Neo-Stalinism is the promotion of positive views of Joseph Stalin's role in history, the partial re-establishing of Stalin's policies on certain or all issues and nostalgia for the Stalin period. Neo-Stalinism overlaps significantly with neo-Sovietism and Soviet nostalgia. Various definitions of the term have been given over the years.

Neo-Stalinism is being actively promoted by Eurasianist currents in various post-Soviet states and official rehabilitation of Stalin has occurred in Russia under Vladimir Putin. Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an influential neo-Stalinist ideologue in Russian elite circles, has praised Stalin as the "greatest personality in Russian history", comparing him to Ivan the Terrible who established the Tsardom of Russia.

Definitions

The American Trotskyist Hal Draper used "neo-Stalinism" in 1948 to refer to a new political ideology—new development in Soviet policy, which he defined as a reactionary trend whose beginning was associated with the Popular front period of the mid-1930s, writing: "The ideologists of neo-Stalinism are merely the tendrils shot ahead by the phenomena – fascism and Stalinism – which outline the social and political form of a neo-barbarism".

During the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) distinguished between Stalinism and neo-Stalinism in that "[t]he Soviet leaders have not reverted to two extremes of Stalin's ruleone-man dictatorship and mass terror. For this reason, their policy deserves the label "neo-Stalinist" rather than "Stalinist".

Katerina Clark, describing an anti-Khrushchev, pro-Stalin current in Soviet literary world during the 1960s, described the work of "neo-Stalinist" writers as harking back to "the Stalin era and its leaders... as a time of unity, strong rule and national honor". According to historian Roy Medvedev, writing in 1975, the term describes the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin, identification with him and the associated political system, nostalgia for the Stalinist period in Russia's history, restoration of Stalinist policies and a return to the administrative terror of the Stalinist period while avoiding some of the worst excesses. Academic Katerina Clark defines Neo-Stalinism as praising "the Stalin era and its leaders... as a time of unity, strong rule and national honor".

Political geographer Denis J. B. Shaw, writing in 1999, considered the Soviet Union as neo-Stalinist until the post-1985 period of transition to capitalism. He identified neo-Stalinism as a political system with planned economy and highly developed military–industrial complex.

Philosopher Frederick Copleston, writing in 2003, portrays neo-Stalinism as a "Slavophile emphasis on Russia and her history", saying that "what is called neo-Stalinism is not exclusively an expression of a desire to control, dominate, repress and dragoon; it is also the expression of a desire that Russia, while making use of western science and technology, should avoid contamination by western 'degenerate' attitudes and pursue her own path".

According to former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, using the term in 2006, it more broadly refers to a moderated Stalinist state without large-scale repressions, but with persecution of political opponents and total control of all political activities in the country.

Stalinism and anti-Stalinism
In his monograph Reconsidering Stalinism, historian Henry Reichman discusses differing and evolving perspectives on the use of the term Stalinism, saying that "in scholarly usage 'Stalinism' describes here a movement, there an economic, political, or social system, elsewhere a type of political practice or belief-system". He references historian Stephen Cohen's work reassessing Soviet history after Stalin as a "continuing tension between anti-Stalinist reformism and neo-Stalinist conservatism", observing that such a characterization requires a "coherent" definition of Stalinismwhose essential features Cohen leaves undefined.

Alleged neo-Stalinist régimes
Some historians and political scientists have classified the régime of Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965–1989) as "neo-Stalinist". Albanian leader Enver Hoxha (in power 1943 to 1985) described himself as neo-Stalinist, and his ideology - Hoxhaism - features some Stalinist elements. After Stalin's death (1953), Hoxha denounced Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev and accused him of revisionism in the mid-1950s - the differences eventually caused Albania to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact in 1968.

The Khalq regime in Afghanistan (April 1978 – December 1979) has been described as neo-Stalinist with its leader Hafizullah Amin, who kept a portrait of Joseph Stalin on his desk. When Soviet officials criticized him for his brutality, Amin replied "Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country." Its policies shocked the country and contributed to starting the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979-1989 and subsequent Afghan Civil War.

Some Western sources have characterised North Korea as a neo-Stalinist state; North Korea adopted a modified Marxism–Leninism into Juche as its official ideology in the 1970s, with references to Marxism–Leninism altogether scrapped from the revised state constitution in 1992, following by references to communism in 2009.

Ba'athist Syria has long been considered to be a neo-Stalinist state; when Hafez al-Assad established a police state modelled after Stalin's rule during 1970s. Assad's military dictatorship borrowed many features of Stalinism; such as a brutal security apparatus operating extrajudicially, mass-surveillance in the society through an invasive secret police and a pervasive state-sponsored personality cult centred around the ruling family. Assad dynasty ruled Syria by vicious methods of violence throughout its reign, characterized by state terror, massacres, aerial bombing of cities, military clampdowns, etc.; which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

In the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, Georgi Malenkov, one of the new leadership group (Premier of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1955), also headlined new ideologies. He publicly began to advocate for peace and wanted to reduce tensions by negotiating Cold-War issues, and expressing a desire to get along with the West. He called for meetings between the East and West in hopes of reducing forces in Europe, while also advocating for a settlement of the Korean situation and for German reunification. Compare the discussion of the Soviet Union and of post-Soviet Russia below.

Some socialist groups like the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers' Liberty characterise modern China as "neo-Stalinist". By the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov non-communist regime was sometimes considered a neo-Stalinist one, especially in respect of Niyazov's cult of personality. Islam Karimov's non-communist authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan from 1989 to 2016 has also been described as "neo-Stalinist".

Soviet Union
In February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality surrounding his predecessor Joseph Stalin and condemned crimes committed during the Great Purge. Khrushchev gave his four-hour speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", condemning the Stalin regime. Historian Robert V. Daniels holds that "neo-Stalinism prevailed politically for more than a quarter of a century after Stalin himself left the scene". Following the Trotskyist comprehension of Stalin's policies as a deviation from the path of Marxism–Leninism, George Novack described Khrushchev's politics as guided by a "neo-Stalinist line", its principle being that "the socialist forces can conquer all opposition even in the imperialist centers, not by the example of internal class power, but by the external power of Soviet example", explaining as such: "Khrushchev's innovations at the Twentieth Congress... made official doctrine of Stalin's revisionist practices [as] the new program discards the Leninist conception of imperialism and its corresponding revolutionary class struggle policies." American broadcasts into Europe during the late 1950s described a political struggle between the "old Stalinists" and "the neo-Stalinist Khrushchev".

In October 1964, Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who remained in office until his death in November 1982. During his reign, Stalin's controversies were de-emphasized. Andres Laiapea connects this with "the exile of many dissidents, especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn", though whereas Laiapea writes that "[t]he rehabilitation of Stalin went hand in hand with the establishment of a personality cult around Brezhnev". Political sociologist Viktor Zaslavsky characterizes Brezhnev's period as one of "neo-Stalinist compromise" as the essentials of the political atmosphere associated with Stalin were retained without a personality cult. According to Alexander Dubček, "[t]he advent of Brezhnev's regime heralded the advent of neo-Stalinism, and the measures taken against Czechoslovakia in 1968 were the final consolidation of the neo-Stalinist forces in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and other countries".American political scientist Seweryn Bialer has described Soviet policy as turning towards neo-Stalinism after Brezhnev's death.

After Mikhail Gorbachev took over in March 1985, he introduced the policy of glasnost in public discussions to liberalize the Soviet system. Within six years, the Soviet Union fell apart. Still, Gorbachev admitted in 2000 that "[e]ven now in Russia we have the same problem. It isn't so easy to give up the inheritance we received from Stalinism and Neo-Stalinism, when people were turned into cogs in the wheel, and those in power made all the decisions for them". Gorbachev's domestic policies have been described as neo-Stalinist by some Western sources.

Post-Soviet Russia
The most fervent proponents of neo-Stalinism and rehabilitation of Stalin in post-Soviet Russia include the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). With the approval of Putin government, CPRF has installed hundreds of monuments glorifying Joseph Stalin all across Russia since the 2000s. CPRF has been organizing annual ceremonies at the grave of Stalin in Kremlin Wall Necropolis to commemorate his birthday.

Formed in 1992 by anti-Gorbachev hardliners of the CPSU, CPRF became a vehement opponent of 1990s privatization policies and has denounced the current boundaries of Russian Federation as "unnatural". Blaming Russia's decline on Western capitalism, CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov proposes the revival of Soviet Union to restore Russian prestige. The party advocates communist Eurasianism, which believes in the construction of a new "socialist Eurasian homeland" through re-incorporation of post-Soviet countries; imagining the new state as the harbinger "for remaking history" and lead the Socialist Bloc once again. Through its embracal of Russian nationalism, the party portrays communism as an organic expression or communal soul ("sobornost") of "the age-old Russian traditions of community and collectivism" which distinguishes Russian World from the Western world and its "bourgeois values and market individualism". CPRF believes that the revival of Russia's "Derzhava" (super-power status) is dependent on instilling Russians with Soviet patriotism and neo-Stalinism; marked by glorification of Bolshevik Revolution and technological prowess of Soviet Union, promotion of myths around "Great Patriotic War" and adulation of the Stalinist era.

Russia under Vladimir Putin underwent an extensive state-backed programme of Re-Stalinization; through mass media, cinema, academia, educational institutions, military propaganda and historiography. Sociologist Dina Khapaeva asserts that a "social consensus" has emerged amongst the majority of Russian citizens, academics and authorities in rehabilitating Joseph Stalin. In 2014, Russian Duma passed a controversial "memory law" criminalizing  discussions of atrocities committed during the Stalinist era or making comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism, under the pretexts of combating Neo-Nazism and defending the "historical memory of events which took place during the Second World War". Despite strong condemnation from international historical societies across the world, the bill was passed and inserted as an article into the Russian Criminal Code. The bill was supported by the ruling United Russia Party and allied Communist Party.

With the outbreak of Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, neo-Stalinism underwent an explosive growth across the Russian society with the firm backing of the state. Vladimir Putin has personally endorsed the re-emergence of the Stalin cult, portraying the Soviet dictator as a visionary who saved the world from European fascism and led Russians to victory during the Second World War. Various busts and portraits of Stalin have been installed in territories controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

Russian Communist Party has been one of the biggest backers of invasion of Ukraine ordered by Putin in 2022, viewing the invasion as being aligned with their neo-Stalinist world-view.

Public views

As of 2008, more than half of Russians view Stalin positively and many support restoration of his monuments either dismantled by leaders or destroyed by rioting Russians during the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to the Levada polling centre, Stalin's popularity marks have tripled among Russians in the last twenty years and the trend had accelerated since Vladimir Putin came to power.

In April 2019, a Levada center poll revealed that 70% of Russians approve of Stalin's role in Russian history, the highest ever recorded, and that 51% viewed Stalin in a positive light.

According to Andrew Osborn, statues of Stalin "have begun to reappear" and a museum in his honor has been opened in Volgograd (former Stalingrad). Steve Gutterman from the Associated Press quoted Vladimir Lavrov (deputy director of Moscow's Institute of Russian History) as saying that about ten Stalin statues have been restored or erected in Russia in recent years. In December 2013, Putin described Stalin as no worse than the "cunning" English 17th-century military dictator Oliver Cromwell.

School education

In June 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin organized a conference for history teachers to promote a high school teachers manual called A Modern History of Russia: 1945–2006: A Manual for History Teachers, which according to Irina Flige (office director of human rights organization Memorial) portrays Stalin as a cruel yet successful leader who "acted rationally". She claims it justifies Stalin's terror as an "instrument of development". Putin said at the conference that the new manual will "help instill young people with a sense of pride in Russia", and he posited that Stalin's purges pale in comparison to the United States' atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At a memorial for Stalin's victims, Putin said that while Russians should "keep alive the memory of tragedies of the past, we should focus on all that is best in the country".

The official policy of the Russian Federation is that teachers and schools are free to choose history textbooks from the list of the admitted ones, which includes a total of forty-eight history text books for grade school and twenty-four history textbooks by various authors for high school.

In September 2009, the Education Ministry of Russia announced that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a book once banned in the Soviet Union for the detailed account on the system of prison camps, became required reading for Russian high-school students. Prior to that, Russian students studied Solzhenitsyn's short story Matryonin dvor and his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an account of a single day in the life of a gulag prisoner.

History studies
In 2009, it was reported that the Russian government was drawing up plans to criminalize statements and acts that deny the Soviet Union's victory over fascism in World War II or its role in liberating Eastern Europe. In May 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev described the Soviet Union during the war as "our country" and set up the Historical Truth Commission to act against what the Kremlin terms falsifications of Russian history.

On 3 July 2009, Russia's delegation at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) annual parliamentary meeting stormed out after a resolution was passed equating the roles of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in starting World War II, drafted by delegates from Lithuania and Slovenia. The resolution called for a day of remembrance for victims of both Stalinism and Nazism to be marked every 23 August, the date in 1939 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of neutrality with a secret protocol that divided parts of Central and Eastern Europe between their spheres of influence.

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign relations committee of Russia's lower house of parliament, called the resolution "nothing but an attempt to rewrite the history of World War II". Alexander Kozlovsky, the head of the Russian delegation, called the resolution an "insulting anti-Russian attack" and added that "[t]hose who place Nazism and Stalinism on the same level forget that it is the Stalin-era Soviet Union that made the biggest sacrifices and the biggest contribution to liberating Europe from fascism". Only eight out of 385 assembly members voted against the resolution.

Kurskaya station controversy
At the end of August 2009 a gilded slogan, a fragment of the Soviet national anthem was re-inscribed at the Moscow Metro's Kursky station beneath eight socialist realist statues, reading: "Stalin reared us on loyalty to the people. He inspired us to labour and heroism". The slogan had been removed in the 1950s during Nikita Khrushchev's period of de-Stalinization. Another restored slogan reads: "For the Motherland! For Stalin!".

Restoring the slogans was ordered by the head of the metro Dmitry Gayev. He explained his decision with restoring the historic view of the station: "My attitude towards this story is simple: this inscription was at the station Kurskaya since its foundation, and it will stay there".

The chairman of a human rights group Memorial Arseny Roginsky stated: "This is the fruit of creeping re-Stalinization and... they [the authorities] want to use his name as a symbol of a powerful authoritarian state which the whole world is afraid of". Other human rights organizations and survivors of Stalin's repressions called for the decorations to be removed in a letter to Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Mikhail Shvydkoy, the special representative of the President of Russia for the international cultural exchange, responded to the controversy: "In my opinion, the question whether such inscriptions should exist in the Moscow underground is not the question in the competence of neither the Mayor of Moscow, nor even the head of the Moscow underground. One can't take decisions that may break the society that's heated up and politicized even without that. It seems to me, that the presence of the lines about Stalin in the hall of the metro station Kurskaya is the question that should become the matter of discussion for the city denizens." Shvydkoy commented that what Stalin did in respect of the Soviet and in particular Russian people cannot be justified and he does not even deserve a neutral attitude, much less praise. However, he said "it's necessary to remember your own butchers" and without that memory they can "grow among us again". Shvydkoy said that the question is that the society must remember that "Stalin is a tyrant". While the inscription in the Metro should merely be read correctly, "read with the certain attitude to Stalin's personality". Shvydkoy also said that if the hall of the station Kurskaya is a monument of architecture and culture, the inscription must be left because "to knock down inscriptions is vandalism".

Opinions
Scholar Dmitri Furman, director of the Commonwealth of Independent States Research Center at the Russian Academy's of Sciences Institute of Europe, sees the Russian regime's neo-Stalinism as a "non-ideological Stalinism" that "seeks control for the sake of control, not for the sake of world revolution".

In 2005, Communist politician Gennady Zyuganov said that Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague". Zyuganov has said "Great Stalin does not need rehabilitation" and has proposed changing the name of Volgograd back to Stalingrad. In 2010, the Communist leader stated: "Today... the greatness of Stalin's era is self-evident even to his most furious haters... We liberated the whole world!".

In 2008, Dmitry Puchkov accused the authorities of raising a wave of anti-Stalin propaganda to distract the attention of the population from topical troubles. In a December 2008 interview, he was asked a question: "Dmitry Yurievich, what do you think, is the new wave of 'unveiling the horrors of Stalinism' on the TV related to the approaching consequences of the crisis or is it merely another [mental] exacerbation?". He replied: "The wave is being raised to distract opinion of the population from the up-to-date troubles. You don't have to think of your pension, you don't have to think of the education, what matters are the horrors of Stalinism".

Russian writer Sergey Kara-Murza believes that there is a trend to demonize Russia that is common not only in Poland, Ukraine and the Czech Republic, but in Russia as well. He contends that it is a good business and that it was a good business previously to demonize the Soviet Union: "Why do we need to take offense against Poles, if we in our country have the same (and for us – sufficiently more dangerous and hazardous) cohort of pundits, philosophers, historians who enjoy the maximal favourable regime set by the state and do the same things as Poles do?"

In 2016, political scientist Thomas Sherlock claimed that Russia has pulled back somewhat on its neo-Stalinist policies, commenting: "The Kremlin is unwilling to develop and impose on society historical narratives which promote chauvinism, hypernationalism, and re-Stalinization. Although such an agenda has some support among incumbent elites and in society, it remains subordinate.... Instead, the regime is now extending support to... a critical assessment of the Soviet era, including Stalinism. This emerging criticism of the Soviet past serves a number of important goals of the leadership, including re-engagement with the West. To this end, the Kremlin recently approved new history textbooks critical of the Soviet past as well as a significant program that memorializes the victims of Soviet repressions."

United States
Sameera Khan, a former Miss New Jersey and reporter for RT, made a series of tweets glorifying Stalin and the gulag system and calling for his return. Khan was harshly criticized for expressing these views, including by RT itself, and the controversy led to her apologizing and being suspended from the network.

See also
 Anti-Stalinist Left
 De-Stalinization
 Grover Furr
 Ludo Martens
 Neo-Sovietism
 Nostalgia for the Soviet Union
 "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences"
 Soviet patriotism
 Stalin Society
 The Stalinist Legacy
 Tankie, a pejorative term for pro-Soviet communists

References

Further reading
 Khapaeva, Dina. "Triumphant memory of the perpetrators: Putin's politics of re-Stalinization." Communist & Post-Communist Studies (March 2016), pp 61–73. celebrations of Stalin's memory in Russia today. online
 Khapaeva, Dina. "Historical memory in post-Soviet Gothic society." Social Research (2009): 359–394. online
 Sherlock, Thomas. "Russian politics and the Soviet past: Reassessing Stalin and Stalinism under Vladimir Putin." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 49.1 (2016): 45–59. online
 Torbakov, Igor. "History, Memory and National Identity: Understanding the politics of history and memory wars in post-Soviet lands." Demokratizatsiya 19.3 (2011): 209+ online
 Tumarkin, Maria M. "The Long Life of Stalinism: Reflections on the Aftermath of Totalitarianism and Social Memory." Journal of social history 44.4 (2011): 1047–1061.

External links
 Agence France-Presse, 2015. Stalin portraits emerge in heart of Ukraine's rebel-held territory. 19 October The Guardian.
 Russian history in the classroom
 Stalin's Return Time Magazine, 1970
 Moscow: Stalin 2.0 – video report by Global Post
 The rehabilitation of Stalin  – an ideological cornerstone of the new Kremlin politics World Socialist Web Site, 2000
 Russian historians denounce re-Stalinization Eurasia Daily Monitor, 2005
 Russia: Nostalgia For USSR Increases By Victor Yasmann, RFE/RL, 21 December 2006
 Outrage at revision of Stalin's legacy , by Andrew Osborn, 21 February 2006
 Russia: Gorbachev Speaks About Democracy, Authoritarianism, RFE/RL, 1 March 2006

Anti-revisionism
Eponymous political ideologies
Historical negationism

Neo-Stalinism


Olga Aleksandrovna Rukavishnikova () (born March 13, 1955 in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk) is a Soviet athlete who mainly competed in the women's pentathlon event during her career.

Biography
She competed for the USSR in the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow, in the Pentathlon where she won the silver medal splitting team mates Nadiya Tkachenko and Olga Kuragina for a Soviet clean sweep in what was the last Olympic pentathlon leading to the introduction of the heptathlon for women.

She had the shortest ever reign of a track and field world record holder - 0.4 seconds. When she crossed the finish line at the end of the 800 metres, the final event of the 1980 Olympic pentathlon, her score of 4937 points was a new world record, but 0.4 seconds later Tkachenko finished and set a new record of 5083 points.

References

sports-reference

1955 births
Living people
People from Severodvinsk
Russian pentathletes
Soviet pentathletes
Olympic athletes for the Soviet Union
Olympic silver medalists for the Soviet Union
Athletes (track and field) at the 1980 Summer Olympics
Russian female athletes
Soviet female athletes
Medalists at the 1980 Summer Olympics
Olympic silver medalists in athletics (track and field)
Universiade medalists in athletics (track and field)
Universiade bronze medalists for the Soviet Union
Medalists at the 1975 Summer Universiade
Sportspeople from Arkhangelsk Oblast

Olga Rukavishnikova


The following is an episode list for the Adult Swim television series Tom Goes to the Mayor. Two pilots for Tom Goes to the Mayor were produced as web shorts and were featured at an independent film festival and released on timanderic.com. Neither pilots have aired on television. The series officially premiered on November 14, 2004 with "Bear Traps", and ended with "Joy's Ex" on September 25, 2006, with a total of 30 episodes over the course of two seasons. The entire series was released on DVD on April 3, 2007. In addition to being available on DVD, Tom Goes to the Mayor is also available on iTunes.

Series overview

Episodes

Pilots

Season 1 (2004–05)

Season 2 (2006)

Special (2005)

References

External links

Tom Goes to the Mayor
Tom Goes to the Mayor
Tim & Eric

List of Tom Goes to the Mayor episodes


Bushmanland is an arid area south of the Orange River and west of Kenhardt and east of Springbok (Namaqualand) in the Northern Cape, South Africa.

It includes the towns of Pofadder and Aggeneys, and places such as Namies and Bosluis Pan. Extensive plains are dotted with inselbergs like the Gamsberg.

Bushmanland is an arid area inland from Namaqualand. It is probably the most inhospitable area in South Africa, arid and largely with infertile soil and highly saline groundwater. Its wildlife, however, both fauna and flora, though sparse, are full of interest. Although the veld is too arid to bloom like that of the West Coast of Namaqualand, even when there is some spring rain, what does appear is highly unusual and often hauntingly beautiful. Vaalputs, a nuclear waste repository, has been sited between Bushmanland and Namaqualand, and acts as a de facto nature reserve.

See also
Bushmanland (South West Africa)

Geography of the Northern Cape
Karoo

Bushmanland, Northern Cape


The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria is the first expansion pack for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game The Lord of the Rings Online released on November 18, 2008. It added the new game regions of Moria and Lothlórien, two new character classes and a new Legendary Items system. Level cap was raised to 60 and the main storyline was extended by six books of the new Epic Volume II.

Gameplay
The expansion expanded the world of Middle-earth by introducing Rhovanion and its first two regions: Moria and Lothlórien. Moria is divided into ten distinct areas spread across the Upper, Middle and Lower levels, each with unique appearance and role in the history of Khazad-dûm. Lothlórien was added in an update several months after the main expansion and provides much-needed rest after the long dark for players and characters alike.

Moria contained 7 six-man group instances, 2 three-man instances and 3 twelve-man raids. A new concept introduced to the raids was "radiance". Raid instances and bosses inside them gave a progressive "gloom" debuff stats that could only be countered by an equal amount of radiance, found on specific pieces of equipment. Because radiance gear could be inferior to alternative options in all other aspects, this mechanic proved unpopular and was removed from the game within two years.

Seven original classes from Shadows of Angmar were supplemented by two new ones: Warden and Rune-keeper. Rune-keepers are a ranged class with an attunement towards either dealing damage or healing wounds. As a Rune-keeper uses either healing or damaging abilities, the Rune-keeper's proficiency in either focus increases and more powerful skills become available. Wardens use melee weapons with a preference toward spears and specialize in combination attacks. A Warden will execute their abilities in certain sequences of "Gambits" that will eventually culminate in a special attack only available after completing the prescribed set of moves.

Legendary items
Mines of Moria introduced the Legendary Item system designed to replicate the famous weapons in Tolkien lore, such as Bilbo's Sting, Gandalf's Glamdring and Aragorn's Andúril. Each class would acquire and equip two new items: a main hand weapon, and a class item. These Legendary items ranged in base power by level, rarity (Third-, Second-, or First Age), and the attributes assigned to them. Each Legendary Item initially started with two to four random Legacies that affected the existing class skills, with three to four more available to be selected as the Legendary Item increased in levels. Because the number and the potency of Legacies were unpredictable, it forced players to try several different Legendary Items before fully investing in one. The Legendary Items gained experience from quest completions and defeating enemies, increasing in levels alongside their owner until the item reached its cap. Heritage runes could be applied for additional experience, and relics and titles could be applied to further increase the Legendary Item's power.

When originally introduced, the Legendary Item System had the intended effect of prolonging the usage of player's favorite weapons as opposed to them being replaced every time a better piece of equipment is acquired. In practice, the Legendary Item's power was still capped by its level, so with each new expansion a common Third Age item would quickly outperform an exquisite First Age item from the previous level cap, forcing the players to start building all of their items anew. The Legendary Item System received several changes, and in 2014 "imbuement" of Legendary Items was introduced, allowing the players to lock their Legendary Item to their level and select their desired Legacies directly, bypassing the randomization. Finally in 2021 Fate of Gundabad expansion the original Legendary Item system was fully retired and replaced with a completely different, simplified option.

Plot

Volume II: Mines of Moria

Book I - The Walls of Moria
An Iron Garrison of Dwarves sent by King Dain Ironfoot led by Bosi and Brogur, sons of Bifur and Bofur, begins to excavate the Hollin Gate shortly after the Fellowship's passage. When the last rocks are cleared, the Watcher in the Water attacks the assembled Dwarves, taking Brogur's son Broin. As the Dwarves regroup, they turn their hopes to a discovered cache of older weapons from a bygone age. Arming themselves with such weapons, the Iron Garrison faces the Watcher again and drives it from the Black Pool, entering into Moria.

Book II - Echoes in the Dark
Establishing themselves in their new home, the Iron Garrison begins the task of rediscovering the lore and artifacts of their heritage. One such passage of lore speaks of an ancient Dwarf-smith who endeavored to create an axe of solid mithril. An entire forge was created specifically for it, The Heart of Fire is unearthed but the axe, Zigilburk, is nowhere to be found. Heartened by the recovery of one of their greatest forges, Brogur pushes onward into Moria.

Book III - The Lord of Moria
Brogur establishes a command post in the Twenty-First Hall, only to learn of the White Hand minions nearby. Bosi's son Bori executes a strike against the White Hand, sneaking into their camp and defeating its commander who speaks the name of Mazog, son of Bolg, Lord of Moria. This news weighs heavy on Bosi, as the Book of Mazarbul reveals Mazog as the orc responsible for the demise of Balin's company.

Book IV - Fire and Water
The Orcs and Dwarves prepare for war. Bori takes a look at the Book of Mazarbul, finding mention of Óin who went off in search of Zigilburk. Bori and the player follow Óin's path, which leads to a flooded treasury There they find not only Zigilburk, but also Broin, wounded yet alive, and the Watcher in the Water. The player drives the Watcher from the hall once again, and the Dwarves return in victory.

Book V - Drums in the Deep
It is discovered that Mazog is allied with Dol Guldur, and Bori plans a raid on his seat of power to defeat Mazog once and for all. Gorothul, Sauron's servant from Dol Guldur, ruins his plan and Bori is captured along with the legendary axe Zigilburk. Bosi loses hope in the expedition's efforts to reclaim Moria and leaves it up to the player to see to the defenses during a major raid by Mazog's forces, in which the Dwarves hold for a time.

Book VI - The Shadowy Abyss
Bosi seeks help from the Elves of Lothlórien, and a company of elves ventures into the Foundations of Stone in the lowest depths of Moria. The player is instructed to find clues of Gandalf's passage through this area and his fate following the fall from the Bridge of Khazad-Dum. Together with the elf Magor the player defeats a nameless creature in the depths of Moria. Hearing of the victory, Lady Galadriel summons the player to Caras Galadhon.

Book VII - Leaves of Lórien
Bosi is granted an audience with Celeborn and Galadriel, and a contingent of Galadhrim is dispatched to aid the Dwarves in Moria. A record of a secret passage to Mazog's in uncovered and through it, elves and dwarves working together capture Mazog is captured. Bori is nowhere to be found, having already been sent  to Dol Guldur. Lord Celeborn grants the player an audience, commending them while also disagreeing on the notion of sparing Mazog's life.

Book VIII - Scourge of Khazad-dûm
Mazog lets slip a chilling fact: that he's not interested in being a king of Moria because Moria will soon become not fit even for orcs. He is referring to the rise of ancient nameless creatures from within the depth of Moria, which concerns both the elves in Foundations of Stone and the dwarves in the Upper levels. Several relics left by Gorothul are found to attract the nameless creatures but are destroyed by the player.

The conclusion of the Epic Volume 2 takes place within the Siege of Mirkwood expansion.

Soundtrack
Video game composer Chance Thomas who worked on the base game of The Lord of the Rings Online returned to work on the expansion. A compilation album was released as a CD with the Collector's Edition of the expansion.

Critical reception

Mines of Moria has been praised for its attention to detail, with GameSpot Kevin VanOrd stating, "The bowels of Middle-earth have no right to be this interesting to investigate..." WarCry.com went so far as to call it "[t]he best fantasy MMORPG yet created". Gaming Trend claimed it beat World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (released at roughly the same time) as an expansion, citing its replay value and gameplay quality. The review also praised Turbine for making a complete expansion, rather than simply cashing in on the license in their possession. Eurogamer observed the story as one of the high points, stating that frequently this is a weakness of many MMOs. Rather, LotRO was said to be faithful to Tolkien's original narrative, and thus provided a very good storyline.

References

2008 video games
Codemasters games
Games for Windows
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
Role-playing games based on Middle-earth
Role-playing video games
Mines of Moria
Video game expansion packs
Video games developed in the United States
Video games scored by Chance Thomas
Windows games
Windows-only games

fr:Le Seigneur des Anneaux Online : les Mines de la Moria
pl:The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria


The Dirties is a 2013 Canadian found footage thriller film and the directorial debut of Matt Johnson. It has received praise from critics as well as numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative at the 2013 Slamdance Film Festival. Kevin Smith, who helped distribute the film, dubbed The Dirties "the most important movie you will see all year."

Plot
The film opens with the main characters, Matt and Owen, making a movie about a gang of bullies and the revenge that two victimized students take on them. This project, The Dirties, contains references to a score of other movies such as Being John Malkovich, Irréversible, Pulp Fiction, and The Usual Suspects. Matt is shown being bullied.

Afterwards, Matt asks some members of the student body, as well as faculty members at the school, about what someone should do if they are getting bullied. The students see that getting help is much more difficult than the faculty members perceive it to be. Matt and Owen are then shown editing clips together for their film, during the course of which it is revealed that a popular girl, Chrissy, had a crush on Owen in grade three. Matt and Owen shoot more scenes for their film project, and Matt has Owen attempt to look cool in front of Chrissy to see if she still likes him.

After finishing filming, the rough cut of the project is brought to the film teacher, Mr. Muldoon. The movie is revealed to contain Matt and Owen shooting and killing other students, as well as their teacher, in addition to containing a large amount of expletives. Muldoon demands the film be changed.

The edited version of the film is shown in class, and Matt leaves the room in humiliation, while Owen puts his head down while the rest of the class talks and laughs through the entire movie. On their walk home from school, Owen has a rock thrown at his head. As Owen is icing his head back at Matt's, Matt suggests that the movie would have been better if the two had actually shot the Dirties within their movie with real guns.

Matt erases the script for The Dirties from his whiteboard, and proceeds to begin working on The Dirties II. Owen begins to practice the guitar more in attempts to win over Chrissy, and the boys are shown being bullied some more. Matt then acquires blueprints of his high school from the library for the school project he told them he was doing, which Matt points out was concerningly easy to do, and that his school ID was never even checked. Owen is then shown having a lunch dumped on him and being slapped across the face by another student.

The boys go out at night and create a bonfire, where they reflect on being bullied. Matt measures the lockers and takes photos, which Owen sees as suspicious. Matt says that it is entirely inconspicuous, and goes as far to tell Chrissy that they were planning a school shooting and gets Chrissy's number for Owen. Owen calls Chrissy and says he is at a party, at Matt's suggestion. The two go to a cottage and fire guns together with Matt's cousin, shooting targets consisting of milk jugs, melons, and a propane tank bomb. They bake a cake for Chrissy, and Matt gets upset with Owen for sharing it with the Dirties.

Matt is seen reading Columbine, and checks out six copies of Catcher in the Rye "to seem crazy." Owen gets concerned that Matt's basement has plans and pictures of people he plans to shoot in the movie. Owen tells Matt that he is "always acting" and that he is not always in a movie.

Matt self-diagnoses himself as a psychopath, which he glorifies as he reads Columbine. Owen, having had enough of Matt's attitude, berates him for his attitude towards things, leading to an argument between the two. Matt indignantly responds that Chrissy doesn't care about him and that she exists in Owen's life because of "his plans", but Owen takes a firm stand and asserts that Matt is jealous of him because he has no other friends. Owen then takes off his wireless microphone and leaves, much to the dismay of Matt.

Matt has a conversation with his mother where he asks if she thinks he is crazy. His mom says that crazy technically means that someone loses their ability to tell their thoughts from reality and the real world. Matt goes, alone, to the place where he and Owen had the bonfire and burns all of his notebooks. Owen tries calling Matt, who ignores it. Matt goes to the school with a duffel bag full of his cousins firearms entering through a stairwell. He then sets up cameras, shoots Josh and Jackman, and chases Owen. Matt enters a dark classroom where Owen is cornered trying to open a locked door, Matt simply asks, "What are you doing? It's me!"

Cast

Production
The film had a production budget of $10,000. After finishing production, an additional $45,000 was needed to secure licensing rights for the music used in the film. All the film's financing came "out of pocket."

There was almost no scripted dialogue and several scenes were shot without some of the participants' awareness. The school's real students were informed they were being filmed for a movie, but were not told the plot of the film or who the crew members and actors were. The film's ending, however, was staged in a different school that was rented over a weekend.

Release
The Dirties was released by the Kevin Smith Movie Club and has been screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox theater in Toronto.

The film has been released on a limited basis in a DVD/Blu-ray triple disk edition, but is also available for streaming on Netflix.

Reception

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an 81% "fresh" rating, based on 36 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "The Dirties uses likable characters and a surprisingly twisted story to deconstruct the power of violent revenge -- and the audience's expectations when viewing it." On Metacritic, based on reviews from 14 critics, the film has a 65/100 rating, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

The Toronto Star called The Dirties "a fresh, compelling take on bullying," rating it three stars out of four. The Globe and Mail called it "a bravura debut for an up-and-coming Canadian filmmaker," also rating it three stars out of four.

Accolades
The film was a finalist for Best Canadian Film at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 2013, alongside Gabrielle and the eventual winner, Watermark.

References

External links

2013 films
2013 comedy-drama films
Canadian black comedy films
Canadian teen films
Canadian comedy-drama films
English-language Canadian films
Films about bullying
Films about school violence
Films set in schools
Films shot in Toronto
Canadian independent films
SModcast Pictures films
Found footage films
2013 black comedy films
2013 independent films
2010s English-language films
2010s Canadian films

The Dirties


An alligator, or colloquially gator, is a large reptile in the Crocodilia order in the genus Alligator of the family Alligatoridae. The two extant species are the American alligator (A. mississippiensis) and the Chinese alligator (A. sinensis). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the Oligocene epoch about 37 million years ago.

The name "alligator" is probably an anglicized form of , the Spanish term for "the lizard", which early Spanish explorers and settlers in Florida called the alligator. Early English spellings of the name included allagarta and alagarto.

Evolution
Alligators and caimans split in North America during the early Tertiary or late Cretaceous (about 53 million to about 65 million years ago). The Chinese alligator split from the American alligator about 33 million years ago and probably descended from a lineage that crossed the Bering land bridge during the Neogene. The modern American alligator is well represented in the fossil record of the Pleistocene. The alligator's full mitochondrial genome was sequenced in the 1990s. The full genome, published in 2014, suggests that the alligator evolved much more slowly than mammals and birds.

Phylogeny
The genus Alligator belongs to the subfamily Alligatorinae, which is the sister taxon to Caimaninae (the caimans). Together, these two subfamilies form the family Alligatoridae.  The cladogram below shows the phylogeny of alligators.

Species

Extant

Extinct

Alligator hailensis
Alligator mcgrewi
Alligator mefferdi
Alligator munensis
Alligator olseni
Alligator prenasalis
Alligator thomsoni

Description

An average adult American alligator's weight and length is  and , but they sometimes grow to  long and weigh over . The largest ever recorded, found in Louisiana, measured . The Chinese alligator is smaller, rarely exceeding  in length. Additionally, it weighs considerably less, with males rarely over .

Adult alligators are black or dark olive-brown with white undersides, while juveniles have bright yellow or whitish stripes which sharply contrast against their dark hides, providing them additional camouflage amongst reeds and wetland grasses.

No average lifespan for an alligator has been measured. One of the oldest recorded alligator lives was that of Saturn, an American alligator who was hatched in 1936 in Mississippi and spent nearly a decade in Germany before spending the majority of its life at the Moscow Zoo, where it died at the age of 83 or 84 on 22 May 2020. Another one of the oldest lives on record is that of Muja, an American alligator who was brought as an adult specimen to the Belgrade Zoo in Serbia from Germany in 1937. Although no valid records exist about its date of birth, as of 2012, it was in its 80s and possibly the oldest alligator living in captivity.

Habitat

Alligators are native to only the United States and China.

American alligators are found in the southeast United States: all of Florida and Louisiana; the southern parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi; coastal South and North Carolina; East Texas, the southeast corner of Oklahoma, and the southern tip of Arkansas. Louisiana has the largest alligator population. The majority of American alligators inhabit Florida and Louisiana, with over a million alligators in each state. Southern Florida is the only place where both alligators and crocodiles live side by side.

American alligators live in freshwater environments, such as ponds, marshes, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and swamps, as well as in brackish water. When they construct alligator holes in the wetlands, they increase plant diversity and provide habitat for other animals during droughts.  They are, therefore, considered an important species for maintaining ecological diversity in wetlands. Farther west, in Louisiana, heavy grazing by nutrias and muskrats is causing severe damage to coastal wetlands.  Large alligators feed extensively on nutrias, and provide a vital ecological service by reducing nutria numbers.

The Chinese alligator currently is found in only the Yangtze River valley and parts of adjacent provinces and is extremely endangered, with only a few dozen believed to be left in the wild. Far more Chinese alligators live in zoos around the world than can be found in the wild. Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in southern Louisiana has several in captivity in an attempt to preserve the species. Miami MetroZoo in Florida also has a breeding pair of Chinese alligators.

Behavior

Large male alligators are solitary territorial animals. Smaller alligators can often be found in large numbers close to each other. The largest of the species (both males and females) defend prime territory; smaller alligators have a higher tolerance for other alligators within a similar size class.

Alligators move on land by two forms of locomotion referred to as "sprawl" and "high walk". The sprawl is a forward movement with the belly making contact with the ground and is used to transition to "high walk" or to slither over wet substrate into water. The high walk is an up-on-four-limbs forward motion used for overland travel with the belly well up from the ground. Alligators have also been observed to rise up and balance on their hind legs and semi-step forward as part of a forward or upward lunge. However, they can not walk on their hind legs.

Although the alligator has a heavy body and a slow metabolism, it is capable of short bursts of speed, especially in very short lunges. Alligators' main prey are smaller animals they can kill and eat with a single bite. They may kill larger prey by grabbing it and dragging it into the water to drown. Alligators consume food that cannot be eaten in one bite by allowing it to rot or by biting and then performing a "death roll", spinning or convulsing wildly until bite-sized chunks are torn off. Critical to the alligator's ability to initiate a death roll, the tail must flex to a significant angle relative to its body. An alligator with an immobilized tail cannot perform a death roll.

Most of the muscle in an alligator's jaw evolved to bite and grip prey. The muscles that close the jaws are powerful, but the muscles for opening their jaws are weak. As a result, an adult human can hold an alligator's jaws shut bare-handed. It is common to use several wraps of duct tape to prevent an adult alligator from opening its jaws when being handled or transported.

Alligators are generally timid towards humans and tend to walk or swim away if one approaches. This may encourage people to approach alligators and their nests, which can provoke the animals into attacking. In Florida, feeding wild alligators at any time is illegal. If fed, the alligators will eventually lose their fear of humans and will learn to associate humans with food.

Diet

The type of food eaten by alligators depends upon their age and size. When young, alligators eat fish, insects, snails, crustaceans, and worms. As they mature, progressively larger prey is taken, including larger fish such as gar, turtles, and various mammals, particularly nutrias and muskrats, as well as birds, deer, and other reptiles. Their stomachs also often contain gizzard stones. They will even consume carrion if they are sufficiently hungry. In some cases, larger alligators are known to ambush dogs, Florida panthers and black bears, making them the apex predator throughout their distribution. In this role as a top predator, it may determine the abundance of prey species, including turtles and nutrias. As humans encroach into their habitat, attacks are few but not unknown. Alligators, unlike the large crocodiles, do not immediately regard a human upon encounter as prey, but may still attack in self-defense if provoked.

Reproduction

Alligators generally mature at a length of . The mating season is in late spring. In April and May, alligators form so-called "bellowing choruses". Large groups of animals bellow together for a few minutes a few times a day, usually one to three hours after sunrise. The bellows of male American alligators are accompanied by powerful blasts of infrasound. Another form of male display is a loud head-slap. In 2010, on spring nights alligators were found to gather in large numbers for group courtship, the so-called "alligator dances".

In summer, the female builds a nest of vegetation where the decomposition of the vegetation provides the heat needed to incubate the eggs. The sex of the offspring is determined by the temperature in the nest and is fixed within seven to 21 days of the start of incubation. Incubation temperatures of  or lower produce a clutch of females; those of  or higher produce entirely males. Nests constructed on leaves are hotter than those constructed on wet marsh, so the former tend to produce males and the latter, females. The baby alligator's egg tooth helps it get out of its egg during hatching time. The natural sex ratio at hatching is five females to one male. Females hatched from eggs incubated at  weigh significantly more than males hatched from eggs incubated at . The mother defends the nest from predators and assists the hatchlings to water. She will provide protection to the young for about a year if they remain in the area. Adult alligators regularly cannibalize younger individuals, though estimates of the rate of cannibalism vary widely. In the past, immediately following the outlawing of alligator hunting, populations rebounded quickly due to the suppressed number of adults preying upon juveniles, increasing survival among the young alligators.

Anatomy

Alligators, much like birds, have been shown to exhibit unidirectional movement of air through their lungs. Most other amniotes are believed to exhibit bidirectional, or tidal breathing. For a tidal breathing animal, such as a mammal, air flows into and out of the lungs through branching bronchi which terminate in small dead-end chambers called alveoli. As the alveoli represent dead-ends to flow, the inspired air must move back out the same way it came in. In contrast, air in alligator lungs makes a circuit, moving in only one direction through the parabronchi. The air first enters the outer branch, moves through the parabronchi, and exits the lung through the inner branch. Oxygen exchange takes place in extensive vasculature around the parabronchi.

The alligator has a similar digestive system to that of the crocodile, with minor differences in morphology and enzyme activity. Alligators have a two-part stomach, with the first smaller portion containing gastroliths. It is believed this portion of the stomach serves a similar function as it does in the gizzard of some species of birds, to aid in digestion. The gastroliths work to grind up the meal as alligators will take large bites or swallow smaller prey whole. This process makes digestion and nutrient absorption easier once the food reaches the second portion of the stomach. Once an alligator's meal has been processed it will move on to the second portion of the stomach which is highly acidic. The acidity of the stomach has been observed to increase once digestion begins. This is due to the increase in CO2 concentration of the blood, resulting from the right to left shunting of the alligators heart. The right to left shunt of the heart in alligators means the circulatory system will recirculate blood through the body instead of back to the lungs. The re-circulation of blood leads to higher CO2 concentration as well as lower oxygen affinity. There is evidence to suggest that there is increased blood flow diverted to the stomach during digestion to facilitate an increase in CO2 concentration which aids in increasing gastric acid secretions during digestion. The alligator's metabolism will also increase after a meal by up to four times its basal metabolic rate. Alligators also have highly folded mucosa in the lining of the intestines to further aid in the absorption of nutrients. The folds result in greater surface area for the nutrients to be absorbed through.

Alligators also have complex microbiomes that are not fully understood yet, but can be attributed to both benefits and costs to the animal. These microorganisms can be found in the high surface area of the mucosa folds of the intestines, as well as throughout the digestive tract. Benefits include better total health and stronger immune system. However alligators are still vulnerable to microbial infections despite the immune boost from other microbiota.

During brumation the process of digestion experiences changes due to the fasting most alligators experience during these periods of inactivity. Alligators that go long enough without a meal during brumation will begin a process called autophagy, where the animal begins to consume its fat reserves to maintain its body weight until it can acquire a sufficient meal. There is also fluctuation in the level of bacterial taxa populations in the alligator's microbial community between seasons which helps the alligator cope with different rates of feeding and activity.

Like other crocodilians, alligators have an armor of bony scutes. The dermal bones are highly vascularised and aid in calcium balance, both to neutralize acids while the animal cannot breathe underwater and to provide calcium for eggshell formation.

Alligators have muscular, flat tails that propel them while swimming.

The two kinds of white alligators are albino and leucistic. These alligators are practically impossible to find in the wild. They could survive only in captivity and are few in number. The Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans has leucistic alligators found in a Louisiana swamp in 1987.

Human uses

Alligators are raised commercially for their meat and their skin, which when tanned is used for the manufacture of luggage, handbags, shoes, belts, and other leather items. Alligators also provide economic benefits through the ecotourism industry. Visitors may take swamp tours, in which alligators are a feature. Their most important economic benefit to humans may be the control of nutrias and muskrats.

Alligator meat is also consumed by humans.

Differences from crocodiles
While there are rules of thumb for distinguishing alligators from crocodiles, all of them admit exceptions. Such general rules include:

Exposed vs. interdigitated teeth: The easiest way to distinguish crocodiles from alligators is by looking at their jaw line. The teeth on the lower jaw of an alligator fit into sockets in the upper jaw, leaving only the upper teeth visible when the mouth is closed. The teeth on the lower jaw of a crocodile fit into grooves on the outside of the top jaw, making both the upper and lower teeth visible when the mouth is closed, thus creating a "toothy grin."
Shape of the nose and jaw: Alligators have wider, shovel-like, U-shaped snouts, while crocodile snouts are typically more pointed or V-shaped. The alligators' broader snouts have been contentiously thought to allow their jaws to withstand the stress of cracking open the shells of turtles and other hard-shelled animals that are widespread in their environments. A 2012 study found very little correlation between bite force and snout shape amongst 23 tested crocodilian species.
 Functioning salt glands: Crocodilians have modified salivary glands called salt glands on their tongues, but while these organs still excrete salt in crocodiles and gharials, those in most alligators and caimans have lost this ability, or excrete it in only extremely small quantities. The ability to excrete excess salt allows crocodiles to better tolerate life in saline water and migrating through it. Because alligators and caimans have lost this ability, they are largely restricted to freshwater habitats, although larger alligators do sometimes live in tidal mangroves and in very rare cases in coastal areas.
 Integumentary sense organs: Both crocodiles and alligators have small, pit-like sensory organs called integumentary sense organs (ISOs) or dermal pressure receptors (DPRs) surrounding their upper and lower jaws. These organs allow crocodilians to detect minor pressure changes in surrounding water, and assist them in locating and capturing prey. In crocodiles, however, such organs extend over nearly the entire body. Crocodile ISOs may also assist in detection of local salinity, or serve other chemosensory functions.
 Less consistent differences: Crocodiles are generally thought of as more aggressive than alligators. Only six of the 23 crocodilian species are considered dangerous to adult human beings, most notably the Nile crocodile and saltwater crocodile. Each year, hundreds of deadly attacks are attributed to the Nile crocodile in sub-Saharan Africa. The American crocodile is considered to be less aggressive. Only a few (unverified) cases of American crocodiles fatally attacking humans have been reported.

Image gallery of extant species

See also

 Alligator farm
 Caiman
 Gharial
 List of fatal alligator attacks in the United States by decade

References

External links

 Crocodilian Online
 Photo exhibit on alligators in Florida; made available by the State Archives of Florida
 Interview Seminole alligator wrestler; made available for public use by the State Archives of Florida

Alligatoridae
Extant Oligocene first appearances
Reptile genera
Taxa named by Georges Cuvier

Alligator


Margarett R. Best  is a former politician from Ontario, Canada. She was a Liberal candidate of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 2007 to 2013 and represented the riding of Scarborough—Guildwood. She was a cabinet minister in the government of Dalton McGuinty.

Background
Best, an African Canadian lawyer and community activist, was born in Jamaica. She was educated at the University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus and Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. She holds a Mutual Fund Certificate from the Investment Funds Institute of Canada. In 2006 she was awarded the African Canadian Achievement Award and another African Canadian Achievement Award in 2011 for Excellence in Politics.

In 2008, she was conferred with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the Northern Caribbean University. Best has also received the BBPA Women of Distinction Award and, in October 2009, was bestowed with a 2009 National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada Award in the Distinguished Services category of Equality/Social Justice. She was named one of Canada's most influential women in Sports and Physical Activity in 2010 and received a City of Toronto Diversity Award in 2011. In 2012, she received a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her work as a public servant and the 2012 Canadian Association of Black Lawyers(CABL)Pathfinder Award. She was awarded the Jackie Robinson's Fortitude Award, named one of Canada's 100 most Accomplished Black Women in 2016, and named the 2017 Canadian National Laureate for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award.

Best has also been recognized by the Women's Multicultural Resource and Counselling Centre of Durham for her commitment to social and gender equality issues. She received a "Reaching Out and Giving Back Award" from the Prospect Primary School Alumni Association of Canada, and a Professional Award of Excellence from the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

She was a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada Solicitor's Examination Blueprint Committee, the Board of the Women's Multicultural Resource and Counselling Centre of Durham, Sheena's Place Breakfast Committee, and the College Compensations and Appointment Council.

Her community work includes advocating for public safety and diversity awareness as a member of the Ontario Provincial Police Advisory Committee. She presented seminars and facilitated entrepreneurial workshops for under-serviced youths and mentored young people on possible career choices in law, as a panelist with the Applause Institute; and was a member of the Mature Student Association and Black Law Student Association of Osgoode Hall Law School. She is a sponsor for PACE (Project for the Advancement of Childhood Education) for Love Lane Basic School, the Basic School she attended as a child in Jamaica. For the past six years, she has hosted an annual Scarborough Youth Career Fair in her Constituency of Scarborough-Guildwood.  Responding to the recent incidents of youth gun violence, she hosted her first successful Youth Forum in January 2013.

Politics
A member of the Ontario Legislature since 2007, she was appointed Minister of Consumer Services in October 2011, following her re-election to the Ontario Legislature as MPP, Scarborough-Guildwood.

She was first elected in 2007, and appointed as the Minister of Health Promotion and Sport, which supported a wide range of programs and services that include chronic disease prevention, physical activity, sport participation, injury prevention and mental wellness.

In 2008, she introduced legislation banning smoking in cars when children were present. The Bill called the Smoke-Free Ontario Amendment Act imposed a fine of $250 for transgressors.

In August 2010, the name of the Ministry of Health Promotion and Sport was changed to include sports as part of the Ministry's name to reflect the fact that sport was a key component of her Ministerial responsibilities. She was the lead Minister and a key part of the team led by Premier Dalton McGuinty in Ontario's successful bid for the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games.

Best was re-elected 2011. The result was significant because it made her the first Black / African-Canadian woman to be re-elected to the Provincial Legislature in the Province of Ontario. Following the election, she was appointed as Minister of Consumer Services by Dalton McGuinty.

In her capacity as Minister of Consumer Services, she introduced Bill 82, The Wireless Services Agreements Act, 2012, an Act to strengthen consumer protection with respect to consumer agreements relating to wireless services accessed from a cellular phone, smart phone or any other similar mobile device. The Bill died when Premier Dalton McGuinty prorogued the Ontario Legislature in October 2012. Best also did extensive work on reform of the Condominium Act, including developing the framework for legislative reform of the Act and led the consultation process. She worked on the amendments to the Not for Profit Business Corporations Act; and the reform of the Delegated Administrative Authorities Act, which was introduced as part of the 2012 Budget Bill. She introduced several consumer protection initiatives.

She was a member of the Health Education and Social Policy Committee and the Legislation and Regulation Committee of the 39th and 40th Parliament of Ontario, and she sat on the Poverty Reduction Committee of the 39th Parliament of Ontario.

In February 2013, she was appointed as parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Education by the new premier Kathleen Wynne. Her exclusion from Wynne's first cabinet was initially reported as a demotion for political reasons, although it was later revealed that Best had asked to have her duties reduced for undisclosed health reasons.

On June 27, 2013, she announced her resignation as a MPP.

Cabinet posts

Electoral record

References

External links

1958 births
Black Canadian politicians
Canadian women lawyers
Jamaican emigrants to Canada
Lawyers in Ontario
Living people
Members of the Executive Council of Ontario
Ontario Liberal Party MPPs
Osgoode Hall Law School alumni
People from Scarborough, Toronto
Politicians from Toronto
University of Toronto alumni
Women government ministers of Canada
Women MPPs in Ontario
Black Canadian women
21st-century Canadian politicians
21st-century Canadian women politicians
Black Canadian lawyers
Black Canadian activists
Foreign-born Canadian politicians

Margarett Best


Tali Shemesh (Hebrew: טלי שמש; born in 1969) is an Israeli documentary filmmaker.

Biography
Shemesh was born in Jerusalem. She graduated from Sam Spiegel film school.

She then directed dozens of investigative and documentary television programs, including  with Ilana Dayan. In 1999, she directed her first documentary film, Hashmena Vehayafa (Fat and Beautiful) for Channel 8.

In 2004, she directed the film Zahav Lavan Avoda Shchora (White Gold Black Work), which deals with the exploitation of outsourced workers at the Dead Sea Works. The film roused a public outcry.

In 2008, she directed the full-length documentary The Cemetery Club, about s a group of elderly Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel from Poland and meet every week for the last 20 years in the cemetery on Mount Herzl, and hold a meeting there that includes discussions and reading their writings. The film opened the DocAviv documentary film festival, to rave reviews, and became the most successful Israeli documentary film ever. Shemesh won the Most Promising Director award at the festival, and the film also won Best Cinematography. The Cemetery Club won the Israeli Film Academy (Ophir Award) Best Film award, the Mayor of Tel Aviv Award, the White Dove Award at the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival, and Best Documentary awards at the Shanghai International Film Festival. It was nominated for a European Academy of Film award.

In 2016, Shemesh co-directed the film Death in the Terminal with Asaf Sudri. The film follows the events of the Beersheva bus station shooting, during with an Eritrean refugee, Habtoum Zarhoum, was killed by an angry mob, following an attack on the bus station. The film won several awards at DocAviv, including Best Film.

Filmography

Awards

See also
 List of female film and television directors

References

External links

1969 births
Living people
Israeli women film directors
Israeli documentary filmmakers

Tali Shemesh


Bernard G. Segal (June 11, 1907 – June 1, 1997) was an American lawyer known for his advocacy for the poor and his work in the civil rights movement.

Early life and education
Segal was born in New York City but spent his childhood in Allentown and Philadelphia. He received both his bachelor's and law degrees at the University of Pennsylvania.

Career
Upon his graduation from law school, Segal became a deputy attorney general in the office of William A. Schnader, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania.

At 24, Segal was the youngest deputy attorney general in state history. When Schnader lost a race for governor and established his own firm in 1935, Segal quickly became a partner, eventually serving as chairman of the firm, now known as Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis.

In the 1950s, Segal became the first Jewish lawyer elected chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, the nation's oldest bar association. In 1969, he became president of the American Bar Association. In fifty years as a corporate lawyer specializing in appellate work, Segal represented blue-chip clients including Bell Telephone, RCA, NBC, Hertz Corporation, Gimbel Brothers, and also United Parcel Service, where he served for many years as director and general counsel.

Segal argued nearly 50 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, but as a lawyer Segal took a broad view of his calling. Segal was known as the nation's foremost advocate of merit selection of judges. In the mid-1950s he persuaded then Attorney General Herbert Brownell and President Dwight D. Eisenhower to submit to the American Bar Association Committee on the Federal Judiciary the names of all prospective federal judicial nominees, including the Supreme Court, for a report and recommendation on their qualifications. That practice has continued ever since, with Presidents very rarely appointing a Federal Judge found "Not Qualified" by the ABA Committee. Segal chaired that Committee for six years and continued his key role in judicial selection long after he relinquished his chairmanship.

In 1963, as the civil rights revolution was heating up, Segal called Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and asked why the President was not marshaling lawyers to help the civil rights movement. President John F. Kennedy convened a meeting of 244 prominent lawyers suggested by Segal and established the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, with Segal as co-chairman. The Committee sent lawyers to defend civil rights workers in southern states and played a critical role in advancing civil rights, not only in the south, but in many northern cities as well. Segal's wife, Dr. Geraldine Segal, a civil rights scholar in her own right, worked closely with Segal in their civil rights activities.

Segal also played a seminal role in furthering legal services for the poor, chairing the Advisory Committee on the National Legal Services Program under President Lyndon B. Johnson and enlisting lawyers throughout the nation to provide legal services to the indigent. He was devoted to the principle that the most despised defendants also deserved a defense. In 1953, he organized the defense of nine Philadelphians denounced as Communists.

Segal received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Villanova University, Franklin and Marshall College, Dropsie College, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Vermont Law School, Georgetown University, Suffolk University and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He received many other awards and honors from institutions and organizations throughout the world, among them the World Peace Through Law Award as the "World's Greatest Lawyer"; the National Civil Rights Award by the Attorney General of the United States; first Lifetime Achievement Award of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law; the National Human Relations Award by the National Conference of Christians and Jews; and the Judge William H. Hastie Award of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In 1981, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review devoted a unique issue to Segal, with tributes from Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Judges Arlin Adams and Louis H. Pollak and other legal luminaries. In that Review, former Judge A. Leon Higginbotham stated:
When the high court of history writes its judgment in praise of Bernard G. Segal, it will place an even higher value on his indefatigable efforts to expand and improve legal services for the poor, the powerless, and the dispossessed. I will note his mighty role in pushing the organized bar and many individual lawyers to accept the eradication of barriers of racial discrimination and religious bigotry as part of their mission. It will stress his efforts to maintain and improve the independence and excellence of the judiciary."

Personal life
Segal died on June 1, 1997, 10 days before his 90th birthday, from complications of cancer at his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

References

External links
 The Bernard G. Segal Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Law School Archives
 Testimony by Bernard G. Segal in support of the nomination of Justice Lewis F. Powell to the United States Supreme Court
 History of the American Bar Association in the 1960s
 A Moral Issue, by Gerard J. St. John, detailing Segal's work with the American Bar Association on civil rights
 The Rainmakers, by Gerard J. St. John, referencing Segal's career
 Full text of the United States Supreme Court decision in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia

1907 births
1997 deaths
American civil rights lawyers
20th-century American Jews
Activists for African-American civil rights
Pennsylvania lawyers
Political activists from Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania Law School alumni
Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania
Activists from Allentown, Pennsylvania
People from Allentown, Pennsylvania
Lawyers from Philadelphia
20th-century American lawyers

Bernard G. Segal


Sentinel Prime is the name of several fictional characters in many of the Transformers series. First mention of Sentinel Prime was in issue #65 of the US Marvel Comics Transformers series, where he was mentioned to hold the Autobot Matrix of Leadership before Optimus Prime.

Sentinel Prime is One of the members of the Dynasty of Primes and dedicated as the leader of the Autobots and has since appeared in a variety of forms as either Optimus Prime's mentor or friend. In the 2011 live action movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sentinel was the main villain and was voiced by Leonard Nimoy.

Other websites
 Sentinel Prime at the Transformers Wiki
 Sentinel Prime Character Page - Transformers Animated.com

Fictional robots
Transformers (franchise)

Sentinel Prime


Principal Feasts are a type of observance in some churches of the Anglican Communion, including the Church of England, the Episcopal Church (United States), and the Anglican Church of Canada. All Principal Feasts are also Principal Holy Days, sharing equal status with those Principal Holy Days which are not Principal Feasts.  They are considered to be the most significant type of observance, the others being Festivals, Lesser Festivals, and Commemorations.  As with all Principal Holy Days, their observance is obligatory. The Anglican Principal Feasts and Principal Holy Days are somewhat comparable to Roman Catholic Solemnities and Holy days of obligation.

Principal Feasts in the Church of England
The Epiphany
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas)
The Annunciation of Our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary
Easter Day
Ascension Day
Day of Pentecost
Trinity Sunday
All Saints' Day
Christmas Day

Principal Feasts in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada
Easter Day
Ascension Day
The Day of Pentecost
Trinity Sunday
All Saints' Day, November 1
Christmas Day, December 25
The Epiphany, January 6

See also

Principal Holy Days: Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday
Festival (Anglicanism)
Lesser Festival
Commemoration (Anglicanism)
List of Anglican Church calendars

Church of England festivals

Principal Feast


Tear resistance (or tear strength) is a measure of how well a material can withstand the effects of tearing.  It is a useful engineering measurement for a wide variety of materials by many different test methods.

Discussion
For example, with rubber, tear resistance measures how the test specimen resists the growth of any cuts when under tension, it is usually expressed in kN/m. Tear resistance can be gauged via the same ASTM D 412 apparatus used to measure tensile strength, modulus and elongation. ASTM D 624 can be applied to measure the resistance to the formation of a tear (tear initiation) and the resistance to the expansion of a tear (tear propagation). Regardless of which of these two is being measured, the sample is held between two holders and a uniform pulling force applied until the aforementioned deformation occurs. Tear resistance is then calculated by dividing the force applied by the thickness of the material.

Materials with low tear resistance sometimes have poor resistance to abrasion and when damaged will quickly fail (this includes hard materials, since hardness is not related to tear resistance).

Tear resistance of different materials
Substances with high tear resistance include epichlorohydrin, natural rubber and polyurethane. In contrast, materials such as silicone and fluorosilicone have low tear resistance.

Tear-yield ratio
The ratio of tear resistance to the yield strength is called the tear-yield ratio. It is a measure of notch toughness.

Standards by ASTM International
C1681-14 Standard Test Method for Evaluating the Tear Resistance of a Sealant Under Constant Strain
D1004-13 Standard Test Method for Tear Resistance (Graves Tear) of Plastic Film and Sheeting
D1922-15 Standard Test Method for Propagation Tear Resistance of Plastic Film and Thin Sheeting by Pendulum Method
D1938-14 Standard Test Method for Tear-Propagation Resistance (Trouser Tear) of Plastic Film and Thin Sheeting by a Single-Tear Method
D2212-00(2015) Standard Test Method for Slit Tear Resistance of Leather
D2582-16 Standard Test Method for Puncture-Propagation Tear Resistance of Plastic Film and Thin Sheeting
D4932/D4932M-89(2014)e1 Standard Test Method for Fastener Rupture and Tear Resistance of Roofing and Waterproofing Sheets, Roll Roofing, and Shingles
E604-15 Standard Test Method for Dynamic Tear Testing of Metallic Materials

See also
Landfill liner properties - tear resistance
Tearing energy
Fracture mechanics

References

External links
 Tear resistance on rlhudson.com

Solid mechanics
Deformation (mechanics)

Tear resistance


Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co., 433 U.S. 562 (1977), was an important U.S. Supreme Court case concerning rights of publicity.  The Court held that the First and Fourteenth Amendments do not immunize the news media from civil liability when they broadcast a performer's entire act without his consent, and the Constitution does not prevent a state from requiring broadcasters to compensate performers.  It was the first time (and so far the only time) the Supreme Court heard a case on rights of publicity.

Facts and procedural history
Petitioner Hugo Zacchini had a human cannonball act which he performed at various venues.  During August 1972, he was performing his act at the Geauga County Fair in Burton, Ohio.  On August 30, Zacchini noticed a freelance reporter from Scripps-Howard Broadcasting (which operated WEWS-TV in Cleveland) who had brought a movie camera into the fair.  Zacchini asked the reporter not to film his act.  The reporter did not film Zacchini's act that day, but did film him the next day.  The footage taken by the reporter was about fifteen seconds long, sufficient to capture Zacchini's entire act.

Zacchini filed suit against Scripps-Howard in Ohio state court, alleging that the local reporter "showed and commercialized the film of his act without his consent," and that such conduct was an "unlawful appropriation of plaintiff's professional property."  The trial court granted the defendant summary judgment.  The Ohio Court of Appeals reversed, holding that Zacchini's complaint stated a cause of action for conversion and for infringement of a common law copyright, and that the press was not privileged to show Zacchini's entire act on television without compensating him.

The case was then heard by the Ohio Supreme Court, who reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals in favor of Scripps-Howard.  The Ohio Supreme Court held that although Scripps-Howard would be liable for appropriating Zacchini's name, likeness, and performance,

A TV station has a privilege to report in its newscasts matters of legitimate public interest which would otherwise be protected by an individual's right of publicity, unless the actual intent of the TV station was to appropriate the benefit of the publicity for some nonprivileged private use, or unless the actual intent was to injure the individual.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether the First and Fourteenth Amendments immunized respondent from damages for its alleged infringement of Zacchini's right of publicity under Ohio state law.

Decision

Majority opinion
Justice White wrote for the majority.  He held first that, because the Ohio Supreme Court based its decision on the scope of protection offered to the press by the Federal constitution (rather than the Ohio state constitution), no adequate and independent state ground existed for the Ohio Supreme Court's decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court therefore had jurisdiction.

Moving on to the substantive constitutional issue of the case, White disagreed with the Ohio Supreme Court that the press should be privileged in showing Zacchini's entire act.  He distinguished this case from Time, Inc. v. Hill, the U.S. Supreme Court case upon which the Ohio Supreme Court relied in their opinion.  Time, Inc. v. Hill was a case which dealt with the tort of "false light", i.e. portraying a person in a misleading or embarrassing manner, rather than the appropriation of a performer's act or likeness, which was at stake there.  White analogized Zacchini's interest in protecting his act from being shown without his permission to those interests protected by patent and copyright:  Zacchini not only had a commercial interest in being compensated for the time and effort involved in his performance, but also the "economic incentive for him to make the investment required to produce a performance of interest to the public".  White concluded by saying that while a state government may pass a law shielding the press from liability for broadcasting performers' acts, the First and Fourteenth amendments do not require the states to do so.

Dissenting opinions
Justice Powell, joined by justices Brennan and Marshall, disagreed with the standard set forth by the majority.  Powell felt that the majority concentrated too heavily on the fact that the footage which was broadcast constituted Zacchini's "entire act" (which, Powell noted, was a rather uncertain standard in itself), rather than examining the purpose for which the footage was used.  Since the footage was used for the purpose of reporting news, rather than for commercial exploitation, Powell asserted that the television station's use of the footage should be considered privileged from liability.  He worried that the majority's holding may have a chilling effect on freedom of the press:

The Court's holding that the station's ordinary news report may give rise to substantial liability has disturbing implications, for the decision could lead to a degree of media self-censorship.  Hereafter, whenever a television news editor is unsure whether certain film footage received from a camera crew might be held to portray an "entire act," he may decline coverage – even of clearly newsworthy events – or confine the broadcast to watered-down verbal reporting, perhaps with an occasional still picture. The public is then the loser. This is hardly the kind of news reportage that the First Amendment is meant to foster.

Justice Stevens wrote a separate dissent.  He felt that a better resolution of the case would have been to remand it back to the Ohio Supreme Court for clarification of the state law issue before attempting to resolve the constitutional issue.  Stevens felt that it was not clear whether the Ohio Supreme Court was basing its holding purely on the boundaries of common law torts or the First Amendment.

References

External links

 First Amendment Limitations on Civil Law Liability, an article from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law which discusses the case in the context of the First Amendment

Geauga County, Ohio
Personality rights
E. W. Scripps Company
United States Free Speech Clause case law
United States intellectual property case law
United States tort case law
United States Supreme Court cases
United States Supreme Court cases of the Burger Court
1977 in United States case law


"The Son Also Draws" is the 6th episode of the first season of Family Guy. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on May 9, 1999. The episode is about Chris getting kicked out of the Boy Scouts (the episode calls it "Youth Scouts"). Peter drives the family to Scout headquarters to get Chris back in. During a rest stop at a Native American casino, Lois gambles away the family car. Peter pretends to be a member of the tribe in an attempt to get the car back, and is sent on a vision quest to prove his heritage, giving him and Chris an opportunity to bond.

Story

Chris wants to leave the Youth Scouts but does not want to tell his father Peter. Chris is later kicked out of the Youth Scouts. Peter takes Chris and the family to Manhattan, where the headquarters of the Youth Scouts is. Brian stays at the house and watches One Day at a Time. He becomes less smart after watching some episodes.

Peter needs to go to a bathroom, so they go to a Native American casino. Lois gets a gambling addiction and loses the family's car. Peter tries to get the car back by pretending he is a Native American. The Indians who work at the casino tell Peter to go on a vision quest to show that he really is a Native American. Chris goes with Peter into the wilderness. This is so that he can tell Peter he wants to draw instead of be with the Youth Scouts. Peter becomes so hungry in the wilderness that he starts to see talking trees. Fonzie appears in the sky and gets Peter to see Chris as a good artist. Peter and Chris go back to the casino and get their car back. At the end of the episode, the family talks about what Native Americans, Mexicans, and Swedes have achieved in life. Peter then says that "Canada sucks."

Production

"The Son Also Draws" was written by Ricky Blitt. Niel Affleck is the director of the episode. Alex Borstein (voice actor of Lois) helped write the episode. Seth MacFarlane (creator of the show) thought she was helpful on writing for what Lois does in the episode. The part of the story where Lois loses the family's car was based on the movie Lost in America. The part with Peter trying to be an Indian to get the family car back is similar to real events. People say that they are 1/64th of a Native American so that they can get money from casinoes. Suzie Plakson, Kevin Michael Richardson, Fred Tatasciore, Wally Wingert, Bobby Slayton, Butch Hartman, and Patrick Bristow were guest stars for the episode.

Reception

Ahsan Haque from IGN thought that the episode was not an "instant classic" like the other episodes of the first season, but is "still quite strong". He said that the episode did not have as many "laugh out loud moments" but has more "bolder" humor. Robin Pierson of The TV Critic thought that the episode was "very poor" and that the story was not focused. The episode's ending with Peter saying "Canada sucks" made Canadians who watched the episode angry.

References

Other websites

Family Guy (season 1) episodes
1999 television episodes

The Son Also Draws


Curve fitting is constructing a mathematical function which best fits a set of data points.

Curve fitting may involve either interpolation or smoothing. Using interpolation requires an exact fit to the data. With smoothing, a "smooth" function is constructed, that fit the data approximately. A related topic is regression analysis, which focuses more on questions of statistical inference such as how much uncertainty is present in a curve that is fit to data observed with random errors.

Fitted curves can be used to help data visualization, to guess values of a function where no data is available, and to summarize the relationships among two or more variables.  Extrapolation refers to the use of a fitted curve beyond the range of the observed data. This is subject to a degree of uncertainty, since it may reflect the method used to construct the curve as much as it reflects the observed data.

References

Mathematical approximation

Curve fitting


Robert Fowler  (18531926) was a Scottish artist who painted mythological scenes and landscapes.

Biography
Fowler was born in 1853 in Cellardyke, Fife, and was brought up mainly by his uncle and aunt while his parents were away on business. He showed a very early aptitude for art, starting first with pencil drawings then moving on to painting and clay modelling. His family moved to Liverpool and Fowler went to school at Liverpool College. At the age of 16, he found employment in a commercial office where his talent for art was recognised by his employer, who encouraged Fowler's parents to send him to art school.

Fowler went to London to study at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and the South Kensington Schools. He also spent much time making drawings of the exhibits in the British Museum, being particularly impressed by the Elgin Marbles, and found inspiration in the local art galleries. However, his art studies were curtailed by health problems which necessitated a long period of "convalescence" in Yorkshire and Llandudno in Wales.

He moved back to Liverpool and took an art studio in Castle Street, which became his base for several decades. He exhibited his work at the Liverpool autumn exhibitions in 1875, and at the Royal Academy, London, in 1876. He designed posters for the Walker Gallery, and also had work exhibited abroad in Paris and Munich. His studio became a magnet for other artists, writers and musicians. He moved to London in the early 1900s and had a studio in Tite street, Chelsea for some years. Fowler also illustrated a number of children's books, including work by Alice Corkran and G. A. Henty.

Fowler became a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI) in 1891, and the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. His style was classical – frequently drawing on mythological themes – but also with strong elements of symbolism and Japonism. Artists who influenced Fowler included Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, George Watts, James Whistler, Frederick Walker and David Woodlock (1842–1929).

List of selected works

Eve
Ariel
A Naiad
Dance of Salome (1885)
A World of Colours (1887)
The Nymph
Girl with Poppies
Sleep (1893)
Butterflies (1895)
The Streamlet,
he Coming of Apollo
The Enchanted Glade
The Silver Shell
The Butterfly
Aphrodite
Venus and Cupid
Dreaming
Widow's Mite
The Necklace
The Voice of Spring
Merlin and the Enchanted Princess (or "Charity")
Stars of the Summer Night
After Music
He Loves Me He Loves Me Not

Some of his landscapes were included as illustrations in Wilmot-Buxton's travel book "Wales" (A & C Black, 1911).

Gallery

Notes

Bibliography (and references)
Studio international, Volume 9 (London, Cory, Adams & Mackay etc., 1897) pp. 85–98.
The Magazine of Art, Volume 22 (Cassell, 1898) pp. 3–11
Wilmot-Buxton, E. M & Fowler, Robert (illustrator). Wales (A & C Black, 1911)
Mayo, Ralph. In search of Robert Fowler R.I. Victorian Artist (Trafford Pub., 2004)

External links and references

Paintings by Fowler (Art Renewal Center Museum)
Fowler biography
Dance of Salome (Christie's)

19th-century Scottish painters
Scottish male painters
20th-century Scottish painters
Scottish illustrators
Scottish landscape painters
Scottish watercolourists
People educated at Liverpool College
People from Anstruther
1853 births
1926 deaths
Members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours
19th-century Scottish male artists
20th-century Scottish male artists

Robert Fowler (artist)


"Straighten Up and Fly Right"  is a 1943 song written by Nat King Cole and Irving Mills and one of the first vocal hits for the King Cole Trio.  It was the trio's most popular single, reaching number one on the Harlem Hit Parade for ten nonconsecutive weeks.  The single also peaked at number nine on the pop charts. "Straighten Up and Fly Right" also reached number one for six nonconsecutive weeks on the Most Played Jukebox Hillbilly Records.

Background
The song was based on a black folk tale that Cole's father had used as a theme for one of his sermons. In the tale, a buzzard takes different animals for a joy ride. When he gets hungry, he throws them off on a dive and eats them for dinner. A monkey who had observed this trick goes for a ride; he wraps his tail around the buzzard's neck and gives the buzzard a big surprise by nearly choking him to death.

The King Cole Trio recorded the song, along with "Gee, Baby, Ain't I Good to You," "If You Can't Smile and Say Yes," and "Jumpin' at Capitol" for Capitol Records during a 3-hour recording session at C.P. MacGregor Studios in Hollywood on November 30, 1943, with Johnny Mercer producing and John Palladino engineering the session.

Cover versions
The Andrews Sisters' version of the song reached number 8 on the charts in 1944.
In 1958, The DeJohn Sisters recorded the song, which peaked at number 73 on the pop chart.
Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, KGO radio in San Francisco recorded at the Fairmont Hotel.  Tiffany Transcriptions 01 (late '40s)
Sammy Davis Jr., The Nat King Cole Songbook, (1965)
Carmen McRae, Velvet Soul  (1972)
Buddy Tate, Just Jazz (1984)
Linda Ronstadt, For Sentimental Reasons (1986)
Natalie Cole, Unforgettable... with Love (1991)
Norman Foote recorded a jazz version on his album If the Shoe Fits in 1992.
Diana Krall, Stepping Out (1993)
Sharon, Lois & Bram's version of the song was featured on their 1995 album Let's Dance. The trio also performed the song numerous times on tour.
Oscar Brown Jr., Sin & Soul ...and then some (track recorded 1960, album released 1996)
Neal McCoy, The Life of the Party (1999)
Nnenna Freelon (with Take 6), Soulcall (2000)
Robbie Williams, Swing When You're Winning (2001)
Lyle Lovett, Smile: Songs from the Movies (2003)
Vocal Point, Standing Room Only (2004)
Dianne Reeves, Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
Imre Saarna "Estonian Idol - Eesti Otsib Superstaar Lilleball concerti" (2010)
King's Singers, Swimming Over London (2010)
Caravan Palace sampled four lines for the track Human Leather Shoes for Crocodile Dandies, featured on their 2015 album <I°_°I>.
Acoustix, Jazz, Jazz, Jazz (1998)
Jeff Goldblum and Imelda May on his 2018 debut album The Capitol Studios Sessions.
Marvin Gaye in 1965
Suzy Bogguss Swing (2003)

In popular culture
The song was a part of the score of the 1943 film Here Comes Elmer.
The song was used in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. John Glenn (played by Ed Harris) correctly guesses the song on the show Name That Tune. Jeff Goldblum, who recorded a version of the song in 2018, plays one of the NASA recruiters (along with Harry Shearer) who immediately guess the correct song while watching Glenn on television.
The song was used in the 1995 HBO historical war drama The Tuskegee Airmen and the title was quoted by the pilots when going into battle.
The Andrews Sisters' version is featured in the 2010 video game Mafia II as one of the in-game radio songs and was used in the trailer for the Power Armor Edition of Fallout 76 in addition to being in the in-game radio.
The song was used in the season 4 episode of Tales from the Crypt, "Split Personality".
The song was used in NBC's drama series This Is Us, "The best washing machine in the whole world". Rebecca Pearson (played by Mandy Moore) sang the song during rehearsal.
The song was most recently (2019) used in episode 1 of George Clooney's re-tooling of Catch 22 as a miniseries for Hulu, the U.S.-based subscription video on demand service.
 The Nat King Cole's version of the song was quoted by Maya Angelou in her bestseller "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings"
 The Perseverance rover executed a "Straighten Up and Fly Right" maneuver during its descent towards the Mars surface.
 Aardman's 2000 film "Chicken Run" originally used the song Straighten Up and Fly Right in the flight school scene on the workprint 2.0, but the song was eventually cut from the final product.

References

1940s jazz standards
1943 songs
1944 singles
Nat King Cole songs
Songs written by Nat King Cole
Songs with lyrics by Irving Mills
Songs about birds
Songs about primates
United States National Recording Registry recordings

Straighten Up and Fly Right