title: Severus Snape

text: In the chapter illustrations by Mary GrandPré in the American editions of "The Prisoner of Azkaban", "The Order of the Phoenix", and "The Half-Blood Prince", Snape is depicted with a moustache and goatee, long black hair, and a receding hairline.


title: Severus Snape

text: Snape is generally depicted as being cold, calculating, precise, sarcastic, and bitter. He strongly dislikes Harry and often insults him by insulting his father James. As the series progresses, it is revealed that his treatment of Harry stems from Snape's bitter rivalry with James when they were in school together. In particular, James and Sirius bullied Snape, which according to Alan Rickman caused the already lonely boy to further "shut himself in". Rowling further described the young Snape as insecure and vulnerable: "Given his time over again [Snape] would not have become a Death Eater, but like many insecure, vulnerable people he craved membership of something big and powerful, something impressive.[...] [He] was so blinded by his attraction to the dark side he thought [Lily] would find him impressive if he became a real Death Eater."


title: Severus Snape

text: The adult Snape, on the other hand, is portrayed as very self-assured and confident of his abilities, to a degree that Rickman described as "full of himself." Director David Yates said Snape is a character with gravitas, authority and power. Snape typically displays a very calm and collected demeanour, rarely at a loss for words or taken off guard. His temper, however, is sometimes short where Harry is concerned and positively flares when dealing with his erstwhile tormentor Sirius, or when accused of cowardice. His otherwise impassive and aloof attitude seems to stem from his belief that people who cannot control their emotions are weak.


title: Severus Snape

text: Like some other prominent members of Slytherin house, Snape is shown to be a clever and cunning wizard. He is intelligent and has a keen, analytical mind. In an interview, Rowling adds that Snape is immensely brave, and when asked if she considers Snape a hero, replied: "Yes, I do; though a very flawed hero. An anti-hero, perhaps. He is not a particularly likeable man in many ways. He remains rather cruel, a bully, riddled with bitterness and insecurity—and yet he loved, and showed loyalty to that love and, ultimately, laid down his life because of it. That's pretty heroic!"


title: Severus Snape

text: All seven novels show Snape to be a very powerful wizard and to have been outstanding while a student. He specialises in potion making and has talent and passion for the Dark Arts. Sirius claimed that Snape knew more hexes and curses as a first-year student at Hogwarts than most seventh-years knew. Particularly gifted in potion making, Snape added major improvements to his Potions textbook while still a student. Also as a student, Snape shows a rare gift for discovering new spells. Lupin describes Sectumsempra as Snape's "speciality" in "Deathly Hallows." Snape is shown using this spell as a teenager against Harry's father James and in the aerial battle in the last novel when he accidentally hits George Weasley (acting as a Potter decoy) with it while actually aiming for a Death Eater who was trying to attack Lupin, permanently severing George's right ear. Despite Sectumsempra's deadly power, Snape can also heal the wounds it causes. Snape is adept at reversing or containing potentially fatal damage from other dark curses as well, due to his vast knowledge of Dark Arts, as he does when Dumbledore and then Katie Bell are cursed. Skilful in the arts of Legilimency and especially Occlumency, Snape is able to both access the minds of others and protect his own thoughts—indeed, though Snape does not care for the term himself, Harry forms the uncomfortable impression early in the series that the Potions Master is able to "read minds." Being an Occlumens, Snape is able to keep his betrayal from Voldemort, who is himself described as being "the greatest Legilimens" in history. According to Rowling, Snape is the only Death Eater capable of producing a full Patronus, which, like Lily's, is a doe. Snape is a talented duellist, able to hold off by himself (if only briefly) a group of three Hogwarts professors that included former duelling champion Filius Flitwick. Professor McGonagall later implies that Snape learned to fly without the use of a broom, a rare skill previously displayed only by Voldemort.


title: Severus Snape

text: Snape's family background is mostly shown in flashbacks during the course of the last three novels. Snape was born to Eileen Prince, a witch, and Tobias Snape, a Muggle, making him a half-blood (hence the name, "Half-Blood Prince"). This is rare for a Death Eater, as remarked in the last book, though Voldemort himself also had a Muggle father. Snape spent his early childhood living with his parents in a small house in Spinner's End. Snape's family was a poor one and he is described as wearing ill-fitting clothes "that were so mis-matched that it looked deliberate". As a child, Snape was apparently neglected and his parents often fought with one another. Snape was very eager to leave his home to go to Hogwarts. Towards the end of the last novel, Harry draws parallels between his childhood, Snape's, and Voldemort's.


title: Severus Snape

text: Snape's true loyalty was one of the most significant questions in the series up until the end of the final instalment, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". Although the first five novels depict him as unfair and vindictive towards Harry and his friends, he invariably ends up protecting or otherwise helping them when they or their allies are in danger. Several characters express doubts about his loyalty, but Dumbledore's trust in him is generally taken to be the final word. The sixth novel, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", departs from that model. In the second chapter, Snape claims to have been working for Voldemort ever since the latter's return, and only pretending to help Dumbledore. By killing Dumbledore toward the end of the novel, Snape seems to place himself firmly in Voldemort's camp. Rowling maintains this impression through the early chapters of the seventh novel. However, near the climax of the book, Snape leaves Harry his dying thoughts (to be viewed in the Pensieve) and ultimately reveals to Harry that he had been loyal to Albus Dumbledore throughout the series. Snape's fierce devotion to and love of his childhood friend Lily, Harry's mother, is the foundation of that loyalty.


title: Severus Snape

text: After "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", Snape's loyalty was a matter of intense debate among the fans. The issue was given special attention in the marketing campaigns on behalf of the last book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows". "Is Snape Good or Evil?" was one of the questions in Scholastic Inc.'s seven-question series, part of its marketing campaign for the book. As part of the Waldenbooks marketing campaign, two free stickers, one that said "Trust Snape" and another that stated "Snape Is A Very Bad Man" were available with the book. Borders Group published a separate book on the topic, "The Great Snape Debate," containing essays and arguments from both sides of the debate.


title: Severus Snape

text: The secretive attitude and gradual unfolding of Snape's character was broadly admired, with Stephen Fry, the UK audio books narrator, saying in 2003: "Most characters like Snape are hard to love but there is a sort of ambiguity—you can't quite decide—something sad about him—lonely and it's fascinating when you think he's going to be the evil one..., then slowly you get this idea he's not so bad after all." David Yates, who directed the final four films of the series, also expressed his views on the character, saying: "A character like Snape, where you're not really sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy, that gives you a latent tension... I think the coolest thing you can do with an audience is deny them a little bit of information." Despite being less than kind, the character quickly gained popularity within fandom to a level that surprised Rowling herself. Joyce Millman suggests in her essay "To Sir with Love" in the book "Mapping the World of Harry Potter", that Snape is derived from a tradition of Byronic heroes such as "Wuthering Heights" Heathcliff.


title: Severus Snape

text: Jenny Sawyer from "The Christian Science Monitor" commented on the character's development in the series. She claimed that Snape is the only protagonist who genuinely has a choice to make and who struggles to do the right thing, hence the only one to face a "compelling inner crisis". She believed the popularity of the character is due to the moral journey and inner conflict that Snape undergoes within the series, as it is the hero's struggle and costly redemption that really matter: "[Snape's] character ached for resolution. And it is precisely this need for resolution—our desire to know the real Snape and to understand his choices—that makes him the most compelling character in the Potter epic."


title: Severus Snape

text: The final revelation of Snape's loyalty in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" was viewed positively by fans and critics alike. Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays Harry Potter in the movie series, expressed his delight, saying he was pleased to see that his theory that Snape would end up being a sort of tragic hero came through. Elizabeth Hand from "The Washington Post" wrote, "The much-maligned loner Snape does not come onstage until the latter part of "Deathly Hallows," but when he does the book becomes his: Snape's fate, more than Voldemort's, perhaps more even than Harry's, is the most heartbreaking, surprising and satisfying of all of Rowling's achievements."


title: Severus Snape

text: IGN listed Snape as their 4th top "Harry Potter" character, saying that he makes "quite an impact in the "Harry Potter" series", and IGN's Joe Utichi called Snape his favourite "Harry Potter" character and praised his character development. Shortly after the release of the final film, MTV held a public poll for fans to vote for the best character in the series, and Snape was voted #1. Around the same time, "Empire" magazine held a public poll for fans to vote for the 25 greatest characters in the series, and Snape once again came in at #1. In May 2011, Snape was again voted as the No. 1 favourite Harry Potter character in a public poll held by the Bloomsbury publishing house.


title: Severus Snape

text: The character of Severus Snape has appeared in various animated parodies of Harry Potter. He is a starring character in Neil Cicierega's online "Potter Puppet Pals" parodies, and has a centric episode titled "Bothering Snape". Also, the video "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" with the chorus "Snape, Snape, Severus Snape" was the winner for "Best Comedy" of the year 2007 at YouTube; it currently has over 170 million views. Snape is also parodied as Professor Santory Snapekin in Sluggy Freelance's webcomic entitled "Torg Potter". In the first parody, Torg defeats a plot by Professor Snapekin to achieve ultimate power.


title: Severus Snape

text: In a 2004 sketch on "Saturday Night Live" in which Lindsay Lohan appears as Hermione Granger, Snape is portrayed by Will Forte. Snape has also been parodied in UK television. Comic Relief released a story called "Harry Potter and the Secret Chamberpot of Azerbaijan", in which Snape is played by Jeremy Irons. Snape appeared in a "Harry Potter" parody named "Louis Potter and the Philosopher's Scone" in Alistair McGowan's "Big Impression" show, played by Alistair McGowan himself. In the "Harry Bladder" sketches in "All That", Snape appears as Professor Chafe (portrayed by Jeremy Rowley), whose legs were badly chafed, causing him to be unnecessarily mean. Many sketches feature students brewing potions that did silly things, like enlarge students' behinds, give males large breasts, or change people into bras. In a sketch comedy named ""Cooking With..."" on Australian TV series "The Wedge", Snape is played by Anthony Ahern, and catches Harry and Hermione making love. In Team Starkid's "A Very Potter Musical", Snape is played by actor Joe Moses.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed ("Brassica napus "subsp." napus"), also known as rape, or oilseed rape, is a bright-yellow flowering member of the family Brassicaceae (mustard or cabbage family), cultivated mainly for its oil-rich seed, which naturally contains appreciable amounts of erucic acid. The term "canola" denotes a group of rapeseed cultivars which were bred to have very low levels of erucic acid and are especially prized for use as human and animal food. Rapeseed is the third-largest source of vegetable oil and the second-largest source of protein meal in the world.


title: Rapeseed

text: "Brassica napus" grows to in height with hairless, fleshy, pinnatifid and glaucous lower leaves which are stalked whereas the upper leaves have no petioles. "Brassica napus" can be distinguished from "Brassica nigra" by the upper leaves which do not clasp the stem, and from "Brassica rapa" by its smaller petals which are less than across.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed flowers are bright yellow and about across. They are radial and consist of four petals in a typical cross-form, alternating with four sepals. They have indeterminate racemose flowering starting at the lowest bud and growing upward in the following days. The flowers have two lateral stamens with short filaments, and four median stamens with longer filaments whose anthers split away from the flower's center upon flowering.


title: Rapeseed

text: The rapeseed pods are green and elongated siliquae during development that eventually ripen to brown. They grow on pedicels long, and can range from in length. Each pod has two compartments separated by an inner central wall within which a row of seeds develops. The seeds are round and have a diameter of . They have a reticulate surface texture, and are black and hard at maturity.


title: Rapeseed

text: The term "rape" derives from the Latin word for turnip, "rapa" or "rapum", cognate with the Greek word "rhapys".


title: Rapeseed

text: The species "Brassica napus" belongs to the flowering plant family Brassicaceae. Rapeseed is a subspecies with the autonym "B. napus "subsp." napus". It encompasses winter and spring oilseed, vegetable and fodder rape. Siberian kale is a distinct leaf rape form variety ("B. napus "var." pabularia") which used to be common as a winter-annual vegetable. The second subspecies of "B. napus" is "B. napus "subsp." rapifera" (also subsp. "napobrassica"; the rutabaga, swede, or yellow turnip).


title: Rapeseed

text: "Brassica napus" is a digenomic amphidiploid that occurred due to the interspecific hybridization between "Brassica oleracea" and "Brassica rapa". It is a self-compatible pollinating species like the other amphidiploid "brassica" species.


title: Rapeseed

text: In Northern Ireland, U K "B. napus" and "B. rapa" are recorded as escapes in roadside verges and waste ground.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed is grown for the production of edible vegetable oils, animal feed, and biodiesel. Rapeseed was the third-leading source of vegetable oil in the world in 2000, after soybean and palm oil. It is the world's second-leading source of protein meal after soybean.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed oil is one of the oldest known vegetable oils, but historically was used in limited quantities due to high levels of erucic acid, which is damaging to cardiac muscle of animals, and glucosinolates, which made it less nutritious in animal feed. Rapeseed oil can contain up to 54% erucic acid. Food-grade oil derived from rapeseed cultivars, known as canola oil or low-erucic-acid rapeseed oil (LEAR oil), has been generally recognized as safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration. Canola oil is limited by government regulation to a maximum of 2% erucic acid by weight in the US and 2% in the EU, with special regulations for infant food. These low levels of erucic acid are not believed to cause harm in human infants.


title: Rapeseed

text: Processing of rapeseed for oil production produces rapeseed meal as a byproduct. The byproduct is a high-protein animal feed, competitive with soybean. Rapeseed is an excellent silage crop (fermented and stored in air-tight conditions for later use as a winterfeed). The feed is employed mostly for cattle feeding, but is also used for pigs and poultry. However, the high levels of erucic acid and glucosinolates in natural rapeseed oil significantly lowers the nutritional value of rapeseed press cakes for animal feed. Rapeseed meal is mostly used as a soil fertilizer rather than for animal feed in China.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed oil is used as diesel fuel, either as biodiesel, straight in heated fuel systems, or blended with petroleum distillates for powering motor vehicles. Biodiesel may be used in pure form in newer engines without engine damage and is frequently combined with fossil-fuel diesel in ratios varying from 2% to 20% biodiesel. Owing to the costs of growing, crushing, and refining rapeseed biodiesel, rapeseed-derived biodiesel from new oil costs more to produce than standard diesel fuel, so diesel fuels are commonly made from the used oil. Rapeseed oil is the preferred oil stock for biodiesel production in most of Europe, accounting for about 80% of the feedstock, partly because rapeseed produces more oil per unit of land area compared to other oil sources, such as soybeans, but primarily because canola oil has a significantly lower gel point than most other vegetable oils.


title: Rapeseed

text: Because of the changes to the environment caused by climate change, a 2018 study predicted that rapeseed would become an unreliable source of oil for biofuels.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed is also used as a cover crop in the US during the winter as it prevents soil erosion, produces large amounts of biomass, suppresses weeds and can improve soil tilth with its root system. Some cultivars of rapeseed are also used as annual forage and are ready for grazing livestock 80 to 90 days after planting.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed has a high melliferous potential (produces substances that can be collected by insects) and is a main forage crop for honeybees. Monofloral rapeseed honey has a whitish or milky yellow color, peppery taste and, due to its fast crystallization time, a soft-solid texture. It crystallizes within 3 to 4 weeks and can ferment over time if stored improperly. The low fructose-to-glucose ratio in monofloral rapeseed honey causes it to quickly granulate in the honeycomb, forcing beekeepers to extract the honey within 24 hours of it being capped.


title: Rapeseed

text: As a biolubricant, rapeseed has possible uses for bio-medical applications (e.g., lubricants for artificial joints) and the use of personal lubricant for sexual purposes. Biolubricant containing 70% or more canola/rapeseed oil has replaced petroleum-based chainsaw oil in Austria although it is typically more expensive.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed has been researched as a means of containing radionuclides that contaminated the soil after the Chernobyl disaster as it has a rate of uptake up to three times more than other grains, and only about 3 to 6% of the radionuclides go into the oilseeds.


title: Rapeseed

text: Crops from the genus "Brassica", including rapeseed, were among the earliest plants to be widely cultivated by mankind as early as 10,000 years ago. Rapeseed was being cultivated in India as early as 4000 B.C. and it spread to China and Japan 2000 years ago.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed oil is predominantly cultivated in its winter form in most of Europe and Asia due to the requirement of vernalization to start the process of flowering. It is sown in autumn and remains in a leaf rosette on the soil surface during the winter. The plant grows a long vertical stem in the next spring followed by lateral branch development. It generally flowers in late spring with the process of pod development and ripening occurring over a period of 6–8 weeks until midsummer.


title: Rapeseed

text: In Europe, winter rapeseed is grown as an annual break crop in three to four-year rotations with cereals such as wheat and barley, and break crops such as peas and beans. This is done to reduce the possibility of pests and diseases being carried over from one crop to another. Winter rape is less susceptible to crop failure as it is more vigorous than the summer variety and can compensate for damage done by pests.


title: Rapeseed

text: Spring rapeseed is cultivated in Canada, northern Europe and Australia as it is not winter-hardy and does not require vernalization. The crop is sown in spring with stem development happening immediately after germination.


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed can be cultivated on a wide variety of well-drained soils, prefers a pH between 5.5 and 8.3 and has a moderate tolerance of soil salinity. It is predominantly a wind-pollinated plant but shows significantly increased grain yields when bee-pollinated, almost double the final yield but the effect is cultivar-dependent. It is currently grown with high levels of nitrogen-containing fertilisers, and the manufacture of these generates NO. An estimated 3–5% of nitrogen provided as fertilizer for rapeseed is converted to NO.


title: Rapeseed

text: The cultivatable range for rapeseed is both expected to decrease due to climate change, and where rapeseed is grown quality of the crop, in both yield and volume of oil is expected to decrease substantially. Some researchers recommend finding alternative varieties of "Brassica" for cultivation.


title: Rapeseed

text: The main diseases of the winter rapeseed crop are "canker", light leaf spot ("Pyrenopeziza brassicae"), alternaria-" and sclerotinia- stem rots. Canker causes leaf spotting, and premature ripening and weakening of the stem during the autumn-winter (fall-winter) period. A conazole- or triazole- fungicide treatment is required in late autumn (fall) and in spring against canker while broad-spectrum fungicides are used during the spring-summer period for alternaria and sclerotinia control. Oilseed rape cannot be planted in close rotation with itself due to soil-borne diseases such as sclerotinia, verticillium wilt and clubroot.


title: Rapeseed

text: Transgenic rapeseed shows great promise for . Transexpression of a class II chitinase from barley ("Hordeum vulgare") and a type I ribosome inactivating protein into "B. juncea" produces a large . Chhikara "et al.", 2012 finds that this combination of transgenes reduces hyphal growth by 44% and delays disease presentation in "Alternaria brassicicola" of "juncea".


title: Rapeseed

text: Rapeseed is attacked by a wide variety of insects, , as well as wood pigeons. The brassica pod midge ("Dasineura brassicae"), cabbage seed weevil ("Ceutorhynchus assimilis"), cabbage stem weevil ("Ceutorhynchus pallidactylus"), cabbage stem flea beetle ("Psylliodes chrysocephala"), rape stem weevil ("Ceutorhynchus napi") and pollen beetles are the primary insect pests that prey on the oilseed rape crop in Europe. The insect pests can feed on developing pods to lay eggs inside and eat the developing seeds, bore into the plant's stem and feed on pollen, leaves and flowers. Synthetic pyrethroid insecticides are the main attack vector against insect pests though there is a large-scale use of prophylactic insecticides in many countries. Molluscicide pellets are used either before or after sowing of the rapeseed crop to protect against slugs.


title: Rapeseed

text: In 2014 an SNP array was released for "B. napus" by Dalton-Morgan "et al.", and another by Clarke "et al.", in 2016, both of which have since become widely used in molecular breeding. In a demonstration of the importance of epigenetics, Hauben "et al.", 2009 found that isogenic lines did "not" have identical energy use efficiencies in actual growing conditions, due to epigenetic differences. Specific locus amplified fragment sequencing (SLAF-seq) was applied to "B. napus" by Geng "et al.", in 2016, revealing the genetics of the past domestication process, providing data for genome-wide association studies (GWAS), and being used to construct a high-density linkage map.


title: Rapeseed

text: In 1973, Canadian agricultural scientists launched a marketing campaign to promote canola consumption. Seed, oil, and protein meal derived from rapeseed cultivars which is low in erucic acid and low in glucosinolates was originally registered as a trademark, in 1978, of the Canola Council of Canada, as "canola". This is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed but is still officially defined in Canada as rapeseed oil that "must contain less than 2% erucic acid and less than 30 µmol of glucosinolates per gram of air-dried oil-free meal."


title: Rapeseed

text: Following the European Parliament's Transport Biofuels Directive in 2003 promoting the use of biofuels, the cultivation of winter rapeseed increased dramatically in Europe.


title: Rapeseed

text: Bayer Cropscience, in collaboration with BGI-Shenzhen, China, KeyGene, the Netherlands, and the University of Queensland, Australia, announced it had sequenced the entire genome of "B. napus" and its constituent genomes present in "B. rapa" and "B. oleracea" in 2009. The "A" genome component of the amphidiploid rapeseed species "B. napus" is currently being sequenced by the Multinational "Brassica" Genome Project.


title: Rapeseed

text: A genetically modified-for-glyphosate-tolerance variety of rapeseed which was developed in 1998 is considered to be the most disease- and drought-resistant canola. By 2009, 90% of the rapeseed crops planted in Canada were of this sort.


title: Rapeseed

text: The Monsanto company genetically engineered new cultivars of rapeseed to be resistant to the effects of its herbicide, Roundup. In 1998, they brought this to the Canadian market. Monsanto sought compensation from farmers found to have crops of this cultivar in their fields without paying a license fee. However, these farmers claimed that the pollen containing the "Roundup Ready" gene was blown into their fields and crossed with unaltered canola. Other farmers claimed that after spraying Roundup in non-canola fields to kill weeds before planting, "Roundup Ready" volunteers were left behind, causing extra expense to rid their fields of the weeds.


title: Rapeseed

text: In a closely followed legal battle, the Supreme Court of Canada found in favor of Monsanto's patent infringement claim for unlicensed growing of "Roundup Ready" in its 2004 ruling on "Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser", but also ruled that Schmeiser was not required to pay any damages. The case garnered international controversy, as a court-sanctioned legitimization for the global patent protection of genetically modified crops. In March 2008, an out-of-court settlement between Monsanto and Schmeiser agreed that Monsanto would clean up the entire GMO-canola crop on Schmeiser's farm, at a cost of about CAN$660.


title: Rapeseed

text: The Food and Agriculture Organization reports global production of in the 2003–2004 season, and an estimated in the 2010–2011 season.


title: Rapeseed

text: Worldwide production of rapeseed (including canola) has increased sixfold between 1975 and 2007. The production of canola and rapeseed since 1975 has opened up the edible oil market for rapeseed oil. Since 2002, production of biodiesel has been steadily increasing in EU and U.S. to in 2006. Rapeseed oil is positioned to supply a good portion of the vegetable oils needed to produce that fuel. World production was thus expected to trend further upward between 2005 and 2015 as biodiesel content requirements in Europe go into effect.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Richard Theodore Otcasek (March 23, 1944 – September 15, 2019), known as Ric Ocasek, was an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. He was the primary co-lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist, songwriter, and frontman for the rock band the Cars. In addition to his work with the Cars, Ocasek recorded seven solo albums, and his song "Emotion in Motion" was a top 20 hit in the United States in 1986. Ocasek also worked as a record producer for artists such as Motion City Soundtrack, Suicide, Bad Brains, Weezer, Nada Surf, Guided by Voices, and No Doubt. In 2018, Ocasek was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Cars.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek was born on March 23, 1944, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. When he was 16 years old, his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a systems analyst with NASA at the Lewis Research Center. He graduated from Maple Heights High School in 1963. Ocasek briefly attended Antioch College and Bowling Green State University, but dropped out to pursue a career in music.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek met future Cars bassist Benjamin Orr in Cleveland in 1965 after Ocasek saw Orr performing with his band the Grasshoppers on the "Big 5 Show", a local musical variety program. He reconnected with Orr a few years later in Columbus, Ohio, and the two began performing in and booking bands together. They formed a band called ID Nirvana in 1968 and performed in and around Ohio State University.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: After performing in various bands in Columbus and Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ocasek and Orr relocated to Boston in the early 1970s. There they formed a Crosby, Stills and Nash-style folk rock band called Milkwood. They released one album, "How's the Weather", on Paramount Records in early 1973 but it failed to chart. Future Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes played on Milkwood's album. After Milkwood, Ocasek formed the group Richard and the Rabbits, which included Orr and Hawkes. Ocasek and Orr also performed as an acoustic duo during this period. Some of the songs they played became the early Cars songs. Later, Ocasek and Orr teamed up with guitarist Elliot Easton in the band Cap'n Swing. Cap'n Swing soon came to the attention of WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori, who began playing songs from their demo tape on her show. After Cap'n Swing was rejected by several record labels, Ocasek got rid of the bass player and drummer and decided to form a band that better fit his style of writing. Orr took over on bass and David Robinson, best known for his career with the Modern Lovers, became the drummer. Hawkes returned to play keyboards and the band became "the Cars" in late 1976.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek was a founding member of the Cars, recording numerous hit songs from 1978 to 1988. He played rhythm guitar and sang lead vocals for a majority of songs (bassist Benjamin Orr was lead vocalist on the remaining tracks). Ocasek was the oldest member of the band. After splitting writing duty with Orr in the 1970s, Ocasek became the principal songwriter of the band, and wrote nearly all of the Cars' material, sharing credit on only a few songs with bandmate Greg Hawkes as co-writer. In 2010, Ocasek reunited with the surviving original members of the Cars to record their first album in 24 years. The album, entitled "Move Like This", was released on May 10, 2011. Not long after the album's release and its supporting tour, however, the Cars resumed their hiatus, and reunited once again in April 2018 for a performance at the ceremony of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: During his time with the Cars, Ocasek developed a reputation as a producer, and took this role for many up-and-coming bands of differing genres including Bad Brains' "Rock for Light" and Guided by Voices' "Do the Collapse". His other production credits include Weezer's Blue Album and Green Album (both multi-platinum), Suicide, Romeo Void, Hole, Bebe Buell, No Doubt, Nada Surf, American folk-punk band Black 47, Bad Religion, Johnny Bravo, D Generation, the Wannadies, Possum Dixon, Martin Rev, Jonathan Richman, and the 2006 album by the Pink Spiders titled "Teenage Graffiti". He also produced a portion of the third Motion City Soundtrack album, "Even If It Kills Me". In 2014, Ocasek produced "Everything Will Be Alright in the End", the ninth studio album by Weezer and his third collaboration with the band, and "For All My Sisters", the sixth album by the Cribs.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek released his first solo album in 1982. "Beatitude" is a somewhat more experimental variation of the Cars' new wave rock sound. On some tracks Ocasek played all of the instruments. Greg Hawkes also played on the album. A more synthesizer-heavy follow-up, "This Side of Paradise", was released in 1986; this featured Hawkes, Elliot Easton and Ben Orr. A No. 15 hit single, "Emotion in Motion", accompanied the album.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: The Cars disbanded in 1988, and Ocasek disappeared from the public eye for a couple of years. He resurfaced in 1990 with his own album, "Fireball Zone". One track, "Rockaway", enjoyed a brief stay on the charts, but his solo albums realized disappointing sales, especially compared to his success with the Cars. He subsequently released other solo works during the decade, including 1993's "Quick Change World", 1996's "Getchertiktz" (a collaboration with Suicide's Alan Vega and Canadian poet Gillian McCain comprising only Beat poetry set to music, sound effects, etc.), and 1997's Billy Corgan-produced "Troublizing" (which Ocasek supported with a very brief tour, his first since leaving the Cars). In 2005 Ocasek released another album, "Nexterday", to little fanfare, but it received positive reviews.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek wrote a book of poetry in 1993 titled "Negative Theatre". It was at one time expected to be incorporated into an album and multimedia incarnation of the same name, but those plans were dropped abruptly. For many years Ocasek had a hobby of making drawings, photo collages, and mixed-media art works which, in 2009, were shown at a gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as an exhibition called "Teahead Scraps".


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek had a cameo role as a beatnik painter in the John Waters film "Hairspray" (1988), and had a small part in the movie "Made in Heaven" (1987) in which he played a mechanic.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek stated in a 2005 interview in "Rockline" that he hated touring and was unlikely to do so again. He also stated he would not be reuniting with the Cars again, but gave the okay to his former bandmates to do so, with Todd Rundgren replacing him on vocals, using the name the New Cars.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: On April 17, 2006, Ocasek appeared on "The Colbert Report" and volunteered to put Todd Rundgren "on notice". He appeared again on the July 26, 2006, episode to cheers from the audience as he volunteered to lead a commando mission to "rescue" Stephen Jr., the baby eagle at the San Francisco Zoo named after Stephen Colbert. He also appeared again on April 18, 2007, in order to support his wife during her appearance on the show, after remarks that she found Colbert "extremely attractive". He has been mentioned many times in other episodes as well. The Cars, with Ocasek, appeared on "The Colbert Report" on August 9, 2011, to promote their new album, "Move Like This".


title: Ric Ocasek

text: In 2012, Ocasek released "Lyrics and Prose", a complete collection of lyrics from his solo and Cars' albums. The book also contains prose and poetry never set to music, as well as previously unpublished photographs and artwork.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek and Cars co-founder Benjamin Orr were close friends who became estranged when the band broke up. The two reconciled prior to Orr's death in 2000. Their friendship was commemorated in the song "Silver", which Ocasek wrote in memory of Orr.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek was married three times. His first wife Constance divorced him in Ohio in 1971. In the same year he married Suzanne Otcasek, who uses the original spelling of Ocasek's name. They were married for 17 years. During filming of the music video for the Cars' song "Drive" in 1984, Ocasek met 19-year-old Czech-born supermodel Paulina Porizkova, while he was still married to Suzanne. Ocasek and Suzanne divorced in 1988. He and Porizkova were married on August 23, 1989 on Saint-Barthélemy island. In May 2018, Porizkova announced she and Ocasek had separated a year earlier.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek had six sons, two from each of his three marriages. His eldest son, Christopher (b. 1964), is a singer who formed the rock group Glamour Camp which released one album in 1989, and appeared as a solo artist in the film "Pretty Woman" (1990). His other children include Adam (b. 1970), Eron (b. 1973), Derek (b. 1981), Jonathan Raven (b. 1993), and Oliver (b. 1998).


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Ocasek was found dead on September 15, 2019, by his estranged wife, Paulina Porizkova, at his New York City townhouse, which they still shared following their separation the previous May. He had been recovering from surgery. The Chief Medical Examiner office reported that Ocasek died from natural causes. He suffered from both hypertensive heart and coronary artery disease.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: Porizkova and Ocasek were still in the process of their divorce, but he had disinherited her in a new will, alleging that before his recent surgery she had abandoned him. He also disinherited two of his six sons (Chris and Adam), which required a probate judge to rule on the veracity of the abandonment claims before the remaining estate could be divided.


title: Ric Ocasek

text: In 2021, the dispute between Ocasek's estate and Porizkova was settled; Porizkova commenting "They gave me what is mine under New York state law, and we're done."


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov ( – 14 January 1988) was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. However, at the insistence of the rest of the Presidium, he relinquished control over the party apparatus in exchange for remaining Premier and first among equals within the Soviet collective leadership. He then became embroiled in a power struggle with Nikita Khrushchev that culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Presidium in 1957.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Throughout his political career, Malenkov's personal connections with Vladimir Lenin significantly facilitated his ascent within the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By 1925, he was entrusted with overseeing the party's records. This brought him into contact with Stalin who had by then successfully consolidated power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to become the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. As a result of this association, Malenkov became heavily involved in Stalin's purges before later being given sole responsibility over the Soviet missile program during World War II. From 1946 to 1947, he chaired the Council of Ministers Special Committee on Rocket Technology. In order to secure his position as Stalin's favorite, he successfully discredited Marshal Georgy Zhukov and suppressed all glory associated with Leningrad during World War II so that Moscow maintained its image as the Soviet Union's sole cultural and political capital.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Following Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Malenkov temporarily emerged as the Soviet leader's undisputed successor by replacing him as both Chairman of the Council of Ministers (or Premier) and head of the party apparatus. However, only 9 days later, the Politburo (then known as the Presidium) forced him to give up the latter position while letting him retain the premiership. Subsequently, Malenkov contented himself serving as the Presidium’s highest-ranking member and acting chairman until being eclipsed in early 1954 by the party's First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. By 1955, he was also forced to resign as Premier. After later organizing a failed palace coup against Khrushchev in 1957, Malenkov was expelled from the Presidium and exiled to Kazakhstan in 1957, before ultimately being expelled from the Party altogether in November 1961. He officially retired from politics shortly afterwards. After a short sojourn in Kazakhstan, he returned to Moscow and kept a low profile for the remainder of his life.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov was born in Orenburg in the Russian Empire. His paternal ancestors immigrated during the 18th century from the area of Ohrid in the Ottoman Rumelia Eyalet (present day North Macedonia). Some of them served as officers in the Russian Imperial Army. His father was a wealthy farmer in Orenburg province. Young Malenkov occasionally helped his father to do business selling the harvest. His mother was a daughter of a blacksmith and a granddaughter of an Orthodox priest.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov graduated from Orenburg gymnasium just a few months prior to the Russian revolution of 1917.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: In 1918, Malenkov joined the Red Army as a volunteer and fought alongside the Communists against White Russian forces in the Civil War. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1920 and worked as a political commissar on a propaganda train in Turkestan during the Civil War.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: After the Russian civil war, Malenkov quickly built himself a reputation of a tough communist Bolshevik. He was promoted in the Communist party ranks and was appointed Communist secretary at the military-based Moscow Higher Technical School in the 1920s. Russian sources state that, rather than continuing with his studies, Malenkov took a career of a Soviet politician. His university degree was never completed, and his records have been indefinitely classified. Around this time, Malenkov forged a close friendship with Vyacheslav Malyshev, who later became chief of the Soviet nuclear program alongside Igor Kurchatov.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: In 1924, Stalin noticed Malenkov and assigned him to the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1925, Malenkov worked in the staff of the Organizational Bureau ("Orgburo") of the Central Committee of the CPSU.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov was in charge of keeping records on the members of the Soviet communist party; two million files were made under his supervision during the next ten years. In this work Malenkov became closely associated with Stalin and was later heavily involved in the treason trials during the purging of the party. In 1938, he was one of the key figures in bringing about downfall of Yezhov, the head of the NKVD. In 1939, Malenkov became the head of the Communist party's Cadres Directorate, which gave him control over personnel matters of party bureaucracy. During the same year, he also became a member and a Secretary of the Central Committee and rose from his previous staff position to full member of the Orgburo. In February 1941, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Politburo.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: After the German invasion of June 1941, Malenkov was promoted to the State Defense Committee (SDC), along with the NKVD chief Beria, Voroshilov, and Molotov with Stalin as the committee's head. This small group held total control over all the political and economic life in the country and Malenkov's membership thus made him one of the top five most powerful men in the Soviet Union during World War II. Between 1941 and 1943, Malenkov's primary responsibility in the SDC was supervising military aircraft production as well as supervising development of nuclear weapons. In 1943, he also became chairman of a committee that oversaw the post-war economic rehabilitation of some liberated areas with the exception of Leningrad.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Stalin gave Malenkov the task of building nuclear missiles in collaboration with Beria. Malenkov was appointed Chief of the Soviet Missile program, his first deputy was Dmitri Ustinov, a 33-year-old rocket scientist who later became one of the most powerful Soviet Defence Ministers. During World War II, Malenkov, Ustinov, and Mikhail Khrunichev started the Soviet missile and rocket program that soon absorbed the German missile industry. Malenkov supervised takeover of German V2 missile industry that was moved from Peenemünde to Moscow for further development that resulted in building Vostok missiles and orbiting Sputnik a few years later. At the same time, Malenkov followed Stalin's orders of building several space centers, such as Kapustin Yar near the Volga river and Khrunichev missile center in Moscow.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov's main role was supervising the top staff. He took a keen interest in recruiting the most talented young engineers and scientists produced by the university system. Instead of cross-examining candidates for their loyalty to the theoretical ideology of communism, Malenkov looked for team members with strong technical skills who could invent, improve, and manufacture munitions most quickly and efficiently. He downplayed the role of the omnipresent commissars who understood little technology but were charged with ideological purification. The long-run lesson was that economic growth was the nation's highest priority.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: "Zhdanovshchina" was the emphasis on purified communist ideology developed during the Second World War by Andrei Zhdanov. It emerged from Zhdanov's debates inside the party hierarchy opposing Malenkov's pragmatist faction. Malenkov stressed universal values of science and engineering, and proposed to promote technological experts to the highest positions in the Soviet administrative elite. Zhdanov's faction said proper ideology trumped science and called for prioritizing political education and ideological purity. However the technocrats had proven amazingly successful during the war in terms of engineering, industrial production, and development of advanced munitions. Zhdanov sought to use the ideological purification of the party as a vehicle to restore the Kremlin's political control over the provinces and the technocrats. He worried that the provincial party bosses and the heads of the economic ministries had achieved too high a degree of autonomy during the war, when the top leadership realized the urgent need for maximum mobilization of human and material resources. The highest priority in the postwar era was physical reconstruction after the massive wartime destruction. The same argument that strengthened the technocrats continue to operate, and the united opposition of Malenkov, the technocrats, the provincial party bosses, and the key ministries doomed Zhdanov's proposals. He therefore pivoted to devote Zhdanovshchina to purification of the arts and culture.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Georgy Zhukov was the most prominent Soviet military commander during World War II, winning several critical battles, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Battle of Berlin. Stalin, Beria and Malenkov grew suspicious of Zhukov, worrying he possessed capitalistic tendencies, because Zhukov established a friendship with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, invited the future American president to Leningrad and Moscow, and endorsed collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the conclusion of World War II and shortly thereafter, Malenkov sided against several who were considered Soviet war heroes, among them Zhukov, Rokossovsky, and several other popular generals. Malenkov's accusations against Zhukov were mostly based upon allegations of counter-revolutionary behavior and selfish "Bonapartism". Soon Zhukov was demoted in rank and moved to a lower position in Odessa where his only foes were local Party forces. Zhukov had his first heart attack not long after, and Malenkov's concerns about him largely faded.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: After the ruthless attack on Zhukov, Malenkov gained strength and became closer to Stalin and several other top communists. In 1946, Malenkov was named a candidate member of the Politburo. Although temporarily trailing behind his rivals Andrei Zhdanov and Lavrentiy Beria, he soon came back into Stalin's favor, especially after Zhdanov's mysterious death in 1948. That same year, Malenkov became a Secretary of the Central Committee.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: During the late 1940s and early 1950s Malenkov gained more favor with Stalin than any other top Soviet communist. Malenkov's main competition were the leaders of Leningrad whose glory had been earned in resistance to Hitler's attacks during World War II. After the Siege of Leningrad Mayor Kuznetsov and his deputies earned much fame and support all over the USSR. Malenkov followed Stalin's policy of suppressing that glory in order to maintain Moscow's image as the USSR's only center of power. In 1949, Malenkov personally came to Leningrad leading a regiment of armed men from Moscow MGB special forces and swiftly removed and arrested the city leaders. After a series of secret trials, 23 men, including the Mayor and deputies, were executed and buried in an unmarked pit on the outskirts of the city. At the same time, over two thousand top managers and intellectuals were uprooted and exiled from Leningrad to Siberia, their property was confiscated, and their positions were filled by communists loyal to Stalin.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: During the same years, Malenkov also exterminated the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Many members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were killed in the Night of the Murdered Poets. On 12 August 1952, thirteen Jewish writers were executed for treason in the basement of Lubyanka Prison. This was approved by Stalin and supervised by Malenkov.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov's loyalty to Stalin was proven by executions of political competition and the Leningrad affair and catapulted Malenkov to become the only successor of Stalin.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: 1952 and 1953 "Time" magazine covers indicate that Malenkov was generally considered to be Stalin's apprentice and successor.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov's ambitions and crafty politics bore fruit upon Stalin's death on 5 March 1953. Four days later Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lavrentiy Beria, and Nikita Khrushchev gave the eulogy at Stalin's funeral.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: On 6 March, the day after Stalin died, Malenkov succeeded him as Premier of the Soviet Union. His name was also listed first on the newly named Presidium of the Central Committee (as the Politburo had been called since 1952). Although there had been no title identifying the leader of the party for almost a year, this indicated that Malenkov had succeeded Stalin as party leader as well. On 7 March, Malenkov's name appeared atop the list of secretaries of the Secretariat, confirming that he had succeeded Stalin as the most powerful man in the Soviet Union. However, after only a week, Malenkov was forced to resign from the Secretariat. The new leadership wanted to prevent too much power from being concentrated in one pair of hands. For all intents and purposes, Khrushchev replaced him as party leader; Khrushchev's name appeared atop a revised list of secretaries on 14 March, though he was not formally named First Secretary of the CPSU until September 1953. Malenkov remained as premier, beginning a period of a Malenkov-Khrushchev "duumvirate".


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov retained the office of premier for two years. During this time his political activities were mixed with a power struggle within the Kremlin. Still a staunch Stalinist, Malenkov expressed his opposition to research and development of nuclear armament, and inaugurated an international peace campaign against the use of nuclear weapons in 1953, declaring "a new world war ... with modern weapons means the end of world civilization." In debates on diplomacy, he always took the peaceful line.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: On economic issues, Malenkov advocated refocusing the economy on production of consumer goods at the expense of heavy industry, with the goal of elevating the standards of living in the Soviet Union. Malenkov also advocated for an agriculture policy that included tax cuts for peasants, increase in the price paid to the Kolkhozes by the state for grains, and incentives for peasants to cultivate their private plots. These policies were put in place during Malenkov's premiership and duumvirate, but did not meet their objectives and were very expensive, which led Malenkov's influence to decline.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Malenkov was forced to resign in February 1955 after he came under attack for abuse of power and his close connection to Beria (who had been executed as a traitor in December 1953). He was held responsible for the slow pace of reforms, particularly when it came to rehabilitating and freeing political prisoners (in comparison, Khrushchev made considerable efforts in this endeavor). His economic program of prioritizing light industry was subsequently abandoned in favor of increasing investments into heavy industry in the 1955 federal budget.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: For two more years, Malenkov remained a regular member of the Presidium. Together with Khrushchev, he flew to the island of Brioni (Yugoslavia) on the night of 1–2 November 1956 to inform Josip Broz Tito of the impending Soviet invasion of Hungary scheduled for 4 November.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: However, in 1957, Malenkov organized an attempt at a coup against Khrushchev. In a dramatic standoff in the Kremlin, both Khrushchev and Georgy Zhukov (who had the backing of the Soviet Army) turned against Malenkov. Malenkov's attempt failed and he, together with two other prominent co-conspirators, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, who were characterized by Khrushchev at an extraordinary session of the Party Central Committee as the "Anti-Party Group", were dismissed from the Politburo. In 1961, Malenkov was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled to Kazakhstan. He became a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Ust'-Kamenogorsk in Kazakhstan.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: After his exile and eventual expulsion from the Party, Malenkov first fell into obscurity and suffered from depression due to loss of power and the quality of life. Malenkov subsequently found his demotion and dismissal a relief from the pressures of the Kremlin power struggle throughout the 1950s. Malenkov in his later years converted to Russian Orthodoxy, as did his daughter, who has since spent part of her personal wealth building two churches in rural locations. Orthodox Church publications at the time of Malenkov's death said he had been a reader (the lowest level of Russian Orthodox clergy) and a choir singer in his final years.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: In 1920, in Turkestan, Malenkov started living together with Soviet scientist Valeriya Golubtsova (15 May 1901 – 1 October 1987), daughter of Aleksei Golubtsov, former State Councilor of the Russian Empire in Nizhny Novgorod and dean of the Imperial Cadet School. Golubtsova and Malenkov never officially registered their union and remained unregistered partners for the rest of their lives. She had a direct connection to Vladimir Lenin through her mother; one of the "Nevzorov sisters" who were apprentices of Lenin and studied together with him for years, long before the Revolution. This connection helped both Golubtsova and Malenkov in their communist career. Later Golubtsova was the director of the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, a centre for nuclear power research in USSR. They had two sons and one daughter.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: The 1952 "Time" magazine cover shows Malenkov embraced by Stalin. In 1954, a delegation of the British Labour Party (including former Prime Minister Clement Attlee and former Secretary of State for Health Aneurin Bevan) was in Moscow. Sir William Goodenough Hayter, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, asked for a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Much to Hayter's surprise, not only did Khrushchev accept the proposal, but he decided to attend in the company of Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrey Vyshinsky, Nikolay Shvernik, and Malenkov.


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Such was the interest aroused in British political circles by this event that Sir Winston Churchill subsequently invited Sir William Hayter down to Chartwell so as to provide a full account of what had transpired at the meeting. Malenkov seemed "easily the most intelligent and quickest to grasp what was being said" and said "no more than he wanted to say". He was considered an "extremely agreeable neighbour at the table" and was thought to have had a "pleasant, musical voice and spoke well-educated Russian". Malenkov even recommended, quietly, that British diplomatic translator Cecil Parrott should read the novels of Leonid Andreyev, an author whose literature was at that time labeled as decadent in the USSR. Nikita Khrushchev, by contrast, struck Hayter as being "rumbustious, impetuous, loquacious, free-wheeling, and alarmingly ignorant of foreign affairs".


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Hayter thought that Khrushchev seemed "incapable of grasping Bevan's line of thought", and that Malenkov had to explain matters to him in "words of one syllable". Convinced that Malenkov was in charge, nobody in the British delegation felt much inclined to expend effort with Khrushchev. Malenkov "spoke the best Russian of any Soviet leader I have heard", his "speeches were well constructed and logical in their development", and he seemed "a man with a more Western-orientated mind".


title: Georgy Malenkov

text: Jeffrey Tambor played Malenkov in the 2017 satirical film "The Death of Stalin", in which Malenkov is portrayed as naive and meek, contrary to reports of British diplomats.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Jonathan Michael Lovitz (; born July 21, 1957) is an American actor and comedian. He was a cast member of "Saturday Night Live" from 1985 to 1990. Lovitz starred as Jay Sherman in "The Critic" and played a baseball scout in "A League of Their Own". He has appeared in 20 episodes of "The Simpsons".


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz was born on July 21, 1957, in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles, to Harold and Barbara Lovitz. His family is Jewish, and emigrated from Romania, Hungary, and Russia. His paternal grandfather, Feivel Ianculovici, left Romania around 1914. After arriving in the United States, he Americanized his name to Phillip Lovitz.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: "When I was 13, I saw Woody Allen's movie "Take The Money and Run", and I wanted to be a comedian. Then when I was 16, I saw the movie "Lenny", about Lenny Bruce, starring Dustin Hoffman. I thought the movie was so great, and I'd never heard of Lenny, so I went to the record store because I wanted to hear the real guy. Then I saw that Woody Allen had a record. I didn't know he had been a standup. So, I bought "Woody Allen: The Nightclub Years, '64-'68". I learned their routines and performed them at my college dorm. That was at U.C. Irvine. I was a drama major there. In imitating their routines, I learned a lot about writing. You learn how to write a joke. I was influenced by them a lot, the way I say something, the timing or whatever. Or Jack Benny, sometimes I'll go, 'Well...'"


title: Jon Lovitz

text: In college, Lovitz was friends with David Kudrow, brother of Lisa Kudrow, and went on a backpacking trip across Europe and Israel with him in 1978. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in drama in 1979, then studied acting with Tony Barr at the Film Actors Workshop. He became a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, where he befriended his future "SNL" castmate Phil Hartman.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz was a cast member of "Saturday Night Live" from 1985 to 1990. He later said in an interview for the book "Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live" that his time on "SNL" was the most memorable in his career. He went from having no money to being offered a $500,000 film contract. He was nominated for an Emmy Award his first two years on "Saturday Night Live". One of his most notable "SNL" characters was "Tommy Flanagan, The Pathological Liar" who used an old Humphrey Bogart line "Yeah! That's the ticket!" as a catchphrase to punctuate painfully elaborated implausible lies. His other recurring characters and impersonations included Annoying Man, Master Thespian, Tonto, Mephistopheles, Harvey Fierstein, and Michael Dukakis. In a 1986 "SNL" episode, he portrayed a virgin Trekkie, who was scripted to hang his head when asked by William Shatner if he had ever kissed a girl.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Hanukkah Harry, one of Lovitz's most memorable roles, cast him in 1989 as a Jewish contemporary of Santa Claus who lives on Mount Sinai and travels the globe with a cart flown by three donkeys to give bland gifts to Jewish boys and girls. He is asked to fill in when Santa falls ill on Christmas Eve.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: On February 15, 2015, on the "Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special", he was named by Steve Martin as one of the many "SNL" cast members who had died over the years, with the camera cutting to show Lovitz's reaction. Later, his image was seen in a montage of deceased "SNL" members, with the camera once again cutting to his now "outraged" reaction.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitzs first stint as a regular in a situation comedy was that of Mole, an investigator for a New York City district attorneys office, in the short-lived 1985–86 series "Foley Square", starring Margaret Colin.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz was a contestant on "The New Celebrity Apprentice" (also known as Celebrity Apprentice 8), playing for the charity St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. He was the sixth contestant fired, finishing in 11th place and raising $50,000 for his charity.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz has lent his voice to several cartoons and films. In "The Critic", he played the title character Jay Sherman (using his regular speaking voice). He has made several appearances on "The Simpsons—"as Marge's prom date Artie Ziff in "The Way We Was", the art teacher in "Brush with Greatness", theater director Llewellyn Sinclair and his sister who owned a daycare center in "A Streetcar Named Marge", Andre in "Homer's Triple Bypass", and numerous other appearances, including the character of Jay Sherman in the episode "A Star Is Burns", a crossover with "The Critic". He was also the voice of Radio in the Hyperion-produced, Disney-distributed animated movie "The Brave Little Toaster", and that of T.R. Chula the tarantula in Amblimation's "".


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz performed a duet with Robbie Williams on Williams' album "Swing When You're Winning" (2001), in the song "Well, Did You Evah". He also performed on the TV series "Two and a Half Men" singing "Save the Orphans" and beating Charlie (Charlie Sheen) out of the award for best jingle writer.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: He has appeared on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre in Neil Simon's play "The Dinner Party", taking over the lead role from Henry Winkler. He sang at Carnegie Hall three times (including Great Performances' "Ira Gershwin at 100: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall") and sang the national anthem at Dodger Stadium and the U.S. Open.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: On October 10, 2001, Lovitz sang a duet (with Robbie Williams) of the song "Well, Did You Evah!" at the Royal Albert Hall. The recording can be found on the "Swing When You're Winning" album.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Between 1999 and 2000 Lovitz appeared in a $33 million advertising campaign that featured a series of television commercials promoting the Yellow Pages. The comic premise was to present Lovitz as the Yellow Pages' author. One of them featured Lovitz saying, "The hardest thing to do is to come up with a simple idea that is also great. And I just thought, 'Oh, the alphabet!'"


title: Jon Lovitz

text: In 2020, Lovitz starred in commercials for Playology, a brand of toys for aging dogs. They featured him with disparaging puppies, asking for senior dogs to get their due.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz has had a long rivalry with former "NewsRadio" costar Andy Dick concerning the death of their mutual friend Phil Hartman. According to Lovitz, Dick gave Hartman's wife Brynn cocaine at a Christmas party at Hartman's house in 1997. Brynn, a recovering addict, began using drugs again, culminating in her killing Hartman and herself on May 28, 1998. When Lovitz joined the cast of "NewsRadio" as Hartman's replacement, he and Dick got into a heated argument in which Lovitz reportedly shouted "I wouldn't be here if you hadn't given Brynn coke in the first place." Lovitz later apologized to Dick for the remark.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: In early 2007, Dick approached Lovitz at a restaurant and said "I put the Phil Hartman hex on you—you're the next to die." On July 10, 2007, Lovitz got into a physical altercation with Dick at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. Lovitz demanded an apology from Dick, who refused and accused Lovitz of blaming him for Hartman's death. Lovitz then smashed Dick's head into the bar.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: In 2009, The Jon Lovitz Comedy Club location on Universal CityWalk in Universal Studios Hollywood opened. A comic short film starring Ken Davitian and featuring Lovitz was filmed there, directed by Brent Roske and written by Aaron Davitian.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: The Jon Lovitz Comedy Club in Universal Studios Hollywood was home to the first MMA Roasted standup comedy show in 2009.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: On May 29, 2011, the name was changed to the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club & Podcast Theatre. A premiere event called "Podammit" was held, in which Kevin Smith hosted a variety of six podcasts, including "Plus One 3D" with his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach; "Hollywood Babble-On" with Ralph Garman; and "Jay & Silent Bob Get Old" with Jason Mewes; as well as "The ABCs of SNL" with Lovitz himself, a six-episode "This Is Your Life"-style biographical interview about Lovitz's life and career. The Club periodically hosted other podcasts such as Rob Paulsen's "Talkin' Toons" (which subsequently left in October 2013). The Jon Lovitz Comedy Club & Podcast Theater closed on November 5, 2014.


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Lovitz resides in Beverly Hills, California. He is friends with Sean Penn and Adam Sandler. He was also friends with Penny Marshall and Phil Hartman. He has described Hartman as "the big brother I always wanted".


title: Jon Lovitz

text: Politically, Lovitz is a supporter of the Democratic Party. However, he was an outspoken critic of former President Barack Obama. He called Obama a "fucking asshole" and criticized him for claiming the rich did not pay their share of taxes. Lovitz said: "He had nothing … and the guy ends up being at Harvard. He's the president of the United States. And now he's like, 'Fuck me and everyone who made it like me'."


title: Jon Lovitz

text: In June 2021, Lovitz criticized cancel culture and compared it to McCarthyism. He claimed that it made comedians' jobs increasingly difficult, saying, "If you don't have the ability to laugh at yourself, don't go to a comedy club," and "If you're watching TV and you don't like the show, change the channel. It's very simple."


title: Egyptian language

text: The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century. Egyptian is one of the earliest written languages, first being recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4000 years. Its classical form is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period. By the time of classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, and by the Roman era it had diversified into the Coptic dialects. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Egyptian language belongs to the Afroasiatic language family. Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afroasiatic are its fusional morphology, nonconcatenative morphology, a series of emphatic consonants, a three-vowel system , nominal feminine suffix *"-at", nominal "m-", adjectival *"-ī" and characteristic personal verbal affixes. Of the other Afroasiatic branches, linguists have variously suggested that the Egyptian language shares its greatest affinities with Berber and Semitic languages, particularly Hebrew. However, other scholars have argued that the Ancient Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with north-eastern African regions.


title: Egyptian language

text: In Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants developed into pharyngeal : Egyptian "ꜥr.t" 'portal', Semitic "dalt" 'door'. Afroasiatic merged with Egyptian , , , and in the dialect on which the written language was based, but it was preserved in other Egyptian varieties. Original palatalise to in some environments and are preserved as in others.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Egyptian language has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots, in contrast to the Semitic preference for triradical roots. Egyptian is probably more conservative, and Semitic likely underwent later regularizations converting roots into the triradical pattern.


title: Egyptian language

text: Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is very different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic languages in general, and Semitic languages in particular. There are multiple possibilities: Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before it was recorded; the Afroasiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semito-centric approach; or, as G. W. Tsereteli suggests, Afroasiatic is an allogenetic rather than a genetic group of languages.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Coptic alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet, with adaptations for Egyptian phonology. It was first developed in the Ptolemaic period, and gradually replaced the Demotic script in about the 4th to 5th centuries of the Christian era.


title: Egyptian language

text: The term "Archaic Egyptian" is sometimes reserved for the earliest use of hieroglyphs, from the late fourth through the early third millennia BC. At the earliest stage, around 3300 BC, hieroglyphs were not a fully developed writing system, being at a transitional stage of proto-writing; over the time leading up to the 27th century BC, grammatical features such as nisba formation can be seen to occur.


title: Egyptian language

text: Old Egyptian is dated from the oldest known complete sentence, including a finite verb, which has been found. Discovered in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen (dated c. 2690 BC), the seal impression reads:


title: Egyptian language

text: Extensive texts appear from about 2600 BC. The Pyramid Texts are the largest body of literature written in this phase of the language. One of its distinguishing characteristics is the tripling of ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives to indicate the plural. Overall, it does not differ significantly from Middle Egyptian, the classical stage of the language, though it is based on a different dialect.


title: Egyptian language

text: In the period of the 3rd dynasty (c. 2650 – c. 2575 BC), many of the principles of hieroglyphic writing were regularized. From that time on, until the script was supplanted by an early version of Coptic (about the third and fourth centuries), the system remained virtually unchanged. Even the number of signs used remained constant at about 700 for more than 2000 years.


title: Egyptian language

text: Middle Egyptian was spoken for about 700 years, beginning around 2000 BC. As the classical variant of Egyptian, Middle Egyptian is the best-documented variety of the language, and has attracted the most attention by far from Egyptology. Whilst most Middle Egyptian is seen written on monuments by hieroglyphs, it was also written using a cursive variant, and the related hieratic.


title: Egyptian language

text: Middle Egyptian first became available to modern scholarship with the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the early 19th century. The first grammar of Middle Egyptian was published by Adolf Erman in 1894, surpassed in 1927 by Alan Gardiner's work. Middle Egyptian has been well-understood since then, although certain points of the verbal inflection remained open to revision until the mid-20th century, notably due to the contributions of Hans Jakob Polotsky.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Middle Egyptian stage is taken to have ended around the 14th century BC, giving rise to Late Egyptian. This transition was taking place in the later period of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (known as the Amarna Period).


title: Egyptian language

text: Middle Egyptian was retained as a literary standard language, and in this usage survived until the Christianisation of Roman Egypt in the 4th century.


title: Egyptian language

text: Late Egyptian, appearing around 1350 BC, is represented by a large body of religious and secular literature, comprising such examples as the "Story of Wenamun", the love poems of the Chester–Beatty I papyrus, and the "Instruction of Any". Instructions became a popular literary genre of the New Kingdom, which took the form of advice on proper behavior. Late Egyptian was also the language of the New Kingdom administration.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Hebrew Bible contains some words, terms and names that are thought by scholars to be Egyptian in origin. An example of this is Zaphnath-Paaneah, the Egyptian name given to Joseph.


title: Egyptian language

text: Demotic is the name given to the Egyptian script used to write both the Egyptian vernacular of the Late Period from the eight century BC as well as texts in archaic forms of the language. It was written in a script derived from a northern variety of hieratic writing. The last evidence of archaic Egyptian in Demotic is a graffito written in 452 BC, but Demotic was used to write vernacular before and in parallel with the Coptic script throughout the early Ptolemaic Kingdom until it was supplanted by the Coptic alphabet entirely.


title: Egyptian language

text: Coptic is the name given to the late Egyptian vernacular when it was written in a Greek-based alphabet, the Coptic alphabet; it flourished from the time of Early Christianity (c. 31/33–324) but first appeared during the Hellenistic period . It survived into the medieval period.


title: Egyptian language

text: By the 16th century Coptic was dwindling rapidly due to the persecution of Coptic Christians under the Mamluks. It probably survived in the Egyptian countryside as a spoken language for several centuries after that. Coptic survives as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Coptic Catholic Church.


title: Egyptian language

text: Most hieroglyphic Egyptian texts are written in a literary prestige register rather than the vernacular speech variety of their author. As a result, dialectical differences are not apparent in written Egyptian until the adoption of the Coptic alphabet. Nevertheless, it is clear that these differences existed before the Coptic period. In one Late Egyptian letter (dated c. 1200 BC), a scribe jokes that his colleague's writing is incoherent like "the speech of a Delta man with a man of Elephantine.”


title: Egyptian language

text: Recently, some evidence of internal dialects has been found in pairs of similar words in Egyptian that, based on similarities with later dialects of Coptic, may be derived from northern and southern dialects of Egyptian. Written Coptic has five major dialects, which differ mainly in graphic conventions, most notably the southern Saidic dialect, the main classical dialect, and the northern Bohairic dialect, currently used in Coptic Church services.


title: Egyptian language

text: Most surviving texts in the Egyptian language are written on stone in hieroglyphs. The native name for Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is "" ("writing of the gods' words").


title: Egyptian language

text: In antiquity, most texts were written on perishable papyrus in hieratic and (later) demotic. There was also a form of cursive hieroglyphs, used for religious documents on papyrus, such as the "Book of the Dead" of the Twentieth Dynasty; it was simpler to write than the hieroglyphs in stone inscriptions, but it was not as cursive as hieratic and lacked the wide use of ligatures. Additionally, there was a variety of stone-cut hieratic, known as "lapidary hieratic".


title: Egyptian language

text: Hieroglyphs are employed in two ways in Egyptian texts: as ideograms to represent the idea depicted by the pictures and, more commonly, as phonograms to represent their phonetic value.


title: Egyptian language

text: As the phonetic realisation of Egyptian cannot be known with certainty, Egyptologists use a system of transliteration to denote each sound that could be represented by a uniliteral hieroglyph.


title: Egyptian language

text: Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argued that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality" although he acknowledged the geographical location of Egypt made it a receptacle for many influences.


title: Egyptian language

text: While the consonantal phonology of the Egyptian language may be reconstructed, the exact phonetics are unknown, and there are varying opinions on how to classify the individual phonemes. In addition, because Egyptian is recorded over a full 2000 years, the Archaic and Late stages being separated by the amount of time that separates Old Latin from Modern Italian, significant phonetic changes must have occurred during that lengthy time frame.


title: Egyptian language

text: Phonologically, Egyptian contrasted labial, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants. Egyptian also contrasted voiceless and emphatic consonants, as with other Afroasiatic languages, but exactly how the emphatic consonants were realised is unknown. Early research had assumed that the opposition in stops was one of voicing, but it is now thought to be either one of tenuis and emphatic consonants, as in many Semitic languages, or one of aspirated and ejective consonants, as in many Cushitic languages.


title: Egyptian language

text: Since vowels were not written until Coptic, reconstructions of the Egyptian vowel system are much more uncertain and rely mainly on evidence from Coptic and records of Egyptian words, especially proper nouns, in other languages/writing systems. Also, scribal errors provide evidence of changes in pronunciation over time.


title: Egyptian language

text: The actual pronunciations reconstructed by such means are used only by a few specialists in the language. For all other purposes, the Egyptological pronunciation is used, but it often bears little resemblance to what is known of how Egyptian was pronounced.


title: Egyptian language

text: The following consonants are reconstructed for Archaic (before 2600 BC) and Old Egyptian (2686–2181 BC), with IPA equivalents in square brackets if they differ from the usual transcription scheme:


title: Egyptian language

text: In Middle Egyptian (2055–1650 BC), a number of consonantal shifts take place. By the beginning of the Middle Kingdom period, and had merged, and the graphemes and are used interchangeably. In addition, had become word-initially in an unstressed syllable ( > "colour") and after a stressed vowel ( > '[the god] Apis').


title: Egyptian language

text: In Late Egyptian (1069–700 BC), the phonemes "d ḏ g" gradually merge with their counterparts "t ṯ k" ( > Akkadian transcription "ti-ba-an" 'dbn-weight'). Also, "ṯ ḏ" often become , but they are retained in many lexemes; "ꜣ" becomes ; and become at the end of a stressed syllable and eventually null word-finally: > Akkadian transcription -"pi-ta" 'bow'.


title: Egyptian language

text: More changes occur in the 1st millennium BC and the first centuries AD, leading to Coptic (1st–17th centuries AD). In Sahidic "ẖ ḫ ḥ" had merged into "š" (most often from "ḫ") and (most often "ẖ ḥ"). Bohairic and Akhmimic are more conservative and have a velar fricative ( in Bohairic, in Akhmimic). Pharyngeal "*ꜥ" had merged into glottal after it had affected the quality of the surrounding vowels. is not indicated orthographically unless it follows a stressed vowel; then, it is marked by doubling the vowel letter (except in Bohairic): Akhmimic , Sahidic and Lycopolitan "šoʔp", Bohairic "šoʔp" 'to be' < "ḫpr.w" * 'has become'. The phoneme was probably pronounced as a fricative , becoming after a stressed vowel in syllables that had been closed in earlier Egyptian (compare < 'gold' and < * 'horn'). The phonemes occur only in Greek loanwords, with rare exceptions triggered by a nearby : < "ꜥ.t n.t sbꜣ.w" 'school'.


title: Egyptian language

text: Earlier "*d ḏ g q" are preserved as ejective "t' c' k' k" before vowels in Coptic. Although the same graphemes are used for the pulmonic stops (), the existence of the former may be inferred because the stops are allophonically aspirated before stressed vowels and sonorant consonants. In Bohairic, the allophones are written with the special graphemes , but other dialects did not mark aspiration: Sahidic , Bohairic 'the sun'.


title: Egyptian language

text: Thus, Bohairic does not mark aspiration for reflexes of older "*d ḏ g q": Sahidic and Bohairic 'horn'. Also, the definite article is unaspirated when the next word begins with a glottal stop: Bohairic 'the account'.


title: Egyptian language

text: Vowels are always short in unstressed syllables ( = 'first') and long in open stressed syllables ( = 'man'), but they can be either short or long in closed stressed syllables ( = 'we', = 'to stay').


title: Egyptian language

text: In the Late New Kingdom, after Ramses II, around 1200 BC, changes to (like the Canaanite shift), '(the god) Horus' > (Akkadian transcription: -ḫuru). , therefore, changes to : 'tree' > (Akkadian transcription: -sini).


title: Egyptian language

text: In the Early New Kingdom, short stressed changes to : "Menes" > (Akkadian transcription: ma-né-e). Later, probably 1000–800 BC, a short stressed changes to : "Tanis" was borrowed into Hebrew as *ṣuʕn but would become transcribed as during the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


title: Egyptian language

text: Unstressed vowels, especially after a stress, become : 'good' > (Akkadian transcription -na-a-pa). changes to next to and : 'soldier' > (earlier Akkadian transcription: ú-i-ú, later: ú-e-eḫ).


title: Egyptian language

text: In Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, Late Egyptian stressed becomes and becomes , but are unchanged in the other dialects: 'brother' > Sahaidic and Bohairic , Akhminic, Lycopolitan and Fayyumic ; 'name' > > Sahaidic and Bohairic , Akhminic, Lycopolitan and Fayyumic . However, Sahaidic and Bohairic preserve , and Fayyumic renders it as in the presence of guttural fricatives: 'ten thousand' > Sahaidic, Akhmimic and Lycopolitan , Bohairic , Fayyumic . In Akhmimic and Lycopolitan, becomes before etymological : 'river' >


title: Egyptian language

text: Old surfaces as after nasals and occasionally other consonants: 'god' > has acquired phonemic status, as is evidenced by minimal pairs like 'to approach' < ẖnn vs. 'inside' < ẖnw. An etymological > often surfaces as next to and after etymological pharyngeals: < 'street' (Semitic loan).


title: Egyptian language

text: Most Coptic dialects have two phonemic vowels in unstressed position. Unstressed vowels generally became , written as or null ( in Bohairic and Fayyumic word-finally), but pretonic unstressed /a/ occurs as a reflex of earlier unstressed near an etymological pharyngeal, velar or sonorant ('to become many' < ꜥšꜣ ) or an unstressed . Pretonic [i] is underlyingly : Sahidic 'ibis' < h(j)bj.w .


title: Egyptian language

text: Earlier Egyptian has the syllable structure CV(ː)(C) in which V is long in open stressed syllables and short elsewhere. In addition, CVːC or CVCC can occur in word-final, stressed position. However, CVːC occurs only in the infinitive of biconsonantal verbal roots, CVCC only in some plurals.


title: Egyptian language

text: In later Egyptian, stressed CVːC, CVCC, and CV become much more common because of the loss of final dentals and glides.


title: Egyptian language

text: Earlier Egyptian stresses one of the last two syllables. According to some scholars, that is a development from a stage in Proto-Egyptian in which the third-last syllable could be stressed, which was lost as open posttonic syllables lost their vowels: > 'transformation'.


title: Egyptian language

text: As a convention, Egyptologists make use of an "Egyptological pronunciation" in English: the consonants are given fixed values, and vowels are inserted according to essentially arbitrary rules. Two of these consonants known as alef and ayin are generally pronounced as the vowel . Yodh is pronounced , "w" . Between other consonants, is then inserted. Thus, for example, the Egyptian name Ramesses is most accurately transliterated as ("Ra is the one who bore him") and pronounced as /rɑmɛssu/.


title: Egyptian language

text: In transcription, , , and all represent consonants. For example, the name Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC) was written in Egyptian as ("living image of Amun"). Experts have assigned generic sounds to these values as a matter of convenience, which is an artificial pronunciation and should not be mistaken for how Egyptian was ever pronounced at any time. So although "twt-ꜥnḫ-ı͗mn" is pronounced in modern Egyptological pronunciation, in his lifetime, it was likely to be pronounced something like *, transliterable as "təwā́təʾ-ʿā́nəkh-ʾamā́nəʾ".


title: Egyptian language

text: Egyptian is fairly typical for an Afroasiatic language in that at the heart of its vocabulary is most commonly a root of three consonants, but there are sometimes only two consonants in the root: (, "sun"--the is thought to have been something like a voiced pharyngeal fricative). Larger roots are also common and can have up to five consonants: ("be upside-down").


title: Egyptian language

text: Vowels and other consonants are added to the root to derive different meanings, as Arabic, Hebrew, and other Afroasiatic languages still do. However, because vowels and sometimes glides are not written in any Egyptian script except Coptic, it can be difficult to reconstruct the actual forms of words. Thus, orthographic ("to choose"), for example, can represent the stative (whose endings can be left unexpressed), the imperfective forms or even a verbal noun ("a choosing").


title: Egyptian language

text: Egyptian nouns can be masculine or feminine (the latter is indicated, as with other Afroasiatic languages, by adding a ) and singular or plural ( / ), or dual ( / ).


title: Egyptian language

text: Articles, both definite and indefinite, do not occur until Late Egyptian but are used widely thereafter.


title: Egyptian language

text: Egyptian has three different types of personal pronouns: suffix, enclitic (called "dependent" by Egyptologists) and independent pronouns. There are also a number of verbal endings added to the infinitive to form the stative and are regarded by some linguists as a "fourth" set of personal pronouns. They bear close resemblance to their Semitic counterparts. The three main sets of personal pronouns are as follows:


title: Egyptian language

text: Demonstrative pronouns have separate masculine and feminine singular forms and common plural forms for both genders:


title: Egyptian language

text: Finally, are interrogative pronouns. They bear a close resemblance to their Semitic and Berber counterparts:


title: Egyptian language

text: Finite verbs convey person, tense/aspect, mood and voice. Each is indicated by a set of affixal morphemes attached to the verb: For example, the basic conjugation is ("to hear") is "sḏm.f" ("he hears").


title: Egyptian language

text: Non-finite verbs occur without a subject and are the infinitive, the participles and the negative infinitive, which "" calls "negatival complement". There are two main tenses/aspects in Egyptian: past and temporally-unmarked imperfective and aorist forms. The latter are determined from their syntactic context.


title: Egyptian language

text: Adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify: ("[the] good man") and " " ("[the] good woman").


title: Egyptian language

text: However, when they are used independently as a predicate in an adjectival phrase, as ("[the] god [is] great", lit. "great [is the] god"), adjectives precede the nouns they modify.


title: Egyptian language

text: Adverbs, in Egyptian, are at the end of a sentence: For example, in ("[the] god went there", lit. "went [the] god there"), "ı͗m" ("there") is the adverb.


title: Egyptian language

text: Old Egyptian, Classical Egyptian, and Middle Egyptian have verb-subject-object as the basic word order. For example, the equivalent of "he opens the door" would be ("opens he [the] door"). The so-called construct state combines two or more nouns to express the genitive, as in Semitic and Berber languages. However, that changed in the later stages of the language, including Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic.


title: Egyptian language

text: As with other Afroasiatic languages, Egyptian uses two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. It also uses three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural. However, later Egyptian has a tendency to lose the dual as a productive form.


title: Egyptian language

text: The Egyptian language survived through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period in the form of the Coptic language. Coptic survived past the 16th century only as an isolated vernacular and as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches. Coptic also had an enduring effect on Egyptian Arabic, which replaced Coptic as the main daily language in Egypt; the Coptic substratum in Egyptian Arabic appears in certain aspects of syntax and to a lesser degree in vocabulary and phonology.


title: Egyptian language

text: In antiquity, Egyptian exerted some influence on Classical Greek, so that a number of Egyptian loanwords into Greek survive into modern usage. Examples include:


title: Egyptian language

text: The etymological root of "Egypt" is the same as "Copts", ultimately from the Late Egyptian name of Memphis, "Hikuptah", a continuation of Middle Egyptian (lit. "temple of the ka (soul) of Ptah").


title: Egyptian language

text: Important Note: The old grammars and dictionaries of E. A. Wallis Budge have long been considered obsolete by Egyptologists, even though these books are still available for purchase.


title: Michael Palin

text: Sir Michael Edward Palin (; born 5 May 1943) is an English actor, comedian, writer, television presenter, and public speaker. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. Since 1980, he has made a number of travel documentaries.


title: Michael Palin

text: Palin wrote most of his comedic material with fellow Python member Terry Jones. Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows including the "Ken Dodd Show", "The Frost Report", and "Do Not Adjust Your Set". Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "Argument Clinic", "Dead Parrot sketch", "The Lumberjack Song", "The Spanish Inquisition", "Bicycle Repair Man" and "The Fish-Slapping Dance". He also regularly played a Gumby.


title: Michael Palin

text: Palin continued to work with Jones away from Python, co-writing "Ripping Yarns". He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as "A Fish Called Wanda" (1988), for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He also began a new career as a travel writer and travel documentarian in programmes broadcast on the BBC. His journeys have taken him across the world, including the North and South Poles, the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, and Brazil; in 2018, he visited North Korea, documenting his visit to the isolated country in a series broadcast on Channel 5.


title: Michael Palin

text: In a 2005 poll to find "The Comedians' Comedian", Palin was voted the 30th favourite by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. From 2009 to 2012 he was President of the Royal Geographical Society. On 12 May 2013, Palin was made a BAFTA fellow, the highest honour that is conferred by the organisation. Having been appointed a CBE for services to television in the 2000 New Year Honours, Palin received a knighthood in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to travel, culture and geography.


title: Michael Palin

text: Palin was born in Ranmoor, Sheffield, the second child and only son of Edward Moreton Palin (1900–1977) and Mary Rachel Lockhart (née Ovey; 1903–1990). His father was a Shrewsbury and Cambridge-educated engineer working for a steel firm. His maternal grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Lockhart Ovey, DSO, was High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1927.


title: Michael Palin

text: Palin was educated at Birkdale and Shrewsbury School. His sister Angela was nine years his senior; despite the age gap the two had a close relationship until her suicide in 1987. Palin is of mixed English and Irish Catholic heritage; he has ancestral roots in Letterkenny, County Donegal. His great-grandmother fled the Irish Famine and was adopted by a wealthy English family.


title: Michael Palin

text: When he was five years old, Palin had his first acting experience at Birkdale playing Martha Cratchit in a school performance of "A Christmas Carol". At the age of 10, Palin, still interested in acting, made a comedy monologue and read a Shakespeare play to his mother while playing all the parts. After leaving Shrewsbury in 1962, he went on to read modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford. With fellow student Robert Hewison he performed and wrote, for the first time, comedy material at a university Christmas party. Terry Jones, also a student in Oxford, saw that performance and began writing with Hewison and Palin. That year Palin joined the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society Players and first gained fame when he won an acting award at a Co-op drama festival. He also performed and wrote in the Oxford Revue (called the Et ceteras) with Jones.


title: Michael Palin

text: In 1966, Palin married Helen Gibbins, whom he first met in 1959 on holiday in Southwold in Suffolk. This meeting was later fictionalised in Palin's teleplay for the 1987 BBC television drama "East of Ipswich". The couple have three children, Thomas (born 1969), William (born 1971), and Rachel (born 1975), and four grandchildren. Rachel is a BBC TV director, whose work includes "". William is Director of Conservation at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, and oversaw the 2018–19 restoration of the Painted Hall. A photograph of William as a baby briefly appeared in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" as "Sir Not-appearing-in-this-film". His nephew is the theatre designer Jeremy Herbert. Palin is an agnostic. He moved to Gospel Oak, London, in the 1960s.


title: Michael Palin

text: After finishing university in 1965, Palin became a presenter on a comedy pop show called "Now!" for the television contractor Television Wales and the West. At the same time, Palin was contacted by Jones, who had left university a year earlier, for assistance in writing a theatrical documentary about sex through the ages. Although this project was eventually abandoned, it brought Palin and Jones together as a writing duo and led them to write comedy for various BBC programmes, such as "The Ken Dodd Show", "The Billy Cotton Bandshow", and "The Illustrated Weekly Hudd". They collaborated in writing lyrics for an album by Barry Booth called "Diversions". They were also in the team of writers working for "The Frost Report", whose other members included Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Monty Python members Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle.


title: Michael Palin

text: Although the members of Monty Python had already encountered each other over the years, "The Frost Report" was the first time all the British members of Monty Python (its sixth member, Terry Gilliam, was at that time an American citizen) worked together. During the run of "The Frost Report" the Palin/Jones team contributed material to two shows starring John Bird: "The Late Show" and "A Series of Birds". For "A Series of Birds" the Palin/Jones team had their first experience of writing narrative instead of the short sketches they were accustomed to conceiving.


title: Michael Palin

text: Following "The Frost Report" the Palin/Jones team worked both as actors and writers on the show "Twice a Fortnight" with Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Jonathan Lynn, and the successful children's comedy show "Do Not Adjust Your Set" with Idle and David Jason. The show also featured musical numbers by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, including future Monty Python musical collaborator Neil Innes. The animations for "Do Not Adjust Your Set" were made by Terry Gilliam. Eager to work with Palin sans Jones, Cleese later asked him to perform in "How to Irritate People" together with Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The Palin/Jones team were reunited for "The Complete and Utter History of Britain".


title: Michael Palin

text: On the strength of their work on "The Frost Report" and other programmes, Cleese and Chapman had been offered a show by the BBC, but Cleese was reluctant to do a two-man show for various reasons, among them Chapman's reputedly difficult personality. During this period Cleese contacted Palin about doing the show that ultimately became "Monty Python's Flying Circus". At the same time the success of "Do Not Adjust Your Set" had led Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam to be offered their own series and, while it was still in production, Palin agreed to Cleese's proposal and brought along Idle, Jones and Gilliam. Thus the formation of the Monty Python troupe has been referred to as a result of Cleese's desire to work with Palin and the chance circumstances that brought the other four members into the fold.