Lanark: A Life in Four Books was the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, and is still his best known. The book was written over a period of almost thirty years and was published in 1981. It has real and fantasy descriptions of Gray's home city of Glasgow.
The book has won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic. In 2006, "The Guardian" said "Lanark" was "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."
Sexy Little Thug
"Sexy Little Thug" is a song by Beyoncé Knowles on her album "Speak My Mind". It is a remix of 50 Cent's "In da Club."
Encore (concert)
An encore is an extra piece that is played at the end a performance. It is not on the programme, although the performer may have secretly planned it. A performer will play an encore if the audience claps a lot. Sometimes the audience shout "encore!" when they want an encore. The word "encore" is the French word for "again".
An encore is usually a short piece. Often it is a fast piece to finish the performance off happily, but if a musician has just played a very energetic, loud piece, then the encore might be a quiet piece. A concert given by a solo performer or small group of performers is more likely to finish with an encore than a concert with an orchestra, but a lot depends on the tradition from one country to another.
Cay
A cay (also spelled key; both pronounced alike as "key" ) is a small, low island consisting mostly of sand or coral and situated on top of a coral reef.
The English word "cay" comes from the Spanish word "cayo" and this from the Taíno word "cayo" meaning "small island". The English words "key" and "quay" (which means wharf) come from the old French "kai" meaning "sand bank". Because it is a Taíno word, "cay" (and the other forms) are used mainly in the Caribbean, but the type of island is found in the tropical seas where there are coral reefs.
Sand cays are built on the edge of the coral reefs, opposite the direction from which the wind blows most of the time. Because of that, cays are often elongated. Tides and wind (and sometimes sea birds) deposit coral debris. Weather affects the formation of cays greatly; large tides would bring much more debris onto the cay and thus make it larger, while a hurricane destroys a cay.
Some cays are very large; Cayo Coco, north of Cuba, is about 370 km. Those large cays are being used for tourism because they have beaches with white sand and the presence of coral reefs.
Sarcopterygii
The Sarcopterygii is a class of fish. They are lobe-finned fish, like the lungfish and coelacanths. They are a clade of bony fish which first appeared in the Silurian, 418 million years ago (mya). One line in this group gave rise to the tetrapods.
These are bony fishes with paired rounded fins. These fins, being similar to limbs, suggest that these fish may be ancestors of land vertebrates. All sarcopterygians possess teeth covered with true enamel.
As a clade, the group includes all its descendants. This means it includes the Tetrapods, that is, all species of four-limbed vertebrates. The fin-limbs of sarcopterygiians are very similar to what people believe was the ancestral form of tetrapod limbs. The ancestors of tetrapods are to be found amongst the lobe-fins of the Devonian period. The term 'fishapod' is becoming used for this transitional group.
Sarcopterygians and their relatives the Actinopterygii ('ray-finned fish') make up the super-class Osteichthyes, the 'bony fish', which have a bony skeleton rather than cartilage. Otherwise, there are vast differences in fin, respiratory, and circulatory structures between the Sarcopterygii and the Actinopterygii.
The first sarcopterygians, found in the uppermost Silurian (about 418 mya), closely resembled the Acanthodii, the 'spiny fish' which went extinct at the end of the Palaeozoic era. In the early–middle Devonian (416–385 mya), while the predatory placoderms dominated the seas, some sarcopterygians came into freshwater habitats.
In the early Devonian (416–397 mya), the sarcopterygians split into two main lineages — the Coelacanths and the Rhipidistia. The former never left the oceans and their heyday was the late Devonian and Carboniferous, from 385 to 299 mya, as they were more common during those periods than in any other period in the Phanerozoic; coelacanths still live today in the oceans (genus "Latimeria").
The Rhipidistians, whose ancestors probably lived in the oceans near the river mouths (estuaries), left the ocean world and migrated into freshwater habitats. They in turn split into two major groups : the lungfish and the tetrapods. The lungfish evolved the first proto-lungs and proto-limbs; they learned in the middle Devonian (397–385 mya) how to live outside a water environment, using their stubby fins (proto-limbs) to walk on land and find new water if their waterhole was depleted, and their lungs to breathe air and get sufficient oxygen. The lungfish's greatest diversity was in the Triassic period; today there are fewer than a dozen genera left.
The first tetrapodomorphs, which included the gigantic rhizodonts, had the same general anatomy as the lungfish, who were their closest kin, but they appear not to have left their water habitat until the later Devonian epoch (385–359 mya), with the appearance of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates). Tetrapods are the only tetrapodomorphs which survived after the Devonian.
Non-tetrapod sarcopterygians continued until towards the end of Paleozoic era, suffering heavy losses during the Permian-Triassic extinction event (251 mya).
Actinopterygii
The Actinopterygii is the class of ray-finned fishes.
The ray-finned fishes get their name from the fact that they have lepidotrichia or "fin rays". Their fins are webs of skin held by bony or horny spines ("rays"). This is different from the fleshy fins of the fish in the Sarcopterygii.
Actinopterygians are the largest class of vertebrates. There are nearly 25,000 species. They can be found in both fresh water and marine environments from the deep sea to the highest mountain streams. Most of the living species are teleosts.
EP
EP may refer to following:
Extended play
Extended play (EP) is a name given to CDs and records which contain more music than a single, but are too short to be called a music album. EPs usually have about 10 to 25 minutes of music, singles have less than 10 minutes and albums have about 25 to 80 minutes of music.
Richard von Weizsäcker
Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker (15 April 1920 – 31 January 2015) was a German politician, and a member of the CDU party. He was President of Germany from 1984 to 1994.
He was born in Stuttgart, the son of the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker and brother of physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. His grandfather Carl von Weizsäcker had been Minister President of Württemberg
In World War II he served in the German Army. He was wounded in East Prussia in 1945 and was sent home to Stuttgart. Then he continued his study of history in Göttingen and eventually studied law.
As a law student he was a member of his father's defence team at the Eleventh secondary Nuremburg Trial aka the Ministries Trial. He took his first judicial state exam in 1950, the second in 1953, and in 1955 was promoted "doctor juris". In 1953 he married Marianne von Kretschmann; they have four children.
From 1967 to 1984 he was a member both of the Synod and the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany. He leaded the German Evangelical Church Assembly from 1964 to 1970.
Richard von Weizsäcker joined the CDU in 1954 and was a member of the Bundestag (German Parliament) from 1969 to 1981.
He was elected vice president of the Bundestag 1979-1981, but did not stand for re-election, because he became the Governing Mayor () of West Berlin (1981-1984).
He was elected President of Germany by the Bundesversammlung (Federal Convention) in 1984, succeeding Karl Carstens. He was Germany’s first president after reunification.