Before the 1899 season, Frank Robison, the owner of the Spiders, bought the St. Louis Browns, thus owning two clubs at the same time. Just weeks before the start of the season, most of the better Spiders players were transferred to St. Louis, including three future Hall of Famers: Young, Jesse Burkett and Bobby Wallace. Despite the changes in the team members, St. Louis finished fifth in both 1899 and 1900. The Spiders lost 134 games, the most in MLB history, before folding.
In 1901, Young left St. Louis and joined the American League's Boston Americans for a $3,500 contract. Young stayed with the Boston team until 1909.
Young was traded back to Cleveland before the 1909 season, this time to the Cleveland Naps of the American League. He split 1911, his final year, between the Naps and the Boston Rustlers.
On September 22, 1911, Young shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates and their pitcher Babe Adams 1-0, for his last career win. However, two weeks later, Young's 906th and final game ended badly: the last eight batters of Young's career combined to hit a triple, four singles and three doubles.
Young retired after the 1911 season with 511 career wins. His win total set the record for most career wins by a pitcher. At the time, Pud Galvin had the second most career wins with 364. Walter Johnson, then in his fourth season, finished his career with 417 wins and is now second on the list. However, Johnson broke Young's career record for strikeouts.
Cy Young's career is seen as a bridge from baseball's earliest days to its modern era. When Young's career began, pitchers delivered the baseball underhand and fouls were not counted as strikes. The pitcher's mound was not moved back to its present position of 60 feet, six inches until Young's fourth season. He did not wear a glove until his sixth.
Particularly after his fastball slowed, Young's success relied upon his great control. Young said:
By habit, Young restricted his practice throws in spring training. "I figured the old arm had just so many throws in it," said Young, "and there wasn't any use wasting them." Young once described his approach before a game:
Young also said that his offseason farming chores, including wood chopping, kept his pitching arm in good shape until he was 44. Even at the time of his retirement, his arm was healthy, but Young had gained weight and was unable to field his position anymore. In three of his last four years, he was the oldest player in the league.
The first Cy Young Award was voted on in 1956, and was given to Brooklyn's Don Newcombe. Originally, it was a single award covering the whole of baseball. The honor was divided into two Cy Young Awards in 1967, one for each league.
Young was saluted in the poem "Lineup for Yesterday" by Ogden Nash:
"Y is for Young,"
"The magnificent Cy;"
"People batted against him,"
"But I never knew why."
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet is an abjad that is used to write several languages of the Middle East such as Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Urdu. The script is the third most widely used script in the world, after the Latin and Chinese scripts.
The script is written from right to left. When it is used to write the Arabic language, the script has 28 different characters. Usually only consonants are written in an abjad. Vowels are omitted most of the time. The Arabic script is a cursive script. This means that letters of a word are joined together, both in handwriting and in print. Each letter can have up to four different forms. Which of the forms is used depends on the letters before and after it. There is no different form for uppercase letters and lowercase letters.
There are two basic modern variants of the Arabic script. One is called Naskh, it is the one commonly used for printing. The most common script in everyday life is called Kufic, after the city Kufa, in Iraq, where it was developed. There are several variants of both scripts.
The alphabet can also be used to write numbers, which was common in the Middle Ages. They are less used today and usually replaced by Latin-alphabet ("Arabic") numbers.
When the alphabet is used to write numbers, ' is 1, ' is 2, ' is 3 and so on until ' = 10, ' = 20, ' = 30, …, ' = 200, …, ' = 1000. That is sometimes used to produce chronograms in which specific letters, interpreted as numerals, stand for a particular date when they are rearranged.
For dictionaries, it is necessary to put the letters into a predetermined sequence, which is usually called sort order, or alphabetical order. The Arabic script has two sort orders: The one, "abjid", derives from the position of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet. The other, "hijā," sorts letters by similarity of shape.
As Islam spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, Arabic spread along with it. Islam requires its followers to learn Arabic because it states that Gabriel (Jibril) spoke the words of Allah to Muhammad in Arabic. The language is used for Muslim rituals such as prayer and the reciting of Quranic verses. As Arabic spread, the Quran's script also spread. It replaced the Pahlavi writing system as Islam conquered Persia.
Another alphabet, the Uighur alphabet, was based on the shapes of Arabic letters. However, the Uighur alphabet always has vowel letters, unlike in Arabic.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, use of the Arabic language and alphabet, became less common in the Muslim world. The Turkic states and other Muslim-majority states controlled by the Soviet Union did not favour Arabic script. In 1928, Turkey passed a law that banned the use of the Arabic alphabet for writing Turkish, which is now written with the Latin alphabet.
Around the same time, the Soviet Union created a Latin alphabet for the Central Asian states that it occupied: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The decision to replace the Arabic alphabet was amdre to remove religious influence in Central Asia and to modernise the region. For a time, Soviet leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, believed the Latin alphabet was the "world alphabet" because it was the writing system of most developed countries. However, the Soviet Union then required the Central Asian states to write only in the Cyrillic script. That was to influence local cultures and languages to become more like those of Russia.
Although the Soviet Union fell, none of the Central Asian nations returned to using the Arabic alphabet. They either kept using Cyrillic, like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, or adopted a new Latin alphabet, like Azerbaijan. Only Tajikistan is considering switching back to using the Arabic alphabet. Tajik was once a dialect of Persian.
In Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Brunei have all adoptedfor Malay the Latin alphabet, which is called "Rumi" in Malay. The British and Dutch colonialists introduced the Latin alphabet. The Arabic alphabet ("Jawi" in Malay) is still used in Malaysia but much less than Rumi. Brunei is the only Southeast Asian country in which both the Latin and Arabic alphabets are co-official.
Brandenburg Gate
The Brandenburg Gate () is a structure in Berlin, Germany. It is the only remaining gate through which people used to enter Berlin. It was built between 1788 and 1791. It is located between the Platz des 18. März and the Pariser Platz. Nearby to the north is the Reichstag building. During the Cold War, the Reichstag was in West Berlin, and the Brandenburger Tor in East Berlin.
The Brandenburg Gate has twelve columns, six on the entrance side and six on the exit. The columns form five roadways, citizens originally were allowed to use only the outer two. This is rather like Admiralty Arch in London, the central roadway is reserved so that royal and important traffic is not delayed. On top of the gate is the Quadriga. This is Viktoria, the goddess of victory driving a Quadriga, a type of horse-drawn chariot.