regularly walked along the lane, which was the shortest way from East Bergholt and over New Fen Bridge across to the River Stour toward his school in Dedham. The painting was completed from January to March 1826 in Constable's London studio. Constable himself called it The Drinking Boy, and he intended it to be his most important exhibited work of that year. The work is similar in size to The Lock, a painting that was originally planned as a pendant to The Cornfield. Constable produced a smaller preparatory oil sketch, which has survived, and which shows how the work was developed over time. In the background of the sketch, the figure of the boy and his animals are not depicted. None of the trees in the sketch are dead, unlike the trees painted in the final work. He produced a study for the donkey and her foal, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. No sketches made at the scene are known. Constable made The Cornfield as botanically accurate as possible. On 1 March 1826, his friend Henry Phillips, a botanist, wrote to Constable with advice about how the plants should be painted. Phillips commented: "I think it is July in your green lane. At this season all the tall grasses are in flower, bogrush, bullrush, teasel. The white bindwind now hangs in flowers over the branches of the hedge; the wild carrot and hemlock flower in banks of hedges, cow parsley, water plantain, etc.... bramble is now in flower, poppy, mallow, thistle, hop, etc.." The trees were also carefully depicted. He was preoccupied by his work on the painting, writing to his friend John Fisher, "I could think of and speak to no-one. I was like a friend of mine in the battle of Waterloo—he said he dared not turn his head to the right or left—but always kept it straight forward—thinking of himself alone." The village of Higham, shown in the distance, is not actually visible from the lane; Constable's son Charles Golding Constable stated after his father's death that the view of Higham church did not exist. The crop in the field is probably meant to be wheat, depicted at full height and as tall as the gate at the end of the lane. To the public seeing Constable's painting during his lifetime, the wheat would have been a representation of peace, fertility and wealth. Constable appears to have borrowed objects from his other paintings and drawings to include in The Cornfield; a tree in the painting bears a strong resemblance to another specimen in his Edge of a Wood (c. 1816), and the boy—with his blue neck scarf, black hat and red waistcoat—is also depicted in Constable's A Lane near Flatford (c. 1810). According to the art historian Michael Rosenthal, The Cornfield typifies Constable's picturesque phase, which culminated in 1828. After 1822 Constable's was mainly done in his London studio, which led to him being more concerned with the effect of his painting on the senses, and less about realism. The work reflected Constable's nostalgia for the rural Suffolk he recalled from his youth, considered by him to be lost. ### Engraving by Lucas Constable commissioned the engraver David Lucas to produce the plates of the painting for a book, Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery. The book was published in July 1830. After seeing prints of The Cornfield and The Lock produced by Lucas, Constable told him, "Now... is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me. I can never look at these two flattering testimonies of the result of my singularly marked life... without the most painful emotions." in 1834, when suffering from depression and seemingly jealous of the success the prints of The Lock and The Cornfield were attracting, Constable argued with Lucas, and complained his works were no longer giving him pleasure. He told his friend Leslie, "The two beautiful prints by Lucas are in the [shop] windows, but every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it... therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms?" He later apologised to Lucas. After Constable's death, James Brook Pulham, a former pupil, borrowed Lucas's prints of The Cornfield and The Lock without permission from the home of the artist. This caused considerable distress to the family. The prints became well-known during the Victorian era, being images that the public had access to, in contrast with the original oil paintings at the National Gallery. ## Exhibitions and reception On 8 April 1826, Constable wrote to his friend Fisher that The Cornfield had been sent to the Royal Academy to be exhibited. When on display at the Royal Academy that year, the painting was shown under the title Landscape: Noon. When being shown, the painting was altered by another artist, the sculptor Francis Chantry, who joked, "Why Constable, all your sheep have got the rot—give me the palette—I must cure them." Chantry tried unsuccessfully to amend the appearance of the sheep in the foreground. In September 1827, it went to the Paris Salon, where it was shown to the public from early November to the spring of 1828 under the title Paysage avec figures et animaux. It was returned to England the following September. In Paris, it failed to receive the same acclaim given to his previous works. It was praised by the critics but never managed to find a seller at any of the five exhibitions where it was shown. Constable had hoped for a sale, telling Fisher, "I do hope to sell this present picture—as it has certainly got a little more eye-salve than I usually condescend to give to them." When the work was exhibited in London at the British Institution in 1827, Constable included a quotation from a poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson: > > A fresher gale Begins to wave the woods and stir the stream, Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn. The Times described the painting as "singularly beautiful, and not inferior to some of Hobbema's most admired works". The Cornfield was shown by Constable at the Birmingham Society of Arts exhibition in 1829, and by the Worcester Institution in 1835. The English author William Thackeray, writing in 1850, described the painting as "under the influence of a late shower; the shrubs, trees and distance are saturated with it... One cannot but admire the manner in which the specific character of every object is made out: the undulations of the ripe-corn, the chequered light on the road, the freshness of the banks, the trees and their leafage, the brilliant clouds artfully contrasted against the trees, and here and there broken by azure." The miniaturist Andrew Robertson described the work as having "all the truth of conception, with les of the manner that was objected to" in works such as Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. The art historian Anthony Bailey considers the work to have "opened the gate through which a great number of people were to pass into Constable's country". ## Acquisition by the National Gallery In 1837, Constable's friend Charles Robert Leslie began working on the purchase of one of Constable's works for the nation, to be bought by a body of subscribers, The Committee of Friends and Admirers, chaired by the portraitist William Beechey. The committee had initially considered purchasing Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, but this work was rejected after it was thought to be "too boldly executed". The Cornfield was valued at 300 guineas, . The funds were raised, and the National Gallery accepted the painting in December 1837. The Cornfield was the first work to be sold following Constable's death in 1837, and for 10 years, until the National Gallery acquired The Valley Farm from Robert Vernon, it was the only painting by Constable in a national collection. As of February 2022, the work is not on public display in the galleries. ## See also - List of paintings by John Constable

Kid A

2000 studio album by Radiohead

Kid A is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released on 2 October 2000 by Parlophone. It was recorded with their producer, Nigel Godrich, in Paris, Copenhagen, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. After the stress of promoting Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, the songwriter, Thom Yorke, wanted to depart from rock music. Drawing influence from electronic music, ambient music, krautrock, jazz and 20th-century classical music, Radiohead used instruments such as modular synthesisers, the ondes Martenot, brass and strings. They processed guitar sounds, incorporated samples and loops, and manipulated their recordings with software. Yorke wrote impersonal and abstract lyrics, cutting up phrases and assembling them at random. In a departure from industry practice, Radiohead released no singles or music videos and conducted few interviews and photoshoots. Instead, they released short animated "blips", and became one of the first major acts to use the internet for promotion. Bootlegs of early performances were shared on filesharing services, and Kid A was leaked before release. In 2000, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos. Kid A debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the Billboard 200 in the US, where it sold more than 207,000 copies in its first week. Its new sound divided listeners, and some dismissed it as pretentious, deliberately obscure, or derivative. However, at the end of the decade, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Times ranked Kid A the greatest album of the 2000s, and in 2020 Rolling Stone ranked it number 20 on its updated list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Like OK Computer, it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. It has been certified platinum in Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the US and the UK. A second album of material from the sessions, Amnesiac, was released eight months later. Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A, Amnesiac and previously unreleased material, was released in 2021. ## Background Following the critical and commercial success of their 1997 album OK Computer, the members of Radiohead suffered burnout. The songwriter, Thom Yorke, became ill, describing himself as "a complete fucking mess ... completely unhinged". He was troubled by new acts he felt were imitating Radiohead and became hostile to the music media. He told The Observer: "I always used to use music as a way of moving on and dealing with things, and I sort of felt like that the thing that helped me deal with things had been sold to the highest bidder and I was simply doing its bidding. And I couldn't handle that." Yorke suffered from writer's block and could not finish writing songs on guitar. He became disillusioned with the "mythology" of rock music, feeling the genre had "run its course". He began to listen almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists signed to the record label Warp, such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Yorke said: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." He liked the idea of his voice being used as an instrument rather than having a leading role, and wanted to focus on sounds and textures instead of traditional songwriting. Yorke bought a house in Cornwall and spent his time walking the cliffs and drawing, restricting his musical activity to playing the grand piano he had recently bought. "Everything in Its Right Place" was the first song he wrote. He described himself as a "shit piano player", with little knowledge of electronic instruments: "I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. So everything's a novelty. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked. I had no idea what ADSR meant." The guitarist Ed O'Brien had hoped Radiohead's fourth album would comprise short, melodic guitar songs, but Yorke said: "There was no chance of the album sounding like that. I'd completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment." The bassist, Colin Greenwood, said: "We felt we had to change everything. There were other guitar bands out there trying to do similar things. We had to move on." ## Recording In the late 1990s, Radiohead began building their own studio in Oxfordshire. Yorke planned to use it as the German band Can had used their studio in Cologne, recording everything they played and then editing it. However, as the studio would not be complete until late 1999, Radiohead began work in Guillaime Tell Studios, Paris, in January 1999. Radiohead worked with the OK Computer producer Nigel Godrich and no deadline. Yorke, who had the greatest control, was still facing writer's block. His new songs were incomplete, and some consisted of little more than sounds or rhythms; few had clear verses or choruses. Yorke's lack of lyrics created problems, as these had provided points of reference and inspiration for his bandmates in the past. The group struggled with Yorke's new direction. According to Godrich, Yorke did not communicate much, and according to Yorke, Godrich "didn't understand why, if we had such a strength in one thing, we would want to do something else". The lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, feared "awful art-rock nonsense just for its own sake". His brother, Colin, did not enjoy Yorke's Warp influences, finding them "really cold". The other band members were unsure of how to contribute, and considered leaving. O'Brien said: "It's scary – everyone feels insecure. I'm a guitarist and suddenly it's like, well, there are no guitars on this track, or no drums." Radiohead experimented with electronic instruments including modular synthesisers and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument similar to a theremin, and used software such as Pro Tools and Cubase to edit and manipulate their recordings. They found it difficult to use electronic instruments collaboratively; according to Yorke, "We had to develop ways of going off into corners and build things on whatever sequencer, synthesiser or piece of machinery we would bring to the equation and then integrate that into the way we would normally work." O'Brien began using sustain units, which allow guitar notes to be sustained infinitely, combined with looping and delay effects to create synthesiser-like sounds. In March, Radiohead moved to Medley Studios in Copenhagen for two weeks, which were unproductive. The sessions produced about 50 reels of tape, each containing 15 minutes of music, with nothing finished. In April, Radiohead resumed recording in a mansion in Batsford Park, Gloucestershire. The lack of deadline and the number of incomplete ideas made it hard to focus, and the group held tense meetings. They agreed to disband if they could not agree on an album worth releasing. In July, O'Brien began keeping an online diary of Radiohead's progress. Radiohead moved to their new studio in Oxfordshire in September. In November, Radiohead held a live webcast from their studio, featuring a performance of new music and a DJ set. By 2000, six songs were complete. In January, at Godrich's suggestion, Radiohead split into two groups: one would generate a sound or sequence without acoustic instruments such as guitars or drums, and the other would develop it. Though the experiment produced no finished songs, it helped convince O'Brien of the potential of electronic instruments. On 19 April 2000, Yorke wrote on Radiohead's website that they had finished recording. Having completed over 20 songs, Radiohead considered releasing a double album, but felt the material was too dense. Instead, they saved half the songs for their next album, Amnesiac, released the following year. Yorke said Radiohead split the work into two albums because "they cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places." He observed that deciding the track list was not just a matter of choosing the best songs, as "you can put all the best songs in the world on a record and they'll ruin each other". He cited the later Beatles albums as examples of effective sequencing: "How in the hell can you have three different versions of 'Revolution' on the same record and get away with it? I thought about that sort of thing." Agreeing on the track list created arguments, and O'Brien said the band came close to breaking up: "That felt like it could go either way, it could break ... But we came in the next day and it was resolved." The album was mastered by Chris Blair in Abbey Road Studios, London. ### Tracks Radiohead worked on the first track, "Everything in Its Right Place", in a conventional band arrangement in Copenhagen and Paris, but without results. In Gloucestershire, Yorke and Godrich transferred the song to a Prophet-5 synthesiser, and Yorke's vocals were processed in Pro Tools using a scrubbing tool. O'Brien and the drummer, Philip Selway, said the track helped them accept that not every song needed every band member to play on it. O'Brien recalled: "To be genuinely sort of delighted that you'd been working for six months on this record and something great has come out of it, and you haven't contributed to it, is a really liberating feeling." Jonny Greenwood described it as a turning point for the album: "We knew it had to be the first song, and everything just followed after it." Yorke wrote an early version of "The National Anthem" when the band was still in school. In 1997, Radiohead recorded drums and bass for the song, intending to develop it as a B-side for OK Computer, but decided to keep it for their next album. For Kid A, Greenwood added ondes Martenot and sounds sampled from radio stations, and Yorke's vocals were processed with a ring modulator. In November 1999, Radiohead recorded a brass section inspired by the "organised chaos" of Town Hall Concert by the jazz musician Charles Mingus, instructing the musicians to sound like a "traffic jam". The strings on "How to Disappear Completely" were performed by the Orchestra of St John's and recorded in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church about five miles from Radiohead's Oxfordshire studio. Radiohead chose the orchestra as they had performed pieces by Penderecki and Messiaen. Jonny Greenwood, the only Radiohead member trained in music theory, composed the string arrangement by multitracking his ondes Martenot. According to Godrich, when the orchestra members saw Greenwood's score "they all just sort of burst into giggles, because they couldn't do what he'd written, because it was impossible – or impossible for them, anyway". The orchestra leader, John Lubbock, encouraged them to experiment and work with Greenwood's ideas. The concerts director, Alison Atkinson, said the session was more experimental than the orchestra's usual bookings. "Idioteque" was built from a drum machine pattern Greenwood created with a modular synthesiser. It incorporates a sample from the electronic composition "Mild und Leise" by Paul Lansky, taken from Electronic Music Winners, a 1976 album of experimental music. Greenwood gave 50 minutes of improvisation to Yorke, who took a short section of it and used it to write the song. Yorke said it was "an attempt to capture that exploding beat sound where you're at the club and the PA's so loud, you know it's doing damage". "Motion Picture Soundtrack" was written before Radiohead's debut single "Creep" (1992), and Radiohead recorded a version on piano during the OK Computer sessions. For Kid A, Yorke recorded it on a pedal organ, influenced by the songwriter Tom Waits. The band added harp samples and double bass, attempting to emulate the soundtracks of 1950s Disney films. Radiohead also worked on several songs they did not complete until the recording sessions for future albums, including "Nude", "Burn the Witch" and "True Love Waits". ## Music ### Style and influences Kid A incorporates influences from electronic artists on Warp Records such as 1990s IDM artists Autechre and Aphex Twin; 1970s Krautrock bands such as Can; the jazz of Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane and Miles Davis; and abstract hip hop from the Mo'Wax label, including Blackalicious and DJ Krush. Yorke cited Remain in Light (1980) by Talking Heads as a "massive reference point". Björk was another major influence, particularly her 1997 album Homogenic, as was the Beta Band. Radiohead attended an Underworld concert which helped renew their enthusiasm in a difficult moment. The string orchestration for "How to Disappear Completely" was influenced by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Jonny Greenwood's use of the ondes Martenot on several songs was inspired by Olivier Messiaen, who popularised the instrument and was one of Greenwood's teenage heroes. Greenwood described his interest in mixing old and new music technology, and during the recording sessions Yorke read Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, which chronicles the Beatles' recordings with George Martin during the 1960s. The band also sought to combine electronic manipulations with jam sessions in the studio, saying their model was the German band Can. Kid A has been described as a work of electronica, experimental rock, post-rock, alternative rock, post-prog, ambient, electronic rock, art rock, and art pop. Though guitar is less prominent than on previous Radiohead albums, guitars were still used on most tracks. "Treefingers", an ambient instrumental, was created by digitally processing O'Brien's guitar loops. Many of Yorke's vocals were manipulated with effects; for example, his vocals on the title track were simply spoken, then vocoded with the ondes Martenot to create the melody. ### Lyrics Yorke's lyrics on Kid A are less personal than on earlier albums, and instead incorporate abstract and surreal themes. He cut up phrases and assembled them at random, combining cliches and banal observations; for example, "Morning Bell" features repeated contrasting lines such as "Where'd you park the car?" and "Cut the kids in half". Yorke denied that he was "trying to get anything across" with the lyrics, and described them as "like shattered bits of mirror ... like pieces of something broken". Yorke cited David Byrne's approach to lyrics on Remain in Light as an influence: "When they made that record, they had no real songs, just wrote it all as they went along. Byrne turned up with pages and pages, and just picked stuff up and threw bits in all the time. And that's exactly how I approached Kid A." Radiohead used Yorke's lyrics "like pieces in a collage ... [creating] an artwork out of a lot of different little things". The lyrics are not included in the liner notes, as Radiohead felt they could not be considered independently of the music, and Yorke did not want listeners to focus on them. Yorke wrote "Everything in Its Right Place" about the depression he experienced on the OK Computer tour, feeling he could not speak. The refrain of "How to Disappear Completely" was inspired by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who advised Yorke to relieve tour stress by repeating to himself: "I'm not here, this isn't happening". The refrain of "Optimistic" ("try the best you can / the best you can is good enough") was an assurance by Yorke's partner, Rachel Owen, when Yorke was frustrated with the band's progress. The title Kid A came from a filename on one of Yorke's sequencers. Yorke said he liked its "non-meaning", saying: "If you call [an album] something specific, it drives the record in a certain way." ## Artwork The Kid A artwork and packaging was created by Yorke with Stanley Donwood, who has worked with Radiohead since their 1994 EP My Iron Lung. Donwood painted on large canvases with knives and sticks, then photographed the paintings and manipulated them with Photoshop. While working on the artwork, Yorke and Donwood became "obsessed" with the Worldwatch Institute website, which was full of "scary statistics about ice caps melting, and weather patterns changing"; this inspired them to use an image of a mountain range as the cover art. Donwood said he saw the mountains as "some sort of cataclysmic power". Donwood was inspired by a photograph taken during the Kosovo War depicting a square metre of snow full of the "detritus of war", such as military equipment and cigarette stains. He said: "I was upset by it in a way war had never upset me before. It felt like it was happening in my street." The red swimming pool on the album spine and disc was inspired by the 1988 graphic novel Brought to Light by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, in which the number of people killed by state terrorism is measured in swimming pools filled with blood. Donwood said this image "haunted" him during the recording of the album, calling it "a symbol of looming danger and shattered expectations". Yorke and Donwood cited a Paris exhibition of paintings by David Hockney as another influence. Yorke and Donwood made many versions of the album cover, with different pictures and different titles in different typefaces. Unable to pick one, they taped them to cupboards of the studio kitchen and went to bed. According to Donwood, the choice the next day "was obvious". In October 2021, Yorke and Donwood curated an exhibition of Kid A artwork at Christie's headquarters in London. ## Promotion Radiohead minimised their involvement in promotion for Kid A, conducting few interviews or photoshoots. Though "Optimistic" and promotional copies of other tracks received radio play, Radiohead released no singles from the album. Yorke said this was to avoid the stress of publicity, which he had struggled with on OK Computer, rather than for artistic reasons. Radiohead were careful to present it as a cohesive work rather than a series of separate tracks. Rather than give EMI executives their own copies, they had them listen to the album in its entirety on a bus from Hollywood to Malibu. Rob Gordon, the vice president of marketing at Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of Radiohead's label EMI, praised the album but said promoting it would be a "business challenge". No advance copies of Kid A were circulated, but it was played under controlled conditions for critics and fans. On September 5, 2000, it was played for the public for the first time at the IMAX theatre in Lincoln Square, Manhattan. Promotional copies of Kid A came with stickers prohibiting broadcast before September 19. At midnight, it was played in its entirety by the London radio station Xfm. MTV2, KROQ, and WXRK also played the album. Rather than agree to a standard magazine photoshoot for Q, Radiohead supplied digitally altered portraits, with their skin smoothed, their irises recoloured, and Yorke's drooping eyelid removed. The Q editor Andrew Harrison described the images as "aggressively weird to the point of taking the piss ... All five of Radiohead had been given the aspect of gawking aliens." Yorke said: "I'd like to see them try to put these pictures on a poster." Q projected the images onto the Houses of Parliament, placed them on posters and billboards in the London Underground and on the Old Street Roundabout, and had them printed on key rings, mugs and mouse mats, to "turn Radiohead back into a product". ### Videos Instead of releasing traditional music videos for Kid A, Radiohead commissioned dozens of 10-second videos featuring Donwood artwork they called "blips", which were aired on music channels and distributed online. Pitchfork described them as "context-free animated nightmares that radiated mystery", with "arch hints of surveillance". Five of the videos were serviced as exclusives to MTV, and "helped play into the arty mystique that endeared Radiohead to its core audience", according to Billboard. Much of the promotional material featured pointy-toothed bear characters created by Donwood. The bears originated in stories Donwood made for his young children about teddy bears who came to life and ate the "grown-ups" who had abandoned them. ### Internet Though Radiohead had experimented with internet promotion for OK Computer in 1997, by 2000 online music promotion was not widespread, with record labels still reliant on MTV and radio. Donwood wrote that EMI was not interested in the Radiohead website, and left him and the band to update it with "discursive and random content". To promote Kid A, Capitol created the "iBlip", a Java applet that could be embedded in fan sites. It allowed users to stream the album, and included artwork, photos and links to order Kid A on Amazon. It was used by more than 1000 sites, and the album was streamed more than 400,000 times. Capitol also streamed Kid A through Amazon, MTV.com and heavy.com, and ran a campaign with the peer-to-peer filesharing service Aimster, allowing users to swap iBlips and Radiohead-branded Aimster skins. Three weeks before release, Kid A was leaked online and shared on the peer-to-peer service Napster. Asked whether he believed Napster had damaged sales, Capitol president Ray Lott likened the situation to unfounded concern about home taping in the 1980s and said: "I'm trying to sell as many Radiohead albums as possible. If I worried about what Napster would do, I wouldn't sell as many albums." Yorke said Napster "encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do". ### Tour Radiohead rearranged the Kid A songs to perform them live. O'Brien said, "You couldn't do Kid A live and be true to the record. You would have to do it like an art installation ... When we played live, we put the human element back into it." Selway said they "found some new life" in the songs when they came to perform them. In mid-2000, months before Kid A was released, Radiohead toured the Mediterranean, performing Kid A and Amnesiac songs for the first time. Fans shared concert bootlegs online. Colin Greenwood said: "We played in Barcelona and the next day the entire performance was up on Napster. Three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." Later that year, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos, playing mostly new songs. The tour included a homecoming show in South Park, Oxford, with supporting performances by Humphrey Lyttelton (who performed on Amnesiac), Beck and Sigur Rós. According to the journalist Alex Ross, the show may have been the largest public gathering in Oxford history. Radiohead also performed three concerts in North American theatres, their first in nearly three years. The small venues sold out rapidly, attracting celebrities, and fans camped overnight. In October, Radiohead performed on the American TV show Saturday Night Live. The performance shocked viewers expecting rock songs, with Jonny Greenwood playing electronic instruments, the house brass band improvising over "The National Anthem", and Yorke dancing erratically to "Idioteque". Rolling Stone described the Kid A tour as "a revelation, exposing rock and roll humanity" in the songs. In November 2001, Radiohead released I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, comprising performances from the Kid A and Amnesiac tours. ## Sales Kid A reached number one on Amazon's sales chart, with more than 10,000 pre-orders. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, selling 55,000 copies in its first day – the biggest first-day sales of the year and more than every other album in the top ten combined. Kid A also debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, selling more than 207,000 copies in its first week. It was Radiohead's first US top-20 album, and the first US number one in three years for any British act. Kid A also debuted at number one in Canada, where it sold more than 44,000 copies in its first week, and in France, Ireland and New Zealand. European sales slowed on 2 October 2000, the day of release, when EMI recalled 150,000 faulty CDs. By June 2001, Kid A had sold 310,000 copies in the UK, less than a third of OK Computer sales. It is certified platinum in the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Japan and the US. ## Critical reception Kid A was widely anticipated. Spin described it as the most anticipated rock record since Nirvana's In Utero. According to Andrew Harrison, the editor of Q, journalists expected it to provide more of the "rousing, cathartic, lots-of-guitar, Saturday-night-at-Glastonbury big future rock moments" of OK Computer. Months before its release, Pat Blashill of Melody Maker wrote: "If there's one band that promises to return rock to us, it's Radiohead." After Kid A had been played for critics, many bemoaned the lack of guitar, the obscured vocals and the unconventional song structures. Some called it "a commercial suicide note". The Guardian wrote of the "muted electronic hums, pulses and tones", predicting that it would confuse listeners. In Mojo, Jim Irvin wrote that "upon first listen, Kid A is just awful ... Too often it sounds like the fragments that they began the writing process with – a loop, a riff, a mumbled line of text, have been set in concrete and had other, lesser ideas piled on top." The Guardian critic Adam Sweeting wrote that "even listeners raised on krautrock or Ornette Coleman will find Kid A a mystifying experience", and that it pandered to "the worst cliches" about Radiohead's "relentless miserabilism". Several critics found the free jazz of "The National Anthem" discordant and unpleasant. Several critics felt Kid A was pretentious or deliberately obscure. The Irish Times bemoaned the lack of conventional song structures and panned the album as "deliberately abstruse, wilfully esoteric and wantonly unfathomable ... The only thing challenging about Kid A is the very real challenge to your attention span." In the New Yorker, the novelist Nick Hornby wrote that it was "morbid proof that this sort of self-indulgence results in a weird kind of anonymity rather than something distinctive and original". The Melody Maker critic Mark Beaumont called it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory, look-ma-I-can-suck-my-own-cock whiny old rubbish ... About 60 songs were started that no one had a bloody clue how to finish." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian described it as "self-consciously awkward and bloody-minded, the noise made by a band trying so hard to make a 'difficult' album that they felt it beneath them to write any songs". Rolling Stone published a piece mocking Kid A as humourless, derivative and lacking in songs: "Because it was decided that Radiohead were Important and Significant last time around, no one can accept the album as the crackpot art project it so obviously is." Some critics felt Kid A was unoriginal. In the New York Times, Howard Hampton dismissed Radiohead as a "rock composite" and wrote that Kid A "recycles Pink Floyd's dark-side-of-the-moon solipsism to Me-Decade perfection". Beaumont said Radiohead were "simply ploughing furrows dug by DJ Shadow and Brian Eno before them". The Irish Times felt the ambient elements were inferior to Eno's 1978 album Music For Airports and its "scary" elements inferior to Scott Walker's 1995 album Tilt. Select wrote: "What do they want for sounding like the Aphex Twin circa 1993, a medal?" In a retrospective, the journalist Rob Sheffield wrote that the "mastery of Warp-style electronic effects" had appeared "clumsy and dated" at the time of Kid A's release. In an NME editorial, James Oldham wrote that the electronic influences were "mired in compromise", with Radiohead still operating as a rock band, and concluded: "Time will judge it. But right now, Kid A has the ring of a lengthy, over-analysed mistake." Rob Mitchell, the co-founder of Warp, felt Kid A represented "an honest interpretation of [Warp] influences" and was not "gratuitously" electronic. He predicted it might one day be seen in the same way as David Bowie's 1977 album Low, which alienated some Bowie fans but was later acclaimed. AllMusic gave Kid A a favourable review, but wrote that it "never is as visionary or stunning as OK Computer, nor does it really repay the intensive time it demands in order for it to sink in". The NME was also positive, but described some songs as "meandering" and "anticlimactic", and concluded: "For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called Kid A betrays a band playing one-handed just to prove they can, scared to commit itself emotionally." In Rolling Stone, David Fricke called Kid A "a work of deliberately inky, often irritating obsession ... But this is pop, a music of ornery, glistening guile and honest ache, and it will feel good under your skin once you let it get there." Spin said Kid A was "not the act of career suicide or feat of self-indulgence it will be castigated as", and predicted that fans would recognise it as Radiohead's best and "bravest" album. Billboard described it as "an ocean of unparalleled musical depth" and "the first truly groundbreaking album of the 21st century". The music critic Robert Christgau wrote that Kid A was "an imaginative, imitative variation on a pop staple: sadness made pretty". The Village Voice called it "oblique oblique oblique ... Also incredibly beautiful." Brent DiCrescenzo of Pitchfork gave Kid A a perfect score, calling it "cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike". He concluded that Radiohead "must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who". One of the first Kid A reviews posted online, DiCrescenzo's review helped popularise Pitchfork and became notorious for its "obtuse" writing. At Metacritic, which aggregates ratings from critics, Kid A has a score of 80 based on 24 reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews". It was named one of the year's best albums by publications including the Wire, Record Collector, Spin, NME and the Village Voice. At the 2001 Grammy Awards, Kid A was nominated for Album of the Year and won for Best Alternative Album. ## Legacy In the years following its release, Kid A attracted acclaim. In 2005, Pitchfork wrote that it had "challenged and confounded" Radiohead's audience, and subsequently "transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts ... Owning it became 'getting it'; getting it became 'anointing it'." In 2015, Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone likened Radiohead's change in style to Bob Dylan's controversial move to rock music, writing that critics now hesitated to say they had disliked it at the time. He described Kid A as the "defining moment in the Radiohead legend". A year later, Billboard argued that Kid A was the first album since Bowie's Low to have moved "rock and electronic music forward in such a mature fashion". In an article for Kid A's 20th anniversary, the Quietus suggested that the negative reviews had been motivated by rockism, the tendency among music critics to venerate rock music over other genres. In a 2011 Guardian article about his critical Melody Maker review, Beaumont wrote that though his opinion had not changed, "Kid A's status as a cultural cornerstone has proved me, if not wrong, then very much in the minority ... People whose opinions I trust claim it to be their favourite album ever." In 2014, Brice Ezell of PopMatters wrote that Kid A is "more fun to think and write about than it is to actually listen to" and a "far less compelling representation of the band's talents than The Bends and OK Computer". In 2016, Dorian Lysnkey wrote in The Guardian: "At times, Kid A is dull enough to make you fervently wish that they'd merged the highlights with the best bits of the similarly spotty Amnesiac ... Yorke had given up on coherent lyrics so one can only guess at what he was worrying about." Radiohead denied that they had set out to create "difficult" music. Jonny Greenwood argued that the tracks were short and melodic, and suggested that "people basically want their hands held through 12 'Mull Of Kintyre's". Yorke said they had not attempted to alienate or confound people, but that their musical interests had changed. He recalled that the band had been "white as a sheet" before early performances on the Kid A tour, thinking they had been "absolutely trashed". At the same time, the reaction motivated them: "There was a sense of a fight to convince people, which was actually really exciting." He regretted having released no singles, feeling it meant much of the early judgement of the album came from critics. Yorke said Radiohead were "incredibly vindicated and happy" after Kid A went to number one in the US: "It showed maybe it's still possible." Grantland credited Kid A for pioneering the use of internet to stream and promote music, writing: "For many music fans of a certain age and persuasion, Kid A was the first album experienced primarily via the internet – it's where you went to hear it, read the reviews, and argue about whether it was a masterpiece ... Listen early, form an opinion quickly, state it publicly, and move on to the next big record by the official release date. In that way, Kid A invented modern music culture as we know it." In his 2005 book Killing Yourself to Live, critic Chuck Klosterman interpreted Kid A as a prediction of the September 11 attacks. Speaking at Radiohead's induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2019, David Byrne of Talking Heads, one of Radiohead's formative influences, said: "What was really weird and very encouraging was that [Kid A] was popular. It was a hit! It proved to me that the artistic risk paid off and music fans sometimes are not stupid." In 2020, Billboard wrote that the success of Kid A, despite its "challenging" content, established Radiohead as "heavy hitters in the business for the long run". ### Accolades In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Kid A number 20 on its updated "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list, describing it as "a new, uniquely fearless kind of rock record for a new, increasingly fearful century ... [It] remains one of the more stunning sonic makeovers in music history." In previous versions of the list, Kid A ranked at number 67 (2012) and number 428 (2003). In 2005, Stylus and Pitchfork named Kid A the best album of the previous five years, with Pitchfork calling it "the perfect record for its time: ominous, surreal, and impossibly millennial". In 2006, Time named Kid A one of the 100 best albums, calling it "the opposite of easy listening, and the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies, but ... also a testament to just how complicated pop music can be". At the end of the decade, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and the Times ranked Kid A the greatest album of the 2000s. The Guardian ranked it second best, calling it "a jittery premonition of the troubled, disconnected, overloaded decade to come. The sound of today, in other words, a decade early." In 2021, Pitchfork readers voted Kid A the greatest album of the previous 25 years. In 2011, Rolling Stone named "Everything in Its Right Place" the 24th-best song of the 2000s, describing it as "oddness at its most hummable". "Idioteque" was named one of the best songs of the decade by Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone ranked it \#33 on its 2018 list of the "greatest songs of the century so far". (\*) designates unordered list ### Reissues Radiohead left EMI after their contract ended in 2003. After a period of being out of print on vinyl, Kid A was reissued as a double LP on 19 August 2008 as part of the "From the Capitol Vaults" series, along with other Radiohead albums. In 2007, EMI released Radiohead Box Set, a compilation of albums recorded while Radiohead were signed to EMI, including Kid A. On 25 August 2009, EMI reissued Kid A in a two-CD "Collector's Edition" and a "Special Collector's Edition" containing an additional DVD. Both versions feature live tracks, taken mostly from television performances. Radiohead had no input into the reissues and the music was not remastered. The EMI reissues were discontinued after Radiohead's back catalogue transferred to XL Recordings in 2016. In May 2016, XL reissued Kid A on vinyl, along with the rest of Radiohead's back catalogue. An early demo of "The National Anthem" was included in the special edition of the 2017 OK Computer reissue OKNOTOK 1997 2017. In February 2020, Radiohead released an extended version of "Treefingers", previously released on the soundtrack for the 2000 film Memento, to digital platforms. On November 5, 2021, Radiohead released Kid A Mnesia, an anniversary reissue compiling Kid A and Amnesiac. It includes a third album, Kid Amnesiae, comprising previously unreleased material from the sessions. Radiohead promoted the reissue with singles for the previously unreleased tracks "If You Say the Word" and "Follow Me Around". Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, an interactive experience with music and artwork from the albums, was released on November 18 for PlayStation 5, macOS and Windows. ## Track listing All songs written by Radiohead, except "Idioteque", which samples "Mild und Leise" by Paul Lansky and "Short Piece" by Arthur Kreiger. 1. "Everything in Its Right Place" – 4:11 2. "Kid A" – 4:44 3. "The National Anthem" – 5:51 4. "How to Disappear Completely" – 5:56 5. "Treefingers" – 3:42 6. "Optimistic" – 5:15 7. "In Limbo" – 3:31 8. "Idioteque" – 5:09 9. "Morning Bell" – 4:35 10. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" – 7:01 - Untitled hidden track – 0:52 Note: Track 10 ends at 3:20; includes an untitled hidden track from 4:17 until 5:09, followed by 1:51 of silence. On streaming services, the hidden track is listed as a separate track. ## Personnel Credits adapted from liner notes. Production - Nigel Godrich – production, engineering, mixing - Radiohead – production - Gerard Navarro – production assistance, additional engineering - Graeme Stewart – additional engineering - Stanley – artwork ("Landscapes, Knives and Glue") - Tchock – artwork ("Landscapes, Knives and Glue") - Chris Blair – mastering Additional musicians - Orchestra of St John's – strings - John Lubbock – conducting - Jonny Greenwood – scoring - Horns on "The National Anthem" - Andy Bush – trumpet - Steve Hamilton – alto saxophone (credited simply as "alto") - Martin Hathaway – alto saxophone (etc.) - Andy Hamilton – tenor saxophone - Mark Lockheart – tenor saxophone - Stan Harrison – baritone saxophone - Liam Kerkman – trombone - Mike Kearsey – bass trombone - Henry Binns – rhythm sampling on "The National Anthem" ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## Certifications and sales

Drakengard

Video game series

Drakengard, known in Japan as is a series of action role-playing video games created by Yoko Taro. The eponymous first game in the series was released in 2003 on the PlayStation 2, and has since been followed by a sequel, a prequel and several spin-offs. A spin-off series titled Nier, taking place in an alternative timeline set after a different ending to the first Drakengard than the one 2005's Drakengard 2 followed, was started in 2010 with the eponymous game. Yoko directed every game in both series, with the exception of Drakengard 2 in which he only had minor involvement. The stories of both Drakengard and Nier generally focus on the fortunes and personalities of a small group of protagonists either directly or indirectly connected to and affected by the events of the story. Dark or mature plot and character themes and multiple endings have become a staple of the series. The setting of the Drakengard games is a Northern Europe-like dark fantasy world where humans and creatures from myth and legends live side by side, while the Nier games are set in the distant future of a different ending to the first Drakengard from the one Drakengard 2 follows, leading to 2017's Nier: Automata taking place in a much different, post-apocalyptic science fiction setting. Both series have been largely praised for their complex characters and storylines, although the practical gameplay of the Drakengard games has been criticized. Both Drakengard and the original Nier were long considered popular in Japan, selling well and gaining a cult following, and resulting in multiple adaptations and additional media such as books (including several novelizations), manga, comics, and a stage play. They remained little-known outside of Japan until the 2017 release of Nier: Automata, which was a worldwide commercial and critical hit and led to an increase in interest from western countries, resulting in a remaster of the original Nier, subtitled Replicant ver.1.22474487139..., being released in 2021 to larger attention and substantially better sales than the original. ## Games - Drakengard, the first installment in the franchise. It released for the PlayStation 2 (PS2) in September 2003 in Japan, March and May 2004 in North America and Europe respectively. Square Enix published the title in Japan and North America, while Take-Two Interactive published it in European territories. A Europe-exclusive mobile port was released in August 2004. The mobile version was co-developed and co-published with Macrospace. - Drakengard 2, the second installment in the series and direct sequel to the first game. It released on the PS2 in June 2005 in Japan, February 2006 in North America and March of the same year in Europe and Australia. For its release in western territories, Square Enix partnered with European game developer and publisher Ubisoft. Ubisoft also handled the game's localization. - Drakengard 3, the third main installment in the series and a prequel to the first game. It released on the PS3 in December 2013 in Japan and May 2014 in North America and Europe. Like Nier, it was published in all regions by Square Enix. - Nier, a spin-off from the main series stemming from the last of Drakengards five possible endings. Nier was released on the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and Xbox 360 (as Nier Replicant in Japan for PS3 only, Nier Gestalt in Japan for Xbox 360, and Nier in North America and Europe) in April 2010 across all regions. It was published by Square Enix across all regions. An updated version titled Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... was released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows in April 2021. - Nier: Automata, a distant sequel to Nier, set in the same universe but thousands of years in the future. It was released for PlayStation 4 in February 2017, Microsoft Windows in March 2017, Xbox One in June 2018, and Nintendo Switch October 2022. - Nier Reincarnation''', a spin-off title for mobile platforms, set in the Nier universe but disconnected from the other titles as it takes place in a pocket dimension called the Cage. It was released for Android and iOS in February 2021. ## Development ### History The idea for Drakengard originated in 1999 between Takamasa Shiba and Takuya Iwasaki. The gameplay was conceived as a blend of elements from Ace Combat and Dynasty Warriors 2. The team developing the game went under the moniker "Project Dragonsphere". The game was developed by Cavia and directed by Yoko Taro, who was the main drive behind the game's dark atmosphere. It was Shiba's first project as a producer. As Yoko was told there would not be a sequel, multiple endings were created. When it was localized and released in the west, references to things such as sexual taboos were censored. In addition, the title was changed, as Drag-On Dragoon was considered wrong for a western audience. Drakengard was considered enough of a success that a sequel was commissioned. Multiple staff members returned for the creation of the second game, although Yoko was mostly tied up with other projects and was replaced as director by Akira Yasui. Yoko still had a role in development, and he and Yasui had creative clashes during development. Yasui ended up making Drakengard 2 the thematic opposite of the previous game, employing a lighter tone and broader color palette. Nier originated when Yoko and Shiba teamed up to create a third Drakengard game. As the project continued, it became more detached from the main continuity and eventually developed into an entirely new spin-off. Despite what it became, Yoko has stated that he considers Nier to be the true Drakengard 3. It was the last game developed by Cavia. After its release, Cavia closed down and was absorbed by AQ Interactive, then Yoko Taro left to pursue a wider range of projects. A stalled attempt to begin production of further games in the series at AQ Interactive was blamed by Shiba on a prevalent trend at the time for light-weight games for the general gaming community. Later, Yoko and Shiba came together again to create a proper second sequel to Drakengard, with the intention of creating a hard core RPG for the fanbase. Unlike the previous games in the series, Drakengard 3 was developed by Access Games, a developer whose noted games included Deadly Premonition, and brought in team members used to create action games. During the run-up to Drakengard 3's release, both Yoko and Shiba expressed their willingness to continue the series on the PlayStation 4 if the latest game was enough of a success. Speaking in 2014 after the game's release, Yoko stated that the series was on hold due to lack of funds. A new Nier game was revealed to be in development at Square Enix and PlatinumGames. ### Writing and character design The stories of the original game's characters were written by Yoko, Shiba and Iwasaki, while the main game script was written by Sawako Natori, who would go on to co-write the main scenarios for future Drakengard games. Yoko designed the darker elements to both contrast and actively compete with the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Yoko conceived the "insane" characters around the premise that people who killed hundreds of people in pursuit of their goals and took satisfaction from it were naturally insane. During the production of Nier, his focus changed to writing a story where everyone believed they were in the right whatever their actions. Through the series, Yoko has also been attempting to answer the question of why people are driven to kill. Although some of the dark narrative themes were kept for Drakengard 2, many of the other narrative elements were made more mainstream. `Drakengard 3 was intended to return to a dark aesthetic, but also to include moments of humor and tie in with Nier.` The character designer for the Drakengard games is Kimihiko Fujisaka. Initially a minor staff member at Cavia, the team were impressed by his skill as an amateur artist and he was recommended for the post of character designer for the game. The designs for both the characters and the world were influenced by armor and clothing of Medieval Europe. He returned in the same capacity for Drakengard 2, and later for Nier. Disliking some of his initial designs for Drakengard, he took the opportunity to remodel them more to his liking for the arcade game Lord of Vermilion. In Drakengard 3, Fujisaka designed the protagonist Zero around the dark themes of the game, although some unusual elements were nearly cut. The other female characters were inspired by Puella Magi Madoka Magica, while the male characters, considered a low priority, were designed around male archetypes and approved quickly. The character designs for Nier were handled by an artist under the moniker D.K. For Nier's international release, the protagonist was redesigned from a teenager to an adult character. This was because the publishers felt an older character would appeal more to western players. For Nier: Automata, the main character designs were handled by Akihiko Yoshida, an artist noted for his work on the Final Fantasy series. While he was initially expected to refuse, he agreed as several staff members at his company CyDesignation were fans of Nier. For his designs, Yoko requested he focus on smooth outlines and black coloring. Other characters were designed by Yuya Nagai and Toshiyuki Itahana. ### Music The first game's soundtrack was created by Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara. The two created the score using samples from well-known classical composers. The second game's soundtrack was composed by Ryoki Matsumoto and Aoi Yoshiki, who had never before been involved with video game soundtracks. The game's Japanese theme song, Hitori, was sung by Mika Nakashima. The music for Nier was composed by Keiichi Okabe, who composed the soundtrack as something different from the main series, and to directly reflect the sombre tone of the game's setting and story. Singer Emi Evans (Emiko Rebecca Evans) wrote and sung the vocal tracks, and performed many tracks in an invented language dubbed "Chaos Language". "Chaos Language" is less a language and more a writing style, as each individual song has a different language based on a real-world language. The one exception to this is "Song Of The Ancients" which is sung in a language based upon multiple different languages, instead of a single language. Okabe returned to compose the soundtrack for Drakengard 3: in an interview, he stated that, in composing the music, he tried to emulate the work of the earlier composer without imitating them. He also commented that the result was very unlike the traditional Square Enix game. The game features two theme songs: "Black Song", performed by Eir Aoi, and "This Silence is Mine", the game's theme song proper, written and sung by Chihiro Onitsuka. Okabe is again providing the music for Nier: Automata, with singer Emi Evans also returning. ## Common elements ### Setting The Drakengard games take place in a dark fantasy version of Medieval Europe called Midgard. Humans appear to be the predominant species, although races such as dragons, fairies and elves are shown to exist. The setting, mythos, and landscape borrow extensively from the lore of Northern Europe. The world is overseen by a group of unnamed gods who have yet to make a personal appearance. The gods are served by beings known as the Watchers, entities created to destroy humanity because they are considered a failure. The Watchers are kept from entering the world with the seals, which act to keep the world in balance: should the seals be destroyed, the Watchers would enter the world and destroy humanity. At the core of the seals is the Goddess of the Seal, a mortal virgin female chosen and branded with the final seal: if all the seals are destroyed, all that stands between the Watchers and the world is the death of the Goddess herself. A core element of the Drakengard universe is the ability for humans and beasts to form a Pact, a magical bond which links their souls and grants the human partner great power at the cost of some physical ability or personal trait (their voice, singing abilities, etc.). Pacts are normally entered into by beasts so they can feed off negative emotions, but sometimes they will enter a pact for other reasons. A recurring element across the series is the representation of magic using the Celestial Alphabet, with a common letter arrangement representing the human gene. The universe of the Drakengard series is split between multiple timelines. Events in those timelines are separate, but they can overlap. The core timeline is formed from Drakengard and its sequel. Drakengard 3 acts as the first game's prequel, but most of its events take place in separate timelines leading to different outcomes. In Drakengard 3, a malevolent flower uses servants called the Intoners, women gifted with the power to use magic through song, as instruments of humanity's destruction. In Drakengard, which succeeds the fifth version of Drakengard 3's events detailed in a supplementary novel, the Watchers use a group known as the Cult of Watchers to spark a religious war and destroy the seals. In Drakengard 2, the Watchers continue to use the former head of the cult to destroy the new seals, while the dragons prepare to usurp the gods and rule over the world. Nier is set in an alternative reality created by events stemming from Drakengard's fifth ending: in this reality, our modern world was decimated by a plague created by the magical beings who came through the portal, bringing humanity to the brink of extinction. Nier: Automata takes place after the fourth ending of Nier, featuring appearances and mentions of characters from both Nier and the Drakengard games. ### Gameplay The Drakengard games feature a mix of action-based hack-and-slash combat during ground-based battles and aerial combat mixed in with RPG leveling mechanics. In the original, the player guides the characters around ground-based battles to combat small groups of enemy units. In aerial combat, the player takes control of the protagonist's dragon partner. In these situations, the dragon can either lock onto a target and unleash a barrage of small fireballs, or the player can manually aim and fire large bursts of flame, which do more damage but do not home in on a target. Basic gameplay changed little for Drakengard 2, but there are some differences and additions, such as weapon types being tied to the character they are associated with, with changing them also swapping the character. The dragon gameplay remained virtually unchanged, apart from the ability, during air-ground missions, for the dragon to swoop down on a group of enemies in a special attack depicted in a short cutscene. In Nier and Drakengard 3, the player controls the main protagonist with two other characters acting as AI-controlled supports. Drakengard 3 was designed to be a faster experience than the previous games, with the protagonist being given a special hyper-mode and the ability to freely switch between weapons without pausing the action. Aerial gameplay was also changed, with the dragon now capable of ground combat. Nier, while featuring similar hack-and-slash combat, also includes other gameplay types such as a top-down view for puzzle areas, 2D style areas for buildings or similar structures. Side-quests were also added, which often involved fetch quests, fishing and farming. ### Themes and influences One of the running narrative themes for the main series is Immorality, which also became the key character theme and was expressed through their personalities and actions. The second game also focused on themes of war and death. The theme for the world of Drakengard 3, as described by composer Keiichi Okabe, is "the sense of contrast". Multiple anime series have influenced the series' characters over the years, including Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sister Princess and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The series writer, Sawako Natori, drew inspiration for her writing from shōnen manga. The original game world was designed around Celtic and Norse myths, together with Japanese-style revisionism. The team for the original game were influenced by Asian epic movies and western action-adventure films such as the 1999 remake of The Mummy and Dragonheart. While developing Nier, the team drew inspiration from the God of War series, while the narrative structure was inspired by the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror. The central theme of Nier: Automata is struggling out of a bad situation, defined by the game's staff using the Japanese word "agaku". ### Related media The games received multiple adaptations and additional story content in the form of novelizations, manga and supplementary material. The first game received two novelizations: Drag-On Dragoon: Side Story on November 28, 2003, and Drag-On Dragoon: Magnitude "Negative" on January 23, 2004. The first book was written by Emi Nagashima, writing under her pen name of Jun Eishima, and the second by Takashi Aizawa. The novelization of Drakengard 2, written again by Nagashima, was released on September 30, 2005. Nagashima wrote character stories and manga for Drakengard 3 leading up to that game's release. The manga was Drag-On Dragoon: Utahime Five, a prequel following the game's main antagonists, and Drag-On Dragoon: Shi ni Itaru Aka, which acts as a sequel, although for Branch A, as it along with Branches B, C, D, and E lead to alternative timelines. A book detailing the narrative connection between Drakengard 3 and Drakengard, titled Drag-On Dragoon 3 Story Side, which serves as the fifth branch similar to the events of B and D, narrated by Brother One, was released on 28 August 2014. Drag-On Dragoon 3 Complete Guide + Setting, a complete guide to the game with extra features explaining the game chronology and a novella set after the events of Shi ni Itaru Aka, was published by ASCII Media Works in 2014. Nier was expanded after release with a CD drama which told of events immediately after the events of Drakengard's fifth ending, and a supplementary book titled Grimoire Nier containing extra stories and concept art alongside a fifth ending for the game. Square Enix also paired up with WildStorm to create a digital comic, which detailed the backstories of the game's characters and world. The Japanese girl band Yorha performed on the Drakengard 3 soundtrack, and in 2015 performed a stage production written by Yoko Taro that is directly related to the plot of Nier: Automata. The band's fictional backstory places them as military androids similar to the playable characters in Automata. ## Reception The Drakengard series has received mixed to positive reviews over the years. So far, the original Drakengard has received the most positive response of the main series games. Drakengard 2 and Drakengard 3 have received lower scores. Each title in the series has received favorable review scores from Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu. The common point of praise for the series through most of its life has been the story. While individual aspects have come in for criticism, the dark atmospheres, unconventional characters and general scenarios have been cited as one of each game's strengths. Despite some mixed feelings from reviewers either for the story as a whole or certain aspects of it, the characters and plot of Drakengard 3 have also been praised. The major exception is Drakengard 2: the story's lighter tone and more traditional narrative were noted and sometimes criticized for being overly simplistic or too similar to other games in the genre. The Drakengard characters have remained popular in Japan, with Dengeki holding a popularity contest for those characters to celebrate the series' tenth anniversary and the announcement of Drakengard 3. Among the most popular characters were the first game's main protagonists, Caim and Angelus (the former having earned the nickname Prince (王子, ouji) among fans). The characters of Drakengard 3 have also proved to be highly popular. The gameplay has so far come in for major criticism, with the original title's aerial and ground-based gameplay being seen as repetitive and dull, although some reviewers found it entertaining. Drakengard 2 also came in for such criticism, although minor improvements were cited. In contrast, the gameplay of Drakengard 3 was generally praised or seen as an improvement upon the previous two entries, though the dragon-riding segments came in for criticisms for difficult controls. Opinions were divided on Nier's unconventional mix of gameplay styles from multiple game genres, with some praising the variety and others seeing it as poorly executed. The series as a whole has gained a cult following in Japan. Each game has sold relatively well in its home market. The original game was a commercial success, selling over 120,000 units in the first week of release and eventually selling over 240,000 copies in Japan. Drakengard 2's first-week sales were similarly impressive, selling 100,000 units. It sold over 203,000 copies by the end of 2005. Drakengard 3 sold just under 115,000 units in its first week, and over 150,000 units by May 2014. The two versions of Nier—Gestalt and Replicant—sold roughly 12,500 and 60,000 copies in their first week respectively. Replicant eventually sold over 121,000 in Japan by the end of May 2010. The series has sold over 770,000 units in Japan as of May 2014. Sales figures for western regions are unavailable. The first two games in the main series have both been included in Square Enix's Ultimate Hits series, re-releases of popular titles developed or published by them. Nier: Automata became a worldwide success, shipping over 4 million copies by June 2019, becoming the best-selling title in the franchise. As of July 2021, Automata has sold over 6 million units worldwide. Less than two months after its release, the remaster of Replicant'' had shipped over one million copies worldwide, two times the estimated sales of the original game. ## See also - List of Square Enix video game franchises

Battle of Roatán

1782 battle in the American Revolutionary War

The Battle of Roatán (sometimes spelled "Rattan") was an American War of Independence battle fought on March 16, 1782, between British and Spanish forces for control of Roatán, an island off the Caribbean coast of present-day Honduras. A Spanish expeditionary force under Matías de Gálvez, the Captain General of Spanish Guatemala, gained control of the British-held island after bombarding its main defences. The British garrison surrendered the next day. The Spanish evacuated the captured soldiers, 135 civilians and 300 slaves, and destroyed their settlement, which they claimed had been used as a base for piracy and privateering. The assault was part of a larger plan by Gálvez to eliminate British influence in Central America. Although he met with temporary successes, the British were able to maintain a colonial presence in the area. ## Background Following the entry of Spain into the American War of Independence in 1779, both Spain and Great Britain contested territories in Central America. Although most of the territory was claimed to be part of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala, the British had established logging rights on the southern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula (present-day Belize), and had established settlements on the Mosquito Coast. Guatemalan Governor Matías de Gálvez had moved quickly when the declaration of war arrived, seizing St. George's Caye, one of the principal British island settlements off the Yucatan coast. Many of the British fled that occupation to the island of Roatán, another British-controlled island about 40 miles (64 km) off the Honduran coast. British commander Edward Marcus Despard used Roatán as a base for guerilla-style operations to extend and maintain British influence on the Mosquito Coast, and for privateering operations against Spanish shipping. (Sources do not indicate whether Despard was present on Roatán at the time of the Spanish attack; if he was, he was probably not captured, since he continued to be active in the area. Stephens suggests that he was on Jamaica at the time.) Gálvez, who had been ordered by King Charles to "dislocate the English from their hidden settlements on the Gulf of Honduras," began planning offensive operations against the British mainland settlements as early as 1780, after the British abandoned their failed expedition into Nicaragua. He raised as many as 15,000 militia, and received financial and logistical support from many parts of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas. For logistical and diplomatic reasons, no operations were launched until after the American victory at Yorktown in October 1781. The British loss opened the possibility that the British would be able to deploy troops to Central America to better defend the area. Gálvez's plans called for assaults on the British presence in the Bay Islands (principally Roatán), followed by a sweep along the coast to eliminate the British from the mainland. Troops from central Guatemala were staged in early 1782 at Trujillo for the assault on Roatán, while additional forces moved overland from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Salvador toward the principal British settlement of Black River. Gálvez arrived at Trujillo on March 8 to organise the assault on Roatán. Leaving a force of 600 at Trujillo to further harass the British and their partisan allies, he embarked another 600 troops onto transports, and sailed for Roatán on March 12, escorted by three frigates (the Santa Matilde, Santa Cecilia, and Antiope) and a number of smaller armed naval vessels, under the command of Commodore Enrique MacDonell. The British residents of Roatán were aware of the ongoing Spanish military activities. The main settlement, New Port Royal, was defended by Forts Dalling and Despard, which mounted 20 guns. The island's white non-slave population was, however, quite small. In 1781 they appealed to the British commander at Bluefields for support, but he was only able to send additional weapons, which did not add significantly to the island's defenses. ## Battle The Spanish fleet arrived off Roatán at 6:00 am on March 13, and after its defenders fired several ineffectual cannon shots, the Santa Matilde and the other ships anchored out of range. At 8 am Gálvez sent in his English-speaking second-in-command on the Santa Matilde, Enrique MacDonell, to request the surrender of the island's defenders. The defenders asked for six hours to consider their options, which Gálvez granted. After that time had elapsed, MacDonell came back with word that the defenders refused to surrender and were prepared to stand their ground "to the death." The Spanish were not surprised, as their sailors had noticed the English appeared to be preparing defenses during grace period. An immediate attack was not possible due to high winds and rough seas, so Gálvez then held council of his 11 officers, and a plan of attack was formulated. At about 10:15 am on March 16, Spanish guns opened up against Forts Dalling and Despard, which guarded the mouth of New Port Royal's harbour. By 1:00 pm the British guns there had been silenced, and Major General Gabriel Herbias began landing troops. After the two forts were secured, the Spanish warships entered the harbour and began raking the town with cannon fire, while British artillery fired back from positions in the hills above the town. This exchange continued until sunset, at which time the British defenders capitulated. The Spanish had two killed and four wounded in the battle, while only two slaves were wounded on the other side. ## Aftermath Terms of surrender were agreed the next day. Gálvez and his men remained on the island for several days collecting weapons, rounding up slaves that had run away, destroying all the buildings and agriculture on the island, and burning many of the ships in the harbour, which they assumed to be used in smuggling and other illicit trade. The Spanish left the island on March 23, carrying as prisoners of war 81 British soldiers, 300 slaves, and 135 British civilians. The prisoners were sent to Havana, where the slaves were auctioned off and the others held until they could be exchanged. Gálvez was able to only temporarily partially eliminate British influences in the area. He followed up his success at Roatán with the capture of Black River in early April, but any attempt to advance further lost momentum. James Lawrie, the commander at Black River, and Edward Marcus Despard successfully recaptured Black River, and were able to hold it until the end of the war. ## See also

Dream Logic

"Dream Logic" is the fifth episode of the second season of the American science fiction drama television series Fringe, and the 25th episode overall. It was written by Josh Singer and directed by Paul A. Edwards. The episode follows several people seemingly dreaming while still awake, leading the Fringe team to investigate the dangerous side effects of a sleep study. On its initial American broadcast on October 15, 2009 on the Fox network, "Dream Logic" was watched by an estimated 5.78 million viewers. It received mixed reviews, with multiple critics noting it was considerably worse in quality than the previous week's episode while at the same time praising the case's ties to Peter's past as well as the return of Sam Weiss. ## Plot In Seattle a man named Greg Leiter (Jim Thorburn) hallucinates that his boss and coworkers are demons, leading Greg to attack and murder the boss. Greg is hospitalized and falls asleep for sixteen hours; when Olivia (Anna Torv) and Peter (Joshua Jackson) interview him in the hospital, he tells them his boss was a demon out of a bad dream before suffering a seizure and having his hair turn white. Walter (John Noble) posits that Greg died from "acute exhaustion". However, believing Seattle to be like the mental institution, Walter desires to go home to Boston and run tests on the corpse from there. Olivia and Peter learn Greg was being treated for a sleep disorder, and that his dreams had involved demons until they stopped several months ago. Another hallucinating victim turns up in Seattle and dies. The Fringe team discover that both victims had a brain–computer interface chip attached to their thalamus, the part of the brain controlling dreams. Broyles (Lance Reddick) and Nina (Blair Brown) reveal new information leading to the sleep researcher Dr. Nayak (Ravi Kapoor) who implanted the chips. Another victim named Diana (Jovanna Huguet) hallucinates at a restaurant and kills a coworker before similarly dying of exhaustion. Olivia and Peter first suspect Dr. Nayak's research assistant Zach (Jarrett Knowles) but find him dead. Back in Boston Walter believes the chips lead to mind control and tests this on the FBI agent assigned to him while Peter and Olivia are away. However, during these tests Walter soon changes his theory; the dreams are being stolen from their hosts to cause a "high" in Dr. Nayak, who is receiving them and has two personalities. Peter and Olivia shut down the dream equipment before Nayak kills another victim, but the doctor dies in the process. The final scene shows Peter dreaming about his childhood when Walter kidnaps him, an event Peter normally has no memory of; Peter wakes up confused but still unaware of what his father did. In a sideplot, Olivia is grieving for her partner Charlie, whom she discovered in previous episode was murdered by a shapeshifter. Sam Weiss (Kevin Corrigan) helps her work through it by giving her a "project" that requires her to collect business cards from people wearing the color red. She is told to grab random letters from the names, that once unscrambled read "you're gonna be fine". There is also mention in Season 2 Episode 5 when Olivia tells Peter how Charlie helped her when she was a rookie to regain her confidence with handling her gun. Charlie told her, "you're gonna be fine". ## Production "Dream Logic" was written by co-executive producer Josh Singer and was directed by cinematographer Paul A. Edwards. It was filmed in August 2009. Shooting partly took place in the basement of a semi-functioning mental hospital in Vancouver, leading actress Anna Torv to remark during filming, "I heard this is where they kept dead bodies. Bad vibes in this place." Actor Joshua Jackson noted that the hospital's "patients are known to wander through a shot. This has the potential for being a very interesting day." "Dream Logic" featured a guest appearance by recurring guest star Kevin Corrigan, as well as one time guest actors Ravi Kapoor, Jim Thorburn, Travis Schuldt, Drew Nelson, and Alex Zahara. ## Music and cultural references "Dream Logic" featured the song "From the Beginning" by the progressive rock trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Dr. Nayak's lab assistant is named Zack Miller, which was perceived by some media outlets to be a reference to frequent Fringe writing partners Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller. In the final scene set in the young Peter's bedroom in the parallel universe, a poster depicts the Space Shuttle Challenger in its 11th mission (1984). However, in the prime universe the Challenger exploded in its 10th mission two years later. One viewer noted this as yet another sign that the parallel universe is more technologically advanced than ours, as they began their space program earlier than ours. ## Reception ### Ratings On its initial American broadcast on October 15, 2009, an estimated 5.78 million viewers watched "Dream Logic", helping it earn a 3.5/6 ratings share among all households and a 2.2/6 ratings share in the important 18–49 demographic. ### Reviews AOL TV writer Jane Boursaw wrote, "The whole storyline with the creepy dual-personality doc and the mind-control-dreams was good, though I sort of knew the doc must be involved from the beginning. I also wonder how it fits in with the alternate universe." The A.V. Club's Zack Handlen graded the episode with a B−. Ken Tucker from Entertainment Weekly believed that "in some ways, this was one of the less-distinctive, more X-Files-ish episodes of Fringe on Thursday night... But as usual, there was another narrative layer at work here" involving a grieving Olivia. IGN's Ramsey Isler rated the episode 7.4/10, explaining the case-of-the-week failed to have "excitement, surprise, and suspense" and lacked "what makes a typical Fringe episode unique and intriguing". While calling certain parts "kind of boring", Isler did however praise the episode's directing, acting, sets, and other technical aspects. He concluded his review by noting the best part of "Dream Logic" was the ending depicting a young Peter, "It's a haunting scene, and it adds yet another stone in this long pathway to revelation that the Fringe team is building up to... But besides that great little scene at the end, I thought this was an average episode. Granted, Fringe's 'average' episodes are still better than a lot of the other stuff on TV." MTV writer Josh Wigler thought the episode "nearly put [him] to sleep," as it was "bland" and "a bit of a dud". The episode however did lead Wigler to "start dig[ging]" Sam Weiss, and also to enjoying Olivia's subplot, but believed the episode's monster-of-the-week could have been used to actually parallel her trauma; Wigler appreciated how the Fringe case tied into Walter and Peter's backstories. He concluded, "It wasn't bad enough to make me concerned for the future of Fringe or anything, but it certainly didn't keep me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next crazy twist like last week. I'm still loving this season, but tonight's episode was one of the weaker outings." Newsarama's Chanel Reeder stated "Dream Logic" "certainly put the brakes on the speed that Fringe had gained in the previous" episode, but praised the connection with Peter's past as "one of the most interesting underlying parts". Reeder's favorite part was Sam Weiss, calling him "a fantastic dimension to the show". Josie Kafka of Open Salon was more positive than other reviewers, and in particular highlighted the episode's humor, "Almost all of the Cambridge scenes were funny: Astrid and Walter have a great rapport, especially when there's a rube in the room for them to play with." She concluded "I liked this one, more for the great Peter/Olivia and Walter/Astrid stuff than the plot of the week," and gave the episode "Three out of four anagrams". After the episode's broadcast, Popular Mechanics published an article analyzing the science depicted. They concluded that the Brain–computer interface (BCI) chips, like the ones used in the episode to tie the victims' brains to the computer used by Dr. Laxmeesh Nayak, have also been used on real-life human subjects, though not in relation to controlling sleep cycles. However, the article continued that it is "not currently possible" for BCI chips to "facilitate direct transfer of understandable information from one person's brain to another", nor is it possible for the chips to "directly read another person's thoughts or dreams" and steal them. In addition, Popular Mechanics noted that Walter's theory of the victims' deaths being caused by exhaustion is "pure bunk", as there are many long-term experiments that have safely tested humans' deprivation of REM sleep. According to one scientist interviewed, though chips shown in "Dream Logic" cause hallucinations, paranoid thoughts, and a disconnect from reality, these traits are "not even remotely possible" outside of fiction. ### Awards and nominations Director Paul A. Edwards submitted "Dream Logic" for consideration in the Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series category at the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards. He did not receive a nomination.

Errantry

Poem by J.R.R Tolkien

"Errantry" is a three-page poem by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in The Oxford Magazine in 1933. It was included in revised and extended form in Tolkien's 1962 collection of short poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Donald Swann set the poem to music in his 1967 song cycle, The Road Goes Ever On. The poem has a complex metre, invented by Tolkien. It fits the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's patter song, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General". It shares metre and rhyming patterns with the "Song of Eärendil", a poem entirely different in tone. The scholar Paul H. Kocher calls the pair "obviously designed for contrast". The Tolkien scholar Randel Helms calls it "a stunningly skillful piece of versification ... with smooth and lovely rhythms". Tolkien described it as "the most attractive" of his poems. ## Poem ### Subject The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia describes "Errantry" as "the nonsensical adventures of a tiny messenger knight who falls in love with a butterfly and battles various insects." It adds that it is then linked to the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins's "serious account of Eärendil's quest" as described in Tolkien's 1954–55 novel The Lord of the Rings. The poem mentions creatures called Dumbledors and Hummerhorns. "Dumbledor" is an English dialect word for bumblebee, while according to the Tolkien scholars Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, "Hummerhorn" is apparently a name invented by Tolkien for a large wasp or hornet. ### Metre Tolkien invented the metre, which consists of trisyllabic assonances, three in each set of four lines. The second and fourth line in every quatrain rhyme, as do the end of the first line and beginning of the second line in every pair. He found this so difficult that he never wrote another poem in this style, though he did later develop another style from this, and the result, through long evolution from Errantry, was Eärendil the Mariner, published in The Fellowship of the Ring. Joe R. Christopher, in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, writes that the poem could be seen conventionally as quatrains of iambic tetrameters with ABCB rhyme, but that the recording of Tolkien reading the poem shows the metre to be his own invention. In Christopher's analysis, each line is composed of "two second-class paeons", each consisting of an iamb and a pyrrhus: ̆ − ̆ ̆. There is an additional rhyme or half-rhyme of the ends of the A or C lines with the first paeon of the B lines. Catherine McIlwaine, director of an exhibition of Tolkien's works, called the poem "a new metrical experiment", noting that Tolkien read it to The Inklings, C. S. Lewis's literary group at Oxford. ## Middle-earth framework For The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Tolkien needed to find a way to incorporate the poem into the framework of The Lord of the Rings. The scholar Tom Shippey states that he achieved this "with great finesse" with the explanation that "Errantry" was an early work by the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, composed soon after his return from the journey described in The Hobbit, so that he knew a little about Elves, but before he had moved to Rivendell where he actually studied Elvish languages properly. Accordingly, the work is sometimes classed as a Hobbit poem. ## Setting The composer and entertainer Donald Swann set the poem to music. The sheet music and an audio recording are part of his 1967 song cycle, The Road Goes Ever On. The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia states that the poem was "evidently" inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan's patter song "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General", whose tune it fits, and further that Swann's musical setting is an obvious pastiche of Sullivan's style. ## Analysis The scholar of English Randel Helms described "Errantry" as "a stunningly skillful piece of versification ... with smooth and lovely rhythms". The Scottish poet Alan Bold, who, Melanie Rawls notes, disliked almost all of Tolkien's verse, dismissed Helm's praise, writing that the poem "certainly displays all the sentimental silliness of the early Tolkien with its relentlessly contrived internal rhyming". Shippey comments that the subject matter of tiny fairies was exactly what, later in his career, Tolkien came to abhor, emphasising instead the energy and strength of Elves and Dwarves. He suggests that Tolkien may have been especially proud of the poem's complex metre, and so chose to rework and extend the poem for the 1962 book. Tolkien indeed called it "the most attractive" of his poems in a 1952 letter to his publisher, Rayner Unwin, adding that > it is in a metre I invented (depending on trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances, which is so difficult that except in this one example I have never been able to use it again – it just blew out in a single impulse). Paul H. Kocher writes that "Errantry" and the "Song of Eärendil" are "obviously designed for contrast", as if Tolkien had set himself the challenge of using the same theme of endless wandering, the same metrical forms and the same rhyming schemes, it would be possible to create both a tragedy and an "airy jest": "Looking at the passages picturing the armour of the two heroes we can see both the similarity in structure and the polarity in tone".

Ambrose Channel pilot cable

Electromagnetic navigational aid

The Ambrose Channel pilot cable, also called the Ambrose Channel leader cable, was a cable laid in Ambrose Channel at the entrance to the Port of New York and New Jersey that provided an audio tone for guiding ships in and out of port at times of low visibility. The cable was laid during 1919 and 1920; it had been removed from the channel and replaced by wireless technology by the end of the 1920s. ## Background Ambrose Channel is the only shipping channel into and out of the Port of New York and New Jersey, an important commercial port. Delays posed a major problem for shipping en route to New York City, and bad weather could close the channel for days. Ships were forced to wait at the harbor's entrance for conditions to clear. These delays cost shipping companies substantial amounts of money, with each ship costing between \$500 and \$4000 per hour it was stopped (roughly \$5,700 to \$46,000 in 2013 dollars). ## Description and operation The Ambrose leader cable was an armored cable with a single internal conductor (see picture) that acted like a long radio antenna laid on the channel floor. It originated at Fort Lafayette (near the present day Verrazano-Narrows Bridge), then extended 16 miles down the Ambrose Channel to the vicinity of Lightship Ambrose offshore. It was powered by a generator at Fort Lafayette that produced 500 Hz (cycles per second) current at 400 volts, resulting in an alternating electromagnetic field along the length of the cable that could be detected to approximately a thousand yards away. The current was mechanically keyed to send the word "NAVY" in Morse Code. A ship received by a pair of induction coils hung on opposite sides of the ship, and fed through an amplifier into a headset (see diagram, below). By switching between coils, the relative strength of the signal on each side could be compared. The ship maintained a course parallel to the cable by maneuvering to keep the signal strength constant. ## Research and development The pilot cable required a series of prior discoveries and inventions. In 1882, A. R. Sennett patented the use of a submerged electrical cable to communicate with a ship at a fixed location. Around the same time Charles Stevenson patented a means of navigating ships over an electrically charge cable using a galvanometer. The method became practical when Earl Hanson adapted early vacuum tube circuits to amplify the signal. Robert H. Marriott was a radio pioneer employed by the Navy in Puget Sound, where he conducted early experiments with underwater pilot cables. His results were sufficiently promising that he recommended further development to Commander Stanford C. Hooper. In October, 1919 Commander Hooper instructed A. Crossley, an expert radio aid, to develop and test the concept on a larger scale at the New London Naval Base. Crossley installed a longer version of the cable that Marriott had designed. He used a wooden-hulled launch for the first round of tests before moving to a steel-hulled submarine for later tests. Both types of vessel picked up the signal and followed the underwater test cable without problem. ## Installation and testing Following the successful tests at New London, the Navy proceeded to large scale testing in Ambrose Channel late in 1919. The minelayer Ord laid a pilot cable composed of 2,000 feet of leaded and armored cable, 2,000 feet of leaded cable, and 83,000 feet of standard rubber-insulated cable. The USS O'Brien was fitted with receiving equipment and attempted to follow the cable out of the channel. Unfortunately, it was unable to detect a signal past the 1,000 foot mark, where a break in the cable had prevented the signal from continuing. The break in the cable was repaired, but over the course of the winter of 1919–1920, crews found that the cable had broken in a total of fifty-two different places due to the strain placed on it while it was being laid. The damage was irreparable. Going back to the drawing board, engineers tested 150-foot segments of three different types of cable and used the results to design a new full-size pilot cable. The Navy ordered 87,000 feet of cable from the Simplex Wire and Cable Company in Boston. Once complete, the cable was loaded onto the USS Pequot in the Boston Navy Yard. The ship arrived in New York on July 31, 1920. Ambrose Channel was already crossed by three telegraph cables, owned by Western Union, the Army, and the police, all of which had to be raised to the surface so the pilot cable could be laid underneath them. The installation of the cable was completed on August 6, 1920, and by August 28, electrical tests showed that both the sending and receiving circuits were functioning properly. The Navy tested the cable using the seagoing tug USS Algorma. It then invited "representatives of various radio companies, shipping interests, pilots' associations, governmental bureaus, naval attaches, and others" for a public demonstration on board the destroyer USS Semmes from October 6 through October 9. The ship's windows were covered with canvas and the captains took turns navigating using only the audio cues from the cable. The cable was well received. Even before the New London tests, the Washington Post called it "the greatest development in marine travel since the invention of the steam turbine" and the Los Angeles Times declared the technology to be "one of the greatest peacetime gifts that science has devised." Once operational, the latter newspaper called it "the greatest safeguard devised for shipping in modern history". According to a 1921 trade magazine, leader cables had five functions: "to enable a ship to make a good landfall in thick weather, to lead a ship up the harbor, to lead a ship from open water through a restricted channel to open water on the far side, to give warning of outlying dangers, and to assist a vessel to keep a straight course from port to port and thus save fuel." In 1922, the publication Radio World stated that the cable's first two years of operation had been successful. Also in 1922, Radio Broadcast boasted about the money saved by the cable as well as the ease of using it. The cable itself was paid for using public funds, but it was the responsibility of ship owners to outfit their vessels with receiving equipment. Installation of the cable cost roughly \$50,000 and the listening apparatus installed on each ship using the channel cost \$1,200, compared with hourly costs of delays that ranged from \$500 to \$4,000. Radio Broadcast expressed the belief that navigation cables would become common for both ships and aircraft: "...there is a future for the audio cable... Its fullest usefulness at American ports and elsewhere waits, however, on that large appreciation of radio devices for sea as well as air navigation which pilots, both on the sea and in the air, expect, but do not as yet demand." ## Obsolescence and legacy Despite the media hype, it appears that the Ambrose Channel pilot cable never met with large scale commercial success. Initially, some contemporaries of the cable proposed that it be extended several miles past the Ambrose light. Such plans never came to fruition, as advances in technology rendered the pilot cable obsolete. By 1929 the Baltimore Sun reported ships navigating the Channel blindly without making any reference to the cable. In that year, Marriott publicly complained that navigation cables still had unrealized potential for guiding ships. Leader cable systems appear to have been made obsolete by the refinement of radio direction finding and the placement of radio beacons (low-power radio transmitters) at strategic locations. Those beacons are analogous to lighthouses, but can be "seen" in all weather, and are used for navigation in the same way as regular lighthouses. The first successful application of these radio beacons as "radio fog signals" were three stations installed near New York in 1921. In 1924, there were eleven stations in operation in the United States and nearly three hundred ships suitably equipped. By 1930, an article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts declared that "wireless aids and echo sounding have superseded [the leader cable]". Today, more modern navigation tools such as radar, GPS, and lighted buoys help ships navigate Ambrose Channel. Earl Hanson, one of the key players in designing the Ambrose Channel cable, writing for Popular Mechanics, viewed it as a step toward applying radio cable technology in vast swaths of everyday life, including guiding aircraft and navigating and powering automobiles. The Ambrose Channel cable was removed from the channel and used in testing an early system of autolanding. The cable found no more success in that role than it did in guiding ships. The Blind Landing Experimental Unit later tried a similar system briefly before also abandoning it in favor of wireless.

Agar.io

2015 multiplayer video game

Agar.io is a massively multiplayer online action game created by Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares. Players control one or more circular cells in a map representing a Petri dish. The goal is to gain as much mass as possible by eating agar and cells smaller than the player's cell while avoiding larger ones which can eat the player's cells. Each player starts with one cell, but players can split a cell into two once it reaches a sufficient mass, allowing them to control multiple cells. The name comes from the substance agar, used to culture bacteria. The game was released to positive critical reception; critics particularly praised its simplicity, competition, and mechanics, while criticism targeted its repetitive gameplay. Largely due to word of mouth on social networks, it was a quick success, becoming one of the most popular browser and mobile games in its first year. The mobile version of Agar.io for iOS was released on 8 July 2015 and Android on 7 July 2015 by Miniclip. Agar.io has inspired similar web games called ".io games", including games with a similar objective but different characters, and games that incorporate elements of other genres like shooter games. ## Gameplay The objective of Agar.io is to grow a cell on a Petri dish by swallowing both randomly generated pellets, known as "agar", which slightly increases a cell's mass, and smaller cells, without being swallowed by even larger cells. The browser version currently holds five game modes: FFA (Free-For-All), Battle Royale, Teams, Experimental, and Party. The mobile version of the game includes Classic (like FFA), Rush Mode, and Battle Royale. The goal of the game is to obtain the largest cell; players must restart from a small cell when all their cells are eaten by larger players or fountain viruses. Players can change their cell's appearance with predefined words, phrases, symbols, or skins. The more mass a cell has, the more slowly it will move. Cells will gradually lose a small amount of mass over time. Viruses are green, spiky circles that split cells that consume them into many smaller cells, rendering them vulnerable and attractive targets to other players. Players can hide under viruses if their cell is small enough and their name short enough. Viruses are normally randomly generated, but players can also cause viruses to split in two by "feeding" them mass—typically in the direction of another nearby cell which the player wants to consume. Players can split their cell into two, and one of the two evenly divided cells (if the mass of the original cell is odd, one cell will be slightly bigger than the other) will be shot in the direction of the cursor when the space bar was pressed. This can be used as a ranged attack to shoot a cell in order to swallow other smaller cells or to escape an attack and move quickly around the map. Split cells merge back into one cell if a bigger cell of the same player consumes it. Aside from feeding viruses, players can release a small fraction of their mass to feed other cells, an action commonly recognized as an intention to team with another player. ## History ### Development Agar.io was created by nineteen-year-old Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares, written in JavaScript and C++. Valadares shared an IP address to the game for playtesting on the 4chan video game board /v/ and game development forums, before releasing it on the domain agar.io on 28 April 2015. It is named after agar, a substance used to grow cell cultures. Valadares continued to experiment with adding new featuresexperimental mode was created specifically for this purpose. He thought about adding more complex biological features like photosynthesis and mitochondria, but ultimately decided to strip the game down to its current simple mechanics. In-game advertisements covered server costs. ### Popularity Valadares never marketed Agar.io outside of his single post on 4chan, where he received feedback and users formed "cartels" to get on the in-game leaderboard. Its initial success is instead attributed to its popularity among online content creators such as YouTubers and Twitch streamers. Only a week later, the YouTube channel Vinesauce uploaded a gameplay video of Agar.io. On 30 May, PewDiePie, a YouTuber who then had over 42 million subscribers, uploaded the first of nine Agar.io videos and called it his "new favourite game". However, he stated in the video that his fans had been requesting an Agar.io video for a long period of timeit had already become popular via word-of-mouth across social media. Dedicated Agar.io YouTubers saw their subscriber counts quickly rise. Commentators also suggested Agar.io's accessibility as a free browser game, as well as the addictiveness of its simple and intuitive mechanics, as reasons for its unexpected success. In March 2016, Agar.io videos reached two billion views on YouTube. Digital Trends said in 2021 that Agar.io still maintained an active core fanbase. ### Mobile game After meeting with him in Lisbon, mobile game publisher Miniclip began working with Valadares at the end of April 2015. They were attracted by Agar.io's wide appeal; the game already had five million daily players and Miniclip executive producer James Carson that their staff were all playing it within a week. Miniclip released mobile ports of Agar.io on the App Store and Google Play on July 8. It became the number one app on the App Store in the United States, United Kingdom and 32 other countries. ## Reception Agar.io was praised for the addictive nature of its simple gameplay and graphics. PC Gamer included it on its list of the best browser games. Engadget described the game as "a good abstraction of the fierce survival-of-the-fittest competition that you sometimes see on the microscopic level." TouchArcade praised its simplicity, strategic element, and "personality". It was chosen by SFGATE as App of the Week in August 2015. Criticism was mainly targeted towards its repetitiveness and the controls of the mobile version. Tom Christiansen of Gamezebo was mixed on the game, saying that there was "nothing to hold my attention" and that it was "highly repetitive, overall". Pocket Gamer, reviewing the mobile version, described its controls as "floaty". Game journalists also noticed that the ability to choose usernames and skins enabled players to declare their support for geopolitical causes and figures in-game. Some even formed alliances with players supporting the same causes. Others adopted internet memes and online platforms as their skins, as well as offensive usernames. One reviewer jokingly recounted: "I've ... seen the Earth be swallowed by Pubes, Steam absorb EA, and France split in two and flee from Mars before being eaten by Your Mom's Ass (which was, quite frankly, enormous)." In the weeks leading up to the June 2015 Turkish general election, Kotaku noticed that players using names related to Turkish politics were prevalent and often cooperated against other political parties. An article in the journal Games and Culture argued that the feature was the main reason for Agar.io's success. It noted that Agar.io provided a platform for competing ideologies in a "survival of the fittest" simulation when they would instead be shut down on social media. In an effort to make the game more commercial, Miniclip improved moderation and removed the Swastika and ISIS skins, a move which was described as furthering the game from its original 4chan audienceValadares himself had refused to remove the Nazi skin on Reddit. Because it was frequently propagated through social media and broadcast on Twitch and YouTube, Agar.io was a quick success. The agar.io website (for the browser version) was ranked by Alexa as one of the 1,000 most visited websites and the mobile versions were downloaded more than ten million times during their first week, and 113 million times as of December 2016. During 2015, Agar.io was Google's most searched video game. It was Google's second-most searched game in the United States in 2016. A 2015 press release by Miniclip stated that Agar.io was listed as the fifth top game on YouTube's list of top games. ## Similar '.io' games Inspired by Agar.io's success, Steven Howse released the snake-themed Slither.io in March 2016. The game soon reached the top 10 most downloaded apps on iOS and Android, buoyed by the similar word-of-mouth and attention from YouTubers that had propelled Agar.io. By June, Slither.io had hit over sixty million daily players. It eclipsed Agar.io's popularity, pushing it to second place to become the most Googled game of 2016. The rapid rise of Agar.io and Slither.io led to the beginning of a new genre of browser games, dubbed ".io games" for the domain name they use. Characterized by simple graphics and gameplay in a free-for-all multiplayer arena, .io games received around 192 million visits in 2017. Many .io shooters launched after Slither.ioValadares released Diep.io in July 2016. Miniclip also began developing new .io games. ## In popular culture - In the fourth season of the television series House of Cards, the character Frank Underwood is briefly shown playing Agar.io. Underwood compares its objective of eating smaller cells to get bigger to a presidential campaign.

Smith of Wootton Major

1967 novella by J. R. R. Tolkien

Smith of Wootton Major, first published in 1967, is a novella by J. R. R. Tolkien. It tells the tale of a Great Cake, baked for the once in twenty-four year Feast of Good Children. The Master Cook, Nokes, hides some trinkets in the cake for the children to find; one is a star he found in an old spice box. A boy, Smith, swallows the star. On his tenth birthday the star appears on his forehead, and he starts to roam the Land of Faery. After twenty-four years the Feast comes around again, and Smith surrenders the star to Alf, the new Master Cook. Alf bakes the star into a new Great Cake for another child to find. Scholars have differed on whether the story is an allegory or is, less tightly, capable of various allegorical interpretations; and if so, on what those interpretations might be. Suggestions have included autobiographical allusions such as to Tolkien's profession of philology, and religious interpretations such as that Alf is a figure of Christ. The American scholar Verlyn Flieger sees it instead as a story of Faërie in its own right. ## Background J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe. Smith of Wootton Major began as an attempt to explain the meaning of Faery by means of a story about a cook and his cake, and Tolkien originally thought to call it The Great Cake. It was intended to be part of a preface by Tolkien to George MacDonald's fairy story The Golden Key. ## Plot summary The village of Wootton Major was well known around the countryside for its annual festivals, which were particularly famous for their culinary delights. The biggest festival of all was the Feast of Good Children. This festival was celebrated only once every twenty-four years: twenty-four children of the village were invited to a party, and the highlight of the party was the Great Cake, a career milestone by which Master Cooks were judged. In the year the story begins, the Master Cook was Nokes, who had landed the position more or less by default; he delegated much of the creative work to his apprentice Alf. Nokes crowned his Great Cake with a little doll jokingly representing the Queen of Faery. Various trinkets were hidden in the cake for the children to find; one of these was a star the Cook discovered in the old spice box. The star was not found at the Feast, but was swallowed by a blacksmith's son. The boy did not feel its magical properties at once, but on the morning of his tenth birthday the star fixed itself on his forehead, and became his passport to Faery. The boy grew up to be a blacksmith like his father, but in his free time he roamed the Land of Faery. The star on his forehead protected him from many of the dangers threatening mortals in that land, and the Folk of Faery called him "Starbrow". The book describes his many travels in Faery, until at last he meets the true Queen of Faery. The identity of the King is also revealed. The time came for another Feast of Good Children. Smith had possessed his gift for most of his life, and the time had come to pass it on to some other child. So he regretfully surrendered the star to Alf, and with it his adventures into Faery. Alf, who had become Master Cook long before, baked it into the festive cake once again for another child to find. After the feast, Alf retired and left the village; and Smith returned to his forge to teach his craft to his now-grown son. ## Publication history The story was first published in the United Kingdom as a stand-alone book by George Allen & Unwin on 9 November 1967, with 11 black and white illustrations and a coloured jacket illustration by Pauline Baynes. Tolkien had asked Baynes to limit her palette to black and white, as she had done for Farmer Giles of Ham; he was pleased with the result. Smith of Wootton Major was first published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin the same year. It was reprinted in 1969 by Ballantine together with Farmer Giles of Ham. The 2005 edition, edited by Verlyn Flieger, includes a previously unpublished essay by Tolkien, explaining the background and just why the elf-king spent so long in Wootton Major. It also explains how the story grew from this first idea into the published version. The story was republished in 2021 together with Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and "Leaf by Niggle" as Tales from the Perilous Realm. ## Analysis ### Allegory The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey writes that "defeat hangs heavy" in the story, while Tolkien called it "an old man's book", with presage of bereavement. Shippey adds that when Tolkien presents images of himself in his writings, as with Niggle, the anti-hero of "Leaf by Niggle" and Smith, there is "a persistent streak of alienation". While Tolkien had stated that the story was "not 'allegory'", he had immediately added "though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points". Shippey presents evidence in support of the claim. ### Capable of allegorical interpretation Josh B. Long, in Tolkien Studies, states that for Tolkien, "allegorical interpretation" was not the same as allegory, as interpretations come from a free interchange between text and reader, whereas allegory is imposed by the author. Long sees both religious "undertones" in the story, and autobiographical elements. He notes that the Catholic writer Joseph Pearce took the story as a parable, and that Flieger accepts "a level of allegory" but not the philological version proposed by Shippey. Instead, the Hall would be the church, Cook would be the parson, and cooking would be "personal religion". Or, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans suggest, Alf is a figure of Christ, the king of a heavenly realm who arrives as a child and grows to be a man. Martin Sternberg sees the story as religious, with experiences of the numinous and "traditional mystical ideas and motifs". Long presents his own religious interpretation, likening the story's Faery Queen to the Virgin Mary, with the lilies "near the lawn" as her symbol; Alf as Christ; the Great Cake perhaps as a Twelfth-cake for Epiphany; Nokes as a fool or "a kind of anti-Tolkien"; Smith, a "lay Christian". In addition, Long sees Shippey's identification of birch and oak with philology and criticism as correct, but differs about what Tolkien wanted to say here. In Long's view, the birch "represents the sharp critique of most of his philological colleagues who supposed that Tolkien had squandered years of his life on a worthless piece of fantasy literature—a place he didn’t belong, or so they thought." In other words, he writes, the dispute was inside the philological community; far from fighting literary criticism, Tolkien had done much to heal the split between the critics and the philologists at Oxford. ### Visit to Faërie Flieger opposes viewing Smith of Wootton Major as an allegory, instead seeking comparisons with Tolkien's other fantasies. She argues that the story had sufficient "bounce" that no allegorical explanation was necessary, and indeed that such explanation detracts from the story of travels in the land of "Faery" and the element of mystery. She likens the "first Cook" to a whole series of "Tolkien's far-traveled characters", namely Alboin Errol, Edwin Lowdham, Frodo Baggins, Eärendil, Ælfwine-Eriol "and of course Tolkien himself—all the Elf-friends." Further, Flieger sees "thematic connections" between the story and the "dark power and ... echoes of a past too deep to forget" of his poem "The Sea-Bell" (1962, with a history going back to his 1934 "Looney"). The two works share a distinctive feature: a "prohibition against the return to Faërie." She states, however, that the two works describe the prohibition in differing moods and at different times. "The Sea-Bell" was written at the beginning of Tolkien's career, "cry[ing] for lost beauty"; Smith of Wootton Major almost at its end, "an autumnal acceptance of things as they are". She comments, too, that "The Sea-Bell" could be a "corrective" reply to J. M. Barrie's 1920 play Mary Rose; and that Smith of Wootton Major could then be a reply, much later, to his own poem. Whether or not that was the intention, she writes, Tolkien sought to "create a true fairy-tale quality without the use of a traditional fairy-tale plot."

Jackie Slater

American football player and coach (born 1954)

Jackie Ray Slater (born May 27, 1954), nicknamed "Big Bad Jackie", is an American former professional football player who was an offensive tackle for 20 seasons in the National Football League (NFL). He played his entire career with the Rams franchise: 19 seasons in Los Angeles, from 1976 to 1994, and one in St. Louis in 1995. Slater holds the record amongst all offensive linemen who have played the most seasons with one franchise. A graduate of Jackson State University, he was a teammate of Walter Payton. Drafted in the third round of the 1976 NFL Draft, Slater seldom played his first few years before starting in 1979. Known as the most consistent member of one of the most potent offensive lines in NFL history, Slater was selected to seven Pro Bowls and broke a record for most seasons with one team. His jersey number was retired and he was inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2001. Slater was most recently the offensive line coach at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. His son, Matthew Slater, is a special teams player for the New England Patriots. ## College Slater was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He was the first member of his family to attend a desegregated school, Wingfield High School. He attended Jackson State University, where he played three years alongside Walter Payton, who personally recruited him. Slater was selected to the Southwestern Athletic Conference All-Star Game three times. After his senior season, he was invited to participate in the College All-Star Game. ## NFL career Used primarily as a backup and special teams player during his first three seasons, Slater became the starting right tackle in 1979. That year the Rams went to Super Bowl XIV, losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 1980, he was part of an offensive line that surrendered just 29 sacks and helped the Rams' offense finish second in the NFL in total yards gained with 6,006. In 1983, Rams' offensive line allowed a league-low 23 sacks while also blocking for running back Eric Dickerson's rookie rushing record of 1,808 yards. On September 25, Slater took exception to New York Jets defensive end Mark Gastineau, who showboated after beating Slater for a sack, leading to a bench-clearing brawl that saw both players get ejected. In 1986, Slater was a key blocker for Dickerson as he ran for a playoff record 248 yards and two touchdowns against the Dallas Cowboys in an NFL divisional game. Slater was considered the most consistent members of one of the best offensive lines in the NFL, which also included Pro Bowlers Kent Hill and Dennis Harrah, and was recognized for his "work ethic and leadership skills" when he was inducted to the Hall of Fame. He retired after the 1995 season when injuries reduced him to playing one game the entire year. He is the only player in league history to play for one single team/franchise in three different cities (Los Angeles 1976–1979, Anaheim 1980–1994, and St. Louis 1995). Due to his longevity, Slater was also teammates with multiple Hall of Famers from multiple Rams eras such as Merlin Olsen, Joe Namath, Eric Dickerson, Jerome Bettis, and Issac Bruce. He was voted the National Football League Players Association's NFC Offensive Lineman of the Year four times—1983, 1986, 1987, and 1989—and was the Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award winner after the 1995 season. Slater played in 259 games from 1976 to 1995, a then-record for offensive lineman. He was the second player to play 20 seasons for one team following Cleveland Browns tackle/kicker Lou Groza. This record was later matched by Washington Redskins cornerback Darrell Green, Detroit Lions kicker Jason Hanson, and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. He played for 24 quarterbacks and 37 running backs. Former teammate Jim Everett stated "Jackie Slater is proof they were playing football in the prehistoric days". He was Dickerson's Hall of Fame presenter in 1999. In 2001, Slater was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. ## Coaching career After his football career ended, Slater worked for an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles. He participated as a guest coach during St. Louis Rams training camps in the early 2000s. On February 16, 2006, Oakland Raiders head coach Art Shell hired him to become offensive line coach alongside Irv Eatman. Slater was hired to mentor Robert Gallery, who was moving to left tackle. Gallery struggled that season and Slater was released by the Raiders for the 2007 season and replaced by Tom Cable. He was most recently the offensive line coach at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. ## Personal life Slater's son, Matthew Slater, played college football at UCLA and was drafted by the New England Patriots in the fifth round of the 2008 NFL Draft. He is a gunner and special teams captain for the Patriots. The Slaters have 17 Pro Bowl nods between them, making the Slater family the third most-nominated family in history behind the Matthews family (25) and the Manning family (20). Slater and his family live in Orange County, California. Slater is active with the NFL Play 60 program, which sends NFL players to schools to discuss spending 60 minutes a day to participate in sports activities. ## See also - List of St. Louis Rams players - History of the Los Angeles Rams - List of National Football League records (individual) - List of second generation National Football League players

Battle of the Gates of Trajan

Part of the Byzantine–Bulgarian Wars (986 AD)

The Battle of the Gates of Trajan (Bulgarian: Битка край Траянови врати, Medieval Greek: Μάχη στις Πύλες του Τραϊανού) was a battle between Byzantine and Bulgarian forces in the year 986. It took place in the pass of the same name, modern Trayanovi Vrata, in Sofia Province, Bulgaria. It was the largest defeat of the Byzantines under Emperor Basil II. After the unsuccessful siege of Sofia he retreated to Thrace, but was surrounded by the Bulgarian army under the command of Samuil in the Sredna Gora mountains. The Byzantine army was annihilated and Basil himself barely escaped. Fifteen years after the fall and re-capture of the Bulgarian capital of Preslav, the victory at the Gates of Trajan extended the Bulgarian successes achieved since 976. Later on Tsar Samuil moved the capital from Preslav in the northeast to Ohrid in the southwest. The memory of the great victory over Basil II was preserved thirty years later in the Bitola inscription of Ivan Vladislav (1015–1018), the son of Aron. ## Historical sources In addition to the Bitola inscription where the victory of Samuil, commander of the Bulgarian army, is mentioned in summary form, several medieval historians have written accounts for the battle. Among them were Leo the Deacon who was an eyewitness and a direct participant in the campaign; John Skylitzes and two other historians George Kedrin and Joannes Zonaras who repeat the work of Skylitzes. Not only Byzantine historians wrote accounts for the battle, it was also recorded by the Melkite chronicler Yahaya of Antioch and the Armenians Stephen of Taron (also known as Asolic) and Matthew of Edessa. More details can be found in the commended sermon of Saint Photius of Thessaly. ## Origins of the conflict In 971, the Byzantine emperor John Tzimiskes forced the captured Bulgarian emperor Boris II to abdicate and move to Constantinople following the fall of the Bulgarian capital Preslav. The Byzantines had occupied only the eastern parts of Bulgaria; to the west, the four sons of the count of Sredets Nikola (David, Moses, Samuil and Aron) continued to rule western Bulgaria. They ruled the free territories in a tetrarchy residing in four separate cities in order to fight the Byzantines with higher efficiency. The war against Bulgaria was the first major undertaking carried out by Basil II after his ascension to the throne in 976, although the Bulgarian attacks had begun in that year. One of the reasons for the ten years of inaction was the policy of one of the strongest nobles in Byzantium, Basil Lekapenos, who de facto ruled the Byzantine Empire in the first years of Basil II's reign. During that time, the main objective of the government in Constantinople was to crush the rebellion of the military commander Bardas Skleros in Asia Minor between 976 and 979. The local Byzantine governors were left alone to cope with the Bulgarian threat but they were unable to stop the Bulgarians. The positions of the brothers Samuil and Aron (the two eldest brothers David and Moses died soon after the beginning of the great offensive in 976) were strengthened not only by the rebellion of Skleros but also the neglect of the former Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes towards the southwestern Bulgarian lands. After the fall of Preslav and the north-eastern areas of the Bulgarian Empire his main priority became the war against the Arabs in Syria, which gave the Bulgarians time to prepare for a long struggle from the center of the remaining parts of the Empire around the Ohrid and Prespa Lakes. For one decade after 976 Bulgarian offensives achieved major successes. Samuil managed to liberate north-eastern Bulgaria. Between 982 and 986 the Bulgarians occupied the main city of Thessaly (in modern Greece), Larissa. The constant Bulgarian attacks forced Basil II to respond. ## Siege of Serdica In 986, Basil II led a campaign with 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers. The commanders of the eastern armies did not take part in the campaign because they were fighting with the Arabs. The Byzantines marched from Odrin via Plovdiv to reach Sredets (Sofia). According to Leo Diaconus the objective of their Emperor was to subdue the Bulgarians with one strike. After the capture of Serdica which was a strategic fortress between the northeastern and southwestern Bulgarian lands Basil II intended to continue his campaign towards Samuil's main strongholds in Bulgaria. On his way to Serdica Basil II left a strong company under Leon Melissenos to guard the rear of the Byzantine army. When he finally reached the walls of the city, Basil II built a fortified camp and besieged the fortress. After 20 days of fruitless assaults, the Byzantine army ran short of food. Their attempts to find provisions in the surrounding country were stopped by the Bulgarians who burned crops and even took the cattle of the Byzantines. In the end, the city garrison sallied out of the city, killing many enemy soldiers and burning all of the siege equipment, which the inexperienced Byzantine generals had placed too close to the city walls. ## The battle As a result of the successful Bulgarian actions the Byzantines were no longer capable of taking the city with a direct assault. They also could not exhaust the defenders with hunger because, after their supplies were cut, the Byzantines themselves had to deal with that problem. In addition, an army led by Samuil marched into the mountains at the Byzantines' rear. In the meantime, instead of securing the way for retreat, Leon Melissenos pulled back to Plovdiv. That action was an additional reason for Basil II to lift the siege. The commander of the Western armies, Kontostephanos, persuaded him that Melissenos had set off to Constantinople to take his throne. The Byzantine army retreated from the Sofia Valley towards Ihtiman where it stopped for the night. The rumours that the Bulgarians had barred the nearby mountain routes stirred commotion among the soldiers and on the following day the retreat continued in growing disorder. When the Bulgarians under Samuil and probably Roman saw that, they rushed to the enemy camp and the retreat turned to flight. The Byzantine vanguard managed to squeeze through slopes which were not yet taken by the Bulgarian attackers. The rest of the army was surrounded by the Bulgarians. Only the elite Armenian unit from the infantry managed to break out with heavy casualties and to lead their Emperor to safety through secondary routes. Enormous numbers of Byzantine soldiers perished in the battle; the rest were captured along with the Imperial insignia. ## Aftermath The disaster of the campaign in Bulgaria in 986 was a blow to the consolidation of the monocracy of Basil II. Soon after the Battle of the Gates of Trajan, the nobility in Asia Minor, led by the general Bardas Phokas, rebelled against Basil II for three years. According to the historian Petar Mutafchiev, after the battle Samuil was in control of the Balkans. According to some historians, the northeastern parts of the Bulgarian Empire were liberated in the years after the battle. However, according to other sources, they were liberated ten years prior to the battle, in 976. The Bulgarians firmly took the initiative and launched continuous attacks towards Thessaloniki, Edessa, and the Adriatic coast. The Serbs were also defeated and their state incorporated into Bulgaria. ## See also - Medieval Bulgarian army - Byzantine army

DNA (Little Mix song)

"DNA" is a song by British girl group Little Mix. It was released on 9 November 2012, through Syco Music, as the second single from their debut studio album of the same name (2012). It was written by the group members, along with production team TMS and songwriter Iain James. "DNA" was met with mixed reviews from critics; some likened its style to music by Girls Aloud while others found it unoriginal. It has been described as a mid-tempo electropop and techno-pop track featuring eerie synths, a music box introduction, spoken-word middle eight and elements of dubstep. The lyrics was inspired by the group members' experiences with love, and have a theme of obsession. "DNA" reached number three on the UK Singles Chart. It reached the top ten in Ireland and Hungary, and peaked at number fourteen on the US Bubbling Under Hot 100. The song also charted in Australia, France, and Slovakia. The music video was directed by Sarah Chatfield and features the group portraying assassins who stalk and kidnap a man. It was inspired by the comic books Sin City and Watchmen. The group promoted the song with televised performances on Loose Women, and The X Factor UK. The song was performed as part of four of the group's concert tours, including The Glory Days Tour in 2017. As of 2022, it has been certified gold in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Brazil. ## Background Little Mix co-wrote "DNA" with production team TMS, and songwriter Iain James. The song was inspired by the group members' personal experiences with love; Perrie Edwards said the group "perform better when the lyrics mean something to [them] when [they] sing them." The song was intended as a darker and more mature contrast to the group's previous single "Wings", in a style akin to their 2011 performance of Katy Perry's "E.T." on the eighth UK series of the British television talent show The X Factor. Jesy Nelson said, "'Wings' was very upbeat and fun and colourful, and we wanted to show how versatile we were". According to Jade Thirlwall, the group "just wanted to write about a boy, but without making it typical. We came up with the scientific idea and then started matching science words with love." It was one of two songs being considered for release as the album's second single; the group chose "DNA" believing it better showcased their vocals and a more serious side to their personalities. ## Composition "DNA" is composed in the key of E minor using time and a tempo of 70 beats per minute. Little Mix's vocal range spans from E₃ to C₅. The verses follow a chord progression of Em–C–G–Bm/F. It is a midtempo, electropop and techno-pop song, with a pronounced, grinding beat and elements of dubstep. The track is led by spooky synthesizers and features drums and guitar. The first verse is introduced by a tinkling music box and pumping heart rate monitor, and is performed by Edwards in a low vocal register. After a pre-chorus by Thirlwall, all four group members harmonise the pounding refrain, which is backed by slamming and smashing noises. After Nelson's second verse, Thirlwall's second pre-chorus and the second chorus, the song nearly stops. It then enters into a spoken-word middle eight performed by Leigh-Anne Pinnock in a modulated, robotic style, which is followed by a choral interlude. The third and final chorus is preceded by brief rave klaxons and a high note sung by Edwards. According to Pinnock, "DNA" is "not just a love song, it's about being obsessed with someone to the extreme. And sometimes when things go bad you do go like that, you stalk them on Facebook ..." Nelson said the group play a character in the song and portray themselves to be darker than they are. Edwards said that when stripped of its scientific words, "DNA" is just a love song about "when a girl first gets with a boy, that kind of romance makes you feel really giddy and happy". ## Release Details about "DNA" emerged after music industry insiders previewed it at a conference held by Sony Music Entertainment on 11 September 2012. Little Mix shared the single's cover art on Twitter on 30 September 2012. On 1 October 2012, a lyric video was posted on Vevo and the song had its radio premiere on Nick Grimshaw's The Radio 1 Breakfast Show. A digital extended play (EP) was made available to pre-order from the iTunes Store the same day. It was released in Ireland on 9 November 2012 and in the UK two days later. To promote the release, Little Mix held a YouTube competition in which fans shared dance routines for the song. Three entrants won tickets to the group's DNA Tour, a copy of their book Ready to Fly, a copy of the album and a dance tutorial in London with the group's choreographer. A two-track CD single packaged with the album DNA was made available exclusively from music retail chain HMV on 19 November 2012. An unplugged version of "DNA" is included in the deluxe edition of the album. ## Critical reception Critical response to "DNA" was mixed. In his review for Digital Spy, Robert Copsey gave the track four stars out of five and said, "the epic, operatic middle eight is a pop moment this time they can claim entirely as their own". Laurence Green of DIY regarded it as a "great pop tune by any mark" that "sounds quite a bit like a Girls Aloud song" and "a sign of just how embedded Girls Aloud have become in the fabric of contemporary British pop". Mark Davison of No Ripcord rated the track eight out of ten, describing it as "giddy, glitzy pop which would do Girls Aloud, or at least The Saturdays, proud", adding; "You'll know exactly what 'DNA' sounds like before you hear it, and that's no bad thing". AllMusic's Matt Collar viewed it as one of the album's "truly catchy, infectious cuts". NME's Eve Barlow was less enthusiastic, writing that the track sounded too much like "E.T." and from "Tulisa's school of 'ballid'". John Murphy of musicOMH derided it as "woeful", "dated, dull and auto-tuned to death." Eoin Butler of The Irish Times gave the song two stars out of five, finding the lyrics melodramatic. Stuart Heritage wrote in The Guardian that it is "not a good song by anyone's standards" and called Pinnock's spoken-word middle-eight "weird". Digital Spy included "DNA" at number 19 in its 2012 year-end list. In 2013, "DNA" was shortlisted for the Popjustice £20 Music Prize. Attitude named the song \#5 on their list of 32 greatest Little Mix singles of all time writing "DNA is an addictive, moody and rarer example of Little Mix showing us their darker side, as well as being the estranged sister to Katy Perry's 'E.T. Vocally, it really showed off their early potential, where Perrie really shines with those big notes and Leigh-Anne gives us a unique and spooky talky-rapped middle-eight." ## Chart performance In November 2012, "DNA" debuted at number three on the UK Singles Chart with first-week sales of 72,044 copies, becoming Little Mix's third consecutive top-three single in the UK. It fell to number 12 the following week, selling 38,386 copies, and spent a total of 13 weeks on the chart. The song was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), and has sold over 453,000 units in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company. Elsewhere, "DNA" entered the Irish Singles Chart at number eight, making it the group's third consecutive top-ten single in Ireland. It also reached number 10 on Hungary's Single Top 40 chart published by Magyar Hanglemezkiadók Szövetsége (MAHASZ). In Australia, the song peaked at number 48 and was certified gold by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) for sales of 35,000 copies. Following the album's Columbia Records release in the US in June 2013, "DNA" charted at number 14 on the US Bubbling Under Hot 100. ## Music video ### Development and release The music video for "DNA" was directed by Sarah Chatfield and produced by Tiernan Hanby. It was filmed on 12 September 2012 at British production company Blink's Colonel Blimp location in London and uses chroma keying and post-production. The video was inspired by the comic books Sin City and Watchmen; Chatfield viewed the video as "an unrelenting torrent of bold imagery and epic performances". She worked with visual effects artist Pete Young, her frequent collaborator, to develop the look she wanted for "DNA". Little Mix's driving scenes were filmed in front of a green screen. The video's rooftop scene was developed using a matte painting by Johan Gay; the painting was separated into different layer depths then composited into the scene using the visual effects software Flame's 3D tracker. 3D modelling artist Greg McKneally developed computer-generated backgrounds, police cars and helicopters that were composited with reflections and light effects. Thirlwall said, "we took the theme of the song, the whole love and obsession thing, and just took it to an extreme". The group released a teaser trailer daily during a four-day countdown to the music video's Vevo premiere on 19 October 2012. A making of video was released on 29 October 2012. ### Synopsis and reception The music video is in monochrome and red; it depicts Little Mix as female assassins who kidnap a man named Ryan. The video starts with a music box playing. During the first verse, Edwards, accompanied by a bound and gagged Ryan, travels at a high speed in a vintage car. In the next scene, Thirlwall balances on a ledge outside Ryan's bedroom window. All four group members perform a dance routine in black outfits with ammunition belts on a rooftop for the chorus. During the second verse, Nelson speeds in a convertible car while being chased by police. In the next segment, Pinnock is shown masterminding the group's kidnapping plan in a secret room filled with maps and clippings about Ryan that are intercut throughout the video. In the final scene, Ryan is tied to a chair in a warehouse; Little Mix stand in front of him and close in as the video ends. Digital Spy's Lewis Corner named it the eighth-best pop music video of 2012 and "one of the most diva-worthy videos from a girl group in years". Eve Barlow of NME said it "looks a little (exactly) like Sin City." ## Live performances Little Mix performed "DNA" live for the first time at BBC Radio 1's Teen Awards on 7 October 2012. On 11 November 2012, the group performed the song on the ninth UK series of The X Factor. Backed by a troupe of male dancers, they performed in matching black, gold and blue outfits with ammunition belts. The group performed an acoustic rendition of "DNA" for BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge on 13 November 2012. Little Mix performed the track on British daytime television programme T4 on 18 November 2012, and sang the acoustic version on British television panel show Loose Women on 23 November 2012. In Ireland, they performed the song at the ChildLine Concert that aired on TV3 on 1 December 2012. On 8 December 2012, the track was included in their set list for Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball. Backed by a flashing heart rate monitor and sporting star-themed black-and-pink outfits, the group performed without Edwards, who was recovering from a tonsillectomy. During their 2013 DNA Tour, Little Mix performed the song before the encore with a live band; they were wearing monochrome outfits. "DNA" was also performed during the group's set at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend on 26 May 2013. Little Mix made their US television debut with performances of "Wings" and "DNA" on Good Morning America on 7 June 2013. On 8 December 2013, they performed the track again at Capital FM's Jingle Bell Ball. For 2014's The Salute Tour, the group performed an extended version of the song; they wore black leather ensembles and were accompanied by male dancers wearing leather capes. As part of Little Mix's 2016 The Get Weird Tour, they performed an alternate version of "DNA" with a Viennese waltz introduction, enchanted forest backdrop and male backing dancers in bondage attire and muzzles. During their 2017 The Glory Days Tour, the song was performed as part of a medley with "Freak", a track from the group's fourth album Glory Days. ## Personnel Credits adapted from the album liner notes of DNA. - TMS – production - Daniel Aslet – additional vocal engineering - Ben Collier – additional vocal engineering - Thomas Barnes – drums - Ben Kohn – guitar - Peter Kelleher – synths - Serban Ghenea – mixing - John Hanes – mix engineering - Phil Seaford – mixing assistance - Tom Coyne – mastering ## Track listing ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ## Certifications ## Release history

County Road 595 (Marquette County, Michigan)

Proposed county road in Marquette County, Michigan, United States

County Road 595 (CR 595, Co. Rd. 595) was a proposed primary county road in Marquette County in the US state of Michigan. The road would have provided access from the northern part of the county, near the Eagle Mine in Michigamme Township, to US Highway 41 (US 41) and M-28 in Humboldt Township. The approximately 21.5-mile-long (34.6 km) road would have been used primarily for commercial truck traffic hauling rock from the Eagle Mine to a processing facility south of US 41/M-28 in Humboldt Township. At present, such traffic has to use existing county roads which involves passing through the cities of Marquette, Negaunee, and Ishpeming. The northern end would have been northeast of the mine in Champion Township at an intersection with the Triple A Road (Co. Rd. AAA). In 2003, a flood along the Dead River destroyed or forced the closure of several bridges over the river, isolating the northern half of the county. In 2007, Kennecott Minerals received permission to operate the Eagle Mine in the northern part of Marquette County. The company, in a consortium with other local businesses, proposed the construction of a new road to connect their mine with their mill at the former Humboldt Mine. This project, called Woodland Road, was to be built by these private interests. After encountering permitting issues, the private companies involved canceled the project. The Marquette County Road Commission (MCRC) applied for permits from the state and federal governments in 2010, reviving the road as CR 595. Kennecott pledged to finance construction, but removed its support in early 2011 over uncertainty in the permit timetable. After protests from the City of Marquette and local residents, Kennecott restored its commitments to the project. The MCRC moved forward through the permitting process in 2012. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed two formal objections to the road. In response, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the state-level agency handling the permit application, opened a public comment period and held a public hearing on the matter. Several groups spoke in support and opposition, various local, state and federal officials expressed support for the project, and the EPA maintained its objections. After several deadline extensions, the agency lifted one objection and reiterated a second, setting a 30-day timetable in December 2012 for a final decision. The DEQ was forced to deny the permit on January 3, 2013, based on the EPA position on CR 595. With that action, Kennecott Minerals diverted its financial support from the project to upgrade existing roads instead. In late December 2014, state legislators announced interest in suing the EPA in an effort to force federal permits to be issued to build the roadway; the MCRC announced their intent to sue the EPA in January 2015, and the suit was filed on July 8, 2015. The final appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States was denied without review on March 4, 2019. ## Route description The county road would have started at its southern end at an intersection with US 41/M-28 in Humboldt Township. This intersection would be east of the intersection known as Koski Corners, where US 41/M-28 intersects M-95. From its terminus, CR 595 would have run north and passed into Champion Township near a crossing of a line of the Canadian National Railway before turning eastward. The road would have crossed the Middle Branch of the Escanaba River and continued northeasterly into the adjacent Ely Township. Planning maps from late 2011 show CR 595 following what is now Wolf Lake Road in the area but bypassing some curves to follow a straighter route. South of Brocky Lake, the new county road would have crossed the Second River and turned northwesterly parallel to Dishno Road back into Champion Township. This proposed route would have turned back northward near Wolf Lake, crossed Voelkers Creek and passed to the west of Silver Lake through hilly terrain. Immediately west of Silver Lake, CR 595 would have crossed the Dead River and Wildcat Canyon Creek. Through this area, the road would have passed through land owned by one of a few timber companies and other developers. To the north, there would have been a crossing of Mulligan Creek in Michigamme Township south of the mine property. North of the mine, CR 595 was to turn northeasterly through the Yellow Dog Plains and crossed the Yellow Dog River before re-entering Champion Township. Immediately after crossing that political boundary, CR 595 would have terminated at the intersection with Triple A Road (Co. Rd. AAA) near the Salmon Trout River. Along the proposed route, the terrain is heavily forested and hilly, except in the vicinity of the lakes, rivers and streams where there are wetlands. ## History ### Background On May 14, 2003, a section of the Silver Lake Dam failed in northwestern Marquette County. The area received 4 inches (100 mm) of rain, and an earthen dike breached. The failure sent 9 billion US gallons (34 Gl) of water rushing down the Dead River. The flood waters forced the closure of the Steel Bridge carrying CR 510 over the river. As the waters approached the city of Marquette, the old CR 550 bridge was submerged, and the newer parallel structure that carries CR 550 was closed to traffic as well. The effect of these road closures isolated Big Bay from the rest of the county. The flooding damaged or destroyed the bridges carrying county roads AAO and AAT over the river, as well as the Lakeshore Boulevard and old CR 550 bridges. Several other bridges on tributaries of the Dead River were impacted by flooding. The MCRC and City of Marquette estimated that the road-related damages were in the neighborhood of \$650,000 (equivalent to \$ in ). Since the flood a new, roughly 100-foot-tall (30 m) bridge has been constructed on CR 510, ensuring that any future flooding on the Dead River would not necessitate closure of the modern bridge. This structure was built at that height in order to benefit commercial interests in the area, as well as to provide the area with reliable public and emergency access. Rio Tinto Group, the British-based parent company of Kennecott Minerals received permission in 2007 to operate a nickel mine on the Yellow Dog Plains in Marquette County. The mine, dubbed Project Eagle or the Eagle Mine by the company, has been controversial with area residents. Some residents have praised the project as good for the economy, while others including area Indian tribes, have opposed the development citing environmental concerns. Lawsuits have delayed construction and operation of the mine, in addition to economic concerns. Kennecott started construction on the mine in 2011, and they expected to begin mineral extraction in 2013. Opposition to the mine and its operation extended to plans to construct a new road to carry the ore from the mine to a mill for processing. ### Woodland Road Kennecott Minerals, in a consortium with other businesses, originally proposed a privately built road in the area called Woodland Road. The group included the Michigan Forest Products Council, a local construction company, and local landowners. Kennecott wanted the road to shorten the truck route from the Eagle Mine to its processing mill in Humboldt Township from 60 to 22 miles (97 to 35 km) over the previously approved route along Triple A Road (Co. Rd. AAA), CR 510, CR 550 and US 41/M-28. According to the permit application, the road was also to improve access to the forest lands in the area used by timber companies for logging, and it was to provide enhanced recreational access to remote areas of Marquette County. The private interests involved planned to build and maintain Woodland Road to state and county road standards at no cost to the county road commission. By March 2010 the project had encountered permit issues. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) asked the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE) to deny the necessary wetlands mitigations permits and to reconsider "alternative transportation routes that utilize existing main roads". The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers (CoE) were also critical of the project. Based on the actions by the EPA, if the DNRE did not deny the permits, and EPA objections were not resolved, the project would require clearance through the CoE under the Clean Water Act. Local citizens' groups joined the federal agencies in criticizing the road. In the face of the federal agency opposition, the consortium withdrew their permit applications in May 2010. The businesses involved indicated at the time that they would revise their proposals and reapply. Local government leaders supported the road as a means to support economic activity and reduce truck traffic through populated areas in the county. ### County involvement The MCRC became involved with the roadway, which they gave the CR 595 designation, in October 2010. The commission approved a resolution to authorize planning of an all-weather, 22-mile-long (35 km) road. Members of the public present for the meeting expressed opposition to the project that would have been funded by Kennecott Minerals. The company provided assurances to the county that they would pay the \$50- to 80-million cost to plan and construct CR 595. The director of the DNRE said that the department was weighing the options between environmental impacts of the road and impacts of mine truck traffic using the previously approved route through Marquette, Negaunee and Ishpeming. Kennecott removed its support for the project during January 2011. In a statement, the company said that the timeline for the permit process was uncertain, and they considered their currently permitted route to the best option. This move angered city officials in Marquette because it meant a return to trucking ore through the city along CR 550, Sugarloaf Avenue and Wright Street. MCRC officials had stated that "we're going to push it as hard and as fast as we can", according to the board chairman. After the company backed away, local officials protested Kennecott's return to its previously approved trucking route between the mine and the mill. Within a month however, the company reinstated support for the project after the MCRC asked Kennecott to reconsider. The company held a series of public forums starting in April 2011 about their operations, including transportation plans, and the road commission did the same that August. ### Moving forward with the permit process In September 2011, the MCRC voted to move forward with a modified routing to CR 595; the new route was to pass to the west of Brocky Lake instead of the east to address concerns from the public. The new route decreased the length by 1.3 miles (2.1 km) while adding another creek crossing. The EPA and local environmental groups opposed the road, while Humboldt Township officials supported it. As part of the permitting process the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) held public hearings in 2012 about the CR 595 project. In drafting its application, the MCRC said that the purpose of the project is: > To construct a primary county north–south road that > > 1. connects and improves emergency, commercial, industrial and recreational access to a somewhat isolated but key industrial and recreational area in northwest Marquette County to US 41; and > 2. reduces truck travel from this area through Marquette County population centers. Hearings were held by the DEQ on February 15, 2012, and a decision at the state level was due by June 15, 2012. The EPA was to make its decision on the federal level based on input from the USFWS, the DEQ and the CoE; the CoE, USFWS and EPA all submitted comments that were extremely critical of the CR 595 proposal. EPA had recommended that the road commission re-examine two alternative routings; one would add a crossing of the Yellow Dog River immediately downstream of Pinnacle Falls, which the MCRC said would entail high construction costs. The second alignment would increase the length of the road by 19.9 miles (32.0 km). In May 2012 the EPA filed a formal objection to the project which gave the MCRC until July 22 to address its concerns. Until the objection could be cleared, the DEQ could only issue a state-level permit for the project which would then require federal approval from the CoE, similar to the situation encountered by the Woodland Road proposal in 2010. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) expressed concerns over the potential for vehicle–wildlife accidents but also that these concerns could be minimized. The department expressed a willingness to work with the MCRC to address these concerns through consultations over several recommendations. In related news, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) announced a Transportation Economic Development Fund grant that would pay to reconstruct CR 601, which connects M-95 with the Humboldt Mill, and Co. Rd. AAA. The grant money was being provided to the MCRC, with local matching funds provided by Kennecott, to upgrade the two roads to "all-weather" status. Additional improvements were to include a left-turn lane for southbound traffic turning onto CR 601 from M-95 and the flattening of a small hill on CR 601. By the end of May 2012, the DEQ had lodged an objection to the CR 595 permit application; however, the MCRC was working to address it to receive the permits by the following July. The county expected a permit decision the week of June 23, 2012. One of the opponents of both the mine and the road, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, drew criticism of their stance during a meeting of the Marquette County Commission on June 26, 2012, that was discussing the tribe's plans to move its casino from Chocolay Township to the site of the former Marquette County Airport in Negaunee Township. On July 12, it was announced that the deadline for a permit decision by the DEQ has been extended until October 1, 2012, with the permission of the MCRC; state law allows a permit applicant to approve or request such extensions. The MCRC has stated that any funding for the project by Kennecott Minerals may be impacted if the permit process runs longer than the new time frame. While there was no formal contract, the company has said it would provide funding if permits are granted and work on the road is started before May 2013. The EPA scheduled a public hearing on August 28, 2012, as part of a public comment period that ran through September 4. The DEQ had asked the EPA to render a decision on its objections by October 1. ### Political support and bureaucratic opposition According to Jim Iwanicki, the engineer-manager of the MCRC, and Gerald Corkin, a member of the County Commission, US Senator Carl Levin were willing to help local officials obtain the necessary EPA clearances. In addition, 28 of Michigan's 38 state senators signed a letter to the EPA in support of the roadway. The MCRC staged an event on August 27, 2012, where several logging and aggregate trucks drove through the city of Marquette along the route currently used to connect between CR 550 and US 41/M-28. Bill Hennigan, one of the drivers from a local timber company, said, "we want people to understand there's a lot of truck traffic through Marquette now coming from the northern part of the county going to various points, and once the mine starts, there's going to be even more truck traffic going through Marquette." Hennigan and Iwanicki both commented in the press to the fact that the current routes from the northern end of the county south to US 41/M-28 involve passing through populated areas in Ishpeming, Negaunee or Marquette, and that the new road would provide a north–south corridor that was west of the Dead River. Officials were pushing the roadway as a multi-purpose facility, aimed to benefit other businesses like logging, tourism, recreation as well as the mine. At the EPA hearing on August 28, 2012, statements of support were read on behalf of US Senator Debbie Stabenow, US Representative Dan Benishek, Governor Rick Snyder, State Senator Tom Casperson, and State Rep. Matt Huuki. The Michigan departments of Agriculture and Rural Development, Natural Resources, and Transportation also sent letters of support for the road project, which is also supported by the Lake Superior Community Partnership (LSCP), and the Central Upper Peninsula Planning & Development Regional Commission. The township supervisors for Michigamme and Powell townships expressed desire for minor routing changes. Michigamme Township wanted the southern terminus shifted away from Wolf Lake Road (Co. Rd. FY) and Powell Township wanted the roadway extended into Big Bay. Supporters speaking at the meeting cited the benefits to public safety, job creation, less pollution, and moving truck traffic out of populated areas. Opponents cited concerns over the ability of the MCRC to maintain the road based on its budgets, destruction of wetlands, and concerns related to Rio Tinto. An official with the National Wildlife Federation questioned why a road was needed instead of a rail line to haul materials in and out of the area. The EPA objection was primarily based on inadequate consideration of alternative routes and unacceptable impacts to aquatic resources; they asked for more information on two alternatives. The Mulligan Plains East route that would run for 25.9 miles (41.7 km) at a project cost of \$126 million and the Red Road/Sleepy Hollow route that was 39.9 miles (64.2 km) and \$107 million. Both alternatives involved less wetland area (15.7 or 18.3 acres respectively vs. 24.3, that is, 6.4 or 7.4 hectares respectively vs. 9.8) and fewer stream crossings, but each runs east of Silver Lake and crosses the Dead River. At the time of the meeting, MCRC announced a plan to preserve additional wetlands as part of the McCormick Wilderness to expand its wetlands mitigation plan for the CR 595 project. The land measured 1 by 2.5 miles (1.6 km × 4.0 km) and would be called the "Dishno Creek Headwaters Wetland Preservation Area". Conservation easements would limit development activities on the parcel owned by various timber companies. The new proposal would mean that 26.6 acres (10.8 ha) of wetlands mitigation would be provided for every 1 acre (0.40 ha) of wetlands used to build the roadway. This compared to the 2:1 and 1.5:1 ratios from the county road commission's original plan. Compensation to the land owners would be provided by Rio Tinto if the plan was approved. The deadline was later extended to December 1, 2012, with assurances that Rio Tinto would still finance the road if construction started in the spring of 2013; the delay was to allow the EPA additional time to consider the comments from the public hearing in August. The DEQ had asked the EPA to withdraw its objections so that the project could be approved, reiterating the state's support for the project. The backup plan was to upgrade CR 550 to "all-weather status" if CR 595 is not approved; currently weight restrictions are enacted each spring on that roadway. CR 595 was even a topic of discussion as part of the 2012 US presidential election as a family member of Mitt Romney discussed the road at a campaign event in Marquette. The EPA dropped one of its two remaining objections to CR 595 on December 4, 2012. The agency no longer found fault with the MCRC's methods for determining the route of the proposed road, but reaffirmed its objection to how the road commission's plan would minimize impacts to wetlands and streams. The MCRC and DEQ had 30 days to modify plans for the road to account for the remaining objection, or the permitting process would restart under the review of the CoE. ### Cancellation The DEQ announced in a letter to the EPA and MCRC on January 3, 2013, that the department would not be issuing a permit for the project. The department supported the road plan, but said that the complexities of the EPA's outstanding objection prevented the roadway from meeting the requirements of the Clean Water Act. After this action, authority to issue construction permits for the road transferred to the CoE in a new permit process. Iwanicki, the MCRC engineer-manager, went on record in an interview with The Mining Journal to say that the EPA changed the requirements to satisfy the agency's objections to the project throughout discussions in December 2012. "The EPA moved the bar every time we got close. Throughout the whole process, it's been an ever-changing target", he said. The last changes to the project were made on December 27, 2012, to comply with EPA objections, but the DEQ staff working on the permit were sent on vacation rather than continue to work on the project. In the wake of these developments, Kennecott Minerals transferred its financial support from the CR 595 project toward improving existing county roads in the area. The MCRC will not apply for a permit through the CoE, canceling the project instead. Mine trucks would instead use existing roads from the Big Bay area south to Marquette and west to Humboldt Township, including streets that pass through the campus of Northern Michigan University (NMU). Reaction to the decision included disappointment from various elected officials. Congressman Benishek faulted the EPA's regulations for placing "too high a hurdle for this project" and for killing jobs in the area. Benishek also stated that he would fight for the project and investigate what can be done to move it forward. The congressman has requested a hearing on the matter as well. Marquette County Board Chair Deborah Pellow expressed interest in suing the EPA for its denial of the permits to build the road. The county board thanked the road commission in a letter of thanks, approved unanimously at their January 8, 2013, meeting. Casperson was also of the opinion that the EPA and other regulatory agencies had an "agenda" against projects related to the mine. On the other side of the controversy, Catherine Parker said that the MCRC could not have done enough mitigation work to satisfy concerns over the road, and that she was "relieved that we can finally lay this issue to rest and direct our resources elsewhere, namely to improving existing roads." Officials with the KBIC were also "gratified" by the decision, and called it a "victory for the integrity of the nation's Clean Water Act". Margaret Comfort, president of Save the Wild U.P., was "relieved" about the decision, but expressed the sentiment that the fight over the road was not concluded yet. ### Revival Iwanicki authored a white paper in June 2013 on transportation and road needs in the county. Of the four stages of the proposal endorsed by local governments, the first is a resurrection of the CR 595 proposal. The paper carries the endorsements of Marquette County, the City of Marquette, Marquette Township. NMU also "strongly supports the construction of [CR 595]." The university is concerned with the levels of truck traffic between the Eagle Mine and the processing mill passing near its campus. State officials are supporting the collaboration between the local governments and NMU; Casperson and State Rep. John Kivela received copies of the white paper, and Casperson's office is looking for ways to provide funding in support of continued efforts to build CR 595. The MCRC estimates that it will cost \$500,000 to move forward with a permit application through the CoE. Most of the needed environmental studies have already been completed, and they can "repurposed before they are out-of-date". Since the cancellation of CR 595 in early 2013, Rio Tinto has sold the Eagle Mine to Lundin Mining, and there are no funding guarantees for construction of CR 595 if the permitting process is resumed. The MCRC board voted in November 2013 to continue consideration of the project, over the recommendations of the county commission. A truck hauling ore from the Eagle Mine down CR 550 tipped over on December 13, 2014, and was not removed from the roadway until the next day; about 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of ore was spilled in the accident. The roadway, called "a notoriously dangerous highway" by a local state representative, was the site of the first accident involving an ore hauler since the mine began production. The accident "created major delays for drivers" of up to two hours on the primary road between Big Bay and Marquette, which was upgraded and designated as part of a truck route into and through the City of Marquette to enable the mine's ore to pass to the processing mill. The accident prompted additional renewed interest in building CR 595. In an interview with WLUC-TV that aired on December 26, 2014, State Senator Casperson (R-Escanaba) and State Representatives Kivela (D-Marquette), Scott Dianda (D-Calumet) and Ed McBroom (R-Escanaba) said that they had been discussing options to get the roadway built. The MCRC was expected to file suit against the EPA in January 2015 over the denied permits for the road. Opponents like the group Save the Wild UP are disappointed that the road commission is once again moving forward with the road. Just days later, the chair of the MCRC board said that there had been no decision on a lawsuit, although there are "possibilities" and interest in a suit. However, during its January 19, 2015 regular meeting, the road commission board went into closed session with their attorneys and emerged with a resolution to sue, which the board unanimously voted to support. The board's chairman, Dave Hall, said "[the board] believes strongly in how we feel about this road and the need for its existence." Hall cited the December 2014 accident, and a second in early January 2015, as factors prompting the MCRC to move forward with the lawsuit. The Marquette County Board of Commissioners has opposed the suit, citing issues related to the private funding of the suit, provocation of the EPA when permits related to the Eagle Mill are pending, and funding for the road if it is eventually built. In contrast, the Marquette County Townships Association, a group representing the townships in the county, has supported the suit while Lundin Mining is staying neutral. A local group called Stand UP formed to fund the costs of the lawsuit, soliciting donations from supporters of the road; the group's leaders include former chairman of the County Board of Commissioners and current Tilden Township Supervisor Deborah Pellow, Tony Retaskie of the Upper Peninsula Construction Council in Escanaba, and retired banker Stu Bradley. On July 8, 2015, the MCRC filed their lawsuit in the Marquette division of the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan. According to Deb Pellow, chairwoman of the Stand UP board of directors, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the EPA resulted in the disclosure of documents that show that the EPA had pre-determined its decision on the road before the permitting process had begun. The agency, according to Pellow, had told various environmental groups as well as "staff members for a California senator" that the road would not be allowed before the permit application had been submitted. The state senator and state representatives for the Western and Central UP all repeated their bipartisan support for the lawsuit after it was filed, which is also supported by the LSCP. The lawsuit was dismissed in district court on May 18, 2016, and a request for a rehearing based on the Supreme Court decision in Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. was denied the next month. The suit had been appealed to the Sixth Circuit. The decision in Hawkes states that these types of regulatory determinations are immediately appealable to the courts without the need to continue the licensing process, such as the option to refile for a permit for CR 595 from the CoE instead of the DEQ/EPA. The MCRC and the EPA entered court-ordered mediation to resolve the lawsuit, and the MCRC's lawyers called upon the Trump Administration to settle the case and allow the road to be built. The appeals court ruled in favor of the EPA in March 2017. The case ended when the Supreme Court of the United States denied a petition for a writ of certiorari on March 4, 2019. ## Major intersections The entire road would have been in Marquette County. ## See also

Matsya

Fish avatar of Vishnu

Matsya (Sanskrit: मत्स्य, lit. fish) is the fish avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. Often described as the first of Vishnu's ten primary avatars, Matsya is described to have rescued the first man, Manu, from a great deluge. Matsya may be depicted as a giant fish, often golden in color, or anthropomorphically with the torso of Vishnu connected to the rear half of a fish. The earliest account of Matsya is found in the Shatapatha Brahmana, where Matsya is not associated with any particular deity. The fish-saviour later merges with the identity of Brahma in post-Vedic era, and still later, becomes regarded with Vishnu. The legends associated with Matsya expand, evolve, and vary in Hindu texts. These legends have embedded symbolism, where a small fish with Manu's protection grows to become a big fish, and the fish saves the man who would be the progenitor of the next race of mankind. In later versions, Matsya slays a demon named Hayagriva who steals the Vedas, and thus is lauded as the saviour of the scriptures. The tale is ascribed with the motif of flood myths, common across cultures. ## Etymology The deity Matsya derives his name from the word matsya (Sanskrit: मत्स्य), meaning "fish". Monier-Williams and R. Franco suggest that the words matsa and matsya, both meaning fish, derive from the root mad, meaning "to rejoice, be glad, exult, delight or revel in". Thus, matsya means the "joyous one". The Sanskrit grammarian and etymologist Yaska (c. 600 BCE) also refers to the same stating that fish are known as matsya as "they revel in eating each other". Yaska also offers an alternate etymology of matsya as "floating in water" derived from the roots syand (to float) and madhu (water). The Sanskrit word matsya is cognate with Prakrit maccha ("fish"). ## Legends and scriptural references ### Vedic origins The section 1.8.1 of the Shatapatha Brahmana (Yajur veda) is the earliest extant text to mention Matsya and the flood myth in Hinduism. It does not associate the fish Matsya with any other deity in particular. The central characters of this legend are the fish (Matsya) and Manu. The character Manu is presented as the legislator and ancestor king. One day, water is brought to Manu for his ablutions. In the water is a tiny fish. The fish states that it fears being swallowed by a larger fish and appeals to Manu to protect it. In return, the fish promises to rescue Manu from an impending flood. Manu accepts the request. He puts the fish in a pot of water where it grows. Then he prepares a ditch filled with water, and transfers it there where it can grow freely. Once the fish grows further to be big enough to be free from danger, Manu transfers it into the ocean. The fish thanks him, tells him the timing of the great flood, and asks Manu to build a ship by that day, one he can attach to its horn. On the predicted day, Manu visits the fish with his boat. The devastating floods come. Manu ties the boat to the horn. The fish carries the boat with Manu to the high grounds of the northern mountains (interpreted as the Himalayas). The lone survivor Manu then re-establishes life by performing austerities and yajna (sacrifices). The goddess Ida appears from the sacrifice and both together initiate the race of Manu, the humans. According to Bonnefoy, the Vedic story is symbolic. The little fish alludes to the Indian "law of the fishes", an equivalent to the "law of the jungle". The small and weak would be devoured by the big and strong, and needs the dharmic protection of the legislator and king Manu to enable it to attain its full potential and be able to help later. Manu provides the protection, the little fish grows to become big and ultimately saves all existence. The boat that Manu builds to get help from the saviour fish, states Bonnefoy, is symbolism of the means to avert complete destruction and for human salvation. The mountains represent the doorway for ultimate refuge and liberation. Edward Washburn Hopkins suggests that the favour of Manu rescuing the fish from death, is reciprocated by the fish. Though Matsya does not appear in older scriptures, the seeds of the legend may be traced to the oldest Hindu scripture, the Rigveda. Manu (lit. "man"), the first man and progenitor of humanity, appears in the Rigveda. Manu is said to have performed the first sacrifice by kindling the sacrificial fire (Agni) with seven priests; Manu's sacrifice becomes the archetypal sacrifice. Narayan Aiyangar suggests that the ship from the Matsya legend alludes to the ship of Sacrifice referred in the Rigveda and the Aitareya Brahmana. In this context, the fish denotes Agni - God as well as the sacrificial flames. The legend thus signifies how man (Manu) can sail the sea of sins and troubles with the ship of sacrifice and the fish-Agni as his guide. In a prayer to kushta plant in the Atharvaveda, a golden ship is said to rest at a Himalayan peak, where the herb grows. Maurice Bloomfield suggests that this may be an allusion to Manu's ship. ### Saviour of Manu from the Deluge The tale of Matsya also appears in chapter 12.187 of the Book 3, the Vana Parva, in the epic Mahabharata. The legend begins with Manu (specifically Vaivasvata Manu, the present Manu. Manu is envisioned as a title, rather than an individual) performing religious rituals on the banks of the Chirini River in Vishāla forest. A little fish comes to him and asks for his protection, promising to save him from a deluge in the future. The legend moves in the same vein as the Vedic version. Manu places him in the jar. Once it outgrows the jar, the fish asks to be put into a tank which Manu helps with. Then the fish outgrows the tank, and with Manu's help reaches the Ganges River (Ganga), finally to the ocean. Manu is asked by the fish, as in the Shatapatha Brahmana version, to build a ship and additionally, to be in it with Saptarishi (seven sages) and all sorts of seeds, on the day of the expected deluge. Manu accepts the fish's advice. The deluge begins. The fish arrives to Manu's aid. He ties the ship with a rope to the horn of the fish, who then steers the ship to the Himalayas, carrying Manu through a turbulent storm. The danger passes. The fish then reveals himself as Brahma and gives the power of creation to Manu. The key difference between the Vedic version and the Mahabharata version of the allegorical legend are the latter's identification of Matsya with Brahma, a more explicit discussion of the "law of the fishes" where the weak needs the protection from the strong, and the fish asking Manu to bring along sages and grains. The Matsya Purana identifies the fish-savior (Matsya) with Vishnu, instead of Brahma. The Purana derives its name from Matsya and begins with the tale of Manu. King Manu renounces the world. Pleased with his austerities on Malaya mountains (interpreted as Kerala in Southern India), Brahma grants his wish to rescue the world at the time of the pralaya (dissolution at end of a kalpa). As in other versions, Manu encounters a little fish that miraculously increases in size over time and soon he transfers the fish to the Ganges and later to the ocean. Manu recognizes Vishnu in the fish. The fish warns him about the impending fiery end of kalpa accompanied with the pralaya as a deluge. The fish once again has a horn, but the gods gift a ship to Manu. Manu carries all types of living creatures and plant seeds to produce food for everyone after the deluge is over. When the great flood begins, Manu ties the cosmic serpent Shesha to the fish's horn. In the journey towards the mountains, Manu asks questions to Matsya and their dialogue constitutes the rest of the Purana. The Matsya Purana story is also symbolic. The fish is divine to begin with, and needs no protection, only recognition and devotion. It also ties the story to its cosmology, connecting two kalpas through the cosmic symbolic residue in the form of Shesha. In this account, the ship of Manu is called the ship of the Vedas, thus signifying the rites and rituals of the Vedas. Roy further suggests that this may be an allusion to the gold ship of Manu in the Rigveda. In the Garuda Purana, Matysa is said to rescued the seventh Manu Vaivasvata Manu by placing him in a boat from the great Deluge. The Linga Purana praises Vishnu as the one who saved various beings as a fish by tying a boat to his tail. ### Saviour of the Vedas The Bhagavata Purana adds another reason for the Matsya avatar. At the end of the kalpa, a demon Hayagriva ("horse-necked") steals the Vedas, which escape from the yawn of a sleepy Brahma. Vishnu discovers the theft. He descends to earth in the form of a little saphari fish, or the Matsya avatar. One day, the king of Dravida country (South India) named Satyavrata cups water in his hand for libation in the Kritamala river (identified with Vaigai River in Tamil Nadu, South India). There he finds a little fish. The fish asks him to save him from predators and let it grow. Satyavrata is filled with compassion for the little fish. He puts the fish in a pot, from there to a well, then a tank, and when it outgrows the tank, he transfers the fish finally to the sea. The fish rapidly outgrows the sea. Satyavrata asks the supernatural fish to reveal its true identity, but soon realizes it to be Vishnu. Matsya-Vishnu informs the king of the impending flood coming in seven days. The king is asked to collect every species of animal, plant and seeds as well as the seven sages in a boat. The fish asks the king to tie the boat to its horn with the help of the Vasuki serpent. The deluge comes. While carrying them to safety, the fish avatar teaches the highest knowledge to the sages and Satyavrata to prepare them for the next cycle of existence. The Bhagavata Purana states that this knowledge was compiled as a Purana, interpreted as an allusion to the Matsya Purana. After the deluge, Matsya slays the demon and rescues the Vedas, restoring them to Brahma, who has woken from his sleep to restart creation afresh. Satyavrata becomes Vaivasvata Manu and is installed as the Manu of the current kalpa. The Agni Purana narrative is similar to the Bhagavata Purana version placed around Kritamala river and also records the rescue of Vedas from the demon Hayagriva. It mentions Vaivasvata Manu only collecting all seeds (not living beings) and assembling the seven sages similar to the Mahabharata version. It also adds the basis of the Matsya Purana, being the discourse of Matsya to Manu, similar to the Bhagavata Purana version. While listing the Puranas, the Agni Purana states that the Matsya Purana was told by Matsya to Manu at the beginning of the kalpa. The Varaha Purana equates Narayana (identified with Vishnu) as the creator-god, instead of Brahma. Narayana creates the universe. At the start of a new kalpa, Narayana wakes from his slumber and thinks about the Vedas. He realizes that they are in the cosmic waters. He takes the form of a gigantic fish and rescues the Vedas and other scriptures. In another instance, Narayana retrieves the Vedas from the Rasatala (netherworld) and grants them to Brahma. The Purana also extols Narayana as the primordial fish who also bore the earth. PPL The Garuda Purana states that Matysa slew Hayagriva and rescued the Vedas as well as the Manu. In another instance, it states that Vishnu as Matsya killed the demon Pralamba in the reign of the third Manu - Uttama. The Narada Purana states that the demon Hayagreeva (son of Kashyapa and diti) seized the Vedas of the mouth of Brahma. Vishnu then takes the Matsya form and kills the demon, retrieving the Vedas. The incident is said to have happened in the Badari forest. The deluge and Manu are dropped in the narrative. The Shiva Purana praises Vishnu as Matsya who rescued the Vedas via king Satyavrata and swam through the ocean of pralaya. The Padma Purana replaces Manu with the sage Kashyapa, who finds the little fish who expands miraculously. Another major divergence is the absence of the deluge. Vishnu as Matsya slays the demon Shankha. Matsya-Vishnu then orders the sages to gather the Vedas from the waters and then presents the same to Brahma in Prayag. This Purana does not reveal how the scriptures drowned in the waters. Vishnu then resides in the Badari forest with other deities. The Karttikamsa-Mahatmya in the Skanda Purana narrates that slaying of the asura (demon) Shankha by Matysa. Shankha (lit. "conch"), the son of Sagara (the ocean), snatches the powers of various gods. Shankha, wishing to acquire more power, steals the Vedas from Brahma, while Vishnu was sleeping. The Vedas escape from his clutches and hide in the ocean. Implored by the gods, Vishnu wakes on Prabodhini Ekadashi and takes the form of a saphari fish and annihilates the demon. Similar to the Padma Purana, the sages re-compile the scattered Vedas from the oceans. The Badari forest and Prayag also appear in this version, though the tale of growing fish and Manu is missing. Another account in the Padma Purana mentions that a demon son called Makara steals the Vedas from Brahma and hides them in the cosmic ocean. Beseeched by Brahma and the gods, Vishnu takes the Matsya-form and enters the waters, then turns into a crocodile and destroys the demon. The sage Vyasa is credited with re-compilation of the Vedas in this version. The Vedas are then returned to Brahma. The Brahma Purana states that Vishnu took the form of a rohita fish when the earth was in the netherland to rescue the Vedas. The Krishna-centric Brahmavaivarta Purana states that Matsya is an avatar of Krishna (identified with Supreme Being) and in a hymn to Krishna praises Matsya as the protector of the Vedas and Brahmins (the sages), who imparted knowledge to the king. The Purusottama-Ksetra-Mahatmya of Skanda Purana in relationship of the origin of the herb Damanaka states that a daitya (demon) named Damanaka tormented people and wandered in the waters. On the request of Brahma, Vishnu takes the Matsya form, pulls the demon from the waters and crushes him on land. The demon transforms into a fragrant herb called Damanaka, which Vishnu wears in his flower garland. ### In avatar lists Matsya is generally enlisted as the first avatar of Vishnu, especially in Dashavatara (ten major avatars of Vishnu) lists. However, that was not always the case. Some lists do not list Matsya as first, and only later texts start the trend of Matsya as the first avatar. In the Garuda Purana listing of the Dashavatara, Matsya is the first. The Linga Purana, the Narada Purana, the Shiva Purana, the Varaha Purana, the Padma Purana, the Skanda Purana also mention Matsya as the first of the ten classical avatars. The Bhagavata Purana and the Garuda Purana regard Matsya as the tenth of 22 avatars and describe him as the "support of the earth". The Ayidhya-Mahatmya of the Skanda Purana mentions 12 avatars of Vishnu, with Matsya as the 2nd avatar. Matsya is said to support Manu, plants and others like a boat at the end of Brahma's day (pralaya). ### Other scriptural references The Vishnu Purana narrative of Vishnu's boar avatar Varaha alludes to the Matysa and Kurma avatars, saying that Brahma (identified with Narayana, an epithet transferred to Vishnu) took these forms in previous kalpas. The Agni Purana, the Brahma Purana and the Vishnu Purana suggests that Vishnu resides as Matsya in Kuru-varsha, one of the regions outside the mountains surrounding Mount Meru. ## Iconography Matsya is depicted in two forms: as a zoomorphic fish or in an anthropomorphic form. The Agni Purana prescribes Matsya be depicted zoomorphically. The Vishnudharmottara Purana recommends that Matsya be depicted as horned fish. In the anthropomorphic form, the upper half is that of the four-armed man and the lower half is a fish. The upper half resembles Vishnu and wears the traditional ornaments and the kirita-mukuta (tall conical crown) as worn by Vishnu. He holds in two of his hands the Sudarshana chakra (discus) and a shankha (conch), the usual weapons of Vishnu. The other two hands make the gestures of varadamudra, which grants boons to the devotee, and abhayamudra, which reassures the devotee of protection. In another configuration, he might have all four attributes of Vishnu, namely the Sudarshana chakra, a shankha, a gada (mace) and a lotus. In some representations, Matsya is shown with four hands like Vishnu, one holding the chakra, another the shankha, while the front two hands hold a sword and a book signifying the Vedas he recovered from the demon. Over his elbows is an angavastra draped, while a dhoti-like draping covers his hips. In rare representations, his lower half is human while the upper body (or just the face) is of a fish. The fish-face version is found in a relief at the Chennakesava Temple, Somanathapura. Matsya may be depicted alone or in a scene depicting his combat with a demon. A demon called Shankhasura emerging from a conch is sometimes depicted attacking Matsya with a sword as Matsya combats or kills him. Both of them may be depicted in the ocean, while the god Brahma and/or manuscripts or four men, symbolizing the Vedas, may be depicted in the background. In some scenes, Matsya is depicted as a fish pulling the boat with Manu and the seven sages in it. ## Evolution and symbolism The story of a great deluge is found in many civilizations across the earth. It is often compared with the Genesis narrative of the flood and Noah's Ark. The fish motif reminds readers of the Biblical 'Jonah and the Whale' narrative as well; this fish narrative, as well as the saving of the scriptures from a demon, are specifically Hindu traditions of this style of the flood narrative. Similar flood myths also exist in tales from ancient Sumer and Babylonia, Greece, the Maya of Americas and the Yoruba of Africa. The flood was a recurring natural calamity in Ancient Egypt and Tigris–Euphrates river system in ancient Babylonia. A cult of fish-gods arose in these regions with the fish-saviour motif. While Richard Pischel believed that fish worship originated in ancient Hindu beliefs, Edward Washburn Hopkins rejected the same, suggesting its origin in Egypt. The creator, fish-god Ea in the Sumerian and Babylonian version warns the king in a dream of the flood and directs him to build a boat. The idea may have reached the Indian subcontinent via the Indo-Aryan migrations or through trade routes to the Indus Valley civilisation. Another theory suggests the fish myth is home-grown in the Indus Valley or South India Dravidian peoples. The Puranic Manu is described to be in South India. As for Indus Valley theory, the fish is common in the seals; also horned beasts like the horned fish are common in depictions. Even if the idea of the flood myth and the fish-god may be imported from another culture, it is cognate with the Vedic and Puranic cosmogonic tale of Creation through the waters. In the Mahabharata and the Puranas, the flood myth is in fact a cosmogonic myth. The deluge symbolizes dissolution of universe (pralaya); while Matsya "allegorizes" the Creator-god (Brahma or Vishnu), who recreates the universe after the great destruction. This link to Creation may be associated with Matsya regarded as Vishnu's first avatar. Matsya is believed to symbolise the aquatic life as the first beings on earth. Another symbolic interpretation of the Matsya mythology is, states Bonnefoy, to consider Manu's boat to represent moksha (salvation), which helps one to cross over. The Himalayas are treated as a boundary between the earthly existence and land of salvation beyond. The protection of the fish and its horn represent the sacrifices that help guide Manu to salvation. Treated as a parable, the tale advises a good king should protect the weak from the mighty, reversing the "law of fishes" and uphold dharma, like Manu, who defines an ideal king. In the tales where the demon hides the Vedas, dharma is threatened and Vishnu as the divine Saviour rescues dharma, aided by his earthly counterpart, Manu - the king. Another theory suggests that the boat of Manu and the fish represents the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor respectively, when the star Thuban was the Pole Star (4th to 2nd millennium BCE). ## Worship Matsya is invoked as a form of Vishnu in various hymns in scriptures. In a prayer in the Bhagavata Purana, Matsya is invoked for protection from the aquatic animals and the waters. The Agni Purana suggests that Matsya be installed in the Northern direction in temples or in water bodies. The Vishnudharmottara Purana prescribes worship for Matsya for grain. Matsya is invoked as a form of Vishnu in hymns in the Brahma Purana. The Vishnu Sahasranama version of the Garuda Purana includes Matsya. The Vishnu Sahasranama in the Skanda Purana includes Matsya, Maha-matsya ("Great fish") and Timingila ("a great aquatic creature"). The third day in the bright fortnight of the Hindu month of Chaitra is celebrated as Matsya Jayanti, the birthday of Matsya, when his worship is recommended. Vishnu devotees observe a fast from a day before the holy day; take a holy bath on Matsya Jayanti and worship Matsya or Vishnu in the evening, ending their fast. Vishnu temples organize a special Puja. The Meena community claim a mythological descent from Matsya, who is called Meenesh ("Lord of the Meenas"/ "Fish-Lord"). Matsya Jayanti is celebrated as Meenesh Jayanti by the Meenas. The Varaha Purana and the Margashirsha-Mahatmya of the Padma Purana recommends a vrata (vow) with fasting and worshipping Matysa (as a golden fish) in a three lunar-day festival culminating on the twelfth lunar day of the month of Margashirsha. There are very few temples dedicated to Matsya. Prominent ones include the Shankhodara temple in Bet Dwarka and Vedanarayana Temple in Nagalapuram. Matsya Narayana Temple, Bangalore also exists. The Brahma Purana describes that Matsya-madhava (Vishnu as Matsya) is worshipped with Shveta-madhava (King Shveta) in the Shveta-madhava temple of Vishnu near the sacred Shweta ganga pond in Puri. A temple to Machhenarayan (Matsya) is found in Machhegaun, Nepal, where an annual fair is held in honour of the deity. The Koneswaram Matsyakeswaram temple in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka is now destroyed.

Vlad II Dracul

Ruler of Wallachia (r. 1436–42, 1443-47)

Vlad II (Romanian: Vlad al II-lea), also known as Vlad Dracul (Vlad al II-lea Dracul) or Vlad the Dragon (before 1395 – November 1447), was Voivode of Wallachia from 1436 to 1442, and again from 1443 to 1447. He is internationally known as the father of Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula. Born an illegitimate son of Mircea I of Wallachia, he spent his youth at the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg, who made him a member of the Order of the Dragon in 1431 (hence his sobriquet). Sigismund also recognized him as the lawful Voivode of Wallachia, allowing him to settle in nearby Transylvania. Vlad could not assert his claim during the life of his half-brother, Alexander I Aldea, who acknowledged the suzerainty of the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II. After Alexander Aldea died in 1436, Vlad seized Wallachia with Hungarian support. Following the death of Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1437, Hungary's position weakened, causing Vlad to pay homage to Murad II, which included participating in Murad II's invasion of Transylvania in the summer of 1438. John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, came to Wallachia to convince Vlad to join a crusade against the Ottomans in 1441. After Hunyadi routed an Ottoman army in Transylvania, the sultan ordered Vlad to come to Edirne where he was captured in 1442. Hunyadi invaded Wallachia and made Vlad's cousin, Basarab II, voivode. Vlad was released before the end of the year but was forced to leave his two young sons as hostages in the Ottoman court. He was restored in Wallachia with Ottoman support in 1443. He remained neutral during Hunyadi's "Long Campaign" against the Ottoman Empire between October 1443 and January 1444, but he sent 4,000 horsemen to fight against the Ottomans during the Crusade of Varna. With the support of a Burgundian fleet, he captured the important Ottoman fortress at Giurgiu in 1445. He made peace with the Ottoman Empire in 1446 or 1447, which contributed to the deterioration of his relationship with Hunyadi. Hunyadi invaded Wallachia, forcing Vlad to flee from Târgoviște in late November, where he was killed at a nearby village. ## Early life Vlad's early life is poorly documented. He was born before 1395, and was one of the numerous illegitimate sons of Mircea I of Wallachia. Vlad's modern biographers agree that he was sent as a hostage to Sigismund of Luxembourg, King of Hungary, in 1395 or 1396. Sigismund mentioned that Vlad had been educated at his court, suggesting that he spent his youth in Buda, Nuremberg and other major towns of Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire. Mircea I died in 1418, and his only legitimate son (and co-ruler), Michael, succeeded him. Two years later, Michael died fighting against his cousin, Dan II (the son of Mircea I's elder brother, Dan I). During the following decade, Dan II and Vlad's half-brother, Radu II Praznaglava, were fighting against each other for Wallachia. Vlad left Buda for Poland without Sigismund's authorization in early 1423, but was captured before reaching the border. Before long, Sigismund acknowledged Dan II as the lawful ruler of Wallachia. The Byzantine historian, Doukas, recorded that Vlad was "an officer in the army" of the Byzantine Emperor, John VIII Palaiologos, and he "had access" to the imperial palace in Constantinople. Historian Radu Florescu says that Sigismund had appointed Vlad to receive John VIII (who had come to Italy to seek assistance against the Ottomans) in Venice in 1423, and Vlad accompanied the emperor back to Constantinople. After realizing that John VIII could not help him to seize Wallachia, Vlad returned to Hungary in 1429. Sigismund made Vlad a first-class member of the Order of the Dragon (a chivalric order established by Sigismund) in Nuremberg on 8 February 1431. Other first-class members included Alfonso V of Aragon and Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania. The dragon-shaped badge of the order gave rise to his Romanian sobriquet, Dracul ("the Dragon"), for which his sons became known as Dracula ("son of Dracul"). Vlad swore fealty to Sigismund who declared him the lawful prince of Wallachia. Vlad had to promise that he would protect the Roman Catholic Church. However, Sigismund did not assist him to seize Wallachia. In the summer, Vlad's half-brother, Alexander I Aldea, invaded Wallachia with Moldavian support and dethroned Dan II. Vlad did not abandon his claim to Wallachia and settled in Transylvania. A Neo-Renaissance mural in a three-storey house in the main square of Sighișoara (which was uncovered on the 500th anniversary of the death of Vlad Dracul's son, Dracula) may depict Vlad Dracul after an original painting, according to Radu Florescu. The mural depicts a corpulent man with oval-shaped eyes and long moustaches wearing a white turban. Alexander Aldea went to Adrianople to do homage to the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, in 1432. Vlad wanted to invade Wallachia with the support of Wallachian boyars (or noblemen) who had fled to Transylvania, but Alexander Aldea's principal official, Albu, prevented the invasion. Sigismund authorized Vlad to buy weapons and muster an army of exiled boyars only in 1434. In 1435, Alexander Aldea fell seriously ill and never recovered. Taking advantage of his brother's illness, Vlad broke into Wallachia, but Alexander Aldea and his Ottoman allies forced him to retreat. ## Reign ### First rule Alexander Aldea died in autumn 1436, enabling Vlad Dracul to seize Wallachia with Hungarian support. He did not dismiss his predecessor's officials with the exception of Albu, who thus became his enemy. Vlad did not confirm the treaty that Alexander Aldea had concluded with the Ottomans, provoking an Ottoman incursion against Wallachia in November. Vlad's patron, Sigismund of Luxembourg, died on 9 December 1437. Sigismund's death and the uprising of the Transylvanian peasants weakened Hungary, forcing Vlad to seek reconciliation with the Ottoman Empire. He went to Edirne and swore fealty to Murad II. He also promised to pay a yearly tribute to the sultan and to support the Ottomans' military campaigns at the sultan's order. Before long, Murad II decided to invade Hungary and gathered his troops at Vidin. Albert of Habsburg (who was Sigismund of Luxembourg's son-in-law and successor) wrote a letter to Vlad, ordering him to protect Transylvania. Ignoring the king's command, Vlad joined Murad II who came to Wallachia at the head of his army in summer 1438, serving the sultan as his guide. The Ottoman and Wallachian troops broke into Hungary at Orșova. They routed the army of a local Vlach kenez, Cândea, near Hațeg. They marched along the river Mureș, capturing Câlnic and Sebeș. At Sebeș, Vlad convinced the leaders of the town to give in without resistance, promising to protect their property if they accompanied him to Wallachia. The Ottomans and Wallachians laid siege to Sibiu, but the siege lasted only for 8 days. They destroyed the outskirts of Brașov, before they left Hungary loaded with plunder and taking more than 30,000 captives. After the Ottoman army left Wallachia, Vlad offered Albert of Habsburg to set the burghers who had been captured at Sebeș free, but the king (who regarded them traitors) refused his offer. Vlad's attempts to maintain a balance between Hungary and the Ottomans made both the king and the sultan suspicious about his true intentions. Albert allowed a pretender to the Wallachian throne, Basarab (who was a son of Dan II) to settle in Hungary. The Ottomans strengthened the fortress of Giurgiu and sent new troops to garrison the town. Albert of Habsburg died on 27 October 1439. The majority of the Hungarian noblemen elected Władysław III of Poland king in early 1440. Władysław made the talented military commander, John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania in February 1441. Hunyadi who decided to restore the influence of Hungary in Wallachia ordered the burghers of Brașov to mint coins for Vlad around 15 October. Two or three weeks later, Hunyadi came to Târgoviște to meet Vlad, demanding him to join a crusade against the Ottoman Empire. After Hunyadi defeated the Ottomans in Transylvania in March 1442, the Ottoman governor of Bulgaria accused Vlad of treachery, according to the contemporaneous Ottoman historian, Neşri. Murad summoned Vlad to Edirne to demonstrate his loyalty. Before departing, Vlad made his eldest son, Mircea, the ruler of Wallachia. Soon after he came to Edirne, he was captured at the sultan's command. He was held in captivity in Gallipoli. ### Captivity and second rule Murad sent Hadım Şehabeddin, Beylerbey (or governor) of Rumelia, to annex Wallachia in August 1442. Hunyadi annihilated the Ottoman army in the Carpathian Mountains in September, and made Vlad's cousin, Basarab, voivode of Wallachia. Before the end of the year, Murad II released Vlad. Vlad had to pledge that he would not support the enemies of the Ottoman Empire and he would pay an annual tribute and send 500 Wallachian boys to serve as janissaries in the sultan's army. He was also forced to leave his two sons, Vlad and Radu, as hostages in the Ottoman Empire. The circumstances of Vlad's return to Wallachia are unknown. He regained his throne between March and September 1443. During Hunyadi's "Long Campaign" against the Ottoman Empire, which lasted from October 1443 to January 1444, Vlad remained neutral, especially because the sultan promised the release of his two sons. In the ensuing peace negotiations between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, Murad II was willing to release Vlad from his obligation to personally visit his court, but the papal legate, Julian Cesarini, prevented the ratification of the peace treaty. Instead, he urged Władysław to continue the crusade against the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, Vlad tried to dissuade Władysław III from waging war against the Ottomans, reminding him that Murad II went hunting with more retainers than Władysław had troops, according to the Polish historian, Jan Długosz. Nevertheless, he sent 4,000 horsemen under the command of his son, Mircea, to fight against the Ottomans. The crusade ended with the catastrophic defeat of the crusaders in the Battle of Varna on 10 November 1444. After the battle Hunyadi wanted to return to Hungary through Wallachia, but he was captured by Wallachian soldiers at the Danube. Vlad only released him after Lawrence Héderváry, Palatine of Hungary, threatened him with a war. According to historian John Jefferson, Vlad held Hunyadi in captivity because he wanted to hand him over to the sultan. Camil Mureşanu writes that Hunyadi was only imprisoned because the soldiers who captured him did not recognize him. Historian Kurt W. Teptow says, Vlad held Hunyadi responsible for the catastrophe and almost killed him. After releasing Hunyadi, Vlad gave him precious gifts and accompanied him as far as the Hungarian border. A fleet of Burgundian crusaders attacked the Ottoman fleet on the Black Sea in the spring 1445. The commander of the fleet, Walerand of Wavrin, sent envoys to Hungary to start negotiations about a joint campaign against the Ottoman Empire. At Hunyadi's request, one of Wavrin's envoys, Pedro Vasque de Saavedra, visited Vlad and convinced him to meet Wavrin. In July, Vlad went to Isaccea where he made an alliance with Wavrin. Vlad mustered an army of 4,000–6,000 strong and placed it under the command of his son, Mircea. The Burgundian and Wallachian army laid siege to Silistra in the middle of September, but they could not capture it. Before long, however, they conquered and destroyed the small fort at Tutrakan. Vlad convinced Wavrin to attack Giurgiu, saying that whenever the Ottomans "want to harry Wallachia or Transylvania, they and their horses can cross" the Danube near the fortified island at Giurgiu, connected to the Wallachian bank by a bridge. During the siege of Giurgiu, two iron rings of a large bombard suddenly broke, killing two soldiers, because Vlad, who was in the command of the fire, did not allow the bombard to cool down between blows. The Ottoman garrison of the fortress capitulated on the condition that they were allowed to freely leave for the Ottoman Empire. However, after they left the fortress, 2,000 Wallachian soldiers attacked and massacred them at Vlad's order, because he regarded the commander of the Ottoman garrison responsible for his captivity in 1442. Before long, the Ottoman garrison at Ruse also capitulated. Vlad gave asylum to more than 11,000 Bulgarians who had rebelled against the Ottomans, assisting them to cross the Danube into Wallachia. The Burgundian crusaders and the Wallachians approached Nicopolis, where a Hungarian army under the command of John Hunyadi joined them on 14 September. However, an early frost forced the crusaders to abandon the campaign in October, because they feared that the Danube would freeze over. The relationship between Wallachia and Hungary soon deteriorated. In a letter written late in 1445 to the townspeople of Brașov, Vlad complained that Wallachian merchants were arrested in Transylvania, although he had left his "little children to be butchered for Christian peace so that [he] and [his] country [could] be subjects" of the king of Hungary. His words evidence that he was convinced that his two sons had been murdered in the Ottoman Empire, but the sultan did not harm the boys. In 1446 or 1447, Vlad made peace with the Ottomans, even agreeing to return the Bulgarian refugees to the Ottoman Empire. He intervened in the fight for the Moldavian throne in favor of Roman II of Moldavia in July 1447. The Poles also supported Roman, but Roman's opponent, Peter II, was Hunyadi's protégé. On 20 July 1447, John Hunyadi ordered the burghers of Brașov to give shelter to a pretender to the Wallachian throne, Vladislav, who was a cousin of Vlad. Hunyadi unexpectedly broke into Wallachia in late November, taking with him Vladislav (also known as Dan). Vlad fled from Târgoviște, but he was captured and killed in the marshes at Bălteni. In a letter written on 4 December 1447, Hunyadi styled himself "voivode of the Transalpine land" (Wallachia) and referred to Târgoviște as his fortress, implying that he had taken control of Wallachia by that time. Hunyadi placed Vladislav on the throne of Wallachia. The place of Vlad Dracul's burial has not been identified. Cazacu says, he was most probably buried in the Monastery of Snagov. Florescu writes, Vlad Dracul was buried in a chapel in the Dealu Monastery near Târgoviște. ## Family According to a widely accepted scholarly theory, Vlad's wife was "Cneajna", a daughter of Alexander I of Moldavia. She was called Eupraxia, according to Florescu. Historian Matei Cazacu writes that she was his second wife. He does not identify Vlad's first wife. Vlad's descendants were known as Drăculești, because they adopted Vlad's sobriquet as their patronymic (Dracula). The conflict between the Drăculești and the Dănești (the descendants of Dan I of Wallachia), and strifes between the members of the Drăculești line contributed to the political instability in 15th-century Wallachia. Vlad's eldest sons, Mircea and Vlad Dracula, were first mentioned in a charter of Vlad on 20 January 1437. Mircea was born in about 1428, Vlad between 1429 and 1431. Their brother (Vlad Dracul's third son), Radu the Fair, was born before 2 August 1439. Florescu writes that Vlad Dracul's daughter, Alexandra, married the Wallachian boyar Vintilă Florescu. Vlad Dracul also fathered illegitimate children. A Wallachian noblewoman, Călțuna, gave birth to Vlad the Monk. Almost no information is known about the life of another illegitimate son, Mircea.

Trajan

Roman emperor from AD 98 to 117

Trajan (/ˈtreɪdʒən/ TRAY-jən; Latin: Caesar Nerva Traianus; 18 September 53c. 11 August 117) was Roman emperor from 98 to 117. Declared optimus princeps ("best ruler") by the senate, Trajan is remembered as one of the Five Good Emperors of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty due to his philanthropic rule and as a successful soldier-emperor who led the Roman Empire to attain its greatest territorial extent by the time of his death. Trajan was born in Italica, close to modern Santiponce in present-day Spain, a small Italic settlement in Hispania Baetica; his branch of the Ulpia gens, the Ulpii Traiani, came from the town of Tuder in the Umbria region of central Italy. His father, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, also from Italica, was a senator. Trajan rose to prominence during the reign of Domitian. In 89, serving as a legatus legionis in Hispania Tarraconensis, he supported the emperor against a revolt on the Rhine led by Antonius Saturninus. He then served as governor of Germania superior and Pannonia. In September 96, Domitian was succeeded by the elderly and childless Nerva, who proved to be unpopular with the army. After a revolt by members of the Praetorian Guard, Nerva decided to adopt as his heir and successor the more popular Trajan, who had distinguished himself in campaigns against barbarian tribes. As emperor of Rome, Trajan oversaw the construction of building projects such as the forum named after him, the introduction of social welfare policies such as the alimenta, and new military conquests. He annexed Nabataea and Dacia, and his war against the Parthian empire ended with the incorporation of Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria. In August 117, while sailing back to Rome, Trajan fell ill and died of a stroke in the city of Selinus. He was deified by the Senate and his cousin and successor Hadrian. According to historical tradition, Trajan's ashes were entombed in a small room beneath Trajan's Column. ## Early life Marcus Ulpius Trajanus was born on 18 September 53 AD in the Roman province of Hispania Baetica (in what is now Andalusia in modern Spain), in the municipium of Italica (now in the municipal area of Santiponce, in the outskirts of Seville), a Roman colony established in 206 BC by Scipio Africanus. At the time of Trajan's birth it was a small town, without baths, theatre and amphitheatre, and with a very narrow territory under its direct administration. Trajan's year of birth is not reliably attested and may have been 56 AD. Cassius Dio described Trajan as "an Iberian, and neither an Italian nor even an Italiote", but this claim is at odds with other ancient sources and is rejected by modern scholars. In fact, as asserted by Appian and inferred from the name of the city, Trajan's hometown of Italica in Hispania Baetica was founded by Italic settlers: in particular, according to the description of Trajan as "Ulpius Traianus ex urbe Tudertina" in the Epitome de Caesaribus, his branch of the gens Ulpia, the Ulpi Traianii, derived from the town of Tuder (Todi) in the Umbria region of Italia. This is confirmed by archeological attestations, with epigraphic evidence of the Ulpii and the Traii in Umbria at large and Tuder specifically, and by linguistic studies on the family names Ulpius and Traius, both Osco-Umbrian in origin. Intermarriage between the Ulpii and the Traii resulted in the Ulpii Traiani; it's unknown if they were co-founders of Italica or migrants that later arrived in the town. It is also unknown when Trajan's ancestors acquired Roman citizenship; all the Umbrians were awarded this status by 89/88 BC, with Tuder being enrolled in the Clustumina tribe. It is possible that they lost their citizenship by marrying with non-citizen locals of Iberia, but they would have certainly recovered their status when Italica became a municipium with Latin citizenship in the mid-1st century BC. Trajan's father, Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, also born at Italica, was a prominent senator and general, and his mother was Marcia, a Roman noblewoman of the gens Marcia and a sister-in-law of the second Flavian Emperor Titus. Marcus Ulpius Trajanus the elder served Vespasian in the First Jewish-Roman War, commanding the Legio X Fretensis''. Trajan himself was just one of many well-known Ulpii in a line that continued long after his own death. His elder sister was Ulpia Marciana, and his niece was Salonia Matidia. Very little is known about Trajan's early formative years, but it is thought likely that he spent his first months or years in Italica before moving to Rome and then, perhaps at around eight or nine years of age, he almost certainly would have returned temporarily to Italica with his father during Trajanus' governorship of Baetica (ca. 64–65). The lack of a strong local power base, caused by the size of the town from which they came, made it necessary for the Ulpii (and for the Aelii, the other important senatorial family of Italica with whom they were allied) to weave local alliances, in the Baetica (with the Annii, the Ucubi and perhaps the Dasumii from Corduba), the Tarraconense and the Narbonense, here above all through Pompeia Plotina, Trajan's wife. Many of these alliances were made not in Spain, but in Rome. The family home in Rome, the Domus Traiana, was on the Aventine Hill, and excavation findings under a car park in the Piazza del Tempio di Diana are thought to be the family's large suburban villa with exquisitely decorated rooms. ### Military career As a young man Trajan rose through the ranks of the Roman army, serving in some of the most contested parts of the Empire's frontier. In 76–77, his father was Governor of Syria (Legatus pro praetore Syriae), where Trajan himself remained as Tribunus legionis. From there, after his father's replacement, he seems to have been transferred to an unspecified Rhine province, and Pliny implies that he engaged in active combat duty during both commissions. In about 86, Trajan's cousin Aelius Afer died, leaving his young children Hadrian and Paulina orphans. Trajan and his colleague Publius Acilius Attianus became co-guardians of the two children. Trajan, in his late thirties, was created ordinary consul for the year 91. This early appointment may reflect the prominence of his father's career, as his father had been instrumental to the ascent of the ruling Flavian dynasty, held consular rank himself and had just been made a patrician. Around this time Trajan brought the architect and engineer Apollodorus of Damascus with him to Rome, and married Pompeia Plotina, a noblewoman from the Roman settlement at Nîmes; the marriage ultimately remained childless. The historian Cassius Dio later noted that Trajan was a lover of young men, in contrast to the usual bisexual activity that was common among upper-class Roman men of the period. The Emperor Julian also made a sardonic reference to his predecessor's sexual preference, stating that Zeus himself would have had to be on guard had his Ganymede come within Trajan's vicinity. This distaste reflected a change of mores that began with the Severan dynasty, Trajan's putative lovers included the future emperor Hadrian, pages of the imperial household, the actor Pylades, a dancer called Apolaustus, Lucius Licinius Sura, and Trajan's predecessor Nerva. Cassius Dio also relates that Trajan made an ally out of Abgar VII on account of the latter's beautiful son, Arbandes, who would then dance for Trajan at a banquet. The details of Trajan's early military career are obscure, save for the fact that in 89, as legate of Legio VII Gemina in Hispania Tarraconensis, he supported Domitian against an attempted coup by Lucius Antonius Saturninus, the governor of Germania Superior. Trajan probably remained in the region after the revolt was quashed, to engage with the Chatti who had sided with Saturninus, before returning the VII Gemina legion to Legio in Hispania Tarraconensis. In 91 he held a consulate with Acilius Glabrio, a rarity in that neither consul was a member of the ruling dynasty. He held an unspecified consular commission as governor of either Pannonia or Germania Superior, or possibly both. Plinywho seems to deliberately avoid offering details that would stress personal attachment between Trajan and the "tyrant" Domitianattributes to him, at the time, various (and unspecified) feats of arms. ### Rise to power Domitian's successor, Nerva, was unpopular with the army, and had been forced by his Praetorian Prefect Casperius Aelianus to execute Domitian's killers. Nerva needed the army's support to avoid being ousted. He accomplished this in the summer of 97 by naming Trajan as his adoptive son and successor, claiming that this was entirely due to Trajan's outstanding military merits. There are hints, however, in contemporary literary sources that Trajan's adoption was imposed on Nerva. Pliny implied as much when he wrote that, although an emperor could not be coerced into doing something, if this was the way in which Trajan was raised to power, then it was worth it. Alice König argues that the notion of a natural continuity between Nerva's and Trajan's reigns was an ex post facto fiction developed by authors writing under Trajan, including Tacitus and Pliny. According to the Historia Augusta, the future Emperor Hadrian brought word to Trajan of his adoption. Trajan retained Hadrian on the Rhine frontier as a military tribune, and Hadrian thus became privy to the circle of friends and relations with whom Trajan surrounded himself. Among them was the governor of Germania Inferior, the Spaniard Lucius Licinius Sura, who became Trajan's chief personal adviser and official friend. Sura was highly influential, and was appointed consul for third term in 107. Some senators may have resented Sura's activities as a kingmaker and éminence grise, among them the historian Tacitus, who acknowledged Sura's military and oratorical talents, but compared his rapacity and devious ways to those of Vespasian's éminence grise Licinius Mucianus. Sura is said to have informed Hadrian in 108 that he had been chosen as Trajan's imperial heir. As governor of Upper Germany (Germania Superior) during Nerva's reign, Trajan received the impressive title of Germanicus for his skilful management and rule of the volatile Imperial province. When Nerva died on 28 January 98, Trajan succeeded to the role of emperor without any outward adverse incident. The fact that he chose not to hasten towards Rome, but made a lengthy tour of inspection on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, may suggest that he was unsure of his position, both in Rome and with the armies at the front. Alternatively, Trajan's keen military mind understood the importance of strengthening the empire's frontiers. His vision for future conquests required the diligent improvement of surveillance networks, defences and transport along the Danube. Prior to his frontier tours, Trajan ordered his Prefect Aelianus to attend him in Germany, where he was apparently executed forthwith ("put out of the way"), and his now-vacant post taken by Attius Suburanus. Trajan's accession, therefore, could qualify more as a successful coup than an orderly succession. ## Roman emperor On his entry to Rome, Trajan granted the plebs a direct gift of money. The traditional donative to the troops, however, was reduced by half. There remained the issue of the strained relations between the emperor and the Senate, especially after the supposed bloodiness that had marked Domitian's reign and his dealings with the Curia. By feigning reluctance to hold power, Trajan was able to start building a consensus around him in the Senate. His belated ceremonial entry into Rome in 99 was notably understated, something on which Pliny the Younger elaborated. By not openly supporting Domitian's preference for equestrian officers, Trajan appeared to conform to the idea (developed by Pliny) that an emperor derived his legitimacy from his adherence to traditional hierarchies and senatorial morals. Therefore, he could point to the allegedly republican character of his rule. In a speech at the inauguration of his third consulship, on 1 January 100, Trajan exhorted the Senate to share the care-taking of the Empire with himan event later celebrated on a coin. In reality, Trajan did not share power in any meaningful way with the Senate, something that Pliny admits candidly: "[E]verything depends on the whims of a single man who, on behalf of the common welfare, has taken upon himself all functions and all tasks". One of the most significant trends of his reign was his encroachment on the Senate's sphere of authority, such as his decision to make the senatorial provinces of Achaea and Bithynia into imperial ones in order to deal with the inordinate spending on public works by local magnates and the general mismanagement of provincial affairs by various proconsuls appointed by the Senate. ### Optimus princeps In the formula developed by Pliny, however, Trajan was a "good" emperor in that, by himself, he approved or blamed the same things that the Senate would have approved or blamed. If in reality Trajan was an autocrat, his deferential behavior towards his peers qualified him to be viewed as a virtuous monarch. The idea is that Trajan wielded autocratic power through moderatio instead of contumaciamoderation instead of insolence. In short, according to the ethics for autocracy developed by most political writers of the Imperial Roman Age, Trajan was a good ruler in that he ruled less by fear, and more by acting as a role model, for, according to Pliny, "men learn better from examples". Eventually, Trajan's popularity among his peers was such that the Roman Senate bestowed upon him the honorific of optimus, meaning "the best", which appears on coins from 105 on. This title had mostly to do with Trajan's role as benefactor, such as in the case of his returning confiscated property. Pliny states that Trajan's ideal role was a conservative one, argued as well by the orations of Dio Chrysostom—in particular his four Orations on Kingship, composed early during Trajan's reign. Dio, as a Greek notable and intellectual with friends in high places, and possibly an official friend to the emperor (amicus caesaris), saw Trajan as a defender of the status quo. In his third kingship oration, Dio describes an ideal king ruling by means of "friendship"that is, through patronage and a network of local notables who act as mediators between the ruled and the ruler. Dio's notion of being "friend" to Trajan (or any other Roman emperor), however, was that of an informal arrangement, that involved no formal entry of such "friends" into the Roman administration. Trajan ingratiated himself with the Greek intellectual elite by recalling to Rome many (including Dio) who had been exiled by Domitian, and by returning (in a process begun by Nerva) a great deal of private property that Domitian had confiscated. He also had good dealings with Plutarch, who, as a notable of Delphi, seems to have been favoured by the decisions taken on behalf of his home-place by one of Trajan's legates, who had arbitrated a boundary dispute between Delphi and its neighbouring cities. However, it was clear to Trajan that Greek intellectuals and notables were to be regarded as tools for local administration, and not be allowed to fancy themselves in a privileged position. As Pliny said in one of his letters at the time, it was official policy that Greek civic elites be treated according to their status as notionally free but not put on an equal footing with their Roman rulers. When the city of Apamea complained of an audit of its accounts by Pliny, alleging its "free" status as a Roman colony, Trajan replied by writing that it was by his own wish that such inspections had been ordered. Concern about independent local political activity is seen in Trajan's decision to forbid Nicomedia from having a corps of firemen ("If people assemble for a common purpose ... they soon turn it into a political society", Trajan wrote to Pliny) as well as in his and Pliny's fears about excessive civic generosities by local notables such as distribution of money or gifts. Pliny's letters suggest that Trajan and his aides were as much bored as they were alarmed by the claims of Dio and other Greek notables to political influence based on what they saw as their "special connection" to their Roman overlords. Pliny tells of Dio of Prusa placing a statue of Trajan in a building complex where Dio's wife and son were buried – therefore incurring a charge of treason for placing the Emperor's statue near a grave. Trajan, however, dropped the charge. Nevertheless, while the office of corrector was intended as a tool to curb any hint of independent political activity among local notables in the Greek cities, the correctores themselves were all men of the highest social standing entrusted with an exceptional commission. The post seems to have been conceived partly as a reward for senators who had chosen to make a career solely on the Emperor's behalf. Therefore, in reality the post was conceived as a means for "taming" both Greek notables and Roman senators. It must be added that, although Trajan was wary of the civic oligarchies in the Greek cities, he also admitted into the Senate a number of prominent Eastern notables already slated for promotion during Domitian's reign by reserving for them one of the twenty posts open each year for minor magistrates (the vigintiviri). Such must be the case of the Galatian notable and "leading member of the Greek community" (according to one inscription) Gaius Julius Severus, who was a descendant of several Hellenistic dynasts and client kings. Severus was the grandfather of the prominent general Gaius Julius Quadratus Bassus, consul in 105. Other prominent Eastern senators included Gaius Julius Alexander Berenicianus, a descendant of Herod the Great, suffect consul in 116. Trajan created at least fourteen new senators from the Greek-speaking half of the Empire, an unprecedented recruitment number that opens to question the issue of the "traditionally Roman" character of his reign, as well as the "Hellenism" of his successor Hadrian. But then Trajan's new Eastern senators were mostly very powerful and very wealthy men with more than local influence and much interconnected by marriage, so that many of them were not altogether "new" to the Senate. On the local level, among the lower section of the Eastern propertied, the alienation of most Greek notables and intellectuals towards Roman rule, and the fact that the Romans were seen by most such Greek notables as aliens, persisted well after Trajan's reign. One of Trajan's senatorial creations from the East, the Athenian Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, a member of the Royal House of Commagene, left behind him a funeral monument on the Mouseion Hill that was later disparagingly described by Pausanias as "a monument built to a Syrian man". ### Greek-Roman relations As a senatorial Emperor, Trajan was inclined to choose his local base of political support from among the members of the ruling urban oligarchies. In the West, that meant local senatorial families like his own. In the East, that meant the families of Greek notables. The Greeks, though, had their own memories of independenceand a commonly acknowledged sense of cultural superiorityand, instead of seeing themselves as Roman, disdained Roman rule. What the Greek oligarchies wanted from Rome was, above all, to be left in peace, to be allowed to exert their right to self-government (i.e., to be excluded from the provincial government, as was Italy) and to concentrate on their local interests. This was something the Romans were not disposed to do as from their perspective the Greek notables were shunning their responsibilities in regard to the management of Imperial affairsprimarily in failing to keep the common people under control, thus creating the need for the Roman governor to intervene. An excellent example of this Greek alienation was the personal role played by Dio of Prusa in his relationship with Trajan. Dio is described by Philostratus as Trajan's close friend, and Trajan as supposedly engaging publicly in conversations with Dio. Nevertheless, as a Greek local magnate with a taste for costly building projects and pretensions of being an important political agent for Rome, Dio of Prusa was actually a target for one of Trajan's authoritarian innovations: the appointing of imperial correctores to audit the civic finances of the technically free Greek cities. The main goal was to curb the overenthusiastic spending on public works that served to channel ancient rivalries between neighbouring cities. As Pliny wrote to Trajan, this had as its most visible consequence a trail of unfinished or ill-kept public utilities. Competition among Greek cities and their ruling oligarchies was mainly for marks of pre-eminence, especially for titles bestowed by the Roman emperor. Such titles were ordered in a ranking system that determined how the cities were to be outwardly treated by Rome. The usual form that such rivalries took was that of grandiose building plans, giving the cities the opportunity to vie with each other over "extravagant, needless ... structures that would make a show". A side effect of such extravagant spending was that junior and thus less wealthy members of the local oligarchies felt disinclined to present themselves to fill posts as local magistrates, positions that involved ever-increasing personal expense. Roman authorities liked to play the Greek cities against one anothersomething of which Dio of Prusa was fully aware: > [B]y their public acts [the Roman governors] have branded you as a pack of fools, yes, they treat you just like children, for we often offer children the most trivial things in place of things of greatest worth [...] In place of justice, in place of the freedom of the cities from spoliation or from the seizure of the private possessions of their inhabitants, in place of their refraining from insulting you [...] your governors hand you titles, and call you 'first' either by word of mouth or in writing; that done, they may thenceforth with impunity treat you as being the very last!" These same Roman authorities had also an interest in assuring the cities' solvency and therefore ready collection of Imperial taxes. Last but not least, inordinate spending on civic buildings was not only a means to achieve local superiority, but also a means for the local Greek elites to maintain a separate cultural identitysomething expressed in the contemporary rise of the Second Sophistic; this "cultural patriotism" acted as a kind of substitute for the loss of political independence, and as such was shunned by Roman authorities. As Trajan himself wrote to Pliny: "These poor Greeks all love a gymnasium ... they will have to content with one that suits their real needs". The first known corrector was charged with a commission "to deal with the situation of the free cities", as it was felt that the old method of ad hoc intervention by the Emperor and/or the proconsuls had not been enough to curb the pretensions of the Greek notables. It is noteworthy that an embassy from Dio's city of Prusa was not favourably received by Trajan, and that this had to do with Dio's chief objective, which was to elevate Prusa to the status of a free city, an "independent" city-state exempt from paying taxes to Rome. Eventually, Dio gained for Prusa the right to become the head of the assize-district, conventus (meaning that Prusans did not have to travel to be judged by the Roman governor), but eleutheria (freedom, in the sense of full political autonomy) was denied. Eventually, it fell to Pliny, as imperial governor of Bithynia in 110 AD, to deal with the consequences of the financial mess wrought by Dio and his fellow civic officials. "It's well established that [the cities' finances] are in a state of disorder", Pliny once wrote to Trajan, plans for unnecessary works made in collusion with local contractors being identified as one of the main problems. One of the compensatory measures proposed by Pliny expressed a thoroughly Roman conservative position: as the cities' financial solvency depended on the councilmen's purses, it was necessary to have more councilmen on the local city councils. According to Pliny, the best way to achieve this was to lower the minimum age for holding a seat on the council, making it possible for more sons of the established oligarchical families to join and thus contribute to civic spending; this was seen as preferable to enrolling non-noble wealthy upstarts. Such an increase in the number of council members was granted to Dio's city of Prusa, to the dismay of existing councilmen who felt their status lowered. A similar situation existed in Claudiopolis, where a public bath was built with the proceeds from the entrance fees paid by "supernumerary" members of the council, enrolled with Trajan's permission. According to the Digest, Trajan decreed that when a city magistrate promised to achieve a particular public building, his heirs inherited responsibility for its completion. ### Building projects Trajan was a prolific builder. Many of his buildings were designed and erected by the gifted architect Apollodorus of Damascus, including a massive bridge over the Danube, which the Roman army and its reinforcements could use regardless of weather; the Danube sometimes froze over in winter, but seldom enough to bear the passage of a party of soldiers. Trajan's works at the Iron Gates region of the Danube created or enlarged the boardwalk road cut into the cliff-face along the Iron Gate's gorge. A canal was built between the Danube's Kasajna tributary and Ducis Pratum, circumventing rapids and cataracts. Trajan's Forum Traiani was Rome's largest forum. It was built to commemorate his victories in Dacia, and was largely financed from that campaign's loot. To accommodate it, parts of the Capitoline and Quirinal Hills had to be removed, the latter enlarging a clear area first established by Domitian. Apollodorus of Damascus' "magnificent" design incorporated a Triumphal arch entrance, a forum space approximately 120 m long and 90m wide, surrounded by peristyles: a monumentally sized basilica: and later, Trajan's Column and libraries. It was started in 107 AD, dedicated on 1 January 112, and remained in use for at least 500 years. It still drew admiration when Emperor Constantius II visited Rome in the fourth century. It accommodated Trajan's Market, and an adjacent brick market. Trajan was also a prolific builder of triumphal arches, many of which survive. He built roads, such as the Via Traiana, an extension of the Via Appia from Beneventum to Brundisium and the Via Traiana Nova, a mostly military road between Damascus and Aila, which Rome employed in its annexation of Nabataea and founding of Arabia Province. Some historians attribute the construction or reconstruction of Old Cairo's Roman fortress (also known as "Babylon Fort") to Trajan, and the building of a canal between the River Nile and the Red Sea. In Egypt, Trajan was "quite active" in constructing and embellishing buildings. He is portrayed, together with Domitian, on the propylon of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera. His cartouche also appears in the column shafts of the Temple of Khnum at Esna. He built palatial villas outside Rome at Arcinazzo, at Centumcellae and at Talamone. ### Games Trajan invested heavily in the provision of popular amusements. He carried out a "massive reconstruction" of the Circus Maximus, which was already the Empire's biggest and best appointed circuit for the immensely popular sport of chariot racing. The Circus also hosted religious theatrical spectacles and games, and public processions on a grand scale. Trajan's reconstruction, completed by 103, was modestly described by Trajan himself as "adequate" for the Roman people. It replaced flammable wooden seating tiers with stone, and increased the Circus' already vast capacity by about 5,000 seats. Its lofty, elevated Imperial viewing box was rebuilt among the seating tiers, so that spectators could see their emperor sharing their enjoyment of the races, alongside his family and images of the gods, At some time during 108 or 109, Trajan held 123 days of games to celebrate his Dacian victory. They involved "fully 10,000" gladiators, and the slaughter of thousands, "possibly tens of thousands," of animals, both wild and domestic. Trajan's careful management of public spectacles led the orator Fronto to congratulate him for paying equal attention to public entertainments and more serious issues, acknowledging that "neglect of serious matters can cause greater damage, but neglect of amusements greater discontent". State-funded public entertainments helped to maintain contentment among the populace; the more "serious matter" of the corn dole aimed to satisfy individuals. ### Christians During the period of peace that followed the Dacian war, Trajan exchanged letters with Pliny the Younger on how best to deal with the Christians of Pontus. Trajan told Pliny to continue prosecutions of Christians if they merited that, but not to accept anonymous or malicious denunciations. He considered this to be in the interests of justice, and to reflect "the spirit of the age". Non-citizens who admitted to being Christians and refused to recant were to be executed "for obstinacy". Citizens were sent to Rome for trial. ### Currency and welfare In 107, Trajan devalued the Roman currency, decreasing the silver content of the denarius from 93.5% to 89.0%the actual silver weight dropping from 3.04 grams to 2.88 grams. This devaluation, along with the massive amounts of gold and silver acquired through his Dacian wars, allowed Trajan to mint many more denarii than his predecessors. He also withdrew from circulation silver denarii minted before Nero's devaluation. Trajan's devaluation may have had a political intent, enabling planned increases in civil and military spending. Trajan formalised the alimenta, a welfare program that helped orphans and poor children throughout Italy by providing cash, food and subsidized education. The program was supported out of Dacian War booty, estate taxes and philanthropy. The alimenta also relied indirectly on mortgages secured against Italian farms (fundi). Registered landowners received a lump sum from the imperial treasury, and in return were expected to repay an annual sum to support the alimentary fund. ## Military campaigns ### Conquest of Dacia Trajan took the Roman empire to its greatest expanse. The earliest conquests were Rome's two wars against Dacia, an area that had troubled Roman politics for over a decade in regard to the unstable peace negotiated by Domitian's ministers with the powerful Dacian king Decebalus. Dacia would be reduced by Trajan's Rome to a client kingdom in the first war (101–102), followed by a second war that ended in actual incorporation into the Empire of the trans-Danube border group of Dacia. According to the provisions of Decebalus's earlier treaty with Rome, made in the time of Domitian, Decebalus was acknowledged as rex amicus, that is, client king; in exchange for accepting client status, he received from Rome both a generous stipend and a steady supply of technical experts. The treaty seems to have allowed Roman troops the right of passage through the Dacian kingdom in order to attack the Marcomanni, Quadi and Sarmatians. However, senatorial opinion never forgave Domitian for paying what was seen as tribute to a barbarian king. Unlike the Germanic tribes, the Dacian kingdom was an organized state capable of developing alliances of its own, thus making it a strategic threat and giving Trajan a strong motive to attack it. In May of 101, Trajan launched his first campaign into the Dacian kingdom, crossing to the northern bank of the Danube and defeating the Dacian army at Tapae (see Second Battle of Tapae), near the Iron Gates of Transylvania. It was not a decisive victory, however. Trajan's troops took heavy losses in the encounter, and he put off further campaigning for the year in order to regroup and reinforce his army. Nevertheless, the battle was considered a Roman victory and Trajan strived to ultimately consolidate his position, including other major engagements, as well as the capture of Decebalus' sister as depicted on Trajan's Column. The following winter, Decebalus took the initiative by launching a counter-attack across the Danube further downstream, supported by Sarmatian cavalry, forcing Trajan to come to the aid of the troops in his rearguard. The Dacians and their allies were repulsed after two battles in Moesia, at Nicopolis ad Istrum and Adamclisi. Trajan's army then advanced further into Dacian territory, and, a year later, forced Decebalus to submit. He had to renounce claim to some regions of his kingdom, return runaways from Rome then under his protection (most of them technical experts), and surrender all his war machines. Trajan returned to Rome in triumph and was granted the title Dacicus. The peace of 102 had returned Decebalus to the condition of more or less harmless client king; however, he soon began to rearm, to again harbour Roman runaways, and to pressure his Western neighbours, the Iazyges Sarmatians, into allying themselves with him. Through his efforts to develop an anti-Roman bloc, Decebalus prevented Trajan from treating Dacia as a protectorate instead of an outright conquest. In 104, Decebalus devised an attempt on Trajan's life by means of some Roman deserters, a plan that failed. Decebalus also took prisoner Trajan's legate Longinus, who eventually poisoned himself while in custody. Finally, in 105, Decebalus undertook an invasion of Roman-occupied territory north of the Danube. Prior to the campaign, Trajan had raised two entirely new legions: II Traianawhich, however, may have been posted in the East, at the Syrian port of Laodiceaand XXX Ulpia Victrix, which was posted to Brigetio, in Pannonia. By 105, the concentration of Roman troops assembled in the middle and lower Danube amounted to fourteen legions (up from nine in 101)about half of the entire Roman army. Even after the Dacian wars, the Danube frontier would permanently replace the Rhine as the main military axis of the Roman Empire. Including auxiliaries, the number of Roman troops engaged on both campaigns was between 150,000 and 175,000, while Decebalus could dispose of up to 200,000. Other estimates for the Roman forces involved in Trajan's second Dacian War cite around 86,000 for active campaigning with large reserves retained in the proximal provinces, and potentially much lower numbers around 50,000 for Decebalus' depleted forces and absent allies. In a fierce campaign that seems to have consisted mostly of static warfare, the Dacians, devoid of manoeuvring room, kept to their network of fortresses, which the Romans sought systematically to storm (see also Second Dacian War). The Romans gradually tightened their grip around Decebalus' stronghold in Sarmizegetusa Regia, which they finally took and destroyed. A controversial scene on Trajan's column just before the fall of Sarmizegetusa Regia suggests that Decebalus may have offered poison to his remaining men as an alternative option to capture or death while trying to flee the besieged capital with him. Decebalus fled but, when later cornered by Roman cavalry, committed suicide. His severed head, brought to Trajan by the cavalryman Tiberius Claudius Maximus, was later exhibited in Rome on the steps leading up to the Capitol and thrown on the Gemonian stairs. The famous Dacian treasures were not found in the captured capital and their whereabouts were only revealed when a Dacian nobleman called Bikilis was captured. Decebalus’ treasures had been buried under a temporarily diverted river and the captive workers executed to retain the secret. Staggering amounts of gold and silver were found and packed off to fill Rome's coffers. Trajan built a new city, Colonia Ulpia Traiana Augusta Dacica Sarmizegetusa, on another site (north of the hill citadel holding the previous Dacian capital), although bearing the same full name, Sarmizegetusa. This capital city was conceived as a purely civilian administrative centre and was provided the usual Romanized administrative apparatus (decurions, aediles, etc.). Urban life in Roman Dacia seems to have been restricted to Roman colonists, mostly military veterans; there is no extant evidence for the existence in the province of peregrine cities. Native Dacians continued to live in scattered rural settlements, according to their own ways. In another arrangement with no parallels in any other Roman province, the existing quasi-urban Dacian settlements disappeared after the Roman conquest. A number of unorganized urban settlements (vici) developed around military encampments in Dacia proper – the most important being Apulum – but were only acknowledged as cities proper well after Trajan's reign. The main regional effort of urbanization was concentrated by Trajan at the rearguard, in Moesia, where he created the new cities of Nicopolis ad Istrum and Marcianopolis. A vicus was also created around the Tropaeum Traianum. The garrison city of Oescus received the status of Roman colony after its legionary garrison was redeployed. The fact that these former Danubian outposts had ceased to be frontier bases and were now in the deep rear acted as an inducement to their urbanization and development. Not all of Dacia was permanently occupied. After the post-Trajanic evacuation of lands across the lower Danube, land extending from the Danube to the inner arch of the Carpathian Mountains, including Transylvania, the Metaliferi Mountains and Oltenia was absorbed into the Roman province, which eventually took the form of an "excrescence" with ill-defined limits, stretching from the Danube northwards to the Carpathians. This may have been intended as a basis for further expansion within Eastern Europe, as the Romans believed the region to be much more geographically "flattened", and thus easier to traverse, than it actually was; they also underestimated the distance from those vaguely defined borders to the ocean. Defence of the province was entrusted to a single legion, the XIII Gemina, stationed at Apulum, which functioned as an advance guard that could, in case of need, strike either west or east at the Sarmatians living at the borders. Therefore, the indefensible character of the province did not appear to be a problem for Trajan, as the province was conceived more as a sally-base for further attacks. Even in the absence of further Roman expansion, the value of the province depended on Roman overall strength: while Rome was strong, the Dacian salient was an instrument of military and diplomatic control over the Danubian lands; when Rome was weak, as during the Crisis of the Third Century, the province became a liability and was eventually abandoned. Trajan resettled Dacia with Romans and annexed it as a province of the Roman Empire. Aside from their enormous booty (over half a million slaves, according to John Lydus), Trajan's Dacian campaigns benefited the Empire's finances through the acquisition of Dacia's gold mines, managed by an imperial procurator of equestrian rank (procurator aurariarum). On the other hand, commercial agricultural exploitation on the villa model, based on the centralized management of a huge landed estate by a single owner (fundus) was poorly developed. Therefore, use of slave labor in the province itself seems to have been relatively undeveloped, and epigraphic evidence points to work in the gold mines being conducted by means of labor contracts (locatio conductio rei) and seasonal wage-earning. The victory was commemorated by the construction both of the 102 cenotaph generally known as the Tropaeum Traiani in Moesia, as well of the much later (113) Trajan's Column in Rome, the latter depicting in stone carved bas-reliefs the Dacian Wars' most important moments. ### Nabataean annexation In 106, Rabbel II Soter, one of Rome's client kings, died. This event might have prompted the annexation of the Nabataean Kingdom, but the manner and the formal reasons for the annexation are unclear. Some epigraphic evidence suggests a military operation, with forces from Syria and Egypt. What is known is that by 107, Roman legions were stationed in the area around Petra and Bosra, as is shown by a papyrus found in Egypt. The furthest south the Romans occupied (or, better, garrisoned, adopting a policy of having garrisons at key points in the desert) was Hegra, over 300 kilometres (190 mi) south-west of Petra. The empire gained what became the province of Arabia Petraea (modern southern Jordan and northwest Saudi Arabia). At this time, a Roman road (Via Traiana Nova) was built from Aila (now Aqaba) in Limes Arabicus to Bosrah. As Nabataea was the last client kingdom in Asia west of the Euphrates, the annexation meant that the entire Roman East had been provincialized, completing a trend towards direct rule that had begun under the Flavians. ### Parthian campaign In 113, Trajan embarked on his last campaign, provoked by Parthia's decision to put an unacceptable king on the throne of Armenia, a kingdom over which the two great empires had shared hegemony since the time of Nero some fifty years earlier. Trajan, already in Syria early in 113, consistently refused to accept diplomatic approaches from the Parthians intended to settle the Armenian imbroglio peacefully. As the surviving literary accounts of Trajan's Parthian War are fragmentary and scattered, it is difficult to assign them a proper context, something that has led to a long-running controversy about its precise happenings and ultimate aims. #### Cause of the war Modern historians advance the possibility that Trajan's decision to wage war against Parthia had economic motives: after Trajan's annexation of Arabia, he built a new road, Via Traiana Nova, that went from Bostra to Aila on the Red Sea. That meant that Charax on the Persian Gulf was the sole remaining western terminus of the Indian trade route outside direct Roman control, and such control was important in order to lower import prices and to limit the supposed drain of precious metals created by the deficit in Roman trade with the Far East. That Charax traded with the Roman Empire, there can be no doubt, as its actual connections with merchants from Palmyra during the period are well documented in a contemporary Palmyrene epigraph, which tells of various Palmyrene citizens honoured for holding office in Charax. Also, Charax's rulers domains at the time possibly included the Bahrain islands, which offered the possibility of extending Roman hegemony into the Persian Gulf itself. (A Palmyrene citizen held office as satrap over the islands shortly after Trajan's death, though the appointment was made by a Parthian king of Charax.) The rationale behind Trajan's campaign, in this case, was one of breaking down a system of Far Eastern trade through small Semitic ("Arab") cities under Parthia's control and to put it under Roman control instead. In his Dacian conquests, Trajan had already resorted to Syrian auxiliary units, whose veterans, along with Syrian traders, had an important role in the subsequent colonization of Dacia. He had recruited Palmyrene units into his army, including a camel unit, therefore apparently procuring Palmyrene support to his ultimate goal of annexing Charax. It has even been ventured that, when earlier in his campaign Trajan annexed Armenia, he was bound to annex the whole of Mesopotamia lest the Parthians interrupt the flux of trade from the Persian Gulf and/or foment trouble at the Roman frontier on the Danube. Other historians reject these motives, as the supposed Parthian "control" over the maritime Far Eastern trade route was, at best, conjectural and based on a selective reading of Chinese sourcestrade by land through Parthia seems to have been unhampered by Parthian authorities and left solely to the devices of private enterprise. Commercial activity in second century Mesopotamia seems to have been a general phenomenon, shared by many peoples within and without the Roman Empire, with no sign of a concerted Imperial policy towards it. As in the case of the alimenta, scholars like Moses Finley and Paul Veyne have considered the whole idea of a foreign trade "policy" behind Trajan's war anachronistic: according to them, the sole Roman concern with the Far Eastern luxuries tradebesides collecting toll taxes and customswas moral and involved frowning upon the "softness" of luxuries, but no economic policy. In the absence of conclusive evidence, trade between Rome and India might have been far more balanced, in terms of quantities of precious metals exchanged: one of our sources for the notion of the Roman gold drainPliny's the Younger's uncle Pliny the Elderhad earlier described the Gangetic Plains as one of the gold sources for the Roman Empire. Accordingly, in his controversial book on the Ancient economy, Finley considers Trajan's "badly miscalculated and expensive assault on Parthia" to be an example of the many Roman "commercial wars" that had in common the fact of existing only in the books of modern historians. The alternative view is to see the campaign as triggered by the lure of territorial annexation and prestige, the sole motive ascribed by Cassius Dio. As far as territorial conquest involved tax-collecting, especially of the 25% tax levied on all goods entering the Roman Empire, the tetarte, one can say that Trajan's Parthian War had an "economic" motive. Also, there was the propaganda value of an Eastern conquest that would emulate, in Roman fashion, those of Alexander the Great. The fact that emissaries from the Kushan Empire might have attended to the commemorative ceremonies for the Dacian War may have kindled in some Greco-Roman intellectuals like Plutarchwho wrote about only 70,000 Roman soldiers being necessary to a conquest of India as well as in Trajan's closer associates, speculative dreams about the booty to be obtained by reproducing Macedonian Eastern conquests. There could also be Trajan's idea to use an ambitious blueprint of conquests as a way to emphasize quasi-divine status, such as with his cultivated association, in coins and monuments, to Hercules. Also, it is possible that the attachment of Trajan to an expansionist policy was supported by a powerful circle of conservative senators from Hispania committed to a policy of imperial expansion, first among them being the all-powerful Licinius Sura. Alternatively, one can explain the campaign by the fact that, for the Romans, their empire was in principle unlimited, and that Trajan only took advantage of an opportunity to make idea and reality coincide. Finally, there are other modern historians who think that Trajan's original aims were purely military and strategic: to assure a more defensible Eastern frontier for the Roman Empire, crossing Northern Mesopotamia along the course of the Khabur River in order to offer cover to a Roman Armenia. This interpretation is backed by the fact that all subsequent Roman wars against Parthia would aim at establishing a Roman presence deep into Parthia itself. It is possible that during the onset of Trajan's military experience, as a young tribune, he had witnessed engagement with the Parthians; so any strategic vision was grounded in a tactical awareness of what was needed to tackle Parthia. #### Course of the war The campaign was carefully planned in advance: ten legions were concentrated in the Eastern theatre; since 111, the correspondence of Pliny the Younger witnesses to the fact that provincial authorities in Bithynia had to organize supplies for passing troops, and local city councils and their individual members had to shoulder part of the increased expenses by supplying troops themselves. The intended campaign, therefore, was immensely costly from its very beginning. Trajan marched first on Armenia, deposed the Parthian-appointed king, Parthamasiris (who was afterwards murdered while kept in the custody of Roman troops in an unclear incident, later described by Fronto as a breach of Roman good faith), and annexed it to the Roman Empire as a province, receiving in passing the acknowledgement of Roman hegemony by various tribes in the Caucasus and on the Eastern coast of the Black Seaa process that kept him busy until the end of 114. At the same time, a Roman column under the legate Lusius Quietusan outstanding cavalry general who had signalled himself during the Dacian Wars by commanding a unit from his native Mauretaniacrossed the Araxes river from Armenia into Media Atropatene and the land of the Mardians (present-day Ghilan). It is possible that Quietus' campaign had as its goal the extending of the newer, more defensible Roman border eastwards towards the Caspian Sea and northwards to the foothills of the Caucasus. This newer, more "rational" frontier, depended, however, on an increased, permanent Roman presence east of the Euphrates. The chronology of subsequent events is uncertain, but it is generally believed that early in 115 Trajan launched a Mesopotamian campaign, marching down towards the Taurus mountains in order to consolidate territory between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He placed permanent garrisons along the way to secure the territory. While Trajan moved from west to east, Lusius Quietus moved with his army from the Caspian Sea towards the west, both armies performing a successful pincer movement, whose apparent result was to establish a Roman presence into the Parthian Empire proper, with Trajan taking the northern Mesopotamian cities of Nisibis and Batnae and organizing a province of Mesopotamia, including the Kingdom of Osrhoenewhere King Abgar VII submitted to Trajan publiclyas a Roman protectorate. This process seems to have been completed at the beginning of 116, when coins were issued announcing that Armenia and Mesopotamia had been put under the authority of the Roman people. The area between the Khabur River and the mountains around Singara seems to have been considered as the new frontier, and as such received a road surrounded by fortresses. After wintering in Antioch during 115/116 and, according to literary sources, barely escaping from a violent earthquake that claimed the life of one of the consuls, Marcus Pedo VirgilianusTrajan again took to the field in 116, with a view to the conquest of the whole of Mesopotamia, an overambitious goal that eventually backfired on the results of his entire campaign. According to some modern historians, the aim of the campaign of 116 was to achieve a "pre-emptive demonstration" aiming not toward the conquest of Parthia, but for tighter Roman control over the Eastern trade route. However, the overall scarcity of manpower for the Roman military establishment meant that the campaign was doomed from the start. It is noteworthy that no new legions were raised by Trajan before the Parthian campaign, maybe because the sources of new citizen recruits were already over-exploited. As far as the sources allow a description of this campaign, it seems that one Roman division crossed the Tigris into Adiabene, sweeping south and capturing Adenystrae; a second followed the river south, capturing Babylon; Trajan himself sailed down the Euphrates from Dura-Europoswhere a triumphal arch was erected in his honourthrough Ozogardana, where he erected a "tribunal" still to be seen at the time of Julian the Apostate's campaigns in the same area. Having come to the narrow strip of land between the Euphrates and the Tigris, he then dragged his fleet overland into the Tigris, capturing Seleucia and finally the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon. He continued southward to the Persian Gulf, when, after escaping with his fleet a tidal bore on the Tigris, he received the submission of Athambelus, the ruler of Charax. He declared Babylon a new province of the Empire and had his statue erected on the shore of the Persian Gulf, after which he sent the Senate a laurelled letter declaring the war to be at a close and bemoaning that he was too old to go on any further and repeat the conquests of Alexander the Great. Since Charax was a de facto independent kingdom whose connections to Palmyra were described above, Trajan's bid for the Persian Gulf may have coincided with Palmyrene interests in the region. Another hypothesis is that the rulers of Charax had expansionist designs on Parthian Babylon, giving them a rationale for alliance with Trajan. The Parthian city of Susa was apparently also occupied by the Romans. According to late literary sources (not backed by numismatic or inscriptional evidence) a province of Assyria was also proclaimed, apparently covering the territory of Adiabene. Some measures seem to have been considered regarding the fiscal administration of Indian tradeor simply about the payment of customs (portoria) on goods traded on the Euphrates and Tigris. It is possible that it was this "streamlining" of the administration of the newly conquered lands according to the standard pattern of Roman provincial administration in tax collecting, requisitions and the handling of local potentates' prerogatives, that triggered later resistance against Trajan. According to some modern historians, Trajan might have busied himself during his stay on the Persian Gulf with ordering raids on the Parthian coasts, as well as probing into extending Roman suzerainty over the mountaineer tribes holding the passes across the Zagros Mountains into the Iranian plateau eastward, as well as establishing some sort of direct contact between Rome and the Kushan Empire. No attempt was made to expand into the Iranian Plateau itself, where the Roman army, with its relative weakness in cavalry, would have been at a disadvantage. Trajan left the Persian Gulf for Babylonwhere he intended to offer sacrifice to Alexander in the house where he had died in 323 BC But a revolt led by Sanatruces, a nephew of the Parthian king Osroes I who had retained a cavalry force, possibly strengthened by the addition of Saka archers, imperilled Roman positions in Mesopotamia and Armenia. Trajan sought to deal with this by forsaking direct Roman rule in Parthia proper, at least partially. Trajan sent two armies towards Northern Mesopotamia: the first, under Lusius Quietus, recovered Nisibis and Edessa from the rebels, probably having King Abgarus deposed and killed in the process, with Quietus probably earning the right to receive the honors of a senator of praetorian rank (adlectus inter praetorios). The second army, however, under Appius Maximus Santra (probably a governor of Macedonia) was defeated and Santra killed. Later in 116, Trajan, with the assistance of Quietus and two other legates, Marcus Erucius Clarus and Tiberius Julius Alexander Julianus, defeated a Parthian army in a battle where Sanatruces was killed (possibly with the assistance of Osroes' son and Sanatruces' cousin, Parthamaspates, whom Trajan wooed successfully). After re-taking and burning Seleucia, Trajan then formally deposed Osroes, putting Parthamaspates on the throne as client ruler. This event was commemorated in a coin as the reduction of Parthia to client kingdom status: REX PARTHIS DATUS, "a king is given to the Parthians". That done, Trajan retreated north in order to retain what he could of the new provinces of Armeniawhere he had already accepted an armistice in exchange for surrendering part of the territory to Sanatruces' son Vologesesand Mesopotamia. It was at this point that Trajan's health started to fail him. The fortress city of Hatra, on the Tigris in his rear, continued to hold out against repeated Roman assaults. He was personally present at the siege, and it is possible that he suffered a heat stroke while in the blazing heat. ### Kitos War Shortly afterwards, the Jews inside the Eastern Roman Empire, in Egypt, Cyprus, and Cyrenethis last province being probably the original trouble hotspotrose up in what probably was an outburst of religious rebellion against the local pagans, this widespread rebellion being afterwards named the Kitos War. Another rebellion flared up among the Jewish communities of Northern Mesopotamia, probably part of a general reaction against Roman occupation. Trajan was forced to withdraw his army in order to put down the revolts. He saw this withdrawal as simply a temporary setback, but he was destined never to command an army in the field again, turning his Eastern armies over to Lusius Quietus, who meanwhile (early 117) had been made governor of Judaea and might have had to deal earlier with some kind of Jewish unrest in the province. Quietus discharged his commissions successfully, so much that the war was afterward named after himKitus being a corruption of Quietus. Whether or not the Kitos War theatre included Judea proper, or only the Jewish Eastern diaspora, remains doubtful in the absence of clear epigraphic and archaeological evidence. What is certain is that there was an increased Roman military presence in Judea at the time. Quietus was promised a consulate in the following year (118) for his victories, but he was killed before this could occur, during the bloody purge that opened Hadrian's reign, in which Quietus and three other former consuls were sentenced to death after being tried on a vague charge of conspiracy by the (secret) court of the Praetorian Prefect Attianus. It has been thought that Quietus and his colleagues were executed on Hadrian's direct orders, for fear of their popular standing with the army and their close connections to Trajan. In contrast, the next prominent Roman figure in charge of the repression of the Jewish revolt, the equestrian Quintus Marcius Turbo, who had dealt with the rebel leader from Cyrene, Loukuas, retained Hadrian's trust, eventually becoming his Praetorian Prefect. As all four consulars were senators of the highest standing and as such generally regarded as able to take imperial power (capaces imperii), Hadrian seems to have decided to forestall these prospective rivals. ## Death and succession Early in 117, Trajan grew ill and set sail for Italy. His health declined throughout the spring and summer of 117, possibly acknowledged to the public by the display of a bronze portrait-bust at the public baths of Ancyra, showing an aged and emaciated man, though the identification with Trajan is disputed. He reached Selinus, where he suddenly died, on or shortly before 11 August. Trajan in person could have lawfully nominated Hadrian as his successor, but Dio claims that Trajan's wife, Pompeia Plotina, assured Hadrian's succession by keeping Trajan's death a secret, long enough for her to produce and sign a document attesting to Hadrian's adoption as son and successor. Dio, who tells this narrative, offers his fatherthe governor of Cilicia Apronianusas a source, so his narrative may be based on contemporary rumour. It may also reflect male Roman displeasure that an empresslet alone any woman could presume to meddle in Rome's political affairs. Hadrian held an ambiguous position during Trajan's reign. After commanding Legio I Minervia during the Dacian Wars, he had been relieved from front-line duties at the decisive stage of the Second Dacian War, being sent to govern the newly created province of Pannonia Inferior. He had pursued a senatorial career without particular distinction and had not been officially adopted by Trajan although he received from him decorations and other marks of distinction that made him hope for the succession. He received no post after his 108 consulate and no further honours other than being made Archon eponymos for Athens in 111/112. He probably did not take part in the Parthian War. Literary sources relate that Trajan had considered others, such as the jurist Lucius Neratius Priscus, as heir. Hadrian, who was eventually entrusted with the governorship of Syria at the time of Trajan's death, was Trajan's cousin and was married to Trajan's grandniece, which all made him as good as heir designate. Hadrian seems to have been well connected to the powerful and influential coterie of Spanish senators at Trajan's court, through his ties to Plotina and the Prefect Attianus. His refusal to sustain Trajan's senatorial and expansionist policy during his own reign may account for the "crass hostility" shown him by literary sources. Hadrian's first major act as emperor was to abandon Mesopotamia as too costly and distant to defend, and to restore Armenia and Osrhoene to Parthian hegemony, under Rome's suzerainty. The Parthian campaign had been an enormous setback to Trajan's policy, proof that Rome had overstretched its capacity to sustain an ambitious program of conquest. According to the Historia Augusta, Hadrian claimed to follow the precedent set by Cato the Elder towards the Macedonians, who "were to be set free because they could not be protected" – something Birley sees as an unconvincing precedent. Other territories conquered by Trajan were retained. According to a well-established historical tradition, Trajan's ashes were placed within the small cella that still survives at the base of Trajan's column. In some modern scholarship, his ashes were more likely interred near his column, in a mausoleum, temple or tomb built for his cult as a divus of the Roman state. ## Legacy Ancient sources on Trajan's personality and accomplishments are unanimously positive. Pliny the Younger, for example, celebrates Trajan in his panegyric as a wise and just emperor and a moral man. Cassius Dio added that he always remained dignified and fair. A third-century emperor, Decius, even received from the Senate the name Trajan as a decoration. After the setbacks of the third century, Trajan, together with Augustus, became in the Later Roman Empire the paragon of the most positive traits of the Imperial order. Some theologians such as Thomas Aquinas discussed Trajan as an example of a virtuous pagan. In the Divine Comedy, Dante, following this legend, sees the spirit of Trajan in the Heaven of Jupiter with other historical and mythological persons noted for their justice. Also, a mural of Trajan stopping to provide justice for a poor widow is present in the first terrace of Purgatory as a lesson to those who are purged for being proud. > > I noticed that the inner bank of the curve... > > > > Was of white marble, and so decorated With carvings that not only Polycletus But nature herself would there be put to shame... > > > > There was recorded the high glory Of that ruler of Rome whose worth Moved Gregory to his great victory; > > > > I mean by this the Emperor Trajan; And at his bridle a poor widow Whose attitude bespoke tears and grief... > > > > The wretched woman, in the midst of all this, Seemed to be saying: 'Lord, avenge my son, Who is dead, so that my heart is broken..' > > > > So he said: 'Now be comforted, for I must Carry out my duty before I go on: Justice requires it and pity holds me back.' > > > > Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio X, ll. 32 f. and 73 f. ### Iconography After the despised Nero, Roman emperors until Trajan were depicted shaven. Trajan's successor Hadrian made beards fashionable again for emperors. ### Later Emperors Many emperors after Trajan would, when they were sworn into office, be wished Felicior Augusto, Melior Traiano ("May you be more fortunate than Augustus and better than Trajan"). The fourth-century emperor Constantine I is credited with calling him a "plant upon every wall" for the many buildings bearing inscriptions with his name. ### After Rome In the 18th century, King Charles III of Spain commissioned Anton Raphael Mengs to paint The Triumph of Trajan on the ceiling of the banquet hall of the Royal Palace of Madridconsidered among the best works of this artist. It was only during the Enlightenment that this legacy began to be contested, when Edward Gibbon expressed doubts about the militarized character of Trajan's reign in contrast to the "moderate" practices of his immediate successors. Mommsen adopted a divided stance towards Trajan, at some point of his posthumously published lectures even speaking about his "vainglory" (Scheinglorie). Mommsen also speaks of Trajan's "insatiable, unlimited lust for conquest". Although Mommsen had no liking for Trajan's successor Hadrian"a repellent manner, and a venomous, envious and malicious nature"he admitted that Hadrian, in renouncing Trajan's conquests, was "doing what the situation clearly required". It was exactly this military character of Trajan's reign that attracted his early twentieth-century biographer, the Italian Fascist historian Roberto Paribeni, who in his 1927 two-volume biography Optimus Princeps described Trajan's reign as the acme of the Roman principate, which he saw as Italy's patrimony. Following in Paribeni's footsteps, the German historian Alfred Heuss saw in Trajan "the accomplished human embodiment of the imperial title" (die ideale Verkörperung des humanen Kaiserbegriffs). Trajan's first English-language biography by Julian Bennett is also a positive one in that it assumes that Trajan was an active policy-maker concerned with the management of the empire as a wholesomething his reviewer Lendon considers an anachronistic outlook that sees in the Roman emperor a kind of modern administrator. During the 1980s, the Romanian historian Eugen Cizek took a more nuanced view as he described the changes in the personal ideology of Trajan's reign, stressing the fact that it became ever more autocratic and militarized, especially after 112 and towards the Parthian War (as "only an universal monarch, a kosmocrator, could dictate his law to the East"). The biography by the German historian Karl Strobel stresses the continuity between Domitian's and Trajan's reigns, saying that Trajan's rule followed the same autocratic and sacred character as Domitian's, culminating in a failed Parthian adventure intended as the crown of his personal achievement. It is in modern French historiography that Trajan's reputation becomes most markedly deflated: Paul Petit writes about Trajan's portraits as a "lowbrow boor with a taste for booze and boys". For Paul Veyne, what is to be retained from Trajan's "stylish" qualities was that he was the last Roman emperor to think of the empire as a purely Italian and Rome-centred hegemony of conquest. In contrast, his successor Hadrian would stress the notion of the empire as ecumenical and of the Emperor as universal benefactor and not kosmocrator. ### In Jewish legend In the Jewish homiletical works, such as Esther Rabbah, Trajan is described with the epitaph "may his bones be crushed" (Hebrew: שְׁחִיק עֲצָמוֹת, sh'hik atzamot''). The same epitaph is also used for Hadrian. ## See also - Felicior Augusto, melior Traiano - Justice of Trajan - Trajanic art

Sugar Ray Robinson

American boxer (1921–1989)

Walker Smith Jr. (May 3, 1921 – April 12, 1989), better known as Sugar Ray Robinson, was an American professional boxer who competed from 1940 to 1965. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. He is often regarded as the greatest boxer of all time, pound-for-pound. Robinson was a dominant amateur, but his exact amateur record is not known. It is usually listed as 85–0 with 69 knockouts, 40 in the first round. However it has been reported he lost to Billy Graham and Patsy Pesca as a teenager under his given name, Walker Smith Jr. He turned professional in 1940 at the age of 19 and by 1951 had a professional record of 129–1–2 with 85 knockouts. From 1943 to 1951 Robinson went on a 91-fight unbeaten streak, the sixth-longest in professional boxing history behind Pedro Carrasco with 93, Jimmy Wilde with 95, Buck Smith with 102, Packey McFarland with 104, and Young Griffo with 107. Robinson held the world welterweight title from 1946 to 1951, and won the world middleweight title in the latter year. He retired in 1952, only to come back two-and-a-half years later and regain the middleweight title in 1955. He then became the first boxer in history to win a divisional world championship five times (a feat he accomplished by defeating Carmen Basilio in 1958 to regain the middleweight championship). Robinson was named "fighter of the year" twice: first for his performances in 1942, then nine years and over 90 fights later, for his efforts in 1951. Historian Bert Sugar ranked Robinson as the greatest fighter of all time and in 2002, Robinson was also ranked number one on The Ring magazine's list of "80 Best Fighters of the Last 80 Years". As of July 2023, BoxRec ranks Robinson as the greatest boxer, pound-for-pound, of all time. He was named the best boxer of all time, pound for pound, by the International Boxing Research Organization (IBRO) in both of its all-time ratings, in 2006 and 2019. Renowned for his classy and flamboyant lifestyle outside the ring, Robinson is credited with being the originator of the modern sports "entourage". After his boxing career ended, Robinson attempted a career as an entertainer, but it was not successful. He struggled financially until his death in 1989. In 2006, he was featured on a commemorative stamp by the United States Postal Service. ## Early life Robinson was born Walker Smith Jr. in Ailey, Georgia, to Walker Smith Sr. and Leila Hurst. Robinson was the youngest of three children; his eldest sister Marie was born in 1917, and his other sister Evelyn in 1919. His father was a cotton, peanut, and corn farmer in Georgia, who moved the family to Detroit where he initially found work in construction. According to Robinson, Smith Sr. later worked two jobs to support his family—cement mixer and sewer worker. "He had to get up at six in the morning and he'd get home close to midnight. Six days a week. The only day I really saw him was Sunday ... I always wanted to be with him more." His parents separated, and he moved with his mother to the New York City neighborhood of Harlem at the age of 12. Robinson originally aspired to be a doctor, but after dropping out of DeWitt Clinton High School (in the Bronx) in ninth grade, he switched his goal to boxing. When he was 14, he attempted to enter his first boxing tournament, but was told he first needed an AAU membership card—which he could not legally procure until he was 16. He circumvented the AAU's age requirement by using an ID card from a youth named Ray Robinson, who had quit boxing. So, Walker began his amateur fighting career under that name—and it stuck. Later, when a lady in the audience at a fight in Watertown, New York, said he was "sweet as sugar," the name "Sugar Ray Robinson" was born. Robinson idolized Henry Armstrong and Joe Louis as a youth, and actually had lived on the same block as Louis in Detroit when Robinson was 11 and Louis was 17. Outside the ring, Robinson got into trouble frequently as a youth, and was involved with a street gang. He married at 16. The couple had one son, Ronnie, and divorced when Robinson was 19. He reportedly finished his amateur career with an 85–0 record with 69 knockouts – 40 coming in the first round, though this has been disputed. He won the New York Golden Gloves featherweight championship in 1939 (defeating Louis Valentine on points in 3 rounds), and the New York Golden Gloves lightweight championship in 1940 (defeating Andy Nonella by KO in 2). ## Boxing career ### Early career Robinson made his professional debut on October 4, 1940, winning by a second-round stoppage over Joe Echevarria. Robinson fought five more times in 1940, winning all, four by knockout. In 1941, he defeated world champion Sammy Angott, future champion Marty Servo, and former champion Fritzie Zivic. The Robinson-Angott fight was held above the lightweight limit, since Angott did not want to risk losing his lightweight title. The Zivic bout, held at the Madison Square Garden, drew a crowd of 20,551—one of the largest in the arena to that date. Robinson won the first five rounds, according to Joseph C. Nichols of The New York Times, before Zivic came back to land several punches to Robinson's head in the sixth and seventh. Robinson controlled the next two, and had Zivic hurt in the ninth. After a close tenth round, Robinson was announced as the winner on all three scorecards. Robinson knocked out Zivic in the tenth round in a January 1942 rematch, only the second time Zivic had been counted out in more than 150 fights. Robinson knocked him down in the ninth and tenth rounds before the referee stopped the fight. Zivic and his corner protested the stoppage; James P. Dawson of The New York Times stated "[t]hey were criticizing a humane act. The battle had been a slaughter, for want of a more delicate word." Robinson then won four consecutive bouts by knockout, before defeating Servo in a controversial split decision in their May rematch. After winning three more fights, Robinson faced Jake LaMotta, who would become one of his more prominent rivals, for the first time in October. He defeated LaMotta by a unanimous decision, although he failed to get Jake down. Robinson weighed 145 lb (66 kg) compared to 157.5 for LaMotta, but he was able to control the fight from the outside for the entire bout, and actually landed the harder punches during the fight. Robinson then won four more fights, including two against Izzy Jannazzo, from October 19 to December 14. For his performances, Robinson was named "Fighter of the Year". He finished 1942 with a total of 14 wins and no losses. Robinson built a record of 40–0 before losing for the first time to LaMotta in a 10-round re-match. LaMotta, who had a 16 lb (7.3 kg) weight advantage over Robinson, knocked Robinson out of the ring in the eighth round, and won the fight by decision. The fight took place in Robinson's former home town of Detroit, and attracted a record crowd. After being controlled by Robinson in the early rounds LaMotta came back to take control in the later. After winning the third LaMotta fight less than three weeks later, Robinson then defeated his childhood idol: former champion Henry Armstrong, whom he only fought because the older man was in need of money. Robinson later stated that he carried the aged former champion. On February 27, 1943, Robinson was inducted into the United States Army, where he was again referred to as Walker Smith. Robinson had a 15-month military career. Robinson served with Joe Louis, and the pair went on tours with the Special Services division where they performed exhibition bouts in front of U.S. Army troops. Robinson got into trouble several times while in the military. He argued with superiors who he felt were discriminatory against him, and refused to fight exhibitions when he was told African American soldiers were not allowed to watch them. In late March 1944 Robinson was stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, waiting to ship out to Europe, where he was scheduled to perform more exhibition matches. But on March 29, Robinson disappeared from his barracks. When he woke up on April 5 in Fort Jay Hospital on Governor's Island, he had missed his sailing for Europe and was under suspicion of deserting. He himself reported falling down the stairs in his barracks on the 29th, but said that he had complete amnesia, and he could not remember any events from that moment until the 5th. According to his file, a stranger had found him in the street on April 1 and helped him to a hospital. In his examination report, a doctor at Fort Jay concluded that Robinson's version of events was sincere. He was examined by military authorities, who claimed he suffered from a mental deficiency. Robinson was granted an honorable discharge on June 3, 1944. He later wrote that unfair press coverage of the incident had "branded" him as a "deserter". Robinson maintained his close friendship with Louis from their time in military service, and the two went into business together after the war. They planned to start a liquor distribution business in New York City, but were denied a license due to their race. Besides the loss in the LaMotta rematch, the only other mark on Robinson's record during this period was a 10-round draw against José Basora in 1945. ### Welterweight champion By 1946, Robinson had fought 75 fights to a 73–1–1 record, and beaten every top contender in the welterweight division. However, he refused to cooperate with the Mafia, which controlled much of boxing at the time, and was denied a chance to fight for the welterweight championship. Robinson was finally given a chance to win a title against Tommy Bell on December 20, 1946. Robinson had already beaten Bell once by decision in 1945. The two fought for the title vacated by Servo, who had himself lost twice to Robinson in non-title bouts. In the fight, Robinson, who only a month before had been involved in a 10-round brawl with Artie Levine, was knocked down by Bell. The fight was called a "war", but Robinson was able to pull out a close 15-round decision, winning the vacant World Welterweight title. In 1948 Robinson fought five times, but only one bout was a title defense. Among the fighters he defeated in those non-title bouts was future world champion Kid Gavilán in a close, controversial 10-round fight. Gavilán hurt Robinson several times in the fight, but Robinson controlled the final rounds with a series of jabs and left hooks. In 1949, he boxed 16 times, but again only defended his title once. In that title fight, a rematch with Gavilán, Robinson again won by decision. The first half of the bout was very close, but Robinson took control in the second half. Gavilán would have to wait two more years to begin his own historic reign as welterweight champion. The only boxer to match Robinson that year was Henry Brimm, who fought him to a 10-round draw in Buffalo. Robinson fought 19 times in 1950. He successfully defended his welterweight title for the last time against Charley Fusari. Robinson won a lopsided 15-round decision, knocking Fusari down once. Robinson donated all but \$1 of his purse for the Fusari fight to cancer research. In 1950 Robinson fought George Costner, who had also taken to calling himself "Sugar" and stated in the weeks leading up to the fight that he was the rightful possessor of the name. "We better touch gloves, because this is the only round", Robinson said as the fighters were introduced at the center of the ring. "Your name ain't Sugar, mine is." Robinson then knocked Costner out in 2 minutes and 49 seconds. #### Jimmy Doyle incident In June 1947, after four non-title bouts, Robinson was scheduled to defend his title for the first time in a bout against Jimmy Doyle. Robinson initially backed out of the fight because he had a dream that he was going to kill Doyle. A priest and a minister convinced him to fight. His dream ended up becoming a reality. On June 25, 1947, Robinson dominated Doyle and scored a decisive knockout in the eighth round that knocked Doyle unconscious and resulted in Doyle's death later that night. Robinson said that the impact of Doyle's death was "very trying". After Doyle's death, criminal charges were threatened against Robinson in Cleveland, up to and including murder, though none actually materialized. After learning of Doyle's intentions of using the bout's money to buy his mother a house, Robinson gave Doyle's mother the money from his next four bouts so she could purchase herself a home, fulfilling her son's intention. ### Middleweight champion It is stated in his autobiography that one of the main considerations for his move up to middleweight was the increasing difficulty he was having in making the 147 lb (67 kg) welterweight weight limit. However, the move up would also prove beneficial financially, as the division then contained some of the biggest names in boxing. Vying for the Pennsylvania state middleweight title in 1950, Robinson defeated Robert Villemain. Later that year, in defense of that crown, he defeated Jose Basora, with whom he had previously drawn. Robinson's 50-second, first-round knockout of Basora set a record that would stand for 38 years. In October 1950, Robinson knocked out Bobo Olson a future middleweight title holder. On February 14, 1951, Robinson and LaMotta met for the sixth time. The fight would become known as The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Robinson won the undisputed World Middleweight title with a 13th round technical knockout. Robinson outboxed LaMotta for the first 10 rounds, then unleashed a series of savage combinations on LaMotta for three rounds, finally stopping the champion for the first time in their legendary six-bout series—and dealing LaMotta his first legitimate knockout loss in 95 professional bouts. LaMotta had lost by knockout to Billy Fox earlier in his career. However, that fight was later ruled to have been fixed and LaMotta was sanctioned for letting Fox win. That bout, and some of the other bouts in the six-fight Robinson-LaMotta rivalry, was depicted in the Martin Scorsese film Raging Bull. "I fought Sugar Ray so often, I almost got diabetes", LaMotta later said. Robinson won five of his six bouts with LaMotta. After winning his second world title, he embarked on a European tour which took him all over the Continent. Robinson traveled with his flamingo-pink Cadillac, which caused quite a stir in Paris, and an entourage of 13 people, some included "just for laughs". He was a hero in France due to his recent defeat of LaMotta—the French hated LaMotta for defeating Marcel Cerdan in 1949 and taking his championship belt (Cerdan died in a plane crash en route to a rematch with LaMotta). Robinson met President of France Vincent Auriol at a ceremony attended by France's social upper crust. During his fight in Berlin against Gerhard Hecht, Robinson was disqualified when he knocked his opponent out with a punch to the kidney: a punch legal in the US, but not Europe. The fight was later declared a no-contest. In London, Robinson lost the world middleweight title to British boxer Randolph Turpin in a sensational bout. Three months later in a rematch in front of 60,000 fans at the Polo Grounds, he knocked Turpin out in ten rounds to recover the title. In that bout Robinson was leading on the cards but was cut by Turpin. With the fight in jeopardy, Robinson let loose on Turpin, knocking him down, then getting him to the ropes and unleashing a series of punches that caused the referee to stop the bout. Following Robinson's victory, residents of Harlem danced in the streets. In 1951, Robinson was named Ring Magazine's "Fighter of the Year" for the second time. In 1952 he fought a rematch with Olson, winning by a decision. He next defeated former champion Rocky Graziano by a third-round knockout, then challenged World Light heavyweight champion Joey Maxim. In the Yankee Stadium bout with Maxim, Robinson built a lead on all three judges' scorecards, but the 103 °F (39 °C) temperature in the ring took its toll. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was the first victim of the heat, and had to be replaced by referee Ray Miller. The fast-moving Robinson was the heat's next victim – at the end of round 13, he collapsed and failed to answer the bell for the next round, suffering the only knockout of his career. On June 25, 1952, after the Maxim bout, Robinson gave up his title and retired with a record of 131–3–1–1. He began a career in show business, singing and tap dancing. After about three years, the decline of his businesses and the lack of success in his performing career made him decide to return to boxing. He resumed training in 1954. ### Comeback In 1955 Robinson returned to the ring. Although he had been inactive for two and a half years, his work as a dancer kept him in peak physical condition: in his autobiography, Robinson states that in the weeks leading up to his debut for a dancing engagement in France, he ran five miles every morning, and then danced for five hours each night. Robinson even stated that the training he did in his attempts to establish a career as a dancer were harder than any he undertook during his boxing career. He won five fights in 1955, before losing a decision to Ralph 'Tiger' Jones. He bounced back, however, and defeated Rocky Castellani by a split decision, then challenged Bobo Olson for the world middleweight title. He won the middleweight championship for the third time with a second-round knockout—his third victory over Olson. After his comeback performance in 1955, Robinson expected to be named fighter of the year. However, the title went to welterweight Carmen Basilio. Basilio's handlers had lobbied heavily for it on the basis that he had never won the award, and Robinson later described this as the biggest disappointment of his professional career. "I haven't forgotten it to this day, and I never will", Robinson wrote in his autobiography. Robinson and Olson fought for the last time in 1956, and Robinson closed the four-fight series with a fourth-round knockout. In 1957 Robinson lost his title to Gene Fullmer. Fullmer used his aggressive, forward moving style to control Robinson, and knocked him down in the fight. Robinson, however, noticed that Fullmer was vulnerable to the left hook. Fullmer headed into their May rematch as a 3–1 favorite. In the first two rounds Robinson followed Fullmer around the ring, however in the third round he changed tactics and made Fullmer come to him. At the start of the fourth round Robinson came out on the attack and stunned Fullmer, and when Fullmer returned with his own punches, Robinson traded with him, as opposed to clinching as he had done in their earlier fight. The fight was fairly even after four rounds. But in the fifth, Robinson was able to win the title back for a fourth time by knocking out Fullmer with a lightning fast, powerful left hook. Boxing critics have referred to the left-hook which knocked out Fullmer as "the perfect punch". It marked the first time in 44 career fights that Fullmer had been knocked out, and when someone asked Robinson after the fight how far the left hook had travelled, Robinson replied: "I can't say. But he got the message." Later that year, he lost his title to Basilio in a rugged 15 round fight in front of 38,000 at Yankee Stadium, but regained it for a record fifth time when he beat Basilio in the rematch. Robinson struggled to make weight, and had to go without food for nearly 20 hours leading up to the bout. He badly damaged Basilio's eye early in the fight, and by the seventh round it was swollen shut. The two judges gave the fight to Robinson by wide margins: 72–64 and 71–64. The referee scored the fight for Basilio 69–64, and was booed loudly by the crowd of 19,000 when his decision was announced. The first fight won the "Fight of the Year" award from The Ring magazine for 1957 and the second fight won the "Fight of the Year" award for 1958. ### Decline Robinson knocked out Bob Young in the second round in Boston in his only fight in 1959. A year later, he defended his title against Paul Pender. Robinson entered the fight as a 5–1 favorite, but lost a split decision in front of 10,608 at Boston Garden. The day before the fight Pender commented that he planned to start slowly, before coming on late. He did just that and outlasted the aging Robinson, who, despite opening a cut over Pender's eye in the eighth round, was largely ineffective in the later rounds. An attempt to regain the crown for an unheard of sixth time proved beyond Robinson. Despite Robinson's efforts, Pender won by decision in that rematch. On December 3 of that year, Robinson and Fullmer fought a 15-round draw for the WBA middleweight title, which Fullmer retained. In 1961, Robinson and Fullmer fought for a fourth time, with Fullmer retaining the WBA middleweight title by a unanimous decision. The fight would be Robinson's last title bout. Robinson spent the rest of the 1960s fighting 10-round contests. In October 1961 Robinson defeated future world champion Denny Moyer by a unanimous decision. A 12–5 favorite, the 41-year-old Robinson defeated the 22-year-old Moyer by staying on the outside, rather than engaging him. In their rematch four months later, Moyer defeated Robinson on points, as he pressed the action and made Robinson back up throughout the fight. Moyer won 7–3 on all three judges scorecards. Robinson lost twice more in 1962, before winning six consecutive fights against mostly lesser opposition. In February 1963 Robinson lost by a unanimous decision to former world champion and fellow Hall of Famer Joey Giardello. Giardello knocked Robinson down in the fourth round, and the 43-year-old took until the count of nine to rise to his feet. Robinson was also nearly knocked down in the sixth round, but was saved by the bell. He rallied in the seventh and eight rounds, before struggling in the final two. He then embarked on an 18-month boxing tour of Europe. Robinson's second no-contest bout came in September 1965 in Norfolk, Virginia in a match with an opponent who turned out to be an impostor. Boxer Neil Morrison, at the time a fugitive and accused robber, signed up for the fight as Bill Henderson, a capable club fighter. The fight was a fiasco, with Morrison being knocked down twice in the first round and once in the second before the disgusted referee, who said "Henderson put up no fight", walked out of the ring. Robinson was initially given a TKO in 1:20 of the second round after the "obviously frightened" Morrison laid himself down on the canvas. Robinson fought for the final time in November 1965. He lost by a unanimous decision to Joey Archer. Famed sports author Pete Hamill mentioned that one of the saddest experiences of his life was watching Robinson lose to Archer. He was even knocked down and Hamill pointed out that Archer had no knockout punch at all; Archer admitted afterward that it was only the second time he had knocked an opponent down in his career. The crowd of 9,023 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh gave Robinson several standing ovations, even while he was being thoroughly outperformed by Archer. On November 11, 1965, Robinson announced his retirement from boxing, saying: "I hate to go too long campaigning for another chance." Robinson retired from boxing with a record of 174–19–6 (2 no contests) with 109 knockouts in 201 professional bouts, ranking him among the all-time leaders in knockouts. ## Later life In his autobiography, Robinson states that by 1965 he was broke, having spent all of the \$4 million in earnings he made inside and out of the ring during his career. A month after his last fight, Robinson was honored with a Sugar Ray Robinson Night on December 10, 1965, in New York's Madison Square Garden. During the ceremony, he was honored with a massive trophy. However, there was not a piece of furniture in his small Manhattan apartment with legs strong enough to support it. Robinson was elected to the Ring Magazine boxing Hall of Fame in 1967, two years after he retired and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. In the late 1960s he acted in some television shows, like Mission: Impossible. An episode of Land of the Giants called "Giants and All That Jazz" had Sugar as a washed up boxer opening a nightclub. He also appeared in a few films including the Frank Sinatra cop movie The Detective (1968), the cult classic Candy (1968), and the thriller The Todd Killings (1971) as a police officer. In 1969, he founded the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation for the inner-city Los Angeles area. The foundation does not sponsor a boxing program. He was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus that was treated with insulin. ## Death In Robinson's last years he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He died in Los Angeles on April 12, 1989, at the age of 67. Robinson is buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California. ## Personal life Robinson married Marjorie Joseph in 1938; the marriage was annulled the same year. Their son, Ronnie Smith, was born in 1939. Robinson met his second wife Edna Mae Holly, a noted dancer who performed at the Cotton Club and toured Europe with Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. According to Robinson, he met her at a local pool he frequented after his boxing workouts. In an attempt to get her attention he pushed her into the pool one day, and said it was an accident. After this attempt was met with disdain, he appeared at the nightclub she danced at and introduced himself. Soon the couple were dating and they married in 1944. They had one son, Ray Robinson Jr. (born 1949) before their acrimonious divorce in 1962. She appeared on the first cover of Jet magazine in 1951. In April 1959, Robinson's eldest sister, Marie, died of cancer at the age of 41. In December 1959, Barbara Johnson (aka Barbara Trevigne) of South Ozone Park, a singer and dancer, brought a paternity suit in New York against the former champ, claiming Sugar Ray Robinson was the father of her son Paul born in 1953. On May 18, 1963, Jet reported that the court had ruled in Robinson's favor. Robinson is quoted exulting at the win saying "Justice triumphed." In 1965, Robinson married Millie Wiggins Bruce and the couple settled in Los Angeles. When Robinson was sick with his various ailments, his son accused the elder Robinson's wife of keeping him under the influence of medication to manipulate him. According to Ray Robinson Jr., when Robinson Sr's mother died, he could not attend his mother's funeral because Millie was drugging and controlling him. However, Robinson had been hospitalized the day before his mother's death due to agitation which caused his blood pressure to rise. Robinson Jr. and Edna Mae also said they were kept away from Robinson by Millie during the last years of his life. Robinson was a Freemason, a membership shared with a number of other athletes, including fellow boxer Jack Dempsey. ## Boxing style > Rhythm is everything in boxing. Every move you make starts with your heart, and that's in rhythm or you're in trouble. Robinson was the modern definition of a boxer puncher. He was able to fight almost any style: he could come out one round brawling, the next counterpunching, and the next fighting on the outside flicking his jab. Robinson would use his formless style to exploit his opponents' weaknesses. He also possessed great speed and precision. He fought in a very conventional way with a firm jab, but threw hooks and uppercuts in flurries in an unconventional way. He possessed tremendous versatility—according to boxing analyst Bert Sugar, "Robinson could deliver a knockout blow going backward." Robinson was efficient with both hands, and he displayed a variety of effective punches—according to a Time article in 1951, "Robinson's repertoire, thrown with equal speed and power by either hand, includes every standard punch from a bolo to a hook—and a few he makes up on the spur of the moment." Robinson commented that once a fighter has trained to a certain level, their techniques and responses become almost reflexive. "You don't think. It's all instinct. If you stop to think, you're gone." ## Legacy Robinson has been ranked as the greatest boxer of all time by sportswriters, fellow boxers, and trainers. The phrase "pound for pound" was created by sportswriters for him during his career as a way to compare boxers irrespective of weight. Hall of Fame fighters Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Roberto Durán and Sugar Ray Leonard have ranked Robinson as the greatest pound-for-pound boxer in history. In 1997, The Ring ranked him as the best pound-for-pound fighter in history, and in 1999 he was named "welterweight of the century", "middleweight of the century", and overall "fighter of the century" by the Associated Press. In 2007 ESPN.com featured the piece "50 Greatest Boxers of All Time", in which it named Robinson the top boxer in history. In 2003, The Ring ranked him number 11 in the list of all-time greatest punchers. Robinson was also ranked as the number 1 welterweight and the number 1 pound-for-pound boxer of all time by the International Boxing Research Organization. He was inducted into the Madison Square Garden Walk of Fame at its inception in 1992. Robinson was one of the first African Americans to establish himself as a star outside sports. He was an integral part of the New York social scene in the 1940s and 1950s. His glamorous restaurant, Sugar Ray's, hosted stars including Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Nat King Cole, Joe Louis, and Lena Horne. Robinson was known as a flamboyant personality outside the ring. He combined striking good looks with charisma and a flair for the dramatic. He drove a flamingo-pink Cadillac and was an accomplished singer and dancer, who once pursued a career in the entertainment industry. According to ESPN's Ron Flatter: "He was the pioneer of boxing's bigger-than-life entourages, including a secretary, barber, masseur, voice coach, a coterie of trainers, beautiful women, a dwarf mascot and lifelong manager George Gainford." When Robinson first traveled to Paris, a steward referred to his companions as his "entourage". Although Robinson said he did not like the word's literal definition of "attendants", since he felt they were his friends, he liked the word itself and began to use it in regular conversation when referring to them. In 1962, in an effort to persuade Robinson to return to Paris—where he was still a national hero—the French promised to bring over his masseur, his hairdresser, a man who would whistle while he trained, and his trademark Cadillac. This larger-than-life persona made him the idol of millions of African American youths in the 1950s. Robinson inspired several other fighters who took the nickname "Sugar" in homage to him: Sugar Ray Leonard, Sugar Shane Mosley, and MMA fighter "Suga" Rashad Evans. ## Professional boxing record ## See also - List of welterweight boxing champions - List of middleweight boxing champions - The Ring pound for pound

Who Am I (Casting Crowns song)

"Who Am I" is a song recorded by Christian rock band Casting Crowns. Written by Mark Hall and produced by Mark A. Miller and Steven Curtis Chapman, it was released on February 22, 2004, as the second single from the band's 2003 self-titled debut album. A pop rock and adult contemporary ballad, the song is based around the piano and utilizes orchestral sounds. Lyrically, the song is centered on worshiping God. The song received positive reviews from music critics upon its release, with several regarding it as one of the best songs on their debut album. "Who Am I" received the awards for Song of the Year and Pop/Contemporary Recorded Song of the Year at the 36th GMA Dove Awards, and it was also nominated for Worship Song of the Year. It achieved success on Christian radio, topping the Billboard Hot Christian Songs and Hot Christian AC charts as well as simultaneously peaking atop the Radio & Records Christian AC, Christian CHR, and INSPO charts. It has been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), signifying sales of over 500,000 digital downloads. Casting Crowns has performed the song in concert as well as at special events, and re-recorded the song in 2013 for their acoustic album The Acoustic Sessions: Volume One. ## Background and composition According to Casting Crowns' lead singer Mark Hall, the idea for "Who Am I" came while he was driving home with his wife and children one night. Hall, who was having personal worship time during the drive, recounts that he wondered "Who am I to think I can just call up to God whenever I want, from the middle of nowhere, and expect Him to hear me?" Hall says "immediately I started thinking I'm a new creation, I'm more than a conqueror... I'm [also] grass, that is rises up and is gone in a day". In an interview, he commented that "me being a conqueror is true, but at the same time I need to understand that my life is a vapor, and me being able to even pray to [God] is because of what he's done for me". "Who Am I" was produced by Mark A. Miller and Steven Curtis Chapman. It was recorded and mixed at Zoo Studio in Franklin, Tennessee by Sam Hewitt, with additional recording conducted by Matt Goldman at Glow In The Dark Studio in Decatur, Georgia. The song's strings were arranged by Jonathan Yudkin and performed by Yudkin and Bernie Herms. "Who Am I" is a song with a length of five minutes and 35 seconds. According to the sheet music published by Musicnotes.com, it is in set common time in the key of B major and has a tempo of 66 beats per minute. Mark Hall's vocal range in the song spans from the low note of G₃ to the high note of F₃. "Who Am I" has been described as a pop rock and adult contemporary ballad. Based around the piano and featuring orchestral sounds, it begins slowly before building up into a musical crescendo. Lyrically, the song is centered in praising God, relating a theme of nothingness without Christ. ## Reception "Who Am I" received mostly positive reviews from music critics. Andy Argyrakis of CCM Magazine described the song as a "standout" from the album. Tom Lennie of Cross Rhythms noted it as one of the best songs from their debut album. In 2007, Andree Farias of Christianity Today described it as one of the many Casting Crowns songs that have become "beloved anthems of the Christian faith". In 2013, Roger Gelwicks described it as an "AC radio favorite" but felt it was "dated". At the 36th GMA Dove Awards, "Who Am I" won the awards for Song of the Year and Pop/Contemporary Recorded Song of the Year; It was also nominated for Worship Song of the Year. "Who Am I" was released to Christian adult contemporary, Christian CHR, and Soft AC/Inspirational radio on January 22, 2004 as the second single from the band's debut album. It spent six weeks atop the Billboard Christian Songs songs chart and two weeks atop the Hot Christian AC chart. It also simultaneously topped the Radio & Records Christian AC, Christian CHR, and INSPO charts. It was certified Gold on July 26, 2011, and Platinum on January 10, 2018, by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) signifying equivalent sales of 500,000 and 1,000,000 units respectively. ## Live performances and other uses On October 5, 2003 at the band's church in Atlanta, Casting Crowns performed "Who Am I". This performance was included on their 2004 live album Live from Atlanta. The band performed the song on May 6, 2004 at the Nationally Broadcast Concert of Prayer event, held at Daytona International Speedway in front of nearly 10,000 people; the band's performance, along with the rest of those participating in the three-hour event, was simulcast nationally on television, radio, and the internet. The band performed the song on October 27, 2004 at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit, Michigan as part of a Bush-Cheney '04 campaign rally. The event was attended by around 20,000 people. At a concert at the Giant Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania held on April 1, 2005, Casting Crowns performed it as the third song on their set list. On July 10, 2005 at a concert at Seaholm High School in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Casting Crowns performed it as their third song in their set list. At a concert at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, Casting Crowns performed an acoustic version of the song. At a concert on November 12, 2005 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania's Stabler Arena, Casting Crowns performed the song as the thirteenth song in their set. The band performed the song at a February 5, 2010 concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2009, the band was invited to perform in North Korea at the 2009 Spring Friendship Art Festival; the band's set list at the festival included a Korean-language version of "Who Am I". "Who Am I" was included on the 2004 compilation album WOW Hits 2005, the 2006 compilation album WOW Worship: Aqua, and the 2008 compilation album WOW Essentials, as well as the band's 2004 live album Live from Atlanta. The band re-recorded the song for their 2013 acoustic album The Acoustic Sessions: Volume One; unlike the original, which featured Mark Hall on lead vocals, the acoustic version features Megan Garrett on lead vocals. ## Credits and personnel Credits are taken from AllMusic. Casting Crowns - Hector Cervantes – guitar - Juan DeVevo – guitar - Melodee DeVevo – violin - Hector Cervantes – piano, keyboards - Mark Hall – vocals - Chris Huffman – bass guitar - Andy Williams – drums Additional musicians - Rob Graves – guitar - Bernie Herms – strings - Chris Mosher – keyboards, string arrangement - Jonathan Yudkin – string arrangement, strings Technical - Steve Bishir – mixing engineer - Steven Curtis Chapman – producer - Matt Goldman – engineer - Terry Hemmings – executive producer - Sam Hewitt – engineer, mixing engineer - Mark A. Miller – producer - Chris Mosher – programming ## Charts ### Weekly charts ### Decade-end charts ## Certifications ## Release and radio history

Frome

Town in Somerset, England

Frome (/ˈfruːm/ FROOM) is a town and civil parish in eastern Somerset, England. The town is built on uneven high ground at the eastern end of the Mendip Hills, and centres on the River Frome. The town, about 13 miles (21 km) south of Bath, is part of the parliamentary constituency of Somerton and Frome. The population was 28,559 in 2021. Frome was one of the largest towns in Somerset until the Industrial Revolution, and was larger than Bath from AD 950 until 1650. The town first grew due to the wool and cloth industry; it later diversified into metal-working and printing, although these have declined. The town was enlarged during the 20th century but retains a large number of listed buildings, and most of the centre falls within a conservation area. The town has road and rail transport links and acts as an economic centre for the surrounding area. It provides a centre for cultural and sporting activities, including the annual Frome Festival and Frome Museum. In 2014, Frome was named by The Times the "sixth coolest town" in Britain. It was shortlisted as one of three towns in the country for the 2016 Urbanism Awards in the 'Great Town Award' category. In its 2018 and 2021 report on the "Best places to live in the UK", The Sunday Times listed Frome as the best in the South West. In April 2019, Time Out listed Frome among 15 of the best weekend breaks from London. ## History ### Prehistoric Finds from Whatley Quarry near Mells suggest the presence of late Pleistocene man. Neolithic bowl barrows have been located in nearby Trudoxhill. At Murtry Hill, just 3 km to the north-west of Frome, a Neolithic long barrow 35m long by 19m wide was located with substantial upright stones (Orchardleigh Stones), a 'chest' burial and cremation urns. Within Frome itself, another long barrow was found, with skeletons, pottery and a standing stone; its structure seemed similar to the Long Kennet barrow. Others from the Bronze Age have been identified in Berkley to the north-east and near Nunney to the south-west. Iron Age hill forts lie to the west (Kingsdown, Tedbury and Wadbury) and to the east (Cley Hill and Roddenberry). ### Roman There is some limited evidence of Roman settlement in the area. The remains of a villa were found in the village of Whatley, 3 miles (5 km) to the west of Frome. Another villa is suggested at Selwood. Southill House in Cranmore, 10 miles southwest, has evidence of a villa with a hypocaust. Two villas have been surveyed in the Hemington area, 3 miles (5 km) to the north-west of Frome, alongside other sites, ditches and boundaries. Iron Age forts in the area (recorded above) were re-occupied by the Roman military: Kingsdown and Tedbury. A Roman road ran from the west of the Mendips passing south of Frome en route to Old Sarum (Salisbury) and Clausentum (Southampton) or to Moriconium (Hamworthy near Poole), probably for the export of lead and silver from mines in the Mendips. Part of a Romano-British sculpted head and part of a Roman road surface were found near Clink, Frome: possibly linked to a Roman road running south from Aquae Sulis (Bath), but this has been traced only as far as Oldford Farm, Selwood, just 2 miles (3 km) north of Frome. Just to the southeast is Friggle Street, suggestive of a Roman road. In April 2010, the Frome Hoard, one of the largest hoards of Roman coins discovered in Britain, was found in a field near the town by a metal detectorist; the 52,500 coins dating from the third century AD were in a jar 14 inches (36 cm) below the surface. The coins were excavated by archaeologists from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and some are now on display in the British Museum. The find was the subject of a BBC TV programme Digging for Britain in August 2010. A further 250 Dubonnic coins had been found in an urn when ploughing near Nunney in 1860; they included those of Claudius who began the conquest of Britain. Other coins continue to be found in this neighbourhood, both Roman and Byzantine. ### Toponymy of 'Frome' The name Frome comes from the Proto-Brythonic word \*frāmā (Modern Welsh ffraw), itself from Proto-Celtic \*srōm- meaning fair, fine or brisk and describing the flow of the river. In 2019 the BBC ranked Frome as, among places in the UK, having the most difficult name to pronounce. A church built by St. Aldhelm in 685 is the earliest evidence of Saxon occupation of Frome. Aldhelm was a member of the Wessex royal family, cousin to King Cenwealh. The name was first recorded in 701 when Pope Sergius gave permission to Bishop Aldhelm to found a monastery "close to the river which is called From" (Latin: "juxta fluvium qui vocatur From"). The Saxon kings appear to have used Frome as a base from which to hunt in Selwood Forest. In 934 a witenagemot was held there, indicating that Frome must already have been a significant settlement, with even a royal palace. The charter names a Welsh sub-king, sixteen bishops and twenty five ministers, all called by Æthelstan, now regarded as the first king of England. Æthelstan's half-brother, King Eadred (son of Edward the Elder), died in Frome on 23 November 955. ### Medieval At the time of the Domesday Survey, the manor was owned by King William, and was the principal settlement of the largest and wealthiest hundred in Somerset. Over the following years, parts of the original manor were spun off as distinct manors; for example, one was owned by the minster, later passing to the Abbey at Cirencester, which others were leased by the Crown to important families. By the 13th century, the Abbey had bought up some of the other manors (although it did let them out again) and was exploiting the profits from market and trade in the town. Local tradition asserts that Frome was a medieval borough, and the reeve of Frome is occasionally mentioned in documents after the reign of Edward I, but there is no direct evidence that Frome was a borough and no trace of any charter granted to it. However, the Kyre Park Charters of Edward's reign note a Hugh, lord of Parva (or little) Frome, as well as other witnesses. Additionally, Henry VII granted a charter to Edmund Leversedge, then lord of the manor, giving him the right to hold fairs on 22 July and 21 September. The parish was part of the hundred of Frome. Hales Castle was built, probably in the years immediately after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The circular ringwork is 120 feet (37 m) in diameter and stands on the northern slope of Roddenbury Hill, close to the Iron Age Roddenbury Hillfort, to the south-east of Frome. It comprises banks and outer ditches and has an unfinished bailey. At a similar distance to the south-west of Frome stands Nunney Castle, "aesthetically the most impressive castle in Somerset," built from 1373 onwards, surrounded by a moat. In 1369 there is a record of 'three tuns of woad' being purchased by Thomas Bakere of Frome, probably from France. Such a large quantity of the blue dye suggests a well-established trade for local dyers and clothiers. A 1392 survey of the town mentions tentergrounds: fields of racks for drying the cloth and five fulling mills. Where originally wool was exported to Flanders and Italy, more was increasingly retained at home for the production of cloth. Woolens such as broadcloth and the lighter kersey became primary products for the area. Surnames such as Webbe (weaver) or Tayllor appear in the early 14th century and there are explicit references to cloth makers in 1475. By 1470 Somerset was the largest producer after Suffolk, making most of the undyed white broadcloths. The industry had become the town's principal base of employment. On 12 April 1477, a widow, Ankarette Twynyho was taken from the manor house known locally as the Old Nunnery in Lower Keyford, accused by George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence of the murder of Isabel Neville, Duchess of Clarence, who had died in 1476, probably of childbed-fever after birth of a short-lived son. At Warwick, she was charged with "having.....given the Duchess Isabel 'a venomous drink of ale mixed with poison' of which the Duchess has sickened from 10th October to Christmas, when she died. Ankarette protested her innocence, but a packed jury condemned her. She was sentenced and drawn to the gallows.....and hanged all within three hours." Clarence himself was imprisoned in the Tower shortly afterwards and was executed for treason early in 1478. Ankarette's grandson Roger Twynyho received from Edward IV a full posthumous pardon for Ankarette. The petition he submitted to the king later that year describes fully the circumstances of the case, well illustrating the quasi-kingly high-handedness of Clarence. ### Monmouth Rebellion On King Charles II's death in February 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, his illegitimate son led the Monmouth Rebellion, landing with three ships at Lyme Regis in Dorset in early June 1685 in an attempt to take the throne from his Catholic uncle, James II. On 25 June 1685, Robert Smith, the constable of Frome declared Monmouth was King in Frome's marketplace, "as confidently as if he had the crown on his head". Frome was the first locality in England to declare for him. On 28 June, the forces of Monmouth camped in Frome, following their defeat in a skirmish with the King's forces at Norton St Philip, arriving at 4 o'clock in the morning "very wett and weary". Monmouth is reputed to have stayed in a gabled house in Cork Street, now named the Monmouth Chambers. Whatever discipline he had over his troops vanished as he dallied in Frome, unsure what to do. He left on 30 June for Shepton Mallett. At the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July, he was defeated. Captured on 8 July, he was taken to the Tower of London and executed on 15 July on Tower Hill by Jack Ketch. At the subsequent 'Bloody Assizes' more than 500 rebels were brought in front of the court; out of these, 144 were hanged, drawn and quartered, their remains displayed across the country so that people understood the fate of those who rebelled against the king. The other rebels were subjected to transportation to America. In all, 50 Frome men were convicted. 12 men, none of them from Frome, were hanged in the town at Gibbet Hill, Gorehedge. ### Rise and fall of the cloth trade The manufacture of woollen cloth was established as the town's principal industry in the 15th century. In 1542 during one of his itineraries to observe historic English and Welsh landscapes, Leland described Frome as a town that "hathe a metley good market" and "dyvers fayre stone howsys in the towne that stand y the moste by clothinge". He went on to mention what seems to be Spring Gardens where the Mells River meets the River Frome: clothiers' buildings and fulling mills: "I cam to a botome, where an other broke ran in to Frome. And in this botome dwell certayne good clothiuars havynge fayre howsys and tukkynge myles." Frome remained the only Somerset town in which this staple industry flourished. By the end of 1500s the population was around 3,000. The trade declined but then revived again as various clothiers changed their products and expanded their business. The population doubled in size by the mid-1600s, though wages remained low for both weavers and spinners. From 1665 to 1725 further major expansion occurred, including the building of a new artisans' suburb, now known as the Trinity area, one of the earliest purpose built industrial housing in the country. The River provided power for a range of mills along its length, dyewood grinding, fulling, dyeing: 10 or more within 2 km of the town. Families of clothiers gradually came to be the principal landowners in the town, with the manor of Frome itself finally passing into the ownership of a cloth merchant in 1714. In the mid-1720s Daniel Defoe estimated that "Frome is now reckoned to have more people in it, than the city of Bath, and some say, than even Salisbury itself...... likely to be one of the greatest and wealthiest inland towns in England". Poverty, the decline of the wool industry in the mid-18th century, increased industrialisation, and rising food prices led to some unrest amongst the inhabitants of Frome, and there were riots during the century. By 1791, the town was described in less flattering terms than those Defoe had used 50 years earlier. A survey of 1785 listed these occupations: "47 clothiers. 5 dyers, 12 fellmongers, 3 woolstaplers, 54 spinsters, 6 fullers, 146 shearmen, 141 scribblers, 220 weavers, 5 handle setters, 8 twisters, 4 spinning jenny men, for a total of 651 and for the ancillary card making industry 5 cardboard makers, 59 card makers and 23 wire drawers." These occupations of the cloth trade formed almost half of the heads of household in the town. The Sheppard family, settled in Frome since 1558, became dominant, building new factories, purchasing land and properties, being the first to bring in machinery; the establishment of turnpike roads improved access to markets home and abroad. Scribbling (rough carding), carding, spinning and fly shuttle weaving all became mechanised. There were several public disturbances throughout this period. In 1754 a mob of Mendip colliers together with destitute people from Frome protested against the rising cost of flour. A mill and its contents were burned down, others severely damaged. Rioters extorted money from mill owners. Four men were killed when an assault was made on another mill barricaded by the owner and three soldiers. In 1766 a miller in Beckington defended himself against a mob of 2000, firing upon them, wounding some; all of his wheat and flour were seized and fires lit. In 1767, 500 local shearmen assembled and broke up a newly installed spinning jenny in a mill close to Frome. Among many actions across Somerset and Wiltshire, spinning jennies were smashed in a mill by a mob in 1781. In 1796 a body of Mendip colliers entered the town armed with bludgeons to force local millers to reduce their bread prices. The Constable called for dragoons stationed in the town and they themselves were assaulted. Sabres were drawn and the mob dispersed, bloodied but without fatalities. Afterwards the constable was threatened with arson and murder. At a time of rising unemployment, the price of potatoes provoked a riot in Frome in 1816. Magistrates read the Riot Act and suppressed the trouble with local militia and dragoons, preventing an attack on a Sheppard factory. By 1800 the population had increased beyond 12,000. There was a brief boost to the trade from the Napoleonic Wars, Frome supplying blue uniform cloth: 160 miles a year in 1801. As mechanisation increased, fewer skills were required; wages fell along with living conditions. Dyeing ceased. Steam engines replaced water mills. By 1826 the parish established a blanket factory to employ the poor. A lack of investment locally meant the nation chose to buy the cheaper and lighter cloth produced elsewhere. Many mills closed as the trade steadily declined. Tucker's at Wallbridge, the last fabric mill of 'The Finest West of England Cloth', closed in 1965. ### To the present day In the early 19th century, plans were developed to reinvigorate the town and once again elevate it to its former position as a more important town than Bath. These plans, the idea of Thomas Bunn, a man of independent means inherited from his father, mostly failed to come to fruition, although some public buildings were erected and a wide new approach road to the town centre from the south was cut (named Bath Street after the landowner, Lord Bath of Longleat House). Whilst wool remained an important part of the town's economy into the 19th (and even 20th) centuries, other industries were established in the town. A bell-foundry started in 1684 by William Cockey grew to be a major producer of components for the developing gas industry and employer of 800 people, as a new enterprise of his descendant, Edward Cockey The J W Singer brass foundry and bronze-casting works, was a major employer and produced bronze statues. John Webb Singer was born in Frome and established his art metal work foundry in 1851. They made brass ornaments for local churches and became known through the Oxford Movement within the Church of England which led to increasing demand for church ornaments. In addition to church ornaments the firm developed new facilities, opened as the Frome Art Metalworks in 1866, and then the expertise to create large statues. One of the first statues cast in 1889 was that of General Gordon riding a camel. The firm was responsible for the bronze statue of Boudica with her daughters in her war chariot (furnished with scythes after the Persian fashion), which was commissioned by Prince Albert and executed by Thomas Thornycroft. It was unveiled in 1902, 17 years after Thornycroft's death, and now stands next to Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, London. The statue of Lady Justice on the dome above the Old Bailey was executed by the British sculptor, F. W. Pomeroy and cast by Singers. The statue of Alfred the Great at Winchester was a further commission. The statues from Singers have been exported around the world. Printing was another major industry, with the Butler and Tanner printworks being set up in the middle of the century. Brewing was another source of employment. Utility services came quite early in Frome with Cockey setting up a gas facility in Welshpool in 1831. Water was available from springs; the principal source was from a fountain at the foot of Church Steps, fed by stream that flowed under the graveyard. It was not until 1880, after a local company failed to deliver, that local government stepped in and opened a Water Works with a piped supply system. A sewage farm was not installed until 1885. It was 1903 before mains electricity was introduced into the town. In World War I a large number of men from Frome and the surrounding villages enlisted. The Somerset Infantry was the primary recruiter; other county regiments from around Somerset took in many others. Some born in Frome joined up in the country they had emigrated to: Australia and Canada. The Royal Navy, the Royal Flying Corps, the British Red Cross and the Royal Army Medical Corps all took in volunteers and conscripts, as did multiple different regiments from across the UK. Over 450 lives, ranging from a brigadier-general to scores of privates and able seamen, were lost in the conflict, now recorded on memorials throughout the area and elsewhere. A record of more than 140 local survivors of WWI has been published. These survivors included Charlie Robbins who was the model for the bronze statue forged by the Singer company which now stands as the memorial for the fallen of Frome. The population fell and in the 1930s it was slightly smaller than it had been in the mid 19th century. Other industries such as printing, light engineering, metal casting, carpeting and dairying continued, many taking old premises from the cloth mills and others being sited at the new Marston Road Trading Estate which led to growth after World War II, including the construction of council houses. ## Governance and public services ### Local government Prior to 1 April 2023, when the town became part of the new unitary authority of Somerset, the town elected three members to the former Somerset County Council, each from a separate county division. At the last election in May 2017, the Green Party won in two divisions (East and West) and the Conservatives won Frome North. Prior to 1974, Frome was administered by Frome Urban District. Frome had eleven councillors on Mendip District Council, two from each of the town council wards except for Oakfield, which elected one. After the 2019 elections, five were Liberal Democrats, four for The Green Party, one for the Conservatives and one elected as an Independent. The civil parish of Frome has adopted the style of a town, and there is a Town Council of 17 members. Councillors are elected by eight wards: three each for Berkley Down, college and Keyford wards, two each for Market, Oakfield and Park wards, and one each for the Highpoint and Innox wards. In May 2019 all 17 council members elected were members of the Independents for Frome party (ifF). #### Initiatives In early 2015, the UK's first high street library of things was set up in the town. In one year (May 2018 to April 2019), use of the shop helped avoid 92 tonnes CO2e of greenhouse gas emissions, saved 117,000 kg of material usage and avoided 10 tonnes of manufacturing waste. In the same period its members collectively saved £66,800 by borrowing instead of buying items. The Town Council installed the first community fridge in the country in May 2016; 90,000 items a year have been saved from landfill. This was joined by a community larder in October 2017. On 13 December 2017 the Town Council unanimously agreed to become a 'single-use plastic'-free council. Frome has an online market, the Food Hub launched in November 2018, where sustainable supplies from local farmers and food producers can be sourced, either for collection or by delivery (central Frome only). There are a number of public green spaces within the town, both formal and informal; some are substantial such as the Victoria Park or the Rodden Meadow; others may be smaller but are valued within their neighbourhoods, such as Weylands or the Dippy. Many of the public spaces have organised litter picks, arranged by local community groups. ### Parliament The town was not represented in Parliament until given one member in the House of Commons by the Reform Act of 1832. The constituency elected a female MP in 1934: Mavis Tate. Separate representation was abolished for the 1950 general election, with Frome itself being transferred to the Wells division, whilst most of the remainder of the constituency formed the bulk of the new Somerset North constituency. Further changes took place for the 1983 general election when the current Somerton and Frome constituency was created. The seat has been held by Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) David Warburton since 2015. At the 2017 general election, with an improved turnout of 75.7%, Warburton increased his share of the vote to 56.7%. #### Reform Act violence Frome was given the right to elect its own member of Parliament, one of 67 new constituencies, by the Reform Act 1832. This Act removed rotten boroughs like Old Sarum (with three houses and seven voters to elect two MPs) and included for the first time new electors such as small landowners, tenant farmers and shopkeepers; voters were defined as male persons, so women were formally excluded. The election was disputed by two well-known local men: Sir Thomas Champneys and Thomas Sheppard, a Tory and a Radical or Whig respectively. There was no serious trouble until the election itself. The two were personal enemies, with a long history of property dealings between their families over 180 years. Champneys, the second baronet, may have been popular but he was disreputable, his Orchardleigh Estate in decline and in debt. In 1820 Sheppard had been a key witness when Sir Thomas was accused of sodomy; the case was not proven. Voting at that time was in person in public, the hustings taking place in Cork Street just off the Market Place. The Frome county constituency area included Weston, Radstock, Bathampton, Batheaston as well as freeholders in Bath; there were only 322 registered voters. On the first day, 10 December, Champneys arrived with hundreds of men and boys, many armed with lead-loaded bludgeons and cudgels. They attacked Sheppard's supporters. Thomas Bunn, a local man of property, recollected what he saw: > When I went to vote for a member for the county the mob arranged themselves on each side of a long street, to pelt all who did not approve their favourite candidates. I ... disdained to put a printed paper in front of my hat, to shew them for whom I should vote. ... I was pelted going and returning from the hustings and the missiles struck me on the back part of my head. Sheppard arrived, backed by 500 men, all said to be unarmed. > I was to nominate one of the candidates. I entered the town with him in a barouche and four, with a long procession of well dressed men, flags, and a band of musicians. I was surprised at the Market Place to see a rank of horsemen in hostile array. ... The flag was torn to pieces... The candidate and his friends ... had literally their coats torn to atoms. ... All this was instigated by the opposing candidate, a well known character with whom no gentlemen would associate. A Sheppard supporter, Thomas Ford was badly injured and died later. Special constables were sworn in by the magistrates in the George Inn. The mob besieged the building and smashed the windows. Sheppard retreated to his home, Fromefield House, guarded by 300 men. Dragoons were brought from Trowbridge to neighbouring Beckington. Early on the second day, Sheppard had gained 163 votes, more than half of those entitled to vote. Shouting 'Champneys for ever', the opponents attacked the Crown Inn trying to get at Sheppard in the George Inn next door. A draper's house was completely destroyed. Several constables were stoned and injured. The Riot Act was read. Constables with carbines opened fire. At 3 in the afternoon the Dragoons arrived and the battle was halted. Having won 100 votes to Sheppard's 163, Champneys resigned and returned to Orchardleigh. Thomas Sheppard won the next three elections and remained Frome's MP until 1847. One notable successor of Sheppard was elected in 1868: Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, as a Liberal under Gladstone. ## Healthcare The town has a National Health Service community hospital, originally operated by Somerset Primary Care Trust, located on the site of the former Showground at Fromefield. The new hospital was opened in 2008, replacing the former Frome Victoria Hospital in Park Road which had been in use since 1901. The nearest general hospital is the Royal United Hospital in Bath. Compassionate Frome is a programme to combat loneliness amongst residents, pioneered by a local GP, Helen Kingston, in 2013. It proved very successful and reduced emergency hospital admissions by 17% over three years when in the rest of the county they rose by 29%, even though demographics were similar. "There are no other interventions which have ever reduced population emergency admissions like this", said one doctor. The programme's success has been credited in part with attracting an influx of middle-class newcomers to the town. Frome is "at the vanguard" of a growing movement to better incorporate nonclinical solutions into medical care, according to one doctor. Since 2016 there has been an effort to role out the scheme across the entire Mendip area. ## Geography The town rests on Forest Marble which dates back to the Middle Jurassic, and has been used for local building. The area surrounding the town is Cornbrash, Oxford Clay and Greensand. Frome is unevenly built on high ground above the River Frome, which is crossed by a bridge in the town centre. The town centre is approximately 65 metres (213 ft) above sea-level, whilst the outer parts of the town are between 90 metres (295 ft) and 135 metres (443 ft) above sea-level. The main areas of the town are (approximately clockwise from the north-west): Innox Hill, Welshmill, Packsaddle, Fromefield, Stonebridge, Clink, Berkley Down, Easthill, Wallbridge, The Mount, Keyford and Lower Keyford, Marston Gate, The Butts, Critchill, Trinity, and Gould's Ground. When Frome was founded in the 7th century AD, it lay in the centre of the Selwood Forest, Saxon Sealhwudu or 'Sallow Wood', also known as Coit Mawr, Great Wood, by the Welsh. It stretched from Gillingham in Dorset to Chippenham in Wiltshire, from Bruton to Warminster. It served as a boundary between Anglo-Saxon Wessex and the British kingdom of Dumnonia in the west. In 1086 it became a royal forest. Gradually deforestation took place. Frome was often called Frome Selwood. Today the nearby countryside is still richly wooded, for example on the Longleat, Maiden Bradley and Stourhead estates. Around the town the land is predominantly agricultural, with arable cropping, dairy farming and orchards. To the west of the town, on the edge of the Mendip Hills, there are large active limestone quarries, such as Whatley Quarry and Torr Works, formerly known as Merehead, along with disused quarries. Whatley Quarry is served by a dedicated railway line which branches off the main line at Frome, passes through the town centre and out through the Welshmill and Spring Gardens areas in the north-west quadrant of the town. Along with the rest of South West England, Frome has a temperate climate which is generally wetter and milder than the rest of England. The annual mean temperature is about 10 °C (50 °F) with seasonal and diurnal variations, but due to the modifying effect of the sea, the range is less than in most other parts of the United Kingdom. January is the coldest month with mean minimum temperatures between 1 °C (34 °F) and 2 °C (36 °F). July and August are the warmest months in the region with mean daily maxima around 21 °C (70 °F). In general, December is the dullest month and June the sunniest. The south west of England enjoys a favoured location, particularly in summer, when the Azores High extends its influence north-eastwards towards the UK. Cloud often forms inland, especially near hills, and reduces exposure to sunshine. The average annual sunshine totals around 1600 hours. Rainfall tends to be associated with Atlantic depressions or with convection. In summer, convection caused by solar surface heating sometimes forms shower clouds and a large proportion of the annual precipitation falls from showers and thunderstorms at this time of year. Average rainfall is around 800–900 mm (31–35 in). About 8–15 days of snowfall is typical. November to March have the highest mean wind speeds, with June to August having the lightest. The predominant wind direction is from the south west. ## Demography The population of Frome was 12,240 in the 1831 census, however it then declined to 11,057 in 1901 and remained between 11,000 and 12,000 until the 1970s. Since then, it has increased, nearly doubling to over 23,000 in 1991. In the 2011 census, the population was 26,203, comprising 11,863 (48.4%) males and 12,647 (51.6%) females. 7,674 (31.3%) residents were aged 16 or below, 13,150 (63.3%) between 16 and 65, and 3,686 (15.0%) aged 65 or over. In the 2001 census of the population aged between 16 and 74, 11,580 (67%) were in employment, with only 513 (3%) unemployed (the remainder being otherwise economically inactive). About 68% of those in employment were in service industries, with the remainder in manufacturing. 4,323 people were employed in managerial or professional occupations, 1,362 were self-employed, and 4,635 in routine and semi-routine occupations. 10,198 households were recorded in the town, of which 7,679 (75%) were owner-occupied, 981 (10%) rented from private landlords, and 1,538 (15%) rented from the local authority or other social landlord. 10,122 (99.3%) heads of households were white. ## Economy The metal-working and printing industries which replaced wool as Frome's main industry have declined but not left the town. Singers still has a presence in the town, as does Butler and Tanner, although the latter (now named Butler Tanner and Dennis following a take-over) hit major financial difficulties in 2008, and made two-thirds of its workforce redundant. Almost half of the economically active population of Frome commute to work outside the town (in Bath, Bristol, Warminster, Westbury or further afield). About 2,700 people commute into the town. A substantial part of the workforce has no formal qualifications and is poorly skilled, leaving them vulnerable to a decline in manufacturing work. There is no major local government employment in the town, and the principal public sector employers are the primary care trust and the schools. Frome town centre contains a considerable number of independent shops, and a few chain stores. Retail is primarily aimed at serving the local population's requirements for food (there are two large supermarkets on opposite edges of the town, and three smaller supermarkets in the town centre), basic clothing, health and beauty, DIY and some electrical goods. However studies show that only about a quarter of the town's population do their non-food shopping in the town. Banks and building societies have branches in the town centre. Markets are held on Wednesdays and Saturdays in the town centre: some in the Market Yard car park, and others in the former agricultural warehouse, the Cheese and Grain. From March to December, on the first Sunday of each Monday, a street market known as 'The Independent' is held. Attended by an average of 10,000 people, the main street is closed to traffic; it is filled with stalls that extend up Stony Street and St Catherine's Hill and to the main car park. Antiques, artisan wares, food and drink, designer & vintage clothing, plants fill the 150+ stalls. The Saturday cattle market was moved from the centre of the town to nearby Standerwick in the 1980s. In 2003, Frome was granted Fairtrade Town status. A Vision for Frome 2008–2028 has been developed following a consultation with local people in the spring of 2008 which received over 3,000 responses. Mendip District Council and Mendip Strategic Partnership have consulted on a Community Strategy and Local Development Framework for the period to 2026 which includes building 2,500–2,600 new homes, providing more employment and office space, developing a new secondary school and two new primary schools, remodelling the town centre and encouraging a wider range of retailers and leisure providers into the town. There have been a number of significant housing developments within Frome, many on former industrial sites, and these are continuing with plans for the redevelopment of a site at Saxonvale and Garsdale to include several hundred dwellings, shops and a 'cultural quarter' containing workshops for artists. In August 2018 Mendip District Council purchased two areas of Saxonvale, neglected for over twenty years. Combining this with land belonging to Frome Town Council, a new regeneration plan has been drawn up, now under public consultation. ## Culture Frome has a vibrant arts scene. The high-point is the annual ten-day Frome Festival in July, which in recent years has included more than 160 events held at various venues in and around the town. The town is host to a number of artists, many of whom open their studios to the public during the Festival. The event includes a Children's Festival. There are a variety of cultural & community events that have become regular features of the town's life throughout the year: the Window Wonderland (early March), Frome Busks (late March), Apple Day (21 October), Fireworks (November) and Light the Night: lanterns and the Christmas Lights switch-on (late November). The Carnival (September) is part of the Wessex Grand Prix circuit of the West Country Carnival. A national Town Crier festival is held each year in June; for the third year running, it is the largest such festival in Britain, hosting 25 town criers. There are two theatres in Frome: The Memorial Theatre was built in 1924 in memory of the fallen of the World War I, while the 240-seat Merlin Theatre is part of the Frome Community College campus. Frome is home to Somerset's first and only pub theatre: Nevertheless, Productions, which promotes new drama in small venues around the town. The Cheese and Grain, a former farm produce warehouse which was converted into a market and concert hall in 1997, has a capacity of up to 800 and hosts regular pop concerts. Locally based musicians include American saxophonist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis and Irish folk singer Cara Dillon as well as hardcore punk bands More Than Life, Ghost of the Avalanche and Landscapes. On Friday, 24 February 2017, the Foo Fighters played a secret intimate show at the Cheese and Grain venue to announce their Glastonbury 2017 Pyramid Stage headlining slot on the Saturday night of the festival. Frome's only cinema, the Westway, is in Cork Street in the town centre, which closed in March 2016 and re-opened February 2017, after changing hands and undergoing extensive refurbishment. A fire at the cinema in October 2016 was thought to have been started deliberately. There is an arts centre, The Black Swan, within which the information point for Discover Frome is based. The Frome & District Agricultural Society holds an annual Agricultural & Cheese Show in September. This was formerly held on the Showground at Fromefield, but in recent years has moved to West Woodland, 2 miles (3.2 km) to the south of the town. Early markets were known as cheese fairs; the Agricultural Society was formed in 1861 and held its first fair. In 1875 the creation of the Market Hall (now the Cheese and Grain) and of a railway siding into the Cattle Market (now the main car park) established Frome as a cheese town – one sale alone recorded 281⁄2 tons of Cheddar. The Frome Society for Local Study was founded in 1958 to make the history of Frome and the district better known, and to preserve its historic buildings and records; there is an annual programme of winter lectures and summer visits to places of interest as well as a wide range of research, donations, and publications. It has funded plaques across the town, to mark significant buildings and prominent persons. The Frome Museum has a particular important collection of artefacts from Singer's bronze foundry and houses a rolling display of local history including a Cockey lamp and shop contents. The library and archive is open to researchers by appointment throughout the year. Frome is served by two newspapers, the Frome & Somerset Standard and the Frome Times, the latter now has the third largest circulation in the county. In 2008, a 'not for profit' company called Frome Community Productions was formed by members of the community in order to develop and deliver FromeFM, an internet based community radio station. The station broadcasts 24 hours per day and is completely staffed by volunteers who produce features, interviews and music shows. In 2009, FromeFM commenced a service to stream the broadcasts to mobile phones. In late 2011 FromeFM was granted a broadcast licence and on 16 July 2012 began broadcast on 96.6FM in the Frome area. FromeTV, was another 'non-profit' organisation running an online TV station. Frome is home to the Frome Writers Collective – a not for profit organization. Its patron is Barry Cunningham OBE. Frome's Cheap Street is a location in episode six of the first series of BBC TV comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Frome has provided the backdrop to historical dramas, such as Poldark, broadcast in 2016 which has regular scenes shot in Gentle Street, with a further shoot in December 2018 and Drover's Gold, filmed by BBC Wales in 1996. Catherine Hill, in the town centre, was the setting for the 2016 short film Lucky Chicken by Gulliver Moore which is available on YouTube. Aside from a thriving café culture, there is a wide range of restaurants in Frome. A selection includes the Archangel, formerly the Angel, the oldest inn in the town, which has an eclectic menu, as do the Fat Radish or the Stony Street House; others include menus that are French (Bistro Lotte), Thai (Thai Kitchen), vegetarian (Garden Café), vegan (The Good Heart), vegan friendly (Nook), Mediterranean (The High Pavement), Italian (Castello), even a tiny Southern Indian take-away (Lungi Babas). ## Landmarks The older parts of Frome – for example, around Sheppard's Barton and Catherine Hill – are picturesque, containing an outstanding collection of small late-17th- and 18th-century houses. The Trinity area, which was built in the latter half of the 17th century and first half of the 18th, is a fine (and rare) example of early industrial housing. More than 300 houses were built between 1660 and 1756 in an unusual early example of a planned grid pattern. Although about half the area was demolished in the 1960s under a Slum Clearance Order, before its historical importance was realised; the remainder was saved and was restored at a cost of £4 million between 1980 and 1984. In this area is the elaborate former Selwood Printing Works. Stony Street, which leads into Catherine Hill, is a steep, cobbled road climbing out of the town centre. In the centre of the town, Cheap Street contains buildings dating to the 16th and 17th centuries and has a stream running down the middle fed by the spring at St John's Church. Cheap Street has never been used for vehicular traffic and its layout is based on land plots dating to approximately 1500. Despite a fire in 1923 the buildings have remained substantially unchanged since 1830, apart from shop-frontages. The bridge in the centre of the town over the River Frome was rebuilt and widened in 1821, at which time a terrace of houses was built along one side of it. It is one of only three bridges in England that carry buildings; the others are Pulteney Bridge in Bath and the High Bridge in Lincoln. The Tourist Information Centre in Justice Lane is contained within a circular dye-house known to have been in existence by 1813, one of two surviving in the town (the other being in Willow Vale). It was restored in 1994. In the 1990s and early years of the 21st century, Frome benefited from considerable investment in the restoration of its historic buildings through the English Heritage Heritage Economic Regeneration Scheme and the National Lottery Townscape Heritage Initiative. Frome has 370 listed buildings, the greatest number within Somerset, outside of Bath. Individual buildings are best examined through Historic England's listings. Three of these (including the parish church) are Grade I listed. The Blue House, next to the town bridge, is another; it was formerly the Bluecoat School and Almshouses, named after the colour of the school uniforms. Built in 1726 at a cost of £1,401 8s 9d, it replaced an almshouse dating from 1461 and rebuilt in 1621. The Blue House provided a home for twenty widows and schooling for twenty boys. The front of the building is adorned by two statues, of a man and a woman, indicating the building's dual purpose. The building's role as a school came to an end in 1921 and it now provides studio and one-bedroom flats for seventeen elderly residents. Rook Lane Chapel was a nonconformist chapel built between 1705 and 1707 by James Pope: "The size and pride of the building are remarkable at so early a date." The chapel had a gallery around three sides and the centre of the ceiling was domed and supported by two Tuscan columns. Rook Lane ceased to be used as a chapel in 1968 and there followed twenty-five years of neglect. In the early 1990s the building was compulsorily purchased by Somerset County Council and transferred to the Somerset Buildings Preservation Trust, which carried out repairs and restorations. In 2001 it was converted by a firm of architects, the ground floor becoming a community hall and arts centre managed by Rook Lane Arts Trust and the galleried upper floor becoming offices for the architectural firm NVB Architects. Frome is reputed to have one or more systems of tunnels beneath the streets of the older parts of the town. Some entrances are visible above ground; for example in the wall at the top of Stony Street, with other entrances in the cellars of shops and houses. Their purpose and full extent remain unknown but they have been investigated in recent years by at least one local group and a documentary has been made. Merchants Barton, in the Saxonvale area east of St John's church, dates to circa 1785, the approximate date of the Silk Mill or Thompson's Mill. It is a passageway used by workers and employees of the textile crepe and silk industry that set up factories and mills in Saxonvale during the early eighteenth century. When these closed in 1925, an engineering company from Cardiff called Notts Industries settled in the lower part of Saxonvale and Bussmann Cooper, an American fuse manufacturer, took ownership of the upper part. During the mid-20th century, up to 300 mostly female workers in the engineering and fuse factories who walked to and from work along the Merchants Barton were referred to locally as the 'Bussmann Girls'. One of Frome's most ancient and unregarded structures, the Old Town Wall, runs along from Bath Street through into upper Saxonvale below Lidl, whilst the Old Slaughterhouse facade with its blocked-in coach arches and mixture of dressed and rubble stone sections is architecturally of significance in assessing the surviving fabric of previous barton buildings. ## Religious sites The parish church of St John the Baptist, was built between the late 12th century and early 15th century replacing a 685 AD Saxon building. Major restoration work was carried out in the 1860s, including the construction of the Via Crucis, which is thought to be unique in an Anglican church. Outside the east end of the church is the tomb of Bishop Thomas Ken. The tower has eight bells, which bear inscriptions indicating that they were cast at various points between 1622 and 1792. A daughter church of St John's, Christ Church, was built in 1818 by George Allen Underwood, although considerable changes were made throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. St Mary's Church at Innox Hill was built in 1862–1864 to the designs of C.E. Giles as a chapel of ease to St John's; it is small with a decorated sanctuary ceiling. The Anglican Church of the Holy Trinity was built in 1837–38 by Henry Goodridge in the style of Commissioners' Gothic. It is unusual in that the altar is at the west end due to the position in which the church was built. The stained glass windows are near-contemporary copies of windows designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. In 1853, Irvingite Catholics (Catholic-Apostolic) began worshipping in a building in the West End until the church was closed. Nevertheless, there was a St Catherine's Catholic Church conducting weddings in Frome in 1904. The Roman Catholic church began in Frome after the building of a temporary church in Park Road in 1928, and a new church, St Catharine's Catholic Church, was finally built on the site in 1967 and 1968. Rook Lane Chapel, a noncomformist chapel, was in use from 1707 until 1968. In 1773, a split in the congregation of Rook Lane led to the establishment of another Zion Congregational Church in Whittox Lane. This building was replaced in 1810, and was extended in 1888 (a separate, octagonal school room with a conical roof having been built on the grounds in 1875). A Quaker Meeting House existed in Sheppards Barton, now South Parade, from 1675 to 1856. The original building was replaced around 1730 with a simple unadorned stone building comprising a single meeting room with wrought iron gallery above. The building became a school, the town library, Red Cross centre and, since 1999, the offices of a software company. The present chapel-like appearance was created in a 1993 refurbishment by the Red Cross. Baptists had been worshipping in the town since 1669, and had two churches. One was built in Sheppards Barton (now South Parade) in 1708. This was demolished and replaced by a new building in 1850, which was itself closed in 2001. Part of this building was converted to residential use but the main church, with a baptism pool, remains disused. A second Baptist Church was built in Badcox Lane (now Catherine Street) in 1711. It was replaced with a new building in 1813, which was embellished with a Doric portico in 1845. It closed in 1962 (later serving as a library, before being converted into flats in the 1980s). The Methodist church, built in 1812 at Gorehedge, is still in use after considerable additions in 1863, restoration in 1871 and major internal rearrangement in the 1980s. Sun Street Chapel was erected by the Primitive Methodists in 1834, and closed in 1982, although it was used by another religious group afterwards. It is now used as a Community Centre. There is another Methodist church on Portway, built in 1910. A Dissenters' Cemetery with Chapel at Vallis Road, was founded in 1851 by Frome's 'Free Churches', mainly Baptist, Congregational and Methodist, and has been the site of over 6,000 burials. ## Transport Frome is served by the Heart of Wessex Line which passes the eastern edge of the town. Frome station was opened in 1850 and is one of the oldest railway stations still in operation in Britain, now with direct services to Bristol Temple Meads, Exeter St Davids, Weymouth and London Paddington. Trains are operated by Great Western Railway. A freight line, which branches off through the town to serve the quarries on the Mendip Hills, is mainly used by Mendip Rail; Freightliner took over the line in November 2019. A continuation of this line, which previously linked Frome to Radstock, is now the route of National Cycle Route 24, otherwise known as the Colliers Way. Frome is served by a number of bus routes, the busiest being the D2 First West of England service to Bath, followed by the X67 and X34 services run by Faresaver of Chippenham. Other companies running bus services in Frome include FromeBus and Libra Travel. The A361 bypasses the town around the southern and eastern edges, while the A362 passes through the centre of the town from north-west to south-east. Frome is about 26 miles (41 km) southeast of the M4 motorway at junction 18 (Bath). The Town Council employs a resilience officer, one of only two at town council or parish level in the country; a principal task is to support the strategic priorities for transport. Initiatives include a public-access car club, operated by the social enterprise Co-wheels. Electric charging points are available at the Cheese and Grain, the Town Hall, the Football Club and Frome Medical Practice. ## Education Frome has thirteen first schools for pupils aged between 4 and 9 years, including Berkley Church of England First School, Christ Church Church of England First School, Hayesdown First School, St John's Church of England Voluntary Aided First School, St Louis Catholic Primary School, Trinity Church of England First School and Vallis First School. There are two middle schools for pupils between 9 and 13 years of age: Oakfield Academy and Selwood Anglican/Methodist Middle School. The town's main college, Frome Community College, provides education between ages 13 and 18, and has specialist "media arts" status. Critchill School is a special school catering to students who have special educational needs and Farleigh Further Education College is for special needs students aged 16 to 25 with Asperger syndrome and associated conditions. There are no further or higher education establishments in Frome, the closest third-level institution being the University of Bath. Somerset Skills & Learning, which provides apprenticeships and training for young people and adults, has a site in the town. ## Sport and leisure The Leisure Centre offers a wide range of activities including swimming, indoor bowls, squash and a gym, originally opened in 1974, and refurbished through October 2015 to May 2016. There are water based sports including the Frome and Warminster Dive Club, and Canoe Club. There is an inland diving centre near Frome at Vobster. Victoria Park offers sports such as Bowls, Tennis, Putting, Skateboard ramps and a Children's Playground. The Millennium Green has several marked walks and a picnic area close to a semi wild open space for local wildlife. The town is at one end of the Mendip Way which is a 80 kilometres (50 mi) long-distance footpath across the Mendip Hills from Weston-super-Mare. Badgers Hill is the home of Frome Town F.C., which in 2009 was promoted from the Western Football League into the Southern Football League. The team were promoted again in 2011 into the Southern Football League Premier Division. The Frome Town ladies' team also play at Badgers Hill. Frome Town F.C. has Youth/Mini section, launched in the 2010–11 season, which achieved FA Community Club Status in 2012. The Youth section covers players of all abilities from under 6's to under 18's. Starting in September 2019, the Frome Town 'Education and Football Academy' (part of a Southern League Football Academy) will offer the BTEC in Sport Level 3 qualification. Frome Cricket Club plays cricket at the Agricultural Showgrounds on the Bath side of town. The club was formed in 1925 and plays in the West of England Premier League: Somerset Division. Somerset County Cricket Club used to use the ground and Harold Gimblett made his debut at the venue in May 1935. The club's most famed players are Colin Herbert Dredge, who played county cricket 209 times for Somerset from 1976 to 1988 and was known as the "Demon of Frome", Mark Harmon, who played for both Somerset and Kent and still plays for Frome Cricket Club and Alex Barrow, who played for Somerset, represented England at under 19 level and is now a player/coach for Exeter Cricket Club. Founded in 1883, Frome Rugby Football Club has been at the very heart of Rugby Union in Somerset playing at Gypsy Lane. It has four senior teams and a thriving mini and junior section which ranges from Under 6's to Under 16's along with an Academy XV. The First XV, Second XV and Third XV all play in the English Rugby Union South West Division Championship; the First XV play in Wadworth 6X Southern Counties South league, the Second XV in Wadworth 6X Dorset & Wilts 2 North and the Third XV in The Bath Merit Table. The Fourth XV Veterans, known as the Cavalry, and the Fourth XV Academy play friendly, social fixtures against other local sides. Two cycling clubs operate in the town: the Frome CTC, nicknamed the Coffee and Tea-Cake Club, and the Frome & District Wheelers. E-bikes are available for hire, courtesy of a Town Council initiative. The Frome Cobble Wobble, is an individually timed bicycle hill climb sprint. It was first organised by the local community and Councillor Alvin Horsfall to celebrate the stage 5 of the 2009 Tour of Britain, which started in Frome. The last race was in 2012. The Guinness World Record for the most people to row 500m each, in a 24-hour relay on one indoor rowing machine, was held in Frome when 678 rowers broke the record in June 2018. A new record was achieved in June 2019 for the highest number of players in a continuous eight-hour game of skittles, 593 individuals taking place, beating the previous record of 468. Both of these events raised money for a local charity, We Hear You. Unfortunately this latest record will not be verified by Guinness as there was no video recording of the event. The Frome Half Marathon has taken place every year since 2001, in mid-July. It includes 10k, 5k and Family Fun Runs. Frome is an accredited Walkers are Welcome town since 2018. An extensive list of walks and guides is available. Guided walks on a range of topics are now online. The East Mendip Way passes through Frome and gives access to an 80-kilometre (50 mi) long-distance footpath across the Mendip Hills. ## Notable people - Benjamin Baker, builder of the Forth Bridge, was born in Frome in 1840 and is commemorated by a Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - Charles Ball, founder of Ball & Welch department store chain in Australia. - The Formula One racing driver and 2009 world champion Jenson Button was born in Frome in 1980. He went to Selwood Middle School, now Selwood Academy, in Frome. A street, Jenson Avenue, has been named after him, as has a new bridge over the River Frome 'The Jenson Button Bridge'. In May 2010, Button was awarded freedom of the town. - Cara Dillon, Irish folk singer, and her husband, musician and record producer Sam Lakeman (brother of Seth Lakeman), have lived in Frome since 2002. - The cricketer Colin Dredge was born in Frome in 1954. - Edward Cockey (1781–1860) established an iron foundry and brought gas to Frome. He was born, worked and died in Frome. - Eadred (or Edred) (923–955), King of England between 944 and 955, died in Frome on 23 November of that year. - Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (1941–2021, born in Bradenton, Florida), saxophonist, composer and arranger, lived in Frome. - Eva Elwes (1876–1950), actress and playwright, born in Frome. - Anna Friel, actress. - Wilfred Dolby Fuller (1893–1947), English recipient of the Victoria Cross, worked as a local policeman and died in Frome. - The philosopher Joseph Glanvill was Vicar of Frome from 1662 to 1666. - Danny Goffey, drummer with the band Supergrass, lives in Frome. - Clara Grant (1867–1949), educational pioneer and social reformer, lived in Frome in her youth. - Guy Green, film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, who won an Oscar for Great Expectations in the last category, was born at 4 Portway in Frome in 1913. - Alice Seeley Harris, pioneering documentary photographer, missionary and human rights activist, born in Frome in 1870. Commemorated by Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - John Harris, journalist, writer and critic, lives in Frome. - Charlie Higson of The Fast Show was born in Frome in 1958. - Gary Joyce (born 1964), cricketer - Simon King, naturalist and broadcaster, has a business in the town. - David Lassman, author, journalist and scriptwriter has lived in Frome since 2011. - Actor James Laurenson lives in the town. - Pearl Lowe, English fashion and textiles designer, lives in Frome. - Lois Maxwell, who played Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond film series from 1962 to 1985, lived in Frome from 1994 to 2001. Commemorated by Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - Huey Morgan, American lead singer/guitarist from Fun Lovin' Criminals and radio presenter on BBC Radio 6 Music & BBC Radio 2 lived in Frome until 2018. - Sir Charles Oatley, developer of one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes, was born at 5 Badcox in Frome in 1904. Commemorated by Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - Parfitt Brothers, architects in Brooklyn, New York - Anthony Powell, author, died in Frome in 2000. - William Henry "Billy" Reed, violinist, composer and biographer of Edward Elgar, was born in Christ Church Street in Frome in 1875. - Kate Rew, author and wild swimmer. - Christina Rossetti (poet, and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti), helped her mother run a day school in Frome in 1853–4. Commemorated by Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - Elizabeth Singer Rowe (poet and devotional writer, first published by John Dunton). Commemorated by Frome Society for Local Study plaque. - Henry Thomas Ryall, royal engraver to Queen Victoria, was born in Frome in 1811. - John Webb Singer (1819–1904) was a bronze art founder and manufacturer of ecclesiastical metalwork. He was born, worked and died in Frome. - Emma Sheppard (1813–1871) was a writer and workhouse reformer who lived and was buried in Frome. - Thomas Sheppard (1766–1858) was the first MP for Frome after the Reform Act of 1832. - Mavis Tate, campaigner for women's rights, was Frome's only female MP from 1937 to 1945. - Siobhan Thompson, sketch comedian and comedy writer, grew up in Frome. - Betty Trask (1893–1983) writer of romance novels, lived and died in Frome - Richard Vranch of Whose Line Is It Anyway? was born in Frome in 1959. - Sir Charles Wilkins, the first translator of Bhagavad Gita into English, was born in Frome around 1749. - Kerry Wilkinson, one of Amazon's top-10 best-selling authors worldwide for 2011, went to Oakfield Middle School and Frome Community College. ## Twin towns Frome has three twin towns: Château-Gontier in France, Murrhardt in Germany and Rabka-Zdrój in Poland. ## Freedom of the Town The following people have received the Freedom of the Town of Frome. - Jenson Button: 4 May 2010.

Wars of the Delian League

5th century BC military conflicts

The Wars of the Delian League (477–449 BC) were a series of campaigns fought between the Delian League of Athens and her allies (and later subjects), and the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. These conflicts represent a continuation of the Greco-Persian Wars, after the Ionian Revolt and the first and second Persian invasions of Greece. The Greek alliance, centred on Sparta and Athens, that had defeated the second Persian invasion had initially followed up this success by capturing the Persian garrisons of Sestos and Byzantium, both in Thrace, in 479 and 478 BC respectively. After the capture of Byzantium, the Spartans elected not to continue the war effort, and a new alliance, commonly known as the Delian League, was formed, with Athens very much the dominant power. Over the next 30 years, Athens would gradually assume a more hegemonic position over the league, which gradually evolved into the Athenian Empire. Throughout the 470s BC, the Delian League campaigned in Thrace and the Aegean to remove the remaining Persian garrisons from the region, primarily under the command of the Athenian politician Cimon. In the early part of the next decade, Cimon began campaigning in Asia Minor, seeking to strengthen the Greek position there. At the Battle of the Eurymedon in Pamphylia, the Athenians and allied fleet achieved a stunning double victory, destroying a Persian fleet and then landing the ships' marines to attack and rout the Persian army. After this battle, the Persians took an essentially passive role in the conflict, anxious not to risk battle where possible. Towards the end of the 460s BC, the Athenians took the ambitious decision to support a revolt in the Egyptian satrapy of the Persian Empire. Although the Greek task force achieved initial success, they were unable to capture the Persian garrison in Memphis, despite a three year long siege. The Persians then counter-attacked, and the Athenian force was itself besieged for 18 months, before being wiped out. This disaster, coupled with ongoing warfare in Greece, dissuaded the Athenians from resuming conflict with Persia. In 451 BC, a truce was agreed in Greece, and Cimon was able to lead an expedition to Cyprus. However, whilst besieging Kition Cimon died, and the Athenian force decided to withdraw, winning another double victory at the Battle of Salamis-in-Cyprus in order to extricate themselves. This campaign marked the end of hostilities between the Delian League and Persia, and some ancient historians claim that a peace treaty, the Peace of Callias, was agreed to cement the final end of the Greco-Persian Wars. ## Sources and chronology The military history of Greece between the end of the second Persian invasion of Greece and the Peloponnesian War (479–431 BC) is poorly attested by surviving ancient sources. This period, sometimes referred to as the pentekontaetia by ancient scholars, was a period of relative peace and prosperity within Greece. The richest source for the period, and also the most contemporary with it, is Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, which is generally considered by modern historians to be a reliable primary account. Thucydides only mentions this period in a digression on the growth of Athenian power in the run up to the Peloponnesian War, and the account is brief, probably selective and lacks any dates. Nevertheless, Thucydides's account can be, and is used by historians to draw up a skeleton chronology for the period, on to which details from archaeological records and other writers can be superimposed. Much extra detail for the period is provided by Plutarch, in his biographies of Aristides and especially Cimon. Plutarch was writing some 600 years after the events in question, and is therefore very much a secondary source, but he often explicitly names his sources, which allows some degree of verification of his statements. In his biographies, he explicitly draws on many ancient histories which have not survived, and thus often preserves details of the period which are omitted in Thucydides's brief account. The final major extant source for the period is the universal history (Bibliotheca historica) of the 1st century BC Sicilian, Diodorus Siculus. Much of Diodorus's writing concerning this period seems to be derived from the much earlier Greek historian Ephorus, who also wrote a universal history. However, from what little is known of Ephorus, historians are generally disparaging towards his history; for this period he seems to have simply recycled Thucydides's research, but used it to draw completely different conclusions. Diodorus, who has often been dismissed by modern historians anyway, is therefore not a particularly good source for this period. Indeed, one of his translators, Oldfather, says of Diodorus's account of the Eurymedon campaign that "...the three preceding chapters reveal Diodorus in the worst light...". There is also a reasonable body of archaeological evidence for the period, of which inscriptions detailing probable tribute lists of the Delian League are particularly important. ### Chronology Thucydides provides a succinct list of the main events occurring between the end of the second Persian invasion and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, but almost no chronological information. Various attempts have been made to reassemble the chronology, but there is no definitive answer. The assumption central to these attempts is that Thucydides is describing the events in the appropriate chronological order. The one firmly accepted date is 465 BC for the beginning of the siege of Thasos. This is based on an anonymous ancient scholiast's annotations to one of the existing manuscripts of Aeschines's works. The scholiast notes that the Athenians met disaster at 'Nine-Ways' in the archonship of Lysitheus (known to be 465/464 BC). Thucydides mentions this attack on the 'Nine-Ways' in connection with the beginning of the siege of Thasos, and since Thucydides says that the siege ended in its third year, the siege of Thasos therefore dates to c. 465–463 BC. Similarly, the anonymous scholiast provides a probable date for the siege of Eion. This annotation places the fall of Eion in the archonship of Phaidon (known to be 476/475 BC). The siege may therefore have been between either 477–476 BC or 476–475 BC; both have found favour. The Battle of Eurymedon may be dated to 469 BC by Plutarch's anecdote about the Archon Apsephion (469/468 BC) choosing Cimon and his fellow generals as judges in a competition. The implication is that Cimon had recently achieved a great victory, and the most likely candidate is Eurymedon. However, since the Battle of Eurymedon seems to have occurred after the Athenian siege of Naxos (but before the siege of Thasos), the date of Eurymedon is clearly constrained by the date of Naxos. Whilst some accept a date of 469 or earlier for this Naxos, another school of thought places it as late as 467 BC. Since the Battle of Eurymedon seems to have occurred before Thasos, the alternative date for this battle would therefore be 466 BC. The dating of Naxos is intimately connected with two other events in the Greek world which occurred at the same time. Thucydides claims that Pausanias, having been stripped of his command after the siege of Byzantium, returned to Byzantium as a private citizen soon after and took command of the city until he was expelled by the Athenians. He then crossed the Bosporus and settled in Colonae in the Troad, until he was accused of collaborating with the Persians and was recalled by the Spartans for trial (after which he starved himself to death). Thucydides again provides no chronology of these events. Shortly afterwards, the Spartans accused the Athenian statesman Themistocles, then in exile in Argos, of complicity in Pausanias's treason. As a result, Themistocles fled from Argos, eventually to Asia Minor. Thucydides states that on his journey, Themistocles inadvertently ended up at Naxos, at that time being besieged by Athenians. The three events, Pausanias's treason, Themistocles's flight and the siege of Naxos therefore occurred in close temporal sequence. These events certainly happened after 474 BC (the earliest possible date for Themistocles's ostracism), and have generally been placed in around 470/469 BC. However, there are several incongruities in the story of Themistocles if this date is accepted. A much later date for Pausanias's expulsion from Byzantium has been proposed, and if accepted, this pushes these three events into c. 467 BC, which resolves the problems regarding Themistocles, and also probably explains some incidental details mentioned in Plutarch's biography of Cimon. However, this modified timeline is not universally accepted by historians. The Egyptian and Cyprian campaigns are somewhat easier to date. Thucydides says that the Egyptian campaign lasted six years and that three years later, the Athenians and Spartans signed a five-year truce. This treaty is known to date to 451 BC, so the Egyptian campaign dates from c. 460–454 BC. The Cyprian campaign, which directly followed the truce, thus dates to 451–450 BC. ## Background The Greco-Persian Wars had their roots in the conquest of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and in particular Ionia, by the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great shortly after 550 BC. The Persians found the Ionians difficult to rule, eventually settling for sponsoring a tyrant in each Ionian city. While Greek states had in the past often been ruled by tyrants, this was a form of government on the decline. By 500 BC, Ionia appears to have been ripe for rebellion against these Persian place-men. The simmering tension finally broke into open revolt due to the actions of the tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras. Attempting to save himself after a disastrous Persian-sponsored expedition in 499 BC, Aristagoras chose to declare Miletus a democracy. This triggered similar revolutions across Ionia, and indeed Doris and Aeolis, beginning the Ionian Revolt. The Greek states of Athens and Eretria allowed themselves to be drawn into this conflict by Aristagoras, and during their only campaigning season (498 BC) they contributed to the capture and burning of the Persian regional capital of Sardis. After this, the Ionian Revolt carried on (without further outside aid) for a further 5 years, until it was finally completely crushed by the Persians. However, in a decision of great historic significance, the Persian king Darius the Great decided that, despite successfully subduing the revolt, there remained the unfinished business of exacting punishment on Athens and Eretria for supporting the revolt. The Ionian Revolt had severely threatened the stability of Darius's empire, and the states of mainland Greece would continue to threaten that stability unless dealt with. Darius thus began to contemplate the complete conquest of Greece, beginning with the destruction of Athens and Eretria. In the next two decades, there would be two Persian invasions of Greece, including some of the most famous battles in history. During the first invasion, Thrace, Macedon and the Aegean islands were added to the Persian Empire, and Eretria was duly destroyed. However, the invasion ended in 490 BC with the decisive Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon. Between the two invasions, Darius died, and responsibility for the war passed to his son Xerxes I. Xerxes then led the second invasion personally in 480 BC, taking an enormous (although oft-exaggerated) army and navy to Greece. Those Greeks who chose to resist (the 'Allies') were defeated in the twin battles of Thermopylae and Artemisium on land and at sea respectively. All of Greece except the Peloponnesus thus fell into Persian hands, but then seeking to finally destroy the Allied navy, the Persians suffered a decisive defeat at the Battle of Salamis. The following year, 479 BC, the Allies assembled the largest Greek army yet seen and defeated the Persian invasion force at the Battle of Plataea, ending the invasion and the threat to Greece. According to tradition, on the same day as Plataea, the Allied fleet defeated the demoralised remnants of the Persian fleet in the Battle of Mycale. This action marks the end of the Persian invasion, and the beginning of the next phase in the Greco-Persian wars, the Greek counter-attack. After Mycale, the Greek cities of Asia Minor again revolted, with the Persians now powerless to stop them. The Allied fleet then sailed to the Chersonesos, still held by the Persians, and besieged and captured the town of Sestos. The following year, 478 BC, the Allies sent a force to capture the city of Byzantium (modern day Istanbul). The siege was successful, but the behaviour of the Spartan general Pausanias alienated many of the Allies, and resulted in Pausanias's recall. The siege of Byzantium was the last action of the Hellenic alliance which had defeated the Persian invasion. ## Delian League After Byzantium, Sparta was eager to end her involvement in the war. The Spartans were of the view that, with the liberation of mainland Greece, and the Greek cities of Asia Minor, the war's purpose had already been reached. There was also perhaps a feeling that obtaining long-term security for the Asian Greeks would prove impossible. In the aftermath of Mycale, the Spartan king Leotychides had proposed transplanting all the Greeks from Asia Minor to Europe as the only method of permanently freeing them from Persian dominion. Xanthippus, the Athenian commander at Mycale, had furiously rejected this; the Ionian cities were originally Athenian colonies, and the Athenians, if no one else, would protect the Ionians. This marked the point at which the leadership of the Hellenic alliance effectively passed to the Athenians; with the Spartan withdrawal after Byzantium, the leadership of the Athenians became explicit. The loose alliance of city states which had fought against Xerxes's invasion had been dominated by Sparta and the Peloponnesian league. With the withdrawal of these states, a congress was called on the holy island of Delos to institute a new alliance to continue the fight against the Persians. This alliance, now including many of the Aegean islands, was formally constituted as the 'First Athenian Alliance', commonly known as the Delian League. According to Thucydides, the official aim of the League was to "avenge the wrongs they suffered by ravaging the territory of the king." In reality, this goal was divided into three main efforts - to prepare against any future invasion, to seek revenge against Persia, and to organize a means of dividing spoils of war. The members were given a choice of either offering armed forces or paying a tax to the joint treasury; most states chose the tax. League members swore to have the same friends and enemies, and dropped ingots of iron into the sea to symbolize the permanence of their alliance. The ingots of iron were cast into the ocean because the oath the league members swore stipulated that their allegiance would not end, or be otherwise broken, until the iron floated to the surface. In other words, that they had made a pact perceived to be eternal. The Athenian politician Aristides would spend the rest of his life occupied in the affairs of the alliance, dying (according to Plutarch) a few years later in Pontus, whilst determining what the tax of new members was to be. ## Non-Persian campaigns ### Military expansion of the League Thucydides provides just one example of the use of force to extend membership of the League, but since his account seems to be selective, there were presumably more; certainly, Plutarch provides details of one such instance. Karystos, which had collaborated with the Persians during the second Persian invasion, was attacked by the League at some point in the 470s BC, and eventually agreed to become a member. Plutarch mentions the fate of Phaselis, which Cimon compelled to join the league during his Eurymedon campaign. ### Internal rebellions Naxos attempted to leave the League c. 470/467 BC but was attacked by the Athenians and forced to remain a member. A similar fate awaited the Thasians after they tried to leave the League in 465 BC. Thucydides does not provide more examples, but from archaeological sources it is possible to deduce that there were further rebellions in the following years. Thucydides leaves us under no illusions that the behaviour of the Athenians in crushing such rebellions led firstly to the hegemony of Athens over the league, and eventually to the transition from the Delian League to the Athenian Empire. ### Conflicts in Greece During the period 479–461, the mainland Greek states were at least outwardly at peace with each other, even if divided into pro-Spartan and pro-Athenian factions. The Hellenic alliance still existed in name, and since Athens and Sparta were still allied, Greece achieved a modicum of stability. However, over this period, Sparta became increasingly suspicious and fearful of the growing power of Athens. It was this fear, according to Thucydides, which made the second, larger (and more famous) Peloponnesian War inevitable. Athens sent troops in 462 BC to aid Sparta with the Messenian Revolt (c. 465–461 BC), under the terms of the old Hellenic alliance. The Spartans however, in the fear that Athens might interfere in the political situation between the Spartans and their helots, sent the Athenians home. This event directly led to the ostracism of Cimon (who had been leading the troops), the ascendancy of the radical democrats (led by Ephialtes and Pericles) over the previously dominant aristocratic faction (led by Cimon) in Athens, and the First Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies). This conflict was really the Athenians' own struggle, and need not have involved the Delian allies. After all, the League members had signed up to fight against the Persians, not fellow Greeks. Nevertheless, it does seem that at least at the Battle of Tanagra, a contingent of Ionians fought with the Athenians. The conflicts in Greece during these years are, however, not directly relevant to the history of the Delian League. It can be seen, however, that the First Peloponnesian War may have hastened the transition of the Delian League from an Athenian-dominated alliance to an Athenian-ruled empire. During the early years of the war, Athens and her non-Delian allies scored a series of victories. However, the collapse of the simultaneous Delian League expedition in Egypt in 454 BC caused panic in Athens, and resulted in decreased military activity until 451 BC, when a five-year truce was concluded with Sparta. During the panic, the treasury of the League was moved from Delos to the perceived safety of Athens in 454 BC. Although Athens had in practice had a hegemonic position over the rest of the league since the rebellion of Naxos (470/467 BC) was put down, the process by which the Delian league gradually transformed into the Athenian Empire accelerated after 461 BC. The transfer of the treasury to Athens is sometimes used as an arbitrary demarcation between the Delian League and the Athenian Empire. An alternative 'end-point' for the Delian League is the final end of hostilities with the Persians in 450 BC, after which, despite the fact that the stated aims of the League were fulfilled, the Athenians refused to allow member states to leave the alliance. ## Campaigns against Persia ### Thrace #### Siege of Eion According to Thucydides, the League's opening campaign was against the city of Eion, at the mouth of the Strymon river. Since Thucydides does not provide a detailed chronology for his history of the league, the year in which this campaign took place is uncertain. The siege seems to have lasted from autumn of one year into the summer of the next, with historians supporting either 477–476 BC or 476–475 BC. Eion seems to have been one of the Persian garrisons left in Thrace during and after the second Persian invasion, along with Doriskos. The campaign against Eion should probably be seen as part of a general campaign aimed at removing the Persian presence from Thrace. Even though he does not directly cover this period, Herodotus alludes to several failed attempts, presumably Athenian, to dislodge the Persian governor of Doriskos, Mascames. Eion may have been worthy of particular mention by Thucydides because of its strategic importance; abundant supplies of timber were available in the region, and there were nearby silver mines. Furthermore, it was near the site of the future Athenian colony of Amphipolis, which was the site of several future disasters for the Athenians. The force which attacked Eion was under the command of Cimon. Plutarch says that Cimon first defeated the Persians in battle, whereupon they retreated to the city, and were besieged there. Cimon then expelled all Thracian collaborators from the region in order to starve the Persians into submission. Herodotus indicates that the Persian commander, Boges, was offered terms upon which he might be allowed to evacuate the city and return to Asia. However, not wanting to be thought a coward by Xerxes, he resisted to the last. When the food in Eion ran out, Boges threw his treasure into the Strymon, killed his entire household and then immolated them, and himself, on a giant pyre. The Athenians thus captured the city and enslaved the remaining population. After the fall of Eion, other coastal cities of the area surrendered to the Delian League, with the notable exception of Doriscus, which was "never taken". The Achaemenids probably recalled the Governor of Doriscus Mascames with his garrison around 465 BC, and finally abandoned this last Achaemenid stronghold in Europe. #### Skyros Following the action at Eion, and possibly in the same campaign, the Athenians, still under Cimon, attacked the island of Skyros. This was not an anti-Persian action, but a pragmatic assault on a native population that had lapsed into piracy. As a result of this action, the Athenians "liberated the Aegean", and they sent colonists to the island to prevent the island returning to piracy. #### Chersonesos Cimon returned a decade later to complete the expulsion of Persian forces from Europe. This action seems to have occurred concurrently with the siege of Thasos, and so is generally dated to 465 BC. Evidently, even at this point, some Persian forces were holding (or had re-taken) some part of the Chersonesos with the help of native Thracians. Cimon sailed to the Chersonesos with just 4 triremes, but managed to capture the 13 ships of the Persians, and then proceeded to drive them out of the peninsula. Cimon then turned the Chersonesos (of which his father, Miltiades the Younger, had been tyrant before the Greco-Persian Wars began) over to the Athenians for colonisation. ### Asia Minor Once the Persian forces in Europe had largely been neutralised, the Athenians seem to have gone about starting to extend the League in Asia Minor. The islands of Samos, Chios and Lesbos seem to have become members of the original Hellenic alliance after Mycale, and presumably were also therefore original members of the Delian League. However, it is unclear exactly when the other Ionian cities, or indeed the other Greek cities of Asia Minor, joined the league, though they certainly did at some point. Cimon's Eurymedon campaign itself seems to have begun in response to the assembly of a large Persian fleet and army at Aspendos, near the mouth of the Eurymedon River. It is usually argued that the Persians were the would-be aggressors, and that Cimon's campaign was launched in order to deal with this new threat. Cawkwell suggests that the Persian build-up was the first concerted attempt to counter the activity of the Greeks since the failure of the second invasion. It is possible that internal strife with the Persian empire had contributed to the length of time it took to launch this campaign. Cawkwell suggests that the Persian forces gathered at Aspendos were aiming to move along the southern coast of Asia Minor, capturing each city, until eventually the Persian navy could begin operating in Ionia again. Plutarch says that upon hearing that the Persian forces were gathering at Aspendos, Cimon sailed from Cnidus (in Caria) with 200 triremes. It is highly likely that Cimon had assembled this force because the Athenians had had some warning of a forthcoming Persian campaign to re-subjugate the Asiatic Greeks. According to Plutarch, Cimon sailed with these 200 triremes to the Greek city of Phaselis (in Lycia) but was refused admittance. He therefore began ravaging the lands of Phaselis, but with the mediation of the Chian contingent of his fleet, the people of Phaselis agreed to join the league. They were to contribute troops to the expedition, and to pay the Athenians ten talents. By capturing Phaselis, the furthest east Greek city in Asia Minor (and just to the west of the Eurymedon), he effectively blocked the Persian campaign before it had begun, denying them the first naval base they needed to control. Taking further initiative, Cimon then moved to directly attack the Persian fleet at Aspendos. #### Battle of the Eurymedon Thucydides gives only the barest of details for this battle; the most reliable detailed account is given by Plutarch. According to Plutarch, the Persian fleet was anchored off the mouth of the Eurymedon, awaiting the arrival of 80 Phoenician ships from Cyprus. Several different estimates for the size of the Persian fleet are given. Thucydides says that there was a fleet of 200 Phoenician ships, and is generally considered the most reliable source. Plutarch gives numbers of 350 from Ephorus and 600 from Phanodemus. Cimon, sailing from Phaselis, made to attack the Persians before the reinforcements arrived, whereupon the Persian fleet, eager to avoid fighting, retreated into the river itself. However, when Cimon continued to bear down on the Persians, they accepted battle. Regardless of their numbers, the Persian battle line was quickly breached, and the Persian ships then turned about, and made for the river bank. Grounding their ships, the crews sought sanctuary with the army waiting nearby. Despite the weariness of his troops after this first battle, Cimon landed the marines and proceeded to attack the Persian army. Initially the Persian line held the Athenian assault, but eventually, as at Battle of Mycale, the heavily armoured hoplites proved superior, and routed the Persian army. Thucydides says that 200 Phoenician ships were captured and destroyed. It is highly unlikely that this occurred during the apparently brief naval battle, so these were probably grounded ships captured after the battle and destroyed with fire, as has been the case at Mycale. According to Plutarch, Cimon then sailed with the Greek fleet as quickly as possible, to intercept the fleet of 80 Phoenician ships which the Persians had been expecting. Taking them by surprise, he captured or destroyed the entire fleet. However, Thucydides does not mention this subsidiary action, and some have cast doubt on whether it actually happened. According to Plutarch, one tradition had it that the Persian king (who at the time would still have been Xerxes) had agreed a humiliating peace treaty in the aftermath of the Eurymedon (see below). However, as Plutarch admits, other authors denied that such a peace was made at this time, and the more logical date for any peace treaty would have been after the Cyprus campaign. The alternative suggested by Plutarch is that the Persian king acted as if he had made a humiliating peace with the Greeks, because he was so fearful of engaging in battle with them again. It is generally considered unlikely by modern historians that a peace treaty was made in the aftermath of Eurymedon. The Eurymedon was a highly significant victory for the Delian League, which probably ended once and for all the threat of another Persian invasion of Greece. It also seems to have prevented any Persian attempt to reconquer the Asiatic Greeks until at least 451 BC. The accession of further cities of Asia Minor to the Delian league, particularly from Caria, probably followed Cimon's campaign there. The Greeks do not appear to have pressed their advantage home in a meaningful way. If the later date of 466 BC for the Eurymedon campaign is accepted, this might be because the revolt in Thasos meant that resources were diverted away from Asia Minor to prevent the Thasians seceding from the League. The Persian fleet was effectively absent from the Aegean until 451 BC, and Greek ships were able to ply the coasts of Asia Minor with impunity. ### Egypt The Egyptian campaign, as discussed above, is generally thought to have begun in 460 BC. Even this date is subject to some debate however, since at this time Athens was already at war with Sparta in the First Peloponnesian War. It has been questioned whether Athens would really commit to an Egyptian campaign under these circumstances, and therefore suggested that this campaign began before the war with Sparta, in 462 BC. However, this date is generally rejected, and it seems that the Egyptian campaign was, on the part of Athens, simply a piece of political opportunism. The Egyptian satrapy of the Persian Empire was particularly prone to revolts, one of which had occurred as recently as 486 BC. In 461 or 460 BC, a new rebellion began under the command of Inaros, a Libyan king living on the border of Egypt. This rebellion quickly swept the country, which was soon largely in the hands of Inaros. Inaros now appealed to the Delian League for assistance in their fight against the Persians. There was a League fleet of 200 ships under Admiral Charitimides already campaigning in Cyprus at this time, which the Athenians then diverted Egypt to support the revolt. Indeed, it is possible that the fleet had been dispatched to Cyprus in the first place because, with Persian attention focused on the Egyptian revolt, it seemed a favourable time to campaign in Cyprus. This would go some way towards explaining the apparently reckless decision of the Athenians to fight wars on two fronts. Thucydides seems to imply that the whole fleet was diverted to Egypt, although it has also been suggested that such a large fleet was unnecessary, and some portion of it remained of the coast of Asia Minor during this period. Ctesias suggests that the Athenians sent 40 ships, whereas Diodorus says 200, in apparent agreement with Thucydides. Fine suggests a number of reasons that the Athenians may have been willing to engage themselves in Egypt, despite the ongoing war elsewhere; the opportunity to weaken Persia, the desire for a naval base in Egypt, the access to the Nile's huge grain supply, and from the viewpoint of the Ionian allies, the chance to restore profitable trading links with Egypt. At any rate, the Athenians arrived in Egypt, and sailed up the Nile to join up with Inaros's forces. Charitimides led his fleet against the Achaemenids in the Nile river, and defeated a fleet consisting of 50 Phoenician ships. It was the last great naval encounter between the Greeks and the Achaemenids. Of the 50 Phoenician ships, he managed to destroy 30 ships, and capture the remaining 20 that faced him in that battle. The Persian king Artaxerxes I had in the meantime assembled a relief force to crush the revolt, under his uncle Achaemenes. Diodorus and Ctesias give numbers for this force of 300,000 and 400,000 respectively, but these numbers are presumably over-inflated. #### Battle of Papremis (460 BC) According to Diodorus, the only detailed source for this campaign, the Persian relief force had pitched camp near the Nile. Although Herodotus does not cover this period in his history, he mentions as an aside that he "saw too the skulls of those Persians at Papremis who were killed with Darius' son Achaemenes by Inaros the Libyan". This provides some confirmation that this battle was factual, and provides a name for it, which Diodorus does not. Papremis (or Pampremis) seems to have been a city on the Nile delta, and a cult centre for the Egyptian equivalent of Ares/Mars. Diodorus tells us that once the Athenians had arrived, they and the Egyptians accepted battle from the Persians. At first the Persians' superior numbers gave them the advantage, but eventually the Athenians broke through the Persian line, whereupon the Persian army routed and fled. Some portion of the Persian army found refuge in the citadel of Memphis (called the 'White Castle'), however, and could not be dislodged. Thucydides's rather compressed version of these events is: "and making themselves masters of the river and two-thirds of Memphis, addressed themselves to the attack of the remaining third, which is called White Castle". #### Siege of Memphis (459–455 BCE) The Athenians and Egyptians thus settled down to besiege the White Castle. The siege evidently did not progress well, and probably lasted for at least four years, since Thucydides says that their whole expedition lasted 6 years, and of this time the final 18 months was occupied with the Siege of Prosoptis. According to Thucydides, at first Artaxerxes sent Megabazus to try and bribe the Spartans into invading Attica, to draw off the Athenian forces from Egypt. When this failed, he instead assembled a large army under (confusingly) Megabyzus, and dispatched it to Egypt. Diodorus has more or less the same story, with more detail; after the attempt at bribery failed, Artaxerxes put Megabyzus and Artabazus in charge of 300,000 men, with instructions to quell the revolt. They went first from Persia to Cilicia and gathered a fleet of 300 triremes from the Cilicians, Phoenicians and Cypriots, and spent a year training their men. Then they finally headed to Egypt. Modern estimates, however, place the number of Persian troops at the considerably lower figure of 25,000 men given that it would have been highly impractical to deprive the already strained satrapies of any more man power than that. Thucydides does not mention Artabazus, who is reported by Herodotus to have taken part in the Second Persian invasion of Greece; Diodorus may be mistaken about his presence in this campaign. It is clearly possible that the Persian forces did spend some prolonged time in training, since it took four years for them to respond to the Egyptian victory at Papremis. Although neither author gives many details, it is clear that when Megabyzus finally arrived in Egypt, he was able to quickly lift the siege of Memphis, defeating the Egyptians in battle, and driving the Athenians from Memphis. #### Siege of Prosopitis (455 BCE) The Athenians now fell back to the island of Prosopitis in the Nile delta, where their ships were moored. There, Megabyzus laid siege to them for 18 months, until finally he was able to drain the river from around the island by digging canals, thus "joining the island to the mainland". In Thucydides's account the Persians then crossed over to the former island, and captured it. Only a few of the Athenian force, marching through Libya to Cyrene survived to return to Athens. In Diodorus's version, however, the draining of the river prompted the Egyptians (whom Thucydides does not mention) to defect and surrender to the Persians. The Persians, not wanting to sustain heavy casualties in attacking the Athenians, instead allowed them to depart freely to Cyrene, whence they returned to Athens. Since the defeat of the Egyptian expedition caused a genuine panic in Athens, including the relocation of the Delian treasury to Athens, Thucydides's version is probably more likely to be correct. #### Battle of Mendesium As a final disastrous coda to the expedition, Thucydides mentions the fate of a squadron of fifty triremes sent to relieve the siege of Prosopitis. Unaware that the Athenians had finally succumbed, the fleet put in at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile, where it was promptly attacked from the land, and from the sea by the Phoenician navy. Most of the ships were destroyed, with only a handful managing to escape and return to Athens. Total Athenian casualties of the expedition totaled some 50,000 men and 250 ships. ### Cyprus In 478 BC the Allies had, according to Thucydides, sailed to Cyprus and "subdued most of the island". Exactly what Thucydides means by this is unclear. Sealey suggests that this was essentially a raid to gather as much booty as possible from the Persian garrisons on Cyprus. There is no indication that the Allies made any attempt to actually take possession of the island, and shortly after they sailed to Byzantium. Certainly, the fact that the Delian League repeatedly campaigned in Cyprus suggests that the island was not garrisoned by the Allies in 478 BC, or that the garrisons were quickly expelled. The next time Cyprus is mentioned is in relation to c. 460 BC, when a League fleet was campaigning there, before being instructed to head to Egypt to support Inaros's rebellion, with the fateful consequences discussed above. The Egyptian disaster would eventually lead the Athenians to sign a five-year truce with Sparta in 451 BC. Thereby freed from fighting in Greece, the League was again able to dispatch a fleet to campaign in Cyprus in 451 BC, under the recently recalled Cimon. #### Siege of Kition Cimon sailed for Cyprus with a fleet of 200 ships provided by the Athenians and their allies. However, 60 of these ships were sent to Egypt at the request of Amyrtaeus, the so-called "King of the Marshes" (who still remained independent of, and opposed to Persian rule). The rest of the force besieged Kition in Cyprus, but during the siege, Cimon died either of sickness or a wound. The Athenians lacked provisions, and apparently under the death-bed instructions of Cimon, the Athenians retreated towards Salamis-in-Cyprus. #### Battles of Salamis-in-Cyprus Cimon's death was kept a secret from the Athenian army. 30 days after leaving Kition, the Athenians and their allies were attacked by a Persian force composed of Cilicians, Phoenicians, and Cyprians, whilst sailing off Salamis-in-Cyprus. Under the 'command' of the deceased Cimon, they defeated this force at sea, and also in a land battle. Having thus successfully extricated themselves, the Athenians sailed back to Greece, joined by the detachment which had been sent to Egypt. These battles formed the end of the Greco-Persian Wars. ## Peace with Persia After the Battles of Salamis-in-Cyprus, Thucydides makes no further mention of conflict with the Persians, simply saying that the Greeks returned home. Diodorus, on the other hand, claims that in the aftermath of Salamis, a full-blown peace treaty (the "Peace of Callias") was agreed with the Persians. Diodorus was probably following the history of Ephorus at this point, who in turn was presumably influenced by his teacher Isocrates — from whom we have the earliest reference to the supposed peace, in 380 BC. Even during the 4th century BC the idea of the treaty was controversial, and two authors from that period, Callisthenes and Theopompus appear to reject its existence. It is possible that the Athenians had attempted to negotiate with the Persians previously. Plutarch suggests that in the aftermath of the victory at the Eurymedon, Artaxerxes had agreed a peace treaty with the Greeks, even naming Callias as the Athenian ambassador involved. However, as Plutarch admits, Callisthenes denied that such a peace was made at this point (c. 466 BC). Herodotus also mentions, in passing, an Athenian embassy headed by Callias, which was sent to Susa to negotiate with Artaxerxes. This embassy included some Argive representatives and can probably be therefore dated to c. 461 BC (after forging of the alliance between Athens and Argos). This embassy may have been an attempt to reach some kind of peace agreement, and it has even been suggested that the failure of these hypothetical negotiations led to the Athenian decision to support the Egyptian revolt. The ancient sources therefore disagree as to whether there was an official peace or not, and if there was, when it was agreed. Opinion amongst modern historians is also split; for instance, Fine accepts the concept of the Peace of Callias, whereas Sealey effectively rejects it. Holland accepts that some kind of accommodation was made between Athens and Persia, but no actual treaty. Fine argues that Callisthenes's denial that a treaty was made after the Eurymedon does not preclude a peace being made at another point. Further, he suggests that Theopompus was actually referring to a treaty that had allegedly been negotiated with Persia in 423 BC. If these views are correct, it would remove one major obstacle to the acceptance of the treaty's existence. A further argument for the existence of the treaty is the sudden withdrawal of the Athenians from Cyprus in 450 BC, which makes most sense in the light of some kind of peace agreement. On the other hand, if there was indeed some kind of accommodation, Thucydides's failure to mention it is odd. In his digression on the pentekontaetia his aim is to explain the growth of Athenian power, and such a treaty, and the fact that the Delian allies were not released from their obligations after it, would have marked a major step in the Athenian ascendancy. Conversely, it has been suggested that certain passages elsewhere in Thucydides's history are best interpreted as referring to a peace agreement. There is thus no clear consensus amongst modern historians as to the treaty's existence. The ancient sources which give details of the treaty are reasonably consistent in their description of the terms: - All Greek cities of Asia were to 'live by their own laws' or 'be autonomous' (depending on translation). - Persian satraps (and presumably their armies) were not to travel west of the Halys (Isocrates) or closer than a day's journey on horseback to the Aegean Sea (Callisthenes) or closer than three days' journey on foot to the Aegean Sea (Ephorus and Diodorus). - No Persian warship was to sail west of Phaselis (on the southern coast of Asia Minor), nor west of the Cyanaean rocks (probably at the eastern end of the Bosporus, on the north coast). - If the terms were observed by the king and his generals, then the Athenians were not to send troops to lands ruled by Persia. ## Aftermath As already noted, towards the end of the conflict with Persia, the process by which the Delian League became the Athenian Empire reached its conclusion. The allies of Athens were not released from their obligations to provide either money or ships, despite the cessation of hostilities. In Greece, the First Peloponnesian War between the power-blocs of Athens and Sparta, which had continued on and off since 460 BC, finally ended in 445 BC, with the agreement of a thirty-year truce. However, the growing enmity between Sparta and Athens would lead, just 14 years later, to the outbreak of the Second Peloponnesian War. This disastrous conflict, which dragged on for 27 years, would eventually result in the utter destruction of Athenian power, the dismemberment of the Athenian empire, and the establishment of a Spartan hegemony over Greece. However, not just Athens suffered. The conflict would significantly weaken the whole of Greece. Repeatedly defeated in battle by the Greeks, and plagued by internal rebellions which hindered their ability to fight the Greeks, after 450 BC Artaxerxes and his successors adopted a policy of divide-and-rule. Avoiding fighting the Greeks themselves, the Persians instead attempted to set Athens against Sparta, regularly bribing politicians to achieve their aims. In this way, they ensured that the Greeks remained distracted by internal conflicts, and were unable to turn their attentions to Persia. There was no open conflict between the Greeks and Persia until 396 BC, when the Spartan king Agesilaus briefly invaded Asia Minor; as Plutarch points out, the Greeks were far too busy overseeing the destruction of their own power to fight against the "barbarians". If the wars of the Delian League shifted the balance of power between Greece and Persia in favour of the Greeks, then the subsequent half-century of internecine conflict in Greece did much to restore the balance of power to Persia. In 387 BC, Sparta, confronted by an alliance of Corinth, Thebes and Athens during the Corinthian War, sought the aid of Persia to shore up her position. Under the so-called "King's Peace" which brought the war to an end, Artaxerxes II demanded and received the return of the cities of Asia Minor from the Spartans, in return for which the Persians threatened to make war on any Greek state which did not make peace. This humiliating treaty, which undid all the Greek gains of the previous century, sacrificed the Greeks of Asia Minor so that the Spartans could maintain their hegemony over Greece. It is in the aftermath of this treaty that Greek orators began to refer to the Peace of Callias (whether fictional or not), as a counterpoint to the shame of the King's Peace, and a glorious example of the "good old days" when the Greeks of the Aegean had been freed from Persian rule by the Delian League.

Stylidium

Genus of plants

Stylidium (the triggerplants or trigger plants) is a genus of dicotyledonous plants that belong to the family Stylidiaceae. The genus name Stylidium is derived from the Greek στύλος or stylos (column or pillar), which refers to the distinctive reproductive structure that its flowers possess. Pollination is achieved through the use of the sensitive "trigger", which comprises the male and female reproductive organs fused into a floral column that snaps forward quickly in response to touch, harmlessly covering the insect in pollen. Most of the approximately 300 species are only found in Australia, making it the fifth largest genus in that country. Triggerplants are considered to be protocarnivorous or carnivorous because the glandular trichomes that cover the scape and flower can trap, kill, and digest small insects with protease enzymes produced by the plant. Recent research has raised questions as to the status of protocarnivory within Stylidium. ## Characteristics The majority of the Stylidium species are perennial herbs of which some are geophytes that utilize bulbs as their storage organ. The remaining small group of species consists of ephemeral annuals. Members of the genus are most easily identified by their unique floral column, in which the stamen and style are fused. The column—also commonly called a "trigger" in this genus—typically resides beneath the plane of the flower. Stylidium flowers are zygomorphic, which means they are only symmetrical in one plane. Flowers usually bloom in the late spring in Australia. ### Morphology Species of the genus Stylidium represent a very diverse selection of plants. Some are only a few centimeters tall, while others can grow to be 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) tall (S. laricifolium). One typical plant form is a dense rosette of leaves close to the ground that gives rise to the floral spike in the center. Plant forms range from wiry, creeping mats (S. scandens) to the bushy S. laricifolium. Flower morphology differs in details, but ascribes to a simple blueprint: four petals, zygomorphic in nature, with the trigger protruding from the "throat" of the flower and resting below the plane of the flower petals. Flower size ranges from many species that have small 0.5 cm (0.20 in) wide flowers to the 2–3 cm (1–1 in) wide flowers of S. schoenoides. Flower color can also vary from species to species, but most include some combination of white, cream, yellow, or pink. Flowers are usually arranged in a spike or dense raceme, but there is at least one exception to the rule: S. uniflorum, as its name suggests, produces a single flower per inflorescence. Leaf morphology is also very diverse in this large genus. Some leaves are very thin, almost needle-like (S. affine), while others are short, stubby, and arranged in rosettes (S. pulviniforme). Another group of species, such as S. scandens (climbing triggerplant) form scrambling, tangled mats typically propped up on aerial roots. ### Pollination mechanism The column typical of the genus Stylidium is sensitive and responds to touch. The change in pressure when a pollinating insect lands on a Stylidium flower causes a physiological change in the column turgor pressure by way of an action potential, sending the column quickly flying toward the insect. Upon impact, the insect will be covered in pollen and stunned, but not harmed. Because the column comprises the fused male and female reproductive organs of the flower, the stamen and stigma take turns in dominating the function of the column—the anthers develop first and then are pushed aside by the developing stigma. This delayed development of the stigma prevents self-pollination and ensures that cross pollination will occur between individuals of a population. Different species have evolved the trigger mechanism in different locations, with some attacking the pollinating insect from above and others from below (a "punch in the gut" to the insect). The response to touch is very quick in Stylidium species. The column can complete its "attack" on the insect in as little as 15 milliseconds. After firing, the column resets to its original position in anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour, depending on temperature and species-specific qualities. The column is able to fire many times before it no longer responds to stimuli. The response time is highly dependent upon ambient temperature, with lower temperatures relating to slower movement. Stylidium species are typically pollinated by small solitary bees and the nectar-feeding bee flies (Bombyliidae). ### Carnivory Stylidium species with glandular trichomes on their sepals, leaves, flower parts, or scapes have been suggested to be protocarnivorous (or paracarnivorous). The tip of the trichome produces a sticky mucilage—a mixture of sugar polymers and water—that is capable of attracting and suffocating small insects. The ability to trap insects may be a defensive mechanism against damage to flower parts. However, trichomes of S. fimbriatum have been shown to produce digestive enzymes, specifically proteases, like other carnivorous plants. Adding species of Stylidium to the list of plants that engage in carnivory would significantly increase the total number of known carnivorous plants. The insects captured by the glandular trichomes are too small to serve any role in pollination. It is unclear, however, whether these plants evolved the ability to trap and kill insects as an adaptation to low environmental nutrient availability or simply a defensive mechanism against insects damaging flower parts. There is also a correlation between location of Stylidium species and proximity of known carnivorous species, like sundews (Drosera), bladderworts (Utricularia), the Albany pitcher plant (Cephalotus follicularis), and the rainbow plant (Byblis). While this alone does not prove that Stylidium species are themselves carnivorous, the hypothesis is that the association arose because Stylidium species and the known carnivorous plants obtain scarce nutrients using the same source, namely captured insects. Preliminary proof is given that the trapping mechanisms of two associated plants are the same (the tentacles of Byblis and Drosera), though this may be only a coincidence and further research must be done. Recent research has raised questions as to the status of protocarnivory within Stylidium. ### Distribution and habitat Most Stylidium species are endemic to Australia. In Western Australia alone, there are more than 150 species, at least 50 of which are in the area immediately around Perth. There are at least four species of Stylidium that are not confined to the Australian continent: S. tenellum is found in Myanmar, Melaka, and Tonkin; S. kunthii in Bengal and Myanmar; S. uliginosum in Queensland, Sri Lanka, and the south coast of China; and S. alsinoides in Queensland and the Philippines. The cladistic group Stylidium contains more than 230 individual species (more than 300 species exist, but many specimens have not yet been formally described), making it the fifth largest genus in Australia. Stylidium habitat includes grassy plains, open heaths, rocky slopes, sandplains, forests, and the margins of creeks and water holes. Somes species, such as S. eglandulosum, can even be found in disturbed areas like near roads and under powerlines. Others (i.e. S. coroniforme) are sensitive to disturbance and are considered rare because of their extremely specific habitat. Even though many species of Stylidium may coexist in the same location, natural hybrids between species have not often been reported. Both natural hybridisation in the field and artificial hybridisation in cultivation are rare. The first natural hybrid, S. petiolare × S. pulchellum, was reported by Sherwin Carlquist in 1969 between Capel and Boyanup in Western Australia. ## Botanical history Discovery and description of new Stylidium species has been occurring since the late 18th century, the first of which was discovered in Botany Bay in 1770 by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during their travels in the Pacific with James Cook aboard the Endeavour. Seven species were collected by Banks and Solander, some of which were sketched by Sydney Parkinson on board the Endeavour and were later engraved in preparation for publication in Banks' Florilegium. Later, in the early 19th century, the French botanist Charles François Antoine Morren wrote one of the first descriptions of the triggerplant anatomy, illustrated by many botanical artists including Ferdinand Bauer. Around the same time, British botanist Robert Brown described (or "authored") several Stylidium species, including S. adnatum and S. repens. More species began to be described as more botanists explored Australia more thoroughly. In 1958, Rica Erickson wrote Triggerplants, describing habitat, distribution, and plant forms (ephemeral, creeping, leafy-stemmed, rosette, tufted, scale-leaved, and tropical). It was Erickson that began placing certain species into these morphologically-based groups, which may or may not resemble true taxonomic divergences. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that research of the trigger physiology was begun in the lab of Dr. Findlay of Flinders University. Douglas Darnowski added to the growing library of knowledge on Stylidium when he published his book Triggerplants in 2002, describing an overview of habitat, plant morphology, carnivory, and research done to date. Following its publication, he co-founded the International Triggerplant Society. As of 2002, only 221 Stylidium species were known. There are now over 300 species, many of which are awaiting formal description. ## Cultivation Most Stylidium species tend to be hardy species and can be easily cultivated in greenhouses or gardens. They are drought resistant, hardy to cold weather, and the species diversity in this genus gives gardeners a wide variety of choices. Most species that are native to Western Australia will be cold hardy to at least -1 to -2 °C. The few that can be found all over Australia, like S. graminifolium, will tolerate a wider range of habitat since their native ranges includes a great diversity of ecoregions. Some species of triggerplants are suitable for cultivation outdoors outside of the Australian continent including most of the United Kingdom and as far north as New York City or Seattle in the United States. Cultivation from seed may be difficult or easy, depending on the species. The more difficult species to grow include the ones that require a period of dormancy or smoke treatment to simulate a bushfire. Stylidium specimens should be grown in a medium that is kept moist and has a relatively low concentration of nutrients. They appear to be sensitive to disturbance of their root systems. Minimization of such disturbance will likely result in healthier plants.

Veronica Mars

American teen mystery drama TV series (2004–2019)

Veronica Mars is an American teen noir mystery drama television series created by screenwriter Rob Thomas. The series is set in the fictional town of Neptune, California, and stars Kristen Bell as the eponymous character. The series premiered on September 22, 2004, during television network UPN's final two years, and ended on May 22, 2007, after a season on UPN's successor, The CW, airing for three seasons total. Veronica Mars was produced by Warner Bros. Television, Silver Pictures Television, Stu Segall Productions, and Rob Thomas Productions. Joel Silver and Thomas were executive producers for the entire run of the series, while Diane Ruggiero was promoted in the third season. The character Veronica Mars is a student who progresses from high school to college while moonlighting as a private investigator under the tutelage of her detective father. In each episode, Veronica solves a different stand-alone case while working to solve a more complex mystery. The first two seasons of the series each had a season-long mystery arc, introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the season finale. The third season took a different format, focusing on smaller mystery arcs that would last several episodes. Thomas initially wrote Veronica Mars as a young adult novel, which featured a male protagonist; he changed this because he thought a noir piece told from a female point of view would be more interesting and original. Filming began in March 2004, and the series premiered in September to 2.49 million American viewers. The critically acclaimed first season's run of 22 episodes garnered an average of 2.5 million viewers per episode in the United States. The series appeared on several fall television best lists and garnered awards and nominations. During the series' run, it was nominated for two Satellite Awards, four Saturn Awards, five Teen Choice Awards and was featured on AFI's TV Programs of the Year for 2005. Following cancellation, Thomas wrote a feature film script continuing the series. Warner Bros. opted not to fund the project at the time. On March 13, 2013, Bell and Thomas launched a fundraising campaign to produce the film through Kickstarter and attained the \$2 million goal in less than 11 hours. They accumulated over \$5.7 million on Kickstarter. The film was released on March 14, 2014. An eight-episode fourth season was released on July 19, 2019 on Hulu. In November 2019, it was announced that there were no plans for Hulu to order a fifth season. ## Series overview ### Season 1 Season 1 revolves around Veronica Mars, a high school student and private investigator in the fictional Southern California seaside town of Neptune. As the daughter of well-respected County Sheriff Keith Mars, Veronica's biggest life problem was getting dumped by her boyfriend, Duncan Kane, until the murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane. After Lilly's murder, Veronica's life falls apart. Keith mistakenly accused Lilly's father, popular software billionaire Jake Kane, of involvement. When Mr. Kane is proven to be innocent, he has Keith ousted as sheriff in a recall election, who the corrupt Don Lamb then replaces. Veronica's mother, Lianne, develops a drinking problem and leaves town, never to return. Veronica's "09er" friends—wealthy students from the fictional 90909 ZIP Code—demand that she choose between them and her father; Veronica chooses her father. After losing the election for sheriff and ostracized by the entire community, Keith opens a private investigation agency, Mars Investigations, where Veronica works part-time. Veronica helps her father solve cases and conducts her investigations on behalf of schoolmates. Veronica discovers evidence suggesting that Abel Koontz, the man imprisoned after confessing to Lilly's murder, is innocent. Veronica explores the murder case; she also works on other investigations, seeks her estranged mother's whereabouts, and copes with being raped during an 09er party after her drink was spiked. Veronica, no longer part of the school's wealthy and elite "in-crowd," makes some new friends: Wallace Fennel, Neptune High basketball star and new student; Eli "Weevil" Navarro, leader of the PCHers, a Latino biker gang; and Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie, Neptune High's resident computer genius. Using her friends' resources and those provided by her father and his contacts, Veronica gains a reputation for sleuthing and finds her skills in increasingly high demand at her school and the community. Things get more complicated when Veronica falls into a relationship with Lilly's ex-boyfriend Logan Echolls, who for a time held Veronica partly responsible for Lilly's death and went out of his way to harass her. It is eventually revealed that the one who killed Lilly was Aaron Echolls, Logan's father. ### Season 2 The second season begins with introducing two new cases: a bus accident that kills several of Veronica's classmates and the death of PCH gang member Felix Toombs. A school bus carrying six Neptune High students and a teacher plunges off a cliff, killing all but one passenger. Veronica, who was supposed to be on the bus, makes it her mission to discover why the bus crashed and who is responsible. Logan picks a fight with Weevil and the PCHers and ends up accused of killing Felix (a charge he denies). Through the season, Weevil becomes convinced of Logan's innocence, and they team up to find the real killer. This season shows Veronica's life returning to much the way it had been before Lilly's death: having broken up with Logan during the summer, she reunites with Duncan and is somewhat accepted by the 09ers. Her sleuthing sideline and tough persona keep her from fully assimilating into the wealthy crowd. 09ers Dick Casablancas and Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas deal with a gold-digging stepmother, Kendall Casablancas, with whom they are left when their father flees the country while under investigation for real estate fraud. Wallace discovers that his biological father is alive and takes a romantic interest in Jackie Cook, the daughter of baseball legend Terrence Cook who is investigated for the bus accident. Veronica discovers that the town mayor, who years ago coached a little league baseball team, sexually molested several team members, including Cassidy. In the finale, it is discovered that Cassidy is responsible for the bus accident and Veronica's rape, as well as a plane crash that kills the mayor (Veronica's dad was supposed to be on the plane, so she thinks he is dead). Veronica confronts Cassidy on the roof of the Neptune Grand hotel, where he tries to kill her. Logan saves her, but Cassidy dies by suicide. ### Season 3 Veronica, Logan, Wallace, Mac, and Dick are freshmen at Neptune's Hearst College in the third season. Two new regular main characters are introduced: Stosh "Piz" Piznarski and Parker Lee, Wallace and Mac's respective roommates. The first mystery is established when Parker becomes a victim of the Hearst serial rapist, a storyline carried over from the second season. Feeling guilty for not helping her and remembering her rape, Veronica works to catch the rapist. The next mystery, the murder of the College's Dean, commences in the same episode that the rapist is caught. Keith begins an adulterous affair with a married client, Wallace struggles to balance academics and sports, Mac begins dating again after previous failed relationships, and Dick has a breakdown and appeals to Logan for help. The season chronicles Veronica and Logan's failing attempts to maintain their relationship in the face of Veronica's increasing mistrust. ### Season 4 The fourth season opens in 2019, twelve years after the series finale and five following the film. Veronica is living with Logan in Neptune and still solving mysteries with Keith. A significant case arises when several Spring Break locations are bombed, with suspects including a State Congressman to a Mexican cartel. ## Cast and characters The first season had seven regular characters. Kristen Bell portrayed the title character Veronica Mars, a high school junior and skilled private detective. Teddy Dunn played Duncan Kane, Veronica's ex-boyfriend and Lilly's brother. Jason Dohring played Logan Echolls, the "bad-boy" 09er, the son of an A-list actor. Percy Daggs III portrayed Wallace Fennel, Veronica's best friend and frequent partner in solving mysteries. Francis Capra portrayed Eli "Weevil" Navarro, the leader of the PCH Biker gang and Veronica's friend. Enrico Colantoni played Veronica's father Keith Mars, a private investigator and former Balboa County Sheriff. Sydney Tamiia Poitier played Mallory Dent, Veronica's journalism teacher at Neptune High. Although she was given series regular billing, Poitier appeared in only four episodes, but was given credit for seven. Poitier's removal from the series was rumored to be due to budget issues. Thomas, who said he "conceive[d] the show as a one-year mystery," decided that he needed to introduce and eliminate several characters to be able to create an "equally fascinating mystery" for the series' second season. Thomas felt that he could not bring back the Kanes and the Echolls and "have them all involved in a new mystery"; he needed "new blood". The second season saw the introduction of Tessa Thompson as Jackie Cook, a romantic interest of Wallace and daughter of a famous baseball player. Previous recurring characters Dick Casablancas and Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas were upgraded to series regulars. Dick, played by Ryan Hansen, was an 09er friend of Logan, a womanizer and former high-school bully turned frat boy. Kyle Gallner portrayed "Beaver," Dick's introverted younger brother. Dunn left the series midway through the season, although was credited as a main cast member throughout that season. Thomas explained that the Logan-Veronica-Duncan love triangle had run its course, and to keep the series fresh, there would need to be "other guys in her life." He attributed Dunn's removal to fan interest dominating the Logan-Veronica relationship, saying "it became clear that one suitor won out". The third season introduced two new series regulars, Parker Lee and Stosh "Piz" Piznarski. Julie Gonzalo portrayed Parker, Mac's extroverted roommate and "everything that Mac is not." Piz, played by Chris Lowell, was Wallace's roommate and a music lover with his campus radio show. Piz was named after the director of the pilot, Mark Piznarski. The character gave Veronica another middle-class male friend. Thomas used the radio show as a narrative device to capture the mood of the university. Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie and Don Lamb, recurring characters in the first two seasons, were upgraded to series regulars. Mac, portrayed by Tina Majorino, was a computer expert befriended by Veronica. Lamb, portrayed by Michael Muhney, was the Balboa County Sheriff who won the office from Keith in the recall election. ## Production ### Conception Rob Thomas originally wrote Veronica Mars as a young adult novel for publishing company Simon & Schuster. Before his first television job on Dawson's Creek, Thomas sold two novel ideas. One of these was provisionally titled Untitled Rob Thomas Teen Detective Novel, which formed the series's basis. The novel had many elements similar to Veronica Mars, though the protagonist was male. Thomas's father was a vice-principal at Westlake High School near Austin, Texas, and the main character attended a "thinly disguised version" of the school. As Thomas had begun writing for film and television, he did not resume his teen detective idea for several years. Writing a novel could take months for Thomas, whereas a television script only took several weeks. Knowing that television scripts paid more, Thomas wrote the teen detective project's television version as a spec script before it became a novel. Since no studio or network had asked him to write it, and he would not get paid unless it sold, Thomas said that "it was never a very pressing project for me." Tinkering with it from time to time, Thomas wrote project notes a year before writing the television script. Most of his original ideas made it into the script, but some changed drastically. Thomas wanted to use flashbacks, and he had to shorten the timeline so that the murder could happen in a recent time. Thomas changed the gender of the protagonist because he thought a noir piece told from a female point of view would be more interesting and unique. ### Casting Kristen Bell was chosen to play Veronica Mars from more than 500 women who auditioned for the role. Bell felt that it was "just luck" that Rob Thomas saw that "I have some sass to me, and that's exactly what he wanted." Bell thought that her cheerleader looks and an outsider's attitude set her apart from the other women who auditioned. Jason Dohring, who played Logan, originally auditioned for the role of Duncan. Teddy Dunn originally auditioned for Logan, but ended up portraying Duncan. Dohring felt that his audition for Duncan "was a little dark", and he was told by the producers that it was "not really right". The producers asked Dohring to read for the role of Logan. Dohring acted one scene from the pilot, in which he shattered the headlights of a car with a crowbar. During the final auditions, Dohring read twice with Bell and met with the studio and the network. When reading with Bell, Dohring acted the whole scene as if he had raped her and tried to give the character an evil and fun feel. At the time of Dohring's audition for Logan, the character was only going to be a guest star in the pilot. Percy Daggs III auditioned for Wallace Fennel's role twice and took three tests with studio and network executives. During his first audition, Daggs read four scenes from the pilot. Just before his studio test, Daggs read with Bell and had "a great conversation." He said that she "made me feel comfortable about auditioning" and was a big reason why he became more comfortable playing Wallace as the season went on. Thomas described Amanda Seyfried, who portrayed the murdered Lilly Kane, as "the biggest surprise of the year." When casting a series regular, he was able to see all the best actors in town, mainly because they all wanted to be a series regular. When casting Lilly Kane, who would only appear from time-to-time as "the dead girl," Thomas did not receive the same level of actors. Thomas said that he had "never had a more cut and dried audition" than he did with Seyfried. He said that she was "about 100 times better than anyone else that we saw; she was just spectacular". He continued by saying that she ended up being so good in the series that he used her three or four more times than he initially planned. ### Writing and format Episodes have a distinct structure: Veronica investigates a different "case of the week" while trying to solve a larger mystery that spans several episodes or a whole season. The first two seasons of Veronica Mars have a season-long mystery arc, which is introduced in the first episode of the season and solved in the finale. The third season takes on a different format, focusing on two smaller mystery arcs that last the course of nine and six episodes respectively. The final five episodes of the season feature stand-alone mysteries. During the first season, Thomas was unsure if the series's success was attributed to each episode's "case of the week" or the overarching story. He realized that fans were cool with the "case of the week" but returned for the ongoing mystery. Thomas felt that Bell had been overworked in the first season, and the mystery involving Logan and Weevil in the second season was an attempt to give her some time off. He said that the mystery arcs of the second season had "way too many suspects, way too many red herrings" and that the third season needed a change. The third season was initially planned to include three separate mysteries that would be introduced and resolved in a series of non-overlapping story arcs. Thomas realized by talking to CW Entertainment President Dawn Ostroff that viewers got too confused by his original format, and the new format would allow new viewers to start watching at any point in the season. Inspired by the improvised thriller Bubble, Thomas started laying "subtle" motives for the second mystery during the first one, so that fans would have "a theory on whodunit" when it occurred. The first mystery took place over the first nine episodes. Originally, the second mystery was to be seven episodes long, and the third mystery was to occur over the last six episodes of the season. This was changed when The CW ordered a 20 episode season instead of the usual 22 episodes. The second mystery arc was shortened from seven episodes to six, and the third mystery was first changed from a six-episode arc to a five-episode arc. After an eight-week hiatus for the series was announced, the final mystery was changed to five stand-alone episodes designed to be friendlier to new viewers. The final mystery was originally going to be "unlike any of the others we've done before." Previously, "nice characters" like Wallace and Mac had always been absent from the big mystery because no one was going to believe them as a suspect. For the third mystery, Thomas had wanted to present a situation where Wallace and Mac could be fully involved, "key players [with] really interesting stuff to do." ### Filming The original pilot was darker in tone than the one aired. Thomas intended to take the script to FX, HBO or Showtime, but gave UPN "credit" as they only wanted it a bit lighter to match their standards and practices. A lengthy debate considered whether Veronica could be a rape victim; UPN eventually consented. In the aired pilot, Lilly was found by the pool in the same spot where she was murdered. However, Thomas stated that Lilly's body was originally going to be found in the ocean, and he had a plan for events that led there. Thomas pitched the idea to UPN, but the network felt that it was "too dark and creepy" for Jake to dispose of his daughter's body to protect his son, and the idea was changed. Many of the series' scenes were filmed at Stu Segall Productions in San Diego, California. Producer Paul Kurta said that most of the Neptune scenes were filmed in Oceanside, California. Kurta liked that it was "a seaside town that still feels like middle-class people live there [...] Most of the seaside towns feel resort driven." It was estimated that the series spent \$44 million a year shooting each season in San Diego, comprising more than half of the revenue generated by film production there in 2006. The Neptune High setting was also in Oceanside. The school, Oceanside High School, was paid \$7,750 by Stu Segall Productions for the use of the campus and extras. The series' third season setting of Hearst College was mostly filmed on the campuses of San Diego State University, University of San Diego and the University of California, San Diego. Filming locations were chosen by the director and by production designer Alfred Sole. Sole reportedly "really liked the look and feel of the school", and San Diego State University invited the series with "open arms". Taping at the university led to financial and employment benefits for the university and its students. Alumni worked as crew members while students worked as actors; half of the third season extras were students from the university's film department. The fourth season was filmed in Hermosa Beach, California, primarily at the Sea Sprite Hotel. ### Music "We Used to Be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols was used as the series' theme song. Composer Josh Kramon was originally going to produce a noir version of a 1980s song for the theme. However, Rob Thomas was "pretty much set on finding a song," and "We Used to Be Friends" was chosen right from the beginning. TV critic Samantha Holloway considered this theme to be one of "the five most recognizable, sing-along-able, memorable and best theme songs." The theme song was remixed in a softer piano style with dark and vibrant electronic beats to reflect the more noir-influenced opening credits in the third season. Kramon wrote the original background music to convey the film noir themes. For the pilot, Thomas wanted "a really atmospheric, kind of modern noir type of vibe," and Kramon used sounds similar to that of Air and Zero 7. Kramon used "traditional sounds" for the series but also processed and filtered them. Among the instruments used were piano, vibraphone, and guitar. When using an acoustic piano, Kramon would use compression to not sound like a traditional piano. Live bass and percussion were also used, as Kramon did not like to program them. The main instrument used was the guitar, but Kramon felt that the piano was "by far the most important instrument for working on TV shows, especially when you're doing everything yourself." A week before choosing the sounds for the episodes, the crew had a "spotting session," where they would discuss with Thomas and the producers which type of music would be featured. Kramon did not decide the songs to be featured but composed and created the whole score. Since there was little orchestral music, and Kramon could play guitar, piano, bass, and drums, he played all parts without another musician. Veronica Mars: Original Television Soundtrack, a song compilation from the series' first and second seasons, was released by Nettwerk Records on September 27, 2005. Thomas revealed that the primary goal for the soundtrack was to "get more publicity, which will in turn hopefully get more viewers for the show". ## Cancellation, film and revival ### Cancellation In January 2007, Dawn Ostroff announced that while she was pleased with the gradual ratings improvement of Veronica Mars, the series would be put on hiatus after the February sweeps to air a new reality series, Pussycat Dolls Present. When the hiatus ended, the series returned for the last five episodes of the season. At the 2007 CW Upfront, Ostroff announced that Veronica Mars was not part of the new primetime lineup and was "not coming back". Thomas created a trailer that took place four years after the third-season finale, with the working title "Veronica in the FBI", and released it on the third season DVD. When asked if the FBI concept could happen, Ostroff said that the series was probably completely gone "in any form". Ostroff also said that Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas might collaborate on another project for the CW network. In June 2007, TV Guide writer Michael Ausiello confirmed that the cancellation of Veronica Mars was official. ### Potential film progress Thomas stated that he was interested in writing a feature film based on the series to provide closure to the storylines and character arcs. In September 2008, Michael Ausiello, writing for Entertainment Weekly, reported that Thomas had met with Bell to discuss the plot, which would likely involve Veronica solving crime in college rather than as an FBI agent. Thomas felt that the "FBI scenario was more of a 'What if...?'", aimed at getting a fourth season and that he "would want to bring back our key players, and it would be tough to believe that the FBI stationed Veronica in Neptune." Ausiello later reported that Enrico Colantoni would be involved in the project. Colantoni said that he was fully aware of the talks taking place, adding, "cult shows have translated well into the film arena. Nothing's official, but they're talking about it." In addition to the feature-film possibility, Thomas had a meeting with DC Comics to talk about a Veronica Mars comic book series. In September 2008, Thomas told Entertainment Weekly that "I thought I had the idea broken, but I've hit a wall in the final act that I haven't quite figured out." Thomas explained that he had been very busy writing for Cupid and Party Down, both of which he created. In January 2009, TV Guide reported that the film was Thomas' first priority after Cupid. Thomas noted that as well as writing the script, someone would need to pay for the film, but indicated that producer Joel Silver was ready to green-light the film. In June 2009, Bell said "I don't think it will ever happen, and here's why: [Series creator] Rob Thomas and I had a powwow, and we were both 100 percent on board. We took our proposal to Warner Bros., and Joel Silver told us that there is no enthusiasm [there] to make a Veronica Mars movie, and that is, unfortunately, a roadblock we cannot compete with." At the 2010 TCA Winter Press Tour, Rob Thomas stated that the movie wouldn't be happening, "I would write it if anyone would finance it. If anyone's interested in making that movie, I am available, Kristen's [Bell] available. I would love to do it. I think the closest we came was Joel [Silver] pushing it at Warner Bros., and they didn't bite. It has sort of gone away." In April 2010, Thomas insisted, "it's not dead. I continue to want to do it [...] We're still looking into it." In June 2010, Silver was less optimistic about the film happening; "we analyzed all these areas about it. I talked to the home video people because a movie like that would be driven by video. The [season DVDs] didn't do that well... So they didn't feel there was a need or an audience." ### Kickstarter project On March 13, 2013, Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell launched a Kickstarter fundraiser in an attempt to get the film made, with the help of fans to reach the goal of \$2 million. The campaign offered various incentives to those who donated more than \$10. Thomas and Bell stated that they approached Warner Bros. with the idea and they approved and will be distributing the finished title. Bell, Thomas, Enrico Colantoni, Ryan Hansen, and Jason Dohring appeared in a video promoting the campaign that was shot in February 2012. The goal was met within 10 hours of the start of the campaign. The project broke several Kickstarter records, becoming the site's largest successful film project. The campaign ended on April 13, with 91,585 donors raising \$5,702,153. Production began in June 2013, with a projected early 2014 release. In December 2013, Thomas announced that the release date would be March 14, 2014, a year and a day after the start of the Kickstarter project. On April 5, Thomas had completed the first draft of the script. Several casting announcements were made through April to June, with confirmation of several returning cast members, including Jason Dohring (Logan Echolls), Enrico Colantoni (Keith Mars), Percy Daggs III (Wallace Fennel), Chris Lowell (Stosh "Piz" Piznarski), Francis Capra (Eli "Weevil" Navarro), Ryan Hansen (Dick Casablancas), and Tina Majorino (Cindy "Mac" Mackenzie), among several others. The film had its world premiere at the South by Southwest film festival on March 8, 2014, and was released in theatres and through online platforms on March 14, 2014. The film grossed \$3.5 million worldwide, and received positive reviews from critics, with a 79% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on reviews from 125 critics, with an average score of 6.7 out of 10. ### Revival series In September 2018, Hulu officially confirmed the revival of Veronica Mars, and announced it would consist of eight episodes, and series creator Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell were confirmed to return. The plot revolves around a serial killer murdering spring breakers. Other returning cast members include Jason Dohring (Logan Echolls), Enrico Colantoni (Keith Mars), Percy Daggs III (Wallace Fennel), Francis Capra (Eli "Weevil" Navarro), Ryan Hansen (Dick Casablancas), and several others. New cast members include Dawnn Lewis, Patton Oswalt, Clifton Collins Jr., and J. K. Simmons. It was originally scheduled for release on July 26, 2019; however, Hulu released the season one week early on July 19 shortly after the series' appearance at San Diego Comic-Con. ## Other media ### Novels A series of novels, written by series creator Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, continue the story after the events of the Veronica Mars film and also feature Logan, Mac, Wallace, and Dick. The first novel, Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, was released by Random House on March 25, 2014, as a Vintage Books trade paperback (), an eBook (), and an unabridged audiobook read by Kristen Bell (). It featured the return of Veronica's mother, Lianne Mars. The second novel, Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell, also published by Vintage Books, was released on January 20, 2015. Thomas has said in interviews that the novels are canon, and would not be negated by a future film. ### Web spin-off In January 2014, it was announced that a digital spin-off of Veronica Mars was in development with creator Rob Thomas. The metafictional concept features Ryan Hansen portraying himself in an attempt to make a spin-off based on his character Dick Casablancas. On August 13, 2014, it was announced that the web series, titled Play It Again, Dick, would premiere on September 18, 2014 on The CW's digital content website, CW Seed in 8-episode installments with a length of 8–10 minutes per installment. Other cast members returning include Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Enrico Colantoni, Percy Daggs III, Daran Norris, Francis Capra, Chris Lowell and Ken Marino, who portrayed their "Veronica Mars" characters as well as fictionalized versions of themselves. ## Reception ### Ratings Below, "rank" refers to how well Veronica Mars rated compared to other television series which aired during primetime hours of the corresponding television season. The television season begins in September of any given year and ends during the May of the following year. "Viewers" refers to the average number of viewers for all original episodes broadcast during the television season in the series' regular timeslot. "Rank" is shown with the total number of series airing on the six/five major English-language networks in a given season. The "season premiere" is the date that the first episode of the season aired. Similarly, the "season finale" is the date that the final episode of the season aired. ### Critical reception Although not a ratings success, the series was a critical success from its first season. Robert Abele of LA Weekly said "in this smart, engaging series about a former popular girl turned crime-solving high school outcast, the hard-boiled dialogue comes from its teen protagonist's mouth in a way that stabs any potential cutesiness in the heart with an ice pick." In her review, Paige Wiser of the Chicago Sun Times said that "on Veronica Mars, wholesome is out; gritty reality is in. The show never soft-pedals the timeless, fundamental truth that high school is hell." Joyce Millman of The Phoenix felt that the series was "a character study masquerading as a high-school drama". Joy Press of The Village Voice saw the series as "a sharp teen noir in the making. Tinged with class resentment and nostalgia for Veronica's lost innocence, this series pulses with promise." Michael Abernethy of PopMatters said that "intrigue, drama, and humor, Veronica Mars is also a lesson book for the disenfranchised. Few TV series aim so high; even fewer succeed so well." James Poniewozik of Time labeled it as one of the six best dramas on television. He praised Bell as "a captivating star", and said that the series "uses its pulp premise to dramatize a universal teen experience: that growing up means sleuthing out the mystery of who you really are." Kay McFadden of The Seattle Times called the series an update to the "classic California film noir". She felt that Veronica Mars was the best new series on UPN, and that the title character was potentially "this season's most interesting character creation". McFadden described the series as "Alias in its attitude, Raymond Chandler in its writing and The O.C. in its class-consciousness." Stephanie Zacharek of Salon praised the first-season finale for being "just the sort of satisfying capper you look for in a series that, week after week, keeps you asking questions." Veronica Mars was also positively received by other writers. Joss Whedon, who made a guest appearance in the second-season episode "Rat Saw God", said that it was the "Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I've never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn't making, and maybe even more than those [...] These guys know what they're doing on a level that intimidates me. It's the Harry Potter of shows." Kevin Smith, who guest starred in the episode "Driver Ed", said that Veronica Mars was "hands-down, the best show on television right now, and proof that TV can be far better than cinema." Stephen King described the series as "Nancy Drew meets Philip Marlowe, and the result is pure nitro. Why is Veronica Mars so good? It bears little resemblance to life as I know it, but I can't take my eyes off the damn thing." Ed Brubaker called it "the best mystery show ever made in America." Despite being a critical success throughout its run, criticisms began to emerge in its third season. Keith McDuffee of TV Squad described the third season as "disappointing," mainly because the episodes offered nothing new: "most fans of Veronica Mars felt that season three was clearly its weakest." Eric Goldman of IGN said that the main issue was the shift in the overall tone, with a lighter feeling than the previous seasons. He felt that Logan had been most affected by the tone change, robbed of his darker aspects, and changed into an "increasingly extraneous character." Goldman felt that despite the concerns over the final five episodes, the series ended with "three very strong episodes, with lots of strong dialogue and Veronica proving again just how tough she can be, and what a strong character she is." Goldman concluded that although the third season "was very choppy," it still had "plenty of witty dialogue and a continually engaging performance by Kristen Bell as the title character." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opined that Veronica Mars had taken a dive "creatively", from "the mopier version of its theme song to stalled storylines." The reviewer felt that "the arcing mysteries had grown less convincing and compelling as time went on and were too drawn out." Fox News Channel's Bridget Byrne pointed out that Veronica had "gone from punky to—dare we say—preppy" in the third season. Byrne further explained that "with her quick, bright wit and sharp eye for life's darker moments [Veronica] has left high school and is going to college, doffing her dark threads and spiked tresses for something a little more stylish." The series, described as a "critical darling", appeared on a number of fall television best lists. In 2005, the series was featured on AFI's TV Programs of the Year, and on the lists of MSN TV, The Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, People Weekly and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It was named the second best series by Ain't It Cool News, fourth best returning series by Time, fifth best series by Newsday, PopMatters and San Jose Mercury-News, and sixth best by Entertainment Weekly and USA Today. In 2006, the series was ranked number one on the lists of Ain't It Cool News and the Chicago Sun-Times, and was ranked number six by Metacritic. In 2007, the series ranked number 18 on TV Guide's list of the "Top Cult Shows Ever". In 2008, AOL TV ranked Veronica Mars the 10th Best School Show of All Time. The same year, British film magazine Empire ranked it number 48 in their list of the "50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time". The magazine said that "smart storylines and witty riffs on pop culture pepper the scripts, while Kristen Bell lent ballsy charm to the title role and ensured that every episode of the show's three seasons was television gold. Its untimely cancellation was a slap in the face that still smarts to this day." Empire named "Not Pictured" the best episode of the series. In 2010, Kristin dos Santos of E! ranked Veronica Mars number 8 on her list, "Top 20 TV Series of the Past 20 Years". The A.V. Club named it the 15th best TV series of the 2000s (decade). In 2012, Entertainment Weekly listed the show at \#13 in the "25 Best Cult TV Shows from the Past 25 Years", with the comments, "It's not easy telling the story of a girl's mission to solve her best friend's murder – while also investigating her own rape – but creator Rob Thomas' tough assignment was made easier by putting the tirelessly smart and snarky Veronica Mars on the case. Her wry one-liners injected much-needed lightness into sometimes grim mysteries." In 2020, Briana Kranich of Screen Rant ranked Veronica Mars as the top contender of The 10 Best TV Teen Heroines. ### Fandom Veronica Mars has attracted a loyal and dedicated fan base. A group of fans calling themselves the "Cloud Watchers" organized several campaigns to bring more viewers to the series to ensure its continuation. The group hired a plane to fly over the CW offices, carrying a banner reading "Renew Veronica Mars." The group hired street teams in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago to distribute 30,000 fliers advertising the series' return after its midseason hiatus in the third season. The "Cloud Watchers" raised \$50,000 in donations and through the sale of Veronica Mars clothing and tchotchkes. Upon the cancellation of the series, fans sent more than 10,000 Mars Bars to the CW, hoping that the network would reverse its decision and renew the series. Rob Thomas thanked the fans of the series for their efforts, saying, "I love those people, and they have been so good to me, but it's not going to happen." A feature film continuation was made possible in 2013 through a Kickstarter fund, in which 91,585 fans donated \$5,702,153 to get the film made. Fans have also come to refer to themselves and be referred to as "Marshmallows" by media as well as the cast and crew of the series after a line delivered by Wallace (Percy Daggs III) in the pilot episode: "You're a marshmallow, Veronica Mars. A Twinkie." At the end of the same episode, Veronica in voiceover remarks "Well, you know what they say: 'Veronica Mars, she's a marshmallow.'" A reference to the term was also included in the fan-funded film. ### Awards and nominations ## Distribution ### International The CTV Television Network began airing Veronica Mars in Canada as a mid-season replacement on May 30, 2005. CTV decided not to pick up the second season, which began broadcast by Sun TV on July 18, 2006. The third season was initially only available through American border stations. The fourth season premiered in Canada on the Crave streaming service (owned by the same company as CTV) within a few hours of its U.S. release on Hulu on July 19, 2019. Subscription channel Living began showing the series in the United Kingdom in October 2005, averaging 50,000 viewers per episode for its first season. The channel began airing the second season on June 8, 2006, airing one episode per week rather than showing one every night as they did in the first season. Despite low ratings in the second season, Living decided to air the series' third season. It was syndicated through the Living TV Group platform, airing on the now defunct channel Trouble just before its closure. Free-to-air channel E4 began broadcasting the series from July 16, 2009. Veronica Mars premiered in Australia by Network Ten on November 28, 2005, where the series saw erratic airings. TV2 began showing the series in New Zealand on July 15, 2005. ### Home media The first season of Veronica Mars was released in region 1 as a widescreen six-disc DVD box set on October 11, 2005. In addition to all the episodes that had been aired, DVD extras included an extended "Pilot" episode (through the inclusion of an unaired opening sequence) and over 20 minutes of unaired scenes. The same set was released on May 16, 2008 in Region 2, and on June 4, 2008 in Region 4. The second season was released in region 1 as a widescreen six-disc DVD box set on August 22, 2006, Region 2 on August 15, 2008, and Region 4 on September 8, 2008. In addition to all the aired episodes, DVD extras included two featurettes: "A Day on the Set with Veronica Mars" and "Veronica Mars: Not Your Average Teen Detective", a gag reel, a promo trailer for the third season and additional scenes, including an alternate ending to "My Mother, the Fiend". The third season was released in region 1 as a widescreen six-disc DVD box set on October 23, 2007, Region 2 on December 12, 2008, and Region 4 on February 11, 2009. In addition to all the aired episodes, DVD extras included "Pitching Season 4", an interview with Rob Thomas discussing a new direction for the series that picks up years later, with Veronica as a rookie FBI agent; "Going Undercover with Rob Thomas"; webisode gallery with cast interviews and various set tours; unaired scenes with introductions by Rob Thomas; and a gag reel. In the United Kingdom, Veronica Mars: The Complete Collection was released on May 12, 2014. The set contains all three seasons and the film in an 18-disc set. This is the first time the series received a release in the UK, as the seasons were not released individually. ### Syndication In July and August 2005, four episodes of the first season aired on CBS, UPN's sibling network, to gain more exposure for the series. The series aired on SOAPnet in 2012. Pivot began airing the series in January 2014. ## See also

1988 Football League Fourth Division play-off final

Association football match

The 1988 Football League Fourth Division play-off Final was an association football match contested by Swansea City and Torquay United over two legs on 25 and 28 May 1988, to determine which club would play the following season in the Third Division. Torquay United had finished in fifth place in the Fourth Division while Swansea City finished sixth. They were joined in the play-offs by fourth-placed Scunthorpe United and Rotherham United, who had finished in 21st place in the division above. Swansea City defeated Rotherham United County in their semi-final, consigning the latter to relegation to the Fourth Division, while Torquay United beat Scunthorpe United in the other. The play-off final first leg was played at Swansea City's Vetch Field, in front of a crowd of 10,825, and was refereed by Roger Milford. The first half ended goalless and Swansea City took the lead when McCarthy scored with a header in the 73rd minute. Ian Love doubled their advantage thirteen minutes later, again with a header. With two minutes remaining, Torquay United's Jim McNichol scored to end the game 2–1 to Swansea City. The second leg of the final was played at Plainmoor in Torquay on 28 May 1988 in front of 5,000 spectators and was refereed by J. Martin. In the 22nd minute, Paul Raynor gave Swansea City the lead and five minutes later McCarthy scored a penalty kick. McNichol then scored with two headers in the space of six minutes, but just before half-time, Alan Davies struck the ball past Kenny Allen, the Torquay United goalkeeper. In the 65th minute, David Caldwell scored at the near post, and the match ended 3–3 with Swansea City winning the final 5–4 on aggregate to secure promotion to the Third Division. Swansea City's next season saw them finish in twelfth place in the Third Division, eleven points outside the 1989 Football League play-offs. Torquay United ended the following season in fourteenth position in the Fourth Division, twelve points below the play-offs. ## Route to the final This was the second time the Football League play-offs had taken place. They were introduced in the previous season as part of the "Heathrow Agreement", a ten-point proposal to restructure the Football League. For the first two years of the play-offs, the team which had finished immediately above the relegation positions in the Third Division competed with three clubs from the Fourth Division for a place in the third tier of English football for the following season. Swansea City finished the season in sixth place in the Fourth Division, and faced Rotherham United, who had finished 21st in the Third Division in their play-off semi-final. The first match of the two-legged tie took place at the Vetch Field in Swansea on 15 May 1988 in front of 9,148 spectators. After a goalless first half, Sean McCarthy scored with five minutes of the match remaining to give Swansea City a 1–0 victory. The second leg was held three days later at Millmoor in Rotherham in front of a crowd of 5,568. McCarthy scored with a volley after 19 minutes before Rotherham United's Nigel Johnson equalised with a goal before half-time. Although Rotherham United dominated the second half, the match ended 1–1. Swansea City progressed to the final with a 2–1 aggregate victory while Rotherham United were relegated to the fourth tier of English football for the first time since 1975. Torquay United had finished second-from-last in the 1986–87 Fourth Division, only avoiding relegation by scoring a final minute penalty kick in their final game of the season. Going into the final match of the 1987–88 season, Torquay United were in third and played Scunthorpe United, only needing a draw to secure automatic promotion. Torquay United lost the game 2–1, and ended the season in fifth position, behind Scunthorpe United. Torquay United thus faced Scunthorpe United in the other play-off semi-final, with the first leg being played eight days after their final league encounter, again at Plainmoor in Torquay, on 15 May 1988, in front of 4,602 spectators. Scunthorpe were reduced to ten players when Paul Nicol was sent off. David Caldwell and Paul Dobson put Torquay United 2–0 ahead in the first half, before Kevin Taylor scored in the 71st minute to make the final score 2–1 to Torquay United. The second leg was held three days later at the Old Show Ground in Scunthorpe which was hosting its final game, in front of a crowd of 4,602. Mark Loram opened the scoring from a Dobson pass for Torquay United despite Scunthorpe dominating the early stages of the match. Steve Lister scored a late penalty for Scunthorpe United, but the match ended 1–1 and Torquay United progressed to the final with a 3–2 aggregate win. ## Match ### Background Torquay United had played in the Fourth Division since being relegated in the 1971–72 season and had avoided relegation to the Football Conference the previous season on goal difference. This was their first appearance in the play-offs. Swansea City had played in the fourth tier of English football for two seasons, and had featured in the First Division as recently as the 1982–83 season, before suffering three relegations in four seasons. In the matches between the sides during the regular season, the game at the Vetch Field in December 1987 ended in a 1–1 draw while the fixture at Plainmoor the following March saw Swansea City win 1–0. ### First leg #### Summary The play-off final first leg was played at Swansea City's Vetch Field, in front of a crowd of 10,825, and was refereed by Roger Milford. Swansea were the stronger team in the early minutes, and won an attacking free kick, which was taken by Robbie James. Andy Melville had a headed chance at goal from the free kick, but did not score. According to The Guardian's Grahame Lloyd, "Torquay always threatened to score on the break", and they had two opportunities to score in five minutes through Derek Dawkins. First, he had a headed shot from a cross by Tom Kelly, and then a shot from 12 yards (11 m), both saved by the Swansea goalkeeper, Peter Guthrie. The first half ended goalless and soon after the interval, Dobson's strike hit the Swansea City crossbar. McCarthy scored with a header in the 73rd minute to give Swansea City the lead before Ian Love doubled their advantage thirteen minutes later, again with a header. With two minutes remaining, Torquay United's Jim McNichol scored to end the game 2–1 to Swansea City. #### Details ### Second leg #### Summary The second leg of the final was played at Plainmoor on 28 May 1988 in front of 5,000 spectators and was refereed by J. Martin. In the 22nd minute, Paul Raynor gave Swansea City the lead when he scored from missed clearances by Torquay United. Five minutes later, Love was pulled down in the Torquay United penalty area and McCarthy scored the resulting penalty kick. McNichol then scored with two headers in the space of six minutes, but just before half-time, Alan Davies struck the ball past Kenny Allen, the Torquay United goalkeeper, to make it 3–2 to Swansea City at the interval. In the second half, Torquay United went close to scoring twice more, with Caldwell shooting off-target from close range and McNichol heading the ball against the Swansea City crossbar. In the 65th minute, Caldwell scored at the near post, flicking the ball with his head past Guthrie. The match ended 3–3 and Swansea City won the final 5–4 on aggregate to secure promotion to the Third Division. #### Details ## Post-match Terry Yorath, Swansea City's manager, offered condolences to his opponents, saying "I've got all the sympathy in the world for them". His counterpart, Cyril Knowles, was critical of the play-offs, suggesting "it's all wrong. I don't like it, whatever the financial considerations, and I'm not saying that because we lost." Swansea City's next season saw them finish in twelfth place in the Third Division, eleven points outside the 1989 Football League play-offs. Torquay United ended the following season in fourteenth position in the Fourth Division, twelve points below the play-offs.

Como la Flor

1992 single by Selena

"Como la Flor" ("Like the Flower") is a song recorded by American singer Selena. Written by A. B. Quintanilla and Pete Astudillo, it was released as the second single from her third studio album Entre a Mi Mundo (1992). The song was written by Quintanilla, who was inspired by a family selling illuminated plastic flowers at a concert in Sacramento, California, in 1982. A decade later, Quintanilla. was seized with an infectious melody and abruptly dashed out of the shower in a hotel room in Bryan, Texas, to recreate it on a keyboard with Astudillo. He completed the music in just 20 minutes, while Astudillo took another hour to complete the lyrics. "Como la Flor" is an up-tempo, Tejano cumbia torch song that blends tropical cumbia rhythms with hints of reggae and pop music. Its lyrics describe the feelings of a female protagonist addressing her former lover, who abandoned her for another partner. The narrator is uncertain of her ability to love again, while at the same time, wishing her former partner and his new lover the best. "Como la Flor" received widespread acclaim from music critics, who lauded Selena's powerful performance of the song's poignant lyrics about heartbreak and loss. At the Premio Lo Nuestro 1993, the song won Regional Mexican Song of the Year. It was nominated for Single of the Year at the 1993 Tejano Music Awards but was removed in preliminaries; a move music critic Rene Cabrera criticized. The song peaked at number six on the US Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart and became one of the most-played songs on Latin music radio stations in Texas. After Selena's press tour in Monterrey, Mexico, organized by music executive José Behar, "Como la Flor" climbed to number three on Mexico's Grupera Songs chart, marking her first major commercial breakthrough in the country. Following its inclusion in Selena's live set list, "Como la Flor" quickly gained popularity and became a staple in her concert repertoire, often serving as the opening or closing number. During her performances, Selena would often deliver the song in a slow, mournful tempo while performing a flamenco-inspired floreo hand gesture. As she transitioned to the upbeat section, she would exclaim "como me duele" ("how it hurts me") while beating her chest, imbuing the song with a powerful emotional resonance. Selena's stage presence, choreography, and nuanced delivery of the song's themes of heartbreak and resilience were hailed by music critics and scholars alike, who praised her ability to capture the essence of Latino mournfulness in her performances. "Como la Flor" was the closing number of Selena's final live performance in Bryan on March 19, 1995; she was shot and killed on March 31. The song has since been regarded as Selena's signature and "trademark", serving as both her posthumous epithet and swan song. Its popularity has placed it among her most celebrated works and cemented its position in the Texas musical canon. "Como la Flor" became one of the most popular songs recorded by an artist of Mexican descent in the US. In 2018, Rolling Stone named "Como la Flor" one of the best Latin pop songs. Several artists have recorded cover versions of the song; these include Jackie Cruz, Ángela Aguilar, and Cristian Castro. Selena's performances of the recording were dramatized by Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 Warner Bros. biopic film and in 2020 by Christian Serratos in Netflix's Selena: The Series. The New York Times writer Joe Nick Patoski named his biography of Selena after the song. Contemporary reviews have been positive; essayist Ilan Stavans said the emergence of Latin pop in the United States in the 1990s is attributed to the popularity of "Como la Flor". Scholar Deborah Parédez lauded Selena for innovatively blending unexplored genres of African American music into the Tejano genre, which she believes led to the song's success. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has certified "Como la Flor" 9x Platinum (Latin). The song currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most video uploads of people lip syncing to a single song in one hour. ## Background and inspiration Following the 1981 recession in Texas, former musician Abraham Quintanilla, sought to promote his children's band Selena y Los Dinos as a way to make ends meet after being evicted from their home. In 1982, Selena y Los Dinos, along with three other Mexican bands, performed at a nightclub in Sacramento, California. Following their performance, A. B. Quintanilla caught sight of a family vending illuminated plastic flowers. Struck by inspiration, A. B. conceived a repetitive rhythm and the working title "flor" ("flower"), though he found the term "plastic flower" lyrically unappealing. With the vision of someday crafting a song about a flower, he vowed to himself to turn his inspiration into a reality. In 1992, after a live performance, the band spent the night at a hotel in Bryan, Texas before their scheduled travel to Houston the following day. While staying at the hotel, A. B. was seized by an irresistible melody that he could not silence. He sprang out of the shower, grabbed a keyboard, and started working on the tune with backup vocalist Pete Astudillo and keyboardist Joe Ojeda. A. B. had a ten-year-old concept for a song, and he shared it with Astudillo, who initially proposed a different idea based on his own life experience. Astudillo believed that the lyrics would resonate more deeply with audiences if they were based on genuine emotions. Despite this, A. B. remained committed to his vision of a song about someone receiving a wilting flower from their lover as an analogy for the end of a relationship. The two decided to write about a despondent woman who wished her former partner well rather than portraying someone better off without them. Astudillo linked the song to a Spanish-language version that predated Adele's 2012 single "Someone like You". A. B. took 20 minutes to compose the music and another hour for Astudillo to complete the lyrics. According to keyboardist Ricky Vela, the song was finished in his absence while he was out for dinner. During the recording sessions, Selena left the studio before completing the backing vocals. A. B. lamented, "homegirl just bounced on me, she said, 'I'm out of here, I'm going to the mall." Nevertheless, he revised the melody and added the finishing touches by recording the backing vocals himself. Keyboardist Joe Ojeda also provided instrumental arrangement for "Como la Flor". A. B. developed a simple formula for writing songs like "Como la Flor", which emphasized melody lines, synth hooks, and basic instrumentation, believing that simplicity is "what sells". The recording took place at Manny Guerra's AMEN Studios. ## Music and lyrics Musically, "Como la Flor" is primarily a Tejano cumbia torch song, which American scholar Deborah Parédez described as a transnational fusion that melds tropical and cumbia rhythms with reggae and pop music. Tejano music journalist Ramiro Burr referred to the track as a "pop polka", that incorporates pop, disco, and R&B. Although "Como la Flor" is "equally catchy" as "La Carcacha", it is performed at a slower tempo. Mike Hazelwood of Tulare Advance - Register called "Como la Flor" an infectious Tejano recording that is appealing to a broad audience beyond its genre. The song is written in the key of B major and composed in time signature, with a moderate "lively tempo" of 92 beats per minute. Selena's vocals range from F₃ to B₄, highlighting her "trademark cumbia rhythm." The melody of the song is simple yet melancholic, making it a "heart-wrenching ballad" according to Chris Pérez, the widower of Selena. Parédez also described it as a "captivating ballad", while Nathan Smith of Texas Music Magazine called it a "heartfelt, pop-tinged Tejano ballad." The call-and-response lyrics of the song's chorus invite audience participation. The bassline is described as "emphatic" and the beat is "irresistible" according to Christian Wallace of Texas Monthly. "Como la Flor" evokes "beauty and ephemerality", a connection that scholars Rosana Blanco-Cano and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz consider clichéd because of its title. Joey Guerra of the Houston Chronicle praised "Como la Flor" for its unique sound compared to other Spanish-language songs. It contains a danceable, synthesizer-based, pop-cumbia beat, and a banda keyboard sound. Selena "mixes pop vocalism" and displays a "boo-hooing cadence" that is consistent with ranchera songs. Writing for the San Antonio Express-News, Burr enjoyed the song's "memorable melodic hook" that he felt "had listeners whistling along". Soraya Nadia McDonald of The Washington Post called "Como la Flor" an "ear-wormy goodness" track. In the lyrics of "Como la Flor", the protagonist directs her words to her former lover who has terminated their relationship. She expresses her desire for her ex-lover to find happiness in his new relationship, something that she was unable to provide. The protagonist uses the metaphor of a wilting flower to describe the end of their relationship, which she finds painful. Uncertain of her ability to love again, the narrator reveals that she gave all of her love to her former partner and wishes him and his new partner the best. The lyrics delve into the complexities of romantic relationships. Selena portrays a hopeless romantic who finds solace in being able to say that she had loved, even if it meant losing the relationship. According to Erika Ramirez of Billboard, Selena's performance of "Como la Flor" and "No Me Queda Más" (1994) was so passionate and devoted that it left listeners feeling either nostalgic or transported to a fantasy world. Pérez describes the lyrics as "aching", while Wallace finds them plaintive, bringing even "the toughest hombres" to tears. Peralta describes the lyrics as lovelorn, and a "clean pop [offering]" that echoes the works of Chelo Silva. Parédez characterizes the lyrics as self-abnegating after an unsuccessful relationship, in stark contrast to the themes of typical cumbia, salsa, and dance songs in Latin music; its lyrics more closely resemble those of pop music. According to Jessica Roiz of Billboard, "Como la Flor" teaches a life lesson about maturely ending a relationship and being the bigger person, wishing the new couple well. She finds the lyrics empowering and positive. According to Parédez, "Como la Flor" exemplifies a pop-cumbia composition that caters to a broad range of Latino musical preferences. The song's themes of yearning and anguish are palpable, and the recording possesses a "residue of materiality". The song's melodic shifts successfully evoke Selena's presence in an elegy that marks her absence, providing a multi-layered "emotional register and communal sensibility". During Selena's emotional proclamations of unrequited love, "Como la Flor" exerts a "tensive pull" on the listener. Selena's "teardrop vocals" capture and convey what Roland Barthes referred to as "the grain of Selena's voice". "Como la Flor" furnishes "emotionally useful modalities" akin to Jill Dolan's "utopian performatives" or Josh Kun's "audiotopias". Blanco-Cano and Urquijo-Ruiz assert that "Como la Flor" is capable of measuring and directing "the affective labor of Latinidad". Pérez extols Selena's emotive vocal delivery, which elevated "Como la Flor" and found other performances of the song by other artists as lacking Selena's emotional delivery. Sertan Sanderson of Deutsche Welle asserts that the song can be appreciated even by non-Spanish speakers. "Como la Flor" was included in the posthumously released album Dreaming of You (1995), which was remixed by A. B who mixed the song to match the way the band would have performed it live. It diluted Selena's ethnic sound so that it would appeal to a wider mainstream audience, incorporating additional percussions to enhance the track's appeal, according to Burr in Billboard. ## Commercial and critical performance Upon its radio release in June 1992, "Como la Flor" entered at number 36 on the US Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart for the week ending July 18, 1992. The song entered the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs chart on September 19, 1992, rising to number nine. Rene Cabrera of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times called it "a giant leap", noting the dominance of Selena and other Tejano recording artists on Billboard's music charts. "Como la Flor" peaked at number six for the week ending October 24, 1992. Suzette Fernandez of Billboard stated that the song was Selena's first commercially successful single in the United States and that it had made a statement in her musical career. The success of "Como la Flor" boosted sales of its parent album, Entre a Mi Mundo, which replaced La Mafia's Ahora y Siempre at number one on the Regional Mexican Albums chart. "Como la Flor" was the most-played song on Tejano radio stations in Texas, according to a survey conducted by the Austin American-Statesman. The song was also one of the most-played tracks on radio stations in Houston, Dallas, and San Francisco. In Los Angeles, California, "Como la Flor" was the most-played song on Latin music radio stations for three weeks starting from October 13 through the week of October 29, 1992. The song finished 1992 as the 31st-best-performing song on the Hot Latin Songs chart while topping indie music charts in Texas. In July 1992, EMI Latin president José Behar arranged a high-profile press tour for Selena in Monterrey, Mexico. The event attracted twice as many Mexican entertainment journalists as those from the US, highlighting the enormous potential of the Mexican music market, which was valued at US\$267 million according to a 1992 market report. Selena was not commercially successful in Mexico; a music reporter from El Sol de Monterrey showed Mexicans did not accept Selena's music. At the time, the perception was that Tejanos were "hayseed pochos", a term that carries a derogatory connotation towards those of lower social class and racial background. Faced with Selena's limited Spanish proficiency, EMI Latin executives feared negative media coverage. However, the record company seized the opportunity to capitalize on the growing popularity of "¿Qué Creías?" (1992) and Entre a Mi Mundo, Selena's first recordings to gain traction in Mexico. Selena's approachable demeanor endeared her to the Mexican press, who hailed her as "an artist of the people", and she was booked for several concerts in the country. As a result of the tour, "Como la Flor" climbed to number five on Mexico's Grupera chart before peaking at number three on October 12, 1992. According to a music report by El Siglo de Torreón, "Como la Flor" was one of the most-played songs on Mexican radio stations in 1992 and early 1993, and the most popular "grupero" (group) song in Mexico City. The song's popularity helped Selena's commercial growth in Mexico, where it was regarded as "very popular". "Como la Flor" marked Selena's "breakthrough hit", earning her fame with Mexican audiences and paving the way for her first "international hit song". At the Premio Lo Nuestro 1993 awards, "Como la Flor" won Regional Mexican Song of the Year. It was nominated for Single of the Year at the 1993 Tejano Music Awards. "Como la Flor" was dropped during preliminaries, which was considered a surprise according to music critic Rene Cabrera, who expected Selena to win the category. The track was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1993 Pura Vida Hispanic Awards, but lost to Emilio Navaira's "Como Le Haré". "Como la Flor" was recognized as one of the award-winning songs at the first BMI Latin Awards in 1994. Tom Whitehurst Jr of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times compared A. B.'s "famous songwriting" of the song to that of Jerry Jeff Walker's fame after writing "Mr. Bojangles" (1970). In 1993, the commercial success of "Como la Flor" led to A. B. being contracted with EMI Latin as one of their top songwriters, inking a deal worth \$250,000 (1993 USD) in 1993. Following the murder of Selena on March 31, 1995, "Como la Flor" debuted and peaked at number nine on the Regional Mexican Songs chart for the week ending April 15, 1995. It was the most-requested song, along with "La Carcacha", on radio stations in Mexico following the announcement of her death. Elsewhere on Billboard, "Como la Flor" peaked at number three on the US Billboard TouchTunes Latin Songs chart, which ranks the top-selling jukebox spins in the US, for the week ending December 14, 2002. "Como la Flor" peaked at number one on the US Regional Mexican Digital Song Sales chart following the 20th anniversary of Selena's death for the week ending April 18, 2015. The song peaked at number four on the Latin Digital Song Sales chart on the tracking week of December 16, 2020. As of March 31, 2020, "Como la Flor" has been streamed on Spotify 1.83 million times, and continues to receive airplay on Tejano music radio stations. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has certificated "Como la Flor" 9× Platinum (Latin), denoting 540,000 units consisting of sales and on-demand streaming in the US. ## Live performances and other versions During Selena's live performances of "Como la Flor", she frequently incorporated a flamenco-inspired hand gesture called a floreo. She could be seen "turning her wrist in three backbonning [sic] waves, elbow to fingertips twisting in a serpentine motion, fingers elongated" as she "languorously croons" the title of the song. Selena's opening of "Como la Flor" was characterized by a languid, mournful cadenza, marked by a downtempo, seductive, and emotional delivery, where she would take several breaths before the song transitioned into an upbeat cumbia. The song's initial slow, emotive opening was reminiscent of the melancholic and booming voices of Mexican ranchera singers, who performed with a melodramatic flair. Selena's vocal performance was "achingly melodic", and according to Elijah Wald of The New York Times, she "[emphasized] the heartache of the lyric, slowly drawing out the lines about a lover leaving, her face contorted in pain". Selena's dramatic pauses were comparable to the flin styles of bolero singers Chavela Vargas and La Lupe. During one performance, Selena was seen "smiling and even laughing" during a dramatic pause, which Wald said was Selena "reminding the audience they are all watching and enjoying this together" before her enunciation of agony and "beating her chest, murmuring the final words, como me duele ("how it hurts me"). When the song transitioned into an upbeat cumbia, Selena would sway her hips to the beat. According to Parédez, Selena's performances of the song provided audiences with "valedictory reverence, pleasurable engagement, and gestures of identification across the space of Selenidad". Parédez called Selena's performances of the song "ebullient" and equating to the "emotional register" of Latino mournfulness. Scholars Blanco-Cano and Urquijo-Ruiz agreed with Parédez's assertion, saying Selena's performance of "Como la Flor" exemplified "the emotional register and cultural codes of Latinidad". Wald noted Selena's repetitive acts on stage whenever she sang "Como la Flor", saying the performances still "feel authentic". Blanco-Cano and Urquijo-Ruiz said Selena's performances of "Como la Flor" matched the Latino expressions of longing and belonging, as well as grief and survival, noting her "easy charisma, choreographic virtuosity, [and] velvety voice" as evidence. "Como la Flor" is one of the most popular re-enactments of Selena by drag queens. Following the growing popularity of the song, "Como la Flor" became a staple in Selena's set lists and she often opened or closed her concerts with it. According to Pérez, it was likely her favorite song to perform. However, A. B. had a differing opinion, citing Selena's annoyance at constantly playing the song at every concert. Selena expressed her frustration to A. B., stating, "I don't wanna play that song anymore, I am sick of singing [that song]". In response, A. B. argued that, just as concertgoers expect to hear "Billie Jean" at a Michael Jackson show, Selena's fans expect to hear "Como la Flor" at her concerts. On February 26, 1995, Selena closed her Houston Astrodome concert with "Como la Flor" to positive reviews; Jennifer Machin of Billboard lauded the performance as one of Selena's best, and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times' Natalie Contreras called it Selena's "finest rendition". According to Blanco-Cano and Urquijo-Ruiz, the song provided the audience with "the sounds of Latino desire [and witnessed] the improvised steps marking Latino loss". They noted that the song's placement as the closing number "underscores its special status" in Selena's repertoire. Selena's final performance of "Como la Flor" was on March 19, 1995, in Bryan, Texas, where A. B. and Astudillo wrote the song, it was her closing performance. In "Cumbia Medley", a live medley on the Selena movie soundtrack (1997), Selena performs the song in a "soothing, elongated tempo". In the San Antonio Express-News, Burr hailed the song as a "prime cut", finding it "electrifying and bursting with energy", and seeing it as a "crowning achievement" for Selena. The greatest hits album Ones (2002) includes "Con Tanto Amor Medley", a three-song medley that features a remix of "Como la Flor" with new arrangements by A. B. The track was created to fit an array of Latin music radio formats, with "Como la Flor" appealing to regional Mexican music radio stations with the addition of mariachi-style trumpets, as stated by Cobo writing for Billboard. In 1996, Jennifer Peña performed "Como la Flor", which impressed music executives in attendance. "Como la Flor" was the closing song on the Broadway musical Selena Forever (2000), starring Veronica Vasquez as Selena, and in the Mexican musical Selena, El Musical (2006), which featured Lidia Ávila. The recording is also the closing song of Selena ¡VIVE! (2005). Olivia Tallet and Larry Rodarte of Mi Gente magazine called it the climax of the show. Other performances include David Archuleta at the 2010 Tejano Music Awards; and Becky G at the 2018 Fiesta de la Flor. Cover versions include American actress Jackie Cruz who received a positive reception from Billboard magazine; and Angela Aguilar on her EP homage to Selena in 2020. Country singer Kacey Musgraves received critical acclaim for her redention of "Como la Flor" at one of her concerts. Elia Esperanza's performance of "Como la Flor" during her audition on the eleventh season of The Voice debuted and peaked at number 21 on the Billboard Latin Digital Song Sales chart, while Selena's version re-entered the same chart at number 12. Esperanza wanted to perform "Como la Flor" to showcase her musical abilities. Adam Levine turned first, before Blake Shelton and Miley Cyrus did, with Levine thanking her for "being different". Cristian Castro's version, a duet with Selena that was created for Enamorada de Ti (2012), received mixed reviews from music critics. The duet debuted and peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Regional Mexican Digital Song Sales chart. Castro promoted the song at the 2012 Billboard Latin Music Awards. Jennifer Lopez, who played Selena in the 1997 biopic, performed a four-song medley at the 2015 Billboard Latin Music Awards that included "Como la Flor", gaining positive reviews. Aimee Garcia performed "Como la Flor" as part of her audition to play Selena in the biopic. English YouTube video producers the Kabs Family uploaded a video of their four-year-old daughter singing "Como la Flor", which went viral in March 2021. The staff of Billboard magazine described Kabs' singing as having "so much emotion". ## Legacy and impact A. B. believed that "Como la Flor" was ahead of its time. When writing for Selena's album Amor Prohibido (1994), he said he found meeting expectations after the commercial success of Entre a Mi Mundo and "Como la Flor" challenging. A. B. encountered pressure from record executives in New York City and Nashville to create another hit song. However, he recognized that trying to surpass the success of "Como la Flor" was not feasible and instead chose to focus on writing a new hit. Widely considered to be Selena's signature song and her "trademark", "Como la Flor" has become a posthumous epithet and swan song, as well as her most popular recording. The song has enjoyed international success, and is credited for Selena's domination of the Latin charts. It is one of her "most celebrated" songs and has become part of the Texas musical cannon. "Como la Flor" became one of the most popular songs recorded by an artist of Mexican descent in the US. It became the singer's breakout recording that catapulted her to fame in Mexico and Latin America. According to a Santa Ana Orange County Register, "Como la Flor" is a Cinderella story that has lyrical parallels to Selena's life that "by the time she blossomed, her life was cut short". Cathy Ragland of the Austin American Statesman agreed, comparing "Como la Flor" to Selena as being "a metaphor for her life—a beautiful, delicate creature", as did Raul Reyes of USA Today. As Roiz points out, "Como la Flor", along with "Dreaming of You" (1995) and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" (1994), has "universal appeal". Burr also said "Como la Flor" and other recordings by Selena, has "instant appeal". The singer acknowledged that "Como la Flor" was her "very first big record and the one that started making things click [for her and the band]". Following the song's release, Selena's popularity skyrocketed. According to Parédez, "Como la Flor" resonated with Latinos. It established Selena in the Tejano music market, which previously dismissed her works. Along with "La Carcacha" and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom", "Como la Flor" launched Selena's commercial Tejano career, and brought her fame in the Tejano, and Latin pop music markets. This was a surprise, according to Brian "Red" Moore who oversaw the production of Entre a Mi Mundo, because the group believed "La Carcacha" would have been the most successful song off the album. According to Music executive Cameron Randle of Arista Records, the use of cumbia music in "Como la Flor" served as a "musical passport" for Selena, opening up opportunities for her. The Tejano cumbia style is characterized by a simple, accordion-driven, conjunto style of cumbia music. Selena innovated and transculturated Tejano cumbia by introducing ska, reggae, hip-hop, and funk into her repertoire. The incorporation of African-American music into Tejano cumbia allowed Selena to explore the cultural similarities between Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, exploiting this previously under-explored territory. According to essayist Ilan Stavans, "Como la Flor" along with "Baila Esta Cumbia" (1990) and "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom", helped bridge Tejano music and Latin pop, bringing Tejano music into the public consciousness and paving the way for Latin pop. Leila Cobo described "Como la Flor" and "La Carcacha" as examples of Selena's best work. Throughout the 1990s, the songs were played constantly at parties in Latino communities in the US and Mexico. By blending her Mexican-American roots with her American heritage, Selena was able to "conquer Mexico" in the 1990s with songs such as "Como la Flor" and "La Carcahca". In recognition of its cultural significance, "Como la Flor" has been considered a possible contender for the official Texas state song. Atlanta Journal-Constitution writers Shane Harrison, Nick Marino, and Sonia Murray selected "Como la Flor" as one of Texas' contributions to popular music. In 1996, Joe Nick Patoski, a writer for The New York Times published an acclaimed biography of Selena titled Selena: Como la Flor, which literary critics lauded as "the most insightful portrayal [of Selena]". The city of Corpus Christi erected a life-size, bronze statue called Mirador de la Flor; years after its inception, the city erected speakers that play "Como la Flor" above the statue. The 1997 Warner Bros. film Selena, starring Jennifer Lopez in the title role, features a scene in which Selena manages a rowdy crowd at a fair by performing a downtempo rendition of "Como la Flor". Lopez's portrayal captures Selena's live performances of the song, as she gradually sings the chorus, savoring each phrase before pulling away the microphone on the final line and dramatically pausing to "cast[s] her performative spell". Billboard named this scene one of the film's top-eight moments. In an interview with the BBC, director Gregory Nava stated that people in Europe would have been singing along to "Como la Flor" had Selena lived longer. Selena Etc., Selena's boutique and beauty salon, released a perfume bottle bearing the name of the song in April 1997, featuring scents selected by Selena prior to her death. Music critic Roiz hailed "Como la Flor" as a "must-have" on anyone's playlist, while the 2016 Selena collection from MAC Cosmetics includes a lipstick named after the song. Suzette Quintanilla, Selena's sister, remarked that the lipstick is a "beautiful red-tone color, a signature color that my sister would wear when performing onstage". The influence of "Como la Flor" extends to other artists, with Greg Gonzalez, singer-songwriter of Cigarettes After Sex, citing the song as an inspiration for "Kiss It Off Me" (2019). More recently, in December 2020, to promote its streaming video series Selena: The Series with Christian Serratos as the title role, Netflix asked people to upload videos of themselves lip-syncing to "Como la Flor" with the hashtag "TodosComoLaFlor". Participants began uploading their videos on TikTok, reaching 250 videos per hour, a Guinness World Record. The song was used in the second season of the HBO television drama Euphoria (2021). ## Credits and personnel Credits are adapted from the liner notes of Entre a Mi Mundo. - Selena – lead vocals - A.B. Quintanilla – producer, songwriter, mixing, programming, background vocals - Pete Astudillo – songwriter - Ricky Vela – keyboard - Joe Ojeda – keyboard - Chris Perez – guitar - Brian "Red" Moore – music engineer ## Charts and certifications ### Weekly charts ### Year-end charts ### Certifications

Staten Island Railway

Rapid transit line in New York City

The Staten Island Railway (SIR) is a rapid transit line in the New York City borough of Staten Island. It is owned by the Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority (SIRTOA), a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and operated by the New York City Transit Authority Department of Subways. SIR operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing local service between St. George and Tottenville, along the east side of the island. There is currently only one line on the island, and there is no direct rail link between the SIR and the New York City Subway system, but SIR riders do receive a free transfer to New York City Transit bus and subway lines, and the line is included on official New York City Subway maps. Commuters on the railway typically use the Staten Island Ferry to reach Manhattan. The line is accessible from within the Ferry Terminal, and most of its trains are timed to connect with the ferry. In , the system had a ridership of , or about per weekday as of . The line has a route bullet similar to subway routes: the letters SIR in a blue circle. It is used on timetables, the MTA website, and some signage, but not on trains. Like the New York City Subway, the line runs 24 hours a day every day of the year, and is one of the few 24/7 mass-transit rail systems in the United States. Fares are only collected at two stations, St. George and nearby Tompkinsville. Although the railway was originally considered a standard rail line, the existing line is severed from the national rail system, and only a small portion of the former North Shore Branch still sees freight use. The passenger operations are now regulated as a rapid transit system, and exempt from certain regulations. The line uses modified R44 subway cars, which are planned to be replaced by R211S cars in January 2024. ## History ### 19th century The Staten Island Rail Road was incorporated on August 2, 1851, after Perth Amboy and Staten Island residents petitioned for a Tottenville-to-Stapleton rail line. The railroad was financed with a loan from Cornelius Vanderbilt, the sole Staten Island-to-Manhattan ferry operator on the East Shore, his first involvement in a railroad. The line was completed to Tottenville on June 2, 1860. Under the leadership of Vanderbilt's brother, Jacob H. Vanderbilt, the Staten Island Rail Road took over several independent ferries. The Staten Island Railway and ferry line made a modest profit until the explosion of the ferry Westfield at Whitehall Street Terminal on July 30, 1871. By July 1872, the railroad and ferry were in receivership. On September 17, 1872, the company was sold to George Law in foreclosure. The following April 1, the Staten Island Rail Road was transferred to the Staten Island Railway Company. By 1880 the railway was barely operational, and New York State sued (through Attorney General Hamilton Ward) to dissolve the company in May of that year. Erastus Wiman, one of the island's most prominent residents, organized the Staten Island Rapid Transit Company (SIRT) on March 25, 1880, and partnered with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) to build a large rail terminal on the island and centralize the six-to-eight ferry landings. He secured an extension on a land-purchase option from George Law by offering to name it "St. George" after him. Construction of the Vanderbilt's Landing-to-Tompkinsville portion of the North Shore Branch began on March 17, 1884, and the line opened for passenger service on August 1 of that year. The lighthouse just above Tompkinsville impeded the line's extension to St. George but, after the SIRT lobbied for an act of Congress, construction of a two-track, 580-foot (180 m) tunnel under the lighthouse began in 1885 for about \$190,000. The SIR was leased to the B&O for 99 years in 1885. Proceeds of the lease were used to complete the terminal at Saint George, pay for two miles of waterfront property, complete the Rapid Transit Railroad, build a bridge over the Kill Van Kull at Elizabethport, and build other terminal facilities. The North Shore Branch opened for service on February 23, 1886, to Elm Park. The Saint George terminal opened on March 7, 1886, and all SIR lines were extended to the station. The remainder of the North Shore Branch, to its terminus at Erastina, was opened in the summer of 1886. On January 1, 1888, the South Beach Branch opened for passenger service to Arrochar. In 1893, the South Beach Branch was extended from Arrochar to a new terminal at South Beach. The new lines opened by the B&O were known as the Staten Island Rapid Transit Railway, and the original line (from Clifton to Tottenville) was called the Staten Island Railway. In 1886, Congress passed a law authorizing the construction of a 500-foot (150 m) swing bridge over Arthur Kill, after three years of effort by Wiman. The bridge was completed three days early, on June 13, 1888, at 3 p.m. The Arthur Kill Bridge was the world's largest drawbridge when it opened, and there were no fatalities in its construction. In 1889, construction began on the Baltimore and New York Railway— 5.25-mile (8.45 km) line from Arthur Kill to the Jersey Central at Cranford, and was finished later in the year. On January 1, 1890, the first train operated from St. George Terminal to Cranford Junction. When the Arthur Kill Bridge was completed, the United States War Department was unsuccessfully pressured by the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania Railroads to have the newly built bridge replaced with a bridge with a different design; according to the railroads, it was an obstruction to navigation of the large numbers of coal barges past Holland Hook on Arthur Kill. In 1897, the terminal at Saint George (which served the railroad and the ferry to Manhattan) was completed. ### 20th century Improvements were made to the SIRT after the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) took control of the B&O in 1900, after which the B&O became profitable again. On October 25, 1905, New York City took ownership of the ferry and terminals and evicted the B&O from the Whitehall Street terminal. The St. George Terminal was then built by the city for \$2,318,720, . In anticipation of a tunnel under the Narrows to Brooklyn and a connection there with the BMT Fourth Avenue Line of the New York City Subway, the SIRT electrified its lines with third rail power distribution and cars similar to those of the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT). The first electric train was operated on the South Beach Branch between South Beach and Fort Wadsworth on May 30, 1925, and the other branches were electrified by November of that year. Electrification did not greatly increase traffic, and the tunnel was never built. During the 1920s, a branch line along Staten Island's West Shore was built to haul building materials for the Outerbridge Crossing. The branch was cut back to a point south of the crossing after the bridge was built. The Gulf Oil Corporation opened a dock and tank farm along Arthur Kill in 1928; to serve it, the Travis Branch was built south from Arlington Yard into the marshes of the island's western shore to Gulfport in the early 1930s. The Port Richmond–Tower Hill viaduct, the nation's largest grade-crossing-elimination project, was completed on February 25, 1937. The viaduct, more than a mile long, spanned eight grade crossings on the SIRT's North Shore Branch and was the final part of a \$6 million grade-crossing-elimination project on the island which eliminated thirty-four crossings on its north and south shores. Freight and World War II traffic helped pay some of the SIRT's accumulated debt, and the line was briefly profitable in the 1940s. All East Coast military-hospital trains were handled by the SIRT during the war, and some trains stopped at Staten Island's Arlington station to transfer wounded soldiers to a large military hospital. The need to transport war materiel, POW trains and troops made the stretch of the Baltimore & New York Railway between Cranford Junction and Arthur Kill extremely busy. The B&O also operated special trains for important officials, such as Winston Churchill. On June 25, 1946, a fire destroyed the St. George Terminal; three people were killed, twenty-two were injured and damage totaled \$22 million. The fire destroyed the ferry terminal, the four slips used for service to Manhattan and the SIRT terminal. Normal service was not restored until July 13, 1946, and a request for bids to build a temporary terminal was issued on August 21 of that year. On February 10, 1948, a replacement terminal was promised by Mayor William O'Dwyer. The new \$23 million terminal opened on June 8, 1951, with ferry, bus and rail service in one building; portions of the new terminal were phased into service earlier. Ridership decreased from 12.3 million in 1947 to 4.4 million in 1949 as passengers switched from the rail line to city-operated buses due to a bus-fare reduction. In September 1948, about half of weekday trains were cut, night trains after 1:29 a.m. were cancelled, and thirty percent of the company's employees were laid off. After backlash, service was slightly increased. On September 22, the Interstate Commerce Commission allowed the SIRT to abandon the ferry it had operated for 88 years between Tottenville and Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and the ferry operation was transferred to Sunrise Ferries of Elizabeth, New Jersey on October 16. SIRT discontinued passenger service on the North Shore Branch and the South Beach Branch at midnight on March 31, 1953, due to competition from city-operated buses; the South Beach Branch was abandoned shortly afterwards, and the North Shore Branch continued to carry freight. On September 7, 1954, SIRT applied to discontinue passenger service on the Tottenville Branch on October 7 of that year; a large city subsidy allowed passenger service on the branch to continue. In 1956, work began on the replacement of the Arthur Kill swing bridge by a single-track, 558-foot (170 m) vertical-lift bridge, which opened in August 1959. The prefabricated, 2,000-ton bridge was floated into place. The new bridge could rise 135 feet (41 m) and, since it aided navigation on Arthur Kill, the federal government assumed 90% of the project's \$11 million cost. Freight trains started crossing the bridge when it opened on August 25, 1959. The Travis Branch was extended in 1958 to a new Consolidated Edison power plant in Travis (on the West Shore), allowing coal trains from West Virginia to serve the plant. Operation of the Tottenville line was turned over to the Staten Island Rapid Transit Operating Authority (a division of the state's Metropolitan Transportation Authority) on July 1, 1971, and the line was purchased by the city of New York. As part of the agreement, freight on the line would continue to be handled by the B&O under the Staten Island Railroad. The first six R44 cars (the same as the newest cars then in use on the subway lines in the other boroughs) were put into SIRT service on February 28, 1973, replacing the ME-1 cars which had been in service since 1925. Between 1971 and 1973, a project began to extend the high-level platforms at six stations. A station-rebuilding program began in 1985, and the line's R44s were overhauled starting in 1987. The B&O became part of the larger C&O system in a merger with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and the island's freight operation was renamed the Staten Island Railroad Corporation in 1971. The B&O and C&O became isolated from their other properties in New Jersey and Staten Island with the creation of Conrail on April 1, 1976, in a merger of bankrupt lines in the northeastern U.S. Their freight service now terminated in Philadelphia, but for several years afterward B&O locomotives and one B&O freight train a day ran to Cranford Junction. In 1973, the Jersey Central's car float yard was closed; however, the B&O's car-float operation was later brought back to Staten Island at Saint George Yard, after having ended in September 1976. This car-float operation was taken over by the New York Dock Railway in September 1979, and ended the following year. Only a few isolated industries on Staten Island used rail freight, and the yard at Saint George was essentially abandoned. The C&O system sold the Staten Island Railroad to the New York, Susquehanna & Western Railroad, owned by the Delaware Otsego Corporation, in April 1985 due to a lack of business. The Susquehanna then embargoed the track east of Elm Park on the North Shore Branch, ending rail freight to Saint George. Procter & Gamble (the line's largest customer) closed in 1990, leading to a large drop in freight traffic. The last freight train crossed the bridge in 1990 and the operation ended on July 25, 1991, when the Arthur Kill Bridge was taken out of service. The North Shore Branch and the Arthur Kill Bridge were then taken over by CSX Transportation (CSX). The line and bridge were purchased in 1994 by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), followed by a decade of false starts. SIRT was transferred from the New York City Transit Authority's Surface Transit Division to its Department of Rapid Transit on July 26, 1993, and that year the Dongan Hills station became accessible, making it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. MetroCards were accepted for fare payment at the St. George station beginning on March 31, 1994, and the station became the 50th MTA rapid transit station to accept them. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) restored the line's original name on April 2 of that year as the MTA Staten Island Railway (SIR). On July 4, 1997, the MTA eliminated fares for travel between Tompkinsville and Tottenville as part of the year's "One City, One Fare" fare reductions. United Transportation Union Local 1440, the union representing SIR employees, was concerned about the fare reduction in part because of an expected increase in ridership. No turnstiles were installed at the other stations on the line, and passengers at St. George began paying when entering and exiting; fares had previously been collected on board by the conductor. The removal of fares was blamed for an immediate spike in crime along the line. Three afternoon express trains were added to the schedule on April 7, 1999, nearly doubling the previous express service. The express trains skipped stops between St. George and Great Kills. A several-hundred-foot section of the easternmost portion of the North Shore Branch was reopened for passenger service to the Richmond County Bank Ballpark, home of the Staten Island Yankees minor-league baseball team, on June 24, 2001; the service was discontinued on June 18, 2010. A new station building at Tompkinsville opened on January 20, 2010, with turnstiles installed to prevent passengers from exiting (free of charge) at Tompkinsville and walking the short distance to the St. George ferry terminal. ## Current use ### Passenger service Although the Staten Island Railway originally consisted of three lines, only the north-south Main Line is in passenger service. It has been grade-separated from all roads since the 1960s, but runs more or less at street level for a brief stretch north of Clifton, between the Grasmere and Old Town stations, and from south of the Pleasant Plains station to Tottenville—the end of the line. The terminus at St. George provides a direct connection with the Staten Island Ferry. St. George has twelve tracks, ten of which are in service. Tottenville has a three-track yard to the east of the station, which itself has two tracks and an island platform. Rolling stock consists of modified R44 subway-type cars built in early 1973, added to the end of the R44 order of subway cars for New York City Transit; they were the last cars built by the St. Louis Car Company. Heavy maintenance is performed at NYCT's Clifton Shops, and any work unable to be done at Clifton requires the cars to be trucked over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to the subway's Coney Island Complex in Brooklyn. The right-of-way includes elevated, embankment and open-cut sections, as well as a tunnel near St. George. Before 2007, the Staten Island Railway used Baltimore & Ohio Railroad-style color position light signals dating back to its B&O days. That year, a \$72-million project to replace the old signal system was completed. The system was replaced with an FRA-compliant 100 Hz, track-circuit-based automatic train control (ATC) signal system. As part of the project, forty R44 subway cars and four locomotives were modified with onboard cab signaling equipment for ATC bi-directional movement. A new rail control center and backup control center were built as part of the project. The line uses NYC Transit-standard 600 V DC third-rail power. Sally Librera has been the railway's vice-president and chief officer since her appointment in May 2017. The workforce, about 200 hourly employees, is represented by United Transportation Union Local 1440. #### Accessibility Only the Dongan Hills, St. George, Great Kills, and Tottenville stations have been renovated to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; these stations have elevators and/or ramps. In late 2019, as part of the MTA's 2020–2024 capital plan, three stations are planned to be renovated to become ADA-accessible. These stations are Huguenot, New Dorp, and Clifton. The Prince's Bay, Huguenot, Annadale, Great Kills, Dongan Hills, and Arthur Kill stations have park-and-ride facilities. The newest station on the Staten Island Railway, Arthur Kill, opened on January 21, 2017, and is ADA-compliant. The station is between (and has replaced) the now-demolished Atlantic and Nassau stations, which were in the poorest condition of all the stations on the line. #### Police On June 1, 2005, the Staten Island Rapid Transit Police Department was disbanded and its 25 railroad police officers became part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department. The MTA Police Department was created in 1998 with the merger of the Long Island Rail Road Police Department and the Metro-North Railroad Police Department. The MTA Police Department then opened its newest patrol district, Police District \#9, which began covering the Staten Island Railway. #### Fare The cash fare is \$2.90, the same fare as the New York City Subway and MTA buses. Fares are paid on entry and exit only at St. George and Tompkinsville. Rides not originating or terminating at St. George or Tompkinsville are free. Fares are payable by MetroCard or OMNY. Since the card enables free transfers for a continuous ride on the subway and bus systems, for many riders there is effectively no fare for riding the SIR. Riders can also transfer between a Staten Island bus, the SIR and a Manhattan bus (or subway) near South Ferry. Because of this, the SIR's 2001 farebox recovery ratio was 0.16; for every dollar of expense, 16 cents was recovered in fares (the lowest ratio of MTA agencies). The low farebox recovery ratio is part of the reason the MTA sought to merge the SIR with the subway to form MTA Subways in October 2002: to simplify accounting and subsidy of a single line. Before the 1997 introduction of the one-fare zone, with the MetroCard's free transfers from the SIR to the subway system and MTA buses, fares were collected from passengers boarding at stops other than St. George by onboard conductors. In the past, passengers had avoided paying the fare by exiting at Tompkinsville and walking a short distance to the St. George Ferry Terminal. As a result, the MTA installed turnstiles at Tompkinsville and a new station building, which opened on January 20, 2010. On October 23, 2017, it was announced that the MetroCard would be phased out and replaced by OMNY, a contactless fare payment system also by Cubic, with fare payment being made using Apple Pay, Google Pay, debit/credit cards with near-field communication technology, or radio-frequency identification cards. The St. George and Tompkinsville stations, the only two Staten Island Railway stations with turnstiles, received OMNY readers in December 2019. Support of the MetroCard is slated to remain until 2023. ### Freight service During the early 2000s, plans to reopen the Staten Island Rapid Transit line in New Jersey were announced by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). Since the Central Railroad of New Jersey became a New Jersey Transit line, a new junction would be built to the former Lehigh Valley Railroad. So all New England and southern freight could pass through the New York metropolitan area, two rail tunnels from Brooklyn (one to Staten Island and the other to Greenville, New Jersey) were planned. On December 15, 2004, a \$72 million project to reactivate freight service on Staten Island and repair the Arthur Kill Vertical Lift Bridge was announced by the NYCEDC and the PANYNJ. Projects on the Arthur Kill Bridge included repainting the steel superstructure and rehabilitating its lift mechanism. In 2006, the freight line connection reopened from New Jersey to the Staten Island Railroad, including the Arthur Kill Bridge. Regular service began on April 2, 2007 (16 years after it had closed) to ship container freight from the Howland Hook Marine Terminal and other industrial businesses. The service at the marine terminal is part of the PANYNJ's ExpressRail system completed with of the single-track Chemical Coast connector. Service is provided by and Conrail Shared Assets Operations (CRCX) for its co-owners, CSX, Norfolk Southern Railway. As part of the project, a portion of the North Shore Branch was rehabilitated, the Arlington Yard was expanded, and 6,500 feet (1,981 m) of new track was laid along the Travis Branch to Staten Island Transfer Station at Fresh Kills. Soon after service restarted on the line, Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially commemorated the reactivation on April 17, 2007. As of 2019, the New York City Department of Sanitation's contractor was moving containers of municipal solid waste by barge from Queens and Manhattan to the Howland Hook Marine Terminal for transfer to rail there. Along the remainder of the North Shore Branch, there are still tracks and rail overpasses in some places. ## Future plans Elected officials on Staten Island, including State Senator Diane Savino, have demanded the replacement of the railway's aging R44 cars. Although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority initially planned to order R179s for the Staten Island Railway, it was later decided to overhaul R46s to replace the R44s. However, the R46 overhaul plan was also dropped, and 75 R211S cars will replace the R44s. In the meantime, the R44s are receiving intermittent rounds of scheduled maintenance to extend their usefulness until at least 2022–2023. There has been discussion of building an in-fill station in the Rosebank neighborhood, which would bridge the longest gap between two stations (Grasmere and Clifton). The area was once home to the Rosebank station on the railway's now-defunct South Beach Branch, which was located east of the proposed station site. Several proposals have been made to connect the SIR to the subway system, including the abandoned, unfinished Staten Island Tunnel and a line along the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge using B Division cars and loading gauge, but economic, political and engineering difficulties have prevented these projects from realization. ### Possible branch restoration In a 2006 report, the Staten Island Advance explored the restoration of passenger service on 5.1 miles (8.2 km) of the North Shore Branch between St. George and Arlington. Completion of a study is necessary to qualify the project for an estimated \$360 million. A preliminary study found that ridership could reach 15,000 daily. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York requested \$4 million of federal funding for a detailed feasibility study. In 2012, the MTA released an analysis of North Shore transportation solutions which included proposals for the reintroduction of heavy rail, light rail or bus rapid transit using the North Shore line's right-of-way. Other options included system management, which would improve existing bus service, and the possibility of future ferry and water taxi service. Bus rapid transit was preferred for its cost (\$352 million in capital investment) and relative ease of implementation. In January 2018, the project had yet to receive funding. As part of the 2015–2019 MTA Capital Program, \$4 million was allocated for an analysis of a Staten Island light rail. ## Branches and stations ### Main Line stations \* Some local trains start at Huguenot during morning rush hours. ### Former stations #### North Shore Branch The North Shore Branch closed to passenger service at midnight on March 31, 1953. A small portion of the western end is used for freight service as part of the ExpressRail intermodal network at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal. The network, which opened in 2007, connects to the Chemical Coast after crossing the Arthur Kill Vertical Lift Bridge. The North Shore Branch served Procter & Gamble, United States Gypsum, shipbuilders and a car float at Saint George Yard. A smaller eastern portion, which provided seasonal passenger service to the Richmond County Bank Ballpark station (where the Staten Island Yankees played), operated from June 24, 2001, to June 18, 2010. In 2008, restoration was discussed along the mostly abandoned 6.1-mile (9.8 km) line as part of the island's light-rail plan. An environmental impact assessment is being worked on for the implementation of a bus rapid transit line on the North Shore Branch. #### South Beach Branch The South Beach Branch opened on January 1, 1888, to Arrochar, and was extended to South Beach in 1893. The branch closed at midnight on March 31, 1953. It was abandoned and demolished, except for a few segments: a concrete embankment at Clayton Street and Saint John's Avenue, the Tompkins Avenue overpass, trestle over Robin Road in Arrochar and a filled-in bridge under McClean Avenue. This 4.1-mile (6.6 km) line left the Main Line at (south of the Clifton station), and was east of the Main Line. Although the right-of-way has been redeveloped, most of it is still traceable on maps; Lily Pond Avenue is built over the right of way where it passes under the Staten Island Expressway. The Robin Road trestle is the only remaining intact trestle along the former line. Developers purchased the land on either side of its abutments during the early 2000s, and the developers, the New York City Department of Transportation, and the New York City Transit Authority all claimed ownership. Townhouses have been built on both sides of the trestle. ### Freight lines #### Mount Loretto Spur The Mount Loretto Spur is an abandoned branch whose purpose was to serve the Mount Loretto Children's Home. The spur diverged from the Main Line south of Pleasant Plains. The B&O Railroad served the non-electrified branch, which had some industry and a passenger station, until 1950. Although its track was removed during the 1960s and 1970s, some ties were visible until the 1980s. A coal trestle is all that remains of the branch. #### West Shore Line South of the Richmond Valley station, a non-electrified spur, branched off the Tottenville-bound track. The spur, built in 1928, was called the West Shore Line by the B&O Railroad and delivered building materials to the Outerbridge Crossing construction site near Arthur Kill. Years later, the track was used to serve a scrapyard owned by the Roselli Brothers. This siding went out of service on June 14, 2011. The track divided in two under Page Avenue, with the rails still in place. The line's right-of-way, an easement on property owned by Nassau Metals, was later used by CSX. Although sections of the old tracks have been removed, others remain in the overgrowth. #### Travis Branch The Travis Branch, from Arlington Yard to Fresh Kills, runs along the island's West Shore. The branch was built in 1928 to serve Gulf Oil along the Arthur Kill, south from Arlington Yard into the marshes to Gulfport. It was extended to Travis to serve the new Consolidated Edison power plant in 1957. In 2005, the branch was renovated and extended from the old Con Edison plant to the Staten Island Transfer Station at Fresh Kills; regular service to the transfer station began in April 2007. ## See also - Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel

Rusco Tower

Early 16th-century tower house in Scotland

Rusco Tower, sometimes called Rusco Castle, is a tower house near Gatehouse of Fleet in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. Built around 1500 for Mariota Carson and her husband Robert Gordon, on lands given to them by her father, it was used to incarcerate a number of the Gordons' rivals in the 16th century. After Robert Gordon died and Carson remarried, their eldest son James Gordon seized the tower and imprisoned his mother, fearing that she would make it over to her new husband, Thomas Maclellan of Bombie. Gordon went on to kill Maclellan on the High Street in Edinburgh, while a court case intended to settle the matter was ongoing. The Gordons sold the tower in the 17th century, and it was inhabited continuously until the late 19th or early 20th century. By the middle of the 20th century the building was uninhabited and had fallen into a state of disrepair. In 1971 it was designated a Category A listed building, and was shortly afterwards purchased and renovated by Graham Carson, a Scottish businessman, who went on to live in it from 1979 until 2006. Carson attempted to discover whether his family was related to the Carsons who originally owned the estate, but was unable to document a connection. It remains in the Carson family, and is still used as a domestic dwelling. The tower was the subject of a poem, "Rusco Castle, a Tale of the Olden Time", published in 1841. ## Name The building's name is recorded by Historic Environment Scotland as Rusco Tower, but some authors refer to it as Rusco Castle, and it is sometimes spelled Rusko. In 1515, when a charter was signed at the tower, its name was recorded as "Ruschen", and it appears in records of 1575 as "Ruschew". ## Description Rusco Tower is located about 5 kilometres (3 mi) north of Gatehouse of Fleet, on a wooded hillside looking down into the valley of the Water of Fleet. It is a rectangular tower house, four storeys high including its attic, with a wall walk inside its parapet. Its overall design is very similar to that of nearby Cardoness Castle, on a slightly smaller scale, and it is possible that it was constructed by the same builder. ### Exterior The external footprint of the tower is rectangular, roughly 11.8 metres (39 ft) by 8.8 metres (29 ft), and it is about 15 metres (49 ft) high. Stone water spouts project from the roof, cannon-shaped to the east frontage, and U-shaped on the other sides. Within the parapet, which is crenellated and supported by chequered corbels, there is a garret, and in the south east corner is a cap-house: a small attic covering the stairway and opening onto the wall walk. The chamfered windows are small and irregularly placed, and corniced on the upper floors; their projecting lintels, unusual in Scotland, seem to have been intended to cast off rain. In the west and east faces, the ground floor walls are pierced by gunloops, shaped like inverted keyholes, in a style similar to that of Cardoness. The main entrance, on the ground floor of the north wall, has a broad segmental arch, and was formerly a doorway into a (now demolished) 17th-century extension; the less elaborate original entrance remains, in the centre of the east front. Above it is a worn heraldic plaque with two shields: the upper one, supported by a pair of unicorns, bears the Royal Arms of Scotland, while the lower shield shows a quartered coat of arms, probably for Gordon and Carson, although only a G is still discernible. On the north side of the building, the lower sections of the west and north walls of a 17th-century extension survive. This was already dilapidated by the 19th century, and most of it has since been demolished. ### Interior The tower is noted for its unusual sophistication in the arrangement of small rooms built into the thickness of its walls, which are up to 2.4 metres (7.9 ft) thick in places. Also built into the thickness of the walls is a turnpike stair with a newel, which ascends the full height of the tower. The ground floor, which has an entresol level, is vaulted, and is divided into a number of store rooms and guard rooms, some with gun loops, and one with a trap door dropping down to a windowless dungeon. The entresol is tunnel vaulted, and occupied by a single room with windows in the south and east walls. It is likely that the ground floor was originally used to accommodate horses or cattle, with the entresol providing a sleeping place for servants. Taking up most of the first floor is the great hall, 7.8 metres (25.6 ft) by 5 metres (16.4 ft) in size, with a beamed ceiling supported by corbels projecting from the walls, and arched windows. One of the stone seats in the west window serves as a step up to a concealed door. This gives access to a small room, again built into the thickness of the wall, which has an external window and also a laird's lug (Scots language for lord's ear): a small listening hole into the hall. The second floor and the attic, which would each originally have been occupied by single large rooms, have been subdivided. ## History ### Construction The tower was built between 1494 and 1504 for Mariota Carson (or Acarsane) and her husband, Robert Gordon, within the Glenskyreburn estate that had been gifted to them by her father, John Carson. Gordon, heir to the Lochinvar estate, took on the designation "of Rusco" after its completion, and is sometimes referred to by his wife's surname in records. He was brought before the Lords of Council in 1501 or 1502, charged with the destruction of a house on Crown lands within the barony of Kirkandrews in order to remove timber and slates, possibly to be used for the construction of Rusco Tower; he claimed that the house belonged to him, but was unable to prove it, and was ordered to pay 1,000 merks in damages. ### 16th century Gordon was forced to leave Rusco soon after it had been constructed. With his brother Alexander, he was implicated in the murder of John Dunbar of Mochrum around 1503, and while his brother fled the country, Gordon was put to the horn, a form of punishment similar to outlawry, and his possessions were confiscated; his estate was let by the crown to a neighbour. In 1507, while still under the horn, Gordon was given permission to travel to France, and in 1511 he was given a pardon for his part in the crime, and allowed to return to Scotland and take up his estate once more. By 1516, he had been knighted. Rusco Tower was used to incarcerate a number of people in the 16th century. Gordon seized and imprisoned Janet Porter, an heiress who had recently married John McCulloch, a lesser member of the Cardoness McCulloch family. Gordon attempted to force her to sign over her inheritance, the Blacket estate, to him instead of her new husband, and McCulloch, who was not powerful enough to recapture his wife by force, applied to the courts. Gordon did not appear at the hearing, but in his absence the court ordered him to return Porter to her husband. It is not clear whether the order was obeyed, but records show that the Gordon family came to own the Blacket estate shortly afterwards. Gordon spent several years in litigation with the Agnews of Lochnaw, who were related to him by marriage. In 1523 he sought to bring the legal dispute to an end by abducting Andrew Agnew, the heir of Lochnaw and his own grandson, and imprisoning him at Rusco. When the boy's uncle, Matthew Agnew, demanded that he be returned within three days, Gordon claimed that he had been placed in a school in Dumfries. The records do not show how this affair was concluded. Robert Gordon died in 1524, and within a year his wife Mariota Carson married Thomas Maclellan of Bombie. Since she owned Rusco Tower and its lands in her own right following the death of her husband, there would have been nothing to prevent her from leaving them to her new husband's family upon her death; her eldest son, James Gordon of Lochinvar, was so concerned that this might happen that he seized Rusco, where his mother was still living, and had her transported to the Borders and imprisoned. Her husband appealed to the courts, but before the case was concluded Maclellan was killed, in broad daylight, by Gordon and his retinue on the High Street in Edinburgh. ### Later history The later history of the tower was less turbulent. It was of minor importance to the Gordons once they had taken possession of Lochinvar, and was mostly used as accommodation for minor family members. It was sold in the 17th century, around which time a two-storey extension was added to the north side. It was described in the poem "Rusco Castle, a Tale of the Olden Time" published in 1841 by Dugald Williamson of Tongland. The tower was lived in until the late 19th or early 20th century, but was abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin between the First and Second World Wars. In 1971, Rusco Tower was designated a Category A listed building. The following year, it was purchased by Graham Carson, a Scottish businessman, who employed the architect W. Murray Jack to restore it to an inhabitable condition. The work was completed in 1979, and Carson moved into the tower with his family. Carson had a great-grandfather who was born in Wigtonshire, close to Rusco, and he attempted to find any connection between his family and the Carsons who had originally built the tower, but was never able to do so. He lived in the tower until 2006, when he moved out and his son, Ian, took up residence; as of 2018, Ian Carson was still living at Rusco Tower. ## See also - Restoration of castles in Scotland

WrestleMania XXIV

2008 World Wrestling Entertainment pay-per-view event

WrestleMania XXIV was the 24th annual WrestleMania professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It was held for wrestlers from the promotion's Raw, SmackDown, and ECW brand divisions. The event took place on March 30, 2008, at the Florida Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Florida and was the first WrestleMania to be held in the state of Florida. It was also the second WrestleMania to be held outdoors (the first was WrestleMania IX in April 1993). American socialite Kim Kardashian served as the hostess of the event. Nine professional wrestling matches were scheduled for the event, which featured a supercard, a scheduling of more than one main event. In the final match of the event, which was the main match from SmackDown, The Undertaker defeated Edge to win the World Heavyweight Championship. Raw's main match was a triple threat match, in which Randy Orton defeated Triple H and John Cena to retain the WWE Championship. The main match from the ECW brand was a singles match in which Kane defeated Chavo Guerrero to win the ECW Championship. From the six scheduled bouts on the undercard, three received more promotion than the others. In a No Disqualification match, professional boxer Floyd "Money" Mayweather defeated Big Show. The other featured undercard matches saw CM Punk win the inter-promotional Money in the Bank ladder match and a retirement match in which Shawn Michaels defeated Ric Flair, leading to Flair's departure from the WWE and a period of retirement from active wrestling. Tickets for the event commenced sale to the public on November 3, 2007. WWE and the City of Orlando hosted festivities that spanned a five-day period within the central Florida region. For the second consecutive year, WrestleMania broke the record for the highest-grossing pay-per-view in WWE history. It also set a gate record for the Citrus Bowl, grossing US\$5.85 million in ticket sales. According to a study by Enigma Research Corporation of Toronto, the Citrus Bowl's record-breaking attendance brought an estimated \$51.5 million – surpassing the projected \$25 million – into the local economy and generated \$1.8 million in local tax revenue. The Central Florida Sports Commission reported that the event created jobs and brought approximately 60,000 visitors to the city. Over one million people ordered the event on pay-per-view, grossing \$23.8 million in revenue. It was also the first WrestleMania PPV broadcast in high definition. ## Production ### Background WrestleMania is considered World Wrestling Entertainment's (WWE) flagship pay-per-view (PPV) event, having first been held in 1985. It has become the longest-running professional wrestling event in history and is held annually between mid-March to mid-April. It was the first of WWE's original four pay-per-views, which includes Royal Rumble, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series, referred to as the "Big Four". WrestleMania XXIV featured wrestlers from the Raw, SmackDown, and ECW brands. On March 21, 2007, a press conference was held at City Hall in Orlando, Florida, formally announcing that WrestleMania XXIV would be held in Orlando at the Florida Citrus Bowl on March 30, 2008, which would be the first WrestleMania held in Florida. According to an interview with The Daytona Beach News-Journal at the press conference, WWE chairman Vince McMahon mentioned Orlando being one of three front-runners to host the event, the other two being Las Vegas and Paris. McMahon explained that Orlando was chosen as geographically, a WrestleMania was never held in the southeast before. As the second WrestleMania to be held entirely outdoors (after WrestleMania IX), McMahon also announced that the event would have taken place regardless of the weather conditions. In the March 2008 issue of WWE Magazine, WWE set designer Jason Robinson revealed that a steel rig with a tarpaulin roof would be built above the ring itself to prevent rain from falling on the ring; during the Money in the Bank ladder match, it rained briefly. In that same issue, an initial design of the ring setup was revealed showing a larger rig surrounding the tarpaulin rig, with lighting and two giant screens attached. The final design had the lighting and video screens on the tarpaulin rig, as well as the sound system. During an interview, WWE production manager Brian Petree mentioned that video reinforcement should prevent anyone's view from being obstructed by the steel structure. Up to seven generators were used to power up the event. The set design for the entrance stage was at the north end of the stadium and consisted of another steel structure with various video screens hanging from it. The steel beams for the structure were custom built in Belgium and shipped over to Orlando. According to WWE Magazine, the amount of pyrotechnics used would be ten times that of the amount used on Raw. Without the restriction of a roof, the pyrotechnics for the show shot as high as 2,000 feet (610 m) as compared to WrestleMania 23's height of 150 feet (46 m). The fireworks were set off from boats on one of the lakes nearby the stadium. WWE has been said to have spent an estimated \$300,000 on the fireworks alone. With the Citrus Bowl's locker rooms on the south side and the entrance set on the north side, a tented 40,000 square feet (3,700 m²) mini-city outside the north end served as the show's backstage area and included air conditioning, trailers, VIP areas, showers and restrooms. As a consequence, the road next to the north end zone, W. Church Street, was closed down until a day after the event. Numerous other roads were also closed to allow trucks and forklifts to move in mega equipment for the event. The ring itself was built on the 50-yard line of the Citrus Bowl to give the best view for fans. Heavy-duty plastic flooring had been put over the field, to protect the turf, provide seating, and serve as the steel structures' foundation. Development on the set design began in the middle of 2007. The building of the actual set began in the middle of March 2008. 100 people worked 16 hours a day to construct the set for the event. The construction finished on March 29. WrestleMania XXIV was the first WrestleMania event to be filmed in high-definition. It was also the first WWE show and sports related title to be released on the Blu-ray Disc format by WWE Home Video. WrestleMania also led to an increase in sales for musical artists related to the event, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' album Stadium Arcadium, John Legend's album Live from Philadelphia, Rev Theory's single "Light It Up", and Fuel's single "Leave the Memories Alone", which was used as part of a tribute to Ric Flair. ### Storylines WrestleMania XXIV featured nine professional wrestling matches with wrestlers involved in pre-existing scripted feuds, plots, and storylines. Wrestlers were portrayed as either villains or fan favorites as they followed a series of tension-building events, which culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches. All wrestlers belonged to either the Raw, SmackDown, or ECW brand – storyline divisions in which WWE assigned its employees to different programs. The predominant rivalry scripted into WrestleMania on the Raw brand was between Randy Orton, John Cena, and Triple H, over the WWE Championship. At the Royal Rumble pay-per-view event in January, Orton successfully defended the WWE Championship against Jeff Hardy and later that night, Cena returned from an injury and won the Royal Rumble match when he last eliminated Triple H. Instead of challenging Orton for the title at WrestleMania, Cena decided to challenge him at No Way Out, where Orton got himself intentionally disqualified by slapping the referee, thus retaining the WWE Championship. Later, Triple H also became a top contender to the WWE Championship by defeating five other men in an Elimination Chamber match. The next night on Raw, Cena argued that he deserved another WWE Championship match. Raw general manager William Regal then announced that Cena would face Orton later in the night, where if Cena won, he would be added to the WrestleMania match between Triple H and Orton, making it a triple threat match. If Orton won, the main event would remain as Orton versus Triple H in a singles match. However, Cena won the match and was added to the bout at WrestleMania. After the match, Triple H, who was the special guest referee, executed a Pedigree on both Cena and Orton. The predominant rivalry on the SmackDown brand was between Edge and The Undertaker, over the World Heavyweight Championship. On the February 1 episode of SmackDown, assistant general manager Theodore Long announced that at No Way Out, an Elimination Chamber match would be held to determine the number one contender to the World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania. The Undertaker won the match by last eliminating Batista. On the following episode of SmackDown, Edge predicted that The Undertaker's 15–0 undefeated streak at WrestleMania would come to an end once he defeated him. Two weeks later on the March 7 episode of SmackDown, the team of Edge and Curt Hawkins and Zack Ryder defeated The Undertaker in a Handicap match after Edge pinned The Undertaker. The following week, La Familia (Chavo Guerrero, Edge, Hawkins and Ryder) defeated Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels in a steel cage match. During the match, Undertaker interfered and attacked La Familia. However, Edge escaped the cage to win the match for his team. Two weeks later on SmackDown, Edge, along with Vickie Guerrero, Hawkins and Ryder, held a mock burial entitled "Burial of The Undertaker's WrestleMania Undefeated Streak", to celebrate Edge's early victory over The Undertaker. During the "burial", however, The Undertaker emerged from a casket, which was inside the ring, and attacked Edge, Hawkins, and Ryder, knocking Hawkins and Ryder outside the ring and chokeslamming Edge through the casket. At No Way Out, Big Show made a return to the company after taking time off for injuries beginning in December 2006. In his return promotional interview, Big Show threatened to give Rey Mysterio a chokeslam. Professional boxer and WBC Welterweight Champion Floyd "Money" Mayweather, who was in attendance and a close friend of Mysterio's, came to his aid and confronted Big Show. After Big Show dropped to his knees, Mayweather attacked him with a combination of punches, which caused Big Show to bleed from the nose and mouth. The following night on Raw, Big Show challenged Mayweather to a wrestling match, which Mayweather accepted. As part of the storyline, Big Show arranged an exhibition match with fighter Brandon Hill, who was similar in size and stature to Mayweather. Unimpressed with Big Show's display of dominance over Hill, Mayweather told Big Show that "at WrestleMania, I'm going to break your jaw". At their weigh-in for their WrestleMania match, Big Show threw Mayweather into a crowd of wrestlers to emphasise the disparity in size. On the February 25 episode of Raw, 2008 WWE Hall of Fame Inductee Ric Flair challenged Shawn Michaels to a match at WrestleMania. Michaels accepted after some reluctance, knowing that due to a previous announcement from WWE chairman Mr. McMahon the next match Flair lost would result in his forced retirement. Flair said that "it would be an honor for [him] to retire at the hands of Shawn Michaels." On February 18, WWE announced via its website that the fourth annual Money in the Bank ladder match would take place at WrestleMania XXIV, a match where the objective is to retrieve a briefcase suspended in the air using a ladder. The match involved wrestlers from all three WWE brands. The winner would earn a contract to challenge for any of the three WWE World Championships (the WWE Championship of Raw, the World Heavyweight Championship of SmackDown, or the ECW Championship of ECW) at any time and any place over a one-year period. Qualifying matches occurred to determine the participants in the match at WrestleMania, starting on that night's Raw with Jeff Hardy and Mr. Kennedy defeating Snitsky and Val Venis respectively to qualify. Shelton Benjamin became the third participant when he defeated Jimmy Wang Yang on the following episode of SmackDown. During the next two weeks on Raw, Chris Jericho defeated Hardy, and Carlito defeated Cody Rhodes to qualify. At a non-televised SmackDown/ECW house show held on March 8, Montel Vontavious Porter qualified when he defeated Jamie Noble. On the March 11 episode of ECW, CM Punk became the seventh entrant when he defeated Big Daddy V. John Morrison was the final person to qualify when he beat The Miz on the March 14 episode of SmackDown. Hardy was later removed from the match after a legitimate suspension by WWE for a drug violation of the company's Wellness Policy. WWE decided not to add another superstar in his place, making that year's Money in the Bank ladder match the first year to have seven participants. ## Event ### Pre-show Before the show aired live on pay-per-view, Kane won a 24-man Interpromotional Battle Royal, an elimination style match where the last person remaining was the winner, to win an ECW Championship match against Chavo Guerrero later that night. The event officially began with John Legend singing a rendition of "America the Beautiful". ### Preliminary matches The first match was a Belfast Brawl between Finlay and John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL), a match in which there were no disqualifications or countouts and the match outcomes could have occurred anywhere. Finlay was accompanied to the ring by his storyline son, Hornswoggle, who was returning from a scripted injury suffered at the hands of JBL. During the match, JBL hit Finlay with a trash can lid when the latter was about to perform a suicide dive on him through the ropes on the outside. Later on, Finlay tossed JBL through a table that he had set up earlier on the turnbuckle. Hornswoggle also got involved during the match by hitting JBL with a kendo stick, while later on JBL threw a trash can at him. Attacking Finlay's knee with a kendo stick, JBL delivered a Clothesline from Hell to Finlay to score a successful pinfall. This was an interpromotional match. The next match of the evening was the fourth-annual Money in the Bank ladder match, in which there were no disqualifications or countouts, and the only way to win the match was to climb a ladder in the ring and retrieve a contract briefcase hanging above. The match featured Chris Jericho, Mr. Kennedy, and Carlito from the Raw brand; CM Punk, Shelton Benjamin and John Morrison from the ECW brand; and Montel Vontavious Porter (MVP) from the SmackDown brand. Jeff Hardy was supposed to be in the match, but he violated the wellness program and was taken out of the match. Early in the match, Morrison climbed a turnbuckle and performed a moonsault onto other competitors outside the ring while holding a ladder against his chest. Later, while Kennedy and Morrison were battling on top of a ladder, Benjamin climbed another ladder placed adjacent to the first one and performed a sunset flip powerbomb on Kennedy, who in turn superplexed Morrison from the top of the ladder. Later, Carlito and Kennedy flipped Benjamin off a ladder in the ring, sending him crashing through another ladder set-up between the barricade and the ring apron. When MVP was close to retrieving the contract briefcase, Matt Hardy (returning to action after suffering a legitimate injury), entered the ring from the crowd, climbed the ladder, and delivered a Twist of Fate to MVP off that ladder. As soon as Morrison started to climb a ladder, see-sawing with another ladder, Jericho flipped the other one and Morrison landed on the ring-ropes groin-first. Jericho even performed a Codebreaker on Punk using a ladder. In the end, Jericho and Punk fought each other on a ladder, but Punk trapped Jericho's one leg in the ladder's steps and retrieved the briefcase to win the match. This was an interpromotional match. Next after that match, Howard Finkel introduced the 2008 WWE Hall of Fame class: Jack and Gerald Brisco, Gordon Solie (represented by his family), Rocky Johnson, High Chief Peter Maivia (represented by his wife Lia and daughter Ata), Eddie Graham (represented by his son Mike), Mae Young, and Ric Flair (represented by his family). The next match, which was billed as a "Battle for Brand Supremacy", was between SmackDown's Batista and Raw's Umaga. Early in the match, both Batista and Umaga exchanged blows and Batista knocked Umaga outside with a shoulder block. Umaga later kicked Batista in the face, which caused him to fall back-first outside the ring from the ring-apron. As a result, Umaga started targeting Batista's injured back. In the end, however, when Umaga tried to perform his Samoan Spike, Batista countered the attempt and gave him a spinebuster. Batista won the match by pinning Umaga after a Batista Bomb. The fourth match for the event featured Chavo Guerrero defending his ECW Championship against Kane. Kane surprised Chavo by emerging from underneath the ring instead of from the entrance stage during his ring entrance. Kane instantly pinned Chavo after a chokeslam and won the ECW Championship in eleven seconds. This was the only ECW match on the show and the only ECW Championship match in WrestleMania history. ### Main event matches Ric Flair's "Career Threatening" match against Shawn Michaels was next, which stipulated that Flair would have to retire from wrestling if he had lost. At the start of the match, both superstars engaged in a series of counters, and then Flair shoved Michaels in a corner, making "Old Yeller" comments to him. In retaliation, Michaels slapped Flair in the face, which caused him to start bleeding from the mouth. Later, Michaels attempted Sweet Chin Music, but stopped in the process and Flair capitalized by trapping him in his figure four leglock. Afterward, Michaels finally delivered the Sweet Chin Music to Flair for a near-fall. Michaels then trapped Flair in his modified figure four leglock, but Flair delivered a thumb to the eye to Michaels to break the submission. As Flair was delivering chops to Michaels' chest, Michaels executed a second Sweet Chin Music. After getting up on his feet with a worried face, Michaels said to Flair "I'm sorry, I love you", before nailing a final Sweet Chin Music and thus pinning Flair to end his 35-year-long wrestling career. After the match, Michaels left quickly and Flair got a standing ovation from the crowd. An emotional Flair embraced his family at ringside and then, as he proceeded to go backstage, he thanked the crowd for their support. The sixth match was the Playboy BunnyMania Lumberjack match, in which Maria and Ashley (the latter who replaced Candice Michelle due to injury) faced Beth Phoenix and Melina, who were accompanied to the ring by Santino Marella. Rapper Snoop Dogg served as the official "Master of Ceremonies" for the match. In the match, several WWE Divas surrounded the ring and were able to interfere in the match without disqualifications. Due to some technical difficulties, the lights at Citrus Bowl temporarily went out during the match. Near the end, a pin attempt by Maria was prevented when Marella pulled Maria's leg. In response, Raw commentator Jerry Lawler approached and knocked Marella down with a punch. Phoenix executed a Fisherman Suplex and pinned Maria to win the match. After the match, Snoop Dogg executed a Clothesline on Marella and kissed Maria, before leaving with her and Ashley. Next was Randy Orton defending his WWE Championship against Triple H and John Cena in a triple threat match, which is a standard match involving three wrestlers with no disqualifications. For his entrance, Cena had the Jones High School Marching Tigers marching band perform an instrumental version of his theme song "The Time Is Now" live. During the match, when Triple H had held Orton in a sleeper hold, Cena picked up both Orton and Triple H for an FU, but Triple H dropped down and low blowed him. Orton then dominated the match for some time; one highlight of the match featured Orton performing a crossbody from the top rope on Cena, while the latter was held on Triple H's shoulders in a seating position. Orton also performed a DDT to both Cena and Triple H simultaneously. Orton then tried to perform an RKO on Cena, but he countered and threw Orton onto Triple H. Triple H then started targeting Orton's legs and using some submissions on him. The match came to an end when Cena had Triple H on his shoulders for the FU, but was countered into a Pedigree. As Triple H was in the pin, Orton punted Triple H and pinned Cena to win the match and retain the WWE Championship. The next match was the No Disqualification match between Big Show and Floyd Mayweather Jr. Early in the match, Mayweather repeatedly escaped Big Show's grasp and delivered body shots to him. Mayweather and his accomplices tried to "walk out" of the match, but Big Show walked up the ramp and brought Mayweather back in the ring. As Big Show was about to chokeslam Mayweather, one of Mayweather's accomplices struck a steel chair on Big Show's back, and the latter chokeslammed him in retaliation. Capitalizing from this distraction, Mayweather grabbed that chair and hit Big Show multiple times on the head with it. Finally, Mayweather removed his right glove and put on a pair of brass knuckles to hit Big Show in the face. As a result, Big Show was knocked out as he could not answer the referee's ten count, and Mayweather was declared the winner. The main event of the night saw Edge putting his World Heavyweight Championship on the line against The Undertaker. The early going of the match was slow-paced, in which both superstars countered each other's maneuvers. During the match, Undertaker ran and leapt over the top rope from the ring onto Edge on the outside. Then throughout the match, Edge was able to counter Undertaker's numerous signature moves, including the Chokeslam, Old School and the Last Ride, a variation of the powerbomb. Near the end, Edge hit Undertaker with a television camera while the referee was knocked down. When he proceeded to deliver a Tombstone Piledriver to Undertaker, Undertaker countered it into his own version and successfully delivered it to Edge for a two-count. Curt Hawkins and Zack Ryder came to the ring for Edge's aid, but Undertaker took them out. Because of their distraction, Edge was able to execute a spear on Undertaker, but was unable to pin him. When Edge delivered another spear to Undertaker, Undertaker applied Hell's Gate and forced Edge to submit to win the World Heavyweight Championship, improving his WrestleMania record to 16–0. ## Reception Approximately 1,058,000 people ordered WrestleMania XXIV, grossing \$23.8 million in revenue. This number was fewer than the 1,188,000 buys that WrestleMania 23 achieved. Canadian Online Explorer's professional wrestling section gave the entire event 9 out of 10 stars. The rating was higher than WrestleMania 23 which received 8 out of 10 stars. The main event between The Undertaker and Edge for the World Heavyweight Championship was rated a 9.5 out of 10 stars. The Career Threatening match between Ric Flair and Shawn Michaels was rated a perfect 10 out of 10. Big Show vs. Floyd "Money" Mayweather Jr. was rated 7 out of 10 stars, and the Triple Threat match for the WWE Championship between Randy Orton, Triple H and John Cena was rated 8.5 out of 10 stars. ## Aftermath After the show, WWE was criticized for a malfunction in the pyrotechnics during The Undertaker's victory celebration. During the celebration, a hot cable for pyrotechnics was sent flying into audience members in the upper seating bowl of the stadium, leaving 45 injured, with some hospitalized. The accident was apparently due to a cable which fireworks were traveling across snapping, thus resulting in the fireworks exploding into the top rows of the upper bowl of the stadium. WWE's corporate website released a statement afterward stating that they would investigate the incident, but the results of the investigation were never released. On the following episode of Raw, Ric Flair made his farewell speech, which led to Triple H introducing various people from Flair's past, such as the Four Horsemen, Ricky Steamboat, and others, each coming out to give an emotional farewell. Afterward, the entire WWE roster came out to say thank you to Flair (Including Undertaker, who came out after Raw went off the air and hugged Flair and did his kneeling stance). Shawn Michaels, who was clearly upset about retiring Flair, was forgiven by Flair. Despite Flair's forgiveness, his former protégé Batista later started a feud with Michaels, citing Michaels' "selfishness" at WrestleMania for not lying down for Flair. The two had a match booked at Backlash, and after a confrontation between Michaels and Chris Jericho, Jericho was later added into the match as a Special Guest Referee. Michaels won with a superkick. The feud between Randy Orton, John Cena and Triple H continued after WrestleMania with the added involvement of John "Bradshaw" Layfield (JBL) leading to a Fatal Four-Way Elimination match between all four at Backlash. At Backlash, Triple H won his seventh WWE Championship by last pinning Orton. With Matt Hardy's return at WrestleMania, his feud with Montel Vontavious Porter over the WWE United States Championship, that had started in July 2007, was revived with a match booked at Backlash, which Hardy won. The rivalries between The Undertaker and Edge and the one between Kane and Chavo Guerrero both continued with successful title defenses at Backlash. On the May 2 episode of SmackDown, General Manager Vickie Guerrero stripped The Undertaker of the World Heavyweight Championship because of his continued use of his illegal chokehold, claiming she did it to protect the other wrestlers. ### DVD / Blu-ray release The event was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc by WWE Home Video in the U.S. on May 20, 2008, after it had completed broadcast on pay-per-view. It was also released on UMD on August 23 2008. It was the first WWE PPV event to be released via the Blu-ray and UMD format. As well as the event, the DVD/BD release features bonus material in the form of the 2008 Hall of Fame ceremony in its entirety and the battle royal that took place before the event. ## Results

2018 Berlin ePrix

Formula E electric car race held in Berlin in 2018

The 2018 Berlin ePrix (formally the 2018 BMW i Berlin E-Prix) was a Formula E electric car race held at the Tempelhof Airport Street Circuit at Tempelhof Airport in the outskirts of Berlin on 19 May 2018. It was the ninth round of the 2017–18 Formula E Championship and the fourth edition of the event as part of the championship. The 45-lap race was won by Audi driver Daniel Abt after starting from the pole position. Defending champion Lucas di Grassi finished second in the other Audi, thus recording the second one-two finish in Formula E history. Jean-Éric Vergne, the championship leader going into Berlin, took third for Techeetah. Daniel Abt won the pole position by recording the fastest lap in qualifying and he maintained his start line advantage for virtually the entire race, with teammate di Grassi in second at Audi's home ePrix despite Abt having a slow mandatory mid-event pit stop to switch into a second car as he had to let e.Dams-Renault's Sébastien Buemi enter his pitbox. Abt also set the fastest lap of the race, meaning he left Berlin with the full complement of 29 points from a single ePrix, and he achieved the first Grand Chelem in the history of Formula E. The consequence of the final positions increased Vergne's Drivers' Championship lead to 40 points over Virgin's Sam Bird, who came seventh. In the Teams' Championship, Audi scored a maximum 47 points because of their one-two finish and with Abt scoring pole and fastest lap. They advanced to second in the points standings behind the dominant Techeetah squad, with 45 points separating the two teams with three races left in the season. ## Background The 2018 Berlin ePrix was confirmed as part of Formula E's 2017–18 series schedule in September 2017 by the FIA World Motor Sport Council. It was the ninth of twelve scheduled single-seater electric car races of the 2017–18 Championship, and the fourth Berlin ePrix. The ePrix was held at the 2.375 km (1.476 mi) clockwise ten-turn Tempelhof Airport Street Circuit at Berlin Tempelhof Airport on 19 May 2018. The track was described as "very technical" and it was anticipated by the press that most of the overtaking manoeuvres during the race would occur at the braking areas for turns one, six and the turn nine hairpin. Three changes were made to the Tempelhof circuit from the year before: the first involved the re-positioning pit lane entry from turn ten to after the final corner. The second was that the 180 degree turn six right-hander was moved away from the center of a braking zone slightly to allow for a straighter approach to the turn nine hairpin and to provide more overtaking opportunities. The last change saw the length of the straight increase by 40 m (130 ft). These alterations increased the track's overall length by 100 m (330 ft). Entering the race, Techeetah driver Jean-Éric Vergne was leading the Drivers' Championship with 147 points. His nearest rival Sam Bird of Virgin was thirty-one points behind in second place and third-placed Felix Rosenqvist for Mahindra was another thirty points adrift. e.Dams-Renault's Sébastien Buemi was fourth with 70 points and Lucas di Grassi of Audi completed the top five with 58 points. In the Teams' Championship, Techeetah led the standings with 186 points accrued throughout the season; Virgin were 42 points behind in second and Audi were a further 21 points in arrears in third place. Mahindra placed fourth with 107 points and Jaguar stood in fifth position with 88 points. After winning the Paris ePrix three weeks ago, Vergne focused on trying to finish ahead of Bird in the battle for the Drivers' Championship in the closing four races of the season but entered the Berlin race with a poor record from the previous year and Techeetah had limited testing opportunities because of its status as a customer team, "At this stage in the season, it's all about keeping it clean and scoring points." Vergne received support from his teammate André Lotterer, one of four German drivers competing in Berlin, who declared he would help Vergne win the championship and pledged not to crash into anybody, "If I can help, I'll help. JEV has been a great team-mate to help me get up to speed anyhow – we play this card for the team [and] everything in a reasonable [way]." Daniel Abt of Audi meanwhile came second in the 2016 race and was confident about his chances, "A victory in Berlin would be the highlight of my Formula E career. I had a second place in the penultimate season and even that was very emotional for me." A total of 20 drivers representing ten teams of two participants each raced in the event. There were three driver changes entering the race. Having been in one of the Venturi cars since the season-opening Hong Kong race, Edoardo Mortara was replaced by the team's reserve and test driver Tom Dillmann, who had previously competed in the final seven races of the previous season. The change was necessitated because Mortara was mandated to prioritise the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM) round at the Lausitzring over the Berlin Formula E race by Mercedes-Benz per the requirements of his DTM contract. Tom Blomqvist was released from his contract by Andretti after his poor performance in comparison to teammate António Félix da Costa since he debuted in Marrakesh and was set to focus on BMW's GT programme. Blomqvist was replaced by series veteran and SMP Racing driver Stéphane Sarrazin for the rest of the season. After being stood down for NIO reserve driver Ma Qinghua in Paris to exercise a contractual arrangement and for promotional reasons, Luca Filippi returned to partner Oliver Turvey at the team. ## Practice Two practice sessions—both on Saturday morning—were held before the late afternoon race. The first session ran for 45 minutes and the second lasted half an hour. A half an hour untimed shakedown session was held on Friday afternoon to enable teams to check the reliability of their cars and their electronic systems. A post-shakedown fine of €1000 was issued to Filippi because he was observed speeding in the pit lane. Nick Heidfeld (Mahindra) was fastest in the first practice session with a 200 kW (270 hp) lap of one minute and 9.667 seconds at the close of the session. His closest challenger was Buemi who was 0.474 seconds off Heidfeld's pace in second with Vergne in third and Rosenqvist fourth. Turvey, Alex Lynn (Virgin), Félix da Costa, di Grassi, Mitch Evans (Jaguar), Nico Prost (e.Dams-Renault) and Abt placed fifth through tenth. Sarrazin caused the session to be stopped for fifteen minutes when he understeered straight into the turn one barrier due to his throttle being partially engaged under braking. This necessitated officials to extract his damaged car from the track via a crane and one of the TecPro barriers needed repairing. Competitors lost valuable practice time and the session restarted with fifteen minutes remaining. Drivers familiarised themselves with their car-setups in second practice and got into a rhythm during their 200 kW (270 hp) laps despite encountering slower traffic and discarded tyre rubber at the side of the circuit was problematic for all. Vergne set the fastest lap of the weekend so far with a time of one minute and 9.438 seconds despite narrowly avoiding grazing the turn seven wall. Rosenqvist was second and Lotterer was the fastest of the German drivers in third. Di Grassi and Abt were fourth and sixth and the Audis were separated by Buemi in fifth. Jérôme d'Ambrosio (Dragon) was seventh-quickest, Lynn eighth, Evans ninth and Bird completed the top ten ahead of qualifying. ## Qualifying Saturday's afternoon qualifying session ran for an hour and was divided into four groups of five cars. Each group was determined by a lottery system and was permitted six minutes of on-track activity. All drivers were limited to two timed laps with one at maximum power. The fastest five overall competitors in the four groups participated in a "Super Pole" session with one driver on the track at any time going out in reverse order from fifth to first. Each of the five drivers was limited to one timed lap and the starting order was determined by the competitor's fastest times (Super Pole from first to fifth, and group qualifying from sixth to twentieth). The driver and team who recorded the fastest time were awarded three points towards their respective championships. Traditionally the first qualifying group would have competitors struggle to reach super pole but the Templehof Airport Street Circuit has been known to produce unexpected results since its concrete surface absorbs heat generated by a car's tyres and this posed a risk those who had little to no grip in their vehicles. Abt paced the first group, followed by Turvey and the Jaguar duo of Evans (who made a driving error) and Nelson Piquet Jr. Super pole favourite Lotterer was one of the first drivers to venture onto the circuit and attempt a maximum power lap. He slid luridly through the sixth turn, and then glanced the outside barrier leaving the high-speed turn seven left-hander on his timed lap, sustaining possible car damage given he was eight-tenths of a second slower than Abt. In the second group, Lynn set the fastest first sector time of anyone at the time to go third overall and was fastest despite losing time through car correction in the second sector. José María López (Dragon) eliminated Piquet and Lotterer from super pole with the second quickest group time. Maro Engel (Venturi) placed third and Heidfeld managed fourth after glancing the wall. Félix da Costa locked his brakes and was slowest in the second group. D'Ambrosio set the fastest group three lap to go second overall, which was deemed "a major improvement" considering his poor performance earlier in the season. Dillmann was second-quickest, Sarrazin out-qualified teammate Félix da Costa on his Formula E return in third, and Filippi took fourth. Prost had an untidy exit coming out of turn five and was the slowest overall driver in group qualifying. Di Grassi was fastest overall in the fourth group with a 1-minute and 9.620 seconds lap, which was one-tenth of a second slower than Engel's 2017 fastest race lap despite the track's increased length. Vergne was one-tenth of a second slower than di Grassi in second and Rosenqvist could not reach super pole with a lap that was one hundredths of a second outside the limit and it placed him third in the group. Buemi was the first driver to record a lap time in the group and briefly moved into the top five before di Grassi and Vergne demoted him. Bird was the fourth group's slowest competitor. At the end of group qualifying, di Grassi, Vergne, Turvey, d'Ambrosio and Abt's lap times advanced them to super pole. Abt was fastest in all three sectors by making no errors and secured his and Audi's first pole position of his season and the second of his career since the 2015 Long Beach ePrix with a time of one minute and 9.472 seconds. He was joined on the grid's front row by Turvey (the first to drive onto the track) who recorded a lap 0.263 seconds slower and had the pole until Abt's lap despite locking his brakes on the approach to turn six. Vergne could not match Abt's pace as he went close to hitting the wall exiting the turn nine hairpin and took third. D'Ambrosio picked up some oversteer going through the first corner and slowed for fourth. Fifth-placed di Grassi ran close to the turn three exit barrier and carried too much speed entering the turn nine hairpin, understeered, and corrected a slide which lost him eight-tenths of a second. ### Post-qualifying Abt was investigated by the stewards for a potential infraction of Article 33.3 of Formula E's sporting regulations because data received by the technical delegate of Formula E from his car was in the 200 kW (270 hp) mode approximately 350 m (1,150 ft) before the beginning of the circuit's final sector. Though Audi and Abt could not explain why the infraction occurred, he was reprimanded not penalised as the stewards deemed he had gained no performance advantage. Lotterer was demoted ten places on the grid because he was adjudged to have caused an crash with Bird on the final lap of the Paris ePrix. However, he could not take the full penalty because he began from 20th after setting the 18th quickest lap time and had to serve a mandatory ten-second time penalty at his pit stop to switch into a second car. After Lotterer's penalty, the rest of the grid lined up as Rosenqvist, Buemi, Lynn, Evans, Bird, López, Dillmann, Engel, Heidfeld, Piquet, Sarrazin, Félix da Costa, Filippi, Prost and Lotterer. ### Qualifying classification Notes: - — André Lotterer was demoted ten places on the grid because was deemed to have an accident at the preceding Paris ePrix. ## Race Weather conditions at the start of the race were dry and sunny. The air temperature throughout the race was between 21.45 and 22.05 °C (70.61 and 71.69 °F) and the track temperature ranged from 20.55 to 21.10 °C (68.99 to 69.98 °F). A special feature of Formula E is the "Fan Boost" feature, an additional 100 kilowatts (130 hp) of power to use in the driver's second car. The three drivers who were allowed to use the boost were determined by a fan vote. Abt, Rosenqvist and Buemi were awarded the extra power for the Berlin race. The ePrix's start time was moved from 16:03 Central European Summer Time (UTC+02:00) to 18:03 by German national broadcaster ARD to enable a live telecast between the women's DFB-Pokal and the men's DFB-Pokal finals. On the grid, Abt held his lead approaching the first corner, while Turvey aggressively held off an attack by Vergne. D'Ambrosio then executed a late manoeuvre around the outside of Vergne for third at the first turn having moved past di Grassi shortly beforehand. Behind them, Rosenqvist tried to copy this move but ran wide onto the dusty turn one run-off area. He kept his car out of the barriers but fell out of the top ten. At the end of the first lap, Abt led Turvey by seven-tenths of a second with d'Ambrosio nearly a further second behind in third. D'Ambrosio fended off Vergne and di Grassi until Vergne moved ahead of him on the inside line at turn six on the second lap with di Grassi getting past d'Ambrosio entering the turn nine hairpin the lap after. Buemi then demoted d'Ambrosio to sixth with an overtake at the turn nine hairpin on lap four. Further down the order, Heidfeld passed Piquet around the outside at the first corner on the fifth lap while Rosenqvist waited until the following lap to get by the latter. Meanwhile, Evans overtook Bird to claim seventh into turn six. Bird considered challenging him around the outside before slowing. On lap seven, Heidfeld dived down the inside of López driving into the first turn to take over twelfth. Upfront, Abt established a healthy advantage over Turvey who held off Vergne and di Grassi. The ninth lap had Heidfeld overtake Dillmann approaching the turn nine hairpin to move into the top ten while Lynn fell behind Piquet, Rosenqvist, Sarrazin and Félix da Costa because an electrical glitch affected his power usage. Then on lap 11, di Grassi passed Vergne around the outside of turn six to move into third. This disrupted Vergne's momentum enough to enable Buemi to demote him to fifth around the inside of the turn nine hairpin on that lap. Starting lap 12, Di Grassi attacked the electrical energy saving Turvey entering turn one but his manoeuvre was unsuccessful. That did not prevent di Grassi from attempting again and was successful next time round; getting past Turvey to claim second around the inside on the straight heading into turn six. Elsewhere, Heidfeld's move up the field temporarily stopped as he was delayed by Engel and defended from López. Similarly, d'Ambrosio lost positions to Evans and Bird while Lotterer was now in fifteenth position by lap 15. Abt's lead had stabilised to three and a half seconds over teammate di Grassi by lap 20. That lap, Vergne lunged at Buemi on the run to the first corner as both drivers went wide and minor contact was made when Vergne took fourth from Buemi at the next turn. The first pit stops for the switch into a second car was made by Turvey at the end of lap 22 with the rest of the field following on the next lap with no incidents occurring in contrast to previous rounds of the season. After the pit stops, Abt retained his lead over teammate di Grassi but it was lowered to six-tenths of a second because he waited for Buemi to pass by but it prevented him from having an unsafe release. Buemi meanwhile got back past Vergne due to a faster pit stop. Abt soon began increasing his lead over teammate di Grassi who reportedly carried a steering problem. He earned one point for setting the race's fastest lap at lap 26, a 1-minute and 12,409 seconds lap. Audi also instructed their drivers via pit boards not to take any risks. Attention then focused on d'Ambrosio who delayed the quartet of López, Heidfeld, Engel and Rosenqvist. Heidfeld was so distracted on attempting to pass López, that it allowed Engel to overtake him for ninth at the first turn. Upfront, Buemi and Vergne got close enough to challenge Turvey who had electrical energy management problems. Buemi passed Turvey when the latter ran wide at turn ten on lap 33 and Vergne saw an opportunity to get past Turvey leaving the same corner. Vergne later found himself in a position to overtake Buemi entering turn one upon starting the next lap but decided against doing so. He instead waited until turn six when he decided late on to steer to the left and pass a surprised Buemi for third as he was intent on maintaining his championship lead. Buemi tried to cutback on Vergne leaving the corner but nudged his nose cone into Vergne's rear wing. Elsewhere, D'Ambrosio fell behind López. He fell further back when Dillmann passed him before turn one. Heidfeld moved past d'Ambrosio approaching turn two and Rosenqvist overtook the latter heading towards turn six. Engel and López fought amongst themselves but got close to Bird and formed a close queue of cars from seventh to thirteenth. Piquet moved ahead of Rosenqvist around the outside entering turn ten to claim twelfth. Rosenqvist used his FanBoost the lap after on the straight entering turn six to try and retake twelfth from Piquet but the latter fended off his manoeuvre. Piquet carried enough momentum to pass Heidfeld and Dillmann to move into the top ten. Piquet tried to pass López on the inside line heading into the final corner but was unsuccessful. Piquet then tried again on the same line into the first corner but locked his front brakes; he and López ran wide into the turn's dusty run-off area. Both Mahindras moved past and López was tapped from behind by Rosenqvist on the apex of turn three and spun. These events allowed Lotterer to get into the top ten. Vergne tried to set the fastest lap in the final laps but could not do so. Lotterer had conserved enough electrical energy and used it to overtake Heidfeld for ninth on the final lap. Meanwhile, Abt found a rhythm he liked and extended his advantage at the front of the field to 6.7 seconds to cross the start/finish line after 45 laps to claim his second career victory after his Mexico City ePrix win two months prior. Abt achieved the first "Grand Slam" in Formula E history (pole position, fastest lap, led every lap and the win). Di Grassi followed 6.758 seconds later in second and Audi secured the second one-two finish in Formula E history after Techeetah achieved the feat in the Santiago ePrix. Vergne completed the podium in third. Off the podium, Buemi took fourth, Turvey claimed fifth, Evans finished sixth, Bird placed seventh, Engel was eighth and Lotterer came ninth. Heidfeld completed the top ten and earned his first point since the Marrakesh ePrix. The last of the finishers were Rosenqvist, Piquet, Dillmann, Prost, Félix da Costa, Lynn, Filippi, López, d'Ambrosio and Sarrazin. This race had all twenty starters finish for the first time in the season. ### Post-race The top three drivers appeared on the podium to collect their trophies and spoke to the media in a later press conference. Abt spoke of his delight over taking the victory the one-two finish and stated he was feeling confident on the day, "It's super special. I keep saying I have these weeks where I just feel like good stuff is going to happen and I had this feeling here in my home round." Di Grassi took his fourth successive second-place finish and congratulated his teammate Abt on taking the win. He stated his feeling that it was a deserved victory for Abt, "The one-two is a dream come true for Audi after we started the year so badly and now we've recovered and are second in the team championship, and it was my fourth straight podium in a row – I can only be happy!" Third-placed Vergne joined in the congratulations to Abt and Audi for their achievements and said he was happy with the job his team undertook after their poor performance at Templehof the previous year, "The race went very well, I took it easy, I knew from this morning the Audi guys were out of reach. When Lucas was behind I didn't even look, I let him by. Then I passed Buemi and he was quite aggressive in closing the door sometimes. The pit stop wasn't bad, I lost a position to Buemi so I had to pass him again." Turvey was convinced that the strategy his team made was the correct one, saying the decision to make a pit stop one lap earlier than everyone else was because of him saving too much electrical energy but believed a podium would have been difficult to maintain due to Buemi and Vergne's fast pace, "When we changed strategy, I felt I could stay with the Audis but not be any quicker. They were super quick, both of them. When I saw them carry on and I pitted a lap earlier, that was it. They had a big advantage today in the race." Rosenqvist spoke of his belief that he had to risk his first lap overtaking manoeuvre so he could get back into championship contention and suspected his car's handling was the reason he struggled during the ePrix because he anticipated an eighth or ninth-place finish, "I don't think it's a powertrain matter, it's more [that] I don't feel the car underneath me and I think that's costing a lot of energy and a lot of lap time, [at] every corner. It's just been a different car compared to last year." Sarrazin said that energy management hindered his race because he had used too much but sought to improve for the Zürich ePrix. Buemi warned Vergne to expect an alternative response if he decided to battle with him in the future but said he believed if he attempted the same action as Vergne he would have crashed, "He's been a bit tough I felt in some of the contacts but I was just a bit on the back foot because I was slower. I'm looking forward to the next time because next time I'll go a bit harder, I won't care as much so we'll see. He won the battle, but next time he should not expect it to be like that." Bird told the press that he was still hopeful that he could catch Vergne in the Drivers' Championship battle as he expected to improve his results in the season's closing three races but stated his feeling a repeat of his 2017 New York City ePrix double header success would be more difficult next time round, "Like normal, I have to do a miracle at the last race! But stranger things have happened. Looking back at New York last year, that wasn't so bad for me. 53 out of 58 points came my way. To do that again will take some doing though." The consequence of the race meant Vergne increased his lead at the top of the Drivers' Championship to 40 points over his nearest rival Bird. Rosenqvist was a further 36 points adrift in third place and race winner Abt moved from sixth to fourth. Buemi's fourth-place finish meant he fell to fifth position. Techeetah maintained their lead in the Teams' Championship but their advantage had been reduced to 44 points by Audi whose one-two result moved them to second. Virgin's solitary points result from Bird meant the team fell to third and Mahindra and Jaguar kept fourth and fifth places respectively with three races left in the season. Ivan Yim the managing director for Techeetah, cautioned the team over their battle against Audi as he was aware of the German marque's strengths and urged his team to score as many points as possible. ### Race classification Drivers who scored championship points are denoted in bold. Notes: - — One point for fastest lap, three points for pole position. ## Standings after the race Drivers' Championship standings Teams' Championship standings - Notes: Only the top five positions are included for both sets of standings.

HD 40307 c

Extrasolar planet in the constellation Pictor

HD 40307 c is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star HD 40307, located 42 light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Pictor. The planet was discovered by the radial velocity method, using the HARPS apparatus, in June 2008. Of the six proposed planets in the HD 40307 star system, it is the third-largest, and has the second-closest orbit from the star. The planet is of interest as this star has relatively low metallicity, supporting a hypothesis that different metallicities in protostars determine what kind of planets they will form. ## Discovery Like the other two exoplanets, HD 40307 b and HD 40307 d, orbiting the star HD 40307, HD 40307 c was discovered by measuring variations in the radial velocity of HD 40307 caused by the star's orbit around the center of mass of the planetary system. These measurements were made by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher spectrograph apparatus (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. The discovery of planets in the HD 40307 system was announced in an astrophysics convention that took place in Nantes, France in mid-June 2008. ## Orbit and mass HD 40307 c is the third-most massive planet in the system, with a lower mass bound 6.8 times the mass of the Earth. The planet orbits HD 40307 at about 0.08 astronomical units (AU), as compared to the Earth's distance from the Sun at 1 AU; as a result, one year on the planet constitutes approximately 9.6 Earth days. Analysis of the radial velocity data used to detect the planet does not yield a statistically significant deviation from a circular orbit. The star around which the planet HD 40307 orbits has a low metallicity, unusual when compared to other planet-bearing stars. This supports a hypothesis concerning the possibility that the metallicity of stars during their births may determine whether a protostar's accretion disk forms gas giants or terrestrial planets. ## Characteristics HD 40307 c has not been observed directly and likely does not transit. More specific characteristics (such as surface temperature, composition and radius) cannot be determined. HD 40307 c has a small mass of at least 6.9 times Earth's, so it was first assumed terrestrial. Later in 2009 a study stated that if HD 40307 c is terrestrial, tidal heating would destabilise it, in a manner greater than this process crushes the Jovian moon Io. Such restrictions as bind terrestrial planets would not restrict ice giant planets like Neptune or Uranus. HD 40307 c might be a sub-Neptune. Since the same tides are predicted to result in the destruction of larger natural satellites of planets located close to their parent star, it is unlikely that HD 40307 c hosts any satellites. ## Trivia The planet was named "Problemland" in the Xkcd strip "Exoplanet Names" in August, 2013. ## See also

Tommy Lawton

English association footballer (1919–1996)

Thomas Lawton (6 October 1919 – 6 November 1996) was an English football player and manager. A strong centre-forward with excellent all-round attacking skills, he was able to head the ball with tremendous power and accuracy. Born in Farnworth and raised in Bolton, he played amateur football at Rossendale United, before he turned professional at Burnley on his 17th birthday. He also played cricket for Burnley Cricket Club, before his potential as a footballer won him a £6,500 move to Everton in January 1937. He went on to finish as the First Division's top-scorer in 1938 and 1939, helping Everton to finish as champions of the Football League in the latter campaign. League football was then suspended for seven full seasons due to the outbreak of war in Europe, during which time he scored 24 goals in 23 appearances for England whilst guesting for Everton and a number of other clubs. In November 1945, he moved to Chelsea for £14,000, and scored a club record 26 goals in 34 league games in the 1946–47 season. In November 1947, he made a surprise move to Third Division South club Notts County for a British record transfer fee of £20,000. He helped the club to win promotion as champions in 1949–50, before he moved on to Brentford in March 1952 for a club record £16,000. In January 1953, Brentford appointed him player-manager, though he would only remain in charge for nine months. He joined Arsenal as a player in November 1953 for £10,000, where he saw out the remainder of his playing career. Despite losing much of his best years to World War II, he scored 260 goals in 433 league and cup competitions in 14 full seasons in the Football League. He had a promising start to his managerial career by leading Kettering Town to the Southern League title in 1956–57, but then only had two more seasons as manager, getting relegated with Notts County in 1957–58 and then relegated with Kettering Town in 1963–64. During the 1970s he struggled with debt and related legal problems, which were reported in the media as an example of a celebrated person having fallen from grace. He scored 22 goals in his 23 England appearances over a ten-year international career from 1938 to 1948, including four against Portugal in May 1947. He helped England to win two British Home Championship titles outright (1946–47 and 1947–48), and to share the Championship in 1938–39. He fell out of international contention at the age of 28 due to his contempt for manager Walter Winterbottom, his decision to drop out of the First Division, and the emergence of Jackie Milburn and Nat Lofthouse. As well as his England caps, he also represented The Football League XI and played in a special Great Britain game against Europe in 1947. He married twice, and had two children and one step-child. His ashes are held in the National Football Museum, and he was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2003. ## Early life Thomas Lawton was born on 6 October 1919 to Elizabeth Riley and Thomas Lawton senior in Farnworth, Lancashire. His father was a railway signalman, and his mother worked as a weaver at Harrowby Mill. His father left the family 18 months after Lawton was born, and Elizabeth moved back into her parents' home in Bolton. Elizabeth's father, James Hugh "Jim" Riley, became Lawton's surrogate father. Lawton's natural footballing ability earned him a place on the Bolton Town Schools team in 1930. He was picked by Lancashire Schools at the age of 13. Despite scoring a hat-trick in a trial game for England Schoolboys, he never earned a full England Schoolboy cap. At the age of 14 he began playing for Hayes Athletic in the Bolton Senior League, and went on to score 570 goals in three seasons. The FA's rules meant he was unable to turn professional at a club until he was 17, and Lawton's grandfather rejected Bolton Wanderers's offer for Lawton to work as a delivery driver for two years before turning professional at the club. Lawton instead played as an amateur for Rossendale United in the Lancashire Combination, scoring a hat-trick on his debut against Bacup. He took up temporary work at a tannery, and then joined Burnley as assistant groundsman after his mother rejected an offer from Sheffield Wednesday as she objected to him travelling to Sheffield on a daily basis. ## Club career ### Burnley Lawton played his first game for Burnley Reserves against Manchester City Reserves in September 1935, and though he struggled in this game he went on to become a regular Reserve team player by the age of 16. After a poor run of form from Cecil Smith, Lawton was selected ahead of Smith for the Second Division game against Doncaster Rovers at Turf Moor on 28 March 1936; aged 16 years and 174 days, this made him the youngest centre-forward ever to play in the Football League. Rovers centre-half Syd Bycroft, also making his league debut, marked Lawton out of the game, which ended in a 1–1 draw. Burnley had played poorly, though Lawton was praised for his "keen and fearless" performance by the Express & News newspaper. He retained his place for the following game, and scored two goals in a 3–1 victory over Swansea Town at Vetch Field. He picked up a groin strain in his third appearance which caused him to miss two fixtures, before he returned to the first team for the final four games of the 1935–36 season; he claimed three more goals to take his season tally to five goals from seven games. Lawton continued to train his heading skills intensely in the summer of 1936, and also played cricket for Burnley Cricket Club as a batsman in the Lancashire League. He scored a six against both Learie Constantine and Amar Singh. He scored 369 runs in 15 completed innings for an average of 24.06. He turned professional at Burnley at the age of 17 on wages of £7 a week. His grandfather attempted to negotiate a £500 signing-on fee on his behalf but was rebuffed after the club alerted Charles Sutcliffe, Secretary of the Football League, who informed them that any attempt to circumvent the league's maximum wage was illegal. Lawton scored in his first appearance since signing the contract after just 30 seconds, before going on to record a hat-trick in a 3–1 win over Tottenham Hotspur, scoring a goal with either foot and one with his head. ### Everton In January 1937, First Division club Everton paid Burnley £6,500 to secure Lawton's services, and also gave his grandfather a job as deputy groundsman at Goodison Park; the fee was a record for a player under 21. The move to Everton made him a teammate of Dixie Dean, his boyhood idol, who he was expected to gradually replace as first choice centre-forward. He later recalled that on his way to Goodison Park on his first day as an Everton player he was told by a tram conductor that "You're that young Lawton, aren't you? You'll never be as good as Dixie." Dean was finally rested on 13 February, which allowed Lawton to make his first team debut against Wolverhampton Wanderers at Molineux; the match ended in a 6–2 defeat, though Lawton scored a penalty. He spent the rest of the season at inside-left, with Dean at centre-forward, and ended the 1936–37 campaign with four goals in 11 games. He started the 1937–38 season in the Reserves, but was installed as first choice centre-forward in September after Dean was dropped for punching club secretary Theo Kelly. On 2 October, Lawton scored the winning penalty in a 2–1 victory over Merseyside derby rivals Liverpool at Anfield. He ended the campaign with 28 goals in 39 appearances to become the division's top-scorer. Everton had a young but highly effective team for the 1938–39 campaign, and Lawton was praised for the way he led the attack, with the Evening Standards Roland Allen describing Lawton as a "clever footballer, bringing his wing men into the game with shrewd flicks and widely flung and accurate passes" after Everton recorded a 2–1 victory over Arsenal at Highbury. The game against Arsenal was part of a run of six wins in the first six games of the campaign, during which time Lawton scored eight goals. Everton lost their lead at the top of the table to Derby County over Christmas, but returned to form and to first position by Easter. They faced a difficult final run of games, but beat Chelsea and recorded two victories over Sunderland to secure the club's fifth league title, finishing four points ahead of second-place Wolverhampton Wanderers. Lawton scored 35 goals in 38 league games to finish as the division's top-scorer for the second successive season. However, in the summer he wrote to Leicester City to request that the club buy him from Everton; it was reported that he reached out to Leicester as they were managed by Tom Bromilow, his former Burnley manager. Everton were fifth in the league and Lawton was the division's top-scorer with four goals when league football was suspended three games into the 1939–40 season due to the outbreak of World War II. Lawton later remarked that "I'm convinced that if it hadn't been for the War, we'd have won the Championship again, the average age of those players was about 24 or 25". ### World War II Lawton continued to play for both Everton and England during the war. However the FA decided to not award full caps for England appearances during the war, and as a result his 24 goals in 23 international games were not counted in statistics for the official England team. As was common for footballers during the war, he also made guest appearances for a number of clubs besides Everton, including Leicester City, Greenock Morton, Chester City, Aldershot, and Tranmere Rovers. He was called up to the British Army in January 1940, and his status as an England international saw him recruited to the Royal Army Physical Training Corps. He also played for the British Army team and his Area Command team. He was posted in Birkenhead, which allowed him to frequently appear for Everton. On Christmas Day 1940, he played for Everton against Liverpool at Anfield in the morning and for Tranmere Rovers at Crewe Alexandra in the afternoon. Explaining this later, he said, 'The Tranmere people came into the dressing room and asked if anyone wanted to play as they were two men short. I said, "Go on, I'll help you out." And I did.' In 1942 he scored a hat-trick for England in a 5–4 win over Scotland at Hampden Park. Later in the year he scored six goals for Aldershot in a 9–0 win over Luton Town. On 16 October 1943, he scored four goals in an 8–0 victory over Scotland at Maine Road. ### Chelsea In July 1945, Lawton handed in a transfer request at Everton as he wanted a move to a Southern club so as to see more of his increasingly estranged wife. In November 1945, he was sold to Chelsea for a fee of £14,000. Chelsea continued to play regional wartime fixtures as national league football had not resumed for the 1945–46 season, and Lawton also continued his uncapped appearances for the England national team. In the summer of 1946, following his demobilisation, he coached for the FA in a summer camp in Switzerland. He scored a club record 26 goals in 34 league games in the 1946–47 season. However he struggled to settle at Stamford Bridge and came into conflict with manager Billy Birrell after refusing to go on a pre-season tour of Sweden in 1947, which resulted in him requesting a transfer. He favoured a move to Arsenal, but this was ruled out by the Chelsea hierarchy. Lawton turned down an approach by Sunderland manager Bill Murray as he held out hope that Chelsea would relent and allow him a move to Arsenal. ### Notts County In November 1947, Lawton was sold to Notts County of the Third Division South for a British record transfer fee of £20,000 (). He made the surprise decision to drop down two divisions so as to be reunited with manager Arthur Stollery, his former masseur and friend at Chelsea, and because he was promised a job outside of football upon his retirement by vice-chairman Harold Walmsley. Walmsley told the Nottingham Guardian Journal that "we are prepared to spend to the limit to put this old club back where it belongs". He scored two goals on his home debut, a 4–2 win over Bristol Rovers in front of 38,000 spectators at Meadow Lane – a huge increase on previous home games of typically 6,000 to 7,000 supporters. He ended the 1947–48 season with 24 goals in as many games, though was resented by the club's directors after he insisted on pay rises for his teammates and stopped the practice of director's friends and family travelling to away games on the team coach. He formed a productive forward partnership with Jackie Sewell in the 1948–49 campaign, and scored 23 goals in 40 league and cup appearances. County finished in mid-table despite scoring 102 goals, 15 more than champions Swansea. Stollery was sacked and upon Lawton's suggestion the club appointed Eric Houghton as manager after Lawton turned down the role as player-manager. Lawton and Sewell's understanding grew throughout the 1949–50 campaign, and Lawton finished as the division's top-scorer with 31 goals in 37 league games as County won promotion as champions, seven points ahead of second-placed Northampton Town. Promotion was secured with a 2–0 win over local rivals Nottingham Forest at Meadow Lane on 22 April. However he struggled with poor form during the 1950–51 season as his first marriage was coming to an end and he came into increasing conflict with his teammates. He was angered when the club sold Jackie Sewell to Sheffield Wednesday in March 1951 – breaking Lawton's own transfer record in the process – as he felt the move showed a lack of ambition from the club's directors. He also found that the well paid job he was promised outside of football did not transpire. His tally of nine goals in 31 games in 1950–51 and 13 goals in 31 games in 1951–52 was disappointing, and he was made available for transfer. ### Brentford In March 1952, Lawton joined Second Division side Brentford for a club record £16,000 fee. Manager Jackie Gibbons left the club at the start of the 1952–53 season and was succeeded by his assistant Jimmy Bain, who proved ill-suited to management, and so in January 1953 Lawton was appointed as player-manager, with Bain as his assistant. However he lost the dressing room due to his excessive demands of the players, and the strains of management were having a negative impact on his form. Brentford also lost their best players having sold both Ron Greenwood and Jimmy Hill. He signed two veterans in former Notts County teammate Frank Broome and Ian McPherson to play on the wings, who, with Lawton, formed an attacking trio with a combined age of 104. They got off to a poor start to the 1953–54 season, and Lawton resigned as manager after the Griffin Park crowd began to mock the forward line by singing Dear Old Pals. ### Arsenal In November 1953, Lawton was traded to First Division champions Arsenal for £7,500 plus James Robertson who was valued at £2,500. He was signed by manager Tom Whittaker, who had previously found success in bringing in veterans such as Ronnie Rooke and Joe Mercer. However Lawton was limited to ten appearances in the 1953–54 campaign after picking up an injury on his debut. He also played in the 1953 Charity Shield, scoring one goal as Arsenal beat Blackpool 3–1. He scored seven goals in 20 appearances throughout the 1954–55 season, including winning goals against Chelsea and Cardiff City. He scored a hat-trick past Cardiff City on the opening day of the 1955–56 season, before he announced his decision to leave Arsenal to pursue a career in management eight games into the campaign. > "More than 20 years of soccer. What glorious years. Years that all the money in the world couldn't buy. I have been lucky. I have played with great clubs; I have escaped serious injury; I have played for my country; I have even captained my country; I have won many of the game's top honours. Soccer has been good to me and I hope that I have repaid the game in some small way. I have had great experiences. I have met some wonderful people. I have memories that nobody can take away from me. If I could turn the clock back 20 years, I would still go into the game as a full-time professional and I can say to any lad who is contemplating a career in football: Go ahead son ... providing you are willing to work and work hard and providing you are willing to learn the craft thoroughly. You will meet some of the grandest fellows you could ever wish to meet and you will have a pleasant, healthy life and be quite well paid for it. ## International career Lawton was called up to play for The Football League XI against a League of Ireland XI at Windsor Park on 21 September 1938, and scored four goals in what finished as an 8–2 win. A month later he went on to win his first cap for England on 22 October, England's first game of the 1938–39 British Home Championship, a 4–2 defeat to Wales at Ninian Park, and converted a penalty kick to mark his first England appearance with a goal. This made him the youngest player to score on his England debut, a record which lasted until Marcus Rashford broke it in 2016. Four days after Lawton's debut, he scored again for England at Highbury in a 3–0 win over 'The Rest of Europe', a team of players selected from Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Hungary and Norway. Later in the year he also scored in victories over Norway and Ireland. He played in all four games of 1939, scoring against Scotland and Italy; the goal against Scotland secured a 2–1 win in front of 149,269 spectators at Hampden Park. Newly appointed England manager Walter Winterbottom played Lawton in England's first official match in seven years on 28 September 1946, a 7–2 win over Ireland. He played the remaining three fixtures of 1946, and scored four goals in an 8–2 victory over the Netherlands at Leeds Road on 27 November. On 10 May 1947, he scored two goals playing for the Great Britain XI in a 6–1 victory over a Rest of Europe XI that was billed as the 'Match of the Century'. Five days later he scored four goals in a 10–0 victory over Portugal at Lisbon's Estádio Nacional. On 21 September, he scored after just 12 seconds in a 5–2 win over Belgium at Heysel Stadium. He retained his place in the England team following his club move to Notts County, and in doing so became the first Third Division footballer to represent England when he scored from the penalty spot in a 4–2 win over Sweden on 19 November. However he only won three further caps in 1948, his final appearance coming in a 0–0 draw with Denmark in Copenhagen on 26 September. He had become increasingly disillusioned with the England set-up, and told Winterbottom that "if you think you can teach Stanley Matthews to play on the wing and me how to score goals, you've got another think coming!" Winterbottom was also frustrated by Lawton's smoking habit, and preferred Jackie Milburn ahead of Lawton. Hopes of any future comeback were ended by the emergence of powerful centre-forward Nat Lofthouse, who made his England debut in November 1950. ## Style of play Lawton was widely regarded as the finest centre-forward of his generation. He boasted a strong physique and good ball control skills, as well as a great passing range and a powerful shot. He was naturally right-footed, though worked to improve his left foot to a good enough standard to be considered a two-footed player. His greatest strength though was his ability to head the ball with power and accuracy, as he possessed muscular legs to give himself a strong jump and long hang-time, and was also able to time his jumps to perfection. Stanley Matthews surmised that "Quite simply, Tommy was the greatest header of the ball I ever saw." Lawton was never booked throughout his career. ## Coaching career and later life An Arsenal director helped Lawton to secure the position of the player-manager at Southern League side Kettering Town. He took up the role at the club on wages of £1,500 a year in the summer of 1956. At the helm he thereafter signed several footballers such as Jim Standen of Arsenal, Amos Moss of Aston Villa, Jack Wheeler who played for Huddersfield Town and Brentford's Jack Goodwin. He was also successful in bringing to Kettering Fulham's Bob Thomas, Harry McDonald who was previously with Crystal Palace and Sunderland's Geoff Toseland. During his debut season as manager, 1956–1957, Kettering found themselves ten points clear at the top of the table by Christmas. As a result of this success, in January 1956 he turned down an approach from Notts County. Lawton then went on to foster Kettering towards their winning of the league title in 1956–57 by eight points. Out of Kettering's 106 league goals, Lawton scored 15. He was appointed as Notts County manager in May 1957, controversially replacing caretaker-manager Frank Broome. Broome, who had steered the club away from being relegated from the Second Division, was installed as his assistant manager. He found it tedious making new signings due to financial constraints on the part of the club. He did though take on forwards Jeff Astle and Tony Hateley as apprentices, who would both go on to have long careers in the First Division. Lawton agreed to go without his wages for six months so as to improve the club's finances. County were however relegated at the end of the 1957–58 season, finishing one point short of safety, and Lawton was sacked. He received a total of just three months pay for his time at the club, having only a verbal offer of a three-year contract to fall back on, and nothing in writing. After being sacked as Notts County manager, Lawton ran the Magna Charta public house in Lowdham from October 1958. An employee stole £2,500 from the business and Lawton decided to leave the pub trade after four years. He then took up a job selling insurance. He returned to football management with Kettering Town for the 1963–64 season as a caretaker following the resignation of Wally Akers, but the season ended with Kettering being relegated from the Southern League Premier Division. He was offered the job on a permanent basis, but turned it down so as to concentrate on his job as an insurance salesman. He lost his job in insurance in 1967, and then opened a sporting goods shop that bore his name after going into partnership with a friend, but was forced to close the business after just two months due to poor sales. After a period on unemployment benefits he found work at a betting company in Nottingham. He returned to Notts County to work as a coach and chief scout from 1968 to 1970. He was sacked after new manager Jimmy Sirrel decided to appoint his own backroom staff, and Lawton returned to unemployment. In May 1970, he wrote to Chelsea chairman Richard Attenborough asking for a loan of £250 and for possible employment; Attenborough lent him £100. He was interviewed by Eamonn Andrews on ITV's Today programme on his fall from England star to the unemployment line. After his financial troubles became public knowledge he was offered a lucrative job as director of his own subsidiary furniture company by a large furnishing company on Tottenham Court Road; however the company went into liquidation the following year. He continued to write cheques in the company's name, and in June 1972 pleaded Guilty to seven charges of obtaining goods and cash by deception. He was sentenced to three years probation, and ordered to pay £240 compensation and £100 in costs. In 1972 a testimonial match was organised by Everton on Lawton's behalf to help him pay off his debts of around £6,000. However his financial situation was still bleak, and on two occasions he narrowly avoided a prison sentence for failing to pay his rates after an Arsenal supporters club and later an anonymous former co-worker stepped in to pay the bill for him. In August 1974, he was again found Guilty of obtaining goods by deception after failing to repay a £10 debt to a publican, and was sentenced to 200 hours of Community service and ordered to pay £40 costs. In 1984, he began writing a column for the Nottingham Evening Post. Brentford also organised a testimonial match for him in May 1985. Lawton's health deteriorated in his old age and he died in November 1996, aged 77, as a result of pneumonia. His ashes were donated to the National Football Museum. He was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame in 2003. ## Personal life Lawton married Rosaleen May Kavanagh in January 1941; the marriage bore one child, Amanda. Rosaleen never watched Lawton play football during their ten-year marriage. Divorce was granted with a decree nisi in March 1951 after Rosaleen was found to have committed adultery with Notts County director Adrian Van Geffen; Lawton never saw Amanda again and was not required to pay child support. He would not hear from his daughter until she was convicted of stealing from playwright George Axelrod in 1968, by which time Rosaleen was on her fourth marriage and living in Jamaica. Lawton married second wife Gladys Rose in September 1952, who bore him a son, Thomas Junior. Gladys was also divorced, and her ex-husband cited Lawton as a co-respondent in the divorce proceedings as the pair had begun their relationship whilst Gladys was still married; her family were staunch Catholics, and Gladys was ostracised by her family following her divorce. Gladys had a daughter, Carol, from her previous marriage, who Lawton raised as his own. Thomas Junior went on to play rugby union for Leicester Tigers. He starred alongside Thora Hird and Diana Dors in 1953 film The Great Game, playing himself in a cameo role. Throughout the 1950s he went on to appear on What's My Line? amongst other radio and television programmes. He published a total of four books: Tommy Lawton's all star football book (1950), Soccer the Lawton way (1954), My Twenty Years of Soccer (1955), and When the Cheering Stopped (1973). ## Career statistics ### Club ### International ## Managerial statistics ## Honours ### Player Everton - Football League First Division: 1938–39 Notts County - Football League Third Division South: 1949–50 Arsenal - Charity Shield: 1953 England - British Home Championship: 1938–39 (shared), 1946–47, 1947–48 ### Managerial Kettering Town' - Southern Football League: 1956–57 ### Individual - First Division top scorer: 1937–38, 1938–39 - Third Division South top scorer: 1949–50 - English Football Hall of Fame: 2003 - Notts County FC Hall of Fame: 2014 ## See also - List of men's footballers with 500 or more goals

1988 Football League Third Division play-off final

Association football match

The 1988 Football League Third Division play-off Final was an association football match contested by Walsall and Bristol City over two legs on 25 and 28 May 1988, and then a replay on 30 May 1988, to determine which club would play the following season in the Second Division. Walsall had finished in third place in the Third Division while Bristol City finished fifth. They were joined in the play-offs by fourth-placed Notts County and Sheffield United, who had finished in 21st place in the division above. Walsall defeated Notts County in their semi-final while Bristol City beat Sheffield United in the other. The first leg of the final took place on 25 May 1988 at Ashton Gate in Bristol and was refereed by Joe Worrall. Alan Walsh scored directly from a free kick for Bristol City before Walsall equalised in the 62nd minute through Trevor Christie. David Kelly put Walsall ahead with ten minutes to go and scored again just before the final whistle to end the match 3–1. The second leg took place three days later at Fellows Park in Walsall, refereed by George Tyson. Rob Newman gave Bristol City the lead in the 31st minute and Carl Shutt made it 2–0 midway through the second half. The match ended with the aggregate score at 3–3 so a penalty shootout was used to determine the venue for a replay: Walsall won 4–2 so the deciding match took place at Fellows Park on 30 May 1988. A hat-trick from Kelly along with a header from Phil Hawker secured a 4–0 victory for Walsall and promotion to the Second Division. Walsall's manager Tommy Coakley was sacked in December 1988 after a losing streak of eleven games, culminating in a 5–1 Boxing Day defeat at home to Oxford United which sent Walsall to the bottom of the league. He was replaced the following January by John Barnwell, but Walsall ended their following season in last position in the Second Division and were relegated back to the Third Division. Bristol City's next season saw them finish in 11th position in the Third Division, five places and nine points outside the play-offs. ## Route to the final This was the second time the Football League play-offs had taken place. They were introduced in the previous season as part of the "Heathrow Agreement", a ten-point proposal to restructure the Football League. For the first two years of the play-offs, the club which had finished immediately above the relegation places in the Second Division competed with three clubs from the Third Division for a place in the second tier of English football for the following season. Sheffield United had finished the 1987–88 season in 21st place in the Second Division, having won their final game against bottom club Huddersfield Town on the last day of the season to avoid automatic relegation. Walsall had finished in third place in the Third Division, two points behind Brighton & Hove Albion (who were automatically promoted in second position) and eleven behind Sunderland (who were promoted as champions). Bristol City ended the regular season in fifth place, two positions and seven points below Walsall. Walsall's opponents in their play-off semi-final were Notts County with the first match of the two-legged tie being played at Meadow Lane in Nottingham on 15 May 1988. The home side took an early lead when Dean Yates scored with a header from an Aidey Thorpe inswinging cross in the second minute of the match. Walsall started to control the match and four minutes before half-time, David Kelly scored the equaliser from a Richard O'Kelly cross. Two minutes after half-time, Craig Shakespeare gave Walsall the lead with a low strike and nine minutes later Kelly scored Walsall's third goal after holding off a tackle from Chris Withe to convert O'Kelly's headed pass. No further goals were scored and the first leg ended 3–1 to Walsall. The second leg of the semi-final took place at Fellows Park in Walsall three days later. Notts County took an early lead, once again with a headed goal from Yates, in the 12th minute of the match. Although the visiting side dominated the match and made several chances to score, Walsall equalised on the hour mark when Trevor Christie scored from around 12 yards (11 m) after the initial strike by Kelly was blocked by Yates. The match ended 1–1 and Walsall progressed to the final with a 4–2 aggregate victory. Bristol City faced Sheffield United in the other semi-final and the first leg was held at Ashton Gate in Bristol on 15 May 1988. In front of their largest crowd in nine years, Alan Walsh put the home side ahead two minutes before half-time with his 14th goal of the season after shooting from close range after a long throw-in from Steve McClaren. Bristol City's goalkeeper Keith Waugh made a number of saves, from Richard Cadette, Wally Downes and Paul Stancliffe, and the match ended 1–0. The second leg was played three days later at Bramall Lane in Sheffield. In the 16th minute, Bristol City took the lead when Carl Shutt scored with a diving header. Colin Morris equalised after half-time after he lifted the ball over Waugh in the Bristol City goal and the match ended 1–1. With a 2–1 aggregate victory, Bristol City progressed to the final while Sheffield United were relegated to the Third Division. ## Match ### Background Bristol City had last played in the Second Division in the 1979–80 season after which they suffered three consecutive relegations before gaining promotion from the Fourth Division in the 1983–84 season. Walsall had been promoted to the Third Division after ending the 1979–80 season as Fourth Division runners-up. They had finished the previous season in eighth position, one place outside the play-offs. Before the final, there was speculation over the future of Kelly who had scored 25 goals for Walsall during the season: he was reportedly the subject of a £500,000 transfer bid from First Division side Liverpool. Colin Gordon was no longer available for selection by Bristol City as Reading had refused to extend his loan. Gordon had scored five goals in ten games for Bristol City, but his loan had expired the day of the first leg of the final: Reading had insisted on a transfer fee of £70,000 to secure Kelly's services but Bristol City's manager Joe Jordan said "there's no way we can afford that." Both matches between the sides during the regular season ended in draws, 1–1 at Fellows Park in September 1987 and 0–0 at Ashton Gate the following February. According to bookmakers, Bristol City were clear favourites to win the final over two legs. ### First leg #### Summary The first leg of the final kicked off at 7:45 p.m. on 25 May 1988 at Ashton Gate in front of 25,128 spectators and refereed by Joe Worrall. Walsall made the better start with Christie going close to scoring within the opening minute of the match. Bristol City's Walsh then saw his carefully placed shot saved by Fred Barber, the Walsall goalkeeper. Seven minutes before half-time, Graeme Forbes fouled Steve Neville and Walsh scored directly from the resulting free kick to give Bristol City the lead. Both Rob Newman and Neville went close to doubling the lead but the half ended with Bristol City leading 1–0. Walsall equalised in the 62nd minute: Forbes' header from a Mark Goodwin corner was cleared off the Bristol City goalline and Christie bundled in the rebound. Joe Jordan, Bristol City's player-manager, substituted himself on for Neville two minutes later, and soon after saw his shot pass a foot wide of the Walsall goalpost. With ten minutes remaining, a Peter Hart free kick was headed on by Christie to Kelly who scored to give Bristol City the lead. In the final minute of the match, Barber's goal kick found Kelly in Bristol City's half of the pitch who ran with the ball and shot from around 20 yards (18 m), past Waugh in the goal to score and make the final score 3–1. #### Details ### Second leg #### Summary O'Kelly was unavailable for Walsall for the match having pulled a calf muscle in the first leg. The second leg of the final kicked off at 3 p.m. on 28 May 1988 at Fellows Park in front of 13,941 spectators and was refereed by George Tyson. Bristol City started the stronger of the sides and Barber punched a shot away from Ralph Milne in the third minute. An early strike from Walsh hit the Walsall goalpost, a shot from Shutt went close and Walsh's 25 yards (23 m) free kick also narrowly missed the target. In the 31st minute, Walsh played in a corner which Newman headed into the Walsall goal and although Craig Shakespeare hooked the ball out from under the crossbar, the linesman adjudged that the ball has crossed the goalline. Cynthia Bateman, writing in The Guardian suggested that the "strong, swirling wind was not altogether responsible for some pretty awful football". Shakespeare and Kelly had both come close to equalising, but midway through the second half, McClaren crossed for Shutt to shoot past Barber to make it 2–0 and level the aggregate score at 3–3. In the 76th minute Forbes saw his header cleared off the Bristol City goalline by Steve Galliers. With no outright winner after 90 minutes, a penalty shootout was used to determine which side would host the replay: Walsall won 4–2 and earned the right to play the deciding match at Fellows Park. #### Details ### Replay #### Summary The replay of the final kicked off at 3 p.m. on 30 May 1988 at Fellows Park in front of 13,007 spectators and refereed by George Courtney. Walsall took the lead in the 11th minute: Bristol City's John Pender had tackled Shakespeare but failed to clear the ball which Kelly won and struck past Waugh. Six minutes later, Kelly ran onto a through-ball from Goodwin and scored his second goal. Within minutes, Walsall were 3–0 ahead: Goodwin's corner was headed into the Bristol City net by Phil Hawker. Willie Naughton's diving header just before half-time went wide for Walsall and the half ended without further scoring. Although the second half started with Bristol City winning a series of corners, it was Walsall who scored. Kelly beat Galliers and struck the ball which took a deflection off Humphries before spinning round Waugh and ending in the Bristol City goal off the goalpost, to complete Kelly's hat-trick. Towards the end of the match, Shutt was sent off for a foul on Barber and the match ended 4–0 to Walsall who secured promotion to the Second Division. #### Details ## Post-match Kelly was sold by Walsall to West Ham United in July 1988 for a fee of £600,000. Walsall's manager Tommy Coakley was sacked in December 1988 after a losing streak of eleven games, culminating in a 5–1 Boxing Day defeat at home to Oxford United which sent Walsall to the bottom of the league. He was replaced the following January by John Barnwell, but Walsall ended their following season in last position in the Second Division and were relegated back to the Third Division. Bristol City's next season saw them finish in 11th position in the Third Division, five places and nine points outside the play-offs.

Hurricane Fefa

Category 3 Pacific hurricane in 1991

Hurricane Fefa was the only tropical cyclone during the 1991 Pacific hurricane season to directly impact the Hawaiian Islands. The sixth tropical storm, fourth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the season, the storm developed from a tropical wave on July 29 about 975 miles (1,569 km) south-southeast of Cabo San Lucas. It moved west-northwestward, and under generally favorable conditions it strengthened to attain peak winds of 120 mph (190 km/h) on August 2. Fefa turned to the west towards Hawaii, and slowly weakened until dissipating near the island of Hawaii. The system produced rough surf, moderate wind gusts, and locally heavy rainfall during its passage over Hawaii. No damages or deaths were reported. Two people were injured in the island of Hawaii due to lightning strikes from the storm. ## Meteorological history A westward-moving tropical wave exited the coast of Africa on July 17. It tracked across the unfavorable Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea without development, and after crossing Central America, it entered the eastern Pacific Ocean on July 25. The cloud pattern and convection began to become better organized on July 28, and shortly thereafter a mid-level circulation developed. It continued to organize, and subsequent to the development of a low-level circulation it formed into Tropical Depression Seven-E while located about 975 miles (1,569 km) south-southeast of Cabo San Lucas on July 29. Operationally, tropical cyclone advisories were not initiated until visible satellite images confirmed the low-level circulation twelve hours after the depression formed. Located over warm waters with fair upper-level outflow, the depression quickly intensified and attained tropical storm status twelve hours after forming. Upon strengthening into a tropical storm, Fefa developed a curved cloud band over the southern and eastern portion of the center. The storm slowly strengthened as it tracked west-northwestward, a motion due to the presence of a high-pressure ridge to its north. Fefa initially strengthened slowly; on the day after it became a tropical storm the center was located on the western edge of the deep convection. On July 31, convection began increasing over the center, and it is estimated it intensified into a hurricane later that day while located about 710 miles (1,140 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Initially, Fefa was forecast to intensify slightly after reaching hurricane status to reach peak winds of 80 mph (130 km/h). However, it quickly intensified after a large, ragged eye developed early on August 1. On August 2, the eye organized further, and Fefa strengthened to attain a peak intensity of 120 mph (190 km/h) while located about 940 miles (1,510 km) west-southwest of Cabo San Lucas. Based on higher Dvorak numbers, the hurricane could have peaked with winds stronger than 120 mph (190 km/h). Fefa encountered cooler waters shortly after peaking in intensity, and subsequently began to weaken. The hurricane gradually weakened as it turned more to the west, a change in motion due to building high pressures to its north, and on August 3 the winds of Fefa dropped to 85 mph (137 km/h) due to cooler water and dry air. As Fefa turned more to the west, it paralleled the cooler waters, allowing the eye to remain distinct as the hurricane remained well-organized. Despite moving over marginally warm sea surface temperatures and becoming involved with the Stratocumulus cloud field to its north, the hurricane restrengthened on August 4 to reach a secondary peak intensity of 105 mph (169 km/h) while located about 1,265 miles (2,036 km) east-southeast of Hilo, Hawai'i. After maintaining 105 mph (169 km/h) winds for about 18 hours, Fefa weakened slightly due to increasing wind shear from a cold-core trough as it entered the Central Pacific Hurricane Center area of responsibility. As the shear increased, the cyclone weakened more rapidly, and on August 6 it weakened to a tropical storm while located about 650 miles (1,050 km) east of the island of Hawaii. Initially, forecasters predicted Fefa to turn to the northwest to the north of the Hawaiian Islands. However, the storm continued moving almost due westward as it steadily weakened. Aircraft reconnaissance flew into Fefa three times as it neared Hawaii. Late on August 7, Fefa weakened to a tropical depression a short distance of the island of Hawaii, and early on August 8 the depression began dissipating and degenerated into a tropical wave after moving onshore. The remnants tracked west-northwestward and passed south of the Hawaiian Islands until dissipating on August 9 to the northwest of Kauai. ## Impact The prolonged westward track of Hurricane Fefa produced swells of up to 15 feet (4.6 m) in height. The swells hit eastward facing beaches along the island of Hawaii. The swells washed debris and sea water onto coastal roads near Punaluu Black Sand Beach, resulting in the roads being closed following the storm. Southwestern Maui experienced rough surf, as well. Despite being a weak tropical depression and a tropical wave while moving through the Hawaiian Islands, Fefa produced locally strong wind gusts of up to 50 mph (80 km/h) in the islands of Hawaii and Maui. Prior to moving across the island of Hawaii, strong thunderstorms developed in the northeastern portion of the remnant circulation of Fefa. The thunderstorms developed further as they moved over the slopes of Mauna Kea and Kohala. The thunderstorms produced heavy rainfall in areas, resulting in flash flooding in Kohala and Hamakua. Hurricane Fefa resulted in no known deaths. Lightning from the storm caused two injuries. A man in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was hurt when lightning struck where he was walking. A man in Hilo was burnt when lightning moved through telephone wires. The storm resulted in no reported damage. ## Retirement Though Fefa caused little damage, the name was retired by the World Meteorological Organization in the spring of 1992, and replaced with Felicia in the 1997 season. A reason for the name retirement was not given. ## See also - Other storms of the same name - List of Pacific hurricanes

Frances Oldham Kelsey

Canadian-American physician and pharmacologist (1914–2015)

Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey CM (née Oldham; July 24, 1914 – August 7, 2015) was a Canadian-American pharmacologist and physician. As a reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety. Her concerns proved to be justified when it was shown that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey was the second woman to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, awarded to her by John F. Kennedy in 1962. ## Birth and education Born in Cobble Hill, British Columbia, Kelsey attended St. Margaret's School from 1928 to 1931 in the provincial capital, graduating at age 15. From 1930 to 1931, she attended Victoria College (now University of Victoria). She then enrolled at McGill University, where she received both a B.Sc. (1934) and an M.Sc. (1935) in pharmacology. Encouraged by one of her professors, she "wrote to EMK Geiling, M.D., a noted researcher [who] was starting up a new pharmacology department at the University of Chicago, asking for a position doing graduate work". Geiling, unaware of spelling conventions with respect to Francis and Frances, presumed that Frances was a man and offered her the position, which she accepted, starting work in 1936. During Kelsey's second year, Geiling was retained by the FDA to research unusual deaths related to elixir sulfanilamide, a sulfonamide medicine. Kelsey assisted on this research project, which showed that the 107 deaths were caused by the use of diethylene glycol as a solvent. The next year, the United States Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. That same year she completed her studies and received a Ph.D. in pharmacology at the University of Chicago. Working with Geiling led to her interest in teratogens, drugs that cause congenital malformations (birth defects). ## Early career Upon completing her Ph.D., Oldham joined the University of Chicago faculty. In 1942, like many other pharmacologists, Oldham was looking for a synthetic cure for malaria. As a result of these studies, Oldham learned that some drugs are able to pass through the placental barrier. During her work, she also met fellow faculty member Fremont Ellis Kelsey, whom she married in 1943. While on the faculty at the University of Chicago, Kelsey was awarded her M.D. in 1950. She supplemented her teaching with work as an editorial associate for the American Medical Association Journal for two years. Kelsey left the University of Chicago in 1954, decided to take a position teaching pharmacology at the University of South Dakota, and moved with her husband and two daughters to Vermillion, South Dakota, where she taught until 1957. She became a dual citizen of Canada and the United States in the 1950s in order to continue practicing medicine in the U.S., but retained strong ties to Canada where she continued to visit her siblings regularly until late in life. ## Work at the FDA and thalidomide In 1960, Kelsey was hired by the FDA in Washington, D.C. At that time, she "was one of only seven full-time and four young part-time physicians reviewing drugs" for the FDA. One of her first assignments at the FDA was to review an application by Richardson-Merrell for the drug thalidomide (under the tradename Kevadon) as a tranquilizer and painkiller with specific indications to prescribe the drug to pregnant women for morning sickness. Although it had been previously approved in Canada and more than 20 European and African countries, she withheld approval for the drug and requested further studies. Despite pressure from thalidomide's manufacturer Grünenthal, Kelsey persisted in requesting additional information to explain observations by Lesley Florence of neurological symptoms published in the British Medical Journal in December 1960. She also requested data showing the drug was not harmful to the fetus. Kelsey's insistence that the drug should be fully tested prior to approval was vindicated when the births of deformed infants in Europe were linked to thalidomide ingestion by their mothers during pregnancy. Researchers discovered that the thalidomide crossed the placental barrier and caused serious birth defects. She was hailed on the front page of The Washington Post as a heroine for averting a similar tragedy in the U.S. Morton Mintz, author of The Washington Post article, said "[Kelsey] prevented ... the birth of hundreds or indeed thousands of armless and legless children." Kelsey insisted that her assistants, Oyama Jiro and Lee Geismar, as well as her FDA superiors who backed her strong stance, deserved credit as well. The narrative of Kelsey's persistence was used to help pass rigorous drug approval regulation in 1962. After Morton Mintz broke the story in July 1962, there was a substantial public outcry. The Kefauver Harris Amendment was passed unanimously by Congress in October 1962 to strengthen drug regulation. Companies were required to demonstrate the efficacy of new drugs, report adverse reactions to the FDA, and request consent from patients participating in clinical studies. The drug testing reforms required "stricter limits on the testing and distribution of new drugs" to avoid similar problems. The amendments, for the first time, also recognized that "effectiveness [should be] required to be established prior to marketing." As a result of her blocking American approval of thalidomide, Kelsey was awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy on August 7, 1962, becoming the second woman so honoured. After receiving the award, Kelsey continued her work at the FDA. There she played a key role in shaping and enforcing the 1962 amendments. She also became responsible for directing the surveillance of drug testing at the FDA. Kelsey retired from the FDA in 2005, at age 90, after 45 years of service. In 2010 the FDA named the Kelsey Award for her, to be awarded annually to an FDA employee for Excellence and Courage in Protecting Public Health. ## Later life and death Kelsey continued to work for the FDA while being recognised for her earlier work. She was still working at the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research in 1995 and was appointed deputy for scientific and medical affairs. In 1994, the Frances Kelsey Secondary School in Mill Bay, British Columbia, was named in her honour. In 2010, the FDA presented Kelsey with the first Drug Safety Excellence Award and named the annual award after her, announcing that it would be given to one FDA staff member annually. In announcing the awards, Center Director Steven K. Galson said "I am very pleased to have established the Dr. Frances O. Kelsey Drug Safety Excellence Award and to recognize the first recipients for their outstanding accomplishments in this important aspect of drug regulation." Kelsey turned 100 in July 2014, and shortly thereafter, in the fall of 2014, she moved from Washington, D.C., to live with her daughter in London, Ontario. In June 2015, when she was named to the Order of Canada, Mercédes Benegbi, a thalidomide victim and the head of the Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada, praised Kelsey for showing strength and courage by refusing to bend to pressure from drug company officials, and said "To us, she was always our heroine, even if what she did was in another country." Kelsey died in London, Ontario, on August 7, 2015, at the age of 101, less than 24 hours after Ontario's Lieutenant-Governor, Elizabeth Dowdeswell, visited her home to present her with the insignia of Member of the Order of Canada for her role against thalidomide. ## Legacy and awards - 1962 • President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service - 1963 • Gold Key Award from University of Chicago, Medical and Biological Sciences Alumni Association - 1994 • Chosen as the namesake for Frances Kelsey Secondary School which opened in 1995. - 2000 • Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame - 2001 • Named a Virtual Mentor for the American Medical Association - 2006 • Foremother Award from the National Center for Health Research - 2010 • Recipient of the first Dr. Frances O. Kelsey Award for Excellence and Courage in Protecting Public Health given out by the FDA - 2012 • Honorary doctor of science degree from Vancouver Island University - 2015 • Named to the Order of Canada ## See also - European Medicines Agency

Tornado outbreak of October 17–19, 2007

2007 tornado outbreak in the United States

The tornado outbreak of October 17–19, 2007 was a widespread tornado outbreak that took place across much of the eastern half of North America starting on October 17, 2007, and continuing into the early hours of October 19. The outbreak was also responsible for five deaths; three in Michigan and two in Missouri, plus many injuries (including some from non-tornadic events). At least 64 tornadoes were confirmed including 16 on October 17 across six states including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri with wind damage reported in Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Arkansas and Mississippi. On October 18, at least 48 tornadoes were confirmed across eight states including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, plus widespread straight line wind damage. Until 2010, this event held the record for largest tornado outbreak ever recorded in the month of October according to NOAA. ## Meteorological synopsis A deep low pressure system (with a pressure of 977 mbar at its peak) moved across the Pacific Coast on October 15 and then crossed the Rockies during the following day and touched out some moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, a major source for storm development and intensification. Not part of the main outbreak, 3 tornadoes were reported, during the overnight hours of October 16 towards October 17, across Randall County, Texas south of Amarillo on October 16 with one of them confirmed as a high-end EF1; that tornado caused damage to trees, fences, power poles, steel pipes, trailers, and barns. The next day, a dry line, which separates the drier air from the more moist and humid air, formed ahead of the cold front across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and tracked eastward. The high humidity levels with dew points in the 70s°F (low 20s°C), temperatures that in many areas were near 80 °F (27 °C), strong wind shear, and the presence of the dry line helped develop the instability to produce severe thunderstorms across both the Midwest and the Southern Plains on October 17. A moderate risk for severe weather was issued by the Storm Prediction Center two days prior to the event. The storm then moved across the most of the Midwest on October 18, where a moderate risk was in effect also for two days for most of Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Kentucky; however, the moderate risk was revised further to the south and the east to include western Ohio, western Tennessee, southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, and a larger portion of Kentucky. Both Michigan and Wisconsin were no longer under a moderate risk. A slight risk of severe weather was forecast for a large area from beyond the Canada–US border to the Florida Panhandle and the Mobile Bay area. Dew points above 70 °F (21 °C) were reported well into the Ohio Valley, and those over 60 °F (16 °C) were reported as far north as northern Ontario. The outbreak was expected to continue into October 19 east of the Appalachian Mountains, but extensive cloud cover prevented any significant severe storms from developing; even though, several wind reports were reported in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. The storm then moved out into the Atlantic Ocean on October 20. ## Tornadoes confirmed ### October 17 event ### October 18 event ## Significant tornadoes The first severe thunderstorms developed during the early morning of October 17 across much of northern and eastern Texas and parts of Oklahoma and Kansas with only one reported tornado in east Texas. Several severe thunderstorms then later developed across eastern Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, western Mississippi, eastern Kansas, Missouri and parts of Nebraska, Iowa, Kentucky, Illinois and Tennessee. Twelve additional tornadoes were reported in Missouri and Louisiana during the late afternoon and early evening with damage reported in Lawrence and Greene counties in Missouri. One of the tornadoes located near Verona destroyed several barns and homes but did not cause any injuries and was later confirmed as an EF2. The storms persisted throughout the night and an additional tornado killed 2 people inside a mobile home in Greene County, Missouri, near Paris. On October 18, several thunderstorms already developed during the morning hours and continued to intensify during the afternoon. Just after 11:00 am EDT, one tornado in downtown Pensacola, Florida, caused some extensive damage to the roof of a Baptist church as well as portions of Cordova Mall, but there were no reported injuries at the church and daycare center. During the early evenings severe weather affected the Louisville, Kentucky Metro area in which tree damage and power outages were reported throughout the area and a possible tornado at around 7:00 pm EDT near the Crescent Hill area which was later confirmed as a brief EF0. Still in the region, one tree fell over a passing car but the motorist escaped injuries although he was trapped for several minutes inside. The Louisville power authority the LG&E reported as much as 2,500 homes without power mostly in St. Matthews and Crescent Hill areas. More storms rolled through much of the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys during the second half of the evening and overnight with more storms in Michigan. Areas the hardest hit were along and near the Ohio River in western Kentucky as well as central and northern Indiana in Nappanee where injuries were reported as well as significant damage, and in Central Michigan. Three people were killed overall on October 18: one in Kalkaska County, Michigan and two in Locke Township, near Williamston, Michigan. In addition to the tornadoes, storm straight-line damaging winds measured up to 80 mph (130 km/h) were recorded across several of the regions hit by the severe weather, causing extensive tree and power line downings with isolated reports of structural damage. In Michigan, a tornado in Tuscola near Flint threw a one-year-old baby 40 feet (12 m) away from its location along with the crib and was later found amongst a pile of rubble under a mattress. His parents told reporters that the mattress saved the toddler's life and he suffered few to no injuries. According to the National Weather Service in Detroit, tornadoes this late in the year in Michigan are rare. The last significant October tornado event was on October 24, 2001, when three tornadoes hit southeastern Lower Michigan, out of a total of nine in the state that day. Including the 2001 tornadoes, only seven October tornadoes had been recorded in the NWS Detroit county warning area prior to the 2007 outbreak. By comparison, NWS Detroit had confirmed five tornadoes in its coverage area from this outbreak. It was also the largest October outbreak over western Kentucky and southern Indiana as 15 tornadoes were confirmed on October 18. Previous to this outbreak, only 19 tornadoes had been recorded in that same region during the history of October prior to this event. The Owensboro tornado, which was rated an EF3 was also the strongest ever in that month over the same region since records were kept in 1950 although an unofficial F3 took place in Posey County, Indiana on October 16, 1928. ## Non-tornadic events In addition to the tornadoes, widespread straight-line wind damage took place across much of the affected region, particularly on the night of October 17 as a result of a derecho that moved across the southern Great Plains into the Ozarks. Winds were reported as high as 100 mph (160 km/h) as a result of the bow echo that moved across the region. Tulsa was hard hit, with at least 55 people injured (one critically) due to wind damage at the Oktoberfest event. Many mobile homes were destroyed, and widespread power outages were reported in the region including in Rogers County near Oologah where five people where injured. In Kansas, a bow echo caused some localized significant damage in and around the Wichita Metropolitan Area with the most significant damage at the International Cold Storage located in the Andover area where the peak winds were measured. Overall, over 400 wind reports in the US alone, were reported on both October 17 and 18 across the Midwest, Gulf Coast and Great Lakes with several reports of damage but there were no direct non-tornadic fatalities. In Chicago, an eleven-year-old boy was struck and injured by lightning while another person was injured by broken glass when high winds broke windows of a lobby hall of a condominium. In addition, the Gulf Coast region, particularly the Florida Panhandle, received torrential rain due to continuous thunderstorms ahead of the cold front. Rainfall amounts over 12 inches (300 mm) were common (with amounts as high as 22 inches (560 mm) were reported in Gulf Breeze, Florida), although only minor flooding was reported including roads and some houses flooded. ## See also - List of North American tornadoes and tornado outbreaks - Tornadoes of 2007 - 2016 Pensacola Tornado

Siddhantasara

1889 book of history of philosophy by Manilal Dwivedi

Siddhantasara (; transl. The Gist of Principles) is a 1889 Gujarati book on the history of philosophy by Indian writer and philosopher Manilal Dwivedi. It is a historical critique of the world's religious philosophies. The book deals with the evolution of religious sentiment and attempts to establish the superiority of the Advaita philosophy over other religious philosophies. Siddhantasara received positive reviews and became a landmark in the history of Gujarati literature but was also criticised because of the logical lapses and inconsistencies in the author's arguments. Manishankar Bhatt (known as Kavi Kant) published his review as a book titled Siddhantasaranu Avalokan (Analysis of Siddhantasara). Siddhantasara is considered by critics to be Manilal's most important work, and has been seen as a response to the cultural agenda and reform activities of colonial India at the time. ## Background In 1888, Manilal had planned to write two books in Gujarati. The first of these was a book expounding on practical expressions of Hindu philosophy. The second was a detailed treatise on the theoretical aspects of Advaita philosophy, in the context of a comparative study of Hinduism on the one hand and all other religions of the world on the other. On 9 September that year he finished writing the first book, called Pranavinimaya, and it was published in December. Pranavinimaya was based on mesmerism. On 5 October, Manilal began writing the second book, Siddhantasara. Progress was interrupted by illness, but the book was completed in March 1889 and published from Bombay in June 1889. The book had a subtitle Sarvamanya Ekdharmana Tatva Suchavvano Prayatna (Towards a Philosophy of Universal Religion). In the preface to Siddhantasara, Manilal clarifies his aim in writing the book: > There are many systems of thought — like religion and philosophy — in this world, but I believe that all these are the transformations of the same eternal principles. The path of arriving at these eternal principles is the Advaita philosophy of ancient India. I believe that this needs no proof, as it is its own proof. My attempt here is to establish these principles. On the title page, Manilal described the work as "an outline of the history of thought in India terminating with an attempt to point out the basis of a universal religion". Manilal explained that his "attempt [was] to search for truth, which is not bound by any sectarian or ideological considerations", and suggested that this search for truth would be conditioned by his own beliefs. ## Contents The book is divided into eleven chapters. Chapter One discusses religious ideas, and emphasizes the need for a standard religion acceptable to all. The final chapter presents a comparison of Indian and Western ideas on religion, and describes in detail the claim of the Aryan religion, based on Advaita philosophy, as the most acceptable religious philosophy. The intervening chapters present a history of Indian religious-philosophical traditions, including detailed discussion of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sutras, the Smritis, the Six Systems of Hindu philosophy, Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka philosophy, the Puranas, and the Tantras. In the first chapter, Manilal rejects the idea of the Genesis creation narrative as told in the Old Testament, and argues that the universe is eternal; that is, with neither beginning nor end. Manilal claims that the Vedas are the source of all religious ideas, wherein lies the origin of a universal religion. He claims that the Vedas were "divinely inspired" texts, and that they are therefore eternal. He attempts a logical explanation of the ritual practices described in the Vedas, their emphasis on Karma Marga, and their ideas of multiple gods and goddesses and of idol worship. Manilal's theological conclusions are that Āryāvarta (ancient India) is the source of all religions; that Advaita Vedanta is the original and universal religion, with other religions as its mere derivatives; and that Advaita Vedanta is the supreme religion, in which lies moksha (emancipation). ## Methodology Manilal seeks to demonstrate that, in their original form, all religions contain aspects of Advaita philosophy at their core. To this end, he presents the history of the world's religions and explores the characteristics of each. He attempts to explain the significance of old customs, and to prove that the myths and exaggerations of the Puranas are purposeful. In reply to Max Müller's criticism of the Puranas, he presents a detailed interpretation of the dashavatara of Vishnu (the ten incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu) in the Puranas, rejecting Darwin's theory of evolution. As a metaphorical explanation of the relationship between the Vedas, the Puranas and the Upanishads, he writes: "The Vedas are the box of history of philosophical thoughts; the Upanishads are the key to open it to obtain the contents, and the Puranas are the lamps enabling us to see those contents fully." Dhirubhai Thaker, Manilal's biographer, characterised Manilal's method as beginning with logical reasoning, which is then abandoned as the discussion proceeds in favor of an abrupt statement of personal conviction presented as self-evident. He writes that "there is a force of conviction in [Manilal's] style which is so vigorous that an average reader is not able to detect the gimmick, but it hardly escapes the notice of a critical reader". ## Reception and criticism Siddhantasara is considered Manilal's most important work. With its publication, Manilal was recognised as one of the major philosophical and religious thinkers of his time. The work also generated prolonged controversy among intellectuals over the logical lapses and inconsistencies in the author's arguments. Most critics contend that, in his over-enthusiasm to prove a thesis, Manilal takes certain facts as self-evident, twists them to suit his purpose, presents evidence from obscure sources or, in the absence of evidence, resorts to sophistry. The historian Vijay Singh Chavda [gu] wrote: "This work was the outcome of Manilal's long and thoughtful study of the fundamental principles of Sanatan Hindu Dharma and he placed them in their proper historical context". Thaker sees the publication of Siddhantasara as an event in Gujarat, saying that it corrected the impression among the educated class that the Puranas were merely fanciful stories. The cultural historian Tridip Suhrud sees Siddhantasara as an "interesting response to both the colonial cultural agenda and the reform movements". ### Kant's critique Gujarati poet Manishankar Bhatt (known as Kavi Kant) reviewed Siddhantasar at length. His chapter-by-chapter comments were published in Jnanasudha, a journal edited by Ramanbhai Neelkanth, from 1894 to 1896. They were written in the form of love-letters addressed by Kant to his imaginary beloved, Kanta. Through these letters, Kant exposed Manilal's verbal and logical gimmicks in a light, ironic style. Manilal responded to Kant's comments in his own monthly literary magazine, Sudarashan. In June 1895, Kant met Manilal for the first time, by chance, at the residence of a common friend in Baroda. As Thaker notes, on that occasion Kant was influenced by Manilal's personality and philosophy. After this meeting, Kant's views underwent change. He ceased criticizing Manilal, and expressed admiration for him in his letters. In one letter, he wrote of Manilal's view of the Puranas: > His method of treatment is correct. He has been able to establish that the writers of the Puranas were, to large extent, conversant with the Vedas and the Upanishads, and that their objective was not to create superstition in the mind of the people, but to teach them truth of religion in a simple popular form. In the final installment of his letters, which appeared in August–September issue of Jnanasudha, Kant wrote: "I respectfully welcome this work of Manilal despite several contradictions, much one-sided reasoning and similar other faults ... Speaking for myself, I look upon him as my guru for attracting my attention to several praiseworthy traits of our ancient religion". Kant's critique of the Siddhantasara was later published as a book entitled Siddhantasaranu Avalokan (Analysis of Siddhantasara).

My Old Kentucky Home State Park

State park in Kentucky, United States

My Old Kentucky Home State Park is a state park located in Bardstown, Kentucky, United States. The park's centerpiece is Federal Hill, a former plantation home owned by United States Senator John Rowan in 1795. During the Rowan family's occupation, the mansion became a meeting place for local politicians and hosted several visiting dignitaries. The farm is best known for its association with American composer Stephen Foster's sentimental ballad. "My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night." Foster was a cousin of the Rowan family and reputedly an occasional visitor to Federal Hill, though Foster was likely inspired to write the ballad by Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. After the popularity of the song increased throughout the United States, Federal Hill was purchased by the Commonwealth of Kentucky, dedicated as a historic site, and renamed "My Old Kentucky Home" on July 4, 1923. Foster's song by the same name was made the state song of Kentucky in 1928. The Federal Hill mansion was featured on a U.S. postage stamp in 1992, and it is one of the symbols featured on the reverse of the Kentucky state quarter issued in 2001. ## Federal Hill Federal Hill, commonly known as "My Old Kentucky Home", is a historic 7,501 square feet (696.9 m²) mansion that was planned and commissioned by Judge John Rowan and his wife Ann Lytle. The mansion's original surrounding 1,200 acres were also known as "Federal Hill.” Built in two phases, the rear ell portion of the mansion was constructed in 1795, while the main block, in the form of a five-bay, three-story mansion was completed in 1818, using slave labor. With Rowan in residence, Federal Hill was a local power center in the realms of legal, political, and social events. Prominent visitors to the home included Marquis de Lafayette, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay. According to Stephen Foster's brother Morrison Foster, Stephen was an occasional visitor to Federal Hill. Stephen's sister Charlotte visited Federal Hill, where her cousin Atkinson Hill Rowan unsuccessfully proposed to Charlotte. Judge Rowan occupied a Louisville residence during the majority of his later years and was rarely in residence at Federal Hill near the end of his life. In 1839, the house suffered fire damage to the third story and roof. Carpenter Alexander Moore was hired to repair the damage, as he had worked on the design elements and woodwork in 1818. John Rowan Jr. occupied Federal Hill after the death of his father. When John Jr. died in 1855, his widow, Rebecca Carnes Rowan, occupied Federal Hill until 1897. The house then passed to their daughter, Madge (Rowan) Frost. In 1922, the "My Old Kentucky Home Commission" purchased Federal Hill from Madge Rowan Frost, the last heir of Federal Hill farm. The Commission renovated the property and gave the farm to the Commonwealth of Kentucky for use as a state park, with the official dedication on July 4, 1923. ### Architecture Federal Hill is designed in the Federal Style that was popular at the beginning of the 19th century. The mansion is constructed on a native limestone foundation that supports an English basement and two and a half stories, with an exterior primarily of brick that were fired on-site and laid in the Flemish bond pattern. The interior of the mansion has a center-hall floorplan, ceilings of 13 feet (4.0 m) and ash wood flooring throughout. The principal rooms of the house are located on the ground floor and consists of the dining room, parlor, and library, while the second floor has three bedrooms similarly spaced to the rooms below. All the rooms feature mantels and windowsills that were finely carved by a free black craftsman. Auxiliary farm buildings associated with the mansion include the original springhouse. To the rear of the home the oldest section of residence can be seen. The ell consists of four rooms as well as the kitchen and smokehouse. The smokehouse was built as part of the existing structure, and not free-standing as is most often seen. The rear ell structure served as the first residence for the family while the primary residence was constructed. To the east of the house is the family burial ground. Behind the house is a modern flower garden. A burial ground of enslaved men, women, and children is located to the southwest of the mansion, adjacent to the site of the property's "sugar camp.". Documented but no longer existing buildings include multiple slave houses, a large stable due-west of the mansion, an ash house, and garden house. ## State Park The property was originally a State Historic Site, but it was passed to the Division of State Parks in 1936 with intentions to increase the amount of activities surrounding the historic mansion. Today, the tour focuses on the career of Stephen Foster, the life of enslaved people at Federal Hill, Kentucky traditions, and information regarding 19th century daily life on a Kentucky farm. 85% of the furniture exhibited inside the mansion was owned by the Rowan family. The Judge Rowan family coin silver is also exhibited there. The mansion was renovated in 1977, and again in 2006. The 2006 renovation was funded by an anonymous donor. New floor coverings, elaborate wallpapers, and period window treatments were used to interpret the mansion to the period in which John Rowan Jr. occupied the mansion. The use of family letters, photos from the 1920s, and 1950s, assisted in the renovation. The 2006 renovation cost nearly \$1 million. Tour guides dress in period costumes and as of 2015, the tour has been altered to include the singing of "My Old Kentucky Home" by tour guides, many of whom also play in The Stephen Foster Story, a musical that typically is performed daily at the park from May until August of every year. Throughout the year, various events are held at My Old Kentucky Home State Park. Special Christmas candlelight tours are offered during the holiday season each year in which the mansion is decorated for the holiday and is lit by candlelight. A new visitors center was added to the park in the 1990s, and houses a conference and wedding space, a giftshop, and kitchen. The gift shop contains Items concerning the park and the state of Kentucky, especially books by Kentucky authors and Kentucky Derby items. The park also features the Kenny Rapier Golf Course, a regulation 18-hole golf course named for a previous Kentucky Commissioner of Parks and Bardstown native, that also features a fully equipped pro shop. The 39-site campground is available mid-March to mid-November. ## State Quarter On June 1, 1992, a 29-cent stamp was issued honoring the park. The Federal Hill mansion was also chosen to be one of the icons featured on the Kentucky State Quarter. To the right of the stately mansion, an inscription on the coin reads "My Old Kentucky Home". It was the 15th state quarter, released on October 18, 2001, denoting the fact that Kentucky was the 15th state to join the United States. The official ceremony revealing the quarter was held in the park, and was said by then-governor Paul E. Patton that the mansion and the accompanying thoroughbred were: "...the two most visible, beloved symbols in Kentucky". ## The Stephen Foster Story and other outdoor productions The park features an amphitheater that is home to the long-running outdoor musical, The Stephen Foster Story, which is staged during the summer. It is the longest running outdoor drama in the state of Kentucky, having started in 1959. It was written by playwright Paul Green. Matinees are performed in an indoor theater with air conditioning. Many Foster songs are performed, with the actors dancing in antebellum period costume, in a retelling of Foster's life. Recently, the amphitheater has incorporated new musicals into its performance schedule, in addition to The Stephen Foster Story. In 2008, the amphitheater produced The Civil War in celebration of the Lincoln Bicentennial. In 2009, a second musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was staged. Other musicals have included The Wizard of Oz, and All Shook Up. In addition, the amphitheater hosts a summer concert series. ## See also - List of attractions and events in the Louisville metropolitan area - National Register of Historic Places listings in Nelson County, Kentucky

Mega Man (1995 video game)

1995 action-platform video game published by U.S. Gold

Mega Man is an action-platform video game developed by Freestyle for the Sega Game Gear, and saw a North America-only release in October 1995. The game was sublicensed by British publisher U.S. Gold from Japanese-based company and creator of Mega Man Capcom. The game features Mega Man fighting against the mad scientist Dr. Wily and the six Robot Masters under his control, and features bosses and stages from Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5. Mega Man received generally positive reviews from video game critics upon release, though retrospective reviews were more mixed. While the game was praised for its graphics and sound being similar to the NES titles upon which it was based, its gameplay was criticized for its excessive level of zoom and fast enemy movement that led to unfair difficulty. ## Gameplay Mega Man is an action-platform game that is very similar to the original series. The protagonist, Mega Man, is able to run, jump, shoot, and climb his way past obstacles and enemies. It is based on elements from the NES versions of Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5. Differences from previous entries include the lack of continues after running out of lives. Mega Man's robotic canine companion Rush, using an ability called Rush Coil, assists in helping the character jump higher. The Robot Masters featured at the beginning are Bright Man, Napalm Man, Star Man, and Stone Man. Mega Man 4 antagonist Dr. Cossack's fortress contains Wave Man's and Toad Man's levels and respective bosses. Wily's fortress is Quick Man's stage from Mega Man 2, with the Wily fight taken from Mega Man 5. ## Development Mega Man was published by British-based publisher U.S. Gold. U.S. Gold sublicensed the series from Capcom and had a different company, Freestyle, develop the game. It was released exclusively in North America on the Game Gear in 1995. ## Reception Reception to the game was generally positive. Mega Man received an 87 percent from the UK-based magazine Sega Power. A reviewer for GamePro gave the game a total score of 3.75 out of 5, complimenting its graphics and sound, but noting that the small Game Gear screen increases the difficulty. Mean Machines gave it a 75 percent, with Gus Swan calling it a "close conversion of the Megaman [sic] style". Retrospective reviews for the game have been mixed. 1UP.com's Nadia Oxford elaborated, "Mega Man often has to fight with his enemies in such close quarters, he might as well hold their hands and try his luck at a friendship. The constant screen-scrolling and sticky controls makes for a very frustrating game, although the Game Gear's low battery life ends the torment in a couple of hours anyway." GameSpot contributors Christian Nutt and Justin Speer described it as "a decent, if somewhat sluggish, translation of the Mega Man series". Damien Butt from Retro Gamer, while giving it praise for its graphics, was more mixed towards its gameplay, criticizing its difficulty and the enemies moving too fast for the player. Robert Workman for GameZone believed the game deserved a second chance for re-release, praising it for its controls, visuals, and sound. In 2013, due to an ESRB listing, there was speculation that the Game Gear title was being released for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console. Despite the listing, nothing came of it. Because of its North American exclusivity, copies of the game garner a high price point, with complete copies going for \$200 as of 2013.

Sashel Palacios

Mexican-American softball player

Sashel Aitiana Palacios Barajas (born September 9, 1995) is an American softball catcher of Mexican descent. After playing college softball for Arizona State, she embarked on a professional career in 2018. She also helped the Mexico national team qualify for the 2020 Summer Olympics, which finished the tournament in fourth place. ## Early years Palacios was born on September 9, 1995, in Chula Vista, California. Her father, Francisco "Kiko", is a Tijuana native who was born and raised in Mexico. After coming to the United States as a teenager, he became a three-time All-San Diego Section catcher at Castle Park High School before playing at local Southwestern College. He was drafted twice: first by the Cleveland Indians in the 1992 MLB draft and then by the Detroit Tigers in the 1993 MLB draft. However, lacking the financial support to pursue a professional career, he never signed a contract. He did, however, play for the Mexico national baseball team. Her mother, Soida, is a California native with Mexican roots who played softball growing up. Palacios tried many sports in her childhood, including volleyball, basketball and soccer, but ultimately chose to focus on softball under the tutelage of her father. She played in the Bonita Valley League from 2003 to 2009. She then attended Otay Ranch High School in Chula Vista, where she was a three-time Mesa League MVP on the softball team. As a sophomore, she batted .460 with a .505 on-base percentage along with 34 runs scored and 43 runs batted in (RBI). As a junior, she earned second team all-section and second-team all-CIF Division II honors. As a senior in 2013, she had a .523 batting average, earning first-team all-section honors as well as a selection to the Cal-Hi Sports all-state third-team. She was also named MVP of the annual Hilltop Tournament, recording three hits and four RBI in their championship game victory over Santana High School. In November 2012, she signed an early letter of intent to play at Arizona State University. Palacios also lettered twice in volleyball in high school and played travel softball with Team Muzino and the San Diego Renegades. She graduated from Otay Ranch with a 4.3 GPA. ## Career ### College career Palacios played Division I college softball for the Arizona State Sun Devils from 2014 to 2017. She helped the Sun Devils reach the NCAA Tournament all four years, including a trip to the Super Regionals in 2014. She initially served as a backup catcher to Amber Freeman, appearing in only eight games as a freshman. She later claimed to have "[fallen] out of love" with the game around this time, even contemplating quitting the team altogether. However, she did record five hits in eleven at-bats. After spending the summer playing with the Mexico national team, she returned for her second year. As a sophomore in 2015, Palacios finished fifth on the team with a .323 batting average and third on the team with a .459 on-base percentage, along with 20 RBI and three home runs. She went the entire regular season without an error, earning Pac-12 All-Defensive and NFCA Third-Team All-West Region honors. She hit a home run in their Pac-12 home opener against California on March 20. On May 1, she went three-for-three with three RBI in a 20–0 mercy rule victory over Stanford. The following day, she went four-for-four with an RBI in another mercy rule win over Stanford. She also became known this season for videobombing her teammates, and even head coach Craig Nicholson, in post-game interviews. As a junior in 2016, Palacios split playing time behind the plate with senior Katee Aguirre after the graduation of four-year starter Amber Freeman. In 54 games played, she batted .311 with 26 RBI and five home runs. On February 20, she hit a two-run home run during a 6–0 defeat of Illinois State at the Littlewood Classic. Overall she went four-for-10 with five RBI and a walk as the Sun Devils went undefeated in the tournament. After a cold streak of two hits in 12 games, she had two home runs and three RBI in a 12–9 loss to Washington on April 10. As a senior in 2017, she appeared in all 53 games, finishing third on the team in batting average (.322), RBI (40) and home runs (10). She hit a grand slam in a 12–1 win over Nebraska on March 10. After amassing 17 RBI through the first six weeks of play, she was named the Pac-12 Player of the Week in late March after batting .533 with six home runs and 11 RBI in a five-game stretch. She recorded two home runs and four RBI in a doubleheader against New Mexico State on March 22. She hit another homer in a 8–0 win against Oregon State on March 25. In the second game of the series the next day, Palacios went three-for-four with two home runs and six RBI, including the walk-off grand slam to seal the 11–0 mercy rule win. Finally, she hit a two-run homer in the third game of the Oregon State series on March 27. On May 5 and 6, she recorded two home runs and five RBI in back-to-back wins over California. At the conclusion of the season she earned first-team All-Pac-12 and Pac-12 All-Defensive honors. ### Professional career On November 21, 2017, Palacios signed her first professional contract, a one-year deal with the Chicago Bandits of National Pro Fastpitch (NPF) ahead of the 2018 NPF season. She made her pro debut on June 6 and was named the NPF Rookie of the Week after batting .556 in their six-game opening week series against the Aussie Spirit. She went 3 for 4 with three RBI and her first career home run in their June 10 victory over the Spirit, earning player of the game honors. Palacios batted .275 with six RBI and one home run on the season. She spent the following year with the Cleveland Comets, who partnered with the Mexico national team, and hit .217 with 13 RBI during the 2019 NPF season. In 2020 Palacios took part in the inaugural six-week season of Athletes Unlimited Softball, an experimental player-run league without coaches or owners where team rosters are shuffled weekly via a draft. Instead of team standings, players are ranked on a leaderboard based on their individual performances. She recorded one home run, five RBI and nine walks, tallying 670 points overall. Her sole home run came on the last day of the season. Palacios was announced as a returning player for the 2021 Athletes Unlimited season. She hit a home run for Team Warren in her second game and was voted "MVP 2" by the players and fans (as the second-best player of the game). Shortly thereafter she earned "MVP 3" honors in a week 3 defeat to Team Osterman. In her last game of the season, she broke a scoreless tie with a fifth inning home run to help Team Jaquish defeat Team Eberle 6–2, earning "MVP 2" honors. In total, she recorded seven hits, five RBI and two home runs for a total of 934 individual points on the season. ### International career The summer after Palacios's freshman year at Arizona State, during which she thought about quitting the sport, her father informed her that the Mexican Softball Federation was allowing Mexican-American players to try out for the national team. After some initial hesitation, she began training for the opportunity and eventually earned a spot on the roster. Her first international competition was the 2014 World Cup of Softball in Irvine, California, and she credits the experience for rekindling her love of the game. She also joined the team for the 2015 World Cup of Softball the following summer, driving in a run against Argentina. Palacios played in the 2017 Canada Cup, where she recorded seven hits, four RBI and a home run in seven games. Later that year, she participated in the Pan American Championships, where Mexico finished second and secured a bid to the 2019 Pan American Games. She also won a silver medal with the team at the 2018 Central American and Caribbean Games, with their only loss coming in the championship game after extra innings. At the 2018 Women's Softball World Championship the following month, Palacios drove in the first run of Mexico's 2–0 victory over the Philippines. Four days later, on the last day of group play, she drove in the first two runs of their 4–3 defeat of Chinese Taipei. Mexico finished the tournament in sixth place. Palacios was one of 12 American-born players included on the Mexico roster for the 2019 Pan American Games. She hit a grand slam in their opening game, a 9–0 victory over the host team Peru, but they ultimately failed to medal after being eliminated in the semifinals. A few weeks after the disappointing Pan American Games campaign, Palacios helped her team achieve a surprise first-place finish at the 2019 WBSC Americas Olympic Qualifier. They defeated the host nation, Canada, by a 2–1 score in the super round to secure Mexico's first ever Olympic berth in softball, a victory which Palacios called the highlight of her career. She scored the game-tying run in the fifth inning after leading off with a single. In preparation for the Olympics, she joined the team for the 2020 Australia Pacific Cup, where they finished in third place. At the Tokyo Olympics, Palacios recorded hits in wins against Italy and Australia. Mexico lost the bronze medal game to Canada. ## Personal life Palacios has two younger siblings: her sister Sharlize, who plays softball at Arizona, and her brother Sabian. The two sisters played against each other for the first time in April 2021, when the Mexico national team faced Arizona in an exhibition game at Rita Hillenbrand Memorial Stadium. In the game, Sashel hit the game-winning solo home run in the seventh inning for the 3–2 victory. Palacios earned her bachelor's degree in family and human development in the spring of 2017 and was named an All-Pac-12 Academic honorable mention. She earned several dean's list distinctions and was named to the CoSIDA Academic All-District softball team as a senior. She later returned to Arizona State to pursue her master's degree in higher and postsecondary education. She took the opportunity to serve as a graduate assistant coach during the 2018 season and finished her studies in 2019.

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport

Airport serving Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Rajiv Gandhi International Airport is an international airport that serves Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. It is located in Shamshabad, about 24 kilometres (15 mi) south of Hyderabad and it was opened on 23 March 2008 to replace Begumpet Airport, which was the sole civilian airport serving Hyderabad. It is named after Rajiv Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India. Built over an area of 5,500 acres (2,200 ha), it is the largest airport of India by area. It is owned and operated by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited (GHIAL), a public–private consortium. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad was the first airport in India to launch domestic e-boarding facility in December 2015 and international e-boarding facility in October 2020. It has also ranked in AirHelp's list of top 10 airports in the world. The fourth busiest airport in India by passengers traffic, it handled almost 21 million passengers and over 140,000 tonnes (150,000 short tons) of cargo between April 2022 and March 2023. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport is India's first greenfield airport built under a public-private partnership model. The airport has an integrated passenger terminal, a cargo terminal and two runways. There are also aviation training facilities, a fuel farm, a solar power plant and two maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) facilities. The airport serves as a hub for Alliance Air (India), Amazon Air, Blue Dart Aviation, SpiceJet and IndiGo. It is a focus city for Air India. ## History ### Planning (1991–2004) The existing commercial airport, Begumpet Airport, was unable to handle rising passenger traffic. The state government led by then chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu initially considered converting Hakimpet Air Force Station to civilian use; however, the Air Force refused. When the State proposed the construction of a new airport for the Air Force, the Ministry of Defence suggested the State consider sites south of Begumpet Airport. By October 1998, the State had narrowed down to three possible locations for the new airport: Bongloor, Nadergul and Shamshabad. Due to its convenient location near two highways (NH 44 and NH 765) and a railway line, Shamshabad was selected in December 1998. In November 2000, under the N. Chandrababu Naidu government and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) signed a memorandum of understanding on the greenfield airport project, establishing it as a public–private partnership. The State and AAI together would hold a 26% stake in the project, while the remaining 74% would be allotted to private companies. Through a bidding process the Shamshabad international airport with already land acquired of 5500 acres is in government possession and N. Chandrababu Naidu assigned bid to consortium consisting of Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao (GMR Group) and Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad was chosen as the holder of the 74% stake. In December 2002, Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (HIAL), later renamed GMR Hyderabad International Airport Limited (GHIAL), was created as a special purpose entity, into which the State, AAI and GMR–MAHB placed their stakes. In September 2003, the members of GHIAL signed a shareholders' agreement, as well as an agreement for state subsidy of over ₹4 billion (US\$50 million). A concession agreement between GHIAL and the Central Government was signed in December 2004, stipulating that no airport within a 150-kilometre (93 mi) radius of RGIA could be operated. Thus, the closure of Begumpet Airport was required. ### Construction and opening (2005–2008) The project was forwarded when Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy gained power and construction began by GMR on 16 March 2005 when Sonia Gandhi laid the foundation stone. Two days prior, the Central Government had named the airport after former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who had undergone pilot training in Hyderabad. The naming resulted in opposition from the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). At Begumpet Airport, the international terminal was named after Rajiv Gandhi while the domestic terminal was named after TDP founder N. T. Rama Rao; TDP wanted to continue this naming convention at the new airport. However, the new airport has only one terminal. Roughly three years after the foundation stone laying ceremony, the airport was inaugurated on 14 March 2008 amid protests. TDP repeated its demand for the naming of the domestic terminal. In addition, on 12 and 13 March, 20,000 AAI employees had conducted a strike against the closure of Begumpet Airport, as well as that of HAL Airport in Bangalore, fearing they would lose their jobs. RGIA was originally scheduled to open to commercial operations on 16 March 2008; however, the date was delayed due to protests from some airlines over the high ground handling rates at the airport. Once the rates were reduced, the launch date was set for 23 March 2008. Although Lufthansa Flight 752 from Frankfurt was scheduled to be the first flight to land at RGIA, two SpiceJet flights landed earlier. However, the Lufthansa flight still received the planned ceremonial welcome upon its 12:25 am arrival. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport reassigned the IATA airport code, HYD, from Begumpet Airport after the previous airport ceased international commercial flights. ### Later developments (2009–present) In September 2011, SpiceJet launched its regional hub at RGIA, using its new Bombardier Q400 aircraft. The airline, which chose Hyderabad due to its central location in the country, flies to several Tier-II and Tier-III cities from the airport. Regional airline TruJet too opened a hub at RGIA upon commencing operations in July 2015. In November 2014, the Ministry of Civil Aviation resolved that the domestic terminal of RGIA would be named after N. T. Rama Rao, resulting in protests from members of the Rajya Sabha. Airport officials remained unsure as to how the naming would occur. ## Ownership RGIA is owned and operated by GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd (GHIAL), a public–private venture. It is composed of public entities Airports Authority of India (13%) and the Government of Telangana (13%), as well as a private consortium between GMR Group (63%) and Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad (11%). Per the concession agreement between GHIAL and the Central Government, GHIAL has the right to operate the airport for 30 years, with the option to continue doing so for another 30 years. In May 2022, Central Government extended the concession agreement term of GHIAL from 23 March 2038, up to 22 March 2068. ## Facilities ### Structure The airport is spread over 2,200 hectares (5,500 acres). Out of which 810 hectares (2,000 acres) have been developed towards airport needs which mainly constitutes 690 hectares (1,700 acres) of land is airside and 120 hectares (300 acres) of land is landside facilities. The remaining 1,414 hectares (3,495 acres) is expansion of the airport. No further land will be acquired. The airport is fully planned within 2,200 hectares (5,500 acres). ### Runways The airport has two runways: - Runway 09L/27R: 3,707 by 45 metres (12,162 ft × 148 ft). - Runway 09R/27L: 4,260 by 60 metres (13,980 ft × 200 ft), ILS equipped. Runway 09R/27L, the original and primary runway, is long enough to be able to receive the Airbus A380 which is the world's largest passenger aircraft. Originally a taxiway, runway 09L/27R was inaugurated in February 2012. Its length is shorter than the main runway and able to handle aircraft such as the Airbus A340 and Boeing 747. It is mainly used when runway 09R/27L is undergoing maintenance, and as air traffic to the airport rises it will be used more often. North of these runways are the three parking aprons: the cargo, passenger terminal and MRO aprons. The passenger terminal apron contains parking stands on both the north and south sides of the terminal. Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad was the first international airport in south India to have a parallel runway at the time of inauguration of the second runway in February 2012 respectively. ### Terminal RGIA has an integrated passenger terminal, which covers 379,370 m² (4,083,500 sq ft) and has a capacity for 34 million passengers per year. The western side of the terminal handles international flights while the eastern side is for domestic operations. There are 46 immigration counters and 96 check-in desks with 19 kiosks for self check-in. There is a total of nine gates, seven of which are located on the south side of the terminal and the other two on the north side. Three gates are each equipped with two jetways to accelerate the handling of widebody aircraft. Public lounge facilities are provided by Plaza Premium Lounge, which operates three lounges in the terminal; there are also three separate lounges for VIPs. The pre-security "airport village" is a meeting point for passenger pick-up. The airport has 57 parking bays: 47 remote parking bays and 10 aero bridges. In January 2019 the GHIAL added another 26 parking bays which makes a total of 83 parking bays. ## Airlines and destinations ### Passenger ### Cargo ## Statistics ## GMR Aerospace Park The GMR Aerospace Park contains several facilities primarily related to the aviation sector. It has a 100-hectare (250-acre) special economic zone, which includes an 8.1-hectare (20-acre) Free Trade and Warehousing Zone, as well as a domestic tariff area. ### Aviation training The GMR Aviation Academy is located in the park. It was established in 2009 in co-operation with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Airports Council International (ACI) and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The academy offers programmes related to airport operations, which are accredited by the listed organisations. The park also includes the Asia Pacific Flight Training (APFT) academy, an initiative of GMR Group and Asia Pacific Flight Training. Launched in 2013, it provides pilot training courses. ### GMR Aero Technic Ltd MRO The MRO operated by GMR Aero Technic Ltd is one of two MROs at the airport. Built at a cost of ₹3.5 billion (US\$44 million) and inaugurated in March 2012, the facility can handle up to five aircraft simultaneously. Initially, the MRO was a joint venture between GMR Group and Malaysian Aerospace Engineering (MAE), a subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines. However, amid its parent's poor financial situation following the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 incident, MAE was unable to fund the MRO, which had been accruing losses. GMR bought out MAE's stake in December 2014. GMR Aero Technic Ltd is the only one MRO in private sector in India with extensive capability to maintain Airbus A320 family aircraft, Boeing 737, ATR 72/42 and Bombardier DHC Q400 aircraft. GMR Aero Technic is a world class aircraft maintenance organisation approved by EASA and Directorate General of Civil Aviation (India) and various civil aviation authorities and one of the few MROs certified for AS9110 standards in South East Asia region. ## Other facilities ### Air India MRO The other MRO is operated by Air India Engineering Services Limited (AIESL), a subsidiary of Air India. Spread over 2 hectares (5 acres), the facility cost ₹790 million (US\$9.9 million) to construct and was opened in May 2015. ### Cargo terminal The cargo terminal is located west of the passenger terminal. It covers 14,330 square metres (154,200 sq ft) and can handle 150,000 tonnes (170,000 short tons) of cargo annually. The terminal is operated by Hyderabad Menzies Air Cargo Pvt Ltd, a joint venture between GHIAL (51%) and Menzies Aviation (49%). Within the terminal is the Pharma Zone, a temperature-controlled facility designed for storing pharmaceuticals. The first such facility to be opened at an Indian airport, it is important to RGIA as pharmaceuticals account for 70% of exports from the airport. In May 2011, Lufthansa Cargo launched its first pharma hub at the airport. ### Fuel farm The airport has a fuel farm consisting of six storage tanks in which 4 are filled, with a total capacity for 13,500 kilolitres (480,000 cu ft) of jet fuel. The tanks are connected to the apron via underground pipelines. Reliance Industries built and operates the farm, which can be used by any oil company under an open-access model. ### Solar power plant In January 2016, GHIAL commissioned a 5 MW solar power plant near RGIA, which will be used to serve the airport's energy needs. It was built over 9.7 hectares (24 acres) at a cost of ₹300 million (US\$3.8 million). Over the following two to three years, the capacity of the plant will be raised to 30 MW, allowing RGIA to become fully solar powered. ### Airport hotel The Novotel Hyderabad Airport, located 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) from RGIA, was opened in October 2008. The hotel includes 305 rooms, two restaurants and a lounge for aircrew. It was initially owned by GHIAL before being shifted to subsidiary GMR Hotels and Resorts Ltd. Owing to high losses from low occupancy, GMR began seeking buyers of the hotel in August 2015. ### Kartainment Go Karting Track Kartainment is a professional racing and recreational Go- Karting track located in the GMR Rajiv Gandhi Hyderabad International Airport, Shamshabad. It is made up of 900 meter professional track and 600 meter recreational Go-Karting track. The quality of the track and its maintenance is of extremely high standards and Kartaiment is the preferred choice to host many National Karting Championship events. ### Aero plaza Aeroplaza is located within the main terminal of the airport. It is spread over two floors and was inaugurated in 2022. ### GMR Aerocity Hyderabad In April 2021, GMR Group announced the launch of GMR Hyderabad Airport City, which is proposed to be the largest aerotropolis in India spread across 1,500-acre (6.1 km²) around Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, and is being billed as an "integrated ecosystem covering Office Space, Retail, Leisure, Entertainment, Hospitality, Education, Healthcare, Aerospace & Logistics". ## Connectivity ### Road RGIA is connected to the city of Hyderabad by NH 44, NH 765 and the Outer Ring Road. In October 2009, the PV Narasimha Rao Expressway was completed between Mehdipatnam and Aramghar, where it joins NH 44. This long flyover which is 13 km has reduced travel time between the airport and the city to 30–40 minutes and also provides three entry and exit points. The "Pushpak – Airport Liner" service of the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation provides bus transportation to different parts of the city. It was launched in December 2012 to replace GMR's Aero Express service. ### Metro Under the second phase of the Hyderabad Metro Rail project, a 31-kilometre (19 mi) rail link between Raidurg and RGIA will be constructed. As of late 2015, feasibility studies on the phase are underway. In August 2019, K. T. Rama Rao said that state cabinet has approved the Hyderabad Airport Metro Express Link from Raidurg to the airport. The alignment to Shamshabad RGI Airport from the Raidurg metro station will be passing over Bio-diversity Junction, through Roda Mistry college lane, Khajaguda Junction. The 31 km-long Hyderabad Airport Metro Express link will cost around ₹ 6250 crore. In September 2021, GMR Group, the company operating the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) in Hyderabad said that it will invest ₹ 519.52 crore towards metro connectivity at the airport. During foundation laying ceremony on 9 December 2022, GMR Group contributed ₹625 crore (US\$78 million), or 10 per cent of the project's cost. The closest Indian Railways station is Umdanagar, which is 6 km from the airport. ## Awards In December 2022, the airport was ranked among the most punctual airports in the world, in which it ranked the fourth position, globally, by Cirium, an aviation data analytics company. The airport was awarded as the Best Airport in the category of 15 to 25 million passengers per annum in the Asia-Pacific region for 2022, by Airports Council International in March 2023. As per a survey of April 2023 on airports performing best in on-time performance, conducted by Cirium, the airport was ranked as the most punctual in the world, in May 2023. As per report by the aviation analytical firm Cirium, in March 2023 RGIA emerged as only airport in the world with a 90.43% on-time performance in the global as well as large airport category. ## Future plans In 2009, GHIAL decided to postpone the second phase due to lower growth in passenger traffic than anticipated. The phase was revived in late 2015, as the airport is expected to reach its capacity in 2016. The first leg of this phase will bring the capacity to 18 million passengers annually, and the second leg will raise it to 20 million. The passenger terminal will be enlarged with additional security lanes, check-in counters and other facilities, and solar panels will be built on the roof. In October 2017, GHIAL CEO SGK Kishore confirmed that the airport expansion would start by January 2018, and it is expected to be completed by the end of 2019. But due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which caused lockdowns, restrictions and curfews, it resulted in lack of labour and delays in work. Construction work has resumed as of mid 2021, and now it is expected to be completed by 2023. The airport terminal will be expanded to include 48 aerobridges, a larger arrival area for faster check out and more check-in desks. In the midst of the expansion to 25 million, the grant for the 50 million PPA expansion was awarded. The master plan of the airport involves construction of new runways and the terminal on the north side of the airport approach road which replicates the existing runways and terminal on the south of approach road. New cross taxiways will be built on east & west of terminals connecting the runways on north and south of the approach road. The approach road tunnel will be built under the new taxiways which allows free flow of traffic entering airport from ORR/Bangalore Highway junction and Srisailam Highway as well. The final phase of expansion will increase the terminal capacity to 80 million passengers annually. ## See also - List of airports in India - List of the busiest airports in India - List of airports in Telangana - Warangal Airport

Iazyges

Ancient Sarmatian tribe of Central Europe

The Iazyges (/aɪˈæzɪdʒiːz/) were an ancient Sarmatian tribe that traveled westward in 200 BC from Central Asia to the steppes of modern Ukraine. In c. 44 BC, they moved into modern-day Hungary and Serbia near the Dacian steppe between the Danube and Tisza rivers, where they adopted a semi-sedentary lifestyle. In their early relationship with Rome, the Iazyges were used as a buffer state between the Romans and the Dacians; this relationship later developed into one of overlord and client state, with the Iazyges being nominally sovereign subjects of Rome. Throughout this relationship, the Iazyges carried out raids on Roman land, which often caused punitive expeditions to be made against them. Almost all of the major events of the Iazyges, such as the two Dacian Wars—in both of which the Iazyges fought, assisting Rome in subjugating the Dacians in the first war and conquering them in the second—are connected with war. Another such war is the Marcomannic War that occurred between 169 and 175, in which the Iazyges fought against Rome but were defeated by Marcus Aurelius and had severe penalties imposed on them. ## Culture Although the Iazyges were nomads before their migration to the Tisza plain, they became semi-sedentary once there, and lived in towns, although they migrated between these towns to allow their cattle to graze. Their language was a dialect of Old Iranian, which was quite different from most of the other Sarmatian dialects of Old Iranian. According to the Roman writer Gaius Valerius Flaccus, when an Iazyx became too old to fight in battle, they were killed by their sons or, according to Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, threw themselves from a rock. ### Etymology The Iazyges' name was Latinized as Iazyges Metanastae (Ἰάζυγες Μετανάσται) or Jazyges, or sometimes as Iaxamatae. Their name was also occasionally spelled as Iazuges. Several corruptions of their name, such as Jazamatae, Iasidae, Latiges, and Cizyges, existed. Other modern English forms of their name are Iazyigs, Iazygians, Iasians, and Yazigs. The root of the name may be Proto-Iranian \*yaz-, "to sacrifice", perhaps indicating a caste or tribe specializing in religious sacrifices. According to Peter Edmund Laurent, a 19th-century French classical scholar, the Iazyges Metanastæ, a warlike Sarmatian race, which had migrated during the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and therefore received the name of "Metanastæ", resided in the mountains west of the Theiss (Tisza) and east of the Gran (Hron) and Danube. The Greek Metanastæ (Greek: Μετανάσται) means "migrants". The united Scythians and Sarmatæ called themselves Iazyges, which Laurent connected with Old Church Slavonic ѩзꙑкъ (językŭ, "tongue, language, people"). ### Burial traditions The graves made by the Iazyges were often rectangular or circular, although some were ovoid, hexagonal, or even octagonal. They were flat and were grouped like burials in modern cemeteries. Most of the graves' access openings face south, southeast, or southwest. The access openings are between 0.6 metres (2 ft) and 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) wide. The graves themselves are between 5 m (16 ft) and 13 m (43 ft) in diameter. After their migration to the Tisza plain, the Iazyges were in serious poverty. This is reflected in the poor furnishings found at burial sites, which are often filled with clay vessels, beads, and sometimes brooches. Iron daggers and swords were very rarely found in the burial site. Their brooches and arm-rings were of the La Tène type, showing the Dacians had a distinct influence on the Iazyges. Later tombs showed an increase in material wealth; tombs of the 2nd to early 4th centuries had weapons in them 86% of the time and armor in them 5% of the time. Iazygian tombs along the Roman border show a strong Roman influence. ### Diet Before their migration into the Pannonian Basin, while still living north of Tyras, on the north-western coast of the Black Sea, the geographer Strabo states that their diet consisted largely of "honey, milk, and cheese". After their migration, the Iazyges were cattle breeders; they required salt to preserve their meat but there were no salt mines within their territory. According to Cassius Dio, the Iazyges received grain from the Romans. The Iazyges used hanging, asymmetrical, barrel-shaped pots that had uneven weight distribution. The rope used to hang the pot was wrapped around the edges of the side collar; it is believed the rope was tied tightly to the pot, allowing it to spin in circles. Due to the spinning motion, there are several theories about the pot's uses. It is believed the small hanging pots were used to ferment alcohol using the seeds of touch-me-not balsam (Impatiens noli-tangere), and larger hanging pots were used to churn butter and make cheese. ### Military The Iazyges wore heavy armor, such as sugarloaf helms, and scale armor made of iron, bronze, horn, or horse hoof, which was sewn onto a leather gown so the scales would partially overlap. They used long, two-handed lances called contus; they wielded these from horses, which they barded. Their military was exclusively cavalry. They are believed to have used saddle blankets on their horses. Although it was originally Gaulish, it is believed the Iazyges used the carnyx, a trumpet-like wind instrument. ### Religion One of the Iazygian towns, Bormanon, is believed to have had hot springs because settlement names starting with "Borm" were commonly used among European tribes to denote that the location had hot springs, which held religious importance for many Celtic tribes. It is not known, however, whether the religious significance of the hot springs was passed on to the Iazyges with the concept itself. The Iazyges used horse-tails in their religious rituals. ## Economy When the Iazyges migrated to the plain between the Tisza and the Danube, their economy suffered severely. Many explanations have been offered for this, such as their trade with the Pontic Steppe and Black Sea being cut off and the absence of any mineable resources within their territory making their ability to trade negligible. Additionally, Rome proved more difficult to raid than the Iazyges' previous neighbors, largely due to Rome's well-organized army. The Iazyges had no large-scale organized production of goods for most of their history. As such, most of their trade goods were gained via small-scale raids upon neighboring peoples, although they did have some incidental horticulture. Several pottery workshops have been found in Banat, which was within the territory of the Iazyges, close to their border with Rome. These pottery workshops were built from the late 3rd century and have been found at Vršac–Crvenka, Grădinari–Selişte, Timişoara–Freidorf, Timişoara–Dragaşina, Hodoni, Pančevo, Dolovo, and Izvin şi Jabuca. The Iazyges' trade with the Pontic Steppe and Black Sea was extremely important to their economy; after the Marcomannic War, Marcus Aurelius offered them the concession of movement through Dacia to trade with the Roxolani, which reconnected them with the Pontic Steppe trade network. This trade route lasted until 260, when the Goths took over Tyras and Olbia, cutting off both the Roxolani's and the Iazyges' trade with the Pontic Steppe. The Iazyges also traded with the Romans, although this trade was smaller in scale. While there are Roman bronze coins scattered along the entirety of the Roman Danubian Limes, the highest concentration of them appear in the Iazyges' territory. ### Imports Because the Iazyges had no organized production for most of their history, imported pottery finds are sparse. Some goods, such as bronze or silver vessels, amphorae, terracotta wares, and lamps are extremely rare or nonexistent. Some amphorae and lamps have been found in Iazygian territory, often near major river crossings near the border with Rome, but the location of the sites make it impossible to determine whether these goods are part of an Iazygain site, settlement, or cemetery; or merely the lost possessions of Roman soldiers stationed in or near the locations. The most commonly found imported ware was Terra sigillata. At Iazygian cemeteries, a single complete terra sigillata vessel and a large number of fragments have been found in Banat. Terra sigillata finds in Iazygian settlements are confusing in some cases; it can sometimes be impossible to determine the timeframe of the wares in relation to its area and thus impossible to determine whether the wares came to rest there during Roman times or after the Iazyges took control. Finds of terra sigillata of an uncertain age have been found in Deta, Kovačica–Čapaš, Kuvin, Banatska Palanka, Pančevo, Vršac, Zrenjanin–Batka, Dolovo, Delibata, Perlez, Aradac, Botoš, and Bočar. Finds of terra sigillata that have been confirmed to having been made the time of Iazygian possession but of uncertain date have been found in Timișoara–Cioreni, Hodoni, Iecea Mică, Timișoara–Freidorf, Satchinez, Criciova, Becicherecul Mic, and Foeni–Seliște. The only finds of terra sigillata whose time of origin is certain have been found in Timișoara–Freidorf, dated to the 3rd century AD. Amphorae fragments have been found in Timișoara–Cioreni, Iecea Mică, Timișoara–Freidorf, Satchinez, and Biled; all of these are confirmed to be of Iazygian origin but none of them have definite chronologies. In Tibiscum, an important Roman and later Iazygian settlement, only a very low percent of pottery imports were imported during or after the 3rd century. The pottery imports consisted of terra sigillata, amphorae, glazed pottery, and stamped white pottery. Only 7% of imported pottery was from the "late period" during or after the 3rd century, while the other 93% of finds were from the "early period", the 2nd century or earlier. Glazed pottery was almost nonexistent in Tibiscum; the only finds from the early period are a few fragments with Barbotine decorations and stamped with "CRISPIN(us)". The only finds from the late period are a handful of glazed bowl fragments that bore relief decorations on both the inside and the outside. The most common type of amphorae is the Dressel 24 similis; finds are from the time of rule of Hadrian to the late period. An amphora of type Carthage LRA 4 dated between the 3rd and 4th century AD has been found in Tibiscum-Iaz and an amphora of type Opaiţ 2 has been found in Tibiscum-Jupa. ## Geography Records of eight Iazygian towns have been documented; these are Uscenum, Bormanum, Abieta, Trissum, Parca, Candanum, Pessium, and Partiscum. There was also a settlement on Gellért Hill. Their capital was at Partiscum, the site of which roughly corresponds with that of Kecskemét, a city in modern-day Hungary. It is believed that a Roman road may have traversed the Iazyges' territory for about 200 miles (320 km), connecting Aquincum to Porolissum, and passing near the site of modern-day Albertirsa. This road then went on to connect with the Black Sea city states. The area of plains between the Danube and Tisza rivers that was controlled by the Iazyges was similar in size to Italy and about 1,000 mi (1,600 km) long. The terrain was largely swampland dotted with a few small hills that was devoid of any mineable metals or minerals. This lack of resources and the problems the Romans would face trying to defend it may explain why the Romans never annexed it as a province but left it as a client-kingdom. According to English cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith, the Iazyges Metanastæ lived east (sic) of the [Roman] Dacia separating it from [Roman] Pannonia and Germania. The Iazyges Metanastæ drove Dacians from Pannonia and Tibiscus River (today known as Timiș River). ## History ### Early history In the 3rd century BC the Iazyges lived in modern-day south-eastern Ukraine along the northern shores of the Sea of Azov, which the Ancient Greeks and Romans called the Lake of Maeotis. From there, the Iazyges—or at least some of them—moved west along the shores of the Black Sea into modern-day Moldova and south-western Ukraine. It is possible the entirety of the Iazyges did not move west and that some of them stayed along the Sea of Azov, which would explain the occasional occurrence of the surname Metanastae; the Iazyges that possibly remained along the Sea of Azov, however, are never mentioned again. #### Migration In the 2nd century BC, sometime before 179 BC, the Iazyges began to migrate westward to the steppe near the Lower Dniester. This may have occurred because the Roxolani, who were the Iazyges' eastern neighbors, were also migrating westward due to pressure from the Aorsi, which put pressure on the Iazyges and forced them to migrate westward as well. The views of modern scholars as to how and when the Iazyges entered the Pannonian plain are divided. The main source of division is over the issue of if the Romans approved, or even ordered, the Iazyges to migrate, with both sides being subdivided into groups debating the timing of such a migration. Andreas Alföldi states that the Iazyges could not have been present to the north-east and east of the Pannonian Danube unless they had Roman approval. This viewpoint is supported by János Harmatta, who claims that the Iazyges were settled with both the approval and support of the Romans, so as to act as a buffer state against the Dacians. András Mócsy suggests that Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Augur, who was Roman consul in 26 BC, may have been responsible for the settlement of the Iazyges as a buffer between Pannonia and Dacia. However, Mócsy also suggests that the Iazyges may have arrived gradually, such that they initially were not noticed by the Romans. John Wilkes believes that the Iazyges reached the Pannonian plain either by the end of Augustus's rule (14 AD) or some time between 17 and 20 AD. Constantin Daicoviciu suggests that the Iazyges entered the area around 20 AD, after the Romans called upon them to be a buffer state. Coriolan Opreanu supports the theory of the Iazyges being invited, or ordered, to occupy the Pannonian plain, also around 20 AD. Gheorghe Bichir and Ion Horațiu Crișan support the theory that the Iazyges first began to enter the Pannonian plain in large numbers under Tiberius, around 20 AD. The most prominent scholars that state the Iazyges were not brought in by the Romans, or later approved, are Doina Benea, Mark Ščukin, and Jenő Fitz. Doina Benea states that the Iazyges slowly infiltrated the Pannonian plain sometime in the first half of the 1st century AD, without Roman involvement. Jenő Fitz promotes the theory that the Iazyges arrived en masse around 50 AD, although a gradual infiltration preceded it. Mark Ščukin states only that the Iazyges arrived by themselves sometime around 50 AD. Andrea Vaday argued against the theory of a Roman approved or ordered migration, citing the lack of strategic reasoning, as the Dacians were not actively providing a threat to Rome during the 20–50 AD period. The occupation of the lands between the Danube and Tisza by the Iazyges was mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia (77–79 AD), in which he says that the Iazyges inhabited the basins and plains of the lands, while the forested and mountainous area largely retained a Dacian population, which was later pushed back to the Tisza by the Iazyges. Pliny's statements are corroborated by the earlier accounts of Seneca the Younger in his Quaestiones Naturales (61–64 AD), where he uses the Iazyges to discuss the borders that separate the various peoples. From 78 to 76 BC, the Romans led an expedition to an area north of the Danube—then the Iazyges' territory—because the Iazyges had allied with Mithridates VI of Pontus, with whom the Romans were at war. In 44 BC King Burebista of Dacia died and his kingdom began to collapse. After this, the Iazyges began to take possession of the Pannonian Basin, the land between the Danube and Tisa rivers in modern-day south-central Hungary. Historians have posited this was done at the behest of the Romans, who sought to form a buffer state between their provinces and the Dacians to protect the Roman province of Pannonia. The Iazyges encountered the Basternae and Getae along their migration path sometime around 20 AD and turned southward to follow the coast of the Black Sea until they settled in the Danube Delta. This move is attested by the large discrepancy in the location reported by Tacitus relative to that which was earlier given by Ovid. Archeological finds suggest that while the Iazyges took hold of the northern plain between the Danube and the Tisa by around 50 AD, they did not take control of the land south of the Partiscum-Lugio line until the late 1st or early 2nd century. The effects of this migration have been observed in the ruins of burial sites left behind by the Iazyges; the standard grave goods made of gold being buried alongside a person were absent, as was the equipment of a warrior; this may have been because the Iazyges were no longer in contact with the Pontic Steppe and were cut off from all trade with them, which had previously been a vital part of their economy. Another problem with the Iazyges' new location was that it lacked both precious minerals and metals, such as iron, which could be turned into weapons. They found it was much more difficult to raid the Romans, who had organized armies around the area, as opposed to the disorganized armies of their previous neighbors. The cutting-off of trade with the Pontic Steppe meant they could no longer trade for gold for burial sites, assuming any of them could afford it. The only such goods they could find were the pottery and metals of the adjacent Dacian and Celtic peoples. Iron weapons would have been exceedingly rare, if the Iazyges even had them, and would likely have been passed down from father to son rather than buried because they could not have been replaced. #### Post-migration After the conquest of the Pannonian Basin, the Iazyges appear to have ruled over some measure of the remaining Germanic, Celtic, and Dacian populations, with the hilly areas north of modern-day Budapest retaining strong Germanic traditions, with a significant presence of Germanic burial traditions. Items of Celtic manufacturing appear up until the late 2nd centuryAD, in the northern area of the Carpathian Basin. During the time of Augustus, the Iazyges sent an embassy to Rome to request friendly relations. In a modern context, these "friendly relations" would be similar to a non-aggression pact. Around this time, some of the western parts of the land of the Iazyges were occupied, apparently without conflict, by the Quadi, which scholar Nicholas Higham states "suggests long-term collaboration between [them]". Later, during the reign of Tiberius, the Iazyges became one of many new client-tribes of Rome. Roman client states were treated according to the Roman tradition of patronage, exchanging rewards for service. The client king was called socius et amicus Romani Populi (ally and friend of the Roman People); the exact obligations and rewards of this relationship, however, are vague. Even after being made into a client state, the Iazyges conducted raids across their border with Rome, for example in 6 AD and again in 16 AD. In 20 AD the Iazyges moved westward along the Carpathians into the Pannonian Steppe, and settled in the steppes between the Danube and the Tisza river, taking absolute control of the territory from the Dacians. In 50 AD, an Iazyges cavalry detachment assisted King Vannius, a Roman client-king of the Quadi, in his fight against the Suevi. In the Year of Four Emperors, 69 AD, the Iazyges gave their support to Vespasian, who went on to become the sole emperor of Rome. The Iazyges also offered to guard the Roman border with the Dacians to free up troops for Vespasian's invasion of Italy; Vespasian refused, however, fearing they would attempt a takeover or defect. Vespasian required the chiefs of the Iazyges to serve in his army so they could not organize an attack on the undefended area around the Danube. Vespasian enjoyed support from the majority of the Germanic and Dacian tribes. Domitian's campaign against Dacia was mostly unsuccessful; the Romans, however, won a minor skirmish that allowed him to claim it as a victory, even though he paid the King of Dacia, Decebalus, an annual tribute of eight million sesterces in tribute to end the war. Domitian returned to Rome and received an ovation, but not a full triumph. Considering that Domitian had been given the title of Imperator—for military victories 22 times, this was markedly restrained, suggesting the populace—or at least the senate—was aware it had been a less-than-successful war, despite Domitian's claims otherwise. In 89 AD, however, Domitian invaded the Iazyges along with the Quadi and Marcomanni. Few details of this war are known but it is recorded that the Romans were defeated, it is, however, known that Roman troops acted to repel simultaneous incursion by the Iazyges into Dacian lands. In early 92 AD the Iazyges, Roxolani, Dacians, and Suebi invaded the Roman province of Pannonia—modern-day Croatia, northern Serbia, and western Hungary. Emperor Domitian called upon the Quadi and the Marcomanni to supply troops to the war. Both client-tribes refused to supply troops so Rome declared war upon them as well. In May 92 AD, the Iazyges annihilated the Roman Legio XXI Rapax in battle. Domitian, however, is said to have secured victory in this war by January of the next year. It is believed, based upon a rare Aureus coin showing an Iazyx with a Roman standard kneeling, with the caption of "Signis a Sarmatis Resitvtis", that the standard is taken from the annihilated Legio XXI Rapax was returned to Rome at the end of the war. Although the accounts of the Roman-Iazyges wars of 89 and 92 AD are both muddled, it has been shown they are separate wars and not a continuation of the same war. The threat presented by the Iazyges and neighbouring people to the Roman provinces was significant enough that Emperor Trajan travelled across the Mid and Lower Danube in late 98 to early 99, where he inspected existing fortification and initiated the construction of more forts and roads. Tacitus, a Roman Historian, records in his book Germania, which was written in 98 AD, that the Osi tribes paid tribute to both the Iazyges and the Quadi, although the exact date this relationship began is unknown. During the Flavian dynasty, the princes of the Iazyges were trained in the Roman army, officially as an honor but in reality serving as a hostage, because the kings held absolute power over the Iazyges. There were offers from the princes of the Iazyges to supply troops but these were denied because of the fear they might revolt or desert in a war. ### Dacian wars An alliance between the Iazyges and the Dacians led the Romans to focus more on the Danube than the Rhine. This is shown by the placement of the Roman legions; during the time of Augustus's rule there were eight legions stationed along the Rhine, four stationed in Mainz, and another four in Cologne. Within a hundred years of Augustus' rule, however, Roman military resources had become centered along the Danube rather than the Rhine, with nine legions stationed along the Danube and only one at the Rhine. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, however, twelve legions were stationed along the Danube. The Romans also built a series of forts along the entire right bank of the Danube—from Germany to the Black Sea—and in the provinces of Rhaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia the legions constructed bridge-head forts. Later, this system was expanded to the lower Danube with the key castra of Poetovio, Brigetio, and Carnuntum. The Classis Pannonica and Classis Flavia Moesica were deployed to the right and lower Danube, respectively; they, however, had to overcome the mass of whirlpools and cataracts of the Iron Gates. #### First Dacian War Trajan, with the assistance of the Iazyges, led his legions into Dacia against King Decebalus, in the year 101. In order to cross the Danube with such a large army, Apollodorus of Damascus, the Romans' chief architect, created a bridge through the Iron Gates by cantilevering it from the sheer face of the Iron Gates. From this he created a great bridge with sixty piers that spanned the Danube. Trajan used this to strike deep within Dacia, forcing the king, Decebalus, to surrender and become a client king. #### Second Dacian War As soon as Trajan returned to Rome, however, Decebalus began to lead raids into Roman territory and also attacked the Iazyges, who were still a client-tribe of Rome. Trajan concluded that he had made a mistake in allowing Decebalus to remain so powerful. In 106 AD, Trajan again invaded Dacia, with 11 legions, and, again with the assistance of the Iazyges—who were the only barbarian tribe that aided the Romans in this war —and the only barbarian tribe in the Danube region which did not ally with Dacia. The Iazyges were the only tribe to aid Rome in both Dacian Wars, pushed rapidly into Dacia. Decebalus chose to commit suicide rather than be captured, knowing that he would be paraded in a triumph before being executed. In 113 AD Trajan annexed Dacia as a new Roman province, the first Roman province to the east of the Danube. Trajan, however, did not incorporate the steppe between the Tisza river and the Transylvanian mountains into the province of Dacia but left it for the Iazyges. Back in Rome, Trajan was given a triumph lasting 123 days, with lavish gladiatorial games and chariot races. The wealth coming from the gold mines of Dacia funded these lavish public events and the construction of Trajan's Column, which was designed and constructed by Apollodorus of Damascus; it was 100 feet (30 m) tall and had 23 spiral bands filled with 2,500 figures, giving a full depiction of the Dacian war. Ancient sources say 500,000 slaves were taken in the war but moderns sources believe it was probably closer to 100,000 slaves. ### After the Dacian Wars Ownership of the region of Oltenia became a source of dispute between the Iazyges and the Roman empire. The Iazyges had originally occupied the area before the Dacians seized it; it was taken during the Second Dacian War by Trajan, who was determined to constitute Dacia as a province. The land offered a more direct connection between Moesia and the new Roman lands in Dacia, which may be the reason Trajan was determined to keep it. The dispute led to war in 107–108, where the future emperor Hadrian, then governor of Pannonia Inferior, defeated them. The exact terms of the peace treaty are not known, but it is believed the Romans kept Oltenia in exchange for some form of concession, likely involving a one-time tribute payment. The Iazyges also took possession of Banat around this time, which may have been part of the treaty. In 117, the Iazyges and the Roxolani invaded Lower Pannonia and Lower Moesia, respectively. The war was probably brought on by difficulties in visiting and trading with each other because Dacia lay between them. The Dacian provincial governor Gaius Julius Quadratus Bassus was killed in the invasion. The Roxolani surrendered first, so it is likely the Romans exiled and then replaced their client king with one of their choosing. The Iazyges then concluded peace with Rome. The Iazyges and other Sarmatians invaded Roman Dacia in 123, likely for the same reason as the previous war; they were not allowed to visit and trade with each other. Marcius Turbo stationed 1,000 legionaries in the towns Potaissa and Porolissum, which the Romans probably used as the invasion point into Rivulus Dominarum. Marcius Turbo succeeded in defeating the Iazyges; the terms of the peace and the date, however, are not known. ### Marcomannic Wars In 169, the Iazyges, Quadi, Suebi, and Marcomanni once again invaded Roman territory. The Iazyges led an invasion into Alburnum in an attempt to seize its gold mines. The exact motives for and directions of the Iazyges' war efforts are not known. Marcus Claudius Fronto, who was a general during the Parthian wars and then the governor of both Dacia and Upper Moesia, held them back for some time but was killed in battle in 170. The Quadi surrendered in 172, the first tribe to do so; the known terms of the peace are that Marcus Aurelius installed a client-king Furtius on their throne and the Quadi were denied access to the Roman markets along the limes. The Marcomanni accepted a similar peace but the name of their client-king is not known. In 173, the Quadi rebelled and overthrew Furtius and replaced him with Ariogaesus, who wanted to enter into negotiations with Marcus. Marcus refused to negotiate because the success of the Marcomannic wars was in no danger. At that point the Iazyges had not yet been defeated by Rome. having not acted, Marcus Aurelius appears to have been unconcerned, but when the Iazyges attacked across the frozen Danube in late 173 and early 174, Marcus redirected his attention to them. Trade restrictions on the Marcomanni were also partially lifted at that time; they were allowed to visit the Roman markets at certain times of certain days. In an attempt to force Marcus to negotiate, Ariogaesus began to support the Iazyges. Marcus Aurelius put out a bounty on him, offering 1,000 aurei for his capture and delivery to Rome or 500 aurei for his severed head. After this, the Romans captured Ariogaesus but rather than executing him, Marcus Aurelius sent him into exile. In the winter of 173, the Iazyges launched a raid across the frozen Danube but the Romans were ready for pursuit and followed them back to the Danube. Knowing the Roman legionaries were not trained to fight on ice, and that their own horses had been trained to do so without slipping, the Iazyges prepared an ambush, planning to attack and scatter the Romans as they tried to cross the frozen river. The Roman army, however, formed a solid square and dug into the ice with their shields so they would not slip. When the Iazyges could not break the Roman lines, the Romans counter-attacked, pulling the Iazyges off of their horses by grabbing their spears, clothing, and shields. Soon both armies were in disarray after slipping on the ice and the battle was reduced to many brawls between the two sides, which the Romans won. After this battle the Iazyges—and presumably the Sarmatians in general—were declared the primary enemy of Rome. The Iazyges surrendered to the Romans in March or early April of 175. Their prince Banadaspus had attempted peace in early 174 but the offer was refused and Banadaspus was deposed by the Iazyges and replaced with Zanticus. The terms of the peace treaty were harsh; the Iazyges were required to provide 8,000 men as auxiliaries and release 100,000 Romans they had taken hostage, and were forbidden from living within ten Roman miles (roughly 9 miles (14 km) of the Danube. Marcus had intended to impose even harsher terms; it is said by Cassius Dio that he wanted to entirely exterminate the Iazyges but was distracted by the rebellion of Avidius Cassius. During this peace deal, Marcus Aurelius broke from the Roman custom of Emperors sending details of peace treaties to the Roman Senate; this is the only instance in which Marcus Aurelius is recorded to have broken this tradition. Of the 8,000 auxiliaries, 5,500 of them were sent to Britannia to serve with the Legio VI Victrix, suggesting that the situation there was serious; it is likely the British tribes, seeing the Romans being preoccupied with war in Germania and Dacia, had decided to rebel. All of the evidence suggests the Iazyges' horsemen were an impressive success. The 5,500 troops sent to Britain were not allowed to return home, even after their 20-year term of service had ended. After Marcus Aurelius had beaten the Iazyges; he took the title of Sarmaticus in accordance with the Roman practice of victory titles. ### After the Marcomannic Wars In 177, the Iazyges, the Buri, and other Germanic tribes invaded Roman territory again. It is said that in 178, Marcus Aurelius took the bloody spear from the Temple of Bellona and hurled it into the land of the Iazyges. In 179, the Iazyges and the Buri were defeated, and the Iazyges accepted peace with Rome. The peace treaty placed additional restrictions on the Iazyges but also included some concessions. They could not settle on any of the islands of the Danube and could not keep boats on the Danube. They were, however, permitted to visit and trade with the Roxolani throughout the Dacian Province with the knowledge and approval of its governor, and they could trade in the Roman markets at certain times on certain days. In 179, the Iazyges and the Buri joined Rome in their war against the Quadi and the Marcomanni after they secured assurances that Rome would prosecute the war to the end and not quickly make a peace deal. As part of a treaty made in 183, Commodus forbade the Quadi and the Marcomanni from waging war against the Iazyges, the Buri, or the Vandals, suggesting that at this time all three tribes were loyal client-tribes of Rome. In 214, however, Caracalla led an invasion into the Iazyges' territory. In 236, the Iazyges invaded Rome but were defeated by Emperor Maximinus Thrax, who took the title Sarmaticus Maximus following his victory. The Iazyges, Marcomanni, and Quadi raided Pannonia together in 248, and again in 254. It is suggested the reason for the large increase in the amount of Iazyx raids against Rome was that the Goths led successful raids, which emboldened the Iazyges and other tribes. In 260, the Goths took the cities of Tyras and Olbia, again cutting off the Iazyges' trade with the Pontic Steppe and the Black Sea. From 282 to 283, Emperor Carus lead a successful campaign against the Iazyges. The Iazyges and Carpi raided Roman territory in 293, and Diocletian responded by declaring war. From 294 to 295, Diocletian waged war upon them and won. As a result of the war, some of the Carpi were transported into Roman territory so they could be controlled. From 296 to 298, Galerius successfully campaigned against the Iazyges. In 358, the Iazyges were at war with Rome. In 375, Emperor Valentinian had a stroke in Brigetio while meeting with envoys from the Iazyges. Around the time of the Gothic migration, which led the Iazyges to be surrounded on their northern and eastern borders by Gothic tribes, and most intensely during the reign of Constantine I, a series of earthworks known as the Devil's Dykes (Ördögárok) was built around the Iazygian territory, possibly with a degree of Roman involvement. Higham suggests that the Iazyges became more heavily tied to the Romans during this period, with strong cultural influence. ### Late history and legacy In late antiquity, historic accounts become much more diffuse and the Iazyges generally cease to be mentioned as a tribe. Beginning in the 4th century, most Roman authors cease to distinguish between the different Sarmatian tribes, and instead refer to all as Sarmatians. In the late 4th century, two Sarmatian peoples were mentioned—the Argaragantes and the Limigantes, who lived on opposite sides of the Tisza river. One theory is that these two tribes were formed when the Roxolani conquered the Iazyges, after which the Iazyges became the Limigantes and the Roxolani became the Argaragantes. Another theory is that a group of Slavic tribesmen who gradually migrated into the area were subservient to the Iazyges; the Iazyges became known as the Argaragantes and the Slavs were the Limigantes. Yet another theory holds that the Roxolani were integrated into the Iazyges. Regardless of which is true, in the 5th century both tribes were conquered by the Goths and, by the time of Attila, they were absorbed into the Huns. ## Foreign relations ### The Roman Empire The Iazyges often harassed the Roman Empire after their arrival in the Pannonian Basin, but they never rose to become a true threat. During the 1st century, Rome used diplomacy to secure their northern borders, especially on the Danube, by way of befriending the tribes, and by sowing distrust amongst the tribes against each other. Rome defended their Danubian border not just by way of repelling raids, but also by levying diplomatic influence against the tribes and launching punitive expeditions. The combination of diplomatic influence and swift punitive expeditions allowed the Romans to force the various tribes, including the Iazyges, into becoming client states of the Roman Empire. Even after the Romans abandoned Dacia, they consistently projected their power north of the Danube against the Sarmatian tribes, especially during the reigns of Constantine, Constantius II, and Valentinian. To this end, Constantine constructed a permanent bridge across the middle Danube in order to improve logistics for campaigns against the Goths and Sarmatians. Another key part of the relationship between the Roman Empire and the Sarmatian tribes was the settling of tribes in Roman lands, with emperors often accepting refugees from the Sarmatian tribes into nearby Roman territory. When the Huns arrived in the Russian steppes and conquered the tribes that were there, they often lacked the martial ability to force the newly conquered tribes to stay, leading to tribes like the Greuthungi, Vandals, Alans, and Goths migrating and settling within the Roman Empire rather than remaining subjects of the Huns. The Roman Empire benefited from accepting these refugee tribes, and thus continued to allow them to settle, even after treaties were made with Hunnic leaders such as Rugila and Attila that stipulated that the Roman Empire would reject all refugee tribes, with rival or subject tribes of the Huns being warmly received by Roman leaders in the Balkans. #### Archeology Around the time of Trajan, the Romans established routes between Dacia and Pannonia, with evidence of Roman goods appearing in Iazygian land occurring around 100AD, largely centered near important river crossings. Additionally, a small number of Roman inscriptions and buildings were made during this period, which scholar Nicholas Higham states suggests either a high degree of Romanization or the presence of diplomatic or military posts within Iazygian territory. Roman goods were widespread in the second and early third centuryAD, especially near Aquincum, the capital of Roman Pannonia Inferior, and the area east to the Tizsa valley. ### Roxolani The Iazyges also had a strong relationship with the Roxolani, another Sarmatian tribe, both economically and diplomatically. During the second Dacian War, where the Iazyges supported the Romans, while the Roxolani supported the Dacians, the Iazyges and Roxolani remained neutral to each other. After the Roman annexation of Dacia, the two tribes were effectively isolated from each other, until the 179 peace concession from Emperor Marcus Aurelius which permitted the Iazyges and Roxolani to travel through Dacia, subject to the approval of the governor. Because of the new concession allowing them to trade with the Roxolani they could, for the first time in several centuries, trade indirectly with the Pontic Steppe and the Black Sea. It is believed the Iazyges traveled through Small Wallachia until they reached the Wallachian Plain, but there is little archeological evidence to prove this. Cypraea shells began to appear in this area in the last quarter of the 2nd century. ### Quadi The scholar Higham suggests that there was some degree of "long-term collaboration" between the Iazyges and the Quadi, noting that they were allied in the late 2nd century AD, and that the Iazyges ceded the western portions of their land to them shortly after arriving in the Pannonian Basin, apparently without conflict. ## List of princes - Gesander ? – ? - Banadaspus: ? – 174 AD - Zanticus: 174 AD – ? - Benga and Babaï: co-rulers in 470–471 AD ## See also - Zichia - Záh (gens) - Jasz people - Gothic Wars - Pannonian Avars

Mega Man X5

2000 video game

Mega Man X5, known as Rockman X5 (ロックマンX5) in Japan, is an action-platform video game and the fifth main installment in the Mega Man X series. Developed by Capcom, it was first released for the PlayStation in Japan on November 30, 2000, and in North America and PAL territories the following year. In 2002, the game was ported to Microsoft Windows as retail packages in both Japan and North America. Players control X and Zero, heroes who traverse eight selectable stages and acquire the special weapon of each stage's boss. Mega Man X5 was intended to be the final game in its series, according to Capcom producer Keiji Inafune. Its story is set in the 22nd century, in a world where humans coexist with androids called "Reploids". X and Zero once again face their nemesis Sigma who aims to destroy the planet and infect all Reploids with a virus. The design of X's upgrades, new villains, and new tactics for the platform franchise were the biggest focus from Capcom when developing the game. It was a commercial success and garnered a generally positive reception among critics, many of whom agreed that it would satisfy diehard fans of the series despite the stale gameplay formula and presentation of the story. It was re-released in 2006 as part of the Mega Man X Collection for the PlayStation 2 and in the Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 in 2018 for additional consoles. ## Gameplay The gameplay in Mega Man X5 is similar to the previous installments of the Mega Man X series. The player is presented with a series of action-platforming stages that can be cleared in any order desired. The core aspects of gameplay are largely unchanged from previous installments, though X5 differs from its predecessor in a few notable ways. Before each level, players can choose whether to play as the shooter X or the swordsman Zero. X focuses on distanced combat using his X Buster while the latter instead uses his Z Sword in close combat. Defeating bosses results in the two characters gaining new weapons and techniques, respectively. and for the first time in the franchise, players are able to change the game's difficulty. The characters gain the new movement mechanics of crouching and hanging from ropes. Between the two characters, the one not chosen at the start of the game is disadvantaged – X loses his "Fourth Armor" (a less-powerful recreation of his armor from Mega Man X4), and Zero loses his Z-Buster weapon. X has four enhancing armor sets available: the Fourth Armor, the secret Ultimate Armor, and two others that must be assembled from parts found in capsules. X cannot wear any individual armor part without the rest of the matching set. Zero can find and enter Dr. Light's armor capsules, but in most cases he cannot use the armor parts inside – he can only retrieve them to deliver to X. If Zero reaches the capsule containing X's Ultimate Armor, Dr. Light offers him the "Black Zero" armor instead, which enhances his abilities. After the introduction stage, the player has 16 attempts to challenge four Maverick bosses in stages to complete the Enigma weapon needed to protect the planet from a space colony. A mid-boss named Dynamo also appears at predetermined intervals, stalling the player for time. If X is infected by a sufficient number of Sigma's viruses, his health begins to rapidly decline. Zero is affected differently by this level of infection – he becomes briefly invincible, with increased attack power. At any point between levels, the player can choose to fire the Enigma at the Eurasia, though the chance of success increases as the game progresses. ## Plot Like other entries in the series, Mega Man X5 takes place in "21XX", an unspecified year in the 22nd century, where humans have adapted to life with intelligent androids dubbed "Reploids". However, a series Reploids become Mavericks, causing crimes and chaos. The series' primary antagonist is Sigma, a Maverick who spreads a computer virus across the Earth, causing a series of new infected Mavserick. He also hires a Reploid mercenary named Dynamo to hijack the space colony Eurasia to make it collide with Earth. To prevent Eurasia from striking the planet, the Maverick Hunters pursue two options: firing a powerful cannon called "Enigma" at Eurasia to vaporize it, or failing that, launching a space shuttle and piloting it into the colony to destroy it. To maximize their chances of success, Hunters X and Zero are dispatched to collect parts for the two devices with the aid of their new teammates Alia, Douglas, and Signas. The necessary parts to upgrade the Enigma and shuttle are held by eight Mavericks, and X and Zero must defeat them to claim the parts. Whether the Enigma succeeds or fails, a new virus appears on the Earth, identified by Alia as the Sigma virus. If either one of the two methods succeeds, X and Zero proceed to hunt for the source of the virus. If the shuttle fails or if time expires, the colony crashes into the planet, nearly destroying it, and Zero is then infected by the virus. In either case, once the virus' origin is discovered, the Hunters investigate, penetrating a bizarre underground fortress. In the fortress, X and the infected Zero cross paths, where mutual suspicion and mistrust leads them to duel. After the duel, the story diverges into a few possible paths, each with its own ending. If Zero's mind is unaffected by the virus, he saves himself and X from Sigma, and they confront Sigma together. Upon defeating him, Sigma attempts to make the Hunters' victory for naught by taking them down with him. X tries to save Zero but is ambushed by Sigma and both Hunters are critically damaged. At this point, the endings diverge again depending on the player's chosen character. If Zero defeats Sigma, he reflects on his origin and life before dying. If X defeats Sigma, he inherits Zero's beam saber weapon and lives on as a Hunter. If Zero becomes a Maverick as a result of the virus, he sacrifices himself to save X from Sigma, and X continues on alone. Upon defeating Sigma, X is badly damaged. A mysterious figure recovers him but deletes all his memories of Zero. ## Development Mega Man X5 was originally intended to be the final game in the Mega Man X series. According to producer Keiji Inafune, he had little to do with the title and told the staff his idea. Much to the dismay of Inafune, Capcom decided to publish Mega Man X6 the following year, in which Zero survived his fight from X5. Haruki Suetsugu, an artist for Mega Man X4, designed almost all of the characters and promotional artwork for X5, adding various details to differentiate the characters from each other. Advancements in technology allowed the team to improve the visuals of the game over the previous installment. X5 uses still images without voiceovers instead of the animated cutscenes displayed in X4, which bothered Suetsugu as the price players paid was the same as before. Artist Hitoshi Ariga agreed with this sentiment as the boss characters were unvoiced. Suetsugu believed that the navigator Alia might be the most fitting heroine in the series in contrast to the tragic Iris from Mega Man X4. Alia stood out as the only female character, which Suetsugu did not mind since the game is aimed towards a young demographic. As the idea of having a calm woman as navigator proved difficult to execute, the other navigator Roll Caskett from Mega Man Legends was used as a reference. The villain Dynamo was based on Western movies, with a design that combined features from X and Zero. X's new Falcon Armor was designed by Ryuji Higurashi to resemble a bird with a beak-shaped chest piece, wings coming out of the back, and a talon-like arm cannon. Suetsugu designed the Gaea Armor to resemble Sanagiman from the Inazuman manga series. Other new characters were introduced to expand the roster of the Maverick Hunters beyond just the fighters, with Signus being the most mature among them and possibly having connections to the Repliforce from X4. Douglas and Lifesaver were created as minor characters for the roles of mechanic and doctor, respectively. The game does not employ voice acting, except that yells in the Japanese version were performed by Showtaro Morikubo, who replaced Kentarō Itō as X's voice actor, and by Ryōtarō Okiayu for Zero. Morikubo found the task challenging as he was debuting as a musician during the release of X5. The Maverick bosses in the English localization of the game are named after members of the American hard rock band Guns N' Roses. Capcom voice actress Alyson Court, who was involved in the game's English localization, chose the new names as a tribute to her then-husband's love of the band. For the Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 release, the names of the Maverick bosses were changed to translations of their original Japanese names. The musical score for Mega Man X5 was composed by Naoto Tanaka, Naoya Kamisaka, and Takuya Miyawaki. The Japanese version of the game features "Monkey" as the opening theme and "Mizu no Naka" (水の中, Inside the Water) as the closing theme, both composed and performed by Morikubo and his band Mosquito Milk. The theme songs were included in the Rockman Theme Song Collection, published by Suleputer in 2002, and all of the game's instrumental and vocal music was included on the Capcom Music Generation: Rockman X1 \~ X6 soundtrack, released by Suleputer in 2003. The game was first released in Japan for the PlayStation on November 30, 2000. The North American release followed the next month on January 31, 2001. It was later released in Europe on August 3, 2001. A Microsoft Windows port was first released to retail in Asia on July 30, 2001, in Japan on May 24, 2002, and in North America on August 20, 2002. The game was included in the North American Mega Man X Collection for GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2006. In 2014, the PlayStation Network released Mega Man X5 alongside X4. It became available for Windows via Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch as a part of Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 on July 24, 2018, worldwide and July 26, 2018, in Japan. ## Reception Mega Man X5 was generally well-received as an appealing sidescroller, although several sites commented that it did not contribute new major ideas to the franchise. GameRevolution enjoyed the contrasting gameplay system between X and Zero as well as the improved graphics. Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine stated that the game's difficulty felt harsher than previous installments as a result of enemy placement but still appreciated the focus on more checkpoints and continues, which balance it out. While they also appreciated the storytelling and multiple endings, they panned the idea of being forced into several cutscenes in the middle of the game without offering new ideas. Eurogamer agreed that players would need to properly collect most power-ups, like heart-shaped items, to make X and Zero able to fight the bosses. He found the system so repetitive that he instead recommended playing the related series, Legends, which he finds more innovative. Electronic Gaming Monthly found several parts of the game to be similar to Mega Man X4 and that the characters' interactions were cheesy. GameSpot said the gameplay would appeal to non-Mega Man fans and gamers in general due to the attention given to detail and the design of the new bosses. GamePro was more positive on the new content and improvements made over X4 and found it important for most fans. Regarding the game's presentation, responses were mixed. GameRevolution enjoyed the narrative associated with Armageddon but still felt it was poorly executed due to having to retread previous stages at the cost of losing hours to attack the colony. Both IGN and GameSpot enjoyed the presentation for relying on nostalgic tracks fitting for popular Super Nintendo games. The PC port was also the focus of some reviews, with Absolute Games criticizing the lack of noticeable improvements to the visuals or gameplay compared to Mega Man X4. On the other hand, Wolf praised the handling of stages and skills needed to defeat the bosses. According to the Japanese publication Famitsu, Mega Man X5 was the third best-selling video game in Japan during its release week, with 46,033 copies sold. It placed at number eight the following week with an additional 22,963 copies sold. Media Create sales information showed that the game was the 96th best-selling video game in Japan in 2000. Dengeki Online reported that Mega Man X5 sold a total of 215,687 copies in Japan by the end of 2001, listing it as the 132nd best-selling game of the year in the region. Toy Retail Sales Tracking (TRST) data showed that X5 was the fifth best-selling PlayStation game in North America for the month of February 2001. The game was eventually re-released as part of Sony's PlayStation The Best for Family collection of budget titles in Japan.

Hubert William Lewis

Recipient of the Victoria Cross

Lance Corporal Hubert William Lewis (1 May 1896 – 22 February 1977) was a Welsh soldier and recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. Born in Milford Haven, he left school at 13 to work in a local fish market. He enlisted in the Welsh Regiment in 1914 and, after serving briefly in France, he was reposted to the Macedonian front of the First World War. During a night raid on German trenches, despite being wounded twice, he single-handedly captured three enemy soldiers before carrying a wounded officer back to safety under artillery fire. For his actions he was awarded the Victoria Cross, becoming the youngest Welsh recipient of the award. He later performed a similar feat when carrying a captain to safety in 1918 during an assault on an enemy position. After the war, he returned to Milford Haven where he married and raised three children. He continued working in the local fish market, first as a trader before becoming the foreman for an ice company at the site for over 40 years. He served in the Home Guard during the Second World War. Prior to his death in 1977, he was the last surviving Welsh Victoria Cross recipient from the First World War. ## Early life Lewis was born on 1 May 1896 in Robert Street in the coastal town of Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. He was the second of four children born to Adrian Lewis, a brass moulder and fitter at Milford Haven docks, and his wife Sarah (née Broome). His father was known as "Stokey" Lewis and Hubert became known as "Young Stokey" as a child before taking on the original nickname as he grew older. The family later moved to 27 Dartmouth Gardens and Lewis attended Milford Haven National School as well as a Wesleyan Sunday School. After leaving school at the age of 13, Lewis went to work as a packer in the town's fish market for local businessman George Bradbury. A local newspaper reporter described him as an "unpredictable prankster" and recounted incidents where Lewis lightly nicked the reporter with a fish knife and where he once "swiped" the editor of the Western Telegraph with a hake. He also played amateur football for local side Milford Haven Stars. ## First World War In early September 1914, 18-year old Lewis attended a recruitment meeting organised by a Major Birt, who was also his father's employer, which drew crowds of 2000–3000 people before enlisting in the 11th (Service) Battalion of the Welsh Regiment which had been formed little over a month before as the Cardiff Commercial Battalion, a pals unit. At 10 a.m. the next day, Lewis, was one of 75 local volunteers who left Milford Haven before being split into smaller groups with Lewis and 45 others travelling to Maindy Barracks in Cardiff, the rest joining the Royal Engineers or the Royal Artillery. Two days later, his unit was moved to Lewes as part of the 67th Brigade. He also underwent training at Eastbourne, Hastings, Aldershot and Seaford. On 5 September 1915, just over a year after enlisting, Lewis and his unit sailed to Boulogne, France from Southampton. Several days after his arrival, he was attached to the 9th (Service) Battalion, Border Regiment as a machine gunner. ### Victoria Cross Soon after, Bulgaria entered the war on the German side. Lewis' regiment was one of several that were removed from the Western Front and posted to Greece to prepare for a possible attack by enemy forces on the Macedonian front under the command of Lieutenant-General Bryan Mahon of the British Salonika Army. The force initially entrenched themselves in the Thessaloniki area in preparation for an attack but the decision was eventually made to launch an offense against the enemy forces. On 17 October 1916, the order was given for Lewis' battalion to launch a raid on German trenches near Dorsale. However, bad weather delayed the attack for several days before it was eventually launched at 9 p.m. on 22 October. The battalion was split into four parties with Lewis assigned to "D" Party. During the initial rush, D Party was spotted by a German sentry after crossing only 300 yards (270 m) of ground, allowing the enemy forces to open fire with machine guns and artillery. They were targeted by "intense" shelling for 40 minutes during which Lewis received a wound to his arm. However, he turned away medical assistance after seeing more badly wounded men needing attention. During a brief respite in the shelling, Captain Guthrie Morgan led a charge of around 150 men, including Lewis, into the German trenches where they were able to gain control after a period of hand-to-hand combat. During the fighting, Lewis received a second wound as the Germans attempted to counterattack but refused treatment for a second time. He continued through the enemy trench where he came across three German soldiers. Using his rifle butt and bayonet, Lewis briefly fought with the men before they surrendered to him, in an incident witnessed by Captain Morgan and another soldier. The German forces launched another counterattack, this time successful, and Lewis and his battalion were ordered to retreat. In the descent back to their lines, Lewis heard the cries of a wounded officer, Lieutenant Turner, who was lying on the fire step of a trench, and, despite suffering from two wounds himself, carried the wounded soldier over his shoulder the rest of the way through enemy artillery fire. They reached safety at 4:30 a.m. the following morning at which point Lewis let down Turner before collapsing though exhaustion. For his actions, Lewis was awarded for the Victoria Cross (VC). His award was announced on 15 December 1916 in the London Gazette, the citation reading: > For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty during a raid. > > On reaching the enemy trenches Private Lewis was twice wounded, but refused to be attended to, and showed great gallantry in searching enemy dug-outs. He was again wounded and again refused attendance. At this point three of the enemy were observed to be approaching, and Private Lewis immediately attacked them single-handed, capturing all. > > Subsequently, during the retirement, he went to the assistance of a wounded man, and under heavy shell and rifle fire brought him to our lines, on reaching which he collapsed. Private Lewis showed throughout a brilliant example of courage, endurance and devotion to duty. Lewis returned home in January 1917, attending a press conference at The Grand Hotel in Cardiff where he stated "I joined The Welsh Regiment as a raw recruit, and I am proud of the fact that I have not disgraced the honour and proud record of the regiment." He also corrected errors in the reporting of his actions, including the number of wounds he had received which had initially been reported as three. He later returned to his hometown Milford Haven, where he was given a gold watch, before receiving his VC from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 5 February 1917. At the age of 20, he was the youngest Welsh recipient of the award. ### Later actions Only ten days after being awarded his VC, Lewis returned to the front lines of the Balkans campaign. In June 1918, Lewis again received praise for his bravery under fire when he rescued Captain Morgan during an assault near Salonika. After seeing his captain fall, he rushed to his aid despite suffering the effects of poisonous gas and fighting off nearby Bulgarian troops. He then carried Morgan back to safety. Morgan later wrote to Lewis and stated "It is impossible for me to express how grateful I am to you for saving my life...You certainly deserve a Bar to your Victoria Cross." However, he was not put forward for the award, only one other soldier (Noel Godfrey Chavasse) received a second VC during the First World War. He was also awarded the Médaille militaire by France in July 1917. He was promoted to lance corporal on 16 April 1919. ## Later life At the end of the hostilities, Lewis returned to his hometown Milford Haven and continued work at the fish market where he worked as a merchant before his employer went out of business during the 1920s. He took several jobs in order to earn a living before again returning to the fish market to work for the Milford Haven Ice Company, unloading delivery lorries. He eventually became the foreman for the company at the site where he worked for a further 43 years and was locally known by the nickname "VC Lewis". Lewis married his fiancée, Edith Eveline Etherington, in Haverfordwest on 9 October 1920 and the couple had three sons, Edward, Vernon and Arthur. In 1921 he was asked to unveil the County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and was given a Certificate of Good Service. One of his sons, Vernon, a flight sergeant in the RAF, was killed in a nighttime bombing raid over Germany in August 1943 at the age of 22; his Avro Lancaster was shot down by an enemy night fighter. Lewis subsequently received his son's posthumous Distinguished Flying Medal from King George VI in May 1946. He also suffered further loss during the 1960s when his grandson was accidentally killed by a reversing bus. Lewis became active in the veteran community and was the vice-president of the Milford Haven branch of The Royal British Legion. He became friends with fellow VC recipient Ivor Rees. In 1964, the pair, along with another VC recipient, Edward Thomas Chapman, attended the film premiere of Zulu where they dined with Michael Caine. His wife Edith died in 1969. Lewis died eight years later in his hometown of Milford Haven on 22 February 1977 at the age of 80. He was buried in St. Katherine's Cemetery next to his wife. Prior to his death, he was the last surviving Welsh recipient of the Victoria Cross from the First World War. Lewis's medals, including his VC, were sold at a Sotheby's auction in 1993 for £26,450. They were later bought by Lord Ashcroft in 1999 and his VC is on display in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery at the Imperial War Museum, London.

Mermaid vs Sailor

Mermaid vs Sailor is the first extended play by Welsh singer-songwriter Marina Diamandis, released under the stage name Marina and the Diamonds. The EP was independently released on 23 November 2007 and distributed via her official profile on Myspace. It contains six demos recorded by Diamandis at her home and approximately 70 CD-R copies were created. She also distributed the EP to several record labels with the hope that she would secure a contract; she ultimately was signed to 679 Recordings in 2008. The EP is a collection of indie pop tracks that heavily utilise keyboards in their production. Diamandis wrote and produced all of the six songs that appear on the EP by herself using the computer software program GarageBand. Several of these songs later appeared on other projects by Diamandis, such as her following release The Crown Jewels EP (2009) and debut studio album The Family Jewels (2010). Retrospectively, Mermaid vs Sailor received generally positive reviews from music critics, who felt it was indicative of Diamandis' potential as an artist. ## Background and release Marina and the Diamonds launched her career as a musician at 18 years old, when she began auditioning for roles in London-based musicals. Despite attending several auditions, she was unable to secure roles and began self-composing and producing demos using the digital audio workstation GarageBand on her personal laptop computer instead. Around this time, she began to learn how to properly play the keyboard, an instrument commonly featured throughout Mermaid vs Sailor. After completing several recordings, she compiled them into a demo tape and submitted it to several major record labels for consideration. Mermaid vs Sailor was released on 23 November 2007 through Diamandis' official Myspace profile page. It could be purchased digitally as a paid download or as a handmade CD-R self-distributed by Diamandis. According to her, she produced and packaged approximately 70 physical copies of the EP. The disc came inside a transparent sleeve lined with stickers, hard candy, and ribbon. Diamandis collected payments of the release through the use of PayPal transactions. Due to the limited quantity distribution of the EP, she later suggested that fans would have to resort to using eBay in order to obtain a copy. Unofficial record label Story Tailors productions later created a bootleg version of the release on 10" vinyl in November 2009, limited to just 35 copies. During her time spent on Myspace, Diamandis referred to herself in her biography section as "an indie artist with pop goals". Her inspiration, musically, at this point of her career drew from artists like Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears. However, she distinguished herself from these artists by applying a unique "voice and melodic style" to glam pop and ballad-style songs. She was also influenced by outsider musician Daniel Johnston, which inspired Diamandis to compose her own music. ## Songs and lyrics In total, Mermaid vs Sailor contains six songs written, produced, and recorded by Diamandis. Three of the songs on the EP were eventually reworked on later releases by the artist. Re-recorded versions of "Seventeen" and "Hermit the Frog" both appear on her debut studio album, The Family Jewels (2010), although the former song is only included as a bonus track on the Japan deluxe and United States standard editions. Both re-released versions of the songs received additional production from English musician Liam Howe. "Simplify", the EP's fifth track, was also re-recorded, this time for inclusion on The Crown Jewels EP (2009) with production credited to Martin Craft. Mermaid vs Sailor opens with "Seventeen", a song that tells the story of an undisclosed event that occurred in Diamandis' life when she was 17 years old. "Horror Pop" follows, a song that makes several references to horoscopes and astrological signs. Third track "Hermit the Frog" is written in D minor and is a play on words of the Muppets character Kermit the Frog. "Daddy Was a Sailor" and "Simplify" are the EP's fourth and fifth tracks, respectively. The former song was described by Diamandis as her favourite song that uses an Argos keyboard, while the latter received a lyrical change prior to release, switching the line "Monopoly is underrated" out for "board games are underrated". The release closes with sixth track "Plastic Rainbow", which is about her personal experience of "being a fake" for two years and "moving onto what I really was which was myself." In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Diamandis revealed that "Plastic Rainbow" was the first song she had ever written at around the age of 19 or 20, which gave her a feeling of wanting to become a songwriter. ## Critical reception and impact Mermaid vs Sailor received favourable reviews from music critics. Rick Fulton from the Daily Record suggested that the EP generated extensive exposure for Diamandis as an artist and felt it helped to establish her as "yet another MySpace success story". Angie Bhandal, writing for Music Bloggery, considered the EP a charming effort that "instantly [revealed] something about her music that record labels wanted a piece of"; further in her review, she acknowledged that her overall reaction to the EP was "cringe" but said that later releases such as The Family Jewels managed to reveal the same quirky sound of Mermaid vs Sailor. In 2008, a year after the release of the EP, Diamandis was signed during a bidding war to London-based 679 Recordings, a subdivision of the Warner Music Group record label. The popularity of her Myspace profile and Mermaid vs Sailor led to her discovery by Neon Gold Records head Derek Davies, who worked with Diamandis for a period of six months. He also booked her as the opening act for select shows with Australian singer Gotye. ## Track listing All tracks written and produced by Marina and the Diamonds. ## Release history

University of Colorado Denver

Public university in Denver, Colorado

The University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver, Colorado–Denver) is a public research university located in downtown Denver, Colorado. It is part of the University of Colorado system. Established in 1912 as an extension of the University of Colorado Boulder, CU Denver attained university status and became an independent institution in 1973. CU Denver is the largest research university in Colorado, and is classified among R1: Doctoral Universities - Very High Research Activity. The university's graduate programs award more master's degrees than any other institution in the state, serving roughly 5,000 students annually. Notably, CU Denver makes up one-third of the Auraria Campus in downtown Denver, along with the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver. This arrangement of three separate institutions sharing the same campus is unique, as it is the only such campus in the United States. ## History ### University of Colorado System Anschutz Medical Campus The University of Colorado created the Department of Medicine and Surgery in September 1883 in the Old Main building on the Boulder campus. The Department of Nursing opened in 1898. By 1892, the last two years of classes were taught in Denver because the larger population afforded more practical experience. This practice triggered something of a turf battle with the University of Denver's medical school and the subsequent legal battle went to the state Supreme Court. In 1897, the court found that CU's charter restricted them to Boulder. However, in 1910, CU got an amendment to the state Constitution passed which allowed them to move back to Denver. In 1911, the School of Medicine combined with the Denver and Gross Medical College to form a larger school with a more comprehensive program, paving the way for the school's permanent move to Denver. In 1925, the School of Medicine moved to the campus on Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in Denver. This would become the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC). In 1995, the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center was officially put on the Base Realignment and Closure list, after which officials from the Health Sciences Center, University of Colorado Hospital and the City of Aurora presented a proposal to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. to repurpose the decommissioned base as an academic health center. In 1999, the Army base was closed under the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure action. In 2004, the first UCHSC labs moved from Denver to the research towers on the Fitzsimons campus. In 2006, the Fitzsimons campus of UCHSC was renamed the Anschutz Medical Campus in recognition of philanthropic donations from Philip and Nancy Anschutz. By the end of 2008, academic and research operations of all CU Denver health sciences schools and colleges relocated from the Ninth Avenue and Colorado Boulevard campus to the new Anschutz campus, joining the affiliated University of Colorado Hospital and Children's Hospital. In 2014, the University of Colorado appointed separate chancellors for the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, effectively separating the two campuses. The campuses offer some dual campus programs, but the Anschutz Medical Campus is a separate institution and is independently referred to as CU Anschutz or CU Anschutz Medical Campus in official materials, and the Denver Campus is independently referred to as CU Denver in official materials. ### University of Colorado Denver The University of Colorado Denver began as the Extension Center of University of Colorado's Department of Correspondence and Extension, which was established in 1912. In 1938, the Extension Center acquired permanent quarters in Denver in the C.A. Johnson Building at 509 17th Street, where a single, full-time faculty member ran the school with the help of part-time teachers. In 1947, the Extension Center moved into the Fraternal Building at 1405 Glenarm Place. In 1956, the university acquired the Denver Tramway Company Building at 14th and Arapahoe Streets (now the Hotel Teatro and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Tramway building). In 1964, the Extension Center was renamed the University of Colorado – Denver Center. On January 11, 1973, lawmakers, upon proclamation of the governor, amended the state constitution to establish additional CU campuses, transforming the University of Colorado—Denver Center into the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver). `Between 1973 and 1976, the State of Colorado built the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) on a 127-acre (0.51 km`^`2``) downtown campus to be shared by the University of Colorado Denver, the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver. In 1977, the Denver campus expanded to the newly opened AHEC, and later to several buildings extending into downtown Denver.` ### Merger, subsequent separation, and renaming In the summer of 2004, the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center merged to create the University of Colorado Denver and Health Sciences Center (UCDHSC). On October 29, 2007, the board of regents voted to rename UCDHSC as the University of Colorado Denver, consisting of the Anschutz Medical Campus and the Denver Campus. In August 2011, the regents approved a name change to the University of Colorado Denver \| Anschutz Medical Campus (including the vertical bar), while the legal name of the dual institution remained University of Colorado Denver. However, in 2014, the University of Colorado appointed separate chancellors for the University of Colorado Denver and the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, effectively separating the two campuses. The campuses offer some dual campus programs, but the Anschutz Medical Campus is independently referred to as CU Anschutz or CU Anschutz Medical Campus in official materials, and the Denver Campus is independently referred to as CU Denver in official materials. The marketing campaign ALL FOUR:COLORADO emphasizes the distinct identities of the Denver and Anschutz campuses alongside the other CU institutions, Boulder and Colorado Springs. ### Beall's List The university is known for its association with Beall's List, created by its former faculty member Jeffrey Beall and used by universities worldwide, and ultimately for the role the university played in the disappearance of the list. In an interview in 2018, Beall stated that "my university began to attack me in several ways. They launched a research misconduct investigation against me (after seven months, the result of the investigation was that no misconduct had occurred). They also put an unqualified, mendacious supervisor over me, and he constantly attacked and harassed me. I decided I could no longer safely publish the list with my university threatening me in these ways." ## Campuses ### CU Denver Campus CU Denver, part of the Auraria Campus, is located to the southwest of downtown Denver in the Auraria Neighborhood, on Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway. In a unique arrangement, CU Denver shares certain facilities (such as the Tivoli Student Union) on the Auraria Campus with two additional institutes of higher education, Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Community College of Denver. Proprietary facilities such as the CU Denver Student Commons Building are not shared. CU Denver Regional Transportation District's (RTD) Light Rail has two stops on the Auraria Campus: Colfax at Auraria and Auraria West Campus. A student wellness center opened in Summer of 2018. CU Denver features both undergraduate and graduate courses, with graduate students making up 32 percent of enrolled students. The campus is located in the heart of the central business district and is in close proximity to the Pepsi Center, Elitch Gardens, the Colorado Convention Center, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Larimer Square, and the 16th Street Mall. The reclaimed Tivoli brewery, which closed in 1969, houses the student union. ## Institutional profile University of Colorado Denver offers bachelor's, master's, doctoral, and first professional degrees. ### Enrollment In addition to on campus students the university has an additional 11,000 online students. 76% of the student population are full-time students, 16% are out-of-state residents, and international students make up 6% of total enrollment. 15,490 students are enrolled at CU (Fall, 2019). 41% of undergraduate students and 55% of new freshmen at CU Denver belong to an ethnic minority. The average entering ACT score for new freshmen at CU Denver is 22.9 composite. The average entering SAT scores at CU Denver is 549 Math and 542 Verbal. The average high school GPA for new freshmen is 3.37. The most popular undergraduate majors at CU Denver are biology, psychology, pre-engineering, music, and economics. International students on the campus arrive from 125 countries. The 2020 average 6-year graduation rate was 48%. The CU Denver campus has 14,000 enrolled students as of Fall 2022. 52 percent of undergraduate students and 25 percent of graduate students belong to minority groups. U.S. News gives the school a diversity index rating of 0.68, ranking 75th of national universities. ## Academics University of Colorado Denver has the largest graduate business school and graduate school of education in Colorado. ### Libraries The Auraria library on the CU Denver campus downtown serves the three institutions that share the campus—CU Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and Community College of Denver. The library houses nearly 1 million print books, 130,000 e-books, 44,000 e-journals and 300 databases. ### Schools and colleges The university offers degrees in a wide variety of academic fields such as music industry, engineering, business, film & television, culture, history, language, digital design, the natural sciences, and biomedical sciences. CU Denver hosts 8 schools and colleges: the College of Architecture and Planning, the College of Arts & Media, The Business School, the School of Education & Human Development, the College of Engineering, Design, and Computing, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs and its Presidential Climate Action Project, and the Graduate School. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is CU Denver's largest school offering 23 baccalaureate degrees, 17 master's degrees, and 4 PhD programs. The College of Arts & Media is home to The Music & Entertainment Industry Studies (MEIS) Department, the largest music department in the Rocky Mountain Region. CU Denver sponsors the only college of architecture and planning in Colorado. The College of Architecture and Planning is located on 14th street, offering graduate degrees in architecture, urban design, historic preservation, urban and regional planning, and landscape architecture. In the engineering areas, the downtown campus has worked with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. #### School of Medicine for the University of Colorado System The University of Colorado School of Medicine is the medical school of the University of Colorado system. It is separate from the University of Colorado Denver, located at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado, one of the four University of Colorado system campuses. The medical school and CU Denver offer some dual programs. #### College of Arts & Media The College of Arts & Media (CAM) was the first college in Colorado devoted exclusively to Arts and Entertainment. The college is focused on the intersections of arts, technology, and commerce. With over 1,300 students in the college, it is one of the largest arts colleges in the Western U.S. CAM houses three departments: Music & Entertainment Industry Studies, Film & Television, and Visual Arts. The Music & Entertainment Industry Studies (MEIS) is one of the only contemporary focused music departments in the U.S. It is nationally known and ranked as one of the top contemporary music departments. MEIS attracts students from throughout the country and has over 500 enrolled students. There are currently four emphasis programs in MEIS: Music Business, Recording Arts, Music Performance, and Singer/Songwriter. The facilities used by the program include five recording studios, 16 practices rooms, a piano lab, a 200-seat King Center Recital Hall, and a 500-seat King Center Concert Hall. The Film & Television Program is the only BFA film and television program in Colorado. Over 250 students are enrolled in the department. The curriculum is hands-on and students generally start making films in Production One during the second semester of their freshman year. The Visual Arts Department houses programs in Art History, 3D Digital Animation, Photography, Digital Design, Illustration, and Art Practices. The college houses the renowned Digital Animation Center (DAC). All of the programs in the College of Arts & Media are hands-on and career focused. #### Graduate school The Graduate School at CU Denver \| Anschutz awards more graduate degrees than any other institution in Colorado. The school consists of nearly 60 graduate programs. The departments running these programs are housed in the schools and colleges on both campuses of the university. These offerings include both department-based and interdisciplinary programs in architecture and planning, arts and media, biomedical sciences, business, education and human development, engineering and applied sciences, humanities, sociology, applied mathematics, nursing, public affairs, public health, chemistry, and social sciences. Graduate programs at the Anschutz Medical Campus offer MS and PhD degrees focusing on basic, clinical and translational research in the biomedical sciences. #### Business School The University of Colorado Denver Business School is accredited by AACSB International. The school is accredited at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Business School is one of only a few schools in the US to have a separate accreditation for its Accounting program. Business is one of the school's most popular majors since it is located in the heart of Downtown Denver. The Business School has worked with some of Colorado's top businesses such as Molson Coors, Wells Fargo, First Bank and Frontier Airlines, who provide feedback on the school's curriculum. #### School of Public Affairs The School of Public Affairs at CU Denver is ranked 25th among schools of public affairs in the United States and is fully accredited by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA). The school offers a number of highly ranked programs, including environmental policy, nonprofit management and public management. The online Master of Criminal Justice program was recently ranked in the top 10 nationwide by U.S. News & World Report. Students can choose from a wide range of innovative Master of Public Affairs and Master of Criminal Justice concentrations. The school also offers a Ph.D. in Public Affairs and recently launched a highly successful Bachelor of Criminal Justice undergraduate degree. Through community events and the timely research of the Buechner Institute for Governance, the School of Public Affairs is committed to making a real impact in Colorado, the region and beyond. ### Rankings The graduate school ranked 68th in the biological sciences in 2007. The Music Business Program was ranked in the top 11 in the U.S. by billboard magazine in 2014. In 2009, the university ranked 34th on the Forbes list of best public colleges. For 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked the university 113th in Top Public Schools, 106th in Top Performers on Social Mobility, and 161th in Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs. In 2007, the Business School was the fifth Best Graduate School for Physician – Executives according to Modern Healthcare. ## Student life University of Colorado Denver has over 100 student organizations, honor societies, professional organizations and faith-based groups, that offer social, service, and professional opportunities for their members within the university and community. First time freshmen and first time international students at the downtown campus are encouraged to live on campus in the Campus Village Residence Halls, a student housing complex at the Auraria Campus for students, faculty and staff from any of the three schools that share the campus. CU Denver provides a variety of sports and recreation activities to students, faculty and staff, including personal training, intramural basketball, volleyball, soccer, squash, and tennis, and sports equipment check out for on or off campus use. The CU Denver student newspaper is called the "CU Denver Sentry". The Distinguished Lecture Series hosts an array of speakers, that have included David Horowitz and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. The Tivoli Student Union serves as a student center for the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado Denver. ### Club sports While CU Denver does not sponsor officially sanctioned collegiate athletic programs, the school does offer several club athletic teams. These include men's and women's basketball, men's soccer, men's volleyball, cheer, cycling, powerlifting, swimming, and tennis. CU Denver's club teams compete against other programs in Colorado and the greater mountain west region. ## Notable people ### Notable faculty - Jeffrey Beall, founder of Beall's list - Mary E. Guy, political scientist, public administration scholar - Mark A. Heckler, founding dean of its College of Arts and Media - Nobel Laureate Tom Cech, of CU Boulder, is an affiliated faculty with CU Denver's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. - Leo Franca from the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences has developed stabilized finite elements, important in computational mechanics and engineering simulation. - Lawrence Hunter is the founder of the International Society for Computational Biology, the world's oldest and largest professional organization for bioinformatics and computational biology. - Bill Porter, a famous audio engineer from the School of Music, created the first college program in audio engineering ### Notable alumni - Rick Alden, Class of 1996, Owner and CEO of Skullcandy - Insook Bhushan, Olympic table tennis player - Janet Bonnema, civil engineer, first woman allowed to enter a tunnel project in Colorado - Deanne Criswell, first female administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency - Daniel Gilbert, Class of 1981, author and Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - Christi Grimm, Inspector General for the United States Department of Health and Human Services - Michael B. Hancock, Class of 1995, 45th Mayor of Denver - Illenium, Class of 2013, American EDM DJ. - Russell Keanini, Class of 1987, American Mechanical Engineer - Aaron Kopp, Class of 2009, filmmaker, director/producer of Liyana - Amanda Kopp, Class of 2008, filmmaker, director/producer of Liyana - Frances McConnell-Mills, Class of 1918, toxicologist - John Morse, Class of 2001, former Majority Leader of the Colorado State Senate - Karen Middleton, Class of 1996, former member of the Colorado House of Representatives and current Executive Director of Cobalt (formerly known as NARAL Pro-Choice Colorado) - Julie Anne Peters, MBA 1989, American author of young adult fiction - Tenzing Rigdol, contemporary Tibetan artist and activist - Carlos Samour, Associate Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court - Isaac Slade, Class of 2005, former lead singer and co-founder of Denver-based rock band The Fray - Don Southerton, American writer - Gloria Tanner, Class of 1976, first African-American woman to be a Colorado State Senator - Jun Xia, Class of 1989, Chinese architect and lead designer of the Shanghai Tower

Pteranodon

Genus of pteranodontid pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous

Pteranodon (/tɪˈrænədɒn/); from Ancient Greek πτερόν (pteron 'wing') and ἀνόδων (anodon 'toothless') is a genus of pterosaur that included some of the largest known flying reptiles, with P. longiceps having a wingspan of over 6 m (20 ft). They lived during the late Cretaceous geological period of North America in present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota and Alabama. More fossil specimens of Pteranodon have been found than any other pterosaur, with about 1,200 specimens known to science, many of them well preserved with nearly complete skulls and articulated skeletons. It was an important part of the animal community in the Western Interior Seaway. Pteranodon was not a dinosaur. By definition, all dinosaurs belong to the group Dinosauria; Pteranodon belongs to the group Pterosauria. Nonetheless, Pteranodon is the most famous pterosaur, frequently featured in dinosaur media and strongly associated with dinosaurs by the general public. While not dinosaurs, pterosaurs such as Pteranodon form a clade closely related to dinosaurs as both fall within the clade Avemetatarsalia. ## Discovery and history ### First fossils Pteranodon was the first pterosaur found outside of Europe. Its fossils first were found by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1871, in the Late Cretaceous Smoky Hill Chalk deposits of western Kansas. These chalk beds were deposited at the bottom of what was once the Western Interior Seaway, a large shallow sea over what now is the midsection of the North American continent. These first specimens, YPM 1160 and YPM 1161, consisted of partial wing bones, as well as a tooth from the prehistoric fish Xiphactinus, which Marsh mistakenly believed to belong to this new pterosaur (all known pterosaurs up to that point had teeth). In 1871, Marsh named the find Pterodactylus oweni, assigning it to the well-known (but much smaller) European genus Pterodactylus. Marsh also collected more wing bones of the large pterosaur in 1871. Realizing that the name he had chosen had already been used for Harry Seeley's European pterosaur species Pterodactylus oweni in 1864, Marsh renamed his giant North American pterosaur Pterodactylus occidentalis, meaning "Western wing finger," in his 1872 description of the new specimen. He named two additional species, based on size differences: Pterodactylus ingens (the largest specimen so far), and Pterodactylus velox (the smallest). Meanwhile, Marsh's rival Edward Drinker Cope had unearthed several specimens of the large North American pterosaur. Based on these specimens, Cope named two new species, Ornithochirus umbrosus and Ornithochirus harpyia, in an attempt to assign them to the large European genus Ornithocheirus, though he misspelled the name (forgetting the 'e'). Cope's paper naming his species was published in 1872, just five days after Marsh's paper. This resulted in a dispute, fought in the published literature, over whose names had priority in what obviously were the same species. Cope conceded in 1875 that Marsh's names did have priority over his, but maintained that Pterodactylus umbrosus was a distinct species (but not genus) from any that Marsh had named previously. Re-evaluation by later scientists has supported Marsh's case, refuting Cope's assertion that P. umbrosus represented a larger, distinct species. ### A toothless pterosaur While the first Pteranodon wing bones were collected by Marsh and Cope in the early 1870s, the first Pteranodon skull was found on May 2, 1876, along the Smoky Hill River in Wallace County (now Logan County), Kansas, USA, by Samuel Wendell Williston, a fossil collector working for Marsh. A second, smaller skull soon was discovered as well. These skulls showed that the North American pterosaurs were different from any European species, in that they lacked teeth and had bony crests on their skulls. Marsh recognized this major difference, describing the specimens as "distinguished from all previously known genera of the order Pterosauria by the entire absence of teeth." Marsh recognized that this characteristic warranted a new genus, and he coined the name Pteranodon ("wing without tooth") in 1876. Marsh reclassified all the previously named North American species from Pterodactylus to Pteranodon. He considered the smaller skull to belong to Pteranodon occidentalis, based on its size. Marsh classified the larger skull, YPM 1117, in the new species Pteranodon longiceps, which he thought to be a medium-sized species in between the small P. occidentalis and the large P. ingens. Marsh also named several additional species: Pteranodon comptus and Pteranodon nanus were named for fragmentary skeletons of small individuals, while Pteranodon gracilis was based on a wing bone that he mistook for a pelvic bone. He soon realized his mistake, and re-classified that specimen again into a separate genus, which he named Nyctosaurus. P. nanus was also later recognized as a Nyctosaurus specimen. In 1892, Samuel Williston examined the question of Pteranodon classification. He noticed that, in 1871, Seeley had mentioned the existence of a partial set of toothless pterosaur jaws from the Cambridge Greensand of England, which he named Ornithostoma. Because the primary characteristic Marsh had used to separate Pteranodon from other pterosaurs was its lack of teeth, Williston concluded that "Ornithostoma" must be considered the senior synonym of Pteranodon. However, in 1901, Pleininger pointed out that "Ornithostoma" had never been scientifically described or even assigned a species name until Williston's work, and therefore had been a nomen nudum and could not beat out Pteranodon for naming priority. Williston accepted this conclusion and went back to calling the genus Pteranodon. However, both Williston and Pleininger were incorrect, because unnoticed by both of them was the fact that, in 1891, Seeley himself had finally described and properly named Ornithostoma, assigning it to the species O. sedgwicki. In the 2010s, more research on the identity of Ornithostoma showed that it was probably not Pteranodon or even a close relative, but may in fact have been an azhdarchoid, a different type of toothless pterosaur. ### Revising species Williston was also the first scientist to critically evaluate all of the pteranodon species classified by Cope and Marsh. He agreed with most of Marsh's classification, with a few exceptions. First, he did not believe that P. ingens and P. umbrosus could be considered synonyms, which even Cope had come to believe. He considered both P. velox and P. longiceps to be dubious; the first was based on non-diagnostic fragments, and the second, though known from a complete skull, probably belonged to one of the other, previously-named species. In 1903, Williston revisited the question of Pteranodon classification, and revised his earlier conclusion that there were seven species down to just three. He considered both P. comptus and P. nanus to be specimens of Nyctosaurus, and divided the others into small (P. velox), medium (P. occidentalis), and large species (P. ingens), based primarily on the shape of their upper arm bones. He thought P. longiceps, the only one known from a skull, could be a synonym of either P. velox or P. occidentalis, based on its size. In 1910, Eaton became the first scientist to publish a more detailed description of the entire Pteranodon skeleton, as it was known at the time. He used his findings to revise the classification of the genus once again based on a better understanding of the differences in pteranodont anatomy. Eaton conducted experiments using clay models of bones to help determine the effects of crushing and flattening on the shapes of the arm bones Williston had used in his own classification. Eaton found that most of the differences in bone shapes could be easily explained by the pressures of fossilization, and concluded that no Pteranodon skeletons had any significant differences from each other besides their size. Therefore, Eaton was left to decide his classification scheme based on differences in the skulls alone, which he assigned to species just as Marsh did, by their size. In the end, Eaton recognized only three valid species: P. occidentalis, P. ingens, and P. longiceps. The discovery of specimens with upright crests, classified by Harksen in 1966 as the new species Pteranodon sternbergi, complicated the situation even further, prompting another revision of the genus by Miller in 1972. Because it was impossible to determine crest shape for all of the species based on headless skeletons, Miller concluded that all Pteranodon species except the two based on skulls (P. longiceps and P. sternbergi) must be considered nomena dubia and abandoned. The skull Eaton thought belonged to P. ingens was placed in the new species Pteranodon marshi, and the skull Eaton assigned to P. occidentalis was re-named Pteranodon eatoni. Miller also recognized another species based on a skull with a crest similar to that of P. sternbergi; Miller named this Pteranodon walkeri. To help bring order to this tangle of names, Miller created three categories or "subgenera" for them. P. marshi and P. longiceps were placed in the subgenus Longicepia, though this was later changed to simply Pteranodon due to the rules of priority. P. sternbergi and P. walkeri, the upright-crested species, were given the subgenus Sternbergia, which was later changed to Geosternbergia because Sternbergia was already in use ("preoccupied"). Finally, Miller named the subgenus Occidentalia for P. eatoni, the skull formerly associated with P. occidentalis. Miller further expanded the concept of Pteranodon to include Nyctosaurus as a fourth subgenus. Miller considered these to be an evolutionary progression, with the primitive Nyctosaurus, at the time thought to be crestless, giving rise to Occidentalia (with a small crest), which in turn gave rise to Pteranodon with its long backwards crest, finally leading to Geosternbergia with its large, upright crest. However, Miller made several mistakes in his study concerning which specimens Marsh had assigned to which species, and most scientists disregarded his work on the subject in their later research, though Wellnhofer (1978) followed Miller's species list. and Schoch (1984) somewhat oddly published another revision that essentially returned to Marsh's original classification scheme, most notably sinking P. longiceps as a synonym of P. ingens. ### Recognizing variation During the early 1990s, S. Christopher Bennett also published several major papers reviewing the anatomy, taxonomy and life history of Pteranodon. Fragmentary fossils assigned to Pteranodon have also been discovered in Skåne, Sweden. ## Description Pteranodon species are extremely well represented in the fossil record, allowing for detailed descriptions of their anatomy and analysis of their life history. Over 1,000 specimens have been identified, though less than half are complete enough to give researchers good anatomical information. Still, this is more fossils material than is known for any other pterosaur, and it includes both male and female specimens of various age groups and possibly species. Adult Pteranodon specimens from the two major species can be divided into two distinct size classes. The smaller class of specimens have small, rounded head crests and very wide pelvic canals, even wider than those of the much larger size class. The size of the pelvic canal probably allowed the laying of eggs, indicating that these smaller adults are females. The larger size class, representing male individuals, have narrow hips and very large crests, which were probably for display. Adult male Pteranodon were among the largest pterosaurs, and were the largest flying animals known until the late 20th century, when the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs were discovered. The wingspan of an average adult male Pteranodon was 5.6 m (18 ft). Adult females were much smaller, averaging 3.8 m (12 ft) in wingspan. A large specimen of Pteranodon longiceps, USNM 50130, is estimated to have a wingspan of 6.25–6.5 m (20.5–21.3 ft), body length of 2.6 m (8.5 ft) and body mass of 50 kg (110 lb). An even larger specimen had a wingspan of 7.25 m (23.8 ft). While most specimens are found crushed, enough fossils exist to put together a detailed description of the animal. Methods used to estimate the mass of large male Pteranodon specimens (those with wingspans of about 7 meters) have been notoriously unreliable, producing a wide range of estimates. In a review of pterosaur size estimates published in 2010, researchers Mark Witton and Mike Habib argued that the largest estimate of 93 kg is much too high and an upper limit of 20 to 35 kg is more realistic. Witton and Habib considered the methods used by researchers who obtained smaller mass estimates equally flawed. Most have been produced by scaling modern animals such as bats and birds up to Pteranodon size, despite the fact that pterosaurs have vastly different body proportions and soft tissue anatomy from any living animal. Other distinguishing characteristics that set Pteranodon apart from other pterosaurs include narrow neural spines on the vertebrae, plate-like bony ligaments strengthening the vertebrae above the hip, and a relatively short tail in which the last few vertebrae are fused into a long rod. The entire length of the tail was about 3.5% as long as the wingspan, or up to 25 centimeters (9.8 in) in the largest males. ### Skull and beak Unlike earlier pterosaurs, such as Rhamphorhynchus and Pterodactylus, Pteranodon had toothless beaks, similar to those of birds. Pteranodon beaks were made of solid, bony margins that projected from the base of the jaws. The beaks were long, slender, and ended in thin, sharp points. The upper jaw, which was longer than the lower jaw, was curved upward; while this normally has been attributed only to the upward-curving beak, one specimen (UALVP 24238) has a curvature corresponding with the beak widening towards the tip. While the tip of the beak is not known in this specimen, the level of curvature suggests it would have been extremely long. The unique form of the beak in this specimen led Alexander Kellner to assign it to a distinct genus, Dawndraco, in 2010. The most distinctive characteristic of Pteranodon is its cranial crest. These crests consisted of skull bones (frontals) projecting upward and backward from the skull. The size and shape of these crests varied due to a number of factors, including age, sex, and species. Male Pteranodon sternbergi, the older species of the two described to date (and nowadays placed in its own genus Geosternbergia), had a more vertical crest with a broad forward projection, while their descendants, Pteranodon longiceps, evolved a narrower, more backward-projecting crest. Females of both species were smaller and bore small, rounded crests. The crests were probably mainly display structures, though they may have had other functions as well. ## Paleobiology ### Flight The wing shape of Pteranodon suggests that it would have flown rather like a modern-day albatross. This is based on the fact that Pteranodon had a high aspect ratio (wingspan to chord length) similar to that of the albatross — 9:1 for Pteranodon, compared to 8:1 for an albatross. Albatrosses spend long stretches of time at sea fishing, and use a flight pattern called "dynamic soaring" which exploits the vertical gradient of wind speed near the ocean surface to travel long distances without flapping, and without the aid of thermals (which do not occur over the open ocean the same way they do over land). While most of a Pteranodon flight would have depended on soaring, like long-winged seabirds, it probably required an occasional active, rapid burst of flapping, and studies of Pteranodon wing loading (the strength of the wings vs. the weight of the body) indicate that they were capable of substantial flapping flight, contrary to some earlier suggestions that they were so big they could only glide. However, a more recent study suggests that it relied on thermal soaring, unlike modern seabirds but much like modern continental flyers and the extinct Pelagornis. Like other pterosaurs, Pteranodon probably took off from a standing, quadrupedal position. Using their long forelimbs for leverage, they would have vaulted themselves into the air in a rapid leap. Almost all of the energy would have been generated by the forelimbs. The upstroke of the wings would have occurred when the animal cleared the ground followed by a rapid down-stroke to generate additional lift and complete the launch into the air. ### Terrestrial locomotion Historically, the terrestrial locomotion of Pteranodon, especially whether it was bipedal or quadrupedal, has been the subject of debate. Today, most pterosaur researchers agree that pterosaurs were quadrupedal, thanks largely to the discovery of pterosaur trackways. The possibility of aquatic locomotion via swimming has been discussed briefly in several papers (Bennett 2001, 1994, and Bramwell & Whitfield 1974). ### Diet The diet of Pteranodon is known to have included fish; fossilized fish bones have been found in the stomach area of one Pteranodon, and a fossilized fish bolus has been found between the jaws of another Pteranodon, specimen AMNH 5098. Numerous other specimens also preserve fragments of fish scales and vertebrae near the torso, indicating that fish made up a majority of the diet of Pteranodon (though they may also have taken invertebrates). Traditionally, most researchers have suggested that Pteranodon would have taken fish by dipping their beaks into the water while in low, soaring flight. However, this was probably based on the assumption that the animals could not take off from the water surface. It is more likely that Pteranodon could take off from the water, and would have dipped for fish while swimming rather than while flying. Even a small, female Pteranodon could have reached a depth of at least 80 centimeters (31 in) with its long bill and neck while floating on the surface, and they may have reached even greater depths by plunge-diving into the water from the air like some modern long-winged seabirds. In 1994, Bennett noted that the head, neck, and shoulders of Pteranodon were as heavily built as diving birds, and suggested that they could dive by folding back their wings like the modern gannet. ### Crest function Pteranodon was notable for its skull crest, though the function of this crest has been a subject of debate. Most explanations have focused on the blade-like, backward pointed crest of male P. longiceps, however, and ignored the wide range of variation across age and sex. The fact that the crests vary so much rules out most practical functions other than for use in mating displays. Therefore, display was probably the main function of the crest, and any other functions were secondary. Scientific interpretations of the crest's function began in 1910, when George Francis Eaton proposed two possibilities: an aerodynamic counterbalance and a muscle attachment point. He suggested that the crest might have anchored large, long jaw muscles, but admitted that this function alone could not explain the large size of some crests. Bennett (1992) agreed with Eaton's own assessment that the crest was too large and variable to have been a muscle attachment site. Eaton had suggested that a secondary function of the crest might have been as a counterbalance against the long beak, reducing the need for heavy neck muscles to control the orientation of the head. Wind tunnel tests showed that the crest did function as an effective counterbalance to a degree, but Bennett noted that, again, the hypothesis focuses only on the long crests of male P. longiceps, not on the larger crests of P. sternbergi and very small crests that existed among the females. Bennett found that the crests of females had no counterbalancing effect, and that the crests of male P. sternbergi would, by themselves, have a negative effect on the balance of the head. In fact, side to side movement of the crests would have required more, not less, neck musculature to control balance. In 1943, Dominik von Kripp suggested that the crest may have served as a rudder, an idea embraced by several later researchers. One researcher, Ross S. Stein, even suggested that the crest may have supported a membrane of skin connecting the backward-pointing crest to the neck and back, increasing its surface area and effectiveness as a rudder. The rudder hypothesis, again, does not take into account females nor P. sternbergi, which had an upward-pointing, not backward-pointing crest. Bennett also found that, even in its capacity as a rudder, the crest would not provide nearly so much directional force as simply maneuvering the wings. The suggestion that the crest was an air brake, and that the animals would turn their heads to the side in order to slow down, suffers from a similar problem. Additionally, the rudder and air brake hypotheses do not explain why such large variation exists in crest size even among adults. Alexander Kellner suggested that the large crests of the pterosaur Tapejara, as well as other species, might be used for heat exchange, allowing these pterosaurs to absorb or shed heat and regulate body temperature, which also would account for the correlation between crest size and body size. There is no evidence of extra blood vessels in the crest for this purpose, however, and the large, membranous wings filled with blood vessels would have served that purpose much more effectively. With these hypotheses ruled out, the best-supported hypothesis for crest function seems to be as a sexual display. This is consistent with the size variation seen in fossil specimens, where females and juveniles have small crests and males large, elaborate, variable crests. ### Sexual variation Adult Pteranodon specimens may be divided into two distinct size classes, small and large, with the large size class being about one and a half times larger than the small class, and the small class being twice as common as the large class. Both size classes lived alongside each other, and while researchers had previously suggested that they represent different species, Christopher Bennett showed that the differences between them are consistent with the concept that they represent females and males, and that Pteranodon species were sexually dimorphic. Skulls from the larger size class preserve large, upward and backward pointing crests, while the crests of the smaller size class are small and triangular. Some larger skulls also show evidence of a second crest that extended long and low, toward the tip of the beak, which is not seen in smaller specimens. The sex of the different size classes was determined, not from the skulls, but from the pelvic bones. Contrary to what may be expected, the smaller size class had disproportionately large and wide-set pelvic bones. Bennett interpreted this as indicating a more spacious birth canal, through which eggs would pass. He concluded that the small size class with small, triangular crests represent females, and the larger, large-crested specimens represent males. Note that the overall size and crest size also corresponds to age. Immature specimens are known from both females and males, and immature males often have small crests similar to adult females. Therefore, it seems that the large crests only developed in males when they reached their large, adult size, making the sex of immature specimens difficult to establish from partial remains. The fact that females appear to have outnumbered males two to one suggests that, as with modern animals with size-related sexual dimorphism, such as sea lions and other pinnipeds, Pteranodon might have been polygynous, with a few males competing for association with groups consisting of large numbers of females. Similar to modern pinnipeds, Pteranodon may have competed to establish territory on rocky, offshore rookeries, with the largest, and largest-crested, males gaining the most territory and having more success mating with females. The crests of male Pteranodon would not have been used in competition, but rather as "visual dominance-rank symbols", with display rituals taking the place of physical competition with other males. If this hypothesis is correct, it also is likely that male Pteranodon played little to no part in rearing the young; such a behavior is not found in the males of modern polygynous animals who father many offspring at the same time. ## Paleoecology Specimens assigned to Pteranodon have been found in both the Smoky Hill Chalk deposits of the Niobrara Formation, and the slightly younger Sharon Springs deposits of the Pierre Shale Formation. When Pteranodon was alive, this area was covered by a large inland sea, known as the Western Interior Seaway. Famous for fossils collected since 1870, these formations extend from as far south as Kansas in the United States to Manitoba in Canada. However, Pteranodon specimens (or any pterosaur specimens) have only been found in the southern half of the formation, in Kansas, Wyoming, and South Dakota. Despite the fact that numerous fossils have been found in the contemporary parts of the formation in Canada, no pterosaur specimens have ever been found there. This strongly suggests that the natural geographic range of Pteranodon covered only the southern part of the Niobrara, and that its habitat did not extend farther north than South Dakota. Some very fragmentary fossils belonging to pteranodontian pterosaurs, and possibly Pteranodon itself, have also been found on the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the United States. For example, some bone fragments from the Mooreville Formation of Alabama and the Merchantville Formation of Delaware may have come from Pteranodon, though they are too incomplete to make a definite identification. Some remains from Japan have also been tentatively attributed to Pteranodon, but their distance from its known Western Interior Seaway habitat makes this identification unlikely. Pteranodon longiceps would have shared the sky with the giant-crested pterosaur Nyctosaurus. Compared to P. longiceps, which was a very common species, Nyctosaurus was rare, making up only 3% of pterosaur fossils from the formation. Also less common was the early toothed bird, Ichthyornis. It is likely that, as in other polygynous animals (in which males compete for association with harems of females), Pteranodon lived primarily on offshore rookeries, where they could nest away from land-based predators and feed far from shore; most Pteranodon fossils are found in locations which at the time, were hundreds of kilometres from the coastline. Below the surface, the sea was populated primarily by invertebrates such as ammonites and squid. Vertebrate life, apart from basal fish, included sea turtles, such as Toxochelys, the plesiosaur Styxosaurus, and the flightless diving bird Parahesperornis. Mosasaurs were the most common marine reptiles, with genera including Clidastes and Tylosaurus. At least some of these marine reptiles are known to have fed on Pteranodon. Barnum Brown, in 1904, reported plesiosaur stomach contents containing "pterodactyl" bones, most likely from Pteranodon. Fossils from terrestrial dinosaurs also have been found in the Niobrara Chalk, suggesting that animals who died on shore must have been washed out to sea (one specimen of a hadrosaur appears to have been scavenged by a shark). ## Classification ### Timespan and evolution Pteranodon fossils are known primarily from the Niobrara Formation of the central United States. Broadly defined, Pteranodon existed for more than four million years, during the late Coniacian to late Maastrichtian stages of the Cretaceous period. The genus is present in most layers of the Niobrara Formation except for the upper two; in 2003, Kenneth Carpenter surveyed the distribution and dating of fossils in this formation, demonstrating that Pteranodon sternbergi existed there from 88 to 85 million years ago, while P. longiceps existed between 86 and 84.5 million years ago. A possible third species, which Kellner named Geosternbergia maysei in 2010, is known from the Sharon Springs member of the Pierre Shale Formation in Kansas, Wyoming, and South Dakota, dating to between 81.5 and 80.5 million years ago. In the early 1990s, Bennett noted that the two major morphs of pteranodont present in the Niobrara Formation were precisely separated in time with little, if any, overlap. Due to this, and to their gross overall similarity, he suggested that they probably represent chronospecies within a single evolutionary lineage lasting about 4 million years. In other words, only one species of Pteranodon would have been present at any one time, and P. sternbergi (or Geosternbergia) in all likelihood was the direct ancestor species of P. longiceps. ### Valid species Many researchers consider there to be at least two species of Pteranodon. However, aside from the differences between males and females described above, the post-cranial skeletons of Pteranodon show little to no variation between species or specimens, and the bodies and wings of all pteranodonts were essentially identical. Two species of Pteranodon are traditionally recognized as valid: Pteranodon longiceps, the type species, and Pteranodon sternbergi. The species differ only in the shape of the crest in adult males (described above), and possibly in the angle of certain skull bones. Because well-preserved Pteranodon skull fossils are extremely rare, researchers use stratigraphy (i.e. which rock layer of the geologic formation a fossil is found in) to determine species identity in most cases. Pteranodon sternbergi is the only known species of Pteranodon with an upright crest. The lower jaw of P. sternbergi was 1.25 meters (4.1 ft) long. It was collected by George F. Sternberg in 1952 and described by John Christian Harksen in 1966, from the lower portion of the Niobrara Formation. It was older than P. longiceps and is considered by Bennett to be the direct ancestor of the later species. Because fossils identifiable as P. sternbergi are found exclusively in the lower layers of the Niobrara Formation, and P. longiceps fossils exclusively in the upper layers, a fossil lacking the skull can be identified based on its position in the geologic column (though for many early fossil finds, precise data about its location was not recorded, rendering many fossils unidentifiable). Below is a cladogram showing the phylogenetic placement of this genus within Pteranodontia from Andres and Myers (2013). ### Alternative classifications Due to the subtle variations between specimens of pteranodontid from the Niobrara Formation, most researchers have assigned all of them to the single genus Pteranodon, in at least two species (P. longiceps and P. sternbergi) distinguished mainly by the shape of the crest. However, the classification of these two forms has varied from researcher to researcher. In 1972, Halsey Wilkinson Miller published a paper arguing that the various forms of Pteranodon were different enough to be placed in distinct subgenera. He named these Pteranodon (Occidentalia) occidentalis (for the now-disused species P. occidentalis) and Pteranodon (Sternbergia) sternbergi. However, the name Sternbergia was preoccupied, and in 1978 Miller re-named the species Pteranodon (Geosternbergia) sternbergi, and named a third subgenus/species combination for P. longiceps, as Pteranodon (Longicepia) longiceps. Most prominent pterosaur researchers of the late 20th century however, including S. Christopher Bennett and Peter Wellnhofer, did not adopt these subgeneric names, and continued to place all pteranodont species into the single genus Pteranodon. In 2010, pterosaur researcher Alexander Kellner revisited H.W. Miller's classification. Kellner followed Miller's opinion that the differences between the Pteranodon species were great enough to place them into different genera. He placed P. sternbergi into the genus named by Miller, Geosternbergia, along with the Pierre Shale skull specimen which Bennett had previously considered to be a large male P. longiceps. Kellner argued that this specimen's crest, though incompletely preserved, was most similar to Geosternbergia. Because the specimen was millions of years younger than any known Geosternbergia, he assigned it to the new species Geosternbergia maysei. Numerous other pteranodont specimens are known from the same formation and time period, and Kellner suggested they may belong to the same species as G. maysei, but because they lack skulls, he could not confidently identify them. ### Disused species A number of additional species of Pteranodon have been named since the 1870s, although most now are considered to be junior synonyms of two or three valid species. The best-supported is the type species, P. longiceps, based on the well-preserved specimen including the first-known skull found by S. W. Williston. This individual had a wingspan of 7 meters (23 ft). Other valid species include the possibly larger P. sternbergi, with a wingspan originally estimated at 9 m (30 ft). P. oweni (P. occidentalis), P. velox, P. umbrosus, P. harpyia, and P. comptus are considered to be nomina dubia by Bennett (1994) and others who question their validity. All probably are synonymous with the more well-known species. Because the key distinguishing characteristic Marsh noted for Pteranodon was its lack of teeth, any toothless pterosaur jaw fragment, wherever it was found in the world, tended to be attributed to Pteranodon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This resulted in a plethora of species and a great deal of confusion. The name became a wastebasket taxon, rather like the dinosaur Megalosaurus, to label any pterosaur remains that could not be distinguished other than by the absence of teeth. Species (often dubious ones now known to be based on sexual variation or juvenile characters) have been reclassified a number of times, and several subgenera have in the 1970s been erected by Halsey Wilkinson Miller to hold them in various combinations, further confusing the taxonomy (subgenera include Longicepia, Occidentalia, and Geosternbergia). Notable authors who have discussed the various aspects of Pteranodon include Bennett, Padian, Unwin, Kellner, and Wellnhofer. Two species, P. oregonensis and P. orientalis, are not pteranodontids and have been renamed Bennettazhia oregonensis and Bogolubovia orientalis respectively. ### List of species and synonyms Status of names listed below follow a survey by Bennett, 1994 unless otherwise noted. ## See also - List of pterosaur genera - Pterosaur size

Architecture of Fremantle Prison

Building design of Fremantle Prison

The architecture of Fremantle Prison includes the six-hectare (15-acre) site of the former prison on The Terrace, Fremantle, in Western Australia. Limestone was quarried on-site during construction, and the south-western corner (the South Knoll) and eastern portion of the site are at a considerably higher ground level. The Fremantle Prison site includes the prison cell blocks, gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, tunnels, and related infrastructure. The Main Cell Block is the longest and tallest cell range in Australia, and a dominating feature of the prison. New Division, constructed between 1904 and 1907, continues the façade alignment of the main block. Service buildings were converted into the separate Women's Prison. Fremantle Prison is surrounded by limestone perimeter walls, while a two storey limestone gatehouse, with a central clock, presents an imposing entrance. North and south of the gatehouse, on The Terrace, are several cottages and houses – three of which are built in Victorian style in contrast to the Georgian style of the others. A tunnel network exists under the prison, built to provide the prison, and later the town of Fremantle, with a supply of fresh water. Other elements of the site include the hospital building, prisoner workshops, open spaces, and a limestone ramp on the axis of the gatehouse, heading down towards the port area of Fremantle. Archaeological zones and sub-surface remains of varying levels of significance are found throughout the area of the convict grant. ## Background Fremantle Prison dates from the early years of European settlement, when it was constructed as the centre of the British Imperial Convict Establishment in Western Australia. While the colony was established as a "free settlement" in 1829, by the 1840s the early reluctance to accept Britain's convicts was overcome. Cheap convict labour could overcome the significant shortage of manpower in the colony. However, the arrival of the first convict ship Scindian on 2 June 1850 was unexpected. While a sailing ship had been sent ahead to inform of the pending arrival of seventy-five convicts, it had been blown off course. The Round House was full to capacity, almost overflowing, so the convicts had to be left on the ship. There was also no prepared accommodation for the warders, pensioner guards, Captain Edward Walcott Henderson, Comptroller General of Convicts, or his clerk, James Manning. Rents for accommodation in Fremantle quickly rose due to the sudden increase in demand, leaving Henderson paying more for his basic lodgings in Fremantle than for his house in London. Eventually Henderson leased two properties in Essex Street for £250 per year, at the site of the modern-day Esplanade Hotel. He used his convicts to convert the buildings into a temporary prison. Meanwhile, Henderson was looking for a site to build a permanent convict establishment. Whilst he favoured Mount Eliza (now known as Kings Park) due to its height, which gave it pleasing vistas and supposedly healthier air, Governor Charles Fitzgerald rejected that proposal. Henderson ultimately settled on the current site on a hill, in a raised and dominant position overlooking the port city of Fremantle. ## Site ### Description Fremantle Prison was built on a land grant of about 36 acres (15 ha) from limestone quarried on-site, and timber cut from Mount Eliza. The site exhibits considerable changes in ground level, natural and man-made, as a result of its location and former use. The ground level is considerably higher in the south-western corner of the site with what remains of the natural landform, formerly known as Church Hill, now referred to as the South Knoll. The eastern portion of the site is also considerably higher than the ground level established around the main cell block. It is a comparatively level terrace and is the highest part of the precinct. Fremantle Prison comprises substantially intact convict era structures, including the limestone perimeter walls of exceptional heritage significance. Other structures, dating from the time the precinct was in use as a colonial and state prison, are also significant. The convict era complex includes the 1859 main cell block, chapel and wards, yards and refractory cells; perimeter walls, gate house complex and prison officer residences on the Terrace; service buildings and hospital; south-eastern workshops; ramp access tramway (Fairbairn Street) and Henderson Street Warder's Cottages. Other elements which contribute to the site's overall heritage significance include the western workshops (1900); new division (1907); and conversion of service building to the female division and the addition of an eastern range (1889–1909). ### Layout A 4.6-metre-tall (15 ft) boundary wall encloses the prison grounds, with a gatehouse in the centre of the western wall, facing The Terrace. Other roads bounding the site are Knutsford Street to the north, Hampton Road to the east, and Fothergill Street to the south. Cottages, which housed prison workers and officials, are located outside the wall either side of the gatehouse. Inside the walls, the parade ground is located east of the gatehouse. Beyond it is the Main Cell Block at the centre of the site, which contains two chapels. North of the main block is New Division, and west of that, in the north-western corner, is the former Women's Prison, previously the cookhouse, bakehouse and laundry. The hospital building stands in the north-eastern corner, while the former workshops are located in the south-eastern corner, as well as to the north of the gatehouse. A system of tunnels, constructed to provide fresh water from an aquifer, runs under the eastern edge of the site. ### Archaeology Archaeological zones and sub-surface remains of varying levels of significance are found throughout the area of the convict grant. In particular, the sites of the three former cottages to the east of the perimeter wall in the Hampton Road reserve, the site of the former 'cage' in the New Division courtyard and the features upon and under the knoll terraces. Other site features include those associated with the water supply system constructed in the 1890s: the brick-vaulted underground reservoir, the associated pumping station, a complex series of rock cut shafts, drives, weirs and the one-kilometre (0.6 mi) tunnel network. Graffiti and a tablet records the progress of the excavators. ## Walls and gatehouse The prison is surrounded by limestone perimeter walls, which define the extent of the depot and its original topography to the south, east and north. The walls are of random rubble limestone and lime mortar and range in height from 1.2 to 5 metres (3 ft 11 in to 16 ft 5 in). The additional four courses added in 1898 are of dark stone with a coping. Attached piers occur at approximately 6-metre (20 ft) centres on the lee sides of the walls. There are a number of openings including both vehicular and pedestrian gates. The walls are of exceptional heritage significance being a vital part of the precinct defining its character. Sterile zones, inside the main perimeter walls and the walls encircling the female division and outside the prison wall, were standard prison practice for surveillance and contribute to the austere character of the prison. The entry complex consists of a combined gate house and quarters, an entry court and military and civil guard houses with embrasures flanking the inner gate. The two storey limestone gatehouse, with a central clock, presents an imposing entry to the former prison. The gatehouse and associated entry complex was constructed between 1854 and 1855 using convict labour. It was designed by Royal Engineer Edmund Henderson, and constructed out of limestone. The gatehouse has two towers either side of a narrow gate, reminiscent of those found in 13th century English castles or walled cities. The gate was made from iron which had been scavenged from shipwrecks, while the clock at the top of the structure was imported from England. The clock was made in London in 1854, installed two years later, and as of 2004, was still sounding every hour. The gatehouse also has a smaller, second, inner gate, engraved with the names of three significant figures: H. Wray RE, who designed the gate; J. Manning, clerk of works, who supervised its fabrication; and Joseph Nelson, the Royal Sappers soldier that wrought the iron. The complex was expanded and altered successively throughout the use of the entry complex for prison's functions. The entry complex was extended north to the female division as a workshop range, the western workshops, leaving a sterile zone beside the perimeter wall. The gatehouse has remained a significant feature and landmark since the closure of the prison, as the main entrance, and housing a café and office areas. Restoration was carried out in 2005, preserving the original stone facade and removing non-original rendering. ## Cell blocks ### Main Cell Block Based on the English Pentonville Prison design model of Joshua Jebb, the site's key feature, the Main Cell Block, was designed by the Comptroller of Convicts Captain Henderson, and completed in 1859. Designed to hold up to 1000 prisoners, it is 145 metres (476 ft) long and four storeys high, the longest and tallest cell range in Australia. It was constructed by convicts in the 1850s, and there have been few changes since that time. The 1859 main cell block has an impressive facade and is built of limestone ashlar blocks quarried from the site. It is significant for the ways in which its scale, position in the precinct, simplicity, material and near pristine character ensures that it is the focal and dominating feature of the prison; the evidence of its fabric, internal configuration and spaces reveals its functioning as a convict depot and subsequent prison and its atmosphere. It has come to symbolise the imperial convict era in colonial Western Australia. The central, four-storey high cell block is flanked on either end by large dormitory wards, called the Association Rooms. Here, as many as 80 men slept in hammocks, either as a reward for good behaviour or because they would soon receive their Ticket of Leave. In contrast, the cells were a confining space measuring just 2.1 by 1.2 metres (7 by 4 ft). While each cell initially had a basin connected to running water, the installation was before the advent of S-bends; the smells coming up the pipes lead to their removal by the 1860s. Following a Royal Commission, the cells were made larger by removing a dividing wall from between two cells. Electric lighting was installed in the 1920s, but there were never any toilets – buckets were used for the duration of the prison's operation. Since the prison's closure, six cells have been restored to represent the varying living conditions at different times in the prison's history. The main block also houses the gallows, solitary confinement cells, and two chapels. The single storey 1855 refractory block is on the same axis as the main cell block to its east. It consists of twelve punishment cells and six dark cells with no light. The gallows chamber, built in 1888, is between this and the main cell block and relates to the colonial use of the prison. The gallows operated via a rope tied around a beam, over a trap door, on the upper level. Opening the trap door would cause the condemned prisoner fall, and thus be hanged. At the centre of the Main Cell Block is the Anglican Chapel, whose windows were the only ones without bars. It occupies a prominent position in the projecting wing in the centre of the facade. It retains its original painted and stencilled wall patterns beneath later paint layers and is the most intact early prison chapel in Australia. Its interior features include an early and substantial example of a laminated arch construction in the colonies and the first in WA, handsome decalogue boards and some original and elegant joinery. Behind the Anglican chapel altar, there is a painted representation of the Ten Commandments. The words to the sixth commandment use the unusual translation of "thou shalt do no murder" rather than "thou shalt not kill," the more common interpretation in the Church of England. Given that the gallows were still in regular use, it was felt that "thou shalt not kill" would have been hypocritical. The Catholic Chapel was put into the upper northern Association Ward in 1861. The floor has evidence of its former use for communal prisoner accommodation, in the form of mortices for hammock rails and a convict painted mural which decorates its wall. ### New Division Fremantle Prison's New Division was constructed between 1904 and 1907, as a response to overcrowding. The division continues the façade alignment of the main block. The building, L shaped in plan, is three storeys high of regular coursed pale ashlar limestone blocks with rock-face. Openings are set in brick and freestone and it has a handsome lantern range above the main atrium. The building is visually significant as it complements the main cell block and completes the northern zone of the prison. The interior configuration and cells are significant as an example of an attempt to introduce the separate system to Western Australia, whereby prisoners were completely isolated for the first three months of their sentence. The division's exercise yard initially used a panopticon to facilitate this concept during the prisoners' hour of exercise each day. The system was not successful, and considered a dated prisoner management strategy, leading its removal within five years. The New Division was the first to have electricity, with underground wiring. During World War Two, the Australian Army appropriated the New Division, to keep prisoners separate from the main population, and for those condemned to death. In 1994 the building was retrofitted to cater for offices, small business premises, and meeting rooms. ### Women's Prison The north-western complex was originally a service area with a cookhouse, bakehouse and laundry, built in the 1850s. A place for women prisoners was needed following the closure of Perth Gaol and the transfer of prisoners to Fremantle. The buildings were converted to a prison, and a wall built around them, creating Western Australia's first separate prison for women – a gaol within a gaol. Population and crime growth led to them being extended in the 1890s and 1910s. The single storey limestone building, also known as the female division, has a distinctive monitor roof and an upper storey addition to part of the eastern range in red brick. The construction of Bandyup Women's Prison saw Fremantle's Women's Prison close in 1970. The space was used for education and assessment until the main prison's closure in 1991, and has since been adapted for TAFE use as a visual arts facility. ## Staff accommodation A flat area, to the immediate west of the prison, is called The Terrace and was formed from rubble resulting from the levelling of the prison site. Adjoining the western perimeter wall, but outside the prison on the northern side of the terrace compound, is staff accommodation. Three adjoining residences were built in the 1890s as quarters for prison staff. The cottages at 2, 4, and 6 The Terrace, at the northern end of the street, were built in a Victorian style, in contrast to the Georgian style of the other houses. Number 2 incorporates parts of an 1857 guard room and was converted in the 1890s to quarters, when Numbers 4 and 6 were built alongside as a duplex. Number 2 is a single storey house with random rubble limestone walls and corrugated iron roof separated from the perimeter wall by a rear yard. Numbers 4 and 6 are a pair of single duplex units with random rubble limestone walls, corrugated iron roofs and front verandahs, separated from the perimeter wall by a rear yard. Four two storey residences, Numbers 8, 10, 16 and 18 The Terrace, were built during the 1850s for officer accommodation. Number 8, also known as the Chaplain's House, is a two storey house with rendered and painted limestone walls. The plan is roughly square with verandahs and balconies along the west and south sides. A single storey building connects the south-east side of the house to the main prison wall. Number 10, also known as the Superintendent's House, is a two storey house with rendered limestone walls and a corrugated iron roof behind parapet walls. It is connected to the gatehouse with limestone walled buildings. The plan is roughly square and there is a door from the house into the prison from the north-east room of the ground floor. The house was initially built in 1853 for the Chaplain, but was taken over by the superintendent in 1878 and was later used by the prison administration. Number 16 is a house is two storey building, roughly square in plan, with painted limestone walls and a corrugated sheet metal roof behind a parapet. It accommodated first the superintendent, later on the resident magistrate, and remained in-use as housing for prison officers until the 1970s. Number 18, also known as the Surgeon's House, is a two storey structure with limestone walls. It is the southernmost house on The Terrace. Numbers 18 and 8, the northernmost of the initial buildings, both featured two sitting rooms, three bedrooms, and two dressing rooms, as well as a kitchen, water closet and shed, but with mirrored layouts. Number 18 was expanded with additions built in the 1890s. A single storey limestone structure (former stables) is located to the south of Number 18. ## Other buildings ### Hospital The hospital, built between 1857 and 1859, was a crucial component of Fremantle Prison. Public works during the convict era relied on convict labour, which could only be provided if the convicts were healthy. Located in the north-eastern corner of the prison compound, the building is H-shaped in plan, single storey with rendered and painted limestone walls. It features a wide verandah with timber posts. From 1886 to 1903, medical services were relocated to the main cell block, with the former building used to keep invalids and female prisoners. The hospital was refurbished, and reopened in 1904. It subsequently remained in continuous operation until the prison's closure in 1991. Adjacent to the hospital building is the east reservoir. The brick vaulted reservoir and reticulation system, constructed in 1890 and about 1895, appear as a low brick structure. The reservoir roof consists of five rendered vaults each side of a central vault raised 600 millimetres (24 in) above those each side. The centre of the eastern terrace contains the subsurface remains of the 1850s bathhouse and well. ### Workshops The prison's workshops provided activities and training for the prisoners. They also reduced the cost of maintenance, repairs, and construction by providing an in-house service. The original workshop was a blacksmith's shop, one of the first buildings to be constructed on the prison site. Later known as the East Workshops, other workshops included carpenter's, plumber's and painter's, a printing office, and from the 1850s, a metal shop. The West Workshops were built at the start of the twentieth century, providing more work for prisoners through a paint shop, mat maker, shoe maker, book binder and tailor shop. The five western workshops are a single storey squared limestone rubble building with openings dressed in brick, with an open saw-tooth roof with southern skylights, concealed behind a parapet wall. In 1993 the western workshops were adapted for use as TAFE art workshops. Buildings in the area south of the east workshops were used for a shower block, helmet workshop and associated sheds. The structures are recent and, with the exception of some terrace walling, are the last of a series that have been erected and dismantled since World War I. ## Tunnels At the south eastern corner of the eastern terrace is the former pumping station, associated tunnels and a set of 1850s workshops within an enclosing wall. Underneath parts of the eastern terrace, the adjacent Hampton Road, the pumping station and the workshops there are a complex series of shafts, drives and weirs cut from the rock during the 1890s and early twentieth century. The east workshops is a single storey limestone building on the western side with an enclosed area to the east. The entire workshops yard was roofed using a light steel truss on steel supports in 1960. A tunnel network exists under the prison, including a one-kilometre (0.6 mi) connection to South Beach in South Fremantle. It was built by prisoners, but the purpose was not to enable escapes; their labour was used to provide the prison, and later the town of Fremantle, with a supply of fresh water. Guards in a gun tower adjacent to the tunnel entrance prevented any attempted escapes. In 1852, during construction of the buildings, shafts were sunk into the limestone bedrock to provide the prison with fresh water from an aquifer. In 1874, the Fremantle's "Water House Well", used to supply ships, suffered storm damage. This prompted a tank to be installed at the prison, behind the main cell block, to offer the town an alternative water supply. Prisoners worked a pump to fill the tank, which was connected to the jetties through gravity-fed pipes. Increasing demand led to the construction of a reservoir in 1876, from which water was drawn, still pumped by prisoners. From 1888 to 1894, additional wells were built, connected by a series of tunnels or horizontal drives 20 metres (66 ft) under the north-east of the prison. A steam pump was implemented, which drew 68,000 litres (15,000 imperial gallons) per hour of water into the new East Reservoir. In 1896, a town reservoir was constructed on Swanbourne Street, fed from the prison by a triple expansion steam-driven pump which could take more than 4.5 million litres (1 million imperial gallons) per day from the prison tunnels. Prisoners, relieved of manual pumping, were employed to supply wood and stoke boilers. The Metropolitan Sewerage & Water Supply authority took over control of the pumping station from 1901 until 1910, when both the prison and town were connected to Perth's metropolitan water supply. The tunnels were closed in 1910, but the groundwater continued to be used for the prison's gardens. In 1989, oil leaking from nearby tanks contaminated the water. The pollution was eventually cleared by 1996 through bioremediation. Since the prison's closure the water supply system including the tunnels, were the subject of heritage studies, including a 2004 inspection by the Western Australia Maritime Museum. The tunnels were re-opened in mid-2005, and within one year the main shaft had been refurbished, including "installation of audio-visual equipment, railings and lighting as well as the removal of debris from the access shaft and tunnels, the creation of new steel platforms and ladders and the addition of extra limestone rocks in the tunnels to help lift users out of the water." ## Open spaces and related elements The open spaces of the precinct are significant as they provide impressive settings for the structures. They are also important spaces in their own right retaining the stark open character of a penal institution required for surveillance. The extensive forecourt of the main cell block, with its scale and secure location within the perimeter walls, is particularly impressive. Paths are bitumen with grassed garden beds delineated by raised brick edging. South Knoll comprises the remains of the high, natural ground level which at least by 1896 had been terraced to form flat, grassed areas. The former playing fields and tennis courts are still in evidence. There is a brick-vaulted reservoir located under the Knoll. The significant landscape presents an austere and formal quality within the perimeter walls. Generally the landscape is sparse and simple, comprising unobtrusive elements such as lawn, low plantings and pavement. Landscape elements outside the walls include the exotic almond and pine trees on the Terrace. An inclined tramway, the ramp, was built from the front of the terrace, on the axis of the gatehouse, down towards the port area of Fremantle. The ramp, constructed between 1852 and 1853, is of limestone rubble from the cut and fill activities required to create the prison site and the terrace. The ramp is an integral part of the original design of the prison complex and is of exceptional heritage significance. It is now cut at its western end by a modern road which severs the historic visual link with Fremantle. On each side of the alignment of the ramp, where it intersects with Henderson Street, are three terrace houses for the accommodation of prison warders. These were erected between 1851 and 1858 and mark the boundary of the Convict Establishment at this point. The limestone used for the early prison and its associated housing was quarried on the site. Other surviving elements of the early convict establishment include Henderson's house, "The Knowle", the three Henderson Street cottages (terrace housing) at numbers 7–17, 19–29, and 31–41 Henderson Street, a range of terraces at 3–9 Holdsworth Street, paths, roads and ramps, garden sites, walls, sub surface works and the more distant routes to the Asylum, the Commissariat Store and wharf site. ## See also - List of executions at Fremantle Prison - History of Fremantle Prison - Riots at Fremantle Prison - Staff and prisoners of Fremantle Prison

Overdrive (Shonen Knife album)

Overdrive is the 19th studio album by Japanese pop punk trio Shonen Knife. It was released on April 14, 2014 in Europe, and on April 16, 2014 in Japan. According to band leader Naoko Yamano, because their album Free Time (2010) was heavily influenced by punk rock, and Pop Tune (2012) had explored a more pop-oriented sound, Overdrive was a chance for the band to explore a more hard rock sound. The album's lyrics cover a wide array of topics, from green tea, fortune cookies, and cats. The CD album artwork was created by Masahiko Ohno; three different color variations were released, with each corresponding to either Japan, North America, or Europe. The album received moderately positive reviews from critics, with many applauding the band's dabbling in more harder rock, whereas others were critical of its musical and lyrical simplicity. ## Production While Shonen Knife's usual sound is Ramones-inspired pop punk, the band branched out musically and listened to harder rock bands for Overdrive, such as such as Bad Company, Black Sabbath, Boston, Deep Purple, The Doobie Brothers, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, and ZZ Top—for inspiration. IAmTunedUp.com described the album's sound as a combination of "edgy guitar riffs with psychedelic 70s-esque enchanting nostalgia". Naoko Yamano reasoned that because Free Time (2010) was heavily influenced by punk rock, and Pop Tune (2012) explored a more pop-oriented sound, Overdrive represented an opportunity for the band to explore harder rock. Because of the band's exploration, the album's name references the overdrive pedal, which, in Yamano's mind, conjured up images of 1970s rock music. In an interview with 100PercentRock.com, Yamano explained that her process for writing and recording has not changed substantially since the band's early days: "I’m lazy and I don’t start writing songs until we book recording studio [sic], but once we booked the studio, I can write songs quickly with concentration. Then I send my demo to our members and we rehearse. At the recording studio, we start to record from basic tracks then overdub." On this album, every member of the band also sings a unique song about a food item; Yamano sings "Fortune Cookie", the band's bassist Ritsuko Taneda lends her vocals to "Ramen Rock", and drummer Emi Morimoto can be heard on "Green Tea". The first song was inspired by Yamano fondness for eating a fortune cookie after a meal of Chinese food in America; after learning that the cookies were a Japanese invention, Yamano decided to pen the song. "Ramen Rock" was inspired by Taneda's habit of eating ramen after every show. As for "Green Tea", Yamano asked Morimoto to sing the song because she is from Kyoto, which is known for its green tea. Other lyrical themes include on the album include tennis in "Jet Shot", and cats in "Like a Cat". Regarding the former, Yamano expressed in an interview that she had always wanted to sing about tennis, but felt that the topic did not fit well with the style of the band's music. She revisited this opinion after watching a tennis match on television in which the announcer referred to a move made by Kei Nishikori as a "great jet shot". Yamano was struck by the phrase, and used it as inspiration for a song about wanting to be a more aggressive tennis player. "Like a Cat" joins the long canon of Shonen Knife songs about cats. Yamano explained, "I just like cats. Dogs are sometimes too earnest, but cats are so free." The band released a music video for the song, featuring cat videos submitted by their fans the world over. For the non-Japan releases of the album, all songs were recorded with English lyrics. However, for the domestic release of the album, "Dance to the Rock", "Shopping", and "Like a Cat" were recorded with Japanese lyrics. ## Critical reception Overdrive received moderately positive reviews from critics; Metacritic, a review aggregator website, gave the album an average score of 67 out of 100 from 17 reviews, which indicates "generally favourable reviews". NME awarded the album 7 out of 10 stars, with reviewer Stuart Huggett arguing that the album contained "personal and political lyrics far smarter than Shonen Knife’s cartoon image suggests." Will Fitzpatrick of The Skinny awarded the album four out of five stars, writing that "Overdrive's sugary take on 70s dinosaur rock" is replete with a "never-ending supply of bubblegum hooks". Zachary Houle of PopMatters awarded the album six out of ten stars, and mused that Shonen Knife's fusing of punk and classic rock on the album "somehow work[s]". Houle, however, was critical of the band's penchant for bordering closely on copying other artists' music; he argued that "Bad Luck Song" and "Black Crow" are strikingly similar to Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town" and Kiss's "Black Diamond", respectively, but felt that "the album gets better as it goes along". Mark Deming of AllMusic awarded the album three out of five stars, commenting on the band's musical shift; he wrote, "By Shonen Knife's standards, Overdrive does sound like some sort of hard rock album, and the attempts to make like Kiss, Thin Lizzy, or Deep Purple come off better than one might expect, though Yamano's guitar skills are less impressive than those of the average metal axe slinger." Deming complimented the charm of the album, but criticized Yamano's lyrics as "run-of-the-mill", ill-fitting the change in musical direction. The site selected "Black Crow", "Ramen Rock", and "Green Tea" as album highlights. Joe Goggins of Drowned in Sound awarded the album 6 out of 10 stars, and complimented the band for successfully managing to release nineteen studio albums. However, he was slightly critical of the "derivative" nature of the band's sound, as well as their "one-dimensional guitar playing and unrelentingly trivial lyrics". ## Promotion To promote Overdrive, Shonen Knife embarked on a North American tour in the fall of 2014. The band's first show was on September 11, 2014, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, while their final stop was at Asbury Park, New Jersey, on October 21 of the same year. Although most of the tour was confined to the United States, the band also played two Canadian shows in Toronto (September 20) and Montreal (September 21), respectively. During the tourwhich saw Shonen Knife play their 1000th showAtsuko Yamano, one of the band's founding members, rejoined the group as a touring musician (in 2016, she would rejoin as a full member). ## Track listing ## Personnel - Naoko Yamano - guitar, vocals - Ritsuko Taneda - bass, backing vocals - Emi Morimoto - drums, backing vocals

Tunicate

Marine animals, subphylum of chordates

A tunicate is a marine invertebrate animal, a member of the subphylum Tunicata (/ˌtjuːnɪˈkeɪtə/ ). It is part of the Chordata, a phylum which includes all animals with dorsal nerve cords and notochords (including vertebrates). The subphylum was at one time called Urochordata, and the term urochordates is still sometimes used for these animals. They are the only chordates that have lost their myomeric segmentation, with the possible exception of the 'seriation of the gill slits'. However, doliolids still display segmentation of the muscle bands. Some tunicates live as solitary individuals, but others replicate by budding and become colonies, each unit being known as a zooid. They are marine filter feeders with a water-filled, sac-like body structure and two tubular openings, known as siphons, through which they draw in and expel water. During their respiration and feeding, they take in water through the incurrent (or inhalant) siphon and expel the filtered water through the excurrent (or exhalant) siphon. Adult ascidian tunicates are sessile, immobile and permanently attached to rocks or other hard surfaces on the ocean floor. Thaliaceans (pyrosomes, doliolids, and salps) and larvaceans on the other hand, swim in the pelagic zone of the sea as adults. Various species of ascidians, the most well-known class of tunicates, are commonly known as sea squirts, sea pork, sea livers, or sea tulips. The earliest probable species of tunicate appears in the fossil record in the early Cambrian period. Despite their simple appearance and very different adult form, their close relationship to the vertebrates is evidenced by the fact that during their mobile larval stage, they possess a notochord or stiffening rod and resemble a tadpole. Their name derives from their unique outer covering or "tunic", which is formed from proteins and carbohydrates, and acts as an exoskeleton. In some species, it is thin, translucent, and gelatinous, while in others it is thick, tough, and stiff. ## Taxonomy About 3,000 species of tunicate exist in the world's oceans, living mostly in shallow water. The most numerous group is the ascidians; fewer than 100 species of these are found at depths greater than 200 m (660 ft). Some are solitary animals leading a sessile existence attached to the seabed, but others are colonial and a few are pelagic. Some are supported by a stalk, but most are attached directly to a substrate, which may be a rock, shell, coral, seaweed, mangrove root, dock, piling, or ship's hull. They are found in a range of solid or translucent colours and may resemble seeds, grapes, peaches, barrels, or bottles. One of the largest is a stalked sea tulip, Pyura pachydermatina, which can grow to be over 1 metre (3.3 ft) tall. The Tunicata were established by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1816. In 1881, Francis Maitland Balfour introduced another name for the same group, "Urochorda", to emphasize the affinity of the group to other chordates. No doubt largely because of his influence, various authors supported the term, either as such, or as the slightly older "Urochordata", but this usage is invalid because "Tunicata" has precedence, and grounds for superseding the name never existed. Accordingly, the current (formally correct) trend is to abandon the name Urochorda or Urochordata in favour of the original Tunicata, and the name Tunicata is almost invariably used in modern scientific works. It is accepted as valid by the World Register of Marine Species but not by the Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Various common names are used for different species. Sea tulips are tunicates with colourful bodies supported on slender stalks. Sea squirts are so named because of their habit of contracting their bodies sharply and squirting out water when disturbed. Sea liver and sea pork get their names from the resemblance of their dead colonies to pieces of meat. ### Classification Tunicates are more closely related to craniates (including hagfish, lampreys, and jawed vertebrates) than to lancelets, echinoderms, hemichordates, Xenoturbella or other invertebrates. The clade consisting of tunicates and vertebrates is called Olfactores. The Tunicata contain roughly 3,051 described species, traditionally divided into these classes: - Ascidiacea (Aplousobranchia, Phlebobranchia, and Stolidobranchia) - Thaliacea (Pyrosomida, Doliolida, and Salpida) - Appendicularia (Copelata) Members of the Sorberacea were included in Ascidiacea in 2011 as a result of rDNA sequencing studies. Although the traditional classification is provisionally accepted, newer evidence suggests the Ascidiacea are an artificial group of paraphyletic status. A close reationship between Thaliacea and Ascidiacea, with the former possibly emerging from the latter, had already been proposed since the early 20th century under the name of Acopa. The following cladogram is based on the 2018 phylogenomic study of Delsuc and colleagues. ### Fossil record Undisputed fossils of tunicates are rare. The best known and earliest unequivocally identified species is Shankouclava shankouense from the Lower Cambrian Maotianshan Shale at Shankou village, Anning, near Kunming (South China). There is also a common bioimmuration, (Catellocaula vallata), of a possible tunicate found in Upper Ordovician bryozoan skeletons of the upper midwestern United States. A well-preserved Cambrian fossil, Megasiphon thylakos, shows that the tunicate basic body design had already been established 500 million years ago. Three enigmatic species were also found from the Ediacaran period – Ausia fenestrata from the Nama Group of Namibia, the sac-like Yarnemia ascidiformis, and one from a second new Ausia-like genus from the Onega Peninsula of northern Russia, Burykhia hunti. Results of a new study have shown possible affinity of these Ediacaran organisms to the ascidians. Ausia and Burykhia lived in shallow coastal waters slightly more than 555 to 548 million years ago, and are believed to be the oldest evidence of the chordate lineage of metazoans. The Russian Precambrian fossil Yarnemia is identified as a tunicate only tentatively, because its fossils are nowhere near as well-preserved as those of Ausia and Burykhia, so this identification has been questioned. Fossils of tunicates are rare because their bodies decay soon after death, but in some tunicate families, microscopic spicules are present, which may be preserved as microfossils. These spicules have occasionally been found in Jurassic and later rocks, but, as few palaeontologists are familiar with them, they may have been mistaken for sponge spicules. In Permian and Triassic there were also forms with a calcareous exoskeleton. At first they were mistaken for corals. ### Hybridization studies A multi-taxon molecular study in 2010 proposed that sea squirts are descended from a hybrid between a chordate and a protostome ancestor (before the divergence of panarthropods and nematodes). This study was based on a quartet partitioning approach designed to reveal horizontal gene transfer events among metazoan phyla. ## Anatomy ### Body form Colonies of tunicates occur in a range of forms, and vary in the degree to which individual organisms, known as zooids, integrate with one another. In the simplest systems, the individual animals are widely separated, but linked together by horizontal connections called stolons, which grow along the seabed. Other species have the zooids growing closer together in a tuft or clustered together and sharing a common base. The most advanced colonies involve the integration of the zooids into a common structure surrounded by the tunic. These may have separate buccal siphons and a single central atrial siphon and may be organized into larger systems, with hundreds of star-shaped units. Often, the zooids in a colony are tiny but very numerous, and the colonies can form large encrusting or mat-like patches. ### Body structure By far the largest class of tunicates is the Ascidiacea. The body of an ascidiacean is surrounded by a test or tunic, from which the subphylum derives its name. This varies in thickness between species but may be tough, resembling cartilage, thin and delicate, or transparent and gelatinous. The tunic is composed of proteins and complex carbohydrates, and includes tunicin, a variety of cellulose. The tunic is unique among invertebrate exoskeletons in that it can grow as the animal enlarges and does not need to be periodically shed. Inside the tunic is the body wall or mantle composed of connective tissue, muscle fibres, blood vessels, and nerves. Two openings are found in the body wall: the buccal siphon at the top through which water flows into the interior, and the atrial siphon on the ventral side through which it is expelled. A large pharynx occupies most of the interior of the body. It is a muscular tube linking the buccal opening with the rest of the gut. It has a ciliated groove known as an endostyle on its ventral surface, and this secretes a mucous net which collects food particles and is wound up on the dorsal side of the pharynx. The gullet, at the lower end of the pharynx, links it to a loop of gut which terminates near the atrial siphon. The walls of the pharynx are perforated by several bands of slits, known as stigmata, through which water escapes into the surrounding water-filled cavity, the atrium. This is criss-crossed by various rope-like mesenteries which extend from the mantle and provide support for the pharynx, preventing it from collapsing, and also hold up the other organs. The Thaliacea, the other main class of tunicates, is characterised by free-swimming, pelagic individuals. They are all filter feeders using a pharyngeal mucous net to catch their prey. The pyrosomes are bioluminous colonial tunicates with a hollow cylindrical structure. The buccal siphons are on the outside and the atrial siphons inside. About 10 species are known, and all are found in the tropics. The 23 species of doliolids are small, mostly under 2 cm (0.79 in) long. They are solitary, have the two siphons at opposite ends of their barrel-shaped bodies, and swim by jet propulsion. The 40 species of salps are also small, under 4 cm (1.6 in) long, and found in the surface waters of both warm and cold seas. They also move by jet propulsion, and often form long chains by budding off new individuals. A third class, the Larvacea (or Appendicularia), is the only group of tunicates to retain their chordate characteristics in the adult state, a product of extensive neoteny. The 70 species of larvaceans superficially resemble the tadpole larvae of amphibians, although the tail is at right angles to the body. The notochord is retained, and the animals, mostly under 1 cm long, are propelled by undulations of the tail. They secrete an external mucous net known as a house, which may completely surround them and is very efficient at trapping planktonic particles. ### Physiology and internal anatomy Like all other chordates, tunicates have a notochord during their early development, but it is lost by the time they have completed their metamorphosis. As members of the Chordata, they are true Coelomata with endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm, but they do not develop very clear coelomic body cavities, if any at all. Whether they do or not, by the end of their larval development, all that remain are the pericardial, renal, and gonadal cavities of the adults. Except for the heart, gonads, and pharynx (or branchial sac), the organs are enclosed in a membrane called an epicardium, which is surrounded by the jelly-like mesenchyme. Ascidian tunicates begin life as a lecithotrophic (non-feeding) mobile larva that resembles a tadpole, with the exception of some members of the families Styelidae and Molgulidae which has direct development. The latter also have several species with tail-less larval forms. The ascidian larvae very rapidly settle down and attach themselves to a suitable surface, later developing into a barrel-like and usually sedentary adult form. The species in the class Appendicularia are pelagic, and the general larval form is kept throughout life. Also the class Thaliacea is pelagic throughout their lives and may have complex lifecycles. In this class a free living larval stage is absent: Doliolids and pyrosomatids are viviparous–lecithotrophic, and salpids are viviparous–matrotrophic. Only some species of doliolids still have a rudimentary tailed tadpole stage, which is never free-living and lacks a brain. Tunicates have a well-developed heart and circulatory system. The heart is a double U-shaped tube situated just below the gut. The blood vessels are simple connective tissue tubes, and their blood has several types of corpuscle. The blood may appear pale green, but this is not due to any respiratory pigments, and oxygen is transported dissolved in the plasma. Exact details of the circulatory system are unclear, but the gut, pharynx, gills, gonads, and nervous system seem to be arranged in series rather than in parallel, as happens in most other animals. Every few minutes, the heart stops beating and then restarts, pumping fluid in the reverse direction. Tunicate blood has some unusual features. In some species of Ascidiidae and Perophoridae, it contains high concentrations of the transitional metal vanadium and vanadium-associated proteins in vacuoles in blood cells known as vanadocytes. Some tunicates can concentrate vanadium up to a level ten million times that of the surrounding seawater. It is stored in a +3 oxidation form that requires a pH of less than 2 for stability, and this is achieved by the vacuoles also containing sulfuric acid. The vanadocytes are later deposited just below the outer surface of the tunic, where their presence is thought to deter predation, although it is unclear whether this is due to the presence of the metal or low pH. Other species of tunicates concentrate lithium, iron, niobium, and tantalum, which may serve a similar function. Other tunicate species produce distasteful organic compounds as chemical defenses against predators. Tunicates lack the kidney-like metanephridial organs typical of deuterostomes. Most have no excretory structures, but rely on the diffusion of ammonia across their tissues to rid themselves of nitrogenous waste, though some have a simple excretory system. The typical renal organ is a mass of large clear-walled vesicles that occupy the rectal loop, and the structure has no duct. Each vesicle is a remnant of a part of the primitive coelom, and its cells extract nitrogenous waste matter from circulating blood. They accumulate the wastes inside the vesicles as urate crystals, and do not have any obvious means of disposing of the material during their lifetimes. Adult tunicates have a hollow cerebral ganglion, equivalent to a brain, and a hollow structure known as a neural gland. Both originate from the embryonic neural tube and are located between the two siphons. Nerves arise from the two ends of the ganglion; those from the anterior end innervate the buccal siphon and those from the posterior end supply the rest of the body, the atrial siphon, organs, gut and the musculature of the body wall. There are no sense organs but there are sensory cells on the siphons, the buccal tentacles and in the atrium. Tunicates are unusual among animals in that they produce a large fraction of their tunic and some other structures in the form of cellulose. The production in animals of cellulose is so unusual that at first some researchers denied its presence outside of plants, but the tunicates were later found to possess a functional cellulose synthesizing enzyme, encoded by a gene horizontally transferred from a bacterium. When, in 1845, Carl Schmidt first announced the presence in the test of some ascidians of a substance very similar to cellulose, he called it "tunicine", but it is now recognized as cellulose rather than any alternative substance. ## Feeding Nearly all adult tunicates are suspension feeders (the larval form usually does not feed), capturing planktonic particles by filtering sea water through their bodies. Ascidians are typical in their digestive processes, but other tunicates have similar systems. Water is drawn into the body through the buccal siphon by the action of cilia lining the gill slits. To obtain enough food, an average ascidian needs to process one body-volume of water per second. This is drawn through a net lining the pharynx which is being continuously secreted by the endostyle. The net is made of sticky mucus threads with holes about 0.5 μm in diameter which can trap planktonic particles including bacteria. The net is rolled up on the dorsal side of the pharynx, and it and the trapped particles are drawn into the esophagus. The gut is U-shaped and also ciliated to move the contents along. The stomach is an enlarged region at the lowest part of the U-bend. Here, digestive enzymes are secreted and a pyloric gland adds further secretions. After digestion, the food is moved on through the intestine, where absorption takes place, and the rectum, where undigested remains are formed into faecal pellets or strings. The anus opens into the dorsal or cloacal part of the peribranchial cavity near the atrial siphon. Here, the faeces are caught up by the constant stream of water which carries the waste to the exterior. The animal orientates itself to the current in such a way that the buccal siphon is always upstream and does not draw in contaminated water. Some ascidians that live on soft sediments are detritivores. A few deepwater species, such as Megalodicopia hians, are sit-and-wait predators, trapping tiny crustacea, nematodes, and other small invertebrates with the muscular lobes which surround their buccal siphons. Certain tropical species in the family Didemnidae have symbiotic green algae or cyanobacteria in their tunics, and one of these symbionts, Prochloron, is unique to tunicates. Excess photosynthetic products are assumed to be available to the host. ## Life cycle Ascidians are almost all hermaphrodites and each has a single ovary and testis, either near the gut or on the body wall. In some solitary species, sperm and eggs are shed into the sea and the larvae are planktonic. In others, especially colonial species, sperm is released into the water and drawn into the atria of other individuals with the incoming water current. Fertilization takes place here and the eggs are brooded through their early developmental stages. Some larval forms appear very much like primitive chordates with a notochord (stiffening rod) and superficially resemble small tadpoles. These swim by undulations of the tail and may have a simple eye, an ocellus, and a balancing organ, a statocyst. When sufficiently developed, the larva of the sessile species finds a suitable rock and cements itself in place. The larval form is not capable of feeding, though it may have a rudimentary digestive system, and is only a dispersal mechanism. Many physical changes occur to the tunicate's body during metamorphosis, one of the most significant being the reduction of the cerebral ganglion, which controls movement and is the equivalent of the vertebrate brain. From this comes the common saying that the sea squirt "eats its own brain". However, the adult does possess a cerebral ganglion adapted to lack of self-locomotion. In the Thaliacea, the larval stage is rudimentary or suppressed, and the adults are pelagic (swimming or drifting in the open sea). Colonial forms also increase the size of the colony by budding off new individuals to share the same tunic. Pyrosome colonies grow by budding off new zooids near the posterior end of the colony. Sexual reproduction starts within a zooid with an internally fertilized egg. This develops directly into an oozooid without any intervening larval form. This buds precociously to form four blastozooids which become detached in a single unit when the oozoid disintegrates. The atrial siphon of the oozoid becomes the exhalent siphon for the new, four-zooid colony. Doliolids have a very complex life cycle that includes various zooids with different functions. The sexually reproducing members of the colony are known as gonozooids. Each one is a hermaphrodite with the eggs being fertilised by sperm from another individual. The gonozooid is viviparous, and at first, the developing embryo feeds on its yolk sac before being released into the sea as a free-swimming, tadpole-like larva. This undergoes metamorphosis in the water column into an oozooid. This is known as a "nurse" as it develops a tail of zooids produced by budding asexually. Some of these are known as trophozooids, have a nutritional function, and are arranged in lateral rows. Others are phorozooids, have a transport function, and are arranged in a single central row. Other zooids link to the phorozooids, which then detach themselves from the nurse. These zooids develop into gonozooids, and when these are mature, they separate from the phorozooids to live independently and start the cycle over again. Meanwhile, the phorozooids have served their purpose and disintegrate. The asexual phase in the lifecycle allows the doliolid to multiply very rapidly when conditions are favourable. Salps also have a complex lifecycle with an alternation of generations. In the solitary life history phase, an oozoid reproduces asexually, producing a chain of tens or hundreds of individual zooids by budding along the length of a stolon. The chain of salps is the 'aggregate' portion of the lifecycle. The aggregate individuals, known as blastozooids, remain attached together while swimming and feeding and growing larger. The blastozooids are sequential hermaphrodites. An egg in each is fertilized internally by a sperm from another colony. The egg develops in a brood sac inside the blastozooid and has a placental connection to the circulating blood of its "nurse". When it fills the blastozooid's body, it is released to start the independent life of an oozooid. Larvaceans only reproduce sexually. They are protandrous hermaphrodites, except for Oikopleura dioica which is gonochoric, and a larva resembles the tadpole larva of ascidians. Once the trunk is fully developed, the larva undergoes "tail shift", in which the tail moves from a rearward position to a ventral orientation and twists through 90° relative to the trunk. The larva consists of a small, fixed number of cells, and grows by enlargement of these rather than cell division. Development is very rapid and only takes seven hours for a zygote to develop into a house-building juvenile starting to feed. During embryonic development, tunicates exhibit determinate cleavage, where the fate of the cells is set early on with reduced cell numbers and genomes that are rapidly evolving. In contrast, the amphioxus and vertebrates show cell determination relatively late in development and cell cleavage is indeterminate. The genome evolution of amphioxus and vertebrates is also relatively slow. ### Promotion of out-crossing Ciona intestinalis (class Ascidiacea) is a hermaphrodite that releases sperm and eggs into the surrounding seawater almost simultaneously. It is self-sterile, and thus has been used for studies on the mechanism of self-incompatibility. Self/non-self-recognition molecules play a key role in the process of interaction between sperm and the vitelline coat of the egg. It appears that self/non-self recognition in ascidians such as C. intestinalis is mechanistically similar to self-incompatibility systems in flowering plants. Self-incompatibility promotes out-crossing, and thus provides the adaptive advantage at each generation of the masking of deleterious recessive mutations (i.e. genetic complementation) and the avoidance of inbreeding depression. Botryllus schlosseri (class Ascidiacea) is a colonial tunicate, a member of the only group of chordates that are able to reproduce both sexually and asexually. B. schlosseri is a sequential (protogynous) hermaphrodite, and in a colony, eggs are ovulated about two days before the peak of sperm emission. Thus self-fertilization is avoided, and cross-fertilization is favored. Although avoided, self-fertilization is still possible in B. schlosseri. Self-fertilized eggs develop with a substantially higher frequency of anomalies during cleavage than cross-fertilized eggs (23% vs. 1.6%). Also a significantly lower percentage of larvae derived from self-fertilized eggs metamorphose, and the growth of the colonies derived from their metamorphosis is significantly lower. These findings suggest that self-fertilization gives rise to inbreeding depression associated with developmental deficits that are likely caused by expression of deleterious recessive mutations. ### A model tunicate Oikopleura dioica (class Appendicularia) is a semelparous organism, reproducing only once in its lifetime. It employs an original reproductive strategy in which the entire female germ-line is contained within an ovary that is a single giant multinucleate cell termed the "coenocyst". O. dioica can be maintained in laboratory culture, and is of growing interest as a model organism because of its phylogenetic position within the closest sister group to vertebrates. ## Invasive species Over the past few decades, tunicates (notably of the genera Didemnum and Styela) have been invading coastal waters in many countries. The carpet tunicate (Didemnum vexillum) has taken over a 6.5 sq mi (17 km²) area of the seabed on the Georges Bank off the northeast coast of North America, covering stones, molluscs, and other stationary objects in a dense mat. D. vexillum, Styela clava and Ciona savignyi have appeared and are thriving in Puget Sound and Hood Canal in the Pacific Northwest. Invasive tunicates usually arrive as fouling organisms on the hulls of ships, but may also be introduced as larvae in ballast water. Another possible means of introduction is on the shells of molluscs brought in for marine cultivation. Current research indicates many tunicates previously thought to be indigenous to Europe and the Americas are, in fact, invaders. Some of these invasions may have occurred centuries or even millennia ago. In some areas, tunicates are proving to be a major threat to aquaculture operations. ## Use by humans ### Medical uses Tunicates contain a host of potentially useful chemical compounds, including: - Didemnins, effective against various types of cancer, as antivirals and as immunosuppressants \* Aplidine, a didemnin effective against various types of cancer; as of late January 2021 undergoing Phase III trials as a treatment for COVID-19 \* Trabectedin, another didemnin effective against various types of cancer Tunicates are able to correct their own cellular abnormalities over a series of generations, and a similar regenerative process may be possible for humans. The mechanisms underlying the phenomenon may lead to insights about the potential of cells and tissues to be reprogrammed and to regenerate compromised human organs. ### As food Various Ascidiacea species are consumed as food around the world. The piure (Pyura chilensis) is used in the cuisine of Chile, both raw and in seafood stews. In Japan and Korea, the sea pineapple (Halocynthia roretzi) is the main species eaten. It is cultivated on dangling cords made of palm fronds. In 1994, over 42,000 tons were produced, but since then, mass mortality events have occurred among the farmed sea squirts (the tunics becoming soft), and only 4,500 tons were produced in 2004. ### Other uses The use of tunicates as a source of biofuel is being researched. The cellulose body wall can be broken down and converted into ethanol, and other parts of the animal are protein-rich and can be converted into fish feed. Culturing tunicates on a large scale may be possible and the economics of doing so are attractive. As tunicates have few predators, their removal from the sea may not have profound ecological impacts. Being sea-based, their production does not compete with food production as does the cultivation of land-based crops for biofuel projects. Some tunicates are used as model organisms. Ciona intestinalis and Ciona savignyi have been used for developmental studies. Both species' mitochondrial and nuclear genomes have been sequenced. The nuclear genome of the appendicularian Oikopleura dioica appears to be one of the smallest among metazoans and this species has been used to study gene regulation and the evolution and development of chordates. ## See also - Vetulicolia – crown-group chordates which are probably the sister group of modern tunicates - Donald I. Williamson – claimed hybridization

Mamma Mia (30 Rock)

"Mamma Mia" is the 21st episode of the third season of the American television comedy series 30 Rock, and the 57th overall episode of the series. It was written by co-executive producer Ron Weiner and directed by series producer Don Scardino. The episode originally aired on NBC in the United States on May 7, 2009. Guest stars in this episode include Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Stuart Margolin, Keith Olbermann, Clayton Dean Smith, and Michael Benjamin Washington. In the episode, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) begins to search for his biological father with help from Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) introduces his supposedly illegitimate son (Washington) to the cast and crew of the fictitious show The Girlie Show with Tracy Jordan (TGS), but some question his intentions. At the same time, Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) and Liz fight for attention when Jenna gets public recognition for a comedic sketch Liz wrote. "Mamma Mia" has received generally positive reception from television critics. According to the Nielsen Media Research, the episode was watched by 6.2 million households during its original broadcast. Ron Weiner and Alan Alda received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, respectively, both for this episode. ## Plot Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) decides not to search for his biological father, after it was revealed in the previous episode that the man he believed was his father was not. Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), however, convinces him to find out who his real father is, so Jack contacts Lenny Wosniak (Steve Buscemi)—a private investigator—to search for his biological father. Lenny gives him an envelope containing the names of three individuals who could be his father. Jack tells Liz about the envelope, and she suggests they Mamma Mia! this and bring the three men to New York under false pretenses, to which Jack agrees. Jack meets the men, George Park, Fred O'Dwyer (Stuart Margolin), and Professor Milton Greene (Alan Alda). At meeting the three men, Jack comes to the realization that Milton is his father, as George Park is Korean and Fred O'Dwyer lost his genitals in a grenade explosion during World War II. He tells Milton that he is his son, after Milton admitted to sleeping with his mother, Colleen Donaghy (Elaine Stritch), around the time Jack was conceived. Milton is happy to have him as his son, and reveals to Jack that he is in need of a kidney transplant. Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) introduces his illegitimate son, Donald (Michael Benjamin Washington), to the TGS with Tracy Jordan staff. Liz and Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) suspect that Donald is embezzling from Tracy as they do not believe that Donald is twenty-one years old, which Donald claims to be. Cerie Xerox (Katrina Bowden), Liz's assistant, obtains Donald's birth certificate and gives it to Liz and Pete; the two learn that Donald is forty years of age, thus confirming their suspicions about him. Liz tells Tracy about this, but Tracy knew all about Donald's scam, explaining he decided to go along with it because Donald was putting all of the money into a dojo and doing good for the community. At the same time, Liz becomes jealous when her friend and TGS star Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) takes credit for "That's A Deal Breaker, ladies!" catchphrase, resulting in Liz not getting recognition as she wrote the sketch. As a result of this, Jenna is named the "Funniest Person in New York" by Time Out magazine, and seeing how Liz feels about this, Jenna decides to share the magazine cover with her. At the photo shoot, the photographer (Clayton Dean Smith) wants Jenna to use props for the shoot, but Jenna is reluctant to use any of them. Liz, however, decides to pose with the props, resulting in her being on the cover of Time Out, much to Jenna's displeasure. ## Production "Mamma Mia" was written by co-executive producer Ron Weiner, making it his fourth writing credit after "Secrets and Lies", "Señor Macho Solo", and "Goodbye, My Friend". The episode was directed by series producer Don Scardino, his twentieth for the series. "Mamma Mia" originally aired in the United States on May 7, 2009, on NBC as the twenty-first episode of the show's third season and the 57th overall episode of the series. The character Professor Milton Greene, Jack Donaghy's biological father, was played by guest actor Alan Alda, best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce from the television series M\*A\*S\*H. Alda and Alec Baldwin have worked together, having appeared in the 2004 biographical drama film The Aviator. Actor Steve Buscemi reprised his role as private investigator Lenny Wosniak for the third time, having appeared in "The Collection" and "The Natural Order". Buscemi directed the 30 Rock episode "Retreat to Move Forward" that aired on January 22, 2009, during the show's third season. News anchor Keith Olbermann, of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, did a voice over in this episode, in which Pete recalls hearing a sports anchor (Olbermann) saying the line "That's A Deal Breaker, ladies!" in SportsCenter during a hockey game highlight. The episode also features one of the first on-screen performances by Amy Schumer, who has one line as "Stylist". One filmed scene from "Mamma Mia" was cut out from the airing. Instead, the scene was featured on 30 Rock's season three DVD as part of the deleted scenes in the Bonus feature. In the scene, NBC page Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) gives George Park, Fred O'Dwyer, and Milton Greene a tour around the backstage area of TGS. Fred tells Kenneth that he resembles a man he served with in the service, which Kenneth says "Well, obviously that's a coincidence. How could I be in Normandy?". Fred responds by saying that he never told Kenneth where he served. Jack shows up where Kenneth and the three men are, and tells Kenneth that he would like to talk to Milton, prompting Kenneth to tell Jack "As head of this tour, I'm going to deny your request." Jack and Milton are then seen at Jack's office. ## Cultural references Throughout the episode, numerous references are made to the jukebox musical Mamma Mia!, in which Jack tells Liz about his possible three fathers, Jack agreeing to meet with the three men, and Liz saying "And all I'm promising is a madcap musical romp, dot dot dot, fun, dot dot dot, good. ... That was on the [Mamma Mia!] poster", and finally Jack revealing his kinship to Milton. Liz tells Jack that he should find out who his real father is, explaining "If I have learned anything from my Sims family: When a child doesn't see his father enough he starts to jump up and down, then his mood level will drop until he pees himself." The Sims is a video game in which players create virtual people called "Sims" and places them in houses and helps direct their moods and satisfy their desires. Liz and Pete learn from James "Toofer" Spurlock (Keith Powell) that Tracy's favorite television show is NCIS, a CBS police drama series revolving around special agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who conduct criminal investigations involving the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Later, Liz and Pete sing the song "It Takes Two" by hip-hop duo Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock to see if Tracy is familiar with the song as they have doubts about the age Tracy claims to be. ## Reception According to the Nielsen Media Research, "Mamma Mia" was watched by 6.2 million households in its original American broadcast. It earned a 2.9 rating/8 share in the 18–49 demographic. This means that it was seen by 2.9 percent of all 18- to 49-year-olds, and 8 percent of all 18- to 49-year-olds watching television at the time of the broadcast. This was an increase from the previous episode, "The Natural Order", which was watched by 6.0 million American viewers. Ron Weiner received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series, but lost it to fellow 30 Rock writer Matt Hubbard for the episode "Reunion" at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards. At the same awards show, Alan Alda received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series, but lost it to singer-songwriter Justin Timberlake for hosting Saturday Night Live. IGN contributor Robert Canning complimented 30 Rock for Jack's search of his father plot, writing that they took it and "rolled forward with energy and smarts and delivered one of the funnier episodes from the past several weeks." Canning said that the other stories were "also very fun", and having been a critic to Jane Krakowski's Jenna, Canning said that her appearance in "Mamma Mia" was "effectively funny without overdoing her self-centeredness." In conclusion, Canning gave it a 9.1 out of 10 rating. Television columnist Alan Sepinwall for The Star-Ledger wrote that this was a "very funny episode, boosted by the ingenious casting of Alan Alda" as Jack's biological father. The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin praised 30 Rock for delivering "comically" with this episode, and observing there were good elements in it. Rabin opined that the casting of Alda as Jack's father was "inspired", and gave "Mamma Mia" an A− grade rating. Entertainment Weekly contributor Aly Semigran was complimentary towards the episode, and appreciated the guest appearances from Alda and Steve Buscemi. Bruce Fretts for TV Guide Magazine said that "Mamma Mia" was "strong", and cited that it had "quotable inside-TV digs ... an instant chemistry between Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda ... and an infectious rendition of 'It Takes Two' by Liz and Pete." Mike Moody of AOL's TV Squad hoped that "someone on the show figure out" what to do with the Jenna character, and suggested that she have a love interest "that makes her mature or ... makes her move away" because Jenna's "vacuous, selfish aging diva routine has gotten old already." Moody, however, said that the best part of Tracy's story was the karate showdown between Donald and J. D. Lutz (John Lutz).

Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good!

Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! is the debut studio album by American thrash metal band Megadeth, released on June 12, 1985, by Combat Records. At the beginning of 1985, the band was given \$8,000 by Combat to record and produce its debut album. The band was forced to fire their original producer and produce the album by themselves, after spending half of the album's budget on drugs, alcohol, and food. Despite the poor production, the album was a well-received effort that obtained strong reviews in various music publications. Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! played an essential role in establishing thrash metal as an authentic subgenre of heavy metal music. It explores themes of death, occultism, and violence. The album features the track "Mechanix", a song that frontman Dave Mustaine would perform with Metallica during his tenure in the band, and a controversial cover of the 1965 song "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. A deluxe edition, completely remixed and remastered with several bonus tracks, was released through Loud Records on February 5, 2002. It features vastly different artwork, with its cover based on the version originally designed by Mustaine in 1985. All songs from the album were performed frequently during Megadeth's initial tour but have been steadily dropped from the setlist since, except for "Mechanix". A new remastered version of the album called Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! - The Final Kill was released on June 8, 2018, which includes a version of "These Boots" with re-recorded vocals, redone to Lee Hazlewood's version. ## Background Dave Mustaine had been originally the lead guitarist for Metallica. However, due to drinking, substance abuse, violent behavior, and personality conflicts with bandmates James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich, Mustaine was eventually fired from the band. Two months after being fired from Metallica, Mustaine met bassist David Ellefson and together they formed Megadeth in Los Angeles. Mustaine later recalled: "After getting fired from Metallica, all I remember is that I wanted blood. Theirs. I wanted to be faster and heavier than them." Fueled by the desire for revenge, Mustaine elevated the intensity of Megadeth's music in order to challenge his former band. He sped up existing songs such as "Mechanix", which Metallica's new line-up adapted into the slower paced "The Four Horsemen". Mustaine included his original version of the song on the album to "straighten Metallica up", as Metallica referred to Mustaine as a drunk, and said that he could not play guitar. After going through multiple vocalists, including Billy Bonds and John Cyriis, Mustaine decided to handle the vocal duties himself, while also serving as the band's primary lyricist, main songwriter, and co-lead and rhythm guitarist. Megadeth recorded a three-song demo tape early in 1984 titled "Last Rites", engineered by Karat Faye, and released it on March 9, 1984. On the strength of the demo, the band was asked to sign with the New York-based independent label Combat Records in November 1984. Early in 1985, Megadeth was given \$8,000 by Combat to record and produce its debut album. However, this proved not to be enough, and the band was given a further \$4,000. Instead, a majority of the budget was spent on drugs, alcohol, and food, prompting the group to fire the original producer, and produce the record themselves. Poland has disputed this account. The album was successfully recorded at the Indigo Ranch Studios, in Malibu, California. ## Release and promotion The album's artwork, featuring a plastic skull with tinfoil, was not intended to be the original artwork. Both Mustaine and Ellefson had many phone conversations with Combat Records to get the cover artwork properly reproduced from a sketch given to them by Mustaine of a picture of Megadeth mascot Vic Rattlehead on the cover. However the studio lost the artwork, and instead made their own improvised and low-budget replacement, with which Mustaine and the whole band were mortified. Megadeth began with live performances before the record was released. Although not a member of the band, Kerry King of Slayer played guitar for a short period because Mustaine had not recruited a full-time guitarist yet. In mid-1985, the group toured the United States and Canada for the first time, supporting Killing Is My Business... with Canadian speed metal band Exciter. During the tour, guitarist Chris Poland abruptly left the band, and was replaced by guitarist Mike Albert. However, Poland rejoined Megadeth in October 1985, and stayed with the band up after the tour of the next album. The album was released on June 12, 1985. To date it remains the only Megadeth album that did not chart on the Billboard 200, primarily because it was released through an independent label with little promotion. Nevertheless, the album still went on to become one of Combat Records' highest selling releases. Later that year, Capitol Records signed Megadeth as they began working on their second album, Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, released the following year. A limited edition of Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! was released in 2009. The CD itself is pressed on black plastic with grooves on the top to imitate an LP. This version's cover is redesigned to match Mustaine's original sketch, and the song "These Boots" was removed. Over 254,000 copies of the album were sold in the United States since the beginning of the Nielsen SoundScan era. On April 6, 2018, it was announced that the album would once again be remixed and remastered, this time by Mark Lewis and Ted Jensen. Titled Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! - The Final Kill, the deluxe reissue features new mixes and masters of the original album, a new version of "These Boots" featuring Lee Hazlewood's original lyrics (albeit with the song downtuned as a result), the original 1984 demos featured on the 2002 remix, and newly-discovered live tracks sourced from VHS tapes found in Dave Mustaine's attic. The new remaster was released on June 8, 2018. ## Music and lyrics According to writer Peter Buckley, the record presented a faster, "thrashier kind of heavy metal". Steve Huey of AllMusic opined that the music on Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! is predominantly "chaotic", accompanied by "lightning-fast" solo sections. Sputnikmusic's Mike Stagno said that the original pressing greatly suffered from the poor production, which made the record difficult to listen to. However, he noted that the music is performed at rapid speed, with precise riffing by both Poland and Mustaine. In his book Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal, editor Jeff Wagner wrote the album displayed unusual rhythms and unorthodox guitar riffs, which carried "like a runaway train". Speaking about the intensity of the record, Ellefson said that "extreme speed was deemed the cool factor in thrash metal back in those days". Although Ellefson considers the album as a solid debut release, he wanted some of the songs to be recorded in slower tempo. The album explores gloomy lyrical subjects such as death, violence, and occultism. Speaking about the themes on the album, author Bob Larson asserted that Megadeth "cranks out songs about spilling blood and stomping guts with venomous anger". The album's title, as well as its lyrics, led to accusations whether the band was promoting Satanism. These allegations were rigidly denied by Mustaine, who said that the band consciously kept away from the Satanic image. "I mean, it's great to thrash and pound, cut yourself up, scream and have fun, but you don't have to take out a Pagan attitude. Why support the Devil? He's already there. I'd rather just fucking thrash and be a metalist and listen to whatever I want to than be forced to listen to one style of music." ## Songs The album's opening track, "Last Rites/Loved to Death", consists of two parts. The first part, "Last Rites", is an instrumental featuring a piano intro, which is a reinterpretation of J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Mustaine explained that "Loved to Death" was his "version of a love song" to his girlfriend at the time. The title track was inspired by The Punisher comic book, and tells of a paid assassin. The song caused minor media controversy when a man posted an online request to a radio station to play the tune, saying it was "good music to go postal and kill a bunch of people to". The man was later arrested under suspicion of commencing a potential shooting spree. "The Skull Beneath the Skin" was developed under the working title "Self Destruct". The song graphically describes a horrendous human torture, while also probing into the occult and black magic. Mustaine pointed that the creation of Vic Rattlehead was explained throughout that track. "Rattlehead", according to Dave Mustaine, was dedicated to the band's mascot and their fans. "Looking Down the Cross" was penned by Mustaine in 1983 under the working title "Speak No Evil". The song tells about the temptation of Jesus Christ, using religious metaphors and imagery. "Chosen Ones" was partially inspired by Tim the Enchanter from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Mechanix" was originally written by Mustaine before his tenure in Metallica. He would perform the song with them during his time in the band and, after his departure, the music and lyrics were modified to create "The Four Horsemen". Lyrically, "Mechanix" is about having sex at a gas station. The album features the first of many covers performed by Megadeth: a speed metal version of Nancy Sinatra's classic "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", with lyrics altered by Mustaine. This sparked controversy, as in 1995, the song's original author, Lee Hazlewood, deemed Mustaine's changes to be "vile and offensive" and demanded that the song be removed from the album under threat of legal action. The song was removed from all pressings released afterwards, and in 2002, the album was re-released with a modified version of the song: the altered lyrics were censored because Hazlewood had not given permission to the band to release the cover in its original version. In the liner notes of the album's 2002 reissue, Mustaine was strongly critical of Hazlewood, noting that he had received royalties for almost ten years before he objected to the altered version. In 2018, the song was released with the original Lee Hazlewood lyrics on the remixed and remastered version of Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! ## Critical reception Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! received mostly positive reviews, not just from metal-oriented magazines, but from the mainstream press too. Colin Larkin, writing in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music, called the album a "ferocious blast of high-energy thrash metal", weakened by a thin production. Similarly, Steve Huey from AllMusic observed that the album is "as raw as Megadeth gets". However, Huey noted that the riffs and compositions weren't completely developed, and called Mustaine's vocals "amateurish at best". Chad Bowar from About.com said that Megadeth were still "finding their way" on their debut album, but remarked that the band showed great potential through angry and passionate musicianship. Adrien Begrand of PopMatters dismissed the original recording, but praised the re-release, writing that the album "blazes on at a furious pace". According to him, the record greatly influenced the heavy metal genre in the upcoming two decades. Sputnikmusic staff member Mike Stagno agreed with the praise for the remaster, saying that the "fuzzy" sound of the original release was replaced with a clearer production. Even so, he opined that the album still retained the "thrashy" sound characteristic for the band during this period. Mike Marsh of Drowned in Sound recommended the music "for people who want it loud, fast and brutal". In a retrospective review for KNAC, Frank Meyer said that the album put Megadeth at the forefront of heavy metal scene in the early 1980s and credited it for paving the way for thrash metal's arrival. CMJ New Music Report praised Mustaine's "masterful" wordplay and called the record a representative of "the golden age of speed metal". ## Track listing ## Personnel Production and performance credits are adapted from the album liner notes. Megadeth - Dave Mustaine – guitars, lead vocals, piano (track 1) - David Ellefson – bass, backing vocals - Chris Poland – guitars - Gar Samuelson – drums, timpani (track 7) - Lee Rauch – drums (demos only; possibly false?) Production - Produced and mixed by Dave Mustaine and Karat Faye - Co-produced by Megadeth - Pre-production by Jay Jones 2002 remix and remaster - Mixed by Bill Kennedy - Pro Tools by Chris Vrenna - Mastered by Tom Baker The Final Kill 2018 remix and remaster - Mixed by Mark Lewis (tracks 1–8) - Mastered by Ted Jensen ## Charts The Final Kill

Marais des Cygnes Massacre Site

The Marais des Cygnes Massacre Site, also known as Marais des Cygnes Massacre Memorial Park, is a state historic site near Trading Post, Kansas that commemorates the 1858 massacre of the same name. On May 19, 1858, during a period of political instability and sporadic violence known as Bleeding Kansas, a group of pro-slavery border ruffians captured 11 abolitionist free-staters. The prisoners were forced to a nearby ravine, where 10 of them were shot, resulting in five fatalities. The abolitionist John Brown later built a fort near the site. The first commemoration at the site was two stone markers erected by men of the 3rd Iowa Cavalry Regiment in 1864, although these monuments had been destroyed by souvenir hunters by 1895. In 1941, the land where the massacre occurred, as well as an 1870s-era house constructed by a friend of Brown, were transferred to the state of Kansas. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974. The Kansas Historical Society administers the site, which is interpreted by signage and a hand-cranked audio recording. ## History ### Background When the United States Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, it did not directly state whether Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory would allow slavery or not. While Nebraska did not see much controversy, Kansas became a hotly debated area. While the previous Missouri Compromise would have prevented slavery from being practiced in Kansas, the new law left the question open. In response to the new opening, pro-slavery advocates known as border ruffians, many of whom were from Missouri, entered Kansas to illegally vote in an attempt to sway local elections. The New England Emigrant Aid Company also sought to bring anti-slavery settlers into the territory. The elections, which were held on March 30, 1855, resulted in a pro-slavery majority in the Kansas territorial government, who in turn created laws protecting slavery and, among other things, outlawing abolitionist literature. Abolitionist sentiment was strong near Lawrence, and several prominent Lawrence residents formed the Free State Party to organize resistance to the pro-slavery government in September. In October, free-staters drafted the Topeka Constitution, which sought to create an abolitionist government in the state. There were now both pro- and anti-slavery governments vying for control of Kansas; President of the United States Franklin Pierce supported the pro-slavery government as the lawful one. Beginning in 1855, the political disturbances transitioned into a period of sporadic violence known as Bleeding Kansas. On May 21, 1856, the Sack of Lawrence was carried out by several hundred supporters of slavery. While there were no fatalities, several buildings were burned down and newspaper equipment was destroyed. Later that month, John Brown, an abolitionist, led a group that murdered five pro-slavery southerners in a single night, an event that became known as the Pottawatomie massacre. In 1858, the situation deteriorated further. James Montgomery led a group of free-staters who fought with elements of the United States Army garrison of Fort Scott in the Battle of Paint Creek in April; one of the soldiers was slain in the action. The next month, Montgomery and some of his followers successfully evicted border ruffians from Linn County. ### Massacre On May 19, a border ruffian named Charles Hamilton led a group of about 30 men on a ride through the settlement of Trading Post. After taking 11 local free-staters hostage, the border ruffians forced them into a nearby ravine and began shooting at them. 10 of the men were hit by the fire, five of them fatally. The wife of one of the victims followed the border ruffians to the site, and attempted to give medical treatment to the wounded. Later that day, other locals gathered at the area, aiding the wounded and disposing of the bodies of the dead. Rumor spread that the massacre had been planned in a building known as the Western Hotel; Montgomery unsuccessfully attempted to burn it down on June 5. Only one man was ever prosecuted for his involvement in the massacre: William Griffith of Bates County, Missouri. In the spring of 1863, Griffith was recognized and arrested. That October, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Griffith was hanged on October 30, 1863. Charles Hamilton returned to Georgia, where he died in 1880. Land south of the ravine where the massacre occurred was owned by a local blacksmith, who later sold the site to Charles Hadsall, a friend of Brown. In late June, Brown built a two-story log fort south of the ravine; Hadsall allowed him to keep a military post at the site. Brown abandoned the fort later that summer. ## Description Commemoration of the massacre began in late October 1864, when men of the 3rd Iowa Cavalry Regiment erected two stone markers at the site, after the Battle of Mine Creek during the American Civil War. In 1889, on the anniversary of the battle, a formal monument to the victims was dedicated in a cemetery at Trading Post. By 1895, souvenir hunters had largely destroyed the 1864 markers. Hadsall, probably in the 1870s, built a stone house next to the fort site. A spring was enclosed by the house, although the fort itself was destroyed by sightseers. In 1941, a Veterans of Foreign Wars post donated the site of the massacre and Hadsall's house to the state of Kansas. From 1961–1962, the home underwent a renovation, after which it was transferred to Kansas Historical Society administration. In 1964, part of the house was transitioned into use as a museum. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 21, 1971, with a reference number of 71000317. It was further listed as a National Historic Landmark (NHL) on May 30, 1974. The area is still rural. Signs provide interpretation of the events of the massacre, and a hand-cranked device plays an audio recording. The NHL-designated area incorporates 43 acres (17 ha). As of October 2020, the site is open from dusk to dawn. No admission fee is charged, and visits are self-guided. The Hadsall house still stands and can be viewed from the exterior. Sites designed for picnicing are also present at the park. ## See also - List of National Historic Landmarks in Kansas - National Register of Historic Places in Linn County, Kansas

Cynthia Lummis

American politician (born 1954)

Cynthia Marie Lummis Wiederspahn (/ˈlʌmɪs/ LUH-miss; born September 10, 1954) is an American attorney and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Wyoming since 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Lummis served as the U.S representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district from 2009 to 2017. She served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1979 to 1983 and from 1985 to 1993, in the Wyoming Senate from 1993 to 1995, and as the Wyoming State Treasurer from 1999 to 2007. Lummis was elected treasurer of Wyoming in 1998 and reelected without opposition in 2002. She chaired Mary Mead's gubernatorial campaign in 1990 and Ray Hunkins's gubernatorial campaign in 2006. She also served on Bob Dole's presidential steering committee in Wyoming and chaired Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign in Wyoming. Lummis unsuccessfully sought to be appointed to replace Senator Craig L. Thomas in 2007. She was elected to succeed Barbara Cubin in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2008 election, defeating Democratic nominee Gary Trauner. During her tenure in the House, she was the first Wyoming representative to serve on the Agriculture Committee since 1941, chaired the Science Subcommittee on Energy, co-chaired the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, and was active in the Congressional Western Caucus and Freedom Caucus. She served until her retirement in 2017, and was succeeded by Liz Cheney. After her tenure in the House, Lummis sought a position in President Donald Trump's cabinet as Secretary of the Interior, but was not appointed. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in the 2020 election, becoming the first woman to represent Wyoming in the Senate. She voted to reject the certification of Pennsylvania's electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election, which were narrowly won by Joe Biden. ## Early life and education Cynthia Marie Lummis was born on September 10, 1954, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Doran Lummis and Enid Bennett. She is descended from German immigrants and her family first came to Wyoming in 1868. Her father chaired the Laramie County Republican Party and served on the county board of commissioners. Her brother Del Lummis also chaired the Laramie County Republican Party. Lummis attended Cheyenne East High School, and graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Bachelor of Science degree in animal science in 1976 and a Bachelor of Science in biology in 1978. She graduated from the University of Wyoming with a Juris Doctor in 1985, and was on the dean's list. She worked as a student teacher at Rock River School in 1977. ## Career ### State legislature #### Elections In 1978, Lummis was elected to the Wyoming House of Representatives at age 24, the youngest woman to serve in the state legislature. She was reelected in 1980, but chose to not seek reelection in 1982. Lummis returned to the state house after winning the 1984 election. She filed to run for reelection on June 19, 1986, and was reelected after placing third out of 18 candidates. She was reelected in the 1988 and 1990 elections. She was reapportioned to the 8th district in 1992. In 1990, when Republican Senator Dan Sullivan resigned from the Wyoming Senate, Senate Majority Leader Diemer True stated that Lummis was qualified to replace Sullivan in the state senate. But she could not take the position, as she was busy serving as a campaign manager in the gubernatorial election. In 1992, Lummis ran for a seat in the Wyoming Senate from the 5th district, defeating Norman P. Feagler for the Republican nomination, and incumbent Democratic Senator Harriet Elizabeth Byrd in the general election. During the campaign Lummis spent \$11,661, making her the fifth-highest spending elected candidate in the 1992 election. On June 8, 1994, she announced that she would not run for reelection, saying she had other commitments to her family. Republican nominee Don Lawler was elected to succeed her after defeating Democratic nominee Steve Freudenthal. #### Tenure During Lummis's tenure in the state house, she chaired the Revenue committee and served on the Judiciary and Agriculture Committees. During her tenure in the state senate she served on the Judiciary Committee. After leaving the state legislature, she was appointed to Jim Geringer's gubernatorial transition team, and served as his general counsel until 1997. Geringer appointed Lummis to serve as interim director of the Office of State Lands and Investments in 1997, after he fired Jim Magagna. On February 28, 1982, Lummis was injured in a car accident while Wiederspahn was driving. She attended the National Conference of State Legislatures national conference in 1982, alongside Senate President Donald Cundall and Representatives Wiederspahn, Peg Shreve, Scott Ratliff, William A. Cross, and George Salisbury. In a 1982 roll-call vote in favor of legislation about the treatment of non-resident traffic offenders, a man cast Lummis's vote while she was outside the room. Lummis changed the vote to a nay after coming back in, and Representative Ken Burns cited this as an example of why electronic voting was needed. During the 1988 Republican presidential primaries, Lummis served on Bob Dole's steering committee in Wyoming. A 1989 survey of the financial contributors of the Wyoming Republican Party showed that Lummis was suggested as a candidate for Secretary of State of Wyoming. She served as Republican candidate Mary Mead's campaign manager during the 1990 gubernatorial election. ### Treasurer #### Elections On November 17, 1996, incumbent Treasurer Stan Smith announced that he would not seek reelection to a fifth term in 1998. It was speculated that Lummis would replace him. At the Laramie County Republican convention on March 28, 1998, she announced that she would run for treasurer, and formally announced her campaign on April 20, at a press conference alongside Smith. During the campaign, the Attorney General ruled that public funds could not be used to send state treasurer candidates to an investment seminar. Lummis won the Republican nomination without opposition and defeated Democratic nominee Charyl Loveridge and Libertarian nominee James Blomquist. Lummis was considered as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2002 gubernatorial election, but declined to run. She announced on April 30 that she would seek reelection as treasurer, and was reelected without opposition in 2002. Lummis was the only statewide candidate to face no opposition in the 2002 election, as nobody had filed to run in the Democratic primary and no other candidate received the 25 write-in votes required to qualify for the nomination. During the campaign she had raised \$9,275 and spent \$12,151. She was limited to two terms as treasurer and did not challenge the constitutionality of the legislation, despite the Wyoming Supreme Court having invalidated term limits on state legislators. She endorsed former Speaker Fred Parady to succeed her as treasurer in the 2006 election, but Joseph Meyer won the Republican primary and the general election. #### Tenure Lummis conducted an accounting change by raising the interest rate on the \$100 million in Wyoming banks, which reduced Wyoming's expected budget deficit in 1999 by over \$5 million. She also planned a 1% increase on the interest yield of Wyoming's \$2.6 billion permanent fund, which would raise \$26 million per year. She served on the Wyoming Board of Land Commissioners alongside Governor Geringer, Secretary of State Meyer, Auditor Max Maxfield, and superintendent of public instruction Judy Catchpole. During her tenure, the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund rose to over \$2 billion for the first time. In April 2001, Lummis announced a conflict of interest involving her role as treasurer of the Arp and Hammond Hardware Company, which she claimed had existed since December 2000 but had existed since April 2000. She and other Republican statewide officials were accused of trying to expand their powers at the expense of Governor Dave Freudenthal, but denied the claims. Lummis claimed that she was the person responsible for the increase in Wyoming's investments during her tenure as treasurer, but Freudenthal said that no one person could take credit for the increase. As a member of the Wyoming Canvassing Board, Lummis voted unanimously alongside the three other members against a recall of the ballots cast in Natrona County during the 2002 United States House of Representatives election. Even though the results in Natrona County could not overturn the statewide results, they would determine which county was placed first on the ballot. Lummis initially supported a recount, but changed her mind after Mary Ann Collins, the Natrona County Clerk, told her that all of the ballots had been counted. Lummis and all other statewide officials in Wyoming attended the first inauguration of George W. Bush. During the 2004 presidential election, she served as one of Wyoming's 28 delegates to the Republican National Convention. Lummis was the only statewide official from Wyoming to attended Bush's second inauguration. She served as the chair of Ray Hunkins's campaign during the 2006 gubernatorial election. ### United States House of Representatives #### Elections Representative Barbara Cubin, whom Lummis had supported during the 1994 election, announced that she would not run for reelection in the 2008 election. On January 2, 2008, Lummis announced that she would run for Cubin's seat, winning the Republican nomination against Mark Gordon, Bill Winney, and Michael Holland, having challenged them to debates held in all 23 Wyoming counties during the primaries. A poll conducted from January 18 to 21 showed that Lummis had a favorability rating of 29%, unfavorability rating of 17%, a neutral rating of 24%, and 30% did not recognize her. Tucker Fagan, who later served as her chief of staff, served as Lummis's campaign manager. During the campaign Rachael Seidenschnur, her press secretary, resigned after using a fake name to ask Lummis's opponent a question. She defeated Democratic nominee Gary Trauner in the general election. During the campaign Lummis raised \$1,557,313 and spent \$1,543,875 while Trauner raised \$1,672,707 and spent \$1,716,013. Lummis was reelected in 2010 against Democratic nominee David Wendt and Libertarian nominee John V. Love, after having raised \$780,426 and spending \$754,270 compared to Wendt, who had raised \$65,709 and spent \$68,523 Lummis announced that she would run for reelection on May 21, 2012, and was reelected in the 2012 election over Democratic nominee Chris Henrichsen after having raised \$715,314 and spent \$631,026. She was reelected in the 2014 election against Democratic nominee Richard Grayson after having raised \$432,666 and spent \$300,949. On November 12, 2015, Lummis announced that she would not seek reelection in the 2016 election, and Liz Cheney was elected to succeed her. Lummis's daughter, Annaliese Wiederspahn, served as Leland Christensen's campaign manager during the Republican primary. Lummis considered running for the Republican nomination in the 2018 gubernatorial election, but declined to run and endorsed Sam Galeotos. She sought a position in President Donald Trump's cabinet by attempting to replace Ryan Zinke as United States Secretary of the Interior, but David Bernhardt was appointed instead. #### Tenure During Lummis's tenure in the House, she served on the Agriculture and Appropriations Committees and on the Energy and Mineral Resources, National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, and Energy and Water Development Subcommittees. She was the first representative from Wyoming to serve on the Agriculture Committee since Frank O. Horton, who served on the committee from 1939 to 1941. In 2011, she was appointed vice chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee of the Agriculture Committee. Lummis left the Appropriations Committee in 2013, saying she had requested her removal from the committee and that it was not part of a purge of radical Republicans from committee positions. She was appointed chair of the Science Subcommittee on Energy in 2013. Lummis served as the communications chair and spokesperson of the Congressional Western Caucus and succeeded Dean Heller as vice chair in 2011 following Heller's appointment to the United States Senate. Lummis was elected to serve on the House Republican Steering Committee in 2010. She was at one point the only female member of the Freedom Caucus and the last until the election of Debbie Lesko. Lummis co-chaired the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues alongside Representative Gwen Moore from 2011 to 2013. She was also a member of the Tea Party Caucus. Lummis supported Speaker John Boehner while the Freedom Caucus successfully pushed to remove Boehner. She praised the election of Paul Ryan as Speaker, saying, "we have ushered in thoughtful, conservative leadership, restored member-driven policy-making to the legislative process and returned regular order that will bring sunshine to back rooms making government work better". Lummis served on the Republican whip team until she was removed from the position in 2015, for voting against giving President Barack Obama the authority to propose a trade agreement with Pacific countries. She said she knew she would be removed from her position on the whip team for her vote but did not regret it. Representatives Steve Pearce and Trent Franks were also removed from the whip team for their votes. During the 2008 presidential election, Lummis was supposed to give a speech at the Republican National Convention on the first day, but her speech was canceled due to Hurricane Gustav. During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries she endorsed Mitt Romney and served as the chair of Romney's campaign in Wyoming. During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, she was a campaign surrogate for Rand Paul, and later endorsed Trump in the presidential election. ### United States Senate #### Elections After Senator Craig L. Thomas died on June 4, 2007, Lummis announced on June 12 that she would seek an appointment to replace him. She placed third in the final vote, making her one of the nominees submitted to the governor as a candidate for appointment, alongside John Barrasso and Tom Sansonetti. Freudenthal selected Barrasso to replace Thomas. Lummis was speculated as a possible candidate in the 2014 United States Senate election. On June 20, 2019, Lummis filed to run for a seat in the United States Senate to succeed retiring Senator Mike Enzi. She won the Republican nomination and defeated Democratic nominee Merav Ben-David in the general election. Her victory made her the first woman to represent Wyoming in the United States Senate. She raised more during the campaign than all of her Republican and Democratic opponents combined. During the campaign Lummis raised \$3,003,788 and spent \$3,037,813 while Ben-David raised \$559,626 and spent \$545,348. #### Tenure During her tenure in the Senate, Lummis has served on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees. Hans Hunt, a member of the Wyoming state House, resigned so that he could work as Lummis's agriculture and trade policy adviser. During the counting of the electoral college vote of the 2020 presidential election Lummis voted to certify the results from Arizona, but against certifying the results from Pennsylvania. She voted to acquit Trump during his second impeachment trial. Lummis voted against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 but for the PPP Extension Act and the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. ## Political positions ### Economy Lummis supported the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but said the government should avoid bailing out private companies. She supported the privization of Social Security, raising the age at which people received Social Security money, and making the Bush tax cuts permanent. She voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In 2010, the House voted 228 to 192, with Lummis in favor, to prohibit federal funding for NPR. She said that House Democrats had a "cocaine-like addiction" to spending. Lummis voted against the Hurricane Sandy relief bill, saying that although victims of Hurricane Sandy deserved the money the federal government should cut its budget to offset the cost of the legislation. Lummis has campaigned for a regulatory framework for digital assets, a stance she reiterated after the FTX exchange collapsed. Lummis was among the 31 Senate Republicans who voted against final passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. ### Energy and climate change In a 2012 campaign debate, Lummis rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, claiming that climate change was "not settled science". She supports the development of nuclear power and oil drilling in Alaska. ### Equality In 1979, Lummis said that it was "important to me to see Equal Rights Amendment not rescinded". In 2015, she and Representative Carolyn Maloney led another effort to pass the ERA. In 2013, the House voted 286 to 138, with Lummis against, to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. She and Senator Chris Van Hollen attempted to have a federal building in Cheyenne named after Louisa Swain, the first woman to vote in the United States. ### LGBT rights Lummis voted against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after Matthew Shepard, who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime, stating that she believed that hate crime legislation was "a state's rights issue". She voted against the repeal of don't ask, don't tell and co-sponsored the State Marriage Defense Act. Following the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which found same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional, Lummis supported the First Amendment Defense Act to protect religious groups that opposed gay marriage. She opposes same-sex marriage and believes that it "should be left to the states". She was given a zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign during her entire tenure in the House of Representatives. She was one of 12 Republicans to vote to advance the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation that codifies same-sex marriage rights into federal law. On November 29, 2022, Lummis voted for the final passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. Explaining her decision, reversing her prior opposition to federal same-sex marriage recognition, she said she was "guided by two things—the Wyoming Constitution and ensuring religious liberties for all citizens and faith-based organizations were protected." ### Foreign policy Lummis supported continuing the United States' occupation of Iraq, holding that soldiers should not be withdrawn until General David Petraeus said it was time to leave. She supported the surge of soldiers in Iraq. Lummis was one of four Republicans on the Agriculture Committee to vote in favor of legislation that would have lifted the travel ban on Americans and agricultural products to and from Cuba. Lummis opposed American involvement in the Syrian civil war, stating that the civil war "should be dealt with by the Arab world" and that she did not see how "getting involved in another open-ended and costly conflict is in the best interest of America". ### Firearms Lummis received an "A" rating and endorsement from the NRA Political Victory Fund during the 2008 campaign. In 2009, the House voted 279 to 147, with Lummis in favor, to allow people to bring loaded guns into national parks and wildlife refuges. ### Health care legislation Lummis supported the creation of federal legislation to allow private insurance companies to form interstate insurance pools. She voted against passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and has supported subsequent efforts to defund the ACA. Lummis and 182 other Republican members of Congress filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to halt a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for companies with 100 or more employees. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she opposed adding unruly passengers to the "no-fly" list, saying that unruly passengers who refuse to comply with mask requirements are not the same as terrorists. Lummis co-sponsored legislation in the state house to allow state Medicaid funding to be used for abortions when the mother's life was at risk. The Wyoming "Right to Choose" political action committee reported that Lummis was pro-choice after she completed a questionnaire during the 1990 election and the organization endorsed her during the 1992 election. Lummis said in the 1990s that abortion was a sin, but that it should not be illegal, because people can better evaluate their circumstances than the state. In 2015, Lummis cosponsored and voted for legislation in the House to defund Planned Parenthood. The National Right to Life Committee endorsed her in the 2020 election and gave her a 100% anti-abortion rating during her tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives. She supported the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Lummis was given a 0% rating by NARAL Pro-Choice America in 2016. ## Personal life Lummis met Alvin Wiederspahn while both were campaigning during the 1978 election; they married on May 28, 1983. Both later served in the Wyoming House of Representatives, one of the few married couples to do so, though Lummis was a Republican and Wiederspahn a Democrat. She remained married to Wiederspahn, with whom she had one child, until his death on October 24, 2014. Lummis has a net worth of \$12.26 million as of 2015, but reported a net worth between \$20 million and \$75 million from 2007 to 2008. She purchased Bitcoin in 2013 on her son-in-law's advice and became the first U.S. senator to own cryptocurrency. Her enthusiasm for the technology led to her being known as Congress's "Crypto Queen". Lummis owned at least \$230,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2021. She is a Lutheran and adheres to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS). ## Electoral history ## See also - Women in the United States House of Representatives - Women in the United States Senate

George N. Parks

American conductor

George N. Parks (May 23, 1953 – September 16, 2010) was the director of the University of Massachusetts Minuteman Marching Band at University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1977 until 2010. He also led the George N. Parks Drum Major Academy, a summer workshop program for high school drum majors that he founded in 1978. ## Early life and education Parks was born on 23 May 1953 in Buffalo, New York and grew up in Newark, Delaware. He graduated from Christiana High School in 1971, and was the Drum Major of the high school's marching band. He earned a bachelor's degree from West Chester University, where he was the drum major in the West Chester University Golden Rams Marching Band. At West Chester, Parks was initiated into the Rho Sigma chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. After college he earned a master's degree in tuba performance at Northwestern University. ## Career ### Drum corps Parks made his first appearance on the national scene as Drum Major of the award-winning Reading Buccaneers Drum and Bugle Corps. He helped lead the Buccaneers to two DCA Championships, in 1979 and 1980, and received numerous individual honors, including eight DCA Championship Drum Major Awards. In 1976, while working as a graduate assistant under John P. Paynter at Northwestern University, he was instrumental in bringing the first color guard/flag corp to the Big Ten. In 1993, Parks was inducted into the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame, for recognition of his work in the field of drum corps and mace technique. ### University of Massachusetts Parks became the director of the University of Massachusetts Minuteman Marching Band in 1977 at the age of 24, and built upon a strong program that had been headed by John Jenkins. Parks was a professor in the Department of Music and was the recipient of the university's Distinguished Teacher Award in 1989 and the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Service in 1997. The University's Alumni Association named him an honorary alumnus in 1997. At the time of his death, he was director of the band alongside Assistant Director Thom Hannum. ### George N. Parks Drum Major Academy Parks founded the George N. Parks Drum Major Academy, a summer program to train high school drum majors. Each summer, over 3,000 students attend the Band Leadership Training Seminar and Drum Major Academy. ### Other work In addition to his work at UMass Amherst and with his Drum Major Academy, Parks worked regularly with Bowl Games of America (BGA), where he assisted in the production of massed band halftime shows. He conducted BGA halftime shows at the Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, Gator Bowl, and the BCS National Championship Game. In 2005 and 2009, he was the director of the Bands of America Honor Band in the Tournament of Roses Parade. ## Personal life Parks and his wife, Jeanne, married in 1979 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. They have two children, Michael and Kyle. ## Death and legacy Parks died from a heart attack on the evening of September 16, 2010. After a performance with the marching band at a Cuyahoga Falls High School football game, he collapsed while getting into a van. Paramedics were called again, and they transported him to Summa Western Reserve Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:02 p.m. Earlier in the day, Parks had been complaining about neck pain, and paramedics were called. According to Gary Guenther, chief investigator for the Summit County Medical Examiner, "When they got there, they checked him out," he said. "Mr. Parks apparently said he was feeling better and refused to go to the hospital." At the time of his death, he was en route to Ann Arbor, Michigan with the band for a football game on September 18 between UMass and the University of Michigan. He was honored on Homecoming Day on October 16, 2010 by current and former band members and staff. This included a performance by the alumni band, which included approximately 1,300 participants, the largest the university had ever seen. ## Awards and honors Parks was inducted into the Massachusetts Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association Hall of Fame, the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame, The Bands of America Hall of Fame, and the Buccaneers Hall of Fame. Additionally, he received the Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity Distinguished Service to Music Medal, in the field of marching band, in October 2008. Parks was initiated into the Epsilon Nu chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity as an Honorary Member and the Delta Delta chapter of Tau Beta Sigma National Honorary Band Sorority as an Honorary Member. The George N. Parks Minuteman Marching Band Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which officially opened on Homecoming Weekend in November 2011, was named in Parks' honor. The name was chosen a year before his death and announced in Parks' presence at the groundbreaking in October 2009. Following his death, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick named October 16, 2010 "George N. Parks Day", delivered by proclamation through state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg (himself a UMASS band alum), and instructed University of Massachusetts President Jack M. Wilson that the state flags be lowered to half-staff in Parks' honor.

Cicada

Superfamily of insects

The cicadas (/sɪˈkɑːdəz, -ˈkeɪ-/) are a superfamily, the Cicadoidea, of insects in the order Hemiptera (true bugs). They are in the suborder Auchenorrhyncha, along with smaller jumping bugs such as leafhoppers and froghoppers. The superfamily is divided into two families, the Tettigarctidae, with two species in Australia, and the Cicadidae, with more than 3,000 species described from around the world; many species remain undescribed. Cicadas have prominent eyes set wide apart, short antennae, and membranous front wings. They have an exceptionally loud song, produced in most species by the rapid buckling and unbuckling of drum-like tymbals. The earliest known fossil Cicadomorpha appeared in the Upper Permian period; extant species occur all around the world in temperate to tropical climates. They typically live in trees, feeding on watery sap from xylem tissue, and laying their eggs in a slit in the bark. Most cicadas are cryptic. The vast majority of species are active during the day as adults, with some calling at dawn or dusk. Only a rare few species are known to be nocturnal. One exclusively North American genus, Magicicada (the periodical cicadas), which spend most of their lives as underground nymphs, emerge in predictable intervals of 13 or 17 years, depending on the species and the location. The unusual duration and synchronization of their emergence may reduce the number of cicadas lost to predation, both by making them a less reliably available prey (so that any predator that evolved to depend on cicadas for sustenance might starve waiting for their emergence), and by emerging in such huge numbers that they will satiate any remaining predators before losing enough of their number to threaten their survival as a species. The annual cicadas are species that emerge every year. Though these cicadas' life cycles can vary from 1 to 9 or more years as underground nymphs, their emergence above ground as adults is not synchronized, so some members of each species appear every year. Cicadas have been featured in literature since the time of Homer's Iliad and as motifs in art from the Chinese Shang dynasty. They have also been used in myth and folklore as symbols of carefree living and immortality. The cicada is also mentioned in Hesiod's Shield (ll.393–394), in which it is said to sing when millet first ripens. Cicadas are eaten by humans in various parts of the world, including China, Myanmar, Malaysia, central Africa, and Pakistani Balochistan. ## Etymology The name is directly from the onomatopoeic Latin cicada. ## Taxonomy and diversity The superfamily Cicadoidea is a sister of the Cercopoidea (the froghoppers). Cicadas are arranged into two families: the Tettigarctidae and Cicadidae. The two extant species of the Tettigarctidae include one in southern Australia and the other in Tasmania. The family Cicadidae is subdivided into the subfamilies Cicadettinae, Cicadinae, Derotettiginae, Tibicininae (or Tettigadinae), and Tettigomyiinae they are found on all continents except Antarctica. Some previous works also included a family-level taxon called the Tibiceninae. The largest species is the Malaysian emperor cicada Megapomponia imperatoria; its wingspan is up to about 20 cm (8 in). Cicadas are also notable for the great length of time some species take to mature. At least 3,000 cicada species are distributed worldwide, in essentially any habitat that has deciduous trees, with the majority being in the tropics. Most genera are restricted to a single biogeographical region, and many species have a very limited range. This high degree of endemism has been used to study the biogeography of complex island groups such as in Indonesia and Asia. There are several hundred described species in Australia and New Zealand, around 150 in South Africa, over 170 in America north of Mexico, at least 800 in Latin America, and over 200 in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific. About 100 species occur in the Palaearctic. A few species are found in southern Europe, and a single species was known from England, the New Forest cicada, Cicadetta montana, which also occurs in continental Europe. Many species await formal description and many well-known species are yet to be studied carefully using modern acoustic analysis tools that allow their songs to be characterized. Many of the North American species are the annual or jarfly or dog-day cicadas, members of the Neotibicen, Megatibicen, or Hadoa genera, so named because they emerge in late July and August. The best-known North American genus, however, may be Magicicada. These periodical cicadas have an extremely long life cycle of 13 or 17 years, with adults suddenly and briefly emerging in large numbers. Australian cicadas are found on tropical islands and cold coastal beaches around Tasmania, in tropical wetlands, high and low deserts, alpine areas of New South Wales and Victoria, large cities including Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and Tasmanian highlands and snowfields. Many of them have common names such as cherry nose, brown baker, red eye, greengrocer, yellow Monday, whisky drinker, double drummer, and black prince. The Australian greengrocer, Cyclochila australasiae, is among the loudest insects in the world. More than 40 species from five genera populate New Zealand, ranging from sea level to mountain tops, and all are endemic to New Zealand and its surrounding islands (Kermadec Islands, Chatham Islands). One species is found on Norfolk Island, which technically is part of Australia. The closest relatives of the NZ cicadas live in New Caledonia and Australia. ### Palaeontology Fossil Cicadomorpha first appeared in the Late Triassic. The superfamily Palaeontinoidea contains three families. The Upper Permian Dunstaniidae are found in Australia and South Africa, and also in younger rocks from China. The Upper Triassic Mesogereonidae are found in Australia and South Africa. This group, though, is currently thought to be more distantly related to Cicadomorpha than previously thought. The Palaeontinidae or "giant cicadas" come from the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous of Eurasia and South America. The first of these was a fore wing discovered in the Taynton Limestone Formation of Oxfordshire, England; it was initially described as a butterfly in 1873, before being recognised as a cicada-like form and renamed Palaeontina oolitica. Most fossil Cicadidae are known from the Cenozoic, and the oldest unambiguously identified specimen is Davispia bearcreekensis (subfamily Tibicininae) from 59–56 million years ago (Mya). One fossil genus and species (Burmacicada protera) based on a first-instar nymph has recently been reported from 98–99 Mya in the Late Cretaceous, although questions remain about its assignment to the Cicadidae. ## Biology ### Description Cicadas are large insects made conspicuous by the courtship calls of the males. They are characterized by having three joints in their tarsi, and having small antennae with conical bases and three to six segments, including a seta at the tip. The Auchenorrhyncha differ from other hemipterans by having a rostrum that arises from the posteroventral part of the head, complex sound-producing membranes, and a mechanism for linking the wings that involves a down-rolled edging on the rear of the fore wing and an upwardly protruding flap on the hind wing. Cicadas are feeble jumpers, and nymphs lack the ability to jump altogether. Another defining characteristic is the adaptations of the fore limbs of nymphs for underground life. The relict family Tettigarctidae differs from the Cicadidae in having the prothorax extending as far as the scutellum, and by lacking the tympanal apparatus. The adult insect, known as an imago, is 2 to 5 cm (1 to 2 in) in total length in most species. The largest, the empress cicada (Megapomponia imperatoria), has a head-body length around 7 cm (2.8 in), and its wingspan is 18–20 cm (7–8 in). Cicadas have prominent compound eyes set wide apart on the sides of the head. The short antennae protrude between the eyes or in front of them. They also have three small ocelli located on the top of the head in a triangle between the two large eyes; this distinguishes cicadas from other members of the Hemiptera. The mouthparts form a long, sharp rostrum that they insert into the plant to feed. The postclypeus is a large, nose-like structure that lies between the eyes and makes up most of the front of the head; it contains the pumping musculature. The thorax has three segments and houses the powerful wing muscles. They have two pairs of membranous wings that may be hyaline, cloudy, or pigmented. The wing venation varies between species and may help in identification. The middle thoracic segment has an operculum on the underside, which may extend posteriorly and obscure parts of the abdomen. The abdomen is segmented, with the hindermost segments housing the reproductive organs, and terminates in females with a large, saw-edged ovipositor. In males, the abdomen is largely hollow and used as a resonating chamber. The surface of the fore wing is superhydrophobic; it is covered with minute, waxy cones, blunt spikes that create a water-repellent film. Rain rolls across the surface, removing dirt in the process. In the absence of rain, dew condenses on the wings. When the droplets coalesce, they leap several millimetres into the air, which also serves to clean the wings. Bacteria landing on the wing surface are not repelled; rather, their membranes are torn apart by the nanoscale-sized spikes, making the wing surface the first-known biomaterial that can kill bacteria. ### Temperature regulation Desert cicadas such as Diceroprocta apache are unusual among insects in controlling their temperature by evaporative cooling, analogous to sweating in mammals. When their temperature rises above about 39 °C (102 °F), they suck excess sap from the food plants and extrude the excess water through pores in the tergum at a modest cost in energy. Such a rapid loss of water can be sustained only by feeding on water-rich xylem sap. At lower temperatures, feeding cicadas would normally need to excrete the excess water. By evaporative cooling, desert cicadas can reduce their bodily temperature by some 5 °C. Some non-desert cicada species such as Magicicada tredecem also cool themselves evaporatively, but less dramatically. Conversely, many other cicadas can voluntarily raise their body temperatures as much as 22 °C (40 °F) above ambient temperature. ### Song The "singing" of male cicadas is produced principally and in the majority of species using a special structure called a tymbal, a pair of which lies below each side of the anterior abdominal region. The structure is buckled by muscular action and, being made of resilin, unbuckles rapidly on muscle relaxation, producing their characteristic sounds. Some cicadas, however, have mechanisms for stridulation, sometimes in addition to the tymbals. Here, the wings are rubbed over a series of midthoracic ridges. In the Chinese species Subpsaltria yangi, both males and females can stridulate. The sounds may further be modulated by membranous coverings and by resonant cavities. The male abdomen in some species is largely hollow, and acts as a sound box. By rapidly vibrating these membranes, a cicada combines the clicks into apparently continuous notes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae serve as resonance chambers with which it amplifies the sound. The cicada also modulates the song by positioning its abdomen toward or away from the substrate. Partly by the pattern in which it combines the clicks, each species produces its own distinctive mating songs and acoustic signals, ensuring that the song attracts only appropriate mates. The tettigarctid (or hairy) cicadas Tettigarcta crinita of Australia and T. tomentosa have rudimentary tymbals in both sexes and do not produce airborne sounds. Both males and females produce vibrations that are transmitted through the tree substrate. They are considered as representing the original state from which other cicada communication has evolved. Average temperature of the natural habitat for the South American species Fidicina rana is about 29 °C (84 °F). During sound production, the temperature of the tymbal muscles was found to be significantly higher. Many cicadas sing most actively during the hottest hours of a summer day; roughly a 24-hour cycle. Most cicadas are diurnal in their calling and depend on external heat to warm them up, while a few are capable of raising their temperatures using muscle action and some species are known to call at dusk. Kanakia gigas and Froggattoides typicus are among the few that are known to be truly nocturnal and there may be other nocturnal species living in tropical forests. Cicadas call from varying heights on trees. Where multiple species occur, the species may use different heights and timing of calling. While the vast majority of cicadas call from above the ground, two Californian species, Okanagana pallidula and O. vanduzeei are known to call from hollows made at the base of the tree below the ground level. The adaptive significance is unclear, as the calls are not amplified or modified by the burrow structure, but this may avoid predation. Although only males produce the cicadas' distinctive sounds, both sexes have membranous structures called tympana (singular – tympanum) by which they detect sounds, the equivalent of having ears. Males disable their own tympana while calling, thereby preventing damage to their hearing; a necessity partly because some cicadas produce sounds up to 120 dB (SPL) which is among the loudest of all insect-produced sounds. The song is loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans should the cicada be at "close range". In contrast, some small species have songs so high in pitch that they are inaudible to humans. For the human ear, telling precisely where a cicada song originates is often difficult. The pitch is nearly constant, the sound is continuous to the human ear, and cicadas sing in scattered groups. In addition to the mating song, many species have a distinct distress call, usually a broken and erratic sound emitted by the insect when seized or panicked. Some species also have courtship songs, generally quieter, and produced after a female has been drawn to the calling song. Males also produce encounter calls, whether in courtship or to maintain personal space within choruses. The songs of cicadas are considered by entomologists to be unique to a given species, and a number of resources exist to collect and analyse cicada sounds. ### Life cycle In some species of cicadas, the males remain in one location and call to attract females. Sometimes, several males aggregate and call in chorus. In other species, the males move from place to place, usually with quieter calls, while searching for females. The Tettigarctidae differ from other cicadas in producing vibrations in the substrate rather than audible sounds. After mating, the female cuts slits into the bark of a twig where she deposits her eggs. Both male and female cicadas die within a few weeks after emerging from the soil. Although they have mouthparts and are able to consume some plant liquids for nutrition, the amount eaten is very small and the insects have a natural adult lifespan of less than two months. When the eggs hatch, the newly hatched nymphs drop to the ground and burrow. Cicadas live underground as nymphs for most of their lives at depths down to about 2.5 m (8 ft). Nymphs have strong front legs for digging and excavating chambers in close proximity to roots, where they feed on xylem sap. In the process, their bodies and interior of the burrow become coated in anal fluids. In wet habitats, larger species construct mud towers above ground to aerate their burrows. In the final nymphal instar, they construct an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge. They then moult (shed their skins) on a nearby plant for the last time, and emerge as adults. The exuviae or abandoned exoskeletons remain, still clinging to the bark of the tree. Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts 2–5 years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year, or in some parts of the region, a 13-year life cycle. The long life cycles may have developed as a response to predators, such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A specialist predator with a shorter life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas. An alternate hypothesis is that these long life cycles evolved during the ice ages so as to overcome cold spells, and that as species co-emerged and hybridized, they left distinct species that did not hybridize having periods matching prime numbers. ### Diet Cicada nymphs drink sap from the xylem of various species of trees, including oak, cypress, willow, ash, and maple. While common folklore indicates that adults do not eat, they actually do drink plant sap using their sucking mouthparts. ### Locomotion Cicadas, unlike other Auchenorrhyncha, are not adapted for jumping (saltation). They have the usual insect modes of locomotion, walking and flight, but they do not walk or run well, and take to the wing to travel distances greater than a few centimetres. ## Predators, parasites, and pathogens Cicadas are commonly eaten by birds and mammals, as well as bats, wasps, mantises, spiders, and robber flies. In times of mass emergence of cicadas, various amphibians, fish, reptiles, mammals, and birds change their foraging habits so as to benefit from the glut. Newly hatched nymphs may be eaten by ants, and nymphs living underground are preyed on by burrowing mammals such as moles. In northern Japan, brown bears prey on final instar nymphs of cicadas during summer by digging up the ground. In Australia, cicadas are preyed on by the Australian cicada killer wasp (Exeirus lateritius), which stings and stuns cicadas high in the trees, making them drop to the ground, where the cicada hunter mounts and carries them, pushing with its hind legs, sometimes over a distance of 100 m, until they can be shoved down into its burrow, where the numb cicadas are placed onto one of many shelves in a "catacomb", to form the food stock for the wasp grub that grows out of the egg deposited there. A katydid predator from Australia is capable of attracting singing male cicadas of a variety of species by imitating the timed click replies of sexually receptive female cicadas, which respond in pair formation by flicking their wings. Several fungal diseases infect and kill adult cicadas, while other fungi in the genera Ophiocordyceps and Isaria attack nymphs. Massospora cicadina specifically attacks the adults of periodical cicadas, the spores remaining dormant in the soil between outbreaks. This fungus is also capable of dosing cicadas with psilocybin, the psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms, as well as cathinone, an alkaloid similar to various amphetamines. These chemicals alter the behaviour of the cicadas, driving males to copulate, including attempts with males, and is thought to be beneficial to the fungus, as the fungal spores are dispersed by a larger number of infected carriers. Plants can also defend themselves against cicadas. Although cicadas can feed on the roots of gymnosperms, it has been found that resinous conifers such as pine do not allow the eggs of Magicicada to hatch, the resin sealing up the egg cavities. ### Antipredator adaptations Cicadas use a variety of strategies to evade predators. Large cicadas can fly rapidly to escape if disturbed. Many are extremely well camouflaged to evade predators such as birds that hunt by sight. Being coloured like tree bark and disruptively patterned to break up their outlines, they are difficult to discern; their partly transparent wings are held over the body and pressed close to the substrate. Some cicada species play dead when threatened. Some cicadas such as Hemisciera maculipennis display bright deimatic flash coloration on their hind wings when threatened; the sudden contrast helps to startle predators, giving the cicadas time to escape. Most cicadas are diurnal and rely on camouflage when at rest, but some species use aposematism-related Batesian mimicry, wearing the bright colors that warn of toxicity in other animals; the Malaysian Huechys sanguinea has conspicuous red and black warning coloration, is diurnal, and boldly flies about in full view of possible predators. Predators such as the sarcophagid fly Emblemasoma hunt cicadas by sound, being attracted to their songs. Singing males soften their song so that the attention of the listener gets distracted to neighbouring louder singers, or cease singing altogether as a predator approaches. A loud cicada song, especially in chorus, has been asserted to repel predators, but observations of predator responses refute the claim. ## In human culture ### In art and literature Cicadas have been featured in literature since the time of Homer's Iliad, and as motifs in decorative art from the Chinese Shang dynasty (1766–1122 BCE). They are described by Aristotle in his History of Animals and by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History; their mechanism of sound production is mentioned by Hesiod in his poem "Works and Days": "when the Skolymus flowers, and the tuneful Tettix sitting on his tree in the weary summer season pours forth from under his wings his shrill song". In the classic 14th-century Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Diaochan took her name from the sable (diāo) tails and jade decorations in the shape of cicadas (chán), which adorned the hats of high-level officials. In the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, the title character poetically likens one of his many love interests to a cicada for the way she delicately sheds her robe the way a cicada sheds its shell when molting. Cicada exuviae play a role in the manga Winter Cicada. Cicadas are a frequent subject of haiku, where, depending on type, they can indicate spring, summer, or autumn. Shaun Tan's illustrated book Cicada tells the story of a hardworking but underappreciated cicada working in an office. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' play Appropriate takes place on an Arkansas farm in summer, and calls for the sounds of mating cicadas to underscore the entire show. ### In fashion Being lightweight, and with hooklike legs, the exuviae of cicadas can be used as hair or clothing accessories. ### As food and folk medicine Cicadas were eaten in Ancient Greece, and are consumed today only in selected regions in China, both as adults and (more often) as nymphs. Cicadas are also eaten in Malaysia, Burma, North America, and central Africa, as well as the Balochistan region of Pakistan, especially in Ziarat. Female cicadas are prized for being meatier. Shells of cicadas are employed in traditional Chinese medicines. The 17-year "Onondaga Brood" Magicicada is culturally important and a particular delicacy to the Onondaga people, and are considered a novelty food item by modern consumers in several states. ### In music Cicadas are featured in the protest song "Como La Cigarra" ("Like the Cicada") written by Argentinian poet and composer María Elena Walsh. In the song, the cicada is a symbol of survival and defiance against death. The song was recorded by Mercedes Sosa, among other Latin American musicians. In North America and Mexico, there is a well-known song, "La Cigarra" ("The Cicada"), written by Raymundo Perez Soto, which is a song in the Mariachi tradition, that romanticises the insect as a creature that sings until it dies. Brazilian artist Lenine with his track "Malvadeza" from the album Chão, creates a song built upon the sound of the cicada that can be heard along the track. Cicada sounds heavily feature on the 2021 album Solar Power by New Zealand artist Lorde. She described cicada song as being emblematic of the New Zealand summer. ### In mythology and folklore Cicadas have been used as money, in folk medicine, to forecast the weather, to provide song (in China), and in folklore and myths around the world. In France, the cicada represents the folklore of Provence and the Mediterranean cities. The cicada has represented since classical antiquity. Jean de La Fontaine began his collection of fables Les fables de La Fontaine with the story "La Cigale et la Fourmi" ("The Cicada and the Ant") based on one of Aesop's fables; in it, the cicada spends the summer singing, while the ant stores away food, and finds herself without food when the weather turns bitter. In Chinese tradition, the cicada (蟬, chán) symbolises rebirth and immortality. In the Chinese essay "Thirty-Six Stratagems", the phrase "to shed the golden cicada skin" (simplified Chinese: 金蝉脱壳; traditional Chinese: 金蟬脫殼; pinyin: jīnchán tuōqiào) is the poetic name for using a decoy (leaving the exuviae) to fool enemies. In the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West (16th century), the protagonist Priest of Tang was named the Golden Cicada. In Japan, the cicada is associated with the summer season. For many Japanese people, summer hasn't officially begun until the first songs of the cicada are heard. According to Lafcadio Hearn, the song of Meimuna opalifera, called tsuku-tsuku boshi, is said to indicate the end of summer, and it is called so because of its particular call. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess Aphrodite retells the legend of how Eos, the goddess of the dawn, requested Zeus to let her lover Tithonus live forever as an immortal. Zeus granted her request, but because Eos forgot to ask him to also make Tithonus ageless, Tithonus never died, but he did grow old. Eventually, he became so tiny and shriveled that he turned into the first cicada. The Greeks also used a cicada sitting on a harp as an emblem of music. In Kapampangan mythology in the Philippines, the goddess of dusk, Sisilim, is said to be greeted by the sounds and appearances of cicadas whenever she appears. ### As pests Cicadas feed on sap; they do not bite or sting in a true sense, but may occasionally mistake a person's arm for a plant limb and attempt to feed. Male cicadas produce very loud calls that can damage human hearing. Cicadas are not major agricultural pests, but in some outbreak years, trees may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of females laying their eggs in the shoots. Small trees may wilt and larger trees may lose small branches. Although in general, the feeding activities of the nymphs do little damage, during the year before an outbreak of periodic cicadas, the large nymphs feed heavily and plant growth may suffer. Some species have turned from wild grasses to sugarcane, which affects the crop adversely, and in a few isolated cases, females have oviposited on cash crops such as date palms, grape vines, citrus trees, asparagus, and cotton. Cicadas sometimes cause damage to ornamental shrubs and trees, mainly in the form of scarring left on tree branches where the females have laid their eggs. Branches of young trees may die as a result. ## See also - Cicada 3301 - List of Cicadidae genera