MacMillan spent four seasons in the Ontario Hockey League with three different teams and turned pro in 2003. He played in the ECHL and split the 2003-04 season with the Peoria Rivermen, Cincinnati Cyclones and the Florence Pride. After spending 2004-05 in the United Hockey League with the Port Huron Beacons, MacMillan returned to the ECHL with the Reading Royals. He also had short spells in the American Hockey League with the Hershey Bears and the Albany River Rats. In 2008, MacMillian moved to the United Kingdom, signing with the Belfast Giants scoring 36 points in 47 games.
On August 26, 2009, MacMillan returned to North America to sign a one-year deal with the Toledo Walleye of the ECHL.
Bobby Bolt
Bobby Bolt (born April 29, 1987 in Thunder Bay, Ontario) is a Canadian professional ice hockey player who was drafted 127th by the Anaheim Ducks in the 2005 NHL Entry Draft.
Maleficium (sorcery)
Maleficium is a term from Latin. It can be translated as "wrongdoing" or "evil doing", or "mischief". It was used to refer to dangerous and harmful magic, and to acts of witchcraft.
Komodo (island)
Komodo is one of the 17,508 islands in the Republic of Indonesia. The island has a surface area of 390 km² and over 2000 people live there. The people on Komodo are descendants of former convicts. They were sent away to the island and mixed with the Bugis from Sulawesi. Most people are Muslim, but there are also smaller groups of Christians and Hindus.
Komodo is part of the Lesser Sunda chain of islands. It is part of the Komodo National Park. The Komodo dragon is especially famous here. Also, the island is a popular place for Scuba diving. It is part of the East Nusa Tenggara province.
Komodo is between two much larger islands. Sumbawa is on the west side and Flores is on the east.
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996), was an American jazz singer. She was called "Lady Ella", the "Queen of Jazz", and the "First Lady of Song".
Her voice spanned three octaves. She could sing very high notes and very low notes. She was famous for her scat singing. She won 14 Grammy Awards. She was awarded the National Medal of Art and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Ella Fitzgerald was born in 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, United States to William and Temperance "Tempie" Fitzgerald. Soon after Ella was born, her parents separated. She went to live in Yonkers, New York with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. In 1923, Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born. When she was a child, Fitzgerald lived in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, the Bronx.
As a youngster, Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer. She loved listening to jazz music by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She especially liked the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it...I tried so hard to sound just like her."
In 1932, Fitzgerald's mother died. Ella began doing badly at school. At one time, she had a job as a lookout at a brothel and a job with some people with Mafia connections. She got into trouble with the police, and was sent to a reform school. She escaped from the reformatory, and for a time was homeless.
Fitzgerald had her first job as a singer when she was 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Harlem Opera House in Harlem, New York. She was able to compete in one of its famous "Amateur Nights". At first she was going to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by some local dancers, she decided to sing instead. She won the first prize of US$25 singing Connee Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection".
In January 1935, Fitzgerald won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. She met a drummer and bandleader called Chick Webb here. Webb had already hired a singer called Charlie Linton to work with the band. According to "The New York Times", Webb was "reluctant to sign her...because she was gawky and unkempt, a "diamond in the rough."" Webb let her try singing with his band when they played a dance at Yale University.
Fitzgerald began singing often with Webb's Orchestra during 1935, at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. She recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". In 1938 she co-wrote and sang a version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket". After this, she started getting famous.
Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra". Fitzgerald became the bandleader. She recorded nearly 150 sides during her time with the orchestra.
In 1942, Fitzgerald left the band and began to work as a solo singer. She was signed to the Decca label, and she had several popular hit songs. She recording with other musicians like the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and the Delta Rhythm Boys.
Decca's Milt Gabler became her manager and she began working often for the jazz producer Norman Granz. She often sang in his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts. Then, Granz became her manager, but he did not record her on any of his record labels for nearly a decade.
In the mid-1940s, after the swing era, and the end of the great touring big bands, jazz music became quite different. A new kind of jazz called bebop became popular and Fitzgerald changed her style of singing. She worked with Dizzy Gillespie's big band and started including scat singing as a big part of her performances. About singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald said, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."
Her 1945 scat recording of "Flying Home" was later described by "The New York Times" as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade...Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her be-bop recording of "Oh, Lady be Good!" (1947) was also very popular, and made people think of her as one of the most important jazz singers.
Granz did not like some of the music Fitzgerald was given at this time, so during her last years on the Decca label she recorded some duets with pianist Ellis Larkins, released in 1950 as "Ella Sings Gershwin".
In 1955, Fitzgerald left Decca, and joined Granz's new record label, Verve Records. She said later, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing bebop. I thought bebop was 'it', and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman...felt that I should do other things, so he produced "The Cole Porter Songbook" with me. It was a turning point in my life."
A new album, "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook", was released in 1956. It was the first of eight multi-album "Songbook" sets that she would record for Verve between 1956 and 1964. Many of the songs were standards and Fitzgerald tried to cross over into a non-jazz audience.
"Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook" was the only "Songbook" on which the composer of the songs also played with her. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, who had worked together for a long time, both played on half the set's 38 tracks, and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues", and a musical piece about Fitzgerald (the only "Songbook" track that Fitzgerald does not sing on).
The "Songbook" series became the Fitzgerald's most critically acclaimed and popular work. "The New York Times" wrote in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration."