A funeral ceremony can be held at a church, a temple, a public building for holding funerals or in many other places.
In North America, it is common for there to be a "visitation" (also called a "viewing" or a "wake") a few days before the funeral. This is where people are invited to see the dead body.
In Madagascar, people have a ritual called famadihana or “the turning of the bones” in English. Once every five or seven years, family members exhume the remains of their ancestors. They clean the bones and spray them with perfume or wine. They take the skeleton back home to dance with it and introduce it to the younger generation.
According to Balinese Hindu tradition, the soul of the deceased restarts the rebirth cycle once it is free through cremation. Balinese cremation, or Ngaben, uses an open pyre to incinerate the corpse. The whole memorial often has a festive atmosphere, focusing on celebrating the life of the departed loved one.
Several things often happen at a funeral in a Western country:
At many present day funerals there is a video tribute played before, after, or during the funeral service. Memorial folders or prayer cards are handed out at many funeral services and this, too, is a way to make a funeral service personal. At funerals it is not uncommon to see a "life reflection" table. Family members sometimes bring favorite pictures or other reminders of the dead person. There are lots of different traditions that different religions use.
Georgian Uprising of Texel
The Georgian Uprising of Texel (5 April 1945 – 20 May 1945) was an insurrection (a rebellion, or mutiny, when soldiers disobey their orders) by Soviet Georgian soldiers on the island of Texel. The uprising was against the Germans army who had taken over the Dutch island during the Second World War. The event is sometimes described as "Europe's last battlefield".
The island was very important in the German Atlantic Wall – the line of defences along the Atlantic coast. It was strong and had many defences. The Georgians were soldiers from the Soviet Republic of Georgia who had been captured (taken prisoner) on the Eastern front. They were now fighting for the Germans so that they did not have to stay in camps for prisoners. Their job was to help the German troops.
On the night of 5–6 April 1945 they thought that the Allies would land soon. They took over the island and killed 400 German soldiers. Some parts of the island stayed under German control and the Georgian soldiers could not capture them. More Germans were able to come to the island to help defeat the Georgians. After a few weeks of very tough fighting the Germans took control of the island again.
Unfortunately the British and Canadians, who were warned of the events on Texel by escapees who fled by boat to England, did not believe them, and did not take any action in order to stop the fighting.
On Texel this is called the "Russian war". Approximately 800 Germans, 500 Georgians, and 120 Tesselans (people from the island) were killed. Lots of farms were burned. Even after the Germans surrendered (gave up) in the Netherlands and Denmark on 5 May 1945, and after the full German surrender on 8 May, the fighting continued. Canadian soldiers stopped the fighting on 20 May.
The Georgian survivors did not have a happy ending. They were sent back to the Soviet Union. Stalin said that because the soldiers had been captured by the Germans, they had not fought until they died, so they were traitors. Some of the two million Soviet prisoners who were sent back to the Soviet Union by the Allied forces after the end of the war were executed (killed) when they got there.
A museum at the airport on the island tells the story of this event.
Neutrino
Neutrinos are a type of elementary particle that exist all across the universe. The word "neutrino" means a small neutral particle. Physicists study these particles, but they are hard to find because they have a very small chance of interacting with regular matter. (For example, they usually pass through the whole earth without touching any other particles). Neutrinos travel near the speed of light.
Neutrinos are very difficult to detect. They are very unlikely to collide (interact) with other particles as they travel through space or through matter. Electrons have an electric charge, but neutrinos do not. This means that neutrinos are unaffected by the electromagnetic force. The first detectors built to find neutrinos observed only 10 or 15 each year. Recent detectors use tanks that contain about a thousand tons of water or other liquid, which lets them detect about 10 to 100 neutrinos per day.
Neutrinos are generated in particle accelerators, in the sun, in other stars, and in nuclear reactions such as in nuclear reactors. They are generated whenever there is a nuclear reaction in the form of beta decay. This process starts off with one neutron, and ends with one electron, one proton, and one neutrino.
We used to think that neutrinos have no mass, but a few years ago physicists found that they have a very small mass, much lighter than electrons. By finding neutrinos, we can learn about the structure and the history of the universe. Since most of them pass easily through sun, physicists have learned about the reactions in the center of the sun that make the sun's heat, by detecting the neutrinos that come out from the sun's center.
The three types of neutrinos are named after the three leptons that have electric charge. There is the electron neutrino (v), the muon neutrino (v), and the tau neutrino (v). Each neutrino has an antiparticle, called an antineutrino. Therefore, there is an electron antineutrino, a muon antineutrino, and tau antineutrino.
The three types of neutrinos change into each other over time, so an electron neutrino could turn into a muon or tau neutrino and then back again. This is called neutrino oscillation. This oscillation was suggested when then number of electron neutrinos from the Sun was measured in the 1960s, and the amount was only about a third of what theories at the time said there should be. The result of neutrino oscillation is that most of the electron neutrinos made in the Sun change to another type of neutrino .
Most neutrinos passing through the planet Earth come from the Sun. About 65 billion () solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter of area, including our own bodies.
This is true even on the night side of Earth, because nearly all the neutrinos from the sun pass easily through the Earth.
Play (theatre)
A play is a piece of writing (literature) which can be seen at a theatre or on television, or heard on the radio. Plays often show conversations between people. A play is usually watched, rather than being read.
The people who appear in a play are actors; in a theatre they stand on a stage so the people watching (the audience) can see them better. A director helps the actors to work better, or tells them how he wants the play to be.
Plays can be very interesting because they can be understood in many different ways. When the writer - the playwright - makes the play, he can not say how the actors or director will use it. Sometimes the playwright is also the director or an actor: Molière, for example, was often an actor in his plays. But the director can change the play in different ways: the actors' costume, the music, how people say things, how they move or what they hold. Modern directors can direct plays by Shakespeare, and these old plays seem modern now, too.
There are many sorts of plays, but there are six important sorts:
Symbolic can also be called expressionistic. Its all about how the writer or director presents ideas in a very different point of view.
Phrasal verb