La Peau de chagrin (, The Skin of Shagreen), known in English as The Magic Skin and The Wild Ass's Skin, is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Set in early 19th-century Paris, it tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen (untanned skin from a wild ass) that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. La Peau de chagrin belongs to the Études philosophiques group of Balzac's sequence of novels, La Comédie humaine.

Before the book was completed, Balzac created excitement about it by publishing a series of articles and story fragments in several Parisian journals. Although he was five months late in delivering the manuscript, he succeeded in generating sufficient interest that the novel sold out instantly upon its publication. A second edition, which included a series of twelve other "philosophical tales", was released one month later.

Although the novel uses fantastic elements, its main focus is a realistic portrayal of the excesses of bourgeois materialism. Balzac's renowned attention to detail is used to describe a gambling house, an antique shop, a royal banquet, and other locales. He also includes details from his own life as a struggling writer, placing the main character in a home similar to the one he occupied at the start of his literary career. The central theme of La Peau de chagrin is the conflict between desire and longevity. The magic skin represents the owner's life-force, which is depleted through every expression of will, especially when it is employed for the acquisition of power. Ignoring a caution from the shopkeeper who offers him the skin, the protagonist greedily surrounds himself with wealth, only to find himself miserable and decrepit at the story's end.

La Peau de chagrin firmly established Balzac as a writer of significance in France. His social circle widened significantly, and he was sought eagerly by publishers for future projects. The book served as the catalyst for a series of letters he exchanged with a Polish baroness named Ewelina Hańska, who later became his wife. It also inspired Giselher Klebe's opera Die tödlichen Wünsche.

Background

In 1830 Honoré de Balzac had only begun to achieve recognition as a writer. Although his parents had persuaded him to make his profession the law, he announced in 1819 that he wanted to become an author. His mother was distraught, but she and his father agreed to give him a small income, on the condition that he dedicate himself to writing, and deliver to them half of his gross income from any published work. After moving into a tiny room near the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal in Paris, Balzac wrote for one year, without success. Frustrated, he moved back to his family in the suburb of Villeparisis and borrowed money from his parents to pursue his literary ambitions further. He spent the next several years writing simple potboiler novels, which he published under a variety of pseudonyms. He shared some of his income from these with his parents, but by 1828 he still owed them 50,000 francs.

He published for the first time under his own name in 1829. Les Chouans, a novel about royalist forces in Brittany, did not succeed commercially, but it made Balzac known in literary circles. He achieved a major success later the same year when he published La Physiologie du mariage, a treatise on the institution of marriage. Bolstered by its popularity, he added to his fame by publishing a variety of short stories and essays in the magazines Revue de Paris, La Caricature, and La Mode. He thus made connections in the publishing industry that later helped him to obtain reviews of his novels.

At the time, French literary appetites for fantastic stories had been whetted by the 1829 translation of German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann's collection Fantastic Tales; the gothic fiction of England's Ann Radcliffe; and French author Jules Janin's 1829 novel L'Âne Mort et la Femme Guillotinée (The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman). Although he planned a novel in the same tradition, Balzac disliked the term "fantastic", referring to it once as "the vulgar program of a genre in its first flush of newness, to be sure, but already too much worn by the mere abuse of the word".

The politics and culture of France, meanwhile, were in upheaval. After reigning for six controversial years, King Charles X was forced to abdicate during the July Revolution of 1830. He was replaced by Louis-Philippe, who named himself "King of the French" (rather than the usual "King of France") in an attempt to distance himself from the Ancien Régime. The July Monarchy brought an entrenchment of bourgeois attitudes, in which Balzac saw disorganization and weak leadership.

Writing and publication

The title La Peau de chagrin first appeared in print on 9 December 1830, as a passing mention in an article Balzac wrote for La Caricature under the pseudonym Alfred Coudreux. His scrapbook includes the following note, probably written at the same time: "L'invention d'une peau qui représente la vie. Conte oriental." ("The invention of a skin that represents life. Oriental story.") One week later, he published a story fragment called "Le Dernier Napoléon" in La Caricature, under the name "Henri B...". In it, a young man loses his last Napoleon coin at a Parisian gambling house, then continues to the Pont Royal to drown himself. During this early stage, Balzac did not think much of the project. He referred to it as "a piece of thorough nonsense in the literary sense, but in which [the author] has sought to introduce certain of the situations in this hard life through which men of genius have passed before achieving anything". Before long, though, his opinion of the story improved.

By January 1831 Balzac had generated enough interest in his idea to secure a contract with publishers Charles Gosselin and Urbain Canel. They agreed on 750 copies of an octavo edition, with a fee of 1,125 francs paid to the author upon receipt of the manuscript – by mid-February. Balzac delivered the novel in July.

During the intervening months, however, he provided glimpses of his erratic progress. Two additional fragments appeared in May, part of a scheme to promote the book before its publication. "Une Débauche", published in the Revue des deux mondes, describes an orgiastic feast that features constant bantering and discussion from its bourgeois participants. The other fragment, "Le Suicide d'un poète", was printed in the Revue de Paris; it concerns the difficulties of a would-be poet as he tries to compensate for his lack of funds. Although the three fragments were not connected into a coherent narrative, Balzac was excerpting characters and scenes from his novel-in-progress.

The novel's delayed publication was a result of Balzac's active social life. He spent many nights dining at the homes of friends, including novelist Eugène Sue and his mistress Olympe Pélissier, as well as the feminist writer George Sand and her lover Jules Sandeau. Balzac and Pélissier had a brief affair, and she became the first lover with whom he appeared in public. Eventually he removed himself from Paris by staying with friends in the suburbs, where he committed himself to finishing the work. In late spring he allowed Sand to read a nearly-finished manuscript; she enjoyed it and predicted it would do well.

Finally, in August 1831, La Peau de chagrin: Conte philosophique was published in two volumes. It was a commercial success, and Balzac used his connections in the world of Parisian periodicals to have it reviewed widely. The book sold quickly, and by the end of the month another contract had been signed: Balzac would receive 4,000 francs to publish 1,200 additional copies. This second edition included a series of twelve other stories with fantastic elements, and was released under the title Romans et contes philosophiques (Philosophical Novels and Stories). A third edition, rearranged to fill four volumes, appeared in March 1833.

Synopsis
La Peau de chagrin consists of three sections: "Le Talisman" ("The Talisman"), "La Femme sans cœur" ("The Woman without a Heart"), and "L'Agonie" ("The Agony"). The first edition contained a "Preface" and a "Moralité", which were excised from subsequent versions. A two-page Epilogue appears at the end of the final section.

"Le Talisman" begins with the plot of "Le Dernier Napoléon": A young man named Raphaël de Valentin wagers his last coin and loses, then proceeds to the river Seine to drown himself. On the way, however, he decides to enter an unusual shop and finds it filled with curiosities from around the world. The elderly shopkeeper leads him to a piece of shagreen hanging on the wall. It is inscribed with "Oriental" writing; the old man calls it "Sanskrit", but it is imprecise Arabic. The skin promises to fulfill any wish of its owner, shrinking slightly upon the fulfillment of each desire. The shopkeeper is willing to let Valentin take it without charge, but urges him not to accept the offer. Valentin waves away the shopkeeper's warnings and takes the skin, wishing for a royal banquet, filled with wine, women, and friends. He is immediately met by acquaintances who invite him to such an event; they spend hours eating, drinking, and talking.

Part two, "La Femme sans cœur", is narrated as a flashback from Valentin's point of view. He complains to his friend Émile about his early days as a scholar, living in poverty with an elderly landlord and her daughter Pauline, while trying fruitlessly to win the heart of a beautiful but aloof woman named Foedora. Along the way he is tutored by an older man named Eugène de Rastignac, who encourages him to immerse himself in the world of high society. Benefiting from the kindness of his landladies, Valentin maneuvers his way into Foedora's circle of friends. Unable to win her affection, however, he becomes the miserable and destitute man found at the start of "Le Talisman".

"L'Agonie" begins several years after the feast of parts one and two. Valentin, having used the talisman to secure a large income, finds both the skin and his health dwindling. He tries to break the curse by getting rid of the skin, but fails. The situation causes him to panic, horrified that further desires will hasten the end of his life. He organizes his home to avoid the possibility of wishing for anything: his servant, Jonathan, arranges food, clothing, and visitors with precise regularity. Events beyond his control cause him to wish for various things, however, and the skin continues to recede. Desperate, the sickly Valentin tries to find some way of stretching the skin, and takes a trip to the spa town of Aix-les-Bains in the hope of recovering his vitality.

With the skin no larger than a periwinkle leaf, he is visited by Pauline in his room; she expresses her love for him. When she learns the truth about the shagreen and her role in Raphaël's demise, she is horrified. Raphaël cannot control his desire for her and she rushes into an adjoining room to escape him and so save his life. He pounds on the door and declares both his love and his desire to die in her arms. She, meanwhile, is trying to kill herself to free him from his desire. He breaks down the door, they consummate their love in a fiery moment of passion, and he dies.

Style
Although he preferred the term "philosophical", Balzac's novel is based upon a fantastic premise. The skin grants a world of possibility to Valentin, and he uses it to satisfy many desires. Pressured into a duel, for example, he explains how he need neither avoid his opponent's gunshot nor aim his own weapon; the outcome is inevitable. He fires without care, and kills the other man instantly. Elsewhere, the supernatural qualities of the skin are demonstrated when it resists the efforts of a chemist and a physicist to stretch it.

This inclusion of the fantastic, however, is mostly a framework by which the author discusses human nature and society. One critic suggests that "the story would be much the same without it". Balzac had used supernatural elements in the potboiler novels he published under noms de plume, but their presence in Peau de chagrin signaled a turning point in his approach to the use of symbolism. Whereas he had used fantastic objects and events in earlier works, they were mostly simple plot points or uncomplicated devices for suspense. With La Peau de chagrin, on the other hand, the talisman represents Valentin's soul; at the same time, his demise is symbolic of a greater social decline. Balzac's real foci in the 1831 novel are the power of human desire and the nature of society after the July Revolution. French writer and critic Félicien Marceau even suggests that the symbolism in the novel allows a purer analysis than the individual case studies of other Balzac novels; by removing the analysis to an abstract level, it becomes less complicated by variations of individual personality. As an everyman, Valentin displays the essential characteristics of human nature, not a particular person's approach to the dilemma offered by the skin.

In his Preface to the novel's first edition, Balzac meditates on the usefulness of fantastic elements: "[Writers] invent the true, by analogy, or they see the object to be described, whether the object comes to them or they go toward the object ... Have men the power to bring the universe into their brain, or is their brain a talisman with which they abolish the laws of time and space?" Critics agree that Balzac's goal in La Peau de chagrin was the former.

Realism
The novel is widely cited as an important early example of the realism for which Balzac became famous. Descriptions of Paris are one example: the novel is filled with actual locations, including the Palais Royal and the Notre Dame Cathedral. The narration and characters allude repeatedly to art and culture, from Gioachino Rossini's opera Tancredi to the statue of Venus de Milo.

The book's third paragraph contains a long description of the process and purpose behind the ritual in gambling houses whereby "the law despoils you of your hat at the outset." The atmosphere of the establishment is described in precise detail, from the faces of the players to the "greasy" wallpaper and the tablecloth "worn by the friction of gold". The emphasis on money evoked in the first pages – and its contrast with the decrepit surroundings – mirrors the novel's themes of social organization and economic materialism.

The confluence of realist detail with symbolic meaning continues when Valentin enters the antique shop; the store represents the planet itself. As he wanders about, he tours the world through the relics of its various epochs: "Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of its learning, some example of its art." The shop contains a painting of Napoleon; a Moorish yataghan; an idol of the Tartars; portraits of Dutch burgomasters; a bust of Cicero; an Ancient Egyptian mummy; an Etruscan vase; a Chinese dragon; and hundreds of other objects. The panorama of human activity reaches a moral fork in the road when the shopkeeper leads Valentin to Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ. It does not deter him from his goal, however; only when he finds the skin does Valentin decide to abort his suicidal mission. In doing so, he demonstrates humanity favoring ego over divine salvation.

Opening image

At the start of the novel, Balzac includes an image from Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel Tristram Shandy: a curvy line drawn in the air by a character seeking to express the freedom enjoyed "whilst a man is free". Balzac never explained his purpose behind the use of the symbol, and its significance to La Peau de chagrin is the subject of debate. In his comprehensive review of La Comédie humaine, Herbert J. Hunt connects the "serpentine squiggle" to the "sinuous design" of Balzac's novel. Critic Martin Kanes, however, suggests that the image symbolizes the impossibility of language to express an idea fully. This dilemma, he proposes, is directly related to the conflict between will and knowledge indicated by the shopkeeper at the start of the novel.

Themes

Autobiography
Balzac mined his own life for details in the first parts of La Peau de Chagrin, and he likely modeled the protagonist Raphaël de Valentin on himself. Details recounted by Valentin of his impoverished living quarters are autobiographical allusions to Balzac's earliest days as an author: "Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its scholar, with its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. The roofing fell in a steep slope, and the sky was visible through chinks in the tiles. There was room for a bed, a table, and a few chairs, and beneath the highest point of the roof my piano could stand." Although they allow for a degree of embellishment, biographers and critics agree that Balzac was drawing from his own experience.

Other parts of the story also derive from the author's life: Balzac once attended a feast held by the Marquis de Las Marismas, who planned to launch a newspaper – the same situation in which Valentin finds himself after expressing his first wish to the talisman. Later, Valentin visits the opera armed with a powerful set of glasses that allow him to observe every flaw in the women on stage (to guard against desire). These may also have been drawn from Balzac's experience, as he once wrote in a letter about a set of "divine" opera glasses he ordered from the Paris Observatory.

More significant is the connection between the women in the novel and the women in Balzac's life. Some critics have noted important similarities between Valentin's efforts to win the heart of Foedora and Balzac's infatuation with Olympe Pélissier. A scene in which Valentin hides in Foedora's bedroom to watch her undress is said to come from a similar situation wherein Balzac secretly observed Pélissier. It's probable that Pélissier was not the model for Foedora, however, since she accepted Balzac's advances and wrote him friendly letters; Foedora, by contrast, declares herself outside the reach of any interested lover. Critics agree that the "Woman without a Heart" described in the novel is a composite of other women Balzac knew. The character of Pauline, meanwhile, was likely influenced by another of Balzac's mistresses, Laure de Berny.

Vouloir, pouvoir, and savoir
At the start of the book, the shopkeeper discusses with Valentin "the great secret of human life". They consist of three words, which Balzac renders in capital letters: VOULOIR ("to will"), POUVOIR ("to be able"), and SAVOIR ("to know"). Will, he explains, consumes us; power (or, in one translation, "to have your will") destroys us; and knowledge soothes us. These three concepts form the philosophical foundation of the novel.

The talisman connects these precepts to the theory of vitalism; it physically represents the life force of its owner, and is reduced with each exercise of the will. The shopkeeper tries to warn Valentin that the wisest path lies not in exercising his will or securing power, but in developing the mind. "What is folly", he asks Valentin, "if not an excess of will and power?" Overcome with the possibilities offered by the skin, however, the young man throws caution to the wind and embraces his desire. Upon grabbing the talisman, he declares: "I want to live with excess." Only when his life force is nearly depleted does he recognize his mistake: "It suddenly struck him that the possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring with it the knowledge of how to use it ... [he] had had everything in his power, and he had done nothing."

The will, Balzac cautions, is a destructive force that seeks only to acquire power unless tempered by knowledge. The shopkeeper presents a foil for Valentin's future self, offering study and mental development as an alternative to consuming desire. Foedora also serves as a model for resistance to the corruption of will, insofar as she seeks at all times to excite desire in others while never giving in to her own. That Valentin is happiest living in the material squalor of his tiny garret – lost in study and writing, with the good-hearted Pauline giving herself to him – underscores the irony of his misery at the end of the book, when he is surrounded with the fruits of his material desire.

Society

The novel extrapolates Balzac's analysis of desire from the individual to society; he feared that the world, like Valentin, was losing its way due to material excess and misguided priorities. In the gambling house, the orgiastic feast, the antique shop, and the discussions with men of science, Balzac examines this dilemma in various contexts. The lust for social status to which Valentin is led by Rastignac is emblematic of this excess; the gorgeous but unattainable Foedora symbolizes the pleasures offered by high society.

Science offers no panacea. In one scene, a group of doctors offer a range of quickly formulated opinions as to the cause of Valentin's feebleness. In another, a physicist and a chemist admit defeat after employing a range of tactics designed to stretch the skin. All of these scientific approaches lack an understanding of the true crisis, and are therefore doomed to fail. Although it is only shown in glimpses – the image of Christ, for example, painted by Valentin's namesake, the Renaissance artist Raphael – Balzac wished to remind readers that Christianity offered the potential to temper deadly excess. After failing in their efforts to stretch the skin, the chemist declares: "I believe in the devil"; "And I in God", replies the physicist.

The corruption of excess is related to social disorganization in a description at the start of the final section. Physically feeble though living in absolute luxury, Raphaël de Valentin is described as retaining in his eyes "an extraordinary intelligence" with which he is able to see "everything at once":That expression was painful to see ... It was the inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him, while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours of command in vain ...

Reception and legacy

The novel sold out immediately after going on sale, and was reviewed in every major Parisian newspaper and magazine. In some cases Balzac wrote the reviews himself; using the name "Comte Alex de B—", he announced that the book proved he had achieved "the stature of genius". Independent reviews were less sweeping, but also very positive. Poet Émile Deschamps praised the rhythm of the novel, and the religious commentator Charles Forbes René de Montalembert indicated approvingly that it highlighted the need for more spirituality in society as a whole. Although some critics chastised Balzac for reveling in negativity, others felt it simply reflected the condition of French society. German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe declared it a shining example of the "incurable corruption of the French nation". Critics argue about whether Goethe's comments were praise for the novel or not.

This storm of publicity caused a flurry of activity as readers around France scrambled to obtain the novel. Balzac's friend and La Caricature editor Charles Philipon wrote to the author one week after publication: "there is no getting hold of La Peau de chagrin. Grandville had to stop everything to read it, because the librarian sent round every half-hour to ask if he had finished." Friends near and far wrote to Balzac indicating their similar difficulties in locating copies. The second edition was released one month later, and it was followed by parodies and derivative works from other writers. Balzac's friend Théophile Gautier included a comical homage in his 1833 story collection Les Jeunes-France when, during a recreation of the feast from Balzac's novel, a character says: "This is the point at which I'm supposed to pour wine down my waistcoat ... It says so in black and white on page 171 of La Peau de chagrin ... And this is where I have to toss a 100-sou coin in the air to see whether or not there's a God."

The novel established Balzac as a prominent figure in the world of French literature. Publishers fought among themselves to publish his future work, and he became a mainstay on the list of invitation for social functions around Paris. Balzac took pride in his novel's success, and declared to the editor of the journal L'Avenir that "Elle est donc le point de départ de mon ouvrage" ("This is the point of departure for my body of work"). Consistently popular even after his death, La Peau de chagrin was republished nineteen times between 1850 and 1880.

When he developed his scheme for organizing all of his novels and stories into a single sequence called La Comédie humaine, Balzac placed La Peau de chagrin at the start of the section called Études philosophiques ("Philosophical Studies"). Like the other works in this category – including the similarly autobiographical Louis Lambert (1832) – it deals with philosophy and the supernatural. But it also provides a bridge to the realism of the Études des mœurs ("Study of Manners"), where the majority of his novels were located.

L'Étrangère

The popularity of the novel extended to Ukraine, where a baroness named Ewelina Hańska read about Balzac's novels in newspapers she received from Paris. Intrigued, she ordered copies of his work, and she read them with her cousins and friends around Volhynia. They were impressed by the understanding he showed toward women in La Physiologie du mariage, but felt that La Peau de chagrin portrayed them in a cruel and unforgiving light. Hańska wrote a letter to Balzac, signed it as L'Étrangère ("The Stranger"), and mailed it from Odessa on 28 February 1832.

With no return address, Balzac was left to reply in the Gazette de France, with the hope that she would see the notice. She did not, but wrote again in November: "Your soul embraces centuries, monsieur; its philosophical concepts appear to be the fruit of long study matured by time; yet I am told you are still young. I would like to know you, but feel I have no need to do so. I know you through my own spiritual instinct; I picture you in my own way, and feel that if I were to actually set eyes upon you, I should instantly exclaim, 'That is he!'"

Eventually she revealed herself to him, and they began a correspondence that lasted for fifteen years. Although she remained faithful to her husband Wacław, Mme. Hańska and Balzac enjoyed an emotional intimacy through their letters. When the baron died in 1841, the French author began to pursue the relationship outside the written page. They wed in the town of Berdychiv on 14 March 1850, five months before he died.

Recurring characters
Because it was among the first novels he released under his own name, Balzac did not use characters in La Peau de chagrin from previous works. He did, however, introduce several individuals who resurfaced in later stories. Most significant of these is Eugène de Rastignac, the older gentleman who tutors Valentin in the vicious ways of high society. Thirty pages into the writing of his 1834 novel Le Père Goriot, Balzac suddenly crossed out the name he had been using for a character – Massiac – and used Rastignac instead. The relationship between teacher and student in La Peau de chagrin is mirrored in Le Père Goriot, when the young Rastignac is guided in the ways of social realpolitik by the incognito criminal Vautrin.

Balzac used the character Foedora in three other stories, but eventually wrote her out of them after deciding on other models for social femininity. In later editions of La Peau de chagrin, he changed the text to name one of the bankers "Taillefer", whom he had introduced in L'Auberge rouge (1831). He also used the name Horace Bianchon for one of the doctors, thus connecting the book to the famous physician who appears in thirty-one stories in La Comédie humaine. So vividly had the doctor been rendered that Balzac himself called out for Bianchon while lying on his deathbed.

The use of recurring characters lends Balzac's work a cohesion and atmosphere unlike any other series of novels. It enables a depth of characterization that goes beyond simple narration or dialogue. "When the characters reappear", notes the critic Samuel Rogers, "they do not step out of nowhere; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see." Although the complexity of these characters' lives inevitably led Balzac to make errors of chronology and consistency, the mistakes are considered minor in the overall scope of the project. Readers are more often troubled by the sheer number of people in Balzac's world, and feel deprived of important context for the characters. Detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle said that he never tried to read Balzac, because he "did not know where to begin".

Influence
Balzac's novel was adapted for the libretto of Giselher Klebe's 1959 opera Die tödlichen Wünsche (The Deadly Wishes). 1977–1978 the German composer Fritz Geißler composed Das Chagrinleder after a libretto by Günther Deicke. In 1989–1990 the Russian composer Yuri Khanon wrote the ballet L'Os de chagrin (The Shagreen Bone), based on Balzac's text, which included an opera-interlude of the same name. In 1992 a biographic pseudo-documentary in the form of an opera-film based on his opera L'os de Chagrin («Chagrenevaia Kost»,ru) was released.

The novel has also been cited as a possible influence on Oscar Wilde for his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, although this hypothesis is rejected by most scholars. The protagonist, Dorian Gray, acquires a magical portrait that ages while he remains forever youthful.

Russian literature specialist Priscilla Meyer maintains in her book How the Russians Read the French, that both La Peau de Chagrin and Pere Goriot were extensively paralleled, subverted and inverted, by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment.

The story was first adapted into a 1909 French silent film entitled The Wild Ass's Skin, directed by Albert Capellani, written by Michel Carre  and starring Henri Desfontaines, which, despite its brief 19-minute running time, was formatted into three acts.

In 1915, American director Richard Ridgely made a film adaptation of Balzac's novel entitled The Magic Skin for Thomas A. Edison, Inc. The 50-minute film starred Mabel Trunnelle, Bigelow Cooper, and Everett Butterfield, and diluted the supernatural aspects of the story by revealing it all to be a dream.

In 1920, it was adapted again as a 54-minute British silent film called Desire (aka The Magic Skin), written and directed by George Edwardes-Hall, and starring Dennis Neilson-Terry, Yvonne Arnaud and Christine Maitland.

George D. Baker directed yet another version of the story, a 1923 American silent film called Slave of Desire starring George Walsh and Bessie Love.

In 1960 Croatian animator Vladimir Kristl made an animated short entitled Šagrenska koža (The Piece of Shagreen Leather) inspired by Balzac's novel.

It was adapted for French television in 1980, with Marc Delsaert, Catriona MacColl, Anne Caudry, Richard Fontana and Alain Cuny.

In 2010, a French and Belgian television production featured   Thomas Coumans, Mylène Jampanoï,  Jean-Paul Dubois, Julien Honoré, Jean-Pierre Marielle and Annabelle Hettmann.

Toward the end of his life, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud felt a special connection to Balzac's novel, since he believed that his world was shrinking like Valentin's talisman. Diagnosed with a fatal tumor, Freud resolved to commit suicide. After re-reading La Peau de chagrin, he said to his doctor: "This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation." The next day, his doctor administered a lethal dose of morphine, and Freud died.

In 2011 French director Marianne Badrichani staged an adaptation of La Peau de Chagrin in London's Holland Park.

Notes

References
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 Pugh, Anthony R. Balzac's Recurring Characters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. .
 Raffini, Christine. "Balzac's Allegories of Energy in La Comédie humaine". Honoré de Balzac. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. . pp. 211–222.
 Robb, Graham. Balzac: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. .
 Rogers, Samuel. Balzac & The Novel. New York: Octagon Books, 1953. .
 Sprenger, Scott. "Death by Marriage in Balzac's Peau de chagrin", Dix-Neuf, Oct. 2008, 59–75.j
 Stowe, William W. Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. .
 Tournier, Isabelle. "La Peau de chagrin"  (French). Online at Balzac: La Comédie humaine . The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language. Retrieved on 22 May 2008.

External links

 The Magic Skin at Project Gutenberg (plain text)
 The Magic Skin at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

French philosophical novels
French fantasy novels
1831 French novels
Books of La Comédie humaine
Novels by Honoré de Balzac
French novels adapted into films
Novels set in the 19th century

La Peau de chagrin


Inaccessible Island is an extinct volcano. It was last active six million years ago. Together with Gough Island, Inaccessible Island is a protected wildlife reserve, both make up the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Gough and Inaccessible Islands. Inaccessible Island is home to the endemic Inaccessible Island rail, the world's smallest extant flightless bird.

Inaccessible Island is part of the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha. It is part of the overseas territory of the United Kingdom known as Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. Tristan da Cunha itself is accessible only by sea via a seven-day sail from Cape Town, South Africa, by landing during the 60 days of the year that the harbor allows for access to the island.

Geography
The island is approximately  to the southwest of the main island of the Tristan da Cunha archipelago. Mostly bare and inhospitable, the island has one small landing site named Port David on the northwesternmost point.

The island is  in area. It is between South Atlantic Ocean  south-west of Tristan da Cunha. Inaccessible Island is bordering with sheer sea cliffs, but one can landed on it through a few boulder beaches. Generations of sailors were wary of the difficult landings and inhospitable terrain. Inaccessible Island does not have any permanent inhabitants since 1873.

In popular culture

 Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket alluded to Nightingale Island, Inaccessible Island, and Tristan da Cunha.
 In Patrick O'Brian's The Thirteen Gun Salute (1989), pp. 120–29, Captain Aubrey's ship Diane, in a dead calm, is carried toward Inaccessible Island by the inshore current. One of the sailors recounts the wreck of a whaling ship that he witnessed when it was lost with all hands in similar conditions. Only a fortunate breeze saves Aubrey's ship. The episode is depicted in the cover painting of the book showing the towering cliffs plunging directly into the sea.
 "Sea Lion", the pseudonym of "a serving naval officer" (Geoffrey Martin Bennett), wrote The Phantom Fleet (1946), a novel that was predicated on the supposition that Inaccessible Island contained a natural harbour, the entrance to which was concealed from the sea. The antagonists were assembling a fleet of obsolescent warships in this harbour, with the intention of striking a coup de main leading to world domination, a scheme foiled by the derring-do of a naval officer and the guns of the Royal Navy.
 Eric Newby passed within sight of Inaccessible Island on his 1938/1939 voyage from Ireland to Australia aboard Moshulu. It was chronicled in his books The Last Grain Race and Learning the Ropes. Inaccessible Island was the only land the crew saw on the voyage, until reaching Australia, and was therefore a cause for some excitement.
 Daniel Suarez's 2014 novel Influx refers to this island as the location of the underground prison 'Hibernity'.

References

Other websites

 Inaccessible Island: Tristan da Cunha website

Uninhabited islands
Volcanoes
Islands of the United Kingdom
Tristan da Cunha
World Heritage Sites in the United Kingdom

Inaccessible Island


The Alpine Club classification of the Eastern Alps (, AVE) is a common division of the Eastern Alps into 75 mountain ranges, based on the Moriggl Classification (ME) first published in 1924 by the German and Austrian Alpine Club. The present-day division established for the German-speaking world (less Switzerland) was compiled by the German, Austrian and South Tyrol Alpine Clubs and published in 1984 and is also used for the basic numbering of Alpine Club maps for mountaineering.

Classification system
The Eastern Alps are divided into four main areas: the  Northern Limestone Alps, the Central Eastern Alps, the Southern Limestone Alps, and the Western Limestone Alps. These four main ranges are further divided into 75 sub-groups. The Northern Limestone and Central Eastern Alps are the largest with 27 groups each, while the Southern Limestone Alps have 15. The six groups of the Western Limestone Alps are also classed with the Central Eastern Alps.

The classification is based principally on orographic considerations and takes account of the regional usage in terms of the names of the mountain groups. The amendments of 1984 address a number of geological problems and have dropped many of the 1924 Morrigl groups, making more precise sub-divisions for them in other areas. These changes are evident from the missing serial numbers and sub-division letters. The Western Limestone Alps were added, an area which is not covered by the three Alpine Clubs and actually is a continuation of the Southern and Swiss Alps. Unlike the previous scheme, the Salzburg Slate Alps were assigned to the Northern Limestone Alps as they are part of the greywacke zone that forms the basement of the Limestone Alps. The Ortler Alps and the Sobretta-Gavia range were grouped into the Southern Limestone Alps, though geologically, they are north of the Periadriatic Seam and ranked part of the Austroalpine nappes.

Geographical characteristics
The Eastern Alps extend across six European countries: Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland and Slovenia. With 57 mountain groups, Austria has the largest share. It is followed by Italy with 23 and Switzerland with ten. There are seven mountain ranges in Germany and four in Slovenia. Liechtenstein shares one group.

The only four-thousander and the highest mountain in the Eastern Alps is the Piz Bernina at . Thus the Bernina Range is the highest of all the groups in the Eastern Alps. Next are the Ortler Alps, whose highest peak, Mt. Ortler at , is the highest mountain in South Tyrol. The third highest range is the Glockner Group with the highest mountain in Austria: the Grossglockner at . Another 22 groups reach a height of 3,000 metres. The only group in the Northern Limestone Alps with a three-thousander is the Lechtal Alps, whose highest summit is the Parseierspitze at . 39 groups are over 2000 metres high. Seven of the groups exceed 1000 metres—except for the Vienna Woods, whose highest mountain, the Schöpfl, just reaches an altitude of .

Mountain groups as per the Alpine Club classification
See List of mountain groups in the Alpine Club classification of the Eastern Alps

Other classifications
Up to today, there is no internationally accepted classification of the Alps. Beside the common AVE arrangement, the Swiss Alpine Club subdivides the Swiss Alps (including the East Alpine parts) along cantonal boundaries, while Austrian hydrography uses a slightly different orographic system. In Italy and France the segmentation is usually based on the 1926 Partizione delle Alpi. In 2005, a new proposal was made by the Italian Alpinist, Sergio Marazzi, to merge the competing systems of the Alpine states into the Suddivisione Orografica Internazionale Unificata del Sistema Alpino (SOIUSA), but this has not gained a general acceptance.

Sources

External links

Alps
Alpine clubs
.
!
Geographic classifications


Greg Brown is a guitarist and founding member of the band Cake.

Biography
Brown played on the Cake albums Motorcade of Generosity and Fashion Nugget before leaving the band in 1998 prior to the recording of Prolonging the Magic. That album's liner notes indicate that some of his guitar arrangements were used. During his years as CAKE's guitar player, Brown primarily used a 1965 Guild Starfire III run through a Pro Co RAT distortion pedal into a Silvertone amp. Brown wrote or co-wrote several songs on Cake's first two albums, including their most popular single The Distance.

After Cake, he joined Deathray, a band where he provided backing vocals and lead guitar. He also wrote four songs and co-penned two more for their 2000 debut album, which was released on Capricorn Records and then re-released on Doppler Records. He also joined the side project of Weezer singer-songwriter Rivers Cuomo, Homie. In 2003, he played piano and guitar and co-produced Puckett's Versus the Country Boy, an EP by Matt Sharp, formerly of Weezer and The Rentals. Deathray recorded their second album (Believe Me) in late 2004 and early 2005 in which Brown played guitar, did backing vocals, and other instruments on. "Believe Me" was released via download later in 2005 and a few copies were available on CD format despite not being signed on any label. He also co-produced the debut album from Golden Shoulders with Deathray bandmate Victor Damiani, and played guitar on Friendship is Deep, the second album from Golden Shoulders released on label, Doppler Records. Greg played guitar on "Bound Away" from Cake's 2011 album, Showroom of Compassion, which was the first appearance of him on a Cake album since 1996's Fashion Nugget.

Since his days in Cake and Deathray, he has crafted a solo EP with a release of June 2023. His eclectic indie-pop style has been compared to the sensitivity of Elliott Smith and Grandaddy while having the intensity and depth of Blur and Beck.

References

Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American rock guitarists
American male guitarists
Cake (band) members

Greg Brown (rock musician)


Unicode is a standard, promoted by the Unicode Consortium, for encoding the text of most of the world's writing systems, using variable-width encodings, such as UTF-8. Its goal is to replace current and previous character encoding standards with one worldwide standard for all languages. It has already done that to a large degree; for example, it is dominant on the web, in the form of the UTF-8 encoding. UTF-16 is also common, for example, on Windows, while Microsoft recommends UTF-8. The standard supports emojis and other symbols that older standards did not support.

Older standards for (English) text could not represent all languages of the world, for example, Chinese or Japanese. They also could not represent languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, which are written from right to left—at least not when mixed with other languages that are written from left to right. Unicode supports such mixing. It also allows for sorting (collating), which is not easy when languages are mixed.

Unicode provides many printable characters, such as letters, digits, diacritics (things that attach to letters), and punctuation marks. It also provides characters that do not actually print, but instead control how text is processed. For example, a newline and a character that makes text go from right to left are both characters that do not print.

Details
Unicode, formally the Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, as of Unicode 14.0 defines 144,697 characters covering 159 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, emoji, and non-visual control and formatting codes. Unicode is promoted by the Unicode Consortium and based on ISO standards. New versions are issued every few years and later versions have over 144,000 characters, covering 159 modern and historic scripts, as well as symbols, emoji, and non-visual control and formatting codes.

Unicode was developed in the 1990s and integrated earlier codes used on computer systems.

The Unicode Standard includes more than just the base code. Alongside the character encodings, the Consortium's official publication includes a wide variety of details about the scripts and how to display them: normalization rules, decomposition, collation, rendering, and bidirectional text display order for multilingual texts, and so on.

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, and most modern programming languages.

Older standards for (English) text could represent only 32, 64, 128 (ASCII) or usually 256 different letters or symbols, 32 though only enough for upper case English letters and no numbers. ASCII is enough for English, but not most other languages, and 256 codes are enough for many European languages, but not for many Asian languages such as Chinese. Unicode has over 144,000 characters already defined, and allows for over a million, which is enough for all languages of the world, including e.g. Arabic and Hebrew that are written from right-to-left, and Unicode allows those languages, even mixed with other such as English or Russian that written in the other direction.

Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The Unicode standard defines Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF): UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, and several other encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16; GB18030, while not an official Unicode standard, is standardized in China and implements Unicode fully.

Unicode considers a graphical character (for instance é) as a code point (alone or in sequence [e + '] ). Each code point is a number with many digits which can be encoded in one or several code units. Code units are 8, 16, or 32 bits. This allows Unicode to represent characters in binary.

Some letters such as the Devanagari kshi, and national flag emojis, are represented with more than one code point.

Encodings
There are different ways to encode Unicode, the most common ones are:

 UTF-8, uses one to four bytes for each code point, maximizes compatibility with ASCII

 UTF-16, uses one or two 16-bit code units per code point, cannot encode surrogates

UTF-8 is the most common of these for exchange. It is used for internet, electronic mail, and Java also uses a variant of it.

UTF-8 is the dominant encoding for the World Wide Web (and internet technologies), accounting for 98% of all web pages, and up to 100.0% for some languages, as of 2022, uses one byte (8 bits) for the first 128 code points, and up to 4 bytes for other characters. The first 128 Unicode code points represent the ASCII characters, which means that any ASCII text is also a UTF-8 text.

Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable-width encodings. It's a common mistake to think that UTF-16 isn't, but it's not a fixed-width encoding like ASCII, so that's not a good reason to prefer UTF-16 (only its obsolete predecessor UCS-2 is fixed-width).

Problems

Other websites
 Mapping of Unicode characters (English Wikipedia)
 The Unicode Consortium official website

Computer science
Encodings
Internet

Unicode


The term underweight refers to humans that have much less weight than they should. Being underweight is bad for the overall health of the person affected. It is normal that a person's weights changes over time. Being underweight is often defined using a measure called the body mass index which calculates a score, based on height and weight. If this score is below 18.5, a person is generally said to be underweight. This is only a general indication, though as the scores must not be calculated for everyone. It does not apply to children and adolescents, for example.

Being underweight can have different causes:
Malnutrition, not eating enough, or eating the wrong kinds of foods. The right kinds may not be available, or they may be too expensive to buy.
 The weight of a person is also determined by genetic factors. One of these factors is that some people have a "lighter build" than others.
 Stress, anxiety and depression can influence weight.
 There are eating disorders that cause people to become underweight. The most common of these are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.
 Sudden unexplained weight loss can point to a disease, such as cancer, tuberculosis, hyperthyroidism, type 1 diabetes or inflammatory bowel disease.
 Sometimes the use of drugs leads to weight loss.
 Organs of the digestive tract may not be working as expected.
 People who train sports too much may be using more energy than they get.

Problems
There are problems that are related to being underweight. Very often being underweight is not the first problem. Rather, it often is the effect of another condition or disease. Unexpected weight loss requires the attention of a doctor. There might be another disease. If that disease is treated, the weight problem also disappears.

Another problem underweight people face is that the weight problem affects their health: Their immune system is weakened, and they may get sick more often. People who are underweight because they cannot get or afford the right food need special attention. Women who are underweight may not have their menstruation and face difficult pregnancies.

Once they were being underweight, psychically, they may feel sad and worried about their health. Therefore, family and friends should support them to help them get rid of their unhappiness.

Nutrition problems

Underweight


Rock 'n Roll Stage Show is the first studio album and fourth overall album by rock and roll band Bill Haley and His Comets. Released by Decca Records in August 1956, it was the group's first album to include new, as opposed to previously released material. Although the album spawned several singles, it also featured several album-only tracks.

Of the released singles, "Rudy's Rock" reached No. 34 on Billboard and No. 38 on Cashbox, "Hot Dog Buddy Buddy" reached No. 36 on Cashbox, and "Rockin Thru the Rye" reached No. 39 on Cashbox

The album was number one for one week in the UK on Brusnwick Records on the official Record Retailers (RR) chart in 1956.

Content
Rock 'n Roll Stage Show moved away from focusing solely on Bill Haley as the main singer, and included several instrumental recordings, including "Rudy's Rock" featuring tenor saxophone player Rudy Pompilli, which was featured (in a different performance) in the motion picture Rock Around the Clock earlier in the year. Also given the spotlight is guitarist Franny Beecher on "Goofin' Around" and "Blue Comet Blues", accordion player Johnny Grande on "A Rockin' Little Tune", and steel guitar player Billy Williamson sings a solo vocal on a version of Big Joe Turner's "Hide and Seek". In addition, two songs - "Tonight's the Night" and "Hey Then, There Now" were trio vocals featuring Williamson, Beecher and bass player Al Rex. Haley himself is heard on only four tracks: "Rockin' Thru the Rye" (a rock and roll version of Robert Burns' poem, "Comin' Thro' the Rye"), "Hook, Line and Sinker", "Hot Dog Buddy Buddy", and "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie", a song co-written by the album's producer, Milt Gabler, who had success with it when he produced Louis Jordan a decade earlier.

The album is also significant in that all but two of its tracks were original songs written by Haley and/or members of the Comets.

Several songs from this album were performed or heard in the band's film, Don't Knock the Rock: "Calling All Comets", "Hook, Line and Sinker", "Hot Dog Buddy Buddy", and an alternate take of "Goofin' Around."

The album was reissued in the 1980s by Charly Records, but due to a mastering error, "Hook, Line and Sinker" contains noticeable sound distortion in that version.

This album should not be confused with Rock 'n' Roll Show, a live recording of Bill Haley & His Comets from April 1955 that was released in 1997 by Hydra Records.

Track listing
 "Calling All Comets" (Bill Haley, Milt Gabler, Rudy Pompilli)
 "Rockin' Thru the Rye" (Bill Haley, Milt Gabler, Rusty Keefer, Catherine Cafra)
 "A Rockin' Little Tune" (Johnny Grande, Billy Williamson)
 "Hide and Seek" (Paul Winley, Ethel Byrd)
 "Hey Then, There Now" (Rudy Pompilli, Ralph Jones)
 "Goofin' Around" (Franny Beecher, Johnny Grande)
 "Hook, Line and Sinker" (Bill Haley, Edward A. Khoury, Ronnie Bonner)
 "Rudy's Rock" (Bill Haley, Rudy Pompilli)
 "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" (Milt Gabler, Denver Darling, Vaughn Horton)
 "Blue Comet Blues" (Franny Beecher, Al Rex)
 "Hot Dog Buddy Buddy" (Bill Haley)
 "Tonight's the Night" (Bill Haley, Catherine Cafra)

Personnel
 Bill Haley – rhythm guitar, vocals on 2 7 9 11
 Franny Beecher – lead guitar, vocal on 5 12
 Billy Williamson – steel guitar, vocal on 4 5 12
 Johnny Grande – piano, accordion on 3
 Al Rex – double bass, vocal on 5 12
 Ralph Jones – drums
 Rudy Pompilli - tenor saxophone

Chart positions

References

External links
 Bill Haley discography

1956 debut albums
Bill Haley & His Comets albums
Albums produced by Milt Gabler
Decca Records albums

Rock 'n Roll Stage Show


Kathryn Patricia "Kay" Hire (born August 26, 1959) is a former NASA astronaut and Captain in the U.S. Navy Reserve who has flown aboard two Space Shuttle missions.

Education
Born in Mobile, Alabama, she attended St. Pius X Catholic Elementary School and Murphy High School. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering and Management from the United States Naval Academy in 1981 and her Master of Science degree in Space Technology from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1991.

Experience

Navy experience
After earning her Naval Flight Officer wings in October 1982, Hire conducted worldwide airborne oceanographic research missions with Oceanographic Development Squadron Eight (VXN-8) based at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland. She flew as Oceanographic Project Coordinator, Mission Commander and Detachment Officer-in-Charge on board specially configured RP-3A and RP-3D Orion aircraft.

Hire later instructed student naval flight officers while assigned to Naval Air Training Unit Mather (NAVAIRTU Mather), a tenant command associated with the 323d Flying Training Wing at Mather Air Force Base, California.  While assigned to NAVAIRTU Mather, Hire progressed from Navigation Instructor and Course Manager to Curriculum Manager while concurrently assigned as a navigator flight instructor in the USAF T-43A aircraft.

In January 1989, Hire resigned her Regular Navy commission and left active duty, accepting a Reserve commission and joining the Naval Reserve at NAS Jacksonville, Florida. Her initial tours of duty included Patrol Squadron Augment Unit VP-0545 and Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Center 0574 and 0374.

Following the repeal of the Title 10 U.S.C. combat aircraft restriction for female military aviators in 1993, Hire was the first female in the U.S. military assigned to a combat aircrew, reporting to Patrol Squadron Sixty-Two (VP-62) on May 13, 1993, as a Navigator/Communicator flying the P-3C Update III Orion maritime patrol aircraft.  VP-62 was also based at NAS Jacksonville and Hire routinely deployed for flight operations throughout the North Atlantic, Europe, and the Caribbean.

Hire later served with  Detachment 0482, Tactical Support Center 0682, U.S. Seventh Fleet Detachment 111, and U.S. Naval Forces Central Command Detachment 108. Recalled to full-time active military duty from 2001 to 2003, Hire supported Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom as a member of the Headquarters, U.S. Central Command Current Operations and Joint Operations Center (JOC) staffs at MacDill AFB, Florida during Operation Enduring Freedom, followed by reassignment to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. Fifth Fleet staff for Operation Iraqi Freedom.  She was promoted to her current rank of captain in the U.S. Navy on December 1, 2002.

NASA experience
Hire began work at the Kennedy Space Center in May 1989, first as an Orbiter Processing Facility 3 Activation Engineer and later as a Space Shuttle Orbiter Mechanical Systems Engineer for Lockheed Space Operations Company. In 1991 she was certified as a Space Shuttle Test Project Engineer (TPE) and headed the checkout of the Extravehicular Mobility Units (spacesuits) and Russian Orbiter Docking System. She was assigned as Supervisor of Space Shuttle Orbiter Mechanisms and Launch Pad Swing Arms in 1994.

Selected by NASA in December 1994, Hire reported to the Johnson Space Center in March 1995. After a year of training, she worked in mission control as a spacecraft communicator (CAPCOM). Hire flew as Mission Specialist-2 on STS-90 Neurolab (1998) and logged over 381 hours in space. She served as the Astronaut Office Lead for Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL), Shuttle Payloads, and Flight Crew Equipment. Hire was assigned to the Astronaut Support Personnel (ASP) team for Kennedy Space Center Operations. She then journeyed to the International Space Station as a mission specialist for Space Shuttle mission STS-130.

Space flight experience
STS-90 Neurolab (April 17 – May 3, 1998). During the 16-day Spacelab flight, the seven-member crew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia served as both experimental subjects and operators for 26 life science experiments focusing on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system. The STS-90 flight orbited the Earth 256 times and covered 6.3 million miles.

STS-130 (February 8, 2010 – February 21, 2010) She also journeyed to the International Space Station as a mission specialist for Space Shuttle mission STS-130.

As of June 2018, Hire was considered a "NASA Management Astronaut", which meant that she was employed at NASA but was no longer eligible for spaceflight assignments.

On February 28, 2019, Hire retired from NASA.

Organizations
 Association of Space Explorers
 Association of Naval Aviation
 Institute of Navigation
 Naval Reserve Association
 U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association
 U.S. Sailing Association

Special honors

 Defense Superior Service Medal
 Meritorious Service Medal (3)
 Joint Service Commendation Medal
 Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal
 National Defense Service Medal (2)
 Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal
 War on Terrorism Service Medal
 Armed Forces Reserve Medal with bronze "M" Device and silver Hourglass Device
 NASA Space Flight Medal

References

External links

 NASA biography

1959 births
Living people
Women astronauts
United States Navy astronauts
Military personnel from Mobile, Alabama
United States Naval Academy alumni
Florida Institute of Technology alumni
Systems engineers
American women engineers
Female United States Navy officers
United States Naval Flight Officers
Recipients of the Defense Superior Service Medal
Space Shuttle program astronauts
United States Navy captains
21st-century American women

Kathryn P. Hire


Tejedor is a folk music group from Avilés, Asturias, Spain, consisting originally of three siblings (Jose, Javier and Eva Tejedor). Eva left the band in 2010, being replaced by Silvia Quesada on vocals. Tejedor's members play traditional Asturian styles of music using traditional instruments such as bagpipes, flutes, accordions and guitars.

Tejedor has become known on the international Celtic music scene, the two brothers of the group winning on several occasions the McCallan bagpipe awards at the Inter Celtic Music Festival in Lorient, France.

Their first album, Texedores De Suaños, was produced by Phil Cunningham and features musicians like Michael McGoldrick, Duncan Chisholm, James McKintosh and Kepa Junkera.

Discography
 Texedores de Suaños (1999)
 Llunáticos (Aris Música/Resistencia, 2003)
 Música Na Maleta (2007)
 Positivu (2011)

The discography comes from "World Music Central" (see below).

External links
 Official Page
 National Geographic listing
 CDROOTS listing
 World Music Central listing
 Tejedor in Celtic Connections 2007 (BBC Scotland)

Asturian music
Spanish music

Tejedor (band)


is a type of thick, wheat-based noodle popular in Japanese cuisine.

Udon is most often served hot as a noodle soup in a mild, salty broth. Its simplest form is called kake udon. This consists only of dashi stock, soy sauce (shōyu), mirin, and udon noodles. Different things can be put on top of the soup as toppings. Often thinly cut scallions are used, along with other common toppings such as kamaboko, prawn or vegetable tempura, some spices, and wakame.

The flavor of the broth and toppings, as well as even noodle texture and thickness, is different from region to region. Usually, dark brown broth made from dark soy sauce (koikuchi shōyu) is common in eastern Japan. Light brown broth made from light soy sauce (usukuchi shōyu) is common in western Japan. However, many other regional types exist outside of just broth color and mainly vary in toppings used.

Kagawa Prefecture is famous for using udon as a staple food.

Types
 Tempura Udon (topped with tempura such as prawn and squid)
 Tororo Udon (served with grated yam on top)
 Kitsune Udon (topped with deep-fried bean curd)
 Tikara Udon (topped with rice cake)
 Curry Udon (Udon soup is curry,which contains dashi)
 Niku Udon (topped with beef that has been seasoned with mirin and sugar)
 Tanuki Udon (topped with agedama)
 Kamatama Udon (raw egg in boiled udons)
 Bukkake Udon (consists of noodle soup)
 Kamaage Udon (to eat without tighten the boiled noodles)
 Tamagotoji Udon (udon closed with egg)
 Tsukimi Udon (topped with raw egg)
 Nabeyaki Udon (noodles braised in a pan with many toppings)
 Yaki Udon (seasoned baked noodles in a sauce)
 Nabe Udon (to eat with vegetables in a pan)
 Zaru udon  (cold udon on zaru)

Definition
According to JAS (Japanese Agricultural Standard), to be udon, a round noodle's diameter has to be over 1.7 mm and a flat noodle's width over 1.7 mm. Udon dough is made from wheat flour and salt.

Noodles
Japanese food

Udon


East Tyrol (German: Osttirol) is a small part of the Austrian state of Tyrol, located in the ost part of the state. The other part of the state is North Tyrol, which also belongs to Austria, but does not share a border with East Tyrol.

East Tyrol borders Carinthia in the east, Salzburg in the north, South Tyrol in the west, Veneto in the south. Its capitals are Lienz and "the big brother" Innsbruck.

Tyrol
Regions of Austria

East Tyrol


On the Kocher Viaduct () near Schwäbisch Hall in Germany the Autobahn 6 crosses the Kocher valley between Heilbronn and Nuremberg. With its maximum height of 185m above the valley bottom, it is the highest viaduct in Germany, and was also the bridge with the tallest pillars in the world before the Millau Viaduct, France was completed in 2004.

The nine spans of this prestressed concrete girder bridge cover a length of 1128m, the individual span lengths being 81m for the outer two and 138m for the remaining seven. Pillar height varies from 40m to 178m. The bridge table is 31m wide. Construction was from 1976 to 1979.

A museum in the village of Geislingen am Kocher below the bridge (visits by prior appointment) not only tells the bridge's story but also displays dinosaur fossils found during the construction of the motorway.

See also
 List of bridges in Germany
List of highest bridges
List of tallest bridges

References

A. Linse: Kochertalbrücke-Entwürfe einer Großbrücke. In: Bauingenieur, Jahrgang 1978, S. 453–463.
Höchste deutsche Talbrücke: Kochertalbrücke

Buildings and structures in Baden-Württemberg
Bridges completed in 1979
Road bridges in Germany
Viaducts in Germany

Kocher Viaduct


The fathom is a unit of length. It is used especially when talking about operating ships, to measure the depth of water. It is equal to two yards. The distance between a man's outstreched arms is about a fathom. By this definition, a statute mile is 880 fathoms long. According to the directive 80/181/EWG, one fathom is 1,829 meters long.
One  fathom is equal to:
 1.8288 metres exactly (1 metre is about 0.5468 fathoms)
 2 yards (1 yard is exactly 0.5 fathoms)
 6 feet (1 foot is about 0.1667 fathoms)
 18 hands
 72 inches

In 1959 the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom defined the length of the international yard to be exactly 0.9144 metre. With the adoption of the metric SI system the use of fathoms declined.

References

Imperial units
Units of length

Fathom


Harold P. Pierce (August 11, 1917 – March 8, 1988) was an African-American entrepreneur who founded the successful Harold's Chicken Shack restaurant chain in Chicago, Illinois.

Pierce was born in Midway, Alabama, and moved to Chicago in 1943 from Freemanville, Alabama, to work as a chauffeur for Jack Stern, a furniture store owner. By 1950, he was running a small restaurant with his wife, Hilda, on 39th Street.  The H & H specialized in chicken feet and dumplings.  Pierce thought that he could adapt his recipe for fried chicken, and a friend, Gene Rosen, who ran a poultry shop nearby, offered him some chickens to experiment with.  The resultant recipe caused Pierce to open Harold's Chicken Shack at 47th and Greenwood in 1950.

He franchised the idea out to friends and family who opened additional Harold Chicken Shacks throughout Chicago.  One of Pierce's stipulations was that they purchase their chickens from Rosen.  Otherwise, Pierce did not interfere with the management of the stores, which led to deviations in the techniques, flavors, and qualities of the product as well as variations in the menu from one restaurant to another. After retiring in the early 1980s, he moved to Beaverville, Illinois, where he indulged in a passion for raising hunting dogs. Pierce died in Kankakee, Illinois, of prostate cancer in 1988.  His second wife, Willa, took over running the business and began expanding it outside of Chicago. Willa died on January 21, 2003, in Beaverville.

References
 "Harold Pierce, 70, Dies, Chicken Franchise Founder," Jet, March 28, 1988
 "Harold Pierce, 70, founder of Harold's Chicken Shacks," Chicago Sun-Times, March 11, 1988.
 Social Security Death Index

External links
 Sula, Mike. "The First Family of Fried Chicken", Chicago Reader, April 14, 2006.

1917 births
1988 deaths
Fast-food chain founders
People from Midway, Alabama
Deaths from prostate cancer
Deaths from cancer in Illinois
Businesspeople from Chicago
American restaurateurs
20th-century American businesspeople
20th-century African-American businesspeople

Harold Pierce


Mill could mean:
 Mill (grinding), equipment for the grinding or pulverizing of raw materials using millstones
 a gristmill grinds grain into flour
 windmill, wind powered
 watermill, water powered
 horse mill, animal powered
 treadwheel, human powered (archaic: "treadmill")
 Mill (factory), a place of business for making articles of manufacture. The term mill was once in common use for a factory because many factories in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were powered by a watermill, but nowadays it is only used in a few specific contexts; e.g.
 a cotton mill is a factory for processing cotton
 a paper mill produces paper
 a sawmill cuts timber
 a steel mill manufactures steel
 a sugar mill (also called a sugar refinery) processes sugar beets or sugar cane into various finished products
 a huller (also called a rice mill, or rice husker) is used to hull rice
 Milling machine, machine tool that operates by moving a work piece against a cutter.
 Stamp mill, a specialized machine for reducing ore to powder for further processing or for fracturing other materials
 Mill (currency), a tenth of a cent/penny
 The standard author abbreviation Mill. may be used to indicate botanist Philip Miller's work when citing a botanical name
 Diploma mill or degree mill an organization which awards academic degrees and diplomas with very little or no academic study and without recognition by official accrediting bodies
 Nine Men's Morris, a traditional board game; the term "mill" may also mean "three (playing pieces) in a row" within the game
 Mill (Netherlands), a town in the municipality of Mill en Sint Hubert
 Arithmetical unit, used in the context of Charles Babbage's Analytical engine, a 19th-century concept of a computer
 Windmill (breakdance move) or mill, a power move in breakdancing
 The Mill (post-production), a visual effects company

People named Mill:
 Andy Mill, skier
 Frank Mill, German football player (World Cup winner, Summer Olympics bronze medalist)
 Harriet Taylor Mill, philosopher
 James Mill, a Scottish historian, economist and philosopher
 John Stuart Mill, an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century

Mill


Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site is a National Historic Site about 10 miles (16 kilometers) northeast of Downtown Boston in Saugus, Massachusetts. It is the site of the first integrated ironworks in North America, founded by John Winthrop the Younger and in operation between 1646 and approximately 1670. It includes the reconstructed blast furnace, forge, rolling mill, shear, slitter and a quarter-ton trip hammer.

The facility is powered by seven large waterwheels, some of which are rigged to work in tandem with huge wooden gears connecting them.  It has a wharf to load the iron onto ocean-going vessels, as well as a large, restored 17th-century house.

History
During the 17th century, iron was used to manufacture a number of indispensable goods, including nails, horseshoes, cookware, tools, and weapons. The production of iron required a complex manufacturing process that could only be done by an industrial enterprise. This process was not available in North America during the early years of English colonization, which meant that all iron goods had to be imported. As it took at least two months to sail to the nearest foundry, iron goods were very expensive.

Winthrop believed that because the colonies had a cheap and abundant supply of raw materials, an iron works in Massachusetts could produce goods that could be sold profitably in the New England and Chesapeake Colonies as well as in England itself. In 1641, Winthrop sailed to England to get the capital he needed to fund the enterprise. The Company of Undertakers for the Iron Workes [sic] in New England was founded to finance the project. Winthrop selected a site in Braintree, Massachusetts (now part of present-day Quincy, Massachusetts) as the location of the first Iron Works. Construction began in 1644 and was completed in 1645. On October 15, 1645, Winthrop secured the Undertakers an exemption from taxes and a 21-year monopoly on iron production from the Massachusetts General Court. The Braintree Iron Works, however, was unsuccessful due to a lack of iron ore in the area and an inadequate supply of water to power the machinery.

In 1645, the Undertakers wrote to Winthrop informing him that Richard Leader, a merchant from Salehurst who was familiar with the iron making process, would replace him as manager of the Iron Works. After arriving in Massachusetts, Leader reviewed the previous site survey and looked into some other locations. He selected a location in Lynn, Massachusetts (now part of present-day Saugus) on the Saugus River. The river was navigable for shallow draft vessels and could be dammed to power machinery. The surrounding forests could be used to make charcoal. Bog ore could be mined from nearby ponds, swamps, riverbeds, and bogs. Limestone, which was normally used for flux, was not available, but through trial and error it was found that gabbro, which could be mined in nearby Nahant, would work as a flux.

The new iron works, which was called Hammersmith, began operations in 1646. It consisted of a blast furnace for producing pig iron and gray iron (the later of which was poured into molds to make firebacks, pots, pans, kettles, and skillets), a forge where pig iron was refined into wrought iron and a 500-pound hammer was used to make merchant bars, which were sold to blacksmiths for manufacture into finished products, and a rolling and slitting mill where flat stock that could be used to manufacture nails, bolts, horse shoes, wagon tires, axes, saw blades, and other implements was produced. At the time, it was one of the most technologically advanced iron works in the world. Once functioning, the Iron Works ran for thirty weeks of the year and produced one ton of cast iron a day.

Skilled workers were brought over from England to ply their trade at the iron works. These emigrants did not fit in with the local Puritan society and often ran afoul of its laws. Many ironworkers were arrested for crimes such as drunkenness, adultery, gambling, fighting, cursing, not attending church, and wearing fine clothes. The less experienced local men who worked at the Iron Works met with frequent and sometimes fatal accidents. Another source of labor was indentured servants. Indentured servants typically worked at the Iron Works for three to seven years for little or no pay in exchange for their passage to Massachusetts and the provision of food, clothing, housing, and other necessities. Following the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, 60 Scottish prisoners of war were sent to the Iron Works to work as indentured servants. 35 or 37 of the 60 Scots intended for the Iron Works were employed there, while the remainder were sold for between 20 pounds and 30 pounds each to various interests in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Scots mostly worked as unskilled laborers, performing tasks like chopping wood. Some learned skills such as making charcoal, blacksmithing and carpentry. Most Scots were able to gain their freedom after seven years and afterwards they remained in Massachusetts or moved to Maine, where they started families and assimilated into Puritan society.

In 1650, Leader, who had encountered difficulties with the Undertakers, left the Iron Works to go into the sawmill business. John Gifford and William Aubrey assumed management of the Iron Works, with Gifford serving as ironmaster and Aubrey doing the accounting.

Although the Iron Works produced a respectable quantity of iron, due to the high cost of labor, financial mismanagement which may have included embezzlement, and a number of lawsuits, it seldom operated at a profit. The Iron Works closed around 1670.

Site reconstruction and restoration
After the iron works closed, the site fell into disuse and became hidden by underbrush. In 1898, the Lynn Historical Society erected a historical marker near the site which read "The First Iron Works. The first successful iron works in this country established here. Foundry erected in 1643. Joseph Jenckes built a forge here in 1647 and in 1652 made the dies for the first silver money coined in New England. In 1654 he made the first fire engine in America." Eventually, the plaque too became obscured by the underbrush and remained camouflaged until it was discovered during the restoration of the Iron Works.

In 1915, antiquarian Wallace Nutting purchased the Appleton-Taylor-Mansfield House, a 1680s farmhouse near the iron works site which was believed to be the former home of the ironmaster of the Saugus Iron Works. He renamed the home Broadhearth and undertook an extensive, albeit embellished, restoration of the home. Nutting used Broadhearth to showcase his collection of antiques, photographs, and reproduction furniture. In 1917 he added a blacksmith's shop to the property and hired a blacksmith to manufacture and sell reproductions of early ironwork. In 1920, Nutting, who was having financial troubles, sold the house to Boston antiques dealer Charles L. Cooney. After Cooney's death, his widow sold it to another Boston antiques dealer, Philip Rosenberg. Upon purchasing property, Rosenberg promised Louise Hawkes of the Parson Roby Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution that he would only sell the house to the DAR or the Town of Saugus. In 1938, the DAR purchased a piece of the former Iron Works property out of foreclosure for $50. In 1941, Rosenberg offered to sell the house to Saugus and the DAR, however neither could meet his asking price. Instead he reached an agreement with the Alumni Association of the Henry Ford Trade School, which intended on moving the building to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. News of the impending move caused outrage amongst Saugus residents and preservationists who, after extensive discussions, convinced Henry Ford not to acquire the building. In exchange, Ford wanted the Alumni Association reimbursed what it spent on the property. Fundraising efforts in Saugus were disappointing, so William Sumner Appleton, President of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, proposed splitting the cost between the state, town, and the public. When it became clear that this plan would not work, Appleton created a nonprofit, called the First Iron Works Association, to purchase and maintain the property. In 1943 the First Iron Works Association (FIWA) purchased the farmhouse as well as the DAR's piece of the former Iron Works property.

Louise E. du Pont Crowninshield, one of the FIWA's directors, approached Quincy Bent, a retired executive of Bethlehem Steel residing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for money. Although Bent was unimpressed by the house, he was interested in the property's slag pile, which indicated that the site could contain the remains of an iron works. Bent eventually convinced the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) to fund the restoration of the Iron Works.

In September 1948, FIWA president J. Sanger Attwill approached archaeologist Roland W. Robbins who had discovered the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond about trying to find the site of the Iron Works. Robbins was interested in the idea of digging at a site that was over three hundred years old, the challenge of working on a site where there little information, including no plans or sketches, and the opportunity to work at what may have been the first iron-manufacturing plant in the American colonies. Robbins' excavations uncovered the major manufacturing units of the Iron Works, including the foundations of buildings, remains of the blast furnace, holding ponds, and canal, a 500-pound hammer used in the forge, and a waterwheel that powered the bellows for the blast furnace, along with its wheel pit. The wheel was saved by biologists from Harvard University, who developed a process to preserve it. In total, more than 5,000 artifacts were found. Robbins was aided by a historical researcher (Professor E. Neal Hartley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), metallurgic experts, specialists from Harvard University's biological laboratory and botanical museum, and a professional photographer. He also received assistance from collectors and experts, including Smithsonian curator C. Malcolm Watkins, MIT professor Herbert H. Uhlig, and Harvard professor Elso Barghoorn. Robbins abruptly left the Iron Works in 1953. Robbins departure came not long after a dispute with Bent, who wanted Robbins to give tours of the excavation site on weekends in addition to his other duties. According to archaeologist and author Donald W. Linebaugh, it was also due in part because of the decision of the FIWA to base the reconstruction of the Iron Works primarily on documentary evidence instead of archaeological evidence. Robbins also clashed with the project's architects, thinking them to be ignorant about and uninterested in archeological data.

The Boston architecture firm of Perry, Shaw & Hepburn, Kehoe & Dean, which was responsible for the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, was hired to reconstruct the Iron Works. The reconstruction was based on archeological evidence and historical documents, as well as partially on conjecture. The Saugus Iron Works was opened on September 18, 1954, the first day of Saugus' three-day celebration of the town's 325th anniversary. Benjamin Franklin Fairless, chairman of U.S. Steel, served as master of ceremonies at the dedication. Also participating in the ceremony were Senator Leverett Saltonstall, Governor Christian Herter, First Iron Works Association President J. Sanger Attwill, and Inland Steel Company chairman Edward L. Ryerson.

Becoming a National Park
After it opened to the public, Saugus Iron Works operated as a private museum run by the First Iron Works Association and funded by the American Iron and Steel Institute. In 1961, the AISI announced that it would no longer pay its annual maintenance subsidy, which left the future of the site uncertain. On April 5, 1968, the Saugus Iron Works was added to the National Park Service system and renamed the Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site. The park is open seasonally, spring through fall.

Gallery

See also
 Boardman House
 List of National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts
 National Register of Historic Places listings in Essex County, Massachusetts
 Rowley Village Forge Site, Boxford
 Falling Creek Ironworks, first iron production works in North America

References

External links

 National Park Service: Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site

Archaeological sites in Massachusetts
Archaeological sites on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts
Buildings and structures in Saugus, Massachusetts
Foundries in the United States
Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmarks
Industrial archaeological sites in the United States
Industrial buildings and structures on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts
Industry museums in the United States
Industry museums in Massachusetts
Museums in Essex County, Massachusetts
National Historic Landmarks in Massachusetts
National Historic Sites in Massachusetts
National Register of Historic Places in Essex County, Massachusetts
Open-air museums in Massachusetts
Protected areas established in 1968
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts
1968 establishments in Massachusetts


BIOS, computing, stands for Basic Input/Output System. The BIOS is a computer program embedded on a chip on a computer's motherboard that recognizes and controls various devices that make up the computer. The purpose of the BIOS is to make sure all the things plugged into the computer can work properly. It brings life to the computer, and the term is a pun on the Greek word , bios meaning "life".

"Booting", sometimes called "Booting up" is the process that the computer completes to get it ready to use when it is first turned on. When the computer turns on, the BIOS starts up and performs a Power-On Self Test (POST). During the POST, the BIOS will check various devices in the computer like the computer processor, memory, the video card and others to make sure they are present and functioning. Once the POST has completed successfully, the BIOS looks for an operating system to load, which is usually located on the computer's hard drive. When it finds one, it starts to load it. At this point, the operating system takes over control of the system.

Overclocking
Some people try to configure their computer to run faster than it was designed to do. This is called "overclocking". Since the BIOS controls the computer processor, entering the BIOS setup screen while it is booting up gives people access to advanced computer settings. For most computers, pressing the delete or F12 button while the computer is booting up will bring up the BIOS setup screen. There are many ways a computer can be overclocked to run faster, but most involve simply turning up the speed of the computer processor. Doing this will usually make your computer run much hotter, though, and can sometimes break your computer, which is why overclocking will usually void your computer's warranty. Only people who are computer hardware experts should attempt to overclock their computers.

References

Software

BIOS


A rush hour or peak hour is a part of the day during which traffic on roads and crowding on public transport is most. Normally, this happens twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening. These are the times during when the most people commute.

Traffic

Rush hour


Florina is a city in Greece in the region of Macedonia.  It is the capital of the Florina prefecture. Its population is 15,265 inhabitants. Florina is build at the foot of Varnus mountain. It is built at an altitude of 600 meter approximately. Around Florina there are many forests.

Cities in Greece

Florina


Electronic warfare is all military techniques for aerial reconnaissance, spying, and radar jamming. In electronic warfare, missiles like AGM-45 Shrike or AGM-88 Harm can be used to destroy radar or communication systems. Examples include deciphering encrypted messages, such as the messages decoded due to the British reverse engineering of the German Enigma.

Military

Electronic warfare


Richard and Florence Atwater co-authored the book Mr. Popper's Penguins, which won the 1939 Newbery Honor Award.

Florence

Florence Hasseltine Atwater (née Carroll; September 13, 1896 – August 23, 1979) was born in Chicago, the last child of Mary Josephine ("Minnie") Delany, a former concert pianist with the Philadelphia Conservatory, and James Carroll, a Philadelphia publisher. As Florence Carroll, she obtained her AB and MA in French literature at the University of Chicago (1920) where she was co-editor of The Chicago Literary Monthly, and student of Richard Atwater. They married in 1921 and had two children, Doris (1922–2000) and Carroll (1925–2013).

After her husband's stroke in 1934, Florence Atwater started teaching high school French, English and Latin, and wrote short pieces for The New Yorker, Woman's Home Companion and The Atlantic.  She submitted her husband's original version of Mr. Popper's Penguins to two different publishers but it met with no success.  She rewrote parts of the book and the revised version was accepted by Little Brown and published in 1938 to great success.  Mr. Popper's Penguins won the Newbery Honor Award in 1939 and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958.  It has been translated into many languages, and has never been out of print. In the summer of 2011, a movie of the same name was released.

Richard

Richard Tupper Atwater (December 29, 1892 – August 21, 1948) was a Chicago writer and classics professor at the University of Chicago. He is probably best known as the co-author, with his wife Florence, of the book Mr. Popper's Penguins.  He contributed to the literary and arts magazine The Chicagoan and wrote for a number of newspapers, including the Chicago Evening Post, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Herald-Examiner. He also taught  Classical Greek at the University of Chicago.

Atwater translated into English Procopius' Secret History, a 6th century story of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. It was published in a limited edition of 760 copies by Pascal Covici in 1927 and reprinted by University of Michigan Press in 1961.

Richard Atwater's other publications include Rickety Rhymes of Riq, a book of poetry published in 1925; Doris and the Trolls, a children's book published in 1931; and The King's Sneezes, A Children's Operetta with music by Jessie Thomas, in 1933.

Richard Atwater suffered a stroke in 1934 which left him unable to speak or write.  He had finished a manuscript of a book he called "Ork! The Story of Mr. Popper's Penguins", inspired by a documentary about Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition that he had seen with his family in 1932.  His wife Florence revised the book after he became disabled, and Mr. Popper's Penguins went on to become a children's classic.

References

Sources
 Bishop, Carroll Atwater & Katherine Elizabeth. Family history materials.

External links
 Lesson plans for Mr. Popper's Penguins at WebEnglishTeacher.com
 Who's Who Chicago: Richard Atwater
  (under multiple headings)
 Florence Atwater at LC Authorities, with 4 records (1 work)

American children's writers
Married couples
Writers from Chicago

Richard and Florence Atwater


Bulimia nervosa (bulimia) is a disease and a type of eating disorder. It is when a person eats large amounts of food then will force themself to vomit it up or purge. Other ways that they get it out of their body include laxatives and exercising. Most who have it feel that they are fat and want to be skinny.

Symptoms
Most people with bulimia eat large amounts of food then make themselves vomit or purge. Typically, they will do this at least once a week or more often. Bulimic people often think about how their bodies look, and usually, the motive behind purging is the want to be skinny. The person may also have anorexia nervosa. However, most with bulimia have a normal weight or are overweight, which makes it difficult to know when someone has bulimia from just simply looking at them. It is also common to have calluses or bruising on the fingers from purging.

Risks
Bulimia nervosa can cause many health problems. Because vomit has lots of acid in it, purging frequently can burn the person's mouth, throat, or teeth. One can lose nutrients or fluids in their body. Glands in one's throat and face may get larger and hurt. The immune system is weakened, as well as the possibility of muscle or heart problems.
Sometimes bulimia can cause difficulty breathing. This is because the acids that are in your mouth go to your lungs and damage the bronchioles. There is also feedback to the ego and a social stigma that may cause further psychological impact.

Statistics
Most people who have bulimia are between the ages of 10 to 25. It is more common in females than it is in males. People who have had past trauma are more likely to be bulimic. People with obsessive compulsive disorder or perfectionism are also likely to have bulimia.

Related pages
Anorexia nervosa

References

Eating disorders

Bulimia nervosa


Viktor Graf von Scheuchenstuel (May 10, 1857 – April 17, 1938) was a colonel general in the Austro-Hungarian Army.  He was a general staff officer and division commander until World War I broke out.  During World War I he was a Corps and Army commander serving in Serbia, Albania and Italy.  During World War I he was promoted to Graf (equivalent to a Count) in the Austrian nobility.  Following the end of World War I and the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Scheuchenstuel retired from the military.  He died in Vienna.

Before World War I
Scheuchenstuel was born in Witkowitz, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic).  In 1874 he attended Pioneer Cadet School in Hainburg in Austria.  He served as a lieutenant and Oberleutnant in the Pioneers until 1884 when he attended a military academy in Vienna. Following graduation in 1886, Scheuchenstuel joined the Austro-Hungarian General Staff. In 1903 he commanded the Austro-Hungarian 50th Infantry Regiment.  Following the promotion to major general in 1907 he commanded the 69th Infantry Brigade, the 8th Mountain Brigade and the 10th Infantry Division.  In 1911 he was promoted to field marshal lieutenant and in 1912 took over the 9th Infantry Division.

World War I

Serbian Front
In August 1914 Field Marshal Lieutenant Scheuchenstuel commanded the Austrian 9th Infantry Division, which was part of General Arthur Giesl von Gieslingen's VIII. Corps on the Serbian border.  Around August 12 three Austrian Armies, including the VIII. Corps, attacked Serbia in what became known as the First Invasion of Serbia.  The Austrians were driven back by August 24, with over 50,000 men lost.  On October 12, 1914, Gieslingen was relieved of duty and Scheuchenstuel assumed command of the Austrian VIII. Corps.

In mid-November Scheuchenstuel's VIII. Corps joined General Potiorek's V. Army in the invasion of Mačva in Northern Serbia.  Scheuchenstuel advanced through Serbia reaching Belgrade, abandoned by Serbian Marshal Putnik, on December 1.  Once Putnik resupplied, he counter-attacked and drove the Austrian army back.  By December 16 the VIII. Corps was back across the Danube and out of Belgrade.

Throughout most of 1915 Scheuchenstuel was involved in battles along the Serbian front.  Finally in October 1915, his VIII. Corps was included in Field Marshal von Macksensen's Army for the Conquest of Serbia.  The Central Powers Army under Mackensen was able to crush the Serbian Army, and by December 1915 the VIII. Corps was part of General Kövesshaza's III. Army on the Albanian Front.

Albanian Front
On January 25, 1916, the Austro-Hungarian Army attacked Montenegro which quickly surrendered.  The army then moved down into the Italian controlled Albania, which fell to the Austrians by the end of winter.  The Serbian Army made a fighting retreat over the Albanian coastal mountains.  Once they reached the coast, the Italian and French Navies evacuated the Serbian Army.  By February 26, 1916 nearly all of Albania was under Austrian control.

Italian Front
On May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, however the Italian front quickly became a stalemate as the Battles of the Isonzo led to heavy casualties on both sides without any major territorial gains. In an attempt to break the stalemate, on May 15, 1916 Army Group Archduke Eugen under the command of the Archduke Eugen of Austria attacked into the Trentino area in Italy. Scheuchenstuel's VIII. Korps was included as part of the XI. Army which formed half of the Army Group. Initially the attacks, which became known as the Battle of Asiago, were successful. The Austrian army was able to open a 5 mile wide and 12 mile deep gap in the Italian lines.  However, by June 10, 1916 the attack had stalled. Following the effective Russian Brusilov Offensive the Austrian attack stopped completely, and the VIII. Korps was transferred east.

Following brutal fighting against the Russians, the entire VIII. Korps was disbanded. Scheuchenstuel was dismissed from the army following "disputes with Army High Command" in July.  However he was reinstated by the Kaiser and given command of I. Korps in Romania in September.

Romanian Front

Scheuchenstuel's new I. Korps were part of Hermann Kövess von Kövessháza's VII. Army in northern Romania.  The VII. Army in the north was not directly involved in Falkenhayn's counterattack and sweep through southern Romania, but was certainly involved in fighting in the Carpathian Mountains.  By January 1917, most of the fighting appeared to be over.  On February 28, 1917, Scheuchenstuel was made a noble and given the rank of Graf.  In addition to his rank, he was given command of the XI. Army on the Italian Front.

Return to the Italian Front
By spring 1917 Scheuchenstuel was in command of the Austro-Hungarian 11th Army on the Italian Front.  He was under the command of Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, commander of the entire Front.  He took part in the Battle of Caporetto in November 1917, one of the largest Central Powers victories in Italy.  Following the victory at Caporetto, Scheuchenstuel was promoted to Colonel General on November 16, 1917.

In the spring of 1918 he directed a diversionary attack into the Tonale Pass, which was beaten back by the Italians.  During the summer of 1918, food supplies ran short prompting Scheuchenstuel to write to Count Franz Conrad insisting that more food was needed.  Conrad blamed the suppliers and Army Headquarters ordered an increase in the meat ration.  However, the supplies didn't exist and this order was not fulfilled.

The unsuccessful Battle of the Piave River in July 1918 resulted in Scheuchenstuel's troops being unable to advance.  Due to dissatisfaction of his troops he was forced to retreat from Trentino after the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which ended World War I on the Italian Front.  Following the war, Scheuchenstuel retired in 1918.  He died in Vienna on 17 April 1938.

References

 http://www.austro-hungarian-army.co.uk/index.htm

1857 births
1938 deaths
Counts of Austria
Austro-Hungarian generals
Austro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I
Moravian-German people

Viktor Graf von Scheuchenstuel