This is someone who agrees to help another person or persons, and be responsible for them. For example, an employer may sponsor a foreign national to become a permanent resident of the United States by guaranteeing that person a job. Sponsorship can also mean an individual who helps an organization. Many charitable organizations offer personal sponsorship of a boy or girl to help them. Many public radio and television stations ask for sponsors to provide funds for them to operate. At a Ceremonial ship launching the person breaking the champagne bottle over the ship's bow is called the sponsor of that ship. In many religions, godparents are the baptized child's sponsors.
Sponsorship is not always for the purposes of doing good. A state (or government) may sponsor terrorism for their own purposes. While not engaging in activities against another country (or countries) themselves, they may sponsor other groups to do it for them. The United States currently lists four countries who sponsor terrorism. They are: Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. State sponsors may also be called affiliates and/or supporters.
Texas Rangers (baseball)
The Texas Rangers are an American Major League Baseball team from Arlington, Texas. They are currently owned by Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve. The team plays in Arlington, but it also represents the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth and the surrounding area. The Rangers are part of the Western Division of Major League Baseball's American League.
Their first home field in Texas was Arlington Stadium. They built Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, later known as Globe Life Park in Arlington, next door, and tore down Arlington Stadium when they moved in to the new stadium. After the 2019 season, they left Globe Life Park for the new Globe Life Field, located across the street. Globe Life Park was then rebuilt into a football and soccer stadium.
The team began in 1961 as the Washington Senators. The Senators played poorly and had too few fans to support them. The team moved to Arlington, Texas, in 1972. They were renamed in honor of the famous state police force called the Texas Rangers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there had also been a minor league baseball team called the Dallas Rangers.
On October 22, 2010, the Rangers won the American League Championship Series (ALCS) for the first time. They beat the then-defending champion New York Yankees four games to two in the series. This was their first trip to the World Series, but they lost the San Francisco Giants in five games.
In 2011, the Rangers again reached the World Series, and again lost, this time to the St. Louis Cardinals.
Texas Rangers
Texas Rangers may mean:
Office suite
In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a software suite for use by workers. The parts of an office suite are usually come together, have a standard user interface and usually can interact with each other, sometimes in ways operating systems would not normally allow.
20th century office suites operated "offline," not using the Internet. Examples that are still widely used include Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. Some can operate "online", including Microsoft Office Online, Google Docs, and LibreOffice Online.
The most used office suite is Microsoft Office, which is available for Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh. It has become a proprietary standard in office software.
Another office suite is any of the OpenDocument suites, which use the free OpenDocument file format. The most used one was OpenOffice.org , open-source software that can be used in Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and has created several other office suites similar to it, such as the Mac-native NeoOffice. Other free or less expensive office suites include LibreOffice, StarOffice, SoftMaker Office, KOffice and WPS Office. These programs support many of the features of Microsoft Office, and can open the files it creates and save new documents in those formats.
Apple computers have iWork, which is a office suite created specially for Mac OS X. It includes Pages, for word-processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote, for presentations. They can also use Microsoft Office for Mac, or StarOffice, KOffice, NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org, which all can be used on Apple computers.
The Rake's Progress
The Rake's Progress is an opera by Igor Stravinsky. The libretto written by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman is based loosely on the eight paintings and engravings from the 18th century by William Hogarth called "A Rake's Progress". Stravinsky had seen these paintings in 1947 at an exhibition in Chicago.
The Rake’s Progress tells the story of a man called Tom Rakewell. The word “rake” in this sense means “someone (usually a man) who behaves in an immoral way: a man who has relationships with lots of women.
The word “progress” in the title is ironic because Tom does not really make progress: he does not become a better man. In a sense he progresses backwards, because he starts off in a state of blissful innocence, i.e. he does not understand anything about his life, he does not know about good and bad. At the end of the opera he also does not
understand anything about his life, but that is because he has gone mad.
Tom is like Faust because he sells his soul to the devil. In this opera the character Nick Shadow represents the devil. Tom leaves his lover Anne Trulove and goes to find lots of other women in London. He has several adventures, which are all arranged by Nick who is helping him to have a good time. In the end Tom finds himself in Bedlam which was a horrible building where mad people were sent in the 18th century.
The Rake’s Progress is the only full-length opera that Stravinsky wrote. It is unusual because it was not written in the modern way of most music of the 1950s. Because the story of the opera is set in the 18th century, the style of the music is deliberately like music from that period. It is divided into arias and recitative (big songs which are linked with simpler music which tells the story).
Stravinsky’s music in this opera is in the neoclassical style. He uses counterpoint a lot in this opera. This helped him later on to write serial music: music in which all 12 notes in an octave are equally important. Tom sings some words in the second act of The Rake’s Progress which suggest that Stravinsky is going to widen his compositional style in this way: “Vary the song, O London, change!/Disband your notes and let them range”.
Tom Rakewell wants to marry Anne Trulove. Her father does not trust Tom because he has no regular job. Tom would like to have lots of money. He meets Nick Shadow who tells him that an unknown uncle has died and left him lots of money. He says to Tom that he can be his servant and go with him to London to sort out his inheritance.
Nick takes Tom to places where there is a lot of bad, immoral behaviour. Tom agrees to spend the night with Mother Goose in her brothel. Meanwhile Anne, who lives in the country, wonders why she has not heard from Tom. She thinks something might have happened to him, so she goes to London to look for him.
Tom is bored with his immoral way of life. He tells Nick he wants happiness, so Nick says he should marry Baba the Turk, a famous bearded lady. Soon afterwards Anne finds Tom's London house. She arrives just in time to see Tom get out of a sedan chair with Baba, whom he has just married. Tom tells Anne to leave, but he really is sorry for what has happened.