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True or false, Bobby Brown has a cameo in the film Ghostbusters 2'? | Red Letter Media Ghostbusters 2 – Half in the Bag Commentary Track! :
RIP Harold Ramis. Not sure how good Ghostbusters 3 will be without Egon Spangler.
bluebottle
i’m pretty sure it will be just as terrible.
Jason
I’m sure Ghostbusters 3 will be just as good as the original, if not better. I mean, Hollywood wouldn’t make a third installment on a 30 year old film just to cash-in on brand name recognition and nostalgia. That really doesn’t seem like them.
Lilgreenman
I’m not sure whether I’d hate a reboot or sequel to Ghostbusters more. Dammit, can’t we leave well enough alone?
Mike Jakermen
Whats wrong with Ghostbusters 2. Sure its not as good as Ghostbusters 1. But its hardly a bad movie.
Percy Gryce
I think my period is syncing up with Mike & Jay’s because, totally randomly, I watched the first half of Ghostbusters last night.
Percy Gryce
There’s not going to be a Ghostbusters 3–at least not one with any of the original talent (save perhaps Ackroyd).
Lars
(Though the V would be more like an F, so it would roughly be pronounced like “Fawn-Seedoe”)
WrongWithYourFace
Ahem, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull calling.
WrongWithYourFace
Oh, man! I need to borrow the movie from my friend now!
Lars
No way. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was made because Spielberg and Lucas had all these ideas still waiting to burst out for decades.
It was an artistic tour de force for everything involved. At last, the original actors and creators were reunited to take one long, lingering look at the franchise and give us a structural and intellectual reassesment of the original material. Especially Harrison Ford broke ground finding new aspects and deeper meaning in a character that we all thought had been well established long.
It’s like Goethe when he kept working on his Faust right up until his death. In both Faust II and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull we encounter creative minds reaching their intellectual and creative peak at the height of their maturity.
In short, WrongWithYourFace: Jason is right and you are wrong. Sorry to be blunt, but there is no alternative way of putting it without distoring the truth beyond belief.
I hope you appreciate me being candid, but in matters like that, honesty has to be more important than the rules of courtesy.
Chris
Around the 40:20 mark, it sounds like someone is laughing who is neither Mike, Jay or Rich. I might also be losing my mind.
WrongWithYourFace
I apologize. I am dumb. And the delete button didn’t do my bidding.
Lars
My dear good sir,
your apology is accepted, of course. You are a true gentleman for accepting your error. I am humbled by your ability to accept defeat.
All I can hope that I will be able to behave just as nobly if the tables are ever turned.
TapewormBike
When I was a kid, the czech TV stations (that´s right, all three of them), had this weird habit of showing mostly sequels to great original movies. That is how I have an acquired hatred of this movie, Die Hard 2 and Robocop 2. The only one I appreciated at that time was New Batch, because, yay for Joe Dante not giving a single fuck.
Anyway, saving this track for a rainy day (or rather a 12 hour nightshift, as is now my new tradition with HitB commentaries.). I am like 80% sure it will rock. The other 20% is reserved in case it turns out to be amazeballs.
Lars
There were some TV-stations in Germany that did the same thing. I guess that these crappy sequels were much cheaper and they could still hope to draw a decent amount of viewers because of the appealing brand name in the title. (Right before the number which is a give away in regards to the quality of the actual product).
TapewormBike
I figured it must have been that. It just made the waiting for the crappy soft porn movie at midnight all the more tedious.
Domo_Konnichiwa
When great minds get together, their periods almost always sync up.
Lars
Did they place the commercials right about the time when people were in their birthday suits and ready to go on Czech TV back in the day as well?
That was tedious. Just when you were ready to go, they’d switch to commercials and afterwards, they just had a few more seconds before switching to the next non-porn scene.
Damn, back then, masturbation involved lots and lots of pauses. In my desperation, I sometimes switched over to the news, hoping for a female newscaster.
Domo_Konnichiwa
I understand where they’re coming from with hating Ghostbusters 2 because they wanted the franchise to take a risk, or at least try something different. A lot of the stuff RLM brings up makes sense from a story-telling standpoint; the movie isn’t bad, but it could have been SO much better. I also didn’t realize that GB 2 doesn’t have any memorable one-liners, or really any funny stuff from mid-way onward. So maybe it’s an alright movie, but it failed as a comedy.
ah, i was wondering what movie to watch tonight and you answered my prayers … badly …. what a shite movie .. 😛
TapewormBike
My 14yr old self feels the pains of your 14yr old self.
Lars
Well, at least we were taught the virtues of patience and self-discipline.
Something these youngsters today with their internet and fancy clothes will never be able to fully appreciate.
Percy Gryce
http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=541027&trkid=7852267
TapewormBike
God, I cannot wait to be one of the new breed of creepy old men, shouting at kids “I been jerking it before Youpooooorn!”
Lars
Yeah, we will walk into their front gardens and tap against the windows with our walking canes while shouting abuse and advice at them in front of their laptops.
Oh, the benefits we are going to reap at old age…
TapewormBike
“Y´all should get your Google Ass whooped ,´s what I say”
WrongWithYourFace
I’m too old skool for Netflix. If I want to see a movie, the first thing I do is check if it’s in the library. And my friend won’t charge me for it.
Lars
Maybe we should get together and create a “Best of the Worst” tribute with shitty soft porn from the 70s and 80s.
Maybe then those who came after us will understand our pain.
TapewormBike
I feel like “shitty soft porn” is the most all encompassing description for most of the film production in the 80s. Hard to choose, but I like the idea.
Domo_Konnichiwa
If BOTW did a shitty soft porn episode, that’d be hysterical.
TapewormBike
You know what I want? XXX parodies of movies featured on BotW. – “Hey there sexy momma, need your wombspace oxygenated?”
Domo_Konnichiwa
The slime will be CGI, though. It’ll be great!
Domo_Konnichiwa
“Only if you put your peanut butter in my chocolate, babycakes!”
Lars
Just watched the commentary, but unfortunately it ended before the final song came on.
I don’t have own words that could describe this experience, so let me put it this way: I’ve heard things you people wouldn’t believe.
Now I Get It
I like how you put that in quotes, like it didn’t come directly from your own brain.
TapewormBike
Half of them does not even need their names changed for porn. Thunderpants, Night Beast, Alien Seed is too easy..Maybe Shapeshafter is the only one I think needed the rearrangement.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Rich Evans’ quotes speak through me.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Shapeshifter will become a XXX grudge match between Furries and Bronies.
TapewormBike
If there ever will be a movie with such subject, I expect the trailer narrator to say “In the world, where…” and then shoot himself.
Now I Get It
I long for such a relationship with the Divine, but “So many canons, so little time.” …Hey, I just quoted myself.
http://redlettermedia.com/best-of-the-worst-wheel-of-the-worst-2/#comment-998012237
Percy Gryce
I quit Netflix when it was only DVDs in the mail. And I was slow to come back for the streaming. But now having tried the streaming, it’s pretty great to have all of Star Trek and Firefly, e.g., on demand.
Jeff
When’s the Next Plinkett Review?????
Thanatos2k
That slapped on Rich Evans picture makes me crack up every time
Thanatos2k
Ghostbusters 3 was the video game.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Don’t forget Xena!
Hank
Eh, it could be worse. In Turkey instead of getting the rights to the great American films or even the sequels, they just made their own, but with laughably bad quality. The Turkish versions of Star Wars and Superman are forever imbedded in my mind
Domo_Konnichiwa
Would that mean the Juggalos take over, then?
KarmikCykle
I don’t know why I laughed at “Milwaukee” being one of the tags.
Redblaze27
Convert the Dialogue recorded for Ghostbusters The Video Game and use it to make Ghostbusters 3 as a CG Film.
Ghostbusters The Video Game >>>>>>>>> Ghostbusters 2.
Striker, Ted
It’s nothing like poetry, it doesn’t rhyme at all.
Jack Smith
Actually they are Wrong. Ghostbusters 2 isn’t the only sequel. Ghostbusters the Video Game is more or less Ghostbuster 3.
Morgan D Beck
Could you guys please please please tell us where we need to cue the Movie up to next time you release one of these things? I was constantly having to hit pause because stuff was being referenced from minutes earlier
fragmer
I’d buy that for a dollar!
redletterjay
Read the descriptions on the bandcamp pages. They all say when to start.
Alexandria Sanders
this is going to be a good night
Domo_Konnichiwa
Oh boy, gonna try seeing it with Netflix. Hopefully my computer won’t spaz out uncontrollably because I dare to have two windows open.
Kevin Eakes
Just some random nerd movie knowledge: the actor that played Vigo, Wilhelm von Homburg, you can see quite well as one of Hans’ henchmen in Die Hard, and in one of my favorite movies, Diggstown, with James Woods. He was actually a boxer and quite a famous playboy type in Germany. Also, I read somewhere that the film score for this movie is lost or possibly destroyed, but no one knows where it is to distribute on CD or anything. It’s nice in it’s own way. The review was a bit harsher than I expected, but still entertaining as always. 🙂
Tyler
Never, they hate us.
shouji
could you think about maybe not having that music in the background, as we already have the movie audio listen to.
TapewormBike
Rocketboy1313
The revised “Extreme Ghostbusters” cartoon from the 90’s was great. The characters were diverse, but that was to make the action figures more diverse, they all had good personalities and voice actors.
They had updated equipment that still looked like it was cobbled together, and it has a better sequel hook than “Ghostbusters II”, with Egon working as a college professor and enlisting his students to help save the world. They even had the old Ghostbusters come back for the series finally where they convert a fire truck into a giant proton blaster and a dump truck into a giant trap to catch a ghost the size of an island.
ident
Could you think about making the background music louder? The dialogue hurts my soul.
ident
Is it really a sequel if it’s on a different medium? It’s more like fan fiction with a bigger a budget.
ident
We get it, you’re old. Quit bragging.
ident
Theoritically, anyway. Great minds and periods tend to be…nonsympatric, let’s say.
SeekerLancer
There already is a Ghostbusters 3. It was the video game, which was pretty damn good. They should leave it at that.
SeekerLancer
Well it had the original actors and writers so calling it fan fiction would be going a little far.
ident
Hyperbole. It hits you like a sledgehammer.
Cameron Vale
‘Spinoff’ would be most accurate.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Ohhhh. Did you learn this from Dr. Scientist in “Elves”? Because…. (He’s not really a scientist.)
Ogrot
Rich Evans hates that rap in Ghostbusters 2 because it reminds him of that time he wasn’t cool about fire safety.
Ogrot
Too soon?
Muthsarah
Oh c’mon, Ghostbusters 2 isn’t THAT bad. As far as sequels go, it’s actually one of the better ones. Murray’s still funny. Not AS funny, but still quality. Peter MacNichol is great. The rest…derivative. But had Ghostbusters 2 somehow been the first movie…totally decent.
I know, 20+ year old apologia, but still. Needs to be said. Not one of the best sequels, but FAR from the worst. The characters are still fun, the new ghosts are interesting. New supporting characters are fun, same as in the first movie.
Seriously, comedy’s fallen so far since 1989. How can you hate on this movie, unless you ONLY wanna view it in comparison to the first. Decent movie. Only bad in comparison to the almost-legendary first.
Muthsarah
And c’mon, the underground/railway scene isn’t creepy? That’s an awesome scene. The heads-on-pikes, the disappearing echo, the ghost train coming outta nowhere. You don’t need Venkman for that. Scene ain’t supposed to be funny. It’s short, fast-paced, and creepy as hell. BEST SCENE in the movie.
Muthsarah
Seriously, you guys are so negative. The Statue of Liberty scene(s) don’t deserve this level of hate. I get the hatred of everything below the standards of quality 80s stuff, but you can do so much worse than this. It’s cheesy, sure, but I just don’t understand why you’re hating on everything here. Possessed Statue of Liberty goes down the street…and you’re commenting on the the physical strength of the street, and saying this makes the movie into THE WORST.
I LOVE the first Ghostbusters. But even I am not this much of a hard-ass. And just two hours ago, I was under the impression that I was. I feel so….reasonable now. And I kinda don’t like it. And I really don’t like how you guys have collectively made me feel so reasonable. This isn’t what I paid one dollar for. I didn’t want my whole reality shattered.
Kram Sacul
re: the movie not establishing New York is full of negative energy and a-holes
The opening shot of Dana walking down the street makes it kind of clear that the city is full of negative energy with people yelling and insulting eachother. This ties in with how the mood slime materialized under the street and how Vigo gains his strength. It’s not really brought up again through the rest of the movie but it’s there in the beginning.
Manpuppy
Wish I could buy this and listen, but paypal refuses to let me checkout without making an account. Even when I unclick and use an e-mail that has never had paypal, it won’t let me. I have no idea why so many companys use it.
Joe Syxpac
The problem is that’s normal for New York.
They don’t establish that there is more negative energy than normal.
Mk Ultra
They fucking KILLED him.
Oh wait a minute that’s alternate plinkett from the half in the bag universe that doesn’t matter as much as the true plinkett from the original reviews.
Shit what’s next? CGI plinkett?
Kenshiroh
How exactly are they “Wrong”? They discussed the video game in this commentary.
Kenshiroh
Here is some info about the GBII deleted scenes: http://www.theraffon.net/~spookcentral/gb2_deleted.htm
In the extended version the TV commercial the Ghosbusters make to advertise that they are back in business, they say “twice” a lot. Perhaps this was meant to explain why their logo changed to the “peace sign” logo. (But that’s just a guess on my part.) http://www.theraffon.net/~spookcentral/gb2_deleted08.htm
Alex Lee
Suddenly, the bootleg industry doesn’t sound so evil.
Kenshiroh
This behind the scenes video shows how they were originally going to have the Vigo painting come to life. I think this looks much better than what they ended up doing in the final movie (just having Vigo’s head floating there over the river of slime when the painting talks).
“He’s a funnier character than we’ve ever had.”
pit
This was amazing, I demand more! But please don’t do old crappy movies a-la best of the worst, do more stuff like GBII: disappointing sequels, remakes etc.
pit
They could have really made the job easier by making just a mannequin body of Vigo and then finding a position for actor to put his head on top, instead of making him freeze on camera every time.
mikeohare
I wholeheartedly agree with Jay on the subject of the Austin Powers sequels. Instead of throwing away everything established in the first movie, they should have made a sequel where Austin has a wife and kid, nd has to save the world without using his mojo at all, which he would have no idea how to do. Wouldn’t that be a funnier take on a spy spoof?
joel floris
I am shocked and disgusted at the level of hate you guys all apparently have for this. I don’t believe that in 89 any of you were this pretentious enough to hate this move. I can tell from listening to this that there is some love there for it. But like most of your reviews, you throw around words like shit, bad, and awful…..and then go on to say you like a lot of it. I personally love Ghostbusters 1…and I love this one just as much.
For once, my computer didn’t commit virtual suicide, but that is a great idea for next time.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Andreas Rayo Kniep
Guys, I really like a lot of your stuff…
… but this commentary is just plain sloppy! Exactly like you assess the screenwriting of the movie to be!
It’s really bothering that the comments hardly ever match the video, the background-music is simply annoying (why can’t we here the audio of the movie play in the background like in normal commentaries), and you obviously being bored of watching this movie made me stop listening to this!
I love Ghostbusters2, but I was really interested in your comments about it. Just as I like I like the Star Trek TNG movies, but I was also very intrigued and amused by your Mr. Plinkett’s reviews of them. In this case, however, watching the movie for the 20th time is a much better way of spending time than your commentary! There is no interesting content, just bored voices and stupid music.
You can go much better, guys!
J from Raleigh
I never realized how much Bill Murray wasn’t a part of this film. He’s never really with the main Ghostbusters group.
I think it’s hilarious that so many people are butt hurt that you ripped this movie a new one. It’s a pretty bad movie.
Also, I think the scene where they investigate the painting the first time equals when they investigated Dana and her apartment.
The Bobby Brown song was my favorite jam that year.
Gotta agree, the background music is annoying. Take it out please.
FACLC
Turkish Star Wars is definitely a Best of the Worst candidate.
FACLC
Also, the guys don’t necessarily change to talking about a scene when the scene cuts in. The talk about the babycarriage scene, for example, doesn’t start until the scene is starting to cut away. The timing isn’t as critical for this commentary as it was for the Plinkett Star Wars ones (the STV commentary wasn’t very scene dependent either)
DisqusHound
There already was a Ghostbusters 3….it was the Ghostbusters Video Game on PS3 and XBox 360. Written by Aykroyd and Ramis, has the entire cast, with the exceptions of Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis. And the story itself involves the ghost of Ivo Shandor, the Gozer cultist who built the temple at the end of the first movie.
Hell, they even got Max Von Sydow to cameo as Vigo the Carpathian in a humorous little scene.
pit
OH NOES, when we were stupid tasteless kids we didn’t hate bad movies? NO WAY.
If you like this as much as the first movie, then you’re a tasteless idiot and your opinion has no value whatsoever. Now please remove yourself from this side of the internet immediately.
Mk Ultra
If it weren’t because I’ve seen bits of this dog pile on TV I wouldn’t even remember it existed. No wonder I never wtached all of it. It played like a safe boring knock-off of the original GB. But god damn I watched all of it for the first time. Fucking wheelof the worst has conditioned me to sit through shit movies. Rich’s laughter is starting to soothe me. WTF is happening to me? HEEEELP
DisqusHound
Also….Vigo and the river of slime was just a coincidence. The slime was conjured by Ivo Shandor as a way to fuel his portal to bring Gozer over. It just happened to bring ghosts back based on negative feelings. Hence Vigo springs out from his painting, and the Scolari brothers are conjured from the judge’s memories of them.
Kram Sacul
That is true. They didn’t push it that far.
Alexa
Hate to say it, well actually not really, but I love this movie. Obviously not as great as the first one, it does have weaker writing, but its not “terrible” as you guys say. It was just a fun movie for me. Murray is still very funny, everyone is giving a pretty good performance and it still had some genuinely creepy moments. And yes, they’re doing what they did before, but at least its no Splash Too. And yeah there is a sequel to Splash…
RalphCifaretto
Ghostbusters 2 isn’t nearly as good as the first one. But I don’t think it’s as terrible as these guys think it is.
Christopher Kulik
For those of you who want to pay for the commentary but not the movie, here is a free YouTube version in German ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYN6jXwCRK0 ). The background music is annoying, but the boys’ trivia and lines are awesome.
“Why do anything?” — Mike
ident
I liked this movie as a kid. I owned it. I watched it many times. I tried to watch it a few months ago and turned it off after 20 minutes. It’s called growing up.
ident
I think that degree on the wall from the University of Phoenix says otherwise, sir.
Cameron Vale
I do like Ghostbusters 2, but hearing it dissected this way makes me realize that it’s mostly for reasons calculated to achieve that end. But I don’t think I agree that this movie was paying any serious deference to the cartoon show, because it fucked over the cartoon show in at least one way; it transferred Janine’s love interest from Egon to Louis.
DanimalCollective
The only reason I have this DVD is because it came with the box set (the shiny green one) and I got it as a gift. Thanks for giving me a reason to watch it, because I otherwise would have never used it.
Now do commentary tracks for Vegas Vacation, Neverending Story II, and the Substitute II through IV so I have an excuse to watch these movies that I own because I only wanted one movie out of the multi-pack.
Tea Party Patriot 4 Obama
I was a teenager in ’89 and most everyone I knew thought the movie was terrible. Even the elementary school kids ruthlessly bullied any kid who went to school with a Ghostbusters II lunch box.
I thought the commentary did a good job explaining what made Ghostbusters so unique compared to Ghostbusters II.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Idiomatically we call them educated.
ident
You may have your universities confused. It’s one step above a diploma mill.
Gene Parmesan
I find it hilarious that they have mentioned Cone heads in two commentary tracks.
Roach Queen
I LOVE Ghostbusters II. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just a not-as-good movie.
ident
Hmm, you’re switching mediums. Why not count the TV show as Ghostbusters 3, then? Or the comic books? Or Dan Akroyd’s interpretive dance prequel The Short Life and Eternal Death of John T. Slimer?
DisqusHound
Because the video game shared writers, shared cast and shared continuity with both Ghostbusters movies.
In the same vein, the Star Wars books written after Return of the Jedi are all canon. JJ Abrams can kiss my arse.
DisqusHound
The ghost train is a callback to the news montage in the first movie. News reporter: “Heck, my grandmother would spin yarns about a spectral locomotive that would rocket past the farm where she grew up.”
DisqusHound
I LOVED it as a kid…and as an adult, I think it’s just “okay”.
I always did get the impression that Bill Murray was distant…I always assumed it was Venkman just being a cynical asshole. Think about it…in the five years between movies, the Ghostbusters were “sued by every state, county, and city agency in New York”, reduced to working childrens’ birthday parties, and he lost Dana to another guy, who scrammed when she got pregnant.
Though for the life of me I don’t understand why everybody in New York stopped believing in the supernatural, what with the 100 foot tall food mascot stomping his way down the street.
It’s even more bothersome than everyone in Transformers 2 conveniently forgetting about the giant robot civil war that tore up Los Angeles in the first movie.
Hale
Shared writers and cast justifies the game as a sequel moreso than most other Ghostbuster-media, but by that logic, I don’t think most EU Star Wars material really counts, unless Lucas and other writers who worked on the original movies also penned some of the extra media.
I know Lucas makes the claim the EU stuff is generally canon or whatever, but that has been reversed in the past. Take Boba Fett’s (supposed) origin before the prequels were released. Hell, lots of stuff that was all fine and canon with the movies before the prequels either had to be ignored or retconned.
Christopher Kulik
Wow! Didn’t even make that connection. Incidentally, there was a British horror movie I saw on TCM one day called THE GHOST TRAIN (1941), pretty good.
Domo_Konnichiwa
Ah. I can attest to that. My dick-stabbing assassin degree from Devry has been completely useless to me.
Mr Bighead
I laughed out loud when Jay was theorizing that Egon had to fuck the slime tanks in order to positively charge them. RIP HR.
Ghostbusters 2 is definately consistent with the production ethos of the time when it came to sequels. Such a shame because there was potential there. Great scene ideas like the slime filled subway, the haunted painting etc. The guys are harsh but largely fair in their comments. I’m glad they acknowledge Janosz though, he has the best lines in the film which I often use in everyday situations. Such as…
“Soon the world will be mine and Vigo’s, well mostly Vigo’s.”
“Everything you’re doing is bad, I want you to know this”
“Oh but I woo.”
“So why are you came?”
“A child.” (in Janosz voice)
Jack Friday
After the part in the museum where Ray stares into the painting and goes into a trance, there is a deleted scene after where he goes nuts driving Ecto 1 and tries to crash the car with the rest of the ghostbusters riding along. I knew it because I read the novel adaptation as a kid and had the three-issue comic book set for the movie featuring the animated characters in the respective roles.
So there was a payoff to Ray’s interaction with the painting, but it didn’t test well with audiences. Neither did the scenes with Louis Tully trying to capture slimer himself at the firehouse.
Kenny Boutot
First off, ditch your background music. It’s just the worst. How you feel about The Statue of Liberty scene is how I feel about your background music.
Next, I know Rich and Jay constantly posit that they rewatched the movie exclusively to prepare for this, but wow half the commentary is you guys not knowing what’s going on. Yes, it’s a rehash, yes, there are massive plot holes, but you question plot points throughout that are explained.
You complain about the movie not being clever, but this is a weak commentary. You get lazy in the way you criticize this very quickly.
On the cartoon notes, it was far better than this movie. It was character driven, and actually plays the original movie as a “Based on the True Story” film within the cartoon universe, which I think is pretty genius.
Lastly, I know it’s terrible, but I LOVE the Run DMC Ghostbusters II theme. I don’t know why. I’m not proud of it.
AlienFanatic
Well, we are a contemptible lot.
Jordan
I’d buy that for a dollar!
ident
First off, love the background music. It’s just the best. Can it be louder? I can still hear the stupid words in the movie and I feel like they’re infecting me with whatever this guy has.
Jeremy Davis
everytime I hear Rich Evans laugh, I make a mess in my pantaloons. This, of course, leads to the inevitable question… “Why am I drippings with goo?”
Big Mclargehuge
We just need to get him working
Big Mclargehuge
Though I did question the altruism of their equal opportunities policy when they had a guy in a wheelchair. When I think, haunted house, I’m not thinking they have considered accesible entrances
Just saying, he ain’t climbing the stairwell up to Dana Barret’s apartment to face Zuul…
Guest
Hey anyone want to go in one the 18 pack, I am not Jewish but you never know.
Rocketboy1313
That is an issue in one episode, I think it was an old NYU Dormitory that had no wheelchair access. So he stayed on the ground floor, got a vantage point, and relayed directions about the building via walky talky with the help of the school staff.
They used what they wrote.
ident
Whenever a movie can be reduced to “just a fun movie”, that’s a great indication that it has serious technical problems (e.g. story, plot, characterization, editing, etc.) that would cause many people to disagree. There are movies I, too, think are “just fun”, but that just means there are reasons exterior to the movie that cause me to like it in spite of itself. Movies that I watched as a kid or happened to hit home with whatever was going on in my life at the time. I won’t even give examples because I know these “just a fun movie” movies are indefensible.
Kenny Boutot
Your brain makes leaps in astounding ways. Please go watch a Madea movie and solve world hunger.
ident
Are you trying to say Madea movies are the films they show at the “Home” clinics now where they euthanize people and turn them into Soylent Green to feed to the hungry people of the world? If so, I would prefer the nature documentary. Is that no longer an option? Or did my brain just make another astounding leap?
ident
Who gets the yarmulke?
Duckler
I saw it in the theater as a kid (11/12) and no, it wasn’t bad. As an adult, it isn’t actively bad, but it’s just not what it should have been.
cabbo
I remember watching the film as a kid (a very young kid) and being terrified of that baby snatching scene. about twenty years later, A bunch of my friends and I were watching shit on youtube a good bit into a drunk week. I brought up that scene and how terrifying it was, someone agreed, and we watched it and pissed ourselves. Mostly from laughing.
Wildo
The dancing toaster scene I’m pretty sure is the equivalent of the twinkie scene in the first one. The extra scene at the end with the mayor has the Ghostbusters asking for permission to go to the Statue of Liberty, but it was cut in editing in favor of a surprise hard cut to the SoL. Also in the original script, Hardemeyer was absorbed into the slime mold at the end of the movie; a la Peck getting drenched in marsh-mellow.
In fact the negative/positive mood reactions actually harp back to Venkman’s study in the first scene of the first movie.
boobio
Extreme Ghostbusters was dogshit, burn in Hell!
Bill
It was great listening to Mike sigh twenty or thirty times.
Kishi Jugo
Wanna make this movie instantly turn straight insane?
All the slime in the film is actually a stand-in for blood. You have the two murderers who issue forth from the vial of blood in the courtroom. All the blood becomes animated when people get their blood up, so to speak. If the blood is on their clothes they get angry and almost come to blows. You have the shot with the blood flowing out of the museum doors just like the blood issuing from the elevator in the shining.
On top of that you get a river of blood under the city which is similar to the one Dante finds in hell under the city of Dis that burns up and submerges violent murderers.
“And Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go forth abroad. And when they
were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him. And the Lord said to Cain: Where is thy brother Abel? And he answered, I know not: am I my brother’ s keeper? And he said to him: What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’ s blood crieth to me from the earth.” Cain murdered his brother out of envy at the acceptable sacrifice he made to God. The ghostbusters murder vigo in the midst of what they perceive to be unacceptable sacrifices and whatnot. Certainly Cain would have perceived Abel’s sacrifice as unacceptable.
With this analogy, believe it or not, you then get a spooky parallel with the french revolution. The french revolution was born out of a specious cry for Liberty and the blood of untold numbers of opponents who perished famously by the blade of the guillotine. In one instance even, some of the architects of the revolution Christened a lady of the night the godess of Liberty and took her to a church where they put her on the altar. Ghostbusters 2 concludes with our heroes spraying a lady of liberty with blood. This blood gives her life and this goddess trounces the bland superstitious vague medieval European bad guy and his altar back to Europea.
As slime the movie makes no sense. When it becomes blood it makes so much twisted sense you want to cry yourself to sleep every night for the rest of your life. I mean to go further The villain of the story is completely Dracula and Peter Macnicol is just Renfield right? Macnicol actually played Renfield in Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving it. In this light the Ghostbusters themselves become weird vampires who offer the blood of the dead to their weird liberty goddess. Egon has sex with blood even.
Dan Akroyd isn’t just nuts now. He’s been nuts for a long time folks, and so has everyone in Hollywood. Get out while you still can.
People think “the truth is stranger than fiction,” is a cliche. The truth of things is so incomprehensible it turns the mind inside out backwards and reverse and makes it explode. Remember, you heard it here, on this obscure comment section on the internet, first, for no apparent reason.
jt
I’ve watched this too many times as a kid to have anything but fond nostalgia for it.
Wildo
Oh…I thought we we’re going to beat each other to death.
Winner is king of the Internet.
TapewormBike
Presuming Rich Evans gives up the title willingly of course.
Wildo
a man can dream.
playdude92 .
Bill Murray didn´t tell the creators of this to fuck off, so it must be good, right?
ident
“Secondarologically” would be above “Suck my Balls”.
JOnn
When is the Things commentary coming out? I think that RLM comments might make that movie watchable.
Torgos_Giant_Knees
At the time, there was “Masters of the Universe” branded slime being sold that was green, so the “Ghostbusters” toy people needed to differentiate themselves somehow. That’s my theory behind the pink versus green slime, anyway. I also predict that Ecto 3.0 will be a Toyota Prius or Chevy Volt.
Mk Ultra
Yup. That’s exactly what I thought.
Guest
Growing up to be an asshole?
Gordon Chapman-Fox
I can’t believe I just listened to a commentary track for a film I’ve only ever seen once, 20+ years ago. Thanks guys!
ident
Because only assholes don’t like movies you like.
Drain
Great commentary. It made me realize what a cash grab and copy/paste the movie was. Since I was never really a fan of these and didn’t see them once in probably 15 years, I didn’t know much about them.
Kishi Jugo
Um, allow me to point out an odd coincidence between this commentary and your other recent AVP commentary. At the heart of Ghostbusters 2 is the Dantean river of blood below the city. In the Inferno, this river travels all the way down to the very bottom of hell where it pools into a massive frozen lake where the devil is frozen forever. In AVP there is a frozen place below the earth where the queen alien is frozen forever. On the surface there is an abandoned frozen whaling station. Job compared the devil to leviathan which resembles a giant sea creature not unlike a whale. “Canst thou draw out the leviathan with a hook, or canst thou tie his tongue with a cord?”
Freak #1
Lord. Now I have this film’s garbage soundtrack stuck in my head.
Paul Garrison
The commentary tracks are great! Keep them coming!
Chuck Burly
You dinks. What possessed you to think your commentary needed background music? It never was needed on DVDs, MST3K or countless Youtube videos. The person that suggested that to you as necessary is a dope.
Good work otherwise!
ident
I asked them to put it in. They owed me since that one time with the thing.
Chuck Burly
Goddamn you George Lucas! Must you put your effects in everything!
Rob Rose
it’s stylistically designed to be that way.
Captain Matticus, LP Inc.
I get that you guys didn’t like Ghostbusters 2, and that’s fine. I liked it, though. Janosz and Egon did have some of the best jokes, and that painting of Vigo the Carpathian is one of the coolest prop pieces in any movie. Also, this is my favorite part of the movie:
He’s talking trash to his own god. To me, that’s brilliant.
Jason Ross
That website looks like it was built by a ree ree.
mikeohare
Man of Steel had a 37 year old woman as it’s leading lady, just saying.
Greg G Gould
Good news everyone. Ghostbuster 2 has an official release date for blu-ray. 9/16/14, and it’s not a bare-bones release this time. It has deleted scenes, a Bobby Brown music video, and a round table discussion by Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd. Now, I just need UHF to come out on blu-ray.
Rocketboy1313
That actually comes up several times. He is thrown out of his chair, he is unable to go into an NYU dorm, and he sometimes can’t keep up with the group. They treat the disability as a disability, in many ways that is very respectful of how disabled people can contribute while still having limitations.
Kind of in contrast to someone like Daredevil, whose powers so effectively replace his sight that his blindness is barely an element of the story.
Pork Frankins
Everyone in the world that is not Rich Evans needs to get “STFU” tattooed on their foreheads. That way Rich Evans will know what to do at all times.
Hank_Henshaw
I wasn’t interested, until I read they included that Bobby Brown video. I bought two copies: one to open, one to keep mint in box.
Greg G Gould
Whats more important is that UHF has been released on blu-ray.
arihant singh
you have great opportunity to get how to generate free roblox robux at free of cost.
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Which member of the group All Saints appeared in Bend it like Beckham'? Shaznay Lewis or Nicole Appleton?7 | Bobby Brown Will ‘Never’ Take Bobbi Kristina Off Life Support | EURweb
Bobby Brown Will ‘Never’ Take Bobbi Kristina Off Life Support
Health News Top News Whitney Houston 0 Comments 612 views
*Responding to several reports over the Memorial Day weekend that Bobby Brown was preparing to take his daughter Bobbi Kristina off of life support, a family source tells People magazine that those were false stories, and that the singer would “never” take that action toward his child.
Several websites (including MediaTakeOut.com) were claiming that Bobby planned to remove BK from life support, nearly four months after she was found unresponsive in a bathtub on Jan. 31. Because of the reports, hundreds of fans began flooding the family with supportive messages on social media.
The only problem: it wasn’t true. Reps for Brown, Cissy Houston and Pat Houston came out to deny the reports.
A Brown family source told People that those “false stories” are distracting to the family. “It’s background noise,” says the source. “Bobby hears these reports, and it’s annoying to him. He hates that people are just waiting for his daughter to die.”
IBobbi Kristina’s condition has remained unchanged since she was transported to a rehab facility in March. While Cissy Houston has publicly said that there is little hope of recovery, the Brown family says they’re unwilling to give up on the 22-year-old.
“Let me tell you this now,” says the Brown family source. “Don’t believe any reports that Bobby is going to take her off life support. He’s never going to do that. I don’t think he’ll ever go there; if there’s a 2 percent chance, a 1 percent chance, a 0.1 percent chance, he will keep hope alive.”
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Dwayne Johnson is better known by which nickname | Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - Universal Life Church Ministers
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Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
Dwayne Johnson, or better known for his stage name as “The Rock”, is an actor, athlete, television host, professional wrestler, and just recently, an ordained minister through the Universal Life Church.
Born in Hayward California, Johnson was the son of a professional wrestler, so it comes to no surprise that at an early age he was exposed to fitness and sports. Johnson was a highly praised athlete all throughout his years growing up, playing college football, track and field, and of course, wrestling. After school, Dwayne trained hard and earned multiple shots at wrestling matches where his career took off.
Fast forward to the present day, and Dwayne Johnson is a well known name in the wrestling industry and in Hollywood. He spent years wrestling in the WWE/WWF under the nickname “The Rock,” where he became known as one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. He then pursued his career in acting and film, where he starred in many movies, most notably the Fast and Furious Franchise. He earned the title of highest grossing actor in 2013 by Forbes. He also holds the world record for most selfies in 3 minutes.
Johnson got ordained as a minister in order to give a fan a surprise wedding. He originally was asked to just be a part of the wedding, but Dwayne went above and beyond, getting ordained to perform the wedding, and give his fan a wedding of a lifetime.
Link to the video below
| The Rock |
Name the voice actor most famous for Winnie the Pooh, Kaa in Jungle Book, & Mr Stork in Dumbo. | Dwayne Johnson | Profile Biography
Sunday, July 24, 2011 No Comments
Dwayne Johnson Biography . Dwayne Douglas Johnson (born May 2, 1972) better known by his ring name The Rock, is an American star in wrestling and movie industry. He is the son of Ata Johnson and Rocky Johnson, a professional wrestler. Johnson married Dany Garcia on May 3, 1997, but they divorced on June 1, 2007. They have a daughter, Simone Alexandra, born August 14, 2001.
Johnson has won a total of sixteen championships in WWF, including nine World Heavyweight Championships, two WWF Intercontinental Championships, and five times as co-holder of the WWF Tag Team Championships. He was the sixth WWF Triple Crown Champion, and the winner of the 2000 Royal Rumble. He was featured in the 2007 Guinness Book of World Records for having the highest salary as an actor in his first starring role, receiving $5.5 million and nominated for Favorite Movie Actor at the 2008 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for his role in The Game Plan.
Biography of Dwayne Johnson
Occupation: Actor, Professional Wrestler, Philanthropist
Years Active: 1996 – present
Dwayne Johnson Career:
In 1991, Johnson was a college football player for the University of Miami’s national championship team and he later played for the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. This led to his decision to become a professional wrestler. He gained mainstream fame as a wrestler in World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Having joined the WWF for two years, he won the WWF Championship, and became one of the most popular wrestlers. The Johnson’s success inside the ring helped him to cross over into mainstream popularity. In 2002, Johnson got his chance as the main character in film The Scorpion King. For this film, he was reported to receive the highest salary for an actor in his first starring role, earning $5.5 million. Soon after, he played in several blockbuster movies such as The Rundown, Be Cool, Walking Tall, Gridiron Gang, The Game Plan, Get Smart, Race to Witch Mountain, Planet 51, Tooth Fairy, Doom, Why Did I Get Married Too?, The Other Guys, and Faster.
Dwayne Johnson Filmography:
Beyond the Mat (1999), Longshot (2000), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Scorpion King (2002), The Rundown (2003), Walking Tall (2004), Be Cool (2005), Doom (2005), Gridiron Gang (2006), Reno 911!: Miami (2007), Southland Tales (2007), The Game Plan (2007), Get Smart (2008), Race to Witch Mountain (2009), Planet 51 (2009), Tooth Fairy (2010), Tooth Fairy Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010), Faster (2010), The Other Guys (2010), You Again (2010), Fast Five (2011), Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2011)
Dwayne Johnson biography Dwayne Johnson wikipedia Dwayne Johnson short biography family Dwayne Johnson girlfriend Dwayne Johnson film
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Which caves are a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), near Wells in Somerset | Wookey Hole Caves Tour, Somerset, UK - YouTube
Wookey Hole Caves Tour, Somerset, UK
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Published on May 17, 2015
A Tour around the Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset, UK.
Wookey Hole Caves are a series of limestone caverns, show cave and tourist attraction in the village of Wookey Hole on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills near Wells in Somerset, England. The River Axe flows through the cave. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for both biological and geological reasons. Wookey Hole cave is a "solutional cave", one that is formed through a process of weathering in which the natural acid in groundwater dissolves the rocks. Some of the water originates as rain that flows into streams on impervious rocks on the plateau before sinking at the limestone boundary into cave systems such as Swildon's Hole, Eastwater Cavern and St Cuthbert's Swallet; the remainder is rain that percolates directly through the limestone. The caves are at a constant temperature of 11 °C (52 °F).
The caves have been used by humans for around 45,000 years, demonstrated by the discovery of tools from the Palaeolithic period, along with the fossilised animal remains. Evidence of Stone and Iron Age occupation continued into Roman Britain. A corn grinding mill operated on the resurgent waters of the River Axe as early as 1086. The waters of the river are used in a handmade paper mill, the oldest extant in Britain, which began operations circa 1610.[4] The low temperature of the caves means that they can be used for maturing Cheddar cheese.
The caves are the site of the first cave dives in Britain which were undertaken by Jack Sheppard and Graham Balcombe. Since the 1930s divers have explored the extensive network of chambers developing breathing apparatus and novel techniques in the process. The full extent of the cave system is still unknown with approximately 4,000 metres (13,000 ft), including 25 chambers, having been explored. Part of the cave system opened as a show cave in 1927 following exploratory work by Herbert E. Balch. As a tourist attraction it has been owned by Madame Tussauds and, most recently, the circus owner Gerry Cottle. The cave is noted for the Witch of Wookey Hole – a roughly human shaped stalagmite that legend says is a witch turned to stone by a monk from Glastonbury. It has also been used as a location for film and television productions.
Check out the blog: http://travelshorts.com
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| Wookey Hole |
In woodwork, what are butt, dovetail & mitre | Category:Wookey Hole Caves - Wikimedia Commons
Category:Wookey Hole Caves
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English: Wookey Hole Caves is a show cave and tourist attraction in the village of Wookey Hole on the southern edge of the Mendip Hills near Wells in Somerset, England. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for both biological and geological reasons.
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Which car manufacturer has produced the Taunus, Laser & Thunderbird models | Ford - Overview - Review - CarGurus
Ford Zephyr
Ford Overview
One of the earliest manufacturers, Ford invented the mass-produced, assembly-line factory for cars. Over the years the company has put out some of America's favorite classic cars, such as the sporty Ford Mustang and the Ford Thunderbird. (Ford has also created some of the automotive world's most notable disasters, including the Edsel and the Pinto.)
Based in Dearborn, Michigan, the Ford Motor Company is a pillar of the US corporate community. Despite recent money woes and scattered layoffs, Ford continues to turn out some of the market's most popular products. Ford's pickup trucks, especially the sales juggernaut F-150 line, are ubiquitous on farms and ranches across the US and Canada.
In the late 1990s, Ford put a lot of its eggs into the 'bigger is better' basket, upsizing its truck lines and creating several SUV models. The recent climb in gas prices and resulting contraction of the sport-utility vehicle market has been a tough pill for Ford to swallow.
Ford is something of a player on the international scene as well, with a 10% share of the European market. Some of the popular fuel-efficient compacts marketed in Europe may be just the ticket to bail Ford out of its current woes. And the company's acquisition of Jaguar (in 1989) and Volvo (in 1999) may be part of a long-term global strategy.
Ford's come a long way since founder Henry Ford marketed the Model T through the Sears Catalog, announcing that 'you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black!'
In late 2006, Bill Ford announced that Alan Mulally would be taking over the role of CEO and President of Ford Motor Company; Bill Ford remains in the role of Executive Chairman.
Mulally brings some important experience to Ford: as president and CEO of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes Division from 1998 to 2006, he engineered a dramatic corporate turnaround for the aeronautics giant. Let's see whether Mulally's magic works for Ford as well!
| Ford Motor Company |
Name the third light blue property on a Monopoly board, that joins The Angel Islington & Euston Road. | Ford Capri - Ford Wiki
Ford Capri
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1986 Ford Capri Mk III 1.6 Laser in Blackpool, England
Ford Capri was a name used by the Ford Motor Company for three separate Automobile models:
The Ford Consul Capri coupe, produced by Ford of Great Britain between 1961 and 1964
The Ford Capri coupe, produced by Ford Europe from 1969 to 1986
The Ford Capri convertible, produced by the Ford Motor Company of Australia from 1989 to 1994.
The Capri name was also used by Ford's Lincoln-Mercury Division on a number of models which did not bear the Ford name:
The Mercury Capri , 1991 to 1994
Contents
Ford Consul Capri (335) (1961–64)
Ford Consul Capri
99 in (2515 mm) [1]
Length
2,100 lb (953 kg) approx
Related
Ford Consul Classic
The first use of the name Capri outside the USA was by Ford of Great Britain for a 2 door coupé version of the Ford Classic Sedan (car). To really understand why this model was produced and in such limited numbers, one has to look at the history of the Ford Motor Company (UK) at that time. During the 1950's all bodies for Ford of Great Britain's passenger vehicles were built by outside body builders. Dearborn made it known in November 1960 that it wanted to purchase the rest of the share capital in Ford of Great Britain. This brought about some policy changes that had great influence into the styling of the coming models. Not the least the fact that they put their own people into Dagenham. The Ford Classic was a result of 4 years of intensive development. Approval for the project was given in autumn 1956. The Styling of the car was the last project undertaken by Colin Neale before he left Dagenham for Dearborn. The initial design requirements was for the Ford Classic to be a full range model, to take Ford into the new decade. Ford produced a full size estate (or Station Wagon) mock -up but it never reached production.
The Capri Project was code named "Sunbird", it took design elements from the Ford Thunderbird and the Ford Galaxie Sunliner. It was instigated by Sir Horace Denne, Ford's Export Director. He wanted a "Co-repondent's" car to add a little glamour to the export line. On it's September announcement it was initially for Export only. It was designed by Charles Thompson who worked under. It had sweeping lines, a large boot space and a pillarless coupé roof. The Ford Consul Capri went on sale to the domestic home market of Britain in January 1962: The bodies were sub-assembled by Pressed Steel Fisher, with only final assmbly taking place at Dagenham. Because it was intended as part of the Ford Classic range of cars, the body was well engineered but was complex and expensive to produce. With new production methods, time demands from Dearborn and a need to match opposition manufacturers in price, the Ford Classic and Consul Capri were almost doomed from the start. The Ford Classic ran from 61 - 63, and was replaced by the equally short lived Ford Corsair.
The Consul Capri was made to Ford Classic De-Luxe spec only, it offered many then unusual features, such as four Automotive lighting, variable speed wipers, disc brakes, dimming dashboard lights, and a cigar lighter. It was proclaimed as "The First Personal car from Ford of Great Britain" (Ford of Great Britain, sales literature, December 1961) Initially fitted with a 1340 cc 3 main bearing engine (model 109E), these earlier cars were considered underpowered and suffered from premature crankshaft failure. Engine capacity was increased in August 1962 to 1498 cc (model 116E), this engine was a vast improvement. The first 200 Capris were left-hand-drive cars for export including Europe and North America.
In Germany at the 1961 Frankfurt Auto Show, Ford sold 88 Capris.
In February 1963 a GT version (also 116E, ) was announced. The new GT engine, developed by Cosworth, featured a raised compression ratio to 9:1, a modifed head with larger exhaust valves and aluminium inlet manifold, a four branch exhaust manifold and most noticeably a Twin-Choke Webber Carburettor - This being the first use of this carburettor on a British production car. (this same engine was announced for use in the Ford Cortina in April 1963. The Consul Capri was the First genuine factory GT from Ford, as we know it. From 1961 to 1964 just on 19,421 Capris were sold, of which 2002 were GT models. The Consul Capri was discontinued in July 1964.
Overall the car was very expensive to produce and in the latter part of its production was running alongside the very popular Ford Cortina , sales were disappointing and the Consul Capri was removed from sale after just two and a half years. Just 1007 cars were sold in 1964,the last year of production, 412 of them being GT's . The Consul Capri (335) is one of the rarest cars from Ford of Great Britain.
Ford Capri Mk1 (1969–1974)
Ford Capri Mk1
Manual transmission
Hans Heyer 1973 with Ford Capri at the Nürburgring
The first Ford Capri to bear that precise name was introduced in January 1969 at the Brussels Motor Show, with sales starting the following month. The intention was to reproduce in Europe the success Ford had had with the North American Ford Mustang ; to produce a European Pony car. It was mechanically based on the Cortina and built in Europe at the Dagenham and Halewood plants in the United Kingdom, the Genk plant in Belgium, and the Saarlouis and Cologne plants in Germany. The car was named Colt during development stage, but Ford were unable to use the name, as it was trademarked by Mitsubishi Motors.
Although a Fastback coupé, Ford wanted the Capri Mark 1 to be affordable for a broad spectrum of potential buyers. To help achieve that, it was available with a variety of engines. The British and German factories produced different line-ups. The continental model used the Ford Taunus V4 engine in 1.3, 1.5 and 1.7 L Engine displacement, while the British versions were powered by the Ford Kent straight-4 in 1.3 and 1.6 L form. The Cologne V6 2.0 L served as initial range-topper. Until the end of the year, new sports versions were added: the 2300 GT in Germany, using a double-barrel Carburettor with 125 PS (92 kW), and the 3000 GT in the UK, with the Essex V6 , capable of 138 hp (103 kW).
In April 1970, Ford began selling the Capri outside Europe, in the North-America, South Africa and Australia markets. These versions were powered solely by the underpowered Kent 1.6 engine, but a Pinto straight-4 2.0 L replaced it in 1971. The North American version featured new headlights and bumpers (to comply with U.S. DOT regulations), and carried no brand badge.
A new 2637 cc version of the Cologne V6 engine assembled by Weslake appeared in September 1971, powering the Capri RS2600. This model used Kugelfischer Fuel injection to raise power to 150 PS (110 kW), and was the basis for the Group 2 RS2600 used in the European Touring Car Championship. Fitted with the Weslake engine featuring their special all alloy cylinder heads. The RS2600 also received modified suspensions, a Close ratio gearbox, lightened bodywork panels, ventilated disc brakes and aluminium wheels. The 2.6 L engine was detuned in September for the deluxe version 2600 GT, with 2550 cc and a double-barrel Solex carburettor. Germany's Dieter Glemser won the Drivers title in the 1971 European Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a Ford Köln entered RS2600 and fellow German Jochen Mass did likewise in 1972.
Mk1 facelift
Ford Capri 1973
The Capri proved highly successful, with 400,000 cars sold until 1970, and Ford revised it in 1972, to become what is known by enthusiasts as the Capri "Bis" or, in the UK, the "Mark 1 facelift" Capri. The car received a new and more comfortable suspension, rectangular headlights, enlarged taillights and new seats. The Kent engines were replaced by the Ford Pinto engine , and the previously UK-only 3000 GT joined the German lineup. In the UK the 2.0 L V4 remained in use. The following year, 1973, saw the highest sales total the Capri ever attained, at 233,000 vehicles, and the 1,000,000th Capri sold in August.
In December, Ford replaced the RS2600 with the RS3100, with the Essex V6's displacement increased to 3098 cc. Unlike its predecessor, it used a double-barrel Magneti-Marelli carburettor, and reached the same 150 PS (110 kW). Only 250 RS3100s were built for Homologation purposes. However, the car was still competitive in Touring car racing, and Ford Motorsport produced a 100-model limited edition with this new engine. The Group 4 RS3100’s engine was tuned by Cosworth into the GAA, with 3412 cc, fuel injection, DOHC , four valves per cylinder and 435 hp (324 kW) in racing trim. The car also featured improved aerodynamics. Besides the racing RS3100, the GAA was also used in Formula 5000.
Ford Capri Mk2 (1974–1977)
Ford Capri Mk2
Transmission (mechanics)
Manual transmission
In February 1974, the Capri Mk2 was introduced. After 1.2 million cars sold, and with the 1973 oil crisis, Ford chose to make the new car more suited to everyday driving, with a shorter bonnet, larger cabin and the adoption of a Hatchback rear door. By the standards of the day the mk2 was a very well evolved vehicle with very few reliability issues.
Although it was mechanically similar to the Mk1, the Capri 2 had a revised larger body and a more modern dashboard including a smaller steering wheel. The 2.0 L version of the Pinto was introduced in the European model, and was placed below the 3.0L V6, although it was more powerful. The Capri still maintained the large square headlights, which became the easiest way to distinguish between a Mk2 and a Mk3. Larger disc brakes and a standard Alternator (auto) finished the list of modifications.
In order to keep the sporty appeal of the car, Ford introduced the John Player & Sons limited edition, (known as the JPS) in March 1975, but in May 1976, and with sales decreasing, the intermediate 3.0 GT models disappeared to give way for the upscale 3.0 S and Ghia designations. In October 1976, production was limited to the Saarlouis factory only, and the following year the Capri left the American market with only 513,500 models sold.
Ford Capri Mk3 (1977–1986)
Ford Capri Mk3
Manual transmission,
Automatic transmission
The Capri Mk3 was referred to internally as "Project Carla", and although little more than a substantial update of the Mk2, it was often referred to as the Mk3. The first cars were available in March 1978, but failed to halt a terminal decline in sales. The concept of a heavily facelifted Capri 2 was shown at the 1976 Geneva show: a Capri 2 with a front very similar to the Escort RS2000 (with four headlamps and black slatted grille), and with a rear Spoiler (automotive), essentially previewed the model some time before launch. The Mk3 featured improved aerodynamics, leading to improved performance and economy over the Mk2 and the trademark quad headlamps were introduced.
At launch the existing engine and transmission combinations of the Capri 2 were carried over, with the 3.0 S model regarded as the most desirable model although in truth the softer, Ghia derivative with automatic rather than manual transmission the bigger seller of the two V6 engined models.
The 3.0 S was used extensively in the TV series The Professionals (TV series), with characters Bodie driving a silver 3.0 S and Doyle a gold 3.0 S, which was credited with maintaining interest in the car in the UK.
Ford began to focus their attention on the UK Capri market as sales declined, realizing the car had something of a cult following there. Unlike sales of the contemporary 4 door Cortina , Capri sales in Britain were to private rather than fleet buyers who would demand less discounts, allowing higher margins with the coupé. Ford tried to maintain interest in 1979 with "X Pack" options from the performance oriented "Rallye Sport", or "RS" parts range. Although expensive and slow selling these proved that the press would enthusiastically cover more developed Capris with higher performance.
In 1981, the 3.0 V6 powerplant was dropped from the line-up, while a new sporty version debuted at the Geneva Motor Show, called the 2.8 Injection. The new model was the first regular model since the RS2600 to use fuel injection. Power rose to 160 PS (118 kW) giving a top speed of 210 km/h (130 mph), but the car still had a standard four-speed gearbox. The Capri 2.8 Injection breathed new life into the range and kept the car in production 2-3 years longer than Ford had planned. The four-speed gearbox was replaced with a five-speed unit early on – at the same time Ford swapped the dated looking chequered seats for more luxurious looking velour trim. A more substantial upgrade was introduced in 1984 with the Capri Injection Special. This development used half leather seating and included a Limited slip differential. Externally the car could be easily distinguished by seven spoke RS wheels (without the customary "RS" logo since this was not an RS vehicle) and color coded grille and headlamp surrounds. At the same time the 2.0 L Capri was rationalized to one model the 2.0 S, which simultaneously adopted a mildly modified suspension from the Capri Injection. The 1.6 model was also reduced to one model, the 1.6 LS.
Although the Capri no longer had a racing career, Ford of Germany developed a limited edition, left hand drive only, turbocharged model with 190 PS (140 kW), which could propel the car to 220 km/h (137 mph) in April 1982. This wild looking derivative featured widened bodywork and "RS" badging of the engine and wheels. Although rare and collectible it was not regarded as a car of equal stature to the later Tickford - the other Ford "official" turbo Capri.
The Tickford Capri used the 2.8 Injection (rather than the RS model which strangely used the Granada carburettor engine) and developed 205 hp (153 kW) this version also featured a luxury interior with optional full leather retrim and Wilton, Wiltshire carpeting and headlining, large rear spoiler, color coded front grille, deeper bumpers and 'one off' bodykit designed by Simon Saunders, later of KAT Designs and now designer of the Ariel Atom.
The independent tuner Turbo Technics also released a 200 hp (149 kW) version, and a new 230 hp (172 kW) evolution which came supplied with a specially built gearbox. The Tickford Capri pricing issues meant that Ford also sanctioned the Turbo Technics conversion as semi-official, although only the German RS and British Tickford ever appeared in Ford literature as official Ford products.
Rear Disc brake were standard on the Tickford which featured numerous other suspension modifications. This model was essentially rebuilt by hand by Tickford at approximately 200 hours per car, several of those dedicated to reshaping the leading edge of the bonnet to mate with the redesigned grille and body kit. It sold fewer than 100 units. One problem was the relative price difference to the standard Capri Injection, with the Tickford version costing twice as much.
From November 1984 onwards, the Capri was sold only in Britain, with only right hand drive cars were made from this date. The 1.6 and 2.0 variants were rebranded with a new trim level – "Laser" – which featured a fully populated instrument pod, leather Gear lever, leather steering wheel and an electric aerial along with colour-coded grille and mirrors. The last run limited edition "Brooklands" Green, 280 model, featuring a Limited slip differential, full leather Recaro interior and 15 inch versions of the seven spoke 13 inch wheels fitted to the superseded Capri Injection Special. Ford originally intended to make 500 turbo charged vehicles (by Turbo Technics) complete with gold alloy wheels and name it the Capri 500 but a change of production planning meant a name change to Capri 280 as the cars were simply the last models ran down the production line. A total of 1,038 Capri 280s were built. Contrary to some reports these cars were not called "Capri 280 Brooklands", the latter name of the famous Surrey race track only being applied to the paint colour rather than the car itself.
When the last Capri was made on 19 December 1986, 1,886,647 cars had rolled off the production line. Production had ended at Halewood, UK in 1976 and the Capri was made exclusively in Germany from 1976 to 1986. Most of those (more than a million) were the Mk 1, mostly because the Mk 1 sold well in North America and Australia, while the Mk 2 and Mk 3 were only exported outside Europe (to Asia and New Zealand) in limited numbers.
The Capri is remembered for the classic advertising slogan "The car you always promised yourself". A North American advertising campaign featured a shorter line: "Capri: The Sexy European".
Ford Capri outside Europe
North America
From 1970 to 1977, the Capri was sold in North America through Ford's Lincoln / Mercury Division. These cars carried no brand identification, only the "Capri" name. They were known however as the "Mercury Capri".
Originally, the Cologne-built Capri 1600 was fitted with a British 1.6 L Kent engine. Initial output was just 64 hp (48 kW). The 1971 Capri 2000 featured the Cologne-built 2.0 L OHC engine for much-improved performance from 101 hp (75 kW). A Capri 2600 GT was offered in 1972 with a 2.6 L Cologne V6 which produced a substantial 120 hp (89 kW).
1983 Mercury Capri.
In 1979, no longer importing the Ford Capri, Ford began selling a new Mercury Capri which was essentially a re-badged Ford Mustang. It was initially available with a 88 hp (66 kW) 2.3 L 4-cylinder. Later, an optional 302 (5.0 L) V8 became available. In 1984, the Capri was available with a 175 hp (130 kW) turbocharged 2.3 L 4-cylinder engine as well as a 165 hp (123 kW) 302 V8. While lighter than the V8 model, the Capri Turbo lacked the torque of the V8 and suffered from turbo lag, making it slower. Next year, the V8 was rated at 180 hp (134 kW) and the turbo model was dropped. This generation of Mercury Capri should not be confused with the Europe based Capri and it never became nearly as popular as the Ford Mustang, although it was essentially identical, save for cosmetic details. After 1986, the Mercury Capri was dropped.
In 1991, a new Mercury Capri was introduced, this model being fully imported from Australia (see below). It was a convertible with four seats, front wheel drive and a 100 hp (75 kW) 4 cylinder 1.6 L engine. It was also available with a 132 hp (98 kW) 1.6 turbo engine. Both versions were dropped after 1994.
South Africa
Ford of South Africa assembled the Capri from 1970 to 1972 with a similar model range to the UK. No facelift models or RS variants were marketed in South Africa. About 500 Capris were converted by specialist Basil Green Motors to run the 302 Ford Windsor V8 engine . These models were known as the Capri Perana and were very successful in local touring car events, winning the 1970 South African championship and, in a different format, the 1971 championship as well. No Mark 2 and Mark 3 Capris were exported to, or built in South Africa. Most of the Capris that survive in South Africa are 1.6 or 3.0 models. Fewer 1.3 and 2.0 models survive.
Australia
The Ford Motor Company of Australia manufactured the European designed Mark 1 Capri at its plant in the Sydney suburb of Homebush from 1969 until 1972. The Capri was offered to the Australian market from 3rd May 1969 as the 1600 Deluxe and the 1600 GT, using the 1.600 L Ford Kent OHV engine. On 25th February 1970, the 3000 GT was launched, equipped with the 3.0 L Ford Essex V6 . At the same time the 1600 GT became the 1600 XL whilst the 1600 Deluxe remained unchanged.
Sales of the car began very well but began to dwindle as a result of local and imported competitor vehicles in the small to mid sized sports sedan segments. In November 1972, production of the Capri ended in Australia, with a total of 15,122 vehicles having been made. Neither the Mark 1 facelift Capri nor the subsequent Mark 2 and Mark 3 models were ever produced in Australia.
In 1973, Ford Australia imported fifty Capri RS3100 models. Many of the surviving cars are well preserved and some were used in competitive motorsport. .
Ford Capri SA30
1991-1994 Mercury Capri, the badge-engineered version sold in North America.
The Ford Capri name was revived in Australia in 1989. The Australian Capri, codenamed the SA30, was a convertible designed to rival the Mazda MX-5 . Ironically, it used Mazda 323 engines and mechanicals which Ford Australia had adopted as the basis of the Laser . It had a bodyshell designed by Ghia and an interior by ItalDesign. However, by comparison with the MX-5, it was dated by the time of its release – some two years after its originally scheduled date, and its Laser underpinnings meant front-wheel-drive rather than the MX-5's more driver-focused RWD.
Two models were originally offered: a standard 1.6 L model, and a turbocharged variant, with 136 PS (100 kW).
The Australian-built Capri was intended primarily for export to the US. Exports began in 1991, as the Mercury Capri , and sales briefly exceeded those of the MX-5, but then dropped rapidly, so production ceased in 1994. The car was plagued by quality problems and recalls, although it eventually had success in the early 1990s with models modified by Tickford.
An interesting point was that the retail price of a US specification Capri in the US was less than the retail price of an Australian specification Capri in Australia. Approximately 90% of production was exported to the US and the increased shipping costs were offset by the reduced cost of manufacturing the "mainstream" left hand drive model compared with the small volume right hand drive model for the Australian market.
The 1989-94 Capri was assessed in the Used Car Safety Ratings 2006 as providing "worse than average" protection for its occupants in the event of a crash. It was also highly criticized as commonly having leaking roof problems, even after multiple replacements from Ford Dealerships. This was eventually resolved by a new roof sealing system, and 100% testing in the factory.
Possible future Capris
The British magazine Auto Express and German magazine Stern (magazine) have shown computer drawings of a proposed Focus -based Capri, with Auto Express advancing a 2005 release date in their July 2002 issue. In September 2003, Ford presented the Visos concept-car, a hatchback coupé, in the Frankfurt Auto Show. However, none of these examples have made it into production. In May 2008 Auto Express once again started speculation of a possible new Capri using computer generated images based on the Visos concept, the car is said to share its platform with the Focus ST using engines from the current Focus range, meaning it will have a front engine front wheel drive layout, a top of the range RS may feature a 3.2 litre 6 cylinder engine and Four-wheel drive. The car will continue the Kinetic design theme seen on the current Mondeo, S-Max and Galaxy . It is set to be officially revealed as a concept in 2009.
See also
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What is the commonest bird in Britain? | What are Britain's most common birds? || News & Features || CJ Wild Bird Food
What are Britain's most common birds?
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What are Britain's most common birds?
Posted on
30th September 2015
Ask the average person to name Britain's most common bird and they'll probably pick the Feral Pigeon. This is understandable, as for most people, the flocks of pigeons that inhabit the UK's towns and cities are the birds they see most often. However, research suggests the species is not actually the most common in the country.
According to the RSPB and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), there are just over half a million breeding pairs of Feral Pigeons in the UK. The organisations' research is not conclusive and whether the number of pigeons living in urban areas has been accurately calculated isn't clear, but with 11 other species reported to have a UK population that numbers one million or more, it seems the Feral Pigeon is someway down the list of Britain's most common birds.
The million or more club
So, if not the Feral Pigeon, what are the most numerous species in the UK? Three members of the Corvid (crow) family - the Carrion Crow, Rook and Jackdaw - all have populations roughly between one and 1.4 million. For Pheasants, the population is recorded as 2.3 million females, with no figure available for males. Considering the species is polygynous - one male breeds with a harem of females - it's likely the overall population may be closer to three million.
Also among the country's most common birds are the Great Tit and Blue Tit. Always attractive garden visitors, these species have populations of roughly 2.3 million and 3.6 million breeding pairs respectively.
The top five
We now move on to the UK's top five most numerous birds.
5. House Sparrow
At number five, it's the House Sparrow, with the latest research putting the species' population at 5.3 million breeding pairs. However, sparrow numbers have actually fallen dramatically in recent years, with an estimated decline of 71 per cent occurring between 1977 and 2008. You can give the House Sparrow population a helping hand by providing them with somewhere to nest in your garden.
4. Wood Pigeon
The fourth most common UK bird is the Feral Pigeon's cousin the Wood Pigeon. Larger, and some would say more attractive, than their feral counterparts, Wood Pigeons are a common sight in both urban and rural environments, with 5.3 million breeding pairs calling the UK home.
3. Chaffinch
In third is the colourful Chaffinch, with a population of around 6.3 million across the country. One of the main reasons Chaffinches are so numerous is the ease with which they have adapted to living in gardens, parks and other man-made environments.
2. Robin
Recently voted the nation's favourite bird, the Robin is also the second most numerous, with a population of around 6.7 million. You can make your garden an attractive destination for these iconic birds by providing their favourite food .
1. Wren
Britain's most common bird is one of its smallest: the Wren. Because of its diminutive size, the typical Wren is just two per cent the weight of a Wood Pigeon, and tendency to stick to cover, the species isn't seen as regularly as its large population would suggest. Increase your chances of catching sight of the delightful little birds by installing a Wren nest box in your garden.
| Wren (disambiguation) |
On which island was the now extinct Elephant bird found? | BBC NEWS | UK | Wood pigeon 'most common UK bird'
Wood pigeon 'most common UK bird'
Wood pigeons are seen more often than any other birds
The wood pigeon is now the most commonly seen bird across the UK, a study has found.
The second most common was the chaffinch, followed by blackbirds, wrens, robins and carrion crows.
The survey, by 2,000 British Trust for Ornithology volunteers, found many species had bounced back in 2004 from a decline in numbers recorded in 2003.
Numbers of ravens, for example, increased by 91% during the course of 2004, the trust said.
MOST COMMONLY SEEN BIRDS
19. Willow warbler
20. Blackcap
The annual survey carried out by the BTO involves 2,000 people who go out at dawn to count the UK's birds.
It was also a good year for many African migrant species and for some farmland species that had been in long-term decline, particularly the tree sparrow and song thrush.
But there was bad news for the lesser redpoll and yellow wagtail and signs that sparrowhawk numbers are falling.
There was a 247% increase in sand martins; and numbers of cuckoo, which had declined 47% between 1970 and 2001, were up by 31%.
Whitethroats were up 19%, chiffchaffs up 17% and willow warblers up 12%.
The increases are believed to reflect a good breeding season in 2003 or better than average winter conditions in Africa during the winter of 2003/2004.
A selection of your comments on this story:
Regular visitors are a pair of song thrushes. Two families of blackbird. Two pairs of collared dove, several blue tits, pair of robins, several house sparrows, pair of wood pigeons, occasional green finch and great tit, and of course several starlings.
Eric Beech, Great Wakering, Essex
We have at least two permanent wood pigeon nests in or near our garden. It seems that they are the only birds capable of defending their nests against the magpies. All other birds, especially house sparrows, have had their nests hit by the black and white pests.
K Sadler, Biggin Hill, UK
I live in a second floor flat near Heathrow Airport. I have suction-type feeders which I attach to the window. When I am home I have to police the window because I have wood pigeons, collard doves, green finches, chaffinches, sparrows, woodpeckers (I never chase woodpeckers away because they are only occasional visitors) and starlings. I keep the path clear for blue tits, great tits, and another one or two varieties of tits because if I did not all the others would get in first.
Marina McGuire, West Drayton, England
Here it's the seagull, the rat with wings.
Kevin Smart, Brighton UK
I would definitely say that I have noticed an increase in the numbers of wood pigeons, even in London. Thing is, they're so big that they're hard to miss when you see them!
Darryl Walker, London
We have starlings, the odd blackbird and robin in our garden. By far the most noticeable, though, are the half dozen super-sized woodpigeons. Someone get them a nutritionist.
Louise Thomas, Brighton, UK
There were almost no birds in my garden when I moved in four years ago. Now there are two pairs of blackbirds, dunnocks, blue and coal tits, wrens, starlings and the occasional sparrow. Would like to see more sparrows! Less welcome are the greedy pigeons and noisy magpies.
Sean, Horndean
The wood pigeon is by far the most common bird where I live.
Scott McAdam, Perth
No, house sparrows are easily the commonest bird. Wood pigeons are a daily visitor.
Paul, York
I feed birds in my garden and am very fortunate to be able to take delight in the sparrows, blackbirds, thrush, blue and great tits, wrens, greenfinch, goldfinch, green woodpecker and even a merlin (what's it doing here?) that regularly visit.
But I am getting a little tired of getting up every morning at dawn to close the window because of the wretched collared doves' incessant "ka-coo-coo".
Jim, Cotswolds, UK
My dawn chorus is made up of the revolting cooing of feral pigeons and the squawks of ring necked parrots. To my neighbours, please stop feeding the pigeons and throw your litter in the bin.
Ciaran, London
We have a pair of wood pigeons that nest in our garden each year. I'm rather fond of them even if they are a little noisy. My brother lives in China, the last time I spoke to him I was in the garden and the pigeons were cooing away. Peter commented that it was such an English sound and came over all nostalgic!
Kate, Dorset, UK
Even though we live in a town we have pheasants and a sparrowhawk in our garden thanks to the unused allotments behind us. But it is the blackbird that sits on the corner of the eave that wakes us up, and serenades us in the evening.
Paul Robinson, Grimsby, England
Collared dove has to be in the common list here. I also have sparrows nesting, starlings, Robins and blackbirds, would make up the rest of the frequent list, and yes some wood pigeons.
Robin, Letchworth, Herts
The wood pigeon is a very common sight up our road. Largely because the two we have are so obese, they can barely fly. I'm surprised they haven't been nabbed by the numerous cats. Starlings seemed to have dropped, as have thrushes sadly. We do have a lot of buzzards though.
Nick Payne, Alcester, UK
I have had a pair of blackbirds in my garden for the past two years. They follow me around quite happily when I am doing my garden, (especially the female), collecting worms, beetles etc. A large family of hedge sparrows are also in residence, but a wee bit shyer. There is also a coal tit that visits now and again, and a pied wagtail. However, the wood pigeon is a very rare visitor.
Alec McKenzie, York
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A pandemonium is the collective noun for which order of birds? | A Pandemonium of Parrots: Collective Nouns for Animal Groups
Home / Blog / A Pandemonium of Parrots: Collective Nouns for Animal Groups
A Pandemonium of Parrots: Collective Nouns for Animal Groups
Posted on: 03-9-2013 by: Brian Wasko
I recently posted an article on subject-verb agreement when the subject is a collective noun, and in researching collective nouns, I came across several sites that list the numerous and colorful names for groups of particular animals.
We all know dogs come in packs, cattle come in herds, and fish travel in schools. But did you know that a group of otters is called a romp or that a bunch of peacocks is an ostentation?
Below is a fairly comprehensive list garnered from various locations on the web. I don’t know how authoritative it is, as no two sites had quite the same list. Who’s in charge of such matters anyway?
I found myself fascinated for hours (literally) by this list. So many of these names are beautiful, clever, or evocative. Take, for example, a bloat of hippos, a bouquet of pheasants, or a murmuration of starlings. I love the alliteration of a flamboyance of flamingos, a rhumba of rattlesnakes, or a scurry of squirrels. Or the humor of a prickle of porcupines, a memory of elephants, or a lounge of lizards (really?) I can’t pick a favorite — an ambush of tigers? A murder of crows? A pounce of cats? There is poetry here.
Please don’t resist the urge to talk about your favorites in the comments below! And, of course, feel free to share this.
*****
| Parrot |
Which bird has the Latin name Puffinus puffinus? | The Feathery Saga Of A 'Sucker For Unwanted Birds' : NPR
The Feathery Saga Of A 'Sucker For Unwanted Birds'
Life Among the Exotic and the Endangered
Author
Independent Booksellers
Did you know that the collective noun for a flock of parrots — akin to, say, a pride of lions — is a pandemonium? Apparently, Michele Raffin didn't know that either when she founded Pandemonium Aviaries — named instead for the chaotic, noisy nature of her "petulant psittacines" and "feathered vaudevillians." The apt name is characteristic of the serendiptious nature of what has turned out to be her life calling.
The Birds of Pandemonium, Raffin's memoir about her unexpected odyssey into aviculture, does for rare birds what Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief did for rare orchids, Joy Adamson's Born Free did for lions, and Jane Goodall did for chimpanzees and apes.
After stumbling on an injured white dove by the side of a California highway in 1996, Raffin, a former Silicon Valley venture capital consultant, fell in love. Even before she became a breeder, her flock grew exponentially as she quickly earned a reputation as "a sucker for unwanted birds."
In her backyard half an hour south of San Francisco, she now houses, nurtures, and breeds more than 300 birds belonging to more than 40 species in 34 large aviaries "and still counting." At the time she was building her aviaries, Raffin shared the one-acre Los Altos property with her then-husband, a pulmonologist, their four children, two donkeys, a pair of goats, a collie, a sheepdog, and "one understandably aloof elder cat." (The husband and now-grown children have since moved on, but one can't help wondering about her neighbors' reactions to this motley menagerie.)
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Raffin introduces readers to the esoteric world of obsessive collectors and passionate protectors of endangered bird species. She explains how the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992 caused problems by drastically limiting the number of imported birds, which reduced fresh breeding stock. This caused breeders to concentrate on species at both ends of the price spectrum — parrots, macaws and cockatoos at the high end and budgies and finches at the low. Meanwhile, less desired and more difficult-to-breed rare pigeons and doves were cast off — giving new meaning to one of their many flock names, a piteousness of doves. Many landed in Raffin's care.
Mostly, Raffin seduces us with entertaining stories of some of her fine feathered friends, anthropomorphizing them with names and personalities. Amigo, a small red-headed Amazon parrot, is a "perpetual toddler," a biter with a nasty disposition who always greeted Raffin's husband with a glare and an expletive. Sweetie, a small coturnix quail, taught Raffin to "speak bird" and understand his dietary needs, while Oscar, a shy Lady Gouldian finch who couldn't fly, "proved to be the resourceful architect of his own destiny" by instructing her to build a ladder he could climb in order to sleep safely and happily on a high perch. When half of a bonded pair of lorikeets died and the necropsy revealed that she was a he, it raised a dilemma for Raffin: Should she find a female or male partner for the male survivor? But how to find a gay male lorikeet?
Raffin is on a mission with this book — not just to draw attention to her non-profit foundation to preserve species like the spectacular blue Victoria crowned pigeons, considered modern-day dodos — but to prove that they are more than just eye candy. "I intend to convince you that 'birdbrain' is the finest of compliments," she writes. "Our birds are gorgeous. But that's not why I've fallen for them so hard and so deeply. I've learned that their behavior is far more fascinating than their plumage."
This occasionally jumbled but always impassioned book captures the "controlled chaos" on which Raffin clearly thrives. Among many other things, we learn that caring for birds is expensive, exhausting, smelly, and noisy. It's also a constant tug of war between emotion and reason and "involves a scary amount of guesswork." With vibrant photographs of its spectacularly plumed lead characters, The Birds of Pandemonium is a rich suet, seeded with both hearty information and delectable flights of fancy.
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In the video game who are the antagonists of the Angry Birds? | Bad Piggies | Antagonists Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
[Source]
The Bad Piggies are the main antagonists of the Angry Birds video game franchise, and the secondary antagonists in The Angry Birds Movie. They constantly to steal eggs from the Angry Birds. To prevent the birds from reclaiming their eggs, they construct buildings and other structures. The Pigs reappear in Angry Birds Rio as balloons. In The Angry Birds Movie, it is revealed that they have a leader named Leonard .
They are all green in color and come in different variants: small, medium, and large and sometimes wear different accessories and hats.
| Pig |
Who famously said I spent a lot of money on booze,birds and fast cars, the rest I just squandered? | Movie | Angry Birds
Angry Birds
Watch the trailer
The Angry Birds Movie takes us to an island populated entirely by happy, flightless birds – or almost entirely. In this paradise, Red, a bird with a temper problem, speedy Chuck, and the volatile Bomb have always been outsiders. When the island is visited by mysterious green piggies, it’s up to these unlikely outcasts to figure out what the pigs are up to.
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In which film can you the Sulaco spacship | uss Sulaco
uss Sulaco
uss Sulaco
Lodďż˝/Ships
Lo� U.S.S. Sulaco snad ani nelze p�edstavovat, ale p�esto pro nov� p��choz� d�m p�r informac�.
There is no need to introduce the U.S.S. Sulaco, but for new fans, some information will be displayed here.
Model t�to lodi byl vytvo�en pro film Vet�elci (Aliens 1986) Jamese Camerona. Za designem se skr�v� Syd Mead a tvrobou filmov�ho modelu byli pov��eni brat�i Skotakov�. Za zaj�mavost stoj�, �e d�la na Sulacu byla p�ed�l�v�na a model samotn� je detailn� vyhotoven jen na pravoboku.
The movie prop was constructed for James Cameron�s ALIENS (1986) movie. Syd Mead is responsible for the design and Skotak Brothers for the construction. Interesting Thing is, that the rail-guns positions were changed and the whole model is detailed from the right side only.
Galerie p�ipravovan�ho modelu / Prepations of the model gallery
P��b�hov� je lo� p�id�lena jako transport koloni�ln�ch mari��k� (USCM-United States Colonial Marines) , kte�� maj� pro�et�it , co se vlastn� stalo s koloni� na LV-426. To� v�e k fimov� p��b�hov� lince. �ir�� okolonosti okolo lodi byly pops�ny mnoha fanou�ky a rozch�zej� se i v docela podstatn�ch detailech. Za sebe m��u ��ct jen to, co jsem odpozoroval a co m� p�ipadne jako nejv�ce pravd�podobn�. Tak�e u.s.s.Sulaco m� d�lku lehce p�es 731 metr� , nese 2 v�sadkov� lod� UD-4L (jsem ochoten p�ipustit i 4).Hang�r pro v�sadkov� lod� m� n�co k 80ti metr�m d�lky. Podle po�tu z�chrann�ch modul� EEV by se maxim�ln� kapacita pos�dky dala po��tat ke 100 lid�. Potvrzeno je zat�m zhruba 30 (dva v�sadky po 15 ti lidech). Lo� d�le disponuje 5ti hang�ry pro p�il�t�vaj�c� lod�. Tyto hang�ry jsou obsluhov�ny port�lovou rampou, kter� se pohybuje v�dy p�ed p��slu�n� hang�rov� dve�e. Dal�� funkce lze jen odhadovat. Nap��klad ,co vyvol�v� um�lou gravitaci nebo jak� m� lo� motory. Z vn�j��ch znaku lze usoudit n�co o v�zbroji (kanony, railguny a ��sticov� d�la) nebo charakteristice pohonu (reaktor s chlad�c� v��).
In the story is the ship assigned as a transport for colonial Marines (USCM-United States Colonial Marines), which must investigate, what happened with the colony on the LV426. That�s all to the movie line. In the bigger perspective there is no proper (correct) information. Most fans disagree on the major details of the back story. Personally, the only things that I can state are facts that were mentioned in the movie. So, the U.S.S. Sulaco is a little bit over 731 meters in length, carry two of the UD-4L Drop-ships (I can tolerate 4). The hangar for the drop-ships is over 80 meters in length. By the number of EEV vehicles we can calculate hypothetical capacity to 100 people. There are 30 crew members confirmed (two drops with 15 people). In the front hull there are 5 hangars for incoming ships. Two Portal ramps operated in front of the hangar doors on each side of the ship. Other functions are unknown. How is artificial gravity works, What kind of engines the ship have?..And so on. From the outer signs we can guess something about the weapons (cannons, rail-guns, partial beams), or engine character (rounded reactor with the " cooling tower")
Galerie filmov�ho modelu / Movie prop gallery
u.s.s.Sulaco je prvn�m ze t�� (Sulaco, Sulaco3 , Patna ) pap�rov�ch model� , kter� bude po ��stech mo�no st�hnout , vytisknout a slepit. Model je v kamufl�i vybledl� a za�pin�n� n�mo�n� modr�. k Sulacu si m��ete je�t� st�hnout Addony (p��davky) v podob� v�sadkov�ch lod� Bug Stomper 01 & Smart Ass 02 a z�chrann�ho modulu BD-409 EEV v nov� a zni�en� podob�. V�echny lod� v�etn� addon� jsou v m���tku 1:430. Tisk je uzp�soben na form�t A4 na ���ku. V�sledn� slepen� model vych�z� zhruba na n�jak�ch 175cm d�lky. Pokud chcete v�d�t v�c o tisku nebo m�te k tomuto t�matu n�jakou ot�zku, nejprve nav�tivte sekci F.A.Q. (nej�ast�ji pokl�dan� ot�zky). Jinak jednotliv� d�ly Lodi hledejte v sekci p��hodn� nazvan� Download .
U.S.S. Sulaco the is first ship of three (Sulaco, Sulaco3 , Patna ) paper-models, which will be downloadable here piece by piece trough time. Model has dirty navy blue camouflage. There is an Add-on in the shape of two drop-ships known as Bug Stopper 01 & Smart Ass 02 and an emergency escape vehicle - The BD-409 EEV in new and destroyed. All kits are designed to be printed on A4 format paper. The completed ship will be 175cm in length in this scale and printing settings. If you want to know more about printing or you have another question, first visit F.A.Q. section . You can find all of the models in the " Download " section
| Alien |
In which TV series would you find the Liberator | USS Sulaco | Weyland-Yutani corporation Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
Aliens (film)
After departing from Earth the USS Sulaco arrives at LV426 , were the crew emerge from stasis and prepare for a reconn and airdrop. They descend to the surface leaving the Sulaco under automated control and set up command in Operations. Later after the Aliens attack they decided to nuke the entire site from orbit, Ferro crashes the UD4L Cheyenne as they set to leave which causes Bishop to remote pilot the second Dropship from the Sulaco. As they escape and land back aboard the Sulaco the Alien Queen emerges tearing Bishop apart and causing Newt and Ripley to run. Ripley reemerges and battles with the Queen eventually expelling it out of the airlock. The surviving four set course to return home.
Alien 3 (film)
The USS Sulaco appears at the beginning of the film, and as a fire starts aboard ship the crew stasis units are ejected into an EEV .
As the EEV detaches an alien egg appears in the EEV, as it landed the emerged Face Hugger attacks the sleeping crew and later it is found to of impregnated Ripley .
Aliens: Colonial Marines
The Sulaco as a continuing story of the film Aliens is boarded enroute to Fiorina 'Fury' 161, were Turk and Stone release Hicks from stasis just before PMCs arrive. Later they link up with Lisbeth who also out from stasis must find a way off the Legato. Lisbeth goes to find her parents while Turk and Hicks head for the Sulaco then a Service Skiff as Lisbeth decides to set the self-destruct as she find both parents dead. Later the Sulaco is returned around LV426 by PMCs were the USS Sephora arrives and docks along side.
In Aliens: Colonial Marines the USS Sephora docks along side the USS Sulaco in orbit around LV426 . Winter's missions in the first level continues aboard the Sulaco, after the USS Sephora collides with the Sulaco it starts drifting towards LV426 and at the end of Sulaco Falls collides with the surface together with the USS Sephora .
Aliens: Infestation
Levels 1,3 and 5 are played aboard the USS Sulaco with USCMs Fox-Six, Fire Team Delta and Fire Team Echo. Fire Team Delta mission is Secure the Command Center, Fire Team Echo mission is retrieve the flight recorder and Fox-Six mission is to board the USS Sulaco, locate and identify the life form, then secure them and extract them back to the USS Sephora.
Returning aboard from LV426 the Sulaco is intercepting a Weyland-Yutani freighter containing cargo straight from LV426, getting to the gun batteries destroying it is required. An Alien Queen is aboard slowing the teams advance but by expelling it from the airlock allows them to continue. After returning aboard from Phobos and the Special Research Facility the teams need to kill any xenomorphs on the Sulaco including a queen before finally switching off the cooling regulators so the Sulaco can be destroyed.
After using the Dropship and making your way to the Sulaco, you play the final level aboard the USS Sulaco , here you need to kill the final Queen xenomorph by blowing in out of the airlock.
Continuity
Various
After departing from Earth in the film Aliens the USS Sulaco arrives at LV426 . It stays in orbit until the surviving crew depart, appearing in the film Alien 3 not far from Fiorina 'Fury' 161 . In the Aliens: Colonial Marines game, PMCs board the USS Sulaco and Hicks is replaced with Turk and ejected along with the other crew and the Sulaco is retured in orbit around LV426 it stays there until the USS Sephora arrives. Later the two spacecrafts crash into the surface of LV426 due to a sustained attack of the weapon systems of the Sulaco onto the Sephora. In the game Aliens: Infestation the Sulaco stays in orbit until it is destroyed.
USS Sulaco is in the Conestoga Class like the USS Sephora .
The USS Sulaco gained it's name from Joseph Conrad's book entitled "Nostromo", the location setting of the book in the town Sulaco.
Aliens: Infestation
In Aliens: Infestation a map is available on screen this is for keeping track of the rooms entered using marker flares if required, this layout shows the Sulaco has between 7 and 10 decks. Flight bays can be split in two, these suggest between 2 and 4 flight bays, with various hangers and multiple vents, corridors, laboratories and side rooms. Part of Fox-Six's missions is an EVA outside of the Sulaco, this allows them to continue towards the Queen in a hanger.
In Aliens: Infestation the Sulaco was said to be adrift near Gamma Leporis in the Outer Rim before it had been returned in orbit around LV426. In the final level the USS Sulaco is destroyed after the cooling regulators are put off line and the command override is initiated.
Aliens (film)
In the film Aliens the cargo bay is smaller in size then in the game Aliens: Colonial Marines, this cargo bay could be the aft suggesting the same size for the two different versions.
The following is the description of the USS Sulaco from a draft script from the film Aliens as it approaches LV426:
EXT. DEEP SPACE -THREE WEEKS LATER
An empty starfield. Metal spires slice ACROSS FRAME. A
mountain of steel following. A massive military transport ship, the
SULACO. Ugly, battered... functional.
INT. CORRIDOR TO CARGO LOCK
An empty corridor, seemingly miles long. No movement.
The THRUMMING of hyperdrive engines.
INT. CARGO LOCK
An enormous chamber, cavernous and dark. Squatting
in the shadows are two orbit-to-surface shuttles. DROP-SHIPS.
Heavy machinery all around them... cranes, loading equipment.
INT. BRIDGE
Dark electronic womb. CAMERA DOLLIES SLOWLY among
murmuring instrumentation. A sudden high-pitched TRILLING
accompanies a sequence of lights. An alarm.
INT. HYPERSLEEP VAULT
Blackness, until a bank of indicators lights up. Hydraulics lift a grid
of equipment from a row of horizontal HYPERSLEEP
CYLINDERS. It reaches the ceiling. Locks. CLOSE ON RIPLEY'S
CAPSULE as trickles of water run down the frosted canopy.
DISSOLVE TO: INT. HYPERSLEEP VAULT
Lit up, white and sterile.
"The Sulaco is so automated that it would be unnecessary. If another dropship was required, the APC was equipped to remote-pilot it down and so was the station on LV-426." ~ James Cameron Online 'Why didn't anyone stay aboard the Sulaco?'
Concept
Syd Mead who had worked on Blade Runner, drew on ideas from the Refinery in the film Alien to design and construct the Sulaco, initial ideas and designs were thought unusable when filming as they would effect camera shots and filming due to the spherical attachments. These were mainly sideway modules and antennas which protruded outwards from the body of the Sulaco, discussions with James Cameron in LA and with his ideas for the design allowed Syd Mead a route to focus on and finally designed a spacecraft that was 800' - 900' (245m - 275m) long. This final Cameron and Mead concept was described as a "rocket gun that carries stuff". A spacecraft that was streamline but also usable, retaining it's armament some was more futuristic then others, including a futuristic interior that wasn't too far in the future and believable as a spacecraft's fittings.
Syd Mead also draw the designs for the Dropship, these were altered by filming but kept the drop idea from the Sulaco and it's ability to carry marines and equipment, notably the APC armoured vehicle. These initial designs including the fold out wings were kept but the rest of the Dropship was redesigned and a more streamline spacecraft was chosen. Ron Cobb with James Cameron used ideas from the Vietnam war like the F4 Phantoms and Huey's, with these and the original ideas making up the final design.
Cardboard mock ups of the Sulaco, Narcissus and the APC were produced and filmed for pacing along with the story boards, these were smaller in size with models and filmed with a standard camera.
Production
Peter Lamont production designer brought these ideas to life, building the Dropship and Sulaco sets. Using parts from Vulcan jets, Peter Lamont and his brother rented the undercarriage from a Vulcan Norfolk breaker for using on the Dropship with slip trays used as skid pads for the landing legs.
Ron Cobb designed the art for the Dropships from a script idea that the Colonial Marines were bug hunters and the Xenomorphs were the bugs. So using an eagle with boots on carrying a machine gun painted inside a red circle the slogan 'We Endanger Species ', naming the spacecraft Bug Stomper, also adding this design on jackets worn by the crew. The second Dropship was named Smart Ass, also with an eagle and the slogan 'We Aim By P.F.M', dressed in boots and carrying a large gun on a blue circle.
Further details in the dropship bay were rotary lights, these were made from a rotating bulb in a cylinder with a reflector at an angle, the effect gave the impression of a rotating spotlight.
For the spacecraft model only one side of the Sulaco was constructed on a 5' scaled model which was then sent off to the VFX company so it could be added in the scene as the Sulaco approached LV426. Later the scene with Queen falling out of the air lock was produced with stop motion photography.
Running short of funds the set crew and production designer Peter Lamont used the idea of a mirror giving the illusion of many more Hypersleep units aboard the Sulaco then there where. Use of wires and not pneumatics for the opening mechanisms speeded up construction and lowered costs, other parts of Mess and Hypersleep saw the use of vending machine parts and helicopter engines with the lockers redressed from other areas, Hypersleep and Ripley's quarters at the Gateway Station being the last scenes to be filmed.
Alien 3 (film)
It is later stated in the game Aliens: Colonial Marines that the cause of the fire aboard the Sulaco was due to PMCs (W-Y Commandos) boarding and starting a fire fight with researchers and Hicks, Aliens still aboard are injured during the attack from PMCs fire which cause the fires. In Stasis Interrupted the USS Legato intercepts the Sulaco with various xenomorphs aboard, the researchers also from the Legato assist Hicks but are too late for Ripley, in the confusion a researcher Turk falls in the stasis and is locked in as the stases are ejected.
From the draft and final script for Alien 3 but edited for filming was the description of a face hugger entering Ripley's Hypersleep by shattering the glass above her face (impregnating her), the glass cuts the face hugger's digits and acid blood hits the floor sizzling through it and wires, smoke raises and triggers the alarm and stasis units are ejected. Filming had smoke raising and setting the alarm, later in the EEV the face hugger made an appearance but with stasis unit intact.
On-set
Of the various EEVs produced, a 16' part model was used for filming against a blue screen were the EEV would detach from the USS Sulaco, before the 3' 6" model was used as the EEV then drifts towards Finora 'Fury' 161 filmed with stop motion photography.
The blue screen then allowed for matte paintings and CGI to be added when filming and in post production.
Michelle Moen matte department supervisor and Paul Lasaine matte painter painted all the matte backgrounds for the surface, sky and surface features. As the EEV drifts slowly away from the Sulaco and enters the atmosphere, crashing into the water. The crew used an ultraviolet light to give the clouds a glow against a matte painting of the sky, this was an animated shot with the water splash a digital shot.
Production
In production a shaft was constructed so as to allow the jettison of the new units produced which slide along and using editing were shown ejected into the EEV.
Another 16' model of the EEV was used for interior filming on the set outside, used for filming the salvage and as Ripley returns to use her stasis' unit scanner.
The Sulaco from the film Aliens was used again later for the USS Patna as it approached the surface.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Unlike Aliens: Infestation , gameplay is played on 4 main decks, in game, hangers for Dropships are positioned centrally (inline) and aft (side-by-side). A schematic for the Sulaco shows 4 hangers with the bridge aft, this is similiar with the schematic for the Sephora. Unique to the Sulaco in the game are Service Skiffs which also appear aboard the Sephora, these are used in the opening sequence and in the level Stasis Interrupted.
Dorsal and ventral turrets
Timeline
The film Aliens is set after the events of the film Alien, Ellen Ripley having killed the Alien goes into stasis aboard the Narcissus only to be found drifting in space 57 years later.
The events of the film Alien 3 are set after Aliens, Ellen Ripley having survived the detonation of the Atmosphere Processor with Bishop , Hicks and Newt escape to the USS Sulaco only for a fire to start, causing their stasis units to be ejected into an EEV and soon after landing on Fiorina 'Fury' 161 a prison planet.
The events of the game Aliens: Colonial Marines are set between those of the films Aliens and Alien 3 but diverge from the film Aliens and over lap the film Alien 3.
The events of the games Aliens: Infestation and Aliens: Arcade are set around those of the films Aliens and Alien 3 both include Hadley's Hope and LV426 .
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In which film will you find the Rodger Young | Rodger Young (176) | Starship Troopers Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
Edit
While underway, the ship was damaged when its communications array was hit by an asteroid. Shortly afterwards, the Rodger Young was repaired and a different type of command module was added to the structure before she was able to return to active service. The Rodger Young took part in the massive Battle of Klendathu , and was one of the few ships that managed to survive the disaster with only moderate damage.
The ship was later destroyed in the Invasion of Planet P when a Plasma burst tore the ship in two.
During these events, Carmen Ibanez was assigned as a pilot of the Rodger Young, under the supervision of Zander Barcalow . Starship Troopers
Known personnel
Accessories: Display plate with serial number
A pre-paint model of Rodger Young.
Rodger Young Earlier version (Sci-Fi Figure Gallery, 2009)
Accessories: Display plate with serial number
A pre-paint model of Rodger Young with a communication module damaged by the meteor.
Notes
Edit
The ship is named after Rodger Wilton Young , a private who posthumously earned the Medal of Honor in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
A continuity error involving the Rodger Young can be seen in the film Starship Troopers 3: Marauder . During a scene showing the York , at least two Corvette Transports appear in the shot that bear the same ship number as the Rodger Young, which was 176. This error is due to the fact that the models of the Corvette Transports used in the third film were models of the Rodger Young that were left over after the production of the first film.
Appearance
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In which film will you find the space craft called Churchill | Interview: George Willis on making the Rodger Young for Starship Troopers | Den of Geek
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Interview: George Willis on making the Rodger Young for Starship Troopers
The man who brought death and destruction to the wonderful ship in Paul Verhoeven's cult favourite tells us how he did it...
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Master model-maker and movie fabricator George Willis has just finished outfitting Mickey Rourke for Iron Man 2. He's as busy and in-demand as ever, but less so for spaceships in these days of CGI (sigh). In support of Top 75 spaceships in movies and TV , we had a chat with George about his time working on Paul Voeherven's Starship Troopers...
What can you tell us about working on the Rodger Young?
When we first got the designs for it, everyone was sort of sceptical and a few were rolling their eyes because the basic shape of it was reminiscent of the Battlestar Galactica. But as we worked on it, putting all these details on to it, it was just so much fun. We really came to love it. There are a lot of archetypal things that show up in spaceships - having the engines out on these kind of pods sticking out, and this lumbering sort of frame and all this great panel detail.
I think one of the things I like about the ship is that it has a kind of 'whale' look to it...
Yeah - it really has the look of a battleship. It's very heavy and lumbering. I worked on a TV show about 15 years ago that ran for six episodes called Space Rangers. It was kind of a bad Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek rip-off. But the main ship had a really weird shape, where the designers just decided 'Let's make it different from all the other spaceships that have ever been done'. So it sort of looked like a Concorde jet - it was very long and sleek, but it had a lop-sided wing; there was an engine on one side and no engine on the other side and it just looked like it wouldn't fly and it would never go in space. There were a lot of things wrong with the show, but not that - when you looked at it, you didn't think 'spaceship'.
When you look at the Rodger Young you think that it's this big, heavy indestructible battle-cruiser. It hangs there...
It's got the NASA thing as well - the kit-bashed detailing that Kubrick and Trumbull pretty much originated...
Yeah, once that's on, that's just what spaceships are supposed to look like. Even the real ones look nothing like that [laughs].
How many versions were there of the ship?
There were three main versions. There was one that was eighteen feet long, and then there were two that were nine feet long. The eighteen-foot version was actually built where it would come apart in two sections for the destruction sequence. I wish I had it in a digital format that I could send you, but there's a designer's rendition of how the damage would spread once the nuclear bug-juice hit the Rodger Young and started eating it away.
A great deal of model-making effort seemed to have gone into that section of the movie where the ship is split apart...
It's interesting, because when that project was done we were really on the cusp of when computer animation and effects were really coming into their own. At the time there was this big surge, maybe around 96-97, when all of these big-budget action films came out at the same time. There was pretty much one coming out every weekend that summer. You had Batman 4, Alien 4, Armageddon. Independence Day and Twister had come out a couple of years earlier, and this surge was coming out towards the end of this Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Willis era, and when Twister and Independence Day came out, they both made a huge amount of money and they weren't that big a budget films. They were sort of medium-budget action films and they didn't really have any stars. Will Smith wasn't really a huge star yet, and the biggest star in Independence Day was Bill Pullman.
But these films made a ton of money in the box-office, so the studios suddenly went 'Oh, we don't need to be spending twenty-five million dollars on a star, we'll just spend twenty-five million dollars on the special effects, and that will make the film successful'. There were then probably a dozen films made within a year of each other that cost over a hundred million dollars each.
Armageddon, they say was a success, but for how much it cost, it was still kind of a disappointment. The only real runaway hit in that time was Titanic.
But anyway, at the time they were making all these big-budget action films, and there weren't enough computers in the world to do the animation. There were computers that hadn't been made yet that had been bought in advance to be working on these films. So part way through the project as we were building the spaceships for Starship Troopers, Sony at the time had its own model shop, which was called Thunderstone. They were doing Starship Troopers and Contact at the same time.
What happened was that the Starship Troopers art department came to the model shop with a bunch of storyboards and said 'Which of these shots could you do in some way other than computer effects?'. They were budgeted out. Just the rendering time that was required to do these shots was a huge obstacle. With the amount of computers they had and the ones they were able to get, there was no way they were going to be able to finish Starship Troopers in time for the release date.
So the model shop took a look and said 'We can do this bit with stop-motion animation'. Basically in the cavity that's blown open by the nuclear bug-juice, they had a close-up shot of about eighteen or twenty interior floors.
I was watching the film this week, and that shot still makes a big impression.
Well, that's one that I worked on. I designed a rig that had about eighteen or twenty bass-guitar tuning pegs, from the neck of a guitar; you twist them and they have that little worm-drive on them. I made all these rods that were basically brass tubes running behind it, and had all the cables running through the floors to the outside edge, where the floors were actually composed of two sheets of aluminum foil. They were sandwiched together with a bunch of photo-etched brass to get the structure. With each twist of these guitar-tuning pegs, the floors would collapse a quarter of an inch or so.
They put the two halves of the Rodger Young in one piece upon this giant motion-control camera rig called a model-mover, and it slowly moved the sections apart, an eighth of an inch per frame. It was only a five-second sequence, but it took about two hours to shoot. They'd say 'action' and take a shot of one frame, and we'd go and twist these guitar tuning pegs and make the floors collapse, and there were a few little beams that crashed and towers that fell over and other things.
Was this something that couldn't have been conceived with motors?
The problem with motors is that all of the tiny details with the floors crushing would have been too difficult to do with motors, and it would have been hard to do it that slowly. Basically it's just five seconds that these floors tear apart and crush. It took about two days after each shot to sort out all those interior floors. In the end they added a lot of computer-generated fire effects and stuff like that over the floors, to the point where you really couldn't see that much of the effect. There was this guy called Pete Kleinow, who was the lead animator on it, and I was working with him. He was a legend in the stop-motion world; he actually worked on a pretty famous American television show in the sixties and early seventies called Gumbie. I don't know if they had that in the UK...?
If they did, it passed me by!
It was a little green...he looks like a stick of gum, basically. But it was fun learning from Pete, and the different ways of animating something so that it moves in a more fluid way.
Who actually designed the Rodger Young?
All I did was actually design that animation rig that was inside of it. But another funny story is that in addition to the eighteen foot and the two nine foot versions, we made twelve of them that were nineteen inches long and perfect replicas of the big one. These were used for the mass fleet-attack. They had all of them in play at once, whereas [laughs] they could have just duplicated one. But the way they did it at the time, they didn't want to mess with tying up the computers, so they just made twelve of these little ones.
The big ones were nice, and those ended up in some Sony museum somewhere, I'm sure. But the little ones...all the model-makers were salivating over these things [laughs]. Every model-maker collects things from movies they've worked on, and these were a perfect size for you to display on your mantle. They kept asking the shop foreman 'Hey, what's going to happen to these twelve little ones when the movie's over?'. There were nearly fifty people working in the shop at the time, and they were all asking about these.
The shop foreman said no, there's not a chance. These were already spoken for; the producers were each going to get one, and a couple of people at Sony and different departments too. So they said 'No, you're not going to get one'.
Anyway towards the end of the project, the guys who were making the little ones kept putting in more orders, and the boss came in and said 'Oh, we're going to need a couple more of these for the agents', and the stars wanted one. At the point where they were making about ten more than they were going to be filming, they had just started making them as souvenirs for some of the bigwigs working on the film.
Finally the boss came in and said 'Okay!' [laughs] 'Everyone that wants one can have one of these, but you have to cast up the parts and you have to assemble it on your own time. But everyone gets one!'. So I've got one sitting right here in my kitchen.
So that was one of the big pay-offs of that film for us. We were all so excited when we watched the dailies, because the shots were just beautiful. The ships were coming out of the docking bays and stopping and falling through the atmosphere. We all believed that it was going to be the next Star Wars, [laughs] and we were all so disappointed when the film wasn't as successful as we would have liked.
Did Paul Verhoeven have much input into these model shots?
I'm trying to think - I don't really recall him being around the shop. I've worked on other films with him. I actually worked on Total Recall with him.
I noticed! Were you working on the one spaceship in that film - the Mars ferry?
No, I worked on the landing bay area. The guy that built that ship was Ian Hunter, who now runs Hunter-Gratzner. He was basically a model-maker back then.
I was talking to him about two hours ago regarding Pitch Black.
Yeah, he built that one almost single-handedly. The model's only about two and a half foot wide. It is quite a small, incestuous community here in Hollywood, and we all seem to have worked on a lot of the same things.
Is trade still brisk in the CGI age?
It's interesting - there really is now only one model-shop that I know of, which is Hunter-Gratzner, which still does a lot of motion picture models. That's because they're a sort of self-contained studio where they have shooting stages and a lot of cameras, and they have a CG department and everything. But they generally only use miniatures like that on high-budget films for the big destruction sequences. The last model I worked on for a feature was X-Men 3, and that was the Golden Gate bridge that gets destroyed. That's because if it's a $100 million movie, the director is a big enough personality that they can fight with the producers and say 'Look, this shot is important - it's got to look real and the only way that we can do it is with a miniature'...and squeeze a half-million dollars out of the budget to build it.
The model in X-Men 3 was thirty feet high and fifty feet long...but other than that, most of the features that I've worked on in the last couple of years have been doing costume props and industrial stuff. I made some of the robots for I Robot. And then last year I worked on Race To Witch Mountain; more for kids, but there was a Predator-type alien in it that had guns and weapons and things that popped out of the wrist of his suit, and I built all those.
So the model-making skills have transferred over nicely into building these armoured suits. Actually I finished about two weeks ago on Iron Man 2, where we were building all the armour suits. All the scenes where Iron Man is flying around, that's done with CG and it looks great, but the close-ups where he's got the helmet off and he's talking to people, or they've got the suit just lying there in the shop and they're working on it - they have to have a physical prop for it.
So there's been a bit of a Renaissance, I think because of all these comic-book movies like X-Men and Iron Man, and films like that where there's a lot of money being made. So I've transitioned to making the full-size, industrial looking props rather than the miniatures. I also worked on a few commercials for Stan Winston back when it was still Stan Winston's. Since Stan died some of the producers basically started their own company and out of respect for him called it Legacy instead of Stan Winston.
There are still miniatures being used in Hollywood but it seems most of them are being used for commercials where they need to do something in as little as a couple of weeks. In these cases it's just a few seconds of a shot, and they'll make miniature buildings, or whatever's needed.
Are you against CGI taking over miniature work completely?
They've got the CGI down pretty nicely now, where it looks pretty real. I actually had an editorial that I wrote in Wired magazine right around the time I was working on Starship Troopers, basically saying that they still haven't got the technology down and that CG was great for compositing things and making explosions and water and smoke...like those World War II movies where they'd have a miniature battleship and they'd film it in slow motion with giant drops of water, and firecrackers blowing up...
CGI is surely the best thing for water. Doesn't seem to scale at anything but 1:1.
Yes, CGI works great for that. But they've got it down very well generally, especially for television. I used to do a lot of work with spaceship models and ship models for television. They really don't use any models for TV anymore because on a small screen with a lower resolution, they can get away with something that looks more like a video game.
So personally I'm against it - I'm sad to see that they're not using nearly as many models as they used to. But then there have been some bad models over the years too, in movies. Some movies have bad models and some have bad CG. Logan's Run I loved as a kid, but it has some pretty problematic models in it...
George Willis, thank you very much!
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In which film will you find the Jupiter 2 spaceship | Lost In Space: The Launch of The Jupiter 2 ! Part 1 - YouTube
Lost In Space: The Launch of The Jupiter 2 ! Part 1
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Uploaded on Jul 11, 2010
Part 1. A re-imagining of the first automated test flight of the Jupiter 2 from the TV show "Lost in Space."
Set in the year 2097 at the Alpha Control Shipyards on Jupiter's moon, Callisto. The ship's systems are tested during a shakedown flight before the spacecraft is sent to Earth to pick up the Robinson Family a week later. The Jupiter 2 is the first in a series of ships designed to take families from Earth to the new colony planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri.
Part 1 shows the launch, attainment of escape velocity from Callisto, the deployment of the ship's sensors and engagement of the navigational systems. Part 2 will take a look at the ship's passenger compartment and feature the most famous crew member, Robot B9.
All models, animation, original texture mapping & editing by me. Sound FX are modified from the show. Royalty-free music from AudioMicro, since FOX hates any use of their own music, even if it's fair use.... All models created entirely with 3ds MAX. Compiled with AfterEffects & Audacity. EDIT: YOUTUBE CLAIMS THE MUSIC IS "TEXTURE" BY HEXAGRAM. THAT IS NOT TRUE. The tracks are named "Taklamakan" and "Arctic Voices." IT IS ROYALTY-FREE MUSIC from AUDIO-MICRO.
Recognition must be given to Art Creber and Robert Kinoshita, the original designers of the Jupiter 2 and the Robot, and many of the props in the show. A sincere thank you for giving us a means by which our imaginations can run free.
Category
| Lost in Space |
In which film can you find the Oberon spaceship | MOEBIUS LOST IN SPACE JUPITER 2 INTERIOR
MOEBIUS LOST IN SPACE JUPITER 2 INTERIOR
JUPITER 2 INTERIOR
We now offer several new and more accurate interior details including new door graphics in the correct 2 tone gray color scheme.
We can also offer the season 1 & 2 style door to replace the space pod airlock style hatch.
Click on the link below to see Part 2 of our YouTube video of this project.
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What was the surly debut single from Magic | Home - Magic!
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In 2014, Toronto-bred, Los Angeles-based quartet MAGIC! scored the song of the summer with their debut single “Rude” — a buoyant reggae-pop tune that held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks, charted in 41 countries, and sold more than 10 million singles, while its video nears a billion VEVO views. It was a juggernaut that launched their debut album, Don’t Kill the Magic, into the Top 10 and introduced MAGIC!’s breezy sound — a catchy fusion of reggae, pop, and R&B — to the world. “When ‘Rude’ got big, my thought was, ‘What do we do with this?’” says the band’s lead vocalist and chief songwriter Nasri. “So we chased it. We used its success to get us around the world a few times and to turn those 350 million streams into a fan base.”
Indeed over the past two years MAGIC! has established itself as a bonafide sensation thanks to its undeniably catchy sound, superlative songwriting, and masterful musicianship. Now the band, which also features guitarist Mark Pelli, drummer Alex Tanas, and bassist Ben Spivak, has released a new single, the Caribbean-tinged “Lay You Down Easy” (featuring Sean Paul), which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Reggae Digital Songs chart and racked up two million Spotify streams and one million VEVO views in its first two weeks. MAGIC! is also gearing up for the July release of its new album, Primary Colours, which finds the band further displaying its reggae influences and pop smarts.
“The ultimate goal was to make an album that is groovy and fun,” Nasri says. “We are embracing ourselves now. We’ve actually found our identity and have really gotten to know each other as friends and fellow musicians. We had only known each other a short time when we made our debut album.”
Produced by Nasri and Adam Messinger (who as Grammy-winning production duo the Messengers, have scored hits for Justin Bieber, David Guetta, Shakira, Chris Brown, Pitbull, and Christina Aguilera), and with production assists from Pelli and Tanas, Primary Colours is the sound of a band that has come into its own. “Each of these guys is a phenomenal musician and they all stepped up in various capacities, whether it was writing, playing, or producing,” says Nasri. “Mark is extraordinary and plays everything to the highest degree. He has these amazing colors. Alex really grew as a producer and was stronger about sharing his opinion, and Ben is always open and very melodic, he played all over the record. My bandmates are always shocking me with what they can do musically. Everyone’s contribution is always full-hearted.”
The creative bond that the band members have developed is palpable in the good-natured bounce of the music on Primary Colours, as are the rhythms the four have soaked up through their worldwide travels. Last year they toured as first support for Maroon 5 and performed headlining shows across the U.S., South America, Asia, and Europe. “We definitely had that spiritual connection to the cultures we visited,” Nasri says. “We’re all natives of Canada, but we have different heritages. But when we get together, the guitar and the bass come out and we start to go with it. When we were in the studio making Primary Colours, the more rock-oriented songs started to give way to the groovier songs, and we thought, ‘This is us, We are this fusion band.’ It’s like home for me. I’ll make a song and if something doesn’t feel right, I’ll try a reggae melody or beat and it suddenly feels great …
“It’s like I took reggae on a couple of dates and it went really well and now we’re going steady.”
In the time between making Don’t Kill the Magic and Primary Colours, Nasri also gave himself a musical education, diving into records by reggae stars Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and Peter Tosh. He also immersed himself in The Beatles catalog and records by Paul Simon. “Growing up we had no money, so I only listened to the radio,” he explains. “It wasn’t until my ’20s that I started getting into Stevie Wonder and early Police. I didn’t know anything about The Beatles, just the hits. Now I know 70 of their songs. And I’ve realized, ‘Oh, I’m getting all of this from Paul McCartney.’ And I think being in this band with these super-talented guys — Mark and Ben are both jazz musicians — has given me more of an internal license to explore things. I feel like a kid in MAGIC!. It’s very pure.”
On Primary Colours, MAGIC! effortlessly spin out memorable melodies in a variety of styles, like the flirtatious “Lay You Down Easy,” the sultry ’50s-tinged “Red Dress,” the synth-pop tunes “No Sleep” and “Gloria” (the latter with its comical story of a hapless guy and his cheating girlfriend) while never straying too far from their signature reggae sound. Horns make an appearance on several songs, including “Have It All,” which the band wrote in The Philippines. “No Regrets” and “I Need You” are heartfelt ballads that show another dimension to Nasri’s songwriting.
The closing track, the swaggy “The Way God Made Me,” features an urban reggae beat and finds Nasri channeling his inner Rastafarian in his vocals.
Then there’s the title track “Primary Colours,” which refers to Nasri’s need to start over not only in his personal life (which is where he draws lyrical inspiration from) but also when it came to making the record. “We were getting really complicated in the studio,” he says. “And I said, ‘Guys, we need to simplify. Our fans are going to be confused. Let’s start with a hook and then build on top of that.’ So we were able to strip everything back to its primary colors and then add layers of musicality. And I had to get in touch with myself and enjoy making pop music again. Luckily the guys can make simple ideas sound soulful and musical.”
Nasri’s goal for Primary Colours is also simple. “I want people to laugh and cry and dance,” he says. “I want people to have fun at our shows. And when it’s a serious song, they’ll get serious with us. But when it’s not, what are they doing? Are they just standing there watching us? Or are they with us? I want people to be with us. I want them to move their bodies and have fun.”
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| Rudeness |
Released in September 2014 which Labrinth song sounds like it should be in your Beatles Collection | Amazon.com: Rude: Magic!: MP3 Downloads
By turkeygirl on December 1, 2014
Format: MP3 Music Verified Purchase
I was watching a youtube video and the maker of the video sang some of the chorus from Rude in his vlog; it really got into my head. Then I happened to catch the whole song on the radio and I totally fell in love with the story of the song. I think my favorite part is the declaration to "marry that girl". It just thrills my little single girl's heart. La Sigh! Anyway, as usually happens, I listen to it free on youtube until I want it so much I have to buy it for listening to while driving in the car.
| i don't know |
Which cheery Pharell Williams song was used on Despicable Me 2 soundtrack | Pharrell Williams - Happy (Despicable Me 2 - Lyric Video) - YouTube
Pharrell Williams - Happy (Despicable Me 2 - Lyric Video)
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Published on Jun 18, 2013
Category
| Happiness |
Which John Legend song knocked Pharell Willams completely off the No.1 spot on the US Billboard | DESPICABLE ME 2 Soundtrack - List Of Songs
DESPICABLE ME 2 SOUNDTRACK
Fun Fun Fun – Pharrell Williams
Chiquita Banana (Theme Song) – Pierre Coffin
Another Irish Drinking Song – Pierre Coffin
Love’s Theme – Love Unlimited Orchestra
Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, Gute Nacht Op. 49, No. 4 – Chris Renaud
Super Girl – Samantha Marq
Just A Cloud Away – Pharrell Williams
Cielito Lindo – Ali Dee
Cielito Lindo – Tito Puente And Eddie Palmieri
In The Summertime – Mungo Jerry
Funiculiĺ Funiculà – Andrew Driscoll
Italian Tarantella (Traditional) – Andrew Driscoll
Happy – Pharrell Williams
Don’t Stop The Party – Pitbull (Feat. Tjr)
Where Them Girls At – David Guetta Feat. Nicki Minaj And Flo Rida
Echa Pa’lla (Manos Pa’rriba) – Pitbull (Feat. Papayo)
El Bon Bon De Elena – Los Lobos
Flor De Huevo (Son Locos) – Los Lobos
I Swear – Pierre Coffin
Y.m.c.a. – Village People (Vocals Performed By Pierre Coffin)
Scream – Ceelo Green
Despicable Me 2 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Music By Heitor Pereira & Pharrell Williams
Scream – Pharrell Williams feat. Cee Lo Green
Another Irish Drinking Song – The Minions
Just A Cloud Away – Pharrell Williams
Happy – Pharrell Williams
Fun, Fun, Fun – Pharrell Williams
Despicable Me – Pharrell Williams
Going To Save The World
El Macho
The Big Battle
Ba Do Bleep – The Minions
Synopsis: Gru is no longer a villain, since saving his three adopted daughters Margo, Edith, and Agnes from Vector in the first film (Despicable Me). But his calm and unexciting new life takes an unexpected turn when he is recruited by Lucy Wilde and Silas Ramsbottom and is taken to the headquarters of the Anti-Villain League, a society dedicated to fighting crime on a global scale. There he discovers that there is a new villain called Eduardo on the loose and because Gru was once a villain himself and knows how they think, Silas (who is the League’s head), wants Gru to help them fight Eduardo. With the help of Gru’s assistant, Dr. Nefario, his minions, Margo, Edith, and Agnes, Gru must save the world (again).
Director: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
SONGS FROM THE ANIMATION DESPICABLE ME 2
| i don't know |
Which accusing Calvin Harris song reached No1 on the UK Singles Chart on 14th Sept 2014 | UK MUSIC CHARTS, No.1 Singles
1: Al Martino - Here In My Heart - 14/11/1952.
1953
2: Jo Stafford : You Belong To Me - 16/1/1953
3: Kay Starr : Comes A-Long A-Love - 23/1/1953.
4: Eddie Fisher: Outside Of Heaven - 30/1/1953.
Feb
5: Perry Como: Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes - 6/2/1953
March
6: Guy Mitchell: She Wears Red Feathers - 13/3/1953
April
7: Stargazers: Broken Wings - 10/4/1953
8: Lita Roza: (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window - 17/4/1953
9: Frankie Laine: I Believe - 24/4/1953
June
10: Eddie Fisher: I'm Walking Behind You - 26/6/1953
Aug
11: Mantovani Song: from 'The Moulin Rouge' - 14/8/1953
Sept
12: Guy Mitchell: Look At That Girl - 11/9/1953
Oct
13: Frankie Laine: Hey Joe - 23/10/1953
Nov
14: David Whitfield: Answer Me - 6/11/1953
15: Frankie Laine: Answer Me - 13/11/1953
1954
16: Eddie Calvert: Oh Mein Papa 8/1/1954
March
17: Stargazers: I See The Moon 12/3/1954.
April
18: Doris Day: Secret Love 16/4/1954
19: Johnnie Ray: Such A Night 30/4/1954
July
20: David Whitfield: Cara Mia 2/7/1954
Sept
21: Kitty Kallen: Little Things Mean A Lot 10/9/1954
22: Frank Sinatra: Three Coins In The Fountain 17/9/1954
Oct
23: Don Cornell: Hold My Hand 8/10/1954
Nov
24: Vera Lynn: My Son My Son 5/11/1954
25: Rosemary Clooney: This Ole House 26/11/1954
Dec
26: Winifred Atwell: Let's Have Another Party 3/12/1954
1955
27: Dickie Valentine: Finger Of Suspicion 7/1/1955.
28: Rosemary Clooney: Mambo Italiano 14/1/1955
Feb
29: Ruby Murray: Softly, Softly 18/2/1955
March
30: Tennessee Ernie Ford: Give Me Your Word, 11/3/1955
April
31: Perez Prez Prado & His Orchestra: Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White 29/4/1955
May
32: Tony Bennett: Stranger In Paradise 13/5/1955
33: Eddie Calvert: Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White 27/5/1955
June
34: Jimmy Young: Unchained Melody 24/6/1955
July
35: Alma Cogan: Dreamboat 15/7/1955
36: Slim Whitman: Rose Marie 29/7/1955
Oct
37: Jimmy Young: The Man From Laramie 14/10/1955
Nov
38: Johnston Brothers: Hernando's Hideaway 11/11/1955
39: Bill Haley & His Comets: Rock Around The Clock 25/11/1955
Dec
40: Dickie Valentine: Christmas Alphabet 16/12/1955
1956
41: Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons 20/1/1956.
Feb
42: Dean Martin: Memories Are Made Of This 17/2/1956
March
43: Dream Weavers: It's Almost Tomorrow 16/3/1956
44: Kay Starr: Rock And Roll Waltz 30/3/1956
April
45: Winifred Atwell: Poor People Of Paris 13/4/1956
May
46: Ronnie Hilton: No Other Love 4/5/1956
June
47: Pat Boone: I'll Be Home 15/6/1956
July
48: Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall in Love 20/7/1956
Aug
49: Doris Day - Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) 10/8/1956
Sept
50: Anne Shelton - Lay Down Your Arms 21/9/1956
Oct
51: Frankie Laine - A Woman In Love 19/10/1956
Nov
52: Johnnie Ray - Just Walking In The Rain 16/11/1956
1957
53: Guy Mitchell.. Singing The Blues 4/1/1957
54: Tommy Steele.. Singing The Blues 11/1/1957
55: Frankie Vaughan.. The Garden Of Eden 25/1/1957
Feb
56: Tab Hunter.. Young Love 22/2/1957
April
57: Lonnie Donegan.. Cumberland Gap 12/4/1957
May
58: Guy Mitchell.. Rock-A-Billy 17/5/1957
59: Andy Williams.. Butterfly 24/5/1957
June
60: Johnnie Ray.. Yes Tonight Josephine 7/6/1957
61. Lonnie Donegan.. Puttin' On The Style / Gamblin' Man 28/6/1957
July
62. Elvis Presley.. All Shook Up 12/7/1957
Aug
63. Paul Anka.. Diana 30/8/1957
Nov
64. The Crickets.. That'll Be The Day 1/11/1957
65. Harry Belafonte.. Mary's Boy Child 22/11/1957
1958
66. Jerry Lee Lewis.. Great Balls Of Fire 10/1/1958
67. Elvis Presley.. Jailhouse Rock 24/1/1958
Feb
68. Michael Holliday.. The Story Of My Life 14/2/1958
69. Perry Como.. Magic Moments 28/2/1958
April
70. Marvin Rainwater.. Whole Lotta Woman 25/4/1958
May
71. Connie Francis.. Who's Sorry Now 16/5/1958
June
72. Vic Damone.. On The Street Where You Live 27/6/1958
July
73. Everly Brothers.. All I Have To Do Is Dream / Claudette 4/7/1958
Aug
74. Kalin Twins.. When 22/8/1958
Sept
75. Connie Francis.. Carolina Moon / Stupid Cupid 26/9/1958
Nov
76. Tommy Edwards.. All In The Game 7/11/1958
77. Lord Rockingham's XI.. Hoots Mon 28/11/1958
Dec
78. Conway Twitty.. It's Only Make Believe 19/12/1958
1959
79. Jane Morgan 'The Days The Rains Came' 23/1/1959
80. Elvis Presley 'I Got Stung / One Night' 30/1/1959
Feb
81. Shirley Bassey 'As I Love You' 20/2/1959
March
82. The Platters 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' 20/3/1959
83. Russ Conway 'Side Saddle' 27/3/1959
April
84. Buddy Holly 'It Doesn't Matter Anymore' 24/4/1959
May
85. Elvis Presley 'A Fool Such As I / I Need Your Love Tonight' 15/5/1959
June
86: Russ Conway 'Roulette' 19/6/1959
July
87: Bobby Darin 'Dream Lover' 3/7/1959
88: Cliff Richard 'Living Doll' 31/7/1959
Sept
89: Craig Douglas 'Only Sixteen' 11/9/1959
Oct
90: Jerry Keller 'Here Comes Summer' 9/10/1959
91: Bobby Darin 'Mack The Knife' 16/10/1959
92: Cliff Richard 'Travellin' Light' 30/10/1959
Dec
93: Adam Faith 'What Do You Want' 4/12/1959
94: Emile Ford & The Checkmates: What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For 18/12/1959
1960
95: Michael Holliday 'Starry Eyed' 29/1/1960
Feb
96: Anthony Newley 'Why' 5/2/1960
March
97: Adam Faith 'Poor Me' 10/3/1960
98: Johnny Preston 'Running Bear' 17/3/1960
99: Lonnie Donegan 'My Old Man's A Dustman' 31/3/1960
April
100: Anthony Newley 'Do You Mind' 28/4/1960
May
101: Everly Brothers 'Cathy's Clown' 5/5/1960
June
102: Eddie Cochran 'Three Steps To Heaven' 23/6/1960
July
103: Jimmy Jones 'Good Timin' 7/7/1960
104: Cliff Richard 'Please Don't Tease' 28/7/1960
Aug
105: Johnny Kidd & The Pirates 'Shakin' All Over' 4/8/1960
106: Shadows 'Apache' 25/8/1960
107: Ricky Valence 'Tell Laura I Love Her' 29/9/1960
Oct
108: Roy Orbison 'Only The Lonely' 20/10/1960
Nov
109: Elvis Presley 'It's Now Or Never' 3/11/1960
Dec
110: Cliff Richard 'I Love You' 29/12/1960
1961
111: Johnny Tillotson: Poetry In Motion, 12/1/1961
112: Elvis Presley: Are You Lonesome Tonight, 26/1/1961
Feb
113: Petula Clark: Sailor, 23/2/1961
March
114: Everly Brothers: Walk Right Back, 2/3/1961
115: Elvis Presley: Wooden Heart, 23/3/1961
May
116: The Marcels: Blue Moon, 4/5/1961
117: Floyd Cramer: On The Rebound, 18/5/1961
118: The Temperance Seven: You're Driving Me Crazy, 25/5/1961
June
119: Elvis Presley: Surrender, 1/6/1961
120: Del Shannon: Runaway, 29/6/1961
July
121: Everly Brothers: Temptation, 20/7/1961
Aug
122: Eden Kane: Well I Ask You, 3/8/1961
123: Helen Shapiro: You Don't Know, 10/8/1961
124: John Leyton: Johnny Remember Me, 31/8/196
Sept
125: Shirley Bassey: Reach For The Stars / Climb Ev'ry Mountain, 21/9/1961
Oct
126: Shadows: Kon Tiki - 5/10/1961
127: The Highwaymen: Michael - 12/10/1961
128: Helen Shapiro: Walkin' Back To Happiness - 19/10/1961
Nov
129: Elvis Presley: His Latest Flame - 9/11/1961
Dec
130: Frankie Vaughan: Tower Of Strength - 7/12/1961
131: Danny Williams: Moon River - 28/12/1961
1962
132. Cliff Richard 'The Young Ones' 11/1/1962
Feb
133. Elvis Presley 'Can't Help Falling In Love / Rock-A-Hula Baby' 22/2/1962
March
134. Shadows 'Wonderful Land' 22/3/1962
May
135. B.Bumble & The Stingers 'Nut Rocker' 17/5/1962
136. Elvis Presley 'Good Luck Charm' 24/5/1962
June
137. Mike Sarne with Wendy Richard 'Come Outside' 28/6/1962
jJuly
138. Ray Charles 'I Can't Stop Loving You' 12/7/1962
139. Frank Ifield 'I Remember You' 26/7/1962
Sept
140. Elvis Presley 'She's Not You' 13/9/1962
Oct
142. Frank Ifield 'Lovesick Blues' 8/11/1962
Dec
143. Elvis Presley 'Return To Sender' 13/12/1962
1963
144. Cliff Richard 'The Next Time / Bachelor Boy' 3/1/1963
145. Shadows 'Dance On' 24/1/1963
146. Jet Harris & Tony Meehan 'Diamonds' 31/1/1963
147. Frank Ifield 'Wayward Wind' 21/2/1963
March
148. Cliff Richard 'Summer Holiday' 14/3/1963
149. Shadows 'Foot Tapper' 29/3/1963
April
150. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'How Do You Do It?' 11/4/1963
May
151. Beatles' From Me To You' 2/5/1963
June
152. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'I Like It' 20/6/1963
July
153. Frank Ifield 'Confessin' (That I Love You)' 18/7/1963
Aug
154. Elvis Presley '(You're The) Devil In Disguise' 1/8/1963
155. Searchers 'Sweets For My Sweet' 8/8/1963
156. Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas 'Bad To Me' 22/8/1963
Sept
157. Beatles 'She Loves You' 12/9/1963
Oct
158. Brian Poole & The Tremeloes 'Do You Love Me' 10/10/1963
159. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'You'll Never Walk Alone' 31/10/1963
Dec
160. Beatles 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' 12/12/1963
1964
161 Dave Clark Five.. Glad All Over 16/1/1964
162 Searchers.. Needles & Pins 30/1/1964
Feb
164 Cilla Black.. Anyone Who Had A Heart 27/2/1964
March
165 Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas.. Little Children 19/3/1964
April
166. Beatles.. Can't Buy Me Love 2/4/1964
167. Peter & Gordon.. A World Without Love 23/4/1964
May
168. Searchers.. Don't Throw Your Love Away 7/5/1964
169. Four Pennies.. Juliet 21/5/1964
170. Cilla Black .. You're My World 28/5/1964
June
171. Roy Orbison.. It's Over 25/6/1964
July
172. Animals.. The House Of The Rising Sun 9/7/1964
173. Rolling Stones.. It's All Over now 16/7/1964
174. Beatles.. A Hard Day's Night 23/7/1964
Aug
175. Manfred Mann.. Do Wah Diddy Diddy 13/8/1964
176. Honeycombes.. Have I The Right 27/8/1964
Sept
177. Kinks.. You Really Got Me 10/9/1964
178. Herman's Hermits.. I'm Into Something Good 24/9/1964
Oct
179. Roy Orbison.. Oh Pretty Woman 8/10/1964
180. Sandie Shaw.. (There's) Always Something There To Remind Me 22/10/1964
Nov
181. Supremes.. Baby Love 19/11/1964
Dec
182. Rolling Stones.. Little Red Rooster 3/12/1964
183. Beatles.. I Feel Fine 10/12/1964
1965
184. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames 'Yeh Yeh' 14/1/1965
185. Moody Blues 'Go Now!' 28/1/1965
Feb
186. Righteous Brothers 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' 4/2/1965
187. Kinks 'Tired Of Waiting For You' 18/2/1965
188. Seekers 'I'll Never Find Another You' 25/2/1965
March
189. Tom Jones 'It's Not Unusual' 11/3/1965
190. Rolling Stones 'The Last Time' 18/3/1965
April
191. Unit Four Plus Two 'Concrete & Clay' 8/4/1965
192. Cliff Richard 'The Minute You're Gone' 15/4/1965
193. Beatles 'Ticket To Ride' 22/4/1965
May
194. Roger Miller 'King Of The Road' 13/5/1965
195. Jackie Trent 'Where Are You Now (My Love)' 20/5/1965
196. Sandie Shaw 'Long Live Love' 27/5/1965
197. Elvis Presley 'Crying In The Chapel' 17/6/1965
198. Hollies 'I'm Alive' 24/6/1965
July
199. Byrds 'Mr Tambourine Man' 22/7/1965
Aug
201. Sonny & Cher 'I Got You Babe' 26/8/1965
Sept
202. Rolling Stones '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' 9/9/1965
203. Walker Brothers 'Make It Easy On Yourself' 23/9/1965
204. Ken Dodd 'Tears' 30/9/1965
Nov
205. Rolling Stones 'Get Off Of My Cloud' 4/11/1965
206. Seekers 'The Carnival Is Over' 25/11/1965
Dec
207. Beatles 'Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out' 16/12/1965
1966
208. Spencer Davis Group 'Keep On Running' 20/1/1966
209. Overlanders 'Michelle' 27/1/1966
210. Nancy Sinatra 'These Boots Are Made For Walking' 17/2/1966
March
211. Walker Brothers 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore' 17/3/1966
April
212. Spencer Davis Group 'Somebody Help Me' 14/4/1966
213. Dusty Springfield You 'Don't Have To Say You Love Me' 28/4/1966
May
214. Manfred Mann 'Pretty Flamingo' 5/5/1966
215. Rolling Stones 'Paint It Black' 26/5/1966
June
216. Frank Sinatra 'Strangers In The Night' 2/6/1966
217. Beatles 'Paperback Writer' 23/6/1966
July
218. Kinks 'Sunny Afternoon' 7/7/1966
219. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames 'Get Away' 21/7/1966
220. Chris Farlowe 'Out Of Time' 28/7/1966
Aug
221. Troggs 'With A Girl Like You' 4/8/1966
222. Beatles 'Yellow Submarine / Eleanor Rigby' 18/8/1966
Sept
223. Small Faces 'All Or Nothing' 15/9/1966
224. Jim Reeves 'Distant Drums' 22/9/1966
Oct
225. Four Tops 'Reach Out I'll Be There' 27/10/1966
Nov
226. Beach Boys 'Good Vibrations' 17/11/1966
Dec
227. Tom Jones 'Green Green Grass Of Home' 1/12/1966
1967
228. Monkees 'I'm A Believer' 19/1/1967
Feb
229. Petula Clark 'This Is My Song' 16/2/1967
March
230. Engelbert Humperdink 'Release Me (And Let Me Love Again)' 2/3/1967
April
231. Frank Sinatra & Nancy Sinatra 'Somethin' Stupid' 13/4/1967
232. Sandie Shaw 'Puppet On A String' 27/4/1967
May
233. Tremeloes 'Silence Is Golden' 18/5/1967
June
234. Procol Harum 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' 8/6/1967
July
235. Beatles 'All You Need Is Love' 19/7/1967
Aug
236. Scott McKenzie 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)' 9/8/1967
Sept
237. Engelbert Humperdink 'The Last Waltz' 6/9/1967
Oct
238. Bee Gees 'Massachusetts' 11/10/1967
Nov
239. Foundations - 'Baby Now That I've Found You' 8/11/1967
240. Long John Baldry - 'Let The Heartaches Begin' 22/11/1967
Dec
241. Beatles - 'Hello Goodbye' 6/12/1967
1968
242. Georgie Fame - 'The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde' 24/1/1968
243. Love Affair - 'Everlasting Love' 31/1/1968
Feb
244. Manfred Mann - 'The Mighty Quinn' 14/2/1968
245. Esther & Abi Ofarim - 'Cinderella Rockefella' 28/2/1968
March
246. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - 'Legend Of Xanadu' 20/3/1968
247. Beatles - ''Lady Madonna' 27/3/1968
April
248. Cliff Richard - 'Congratulations' 10/4/1968
249. Louis Armstrong -'What A Wonderful World / Cabaret' 24/4/1968
May
250. Union Gap featuring Gary Puckett -'Young Girl' 22/5/1968
June
251. Rolling Stones- 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' 19/6/1968
July
252. Equals - 'Baby Come Back' 3/7/1968
253. Des O'Connor - 'I Pretend' 24/7/1968
254. Tommy James & The Shondells - 'Mony Mony 31/7/1968
Aug
255. Crazy World of Arthur Brown - 'Fire' 14/8/1968
256. Beach Boys - ''Do It Again' 28/8/1968
Sept
257. Bee Gees - 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' 4/9/1968
258. Beatles -'Hey Jude' 11/9/1968
259. Mary Hopkin - 'Those Were The Days' 25/9/1968
Nov
260. Joe Cocker - 'With A Little Help From My Friends' 6/11/1968
261. Hugo Montenegro Orchestra - 'The Good The Bad And The Ugly' 13/11/1968
262. Scaffold - 'Lily The Pink' 11/12/1968
1969
263. Marmalade - 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da' 1/1/1969
264. Fleetwood Mac - Albatross 29/1/69
Feb
265. Move - Blackberry Way 05/2/69
266. Amen Corner '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' 12/2/1969
267. Peter Sarstedt 'Where Do You Go To My Lovely?' 26/2/1969
March
268. Marvin Gaye 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' 26/3/1969
April
269. Desmond Dekker & The Aces 'Israelites' 16/4/1969
270. Beatles 'Get Back' 23/4/1969
June
271. Tommy Roe 'Dizzy' 4/6/1969
272. Beatles 'The Ballad Of John & Yoko' 11/6/1969
July
273. Thunderclap Newman 'Something In The Air' 2/7/1969
274. Rolling Stones 'Honky Tonk Women' 23/7/1969
Aug
275. Zager & Evans 'In The Year 2525' (Exorium & Terminus) 30/8/1969
Sept
276. Creedence Clearwater Revival 'Bad Moon Rising' 20/9/1969
Oct
277. Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg 'Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus' 11/10/1969
278. Bobby Gentry 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' 18/10/1969
279. Archies 'Sugar Sugar' 25/10/1969
Dec
280. Rolf Harris 'Two Little Boys' 20/12/1969
1970
281. Edison Lighthouse 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)' 31/1/1970
March
282. Lee Marvin - 'Wandrin' Star' 7/3/1970
283. Simon & Garfunkel - 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' 28/3/1970
April
284. Dana .. 'All Kinds Of Everything' 18/4/1970
May
285. Norman Greenbaum - 'Spirit In The Sky' 2/5/1970
286. England World Cup Squad -'Back Home' 16/5/1970
June
287. Christie - 'Yellow River' 6/6/1970
288. Mungo Jerry - 'In The Summertime' 13/6/1970
Aug
289. Elvis Presley - 'The Wonder Of You' 1/8/1970
Sept
290. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 'Tears Of A Clown' 12/9/1970
291. Freda Payne 'Band Of Gold' 19/9/1970
Oct
292. Matthew's Southern Comfort 'Woodstock' 31/10/1970
Nov
293. Jimi Hendrix 'Voodoo Chile' 21/11/1970
294. Dave Edmunds 'I Hear You Knockin' 28/11/1970
1971
295. Clive Dunn - Grandad 9/1/1971
296. George Harrison - 'My Sweet Lord' 30/1/1971
March
297. Mungo Jerry - 'Baby Jump' 6/3/1971
298. T Rex - 'Hot Love' 20/3/1971
May
299. Dave & Ansil Collins - 'Double Barrel' 1/5/1971
300. Dawn - 'Knock Three Times' 15/5/1971
June
301. Middle Of The Road 'Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep' 19/6/1971
July
302. T Rex 'Get It On' 24/7/1971
Aug
303. Diana Ross 'I'm Still Waiting' 21/8/1971
Sept
304. Tams 'Hey Girl Don't Bother Me' 18/9/1971
Oct
305. Rod Stewart 'Maggie May' 9/10/1971
Nov
306. Slade 'Coz I Luv You' 13/11/1971
Dec
307. Benny Hill 'Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)' 11/12/1971
1972
308. New Seekers - 'I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing' 8/1/1972
Feb
309. T Rex 'Telegram Sam' 5/2/1972
310. Chicory Tip 'Son Of My Father' 19/2/1972
March
311. Nilsson' Without You' 11/3/1972
April
312. The Pipes & Drums & Military Band of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards 'Amazing Grace' 15/4/1972
May
313. T Rex 'Metal Guru' 20/5/1972
June
314. Don McLean 'Vincent' 17/6/1972
July
315. Slade 'Take Me Back 'Ome' 1/7/1972
316. Donny Osmond 'Puppy Love' 8/7/1972
Aug
317. Alice Cooper 'School's Out' 12/8/1972
Sept
318. Rod Stewart 'You Wear It Well' 2/9/1972
319. Slade 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now' 9/9/1972
320. David Cassidy 'How Can I Be Sure' 30/9/1972
Oct
321. Lieutenant Pigeon 'Mouldy Old Dough' 14/10/1972
Nov
322. Gilbert O'Sullivan 'Clair' 11/11/1972
323. Chuck Berry 'My Ding-A-Ling' 25/11/1972
Dec
324. Little Jimmy Osmond 'Long Haired Lover From Liverpool' 23/12/1972
1973
326. Slade 'Cum On Feel The Noize' 3/3/1973
327. Donny Osmond 'The Twelfth Of Never' 31/3/1973
April
328. Gilbert O'Sullivan 'Get Down' 7/4/1973
329. Dawn featuring Tony Orlando 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree' 21/4/1973
May
330. Wizzard 'See My Baby Jive' 19/5/1973
June
331. Suzi Quatro 'Can The Can' 16/6/1973
332. 10 CC 'Rubber Bullets' 23/6/1973
333. Slade 'Skweeze Me Pleeze Me' 30/6/1973
July
334. Peters & Lee 'Welcome Home' 21/7/1973
335. Gary Glitter 'I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)' 28/7/1973
Aug
336. Donny Osmond 'Young Love' 25/8/1973
Sept
337. Wizzard 'Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)' 22/9/1973
338. Simon Park Orchestra 'Eye Level' 29/9/1973
Oct
339. David Cassidy 'Daydreamer / The Puppy Song' 27/10/1973
Nov
340. Gary Glitter 'I Love You Love Me Love' 17/11/1973
Dec
341. Slade 'Merry Xmas Everybody' 15/12/1973
1974
342. New Seekers 'You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me' 19/1/1974
343. Mud 'Tiger Feet' 26/1/1974
Feb
344. Suzi Quatro 'Devil Gate Drive' 23/2/1974
March
345. Alvin Stardust 'Jealous Mind' 9/3/1974
346. Paper Lace 'Billy Don't Be A Hero' 16/3/1974
April
347. Terry Jacks 'Seasons In The Sun' 6/4/1974
May
349. Rubettes 'Sugar Baby Love' 18/5/1974
June
350. Ray Stevens 'The Streak 15/6/1974
351. Gary Glitter 'Always Yours' 22/6/1974
352. Charles Aznavour 'She' 29/6/1974
July
353. George McCrae 'Rock Your Baby' 27/7/1974
Aug
354. Three Degrees 'When Will I See You Again' 17/8/1974
355. Osmonds 'Love Me For A Reason' 31/8/1974
Sept
356. Carl Douglas 'Kung Fu Fighting' 21/9/1974
Oct
357. John Denver 'Annie's Song' 12/10/1974
358. Sweet Sentation 'Sad Sweet Dreamer' 19/10/1974
359. Ken Boothe 'Everything I Own' 26/10/1974
Nov
360. David Essex 'Gonna Make You A Star' 16/11/1974
Dec
361. Barry White 'You're The First, The Last, My Everything' 7/12/1974
362. Mud 'Lonely This Christmas' 21/12/1974
1975
363. Status Quo 'Down Down' 18/1/1975
364. Tymes 'Ms Grace' 25/1/1975
Feb
366. Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel 'Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)' 22/2/1975
March
367. Telly Savalas ''If'' 8/3/1975
368. Bay City Rollers 'Bye Bye Baby 22/3/1975
May
369. Mud 'Oh Boy 3/5/1975
370. Tammy Wynette 'Stand By Your Man 17/5/1975
June
371. Windsor Davies & Don Estelle 'Whispering Grass' 7/6/1975
372. 10 CC 'I'm Not In Love' 28/6/1975
July
373. Johnny Nash 'Tears On My Pillow' 12/7/1975
374. Bay City Rollers 'Give A Little Love' 19/7/1975
Aug
375. Typically Tropical 'Barbados' 9/8/1975
376. Stylistics 'Can't Give You Anything (But My Love)' 16/8/1975
Sept
377. Rod Stewart 'Sailing' 6/9/1975
Oct
378. David Essex 'Hold Me Close' 4/10/1975
379. Art Garfunkel 'I Only Have Eyes For You' 25/10/1975
Nov
380. David Bowie 'Space Oddity' 8/11/1975
381. Billy Connolly 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E'. 22/11/1975
382. Queen 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 29/11/1975
1976
383. Abba 'Mamma Mia' 31/1/1976
Feb
384. Slik 'Forever And Ever' 14/2/1976
385. Four Seasons 'December '63' 21/2/1976
March
386. Tina Charles 'I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)' 6/3/1976
387. Brotherhood Of Man ''Save Your Kisses For Me' 27/3/1976
May
396. Chicago 'If You Leave Me Now' 13/11/1976
Dec
397. Showaddywaddy 'Under The Moon Of Love'' 4/12/1976
398. Johnny Mathis 'When A Child Is Born' (Soleado) 25/12/1976
1977
399. David Soul ''Don't Give Up On Us 15/1/1977
Feb
400. Julie Covington 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina 12/2/1977
401. Leo Sayer 'When I Need You 19/2/1977
March
402. Manhattan Transfer 'Chanson D'Amour 12/3/1977
April
403. Abba 'Knowing Me Knowing You 2/4/1977
May
404. Deniece Williams 'Free 7/5/1977
405. Rod Stewart 'I Don't Want To Talk About It / First Cut Is The Deepest 21/5/1977
June
406. Kenny Rogers 'Lucille 18/6/1977
407. Jacksons Show 'You The Way To Go 25/6/1977
July
408. Hot Chocolate 'So You Win Again 2/7/1977
409. Donna Summer 'I Feel Love 23/7/1977
Aug
410. Brotherhood Of Man 'Angelo 20/8/1977
411. Floaters 'Float On 27/8/1977
Sept
412. Elvis Presley 'Way Down 3/9/1977
Oct
413. David Soul 'Silver Lady 8/10/1977
414. Baccara 'Yes Sir I Can Boogie 29/10/1977
Nov
415. Abba 'The Name Of The Game 5/11/1977
Dec
416. Wings 'Mull Of Kintyre / Girls' School 3/12/1977
1978
417. Althia & Donna 'Up Town Top Ranking 4/2/1978
418. Brotherhood Of Man 'Figaro 11/2/1978
419. Abba 'Take A Chance On Me 18/2/1978
March
420. Kate Bush 'Wuthering Heights 11/3/1978
April
421. Brian & Michael 'Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs 8/4/1978
422. Bee Gees 'Night Fever 29/4/1978
423. Boney M - 'Rivers Of Babylon / Brown 'Girl In The Ring 13/5/1978
June
424. John Travolta & Olivia Newton John 'You're The One That I Want 17/6/1978
Aug
425. Commodores 'Three Times A Lady 19/8/1978
Oct
426. 10 CC 'Dreadlock Holiday 23/9/1978
427. John Travolta & Olivia Newton 'John Summer Nights 30/9/1978
Nov
428. Boomtown Rats .. 'Rat Trap 18/11/1978
Dec
429. Rod Stewart.. 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy 2/12/1978
430. Boney M .. 'Mary's Boy Child - Oh My Lord 9/12/1978
1979
431. Village People , Y.M.C.A. 6/1/1979
432. Ian Dury & The Blockheads , Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick 27/1/1979
Feb
433. Blondie , Heart Of Glass 3/2/1979
March
434. Bee Gees , Tragedy 3/3/1979
435. Gloria Gaynor , I Will Survive 17/3/1979
April
436. Art Garfunkel , Bright Eyes 14/4/1979
May
437. Blondie, Sunday Girl 26/5/1979
June
438. Anita Ward , Ring My Bell 16/6/1979
439. Tubeway Army , Are 'Friends' Electric 30/6/1979
July
440. Boomtown Rats , I Don't Like Mondays 28/7/1979
Aug
441. Cliff Richard , We Don't Talk Anymore 25/8/1979
Sept
442. Gary Numan , Cars 22/9/1979
443. Police , Message In A Bottle 29/9/1979
Oct
444. Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star 20/10/1979
445. Lena Martell , One Day At A Time 27/10/1979
Nov
446. Dr Hook , When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman 17/11/1979
Dec
447. Police ,Walking On The Moon 8/12/1979
448. Pink Floyd , Another Brick In The Wall 15/12/1979
1980
449. Pretenders 'Brass In Pocket' 19/1/1980
Feb
450. The Special AKA (Specials) The Specials Live EP (main track: Too Much Too Young) 2/2/1980
451. Kenny Rogers 'Coward Of The County' 16/2/1980
March
453. Fern Kinney 'Together We Are Beautiful '15/3/1980
454. Jam 'Going Underground / Dreams Of Children' 22/3/1980
April
455. Detroit Spinners 'Working My Way Back To You - Forgive Me Girl' 12/4/1980
456. Blondie 'Call Me' 26/4/1980
May
457. Dexy's Midnight Runners 'Geno' 3/5/1980
458. Johnny Logan 'What's Another Year' 17/5/1980
459. Mash 'Suicide Is Painless (Theme from M*A*S*H)' 31/5/1980
June
460. Don McLean 'Crying' 21/6/1980
July
461. Olivia Newton John & Electric Light Orchestra 'Xanadu' 12/7/1980
462. Odyssey 'Use It Up And Wear It Out' 26/7/1980
Aug
463. Abba 'The Winner Takes It All' 9/8/1980
464. David Bowie 'Ashes To Ashes' 23/8/1980
Sept
466. Kelly Marie 'Feels Like I'm In Love' 13/9/1980
467. Police 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' 27/9/1980
Oct
468. Barbra Streisand 'Woman In Love' 25/10/1980
Nov
469. Blondie 'The Tide Is High' 15/11/1980
470. Abba 'Super Trouper' 29/11/1980
Dec
471. John Lennon '(Just Like) Starting Over' 20/12/1980
472. St Winifred's School Choir 'There's No One Quite Like Grandma' 27/12/1980
1981
473. John Lennon 'Imagine' 10/1/1981
Feb
474. John Lennon 'Woman' 7/2/1981
475. Joe Dolce Music Theatre 'Shaddup You Face' 21/2/1981
March
476. Roxy Music 'Jealous Guy' 14/3/1981
477. Shakin' Stevens 'This Ole House' 28/3/1981
April
478. Bucks Fizz 'Making Your Mind Up' 18/4/1981
May
479. Adam & The Ants 'Stand And Deliver' 9/5/1981
June
480. Smokey Robinson 'Being With You' 13/6/1981
481. Michael Jackson 'One Day In Your Life' 27/6/1981
July
482. Specials 'Ghost Town' 11/7/1981
Aug
483. Shakin' Stevens 'Green Door' 1/8/1981
484. Aneka 'Japanese Boy' 29/8/1981
Sept
485. Soft Cell 'Tainted Love' 5/9/1981
486. Adam & The Ants 'Prince Charming' 19/9/1981
Oct
487. Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin 'It's My Party' 17/10/1981
Nov
488. Police ''Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' 14/11/1981
489. Queen & David Bowie ''Under Pressure' 21/11/1981
Dec
490. Julio Iglesias ''Begin The Beguine (Volver A Empezar) 5/12/1981
491. Human League ''Don't You Want Me' 12/12/1981
1982
492. Bucks Fizz - Land Of Make Believe 16/1/1982
493. Shakin' Stevens - Oh Julie 30/1/1982
Feb
494. Kraftwerk - The Model / Computer Love 6/2/1982
495. Jam - A Town Called Malice / Precious 13/2/1982
March
496. Tight Fit - The Lion Sleeps Tonight 6/3/1982
497. Goombay Dance Band Seven - Tears 27/3/1982
April
498. Bucks Fizz - My Camera Never Lies 17/4/1982
499. Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder - Ebony And Ivory 24/4/1982
May
500. Nicole- A Little Peace 15/5/1982
501. Madness - House Of Fun 29/5/1982
June
502. Adam Ant - Goody Two Shoes 12/6/1982
503. Charlene - I 've Never Been To Me 26/6/1982
July
504. Captain Sensible - Happy Talk 3/7/1982
505. Irene Cara - Fame 17/7/1982
Aug
506. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen 7/8/1982
Sept
507. Survivor - Eye Of The Tiger 4/9/1982
Oct
508. Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie 2/10/1982
509. Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me 23/10/1982
Nov
510. Eddy Grant - I Don't Wanna Dance 13/11/1982
Dec
511. Jam - Beat Surrender 4/12/1982
512. Renee & Renato - Save Your Love 18/12/1982
1983
513. Phil Collins 'You Can't Hurry Love' 15/1/1983
514. Men At Work 'Down Under' 29/1/1983
Feb
515. Kajagoogoo 'Too Shy' 19/2/1983
March
516. Michael Jackson 'Billie Jean' 5/3/1983
517. Bonnie Tyler 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' 12/3/1983
518. Duran Duran 'Is There Something I Should Know' 26/3/1983
April
519. David Bowie 'Let's Dance' 9/4/1983
520. Spandau Ballet 'True' 30/4/1983
May
521. New Edition 'Candy Girl' 28/5/1983
June
522. Police 'Every Breath You Take' 4/6/1983
July
523. Rod Stewart 'Baby Jane' 2/7/1983
524. Paul Young 'Wherever I Lay My Hat' 23/7/1983
Aug
525. K C & The Sunshine Band 'Give It Up' 13/8/1983
Sept
526. UB 40 'Red Red Wine' 3/9/1983
527. Culture Club 'Karma Chameleon' 24/9/1983
Nov
528 Billy Joel 'Uptown Girl 5/11/1983
Dec
529 Flying Pickets 'Only You 10/12/1983
1984
530. Paul McCartney - Pipes Of Peace 14/1/1984
531. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax 28/1/1984
March
532. Nena - 99 Red Balloons 3/3/1984
533. Lionel Richie - Hello 24/3/1984
May
534. Duran Duran - The Reflex 5/5/1984
June
535. Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go 2/6/1984
536. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes 16/6/1984
Aug
537. George Michael - Careless Whisper 18/8/1984
Sept
538. Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You 8/9/1984
Oct
540. Chaka Khan - I Feel For You 10/11/1984
Dec
541. Jim Diamond - I Should Have Known Better 1/12/1984
542. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love 8/12/1984
543. Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas 15/12/1984
1985
544. Foreigner 'I Want To Know What Love Is 19/1/1985
Feb
545. Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson 'I Know Him So Well 9/2/1985
March
546. Dead Or Alive 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) 9/3/1985
547. Philip Bailey & Phil Collins 'Easy Lover 23/3/1985
April
548. USA For Africa 'We Are The World 20/4/1985
May
549. Phyllis Nelson 'Move Closer 4/5/1985
550. Paul Hardcastle '19' 11/5/1985
June
551. Crowd ''You'll Never Walk Alone 15/6/1985
552. Sister Sledge ''Frankie 29/6/1985
July
553. Eurythmics 'There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) 27/7/1985
Aug
554. Madonna 'Into The Groove 3/8/1985
555. UB 40 & Chrissie Hynde 'I Got You Babe 31/8/1985
Sept
556. David Bowie & Mick Jagger 'Dancing in the Street 7/9/1985
Oct
557. Midge Ure 'If I Was 5/10/1985
558. Jennifer Rush 'The Power Of Love 12/10/1985
Nov
559. Feargal Sharkey 'A Good Heart 16/11/1985
560. Wham! 'I'm Your Man 30/11/1985
Dec
561. Whitney Houston 'Saving All My Love For You 14/12/1985
562. Shakin' Stevens 'Merry Christmas Everyone 28/12/1985
1986
563. Pet Shop Boys 'West End Girls 11/1/1986
564. A-Ha 'The Sun Always Shines On TV 25/1/1986
Feb
565. Billy Ocean 'When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going 8/2/1986
March
566. Diana Ross 'Chain Reaction 8/3/1986
567. Cliff Richard & The Young 'Ones Living Doll 29/3/1986 The first official Comic Relief single
April
568. George Michael 'A Different Corner 19/4/1986
May
569. Falco 'Rock Me Amadeus 10/5/1986
570. Spitting Image 'The Chicken Song 17/5/1986
June
571. Doctor & The Medics 'Spirit In The Sky 7/6/1986
572. Wham! 'The Edge Of Heaven 28/6/1986
July
573. Madonna 'Papa Don't Preach 12/7/1986
Aug
574. Chris de Burgh 'The Lady In Red 2/8/1986
575. Boris Gardiner 'I Want To Wake Up With You 23/8/1986
Sept
576. Communards 'Don't Leave Me This Way 13/9/1986
Oct
577. Madonna 'True Blue 11/10/1986
578. Nick Berry 'Every Loser Wins 18/10/1986
Nov
579. Berlin 'Take My Breath Away 8/11/1986
Dec
580. Europe 'The Final Countdown 6/12/1986
581. Housemartins 'Caravan Of Love 20/12/1986
582. Jackie Wilson 'Reet Petite 27/12/1986
1987
583. Steve 'Silk' Hurley 'Jack Your Body 24/1/1987
Feb
584. George Michael & Aretha Franklin 'I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) 7/2/1987
585. Ben E King 'Stand By Me 21/2/1987
March
586. Boy George 'Everything I Own 14/3/1987
587. Mel & Kim 'Respectable 28/3/1987
April
588. Ferry Aid 'Let It Be 4/4/1987
589. Madonna 'La Isla Bonita 25/4/1987
May
590. Starship 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now 9/5/1987
June
591. Whitney Houston 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) 6/6/1987
592. The Firm 'Star Trekkin' 20/6/1987
July
593. Pet Shop Boys' It's A Sin 4/7/1987
594. Madonna 'Who's That Girl 25/7/1987
Aug
595. Los Lobos 'La Bamba 1/8/1987
596. Michael Jackson ''I Just Can't Stop Loving You 15/8/1987
597. Rick Astley 'Never Gonna Give You Up 29/8/1987
Oct
598. M/A/R/R/S ''Pump Up The Volume / Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance) 3/10/1987
599. Bee Gees 'You Win Again 17/10/1987
Nov
600. T'Pau 'China In Your Hand 14/11/1987
Dec
601. Pet Shop Boys 'Always On My Mind 19/12/1987
1988
602. Belinda Carlisle 'Heaven Is A Place On Earth 16/1/1988
603. Tiffany 'I Think We're Alone Now 30/1/1988
Feb
604. Kylie Minogue 'I Should Be So Lucky 20/2/1988
March
605. Aswad 'Don't Turn Around 26/3/1988
April
606. Pet Shop Boys 'Heart 9/4/1988
607. S'Express 'Theme from S'Express 30/4/1988
May
608. Fairground 'Attraction Perfect 14/5/1988
609. Wet Wet Wet 'With A Little Help From My Friends 21/5/1988
June
610. Timelords 'Doctorin The Tardis 18/6/1988
611. Bros 'I Owe You Nothing 25/6/1988
July
612. Glenn Medeiros 'Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You 9/7/1988
Aug
613. Yazz & The Plastic Population 'The Only Way Is Up 6/8/1988
Sept
614. Phil Collins 'A Groovy Kind Of Love 10/9/1988
615. Hollies 'He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother 24/9/1988
Oct
617. Whitney Houston 'One Moment In Time 15/10/1988
618. Enya 'Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) 29/10/1988
Nov
619. Robin Beck 'The First Time 19/11/1988
Dec
620. Cliff Richard 'Mistletoe & Wine 10/12/1988
1989
621. Kylie Minogue & Jason Donovan - Especially For You 7/1/1989
622. Marc Almond with Gene Pitney - Somethings Gotten Hold Of My Heart 28/1/1989
Feb
623. Simple Minds - Belfast Child 25/2/1989
March
624. Jason Donovan - Too Many Broken Hearts 11/3/1989
625. Madonna - Like A Prayer 25/3/1989
April
626. Bangles - Eternal Flame 15/4/1989
May
627. Kylie Minogue - Hand On Your Heart 13/5/1989
628. Gerry Marsden, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson & Christians - Ferry 'Cross The Mersey 20/5/1989
June
629. Jason Donovan - Sealed With A Kiss 10/6/1989
630. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler - Back To Life 24/6/1989
July
631. Sonia - You'll Never Stop Me Loving You 22/7/1989
Aug
632. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers -Swing The Mood 5/8/1989
Sept
633. Black Box - Ride On Time 9/9/1989
Oct
634. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers - That's What I Like 21/10/1989
Nov
635. Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World 11/11/1989
636. New Kids On The Block - You Got It (The Right Stuff) 25/11/1989
Dec
637. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers - Let's Party 16/12/1989
638. Band Aid II - Do They Know It's Christmas 23/12/1989
1990
639. New Kids On The Block - Hangin' Tough 16/1/1990
640. Kylie Minogue - Tears On My Pillow 27/1/1990
Feb
641. Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U 3/2/1990
March
642. Beats International Dub Be Good To Me 3/3/1990
643. Snap - The Power 31/3/1990
April
646. England New Order - World In Motion 9/6/1990
647. Elton John - Sacrifice / Healing Hands 23/6/1990
July
648. Partners In Kryme Turtle Power 28/7/1990
Aug
649. Bombalurina - Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini 25/8/1990
Sept
650. Steve Miller - Band The Joker 15/9/1990
651. Maria McKee - Show Me Heaven 29/9/1990
Oct
652. Beautiful South - A Little Time 27/10/1990
Nov
653. Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody 3/11/1990
Dec
654. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby 1/12/1990
655. Cliff Richard - Saviour's Day 22/12/1990
1991
656. Iron Maiden - Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter 5/1/1991
657. Enigma - Sadness Part 1 19/1/1991
658. Queen - Innuendo 26/1/1991
659. KLF - 3 AM Eternal 2/2/1991
660. Simpsons - Do The Bartman 16/2/1991
March
661. Clash - Should I Stay Or Should I Go 9/3/1991
662. Hale & Pace - The Stonk 23/3/1991 The official Comic Relief single
663. Chesney Hawkes - The One And Only 30/3/1991 .
May
664. Cher - Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss) 4/5/1991
June
665. Color Me Badd - I Wanna Sex You Up 8/6/1991
666. Jason Donovan - Any Dream Will Do 29/6/1991 .
July
667 Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You 13/7/1991
Nov
668. U2 - The Fly 2/11/1991
669. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy 9/11/1991
670. Michael Jackson - Black Or White 23/11/1991
Dec
671. George Michael & Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me 7/12/1991
672. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody / These Are The Days Of Our Lives 21/12/1991
1992
673. Wet Wet Wet.. Goodnight Girl 25/1/1992
Feb
674. Shakespears Sister.. Stay 22/2/1992
April
675. Right Said Fred.. Deeply Dippy 18/4/1992
May
676. KWS.. Please Don't Go / Game Boy 9/5/1992
June
677. Erasure Abba-esque EP 13/6/1992
July
678. Jimmy Nail.. Ain't No Doubt 18/7/1992
Aug
679. Snap.. Rhythm Is A Dancer 8/8/1992
Sept
680. Shamen.. Ebeneezer Goode 19/9/1992
Oct
681. Tasmin Archer.. Sleeping Satellite 17/10/1992
682. Boyz II Men .. End Of The Road 31/10/1992
Nov
683. Charles & Eddie.. Would I Lie To You 21/11/1992
Dec
684. Whitney Houston.. I Will Always Love You 5/12/1992 .
1993
685. 2 Unlimited.. No Limit 13/2/1993
March
686. Shaggy.. Oh Carolina 20/3/1993
April
687. Bluebells.. Young At Heart 3/4/1993
May
688. George Michael & Queen with Lisa Stansfield - Five Live (EP) 1/5/1993
689. Ace Of Base.... All That She Wants 22/5/1993
June
690. UB 40.. (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You 12/6/1993 .
691. Gabrielle.. Dreams 26/6/1993 .
692. Take That.. Pray 17/7/1993
August
693. Freddie Mercury.. Living On My Own 14/8/1993
694. Culture Beat.. Mr Vain 28/8/1993
Sept
695. Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Will Smith).. Boom! Shake The Room 25/9/1993
Oct
696. Take That featuring Lulu.. Relight my Fire 9/10/1993
697. Meat Loaf.. I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) 23/10/1993 .
Dec
698. Mr Blobby.. Mr Blobby 11/12/1993
699. Take That.. Babe 18/12/1993
1994
700. Chaka Demus & Pliers - Twist & Shout 8/1/1994
701. D:Ream - Things Can Only Get Better 22/1/1994
Feb
702. Mariah Carey - Without You 19/2/1994
703. Doop - Doop 19/3/1994
704. Take That - Everything Changes 9/4/1994
705. Prince - The Most Beautiful Girl In The World 23/4/1994
May
706. Tony Di Bart - The Real Thing 7/5/1994
707. Stiltskin - Inside 14/5/1994
708. Manchester United 1994 Football Squad - Come On You Reds 21/5/1994
June
709. Wet Wet Wet - Love Is All Around 4/6/1994
Sept
710. Whigfield - Saturday Night 17/9/1994
Oct
711. Take That - Sure 15/10/1994
712. Pato Banton (with Robin & Ali Campbell) - Baby Come Back 29/10/1994
Nov
713. Baby D - Let Me Be Your Fantasy 26/11/1994
Dec
714. East 17 - Stay Another Day 10/12/1994
1995
715. Rednex.. Cotton Eye Joe 14/1/1995
Feb
716. Celine Dion.. Think Twice 4/2/1995
March
717. Cher,Chrissie Hynde,Neneh Cherry & Eric Clapton.. Love Can Build A Bridge 25/3/1995
April
718. Outhere Brothers.. Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) 1/4/1995
719. Take That.. Back For Good 8/4/1995
May
720. Oasis Some.. Might Say 6/5/1995
721. Livin' Joy.. Dreamer 13/5/1995
722. Robson Green & Jerome Flynn.. Unchained Melody / White Cliffs Of Dover 20/5/1995
June
723. Outhere Brothers.. Boom Boom Boom 8/7/1995
Aug
724. Take That.. Never Forget 5/8/1995
725. Blur.. Country House 26/8/1995
Sept
726. Michael Jackson.. You Are Not Alone 9/9/1995
727. Shaggy - Boombastic 23/9/1995
728. Simply Red - Fairground 30/9/1995
Oct
729. Coolio featuring LV Gangsta's.. Paradise 28/10/1995
Nov
730. Robson & Jerome.. I Believe / Up On The Roof 11/11/1995
Dec
731. Michael Jackson.. Earth Song 9/12/1995
1996
732. George Michael - Jesus To A Child 20/1/1996
733. Babylon Zoo, Spaceman 27/1/1996
March
734. Oasis, Don't Look Back In Anger 2/3/1996
735. Take That, How Deep Is Your Love 9/3/1996 .
736. Prodigy, Firestarter 30/3/1996
737. Mark Morrison, Return Of The Mack 20/4/1996
May
738. George Michael, Fastlove 4/5/1996 .
739. Gina G Ooh Aah Just A Little Bit 25/5/1996
June
740. Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds.. Three Lions 1/6/1996 .
741. Fugees, Killing Me Softly 8/6/1996
July
742. Gary Barlow, Forever Love 20/7/1996 .
743. Spice Girls, Wannabe 27/7/1996
Sept
744. Peter Andre, Flava 14/9/1996
745. Fugees, Ready Or Not 21/9/1996
Oct
746. Deep Blue Something - Breakfast At Tiffany's 5/10/1996
747. Chemical Brothers, Setting Sun 12/10/1996
748. Boyzone, Words 19/10/1996
749. Spice Girls, Say You'll Be There 26/10/1996
Nov
750. Robson & Jerome, What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted / Saturday Night At The Movies / You'll Never Walk Alone 9/11/1996
751. Prodigy, Breathe 23/11/1996
752. Peter Andre, I Feel You 7/12/1996
753. Boyzone, A Different Beat 14/12/1996
754. Dunblane, Knockin' On Heaven's Door / Throw These Guns Away 21/12/1996
755. Spice Girls, 2 Become 1 28/12/1996
1997
756. Tori Amos, Professional Widow (It's Got To Be Big) 18/1/1997
757. White Town, Your Woman 25/1/1997
Feb
759. LL Cool J,, Ain't Nobody 8/2/1997
760. U2, Discotheque 15/2/1997
761. No Doubt, Don't Speak 22/2/1997
March
762. Spice Girls - Mama / Who Do You Think You Are 15/3/1997 "Who Do You Think You Are" was the official Comic Relief single and sold 672,577 copies.
April
763. Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats 5/4/1997
764. R Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly 12/4/1997
May
765. Michael Jackson, Blood On The Dance Floor 3/5/1997
766. Gary Barlow, Love Won't Wait 10/5/1997 .
767. Olive, You're Not Alone 17/5/1997
768. Eternal ft. Bebe Winans - I Wanna Be The One 31/5/1997 .
June
770. Puff Daddy & Faith Evans, I'll Be Missing You 28/6/1997
July
771. Oasis, D'you Know What I Mean 19/7/1997
Aug
772. Will Smith, Men In Black 16/8/1997
Sept
773. Verve, The Drugs Don't Work 13/9/1997
774. Elton John, Candle In The Wind 97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight 20/9/1997
Oct
775. Spice Girls, Spice Up Your Life 25/10/1997
Nov
776. Aqua, Barbie Girl 1/11/1997
777. Various Artists, Perfect Day 29/11/1997
Dec
778. Teletubbies, Teletubbies Say Eh-oh! 13/12/1997
779. Spice Girls, Too Much 27/12/1997
1998
780. All Saints - Never Ever 17/1/1998
781. Oasis - All Around The World 24/1/1998
782. Usher - You Make Me Wanna... 31/1/1998
Feb
783. Aqua - Doctor Jones 7/2/1998
784. Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On 21/2/1998
785. Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha 28/2/1998
March
787. Run DMC vs Jason Nevins- It's Like That 21/3/1998
May
788. Boyzone - All That I Need 2/5/1998
789. All Saints - Under The Bridge / Lady Marmalade 9/5/1998
790. Aqua - Turn Back Time 16/5/1998
791. Tamperer featuring Maya - Feel It 30/5/1998
June
792. B*Witched - C'est La Vie 6/6/1998
793. Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds - Three Lions '98 20/6/1998 .
July
794. Billie - Because We Want To 11/7/1998
795. Another Level - Freak Me 18/7/1998
796. Jamiroquai - Deeper Underground 25/7/1998
Aug
797. Spice Girls - Viva Forever 1/8/1998
798. Boyzone - No Matter What 15/8/1998
Sept
799. Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next 5/9/1998
800. All Saints - Bootie Call 12/9/1998
801. Robbie Williams - Millennium 19/9/1998
802. Melanie B featuring Missy Elliott - I Want You Back 26/9/1998
Oct
803. B*Witched - Rollercoaster 3/10/1998
804. Billie - Girlfriend 17/10/1998
805. Spacedust - Gym & Tonic 24/10/1998
806. Cher - Believe 31/10/1998
807. B*Witched - To You I Belong 19/12/1998
808. Spice Girls - Goodbye 26/12/1998
1999
809. Chef - Chocolate Salty Balls (PS I Love You) 2/1/1999
810. Steps - Heartbeat / Tragedy 9/1/1999
811. Fatboy Slim - Praise You 16/1/1999
812. 911 - A Little Bit More 23/1/1999
813. Offspring Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) 30/1/1999
Feb
814. Armand Van Helden featuring Duane Haeden - You Don't Know Me 6/2/1999
815. Blondie - Maria 13/2/1999
816. Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away 20/2/1999
817. Britney Spears - Baby One More Time 27/2/1999 .
March
818. Boyzone - When The Going Gets Tough 13/3/1999 The official Comic Relief single
819. B*Witched - Blame It On The Weatherman 27/3/1999
April
820. Mr Oizo - Flat Beat 3/4/1999
821. Martine McCutcheon - Perfect Moment 17/4/1999
May
822. Westlife - Swear It Again 1/5/1999
823. Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way 15/5/1999
824. Boyzone - You Needed Me 22/5/1999
825. Shanks & Bigfoot - Sweet Like Chocolate 29/5/1999
June
826. Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen): The Sunscreen Song (Class of 99) 12/6/1999
827. S Club 7 - Bring It All Back 19/6/1999
828. Vengaboys - Boom Boom Boom Boom!! 26/6/1999
July
829. ATB - 9PM (Till I Come) 3/7/1999
830. Ricky Martin - Livin' La Vida Loca 17/7/1999
831. Ronan Keating - When You Say Nothing At All 7/8/1999
Aug
832. Westlife - If I Let You Go 21/8/1999
833. Geri Halliwell - Mi Chico Latino 28/8/1999
Sept
834. Lou Bega - Mambo No 5 4/9/1999
835. Vengaboys - We're Going To Ibiza 18/9/1999
836. Eiffel 65 Blue (Da Ba Dee) 25/9/1999
Oct
837. Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle 16/10/1999
838. Westlife - Flying Without Wings 30/10/1999
Nov
839. Five - Keep On Movin' 6/11/1999
840. Geri Halliwell - Lift Me Up 13/11/1999
841. Robbie Williams - She's The One / It's Only Us 20/11/1999
842. Wamdue Project - King Of My Castle 27/11/1999
Dec
843. Cliff Richard - Millennium Prayer 4/12/1999
844. Westlife - I Have A Dream / Seasons In The Sun 25/12/1999
2000
845. Manic Street Preachers - The Masses Against The Classes 22/1/2000
846. Britney Spears - Born To Make You Happy 29/1/2000
Feb
848. Oasis - Go Let It Out 19/2/2000
849. All Saints - Pure Shores 26/2/2000
March
850. Madonna - American Pie 11/3/2000
851. Chicane featuring Bryan Adams - Don't Give Up 18/3/2000
852. Geri Halliwell - Bag It Up 25/3/2000
April
853. Melanie C with Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes - Never Be The Same Again 1/4/2000
854. Westlife - Fool Again 8/4/2000
855. Craig David - Fill Me In 15/4/2000
856. Fragma Toca's Miracle 22/4/2000
May
857. Oxide & Neutrino - Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty) 6/5/2000
858. Britney Spears - Oops!... I Did It Again 13/5/2000
859. Madison Avenue - Don't Call Me Baby 20/5/2000
860. Billie Piper - Day & Night 27/5/2000
June
861. Sonique - It Feels So Good 3/6/2000 (3 weeks)
862. Black Legend - You See The Trouble With Me 24/6/2000
July
863. Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around 1/7/2000
864. Eminem - Real Slim Shady 8/7/2000
865. Corrs - Breathless 15/7/2000
866. Ronan Keating - Life Is A Rollercoaster 22/7/2000
867. Five and Queen - We Will Rock You 29/7/2000
Aug
868. Craig David - 7 Days 5/8/2000
869. Robbie Williams - Rock DJ 12/8/2000
870. Melanie C- I Turn To You 19/8/2000
871. Spiller - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) 26/8/2000
Sept
873. A1 - Take On Me 9/9/2000
874. Modjo - Lady (Hear Me Tonight) 16/9/2000
875. Mariah Carey & Westlife - Against All Odds 30/9/2000
Oct
876. All Saints - Black Coffee 14 Oct
877. U2 - Beautiful Day 21/10/2000
878. Steps - Stomp 28/10/2000
879. Spice Girls - Holler / Let Love Lead The Way 4/11/2000
880. Westlife - My Love 11/11/2000
881. A1 - Same Old Brand New You 18/11/2000
882. LeAnn Rimes - Can't Fight The Moonlight 25/11/2000
Dec
883. Destiny's Child - Independent Women Part 1 2/12/2000
884. S Club 7 - Never Had A Dream Come True 9/12/2000
885. Eminem Stan 16/12/2000
886. Bob The Builder - Can We Fix It 23/12/2000 (3 weeks)
2001
887. Rui Da Silva featuring Cassandra.. Touch Me 13/1/2001
888. Jennifer Lopez.. Love Don't Cost A Thing 20/1/2001
889. Limp Bizkit.. Rollin' 27/1/2001
Feb
890. Atomic Kitten.. Whole Again 10/2/2001 (4 weeks)
March
891. Shaggy featuring Rikrok.. It Wasn't Me 10/3/2001
892. Westlife.. Uptown Girl 17/3/2001
893. Hear'Say.. Pure And Simple 24/3/2001
April
894. Emma Bunton.. What Took You So Long 14/4/2001
895. Destiny's Child.. Survivor 28/4/2001
May
896. S Club 7.. Don't Stop Movin' 5/5/2001
897. Geri Halliwell.. It's Raining Men 12/5/2001
June
898. DJ Pied Piper Do You Really Like It 2/6/2001
899. Shaggy featuring Rayvon.. Angel 9/6/2001
900. Christina Aguilera / Lil' Kim, Mya & Pink.. Lady Marmalade 30/6/2001
July
901. Hear'Say.. The Way To Your Love 7/7/2001
902. Roger Sanchez .. Another Chance 14/7/2001
903. Robbie Williams.. Eternity/The Road To Mandalay 21/7/2001
Aug
904. Atomic Kitten.. Eternal Flame 4/8/2001
905. So Solid Crew.. 21 Seconds 18/8/2001
906. Five.. Let's Dance 25/8/2001
Sept
907. Blue.. Too Close 8/9/2001
908. Bob The Builder.. Mambo No 5 15/9/2001
909. DJ Otzi.. Hey Baby 22/9/2001
910. Kylie Minogue.. Can't Get You Out Of My Head 29/9/2001
Oct
911. Afroman.. Because I Got High 27/10/2001
Nov
912. Westlife.. Queen of My Heart 17/11/2001
913. Blue.. If You Come Back 24/11/2001
Dec
914. S Club 7.. Have You Ever 1/12/2001
915. Daniel Bedingfield.. Gotta Get Thru This 8/12/2001
916. Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman.. Somethin' Stupid 22/12/2001
2002
917. Aaliyah.. More Than A Woman 19/1/2002
918. George Harrison.. My Sweet Lord 26/1/2002
Feb
919. Enrique Iglesias.. Hero 2/2/2002 (4 weeks)
March
920. Westlife.. World Of Our Own 2/3/2002
921. Will Young.. Anything Is Possible / Evergreen 9/3/2002
922. Gareth Gates.. Unchained Melody 30/3/2002 (4 weeks)
April
923. Oasis.. The Hindu Times 27/4/2002
May
924. Sugababes.. Freak Like Me 4/5/2002
925. Holly Valance.. Kiss Kiss 11/5/2002
926. Ronan Keating.. If Tomorrow Never Comes 18/5/2002
927. Liberty X.. Just a Little 25/5/2002
June
928. Eminem.. Without Me 1/6/2002
929. Will Young.. Light My Fire 8/6/2002
930. Elvis vs JXL.. A Little Less Conversation 22/6/2002 (4 weeks)
July
931. Gareth Gates.. Anyone Of Us (Stupid Mistake) 20/7/2002
Aug
933. Sugababes.. Round Round 24/8/2002
934. Blazin' Squad.. Crossroads 31/8/2002
Sept
935. Atomic Kitten.. The Tide Is High (Get The Feeling) 7/9/2002
936. Pink.. Just Like A Pill 28/9/2002
Oct
937. Will Young & Gareth Gates.. The Long And Winding Road / Suspicious Minds 5/10/2002
938. Las Ketchup.. The Ketchup Song (Asereje) 19/10/2002
939. Nelly feat. Kelly Rowland.. Dilemma 26/10/2002
Nov
940. DJ Sammy & Yanou feat. Do Heaven 9/11/2002
941. Westlife.. Unbreakable 16/11/2002
942. Christina Aguilera.. Dirty 23/11/2002
Dec
943. Daniel Bedingfield.. If You're Not The One 7/12/2002
944. Eminem.. Lose Yourself 14/12/2002
945. Blue feat. Elton John.. Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word 21/12/2002
946. Girls Aloud.. Sound Of The Underground 28/12/2002 (4 weeks)
2003
947: David Sneddon: Stop Living The Lie 25/1/2003
Feb
948: Tatu: All The Things She Said 8/2/2003
March
949: Christina Aguilera: Beautiful 8/3/2003
950: Gareth Gates: Spirit In The Sky 22/3/2003
April
951: Room 5 feat. Oliver Cheatham: Make Luv 5/4/2003
May
952: Busted: You Said No 3/5/2003
953: Tomcraft: Loneliness 10/5/2003
954: R Kelly: Ignition 17/5/2003
June
955: Evanescence: Bring Me To Life 14/6/2003
July
956: Beyonce: Crazy In Love 12/7/2003
Aug
957: Daniel Bedingfield: Never Gonna Leave Your Side 2/8/2003
958: Blu Cantrell Feat. Sean Paul: Breathe 9/8/2003
Sept
959: Elton John: Are You Ready For Love? 6/9/2003
960: Black Eyed Peas: Where Is The Love? 13/9/2003 (6 weeks)
Oct
961: Sugababes: Hole In The Head 25/10/2003
Nov
962: Fatman Scoop: Be Faithful 1/11/2003
963: Kylie Minogue: Slow 15/11/2003
964: Busted: Crashed The Wedding 22/11/2003
965: Westlife: Mandy 29/11/2003
966: Will Young: Leave Right Now 6/12/2003
967: Kelly & Ozzy Osbourne: Changes 20/12/2003
968: Michael Andrews feat. Gary Jules: Mad World 27/12/2003
2004
969: Michelle McManus: All This Time 17/1/2004
February
970: LMC V U2: Take Me To The Clouds Above 7/2/2004
971: Sam & Mark: With A Little Help From My Friends / Measure Of A Man 21/2/2004
972: Busted: Who's David 28/2/2004
March
973: Peter Andre: Mysterious Girl 6/3/2004
974: Britney Spears: Toxic 13/3/2004
975: DJ Casper Cha Cha Slide 20/3/2004
976: Usher: Yeah 27/3/2004
977: McFly: Five Colours In Her Hair 10/4/2004
978: Eamon: F**k It (I Don't Want You Back) 24/4/2004 (4 weeks)
May
979: Frankee: F.U.R.B (F U Right Back) 22/5/2004
June
980: Mario Winans feat. Enya & P.Diddy: I Don't Wanna Know 12/6/2004
981: Britney Spears: Everytime 26/6/2004
July
984: Shapeshifters: Lola's Theme 24/7/2004
985: The Streets: Dry Your Eyes 31/7/2004
August
986: Busted: Thunderbirds / 3AM 7/8/2004
987: 3 Of A Kind: Babycakes 21/8/2004
988: Natasha Bedingfield: These Words 28/8/2004
September
989: Nelly: My Place / Flap Your Wings 11/9/2004
990: Brian McFadden: Real To Me 18/9/2004
991: Eric Prydz: Call On Me 25/9/2004
October
992: Robbie Williams: Radio 16/10/2004
November
993: Ja Rule feat. R.Kelly & Ashanti: Wonderful 6/11/2004
994: Eminem: Just Lose It 13/11/2004
995: U2: Vertigo 20/11/2004
996: Girls Aloud: I'll Stand By You 27/11/2004
December
997: Band Aid 20: Do They Know It's Christmas 11/12/2004 (4 weeks)
2005
998: Steve Brookstein - Against All Odds ..8/1/2005 X Factor winner
999: Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock .. 15/1/2005 (No.1 Jan 24th 1958)
1000: Elvis Presley - One Night .. 22/1/2005 (No.1 Jan 30th 1959)
1001:Ciara feat. Petey Pablo - Goodies .. 29/1/2005
February
1002: Elvis Presley - It's Now Or Never .. 5/2/2005 (No.1 Nov 3rd 1960)
1003: Eminem - Like Toy Soldiers .. 12/2/2005
1004: U2 - Sometimes You Cant Make It On Your Own .. 19/2/2005
1005: Jennifer Lopez - Get Right .. 26/2/2005
March
1006: Nelly featuring Tim McGraw - Over and Over .. 5/3/2005
1007: Stereophonics - Dakota .. 12/3/2005
1008: McFly - All About You / You've Got A Friend 19/3/2005 Official Comic Relief single
1009: Tony Christie feat. Peter Kay (Is This The Way To) Amarillo .. 26/3/2005 (7) The 2nd Comic Relief single
May
1010: Akon - Lonely .. 14/5/05 (2)
1011: Oasis - Lyla .. 28/5/05 (1)
June
1012: Crazy Frog - Axel F .. 05/6/2005 (4) in@ No.1 (First RINGTONE to chart in UK)
July
1013: 2Pac feat. Elton John - Ghetto Gospel .. 2/7/2005
1014: James Blunt - You're Beautiful .. 23/7/2005
August
1015: McFly - I'll Be OK .. 27/8/2005
September
1016: Oasis - The Importance Of Being Idle .. 3/9/2005
1017: Gorillaz - Dare .. 10/9/2005
1018: Pussycat Dolls Ft Busta Rhymes - Don't Cha .. 17/9/2005
October
1019: Sugababes - Push The Button .. 8/10/2005 (3)
1020: Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor .. 29/10/2005 (1) ..
November
1021: Westlife - You Raise Me Up ..5/11/05 (2)
1022: Madonna - Hung Up .. 19/11/05 (3)
December
1023: Pussycat Dolls - Stickwitu ..10/12/05 (2)
1024: Nizlopi - JCB Song .. 24/12/05 (1)
1025: Shayne Ward - That's My Goal .. 31/12/05 (4) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2006
1026: Arctic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down .. 28/1/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
February
1027: Notorious BIG/ P Diddy/ Nelly - Nasty Girl .. 4/2/06 (2)
1028: Meck Ft Leo Sayer - Thunder In My Heart Again .. 18/2/06 (2) in@ No.1 ..
March
1029: Madonna - Sorry .. 4/3/06 (1) in@ No.1
1030: Chico - It's Chico Time .. 11/3/06 (2) in@ No.1
1031: Orson - No Tomorrow .. 25/3/06 (1) ..
April
1032: Ne*Yo - So Sick .. 1/4/06 (1)
1033: Gnarls Barkley - Crazy .. 8/4/06 (9) in@ No.1
June
1034: Sandi Thom - I Wish I A Punk Rocker .. 10/6/06 (1) ..
1035: Nelly Furtado - Maneater .. 17/6/06 (3)
July
1036: Shakira Ft Wyclef Jean - Hips Don't Lie .. 8/7/06 (1)
1037: Lily Allen - Smile .. 15/7/06 (2)
1038: McFly - Don't Stop Me Now/please Please .. 29/7/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
August
r/e. : Shakira Ft Wyclef Jean - Hips Don't Lie .. 5/8/06 (4)
September
1039: Beyonce Ft Jay-z - Deja Vu .. 2/9/06 (1)
1040: Justin Timberlake - Sexyback .. 9/9/06 (1) in@ No.1..
1041: Scissor Sisters - I Don't Feel Like Dancin' .. 16/9/06 (4)
October
1042: Razorlight - America .. 14/10/06 (1)..
1043: My Chemical Romance - Welcome To The Black Parade .. 21/10/06 (2)..
November
1044: McFly - Star Girl .. 4/11/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
1045: Fedde Le Grand - Put Your Hands Up For Detroit ..11/11/06 (1) ..
1046: Westlife - The Rose .. 18/11/06 (1) in@ No.1
1047: Akon Ft Eminem - Smack That .. 25/11/2006 (1)
December
1048: Take That - Patience .. 2/12/2006 (4)
1049: Leona Lewis - A Moment Like This .. 30/12/2006 (4) in@ No.1 .. X Factor winner
2007
1050: Mika - Grace Kelly .. 27/01/07 (5) ..
March
1051: Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby .. 03/03/07 (1) ..
1052: Take That - Shine .. 10/03/07 (2)
1053: Sugababes Vs Girls Aloud - Walk This Way .. 24/03/07 (2) The official Comic Relief single
1054: Proclaimers/B.Potter/A.Pipkin - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) .. 31/03/07 (3) in@ No.1 also released for the Comic Relief charity. Its sales were double that of the "official" Comic Relief single.
April
1055: Timbaland/Nelly Furtado/Justin Timberlake - Give It To Me .. 21/04/07 (1)
1056: Beyonce & Shakira - Beautiful Liar .. 28/04/07 (4) ..
May
1057: McFly - Baby's Coming Back/Transylvania .. 19/05/07 (1) in@ No.1
1058: Rihanna ft Jay.Z - Umbrella .. 26/05/07 (10) in@ No.1
August
1059: Timbaland Ft Keri Hilson - The Way I Are .. 4/08/07 (2)..
1060: Robyn With Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat .. 18/08/2007 (1)
1061: Kanye West - Stronger .. 25/08/2007 (2)
September
1062: Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls .. 08/09/2007 (4)
October
1063: Sugababes - About You Now .. 06/10/2007 (4)
November
1064: Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love .. 03/11/2007 (7) in@ No.1 ..
December
1065: Eva Cassidy & Katie Melua - What A Wonderful World .. 22/12/2007 (1) in@ No.1 ..
1066: Leon Jackson - When You Believe .. 29/12/2007 (3) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2008
1067: Basshunter Ft. Dj Mental Theo - Now You're Gone .. w/e 19/01/2008 (5)
February
1068: Duffy - Mercy .. w/e 23/02/2008 (5) in@ No.1
March
1069: Estelle Ft Kanye West - American Boy .. w/e 29/03/2008 (4) in@ No.1 ..
April
1070: Madonna Ft Justin Timberlake - 4 Minutes .. w/e 26/04/2008 (4)
May
1071: Ting Tings - That's Not My Name .. w/e 24/05/2008 (1) in@ No.1
1072: Rihanna - Take A Bow .. 31/05/2008 (2)
June
1073: Mint Royale - Singin' In The Rain .. 14/06/2008 (2) in@ No.1 ..
1074: Coldplay - Viva La Vida .. 28/06/2008 (1) in@ No.1
July
1075: Ne-Yo . - Closer .. 05/07/2008 (1)
1076: Dizzee Rascal /Calvin Harris /Chrome - Dance Wiv Me .. 12/07/2008 (4) in@ No.1
August
1077: Kid Rock - All Summer Long .. 09/08/2008 (1) ..
1078: Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl .. 16/08/2008 (5)
September
1079: Kings Of Leon - Sex On Fire .. 20/09/2008 (3) in@ No.1 ..
October
1080: Pink - So What .. 11th Oct (3)
November
1081: Girls Aloud - The Promise .. 1st Nov (1) in@ No.1
1082: X Factor Finalists - Hero .. 7th Nov (3) in@ No.1
1083: Beyonce - If I Were A Boy .. 29 Nov (1)
December
1084: Take That - Greatest Day .. 06 Dec (1) in@ No.1 ..
1085: Leona Lewis - Run .. 13 Dec (2) in@ No.1
1086: Alexandra Burke - Hallelujah .. 27 Dec (3) [email protected] X Factor winner
2009
1087: Lady Gaga - Just Dance .. w/e Jan 17th (3)
February
1088: Lily Allen - The Fear.. w/e Feb 07th (4) in@ No.1
March
1089: Kelly Clarkson - My Life Would Suck Without You.. w/e March 07 (1) in@ No.1
1090: Flo Rida Ft Kesha - Right Round.. w/e March 14 (1) in@ No.1 ..
No.2 in the charts .. "Just Can't Get Enough" - The Saturdays .. the first official Comic Relief single not to reach No.1 in 14 years.
1091: Jenkins/West/Jones/Gibb - Islands In The Stream.. w/e March 21 (1) in@ No.1 ..The second Comic Relief 2009 single.
1092: Lady Gaga - Poker Face.. w/e March 28 (3)
April
1093: Calvin Harris - I'm Not Alone.. w/e April 18 (2) in@ No.1
May
1094: Tinchy Stryder Ft N-dubz - Number 1.. w/e May 02 (3) in@ No.1
1095: Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow.. w/e May 23 (1) in@ No.1
1096: Dizzee Rascal / Armand Van Helden - Bonkers.. w/e May 30 (2) in@ No.1
June
r/e.. : Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow.. w/e June 13 (1)
1097: Pixie Lott - Mama Do.. w/e June 20 (1) in@ No.1
1098: David Guetta Ft Kelly Rowland - When Love Takes Over.. w/e June 27 (1) ..
July
1099: La Roux - Bulletproof.. w/e July 4 (1) in@ No.1
1100: Cascada - Evacuate The Dancefloor.. w/e 11 July (2) in@ No.1
1101: JLS - Beat Again.. w/e 25 July (1) in@ No.1
August
1102: Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling.. w/e 08 Aug (1)
1103: Tinchy Stryder Ft Amelle - Never Leave You.. w/e 15 Aug (1) in@ No.1
r/e ..: Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling.. w/e 22 Aug (1)
1104: David Guetta Ft Akon - Sexy Chick.. w/e 29 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
September
1105: Dizzee Rascal - Holiday.. w/e 05 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1106: Jay-Z Ft Rihanna & Kanye West - Run This Town.. w/e 12 Sept (1) in@ No.1 ..
1107: Pixie Lott - Boys & Girls.. w/e 19 Sept (1)
1108: Taio Cruz - Break Your Heart.. w/e 26 Sept (3) in@ No.1
October
1109: Chipmunk - Oopsy Daisy.. w/e 17 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1110: Alexandra Burke ft. Flo Rida - Bad Boys .. w/e 24 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1111: Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love.. w/e 31 Oct (2) in@ No.1 ..
November
1112: JLS - Everybody In Love.. w/e 14 Nov (1) in@ No.1 ..
1113: Black Eyed Peas - Meet Me Halfway.. w/e 21 Nov (1) ..
1114: X Factor Finalists 2009 - You Are Not Alone.. w/e 28 Nov (1) in@ No.1
December
1115: Peter Kay's Animated All Star Band - BBC Children In Need Medley.. w/e 05 Dec (2)
1116: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance.. w/e 19 Dec (1)
1117: Rage Against the Machine - Killing In The Name.. w/e 26 Dec (1) in@ No.1
2010
1118: Joe McElderry - The Climb.. w/e 02 Jan (1) X Factor winner
r/e....: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance.. w/e 09 Jan (1) ..
1119: Iyaz - Replay.. w/e 16 Jan (2) in@ No.1
1120: Owl City - Fireflies.. w/e 30 Jan (3) ..
February
1121: Helping Haiti - Everybody Hurts.. w/e 20 Feb (2) in@ No.1
March
1122: Jason Derulo - In My Head.. w/e 06 March (1) in@ No.1
1123: Tinie Tempah - Pass Out.. w/e 13 March (2) in@ No.1 ..
1124: Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncé - Telephone.. w/e 27 March (2)
April
1125: Scouting for Girls - This Ain't A Love Song.. w/e 10 April (2) in@ No.1 ..
1126: Usher ft. will.i.am - OMG.. w/e 24 April (1)
May
1127: Diana Vickers - Once.. w/e 01 May (1) in@ No.1
1128: Roll Deep - Good Times.. w/e 08 May (3) in@ No.1 ..
1129: B.o.B ft Bruno Mars - Nothin' On You.. w/e 29 May (1) in@ No.1
June
1130: Dizzee Rascal - Dirtee Disco.. w/e 05 June (1) in@ No.1 ..
1131: David Guetta ft. Chris Willis - Gettin' Over You.. w/e 12 June (1) in@ No.1 ..
1132: Shout ft. Dizzee & James Corden - Shout For England.. w/e 19 June (2) in@ No.1 ..
July
1133: Katy Perry ft.Snoop Dogg - California Gurls.. w/e 03 July (2) in@ No.1 ..
1134: JLS - The Club Is Alive.. w/e 17 July (1) in@ No.1 ..
1135: B.o.B ft. Hayley Williams - Airplanes.. w/e 24 July (1) ..
1136: Yolanda Be Cool Vs D Cup - We No Speak Americano.. w/e 31 July (1) ..
August
1137: Wanted - All Time Low.. w/e 07 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
1138: Ne-Yo - Beautiful Monster.. w/e 14 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
1139: Flo Rida Club ft. David Guetta - Can't Handle Me.. w/e 21 Aug (1)
1140: Roll Deep - Green Light.. w/e 28 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
September
1141: Taio Cruz - Dynamite.. w/e 04 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1142: Olly Murs - Please Don't Let Me Go.. w/e 11 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1143: Alexandra Burke ft. Laza Morgan - Start Without You.. w/e 18 Sept (2) in@ No.1 ..
October
1144: Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are (Amazing).. w/e 02 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1145: Tinie Tempah - Written In The Stars.. w/e 09 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1146: Cee Lo Green - Forget You.. w/e 16 Oct (2) in@ No.1
r/e...: Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are (Amazing).. w/e 30 Oct (1) ..
November
1147: Cheryl Cole - Promise This.. w/e 06 Nov (1) in@ No.1
1148: Rihanna - Only Girl (In The World).. w/e 13 Nov (2) ..
1149: JLS - Love You More.. w/e 27 Nov (1) in@ No.1 .
December
1150: The X Factor Finalists 2010 - Heroes.. w/e 04 Dec (2) in@ No.1 .
1151: The Black Eyed Peas - The Time (Dirty Bit).. w/e 18 Dec (1).
1152: Matt Cardle - When We Collide.. w/e 25 Dec (3) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2011
1153: Rihanna ft. Drake - What's My Name.. w/e 15 Jan (1).
1154: Bruno Mars - Grenade.. w/e 22 Jan (2) in@ No.1.
February
1155: Kesha - We R Who We R.. w/e 05 Feb (1)
1156: Jessie J ft. B.o.B - Price Tag.. w/e 12 Feb (2) in@ No.1
1157: Adele - Someone Like You.. w/e 26 Feb (4)
March
1158: Nicole Scherzinger - Don't Hold Your Breath.. w/e 26 March (1) in@ No.1
April
r/e.,.: Adele - Someone Like You.. w/e 02 April (1)
1159: Jennifer Lopez ft. Pitbull - On The Floor.. w/e 09 April (2) in@ No.1
1160: LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem.. w/e 23 April (4).
May
1161: Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song.. w/e 21 May (1).
1162: Pitbull ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer - Give Me Everything.. w/e May 28 (3)
June
1163: Example - Changed The Way You Kiss Me.. w/e 18 June (2) in@ No.1.
July
1164: Jason Derulo - Don't Wanna Go Home.. w/e 02 July (2) in@ No.1.
1165: DJ Fresh ft. Sian Evans - Louder.. w/e 16 July (1) in@ No.1
1166: The Wanted - Glad You Came.. w/e 23 July (2) in@ No.1
August
1167: JLS ft. Dev - She Makes Me Wanna.. w/e 06 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1168: Cher Lloyd - Swagger Jagger.. w/e 13 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1169: Nero - Promises.. w/e 20 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1170: Wretch 32 ft.Josh Kumra - Don't Go.. w/e 27 Aug (1) in@ No.1
September
1171: Olly Murs ft. Rizzle Kicks - Heart Skips A Beat.. w/e 03 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
1172: Example - Stay Awake.. w/e 10 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1173: Pixie Lott - All About Tonight.. w/e 17 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
1174: One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful.. w/e 24 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
October
1175: Dappy - No Regrets.. w/e 01 Oct (1) in@ No.1
1176: Sak Noel - Loca People .. w/e 08 Oct (1) in@ No.1.
1177: Rihanna ft.Calvin Harris - We Found Love .. w/e 15 Oct (3) in@ No.1 .
November
1178: Professor Green ft.Emeli Sande - Read All About It .. w/e 05 Nov (2) [email protected] .
R / E: Rihanna ft.Calvin Harris - We Found Love .. w/e 26 Nov (3)
December
1179: The X Factor Finalists 2011 - Wishing On A Star .. w/e Dec 10 (1) [email protected]
1180: Olly Murs - Dance With Me Tonight .. w/e Dec 17 (1)
1181: Little Mix - Cannonball .. w/e Dec 24 (1) [email protected] X Factor winner
1182: Military Wives with Gareth Malone - Wherever You Are .. w/e Dec 31 (1) [email protected]
2012
1183: Coldplay - Paradise .. w/e Jan 7 (1)
1184: Flo Rida - Good Feeling .. w/e Jan 14 (1)
1185: Jessie J - Domino .. w/e Jan 21 (2)
February
1186: Cover Drive - Twilight .. Feb 04 (1) [email protected]
1187: David Guetta ft Sia - Titanium .. Feb 11 (1)
1188: Gotye Somebody ft Kimbra - That I Used To Know .. Feb 18 (1)
1189: DJ Fresh ft. Rita Ora - Hot Right Now .. Feb 25 (1)
March
R / E: Gotye ft Kimbra - SomebodyThat I Used To Know .. March 03 (4)
1190: Katy Perry - Part Of Me .. March 31 (1) in@ No.1
April
1191: Chris Brown - Turn Up The Music .. April 07 (1) [email protected]
1192: Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe .. April 14 (4)
May
1193: Tulisa - Young .. w/e May 12 (1) [email protected]
1194: Rita Ora ft.Tinie Tempah - R.I.P .. w/e May 19 (2) [email protected]
June
1195: fun ft. Janelle Monae - We Are Young .. w/e June 2 (1)
1196: Rudimental ft. John Newman - Feel The Love .. w/e June 9 (1) [email protected]
1197: Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band - Sing .. w/e June 16 (1)
1198: Cheryl - Call My Name .. w/e June 23 (1) [email protected]
1199: Maroon 5 ft. Wiz Khalifa - Payphone .. w/e June 30 (1) [email protected]
July
1200: will.i.am ft. Eva Simons - This Is Love .. w/e July 7 (1) [email protected]
R / E: Maroon 5 ft.Wiz Khalifa - Payphone .. w/e July 14 (1)
1201: Florence + the Machine (Calvin Harris Mix) - Spectrum (Say My Name) .. w/e July 21 (3)
August
1202: Wiley ft. Rymez & Ms D - Heatwave .. w/e Aug 11 (2) [email protected]
1203: Rita Ora - How We Do (Party) .. w/e Aug 25 (1) [email protected]
September
1204: Sam and The Womp - Bom Bom .. w/e Sept 01 (1) [email protected]
1205: Little Mix - Wings .. w/e Sept 08 (1) [email protected]
1206: Ne-Yo - Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself) .. w/e Sept 15 (1) [email protected]
1207: The Script feat. will.i.am - Hall Of Fame .. w/e Sept 22 (2)
October
1208: PSY - Gangnam Style .. w/e Oct 06 (1)
1209: Rihanna - Diamonds .. w/e Oct 13 (1) [email protected]
1210: Swedish House Mafia ft.John Martin - Don't You Worry Child .. w/e Oct 20 (1) [email protected]
1211: Calvin Harris ft.Florence Welch - Sweet Nothing .. w/e Oct 27 (1) [email protected]
November
1212: Labrinth ft. Emeli Sande - Beneath Your Beautiful .. w/e Nov 03 (1)
1213: Robbie Williams - Candy .. w/e Nov 10 (2) [email protected]
1214: One Direction - Little Things .. Nov 24 (1) [email protected]
December
1215: Olly Murs ft. Flo Rida - Troublemaker .. Dec 01 (2) [email protected]
1216: Gabrielle Aplin - The Power Of Love .. Dec 15 (1)
1217: James Arthur - Impossible .. Dec 22 (1) [email protected] the fastest-selling X Factor single of all time (to date) reaching 255,000 downloads within 48 hours
1218: The Justice Collective - He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother .. Dec 29 (1) [email protected].
2013
R/E .: James Arthur - Impossible .. Jan 05 (2)
1219: will.i.am feat. Britney Spears - Scream & Shout .. Jan 19 (2)
February
1220: Bingo Players ft. Far East Movement - Get Up (Rattle) .. Feb 02 (2) [email protected]
1221: Macklemore - Thrift Shop .. w/e Feb 16 (1)
1222: Avicii vs Nicky Romero - I Could Be The One .. w/e Feb 23 (1) [email protected]
March
1223: One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks) - One Direction .. w/e March 02 (1) [email protected] The official Comic Relief 2013 single.
1224: Justin Timberlake - Mirrors .. w/e March 09 (3)
1225: The Saturdays ft Sean Paul - What About Us .. March 30 (1) [email protected]
April
1226: PJ & Duncan - Let's Get Ready To Rhumble .. April 06 (1) first released July 11th 1994 peaking at No.9. ~ re-released in March 2013, with royalties from sales to be donated to the charity ChildLine.
1227: Duke Dumont ft. A*M*E - Need U (100%) .. April 13 (2) [email protected]
1228: Rudimental ft. Ella Eyre - Waiting All Night .. April 27 (1) [email protected]
May
1229: Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams - Get Lucky .. May 04 (4)
June
1230: Naughty Boy ft. Sam Smith - La La La .. June 01 (1) [email protected]
1231: Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams & T.I. - Blurred Lines .. June 08 (4) [email protected]
July
1232: Icona Pop ft. Charli XCX - I Love It .. July 06 (1) [email protected]
1233: John Newman - Love Me Again .. July 13 (1) [email protected]
R/E .: Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams & T.I. - Blurred Lines .. July 20 (1)
1234: Avicii - Wake Me Up .. July 27 (3) [email protected]
August
1235: Miley Cyrus - We Can't Stop .. Aug 17 (1) [email protected]
1236: Ellie Goulding - Burn .. Aug 24 (3) [email protected]
September
1237: Katy Perry - Roar .. Sept 14 (2) [email protected]
1238: Jason Derulo ft. 2 Chainz - Talk Dirty .. Sept 28 (2) [email protected]
October
1239: OneRepublic - Counting Stars .. Oct 12 (1)
1240: Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball .. Oct 19 (1) [email protected]
R/E .: OneRepublic - Counting Stars .. Oct 26 (1)
November
1241: Lorde - Royals .. Nov 02 (1) [email protected]
1242: Eminem ft Rihanna - The Monster .. Nov 09 (1) [email protected]
1243: Storm Queen - Look Right Through .. Nov 16 (1)
1244: Martin Garrix - Animals .. Nov 23 (1) [email protected]
1245: Lily Allen - Somewhere Only We Know .. Nov 30 (1)
December
1246: Calvin Harris/Alesso/Hurts - Under Control .. Dec 07 (1) [email protected]
R/E .:.Lily Allen - Somewhere Only We Know .. Dec 14 (2)
1247: Sam Bailey - Skyscaper .. Dec 28 (1) [email protected] Xmas No.1
2014
1248: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. Jan 04 (1).
1249: Pitbull ft Kesha - Timber .. Jan 11 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. Jan 18 (2).
February
1250: Clean Bandit ft. Jess Glynne - Rather Be .. Feb 01 (4) [email protected]
March
1251: Sam Smith - Money On My Mind .. March 01 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. March 08 (1).
1252: Route 94 ft. Jess Glynne - My Love .. March 15 (1) [email protected].
1253: DVBBS & Borgeous ft Tinie Tempah - Tsunami (Jump) .. March 22 (1) [email protected].
1254: Duke Dumont ft Jax Jones - I Got U .. March 29 (1) [email protected]
April
1255: 5 Seconds Of Summer - She Looks So Perfect .. April 05 (1) [email protected].
1256: Aloe Blacc - The Man .. April 12 (1) [email protected].
1257: Sigma - Nobody To Love .. April 19 (1) [email protected].
1258: Kiesza - Hidaway .. April 26 (1) [email protected]
May
1259: Mr Probz - Waves .. May 03 (1) [email protected].
1260: Calvin Harris - Summer .. May 10 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Mr Probz - Waves .. May 17 (1).
1261: Rita Ora - I Will Never Let You Down .. May 24 (1) [email protected].
1262: Sam Smith - Stay With Me .. May 31 (1) [email protected]
June
1263: Secondcity - I Wanna Feel .. June 07 (1) [email protected]
1264: Ed Sheeran - Sing .. June 14 (1) [email protected]
1265: Ella Henderson - Ghost .. June 21 (2) [email protected]
July
1266: Oliver Heldens & Becky Hill - Gecko (Overdrive) .. July 05 (1) [email protected]
1267: Ariana Grande ft Iggy Azalea - Problem .. July 12 (1) [email protected]
1268: Will.i.am ft. Cody Wise - It's My Birthday .. July 19 (1) [email protected]
1269: Rixton - Me And My Broken Heart .. July 26 (1) [email protected]
August
1270: Cheryl Cole ft Tinie Tempah - Crazy Stupid Love .. Aug 02 (1) [email protected]
1271: Magic - Rude .. Aug 09 (1)
1272: Nico & Vinz - Am I Wrong .. Aug 16 (2)
1273: David Guetta ft. Sam Martin - Lovers On The Sun .. Aug 30 (1) [email protected]
September
1274: Lilly Wood & Robin Schulz - Prayer in C .. Sept 06 (2) .
1275: Calvin Harris ft. John Newman - Blame .. Sept 20 (1) [email protected]
1276: Sigma ft. Paloma Faith - Changing .. Sept 27 (1)
October
1277: Jesse J / Grande / Minaj - Bang Bang .. Oct 04 (1) [email protected] .
1278: Meghan Trainor - All About That Bass .. Oct 11 (4) .
November
1279: Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Aloud .. Nov 08 (1)
1280: Cheryl - I Don't Care - Cheryl .. Nov 15 (1) [email protected]
1281: Gareth Malone's All Star Choir - Wake Me Up .. Nov 22 (1) [email protected]
1282: Band Aid 30 - Do They Know It's Christmas .. Nov 29 (1) [email protected]
December
1283: Take That - These Days .. Dec 06 (1) [email protected]
R/E:.: Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Aloud .. Dec 13 (1)
1284: Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk .. Dec 20 (1) [email protected]
1285: Ben Haenow - Something I Need .. Dec 27 (1) [email protected]
2015
R/E:.: Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk .. Jan 03 (6)
February
1286: Ellie Goulding - Love Me Like You Do .. Feb 14 (4) [email protected]
March
1287: Years & Years - King .. March 14 (1) [email protected]
1288: Sam Smith ft.John Legend - Lay Me Down .. March 21 (2) [email protected]
April
1289: Jess Glynne - Hold My Hand .. April 04 (3) [email protected]
1290: Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth - See You Again .. April 25 (2)
May
1291: OMI - Cheerleader .. May 09 (4)
June
1292: Jason Derulo - Want To Want Me .. June 06 (4) [email protected]
July
1293: Tinie Tempah ft Jesse Glynne - Not Letting Go .. July 04 (1)
WEEK ENDING DATE CHANGES TO FRIDAYS
1294: Lost Frequences - Are You With Me .. July 09 (1)
1295: David Zowie - House Every Weekend .. July 16 (1)
1296: Little Mix - Black Magic .. July 23 (3) [email protected]
August
1297: One Direction - Drag Me Down .. Aug 13 (1) [email protected]
1298: Charlie Puth ft Meghan Trainor - Marvin Gaye .. Aug 20 (1)
1299: Jess Glynne - Don't Be So Hard on Yourself .. Aug 27 (1)
September
1300: Rachel Platten - Fight Song .. Sept 03 (1)
1301: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Sept 10 (1) [email protected]
1302: Sigala - Easy Love .. Sept 17 (1)
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Sept 24 (2)
October
1303: Sam Smith - Writing On The Wall .. Oct 08 (1) [email protected].
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Oct 15 (2)
1304: KDA ft Tinie Tempah & Katy B - Turn The Music Louder (Rumble) .. Oct 29 (1) [email protected]
November
1305: Adele - Hello .. Nov 05 (3) [email protected]
1306: Justin Bieber - Sorry .. Nov 26 (2)
December
1307: Justin Bieber - Love Yourself .. Dec 10 (3)
1308: Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir - A Bridge Over You .. Dec 31 (1) [email protected]
2016
January
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - Love Yourself .. Jan 07 (3)
Jan 8th - Jan 14th Justin Bieber holds the 1st, 2nd, 3rd position on the charts; a first in UK chart history
1309: Shawn Mendes - Stitches . . Jan 28 (2)
February
1310: Zayn - Pillowtalk . . Feb 11 (1) in@ No.1
1311: Lukas Graham - 7 Years . . Feb 18 (5)
March
1312: Mike Posner - I Tool A Pill In Ibiza .. March 24 (4)
April
1313: Drake ft. Wizkid & Kyla - One Dance .. April 21 (15)
August
1314: Major Lazer/Justin Beiber/Mo - Cold Water .. Aug 04 (5)
September
1315: Chainsmoker ft Halsey - Closer .. Sept 08 (4)
October
1316: James Arthur - Say You Won't Let Go .. Oct 06 (3)
1317: Little Mix - Shout Out To My Ex .. Oct 27 (3) [email protected]
November
1318: Clean Bandit - Rockabye .. Nov 17 (9) Christmas No.1
2017
January
1319: Ed Sheeran - Shape Of You .. w/e Jan 19 (1) [email protected] "Shape of You" and Ed Sheeran's "Castle on the Hill" debuted on UK Singles Chart at No1 & No.2, the first time in history an artist has taken the top two chart positions with new releases.
UPDATED: January 13th 2016.
A FEW FACTS (UK Singles charts)
Most Consecutive Weeks at No.1
16 weeks: Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You .. 1991
Most Weeks at No.1
18 weeks: Frankie Laine's - I Believe
In 1953 it topped the chart on three separate occasions
Longest Time For A Track To Get To No.1
33 Years, 3 Months, and 27 Days.
Tony Christie "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo"
w/e November 27th 1971 - it reached No.18.
w/e March 26th 2005 - it reached No.1 with the re-release, after comedian Peter Kaye sung the song and made an amusing video with it, featuring many other celebrities. It was in aid of Comic Relief.
it beat the previous record of
29 Years, 1 Month, and 11 Days
Jackie Wilson -"Reet Petite (The Sweetest Girl in Town)" the original subtitle: (The Finest Girl You Ever Want To Meet)
w/e November 15th 1957 - it reached No.6 in the UK charts
w/e December 29th 1986 - it reached No.1 , two years after his death, when it was re-released after being used on an advert for Levi Jeans .
Until 1983, the chart was made available on Tuesdays.
Due to improved technology, from January 1983 it was released on the Sunday.
The convention of using Saturday as the 'week-ending' date
has remained constant throughout.
JULY 2015 .. WEEK-ENDING DATE CHANGES TO THURSDAYS AND RELEASED ON FRIDAYS
Information up to 2004 is from the
"Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums"
2004 onwards from BBC Radio 1
*****************************************
| Blame |
Name the scarey debut Single from Ella Henderson released in June 2014 | UK MUSIC CHARTS, No.1 Singles
1: Al Martino - Here In My Heart - 14/11/1952.
1953
2: Jo Stafford : You Belong To Me - 16/1/1953
3: Kay Starr : Comes A-Long A-Love - 23/1/1953.
4: Eddie Fisher: Outside Of Heaven - 30/1/1953.
Feb
5: Perry Como: Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes - 6/2/1953
March
6: Guy Mitchell: She Wears Red Feathers - 13/3/1953
April
7: Stargazers: Broken Wings - 10/4/1953
8: Lita Roza: (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window - 17/4/1953
9: Frankie Laine: I Believe - 24/4/1953
June
10: Eddie Fisher: I'm Walking Behind You - 26/6/1953
Aug
11: Mantovani Song: from 'The Moulin Rouge' - 14/8/1953
Sept
12: Guy Mitchell: Look At That Girl - 11/9/1953
Oct
13: Frankie Laine: Hey Joe - 23/10/1953
Nov
14: David Whitfield: Answer Me - 6/11/1953
15: Frankie Laine: Answer Me - 13/11/1953
1954
16: Eddie Calvert: Oh Mein Papa 8/1/1954
March
17: Stargazers: I See The Moon 12/3/1954.
April
18: Doris Day: Secret Love 16/4/1954
19: Johnnie Ray: Such A Night 30/4/1954
July
20: David Whitfield: Cara Mia 2/7/1954
Sept
21: Kitty Kallen: Little Things Mean A Lot 10/9/1954
22: Frank Sinatra: Three Coins In The Fountain 17/9/1954
Oct
23: Don Cornell: Hold My Hand 8/10/1954
Nov
24: Vera Lynn: My Son My Son 5/11/1954
25: Rosemary Clooney: This Ole House 26/11/1954
Dec
26: Winifred Atwell: Let's Have Another Party 3/12/1954
1955
27: Dickie Valentine: Finger Of Suspicion 7/1/1955.
28: Rosemary Clooney: Mambo Italiano 14/1/1955
Feb
29: Ruby Murray: Softly, Softly 18/2/1955
March
30: Tennessee Ernie Ford: Give Me Your Word, 11/3/1955
April
31: Perez Prez Prado & His Orchestra: Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White 29/4/1955
May
32: Tony Bennett: Stranger In Paradise 13/5/1955
33: Eddie Calvert: Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White 27/5/1955
June
34: Jimmy Young: Unchained Melody 24/6/1955
July
35: Alma Cogan: Dreamboat 15/7/1955
36: Slim Whitman: Rose Marie 29/7/1955
Oct
37: Jimmy Young: The Man From Laramie 14/10/1955
Nov
38: Johnston Brothers: Hernando's Hideaway 11/11/1955
39: Bill Haley & His Comets: Rock Around The Clock 25/11/1955
Dec
40: Dickie Valentine: Christmas Alphabet 16/12/1955
1956
41: Tennessee Ernie Ford: Sixteen Tons 20/1/1956.
Feb
42: Dean Martin: Memories Are Made Of This 17/2/1956
March
43: Dream Weavers: It's Almost Tomorrow 16/3/1956
44: Kay Starr: Rock And Roll Waltz 30/3/1956
April
45: Winifred Atwell: Poor People Of Paris 13/4/1956
May
46: Ronnie Hilton: No Other Love 4/5/1956
June
47: Pat Boone: I'll Be Home 15/6/1956
July
48: Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers - Why Do Fools Fall in Love 20/7/1956
Aug
49: Doris Day - Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera, Sera) 10/8/1956
Sept
50: Anne Shelton - Lay Down Your Arms 21/9/1956
Oct
51: Frankie Laine - A Woman In Love 19/10/1956
Nov
52: Johnnie Ray - Just Walking In The Rain 16/11/1956
1957
53: Guy Mitchell.. Singing The Blues 4/1/1957
54: Tommy Steele.. Singing The Blues 11/1/1957
55: Frankie Vaughan.. The Garden Of Eden 25/1/1957
Feb
56: Tab Hunter.. Young Love 22/2/1957
April
57: Lonnie Donegan.. Cumberland Gap 12/4/1957
May
58: Guy Mitchell.. Rock-A-Billy 17/5/1957
59: Andy Williams.. Butterfly 24/5/1957
June
60: Johnnie Ray.. Yes Tonight Josephine 7/6/1957
61. Lonnie Donegan.. Puttin' On The Style / Gamblin' Man 28/6/1957
July
62. Elvis Presley.. All Shook Up 12/7/1957
Aug
63. Paul Anka.. Diana 30/8/1957
Nov
64. The Crickets.. That'll Be The Day 1/11/1957
65. Harry Belafonte.. Mary's Boy Child 22/11/1957
1958
66. Jerry Lee Lewis.. Great Balls Of Fire 10/1/1958
67. Elvis Presley.. Jailhouse Rock 24/1/1958
Feb
68. Michael Holliday.. The Story Of My Life 14/2/1958
69. Perry Como.. Magic Moments 28/2/1958
April
70. Marvin Rainwater.. Whole Lotta Woman 25/4/1958
May
71. Connie Francis.. Who's Sorry Now 16/5/1958
June
72. Vic Damone.. On The Street Where You Live 27/6/1958
July
73. Everly Brothers.. All I Have To Do Is Dream / Claudette 4/7/1958
Aug
74. Kalin Twins.. When 22/8/1958
Sept
75. Connie Francis.. Carolina Moon / Stupid Cupid 26/9/1958
Nov
76. Tommy Edwards.. All In The Game 7/11/1958
77. Lord Rockingham's XI.. Hoots Mon 28/11/1958
Dec
78. Conway Twitty.. It's Only Make Believe 19/12/1958
1959
79. Jane Morgan 'The Days The Rains Came' 23/1/1959
80. Elvis Presley 'I Got Stung / One Night' 30/1/1959
Feb
81. Shirley Bassey 'As I Love You' 20/2/1959
March
82. The Platters 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' 20/3/1959
83. Russ Conway 'Side Saddle' 27/3/1959
April
84. Buddy Holly 'It Doesn't Matter Anymore' 24/4/1959
May
85. Elvis Presley 'A Fool Such As I / I Need Your Love Tonight' 15/5/1959
June
86: Russ Conway 'Roulette' 19/6/1959
July
87: Bobby Darin 'Dream Lover' 3/7/1959
88: Cliff Richard 'Living Doll' 31/7/1959
Sept
89: Craig Douglas 'Only Sixteen' 11/9/1959
Oct
90: Jerry Keller 'Here Comes Summer' 9/10/1959
91: Bobby Darin 'Mack The Knife' 16/10/1959
92: Cliff Richard 'Travellin' Light' 30/10/1959
Dec
93: Adam Faith 'What Do You Want' 4/12/1959
94: Emile Ford & The Checkmates: What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For 18/12/1959
1960
95: Michael Holliday 'Starry Eyed' 29/1/1960
Feb
96: Anthony Newley 'Why' 5/2/1960
March
97: Adam Faith 'Poor Me' 10/3/1960
98: Johnny Preston 'Running Bear' 17/3/1960
99: Lonnie Donegan 'My Old Man's A Dustman' 31/3/1960
April
100: Anthony Newley 'Do You Mind' 28/4/1960
May
101: Everly Brothers 'Cathy's Clown' 5/5/1960
June
102: Eddie Cochran 'Three Steps To Heaven' 23/6/1960
July
103: Jimmy Jones 'Good Timin' 7/7/1960
104: Cliff Richard 'Please Don't Tease' 28/7/1960
Aug
105: Johnny Kidd & The Pirates 'Shakin' All Over' 4/8/1960
106: Shadows 'Apache' 25/8/1960
107: Ricky Valence 'Tell Laura I Love Her' 29/9/1960
Oct
108: Roy Orbison 'Only The Lonely' 20/10/1960
Nov
109: Elvis Presley 'It's Now Or Never' 3/11/1960
Dec
110: Cliff Richard 'I Love You' 29/12/1960
1961
111: Johnny Tillotson: Poetry In Motion, 12/1/1961
112: Elvis Presley: Are You Lonesome Tonight, 26/1/1961
Feb
113: Petula Clark: Sailor, 23/2/1961
March
114: Everly Brothers: Walk Right Back, 2/3/1961
115: Elvis Presley: Wooden Heart, 23/3/1961
May
116: The Marcels: Blue Moon, 4/5/1961
117: Floyd Cramer: On The Rebound, 18/5/1961
118: The Temperance Seven: You're Driving Me Crazy, 25/5/1961
June
119: Elvis Presley: Surrender, 1/6/1961
120: Del Shannon: Runaway, 29/6/1961
July
121: Everly Brothers: Temptation, 20/7/1961
Aug
122: Eden Kane: Well I Ask You, 3/8/1961
123: Helen Shapiro: You Don't Know, 10/8/1961
124: John Leyton: Johnny Remember Me, 31/8/196
Sept
125: Shirley Bassey: Reach For The Stars / Climb Ev'ry Mountain, 21/9/1961
Oct
126: Shadows: Kon Tiki - 5/10/1961
127: The Highwaymen: Michael - 12/10/1961
128: Helen Shapiro: Walkin' Back To Happiness - 19/10/1961
Nov
129: Elvis Presley: His Latest Flame - 9/11/1961
Dec
130: Frankie Vaughan: Tower Of Strength - 7/12/1961
131: Danny Williams: Moon River - 28/12/1961
1962
132. Cliff Richard 'The Young Ones' 11/1/1962
Feb
133. Elvis Presley 'Can't Help Falling In Love / Rock-A-Hula Baby' 22/2/1962
March
134. Shadows 'Wonderful Land' 22/3/1962
May
135. B.Bumble & The Stingers 'Nut Rocker' 17/5/1962
136. Elvis Presley 'Good Luck Charm' 24/5/1962
June
137. Mike Sarne with Wendy Richard 'Come Outside' 28/6/1962
jJuly
138. Ray Charles 'I Can't Stop Loving You' 12/7/1962
139. Frank Ifield 'I Remember You' 26/7/1962
Sept
140. Elvis Presley 'She's Not You' 13/9/1962
Oct
142. Frank Ifield 'Lovesick Blues' 8/11/1962
Dec
143. Elvis Presley 'Return To Sender' 13/12/1962
1963
144. Cliff Richard 'The Next Time / Bachelor Boy' 3/1/1963
145. Shadows 'Dance On' 24/1/1963
146. Jet Harris & Tony Meehan 'Diamonds' 31/1/1963
147. Frank Ifield 'Wayward Wind' 21/2/1963
March
148. Cliff Richard 'Summer Holiday' 14/3/1963
149. Shadows 'Foot Tapper' 29/3/1963
April
150. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'How Do You Do It?' 11/4/1963
May
151. Beatles' From Me To You' 2/5/1963
June
152. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'I Like It' 20/6/1963
July
153. Frank Ifield 'Confessin' (That I Love You)' 18/7/1963
Aug
154. Elvis Presley '(You're The) Devil In Disguise' 1/8/1963
155. Searchers 'Sweets For My Sweet' 8/8/1963
156. Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas 'Bad To Me' 22/8/1963
Sept
157. Beatles 'She Loves You' 12/9/1963
Oct
158. Brian Poole & The Tremeloes 'Do You Love Me' 10/10/1963
159. Gerry & The Pacemakers 'You'll Never Walk Alone' 31/10/1963
Dec
160. Beatles 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' 12/12/1963
1964
161 Dave Clark Five.. Glad All Over 16/1/1964
162 Searchers.. Needles & Pins 30/1/1964
Feb
164 Cilla Black.. Anyone Who Had A Heart 27/2/1964
March
165 Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas.. Little Children 19/3/1964
April
166. Beatles.. Can't Buy Me Love 2/4/1964
167. Peter & Gordon.. A World Without Love 23/4/1964
May
168. Searchers.. Don't Throw Your Love Away 7/5/1964
169. Four Pennies.. Juliet 21/5/1964
170. Cilla Black .. You're My World 28/5/1964
June
171. Roy Orbison.. It's Over 25/6/1964
July
172. Animals.. The House Of The Rising Sun 9/7/1964
173. Rolling Stones.. It's All Over now 16/7/1964
174. Beatles.. A Hard Day's Night 23/7/1964
Aug
175. Manfred Mann.. Do Wah Diddy Diddy 13/8/1964
176. Honeycombes.. Have I The Right 27/8/1964
Sept
177. Kinks.. You Really Got Me 10/9/1964
178. Herman's Hermits.. I'm Into Something Good 24/9/1964
Oct
179. Roy Orbison.. Oh Pretty Woman 8/10/1964
180. Sandie Shaw.. (There's) Always Something There To Remind Me 22/10/1964
Nov
181. Supremes.. Baby Love 19/11/1964
Dec
182. Rolling Stones.. Little Red Rooster 3/12/1964
183. Beatles.. I Feel Fine 10/12/1964
1965
184. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames 'Yeh Yeh' 14/1/1965
185. Moody Blues 'Go Now!' 28/1/1965
Feb
186. Righteous Brothers 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' 4/2/1965
187. Kinks 'Tired Of Waiting For You' 18/2/1965
188. Seekers 'I'll Never Find Another You' 25/2/1965
March
189. Tom Jones 'It's Not Unusual' 11/3/1965
190. Rolling Stones 'The Last Time' 18/3/1965
April
191. Unit Four Plus Two 'Concrete & Clay' 8/4/1965
192. Cliff Richard 'The Minute You're Gone' 15/4/1965
193. Beatles 'Ticket To Ride' 22/4/1965
May
194. Roger Miller 'King Of The Road' 13/5/1965
195. Jackie Trent 'Where Are You Now (My Love)' 20/5/1965
196. Sandie Shaw 'Long Live Love' 27/5/1965
197. Elvis Presley 'Crying In The Chapel' 17/6/1965
198. Hollies 'I'm Alive' 24/6/1965
July
199. Byrds 'Mr Tambourine Man' 22/7/1965
Aug
201. Sonny & Cher 'I Got You Babe' 26/8/1965
Sept
202. Rolling Stones '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' 9/9/1965
203. Walker Brothers 'Make It Easy On Yourself' 23/9/1965
204. Ken Dodd 'Tears' 30/9/1965
Nov
205. Rolling Stones 'Get Off Of My Cloud' 4/11/1965
206. Seekers 'The Carnival Is Over' 25/11/1965
Dec
207. Beatles 'Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out' 16/12/1965
1966
208. Spencer Davis Group 'Keep On Running' 20/1/1966
209. Overlanders 'Michelle' 27/1/1966
210. Nancy Sinatra 'These Boots Are Made For Walking' 17/2/1966
March
211. Walker Brothers 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore' 17/3/1966
April
212. Spencer Davis Group 'Somebody Help Me' 14/4/1966
213. Dusty Springfield You 'Don't Have To Say You Love Me' 28/4/1966
May
214. Manfred Mann 'Pretty Flamingo' 5/5/1966
215. Rolling Stones 'Paint It Black' 26/5/1966
June
216. Frank Sinatra 'Strangers In The Night' 2/6/1966
217. Beatles 'Paperback Writer' 23/6/1966
July
218. Kinks 'Sunny Afternoon' 7/7/1966
219. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames 'Get Away' 21/7/1966
220. Chris Farlowe 'Out Of Time' 28/7/1966
Aug
221. Troggs 'With A Girl Like You' 4/8/1966
222. Beatles 'Yellow Submarine / Eleanor Rigby' 18/8/1966
Sept
223. Small Faces 'All Or Nothing' 15/9/1966
224. Jim Reeves 'Distant Drums' 22/9/1966
Oct
225. Four Tops 'Reach Out I'll Be There' 27/10/1966
Nov
226. Beach Boys 'Good Vibrations' 17/11/1966
Dec
227. Tom Jones 'Green Green Grass Of Home' 1/12/1966
1967
228. Monkees 'I'm A Believer' 19/1/1967
Feb
229. Petula Clark 'This Is My Song' 16/2/1967
March
230. Engelbert Humperdink 'Release Me (And Let Me Love Again)' 2/3/1967
April
231. Frank Sinatra & Nancy Sinatra 'Somethin' Stupid' 13/4/1967
232. Sandie Shaw 'Puppet On A String' 27/4/1967
May
233. Tremeloes 'Silence Is Golden' 18/5/1967
June
234. Procol Harum 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' 8/6/1967
July
235. Beatles 'All You Need Is Love' 19/7/1967
Aug
236. Scott McKenzie 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)' 9/8/1967
Sept
237. Engelbert Humperdink 'The Last Waltz' 6/9/1967
Oct
238. Bee Gees 'Massachusetts' 11/10/1967
Nov
239. Foundations - 'Baby Now That I've Found You' 8/11/1967
240. Long John Baldry - 'Let The Heartaches Begin' 22/11/1967
Dec
241. Beatles - 'Hello Goodbye' 6/12/1967
1968
242. Georgie Fame - 'The Ballad Of Bonnie & Clyde' 24/1/1968
243. Love Affair - 'Everlasting Love' 31/1/1968
Feb
244. Manfred Mann - 'The Mighty Quinn' 14/2/1968
245. Esther & Abi Ofarim - 'Cinderella Rockefella' 28/2/1968
March
246. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - 'Legend Of Xanadu' 20/3/1968
247. Beatles - ''Lady Madonna' 27/3/1968
April
248. Cliff Richard - 'Congratulations' 10/4/1968
249. Louis Armstrong -'What A Wonderful World / Cabaret' 24/4/1968
May
250. Union Gap featuring Gary Puckett -'Young Girl' 22/5/1968
June
251. Rolling Stones- 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' 19/6/1968
July
252. Equals - 'Baby Come Back' 3/7/1968
253. Des O'Connor - 'I Pretend' 24/7/1968
254. Tommy James & The Shondells - 'Mony Mony 31/7/1968
Aug
255. Crazy World of Arthur Brown - 'Fire' 14/8/1968
256. Beach Boys - ''Do It Again' 28/8/1968
Sept
257. Bee Gees - 'I've Gotta Get A Message To You' 4/9/1968
258. Beatles -'Hey Jude' 11/9/1968
259. Mary Hopkin - 'Those Were The Days' 25/9/1968
Nov
260. Joe Cocker - 'With A Little Help From My Friends' 6/11/1968
261. Hugo Montenegro Orchestra - 'The Good The Bad And The Ugly' 13/11/1968
262. Scaffold - 'Lily The Pink' 11/12/1968
1969
263. Marmalade - 'Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da' 1/1/1969
264. Fleetwood Mac - Albatross 29/1/69
Feb
265. Move - Blackberry Way 05/2/69
266. Amen Corner '(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice' 12/2/1969
267. Peter Sarstedt 'Where Do You Go To My Lovely?' 26/2/1969
March
268. Marvin Gaye 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' 26/3/1969
April
269. Desmond Dekker & The Aces 'Israelites' 16/4/1969
270. Beatles 'Get Back' 23/4/1969
June
271. Tommy Roe 'Dizzy' 4/6/1969
272. Beatles 'The Ballad Of John & Yoko' 11/6/1969
July
273. Thunderclap Newman 'Something In The Air' 2/7/1969
274. Rolling Stones 'Honky Tonk Women' 23/7/1969
Aug
275. Zager & Evans 'In The Year 2525' (Exorium & Terminus) 30/8/1969
Sept
276. Creedence Clearwater Revival 'Bad Moon Rising' 20/9/1969
Oct
277. Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg 'Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus' 11/10/1969
278. Bobby Gentry 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again' 18/10/1969
279. Archies 'Sugar Sugar' 25/10/1969
Dec
280. Rolf Harris 'Two Little Boys' 20/12/1969
1970
281. Edison Lighthouse 'Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)' 31/1/1970
March
282. Lee Marvin - 'Wandrin' Star' 7/3/1970
283. Simon & Garfunkel - 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' 28/3/1970
April
284. Dana .. 'All Kinds Of Everything' 18/4/1970
May
285. Norman Greenbaum - 'Spirit In The Sky' 2/5/1970
286. England World Cup Squad -'Back Home' 16/5/1970
June
287. Christie - 'Yellow River' 6/6/1970
288. Mungo Jerry - 'In The Summertime' 13/6/1970
Aug
289. Elvis Presley - 'The Wonder Of You' 1/8/1970
Sept
290. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 'Tears Of A Clown' 12/9/1970
291. Freda Payne 'Band Of Gold' 19/9/1970
Oct
292. Matthew's Southern Comfort 'Woodstock' 31/10/1970
Nov
293. Jimi Hendrix 'Voodoo Chile' 21/11/1970
294. Dave Edmunds 'I Hear You Knockin' 28/11/1970
1971
295. Clive Dunn - Grandad 9/1/1971
296. George Harrison - 'My Sweet Lord' 30/1/1971
March
297. Mungo Jerry - 'Baby Jump' 6/3/1971
298. T Rex - 'Hot Love' 20/3/1971
May
299. Dave & Ansil Collins - 'Double Barrel' 1/5/1971
300. Dawn - 'Knock Three Times' 15/5/1971
June
301. Middle Of The Road 'Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep' 19/6/1971
July
302. T Rex 'Get It On' 24/7/1971
Aug
303. Diana Ross 'I'm Still Waiting' 21/8/1971
Sept
304. Tams 'Hey Girl Don't Bother Me' 18/9/1971
Oct
305. Rod Stewart 'Maggie May' 9/10/1971
Nov
306. Slade 'Coz I Luv You' 13/11/1971
Dec
307. Benny Hill 'Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)' 11/12/1971
1972
308. New Seekers - 'I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing' 8/1/1972
Feb
309. T Rex 'Telegram Sam' 5/2/1972
310. Chicory Tip 'Son Of My Father' 19/2/1972
March
311. Nilsson' Without You' 11/3/1972
April
312. The Pipes & Drums & Military Band of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards 'Amazing Grace' 15/4/1972
May
313. T Rex 'Metal Guru' 20/5/1972
June
314. Don McLean 'Vincent' 17/6/1972
July
315. Slade 'Take Me Back 'Ome' 1/7/1972
316. Donny Osmond 'Puppy Love' 8/7/1972
Aug
317. Alice Cooper 'School's Out' 12/8/1972
Sept
318. Rod Stewart 'You Wear It Well' 2/9/1972
319. Slade 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now' 9/9/1972
320. David Cassidy 'How Can I Be Sure' 30/9/1972
Oct
321. Lieutenant Pigeon 'Mouldy Old Dough' 14/10/1972
Nov
322. Gilbert O'Sullivan 'Clair' 11/11/1972
323. Chuck Berry 'My Ding-A-Ling' 25/11/1972
Dec
324. Little Jimmy Osmond 'Long Haired Lover From Liverpool' 23/12/1972
1973
326. Slade 'Cum On Feel The Noize' 3/3/1973
327. Donny Osmond 'The Twelfth Of Never' 31/3/1973
April
328. Gilbert O'Sullivan 'Get Down' 7/4/1973
329. Dawn featuring Tony Orlando 'Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree' 21/4/1973
May
330. Wizzard 'See My Baby Jive' 19/5/1973
June
331. Suzi Quatro 'Can The Can' 16/6/1973
332. 10 CC 'Rubber Bullets' 23/6/1973
333. Slade 'Skweeze Me Pleeze Me' 30/6/1973
July
334. Peters & Lee 'Welcome Home' 21/7/1973
335. Gary Glitter 'I'm The Leader Of The Gang (I Am)' 28/7/1973
Aug
336. Donny Osmond 'Young Love' 25/8/1973
Sept
337. Wizzard 'Angel Fingers (A Teen Ballad)' 22/9/1973
338. Simon Park Orchestra 'Eye Level' 29/9/1973
Oct
339. David Cassidy 'Daydreamer / The Puppy Song' 27/10/1973
Nov
340. Gary Glitter 'I Love You Love Me Love' 17/11/1973
Dec
341. Slade 'Merry Xmas Everybody' 15/12/1973
1974
342. New Seekers 'You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me' 19/1/1974
343. Mud 'Tiger Feet' 26/1/1974
Feb
344. Suzi Quatro 'Devil Gate Drive' 23/2/1974
March
345. Alvin Stardust 'Jealous Mind' 9/3/1974
346. Paper Lace 'Billy Don't Be A Hero' 16/3/1974
April
347. Terry Jacks 'Seasons In The Sun' 6/4/1974
May
349. Rubettes 'Sugar Baby Love' 18/5/1974
June
350. Ray Stevens 'The Streak 15/6/1974
351. Gary Glitter 'Always Yours' 22/6/1974
352. Charles Aznavour 'She' 29/6/1974
July
353. George McCrae 'Rock Your Baby' 27/7/1974
Aug
354. Three Degrees 'When Will I See You Again' 17/8/1974
355. Osmonds 'Love Me For A Reason' 31/8/1974
Sept
356. Carl Douglas 'Kung Fu Fighting' 21/9/1974
Oct
357. John Denver 'Annie's Song' 12/10/1974
358. Sweet Sentation 'Sad Sweet Dreamer' 19/10/1974
359. Ken Boothe 'Everything I Own' 26/10/1974
Nov
360. David Essex 'Gonna Make You A Star' 16/11/1974
Dec
361. Barry White 'You're The First, The Last, My Everything' 7/12/1974
362. Mud 'Lonely This Christmas' 21/12/1974
1975
363. Status Quo 'Down Down' 18/1/1975
364. Tymes 'Ms Grace' 25/1/1975
Feb
366. Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel 'Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)' 22/2/1975
March
367. Telly Savalas ''If'' 8/3/1975
368. Bay City Rollers 'Bye Bye Baby 22/3/1975
May
369. Mud 'Oh Boy 3/5/1975
370. Tammy Wynette 'Stand By Your Man 17/5/1975
June
371. Windsor Davies & Don Estelle 'Whispering Grass' 7/6/1975
372. 10 CC 'I'm Not In Love' 28/6/1975
July
373. Johnny Nash 'Tears On My Pillow' 12/7/1975
374. Bay City Rollers 'Give A Little Love' 19/7/1975
Aug
375. Typically Tropical 'Barbados' 9/8/1975
376. Stylistics 'Can't Give You Anything (But My Love)' 16/8/1975
Sept
377. Rod Stewart 'Sailing' 6/9/1975
Oct
378. David Essex 'Hold Me Close' 4/10/1975
379. Art Garfunkel 'I Only Have Eyes For You' 25/10/1975
Nov
380. David Bowie 'Space Oddity' 8/11/1975
381. Billy Connolly 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E'. 22/11/1975
382. Queen 'Bohemian Rhapsody' 29/11/1975
1976
383. Abba 'Mamma Mia' 31/1/1976
Feb
384. Slik 'Forever And Ever' 14/2/1976
385. Four Seasons 'December '63' 21/2/1976
March
386. Tina Charles 'I Love To Love (But My Baby Loves To Dance)' 6/3/1976
387. Brotherhood Of Man ''Save Your Kisses For Me' 27/3/1976
May
396. Chicago 'If You Leave Me Now' 13/11/1976
Dec
397. Showaddywaddy 'Under The Moon Of Love'' 4/12/1976
398. Johnny Mathis 'When A Child Is Born' (Soleado) 25/12/1976
1977
399. David Soul ''Don't Give Up On Us 15/1/1977
Feb
400. Julie Covington 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina 12/2/1977
401. Leo Sayer 'When I Need You 19/2/1977
March
402. Manhattan Transfer 'Chanson D'Amour 12/3/1977
April
403. Abba 'Knowing Me Knowing You 2/4/1977
May
404. Deniece Williams 'Free 7/5/1977
405. Rod Stewart 'I Don't Want To Talk About It / First Cut Is The Deepest 21/5/1977
June
406. Kenny Rogers 'Lucille 18/6/1977
407. Jacksons Show 'You The Way To Go 25/6/1977
July
408. Hot Chocolate 'So You Win Again 2/7/1977
409. Donna Summer 'I Feel Love 23/7/1977
Aug
410. Brotherhood Of Man 'Angelo 20/8/1977
411. Floaters 'Float On 27/8/1977
Sept
412. Elvis Presley 'Way Down 3/9/1977
Oct
413. David Soul 'Silver Lady 8/10/1977
414. Baccara 'Yes Sir I Can Boogie 29/10/1977
Nov
415. Abba 'The Name Of The Game 5/11/1977
Dec
416. Wings 'Mull Of Kintyre / Girls' School 3/12/1977
1978
417. Althia & Donna 'Up Town Top Ranking 4/2/1978
418. Brotherhood Of Man 'Figaro 11/2/1978
419. Abba 'Take A Chance On Me 18/2/1978
March
420. Kate Bush 'Wuthering Heights 11/3/1978
April
421. Brian & Michael 'Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs 8/4/1978
422. Bee Gees 'Night Fever 29/4/1978
423. Boney M - 'Rivers Of Babylon / Brown 'Girl In The Ring 13/5/1978
June
424. John Travolta & Olivia Newton John 'You're The One That I Want 17/6/1978
Aug
425. Commodores 'Three Times A Lady 19/8/1978
Oct
426. 10 CC 'Dreadlock Holiday 23/9/1978
427. John Travolta & Olivia Newton 'John Summer Nights 30/9/1978
Nov
428. Boomtown Rats .. 'Rat Trap 18/11/1978
Dec
429. Rod Stewart.. 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy 2/12/1978
430. Boney M .. 'Mary's Boy Child - Oh My Lord 9/12/1978
1979
431. Village People , Y.M.C.A. 6/1/1979
432. Ian Dury & The Blockheads , Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick 27/1/1979
Feb
433. Blondie , Heart Of Glass 3/2/1979
March
434. Bee Gees , Tragedy 3/3/1979
435. Gloria Gaynor , I Will Survive 17/3/1979
April
436. Art Garfunkel , Bright Eyes 14/4/1979
May
437. Blondie, Sunday Girl 26/5/1979
June
438. Anita Ward , Ring My Bell 16/6/1979
439. Tubeway Army , Are 'Friends' Electric 30/6/1979
July
440. Boomtown Rats , I Don't Like Mondays 28/7/1979
Aug
441. Cliff Richard , We Don't Talk Anymore 25/8/1979
Sept
442. Gary Numan , Cars 22/9/1979
443. Police , Message In A Bottle 29/9/1979
Oct
444. Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star 20/10/1979
445. Lena Martell , One Day At A Time 27/10/1979
Nov
446. Dr Hook , When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman 17/11/1979
Dec
447. Police ,Walking On The Moon 8/12/1979
448. Pink Floyd , Another Brick In The Wall 15/12/1979
1980
449. Pretenders 'Brass In Pocket' 19/1/1980
Feb
450. The Special AKA (Specials) The Specials Live EP (main track: Too Much Too Young) 2/2/1980
451. Kenny Rogers 'Coward Of The County' 16/2/1980
March
453. Fern Kinney 'Together We Are Beautiful '15/3/1980
454. Jam 'Going Underground / Dreams Of Children' 22/3/1980
April
455. Detroit Spinners 'Working My Way Back To You - Forgive Me Girl' 12/4/1980
456. Blondie 'Call Me' 26/4/1980
May
457. Dexy's Midnight Runners 'Geno' 3/5/1980
458. Johnny Logan 'What's Another Year' 17/5/1980
459. Mash 'Suicide Is Painless (Theme from M*A*S*H)' 31/5/1980
June
460. Don McLean 'Crying' 21/6/1980
July
461. Olivia Newton John & Electric Light Orchestra 'Xanadu' 12/7/1980
462. Odyssey 'Use It Up And Wear It Out' 26/7/1980
Aug
463. Abba 'The Winner Takes It All' 9/8/1980
464. David Bowie 'Ashes To Ashes' 23/8/1980
Sept
466. Kelly Marie 'Feels Like I'm In Love' 13/9/1980
467. Police 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' 27/9/1980
Oct
468. Barbra Streisand 'Woman In Love' 25/10/1980
Nov
469. Blondie 'The Tide Is High' 15/11/1980
470. Abba 'Super Trouper' 29/11/1980
Dec
471. John Lennon '(Just Like) Starting Over' 20/12/1980
472. St Winifred's School Choir 'There's No One Quite Like Grandma' 27/12/1980
1981
473. John Lennon 'Imagine' 10/1/1981
Feb
474. John Lennon 'Woman' 7/2/1981
475. Joe Dolce Music Theatre 'Shaddup You Face' 21/2/1981
March
476. Roxy Music 'Jealous Guy' 14/3/1981
477. Shakin' Stevens 'This Ole House' 28/3/1981
April
478. Bucks Fizz 'Making Your Mind Up' 18/4/1981
May
479. Adam & The Ants 'Stand And Deliver' 9/5/1981
June
480. Smokey Robinson 'Being With You' 13/6/1981
481. Michael Jackson 'One Day In Your Life' 27/6/1981
July
482. Specials 'Ghost Town' 11/7/1981
Aug
483. Shakin' Stevens 'Green Door' 1/8/1981
484. Aneka 'Japanese Boy' 29/8/1981
Sept
485. Soft Cell 'Tainted Love' 5/9/1981
486. Adam & The Ants 'Prince Charming' 19/9/1981
Oct
487. Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin 'It's My Party' 17/10/1981
Nov
488. Police ''Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' 14/11/1981
489. Queen & David Bowie ''Under Pressure' 21/11/1981
Dec
490. Julio Iglesias ''Begin The Beguine (Volver A Empezar) 5/12/1981
491. Human League ''Don't You Want Me' 12/12/1981
1982
492. Bucks Fizz - Land Of Make Believe 16/1/1982
493. Shakin' Stevens - Oh Julie 30/1/1982
Feb
494. Kraftwerk - The Model / Computer Love 6/2/1982
495. Jam - A Town Called Malice / Precious 13/2/1982
March
496. Tight Fit - The Lion Sleeps Tonight 6/3/1982
497. Goombay Dance Band Seven - Tears 27/3/1982
April
498. Bucks Fizz - My Camera Never Lies 17/4/1982
499. Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder - Ebony And Ivory 24/4/1982
May
500. Nicole- A Little Peace 15/5/1982
501. Madness - House Of Fun 29/5/1982
June
502. Adam Ant - Goody Two Shoes 12/6/1982
503. Charlene - I 've Never Been To Me 26/6/1982
July
504. Captain Sensible - Happy Talk 3/7/1982
505. Irene Cara - Fame 17/7/1982
Aug
506. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen 7/8/1982
Sept
507. Survivor - Eye Of The Tiger 4/9/1982
Oct
508. Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie 2/10/1982
509. Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me 23/10/1982
Nov
510. Eddy Grant - I Don't Wanna Dance 13/11/1982
Dec
511. Jam - Beat Surrender 4/12/1982
512. Renee & Renato - Save Your Love 18/12/1982
1983
513. Phil Collins 'You Can't Hurry Love' 15/1/1983
514. Men At Work 'Down Under' 29/1/1983
Feb
515. Kajagoogoo 'Too Shy' 19/2/1983
March
516. Michael Jackson 'Billie Jean' 5/3/1983
517. Bonnie Tyler 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' 12/3/1983
518. Duran Duran 'Is There Something I Should Know' 26/3/1983
April
519. David Bowie 'Let's Dance' 9/4/1983
520. Spandau Ballet 'True' 30/4/1983
May
521. New Edition 'Candy Girl' 28/5/1983
June
522. Police 'Every Breath You Take' 4/6/1983
July
523. Rod Stewart 'Baby Jane' 2/7/1983
524. Paul Young 'Wherever I Lay My Hat' 23/7/1983
Aug
525. K C & The Sunshine Band 'Give It Up' 13/8/1983
Sept
526. UB 40 'Red Red Wine' 3/9/1983
527. Culture Club 'Karma Chameleon' 24/9/1983
Nov
528 Billy Joel 'Uptown Girl 5/11/1983
Dec
529 Flying Pickets 'Only You 10/12/1983
1984
530. Paul McCartney - Pipes Of Peace 14/1/1984
531. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax 28/1/1984
March
532. Nena - 99 Red Balloons 3/3/1984
533. Lionel Richie - Hello 24/3/1984
May
534. Duran Duran - The Reflex 5/5/1984
June
535. Wham! - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go 2/6/1984
536. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes 16/6/1984
Aug
537. George Michael - Careless Whisper 18/8/1984
Sept
538. Stevie Wonder - I Just Called To Say I Love You 8/9/1984
Oct
540. Chaka Khan - I Feel For You 10/11/1984
Dec
541. Jim Diamond - I Should Have Known Better 1/12/1984
542. Frankie Goes To Hollywood - The Power Of Love 8/12/1984
543. Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas 15/12/1984
1985
544. Foreigner 'I Want To Know What Love Is 19/1/1985
Feb
545. Elaine Paige & Barbara Dickson 'I Know Him So Well 9/2/1985
March
546. Dead Or Alive 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) 9/3/1985
547. Philip Bailey & Phil Collins 'Easy Lover 23/3/1985
April
548. USA For Africa 'We Are The World 20/4/1985
May
549. Phyllis Nelson 'Move Closer 4/5/1985
550. Paul Hardcastle '19' 11/5/1985
June
551. Crowd ''You'll Never Walk Alone 15/6/1985
552. Sister Sledge ''Frankie 29/6/1985
July
553. Eurythmics 'There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) 27/7/1985
Aug
554. Madonna 'Into The Groove 3/8/1985
555. UB 40 & Chrissie Hynde 'I Got You Babe 31/8/1985
Sept
556. David Bowie & Mick Jagger 'Dancing in the Street 7/9/1985
Oct
557. Midge Ure 'If I Was 5/10/1985
558. Jennifer Rush 'The Power Of Love 12/10/1985
Nov
559. Feargal Sharkey 'A Good Heart 16/11/1985
560. Wham! 'I'm Your Man 30/11/1985
Dec
561. Whitney Houston 'Saving All My Love For You 14/12/1985
562. Shakin' Stevens 'Merry Christmas Everyone 28/12/1985
1986
563. Pet Shop Boys 'West End Girls 11/1/1986
564. A-Ha 'The Sun Always Shines On TV 25/1/1986
Feb
565. Billy Ocean 'When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going 8/2/1986
March
566. Diana Ross 'Chain Reaction 8/3/1986
567. Cliff Richard & The Young 'Ones Living Doll 29/3/1986 The first official Comic Relief single
April
568. George Michael 'A Different Corner 19/4/1986
May
569. Falco 'Rock Me Amadeus 10/5/1986
570. Spitting Image 'The Chicken Song 17/5/1986
June
571. Doctor & The Medics 'Spirit In The Sky 7/6/1986
572. Wham! 'The Edge Of Heaven 28/6/1986
July
573. Madonna 'Papa Don't Preach 12/7/1986
Aug
574. Chris de Burgh 'The Lady In Red 2/8/1986
575. Boris Gardiner 'I Want To Wake Up With You 23/8/1986
Sept
576. Communards 'Don't Leave Me This Way 13/9/1986
Oct
577. Madonna 'True Blue 11/10/1986
578. Nick Berry 'Every Loser Wins 18/10/1986
Nov
579. Berlin 'Take My Breath Away 8/11/1986
Dec
580. Europe 'The Final Countdown 6/12/1986
581. Housemartins 'Caravan Of Love 20/12/1986
582. Jackie Wilson 'Reet Petite 27/12/1986
1987
583. Steve 'Silk' Hurley 'Jack Your Body 24/1/1987
Feb
584. George Michael & Aretha Franklin 'I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) 7/2/1987
585. Ben E King 'Stand By Me 21/2/1987
March
586. Boy George 'Everything I Own 14/3/1987
587. Mel & Kim 'Respectable 28/3/1987
April
588. Ferry Aid 'Let It Be 4/4/1987
589. Madonna 'La Isla Bonita 25/4/1987
May
590. Starship 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now 9/5/1987
June
591. Whitney Houston 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) 6/6/1987
592. The Firm 'Star Trekkin' 20/6/1987
July
593. Pet Shop Boys' It's A Sin 4/7/1987
594. Madonna 'Who's That Girl 25/7/1987
Aug
595. Los Lobos 'La Bamba 1/8/1987
596. Michael Jackson ''I Just Can't Stop Loving You 15/8/1987
597. Rick Astley 'Never Gonna Give You Up 29/8/1987
Oct
598. M/A/R/R/S ''Pump Up The Volume / Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance) 3/10/1987
599. Bee Gees 'You Win Again 17/10/1987
Nov
600. T'Pau 'China In Your Hand 14/11/1987
Dec
601. Pet Shop Boys 'Always On My Mind 19/12/1987
1988
602. Belinda Carlisle 'Heaven Is A Place On Earth 16/1/1988
603. Tiffany 'I Think We're Alone Now 30/1/1988
Feb
604. Kylie Minogue 'I Should Be So Lucky 20/2/1988
March
605. Aswad 'Don't Turn Around 26/3/1988
April
606. Pet Shop Boys 'Heart 9/4/1988
607. S'Express 'Theme from S'Express 30/4/1988
May
608. Fairground 'Attraction Perfect 14/5/1988
609. Wet Wet Wet 'With A Little Help From My Friends 21/5/1988
June
610. Timelords 'Doctorin The Tardis 18/6/1988
611. Bros 'I Owe You Nothing 25/6/1988
July
612. Glenn Medeiros 'Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You 9/7/1988
Aug
613. Yazz & The Plastic Population 'The Only Way Is Up 6/8/1988
Sept
614. Phil Collins 'A Groovy Kind Of Love 10/9/1988
615. Hollies 'He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother 24/9/1988
Oct
617. Whitney Houston 'One Moment In Time 15/10/1988
618. Enya 'Orinoco Flow (Sail Away) 29/10/1988
Nov
619. Robin Beck 'The First Time 19/11/1988
Dec
620. Cliff Richard 'Mistletoe & Wine 10/12/1988
1989
621. Kylie Minogue & Jason Donovan - Especially For You 7/1/1989
622. Marc Almond with Gene Pitney - Somethings Gotten Hold Of My Heart 28/1/1989
Feb
623. Simple Minds - Belfast Child 25/2/1989
March
624. Jason Donovan - Too Many Broken Hearts 11/3/1989
625. Madonna - Like A Prayer 25/3/1989
April
626. Bangles - Eternal Flame 15/4/1989
May
627. Kylie Minogue - Hand On Your Heart 13/5/1989
628. Gerry Marsden, Paul McCartney, Holly Johnson & Christians - Ferry 'Cross The Mersey 20/5/1989
June
629. Jason Donovan - Sealed With A Kiss 10/6/1989
630. Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler - Back To Life 24/6/1989
July
631. Sonia - You'll Never Stop Me Loving You 22/7/1989
Aug
632. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers -Swing The Mood 5/8/1989
Sept
633. Black Box - Ride On Time 9/9/1989
Oct
634. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers - That's What I Like 21/10/1989
Nov
635. Lisa Stansfield - All Around The World 11/11/1989
636. New Kids On The Block - You Got It (The Right Stuff) 25/11/1989
Dec
637. Jive Bunny & The Mastermixers - Let's Party 16/12/1989
638. Band Aid II - Do They Know It's Christmas 23/12/1989
1990
639. New Kids On The Block - Hangin' Tough 16/1/1990
640. Kylie Minogue - Tears On My Pillow 27/1/1990
Feb
641. Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U 3/2/1990
March
642. Beats International Dub Be Good To Me 3/3/1990
643. Snap - The Power 31/3/1990
April
646. England New Order - World In Motion 9/6/1990
647. Elton John - Sacrifice / Healing Hands 23/6/1990
July
648. Partners In Kryme Turtle Power 28/7/1990
Aug
649. Bombalurina - Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini 25/8/1990
Sept
650. Steve Miller - Band The Joker 15/9/1990
651. Maria McKee - Show Me Heaven 29/9/1990
Oct
652. Beautiful South - A Little Time 27/10/1990
Nov
653. Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody 3/11/1990
Dec
654. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby 1/12/1990
655. Cliff Richard - Saviour's Day 22/12/1990
1991
656. Iron Maiden - Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter 5/1/1991
657. Enigma - Sadness Part 1 19/1/1991
658. Queen - Innuendo 26/1/1991
659. KLF - 3 AM Eternal 2/2/1991
660. Simpsons - Do The Bartman 16/2/1991
March
661. Clash - Should I Stay Or Should I Go 9/3/1991
662. Hale & Pace - The Stonk 23/3/1991 The official Comic Relief single
663. Chesney Hawkes - The One And Only 30/3/1991 .
May
664. Cher - Shoop Shoop Song (It's In His Kiss) 4/5/1991
June
665. Color Me Badd - I Wanna Sex You Up 8/6/1991
666. Jason Donovan - Any Dream Will Do 29/6/1991 .
July
667 Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You 13/7/1991
Nov
668. U2 - The Fly 2/11/1991
669. Vic Reeves & The Wonder Stuff - Dizzy 9/11/1991
670. Michael Jackson - Black Or White 23/11/1991
Dec
671. George Michael & Elton John - Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me 7/12/1991
672. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody / These Are The Days Of Our Lives 21/12/1991
1992
673. Wet Wet Wet.. Goodnight Girl 25/1/1992
Feb
674. Shakespears Sister.. Stay 22/2/1992
April
675. Right Said Fred.. Deeply Dippy 18/4/1992
May
676. KWS.. Please Don't Go / Game Boy 9/5/1992
June
677. Erasure Abba-esque EP 13/6/1992
July
678. Jimmy Nail.. Ain't No Doubt 18/7/1992
Aug
679. Snap.. Rhythm Is A Dancer 8/8/1992
Sept
680. Shamen.. Ebeneezer Goode 19/9/1992
Oct
681. Tasmin Archer.. Sleeping Satellite 17/10/1992
682. Boyz II Men .. End Of The Road 31/10/1992
Nov
683. Charles & Eddie.. Would I Lie To You 21/11/1992
Dec
684. Whitney Houston.. I Will Always Love You 5/12/1992 .
1993
685. 2 Unlimited.. No Limit 13/2/1993
March
686. Shaggy.. Oh Carolina 20/3/1993
April
687. Bluebells.. Young At Heart 3/4/1993
May
688. George Michael & Queen with Lisa Stansfield - Five Live (EP) 1/5/1993
689. Ace Of Base.... All That She Wants 22/5/1993
June
690. UB 40.. (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You 12/6/1993 .
691. Gabrielle.. Dreams 26/6/1993 .
692. Take That.. Pray 17/7/1993
August
693. Freddie Mercury.. Living On My Own 14/8/1993
694. Culture Beat.. Mr Vain 28/8/1993
Sept
695. Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (Will Smith).. Boom! Shake The Room 25/9/1993
Oct
696. Take That featuring Lulu.. Relight my Fire 9/10/1993
697. Meat Loaf.. I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) 23/10/1993 .
Dec
698. Mr Blobby.. Mr Blobby 11/12/1993
699. Take That.. Babe 18/12/1993
1994
700. Chaka Demus & Pliers - Twist & Shout 8/1/1994
701. D:Ream - Things Can Only Get Better 22/1/1994
Feb
702. Mariah Carey - Without You 19/2/1994
703. Doop - Doop 19/3/1994
704. Take That - Everything Changes 9/4/1994
705. Prince - The Most Beautiful Girl In The World 23/4/1994
May
706. Tony Di Bart - The Real Thing 7/5/1994
707. Stiltskin - Inside 14/5/1994
708. Manchester United 1994 Football Squad - Come On You Reds 21/5/1994
June
709. Wet Wet Wet - Love Is All Around 4/6/1994
Sept
710. Whigfield - Saturday Night 17/9/1994
Oct
711. Take That - Sure 15/10/1994
712. Pato Banton (with Robin & Ali Campbell) - Baby Come Back 29/10/1994
Nov
713. Baby D - Let Me Be Your Fantasy 26/11/1994
Dec
714. East 17 - Stay Another Day 10/12/1994
1995
715. Rednex.. Cotton Eye Joe 14/1/1995
Feb
716. Celine Dion.. Think Twice 4/2/1995
March
717. Cher,Chrissie Hynde,Neneh Cherry & Eric Clapton.. Love Can Build A Bridge 25/3/1995
April
718. Outhere Brothers.. Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle) 1/4/1995
719. Take That.. Back For Good 8/4/1995
May
720. Oasis Some.. Might Say 6/5/1995
721. Livin' Joy.. Dreamer 13/5/1995
722. Robson Green & Jerome Flynn.. Unchained Melody / White Cliffs Of Dover 20/5/1995
June
723. Outhere Brothers.. Boom Boom Boom 8/7/1995
Aug
724. Take That.. Never Forget 5/8/1995
725. Blur.. Country House 26/8/1995
Sept
726. Michael Jackson.. You Are Not Alone 9/9/1995
727. Shaggy - Boombastic 23/9/1995
728. Simply Red - Fairground 30/9/1995
Oct
729. Coolio featuring LV Gangsta's.. Paradise 28/10/1995
Nov
730. Robson & Jerome.. I Believe / Up On The Roof 11/11/1995
Dec
731. Michael Jackson.. Earth Song 9/12/1995
1996
732. George Michael - Jesus To A Child 20/1/1996
733. Babylon Zoo, Spaceman 27/1/1996
March
734. Oasis, Don't Look Back In Anger 2/3/1996
735. Take That, How Deep Is Your Love 9/3/1996 .
736. Prodigy, Firestarter 30/3/1996
737. Mark Morrison, Return Of The Mack 20/4/1996
May
738. George Michael, Fastlove 4/5/1996 .
739. Gina G Ooh Aah Just A Little Bit 25/5/1996
June
740. Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds.. Three Lions 1/6/1996 .
741. Fugees, Killing Me Softly 8/6/1996
July
742. Gary Barlow, Forever Love 20/7/1996 .
743. Spice Girls, Wannabe 27/7/1996
Sept
744. Peter Andre, Flava 14/9/1996
745. Fugees, Ready Or Not 21/9/1996
Oct
746. Deep Blue Something - Breakfast At Tiffany's 5/10/1996
747. Chemical Brothers, Setting Sun 12/10/1996
748. Boyzone, Words 19/10/1996
749. Spice Girls, Say You'll Be There 26/10/1996
Nov
750. Robson & Jerome, What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted / Saturday Night At The Movies / You'll Never Walk Alone 9/11/1996
751. Prodigy, Breathe 23/11/1996
752. Peter Andre, I Feel You 7/12/1996
753. Boyzone, A Different Beat 14/12/1996
754. Dunblane, Knockin' On Heaven's Door / Throw These Guns Away 21/12/1996
755. Spice Girls, 2 Become 1 28/12/1996
1997
756. Tori Amos, Professional Widow (It's Got To Be Big) 18/1/1997
757. White Town, Your Woman 25/1/1997
Feb
759. LL Cool J,, Ain't Nobody 8/2/1997
760. U2, Discotheque 15/2/1997
761. No Doubt, Don't Speak 22/2/1997
March
762. Spice Girls - Mama / Who Do You Think You Are 15/3/1997 "Who Do You Think You Are" was the official Comic Relief single and sold 672,577 copies.
April
763. Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats 5/4/1997
764. R Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly 12/4/1997
May
765. Michael Jackson, Blood On The Dance Floor 3/5/1997
766. Gary Barlow, Love Won't Wait 10/5/1997 .
767. Olive, You're Not Alone 17/5/1997
768. Eternal ft. Bebe Winans - I Wanna Be The One 31/5/1997 .
June
770. Puff Daddy & Faith Evans, I'll Be Missing You 28/6/1997
July
771. Oasis, D'you Know What I Mean 19/7/1997
Aug
772. Will Smith, Men In Black 16/8/1997
Sept
773. Verve, The Drugs Don't Work 13/9/1997
774. Elton John, Candle In The Wind 97 / Something About The Way You Look Tonight 20/9/1997
Oct
775. Spice Girls, Spice Up Your Life 25/10/1997
Nov
776. Aqua, Barbie Girl 1/11/1997
777. Various Artists, Perfect Day 29/11/1997
Dec
778. Teletubbies, Teletubbies Say Eh-oh! 13/12/1997
779. Spice Girls, Too Much 27/12/1997
1998
780. All Saints - Never Ever 17/1/1998
781. Oasis - All Around The World 24/1/1998
782. Usher - You Make Me Wanna... 31/1/1998
Feb
783. Aqua - Doctor Jones 7/2/1998
784. Celine Dion - My Heart Will Go On 21/2/1998
785. Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha 28/2/1998
March
787. Run DMC vs Jason Nevins- It's Like That 21/3/1998
May
788. Boyzone - All That I Need 2/5/1998
789. All Saints - Under The Bridge / Lady Marmalade 9/5/1998
790. Aqua - Turn Back Time 16/5/1998
791. Tamperer featuring Maya - Feel It 30/5/1998
June
792. B*Witched - C'est La Vie 6/6/1998
793. Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds - Three Lions '98 20/6/1998 .
July
794. Billie - Because We Want To 11/7/1998
795. Another Level - Freak Me 18/7/1998
796. Jamiroquai - Deeper Underground 25/7/1998
Aug
797. Spice Girls - Viva Forever 1/8/1998
798. Boyzone - No Matter What 15/8/1998
Sept
799. Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next 5/9/1998
800. All Saints - Bootie Call 12/9/1998
801. Robbie Williams - Millennium 19/9/1998
802. Melanie B featuring Missy Elliott - I Want You Back 26/9/1998
Oct
803. B*Witched - Rollercoaster 3/10/1998
804. Billie - Girlfriend 17/10/1998
805. Spacedust - Gym & Tonic 24/10/1998
806. Cher - Believe 31/10/1998
807. B*Witched - To You I Belong 19/12/1998
808. Spice Girls - Goodbye 26/12/1998
1999
809. Chef - Chocolate Salty Balls (PS I Love You) 2/1/1999
810. Steps - Heartbeat / Tragedy 9/1/1999
811. Fatboy Slim - Praise You 16/1/1999
812. 911 - A Little Bit More 23/1/1999
813. Offspring Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) 30/1/1999
Feb
814. Armand Van Helden featuring Duane Haeden - You Don't Know Me 6/2/1999
815. Blondie - Maria 13/2/1999
816. Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away 20/2/1999
817. Britney Spears - Baby One More Time 27/2/1999 .
March
818. Boyzone - When The Going Gets Tough 13/3/1999 The official Comic Relief single
819. B*Witched - Blame It On The Weatherman 27/3/1999
April
820. Mr Oizo - Flat Beat 3/4/1999
821. Martine McCutcheon - Perfect Moment 17/4/1999
May
822. Westlife - Swear It Again 1/5/1999
823. Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way 15/5/1999
824. Boyzone - You Needed Me 22/5/1999
825. Shanks & Bigfoot - Sweet Like Chocolate 29/5/1999
June
826. Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen): The Sunscreen Song (Class of 99) 12/6/1999
827. S Club 7 - Bring It All Back 19/6/1999
828. Vengaboys - Boom Boom Boom Boom!! 26/6/1999
July
829. ATB - 9PM (Till I Come) 3/7/1999
830. Ricky Martin - Livin' La Vida Loca 17/7/1999
831. Ronan Keating - When You Say Nothing At All 7/8/1999
Aug
832. Westlife - If I Let You Go 21/8/1999
833. Geri Halliwell - Mi Chico Latino 28/8/1999
Sept
834. Lou Bega - Mambo No 5 4/9/1999
835. Vengaboys - We're Going To Ibiza 18/9/1999
836. Eiffel 65 Blue (Da Ba Dee) 25/9/1999
Oct
837. Christina Aguilera - Genie In A Bottle 16/10/1999
838. Westlife - Flying Without Wings 30/10/1999
Nov
839. Five - Keep On Movin' 6/11/1999
840. Geri Halliwell - Lift Me Up 13/11/1999
841. Robbie Williams - She's The One / It's Only Us 20/11/1999
842. Wamdue Project - King Of My Castle 27/11/1999
Dec
843. Cliff Richard - Millennium Prayer 4/12/1999
844. Westlife - I Have A Dream / Seasons In The Sun 25/12/1999
2000
845. Manic Street Preachers - The Masses Against The Classes 22/1/2000
846. Britney Spears - Born To Make You Happy 29/1/2000
Feb
848. Oasis - Go Let It Out 19/2/2000
849. All Saints - Pure Shores 26/2/2000
March
850. Madonna - American Pie 11/3/2000
851. Chicane featuring Bryan Adams - Don't Give Up 18/3/2000
852. Geri Halliwell - Bag It Up 25/3/2000
April
853. Melanie C with Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes - Never Be The Same Again 1/4/2000
854. Westlife - Fool Again 8/4/2000
855. Craig David - Fill Me In 15/4/2000
856. Fragma Toca's Miracle 22/4/2000
May
857. Oxide & Neutrino - Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty) 6/5/2000
858. Britney Spears - Oops!... I Did It Again 13/5/2000
859. Madison Avenue - Don't Call Me Baby 20/5/2000
860. Billie Piper - Day & Night 27/5/2000
June
861. Sonique - It Feels So Good 3/6/2000 (3 weeks)
862. Black Legend - You See The Trouble With Me 24/6/2000
July
863. Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around 1/7/2000
864. Eminem - Real Slim Shady 8/7/2000
865. Corrs - Breathless 15/7/2000
866. Ronan Keating - Life Is A Rollercoaster 22/7/2000
867. Five and Queen - We Will Rock You 29/7/2000
Aug
868. Craig David - 7 Days 5/8/2000
869. Robbie Williams - Rock DJ 12/8/2000
870. Melanie C- I Turn To You 19/8/2000
871. Spiller - Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) 26/8/2000
Sept
873. A1 - Take On Me 9/9/2000
874. Modjo - Lady (Hear Me Tonight) 16/9/2000
875. Mariah Carey & Westlife - Against All Odds 30/9/2000
Oct
876. All Saints - Black Coffee 14 Oct
877. U2 - Beautiful Day 21/10/2000
878. Steps - Stomp 28/10/2000
879. Spice Girls - Holler / Let Love Lead The Way 4/11/2000
880. Westlife - My Love 11/11/2000
881. A1 - Same Old Brand New You 18/11/2000
882. LeAnn Rimes - Can't Fight The Moonlight 25/11/2000
Dec
883. Destiny's Child - Independent Women Part 1 2/12/2000
884. S Club 7 - Never Had A Dream Come True 9/12/2000
885. Eminem Stan 16/12/2000
886. Bob The Builder - Can We Fix It 23/12/2000 (3 weeks)
2001
887. Rui Da Silva featuring Cassandra.. Touch Me 13/1/2001
888. Jennifer Lopez.. Love Don't Cost A Thing 20/1/2001
889. Limp Bizkit.. Rollin' 27/1/2001
Feb
890. Atomic Kitten.. Whole Again 10/2/2001 (4 weeks)
March
891. Shaggy featuring Rikrok.. It Wasn't Me 10/3/2001
892. Westlife.. Uptown Girl 17/3/2001
893. Hear'Say.. Pure And Simple 24/3/2001
April
894. Emma Bunton.. What Took You So Long 14/4/2001
895. Destiny's Child.. Survivor 28/4/2001
May
896. S Club 7.. Don't Stop Movin' 5/5/2001
897. Geri Halliwell.. It's Raining Men 12/5/2001
June
898. DJ Pied Piper Do You Really Like It 2/6/2001
899. Shaggy featuring Rayvon.. Angel 9/6/2001
900. Christina Aguilera / Lil' Kim, Mya & Pink.. Lady Marmalade 30/6/2001
July
901. Hear'Say.. The Way To Your Love 7/7/2001
902. Roger Sanchez .. Another Chance 14/7/2001
903. Robbie Williams.. Eternity/The Road To Mandalay 21/7/2001
Aug
904. Atomic Kitten.. Eternal Flame 4/8/2001
905. So Solid Crew.. 21 Seconds 18/8/2001
906. Five.. Let's Dance 25/8/2001
Sept
907. Blue.. Too Close 8/9/2001
908. Bob The Builder.. Mambo No 5 15/9/2001
909. DJ Otzi.. Hey Baby 22/9/2001
910. Kylie Minogue.. Can't Get You Out Of My Head 29/9/2001
Oct
911. Afroman.. Because I Got High 27/10/2001
Nov
912. Westlife.. Queen of My Heart 17/11/2001
913. Blue.. If You Come Back 24/11/2001
Dec
914. S Club 7.. Have You Ever 1/12/2001
915. Daniel Bedingfield.. Gotta Get Thru This 8/12/2001
916. Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman.. Somethin' Stupid 22/12/2001
2002
917. Aaliyah.. More Than A Woman 19/1/2002
918. George Harrison.. My Sweet Lord 26/1/2002
Feb
919. Enrique Iglesias.. Hero 2/2/2002 (4 weeks)
March
920. Westlife.. World Of Our Own 2/3/2002
921. Will Young.. Anything Is Possible / Evergreen 9/3/2002
922. Gareth Gates.. Unchained Melody 30/3/2002 (4 weeks)
April
923. Oasis.. The Hindu Times 27/4/2002
May
924. Sugababes.. Freak Like Me 4/5/2002
925. Holly Valance.. Kiss Kiss 11/5/2002
926. Ronan Keating.. If Tomorrow Never Comes 18/5/2002
927. Liberty X.. Just a Little 25/5/2002
June
928. Eminem.. Without Me 1/6/2002
929. Will Young.. Light My Fire 8/6/2002
930. Elvis vs JXL.. A Little Less Conversation 22/6/2002 (4 weeks)
July
931. Gareth Gates.. Anyone Of Us (Stupid Mistake) 20/7/2002
Aug
933. Sugababes.. Round Round 24/8/2002
934. Blazin' Squad.. Crossroads 31/8/2002
Sept
935. Atomic Kitten.. The Tide Is High (Get The Feeling) 7/9/2002
936. Pink.. Just Like A Pill 28/9/2002
Oct
937. Will Young & Gareth Gates.. The Long And Winding Road / Suspicious Minds 5/10/2002
938. Las Ketchup.. The Ketchup Song (Asereje) 19/10/2002
939. Nelly feat. Kelly Rowland.. Dilemma 26/10/2002
Nov
940. DJ Sammy & Yanou feat. Do Heaven 9/11/2002
941. Westlife.. Unbreakable 16/11/2002
942. Christina Aguilera.. Dirty 23/11/2002
Dec
943. Daniel Bedingfield.. If You're Not The One 7/12/2002
944. Eminem.. Lose Yourself 14/12/2002
945. Blue feat. Elton John.. Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word 21/12/2002
946. Girls Aloud.. Sound Of The Underground 28/12/2002 (4 weeks)
2003
947: David Sneddon: Stop Living The Lie 25/1/2003
Feb
948: Tatu: All The Things She Said 8/2/2003
March
949: Christina Aguilera: Beautiful 8/3/2003
950: Gareth Gates: Spirit In The Sky 22/3/2003
April
951: Room 5 feat. Oliver Cheatham: Make Luv 5/4/2003
May
952: Busted: You Said No 3/5/2003
953: Tomcraft: Loneliness 10/5/2003
954: R Kelly: Ignition 17/5/2003
June
955: Evanescence: Bring Me To Life 14/6/2003
July
956: Beyonce: Crazy In Love 12/7/2003
Aug
957: Daniel Bedingfield: Never Gonna Leave Your Side 2/8/2003
958: Blu Cantrell Feat. Sean Paul: Breathe 9/8/2003
Sept
959: Elton John: Are You Ready For Love? 6/9/2003
960: Black Eyed Peas: Where Is The Love? 13/9/2003 (6 weeks)
Oct
961: Sugababes: Hole In The Head 25/10/2003
Nov
962: Fatman Scoop: Be Faithful 1/11/2003
963: Kylie Minogue: Slow 15/11/2003
964: Busted: Crashed The Wedding 22/11/2003
965: Westlife: Mandy 29/11/2003
966: Will Young: Leave Right Now 6/12/2003
967: Kelly & Ozzy Osbourne: Changes 20/12/2003
968: Michael Andrews feat. Gary Jules: Mad World 27/12/2003
2004
969: Michelle McManus: All This Time 17/1/2004
February
970: LMC V U2: Take Me To The Clouds Above 7/2/2004
971: Sam & Mark: With A Little Help From My Friends / Measure Of A Man 21/2/2004
972: Busted: Who's David 28/2/2004
March
973: Peter Andre: Mysterious Girl 6/3/2004
974: Britney Spears: Toxic 13/3/2004
975: DJ Casper Cha Cha Slide 20/3/2004
976: Usher: Yeah 27/3/2004
977: McFly: Five Colours In Her Hair 10/4/2004
978: Eamon: F**k It (I Don't Want You Back) 24/4/2004 (4 weeks)
May
979: Frankee: F.U.R.B (F U Right Back) 22/5/2004
June
980: Mario Winans feat. Enya & P.Diddy: I Don't Wanna Know 12/6/2004
981: Britney Spears: Everytime 26/6/2004
July
984: Shapeshifters: Lola's Theme 24/7/2004
985: The Streets: Dry Your Eyes 31/7/2004
August
986: Busted: Thunderbirds / 3AM 7/8/2004
987: 3 Of A Kind: Babycakes 21/8/2004
988: Natasha Bedingfield: These Words 28/8/2004
September
989: Nelly: My Place / Flap Your Wings 11/9/2004
990: Brian McFadden: Real To Me 18/9/2004
991: Eric Prydz: Call On Me 25/9/2004
October
992: Robbie Williams: Radio 16/10/2004
November
993: Ja Rule feat. R.Kelly & Ashanti: Wonderful 6/11/2004
994: Eminem: Just Lose It 13/11/2004
995: U2: Vertigo 20/11/2004
996: Girls Aloud: I'll Stand By You 27/11/2004
December
997: Band Aid 20: Do They Know It's Christmas 11/12/2004 (4 weeks)
2005
998: Steve Brookstein - Against All Odds ..8/1/2005 X Factor winner
999: Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock .. 15/1/2005 (No.1 Jan 24th 1958)
1000: Elvis Presley - One Night .. 22/1/2005 (No.1 Jan 30th 1959)
1001:Ciara feat. Petey Pablo - Goodies .. 29/1/2005
February
1002: Elvis Presley - It's Now Or Never .. 5/2/2005 (No.1 Nov 3rd 1960)
1003: Eminem - Like Toy Soldiers .. 12/2/2005
1004: U2 - Sometimes You Cant Make It On Your Own .. 19/2/2005
1005: Jennifer Lopez - Get Right .. 26/2/2005
March
1006: Nelly featuring Tim McGraw - Over and Over .. 5/3/2005
1007: Stereophonics - Dakota .. 12/3/2005
1008: McFly - All About You / You've Got A Friend 19/3/2005 Official Comic Relief single
1009: Tony Christie feat. Peter Kay (Is This The Way To) Amarillo .. 26/3/2005 (7) The 2nd Comic Relief single
May
1010: Akon - Lonely .. 14/5/05 (2)
1011: Oasis - Lyla .. 28/5/05 (1)
June
1012: Crazy Frog - Axel F .. 05/6/2005 (4) in@ No.1 (First RINGTONE to chart in UK)
July
1013: 2Pac feat. Elton John - Ghetto Gospel .. 2/7/2005
1014: James Blunt - You're Beautiful .. 23/7/2005
August
1015: McFly - I'll Be OK .. 27/8/2005
September
1016: Oasis - The Importance Of Being Idle .. 3/9/2005
1017: Gorillaz - Dare .. 10/9/2005
1018: Pussycat Dolls Ft Busta Rhymes - Don't Cha .. 17/9/2005
October
1019: Sugababes - Push The Button .. 8/10/2005 (3)
1020: Arctic Monkeys - I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor .. 29/10/2005 (1) ..
November
1021: Westlife - You Raise Me Up ..5/11/05 (2)
1022: Madonna - Hung Up .. 19/11/05 (3)
December
1023: Pussycat Dolls - Stickwitu ..10/12/05 (2)
1024: Nizlopi - JCB Song .. 24/12/05 (1)
1025: Shayne Ward - That's My Goal .. 31/12/05 (4) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2006
1026: Arctic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down .. 28/1/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
February
1027: Notorious BIG/ P Diddy/ Nelly - Nasty Girl .. 4/2/06 (2)
1028: Meck Ft Leo Sayer - Thunder In My Heart Again .. 18/2/06 (2) in@ No.1 ..
March
1029: Madonna - Sorry .. 4/3/06 (1) in@ No.1
1030: Chico - It's Chico Time .. 11/3/06 (2) in@ No.1
1031: Orson - No Tomorrow .. 25/3/06 (1) ..
April
1032: Ne*Yo - So Sick .. 1/4/06 (1)
1033: Gnarls Barkley - Crazy .. 8/4/06 (9) in@ No.1
June
1034: Sandi Thom - I Wish I A Punk Rocker .. 10/6/06 (1) ..
1035: Nelly Furtado - Maneater .. 17/6/06 (3)
July
1036: Shakira Ft Wyclef Jean - Hips Don't Lie .. 8/7/06 (1)
1037: Lily Allen - Smile .. 15/7/06 (2)
1038: McFly - Don't Stop Me Now/please Please .. 29/7/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
August
r/e. : Shakira Ft Wyclef Jean - Hips Don't Lie .. 5/8/06 (4)
September
1039: Beyonce Ft Jay-z - Deja Vu .. 2/9/06 (1)
1040: Justin Timberlake - Sexyback .. 9/9/06 (1) in@ No.1..
1041: Scissor Sisters - I Don't Feel Like Dancin' .. 16/9/06 (4)
October
1042: Razorlight - America .. 14/10/06 (1)..
1043: My Chemical Romance - Welcome To The Black Parade .. 21/10/06 (2)..
November
1044: McFly - Star Girl .. 4/11/06 (1) in@ No.1 ..
1045: Fedde Le Grand - Put Your Hands Up For Detroit ..11/11/06 (1) ..
1046: Westlife - The Rose .. 18/11/06 (1) in@ No.1
1047: Akon Ft Eminem - Smack That .. 25/11/2006 (1)
December
1048: Take That - Patience .. 2/12/2006 (4)
1049: Leona Lewis - A Moment Like This .. 30/12/2006 (4) in@ No.1 .. X Factor winner
2007
1050: Mika - Grace Kelly .. 27/01/07 (5) ..
March
1051: Kaiser Chiefs - Ruby .. 03/03/07 (1) ..
1052: Take That - Shine .. 10/03/07 (2)
1053: Sugababes Vs Girls Aloud - Walk This Way .. 24/03/07 (2) The official Comic Relief single
1054: Proclaimers/B.Potter/A.Pipkin - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) .. 31/03/07 (3) in@ No.1 also released for the Comic Relief charity. Its sales were double that of the "official" Comic Relief single.
April
1055: Timbaland/Nelly Furtado/Justin Timberlake - Give It To Me .. 21/04/07 (1)
1056: Beyonce & Shakira - Beautiful Liar .. 28/04/07 (4) ..
May
1057: McFly - Baby's Coming Back/Transylvania .. 19/05/07 (1) in@ No.1
1058: Rihanna ft Jay.Z - Umbrella .. 26/05/07 (10) in@ No.1
August
1059: Timbaland Ft Keri Hilson - The Way I Are .. 4/08/07 (2)..
1060: Robyn With Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat .. 18/08/2007 (1)
1061: Kanye West - Stronger .. 25/08/2007 (2)
September
1062: Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls .. 08/09/2007 (4)
October
1063: Sugababes - About You Now .. 06/10/2007 (4)
November
1064: Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love .. 03/11/2007 (7) in@ No.1 ..
December
1065: Eva Cassidy & Katie Melua - What A Wonderful World .. 22/12/2007 (1) in@ No.1 ..
1066: Leon Jackson - When You Believe .. 29/12/2007 (3) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2008
1067: Basshunter Ft. Dj Mental Theo - Now You're Gone .. w/e 19/01/2008 (5)
February
1068: Duffy - Mercy .. w/e 23/02/2008 (5) in@ No.1
March
1069: Estelle Ft Kanye West - American Boy .. w/e 29/03/2008 (4) in@ No.1 ..
April
1070: Madonna Ft Justin Timberlake - 4 Minutes .. w/e 26/04/2008 (4)
May
1071: Ting Tings - That's Not My Name .. w/e 24/05/2008 (1) in@ No.1
1072: Rihanna - Take A Bow .. 31/05/2008 (2)
June
1073: Mint Royale - Singin' In The Rain .. 14/06/2008 (2) in@ No.1 ..
1074: Coldplay - Viva La Vida .. 28/06/2008 (1) in@ No.1
July
1075: Ne-Yo . - Closer .. 05/07/2008 (1)
1076: Dizzee Rascal /Calvin Harris /Chrome - Dance Wiv Me .. 12/07/2008 (4) in@ No.1
August
1077: Kid Rock - All Summer Long .. 09/08/2008 (1) ..
1078: Katy Perry - I Kissed A Girl .. 16/08/2008 (5)
September
1079: Kings Of Leon - Sex On Fire .. 20/09/2008 (3) in@ No.1 ..
October
1080: Pink - So What .. 11th Oct (3)
November
1081: Girls Aloud - The Promise .. 1st Nov (1) in@ No.1
1082: X Factor Finalists - Hero .. 7th Nov (3) in@ No.1
1083: Beyonce - If I Were A Boy .. 29 Nov (1)
December
1084: Take That - Greatest Day .. 06 Dec (1) in@ No.1 ..
1085: Leona Lewis - Run .. 13 Dec (2) in@ No.1
1086: Alexandra Burke - Hallelujah .. 27 Dec (3) [email protected] X Factor winner
2009
1087: Lady Gaga - Just Dance .. w/e Jan 17th (3)
February
1088: Lily Allen - The Fear.. w/e Feb 07th (4) in@ No.1
March
1089: Kelly Clarkson - My Life Would Suck Without You.. w/e March 07 (1) in@ No.1
1090: Flo Rida Ft Kesha - Right Round.. w/e March 14 (1) in@ No.1 ..
No.2 in the charts .. "Just Can't Get Enough" - The Saturdays .. the first official Comic Relief single not to reach No.1 in 14 years.
1091: Jenkins/West/Jones/Gibb - Islands In The Stream.. w/e March 21 (1) in@ No.1 ..The second Comic Relief 2009 single.
1092: Lady Gaga - Poker Face.. w/e March 28 (3)
April
1093: Calvin Harris - I'm Not Alone.. w/e April 18 (2) in@ No.1
May
1094: Tinchy Stryder Ft N-dubz - Number 1.. w/e May 02 (3) in@ No.1
1095: Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow.. w/e May 23 (1) in@ No.1
1096: Dizzee Rascal / Armand Van Helden - Bonkers.. w/e May 30 (2) in@ No.1
June
r/e.. : Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow.. w/e June 13 (1)
1097: Pixie Lott - Mama Do.. w/e June 20 (1) in@ No.1
1098: David Guetta Ft Kelly Rowland - When Love Takes Over.. w/e June 27 (1) ..
July
1099: La Roux - Bulletproof.. w/e July 4 (1) in@ No.1
1100: Cascada - Evacuate The Dancefloor.. w/e 11 July (2) in@ No.1
1101: JLS - Beat Again.. w/e 25 July (1) in@ No.1
August
1102: Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling.. w/e 08 Aug (1)
1103: Tinchy Stryder Ft Amelle - Never Leave You.. w/e 15 Aug (1) in@ No.1
r/e ..: Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling.. w/e 22 Aug (1)
1104: David Guetta Ft Akon - Sexy Chick.. w/e 29 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
September
1105: Dizzee Rascal - Holiday.. w/e 05 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1106: Jay-Z Ft Rihanna & Kanye West - Run This Town.. w/e 12 Sept (1) in@ No.1 ..
1107: Pixie Lott - Boys & Girls.. w/e 19 Sept (1)
1108: Taio Cruz - Break Your Heart.. w/e 26 Sept (3) in@ No.1
October
1109: Chipmunk - Oopsy Daisy.. w/e 17 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1110: Alexandra Burke ft. Flo Rida - Bad Boys .. w/e 24 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1111: Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love.. w/e 31 Oct (2) in@ No.1 ..
November
1112: JLS - Everybody In Love.. w/e 14 Nov (1) in@ No.1 ..
1113: Black Eyed Peas - Meet Me Halfway.. w/e 21 Nov (1) ..
1114: X Factor Finalists 2009 - You Are Not Alone.. w/e 28 Nov (1) in@ No.1
December
1115: Peter Kay's Animated All Star Band - BBC Children In Need Medley.. w/e 05 Dec (2)
1116: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance.. w/e 19 Dec (1)
1117: Rage Against the Machine - Killing In The Name.. w/e 26 Dec (1) in@ No.1
2010
1118: Joe McElderry - The Climb.. w/e 02 Jan (1) X Factor winner
r/e....: Lady Gaga - Bad Romance.. w/e 09 Jan (1) ..
1119: Iyaz - Replay.. w/e 16 Jan (2) in@ No.1
1120: Owl City - Fireflies.. w/e 30 Jan (3) ..
February
1121: Helping Haiti - Everybody Hurts.. w/e 20 Feb (2) in@ No.1
March
1122: Jason Derulo - In My Head.. w/e 06 March (1) in@ No.1
1123: Tinie Tempah - Pass Out.. w/e 13 March (2) in@ No.1 ..
1124: Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncé - Telephone.. w/e 27 March (2)
April
1125: Scouting for Girls - This Ain't A Love Song.. w/e 10 April (2) in@ No.1 ..
1126: Usher ft. will.i.am - OMG.. w/e 24 April (1)
May
1127: Diana Vickers - Once.. w/e 01 May (1) in@ No.1
1128: Roll Deep - Good Times.. w/e 08 May (3) in@ No.1 ..
1129: B.o.B ft Bruno Mars - Nothin' On You.. w/e 29 May (1) in@ No.1
June
1130: Dizzee Rascal - Dirtee Disco.. w/e 05 June (1) in@ No.1 ..
1131: David Guetta ft. Chris Willis - Gettin' Over You.. w/e 12 June (1) in@ No.1 ..
1132: Shout ft. Dizzee & James Corden - Shout For England.. w/e 19 June (2) in@ No.1 ..
July
1133: Katy Perry ft.Snoop Dogg - California Gurls.. w/e 03 July (2) in@ No.1 ..
1134: JLS - The Club Is Alive.. w/e 17 July (1) in@ No.1 ..
1135: B.o.B ft. Hayley Williams - Airplanes.. w/e 24 July (1) ..
1136: Yolanda Be Cool Vs D Cup - We No Speak Americano.. w/e 31 July (1) ..
August
1137: Wanted - All Time Low.. w/e 07 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
1138: Ne-Yo - Beautiful Monster.. w/e 14 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
1139: Flo Rida Club ft. David Guetta - Can't Handle Me.. w/e 21 Aug (1)
1140: Roll Deep - Green Light.. w/e 28 Aug (1) in@ No.1 ..
September
1141: Taio Cruz - Dynamite.. w/e 04 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1142: Olly Murs - Please Don't Let Me Go.. w/e 11 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1143: Alexandra Burke ft. Laza Morgan - Start Without You.. w/e 18 Sept (2) in@ No.1 ..
October
1144: Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are (Amazing).. w/e 02 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1145: Tinie Tempah - Written In The Stars.. w/e 09 Oct (1) in@ No.1 ..
1146: Cee Lo Green - Forget You.. w/e 16 Oct (2) in@ No.1
r/e...: Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are (Amazing).. w/e 30 Oct (1) ..
November
1147: Cheryl Cole - Promise This.. w/e 06 Nov (1) in@ No.1
1148: Rihanna - Only Girl (In The World).. w/e 13 Nov (2) ..
1149: JLS - Love You More.. w/e 27 Nov (1) in@ No.1 .
December
1150: The X Factor Finalists 2010 - Heroes.. w/e 04 Dec (2) in@ No.1 .
1151: The Black Eyed Peas - The Time (Dirty Bit).. w/e 18 Dec (1).
1152: Matt Cardle - When We Collide.. w/e 25 Dec (3) in@ No.1 X Factor winner
2011
1153: Rihanna ft. Drake - What's My Name.. w/e 15 Jan (1).
1154: Bruno Mars - Grenade.. w/e 22 Jan (2) in@ No.1.
February
1155: Kesha - We R Who We R.. w/e 05 Feb (1)
1156: Jessie J ft. B.o.B - Price Tag.. w/e 12 Feb (2) in@ No.1
1157: Adele - Someone Like You.. w/e 26 Feb (4)
March
1158: Nicole Scherzinger - Don't Hold Your Breath.. w/e 26 March (1) in@ No.1
April
r/e.,.: Adele - Someone Like You.. w/e 02 April (1)
1159: Jennifer Lopez ft. Pitbull - On The Floor.. w/e 09 April (2) in@ No.1
1160: LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem.. w/e 23 April (4).
May
1161: Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song.. w/e 21 May (1).
1162: Pitbull ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer - Give Me Everything.. w/e May 28 (3)
June
1163: Example - Changed The Way You Kiss Me.. w/e 18 June (2) in@ No.1.
July
1164: Jason Derulo - Don't Wanna Go Home.. w/e 02 July (2) in@ No.1.
1165: DJ Fresh ft. Sian Evans - Louder.. w/e 16 July (1) in@ No.1
1166: The Wanted - Glad You Came.. w/e 23 July (2) in@ No.1
August
1167: JLS ft. Dev - She Makes Me Wanna.. w/e 06 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1168: Cher Lloyd - Swagger Jagger.. w/e 13 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1169: Nero - Promises.. w/e 20 Aug (1) in@ No.1
1170: Wretch 32 ft.Josh Kumra - Don't Go.. w/e 27 Aug (1) in@ No.1
September
1171: Olly Murs ft. Rizzle Kicks - Heart Skips A Beat.. w/e 03 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
1172: Example - Stay Awake.. w/e 10 Sept (1) in@ No.1
1173: Pixie Lott - All About Tonight.. w/e 17 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
1174: One Direction - What Makes You Beautiful.. w/e 24 Sept (1) in@ No.1.
October
1175: Dappy - No Regrets.. w/e 01 Oct (1) in@ No.1
1176: Sak Noel - Loca People .. w/e 08 Oct (1) in@ No.1.
1177: Rihanna ft.Calvin Harris - We Found Love .. w/e 15 Oct (3) in@ No.1 .
November
1178: Professor Green ft.Emeli Sande - Read All About It .. w/e 05 Nov (2) [email protected] .
R / E: Rihanna ft.Calvin Harris - We Found Love .. w/e 26 Nov (3)
December
1179: The X Factor Finalists 2011 - Wishing On A Star .. w/e Dec 10 (1) [email protected]
1180: Olly Murs - Dance With Me Tonight .. w/e Dec 17 (1)
1181: Little Mix - Cannonball .. w/e Dec 24 (1) [email protected] X Factor winner
1182: Military Wives with Gareth Malone - Wherever You Are .. w/e Dec 31 (1) [email protected]
2012
1183: Coldplay - Paradise .. w/e Jan 7 (1)
1184: Flo Rida - Good Feeling .. w/e Jan 14 (1)
1185: Jessie J - Domino .. w/e Jan 21 (2)
February
1186: Cover Drive - Twilight .. Feb 04 (1) [email protected]
1187: David Guetta ft Sia - Titanium .. Feb 11 (1)
1188: Gotye Somebody ft Kimbra - That I Used To Know .. Feb 18 (1)
1189: DJ Fresh ft. Rita Ora - Hot Right Now .. Feb 25 (1)
March
R / E: Gotye ft Kimbra - SomebodyThat I Used To Know .. March 03 (4)
1190: Katy Perry - Part Of Me .. March 31 (1) in@ No.1
April
1191: Chris Brown - Turn Up The Music .. April 07 (1) [email protected]
1192: Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe .. April 14 (4)
May
1193: Tulisa - Young .. w/e May 12 (1) [email protected]
1194: Rita Ora ft.Tinie Tempah - R.I.P .. w/e May 19 (2) [email protected]
June
1195: fun ft. Janelle Monae - We Are Young .. w/e June 2 (1)
1196: Rudimental ft. John Newman - Feel The Love .. w/e June 9 (1) [email protected]
1197: Gary Barlow & The Commonwealth Band - Sing .. w/e June 16 (1)
1198: Cheryl - Call My Name .. w/e June 23 (1) [email protected]
1199: Maroon 5 ft. Wiz Khalifa - Payphone .. w/e June 30 (1) [email protected]
July
1200: will.i.am ft. Eva Simons - This Is Love .. w/e July 7 (1) [email protected]
R / E: Maroon 5 ft.Wiz Khalifa - Payphone .. w/e July 14 (1)
1201: Florence + the Machine (Calvin Harris Mix) - Spectrum (Say My Name) .. w/e July 21 (3)
August
1202: Wiley ft. Rymez & Ms D - Heatwave .. w/e Aug 11 (2) [email protected]
1203: Rita Ora - How We Do (Party) .. w/e Aug 25 (1) [email protected]
September
1204: Sam and The Womp - Bom Bom .. w/e Sept 01 (1) [email protected]
1205: Little Mix - Wings .. w/e Sept 08 (1) [email protected]
1206: Ne-Yo - Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself) .. w/e Sept 15 (1) [email protected]
1207: The Script feat. will.i.am - Hall Of Fame .. w/e Sept 22 (2)
October
1208: PSY - Gangnam Style .. w/e Oct 06 (1)
1209: Rihanna - Diamonds .. w/e Oct 13 (1) [email protected]
1210: Swedish House Mafia ft.John Martin - Don't You Worry Child .. w/e Oct 20 (1) [email protected]
1211: Calvin Harris ft.Florence Welch - Sweet Nothing .. w/e Oct 27 (1) [email protected]
November
1212: Labrinth ft. Emeli Sande - Beneath Your Beautiful .. w/e Nov 03 (1)
1213: Robbie Williams - Candy .. w/e Nov 10 (2) [email protected]
1214: One Direction - Little Things .. Nov 24 (1) [email protected]
December
1215: Olly Murs ft. Flo Rida - Troublemaker .. Dec 01 (2) [email protected]
1216: Gabrielle Aplin - The Power Of Love .. Dec 15 (1)
1217: James Arthur - Impossible .. Dec 22 (1) [email protected] the fastest-selling X Factor single of all time (to date) reaching 255,000 downloads within 48 hours
1218: The Justice Collective - He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother .. Dec 29 (1) [email protected].
2013
R/E .: James Arthur - Impossible .. Jan 05 (2)
1219: will.i.am feat. Britney Spears - Scream & Shout .. Jan 19 (2)
February
1220: Bingo Players ft. Far East Movement - Get Up (Rattle) .. Feb 02 (2) [email protected]
1221: Macklemore - Thrift Shop .. w/e Feb 16 (1)
1222: Avicii vs Nicky Romero - I Could Be The One .. w/e Feb 23 (1) [email protected]
March
1223: One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks) - One Direction .. w/e March 02 (1) [email protected] The official Comic Relief 2013 single.
1224: Justin Timberlake - Mirrors .. w/e March 09 (3)
1225: The Saturdays ft Sean Paul - What About Us .. March 30 (1) [email protected]
April
1226: PJ & Duncan - Let's Get Ready To Rhumble .. April 06 (1) first released July 11th 1994 peaking at No.9. ~ re-released in March 2013, with royalties from sales to be donated to the charity ChildLine.
1227: Duke Dumont ft. A*M*E - Need U (100%) .. April 13 (2) [email protected]
1228: Rudimental ft. Ella Eyre - Waiting All Night .. April 27 (1) [email protected]
May
1229: Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams - Get Lucky .. May 04 (4)
June
1230: Naughty Boy ft. Sam Smith - La La La .. June 01 (1) [email protected]
1231: Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams & T.I. - Blurred Lines .. June 08 (4) [email protected]
July
1232: Icona Pop ft. Charli XCX - I Love It .. July 06 (1) [email protected]
1233: John Newman - Love Me Again .. July 13 (1) [email protected]
R/E .: Robin Thicke ft. Pharrell Williams & T.I. - Blurred Lines .. July 20 (1)
1234: Avicii - Wake Me Up .. July 27 (3) [email protected]
August
1235: Miley Cyrus - We Can't Stop .. Aug 17 (1) [email protected]
1236: Ellie Goulding - Burn .. Aug 24 (3) [email protected]
September
1237: Katy Perry - Roar .. Sept 14 (2) [email protected]
1238: Jason Derulo ft. 2 Chainz - Talk Dirty .. Sept 28 (2) [email protected]
October
1239: OneRepublic - Counting Stars .. Oct 12 (1)
1240: Miley Cyrus - Wrecking Ball .. Oct 19 (1) [email protected]
R/E .: OneRepublic - Counting Stars .. Oct 26 (1)
November
1241: Lorde - Royals .. Nov 02 (1) [email protected]
1242: Eminem ft Rihanna - The Monster .. Nov 09 (1) [email protected]
1243: Storm Queen - Look Right Through .. Nov 16 (1)
1244: Martin Garrix - Animals .. Nov 23 (1) [email protected]
1245: Lily Allen - Somewhere Only We Know .. Nov 30 (1)
December
1246: Calvin Harris/Alesso/Hurts - Under Control .. Dec 07 (1) [email protected]
R/E .:.Lily Allen - Somewhere Only We Know .. Dec 14 (2)
1247: Sam Bailey - Skyscaper .. Dec 28 (1) [email protected] Xmas No.1
2014
1248: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. Jan 04 (1).
1249: Pitbull ft Kesha - Timber .. Jan 11 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. Jan 18 (2).
February
1250: Clean Bandit ft. Jess Glynne - Rather Be .. Feb 01 (4) [email protected]
March
1251: Sam Smith - Money On My Mind .. March 01 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Pharrell Williams - Happy .. March 08 (1).
1252: Route 94 ft. Jess Glynne - My Love .. March 15 (1) [email protected].
1253: DVBBS & Borgeous ft Tinie Tempah - Tsunami (Jump) .. March 22 (1) [email protected].
1254: Duke Dumont ft Jax Jones - I Got U .. March 29 (1) [email protected]
April
1255: 5 Seconds Of Summer - She Looks So Perfect .. April 05 (1) [email protected].
1256: Aloe Blacc - The Man .. April 12 (1) [email protected].
1257: Sigma - Nobody To Love .. April 19 (1) [email protected].
1258: Kiesza - Hidaway .. April 26 (1) [email protected]
May
1259: Mr Probz - Waves .. May 03 (1) [email protected].
1260: Calvin Harris - Summer .. May 10 (1) [email protected].
R/E .: Mr Probz - Waves .. May 17 (1).
1261: Rita Ora - I Will Never Let You Down .. May 24 (1) [email protected].
1262: Sam Smith - Stay With Me .. May 31 (1) [email protected]
June
1263: Secondcity - I Wanna Feel .. June 07 (1) [email protected]
1264: Ed Sheeran - Sing .. June 14 (1) [email protected]
1265: Ella Henderson - Ghost .. June 21 (2) [email protected]
July
1266: Oliver Heldens & Becky Hill - Gecko (Overdrive) .. July 05 (1) [email protected]
1267: Ariana Grande ft Iggy Azalea - Problem .. July 12 (1) [email protected]
1268: Will.i.am ft. Cody Wise - It's My Birthday .. July 19 (1) [email protected]
1269: Rixton - Me And My Broken Heart .. July 26 (1) [email protected]
August
1270: Cheryl Cole ft Tinie Tempah - Crazy Stupid Love .. Aug 02 (1) [email protected]
1271: Magic - Rude .. Aug 09 (1)
1272: Nico & Vinz - Am I Wrong .. Aug 16 (2)
1273: David Guetta ft. Sam Martin - Lovers On The Sun .. Aug 30 (1) [email protected]
September
1274: Lilly Wood & Robin Schulz - Prayer in C .. Sept 06 (2) .
1275: Calvin Harris ft. John Newman - Blame .. Sept 20 (1) [email protected]
1276: Sigma ft. Paloma Faith - Changing .. Sept 27 (1)
October
1277: Jesse J / Grande / Minaj - Bang Bang .. Oct 04 (1) [email protected] .
1278: Meghan Trainor - All About That Bass .. Oct 11 (4) .
November
1279: Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Aloud .. Nov 08 (1)
1280: Cheryl - I Don't Care - Cheryl .. Nov 15 (1) [email protected]
1281: Gareth Malone's All Star Choir - Wake Me Up .. Nov 22 (1) [email protected]
1282: Band Aid 30 - Do They Know It's Christmas .. Nov 29 (1) [email protected]
December
1283: Take That - These Days .. Dec 06 (1) [email protected]
R/E:.: Ed Sheeran - Thinking Out Aloud .. Dec 13 (1)
1284: Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk .. Dec 20 (1) [email protected]
1285: Ben Haenow - Something I Need .. Dec 27 (1) [email protected]
2015
R/E:.: Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk .. Jan 03 (6)
February
1286: Ellie Goulding - Love Me Like You Do .. Feb 14 (4) [email protected]
March
1287: Years & Years - King .. March 14 (1) [email protected]
1288: Sam Smith ft.John Legend - Lay Me Down .. March 21 (2) [email protected]
April
1289: Jess Glynne - Hold My Hand .. April 04 (3) [email protected]
1290: Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth - See You Again .. April 25 (2)
May
1291: OMI - Cheerleader .. May 09 (4)
June
1292: Jason Derulo - Want To Want Me .. June 06 (4) [email protected]
July
1293: Tinie Tempah ft Jesse Glynne - Not Letting Go .. July 04 (1)
WEEK ENDING DATE CHANGES TO FRIDAYS
1294: Lost Frequences - Are You With Me .. July 09 (1)
1295: David Zowie - House Every Weekend .. July 16 (1)
1296: Little Mix - Black Magic .. July 23 (3) [email protected]
August
1297: One Direction - Drag Me Down .. Aug 13 (1) [email protected]
1298: Charlie Puth ft Meghan Trainor - Marvin Gaye .. Aug 20 (1)
1299: Jess Glynne - Don't Be So Hard on Yourself .. Aug 27 (1)
September
1300: Rachel Platten - Fight Song .. Sept 03 (1)
1301: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Sept 10 (1) [email protected]
1302: Sigala - Easy Love .. Sept 17 (1)
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Sept 24 (2)
October
1303: Sam Smith - Writing On The Wall .. Oct 08 (1) [email protected].
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - What Do You Mean .. Oct 15 (2)
1304: KDA ft Tinie Tempah & Katy B - Turn The Music Louder (Rumble) .. Oct 29 (1) [email protected]
November
1305: Adele - Hello .. Nov 05 (3) [email protected]
1306: Justin Bieber - Sorry .. Nov 26 (2)
December
1307: Justin Bieber - Love Yourself .. Dec 10 (3)
1308: Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir - A Bridge Over You .. Dec 31 (1) [email protected]
2016
January
R/E:.: Justin Bieber - Love Yourself .. Jan 07 (3)
Jan 8th - Jan 14th Justin Bieber holds the 1st, 2nd, 3rd position on the charts; a first in UK chart history
1309: Shawn Mendes - Stitches . . Jan 28 (2)
February
1310: Zayn - Pillowtalk . . Feb 11 (1) in@ No.1
1311: Lukas Graham - 7 Years . . Feb 18 (5)
March
1312: Mike Posner - I Tool A Pill In Ibiza .. March 24 (4)
April
1313: Drake ft. Wizkid & Kyla - One Dance .. April 21 (15)
August
1314: Major Lazer/Justin Beiber/Mo - Cold Water .. Aug 04 (5)
September
1315: Chainsmoker ft Halsey - Closer .. Sept 08 (4)
October
1316: James Arthur - Say You Won't Let Go .. Oct 06 (3)
1317: Little Mix - Shout Out To My Ex .. Oct 27 (3) [email protected]
November
1318: Clean Bandit - Rockabye .. Nov 17 (9) Christmas No.1
2017
January
1319: Ed Sheeran - Shape Of You .. w/e Jan 19 (1) [email protected] "Shape of You" and Ed Sheeran's "Castle on the Hill" debuted on UK Singles Chart at No1 & No.2, the first time in history an artist has taken the top two chart positions with new releases.
UPDATED: January 13th 2016.
A FEW FACTS (UK Singles charts)
Most Consecutive Weeks at No.1
16 weeks: Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You .. 1991
Most Weeks at No.1
18 weeks: Frankie Laine's - I Believe
In 1953 it topped the chart on three separate occasions
Longest Time For A Track To Get To No.1
33 Years, 3 Months, and 27 Days.
Tony Christie "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo"
w/e November 27th 1971 - it reached No.18.
w/e March 26th 2005 - it reached No.1 with the re-release, after comedian Peter Kaye sung the song and made an amusing video with it, featuring many other celebrities. It was in aid of Comic Relief.
it beat the previous record of
29 Years, 1 Month, and 11 Days
Jackie Wilson -"Reet Petite (The Sweetest Girl in Town)" the original subtitle: (The Finest Girl You Ever Want To Meet)
w/e November 15th 1957 - it reached No.6 in the UK charts
w/e December 29th 1986 - it reached No.1 , two years after his death, when it was re-released after being used on an advert for Levi Jeans .
Until 1983, the chart was made available on Tuesdays.
Due to improved technology, from January 1983 it was released on the Sunday.
The convention of using Saturday as the 'week-ending' date
has remained constant throughout.
JULY 2015 .. WEEK-ENDING DATE CHANGES TO THURSDAYS AND RELEASED ON FRIDAYS
Information up to 2004 is from the
"Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums"
2004 onwards from BBC Radio 1
*****************************************
| i don't know |
Released in August 2014, which noisy song from Jessie J features Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj | Bang Bang | Nicki Minaj Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
" Anaconda "
"Bang Bang" is a song by Jessie J , Ariana Grande , and Nicki Minaj . It serves as a joint single from all three. It's the first single from Jessie J's third studio album, Sweet Talker, released on October 10, 2014. It was included on the deluxe edition of Ariana's sophomore album, My Everything, which came out August 22, 2014. The Song was not however included on Nicki's album The Pinkprint . The song was released on July 29, 2014 as a digital download. The song impacted Top 40 Mainstream (Pop), Top 40 Rhythmic, and Hot AC stations on the same day. A music video was shot on July 30-31, and premiered on August 24. The song was included on Just Dance 2015. It was included on the US version (Now! 52) and the UK version (Now! 89) of the music complilation album series Now That's What I Call Music!.
It peaked at #1 becoming Nicki's first ever UK chart-topper, Ariana's 2nd, and Jessie J's 3rd. It became Nicki and Jessie J's 1st ever US Pop radio #1 while becoming Ariana's 2nd. The song has been certified 5x Platinum in the US (making it her third song to ever do so), 3x Platinum in Australia and Canada, 2x Platinum in New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, Platinum in Denmark, Italy and the UK, and Gold in Spain.
Contents
Edit
On June 30, 2014, Jessie J tweeted that she was revealing her new single a day later and that it featured two artists. On July 1, she announced the single called "Bang Bang", and that the two features were Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande. The official release date was revealed to be July 29, 2014. In a press release, it was revealed to be the lead single from Jessie J's new album and will be included on Ariana's album as well. Jessie J released a snippet of her verse on IG, and Republic Records posted a snippet of the beat on Vine on July 9. On July 23, Nicki posted a snippet of her verse. On July 27, Ariana Grande posted her snippet.
The song was released as a digital download on July 29, 2014, and impacted Top 40 Mainstream (Pop), Top 40 Rhythmic, and Hot AC stations the same day. It was the #1 most added song on both Pop & Rhythmic.
Music Video
[1]
A fan asked Nicki if they were going to shot a video, and she badged the tweet. The music video will be shot by Hannah Lux Davis . It was shot on July 30-31, and premiered on August 24, 2014 at the MTV Video Music Awards . It premiered on VEVO the next day.
Live Performances
Edit
Nicki, Ariana, and Jessie performed the song for the first time together at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards . Then Nicki and Ariana performed it again at the 2014 iHeartRadio Music Festival . All three performed the song together again at the 2014 American Music Awards .
Charts
| Bang Bang |
Released in July 2014, which deadly song is from Iggy Azalea and features Rita Ora | Jessie J + Ariana Grande + Nicki Minaj Premiere New Single “Bang Bang”
Jessie J + Ariana Grande + Nicki Minaj Premiere New Single “Bang Bang”
News , NEWS
Anything these three ladies touch turns to pure gold. Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj premiered their new collaboration titled “Band Bang” and it’s the powerful all girl pop song this summer needs. Instead of taking the techno-remix approach that is flooding the airwaves, they brought back old school harmonies and head bopping melodies that are reminiscent of 2004’s “Lady Marmelade.” The single has already debuted at #1 on the iTunes overall and pop charts as well as hitting #1 on the Billboard Trending 140 chart.
The song will serve as the first single for Jessie J’s forthcoming album due out this fall and will also be apart of the deluxe edition of Grande’s sophomore album, My Everything, out August 25th.
| i don't know |
Which battle is commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand? | Battle of Little Bighorn Coverup
By Robert Nightengale
Editor’s note: Like many George Armstrong Custer defenders, the author of the following article believes that Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen were to blame for the 7th Cavalry’s failure in Montana 120 years ago. And, like some of those Custer defenders, the author believes that Reno and Benteen tried to hide the truth. Part of that truth, the author suggests, may have been that Colonel Custer actually crossed the Little Bighorn River and fought in the Indian village.
June 25, 1876. It has become a day of myth and mystery. On that date, Lieutenant Colonel (Brevet Major General) George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry fought perhaps the biggest alliance of Plains Indians hostile to the government that had ever gathered in one place. As every student of the American West knows, the 7th Cavalry lost that battle, and Custer’s personal command, about 210 soldiers, was wiped out. Without a survivor of Custer’s command to tell the story, with the possible exception of the young Crow scout Curley, it is only natural that the dramatic event would trigger more debate and conjecture than any other battle in U.S. history.
The entire 7th Cavalry was not destroyed in the desperate fighting. Under the command of Major Marcus Reno and Captain Frederick Benteen, about 400 soldiers and scouts survived a two-day siege on a bluff about four miles from where Custer was annihilated. On June 27, reinforcements commanded by Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry arrived on the battlefield to rescue the survivors and bury the dead of the 7th Cavalry. A coverup of the facts of the battle immediately began–a coverup endorsed by many, but orchestrated first and foremost by Major Reno and Captain Benteen.
Custer’s political difficulties during the spring of 1876 and his testimony in Washington, D.C., concerning governmental corruption on the frontier also kept the authorities from pursuing an investigation that might clear up some of the mystery. It was an election year, and President Ulysses S. Grant and his administration had no desire to elevate Custer from his former status of political enemy to that of martyr. Even General Terry confused the issues by inventing a charge that Custer disobeyed orders–a charge still frequently repeated despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Orders were disobeyed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but not by Custer. Reno and Benteen had been ordered forward to attack the Indian village. Not only did the two officers fail to carry out those orders but they also failed to carry out the spirit of military duty as it exists historically in any military structure. Reno and Benteen, to protect themselves, went far in confusing the issues of the battle.
It was early morning on June 25 when, from the divide between the Rosebud Creek and Little Bighorn River valleys, Custer was informed by his scouts of the location of an enormous camp of hostile Indians, mostly Sioux and Cheyenne. Custer was also informed that the 7th Cavalry was under observation by hostile scouts. Because the Indians in the camp might escape–the greatest concern to the frontier army while on campaign–Custer ordered his force forward to the attack. Custer could do so with confidence, for there was no record up to that date of Plains Indians ever having confronted an entire regiment of U.S. cavalry, much less defeating them.
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Dividing the regiment into four elements, Custer began the advance into the Little Bighorn Valley. The Indians were camped some 12 miles away. Custer himself commanded two battalions–five companies–and Reno commanded a third battalion of three companies. These three battalions made up the main force of the advance, while Benteen and three companies were sent on a controversial and somewhat mysterious’scout’ to the left (south) of the main advance. One company and several picked soldiers from each of the other companies made up the rear guard and pack-train escort.
As Custer’s and Reno’s forces neared the valley, hostile war parties were observed, as well as dust rising from the valley, indicating that there was activity in the village–probably that the Indians were preparing to flee. Reno was ordered to advance directly into the valley, while Custer turned to the right and took a route parallel to Reno’s advance.
While Custer has been criticized for his tactics in the battle, this maneuver was, in fact, a standard cavalry tactic. Both Custer and Reno were experienced Civil War cavalry officers and would have been very familiar with it. The official manual of the time (used during the Civil War and in the postwar period) was Cavalry Tactics and Regulations of the United States Army, written by Philip St. George Crook. Regulation 561 of that manual states, ‘If possible, at the moment of a charge, assail your enemy in the flank when [the enemy] is engaged in the front.’ Reno’s attack in the valley was to be a diversion, the ‘anvil’ so to speak, while Custer maneuvered to strike the flank, or be the ‘hammer’ of the combined attacks. Custer’s maneuver was straight out of the book.
Two messages are known to have been sent by Custer before his command was destroyed. The first message was brought by Sergeant Daniel Kanipe to the pack train, and the second message was sent with Private John Martin to Captain Benteen. Both messages ordered these forces to quickly advance to support the attack on the Indian village. It is after this point that many details of the battle become obscured, especially the movements of Custer and his five companies.
Although there are conflicting accounts by the survivors of Reno’s command about times and distances involved in the valley attack, it is known that after reaching the valley and advancing toward the camp for perhaps up to two miles, Reno halted his advance and deployed his soldiers as skirmishers, while the mounts were sent into a sheltered wooded area on the right of his line. When the now-alerted Indian warriors began to advance and flank his line, Reno withdrew his men to the wooded area and had them remount. After a bullet struck an Arikara scout, Bloody Knife, in the head, sending a shower of gore into Reno’s face, Reno led a disorganized retreat out of the woods and to the rear. The retreat turned into a total rout, during which Reno lost about a third of his command killed, wounded or missing.
Advancing toward the battlefield, Benteen witnessed Reno’s retreat and then joined Reno and his command on the bluffs. Custer had passed this very spot on his advance to attack the village, and farther downstream (at the position now known as Weir Peak, or Weir Point), Custer had been seen by members of Reno’s command before they retreated from the valley. The pack train soon joined Reno and Benteen on the bluff position, and all the hostile Indian forces that were in the area left. It was also about this time that the sound of gunfire, volley fire, was heard downstream.
At the Reno court of inquiry in 1879–the only ‘official’ investigation of the battle–nearly every participant that testified said he heard gunfire from downstream, and only Reno and Benteen claimed this gunfire did not occur. Among those who heard the gunfire were Lieutenant George Wallace, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, Captain Myles Moylan, Lieutenant Luther Hare and Lieutenant Winfield Edgerly. Most of these soldiers mentioned hearing ‘volley’ fire, which would indicate that Custer’s force was engaged.
The only known position that Custer and his soldiers fought at is on and around the hill (today called Custer Hill, or Last Stand Hill) where the soldiers were killed. This position is 4.1 miles from the Reno position (now known as Reno Hill), where the gunfire was heard. A mile north of the Reno position stands Weir Peak, a geographical formation that might affect any sound from Custer Hill. From the position of the bodies found on Custer Hill, it would appear most of the soldiers were fighting in skirmish formation and not close together–unlike how they would have stood if firing volleys under the direction of an officer. Background noise on Reno Hill, where there were more than 400 men and almost 600 horses and mules, must have affected the hearing of the soldiers there.
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To further explore such matters, I created a task force of experts in 1994. Steve Fjstad, firearms expert and author of the Blue Book of Guns, was consulted concerning the question of the gunfire heard. In November 1994, Fjstad directed a sound test using a Springfield carbine and ammunition with powder loads that were similar to those used in 1876 (the cavalrymen at the Little Bighorn used .45-caliber Springfield single-shot carbines). Rick Van Doren, an acoustics expert, provided testing equipment; John Allan, another firearms expert, conducted the actual firing; and firing range supervision was provided by legal investigator John Swanson. Also attending the test was Edward Zimmerman, a lawyer and military law specialist. The results of this test indicate that it was unlikely the gunfire heard on Reno Hill originated from Custer Hill.
Terry Flower, a physics professor at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., conducted a second test in 1995, again using a Springfield carbine and appropriate powder loads. In a 25-page report on his test, Flower wrote, ‘Volleys heard at Reno Hill most probably did not originate from Last Stand Hill [about 7,000 meters away].’ Only on-site testing will answer the question with certainty, but such testing has not as yet been permitted at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (known until 1991 as the Custer Battlefield National Monument).
Still, if it is probable that gunfire from Custer Hill could not have been heard on Reno Hill on July 25, 1876, then where could the sound of gunfire have come from? Interestingly enough, there is testimony from the Reno court of inquiry that may suggest an answer. Sergeant Edward Davern testified: ‘Shortly after reaching the top [of Reno Hill], I heard volley firing from downstream….I could see Indians circling around in the bottom on the right, way down and raising a big dust….I spoke to Captain [Thomas] Weir about it. I said, ‘That must be General Custer fighting down in the bottom.’ He asked me where and I showed him. He said, ‘Yes, I believe it is.” Statements made by Lieutenant Edward Mathey and Lieutenant Edgerly supported Sergeant Davern’s observation.
The ‘bottom’ is, of course, where the Indian village was located. If Davern’s observation was correct, then it would indicate Custer had conducted a successful charge across the river–probably at Medicine Tail Ford, also known as Minneconjou Ford–and into the Indian camp. The testing done by Terry Flower indicates that shots fired near that ford could have been heard on Reno Hill. ‘U.S. Government Survey maps indicate that the Minneconjou Ford is located about 4,300 meters from the Reno entrenchment,’ Flower said. ‘While single shots could marginally be heard, volleys and multiple firings could most likely be identified.’ There are statements from Indians who were in the camp that seem to indicate soldiers were in the camp and fighting there. Indian participants such as Gall, Red Horse, Kill Eagle and Thunder Hawk mentioned women and children being killed and tepees set afire. There is no evidence that this killing and tepee-burning was done by Reno’s men, and most accounts from survivors of his command say Reno’s charge was stopped short of the village. Stray bullets could kill women and children, but they would not set tepees afire.
In his official report of the battle, Reno mentioned that Custer may have crossed the river and attacked the camp, but he later changed this view. Benteen, in a letter to his wife, also mentioned the possibility that Custer got across, but by the time of the Reno court of inquiry, he had changed his view: ‘I can’t think he [Custer] got within three furlongs of the ford.’
The distortions and untruths told by Reno and Benteen about the Battle of the Little Bighorn are so many and so obvious that almost everything they said about it becomes suspect. These ‘errors’ have been pointed out by many researchers. ‘There are many elements to this story that indicate that others besides Reno and Benteen were involved in a coverup of the facts, distortions and outright criminal acts,’ Zimmerman said. ‘Some of these issues require a more in-depth investigation to expose the truth.’
The 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment Fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn
By Vincent A. Transano
Shortly before noon Chicago time on Sunday, June 25, 1876, approximately 600 officers and men of the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, scouts, mule drivers, and other associated civilians were in the saddle advancing toward destiny on the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. The soldiers’ appearance was much at odds with popular portrayals of the Indian-fighting army. Their uniforms, especially those of the officers, were wildly nonregulation. Many officers wore custom-tailored sailor-style shirts, buckskins, straw hats (or any kind of hat that caught their fancy); the men wore blue shirts of various shades, battered black campaign hats or privately purchased civilian hats; and occasionally individual troopers even wore white canvas trousers or had their light-blue regulation trousers reinforced with canvas. White alkaline dust kicked up by their horses’ hooves mixed with sweat on their uniforms, giving them a spurious appearance of uniformity. Heat in the high 90s and accompanying thirst added to the discomfort of both men and horses.
Led by its second-in-command, Lt. Col. George A. Custer, the regiment had marched out of Fort Abraham Lincoln on May 17 as part of Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry’s column during the ill-fated Indian campaign of 1876. Three bodies of troops converging from west, south and east were attempting to bring the recalcitrant Sitting Bull, his Lakotas, and their Northern Cheyenne and other Indian allies to battle. Neither Sitting Bull’s exact location nor the number of Indians with him were known. Thus, on June 22, Terry sent Custer forward toward the Rosebud and Little Bighorn rivers to try and find the Indians’ village. By the 25th of the month the 7th Cavalry had ridden 105 miles since separating from Terry’s column. The troops had been on campaign for a total of six weeks. The men were tired, dirty and sore. Their mounts also were worn, but despite this the 7th Cavalry was still a very formidable military organization by Indian wars’ standards. Among the troops advancing on the Little Bighorn were three Italian-born soldiers. Each of them was at a key point in the forthcoming battle, and taken together, their personal stories effectively tell the story of the battle. How did these Italians come to find themselves fighting Indians in the vastness of the American West?
The full complement of the 7th Cavalry in June 1876 was 43 officers and 793 enlisted men. Of that number 473 were native born and 320 foreign born. The two largest foreign-born groups in the regiment comprised 129 Irish and 127 Germans. The remaining 64 foreign born were drawn from 14 other nationalities, including six Italians. These were: 1st Lt. Charles Camillus DeRudio (a k a Count Carlo Camillo Di Rudio) of Company A; Private Augustus L. De Voto (a k a Augusto De Voto) of Company B; Private John James (a k a Giovanni Casella) of Company E; Private Frank Lombard (a k a Frank Lombardy, Francesco Lombardi) of the regimental band; Private John Martin (a k a Giovanni Martini), trumpeter of Company H; and Chief Musician Felix Villiet Vinatieri (a k a Felice Villiet Vinatieri) of the regimental band. Two of the six were married. As might be expected, given that the pay of the era made it virtually impossible for junior enlisted personnel to wed and support a family, they were the two highest ranking: DeRudio and Vinatieri.
Unlike native-born Americans, Irish and Germans, the Italians were too few to constitute a group or subculture in the regiment. They were individuals who had come to the United States for a variety of reasons, both political and economic. In many cases the latter flowed from the former. Irish and Germans constituted major immigrant groups during the 19th century. Both nationalities immigrated largely for economic reasons by the mid-1800s. Socially, the Germans were more acceptable; they frequently were skilled craftsmen, and a very large percentage were Protestants. The Irish were much less socially acceptable; they were mostly unskilled, usually dirt-poor and Roman Catholic. In 1876 they constituted a clearly defined minority group that suffered very real social and economic discrimination. The Italians shared many of the social disadvantages of the Irish as well as some unique to themselves. They, too, were Roman Catholics; they were poor and, as southern Europeans, tended to be short and swarthy, and thus further removed in appearance from the northern European norm. Further, they came to the new country speaking a foreign tongue. The only advantage the Italians had over the Irish was that they were so few that they were not objects of such organized discrimination.
If there were six Italians in the 7th Cavalry, why were only three present on that fateful day in 1876? The three absentees were in good company because Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis, the regimental commanding officer, the two senior majors, and approximately 200 other officers and men were also absent. This was characteristic of the frontier army. Large numbers of regimental personnel routinely were seconded to headquarters assignments or detailed to other duties away from their units. This was a pleasant break from the harsh and boring life of campaign and garrison duty in the Far West. In the case of the three absent Italians, Vinatieri was at the Powder River base camp with the regimental band, James was detailed away to unspecified duties, and Lombard was in the hospital back at Fort Abraham Lincoln.
The Italians in the 7th Cavalry evidently recognized their social disadvantages and took steps to lessen the obvious differences between themselves and native-born Americans. All six anglicized their given names, and three of them did the same to their surnames (or in the case of John James, adopted an new surname). Of the six, DeRudio was the only one who could not be expected to downplay his origins. He was a nobleman by birth and as such was pro forma a gentleman. His commission depended on recognition of this distinction. The most he would do was anglicize his Christian name and change the spelling of his surname to make it more phonetic for English speakers. The other Italians, however, labored under no such stricture. They had no urge to maintain their cultural identity, since they belonged to no ethnic subculture. They simply desired to lose themselves in the general population and become Americans.
Three of the six Italians held music-related positions, a traditional occupation for Italians in America at the time, especially those in the Army. Indeed, 20th century New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was an ‘army brat, the son of a regimental bandmaster. Italians stereotypically were thought to possess greater natural musical talent than other ethnic groups and thus were much sought after for military bands. It is no mystery that Chief Musician Felix Vinatieri was the regimental bandmaster, Frank Lombard was a musician (instrument unknown), and John Martin, while a line private, was a trumpeter in his company. Some years before immigrating, when he was only 14, Martin also had served in the Italian army as a drummer boy.
As with John Martin, two other Italians, DeRudio and John James, claimed prior military service. The former attended an Austrian cadet academy in Milan and served with the revolutionary forces of Mazzini and Garibaldi during the period of the Roman Republic in 1848. The latter simply listed his previous occupation as soldier. Vinatieri and Lombard were formerly musicians, and De Voto identified his previous occupation as that of bookbinder.
That three of the six Italians should claim prior military experience is not unexpected, although seemingly flying in the face of the musical stereotype. Italy had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity and active warfare for the past several decades. Up to 1870 the nation of Italy was being forged from many disparate elements. This forging entailed a great deal of armed conflict–against foreign occupiers, such as the Austrians, between the various states that comprised pre-unification Italy, and finally against the Pope himself, ruler of most of central Italy. Thus, while Americans typecast Italians as artistic and musical, given the amount of warfare that afflicted Italy during the first half of the 19th century, the reality was that Italians were much more likely to be soldiers than music makers.
The six Italians were from different parts of Italy, spoke different dialects, and probably felt very little solidarity with one another. After all, Italian was a relatively new term, at least to the degree that it expressed nationality. Italy had only been a nation since 1860, and it was not until 1870 that King Victor Emmanuel II defeated the last enemy of national unification, Pope Pius IX. DeRudio was from Belluno, in the province of Venice, and was born a subject of the Austrian emperor. De Voto from Genoa, Vinatieri from Turin and Martin from Sola Conzalina were all born subjects of the Piedmontese king of Sardinia, who would one day be king of Italy. James was born in Rome, a subject of the Pope, and Lombard in Naples, a subject of the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies.
The Italians of the 7th Cavalry, like so many others, came to the United States because they saw little future for themselves in the land of their birth. They ended up in the army because it was the employer of first and last resort for recently arrived male immigrants with no prospects. Such immigrants could use the army as a springboard to better things.
One of this group, Charles DeRudio had nothing in common with the others; as a nobleman, an aristocrat, he claimed and received a commission not long after his arrival in the United States. Given his status, he would have felt no camaraderie for his fellow Italians. DeRudio was certainly the most controversial of the six. The Di Rudio family of Belluno held the title count. Their nobility was fairly recent, however, dating back only to the mid-17th century. DeRudio’s grandfather had been an ardent Bonapartist and was extremely hostile to the Austrians. Under Napoleon I, the elder Di Rudio had been prefect of Belluno where Charles would one day be born. Following Napoleon’s defeat and the re-establishment of Austrian power in Italy, the family fell on hard times. Charles’ father, Count Aquila Di Rudio, was as hostile to the Austrians as his father and was involved continually in conspiratorial activities against them. Political ideology, however, had no effect on matters of the heart. While working against the hated Austrians, Count Aquila managed to fall in love and subsequently elope with the daughter of the pro-Austrian governor of Belluno. Disinherited by her father, the bride and her revolutionary husband were compelled to live in modest circumstances. Carlo Camillo Di Rudio was born of this union on August 26, 1832. As a teenager, he attended an Austrian military academy in Milan. At the age of 15 he left to join the Italian patriots during the uprising in 1848, and participated in the defense of Rome and, later, of Venice against the Austrians. Following the suppression of the revolutions in Italy, Di Rudio sailed for America but was shipwrecked off Spain. He claimed subsequently to have served with French colonial troops in North Africa, and he finally ended up in exile in England in 1855. There he impregnated and later married a 15-year-old English girl, an illiterate of working-class origin.
It was in England that the Italian revolutionary Felice Orsini recruited Di Rudio in a plot to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III of France, who had displeased Italian nationalists by his lukewarm support of their bid for nationhood and independence from Austrian domination. Orsini previously had been in an Austrian prison with Di Rudio’s father and sister, and also had a prior association with Di Rudio himself. Although Di Rudio was condemned to death for throwing the most powerful bomb in the 1858 attempt that killed and wounded more than 100 people, he escaped the guillotine via a last-minute reprieve, probably because his wife testified against an English co-conspirator. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of Cayenne, French Guiana, he escaped (it has been alleged with French connivance), made his way back to England to gather up wife and family, and then left for a new home in the United States. Arriving in the midst of the Civil War, DeRudio joined the 79th New York Infantry in 1864. This was followed by a commission as a second lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Colored Volunteer Infantry. DeRudio may have been an idealist at 15, but by the time he was 32 he was an opportunistic survivor. Very plausible in manner, he claimed to be a great believer in the cause to free the slaves. He soon had many influential supporters among the liberals of the period, not least of whom was the famous newspaper reporter Horace Greeley. The influence of these supporters won DeRudio a commission in the Regular Army at the end of the war. In 1869 he was a second lieutenant in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, and by 1876 had advanced to first lieutenant. DeRudio possessed an air of Old World charm and sophistication and was an inveterate storyteller. He clearly was popular in the social milieu of Far West military outposts, for he was witty and entertaining and helped relieve the crushing boredom that was part of the life of frontier Regulars.
On the other hand, DeRudio’s superiors thought little of his military ability. His previous company commander, Captain Frederick W. Benteen of Company H, although finding DeRudio an amusing companion, disparaged him as Count No Account and had a low estimate of his military skills. Benteen himself was an accomplished Indian fighter and the senior captain of the regiment. The de facto commanding officer of the 7th Cavalry, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, also held DeRudio in low esteem. Custer wrote early in 1876 that He [DeRudio] is, all things considered, the inferior of every first lieutenant in this Regt. as an efficient and subordinate officer. Ironically, one factor in Custer’s disesteem of DeRudio may have been how well the latter got on socially with Benteen, who made no bones about his dislike for Custer. In February 1876 Custer transferred DeRudio from Company E, of which he was acting commanding officer by seniority, and attached him to Company A, under Captain James M. Moylan. Custer simultaneously transferred 1st Lt. Algeron E. Smith, Company A’s executive officer, to Company E where he became acting commanding officer in DeRudio’s place. This transfer saved DeRudio’s life and condemned Smith to death. One thing is certain: at 43, DeRudio was the oldest officer riding toward the Little Bighorn on that fateful June day in 1876; he was perhaps too old, cynical and wily for Custer to consider him a good cavalry officer.
Chance events on the morning of June 25 propelled the trio of Italians in three different directions. That morning Captain Benteen of Company H detailed John Martin to serve as Custer’s personal trumpeter-orderly for the day. As such he would accompany Longhair wherever he went. The Indian scouts had spotted a very large village from the Crow’s Nest, a lookout point some distance ahead of the column. Although warned that the village was enormous, Custer determined to move against the Indians that afternoon instead of attacking during the early morning hours of June 26 as originally planned. Waiting for the next day would have allowed both men and horses time for needed rest and would be more likely to catch the Indians asleep in their lodges. Further, Custer and Terry had agreed that if he, Custer, found Indians on the Little Bighorn, he would attack on the 26th and drive them toward Terry, who would by then be approaching from the northeast.
Despite the seemingly rash change in plan, Custer’s decision to attack on the afternoon of the 25th was perfectly reasonable in the context of the conventional tactics of the era. Although his scouts informed him that he faced up to 2,000 warriors, they also told him that the Indians already had spotted his approach. The greatest fear of Custer and other frontier military commanders on major campaigns was not that they would be outnumbered and overwhelmed, but that their adversaries would break up into small bands and succeed in fleeing, rendering an expensive and exhausting military campaign a failure. Indians habitually picked their battles and, because they were infinitely more mobile than the ponderous columns of cavalry and infantry that pursued them, rarely could be brought to battle except on their own terms. Custer recognized that he had found a large village; if he could attack it before it broke and could capture a large number of women and children, he could force the enemy to surrender. Custer was probably the best cavalry leader in the army’s history; he was no fool and believed that his regiment, properly handled, could defeat any number of Indians. While man for man, Indian warriors were often superior to the soldiers, they fought as individuals. The discipline and organization of Custer’s troops gave them an advantage far beyond their numbers.
Custer had Martin sound officers’ call at about noon, and when the officers had gathered, he gave them orders out of Martin’s earshot. Shortly thereafter, Martin observed Captain Benteen with Companies D, H and K riding off to the left of the regiment, which was preceding roughly southwest along what would later be named Reno Creek. At the meeting, Custer had put 11 of the 12 companies that made up the 7th Cavalry into three maneuver battalions. As senior captain, Benteen was ordered to take one battalion and scout the valleys to the southeast to prevent the Indians from slipping away in that direction; he led his battalion away from the main column at about 12:12 p.m. The other two battalions, under Custer and Major Marcus A. Reno, the 7th Cavalry’s second-in-command on the expedition, continued to advance along Reno Creek.
Custer’s plan for defeating the Indians impelled him to make the classic error of dividing his force in the face of a numerically superior enemy. He did this, however, for the sound tactical reason of preventing the Indians from escaping. After advancing for about two hours, Custer ordered Reno and his battalion, comprising Companies A, G and M, down into the valley of the Little Bighorn, across the river, then roughly west along its left bank to attack the south end of the village. He himself, with Companies C, E, F, I and L, a total of 221 men, continued along the bluffs to the east of the Little Bighorn, heading toward what he thought was the far end of the village. Custer was confident that Benteen would rejoin him shortly, increasing his strength to eight companies. The slow pack train with the extra ammunition and supplies followed well in the rear. Because Company B, to which August De Voto belonged, was the last to report ready to march that morning, it drew the inglorious assignment of escorting the pack train.
At about 3:10 p.m., Major Reno’s battalion charged the south end of the village. Reno, however, daunted by the size of the village, did not press home the charge. Instead, he dismounted his troops short of the village and formed a skirmish line to defend himself against the enraged defenders who began to boil out of the huge encampment. In the meantime, Benteen, who had found no Indians to the south, was following on Custer’s trail but was still some four miles behind him. At about the time that Reno attacked, Custer reached a promontory and, for the first time, saw the village in its entirety. His original plan apparently had been to attack the north end of the village in support of Reno, who was attacking the south end. This would have prevented noncombatants from escaping the village to the north and hopefully would have allowed their capture and a successful end to the battle. Having seen how large the village was, he realized he would need all possible troops and additional ammunition if his plan were to succeed. At 3:20 p.m., he sent trumpeter John Martin with a written message to Benteen to hurry his advance and bring up the pack train. The message was written because Martin, who had only been in the United States three years, spoke very little English. As he rode away from Custer’s battalion, Martin became the last surviving white man to see Custer and his men alive.
What happened next to Custer and his battalion has been a matter of conjecture and controversy for more than a century. It appears likely that he attempted to cross the Little Bighorn at Medicine Tail Coulee and attack the middle of the village but was forced to withdraw in the face of Indian resistance. This attack on the middle of the village instead of the far end probably was precipitated by the fact that Custer could visually observe Reno’s abortive attack and felt he had to get into action against the village to distract the Indians and give Reno some relief. If this were his objective, he was more than successful: large numbers of Indians began to move away from Reno’s beleaguered force toward Custer’s. Custer and his men were attacked by overwhelming numbers and surrounded. They ended up dismounted and entrenched on a high point, later called Custer Hill, and the battle was probably over for them by 4:45 p.m.
John Martin, whose horse had been wounded by an Indian sharpshooter, reached Captain Benteen at 3:35 p.m. At that time, Benteen was some three miles east of Custer, and the pack train was a couple of miles behind him. He could not see how he could proceed quickly and still go back for the pack train. He told Martin to fall in with Company H, and he continued his advance up to the area now known as Reno Hill. There, at 4:10 p.m., he came upon the remnants of Reno’s battalion, which had not fared well in the valley below. Benteen determined not to advance to Custer as ordered but to join Reno and dig in on high ground until the situation clarified. The pack train and Company B subsequently came up and joined this force at 5:15 p.m.
Indeed, Reno had fared poorly in his attack on the village–and no little blame could be placed squarely on himself. Approximately 10 minutes after the beginning of the action, Indian pressure on both his front and left flank forced Reno to withdraw northeast to the edge of a wooded area in a bend of the Little Bighorn; there, he formed a second skirmish line, which faced roughly south. Although the position seemed to be holding, Reno became panicky and at 3:55 p.m. ordered another withdrawal, this time to the east, across the Little Bighorn, and then up the bluffs on the other side to Reno Hill. However, perhaps due largely to Reno’s panicking, the withdrawal turned into a rout. Reno lost 40 percent of his command before he and other survivors made it to the top of the bluffs. Not everyone got word of the withdrawal, which swiftly degenerated into a complete disaster with Indians attacking from behind and on both flanks. First Lieutenant Charles DeRudio and 18 other men remained behind in the woods.
DeRudio and the others either never got word of Reno’s withdrawal, lost their mounts, or became separated from the main body of the battalion. Surrounded by Indians, they took refuge in the heavily timbered area. Shortly after the formation of the first skirmish line, DeRudio, on his own initiative, led a half-dozen Company A troopers to the northwest corner of the woods to head off an attack on the right flank of the line. From this position, DeRudio later claimed he could see Custer’s column atop the high ridge to the north. DeRudio and his detail remained in this position until the battalion pulled out. DeRudio was informed of the withdrawal by Company A’s trumpeter, who brought DeRudio his horse. The men with DeRudio panicked and fled, and though he supposedly tried to save the company guidon, he was also compelled to flee. Unfortunately, his horse bolted and ran away when he tried to mount, leaving him stranded in the woods.
After hiding for a while and following an unsuccessful attempt by the Indians to fire the woods, DeRudio began to cautiously move about in the undergrowth. While doing so, he observed Indian women mutilating dead and dying soldiers who lay on the open ground between the woods and the high ground, men shot down during the battalion’s flight from the valley. Moving stealthily about, DeRudio met Private Thomas F. O’Neil of Company G, who was also on foot. Later, the two met Frederic F. Gerard, a civilian interpreter of the Lakota, and Billy Jackson, a half-blooded enlisted scout. The latter two men still had their mounts. Gerard and Jackson planned to make a dash on horseback for Reno on the bluffs, but DeRudio dissuaded them, fearing that such an attempt would lead the Indians, who were moving around nearby looking for stragglers, to the two men on foot. At this point, in the late afternoon, there were two groups of stragglers in the woods: DeRudio’s group of four and another group of 15 led by George B. Herendeen, a civilian scout. By 5 p.m. Reno’s command faced relatively few Indians; most had earlier moved off to the northwest to engage Custer. This provided an opportunity for the second group of stragglers (with two exceptions who were later killed) to rejoin Reno on the bluffs by 5:30 p.m.
DeRudio and his three companions remained in the woods. After darkness fell, they wandered around trying to find a safe path across the river and up the steep opposite riverbank. They were unsuccessful and had at least one close brush with a party of Lakota who were patrolling along the river. The two unmounted men became separated from their mounted companions and by dawn of June 26 were hiding on a wooded peninsula jutting into the middle of the Little Bighorn. That morning they saw a group of warriors riding along the riverbank. DeRudio mistook them for soldiers, probably because they were wearing items of uniforms and equipment stripped from Custer’s dead. He yelled at them, but O’Neil, recognizing the horsemen as Indians, pulled DeRudio back under cover where they remained undetected. Throughout the day, they could hear the battle that raged on the bluffs above between the surviving elements of the 7th Cavalry and the Indians. DeRudio and O’Neil spent the day under a scorching sun and suffered greatly from thirst because they dared not expose themselves to nearby braves who were sniping at soldiers on the bluffs. Toward sunset, the Indians began to move their village off to the southeast. DeRudio and O’Neil witnessed at a distance of only 150 yards thousands of Indian men, women and children carrying their wounded and dead and all their worldly possessions, accompanied by an estimated 25,000 ponies. The procession took several hours to pass by. At this point the fighting was effectively over. DeRudio and O’Neil remained in their lair until around 3 a.m. on the 27th of June; then they left the woods, scaled the bluffs, and rejoined the command.
DeRudio’s conduct during the Little Bighorn action, like that of many of his fellow officers, was certainly not above reproach. He was criticized by Benteen among others for hiding out while his command was heavily engaged for some 24 hours on the bluffs above. In the end, DeRudio was a survivor. As he candidly admitted, he had gone through too much in his life, had too many close calls with death, to die in an obscure action against Indians in America.
Private August De Voto’s day had been far less harrowing than John Martin’s or Charles DeRudio’s. A member of Captain Thomas M. McDougal’s Company B, he was far removed from the dramatic events of the day until the pack train caught up with the surviving companies of the 7th Cavalry on Reno Hill. At 4:20 p.m., as the pack train followed Custer’s and Benteen’s trail, some of the personnel heard heavy volley fire ahead. This firing, more clearly heard two miles ahead on Reno Hill, was Custer and his men fighting for their lives some miles distant.
De Voto and the others in the pack train encountered a lone Crow scout riding away from the battlefield. His English was poor and all he said was Much soldier down before riding on. Second Lieutenant Luther R. Hare, Reno’s acting assistant adjutant general, arrived shortly thereafter with orders to hurry forward the mules carrying ammunition. He left to return to Reno Hill with two of the mules in tow. The slowly plodding remainder of the pack train took another 45 minutes or so to cover the distance to Reno Hill. The volley fire heard from the northwest had long since ceased, and, in fact, all sustained firing from that direction had ended by 4:45 p.m.
Beginning at about 5 p.m., an abortive attempt was made to advance the seven companies and the pack train toward Custer’s presumed location roughly two miles west of Reno Hill. By this time, however, large numbers of Indians were seen approaching from that direction, so the troops withdrew back to Reno Hill and began to dig in. What remained of the 7th Cavalry made its stand on and around Reno Hill. The battle would continue for almost another 24 hours.
By 5:30 p.m. on June 25, 1876, the disaster was complete. Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry lay dead, killed to the last man on or near Custer Hill. Reno, Benteen and the pack train lay under heavy attack by Indians at Reno Hill, and 19 stragglers hid in the woods below, along the riverbank. No one knew what had become of Custer; all supposed that he had retreated north, but would return and rescue them at some point. Also unknown to them was that General Terry had joined his column with the western column, and both would arrive at the battlefield in about 48 hours. In fact, Terry was expecting to encounter Indians fleeing north from what he hoped was a successful attack by Custer.
The men of the 7th Cavalry who had the good fortune not to ride with Custer that day were involved in a desperate fight for survival. It was here that John Martin ended up because he had been ordered to rejoin Company H after delivering Custer’s last message, and it was here that the pack train delivered August De Voto.
Instead of rushing the soldiers, the Indians occupied vantage points to the north, west, east, and down in the valley to the south. From this last position, they made it impossible for both the troopers above and DeRudio and O’Neil hiding below to get water during the last phase of the battle. The Indians poured a murderous sniping fire onto Reno Hill until nightfall. The soldiers, now joined by 13 stragglers from the valley, spent an uncomfortable night listening and watching the Indians celebrating their victory in the village.
The following day dawned hot, and the Indians resumed their sniping. Everyone in Reno’s command, especially the wounded, suffered terribly from thirst. Consequently, 34 men volunteered to try to bring water up from the river despite the harassing fire. Private De Voto was one of the volunteers. This was an extremely hazardous undertaking as Indian marksmen across the Little Bighorn could easily target anyone coming down from the bluffs to the river. De Voto made it to the river and filled a large cooking kettle and several canteens with water while bullets struck all around him. He survived this ordeal unharmed, although two other water carriers were killed and another was so severely wounded that his leg had to be amputated. Fifteen of the 34 earned the Medal of Honor; De Voto, however, was not one of them.
The sniping began to slack off at 11 a.m., and all firing had ceased by 3 p.m. Not long after, the Indian village was seen moving away to the south; the Battle of the Little Bighorn was over. That night, DeRudio and O’Neil came up from the valley, and the next day General Terry arrived. It was only then that the survivors of the 7th Cavalry learned the fate of Custer and their comrades, for Terry and his men had crossed the site of Custer’s Last Stand on their way to Reno Hill.
In military terms, the Battle of Little Bighorn was of little significance. It did, nevertheless, signal the last push to crush the Plains Indians. The nation was horrified that savages could annihilate the Beau Sabre of the Civil War and nearly half of the elite 7th Cavalry a week before the United States celebrated its centennial. More troops were mobilized and moved west, and the Indians were ultimately defeated and forced permanently onto reservations. The free-roaming culture of the northern Plains Indian was coming to an end. What no one could guess at the time was that this single battle, involving fewer than 600 troops, would become, along with George Armstrong Custer, an icon in American history. More than a century after the event, nearly all Americans as well as large numbers of people the world over know about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The events at the Little Bighorn on that 25th of June 1876 have been the subject of innumerable publications, motion pictures and television productions. A large number of enthusiasts have been and remain fiercely dedicated to studying every aspect of the battle. But what became of the three Italians who rode with Custer that fateful day and their three comrades who did not?
First Lieutenant Charles Camillus DeRudio, whom Custer considered incompetent, found himself in command of a reconstituted Company E after the battle. Because promotion was on the basis of seniority within the regiment for company-grade officers, those who survived the battle were rapidly advanced. DeRudio was promoted to captain in 1882 and remained on active service with the 7th Cavalry until 1896 when he was promoted to major upon retirement from active duty. He died November 1, 1910, in Pasadena, Calif.
John Martin, the former Giovanni Martini and the last white man to see Custer and his men alive, served for a full 30 years in the Army, retiring as a sergeant in 1904. He subsequently worked as a ticket agent for the New York City subway system, and died in Brooklyn on December 24, 1922.
August De Voto was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1878 at Fort Yates in the Dakota Territory. He died November 3, 1923, in Tacoma, Wash.
John James, who began life as Giovanni Casella, left the army as a corporal at Fort Abraham Lincoln when his enlistment ended in May 1877. Nothing more is known of him.
Frank Lombard the musician also was discharged at Fort Abraham Lincoln when his enlistment expired in September 1876. He died in San Diego, Calif., on June 21, 1917.
Felix Villiet Vinatieri, the 7th Cavalry’s bandmaster, left the army in December 1876. He settled with his wife and five sons in Yankton, Dakota Territory, where he died on December 15, 1891.
Like so many others in this nation’s history, the six Italians came from abroad to make a new and, hopefully, better life in a fresh land filled with opportunities. They found themselves, however, in the front lines of a cultural clash with the original inhabitants of their adopted country. Three of them directly participated in and survived one small chapter of this struggle. In fact, they were more fortunate than the 263 of their comrades who died as a result of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. One hundred of these dead–Irish, Germans, Canadians, French, English, Scots, Welsh, Swiss, Danes, a Russian and a Greek–came to the United States largely for the same reasons as the Italians. They came for a better life, but instead found a violent death at the hands of people fighting desperately for not only their own physical survival but also the survival of their way of life. Although the Indians could justly take pride in having beaten the best the Army had, there were no true victors on the Little Bighorn. The soldiers lost the battle and many lost their lives; the Indians ultimately lost something infinitely more precious, the freedom to live as they chose.
This article was written by Vincent A. Transano and originally appeared in the June 1999 issue of Wild West.
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Battle of The Little Big Horn / Custer Las Stand / Battle of the Greasy Grass
La bataille de Little Big Horn, surnommée aux États-Unis "Custer's Last Stand", et en sioux "Battle of the Greasy Grass", est une bataille qui opposa les 647 hommes du 7e régiment de cavalerie de l'armée américaine du lieutenant-colonel George A. Custer à une coalition de Cheyennes et de Sioux rassemblés sous l'influence de Sitting Bull. Elle s'est déroulée les 25-26 juin 1876 et résulta par une victoire écrasante des Indiens. Custer et 267 de ses hommes périrent. Wikipédia
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Who wrote the book Last of the Mohicans? | SparkNotes: The Last of the Mohicans: Chapters III–IV
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
(See Important Quotations Explained )
Summary: Chapter III
The narrator shifts the focus of attention from Magua and his party to another group of people in another part of the forest, a few miles west by the river. We meet the remaining primary characters: Hawkeye, a white hunter, and Chingachgook, his Mohican ally. Though both men are hunters, they dress differently. Hawkeye wears a hunting shirt, a skin cap, and buckskin leggings; he carries a knife, a pouch, and a horn. Chingachgook is almost naked and covered in war-paint. Both men carry weapons. Hawkeye carries a long rifle, and Chingachgook carries a short rifle and a tomahawk. They discuss the historical developments that have caused them to both inhabit the same forest. Hawkeye proclaims his inheritance of a genuine and enduring whiteness, and Chingachgook laments the demise of his tribe of Mohicans. Of the Mohican tribe, only Chingachgook and his son remain. At this mention of the diminishing tribe, Chingachgook’s son Uncas appears and reports that he has been trailing the Maquas, the Iroquois enemies of the Mohicans. When the antlers of a deer appear in the distance, Hawkeye wants to shoot the animal, but then realizes that the noise of the rifle will draw the attention of the enemy. In the place of the long rifle, Uncas uses an arrow to kill the deer. Shortly thereafter, Chingachgook detects the sound of horses approaching.
Summary: Chapter IV
[T]he worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white.
(See Important Quotations Explained )
Heyward and his party encounter Hawkeye. When Hawkeye questions the group, Heyward and Gamut explain that their guide, Magua, has led them away from their desired destination. Hawkeye finds this explanation suspicious, because he does not believe that an Indian could be lost in the forest that is his home. He thinks his suspicions are justified when he learns that Magua is a Huron. Hawkeye describes the Huron tribe as untrustworthy, unlike the Mohican or Delaware tribes. After learning that Heyward is the major of the 60th regiment of the king at Fort William Henry, Hawkeye considers punishing Magua for treachery. Though Hawkeye considers shooting Magua on the spot, so that the traitor will not accompany the party to Fort William Henry, Heyward opposes that violence. Instead of shooting Magua, Heyward approaches him while Chingachgook and Uncas surround him. So that Magua will not suspect the plot to capture him, Heyward engages Magua in conversation. As they talk, Magua discloses the name he prefers: Le Renard Subtil (The Subtle Fox). Magua feels suspicious of Heyward, but eventually he warms to him and agrees to sit and eat. Sounds in the forest make Magua agitated, and Heyward dismounts and makes a move to capture the guide. Magua cries out and darts away from Heyward just as Chingachgook and Uncas emerge from the thickets and give chase. Hawkeye, meanwhile, fires his rife toward the escaping Huron.
A Mingo is a Mingo, and God having made him so, neither the Mohawks nor any other tribe can alter him.
| James Fenimore Cooper |
Which football team were the last to win the English football league Division One? | The Last of the Mohicans (1992) - IMDb
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The Last of the Mohicans ( 1992 )
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Three trappers protect a British Colonel's daughters in the midst of the French and Indian War.
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Title: The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
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Won 1 Oscar. Another 6 wins & 13 nominations. See more awards »
Videos
Christy Brown, born with cerebral palsy, learns to paint and write with his only controllable limb - his left foot.
Director: Jim Sheridan
Peaceful farmer Benjamin Martin is driven to lead the Colonial Militia during the American Revolution when a sadistic British officer murders his son.
Director: Roland Emmerich
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Storyline
The last members of a dying Native American tribe, the Mohicans -- Uncas, his father Chingachgook, and his adopted half-white brother Hawkeye -- live in peace alongside British colonists. But when the daughters of a British colonel are kidnapped by a traitorous scout, Hawkeye and Uncas must rescue them in the crossfire of a gruesome military conflict of which they wanted no part: the French and Indian War. Written by Jwelch5742
Rated R for violence | See all certifications »
Parents Guide:
25 September 1992 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
El último de los mohicanos See more »
Filming Locations:
70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints)| Dolby (35 mm prints)
Color:
Did You Know?
Trivia
Michael Mann has said watching The Last of the Mohicans (1936) when he was young was his inspiration for the film. See more »
Goofs
Gray rock-textured canvas, presumably covering modern trail signs or graffiti, is clearly visible in final scenes. Hawkeye bumps a canvas while running through underpass, and a larger portion is visible as he returns to embrace Cora after Magua's death. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Title Card: 1757 / The American colonies. / It is the 3rd year of the war between England and France for the possession of the continent. / Three men, the last of a vanishing people, are on the frontier west of the Hudson River.
Will make you forget that wimpy TV Hawkeye.
24 November 2003 | by jckruize
(North Hemis) – See all my reviews
Policier specialist Michael Mann steps way off his usual beaten path with this adaptation of that hoary old James Fenimore Cooper tale of frontiersmen, Indians, Redcoats and the French -- the latter back when they knew how to fight.
Chameleonic actor Daniel Day Lewis is totally convincing as Hawkeye, tracker, warrior, and adopted white son of Chingagchook, last of the Mohicans tribe. Along with adoptive brother, Uncas, the three are swept into the French and Indian war of 1757, treading lightly between the antagonists: French and Hurons on one side, British and colonials on the other, each faction potentially treacherous and deadly.
Mann doesn't waste time on exposition or character development; he just hurls us into the fast-paced, brutal action and the effect is like snagging the tail of a galloping racehorse and trying to hang on to the finish line. Madeline Stowe and Jodhi May, as sisters of the British major Munro, provide love interest for Hawkeye and Uncas, respectively. Steven Waddington is another Redcoat officer infatuated with Stowe, and he too shines as a 'bad guy' who's more complex than he at first seems. But the movie's almost stolen by Wes Studi as Magua, a Huron warrior who's allied himself with the French solely as a means to avenge himself on the white man. He's as mesmerizing and lethal as a cobra.
Technical qualities are exemplary, with special mention to the magnificent scenery of old-growth forestlands and mountains in North Carolina, and a superb score by Trevor Jones, with an assist by Randy Edelman.
Mann might not be the first guy you'd think of to stage an 18th-century period action/adventure/romance. But after seeing what he does here, no one can fail to be impressed by his range and bravura. This is a must-own.
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What mission number was the last Apollo lunar landing? | Apollo 17 (AS-512) | National Air and Space Museum
Apollo 17 (AS-512)
The Last Manned Lunar Landing
Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission to land men on the Moon. It carried the only trained geologist to walk on the lunar surface, lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt. Compared to previous Apollo missions, Apollo 17 astronauts traversed the greatest distance using the Lunar Roving Vehicle and returned the greatest amount of rock and soil samples. Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, still holds the distinction of being the last man to walk on the Moon, as no humans have visited the Moon since December 14, 1972.
Summary of Events
The successful Apollo 17 manned lunar landing mission was the last in a series of three J-type missions planned for the Apollo Program. The J-type missions have been characterized by extended hardware capability, by a scientific payload larger than the previous G- and H-series missions and by use of a battery powered lunar roving vehicle (LRV). As a result of these additions, the Apollo 17 mission had a duration of 12.6 days, and a time on the lunar surface of 75 hr with a total surface traverse distance of approximately 35 km.
The Saturn V carrying Apollo 17 was launched from NASA John F. Kennedy Space Center at 05:33:00 UT on December 7, 1972 (11:33:00 p.m. CST on December 6, 1972).
View of Apollo 17 Landing SiteThe landing site was on the southeastern rim of Mare Serenitatis in a dark deposit between massif units of the southwestern Montes Taurus.
Scientific objectives included geological surveying and sampling of materials and surface features in a preselected area of the Taurus-Littrow region, deploying and activating surface experiments, and conducting inflight experiments and photographic tasks during lunar orbit and transearth coast.
Lunar orbit insertion, executed at 19:47:23 GMT on December 10, placed the spacecraft into a lunar orbit of 170.0 by 52.6 nautical miles. Following a nominal descent sequence, the spacecraft landed at 19:54:57 GMT on December 11 in a valley at Taurus-Littrow, less than 200 m from the preferred landing point.
The first lunar surface EVA began at 23:54:49 GMT on December 11, with Cernan stepping out of the spacecraft at 00:01:00 GMT on December 12. Deployment of the Apollo lunar-surface experiments package (ALSEP) and the cosmic ray experiment took place during EVA-1. Duration of this EVA was 7 hr 12 min.
Schmitt collects samplesThe second EVA began at 23:28:06 GMT on December 12. Using the LRV, samples from Nansen Crater, Lara Crater and others were collected. Traverses, core samples and trenches were dug at different stations. This EVA lasted 7 hr 37 min.
Lunar Roving VehicleDuring EVA-3, sampling stops were made and traverse gravimeter measurements were taken. Additional explosive packages for the Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment were also deployed. One of the final science activities was the retrieval of the neutron flux probe from the deep drill core hole. The third EVA ended at 05:40:56 GMT on December 14.
TV View of LM liftoffThe LM ascent stage lifted off the Moon at 22:54:37 GMT on December 14. Lift-off and ascent were recorded by the ground-commanded television assembly on the LRV. After docking with the CSM, the ascent stage was sent back to the lunar surface. Its impact was recorded by the four Apollo 17 geophones and by each ALSEP at the Apollo 12, 14, 15 and 16 landing sites.
From NASA SP-330, Apollo 17 Preliminary Science Report and Apollo 17 Press Kit, Release No: 72-220K
| 17 |
Which band's debut single was Last Train to Clarksville? | Last lunar-landing mission ends - Dec 19, 1972 - HISTORY.com
Last lunar-landing mission ends
Publisher
A+E Networks
The Apollo lunar-landing program ends on December 19, 1972, when the last three astronauts to travel to the moon splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean. Apollo 17 had lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, 10 days before.
In July 1969, after three years of preparation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) accomplished President John F. Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon and safely returning him to Earth with Apollo 11. From 1969 to 1972, there were six successful lunar landing missions, and one aborted mission, Apollo 13. During the Apollo 17 mission, astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt stayed for a record 75 hours on the surface of the moon, conducting three separate surface excursions in the Lunar Rover vehicle and collecting 243 pounds of rock and soil samples.
Although Apollo 17 was the last lunar landing, the last official Apollo mission was conducted in July 1975, when an Apollo spacecraft successfully rendezvoused and docked with the Soviet Soyuz 19 spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. It was fitting that the Apollo program, which first visited the moon under the banner of “We came in peace for all mankind,” should end on a note of peace and international cooperation.
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Who created the television series Last of the Summer Wine? | Last of the Summer Wine (TV Series 1973– ) - IMDb
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Three old men from Yorkshire who have never grown up face the trials of their fellow town citizens and everyday life and stay young by reminiscing about the days of their youth and attempting feats not common to the elderly.
Creator:
The village prepares for Compo's funeral; even Auntie Wainwright closes her shop (her mobile phone is on for emergency purchases). Compo's "Thursday Lady" arrives to pay her respects.
9.1
A depressed Howard tries to build himself up but, under Foggy's instruction, ends up breaking his leg. Auntie Wainwright has Smiler testing a Triumph Motorcycle, after she rents him the riding gear. ...
8.8
Nora Batty finally decides to give Compo a taste of what he's been asking for and it sends him to the hospital. Clegg, Nora, and friends need to deal with the loss of their friend.
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Title: Last of the Summer Wine (1973– )
7/10
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1 win & 8 nominations. See more awards »
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The misadventures of the staff of a retail floor of a major department store.
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The misadventures of a ragtag group of elderly Home Guard local defense volunteers at the onset of WW2.
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Long running BBC comedy show consisting of sketches and humourous musical routines involving the large Ronnie Barker and the small Ronnie Corbett. Most sketches involved both men, but ... See full summary »
Stars: Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, The Fred Tomlinson Singers
Edit
Storyline
Three old men from Yorkshire who have never grown up face the trials of their fellow town citizens and everyday life and stay young by reminiscing about the days of their youth and attempting feats not common to the elderly.
4 January 1973 (UK) See more »
Also Known As:
A bor nem válik vízzé See more »
Filming Locations:
Did You Know?
Trivia
Holmfirth was chosen as the setting for Last of the Summer Wine after Barry Took made a programme about Working Men's Clubs at nearby Burnlee WMC. When producer James Gilbert was looking for a location for an episode of Comedy Playhouse (1961), Barry Took recommended Holmfirth. That episode was developed into the series "Last of the Summer Wine". See more »
Quotes
Ivy : Anyway, you're allowed to be stupid at seventeen.
Pearl : You were never seventeen. You were forty when you were born.
(United Kingdom) – See all my reviews
I was a big fan of this series before i appeared in it. I still get letters and cards from fans despite leaving the show in 1988. Roy Clarke is one of the greatest comedy writers of his generation, he explores the British class system, old age, and the relationships between Yorshiremen and the Women they love brilliantly. The early shows were about boredom, retirement, life in Yorkshire and friendship between men of differing backgrounds. When the show was taken over by Alan J W Bell ,who produced and directed all the episodes i appeared in, the comedy broadened. Wonderful slapstick and unlikely romance became the strong central themes. In 1987 the show regularly had viewing figures just below 20 Million, and it continues to have a cult following to this day. I made some wonderful friends on the series too, Jane Freeman (who played my Auntie Ivy), Bill Owen (who i sadly miss) Peter Sallis (who taught me so much when we worked on stage together) Thora Hird (who told great stories of her early life in the Co-op as a sales assistant) Joe Gladwyn (who told me the most wonderful tales of early music hall and variety shows) to name just a few... I think one of the best qualities of this show is that anyone of any age can watch it and find something amusing, popular family entertainment is rare these days and this is a gem.
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| Roy Clarke |
In which month does The Last Night of the Proms take place? | Last Of The Summer Wine - YouTube
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What is the first name of cricket umpire Dickie Bird | Dickie Bird | England Cricket | Cricket Players and Officials | ESPN Cricinfo
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Dickie Bird's white cap, twitching shoulders and forearm stretch became as much a part of the day out as the battle between bat and ball. He seemed to attract minor incident, without ever allowing the day to be soured by controversy. Burst pipes, reflecting windscreens and bomb scares all conspired to trouble him, but each impostor was met with humour and Yorkshire-bred common sense. Notorious for being an early Bird (he once made it to The Oval at 6am, so nervous was he about being late and was five-hours early to meet the Queen on one occasion), and plagued by bad weather he made the transition from cricketing figure to something close to a national institution.
A favourite among the public who took to his idiosyncrasies, Bird was equally admired and respected by the players. He diffused many a situation that a lesser umpire may have allowed to escalate, typically with common sense and good humour. Most importantly, he simply made few mistakes. "They all rated me the best: Sobers, Richards, Lillee and Botham. That means a lot I can tell you," he admitted.
Harold "Dickie" Bird was born in Barnsley in April 1933. 5'10" and a right-hand batsman, Bird played in a Barnsley side that included Geoff Boycott and the journalist Michael Parkinson, with whom he remained friends. A good enough player to have represented Yorkshire during their period of dominance (debuting in 1956 against Scotland), a regular first team place eluded him in such a strong side (his career best performance 181* against Glamorgan at Bradford in 1959 was rewarded with omission from the next game as the senior players returned from Test duty) and he moved to Leicestershire at the end of that year. He won his county cap in his first season, 1960, in which he topped 1,000 first-class runs, but later referred to the decision to leave Yorkshire as "the biggest mistake of my life".
Bird retired relatively early, aged just 32, and spent a few years coaching and playing as a club professional. He later admitted to regret that his playing career had not been more successful (first-class average: 20.71): "I just wish I'd have believed in myself as a batsman the way I do as an umpire," he told The Cricketer (November 1998) during his final match as an umpire. "I had the ability I can tell you. If you had compared me to Boycott in the nets you would have picked me as the Test player. Ray Illingworth said I played as straight as anyone he'd ever seen. Umpiring has been good to me, but it is the second-best thing to playing."
Bird officiated his first game in 1970, with his first Test coming against New Zealand at Leeds in 1973. In 1992 he stood in Zimbabwe's inaugural Test as the first ICC panel umpire. A guard of honour by the players and a standing ovation from the crowd as England took on India in 1996 marked his final Test, at his beloved Lord's. Bird, always an emotional man, was reduced to tears. In all he officiated in 66 Tests and 69 One-Day Internationals, overtaking Frank Chester's record (of 48 Tests) in Zimbabwe in 1996. His final first-class game was at Headingley, between Yorkshire and Warwickshire in 1998.
Bird was awarded the MBE in June 1986 in the Queen's Birthday Honours List ("It means more to me than my life," he commented) and became a frequent tea-time visitor at the Palace, apparently attending more than 20 times. He gained other remarkable friends, including former Prime Minister John Major, billionaire cricket fanatic John Paul Getty and the thriller writer Stephen King. "I wish I'd had a family. That's where I missed out in life," he lamented on his retirement but his oft-repeated phrase was that he was "married to the game."
Bird's real legacy will be top-quality umpiring. Calm, despite his nervous disposition; consistent, despite his erratic body movements; and unimpeachably impartial despite his obvious love for all things Yorkshire and England, Bird added to the enjoyment of the spectators without ever detracting from the cricket. Maybe a little reluctant to give lbw decisions, (he would argue "the Laws state I have to be certain"), he has expressed reservations about the marginalisation of umpires by technology in recent times.
A busy retirement, in which he revels in the new role of a media personality, has seen the ubiquitous Bird appear on quiz and chat shows, embark on a speaking tour where his routine of anecdotes provokes great amusement and improve upon each telling. He has produced several books, including My Autobiography with Keith Lodge, the biggest selling sports book of all time and the follow-up White Cap and Bails, another best-seller.
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Which US President's wife was known as Bird | The Best Cricket Umpires of All Time
The Best Cricket Umpires of All Time
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People often tend to forget that in a game of cricket, it is not 11 players of each who are participating in it. There is a match referee and more importantly, a set of umpires to make decisions as to how the match will progress. However, here the focus is on the two umpires who grace the cricket field.
Had it not been for good umpiring standards, no person would ever watch cricket again for the rest of his life since he wants to see a fair game of cricket. And to make the game reasonable is the responsibility of the umpire, whose duty is to make decisions impartially. A player always seem to get the credit and maximum popularity in cricket, but not umpires despite the fact that they have to stand for 90 overs per day in a Test match or for 100 overs in a one-day match, without getting a long break and has to keep his focus intact on the occurrence of all events on the field and on every delivery so that he makes correct decisions.
To maintain high levels of concentration and physical fitness is extremely difficult in this professions and this piece salutes those men who have been able to do for a long period of time. Here are a few examples.
1) Harold Dennis Bird (Dickie Bird) (England)
Commonly known as Dickie Bird, he was born on April 19, 1933 in a place called Barnsley in the county Yorkshire in England.
Harold Dennis Bird a.k.a Dickie is the best Cricket Umpire of all time
Dickie Bird was a high school dropout, having failed his board exams. Yet, he worked in a coal mine with his father until he decided to leave that too since he thought that he would succeed in a sporting profession.
His first love however, was football. But due to an injury, he could continue pursuing the game and instead turned to cricket. During the period between 1956 and 1964, he played first-class cricket as a batsman with his home team Yorkshire and later on, Leicestershire. He then took up coaching for a while, before deciding to become an umpire.
Within three years of umpiring in county cricket, he was promoted to do the job in international cricket as well. His first Test match where he officiated as an umpire was when England were playing New Zealand in his home ground Headingley at Leeds. In this game itself, he gained recognition for stopping play due to fluctuating weather conditions and not declaring batsmen out leg before wicket.
He came under heavy controversy during a Test match between England and Australia at the iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground in 1980, which incidentally happened to be the centenary Test between the two sides. It is because he did not permit play to begin on the morning of the first day’s play, due to the overnight rain which waterlogged some parts of the field. This is reasonable but not so much before the morning had pleasant sunshine and play could have been started much earlier than the eventual time of 3:45 pm.
Dickie Bird has officiated in 66 Test matches which was once a world record. As well as 69 one-day internationals, which included the World Cup finals of 1975, 1979 and 1983. After the 1975 final, his famous white hat was lost and humorously he found it a year later on the head of a bus conductor in South London who had taken it off his head when there was a crowd invasion after West Indies won the match, deliberately.
One of the best features of Bird’s umpiring is not just his mixture of intuition and reasoning, but also the respect that he was able to earn from any player due to his great sense of humour. That was the main reason why he was given a ‘guard of honour’ by the English and the Indian players in his final Test match as umpire at Lords in 1996, a game which was drawn but otherwise known for Sourav Ganguly’s debut hundred and Rahul Dravid’s 95. He was also given a standing ovation from the crowd, a rarity for an international umpire.
He received the Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2012 for his contributions to the game of cricket and charity.
2) David Shepherd (England)
David Shepherd is by far one of the world’s most popular umpires, even after his unfortunate expiry in 2009.
David Shepherd
David Shepherd was born in Bideford, Devon on December 27, 1940. He had an illustrious playing career for the English county, Gloucestershire having represented the team for as many as 14 years and in that time, gaining the reputation of being pugnacious as a middle order batsman who once knocked the ball so hard that it injured a spectator who was reading a newspaper, and had to be taken to hospital.
After two years of retiring as a player from county cricket, he qualified to officiate as an umpire in it in 1981. His rise was rapid as he was identified to be one of the most capable umpires around in the circuit and the most impartial, which made him debut in international cricket as an umpire in the 1983 World Cup in England, in a match between Asian rivals Pakistan and Sri Lanka at Swansea. Whereas his Test debut was in the 1985 Ashes Series in the fourth Test at Old Trafford, Manchester. Incidentally, the other umpire who took field with him was Dickie Bird.
Ever since, Shepherd had become one of the most proficient and popular umpires in the world cricket, with many rating him as the best to have umpired in the game of cricket. Moreover, his roly-poly figure and his light-hearted character had become his trademark over the years. But he will always be remembered the most for his incredible superstition of doing a little ‘jig’ or hop whenever any score would reach 111, also referred to as ‘Nelson’ or its multiples since it is considered unlucky for a batsman in English culture. Plus, whenever he used to signal a boundary, he had his own style of doing so, by shaking his right hand instead of sliding it across smoothly. This action is imitated by many cricket spectators when a four is hit, even these days.
David Shepherd was one of the few umpires to be inducted in the ICC’s first ever panel of neutral umpires when it was introduced in the 1990s and maintained his place in it until his retirement from both Tests and ODIs in 2005, as his career spanned for more than two decades. He officiated in 172 ODIs, which included World Cup finals in 1999, 2003 and 2007. As well as 92 Tests, which ranks him third in the all time list of umpires who have officiated in the most number of Test matches, after West Indies’ Steve Bucknor and South Africa’s Rudi Koertzen.
He was given a guard of honour by Australia and New Zealand’s teams in a Test series in New Zealand in 2005 when he stepped out on a cricket field and after his final Test which was in Jamaica between West Indies and Pakistan, Brian Lara, the cricketing legend gifted him a bat with a message which was filled with gratitude towards Shepherd’s services, memories and professionalism in umpiring.
Shepherd was also awarded the Member of the British Empire in 1987 for his achievements in cricket. And married his long time girlfriend in 2008, a year before he expired due to lung cancer which was a tragic end to his life.
3) Steve Bucknor (West Indies)
Stephen Anthony Bucknor is by far one of the most experienced umpires to have ever officiated in the game of cricket, with 128 Test matches and 181 one-day internationals, spanning exactly 20 years.
Steve Bucknor - The most experienced Cricket umpire
The West Indian was born in Montego Bay, St James, Jamaica on May 31, 1946 and is also one of the tallest umpires in cricket, being 6 feet 3 inches tall.
He was earlier a mathematics teacher at high school level and sports coach as well, before actually officiating as a match referee in a FIFA World Cup qualifier match between El Salvador and the Netherlands Antilles in 1988. However, whatever happens does happen for the best as Bucknor had to quit being referee due to his age being 45 and the football rules do not allow anyone to be referee at this age or above. So, this made him take up umpiring in cricket instead having played cricket in his hometown and stumped by incorrect decisions taken time and again in the matches, which improved his judgement further.
He made his international debut as an umpire was in a one-day international between West Indies and India at St. John’s, Antigua in March 1989, while in Tests his debut was in the same series at his home ground in Kingston, Jamaica. He reached a peak point, so much so that within three years in which he had umpired in a handful of games, he was still picked to officiate in the World Cup 1992 in Australia and New Zealand and more importantly was one of the umpires in the grand finale between Pakistan and England.
In the 1990s, alongside David Shepherd, Steve Bucknor was chosen in the panel of neutral umpires until a change of policy in 2002. While he maintained his place in the ICC Elite Panel of Umpires until his retirement in March 2009. But he is the most distinctive since he is referred to as the ‘Slow Death’, due to the fact that he took a considerable amount of time to make an lbw decision and when he had made up his mind; he would nod gently and slowly raise that dreaded index finger of his.
Steve Bucknor was the on-field umpire in the 1992, 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2007 World Cup finals, a terrific achievement for any umpire, which goes to show how much he was relied by the ICC to maintain the spirit of the game. Although agreed that it was due to his misinterpretation of the rules regarding how to conduct the game with respect to bad light that ruined the finish of the 2007 World Cup final in Barbados, which Australia eventually won.
However, for Indian fans he will always remain a villain for his poor umpiring decisions in matches involving India which included the wicket of Sachin Tendulkar in the Brisbane Test against Australia in 2003, against Pakistan in 2004 and 2005 and more famously, the 2008 Sydney Test match where he was responsible for India’s defeat which could have been a victory due to pathetic decisions, which was the result of a tremendous workload set for him by the ICC.
He was suspended for the World T20 2007 in South Africa and from the third Test at Perth of the Australia-India series in 2008. Yet, he remains one of the most legendary umpires to have graced the cricket field and consequently, was presented with an award in Cape Town after officiating in his final Test match in 2009, involving South Africa and Australia. Whereas, his last ODI was between West Indies and England at Barbados a month later.
In his hometown Jamaica, he was awarded the Order of Jamaica, Commander Class for “outstanding services in the field of sports”. While the ICC awarded him with the Bronze Bail Award for officiating in more than 100 ODIs and the Golden Bail Award for completing a double of officiating in more than 100 Tests.
4) Simon Taufel (Australia)
Born on January 21, 1971 in an area called St Leonard’s in Sydney, Simon Taufel will go down as one of those umpires whose decisions were as accurate as that of an answer in a calculator of a mathematical problem.
Simon Taufel
This is why he is the most liked contemporary umpires by many, with the likes of David Shepherd and Steve Bucknor not missed as much. He is the personification of the tagline ‘Simplicity is style’, with no features in him which make him look innovative as such.
He has been the member of the ICC Elite Panel of Umpires since its inception and has won the ICC Umpire Award of the Year four times on the trot, between the years 2004 and 2008 which is easily a record by any umpire of all time. This is amazing, considering the fact that this was a man whose playing career was cut short by a back injury and had no intentions of ever becoming an umpire even at first class level at a point of time. It was due to one of his friends that he was able to overcome the trauma of not playing cricket and instead taking up the distinguished career of being an umpire.
His rise in becoming a cricket umpire was at a brisk pace, having passed an exam to umpire in grade cricket in Sydney and then first class cricket at the age of 24. Within the next five years, he was seen umpiring for the first time in a one-day international between Australia and Sri Lanka at his hometown Sydney in January 1999, eight days before his 28th birthday. And then he made his umpiring debut in Test cricket in a match between Australia and West Indies at Melbourne in December 2000.
He has the distinction though, of being one of the most experienced umpires in the Elite Panel despite being its youngest member of all, making him a ‘success story’ for youths who aspire to become umpires any time soon. However, a calendar year packed with excessive cricket takes on the mind of the umpire the most rather than a player and Taufel has admitted to suffer from it, so his umpiring future remains uncertain until the 2015 World Cup which is in Australia and New Zealand.
Unfortunately, the brilliant Taufel has also been the victim of Australia’s decade-old dominance in one-day cricket which has denied him to host two potential World Cup finals, in 2003 and 2007 and two ICC Champions Trophy finals, in 2006 and 2009. Yet, he did umpire in the ICC Champions Trophy final in 2004 involving West Indies and England as the teams playing. While his dream came true of umpiring in a World Cup final in 2011 in Mumbai when Sri Lanka took on India, the team which knocked Australia out of the tournament in the quarterfinals.
His concentration has not deteriorated one bit, although his confidence has increased by the day as he has become advanced in umpiring, learning the tricks of the trade quickly. It is due to this that he was the youngest umpire to receive the Bronze Bails Award by the ICC for officiating in more than 100 ODIs and also the most experienced umpire in T20 internationals, having officiated in 22 of such matches.
The worst moments of his career were the 2009 terrorist attacks in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team where he was one of the on-field umpires. He could have not been here today, but was quick enough to criticize the Pakistani security forces. Whereas on the field, he took two back-to-back wrong decisions in the Nottingham Test between England and India in mid-2007. His accuracy otherwise is spot on and he is still the most sought-after umpires in cricket, with his only aim now being to reach the golden landmark of officiating in 100 Tests, as he is stuck on 66 at the moment.
5) Aleem Dar (Pakistan)
The best umpire at the moment in international cricket is none other than Aleem Sarwar Dar.
Aleem Dar
He was born in Jhang, Punjab on June 6, 1968. He did have the desire to play for Pakistan some day, as he had a long first-class career in which he represented teams such as Pakistan Railways, Lahore, Gujranwala and Allied Bank Limited for more than a decade. But he was not a big success and by the time he turned 30, he decided to quit playing and instead pursue umpiring in the game.
It was incidentally in Gujranwala that he made his ODI debut as an umpire in a match featuring Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2000, at the ‘tender’ age of 32. Within two years, he was awarded the membership of the Emirates ICC International Panel of Umpires and in another two years, a place in the ICC Elite Panel of Umpires which has some of the best umpires in the game according to its governing body. Dar become the first Pakistani to be a part of it, a massive achievement indeed. His Test debut though was in a match between Bangladesh and England at Dhaka in October 2003.
Aleem Dar has stood in matches of intense rivalry which includes the iconic India-Pakistan ODI matches as well as the five Ashes Test matches till date. He was also seen officiating in the final of the ICC Champions Trophy 2006 in Mumbai between Australia and West Indies and also two World Cups, that of 2007 in Barbados and 2011 in Mumbai once again. However, he would not like to bury the ghosts of the 2007 contest because that was the day he was suspended from officiating in the World T20 in South Africa alongside Steve Bucknor for misinterpretation of rules regarding play in bad light.
Aleem Dar is the second most experienced umpire in T20 internationals, having officiated in 18 of them and had also umpired in the World T20 final in 2010 between Australia and England at Barbados. His debut was in a match between Pakistan and Australia in Dubai in 2009.
His spot on accuracy was given tribute to, in the 2011 World Cup where all the 15 lbw decisions he had taken in the competition were approved by the UDRS system and as a result the decision remained the same and not overturned.
Dar was nominated for the ICC Umpire of the Year Award in 2005 and 2006, but lost out to the Australian Simon Taufel whose reign at the top lasted till 2008. It was Dar who succeeded him by receiving a hat-trick of the award, in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011 respectively. He alongside Taufel are the youngest members of the Elite Panel and the only ones to have been rewarded by the ICC till date.
He has officiated in 68 Tests and 146 ODIs, and Dar’s achievements were recognized by the Government of Pakistan as well which decided to hand him the Pride of Performance Award in the year 2010 which only a few distinguished people from different fields get, which can be considered equivalent to the Member of the British Empire title in England.
He can hope to carry on for long with age on his side, with the only impediment in his path being the excessive cricket played these days with the Indian Premier League and other T20 competitions across the world being another burden on the head which cannot afford to lose its powers of concentration.
6) Rudi Koertzen (South Africa)
Rudolf Eric Koertzen has definitely been one of the veterans when it comes to umpiring on the cricket field, having officiated in 206 ODIs, 108 Test matches and 14 T20 internationals.
Rudi Koertzen
The South African was born in the town of Knysna, which is one of the closest to the city of Cape Town. He was said to be an ardent cricket fan since childhood, which prompted him to play for South African railways while he worked there as a clerk.
However like most of his colleagues mentioned above, he turned to umpiring and qualified to become one in the year 1981. His ODI debut as umpire was in a match between South Africa and India at Port Elizabeth in 1992 while his Test debut was on the same tour and incidentally the same venue, that too at the age of 43. This was the first series in cricket where television replays were used to assist making decisions with regards to run outs or stumpings, therefore having a third umpire acting as a TV umpire for the first time as well.
He was declared as a full time umpire by the ICC in 1997, which was the fruit of his professionalism and his rising fame due to his ‘slow motion’ style raising of the index figure to declare the batsman out, similar to Steve Bucknor but much slower than him too. But his fame was wide-spread, even amongst bookies who wanted to fix some one-day matches in 1999 through him in the form of poor umpiring decisions and in return giving him a huge sum of money. He bravely refused the offer, for which he was highly appreciated.
However, parts of the years 1999, 2000 and 2001 were the toughest of his career as the beginning of 2000 saw the Test match between South Africa and England played at Centurion, which is now infamous due to Hansie Cronje fixing the match in favour of England, but still Koertzen was accused due to his involvement as one of the on-field umpires in the match, which gave him the right to explain the players the procedures regarding the forfeiture of an innings.
While in 2001, Sri Lanka played England in a Test match in Kandy in Sri Lanka. England won by 3 wickets but there were several poor umpiring decisions been taken in the game, which were against the home team. The Kandy match made a huge impact as the series was leveled at 1-1 and the final Test was also won by the visitors, handing them a 2-1 series win out of 3 Tests and a rare Indian subcontinent victory for England.
But following all those incidents, Koertzen’s umpiring career has moved more or less smoothly. He officiated in the ICC Cricket World Cup 2003 final in Johannesburg between India and Australia as the third umpire and playing the same role in the 2007 final in Barbados, where unfortunately he was suspended from umpiring in the World T20 2007 due to being in the umpiring team in the game, which had members such as Steve Bucknor, Aleem Dar and Billy Bowden. Besides, he officiated on the field in the finals of the ICC Champions Trophy in England in 2004 and in India in 2006.
He has officiated in 108 Test matches, which is the third highest of all time and 206 ODIs, which is a world record, as he took it from David Shepherd. Also he has never been the recipient of the ICC Umpire of the Year Award; he is the first umpire to be awarded the Bronze Bail Award for officiating in 100 ODIs alongside the Silver Bail Award for officiating in 200 ODIs. As well as the Golden Bail Award for officiating in 100 Test matches.
Koertzen retired from the game in July 2010 with his last Test being the one between Australia and Pakistan at Headingley while his last ODI was between Zimbabwe and India at Harare a month prior to the Test match.
7) Billy Bowden (New Zealand)
Brent Fraser Bowden, popularly known as Billy Bowden, was born in Henderson in the city of Auckland on April 11, 1963.
Billy Bowden
The 48 year old has gained the maximum popularity in the last decade or so with his antics on the field, which are a rarity to see an umpire doing so. They include declaring a batsman out with a ‘crooked’ finger rather than normally raising the finger up straight. To signal a four, there is a ‘crumb-sweeping’ wave of the arm while to signal a six, his signal is called the ‘double crooked finger six-phase hop’. As well the fact that to ask the TV umpire to make a decision, he would do an action resembling a square being cut from both his hands rather than just making a normal square with a few fingers.
All these attributes attracted the global cola giant, Pepsi for the World Cup 2011 in the Indian subcontinent and Bowden was asked to act in an advertisement advocating his way of using a crooked finger to give the batsman out, which in India it was called the ‘Tedi Ungal’. However, as funny as it may look to the naked eye, there is a valid reason why Billy does this. It is not just for the entertainment of many, but also the fact that he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis in his early 20s which made him quit his playing career and take up umpiring. Due to the disease, it gives him pain to declare a batsman out in conventional fashion.
It was in March 1995 that Billy umpired in an international fixture, a one-day international between New Zealand and Sri Lanka at Hamilton. But it was only after exactly five years that he got the opportunity of officiating as an on-field umpire in a Test match. That was between New Zealand and Australia at Auckland. In T20 cricket, he was one of the first umpires to have officiated in this format as his debut was the first ever T20 international which was incidentally between New Zealand and Australia at Auckland in February 2005.
In 2002, he was promoted in the Emirates Panel of International Umpires which was followed by umpiring in some of the matches in the World Cup 2003 in South Africa and being the fourth umpire in the final at Johannesburg. With continuously good performances, he was finally given membership in the Elite Panel of Umpires and since then, there has been no looking back for him.
In the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies, he officiated in several group and Super 8 games, but was again the fourth umpire in the final at Barbados, where he too was suspended from umpiring in the ICC World T20 in South Africa a few months later. He has been involved in some horribly wrong and consequently match changing decisions in Tests. For instance, the wicket of Virender Sehwag off the bowling of Glenn McGrath in the second innings of the 2004 Bangalore Test match where Sehwag was given out despite there being a huge inside edge onto the pads.
While a year later, and Bowden was the man to declare the Australian No.11 Michael Kasprowicz out off the bowling of England’s Steve Harmison when it was not sure whether the ball hit his glove to loop in the air. It was the last wicket of the match and England won the Birmingham Test by 2 runs to square the Ashes 1-1, and go on to win the series 2-1.
Yet, Bowden is one of the most reliable umpires in the game at the moment if not the greatest. He is also the proud recipient of the ICC Bronze Bails Award for officiating in 100 ODIs. He has also officiated in 70 Test matches and 19 T-20 internationals.
8) Daryl Harper (Australia)
Daryl John Harper was born on October 23, 1951 in a suburb called Mile End in Adelaide in South Australia.
Daryl Harper
He initially was a primary school teacher by profession before trying his hand in the Australian Rules Football Competition as an umpire, until he had to retire from the game due to injury. But when it comes to cricket, he has had some playing experience, having turned out for the Teachers’ College and East Torrens Clubs respectively in Adelaide grade cricket.
However, that did not last for long as well as he decided to switch to umpiring in 1983, and made his first-class umpiring debut in 1987, as a 36-year old. It was seven years later that Harper would go on to feature in an international cricket match, which was a one-day international at the WACA, Perth between South Africa and New Zealand. While it was in November 1998 that he made his first appearance as umpire in Tests, perfectly at the WACA as well, in the Ashes Test match. He also featured in the Boxing Day Test as one of the on field umpires.
His rise was as high as his fall. In 2002, he was considered to be much better an umpire than his Australian counterparts, Simon Taufel and Darrell Hair. So much so that he was the first from his country to be elevated to the Elite Panel of Umpires by the ICC, and selected to officiate in the curtain raiser of the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, between the hosts and the West Indies team. He also featured in the semifinal between India and Kenya. His 100th one-day international as an umpire was the match between Zimbabwe and New Zealand at Harare in 2005 in a triseries which also involved India.
But his fall began in 2009 when he made several errors after being selected for a trial of using of what is now called the UDRS system. In 2010, on England’s tour of South Africa, it was in one of the Test matches that Harper could not detect a ball clearly kissing the outside edge of the bat and when referred, his decision was upheld which was actually a wrong one. For this matter, the England team management filed a formal complaint against Harper and many cricketing pundits demanded his ouster from the game as an umpire.
Come India’s tour of West Indies in 2011 and Harper did a Bucknor by creating a furore in the Indian ranks due to three poor decisions in the first Test match. India decided to use the muscles it has in terms of its financial clout in the ICC to suspend the contract of Harper and effectively oust him from the Elite Panel of Umpires. Following the next Test, he retired from officiating in all formats of the game.
However, he was definitely one of the senior most umpires in his era having officiated in 94 Test matches, 174 one-day internationals and 10 T-20 internationals.
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Who starred alongside Rod Taylor in Hitchcock's movie The Birds | Rod Taylor, star of The Birds, dies aged 84 - BBC News
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Rod Taylor, star of The Birds, dies aged 84
9 January 2015
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Image caption Rod Taylor with actress Rhonda Fleming. He starred alongside greats like Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor
Australian actor Rod Taylor, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Birds, has died aged 84, according to reports in the US.
Taylor, who lived in the United States, is said to have died at his home in Los Angeles after a dinner party.
He came to prominence in the 1960s, starring alongside Hollywood greats like Jane Fonda and Richard Burton.
In 2009, he made a cameo as ex-UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds.
He got his first leading role in the 1960 adaptation of HG Wells' science-fiction classic The Time Machine and went on to star in several hit films in the 1960s and 1970s.
He also voiced one of the Dalmatian dogs in Disney's animated hit 101 Dalmatians.
Tippi Hedren, his co-star in The Birds, told People magazine that Taylor had been "a great pal to me and a real strength".
"He was one of the most fun people I have ever met, thoughtful and classy. There was everything good in that man," she said.
He was due to turn 85 on Sunday.
He is survived by spouse Carol Kikumura and daughter Felicia Rodrica Sturt Taylor, a TV presenter in the US.
| Tippi Hedren |
The Birds were a 60s R&B; group, but name their guitarist who went on to bigger things, and still tours in 2014 | Rod Taylor - Star Of 'The Birds' And 'Inglourious Basterds' - Dead At 84
Scott Falkner
Rod Taylor, the Australian born actor and star of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, The Birds, died on Wednesday at the age of 84.
Rod Taylor was born near Sydney, Australia, on January 11, 1930. An only child, Taylor’s father was a steel contractor and his mother was a writer. Taylor attended a fine arts college and a theater school in Sydney, before heading to Hollywood to become a movie star in the 1950s.
Once in Hollywood, Rod managed to acquire television parts quickly on such shows as Studio 57 and Cheyenne, and was considered for the lead role in the Warner Bros. television series Maverick. In 1955, Taylor appeared in the film Hell on Frisco Bay, and in 1956 he starred alongside James Dean, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dennis Hopper in Giant. Rod made an impact with a guest-star appearance in an episode of The Twilight Zone, titled “And When the Sky Was Opened,” based on a short story by Richard Matheson and scripted by Rod Sterling. “And When the Sky was Opened” tells the tale of three astronauts who crash land back on Earth after flying into space. Once back on earth, the three slowly find that they don’t exist… and never did. Taylor played the part of Lt. Col. Clegg Forbes.
Taylor’s big break came in 1960 when he played the lead character in The Time Machine — George Pal’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ science-fiction classic. Rod plays a time traveller who ends up at first decades, and then thousands of years in the future. The film was lauded for its ingenuity and special effects.
Rod Taylor in ‘The Time Machine’
Between 1960 and 1961, Taylor did some more stints on television as a foreign correspondent in the ABC drama Hong Kong, and his voice returned to the big screen as the voice of Pongo in Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.
In 1963, Rod Taylor starred in what could be considered his biggest film, when he was cast as the co-lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Rod plays a man whose small town is suddenly beset by hostile birds of all types. Taylor co-starred with Tippi Hedren.
Throughout the remainder of the 1960s, Taylor worked well and often with MGM. In the 1970s, Rod returned to television, playing roles on such shows as Bearcats! and The Oregon Trail. In the 80s and 90s he appeared on Masquerade, Outlaws, Falcon Crest, Murder, She Wrote, and Walker, Texas Ranger.
Rod Taylor’s Final role was in 2009, when a played Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Rod Taylor died at his home on Wednesday, January 7, just four days shy of his 85th birthday. He is survived by his wife, Carol, and his daughter, Felicia. The family reports that he was surrounded by love ones when he died, but no cause of death was revealed.
Felicia Taylor released a statement.
“My dad loved his work. Being an actor was his passion — calling it an honorable art and something he couldn’t live without.”
Rod’s co-star in The Birds, Tippi Hedren, spoke fondly of Taylor.
“There are so many incredible feelings I have for him. Rod was a great pal to me… we were very, very good friends. He was one of the most fun people I have ever met, thoughtful and classy, there was everything good in that man.”
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The birdeating spider (the largest spider in the world is found in what part of the world | World's Largest Spider
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World's Largest Spider
The goliath birdeater tarantula of South America is arguably the biggest spider in the world. Watch as one hapless mouse wanders into a spider's… more
They're the big, hairy spiders of our nightmares.
And it's no wonder we're afraid.
Tarantulas are the biggest of all of the arachnids.
These spiders are killing machines, perfectly adapted to their habitats.
And the biggest and baddest of them all is the Goliath.
It can grow to nearly a foot across, with fangs an inch long.
The Goliath makes its home in the remote rainforests of South America.
Night is when the Goliath is most active.
But for these ambush predators, hunting means lying in wait.
Near the entrance to her burrow, she lays down a silk welcome mat.
It acts like a trip-wire, letting her know when something has ventured within range.
Even with eight eyes, Goliaths-like most spiders-have weak vision.
They're alerted to the presence of prey by vibrations rippling across their sensitive hairs.
It's only a matter of time before some hapless creature-like this floor mouse-wanders too close, and brushes against the silk.
It's like ringing a dinner bell.
The Goliath's venom proves fatal to this mouse.
But for most people, the tarantula's bite is no worse than a bee sting.
According to researchers, there's never been a single confirmed human death from a tarantula bite.
Perhaps knowing the facts about these ancient predators can help turn human fear… into fascination.
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World's Largest Spider
The goliath birdeater tarantula of South America is arguably the biggest spider in the world. Watch as one hapless mouse wanders into a spider's deadly trap, and see the unusual adaptations that make the goliath one of nature's deadliest ambushers.
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Who is credited with organising the first package holidays? | World's largest spider: 'Goliath birdeater'
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World's largest spider: 'Goliath birdeater'
Scientists say the world's largest spider, the Goliath birdeater, can grow to be the size of a puppy and have legs spanning up to a foot.
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World's largest spider: 'Goliath birdeater' Scientists say the world's largest spider, the Goliath birdeater, can grow to be the size of a puppy and have legs spanning up to a foot. Check out this story on azcentral.com: http://azc.cc/1wglUOZ
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World's largest spider: 'Goliath birdeater'
Geobeats video 1:59 p.m. MT Oct. 20, 2014
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According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s largest spider is the Goliath birdeater native to South America. These huge spiders can weigh more than 6 ounces, with legs spanning up to
A photo taken from video shows the Goliath birdeater spider.
(Photo: Geobeats video)
Scientists say the world's largest spider, the Goliath birdeater, can grow to be the size of a puppy and have legs spanning up to a foot, according to video from Geobeats.
Native to South America, the spiders can weigh more than 6 ounces and have two-inch fangs, the Guinness Book of World Records says.
While some experts think the huntsman spider is larger because of its leg span, the birdeater spiders are actually more massive, Geobeats says.
They were named birdeaters because one was observed eating a hummingbird; however, they mainly eat earthworms and another insects. They are not deadly to humans, but their fangs can cause pain, itchiness, and discomfort for days, Geobeats says.
Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, captured a female specimen in Guyana and it is currently being studied at a museum.
"I've been working in the tropics in South America for many, many years, and in the last 10 to 15 years, I only ran across the spider three times," he said.
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Strawberry tongue is a characteristic of which (colourful) disease? | What Is Strawberry Tongue? (with pictures)
What Is Strawberry Tongue?
Last Modified Date: 31 December 2016
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Strawberry tongue is a physical exam finding in which the upper surface of a patient’s tongue has a distinct red coloration and a characteristic bumpy appearance because of inflammation of the taste buds. This condition is most closely associated with scarlet fever , a childhood illness that is caused by a certain type of bacteria. Toxic shock syndrome, another bacterial infection, also is associated with this tongue abnormality. Kawasaki's disease is another cause of the symptom. Strawberry tongue should be differentiated from other conditions, such as vitamin deficiencies, that can also cause tongue inflammation.
The appearance of strawberry tongue is characterized by a bright red discoloration of the surface of the tongue. It also is associated with a change in the texture of the tongue; the surface of the tongue becomes bumpier because inflammation increases the size of the tastebuds. Many people describe this finding as a looking like a strawberry because of similarities in color and texture between the tongue and the fruit. This condition must be differentiated, of course, from other causes of tongue staining, such as eating red candy or a red popsicle.
Having this tongue condition is most closely linked to a childhood illness called scarlet fever. This disease is caused by infection of bacteria called Streptococcus pyogenes. People who have scarlet fever also experience symptoms such as fever, chills, a sandpaper-like skin rash and a sore throat. It can be treated with antibiotics.
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Other bacterial infections also can be associated with strawberry tongue. One is toxic shock syndrome, a disease that can be caused by the bacterial species Streptoccoccus pyogenes or Staphylococcus aureus. This syndrome can be life-threatening, causing symptoms such as fever, low blood pressure and rash.
Another cause of strawberry tongue in children is Kawasaki syndrome, also known as mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome. It causes additional symptoms such as rash, enlarged lymph nodes , eye inflammation and generalized redness and swelling of the mouth and nose. Recognizing and treating this infection is critical because it can have side effects such as the development of coronary artery aneurysms, which can be fatal.
Some other causes of tongue inflammation can mimic strawberry tongue. For example, vitamin deficiencies such as a lack of dietary vitamin B12 can cause the tongue to become red and inflamed, a condition called glossitis . Vitamin deficiencies typically do not cause inflammation of the taste buds, but they can cause erosion and irritation of the corners of the lips.
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Which U.S. band had hits with Sylvia's mother and A little bit more? | Skin Rashes: Diseases 1-6
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Rubella: The rash begins as discrete macules (red spots) on the face that spread to the neck, trunk, and extremities. The macules may coalesce on the trunk. Appearance of the rash corresponds with the appearance of rubella-specific antibody. The exanthem lasts 1-3 days, first leaving the face and may be followed by desquamation. On occasion a nonspecific enanthem (Forscheimer's spots) of pinpoint red macules and petechiae can be seen over the soft palate and uvula just before or with the exanthem. The hallmark of rubella is the generalized tender lymphadenopathy which involves all nodes, but which is most striking in the suboccipital, postauricular, and anterior and posterior cervical nodes. Swelling of the lymph nodes most prevalent at the time of appearance of the exanthem but may precede it by a week. The tenderness that accompanies this lymphadenopathy subsides rapidly, however the enlargement may last days or weeks.
Filatow-Dukes' Disease: Controversy exists concerning the existence of this disease. Some believe the disease that was described by Clement Dukes in 1900 was what we now refer to as staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome (SSSS or Ritter's disease). This disease is caused by epidermolytic (exfoliative) toxin-producing strains of Staphylococcus aureus 2,3 . However, others believe it to be a misdiagnosis of either scarlet fever or rubella and therefore a nonexistent disease entity 1 . The term was dropped from medical textbooks in the 1960's and is only rarely used for medical trivia purposes today.
If one believes fourth disease is SSSS then the following symptoms are usually seen. SSSS is usually see in infants and begins with an abrupt appearance of perioral erythema. This red well-demarcate and tender to the touch rash covers most of the body in around 2 days. Applying slight pressure with side to side movement of a finger to the skin lesions results in displacement of the epidermis from the dermis (positive Nikolsky's sign). In most cases the lesions become fluid filled bullae or cutaneous blisters. The fluid in the bullae and blisters is clear and does not contain bacteria or white blood cells. The bullae and blisters will break and will then desquamate. The lesions do not always fill with fluid and in this case some refer to the disease as staphylococcal scarlet fever. Desquamation of lesions also occurs with staphylococcal scarlet fever. Within 7-10 days of lesion appearance the skin heals without any scarring. Secondary bacterial infections of the lesions can result in scarring.
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Fifth Disease: Pruritus, low-grade fever, malaise, and sore throat precede the rash in approximately 10% of cases. Lymphadenopathy is absent. Older individuals may complain of joint pain. There are three distinct, overlapping rash stages. Facial erythema ("slapped cheek") that consist of red papules on the cheeks that rapidly coalesce in hours, forming red, slightly edematous, warm, plaques that are symmetric on both cheeks but do not cover the nasolabial fold and the circumoral region. The "slapped cheek'' appearance fades in 4 days. Net pattern erythema is a unique characteristic eruption--erythema in a fishnetlike pattern--begins on the extremities approximately 2 days after the onset of facial erythema and extends to the trunk and buttocks, fading in 6 to 14 days. At times, the rash (exanthem) begins with erythema and does not become characteristic until irregular clearing takes place. The eruptions may fade and then reappear in previously affected sites on the face and body during the next 2 to 3 weeks (recurrent phase). Temperature changes, emotional upsets, and sunlight may stimulate recurrences. The rash fades without scaling or pigmentation. There may be a slight lymphocytosis or eosinophilia.
Exanthem subitum: There is a sudden onset of high fever of 103° to 106° F with few or minor symptoms. Most children appear inappropriately well for the degree of temperature elevation, but they may experience slight anorexia or one or two episodes of vomiting, running nose, cough, and hepatomegaly. Seizures (but more frequently general cerebral irritability) may occur before the eruptive phase. The rash begins as the fever goes away. The term exanthem subitum describes the sudden "surprise" appearance of the rash after the fall of the fever. Numerous pale pink, almond-shaped macules appear on the trunk and neck. They become confluent, and then fade in a few hours to 2 days without scaling or pigmentation.
References :
1. Morens DM, Katz AR. The "fourth disease" of childhood: reevaluation of a nonexistent disease. Am J Epidemiol. 1991 Sep 15;134(6):628-40.
2. Powell KR. Filatow-Dukes' disease. Epidermolytic toxin-producing staphylococci as the etiologic agent of the fourth childhood exanthem. Am J Dis Child. 1979 Jan;133(1):88-91.
3. Weisse ME. The fourth disease, 1900-2000. Lancet. 2001 Jan 27;357(9252):299-301.
Created 8/3/01; last revised 11/27/13
© 1996-2013 Neal Chamberlain . All rights reserved.
Site Last Revised 11/12/13
Neal Chamberlain, PhD. A. T. Still University of Health Sciences/Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Take Care and Think Microbiologically!
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What is the name of the film director whose films include Bladerunner and Gladiator? | Blade Runner (1982) - IMDb
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A blade runner must pursue and try to terminate four replicants who stole a ship in space and have returned to Earth to find their creator.
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Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 11 wins & 16 nominations. See more awards »
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.5/10 X
After a space merchant vessel perceives an unknown transmission as distress call, their landing on the source moon finds one of the crew attacked by a mysterious lifeform. Continuing their journey back to Earth with the attacked crew having recovered and the critter deceased, they soon realize that its life cycle has merely begun.
Director: Ridley Scott
The moon from Alien (1979) has been colonized, but contact is lost. This time, the rescue team has impressive firepower, but will it be enough?
Director: James Cameron
During the Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8/10 X
A seemingly indestructible humanoid cyborg is sent from 2029 to 1984 to assassinate a waitress, whose unborn son will lead humanity in a war against the machines, while a soldier from that war is sent to protect her at all costs.
Director: James Cameron
Humanity finds a mysterious, obviously artificial object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the intelligent computer H.A.L. 9000, sets off on a quest.
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Archaeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones is hired by the U.S. government to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis.
Director: Steven Spielberg
A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after he narrowly escapes a bizarre accident.
Director: Richard Kelly
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.3/10 X
In future Britain, Alex DeLarge, a charismatic and psycopath delinquent, who likes to practice crimes and ultra-violence with his gang, is jailed and volunteers for an experimental aversion therapy developed by the government in an effort to solve society's crime problem - but not all goes according to plan.
Director: Stanley Kubrick
A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future.
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.
Director: Robert Zemeckis
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 8.2/10 X
It's the first week of winter in 1982. An American Research Base is greeted by an alien force, that can assimilate anything it touches. It's up to the members to stay alive, and be sure of who is human, and who has become one of the Things.
Director: John Carpenter
Luke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a wookiee and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire's world-destroying battle-station, while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the evil Darth Vader.
Director: George Lucas
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Storyline
In the futuristic year of 2019, Los Angeles has become a dark and depressing metropolis, filled with urban decay. Rick Deckard, an ex-cop, is a "Blade Runner". Blade runners are people assigned to assassinate "replicants". The replicants are androids that look like real human beings. When four replicants commit a bloody mutiny on the Off World colony, Deckard is called out of retirement to track down the androids. As he tracks the replicants, eliminating them one by one, he soon comes across another replicant, Rachel, who evokes human emotion, despite the fact that she's a replicant herself. As Deckard closes in on the leader of the replicant group, his true hatred toward artificial intelligence makes him question his own identity in this future world, including what's human and what's not human. Written by blazesnakes9
The original cut of the futuristic adventure. [Director's Cut] See more »
Genres:
Rated R for violence | See all certifications »
Parents Guide:
25 June 1982 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
$6,150,002 (USA) (25 June 1982)
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70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints)| Dolby Stereo (35 mm prints)
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Did You Know?
Trivia
As Gaff takes Deckard to see Bryant in his flying police car, a brief shot of a monitor appears which displays an 'Environmental CTR Purge' screen. The exact same screen is used in Alien (1979) as Ripley goes through the shuttle start-up procedure. See more »
Goofs
When Deckard enters the Bradbury building for his final confrontation with Pris and Roy, he enters the building at street level and walks up three flights of stairs before entering Sebastian's apartment. During the fight with Roy, Deckard climbs out a window, and pulls himself one flight higher; at most he should be only four or five stories above the street. Yet when he attempts to jump to another building and fails to make the jump, suddenly he seems to be hanging hundreds of feet from the ground with flying cars passing under him in the far distance. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Female announcer over intercom: Next subject: Kowalski, Leon. Engineer, waste disposal. File section: New employee, six days.
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Crazy Credits
In the "happy ending" Theatrical/International cuts, the credits play over the gorgeous scenery. In later Director/Final cuts, they play over a normal black background. See more »
Connections
Referenced in A:D (2005) See more »
Soundtracks
New Blu-Ray Disc Made Me A Blade Runner Fan
7 December 2008 | by ccthemovieman-1
(United States) – See all my reviews
Sometimes you just need to give a film a second chance, even if it is 20 years later! Only some rave reviews about the picture quality of this new 5-disc "Complete Collector's Edition" enticed me to watch this again. Wow, I am glad; this was a very entertaining and a tremendous visual and audio treat.
I actually appreciated the audio best because, even in this new Blu-Ray era, one doesn't often find a film with very active surround speakers. However, this "restored" version did and the sound is, at the point, the best I've heard on a Blu-Ray disc....or any DVD, for that matter. The visuals? Well, fans of Blade Runner know all about them. They are fantastic. Scene-after-scene reminded me of a Stanley Kubrick film or another bizarre 1980s movie called "Jacob's Ladder."
Because there are so many things to see and hear, and the story is different, one filled with strange characters, I can see where people would watch this film multiple times and enjoy it very much each time. The "Collector's Edition" has the best picture ever, according to director Ridley Scott, and "is the version I'm most pleased with." It has added scenes one didn't see in earlier versions. The rest of the DVD has those earlier versions. Apparently, there are several including those with Harrison Ford doing narration, like out of a late '40s film noir.
Speaking of the latter, that's what this film looked like: a combination film noir (or neo-noir) and sci-fi movie. It has many dark images, fantastic night-time scenes, wonderful closeups and an always-interesting color palette. Sci-fi films usually get dated in a hurry, thanks to ever-increasing special-effects progress in the movie industry, but this still looks very good. Despite being made over 25 years ago, Blade Runner still looks very much state-of-the-art.
Scott says this is the best version and the best his film has ever looked and sounded. Since it's his movie, who am I to argue. So, if you're like me and never gave this movie a chance (I lost interest halfway through with my VHS look at it), give this a second look on this Blu-Ray edition....and you will be blown away. This is, indeed, an amazing film.
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| Ridley Scott |
In Arthurian legend, what is the name of the enchantress who is Arthur's half sister? | Ridley Scott - IMDb
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Producer | Director | Production Designer
Ridley Scott was born in South Shields, Tyne and Wear (then County Durham) on 30 November 1937. His father was an officer in the Royal Engineers and the family followed him as his career posted him throughout the UK and Europe before they eventually returned to Teesside. Scott wanted to join Army (his elder brother Frank had already joined the ... See full bio »
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Nominated for 4 Oscars. Another 37 wins & 85 nominations. See more awards »
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Filmography
2015-2016 The Man in the High Castle (TV Series) (executive producer - 20 episodes)
- Detonation (2016) ... (executive producer)
- Loose Lips (2016) ... (executive producer)
- Fallout (2016) ... (executive producer)
- Land O' Smiles (2016) ... (executive producer)
- Kintsugi (2016) ... (executive producer)
2016 Killing Reagan (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2016 Mindhorn (executive producer)
2016 BrainDead (TV Series) (executive producer - 13 episodes)
2016 Jean-Claude Van Johnson (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2009-2016 The Good Wife (TV Series) (executive producer - 156 episodes)
- End (2016) ... (executive producer)
2014 Italy in a Day (Documentary) (executive producer)
2014 1.24.14 (Short) (producer)
- Episode #1.1 (2014) ... (executive producer)
2013 Killing Kennedy (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2013 Killing Kennedy (Documentary) (producer)
2013 The Vatican (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2012 The Polar Bears (Short) (producer)
2012 Labyrinth (TV Mini-Series) (producer - 2 episodes)
2011 Life in a Day (Documentary) (executive producer)
2010 Nomads (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2010 The Pillars of the Earth (TV Mini-Series) (executive producer - 9 episodes)
- Illumination (2010) ... (executive producer)
- New Beginnings (2010) ... (executive producer)
- Witchcraft (2010) ... (executive producer)
2010 The Real Robin Hood (TV Movie documentary) (producer)
2005-2010 Numb3rs (TV Series) (executive producer - 119 episodes)
- Episode #1.1 (2008) ... (executive producer)
2007 Law Dogs (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2006 Tristan + Isolde (executive producer)
2006 Orpheus (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2002 Beat the Devil (Short) (executive producer)
2002 Hostage (Short) (executive producer)
2000 The Last Debate (TV Movie) (executive producer)
2000 Gladiator (executive producer - uncredited)
1999 RKO 281 (TV Movie) (executive producer)
1997-1999 The Hunger (TV Series) (executive producer - 4 episodes)
1994 Monkey Trouble (executive producer)
1993 Elephant (TV Short) (associate producer)
1965 Boy and Bicycle (Short) (producer)
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1965 Reluctant Bandit (TV Movie)
1964 Singalong Saturday (TV Series) (3 episodes)
1965 Boy and Bicycle (Short) (written by)
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2001 Hannibal (executive music producer - uncredited)
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1999 The Alien Legacy (Video documentary) (archival material)
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2010 London Boulevard (special thanks)
2008 The Rhapsody (Short) (very special thanks)
2007 99 francs (special thanks)
2007 Boot Polish (Short) (very special thanks)
2016 20/20 (TV Series documentary)
Himself - Director, The Martian
Himself - Director (as Sir Ridley Scott)
2016 Today (TV Series)
2015 Celebrity Conversations (TV Series)
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2010-2015 Made in Hollywood (TV Series)
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2012-2015 Janela Indiscreta (TV Series)
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2015 CBS This Morning (TV Series)
Himself - Guest
2014 Rencontres de cinéma (TV Series)
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2002-2014 Film 2016 (TV Series)
Himself - Interviewee / Himself
2014 World Premiere (TV Series)
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2013-2014 Special Look (TV Series)
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2014 Weekend Ticket (TV Series short)
Himself
2014 The Counselor: Sky Movies Special (TV Movie documentary)
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1988-2013 Cinema 3 (TV Series)
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2012 Bergmans video (TV Mini-Series documentary)
Himself (2012)
2000-2012 HBO First Look (TV Series documentary)
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2012 Ad Men (TV Movie documentary)
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2011-2012 Prophets of Science Fiction (TV Series documentary)
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2010 Alien: Enhancement Pods (Video documentary)
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2010 The Real Robin Hood (TV Movie documentary)
Himself
2010 2010 Britannia Awards (TV Special)
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Personal Details
Other Works:
1984: Directed the famous Super Bowl ad for Apple Computers inspired by the book "1984". See more »
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1 Biographical Movie | 5 Print Biographies | 1 Portrayal | 15 Interviews | 11 Articles | 2 Pictorials | See more »
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The digital and theatrical markets are two different marketplaces. I think the digital marketplace - thank God for it! - is like having a book on the shelf: so you can actually go to that book and if it's four hours long, you can put it on pause, you can have a beer - no one's counting. See more »
Trivia:
Directed 6 actors in Oscar nominated performances: Geena Davis , Susan Sarandon , Russell Crowe , Joaquin Phoenix , Ruby Dee , and Matt Damon . Crowe won for his performance in Gladiator (2000). See more »
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Frequently uses fast shutter speeds during action scenes. See more »
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Which Disney film includes the characters Bubbles,Crush and Mr Ray? | Mr. Ray | Disney Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
Finding Nemo
Mr. Ray is the teacher of Nemo 's class. He's the jolliest science master working in marine education. He is an eagle ray who believes in the practical, taking his little fishy pupils for a ride on his back to teach them about the other creatures of the seabed and singing a whole bunch of memory-aiding ditties along the way. He helps teach his class by singing the "Let's Name the Species" song. Despite his jolly personality, he is shown to be very protective of his students, telling them to hide under him when danger approaches. He takes the class on a field trip to the drop-off, much to Marlin 's discomfort for his son's sake. In the end, he is seen with a newcomer student named Squirt who joins the whole class on another field trip.
Finding Dory
Mr. Ray first appears telling his class about the Stingray migration, a journey back to home. When the Stingray show up, Dory , who was staring at the seaweed thinking about her past, accidentally gets swooped up by the Stingray swarm, knocking her out. He is last seen wishing Dory good luck on finding her parents. At the end, Mr. Ray leaves his class under Hank , Destiny , and Bailey while he joins the migration. Unlike the first film, he is not seen after this point in the film. He is also mentioned by Kathy , when Hank heard a question.
Trivia
| Finding Nemo |
Which U.S. actor played the title role in Spartacus ? | Finding Nemo | Disney Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
“71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. That's a big place to find one fish.”
―Tagline
Finding Nemo is a 2003 American computer-animated comedy-drama adventure film written and directed by Andrew Stanton , released by Walt Disney Pictures on May 30 , 2003, and the fifth film produced by Pixar Animation Studios . It tells the story of the over-protective clownfish named Marlin ( Albert Brooks ) who, along with a regal tang named Dory ( Ellen DeGeneres ), searches for his abducted son Nemo ( Alexander Gould ) in Sydney Harbour . It is Pixar's first film to be released theatrically during the Northern Hemisphere summer. The film was re-released in 3D on September 14 , 2012 and it was released on Blu-ray for the first time on December 4 , 2012.
The film received critical acclaim and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was the second highest-grossing film of 2003 , behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, earning a total of $868 million worldwide. Finding Nemo is also the best-selling DVD of all time, with over 40 million copies sold as of 2006 (which was both before and after the release of the 2006 film Cars ), and was the highest-grossing G-rated film of all time, before Pixar's own Toy Story 3 overtook it. It is also the 6th highest-grossing animated film of all time, the 5th highest grossing CGI animated film of all time, and the 27th highest-grossing film of all time.
In 2008 , the American Film Institute named it the 10th greatest animated film ever made during their Top 10. A sequel, Finding Dory , was released on June 17 , 2016.
Contents
[ show ]
Plot
Two clownfish, Marlin and his wife Coral , are admiring their new home in the Great Barrier Reef and their clutch of eggs that are due to hatch in a few days. Suddenly, a barracuda attacks them, leaving Marlin unconscious before eating Coral and all but one of their eggs. Marlin names this egg Nemo , a name that Coral liked.
A few years later, Nemo's first day of school arrives. Nemo has a tiny right fin, due to a minor injury to his egg from the barracuda attack, which limits his swimming ability. After Marlin embarrasses Nemo during a school field trip, Nemo disobeys his father and sneaks away from the reef towards a boat, resulting in him being captured by scuba divers. As the boat sails away, one of the divers accidentally knocks his diving mask into the water.
While unsuccessfully attempting to save Nemo, Marlin meets Dory , a blue tang with short-term memory loss. While meeting three sharks on a fish-free diet, Bruce , a great white shark, Anchor , a hammerhead shark, and Chum , a mako shark, Marlin discovers the diver's mask that was dropped from the boat and notices an address written on it. However, when he argues with Dory and accidentally gives her a nosebleed, the scent of blood causes Bruce to lose control of himself and attempt to eat Marlin and Dory. The two escape from Bruce but the mask falls into a trench in the deep sea. During a hazardous struggle with an anglerfish in the trench, Dory realizes she is able to read the words written on the mask, "P. Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney." The address leads them to Sydney, Australia , and Dory manages to remember it. After receiving directions to Sydney from a large school of moonfish , Marlin and Dory accidentally run into a bloom of jellyfish that nearly sting them to death; Marlin falls exhausted after the risky escape and wakes up to see a surf-cultured sea turtle named Crush, who takes Dory and him on the East Australian Current . In the current, Marlin reluctantly shares the details of his journey with a group of young sea turtles; his story spreads rapidly across the ocean through word of mouth and eventually reaches Nemo in Sydney.
Meanwhile, Nemo's captor - P. Sherman , a dentist - places him into a fish tank in his office on Sydney Harbour. There, Nemo meets a group of aquarium fish called the "Tank Gang", led by a crafty and ambitious Moorish idol named Gill . The "Tank Gang" includes Bloat , a pufferfish; Bubbles , a yellow tang; Peach , a starfish; Gurgle , a Royal gramma; Jacques , a pacific cleaner shrimp; and Deb , a Blacktailed Humbug. The fish are frightened to learn that the dentist plans to give Nemo to his niece, Darla , who is infamous for killing a goldfish given to her previously, by constantly shaking her bag. In order to avoid this, Gill gives Nemo a role in an escape plan, which involves jamming the tank's filter and forcing the dentist to remove the fish from the tank to clean it manually. The fish would be placed in plastic bags, at which point they would roll out the window and into the harbor. After a friendly pelican named Nigel visits with news of Marlin's adventure, Nemo succeeds in jamming the filter, but the plan backfires when the dentist installs a new high-tech filter.
Upon leaving the East Australian Current, Marlin and Dory become lost and are eaten by a whale. Inside the whale's mouth, Marlin desperately tries to escape while Dory tries to communicate with it. In response, the whale carries them to Sydney Harbour and expels them through his blowhole. They are met by Nigel, who recognizes Marlin from the stories he has heard and rescues him and Dory from a flock of hungry seagulls by scooping them into his beak and taking them to the dentist's office. By this time, Darla has arrived and the dentist is prepared to give Nemo to her. Nemo tries to play dead in hopes of saving himself, and, at the same time, Nigel arrives. Marlin sees Nemo and mistakes this act for the actual death of his son. When Nigel suddenly gets thrown out the window by the dentist, Gill helps Nemo escape into a drain through a sink after a chaotic struggle.
Overcome with despair, Marlin leaves Dory and begins to swim back home. Dory then loses her memory and becomes confused, but meets Nemo, who has reached the ocean through an underwater drainpipe. Dory's memory is restored after she reads the word "Sydney" on a nearby drainpipe and, remembering her journey, she guides Nemo to Marlin who changes his sadness to happiness. After the two joyfully reunite, Dory is caught in a fishing net with a school of grouper. Nemo bravely enters the net and directs the group to swim downward to break the net, reminiscent of a similar scenario that occurred in the fish tank earlier. The fish, including Dory, succeed in breaking the net and escape. After some days, Nemo leaves for school once more and Marlin is no longer overprotective or doubtful of his son's safety, proudly watching Nemo swim away into the distance.
Back at the dentist's office, the high-tech filter breaks down and The Tank Gang have escaped into the harbor, but realize they are confined in plastic bags of water that the dentist put them into (when their plan has now worked) while cleaning the tank.
Cast
Aaron Fors, Jess Harnell , Bob Peterson and Jan Rabson as the seagulls
Production
The inspiration for Nemo was made up of multiple experiences. The idea goes back to when director Andrew Stanton was a child, when he loved going to the dentist to see the fish tank, assuming that the fish were from the ocean and wanted to go home. In 1992 shortly after his son was born, he and his family took a trip to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (which was called Marine World at the time). There, he saw the shark tube and various exhibits he felt that the underwater world could be done beautifully in computer animation. Later, in 1997 he took his son for a walk in the park but found that he was over protecting him constantly and lost an opportunity to have any "father-son experiences" on that day. In an interview with National Geographic magazine, he stated that the idea for the characters of Marlin and Nemo came from a photograph of two clownfish peeking out of an anemone: "It was so arresting. I had no idea what kind of fish they were, but I couldn't take my eyes off them. And as an entertainer, the fact that they were called clownfish—it was perfect. There's almost nothing more appealing than these little fish that want to play peekaboo with you." Also, clownfish are very colorful and don't tend to come out of an anemone very often, and for a character who has to go on a dangerous journey, Stanton felt a clownfish was the perfect kind of fish for the character.
Pre-production of the film took place in early 1997. Stanton began writing the screenplay during the post-production of A Bug's Life . As such, it began production with a complete screenplay, something that co-director Lee Unkrich called "very unusual for an animated film." The artists took scuba diving lessons so they could go and study the coral reef. The idea for the initiation sequence came from a story conference between Andrew Stanton and Bob Peterson while driving to record the actors. Ellen DeGeneres was cast after Stanton was watching Ellen with his wife and seeing Ellen "change the subject five times before finishing one sentence" as Stanton recalled. There was a pelican character known as Gerald (who in the final film ends up swallowing and choking on Marlin and Dory) who was originally a friend of Nigel. They were going to play against each other as Nigel being neat fastidious while Gerald being scruffy and sloppy. However, the filmmakers could not find an appropriate scene for them that didn't slow the pace of the picture down, so Gerald's character was minimized.
Stanton himself provided the voice of Crush the sea turtle. Stanton originally did the voice for the film's story reel and assumed they would find an actor later. When Stanton's performance was popular in test screenings, Stanton decided to keep his performance in the film. Stanton recorded all his dialogue while lying on a sofa in co-director Lee Unkrich 's office.
Crush's son Squirt was voiced by Nicholas Bird, the young son of fellow Pixar director Brad Bird . According to Stanton, the elder Bird was playing a tape recording of his young son around the Pixar studios one day. Stanton felt the voice was "this generation's Thumper " and immediately cast Nicholas.
Megan Mullally revealed that she was originally doing a voice in the film. According to Mullally, the producers were dissatisfied to learn that the voice of her character Karen Walker on the television show Will & Grace was not her natural speaking voice. The producers hired her anyway, and then strongly encouraged her to use her Karen Walker voice for the role. When Mullally refused, she was dismissed.
The film was dedicated to Glenn McQueen, a Pixar animator who died of melanoma in October 2002.
Home media
Main article: Finding Nemo (video)
Finding Nemo was released on DVD and VHS on November 4, 2003. After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King , Disney and Pixar announced a 3D re-release of Finding Nemo on September 14, 2012. The film was also released on DVD in a "Gold Edition", which came with a Finding Nemo stuffed toy character. The film will be released for the first time on Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D on December 4, 2012, with both a 3-disc and a 5-disc set.
Reception
Finding Nemo currently holds a 99% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 8.7/10 based on 254 reviews. A rating of 89% on Metacritic indicating " Universal Acclaim" and four stars from Empire. Roger Ebert gave the film four stars, calling it "one of those rare movies where I wanted to sit in the front row and let the images wash out to the edges of my field of vision." Broadway star Nathan Lane who was the voice of Timon the meerkat in The Lion King , said Finding Nemo was his favorite animated film.
The film's use of clownfish prompted mass purchase of the animal as pets in the United States, even though the movie portrayed the use of fish as pets negatively and suggested that saltwater aquariums are notably tricky and expensive to maintain. The demand for clownfish was supplied by large-scale harvesting of tropical fish in regions like Vanuatu.
At the same time, the film had a quote that "all drains lead back to the ocean " (Nemo escapes from the aquarium by going down a sink drain, ending up in the sea). Since water typically undergoes treatment before leading to the ocean, the JWC Environmental company quipped that a more realistic title for the movie might be Grinding Nemo. However, in Sydney, much of the sewer system does pass directly to outfall pipes deep offshore, without a high level of treatment (although pumping and some filtering occur). Additionally, according to the DVD, there was a cut sequence with Nemo going through a treatment plant's mechanisms before ending up in the ocean pipes. However, in the final product, logos for "Sydney Water Treatment" are featured prominently along the path to the ocean, implying that Nemo did pass through some water treatment.
Tourism in Australia strongly increased during the summer and autumn of 2003, with many tourists wanting to swim off the coast of Eastern Australia to "find Nemo". The Australian Tourism Commission (ATC) launched several marketing campaigns in China and the USA in order to improve tourism in Australia, many of them utilizing Finding Nemo clips. Queensland also used Finding Nemo to draw tourists to promote its state for vacationers.
On the 3-D re-release, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote that its emotional power was deepened by "the dimensionality of the oceanic deep" where "the spatial mysteries of watery currents and floating worlds are exactly where 3-D explorers were born to boldly go."
Box office
Finding Nemo earned $339,714,978 in North America and $528,179,000 in other countries for a worldwide total of $867,893,978. It is the second highest-grossing film of 2003, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. In North America, outside North America, and worldwide, it was the highest-grossing Disney·Pixar film, up until 2010 when Toy Story 3 surpassed it.
Finding Nemo set an opening-weekend record for an animated feature, making $70,251,710 (first surpassed by Shrek 2). It became the highest-grossing animated film in North America ($339.7 million), outside North America ($528.2 million) and worldwide ($867.9 million), in all three occasions outgrossing The Lion King . In North America, it was surpassed by Shrek 2 in 2004, and by Toy Story 3 in 2010. After the re-release of The Lion King in 2011, it stands as the fourth highest-grossing animated film in these regions. Outside North America, it was surpassed by Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Toy Story 3 and Ice Age: Continental Drift. Worldwide, it now ranks fifth among animated films.
The film had impressive box-office runs in many international markets. In Japan , its highest-grossing market after North America, it grossed $102.4 million becoming the highest-grossing Western animated film until it was out-grossed by Toy Story 3 ($126.7 million). Following in biggest grosses are the UK Ireland and Malta, where it grossed £37.2 million ($67.1 million), France and the Maghreb region ($64.8 million), Germany ($53.9 million), and Spain ($29.5 million).
3D re-release
After the success of the 3D re-release of The Lion King , Disney and Pixar re-released Finding Nemo in 3D on September 14, 2012, with a conversion cost estimated below $5 million. For the opening weekend of its 3D re-release in North America, Finding Nemo grossed $16.7 million, debuting at the No. 2 spot behind Resident Evil: Retribution. From 36 foreign markets, it earned a total of $13 million. The re-release grossed $41,128,283.
The film's current domestic total is $380,843,261 with $936,743,261 worldwide.
Accolades
Finding Nemo won the Academy Award and Saturn Award for Best Animated Film. It also won the award for best Animated Film at the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards, the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards, the National Board of Review Awards, the Online Film Critics Society Awards, and the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards.
The film received many awards, including:
Kids Choice Awards for Favorite Movie and Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie, Ellen DeGeneres.
Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, Ellen DeGeneres
Finding Nemo was also nominated for:
Two Chicago Film Critics Association Awards for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress, Ellen DeGeneres
A Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Two MTV Movie Awards for Best Movie and Best Comedic Performance, Ellen DeGeneres
In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten Top Ten", the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres, after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Finding Nemo was acknowledged as the 10th best film in the animation genre. It was the most recently released film among all ten lists, and one of only three movies made after the year 2000, the others being The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Shrek.
American Film Institute recognition:
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – Nominated
AFI's 10 Top 10 – #10 Animated film
Environmental concerns and consequences
The reaction to the film by the general public has led to environmental devastation for the clownfish and has provoked an outcry from several environmental protection agencies, including Marine Aquarium Council, Australia. Apparently, the demand for tropical fish skyrocketed after the film's release. This has caused reef species decimation in Vanuatu and many other reef areas.
Even more bizarre, after seeing the film, some aquarium owners released their pets into the ocean, but the wrong ocean. This has introduced species harmful to the indigenous environment and is harming reefs worldwide as well. This led to people wondering if the protagonist being a clownfish was a good idea.
There have also been seafood restaurants called "Frying Nemo" in certain countries, which has a logo that includes a terrified Nemo being fried on a pan.
Finding Nemo vs. Shark Tale
A year after Finding Nemo was released, DreamWorks also released Shark Tale, a dark comedy film starring Will Smith. Since both films were released only a year apart, it was accused of ripping off Nemo with pop culture references and a soundtrack with famous pop stars at the time.
DreamWorks and Disney's feud has gone as far back in 1998, the time where A Bug's Life and Antz were released. It's no surprise since Jeffery Katzenberg left Disney on bad terms and has remained bitter towards them since then.
Music
Finding Nemo is the original soundtrack album. It was the first Pixar film not to be scored by Randy Newman . The album was nominated for the Academy Award for Original Music Score, losing to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Also, English singer Robbie Williams performed a cover of Beyond the Sea .
Theme park attractions
2008 Turtle Talk with Crush ( Hong Kong Disneyland )
Musical adaptation
The stage musical Tarzan Rocks! occupied the Theater in the Wild at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida from 1999 to 2006. When it closed in January 2006, it was rumored that a musical adaptation of Finding Nemo would replace it. This was confirmed in April 2006, when Disney announced that the adaptation, with new songs written by Tony Award-winning Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez , would "combine puppets, dancers, acrobats and animated backdrops" and open in late 2006. Tony Award-winning director Peter Brosius signed on to direct the show, with Michael Curry, who designed puppets for Disney's successful stage version of The Lion King , serving as leading puppet and production designer.
Anderson-Lopez said that the couple agreed to write the adaptation of "one of their favorite movies of all time" after considering "The idea of people coming in [to see the musical] at 4, 5 or 6 and saying, 'I want to do that'....So we want to take it as seriously as we would a Broadway show." To condense the feature-length film to thirty minutes, she said she and Lopez focused on a single theme from the movie, the idea that "The world's dangerous and beautiful."
The forty-minute show (which is performed five times daily) opened on January 2, 2007. Several musical numbers took direct inspiration from lines in the film, including "(In The) Big Blue World", "Fish Are Friends, Not Food", "Just Keep Swimming", and "Go With the Flow". In January 2007, a New York studio recording of the show was released on iTunes, with Lopez and Anderson-Lopez providing the voices for Marlin and Dory, respectively. Avenue Q star Stephanie D'Abruzzo also appeared on the recording, as Sheldon/Deb.
Nemo was the first non-musical animated film to which Disney added songs in order to produce a stage musical. In 2009, Finding Nemo – The Musical was honored with a Thea award for Best Live Show from the Themed Entertainment Association.
Video game
A video game based on the film was released in 2003, for PC, Xbox, PS2, GameCube, and GBA.
Sequel
In 2005, after disagreements between Disney's Michael Eisner and Pixar's Steve Jobs over the distribution of Pixar's films, Disney announced that they would be creating a new animation studio, Circle 7 Animation , to make sequels to the seven Disney-owned, Pixar films (which consisted of the films released between 1995 and 2006).
The Official Logo for Finding Dory
The studio had put Toy Story 3 and Monsters, Inc. 2 in development, and had also hired screenwriter, Laurie Craig, to write a draft for Finding Nemo 2. Circle 7 had since been shut down after Robert Iger replaced Eisner as CEO of Disney and arranged the acquisition of Pixar.
In July 2012, it was reported that Andrew Stanton is developing a sequel to Finding Nemo, with Victoria Strouse writing the script and a schedule to be released in 2016. However, the same day the news of a potential sequel broke, director Andrew Stanton posted a message on his personal Twitter calling into question the accuracy of these reports. The message said, "Didn't you all learn from Chicken Little ? Everyone calm down." Don't believe everything you read. Nothing to see here now. According to the report by Hollywood Reporter published in August 2012, Ellen DeGeneres is in negotiations to reprise her role of Dory. In September 2012, it was confirmed by Stanton saying: "What was immediately on the list was writing a second John Carter movie. When that went away, everything slid up. I know I'll be accused by more sarcastic people that it's a reaction to Carter not doing well, but only in its timing, but not in its conceit." In February 2013, it was confirmed by the press that Albert Brooks would reprise the role of Marlin in the sequel.
Trivia
The Polish title is translated as Where's Nemo.
The film's logo was created by Neil Kellerhouse, an acclaimed film poster designer who is known for creating the posters for The Social Network (2010) and Under the Skin (2014). [1] He was also originally tasked to design the logo for Up , [1] but the logo was instead designed by Susan Bradley. [2]
When Bruce bursts through the submarine door and shouts, "Here's Brucey!", this was a reference to Stephen King's "The Shining".
When Dory wants to ask the whale for directions and Marlin doesn't, she says, "What is it with men and asking for directions?" this line was also in Mulan II .
Nemo appears in Monsters, Inc. in a cameo near the end. He is also mentioned by Bugs Bunny in the film Looney Tunes: Back in Action when he was fishing in a flooded Alfa Romeo car and says "Hey, what do ya know? I found Nemo!"
Nemo's mother's death was intended to be previewed in a series of flashbacks, but Lasserter insisted it to be shown in the beginning of the film to explain why Marlin was so over protective towards his son.
The lines "Curse you, AquaScum!", "He's dead" and "He's not dead" were omitted when the movie was aired on Disney Junior due to inappropriate language for younger children.
This is also the similar case to The Incredibles in Dash's line "We survived but we're dead."
The voice clips that were previously recorded are later being replayed in the movie.
This is the first Pixar film to include a classic cartoon sound effect (although some cartoon-like sound effects were previously used for the Woody's Roundup scenes in Toy Story 2 ); the bone bite sound effect (originally from various Hanna-Barbera cartoons) is heard when Bloat eats a piece of fish dust.
The HighlightsTM magazine can be seen during the fish tank scene.
This was the fifth Pixar movie to be released on VHS.
The poster in surrounded by supporting characters. They did same with Finding Dory.
P. Sherman, the name in the diver's goggle was inspired of how Filipinos pronounce the word "fisherman".
Allusions
When Nemo first realizes he is in a fish tank in a waiting room, a Buzz Lightyear toy is seen on the floor.
As Gill is telling his plan, the camera is in the view of the fish. After dropping out of the window, the Pizza Planet truck drives past.
In the credits, Mike Wazowski appears wearing the diving gear he wore to protect himself from Boo in Monsters, Inc.
A113 appears on a diver's camera.
Gallery
The Disney Wiki has a collection of images and media related to Finding Nemo .
Releases
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After serving as a bridesmaid 27 times, a young woman wrestles with the idea of standing by her sister's side as her sibling marries the man she's secretly in love with.
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A smart but sensible new graduate lands a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the demanding editor-in-chief of a high fashion magazine.
Director: David Frankel
A girl makes a wish on her 13th birthday and wakes up the next day as a 30-year-old woman.
Director: Gary Winick
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 6.4/10 X
When her brother decides to ditch for a couple weeks in London, Viola heads over to his elite boarding school, disguises herself as him, and proceeds to fall for one of her soccer teammates. Little does she realize she's not the only one with romantic troubles, as she, as he, gets in the middle of a series of intermingled love affairs.
Director: Andy Fickman
A man in a legal but hurtful business needs an escort for some social events, and hires a beautiful prostitute he meets... only to fall in love.
Director: Garry Marshall
Elle Woods heads to Washington D.C. to join the staff of a congresswoman in order to pass a bill to ban animal testing.
Director: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
A man and a woman are compelled, for legal reasons, to live life as a couple for a limited period of time. At stake is a large amount of money.
Director: Tom Vaughan
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Storyline
Undercover FBI agent Gracie Hart shows no signs of having any femininity in her demeanor or appearance. Generally a bright and capable agent, she is in trouble at work when she makes an error in judgment in a case which results in a near disaster. As such, one of her by-the-books colleagues, Eric Matthews, who has never shown any inclination of thinking outside the box, is assigned to lead the high profile case of a terrorist coined The Citizen instead of her, while she is facing possible disciplinary action. Gracie pieces together the evidence to determine that The Citizen's next target will be the Miss United States beauty pageant. The pageant represents everything that Gracie abhors. Despite Gracie's mannish demeanor, Eric, with no other undercover female agent remotely fitting the demographic, assigns her to go undercover as a pageant contestant to see if she can flush out The Citizen, who is perhaps one of the other contestants. Although the pageant administration, led by former ... Written by Huggo
She's Got A Killer To Catch... Right After The Swimsuit Competition. See more »
Genres:
Rated PG-13 for sexual references and a scene of violence | See all certifications »
Parents Guide:
22 December 2000 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
$13,853,686 (USA) (22 December 2000)
Gross:
The people working in Starbucks were actual Starbucks employees. See more »
Goofs
When Gracie is practicing gliding down the street, a large crowd can be seen watching the filming from the other side of the road. See more »
Quotes
Victor Melling : If I'd ever had a daughter, I imagine she might have been something like you... which is perhaps why I've never reproduced.
User Reviews
There are 100 things wrong with it...but you may catch yourself smiling after thinking it over
4 October 2001 | by moonspinner55
(las vegas, nv) – See all my reviews
It's over-the-top, it's occasionally offensive--to men, to women, to gays, to lesbians, and to poor Miss Hawaii--but "Miss Congeniality" has Sandra Bullock, and she's wonderful. The opening moments, with FBI agent Bullock busting Russians in a restaurant sting operation, are so good that the movie might've played very well as an FBI comedy-drama, with Bullock on different cases. I mean, maybe they should've ditched the pageant stuff, at least until next time. But, no, Bullock goes undercover as a contestant in the Miss U.S. pageant, and the movie turns into your typical makeover thing. Lots of breast jokes, TOO many high heel pratfalls, and Michael Caine as a peculiar makeover artist (he's "dripping with disdain" one minute, fatherly the next, then bitter, then cuddly). Bullock has no chemistry with Benjamin Bratt as her boss on the operation (that's not her fault, however) and I wanted more of her home life (and that doomed microwave oven), but what works does work well. Sandra's "bonding" paint party with the girls is terrific, as is her friendship with shaky Miss Rhode Island and her attempts to face down snarling Ernie Hudson as the FBI chieftain (who, like in "Ghostbusters", gets no funny lines). The movie rests solely on Bullock's shoulders, and she delivers. It may not be comic genius, but it is congenial. **1/2 from ****
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| Sandra Bullock |
In which Dickens novel does Miss Havisham appear? | Miss Congeniality turns 15 today, where are Sandra Bullock and the cast are now? | Daily Mail Online
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Academy Awards, battles with weight and even early retirement: 15 years after comedy hit Miss Congeniality was released, FEMAIL reveals where the cast are now (and how star Sandra Bullock hasn't aged a day)
The 2000 hit film took in $212.7 million worldwide at the box office when Sandra was 36 and her co-star, Benjamin Bratt, was 37
Sandra went on to win an Oscar, while Benjamin, Michael Caine, William Shatner, and Candice Bergen continue to have successful careers
Several of the actors playing Gracie's pageant competitors went on to score major roles, though Miss Texas retired from Hollywood
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In the 1989 film, who was Driving Miss Daisy? | Driving Miss Daisy (1989) - IMDb
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An old Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur in the American South have a relationship that grows and improves over the years.
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Title: Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
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Won 4 Oscars. Another 17 wins & 21 nominations. See more awards »
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An elderly Jewish widow living in Atlanta can no longer drive. Her son insists she allow him to hire a driver, which in the 1950s meant a black man. She resists any change in her life but, Hoke, the driver is hired by her son. She refuses to allow him to drive her anywhere at first, but Hoke slowly wins her over with his native good graces. The movie is directly taken from a stage play and does show it. It covers over twenty years of the pair's life together as they slowly build a relationship that transcends their differences. Written by John Vogel <[email protected]>
The comedy that won a Pulitzer Prize See more »
Genres:
26 January 1990 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
Miss Daisy und ihr Chauffeur See more »
Filming Locations:
Did You Know?
Trivia
One of three Warner Bros. movies in a row where the Best Picture winner costars Morgan Freeman. The other two are Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004). The Departed (2006) would be the first Warner Bros. Best Picture Oscar without Morgan Freeman since Amadeus (1984). It is also the only one out of the three that Clint Eastwood didn't direct or star with Morgan Freeman. See more »
Goofs
When Hoke is eating while sitting at the kitchen table, there is a bottle of hot sauce on the table. The bottle cap can be seen to have a tamper-proof seal in place. Those weren't used at that time. See more »
Quotes
Daisy Werthan : Did you have the air-conditioning checked? I told you to have the air-conditioning checked.
Hoke Colburn : I had the air-conditioning checked. I don't know what for. You never allow me to turn it on.
Referenced in Honey (2003) See more »
Soundtracks
Conducted by Václav Neumann (uncredited)
Courtesy of Supraphon Int'l
Looking for a great, in-yer-face fast-moving action THRILLER? Driving Miss Daisy ain't it.
Looking for a great MOVIE? You're in the right place.
"Driving Miss Daisy" charts the subtly-shifting relationship between "Miss Daisy," a very reluctantly aging Jewish lady who's no longer able to drive for herself, and her new (and, as you can expect, rather unwelcome!) driver -- a not-terribly-young-himself Black guy (or African-American guy, whichever you prefer) named Hoke.
Bear in mind this is the Deep South of the 1950's and 60's we're talking about here, and the racial attitudes and prejudices of that time make for fascinating background -- as does the whole general culture, which I believe was well portrayed.
The directors frankly took on some delicate racial subject matter here (and certainly the racial divide in those days was very deep indeed) -- but they handled it with remarkable skill. I think they succeeded so well because they brought you into the lives of people as people, not just as cardboard stereotypes. Long before the movie is over, you find yourself really caring about the two main characters -- Daisy and Hoke.
This is a movie about life, relationships, and people. You see some good things -- and also some very human weaknesses, not the least of which is sheer stubborn pride.
I personally was a child of the deep South, and I appreciate movies such as this one and Jessica Tandy's other wonderful movie Fried Green Tomatoes (which is in some ways very similar) which give us a glimpse into the culture of those days. There are definitely things we can learn from the past, and there are also things we can learn from watching how people change over the course of their lives.
Several moments from this movie stand out, some of which are funny, some sobering, and some of which are particularly moving:
The scene involving Dr. Martin Luther King.
The unashamedly bigoted comments of a 50's or 60's police officer.
A great scene involving Hoke and Miss Daisy's businessman son.
An incredible scene in which Jessica Tandy portrays the aging Miss Daisy.
And, perhaps most of all, what Miss Daisy says to Hoke towards the end of the movie.
Now personally, I love action movies so well that I was initially reluctant even to watch this one. This is not a movie of action, but it IS a movie of substance and beauty, mixed with some funny moments.
The acting is great, the script and directing are beautifully done, and the substance, humor and beauty are such that overall, I consider "Driving Miss Daisy," one of the best movies I've ever seen.
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| Morgan Freeman |
Where does Agatha Christie's Miss Marple live? | Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Trailer - YouTube
Driving Miss Daisy (1989) Trailer
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Uploaded on Apr 24, 2010
Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd
December 13, 1989
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The musical Miss Saigon is based on which Puccini opera? | Broadway Musical Home - Miss Saigon
Broadway Musical Home
Who starred in the original cast?
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Find out at Broadway Musical Home
Miss Saigon
by Claude-Michel Schönberg , Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby Jr.
Opening Soon on Broadway
Buy Tickets
About the Musical
Based on Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, Miss Saigon is set in the 1970s during the final days of and following the Vietnam War.
Story:
The Vietnam War is in its final days, and American soldiers are celebrating in careless escapades with Saigon’s prostitutes. Chris, a sergeant with a distaste for the club scene, is coerced to spend the night with a new bargirl, Kim. When they quickly fall in love and Chris bargains for her freedom from the bar owner, named the Engineer, a love saga begins that puts the characters’ moral convictions and honor codes to the test.
| Madama Butterfly |
Miss Phillipines, Mary Jean Lastimosa currently holds which title? | Waukesha Civic Theatre - Miss Saigon
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Miss Saigon
Book by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil
Music By Claude-Michel Schönberg
Lyrics By Alain Boublil and Richard Maltby, Jr.
Directed by Mark E. Schuster
May 4 to 20, 2012
Read the Reviews:
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Photos By Carroll Studios Of Photography
Volunteer of the Production
An Interview with the King Family
Cast
WCT captures emotions of war in 'Miss Saigon'
By JULIE McHALE - TimeOut Theater Critic
May 10, 2012
WAUKESHA - It is rare for a community theater to tackle a musical as complex as "Miss Saigon," which is a modern version of Puccini’s "Madame Butterfly," set during the Vietnam War.
I must admit that I had my reservations when I saw it on the Waukesha Civic Theatre’s offerings. However, after viewing the amazing production the WCT mounted, my doubts quickly dissipated.
A.J. Simon’s realistic, stylized set design is as functional as it is splendid. The leading vocalists were very strong. Sharon Sohner’s vibrant costume designs and Lisa Moberly’s well-executed choreography all serve the beautiful music and poignant story written by Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil. It is an experience not soon to be forgotten.
Karissa Lade, the leading lady, is extraordinary in her role as Kim. Her voice is melodic and pure, and her emotions convincing. Chris, her marine lover, is a tad pitchy in some of his solos but right in tune with her in their duets.
Phil Stepanski conveyed the beauty of love and the horror of war with passion. Another voice to be reckoned with is that of Jonathon Bartos, whose solo "Bui-Doi" is powerfully delivered. Those pictures of abandoned children projected on a screen told their own pitiable story.
Credit must also be given to Even Huang as Thuy. He exuded power, frustration and pain in his role as the rejected suitor. He learned that fear cannot force love.
Rob King as Engineer has a flair for comedy. His rendition of "The American Dream" is a standout. He is probably the most complex character in the show, and King captures those dimensions. Angela Lombardi as Chris’ wife, Ellen, evoked our sympathy and helped highlight the depth of her husband’s conflicted situation.
The ensemble numbers are not as strong as the solos, but the drama and pageantry of the big numbers compensated for some harmonic deficiencies. The most beautiful songs included "The Movie in my Mind," where Kim and Gigi, played by Emily Ruzga, join voices; "Sun and Moon," movingly sung by Kim and Chris; and "I Still Believe," rendered by Kim and Ellen.
How many women and children are left stranded after a war when transient alliances are made, often in desperation, and promises are too frequently broken? We will never know the answer to that question, nor the one that Chris asks in his heart-wrenching cry, "Why, God, why?" His piercing scream as the play ends says it all.
We are moved. We are awed. This is a searing look at the devastation of war on a very personal level.
Kudos to director Mark E. Schuster and his crew and staff for reminding us again of both the strength and weakness of the human spirit in such a stirring format.
Waukesha Civic Theatre Recreates 'Miss Saigon'
By By Willy Thorn
Posted: Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The Waukesha Civic Theatre has ambitiously set out to recreate the Broadway classic Miss Saigon—scene by scene, song for song. It's no small feat. Miss Saigon is one of Broadway's longest-running musicals ever—and for good reason. The epic Vietnam War period piece has complex characters, drama and depth in a perfectly woven plot with not one but two love triangles.
Waukesha Civic Theatre has spared no expense. Fantastic costumes designed by Sharon Sohner dot every scene. The set, designed and created by A.J. Simon, is a wonder unto itself—all steel girders, wood slat shards, bamboo and straw, chain link and netting. It is built to flex, adapt and adjust for a wide variety of scenes: brothels and offices, Bangkok streets and refugee camps, communist parades, even helicopter escapes and telephone conversations.
Recreating a classic on the scale of Miss Saigon is a tall task. More than 30 musical numbers comprise the two-and-a-half-hour show. But even with a young cast, director Mark E. Schuster stays the ambitious course, determined to sing each and every line.
As with the Vietnam War, some poor souls don't make it. But those that do, shine. Notably: Karissa Lade as Kim (Miss Saigon herself) and Evan Huang as Thuy (her betrothed love). The former has the voice to carry the heavy load. The latter brings the passion, intensity, fervor and fire to make it all real. Huang is one of but a handful of Asians in the cast. Ironically, though, Wisconsin is home to many Southeast Asians who relocated following the Vietnam War. Reaching a few miles east to grab a few Hmongs (and a black soldier or two?) would have gone a long way toward authenticating the effort.
Waukesha Civic Theatre's Miss Saigon continues through May 20. For ticket reservations, call 262-547-0708.
'Miss Saigon' makes successful landing at WCT
Ambitious musical captures the chaos of the Vietnam War
By Marilyn Jozwik - WaukeshaNOW Theater Critic
May 8, 2012
Hours before Saigon succumbed to the North Vietnamese Communists in 1975, American military helicopters rescued Vietnamese refugees from rooftops and transported them to safety.
The city was in chaos with thousands of people trying to flee. Those who didn't fit in the copters clung to the skids as they ascended, desperate to escape Communist brutality.
It is the hell that surrounds the eve of the fall of Saigon and the toll war had on the people of two nations that is at the heart of "Miss Saigon," which opened Friday at the Waukesha Civic Theatre.
The Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil musical (Richard Maltby Jr. worked on lyrics with Boublil in "Miss Saigon"), which premiered in London in 1985, followed the pair's first success, "Les Miserables."
In "Miss Saigon," Chris (Phil Stepanski), an American GI, and Kim (Karissa Lade), a Vietnamese teenager orphaned by the war and trying to make a living as a bar girl, meet at a sleazy nightclub in Saigon run by a French-Vietnamese "entrepreneur" called Engineer (Rob King).
Like many soldiers forced to fight in the unpopular war, Chris is trying to make sense of it until he meets Kim and falls in love the night before the Americans evacuate the U.S. Embassy. The two "marry" in a religious ceremony before they are separated by the fates of war.
After returning home, Chris tries unsuccessfully to contact Kim before he decides to move on and marries Ellen (Angela Lombardi). Three years after meeting Kim, he is contacted by an organization that attempts to find American fathers of children born to Vietnamese women during the war. Among these children, who are called bui-doi, is Tam who is being raised by Kim. She is hopeful that Chris will some day return to take them to America. Chris travels to Bangkok with Ellen where he finds Kim and Tam, played by an absolutely darling 3-year-old Lexi Hueschen, and a challenge greater than anything he faced as a GI.
The show is ambitious for community theater for many reasons but Waukesha Civic Theatre mostly hits its mark. It is like a figure skater attempting to hit the sport's most difficult maneuver, a quadruple jump, and nearly sticking the landing.
"Miss Saigon," based on Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly," is virtually all sung, creating quite a challenge for any group. Waukesha Civic overcame the obstacle of having to come up with an orchestra by using prerecorded music.
Another challenge is the mostly Asian characters. A versatile set also must work for a nightclub, bedrooms, the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy, the streets of Saigon, Bangkok and other locations.
Waukesha Civic Theatre was fortunate to get an outstanding group of principal actors who handled the huge volume of music beautifully. All were miked for clear, crisp sound, which is essential when it is only lyrics telling the story.
Lade as Kim was flawless in her execution, but could perhaps have played the role with more vulnerability. Stepanski as Chris handled the American GI role with great passion. Musically, however, he lost pitch somewhat when he ratcheted up the volume for the high notes. The two voices blended nicely in the emotionally-charged "Last Night of the World."
Almost ever-present was Rob King's Engineer, and he didn't disappoint. Engineer is hellbent on making money and getting to America, where he thinks his greediness and lack of scruples will fit right in. King oozes with self-satisfaction as he tells Engineer's story and plans to be a corrupt, rich American entrepreneur in "The American Dream."
Lombardi as Ellen did a lovely job with "Now That I've Seen Her," although her big blonde wig made her look like a caricature and didn't seem to fit the times. Jonathon Bartos as John, Chris's GI buddy, was solid and opened Act II with a heartfelt "Entr'acte Bui-Doi," a pictorial tribute to the children fathered by American GIs left behind in Vietnam.
Almost in a class by himself, was Evan Huang as Thuy, the villager betrothed to Kim before Kim's parents died and later becomes a commander in the Communist army. Huang displayed tremendous strength and conviction as Thuy confronted Kim with the promise and was truly frightening when Kim saw him in her nightmare.
The show, however, faltered in some of the ensemble numbers, in which the music often seemed to overwhelm the singers. This led to some garbled lyrics, especially in "The Morning of the Dragon." The scene takes place three years after the fall of Saigon to the Viet Cong and its lyrics are critical to understanding the story. It was opening night and the ensemble numbers are the last to come together, so they should improve with subsequent performances.
One nicely done ensemble scene was "The Movie in My Mind," in which Emily Ruzga as Gigi lead the bar girls as they wistfully imagine themselves in a better place.
The mostly non-Asian cast was able to convey the culture adequately through makeup and attire. Some of the actresses portraying the bar girls seemed somewhat uncomfortable in their scanty outfits and sexy poses; the comfort levels, however, should also get better with more audience exposure.
But truly remarkable was the versatile set, which worked well in all the settings - especially the dramatic helicopter rescue from the U.S. Embassy rooftop, which required expert timing and execution of lighting, sound and visuals for its successful presentation.
It was scenes like that, as well as the commitment of the cast and director Mark Schuster to excellence that made this show a most worthy rendition of "Miss Saigon," which gives insight into one of the most important eras in modern American history.
Volunteer of the Production - Eli King
Eli has an infectious positive attitude and always gives 110%. He stepped into the role of vocal warm-up leader and worked tirelessly to keep the cast sounding their best. Eli volunteered to assist in selling raffle tickets during intermission on many occasions. Several of the members of the cast and crew noted that his maturity and dedication were exceptional. His love for the theatre and this show was ever present.
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What is the sunsme of The Muppets Miss Piggy? | Miss Piggy | Muppet Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
designer/builder
First Mate Piggy of the USS Swinetrek.
Miss Piggy is one of the central characters on The Muppet Show . She is a force of nature who developed from a one-joke running gag into a complex, three-dimensional character.
Miss Piggy is a prima-donna pig who is absolutely convinced that she's destined for stardom, and nothing is going to stand in her way. Her public face is the soul of feminine charm, but she can instantly fly into a rage whenever she thinks she's insulted or thwarted. Kermit the Frog has learned this all too well; when she isn't smothering him in kisses, she's sending him flying through the air with a karate-chop.
Contents
[ show ]
Piggy's Biography
From modest beginnings (which she is quick to gloss over), Miss Piggy first broke into show business by winning the Miss Bogen County beauty contest, a victory which also marked her first meeting with the frog of her life, Kermit (whom she often calls "Kermie"). The rest, as they say, is history (and a lot of juicy gossip, too).
In 1976, Miss Piggy started out in the chorus of The Muppet Show. Thanks to her charisma and a correspondence course in karate, [1] Piggy made her presence known and soon became the lead chanteuse and femme fatale on the show. Quickly, her career expanded to include television specials, home videos, records and books. Her "how to" volume of advice on absolutely everything, Miss Piggy's Guide to Life , became a national bestseller, and her fabulous face has been featured on the cover of countless magazines too numerous to mention.
Miss Piggy starred in two regular Muppet Show sketches -- " Veterinarian's Hospital ", as the ravishing Nurse Piggy, and " Pigs in Space ", as the enchanting First Mate Piggy.
She also has a dog named Foo-Foo .
Miss Piggy has starred in all eight theatrically-released Muppet feature films, and both made-for-TV movies. She starred in two television specials, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show and Miss Piggy's Hollywood . She also starred in her own workout album .
Miss Piggy's Talents
Miss Piggy considers herself a dramatic actress and a great singer, but she has other talents, too (besides karate).
In the Kaye Ballard episode of The Muppet Show, it has been proven that Miss Piggy can play a few instruments such as the trumpet and kazoo.
Miss Piggy proves to be great at bending metal bars (for example, in The Great Muppet Caper , she bent back the jail bars, and in The Muppets Take Manhattan, she was able to bend a metal bar).
As shown in The Great Muppet Caper, Miss Piggy also has the ability to model, tap dance, swim, drive a truck, and ride a motorcycle.
Pointed out by Rowlf in The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years and Kermit in A Muppet Family Christmas , no one can make an entrance like Piggy.
Kermit and Piggy
Eventually in the films, Kermit started returning her affections and (unwittingly) married her in The Muppets Take Manhattan —although subsequent events suggest that it was only their characters in the movie that married and that their relationship is really the same as ever.
Before The Muppets Take Manhattan, in episode 310 of The Muppet Show, Miss Piggy unsuccessfully attempted to get Kermit to marry her. She wrote a "comedy sketch" involving a wedding between her and Kermit, got Scooter to trick Kermit into signing a marriage license, and hired a real minister for the sketch. However, during the skit, before Kermit was to say "I do," he introduced Lew Zealand instead.
In episode 502 , after planting one too many rumors about her and Kermit's relationship to the gossip papers, Kermit fired Miss Piggy, having guest star Loretta Swit replace her in "Pigs in Space" and "Veterinarian's Hospital". The rest of the cast were sad, until they realized that this meant they'd be rid of Foo-Foo. Eventually, Loretta Swit got them to sing a song, and all was apparently forgiven after that.
A month before the debut of their 2015 ABC series, The Muppets , Miss Piggy and Kermit formally announced that they were breaking up. Piggy said in a statement that “Dating moi is like flying close too the sun. It was inevitable that Kermit would drop down to the ground while I stayed in the heavens.” while also concluding it was a mutual agreement. Kermit however countered “After careful thought, thoughtful consideration and considerable squabbling, Miss Piggy made the difficult decision to terminate our romantic relationship.” It was specified, however, that they will continue to work together. [2] [3] [4] Kermit has apparently moved on with his new girlfriend, a pig named Denise , who works for ABC. [5]
See also: Are Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy married?
Family and Background
Miss Piggy was born above Becker's Butcher Shop [6] in a small town. Frank Oz filled in some of her backstory in a 1979 People magazine article: "Miss Piggy's father chased after other sows, and her mother had so many piglets she never found time to develop her mind. 'I'll die before I live like that!' Miss Piggy screamed, and ran away to the city. Life was hard at first. People got all the jobs; pigs had to take what was left. To keep going, Miss Piggy walked a sandwich board for a barbecue stand. Desperate, she took a stage name, Laverne, and entered a beauty contest. She won and got her big break: a bacon commercial. This led to a season as mascot for a local TV sportscast called Pigskin Parade -- and then on to The Muppet Show."
Commentary in the Muppet Morsels on The Muppet Show: Season One revealed the fate of her father, and expanded more: "Her father died in a tractor accident when she was young and her mother wasn't very nice to her. She left home as a teenager after graduating charm school and working in a department store selling gloves. She was forced to pose for some ads including a bacon product. She also had to enter beauty pageants to survive in the world."
Speaking years later on Take Two with Phineas and Ferb about what it was like to grow up on a farm, she said that it was "Very humbling... I don't like being humble, so I got out fast." She also confirmed having done bacon ads during a 1984 appearance on The Merv Griffin Show , and her beauty pageant career culminated in a win at the Bogen County Fair , after which she began her rise to fame in Hollywood .
Piggy has two dim-witted nephews, Andy and Randy Pig , who she sometimes employs as seen in Muppets Tonight and The Muppets . She also has at least one niece, aged six, who she mentions in The Muppets episode " The Ex-Factor " to compare with Denise who eats her cupcakes upside-down so that there's just a handful of frosting left. A niece is mentioned again by Kermit in " Swine Song " when Piggy begins listing current trends that she thinks makes her relevant.
According to her her Facebook page , Miss Piggy was educated at the Paris School of Fashion, but she refuses to publish her birth date.
Performing Piggy
An assistant of Piggy's peeks in on a photo shoot.
Frank Oz with Miss Piggy
Frank Oz performed "Piggy Lee" on The Tonight Show on May 24, 1974 , lip-synching with Hamilton Pig to " Old Black Magic ". Five months later on October 13, 1974, Jerry Nelson performed "Piggy" (not yet Miss Piggy) on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass . A beady-eyed variation later appeared briefly in The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence (1975), in a sketch called "Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs." By the time The Muppet Show began in 1976, she was recognizably Miss Piggy, sporting large blue eyes, wearing a flowing lavender gown, and jumping on Kermit, the love of her life.
Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson remembers, "My mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer. When I first created Miss Piggy I called her Miss Piggy Lee -- as both a joke and an homage. Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same. But as Piggy's fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because we admired her work. So, the Muppet's name was shortened to Miss Piggy." [7]
The character was referred to as "Piggy Lee" in one Muppet Show episode, episode 106 . She also uses that name in the 1977 Muppet Show Annual released in the U.K.
Miss Piggy soon developed into a major character as the Muppet creators recognized that a lovelorn pig could be more than a one-note running gag. Frank Oz has said that while Fozzie Bear is a two-dimensional character, and Animal has no dimensions, Miss Piggy is one of the few Muppets to be fully realized in three dimensions. She became one of The Muppet Show's most popular characters, which was noted by Jim Henson during the development of Fraggle Rock . When discussing characters for the show, Henson included this in his notes:
“ ...we would anticipate coming up with new personalities which would have much of the same kind of appeal as a Kermit, Fozzie or Gonzo . We will not create anybody with Miss Piggy's kind of appeal- nobody should try. ”
Miss Piggy's distinctive personality has been seen in a few other Muppet characters before the famous sow's debut. For instance, this personality and voice can be seen (and heard) in the Sesame Street versions of Little Miss Muffet and Snow White , both performed by Frank Oz.
Quotes about Miss Piggy
"She wants everyone to treat her like a lady, and if they don't, she'll cut them in half." -- Frank Oz in Time Magazine, Dec. 25, 1978.
"In one rehearsal, I was working as Miss Piggy with Jim, who was doing Kermit, and the script called for her to slap him. Instead of a slap, I gave him a funny karate hit. Suddenly, that hit crystallized her character for me -- the coyness hiding the aggression; the conflict of that love with her desire for a career; her hunger for a glamour image; her tremendous out-and-out ego -- all those things are great fun to explore in a character." -- Frank Oz in The New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1979.
"Miss Piggy's not aware of the fact that she's overweight -- she dresses as if she's 30 pounds lighter. So she has a lot of fantasy." -- Costume designer Calista Hendrickson in The New York Times Magazine, June 10, 1979.
"Well, it was actually a request from Jim. He wanted three pigs for a series that we were doing. He came to me because I'm from the Midwest, so I'm sure he thought I understood and knew pigs. The three pigs ended up being Miss Piggy, one was just sort of a background pig, and the other ended up being something very similar to Dr. Strangepork. So we first did her as a character for that bit, but she was quickly commandeered because we did a Herb Alpert appearance and they needed some sexy female, so I very quickly made her purple gloves, and I draped her in purple satin, and gave her some pearls and bigger eyes —I went to the eye drawer and changed her look and she went back and forth in those personalities for quite awhile. She started out in "the Muppet Show" as a chorus girl and as you know, she's now a big diva." -- Bonnie Erickson, when asked "How did you come up with the idea for Miss Piggy?" by Artinfo in 2011. [8]
Miss Piggy's entourage
Like all great Hollywood divas, Miss Piggy has employed a variety of personal assistants, servants, publicity and talent agents, and others to further her career. This sometimes included her Muppet Show colleagues (such as Scooter on several occasions), but more often required outside help.
According to Miss Piggy's Guide to Life , Miss Piggy's birthday is June 14.
In 1998, Miss Piggy had her own perfume released titled " Moi ."
In The Muppet Show episode 106 Piggy is referred to by the full name "Piggy Lee"; and in episode 116 Piggy tells guest star Avery Schreiber that Piggy is short for "Pigathius," which is "From the Greek, meaning 'river of passion'." Many years later, Piggy admitted to Marci Ien in a March 18, 2014 appearance on Canada AM that her full name is Miss Pigathia Lee, "but us stars, we keep trimming parts of our names off as we get bigger and bigger. Pretty soon you'll just be calling me P."
On her August 2, 2007 guest appearance on The Late Late Show , Piggy stated that her first name is actually "Miss". This fact was also mentioned in the inside cover for The Kermit and Piggy Story .
Because Frank Oz was busy with other projects and not on the set very often, Miss Piggy was puppeteered by Kevin Clash in Muppet Treasure Island and Peter Linz in Muppets from Space , with Oz dubbing the voice in later.
Though normally called "Piggy" in the original French version of the show, her name has become "Peggy" for the 2006 French Muppets TV series; "Peggy" has also been used in Spain and Mexico.
For several international dubs such as French Le Muppet Show , German Die Muppet Show and Italian Il Muppet Show , Miss Piggy was originally dubbed by female voice artists. They were replaced with male artists only much later when Disney Character Voices International, Inc. was put in charge, in some cases even ordering re-dubs of the series and select TV specials.
On being a gay icon, Piggy commented in 2014: "I love being anybody's icon. I'm an icon to all who will have me." [9]
In addition to her many real world endorsements and licensing, Miss Piggy has occasionally created her own brands and products, such as Piggy Water in the 2015 series The Muppets (" Going, Going, Gonzo .")
Miss Piggy's Fame
| Lee |
Which Greek hero set off on a quest to find the golden fleece? | Miss Piggy (Character)
Miss Piggy (Character)
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Overview
Miss Piggy is one of the central characters on "The Muppet Show"... See more »
Alternate Names:
Baby Piggy / Miss Piggy B / Miss Piggy as Emily Cratchit / Miss Piggy as the Witches / Piggy
Filmography
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Which God did the ancient Egyptians believe protected the souls of the dead? | Ancient Egypt: Body and soul - khat, ab, ren, ka, ba, shut, akh, sahu
Ancient Egypt: Body and soul - body : khat, sahu, heart : ab, name : ren, ka , shadow : shut, ba , akh
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Body and soul
The ancient Egyptian view of what made up a person is confusing. [ 1 ] The main constituents were the body, its ka, and its name which remained always in close proximity to each other even in the tomb, and the shadow, the ba, sahu and akh which were more mobile and independent.
In magical thinking the limits of a person are ill defined: things which we would pay little heed to could be of critical importance to an ancient Egyptian. How much of a person's essence is inherent in an image? Jilted lovers still tear up pictures of their former love, but they know that this cannot hurt anybody. An ancient Egyptian on the other hand believed that he could harm somebody by destroying his image or gain power over him by applying spells to things which had belonged to him.
Some of the terms below were at times (at least in our eyes) almost interchangeable, and they acquired new aspects during the three millennia of their use, changing their meanings. There are no proper unequivocal translations for them, though attempts have been made to equate them with modern psychological terms: The akh is referred to as the Id, the name as the Ego and the ka as the Super-ego. Only, they are nothing like it.
The body ( X.t ) and its mummy ( saH )
Khnum, the sculptor who gives lives, created a child's body, the khat,
( MdC transliteration X.t) - together with its twin, the ka - on his potter's wheel and inserted them with the sperm into the mother's womb. The Egyptian view of the body was, from its conception to its death, mostly magical. The biological aspects of the body's functions, apart from the obvious ones everybody can discern, were largely unknown, instead it was populated and surrounded with spiritual and demonic entities whose evil influence caused the diseases and ailments people suffered from.
The mummy of Hont-m-pet
Source: Smith, G. Elliot. Catalogue Général Antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire: The Royal Mummies.
Le Caire: Imprimerie de L'institut Français D'archéologie Orientale, 1912
The preservation of the body [ 6 ] by mummification in order to enable the deceased to enjoy a life after death was at first only performed on the corpse of the divine pharaoh, but became widespread as the notion of everybody being capable of having an afterlife took root. This afterlife was a continuation of life in the here and now: Tombs were decorated with scenes of daily life (above all during the Old Kingdom), things the deceased had used were left in their graves, and since the Middle Kingdom they were given servants in the form of little statuettes, ushabtis to stand in for them and perform their civic duties in the beyond.
The body, the X.t, after its transformation into a mummy, a saH, had to undergo the Ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth to have its senses restored as it was the body which had to justify itself before the judges of the underworld .
The sahu ,
(MdC transliteration saH), has been variously described as the spirit-body, as a self-defined psychic boundary or the repository of the soul (Budge). It was seemingly immortal and similar in form to the mortal body it sprang from.
Thou goest round about heaven, thou sailest in the presence of Ra, thou lookest upon all the beings who have knowledge. Hail, Ra, thou who goest round about in the sky, I say, O Osiris in truth, that I am the Sahu of the god, and I beseech thee not to let me be driven away, nor to be cast upon the wall of blazing fire.
Book of the Dead.[ 13 ]
The heart ( jb )
A special part of the body was the heart,
(MdC transliteration jb), the essence of life, seat of the mind with its emotions, intelligence, and moral sense.
My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My heart whereby I came into being!
The prayer of Ani.[ 14 ]
The heart gave man 's life its direction. Enjoyment was closely tied to the sensations of the body. Following one's heart meant living a full life:
The west seeks to hide (i.e. death and its realm is forgotten) from him who follows his heart. The heart is a god, the stomach is its shrine.
The inscription of Nebneteru
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume III, p. 22
When the heart got tired the body died. When the deceased set out on his journey through the underworld, the jb as a record of his moral past was weighed by Anubis against a feather representing Maat . If found too heavy, the heart was devoured by the monster Ammit , destroying its owner for eternity [ 3 ].
The heart of Osiris hath in very truth been weighed, and his Heart-soul hath borne testimony on his behalf; his heart hath been found right by the trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him; he hath not wasted the offerings which have been made in the temples; he hath not committed any evil act; and he hath not set his mouth in motion with words of evil whilst he was upon earth.
Book of the Dead[ 15 ]
Heart Scarab of Hatnofer,
Rogers Fund, 1936 (36.3.2)
Source: Metmuseum website [ 8 ]
During the embalming the heart was not removed together with the other interior organs. A scarab was inserted into the mummy's bindings right above the heart in an attempt to prevent it from speaking out against its owner, lest my name appear stinking and putrid before the lord of the other world.
Heart scarabs, the earliest examples of which date to the 17th dynasty, [ 10 ] were often inscribed with texts from the 30th chapter of the Book of the Dead, but at times other texts were chosen, such as the one below which, with its invocation of Nut, is exceptional:
I have come and I have brought to you. I am your guide Nut. I open my wing and spread it over you. I keep your heart in its place: It will not be removed from your coffin until you come to life again, O blessed Tjatenbastet-tanedjemtjaut.
22nd dynasty
After Étienne Drioton, Une formule inédite sur un scarabée de coeur, BIFAO 41 (1942), p.100
The name ( rn )
The name,
(MdC transliteration rn), is the foundation of a being as an individual. Only when it has a name, when it can be addressed and related to, does it begin its proper existence—with its name as its essence. The various aspects of the being are reflected in the different names it is given: In the Book of the Dead, chapter 142, Osiris had one hundred different names.
Names were closely bound up with magic . Knowledge of somebody's names gave one insight into his being and power over him, but speaking out a name could also be dangerous
It is the king who will judge the dead, accompanied by Hell's chief executioner He-who-must-not-be-named, on the day the revered gods are slaughtered.
Pyramid Texts 273-4 [ 16 ]
'True' names were often kept secret. In the Pyramid Texts (# 394) a god is mentioned whose name was not even known to his mother.
An adoration of Ra who rises on the horizon, when he makes his ba, the visible form of his soul, rise like a powerful ghost from the underworld - the shining spectre of Ra that is our physical sun; when he raises himself, rejoicing in the power of his ka; an adoration of Ra, his ba and his ka, when he has the sun-boat's steersman shove off from the east and head out into deep sky while addressed in these words by the Osiris X [ 9 ]:
Hail Ra!
Hail to your ba!
Hail to your ka!
The Osiris X knows our name, and the names of your ba and your ka in all their aspects.
Book of the Dead 15a.[ 16 ]
An important part of ensuring the continued existence after death was the perpetuation of the name, in accordance with the Egyptian saying He lives whose name is spoken [ 4 ]. Especially important was that inscriptions of offerings crucial for survival in the hereafter, named the recipient.
Erased inscription and picture of Hatshepsut
Luxor
The reasons for Thutmose III trying to obliterate all references to
his stepmother 20 years after he came to power are unclear
Inscribing names in stone gave them permanence, and obliterating them was a kind of postmortem punishment or revenge: the person was assigned to oblivion. This was the fate post-Amarnan pharaohs had in mind when they erased inscriptions containing the name of Akhenaten.
The ka ( kA )
Unfortunately the ancient Egyptians never defined clearly what was meant by the ka,
(MdC transliteration kA), or its female complementary, the hemset (Hms.t). The concepts may well have undergone changes over the millennia or had different meanings according to the social settings. kA has been variously translated as soul, life-force, will etc. but no single western concept is anything like it. Being written kA like the word for 'bull', a symbol of potency, the closest to it in English may be a 'life-creating force'. [ 5 ]
The ka was a constant close companion of the body in life and death, depicted throughout the pharaonic period following the king and bearing the royal Horus name.
The kas of Unas are behind him. His hemesets are under his feet. His gods are above him.
Pyramid Texts 273-4
After a transliteration and German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website , D. Topmann ed.
Altägyptisches Wörterbuch, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften => Pyramidentexte => Unas-Pyramide => Vorkammer => Ostgiebel => PT 273-4
According to pictures drawn during the 18th dynasty, the ka came into being when a person was born, often depicted as a twin or double, but, unlike the body it belonged to, it was immortal provided it received nourishment. Being a spiritual entity it did not eat the food but seems to have extracted the life-sustaining forces from the offerings, be they real or symbolic.
Dying was referred to as going to one's ka. Upon the body's demise the ka rejoined its divine origin, but always remained in close proximity of the body. In Old Kingdom tombs false or ka doors were supposed to give this spiritual part of the deceased access to the world of the living. The kas were thought to reside in tomb statues.
Ka statue of Harawibra, 13th dynasty
The pair of arms on his head spell out kA.
Courtesy Jon Bodsworth
The ka as a life-sustaining force was contained in the food. The plural of ka, kaw, meant food offerings. The ka as recipient of food offerings is attested to since the late Old Kingdom.
During the New Kingdom the ka was seen to have different aspects:
The Osiris X, may he rest in peace, knows the names of your ka, the aspect of your soul that abides in the ground:
Nourishing ka,
effective ka.
Book of the Dead 15a.[ 16 ]
The ka has also been interpreted as meaning "will" somewhat in the sense Schopenhauer used it. It has been claimed that during the Late New Kingdom it was a hidden, transcendental god which was described as
Thy being is the infinite neheh [ 2 ]
Thy image is the unchanging djet [ 2 ]
From thy planning ka emanate all occurrences
Jan Assmann, Ägypten, Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur, p.280
The shadow ( Sw.t )
In a hot country like Egypt shadows were a blessing for those who could rest in them. Metaphorically, gods threw shadows too, shadows of protection: Kings were described as being in the shadow of the god. The holy sites at Amarna were called Shadow of Re. We can easily understand the divine shadow and its effects, but it is unclear what the function of the human shut,
(MdC transliteration Sw.t), was.
In the light of the life-giving sun body and shadow are inseparable. But the pitch-black Sw.t was not an ordinary shadow of a body, it rather belonged to the world of the 'soul', moving independently of its body and partaking of the funerary offerings:
Shadow and ba-birds
After a transliteration and German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website
Unlike the body, the shadow was not bound to the grave and could go where the body could not. In New Kingdom tombs it was at times depicted leaving it accompanied by the ba-bird.
Let not be shut in my soul, let not be fettered my "shadow", let be opened the way for my soul and for my "shadow", may it see the great god,
E.A.W.Budge The Book of the Dead Chapter 92
May I look upon my soul and my "shadow".
E.A.W.Budge The Book of the Dead Chapter 89
On his journey through the underworld the deceased had to beware of many dangers. There are affirmations in the Book of the Dead that his akh power will not be taken from him, and that he will not lose his shadow:
My shadow will not be prevailed over
The Papyrus of Nu (BM EA 10477)
After a transliteration and German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website
One of the perils the shadow would meet was the Devourer of Shadows, one of the daemons appealed to in the Negative Confessions :
O Devourer of Shadows who comes forth from the cave, I have not stolen.
pKairo CG 25095 (pMaiherperi)
After a transliteration and German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website
What would happen to the deceased if it fell prey to the Devourer is not known, though one may surmise that it would have spelled out his destruction and oblivion.
The ba ( bA )
Originally, gods who manifested themselves anonymously were called ba, later it became also the visible form a god assumed, thus the Phoenix was the ba of Re.
Ba-bird of Tutankhamen
Excerpt
From the end of the Old Kingdom onwards the ba,
(MdC transliteration bA), was the sum of the immortal forces inherent in human beings which made up his personality. It has been called a person's psyche and is generally translated as soul. But it was also in a way a corporeal, sexual being, which needed food and drink.
The ba was mostly represented in the form of a bird, generally with a human head and, according to grave images, often perching on trees planted by the tomb. It moved about, sometimes in the company of the shadow, but did not stray far. Every evening it returned to the body, reuniting with it and thus ensuring the body's continued existence in the afterlife.
Spells enabled it to assume any shape it wished. It seems to have had creative powers and was frequently depicted with an erect phallus.
Ithyphallic Amen-Re ba-bird
ba whose warm energy encourages copulating.
Book of the Dead 15a.[ 16 ]
In Egypt's declining years Amen-Re is addressed as Hidden ba, who is revered, at the same time Bes Pantheos, a seven-headed daemon was a manifestation of the power of Amen-Re:
Bes with seven heads: he embodies the ba's of Amen-Re
Jan Assmann, Ägypten, Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur, p.282
The akh ( Ax )
According to the Pyramid Text #474 the akh,
(MdC transliteration Ax), belongs to the heaven, the corpse to the earth. The body is buried while the akh, the Shining One, ascends to the sky, becoming a star. It comes into being when ba and ka unite [ 12 ] and is the part of the person least bound to the rest, leaving it behind in the quest for immortality. Rising to the heavens king Unas joined the stars:
This Unas comes to you, O Nut,
This Unas comes to you, O Nut,
He has consigned his father to the earth,
He has left Horus behind him.
Grown are his falcon wings,
Plumes of the holy hawk;
His power has brought him,
His magic has equipped him!
The sky-goddess replies
Make your seat in heaven,
Among the stars of heaven,
For you are the Lone Star, the comrade of Hu!
You shall look down on Osiris,
As he commands the spirits,
While you stand far from him;
You are not among them,
You shall not be among them!
M. Lichtheim. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Vol. 1 - Pyramid Texts, Utterance 245
The gods as embodiments of eternal divine might and magical powers would best be described as akhu.
Shining Ra, in your celestial aspect, as an akh,
you are Atum within the sky,
an old man as you set on the horizon,
a judge within your palace - which is the heavens,
a king enthroned in the sunset,
and when you've sunk west into the underworld, a king down there as well.
Atum, ancient one, who first dawned from Nun, from the black deep of her primordial night.
Book of the Dead, chapter 15a.[ 16 ]
The pharaoh, having a divine nature, had always become an akh and joined the stars after the demise of his mortal shell, but from the later Old Kingdom on ordinary mortals too could attain this status when they became transfigured dead. [ 11 ]
Akh has been translated as spirit, ghost or as transfiguration. [ 7 ]
Footnotes:
[1] Not that our own views are less so: many of us speak of the body and its resurrection without having a clear notion of what that entails. We speak of having a mind, spirit, and soul but are hard put when having to define what they are
[2] Neheh and djet are dimensions of time. Assmann speaks of them (in analogy with the 'united double kingdom') as 'united double time', where neheh, the imperfect time dimension, is associated with change, Kheper, the One who Becomes, and djet, the perfect aspect of time, is related to completion, Atem, the Perfect One.
[3] The final judgment was - in theory - not influenced by the social position of the deceased:
The west is the abode of him who is faultless,
Praise god for the man who has reached it!
No man will attain it,
Unless his heart is exact in doing right.
The poor is not distinguished there from the rich,
Only he who is found free of fault
By scale and weight before eternity's lord.
There is none exempt from being reckoned:
Thoth as Baboon in charge of the balance
Will reckon each man for his deeds on earth.
Inscription from the tomb of Petosiris
M. Lichtheim Ancient Egyptian Literature Volume III, pp.45f
On the other hand, the knowledgable were certainly at an advantage. Magic could protect a person, prevent the heart from disclosing any dark secrets, or bully deities into being lenient. Knowlegde, or the means to acquire a semblance of it, went with social position.
[4] Inscription from the tomb of Petosiris, High Priest of Thoth, Hermopolis:
I built this tomb in this necropolis,
Beside the great souls who are there,
In order that my father's name be pronounced,
And that of my elder brother,
A man is revived when his name is pronounced!
M. Lichtheim Ancient Egyptian Literature Volume III, pp.45f
[5] This interpretation like the ones that follow it are mostly speculative. They reflect what some Egyptologists think rather than what the Egyptians thought.
[6] Rituals were of essence in achieving transfiguration, as is written in pBM 10208, the recitation of this ritual is effective for the one who recites it:
[Ritual for the transfiguration of Osiris in the necropolis, to be performed in the temple of Osiris-Khentamenti], the great god, lord of Abydos at all feasts for Osiris and at all his epiphanies in the land, [which are performed in the sanctuaries, both for the transfiguration of his ba and the permanent preservation of his corpse (and that) his ba] shall shine in the heavens and his corpse endure in the underworld, that he may be rejuvenated at the beginning of the month, that [his son Horus] be constant [on his throne, (while) he is holding his office for all eternity].
from Papyrus BM 10208, 4th century BCE
after a German translation on the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website
[7] The verb belonging to the noun Ax, sAx, is just as difficult to pin down. "Glorifying", "making excellent" or "rendering effective" have been used as translations. In the tomb of Meresankh III at Gizeh the process of embalming is described as glorification by the embalmer. The unguent used was one of the means: I put you (i.e. the unguent) on the forehead of this Unas, so that you will make him comfortable under you, so that you will make him effective, that you will give him control over his body. The oil used in this case was best conifer oil.
The priests too helped to make the deceased perfect. In the mastaba of Hesi the actions of the lector priest are defined precisely: May he be glorified by the lector priest with the secret writing of the god's library on New Year's Day, the wag-feast, the sokar-feast, the great feast, the appearance of Min, the rekekh-feast of the month, the half-month and daily.
The aim of these exertions was to make the deceased fit for the company of the gods. Ra-khuief is described in his mastaba as made excellent and splendidly furnished by the side of the great god.
(All examples are taken from the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website .)
[9] The name Osiris in writings found in tombs can refer to the deceased himself: the person has died and is being resurrected like Osiris.
[10] Cooney, Kathlyn M., 2008, "Scarab" in Willeke Wendrich (ed.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology , Los Angeles.
[11] Mark Smith suggests that commoners probably always had access to glorification spells very much like the ones known from the royal Pyramid Texts (Smith, Mark, 2009, "Democratization of the Afterlife" in Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles; http://repositories.cdlib.org/nelc/uee/1147 accessed June 2009). Cf Religion of the People, Note 11
[12] According to James Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p.7
[13] E. A. Wallis Budge, Papyrus of Ani - The Egyptian Book of the Dead, NuVision Publications, 2007, p.35
[14] Epiphanius Wilson, E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead According to the Theban Recension, Health Research Books, 1968, p.25
[15] The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1240 BC, THE PAPYRUS OF ANI Translated by E.A. Wallis Budge, accessed at http://www.thenazareneway.com/ebd_book_2.htm, September 2003
[16] Jacob Rabinowitz, Isle of Fire, A Tour of the Egyptian Further World in English and Hieroglyphics, Invisible Books 2004, accessed at http://www.invisiblebooks.com/isle_of_fire.htm, March 2012
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Who was the Roman God of doorways, gates and passageways? | Egyptian Afterlife Beliefs | Globerove
Globerove > Egypt > Egyptian Afterlife Beliefs
Egyptian Afterlife Beliefs
By Globerover on March 29, 2010 in Egypt
Want to learn more about Egyptian afterlife beliefs? Read on for a historical overview of the complex afterlife belief system of the Egyptians…
The Egyptians had really complex beliefs about life after death. Death was not considered to be the end of one’s life, rather it was considered to be a necessary process that one has to go through in order to enter a dimension of complete bliss and eternity. However this was dependent on the way the individual lived their lives. The Egyptians have their own criteria for judgment according to which each individual will be judged and awarded his destination in the afterlife.
The Underworld
The afterlife was known by many different terms such as “Field of Offerings” and “Rushes”. The Egyptians spent their life preparing for life after death. According to the ancient mythology all individuals would enter the underworld, which was a terrifying dimension which every individual dreaded. The underworld had its own tests which the individual had to overcome in order to proceed to the blissful afterlife.
Gods of the Underworld
Religion played an important role in all aspects of life for the Egyptians. Their religion was polytheistic in nature and had many different deities that were assigned different responsibilities and domains of creation. The gods were classified into different categories. Amongst them were gods that solely governed the underworld. Egyptians priests developed many myths and legends concerning life after death and it was these stories that dominated the Egyptian afterlife beliefs.
Anatomy of the Soul
According to ancient Egyptian beliefs the soul was a perishable entity which meant that it was at great risk at all times. This is why the Egyptians had elaborate burial rituals the purpose of which was to ensure the preservation of the dead bodies and the various elements of the soul. Some of the most important burial rituals included the process of mummification, the making of the tomb, the casting of spells and death masks . The Egyptians believe the soul had three parts namely Ka, Ba and Ahk and it was essential to ensure the protection of all these three parts.
Hall of Two Truths
Upon death the soul would enter the underworld where it would have to pass certain tests and then reach it’s judgment day. This would take place in the Hall of Two Truths. Anubis was a jackal headed deity considered to be the god of the dead. He would be the judge along with forty two other deities and judges that would judge each soul.
Scales of Judgement
The worth of the soul would be valued with a set of scales that would be placed on his heart. All the good deeds and bad deeds performed by the individual would then be placed on these scales and then he would be judged according to their criterion, which was the Ma’at. Ma’at was considered to be the goddess of justice and was symbolized by a feather. Depending upon which scales were heavy the soul would be made to proceed to its final destination. Those souls whose scales of good had outweighed their scales of bad would be granted permission to enter the blissful afterlife. On the other hand those whose scales of bad deeds were heavy would be handed over to the Devourer of the Dead, which was the Egyptian equivalent of hell.
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In Norse myth, what was the name of Odin's eight- legged horse? | Sleipnir - Norse Mythology for Smart People
Norse Mythology for Smart People
Sleipnir
Odin riding Sleipnir (detail from the Tjängvide Runestone)
Sleipnir (pronounced “SLAYP-neer”; Old Norse Sleipnir, “The Sliding One”) is the eight-legged horse of the god Odin . Sleipnir is one of Odin’s many shamanic helping spirits, ranks that also include the valkyries and Hugin and Munin , and he can probably be classified as a fylgja . Odin rides Sleipnir on his frequent journeys throughout the Nine Worlds , which are held in the branches and roots of the world-tree Yggdrasil .
The eight-legged horse as a means of transportation used by shamans in their ecstatic travels throughout the cosmos is a motif that can be found in a staggering number of indigenous traditions from all over the world. Sleipnir is “the shamanic horse par excellence,”[1] just as Odin is the shamanic god par excellence.
Sleipnir was born when the god Loki shape-shifted into a mare and became pregnant by the stallion of a giant , as is recounted in the tale of The Fortification of Asgard .
Looking for more great information on Norse mythology and religion? While this site provides the ultimate online introduction to the topic, my book The Viking Spirit provides the ultimate introduction to Norse mythology and religion period. I’ve also written a popular list of The 10 Best Norse Mythology Books , which you’ll probably find helpful in your pursuit.
References:
[1] Price, Neil S. 2002. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia. p. 320-323.
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In Greek mythology, who was the mother (and later wife) of King Oedipus? | Sleipnir (Steed of Odin)
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Sleipnir (Steed of Odin)
Sleipnir (Norse, “gliding one”) is the legendary eight-legged horse belonging to Odin, the Father-God of the Norse pantheon. Sleipnir carries Odin between the world of the Gods and the world of matter. The eight legs symbolize the directions of the compass, and Sleipnir’s ability to travel through both land and air.
The eight legs of Sleipnir were probably symbolic of the eight spokes solar wheel, and probably relate to an earlier form of Odin as a sun-god. There is some evidence that Odin himself was at one time anthropomorphized as a horse; Sleipnir’s ability to travel instantaneously associates him with sunlight.
In Norse mythological tales, Sleipnir is the offspring of the God Loki and Svaldifari, the great horse of the Giants. Sleipnir can be compared to the otherworldly horses of Celtic gods such as Manannan Mac Lir and Im Dagda.
Dave Mowers February 25, 2013 at 5:52 am
The horse represents the nine lunar phases with eight visible and one not as eight legs and the horse itself. The horse is the moon as a god of the underworld or land of the dead. Odin rides the horse because he is represented as the sun and his act of riding the horse shows he is more powerful than the moon for he drives him off every morning. In ancient Britain during winter and summer solstice gatherings and on up to the 17th century or so during the celebrations at night a man would appear dressed as a white horse and everyone would wail and scream and run to get away from him and in ancient times the person caught by the pale rider would then be tossed into a fire as an offering to the sun god so that he will dawn again the next day and renew the world.
This is the source for the Biblical pale rider, it is an Aryan Druid lunar concept and is cognate with Osiris; the pale green god.
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In Norse mythology who was the shield maiden cursed to sleep within a circle of fire? | Völsunga Saga
Beginning
Sigi was a great hunter, yet a thrall of Skadi named Bredi, who had matched his prowess in hunting, bested him. In a jealous rage he killed Bredi hiding the body in a snowdrift. When Skadi found his thrall dead in a snowdrift, he declared Sigi an outlaw. Later, Sigi, became king of the Huns. Sigi made many enemies in his long reign, among the enemies were his brother-in-laws. In his old age, his enemies had him killed.
His son, Rerir , succeeded Sigi. Rerir, who was an even greater king than his father, in bravery and combat, avenged his father, killing his uncles and other enemies. He built a great empire through his numerous victories in wars against his neighbours. However, he and his wife had problems with producing an heir. Desperately wanting a son, Rerir prayed to the gods. Frigg, wife and consort of Odin, asked for a golden apple from the giant, Hrimnir. The apple was delivered to Rerir by crow, which dropped the apple in his laps. Immediately realising the importance of this divine sign, Rerir shared the apple with his wife. Soon, Rerir's wife was pregnant.
Rerir, who fought a war to fight, fell ill and died. Rerir's wife was pregnant for an impossible six winters! Dying, the queen asked them to cut the baby out of her womb. Volsung was born almost a man in size and strength.
Volsunga Saga is an Icelandic Saga, written about 1250.
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Signy & Sigmund
Volsung was born an orphan, but unlike children, but he was huge in size and strength, succeeded his father, becoming king of Hunland. Volsung became even powerful than father. His palace was built, with the oak tree called Branstock, in the middle of his great hall.
Hrimnir send his daughter Ljod (Hljod) to marry Volsung. Volsung became the father of ten mighty sons and a daughter, Signy . Signy was the twin sister of Sigmund and enjoyed a close relationship with her brother.
One day, Siggeir , king of Gothland, came and asked for Volsung, his daughter's hand in marriage. Volsung agreed, though Signy did not want to marry Siggeir, knowing him to be treacherous and murderous king.
During the feast, Odin disguised as old man, came to the hall and drove a great sword into Branstock. Odin told them it would be his gift to the person who could draw the sword out of great oak tree.
It was said that Volund (or Wayland the Smith) made the sword, and the magic sword was later called Gram (Balmung or Mimung in German myth). The sword had the power to make the owner win all his battles. No one in the hall except Sigmund, Volsung's younger son, could extract the sword from Branstock.
Siggeir, who could not draw the sword from Branstock, wanted the sword for himself, offered to buy the sword off Sigmund. Sigmund scornfully rejected Siggeir's offer of gold. Offended by the young man's reply, Siggeir was determined to destroy Volsung's family.
Signy unsuccessfully tried to persuade her father not to marry her to the king. She had forboding that Siggeir will betray them. Volsung refused to heel her warning.
After Siggeir married the reluctant Signy, he invited Volsung to come to his home.
Again, Signy warned her father, fearing her new husband would attack them, but again Volsung ignored her warning. The moment Volsung and his sons arrived in Siggeir's territory, they were ambushed in the woods. Volsung was killed in the fighting and all his sons were captured.
Siggeir had Signy's entire brothers bound in the trees in chain. Helpless, a she-wolf would come each night to kill and devour them. One by one, the brother was killed by the she-wolf until only Sigmund was left. Signy secretly went to her brother and smeared honey all over his face and inside his mouth. When the she-wolf came, instead of biting Sigmund, she licked his face and inside of the youth's mouth. Sigmund bit hard on the wolf, until died. Somehow, Sigmund managed to get out of his chain and hid in a cave in the woods.
Signy found her brother alive, and together they plotted to destroy Siggeir and his men.
As Sigmund recovered in the cave, Signy had several children to the king. When Signy's eldest son reach the age of eleven, she sent him to her brother. Sigmund was to train her son to destroy Siggeir. However, Sigmund found that Siggeir's son was too weak for such task. Signy told her brother to then kill her son.
The following year, Signy sent her second son to her brother, but once again, Sigmund found him also to be weak; hence her second son was killed.
Realising that none of her children by her husband would be strong enough to avenge her father and brothers' death against her husband Siggeir; Signy sought help from a beautiful witch. The witch help Signy by transforming her to look exactly like the witch.
In the form of the witch, Signy visited her Sigmund, making love with her brother for three nights. Returning to her husband she was changed back to her own form. Later she discovered she was pregnant by her brother. She gave birth to Sinfjotli .
When Sinfjotli reach the age of eleven, Signy sends her son to Sigmund. Sigmund thought that Sinfjotli was Siggeir's son. Nor did Sinfjotli recognise his real father. Only Signy knew of the true relationship between Sigmund and Sinfjotli.
Sinfjotli had already grown to man in size and strength. Sigmund discovered that Sinfjotli was suitable to help him avenge his family. When Sigmund told Sinfjotli about his family and Siggeir's betrayal, Sinfjotli agreed to help. Sigmund trained Sinfjotli, until it was time for vengeance.
Sigmund and Sinfjotli tried to use stealth to reach the palace. However, Siggeir's two remaining children discovered them and told their father about armed strangers in the palace. Signy ordered her brother to kill her last two children to Siggeir, but he refused to kill any more of his sister's children. Sinfjotli had no such compunction and murdered his siblings.
Siggeir's men captured Sigmund and Sinfjotli and had them entombed alive. Signy however managed to secretly give Sigmund's magic sword to him. Sigmund and Sinfjotli used the sword and dug their way out of the barrow.
Together they set fire to Siggeir's palace, while he and his men slept. Signy came to them, revealing Sinfjotli was Sigmund's own son by her. Because she had ordered death of her own children, she returned to the burning palace to die with her hated husband.
Death of Sigmund & Sinfjotli
Sigmund returned to his home (Hunland) with Sinfjotli , where Sigmund had to drive out the king, who had set himself as ruler since Volsung's death. Once again, the Volsungs re-established a mighty kingdom. Sigmund married Borghild and became the father of Helgi and Hamund.
At the age of fifteen, Helgi fought many wars and won his own kingdom. Helgi earned the named Helgi Hundingsbani, when he fought two battles and killed Hunding and his sons. Helgi then went on to defeat defeat Hodbrodd and Granmar, to win his marriage to Sigrun , daughter of King Hogni (this Hogni should not be confused with the Burgundian Hogni ) Sigrun was probably a Valkyrie (shield-maiden). (See The Two Helgi for the full legend about Helgi and Sigrun.)
Borghild was jealous of her stepson Sinfjotli's prowess, and plotted his death. Sigmund, who was immune to all poison, drank two of the mugs of wine that Borghild had offered to Sinfjotli. Sinfjotli however drank the third mug and died from the poison.
Borghild was banished from Hunland, for poisoning her stepson.
Sigmund carried Sinfjotli's body into the wood. Sigmund met a ferryman at the fjord. The ferryman offered to help him cross, but the boat was only large enough to take one passenger. So Sigmund allowed the ferryman to take his son's body to otherside of the fjord first.
As the boat reached the middle of the fjord, the boat along with Sinfjotli's body disappeared. Apparently the ferryman was none other than Odin. It seemed that Odin was personally taking Sinfjotli to Valhalla.
Sigmund sought another wife. He fell in love with Hjordis (Sisibe or Sieglind), the beautiful daughter of King Eylimi. Sigmund wooed Hjordis but he had to compete against other powerful and younger kings, including Lyngi (Lyngvi), the son of King Hunding.
Sigmund won Hjordis' despite being a much older man than the other suitors were, and married Hjordis. War broke out between Sigmund and the Hundings, because Lyngi refused to give up Hjordis.
Sigmund and Eylimi were winning the battle. Yet, according to the Norns, Sigmund was fated to die that day. Yet Sigmund could never be defeated, nor he could be wounded, while he wielded his magic sword (Gram or Balmung) in battle.
To fulfil Sigmund's doom, Odin came into the battlefield with his invincible spear, Gungnir . When Sigmund saw Odin, he attacked the god, but when he struck the Gungnir, Sigmund shattered the sword into two.
The tide of the battle turned against Sigmund's army and he was defeated. Sigmund and his father-in-law, King Eylimi, had fallen in battle.
At night, Hjordis, who was still pregnant with Sigmund's child, found her husband mortally wounded in the battlefield. Sigmund advised his wife to gather the shards of his shattered sword, so that their son could make forge a new sword. Sigmund foretold that his unborn son would avenge him and Hjordis' father.
Lyngi, who still wanted to marry Hjordis, but could not find her or her treasure, for she had fled to King Alf, whom she married.
Hjordis gave birth to a son, whom she named Sigurd . Alf, the son of King Hjalprek of Denmark, brought up Sigmund's son as if he was his very own son.
Sigurd had a tutor named Regin , who was his foster-father.
Regin was the son of Hreidmar , and brother of Otter and Fafnir .
Regin hoping to use Sigurd to gain the famous treasure from his brother, told the youth of his family history.
Otter was able to shift-change into an otter. Loki , who was travelling with Odin and Hoenir , saw Otter by the river, killed him and skinned the otter. Loki wore the pelt over his shoulder.
When Odin, Loki and Hoenir came to Hreidmar's estate and imposed upon the owner for hospitality, Hreidmar discovered that Loki had killed his son. Hreidmar captured three strangers and chained the three gods. Hreidmar will released the gods, on the condition that one of them pay a ransom. Loki agreed to perform the task and was released.
Loki knew that the only ransom that would be able to release Odin and Hoenir, was the treasure of Andvari .
Andvari was a dwarf who not only owned a treasure hoard, but also a magic gold ring called Andvaranaut. Andvaranaut could help him find or make more gold. Loki managed to steal the treasure but Andvari escaped with the ring by changing himself into a salmon. Loki managed to capture the dwarf and forced Andvari to give up the Andvaranaut.
As Loki left the dwarf, Andvari hurled a curse upon the Andvaranaut, causing tragedy to fall on any mortal who wore the ring.
Loki returned with the ransom, now known as the Ottergild (meaning Otter's Ransom, which was later called Rhinegold), and the other gods were released. Hreidmar forgot about his grief over his son at the sight of the treasure.
Hreidmar's two sons wanted a share in the treasure, but in his greed, Hreidmar refused to share with Fafnir and Regin. Fafnir, wanting the treasure for himself murdered his own father and drove Regin away.
The greed of Fafnir transformed the son of Hreidmar into a great dragon. Fafnir lived with his treasure on what was called Gnitaheath or "Glittering Heath".
After Regin's story, Sigurd agreed to help his foster-father to gain the Ottergild.
To face the dragon, Sigurd needed a great sword. Twice, Regin made Sigurd a sword, and each time the sword broke on the anvil. Finally Hjordis gave her son the shard of Sigmund's broken sword. Regin forge a new with the shard, Sigurd called the sword Gram. With Gram, Sigurd cleaved the anvil in two.
Before Sigurd sought out Fafnir , he gathered an army, to avenge his death of his father ( Sigmund ) and grandfather (Eylimi). Sigurd killed all the sons of Hunding, including Lyngi (Lyngvi) and Hjorward.
Sigurd and Regin then went to Gnitaheath or "Glittering Heath". Sigurd dug a pit to hide in and wait for Fafnir. When Fafnir went to drink from the stream, Sigurd attacked and killed the dragon.
Regin wanting the treasure for himself, told Sigurd that he would not seek revenge for killing his brother if Sigurd would cut out Fafnir's heart and roast it for him. The dragon's heart would give any man who devours the heart, with power over other men. Sigurd agreed.
As Sigurd cook the heart over a fire, he tested the heart to see if it was cooked, but burned his fingers from the juice (heart-blood). Sigurd instinctively put his fingers in his mouth and immediately understood the language of the bird and some other animal.
The birds told Sigurd that Regin would betray him once he ate the heart, and take the whole treasure for himself.
The bird also told him about Brynhild , a Valkyrie, slept within a Ring of Fire at Hindfell.
Sigurd killed Regin by striking off his head. Sigurd ate Fafnir's heart himself. Among the treasure he found the magic ring Andvaranaut, the sword Rotti (Hrotti), the Aegishjálmr (Helm of Awe, Aegishjalmr) and the Golden Byrnie (cuirass). Sigurd then left Glittering Heath and journeyed north to Hindfell.
Sigurd & Brynhild
Brynhild was the daughter of Budli. She was a Valkyrie punished by Odin for disobedience. Her punishment was that she was to wed a mortal. She would sleep, surrounded by a circle of fire, at the mountaintop, at the place known as Hindfell. She would sleep until a mortal warrior was brave enough to ride through the flame.
Sigurd sought out Brynhild and went to Hindfell. Sigurd rode Grani through the flame and wakened the beautiful battle-maiden. They fell in love with one another. Sigurd stayed with her, until he decided it was time to leave.
It was obviously that they had made love in the mountain, since Brynhild had a daughter named Aslaug.
Sigurd told Brynhild, that he had duties to perform, but he would come back for her. Brynhild agreed and told the hero she would sleep in the Ring of Fire and wait for his return. Sigurd gave the magic ring (Andvaranaut) to Brynhild as a token of his love. But the token was cursed.
As Sigurd journey north, he reached the kingdom, south of the Rhine (Burgundy), ruled by Giuki. Giuki had married Grimhild , a wise-woman or witch, and had three sons - Gunnar , Hogni and Guttorm . They also had beautiful daughter named Gudrun .
Gudrun had a dream of the Sigurd, symbolised as a falcon and later a hart or stag, a hero she would marry and love, but who would be kill by her own family and Brynhild. Gudrun also dreamed of her second husband whom she loathed, Atli , brother of Brynhild. Atli was symbolised as a wolf, which would in the end, kills her brothers.
When Sigurd arrived at the home of the Giukungs, Gudrun had fallen in love with the hero, but Sigurd was still in love with Brynhild. Gudrun's mother, Grimhild, had a magic potion to make Sigurd forget Brynhild. Because he had no memory of Brynhild, Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun and married her. They had a son named Sigmund, named after Sigurd's father. A couple years later they would have a daughter named Svanhild .
As a brother-in-law, Sigurd swore an oath to Gunnar, and helped the Burgundian king win many wars.
Shortly after Sigurd and Gudrun's first child, Grimhild told Gunnar that he must marry a woman who was worthy to be his wife. Gunnar wanted Brynhild for his wife. Gunnar went to Hindfell with Sigurd to woo Brynhild. The problem with Gunnar was that the king was no great hero. Gunnar could not ride his horse through the flame.
Even when the king sat on Grani, Sigurd's horse refused to move at Gunnar direction. The king asked Sigurd to help him win Brynhild for him. With the magic potion of Grimhild, Sigurd and Gunnar exchange appearance with one another. Gunnar returned home.
Sigurd, disguised as Gunnar, again rode Grani through the flame and awakened Brynhild. Brynhild was disappointed that it was not Sigurd who woke him but she agreed to marry Gunnar. Brynhild left her daughter to Sigurd, named Aslaug, with Heimir, a chieftain and husband of her sister Bekkhild.
For three day they rode toward Gunnar's home. Each night as the disguised Sigurd slept with Brynhild, Sigurd placed the sword between them. Sigurd exchanged the ring from Gunnar with the magic ring (Andvaranaut), which the hero had given to Brynhild in their first meeting.
When they reached the palace, Sigurd resumed his own appearance. Gunnar happily married Brynhild. It was only after the wedding of Gunnar and Brynhild, that the drug worn off, and Sigurd was able to recalled that he had promised to marry Brynhild in the mountain, and realised that he had broken his vow with her. Yet Sigurd could do nothing.
Returning to his own wife, Sigurd told Gudrun everything that happened. Sigurd then gave the magic ring (Andvaranaut) to Gudrun. The ring would take a tragic consequence several years later.
One day when Sigurd and Gudrun came to visit, Gudrun and Brynhild had a quarrel of whose husband was better. Brynhild told Gudrun, that Sigurd was nothing but a vassal. Gudrun foolishly revealed that it was Sigurd, who rode through the flame twice, not her husband, and that Sigurd changed his form to ressembled Brynhild's husband. Brynhild did not believed her, until Gudrun showed her the Andvaranaut, which Brynhild had once received from Sigurd.
Brynhild, who had never stopped loving Sigurd, was enraged to learn that her husband and Sigurd had tricked her. No one could comfort Brynhild. When Sigurd visit her, he revealed that he had been deceived by the magic of Grimhild , causing him to forget her and married Gudrun, yet it was too late for him to correct matters after Brynhild married Gunnar. Brynhild kept insisting that she wanted to kill Sigurd for his betrayal. Not even when Sigurd offered her his treasure could he reconcile with her. When Sigurd offered to leave Gudrun and make her as his wife, Brynhild flatly rejected the offer.
Brynhild sought vengeance upon Sigurd and the Giukings (Niflungs). That night, Brynhild falsely accused Sigurd that he had taken advantage of her when the two had travelled to Giukungs' home from the mountain, therefore Sigurd had dishonoured his oath of brotherhood to Gunnar. She told Gunnar to kill his brother-in-law or else she would leave him.
Gunnar, who had always envied the hero's prowess, decided to plot for Sigurd's death. But since Gunnar and Hogni were bound by oath to Sigurd, the king could not kill his brother-in-law. Gunnar called upon his younger brother to slay Sigurd.
After two unsuccessful attempted to kill Sigurd, Guttorm decided to wait for Sigurd to sleep. With his sword Guttorm mortally wounded Sigurd. Sigurd woke and speared his sword into Guttorm's back as the killer tried to flee. Gudrun woke, to find her husband dying. Sigurd tried to comfort Gudrun, who was pregnant with their son, before he died.
When Gudrun weep for husband, Brynhild laughed and mocked at her sister-in-law's wretched state.
In the Poetic Edda poem called the First Lay of Gudrun, Gudrun sat beside Sigurd's body. Gudrun was so numb and overwhelmed by her grief that she could not weep that her friends thought she would die from sorrow. Each lady tried to convince her to weep by relating to their own experience, but Gudrun was unmoved. Finally on wise woman, uncovered Sigurd's body and told her to kiss her husband as if he was alive. Gudrun finally broke down and wept.
At the funeral of Sigurd, however, Brynhild suffering from her own grief over the hero. Then Brynhild told her husband, the truth, that Sigurd had never broken his oath to Gunnar, nor had the hero ever taken advantage of her.
Brynhild foretold the tragedy that would befall upon the Guikings. Gunnar and Hogni would be captured and killed by her brother Atli. Brynhild also revealed Atli's own death by Gudrun, as well as the death of Gudrun's daughter and sons.
At the pyre, Brynhild ordered Sigmund's death, the son of Sigurd and Gudrun (this Sigmund should not be confused with Sigurd's father, who was already dead before Sigurd was born). Brynhild then killed herself, asking her husband, that she would be laid in the pyre beside Sigurd, whom she never ceased to love.
Gudrun and the Fall of the Niflungs
Gunnar tried to console his sister for his part in Sigurd's death, as well as the death of her son Sigmund. Gudrun could not be comforted.
One day, finding that she could no longer live with her family. She took her daughter and fled to Denmark, and sought refuge in King Alf's court. Alf was Sigurd's stepfather and when Sigurd's mother ( Hjordis ) had died, the king had remarried to Thora. Both Alf and Thora had welcomed Gudrun. Here, Gudrun stayed for many years, finally finding comfort.
Gudrun would have happily stayed in Denmark, but Atli , king of the Huns, went to Gunnar's court, to ask for her hand in marriage. Gunnar and his mother Grimhild agreed, mainly because they feared that Atli would invade their land, for not preventing the death of Brynhild, who was Atli's sister.
They went to Denmark, and tried to persuade her with gift of gold at first. Gudrun refused to marry Atli and ignored the conciliating pleas from her mother and brothers. Gudrun also warned them if she was to marry Atli, her new husband would one day destroy their family. They ignored her warning.
Again Gudrun's mother (Grimhild) used her potion, this time to make Gudrun forget about her grief for Sigurd. Without her memory of Sigurd, Gudrun agreed to marry Atli.
It was only after they were married, that her memory had also returned to her. Gudrun bore two sons to the king of Hunland.
Atli had learned of the treasure of Sigurd that should have belonged to Gudrun at his death. Atli wanted to gain possession of Sigurd's cursed treasure from Gunnar. Atli invited Gunnar to come to a feast in Hunland.
Unlike the German tradition (ie. the Nibelungenlied), Gudrun was more loyal to her brothers than her second husband (Atli). Gudrun did not seek to avenge Sigurd upon her brothers.
Gudrun immediately discovered her husband's intention and tried to warn her brothers of the betrayal. When Atli sent a message to lure his brother-in-laws to Hunland, Gudrun carved runes to her message, and also wrapped wolf's hair from the cursed ring, Andvaranaut. But the message was distorted by Atli's messenger, Vingi, who could read runes. So Vingi changed the runes so that urged Gunnar and Hogni to come to visit her.
Vingi came to Gunnar's court, inviting the brothers to visit their sister and her husband. They received gold from Atli, and Vingi told the Gunnar that there would be more gold if he and Hogni would visit their sister. Gunnar and Hogni were suspicious of Atli's generosity. Both Gunnar and Hogni were puzzled that the wolf hair on Gudrun's ring (Andvaranaut), despite the altered message on the ring. The wolf hair must signify danger, so that Gudrun was advising her brothers not visit Atli.
Gunnar's new wife, named Glaumvor, also warned the king not to go. Gunnar and Hogni , however, decided to go, but they sank Sigurd's treasures in the Rhine, before each of them swore an oath, never to reveal the location of Sigurd's treasure, which now became known as Rhinegold. The Giukings, with their followers then set out for Atli's court.
When they arrived, Atli immeditately demanded the treasure of Sigurd. Gunnar flatly refused, so Atli had the guests ambushed. Fierce battle broke out, and though the Burgundians proved to be great warriors, they were helplessly outnumbered.
Gudrun seeing her brothers' plight, so she went to them and greeted both her brothers with kisses, before asking if it was possible them to have peace with husband. They said peace was not possible, so she donned a mail coat and took up the sword, where she joined the Burgundians, and fought as bravely as her brothers. However her aid, wasn't enough to save her brothers. Eventually, all the Burgundian warriors were killed in the fighting, except Gunnar and Atli, who bravely fought on, until Atli's warriors managed to capture Gunnar and Hogni alive.
Neither brother would reveal the location of the treasure. When threatened with tortures, Gunnar told Atli, he would reveal the location, on the condition that the king cut out his brother's heart. Gunnar told the king, he did not want his brother learning of his betrayal.
Atli had the heart of the thrall, named Hjalli, cut out and brought to Gunnar, pretending this was the heart of Hogni. Gunnar took one look at the heart, and was not deceived by Atli's trickery. Gunnar told the king that this was the heart of the coward Hjalli, because it quaked tremendously. So Atli had Hogni murdered and cut out his heart. Gunnar then knew his brother was dead, because Hogni's heart does not tremble in his hand, because Hogni was brave.
Then Gunnar laughed at Atli, telling the treacherous king that he would never tell them the secret of treasure's location. For while Hogni was alive, Gunnar wavered, but now that his brother was dead, he is the only person who could reveal its location. Gudrun came to her husband and cursed him for betraying her and her brothers.
Realising that Gunnar would not reveal the treasure whereabouts, the enraged king ordered Gunnar to be thrown into a pit full of adders.
Gudrun learning of his brother's fate, threw a harp to Gunnar. Since his hand were tied tightly to his body, Gunnar played the harp with his toes so well that all but one adder fell to sleep by his sweet music. But that one adder was enough to kill him. According to Snorri's Prose Edda, the adder had struck the bottom of Gunnar's breastbone, burying its head into Gunnar's liver.
Atli boasted over the death of Gudrun's brothers, but tried to reconcile with his wife with gift of gold. Gudrun was satified to live with Atli as his wife, while Hogni lived. With Hogni's death, Gudrun sought to avenge her brothers.
Gudrun had a huge funeral feast prepared in honour of her brothers and those of Atli's kins who had died. While Atli and his guests became intoxicated with wine, Gudrun went into her sons' room. Gudrun, who could not rest after the death of her brothers, cut the throats of her two sons, Erp and Eitil; her sons that she bore to Atli. Gudrun had mixed their blood with the wine and roasted their hearts in the spits before serving them to the drunken king and his guests.
When Atli asked his wife where their sons were, (rather sweetly) Gudrun told him he had eaten their flesh. Gudrun then took up a sword and stabbed Atli to death. Gudrun bitterly told her dying husband that she still loved Sigurd, and though she could live with being a widow to Sigurd, she could not bear it with her being married to him (Atli).
With the help of her nephew, Niflung, son of Hogni, they set the entire hall in flame, killing her husband's drunken guests.
Gudrunarkvida I (First Lay of Gudrun)
Sigurdarkvida in skemmal(Short poem about Sigurd)
Brynhild's Ride to Hel
The Death of the Niflungs
Gudrunarkvida II (Second Lay of Gudrun)
Gudrunarkvida III (Third Lay of Gudrun)
Oddrun's Lament
Atlamal (Greenlandic Poem of Atli)
Skaldskaparmal, from the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson.
Related Articles
Fact and Figures: The Norse Way .
Gunnar playing a harp with his toe in a snake-pit
Wood-carving on the door posts in Hylestad Church
Setesdal, Norway
Fate of Svanhild
With the death of her sons and husband, whom she had murdered, Gudrun sought to end her life, by throwing herself into the sea. She was however saved by King Jonakr, who made her his wife. Gudrun bore three sons: Hamdir, Sorli, and Erp. Gudrun had her daughter Svanhild brought here to live with their new family.
Years later, King Jormunrek wanted to marry Svanhild, daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun, and sent his son Randver, to help him woo her.
Before Jormunrek was to marry Svanhild, Jormunrek's treacherous counsellor named Bikki, told Randver it would be better if he was to marry Svanhild, rather than his father. Randver told Svanhild that he was in love with her, which she seemed to readily return. Bikki then told the king of his son's betrayal and Svanhild's unfaithfulness. Jormunrek had his own son hanged. Before Randver's execution, he had plucked all the feathers of his father's favourite hawk, so that his father could not produce a new heir for his kingdom. Jormunrek ordered wild horses to trampled Svanhild to death, but the horses refused to harm the maiden, because her eyes so captivated the horses. So Bikki had a bag covered Svanhild's head, and only then would the horses trample her to death.
Snorri's version in the Prose Edda was slightly different. Svanhild was bleaching her hair in the forest, when Jormunrek and his men were hunting; they came upon her on their horses as she sat there and trampled her to death.
Gudrun having heard of her daughter's execution, she asked her sons to avenge her Svanhild death. Erp made a comment that his brother misunderstood. They thought that Erp refused to help them with the vengeance, so they killed Erp. Accoridng to Snorri, Erp was Gudrun's favourite of the 3 sons, and Hamdir and Sorli killed their brother to cause their mother more pain.
Anyway, Hamdir and Sorli attacked Jormunrek, cutting off the king's hands and feet. Before they could behead the king, Jormunrek's men attack the brothers, but was driven back. The armours that Hamdir and Sorli worn, made then invulnerable to swords, spears and arrows. Then Odin appeared suddenly and advised the king to have them stoned. Jormunrek's men then stoned Hamdir and Sorli to death. Here ended the last of the Giukings.
| Brynhildr |
Which Greek warrior and hero killedthe monster called the Chimera? | Valkyries
Valkyries
The Valkyries had often inspired poets as women-warriors. Their name means, "Chooser of the Slain", and were often called battle-maidens, shield-maidens, swan-maidens, wish-maidens and mead-maidens. As these names suggest, they had various functions.
Their main duty was to select the slain warriors, who had fallen in battle or other combat, such as quest or killing dragon, etc. These slain warriors were known as the Einherjar (Einheriar), and were chosen to fight alongside with the Aesir gods at Ragnarok . The Einherjar waited for Ragnarok, in Odin's hall, called Valhalla .
They were sometimes called "Swan-maiden", because they wore garments made of swan feathers that allowed them to fly, carrying off the slain warriors to the hall called Valhalla. Their other duties included serving mead or ales in drinking-horns or mugs to the Einherjar in Valhalla.
Three Valkyries appeared in the Volsunga Saga . Sigrun ("victory-rune") married the hero Helgi , the son of Sigmund . The other two Valkyries were Brynhild ("bright battle") and Gudrun ("battle-rune"), and these two were associated with the hero Sigurd , another son of Sigmund. Gudrun had also been associated with Helgi in other sources, as the hero's first wife.
Brynhild was the most famous of all the Valkyries. In the Volsunga Saga , Odin punished Brynhild, for assigning the wrong king to die in battle. Odin condemned her to marry a mortal. Brynhild vowed that she would only marry the bravest of warriors, so she slept in the Ring of Fire, until the bravest hero could ride through the flame. Sigurd had rode through the flame, twice. The second time, she was duped into marrying Gunnar, the brother of Gudrun, while her hero married Gudrun. In the end she caused Sigurd's death. Brynhild overcome with grief, died in Sigurd's funeral pyre. See Volsunga Saga for the whole tale about Brynhild.
Brynhild goes by a different name in the one of the poems of Poetic Edda. In Sigrdrifumal ("Lay of Sigrdrifa"), Brynhild was known as Sigrdrifa ("victory-urger"), where she taught the hero runic magic.
Odin also had the wish-maidens or Óskmær to serve him. In once instance, the wish-maiden have fertility function, as found in the Volsunga Saga. See Hljod .
Brynhild (Brünhild)
A Valkyrie . Brynhild was the daughter of Budli. She was the sister of Atli and Bekkhild, and possibly of Oddrun. Brynhild was also the foster-daughter of Heimir. In a Eddaic poem, Helreid Brynhildar (Brynhild's Ride to Hell), it says that she was one among eight sisters; whether this referred only to Valkyries that served Odin or that she really had seven sisters, is not made clear (I'm assuming the former).
Brynhild (Brünhild or Brunhild) was the beautiful Valkyrie who punished by Odin for disobedience. Brynhild had struck down Hjalmgunnar, the king Odin had promised victory. As punishment Odin told the Valkyrie that she had to marry, but she made a vow to marry only a man without fear. In the high mountain of Hindarfell, sleeping within a circle of fire, Brynhild was to sleep until a hero with no fear ride through the flame.
Sigurd rode through the flame twice.
The first time he rode through, Sigurd had already killed the dragon Fafnir, and had taken the dragon's cursed treasure. Sigurd and Brynhild fell in love with one another. But Sigurd left her there, since he had many tasks he must perform. Sigurd promised to return to her when he had complete his tasks. Brynhild agreed and said she would wait for him within the Ring of Fire. She promised she would marry no other but the man who would ride through the flame. Sigurd gave her his magic ring (Andvaranaut), so they were betrothed.
The second time Sigurd came to her, he was disguised as Gunnar , through the use of magic. The problem was that Gunnar was not brave enough to ride through the flame, so they had switch faces (shape-shifting) and Sigurd rode in Gunnar's place.
Sigurd had forgotten his pledge to Brynhild, was now betrothed to Gudrun , sister of Gunnar. Sigurd's amnesia was due to the magic potion of Grimhild , mother of Gunnar and Gudrun.
Brynhild was disappointed that it wasn't Sigurd who came for her. With no choice (because of her promise), she agreed to marry Gunnar. Sigurd exchanged the rings with Brynhild again, taking back the magic ring (Andvaranaut); Brynhild thought that Gunnar had taken her ring. Sigurd then brought her to Gunnar's court. Sigurd then resumed his own form. Gunnar and Brynhild were soon wedded, while Sigurd married Gunnar's sister, Gudrun.
Sigurd probably slept with her the first time they met, and bore a daughter named Aslaug. When Brynhild married Gunnar, instead of Sigurd, Byrnhild left Aslaug with Heimir, a chieftain and husband of Bekkhild, Brynhild's sister. (In the Nibelungenlied, Brunhild (Brynhild) was a virgin before she married Gunther (Gunnar).)
Later Brynhild argued with Gudrun of who had the bravest husband. Gudrun claimed that Brynhild had be duped by Sigurd and Gunnar, that it was actually Sigurd who rode through the flame the second time, disguised as Gunnar. As proof, Gudrun produced the magic ring that Brynhild had unknowingly returned to Sigurd. When the truth had being revealed, Brynhild sought revenge upon Sigurd.
Brynhild told Gunnar that Sigurd had broken his vow to him, and slept with her the night before she arrived in the palace. Anger at the betrayal, Gunnar sought Sigurd's death. Since vow to brotherhood to Sigurd, Gunnar and Hogni could not kill Sigurd without violating their oaths. His brother ( Guttorm ) mortally wounded Sigurd. At his death, Brynhild mocked Gudrun's grief and told her husband, that she lie about Sigurd betraying him. Brynhild told Gunnar and Hogni that her brother would avenge her death upon them. Gunnar tried to prevent her from killing herself, but Hogni saw that it was inevitable.
At the funeral, Brynhild was overcome with grief, killed herself. Brynhild revealed to Gunnar that he had always loved Sigurd, and asked her husband to allow her body to be burned together with Sigurd in a single pyre. By her order, she had Sigmund, the three years old son of Sigurd and Gudrun, killed and burnt in the pyre with her and Sigurd.
Brynhild seemed to have the ability to interpret dreams and as well foretell the future. Brynhild told Gudrun (before Gudrun met Sigurd), that Sigurd would love her (Brynhild) but marry Gudrun. She also told Gudrun that Sigurd would die at her brothers' hands, and that she would marry Atli and that she would killed her children and Atli. She also saw that Svanhild would be trampled to death. During the funeral of Sigurd, Brynhild told her husband, that he and Hogni, would be kill by her brother (Atli).
In German literature (Nibelungenlied), Brynhild had been identified with Brunhild , the warrior queen of Isenstein (possibly in Iceland). The theme in which Siegfried (Sigurd) won Brunhild for Gunther (Gunnar) through deception, and how Kriemhild (Gudrun) disclose to Brunhild, which would utlimately leads to Siegfried's death – the Nibelungenlied was the same as that of Volsunga Saga, but how and the way it reach its climax was different in many aspects. See Brunhild for more detail.
Being a daughter of Budli, would make her a Budling, however, in a fragment of a poem of Sigurd (Poetic Edda), she was called a "lady of the Skioldungs". Skioldungs were descendants of Skiold. Brynhild is connected to the Skioldungs because her father was one of the 18 sons of Halfdan the Old , or Ali in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (see 2nd genealogy about Halfdan the Old). Nine of these sons of Halfdan found dynasties in the northern kingdoms. Brynhild was there related to Sigurd (on his mother's side) and to children of Guiki (Gunnar, Hogni and Gudrun).
Gudrun (Grimhild, Kriemhild)
Wife of the hero Sigurd . Gudrun was the daughter of Giuki and Grimhild . She was the sister of Gunnar , Hogni and Guttorm . In the first lay of Gudrun (Gudrunarkvida I), when Gudrun mourned for Sigurd, she has a sister named Gullrond. But in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (41), Gudrun's sister was named Gudny, and Guttorm was only her half-brother (The Song of Hyndla 27).
Gudrun had a vision that her family and Brynhild would cause her husband's death. In the dream, Sigurd was sometimes symbolised as beautiful falcon with feather of gold, at other times as a hart.
Sigurd was actually in love with, Brynhild whom he was betrothed to (at their first meeting). The hero only had no memory of Brynhild, because Grimhild gave magic potion to Sigurd. Without his memory of Brynhild, Sigurd fell in love with Gudrun and married her. She became mother of a daughter named Svanhild and a son named Sigmund (Sigmund Sigurdarson).
Later, some time after Brynhild married her brother Gunnar, Gudrun and Brynhild had an argument. Infuriated by Brynhild's remark about her husband, Gudrun reveal the truth about who rode through the flame for Brynhild, Sigurd. Her brother and husband had deceived Brynhild. Enraged by the revelation, Brynhild sought Sigurd's death.
When her brother Guttorm killed Sigurd, her son Sigmund II was killed on the day of the funeral of Sigurd and Brynhild. Brynhild had deprived Gudrun of her son. Gudrun could not bear to live with her family anymore, ran off with Svanhild, and live for awhile with King Alf of Denmark, Sigurd's stepfather.
Years later, Atli, brother of Brynhild, want to have Gudrun's hand in marriage. Her brother (Gunnar) and her mother Grimhild tried to encourage Gudrun to marry Atli. Gudrun recalled in her dream that Atli would cause her brothers' death, refused. Grimhild, however, used her potion on Gudrun and made her daughter forget Sigurd.
Gudrun left her daughter behind, and married Atli. By Atli, Gudrun was the mother of two sons, Erpr and Eitill. However, Gudrun was unhappy with the marriage, and later realised that Atli married her so he could get the treasure of Sigurd, (which now belonged to her brothers, Gunnar and Hogni), and to avenge Brynhild's death.
Unlike the German tradition, ie. the Nibelungenlied, Gudrun was not interested in Sigurd's treasure, nor did she wanted to avenge her Sigurd upon her brothers, Gunnar and Hogni. Gudrun was more loyal to her brothers than to Atli, her second husband.
Gudrun tried to warn her brothers of Atli's treachery. Atli had invited the Giukings (Niflungs) to Hunland, to visit their sister. Gudrun had sent her cursed ring, the Andvaranaut, wrapped around by wolf's hair, to indicate treachery from Atli. Gunnar suspecting treachery, the two brothers hid the treasure before leaving home. They sank the treasure in the Rhine. The treasure became known as Rhinegold. When Atli's men ambushed the Burgundians, Gudrun donned a mail coat, took up the sword, and fought beside her brothers. Eventually all the Burgundians men were slaughtered, while Gunnar and Hogni were captured, and when neither brother would reveal the treasure whereabouts, they were interrogated before they were killed.
When Atli was celebrating with followers, they became intoxicated with wine and mead. Gudrun saw her chance to avenge her brothers. She killed her two sons to Atli, roasted their hearts before serving it to her drunken husband. After Gudrun revealed to husband what she done, she ran a sword through Atli. Together with her nephew, Niblung, son of Hogni, they killed the other guest by setting the palace on fire.
After killing Atli , she tried to drown herself, but was saved by King Jonakr, whom she married and became mother of three sons: Hamdir, Sorli, and Erp. When her daughter Svanhild was killed by a jealous king named Jormunrek, she asked her sons to avenge their stepsister's death. All three of her sons died.
There is also a story of Gudrun being a Valkyrie , who first fell in love with Helgi , half-brother of Sigurd. She married Helgi until he died, before she even met Sigurd.
In the Third Lay of Gudrun, a poem found in the Poetic Edda, Gudrun's maid, Herkia or Herkja, had accused Gudrun of committing adultery with Thiodrek (Dietrich). Gudrun bravely plead her innocence to her husband Atli. Gudrun was subjected to a trial where she had to retrieve precious stones from a hot, boiling cauldron. Gudrun retrieved the stones, her hand and arm unscalded. Herkia failed the test and her arm was scalded from the ordeal. Herkia was put to death at the bog for false accusation against the queen.
She should not be confused with Gudrun Osvifrsdottir from the Laxdæla saga.
In the Germanic literature, Gudrun is identified as Kriemhild , daughter of Aldrian and Uote.
In the Norwegian epic, titled Thiðrekssaga (Saga of Thidrek), her name was similar to Kriemhild; in this tale she was called Grimhild, "mask-battle". Grimhild was the daughter of Aldrian or Irung and Oda.
Kriemhild married the hero Siegfried (Sigurd). When her brother Gunther (Gunnar) and his henchman, Hagen (Hogni), killed Siegfried, Hagen had stolen Siegfried's treasure that Gudrun should have inherited. Kriemhild wanted the treasure, so she could use it to avenge her husband's death.
When she could not retrieved the treasure, Kriemhild married Etzel (Atli), king of the Huns. With a new and powerful husband, Kriemhild plotted her brother's death. She pretended that she was reconciled with brother and sent a message to Gunther to come and visit her. Hagen did not trust Kriemhild, so he hid the treasure somewhere on the Rhine River. When Gunther and his followers arrived, Kriemhild tricked Etzel's men into attacking her brother and his followers.
Gunther and Hagen were captured. It was she, who killed her own brother Gunther, not her husband Etzel. She killed Gunther to avenge Siegfried's death. Kriemhild also killed her brother's henchman Hagen, when he would not reveal the location of Siegfried's treasure. The German hero Hildebrand , sick of the killing committed by Kriemhild, killed his queen. The Nibelungenlied ended with her death, and the treasure was never recovered. See Kriemhild and the Nibelungenlied .
Gudrun or her German counterpart, Kriemhild, was a vindictive woman, but the heroine had different traditions, which produced two different outcomes.
In the Norse tradition, we have the heroine (Gudrun) who was more loyal to her brothers than her second husband (Atli), despite her brothers being responsible for the death of Sigurd and her son. She set out to avenge her brothers and kill Atli.
In the German tradition, the heroine (Kriemhild) was neither loyal to her second husband (Etzel), nor her brothers. Her single-minded determination to avenge her first husband (Siegfried) and eliminate her arch-enemy, Hagen, at all cost. Kriemhild used her husband and her son to sow discord between Etzel's vassals and the Burgundians, to manipulate the destruction upon her own family. Even her favourite brother, Giselher, was not spared.
The Norse version was no less horrific, because Gudrun killed her own two sons to Atli, and served their blood and flesh to her intoxicated husband, in a feast. The death of her sons was used to taunt her husband, before she cut down Atli with a sword.
Hjordis (Sisibe)
In the Icelandic legend, Hjördís (Hjordis) was the wife of Sigmund and mother of the hero Sigurd .
Hjördís is known from various names. In the Icelandic works she was Hjördís or Hiordis the daughter of King Eylimi (though in the song of Hyndla, her father was called Hraundung), in the family called Odlings. Hiordis, as well as her father were descendants of Lofdi, hence they were the Lofdungs.
She is the sister of Svava, a Valkyrie, though this link between two women is only due to Eylimi being their father. But in the Norwegian Thiðrekssaga , she was Sisibe the daughter of the King Nidung of Spain. While in the Nibelungenlied , she was called Sieglind and was known only as wife of King Siegmund of the Netherlands.
In the Norse myth, she was the last wife of Sigmund. Hjördís was known for great beauty and was wooed by Lyngvi, the son of King Hunding, but she preferred Sigmund, even though the hero was a great deal older than she was.
According to the Volsunga Saga, she was pregnant when Sigmund and her father (Eylimi) fell in battle to the sons of Hunding. Sigmund was mortally wounded. He asked Hjördís to collect his shattered shard of his sword to be reforged for their unborn son. Hjördís fled to Denmark where she remarried to Alf, the son of King Hjalprek. Hjalprek raised her son Sigurd as if he was his own son, under the fosterage and tutoring of Regin. When Sigurd was old enough to avenge her husband's death, Hjördís gave Sigmund's shards to be reforged by Regin. With the sword Gram, Sigurd killed Lyngvi and his brothers in battle, and later killed a dragon Fafnir, who guarded the fable treasure of the dwarf Andvari.
In the Thiðrekssaga , the tale was quite different.
Sigmund was the king of Tarlungaland (most of France) and he had successfully wooed Sisibe (Hjördís), the daughter of King Nidung of Hispania (Spain).
Unlike the Volsunga Saga , it was not a rival king who had warred on Sigmund, because of Sisibe's beauty, but it was Sigmund's own vassals and advisers who had betrayed him during his absence.
They had only being at home for seven days, when Sigmund received news from his sister that he was called upon by King Drasolf, his brother-in-law, to aid him in war in the Pulinaland. During her husband's absence, she and Sigmund's kingdom were left in the hands of his two vassals, Count Artvin (Artwin) and Count Hermann (Herman). Sigmund left his kingdom with his army, without any knowledge that his young bride was already pregnant.
Artvin lusted after Sigmund's pregnant wife. When he made known of his attraction for her, she warned him to leave her alone or else face her husband's wrath. Fearing that Sisibe would disclose this to her husband, Artvin conspired with his companion Hermann to discredit the Queen.
When Artvin and Hermann met with Sigmund in the forest, they told her that she had committed adultery with her thrall (slave). Artvin claimed that he had killed the stranger and any witness to her treachery. Sigmund believing Artvin's lies, because he ordered his counts of her removal before his return to court. Artvin's plan was to lure Sisibe to the forest called Svava-forest (Black Forest?) and cut off her tongue for rejecting him.
The plan went went almost without a hitch. Sisibe had thought she would be going into the forest to meet with her husband. When they pulled off her horse when they reached a brook, Artvin gloated that her husband had given them permission to punish her for committing adultery.
Sisibe was shock with this news and frightened out of wits, managed to momentarily escape them. Hermann, who was reluctant from onset of Artvin's plots against the queen, now felt pity for the innocent, but terrified woman. Hermann felt guilty for also lying to their king. For now, Hermann refused to commit atrocity against a pregnant queen, and stood ready to defend her.
Artvin and Hermann were friends and blood brothers but they now fought one another with hatred. As they fought, Sisibe had crawled away to where belongings were, near the water. There she gave birth to Sigurd.
Frightened by her ordeal and weakened by the delivery, she wrapped her son in a linen cloth. Sisibe also put a neck chain around her son neck, with a ring that had rune inscriptions on it. She managed to place him in a crystal cask, before she fainted from fatigue and fright.
Hermann proved himself a better warrior as he drove his former friend back. With his sword, Hermann lopped Artvin's head. As Artvin fell, his foot knocked the crystal vessel into the river. Sisibe seeing her newborn son floated away downstream, Sisibe fainted in despair and died. Hermann buried her body.
(According to a different tradition, after killing Artvin, Hermann turned his attention on the queen. Seeing that Sisibe was cold and senseless, he thought the queen had died. So he left the bodies behind.)
Hermann returned to the king's with the news of the death of his wife and son. Hermann also told the king that he had killed Artvin. Sigmund banished Hermann for killing Artvin and disobeying his order.
The child in the casket landed on some rock, where Sigurd was found and was suckled by a hind. The baby lived with the hind for 12 months, but he grew rapidly; he was taller and stronger than any four-year-old boy.
One day Mimir, the great smith, founded the boy in the forest with the hind. Mimir saw that the boy could not speak, he realised that the gentle hind brought him up. Mimir, who was married, but had no son, decided to take the boy home and became the child's foster-father. It was Mimir who named the boy Sigurd .
As you can see, this version about the birth of Sigurd is quite different from the Icelandic legend, like the Volsunga Saga and the Eddas, where Sigmund had died in battle before his son was born, and Hjördís lived to marry Alf, the son of King Hjalprek of Denmark. Whereas in the Thiðrekssaga , Sisibe (Hjördís) died, but not Sigmund.
In the Nibelungenlied , where she was known as Sieglind, and she was married to Siegmund (Sigmund), the king of the Netherlands. The only role in the German epic was that she was concern about her son Siegfried (Sigurd) seeking to woo Kriemhild (Gudrun), the Burgundian princess, and later on, when she welcomed her new daughter-in-law when Siegfried and Kriemhild lived with them in the Netherlands. In this story, both parents outlived their son, Siegfried (Sigurd's).
Signy
Signy was the daughter of Volsung and Ljod ( Hljod ). She was the sister of Sigmund (her twin) and nine other brothers.
Signy was the reluctant bride of Siggeir , king of Gothland. She immediately knew that Siggeir was treacherous and murderous. She unsuccessfully tried to convince her father not to let the marriage to take place. When Siggeir invited her father and brothers to his land, Signy tried to warn her father of her husband's plot, but was ignored. As a result, Volsung and nine of her brothers died. She only managed to save twin, Sigmund.
Signy bore four children to Siggeir. As her brother hid in the wood near the palace, the two plot to avenge their family. Signy planned to use her two eldest sons to destroy Siggeir. When each of her two elder sons reach the age of eleven, she send them to her brother to test their mettle. When each of her son show lacking in strength and courage, Signy ordered her brother to kill her son.
Still determined to avenge her father's death, Signy sought help from beautiful witch. The witch transformed Signy so that her looks resemble the witch herself. Disguised as the witch, Signy made love to her brother for three nights. She bore Sigmund a son named Sinfjotli .
Signy sent Sinfjotli (when he was eleven) to Sigmund. Sigmund was unaware that Sinfjotli was really his son. Likewise, Sinfjotli did not know Sigmund was his father. Together, Sigmund and Sinfjotli were strong enough to defeat Siggeir and his warriors. Using stealth, they tried to sneak into Siggeir's palace, but Siggeir and Signy's younger children spotted them. Again, Signy ordered Sigmund to kill her children, but he refused. They were instead killed by Sinfjotli. Sigmund and Sinfjotli were captured. Siggeir had them put in the barrow, and have them buried alive. Signy however secretly managed to give the magic sword to Sigmund. Sigmund and Sinfjotli dug their way out of the barrow.
When Sigmund and Sinfjotli escaped, they set the palace on fire letting no one but Signy to escape. Signy came out of the burning building only to tell Sigmund that Sinfjotli was really his son. Signy who was involved with her other children's death, returned to the burning house, to die with her husband, whom she hated.
Svanhild (Swanhild)
Svanhild or Swanhild was the daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun. Svanhild was the sister of Sigmund Sigurdarson, as well as half-sister of Aslaug, the daughter of Sigurd and Brynhild. After Sigurd's death, Gudrun took her daughter to Denmark, where she was brought up in the court of Alf, Sigurd's stepfather.
Svanhild was so beautiful that the aged king, Jormunrek, wooed her. Gudrun agreed to her marriage to the king. However, she was in love with Randver, Jormunrek's son. Jormunrek's advisor, Bikki, betrayed them, by revealing to Jormunrek. Jormunrek killed his own son while Svanhild was trampled to death by horses. At first, the horses were unwilling to harm Svanhild, because she had inherited her father's eyes – very penetrating gaze.
Gudrun asked her three sons to King Jonakr - Hamdir, Sorli, and Erp - to avenge their half-sister's death. During their journey, his brothers accidentally killed Erp. Hamdir and Sorli managed to maimed Jormunrek, but the king's men kill the brothers.
Historically or in Germanic legend, Svanhild was identified with Sunilda, wife of chieftain of the Rosomoni. When the failed to aid the Goths against the Huns, Ermanaric (Jormunrek) captured Sunilda, and had her torn to pieces by wild horses. Her brothers, Sarus and Ammius, tried to avenged her death, by killing Ermanaric. They only managed to wounded Ermanaric.
Svava
Valkyrie in the Helgarkvida Hiorvardssonar (Lay of Helgi Hiorvardsson, Poetic Edda). Svava was a daughter of Eylimi. If this Eylimi is the same king in the Icelandic saga of the Volsungs, then this would make her sister of Hjordis , who was wife of Sigmund and mother of Sigurd . But this seem unlikely, because Helgi Sigmundsson is supposed to be the reincarnation of Helgi Hiorvardsson .
Svava is a Valkyrie, and the poem referred to her as a shield-maiden.
Svava was riding with eight other Valkyries, where she met Helgi, son of Hiorvard and Sigrlinn, and she gave him the name, Helgi (his parents had never given a name at birth, until Helgi and Svava met).
Helgi and Svava married, but Hedin, Helgi's half-brother desired Svava for himself, and in the duel, Hedin had mortally wounded her lover. Helgi told his wife that Svava should marry and sleep with Helgi's killer (Hedin), but she rejected her husband's proposal. It would seem that Svava died with Helgi, and they were both reincarnated. She as Sigrun , and he as Helgi Sigmundsson .
A wish-maiden or óskmær and wife of Volsung . Hljod was a daughter of the giant Hrimnir.
Hljod first appeared in the Volsunga Saga, serving Odin as a wish-maiden, one of the many names for a valkyrie. When Rerir , son of Sigi and grandson of Odin, was having trouble to beget a child upon his wife, Odin summoned Hljod to deliver a magic apple. Apples have several different mythological symbols in Norse mythology. For the gods in Asgard, the apples of Idun keep all deities from aging. But in Hljod's case, apples are symbol of fertility. Hljod dropped the apple on Rerir's lap. It is not exactly explicit, who ate the apple, but it is most likely Rerir had shared the apple with his wife. Shortly afterward, Rerir's wife became pregnant.
Rerir died before the child was born, and Rerir's wife carried the child for an incredible six years, before her son was born. Her son was named Volsung, and she died after childbirth, but not before her son gave her a kiss.
Volsung grew faster and stronger than most boys of that age. When he was fully grown, the giant Hrimnir send his daughter Hljod to marry Volsung.
Hljod became the mother of ten sons and one daughter. The eldest of her children were the twins Sigmund and a daughter Signy . Hljod doesn't appear again in the story before the incidence of Siggeir's arrival at her husband's court.
Swan-Maidens
Swan-maidens was another name for the Valkyries, because they wore garments with swan feathers, which enabled them to fly, just like the goddess Frigg or Freyja have a cloak of falcon feathers.
Here, I am interested in three particular swan-maidens, found in the poem in the Poetic Edda, called Völundarkvida ("Lay of Völundr").
Volund, or Wayland as he was known in English legend, was a famous master smith. Volund and his two brothers, Egil and Slagfid, encountered the three swan-maidens bathing in the lake. The three brothers raped these maidens.
Two of the maidens, Alvit (Hervor) and Svanhvit (Hladgud) were the daughters of King Hlodver. While the third swan-maiden, named Olrun, was the daughter of King Valland. The three brothers had each married one of the maidens. Volund (Wayland) was married to Alvit, while Egil was husband of Olrun and Slagfid that of Svanhvit.
The three swan-maidens lived with the three brothers for seven years, before they had unexpectedly abandoned their husbands, and were never heard of again. Volund's two brothers went to find their wives, but the smith stayed at home in Wolfdale.
Olof
Queen of Saxland, and mother of Yrsa. Although, she is not a really a Valkyrie, the Olof in Hrolfs saga do like dressing in armour and carry weapons around.
According to the saga of Hrolf Kraki, she was unmarried. She was raped by Helgi king of Denmark, after she rejected his marriage proposal. She had Yrsa, but she neglected her daughter, and knowing that Helgi would marry she did her daughter, Olof did not say anything, letting them committed incest. Some time after Hrolf was born, Olof revealed the secret to what seem to be happy couple. Both were devastated by the truth, and Yrsa left her father-husband and returned to Olof, only to be married off to Adils, king of Sweden, whom Yrsa despire.
Olof got her revenge on Helgi for raping her, and get her with a child whom she never loved.
In the Ynglinga (part of Heimskringla), however, Snorri Sturluson says that Alof (Olof) the Great was married to Geirthjof, the king of Saxland, and that Geirthjof was Yrsa's father, not Helgi of Denmark. Though the saga and the Ynglinga are both Icelandic literature, their traditions seemed to be different, in regarding to Yrsa's father. Alof's part in the Ynglinga, but more about Yrsa's marriage to both Adils and Helgi were different to the saga. (See Yrsa, Helgi and Adils.)
In Snorri's Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, Olof is not mentioned at all. However, Yrsa and Hrolf are, but neither Eddaic works revealed much about them.
In the Old English epic, Beowulf, Olof is not mentioned at all, and the father of Yrse (Yrsa) is neither Halga (Helgi) nor Geirthjof; her father was Healfdene (Halfdan), which would make Yrse sister to Heorogar, Hrothgar and Halga (Helgi). Also she is not the mother of Hrothulf or Hrolf in this Old English epic.
Queen of Saxland. Olof was both a warrior-queen and sorceress, she could very well be a Valkyrie. Not only was she beautiful, she was very strong. But her beauty was not match by her temperament, because she was cruel and arrogant. She wanted no husband, least of all, Helgi, king of Denmark.
When Olof rebuffed Helgi, by humilating him – got him drunk, drugging him to sleep, shave off all his hair, and stuck tar all over his body, before sticking him a bag and send him back his ship. Helgi was powerless against Olof, since she managed to gather her army.
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In Roman legend, which animals are said to have saved Rome from a surprise attack by raising an alarm? | Cullen Murphy Reads 'Are We Rome?' : NPR
Cullen Murphy Reads 'Are We Rome?'
June 18, 200712:00 AM ET
Linda Kulman
Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy helped steer the magazine through a major overhaul; he recently moved to Vanity Fair. hide caption
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Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy helped steer the magazine through a major overhaul; he recently moved to Vanity Fair.
Murphy Highlights
On American (and Roman) identity
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On privatization in Rome and in the U.S.
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On military structures in Rome and the U.S.
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Hear Murphy read and discuss his book
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Book Tour is a new Web feature and podcast . Each week we present leading authors of fiction and nonfiction as they read from and discuss their work.
In Cullen Murphy's new book, Are We Rome? the author argues that in fact we are — just in unexpected ways. It's not so much America's tendency toward decadence and our astounding military might that make us like Rome. It's the dangerous blurring of public and private responsibilities, paired with an inflated sense of power that can blind us to what's happening beyond our borders. Fortunately, Murphy's book displays no such hubris. The Boston Globe says it's a lot like the author himself: "reflective, curious, mild and measured."
Murphy's interests are nothing if not eclectic. His previous books include Rubbish!, an anthropological study of garbage; The World According to Eve, about women and the Bible; and the aptly named Just Curious, a collection of essays taken largely from his column in The Atlantic Monthly. And Murphy has put his degree in medieval history to good use: For 25 years, he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, illustrated by his father.
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Murphy is even better known as the unflappable editor who spent two decades helping define the Atlantic. But he moved to Vanity Fair last year rather than follow the Atlantic when it relocated to Washington.
Official Washington, like Rome, prizes its status as the city around which the world revolves, Murphy writes in Are We Rome? Yet there's a crucial difference. Where Rome was all about self-satisfaction, America prides itself on self-improvement. It's this optimistic quality, he believes, that may make it possible for us to reinvent ourselves instead of going the way of the ancient empire.
This reading of Are We Rome? took place in May 2007 at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
Excerpt: 'Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America'
June 18, 200712:00 AM ET
Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
by Cullen Murphy
List Price: $24.00
THE CAPITALS: Where Republic Meets Empire
The empire of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. Rome didn't "fall" the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. Rome itself wasn't touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along.
What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. There would never be another emperor of the West. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true — that the last emperor's name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome's founder. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms — in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today.
Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Monks sang vespers in a church nearby. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum," he later wrote. A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon's restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: "Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind. . . . The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist." Gibbon's life was in many ways a sad and lonely one, but The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was recognized at once as a masterwork, its sonorous cadences enlivened with a dry and biting wit. He observes gratuitously of a monk named Antiochus, for instance, that "one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant." Although his picture of the fall may be more cataclysmic than the immediate reality seems to have been, Gibbon established for people ever after that a page of history had been decisively turned. In the West, "decline and fall" has been a catchphrase and a source of anxiety ever since.
The city of Washington, of course, also has a Capitoline Hill — Capitol Hill, named explicitly for its Roman forebear. The view to the west takes in a vast expanse of classical porticoes and marble monuments; gilded chariots and curtained litters would not seem out of place against this backdrop. Washington rose out of a malarial marsh on a river upstream from the coast, as Rome did. Its people, like the Romans, flee the sweltering city in August. The Romans cherished their myth of origin, the story of Romulus and Remus, and on the Palatine Hill you could be shown a thatched hut said to be the hut of Romulus — yes, the very one. Washington doesn't have anything quite like the hut of Romulus, but on Capitol Hill you can find sacred national touchstones of other kinds, such as the contents of Lincoln's pockets when he was assassinated. (They're in the Library of Congress.) Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient. Materialistic cultures easily forget that "mental outlook" is not some limp and passive construct, of interest chiefly to anthropologists. Mental outlook can drive events and change the world, as the rise of militant Islam makes plain. Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago it was a notion of republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it's a strutting sense of self and mission that Romans of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends and enemies alike. It's a pungent quality — an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces.
The comparison with Rome has always been on the minds of leaders in America's capital. It was celebrated when Washington was no more than a street plan, and inspired what might be called the Bad Virgil school of patriotic verse. ("On broad Potowmac's bank then spring to birth, / Thou seat of empire and delight of earth!") In the settlement's early years there was a tributary of the Potomac called Goose Creek; its name was changed by an aspirational local planter to Tiber Creek. The Jefferson Memorial, off on the Potomac River's edge, is a diminutive version of the Pantheon. Union Station, just below the Capitol, was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian. The Washington Monument recalls the obelisks brought to Rome after the conquest of Egypt. Colonnaded government buildings stretch for miles.
I doubt I'm the only person who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin. The Washington Monument — imagine it a millennium hence, a chipped and mottled spire, trussed with rusting braces. The stern pile of the Archives building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, the gothic National Cathedral on its distant hilltop, the turreted Smithsonian Castle on the Mall — they somehow invite you to see them as derelicts, rendered into darkly impish engravings by the hand of some future Piranesi. What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake? Pestilence? Pride? The end of air conditioning?
What Went Wrong
A page of history may have been turned in 476 A.D., at least for literary purposes, but it's not easy to pinpoint the moment of Rome's fall — just as, one day, it may not be easy to pinpoint the moment of America's. In many ways, "Rome" had already fallen — had evolved into something different from what it once was, and not always through violence — well before it ceased to exist as a formal political entity. It had once been pagan and by the end was largely Christian. A proud army made up of Romans had long since turned into a paid army made up of barbarians. A republic sustained by flinty yeomen had become a precarious autocracy administered by grasping bureaucrats. At the same time, in very concrete ways Rome didn't fall for centuries, if at all. The eastern half of the empire, the richest and most populous part, centered on Constantinople, survived for nearly another thousand years. In the realms of culture and law and infrastructure and language, the Roman Empire has endured much longer. We still use its alphabet, exploit its literary genres, inhabit its cities, preserve its architectural styles, and follow its schedule of holidays. In many respects the Catholic Church survives as a graft on the empire's stump. "Non omnis moriar" ("I shall not wholly die"), the Roman poet Horace proclaimed in one of his most famous odes. He was referring to his work, but he could just as well have been referring to the legacy of his civilization.
Rome began as a farming settlement on hilly portions of the eastern bank of the Tiber River. Tradition puts its founding at 753 B.C., and the Romans calculated the passage of years ab urbe condita — "from the founding of the city." The legendary origins of the Roman people go back even further, to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who with family and friends made his way to Italy after the fall of Troy. It's not easy to infer, even when tramping the most ancient parts of today's Rome, what the early settlement was like. Some musty nineteenth-century guidebooks are actually good at reconstructing the landscape — how steep and rugged the seven hills were, and how willows grew here and oak trees there, and where the ferries crossed the marshes, and how high the Tiber floods could rise. Several centuries as a monarchy gave way, in the sixth century B.C., to a republic, with a senate, consuls, and popular voting for some offices. The territory of Rome gradually expanded to encompass the rest of the Italian peninsula and outposts along the Mediterranean coast. With the conclusion of the Third Punic War against its great rival, Carthage, in northern Africa, in 146 B.C., Rome effectively controlled the Mediterranean world. It continued to grow in all directions, impelled by its military prowess, its administrative genius, and its compulsive sense of destiny.
The republic came to a de facto end in 31 B.C., after a century of social turmoil, constitutional crisis, and civil war. Vast Roman armies had thrown themselves against one another across the Mediterranean world. Emerging supreme from the carnage was Octavian, Julius Caesar's grandnephew, who in proto-Orwellian fashion symbolically "restored" the republic while in fact inaugurating the principate, a regime of one-person rule. The outward forms of republican government would be preserved in various ways right to the very end, a progressively meaningless nod to the past, but whatever the disavowals, Rome was now an imperial state. By the second century A.D., the all-powerful emperor ruled a domain that stretched from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Durable roads linked major and minor cities, defining routes still used today. Seaborne traffic flourished. In the absence of reliable records, one indirect way to gauge the growth in maritime commerce is through underwater archaeology, measuring the change over time in the number of Mediterranean shipwrecks — analogous to tracking the advance of industrialization by the level of pollutants in arctic ice cores. A survey of Roman-era wrecks off the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain yields only about fifty from the period 400–200 B.C., but three times that many from the first two centuries A.D. Ancient Rome held more than a million people; no European city would come close to it in size until the London of Shakespeare's time. The walls that eventually surrounded Rome extend nearly thirteen miles. I once spent the better part of two days walking the entire circuit, noting where the nineteen roads had entered the city, and the eleven aqueducts, and thinking how formidable those walls, forty feet high, must have looked to Alaric and his Visigoths. Little wonder that Alaric cut a deal to get inside.
The decline of Rome came in many forms — in military power, in civil order, in eloquence, in philosophy, in architecture, in trade. Going back to those shipwrecks: they fall off sharply after 200 A.D., and after 400 drop to the levels of half a millennium earlier. It would be a thousand years before seaborne trade returned to the Augustan level. Infrastructure started to degrade: there came a point when full-length columns of colored marble, which literally held up the empire, could no longer be transported to Rome from Greece and Turkey and Egypt. Agricultural methods deteriorated: archaeology indicates that cattle were smaller in the early Middle Ages than they were at the empire's prime. Although 476 has been accepted since Byzantine times as the moment of Rome's demise, there's an element of parlor game in the discussion. Maybe the end really came in 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome. Or maybe it came in 410, when the Visigoths sacked Rome. Or in 378, when a great Roman army was destroyed by barbarians at Adrianople. A racist theoretician in Nazi Germany discerned Rome's "first step toward chaos" in a law passed in the fifth century B.C. permitting patricians, the highest social class, to marry plebeians, the lowest.
"Let students of Rome's decline imagine themselves as medical examiners who have been confronted with a corpse," writes the classical historian Donald Kagan. "It is their duty first to establish the time of death and then the cause. It soon becomes apparent that the various historical practitioners who have examined the Roman remains have achieved remarkably little agreement on either question." In 1980, a German historian set out to catalogue all the explanations for the fall of Rome ever proposed, which include degeneracy and deforestation, too much bureaucracy and too much Christianity. (He cited 210 theories in all.) The Romans themselves continually lamented the unhappy state of their society — as Americans compulsively do — even under circumstances that in retrospect were not all that bad. "Now we suffer the evils of a long peace. Luxury hatches terrors worse than wars." That's Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., when the collapse of the Western empire lay more than three centuries ahead. Other writers were bizarrely sanguine, although trouble was just around the corner. "There will never be an end to the power of Rome," wrote the court poet Claudian, shortly before the city's sack by the Visigoths. Part of the problem of explaining "decline" is that, like "rise," it doesn't happen everywhere at the same rate or in the same way. Ronald Reagan declared the 1980s to be "morning again in America," but dawn looked a lot different in Silicon Valley than it did in Youngstown.
Still, looking at the range of explanations provides a montage of Rome's condition. There is, to begin with, the growing number of incursions into the empire by non-Roman peoples — that is, by the barbarians. Rome had always been adept at assimilating newcomers; until the rise of America, it was history's most successful multi-ethnic state. But the influx eventually became too much to handle, as the Huns, sweeping out from central Asia, drove more and more people south and west in front of them, and finally across the Rhine and the Danube and into the empire.
Another explanation: perhaps the culprit was simply a hollowed- out military, whose capacities were no longer up to the challenge of keeping the barbarians at bay. Related to this: Did a creeping pacifism come into play? ("We Christians defend the empire by praying for it," wrote one early theologian.) Some historians blame economic stagnation for the fall of Rome, or corruption, or manpower shortages, or the exhaustion of the soil, or the depredations of plague, or the more generalized problem, in one view, that "too few producers supported too many idle mouths." An implicitly eugenic argument points to the depletion of the elites by centuries of war and civil strife. You could look at the debilitating effects of a decline of civic spirit. Or at the rise in taxes, which took a greater toll on ordinary people than it did on the rich and influential, worsening an already invidious class divide. There was the impact of slavery, whose harmful consequences were moral and psychological as well as economic. And there was the chaos caused by the lack of a standard procedure for imperial succession, which was resolved frequently by civil war, crippling the government and weakening the empire's defenses. "Decadence" has always been a popular explanation, though in Rome's case the greatest decadence coincided with the greatest power. (Still, here's Richard Nixon on the subject: "When the great civilizations of the past became prosperous, when they lost the will to go on living and make progress, they fell victims to decadence, which in the long run destroys a culture. The United States is now entering this phase.") Some of the more preposterous theories explaining the fall of Rome happen also to be unforgettable. Everybody knows the one that credits lead poisoning from the pipes used in plumbing. Another explanation in this class: the onset of widespread impotence caused by hot water in the public baths. All told, decline-of-Rome explanations fall into two broad categories: either the empire killed itself (internal weaknesses) or it was killed by something else (external factors). Historians tilt one way or the other, but they also tend to cite the interplay of inside and outside forces rather than attributing Rome's demise to a single simple cause. As in Murder on the Orient Express, all the prime suspects shared in the deed.
The third century was a period of deep crisis, with one bad emperor after another (the standard obituary: "killed by his own soldiers") and continual barbarian pressures on the frontiers. The empire was rescued by Diocletian, a no-nonsense administrator who built up the legions and organized the state and its taxes around the need for security. He also created the system known as the tetrarchy, in which power was shared among two coemperors (East and West) and two subemperors-in-waiting, at a stroke mitigating the succession problem and providing enough leaders to command the various armies. From the late third century onward, emperors spent more and more time away with their legions, fending off trouble and settling in for years in subcapitals like Trier and Sirmium. But Rome was still the leading city of the empire and still the home of the senatorial aristocracy. It still enjoyed extraordinary privileges, and it still extracted great wealth from the rest of the empire.
The sack of the city by Alaric, in 410, was both a physical and a psychic blow. By arrangement the sack was an orderly and not especially bloody affair, its terms spelled out in advance. Alaric demanded all portable wealth, and when a member of the Roman legation asked what the Romans could keep, he replied, "Your lives." Rome's perimeter had not been breached by an enemy for eight hundred years. "The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished," wrote Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible, in faraway Jerusalem. Over time, wars and sieges took a toll on Rome's water supply — the aqueducts were cut and repaired, then cut and repaired again. The most reliable aqueduct proved to be the Aqua Virgo, which ran mostly underground. You can see an excavated piece of it, and hear the rush of water, under an indie cinema in one of the narrow back streets near the Trevi Fountain. Rome's dwindling population, maybe 80,000 in 600 A.D., withdrew from the fringes and began to cluster near the bend in the Tiber where the Aqua Virgo had its terminus, creating the maze of streets that gives today's city center its medieval character. Rome is a good place to reflect, post-Katrina, on how the failure of infrastructure can shape a community for a thousand years.
Well before its collapse, as skills declined and building materials became harder to get, Rome began to plunder itself for spolia, or "spoils," in a way that would seem edgily postmodern if it had been driven by academic theory rather than bitter necessity. The fourth-century Arch of Constantine contains bits and pieces carved in the second century (as the painter Raphael pointed out). Builders of churches and palaces used ancient structures as quarries. The original St. Peter's was supported by columns scavenged from Roman-era buildings; the Renaissance basilica that took its place used marble from the Colosseum. To bolster his claim to an imperial pedigree, Charlemagne imported architectural remains from Rome and Ravenna for his palace at Aachen, and even had some of the stonework fashioned to look like spolia from Rome, because it had so much cachet. Meanwhile, in the old imperial capital, blocks of marble and statues by the thousands were burned for lime. A memory of the smoky place where this was done, below the Capitoline Hill, is preserved in the name Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the Street of the Dark Shops. Large tracts of the urban heartland were turned over to pasture, and livestock grazed where Caesars had walked. The process of reversion will not mystify anyone who has visited modern Detroit and noticed trees sprouting on the roofs and ledges of abandoned buildings, or seen how vacant downtown lots are being reclaimed by a hardscrabble urban agriculture.
Such was the spectacle that presented itself to Gibbon on that day in 1764, as he sat looking out over what had once been the Forum and was now the Campo Vaccino, the Field of Cows. In a sentence sagging with judgment and resignation, Gibbon settled on no one cause for the empire's collapse: "Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight."
A decade later, in 1775, as Gibbon prepared to "oppress the public" (as he put it) with the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the British Empire faced a crisis of its own when the thirteen American colonies united in rebellion. Gibbon had celebrated the vaunted freedoms of the Romans, and mourned their loss. He was a friend of Adam Smith, who would become the patron saint of America's economic ideology, his face peering out from the neckties of capitalists. But Gibbon had no sympathy for the "criminal enterprize" of the American Revolution, and as a Tory member of Parliament he supported the campaign of military suppression. When he eventually changed his mind, it was on pragmatic grounds: "I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still farther the finest country in the World in the prosecution of a War, from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined." Gibbon never warmed to the rebellion. Visiting Paris during the war, he on one occasion was introduced to the ambassador from Britain's American colonies, Benjamin Franklin. Gibbon was reportedly officious and distant; in a letter he stresses that the meeting was "by accident." Sly, funny, self-confident in print, Gibbon in person was profoundly awkward. Franklin is said to have heightened his discomfort by offering to furnish Gibbon with some materials for his next book, about the decline and fall of the British Empire.
America's Turn
Gibbon may have had no place in his political cosmology for America, but America had a big place for Rome. An obsession with Roman antecedents could hardly have been helped, given the classical education all the Founding Fathers received. My window at the Boston Athenaeum, where I sit right now, looks out over a colonial graveyard, the Old Granary Burying Ground. Every literate person resting there would have known the fabled stories of Rome: the rape of the Sabine women; Horatio at the bridge; the sacred temple geese who gave the alarm and saved the Capitol; Caesar and Brutus on the Ides of March. These were as familiar to them as the D-Day landing or the march on Selma or the Watergate burglary or the convergence of Bill and Monica would be to Americans now.
The educated elite of the thirteen colonies were steeped in the Roman code of virtus. In this code there was little room for qualities that today hold pride of place in America. The Founders did not cherish therapeutic notions of self-actualization or self-esteem or "the real me." What mattered was adherence to duty as expressed in outward behavior. The very first Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, the so-called Athenaeum portrait, was for a time on display downstairs from where I work. The gaze Washington offers, painted from life, captures no interior spark; it's a serene mask of obligation. In Rome, virtus was inextricably bound up with the ideology of Rome's greatness. Here is the Roman legend as one historian sums it up: "A simple, hardy race of peasants, long uncontaminated by the seductive arts and manners of Greece, they held fast to their rustic virtues: sanctity of family life, sobriety of conduct and demeanour, a stern sense of discipline. . . . In consequence of these virtues the Romans achieved their mission, divinely inspired, to rule the world." These were seen to be the values of Rome especially in its republican days, and they were the values the Founding Fathers believed Americans at their best embodied. They're still the values we look back on wistfully.
The Roman who epitomized republican ideals was Marcus Porcius Cato, or Cato the Younger (95–46 B.C.), the great-grandson of the Cato who had urged his countrymen toward the Third Punic War with the declaration "Carthago delenda est!" — "Carthage must be destroyed!" Cato the Younger was a senator known for eccentric habits, grim austerity, and humorless rectitude — combine Mahatma Gandhi, John the Baptist, and Ralph Nader. He often went about in nothing more than a toga, without shoes or an undergarment. His relations with women were erratic and unhappy. He drank heavily when alone, though his public demeanor was abstemious and his lifestyle bereft of luxury. Cato was not a contented fellow, and was more admired than liked. But his stubborn adherence to Roman virtues and republican principles had no equal. Cato and Julius Caesar were bitter enemies, and Cato tirelessly warned his fellow Romans of Caesar's designs on power. When Caesar eventually triumphed, Cato sought to commit suicide by stabbing himself. He was discovered, and the wounds were bound up, but Cato ripped off the bandages and bled to death; he did not want to give Caesar the satisfaction of sparing his life.
Cato's stand against tyranny echoed down the ages. One of the most popular plays in eighteenth-century America was Joseph Addison's Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Today it is nearly unreadable, unrelenting in its uplift and cloying in its nobility, but its tidy verses once spoke as powerfully to Americans as Arthur Miller's The Crucible does now. Its influence is stamped indelibly on the rhetoric of the Revolution. Nathan Hale's "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country" is, in essence, a line from Addison's Cato. So is Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death."
Rome set not just a moral example but a practical one. The Founding Fathers had overthrown a great empire, and now they looked to preimperial Rome for republican political models — in particular for ideas about "checks and balances" that could help preserve that form of government. Cicero had written, "I consider the most effective constitution to be that which is a reasonably blended combination of three forms — kingship, aristocracy, and democracy." Rome's republican government vested these functions in its two consuls, who shared executive power and could serve for only a year; in a senate, made up of the highborn, who served for life; and in the populus,the people, who could vote on certain matters. This regime promised a government, Cicero thought, with "an equilibrium like a well-trimmed boat." The checks and balances were taken to such an extreme that if both consuls were leading troops in battle, each took charge on alternate days (a pushmi-pullyu procedure that proved fatal at the Battle of Cannae). Roman precedents were invoked time and again as the drafters framed America's new Constitution. Some of them, of course, were sobering: everyone was aware that Cicero's well-trimmed boat had eventually foundered. Benjamin Franklin's famous remark, when asked as he emerged from Independence Hall what kind of government America now had — "A republic, if you can keep it" — represented a cautionary reference to the unhappy fate of Rome. That, at any rate, is how his listeners at the time would have heard it.
George Washington was the epitome of America's Roman ideal. He was unyielding in his embrace of public virtue, supplementing Roman standards of behavior with the famous "Rules of Civility" written out in his own hand in a schoolboy copybook. ("Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present." "When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it.") The Romans were obsessed with surveying, an understandable preoccupation for a people expanding into three continents; Washington's first career was as a surveyor — his country was expanding too. Washington knew his Roman history: an invoice survives for an order from an English dealer of "A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy, neatly finished and bronzed with copper, three pounds, three shillings" — a sculpture of Rome's founding legend for the mantelpiece of America's own founder. At Valley Forge, Washington ordered up a production of Addison's Cato for his frostbitten army, and attended the performance himself.
After the Revolution, sidestepping suggestions of kingship and returning to his beloved Mount Vernon, Washington was hailed as America's Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman of the mid fifth century b.c. who farmed a small plot of land across the Tiber from Rome. As the story goes, Rome was under assault by some neighboring tribes, its army surrounded and on the verge of annihilation. The Romans voted to empower a dictator to lead them out of crisis, and sent word to Cincinnatus, who put aside his plough and came to the city's aid.
In two days he brought the Romans in sight of the combined armies; he formed his line of battle, and after reminding them what they were to fight for he led them onto the charge with such resistless impetuosity that he obtained a complete victory and gave, as it were, a new life to his country's liberties. Soon as this great work was done, he took an affectionate leave of his gallant army and returned to cultivate his four acres.
That's the conclusion of the Cincinnatus tale as recounted not by some Roman chronicler but by Parson Weems, whose best-selling Life of Washington was published soon after Washington's death. In a work commissioned for the Capitol rotunda a few decades later, the sculptor Horatio Greenough produced a massive marble Washington in a classic Roman pose, seated, the toga draped to reveal a bare chest. With his left hand Washington offers his sword back to the people, as Cincinnatus might have done. This sculpture now dominates an entryway at the Smithsonian — it was so heavy that it had to be moved from the Capitol before it fell through the floor. The Cincinnatus reference is probably lost on most visitors: Washington looks like a man in a sauna, asking for a towel.
The Roman ideal ran deep in America for decades. People were so steeped in Cicero that up to the Civil War, the stock form of public presentation was the formal oration. As America began to spread across the continent, and to emerge as an economic power, worries only grew that the country was destined to repeat the Roman story of imperial temptation and humbling decline — worries captured in the painter Thomas Cole's allegorical series The Course of Empire, produced in the 1830s. It's not subtle. The series begins with an idyllic depiction of the state of nature, then portrays a moment of imperial sunshine in all its vainglorious fullness, and ends with a painting titled Desolation.
Not subtle — but not fantasy, either. It's hardly a stretch to find modern relevance in the example of the Roman Republic, overwhelmed by the consequences of its own growing size and might, and by its perceived national-security needs. In 68 B.C. a pirate attack on Rome's port of Ostia prompted the terrified Romans to cede far-reaching powers to one man, Pompey. There would be no turning back. The need to act boldly and react quickly; to ferret out enemy plans while keeping your own hidden; to show a public face of resolve, concealing doubt and dissent — in Rome, over time, all these mandates produced a change in character. They have done so in America, too. You could point to the expanding power of the presidency relative to the other two branches of government; or to restrictions on personal freedom in exchange for personal safety; or to a culture of secrecy; or to the pervasive influence of the military and the security apparatus. People concerned that America may drift away from a republic and toward a principate, as Rome did, took little comfort from the news, reported and confirmed in the summer of 2004, that the government was "reviewing a proposal" to postpone national elections in the event of some sort of terrorist attack; or from the recent Supreme Court ruling that the police may enter homes without knocking; or from the attorney general's threat to use espionage laws to prosecute reporters for publishing leaks of classified information. Nor have their spirits been lifted by the inroads of a relatively new legal argument known as "unitary executive theory." Among other things, it holds that each branch of the government — not just the Supreme Court — has the right to interpret the Constitution, and it asserts an unprecedented view of the extent of presidential power, including the power to make war without the consent of Congress.
This is not in fact just theory. One concrete result has been the president's practice of appending a "signing statement" to legislation when it comes to him for signature, indicating his intention to enforce the legislation according to his own specific interpretation — if the legislation is enforced at all. Up through the year 2000 American presidents had collectively employed signing statements on about 600 occasions. In the six years since then, the president has added signing statements more than 750 times, on laws pertaining to such matters as the use of torture, whistle-blowing by government employees, the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, and the obligation of the executive branch to provide Congress with certain kinds of information.
The Roman Empire's penchant for official secrecy was remarked on by the historian Cassius Dio, who complained that because so much had been done behind closed doors, he couldn't get access to materials he needed to write his narrative. He would not have been surprised by the dogged White House effort, which continues in the courts, to conceal the details of the administration's early planning on energy policy and the names of those who participated in it. The Romans had nothing like the technological means that modern America has to create a true surveillance state, but the empire's undercover operatives — the frumentarii (who turn up in the video game The Regia) and, later, the agentes in rebus — were diligent. In common parlance these operatives were known as the curiosi. The philosopher Epictetus, who was born in Rome and knew firsthand the dangers of thinking freely (he was sent into exile), presents a vignette of entrapment in one of his writings: "A soldier, dressed like a civilian, sits down by your side and begins to speak ill of Caesar, and then you, too, just as though you had received from him some guarantee of good faith in the fact that he began the abuse, tell likewise everything you think, and the next thing is — you are led off to prison in chains." Our own curiosi have big ears. The National Security Agency, in a program known as Echelon, sifts tens of millions of telephone and data communications every day, searching for any of hundreds of words or phrases that may hint at terrorist activity. Some of them ("White House," "mail bomb" "kill the president") are self-explanatory; others ("Roswell," "blowfish," "Bill Gates") may be counterintuitive. Another program, which bore the name Carnivore until someone started to worry, much too late, about the potential public-relations fallout, essentially conducts wiretaps on e-mail. More recently the national-security apparatus has begun wiretapping the international phone calls of thousands of Americans without legal oversight — on presidential orders, and despite the expressed will of Congress. It has also been collecting the telephone records of tens of millions more.
Then as now, legislatures seem to be the first to go. The Roman Senate remained a millionaire's club and a source of public servants, but it atrophied as a true deliberative body. Foreign policy and war-making power became the sole province of the emperor and his amici, his closest advisers. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: "The Congress shall have the power to declare war," a power entrusted to the legislature because, as James Madison observed, the temptation to use force would otherwise "be too great for any one man." A modern historian writes, "The debates in the convention, the later writings of delegates to that meeting, and speeches in the state conventions that voted on ratification of the Constitution leave no doubt that the president's title and role as commander in chief gave him no powers that Congress could not define or limit." The last time Congress authorized the use of force through a declaration of war was more than six decades ago, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then the United States has committed large numbers of troops to major combat operations on fourteen occasions, from Korea and Vietnam through Grenada, the Balkans, and two wars in Iraq, but no president has ever sought a true declaration of war. Power has shifted decisively toward the executive, as the executive understands. George W. Bush made the point this way: "I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain. . . . I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
The Omphalos Syndrome
Something happens to imperial capitals, something psychological and, over time, corrosive and incapacitating. It happens when the conviction takes hold that the capital is the source and focal point of reality — that nothing is more important than what happens there, and that no ideas or perceptions are more important than those of its elites. This conviction saturated imperial Rome, as it saturates official Washington — it's the most important trait the capitals share. The conviction is understandable, up to a point. When powerful states are in an expansive phase, the wishes and ideas of the rest of the world seem secondary, inconsequential. In the capital itself, this frame of mind may far outlast the circumstances that produced it, taking on a life of its own that everyone has an interest in perpetuating. It can prove impossible to eradicate fully. In Italy, manhole covers are still stamped with the letters that once appeared on imperial standards and marble monuments: SPQR, for Senatus Populusque Romanus — the Senate and the Roman People. Modern Russia can't suppress the reflexes of the old Soviet empire, just as the Soviets couldn't suppress the reflexes of imperial Russia. Britain no longer has much of an empire, but many institutions in London retain a noticeably imperial cast of mind. The spirit of the Raj is not absent from the tone of The Economist.
Rome labored under what has been called an "omphalos syndrome." The omphalos, from the Greek word for "navel," was a stone monument found in a number of ancient cities that supposedly marked the navel, or center, of the world. Rome's own version, the marble Umbilicus Romae, stood prominently in the Forum, right next to the Rostra. The marble facing is now gone, but a circular brick pile remains, to which tourists pay no attention at all, unaware that the entrance to the underworld, to Hades, was once believed to be right there, under those very bricks. The term "omphalos syndrome" originated in the study of old maps, and describes the tendency of people who "believe themselves to be divinely appointed to the centre of the universe," as one geographer explains, to place themselves in the middle of the maps they draw. The Romans weren't shy about asserting this belief: they drove it home astutely by means of what today would be considered "branding." In the Forum, in the very center of Rome, they erected not only the official Umbilicus but also, a few yards away, a gilded column called the Golden Milestone, where all the empire's roads symbolically converged. Augustus built a sundial the size of a football field in the Campus Martius, using an Egyptian obelisk to cast the shadow. It was dedicated, technically, to a divinity — to the sun — but on the birthday of Augustus, September 23, the obelisk's shadow pointed directly at the Altar of Peace, which celebrated the fruits of his rule. The message was unmistakable, one scholar concludes: "The whole universe now formed part of the new Augustan system."
In the second century A.D., a young rhetorician named Aelius Aristides delivered an oration in the Athenaeum, in Rome, possibly in front of the emperor himself. Aristides was a panegyrist, a court littérateur whose job it was to extol people in power. It is an occupational category that still exists in Washington. (Think of Peggy Noonan on Reagan, Sidney Blumenthal on Clinton, Ron Kessler on Bush, Midge Decter on Rumsfeld.) The description of Rome offered by Aristides embodies the city's self-satisfied outlook: "Here is brought from every land and sea all the crops of the seasons and each land, river, lake, as well as of the arts of the Greeks and the barbarians. . . . Whatever one does not see here is not a thing which has existed or exists." The architect Vitruvius took up the same theme: "Surely then it was a divine intelligence which placed the city of Rome in so perfect and temperate a country, with the intention that she should win the right to rule the world."
Rome, like Washington, was an economically pointless metropolis, a vast importer and consumer of an empire's riches rather than a producer of anything except words and administration (and the pungent cartloads of garbage that left the city every night). The downstream consequences of Rome's gargantuan appetites can be visualized, literally, even today. Take the basic need for building materials. Augustus would claim that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and the boast was not an idle one. But underneath that marble, and alongside it, mountains of brick remained. Rome's tenement houses, the insulae, were faced with brick, and so were the city walls and sewers and aqueducts. The brick was distinctive — square and thin, red-ochre in color. You recognize it everywhere in the ruins of the city, and if you come across it anywhere in the world, whether in York or Paris or Jerusalem, it always means one thing: Rome was here. The brick and lime for the city of Rome had to be baked and kilned, which required massive quantities of charcoal, which in turn required trees. A single burn of a limestone kiln could consume a thousand donkey loads of wood. The forests around Rome were felled, and then the forests beyond those forests. Ground cover gone, the soil washed from the hillsides and into the rivers. At the mouth of the Tiber, the shoreline pushed outward as accretions of soil built up over the centuries. The docks at Ostia had to constantly be extended to remain adjacent to the water, a process clearly visible now in aerial photographs. As the empire came to an end, so did the effort to keep ahead of nature. The original docks are now a mile from the sea, trapped in dry land, separated from shore by striations of silt.
The biggest component of the city's prodigious intake was something called the annona, an in-kind tax levied by Rome on everyplace else, and collected in the form of grain, which was used to provide free bread for most of Rome's inhabitants. At its peak the annona amounted to 10 million sacks of grain a year. The shipment of the annona from Spain, Egypt, and northern Africa to the docks at the Tiber's mouth, and then by barge up the river to Rome, was never-ending, like tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf. Any serious interruption could mean urban unrest to the point of violence. When conspirators wanted to bring down Cleander, the hated chief minister of the equally hated emperor Commodus, they manipulated grain supplies, causing shortages that led to riots. (Commodus "commanded that the head of Cleander should be thrown out to the people," Gibbon writes. "The desired spectacle instantly appeased the tumult.") Eventually the annona was expanded beyond grain to include olive oil and wine. The smashed amphorae these liquids came in were tossed in a dump near the Tiber wharves, creating a hill known today as Monte Testaccio, a hundred feet high. Warehouses the size of basilicas existed at every stage of the distribution system, and so, too, did opportunities for pilfering and corruption. If you think of the annona as tax revenue, which it was, then the revenue not only accomplished its stated purpose of feeding the city; it also supported large swaths of private-sector activity, from shipping to baking to crime. Some of this activity was encouraged with tax breaks and even grants of citizenship. There was great wealth to be had off government contracts. You can still see today, near the Porta Maggiore, in Rome, the huge marble tomb, in the shape of an old-fashioned bread oven, of a freedman named Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, who is described by an inscription as "baker, contractor, public servant." So large was the work force required for the baking of bread that people convicted of certain minor crimes were sentenced to hard labor in Rome's bakeries. As the empire began to contract, the annona remained the essential lifeline, preserved at all costs. By the fifth century a.d., only the link with North Africa remained unbroken. When Alaric laid siege to Rome, one of his first acts was to send his warriors to seize the docks at Ostia.
To see yourself at the center of everything requires a sense of what "everything" is — a geographic sense, in other words.Americans take such a thing for granted, aware as we are of the location of every place on earth. You can tap into the Global Positioning System with a cell phone. In Roman times geographic knowledge was primitive, though its political uses were not. The Romans called themselves "masters of the oikumene" — "masters of the known world" — long before they were able to depict the known world in any reliable way. But once they could, they erected large public maps showing Rome in the literal center, where it obviously had to be. The Roman Empire's vascular system was its network of roads. At regular points along every roadway in Italy marble markers announced to travelers the distance to the center of the world: to Rome. A monument in the capital schematically depicted the deployments of the imperial legions, arrayed in a circle centered on the capital — a precursor, in stone, of the blinking electronic displays of "readiness" in the Pentagon's situation room. Rome's sense of status and privilege would survive long after Roman emperors stopped living there — and, indeed, long after the empire was gone. It survives to this day in the idea of Rome as the Eternal City, and very literally in an ancient pronouncement that occurs every Easter, when the pope from his balcony in the Vatican delivers a homily that begins with the words of address "Urbi et orbi — "To the city and to the world."
Rome displayed the attributes of any great capital with more hubris than humility: the overweening self-regard, the presumption that it knew better than others, the surprising ignorance about foreign cultures, the languid arrogance, the competitive displays of wealth — all captured in the writings of Suetonius and Plutarch and Juvenal and others. The city's appetite for the wealth of the conquered knew few limits: as its rule spread to one place after another, a steady traffic in artwork made its way to the center. On occasion Roman grandees would obtain classical sculptures from Greece but replace the heads with their own; think of Rodin's leonine Balzac with the head of a Newt Gingrich or a Joseph Biden. All of this coexisted with a rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership — Rome's "special gift." And the fact is, the rhetoric reflected an undeniable reality: Rome held up its end.
Inside the Bubble
Washington, too, sees leadership as its special gift, though it did not always. For more than a century it was very much a provincial southern town. The Washington of Henry Adams's Democracy (1880) is a city of pinched horizons, not the center of anything. There's plenty of religion and corruption and politicking and small-mindedness in the novel, but no sense at all of America on a world stage. Like Rome, Washington changed character suddenly: its Augustan phase began only in the twentieth century and accelerated after the Depression and World War II, spurred by new social ambitions at home and new security obligations abroad. In the eyes of nostalgic proponents of small government, the Rubicon was crossed with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore to spend ever larger amounts of money. In the eyes of those nostalgic for a time when America could hide behind two oceans, the symbolic point of no return is the construction of the Pentagon, rushed to completion in 1943 and still the world's largest office building.
All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capital's own version of Rome's annona — the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nation's tax payments to the city. The keystroking civil servants at the federal Financial Management Service, who gather it all in electronically, are Washington's equivalent of the longshoremen at Ostia. The never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere else in America. Federal employment may no longer be growing — the federal payroll in the Washington region is about 360,000 — but this is in essence a convenient deceit, to make the size of government seem contained. An even larger number of people in the Washington area — about 400,000 — work for private companies that are doing actual government work; like the baker Eurysaces, they're living directly off the annona. H. Ross Perot, the anti-government maverick, made his fortune this way, supplying data systems to an expanding federal government. (He deserves a marble tomb in the shape of an old-fashioned computer punch card.) An additional quarter of a million people in the region feed off government directly or indirectly: the lawyers and lobbyists, the wonks and accountants, the reporters and caterers and limousine drivers and panegyrists, and all the aides and associates whose job it is to function as someone else's brain. Every week a dozen or so pages of the Washington magazine National Journal detail the comings and goings of executives in categories like "image makers," "think tanks," "lobby shops," "interest groups" — denizens of the smoked-glass office blocks on K Street, Washington's own Street of the Dark Shops. Washington simply doesn't look like the rest of America. It's richer, better educated, more professional — number 1 in the country in median income, and in the percentage of college graduates, of women in the work force, and of two-earner families. Its professional classes are largely insulated from economic conditions in the rest of the country. As the analyst Joel Garreau has observed, "Only the residents of Washington, reaping the benefits of being at the center of the Imperium, fail to view this as bizarre."
Washingtonians see themselves as the masters of the oikumene. When Washington appears in novels these days, it's the Washington that plays the Great Game of foreign affairs and espionage, not the Washington that deals with grubby domestic issues. It's the Washington of Jack Ryan, not Mr. Smith. One analysis of Washington phone books found that listings beginning with the word "international" had increased two and a half times as fast in the second half of the twentieth century as those beginning with "national." Although Washington does not have a marble omphalos, the president has his finger on something else that gets everyone's attention: "the button," the one that controls our nuclear arsenal. The president of the United States goes by the acronym POTUS, subliminally evoking potency (from potens, the Latin word for "powerful"). For years he was also "the leader of the free world." Now that there is no longer an unfree world, at least officially, the president is simply "the most important man in the most important city in the world." That turn of phrase attaches itself like a limpet to anything in sight. Ads for one Washington bank have described it as "the most important bank in the most important city in the world." The general manager of Washington's power-lunch restaurant The Palm has been called "the most powerful man at the most powerful restaurant in the most powerful city in the world." And hold on: maybe it's not just "the world." As President Bill Clinton prepared for his inauguration in 1993, the Washington Post published a four-part series called "A Newcomer's Guide to the Most Important City in the Universe."
The sacred boundary of the city of Rome was known as the pomerium. Washington's pomerium is of course the Beltway, and "inside the Beltway" has long been conventional argot for the city's special sense of self; "outside the Beltway" means, in effect, "the provinces," "the hinterland." Even time is held captive within Washington's pomerium: the atomic master clock at the Naval Observatory, in the heart of the city, defines the meaning of "now" for cell phones and satellites, computers and cruise missiles. When Washington's atomic clock makes an adjustment, even a billionth of a second, time obeys. "Once within the confines of the Capitol complex," the late Meg Greenfield explained, "most people come to accept its standards, live by its rules, honor its imperatives." They also "start referring to the rest of the country (without quite realizing what the term conveys) as 'out there.' " Washington itself, though, is the outlier — an anomaly among American cities. It is not a great cultural capital, just as Rome wasn't; it must import its artists and actors, its rhetoricians, its scholars, its thinkers. Architecturally it is without great distinction, using its past as a kind of spolia — erecting new buildings behind old façades (the practice is known as "façodomy"). It's hard to avoid the atmosphere of conspicuous striving — in the slightly overdone formal invitations for every social event, in the leather-and-globe furnishings of offices and studies, in the advertisements for cosmetic surgery in high-end local magazines — and of muted cultural defensiveness. There always seems to be a moment at Washington gatherings when some mildly fortified Oxbridge expatriate begins muttering about how it falls to Britain "to play Athens to your Rome." Washington's wounded riposte would echo that of Julius Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra: "What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art?"
Washington's life-support system is maintained not by one annona but by two. The second comes in the form of information — information about everything, public or proprietary, opensource or top-secret, a vast ingathering from all over America and the world to this one place, where it is stored, minced, parceled out, analyzed, palpated, twisted, packaged, shared, and deployed. (Or, in some cases, withheld or destroyed.) William Petty's seventeenth-century Political Arithmetick, which used statistics to compare the economic and military resources of England with those of Holland and France, marked a revolution in government. Information has become the brick of the modern state, and the demand for it in Washington is impossible to satisfy. In 2002 the government launched a program known as Total Information Awareness, whose name sums up its aims, to be pursued through electronic and other means. Justified on national-security grounds, and run out of the Defense Department, the program encountered opposition because of privacy concerns, and was said to have been shut down. But many of its components continue under other names. As all roads once led to Rome, all computer trunk lines lead to Washington. In locations throughout the city — on Capitol Hill, in the White House, in the offices of defense contractors and political lawyers, there are secure redoubts known as "SCIF rooms"; the acronym, pronounced "skiff," stands for "sensitive compartmentalized information facility." These are special sites, protected against eavesdropping, where information of utmost gravity can be imparted to those select few with clearance to receive it. One participant in SCIF discussions says, "Those of us who've been in those rooms long to be in them again."
In the Ellipse just south of the White House stands a granite Zero Milestone, intended to be Washington's version of Rome's Golden Milestone, the symbolic central reference point from which all things are measured. Well, it isn't our central reference point at all — no one has ever heard of it, though you could argue that modern America began on this very spot. This was the place from which Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1919, set out to lead the army's "transcontinental motor convoy" across America. By the time Eisenhower reached San Francisco, sixty-two days later, he understood that America needed what Rome had possessed, a network of good public roads. When he became president, he created the interstate highway system. Tourists pay no attention to the Zero Milestone at all, and yet our own descent into hell started right there.
Washington's real focal point is provided by the Washington press corps, which provides the magnifying lens through which the capital is seen. Increasingly, the national and international news cycles are set by journalists and media executives inside the Beltway. If you count by the minute, as much as 30 percent of the nightly network news is datelined Washington, and most of that coverage is built around official sources. Of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on the three major networks from September of 2002 through February of 2003 (that is, during the run-up to the war), 380 were reported from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department — as opposed to, for instance, any European capitals, or Middle Eastern capitals, or the United Nations, or Iraq itself. The weekly Friday-evening and Sunday-morning political talk shows begin with a musical flourish that evokes imperial trumpets, and the words "From Washington . . ." The analysts offer what James Wolcott has called a "luxury-skybox view" of national affairs:
Assurance fluffs up their every pronouncement, because they have permanent thrones . . . Not having to answer to angry constituents, they make everything sound easy. They dispatch imaginary troops overseas as if snapping their fingers for a taxi. Welfare cuts? No problem. Slash government payrolls?
Make it so.
"The week" — meaning the political week in Washington, and in essence meaning the president's week — has long been the basic formal unit of journalistic time (has POTUS had a good week? a bad week?), although with the Internet and round-the-clock cable news, the half-life of particular stories keeps getting shorter and shorter. The ephemeral nature of "importance" in the capital is symbolized by the "Zeitgeist Checklist," in the Washington Post, which rates the urgency of various issues — immigration, same-sex marriage, Iraq — as if they were items on a bestseller list (current rank, last week's rank, weeks on list). It's done skillfully, with practiced irony. But it works only because in this instance the ironic and the real overlap completely.
In Rome at its height all social and political life was derived ultimately from the imperial court; and only through access to the court could those men of influence known as suffragatores control jobs and resources. In their day the names of suffragatores like Libanius and Themistus and Fronto were as expeditious as those of Vernon Jordan and Robert Barnett in our own. Money fuels the system, of course — no surprise there. In the days of the republic, when Rome still had functioning electoral elements, the inexorable creep of lobbying and vote-buying induced pathetic fits of "campaign-finance reform," such as placing limits on the numbers of people a candidate could invite to banquets, on how much a candidate could spend on food and drink, and on where the banquets could be held. As Washington would discover to its own great relief, the only effect of such measures was to prompt the discovery of new loopholes.
The degree to which the world inside the pomerium has become a hermetically sealed system is taken for granted. Jimmy Carter thought of Washington as an island (and was thrown off it). Eisenhower complained that everyone in Washington "has been too long away from home." The occasional acknowledgment of how isolating Washington is changes nothing. Newsweek ran a cover story in 2005 called "Bush in the Bubble," because the president and his advisers seemed to be living inside a membrane that kept certain viewpoints in and certain realities out. The description fits any recent administration, though this one more than most. Documents pertaining to Vice President Dick Cheney's travel requirements became public in 2006, revealing that when he entered a new hotel room he wanted all the television sets already turned on and tuned in to the ideologically congenial Fox News. (With the hiring last year of the Fox News anchor Tony Snow as the White House spokesman, the circuit has been closed.) To keep the membrane in good repair, the vice president has required crowds behind rope lines, waiting to shake his hand, to cleanse themselves with antibacterial gel.
Pliny the Elder describes the marvels of Rome's drainage system, the sewers leading down from the seven hills into the central Cloaca Maxima, which another Roman observer once called "the receptacle of all the off-scourings of the city." Washington now drains into the blogosphere, another engineering marvel. In the larger scheme of things, how important were the personnel changes at the White House last year, which removed Scott McClellan as press secretary and took away one of Karl Rove's jobs? They came at a moment when the price of oil had reached $75 a barrel, Iran was pursuing plans to build a nuclear bomb, and the war in Iraq offered a prospect of perpetual carnage, but for a week the swirl of opinion in Washington blogs — scores of sites, hundreds of links, tens of thousands of words every day — centered mainly on those White House personnel changes, and who won and who lost, and how prescient (or asleep) the bloggers themselves had been. Archaeologists excavating the drains of the Colosseum have found the bones of exotic animals and the remains of stadium food. Archaeologists dredging the Washington blogosphere will discover dense strata of self-reference: "as I said this morning . . . ," "as I predicted last week . . . ," "I'll say it again . . . ," "to repeat . . ."
Within any closed, insular system, the competitive pressure for status becomes intense. Edward Gibbon, in a typically tart moment, took note of Roman officialdom's taste for fancy forms of address: "They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames, and curiously select the most lofty and sonorous appellations . . . which may impress the ears of the vulgar with astonishment and respect." Washington titles do not approach the grandeur sought by North Korea's Kim Jong Il ("Saint of All Saints," "Lodestar of the Twenty-first Century"). But consider this: during the Kennedy administration only twenty-nine people held the coveted title of "assistant," "deputy assistant," or "special assistant" to the president; by the time Bill Clinton left office, there were 141 such people. Unabashedly ambitious (Cicero maintained that the quest for gloria explained everything), the Romans spelled out their achievements with painstaking care in autobiographical commentarii when alive, and in detailed elogia by allies when dead; the self-serving, score-settling "Washington memoir" has a long pedigree. In his letters you can watch Cicero hire buyers and decorators to make his villa outside Rome into a statement of good taste and great influence. He would have been an avid consumer of the American capital's glossy shelter and real-estate magazines. ("Its spectacular glass and columned façade speaks of power and professionalism," says one ad for Washington office space.) The Washington world of public relations "handlers" and of "strategic communications" had a counterpart in Rome, where applause in the law courts could be bought and sold at standard rates. When a Roman was awarded an official triumph through the streets of the capital — the pinnacle of public achievement — painted renderings of his deeds were carried along in procession: a mobile version of that Washington fixture, the "I love me" wall, with its photographs of the triumphator gripping hands with the mighty. The quintessential Washington text may in fact be a Roman one, Cato the Elder's self-promotional speech titled "On His Own Virtues."
The omphalos syndrome is not just a curiosity — it leads to isolation and a view of yourself and the world that can be sharply at odds with the true state of affairs. Rome actually had more insulation against the consequences than Washington does. Roman emperors traveled continually, whether to wage wars or just to see the empire for themselves; they could be absent from Rome for years at a time. Moreover, for all his power, a Roman emperor could be an oddly passive figure. In his magisterial study of how Roman emperors did their jobs, the historian Fergus Millar describes what might be called an "in-box imperium." The majority of an emperor's time was spent simply considering petitions and then rendering decisions — often in person, with supplicants from all over the empire standing before him to state their business. His time was not spent dreaming up social programs, defending civil rights, or reinventing government; any talk of pressing toward a New Frontier would have been meant literally — adding territory. Finally, the empire's far-flung parts were run by capable proconsuls of high stature, their autonomy enhanced by great distance and poor communications. The Roman mindset — center of the world! — might be a palpable reality, but in practice the nature of government put limits on its scope.
In Washington it's exactly the opposite: the nature of American government amplifies the mindset of the capital. A president is deemed a failure if he is not pushing an activist agenda. He is therefore wary of being seen as "detached," wants to be seen as "hands-on." The president spends most of his time in the capital, and even on his many short trips he remains largely isolated from ordinary people. The machinery of government centered on Washington — hundreds of agencies, millions of workers — had no counterpart in Rome. The machinery is there to be used, and a president has access to all of it. Modern communications ensure that no job is beyond potential presidential supervision, even when decentralization and autonomy might be all to the good. Lyndon Johnson personally selected bombing targets in Vietnam. The commanders of the failed military rescue mission in Iran, in 1980, had to check with Jimmy Carter's White House by radio every step of the way. With its vast political databases a modern White House can tailor specific messages to individual households everywhere, as easily as VISA or Comcast can, reflecting a Washington presumption that "out there" is subject to manipulation from the center.
In America, then, as a practical matter, the workings of Washington encourage the idea that the world is small, that society is malleable, and that the capital's stance is paramount. All things begin in the capital, the prime mover of all change. You see traces of this idea in everything from the War on Poverty, in the 1960s, to the Clinton health-insurance plan, in the 1990s. In foreign policy the idea makes itself felt as resistance to multilateral arrangements (such as the treaties to reduce atmospheric pollution and to ban land mines and antiballistic missiles) and as faith in unilateral action (such as pre-emptive war). Across the board it fosters the conviction that assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is. Thus, in the most recent federal budget, $20 million has been set aside for an eventual "day of celebration" marking American victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Roman moment captures the spirit: in 476 A.D., not long after the last emperor was deposed and the empire in the West had come to an end, the Roman Senate ordered new coins to be struck. The coins bore the legend "Roma Invicta" — "Rome Unconquered."
Excerpt from Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. Copyright © 2007 by Cullen Murphy. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Picture This, Blondies 1978 single was taken from which number one album? | Cullen Murphy Reads 'Are We Rome?' : NPR
Cullen Murphy Reads 'Are We Rome?'
June 18, 200712:00 AM ET
Linda Kulman
Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy helped steer the magazine through a major overhaul; he recently moved to Vanity Fair. hide caption
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Atlantic Monthly editor Cullen Murphy helped steer the magazine through a major overhaul; he recently moved to Vanity Fair.
Murphy Highlights
On American (and Roman) identity
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On privatization in Rome and in the U.S.
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Hear Murphy read and discuss his book
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Book Tour is a new Web feature and podcast . Each week we present leading authors of fiction and nonfiction as they read from and discuss their work.
In Cullen Murphy's new book, Are We Rome? the author argues that in fact we are — just in unexpected ways. It's not so much America's tendency toward decadence and our astounding military might that make us like Rome. It's the dangerous blurring of public and private responsibilities, paired with an inflated sense of power that can blind us to what's happening beyond our borders. Fortunately, Murphy's book displays no such hubris. The Boston Globe says it's a lot like the author himself: "reflective, curious, mild and measured."
Murphy's interests are nothing if not eclectic. His previous books include Rubbish!, an anthropological study of garbage; The World According to Eve, about women and the Bible; and the aptly named Just Curious, a collection of essays taken largely from his column in The Atlantic Monthly. And Murphy has put his degree in medieval history to good use: For 25 years, he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, illustrated by his father.
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Murphy is even better known as the unflappable editor who spent two decades helping define the Atlantic. But he moved to Vanity Fair last year rather than follow the Atlantic when it relocated to Washington.
Official Washington, like Rome, prizes its status as the city around which the world revolves, Murphy writes in Are We Rome? Yet there's a crucial difference. Where Rome was all about self-satisfaction, America prides itself on self-improvement. It's this optimistic quality, he believes, that may make it possible for us to reinvent ourselves instead of going the way of the ancient empire.
This reading of Are We Rome? took place in May 2007 at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
Excerpt: 'Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America'
June 18, 200712:00 AM ET
Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
by Cullen Murphy
List Price: $24.00
THE CAPITALS: Where Republic Meets Empire
The empire of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. Rome didn't "fall" the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. Rome itself wasn't touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along.
What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. There would never be another emperor of the West. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true — that the last emperor's name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome's founder. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms — in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today.
Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Monks sang vespers in a church nearby. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum," he later wrote. A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon's restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: "Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind. . . . The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist." Gibbon's life was in many ways a sad and lonely one, but The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was recognized at once as a masterwork, its sonorous cadences enlivened with a dry and biting wit. He observes gratuitously of a monk named Antiochus, for instance, that "one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant." Although his picture of the fall may be more cataclysmic than the immediate reality seems to have been, Gibbon established for people ever after that a page of history had been decisively turned. In the West, "decline and fall" has been a catchphrase and a source of anxiety ever since.
The city of Washington, of course, also has a Capitoline Hill — Capitol Hill, named explicitly for its Roman forebear. The view to the west takes in a vast expanse of classical porticoes and marble monuments; gilded chariots and curtained litters would not seem out of place against this backdrop. Washington rose out of a malarial marsh on a river upstream from the coast, as Rome did. Its people, like the Romans, flee the sweltering city in August. The Romans cherished their myth of origin, the story of Romulus and Remus, and on the Palatine Hill you could be shown a thatched hut said to be the hut of Romulus — yes, the very one. Washington doesn't have anything quite like the hut of Romulus, but on Capitol Hill you can find sacred national touchstones of other kinds, such as the contents of Lincoln's pockets when he was assassinated. (They're in the Library of Congress.) Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient. Materialistic cultures easily forget that "mental outlook" is not some limp and passive construct, of interest chiefly to anthropologists. Mental outlook can drive events and change the world, as the rise of militant Islam makes plain. Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago it was a notion of republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it's a strutting sense of self and mission that Romans of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends and enemies alike. It's a pungent quality — an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces.
The comparison with Rome has always been on the minds of leaders in America's capital. It was celebrated when Washington was no more than a street plan, and inspired what might be called the Bad Virgil school of patriotic verse. ("On broad Potowmac's bank then spring to birth, / Thou seat of empire and delight of earth!") In the settlement's early years there was a tributary of the Potomac called Goose Creek; its name was changed by an aspirational local planter to Tiber Creek. The Jefferson Memorial, off on the Potomac River's edge, is a diminutive version of the Pantheon. Union Station, just below the Capitol, was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian. The Washington Monument recalls the obelisks brought to Rome after the conquest of Egypt. Colonnaded government buildings stretch for miles.
I doubt I'm the only person who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin. The Washington Monument — imagine it a millennium hence, a chipped and mottled spire, trussed with rusting braces. The stern pile of the Archives building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, the gothic National Cathedral on its distant hilltop, the turreted Smithsonian Castle on the Mall — they somehow invite you to see them as derelicts, rendered into darkly impish engravings by the hand of some future Piranesi. What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake? Pestilence? Pride? The end of air conditioning?
What Went Wrong
A page of history may have been turned in 476 A.D., at least for literary purposes, but it's not easy to pinpoint the moment of Rome's fall — just as, one day, it may not be easy to pinpoint the moment of America's. In many ways, "Rome" had already fallen — had evolved into something different from what it once was, and not always through violence — well before it ceased to exist as a formal political entity. It had once been pagan and by the end was largely Christian. A proud army made up of Romans had long since turned into a paid army made up of barbarians. A republic sustained by flinty yeomen had become a precarious autocracy administered by grasping bureaucrats. At the same time, in very concrete ways Rome didn't fall for centuries, if at all. The eastern half of the empire, the richest and most populous part, centered on Constantinople, survived for nearly another thousand years. In the realms of culture and law and infrastructure and language, the Roman Empire has endured much longer. We still use its alphabet, exploit its literary genres, inhabit its cities, preserve its architectural styles, and follow its schedule of holidays. In many respects the Catholic Church survives as a graft on the empire's stump. "Non omnis moriar" ("I shall not wholly die"), the Roman poet Horace proclaimed in one of his most famous odes. He was referring to his work, but he could just as well have been referring to the legacy of his civilization.
Rome began as a farming settlement on hilly portions of the eastern bank of the Tiber River. Tradition puts its founding at 753 B.C., and the Romans calculated the passage of years ab urbe condita — "from the founding of the city." The legendary origins of the Roman people go back even further, to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who with family and friends made his way to Italy after the fall of Troy. It's not easy to infer, even when tramping the most ancient parts of today's Rome, what the early settlement was like. Some musty nineteenth-century guidebooks are actually good at reconstructing the landscape — how steep and rugged the seven hills were, and how willows grew here and oak trees there, and where the ferries crossed the marshes, and how high the Tiber floods could rise. Several centuries as a monarchy gave way, in the sixth century B.C., to a republic, with a senate, consuls, and popular voting for some offices. The territory of Rome gradually expanded to encompass the rest of the Italian peninsula and outposts along the Mediterranean coast. With the conclusion of the Third Punic War against its great rival, Carthage, in northern Africa, in 146 B.C., Rome effectively controlled the Mediterranean world. It continued to grow in all directions, impelled by its military prowess, its administrative genius, and its compulsive sense of destiny.
The republic came to a de facto end in 31 B.C., after a century of social turmoil, constitutional crisis, and civil war. Vast Roman armies had thrown themselves against one another across the Mediterranean world. Emerging supreme from the carnage was Octavian, Julius Caesar's grandnephew, who in proto-Orwellian fashion symbolically "restored" the republic while in fact inaugurating the principate, a regime of one-person rule. The outward forms of republican government would be preserved in various ways right to the very end, a progressively meaningless nod to the past, but whatever the disavowals, Rome was now an imperial state. By the second century A.D., the all-powerful emperor ruled a domain that stretched from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Durable roads linked major and minor cities, defining routes still used today. Seaborne traffic flourished. In the absence of reliable records, one indirect way to gauge the growth in maritime commerce is through underwater archaeology, measuring the change over time in the number of Mediterranean shipwrecks — analogous to tracking the advance of industrialization by the level of pollutants in arctic ice cores. A survey of Roman-era wrecks off the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain yields only about fifty from the period 400–200 B.C., but three times that many from the first two centuries A.D. Ancient Rome held more than a million people; no European city would come close to it in size until the London of Shakespeare's time. The walls that eventually surrounded Rome extend nearly thirteen miles. I once spent the better part of two days walking the entire circuit, noting where the nineteen roads had entered the city, and the eleven aqueducts, and thinking how formidable those walls, forty feet high, must have looked to Alaric and his Visigoths. Little wonder that Alaric cut a deal to get inside.
The decline of Rome came in many forms — in military power, in civil order, in eloquence, in philosophy, in architecture, in trade. Going back to those shipwrecks: they fall off sharply after 200 A.D., and after 400 drop to the levels of half a millennium earlier. It would be a thousand years before seaborne trade returned to the Augustan level. Infrastructure started to degrade: there came a point when full-length columns of colored marble, which literally held up the empire, could no longer be transported to Rome from Greece and Turkey and Egypt. Agricultural methods deteriorated: archaeology indicates that cattle were smaller in the early Middle Ages than they were at the empire's prime. Although 476 has been accepted since Byzantine times as the moment of Rome's demise, there's an element of parlor game in the discussion. Maybe the end really came in 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome. Or maybe it came in 410, when the Visigoths sacked Rome. Or in 378, when a great Roman army was destroyed by barbarians at Adrianople. A racist theoretician in Nazi Germany discerned Rome's "first step toward chaos" in a law passed in the fifth century B.C. permitting patricians, the highest social class, to marry plebeians, the lowest.
"Let students of Rome's decline imagine themselves as medical examiners who have been confronted with a corpse," writes the classical historian Donald Kagan. "It is their duty first to establish the time of death and then the cause. It soon becomes apparent that the various historical practitioners who have examined the Roman remains have achieved remarkably little agreement on either question." In 1980, a German historian set out to catalogue all the explanations for the fall of Rome ever proposed, which include degeneracy and deforestation, too much bureaucracy and too much Christianity. (He cited 210 theories in all.) The Romans themselves continually lamented the unhappy state of their society — as Americans compulsively do — even under circumstances that in retrospect were not all that bad. "Now we suffer the evils of a long peace. Luxury hatches terrors worse than wars." That's Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., when the collapse of the Western empire lay more than three centuries ahead. Other writers were bizarrely sanguine, although trouble was just around the corner. "There will never be an end to the power of Rome," wrote the court poet Claudian, shortly before the city's sack by the Visigoths. Part of the problem of explaining "decline" is that, like "rise," it doesn't happen everywhere at the same rate or in the same way. Ronald Reagan declared the 1980s to be "morning again in America," but dawn looked a lot different in Silicon Valley than it did in Youngstown.
Still, looking at the range of explanations provides a montage of Rome's condition. There is, to begin with, the growing number of incursions into the empire by non-Roman peoples — that is, by the barbarians. Rome had always been adept at assimilating newcomers; until the rise of America, it was history's most successful multi-ethnic state. But the influx eventually became too much to handle, as the Huns, sweeping out from central Asia, drove more and more people south and west in front of them, and finally across the Rhine and the Danube and into the empire.
Another explanation: perhaps the culprit was simply a hollowed- out military, whose capacities were no longer up to the challenge of keeping the barbarians at bay. Related to this: Did a creeping pacifism come into play? ("We Christians defend the empire by praying for it," wrote one early theologian.) Some historians blame economic stagnation for the fall of Rome, or corruption, or manpower shortages, or the exhaustion of the soil, or the depredations of plague, or the more generalized problem, in one view, that "too few producers supported too many idle mouths." An implicitly eugenic argument points to the depletion of the elites by centuries of war and civil strife. You could look at the debilitating effects of a decline of civic spirit. Or at the rise in taxes, which took a greater toll on ordinary people than it did on the rich and influential, worsening an already invidious class divide. There was the impact of slavery, whose harmful consequences were moral and psychological as well as economic. And there was the chaos caused by the lack of a standard procedure for imperial succession, which was resolved frequently by civil war, crippling the government and weakening the empire's defenses. "Decadence" has always been a popular explanation, though in Rome's case the greatest decadence coincided with the greatest power. (Still, here's Richard Nixon on the subject: "When the great civilizations of the past became prosperous, when they lost the will to go on living and make progress, they fell victims to decadence, which in the long run destroys a culture. The United States is now entering this phase.") Some of the more preposterous theories explaining the fall of Rome happen also to be unforgettable. Everybody knows the one that credits lead poisoning from the pipes used in plumbing. Another explanation in this class: the onset of widespread impotence caused by hot water in the public baths. All told, decline-of-Rome explanations fall into two broad categories: either the empire killed itself (internal weaknesses) or it was killed by something else (external factors). Historians tilt one way or the other, but they also tend to cite the interplay of inside and outside forces rather than attributing Rome's demise to a single simple cause. As in Murder on the Orient Express, all the prime suspects shared in the deed.
The third century was a period of deep crisis, with one bad emperor after another (the standard obituary: "killed by his own soldiers") and continual barbarian pressures on the frontiers. The empire was rescued by Diocletian, a no-nonsense administrator who built up the legions and organized the state and its taxes around the need for security. He also created the system known as the tetrarchy, in which power was shared among two coemperors (East and West) and two subemperors-in-waiting, at a stroke mitigating the succession problem and providing enough leaders to command the various armies. From the late third century onward, emperors spent more and more time away with their legions, fending off trouble and settling in for years in subcapitals like Trier and Sirmium. But Rome was still the leading city of the empire and still the home of the senatorial aristocracy. It still enjoyed extraordinary privileges, and it still extracted great wealth from the rest of the empire.
The sack of the city by Alaric, in 410, was both a physical and a psychic blow. By arrangement the sack was an orderly and not especially bloody affair, its terms spelled out in advance. Alaric demanded all portable wealth, and when a member of the Roman legation asked what the Romans could keep, he replied, "Your lives." Rome's perimeter had not been breached by an enemy for eight hundred years. "The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished," wrote Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible, in faraway Jerusalem. Over time, wars and sieges took a toll on Rome's water supply — the aqueducts were cut and repaired, then cut and repaired again. The most reliable aqueduct proved to be the Aqua Virgo, which ran mostly underground. You can see an excavated piece of it, and hear the rush of water, under an indie cinema in one of the narrow back streets near the Trevi Fountain. Rome's dwindling population, maybe 80,000 in 600 A.D., withdrew from the fringes and began to cluster near the bend in the Tiber where the Aqua Virgo had its terminus, creating the maze of streets that gives today's city center its medieval character. Rome is a good place to reflect, post-Katrina, on how the failure of infrastructure can shape a community for a thousand years.
Well before its collapse, as skills declined and building materials became harder to get, Rome began to plunder itself for spolia, or "spoils," in a way that would seem edgily postmodern if it had been driven by academic theory rather than bitter necessity. The fourth-century Arch of Constantine contains bits and pieces carved in the second century (as the painter Raphael pointed out). Builders of churches and palaces used ancient structures as quarries. The original St. Peter's was supported by columns scavenged from Roman-era buildings; the Renaissance basilica that took its place used marble from the Colosseum. To bolster his claim to an imperial pedigree, Charlemagne imported architectural remains from Rome and Ravenna for his palace at Aachen, and even had some of the stonework fashioned to look like spolia from Rome, because it had so much cachet. Meanwhile, in the old imperial capital, blocks of marble and statues by the thousands were burned for lime. A memory of the smoky place where this was done, below the Capitoline Hill, is preserved in the name Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the Street of the Dark Shops. Large tracts of the urban heartland were turned over to pasture, and livestock grazed where Caesars had walked. The process of reversion will not mystify anyone who has visited modern Detroit and noticed trees sprouting on the roofs and ledges of abandoned buildings, or seen how vacant downtown lots are being reclaimed by a hardscrabble urban agriculture.
Such was the spectacle that presented itself to Gibbon on that day in 1764, as he sat looking out over what had once been the Forum and was now the Campo Vaccino, the Field of Cows. In a sentence sagging with judgment and resignation, Gibbon settled on no one cause for the empire's collapse: "Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight."
A decade later, in 1775, as Gibbon prepared to "oppress the public" (as he put it) with the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the British Empire faced a crisis of its own when the thirteen American colonies united in rebellion. Gibbon had celebrated the vaunted freedoms of the Romans, and mourned their loss. He was a friend of Adam Smith, who would become the patron saint of America's economic ideology, his face peering out from the neckties of capitalists. But Gibbon had no sympathy for the "criminal enterprize" of the American Revolution, and as a Tory member of Parliament he supported the campaign of military suppression. When he eventually changed his mind, it was on pragmatic grounds: "I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still farther the finest country in the World in the prosecution of a War, from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined." Gibbon never warmed to the rebellion. Visiting Paris during the war, he on one occasion was introduced to the ambassador from Britain's American colonies, Benjamin Franklin. Gibbon was reportedly officious and distant; in a letter he stresses that the meeting was "by accident." Sly, funny, self-confident in print, Gibbon in person was profoundly awkward. Franklin is said to have heightened his discomfort by offering to furnish Gibbon with some materials for his next book, about the decline and fall of the British Empire.
America's Turn
Gibbon may have had no place in his political cosmology for America, but America had a big place for Rome. An obsession with Roman antecedents could hardly have been helped, given the classical education all the Founding Fathers received. My window at the Boston Athenaeum, where I sit right now, looks out over a colonial graveyard, the Old Granary Burying Ground. Every literate person resting there would have known the fabled stories of Rome: the rape of the Sabine women; Horatio at the bridge; the sacred temple geese who gave the alarm and saved the Capitol; Caesar and Brutus on the Ides of March. These were as familiar to them as the D-Day landing or the march on Selma or the Watergate burglary or the convergence of Bill and Monica would be to Americans now.
The educated elite of the thirteen colonies were steeped in the Roman code of virtus. In this code there was little room for qualities that today hold pride of place in America. The Founders did not cherish therapeutic notions of self-actualization or self-esteem or "the real me." What mattered was adherence to duty as expressed in outward behavior. The very first Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, the so-called Athenaeum portrait, was for a time on display downstairs from where I work. The gaze Washington offers, painted from life, captures no interior spark; it's a serene mask of obligation. In Rome, virtus was inextricably bound up with the ideology of Rome's greatness. Here is the Roman legend as one historian sums it up: "A simple, hardy race of peasants, long uncontaminated by the seductive arts and manners of Greece, they held fast to their rustic virtues: sanctity of family life, sobriety of conduct and demeanour, a stern sense of discipline. . . . In consequence of these virtues the Romans achieved their mission, divinely inspired, to rule the world." These were seen to be the values of Rome especially in its republican days, and they were the values the Founding Fathers believed Americans at their best embodied. They're still the values we look back on wistfully.
The Roman who epitomized republican ideals was Marcus Porcius Cato, or Cato the Younger (95–46 B.C.), the great-grandson of the Cato who had urged his countrymen toward the Third Punic War with the declaration "Carthago delenda est!" — "Carthage must be destroyed!" Cato the Younger was a senator known for eccentric habits, grim austerity, and humorless rectitude — combine Mahatma Gandhi, John the Baptist, and Ralph Nader. He often went about in nothing more than a toga, without shoes or an undergarment. His relations with women were erratic and unhappy. He drank heavily when alone, though his public demeanor was abstemious and his lifestyle bereft of luxury. Cato was not a contented fellow, and was more admired than liked. But his stubborn adherence to Roman virtues and republican principles had no equal. Cato and Julius Caesar were bitter enemies, and Cato tirelessly warned his fellow Romans of Caesar's designs on power. When Caesar eventually triumphed, Cato sought to commit suicide by stabbing himself. He was discovered, and the wounds were bound up, but Cato ripped off the bandages and bled to death; he did not want to give Caesar the satisfaction of sparing his life.
Cato's stand against tyranny echoed down the ages. One of the most popular plays in eighteenth-century America was Joseph Addison's Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Today it is nearly unreadable, unrelenting in its uplift and cloying in its nobility, but its tidy verses once spoke as powerfully to Americans as Arthur Miller's The Crucible does now. Its influence is stamped indelibly on the rhetoric of the Revolution. Nathan Hale's "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country" is, in essence, a line from Addison's Cato. So is Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death."
Rome set not just a moral example but a practical one. The Founding Fathers had overthrown a great empire, and now they looked to preimperial Rome for republican political models — in particular for ideas about "checks and balances" that could help preserve that form of government. Cicero had written, "I consider the most effective constitution to be that which is a reasonably blended combination of three forms — kingship, aristocracy, and democracy." Rome's republican government vested these functions in its two consuls, who shared executive power and could serve for only a year; in a senate, made up of the highborn, who served for life; and in the populus,the people, who could vote on certain matters. This regime promised a government, Cicero thought, with "an equilibrium like a well-trimmed boat." The checks and balances were taken to such an extreme that if both consuls were leading troops in battle, each took charge on alternate days (a pushmi-pullyu procedure that proved fatal at the Battle of Cannae). Roman precedents were invoked time and again as the drafters framed America's new Constitution. Some of them, of course, were sobering: everyone was aware that Cicero's well-trimmed boat had eventually foundered. Benjamin Franklin's famous remark, when asked as he emerged from Independence Hall what kind of government America now had — "A republic, if you can keep it" — represented a cautionary reference to the unhappy fate of Rome. That, at any rate, is how his listeners at the time would have heard it.
George Washington was the epitome of America's Roman ideal. He was unyielding in his embrace of public virtue, supplementing Roman standards of behavior with the famous "Rules of Civility" written out in his own hand in a schoolboy copybook. ("Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present." "When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it.") The Romans were obsessed with surveying, an understandable preoccupation for a people expanding into three continents; Washington's first career was as a surveyor — his country was expanding too. Washington knew his Roman history: an invoice survives for an order from an English dealer of "A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy, neatly finished and bronzed with copper, three pounds, three shillings" — a sculpture of Rome's founding legend for the mantelpiece of America's own founder. At Valley Forge, Washington ordered up a production of Addison's Cato for his frostbitten army, and attended the performance himself.
After the Revolution, sidestepping suggestions of kingship and returning to his beloved Mount Vernon, Washington was hailed as America's Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman of the mid fifth century b.c. who farmed a small plot of land across the Tiber from Rome. As the story goes, Rome was under assault by some neighboring tribes, its army surrounded and on the verge of annihilation. The Romans voted to empower a dictator to lead them out of crisis, and sent word to Cincinnatus, who put aside his plough and came to the city's aid.
In two days he brought the Romans in sight of the combined armies; he formed his line of battle, and after reminding them what they were to fight for he led them onto the charge with such resistless impetuosity that he obtained a complete victory and gave, as it were, a new life to his country's liberties. Soon as this great work was done, he took an affectionate leave of his gallant army and returned to cultivate his four acres.
That's the conclusion of the Cincinnatus tale as recounted not by some Roman chronicler but by Parson Weems, whose best-selling Life of Washington was published soon after Washington's death. In a work commissioned for the Capitol rotunda a few decades later, the sculptor Horatio Greenough produced a massive marble Washington in a classic Roman pose, seated, the toga draped to reveal a bare chest. With his left hand Washington offers his sword back to the people, as Cincinnatus might have done. This sculpture now dominates an entryway at the Smithsonian — it was so heavy that it had to be moved from the Capitol before it fell through the floor. The Cincinnatus reference is probably lost on most visitors: Washington looks like a man in a sauna, asking for a towel.
The Roman ideal ran deep in America for decades. People were so steeped in Cicero that up to the Civil War, the stock form of public presentation was the formal oration. As America began to spread across the continent, and to emerge as an economic power, worries only grew that the country was destined to repeat the Roman story of imperial temptation and humbling decline — worries captured in the painter Thomas Cole's allegorical series The Course of Empire, produced in the 1830s. It's not subtle. The series begins with an idyllic depiction of the state of nature, then portrays a moment of imperial sunshine in all its vainglorious fullness, and ends with a painting titled Desolation.
Not subtle — but not fantasy, either. It's hardly a stretch to find modern relevance in the example of the Roman Republic, overwhelmed by the consequences of its own growing size and might, and by its perceived national-security needs. In 68 B.C. a pirate attack on Rome's port of Ostia prompted the terrified Romans to cede far-reaching powers to one man, Pompey. There would be no turning back. The need to act boldly and react quickly; to ferret out enemy plans while keeping your own hidden; to show a public face of resolve, concealing doubt and dissent — in Rome, over time, all these mandates produced a change in character. They have done so in America, too. You could point to the expanding power of the presidency relative to the other two branches of government; or to restrictions on personal freedom in exchange for personal safety; or to a culture of secrecy; or to the pervasive influence of the military and the security apparatus. People concerned that America may drift away from a republic and toward a principate, as Rome did, took little comfort from the news, reported and confirmed in the summer of 2004, that the government was "reviewing a proposal" to postpone national elections in the event of some sort of terrorist attack; or from the recent Supreme Court ruling that the police may enter homes without knocking; or from the attorney general's threat to use espionage laws to prosecute reporters for publishing leaks of classified information. Nor have their spirits been lifted by the inroads of a relatively new legal argument known as "unitary executive theory." Among other things, it holds that each branch of the government — not just the Supreme Court — has the right to interpret the Constitution, and it asserts an unprecedented view of the extent of presidential power, including the power to make war without the consent of Congress.
This is not in fact just theory. One concrete result has been the president's practice of appending a "signing statement" to legislation when it comes to him for signature, indicating his intention to enforce the legislation according to his own specific interpretation — if the legislation is enforced at all. Up through the year 2000 American presidents had collectively employed signing statements on about 600 occasions. In the six years since then, the president has added signing statements more than 750 times, on laws pertaining to such matters as the use of torture, whistle-blowing by government employees, the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, and the obligation of the executive branch to provide Congress with certain kinds of information.
The Roman Empire's penchant for official secrecy was remarked on by the historian Cassius Dio, who complained that because so much had been done behind closed doors, he couldn't get access to materials he needed to write his narrative. He would not have been surprised by the dogged White House effort, which continues in the courts, to conceal the details of the administration's early planning on energy policy and the names of those who participated in it. The Romans had nothing like the technological means that modern America has to create a true surveillance state, but the empire's undercover operatives — the frumentarii (who turn up in the video game The Regia) and, later, the agentes in rebus — were diligent. In common parlance these operatives were known as the curiosi. The philosopher Epictetus, who was born in Rome and knew firsthand the dangers of thinking freely (he was sent into exile), presents a vignette of entrapment in one of his writings: "A soldier, dressed like a civilian, sits down by your side and begins to speak ill of Caesar, and then you, too, just as though you had received from him some guarantee of good faith in the fact that he began the abuse, tell likewise everything you think, and the next thing is — you are led off to prison in chains." Our own curiosi have big ears. The National Security Agency, in a program known as Echelon, sifts tens of millions of telephone and data communications every day, searching for any of hundreds of words or phrases that may hint at terrorist activity. Some of them ("White House," "mail bomb" "kill the president") are self-explanatory; others ("Roswell," "blowfish," "Bill Gates") may be counterintuitive. Another program, which bore the name Carnivore until someone started to worry, much too late, about the potential public-relations fallout, essentially conducts wiretaps on e-mail. More recently the national-security apparatus has begun wiretapping the international phone calls of thousands of Americans without legal oversight — on presidential orders, and despite the expressed will of Congress. It has also been collecting the telephone records of tens of millions more.
Then as now, legislatures seem to be the first to go. The Roman Senate remained a millionaire's club and a source of public servants, but it atrophied as a true deliberative body. Foreign policy and war-making power became the sole province of the emperor and his amici, his closest advisers. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: "The Congress shall have the power to declare war," a power entrusted to the legislature because, as James Madison observed, the temptation to use force would otherwise "be too great for any one man." A modern historian writes, "The debates in the convention, the later writings of delegates to that meeting, and speeches in the state conventions that voted on ratification of the Constitution leave no doubt that the president's title and role as commander in chief gave him no powers that Congress could not define or limit." The last time Congress authorized the use of force through a declaration of war was more than six decades ago, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then the United States has committed large numbers of troops to major combat operations on fourteen occasions, from Korea and Vietnam through Grenada, the Balkans, and two wars in Iraq, but no president has ever sought a true declaration of war. Power has shifted decisively toward the executive, as the executive understands. George W. Bush made the point this way: "I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain. . . . I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
The Omphalos Syndrome
Something happens to imperial capitals, something psychological and, over time, corrosive and incapacitating. It happens when the conviction takes hold that the capital is the source and focal point of reality — that nothing is more important than what happens there, and that no ideas or perceptions are more important than those of its elites. This conviction saturated imperial Rome, as it saturates official Washington — it's the most important trait the capitals share. The conviction is understandable, up to a point. When powerful states are in an expansive phase, the wishes and ideas of the rest of the world seem secondary, inconsequential. In the capital itself, this frame of mind may far outlast the circumstances that produced it, taking on a life of its own that everyone has an interest in perpetuating. It can prove impossible to eradicate fully. In Italy, manhole covers are still stamped with the letters that once appeared on imperial standards and marble monuments: SPQR, for Senatus Populusque Romanus — the Senate and the Roman People. Modern Russia can't suppress the reflexes of the old Soviet empire, just as the Soviets couldn't suppress the reflexes of imperial Russia. Britain no longer has much of an empire, but many institutions in London retain a noticeably imperial cast of mind. The spirit of the Raj is not absent from the tone of The Economist.
Rome labored under what has been called an "omphalos syndrome." The omphalos, from the Greek word for "navel," was a stone monument found in a number of ancient cities that supposedly marked the navel, or center, of the world. Rome's own version, the marble Umbilicus Romae, stood prominently in the Forum, right next to the Rostra. The marble facing is now gone, but a circular brick pile remains, to which tourists pay no attention at all, unaware that the entrance to the underworld, to Hades, was once believed to be right there, under those very bricks. The term "omphalos syndrome" originated in the study of old maps, and describes the tendency of people who "believe themselves to be divinely appointed to the centre of the universe," as one geographer explains, to place themselves in the middle of the maps they draw. The Romans weren't shy about asserting this belief: they drove it home astutely by means of what today would be considered "branding." In the Forum, in the very center of Rome, they erected not only the official Umbilicus but also, a few yards away, a gilded column called the Golden Milestone, where all the empire's roads symbolically converged. Augustus built a sundial the size of a football field in the Campus Martius, using an Egyptian obelisk to cast the shadow. It was dedicated, technically, to a divinity — to the sun — but on the birthday of Augustus, September 23, the obelisk's shadow pointed directly at the Altar of Peace, which celebrated the fruits of his rule. The message was unmistakable, one scholar concludes: "The whole universe now formed part of the new Augustan system."
In the second century A.D., a young rhetorician named Aelius Aristides delivered an oration in the Athenaeum, in Rome, possibly in front of the emperor himself. Aristides was a panegyrist, a court littérateur whose job it was to extol people in power. It is an occupational category that still exists in Washington. (Think of Peggy Noonan on Reagan, Sidney Blumenthal on Clinton, Ron Kessler on Bush, Midge Decter on Rumsfeld.) The description of Rome offered by Aristides embodies the city's self-satisfied outlook: "Here is brought from every land and sea all the crops of the seasons and each land, river, lake, as well as of the arts of the Greeks and the barbarians. . . . Whatever one does not see here is not a thing which has existed or exists." The architect Vitruvius took up the same theme: "Surely then it was a divine intelligence which placed the city of Rome in so perfect and temperate a country, with the intention that she should win the right to rule the world."
Rome, like Washington, was an economically pointless metropolis, a vast importer and consumer of an empire's riches rather than a producer of anything except words and administration (and the pungent cartloads of garbage that left the city every night). The downstream consequences of Rome's gargantuan appetites can be visualized, literally, even today. Take the basic need for building materials. Augustus would claim that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and the boast was not an idle one. But underneath that marble, and alongside it, mountains of brick remained. Rome's tenement houses, the insulae, were faced with brick, and so were the city walls and sewers and aqueducts. The brick was distinctive — square and thin, red-ochre in color. You recognize it everywhere in the ruins of the city, and if you come across it anywhere in the world, whether in York or Paris or Jerusalem, it always means one thing: Rome was here. The brick and lime for the city of Rome had to be baked and kilned, which required massive quantities of charcoal, which in turn required trees. A single burn of a limestone kiln could consume a thousand donkey loads of wood. The forests around Rome were felled, and then the forests beyond those forests. Ground cover gone, the soil washed from the hillsides and into the rivers. At the mouth of the Tiber, the shoreline pushed outward as accretions of soil built up over the centuries. The docks at Ostia had to constantly be extended to remain adjacent to the water, a process clearly visible now in aerial photographs. As the empire came to an end, so did the effort to keep ahead of nature. The original docks are now a mile from the sea, trapped in dry land, separated from shore by striations of silt.
The biggest component of the city's prodigious intake was something called the annona, an in-kind tax levied by Rome on everyplace else, and collected in the form of grain, which was used to provide free bread for most of Rome's inhabitants. At its peak the annona amounted to 10 million sacks of grain a year. The shipment of the annona from Spain, Egypt, and northern Africa to the docks at the Tiber's mouth, and then by barge up the river to Rome, was never-ending, like tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf. Any serious interruption could mean urban unrest to the point of violence. When conspirators wanted to bring down Cleander, the hated chief minister of the equally hated emperor Commodus, they manipulated grain supplies, causing shortages that led to riots. (Commodus "commanded that the head of Cleander should be thrown out to the people," Gibbon writes. "The desired spectacle instantly appeased the tumult.") Eventually the annona was expanded beyond grain to include olive oil and wine. The smashed amphorae these liquids came in were tossed in a dump near the Tiber wharves, creating a hill known today as Monte Testaccio, a hundred feet high. Warehouses the size of basilicas existed at every stage of the distribution system, and so, too, did opportunities for pilfering and corruption. If you think of the annona as tax revenue, which it was, then the revenue not only accomplished its stated purpose of feeding the city; it also supported large swaths of private-sector activity, from shipping to baking to crime. Some of this activity was encouraged with tax breaks and even grants of citizenship. There was great wealth to be had off government contracts. You can still see today, near the Porta Maggiore, in Rome, the huge marble tomb, in the shape of an old-fashioned bread oven, of a freedman named Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, who is described by an inscription as "baker, contractor, public servant." So large was the work force required for the baking of bread that people convicted of certain minor crimes were sentenced to hard labor in Rome's bakeries. As the empire began to contract, the annona remained the essential lifeline, preserved at all costs. By the fifth century a.d., only the link with North Africa remained unbroken. When Alaric laid siege to Rome, one of his first acts was to send his warriors to seize the docks at Ostia.
To see yourself at the center of everything requires a sense of what "everything" is — a geographic sense, in other words.Americans take such a thing for granted, aware as we are of the location of every place on earth. You can tap into the Global Positioning System with a cell phone. In Roman times geographic knowledge was primitive, though its political uses were not. The Romans called themselves "masters of the oikumene" — "masters of the known world" — long before they were able to depict the known world in any reliable way. But once they could, they erected large public maps showing Rome in the literal center, where it obviously had to be. The Roman Empire's vascular system was its network of roads. At regular points along every roadway in Italy marble markers announced to travelers the distance to the center of the world: to Rome. A monument in the capital schematically depicted the deployments of the imperial legions, arrayed in a circle centered on the capital — a precursor, in stone, of the blinking electronic displays of "readiness" in the Pentagon's situation room. Rome's sense of status and privilege would survive long after Roman emperors stopped living there — and, indeed, long after the empire was gone. It survives to this day in the idea of Rome as the Eternal City, and very literally in an ancient pronouncement that occurs every Easter, when the pope from his balcony in the Vatican delivers a homily that begins with the words of address "Urbi et orbi — "To the city and to the world."
Rome displayed the attributes of any great capital with more hubris than humility: the overweening self-regard, the presumption that it knew better than others, the surprising ignorance about foreign cultures, the languid arrogance, the competitive displays of wealth — all captured in the writings of Suetonius and Plutarch and Juvenal and others. The city's appetite for the wealth of the conquered knew few limits: as its rule spread to one place after another, a steady traffic in artwork made its way to the center. On occasion Roman grandees would obtain classical sculptures from Greece but replace the heads with their own; think of Rodin's leonine Balzac with the head of a Newt Gingrich or a Joseph Biden. All of this coexisted with a rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership — Rome's "special gift." And the fact is, the rhetoric reflected an undeniable reality: Rome held up its end.
Inside the Bubble
Washington, too, sees leadership as its special gift, though it did not always. For more than a century it was very much a provincial southern town. The Washington of Henry Adams's Democracy (1880) is a city of pinched horizons, not the center of anything. There's plenty of religion and corruption and politicking and small-mindedness in the novel, but no sense at all of America on a world stage. Like Rome, Washington changed character suddenly: its Augustan phase began only in the twentieth century and accelerated after the Depression and World War II, spurred by new social ambitions at home and new security obligations abroad. In the eyes of nostalgic proponents of small government, the Rubicon was crossed with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, in 1913, giving Washington the unimpeded power to levy an income tax and therefore to spend ever larger amounts of money. In the eyes of those nostalgic for a time when America could hide behind two oceans, the symbolic point of no return is the construction of the Pentagon, rushed to completion in 1943 and still the world's largest office building.
All life in Washington today derives ultimately from the capital's own version of Rome's annona — the continuous infusion not of grain and olive oil but of tax revenue and borrowed money. Instead of ships and barges there are banks, 10,000 of them designated for this purpose, which funnel the nation's tax payments to the city. The keystroking civil servants at the federal Financial Management Service, who gather it all in electronically, are Washington's equivalent of the longshoremen at Ostia. The never-ending flow of revenue creates a broad level of affluence that has no real counterpart anywhere else in America. Federal employment may no longer be growing — the federal payroll in the Washington region is about 360,000 — but this is in essence a convenient deceit, to make the size of government seem contained. An even larger number of people in the Washington area — about 400,000 — work for private companies that are doing actual government work; like the baker Eurysaces, they're living directly off the annona. H. Ross Perot, the anti-government maverick, made his fortune this way, supplying data systems to an expanding federal government. (He deserves a marble tomb in the shape of an old-fashioned computer punch card.) An additional quarter of a million people in the region feed off government directly or indirectly: the lawyers and lobbyists, the wonks and accountants, the reporters and caterers and limousine drivers and panegyrists, and all the aides and associates whose job it is to function as someone else's brain. Every week a dozen or so pages of the Washington magazine National Journal detail the comings and goings of executives in categories like "image makers," "think tanks," "lobby shops," "interest groups" — denizens of the smoked-glass office blocks on K Street, Washington's own Street of the Dark Shops. Washington simply doesn't look like the rest of America. It's richer, better educated, more professional — number 1 in the country in median income, and in the percentage of college graduates, of women in the work force, and of two-earner families. Its professional classes are largely insulated from economic conditions in the rest of the country. As the analyst Joel Garreau has observed, "Only the residents of Washington, reaping the benefits of being at the center of the Imperium, fail to view this as bizarre."
Washingtonians see themselves as the masters of the oikumene. When Washington appears in novels these days, it's the Washington that plays the Great Game of foreign affairs and espionage, not the Washington that deals with grubby domestic issues. It's the Washington of Jack Ryan, not Mr. Smith. One analysis of Washington phone books found that listings beginning with the word "international" had increased two and a half times as fast in the second half of the twentieth century as those beginning with "national." Although Washington does not have a marble omphalos, the president has his finger on something else that gets everyone's attention: "the button," the one that controls our nuclear arsenal. The president of the United States goes by the acronym POTUS, subliminally evoking potency (from potens, the Latin word for "powerful"). For years he was also "the leader of the free world." Now that there is no longer an unfree world, at least officially, the president is simply "the most important man in the most important city in the world." That turn of phrase attaches itself like a limpet to anything in sight. Ads for one Washington bank have described it as "the most important bank in the most important city in the world." The general manager of Washington's power-lunch restaurant The Palm has been called "the most powerful man at the most powerful restaurant in the most powerful city in the world." And hold on: maybe it's not just "the world." As President Bill Clinton prepared for his inauguration in 1993, the Washington Post published a four-part series called "A Newcomer's Guide to the Most Important City in the Universe."
The sacred boundary of the city of Rome was known as the pomerium. Washington's pomerium is of course the Beltway, and "inside the Beltway" has long been conventional argot for the city's special sense of self; "outside the Beltway" means, in effect, "the provinces," "the hinterland." Even time is held captive within Washington's pomerium: the atomic master clock at the Naval Observatory, in the heart of the city, defines the meaning of "now" for cell phones and satellites, computers and cruise missiles. When Washington's atomic clock makes an adjustment, even a billionth of a second, time obeys. "Once within the confines of the Capitol complex," the late Meg Greenfield explained, "most people come to accept its standards, live by its rules, honor its imperatives." They also "start referring to the rest of the country (without quite realizing what the term conveys) as 'out there.' " Washington itself, though, is the outlier — an anomaly among American cities. It is not a great cultural capital, just as Rome wasn't; it must import its artists and actors, its rhetoricians, its scholars, its thinkers. Architecturally it is without great distinction, using its past as a kind of spolia — erecting new buildings behind old façades (the practice is known as "façodomy"). It's hard to avoid the atmosphere of conspicuous striving — in the slightly overdone formal invitations for every social event, in the leather-and-globe furnishings of offices and studies, in the advertisements for cosmetic surgery in high-end local magazines — and of muted cultural defensiveness. There always seems to be a moment at Washington gatherings when some mildly fortified Oxbridge expatriate begins muttering about how it falls to Britain "to play Athens to your Rome." Washington's wounded riposte would echo that of Julius Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra: "What! Rome produces no art! Is peace not an art? Is war not an art? Is government not an art? Is civilization not an art?"
Washington's life-support system is maintained not by one annona but by two. The second comes in the form of information — information about everything, public or proprietary, opensource or top-secret, a vast ingathering from all over America and the world to this one place, where it is stored, minced, parceled out, analyzed, palpated, twisted, packaged, shared, and deployed. (Or, in some cases, withheld or destroyed.) William Petty's seventeenth-century Political Arithmetick, which used statistics to compare the economic and military resources of England with those of Holland and France, marked a revolution in government. Information has become the brick of the modern state, and the demand for it in Washington is impossible to satisfy. In 2002 the government launched a program known as Total Information Awareness, whose name sums up its aims, to be pursued through electronic and other means. Justified on national-security grounds, and run out of the Defense Department, the program encountered opposition because of privacy concerns, and was said to have been shut down. But many of its components continue under other names. As all roads once led to Rome, all computer trunk lines lead to Washington. In locations throughout the city — on Capitol Hill, in the White House, in the offices of defense contractors and political lawyers, there are secure redoubts known as "SCIF rooms"; the acronym, pronounced "skiff," stands for "sensitive compartmentalized information facility." These are special sites, protected against eavesdropping, where information of utmost gravity can be imparted to those select few with clearance to receive it. One participant in SCIF discussions says, "Those of us who've been in those rooms long to be in them again."
In the Ellipse just south of the White House stands a granite Zero Milestone, intended to be Washington's version of Rome's Golden Milestone, the symbolic central reference point from which all things are measured. Well, it isn't our central reference point at all — no one has ever heard of it, though you could argue that modern America began on this very spot. This was the place from which Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1919, set out to lead the army's "transcontinental motor convoy" across America. By the time Eisenhower reached San Francisco, sixty-two days later, he understood that America needed what Rome had possessed, a network of good public roads. When he became president, he created the interstate highway system. Tourists pay no attention to the Zero Milestone at all, and yet our own descent into hell started right there.
Washington's real focal point is provided by the Washington press corps, which provides the magnifying lens through which the capital is seen. Increasingly, the national and international news cycles are set by journalists and media executives inside the Beltway. If you count by the minute, as much as 30 percent of the nightly network news is datelined Washington, and most of that coverage is built around official sources. Of the 414 stories on Iraq broadcast on the three major networks from September of 2002 through February of 2003 (that is, during the run-up to the war), 380 were reported from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department — as opposed to, for instance, any European capitals, or Middle Eastern capitals, or the United Nations, or Iraq itself. The weekly Friday-evening and Sunday-morning political talk shows begin with a musical flourish that evokes imperial trumpets, and the words "From Washington . . ." The analysts offer what James Wolcott has called a "luxury-skybox view" of national affairs:
Assurance fluffs up their every pronouncement, because they have permanent thrones . . . Not having to answer to angry constituents, they make everything sound easy. They dispatch imaginary troops overseas as if snapping their fingers for a taxi. Welfare cuts? No problem. Slash government payrolls?
Make it so.
"The week" — meaning the political week in Washington, and in essence meaning the president's week — has long been the basic formal unit of journalistic time (has POTUS had a good week? a bad week?), although with the Internet and round-the-clock cable news, the half-life of particular stories keeps getting shorter and shorter. The ephemeral nature of "importance" in the capital is symbolized by the "Zeitgeist Checklist," in the Washington Post, which rates the urgency of various issues — immigration, same-sex marriage, Iraq — as if they were items on a bestseller list (current rank, last week's rank, weeks on list). It's done skillfully, with practiced irony. But it works only because in this instance the ironic and the real overlap completely.
In Rome at its height all social and political life was derived ultimately from the imperial court; and only through access to the court could those men of influence known as suffragatores control jobs and resources. In their day the names of suffragatores like Libanius and Themistus and Fronto were as expeditious as those of Vernon Jordan and Robert Barnett in our own. Money fuels the system, of course — no surprise there. In the days of the republic, when Rome still had functioning electoral elements, the inexorable creep of lobbying and vote-buying induced pathetic fits of "campaign-finance reform," such as placing limits on the numbers of people a candidate could invite to banquets, on how much a candidate could spend on food and drink, and on where the banquets could be held. As Washington would discover to its own great relief, the only effect of such measures was to prompt the discovery of new loopholes.
The degree to which the world inside the pomerium has become a hermetically sealed system is taken for granted. Jimmy Carter thought of Washington as an island (and was thrown off it). Eisenhower complained that everyone in Washington "has been too long away from home." The occasional acknowledgment of how isolating Washington is changes nothing. Newsweek ran a cover story in 2005 called "Bush in the Bubble," because the president and his advisers seemed to be living inside a membrane that kept certain viewpoints in and certain realities out. The description fits any recent administration, though this one more than most. Documents pertaining to Vice President Dick Cheney's travel requirements became public in 2006, revealing that when he entered a new hotel room he wanted all the television sets already turned on and tuned in to the ideologically congenial Fox News. (With the hiring last year of the Fox News anchor Tony Snow as the White House spokesman, the circuit has been closed.) To keep the membrane in good repair, the vice president has required crowds behind rope lines, waiting to shake his hand, to cleanse themselves with antibacterial gel.
Pliny the Elder describes the marvels of Rome's drainage system, the sewers leading down from the seven hills into the central Cloaca Maxima, which another Roman observer once called "the receptacle of all the off-scourings of the city." Washington now drains into the blogosphere, another engineering marvel. In the larger scheme of things, how important were the personnel changes at the White House last year, which removed Scott McClellan as press secretary and took away one of Karl Rove's jobs? They came at a moment when the price of oil had reached $75 a barrel, Iran was pursuing plans to build a nuclear bomb, and the war in Iraq offered a prospect of perpetual carnage, but for a week the swirl of opinion in Washington blogs — scores of sites, hundreds of links, tens of thousands of words every day — centered mainly on those White House personnel changes, and who won and who lost, and how prescient (or asleep) the bloggers themselves had been. Archaeologists excavating the drains of the Colosseum have found the bones of exotic animals and the remains of stadium food. Archaeologists dredging the Washington blogosphere will discover dense strata of self-reference: "as I said this morning . . . ," "as I predicted last week . . . ," "I'll say it again . . . ," "to repeat . . ."
Within any closed, insular system, the competitive pressure for status becomes intense. Edward Gibbon, in a typically tart moment, took note of Roman officialdom's taste for fancy forms of address: "They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames, and curiously select the most lofty and sonorous appellations . . . which may impress the ears of the vulgar with astonishment and respect." Washington titles do not approach the grandeur sought by North Korea's Kim Jong Il ("Saint of All Saints," "Lodestar of the Twenty-first Century"). But consider this: during the Kennedy administration only twenty-nine people held the coveted title of "assistant," "deputy assistant," or "special assistant" to the president; by the time Bill Clinton left office, there were 141 such people. Unabashedly ambitious (Cicero maintained that the quest for gloria explained everything), the Romans spelled out their achievements with painstaking care in autobiographical commentarii when alive, and in detailed elogia by allies when dead; the self-serving, score-settling "Washington memoir" has a long pedigree. In his letters you can watch Cicero hire buyers and decorators to make his villa outside Rome into a statement of good taste and great influence. He would have been an avid consumer of the American capital's glossy shelter and real-estate magazines. ("Its spectacular glass and columned façade speaks of power and professionalism," says one ad for Washington office space.) The Washington world of public relations "handlers" and of "strategic communications" had a counterpart in Rome, where applause in the law courts could be bought and sold at standard rates. When a Roman was awarded an official triumph through the streets of the capital — the pinnacle of public achievement — painted renderings of his deeds were carried along in procession: a mobile version of that Washington fixture, the "I love me" wall, with its photographs of the triumphator gripping hands with the mighty. The quintessential Washington text may in fact be a Roman one, Cato the Elder's self-promotional speech titled "On His Own Virtues."
The omphalos syndrome is not just a curiosity — it leads to isolation and a view of yourself and the world that can be sharply at odds with the true state of affairs. Rome actually had more insulation against the consequences than Washington does. Roman emperors traveled continually, whether to wage wars or just to see the empire for themselves; they could be absent from Rome for years at a time. Moreover, for all his power, a Roman emperor could be an oddly passive figure. In his magisterial study of how Roman emperors did their jobs, the historian Fergus Millar describes what might be called an "in-box imperium." The majority of an emperor's time was spent simply considering petitions and then rendering decisions — often in person, with supplicants from all over the empire standing before him to state their business. His time was not spent dreaming up social programs, defending civil rights, or reinventing government; any talk of pressing toward a New Frontier would have been meant literally — adding territory. Finally, the empire's far-flung parts were run by capable proconsuls of high stature, their autonomy enhanced by great distance and poor communications. The Roman mindset — center of the world! — might be a palpable reality, but in practice the nature of government put limits on its scope.
In Washington it's exactly the opposite: the nature of American government amplifies the mindset of the capital. A president is deemed a failure if he is not pushing an activist agenda. He is therefore wary of being seen as "detached," wants to be seen as "hands-on." The president spends most of his time in the capital, and even on his many short trips he remains largely isolated from ordinary people. The machinery of government centered on Washington — hundreds of agencies, millions of workers — had no counterpart in Rome. The machinery is there to be used, and a president has access to all of it. Modern communications ensure that no job is beyond potential presidential supervision, even when decentralization and autonomy might be all to the good. Lyndon Johnson personally selected bombing targets in Vietnam. The commanders of the failed military rescue mission in Iran, in 1980, had to check with Jimmy Carter's White House by radio every step of the way. With its vast political databases a modern White House can tailor specific messages to individual households everywhere, as easily as VISA or Comcast can, reflecting a Washington presumption that "out there" is subject to manipulation from the center.
In America, then, as a practical matter, the workings of Washington encourage the idea that the world is small, that society is malleable, and that the capital's stance is paramount. All things begin in the capital, the prime mover of all change. You see traces of this idea in everything from the War on Poverty, in the 1960s, to the Clinton health-insurance plan, in the 1990s. In foreign policy the idea makes itself felt as resistance to multilateral arrangements (such as the treaties to reduce atmospheric pollution and to ban land mines and antiballistic missiles) and as faith in unilateral action (such as pre-emptive war). Across the board it fosters the conviction that assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is. Thus, in the most recent federal budget, $20 million has been set aside for an eventual "day of celebration" marking American victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A Roman moment captures the spirit: in 476 A.D., not long after the last emperor was deposed and the empire in the West had come to an end, the Roman Senate ordered new coins to be struck. The coins bore the legend "Roma Invicta" — "Rome Unconquered."
Excerpt from Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. Copyright © 2007 by Cullen Murphy. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Who wrote the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? | SparkNotes: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Analysis of Major Characters
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Stephen Dedalus
Modeled after Joyce himself, Stephen is a sensitive, thoughtful boy who reappears in Joyce's later masterpiece, Ulysses. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though Stephen's large family runs into deepening financial difficulties, his parents manage to send him to prestigious schools and eventually to a university. As he grows up, Stephen grapples with his nationality, religion, family, and morality, and finally decides to reject all socially imposed bonds and instead live freely as an artist.
Stephen undergoes several crucial transformations over the course of the novel. The first, which occurs during his first years as Clongowes, is from a sheltered little boy to a bright student who understands social interactions and can begin to make sense of the world around him. The second, which occurs when Stephen sleeps with the Dublin prostitute, is from innocence to debauchery. The third, which occurs when Stephen hears Father Arnall's speech on death and hell, is from an unrepentant sinner to a devout Catholic. Finally, Stephen's greatest transformation is from near fanatical religiousness to a new devotion to art and beauty. This transition takes place in Chapter 4, when he is offered entry to the Jesuit order but refuses it in order to attend university. Stephen's refusal and his subsequent epiphany on the beach mark his transition from belief in God to belief in aesthetic beauty. This transformation continues through his college years. By the end of his time in college, Stephen has become a fully formed artist, and his diary entries reflect the independent individual he has become.
Simon Dedalus
Simon Dedalus spends a great deal of his time reliving past experiences, lost in his own sentimental nostalgia. Joyce often uses Simon to symbolize the bonds and burdens that Stephen's family and nationality place upon him as he grows up. Simon is a nostalgic, tragic figure: he has a deep pride in tradition, but he is unable to keep his own affairs in order. To Stephen, his father Simon represents the parts of family, nation, and tradition that hold him back, and against which he feels he must rebel. The closest look we get at Simon is on the visit to Cork with Stephen, during which Simon gets drunk and sentimentalizes about his past. Joyce paints a picture of a man who has ruined himself and, instead of facing his problems, drowns them in alcohol and nostalgia.
Emma Clery
Emma is Stephen's "beloved," the young girl to whom he is intensely attracted over the course of many years. Stephen does not know Emma particularly well, and is generally too embarrassed or afraid to talk to her, but feels a powerful response stirring within him whenever he sees her. Stephen's first poem, "To E— C—," is written to Emma. She is a shadowy figure throughout the novel, and we know almost nothing about her even at the novel's end. For Stephen, Emma symbolizes one end of a spectrum of femininity. Stephen seems able to perceive only the extremes of this spectrum: for him, women are either pure, distant, and unapproachable, like Emma, or impure, sexual, and common, like the prostitutes he visits during his time at Belvedere.
Charles Stewart Parnell
Parnell is not fictional, and does not actually appear as a character in the novel. However, as an Irish political leader, he is a polarizing figure whose death influences many characters in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. During the late nineteenth century, Parnell had been the powerful leader of the Irish National Party, and his influence seemed to promise Irish independence from England. When Parnell's affair with a married woman was exposed, however, he was condemned by the Catholic Church and fell from grace. His fevered attempts to regain his former position of influence contributed to his death from exhaustion. Many people in Ireland, such as the character of John Casey in Joyce's novel, considered Parnell a hero and blamed the church for his death. Many others, such as the character Dante, thought the church had done the right thing to condemn Parnell. These disputes over Parnell's character are at the root of the bitter and abusive argument that erupts during the Dedalus family's Christmas dinner when Stephen is still a young boy. In this sense, Parnell represents the burden of Irish nationality that Stephen comes to believe is preventing him from realizing himself as an artist.
Cranly
Stephen's best friend at the university, Cranly also acts as a kind of nonreligious confessor for Stephen. In long, late-night talks, Stephen tells Cranly everything, just as he used to tell the priests everything during his days of religious fervor. While Cranly is a good friend to Stephen, he does not understand Stephen's need for absolute freedom. Indeed, to Cranly, leaving behind all the trappings of society would be terribly lonely. It is this difference that separates the true artist, Stephen, from the artist's friend, Cranly. In that sense, Cranly represents the nongenius, a young man who is not called to greatness as Stephen is, and who therefore does not have to make the same sacrifices.
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In which U.S. state is the Painted Desert ? | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce | PenguinRandomHouse.com
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About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning."
James Joyce’s supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of a soul." For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader in his emerging consciousness, employing language that ranges from baby talk to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist’s manifesto. The result is a novel of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.
The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by Richard Brown.
About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Perhaps Joyce’s most personal work, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man depicts the intellectual awakening of one of literature’s most memorable young heroes, Stephen Dedalus. Through a series of brilliant epiphanies that parallel the development of his own aesthetic consciousness, Joyce evokes Stephen’s youth, from his impressionable years as the youngest student at the Clongowed Wood school to the deep religious conflict he experiences at a day school in Dublin, and finally to his college studies where he challenges the conventions of his upbringing and his understanding of faith and intellectual freedom. James Joyce’s highly autobiographical novel was first published in the United States in 1916 to immediate acclaim. Ezra Pound accurately predicted that Joyce’s book would "remain a permanent part of English literature," while H.G. Wells dubbed it "by far the most important living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing." A remarkably rich study of a developing young mind, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man made an indelible mark on literature and confirmed Joyce’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest and lasting writers.
About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substance while exploding its form, thereby inaugurating a literary revolution.
Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In an exuberantly inventive masterpiece of subjectivity, Joyce portrays his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Dublin and struggling through religious and sexual guilt toward an aesthetic awakening. In part a vivid picture of Joyce’s own youthful evolution into one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, it is also a moment in the intellectual history of an age.
About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man’s self-discovery by respecting its substance while exploding its form, thereby inaugurating a literary revolution.
Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In an exuberantly inventive masterpiece of subjectivity, Joyce portrays his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Dublin and struggling through religious and sexual guilt toward an aesthetic awakening. In part a vivid picture of Joyce’s own youthful evolution into one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, it is also a moment in the intellectual history of an age.
From the Hardcover edition.
About A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Published in 1916, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel.
‘Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics,’ wrote Alfred Kazin. ‘He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce’s passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists…. Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was, perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life…. By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for.’
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Praise
“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul.” –Richard Ellmann
“One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.” –H. G. Wells
“[Mr. Joyce is] concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad message through the brain, he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, though it be probability or coherence or any other of the handrails to which we cling for support when we set our imaginations free.” –Virginia Woolf
“[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will] remain a permanent part of English literature.” –Ezra Pound
With an Introduction by Richard Brown
About James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After… More about James Joyce
About James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After… More about James Joyce
About James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After… More about James Joyce
About James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After… More about James Joyce
About James Joyce
James Joyce, the twentieth century’s most influential novelist, was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. The oldest of ten children, he grew up in a family that went from prosperity to penury because of his father’s wastrel behavior. After… More about James Joyce
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Who wrote the novel The Picture of Dorian Grey? | SparkNotes: The Picture of Dorian Gray: Plot Overview
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Context
Character List
In the stately London home of his aunt, Lady Brandon, the well-known artist Basil Hallward meets Dorian Gray. Dorian is a cultured, wealthy, and impossibly beautiful young man who immediately captures Basil’s artistic imagination. Dorian sits for several portraits, and Basil often depicts him as an ancient Greek hero or a mythological figure. When the novel opens, the artist is completing his first portrait of Dorian as he truly is, but, as he admits to his friend Lord Henry Wotton, the painting disappoints him because it reveals too much of his feeling for his subject. Lord Henry, a famous wit who enjoys scandalizing his friends by celebrating youth, beauty, and the selfish pursuit of pleasure, disagrees, claiming that the portrait is Basil’s masterpiece. Dorian arrives at the studio, and Basil reluctantly introduces him to Lord Henry, who he fears will have a damaging influence on the impressionable, young Dorian.
Basil’s fears are well founded; before the end of their first conversation, Lord Henry upsets Dorian with a speech about the transient nature of beauty and youth. Worried that these, his most impressive characteristics, are fading day by day, Dorian curses his portrait, which he believes will one day remind him of the beauty he will have lost. In a fit of distress, he pledges his soul if only the painting could bear the burden of age and infamy, allowing him to stay forever young. After Dorian’s outbursts, Lord Henry reaffirms his desire to own the portrait; however, Basil insists the portrait belongs to Dorian.
Over the next few weeks, Lord Henry’s influence over Dorian grows stronger. The youth becomes a disciple of the “new Hedonism” and proposes to live a life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure. He falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress who performs in a theater in London’s slums. He adores her acting; she, in turn, refers to him as “Prince Charming” and refuses to heed the warnings of her brother, James Vane, that Dorian is no good for her. Overcome by her emotions for Dorian, Sibyl decides that she can no longer act, wondering how she can pretend to love on the stage now that she has experienced the real thing. Dorian, who loves Sibyl because of her ability to act, cruelly breaks his engagement with her. After doing so, he returns home to notice that his face in Basil’s portrait of him has changed: it now sneers. Frightened that his wish for his likeness in the painting to bear the ill effects of his behavior has come true and that his sins will be recorded on the canvas, he resolves to make amends with Sibyl the next day. The following afternoon, however, Lord Henry brings news that Sibyl has killed herself. At Lord Henry’s urging, Dorian decides to consider her death a sort of artistic triumph—she personified tragedy—and to put the matter behind him. Meanwhile, Dorian hides his portrait in a remote upper room of his house, where no one other than he can watch its transformation.
Lord Henry gives Dorian a book that describes the wicked exploits of a nineteenth-century Frenchman; it becomes Dorian’s bible as he sinks ever deeper into a life of sin and corruption. He lives a life devoted to garnering new experiences and sensations with no regard for conventional standards of morality or the consequences of his actions. Eighteen years pass. Dorian’s reputation suffers in circles of polite London society, where rumors spread regarding his scandalous exploits. His peers nevertheless continue to accept him because he remains young and beautiful. The figure in the painting, however, grows increasingly wizened and hideous. On a dark, foggy night, Basil Hallward arrives at Dorian’s home to confront him about the rumors that plague his reputation. The two argue, and Dorian eventually offers Basil a look at his (Dorian’s) soul. He shows Basil the now-hideous portrait, and Hallward, horrified, begs him to repent. Dorian claims it is too late for penance and kills Basil in a fit of rage.
In order to dispose of the body, Dorian employs the help of an estranged friend, a doctor, whom he blackmails. The night after the murder, Dorian makes his way to an opium den, where he encounters James Vane, who attempts to avenge Sibyl’s death. Dorian escapes to his country estate. While entertaining guests, he notices James Vane peering in through a window, and he becomes wracked by fear and guilt. When a hunting party accidentally shoots and kills Vane, Dorian feels safe again. He resolves to amend his life but cannot muster the courage to confess his crimes, and the painting now reveals his supposed desire to repent for what it is—hypocrisy. In a fury, Dorian picks up the knife he used to stab Basil Hallward and attempts to destroy the painting. There is a crash, and his servants enter to find the portrait, unharmed, showing Dorian Gray as a beautiful young man. On the floor lies the body of their master—an old man, horribly wrinkled and disfigured, with a knife plunged into his heart.
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| Oscar Wilde |
What type of creature is a Painted Lady? | The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde | Feedbooks
The Picture of Dorian Gray
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Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma… (more)
Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps."
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By what other name is the Flying Fox known? | Flying Foxes | About Bats
Flying Foxes
General Information
Flying-foxes (also called fruit bats) are members of a large group of mammals called BATS. There are microbats and megabats. Bats are the only group of mammals capable of sustained flight.
There are four recognized species of megabats on mainland Australia: The Little Red, Grey-headed, Black and Spectacled Flying-foxes. They have a very keen sense of smell and good eyesight, both of which are needed to locate their food during the night. Microbats use echolocation – a bit like hearing with pictures, they still use their eyes to see too. Flying foxes and microbats are protected native Australian species, it is illegal to cause them harm. Flying-foxes are usually found in coastal areas of melaleuca and casuarina swamps, mangroves, heath, dry and wet eucalypt forests, woodlands and rainforests. The little red flying fox can also be found further inland in arid and semi-arid areas. Flying-foxes all over Australia are increasingly on the move searching for new or existing food resources – their favorite foods, nectar and pollen from our native trees and plants.
Family life
Flying foxes only have one live young per year, which compared to other animals of their size, is a very low birth rate. The little red gives birth around April/May whilst the remaining three species give birth around October/November. The mothers carry their babies out each night to forage. The baby clings to the mothers underarm nipple with their mouths and hang onto her waist with their toes. They are carried by their mother for 4-5 weeks until too heavy to carry. The young is then left in the colony or the outlying trees of a colony and wait for their mother to return at dawn. They begin to fly at about 8-10 weeks and feed independently by about 12 weeks.
The bond between mother and baby is very strong, mothers who lose their babies to predators while off foraging will search the place they last saw their baby and continue calling for up to one week later. Females start breeding when they are about 15 months old. Males do not mature until around 3 years of age and they then form either paired or harem groups during the mating season. It is during this season that flying-foxes tend to be the noisiest due to the defending of territories. It is also during this time that the campsite appears to emit the strongest odor due to secretions from the male scent glands at his shoulders. He will rub this perfume on branches to mark his territory. The higher a male hangs in the tree and the smellier he is the more attractive he is to a mate. You need to think about this smell, it’s musky and sometimes strong after rain but it is not as bad as the smell of stepping in dog poo!
Campsites
Campsites are very important to the survival of flying-foxes, as this is where they are born, grow, form relationships and learn to survive. Campsites may be permanently or temporarily occupied throughout the year depending on the season and availability of food. Flying-foxes only have one live young per year. The Little red gives birth around April/May whilst the remaining three species give birth around October/November. The size of the campsite may also vary during the year, increasing when there is a good food source around or when mothers arrive to give birth to their young. Numbers may also increase if there is little food elsewhere or another campsite has been disturbed or destroyed. A decrease in numbers usually indicates poor food in the area or disturbance of a campsite.
Flying-foxes need campsites made up of large areas so that they can circulate with the site according to the defoliation of the trees in which they roost. Currently many sites sustain more damage due to the small areas that the flying-foxes are now confined to and due to their staying longer because of lack of food elsewhere or due to the extensive distances that now exist between campsites. Campsites are usually located on rivers, creeks or near large bodies of water, which provide both fresh water, and a navigation device when coming home at night.
Feeding Habits
Flying-foxes are very fond of the nectar, pollen and fruit of native Australian forest trees such as eucalypts, Melaleuca, Banksia, Lily pilly and Moreton bay figs. Although they do consume cultivated fruit such as peaches, mangoes and pawpaw, they only do so when their native food is scarce.
Flying-foxes generally migrate from one area to another depending on the amount of food available. Unfortunately, with land clearing for agriculture and urban development, the flying foxes have very few areas in which they can migrate to once flowering/fruiting ceases in another area and so find it necessary to sometimes eat cultivated fruit.
Role in our environment
The food that flying foxes eat and the method by which they forage and process that food has lead to the flying fox being one of the most efficient pollinators and seed dispersers of native Australian forest trees. As they move amongst the flowers of Eucalypts or Melaleuca searching for nectar, large amounts of pollen attach to their fur. When they fly to the next tree, which may be several kilometers away, this pollen is deposited on the stigma of awaiting flowers. Such transport of pollen is very important for trees such as eucalypts as they rely on cross-pollination, i.e. pollen coming in from other trees which are a substantial distance away. In the case of seed dispersal, many seeds will not grow unless they are a certain distance away from the parent tree. Flying foxes carry out seed dispersal by one of three methods: 1) carrying the fruit away and dropping it accidentally, 2) carrying the fruit away, eating the flesh and spitting out the seeds and 3) consuming the fruit and seeds but passing the seeds through the gut. Flying foxes have a very short digestive tract, thus seeds swallowed are not digested but pass through the gut within 12-34 minutes.
Viruses
Flying foxes have recently been associated with two potentially pathogenic viruses: Hendra or Equine Morbillivirus (EMV) and Australian Bat Lyssavirus (ABLV).
Hendra virus is not contagious from bat to human, it may require a mediator, such as horses in the case of the Australian incidents. More research needs to be done as the suspected transmission mode from bats to horses is not known. Another animal may prove to be the vector.
ABLV
If you do find an injured bat alone during the day, it needs help, whether it is a flying fox or a microbat, do not pick it up, like any wild animal it may bite when frightened or injured, seek help immediately - call Bat Conservation & Rescue Qld Inc on 0488 228 134.
With regard to Lyssavirus, only a small proportion of the bat population may have the virus, it is very rare. Do not risk infection to yourself and the death of the bat, please – do not handle bats.
If bitten or scratched, wash the area immediately and thoroughly with soap and warm water, and seek medical attention as soon as possible.
Remember NO TOUCH = NO RISK
Conservation
Flying fox numbers have decreased dramatically over the last 50 years due to loss of habitat, uncontrolled killing at orchards and poor management procedures. With changes in climatic conditions our forests are flowering at different times, flowering with no nectar production or not flowering at all. There are also heat events where thousand of young may perish when temperatures rise over 40 degrees C.
We know very little about bat behaviour yet there is little research into their decline nationally. If governments and communities do not work to preserve their populations now Australian forests, our hardwood and rainforests will decline and our entire ecosystem will be under threat.
Recovery teams have now been formed for both the grey-headed and the spectacled flying fox in an attempt to bring their numbers back from such dangerous levels. These teams are headed by the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency, New South Wales Department of Environment and Conservation, and the Department of Environment and Heritage.
Information by Dr. Patrina Birt
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
| Megabat |
From what material is the Taj Mahal constructed? | Indian Flying Fox - Woodland Park Zoo Seattle WA
Indian Flying Fox
Classification and Range
Bats belong to the order Chiroptera which aptly means “hand-wing.” More than 1,100 species exist. The two sub-orders are Megachiroptera or “megabats” and Microchiroptera, the smaller, echolocating and mostly insectivorous bats. Old World fruit bats of Africa, Asia and Australia, commonly called “flying foxes,” make up the single megabat family Pteropodidae. The genus Pteropus contains around 60 species that are found throughout tropical and sub-tropical Asia, Australasia and Pacific islands. The Indian flying fox has a widespread range on the Indian sub-continent that extends from Pakistan to Southeast Asia and China, and south to the Maldive Islands. Pteropus giganteus is also known as the Greater Indian fruit bat.
Habitat
Indian flying foxes inhabit tropical forests and swamps along coasts and bodies of water. They require large trees capable of holding huge bat colonies. Tree species used include banyan, tamarind and fig.
Physical description
All bats possess wings with a clawed thumb and four elongated digits between two layers of skin. They have long-toed feet with sharp claws enabling them to roost hanging upside down. Old World fruit bats share common characteristics designed to find and consume their fruit-oriented diets. A claw on their second finger enhances grasping ability. They have long snouts with excellent sense of smell, long tongues to reach into plants, and dentition for piercing tough rinds and mashing pulp. The large eyes possess excellent night vision and perhaps some color perception to distinguish fruit from foliage. Their ears are simple and small compared to the ears of echolocating bats. Most fruit bats have muted coloration of grays, browns or black with yellowish mantles; however, with its reddish brown fur and pointy ears, Pteropus giganteus truly looks like a flying fox. With wing spans up to 6 feet and weights more than 3 pounds, flying foxes are the largest bat species. While not the biggest fruit bat, Pteropus giganteus does live up to its name in comparison to the smallest, the long-tongued fruit bat with a 12 inch (30 cm) wingspan and weighing only .5 ounces (15 g).
Physical Characteristics
Head and body length: average 9 inches (23 cm)
Weight range: 1.3 to 3.5 pounds (.6 - 1.6 kg); females average 2 pounds (.9 kg)
Wingspan: 3.9 to 4.9 feet (1.2-1.5m)
Life Span
Average 21 years; Oldest captive lived over 31 years
Diet
In the wild: Mainly frugivorous. Eats mainly figs, but also variety of fruit including mango, guava, banana, durian, neem and papaya, as well as blossoms and nectar. Raids cultivated fruit crops.
At the zoo: Apples, bananas, cooked sweet potato and carrots, mixed greens, vitamin and mineral supplements.
Reproduction - Mostly upside down
Bat reproduction occurs mostly upside down. Between July and October, Indian flying foxes mate while hanging in the midst of their large colony. A courting male fans his wings toward a female, follows her to grasp the back of the neck, and mates with her. No pair bonds occur and males have no role in parenting. Between February and May and after a long gestation of 140 to 150 days, the female produces a single pup and rarely twins. To give birth, the female hangs head up thus gravity assists the process. Newborn fruit bats weigh about one-fourth the female’s weight and have fully furred bodies and open eyes. With the infant securely clasped under a wing, the female returns upside down again. Mothers carry infants constantly their first three weeks. Later the young hang by themselves in the home tree, although females carry them to feeding sites. Young bats fly around 11 weeks and they wean by 5 months. Fruit bats become sexually mature at 1 1/2 years of age.
Lifestyle: Life in a Social Colony
Indian flying foxes reside in the same home or camp tree for years. The colony contains several hundreds even thousands of bats living on nearby trees. The bats erupt into loud chatter when an outsider approaches. Males protect the colony and dominant males claim the choicest resting spots: under dense branches during hottest times; near the top open to the sun when cold; and under branches during heavy rain. Fruit bats spend the daytime sleeping, resting, licking and grooming themselves and each other. They vocalize and their spread wings to claim territory. At dusk, they fly off together to feed. Their good senses of smell and sight locate ripe fruit sources. Fruit bats use their clawed digits to grasp fruit and they bite off pieces with their sharp teeth. They chew the fruit and crush it against their hard, ridged palates. Then they swallow the juice and spit out small pellets of pulp and seeds. Large flying foxes consume up to half their body weight daily. After hours spent feeding, resting and digesting, they return to the camp tree at dawn.
Life on the Wing
Bats are the only mammals capable of powered flight which requires both lightness and strength. The wing membrane stretched across the elongated finger digits is so thin that light can be seen though it. Bats have very light bones compared to other mammals. Flight muscles attach to shoulder blades and the breastbone. In contrast to the powerful upper body, most fruit bats lack weight bearing hind limbs for locomotion or even standing. At best, flying foxes crawl on the ground. With lighter and weaker rear quarters, bats hang upside down. Tendons in the hind legs lock claws onto surfaces without any effort. To launch into flight, they merely release their grip.
Flying foxes travel long distances in search of food sources. Nightly flights over 9 miles (15 km) are common; however, they may be up to 40 miles (64 km). To land, they slow to a stall or crash into foliage then grasp branches. Any damage to wing membranes and even broken bones heal quickly. Bats also use their wings for warmth and for fanning when too hot.
Life at Night
Most bats live a nocturnal lifestyle and spend the daylight hours in roosts. Since vast hordes of insects fly at night, the echolocating bats hunt with less competition. For fruit bats living in the tropics and sub-tropics, nighttime has other advantages. Long distance flights generate body heat, and cooler night temperatures help dissipate it. Flying during the heat of daytime could result in heat prostration or dehydration. Increased nighttime moisture enhances elasticity of the wing membrane. Night flight means fewer predators, yet another advantage.
Fruit bats and “bat-adapted” plants aid each other. Flying foxes pollinate and disperse seeds of many tropical plants. To attract these visual and scent-oriented nocturnal feeders, some plants evolved large white flowers, strong aromas, or large quantities of nectar and pollen.
Bats in Culture - Myths and Practices
In Western culture, bats often evoke fear and superstition. Many negative myths exist, such as being “as blind as a bat” and bats as dirty, blood-sucking, rabies transmitters. All bats can see - megabats have excellent sight and microbats rely on hearing and echolocation over vision. Bats keep themselves fastidiously clean with licking and grooming. Only three New World species of vampire bats consume blood and by licking not sucking. Both people and animals can contract rabies from bats, mostly from vampire bats, but the disease is more common in other wildlife species.
For centuries and in many Asian cultures, people hunt fruit bats as a meat source. Some traditional practices use bat meat or fat to treat medical conditions, such as rheumatism. Farmers may kill fruit bats as crop raiding pests. In China, the bat receives acceptance as a symbol of happiness and good luck. In some Indian villages, the Indian flying fox is sacred and protected from harm.
Location at the Zoo
Our Indian flying foxes are located in the Trail of Adaptations. Other nocturnal animals exhibited there include two-toed sloth and tamandua, an anteater.
Conservation Connection
Indian flying foxes have a “Least Concern” listing in CITES Appendix II. They exist in large numbers within an expansive range that includes protected areas. Nonetheless, fruit bats face declining numbers. Humans constitute their major predators along with raptors and snakes. Some governments classify them as “vermin” and allow extermination. Evidence points to flying foxes as hosts for some zoonotic diseases, such as Hendra and Nipah viruses which affect both humans and domestic animals. In India, The Wildlife Protection Act still considers all flying foxes as pests without distinction between the ten species which feed in forests and the three which raid cultivated orchards. Deforestation and cutting down huge roost trees create further problems for fruit bats.
Worldwide, over half of all bat species fall within threatened or near-threatened categories and face serious population decline. In the eastern U.S. over 5.5 million bats died from “white-nose syndrome” since 2008. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) proclaimed 2011-2012 as Year of the Bat to coincide with the United Nations Year of Forests. Leading roles come from the Bat Specialist Group, Species Survival Commission of IUCN and the Organization of Bat Conservation. Year of the Bat promotes conservation, research and education. Flying foxes are a keystone species in the world’s tropical rainforests. They pollinate and disperse seeds of many tropical plants, for example kapok, durian, mango and banana. People collect bat guano, an excellent fertilizer. Microbats provide pest control in their nightly consumption of insects by the tons. Many ecological benefits come from bats.
Sources and Suggested Reading
“Bat Facts” Encyclopedia Smithsonian. www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/batfacts.htm
Bat Specialist Group website. www.iucnbsg.org/about_bsg.html
“Bats” The Encyclopedia of Mammals. edited by Dr David Macdonald. pp 500-503. 1999
Marimuthu, G. “The Sacred Flying Fox of India” Bats Magazine. http://batcon.org/index.php/media-and-info/bats-archives.ftml?task=viewArticle&magArticleID=335
“More on Year of the Bat 2011-2012” www.yearofthebat.org/webedit/uploaded-files
Organization of Bat Conservation website. www.batconservation.org/drupal/indian-ff
“White-Nose Syndrome (WNS)” National Wildlife Health Center www.nwhc.usgs.gov/disease_information/white-nose-syndrome/
Media
Secret World of Bats - DVD 48 minute film originally shown on CBS with Bat Conservation International founder Merlin Tuttle and captures all aspects of bat behavior
For Kids!
Bats: Myth and Reality (1985) 16 minute video for grades 2-12 produced by Bat Conservation International emphasizing the ecological importance and conservation needs of bats worldwide.
Bats of America (1989) 16 minute video for grades 1-6 produced by Bat Conservation International offers an in-depth look at bats, their importance to ecosystems and their threats.
Discover Bats! (revised & updated 2009) Bat-education package produced by Bat Conservation International for grades 4-8.
Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. A children’s book about a young fruit bat.
Indian Flying Fox Taxonomy
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Which Scottish football club is nicknamed The Arabs? | Scottish Football Team Nicknames - Silkysteps early years forum - planning ideas for play
Scottish Football Team Nicknames
Here are Scotland's football team's nicknames...
Aberdeen â The Dons
Airdrie United â The Diamonds
Albion Rovers â The Rovers
Alloa â The Wasps
Arbroath â The Red Lichties
Ayr United â The Honest Men
Berwick Rangers â The Borderers/ The Wee Rangers
Brechin City â The City
Celtic â The Bhoys/ The Hoops/ The Celts/ The Tic
Clyde â The Bully Wee
Cowdenbeath â The Blue Brazil
Dumbarton â The Sons
Dundee â The Dee/ The Dark Blues
Dundee United â The Terrors/ The Tangerines/ Arabs
Dunfermline Athletic â The Pars
East Fife â The Fifers
East Stirlingshire â The Shire
Elgin City â The City
Falkirk â The Bairns
Forfar Athletic â The Loons
Gretna â The Black and Whites
Hamilton Academicals â The Accies
Heart of Midlothian â Hearts/ Jam Tarts
Hibernian â Hibs/ The Hibees
Inverness Caledonian Thistle â Caley Thistle/ CaleyJags
Kilmarnock - Killies
Montrose â The Gable Ends
Morton â The Ton
Motherwell â The Well/ The Steelmen
Partick Thistle â The Jags
Peterhead â The Toons
Queen of the South â The Doonhamers
Queens Park â The Spiders
Raith Rovers â The Rovers
Rangers â The Gers/ Light Blues/ Teddy Bears
Ross County â The County
St Johnstone â The Saints
St Mirren â The Saints/ The Buddies
Stenhousemuir â The Warriors
Stirling Albion â The Binos
Stranraer â The Blues
| Dundee United F.C. |
which region of the earth's stratosphere traps most of the sun's UV radiation? | The Glenrothes Arabs - Dundee United Supporters Club
ARABS
THE NICKNAME OF DUNDEE UNITED SUPPORTERS
There have been several stories regarding the origins of the Arabs term. The most popular view is that the name was coined during the severe winter of the 1962-63 season.
The weather was so bad, with heavy snow and ice that refused to thaw, that between December and March, Dundee United were able to play only three times. The worst winter on record for years wiped out the Dundee derby match on 2nd January and a frozen pitch knocked out the match against Third Lanark to begin three weeks of inactivity on the pitch.
Snow-blowers were not enough, as the real problem was ice beneath the snow - the winter freeze, which had even created large ice flows on the river Tay, caused United's Scottish Cup tie against Albion Rovers to be postponed four times. Desperate to get the tie played before the next round of the Cup was due, the management hired a squad of 25 workmen to break up the ice with picks. When this also didn't work, Club manager Jerry Kerr arranged for industrial tar burners to be brought in to melt two inch thick ice from the pitch. This resulted in the pitch being waterlogged with very little grass left.
The management then arranged for several lorry loads of coarse sand to be spread across the barren surface, and the regulation pitch markings were then painted on top in an effort to make the pitch playable. Astonishingly, the referee pronounced the pitch acceptable and the match went ahead, at the fith time of asking, on 26th January. It cost United over �600 but it was money well spent.
The conditions were described by one reporter as 'Sahara-like' and by another as 'a beach after the tide had gone out'. Although both teams struggled in the sand, United eventually adapted to the strange surface, and advanced to the next round of the Cup with goals from Jim Irvine, Dennis Gillespie and Bert Howieson, all in the final fifteen minutes of a 3-0 victory. In news reports a few days later United were likened to the 'Desert Rats', so well did they adapt to playing on the sand, and with the new all white strip which had been introduced for the first time that season, other observers were prompted to comment that the players had taken to the sand like 'Arabs'.
United didn't play another match at Tannadice unitil the start of May, but following on from the Cup tie against the Rovers, United went on to defeat Ayr United in the 4th Round, Queens Park in the 5th Round and Queen of the South in the Quarter Finals - a marathon tie that took three games to find a winner, with United winning the 2nd replay 4-0 at Ibrox. United then faced Rangers at Hampden in the Club's first ever National Semi Final, coming back from 2 goals down to level the match before half time. However Rangers went on to win 5-2 and went through to face Celtic in the Final.
United Manager Jerry Kerr inspects the frozen Tannadice pitch.
The Tar Burner at Tannadice.
The United Supporters quickly hijacked the name 'Arabs' for themselves, with the next few matches witnessing some fans wearing crude approximations of Arab headgear. However, the practice never became widespread until the late 1970s and early 1980s when it was seen at cup Semi Finals and Finals and by the early 1990s even the official club souvenir shops were selling replicas of Arab Keffiyehs in tangerine and black. By that time the term 'Arabs' had become more widely used, largely as the result of regular references to it by the popular United fanzine The Final Hurdle, which first appeared in 1988. The term has since been firmly connected with Dundee United supporters, with many Supporters Clubs using in it their Club names.
Our Club started off in the early 1980's, and offically became known as The Dundee United Supporters Club Glenrothes Branch. When the running of the club was handed over to Andy Woodrow and Bryan Orr in the early 1990's, the members decided we needed a shorter name. A couple of United Supporters Clubs had already adopted the Arabs title - The Angus Arabs, The Perth Arabs, etc - and so we decided to take it on as well, and in 1992 we officially became THE GLENROTHES ARABS, and have remained so ever since.
It is now a fairly common mistake among tabloid sports journalists to confuse the use of the term 'Arabs', using it to describe the team instead of the fans. Just as the Hibees are the team while the Hibbies are the fans, and the Jam Tarts are the team while the Jambos are the fans, Dundee United are the TERRORS while their supporters are the ARABS.
Many thanks to Steve Gracie and Mike Watson
The Glenrothes Arabs - Website Created by Bryan Orr © Copyright 2011.
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What is the name of the trophy awarded to the NHL Play-off winners? | NHL Award Winners: Patrick Kane wins Hart Trophy | SI.com
NHL award winners: Patrick Kane wins the Hart Trophy (Full results)
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Wednesday June 22nd, 2016
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The biggest hockey stars gathered at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for the 2016 NHL Awards on Wednesday night.
Patrick Kane took home the The Hart Trophy for the player voted most valuable to his team. Kane is coming off a season in which he set a career-best of 46 goals and 60 assists and led the league in scoring. He also won the Ted Lindsay Award, which is awarded to the most outstanding player as voted by fellow players. He won the award over Jamie Benn of the Dallas Stars and Braden Holtby of the Washington Capitals.
• MUIR: Picking the winners
Artemi Panarin of the Chicago Blackhawks won the Calder Trophy as the NHL's top rookie.
The Vezina Trophy for the League’s top goaltender went to Holtby, who posted a 48-9-7 record this season. His coach Barry Trotz won the Jack Adams Award for the league’s top coach for a season in which he led Washington to a 56-18-8 record and the Presidents’ Trophy with 120 points.
Jim Rutherford of the Pittsburgh Penguins won the NHL General Manager of the Year award. The Penguins finished the season 48-26-8 before winning the Stanley Cup.
Florida Panthers forward Jaromir Jagr won the Masterton Trophy for perseverance and dedication to hockey.
The Norris Trophy for the league’s top defenseman went to Drew Doughty of the Kings.
The William M. Jennings Trophy winners, for goaltenders having played a minimum of 25 games for the team with the fewest goals scored against them, are Frederik Andersen and John Gibson of the Anaheim Ducks.
• NHL Board of Governors votes to expand to Las Vegas
Mark Giordano of the Calgary Flames received the NHL Foundation Award for his charitable efforts. The King Clancy Memorial Trophy for leadership on and off the ice and community contribution was awarded to Vancouver Canucks captain Henrik Sedin, while Shea Weber of Nashville Predators received the Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award.
The Lady Byng Trophy, for the player best combining sportsmanship and ability, went to Los Angeles Kings star Anze Kopitar who also took home the Selke Award as the forward who best excels in the defensive aspects of the game.
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| Stanley Cup |
What name is given to the Northumberland dish consisting of layered potato,onion and cheese? | NHL to reveal award winners leading up to Game 2 | NHL.com
NHL to reveal award winners leading up to Game 2
NHL to reveal award winners leading up to Game 2
by Dan Rosen / NHL.com
CHICAGO -- As the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins try to rehydrate, recover and gather their emotions after their marathon Game 1 in the Stanley Cup Final, the hockey world will be allowed the opportunity to quickly swing its attention to a different set of Hall of Fame hardware that is shined up and ready to be handed out.
All 13 of the NHL postseason awards will be distributed before the opening faceoff in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Saturday at United Center (8 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, RDS).
The winners of the Bill Masterton Memorial, Frank J. Selke, King Clancy and Lady Byng trophies, the Jack Adams Award, the Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award, the NHL Foundation Player Award and the NHL General Manager of the Year Award were revealed Friday.
Beginning at 7 p.m. ET Saturday, NBC Sports Network and CBC will join forces to co-host a live pregame television special in which the winners of the Hart Memorial, Calder Memorial, James Norris Memorial and Vezina trophies, along with the Ted Lindsay Award, will be revealed. The show can be seen on NBCSN in the United States and CBC in Canada.
The biggest question heading into awards season is who will win the Hart Trophy as the NHL's most valuable player for the 2012-13 season? The finalists are Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby , Washington Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin and New York Islanders center John Tavares .
Crosby, who won the Hart Trophy in 2007, looked like he was going to be a runaway winner three-quarters of the way into the 48-game season, but he missed the final 12 games due to a jaw injury. He still finished tied with Ovechkin for third in the NHL with 56 points on 15 goals and 41 assists in 36 games.
Ovechkin looked like he had no chance at any postseason honors a third of the way through the season, but he rediscovered his MVP form and put up 46 points, including 21 goals, over his final 32 games to help the Capitals win the Southeast Division. He won the Rocket Richard Trophy with 32 goals and is in line to win the Hart Trophy for the third time in his career. He won in 2008 and 2009.
Tavares, a first-time finalist for the Hart Trophy, led the Islanders into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2007 with 47 points on 28 goals and 19 assists.
Crosby and Ovechkin join Art Ross Trophy (awarded to the League's leading scorer) winner Martin St. Louis (60 points) as finalists for the Ted Lindsay Award, which goes to the most outstanding player as voted on by the players. St. Louis won the Lady Byng Trophy, which is awarded to the player who best demonstrates sportsmanship and gentlemanly play, Friday for the third time in his career.
New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist is in line to win the Vezina Trophy as the League's top goaltender for a second straight season. First-time finalists Sergei Bobrovsky of the Columbus Blue Jackets and Antti Niemi of the San Jose Sharks are his competition. Bobrovsky nearly led the Blue Jackets to the playoffs with a 2.00 goals-against average and .932 save percentage.
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Who played the female lead in the 1933 movie King Kong? | Ann Darrow | King Kong Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia
[Source]
Ann Darrow was a fictional character from the 1933 movie King Kong and its 2005 remake , with whom the giant ape Kong falls in love. In the original film, Ann is played by Fay Wray ; in the 2005 remake, she is played by Naomi Watts ; in an unauthorized 1998 animated musical film, The Mighty Kong , she is voiced by Jodi Benson. The 1976 remake features an analogous character named " Dwan " (played by Jessica Lange ), in the Melbourne stage production in Australia, she is played by Esther Hannaford. The character of Ann Darrow never appears in any other films or television productions of King Kong, yet has been seen in the King Kong Comic books.
Contents
Edit
Ann Darrow is played by Naomi Watts in the 2005 film and has more detail. She was an actress, but lost that job when her studio went bankrupt in the Great Depression. Ann was apparently destitute, as she was shoplifting fruit and caught, but bailed out by Denham, who came to her rescue by paying for the fruit and telling her of his grand plans in film. She also declined Denham's invitation at first, but she then accepted the offer when she was told that Jack Driscoll was going along too. Jack also develops a crush on Ann and even kiss each other before arriving at Skull Island. Ann originally thought that the sound editor of Carl's film crew, Mike, was Jack. After seeing Mike die in front of her, Ann screams with horror. She was able to escape at first from the hostile natives at Skull Island, but was kidnapped from the boat and dragged to a sacrificial chamber in her bare feet and pajamas, where she is offered as a sacrifice to Kong by the natives. Kong takes her as Ann screams at the top of her lungs. She faints as Kong vanishes into the forest. Kong roars as Ann moans as she freaks out. Kong almost drops her as Ann shrieks and yells. She stabs Kong with her skull necklace as she falls onto the pile of skulls. She attempts to escape but Kong grabs her, causing her to shriek. Jack and Carl try to find her along with many other crewmembers. Ann is heard screaming. She woke up the next day, she saw Kong distracted by eating Bamboo sticks. she tried to escape but Kong stopped her. she was then treated like a Rag Doll because King Kong at first was either angry or curious about Ann, enjoyed her dancing and acting, and kept pushing her, making him happy and hooting. When Ann shown anger at him, he also got angry and Kong left her. At the time she escaped, she was unfortunate again because Vastosaurus Rexes wanted to eat her, and Kong saved her life.
Ann ambushed by the creatures of Skull Island
That night Jack comes to Kong's lair, and disturbs him from his slumber, then a swarm of flying Terapus mordax attacks them. Kong ends up battling the giant bats, the attack resulted in Ann losing her dressing gown for unknown reasons (but it most likely her shirt was torn off by one of the Terapus mordax, this forced Ann to continue the journey wearing her pink slip dress only), Kong puts Ann in safety while he battles the giant bats, As Kong fights the swarm of Terapus mordax, Ann and Jack escape by grabbing the wing of one of the bats and then jumping into a river. They arrive at the village wall, with the angry Kong following them.
When Carl and the other crew men were done with their own problems in the island with most of them dead, they captured and kidnapped King Kong. Captain Englehorn was about to kill King Kong with a sharp harpoon but she begged and cried out to let Kong live. but they succesfully captured Kong, Ann simply stared at Kong before she broke down in tears due to have been unable to help kong from getting captured, Carl takes Kong to New York, and he escapes in an angry mood destroying the ampitheater he was taken to. Ann Darrow realized she was the only person who can stop King Kong from trying to destroy Manhattan. Kong was already looking for Ann because he kept picking up women who resembled Ann. Ann and Kong finally are happy together but their happiness and joy vanishes when the military uses giant bullets to kill King Kong. King Kong, like in the 1933 film, ran away to highest building in the city, the Empire State Building.
Ann with Kong on the Empire State Building
When the two are trapped atop the skyscraper at the climax, she tries desperately to prevent Kong from being killed, much like Dwan in the 1976 version, but to no avail. After Kong's death, she embraces Jack Driscoll, who was trying to get to her the entire time.
Edit
Ann is portrayes in both the 1933 film and 2005 remake as a down on her luck actress, who has lost her job and has resorted to stealing. Both incarnations are portrayed as having a fragile personality, except with the 2005 version being a lot more braver than her 1933 counterpart. In the 1933 film, Ann is terrified of Kong, and does not seem to share his affection toward her. She constantly screams in his presence and in the presence of other monsters, fulfilling a kind of 'damsel in distress' type of role. She doesn't care much for Kong, and constantly tries to avoid him.
In the 2005 remake, Ann has a massive shift in character. She is of course initially terrified of the horrors of Skull Island, but shows great courage when in the face of danger. She is afraid of Kong at first, but manages to briefly escape his clutches by first entertaining him and then standing up to him. Later in the film, when Kong saves her from two Vastosaurus Rex, she realises that Kong doesn't wish to hurt her and comes to care for him. In the films climax, she shows great distress and sorrow when Kong falls to his death from the top of the Empire State Building, after going to great lengths to try and save him from the attacking US Army.
In both films, the character falls in love with Jack Driscoll, with the two even preparing to marry in the 1933 version.
Appearance
Edit
In the 1993 film, she is wearing a long white dress. She has blonde hair, and screams a lot. Later in the film, the top side bit of her dress is ripped off, revealing a silver bra. Some critics thought this was too much nudity.
2005 film
Edit
Anne here wore a grey coat which got very dirty after being harassed by dinosaurs and picked up by Kong, she loses her coat when Kong is attacked by giant bats revealing her pink sleeveless shirt underneath, later at the end of the movie, she wears an white dress. She has curly, blonde hair that stops at her shoulders, bright blue eyes, fair skin, a slender figure and a bright smile.
1933 film Screencaps
| Fay Wray |
Which song, released by Elton John as a single in 1975, was a tribute to tennis player Billie Jean King? | King Kong Cast List: Actors and Actresses from King Kong
G Options B Comments & Embed
1
Jeff Bridges Iron Man, The Big Lebowski, Tron
;
Jessica Lange Tootsie, Big Fish, Cape Fear
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Naomi Watts King Kong, The Ring, Mulholland Drive
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Adrien Brody King Kong, Natural Born Killers, The Pianist
;
Ed Lauter True Romance, The Artist, Seabiscuit
;
6
Andy Serkis The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: The ...
;
Corbin Bernsen Major League, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Major League II
;
Rene Auberjonois Batman Forever, The Little Mermaid, MASH
;
Thomas Kretschmann King Kong, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Blade II
;
Charles Grodin Rosemary's Baby, Heaven Can Wait, Midnight Run
;
Fay Wray King Kong, Murder by Death, Doctor X
;
Bruce Cabot King Kong, Cat Ballou, Diamonds Are Forever
;
Jamie Bell King Kong, Flags of Our Fathers, Jumper
;
14
Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Lord of the Rings: The ...
;
John Agar Fort Apache, Sands of Iwo Jima, Chisum
;
Noble Johnson King Kong, The Thief of Bagdad, Jungle Book
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Peter Cullen Predator, Gremlins, Transformers
;
Colin Hanks King Kong, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, That Thing You Do!
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John Randolph National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, All the President's Men, Heaven Can ...
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Kyle Chandler King Kong, The Wolf of Wall Street, Argo
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Forrest J Ackerman Return of the Living Dead Part II, King Kong, Innocent Blood
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James Flavin King Kong, Laura, Mighty Joe Young
;
Frank Reicher King Kong, The Life of Emile Zola, Stage Door
;
Evan Parke King Kong, Django Unchained, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
;
Dennis Fimple House of 1000 Corpses, Maverick, King Kong
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Julius Harris Live and Let Die, Darkman, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
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Robert Armstrong King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong
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Brent Huff Hot Boyz, King Kong, Final Examination
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John Lone Rush Hour, The Last Emperor, Rush Hour 2
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Roscoe Ates Gone with the Wind, King Kong, Freaks
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Joe Piscopo Johnny Dangerously, King Kong, Dead Heat
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Craig Hall King Kong, 30 Days of Night, The World's Fastest Indian
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Richard A. Baker King Kong, Men in Black 3, Men in Black II
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Geraldine Brophy King Kong, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, The Water Horse: Legend of the ...
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David Dennis King Kong, 10^!000 BC, The World Unseen
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Merian C. Cooper King Kong, Grass
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John Sumner King Kong, District 9, The Frighteners
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Ray Buktenica Heat, My Girl, King Kong
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David Pittu King Kong, Men in Black 3, The Spanish Prisoner
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Mark Hadlow King Kong, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Meet the Feebles
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Jack O'Halloran Superman, Superman II, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut
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Mario Gallo Raging Bull, A Woman Under the Influence, King Kong
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Walt Gorney Friday the 13th, Trading Places, Friday the 13th Part 2
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Sam Hardy King Kong, The Florodora Girl, Song of the West
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Donald F. Glut The Graduate, King Kong, The Teenage Werewolf
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Bill Johnson The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Talk Radio, Nate and Hayes
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Garry Walberg King Kong, Two-Minute Warning, MacArthur
;
Shawn McAllister Absence of Malice, The Hospital, King Kong
;
Wayne Heffley Spartacus, Birdman of Alcatraz, King Kong
;
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In the US cartoon series King of the Hill, what is Hank Hill's profession? | Your next box set: King of the Hill | Television & radio | The Guardian
Your next box set
Your next box set: King of the Hill
Almost as close to a real-life sitcom as it is to its animated peers, King of the Hill is a tender, funny portrayal of middle America
Men who love lawnmowers . . . King of the Hill. Photograph: c.20thC.Fox/Everett / Rex Features
Friday 20 August 2010 01.45 EDT
First published on Friday 20 August 2010 01.45 EDT
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In the first ever scene of King of the Hill, Hank Hill and his friends stand around the front of Hank's broken-down Ford truck, drinking beer and lamenting the state of the US auto industry: "Detroit hasn't felt any real pride since George Bush went to Japan and vomited on their auto executives."
Hill is a simple man, probably much closer to an American everyman than Homer Simpson. The best propane salesman in Arlen, Texas, Hank is such a straight-up red-stater that he forbids his son Bobby from writing a school project on President Josiah Bartlet from the West Wing – and makes him extol the virtues of Ronald Reagan instead. Yet Hank, the other Hills and their neighbours are no Republican hicks, whatever Hank's yuppie Laotian neighbours the Souphanousinphones reckon. They're just straight-up folk.
Whereas series creator Mike Judge's previous series, Beavis and Butt-Head, focused on two cartoon idiots, the Hills are more human. Everything from the direction to the dialogue was more realistic than the likes of The Simpsons and South Park. It could almost have been a Roseanne-like sitcom. And it had a star guest list to boot (including Renée Zellweger and Owen Wilson).
Much of the humour and affection lies in Hank's emotional repression. When asked to tell his son he loves him, his response is: "I can't do that, you know how I was raised." But his son Bobby, an aspiring comedian, and Boggle-champ wife Peggy provide an emotional counterpoint, as does Peggy's naive niece, Luanne Platter, who moves in with the Hills to get away from her fighting parents. Luanne was, of course, voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died just a few months after the last ever episode aired.
Like other Fox shows in the US, KotH suffered death by 1,000 cuts: cancelled, revived, cancelled again. Not a proud way to go, but 12 years was an excellent run for a tender, funny portrayal of middle America – and men who love their lawnmowers almost as much as their families.
| propane salesman |
Who succeeded Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England until 2013? | King of the Hill (TV Series 1997–2010) - IMDb
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A straight laced propane salesman in Arlen, Texas tries to deal with the wacky antics of his family and friends, while also trying to keep his son in line.
Creators:
After being beat up by some bullies Hank advises Bobby to attend a boxing course at the YMCA. Once there Bobby discovers that they are full, so instead joins a womens self defense course where he is ...
8.7
Hank, Dale, Boomhauer, and Bill become volunteer firefighters. After one of them accidentally burns down the firehouse the each have different interpretations of how it happened.
8.5
After a violent pimp shows up looking for her, Hank and Peggy unknowingly board a prostitute. Then they soon discover that Hank has been unwittingly "pimping" her all around town.
8.5
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Title: King of the Hill (1997–2010)
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Won 2 Primetime Emmys. Another 9 wins & 55 nominations. See more awards »
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Follows the misadventures of four irreverent grade-schoolers in the quiet, dysfunctional town of South Park, Colorado.
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Storyline
King of the Hill is another animation hit for Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge, who also voices the starring character Hank Hill, a propane gas salesman in the fictional town Arlen, Texas. Hank is often besieged by the idiosyncrasies of society, but he finds (some) serenity in his home-life with his wife, substitute Spanish teacher Peggy, his awkward son Bobby and his live-in niece-in-law Luanne Platter. Adding flavor to the ordinary dish the series serves are Hank's friends, divorcee military barber Bill Dauterive, paranoid Dale Gribble (with an obsession with Government conspiracy theories) and gibberish spouting Boomhauer. Written by Ondre Lombard <[email protected]>
Looking for laughs as big as Texas? Head for the hills!
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12 January 1997 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
Bobby kontra wapniaki See more »
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Did You Know?
Trivia
In the episode "Arlen City Bomber," Lucky (voiced by Tom Petty) tells Bobby that he would help him "run down that dream" after Bobby leyments that he would like to taste a corn chip right off of the line. This is a reference to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song, "Running Down a Dream." See more »
Goofs
At the end the episode where Hank is having issues with Bowel movements, he rushes to the bathroom, and pulls Bobby out. Bobby is wearing PJ's and has toothpaste on his mouth. After Hank passes a movement, the shot is of Peggy and Bobby, and Bobby is now wearing his usual attire. When Hank emerges from the bathroom, Bobby again is wearing his PJ's. See more »
Quotes
See more »
Crazy Credits
In the episodes that were originally broadcast in HD, the episodes were clearly drawn with a widescreen presentation in mind. However, during the credits, the Deedle-Dee Productions "American Flag" credit screen is clearly cropped, with some text nearly being cut off as a result. See more »
Connections
(Austin, Texas) – See all my reviews
After "Beavis & Butthead" (which I loved), I was really surprised what an affectionate portrait Mike Judge put together. I know well how ripe Texas rednecks are for satire (being a native Texan), though the target is SO easy, it would get a bit tiresome to watch it week after week for years. Hank Hill turned out to be a realistic redneck: worshipful of tradition, fearful of variety and progress, but not really quite as conservative as he thinks he is. My parents are very much like that, too. As I've watched the series, I've been tickled by different characters at different times: first Bobby (almost zen in his bizarre but internally consistent individuality), then Hank's buddies (where the sillier satire comes in), then Hank himself (eternally thwarted by life, but always strong and loving in the end). Lately, Peggy's outrageous ego has me laughing the most. Since this is more like a regular sitcom than "The Simpsons" is, I doubt it will hold up as long, but for now I love it. "King of the Hill" may be the most realistic portrait of Texans ever seen on TV. In response to previous complaints: 1. While Texas does have many citizens who are members of ethnic minorities, the area of the state in which the show is set (NW Texas--best reckoning has Arlen based on Abilene or San Angelo) has very few of them. 2. If one finds the show boring, one need only change the channel.
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Who played television character Jason King in the early 1970s? | Jason King (TV Series 1971–1972) - IMDb
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This spin-off from the earlier "Department S" continued the adventures of hedonistic, womanizing dandy Jason King. After leaving Department S, Jason settled down to a full-time career of ... See full summary »
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Jason's temporary secretary in Germany convinces him to go to a health clinic. However, when several strange events occur he realises that there is much more to the clinic than it appears.
8.4
Jason is abducted in order to help the Moscow police work out how three men on a workers' delegation,got into a lift and then,when the doors opened again,there was nothing left of them but three ...
8.1
Jason gets off a plane in Switzerland and is mistaken for the hitman taken ill on the plane as he has picked up the bunch of red roses which will allow the killer's employers to identify him. He ...
7.9
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Title: Jason King (1971–1972)
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An elite department within Interpol, Department S inherited those cases which the other member groups had failed to solve. The brains of the group was Jason King, a hedonistic maverick who ... See full summary »
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This spin-off from the earlier "Department S" continued the adventures of hedonistic, womanizing dandy Jason King. After leaving Department S, Jason settled down to a full-time career of writing (trashy) Mark Caine novels. He philandered his way around the world, doing research for his stories and tripping over a variety of odd--often verging on surreal--cases, usually involving beautiful women. He was occasionally blackmailed into working for British Intelligence under the threat of being arrested for unpaid back taxes. Written by Marg Baskin <[email protected]>
15 September 1971 (UK) See more »
Filming Locations:
(United Kingdom) – See all my reviews
This is by way of a comment on one of the other reviews.
The episode "All that Glisters..." was playing recently on a TV that I could hear but not see. "Thunderbirds!" I thought since I could clearly hear the voice of Scott Tracey. On going in to actually watch the TV I was amazed to see that it was Jason King rather than Thunderbirds and that bizarrely Clinton Greyn was speaking with Scott Tracey's voice. The lip-sync was excellent but it was clearly a dubbed voice since the acoustic was different. And of course, rather than Greyn's rounded Welsh tones we were getting the distinctive Canadian sound of Shane Rimmer. Cant understand why they did this - and then not credit it? Weird.
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| Peter Wyngarde |
Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 while standing on the balcony of which type of building? | TV Spies & Secret Agents · Primer · The A.V. Club
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A year after U.N.C.L.E., TV producer Michael Garrison decided to extend the TV Western cycle by combining it with the Bond-ian pop-art spy thriller. The result was The Wild Wild West, which had Robert Conrad playing a suave, athletic secret agent who traveled across the country in a souped-up boxcar with his partner, hammy inventor Ross Martin. The two men attempted the ridiculous week after week, sneaking into impregnable fortresses (frequently in caves, which made for cheap sets) and smashing the super-machines of the future, created by the makeshift despots and mad scientists springing up in the hinterlands in the wake of the Civil War. Piling gimmick upon gimmick, The Wild Wild West offered crazy gadgets, campy villains, buddy comedy, and a winking disregard for historical accuracy. A pervasive Cold War anxiety also ran through the show, playing on the American fear of some vaguely exotic imperialist threat, manifested inside our borders.
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The Wild Wild West showed how easily spy stories could be grafted onto other genres—as did the British series The Avengers, which debuted on ITV in 1961 as more of a detective show, then went on to become one the most popular examples of small-screen spy drama. The Avengers pioneered “spy-fi,” in which international intrigue ran second to science-fiction gimmicks and Dr. Doomish super-villains bent on world conquest. Add in high-tech gadgets and a general tendency to emphasize escapist adventure over realistic geopolitical gamesmanship, and The Avengers concocted a formula for success that kept it on the air for the rest of the decade. And it didn’t hurt that Patrick Macnee’s John Steed stood as a paragon of suave professionalism, nor that he was accompanied by a series of tantalizingly-outfitted female sidekicks like Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, and Linda Thorson.
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Though The Avengers was the quintessential British spy series, the UK kept pumping out new secret agents throughout the ’60s. Few of those shows were sillier than The Champions, another ITC effort that mixed state-sponsored capering with a dollop of the fantastic. In The Champions’ case, a trio of enforcers were blessed with super-powers—enhanced senses, telepathy, precognition, and super-strength—which they used to clandestinely protect the world from the petty dictators trying to rule it. The show was pure froth, pitched to more of a juvenile audience, with none of the overt winking of The Avengers.
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[pagebreak]
In fact, even though the British and American agents alike took their missions seriously, there was a light-heartedness to the ’60s shows that became more dominant as the decade wore on. Perhaps that’s because it became harder to take spies seriously after Get Smart, the Mel Brooks/Buck Henry-created secret-agent parody that ran from 1965 to 1970, and which openly mocked espionage’s alphabet soup of agencies and agent names, as well as the craziness of the various spookware. Get Smart took the wind out of the sails of spy adventures, urging them to become either sillier or more sophisticated.
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In the Bill Cosby/Robert Culp vehicle I Spy, for example, absurd world-conquering plots and impossible gadgetry took a back seat to banter. I Spy was as much a comedy as Get Smart—it even debuted the same year—but it relied on the chummy interplay of Cosby and Culp, who were cool and low-key even as they traveled the globe dispatching bad guys. I Spy was patriotic in its own way, too, making the U.S. look more integrated and progressive than it actually was at the time by portraying a black agent and a white agent as friends and equals, without ever making a big deal about it.
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While other series were getting goofier, in 1966, Mission: Impossible went the other direction, bringing a touch of class to the genre. M:I stuck covert government agents into complicated caper plots, showing how an “Impossible Missions Force” busted up terrorist cells, mob bosses, and communist dictators by using disguises, deception, split-second timing, and switcheroos. Ringleader Steven Hill (later replaced by Peter Graves) would sort through his dossiers of available agents, nearly always settling on master of disguise Martin Landau, sexy supermodel Barbara Bain, circus strongman Peter Lupus, and guru gadgeteer Greg Morris. Then they’d all embark on an elaborate ruse that the audience at home usually had to figure out as it was happening. It was the spy series as sleight-of-hand puzzle, encouraging viewers to think more about the plots than the politics.
Source
The spy genre hit a lull in the ’70s—perhaps because Watergate made the idea of wiretapping for the government seem a little less heroic—but it rebounded in the ’80s with shows like Scarecrow And Mrs. King and Airwolf, which took advantage of the Reagan-era resurgence in Cold War politicking to re-introduce the idea of extraordinary folk on the frontlines of the fight against terrorism and communism. Airwolf actually started as a more complex depiction of government service, with Jan-Michael Vincent playing a Rambo/Chuck Norris-type loner, unsure whether the super-secret agency he flew his special helicopter for was really on the right side. But by the second season, skepticism gave way to jingoism. As for Scarecrow & Mrs. King, it treated espionage as the backdrop to a grand love story, putting ordinary divorcee housewife Kate Jackson in peril week after week so suave spy Bruce Boxleitner could save her. The heroes’ romantic intentions were what mattered, not their career.
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Perhaps not coincidentally, by the end of the ’80s, the spy-parodists were back on the case. The short-lived Fox sitcom The New Adventures Of Beans Baxter lightly roasted the whole notion of heroes with trenchcoats and earpieces by making its protagonist a teenage kid, brought into the business against his will. The idea that a dopey high-schooler could save the world as well as any specially trained operative punctured some of the genre’s pretensions. Similarly, just last year, ABC Family and comic-book writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach spoofed the square-jawed secret-agent prototype with The Middleman, a wonderfully deranged heroes-and-villains saga that celebrated righteousness even as it recognized how silly a devoted lawman can look.
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In recent years, as America’s public image has taken a beating around the world, even the unapologetically patriotic secret-agent shows have contained an element of world-weariness and slow-burning frustration. Two weeks after 9/11, CBS debuted The Agency, which ran for two seasons, detailing the inner workings of the CIA. The Agency’s agents dealt with bureaucracy and internal corruption between missions that were often challenging for their diplomatic sensitivity as much as for the viciousness of the villains they went after. In 2006, around the time of the third anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, CBS started airing The Unit, a series about paramilitary operatives and the families they leave behind when they go on missions. Co-created by Shawn Ryan (the man behind FX’s crooked-cops-can-be-pretty-effective drama The Shield) and playwright David Mamet (who shortly thereafter publicly renounced liberalism), The Unit was a complex portrait of the compromises and sacrifices required to keep the country safe. It was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. without the fancy gadgets, and Mission: Impossible with the complicated schemes. These men did their jobs with grit and guns.
[pagebreak]
Intermediate: The Pragmatists
Though few would dare question the patriotism of 24’s hero Jack Bauer—a man who’s given up every chance at a healthy, sane existence in order to protect the Stars, the Stripes, and all the geometry between—24 itself takes the conflicted emotions of The Agency and The Unit one step further by implying that patriotism isn’t always enough. For the first six seasons of the series (marked as “Days,” given the show’s real-time gimmick), Jack Bauer has been an on-again, off-again employee of the Counter Terrorist Unit, a government agency designed specifically to combat terrorist attacks inside the United States. As an agent, Jack has often worked undercover, even going so far as to get himself hooked on smack to infiltrate a drug cartel, but tough as the work has been, at least it’s easy to tell the bad guys from the good out in the field. Finding his way through the tricky maze of double-crossed loyalties and political infighting in the halls of CTU has proved tougher. Bauer’s agency has had more than its share of traitors over the years (at least one per Day), as well as some bureaucrats in upper management unwilling to give Jack the leeway he’s needed to get the job done. So Bauer, gifted with an unerring conviction in his own righteousness, has often been forced to strike out on his own. Spy shows are often based on the fantasy of people pretending to be someone else, but there’s always someone in a room somewhere who knows it’s all a game. An operative’s life is made exponentially more difficult when that someone starts changing the rules.
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In a way, 24 is the prime example of the modern secret-agent show, wherein the heroes complete shadowy missions while fully aware that what they’re doing may not always be “right.” And if not 24, then perhaps the definitive 21st-century super-spy series is Alias. Created by J.J. Abrams—and marked by his unique ability to punch right to the heart of the zeitgeist—Alias featured all the elements of the spy hits of previous generations, including high-tech gadgets, international intrigue, flashy action sequences, and goofy disguises. But it was all compressed into a suitably modern sensibility, as Abrams added a lot of the crazed mythology that would pop up again in his series Lost, as well as relationship dramas for the ladies and a sexy, ass-kicking Jennifer Garner for the fellas. What made Alias feel especially cutting-edge was how it held its cards close to the chest regarding who, exactly, were the good guys. Garner’s Sydney Bristow, recruited fresh out of college, was barely allowed to get comfortable with her job before she found out that the agency she worked for was hurting her friends, destroying her family, and—for all she could tell—doing as much harm to the world as the terrorist outfits they claimed to oppose. Keeping the goals and leadership of groups like SD-6, APO, and Prophet Five murky kept Bristow on constantly shifting moral ground—and kept the audience guessing.
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In the contemporary TV spy series, there are fewer Jack Bauers than there are Sydney Bristows. More often than not, today’s heroes tend to be recruited through deceit—or drawn in by circumstance. Consider the current Chuck, in which an ordinary computer geek has government secrets downloaded into his brain, and is subsequently forced into service. Or the short-lived syndicated series She Spies, which resembled the movie version of Charlie’s Angels in style and tone, while following three female agents who worked for the government in order to atone for past crimes. Even the Canadian series Intelligence—about the inner workings of a Vancouver organized-crime unit—splits its story between a driven agent and the mob boss she converts into an informant, and implies that both characters do what they do because they have to, not because they want to.
Then again, that sense of espionage and other covert ops as “just a job” has its roots in the same ’60s TV spy boom that produced The Patriots. In spite of its early-’60s timing and surface similarities to the James Bond oeuvre, the ITV series Danger Man (a.k.a. Secret Agent in the U.S.) largely distinguished itself by how different it was from other contemporary spy shows. Starring Patrick McGoohan as secret agent John Drake (initially an agent of NATO, but retconned in the second series to work for an MI-6 analogue), Danger Man toned down many of the hallmarks of the super-spy genre to a refreshing degree. Drake seemed more like Everyman than Superman, solving his missions with good old hard work and determination instead of insane gadgets and high-flying derring-do. Those missions were also much more straightforward and realistic; Drake’s job was to stabilize struggling democracies and maintain an often-bloody political status quo. In fact, in its portrayal of a spy engaged in the covert cloak-and-dagger work of international espionage, as well as in its ambivalent moral tone (missions were often qualified successes, if not failures, and audiences were clearly shown that innocent people often got hurt in pursuit of what the powers that be considered a greater good), Danger Man anticipated the grim, dirty Cold War spy films of the 1970s. In addition, Patrick McGoohan’s portrayal of a spy often seriously at odds with his paymasters was a meaningful foreshadowing of his most famous role, in The Prisoner.
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American television also imported the British spy series The Baron, with Steve Forrest as an art expert whose jet-setting lifestyle was frequently interrupted by the government’s demand that he help them on a case involving a priceless antique. And ABC created its own arcane-specialist-impressed-into-government-service show in 1968 with It Takes A Thief, with Robert Wagner as a cat burglar who was asked to steal sensitive materials on behalf of Uncle Sam. Forrest’s character in The Baron was much more contented with his lot than Wagner’s in It Takes A Thief, but for both, government work was a sidelight, not a calling.
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In some ways, The Equalizer, a CBS crime drama from the late 1980s, wasn’t a spy show at all. Most episodes played out like slightly twisted detective stories, or vigilante crime-fighter adventures. (Indeed, a bit too often, the show seemed to aspire to be nothing more than a thinking man’s A-Team.) But at its best moments—inevitably buoyed by Edward Woodward’s always-meaty performance as the title character—The Equalizer reminded sharp viewers of the best aspects of previous generations of spy shows. Woodward played Robert McCall, an embittered veteran of a mysterious CIA-type outfit, who had retired from the espionage game and become a sort of combination bodyguard/avenger who hired himself out to desperate people whose lives were in danger. Viewers were kept on their toes by the appearance of shadowy figures from Woodward’s past, alternately acting as allies, informants, or antagonists, and by hints that his work was meant to atone for various morally dubious actions he’d committed in the past. The Equalizer was only ever as good as its individual scripts; it lacked a show-runner with the ambition to give it an overarching narrative, but it deserves credit for a dark and sometimes gripping approach to the spy drama that nicely blended it with other existing action genres in an interesting way.
[pagebreak]
Advanced: The Rogues
Sort of an Equalizer for the 21st century, USA Network’s current hit original series Burn Notice stars Jeffrey Donovan as an ex-spy who hires himself out as a freelance justice-dispenser to the aggrieved citizens of Miami. The difference between The Equalizer and Burn Notice? Donovan’s Michael Westen has been “burned,” meaning that he was dismissed from the agency and turned into a non-person, for reasons no one will explain. Two-thirds of the average Burn Notice episode is dedicated to the client-of-the-week, and the other third follows Westen’s attempts to figure out who burned him, and to get his reputation and job back. Mostly though, Burn Notice is about the hero explaining to the audience, in super-cool voiceovers, exactly how to plant bugs or break into office buildings or plant evidence or bullet-proof a car. Though more a fun, frivolous hour of television than anything else, Burn Notice carries the underlying message that there are no secrets anymore, and that the only loyalty that matters is to the people the hero knows and trusts best—including those of us watching at home.
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Where The Patriots do their jobs out of some rarely wavering commitment to the cause, and The Pragmatists fight on despite uncertainty about the validity of what they’re doing, The Rogues exist in a much murkier realm—often distrusted by the very people they’re supposed to be helping. In the TV adaptation of the film La Femme Nikita, Peta Wilson plays a falsely accused criminal who works on behalf of a shadowy agency that threatens to kill her if she doesn’t comply. Much of the tension in the series is derived from the heroine’s attempts to get out from under the thumb of the agents who control her. Similarly, the too-abruptly cancelled CBS series Now And Again follows the plight of a middle-aged family man who has his brain transplanted into the body of a super-soldier, and is kept captive by the government except when he goes on missions. When he can, he sneaks away to see the family who thinks he’s dead—and who doesn’t recognize him in his new body. Though there’s rarely any doubt that the hero’s missions are vital, he maintains his own private directive: to escape as soon as possible.
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Of course not all Rogues suffer such existential crises. In the early-’70s British series Jason King, Peter Wyngarde played a detective-turned-novelist who found it impossible to get any work done because the government kept drawing him into their missions against his will. Though little-known in the U.S., the one season of Jason King had a lasting cultural impact, with the character’s natty clothes and ice-cool style serving as an inspiration for Austin Powers, the Invisibles character “Mr. Six,” and the X-Men villain Jason Wyngarde, among others. Jason King was like The Saint given a Carnaby Street upgrade.
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And speaking of perhaps the most famous Rogue in espionage fiction, Leslie Charteris’ legendary character The Saint (a.k.a. Simon Templar) began life in a series of pulp novels in the late ’20s as more of a common adventurer, but by the time Britain’s ITV brought the character to television in 1962, he was fully transformed into yet another 007-style international man of mystery. (The comparison was made pretty explicit in the series, and it didn’t help matters much when Roger Moore, who played Templar, went on to replace Sean Connery as James Bond.) Even while fighting globetrotting super-villains and using Q-style gadgets, though, Templar retained his own distinct characteristics which distinguished him from the average super-spy. For one thing, he didn’t work for any government agency; he was more of a jet-setting free agent (and one, it was often hinted, with a criminal past) who would work with organizations like Scotland Yard, but only when it suited him, and always on his own terms. Templar was a man with his own moral code, impenetrable as it may have been, and he was more than willing to stand against people like his sometime-ally Inspector Teal when they didn’t live up to that code. Robin Hood or “robbing hood,” the Saint was always his own man.
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If the super-spy genre can be said to have a logical end-point, it was reached in 1968 with the conclusion of Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein’s brilliant, frustrating ITV series The Prisoner. It’s the story of an unnamed super-spy (whom fans have thought for decades is meant to be Danger Man’s John Drake) who resigns over an unrevealed moral conflict with his superiors and gets banished to a mysterious island. An endless series of interrogators, always designated Number Two, attempt to get the hero—who is alternately enraged, animalistic, cooperative, and calculating—to explain why he resigned. Throughout the brief (17-episode) series, the people who run the island use drugs, flashbacks, seduction, torture, betrayal, and every other trick in the book to get McGoohan’s character to reveal a secret they probably already know. The moral struggle is thus subtly altered, and the entire dynamic of the spy genre is changed. It’s no longer about fighting the enemy, but determining who the enemy is. It’s no longer about who deserves your allegiance, but who owns your conscience. The Prisoner often floated adrift in genre clichés, and its surrealistic elements could be hokey instead of intriguing. The show was wildly inconsistent. But McGoohan was always magnificent, and The Prisoner took the spy genre as far as television has ever allowed it to go.
Top 5
1. The Prisoner
Other spy series have considered what a life of secrets and voyeurism does to the human psyche, but few have been so successful at finding the genre’s layers within layers. This is the secret-agent show as radical pop art.
2. Mission: Impossible
From the propulsive score to the stylish cinematography to the cast of earnest specialists, Mission: Impossible brought a touch of class and professionalism to the genre. The series was a refreshing oasis of classic adventure storytelling in an era of parody and camp.
3. The Avengers
Of course, camp isn’t always a deal-breaker. The Avengers rarely took its supervillains or heroic archetypes all that seriously, but its over-the-top design and droll humor helped redefine spook cool.
4. Burn Notice
Spies don’t get much cooler than Michael Westen, an oft-betrayed and abandoned good soldier who by all rights should be a pitiable, tortured soul. Instead, Westen passes his days trying to live right and help people, while deploying all his spy know-how with a thin little grin that lets the audience know it’s okay to enjoy themselves, because the hero sure is.
5. Alias
Though convoluted to the extreme, Alias understood the two elements that make up a good spy show: mind-bending double-crosses and snazzy outfits.
| i don't know |
The Last King of Scotland was a 2006 movie, that featured which African leader in the storyline? | The Last King of Scotland (2006) - IMDb
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The Last King of Scotland ( 2006 )
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Based on the events of the brutal Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's regime as seen by his personal physician during the 1970's.
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Won 1 Oscar. Another 47 wins & 30 nominations. See more awards »
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Storyline
In the early 1970s, Nicholas Garrigan, a young semi-idealistic Scottish doctor, comes to Uganda to assist in a rural hospital. Once there, he soon meets up with the new President, Idi Amin, who promises a golden age for the African nation. Garrigan hits it off immediately with the rabid Scotland fan, who soon offers him a senior position in the national health department and becomes one of Amin's closest advisers. However as the years pass, Garrigan cannot help but notice Amin's increasingly erratic behavior that grows beyond a legitimate fear of assassination into a murderous insanity that is driving Uganda into bloody ruin. Realizing his dire situation with the lunatic leader unwilling to let him go home, Garrigan must make some crucial decisions that could mean his death if the despot finds out. Written by Kenneth Chisholm ([email protected])
Rated R for some strong violence and gruesome images, sexual content and language | See all certifications »
Parents Guide:
19 January 2007 (USA) See more »
Also Known As:
El último rey de Escocia See more »
Filming Locations:
$142,899 (USA) (29 September 2006)
Gross:
Did You Know?
Trivia
The Times journalist is played by Dr. Dick Stockley who is a British doctor who lives and works in Kampala, Uganda. See more »
Goofs
(at around 44 mins) When Drs Garrigan and Junju are discussing the chest X-ray it is the wrong way round - back to front. See more »
Quotes
Performed by The Nyonza Singers (as Nyzonza Singers)
Choir Master: Wassanyi Serukenya
Story of Idi Amin's Ugandan rule from his personal doctor's POV
20 September 2006 | by fivepoints
(Los Angeles, United States) – See all my reviews
I saw this movie at a free Pre-Screening in Hollywood 9-19-06. Here's the good, the bad and the ugly. THE GOOD: Forrest W. acted his butt off in this one. Amazing. In fact, all of the actor's performances were terrific. The shooting locations were beautiful. There was a lot of suspense in the film and at times I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the next scene. I must admit the story was really good. There were absolutely wonderful camera shots and angles. THE BAD: Gratuitous sex and violence. Say what you will about Alfred Hitchcock being from another era in film making, but his ideas about implied violence and sex in most of his films were good ones. THE UGLY: I would have enjoyed the film a lot more if it had been told from the POV of Idi Amin, one of his wives or a Ugandan in his cabinet. CONCLUSION: Would I pay to see this film? Yes. END
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| Idi Amin |
Who was the singer and voice artist behind King Louis in the cartoon version of Jungle Book? | blackfilm.com | THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND: An Interview with Kerry Washington
(September: Main Page * Features * Reviews * Screenings * Teen ) Current Issue * Archive
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
An Interview with Kerry Washington
By Wilson Morales
September 28, 2006
Kerry Washington continues to strengthen her status as one of the best actresses working today with each role. Having won many accolades for her role in the 2004 Oscar nominated film, “Ray”, which netted co-star Jamie Foxx a gold statue, Washington was later featured in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and had a small but important role in the blockbuster film, “The Fantastic Four”, in which she played the blind artist Alicia Masters. She will reprise her role in the sequel, “The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, which is currently shooting in Canada. Earlier this year, she starred with the Wayans Bros. in the comedy film, ‘Little Man”. Her current project has Washington once again playing the role of a real life person in “The Last King of Scotland”. She plays one of the wives to known dictator Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker. In speaking to blackfilm.com, Washington talks about her character, and her current projects, which include “I Think I Love My Wife” with Chris Rock.
Can you talk about the character you play and how the role came about?
Kerry Washington: Kay was Idi Amin’s third wife and she was the youngest of the wives and thought to be beautiful. She was a dancer and formerly educated, which is somewhat rare for an African woman at that time. They made sure that she was a part of the story, which was awesome for me.
Why do you think the film focused on this pa
rticular wife and not the others?
KW: In real life, Kay was the one who wound up having an affair. It was not with a white doctor; it was with an African doctor, and that’s probably why she’s included in the story, because she was one of the people who defied Amin. She took a dangerous risk having an affair behind his back.
Do you think any of Kay’s friends, should they go see this film, would have an objection watching Kay have an affair with a white man, although the character is a composite of many men in Kay’s life?
KW: I think the most important question is, “Did Kay have any friends?” I don’t think Kay had any friends. I think people in general would have been furious. I think it would have been very, very scandalous for her.
How much research did you do to know everything about Kay?
KW: As much as I could. There’s a little bit of writing about her. There are some pictures. I did some research on beauty magazines from Africa, the time, and in Europe to figures out what were the issues that were worth dealing with, and what the clothes were, and the books there were reading, and what were the things they wanted to know about. I spent time with a woman who was actually Kay’s cousin; a younger cousin.
When I spoke to Forest he had mentioned that he wasn’t sure if Idi was the main cause for Kay’s death. How much do you know as what really happened to Kay?
KW: There is a lot of scandal regarding her death. It depends on who you talk to. There are sort of three versions of the story. One is that she died of complications during the abortions. She had an affair with the African doctor who performed the abortion. Some people say that she died
from complications from the abortion and that he chopped her up and put her in his trunk and that Idi found her there and sowed the pieces back together and displayed it publicly. Some people say that she died from complications from the abortion and that Idi chopped her up and sowed the pieces back together and displayed it publicly. Some people say that she actually made it through the abortion, got home, but was hemorrhaging from the operation and that’s how Idi knew what had happened and that he ordered her death, and had her chopped up and sowed back together. For me what is it important is not so much what happened in between but that she did in fact have an affair with another man. Regardless of who cut her up, Idi ordered her remains to be sowed back together in the wrong places and displayed for people to see what happens when they commit treason. There was too much of his manhood at stake to talk about the fact that this woman had committed adultery; instead it was he was Uganda and she had committed an act of treason against Uganda.
What do you make of Forest’s performance?
KW: I think Forest’s performance is absolutely brilliant!
Did you see him as Idi Amin?
KW: Totally and completely.
How was working with James McAvoy?
KW: He’s awesome. He’s really talented. He’s got a great work ethic. He’s a gr
eat actor and a very easy person to be around.
As much as we think we know about Idi Amin, what do you want the audience to know once they finish seeing the film?
KW: It’s such a complication question, but I think, for me honestly, and this is what I hope people don’t do. I think it’s really easy to sit in the theater and go, “Oh my God, that’s horrible, but I would never do that. I would never be a corrupt leader or I would never cheat on my husband or I would never become complicit in crimes against the nation and its people” and yet, when you walk in the world as a human being, people are committing crimes and the whole Enron thing is people having disregard for other people. People do cheat on their spouses sadly. Me, as an American, I have done marches against Iraq. I have spoken out against the war in Iraq and yet I’m a tax-paying American citizen, so in some ways, I am complicit in the murderous actions of my nation against other people. As much as I can sit in that theater and go, “Thank God I’m not like any of those people”, the reality is a different story. Every American that pays taxes… Can we really say that we are that different from McAvoy’s character, Nicholas Garrigan? There are horrible crimes of atrocities that are being committed by our government and what are doing to stop even though we know? I’m in Vancouver shooting the sequel to “The Fantastic Four” and in Canada, you see those coffins coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq. I was running in the morning on the treadmill and I literally had to stop because when you see those coffins coming home, it changes you as a person. In this country, our government has made it so that we are not allowed to see that reality. In the way that Amin is doing things in secret and committing crimes behind the back of the Ugandan people, our government is killing people and not even letting us see the reality; not even letting participate in that truth so that we can make informed voting decisions based on that truth.
As you just mentioned that film you are shooting now, what can you say about the sequel to “The Fantastic Four” and what can we expect from your character?
KW: I can’t tell you anything. They printed the script with our names all over it so that if anything leaks, they know exactly where it leaked from. Because I like my job and because I don’t want to fight with (Chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment) Tom Rothman and his studio has produced three of the films that I have coming out, I’m not going to tell you anything. In fact, I don’t know anything that’s going on in the set because I’m blind, at least my character is.
You have another film in the can, “The Dead Girl”. Is that still coming out?
KW: It is. It’s actually coming out this year. It was going
to come out next year but they are so excited about it over at Lakeshore (Entertainment) that they are really pushing it to come out early next year, maybe January or February and it has an insane cast. I haven’t seen it yet but I’m excited to.
What’s the story about and who else is in the film?
KW: It has an amazing ensemble piece. It’s myself, Marcia Gay Harden, Brittany Murphy, Toni Collette, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Bryne, James Franco, it’s insane, Josh Brolin; it’s an incredible cast. It’s a collection of stories that are seemingly unrelated that are in fact related; similar to “Crash” but the tone and subject matter are very, very different.
You also have “I Think I Love My Wife” with Chris Rock. How much fun was doing that?
KW: It’s a real departure for him. What I love about the film is that it’s a remake of an old French film, an Eric Rohmer film, a 1972 film called “Chloe In The Afternoon”. He’s done a modern take on t
hat story called “I think I love my wife” and it’s exciting because that’s a different material for him and it’s very much a film as opposed to just a movie, but it is a dramedy and it’s smart, which I think is great.
With all these films that you are making these days, I seem to see you at different events around the world. How do you find time to travel and balance it with work?
KW: A lot of it is for work. My fiancé David (Moscow) and I really took advantage of Uganda when I was there shooting. We traveled a lot. We did a lot when we were there and just this past summer, he was doing a movie in Guatemala, so we were able again to take advantage and explore Central America. As one of the new faces of L'Oreal Paris, we have been to Europe a lot more, so part of it is that we try to figure where we are going for work and then we make sure we tag on days in the beginning and end.
THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND opens on September 27, 2006
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Name the Ancient Greek Muse of Dance? | Muse - Ancient History Encyclopedia
Muse
by Mark Cartwright
published on 14 December 2012
In Greek mythology , the nine Muses are goddesses of the various arts such as music, dance, and poetry and are blessed not only with wonderful artistic talents themselves but also with great beauty, grace, and allure. Their gifts of song, dance, and joy helped the gods and mankind to forget their troubles and inspired musicians and writers to reach ever greater artistic and intellectual heights.
The Muses are the daughters of Zeus and the Titan Mnemosyne (Memory) after the couple slept together for nine consecutive nights. They are:
Calliope, traditionally the most important (beautiful-voiced and representing epic poetry and also rhetoric),
Clio (glorifying and representing history),
Erato (lovely and representing singing),
Euterpe (well-delighting and representing lyric poetry),
Melpomene (singing and representing tragedy),
Polymnia (many hymning and representing hymns to the gods and heroes),
Terpsichore or Stesichore (delighting in dance),
Thalia (blooming and representing comedy),
Urania (heavenly and representing astronomy).
Certain objects also became associated with the Muses and help to identify their particular talents. Calliope often holds a writing tablet and stylus, Clio has a scroll, Euterpe a double aulos (or flute), and Thalia a theatre mask.
The Muses were believed to live on Mt. Olympus where they entertained their father and the other Olympian gods with their great artistry, but later tradition also placed them on Mt. Helicon in Boeotia where there was a major cult centre to the goddesses, or on Mt. Parnassus where the Castalian spring was a favourite destination for poets and artists. On Mount Olympus, Apollo Mousagetes was, in a certain sense, the choir leader of the Muses, although his attachment was not limited to music, as he fathered many children with his musical group. Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, was the mother of Orpheus , the wonderfully gifted lyre player whose father was said by some to be Apollo himself.
Although bringers of festivity and joy, the Muses were not to be trifled with when it came to the superiority of their artistic talents.
Although bringers of festivity and joy, the Muses were not to be trifled with when it came to the superiority of their artistic talents. The nine daughters of Pierus foolishly tried to compete musically with the Muses on Mt. Helicon and were all turned into birds for their impertinence. The Thracian musician Thamyres (son of the Nymph Agriope) was another who challenged the Muses in music and after inevitably coming second best to the goddesses was punished with blindness, the loss of his musical talent, and his singing voice. This myth was also the subject of a tragedy by Sophocles . The Muses also acted as judges in another musical competition, this time between Apollo on his kithara and the satyr Marsyas , who played the aulos given to him by Athena . Naturally, Apollo won and Marsyas was flayed alive for his troubles.
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Hesiod in his Theogony claimed that he spoke with the Muses on Mt. Helicon, and they gave him a luxuriant laurel branch and breathed into him their divine voice so that he could proclaim the glory of the gods and their descendants. Thus, the simple shepherd was transformed into one of the most important poets in history. Hesiod also states that the Muses were created as an aid to forgetfulness and relief from troubles, perhaps as a balance to their mother, who personified memory.
In ancient Greece , music, and by association the Muses, were held in great esteem and music was played in homes, in theatres, during religious ceremonies, to accompany athletics, provided rhythm during military training, accompanied agricultural activities such as harvesting, and was an important element in the education of children. For example, Themistocles , the great Athenian politician and general, considered his education incomplete because he could not play the khitara. Throughout the ancient Greek world musical festivals and competitions were held in honour of the Muses and philosophical schools bore their name: the Mouseia.
In art, the Muses are depicted as beautiful young women, often with wings. The Muses often appear on 5th and 4th century BCE red- and black-figure pottery , in particular in scenes with Apollo playing his kithara or representations of the Marsyas and Thamyres myths. Many statues of the Muses have been found on Delos , an important cult centre to Apollo. In addition, in the 5th century BCE, the iconography of the ideal woman in Greek art came very close to that of a Muse. Music and, therefore, also the Muses, frequently appear as a subject on lekythoi, the elegant funerary vases, which were placed in graves so that loved ones might have the pleasure of music on their journey into the next life. A celebrated representation of the Muses as a group is the three marble reliefs from a statue base, dating to c. 325-300 BCE and now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens .
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Who was the oldest man in the Old Testament? | MUSES (Mousai) - Greek Goddesses of Music, Poetry & the Arts
Muse, Muses, Of Song
Muse with barbiton, Paestan red-figure lekanis C4th B.C., Musée du Louvre
THE MOUSAI (Muses) were the goddesses of music, song and dance, and the source of inspiration to poets. They were also goddesses of knowledge, who remembered all things that had come to pass. Later the Mousai were assigned specific artistic spheres: Kalliope (Calliope), epic poetry; Kleio (Clio), history; Ourania (Urania), astronomy; Thaleia (Thalia), comedy; Melpomene, tragedy; Polymnia (Polyhymnia), religious hymns; Erato, erotic poetry; Euterpe, lyric poetry; and Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), choral song and dance.
In ancient Greek vase painting the Mousai were depicted as beautiful young women with a variety of musical intruments. In later art each of the nine was assigned her own distinctive attribute.
There were two alternative sets of Mousai--the three or four Mousai Titanides and the three Mousai Apollonides .
FAMILY OF THE MUSES
PARENTS
[1.1] ZEUS & MNEMOSYNE (Hesiod Theogony 1 & 915, Mimnermus Frag, Alcman Frag 8, Solon Frag 13, Apollodorus 1.13, Pausanias 1.2.5, Diodorus Siculus 4.7.1, Orphic Hymns 76 & 77, Antoninus Liberalis 9, Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.21, Arnobius 3.37)
[1.2] ZEUS (Homer Odyssey 8.457, Homeric Hymns 32, et al)
[1.3] MNEMOSYNE (Pindar Paean 7, Terpander Frag 4, Aristotle Frag 842, Plato Theaetetus 191c)
[2.1] OURANOS & GAIA (Alcman Frag 67, Mnaseas Frag, Diodorus Siculus 4.7.1, Scholiast on Pindar, Aronobius 3.37)
[2.2] OURANOS (Mimnermos Frag, Pausanias 9.29.1, Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.21)
[2.3] ZEUS & PLOUSIA (Tzetzes on Hesiod 35)
[3.1] APOLLON (Eumelus Frag 35, Tzetzes on Hesiod 35)
[4.1] PIEROS & ANTIOPE (Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.21, Tzetzes on Hesiod 35)
NAMES
[1.2] TERPSIKHORE , ERATO , KALLIOPE , OURANIA (Plato Phaedrus 259)
[1.3] POLYMATHEIA (Plutarch Symposium 9.14)
[2.1] MELETE, AOEDE, MNEME (Pausanias 9.39.3)
[2.2] MELETE, AODE, ARKHE, THELXINOE (Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.21, Tzetzes on Hes. 23)
[3.1] NETE, MESE, HYPATE (Plutarch Symposium 9.14)
[3.2] KEPHISO, APOLLONIS, BORYSTHENIS (Eumelus Frag 35, Tzetzes)
[4.1] NEILO, TRITONE, ASOPO, HEPTAPORA, AKHELOIS, TIPOPLO, RHODIA (Epicharmis, Tzetzes on Hes. 23)
ENCYCLOPEDIA
Muse with box, Paestan red-figure lekanis C4th B.C., Musée du Louvre
MUSAE (Mousai). The Muses, according to the earliest writers, were the inspiring goddesses of song, and, according to later noticus, divinities presiding over the different kinds of poetry, and over the arts and sciences. They were originally regarded as the nymphs of inspiring wells, near which they were worshipped, and bore different names in different places, until the Thraco-Boeotian worship of the nine Muses spread from Boeotia over other parts of Greece, and ultimately became generally established. (Respecting the Muses conceived as nymphs see Schol. ad Theocrit. vii. 92; Hesych. s. v. Numphê; Steph. Byz. s. v. Torrêbos ; Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. vii. 21.)
The genealogy of the Muses is not the same in all writers. The most common notion was, that they were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and born in Pieria, at the foot of Mount Olympus (Hes. Theog. 52, &c., 915; Hom. Il. ii. 491, Od. i. 10; Apollod. i. 3. § 1); but some call them the daughters of Uranus and Gaea (Schol. ad Pind. Nem. iii. 16; Paus. ix. 29. § 2; Diod. iv. 7; Arnob. adv. Gent. iii. 37), and others daughters of Pierus and a Pimpleian nymph, whom Cicero (De Nat. Deor. iii. 21) calls Antiope (Tzetz. ad Hes. Op. et D. p. 6; Paus. l. c.), or of Apollo, or of Zeus and Plusia, or of Zeus and Moneta, probably a mere translation of Mnemosyne or Mneme, whence they are called Mnemonides (Ov. Met. v. 268), or of Zeus and Minerva (Isid. Orig. iii. 14), or lastly of Aether and Gaea. (Hygin. Fab. Praef.) Eupheme is called the nurse of the Muses, and at the foot of Mount Helicon her statue stood beside that of Linus. (Paus. ix. 29. § 3.)
With regard to the number of the Muses, we are informed that originally three were worshipped on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, namely, Melete (meditation), Mneme (memory), and Aoede (song); and their worship and names are said to have been first introduced by Ephialtes and Otus. (Paus. ix. 29. § 1, &c.) Three were also recognised at Sicyon, where one of them bore the name of Polymatheia (Plut. Sympos. ix. 14), and at Delphi, where their names were identical with those of the lowest, middle, and highest chord of the lyre, viz. Nete, Mese, and Hypate (Plut. l. c.), or Cephisso, Apollonis, and Borysthenis, which names characterise them as the daughters of Apollo. (Tzetz. l. c. ; Arnob. iii. 37; Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. vii. 21; Diod. iv. 7.) As daughters of Zeus and Plusia we find mention of four Muses, viz. Thelxinoe (the heart delighting), Aoede (song), Arche (beginning), and Melete. (Cic., Arnob., Tzetz. ll. cc. ; Serv. ad Aen. i. 12.) Some accounts, again, in which they are called daughters of Pierus, mention seven Muses, viz. Neilo, Tritone, Asopo, Heptapora, Achelois, Tipoplo, and Rhodia (Tzetz. Arnob. ll. cc.), and others, lastly, mention eight, which is also said to have been the number recognised at Athens. (Arnob. l. c.; Serv. ad Aen. i. 12; Plat. De Re Publ. p. 116.) At length, however, the number nine appears to have become established in all Greece. Homer sometimes mentions Musa only in the singular, and sometimes Musae in the plural, and once only (Od. xxiv. 60) he speaks of nine Muses, though without mentioning any of their names. Hesiod (Theog. 77. &c.) is the first that states the names of all the nine, and these nine names henceforth became established. They are Cleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope. Plutarch (l. c.) states that in some places all nine were designated by the common name Mneiae, i. e. Remembrances.
If we now inquire into the notions entertained about the nature and character of the Muses, we find that, in the Homeric poems, they are the goddesses of song and poetry, and live in Olympus. (Il. ii. 484.) There they sing the festive songs at the repasts of the immortals (Il. i. 604, Hymn. in Apoll. Pyth. 11), and at the funeral of Patroclus they sing lamentations. (Od. xxiv. 60; comp. Pind. Isthm. viii. 126.) The power which we find most frequently assigned to them, is that of bringing before the mind of the mortal poet the events which he has to relate; and that of conferring upon him the gift of song, and of giving gracefulness to what he utters. (Il. ii. 484, 491, 761, Od. i. 1, viii. 63, &c., 481, 488; Eustath. ad Hom. p. 259.) There seems to be no reason for doubting that the earliest poets in their invocation of the Muse or Muses were perfectly sincere, and that they actually believed in their being inspired by the goddesses; but in later times among the Greeks and the Romans, as well as in our own days, the invocation of the Muses is a mere formal imitation of the early poets. Thamyris, who presumed to excel the Muses, was deprived by them of the gift they had bestowed on him, and punished with blindness. (Hom. Il. ii. 594, &c.; Apollod. i. 3. § 3.) The Seirens, who likewise ventured upon a contest with them, were deprived of the feathers of their wings, and the Muses themselves put them on as an ornament (Eustath. ad Hom. P. 85); and the nine daughters of Pierus, who presumed to rival the Muses, were metamorphosed into birds. (Anton. Lib. 9; Ov. Met. v. 300, &c.) As poets and bards derived their power from them, they are frequently called either their disciples or sons. (Hom. Od. viii. 481, Hymn. in Lun. 20 ; Hes. Theog. 22; Pind. Nem. iii.; Serv. ad Virg. Georg. ii. 476.) Thus Linus is called a son of Amphimarus and Urania (Paus. ix. 29. § 3), or of Apollo and Calliope, or Terpsichore (Apollod. i. 3. § 2); Hyacinthus a son of Pierus and Cleio (Apollod. i. 3. § 3); Orpheus a son of Calliope or Cleio, and Thamyris a son of Erato. These and a few others are the cases in which the Muses are described as mothers; but the more general idea was, that, like other nymphs, they were virgin divinities. Being goddesses of song, they are naturally connected with Apollo, the god of the lyre, who like them instructs the bards, and is mentioned along with them even by Homer. (Il. i. 603, Od. viii. 488.) In later times Apollo is placed in very close connection with the Muses, for he is described as the leader of the choir of the Muses by the surname Mousagetês. (Diod. i. 18.) A further feature in the character of the Muses is their prophetic power, which belongs to them, partly because they were regarded as inspiring nymphs, and partly because of their connection with the prophetic god of Delphi. Hence, they instructed, for example, Aristaeus in the art of prophecy. (Apollon. Rhod. ii. 512.) That dancing, too, was one of the occupations of the Muses, may be inferred from the close connection existing among the Greeks between music, poetry, and dancing. As the inspiring nymphs loved to dwell on Mount Helicon, they were naturally associated with Dionysus and dramatic poetry, and hence they are described as the companions, playmates, or nurses of Dionysus.
The worship of the Muses points originally to Thrace and Pieria about mount Olympus, from whence it was introduced into Boeotia, in such a manner that the names of mountains, grottoes, and wells, connected with their worship, were likewise transferred from the north to the south. Near mount Helicon, Ephialtes and Otus are said to have offered the first sacrifices to them; and in the same place there was a sanctuary with their statues, the sacred wells Aganippe and Hippocrene, and on mount Leibethrion, which is connected with Helicon, there was a sacred grotto of the Muses. (Paus. ix. 29. § 1, &c., 30. § 1, 31. § 3; Strab. pp. 410, 471; Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. x. 11.) Pierus, a Macedonian, is said to have been the first who introduced the worship of the nine Muses, from Thrace to Thespiae, at the foot of mount Helicon. (Paus. ix. 29. § 2.) There they had a temple and statues, and the Thespians celebrated a solemn festival of the Muses on mount Helicon, called Mouseia (Paus. ix. 27. § 4, 31. § 3; Pind. Fragm. p. 656, ed. Boeckh; Diod. xvii. 16.) Mount Parnassus was likewise sacred to them, with the Castalian spring, near which they had a temple. (Plut. De Pyth. Orac. 17.) From Boeotia, which thus became the focus of the worship of the nine Muses, it afterwards spread into the adjacent and more distant parts of Greece. Thus we find at Athens a temple of the Muses in the Academy (Paus. i. 30. § 2); at Sparta sacrifices were offered to them before fighting a battle (iii. 17. § 5); at Troezene, where their worship had been introduced by Ardalus, sacrifices were offered to them conjointly with Hypnos, the god of sleep (Paus. iii. 31. §4 , &c.); at Corinth, Peirene, the spring of Pegasus, was sacred to them (Pers. Sat. Prol. 4; Stat. Silv. ii. 7. 1); at Rome they had an altar in common with Hercules, who was also regarded as Musagetes, and they possessed a temple at Ambracia adorned with their statues. (Plut. Quaest. Rom. 59; Plin. H. N. xxxv. 36.) The sacrifices offered to them consisted of libations of water or milk, and of honey. (Schol. ad Soph. Oed. Col. 100; Serv. ad Virg. Eclog. vii. 21.) The various surnames by which they are designated by the poets are for the most part derived from the places which were sacred to them or in which they were worshipped, while some are descriptive of the sweetness of their songs.
In the most ancient works of art we find only three Muses, and their attributes are musical instruments, such as the flute, the lyre, or the barbiton. Later artists gave to each of the nine sisters different attributes as well as different attitudes, of which we here add a brief account. 1. Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, appears with a tablet and stylus, and sometimes with a roll of paper; 2. Cleio, the Muse of history, appears in a sitting attitude, with an open roll of paper, or an open chest of books; 3. Euterpe, the Muse of lyric poetry, with a flute; 4. Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy, with a tragic mask, the club of Heracles, or a sword, her head is surrounded with vine leaves, and she wears the cothurnus; 5. Terpsichore, the Muse of choral dance and song, appears with the lyre and the plectrum; 6. Erato, the Muse of erotic poetry and mimic imitation, sometimes, also, has the lyre; 7. Polymnia, or Polyhymnia, the Muse of the sublime hymn, usually appears without any attribute, in a pensive or meditating attitude; 8. Urania, the Muse of astronomy, with a staff pointing to a globe; 9. Thaleia, the Muse of comedy and of merry or idyllic poetry, appears with the comic mask, a shepherd's staff, or a wreath of ivy. In some representations the Muses are seen with feathers on their heads, alluding to their contest with the Seirens.
Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
ALTERNATE NAME SPELLINGS
Delighting in Dance
Rich Festivity, Blooming
Kalliope's name was derived from the Greek words kalleis "beautiful" and ops "voice", Kleio's from kleô "to make famous", Erato from eratos "lovely" , Euterpe from eu- "well" and terpô "to delight", Melpomene from melpô "to celebrate with song", Ourania from ouranos "heaven", Polymnia from poly- "many" and hymnos "hymn", Terpsikhore from terpsis "to delight" and khoros "dance", and Thaleia from thaleia "rich feast" or "blooming".
CLASSICAL LITERATURE QUOTES
BIRTH, PARENTAGE & NAMES OF THE MUSES
Muse with lyre, Paestan red-figure lekanis C4th B.C., Musée du Louvre
Homer, Iliad 2. 597 ff (trans. Lattimore) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"The Mousai (Muses), daughters of Zeus who holds the aigis."
Homer, Odyssey 8. 457 ff (trans. Shewring) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"The Mousa (Muse) . . . daughter of Zeus himself."
Hesiod, Theogony 1 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"Them [the Mousai (Muses)] in Pieria did Mnemosyne (Memory), who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father [Zeus], the son of Kronos (Cronus), a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow. For nine nights did wise Zeus lie with her, entering her holy bed remote from the immortals. And when a year was passed and the seasons came round as the months waned, and many days were accomplished, she bare nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song and their spirit free from care, a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympos (Olympus). There are their bright dancing-places and beautiful homes, and beside them the Kharites (Charites, Graces) and Himeros (Desire) live in delight. And they, uttering through their lips a lovely voice, sing the laws of all and the goodly ways of the immortals, uttering their lovely voice. Then went they to Olympos, delighting in their sweet voice, with heavenly song, and the dark earth resounded about them as they chanted, and a lovely sound rose up beneath their feet as they went to their father [Zeus]. And he was reigning in heaven, himself holding the lightning and glowing thunderbolt, when he had overcome by might his father Kronos; and he distributed fairly to the immortals [including the Mousai] their portions and declared their privileges . . .
The Mousai (Muses) who dwell on Olympos, nine daughters begotten by great Zeus, Kleio (Clio) and Euterpe, Thaleia (Thalia), Melpomene and Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), and Erato and Polymnia (Polyhymnia) and Ourania (Urania) and Kalliope (Calliope), who is the chiefest of them all."
Hesiod, Theogony 915 ff :
"And again, he [Zeus] loved Mnemosyne (Memory) with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Mousai (Muses) were born who delight in feasts and the pleasures of song."
Homeric Hymn 32 to Selene (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"Sweet voiced Mousai (Muses), daughters of Zeus."
Eumelus, Fragment 35 (from Tzetzes, On Hesiod's Works & Days 23) (trans. West, Vol. Greek Epic Fragments) (C8th to 7th B.C.) :
"But Eumelos (Eumelus) of Korinthos (Corinth) says there are three Mousai (Muses), daughters of Apollon: Kephiso (Cephiso), Apollonis, and Borysthenis."
Pindar, Paean 7 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"I pray to Mnamosyna (Mnemosyne, Memory), the fair-robed child of Ouranos (Uranus, Heaven), and to her daughters [the Mousai (Muses)]."
Alcman, Fragment 5 (from Scholia) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C7th B.C.) :
"He [Alkman (Alcman)] made the Mousai (Muses) the daughters of Ge (Gaea, the Earth), as Mimnermos does."
Alcman, Fragment 8 :
"Blessed Mosai (Muses), whom Mnemosyne (Memory) bore to Zeus having lain with him."
Alcman, Fragment 67 (from Diodorus Siculus) :
"Most of the mythographers, including those of the highest reputation say that he Mousai (Muses) are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory); but one or two of the poets, Alkman (Alcman) among them, make them the daughters of Ouranos (Uranus, the Sky) and Ge (Gaea, the Earth)."
Terpander, Fragment 4 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C7th B.C.) :
"The Mousai (Muses), the daughters of Mnamas (Mnemosyne, Memory)."
Praxilla of Sicyon, Fragment 3 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (C5th B.C.) :
"Nine Mousai (Muses) were created by great Ouranos (Uranus, the Sky), nine by Gaia (Gaea, the Earth) herself to be an undying joy for mortals."
Aristotle, Fragment 842 (from Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric V) (C5th B.C.) :
"The Mousai (Muses), daughters of Mnamosyna (Mnemosyne, Memory)."
Mimnermus, Fragment 13 (from Oxyrhynchus papyrus) (trans. Gerber, Vol. Greek Elegiac) (Greek elegy C7th B.C.) :
"In the genealogy given by Mimnermos, the Mousai (Muses) are daughters of Ge (Gaea, the Earth)."
Solon, Fragment 13 (trans. Gerber, Vol. Greek Elegiac) (Greek elegy C6th B.C.) :
"Resplendent daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus Olympios (Olympian), Mousai Pierides (Pierian Muses)."
Plato, Theaetetus 191c (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"Mnemosyne (Memory), the mother of the Mousai (Muses)."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 13 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Mnemosyne [bore to Zeus] the Mousai (Muses), the eldest of whom was Kalliope (Calliope), followed by Kleio (Clio), Melpomene, Euterpe, Erato, Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), Ourania (Urania), Thaleia (Thalia), and Polymnia (Polyhymnia)."
Plato, Cratylus 259 (trans. Lamb) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"[The Mousai (Muses) :] Terpsikhore (Terpsichore) for the dancers . . . Erato for the lovers, and of the other Mousai (Muses) for those who do them honour . . . Kalliope (Calliope) the eldest Mousa (Muse) and of Ourania (Urania) who is next to her, for the philosophers."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 7. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"As for the Mousai (Muses) . . . the majority of the writers of myths and those who enjoy the greatest reputation say that they were daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory); but a few poets, among whose number is Alkman (Alcman) [lyric poet C7th B.C.] state that they were daughters of Ouranos (Uranus, Sky) and Ge (Gaea, Earth). Writers similarly disagree also concerning the number of the Mousai; for some say they are but thee, and others that they are nine, but the number nine has prevailed since it rests upon the authority of the most distinguished men, such as Homer and Hesiod and others like them. Homer, for instance writes : ‘The Mousai, nine in all, replying each to each with voices sweet’; and Hesiod even gives their names when he writes : ‘Kleio, Euterpe, and Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsikhore and Erato, and Polymnia, Ourania, Kalliope too, of them all the most comely.’"
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 39. 3 ff (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
""The first to sacrifice on Helikon to the Mousai (Muses) and to call the mountain sacred to the Mousai were, they say, Ephialtes and Otos (Otus), who also founded Askra (Ascra). To this also Hegesinus alludes in his poem Atthis [Greek poet uncertain date] . . . This poem of Hegesinos (Hegesinus) I have not read, for it was no longer extant when I was born. But Kallipos (Callipus) of Korinthos (Corinth) [Greek writer C5th B.C.] in his History of Orkhomenos uses the verses of Hegesinos as evidence in support of his own views, and I too have done likewise, using the quotation of Kallipos himself . . . The sons of Aloeus [i.e. the Aloadai] held that the Mousai were three in number, and gave them the names of Melete (Practice), Mneme (Memory) and Aoede (Song).
But they say that afterwards Pieros (Pierus), a Makedonian (Macedonian), after whom the mountain in Makedonia was named, came to Thespiai (Thespiae) and established nine Mousai, changing their names to the present ones. Pieros was of this opinion either because it seemed to him wiser, or because an oracle so ordered, or having so learned from one of the Thrakians (Thracians). For the Thrakians had the reputation of old of being more clever than the Makedonians, and in particular of being not so careless in religious matters. There are some who say that Pieros himself had nine daughters [the Pierides], that their names were the same as those of the goddesses, and that those whom the Greeks called the children of the Mousai were sons of the daughters of Pieros.
Mimnermos [Greek poet C6th B.C.], who composed elegiac verses about the battle between the Smyrnaians and the Lydians under Gyges, says in the preface that the elder Mousai (Muses) are daughters of Ouranos (Uranus, Sky), and that there are other and younger Mousai, children of Zeus."
Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 9 (trans. Celoria) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Zeus made love to Mnemosyne in Pieria and became father of the Mousai (Muses)."
Orphic Hymn 76 to the Muses (trans. Taylor) (Greek hymns C3rd B.C. to 2nd A.D.) :
"The Mousai (Muses) . . . daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory) and Zeus . . . sweetly speaking Nine . . . Kleio (Clio), and Erato who charms the sight, with thee, Euterpe, ministering delight : Thalia flourishing, Polymnia famed, Melpomene from skill in music named : Terpsikhore (Terpsichore), Ourania (Urania) heavenly bright."
Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3. 21 (trans. Rackham) (Roman rhetorician C1st B.C.) :
"[Cicero sets out several traditions concerning the Muses:] Again the first set of Musae (Muses) are four, the daughters of the second Jupiter [i.e. Ouranos, Uranus], Thelixonoe, Aode, Arche and Melete; the second set are the offspring of the third Jupiter [i.e. Zeus Olympios] and Mnemosyne, nine in number; the third set are the daughters of Pierus and Antiope, and are usually called by the poets Peirides or Peirian Maidens; they are the same in number and have the same names as the next preceding set."
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 4. 25 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"The Musae (Muses) are assigned a birth-place in the grove of Helicon [in Boiotia]."
Arnobius, Against the Heathen 3. 37 (Roman Christian rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"We are told by Mnaseas [Greek writer C3rd B.C.] that the Musae (Muses) are the daughters of Tellus (Earth) [Gaia] and Coelus (Heaven) [Ouranos]; others declare that they are Jove's by his wife Moneta [Mnemosyne, Memory], or Mens (Mind) [Metis?]; some relate that they were virgins, others that they were matrons. For now we wish to touch briefly on the points where you are shown, from the difference of your opinions, to make different statements about the same thing. Ephorus [historian C4th B.B.], then, says that they are three in number; Mnaseas, whom we mentioned, that they are four; Myrtilus brings forward seven; Crates [the philosopher? C4th B.C.] asserts that there are eight; finally Hesiod, enriching heaven and the stars with gods, comes forward with nine names."
NURSING OF THE MUSES
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 29. 5 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"As you go along the straight road to the grove [of the Mousai (Muses) on Mount Helikon (Helicon) in Boiotia] is a portrait of Eupheme (Well Spoken) carved in relief on a stone. She was, they say, the nurse of the Mousai."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 27 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Crotus, son of Eupheme, nurse of the Musae (Muses). As Sositheus, writer of tragedies [Greek C3rd B.C.], says, he had his home on Mount Helicon and took his pleasure in the company of the Musae."
SINGING AT THE CELEBRATIONS OF THE GODS
Portraits of the nine Muses, Greco-Roman mosaic from Neustrasse C3rd-4th A.D., Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier
I) FEASTS OF OLYMPUS
Homer, Iliad 1. 604 ff (trans. Lattimore) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"Thus thereafter the whole day long until the sun went under they [the gods on Olympos] feasted, nor was anyone's hunger denied a fair portion, nor denied the beautifully wrought lyre in the hands of Apollon (Apollo) nor the anitiphonal sweet sound of the Mousai (Muses) singing."
Hesiod, Theogony 36 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"The Mousai (Muses) who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympos with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice. Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spread abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympos resound, and the homes of the immortals. And they uttering their immortal voice, celebrate in song first of all the reverend race of the gods from the beginning, those whom Gaia (Gaea, Earth) and wide Ouranos (Uranus, Heaven) begot, and the gods sprung of these, givers of good things. Then, next, the goddesses sing of Zeus, the father of gods and men, as they begin and end their strain, how much he is the most excellent among the gods and supreme in power. And again, they chant the race of men and strong Gigantes (Giants), and gladden the heart of Zeus within Olympos,--the Mousai Olympiades (Olympian Muses), daughters of Zeus the aigis-holder."
Hesiod, The Shield of Heracles 201 ff :
"[Among the scenes depicted on the shield of Herakles (Heracles) :] There also was the abode of the gods, pure Olympos, and their assembly, and infinite riches were spread around in the gathering, the Mousai Pierides (Pierian Muses) were beginning a song like clear-voiced singers."
Homeric Hymn 3 to Pythian Apollo 186 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"[Apollon journeys to] Olympos, to the house of Zeus, to join the gathering of the other gods :] Then straightway the undying gods think only of the lyre and song, and all the Mousai (Muses) together, voice sweetly answering voice, hymn the unending gifts the gods enjoy and the sufferings of men, all that they endure at the hands of the deathless gods, and how they live witless and helpless and cannot find healing for death or defence against old age. Meanwhile the rich-tressed Kharites (Charites, Graces) and cheerful Horai (Horae, Seasons) dance with Harmonia (Harmony) and Hebe (Youth) and Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus, holding each other by the wrist."
Eumelus, Fragment 1 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C8th to 7th B.C.) :
"For the god of Ithome [Zeus] took pleasure in the Moisa (Muse), the pure Moisa wearing her free sandals."
Anacreon, Fragment 390 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C6th B.C.) :
"The [Mousai, Muses] fair-haired daughters of Zeus danced lightly."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 5. 18. 4 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"[Among the scenes depicted on the chest of Kypselos (Cypselus) dedicated at Olympia :] There are also figures of Mousai (Muses) singing, with Apollon leading the song; these too have an inscription:--This is Leto's son, prince Apollon, far-shooting; around him are the Mousai, a graceful choir, whom he is leading."
Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1. 14 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"[From a description of an ancient Greek painting :] A cloud of fire encompassing Thebes breaks into the dwelling of Kadmos (Cadmus) as Zeus comes wooing Semele; and Semele apparently is destroyed . . . And the form of Semele is dimly seen as she goes to the heavens, where the Mousai (Muses) will hymn her praises."
Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 5. 690 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman epic C1st A.D.) :
"He [Zeus] renews the banquet . . . and at last sends starry night down from Olympus. Then the choir of Musae (Muses) and Apollo, striker of the lyre, whose wont it is to tell of the Phlegraean fight, appear, and the Phrygian henchman [Ganymedes] bears round the heavy bowl. They [the gods] rise when slumber calls, and turn themselves each to his own dwelling."
Statius, Silvae 4. 2. 53 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman poetry C1st A.D.) :
"The monarch of the gods [Jove-Zeus], when he visits once more the bounds of Oceanus and the Aethiopian board, and, his face suffused with sacred nectar, bids the Musae (Muses) utter their mystic songs, and Phoebus praise the triumph of Pallene [the victory of the gods in battle with the Gigantes (Giants)]."
II) WEDDING OF CADMUS (KADMOS) & HARMONIA
Pindar, Pythian Ode 3. 89 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Yet a life free from care came neither to Peleus Aiakos' (Aeacus') son, nor to Kadmos (Cadmus) that godlike king; though they of all men won, so men say, the highest bliss, who heard the Mousai (Muses) in golden diadems chanting their songs upon the mountain and within the seven gates of Thebes, when one took for his bride Harmonia, the dark-eyed maid, the other glorious Thetis, daughter of wise Nereus."
Theognis, Fragment 1. 15 (trans. Gerber, Vol. Greek Elegiac) (Greek elegy C6th B.C.) :
"Mousai (Muses) and Kharites (Charites, Graces), daughters of Zeus, who came once to the wedding of Kadmos (Cadmus) [and Harmonia] and sang the lovely verse, ‘What is beautiful is loved, what is not beautiful is not loved.’ This is the verse that went through your immortal lips."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 48. 2 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"[At the wedding of Kadmos (Cadmus) and Harmonia:] Apollon played upon the lyre and the Mousai (Muses) upon their flutes."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 5. 88 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"[At the wedding of Kadmos (Cadmus) and Harmonia:] The nine Mousai (Muses) too struck up a lifestirring melody: Polymnia (Polyhymnia) nursingmother of the dance waved her arms, and sketched in the air an image of a soundless voice, speaking with hands and moving eyes in a graphic picture of silence full of meaning."
III) WEDDING OF PELEUS & THETIS
Pindar, Pythian Ode 3. 89 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Yet a life free from care came neither to Peleus Aiakos' (Aeacus') son, nor to Kadmos (Cadmus) that godlike king; though they of all men won, so men say, the highest bliss, who heard the Mousai (Muses) in golden diadems chanting their songs upon the mountain and within the seven gates of Thebes, when one took for his bride Harmonia, the dark-eyed maid, the other glorious Thetis, daughter of wise Nereus."
Pindar, Nemean Ode 5. 21 ff :
"Yet for these men [Peleus and Telamon] the Mousai's (Muses') peerless choir glad welcome sang on Pelion [at Peleus' marriage to Thetis], and with them Apollon's seven-stringed lyre and golden quill led many a lovely strain. To Zeus a prelude, then sang they first divine Thetis, and Peleus."
Quintus Smyrnaeus, Fall of Troy 4. 128 ff (trans. Way) (Greek epic C4th A.D.) :
"[At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis was seen :] The ravishing dance twined by the Kharites' (Charites, Graces) feet . . . [and heard] the chant the Mousai (Muses) raised, and how its spell enthralled all mountains, rivers, all the forest brood; how raptured was the infinite firmament, Kheiron's (Chiron's) fair caverns, yea, the very Gods."
Colluthus, Rape of Helen 22 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poetry C5th to C6th A.D.) :
"[Arriving to attend the wedding of Peleus and Thetis :] Out of the land of Melisseus, from fragrant Helikon (Helicon), Apollon came leading the clear-voiced choir of the Mousai (Muses)."
IV) WEDDING OF EROS & PSYCHE (PSYKHE)
Apuleius, The Golden Ass 6. 24 ff (trans. Walsh) (Roman novel C2nd A.D.) :
"[At the wedding of Cupid (Eros) and Psyche (Psykhe):] Vulcanus [Hephaistos (Hephaestus)] cooked the dinner, the Horae (Seasons) brightened the scene with roses and other flowers, the Gratiae (Graces) [Kharites] diffused balsam, and the Musae (Muses), also present, sand in harmony. Apollo sang to the lyre, and Venus [Aphrodite] took to the floor to the strains of sweet music, and danced prettily. She had organized the performance so that the Musae sang in chorus, a Satyrus played the flute, and a Paniscus [a Pan] sang to the shepherd's pipes. This was how with due ceremony Psyche was wed to Cupidos (Love [Eros]."
SINGING AT THE FUNERALS OF HEROES
Symbols of the nine Muses, Greek mosaic from Elis C1st B.C., Archaeological Museum of Elis
I) FUNERAL OF ACHILLES (AKHILLEUS)
Homer, Odyssey 24. 60 ff (trans. Shewring) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"[Description of the funeral of Akhilleus (Achilles) :] The daughters of the ancient sea-god [the Nereides daughters of Nereus] stood round about you [Akhilleus], wailing piteously, and clothed you with celestial garments; and nine Mousai (Muses) sang your dirge with sweet responsive voices. Not one Argive you have seen there who was not weeping, the clear notes went to their hearts. For seventeen days and seventeen nights we lamented for you, immortal beings and mortal men; on the eighteenth day we committed you to the flames."
Arctinus of Miletus, The Aethiopis Frag 1 (from Proclus, Cherstomathia 2) (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"The Akhaians (Achaeans) then . . . lay out the body of Akhilleus (Achilles), while Thetis, arriving with the Mousai (Muses) and her sisters, bewails her son."
Pindar, Isthmian Ode 8. 58 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Not even in death was he [Akhilleus (Achilles)] of songs forsaken, but the [Mousai (Muses)] maids of Helikon (parthenoi Helikoniai) stood by his pyre and grave, and poured o'er him their dirge in chorus. Thus even the immortals ruled that to a brave man, though he be no more, the songs of goddesses by given."
Quintus Smyrnaeus, Fall of Troy 3. 594 ff (trans. Way) (Greek epic C4th A.D.) :
"[The funeral of Akhilleus (Achilles) at Troy :] Swiftly from Helikon (Helicon) the Mousai (Muses) came heart-burdened with undying grief, for love and honour to the Nereis (Nereid) [Thetis] starry-eyed. Then Zeus with courage filled the Argive men, that-eyes of flesh might undismayed behold that glorious gathering of Goddesses [i.e. the Nereides and Mousai attending the funeral]. Then those Divine Ones round Akhilleus' corpse pealed forth with one voice from immortal lips a lamentation. Rang again the shores of Hellespont. As rain upon the earth their tears fell round the dead man, Aiakos' (Aeacus') son; for out of depths of sorrow rose their moan. And all the armour, yea, the tents, the ships of that great sorrowing multitude were wet with tears from ever-welling springs of grief . . . Then plunged the sun down into Okeanos' (Oceanus') stream . . . But upon Thetis sleep laid not his hand: still with the deathless Nereides by the sea she sate; on either side the Mousai spake one after other comfortable words to make that sorrowing heart forget its pain."
Quintus Smyrnaeus, Fall of Troy 3. 766 ff :
"[After the funeral of Akhilleus (Achilles) :] Then returned to Helikon (Helicon) the Mousai (Muses): 'neath the sea, wailing the dear dead, Nereus' daughters [the Nereides] sank."
Anonymous, Epicedeion for a Professor of the University of Berytus (trans. Page, Vol. Select Papyri III, No. 138) (Greek poetry C4th A.D.) :
"As once the Mousai (Muses) nine, Olympian maids (kourai Olympiades) of Zeus, wailed in mourning around Thetis, daughter of Nereus, weeping for her son [Akhilleus (Achilles)], the leader of the Myrmidones."
II) FUNERALS OF THEIR SONS
Pindar, Dirges Fragment 139 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"But in another song did three goddesses [Mousai (Muses)] lull to rest the bodies of their sons. The first of these [Terpsikhore (Terpsichore)] sang a dirge over the clear-voiced Linos (Linus) [personification of the lamentation song]; and the second [Ourania (Urania)] lamented with her latest strains Hymenaios (Hymenaeus), who was seized by Moira (Fate), when first he lay with another in wedlock; while the third [Kalliope (Calliope)] sorrowed over Ialmenos (Ialmenus), when his strength was stayed by the onset of a raging malady. But the son of Oiagros (Oeagrus) [and Kalliope], Orpheus of the golden sword."
Greek Lyric V Folk Songs, Frag 880 (from Scholiast b on Iliad) (trans. Campbell) (B.C.) :
"Oh Linos (Linus), honoured by the gods--for you were the first to whom the immortals gave a song for men to sing with clear voice; Phoibos (Phoebus) [Apollon] killed you in anger, but the Mousai (Muses) mourn for you."
THE MUSES & ORPHEUS
Aeschylus, Bassarae or Bassarides (lost play) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
Aeschylus' lost play Bassarae described the death of Orpheus, son of Kalliope (Calliope). Weir Smyth (L.C.L.) summarises evidence for the plot: "Eratosthenes, Catasterismoi, says of Orpheus that he paid no honour to Dionysos, but considered Helios (the Sun) to be the greatest of the gods and addressed him as Apollon; that, by making haste during the night, he reached at dawn the summit of Mt. Pangaios (Pangaeum), and waited there that he might see the rising of the sun; and that Dionysos, in his wrath, sent against him the Bassarides (as Aeschylus tells the story), who tore him to pieces and scattered his members, which were collected and buried by the Mousai (Muses) in Leibethra." Presumably the sisters appeared with Kalliope (Calliope) at the end of the play to sing the lament.
Callistratus, Descriptions 7 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C4th A.D.) :
"On Helikon (Helicon)--the spot is a shaded precinct sacred to the Mousai (Muses)--near the torrent of the river Olmeios (Olmeius) and the violet-dark spring of Pegasos (Pegasus), there stood beside the [statues of the] Mousai a statue of Orpheus, the son of Kalliope (Calliope), a statue most beautiful to look upon . . . He was carrying the lyre, which was equipped with as many notes as the number of the Mousai."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 7 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"[The Bakkhantes (Bacchantes) slay Orpheus, son of the Muse Kalliope (Calliope) :] They slew him and dismembered his body . . . The Musae (Muses) gathered the scattered limbs and gave them burial, and as the greatest favour they could confer, they put as a memorial his lyre, pictures with stars, among the constellations. Apollo and Jove [Zeus] consented, for Orpheus had praised Apollo highly, and Jupiter [Zeus] granted this favour to his daughter."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 7 :
"[Aphrodite] stirred the women in Thrace by love, each to seek Orpheus [son of the Muse Kalliope (Calliope)] for herself, so that they tore him limb from limb. His head, carried down from the mountain into the sea, was cast by the waves upon the island of Lesbos. It was taken up and buried by the people of Lesbos, and in return for this kindness, they have the reputation of being exceedingly skilled in the art of music. The lyre, as we have said, was put by the Musae (Muses) among the stars."
[Cf. An Athenian vase showing Kalliope with the head of Orpheus.]
MUSES COMPANIONS OF APOLLO & ARTEMIS
Apollo, Marsyas and the Muses, Athenian red-figure bell krater C4th B.C., British Museum
I) THE BIRTH & MENTORING OF APOLLO
Alcman, Fragment 40 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C7th B.C.) :
"The saffron-robed Mousai (Muses) taught these things [music & song] to the far-shooting son of Zeus [Apollon]."
Callimachus, Hymn 4 to Delos 248 ff (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"[At the birth of Apollon on Delos :] With music the swans, the gods' own minstrels, left Maionian Paktolos (Maeonian Pactolus) and circled seven times round Delos, and sang over the bed of child-birth [i.e. of Apollon], the Mousai's (Muses') birds, most musical of all birds that fly. Hence that child in after days strung the lyre with just so many strings--seven strings, since seven times the swans sang over the pangs of birth. No eight time sang they : ere that the child [Apollon] leapt forth."
II) FEASTS OF THE GODS
Apollon and the choir of Mousai (Muses) performed at the feasts of the gods, together with Artemis and the Kharites (Charites, Graces).
III) CELEBRATIONS OF DELPHI (DELPHOI)
Homeric Hymn 27 to Artemis 14 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"[Artemis] goes to the great house of her dear brother Phoibos Apollon (Phoebus Apollo), to the rich land of Delphoi (Delphi), there to order the lovely dance of the Mousai (Muses) and Kharites (Charites, Graces). There she hangs up her curved bow and her arrows, and heads and leads the dances, gracefuly arrayed, while all they utter their heavenly voice, singing."
Pindar, Paean 2 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric lC5th B.C.) :
"On both the lofty rocks of Parnassos (Parnassus) [shrine of Apollon], the bright-eyed maidens of Delphoi (Delphi) [the Mousai (Muses)] full often set the fleet-footed dance, and ring out a sweet strain with resonant voice."
Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 2. 19 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"The Boiotian Kephisos (Boeotian Cephisus), a stream not unknown to the Mousai (Muses) . . . [on] the road which leads straight to Phokis (Phocis) and Delphoi (Delphi)."
Statius, Thebaid 6. 355 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman epic C1st A.D.) :
"Apollo was charming with his strains the Musae's (Muses') glorious company, and, his finger placed upon the strings, was gazing down to earth from the airy summit of Parnassus."
IV) CELEBRATIONS OF HELICON (HELIKON)
Sappho, Fragment 208 (from Himerius, Orations) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric I) (C6th B.C.) :
"[Apollon] the Leader of the Mousai (Muses) (Mousagetos) himself as he appears when Sappho and Pindar in their songs deck him out with golden hair and lyre and send him drawn by swans to Mount Helikon (Helicon) to dance there with the Mousai (Muses) and Kharites (Charites, Graces)."
Simonides, Fragment 578 (from Himerius, Orations) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric III) (C6th to 5th B.C.) :
"I believe what Simonides sid in his songs in praise of the Mousai (Muses). His words were along these lines : the Mousai are always dancing, and the goddesses love to busy themselves with songs and strings. but when they see Apollon beginning to lead the dance, they put their heart into their singing even more than before and send down from Helikon (Helicon) an all-harmonious sound."
V) JUDGES OF THE CONTEST OF APOLLO & MARSYAS
The Mousai (Muses) were frequently depicted in Athenian vase paintings of the C5th B.C. at the contest of Apollon and Marsyas. Presumably these scenes were based on tragedy plays produced in that era, in which a chorus of Mousai presided as judges.
Pausanias, Description of Greece 8. 9. 1 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"[In the temple of Apollon and Leto in Mantinea in Arkadia (Arcadia) :] On the pedestal of these [the statues of the two gods] are figures of the Mousai (Muses) together with Marsyas playing the flute."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 165 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"He [Marsyas] challenged Apollo to play the lure in a contest with him. When Apollo came there, they took the Musae (Muses) as judges. Marsyas was departing as victor, when Apollo turned his lyre upside down, and played the same tune--a thing which Marsyas couldn't do with the pipes. And so Apollo defeated Marsyas, bound him to a tree, and turned him over to a Scythian who stripped his skin off him limb by limb."
VI) NURSES OF APOLLO'S SON ARISTAEUS (ARISTAIOS)
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 512 ff (trans. Rieu) (Greek epic C3rd B.C.) :
"He [Apollon] took his infant son [Aristaios (Aristaeus)] away to be brought up by Kheiron (Chiron) in his cave. When the child had grown up the divine Mousai (Muses) found him a bride, taught him the arts of healing and prophecy, and made him the shepherd of all their flocks that grazed on the Athamantian plain in Phthia, round Mount Othrys and in the valley of the sacred River Apidanos."
VII) DEITIES ALONGSIDE APOLLO OF POETRY & SONG
Homer, The Margites Fragment 2 (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th B.C.)
"A servant [bard] of the Mousai (Muses) and of far-shooting Apollon."
Hesiod, Theogony 92 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"It is through the Mousai (Muses) and far-shooting Apollon that there are singers and harpers upon the earth."
Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes 449 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"And though I [Apollon] am a follower of the Mousai Olympiades (Olympian Muses) who love dances and the bright path of song--the full-toned chant and ravishing thrill of flutes."
Pindar, Pythian Ode 1. 13 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"And on the immortals' hearts your shafts [poetry and song] instil a charmed spell--by grace of Leto's son [Apollon] and the low-girdled Mousai (Muses)."
Pindar, Pythian Ode 1. 1 ff :
"O glorious lyre, joint treasure of Apollon, and of the Mousai (Muses) violet-tressed."
Terpander, Fragment 4 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C7th B.C.) :
"Let us pour libation to the Mousai, the daughters of Mnamas (Mnemosyne, Memory), and to the leader of the Mousai (Muses), Leto's son [Apollon]."
Greek Lyric V Anonymous, Fragments 941 (from Grammatical Extracts) :
"Let us pour libation to the Mousai (Muses), daughters of Mnamas (Mnemosyne, Memory), and the leader of the Mousai, Leto's son [Apollon]."
Greek Lyric V Anonymous, Fragments 1027f (from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Compositions) :
"To you, Phoibos (Phoebus) [Apollon] and the Mousai (Muses) who share your altar."
Callimachus, Iambi Fragment 14 (trans. Trypanis) (Greek poet C3rd B.C.) :
"O Mousai (Muses) fair and Apollon to whom I [the poet] make libation."
Strabo, Geography 10. 3. 10 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"The Mousai (Muses) are goddesses, and Apollon is leader of the Mousai."
Strabo, Geography 10. 3. 10 :
"As for the Mousai (Muses) and Apollo, the Mousai preside over the choruses, whereas Apollon presides both over these and the rites of divination."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1. 2. 5 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"They call Apollon Mousegetes (Musagetes, Leader of the Mousai)."
Oppian, Halieutica 2. 16 (trans. Mair) (Greek poet C3rd A.D.) :
"The gods have given to men cunning arts and have put in them all wisdom. Other god is namesake of other craft, even that whereof he that got the honourable keeping . . . The gifts of the Mousai (Muses) and Apollon are songs."
For MORE information on this god see APOLLON
THE MUSES & HERMES
Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1. 10 (trans. Fairbanks) (Greek rhetorician C3rd A.D.) :
"The clever device of the lyre, it is said, was invented by Hermes, who constructed it of two horns and a crossbar and a tortoise-shell; and he presented it first to Apollon and the Mousai (Muses), then to Amphion of Thebes."
MUSES COMPANIONS OF THE CHARITES
The Kharites (Charites, Graces) were the goddesses of dance, glorification and adornment, three spheres closely associated with the Mousai. The two sets of goddesses were frequently described as companions.
Hesiod, Theogony 60 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"A little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympos (Olympus), there are their [the Mousai's (Muses')] bright dancing-places and beautiful homes, and beside them the Kharites (Charites, Graces) and Himeros (Desire) live in delight."
Homeric Hymn 27 to Artemis 14 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th - 4th B.C.) :
"[Artemis] goes to the great house of her dear brother Phoibos Apollon (Phoebus Apollo), to the rich land of Delphoi (Delphi), there to order the lovely dance of the Mousai (Muses) and Kharites (Charites, Graces). There she hangs up her curved bow and her arrows, and heads and leads the dances, gracefully arrayed, while all they utter their heavenly voice, singing."
Pindar, Paean 3 (trans. Sandys) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
"Hail holy Kharites (Charites, Graces), companions of the Moisai (Muses), enthroned in splendour."
Sappho, Fragment 103 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric I) (C6th B.C.) :
"Hither, holy Kharites (Charites, Graces) and Pierides Moisai (Peirian Muses) [come inspire a song]."
Sappho, Fragment 208 (from Himerius, Orations) :
"[Apollon] appears when Sappho and Pindar in their songs . . . send him drawn by swans to Mount Helikon (Helicon) to dance there with the Mousai (Muses) and Kharites (Charites, Graces)."
The Anacreontea, Fragment 19 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (C5th B.C.) :
"The Mousai (Muses) tied Eros (Love) with garlands and handed him over to Kalleis (Calleis, Beauty) [i.e. one of the Kharites (Charites)]. And now Kythereia (Cytherea) [Aphrodite] brings a ransom and seeks to have him released. But if he is released, he will not leave but will stay: he has learned to be her slave."
The Anacreontea, Fragment 35 :
"The soft rose. It is the breath of the gods and the joy of mortals, the glory of the Kharites (Charites, Graces) in spring-time, the delight of the Erotes (Loves) with their rich garlands and of Aphrodite; it is a subject for poetry and the graceful plant of the Mousai (Muses)."
Bacchylides, Fragment 5 (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric IV) (C5th B.C.) :
"You if any motal now alive will rightly assess the sweet gift [poetry] of the violet-crowned Mousai (Muses) sent for your adornment [i.e. glorification] . . . with the help of the slim-waisted Kharites (Charites, Graces)."
For MORE information on these goddesses see THE KHARITES
MUSES COMPANIONS OF DIONYSUS
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 4. 3 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"They say also that when he [Dionysos] went abroad he was accompanied by the Mousai (Muses), who were maidens that had received an unusually excellent education, and that by their songs and dancing and other talents in which they had been instructed these maidens delighted the heart of the god."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 5. 3 :
"And, in general, the Mousai (Muses) who bestowed benefits and delights through the advantages which their education gave them, and the Satyroi (Satyrs) by the use of devices [flutes, tambourines] which contribute to mirth, made the life of Dionysos happy and agreeable."
For MORE information on this god see DIONYSOS
CONTEST OF THE MUSES & THAMYRIS
Thamyris and the Muses, Athenian red-figure vase fragment C4th B.C., National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Homer, Iliad 2. 594 ff (trans. Lattimore) (Greek epic C8th B.C.) :
"Dorion [near Pylos in Messenia], where the Mousai (Muses) encountered Thamyris the Thrakian (Thracian) stopped him from singing as he came from Oikhalia (Oechalia) and Oikhalian Eurytos (Eurytus); for he boasted that he would surpass, if the very Mousai, daughters of Zeus who holds the aigis, were singing against him, and these in their anger struck him maimed, and the voice of wonder they took away, and made him a singer without memory."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 17 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Thamyris, who was a handsome person and a skilled citharist, entered a musical contest with the Mousai (Muses). If he were to win, he could sleep with all of them; otherwise they would be free to take from him whatever they wanted. The Mousai won, and deprived him of his eyes and his musical skill."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 4. 33. 7 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"Homer [Iliad 2.594 quoted above] states that the misfortune of Thamyris took place here in Dorion [in Messenia], because he said that he would overcome the Mousai (Muses) themselves in song. But Prodikos (Prodicus) of Phokaia (Phocaea) [Greek poet C6th B.C.] , if the epic called the Minyad is indeed his, says that Thamyris paid the penalty in Haides for his boast against the Mousai. My view is that Thamyris lost his eyesight through disease, as happened later to Homer . . . . Thamyris forsook his art through stress of the trouble that afflicted him."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 6 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"The [Constellation] Kneeler. Others call him Thamyris, blinded by the Musae (Muses), kneeling as a suppliant."
Statius, Thebaid 4. 181 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman epic C1st A.D.) :
"Dorion [in Messenia] that bewails the Getic bard : here Thamyris made bold to surpass in song the skilled daughters of Aonia [the Muses], but doomed to a life of silence fell on the instant mute with voice and harp alike--who may despise deities met face to face?-- for that he knew not what it was to strive with Phoebus [Apollon], nor how the hanging Satyrus [Marsyas] brought Celaenae fame."
CONTEST OF THE MUSES & THE SIRENS (SEIRENES)
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 34. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"[At Koroneia (Coronea) in Boiotia] is a sanctuary of Hera . . . in her hands she carried the Seirenes (Sirens). For the story goes that the daughters of Akheloios (Achelous) were persuaded by Hera to compete with the Mousai (Muses) in singing. The Mousai won, plucked out the Seirenes' feathers and made crowns for themselves out of them."
For MORE information on these bird-women see THE SEIRENES
CONTEST OF THE MUSES & THE PIERIDES
Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 9 (trans. Celoria) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Zeus made love to Mnemosyne in Pieria and became father of the Mousai (Muses). Around about this time Pieros (Pierus) was king of Emathia, sprung from its very soil. He had nine daughters. They were the ones who formed a choir in opposition to the Mousai. And there was a musical contest on Helikon (Helicon). Whenever the daughters of Pieros began to sing, all creation went dark and no one would give an ear to their choral performance. But when the Mousai sang, heaven, the stars, the sea and rivers stood still, while Mount Helikon, beguiled by the pleasure of it all, swelled skyward till, by the will of Poseidon, Pegasos (Pegasus) checked it by striking the summit with his hoof. Since these mortals had taken upon themselves to strive with goddesses, the Mousai changed them into nine birds. To this day people refer to them as the grebe, the wryneck, the ortolan, the jay, the greenfinch, the goldfinch, the duck, the woodpecker, and the dracontis pigeon."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 39. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
"The sons of Aloeus [the Aloadae, who founed the shrine of the Muses on Mount Helikon (Helicon)] held that the Mousai (Muses) were three in number . . . But they say that afterwards Pieros (Pierus), a Makedonian (Macedonian). . . came to Thespiai (Thespiae) [the town beneath Mount Helikon] and established nine Mousai, changing their names to the present ones . . . There are some who say that Pieros himself had nine daughters [the Pierides], that their names were the same as those of the goddesses, and that those whom the Greeks called the children of the Mousai were sons of the daughters of Pieros."
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 39. 6 :
"There are many untruths believed by the Greeks [about the poet Orpheus], one of which is that Orpheus was a son of the Mousa Kalliope (Muse Calliope), and not of the daughter of Pieros (Pierus)."
Ovid, Metamorphoses 5. 294 & 662 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"The Musa (Muse) was speaking [to Athena] when in the air a whirr of wings was heard, and from high boughs there came a greeting voice. Jove's [Zeus'] child looked up to see whence came the tongue that spoke so clear, thinking it was a man. It was a bird: nine of them there had perched upon the boughs, lamenting their misfortune, master-mimics, nine magpies. As Minerva [Athena] gazed in wonder, the Musae began (one goddess to another) to tell this tale. ‘Not long ago these, too, worsted in contest, swelled the tribe of birds. Their father was rich Pierus, a squire of Pellae, and Euippe Paeonis their mother. To her aid nine times she called Lucina [Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth] and nine times she bore a child. This pack of stupid sisters, puffed with pride in being nine, had travelled through the towns, so many towns of Haemonia [Thessaly] and Achaea and reached us here at last and challenged us: "Cease cheating with that spurious charm of yours the untutored rabble. If you trust your powers content with us, you Thespian Goddesses (Deae Thespiades) [Mousai (Muses)]. In voice and skill we shall not yield to you; in number we are equal. If you lose, you leave Medusaeus' [Pegasos' (Pegasus')] spring [Hippokrene (Hippocrene) on Mount Helikon] and Aganippe Hyantea [spring of Thebes], or we the plain of Emathia up to Paeonia's snowy mountainsides; and let the judgement of the Nymphae decide."
‘Of course it was a shame to strive with them but greater shame to yield. The choice of Nymphae was made; they took the oath by their own streams, and sat on benches shaped form living stone. Then, without drawing lots, the one who claimed to challenge sang of the great war in heaven, ascribing spurious prowess to the Gigantes, belittling all the exploits of the gods : how Typhoeus, issuing from earth's lowest depths, struck terror in those heavenly hearts, and they all turned their backs and fled, until they found refuge in Aegyptus and the seven-mouthed Nilus. She told how Typhoeus Terrigena (Earthborn) even there pursued them and the gods concealed themselves in spurious shapes; "And Juppiter [Zeus] became a ram," she said, "lord of the herd, and so today great Ammon Libys' [Zeus-Ammon] shown with curling horns. Delius [Apollon] hid as a raven, Semeleia [Dionysos] as a goat, Phoebe [Artemis] a cat, Saturnia [Hera] a snow-white cow, Venus [Aphrodite] a fish and Cyllenius [Hermes] an ibis." So to her lyre she sang and made an end.
‘Then we the Aonides [Mousai] were called. But maybe you've no time or leisure now to listen to our song?’ ‘No, to be sure’, said Pallas [Athena], ‘sing your song, sing it right through’, and took her seat beneath the trees’ light shade. The Musa (Muse) resumed her tale. ‘We appointed one of us our champion, Calliope. She rose, her flowing hair bound in an ivy wreath, and with her thumb tuning the plaintive chords, began this song, accompanying her voice with sweeping strings . . . [she sings the tale of the abduction of Persephone.]
‘Such was the song Calliope our leading sister sang; she finished and the Nymphae with one accord declared the goddesses of Helicon the winners. As the losers hurled abuse, "So then it's not enough," I said, "that your challenge has earned you chastisement; you add insult to injury. Our patience has its limits; we'll proceed to punishment. Where anger calls, we'll follow." Those nine girls, the Emathides, laughed and despised my threats and, as they tried to speak and shout and scream and shake their fists, before their eyes their fingers sprouted feathers, plumage concealed their arms, and each of them saw in the face of each a heard beak form, all weird new birds to live among the woods; and as they beat their breasts their flapping arms raised them to ride the air--and there they were, magpies, the copses' saucy scolds. Now still as birds they keep their former eloquence, their endless raucous chattering, as each indulges in her passionate love of speech.’
Tritonia [Athena] had listened to the tale she told with warm approval of the Aonides' [Mousai's (Muses')] song and of their righteous rage."
Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3. 21 (trans. Rackham) (Roman rhetorician C1st B.C.) :
"The second set [of goddess Mousai (Muses)] are the offspring of the third Jupiter [Zeus Olympios] and Mnemosyne, nine in number; the third set are the daughters of Pierus and Antiope, and are usually called by the poets Peirides or Peirian Maidens; they are the same in number [nine] and have the same names as the next preceding set."
MUSES & THE PUNISHMENT OF PYRENEUS
Ovid, Metamorphoses 5. 274 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) :
"[The Mousai (Muses) tell a story to the goddess Athena :] Blest indeed our fortune here [on Mount Helikon (Helicon)], were we but safe. Crime is so unchecked that everything frightens our virgin hearts. Brutal Pyreneus haunts me; in truth I've not recovered yet. He brought his savage Thracian soldiery and captured Daulis and the countryside of Phocea [i.e. in the region of Helicon] and retained his ill-gained realm. One morning we were travelling towards the temple on Parnasia [i.e. Apollon's shrine of Delphoi], on the road he saw us and, pretending reverence for our divinity, ‘Wait here a while,’ he said, ‘blest Mnemonides [Muses]’ (knowing who we were) ‘Beneath my roof and shelter from the rain’ (For rain was falling) ‘and the angry sky. You must not scruple: often gods of heaven have entered humbler homes.’
Swayed by his words and by the weather we agreed and went inside the entrance hall. The rain now ceased, the south wind yielding to the northern breeze; the dark clouds fled, the sky was clean and clear; we meant to go. Pyreneus locked the door to do us violence, which we escaped by taking wing. As if he meant to follow he climbed a battlement. ‘Whichever way you take,’ he said, ‘I'll take the same’ and leapt, the madman, from the highest pinnacle, and pitched head foremost, shattering his skull upon the ground, red with his wicked blood."
THE MUSES & CROTUS
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 27 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"[Constellation] Archer . . . Some say that he is Crotus, son of Eupheme, nurse of the Musae (Muses). As Sositheus, writer of tragedies [Greek C3rd B.C.], says, he had his home on Mount Helicon and took his pleasure in the company of the Musae, sometimes even following the pursuit of hunting. He attained great fame for his diligence, for he was very swift in the woods, and clever in the arts. As a reward for his zeal the Musae asked Jove [Zeus] to represent him in some star group, and Jove did so. Since he wished to display all his skills in one body, he gave him horse flanks because he rode a great deal. He added arrows, since these would show both his keenness and his swiftness, and he gave him a Satyrus' (Satyr's) tail because the Musae took no less pleasure in Crotus than Liber [Dionysos] did in the Satyri. Before his feet are a few stars arranged in a circle, which some said were a wreath, thrown off as by one at play."
THE MUSES & THE SPHINX
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 5 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"[The Sphinx] had learned a riddle from the Mousai (Muses), and now sat on Mount Phikiom (Phicium) where she kept challenging the Thebans with it."
For MORE information on this monster see SPHINX
ANCIENT GREEK & ROMAN ART
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What is the chemical symbol for Gold? | What is the chemical formula for gold? | Reference.com
What is the chemical formula for gold?
A:
Quick Answer
The chemical formula for gold is Au, which is its periodic table symbol. The symbol comes from the Latin word for gold, "aurum."
Full Answer
Gold is a highly valued metal that has been known about for roughly 5,500 years. It can sometimes be found on its own, but it is more often found mixed with silver, quartz, lead, zinc and copper. There is also approximately 1 milligram of gold dissolved in every ton of seawater, but it would cost more to extract it than the gold is worth. Gold is valuable because it is malleable, a good conductor of heat and electricity and does not tarnish when exposed to air. Plus, it sparkles which pleases jewelry lovers.
| Au |
What is the speed of light (in miles per second)? | It's Elemental - The Element Gold
It's Elemental
Melting Point: 1337.33 K (1064.18°C or 1947.52°F)
Boiling Point: 3129 K (2856°C or 5173°F)
Density: 19.282 grams per cubic centimeter
Phase at Room Temperature: Solid
Element Classification: Metal
Period Number: 6 Group Number: 11 Group Name: none
What's in a name? From the Sanskrit word Jval and the Anglo-Saxon word gold. Gold's chemical symbol comes from the the latin word for gold, aurum.
Say what? Gold is pronounced as GOLD.
History and Uses:
An attractive and highly valued metal, gold has been known for at least 5500 years. Gold is sometimes found free in nature but it is usually found in conjunction with silver , quartz (SiO2), calcite (CaCO3), lead , tellurium , zinc or copper . There is roughly 1 milligram of gold dissolved in every ton of seawater, although extracting it currently costs more than the gold is worth. It has been estimated that all of the gold that has currently been refined could be placed in a cube measuring 20 meters on a side.
Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all known metals. A single ounce of gold can be beaten into a sheet measuring roughly 5 meters on a side. Thin sheets of gold, known as gold leaf, are primarily used in arts and crafts for gilding. One sheet of gold leaf can be as thin as 0.000127 millimeters, or about 400 times thinner than a human hair.
Pure gold is soft and is usually alloyed with other metals, such as silver, copper, platinum or palladium , to increase its strength. Gold alloys are used to make jewelry, decorative items, dental fillings and coins. The amount of gold in an alloy is measured with a unit called a karat. One karat is equal to one part in twenty-four, so an 18 karat gold ring contains 18 parts pure gold and 6 parts alloy material.
Gold is a good conductor of heat and electricity and does not tarnish when it is exposed to the air, so it can be used to make electrical connectors and printed circuit boards. Gold is also a good reflector of infrared radiation and can be used to help shield spacecraft and skyscrapers from the sun's heat. Gold coated mirrors can be used to make telescopes that are sensitive to infrared light.
A radioactive isotope of gold, gold-198, is used for treating cancer. Gold sodium thiosulfate (AuNa3O6S4) is used as a treatment for arthritis. Chlorauric acid (HAuCl4) is used to preserve photographs by replacing the silver atoms present in an image.
Estimated Crustal Abundance: 4×10-3 milligrams per kilogram
Estimated Oceanic Abundance: 4×10-6 milligrams per liter
Number of Stable Isotopes: 1 ( View all isotope data )
Ionization Energy: 9.226 eV
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In science fiction, who formulated the Three Laws of Robotics? | Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The laws quickly attracted - and have since retained - the attention of readers and other science fiction writers. Only two years later, another established writer, Lester Del Rey, referred to "the mandatory form that would force built-in unquestioning obedience from the robot".6
As Asimov later wrote (with his characteristic clarity and lack of modesty), "Many writers of robot stories, without actually quoting the three laws, take them for granted, and expect the readers to do the same".
Asimov's fiction even influenced the origins of robotic engineering. "Engelberger, who built the first industrial robot, called Unimate, in 1958, attributes his long-standing fascination with robots to his reading of [Asimov's] 'I, Robot' when he was a teenager", and Engelberger later invited Asimov to write the foreword to his robotics manual.
The laws are simple and straightforward, and they embrace "the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems"7. They also appear to ensure the continued dominion of humans over robots, and to preclude the use of robots for evil purposes. In practice, however - meaning in Asimov's numerous and highly imaginative stories - a variety of difficulties arise.
My purpose here is to determine whether or not Asimov's fiction vindicates the laws he expounded. Does he successfully demonstrate that robotic technology can be applied in a responsible manner to potentially powerful, semi-autonomous and, in some sense intelligent machines? To reach a conclusion, we must examine many issues emerging from Asimov's fiction.
History
The robot notion derives from two strands of thought, humanoids and automata. The notion of a humanoid (or human- like nonhuman) dates back to Pandora in The Iliad, 2,500 years ago and even further. Egyptian, Babylonian, and ultimately Sumerian legends fully 5,000 years old reflect the widespread image of the creation, with god- men breathing life into clay models. One variation on the theme is the idea of the golem, associated with the Prague ghetto of the sixteenth century. This clay model, when breathed into life, became a useful but destructive ally.
The golem was an important precursor to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818). This story combined the notion of the humanoid with the dangers of science (as suggested by the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give it to mortals). In addition to establishing a literary tradition and the genre of horror stories, Frankenstein also imbued humanoids with an aura of ill fate.
Automata, the second strand of thought, are literally "self- moving things" and have long interested mankind. Early models depended on levers and wheels, or on hydraulics. Clockwork technology enabled significant advances after the thirteenth century, and later steam and electro- mechanics were also applied. The primary purpose of automata was entertainment rather than employment as useful artifacts. Although many patterns were used, the human form always excited the greatest fascination. During the twentieth century, several new technologies moved automata into the utilitarian realm. Geduld and Gottesman8 and Frude2 review the chronology of clay model, water clock, golem, homunculus, android, and cyborg that culminated in the contemporary concept of the robot.
The term robot derives from the Czech word robota, meaning forced work or compulsory service, or robotnik, meaning serf. It was first used by the Czech playwright Karel Çapek in 1918 in a short story and again in his 1921 play R. U. R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. Rossum, a fictional Englishman, used biological methods to invent and mass- produce "men" to serve humans. Eventually they rebelled, became the dominant race, and wiped out humanity. The play was soon well known in English- speaking countries.
Definition
Undeterred by its somewhat chilling origins (or perhaps ignorant of them), technologists of the 1950s appropriated the term robot to refer to machines controlled by programs. A robot is "a reprogrammable multifunctional device designed to manipulate and/or transport material through variable programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks"9. The term robotics, which Asimov claims he coined in 194210 refers to "a science or art involving both artificial intelligence (to reason) and mechanical engineering (to perform physical acts suggested by reason)"11.
As currently defined, robots exhibit three key elements:
programmability, implying computational or symbol- manipulative capabilities that a designer can combine as desired (a robot is a computer);
mechanical capability, enabling it to act on its environment rather than merely function as a data processing or computational device (a robot is a machine); and
flexibility, in that it can operate using a range of programs and manipulate and transport materials in a variety of ways.
We can conceive of a robot, therefore. as either a computer- enhanced machine or as a computer with sophisticated input/output devices. Its computing capabilities enable it to use its motor devices to respond to external stimuli, which it detects with its sensory devices. The responses are more complex than would be possible using mechanical, electromechanical, and/or electronic components alone.
With the merging of computers, telecommunications networks, robotics, and distributed systems software. and the multiorganizational application of the hybrid technology, the distinction between computers and robots may become increasingly arbitrary. In some cases it would be more convenient to conceive of a principal intelligence with dispersed sensors and effectors, each with subsidiary intelligence (a robotics- enhanced computer system). In others, it would be more realistic to think in terms of multiple devices, each with appropriate sensory, processing, and motor capabilities, all subjected to some form of coordination (an integrated multi-robot system). The key difference robotics brings is the complexity and persistence that artifact behaviour achieves, independent of human involvement.
Many industrial robots resemble humans in some ways. In science fiction, the tendency has been even more pronounced, and readers encounter humanoid robots, humaniform robots, and androids. In fiction, as in life, it appears that a robot needs to exhibit only a few human- like characteristics to be treated as if it were human. For example, the relationships between humans and robots in many of Asimov's stories seem almost intimate, and audiences worldwide reacted warmly to the "personality" of the computer HAL in 2001.' A Space Odyssey, and to the gibbering rubbish- bin R2- D2 in the Star Wars series.
The tendency to conceive of robots in humankind's own image may gradually yield to utilitarian considerations, since artifacts can be readily designed to transcend humans' puny sensory and motor capabilities. Frequently the disadvantages and risks involved in incorporating sensory, processing, and motor apparatus within a single housing clearly outweigh the advantages. Many robots will therefore be anything but humanoid in form. They may increasingly comprise powerful processing capabilities and associated memories in a safe and stable location, communicating with one or more sensory and motor devices (supported by limited computing capabilities and memory) at or near the location(s) where the robot performs its functions. Science fiction literature describes such architectures.12,13
Impact
Robotics offers benefits such as high reliability, accuracy, and speed of operation. Low long- term costs of computerized machines may result in significantly higher productivity, particularly in work involving variability within a general pattern. Humans can be relieved of mundane work and exposure to dangerous workplaces. Their capabilities can be extended into hostile environments involving high pressure (deep water), low pressure (space), high temperatures (furnaces), low temperatures (ice caps and cryogenics), and high- radiation areas (near nuclear materials or occurring naturally in space).
On the other hand, deleterious consequences are possible. Robots might directly or indirectly harm humans or their property; or the damage may be economic or incorporeal (for example, to a person's reputation). The harm could be accidental or result from human instructions. Indirect harm may occur to workers, since the application of robots generally results in job redefinition and sometimes in outright job displacement. Moreover, the replacement of humans by machines may undermine the self- respect of those affected, and perhaps of people generally.
During the 1980s, the scope of information technology applications and their impact on people increased dramatically. Control systems for chemical processes and air conditioning are examples of systems that already act directly and powerfully on their environments. And consider computer- integrated manufacturing, just- in- time logistics, and automated warehousing systems. Even data processing systems have become integrated into organizations' operations and constrain the ability of operations- level staff to query a machine's decisions and conclusions. In short, many modern computer systems are arguably robotic in nature already; their impact must be managed - now.
Asimov's original laws (see above) provide that robots are to be slaves to humans (the second law). However, this role is overridden by the higher-order first law, which precludes robots from injuring a human, either by their own autonomous action or by following a human's instructions. This precludes their continuing with a programmed activity when doing so would result in human injury. It also prevents their being used as a tool or accomplice in battery, murder, self- mutilation, or suicide.
The third and lowest level law creates a robotic survival instinct. This ensures that, in the absence of conflict with a higher order law, a robot will
seek to avoid its own destruction through natural causes or accident;
defend itself against attack by another robot or robots; and
defend itself against attack by any human or humans.
Being neither omniscient nor omnipotent, it may of course fail in its endeavors. Moreover, the first law ensures that the robotic survival instinct fails if self- defense would necessarily involve injury to any human. For robots to successfully defend themselves against humans, they would have to be provided with sufficient speed and dexterity so as not to impose injurious force on a human.
Under the second law, a robot appears to be required to comply with a human order to (1) not resist being destroyed or dismantled, (2) cause itself to be destroyed, or (3) (within the limits of paradox) dismantle itself.1.2 In various stories, Asimov notes that the order to self- destruct does not have to be obeyed if obedience would result in harm to a human. In addition, a robot would generally not be precluded from seeking clarification of the order. In his last full- length novel, Asimov appears to go further by envisaging that court procedures would be generally necessary before a robot could be destroyed: "I believe you should be dismantled without delay. The case is too dangerous to await the slow majesty of the law. . . . If there are legal repercussions hereafter, I shall deal with them."14
Such apparent inconsistencies attest to the laws' primary role as a literary device intended to support a series of stories about robot behavior. In this, they were very successful: "There was just enough ambiguity in the Three Laws to provide the conflicts and uncertainties required for new stories, and, to my great relief, it seemed always to be possible to think up a new angle out of the 61 words of the Three Laws."1.
As Frude says, "The Laws have an interesting status. They . . . may easily be broken, just as the laws of a country may be transgressed. But Asimov's provision for building a representation of the Laws into the positronic- brain circuitry ensures that robots are physically prevented from contravening them."2 Because the laws are intrinsic to the machine's design, it should "never even enter into a robot's mind" to break them.
Subjecting the laws to analysis may seem unfair to Asimov. However, they have attained such a currency not only among sci- fi fans but also among practicing roboticists and software developers that they influence, if only subconsciously, the course of robotics.
Asimov's experiments with the 1940 laws
Asimov's early stories are examined here not in chronological sequence or on the basis of literary devices, but by looking at clusters of related ideas.
* The scope for dilemma and deadlock
A deadlock problem was the key feature of the short story in which Asimov first introduced the laws. He constructed the type of stand- off commonly referred to as the "Buridan's ass" problem. It involved a balance between a strong third- law self- protection tendency, causing the robot to try to avoid a source of danger, and a weak second- law order to approach that danger. "The conflict between the various rules is [meant to be] ironed out by the different positronic potentials in the brain," but in this case the robot "follows a circle around [the source of danger], staying on the locus of all points of ... equilibrium."5
Deadlock is also possible within a single law. An example under the first law would be two humans threatened with equal danger and the robot unable to contrive a strategy to protect one without sacrificing the other. Under the second law, two humans might give contradictory orders of equivalent force. The later novels address this question with greater sophistication:
What was troubling the robot was what roboticists called an equipotential of contradiction on the second level. Obedience was the Second Law and [the robot] was suffering from two roughly equal and contradictory orders. Robot- block was what the general population called it or, more frequently, roblock for short . . . [or] `mental freeze- out.' No matter how subtle and intricate a brain might be, there is always some way of setting up a contradiction. This is a fundamental truth of mathematics.16
Clearly, robots subject to such laws need to be programmed to recognize deadlock and either choose arbitrarily among the alternative strategies or arbitrarily modify an arbitrarily chosen strategy variable (say, move a short distance in any direction) and reevaluate the situation: "If A and not- A are precisely equal misery- producers according to his judgment, he chooses one or the other in a completely unpredictable way and then follows that unquestioningly. He does not go into mental freeze- out."16
The finite time that even robot decision making requires could cause another type of deadlock. Should a robot act immediately, by "instinct," to protect a human in danger? Or should it pause long enough to more carefully analyze available data - or collect more data - perhaps thereby discovering a better solution, or detecting that other humans are in even greater danger? Such situations can be approached using the techniques of information economics, but there is inherent scope for ineffectiveness and deadlock, colloquially referred to as "paralysis by analysis."
Asimov suggested one class of deadlock that would not occur: If in a given situation a robot knew that it was powerless to prevent harm to a human, then the first law would be inoperative; the third law would become relevant, and it would not self- immolate in a vain attempt to save the human.25 It does seem, however, that the deadlock is not avoided by the laws themselves, but rather by the presumed sophistication of the robot's decision- analytical capabilities.
A special case of deadlock arises when a robot is ordered to wait. For example, "[Robot] you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.' There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again."26 As written, the passage raises the intriguing question of whether passive hearing is possible without active listening. What if the robot's name is next used in the third person rather than the second?
In interpreting a command such as "Do absolutely nothing until I call you!" a human would use common sense and, for example, attend to bodily functions in the meantime. A human would do nothing about the relevant matter until the event occurred. In addition, a human would recognize additional terminating events, such as a change in circumstances that make it impossible for the event to ever occur. A robot is likely to be constrained to a more literal interpretation, and unless it can infer a scope delimitation to the command, it would need to place the majority of its functions in abeyance
The faculties that would need to remain in operation are the:
sensory- perceptive subsystem needed to detect the condition;
the recommencement triggering function;
one or more daemons to provide a time- out mechanism (presumably the scope of the command is at least restricted to the expected remaining lifetime of the person who gave the command); and
ability to play back the audit trail so that an overseer can discover the condition on which the robot's resuscitation depends.
Asimov does not appear to have investigated whether the behavior of a robot in wait-mode is affected by the laws. If it isn't, then it will not only fail to protect its own existence and to obey an order, but will also stand by and allow a human to be harmed. A robotic security guard could therefore be nullified by an attacker's simply putting it into a wait-state.
* Audit of robot compliance
For a fiction writer, it is sufficient to have the laws embedded in robots' positronic pathways (whatever they may be). To actually apply such a set of laws in robot design, however, it would be necessary to ensure that every robot:
had the laws imposed in precisely the manner intended; and
was at all times subject to them - that is, they could not be overridden or modified.
It is important to know how malprogramming and modification of the laws' implementation in a robot (whether intentional or unintentional) can he prevented, detected, and dealt with.
In an early short story, robots were "rescuing" humans whose work required short periods of relatively harmless exposure to gamma radiation. Officials obtained robots with the first law modified so that they were incapable of injuring a human but under no compulsion to prevent one from coming to harm. This clearly undermined the remaining part of the first law, since, for example, a robot could drop a heavy weight toward a human, knowing that it would be fast enough and strong enough to catch it before it harmed the person. However, once gravity had taken over, the robot would be free to ignore the danger.25 Thus, a partial implementation was shown to be risky, and the importance of robot audit underlined. Other risks include trapdoors, Trojan horses, and similar devices in the robot's programming.
A further imponderable is the effect of hostile environments and stress on the reliability and robustness of robots' performance in accordance with the laws. In one short story, it transpires that "The Machine That Won the War" had been receiving only limited and poor- quality data as a result of enemy action against its receptors and had been processing it unreliably because of a shortage of experienced maintenance staff. Each of the responsible managers had, in the interests of national morale, suppressed that information, even from one another, and had separately and independently "introduced a number of necessary biases" and "adjusted" the processing parameters in accordance with intuition. The executive director, even though unaware of the adjustments, had placed little reliance on the machine's output, preferring to carry out his responsibility to mankind by exercising his own judgment.27
A major issue in military applications generally28 is the impossibility of contriving effective compliance tests for complex systems subject to hostile and competitive environments. Asimov points out that the difficulties of assuring compliance will be compounded by the design and manufacture of robots by other robots.22
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the Zeroth, First, or Second Law.
Asimov suggested this when he first hinted at the zeroth law, because he had his chief robotpsychologist say that "...we can no longer understand our own creations. . . . [Robots] have progressed beyond the possibility of detailed human control."1 In a more recent novella, a robot proposes to treat his form "as a canvas on which I intend to draw a man." but is told by the roboticist, "It's a puny ambition. ... You're better than a man. You've gone downhill from the moment you opted for organicism."3
In the later novels, a robot with telepathic powers manipulates humans to act in a way that will solve problems,4 although its powers are constrained by the psychological dangers of mind manipulation. Naturally, humans would be alarmed by the very idea of a mind- reading robot; therefore, under the zeroth and first laws, such a robot would be permitted to manipulate the minds of humans who learned of its abilities, making them forget the knowledge, so that they could not be harmed by it. This is reminiscent of an Asimov story in which mankind is an experimental laboratory for higher beings5 and Adams' altogether more flippant Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Earth is revealed as a large experiment in which humans are being used as laboratory animals by, of all things, white mice.6 Someday those manipulators of humans might be robots.
Asimov's The Robots of Dawn is essentially about humans, with robots as important players. In the sequel Robots and Empire, however, the story is dominated by the two robots, and the humans seem more like their playthings. It comes as little surprise, then, that the robots eventually conclude that "it is not sufficient to be able to choose [among alternative humans or classes of human] . . . ; we must be able to shape."2 Clearly, any subsequent novels in the series would have been about robots, with humans playing "bit" parts.
Robot dominance has a corollary that pervades the novels: History "grew less interesting as it went along; it became almost soporific."4 With life's challenges removed, humanity naturally regresses into peace and quietude, becoming "placid, comfortable, and unmoving" - and stagnant.
So who's in charge?
As we have seen, the term human can be variously defined, thus significantly affecting the first law. The term humanity did not appear in the original laws, only in the zeroth law, which Asimov had formulated and enunciated by a robot.2 Thus, the robots define human and humanity to refer to themselves as well as to humans, and ultimately to themselves alone. Another of the great science fiction stories, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama,7 also assumes that an alien civilization, much older than mankind, would consist of robots alone (although in this case Clarke envisioned biological robots). Asimov's vision of a robot takeover differs from those of previous authors only in that force would be unnecessary.
Asimov does not propose that the zeroth law must inevitably result in the ceding of species dominance by humans to robots. However, some concepts may be so central to humanness that any attempt to embody them in computer processing might undermine the ability of humanity to control its own fate. Weizenbaum argues this point more fully.8
The issues discussed here, and in Part 1, have grown increasingly speculative, and some are more readily associated with metaphysics than with contemporary applications of information technology. However, they demonstrate that even an intuitively attractive extension to the original laws could have very significant ramifications. Some of the weaknesses are probably inherent in any set of laws and hence in any robotic control regime.
Asimov's laws extended
The behavior of robots in Asimov's stories is not satisfactorily explained by the laws he enunciated. This section examines the design requirements necessary to effectively subject robotic behavior to the laws. In so doing. it becomes necessary to postulate several additional laws implicit in Asimov's fiction.
Perceptual and cognitive apparatus
Clearly, robot design must include sophisticated sensory capabilities. However, more than signal reception is needed. Many of the difficulties Asimov dramatized arose because robots were less than omniscient. Would humans, knowing that robots cognitive capabilities are limited, be prepared to trust their judgment on life- and- death matters? For example, the fact that any single robot cannot harm a human does not protect humans from being injured or killed by robotic actions. In one story, a human tells a robot to add a chemical to a glass of milk and then tells another robot to serve the milk to a human. The result is murder by poisoning. Similarly, a robot untrained in first aid might move an accident victim and break the person's spinal cord. A human character in The Naked Sun is so incensed by these shortcomings that he accuses roboticists of perpetrating a fraud on mankind by omitting key words from the first law. In effect, it really means "A robot may do nothing that to its knowledge would injure a human being, and may not, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm."9
Robotic architecture must be designed so that the laws can effectively control a robot's behavior. A robot requires a basic grammar and vocabulary to "understand" the laws and converse with humans. In one short story, a production accident results in a "mentally retarded" robot. This robot, defending itself against a feigned attack by a human, breaks its assailant's arm. This was not a breach of the first law, because it did not knowingly injure the human: "In brushing aside the threatening arm . . . it could not know the bone would break. In human terms, no moral blame can be attached to an individual who honestly cannot differentiate good and evil."10 In Asimov's stories, instructions sometimes must be phrased carefully to be interpreted as mandatory. Thus, some authors have considered extensions to the apparatus of robots, for example, a "button labeled `Implement Order' on the robot's chest,"11 analogous to the Enter key on a computer's keyboard.
A set of laws for robotics cannot be independent but must be conceived as part of a system. A robot must also he endowed with data collection, decision- analytical, and action processes by which it can apply the laws. Inadequate sensory, perceptual, or cognitive faculties would undermine the laws' effectiveness.
Additional implicit laws
In his first robot short story, Asimov stated that "long before enough can go wrong to alter that First Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It's a mathematical impossibility [for Robbie the Robot to harm a human]."12 For this to be true, robot design would have to incorporate a high- order controller (a "conscience"?) that would cause a robot to detect any potential for noncompliance with the laws and report the problem or immobilize itself. The implementation of such a meta- law ("A robot may not act unless its actions are subject to the laws of robotics") might well strain both the technology and the underlying science. (Given the meta- language problem in twentieth- century philosophy, perhaps logic itself would be strained.) This difficulty highlights the simple fact that robotic behavior cannot be entirely automated; it is dependent on design and maintenance by an external agent.
Another of Asimov's requirements is that all robots must be subject to the laws at all times. Thus, it would have to be illegal for human manufacturers to create a robot that was not subject to the laws. In a future world that makes significant use of robots, their design and manufacture would naturally be undertaken by other robots. Therefore, the Laws of Robotics must include the stipulation that no robot may commit an act that could result in any robot's not being subject to the same laws.
The words "protect its own existence" raise a semantic difficulty. In The Bicentennial Man, Asimov has a robot achieve humanness by taking its own life. Van Vogt, however, wrote that "indoctrination against suicide" was considered a fundamental requirement.13 The solution might be to interpret the word protect as applying to all threats, or to amend the wording to explicitly preclude self- inflicted harm. Having to continually instruct robot slaves would be both inefficient and tiresome. Asimov hints at a further, deep- nested law that would compel robots to perform the tasks they were trained for:
Quite aside from the Three Laws, there isn't a pathway in those brains that isn't carefully designed and fixed. We have robots planned for specific tasks, implanted with specific capabilities.'14 (Emphasis added.)
So perhaps we can extrapolate an additional, lower priority law: "A robot must perform the duties for which it has been programmed, except where that would conflict with a higher order law." Asimov's laws regulate around robots' transactions with humans and thus apply where robots have relatively little to do with one another or where there is only one robot. However, the laws fail to address the management of large numbers of robots. In several stories, a robot is assigned to oversee other robots. This would be possible only if each of the lesser robots were instructed by a human to obey the orders of its robot overseer. That would create a number of logical and practical difficulties, such as the scope of the human's order. It would seem more effective to incorporate in all subordinate robots an additional law, for example, "A robot must obey the orders given it by superordinate robots except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law." Such a law would fall between the second and third laws.
Furthermore, subordinate robots should protect their superordinate robot. This could be implemented as an extension or corollary to the third law; that is, to protect itself, a robot would have to protect another robot on which it depends. Indeed, a subordinate robot may need to be capable of sacrificing itself to protect its robot overseer. Thus, an additional law superior to the third law but inferior to orders from either a human or a robot overseer seems appropriate: "A robot must protect the existence of a superordinate robot as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law."
The wording of such laws should allow for nesting, since robot overseers may report to higher level robots. It would also be necessary to determine the form of the superordinate relationships:
a tree, in which each robot has precisely one immediate overseer, whether robot or human;
a constrained network, in which each robot may have several overseers but restrictions determine who may act as an overseer; or
an unconstrained network, in which each robot may have any number of other robots or persons as overseers.
This issue of a command structure is far from trivial, since it is central to democratic processes that no single entity shall have ultimate authority. Rather, the most senior entity in any decision- making hierarchy must be subject to review and override by some other entity, exemplified by the balance of power in the three branches of government and the authority of the ballot box. Successful, long- lived systems involve checks and balances in a lattice rather than a mere tree structure. Of course, the structures and processes of human organizations may prove inappropriate for robotic organization. In any case, additional laws of some kind would be essential to regulate relationships among robots.
The sidebar shows an extended set of laws, one that incorporates the additional laws postulated in this section. Even this set would not alway's ensure appropriate robotic behavior. However, it does reflect the implicit laws that emerge in Asimov's fiction while demonstrating that any realistic set of design principles would have to be considerably more complex than Asimov's 1940 or 1985 laws. This additional complexity would inevitably exacerbate the problems identified earlier in this article and create new ones.
An Extended Set of the Laws of Robotics
Recognition of stakeholder interests
The Laws of Robotics designate no particular class of humans (not even a robot's owner) as more deserving of protection or obedience than another. A human might establish such a relationship by command, but the laws give such a command no special status: another human could therefore countermand it. In short, the laws reflect the humanistic and egalitarian principles that theoretically underlie most democratic nations.
The laws therefore stand in stark contrast to our conventional notions about an information technology artifact, whose owner is implicitly assumed to be its primary beneficiary. An organization shapes an application's design and use for its own benefit. Admittedly, during the last decade users have been given greater consideration in terms of both the human- machine interface and participation in system development. But that trend has been justified by the better returns the organization can get from its information technology investment rather than by any recognition that users are stakeholders with a legitimate voice in decision making. The interests of other affected parties are even less likely to be reflected.
In this era of powerful information technology, professional bodies of information technologists need to consider:
identification of stakeholders and how they are affected;
prior consultation with stakeholders;
quality assurance standards for design, manufacture, use, and maintenance;
liability for harm resulting from either malfunction or use in conformance with the designer's intentions; and
complaint- handling and dispute- resolution procedures.
Once any resulting standards reach a degree of maturity, legislatures in the many hundreds of legal jurisdictions throughout the world would probably have to devise enforcement procedures.
The interests of people affected by modern information technology applications have been gaining recognition. For example, consumer representatives are now being involved in the statement of user requirements and the establishment of the regulatory environment for consumer electronic- funds- transfer systems. This participation may extend to the logical design of such systems. Other examples are trade- union negotiations with employers regarding technology- enforced change, and the publication of software quality- assurance standards.
For large- scale applications of information technology, governments have been called upon to apply procedures like those commonly used in major industrial and social projects. Thus, commitment might have to be deferred pending dissemination and public discussion of independent environmental or social impact statements. Although organizations that use information technology might see this as interventionism, decision making and approval for major information technology applications may nevertheless become more widely representative.
Closed- system versus open- system thinking
Computer- based systems no longer comprise independent machines each serving a single location. The marriage of computing with telecommunications has produced multicomponent systems designed to support all elements of a widely dispersed organization. Integration hasn't been simply geographic, however. The practice of information systems has matured since the early years when existing manual systems were automated largely without procedural change. Developers now seek payback via the rationalization of existing systems and varying degrees of integration among previously separate functions. With the advent of strategic and interorganizational systems, economies are being sought at the level of industry sectors, and functional integration increasingly occurs across corporate boundaries.
Although programmers can no longer regard the machine as an almost entirely closed system with tightly circumscribed sensory and motor capabilities, many habits of closed- system thinking remain. When systems have multiple components, linkages to other systems, and sophisticated sensory and motor capabilities, the scope needed for understanding and resolving problems is much broader than for a mere hardware/software machine. Human activities in particular must be perceived as part of the system. This applies to manual procedures within systems (such as reading dials on control panels), human activities on the fringes of systems (such as decision making based on computer- collated and - displayed information), and the security of the user's environment (automated teller machines, for example). The focus must broaden from mere technology to technology in use.
General systems thinking leads information technologists to recognize that relativity and change must he accommodated. Today, an artifact may be applied in multiple cultures where language, religion, laws, and customs differ. Over time, the original context may change. For example, models for a criminal justice system - one based on punishment and another based on redemption - may alternately dominate social thinking. Therefore, complex systems must be capable of adaptation.
Blind acceptance of technological and other imperatives
Contemporary utilitarian society seldom challenges the presumption that what can be done should be done. Although this technological imperative is less pervasive than people generally think, societies nevertheless tend to follow where their technological capabilities lead. Related tendencies include the economic imperative (what can be done more efficiently should be) and the marketing imperative (any effective demand should be met). An additional tendency might be called the "information imperative," the dominance of administrative efficiency, information richness, and rational decision making. However, the collection of personal data has become so pervasive that citizens and employees have begun to object.
The greater a technology's potential to promote change, the more carefully a society should consider the desirability of each application. Complementary measures that may be needed to ameliorate its negative effects should also be considered. This is a major theme of Asimov's stories, as he explores the hidden effects of technology. The potential impact of information technology is so great that it would be inexcusable for professionals to succumb blindly to the economic, marketing, information, technological, and other imperatives. Application software professionals can no longer treat the implications of information technology as someone else's problem but must consider them as part of the project.15
Human acceptance of robots
In Asimov's stories, humans develop affection for robots, particularly humaniform robots. In his very first short story, a little girl is too closely attached to Robbie the Robot for her parents' liking.'12 In another early story, a woman starved for affection from her husband and sensitively assisted by a humanoid robot to increase her self confidence entertains thoughts approaching love toward it/him.16
Nonhumaniforms, such as conventional industrial robots and large, highly dispersed robotic systems (such as warehouse managers. ATMs, and EFT/POS systems) seem less likely to elicit such warmth. Yet several studies have found a surprising degree of identification by humans with computers.17,18 Thus, some hitherto exclusively human characteristics are being associated with computer systems that don't even exhibit typical robotic capabilities.
Users must be continually reminded that the capabilities of hardware/software components are limited:
they contain many inherent assumptions;
they are not flexible enough to cope with all of the manifold exceptions that inevitably arise; and
they do not adapt to changes in their environment;
authority is not vested in hardware/ software components but rather in the individuals who use them.
Educational institutions and staff training programs must identify these limitations; yet even this is not sufficient: The human- machine interface must reflect them. Systems must be designed so that users are required to continually exercise their own expertise, and system output should not be phrased in a way that implies unwarranted authority. These objectives challenge the conventional outlook of system designers.
Human opposition to robots
Robots are agents of change and therefore potentially upsetting to those with vested interests. Of all the machines so far invented or conceived of, robots represent the most direct challenge to humans. Vociferous and even violent campaigns against robotics should not be surprising. Beyond concerns of self interest is the possibility that some humans could be revulsed by robots, particularly those with humanoid characteristics. Some opponents may be mollified as robotic behavior becomes more tactful. Another tenable argument is that by creating and deploying artifacts that are in some ways superior. humans degrade themselves.
System designers must anticipate a variety of negative reactions against their creations from different groups of stakeholders. Much will depend on the number and power of the people who feel threatened - and on the scope of the change they anticipate. If, as Asimov speculates,9 a robot- based economy develops without equitable adjustments, the backlash could be considerable.
Such a rejection could involve powerful institutions as well as individuals. In one Asimov story, the US Department of Defense suppresses a project intended to produce the perfect robot- soldier. It reasons that the degree of discretion and autonomy needed for battlefield performance would tend to make robots rebellious in other circumstances (particularly during peace time) and unprepared to suffer their commanders' foolish decisions.19 At a more basic level, product lines and markets might be threatened, and hence the profits and even the survival of corporations. Although even very powerful cartels might not be able to impede robotics for very long, its development could nevertheless be delayed or altered. Information technologists need to recognize the negative perceptions of various stakeholders and manage both system design and project politics accordingly.
The structuredness of decision making
For five decades there has been little doubt that computers hold significant computational advantages over humans. However, the merits of machine decision making remain in dispute. Some decision processes are highly structured and can be resolved using known algorithms operating on defined data items with defined interrelationships. Most structured decisions are candidates for automation, subject, of course, to economic constraints. The advantages of machines must also be balanced against risks. The choice to automate must be made carefully because the automated decision process (algorithm, problem description. problem- domain description, or analysis of empirical data) may later prove to be inappropriate for a particular type of decision. Also, humans involved as data providers, data communicators, or decision implementers may not perform rationally because of poor training, poor performance under pressure, or willfulness.
Unstructured decision making remains the preserve of humans for one or more of the following reasons:
humans have not yet worked out a suitable way to program (or teach) a machine how to make that class of decision;
some relevant data cannot be communicated to the machine;
"fuzzy" or "open- textured" concepts or constructs are involved;
such decisions involve judgments that system participants feel should not be made by machines on behalf of humans.
One important type of unstructured decision is problem diagnosis. As Asimov described the problem, "How..... can we send a robot to find a flaw in a mechanism when we cannot possibly give precise orders, since we know nothing about the flaw ourselves'? `Find out what's wrong' is not an order you can give to a robot; only to a man."20 Knowledge- based technology has since been applied to problem diagnosis, but Asimov's insight retains its validity: A problem may be linguistic rather than technical, requiring common sense, not domain knowledge. Elsewhere, Asimov calls robots "logical but not reasonable" and tells of household robots removing important evidence from a murder scene because a human did not think to order them to preserve it.9
The literature of decision support systems recognizes an intermediate case, semistructured decision making. Humans are assigned the decision task, and systems are designed to provide support for gathering and structuring potentially relevant data and for modeling and experimenting with alternative strategies. Through continual progress in science and technology, previously unstructured decisions are reduced to semistructured or structured decisions. The choice of which decisions to automate is therefore provisional, pending further advances in the relevant area of knowledge. Conversely, because of environmental or cultural change, structured decisions may not remain so. For example, a family of viruses might mutate so rapidly that the reference data within diagnostic support systems is outstripped and even the logic becomes dangerously inadequate.
Delegating to a machine any kind of decision that is less than fully structured invites errors and mishaps. Of course. human decision- makers routinely make mistakes too. One reason for humans' retaining responsibility for unstructured decision making is rational: Appropriately educated and trained humans may make more right decisions and/or fewer seriously wrong decisions than a machine. Using common sense, humans can recognize when conventional approaches and criteria do not apply, and they can introduce conscious value judgments. Perhaps a more important reason is the arational preference of humans to submit to the judgments of their peers rather than of machines: If someone is going to make a mistake costly to me, better for it to be an understandably incompetent human like myself than a mysteriously incompetent machine.8
Because robot and human capabilities differ, for the foreseeable future at least, each will have specific comparative advantages. Information technologists must delineate the relationship between robots and people by applying the concept of decision structuredness to blend computer- based and human elements advantageously. The goal should be to achieve complementary intelligence rather than to continue pursuing the chimera of unneeded artificial intelligence. As Wyndham put it in 1932: "Surely man and machine are natural complements: They assist one another."21
Risk management
Whether or not subjected to intrinsic laws or design guidelines, robotics embodies risks to property as well as to humans. These risks must be managed; appropriate forms of risk avoidance and diminution need to be applied, and regimes for fallback, recovery, and retribution must be established.
Controls are needed to ensure that intrinsic laws, if any, are operational at all times and that guidelines for design, development, testing, use, and maintenance are applied. Second- order control mechanisms are needed to audit first- order control mechanisms. Furthermore, those bearing legal responsibility for harm arising from the use of robotics must be clearly identified. Courtroom litigation may determine the actual amount of liability, but assigning legal responsibilities in advance will ensure that participants take due care.
In most of Asimov's robot stories, robots are owned by the manufacturer even while in the possession of individual humans or corporations. Hence legal responsibility for harm arising from robot noncompliance with the laws can be assigned with relative ease. In most real- world jurisdictions, however, there are enormous uncertainties, substantial gaps in protective coverage, high costs, and long delays.
Each jurisdiction, consistent with its own product liability philosophy, needs to determine who should bear the various risks. The law must be sufficiently clear so that debilitating legal battles do not leave injured parties without recourse or sap the industry of its energy. Information technologists need to communicate to legislators the importance of revising and extending the laws that assign liability for harm arising from the use of information technology.
Enhancements to codes of ethics
Associations of information technology professionals, such as the lEEE Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, and the Australian Computer Society, are concerned with professional standards, and these standards almost always include a code of ethics. Such codes aren't intended so much to establish standards as to express standards that already exist informally. Nonetheless, they provide guidance concerning how professionals should perform their work, and there is significant literature in the area.
The issues raised in this article suggest that existing codes of ethics need to be reexamined in the light of developing technology. Codes generally fail to reflect the potential effects of computer- enhanced machines and the inadequacy of existing managerial, institutional, and legal processes for coping with inherent risks. Information technology professionals need to stimulate and inform debate on the issues. Along with robotics. many other technologies deserve consideration. Such an endeavor would mean reassessing professionalism in the light of fundamental works on ethical aspects of technology.
Asimov's Laws of Robotics have been a very successful literary device. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps because it was artistically appropriate, the sum of Asimov's stories disprove the contention that he began with: It is not possible to reliably constrain the behavior of robots by devising and applying a set of rules.
The freedom of fiction enabled Asimov to project the laws into many future scenarios; in so doing, he uncovered issues that will probably arise someday in real- world situations. Many aspects of the laws discussed in this article are likely to be weaknesses in any robotic code of conduct. Contemporary applications of information technology such as CAD/CAM, EFT/POS, warehousing systems, and traffic control are already exhibiting robotic characteristics. The difficulties identified are therefore directly and immediately relevant to information technology professionals.
Increased complexity means new sources of risk, since each activity depends directly on the effective interaction of many artifacts. Complex systems are prone to component failures and malfunctions, and to intermodule inconsistencies and misunderstandings. Thus, new forms of backup, problem diagnosis, interim operation, and recovery are needed. Tolerance and flexibility in design must replace the primacy of short- term objectives such as programming productivity. If information technologists do not respond to the challenges posed by robotic systems. as investigated in Asimov's stories, information technology artifacts will be poorly suited for real- world applications. They may be used in ways not intended by their designers, or simply be rejected as incompatible with the individuals and organizations they were meant to serve.
Isaac Asimov, 1920-1992
Born near Smolensk in Russia, Isaac Asimov came to the United States with his parents three years later. He grew up in Brooklyn, becoming a US citizen at the age of eight. He earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Columbia University and qualified as an instructor in biochemistry at Boston University School of medicine, where he taught for many years and performed research in nucleic acid.
As a child, Asimov had begun reading the science fiction stories on the racks in his family's candy store, and those early years of vicarious visits to strange worlds had filled him with an undying desire to write his own adventure tales. He sold his first short story in 1938 and after wartime service as a chemist and a short hitch in the Army, he focused increasingly on his writing.
Asimov was among the most prolific of authors, publishing hundreds of books on various subjects and dozens of short stories. His Laws of Robotics underlie four of his full-length novels as well as many of his short stories. The World Science Fiction Convention bestowed Hugo Awards on Asimov in nearly every category of science fiction, and his short story "Nightfall" is often referred to as the best science fiction story ever written. The scientific authority behind his writing gave his stories a feeling of authenticity, and his work undoubtedly did much to popularize science for the reading public.
References to Part 1
1. I. Asimov, The Rest of the Robots (a collection of short stories originally published between 1941 and 1957), Grafton Books, London, 1968.
2. N. Frude, The Robot Heritage, Century Publishing. London. 1984.
3. I. Asimov, I, Robot (a collection of short stories originally published between 1940 and 1950), Grafton Books, London, 1968.
4. I. Asimov, P.S. Warrick, and M.H. Greenberg, eds., Machines That Think, Holt, Rinehart. and Wilson, London. 1983.
5. I. Asimov, "Runaround" (originally published in 1942), reprinted in Reference 3, pp. 33- 51.
6. L. Del Rey, "Though Dreamers Die" (originally published in 1944). reprinted in Reference 4, pp. 153- 174.
7. I. Asimov, "Evidence" (originally published in 1946). reprinted in Reference 3. pp. 159- 182.
8. H.M. Geduld and R. Gottesman. eds.. Robots, Robots, Robots, New York Graphic Soc., Boston. 1978.
9. P.B. Scott. The Robotics Revolution: The Complete Guide. Blackwell, Oxford. 1984.
10. I. Asimov, Robot Dreams (a collection of short stories originally published between 1947 and 1986), Victor Gollancz, London. 1989.
11. A. Chandor, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Computers, 3rd ed.. Penguin, London, 1985.
12. I. Asimov, "The Bicentennial Man" (originally published in 1976), reprinted in Reference 4, pp. 519- 561. Expanded into I. Asimov and R. Silverberg. The Positronic Man, Victor Gollancz, London, 1992.
13. A.C. Clarke and S. Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Grafton Books. London, 1968.
14. I. Asimov, Robots and Empire, Grafton Books, London, 1985.
15. I. Asimov, "Risk" (originally published in 1955), reprinted in Reference 1. pp.122- 155.
16. I. Asimov, The Robots of Dawn, Grafton Books, London, 1983.
17. I. Asimov, "Liar!" (originally published in 1941), reprinted in Reference 3, pp.92- 109.
18. I. Asimov, "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" (originally published in 1974), reprinted in The Bicentennial Man, Panther Books, London, 1978, pp. 79- 107.
19. I. Asimov. The Caves of Steel (originally published in 1954). Grafton Books. London. 1958.
20. T. Winograd and F. Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Ablex. Norwood, N.J., 1986.
21. I. Asimov. "Robbie" (originally published as "Strange Playfellow" in 1940). reprinted in Reference 3. pp. 13-32.
22. I. Asimov, The Naked Sun (originally published in 1957), Grafton Books. London, 1960.
23. I. Asimov. "The Evitable Conflict" (originally published in 1950). reprinted in Reference 3, pp. 183- 706.
24. I. Asimov. "The Tercentenary Incident" (originally published in 1976). reprinted in The Bicentennial Man, Panther Books, London, 1978, pp. 229- 247.
25. I. Asimov, "Little Lost Robot" (originally published in 1947). reprinted in Reference 3, pp. 110- 136.
26. I. Asimov, "Robot Dreams," first published in Reference 10, pp. 51- 58.
27. I. Asimov, "The Machine That Won the War" (originally published in 1961), reprinted in Reference 10. pp. 191- 197.
28. D. Bellin and G. Chapman. eds., Computers in Battle: Will They Work? Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Boston, 1987.
29. I. Asimov, "Reason" (originally published in 1941), reprinted in Reference 3, pp. 52- 70.
1. I. Asimov, "The Evitable Conflict" (originally' published in 1950), reprinted in I. Asimov, I Robot, Grafton Books. London. 1968. pp. l83- 206.
2. I. Asimov, Robots and Empire, Grafton Books. London. 1985.
3. I. Asimov, "The Bicentennial Man" (originally published in 1976). reprinted in I. Asimov, P.S. Warrick, and M.H. Greenberg, eds., Machines That Think. Holt. Rinehart, and Wilson, 1983, pp 519- 561.
4. I. Asimov, The Robots of Dawn, Grafton Books. London, 1983.
5. I. Asimov, "Jokester" (originally' published in 1956), reprinted in 1. Asimov, Robot Dreams, Victor Gollancz, London. 1989 pp 278- ~94.
6. D. Adams. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Harmony Books. New York. 1979.
7. A.C. Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama, Victor Gollancz, London. 1973.
8. J. Weizenbaum. Computer Power and Human Reason, W.H. Freeman. San Francisco, 1976.
9. I. Asimov, The Naked Sun, (originally' published in 1957). Grafton Books. London. 1960.
10. I. Asimov, "Lenny" (originally published in 1958), reprinted in I. Asimov. The Rest of the Robots. Grafton Books, London. 1968, pp. 158- 177.
11. H. Harrison. "War With the Robots" (originally published in 1962), reprinted in I, Asimov, P.S. Warrick, and M.H. Greenberg, eds., Machines That Think, Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1983, pp.357- 379.
12. I. Asimov, "Robbie" (originally published as "Strange Playfellow" in 1940). reprinted in I. Asimov, I, Robot. Grafton Books. London, 1968, pp. 13- 32.
13. A.E. Van Vogt, "Fulfillment" (originally published in 1951). reprinted in I. Asimov, P.S. Warrick, and M.H. Greenberg. eds., Machines That Think, Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1983, pp.175- 205.
14. I. Asimov. "Feminine Intuition" (originally published in 1969), reprinted in I. Asimov, The Bicentennial Man, Panther Books, London, 1978, pp. 15- 41.
15. R.A. Clarke, "Economic, Legal, and Social Implications of Information Technology," MIS Q,uarterly, Vol 17 No. 4, Dec. 1988, pp. 517- 519.
16. I. Asimov, "Satisfaction Guaranteed" (originally published in 1951), reprinted in I. Asimov, The Rest of the Robots, Grafton Books, London, 1968, pp.102- 120.
17. J. Weizenbaum, "Eliza," Comm. ACM, Vol. 9, No. 1, Jan. 1966, pp. 36- 45.
18. S. Turkle, The Second Self' Computers and the Human Spirit, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984.
19. A. Budrys, "First to Serve" (originally published in 1954), reprinted in I. Asimov, M.H. Greenberg, and C.G. Waugh, eds., Robots, Signet, New York, 1989, pp. 227- 244.
20. I. Asimov, "Risk" (originally published in 1955), reprinted in I. Asimov, The Rest of the Robots, Grafton Books, London, 1968, pp. 122- 155.
21. J. Wyndham, "The Lost Machine" (originally published in1932), reprinted in A. Wells, ed., The Best of John Wyndham, Sphere Books, London, 1973, pp. 13- 36, and in I. Asimov, P.S. Warrick, and M.H. Greenberg, eds.,Machines That Think, Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1983, pp. 29- 49.
Author Affiliations
| Isaac Asimov |
What is the name of the highest mountain in Great Britain? | Free Robotics Science Fiction Essays
The Science Fiction Writing
Science FictionScience fiction is among the most versatile forms of writing. It can be a romance, a comedy, a war story, a drama, a mystery and as the recent film The Wild, Wild West proves, even a western. Take any literary classic add in a crazed robot bent on world destruction, and a space s ... Science FictionScience fiction is among the most versatile forms of writing. ... Science fiction belongs to a genre of writing called speculative fiction, which also includes fantasy. ... Space travel is not a recent development in science fiction, in 1790 Carl Ignaz Geiger wrote Journey of an Earthman to Mars (Rottensteiner 153). ... Which brings us to another common theme in science fiction, artificial intelligence.Isaac Asimov formulated the famous Three Laws of Robotics:1. ... With the every growing technology of the 21st century who knows what doors will be open for science fiction? ...
Wordcount: 992
The General Description of Robotics
The image usually thought of by the word robot is that of a mechanical being, somewhat human in shape. Common in science fiction, robots are generally depicted as working in the service of people, but often escaping the control of the people and doing them harm. The word robot comes from the Czech w ... Common in science fiction, robots are generally depicted as working in the service of people, but often escaping the control of the people and doing them harm. ... These devices, however, are for the most part quite different from the androids, or humanlike robots, and other robots of fiction. ... None of these robots look like the androids of fiction. ... As for the thinking androids of the possible future, the well-known science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov has already laid down rules for their behavior. ... "Robot." ...
Wordcount: 1236
The Science Fiction Movie
The Genre of Science FictionScience Fiction has been interpreted by many in a wrong way. Most people feel that the author is just in love with the future. However this is not the truth in most science fiction novels. The majority of Science Fiction books are more about the horrors of the future. In ... However this is not the truth in most science fiction novels. The majority of Science Fiction books are more about the horrors of the future. ... The origin of science fiction "...evolved from the industrial revolution that spawned notions of the rockets, robots, time machines, computers, satellites, matter-transports, and the like" (Johnson 6). ... Fantasy deals with the supernatural where as Science Fiction doesn't. So in no way will Science Fiction ever be the same as Fantasy.One of the greatest writes of his time, Ray Bradbury has contributed so much to the science fiction world. ...
Wordcount: 1201
Science Fiction in Late Victorian England:
"Science Fiction in Late Victorian England:The Wellsian Influence on Science and Technology"Intro: Science fiction as a genre was not referred to as such until 1926 and the publication of the magazine Amazing Tales even though the format dates back to Lucian the Greek historian and author. The wo ... Science Fiction has a reactionary and still developing definition, as science changes the fiction that comes out of it evolves. ... This was the case because Moskowitz was the first to do extensive research into the origins of Science Fiction as detailed largely in his seminal works Science Fiction by Gaslight and Men and Milestones in Science Fiction. ... Wells takes the torch and creates Science Fiction as we know it today. ... Tom Woodman writes his article Science Fiction, Religion, and Transcendence in the collected work Science Fiction: A Critical Guide edited by Patrick Parrinder. ....
Wordcount: 1781
Transformation of Robots into humans in R.U.R.
In Chapek's R.U.R. according to the book robots really become "human" only at the very end. But what is it to become human? Even though robots considered themselves to be superior to humans, throughout the conflict between robots and humans, robots were trying everything to be more human. They tried ... In Chapek's R.U.R. according to the book robots really become "human" only at the very end. ... Even though robots considered themselves to be superior to humans, throughout the conflict between robots and humans, robots were trying everything to be more human. ... I think the main difference between robots and humans is conscience, this is a more contemporary view of the difference between robots and humans. ... However, Chapek seems to have given that to robots from the very start, or at least in rather early models of the robots. ... Just like in Terminator 2, the defense system or Art...
Wordcount: 390
Compare two science fiction films which use different themes
A genre normally has a set list of possible themes in there narratives. Science fiction has a few strong themes running throughout the history of this recently popular genre; science fiction wasn't popularized until the 1950's. Most science fiction tales have a prophetic nature and are often set in ... Science fiction has a few strong themes running throughout the history of this recently popular genre; science fiction wasn't popularized until the 1950's. Most science fiction tales have a prophetic nature and are often set in a future time. They are usually visualized through fanciful settings and advanced technology gadgets, scientific developments or by amazing special effects.A strong theme is science fiction films express society's anxiety about technology and how to forecast and control the impact of technological and environmental changes on society. ... The film Blader...
Wordcount: 1823
The Futuristic Imagination of H.G Wells
H.G. Wells and the Shape of Things to Come Heat rays destroying London, time machines sending people far ahead into the future, and men who can't even be seen: these are all things that H.G. Wells uses in his science-fiction novels. His imagination allows the reader to immerse themselves in the book ... Wells uses in his science-fiction novels. ... Wells, the "future prophet," predicted such things as tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear was, and--in The War of the Worlds--gas warfare, laser-like weapons, and industrial robots. ... Wells is ,perhaps, the most acclaimed science-fiction writer of all time. ... His world, the world of science and adventure, is one where few writers of his time have dared to enter. ...
Wordcount: 1165
The Reality of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence once something that people thought could only come out of science fiction novels and movies. But today that could all change because of a robot called Cog. Cog is an artificial intelligence that its creators have given a body. He is the future of AI ... Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence once something that people thought could only come out of science fiction novels and movies. But today that could all change because of a robot called Cog. ... Cog isn't yet a true humanoid robot. ... Still no other machine has come closer to the humanoid robots of science fiction. ... The insect like robots managed to conquer all. ...
Wordcount: 967
Technology And Science Fiction
The 90's has been a decade full of controversial and world changing events. The first one I could think of would have to be the Persian Gulf War with Iraq. I think that war brought together the United States, stopped our fighting with each other, and helped us focus on one common enemy, Saddam Husse ... New inventions like processing chips that can run billions of commands in a matter of seconds that soon will be able to take control of robots and other machinery that will make human work obsolete. ... Now it is all made up of a few factories that have a very small population base that is mainly operated by machinery and giant robots. ... A future of death and destruction that was brought on by humans that made everything they could being controlled by computers and robots. ... The future will be so advanced that it may look like it came straight out of a science fiction movie that will be ha...
Wordcount: 775
Blade Runner: A Science and Detective Fiction
Tutorial Paper:Blade Runner.By Trisha FarnanRidley Scott's Blade Runner (c 1981/2), a film belonging to the genres of science and detective fiction, and film noir simultaneously, is set in Los Angeles in 2019, almost forty years ahead of when it was made. It has been noted that Scott's Los Angeles i ... Tutorial Paper:Blade Runner.By Trisha FarnanRidley Scott's Blade Runner (c 1981/2), a film belonging to the genres of science and detective fiction, and film noir simultaneously, is set in Los Angeles in 2019, almost forty years ahead of when it was made. ... There is an interesting connection between the idea of the notion of Japan sinking its tentacles in everywhere and taking over, and that of humans being supplanted by robots. ... As she runs towards him she resembles some sort of robotic gymnast, and her otherness is frighteningly evident. ...
Wordcount: 3337
Issac Asimov
Isaac's VisionOnce in a while, a human being comes along with the genius to change the worldviews for all time to come. One such man, named Isaac Asimov, was born in Russia on January 2, 1920. He and his parents immigrated to New York City, in 1923. Asimov originally studied science in school, but l ... Asimov originally studied science in school, but later discovered his love for writing science fiction. By the year 1950, Isaac wrote I, Robot, in this Novel he creates, the term robotics, and the three laws of robotics, which have been adopted by science fiction writer in the present. ... He will be greatly missed by the readers of science fiction, although he leaves behind him a legacy, he has forever altered the future of humanity. ... He loved Science fiction, and enjoyed reading I, Robot. ... Even after society is drawn toward flashy movies for inspiration, " teenagers and adults, everyon...
Wordcount: 1807
The Artificial Intelligence
Artificial IntelligenceMobile Robotics1. Introduction: 1.1 Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage on behaviors that humans consider intelligent. The ability to create intelligent machines has intrigued human ... It draws on some very ancient techniques, as well as some of the most advanced space science and engineering. While the human-machine interface is not yet at a transparent level, the degree of autonomy available after a machine has been program is now approaching that once considered purely science fiction. ... Findings:2.1 Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is a combination of computer science, physiology, and philosophy. ... Analysis:In the new millennium, robots and robotic components more closely resembling those of science fiction fantasies and are prepared...
Wordcount: 1144
Computers with Neural Signals
In the classic science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet,space travelers from Earth land on a distant planet, where theyencounter the remnants of a technologically advancedcivilization. Even though they are not from this distant planet,the space travelers are able to communicate with one of the alienc ... In the classic science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet,space travelers from Earth land on a distant planet, where theyencounter the remnants of a technologically advancedcivilization. ... By doing this the space traveler's thoughts and feelingsare directly conveyed to the alien computer over a neural link.In the science-fiction movie The Matrix, the world isrun by machines that use humans as batteries so sustainthemselves. ... By doing this, the people areable to turn their thoughts, such as dodging bullets and knowingKung-Fu, into reality.The idea of people having their minds linked toc...
Wordcount: 1758
The Story of John Wyndham's Life as A Professional Writer
John Wyndham John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born in 1903 and lived in Brimigham, England. Wyndham tried many occupations before professional writing. John tried to have a career in law, farming, commercial art and advertisement. All of these failed. John began writing short stories ... He began to write speculative fiction, a twist on science fiction. ... There are no robots or people being sent to space. ... Science fiction according to encyclopedia.com is "a literary genre in which a background of science is an integral part of the story. Although science fiction is a form of fantastic literature, many of the events recounted are within the realm of future possibility example space travel, robots, and invasions from outer space."... Other people argue that the first science fiction story was not written until 1818. ...
Wordcount: 396
Biography of Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920 in Petrouchi, Russia. His parents were Judah and Anna Asimov. Isaac also has a sister Veronica and a brother Stanley. In 1923 his family immigrated to the United States. He and his family grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In Brooklyn his family ran a small candy ... This story was featured in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. ... Asimov wrote mainly science fiction stories about robots. ... At the time of their publications science fiction was not very popular. ... However Asimov helped to gain science fiction acceptance. ... Science Fiction Writers. ...
Wordcount: 1812
Biography of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Biography U.S. author, born in Waukegan, Ill., on Aug. 22, 1920. In his stories, Bradbury wove together the intrigue of changing technology with insightful social commentary. One of his best-known works was 'The Martian Chronicles'; a collection of interrelated stories concerning coloni ... His science fiction and fantasy short-story collections included 'The Martian Chronicles', 'The Illustrated Man', and 'Dinosaur Tales'. Bradbury's 1980 collection, 'The Stories of Ray Bradbury', covers a wide range of topics, none of which is truly science fiction. ... In addition to fiction Bradbury wrote 'Zen and the Art of Writing' and also published such dramas as 'The Anthem Sprinters', 'The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, The Pedestrian', and volumes of poetry including 'When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed&...
Wordcount: 367
The Literary Works of Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury Biography U.S. author, born in Waukegan, Ill., on Aug. 22, 1920. In his stories, Bradbury wove together the intrigue of changing technology with insightful social commentary. One of his best-known works was 'The Martian Chronicles'; a collection of interrelated stories concerning coloni ... His science fiction and fantasy short-story collections included 'The Martian Chronicles', 'The Illustrated Man', and 'Dinosaur Tales'. Bradbury's 1980 collection, 'The Stories of Ray Bradbury', covers a wide range of topics, none of which is truly science fiction. ... In addition to fiction Bradbury wrote 'Zen and the Art of Writing' and also published such dramas as 'The Anthem Sprinters', 'The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, The Pedestrian', and volumes of poetry including 'When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed&...
Wordcount: 367
Neuromancer and The Time Machine : A comparative Essay
A common tool of science fiction writers is the use of a character, to whom the reader can relate, placed in an alien setting. This character will represent the reader in this new alien world or society, allowing the reader to form a link between his or her own world and this new one. Because thes ... A common tool of science fiction writers is the use of a character, to whom the reader can relate, placed in an alien setting. ... Wintermute murders people (through control of computer-controlled robots) and manipulates people. ...
Wordcount: 2064
Life of Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov is a very talented writer. Isaac focuses on the intensity of his novels and short stories. Suspense is one of the things he focuses on when writing short stories such as "Marooned off Vesta." "Marooned off Vesta is a story of triumph and intelligence. This story shows what can happen ... It was then that began reading science fiction magazines. ... Although Isaac showed a great deal of interest in science fiction, he only considered it a hobby. ... However, he started to show more interest in his science fiction. ... Stephen describes a common plot used in science fiction. ... Goldman also describes the typical science fiction characters. ...
Wordcount: 1782
Essay Analysis on The Movie "The Terminator"
For the purposes of this essay I have chosen The Terminator, a science fiction B-movie feature from 1984. Although I intend mainly to study this purely as a single film, I do intend to study Terminator 2 in addition, thus making the essay a study of the series. In addition, I will be contrasting the ... For the purposes of this essay I have chosen The Terminator, a science fiction B-movie feature from 1984. ... They are simulacra rather than robots." ... Most significant of all is Rachel, a beautiful young female android who finds love with the Deckard, a human bladerunner (supposedly); a police executioner of trespassing replicants.If The Terminator is about difference between man and machine, as it has been argued, then it is truly to James Cameron's credit that some seven years later he went on to create Terminator 2 (hereafter referred to as T2); a film which once again starred Schwa...
Wordcount: 3117
Future Worlds in The Time Machine and 1984
TITLE: What and how do we learn about the future worlds presented to us in H.G Wells 'THE TIME MACHINE' and George Orwell's '1984'? What trends are these writers choosing to exaggerate and develop in their stories? What are the similarities and differences in the way the writers use science fiction ... What are the similarities and differences in the way the writers use science fiction to explore these trends? It is often said that Science Fiction is the 'literature of change,' the impact of science or technology on people. ... Both H.G Wells and George Orwell were two greatly influential science fiction novelists of their time, who's attempts in trying to scare their readers with visions of where capitalism and totalitarianism could lead, have undoubtedly gone unmissed. ... In fact Winston, who is the main character in the story, is perhaps the only one worth writing about ...
Wordcount: 2582
The Aspects of Short Stories
Short stories consist of many aspects. A very common aspect is imagination. To write a story, the author needs to have an imagination. In many instances, the characters in the stories have imaginations. Imagination is defined as the formation of a mental image of something that is neither perceived ... The character, the Maestro, decides to teach a robot named Rolo to play the piano. ... Rolo does not show feeling because he is a robot. ... The author wrote the story at a time when robots weren?... s main genre is science fiction; he bases his stories on his imagination. ... Isaac Asimov is very famous for his science fiction writings in the future, which he owes to his imagination and his ability to writeAs you can see imagination is a necessity for writing a short story. ...
Wordcount: 833
Life Full of Technology: The Way of the Future
Technology. The Way of the Future?The 90's has been a decade full of controversial and world changing events. The first one I could think of would have to be the Persian Gulf War with Iraq. I think that war brought together the United States, stopped our fighting with each other, and helped us focus ... New inventions like processing chips that can run billions of commands in a matter of seconds that soon will be able to take control of robots and other machinery that will make human work obsolete.Detroit, Michigan home of the General Motors automotive company was once a huge flourishing community that had a huge population base. ... A future of death and destruction that was brought on by humans that made everything they could being controlled by computers and robots. ... The future will be so advanced that it may look like it came straight out of a science fiction movie that will be have to...
Wordcount: 774
Ray Bradbury's Literary Works
Ray Bradbury has long been celebrated as a master of fiction. But it is not only the wondrous realms he shows us nor the fantastic possibilities he shares, but the his characters, his embodiments of humanity that truly captures readers. Courage, weakness, love, hate, passion and cool logic fill th ... Ray Bradbury has long been celebrated as a master of fiction. ... (Science Fiction Writers) In This story, a man, Braling desperate to escape from a bitter marriage, buys an android duplicate of himself to take his place while he vacations in Rio for a month. In the week prior to his departure, he decides to leave the robot with his wife and meet a friend, Smith, who is too interested in an android replacement so that he could escape from his wife who was too loving and affectionate, who smothered him. ... "As for Ethics, they are elemental in Bradbury's fiction... ... (Science Fiction...
Wordcount: 1630
Story of Ray Bradbury
Seldom does a visionary come along with the foresight and imagination to take people to the future; Ray Bradbury is one of those visionaries. Ray Bradbury has had such an impact on the world that the full magnitude of his contribution may never be truly known. Generations have been inspired by his ... About the only thing that critics cannot agree upon is whether Bradbury writes Science Fiction or Fantasy. ... He discovered science fiction in Amazing Stories, a popular magazine of its day, in 1928. ... He dealt with topics ranging from space travel, the colonization of Mars, rockets, robots, time machines and the Earth of the future. ... There is a continuing argument over whether Bradbury writes Science Fiction or Fantasy because of his blending of the genres (Cassiday 86). ... Although Bradbury never won a Hugo or Nebula, he is credited as being "the world's greatest living scien...
Wordcount: 916
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What is the chemical symbol for Silver? | Chemical Elements.com - Silver (Ag)
Bentor, Yinon. Chemical Element.com - Silver.
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Which U.S. Serial Killer was nicknamed The Killer Clown? | The chemical elements of the periodic table sorted by symbol
For chemistry students and teachers: The tabular chart on the right is arranged by the symbol.
The first chemical element is Actinium and the last is Zirconium.
Please note that the elements do not show their natural relation towards each other as in the Periodic system. There you can find the metals, semi-conductor(s), non-metal(s), inert noble gas(ses), Halogens, Lanthanoides, Actinoids (rare earth elements) and transition metals.
C
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From which plant do we derive the drug Digitalis? | Digitalis Uses, Benefits & Dosage - Drugs.com Herbal Database
Adverse reactions are generally related to toxicity.
Toxicology
All parts of the plant are toxic. The incidence of digitalis toxicity in therapeutic use has been estimated to range from 5% to 25%. Ingestion of extremely small amounts of the plant may be fatal to humans, especially children, and to animals. Toxicity is cumulative.
Botany
Digitalis is typically a biennial plant but may be annual or perennial depending on the species. It is characterized by a thick, cylindrical, downy stem that reaches a height of up to 2 m. Leaves form a thick rosette during the first year of growth. The leaves, which are woolly, veined, and covered with white hairs on the underside, have a very bitter taste. Flowers grow in the first or second year, depending on the species, and are tubular and bell-shaped, growing to 8 cm in length. Many colors of flowers have been bred from digitalis, and they are rarely white. Digitalis is native to the British Isles, western Europe, and parts of Africa, but is found today as an ornamental plant throughout the world. Related species that have found some use in traditional medicine include Digitalis lutea (straw foxglove), Digitalis grandiflora and Digitalis ambigua (yellow foxglove), and Digitalis ferriginea (rusty foxglove). 1 , 2 , 3
History
Digitalis was one of the many herbal remedies used by the ancient Romans. Although its use for the treatment of heart failure has been traced back to 10th century Europe, digitalis was not widely used for this indication until its scientific investigation by British physician William Withering in the late 1700s. For most of the 1800s, digitalis was used to treat a wide variety of diseases and disorders. In 1875, German chemist Oswald Schmiedeberg first isolated pure digitoxin from digitalis, leading others to extract and identify other glycosides from various species of digitalis. In 1957, digoxin was isolated from D. lanata and is now a major cardiac glycoside marketed in tablet form. Digitalis was admitted into the first edition of the Pharmacopeia of the United States (1820) and is currently recognized by all major pharmacopeias. In South America, preparations of the powdered leaves are used to relieve asthma, as sedatives, and as diuretic/cardiotonics. In India, an ointment containing digitalis glycosides is used to treat wounds and burns. 2 , 4 , 5
Chemistry
Ornamental strains of D. purpurea typically have low concentrations of active compounds. Leaves of wild varieties that have been used for medicinal purposes contain at least 30 different glycosides in total quantities ranging from 0.1% to 0.6%; these consist primarily of purpurea glycoside A (yielding digitoxin) and glycoside B, the precursor of gitoxin. Upon hydrolysis, digitoxin and gitoxin lose sugar moieties, producing their respective aglycones, digitoxigenin and gitoxigenin. Biosynthetic pathways in the production of cardenolides are reliant on the enzymes of malonyltransferase and progesterone 5 beta-reductase.
The main glycosides of D. lanata are the lanatosides, designated A through E. Removal of acetate groups and sugars results in formation of digitoxin, gitoxin, digoxin, digitalin, and gitaloxin. D. lanata is not typically used in powder form in the United States, but serves as a major source of lanatoside C and digoxin (300 times more potent than the powder prepared from D. purpurea ). Isolated digitoxin is 1,000 times more potent than whole powdered leaves and is completely and rapidly absorbed from the GI tract.
The seeds also contain digitalis glycosides, while steroidal saponins, flavones, the flavonoid chrysoeriol, anthraquinones, and organic acids have been identified in the leaves. High performance liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy have been used to identify and quantify glycoside composition. 2 , 3 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11
Uses and Pharmacology
Cardiovascular effects
Cardiac glycosides possess positive inotropic effects due to inhibition of sodium-potassium adenosine triphosphatase, which allows calcium to accumulate in myocytes leading to enhanced cardiac contractility. These drugs also possess some antiarrhythmic activity, but will induce arrhythmias at higher dose levels. 7 , 12 , 13
Animal data
Studies in animals center largely on evaluations of individual chemical compounds on isolated cardiac and other tissues. 12 , 13 , 14
Clinical data
Digitalis glycosides have been used clinically for the treatment of heart failure for more than 200 years and remain the source of commercial digoxin preparations; however, a defined place in therapy remains under debate. Reviews of the large, multicenter Digitalis Investigation Group trial and other clinical trials have found no clear effect of digitalis on mortality in heart failure. Some effect has been demonstrated for secondary outcomes of decreased hospitalizations and clinical (symptomatic) deterioration. 5 , 15 For further information, consult standard pharmacology references.
Other effects
Cancer
In vitro experiments and screening studies have shown cytotoxic properties of glycosides and flavonoids from D. purpurea and D. lantana . Activity against human cancer cell lines, including solid tumor lines, has been demonstrated. Mechanisms include direct cytotoxicity resulting in apoptosis, inhibition of aflatoxin-induced cytotoxicity, inhibition of induction of nitric oxide synthase, and increases in glutathione S-tranferase. 11 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19
Diabetes
A study in hyperglycemic and dyslipidemic rats demonstrated enhanced glucose tolerance 2 hours after the rats were given a single dose of the saponin digitonin. Positive effects on the lipid profile were also observed. 20
Dosage
Digitalis leaf has a narrow therapeutic index, requiring close medical supervision for safe use. Traditional dosage starts at 1.5 g of leaf divided into 2 daily doses. Purified digoxin is typically used at daily doses of 0.125 to 0.25 mg. 15 , 21
Pregnancy/Lactation
Adverse reactions are generally related to toxicity.
Toxicology
All parts of the plant are toxic. Animal toxicity occurs during grazing. Children have become ill by sucking the flowers or ingesting seeds or parts of the leaves. Deaths have been reported among people who drank tea made from digitalis mistakenly identified as comfrey, although the bitter taste often deters ingestion, and its emetic properties can induce vomiting, thereby limiting systemic absorption. Digitalis poisoning is also associated with intentional ingestion with suicidal intent. 24 , 25 , 26
Digitalis glycosides accumulate and are excreted slowly; therefore, intoxications during therapy are common. The incidence of digitalis toxicity has been estimated to range from 5% to 23%. More stringent dosing guidelines and monitoring techniques have dramatically reduced the incidence of therapeutic overdose.
Signs of plant or purified drug poisoning include blurred vision, contracted pupils, dizziness, excessive urination, fatigue, muscle weakness, nausea, strong but slowed pulse, tremors, and vomiting; in severe cases, stupor, confusion, convulsions, and death can occur. Cardiac signs include atrial arrhythmias and atrioventricular block. Chronic digitalis intoxication is characterized by visual halos, yellow-green vision, and GI upset. 2 , 13 , 24 , 27
In mild cases of toxicity (atrial fibrillation with a slow ventricular response or occasional ectopic beats), temporary withdrawal of the drug and electrocardiogram monitoring is sufficient. 6 Gastric lavage or emesis together with supportive measures, such as electrolyte replacements, antiarrhythmics (eg, lidocaine, phenytoin), and atropine, have been used to manage acute poisonings. Digoxin-specific Fab antibody fragments may be used in managing acute intoxications caused by digitalis and related cardioactive glycosides; however, their efficacy remains unproven by controlled clinical trials. 13 , 25 , 28 , 29
Bibliography
1. Digitalis purpurea L. USDA, NRCS. 2010. The PLANTS Database ( http://plants.usda.gov, March 2010 ). National Plant Data Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70874-4490 USA.
2. Morton JF. Major Medicinal Plants . Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas; 1977.
3. Warren B. Digitalis purpurea. Am J Cardiol . 2005;95(4):544.
4. Belcastro PF. Digitalis: from folklore remedy to valuable drug. J Am Pharm Assoc (Wash) . 2002;42(6):857.
5. Feussner JR, Feussner DJ. Reassessing the efficacy of digitalis: from routine treatment to evidence-based medicine. Am J Med Sci . 2010;339(5):482-484.
6. Trease GE. Trease and Evans' Pharmacognosy . 13th ed. London, UK: Balliere Tindall; 1989.
7. Kuate SP, Pádua RM, Eisenbeiss WF, Kreis W. Purification and characterization of malonyl-coenzyme A: 21-hydroxypregnane 21-O-malonyltransferase (Dp21MaT) from leaves of Digitalis purpurea L. Phytochemistry . 2008;69(3):619-626.
8. Usai M, Atzei AD, Marchetti M. Cardenolides content in wild Sardinian Digitalis purpurea L. populations. Nat Prod Res . 2007;21(9):798-804.
9. Gavidia I, Tarrío R, Rodríguez-Trelles F, Pérez-Bermúdez P, Seitz HU. Plant progesterone 5beta-reductase is not homologous to the animal enzyme. Molecular evolutionary characterization of P5betaR from Digitalis purpurea . Phytochemistry . 2007;68(6):853-864.
10. Kite GC, Porter EA, Simmonds MS. Chromatographic behaviour of steroidal saponins studied by high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. J Chromatogr A . 2007;1148(2):177-183.
11. Choi DY, Lee JY, Kim MR, Woo ER, Kim YG, Kang KW. Chrysoeriol potently inhibits the induction of nitric oxide synthase by blocking AP-1 activation. J Biomed Sci . 2005;12(6):949-959.
12. Keenan SM, DeLisle RK, Welsh WJ, Paula S, Ball WJ Jr. Elucidation of the Na+, K+-ATPase digitalis binding site. J Mol Graph Model . 2005;23(6):465-475.
13. Hauptman PJ, Kelly RA. Digitalis. Circulation . 1999;99(9):1265-1270.
14. Navarro E, Alonso PJ, Alonso SJ, et al. Cardiovascular activity of a methanolic extract of Digitalis purpurea spp. heywoodii . J Ethnopharmacol . 2000;71(3):437-442.
15. Hood, Jr. WB, Dans AL, Guyatt GH, Jaeschke R, McMurray JJ. Digitalis for treatment of congestive heart failure in patients in sinus rhythm. Cochrane Database Syst Rev . 2004;(2):CD002901. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD002901.pub2 .
16. López-Lázaro M, Palma De La Peña N, Pastor N, et al. Anti-tumour activity of Digitalis purpurea L. subsp. heywoodii . Planta Med . 2003;69(8):701-704.
17. Lindholm P, Gullbo J, Claeson P, et al. Selective cytotoxicity evaluation in anticancer drug screening of fractionated plant extracts. J Biomol Screen . 2002;7(4):333-340.
18. Johansson S, Lindholm P, Gullbo J, Larsson R, Bohlin L, Cleason P. Cytotoxicity of digitoxin and related cardiac glycosides in human tumor cells. Anticancer Drugs . 2001;12(5):475-483.
19. Lee JY, Woo E, Kang KW. Screening of new chemopreventive compounds from Digitalis purpurea . Pharmazie . 2006;61(4):356-358.
20. Ebaid GM, Faine LA, Diniz YS, et al. Effects of digitonin on hyperglycaemia and dyslipidemia induced by high-sucrose intake. Food Chem Toxicol . 2006;44(2):293-299.
21. Dec GW. Digoxin remains useful in the management of chronic heart failure. Med Clin North Am . 2003;87(2):317-337.
22. McGuffin M, Hobbs C, Upton R, Goldberg A, eds. American Herbal Products Association's Botanical Safety Handbook . Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press; 1997.
23. Tatro DS, ed. Drug Interaction Facts . St. Louis, MO: Wolters Kluwer Health Inc; 2004.
24. Jowett N. Foxglove poisoning. Hosp Med . 2002;63(12):758-759.
25. Lacassie E, Marquet P, Martin-Dupont S, Gaulier JM, Lachâtre G. A non-fatal case of intoxication with foxglove, documented by means of liquid chromatography-electrospray-mass spectrometry. J Forensic Sci . 2000;45(5):1154-1158.
26. Lin CC, Yang CC, Phua DH, Deng JF, Lu LH. An outbreak of foxglove leaf poisoning. J Chin Med Assoc . 2010;73(2):97-100.
27. Dick M, Curwin J, Tepper D. Digitalis intoxication recognition and management. J Clin Pharmacol . 1991;31(5):444-447.
28. Wickersham RM, Novak K, managing eds. Drug Facts and Comparisons . St. Louis, MO: Facts and Comparisons; 2004.
29. Roberts DM, Buckley NA. Antidotes for acute cardenolide (cardiac glycoside) poisoning. Cochrane Database Syst Rev . 2006;(4):CD005490. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD005490.pub2 .
Copyright © 2009 Wolters Kluwer Health
| Digitalis |
How many centimetres are there in a 'Hand', the measurement used on horses? | Digitalis purpurea (common foxglove) | Plants & Fungi At Kew
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Digitalis purpurea (common foxglove)
A popular ornamental, with tall spires of tapered, tubular, purple to pink or white flowers, common foxglove is also a source of digitoxin, used in the heart drug digitalis.
Digitalis purpurea (common foxglove)
common foxglove, purple foxglove, fairy fingers, fairy gloves, fairy bells, floppy dock, tod-tails
Conservation status:
Not threatened. Not evaluated according to IUCN Red List criteria.
Habitat:
Open places, especially woodland clearings, heaths and mountainsides and also waste ground (especially on disturbed sites and as a pioneer on burnt areas); on acid or calcareous soils; also as a garden escape.
Key Uses:
Ornamental, medicinal.
Known hazards:
All parts of the plant are poisonous if eaten. Contact with plant material can cause irritation.
Taxonomy
Genus: Digitalis
About this species
Digitalis purpurea was named by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in his pivotal publication Species Plantarum in 1753. The generic name Digitalis comes from the Latin for finger (digitus), referring to the shape of the flowers. The specific epithet purpurea refers to the colour of the flowers, which are frequently purple (although a white-flowered form is fairly common). Common foxglove is a popular ornamental, and many hybrids and cultivars are available.
Genus:
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Geography and distribution
Common foxglove is thought to be native to west, south-west and west central Europe, and to be widely naturalised further east.
Its exact status, whether truly native or naturalised, in each country is unknown, but it is possibly native in the following countries: Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy (Sardinia), Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden (and perhaps also Austria, Denmark, Hungary, The Netherlands and Poland).
It is naturalised in North America, and is listed as an ‘invasive and noxious weed’ by the United States Department of Agriculture.
Description
Fruit of Digitalis purpurea
Overview: An erect biennial (or short-lived perennial), growing up to 2 m tall, with a downy covering of hair.
Leaves: The basal leaves are ovate to lanceolate and are borne on a winged petiole (leaf stalk) of 3–12 cm long.
Flowers: The flowers are borne on a simple or sparsely branched raceme with un-stalked bracts; the upper bracts are sometimes minute. The pedicels (individual flower stalks) are 11–20 mm long and hairy. The corolla (petals) is purple to pale pink or white, 40–55 mm long, and is usually marked on the inside with dark purple spots edged with white.
Fruits: The fruit is an ovoid capsule of 11 x 7 mm, equal to or longer than the calyx (sepals). The brown, rectangular seeds are almost 1 mm long, with a network of ridges across the surface.
The flowers usually open between June and September and are pollinated by bumblebees.
Uses
Common foxglove (Photo: Wolfgang Stuppy)
Common foxglove is cultivated for its ornamental value, and many hybrids (with other Digitalis species) and cultivars are available. It is also grown to attract bumblebees to gardens. Its flowers provide food for larvae of the foxglove pug moth (Eupithecia pulchellata) and it is also a food plant for larvae of the frosted orange moth (Gortyna flavago).
Digitalis purpurea also contains loliolide, a potent ant-repellent which was once used as an insecticidal disinfectant for walls in the Forest of Dean, England.
Medicinal uses
Foxgloves are a source of digitoxin, a glycoside used in the drug digitalis, which has been used as a heart stimulant since 1785. It is also well-known for its toxicity, and ingestion of the leaves (usually as a result of misidentification for comfrey, Symphytum officinale) can result in severe poisoning.
Despite their toxicity, they have been widely used in folk-medicine. Foxglove tea (an infusion of the leaves) was taken for colds, fevers and catarrh, and compresses were used for ulcers, swellings and bruises. Its most common use was as a diuretic against dropsy (accumulation of fluid in the tissues), for which it was sometimes effective, but occasionally proved fatal.
William Withering, an 18th century botanist and physician, studied the medicinal use of foxgloves, in particular their use in the treatment of dropsy. He discovered that an infusion of the leaves could slow and strengthen the heartbeat, which in turn stimulated the kidneys to clear the body and lungs of excess fluid. He also showed that foxglove leaves could be used in the treatment of heart failure (but that high doses could stop the heart).
Withering’s An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses: with Practical Remarks on Dropsy, and Other Diseases (1785) is a landmark publication, being the first English text in which the therapeutic effects of a drug are described, and is considered by some to mark the birth of modern pharmacology. Withering’s work led to the eventual isolation and purification of digitoxin and digoxin (cardiac glycosides used in modern medicine as heart stimulants in the drug digitalis).
Today, digitalis is normally made using Digitalis lanata leaves (although during the Second World War D. purpurea seeds were collected from the wild and grown to produce large quantities of leaves for medicinal use).
Toxicity of foxgloves
The main toxins in Digitalis species are cardiac glycosides, which are present in all parts of the plant. The flowers contain the lowest concentration of toxins, yet their ingestion can still result in gastrointestinal effects. The ingestion of leaves can cause oral and abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. In severe cases, symptoms can include visual and perceptual disturbances and heart and kidney problems. There have been many reported cases of poisoning, for example when foxglove leaves have been mistakenly collected by those wishing to make comfrey (Symphytum officinale) herbal tea.
Seeds of Digitalis purpurea
Millennium Seed Bank: Seed storage
Kew's Millennium Seed Bank Partnership aims to save plant life world wide, focusing on plants under threat and those of most use in the future. Seeds are dried, packaged and stored at a sub-zero temperature in our seed bank vault.
A collection of Digitalis purpurea seeds is held in Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank based at Wakehurst in West Sussex.
This species at Kew
Close up of common foxglove (Photo: Wolfgang Stuppy)
Digitalis purpurea can be seen growing wild in the grounds of Queen Charlotte's Cottage at Kew. It is also grown in the Queen’s Garden (behind Kew Palace), the Secluded Garden, and the Woodland Garden around the Temple of Aeolus. Extensive areas of foxgloves can be seen in the woodlands at Wakehurst.
Dried and spirit-preserved specimens of common foxglove are held in Kew’s Herbarium, where they are available to researchers by appointment. The details of some of these can be seen online in the Herbarium Catalogue.
Specimens of Digitalis purpurea leaves, seeds, roots, wood, prepared digitalis BP, a ‘concentrated infusion of foxglove’, and digoxin tablets are held in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection in the Sir Joseph Banks Building, where they are available to researchers by appointment.
References and credits
Aronson, J. K. (1985). An Account of the Foxglove and its Medical Uses, 1785-1985. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Dauncey, E. A. (2010). Poisonous Plants: A Guide for Parents & Childcare Providers. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Huxley, A. (ed.) (1997). The New Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening, Volume 2 (D-K). Macmillan Reference Ltd, London.
Lin, C.-C., Yang, C.-C., Phua, D.-H., Deng, J.-F. & Lu, L.-H. (2010). An outbreak of foxglove leaf poisoning. Journal of the Chinese Medical Association 73: 97-100.
Mabberley, D. J. (2008). Mabberley’s Plant-book: A Portable Dictionary of Plants, their Classification and Uses, 3rd Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Mabey, R. (1997). Flora Britannica. Chatto & Windus, London.
Preston, C. D., Pearman, D. A. & Dines, T. A. (eds) (2002). New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora: An Atlas of the Vascular Plants of Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. (2008) Seed Information Database (SID). Version 7.1. Available online (accessed 22 February 2011).
Stace, C. (1997). New Flora of the British Isles, 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
The Plant List (2010). Digitalis purpurea. Available online (accessed 06 February 2011).
Kew science editor: Emma Tredwell
Kew contributors: Steve Davis (Sustainable Uses Group)
Copyediting: Emma Tredwell
While every effort has been taken to ensure that the information contained in these pages is reliable and complete, the notes on hazards, edibility and such-like included here are recorded information and do not constitute recommendations. No responsibility will be taken for readers’ own actions.
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What were the names of the 3 Bronte sisters? | Literary Names: The Bronte Sisters – Baby Name Blog - Nameberry
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Literary Names: The Bronte Sisters
Posted July 14th, 2011
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We’ve talked a lot about Shakespearean literary names and characters in Dickens and Jane Austen , but we’ve overlooked three of the best namers in literary history—the sisters Brontë. We love their own names— Charlotte , Emily and Anne , and we love their initial-appropriate male pen names—Currer, Ellis and Acton . We even love their surname, which a number of parents have chosen for their daughters.
But it is the particularly rich cast of character names in their novels that we love the most. One of them, in fact, had a considerable effect on baby naming of its era. Though it’s long been said that it was Shirley Temple who promoted her given name in the 1930s, she wasn’t the first. In Charlotte Brontë’ second novel, following Jane Eyre, the protagonist of Shirley was given that name because her father had anticipated a boy, and Shirley was a distinctively male name at the time. The novel’s Father Keeldar made a gender switch that has proven to be permanent.
Here is a selection of Brontë bests; the list isn’t meant to be complete—some of the more common names have not been included. (The initials AB , CB and EB represent Anne , Charlotte and Emily .)
GIRLS
| anne charlotte and emily |
What is a traditional Welsh stew usually made using lamb, leeks, potato, swede and carrot | Literary Names: The Bronte Sisters – Baby Name Blog - Nameberry
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using quick search
Find the right name for your baby using our advanced search tool
Gender
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Literary Names: The Bronte Sisters
Posted July 14th, 2011
Share on Pinterest
We’ve talked a lot about Shakespearean literary names and characters in Dickens and Jane Austen , but we’ve overlooked three of the best namers in literary history—the sisters Brontë. We love their own names— Charlotte , Emily and Anne , and we love their initial-appropriate male pen names—Currer, Ellis and Acton . We even love their surname, which a number of parents have chosen for their daughters.
But it is the particularly rich cast of character names in their novels that we love the most. One of them, in fact, had a considerable effect on baby naming of its era. Though it’s long been said that it was Shirley Temple who promoted her given name in the 1930s, she wasn’t the first. In Charlotte Brontë’ second novel, following Jane Eyre, the protagonist of Shirley was given that name because her father had anticipated a boy, and Shirley was a distinctively male name at the time. The novel’s Father Keeldar made a gender switch that has proven to be permanent.
Here is a selection of Brontë bests; the list isn’t meant to be complete—some of the more common names have not been included. (The initials AB , CB and EB represent Anne , Charlotte and Emily .)
GIRLS
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Which Irish dish is made by combining mashed potatoes, chopped spring onions, butter and milk | Colcannon - All recipes UK
Colcannon
Colcannon
Find traditional and modern versions of this creamy Irish potato dish, combining mashed potatoes with kale or leeks, milk and butter. Or try making the Northern Irish version called champ, which is made with spring onions.
13 recipes
This is a recipe I shared with my girlfiends from my recipe club last year.
Recipe by: MNIKOLAISEN
40min
Looks similar to colcannon, but champ is native to the North of Ireland. It's made by blending spring onions with creamy mashed potatoes. Great on its own, served steaming hot with extra butter which will melt through it. But it's also the perfect side dish for good quality sausages.
30min
This colcannon recipe uses cabbage and leeks. You could use a bunch of spring onions instead of the leeks, if you prefer. Serve with bacon, pork sausages or roast beef.
Recipe by: Marc Boyer
1hr40min
Colcannon is a simple, warming Irish potato dish, combining mashed potatoes with shredded cooked cabbage and chopped spring onions. Here it is used as a lovely pie topping for chicken cooked in cider with sliced apples and carrots. The pie is a well-balanced meal in itself, needing no accompaniments.
Recipe by: Norma MacMillan
3hr
This is beef stew recipe results in melt-in-the-mouth meat in a richly flavoured gravy, perfectly complemented by the colcannon. Your family will love this!
Recipe by: MNIKOLAISEN
40min
This is my famous colcannon recipe. It tastes great with or without bacon, so you can easily make this colcannon vegetarian.
Recipe by: Diane
25min
Pork chops are quick and easy for any night of the week. The sauce is made with beer, mustard, honey, garlic and soy sauce - so you'll probably have all of the ingredients you need in your cupboard already. This is delicious served with colcannon, which allows you to add plenty of dark green veg to your diet!
| Champ |
Which traditional Irish loaf is made using flour, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk | Champ – brúitín- poundies – The McCallum's Shamrock Patch
March 1, 2016
Champ (brúitín in Irish) or Poundies by a few, is an Irish dish, made by combining mashed potatoes and chopped scallions or spring onions with butter and cream, salt and pepper.It is a simple and inexpensive recipe to make. Champ is also very similar to another Irish dish, colcannon, which uses kale or cabbage in place of scallions or spring onions.
I love a good simple potato recipe, this is simple at it’s very finest… literally the recipe calls for 4 main ingredients and salt and pepper. How can you wrong with simple yet traditional for your celebration this ST Patrick’s Day?
As most of you know I have an Irish husband, what a mix we are him being Irish with me being German and Italian… Makes for some interesting days to say the least at the Patch…However, I enjoy making his favorite traditional foods leading up to ST Patrick’s Day…this recipe being one of them.
In the past Champ was served and enjoyed by Northern Country – Irish purists solely as a main course (not as a side dish) in most countryside homes with a knob of creamy butter. I don’t know about you, I don’t think I would mind a main course of these delicious potatoes at all.
Champ – brúitín- Poundies Recipe
8 ounces of half and half cream
3/4 of a cup thinly sliced scallions or spring onions
2 pounds of small whole potatoes
4 tablespoons of unsalted butter + extra for serving
kosher salt, to taste
fresh ground pepper, to taste
Directions
Place the scallions aka spring onions and half and half cream in a small pan and heat to Heavy simmer. Take off the heat, allow half and half cream and scallions to infuse flavors together.
Boil the small whole potatoes in their skins for 30 mins, or until tender. Drain and peel off the skins. Put the potatoes back in the pan, cover with a tight-fitting lid and allow to heat on warm for a few moments.
Remove the potatoes from the heat and mash the potatoes with the butter until you achieve a smoother texture and no lumps remain.
Reheat the milk and the spring onions that have been infusing, then gradually beat this into the potatoes, mixing well. Season at this time to taste.
Serve in separate bowls with creamy butter and enjoy
© Heidy L. McCallum and The McCallum’s Shamrock Patch, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Heidy L. McCallum and The McCallum’s Shamrock Patch with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Which traditional dessert is made from strawberries, broken meringue and cream | Eton Mess | Pretty. Simple. Sweet.
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This quick and easy traditional English dessert is made from a mixture of whipped cream, strawberries, and meringue – either layered as a trifle or mixed together into a delicious mess.
Until just recently, meringues haven’t exactly been my cup of tea since they were too sweet for my taste as a standalone dessert. Every time I get a box of meringues as a gift (it’s quite a thing around here), I break them into pieces, and serve them (mostly to myself) with some strawberries and whipped cream. I had been doing this long before I had even heard of Eton mess because it just felt like the perfect combination. Apparently they thought the same thing back in the 1930s, when this dessert originated at the famous Eton school in England.
Sometimes, if I plan to make the dessert ahead of time, I’ll prepare my homemade meringues from scratch. But when I want to whip up a quick dessert for guests that are about to arrive, I’ll just go (i.e., send Erez) to my favorite bakery near my house and buy their beautiful meringues instead.
You can either serve this dessert in individual serving dishes or glasses, or in one large trifle bowl for anyone to take as much as they want. Just make sure that, in the case of the latter, you don’t invite me to your party. “As much as I want” usually means all of it.
You have two options in assembling this dessert. The first is to layer the ingredients, placing strawberries, broken meringue pieces, and whipped cream one on top of the other, then repeat the layering once more. The other option is to make it the more traditional way, which is folding the pieces of strawberry and meringue into the whipped cream. I already told you about the ‘Eton’ part of the name, so now you get the ‘mess’ part, too.
This dessert needs to be put together close to serving time, when the meringues are still crispy. You can prepare each of the dessert components in advance: whipping the cream, cutting the strawberries, and breaking the meringues. Store the whipped cream and strawberries in the fridge until you’re ready to use them. Once ready to serve, simply mix all of it together.
If you prefer adding more meringues or strawberries (or less, but… really?), then you are welcome to do so. You know I’ll be the last person to stop you.
If you want, you can make a simple strawberry sauce by processing about 150g of additional strawberries in a food processor with a bit of powdered sugar until pureed. Then, either mix it with the strawberries, swirl it into the cream, or pour it on top of the dish.
To dress up this dessert, I top each serving dish with freshly sliced strawberries, meringue pieces, or mini meringue kisses.
| Eton mess |
Which Scottish soup is made from smoked haddock, potatoes and onions | Eton mess recipe - goodtoknow
goodtoknow
Editor's pick
Make in advance
This classic Eton mess recipe is so simple. Eton mess is one of the easiest desserts to rustle up, made with broken meringues, strawberries and cream, it's everyone's favourite pudding. You'll want to make our Eton mess recipe over and over again - it really couldn't be easier and takes a total of 10 minutes to make, which means it's great for when you're having friends over. It gets it's name as it is the dessert traditionally served at Eton College's prize-giving picnic on June 4th. For a speedy pud, use ready made meringues, but if you fancy a challenge, you can make your own! This recipe makes 6 portions and shouldn't break the bank to make either. If you want to add more fruit to the mix, go for it! We'd recommend raspberries, blackberries or blueberries. A drizzle of port, kirsch or Cointreau will turn this summer dessert into an adult-only version.
You could try using different berries like raspberries, blueberries or a combination of fruits
Ingredients
570ml double cream (or use half Greek yogurt for a healthier version)
450g strawberries, washed and hulled
75 ml port, kirsch or Cointreau (optional, for a more grown-up version)
Method
Cut the strawberries in half or into thick slices if they're big. Place in a bowl with the port, kirsch or Cointreau if using, cover and chill for 2-3 hrs.
Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks, then fold in the berries and juices.
Crush the meringues and fold into the strawberry and cream mixture.
Spoon the Eton mess into individual dishes. If you like, you can decorate with extra strawberries.
Nutritional information
Guideline Daily Amount for 2,000 calories per day are: 70g fat, 20g saturated fat, 90g sugar, 6g salt.
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What do we call, particular to one county, an elongated suet crust with a savoury filling at one end and a sweet filling at the other | 1000+ images about Main course Savoury steamed, baked sponge & suet puddings on Pinterest | Suet pudding, Puddings and Steak and ale
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The Bedfordshire Clanger comes from the county of Bedfordshire.It's an elongated suet crust dumpling w/ savory filling at one end & sweet filling at the other comprising a main course & dessert in one package.The savory end is traditionally meat w/ diced potatoes & veg,the sweet end is usually jam,or sweetened apple/ fruit.Traditionally the top pasty is scored w/ a few lines to denote the sweet end.Historically,made by women for their husbands to take to their agricultural work as a midday…
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From what type of wood was Pinocchio carved? | Guest Long Read: Brit Food - 10 Delicious British Dishes Every Anglophile Should Know About - What's Your Favorite? - Anglotopia.net
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British food has been accused of being boring and bland but dedicated Anglophiles know better. This article is a list of 10 British dishes every Anglophile should know about. Whether it’s their interesting story, their plain deliciousness, their significance in England and Great Britain or just their funny name, you should absolutely know about these dishes – and give them a try on your next trip to Blighty.
The Cornish pasty
While there are many varieties of pasties, the Cornish pasty is one of the all-time favourites. With the first references dating back to around 1300, I think I can safely say that the Cornish pasty is a classic, traditional English pasty which has been enjoyed by the English for centuries.
A Cornish pasty consists of suet pastry filled with beef, sliced or diced potato, swede and onion, all lightly seasoned with salt and pepper. A genuine Cornish pasty has a ‘D’ shape and is crimped on one side, never on top . The filling should have a chunky texture, and all ingredients must go in raw.
It has been around for centuries but the industrial revolution really made it take off. It was a favourite of the tin miners in Cornwall, who often had to eat on the move. Being portable and nourishing, the Cornish pasty was ideal to help them through their long working days. The crimping on the side provided the workers with a nice handle to hold the pasty while eating and the handle would have been thrown away afterwards . It was a clever design because the miner’s hands were contaminated with dangerous chemicals from the mines.
After campaigning from the Cornish Pasty Association from 2002 until 2011 the Cornish Pasty was awarded the protected geographical status in Europe. Which means that in order to be called a Cornish pasty, it has to be prepared in Cornwall.
Stargazy pie
The stargazy pie hails from Mousehole (pronounced: mow-zul), Cornwall, in the South-West of England. The pie is made with whole pilchards, eggs and potatoes which are all covered by a pastry crust. The name comes from the dish’s unique feature, which is the heads of the fish, and sometimes even the tails, sticking out of the crust gazing skyward.
The pie is traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock’s Eve, which is held in Mousehole every year on the 23rd of December. The people of Mousehole celebrate the memory of the legendary resident Tom Bawcock, who saved the village from famine. Long ago, on the 23rd of December (the year was never specified) the village was near starvation because terrible winter storms had trapped all the fishing boats in the harbour. Tom Bawcock, a brave widower, dared to go out to sea in the harsh weather. He went fishing and brought back enough fish for all those living in Mousehole, saving the village from imminent starvation.
It is still served in the Ship Inn pub, Mousehole’s only pub, on Bawcock’s Eve every year as a tradition based on this legend.
Fish and Chips
Fish and chips is an immensely popular dish and viewed as typically British. It became particularly popular among the working classes in the UK around the second half of the 19th century, when the invention of the train and the railway developments made it possible for the fish to be delivered quickly all over the country. This enabled many working class people to taste fresh fish for the first time.
In 1860 the first Fish and chips shop was opened in London by Jospeh Malin in London’s East End. He was probably the first to ever sell the fish alongside chipped and fried potatoes which, up until then, had only been found in Irish potato shops. The number of ‘chippies’, kept growing and around the 1920’s there was a peak in the number of shops, with around 35,000(!) throughout Britain. Although that number has dropped, there are still over 10,000 fish and chips shops in Britain nowadays.
In chips shops in the United Kingdom and Ireland the fish and chips are traditionally sprinkled with salt and vinegar when it is served, but it’s optional. The preferred sauces for accompanying fish and chips are brown sauce and tomato ketchup and more recently Brits have taken to adding mayonnaise as well.
In Britain and Ireland cod and haddock are the common fish for fish and chips, but vendors also sell others. British chips are thicker than the American-style French fries sold by many multinational fast food chains. Often referred to as chunky chips – in the United states the closest equivalent are steak fries.
Bedfordshire clanger
The Bedfordshire clanger is a dish from the county of Bedfordshire in the central part of England. It is a suet crust dumpling with an elongated shape. It was originally a dumpling, which means it was boiled or steamed, but nowadays it is often baked. It has a sweet filling at one end and a savoury filling at the other end. Both are separated by the pastry equivalent of a dam. While the savory end is usually meat with diced vegetables and potatoes, the sweet end is often jam, sweetened apple or other fruit. This dish combines a main course and a desert into one package.
But how do you know which end is which? Both ends have markings to guide you. Two holes means it is the savoury end and three slits of a knife denote the sweet end.
In days gone by, the Bedfordshire clanger was made by women for their husbands to take to their job in the field or in the mines.
It would have been prepared using left-overs from the Sunday roast and whatever fruit was available. It was ideal for the working class because it was cheap and wholesome.
The dish’s popularity dwindled after the industrial revolution but today it is still available at some hotels, restaurants and bakers.
Piccalilli
Piccalilli is a condiment made of pickled and chopped vegetables in a thick mustard sauce which makes it bright yellow. It is used as an accompaniment to cheeses, cured meats, sausages, pies, corned beef, sandwiches and chips. It is extremely popular in Britain and is also sold in India, where it is part of the long standing tradition of Anglo-Indian cuisine. This cuisine was inspired by Britons in India and the Far East. Like most pickled foods, piccalilli is designed to keep vegetables good for extended periods of time. Pickling was used to store vegetables in areas where farming was hard or to keep vegetables good in the winter.
The ingredients tend to vary, but mostly include vegetables like cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and cauliflower, although others can be added as well. Goodccalilli will always include mustard and turmeric as these give it the distinctive yellow color, and it can also include chillies for an extra spicy piccalilli.
In older recipes copper and brass pans were sometimes used to deliberately turn the vegetable mixture bright green by boiling the vegetables in vinegar in a copper/brass pan. The copper/brass would react with the acid while cooking and form verdigris, which is a green toxic pigment. Of course, this way of preparation is no longer recommended.
Full English breakfast
The English breakfast is likely to be the first thing people come up with when asked about British food. Other names for it include ‘full English breakfast’, a ‘Full Monty’ or a ‘fry up’. It started out in England and became so popular that the Scottish, Irish and Welsh came up with their own varieties. An English breakfast is usually made up of, but may not always include eggs, bacon, sausages, black or white pudding, potato, bread, baked beans in tomato sauce, fried mushrooms and tomatoes.
Let’s talk about the regional varieties. In Scotland additions might include haggis, porridge, potato scones and oatcakes. In Wales you will get laver, lavercakes or Laverbread (patties made of seaweed) with your breakfast. Within England there are varieties as well, with the coastal areas often adding (smoked) pilchards or herring.
The history of the traditional English breakfast may stretch back as far as the 13th century, where the gentry of the time adored it. The breakfast table was used as an opportunity to display wealth by serving an array of elaborate dishes.
However, it was not just a meal for the wealthy. The combination of food items that we call a full English breakfast nowadays probably emerged during the industrial revolution. The working classes began to eat a full English breakfast on a regular basis because it provided them with enough energy to get though their day of harsh manual labour.
Nowadays, it is not eaten as often because in the hectic modern lifestyle there’s not much time in the morning. It is also that with today’s health-conscious mindset that this calorific breakfast is not a big favourite. Today, it is mostly reserved for weekends and holidays and it is still available in many pubs and hotels.
Cadbury
Yes, chocolate is not a ‘dish’, but how could I not include Cadbury in this list? Chocolate is one of the most loved foods in England (and the world), and this particular chocolate manufacturer originated in the heart of England. You can even visit the factory and its adjacent ‘Cadbury world’ and find out about the history of the company and the process the cocoa beans go though on their way to becoming chocolate. All your Willy Wonka fantasies will come true when you enter the Cadbury world. Having visited it twice, I can vouch for the fact that it is a fantastic interactive day out for the whole family (including free chocolate!).
Cadbury was established in 1824 when John Cadbury opened a shop in Birmingham (England, of course, not Alabama) at 93 Bull Street. It was here that he started selling, among other things, cocoa powder and drinking chocolate as well as tea and coffee. His business was booming and eventually he started manufacturing products himself in a factory in Crooked Lane in 1831. When his first factory became too small, he moved the whole production process to the outskirts of Birmingham. With this new factory he built a neighbourhood, Bourneville, for his factory workers. The houses and facilities in Bourneville were much better than what workers usually would normally have been able to afford in those days.
Ever since moving to Bourneville, Cadbury has been doing very well. It continuously expanded its range and eventually became a household name in England, Britain and beyond. Their delicious chocolate is available all over the world and is enjoyed by people all ages.
Scones
Scones are single-serving cakes or quick bread. They are a much loved part of high teas, cream teas and afternoon teas. Traditional English scones may include raisins or currants, but are often plain. They are traditionally eaten sliced in half with each half covered with clotted cream and strawberry jam, but they can also be topped with honey, lemon curd or any other jam or preserve.
The name might have come from the Gaelic “sgonn” (rhymes with gone), which means a shapeless mass or large mouthful’’, the Dutch “schoonbrood” or even the German “sconbrot” . Both the Dutch and the German term can be translated as nice or beautiful bread. However, no one is really sure where the name came from.
The word is pronounced “skahn” in Scotland and Northern England (rhymes with gone) and “skoan” in the south of England (rhymes with own), the pronunciation adopted by the U.S. and Canada.
Bakewell tart
A bakewell tart is made up of a shortcrust pastry base that is covered with fruit paste, filled with almond-flavoured cake mixture and topped with sliced almonds. The fruit paste can range from strawberry jam, lemon curd and coconut fondant to apple puree and everything in between. Other varieties can include honey, nutmeg, lemon zest in the almond mixture, cinnamon or even preserved fruit on top.
The most popular variety is probably the cherry bakewell, which consists of the same shortcrust pastry base topped with a red jam, filled with almond-flavoured cake mixture and topped with plain white icing and a candied cherry in the middle.
The term bakewell tart has only been a common name since the 1960’s. However, it is generally accepted that the bakewell tart has developed from the bakewell pudding which is suspected to have existed since Tudor times.
Faggots
Faggots, in this sense, are a type of meatball made from off-cuts and offal, often pork. It’s made from pig’s heart, liver, fatty belly meat and/or bacon, which are minced together with herbs and sometimes breadcrumbs. They are a traditional dish of the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Lancashire, where they are often referred to as ‘savory ducks.’ Their traditional accompaniments are mushy peas, mashed potatoes and onion gravy.
They originated as cheap yet nutritious food for the country and mine workers, which couldn’t afford the more expensive cuts of meat. They were first mentioned in print around 1851 but have fallen out of favor over the last few decades. However, there has been a revival and they’re now available all over the UK.
Have you had any of these dishes? Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!
About the Author: My name is Kayleigh Herber. I live in the Netherlands and have been an Anglophile for as long as I can remember. I’m fascinated with Britain; the beautiful landscape, the delicious food and the friendly people. On average, I visit England once every two years. I have always been a fan of British food, and always defend it when people say it’s terrible. It has changed so much over the last few decades and people should know how delicious it really is.
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