During the time he ruled he was troubled by disasters: a rain of blood which lasted three days, a terrible plague, and a great swarm of flies. After he died his son Gurgustius became king.
Pat Fenlon
Pat Fenlon (born 15 March 1969) is an Irish football manager who is currently managing Bohemians F.C..
His first job as a manager was at Shelbourne where he won the league in 2003, 2004 and 2006. In that time they also made history by managing the first Irish club to reach the third qualifying round of the Champions League, where they were knocked out by Deportivo de La Coruña from Spain. He left Shelbourne at the end of 2006.
He was made the Derry City manager at the end of 2006 but left halfway through the 2007 season after making a poor start with his new club.
He was made manager of Bohemians in early 2008 and so far has won back-to-back titles, an FAI Cup and a League Cup. He has stated that his desire is to get Bohemians into the Champions League group stages in 2010.
Victoria Wood
Victoria Wood (19 May 1953, Prestwich, Lancashire – 20 April 2016, Highgate, North London) was an English comedienne, actress, singer, writer and television presenter.
Victoria Wood went to Bury Grammar Girls' School. She wrote and starred in sketches, plays, films and sitcoms. She was a stand-up comedian. She sang and accompanied herself on the piano.
Her humour was usually about everyday life, known as observational comedy. It was often satirical. It referred to popular British media and brand names of British products.
She started her career in 1974 by winning the ATV talent show "New Faces". It was not until the 1980s that she began to be known as a comedy star, with the award-winning television series "Victoria Wood As Seen On TV" and became one of Britain's most popular stand-up comedians.
In 1998, she wrote and starred in the sitcom "dinnerladies" (deliberately spelt with a small-case "d") which ran for 16 episodes over two seasons.
Wood often worked with Anne Reid, Maxine Peake, Julie Walters, Duncan Preston and Celia Imrie.
She won many awards, including the BAFTA award. She was made a CBE in 2008.
Wood married magician Geoffrey Durham in March 1980. They separated in October 2002 and divorced in 2003. They had a daughter, Grace (born 1988) who is a singer and son Henry (born 1992).
Wood's brother is the politician Chris Foote Wood.
Wood was diagnosed with terminal cancer in late 2015, but kept her illness private. She died on 20 April 2016 at her Highgate home, aged 62.
Niccolò Piccinni
Niccolò Piccinni (born Bari, Italy, 16 January 1728; died near Paris, 7 May 1800) was an Italian composer. He wrote over 80 operas. During his life, he worked with the greatest librettists of his age, including Metastasio.
Piccinni’s music is hardly ever played today, but in his day many of his operas were extremely popular. He is mainly remembered today because he was invited to Paris where people wanted him to be a rival of Gluck. There were lots of arguments between the people who supported Piccinni and those who supported Gluck.
Piccinni was born in Bari. His father, who was a musician, did not want his son to study music, but the bishop persuaded him to change his mind. Niccolò went to the music conservatoire in Naples. He started to write comic operas (opera buffa). His opera "La Cecchina, ossia la buona Figliuola" with a libretto by Goldoni played for two years in Rome and was produced in all the important European capital cities. It was probably the most popular opera buffa of the 18th century.
Piccinni wrote music with a sentimental feeling that was very popular in the mid-18th century. It was typical of a lot of music in the early Classical music period.
A few years later Piccinni was invited by Queen Marie Antoinette to go and live in Paris. He had married in 1756 his pupil Vincenza Sibilla. She was a singer, but he never allowed his wife to sing on stage again after they married.
The people who had invited Piccinni to Paris were people who did not like Gluck’s music. They wanted Piccinni to be a rival to Gluck. They enjoyed arguments, and they wanted to try to make the two composers enemies. There were a lot of arguments between the people who supported Piccinni and those who supported Gluck. The whole affair is often called: the war between the Piccinnists and the Gluckists. It was very stupid, because the arguments had nothing to do with music. Both composers were asked to compose an opera about the same story: Roland. Gluck never finished the opera because he wanted to finish his career by writing Alceste. He did not want to be compared to Piccinni. Then both composers were asked to write operas about the story "Iphigénie en Tauride" . Gluck’s opera was first produced on 18 May 1779. Piccinni's "Iphigénie" followed on 23 January 1781. The rival parties went on arguing, even after Gluck left Paris in 1780. Then some people tried to get a new rival for Piccinni: they invited Sacchini to Paris. But Piccinni continued to be popular. When Gluck died, in 1787, Piccinni suggested that a public monument should be built to his memory. Gluck’s supporters refused to support the idea.
In 1784 Piccinni became professor at the Royal School of Music, a school which later became part of the Conservatoire. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, Piccinni returned to Naples. At first he was warmly welcomed by King Ferdinand IV; but when his daughter married a French democrat the Neapolitans were angry. They said he was a revolutionist. He was not allowed to leave his house for four years.
For the next nine years he tried to make a living in Venice, Naples and Rome; but he returned in 1798 to Paris, where the public gave him a warm welcome, but he made no money. He died at Passy, near Paris.
He produced over eighty operas, but although his later work shows the influence of the French and German stage, his music is typical of Italian musicians of the 18th century.
William P. Murphy
William Parry Murphy (February 6, 1892 – October 9, 1987) was an American doctor. He won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with George Whipple and George Minot, for discovering how eating liver could cure anaemia.
Silent Night
"Silent Night" () is a very popular Christmas carol and song. It was first performed in 1818, by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr. Gruber was an organist and headmaster of a primary school. Mohr was a priest. Mohr had written the poem in 1816; Gruber wrote the melody for it before Christmas 1818. Little else is known on how the song came to be.
One of the theses is that at the time it was not possible to play the organ in the church. For this reason Gruber and Mohr created a song that could be accompanied by a guitar. There are many other stories about how the song came to be.
The audience liked the performance very much. Gruber sang, and Mohr played the guitar. It is because of an organ-maker called "Mauracher" that the song became known to a wider audience. Mauracher could capture the attention of the crowd at a performance in Leipzig in 1832. From there it spread, first to the German-speaking countries, then to the world. Today there are translations into more than 300 languages and dialects.
The song was first published on a leaflet in 1833, with other "authentic Tyrolean songs". Frederick William IV of Prussia wanted to know the authors of the song, and asked St. Peter's Archabbey, Salzburg, in 1854. The abbey found Gruber, who was still alive. In the meantime, the song had been attributed to Michael Haydn.
The author Hertha Pauli, who was born in Austria had to flee from the persecutions during the Second World War. In 1943, she found that many Americans thought that "Silent Night" was an American popular tune. She then wrote the children's book, "Silent Night. The Story of a Song", where she explained where the song was from.
Indonesian Rupiah
The Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) is the money used in Indonesia. Rupiah started to be used in 1946.