Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (27 April 1798 – 19 March 1879), or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known, was the stepsister of the writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra. She is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Early life
Clairmont was born in 1798 in Brislington, near Bristol, England, the second child and only daughter of Mary Jane Vial Clairmont. Throughout her childhood, she was known as Jane. In 2010 the identity of her father was discovered to be John Lethbridge (1746–1815, after 1804 Sir John Lethbridge, 1st Baronet) of Sandhill Park, near Taunton in Somerset. Her mother had identified him as a "Charles Clairmont", adopting the name Clairmont for herself and her children to disguise their illegitimacy. It appears that the father of her first child, Charles, was Charles Abram Marc Gaulis, "a merchant and member of a prominent Swiss family, whom she met in Cadiz".

In December 1801, when Clairmont was three years old, her mother married a neighbour, the writer and philosopher William Godwin. This brought her two stepsisters: Godwin's daughter, later Mary Shelley, only eight months her senior, and his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay, a couple of years older. Both were the daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died four years before, but whose presence continued to be felt in the household. The new couple soon became the parents of a son, which completed the family.

All five children were influenced by Godwin's radical anarchist philosophical beliefs. Both parents were well-educated and they co-wrote children's primers on Biblical and classical history, and ran a bookshop and publishers known as the Juvenile Library. Godwin encouraged all of his children to read widely and give lectures from early childhood.

Mary Jane Clairmont was a sharp-tongued woman, who often quarrelled with Godwin and favoured her own children over her husband's. She contrived to send her volatile and emotionally intense daughter to boarding school for a time, so providing her with more formal education than her stepsisters. Unlike Mary, Claire Clairmont was fluent in French as a teenager and was later credited with fluency in five languages. Despite their different treatment, the girls grew close and remained in contact for the rest of their lives.

Travels through Europe with the Shelleys
At 16, Clairmont was a lively brunette with a good singing voice and a hunger for recognition. Her home life had become increasingly tense as her stepfather William Godwin sank deeper into debt and her mother's relations with Godwin's daughter Mary became more strained. Clairmont aided her stepsister's clandestine meetings with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had professed a belief in free love and soon left his own wife, Harriet, and two small children to be with Mary. When Mary ran away with Shelley in July 1814, Clairmont went with them. Clairmont's mother traced the group to an inn in Calais, but could not make Clairmont go home with her. Godwin needed the financial assistance that the aristocratic Shelley could provide.

Clairmont remained in the Shelley household in their wanderings across Europe. The three young people traipsed across war-torn France and into Switzerland, fancying themselves as characters in a romantic novel, as Mary Shelley later recalled, but always reading widely, writing, and discussing the creative process. On the journey, Clairmont read Rousseau, Shakespeare and the works of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. "What shall poor Cordelia do – Love & be silent," Clairmont wrote in her journal while reading King Lear. "Oh [th]is is true – Real Love will never [sh]ew itself to the eye of broad day – it courts the secret glades." Clairmont's emotions were so stirred by Cordelia that she had one of her "horrors", a hysterical fit, Mary Shelley recorded in her own journal entry for the same day. Clairmont, who was surrounded by poets and writers, also made her own literary attempts. During the summer of 1814, she started a story titled The Idiot, which has since been lost. In 1817–1818, she wrote a book, which Percy Bysshe Shelley tried without success to have published. Although Clairmont lacked the literary talent of her stepsister and brother-in-law, she always longed to take centre stage. It was during this period that she changed her name from "Jane", first to "Clara" and finally to the more romantic-sounding "Claire".

Relationship with Lord Byron

Any romantic designs Clairmont might have had on Shelley were frustrated initially, but she did bring the Shelleys into contact with Lord Byron, with whom she entered into an affair before he left England in 1816 to live abroad. (A year marked by agricultural failures and widespread European famine, but also of significant literary advances as the Godwin-Shelley-Byron circle holed up indoors, 1816 would later be known as the "year without a summer".) Clairmont hoped to become a writer or an actress and wrote to Byron asking for "career advice" in March 1816, when she was almost 18. Byron was a director at the Drury Lane Theatre. Clairmont later followed up her letters with visits, sometimes bringing Mary, whom she seemed to suggest Byron might also find attractive. "Do you know I cannot talk to you when I see you? I am so awkward and only feel inclined to take a little stool and sit at your feet," Clairmont wrote to Byron. She "bombarded him with passionate daily communiqués," telling him he need only accept "that which it has long been the passionate wish of my heart to give you." She arranged for them to meet at a country inn. Byron, in a depressed state after the breakup of his marriage to Annabella Milbanke and the scandal over his relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, made it very clear to Clairmont before he left that she would not be a part of his life, but she remained determined to change his mind.

She convinced Mary and Percy Shelley that they should follow Byron to Switzerland, where they met him and his personal physician, John William Polidori, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva. It is unknown whether Clairmont knew she was pregnant with Byron's child at the commencement of the trip, but it soon became apparent to both her travelling companions and to Byron not long after their arrival at his door. At first he maintained his refusal of Clairmont's companionship and allowed her to be in his presence only in the company of the Shelleys; later, they resumed their sexual relationship for a time in Switzerland. Clairmont and Mary also made fair copies of Byron's current work-in-progress, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

Clairmont was the only lover, other than Caroline Lamb, whom Byron referred to as a "little fiend". Confessing the affair in a letter to his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Byron wrote:

He referred to her also in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird (20 January 1817):

Clairmont would later say that her relationship with Byron had given her only a few minutes of pleasure, but a lifetime of trouble.

Allegra
The group left Byron in Switzerland at the end of the summer and returned to England. Clairmont took up residence in Bath and in January 1817 she gave birth to a daughter, Alba, whose name was eventually changed to Allegra. Throughout the pregnancy, Clairmont had written long letters to Byron, pleading for his attention and a promise to care for her and the baby, sometimes making fun of his friends, reminding him how much he had enjoyed making love to her, and sometimes threatening suicide. Byron, who by this time hated her, ignored the letters. The following year, Clairmont and the Shelleys left England and journeyed once more to Byron, who now resided in Italy. Clairmont felt that the future Byron could provide for their daughter would be greater than any she herself would be able to grant the child and therefore, wished to deliver Allegra into his care.

Upon arriving in Italy, Clairmont was again refused by Byron. He arranged to have Allegra delivered to his house in Venice and agreed to raise the child on the condition that Clairmont keep her distance from him. Clairmont reluctantly gave Allegra over to Byron.

Clairmont was granted only a few brief visits with her daughter after surrendering her to Byron. When Byron arranged to place her in a Capuchin convent in Bagnacavallo, Italy, Clairmont was outraged. In 1821, she wrote Byron a letter accusing him of breaking his promise that their daughter would never be apart from one of her parents. She felt that the physical conditions in convents were unhealthy and the education provided was poor and was responsible for "the state of ignorance & profligacy of Italian women, all pupils of Convents. They are bad wives & most unnatural mothers, licentious & ignorant they are the dishonour & unhappiness of society.... This step will procure to you an innumerable addition of enemies & of blame."

By March 1822, it had been two years since she had seen her daughter. She plotted to kidnap Allegra from the convent and asked Shelley to forge a letter of permission from Byron. Shelley refused her request. Byron's seemingly callous treatment of the child was further vilified when Allegra died there at the age of five, from a fever some scholars identify as typhus and others speculate was a malarial-type fever. Clairmont held Byron entirely responsible for the loss of their daughter and hated him for the rest of her life. Shelley's death followed only two months later.

Relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley

Clairmont may have been sexually involved with Percy Bysshe Shelley at various periods, though Clairmont's biographers, Gittings and Manton, find no hard evidence. Their friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg joked about "Shelley and his two wives", Mary and Claire, a remark that Clairmont recorded in her own journal. Clairmont was also entirely in sympathy, more so than Mary, with Shelley's theories about free love, communal living, and the right of a woman to choose her own lovers and initiate sexual contact outside marriage. She seemed to conceive of love as a "triangle" and enjoyed being the third. She had also formed a close friendship with Shelley, who called her "my sweet child," and she both inspired and fed off his work.

Mary Shelley's early journals record several times when Clairmont and Shelley shared visions of Gothic horror and let their imaginings take flight, stirring each other's emotions to the point of hysteria and nightmares. In October 1814, Shelley deliberately frightened Clairmont by assuming a particularly sinister and horrifying facial expression. "How horribly you look... Take your eyes off!" she cried. She was put to bed after yet another of her "horrors". Shelley described her expression to Mary as "distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay". In the autumn of 1814, Clairmont and Shelley also discussed forming "an association of philosophical people" and Clairmont's conception of an idealized community in which women were the ones in charge.

Shelley's poem "To Constantia, Singing" is thought to be about her:

Mary Shelley revised this poem, completely altering the first two stanzas, when she included it in a posthumous collection of Shelley's works published in 1824. In Shelley's "Epipsychidion", some scholars believe that he is addressing Clairmont as his:

At the time Shelley wrote the poem, in Pisa, Clairmont was living in Florence, and the lines may reveal how much he missed her.

 It has occasionally been suggested that Clairmont was also the mother of a daughter fathered by Percy Shelley. The possibility goes back to the accusation by Shelley's servants, Elise and Paolo Foggi, that Clairmont gave birth to Shelley's baby during a stay in Naples, where on 27 February 1819, Shelley registered a baby named Elena Adelaide Shelley as having been born on 27 December 1818. The registrar recorded her as the daughter of Percy Shelley and "Maria" or "Marina Padurin" (possibly an Italian mispronunciation of "Mary Godwin"), and she was baptized the same day as the lawfully begotten child of Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin. It is, however, almost impossible that Mary Shelley was the mother, and this has given rise to several theories, including that the child was indeed Clairmont's. Clairmont herself had ascended Mount Vesuvius, carried on a palanquin, on 16 December 1818, only nine days before the date given for the birth of Elena. It may be significant, however, that Clairmont was taken ill at about the same time – according to Mary Shelley's journal she was ill on 27 December – and that her journal of June 1818 to early March 1819 has been lost. In a letter to Isabella Hoppner of 10 August 1821, Mary Shelley, however, stated emphatically that "Claire had no child". She also insisted:

The infant Elena was placed with foster parents and later died on 10 June 1820. Byron believed the rumours about Elena and used them as one more reason not to let Clairmont influence Allegra.

Later life

Shortly after Clairmont had introduced Shelley to Byron, she met Edward John Trelawny, who was to play a major role in the short remaining lives of both poets. After Shelley's death, Trelawny sent her love letters from Florence pleading with her to marry him, but she was not interested. Still, she remained in contact with him the rest of her long life. Clairmont wrote to Mary Shelley: "He [Trelawny] likes a turbid and troubled life; I a quiet one; he is full of fine feeling and has no principles; I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling (in my life)."

Governess in Russia
Devastated after Shelley's death, Mary returned to England. She paid for Clairmont to travel to her brother's home in Vienna where she stayed for a year, before relocating to Russia, where she worked as a governess from 1825 to 1828, firstly in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. During her time in Russia, she witnessed the Decembrist revolt. The people she worked for treated her almost as a member of the family. Still, what Clairmont longed for most of all was privacy and peace and quiet, as she complained in letters to Mary Shelley.

Two Russian men she met commented on her general disdain for the male sex; irritated by their assumption that since she was always falling in love, she would return their affections if they flirted with her, Clairmont joked in a letter to Mary Shelley that perhaps she should fall in love with both of them at once and prove them wrong.

Dresden
She returned to England in 1828, but remained there only a short while before departing for Dresden, where she was employed as a companion and housekeeper. Scholar Bradford A. Booth suggested in 1938 that Clairmont, driven by a need for money, might have been the true author of most of The Pole, an 1830 short story that appeared in the magazine The Court Assembly and Belle Assemblée as by "The Author of Frankenstein". Unlike Mary Shelley, Clairmont was familiar with the Polish used in the story. At one point, she thought of writing a book about the dangers that might result from "erroneous opinions" about the relations between men and women, using examples from the lives of Shelley and Byron. She did not make many literary attempts, as she explained to her friend Jane Williams:

Return to England
In 1836, the year William Godwin died, Clairmont returned to England, where she worked as a music teacher. She cared for her mother when she was dying. In 1841, after Mary Jane Godwin's death, Clairmont moved to Pisa, where she lived with Margaret King (officially Lady Margaret Mount Cashell but known as Mrs Mason), an old pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. She lived in Paris for a time in the 1840s, where she  attended Harriet de Boinville's social gatherings, crowded with republicans and Italian revolutionaries. In one letter to her stepsister, Mary, she wrote:"At Madame de Boinville's the people are clever and I go there and I like the conversation, but I am never allowed to speak myself...after fifteen years being silent, I want to talk a good deal...to clear out my mind of all the ideas that have been accumulating and literally rotting there for so many years - but they won't allow me this in Rue Clichy- the instant I speak, the whole coterie fall upon my words and pick them to pieces...seize upon my argument (so dear to me)...they are liberals of such opposite characters....I beg it to be understood that I am the most liberal, I am proud to say, not one of them can keep pace with me in liberality - I leave them all five hundred miles behind me."Percy Shelley had left her £12,000 in his will, which she finally received in 1844. She carried on a sometimes turbulent, bitter correspondence with her stepsister, until Mary died in 1851.

Florence and death
Clairmont converted to Catholicism, despite having hated the religion earlier in her life. She moved to Florence in 1870 and lived there in an expatriate colony with her niece, Paulina. She was also close to Paulina's brother Wilhelm Gaulis Clairmont, the only other surviving child of her brother Charles. She considered making her home with him and financially supported some of his endeavours, for example with £500 towards the purchase of a farm.

Clairmont also clung to memorabilia of Percy Shelley. The Aspern Papers by Henry James is inspired by the true story of a retired captain, Edward Silsbee, who tried to purchase the letters that Shelley had written to Clairmont, and which she saved until her death. Clairmont died in Florence on 19 March 1879, at the age of 80 having outlived all the members of Shelley's circle except Trelawny and Jane Williams.

Reputation and legacy
Writing for the Wordsworth Trust in 2014, author Lesley McDowell described Clairmont as "the ideal Romantic woman, as conjured up by Mary Wollstonecraft herself in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," adding that "rarely did any other Romantic figure "mix in the throng" and attain knowledge of herself through others, to the extent that Claire Clairmont did."

In popular culture

Film
The 1816 trip to Switzerland during the Year Without a Summer, during which Clairmont aimed to reunite with Byron, and Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, is the focus of multiple modern re-tellings in several mediums. She was portrayed by Myriam Cyr in the 1986 Ken Russell film Gothic, by Elizabeth Hurley in the Goya Award-winning 1988 Spanish film Rowing with the Wind, and by Laura Dern in Haunted Summer (1988).

Thirty years later, Clairmont was played by Bel Powley in Mary Shelley (2017) and by Nadia Parkes in the Doctor Who episode "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" (2020),

Literature
Clairmont was depicted in a special edition of the comic book The Wicked + The Divine, as an incarnation of the goddess Inanna and a member of the 1830s Pantheon.

See also
Godwin–Shelley family tree

Notes

Bibliography
James Bieri. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. .
Bradford A. Booth. "The Pole: A Story by Claire Clairmont?" In ELH, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1938), pp. 67–70. Retrieved 8 April 2008.
Deirdre Coleman. "Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley: identification and rivalry within the 'tribe of the Otaheite philosopher's'." 2006. Retrieved 8 April 2008.
Benita Eisler. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. .
Audrey A. Fisch, Anne Kostelanetz Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. .

Robert Gittings and Jo Manton. Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. .
Rosalie Glynn Grylls. Claire Clairmont, Mother of Byron's Allegra. London: John Murray, 1939. OCLC 186940021.
Armistead C. Gordon. Allegra: The Story of Byron and Miss Clairmont. New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1926. OCLC 1515933.
Richard Holmes. Shelley: The Pursuit. 1974. London: Harper Perennial, 2003. .
Lisa Diane Leslie.  'How can I exist apart from my sister?': Sisters in the Life and Literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. PhD Thesis. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2001. British Library, DX241303. OCLC 59496278.
Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, Gillian Russell, and Clara Tuite, eds. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. .
Lesley McDowell. "Books: Women's Work". A review of Other People's Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess, by Ruth Brandon. The Scotsman, 29 March 2008. Retrieved 7 April 2008.
Miranda Seymour. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000. .
Mary Shelley. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–44. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. .
Mary Shelley. Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. .
William St Clair. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. .
Marion Kingston Stocking: "Clairmont, Clara Mary Jane (1798–1979" (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). Retrieved 27 July 2018.
Marion Kingston Stocking, ed. The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. .
Marion Kingston Stocking, ed. "The Journals of Claire Clairmont 1814–1827." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Janet Todd. Death & The Maidens. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2007. .
Laura Whalen. "The Song of Claire". Create Space, 2018.

External links
Claire Clairmont biography at Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition (knarf.english.upenn.edu)
Haunted Summer (1988) at IMDb – film story of the unconventional ménage à trois with Laura Dern as Claire Clairmont (see also )
Claire Clairmont manuscript material, 1814–1879, held by the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library

1798 births
1879 deaths
19th-century English people
19th-century English women
English governesses
Godwin family
Lord Byron
Women of the Victorian era
English expatriates in Italy

Claire Clairmont


A child model refers to a child who is employed to display, advertise and promote commercial products or to serve as a subject of works of art, such as photography, painting and sculpture.

Practice

Artists have used children as models for countless works over the centuries. Child modeling has become a distinct activity because of the explosion of commercial media over the past several decades. Many young actresses and actors, notably, Naomi Campbell, Jennifer Connelly, Katherine Heigl, Jessica Alba, Ashley Benson, Lindsay Lohan, Naya Rivera, Zendaya, Bella Thorne, Miranda Cosgrove, Hayley Kiyoko, Liv Tyler, Brooke Shields, Taylor Momsen, Peyton List, Gigi Hadid, Yara Shahidi, Maddie Ziegler, Skai Jackson, Anastasia Bezrukova, Isabella Cramp and Frankie Muniz began as child models. The book, Lisanne: A Young Model, described the life of Lisanne Falk, a colleague of Brooke Shields at the Ford modeling agency in the late 1970s. Falk, like Shields, was a relatively successful child model who posed for magazine covers, notably Seventeen, for editorial fashion layouts, and for advertising in magazines and mail-order catalogs. Both models appeared in the 1977 Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs. Falk, like Shields, moved from modeling to movies as she became older. More recently Australian child model Morgan Featherstone has achieved worldwide success but has also attracted criticism due to her looking older than her age.

The visible success of child models who became media celebrities has led numerous children (and their parents) to pursue modeling as a part-time career. In practice, most modeling jobs go to children who have already worked as models and have developed a working relationship with a modeling agency. For prospective models, the challenge is to land the first job. This usually happens through referrals by people already involved in modeling. It is also possible to land jobs by contacting modeling agencies directly. Occasionally, a child may be "discovered" in a public place or through other grassroots means.

Competing in local and national beauty pageants
Working with local retailers for small-scale modeling
Entering mall fashion shows
Entering photo competitions.

Salary

The amount that a child can earn is based upon the type of work they are contracted to carry out.

A photo shoot for a magazine article will generally pay around $70 per hour. Advertisement work, on the other hand, can pay out between $1,000 and $1,200 for a day's work. The child's agency will take a commission from the earnings, which will be around 20%.

See also
 Child beauty pageant
 Junior idol

References

Modeling (profession)
Childhood

Child model


Urðarbrunnr (Old Norse for the "Well of Urðr") is a well in Norse mythology. It is situated under the Yggdrasil or the world tree. Norse mythology is a version of the older northern Germanic mythology. The gods would travel via the bifrost with the exception of Thor as it was thought that he would break the bridge which took the form of a rainbow, to Urðarbrunnr. Here they would meet and decide things, presumably laws of nature and magic and love and war.

Places in Norse mythology

Urðarbrunnr


Edward Tilley was a passenger on the Mayflower. He was baptized in Henlow, Bedfordshire, England on 27 May 1588.  He was the son Robert and Elizabeth Tilley. Edward was a weaver.

He married Ann (or Agnes) Cooper on 20 June 1614 in Henlow. They had no known children. The Tilleys went to Holland a few years after their marriage. In September 1620, they sailed for the New World on the Mayflower with two young relatives of Anne's, Henry Samson and Humility Cooper.

As the Mayflower lay off Cape Cod in November 1620, Tilley and other passengers signed the Mayflower Compact. He and his wife died during the winter of 1620-1621.

1580s births
1620s deaths
Mayflower passengers

Edward Tilley


Islamic law has the concept of marriage called Nikah (نكاح).  Normal marriages do not end, unless they are divorced. In addition, there is a marriage for a given time, called Nikah Mut'a. Sunni Islam does not recognize Nikah Mut'a; they say it is a legitimisation of prostitution. Despite this, some Sunni schools of law have developed similar concepts.

In Nikah, both husband and wife are asked three times for consent to intercourse with witnesses so later on no one can claim rape.

Islamic law
Marriage

Nikah


In the Middle Ages, people in Europe believed that Incubi (one Incubus, several Incubi) were male demons. There were also female demons, called succubi. They lay on sleeping people, to have sexual intercourse with them. They would also do this to make other incubi. While they had sex with their victim, they drained its energy to sustain themselves. Sometimes, having sex with an incubus may result in a child, as in the legend of Merlin. Some sources say that the incubus may be identified by its unnaturally cold penis. Religious tradition holds that repeated intercourse with such a spirit by either males or females may result in bad health, or even death.

Origins of the legends
People have come up with different explanations for the incubus legends. In the Middle Ages, people worried a lot about sin, especially sexual sins of women. Victims may have been experiencing waking dreams or sleep paralysis. Also, nocturnal arousal, orgasm or nocturnal emission could be explained by the idea of creatures causing an otherwise guilt-producing and self-conscious behavior. The influence of incubi could also have been used to explain how pregnancies happen outside marriage; such pregnancies were often "unexplainable".and unnoticed

Victims who claimed to have fallen prey to the influence of incubi, could in reality have been victims of sexual assault by a real person. Rapists may have attributed the rapes of sleeping women to demons in order to escape punishment. A friend or relative may have assaulted the victim in her sleep. The victims and, in some cases the clergy, may have found it easier to explain the attack as supernatural in origin rather than confront the idea that the attack came from a trusted person.

Ancient and religious descriptions
One of the earliest mentions of an incubus comes from Mesopotamia on the Sumerian kings' list, ca. 2400, where the hero Gilgamesh's father is listed as Lilu (Lila). It is said that Lilu disturbs and seduces women in their sleep, while Lilitu, a female demon, appears to men in their erotic dreams. Two other demons appear as well: Ardat lili visits men by night and bears ghostly children from them. Irdu lili, is the male counterpart to Ardat lili. He visits women by night. These demons were originally storm demons. Because the etymology was interpreted wrongly, they were later seen as night demons. Also considered to be vampires which is another form of a demon that is said to drink blood from its victims.

Incubi and succubi were said by some not to be different sexes, but the same demon able to change its sex. A succubus would be able to sleep with a man and collect his sperm, and then transform into an incubus and use that seed on women. Their offspring were thought to be supernatural in many cases, even if the actual genetic material originally came from humans.

Many tales claim that the incubus is bisexual, but some indicate that it is strictly heterosexual and finds attacking a male victim either unpleasant or detrimental. There are also many stories involving the attempted exorcism of incubi or succubi who have taken refuge in the bodies of men or women.

Incubi are sometimes said to be able to conceive children. The half-human offspring of such a union is sometimes referred to as a cambion. The most famous legend of such a case includes that of Merlin, the famous wizard from Arthurian legend.

According to the Malleus Maleficarum, exorcism is one of the five ways to overcome the attacks of Incubi, the others being Sacramental Confession, the Sign of the Cross (or recital of the Angelic Salutation), moving the afflicted to another location, and by excommunication of the attacking entity, "which is perhaps the same as exorcism."  On the other hand, the Franciscan friar Ludovico Maria Sinistrari stated that incubi "do not obey exorcists, have no dread of exorcisms, show no reverence for holy things, at the approach of which they are not in the least overawed."

References

Demons

Incubus


A software bug is a problem with the code in a computer program which makes it not work properly. They can cause inconvenience to the user and may make their computer crash or freeze. Most computer programs have bugs. A program that has a large number of bugs (or possibly a single or a few serious bugs) is said to be buggy.

Most bugs are caused by bad programming by the developer, but sometimes they can be caused by compiler problems.  When bugs are found, people send bug reports to the developer to tell them about the bug and let them fix it.

Sometimes, people say that their computer has a bug when something is wrong with it.  The problem is usually caused by a computer virus which is making their computer slow or do different things.

Some bugs are harmless, for example, many video games incorrectly allow objects to move through walls. Other bugs are more severe, for example, a bug in a navigation system that causes an airplane to explode, or the two bugs in the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine's control software, which caused it to produce far more radiation than intended, killing at least three people.

Types of bugs

Buffer overflow
A buffer overflow happens when a program writes to or reads from an area of memory that it is not supposed to access.

Arithmetic overflow
An arithmetic overflow happens when a number contained in a variable is increased beyond the highest number that the variable allows. This will usually cause the number to reset back to zero.

Infinite loop
An infinite loop happens when a program enters a loop (a series of instructions that is repeated many times) and there is no way out of the loop. This can cause the program to freeze.

Roundoff errors
If a floating point variable doesn't have enough precision, the number stored in it can be inaccurate. This can cause various problems depending on the type of program, for example it could cause a navigation program to navigate to an unintended location, or distorted sound in an audio recording program.

Division by zero
Division by zero is an invalid math operation. If a program divides an integer by zero, it will crash. On Linux, the message displayed when this bug occurs is "floating point exception", even though floating point numbers were not involved. Floating point math sometimes allows division by zero. This will usually result in a special "not a number" value.

Clipping problems
In video games, clipping problems, also called collision detection problems, occur when an object passes through a barrier (such as a wall, floor, or ceiling) that it was not intended to pass through. This is a very common bug found throughout many video games. This can happen, for example, in Doom 2 when a crushed monster is resurrected by an arch-vile. Clipping problems can often be used as a time-saving tactic in speedruns, for example, in Super Mario 64 it is possible to skip walking up the spiral staircase in the castle by jumping through the ceiling.

Security bugs
Security bugs are bugs that allow an intruder to either gain access to the computer, or cause the computer to crash. Causing the computer to crash is called a denial-of-Service attack. Security bugs are considered especially important to fix because they might allow intruders to steal important information such as credit card numbers or passwords. Examples of security bugs include Heartbleed  and Shellshock.

Misbugs
A misbug is a bug that has been used as a feature. An example would be a bug in an Android phone that allows users to gain root access.

Hardware bugs
Some bugs affect hardware (the physical parts of a computer) instead of software. For example, running the instruction lock cmpxchg8b eax on old Pentium processors would cause the processor to stop working until rebooted. Since hardware bugs are physical design flaws, they can not be corrected with a software update, although it may be possible to work around (hide) the bug with a software update, for example, by checking for the conditions that cause the bug or by rearranging data in a way that prevents the bug from occurring.

Other websites
 Software bug -Citizendium

Software

Software bug


Arachnocampa is a family of flies. They are also called Fungus gnats. They occur in Australia and New Zealand. Their larvae are glowworms.

They were called Bolitphila (mushroom-lovers) until 1924. Then people found out that their larvae use silk threads to catch prey. Their current name means spider-grub.

Flies

Arachnocampa


Psittacosis is a bacterial disease that can be caught from birds such as parrots, pigeons, and parakeets. The disease is not common, with only 50 reported cases in the United States each year.

Psittacosis usually gives flu-like symptoms, such as fevers, chills, headaches, muscle aches, and a dry cough. The disease can also look like pneumonia on an x-ray. In rare cases, Psittacosis can cause endocarditis - swelling of joints, and swelling of the cornea.

Psittacosis can be easily treated with antibiotics, especially with Tetracycline. The disease rarely kills people, with only 1% of those who get the disease dying.

Diseases caused by bacteria
Zoonoses

Psittacosis


A bullet-proof vest (also called "bulletproof vest", "body armor" or "body armour") is a protective piece of clothing that covers the torso (chest, abdomen, and back) of a person. It protects the wearer from most pistol and revolver bullets and from fragments of explosive devices such as grenades. Bullet-proof vests are worn by police officers, soldiers, security guards, and people who are at risk of being shot (such as the leader of a country).

How do they work?
Bullet-proof vests contain many layers of tightly woven fabric such as Kevlar (or hard, strong materials such as ceramic or titanium) which can stop the metal pistol or revolver bullets or metal shell fragments from going into a person's body.

How much protection does a bullet-proof vest provide?
When a bullet hits a bullet-proof vest, the forceful impact of the bullet can seriously hurt, or even kill, the person wearing the vest even if the vest stops the bullet.

A bullet from a strong sniper or rifle can pierce a bullet-proof vest.

If a bullet hits a body part that the bullet-proof vest does not cover, the bullet can hurt or kill the person wearing the vest.

Types of vests
The bullet-proof vests worn by most police officers and security guards are made with many layers of tightly woven fabric such as Kevlar.

Bullet-proof vests for soldiers are heavier and stronger than the bullet-proof vests worn by police officers and security guards, because soldiers need protection from rifle and machine gun bullets. Bullet-proof vests for soldiers often have flat pieces of ceramic material or a strong metal such as titanium. These materials can stop bullets from many rifles and handguns.

Related pages
 Helmet- soldiers and some types of police officers (called tactical police officers) also wear helmets to protect themselves

Protective clothing
Military uniform

Bulletproof vest


Makgeolli (Makuly, also called nongju or takju) is a Korean traditional rice wine. Made from rice, it is a milky brew with an alcohol content of 6 to 7 percent. Rice, the main ingredient of it, is not sweet in itself, so Nuruk is also used to make it. Once boiled rice and Nuruk are mixed, the enzymes in Nuruk break down carbohydrates in rice into sugar. Then the sugar meets yeasts in Nuruk and there begins fermentation. Because the fermentation keeps on going, Makgeolli should be drunk as soon as possible once it is opened.

It has a long history. Ancient people made liquor with grains such as wheat and rice after they found the way to grow them. That is the beginning of it. There are some records about it. For example, a book written in Three Kingdoms of Korea, it says many people drank 'grain liquor.' Moreover, in a document about the brewing of Joesun Dynasty, there says Makgeolli had had long history and been considered as liquor of the folk. Made from newly harvested rice, it was regarded as sacred gift from God. In addition, it played an important role in religious event like praying ceremony for a year of abundance.

Compared to other liquor, it is good for health. Abundant in protein and fiber, it affects to liver much less than any other alcohol. Rather it helps prevent cancer and heart disease. Similar to milk and yogurt, it has good effect on the health with its organic acids.

These days, demand on it is growing from USA and Japan, so exports are rising in Korea. Actually in Korea, most of the men who drank it were farmers or manual workers in 1970s. That's because it was replaced not only by soju but also by Western drinks such as beer or whisky. Recently, however, even young generations are more likely to drink it than before.

References

- Yonhap News https://fitcrv.com/benefits-of-brown-rice/

Wine

Makgeolli


11 Dreams is the third album released bi Dens hivy metal baund Mercenary an the first wi Century Media Records. The oreeginal version wis released in 2004, that being in Europe, the American version wis released ane year later, on 8 Februar 2005. The U.S. release contained twa bonus tracks, ane being a 3-D version o the sang "11 Dreams", an anither being a radio edit o "11 Dreams". This is the first album featurin Mike Park on drums and Martin Buus on lead guitars. This is an aa the feenal album to feature foondin member Henrik "Kral" Andersen on bass/grouls.

Review
Denmark's Mercenary are follaein baunds like In Flames an Soilwork in terms o addin mair symphonic an melodic elements tae their brand o extreme metal with their latest release 11 Dreams. A greater emphasis is placed on catchy vocal heuks, whaur the clean vocal passages frae Mikkel Sandager trade aff wi the mair aggressive daith/black metal stylings frae bass player Hans 'Kral' Andersen.Highly progressive, Mercenary draw influences frae baunds like Soilwork, In Flames, Nevermore, Sentenced, an pretty hintle onything Scandinavian an influential, as well as ocassionally throwin in a bit of thrash.
Century Media haes an absolute winner here folks. Aw reports are that the baunds appearance at last years ProgPower USA in Atlanta, Georgie wis a total success, an wi the release o 11 Dreams Mercenary seems set tae carry that momentum even further.

Track leetin
Into the Sea of Dark Desires - 1:05
World Hate Center - 4:58
11 Dreams - 6:51
reDestructDead - 5:45
Firesoul - 7:36
Sharpen the Edges - 5:32
Supremacy v2.0 - 8:09
Music Non Stop (Kent Cover) - 4:11
Falling - 6:56
Times Without Changes - 2:58
Loneliness - 7:36

Musicians

Jakob Mølbjerg – Rhythm guitar
Mikkel Sandager – Clean vocals
Henrik "Kral" Andersen – Daith grouls, bass
Morten Sandager – Keyboards
Mike Park – Drums
Martin Buus – Lead guitar

Special guest appearances

Additional vocals on Firesoul an Falling – Monika Pedersen
Backin vocals on Sharpen The Edges – Jacob Hansen
Backin vocals on Sharpen The Edges – Ziggy

Credits

Aw muisic written an arranged bi Mercenary.
Aw leerics bi Mercenary.
Produced, ingineered, an mixed bi Jacob Hansen.
Airt bi Niklas Sundin.

References

2004 albums
Century Media Records albums
Mercenary albums

11 Dreams


The Bocom Financial Towers () are two conjoined skyscrapers which reach 265 metres (869 feet) in height. They are located in the Pudong District of Shanghai, China and are split into the North and South Towers. Both towers were designed by ABB Architekten. The North tower is the 810th tallest existing building in the world when measured up to the highest architectural point.

An atrium connects the two towers together and reaches a height of 163.4 metres. A swimming pool offering views over all of Shanghai is located on the 48th floor of the North Tower.

North Tower statistics
Construction of the tower began in 1997 and was completed in 2002. It is 52 stories tall with four basement levels. The height to the top of spire is 265 metres and it has a roof height of 230 metres. At its widest point, the tower is 15.8 metres wide and at its narrowest it is 9.75 metres wide. It has a length of 31 metres.

South Tower statistics
Construction of the South Tower was completed in 1999, three years before the North Tower. It has 42 floors above ground and four below ground level. It has a roof height of 197.4 metres and the top floor is located 171.6 metres up. At its widest point, the tower is 15.8 metres wide and at its narrowest, it is 9.75 metres wide. It has a length of 31 metres.

In popular culture
It was one of the three buildings part of the filming of Mission: Impossible III starring Tom Cruise. Ethan Hunt was shown sliding down the angled roof of the south tower.

See also
 List of tallest buildings in Shanghai

References

External links

Bank of Communications
2002 establishments in China
Office buildings completed in 1999
Office buildings completed in 2002
Twin towers
Skyscraper office buildings in Shanghai

Bocom Financial Towers


Livadeia is a Greek town. It is in the district of Voiotia in central Greece and its population is 21.385. Livadeia is the capital of Voiotia and it is built on a plane, near Kopaida plane. The distance between Athens and Livadeia is 136 km. North of livadeia is mountain Parnassos and west of Livadeia is mountain Elikonas. In the east and south of Livadeia is the plane of Kopaida. Near Livadeia there is Orchomenos and Cheronia which are historical places.

History of Livadeia

In antiquity, Livadeia was one of the Boeotian towns. Boeotians were an ancient Greek tribe which was a branch of the Dorian tribe. In Livadeia there was an oracle which was known by the name Trofonion. The Trofonion oracle was very important, although not as important as the Delphi oracle which was located nearby in the north. During the Middle Ages Livadeia was an insignificant town until about the thirteenth century when it became the capital of the Catalonian knights' domain. The Catalonian knights had conquered central Greece when they defeated the Lombard knights in a battle. Later, during the 15th century, the district was conquered by the Ottomans.
During the Ottoman period, Livadeia became an important town of central Greece. There was a castle and a guard was posted in it. The residents were all with Greek origin. Later during the Greek revolution of 1821 against the Turks, Livadeia played a significant role. Livadeia was liberated in 1830 when Greece became an independent state.

Sights of Livadeia
The most interesting sight of Livadeia is the springs of Krya. These springs are in the edge of the town and they are very beautiful. A river start from these springs whose name is Erkyna. In Livadeia there are some old beautiful houses and an old big clock above the town.

Municipality of Livadeia
Livadeia is a capital of the Livadeia's municipality. In this municipality, apart from Livadeia belong the villages Romeiko, Lafysti, Tsoukalades and Zeriki.

Cities in Greece

Livadeia


A. William Underwood (born c. 1855) was a young African American man from Paw Paw, Michigan purported in his time to have pyrokinetic abilities.

In January 1882, Dr. L. C. Woodman of Paw Paw wrote in the Michigan Medical News of Underwood, whose purported abilities had made him a local celebrity:
I have a singular phenomenon in the shape of a young man living here, that I have studied with much interest, and I am satisfied that his peculiar power demonstrates that electricity is the nerve force beyond dispute. His name is Wm. Underwood, aged 27 years, and his gift is that of generating fire through the medium of his breath, assisted by manipulations with his hands. He will take anybody's handkerchief, and hold it to his mouth, and rub it vigorously with his hands while breathing on it, and immediately it bursts into flames and burns until consumed.

Woodman claimed to have performed comprehensive scientific testing on Mr. Underwood's abilities, proclaiming them a genuine phenomenon. His story became a topic of discussion in many medical and scientific journals of the day, including Scientific American. Skeptics later suggested that Underwood would hide a small piece of phosphorus in his mouth, then spit it out into a handkerchief. The heat from his breath and rubbing his hands together would ignite the phosphorus, which burns in air at about . Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell has written that Underwood may have used a "chemical-combustion technique, and still other means. Whatever the exact method—and the phosphorus trick might be the most likely—the possibilities of deception far outweigh any occult powers hinted at by Charles Fort or others."

A century later, the tale of Mr. Underwood was brought to the public eye again as the subject of a 1974 song by musician Brian Eno, entitled "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch", from his debut solo album Here Come the Warm Jets.

References

1850s births
Year of death missing
Telekinetics
People from Paw Paw, Michigan

A. W. Underwood


The Sony Pictures Studios is an American television and film studio complex located in Culver City, California at 10202 West Washington Boulevard and bounded by Culver Boulevard (south), Washington Boulevard (north), Overland Avenue (west) and Madison Avenue (east). Founded in 1912, the facility is currently owned by Sony Pictures and houses the division's film studios, such as Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, and Screen Gems. The complex was the original studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1986 and Lorimar-Telepictures from 1986 to 1989.

In addition to films shot at the facility, several television shows have been broadcast live or taped there. The lot, which is open to the public for daily studio tours, currently houses a total of sixteen separate sound stages.

History

Early years (1912–1924)

Director Thomas H. Ince built his pioneering Inceville studios in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles in 1912. While Ince was filming at Ballona Creek in 1915, Harry Culver, the founding father of Culver City, persuaded Ince to move Inceville  to Culver City. During that time, Ince co-founded Triangle Film Corporation and the Triangle Studios was opened in the form of a Greek colonnade – the entrance to the studios. The colonnade still stands fronting Washington Boulevard and is a Culver City historical landmark.

Ince added a few stages and an Administration Building before selling out to his partners D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. Ince relocated down the street and built the Culver Studios at that location. In 1918, Triangle Studios was sold to film producer Samuel Goldwyn. Goldwyn also added a few sound stages before selling his shares in Goldwyn Studios.

The Historic MGM Studios/Lorimar-Telepictures Studios/Lorimar Studios (1924–1990)

In 1924, Loew's President Marcus Loew organized the mergers and acquisitions of three film companies – The Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and occupying the Goldwyn production facilities.

In the Classic Hollywood cinema, MGM Studios was responsible for shooting 52 films a year, from screen epic films such as Ben-Hur, and Mutiny on the Bounty, to drawing-room dramas such as Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, and Anna Karenina. But it was the Technicolor musical films, including The Wizard of Oz, Singin' in the Rain and Gigi that MGM was best known for. MGM's success led to six working studio complexes, more than  including twenty-eight soundstages – Stage 15 is the second largest sound stage in the world, and Stage 27 served as "Munchkinland" in the production of The Wizard of Oz.

In addition to the main production building, MGM added two large backlot facilities – Lot 2 located opposite the main studio across Overland Avenue. Lot 3 entered the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Overland Avenue and was MGM's largest backlot. The administration building was inaugurated in 1938 and was named for Thalberg.

However, the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. antitrust case of 1948 severed MGM's connection with Loews Theaters, and it struggled through its affairs.

On August 10, 1965, a massive fire destroyed Vault #7 in Lot 3, resulting in the loss of hundreds of silent-era films, among them Lon Chaney's 1927 film London After Midnight, though the majority of MGM's silent film stock survived the fire. In 1969, millionaire Kirk Kerkorian bought MGM and proceeded to dismantle the studio. MGM's film memorabilia was sold through an 18-day auction, and  of the studio's backlots were sold. Lot 3 was razed while Lot 2 was sold to housing developments. Kerkorian used the money to construct his MGM Resorts hotel chain.

In 1981, Kerkorian's Tracinda acquired United Artists and merged it with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to become MGM/UA Entertainment Co. He then sold MUEC to Ted Turner in 1986, who after 74 days, sold MGM/UA back to Kerkorian while retaining the pre-1986 MGM film library. In 1986, the studio lot was sold to Lorimar-Telepictures. During that time, the MGM logo was removed from the studios and moved across the street to the Filmland Building (now known as Sony Pictures Plaza) before their 1992 and 2003 moves to Santa Monica and Century City and finally settling in Beverly Hills from 2011 onwards.

Columbia Studios/Sony Pictures Studios (1990–present)

In 1988, Warner Communications acquired Lorimar-Telepictures one year before merging with Time Inc. to become Time Warner (now Warner Bros. Discovery). Later in 1989, Sony hired producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber to run the company's newly acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment unit, even though they had a contract with Warner Bros. To resolve this issue, Warner sold their Lorimar lot to Columbia, among other deals. Columbia Pictures had been sharing with Warner Bros. their studio lot in Burbank, California in a partnership called The Burbank Studios beginning in 1972. Sony sold its interest in The Burbank Studios as a result of the Guber-Peters issue.

Sony acquired the property, first renamed Columbia Studios, in poor condition and thereafter invested $100 million to renovate the studio complex. The property underwent a three-year comprehensive plan as it transitioned to the  Sony Pictures Studios complex. The buildings, many of which still bore the names of MGM film actors such as Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth and Burt Lancaster, were painted and upgraded. New walls were erected around the lot and the ironwork gates were restored. Nostalgic art deco and false fronts on Main Street were added, as well as hand-painted murals of Columbia film posters. The MGM logo was removed from the Filmland Building in late 1992.

The studio continues to record TV shows such as The Goldbergs, Ray Donovan, and Shark Tank. The long-running game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (studio 11) and its spin-offs, with Jeopardy! (The Alex Trebek Stage, formerly studio 10;  the studio was renamed in August 2021, following the namesake's death and prior to the start of the 38th season), are also taped at Sony Pictures Studios. The revival of American Gladiators produced by MGM Television was also filmed there.

Taped programs

Talk shows

 Donny & Marie (1998–2000)
 The Queen Latifah Show (2013–2015)
 Chelsea (2016–2017)

Game shows

 Wheel of Fortune (1995–present, Studio 11)
 Jeopardy! (1994–present, The Alex Trebek Stage; formerly Studio 10)
 Wheel 2000 (1997–1998, Studio 11)
 Jep! (1998–1999, Studio 11)
 Rock & Roll Jeopardy! (1998–2001, Studio 11)
 Hollywood Showdown (2000–2001, Studio 11)
 Pyramid (2002–2004)
 American Gladiators (2008 revival, Season 1 only)
 Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? (2010–2011)
 Sports Jeopardy! (2014–2016, The Alex Trebek Stage; formerly Studio 10)
 Snoop Dogg Presents The Joker's Wild (2017–2019)
 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (2020–2021)
 The Celebrity Dating Game (2021)

Sitcoms

 The King of Queens (1998–2007)
 Living with Fran (2005–2006)
 Married... with Children (1994–1997)
 That's My Bush! (2001)
 Cavemen (2007)
 Rules of Engagement (2007–2013)
 'Til Death (2006–2010)
 The Goldbergs (2013–2023)
 Dr. Ken (2015–2017)
 One Day at a Time (2017–2020)
 Live in Front of a Studio Audience (2019, 2021)

Dramas

 Close to Home (2005–2007)
 The Guardian (2001–2004)
 Joan of Arcadia (2003–2005)
 Las Vegas (2003–2008)
 Party of Five (1994–2000)
 Masters of Sex (2013–2016)
 Ray Donovan (2013–2020)
 Insecure (2016–2021)

Reality
 Shark Tank (2014–2020)
 The Gong Show (2017–2018)

References

External links

 Sony Pictures Studios
 Studio Lot History
 SPE Post Production

Studios
American film studios
Mass media companies established in 1912
Television studios in the United States
Companies based in Culver City, California
1912 establishments in California
Buildings and structures in Culver City, California

Sony Pictures Studios