LaVaughn Robinson (born LaVaughn Evett) (February 9, 1927 – January 22, 2008) was an American tap dancer, choreographer, and teacher.

A virtuoso tap dancer, Robinson perfected a high speed, low to the ground, a cappella style of dance that was characterized by elegance, precision, and clarity of sound. In a career spanning over 70 years, he started performing on the street, then in nightclubs, and finally in national and international tap festivals.  He was recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts as a "Living National Treasure", received a NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1989, a lifetime honor, and a 1992 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Career

Street dancing
LaVaughn Robinson was born in South Philadelphia, one of seven brothers and seven sisters. His mother (Catherine Griffin Robinson) taught him his first tap dancing step, the plain time step, at the age of seven. During the Depression, Philadelphia was a Mecca of tap dancing; the Nicholas Brothers (Fayard and Harold) and the Condos Brothers (Steve, Frank, and Nick) came from Robinson's neighborhood.  Robinson learned from older street dancers, who vied for the best corners for busking.  The elements of successful busking consisted of the ability to catch the attention of passersby, build a crowd, and then pass the hat.  The competition required fierce demonstration of dancing prowess, like a gunfighter riding into town and challenging the local champion, with the winners getting better corners.  The ultimate corner in Philadelphia was at Broad and South Streets. The better the dance ability, the nearer to Broad Street the dancer would be permitted busk.  Broad Street being the same as 14th Street, the corners at either 2nd and South or 25th and South implied modest  dance skills.  Although he had no formal dance training, this competitive zeal influenced Robinson's style, and Broad and South became his corner at the age of 13.  He also danced and played in a tramp band (washboard, washtub bass, and kazoo), and when he was older, he busked in clubs.  Robinson earned enough money by busking to buy his own clothes, contribute to paying for the family groceries, and to go to the Earle Theater. It was here that Robinson saw the great tap dancers of the day: Baby Lawrence who performed with Count Basie Orchestra, the Nicholas Brothers with Dolly Dawn and the Dawn Patrol, and Robinson's particular favorite Teddy Hale with Louis Jordan.  Robinson admired Teddy Hale's rendition of "Begin the Beguine", and particularly liked Hale's improvisational style, in which on successive performances, he performed entirely different dances, as opposed to a fixed act—the norm at the time.  At this formative age, Robinson met Henry Meadows, an older dancer who took an interest in Robinson, and taught him a close to the ground, fast step called a paddle and roll, which was to be an important element in Robinson's mature style.  Henry Meadows partnered with Robinson, on and off, over a period of 40 years.

Club dancing
After Robinson graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia, he served in the Army from 1945-1947.  Separating from the Army, he began his career in Philadelphia with booking agents Eddie Suez  and Bernie Rothbard of the Suez/Rothbard Agency.  As Henry Meadows preferred staying in Philadelphia, Robinson partnered with Howard Blow, a fast tempo tap dancer, and learned from Bobby Jones, another high speed dancer also from Philadelphia.  "Howard and LaVaughn" performed in clubs owned by Frank Palumbo and opened for Cab Calloway, for Tommy Dorsey's Band, and on the same stage at the Apollo Theater with Ella Fitzgerald. Robinson also danced with Eddie Sledge and Tony Lopez when he worked for Eddie Smith, a booking agent who handled only trios and quartets.  Robinson performed in a close rhythms style, avoiding splits, jumps, and flips of the style of the Nicholas Brothers, after suffering injuries to his legs. He performed at the Broadwood Hotel and Palumbo's, then the resort hotels in the Catskills, Club Delisa in Chicago, the 500 Club and the Harlem Club both in Atlantic City, New Jersey and throughout Canada. As tastes in music changed and the era of Swing came to an end, Robinson had the opportunity to work with John Coltrane and Charlie Parker.  At the time, Robinson worked from music charts.  John Coltrane said: "Oh, I can play that."  But he did not play it as it was on the page.  The improvisational style proved incompatible with Robinson's dancing.  Robinson said to Coltrane:  "Well, look, I don't need the music, because I'm dancing the way I like to dance and the way I wanted to dance."  Robinson focused his repertoire on tap as music, "sound tap," that made accompaniment a redundant distraction.

Professor of tap dancing
Robinson lived in Boston from 1965 to 1973, then returned to Philadelphia.  Robinson started rehearsing at nights in the basement of the Neff Building in Philadelphia with Jerry Tapps, whose daytime job was the building's elevator operator.  They developed a routine—Telephone, which was a series of calls and responses exchanged between two dancers.  It was Tapps who encouraged Robinson to dance solo and to teach. Tapps inspired Robinson to create his signature solo dance, Artistry in Taps (also known as For Drummers Only).  In 1980, he joined the faculty of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  Teaching a generation of tap dancers, he taught a series of études that he developed over the course of his career, and he included elements of Telephone  in his classes.  In this time period, he also danced in a trio with Sandra Janoff, a teacher, and Germaine Ingram, an attorney.  Later, he danced in a duo with Ingram.  He was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment of the Arts in 1989  and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography and Performance Arts in 1992.  Robinson performed Artistry in Taps at the awards concert in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  In 2000, he won the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Governor's Arts Award for Artist of the Year. The University of the Arts named him Distinguished Professor in 2005, a title he held until his death.  Much in demand, he was a frequent featured performer throughout the U.S., and danced in Africa, Europe, and Russia.

Personal life
Robinson and his wife Edna (Martin) were married for 55 years, and they have three sons, LaVaughn Jr., Gregory, and Shelton. He died in Philadelphia of heart failure.

Contribution to dance and technique
Had Robinson attended dance school in the 1930s, he would have learned a slower Broadway style of tap dancing.  Coming from a street tradition that emphasized speed and flash, his mature style developed from close observation and imitation of the dancers of his day with particular interest in fast dancing.  Robinson's encyclopedic knowledge of tap dancers, and his sense of the importance of the history, led him to create dances such as Robinson's Waltz Clog in tribute to Pat Rooney and Robinson's Impersonation of Bill Bailey impersonating Bill "Bojangles" Robinson imitating Peg Leg Bates.  In the piece, he opens with a basic "Bojangles" time step before jumping into a one-legged Peg Leg Bates step.  Known as the fastest taps in the business,  Robinson was a master and innovator of the paddle and roll step. The exact origins of the paddle and roll is not certain.  Not seen in tap dancing of the 1920s, elements of it appeared in the 1930s in the dancing of John Bubbles and Willie Bryant; one story tells of it being brought to New York in 1937 by Walter Green. The paddle and roll solidly entered the vocabulary of tap dancing in the late 1940s.  Paddle and roll is a combination of heel and toe taps sounded as sixteenth notes creating a drum roll sound.  From that one basic step, Robinson was able to create an endless number of variations.  Fundamentally constructing compositions on the paddle, Robinson was able to subdivide the quarter note, macro beat into four sixteenth note beats.  This also allowed him to easily subdivide the beat further.  Most other tap compositions originate from swing eighth note beats, commonly through the flap or shuffle.  This fundamental only easily allows tap composers to subdivide the quarter note, macro beat, into triplet eighth note beats.  Employing his innovative subdivision scheme, even when Robinson used patterns common to many tap dancers, the steps fit into these complicated structures on the microscopic scale.  So combinations that would be slow, broad gestures in other works become quick, fleeting details in his highly complex, intricate, infectious compositions.  "Robinson elevated the art form of tap.  The rhythmic intricacy and complexity that he invented developed tap into a mature percussive musical form.  So much of what tap dancers do today would not be possible without LaVaughn's innovations." In an encapsulation of a lifetime of thinking about tap dance, his solo piece Artistry in Taps, contains a wealth of the ideas that can be expressed in tap dancing. A completely choreographed piece developed over decades, Robinson drew on all the aspects of his life experience.

References

External links

1927 births
2008 deaths
American tap dancers
Pew Fellows in the Arts
University of the Arts (Philadelphia) faculty
National Heritage Fellowship winners

LaVaughn Robinson


Amplitude Modulation, usually shortened to AM, is a simple way to send a radio signal. The signal can travel long distances, and appear in faraway places, because of the earth's ionosphere.

Amplitude is the height of a wave. A carrier wave is modulated (changed) by adding audio. The combined signal is transmitted over a frequency. AM signals can be received by a crystal-powered radio set, that needs no batteries or electrical power source. Many early radios were homemade, and used earphones.

AM signals are mostly sent out on medium wave and shortwave frequencies. They do not carry high fidelity sound, but the sound is good enough to hear most things. Analog signals can fade in and out, or have interference from power lines and power stations. Sunspot activity can also weaken signals.

In the early years of commercial broadcasting in the 1920s, medium wave AM (from 540 to 1600 kilocycles) was the only kind of radio widely used. Radio programs were much like today's television programs, including news, sports, drama, music, comedy, and other entertainment.

Later Frequency Modulation (FM) radio was developed. It had better fidelity, but the signals could not travel as far, so AM was still important. After television became common in the 1950s, AM became a major format for popular music. As FM became common in the 1970s, AM stations featured more news, and talk shows.

Shortwave radio signals (from 3000 to 30,000 kilocycles) can travel around the world, and are used by countries to send programs to distant places. These programs feature news about the country, examples of their native culture and history, and sometimes foreign language lessons.

References

Mechanical vibrations
Radio technology

Amplitude modulation


For other uses, see Wheel of Fortune.

The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is a concept in medieval and ancient philosophy and means the unpredictable nature of Fate. The wheel belongs to the goddess Fortuna, who spins it at random, changing the positions of those on the wheel - some suffer great misfortune, others gain windfalls.

Origins
The concept developed in antiquity; it was used by Cicero. The Wheel originally belonged to the Roman goddess Fortuna, whose name seems to derive from Vortumna, "she who revolves the year". Fortuna eventually became Christianized: the Roman philosopher Boethius (d. 524) was a major source for the medieval view of the Wheel, writing about it in hisConsolatio Philosophiae.

Carmina Burana

The Wheel of Fortune motif appears significantly in the Carmina Burana (or Burana Codex), over one thousand poems and songs — often profane in content — written by students and clergy in the early 13th century.  Excerpts from two of the collection's better known poems, "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, Empress of the World)" and "Fortune Plango Vulnera (I Bemoan the Wounds of Fortune)," read:The concept developed in antiquity; it was used by Cicero. The Wheel originally belonged to the Roman goddess Fortuna, whose name seems to derive from Vortumna, "she who revolves the year". Fortuna eventually became Christianized: the Roman philosopher Boethius (d. 524) was a major source for the medieval view of the Wheel, writing about it in hisConsolatio Philosophiae.vv

 Sors immanis
 et inanis,
 rota tu volubilis,
 status malus,
 vana salus
 semper dissolubilis,
 obumbrata
 et velata
 michi quoque niteris;
 nunc per ludum
 dorsum nudum
 fero tui sceleris.
 . . . . . . . . . .
 Fortune rota volvitur;
 descendo minoratus;
 alter in altum tollitur;
 nimis exaltatus
 rex sedet in vertice
 caveat ruinam!
 nam sub axe legimus
 Hecubam reginam.

 Fate - monstrous
 and empty,
 you whirling wheel,
 you are malevolent,
 well-being is vain
 and always fades to nothing,
 shadowed
 and veiled
 you plague me too;
 now through the game
 I bring my bare back
 to your villainy.
 . . . . . . . . .
 The wheel of Fortune turns;
 I go down, demeaned;
 another is raised up;
 far too high up
 sits the king at the summit -
 let him fear ruin!
 for under the axis is written
 Queen Hecuba.

Later usage

Fortuna and her Wheel have remained an enduring image throughout history.

William Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and, of fortune personified, to "break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel." And in Henry V, Act 3 Scene VI, are the lines:

Selections from the Carmina Burana, including the two poems quoted above, were set to new music by twentieth-century classical composer Carl Orff, whose bombastic and well-known "O Fortuna" is based on the poem Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.

Fortuna does occasionally turn up in modern literature. She is often associated with gamblers, and dice could also be said to have replaced the Wheel as the primary metaphor for uncertain fortune.

References
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy , trans. W.V. Cooper (London: J.M. Dent, 1902)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Monk's Tale
Thomas Malory,  Le Morte d'Arthur, Chapter XVII'
William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3 Scene VI
Fortuna was also used by a character in the novel "Confederacy of Dunces";the main character, Ignatus J. Reilly, makes many references to "Fortuna's wheel" and also Boethius's works.

Mythology
Middle Ages

Rota Fortunae


Jos Stam (born 28 December 1965 in The Hague, Netherlands) is a researcher in the field of computer graphics, focusing on the simulation of natural physical phenomena for 3D-computer animation. He achieved technical breakthroughs with the simulation of fluids and gases, new rendering algorithms and subdivision surfaces, which are a mix between two previously incompatible worlds of Nurbs- and polygon-modeling in 3D.

Education and career

Jos Stam's maternal grandfather was the Dutch politician Sim Visser. His father Jos Stam was born in Rotterdam (Netherlands), and in 1944 at the , he was deported by the Nazis to Germany, where he had to repair railroads behind the western front, until being liberated by the American troops in 1945. He emigrated to the US in 1956, where he worked as a researcher for the DuPont de Nemours Company. He became a US citizen in 1964. In the US he met his wife, Alida Wilhelmina Visser, born in Wassenaar (Netherlands). In early 1965, Jos' father was transferred by DuPont to Geneva, Switzerland, where Jos was born as their third child in December 1965.
In order to avoid statelessness of their third child,  Jos' mother gave birth to him in  The Hague, so that he obtained Dutch citizenship. Jos got his schooling in French at Geneva. In 1988 he received his bachelor's degree in computer science and a year later in pure mathematics, both at the University of Geneva, and his Masters and Ph.D. in computer science at the Dynamic Graphics Project at University of Toronto.  After graduating, he held two postdoc positions, one at INRIA (in Paris, France) and one at VTT (in Helsinki, Finland).

He then joined SGI's Aliaswavefront division (which later spun out as Alias Systems Corporation) as a full-time researcher in Toronto and Seattle. He started with particle systems for the PowerAnimator software package. Then he made significant contributions to the fluids simulation component of Alias' Maya 3D content creation software product.  As a result of Alias being acquired by Autodesk in early 2006, Stam became a "Senior Research Scientist" at Autodesk, Inc. in Toronto. At Alias and Autodesk Jos Stam has worked closely together with Duncan Brinsmead, another expert in the simulation of natural phenomena. Stam left Autodesk in 2018.

Awards
 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2005) for his contributions to the field of computer graphics
 Academy Award for Technical Achievement (2005) for his work on subdivision surfaces and their resulting impact in the film industry.
 Academy Award for Technical Achievement (2008) for the design and implementation of the Maya Fluid Effects system.

References

External links
Interview with Jos Stam, SIGGRAPH, 2002
Article on Jos Stam, Wired, 20 December 2007
Podcast with Jos Stam, 4 November 2022

1965 births
Living people
University of Toronto alumni
Computer graphics researchers
Dutch computer scientists
Silicon Graphics people
Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners
Scientists from The Hague

Jos Stam


This is about the American musician. For other people called Tipton, see Tipton (disambiguation).

Billy Lee Tipton (December 29, 1914 – January 21, 1989) was an American jazz musician and bandleader. Tipton had been assigned female gender at birth.

Early life
Tipton was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. His aunt raised him after his parents' divorced. He became interested in music in high school, especially jazz. He studied piano and saxophone. He went back to Oklahoma for his last year of high school and joined the school band there. His nickname in high school was "Tippy".

Tipton later took his father's nickname, Billy, when he started a music career. He also began to try to appear to be male by dressing to hide his breasts. At first, Tipton only behaved as a male while performing. However, by 1940 Tipton was living as a man all the time. Very few people knew both sides of his life. They were two of his female cousins and maybe his later lovers.

Career

Early work
In 1936, Tipton lead a band playing on the radio station, KFXR. In 1938, Tipton joined Louvenie's Western Swingbillies. This band played on another rado station, KTOK, and at Brown's Tavern. In 1940, Tipton was touring the Midwest and playing at dances with Scott Cameron's band. Starting in 1941, he played for two and a half years at Joplin, Missouri's Cotton Club with George Meyer's band. He then toured for a time with Ross Carlyle. Later, he played for two years in Texas.

In 1949, Tipton began touring the Pacific Northwest with George Meyer. A local radio station recorded the band's appearances at Roseburg, Oregon's Shalimar Room. Recordings of Tipton's early playing include "If I Knew Then" and "Sophisticated Swing". The band was well known for the song "Flying Home". They played the song like Benny Goodman's band did.

George Meyer's band became more successful, and they began getting better chances to perform. They played with The Ink Spots, the Delta Rhythm Boys, and Billy Eckstine at the Boulevard Club in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Bandleader
Tipton began playing piano alone at the Elks club in Longview, Washington. In Longview, he started the Billy Tipton Trio. This band was Tipton on piano, Dick O'Neil on drums, and Kenny Richards (and later Ron Kilde) on bass. The trio became popular in the area.

A talent scout from Tops Records heard them play at King's Supper Club in Santa Barbara, California and got them a contract to record songs. The Billy Tipton Trio made two albums of jazz standards for Tops, Sweet Georgia Brown and Billy Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on Piano, in 1957. The albums sold 17,678 copies. This was a good number for a small independent record label.

After the albums' success, the Holiday Hotel in Reno, Nevada asked them to become play there regularly. Tops Records asked the trio to record four more albums. Tipton said no both offers. Instead, he moved to Spokane, Washington worked as an agent. The trio played every week at Allen's Tin Pan Alley as the house band. He played mainly swing standards and less jazz, even though he preferred jazz. His performances also included skits like vaudeville performers did. He imitated celebrities like Liberace and Elvis Presley. In some of these comedy skits, he played a little girl. He helped young musicians at the Dave Sobol Theatrical Agency.

In the late 1970s, Tipton's arthritis got worse and he had to retire from music.

Personal life
Early in his career, Tipton appeared as a male only as a musician. He appeared as a woman at other times. He lived with a woman named Non Earl Harrell. Other musicians thought this was a lesbian relationship. The relationship ended in 1942. Tipton's next relationship was with a singer known only as "June". This lasted for several years.

Then, or seven years, Tipton lived with a young woman named Betty Cox. She was 19 when they started their relationship. Cox said they had a heterosexual relationship. Betty remembered Tipton as "the most fantastic love of my life." Tipton kept the secret of his physical sexual characteristics a secret from Betty with a story. Tipton said that he had been in a serious car accident which had badly damaged his genitals and broken some ribs. He said he had to wear bandages protect his damaged chest. He told his female partners this story later in his life. Tipton was never legally married, but several women had drivers' licenses naming them Mrs. Tipton.

In 1960, Tipton ended the relationship with Cox. He settle down with nightclub dancer and stripper, Kitty Kelly (later known as Kitty Oakes). Her professional name was "The Irish Venus." They were involved with their local PTA and with the Boy Scouts. They adopted three sons, John, Scott, and William. After Tipton died, Kitty gave several interviews about him and their relationship. In early interviews, she said, "He gave up everything... There were certain rules and regulations in those days if you were going to be a musician." She was taking about trying to be part of 1920−30s music industry. His son William described Tipton as a good father who loved to go on Scout camping trips.

They had trouble with their adopted sons during their adolescence. The couple often argued over how they should raise the boys. Tipton left Kitty in the late 1970s and moved into a mobile home with their sons. He restarted an old relationship with Maryann. He was poor, but stayed there until his death.

Death and after
In 1989, at the age of 74, Tipton had medical problems. He said it was emphysema and refused to call a doctor. Actually he  had a hemorrhaging peptic ulcer. He died because he did not get medical care for this serious problem. His son William watched while paramedics were trying to save Tipton's life. That is how William learned that his father was born female. Tipton was pronounced dead at Valley General Hospital. The coroner shared the secret with the rest of the family. Kitty had his body to be cremated so that nobody would find out, but one of their sons did not keep the secret. A newspaper article was published the day after Tipton's funeral and wire services picked it up. Stories about Tipton appeared in papers including tabloids such as National Enquirer and Star, as well as more serious papers such as New York Magazine and The Seattle Times. Tipton's family even made talk show appearances.

Works inspired by Tipton
 The 1991 song "Tipton" by folksinger Phranc is a tribute to Billy Tipton.
"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" is a 1995 short movie based on the life and career of Billy Tipton.
 Stevie Wants to Play the Blues was a play based on Tipton's life written by Eduardo Machado and performed in Los Angeles.
 The Slow Drag was a play based on Tipton's life by Carson Kreitzer performed in New York City and London.
 An opera based on Tipton's life, Billy, was staged in Olympia, Washington.
 Trumpet, a novel based on Tipton's life, is by Jackie Kay.
 The Opposite Sex is Neither, a theatrical revue by noted trans woman Kate Bornstein, features Billy Tipton.
 "Billy's Thing" is an unreleased track by Jill Sobule.
 "The Legend of Billy Tipton," by the punk band The Video Dead, is about the story of Billy Tipton.
 The band The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet took its name from Billy Tipton on learning his story.
"Kill Me, Por Favor" is a short story including a section about Billy Tipton in Ry Cooder's 2011 volume entitled "Los Angeles Stories". Pub. City Lights Books 2011.

Recordings
 Sweet Georgia Brown Tops Records L1522 (1957)
 Billy Tipton Plays Hi-Fi on Piano Tops Records L1534 (1957)

References

Other websites
 Billy Tipton photo timeline
 Music from both Billy Tipton Trio albums
 Excerpt from biography by Diane Middlebrook

1914 births
1989 deaths
Deaths from ulcers
Deaths from emphysema
American jazz musicians
American pianists
American saxophonists
LGBT musicians

LGBT people from Oklahoma
Musicians from Oklahoma
Musicians from Kansas City, Missouri
People from Oklahoma City
Transgender people

Billy Tipton


Turkish folk dances are the folk dances of Turkey. Facing three seas, straddling important trade routes, Turkey has a complex, sophisticated culture, reflected in the variety of its dances. The dominant dance forms are types of line dance. There are many different types of folk dances performed in various ways in Turkey. Zeybek, Teke Zortlatması in Aegean region, Bar in Erzurum province, Halay in the central, southern, eastern, and southeastern parts of the country, Hora in Thrace, Horon in the eastern Black Sea region, Spoon dances in and around Konya, and Lezginka in Kars and Ardahan are some of the best known examples of these.

Types of dance

Bar

With their structure and formation, they are the dances performed by groups in the open. They are spread, in general, over the eastern part of Anatolia (Erzurum, Bayburt, Ağrı, Kars, Artvin and Erzincan provinces). The characteristic of their formation is that they are performed side-by-side, hand, shoulder and arm-in-arm. Woman and man bars are different from one another. The principal instruments of bar dances are davul and zurna (shrill pipe). Later, clarinet has been added to women's bar dances. The dominant measures in bars are  and . Occasionally, measures of  and  are used. Aksak  measures which are also the most characteristic measures, in particular, of the Turkish folk music are applied with extremely different and interesting structures in this dance. They normally wear costumes as they dance. They always dance with pride and they turn their hands as they hop dance.

Halay

Halay is a term used for some of the folk dances found in Turkey and is performed to a large extent in Eastern, South-central, Central, and Southeastern Turkey. The rhythmic and choreographic elements of these dances are very diverse. These dances are mostly performed with davul and zurna combination as well as with kaval (shepherd's pipe), sipsi (reed), çığırtma (fife) or bağlama (an instrument with three double strings played with a plectrum) or performed when folk songs are sung.

Horon

The horon (Greek: Horos [masculine noun, singular form, nominative]), which derives from the Greek word: choros () meaning dance in both ancient and modern Greek, Turkish: Horon, is a dance style found in the Black Sea region, now modern Turkey. The dances called Horon derived from the Laz culture of the area and are circular in nature, each characterized by distinct short steps. Horon was originally a Laz pagan dance. Horon or the round dance is a typical folk dance of the Black Sea coastal area and its interior parts. Horons appear very different from the folk dances in other parts of the country with their formation of tempo, rhythm and measure. Horons are performed, in general, by groups and their characteristic measure is  For their melodies are rendered very fast, it is very difficult to render them with every instrument. For this reason, rendering with a drum and zurna becomes practical. Melodies of horon are performed with the small type of zurna which is called 'cura'. In addition, in the interior parts blowing instruments such as bagpipe mey (again, a small zurna) etc. The other measures used are ,  and .

Zeybek

Zeybeks are, in general, the widespread folk dances of the Western Anatolia. Zeybek dance originated from the Zeybeks of the Aegean region. The dance is rendered by one person or two or by a group of people and its name changes for example as 'seymen' in the central parts of Anatolia. Zeybek dances are formed, in general, of  measures and have a variety of tempos such as very slow, slow, fast and very fast. Very slow zeybek dances have the measure of , slow ones  and some others . Very fast dances, for instance, teke (goat) dance seen in Burdur – Fethiye region can be regarded as dances of zeybek character, they have the traditional measure of . There is another folk dance named as bengi in the zeybek region. It is performed more differently from the zeybek and has got a different musical feature and the most characteristic measure of bengi dance is . Particularly in slow zeybeks, the traditional instruments is drum and zurna combination. The use of 2 drums and 2 zurnas in combination is a tradition, function of one of the zurnas is accompaniment, in other words, it accompanies the melody with a second constant tune. Apart from drum-zurna, a three-double string instrument bağlama, reed, marrow bow etc. are used for fast zeybek dances. In particular, the traditional instrument of the teke (goat) dance region is reed.

Other forms
 Karsilamas: (a kind of wedding music) and hora (from ancient Greek art form of χορεία) type folk dances with melodic and rhythmic structure and with a fast performance facing one another and different cultural structure of the region and the dominant measure is  but some other measures are used as well. Their traditional instrument are 2 drum and 2 zurna combination, the most characteristic use of this combination is seen in this region. It can be found also as, Tsifteteli.
 Kasap havasi/Hasapiko: meaning "the butcher's dance" from  "butcher", is a modern dance from Istanbul and East Thrace. The dance has its origins in Byzantine times by butchers, taken by the Byzantine military.
 Kaşık Oyunları: (Wooden-spoon dances): these dances, in general, are mostly spread over the Mediterranean region and have a very different structure with their arrangement performance, rhythmic and melodic characteristics. They are always rendered with wooden- spoons and the characteristic measure is  or . The instruments used are beast bow (later violin), baglama and clarinet, in general, they are accompanied by folk songs. Dinar is probably the best known of the "wooden spoon dances"
 Kolbastı: Kolbastı is among teens in common and widespread.
 Lezginka: Lezginka is mainly performed in Kars and Ardahan.
 Samah: Samah melodies have the measures of ,  and . Their traditional instruments are baglama, bow etc. There is no rhythmic instrument. Performance by singing (without any instrument) is also widespread. The most developed samahs are of 3 parts, namely: ağırlama (entertainment), yeldirme (cloak wearing) and koğdurma (dismissing).
 Syrtos: They are Greek circle dances, originated in ancient Greece, named Syrtos, from σύρω, syro, "drag [the dance]" and can be found mostly at the region of Pontus.
 Shiksaray: is Turkish dance, with origins in Black Sea Region.

See also
 Culture of the Ottoman Empire
 Ottoman music
 Culture of Turkey
 Turkish Cypriot folk dances
 Turkish folklore
 Assyrian folk dance
 Kurdish dance
 Armenian dance
 Pontic Greek folk dance

References

External links

 http://www.anatoliafolk.com (Turkish Folk Dances in USA)
 Examples of Turkish Folk Dances in Istanbul, Turkey
 Folk Dance Federation of Turkey
 Pioneer Turkish Folk Dance Costume Manufacturer

Turkish folklore

Folk dances

Turkish folk dance


The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading private schools. It has the highest number of students going to Oxford or Cambridge Universities of any secondary school or college (49.9%). It had the best GCSE results in 2013, with 98.16% of entries getting A* or A grades.

The school is near to Westminster Abbey in central London. It existed before the 12th century. The school's notable ex-students include Nick Clegg, Ben Jonson, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Jeremy Bentham, and A. A. Milne. Boys enter the Westminster Under School when they are seven years old. They go to the main school when they are thirteen. Girls are allowed only at sixteen. The school has about 750 students. About a third are boarders (who live in the school). Most of the boarders go home for the weekends, after Saturday morning school. The school has eleven houses.

The school made Harris Westminster Sixth Form, a sixth form free school, with the Harris Federation in 2013. It opens in September 2014. It will give preference to applying students from poor backgrounds.

References

City of Westminster
Schools in London

Westminster School


James Forsyth (1838–1871) was an English traveller in India.

Life
After receiving a university education in England, and taking his degree of M.A., Forsyth entered the civil service of the East India Company, and went out to India as assistant conservator and acting conservator of forests. In a short time he was appointed settlement officer and deputy-commissioner of Nimar, and served under Sir Richard Temple, 1st Baronet, Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces.

Forsyth was attached to the Bengal staff corps, and made a complete tour of the Central Provinces of India in 1862–4. He reached Amarkantak, near the sources of the Narmada River, the Mahanadi River, and the Son River. He travelled across the plain of Chhattisgarh to the sál forests in the east.

Forsyth died in London 1 May 1871.

Works
Forsyth acquired wide reputation as a hunter, and in 1862 published a treatise on the Sporting Rifle and its Projectiles. In 1870 he prepared an account of his explorations, with which he returned to England towards the close of that year. Arrangements were made for the publication of the work, but the author died while the sheets were passing through the press. It appeared posthumously (November 1871), under the title of The Highlands of Central India; Notes on their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports.

References

1838 births
1871 deaths
19th-century English non-fiction writers
19th-century explorers
British people in colonial India
English travel writers
English male non-fiction writers
19th-century English male writers
British East India Company civil servants

James Forsyth (traveller)


Honeoye ( ) is a hamlet in the Town of Richmond, in Ontario County, New York, United States. The population was 579 at the 2010 census, which lists the community as a census-designated place (CDP).

It is located 33 miles (53 kilometers) south of downtown Rochester. The community is at the north end of Honeoye Lake, one of the minor Finger Lakes. It is primarily situated along U.S. Route 20A between Ontario County Roads 33 and 37. The center of the hamlet can roughly be placed at the intersection of Route 20A and Ontario County Road 36 (West Lake Road).

Due to its location at the northern tip of Honeoye Lake and seasonal recreational population, the hamlet contains several businesses, including gas stations and grocery, drug, liquor, hardware, auto-parts, and convenience stores.  It also contains several restaurants, a doctor's office, dentist's office, and Honeoye Central School, which is K-12. There are also multiple churches, a fire station, public library, beach, park, state boat launch, and hiking trail.

History
The name Honeoye is derived from the Seneca word ha-ne-a-yah, which means lying finger, or where the finger lies. The name comes from the local story of a Native American whose finger was bitten by a rattlesnake and who therefore cut off his finger with a tomahawk.

The area that is now the hamlet of Honeoye is thought to have first been inhabited by the Point Peninsula Indians more than 10,000 years ago.  Following them came the Seneca, who settled their village at the northeast part of Honeoye Lake, just north of the present-day community of Honeoye Lake Park.

During the American Revolution, this Seneca village was destroyed by General John Sullivan in September 1779 as part of his campaign to eliminate the threat from the Iroquois, most of whose nations were allied with the British.  At the site of the Indian village, Sullivan's troops built a small garrison known as Fort Cummings, named for the commanding officer left in charge.  Here they left their "sick, lame and lazy" as well as a large portion of their supplies, so they could quickly enter the Genesee country to the west and drive the Seneca from the frontier.

After the war, some of these soldiers chose to return and resettle in western New York because of its fertile soil.  Some land was paid as bounty to war veterans.  Captain Peter Pitts was the first European-American to settle the area of present-day Honeoye, where he established Pittstown (now Richmond) in 1789.

In the mid-19th century, this area had numerous abolitionists, feminists, and other progressive activists.  Stations of the Underground Railroad were founded in western New York to help convey escaped slaves to freedom in Canada.  The Seneca Falls Convention for women's rights took place in the nearby town.

Honeoye remained a largely agricultural community until the early part of the 20th century, when many wealthy people from Rochester took interest in Honeoye Lake as a resort area.  Its relatively shallow depth gave it warmer temperatures than the Great Lakes. In the 1920s the City of Rochester took interest in the lake as a source of municipal water and created some plans to flood Honeoye Valley behind a dam, but since the city already was getting water from Canadice and Hemlock lakes, this never took place.  Since then, the area has remained popular for vacationers.

Geography
The Hamlet of Honeoye lies just north of Honeoye Lake on Honeoye Creek and lies at the bottom of Honeoye Valley.  The climate of Honeoye is typical of the northeastern United States, with four distinct seasons including warm, humid summers and cold snowy winters.

Honeoye is located at  (42.7900646, -77.5169374) and its elevation is .

According to the 2010 United States Census, the CDP has a total area of , all  land.

Demographics
As a hamlet with no legally defined boundaries, there are no US Census Bureau demographic data specific to Honeoye. Generally, residents of the encompassing town of Richmond identify themselves with Honeoye, and so one could refer to the demographic data for the Town of Richmond. Richmond, NY Demographic Data

Economy
The hamlet of Honeoye is home to several dozen small businesses that provide services to many surrounding towns and communities, including all or parts of Canadice, Bristol, South Bristol, and Livonia.  Many of the businesses are members of the Honeoye Chamber of Commerce.  Most of the businesses see their best business in the summer months, when population is increased by seasonal residents.  Winter visitors also come to the area, for the exceptional ice fishing on Honeoye Lake and skiing and related activities at two local ski resorts: Bristol Mountain and Hunt Hollow.  Cross-country skiers often visit Harriet Hollister-Spencer State Park in the southern part of Canadice and Ontario County Park in South Bristol.

While once thriving in such a small community, manufacturing in Honeoye downsized from five companies to two over the last 20 years or more, mainly due to the lack of rail access or a major highway. In March 2012, Stone Construction Equipment closed their doors, leaving only CY Plastics & Roome Technologies as the only manufacturers. The local economy is almost exclusively limited to agriculture provided by farms in the area and seasonal tourism generated by Honeoye Lake.

Education

Public school
Honeoye and the surrounding area are included in the Honeoye Central School District.  The district is served by one building providing schooling for all of the district's K-12 students.  Enrollment at Honeoye Central is about 600 students.  The school mascot is the bulldog and the colors are Royal blue and white, with red as an occasional accent color.

The French department maintains connections with Lycée Bréquigny in Rennes, France, which serves as a kind of sister school.  The English Department in the French high school and the French department in Honeoye provide opportunities for students to travel and live in the opposite country, to experience the culture with a student and his or her family.

Local sports
Honeoye Central School competes within the NYSPHAA Section V.  Currently sports are classified in the D to CC range, depending on the sport.  The school also competes in the Finger Lakes West League with strong traditional rivalries with neighboring schools Bloomfield and Naples.

In recent years Honeoye Sports have achieved success in girls volleyball with Section V championships in 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2016  and several Sectional final appearances, girls Soccer with a Section V championship in 2005 and several Sectional final appearances, boys Soccer with ten consecutive sectional appearances, recent league titles in 2004, 2008, 2009, a #1 Class C State-Ranking in 2009, and a Section V Class CC championship in 2008, 2015 and 2016. cross country with several runners competing in sectional and state competitions, and six consecutive Wayne Finger Lakes West League Titles, Golf, with several golfers competing in league and sectional competitions, and a streak of 56 straight team wins was snapped in early 2006, girls basketball with a section V championship in 2006, a NYSPHAA West Regional Championship in 2006 and a New York State Final Four appearance in 2006, indoor track with several athletes competing in sectional and state competitions, boys baseball with three consecutive sectional final appearances, 2008 Section V class CCC Championship, 2008 NYSPHAA West Regional Championship, and a New York State Final 4 appearance and girls softball with several sectional final appearances.  Honeoye athletes have also been recognized by league, region and state committees as all-stars, players of the year and most valuable players. The district has won back-to-back sectional titles in both Volleyball and Cross Country (2015/2016)

Culture and recreation
Honeoye and the surrounding community are recognized mainly for the lake and its recreational value including water sports, fishing, and ice fishing.  The steep valleys of the area also provide excellent snow skiing in the winter at two primary resorts: Bristol Mountain and Hunt Hollow.  Honeoye is also located near the Finger Lakes wine viticultural area.  Several parks also surround the area including: Sandy Bottom Beach and Nature Trail, Harriet Hollister-Spencer State Recreation Area, and Ontario County Park.

Honeoye was previously famous for its annual winter carnival beginning in 1961, but the carnival was discontinued after 1971 because the small community could not support the large number of patrons. In 2005, Honeoye brought back an annual event dubbed The Captain Red Beard's Feast in early September (usually Labor Day weekend.)

In the wintertime, the area is also a popular snowmobiling area, with over 100 miles of marked and partially groomed NYS Corridor snowmobile trails, connecting to the neighboring communities of Bloomfield, Hemlock, Naples, and Wayland.

Honeoye is often viewed as more of a community rather than just a hamlet.  Many residents of the area often identify themselves with Honeoye before identifying with their own town.

Media
Honeoye is served by Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo television and radio stations.  It is also included in the coverage area of the Canandaigua Daily Messenger, Rochester's Democrat & Chronicle. Honeoye has also been served by a weekly newspaper, The Honeoye Herald/The Naples Record, though publication has since ceased.

Notable people
 Helen Pitts Douglass - abolitionist, feminist, and second wife of Frederick Douglass
 Jeannette Klute - Kodak research photographer who demonstrated color photography as an art form
 Brian Kolb (R) - representative to the New York State Assembly, 129th District
 Tim Evanicki - Author, Renowned College Audition Coach, Writer of Bathhouse: The Musical!
 Sara Shields - Medical consultant for Mr Mercedes' season 2.  She also had a guest appearance in episode 3.

See also
 Finger Lakes AVA

References

External links
 Town of Richmond
 Honeoye Valley Association
 Honeoye Lake Chamber of Commerce
 Honeoye Bulldogs Boys Soccer
 Hill and Valley Riders
Honeoye Lake Webcam

Hamlets in New York (state)
Census-designated places in New York (state)
Census-designated places in Ontario County, New York
New York (state) wine
Hamlets in Ontario County, New York

Honeoye, New York


The Happy Bottom Riding Club (1935–1953), was a dude ranch, restaurant, and hotel operated by aviator Florence "Pancho" Barnes near Edwards Air Force Base in the Antelope Valley of California's Mojave Desert.  Barnes and her club were featured in Tom Wolfe's 1979 book, The Right Stuff, and its 1983 film adaptation.

Also known as the Rancho Oro Verde Fly-Inn Dude Ranch, the establishment was a favored hangout of test pilots and the Hollywood elite during the 1940s, boasting over 9,000 members worldwide at the height of its popularity. When the United States Air Force intended to buy the club via eminent domain in order to extend their runways, a long and contentious series of lawsuits ensued. Barnes eventually won the lawsuits, but after the club was destroyed by fire in the 1950s, her plans to re-open in a nearby location never came to fruition.

Establishment
In 1935, Barnes originally purchased the property where the club would later stand to grow alfalfa, raise pigs and cattle and start a dairy. As the nearby U.S. Army Air Corps base at Muroc Army Air Base  expanded in the post World War II period, the ranch's other business as a restaurant, bar, and hotel quickly outgrew its humble beginnings.  Eventually, the ranch also included a hospitality business with an all-female staff and it became a destination of choice for test pilot relaxation.

Amenities
Along with a swimming pool and a rodeo stadium, Rancho Oro Verde had an airstrip that was the first amenity Barnes created in 1935 to stay in touch with her aviator-friendly social circle from south of the San Gabriel Mountains. Visiting civilians and military men alike flew into the strip to stay at the Rancho Oro Verde, with Barnes often holding events to entertain her guests that included barbecues and a treasure hunt for 200 silver dollars.  The rodeo stadium held three-day weekend rodeos jointly sponsored by the local VFW post in Lancaster.

The original swimming pool was rectangular, and was one of the first built in the Antelope Valley, but was destroyed by the 1952 Kern County earthquake.  The replacement pool was circular and had a circular ramp which reportedly allowed Barnes to ride her horse into the pool. This later pool was modeled after one Barnes had owned in the Pasadena area. The pool was lit at night — an aid to visual air navigation.

As depicted in the book and film The Right Stuff, a tradition was started when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 and Barnes provided him with a free steak dinner. After that, pilots were given a free steak dinner when they personally broke the sound barrier for the first time. Following Yeager's achievement, the sound barrier was broken frequently from Edwards AFB in the late 1940s and early 1950s with Barnes giving free dinners multiple times during the course of a week.

Fire and sale

Despite a friendship between Barnes and the military, relations grew sour after a change of command in 1952, four years after Muroc Army Air Base became Edwards Air Force Base. One reason for friction between Barnes and the base commander was the increase in flights out of Edwards, along with an increase in flights at the club's landing strip. After he assumed command at the base, General Albert Boyd, an admirer and friend of Barnes, would berate her if her clientele came too close to military airspace and flight paths.  Allegations surfaced that the club was a brothel, something Barnes believed was connected to her refusal to sell the ranch to the government for a runway expansion.  The rules Barnes posted for hostesses were strict, and many seemed to discredit the allegations. Acting on the rumors, however, the Air Force prohibited servicemen from visiting the club, destroying the vast majority of her business.  Since she and the government were in the middle of negotiations regarding establishing a fair price for her business and property, Barnes felt betrayed by the prohibition.

When the government added a suit to appropriate the ranch, Barnes counter-sued for slander, harassment, unlawful acquisition of land, and conspiracy. The ranch was destroyed by fire on November 13, 1953, shortly before the lawsuit concluded.  Barnes ended up resettling in nearby Cantil and the land was purchased by the Air Force via eminent domain. The proposed runway expansion was never implemented.

Barnes' plans to reestablish the Happy Bottom Riding Club on her and her husband's land in Cantil never materialized.

Legacy

Along with depictions in The Right Stuff, the club was also immortalized in Lauren Kessler's biography of Barnes, The Happy Bottom Riding Club.  Barnes' life was chronicled in a 2009 documentary film for PBS member station KOCE-TV, entitled The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

A made-for-TV movie aired on the CBS television network, Pancho Barnes (1988), starring Valerie Bertinelli, featured a fictionalized version of Barnes' life and events relating to The Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Chuck Yeager, who made a cameo appearance in The Right Stuff film as the bartender of the club, stated "if all the hours were ever totaled, I reckon I spent more time at her place than in a cockpit over those years."

Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club was listed on the Promenade directory as located in section 02-111 in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Air Force personnel from Edwards hold an annual barbecue on the site of the Happy Bottom Riding Club in remembrance of Barnes and the ranch. Visitors may still see the remains of the pool, the restaurant's foundation (including chimney), and the barn. From the air, an outline of the airstrip is visible.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

 Gibson, Karen Bush. Women Aviators: 26 Stories of Pioneer Flights. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013. .
 Pelletier, Alain. High-Flying Women: A World History of Female Pilots. Sparkford, UK: Haynes, 2012. .

External links
 Happy Bottom Riding Club restaurant/bar/casino
 Pancho Barnes (estate official site). Archived from the original on June 30, 2014.

Dude ranches in the United States
Ranches in California
Resorts in California
Antelope Valley
Buildings and structures in Kern County, California
Edwards Air Force Base
History of Kern County, California
Defunct hotels in California
Demolished buildings and structures in California
Hospitality companies established in 1935
Hotels disestablished in 1953
1935 establishments in California
1953 disestablishments in California

Happy Bottom Riding Club


Frederick Earl "Fred" Exley (March 28, 1929 – June 17, 1992) was an American writer. His fictional memoir A Fan's Notes received critical acclaim and awards. He followed it up with two more fictional memoirs.

Early life and education
Exley was born (Frederic) March 28, 1929, in Watertown, New York. He was the third of four children, including a twin sister, Frances, born to Earl and Charlotte. His father, who died in 1945 when Exley was 16, was a celebrated former athlete and local basketball coach whose legacy would be a dominating influence on Exley's early life. A car accident the following year injured Exley and prevented him from graduating high school on schedule. Exley had a brief stint at Katonah High School in Katonah, New York, where he was named to the conference all-star basketball team.

Exley entered Hobart College in the pre-dental program in 1949. The next year he transferred to the University of Southern California, where he began to follow the career of fellow student and future football legend Frank Gifford. Exley avoided being drafted in 1951 when he failed his Selective Service examination on account of injuries sustained in the car accident.

In 1952, Exley dropped out of USC and moved to New York City to find employment, only to return a year later to complete a BA in English.

Early career
He returned to New York to work in public relations for New York Central Railroad. After a year there he relocated to their Chicago office, then began working for Rock Island Railroad in the same capacity. Exley soon took over as managing editor of the railroad's employee magazine, The Rocket, where his first published writing appeared.

Itinerant life and instability
Exley was institutionalized three times in the 1950s after entering an itinerant period marked by acute alcoholism, obsession with New York Giants football, mental instability and schizophrenia that was to provide much of the autobiographical material for his first book, A Fan's Notes. In 1958, Exley was admitted briefly to Stony Lodge, a private mental institution in Westchester County, New York, where he met Francena Fritz, whom he began courting. Soon after, he was admitted to Harlem Valley State Hospital, the model for the Avalon Valley facility mentioned in A Fan's Notes. It was there that Exley began writing in earnest. In 1959, he was released from Harlem Valley and married Fritz on October 31. They moved to Greenwich, Connecticut and Exley was offered a teaching position at a school in Port Chester, New York. In 1960 his first daughter, Pamela Exley, was born.

In 1961 Exley received a provisional appointment as clerk and crier of the courts in Jefferson County, New York, where a lawyer friend, Gordon Phillips (the model for "the Counselor" in A Fan's Notes), asked Exley to forge a signature on a check for one of his clients, an action that led to Phillips' disbarment.

Divorce and A Fan's Notes

In 1962, Fritz obtained a divorce from Exley at her father's request. Several years of intermittent teaching jobs in Clayton, Gouverneur, and Indian River, New York followed. His alcoholism growing worse, Exley began a decade of briefly-held jobs and institutionalization, and spent time vacationing on Singer Island in Riviera Beach, Florida, while continuing to work on A Fan's Notes. In 1964, Exley sent the completed manuscript for A Fan's Notes to Houghton Mifflin who rejected it, and to Joe Fox at Random House, who suggested an agent, Lynn Nesbit. Nesbit shopped the manuscript around and, after it was rejected by at least a dozen publishers, she finally sold it to David Segal at Harper & Row.

In 1965, Exley, then 36, met the 20-year-old Nancy Glenn while on vacation in Palm Beach Shores, Florida. She was working as a bookkeeper for The Buccaneer, her husband's resort. The following year, Glenn separated from her husband and moved in with Exley, beginning a long relationship that saw many temporary separations and reconciliations. She became pregnant while Exley was employed at The Palm Beach Posts copy desk; they married on September 13, 1967, and Glenn gave birth to Exley's second daughter, Alexandra Exley, on January 12, 1968. Exley and Glenn divorced on January 8, 1971.

A Fan's Notes was published in September 1968, and although early sales were not good, its release prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel, about a longtime failure who makes good by finally writing a memoir about his pained life, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award.

Pages From a Cold Island
In 1969, Exley moved into an apartment on 19th Street in Manhattan, spending much of his time at the Lion's Head bar at 59 Christopher Street. In 1970, Exley's mother purchased a small house in Alexandria Bay, New York and he temporarily moved in, though he still spent time in Florida working on Pages From a Cold Island. Charlotte's home was to become Exley's home base for the next 20 years. In the fall of that year he interviewed Gloria Steinem in Key Biscayne Florida. The resulting essay, entitled "Saint Gloria & the Troll", was published in Playboy in July 1974. It earned Exley an Editorial Award for the year's best nonfiction piece.

His second novel, Pages From a Cold Island, was published by Random House in 1975, to considerably less acclaim than his debut. The book primarily concerns Exley's life in Florida; an afternoon with Steinem; a semester spent teaching at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa; and an homage to the life and career of literary critic and author Edmund Wilson, who lived near Watertown at Talcottville in upstate New York.

Last Notes From Home
Exley traveled to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he began work on the final novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Last Notes From Home. In May 1977, Rolling Stone publisher and co-founder Jann Wenner paid Exley $20,000 to publish up to six excerpts of the work-in-progress. The magazine published three excerpts, in June 1977, October 1978 and February 1979. The following year, Exley's papers were acquired by collector Robert C. Stevens and donated to the University of Rochester. In 1984, Exley's major debt was temporarily relieved when he received a Guggenheim Foundation grant of $21,000. Frank Gifford, who was portrayed as a hero and object of Exley's envy in A Fan's Notes, invited Exley to attend Super Bowl XXI in Pasadena, California, where the New York Giants defeated the Denver Broncos.

Last Notes From Home was published by Random House in September 1988. The final volume in Exley's trilogy focuses on his relationship with his older brother, William, a Vietnam veteran who died in Hawaii in 1973 after a battle with cancer.

Soon after, Exley began work on a spy thriller to be titled Mean Greenwich Time, but he did not come close to completing it.

Final years and death
Exley moved in with his aunt Frances Knapp in Alexandria Bay, and became very ill while traveling to London for a journalism assignment. After falling into poor health in late 1990 and being hospitalized with congestive heart failure, Exley cared for his ailing aunt who eventually died in 1991. The following year Exley suffered two strokes and died at Edward John Noble Hospital in Alexandria Bay on June 17, 1992. His ashes were interred at Brookside Cemetery in Watertown, New York, next to his parents.

Film adaptation

A 1972 film adaptation of A Fan's Notes, directed by Eric Till and starring Jerry Orbach, was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and released in Canada, but never put into general release in the US. Exley stated that the film "bore no relationship to anything I'd written."

Posthumous recognition
A biography of Exley, Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley, by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jonathan Yardley, appeared in 1997. Yardley's central thesis is that Exley was a brilliant one-book writer. Yardley also wrote the preface to the Modern Library reissue of A Fan's Notes.

In 2010, author Brock Clarke released a novel entitled Exley. In the novel, the main character, Miller, is obsessed with Exley. Entertainment Weekly gave the novel a B+ and stated: "Frederick Exley's classic 1968 account of his epic alcoholism, A Fan's Notes, bears the oxymoronic subtitle 'A Fictional Memoir.' It is the space between those words, between real and fabricated memory, that Clarke examines. . .  With humor as black as Exley's liver, Clarke picks apart the fictions we tell one another — and those we tell ourselves."

Also in 2010, and in part in recognition of Clarke's novel, Alex Kudera began a series of interviews with novelists on the topic of Exley and his influence on their work. His first interview was with Eleanor Henderson, whose Ten Thousand Saints went on to be named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times. He has also interviewed The Funny Man author John Warner, among others.

In 2012, Matthew Ricke and Brandon Chamberlin opened a bar called "the Exley" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, named after the author of their favorite book, A Fan's Notes.

Bibliography

Novels
A Fan's Notes (1968, Harper & Row)
Pages From a Cold Island (1975, Random House)
Last Notes From Home (1988, Random House)

Articles
"He's a Pro," SPORT, July 1969 (excerpt from A Fan's Notes).
"Poem from a Man at Middle Age," Esquire, May 1973.
"Good-bye, Edmund Wilson," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1974 (excerpt from Pages from a Cold Island).
"Saint Gloria & the Troll," Playboy, July 1974 (excerpt from Pages from a Cold Island).
"To Oahu with the 'Wild Geese'," Rolling Stone, June 30, 1977 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
Letter to the editor about William Styron in Esquire, April 11, 1978.
"James Seamus Finbarr O'Twoomey," Rolling Stone, October 5, 1978 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
"Ms. Robin Glenn," Rolling Stone, February 22, 1979 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
"A Fan's Notes Goes to Super Bowl XIII," Inside Sports, October 1979.
Review of Bill Barich's Laughing in the Hills, for New York, August 11, 1980.
Review of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, for New York, April 13, 1981.
"Holding Penalties Build Men," Inside Sports, November 1981.
"A Case for Backing Cincinnati – and for Ice Fishing," New York Times, January 24, 1982.
"Just Who Is 'the Game' in Professional Football?" New York Times, August 22, 1982.
"Football '83: Side Lines," Rolling Stone, September 15, 1983.
"The Natural," GQ, February 1984.
"The Laureate of Alexandria Bay," Esquire, March 1986.
"Brother in Arms," Rolling Stone, July 17 and 31, 1986 (excerpt from Last Notes from Home).
"A Fan's Note," American Film, September 1986.
"The Giants Will Fail and Here's Why," New York Times, November 30, 1986.
"A Fan's Further Notes," Esquire, June 1987.
Article (title unknown, about Alexandria Bay fishermen) for Adirondack Life, ca. 1989.
"Women and Football," The Cable Guide, November 1989.
"If Nixon Could Possess the Soul of this Woman, Why the Hell Can't I?" Esquire, December 1989.
"Tell 'em Frankie's here," The Sunday Correspondent, London, July 1, 1990.
"The Last Great Saloon" (about The Lion's Head saloon) for GQ, December 1990.
"Exley's Last Notes," Esquire, August 1993 (posthumous extract from unfinished spy novel).

References

External links
 Exley's papers at the University of Rochester

1929 births
1992 deaths
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American essayists
American male essayists
American male novelists
20th-century American memoirists
People from Katonah, New York
People from Watertown, New York
People with schizophrenia
University of Southern California alumni
20th-century American male writers
Novelists from New York (state)
People from Jefferson County, New York

Frederick Exley


Jamshed Akhtar (born 1947, Faizabad, India) is an Indian writer and researcher. He graduated from Aligarh Muslim University, India, in 1969, with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He is involved in the scientific study of religion and has written two books on this topic.

Books
His first book The Ultimate Revelations, published in 1996, is probably the  only Science fiction in the world with Quran as the central topic.
The book outlines his research related to the possibility of coded information in Quran. It was well covered by almost all the major newspapers of India  and UAE (Times of India - Feb 23rd, 1997, The Sunday Observer - May 18–24, 1997, The Hindu -
July 7, 1997, Islamic Voice - Feb 23rd, 1997, Khaleej Times - May 2, 1998, Gulf News - May 1, 1998). In UAE, the book was presented at 'The Book Mall' by Shaikha Azza, daughter of HH Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah (Gulf News).

In 2010, his second book, a non-fiction, In Search of Our Origins has been published. This book presents his research on the origins of life and man in the light of revelations from Quran.

Talk on Noah
In 1998, Akhtar presented a talk on the time, place and source of Noah's Flood, and a possible location of Noah's Ark, combining pointers from Quran with scientific findings. This paper was presented in a workshop jointly organized by Muslim Association for Advancement of Science (MAAS) and Centre for Studies on Sciences (CSOS) at Khandala.

Institute of Revealed Knowledge
Akhtar has established an online Institute of Revealed Knowledge  to collaborate with other researchers of different faiths and to initiate collective investigation of the information in revelations through a panel of linguists, science historians and scientists of various disciplines.

Literacy Drive
Apart from the study on Quran, he is also involved in promoting literacy among rural children of Faizabad, India. He is the Founder Trustee of 'Foundation for Social Care', and President of Faiz-e-Aam Muslim Educational Society. Faiz-e-Aam in association with AFMI was responsible for Faizabad Literacy Project, which has been hailed as a model educational scheme.

Project IMDAAD
In 2002, in collaboration with Institute of Objective Studies (IOS), Jamshed Akhtar designed and initiated Project IMDAAD to connect Muslim primary schools and mosques all over India with the Internet. Its objective was to disseminate information on education, health, business and awareness, and to collect feedback from the masses.

Bibliography

 The Ultimate Revelations (1996) - Science Fiction
 Project IMDAAD (2002)
 Faizabad Literacy Project (2004) - Documentary by Jamshed Akhtar
 In Search of Our Origins (2010), revised and updated (April 2012) - Non Fiction

References

External links
 Official website
 Documentary - Faizabad Literacy Project
 Blog - In Search Of Our Origins
 Blog - The Ultimate Revelations

1947 births
Indian religious writers
Living people

Jamshed Akhtar


The mantle is a significant part of the anatomy of molluscs: it is the dorsal body wall which covers the organs of digestion, reproduction and movement.

In many, but not all, species of molluscs, the epidermis (skin) of the mantle secretes calcium carbonate and conchiolin, and creates a shell.

The word mantle means cloak or cape, and does often resemble a cloak. The edges of the mantle may extend far beyond the main part of the body, forming flaps, double-layered structures adapted for many different uses, including for example, the siphon.

The mantle cavity
The mantle cavity is a central feature of molluscan biology. This cavity is formed by the mantle skirt, a double fold of mantle which encloses a water space. This space contains the mollusc's gills, anus, and organs for taste, excretion and reproductive organs.

The mantle cavity functions as a respiratory chamber in all molluscs. In bivalves it is usually part of the feeding structure. In some mollusks the mantle cavity is a brood chamber, and in cephalopods and some bivalves such as scallops, it is a locomotory organ.

The mantle is highly muscular. In cephalopods the contraction of the mantle is used to force water through a tubular siphon, and this propels the animal rapidly through the water. In other molluscs, it is used as a kind of "foot" for locomotion.

Molluscs
Animal anatomy

Mantle (mollusc)


Debabrata Biswas (also known as George Biswas and George-da;  22 August 1911 – 18 August 1980),  was an Indian Rabindra Sangeet singer.

Early life
Biswas was born in 1911 in Barisal and then later came to Kishoreganj of Mymensingh district of British colonial undivided Bengal province of India. It was the time when King George V was visiting India for the Delhi Durbar, so he was nicknamed George. He was popularly called George Biswas and George Da.

Career
Biswas' music was notable for its exceptional depth of emotional expression combined with an exploration of the subtle dramatic element in Tagore's lyrics. His early gramophone recordings of Tagore songs brought out in the early 1940s demonstrate soulful full-throated expression of melody with a strict adherence to the rules and norms of tradition, written and unwritten, which he felt obliged to break in the early 1960s – considered by most to be his heyday up to the year 1969. His renderings in this period show amazing power of voice and modulation, compounded with an overt emotional expression of a kind hitherto unpractised by his contemporaries and even himself. His voice at this period ranged at ease within the three octaves and with varied tempos and rhythms and showed a greater variety of emotional expression from the thunderous and rumbling to the soft and mellow. Somewhat audacious and overpowering in his personal feelings and mores, his enunciation of the words of even the most familiar of Tagore's lyrics extracted new meanings and freshness from the compositions. Some of his renditions that go deep into the heart of Bengalis include Akash bhora surjo tara, Purano sei diner kotha, E monihar amay nahi saje, Klanti amar khoma koro probhu, Je ratey mor duarguli, Tomar kache e bor magi, Chokher joler laglo joar, Swapne amar mone holo, among others.

Biswas is the only singer who sang Rabindra Sangeet in Sanskrit, English, German, French, and Russian. He got trained at Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata for learning the rudiments of foreign languages.

Filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak took help of  Biswas for song selection & playback of Tagore songs. Those Tagore songs used in the movies became extremely popular among the masses.
Debabrata Biswas was actively engaged with IPTA group for a long period. He sang a few songs set to music by Salil Choudhury, Hemanga Biswas, Jyotirindra Moitra and recorded songs during the liberation movement of Bangladesh. Kazi Nazrul Islam himself was the trainer when Debabrata recorded songs by Nazrul.

Conflict
Authoritarian eyebrows started to be raised from 1964 onwards with the liberties he started taking by challenging the published tune-notations, scansion, traditional tempo, beat and rhythms which people were accustomed to associating with Tagore lyrics, as well as with his inclination towards the use of Western musical instruments for the purposes of accompaniment and interlude –  an obsession that remained with him till his death. He challenged the sensibilities of Tagore song listeners with the use of the Spanish guitar, the saxophone, the clarinet, the piano and the cello along with the sitar, the sarod, the esraj and the violin; and all this in the name of 'interpretation' and 'freedom of expression'.  His popularity swelled beyond bounds with the masses, young and old –  connoisseurs and dilettante alike for, despite these excesses, the power and intrinsic purity of style and spirit of his renditions were unparalleled.

In the later part of the 1960s, Debabrata was seriously challenged by the authorities over his audacious style and quite a number of his records were prohibited from commercial production for reasons attributed to wrong spirit, wrong tempo and other melodic excesses not regarded as harmonious to the purity of Tagore compositions.  Although initially he did brace himself to meet the challenge, he retreated later and on his own volition stopped all record production. As further controversy fuelled, his public live performances continued with an ever- increasing demand but with age (now he was 60) and a declining voice and his lifelong asthma affliction, he withdrew from public appearance, venting his anguish and frustrations in his autobiographical reflections : Bratya Janer Ruddha Sangit (or The Stifled Music of an Untouchable), published in 1979, a year before his death on 18 August 1980.

Personal life

A bachelor, a teetotaller, an excellent cook, a visitor to the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, a traditionalist at heart yet posing as a bohemian in a tongue-in-cheek style, and by any standards an eccentric, he lived a simple, modest and spartan life at his rented flat in South Calcutta, retiring in 1971 from the Life Insurance Corporation of India where he held a clerical position throughout his tenure; this, despite his being a post-graduate in economics from the Calcutta University. A confirmed communist throughout his life, he held his party membership with the Communist Party of India till the mid-1950s. However, he was hurt at the fact that a conflict had arisen among the core groups of the Communist Party itself. Hence, when Communist Party of India (Marxist) was formed, he was in a confused state. However, he remained in touch with the communist party till his death. In one of his memoirs he has said: "When the party got divided into two sections, I was confused, because I was attached to the members of both, Communist Party of India or CPI, as well as the newly formed Communist Party of India (Marxist). So, I decided to remain away from active politics. However, I must confess that I have been lucky to get the true love of all the members of both the wings of the communist party all through my life."

Apart from Rabindrasangeet, he is known to have held the masses spellbound with his booming and baritone voice singing Ganasangit  or Peoples' Songs in party gatherings, meetings and plenary sessions up to the mid-1950s. He remains one of the towering personalities of the peak era of Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), as a cultural delegate of which he visited China twice in the early 1950s with other great cultural luminaries from India. He recorded his experiences with China in a well-written but somewhat simplistic and naive book titled Antaranga Chin  or China of My Heart.

A broad-hearted man of caustic humour even to the point of self-mockery, buffoonery and feigned frivolity, he was fond of sketching and often gave drawings along with autographs. One such signature features himself praying to Tagore  and another showing Tagore hitting a sixer with a cricket bat. Immensely popular as he was, he had shunned the press and the media all his life, not even allowing his own photographs or career history on blurbs or record covers.

He lent his voice to a number of films and after his death was the subject of a documentary film by his name, based on archival footage and interviews.

To this day, he remains the most popular exponent of the art of Rabindra Sangeet, a model of orthodoxy when orthodox, and an icon of protest against the establishment, organized media and cultural dictatorship when breaking away from the orthodox. Even after 40 years from his passing away, his popularity remains supreme cutting across fan base.

His legacy:
Debabrata Biswas's younger sister, Lalita Biswas was an accomplished singer with very similar vocal qualities and a strong theatrical personality with IPTA. The family is known to be reformers and have contributed to the upliftment of the societal challenges at the time. Her sons, Kumar Shankar Chakraborti and Jati Shankar Chakraborti among the four children, were particularly close their uncle. They were Georgeda's wards and were musically highly talented. They were trained by the master himself. Kumar Shankar succumbed to a heart condition at a very young age despite all efforts by Georgeda. Jati Shankar was known to have a very similar vocal quality as Debabrata Biswas. He did not pursue music professionally but more as a passion project. He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Georgeda's nieces were also very talented. The legacy of Debabrata Biswas lives one with his grand-children who have continued to build their lives with the performing arts. The legacy is more to do with the joy of the art and the creative process rather than just the fame and glory. Georgeda's personality, his honesty and his love for music made him a legend.

References

External links
Biography at debabratabiswas.in

1911 births
1980 deaths
Bengali singers
People from West Bengal
Singers from Kolkata
University of Calcutta alumni
Rabindra Sangeet exponents
20th-century Indian male singers
20th-century Indian singers

Debabrata Biswas


Trevi (Latin: Trebiae), an old town and comune of Italy, in the province of Perugia in east central Umbria, 42°53N 12°45E, at 424 meters (1391 ft) above sea-level on the lower part of Mt. Serano above the wide plain of the Clitunno river. It is 10 km (6 mi) S.S.E. of Foligno and 20 km (12 mi) N. of Spoleto. The 2003 count of people by the government said that there were 7800 people living in the comune: about half of the people live in the town and the other people live in the country near town. The frazioni of Trevi (the smaller towns that belong to Trevi) are Borgo, Bovara, Cannaiola, Coste, Pigge, Manciano, Matigge, Parrano, Picciche, S. Lorenzo, S. Maria in Valle.

Most of the town is densely built with many buildings predating the 18th century. It crowns a summit and when one is in the centre the streets are mostly gently sloping. From the town one can see one of the best views in Umbria, over 50 km (30 mi) to the west and on clear days as far as Perugia to the north and even Monte Amiata in southern Tuscany. On the main train route from Rome to Ancona there is a station at the botton of Monte Serano servicing Trevi but the rapid Intercity services do not stop. The train service from Florence to Rome by way of Perugia also stops there: Local bus connections are not frequent. Trevi is a pleasant place to visit and of recent accommodation and good eating has become available; there are few restaurants, but they are good and more numerous than in other nearby small towns.

History

In Roman times, Pliny the Elder said Trevi was a city of the old Umbrians, and an old stone with Umbrian writing was found in the comune, at Bovara, in the 1950s. "Treviae" is also listed in the 5th‑century Bordeaux Itinerary. We do not know the history of Trevi in very old times, although some walls in the center part of the town on the hill are as old as the 1st century BC. Trevi started to spread out away from the hill during the time of the Empire, when Hadrian fixed the main road in the area, the Via Flaminia; this made a small town in the plain grow, at a place now called Pietrarossa. For hundreds of years people have been finding old things there: there were Roman baths that people were probably using in the time of St. Francis, who came here and told people to bathe in them.

In old times people say that Trevi ruled the valley below it, all the way to the Colli Martani, the line of mountains that run down the middle of Umbria. Trevi had a bishop until the 11th century, and was an important place belonging to the Lombards (in Italian, a gastaldato). At the beginning of the 13th century, Trevi made itself independent and became a free commune. It often fought on the side of Perugia to defend itself against nearby Spoleto, and fought wars with other communes in the area, winning some and losing some. It was invaded by Spoleto in the 14th century and by the Trinci, rulers of Foligno. In 1438 Trevi became part of the lands belonging to the Church as part of the "legation" of Perugia: after that Trevi's history was as part of the States of the Church, then (1860) of the united Kingdom of Italy.

Trevi was at its most prosperous in the 15th century: the town was so important for those who wanted to buy and sell that people called it "il porto secco" — the dry port. In 1470, with Foligno, Trevi became the fourth town in Italy to have a printing press, managed by the first known printing company. Many big renaissance palazzi of the town indicate the contemporaneous prosperity.

Important old buildings
Trevi is inside two walls of the Middle Ages; at the end of the 20th century, people found that the inside walls were Roman.

Trevi has about twenty old churches, some of which are interesting:
 the Duomo Sant' Emiliano, a Romanesque building: it has a carved door and the back of the church has more sculpture. The inside of the church was fixed in the 18th century and does not look old.
 the Madonna delle Lacrime, a church from the Middle Ages, for monks, with big wall paintings painted to thank God for good things. The best painting is the Adoration of the Magi by Perugino: it is the last painting he put his name and the date on.
 S. Martino, has old Lombard stones and good paintings by Mezzastris
 S. Francesco, a large Gothic building. It is now a museum.

The country area around the town has many Romanesque churches: some of those on the plain were built on the Roman Via Flaminia and indicate the road's former route. Some of the stone in these churches is old Roman and derives from buildings long gone.

Museums
Trevi's big museum is the Museo S. Francesco, next to the Gothic church S. Francesco, which is not used for worship any more. It has a few Roman stones, but mostly many Umbrian paintings from the late Middle Ages to the 17th century: the best painting once was part of an altar, and it is by Lo Spagna. There is a very interesting group of "ex‑votos" (paintings to thank God for saving a person from a sickness or an accident) painted by ordinary people, not famous artists, of the 16th‑ century to the 18th‑century.

The Museo della Civiltà dell' Olivo demonstrates the local olive culture: how they are planted, how they grow, and how they are made into oil. The Flash Art Museum is dedicated to contemporary art and is the seat of an international art magazine.

Books to learn more about Trevi
The oldest big book on the history of Trevi is Historia universale dello Stato temporale ed ecclesiastico di Trevi, 1233 pages, by Durastante Natalucci, Trevi, 1745. It was translated into a more modern and readable Italian by Carlo Zenobi, a local historian, between 1987 and 1994.
An important book for the plain below Trevi is Cannaiola, Memorie storiche raccolte negli anni 1873‑74 by Father (now the Blessed) Pietro Bonilli.

Pro Trevi, the town's volunteer tourism office, has helped people write and print new books about the history, plants and animals of Trevi and the country nearby.

Other websites
 Official Site
 Trevi Tourist Office (Pro Trevi)
 Bill Thayer's site

Towns in Perugia

Trevi


A prism is a special piece of glass, crystal, or plastic that bends light. The light bends (or refracts) because it moves slower in the glass, crystal or plastic than it does in air. If different colors of light move at different speeds, each color bends a different amount. This is dispersion and it splits the light into a band of different colors called a spectrum. This spectrum has the same colors as a rainbow does, because rainbows are made the same way, by bending light. They happen when light is bent by tiny drops of water floating in the air. If the light does not come out when you shine it into the prism, it is called internal reflection.

Some prisms are used to disperse light. Binoculars also use prisms, to reflect light. This lets the tubes of the binoculars be short. Some cameras use a prism to send light to the viewfinder, so the photographer can see what will be photographed.

Optics

Prism (optics)


Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (; pronounced rahk-MAH-nin-off) was a famous Russian composer and pianist. He was born on April 1, 1873 (N.S.) and died on March 28, 1943. Because the Russian language uses a different alphabet his name is sometimes spelled in different ways in English ("Sergei" or "Sergey", and "Rachmaninoff", "Rachmaninov", "Rakhmaninov" or "Rakhmaninoff"). "Sergei Rachmaninoff" is the way he spelled his own name when he was in the United States.

Rachmaninoff is considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He could play extremely difficult music and had very large hands, so that he could play chords with large stretches. It is said that he could play a 13th. Rachmaninoff was a very tall man for his times, standing about . Rachmaninoff is also considered a great composer, writing very well in the Romantic style, even though he lived most of his adult life in the 1900s, whereas the Romantic style period is usually said to have ended around 1910. His music is characterized by lyrical melodies that are very memorable. His piano compositions are among the most difficult to play in the keyboard.

Life
Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, near Novgorod in the north-west of Russia. Members of his family were important people who had been in the service of the tsars of Russia. His parents played the piano and arranged for him to have piano lessons in Saint Petersburg and then Moscow.

While he was still a student he wrote a short opera called Aleko. He also wrote some piano pieces including a Prelude in C sharp minor with loud, heavy chords. This piece became extremely famous and is still very popular today. He used to get fed up with people asking him to play the piece.

Not all his music was well-liked at first. The critics thought his First Symphony was very bad. This may have been because the orchestra played it so badly some of Rachmaninoff's friends thought the conductor was drunk, but the public reaction made Rachmaninoff compose a lot less for a while. After some years of feeling depressed he wrote his Second Piano Concerto which everybody liked very much, and is one of his most popular pieces.

Rachmaninoff became happier. He was allowed to marry Natalia after years of engagement during which the Russian Orthodox Church did not want them to be married. The political conditions in Russia were bad so he lived in Germany and Italy for a time. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he left his country and never returned. He had been very successful with his Third Piano Concerto in the United States, so he went to live in the United States in 1918. Russia had become the Soviet Union and for many years Rachmaninoff's music was not allowed to be performed there. This worried him a lot and he felt homesick. He did not write very much music during the rest of his life in the United States. One work that did become very popular was the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini which he wrote in Switzerland in 1934. He died of melanoma in Beverly Hills, California.

Music
Rachmaninoff's piano music is mostly difficult to play. He wrote many short pieces called preludes, and some studies which are considered to be very hard. As well as the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini he wrote four piano concertos. The Second and Third are very popular today, as is his Second Symphony. The second concerto reaches the lowest C on the piano, making it one of the lowest pieces of music (this is lower than a bass, which goes down to D).

He wrote some very beautiful choral music which includes a piece for choir and orchestra called The Bells and a very long, religious work called the All-Night Vigil (sometimes called the Vespers).

He wrote some chamber music including a cello sonata.

There are several excellent recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own music. Most of these are available now on CD reissues.

Other websites
 Sergei Rachmaninoff Site

References

20th-century composers
Cancer deaths in Los Angeles County, California
Deaths from melanoma
Romantic composers
Russian composers
Russian pianists
1873 births
1943 deaths

Sergei Rachmaninoff


A micrometre (the American spelling is micrometer; symbol is µm) is a unit of length in the SI measurement system. It can also be called a micron. It is one millionth of a metre. A micrometre is often used as a measurement for small things like bacteria. Like the Angstrom it is used for radiation in or near the visible spectrum.

Units of length
SI units

Micrometre


Fax (short for facsimile),  or telecopying, is the transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device.

The original document is scanned with a fax machine (or a telecopier), which turns the contents (text or images) into a bitmap, then the bitmap is sent through the telephone system. The receiving fax machine reconverts the coded image, printing a paper copy.

Businesses usually have some kind of fax system, but the technology has faced increasing competition from Internet-based methods. Fax machines still retain some advantages, particularly in the transmission of sensitive material which, if sent over the internet, may be intercepted. However, encryption (a secret coding system) can make internet messages secure.

In some countries, because electronic signatures on contracts are not recognized by law while faxed contracts with copies of signatures are, fax machines enjoy continuing support in business.

In many businesses, standalone fax machines have been replaced by fax servers which receive and store incoming faxes electronically. The servers route them to users on paper or via a secure email. Such systems reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary printouts and reducing the number of inbound phone lines needed by an office.

History

Wire transmission
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received the first fax patent in 1843.  Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated a telefax machine. The Pantelegraph was invented by the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli  He introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyons in 1865, some 11 years before the invention of telephones.

In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the scanning phototelegraph that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing. Around 1900, German physicist Arthur Korn invented the Bildtelegraph. It became widely used in continental Europe after a wanted-person photograph was transmitted from Paris to London in 1908. Its main competitors were the Bélinograf by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s the Hellschreiber, invented in 1929 by German inventor Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission.

Transmission by landline was replaced by radiotransmission, and from  1960 by satellite transmission. Digital systems are now universal. Faster, more efficient and cheaper fax machines have allowed even small companies to own a fax machine. The technology is now world-wide.

References

Telecommunications

Fax


The Dicalydones were mentioned by the 4th century writer Ammianus Marcellinus as one of the two branches of the Picti, the Picts, the inhabitants of modern-day Scotland (the other being the Verturiones).

The name bears a striking resemblance to the other historical nomenclature donated to the Picts by classical historians, Caledonii.  Some scholars theorize that the two groups (Dicalydones and Caledonii) are one and the same, and that the other major Pictish tribes, related by Ptolemy as the Vacomagi, Venicones, and Taezali, eventually went on to form the Maeatae mentioned by Cassius Dio. Other archaic accounts, which mention the Caledonii and Maeatae as the two major Pictish tribes, would seem to corroborate this hypothesis.

References
Isabel Henderson, The Picts, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1967.
F.T. Wainwright, Editor, The Problem of the Picts, First Greenwood Reprinting, New York, 1970.

Historical Celtic peoples
Picts

Dicalydones


Interventional radiology is defined as the branch of medicine that diagnoses and treats a wide range of diseases using actions that are performed through the skin (for example an injection) or carried out with the least damage by x-rays, sonography, and so on.

Some of these procedures are done only for diagnostic purposes, while others are done for treatment purposes. Images are used to direct these procedures, which are usually done with needles or other tiny instruments like small tubes called catheters. The images provide road maps that allow the Interventional Radiologist to guide these instruments through the body to the areas containing diseases.

Medicine

Interventional Radiology


Ogden Nicholas Rood (3 February 1831 in Danbury, Connecticut – 12 November 1902 in Manhattan) was an American physicist best known for his work in color theory.

Career
At age 18, Rood became a student at Yale University, but after his sophomore year he transferred to Princeton University (then called the College of New Jersey), where he received his baccalaureate degree in 1852. For the next two years he was successively a graduate student at Yale University, an assistant at the University of Virginia, and an assistant to Benjamin Silliman. In 1854–1858, he lived in Germany, dividing his time between oil painting and academic studies in Berlin and Munich, working in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig. In 1858, shortly before returning to the U.S.A., he married Mathilde Prunner of Munich. In 1858 he joined the faculty of the short-lived Troy University. After the closure of Troy University in 1861, and after a one year absence from the academic world, he attained an appointment as Chair of Physics at Columbia University, a position he held from 1863 until his death. In 1865 Rood was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1869 he became a vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1880.

Legacy
In his book on color theory, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (published in 1879, with German and French translations appearing in 1880 and 1881, respectively) Rood divided color into three constants: purity, luminosity, and hue—equivalent to James Clerk Maxwell's tint, shade, and hue.
As an amateur artist, Rood was a member of the American Watercolor Society. In 1874 he gave two lectures to the National Academy of Design in New York on "Modern Optics in Painting". Along with Maxwell and Michel Eugène Chevreul, Rood's work was an influence on the Impressionist artists and their successors. The painter Camille Pissarro defined the aim of the Neo-Impressionists in a letter: "To seek a modern synthesis of methods based on science, that is, based on M. Chevreul's theory of colour and on the experiments of Maxwell and the measurements of N.O. Rood."

Rood's theory of contrasting colors was particularly influential on Georges-Pierre Seurat, the founder of Neo-Impressionism and the foremost Pointillist. Rood suggested that small dots or lines of different colors, when viewed from a distance, would blend into a new color. He believed that the complementary colors of his color wheel, when applied in pairs by the artist, would enhance the presence of a painting: "... paintings, made up almost entirely of tints that by themselves seem modest and far from brilliant, often strike us as being rich and gorgeous in colour, while, on the other hand, the most gaudy colours can easily be arranged so as to produce a depressing effect on the beholder.". William Innes Homer considered Seurat was influenced by passages in Ogden Rood's Students' Text-book of Color; Or, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry.

In his 1912 Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, Robert Ridgway named four colors for Rood: Rood's Blue, Rood's Brown, Rood's Lavender, and Rood's Violet.

Notes

References
 Harrison, Charles, et al. (1998).  Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishing. .
 Pool, Phoebe (1991) [1985]. Impressionism. London: Thames and Hudson. .
 Rood, Ogden (1881) [1879]. Students' Text-book of Color; Or, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

External links

 Ogden Rood (1879) Modern chromatics - digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library

American physicists
1831 births
1902 deaths
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Yale University alumni
Princeton University alumni

Ogden Rood


The United States Army Medical Unit (1956–1969) –  a now defunct medical research unit for biodefense – was at Fort Detrick, Maryland, US. In contrast to the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (1943–1969), also at Fort Detrick, the USAMU's mission was purely to develop defensive measures against bio-agents, as opposed to weapons development. The USAMU was the predecessor to today's USAMRIID.

History
The U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU or AMU) was originally established on 20 June 1956 as a separate Class II activity under the jurisdiction of Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC). The first USAMU commander was Col. William D. Tigertt. One of the USAMU's first responsibilities was to oversee all aspects of Project CD-22, the exposure of volunteers to aerosols containing a highly pathogenic strain of Coxiella burnetii, the causal agent of Q fever. One pre-existing research project, Operation Whitecoat (1954–1973), outlasted the USAMU. (It was a medical research program using volunteer enlisted personnel – all conscientious objectors.) General Order 9, dated 29 September 1958, Office of The Surgeon General, assigned the USAMU to Headquarters, U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC). In 1961, Col. Dan Crozier assumed command of the USAMU. Modern principles of biosafety and biocontainment were pioneered at Fort Detrick throughout the 1960s by a number of scientists led by Arnold G. Wedum. General Order No. 6, dated 27 January 1969, Office of The Surgeon General, redesignated the USAMU as the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) still assigned to USAMRDC.

See also
United States biological defense program
List of former United States Army medical units

Research institutes established in 1956
1969 disestablishments in the United States
Closed installations of the United States Army
Closed research facilities of the United States Army
Closed medical research facilities of the United States Army
Army, Infectious Diseases
Biological warfare facilities
Fort Detrick

United States Army Medical Unit