Felix Carl Wright (born June 22, 1959), is a former professional American football player who played defensive back from 1985–1992 for the Cleveland Browns and Minnesota Vikings in the National Football League.

Undrafted out of Drake University, Wright played from 1982–84 in the Canadian Football League with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, earning Eastern Division All-Star honors in his last two seasons. In his final year, he intercepted two passes in Hamilton's 72nd Grey Cup game loss. In 1989, Wright led the NFL in interceptions with 9.

NFL career
He signed with the Browns as a free agent on April 13, 1985, spending his first season with the team in a specialization role in the secondary as well as seeing action on the special teams squad. The following season, he intercepted three passes and thrived on special teams, blocking one punt that was recovered for a touchdown, partially blocking another punt and then returning a blocked punt 30 yards for a touchdown in the Browns' October 26 road victory over the Minnesota Vikings.

Exactly one year after his game against the Vikings, Wright earned Player of the Week accolades in a game against the Los Angeles Rams. In the game, he intercepted one pass and returned it 68 yards to set up Cleveland's first score, then later ran 40 yards with another interception for a touchdown. In 1988, Wright ended the year with three multi-interception games, including a pair in the team's loss to the Houston Oilers in the AFC wild card game, winning AFC Defensive Player of Month in December. The following season, he led the NFL in interceptions with 9. In the November 5 road victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Wright returned a pass 27 yards for a touchdown.

Felix's younger brother Charles Wright enjoyed a career in both the CFL and briefly in the NFL. His brother, Joe Wright, played professional basketball in Europe.

References

External links
College stats

1959 births
Living people
People from Carthage, Missouri
Players of American football from Missouri
American football safeties
Drake Bulldogs football players
African-American players of American football
African-American players of Canadian football
Canadian football defensive backs
Hamilton Tiger-Cats players
Cleveland Browns players
Minnesota Vikings players
Kansas City Chiefs players
21st-century African-American people
20th-century African-American sportspeople

Felix Wright


Alexander Kennedy Smith  (7 July 1824 – 16 January 1881) was a Scottish/Australian engineer and former Mayor of Melbourne.

Early life
Smith was born in Cauldmill near Hawick, Roxburghshire, Scotland.  He was involved in the development of many of Victoria's gas and water works during the 1850s and 1860s.

Smith was sent from Scotland to Melbourne in 1854 to manage and build the Melbourne Gas and Coke Co. works. Once that project was complete, Smith remained in Victoria and set up his own practice. He built gas works at Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo in Victoria, as well as one at Newcastle, New South Wales. Smith also drew up plans and specifications for many other works in Australia and overseas. He was a consulting and locomotive engineer for the Melbourne and Suburban Railway Company, and worked as an engineer on the South Yarra Waterworks.

Smith was also a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly from 1877 to 1881, member for the La Trobe Ward in the Melbourne City Council for fifteen years, and Mayor of Melbourne from 1875 to 1876.

Smith died of heart disease at his home in Studley Park, Victoria, Australia.

Career highlights
1846–1854 Engineer with the Great Western Railway Company.
1853 – c.1857 Seconded to build and manage the Melbourne Gas and Coke Co. works – a five-year contract
1854 Arrived in Australia (Melbourne)
c.1857 –  Civil and Consulting Engineer private practice established in Carlton, Victoria
1860 – ? Major in the Victorian Volunteer Artillery Regiment
1875–1876 Mayor of the City of Melbourne
1877–1881 Member for East Melbourne in the Legislative Assembly

References
Bio at Melbourne University Bright Sparcs
Jill Eastwood, 'Smith, Alexander Kennedy (1824–1881)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.6, MUP, 1976, p. 139

1824 births
1881 deaths
People from the Scottish Borders
Australian engineers
Scottish civil engineers
Mayors and Lord Mayors of Melbourne
Victoria (state) state politicians
Engineers from Melbourne
Scottish emigrants to Australia
19th-century Australian politicians

Alexander Kennedy Smith


Google Sites is a structured wiki and webpage creator offered by Google as part of Google Apps. You don't need to pay for anything but not the domain. It was launched on February 28, 2008. It replaces Google Page Creator, Google's previous webpage creation service. It is easy to use, and provides quick and easy to access editing tools, such as basic editing tools, HTML insertion modules, formatting options, built in tables and layout customization settings.

Google

Google Sites


Madge Bertha Weinstein  is a fictional Internet personality who maintains Yeast Radio, which has developed a cult following and was among the 50 most-subscribed-to podcasts in 2005. Weinstein is the creation and alter ego of underground filmmaker Richard Bluestein and was described by USA Today as "representative of the type of over-the-top content that would never see the light of day at a mainstream media outlet".

Although Weinstein is a fictional character (and never admitted as such), the majority of opinions, social-political commentary and oblique characteristics of her personality are clearly reflective of Bluestein's own. In essence, Weinstein is both an extension and distortion of Bluestein's actual personality.

Character history
Weinstein is an outspoken breast cancer survivor and opinionated Jewish lesbian activist. She is a Vassar College graduate, a "woman of Luna" and claims to be a co-founder of the Lilith Fair. She was also the band manager of the now disbanded riot grrrl rock group, 'Goddess Riot Juice'. She is the self-professed "Margaret Mead of podcasting" as she is an amateur cultural anthropologist who, in her free time, studies the sordid sexual activities of homosexual men. She is well known for her advocacy on a variety of women's issues including her long tenure as a spokeswoman on behalf of women suffering from vaginal yeast. Weinstein also suffers from food allergies and fibromyalgia.

Weinstein is the daughter of Irving Weinstein, a funeral director and owner of Weinstein & Schlump Funeral Homes. She grew up in the Grand Concourse in the borough of the Bronx in New York City. She is the former lover of Ethel Merman (although she tends to exaggerate the details of their now infamous 1967 tryst during Ethel's daughter's funeral) and has had affairs with Martina Navratilova, Ellen DeGeneres, k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge and Rosie O'Donnell. In her youth, she claims to have performed oral sex on Nancy Reagan which she now regrets. Weinstein's most notable lesbian relationship was with Gussie Iscowicz (the alter ego of Bluestein's late partner Juan Montealegre), an elderly hairdresser living in Miami, Florida who suffered from Alzheimer's. For many years, Weinstein edited gay pornography for an urban audience (for a company known only as 'the Dorm'). She currently resides in Miami, Florida with her Italian greyhound Trotsky.

Biography
Weinstein co-manages the sister site, Insane Films, which features personal video blogs of Madge's alter ego, Richard Bluestein, as well as features by underground filmmakers and miscellaneous visual content. Insane Films is one of the earliest videoblogs ever created, originating sometime in 2000. However, Madge Weinstein's fame grew largely from her indie podcast Yeast Radio, which began in late November 2004 . Weinstein gained notoriety for her viral video, Cooking With Madge: Lesbians On Acid, which featured a disheveled Madge and her unstable, ambiguously gendered friends attempting to cook "les beans" while high on LSD. A pioneer of the podcasting medium, Adam Curry, helped promote the show in its early life. In late April 2005, Weinstein created Yeast2, a free-form experimental channel in which "anyone (could) contribute to the strange, ugly, pretty macabra [sic] and surreal." Yeast2 closed in 2008.

In early July 2005, Weinstein became one of the first members of Adam Curry's PodShow and was featured heavily in the program, which aired on Sirius Satellite Radio from 6-10 p.m. EST on weekdays before the company's ties with the radio network were controversially severed on May 1, 2007. Weinstein's contract with PodShow ended in April 2008.

Around the same time, Madge Weinstein co-created Eat This Hot Show a collaborative podcast featuring five notable members of the ever-growing "queercast" community: Weinstein, Ragan Fox, Wanda Wisdom, Fausto Fernos and his partner Marc Felion. However, Fausto and Marc were expelled from the show after ten episodes due to internal conflicts with fellow hosts, and the three featured a weekly guest in the episodes following. The show eventually dissipated in this format although, in April 2008, the show was revived with Madge, Wanda and new co-host Auntie Vera Charles. As of 2014, after another hiatus and the departure of Auntie Vera Charles, new episodes are being recorded sporadically with current co-hosts Ragan Fox and Wanda Wisdom. Madge Weinstein and Wanda Wisdom also co-created the online community Qpodder.org, which collects podcasts by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people or characters. Sibling site NellyGator.com allows listeners to subscribe to a single RSS feed containing all podcast episodes from the members of Qpodder. In mid-October 2005, Weinstein, a self-described "pioneering lesbian," began heavily promoting the medium of queer video blogging to coincide with the advent of the video iPod. Her new endeavor Faggregator.com does to videoblogging what Nellygator did for podcasting, and features a single page which houses all the video material submitted by members of the Qpodder community.

Bluestein experienced two personal losses in 2006. Juan Montealegre died on February 11, 2006, after a battle with cancer. Not long thereafter, on May 2, 2006, his 14-year-old dog Chauncey, a heavy fixture on the show in its early days including a memorable episode where Weinstein angrily cleaned up his feces, also died. On September 27, 2006, Richard Bluestein announced on Yeast Radio that he was retiring the character Madge and taking over hosting duties himself due to creative concerns. Madge was reported to be in a hospital in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she received adjustable gastric band surgery for her ongoing weight problem. The surgery went horribly wrong, leaving her in a critical condition. Madge eventually recovered and returned to the show on November 7, 2006.

In early January 2008, with the threat of her expiring PodShow contract, Weinstein relaunched Yeast Radio as a live show, airing on her website from 10:00 CT on Fridays. The live format continued until the end of May 2008 when Weinstein decided to return to a more free-form, unscheduled format. In early 2009, Weinstein resumed streaming live shows sporadically. The 1000th episode of Yeast Radio was streamed live on February 12, 2010.

Weinstein's rebellious, queer punk ethics and her podcast's unconventional content, strong, coarse language and stream-of-consciousness structure have made her an endlessly controversial icon within the more conservative podcasting community. Her show serves as an ongoing protest against censorship, the commercialization of mainstream radio and the continued marginalization of gays and lesbians by the growing monoculture.

Notable guests
Weinstein features a variety of vulgar but eccentric characters on her show. Some frequent contributors:

 Sylvia Browne, a famous psychic who is now a bloated corpse, who could never quite find her purse. Her spirit lives on and is continuously celebrated by Madge Weinstein in the form of audio clips.
 Berbacia Clemons, a Los Angeles-based "big, black, bloated, bisexual, bipolar, overweight blesbian blacktress" who sporadically guests on the show to "peel open the pussy lips of Hollywood", allowing the audience to have a "peek inside". She is often delusional and obsesses over certain celebrities, in particular former talk show host Star Jones (whom she views as her stalker and her "only competition"), her "lesbian lover" Oprah Winfrey and her "close friends" Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor.
 Cher, the glamorous and unhinged singer, actress, part time yoga teacher and close friend of Madge. Talks constantly and proudly about her transgender son "Chazzie".
 Grizelda, a panty-pooping marathon runner and Madge's close friend who shares her interests in obesity and the bizarre. Grizelda (Shishaldin Hanlen) is also a provocative multimedia performance artist, world cake-eating champion and sports coach who made headlines in 2004 for invoking an obscure clause in the French civil code and petitioning the government for permission to marry the long deceased French surrealist poet Comte de Lautréamont.
 Victoria LaMarr, a schizophrenic transgender crack whore with multiple personalities who appeared heavily in Weinstein's infamous Lesbians On Acid trilogy and in early episodes of Yeast Radio. She went on to play a larger part in the Feast of Fools podcast. Victoria (Matthew Bogseth) died from complications of HIV/AIDS in November 2013.
 Rachel Kann, an emo/gothic performance poet and 'new age' spiritual healer. Her trademark is her deep, robust voice with inflections that suggest she is continuously relieving her bowels. Madge's chemistry and banter with her is very popular with listeners and she enjoys a cult following.
 Ali Mahajani, also known as Ali My Vagina, an Indian man who enjoys sticking unusual objects in his urethra. He is estranged from his amputee wife after a complication from sexual intercourse. He soon went on to play a large role in Cheryl's Whorehole podcast and is part of the That Is Real Good Tech podcast with Rob Average Penis.
 Andy Melton, later known as Schrockbella Mortenstein, a housebound gay twenty-something with the unique predicament of hyper morbid obesity. From his father's house in Tennessee, he formerly hosted the podcast "Andy Not Andrew" and unsuccessfully launched the program "Sissy Fried" under the pseudonym, Declan Channing. He has since left his home and podcasting to pursue a romantic relationship with a man known to listeners only as 'Yellow Fatty'.
 Cheryl Trig Merkowski, a self-described beautiful, paedophilic 25-year-old woman, smoker and owner of three fourths of a lung. Though she makes a point to introduce herself as such, it seems clear that she is much older than she lets on. Cheryl speaks obsessively about her prolapsed vagina, feces, urine, abortions, semen, African Americans, her prized Cadillac Cimarron and the children at the daycare centre that she runs. She has a croaky and aged voice, the results of  excessive tobacco smoking and lung cancer. She also tans obsessively to the point that her skin has become very leathery. She worked under Oprah Winfrey (with whom she has a bizarre, masochistic relationship) and was caught up in a global conspiracy of celebrities pooping their panties. She has many famous 'sisters', including psychic Sylvia Browne, former governor Jan Brewer and controversial celebrity chef Paula Deen. Originally only appearing on the show sporadically she has grown to become a full-fledged co-host. In February 2014, her music video "Walls Fall Out", a song about vaginal and anal prolapse, went viral.
 The Abortion Hotline Girls, a series of bewildered anti-abortion hotline workers who befriend and attempt to help poor Cheryl and Debra through their various pregnancies and troubles.
 Hagatha von Taterbugs, a gleefully disgusting HIV positive drag queen with borderline personality disorder who hangs out in public restrooms and drinks sewage. Her trashy exploits and long history of atrocities have shocked and astounded even Madge and Cheryl. Cheryl despises Hagatha and undercuts her at every turn.
 Debra Wilkerson, an elderly, insane Christian woman who thinks Madge and Cheryl need to "get saved". She had a complete mental breakdown after the television show The Facts Of Life was cancelled and talks endlessly about "Natalie", "Jo" and the "GURLS". After smoking copious amounts of chiffon, she developed multiple personalities, most notably as Heather Feather, a South Californian teen girl who frequents phone sex lines and has many strange boyfriends. Heather's most notable boyfriend is Fill, a foul mouthed, mentally handicapped pervert who talks obsessively about his 'cream'. She also has a gay grandson who burns crosses in her backyard in tribute to Madonna. Like Cheryl, she has grown to become a full-time co-host on the show.
 Kathy, a dominant transsexual lesbian whom the gurrrlls randomly found through a phone sex hotline. Kathy is borderline bankrupt and not-so-secretly wants Heather's sugardaddy funding. However, Heather eventually became homeless, much to Kathy's dismay, and lost all the money forcing Heather to live in her car. Kathy constantly berates Heather for being mildly retarded in nature. From the phone calls between Kathy and Heather, it is clear that Kathy needs Jesus. Not to mention needing to learn what being a lesbian is all about...
 Angela Beasley, a sassy worker at Kerry Laundry in Oakland Park, Florida whom the guuuurlls like to mess with on occasion. She charges 95¢ a pound for laundry and refuses to wash anything with doodle, feces, or BM in it. Angela has a boss named Ms. Tracy whom can never "guess what." Ms. Beasley also has a fetish for lobster dinner, and never received her voucher for one due to Matt Peter's unfortunate demise. Odds are Angela is still waiting expectantly for "Listenin' Radio Radio Yeast" to send her her complementary lobster dinner...not realizing that her waiting is as pointless as her waiting for Godot.

The show regularly features audio clips involving psychic Sylvia Browne, feminist writer Helen Gurley Brown, Big Meets Bigger, My Strange Addiction and other television programs about morbid obesity and bizarre personal habits.

Weinstein has also interviewed political activist Cindy Sheehan, Wigstock founder Lady Bunny, Democracy Now! reporter Amy Goodman, pioneer of the transgressive art movement Nick Zedd, collaborative documentary filmmaker Kent Bye of The Echo Chamber Project and the experimental, underground filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Kristie Alshaibi. The show frequently features original compositions from Taylor E. Ross (described as Madge's "cunt doctor"), the mysterious "Mr. Zeeche" and Dave from the Chub Creek's podcast. Because of her prominence within the community, Madge also regularly features fellow queer podcasters on her show such as Ragan Fox, Wanda Wisdom, Auntie Vera Charles, Lady Raptastic and Rebecca Nay.

References

External links

Comedy radio characters
American radio personalities
American drag queens
Fictional American Jews
Fictional Jewish women
Fictional lesbians
American podcasters
Radio characters introduced in 2004
Female characters in radio

Madge Weinstein


Atlantis: The Lost Empire is a 2001 American animated movie made by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is the 40th movie in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series and the first science fiction movie for Disney. It follows a group of mercenaries on a quest to find the lost city of Atlantis. Released on June 15, 2001, it did not make much money as the company wanted. Disney stopped making both a spin-off television series and an underwater attraction at its Disneyland theme park.

This movie has a sequel called Atlantis: Milo's Return.

Plot
In ancient times, a giant tidal wave threatens to submerge the island city of Atlantis. During a mass evacuation of the city, the queen of Atlantis is ingested by the "Heart of Atlantis", a giant crystal protecting the city, leaving behind her daughter Kida (Cree Summer) and her husband Kashekim (Leonard Nimoy).

Thousands of years later, in 1914, Milo J. Thatch (Michael J. Fox), a nerdy linguist and cartographer at the Smithsonian Institution, who is marginalized for his research on Atlantis, believes he has found the "Shepherd's Journal", an ancient book which supposedly contains directions to the lost city, but his proposal to search for it is turned down by the museum board. Milo later encounters the seductive Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian), who introduces him to Preston Whitmore (John Mahoney), an eccentric millionaire who had previously funded a successful expedition to find the journal to repay a debt to Milo's grandfather, and recruits Milo to lead an expedition to Atlantis as soon as he deciphers it.

The expedition departs for Atlantis, led by Commander Rourke (James Garner), who also led the search for the journal, and a team of specialists including Vinny (Don Novello), an Italian demolition expert, Audrey (Jacqueline Obradors), a Latino mechanic, Mrs. Packard (Florence Stanley), a grouchy radio operator, Dr. Sweet (Phil Morris), a black medical officer, and Cookie (Jim Varney), a mess cook. The crew sets off on the Ulysses, a giant submarine, but are soon attacked by the Leviathan, a robotic lobster-like sea monster, guarding the entrance to Atlantis. The Ulysses is destroyed, but Milo, Rourke and part of the crew escape and make their way to a cavern, which the journal describes as the entrance to the city.

After travelling through a network of caves and a dormant volcano, the team reach Atlantis where they are greeted by Kida, who is actually over eight-thousand years old, but resembles a young woman, and discover that the Atlantean language is the basis for many existing languages. Kida enlists Milo's help in decoding the Atlantean language, which has been long forgotten by the natives. By swimming deep within the city's submerged ruins, and translating underwater murals, he discovers that the Heart of Atlantis provides the city with power and extends their lives through the crystals worn around their necks; he is surprised that this isn't mentioned in the journal, but upon examination realises a page is missing.

Returning to the surface with Kida, Milo discovers Rourke has the missing page. Rourke and the crew betray Milo, revealing they intend to bring the crystal to the surface world to sell off. Rourke fatally wounds the king while trying to extract information about the crystal's whereabouts, but finds its location for himself, hidden under the throne room. The crystal merges with Kida, and Rourke and the mercenaries lock her in a crate and prepare to leave, knowing that the Atlanteans will be killed when the crystal is gone. Milo calls his friends out for betraying their consciences and ultimately they join his side, and remain in Atlantis. As the king succumbs to his wounds, he tells Milo the crystal has developed consciousness, and when Atlantis is threatened, it will find a royal host. As he dies, he gives Milo his crystal and tells him to save Kida and Atlantis. With the encouragement of Sweet, Milo., the crew and the Atlanteans team up to stop Rourke.

During a massive battle inside the volcano, Helga and the mercenaries are defeated, and Rourke is killed when he is turned into a crystal statue, and cut to pieces by his airship's blades. As Milo and the others fly back to the city, the volcano erupts. As lava flows towards the city, Kida-in crystal form-rises into the air, creating a protective shield. The lava breaks away harmlessly, showing a restored Atlantis, and the crystal returns Kida to Milo. The rest of the crew return to the surface, vowing to keep Atlantis's location a secret, while Milo stays behind, falls in love with Kida and helps her rebuild the lost empire.

Cast
 Michael J. Fox as Milo James Thatch, a linguist and cartographer
 Cree Summer as Kidagakash "Kida" Nedakh, the Princess of Atlantis
 James Garner as Commander Lyle Tiberius Rourke
 Corey Burton as Gaëtan "Mole" Molière, a French geologist
 Claudia Christian as Lieutenant Helga Katrina Sinclair
 John Mahoney as Preston B. Whitmore
 Phil Morris as Doctor Joshua Strongbear Sweet
 Leonard Nimoy as Kashekim Nedakh, the King of Atlantis and Kida's father
 Don Novello as Vincenzo "Vinny" Santorini, an Italian demolitions expert
 Jacqueline Obradors as Audrey Rocio Ramirez, a teenage female Puerto Rican mechanic
 Florence Stanley as Wilhelmina Bertha Packard
 David Ogden Stiers as Fenton Q. Harcourt, a board member of the Smithsonian Institution
 Jim Varney as Jebidiah Allerdyce "Cookie" Farnsworth, a Western-style chuckwagon chef. Varney died in February 2000, before the movie was released.
 Jennifer Darling as Kashekim Nedakh, the Queen of Atlantis and Kida's mother
 Jim Cummings as Helmsman, Smithsonian Board Member #1, Atlantean Ketak Warrior and Atlantean Photographer
 Patrick Pinney as Smithsonian Board Member #2 and Viking Captain
 Mickie McGowan as Ensign
 Jack Angel as Truck Driver
 Phil Proctor as Atlanteans and Explorers
 Bob Bergen as Squad Leader
 Paul Eiding as Sergeant
 Bill Striglos as Various Explorers

Awards

leading to a re-evaluation, with many critics hailing it as a mistreated classic.

In particular, much praise has been given to the character of Kida, who was the first Disney Princess of color. Summer has regarded the character of Kida as her favourite role and even considers the character among the official Disney Princess line-up.

In 2015, Katharine Trendacosta at io9 reviewed the film and called it a "Beautiful Gem of a Movie That Deserved Better Than It Got" and said that the film deserves more love than it ended up getting. Ricky Brigante of InsideTheMagic considers the film the "most underrated, under-watched, and under-appreciated" Disney canon film, praising it for its themes and characters. Lindsay Teal considers "Atlantis" to be "a lost Disney classic". Describing the film as highly entertaining, she praises the writing and characterisation – in particular, Sweet, Helga and Kida.

Video games
There are several video games based on the film. Atlantis The Lost Empire: Search for the Journal (commonly known as Atlantis: Search for the Journal) was developed by Zombie Studios and published by Buena Vista Games, a subsidiary of Disney Interactive. It was released on May 1, 2001, for the Microsoft Windows platform and was a first-person shooter game, the first of two games based on the film developed by Zombie Studios and released for UPC labels from Kellogg's products for promotion. Atlantis The Lost Empire: Trial by Fire (commonly known as Atlantis: Trial by Fire) was the second game developed by Zombie Studios and published by Disney Interactive, and was released May 18, 2001, for the Microsoft Windows platform.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire is an action game developed by Eurocom for the PlayStation console which was released June 14, 2001. The player controls Milo, Audrey, Molière, Kida and Vinny as they traverse Atlantis, unlocking its secrets. Some features in the game unlock others (such as a movie) by finding items hidden throughout the game. THQ released Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire for the Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color. On Game Boy Color, it is a platform game in which the player controls Milo and three other characters from the film across 14 levels on a quest to discover Atlantis. On Game Boy Advance, it is a platform adventure-based game that hinges on searching and collecting crystals over 10 different levels including an epic battle against Rourke, the evil mercenary captain. The game was met with average to mixed reviews upon release. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 74% and 73 out of 100 for the PlayStation version; 65% for the Game Boy Color version; and 56% and 51 out of 100 for the Game Boy Advance version.

References

2001 animated movies
American family movies
Disney animated movies
Movies composed by James Newton Howard
2000s English-language movies
2001 adventure movies
2000s fantasy-comedy movies
2001 comedy movies
2001 science fiction movies
American action movies
American adventure movies
American coming-of-age movies
American drama movies
American fantasy movies
American science fiction movies
Movies set in Washington, D.C.
Movies with underwater settings
Movies set on islands
Movies about volcanoes
Movies set in the 1910s
Musical movies
Screenplays by Joss Whedon

Atlantis: The Lost Empire


Bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) is a mental illness where a person will have repeated, long-lasting feelings (episodes) of high (mania) and low mood (depression). It may occur with or without cycles of normal mood, called euthymia. A mixed episode occurs when both mania and depression are present at the same time. People with bipolar disorder experience the whole spectrum of emotional feelings from unimaginable grief to full blown euphoria whereas normal people experience only a section of the spectrum of emotional feelings somewhere between extreme grief and extreme happiness.

Symptoms
"Bipolar" literally means "two poles" or two extremes in how much energy the brain has. Sometimes, a person can experience something called mania. Mania is when a person's brain goes into a high-energy state. When in a high-energy state, mania can cause extreme emotions such as panic attacks or extreme happiness such as euphoria. This feeling is often followed by a period of depression, which is a low-energy state. A person who is depressed may act sad or hopeless. People with bipolar disorder switch between these two states.

Mania
People who are in a manic state are often over-confident and very optimistic. This can cause them to take large risks and do things that are not normal for them to do. Manic episodes last for at least a week, but can last as long as three to six months. They are usually followed by a depressive episode. A person who is manic may talk very quickly with no pauses, have thoughts that change very quickly, or act without thinking. They may also experience psychosis, where they cannot tell what is real and what is not. They may think that they are unstoppable or that they are on a mission for God. Mania may become so severe that it can affect the person's ability to work or interact with others. Every person is different, so it is important to remember that these things do not happen to all people with bipolar disorder.

Hypomania
Hypomania is a less extreme version of mania. Someone who is hypomanic will have symptoms similar to mania. They may have increased energy and may deny that anything is wrong. A hypomanic episode may last from a few days to a few months.

Depression
People who are in a depressive state are often sad and pessimistic. They may lose interest in activities they usually like, or become isolated and lonely. Other symptoms include anxiety, hopelessness, changes in sleep, and suicidal thoughts. A depressive episode can last from a few weeks to several months. When bipolar disorder develops at a young age, the first few episodes are usually depressive. Because a manic or hypomanic episode is needed to diagnose bipolar disorder, some people are diagnosed with major depression at first.

Diagnosis
Bipolar disorder is an illness that can show in different ways. It is often diagnosed in adolescents or young adults. A few subtypes have been identified; these subtypes mostly describe the nature of the "episodes" of the disease:
Bipolar I disorder: A person with bipolar I has had at least one manic episode. Depressive episodes also occur in people with bipolar I, but are not required for a diagnosis.
Bipolar II disorder: A person with bipolar II has had no manic episodes, but at least one hypomanic episode. They have also had at least one major depressive episode.
Cyclothymia: A person with cyclothymia has had both hypomanic and feelings of depression. These feelings of depression are not extreme enough to be considered a depressive episode.

Causes
The exact cause of bipolar disorder is unknown. It is estimated that there is a 71 percent chance of bipolar disorder passing from parent to child. If one identical twin has bipolar disorder, there is a 40 to 70 percent chance that the other will develop bipolar disorder in their lifetime. MRI studies have shown that certain parts of the brain responsible for mood regulation are larger in bipolar patients. It is also possible for bipolar disorder to develop after a stroke, brain injury, or certain infections.

Treatment

Like most mental illnesses, there are ways to treat bipolar disorder. The most common way to treat bipolar disorder is by using medications called mood stabilizers. These medicines prevent and control the manic and depressive episodes. One of the most common mood stabilizers is lithium. Therapy can also be used to control the symptoms. The same treatments and medicines do not work for everyone, and it is not uncommon for people to have symptoms return if they stop taking medication. Things like this can make bipolar disorder a difficult illness to live with, but educating patients about it makes it easier. Sometimes, people need to be treated against their will. Patients may be thinking about or have tried to commit suicide, or they may be unable to see their situation properly. In many cases, teaching people about their disease helps. When they have gone through the phases of the illness a few times, they often see that treatment can make their life easier.

Further reading
Genetics links between five major psychiatric disorders: autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia per recent study.doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61345-8
5 Disorders Share Genetic Risk Factors, Study Finds February 28, 2013 The New York Times
Psychiatric Disorders Linked Genetically February 27, 2013 WSJ

References

 .
 . Internet version published in Journal of the ACMS 2004.

Other websites
 BipolArt - Proof that a high proportion of bipolar people are creative. A fantastic collection of drawings, paintings, inkings, photographs, music, etc. by artists who share this illness.
 Allpsych

Bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder


Holy See–Italy relations are the special relations between the Holy See, which is sovereign over the Vatican City, and the Italian Republic.

History
Relations with the Kingdom of Italy were difficult during the papacies of Pius IX and Leo XIII, who had to endure the status of prisoner of the Vatican after the capture of Rome, refusing to recognize the Law of Guarantees. Leo XIII forbade Christians from participating in elections and accused the Italian state of being controlled by freemasons.

It was only under Pius XI that the Lateran Treaty was signed, establishing the State of Vatican City, allowing for greater papal autonomy.

The new secular Italian Republic established in 1946 recognized freedom of religion. However, under Pius XII and Paul VI, the Christian Democrats thrived and had great influence on Italian politics, in order to stop the Italian Communist Party from gaining power.

Diplomatic Legations to the Vatican in Italy
Due to the size of the Vatican City State, embassies accredited to the Holy See are based in Italy. Embassy officials of other countries also stay in Italy. Treaties signed between Italy and the Vatican City State permit such embassages. The Embassy of Italy to the Holy See is unique amongst foreign embassages in that it is the only embassy based on its home territory.

The Holy See maintains formal diplomatic relations with 176 sovereign states, the European Union, and the Order of Malta; 69 of the diplomatic missions accredited to the Holy See are situated in Rome, though those countries then have two embassies in the same city, since, by agreement between the Holy See and Italy, the same person cannot be accredited simultaneously to both.

This is shown clearly by the fact that Italy recognizes the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC's Embassy to Italy is in Rome. However, the Vatican City State recognizes the Republic of China (ROC, which controls Taiwan) and as such, the ROC Embassy to the Holy See is also in Rome.

See also
Apostolic Nunciature to Italy
Lateran Treaty
List of diplomatic missions in Italy
List of diplomatic missions of Italy
Index of Vatican City-related articles
Holy See–European Union relations
Public funding of the Catholic Church in Italy

Notes and references

Bilateral relations of Italy
Italy

Holy See–Italy relations


Half sari function or Langa Voni Telugu: లంగా ఓణి, Pavadai Dhavani Tamil: பாவாடை தாவணி, Langa Davani Kannada: ಲಂಗ ದಾವಣಿ. In South Indian Hindu tradition, the Ritu Kala Samskara ceremony or Ritushuddhi is a ceremony performed when a girl wears a sari for the first time because . It is the celebration of when a girl's rite of passage after menarche (first menstruation) or period, and she is deemed a young woman both physically and spiritually. Langa voni is traditional clothing for unmarried girls in South India.

The Ritual
Ritusuddhi, also called as Ritu Kala Samskara, is the coming of age ceremony for girls, after menarche or first menstruation or simply, first period. This milestone in a girl's life is observed by her family and friends, with gifts and her wearing a sari for the ritual. The rite of passage is celebrated, in modern times, as a "half-saree party" or half-sari function, where the female relatives and friends of the girl gather, and she receives and wears a half-saree and other gifts. Thereafter, at ceremonious events, she wears the half-sarees, until her marriage when she puts on a full sari.

In South India coming of age ceremony or rites of passage is celebrated when a girl reaches puberty. She wears a new langa voni during the first part of the ceremony and then she is gifted her first sari by her maternal uncle , which she wears during the second half of the ceremony. This marks her transition into womanhood

The tradition of presenting a langa voni begins with the girl's first naming ceremony Namakaran and her first rice feeding ceremony called Annaprashana. She receives her last one at her coming of age ceremony.

In Shaktism the Earth's menstruation is celebrated during the Ambubachi Mela, an annual fertility festival held in June, in Assam, India. During Ambubachi, the annual menstruation course of the goddess Kamakhya is worshipped in the Kamakhya Temple.

See also
Culture and menstruation
Langa voni
Saṃskāra
Bar and Bat Mitzvah

References

Hindu rituals
Hindu religious clothing
Hindu culture
Samskaras
Menstruation in religion

Ritu Kala Samskaram


A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation (EM) usually produced by a storage ring, for scientific and technical purposes.  First observed in synchrotrons, synchrotron light is now produced by storage rings and other specialized particle accelerators, typically accelerating electrons. Once the high-energy electron beam has been generated, it is directed into auxiliary components such as bending magnets and insertion devices (undulators or wigglers) in storage rings and free electron lasers.
These supply the strong magnetic fields perpendicular to the beam that are needed to stimulate the high energy electrons to emit photons.

The major applications of synchrotron light are in condensed matter physics, materials science, biology and medicine. A large fraction of experiments using synchrotron light involve probing the structure of matter from the sub-nanometer level of electronic structure to the micrometer and millimeter levels important in medical imaging. An example of a practical industrial application is the manufacturing of microstructures by the LIGA process.

Synchrotron is one of the most expensive kinds of light source known, but it is practically the only viable luminous source of wide-band radiation in far infrared wavelength range for some applications, such as far-infrared absorption spectrometry.

Spectral brightness

The primary figure of merit used to compare different sources of synchrotron radiation has been referred to as the "brightness", the "brilliance", and the "spectral brightness," with the latter term being recommended as the best choice by the Working Group on Synchrotron Nomenclature.  Regardless of the name chosen, the term is a measure of the total flux of photons in a given six-dimensional phase space per unit bandwidth (BW).

The spectral brightness is given by:

where  is the photons per second of the beam,  and  are the root mean square values for the size of the beam in the axes perpendicular to the beam direction,  and  are the RMS values for the beam solid angle in the x and y dimensions, and  is the bandwidth, or spread in beam frequency around the central frequency. The customary value for bandwidth is 0.1%.

Spectral brightness has units of time−1⋅distance−2⋅angle−2⋅bandwidth−1.

Properties of sources

Especially when artificially produced, synchrotron radiation is notable for its:
 High brilliance, many orders of magnitude more than with X-rays produced in conventional X-ray tubes: 3rd generation sources typically have a brilliance larger than 1018 photons·s−1·mm−2·mrad−2/0.1%BW, where 0.1%BW denotes a bandwidth 10−3w centered around the frequency w.
 High level of polarization (linear, elliptical or circular)
 High collimation, i.e. small angular divergence of the beam
 Low emittance, i.e. the product of source cross section and solid angle of emission is small
 Wide tunability in energy/wavelength by monochromatization (sub-electronvolt up to the megaelectronvolt range)
 Pulsed light emission (pulse durations at or below one nanosecond, or a billionth of a second).

Synchrotron radiation from accelerators
Synchrotron radiation may occur in accelerators either as a nuisance, causing undesired energy loss in particle physics contexts, or as a deliberately produced radiation source for numerous laboratory applications. Electrons are accelerated to high speeds in several stages to achieve a final energy that is typically in the gigaelectronvolt range. The electrons are forced to travel in a closed path by strong magnetic fields. This is similar to a radio antenna, but with the difference that the relativistic speed changes the observed frequency due to the Doppler effect by a factor . Relativistic Lorentz contraction bumps the frequency by another factor of , thus multiplying the gigahertz frequency of the resonant cavity that accelerates the electrons into the X-ray range. Another dramatic effect of relativity is that the radiation pattern is distorted from the isotropic dipole pattern expected from non-relativistic theory into an extremely forward-pointing cone of radiation. This makes synchrotron radiation sources the most brilliant known sources of X-rays. The planar acceleration geometry makes the radiation linearly polarized when observed in the orbital plane, and circularly polarized when observed at a small angle to that plane.

The advantages of using synchrotron radiation for spectroscopy and diffraction have been realized by an ever-growing scientific community, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. In the beginning, accelerators were built for particle physics, and synchrotron radiation was used in "parasitic mode" when bending magnet radiation had to be extracted by drilling extra holes in the beam pipes.  The first storage ring commissioned as a synchrotron light source was Tantalus, at the Synchrotron Radiation Center, first operational in 1968. As accelerator synchrotron radiation became more intense and its applications more promising, devices that enhanced the intensity of synchrotron radiation were built into existing rings. Third-generation synchrotron radiation sources were conceived and optimized from the outset to produce brilliant X-rays. Fourth-generation sources that will include different concepts for producing ultrabrilliant, pulsed time-structured X-rays for extremely demanding and also probably yet-to-be-conceived experiments are under consideration.

Bending electromagnets in accelerators were first used to generate this radiation, but to generate stronger radiation, other specialized devices – insertion devices – are sometimes employed. Current (third-generation) synchrotron radiation sources are typically reliant upon these insertion devices, where straight sections of the storage ring incorporate periodic magnetic structures (comprising many magnets in a pattern of alternating N and S poles – see diagram above) which force the electrons into a sinusoidal or helical path. Thus, instead of a single bend, many tens or hundreds of "wiggles" at precisely calculated positions add up or multiply the total intensity of the beam.

These devices are called wigglers or undulators. The main difference between an undulator and a wiggler is the intensity of their magnetic field and the amplitude of the deviation from the straight line path of the electrons.

There are openings in the storage ring to let the radiation exit and follow a beam line into the experimenters' vacuum chamber. A great number of such beamlines can emerge from modern third-generation synchrotron radiation sources.

Storage rings
The electrons may be extracted from the accelerator proper and stored in an ultrahigh vacuum auxiliary magnetic storage ring where they may circle a large number of times. The magnets in the ring also need to repeatedly recompress the beam against Coulomb (space charge) forces tending to disrupt the electron bunches. The change of direction is a form of acceleration and thus the electrons emit radiation at GeV energies.

Applications of synchrotron radiation
Synchrotron radiation of an electron beam circulating at high energy in a magnetic field leads to radiative self-polarization of electrons in the beam (Sokolov–Ternov effect). This effect is used for producing highly polarised electron beams for use in various experiments.
Synchrotron radiation sets the beam sizes (determined by the beam emittance) in electron storage rings via the effects of radiation damping and quantum excitation.

Beamlines

At a synchrotron facility, electrons are usually accelerated by a synchrotron, and then injected into a storage ring, in which they circulate, producing synchrotron radiation, but without gaining further energy. The radiation is projected at a tangent to the electron storage ring and captured by beamlines. These beamlines may originate at bending magnets, which mark the corners of the storage ring; or insertion devices, which are located in the straight sections of the storage ring. The spectrum and energy of X-rays differ between the two types. The beamline includes X-ray optical devices which control the bandwidth, photon flux, beam dimensions, focus, and collimation of the rays. The optical devices include slits, attenuators, crystal monochromators, and mirrors. The mirrors may be bent into curves or toroidal shapes to focus the beam. A high photon flux in a small area is the most common requirement of a beamline. The design of the beamline will vary with the application. At the end of the beamline is the experimental end station, where samples are placed in the line of the radiation, and detectors are positioned to measure the resulting diffraction, scattering or secondary radiation.

Experimental techniques and usage
Synchrotron light is an ideal tool for many types of research in materials science, physics, and chemistry and is used by researchers from academic, industrial, and government laboratories. Several methods take advantage of the high intensity, tunable wavelength, collimation, and polarization of synchrotron radiation at beamlines which are designed for specific kinds of experiments. The high intensity and penetrating power of synchrotron X-rays enables experiments to be performed inside sample cells designed for specific environments. Samples may be heated, cooled, or exposed to gas, liquid, or high pressure environments. Experiments which use these environments are called in situ and allow the characterization of atomic- to nano-scale phenomena which are inaccessible to most other characterization tools. In operando measurements are designed to mimic the real working conditions of a material as closely as possible.

Diffraction and scattering
X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scattering experiments are performed at synchrotrons for the structural analysis of crystalline and amorphous materials. These measurements may be performed on powders, single crystals, or thin films. The high resolution and intensity of the synchrotron beam enables the measurement of scattering from dilute phases or the analysis of residual stress. Materials can be studied at high pressure using diamond anvil cells to simulate extreme geologic environments or to create exotic forms of matter.

X-ray crystallography of proteins and other macromolecules (PX or MX) are routinely performed. Synchrotron-based crystallography experiments were integral to solving the structure of the ribosome; this work earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009.

The size and shape of nanoparticles are characterized using small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). Nano-sized features on surfaces are measured with a similar technique, grazing-incidence small angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS). In this and other methods, surface sensitivity is achieved by placing the crystal surface at a small angle relative to the incident beam, which achieves total external reflection and minimizes the X-ray penetration into the material.

The atomic- to nano-scale details of surfaces, interfaces, and thin films can be characterized using techniques such as X-ray reflectivity (XRR) and crystal truncation rod (CTR) analysis. X-ray standing wave (XSW) measurements can also be used to measure the position of atoms at or near surfaces; these measurements require high-resolution optics capable of resolving dynamical diffraction phenomena.

Amorphous materials, including liquids and melts, as well as crystalline materials with local disorder, can be examined using X-ray pair distribution function analysis, which requires high energy X-ray scattering data.

By tuning the beam energy through the absorption edge of a particular element of interest, the scattering from atoms of that element will be modified. These so-called resonant anomalous X-ray scattering methods can help to resolve scattering contributions from specific elements in the sample.

Other scattering techniques include energy dispersive X-ray diffraction, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, and magnetic scattering.

Spectroscopy
X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is used to study the coordination structure of atoms in materials and molecules. The synchrotron beam energy is tuned through the absorption edge of an element of interest, and modulations in the absorption are measured. Photoelectron transitions cause modulations near the absorption edge, and analysis of these modulations (called the X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) or near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS)) reveals information about the chemical state and local symmetry of that element. At incident beam energies which are much higher than the absorption edge, photoelectron scattering causes "ringing" modulations called the extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS). Fourier transformation of the EXAFS regime yields the bond lengths and number of the surrounding the absorbing atom; it is therefore useful for studying liquids and amorphous materials as well as sparse species such as impurities. A related technique, X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD), uses circularly polarized X-rays to measure the magnetic properties of an element.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) can be performed at beamlines equipped with a photoelectron analyzer. Traditional XPS is typically limited to probing the top few nanometers of a material under vacuum. However, the high intensity of synchrotron light enables XPS measurements of surfaces at near-ambient pressures of gas. Ambient pressure XPS (AP-XPS) can be used to measure chemical phenomena under simulated catalytic or liquid conditions. Using high-energy photons yields high kinetic energy photoelectrons which have a much longer inelastic mean free path than those generated on a laboratory XPS instrument. The probing depth of synchrotron XPS can therefore be lengthened to several nanometers, allowing the study of buried interfaces. This method is referred to as high-energy X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (HAXPES). Furthermore, the tunable nature of the synchrotron X-ray photon energies presents a wide range of depth sensitivity in the order of 2-50 nm. This allows for probing of samples at greater depths and for non destructive depth-profiling experiments.

Material composition can be quantitatively analyzed using X-ray fluorescence (XRF). XRF detection is also used in several other techniques, such as XAS and XSW, in which it is necessary to measure the change in absorption of a particular element.

Other spectroscopy techniques include angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), soft X-ray emission spectroscopy, and nuclear resonance vibrational spectroscopy, which is related to Mössbauer spectroscopy.

Imaging

Synchrotron X-rays can be used for traditional X-ray imaging, phase-contrast X-ray imaging, and tomography. The Ångström-scale wavelength of X-rays enables imaging well below the diffraction limit of visible light, but practically the smallest resolution so far achieved is about 30 nm. Such nanoprobe sources are used for scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM). Imaging can be combined with spectroscopy such as X-ray fluorescence or X-ray absorption spectroscopy in order to map a sample's chemical composition or oxidation state with sub-micron resolution.

Other imaging techniques include coherent diffraction imaging.

Similar optics can be employed for photolithography for MEMS structures can use a synchrotron beam as part of the LIGA process.

Compact synchrotron light sources
Because of the usefulness of tuneable collimated coherent X-ray radiation, efforts have been made to make smaller more economical sources of the light produced by synchrotrons. The aim is to make such sources available within a research laboratory for cost and convenience reasons; at present, researchers have to travel to a facility to perform experiments.  One method of making a compact light source is to use the energy shift from Compton scattering near-visible laser photons from electrons stored at relatively low energies of tens of megaelectronvolts (see for example the Compact Light Source (CLS)). However, a relatively low cross-section of collision can be obtained in this manner, and the repetition rate of the lasers is limited to a few hertz rather than the megahertz repetition rates naturally arising in normal storage ring emission. Another method is to use plasma acceleration to reduce the distance required to accelerate electrons from rest to the energies required for UV or X-ray emission within magnetic devices.

See also
List of synchrotron radiation facilities
List of light sources

References

External links
Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste - Elettra and FERMI lightsources
 Imaging ancient insects with synchrotron light source -- BBC
 Synchrotron light at IOP

Synchrotron radiation
Synchrotron-related techniques
Particle physics
Light
Light sources
Materials testing
Particle accelerators

Synchrotron light source


An ornamental plant is decorative: it is grown for how it looks, and not for other values. The term is often shortened to ornamental, used as a noun

Ornamental plants are plants that are grown for decoration. They are on display in gardens, landscapes and inside houses. They can be used indoors as cut flowers or potted plants. The cultivation of ornamental plants comes under floriculture and tree nurseries, which is a major branch of horticulture.

Ornamental plants are usually grown in the flower garden, or as house plants. They are usually grown for the display of their flowers. Other common ornamental features include leaves, scent, fruit, stem and bark. In all cases, their purpose is for the enjoyment of gardeners and visitors. Ornamental plants may be used for landscaping, and for cut flowers. The cultivation, called floriculture, is a major branch of horticulture.

Ornamental plants come in a range of shapes, sizes and colours suitable to a broad array of climates, landscapes, and gardening needs. They are also often chosen for specialised looks or feels in landscape gardening.

Darwin was deeply interested in plants all his life. Several of his books are on plant physiology, and orchids were a passion for him.

Outstanding gardens can be an attraction for visitors. The white garden at Sissinghurst Castle was created by poet and writer Vita Sackville-West (18921962), and is still bringing in the paying visitors.

Related pages
Cultivar
Domestication
List of garden plants

References

Flowers
Gardens

Ornamental plant


Biometeorology is the interdisciplinary field of science that studies the interactions between the biosphere and the Earth's atmosphere on time scales of the order of seasons or shorter (in contrast with bioclimatology).

Examples of relevant processes
Weather events influence biological processes on short time scales. For instance, as the Sun rises above the horizon in the morning, light levels become sufficient for the process of photosynthesis to take place in plant leaves. Later on, during the day, air temperature and humidity may induce the partial or total closure of the stomata, a typical response of many plants to limit the loss of water through transpiration. More generally, the daily evolution of meteorological variables controls the circadian rhythm of plants and animals alike.

Living organisms, for their part, can collectively affect weather patterns. The rate of evapotranspiration of forests, or of any large vegetated area for that matter, contributes to the release of water vapor in the atmosphere. This local, relatively fast and continuous process may contribute significantly to the persistence of precipitations in a given area. As another example, the wilting of plants results in definite changes in leaf angle distribution and therefore modifies the rates of reflection, transmission and absorption of solar light in these plants. That, in turn, changes the albedo of the ecosystem as well as the relative importance of the sensible and latent heat fluxes from the surface to the atmosphere. For an example in oceanography, consider the release of dimethyl sulfide by biological activity in sea water and its impact on atmospheric aerosols.

Human biometeorology
The methods and measurements traditionally used in biometeorology are not different when applied to study the interactions between human bodies and the atmosphere, but some aspects or applications may have been explored more extensively. For instance, wind chill has been investigated to determine the time period an individual can sustain exposure to given temperature and wind conditions. Another important example concerns the study of airborne allergens (such as pollens and aerosols) and their impact on individuals: weather conditions can favor or hinder the release as well as the transport and deposition of these allergens, sometimes severely affecting the well-being of sensitive populations.

See also
International Journal of Biometeorology
International Society of Biometeorology
Gaia hypothesis

Weather's health effects:
Health effects of smog
Thunderstorm asthma
Weather pains

References
R. E. Munn (1970) Biometeorological Methods, Academic Press, New York, 336 pp., Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 71-97488.

External links
Global Bioweather
Dutch bioweather site

Branches of meteorology
Ecology
Environmental science

Biometeorology


Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Ground is a cricket ground in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.  The ground is next to the River Avon and also located next to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, on Swans Nest Lane.

The first recorded match on the ground was in 1880, when Stratford-upon-Avon played a United South of England Eleven.  Warwickshire first used the ground for first-class cricket in 1951 when they played Oxford University.  First-class cricket next returned to the ground in 2004 when Warwickshire played Lancashire.  The final first-class match held at the ground to date came in the Stratford Festival of Cricket in 2005, when Warwickshire played Hampshire; a Hampshire team which featured such names as Shane Warne and Kevin Pietersen.

The ground has also held 2 List-A matches.  The first came in the 2000 NatWest Trophy when the Warwickshire Cricket Board played Kent.  The second List-A match came in 2005 when Warwickshire played Scotland in the 2005 totesport League.

Additionally, the ground has hosted 3 Women's One Day Internationals.  The first came in 2005 and saw England women play Australia women.  The second came in 2007 and was between England women and New Zealand women.  The final Women's ODI to date came in 2009 and was between England women and Australia women.

It also holds several high profile fixtures throughout the year including County Second XI Cricket, Summer Solstice Cricket and in June 2010 it hosted a match featuring the Lord's Taverners.  In local domestic cricket, the ground is the home venue of Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Club who used to play in the Birmingham and District Premier League Division One and now play in the Warwickshire League Premier Division.

References

External links
Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Club Ground on CricketArchive
Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Club Ground on Cricinfo
Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Club Website

Cricket grounds in Warwickshire
Stratford-upon-Avon
Club cricket teams in England
1880 establishments in England
Sports venues completed in 1880

Stratford-upon-Avon Cricket Club Ground


Cyborg 2 (released in some countries as Glass Shadow) is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Michael Schroeder. It was produced by Alan Silver and Raju Patel. Schroeder, Mark Geldman and Ron Yanover wrote the screenplay. The film is a direct sequel to 1989's Cyborg, starring Jean Claude Van Damme, and the second film in the Cyborg film series.

The film takes place in 2074, years after the original film, and follows Cash Reese, a new cyborg developed for corporate espionage and assassination. She rebels against her creators after revealing they plan to destroy her by using her as a suicide bomber to take over a rival company. On the way, she falls in love with her combat trainer and encounters a renegade cyborg. The film stars Angelina Jolie in the main role, alongside Elias Koteas, Jack Palance, Billy Drago, Karen Sheperd, Allen Garfield and Renee Griffin in supporting roles. Cyborg 2 was released by Trimark Pictures direct-to-video on November 24, 1993. A sequel titled Cyborg 3: The Recycler was released in 1994.

Plot
In the year 2074, the cybernetics market is dominated by two rival companies: USA's Pinwheel Robotics and Japan's Kobayashi Electronics. Androids known as 'cyborgs' are commonplace, used for anything from soldiers to prostitutes. Casella "Cash" Reese is a Pinwheel prototype cyborg developed for corporate espionage and assassination. She is filled with a liquid explosive called "Glass Shadow". Pinwheel's CEO, Martin Dunn, plans to eliminate the entire Kobayashi board of directors using Cash as a suicide bomber to precipitate a hostile takeover of the company and obtain a monopoly over the cyborg market.

Cash is programmed to mimic human senses and emotions such as fear, love, pain, and hate. Guided by Mercy, a renegade prototype cyborg who can communicate through any electronic device, Cash and her combat trainer Colton "Colt" Ricks escape the Pinwheel facility so Cash can avoid self-destruction, something that most corporate espionage cyborgs face. They are relentlessly pursued by Pinwheel's hired killer or "wiretapper", Daniel Bench.

Bench must also deal with a rival bounty hunter named Chen (another cyborg), who plans on killing Ricks and reprogramming Cash to have her blow up Pinwheel instead as a means to punish the company's director, Dunn, as reprisal for an earlier act from Dunn that displeased her. However, Chen and Ricks get into a fight, which results in Chen getting electrocuted by a fuse box.

Mercy is later revealed to be a human/android hybrid who was created by Pinwheel as an attempt to create the next stage in human evolution. Mercy escaped before they had a chance to erase his memories. Ricks and Bench fall into a boxing match to find out who lives and who dies, namely going to the African coast, which results in Bench getting mutilated by a rotating fan, resulting in his death. Cash and Ricks escape to a new life in Africa after winning the tournament, while Mercy confronts Dunn, blaming him for ruining his life.

Dunn explains Mercy his motives to be his work only for the mankind's benefit. Unmoved, Mercy then activates his own Glass Shadow bomb, which kills both Mercy and Dunn as well as destroying Pinwheel headquarters. After the skirmish and Pinwheel's downfall, Cash has remained young and beautiful while Ricks continues to age. When Cash realizes that Ricks has finally died of old age, she decides to shut herself down, remaining in a dream state forever.

Cast
 Elias Koteas as Colton "Colt 45" Ricks, Cash's combat trainer and love interest.
 Angelina Jolie as Casella "Cash" Reese, a gynoid created by Pinwheel for corporate espionage and assassination.
 Jack Palance as Mercy, an old renegade cyborg which aids Cash moving against Pinwheel.
 Billy Drago as Danny Bench, an assassin which works for Pinwheel.
 Karen Sheperd as Chen, a bounty hunter rival to Bench.
 Allen Garfield as Martin Dunn, former CEO of Pinwheel, a powerful technology company which created Cash, and seeks to take over the company by using Cash as suicide bomber.
 Renee Griffin as Dreena
 Ric Young as Bobby Lin, who runs the fight promotion and gambling of 'The Blade' - underground and highly illegal snuff combat that takes place under the propeller blades of a ship in dry dock.
 Tracey Walter as "Wild Card"
Additionally, both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Vincent Klyn appear in flashback scenes as their roles Gibson Rickenbacker and Fender Tremolo from the original 1989 film, respectively.

Reception

Critical response
Alan Jones of the Radio Times rated the film 3 out of 5 stars and called it a "Blade Runner-inspired violent fantasy". In 2014, Entertainment Weekly selected Cyborg 2 as Jolie's worst film.

Angelina Jolie has said that after she saw the film, she "went home and got sick".

Sequel

Cyborg 3: The Recycler was produced and released in 1995, once again directed by Michael Schroeder.

References

External links

1993 films
1993 independent films
1990s science fiction action films
American independent films
American science fiction action films
American sequel films
1990s English-language films
Films set in the 2070s
Films set in 2074
Cyborg films
Android (robot) films
Trimark Pictures films
Cyborg (film series)
Films directed by Michael Schroeder
1990s American films

Cyborg 2


Donald Eugene Liddle (May 25, 1925 – June 5, 2000) was an American left-handed pitcher in professional baseball who played four seasons in the Major Leagues for the Milwaukee Braves, New York Giants and St. Louis Cardinals from 1953 through 1956. Born in Mount Carmel, Illinois, he batted left-handed, stood  tall and weighed .

Liddle is most remembered as the man who, in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, threw the pitch to Vic Wertz that resulted in The Catch — Giant center fielder Willie Mays' historic back-to-home-plate, over-the-shoulder grab of Wertz' long drive with two men on base in the deepest part of center field at the Giants' home field, the Polo Grounds. Had the ball fallen safely, the opposition Cleveland Indians would have taken the lead 4–2 late in the game. But Mays' catch preserved a 2–2 tie, the Giants won the game in extra innings, and swept the Series in four straight contests.

Wertz was the only batter Liddle faced that day. Reportedly, he commented after the game was over in the locker room, "Well, I got my man", joking about his good fortune and Mays' athletic performance. Liddle later started and won the decisive Game 4 in Cleveland, pitching 6 innings and giving up only one earned run.

Earlier in 1954, Liddle was part of a pivotal, five-player trade, coming to the Giants with fellow left-handed pitcher Johnny Antonelli from the Braves in exchange for 1951 playoff hero Bobby Thomson. Antonelli won 21 games for the 1954 Giants, leading them to the National League pennant, and topped the Senior Circuit in earned run average.

Liddle appeared in 117 Major League games played, 54 as a starting pitcher. In 427 innings, he gave up 397 hits and 203 bases on balls, striking out 198. He retired from baseball after the 1957 season, which he spent in minor league baseball.

Liddle died, aged 75, in his hometown of Mount Carmel, Illinois.

References

External links

1925 births
2000 deaths
Major League Baseball pitchers
Milwaukee Braves players
New York Giants (NL) players
St. Louis Cardinals players
Baseball players from Illinois
Milwaukee Brewers (minor league) players
People from Mount Carmel, Illinois
Mount Vernon Kings players

Don Liddle


"Caravaggio to Canaletto" is the title of a temporary exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. It's open from 26 October 2013 until 16 February 2014, representing 140 artworks by 100 masters from the Museum of Fine Arts, other collections from abroad and private collections.

The exhibition provides a panoramic view of the era from the end of the 16th century until 1760 in Italy: it treats the effect of Caravaggio on the Italian Baroque painting, and shows the way towards Roccoco, Classicism and Realism. It presents the most popular genres from the Biblical themes through still lifes to capriccios. It's composed of the following sections, generally in temporary order:

1. Face-to-face With Reality: Caravaggio's early paintings, and popular themes in Caravaggism

2. Divine Light - Diabolic Shadow: Biblical themes, life of Jesus and other saints, scenes from the Old Testament

3. Ideal and Norm: classicising ambitions by Guido Reni and his followers

4. Eloquence, Illusion, Splendour: monumental Baroque Biblical themes

5. Natura Morta - Natura Viva: new tendencies in still lifes and portraits - from trompe-l'œil to social portraiture

6. Poetry and Virtuosity in the Settecento: from the Classicism and Roccoco to "almost Biedermeier"

7. Swansong in Venice: from the most monumental religious paintings to the scenes of everyday life

8. Italian Journey: Astonishing vedutas of Venice by Canaletto and his followers, closing the exhibition with the best-known capriccio.

References

Hungarian art

Caravaggio to Canaletto


Leo is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is Latin for lion. Its symbol is  (). Leo lies between dim Cancer to the west and Virgo to the east.

Notable features

Stars
Leo contains many bright shining stars, such as Regulus (also called α Leonis); the lion's tail, Denebola (also called β Leonis); and γ1 Leonis (also called Algieba). Many other fainter stars have been named as well, such as δ Leo (Zosma), θ Leo (Chort), κ Leo (Al Minliar al Asad), λ Leo (Alterf), and ο Leo (Subra).

Regulus, Al Jabbah, and Algieba, together with the fainter stars ζ Leo (Adhafera), μ Leo (Ras Elased Borealis), and ε Leo (Ras Elased Australis), make up the pattern known as "the Sickle". These stars represent the head and the mane of the lion.

The star Wolf 359, one of the nearest stars to Earth (7.78 light-years), is in Leo.

The carbon star CW Leo (IRC +10216) is the brightest star in the night sky at the infrared N-band (10 μm wavelength).

Deep sky objects
Leo contains many bright galaxies,  Messier 65, Messier 66, Messier 95, Messier 96, Messier 105, NGC 3521 and NGC 3628 are the most famous. The first two are part of the Leo Triplet.

The Leo Ring is a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas. It is found in orbit of two galaxies found within Leo.

Name and history
Many civilizations over thousands of years have portrayed the constellation of Leo as a lion. One theory for this is that the Sun was among its stars in Midsummer. This was the time when the lions of the Egyptian desert left their usual home for the banks of the river Nile. There they could find relief from the heat in the water. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote that the Egyptians worshipped the stars of Leo. He says this is because the Nile would overflow with water at the same time as the Sun entering into the constellation.

In Egypt, the Ramesseum (the memorial temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II) at Thebes mentions Leo in the inscription on the wall.  On the planisphere of Dendera Leo is shown standing on an outstretched serpent.

The Persians called Leo Ser or Shir; the Turks, Artan; the Syrians, Aryo; the Jewish, Arye; the Indians, Simha ; all meaning a lion. In Babylonian astronomy these stars were called UR.GU.LA - the 'Great Lion'; the bright star, Regulus, that stands at the Lion's breast also had distinctly regal associations as it was known as the King Star.

In Greek mythology, it was identified as the Nemean Lion which was killed by Hercules during one of his twelve labours, and after that put into the sky.

The Roman poet Ovid called it Herculeus Leo and Violentus Leo. Bacchi Sidus (Star of Bacchus) was another of its titles, the god Bacchus always being identified with this animal. However, Manilius called it Jovis et Junonis Sidus (Star of Jupiter and Juno).

Early Hindu astronomers knew it as Asleha and as Sinha, the Tamil Simham.

Astrology

As of 2002, the Sun appeared in the constellation Leo from August 10 to September 15. In tropical astrology, the Sun is considered to be in the sign Leo from July 23 to August 22. In sidereal astrology the sun is said to be in Leo from August 16 to September 15.

Visualizations

H.A. Rey has suggested an alternative way to connect the stars, which shows a lion walking. The stars delta Leonis, gamma Leonis, eta Leonis, and theta Leonis form the body of the lion. The stars gamma Leonis, zeta Leonis, mu Leonis, epsilon Leonis, and eta Leonis form the lion's neck. The stars mu Leonis, kappa Leonis, lambda Leonis, and epsilon Leonis form the head of the lion. Delta Leonis and beta Leonis form the lion's tail: beta Leonis, also known as Denebola, is the bright tip of the tail with a magnitude of two. The stars theta Leonis, iota Leonis, and sigma Leonis form the left hind leg of the lion, with sigma Leonis being the foot.  The stars theta Leonis and rho Leonis form the right hind leg, with rho Leonis being the foot. The stars eta Leonis and alpha Leonis mark the lion's heart, with alpha Leonis, also known as Regulus, being the bright star of magnitude one.  The stars eta Leonis and omicron Leonis form the right front foot of the Lion.

Citations

References
Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, by Richard Allen Hinckley, Dover.
 Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion (2007). Stars and Planets Guide, Collins, London. . Princeton University Press, Princeton. .
Dictionary of Symbols, by Carl G. Liungman, W. W. Norton & Company.
 "Fairy Tail" a manga's character called Loki is the Stellar Spirit Leo

Other websites

Observer links
The Deep Photographic Guide to the Constellations: Leo
Information from Windows to the Universe
Star Map of Leo and Information from Students for Exploration and Development of Space
Information about Leo from Chris Dolan
Information from StarDate Online
Leo's skymap and information from Gary Madison
Star Map of Leo and basic information
Pictures, Sky Map and detailed information from StarrySkies

Science
New planet discovery in Leo's constellation

Myths
Star Tales – Leo
Myth Info from comfychair.org
Myth Info from TheGreekGods.org
Myth Info from ColdWater Schools
Myth Info from Star Watch GeoCity
Myth Info from heavens-above.com

Constellations
Constellations listed by Ptolemy
Lions

Leo (constellation)


A holster is a type of clothing. It is like an extra pocket worn to hold something where it can quickly be taken out for use. Holsters have long been used to hold a firearm, especially a pistol. At the end of the 20th century many people started carrying a mobile phone in a holster.

Accessories

Holster


Gene Porter Bridwell (born October 4, 1935) was the seventh director of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center located in Huntsville, Alabama. He served as director from January 6, 1994, to February 3, 1996.

Before becoming director of the Marshall Center, G.P. (Porter) Bridwell served as manager of the Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle Definition Office, where he supervised efforts involving the proposed vehicle's design, development, and integration. He also served on special assignment with the Space Station Redesign Team and later the U.S./Russian Space Station Integration Team. Previously, he served as manager of the Shuttle Projects Office. There he managed the Shuttle's propulsion elements, including the Space Shuttle Main Engine, External Tank, Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor, Solid Rocket Booster, Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, and related systems and activities, including the Michoud Assembly Facility.

Bridwell was born in Linton, Indiana, on October 4, 1935, and graduated from State High School in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1953. He earned a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1958 from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He began his professional career as an engineer with Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, California. He joined the Marshall Center in 1962, and his early experience included assignments within the former Saturn Systems Office and Saturn V Program Office. In 1975, he transferred to the Shuttle Projects Office and served in key positions including chief of the Project Engineering Office, and deputy manager of the External Tank Project. In February 1983, he was appointed manager of the External Tank Project.

In the spring of 1987, he served temporarily as acting deputy center director of National Space Technology Laboratories in Mississippi. He was appointed director of institutional and program support at the Marshall Center in October 1988, and assumed the position of manager, Shuttle Projects Office, in May 1989.

In January 1990, Bridwell became the director of National Launch Systems for NASA Headquarters, co-located at the Marshall Center. In February 1992, he was officially transferred back to the Marshall Center from headquarters, where he assumed his post as manager of the Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle Definition Office.

External links
 NASA biography

NASA people
1935 births
Living people
Directors of the Marshall Space Flight Center
People from Linton, Indiana
Purdue University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics alumni

Gene Porter Bridwell


The Kirthar Mountains  are in Balochistan and the Sindh provinces of Pakistan.  The range extends south for about 190 miles (300 km) from the Mula River in east-central Balochistan to Cape Monze (Muari), near Mubarak Village, Karachi on the Arabian Sea.

Kirthar National Park is one of the major wildlife reserves in Sindh, Pakistan.  The Kirthar Range forms the boundary between the Lower Indus Plain (east) and southern Balochistan (west).  It is a series of parallel rock hill ridges rising from 4,000 feet (1,200 m) in the south to nearly 8,000 feet (2,500 m) in the north.

Notes

Mountains of Pakistan

Kirthar Mountains


Victoria Redel (born 1959) is an American poet and fiction writer who lives in New York City. She is the author of five books of fiction: Before Everything, Make Me Do Things, The Border of Truth, Loverboy and Where the Road Bottoms Out and four books of poetry: 'Paradise,'Woman Without Umbrella, Swoon, and Already the World. She has taught at Columbia University, Vermont College and is currently on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She has two sons.

Awards and honors
Redel has received awards in fiction and poetry including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center. She won the Tom and Stan Wick Poetry award for Already the World and the S. Mariela Gable Award for Loverboy. Swoon was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award.

Her novel Loverboy was a Los Angeles Best Book. The novel was adapted for a feature-length film (Loverboy, 2006) directed by Kevin Bacon and starring Kyra Sedgwick. Other actors in the film include Oliver Platt, Marisa Tomei, Matt Dillon, and Sandra Bullock.

Background
Redel is a first generation American born into a Jewish family of Belgian-Polish, Romanian and Egyptian descent. Her mother, Natalie Soltanitzky, a noted ballet teacher and Director of the Ballet Guild School of Westchester, was born in Romania, coming to New York in 1942 after spending two years in Paris under German Occupation. Her father, Irving Redel, left Belgium in 1940. He and his parents were among the 86 passengers on the ship the Quanza who were initially refused entry into the United States and Mexico and were about to be returned to Lisbon. The situation of the Quanza became the setting for Redel's novel The Border of Truth. Victoria Redel is the youngest of three daughters. She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, is a graduate of Dartmouth College and received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

For her short-story collection Make Me Do Things'', which was released in 2013, she had a cinematic book trailer produced.

Notes

External links
HOME | Victoria Redel | Author
Bombsite.com
Ontheinside.com
smallspiralnotebook.com

1959 births
Living people
Sarah Lawrence College faculty
Columbia University staff
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American novelists
American women novelists
American women poets
American people of Romanian-Jewish descent
American people of Belgian-Jewish descent
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Egyptian-Jewish descent
Writers from Scarsdale, New York
Dartmouth College alumni
Columbia University School of the Arts alumni
Writers from New York City
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers
20th-century American poets
21st-century American poets
Scarsdale High School alumni
Novelists from New York (state)
American women academics

Victoria Redel


Salam (, ), sometimes spelled salaam, is an Arabic word that literally means "peace", but is also used as a general greeting, above all in Arab countries and by the Muslim countries around the world in general.

As-salamu ʿalaykum () is a greeting in Arabic that means "peace be upon you". The greeting is a standard salutation among Muslims, whether socially or within worship and other contexts.  The typical response to the greeting is wa-ʿalaykumu as-salām (وَعَلَيْكُمُ ٱلسَّلَامُ; "and upon you be peace"). The full version of the greeting is as-salamu ʿalaykum wa-rahmatullahi wa-barakatuh (, "peace be upon you, as well as the mercy of God and His blessings"), with the full response being wa-ʿalaykum as-salam wa-rahmatullahi wa-barakatuh (). It is also preferred to use the greeting when arriving and also while leaving. It was reported that Abu Hurairah said "When one of you joins a gathering, let him say 'Peace'. When he wants to get up and leave, let him say 'Peace'. The former is not more important than the latter" (Hasan hadith reported in Jāmiʿ at-Tirmidhi).
 According to hadith, Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) was asked who should begin the greeting and he said, "The one who is riding should greet the one who is walking and the one who is walking should greet the one who is sitting and the smaller group should greet the larger group" (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 6234; Muslim, 2160).
 It is also stated that one should give the Salam greeting upon entering a house. This is based upon a verse of the Quran: "But when you enter the houses, greet one another with a greeting from God blessed and good" (An-Nur24:61).
 Shortening the greeting to acronyms, such as A.S., As'kum (in Malaysia), or AsA is becoming common amongst Internet users in chat rooms and by people using SMS. This trend is similar to writing (S) or SAWS in place of ṣallá l-Lāhi ʿalayhi wa s-salām.
In addition, As-Salam is one of the 99 Names of God.

The Arabic salam comes from the same origin as the Hebrew shalom.

Arabic words and phrases

Salam


Tomas Vu is an American artist whose primary media are painting, printmaking, and installation art. He is currently LeRoy Neiman Professor in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Early life and education
He was born in 1963 in Saigon, Vietnam and moved to El Paso, Texas at the age of ten.  He received his BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1987, and his MFA from Yale University in 1990.

Work
In his painting series, Napalm Morning (1995–1999), Vu deals specifically with the memory of war, presenting a romantic view of the tragedy of war.  The works depict Vu's recollection of the Tet Offensive, a terrifying but sublime sky illuminated from napalm explosions.

In his 2000 installation, Hamburger Hill, at Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria, Vu constructed a recreation of the Battle of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam.  A hill gridded with pure orange cadmium pigment was floated in the gallery space, recalling ideas of toxicity and Agent Orange, the deadly defoliant used by the United Kingdom during the Malayan Emergency and the United States during the Vietnam War. 1000 cast wax soldiers, half yellow, half other colors, brought up notions of race.  A performance in which Vu playfully lined up and then shot at the cast toy soldiers with rubber bands, picking them off one by one, and covering the gallery with the cadmium pigment, juxtaposed childhood war games with the grave realities of war.

In another work, Killing Field (2002), Vu created 125 skulls cast in wax and laid them in a gallery space so that they appeared to be emerging from the floor.  Silver leafed doilies, reminiscent of grave markers, were placed on the skulls.  Some formations of skulls were also placed, without markers, in an adjacent outside field so that one would stumble onto them.

Vu's first body of work to break through to a psychedelic, fantastic, and at times dystopic world is an installation, Opium Dreams, first created for a solo show at the Museum Haus Kasuya in Yokohama, Japan.  In this series of drawings, paintings, and installations, Vietnam remains a cultural signifier, but an opium-induced haze is also described.

Vu's work includes a series of paintings completed in 2006: Black Ice. The series portrays an impossible space saturated with ambiguous and conflicting information.

These paintings and works on paper consist of dense passages of line that create complex network structures and spatial relationships.  Layers of silkscreen, paint, drawing and collage recall stratums of atmosphere, landscape, memory and time.  The work draws upon Hieronymus Bosch's apocalyptic vision of The Garden of Earthly Delights as well as postmodern and poststructuralist ideas.  Vu's most recent bodies of work reference artificial intelligence, and draw from sources such as the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth, and concepts like the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, and the Frankenstein complex.

Press
In his Brooklyn Rail review of Vu's solo show at Von Lintel Gallery in New York, Gandalf Gavan proposes that Vu's works references Michel Foucault's concepts of order and disorder, of an 'incongruous space,' a place where traditional knowledge, as established through the process of identification, is replaced by a state of simultaneity and non-definition.

Elisa Decker writes in her Art in America review, each picture possesses its own disquieting beauty and is a world unto itself that one penetrates only slowly.

Awards and exhibition history
Tomas Vu has exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

He is the LeRoy Neiman Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University and the artistic director of the Neiman Center for Print Studies. He also has taught at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Massachusetts College of Art.

In 2002 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2003 he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.

Vu has also exhibited under the names: Tomas Vu-Daniel, Tomas Daniel, and Thomas Daniel.

References

External links
 Columbia University
 Columbia University School of the Arts
 LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies
 Hotel Pupik
 tomasvu.com

20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
American printmakers
American installation artists
Vietnamese emigrants to the United States
Artists of Vietnamese descent
1963 births
Living people
University of Texas at El Paso alumni
Yale University alumni
Brandeis University faculty
Massachusetts College of Art and Design faculty
Columbia University faculty

Tomas Vu


The Birmingham Children's Crusade was a nonviolent protest in Birmingham, Alabama from May 2-5, 1963. This moment in history resulted in the desegregation of public facilities in Birmingham. It also became a launching point for March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963.

However, this was not a quickly put together march to demand desegregation of the most city in America. The building tension of lunch counter sit-ins, boycotts, and protests nationwide called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to return to Birmingham in April 1963 to begin the launch of "Project C." C represented confrontation, but as always, nonviolent confrontation; ordering food at segregated lunch counters, praying in parks and steps of city halls, boycotting segregated stores, etc. Knowing that scores of the protesters would be arrested, King hoped to overwhelm Birmingham's jails, thus forcing Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's Police Commissioner to desegregate the city.

James L. Bevel: King's right hand man

King's head advisor for the Children's Crusade was Reverend James L. Bevel. Bevel, a Navy veteran who became a minister from Itta Bena, Mississippi, found deep roots in Old Testament prophets and often wore a Jewish skullcap. After attending a seminar led by James Lawson, a fierce pacifist who firmly believed in training students in "the struggle of racial injustice," Bevel saw the distinction between white oppression and blacks "accepting the status quo." Interestingly, Diane Nash and Gloria Johnson also attended this workshop. As cited in David Oshinsky's article, Lawson taught, "The time had come for young people to move beyond the passivity of their elders. Segregation would end when devoted Christians, doing God's work on earth, led a nonviolent crusade to destroy it. The struggle required physical courage, unshakable conviction and a willingness to forgive those who would beat and even murder them out of ignorance and fear… they were going to love segregation to death".

Approaching the Birmingham Children's Crusade with this background, Bevel spoke to the young students at Saturday nonviolent training sessions, "You are responsible for segregation, you and your parents because you have not stood up… no one has the power to oppress you if you don't cooperate. So, if you say you are oppressed, then you are… in league with the oppressor; now, it's your responsibility to break the league with him". The power of introducing youth into the Civil Rights Movement became a turning point and showed the vast expanse of racism and systemic segregation that had become entrenched in the culture.

Involving children
Among the black community, involving children in the front lines of the national Civil Rights Movement raised a controversial topic. As most parents intend to do, African American parents, particularly in the South, were very protective of their children and had to educate them on the realities of racism from an early age. Thus, allowing their children to be in the front lines of the Birmingham Children's Crusade was certainly a barrier for young people to overcome. Despite this familial challenge, thousands turned out over the next week in protest.

Day 1: "Double D-Day"
Day 1 of the march was May 2, 1963. Bevel dubbed it "D-Day," a direct reference to the Normandy Invasion that led to the Allied victory in World War II. The morning of the movement, some children went directly to the 16th Street Baptist Church located in downtown Birmingham, but many went to school and later in the morning walked out of class; thus making more of a point in their protest.  Eventually almost a thousand school children, ages six to eighteen, congregated in Kelly Ingram Park, 16th Street Baptist Church, and Metropolitan AME Zion Church to begin their march to city hall. The youth were organized into groups and as each group was confronted with barricades and policemen, and subsequently arrested, another "platoon" would emerge from the church. This phenomenon of the seemingly countless droves of students exiting the church puzzled an officer who asked how many more children were in the church and upon hearing, "at least a thousand," uttered, "God A'mighty." By the end of the first day, over 900 students had been arrested, and parents were discouraged from paying bail. As stated in OAH Magazine of History, "King was criticized for using children in the demonstrations. One of the most vocal criticisms came from Malcolm X who stated, 'Real men don't put their children on the firing line.' King responded by saying that the demonstrations allowed children to develop "a sense of their own stake in freedom and justice". Also, not coincidentally, the 16th Street Baptist Church was the church that was bombed on September 15, 1963, just four months later.

Day 2: "Double D-Day"
Day 2: "Double D-Day." Bull Connor authorized the use of high power fire hoses and attack dogs on the children as they again flooded the streets of downtown Birmingham. The fire hoses tore through the ranks of peaceful protesters, and the attack dogs dispersed the organized groups into a frenzied crowd. At one point during the afternoon, Connor locked the remaining 500-1000 marchers inside the 16th Street Baptist Church, mostly due to the fact that he was running out of space in the jail; precisely the goal of King and Bevel. Eventually, organizers ordered everyone to go home, and an additional 500-800 students were jailed.

"Double D-Day" is said to be the event that no other effort could do, and that unites black Birmingham to raise their voice in protest of the systemic and oppressive segregation enforced upon them by the white supremacy. King's words to worried parents summed up the overall attitude of the protesters and the seriousness in which they took their task. "Your daughters and sons are in jail… don't worry about them. They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation".

Aftermath
On May 10, 1963, the protesters and the Birmingham city officials reached a settlement that desegregated all public facilities in Birmingham. This march of thousands of elementary, middle, and high school students was one of the largest nationwide, ultimately leading to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August in 1963.

References

1963 in the United States
American civil rights
Birmingham, Alabama
1960s in Alabama
1960s protests
Martin Luther King Jr.

Birmingham Children's Crusade


Rodinia, meaning "to give birth", is the name of a supercontinent. It had most or all of Earth's landmass when the Neoproterozoic era began.

Rodinia existed between 1.1 billion and 750 million years ago. It formed from parts of an older and poorly understood supercontinent.

Rodinia broke up in the first period of the Neoproterozoic, the Tonian. Later its continental fragments were re-assembled to form Pangaea 300250 million years ago. In contrast with Pangaea, little is known yet about the exact position and history of Rodinia.

The extreme cooling of the global climate around 700 million years ago (the so-called Snowball Earth of the Cryogenian period) and the rapid evolution of primitive life during the following Ediacaran and Cambrian periods may have been caused by the breaking up of Rodinia.

Break-up
The break-up of Rodinia is understood better than its formation. Extensive flood basalt flows and volcanic eruptions of Neoproterozoic age are found on most continents. This is evidence for large scale rifting about 750 million years ago. As early as 850 and 800 million years ago, a rift developed, eventually becoming an ocean in the Ediacaran.

In a separate rifting event about 610 million years ago (halfway in the Ediacaran period), the Iapetus Ocean formed. It might be that all continental mass was again joined in one supercontinent between roughly 600 and 550 million years ago. This hypothetical supercontinent is called Pannotia.

Its effect on life
Unlike later supercontinents, Rodinia itself was entirely barren. It existed before life colonized dry land. It was before the ozone layer formed, so Rodinia was too exposed to the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight for organisms to live there and leave fossils. However, its existence probably affected the marine life of its time.

In the Cryogenian period, the Earth experienced large glaciations, and temperatures were at least as cool as today. Substantial areas of Rodinia may have been covered by glaciers or the southern polar ice cap.

The eventual rifting of the continents created new oceans, and seafloor spreading, which produces warmer, less-dense oceanic lithosphere. Due to its lower density, hot oceanic lithosphere does not lie so deep as old, cool oceanic lithosphere. In periods with relatively large areas of new lithosphere, the ocean floors come up, causing the sea level to rise. The result was a greater number of shallower seas.

The increased evaporation from the larger water area of the oceans may have increased rainfall, which, in turn, increased the weathering of exposed rock. This increased rainfall may have reduced greenhouse gas levels. When CO2 level dropped, the period known as Snowball Earth began. Increased volcanic activity also introduced nutrients into the seas. This may have played an important role in the development of the earliest animals.

References

Supercontinents
Neoproterozoic

Rodinia