title: Charles Bronson (prisoner)

text: "Bronson", which loosely follows Bronson's life, was released in Britain on 13 March 2009. It stars Tom Hardy in the eponymous role, and is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Controversy was caused at the première when a recording of Bronson's voice was played with no prior permission granted by officers at HM Prison Service, who called for an inquiry into how the recording had been made.


title: John Goodman

text: John Stephen Goodman (born June 20, 1952) is an American actor. He gained national fame for his role as the family patriarch Dan Conner in the ABC comedy series "Roseanne" (1988–1997; 2018), for which he received a Golden Globe Award, and its sequel series "The Conners" (2018–present).


title: John Goodman

text: He is known as a character actor and regular collaborator with the Coen brothers, starring in such films as "Raising Arizona" (1987), "Barton Fink" (1991), "The Big Lebowski" (1998), "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), and "Inside Llewyn Davis" (2013). He also had voice roles in numerous animated films, appearing as Pacha in "The Emperor's New Groove" franchise (2000–2008), James P. "Sulley" Sullivan in Disney/Pixar's "Monsters, Inc." franchise (2001–2021), Baloo in "The Jungle Book 2" (2003), George Wolfsbottom in "Clifford's Really Big Movie" (2004), Layton T. Montgomery in "Bee Movie" (2007), Eli "Big Daddy" LaBouff in "The Princess and the Frog" (2009), and Mr. Prendergast in "ParaNorman" (2012).


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman's other film performances include lead roles in "Always" (1989), "King Ralph" (1991), "The Babe" (1992), "The Flintstones" (1994), "Blues Brothers 2000" (1998), and "10 Cloverfield Lane" (2016), and supporting roles in "True Stories" (1986), "Storytelling" (2001), "Beyond the Sea" (2004), "Evan Almighty" (2007), "Speed Racer" (2008), "Pope Joan" (2009), "The Artist" (2011), "Argo" (2012), "The Hangover Part III" (2013), "The Monuments Men" (2014), "Trumbo" (2015), "Patriots Day" (2016), and "Atomic Blonde" (2017).


title: John Goodman

text: On television, Goodman had regular roles in the HBO drama series "Treme" (2010–2011), the Audience Network legal drama series "Damages" (2011), the Prime Video comedy series "Alpha House" (2013–2014), and the HBO comedy series "The Righteous Gemstones" (2019–present). He has been a frequent host of "Saturday Night Live" (1989–2013), as well as playing guest roles in series such as "The West Wing" (2003–2004), "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (2006), and "Community" (2011–2012).


title: John Goodman

text: John Heilpern of "Vanity Fair" has called him "among our very finest actors." "IndieWire" named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman was born in Affton, Missouri. His father, Leslie Francis Goodman, was a postal worker who died of a heart attack when John was two years old. Goodman's mother, Virginia Roos ("née" Loosmore), was a waitress at Jack and Phil's Bar-B-Que, a retail store worker, and also took in laundry to support the family. Goodman has an older brother, Leslie, who is 14 years his senior, and a younger sister, Elisabeth, who was born six months after his father's death. He is of English, German, and Welsh ancestry and was raised Southern Baptist.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman described his childhood as alone and withdrawn after his father had died so early and his brother had left to go to college. He was bullied at school for being overweight. Until ninth grade, Goodman was in the Boy Scouts, which he said offered him the structure and camaraderie he missed; he additionally looked to Boy Scout leaders, and later, acting coaches, as father figures. His brother later returned home to help raise Goodman and his sister. As a child, Goodman spent a lot of time listening to the radio and reading comic books, initially subscribing to DC's "Green Lantern" and "The Atom", and later turning to Marvel Comics. He also read his brother's copies of "Mad" and would later confess to shoplifting its paperback editions. Goodman credits his brother with introducing him to comedy and bebop.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman went to Affton High School, where he played football (offensive guard and defensive tackle) and dabbled in theater. After graduating in 1970, he took a gap year. He earned a football scholarship to Missouri State University (then called Southwest Missouri State University, or "SMSU") in Springfield, but tore his ACL before ever suiting onto the field and instead channeled his energy into the school's theater program. He pledged to Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, although he did not join until several years later. He discovered the drama program and studied there with future Hollywood stars Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper. He remains close to his school friends. Goodman graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1975. In 2013, the university presented Goodman with an honorary doctorate degree in humane letters.


title: John Goodman

text: After an injury ended his college football career, Goodman decided to become a professional actor and left Missouri for New York City in 1975. With a small bankroll from his brother, Goodman found an apartment in Hell's Kitchen near the Theater District and unsuccessfully tried to make money as a bartender and waiter. However, he eventually found modest success in voice-overs, commercials, and plays. He was the person who slapped himself (uttering the tagline, "Thanks... I needed that!") in an iconic television ad for Skin Bracer by Mennen. Goodman also performed off-Broadway and in dinner theaters before landing character roles in film during the early 1980s.


title: John Goodman

text: In 1982, Goodman made his film debut with a small role in "Eddie Macon's Run". During this period he continued to work on the stage, starring as Pap Finn in "Big River" from 1985 to 1987. For his role, he received a Drama Desk nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical; he is also featured on the Original Broadway Cast Recording. Before landing his big break into movies in 1986 with a significant comedic role in "True Stories", he had a brief cameo as Otis in "Sweet Dreams". In the former film, his character Louis Fyne says "I'm 6' 3" and maintain a consistent panda bear shape", establishing his trademark size as an important part of many characters he would later play on film and stage.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman rose to fame in acting by playing the role of Dan Conner on the ABC sitcom "Roseanne" from 1988 to 1997. He returned to the character in 2018 for the revived, 10th season, where he said "Roseanne and I just went back to having a ball", and then stayed on for the show's subsequent spin-off "The Conners". Goodman had a long history of appearances on late night comedy shows and was the first guest on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien", which won him the series' "First Guest Medal" (Goodman joked he would pawn the medal for a bottle of cheap Scotch). Goodman has hosted NBC's "Saturday Night Live" 13 times, while also making seven cameo appearances as Linda Tripp during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, three appearances as Rex Tillerson, and cameoing on the season 28 finale hosted by former "SNL" cast member Dan Aykroyd. With little to no experience in TV comedy, Goodman auditioned to be a cast member for Jean Doumanian's tumultuous 1980–1981 "SNL" season and was rejected, along with up-and-coming comedians Jim Carrey, Paul Reubens, and Robert Townsend.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman first worked with the Coen Brothers on "Raising Arizona" (1987). He would go on to appear in their films "Barton Fink" (1991), "The Big Lebowski" (1998), "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), and "Inside Llewyn Davis" (2013). Only Steve Buscemi has appeared in more Coen works (six films), though Frances McDormand and Jon Polito have also appeared in five of their films.


title: John Goodman

text: He worked with Steven Spielberg on "Always" (1989), "Arachnophobia" (1990) and "The Flintstones" (1994).


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman had guest roles on the Aaron Sorkin television dramas "The West Wing" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip". In the former he appeared in four episodes, playing Speaker of the House and eventual acting president Glen Allen Walken. In the latter, he appeared as Pahrump, Nevada Judge Robert Bebe, earning a 2007 Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor – Drama Series for his performance. In addition, Goodman starred as Fred Flintstone in the film adaptation of "The Flintstones".


title: John Goodman

text: He voiced Robot Santa in the character's first appearance on "Futurama". Beginning in 2007, Goodman has been the voiceover in Dunkin' Donuts commercials. In 2000, Goodman provided the voice of Pacha in Disney's "The Emperor's New Groove" and, a year later, the voice of Sulley in Pixar's "Monsters, Inc." He returned to the character for the film's 2013 prequel "Monsters University" (2013) and the 2021 Disney+ series "Monsters at Work". In 2009, Goodman voiced "Big Daddy" La Bouff in "The Princess and the Frog". Goodman's voice can also be heard on an automated message system at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. He was the original voice of the yellow M&M in 1995 before being replaced by J. K. Simmons the following year.


title: John Goodman

text: In theater, Goodman played the Ghost of Christmas Present in the 2008 Kodak Theatre production of "A Christmas Carol", starring Christopher Lloyd as Ebenezer Scrooge. He played the role of Pozzo in a Studio 54 revival of Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot", opposite Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane. John Heilpern of "Vanity Fair" called it "the greatest Pozzo I've ever seen." In 2009, he reprised the role of Pozzo at the Roundabout Theatre Company.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman was cast in "In the Electric Mist" (2009) as Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni. At one time, he was slated to play the role of Ignatius Reilly, the main character of "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole. The story takes place almost entirely in New Orleans. However, the movie was never put into production. "The Princess and the Frog" where he lent his voice as Eli "Big Daddy" La Bouff also takes place in New Orleans. Goodman also featured in "Treme", a drama series focusing on a group of interconnected people trying to rebuild their lives in post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Goodman played Creighton Bernette, a Tulane English professor, in the show's first season.


title: John Goodman

text: In 2011, Goodman was a guest star on the third season of "Community". He also voiced a character in the video game "Rage" voicing Dan Hagar, and played movie studio chief Al Zimmer in the Academy Award–winning live action film "The Artist", as well as Best Picture nominee "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" the same year. Also in 2011, Goodman starred in Kevin Smith's "Red State" playing ATF Agent Joseph Keenan. In February 2012, it was reported that Goodman would reunite with Roseanne Barr for a new NBC pilot titled "Downwardly Mobile". The series would have had Goodman portray a bachelor mechanic who resides in a trailer park, and would have used the standard multiple-camera setup traditionally found in sitcoms; however, the series' option was not picked up by the network. Other prominent roles include performances in "Flight" (2012) and "The Monuments Men" (2014). With his well-received supporting roles in "The Artist" (2011) and "Argo" (2012), Goodman accomplished the rare feat of appearing in back-to-back winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.


title: John Goodman

text: On August 10, 2013, Goodman was inducted as a Disney Legend. In 2013, Goodman received positive reviews for his performance as North Carolina Senator Gil John Biggs in Amazon's "Alpha House", a political comedy written by Garry Trudeau. In the show Goodman's character, a retired UNC basketball coach, and three other Republican senators share a house on Capitol Hill. The show ended after two seasons in 2014.


title: John Goodman

text: In April 2015, Goodman made his return to the stage, making his West End debut in the process while starring as Donny in "American Buffalo" at the Wyndham's Theatre alongside Damian Lewis and Tom Sturridge. He went on to star as Sheriff Hartman in the 2016 Broadway revival of "The Front Page", alongside Nathan Lane and John Slattery.


title: John Goodman

text: On March 10, 2017, Goodman received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in motion pictures, located at 6767 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: John Goodman

text: On April 28, 2017, it was announced that a revival of "Roseanne" was in the works and that Goodman along with most of the original cast and some of the producers would return for the limited series that was being shopped around with ABC and Netflix the frontrunners to land the show. On May 16, 2017, it was confirmed that 8 episodes would air mid-season in 2018 on ABC. On May 29, 2018, in the wake of controversial remarks made by Barr on Twitter regarding Valerie Jarrett (an advisor of former president Barack Obama), ABC canceled the revival after a single season. The next month, ABC ordered a ten-episode "Roseanne" spin-off titled "The Conners", which stars the "Roseanne" cast sans Roseanne Barr. The show's first season premiered on October 16, 2018.


title: John Goodman

text: In 2019, Goodman starred in the role of Southern megachurch preacher and family patriarch Eli Gemstone on the HBO comedy "The Righteous Gemstones", created by and co-starring Danny McBride. Goodman accepted the role right after the revived "Roseanne" series had been cancelled and before its spin-off "The Conners" was announced, which led to Goodman doing both shows. "The Righteous Gemstones" was renewed for a second season in September 2019.


title: John Goodman

text: In 2010, Goodman appeared in a commercial to raise awareness for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Also starring in the commercial were Sandra Bullock, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Jack Del Rio, Drew Brees, Emeril Lagasse, James Carville, and Blake Lively.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman married Annabeth Hartzog, originally of Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1989. They met at a Halloween party at Tipitina's when he was filming "Everybody's All-American" in New Orleans. They reside in the Garden District of New Orleans. Their daughter, Molly Evangeline Goodman (born 1990), works as a production assistant in the film industry.


title: John Goodman

text: In October 2012, he stated: "If I'd picture in my mind a drink—usually straight out of the bottle—I couldn't not do it," noting that while acting in plays he would "have the shakes so bad I'd have to have a drink to get through the show. I'm lucky I never got fired." Sober since 2007, Goodman tries to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting every morning.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman was once known for his sizable frame, at one point weighing close to . However, by August 2010, he had lost through a program of exercise and food journaling. His new figure attracted attention at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015 and the BFI London Film Festival in October 2015.


title: John Goodman

text: Goodman is a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and narrated a 2020 MLB Network documentary about the Cardinals teams of the 1980s.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. The Black Sea is supplied by major rivers, principally the Danube, Dnieper, and Don. Consequently, while six countries have a coastline on the sea, its drainage basin includes parts of 24 countries in Europe.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea covers (not including the Sea of Azov), has a maximum depth of , and a volume of . Most of its coasts ascend rapidly. These rises are the Pontic Mountains to the south, bar the southwest-facing peninsulas, the Caucasus Mountains to the east, and the Crimean Mountains to the mid-north. In the west, the coast is generally small floodplains below foothills such as the Strandzha; Cape Emine, a dwindling of the east end of the Balkan Mountains; and the Dobruja Plateau considerably farther north. The longest east–west extent is about . Important cities along the coast include Odessa, Varna, Samsun, Sochi, Sevastopol, Constanța, Trabzon, Novorossiysk, Burgas, and Batumi.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea has a positive water balance, with an annual net outflow of per year through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles into the Aegean Sea. While the net flow of water through the Bosporus and Dardanelles (known collectively as the Turkish Straits) is out of the Black Sea, water generally flows in both directions simultaneously: Denser, more saline water from the Aegean flows into the Black Sea underneath the less dense, fresher water that flows out of the Black Sea. This creates a significant and permanent layer of deep water that does not drain or mix and is therefore anoxic. This anoxic layer is responsible for the preservation of ancient shipwrecks which have been found in the Black Sea.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea ultimately drains into the Mediterranean Sea, via the Turkish Straits and the Aegean Sea. The Bosporus strait connects it to the small Sea of Marmara which in turn is connected to the Aegean Sea via the strait of the Dardanelles. To the north, the Black Sea is connected to the Sea of Azov by the Kerch Strait.


title: Black Sea

text: The water level has varied significantly over geological time. Due to these variations in the water level in the basin, the surrounding shelf and associated aprons have sometimes been dry land. At certain critical water levels, connections with surrounding water bodies can become established. It is through the most active of these connective routes, the Turkish Straits, that the Black Sea joins the world ocean. During geological periods when this hydrological link was not present, the Black Sea was an endorheic basin, operating independently of the global ocean system (similar to the Caspian Sea today). Currently, the Black Sea water level is relatively high; thus, water is being exchanged with the Mediterranean. The Black Sea undersea river is a current of particularly saline water flowing through the Bosporus Strait and along the seabed of the Black Sea, the first of its kind discovered.


title: Black Sea

text: Current names of the sea are usually equivalents of the English name "Black Sea", including these given in the countries bordering the sea:


title: Black Sea

text: In Greece, the historical name "Euxine Sea", which holds a different meaning (see below), is still widely used:


title: Black Sea

text: The principal Greek name "Póntos Áxeinos" is generally accepted to be a rendering of the Iranian word ("dark coloured"). Ancient Greek voyagers adopted the name as , identified with the Greek word (inhospitable). The name (Inhospitable Sea), first attested in Pindar (), was considered an ill omen and was euphemized to its opposite, (Hospitable Sea), also first attested in Pindar. This became the commonly used designation in Greek, although in mythological contexts the "true" name remained favoured.


title: Black Sea

text: Strabo's "Geographica" (1.2.10) reports that in antiquity, the Black Sea was often simply called "the Sea" ( ). He thought that the sea was called the "Inhospitable Sea by the inhabitants of the Pontus region of the southern shoreline before Greek colonisation due to its difficult navigation and hostile barbarian natives (7.3.6), and that the name was changed to "hospitable" after the Milesians colonised the region, bringing it into the Greek world.


title: Black Sea

text: Popular supposition derives "Black Sea" from the dark colour of the water or climatic conditions. Some scholars understand the name to be derived from a system of colour symbolism representing the cardinal directions, with black or dark for north, red for south, white for west, and green or light blue for east. Hence "Black Sea" meant "Northern Sea". According to this scheme, the name could only have originated with a people living between the northern (black) and southern (red) seas: this points to the Achaemenids (550–330  BC).


title: Black Sea

text: In the Greater Bundahishn, a Middle Persian Zoroastrian scripture, the Black Sea is called . In the tenth-century Persian geography book , the Black Sea is called "Georgian Sea" (). "The Georgian Chronicles" use the name (Sea of Speri) after the Kartvelian tribe of Speris or Saspers. Other modern names such as and (both meaning Black Sea) originated during the 13th century. A 1570 map from Abraham Ortelius's labels the sea (Great Sea), compare Latin .


title: Black Sea

text: English writers of the 18th century often used "Euxine Sea" ( or ). During the Ottoman Empire, it was called either or , both meaning "Black Sea" in Turkish, with the former consisting of Perso-Arabic .


title: Black Sea

text: Another assumption is related to the Turkish. Turkic peoples marked the directions with colours. In ancient Turkish mythology, black represents the north, white represents the west, blue represents the east, red represents the south and yellow represents the center. According to Chinese sources, the horses with red colour in the Xiongnus were in the south, and the black ones were in the north; they sent gray horses to the East and white horses to the West. In Old Uyghur, the north was represented by the "qara yılan" ("black snake") and the south was the "qızıl sagızgan" ("red magpie"). When the Turkomans entered Anatolia, the Black Sea was in the north and therefore it was called Kara ("black"); the Mediterranean was in the west (according to the direction of Turkomans entering Anatolia), hence it was named Ak ("white"). (Also the Red Sea was named Red because it was in the south.) Since the Black Sea was controlled mostly by the Turks for centuries, it can easily have been borrowed by other languages in the Black Sea coast. In addition, the emergence of the name coincides with the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia.


title: Black Sea

text: The area surrounding the Black Sea is commonly referred to as the "Black Sea Region". Its northern part lies within the "Chernozem belt" (black soil belt) which goes from eastern Croatia (Slavonia), along the Danube (northern Serbia, northern Bulgaria (Danubian Plain) and southern Romania (Wallachian Plain)) to northeast Ukraine and further across the Central Black Earth Region and southern Russia into Siberia.


title: Black Sea

text: The largest bays of the Black Sea are Karkinit Bay in Ukraine; the Gulf of Burgas in Bulgaria; Dnieprovski Bay and Dniestrovski Bay, both in Ukraine; and Sinop Bay and Samsun Bay, both in Turkey.


title: Black Sea

text: These rivers and their tributaries comprise a Black Sea drainage basin that covers wholly or partially 24 countries:


title: Black Sea

text: Short-term climatic variation in the Black Sea region is significantly influenced by the operation of the North Atlantic oscillation, the climatic mechanisms resulting from the interaction between the north Atlantic and mid-latitude air masses. While the exact mechanisms causing the North Atlantic Oscillation remain unclear, it is thought the climate conditions established in western Europe mediate the heat and precipitation fluxes reaching Central Europe and Eurasia, regulating the formation of winter cyclones, which are largely responsible for regional precipitation inputs and influence Mediterranean sea surface temperatures (SSTs).


title: Black Sea

text: The relative strength of these systems also limits the amount of cold air arriving from northern regions during winter. Other influencing factors include the regional topography, as depressions and storm systems arriving from the Mediterranean are funneled through the low land around the Bosporus, with the Pontic and Caucasus mountain ranges acting as waveguides, limiting the speed and paths of cyclones passing through the region.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea is divided into two depositional basins—the Western Black Sea and Eastern Black Sea—separated by the Mid-Black Sea High, which includes the Andrusov Ridge, Tetyaev High, and Archangelsky High, extending south from the Crimean Peninsula. The basin includes two distinct relict back-arc basins which were initiated by the splitting of an Albian volcanic arc and the subduction of both the Paleo- and Neo-Tethys oceans, but the timings of these events remain uncertain. Arc volcanism and extension occurred as the Neo-Tethys Ocean subducted under the southern margin of Laurasia during the Mesozoic. Uplift and compressional deformation took place as the Neotethys continued to close. Seismic surveys indicate that rifting began in the Western Black Sea in the Barremian and Aptian followed by the formation of oceanic crust 20 million years later in the Santonian. Since its initiation, compressional tectonic environments led to subsidence in the basin, interspersed with extensional phases resulting in large-scale volcanism and numerous orogenies, causing the uplift of the Greater Caucasus, Pontides, southern Crimean Peninsula and Balkanides mountain ranges.


title: Black Sea

text: During the Messinian salinity crisis in the neighboring Mediterranean Sea, water levels fell but without drying up the sea. The collision between the Eurasian and African plates and westward escape of the Anatolian block along the North Anatolian and East Anatolian faults dictates the current tectonic regime, which features enhanced subsidence in the Black Sea basin and significant volcanic activity in the Anatolian region. These geological mechanisms, in the long term, have caused the periodic isolations of the Black Sea from the rest of the global ocean system.


title: Black Sea

text: The large shelf to the north of the basin is up to wide and features a shallow apron with gradients between 1:40 and 1:1000. The southern edge around Turkey and the eastern edge around Georgia, however, are typified by a narrow shelf that rarely exceeds in width and a steep apron that is typically 1:40 gradient with numerous submarine canyons and channel extensions. The Euxine abyssal plain in the centre of the Black Sea reaches a maximum depth of just south of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula.


title: Black Sea

text: The Paleo-Euxinian is described by the accumulation of eolian silt deposits (related to the Riss glaciation) and the lowering of sea levels (MIS 6, 8 and 10). The Karangat marine transgression occurred during the Eemian Interglacial (MIS 5e). This may have been the highest sea levels reached in the late Pleistocene. Based on this some scholars have suggested that the Crimean Peninsula was isolated from the mainland by a shallow strait during the Eemian Interglacial.


title: Black Sea

text: The Neoeuxinian transgression began with an inflow of waters from the Caspian Sea. Neoeuxinian deposits are found in the Black Sea below water depth in three layers. The upper layers correspond with the peak of the Khvalinian transgression, on the shelf shallow-water sands and coquina mixed with silty sands and brackish-water fauna, and inside the Black Sea Depression hydrotroilite silts. The middle layers on the shelf are sands with brackish-water mollusc shells. Of continental origin, the lower level on the shelf is mostly alluvial sands with pebbles, mixed with less common lacustrine silts and freshwater mollusc shells. Inside the Black Sea Depression they are terrigenous non-carbonate silts, and at the foot of the continental slope turbidite sediments.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea is the world's largest body of water with a meromictic basin. The deep waters do not mix with the upper layers of water that receive oxygen from the atmosphere. As a result, over 90% of the deeper Black Sea volume is anoxic water. The Black Sea's circulation patterns are primarily controlled by basin topography and fluvial inputs, which result in a strongly stratified vertical structure. Because of the extreme stratification, it is classified as a salt wedge estuary.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea experiences water transfer only with the Mediterranean Sea, so all inflow and outflow occurs through the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Inflow from the Mediterranean has a higher salinity and density than the outflow, creating the classic estuarine circulation. This means that the inflow of dense water from the Mediterranean occurs at the bottom of the basin while the outflow of fresher Black Sea surface-water into the Sea of Marmara occurs near the surface. According to Gregg (2002), the outflow is or around , and the inflow is or around .


title: Black Sea

text: The southern sill of the Bosporus is located at below present sea level (deepest spot of the shallowest cross-section in the Bosporus, located in front of Dolmabahçe Palace) and has a wet section of around . Inflow and outflow current speeds are averaged around , but much higher speeds are found locally, inducing significant turbulence and vertical shear. This allows for turbulent mixing of the two layers. Surface water leaves the Black Sea with a salinity of 17 practical salinity units (PSU) and reaches the Mediterranean with a salinity of 34 PSU. Likewise, an inflow of the Mediterranean with salinity 38.5 PSU experiences a decrease to about 34 PSU.


title: Black Sea

text: Mean surface circulation is cyclonic; waters around the perimeter of the Black Sea circulate in a basin-wide shelfbreak gyre known as the Rim Current. The Rim Current has a maximum velocity of about . Within this feature, two smaller cyclonic gyres operate, occupying the eastern and western sectors of the basin. The Eastern and Western Gyres are well-organized systems in the winter but dissipate into a series of interconnected eddies in the summer and autumn. Mesoscale activity in the peripheral flow becomes more pronounced during these warmer seasons and is subject to interannual variability.


title: Black Sea

text: Outside of the Rim Current, numerous quasi-permanent coastal eddies are formed as a result of upwelling around the coastal apron and "wind curl" mechanisms. The intra-annual strength of these features is controlled by seasonal atmospheric and fluvial variations. During the spring, the Batumi eddy forms in the southeastern corner of the sea.


title: Black Sea

text: Beneath the surface waters—from about —there exists a halocline that stops at the Cold Intermediate Layer (CIL). This layer is composed of cool, salty surface waters, which are the result of localized atmospheric cooling and decreased fluvial input during the winter months. It is the remnant of the winter surface mixed layer. The base of the CIL is marked by a major pycnocline at about , and this density disparity is the major mechanism for isolation of the deep water.


title: Black Sea

text: Below the pycnocline is the Deep Water mass, where salinity increases to 22.3 PSU and temperatures rise to around . The hydrochemical environment shifts from oxygenated to anoxic, as bacterial decomposition of sunken biomass utilizes all of the free oxygen. Weak geothermal heating and long residence time create a very thick convective bottom layer.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea undersea river is a current of particularly saline water flowing through the Bosporus Strait and along the seabed of the Black Sea. The discovery of the river, announced on August 1, 2010, was made by scientists at the University of Leeds and is the first of its kind to be identified. The undersea river stems from salty water spilling through the Bosporus Strait from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea, where the water has a lower salt content.


title: Black Sea

text: Because of the anoxic water at depth, organic matter, including anthropogenic artifacts such as boat hulls, are well preserved. During periods of high surface productivity, short-lived algal blooms form organic rich layers known as sapropels. Scientists have reported an annual phytoplankton bloom that can be seen in many NASA images of the region. As a result of these characteristics the Black Sea has gained interest from the field of marine archaeology, as ancient shipwrecks in excellent states of preservation have been discovered, such as the Byzantine wreck Sinop D, located in the anoxic layer off the coast of Sinop, Turkey.


title: Black Sea

text: Modelling shows that, in the event of an asteroid impact on the Black Sea, the release of hydrogen sulfide clouds would pose a threat to health—and perhaps even life—for people living on the Black Sea coast.


title: Black Sea

text: There have been isolated reports of flares on the Black Sea occurring during thunderstorms, possibly caused by lightning igniting combustible gas seeping up from the sea depths.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea supports an active and dynamic marine ecosystem, dominated by species suited to the brackish, nutrient-rich, conditions. As with all marine food webs, the Black Sea features a range of trophic groups, with autotrophic algae, including diatoms and dinoflagellates, acting as primary producers. The fluvial systems draining Eurasia and central Europe introduce large volumes of sediment and dissolved nutrients into the Black Sea, but the distribution of these nutrients is controlled by the degree of physiochemical stratification, which is, in turn, dictated by seasonal physiographic development.


title: Black Sea

text: During winter, strong wind promotes convective overturning and upwelling of nutrients, while high summer temperatures result in a marked vertical stratification and a warm, shallow mixed layer. Day length and insolation intensity also control the extent of the photic zone. Subsurface productivity is limited by nutrient availability, as the anoxic bottom waters act as a sink for reduced nitrate, in the form of ammonia. The benthic zone also plays an important role in Black Sea nutrient cycling, as chemosynthetic organisms and anoxic geochemical pathways recycle nutrients which can be upwelled to the photic zone, enhancing productivity.


title: Black Sea

text: In total, the Black Sea's biodiversity contains around one-third of the Mediterranean's and is experiencing natural and artificial invasions or "Mediterranizations".


title: Black Sea

text: The main phytoplankton groups present in the Black Sea are dinoflagellates, diatoms, coccolithophores and cyanobacteria. Generally, the annual cycle of phytoplankton development comprises significant diatom and dinoflagellate-dominated spring production, followed by a weaker mixed assemblage of community development below the seasonal thermocline during summer months, and surface-intensified autumn production. This pattern of productivity is augmented by an "Emiliania huxleyi" bloom during the late spring and summer months.


title: Black Sea

text: Since the 1960s, rapid industrial expansion along the Black Sea coastline and the construction of a major dam has significantly increased annual variability in the N:P:Si ratio in the basin. In coastal areas, the biological effect of these changes has been an increase in the frequency of monospecific phytoplankton blooms, with diatom bloom frequency increasing by a factor of 2.5 and non-diatom bloom frequency increasing by a factor of 6. The non-diatoms, such as the prymnesiophytes (coccolithophore), sp., and the Euglenophyte , are able to out-compete diatom species because of the limited availability of silicon, a necessary constituent of diatom frustules. As a consequence of these blooms, benthic macrophyte populations were deprived of light, while anoxia caused mass mortality in marine animals.


title: Black Sea

text: The decline in macrophytes was further compounded by overfishing during the 1970s, while the invasive ctenophore "Mnemiopsis" reduced the biomass of copepods and other zooplankton in the late 1980s. Additionally, an alien species—the warty comb jelly ()—was able to establish itself in the basin, exploding from a few individuals to an estimated biomass of one billion metric tons. The change in species composition in Black Sea waters also has consequences for hydrochemistry, as calcium-producing coccolithophores influence salinity and pH, although these ramifications have yet to be fully quantified. In central Black Sea waters, silicon levels were also significantly reduced, due to a decrease in the flux of silicon associated with advection across isopycnal surfaces. This phenomenon demonstrates the potential for localized alterations in Black Sea nutrient input to have basin-wide effects.


title: Black Sea

text: Pollution reduction and regulation efforts have led to a partial recovery of the Black Sea ecosystem during the 1990s, and an EU monitoring exercise, 'EROS21', revealed decreased nitrogen and phosphorus values, relative to the 1989 peak. Recently, scientists have noted signs of ecological recovery, in part due to the construction of new sewage treatment plants in Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in connection with membership in the European Union. populations have been checked with the arrival of another alien species which feeds on them.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea is connected to the World Ocean by a chain of two shallow straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. The Dardanelles is deep, and the Bosporus is as shallow as . By comparison, at the height of the last ice age, sea levels were more than lower than they are now.


title: Black Sea

text: There is evidence that water levels in the Black Sea were considerably lower at some point during the post-glacial period. Some researchers theorize that the Black Sea had been a landlocked freshwater lake (at least in upper layers) during the last glaciation and for some time after.


title: Black Sea

text: In the aftermath of the last glacial period, water levels in the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea rose independently until they were high enough to exchange water. The exact timeline of this development is still subject to debate. One possibility is that the Black Sea filled first, with excess freshwater flowing over the Bosporus sill and eventually into the Mediterranean Sea. There are also catastrophic scenarios, such as the "Black Sea deluge hypothesis" put forward by William Ryan, Walter Pitman and Petko Dimitrov.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC due to waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosporus Strait. The hypothesis was headlined when "The New York Times" published it in December 1996, shortly before it was published in an academic journal. While it is agreed that the sequence of events described did occur, there is debate over the suddenness, dating, and magnitude of the events. Relevant to the hypothesis is that its description has led some to connect this catastrophe with prehistoric flood myths.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea was a busy waterway on the crossroads of the ancient world: the Balkans to the west, the Eurasian steppes to the north, the Caucasus and Central Asia to the east, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to the south, and Greece to the southwest.


title: Black Sea

text: The land at the eastern end of the Black Sea, Colchis (in present-day Georgia), marked for the ancient Greeks the edge of the known world.


title: Black Sea

text: The steppes to the north of the Black Sea is now generally accepted as the original homeland () of the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).


title: Black Sea

text: Greek presence in the Black Sea began at least as early as the 9th century BC with colonies scattered along the Black Sea's southern coast, attracting traders and colonists due to the grain grown in the Black Sea hinterland.


title: Black Sea

text: By 500 BC, permanent Greek communities existed all around the Black Sea, and a lucrative trade-network connected the entirety of the Black Sea to the wider Mediterranean. While Greek colonies generally maintained very close cultural ties to their founding polis, Greek colonies in the Black Sea began to develop their own "Black Sea Greek" culture, known today as Pontic. The coastal communities of Black Sea Greeks remained a prominent part of the Greek world for centuries, and the realms of Mithridates of Pontus, Rome and Constantinople spanned the Black Sea to include Crimean territories.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea became a virtual Ottoman Navy lake within five years of the Republic of Genoa losing control of the Crimean Peninsula in 1479, after which the only Western merchant vessels to sail its waters were those of Venice's old rival Ragusa. Black sea became a trade route of slaves between Crimea and Ottoman Anatolia. This restriction was challenged by the Russian Navy from 1783 until the relaxation of export controls in 1789 because of the French Revolution.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea was a significant naval theatre of World War I (1914-1918) and saw both naval and land battles between 1941 and 1945 during World War II. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea was sailed by Hittites, Carians, Colchians, Thracians, Greeks, Persians, Cimmerians, Scythians, Romans, Byzantines, Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs, Varangians, Crusaders, Venetians, Genoese, Georgians, Bulgarians, Tatars and Ottomans.


title: Black Sea

text: The concentration of historical powers, combined with the preservative qualities of the deep anoxic waters of the Black Sea, has attracted increased interest from marine archaeologists who have begun to discover a large number of ancient ships and organic remains in a high state of preservation.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea plays an integral part in the connection between Asia and Europe. In addition to sea ports and fishing, key activities include hydrocarbons exploration for oil and natural gas, and tourism.


title: Black Sea

text: According to NATO, the Black Sea is a strategic corridor that provides smuggling channels for moving legal and illegal goods including drugs, radioactive materials, and counterfeit goods that can be used to finance terrorism.


title: Black Sea

text: According to an International Transport Workers' Federation 2013 study, there were at least 30 operating merchant seaports in the Black Sea (including at least 12 in Ukraine). There were also around 2,400 commercial vessels operating in the Black Sea.


title: Black Sea

text: The Turkish commercial fishing fleet catches around 300,000 tons of anchovies per year. The fishery is carried out mainly in winter, and the highest portion of the stock is caught between November and December.


title: Black Sea

text: In the 1980s, the Soviet Union started offshore drilling for petroleum in the sea's western portion (adjoining Ukraine's coast). Independent Ukraine continued and intensified that effort within its exclusive economic zone, inviting major international oil companies for exploration. Discovery of the new, massive oilfields in the area stimulated an influx of foreign investments. It also provoked a short-term peaceful territorial dispute with Romania which was resolved in 2011 by an international court redefining the exclusive economic zones between the two countries.


title: Black Sea

text: The Black Sea contains oil and natural gas resources but exploration in the sea is incomplete. , 20 wells are in place. Throughout much of its existence, the Black Sea has had significant oil and gas-forming potential because of significant inflows of sediment and nutrient-rich waters. However, this varies geographically. For example, prospects are poorer off the coast of Bulgaria because of the large influx of sediment from the Danube which obscured sunlight and diluted organic-rich sediments. Many of the discoveries to date have taken place offshore of Romania in the Western Black Sea and only a few discoveries have been made in the Eastern Black Sea.


title: Black Sea

text: During the Eocene, the Paratethys Sea was partially isolated and sea levels fell. During this time sand shed off the rising Balkanide, Pontide and Caucasus mountains trapped organic material in the Maykop Suite of rocks through the Oligocene and early Miocene. Natural gas appears in rocks deposited in the Miocene and Pliocene by the paleo-Dnieper and paleo-Dniester rivers, or in deep-water Oligocene-age rocks. Serious exploration began in 1999 with two deep-water wells, Limanköy-1 and Limanköy-2, drilled in Turkish waters. Next, the HPX (Hopa)-1 deepwater well targeted late Miocene sandstone units in Achara-Trialet fold belt (also known as the Gurian fold belt) along the Georgia-Turkey maritime border. Although geologists inferred that these rocks might have hydrocarbons that migrated from the Maykop Suite, the well was unsuccessful. No more drilling happened for five years after the HPX-1 well. Then in 2010, Sinop-1 targeted carbonate reservoirs potentially charged from the nearby Maykop Suite on the Andrusov Ridge, but the well-struck only Cretaceous volcanic rocks. Yassihöyük-1 encountered similar problems. Other Turkish wells, Sürmene-1 and Sile-1 drilled in the Eastern Black Sea in 2011 and 2015 respectively tested four-way closures above Cretaceous volcanoes, with no results in either case. A different Turkish well, Kastamonu-1 drilled in 2011 did successfully find thermogenic gas in Pliocene and Miocene shale-cored anticlines in the Western Black Sea. A year later in 2012, Romania drilled Domino-1 which struck gas prompting the drilling of other wells in the Neptun Deep. In 2016, the Bulgarian well Polshkov-1 targeted Maykop Suite sandstones in the Polshkov High and Russia is in the process of drilling Jurassic carbonates on the Shatsky Ridge as of 2018.


title: Black Sea

text: In August 2020, Turkey found of natural gas in the biggest ever discovery in the Black Sea, and hoped to begin production in the Sakarya Gas Field by 2023. The sector is near where Romania has also found gas reserves.


title: Black Sea

text: In the years following the end of the Cold War, the popularity of the Black Sea as a tourist destination steadily increased. Tourism at Black Sea resorts became one of the region's growth industries.


title: Black Sea

text: The 1936 Montreux Convention provides for free passage of civilian ships between the international waters of the Black and the Mediterranean seas. However, a single country (Turkey) has complete control over the straits connecting the two seas. Military ships are categorised separately from civilian vessels and can pass through the straits only if the ship belongs to a Black Sea country. Other military ships have the right to pass through the straits if they are not in a war against Turkey and if they stay in the Black Sea basin for a limited time. The 1982 amendments to the Montreux Convention allow Turkey to close the straits at its discretion in both war and peacetime.


title: Black Sea

text: The Montreux Convention governs the passage of vessels between the Black, the Mediterranean and Aegean seas and the presence of military vessels belonging to non-littoral states in the Black Sea waters.


title: Black Sea

text: The Russian Black Sea Fleet has its official primary headquarters and facilities in the city of Sevastopol (Sevastopol Naval Base).


title: Black Sea

text: The Soviet hospital ship was sunk on 7 November 1941 by German aircraft while evacuating civilians and wounded soldiers from Crimea. It has been estimated that approximately 5,000 to 7,000 people were killed during the sinking, making it one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history. There were only 8 survivors.


title: Black Sea

text: In December 2018, the Kerch Strait incident occurred, in which the Russian navy and coast guard took control of three Ukrainian vessels as the ships were trying to enter the Black Sea.


title: Black Sea

text: In April 2022, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk in the western Black Sea by sea-skimming Neptune missiles of the Ukrainian armed forces while the Russians claimed that an onboard fire had caused munitions to explode and damage the ship extensively. She was the largest ship to be lost in naval combat in Europe since World War II.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (Abbreviation: ETH; sign: Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum was conceived in 2013 by programmer Vitalik Buterin. Additional founders of Ethereum included Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, Anthony Di Iorio and Joseph Lubin. In 2014, development work began and was crowdfunded, and the network went live on 30 July 2015. Ethereum allows anyone to deploy permanent and immutable decentralized applications onto it, with which users can interact. Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications provide a broad array of financial services without the need for typical financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, or banks, such as allowing cryptocurrency users to borrow against their holdings or lend them out for interest. Ethereum also allows users to create and exchange NFTs, which are unique tokens representing ownership of an associated asset or privilege, as recognized by any number of institutions. Additionally, many other cryptocurrencies utilize the ERC-20 token standard on top of the Ethereum blockchain and have utilized the platform for initial coin offerings.


title: Ethereum

text: On 15 September 2022, Ethereum transitioned its consensus mechanism from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in an upgrade process known as "the Merge".


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum was initially described in late 2013 in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin, a programmer and co-founder of "Bitcoin Magazine", that described a way to build decentralized applications. Buterin argued to the Bitcoin Core developers that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and that it needed a more robust language for application development that could lead to real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain. In 2013, Buterin briefly worked with eToro CEO Yoni Assia on the Colored Coins project and drafted its white paper outlining additional use cases for blockchain technology. However, after failing to gain agreement on how the project should proceed, he proposed the development of a new platform with a more robust scripting language—a Turing-complete programming language—that would eventually become Ethereum.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum was announced at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami, in January 2014. During the conference, Gavin Wood, Charles Hoskinson, and Anthony Di Iorio (who financed the project) rented a house in Miami with Buterin at which they could develop a fuller sense of what Ethereum might become. Di Iorio invited friend Joseph Lubin, who invited reporter Morgen Peck, to bear witness. Peck subsequently wrote about the experience in "Wired". Six months later the founders met again in Zug, Switzerland, where Buterin told the founders that the project would proceed as a non-profit. Hoskinson left the project at that time and soon after founded IOHK, a blockchain company responsible for Cardano.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum has an unusually long list of founders. Anthony Di Iorio wrote: "Ethereum was founded by Vitalik Buterin, Myself, Charles Hoskinson, Mihai Alisie & Amir Chetrit (the initial 5) in December 2013. Joseph Lubin, Gavin Wood, & Jeffrey Wilcke were added in early 2014 as founders." Buterin chose the name Ethereum after browsing a list of elements from science fiction on Wikipedia. He stated, "I immediately realized that I liked it better than all of the other alternatives that I had seen; I suppose it was the fact that [it] sounded nice and it had the word 'ether', referring to the hypothetical invisible medium that permeates the universe and allows light to travel." Buterin wanted his platform to be the underlying and imperceptible medium for the applications running on top of it.


title: Ethereum

text: Formal development of the software underlying Ethereum began in early 2014 through a Swiss company, Ethereum Switzerland GmbH ("EthSuisse").


title: Ethereum

text: The idea of putting executable smart contracts in the blockchain needed to be specified before it could be implemented in software. This work was done by Gavin Wood, then the chief technology officer, in the Ethereum Yellow Paper that specified the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Subsequently, a Swiss non-profit foundation, the Ethereum Foundation ("Stiftung Ethereum"), was founded. Development was funded by an online public crowd sale from July to August 2014, in which participants bought the Ethereum value token (ether) with another digital currency, bitcoin. While there was early praise for the technical innovations of Ethereum, questions were also raised about its security and scalability.


title: Ethereum

text: Several codenamed prototypes of Ethereum were developed over 18 months in 2014 and 2015 by the Ethereum Foundation as part of their proof-of-concept series. "Olympic" was the last prototype and public beta pre-release. The Olympic network gave users a bug bounty of 25,000 ether for stress-testing the Ethereum blockchain. On 30 July 2015, "Frontier" marked the official launch of the Ethereum platform, and Ethereum created its "genesis block". The genesis block contained 8,893 transactions allocating various amounts of ether to different addresses, and a block reward of 5 ETH.


title: Ethereum

text: Since the initial launch, Ethereum has undergone a number of planned protocol upgrades, which are important changes affecting the underlying functionality and/or incentive structures of the platform. Protocol upgrades are accomplished by means of a hard fork.


title: Ethereum

text: In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization called The DAO—a set of smart contracts developed on the platform—raised a record in a crowd sale to fund the project. The DAO was exploited in June 2016 when of DAO tokens were stolen by an unknown hacker. The event sparked a debate in the crypto-community about whether Ethereum should perform a contentious "hard fork" to reappropriate the affected funds. The fork resulted in the network splitting into two blockchains: Ethereum with the theft reversed, and Ethereum Classic which continued on the original chain. The hard fork created a rivalry between the two networks. After the hard fork, Ethereum subsequently forked twice in the fourth quarter of 2016 to deal with other attacks.


title: Ethereum

text: In March 2017, various blockchain startups, research groups, and "Fortune" 500 companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with 30 founding members. By May 2017, the nonprofit organization had 116 enterprise members, including ConsenSys, CME Group, Cornell University's research group, Toyota Research Institute, Samsung SDS, Microsoft, Intel, J. P. Morgan, Cooley LLP, Merck KGaA, DTCC, Deloitte, Accenture, Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, ING, and National Bank of Canada. By July 2017, there were over 150 members in the alliance, including MasterCard, Cisco Systems, Sberbank, and Scotiabank.


title: Ethereum

text: By January 2018, ether was the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, behind bitcoin. , it maintained that relative position.


title: Ethereum

text: After the Constantinople upgrade on 28 February 2019, there were two network upgrades made within a month late in the year: Istanbul on 8 December 2019 and Muir Glacier on 2 January 2020.


title: Ethereum

text: In 2019, Ethereum Foundation employee Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea. He would later plead guilty to in 2021.


title: Ethereum

text: In March 2021, Visa Inc. announced that it began settling stablecoin transactions using Ethereum. In April 2021, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and MasterCard announced that they were investing into ConsenSys, a software development firm that builds Ethereum-related infrastructure.


title: Ethereum

text: There were two network upgrades in 2021. The first was "Berlin", implemented on 14 April 2021. The second was "London", which took effect on 5 August. The London upgrade included Ethereum Improvement Proposal ("EIP") 1559, a mechanism for reducing transaction fee volatility. The mechanism causes a portion of the ether paid in transaction fees for each block to be destroyed rather than given to the miner, reducing the inflation rate of ether and potentially resulting in periods of deflation.


title: Ethereum

text: On 27 August 2021, the blockchain experienced a brief fork that was the result of clients running different incompatible software versions.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) was a set of three or more upgrades, also known as "phases", meant to transition the network's consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake, and to scale the network's transaction throughput with execution sharding and an improved EVM architecture. The first of these three upgrades, also known as "phase 0", launched the proof-of-stake Beacon Chain on the 1st of December, 2020.


title: Ethereum

text: Following the realisation that the Beacon Chain would be delivered much earlier than the later phases of the Eth2 roadmap, proposals were made for an "early Merge", expediting the delivery of proof-of-stake to Ethereum. Most importantly, the early Merge would not require any migration from Ethereum’s applications or its users, and would continue using the heavily battle-tested mainnet Ethereum clients in conjunction with the new proof-of-stake consensus clients.


title: Ethereum

text: In early 2022, the “Ethereum 2.0” terminology was deprecated in an effort to highlight the existence of only one Ethereum network and one ether cryptocurrency. As a result of the effort, the Eth1 blockchain was renamed to the “execution layer”, and its associated Eth1 clients were reclassified as execution clients. Similarly, the Eth2 blockchain was renamed to the consensus layer, and its associated Eth2 clients were reclassified as consensus clients.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum is a permissionless, non-hierarchical network of computers (nodes) that build and come to a consensus on an ever-growing series of "blocks", or batches of transactions, known as the blockchain. Each block contains an identifier of the chain that must precede it if the block is to be considered valid. Whenever a node adds a block to its chain, it executes the transactions in the block in the order they are listed, each of which may alter the ETH balances and other storage values of Ethereum accounts. These balances and values, collectively known as the "state", are maintained on the node separately from the blockchain, in a Merkle tree.


title: Ethereum

text: Each node communicates with a relatively small subset of the network—its "peers". Whenever a node wishes to include a new transaction in the blockchain, it sends a copy of the transaction to each of its peers, who then send a copy to each of their peers, and so on. In this way, it propagates throughout the network. Certain nodes, called miners, maintain a list of all of these new transactions and use them to create new blocks, which they then send to the rest of the network. Whenever a node receives a block, it checks the validity of the block and of all of the transactions therein and, if it finds the block to be valid, adds it to its blockchain and executes all of those transactions. Since block creation and broadcasting are permissionless, a node may receive multiple blocks competing to be the successor to a particular block. The node keeps track of all of the valid chains that result from this and regularly drops the shortest one: According to the Ethereum protocol, the longest chain at any given time is to be considered the canonical one.


title: Ethereum

text: Ether (ETH) is the cryptocurrency generated in accordance with the Ethereum protocol as a reward to miners in a proof-of-work system for adding blocks to the blockchain. Ether is represented in the state as an unsigned integer associated with each account, this being the account's ETH balance denominated in wei (10 wei = 1 ether). Each block, new ETH is generated by the addition of a protocol-specified amount, currently 2 × 10 wei (equal to 2 ETH), to the balance of any account of the miner's choosing. This is known as the block reward. Additionally, ether is the only currency accepted by the protocol as payment for a transaction fee, which also goes to the miner. The block reward together with the transaction fees provide the incentive to miners to keep the blockchain growing (i.e. to keep processing new transactions). Therefore, ETH is fundamental to the operation of the network. Ether may be "sent" from one account to another via a transaction, which simply entails subtracting the "amount to be sent" from the sender's balance and adding the same amount to the recipient's balance.


title: Ethereum

text: Ether is listed on exchanges under the abbreviation ETH. The Greek uppercase Xi character (Ξ) is sometimes used for its currency symbol.


title: Ethereum

text: The shift to Ethereum 2.0 may reduce the issuance rate of ether. There is currently no implemented hard cap on the total supply of Ether.


title: Ethereum

text: There are two types of accounts on Ethereum: user accounts (also known as externally-owned accounts) and contracts. Both types have an ETH balance, may send ETH to any account, may call any public function of a contract or create a new contract, and are identified on the blockchain and in the state by an account address.


title: Ethereum

text: User accounts are the only type of account that may create transactions. For a transaction to be valid, it must be signed using the sending account's private key, the 64-character hexadecimal string from which the account's address is derived. The algorithm used to produce the signature is ECDSA. Importantly, this algorithm allows one to derive the signer's address from the signature without knowing the private key.


title: Ethereum

text: Contracts are the only type of account that has associated code (a set of functions and variable declarations) and contract storage (the values of the variables at any given time). A contract function may take arguments and may have return values. In addition to control flow statements, the body of a function may include instructions to send ETH, read from and write to the contract's storage, create temporary storage (memory) that vanishes at the end of the function, perform arithmetic and hashing operations, call the contract's own functions, call public functions of other contracts, create new contracts, and query information about the current transaction or the blockchain.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum addresses are composed of the prefix "codice_1" (a common identifier for hexadecimal) concatenated with the rightmost 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash of the ECDSA public key (the curve used is the so-called "secp256k1"). In hexadecimal, two digits represent a byte, and so addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits, e.g. codice_2. Contract addresses are in the same format, however, they are determined by sender and creation transaction nonce.


title: Ethereum

text: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the runtime environment for transaction execution in Ethereum. It includes a stack, memory, and the persistent storage for all Ethereum accounts (including contract code). The EVM is stack-based, in that most instructions pop operands from the stack and push the result to the stack. The EVM is designed to be deterministic on a wide variety of hardware and operating systems, so that given a pre-transaction state and a transaction, each node produces the same post-transaction state, thereby enabling network consensus. The formal definition of the EVM is specified in the Ethereum Yellow Paper. EVMs have been implemented in C++, C#, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, Elixir, Erlang, and soon WebAssembly.


title: Ethereum

text: Gas is a unit of account within the EVM used in the calculation of a transaction fee, which is the amount of ETH a transaction's sender must pay to the miner who includes the transaction in the blockchain.


title: Ethereum

text: Each type of operation which may be performed by the EVM is hardcoded with a certain gas cost, which is intended to be roughly proportional to the amount of resources (computation and storage) a node must expend to perform that operation. When a sender creates a transaction, the sender must specify a "gas limit" and "gas price". The "gas limit" is the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to use in the transaction, and the "gas price" is the amount of ETH the sender wishes to pay to the miner per unit of gas used. The higher the "gas price", the more incentive a miner has to include the transaction in their block, and thus the quicker the transaction will be included in the blockchain. The sender buys the full amount of gas (i.e. their ETH balance is debited the amount: "gas limit" × "gas price") up-front, at the start of the execution of the transaction, and is refunded at the end for any unused gas. If at any point the transaction does not have enough gas to perform the next operation, the transaction is reverted but the sender is still only refunded for the unused gas. In user interfaces, gas prices are typically denominated in gigawei (gwei), a subunit of ETH equal to 10 ETH.


title: Ethereum

text: This fee mechanism is designed to mitigate transaction spam, prevent infinite loops during contract execution, and provide for a market-based allocation of network resources.


title: Ethereum

text: The difficulty bomb is an Ethereum protocol feature that causes the difficulty of mining a block to increase exponentially over time after a certain block is reached, with the intended purpose being to incentivize upgrades to the protocol and prevent miners from having too much control over upgrades. As the protocol is upgraded, the difficulty bomb is typically pushed further out in time. The protocol has included a difficulty bomb from the beginning, and the bomb has been pushed back several times. It was originally placed there primarily to ensure a successful upgrade from proof of work to proof of stake, an upgrade that removes miners entirely from the design of the network. The period during which the mining difficulty is increasing is known as the "Ice Age".


title: Ethereum

text: The EVM's instruction set is Turing-complete. Popular uses of Ethereum have included the creation of fungible (ERC20) and non-fungible (ERC721) tokens with a variety of properties, crowdfunding (e.g. initial coin offerings), decentralized finance, decentralized exchanges, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), games, prediction markets, and gambling.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum's smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages and then compiled down to EVM bytecode and deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. They can be written in Solidity (a language library with similarities to C and JavaScript), Serpent (similar to Python, but deprecated), Yul (an intermediate language that can compile to various different backends—EVM 1.0, EVM 1.5, and eWASM are planned), LLL (a low-level Lisp-like language), and Mutan (Go-based, but deprecated). There was also a research-oriented language under development called Vyper (a strongly-typed Python-derived decidable language). Source code and compiler information are usually published along with the launch of the contract so that users can see the code and verify that it compiles to the bytecode that is on-chain.


title: Ethereum

text: One issue related to using smart contracts on a public blockchain is that bugs, including security holes, are visible to all but cannot be fixed quickly. One example of this is the 2016 attack on The DAO, which could not be quickly stopped or reversed.


title: Ethereum

text: The ERC-20 (Ethereum Request-for-Comments #20) Token Standard allows for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The standard, proposed by Fabian Vogelsteller in November 2015, implements an API for tokens within smart contracts. The standard provides functions that include the transfer of tokens from one account to another, getting the current token balance of an account, and getting the total supply of the token available on the network. Smart contracts that correctly implement ERC-20 processes are called ERC-20 Token Contracts, and they keep track of created tokens on Ethereum. Numerous cryptocurrencies have launched as ERC-20 tokens and have been distributed through initial coin offerings. Fees to send ERC-20 tokens must be paid with ether.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum also allows for the creation of unique and indivisible tokens, called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Since tokens of this type are unique, they have been used to represent such things as collectibles, digital art, sports memorabilia, virtual real estate, and items within games. The first NFT project, Etheria, a 3D map of tradable and customizable hexagonal tiles, was deployed to the network in October 2015 and demonstrated live at DEVCON1 in November of that year. In 2021, Christie's sold a digital image with an NFT by Beeple for , making him the third-most-valuable living artist in terms of auction prices at the time, although observers have noted that both the buyer and seller had a vested interest in driving demand for the artist's work. Land, buildings, and avatars in blockchain-based virtual worlds can also be bought and sold as NFTs, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars.


title: Ethereum

text: Decentralized finance (DeFi) offers traditional financial instruments in a decentralized architecture, outside of companies' and governments' control, such as money market funds which let users earn interest. DeFi applications are typically accessed through a Web3-enabled browser extension or application, such as MetaMask, which allows users to directly interact with the Ethereum blockchain through a website. Many of these DApps can connect and work together to create complex financial services.


title: Ethereum

text: Examples of DeFi platforms include MakerDAO and Compound. Uniswap, a decentralized exchange for tokens on Ethereum grew from in liquidity to in 2020. As of October 2020, over was invested in various DeFi protocols. Additionally, through a process called "wrapping", certain DeFi protocols allow synthetic versions of various assets (such as bitcoin, gold, and oil) to be tradeable on Ethereum and also compatible with all of Ethereum's major wallets and applications.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum-based software and networks, independent from the public Ethereum chain, are being tested by enterprise software companies. Interested parties include Microsoft, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, R3, and Innovate UK (cross-border payments prototype). Barclays, UBS, Credit Suisse, Amazon, Visa, and other companies are also experimenting with Ethereum.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain variants are used and being investigated for various projects:


title: Ethereum

text: The downside is that performance issues arise because every node calculates all the smart contracts in real-time. , the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second; this didn't change after the proof-of-stake implementation. In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second. This has led some to question the scalability of Ethereum. On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time. Visa has also signaled interest in processing NFT and Ethereum transactions.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum engineers have been working on sharding the calculations, and the next step (Ethereum 2) was presented at Ethereum's Devcon 3 in November 2017.


title: Ethereum

text: Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing. As with any Merkle tree implementation, this allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The network has faced congestion problems, such as in 2017 in relation to "CryptoKitties".


title: Ethereum

text: In August 2022 the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act announced that the government would be treating Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies as commodities and be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Stand by Me is a 1986 American coming-of-age drama film directed by Rob Reiner. It is based on Stephen King's 1982 novella "The Body", and the title derives from the song by Ben E. King. Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell star as four boys who, in 1959, go on a hike to find the dead body of a missing boy.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: "Stand by Me" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and for two Golden Globe Awards: one for Best Drama Motion Picture and one for Best Director.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Writer Gordie Lachance reads a newspaper article about a fatal stabbing. As a youth, his parents were too busy grieving the loss of his older brother Denny to give 12-year-old Gordie much attention. He recalls a childhood incident when he, his best friend, Chris Chambers, and two other friends, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio, journeyed to find the body of a missing boy near the town of Castle Rock, Oregon, during Labor Day weekend in September 1959.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: While looking for money that he buried beneath his parents' porch, Vern overhears his older brother Billy talking with his friend Charlie about finding the body of the missing boy, Ray Brower, outside of town. Billy does not want to tell police because it could draw attention to a car theft he and Charlie committed.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: When Vern tells Gordie, Chris, and Teddy what he heard, the four boys—hoping to become local heroes—decide to go find the body. After Chris steals his father's pistol, he and Gordie run into local hoodlums "Ace" Merrill and Chris's older brother, "Eyeball." Ace threatens Chris with a lit cigarette and steals Gordie's Yankees cap, which was a gift from Denny.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The four boys begin their trip. After stopping at a junkyard for water, they are caught trespassing by owner Milo Pressman and his dog, Chopper. Once they escape over a fence, Milo calls Teddy's mentally ill father a "loony" and refers to how he almost burned Teddy's ear off. An enraged Teddy tries to attack Milo but is restrained by the other boys.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The four continue their hike, and Chris encourages Gordie to fulfill his potential as a writer despite his father's disapproval. When they cross a railroad bridge, Gordie and Vern are nearly killed by an approaching train, but jump off the tracks and escape serious injury.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: That evening, as the boys camp, Gordie tells a fictional story he created about "David 'Lard-Ass' Hogan", an obese boy who is constantly bullied. Seeking revenge, he enters a pie-eating contest and throws up deliberately, inducing mass vomiting among everyone there.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: That night, Chris informs Gordie that he hates being associated with his family's reputation. He admits stealing school milk money but says he confessed to a teacher yet was still suspended as the teacher kept quiet and pocketed the money. Devastated by the teacher's betrayal, Chris breaks down and cries.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The next day, the boys swim across a swamp, discovering it filled with leeches. Gordie faints after finding one in his underwear. After more hiking, the boys locate the body. The discovery is traumatic for Gordie, who asks Chris why Denny had to die and cries about his father hating him. Chris comforts Gordie and asserts that his father simply does not know him.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Ace and his gang arrive, announce that they are claiming the body, and threaten to beat the four boys if they interfere. When Chris insults Ace and refuses to back down, Ace draws a switchblade. Gordie gets the gun, fires a warning shot, and stands beside Chris with the gun pointed at Ace. Ace demands the weapon, but Gordie refuses while insulting and threatening him. Ace and his gang retreat, vowing revenge. The four boys realize it is wrong to exploit Ray Brower's death by claiming to find his body and instead report it via an anonymous phone call. They walk back to Castle Rock and part ways.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Back in the present day, an adult Gordie is writing a memoir of the journey. He states that Vern and Teddy drifted away from him and Chris in junior high. Vern married after high school, had four children, and became a forklift operator. Teddy tried to get into the Army several times but failed due to his eyesight and his ear. He later served time in jail and was currently doing odd jobs around Castle Rock. Chris chose to take college prep courses with Gordie and, despite struggling, later became a lawyer, with the two eventually drifting apart. While recently attempting to break up a fight in a restaurant, Chris was stabbed to death. Gordie writes that while he has not seen Chris in over a decade, he will miss him forever. He ends his story with "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" before going outside to play with his sons.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The film was adapted from the Stephen King novella "The Body". Bruce A. Evans sent a copy of "The Body" to Karen Gideon, the wife of his friend and writing partner Raynold Gideon, on August 29, 1983, as a gift for her birthday. Both Gideon and Evans quickly became fans of the novella and shortly thereafter contacted King's agent, Kirby McCauley, seeking to negotiate film rights; McCauley replied that King's terms were $100,000 and 10% of the gross profits. Although the money was not an issue, the share of gross profits was considered excessive, especially considering that no stars could be featured to help sell the movie. In response, Evans and Gideon pursued an established director, Adrian Lyne, to help sell the project.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: After reading the novella, Lyne teamed up with Evans and Gideon, but all the studios the trio approached turned the project down except for Martin Shafer at Embassy Pictures. Embassy spent four months negotiating the rights with McCauley, settling on $50,000 and a smaller share of the profits, and Evans and Gideon spent eight weeks writing the screenplay. Evans and Gideon asked to also produce the film, but Shafer suggested they team up with Andy Scheinman, a more experienced producer. Embassy was unwilling to meet Lyne's salary for directing the film until Evans and Gideon agreed to give up half of their share of profits to meet Lyne's asking price.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Lyne was going to direct the film, but had promised himself a vacation following the production of "9½ Weeks", and would not be available to start production until the spring of 1986. Reiner was better known at the time for playing Michael Stivic in "All in the Family" and had just started a directing career, making comedies like "This Is Spinal Tap" and "The Sure Thing". He was sent the script by Scheinman, and his initial reaction was the script had promise but "no focus". After Lyne withdrew from the project, Reiner signed on to direct in September 1984. In a 2011 interview, Reiner discussed his realization that the film should focus on the character of Gordie:


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: "In the book, it was about four boys, but...once I made Gordie the central focus of the piece then it made sense to me: this movie was all about a kid who didn't feel good about himself and whose father didn't love him. And through the experience of going to find the dead body and his friendship with these boys, he began to feel empowered and went on to become a very successful writer. He basically became Stephen King."


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Reiner has said that he identified with Gordie, as he himself struggled with the shadow of fame cast by his comedian father, Carl Reiner. The writers incorporated Reiner's suggestions, producing a new script by December 1984 for Embassy's review and approval.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Days before the shooting started in the summer of 1985, Embassy was sold to Columbia Pictures, which made plans to cancel the production. Norman Lear, one of the co-owners of Embassy and the developer of "All in the Family", gave of his own money to complete the film, citing his faith in Reiner and the script. However, since Embassy also would have distributed the film, once the film was completed it had no distributor. The producers showed a print to Michael Ovitz, head of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, and Ovitz promised to help them find a distributor. Paramount, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. all passed on the film; Columbia Pictures production head Guy McElwaine screened the film at his house because he was feeling ill, and the positive reaction of his daughters convinced him to distribute the film. In March 1986, Columbia Pictures, concerned that the original title, "The Body", was misleading, renamed the film "Stand by Me". According to screenwriter Raynold Gideon, "The Body" "sounded like either a sex film, a bodybuilding film, or another Stephen King horror film. Rob came up with "Stand by Me", and it ended up being the least unpopular option."


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In a 2011 interview with NPR, Wil Wheaton attributed the film's success to the director's casting choices:


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Feldman recalled how his home life translated into his onscreen character: "[Most kids aren't] thinking they're going to get hit by their parents because they're not doing well enough in school, which will prevent them from getting a work permit, which will prevent them from being an actor." O'Connell agreed that he was cast based on how his personality fit the role, saying "Rob wanted us to understand our characters. He interviewed our characters. [...] I tried to stay like Vern and say the stupid things Vern would. I think I was Vern that summer." Reiner and the producers interviewed more than 70 boys for the four main roles, out of more than 300 who auditioned; Phoenix originally read for the part of Gordie Lachance. Ethan Hawke auditioned for Chris Chambers.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Before filming began, Reiner put the four main actors together for two weeks to play games from Viola Spolin's "Improvisation for the Theater" (which Reiner called "the bible" of theater games) and build camaraderie. As a result, a friendship developed between the actors. Wheaton would recall "When you saw the four of us being comrades, that was real life, not acting."


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Before settling on Richard Dreyfuss as the narrator (and the role of the adult Gordie), Reiner considered David Dukes, Ted Bessell, and Michael McKean.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Parts of the film were shot in Brownsville, Oregon, which stood in for the fictional town of Castle Rock. The town was selected for its small-town 1950s ambience. Approximately 100 local residents were employed as extras.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The "barf-o-rama" scene was also filmed in Brownsville. A local bakery supplied the pies and extra filling, which was mixed with large-curd cottage cheese to simulate the vomit. The quantity of simulated vomit varied per person, from as much as during the triggering event to as little as .


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The scene where the boys outrace a steam train engine across an 80-foot tall trestle was filmed on the McCloud River Railroad, above Lake Britton Reservoir near McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park in California. The scene took a full week to shoot, making use of four small adult female stunt doubles with closely cropped hair who were made up to look like the film's protagonists. Plywood planks were laid across the ties to provide a safer surface on which the stunt doubles could run. The film crew even brought a brand-new camera for use in the shot, only for it to jam between the rails on the first shot. The locomotive used for the scene, M.C.R.R. 25, is still in daily operation for excursion service on the Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad. Telephoto compression was used to make the train appear much closer than it actually was. The actors did not feel a sense of danger until Reiner threatened them as follows: "You see those guys? They don't want to push that dolly down the track anymore. And the reason they're getting tired is because of you... I told them if they weren't worried that the train was going to kill them, then they should worry that I was going to. And that's when they ran."


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Jack Nitzsche composed the film's musical score. On August 8, 1986, a soundtrack album was released containing many of the 1950s and early 1960s oldies songs featured in the film:


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The movie's success sparked a renewed interest in Ben E. King's song "Stand by Me". Initially a number four pop hit in 1961, the song re-entered the "Billboard" Hot 100 in October 1986, eventually peaking at number nine in December of that year. The song was also reissued in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, where it topped the UK Singles Chart and Irish Singles Chart respectively for three consecutive weeks in February 1987. The movie was released in both countries the following month.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: "Stand by Me" was released on VHS on March 19, 1987, by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video. A DVD was issued on August 29, 2000, with a director's commentary, multiple language options (subtitles and audio), scene selections with motion images, and a featurette called "Walking The Tracks- The Summer Of "Stand by Me"." The film was re-issued on Blu-ray in 2011 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and again on 4K Blu-ray in 2019.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The film was a box office success in North America. It opened in a limited release in 16 theaters on August 8, 1986, and grossed $242,795, averaging $15,174 per theater. The film then had its wide opening in 745 theaters on August 22 and grossed $3,812,093, averaging $5,116 per theater and ranking #2. The film's widest release was 848 theaters, and it ended up earning $52,287,414 overall, well above its $8 million budget.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Reviewing the film for "The New York Times", Walter Goodman opined that Reiner's direction was rather self-conscious, "looking constantly at his audience". Goodman called the film a "trite narrative" and said that "Reiner's direction hammers in every obvious element in an obvious script." In his review for the "Chicago Tribune", Dave Kehr wrote that there was "nothing natural in the way Reiner has overloaded his film with manufactured drama". In contrast, Sheila Benson called the film "[a treasure] absolutely not to be missed" in her review for the "Los Angeles Times". Paul Attanasio, reviewing for "The Washington Post", called the acting ensemble "wonderful" and particularly praised the performances by Wheaton and Phoenix.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Stephen King was very impressed with the film. On the special features of the 25th anniversary Blu-ray set, King indicated that he considered the film to be the first successful translation to film of any of his works. According to a later interview with Gene Siskel, Reiner recalled that after a private early screening of the film, King excused himself for fifteen minutes to compose himself; he later returned to remark, "'That's the best film ever made out of anything I've written, which isn't saying much. But you've really captured my story. It is autobiographical.'"


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" chat in 2017, Reiner said that "Stand by Me" is his personal favorite of his own films.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 92% based on 59 reviews and a rating average of 8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: ""Stand by Me" is a wise, nostalgic movie with a weird streak that captures both Stephen King's voice and the trials of growing up." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 75 out of 100 based on 20 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: At the 8th Youth in Film Awards, the film received the Jackie Coogan Award for Outstanding Contribution to Youth Through Motion Picture – Ensemble Cast in a Feature Film (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell).


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In a 2011 piece entitled "25 years of 'Stand by Me'", writer Alex Hannaford opined that "[for] anyone older than about 33, "Stand by Me" remains one of the greatest films to come out of the Eighties." Hannaford added that the film "has a charm and depth that seems to resonate with each generation".


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In 2016, several writers commemorated the 30-year anniversary of the film's release. "Rolling Stone"'s Charles Bramesco called "Stand By Me" "timeless", "a staple of youthful nostalgia for its deft straddling of the line between childhood and adulthood", and "the rare movie that necessarily gets better with time". Others described the film as a "coming-of-age classic" and as a film that stood at "the apex of the ’80s kids’ movie boom".


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Brownsville, Oregon has held an annual "Stand By Me Day" since 2007. The event has attracted international participants. On July 24, 2010, a 25th Anniversary celebration of the filming of "Stand by Me" was held in Brownsville. The event included a cast and crew Q&A session, an amateur pie-eating contest, and an outdoor showing of the film.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In 2013, July 23 was designated as Stand By Me Day by the Brownsville Chamber of Commerce. To encourage tourism, the city has embedded a penny in the street at a location where the fictional Vern found one in the film. An advertising mural painted for the movie production has survived.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: Dan Mangan's song "Rows of Houses" (2011) is based on the film and takes the perspective of Gordie Lachance.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: In 1987, following the success of "Stand by Me", Reiner co-founded a film and television production company and named it Castle Rock Entertainment, after the fictional town in which the film is set.


title: Stand by Me (film)

text: The film is referenced in "Pokémon Red", "Green", "Blue", and "Yellow" for the Nintendo Game Boy, as well their Game Boy Advance remakes, "Pokémon FireRed" and "LeafGreen", where the player character's mother is watching the movie on TV. When interacting with the TV, the player character says: "There's a movie on TV. Four boys are walking on railroad tracks. I better go too." This reference exists in both the original Japanese versions and the English localizations, though the reference changes to The Wizard of Oz in the remakes when the female player character is selected.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Catherine Anne Bosworth (born January 2, 1983) is an American actress. Following minor roles in the films "The Horse Whisperer" (1998) and "Remember the Titans" (2000), she rose to prominence with her role as a young surfer in the box-office hit "Blue Crush" (2002).


title: Kate Bosworth

text: She also had roles in independent films, playing Dawn Schiller in the true crime film "Wonderland" (2003) and Sandra Dee in the Bobby Darin biographical drama "Beyond the Sea" (2004). She portrayed Lois Lane in "Superman Returns" (2006), and had roles in "21" (2008), "Straw Dogs" (2011), "And While We Were Here" (2012), and "Still Alice" (2014). She starred in the horror films "Before I Wake" (2016) and "The Domestics" (2018). Recently, she starred as KC in the Netflix science fiction miniseries "The I-Land" (2019).


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in San Francisco, California, the only child of Patricia ("née" Potter), a homemaker, and Harold Bosworth, a former executive for Talbots. She was born with heterochromia iridum, and has a hazel right eye and a blue left eye. When she was six years old, her family relocated from San Francisco to various parts of the country due to her father's job. She was raised mainly on the East Coast, spending the rest of her youth in Massachusetts and Connecticut.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth developed an interest in equestrian sports, specifically stadium jumping, and by age 14 was a champion equestrian. She graduated from Cohasset High School in Cohasset, Massachusetts in 2001.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth's first film role came after an open casting call in New York for the supporting part of Judith in the 1998 film "The Horse Whisperer". The producers needed someone who was an experienced horse rider, and Bosworth won the role. The film got a positive reception from film critics. In 2000, she starred in the television series drama "Young Americans" as Bella Banks, but it was canceled. That year she had a small part in the film "Remember the Titans". In 2001, she moved to Los Angeles to seek better film parts.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth's breakthrough role came in the 2002 surfing movie "Blue Crush". She prepared for the role by working with two trainers seven hours a day for months, adding 15 pounds of muscle to her frame. In his review of the film, "Rolling Stone"<nowiki>'s</nowiki> Peter Travers wrote: "Bosworth is a star in the making, but even she can't outshine the surfing footage, which is flat-out spectacular." The film received positive reviews and grossed $40 million at the United States box office. Bosworth then took on the lead role in the low-budget "Wonderland" (2003) opposite Val Kilmer. She played the teenage girlfriend of porn star John Holmes.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: In 2004, she played the lead role in romantic comedy "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!", opposite Topher Grace. It was critically and financially unsuccessful. Also in 2004, she portrayed actress Sandra Dee in "Beyond the Sea". Reviews were mixed, and it was a box office failure, though Bosworth's performance received critical acclaim. The next year, she portrayed Chali, a Hare Krishna, in the film adaptation of Myla Goldberg's novel "Bee Season" (2005), about a dysfunctional Jewish family.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth was cast as reporter Lois Lane in Bryan Singer's film "Superman Returns" (2006), which also starred her "Beyond the Sea" co-star Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, and newcomer Brandon Routh as Superman. It was a box office success and received mostly positive reviews. Bosworth's performance however, was not well received; Anthony Lane of "The New Yorker" wrote: "The new Lois Lane, Kate Bosworth, is not a patch on Margot Kidder, or, for that matter, on Teri Hatcher, in the ." "San Francisco Chronicle" film critic Mick LaSalle felt that Bosworth, at age 22, was too young to portray Lane, and that the climax did not "match the potential of the tiring 154 minute long film". Although Bosworth's performance was ambivalently received, she loved working on the movie. As she told "Teen Vogue" in August 2006, "You know how you have an experience, a time in your life when you feel you've come into your own? When you grow up a bit, and think, Now I get it? [...] That's how I feel. I feel a little bit more complete." She was eventually nominated for worst supporting actress at the Razzie Awards for the part. The movie grossed $52 million on its opening weekend in North America and went on to earn $391 million worldwide.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth starred as Louise in the psychological drama "The Girl in the Park" with Sigourney Weaver, Alessandro Nivola and Keri Russell, written and directed by Pulitzer Prize winner David Auburn in his directorial debut. It premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, and was subsequently picked up by The Weinstein Company. Alissa Simon of "Variety" wrote that Bosworth "tries her best, but her character's too extremely drawn." Bosworth also filmed "21", an adaptation of the book "Bringing Down the House", in early 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts and Las Vegas, Nevada, reuniting with co-star Kevin Spacey and director Robert Luketic. It garnered mixed reviews, with Joanne Kaufman of the "Wall Street Journal" concluding, "Very little adds up in "21"."


title: Kate Bosworth

text: In 2006, she optioned the film rights to Catherine Hanrahan's novel "Lost Girls and Love Hotels" and was set to produce the project with filmmaker Nadia Connors. As of 2016, the project was at a standstill. In 2010, she starred in "The Warrior's Way", shot in New Zealand with Korean actor Jang Dong-gun and Geoffrey Rush. It was one of 2010's biggest box-office flops, grossing only slightly more than $11,000,000 worldwide against its $42 million budget. Bosworth has said about her roles, "I just don't do comfort zones."


title: Kate Bosworth

text: In January 2008, Bosworth was named the new face of Calvin Klein Jeans and appeared in their ad campaigns. She also became the spokesperson for the American luxury bag brand Coach in Asia.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: In 2011, Bosworth contracted to sing the television jingle for Cotton Incorporated's "Fabric of My Life" advertisement. On December 4, 2012, Topshop revealed that she was the "secret" woman in the new Topshop Christmas Adverts.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: Bosworth designed a jewelry line with friend and celebrity stylist Cher Coulter called JewelMint, which launched in October 2010. The first vertical venture of MySpace co-founder Josh Berman and Diego Berdakin's social commerce company, BeachMint features designs by Coulter and Bosworth.


title: Kate Bosworth

text: She appeared in ten films between 2011 and 2014, moving away from the big-budget Superman franchise into lower-budget film roles like "Still Alice" with Julianne Moore. The short film "Lov", filmed in Slovenia, featured her and launched fashion designer Vanessa Bruno’s Fall 2011 campaign.