title: Hans Island

text: In 1972, a team consisting of personnel from the Canadian Hydrographic Service and Danish personnel working in the Nares Strait determined the geographic coordinates for Hans Island. During negotiations between Canada and Denmark on their maritime boundary in 1973, both states claimed Hans Island was part of their territory. No agreement was reached between the two governments on the issue.


title: Hans Island

text: The maritime boundary immediately north and south of Hans Island was established in the continental shelf treaty ratified by Greenland and Canada and then submitted to the United Nations on 17 December 1973, in force since 13 March 1974. At the time, it was the longest shelf boundary treaty ever negotiated and may have been the first ever continental shelf boundary developed by a computer.


title: Hans Island

text: The treaty lists 127 points (latitude and longitude) from Davis Strait to the end of Robeson Channel, where the Nares Strait runs into the Lincoln Sea, to draw geodesic lines between, to form the border. The treaty does not, however, draw a line from point 122 () to point 123 (), a distance of , because Hans Island is situated in between those two points.


title: Hans Island

text: In 1984, Iqaluit based Kenn Harper, a historian and writer for "Nunatsiaq News", wrote an article about Hans Island. It was printed in "Hainang", a local newspaper in Qaanaaq in northwestern Greenland. This article was picked up by a Danish newspaper in Copenhagen and by CBC Radio in Canada.


title: Hans Island

text: This article was sparked because of a chance encounter on the ice near Resolute, in the Canadian Arctic in the autumn of 1983. According to Harper, he met a man wearing a hat with bold capitals around the side of the hat saying "Hans Island, N.W.T." This man was a scientist with Dome Petroleum who had just spent the summer on the island doing ice research. Dome Petroleum did research on and around the island from 1980 to 1983.


title: Hans Island

text: Simultaneously, the Danish and Canadian governments were in the process of signing a cooperation agreement in relation to the marine environment in the Nares Strait. The agreement was signed and put into force on 26 August 1983. The Agreement addresses protection of the marine environment of the waters lying between Canada and Greenland, particularly with respect to preparedness measures as a contingency against pollution incidents resulting from offshore hydrocarbon exploration or exploitation and from shipping activities that may affect the marine environment.


title: Hans Island

text: One of the items also discussed was the possibility of establishing a reciprocal arrangement for processing applications to conduct research on and around Hans Island. This was never signed; however, Canadian John Munro, at the time Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and Dane Tom Høyem, at the time Minister for Greenland, agreed, in common interest, to avoid acts that might prejudice future negotiations.


title: Hans Island

text: In 1984, the Danish Minister for Greenland planted the Danish flag on the island and left a little message saying " (). It is also said he left a bottle of brandy; however, this seems to have been Schnapps, which, unlike brandy, is a traditional Danish spirit. It is commonly told, internally in the Royal Danish Navy, that it was specifically a bottle of Gammel Dansk, which translates literally to 'Old Danish'. The Canadians have reciprocated with their own sign, the flag of Canada and a bottle of Canadian Club.


title: Hans Island

text: Though CBC and others had done some reporting in the 1980s, the dispute came to popular attention through Canadian press stories during late March 2004. Within days, it spread to other newspapers worldwide.


title: Hans Island

text: On 25 March 2004, when Adrian Humphreys of the Canadian "National Post" newspaper wrote an article entitled "Five-year plan to 'put footprints in the snow' and assert northern sovereignty", Humphreys made a brief mention of the dispute over Hans Island, and that the Danes had sent warships to the island.


title: Hans Island

text: The Arctic sea region has long been a subject of the dispute. In this matter, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Russia, and Norway share a common interest because they regard parts of the Arctic seas as "national waters". The United States and most European Union countries, on the other hand, officially regard the region as international waters. Further items in the Canadian media led to the issue being picked up by international news organizations.


title: Hans Island

text: The 2004 Canadian budget was introduced on 23 March 2004, by the government of Canada, two days before the issue gained widespread attention. It proposed minimal increases to spending on national defence. The issue of Hans Island was raised in the Canadian Parliament by opposition foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day to highlight the government's failure to provide more funding for the military.


title: Hans Island

text: A new article by Adrian Humphreys on 30 March 2004, also in the "National Post", entitled "Danes summon envoy over Arctic fight—the solution of the dispute is not going to be military", drew even more attention to the issue. The article claimed Brian Herman, Canada's only diplomat in Denmark (ambassador Alfonso Gagliano having been recently recalled as a result of an unrelated Canadian scandal), was called before the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to comment about his country's intentions in the dispute, which had, according to the article, recently been inflamed by Danish sailors occupying Hans Island.


title: Hans Island

text: On 31 March 2004, the Danish and Canadian governments denied Herman or any other Canadian official was summoned to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both governments stated the dispute was a long-standing issue, and nothing had changed in the matter.


title: Hans Island

text: A Canadian military exercise, named "Narwhal 04", inflamed the issue further. However, this exercise had been in the planning stage since September 2003, and it took place around Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, south of Hans Island. The Canadian military denied the exercise had anything to do with the Danish–Canadian territorial dispute. The exercise took place from 9 to 30 August 2004, involving about 160 soldiers from the army, various aircraft, helicopters and one frigate, . About 600 Canadian Forces personnel were involved in total.


title: Hans Island

text: A new development came to light after Canadian Defence Minister Bill Graham visited the island on 20 July 2005. Peter Taksø-Jensen, the head of the international law department at Denmark's foreign ministry, said the following in an interview with Reuters on 25 July in response to the event:


title: Hans Island

text: On 18 August 2005, Canadian frigate left Halifax, Nova Scotia for an Arctic cruise. Canadian officials said the month-long patrol was unrelated to the Hans Island dispute. The s and were also scheduled to patrol the Arctic in 2005.


title: Hans Island

text: In July 2007, owing to updated satellite imagery, Canadian authorities realized the line constructed as a basis for the maritime boundary (but not for land) would have run roughly across the middle of the island, but the boundary did not "move" as that required a bilateral agreement by the two states for which negotiations continued.


title: Hans Island

text: The two countries maintained a sense of humour in the dispute. Peter Taksøe-Jensen has stated "when Danish military go there, they leave a bottle of snaps. And when Canadian military forces come there, they leave a bottle of Canadian Club and a sign saying, 'Welcome to Canada.'"


title: Hans Island

text: Negotiations in 2012 between Canada and Denmark, not yet finalized, call for either a condominium or splitting the disputed island's sovereignty in half.


title: Hans Island

text: On 23 May 2018, Canada and Denmark announced the creation of a Joint Task Force to determine the boundary between Canada and Greenland, including the fate of Hans Island.


title: Hans Island

text: "Google fight" or "Google war" is the name given to a number of advertisements on the Internet search engine Google which promoted either Danish or Canadian sovereignty over Hans Island.


title: Hans Island

text: According to an article in the "Ottawa Citizen" on 27 July 2005, Toronto resident Rick Broadhead saw an advertisement on Google stating "Hans Island is Greenland. Greenland natives have used the island for centuries" and which linked to a Danish foreign affairs webpage that stated the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent a note to Canada's ambassador to Denmark on 25 July 2005, expressing Denmark's regret "the Canadian Minister of National Defence had paid a visit to Hans Island without prior notification of the Danish Government". Poul Erik Dam Kristensen, Denmark's ambassador to Canada, told the press the paid advertisement was not a Danish government initiative and whoever placed it was acting alone.


title: Hans Island

text: According to the article, this prompted Broadhead to put up his own advertisement on Google which linked to his own site, which promoted the Canadian claim to the island, on 26 July.


title: Hans Island

text: <mapframe text="The international border on Hans Island after the 2022 treaty. The balance is 40% Canada and 60% Denmark." latitude="80.826389" longitude="-66.458333" zoom="12" width="300" height="300" align="right">


title: Hans Island

text: On 11 June 2022, the Danish, Greenlandic, Canadian, and Nunavut governments agreed to split Hans Island in half after 17 years of negotiations. On 14 June 2022, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Danish foreign affairs minister Jeppe Kofod, and prime minister of Greenland Múte Bourup Egede signed an agreement to divide the island. The treaty will take effect after the Parliament of Canada, the Folketing (Parliament of Denmark), the Inatsisartut (Parliament of Greenland) and the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut have each voted to approve it. By this, Canada and the Danish Realm, through Greenland, will have an international land border of , which follows a rift, forming a halfcircle with the westernmost part around the middle, in the surface of the island that runs from north to south near the centre of the island. On ratification, the island will contain the third shortest land border between countries, and will create a second land neighbour for Canada and the Danish Realm, each of which only had one, with the United States and Germany respectively. It will also create the most northerly international land border in the world, as well as the third land border between European and American countries, the previous sole two being between French Guiana belonging to France and the South American countries Brazil and Suriname.


title: Little Fockers

text: Little Fockers (known as Meet the Parents: Little Fockers in the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia) is a 2010 American comedy film and the third and final film in the "Meet the Parents" film series, serving as a sequel to "Meet the Parents" (2000) and "Meet the Fockers" (2004). The film stars Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner, Teri Polo, Jessica Alba, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.


title: Little Fockers

text: After the commercial success of the first two films in the franchise, both De Niro and Stiller received a remuneration of $20 million for their roles in "Little Fockers".


title: Little Fockers

text: In addition to the original cast, "Little Fockers" features Jessica Alba, Laura Dern, Kevin Hart, and Harvey Keitel. Although the film was a box office success, grossing over $310 million worldwide, it earned less than its predecessors and was critically panned.


title: Little Fockers

text: Five years after the events of the previous film, Gaylord "Greg" Focker is preparing to celebrate his twins Samantha and Henry's fifth birthday party. Things seem to go awry when Greg's father-in-law Jack Byrnes visits. Recently, he has been diagnosed with a heart condition and become embittered by his daughter Debbie's divorce from her husband Bob for cheating on her with a nurse. Jack's original plan was to declare Bob his successor as head of the Byrnes family, but he decides to pass the role to Greg, naming him "The Godfocker".


title: Little Fockers

text: Despite Greg reluctantly accepting the role, Jack resumes his spying on him and begins to suspect him of infidelity when he sees him with drug representative Andi Garcia, who openly flirts with him. This with the presence of Sustengo erection pills in Greg's house prompts Jack to think he is no longer sexually attracted to Pam, his wife. Furthermore, he starts to doubt his ability to provide for his family when he's initially reluctant to send his children to a private school.


title: Little Fockers

text: During a medical conference promoting Sustengo, Greg meets Bob at a bar, who tells him of Jack's original intention to name him as successor, "The Bobfather". His relief and happiness at leaving Jack's family makes Greg slightly uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Jack speaks to Pam about the possibility of divorcing Greg and renewing her relationship with her ex-fiancé, Kevin Rawley.


title: Little Fockers

text: Eventually, following a confrontation at a clinic, Greg escapes to his and Pam's unfinished new house, where Andi turns up. She tries to cheer him up with Chinese food and wine, but she drinks too much (also taking many erection pills), making an eccentric, extremely aggressive sexual pass on Greg. Jack, looking for him to apologize and bring him home, pulls up to the house and sees through the window what looks like Greg and Andi having sex. Although, he is actually trying to rebuff Andi's advances. Disgusted, Jack leaves, and tells Dina and Pam that he couldn't find him.


title: Little Fockers

text: Greg's parents, Bernie and Roz, rejoin the family at the twins' birthday party the next day. Enraged at Greg's apparent infidelity, Jack engages him in a physical fight, despite Greg insisting that Andi was drunk and he was rejecting her. The fight ends with Jack having a heart attack and collapsing.


title: Little Fockers

text: Greg quickly takes charge of the situation, looking after Jack. As paramedics take him away, Jack quietly admits that he believes him after observing his carotid artery remained stable while Greg was proclaiming his innocence. Impressed with his integrity and quick thinking, Jack approves of him to be "The Gregfocker."


title: Little Fockers

text: Four months later, on Christmas Day, Greg and Pam's parents come to spend Christmas with them in their new house. Greg's parents (being Jewish) give Jack a kippah as a present, informing him that while they were nursing him back to health they traced his family roots and discovered that he is part Jewish (which does not impress Jack).


title: Little Fockers

text: Bernie informs Greg and Pam that he and Roz have sold their Miami home and are moving to Chicago, only two houses down from theirs. Jack and Dina decide they will move too, because they also want to be close to their grandchildren. Greg and Pam try to wean their respective parents off the idea. During the mid-credits scene, Jack views YouTube videos of Greg publicly mocking Jack during a speech promoting Sustengo.


title: Little Fockers

text: Writer John Hamburg stated the film would deal with "themes of death and divorce and all these real things that, as we get older, we start to think about, but in a really comical way."


title: Little Fockers

text: Outside the United States, this is the first film in the series to be released by Paramount Pictures, whose 2006 acquisition of the DreamWorks back catalog included co-ownership of and sequel rights to the "Meet the Parents" franchise. DreamWorks remains a copyright co-holder, as "DW Studios," with Universal Pictures.


title: Little Fockers

text: On August 24, 2010, it was announced that Dustin Hoffman would be reprising his role as Greg's father, Bernie Focker. The studio failed to reach salary terms with Hoffman until principal photography had wrapped. As a result, his role in the film is significantly smaller than that in the previous entry.


title: Little Fockers

text: In January 2010, the release date for the film was pushed back from July 30, 2010, to December 22, 2010, nominally because Universal hoped to benefit from the long Christmas weekend; it was later revealed to be deliberately delayed as such because it was only at the time of the delay announcement that Hoffman elected to reprise his character, and the producers had to adjust the filming schedule to accommodate for the filming of his scenes, keeping the announcement secret until the aforementioned August reveal.


title: Little Fockers

text: The first trailer was released on June 24, 2010, preceding showings of "Grown Ups" and "Dinner for Schmucks". A second trailer, released November 10, 2010, was attached to "Morning Glory", "Unstoppable" and "Skyline". The film was released in the UK and US on December 22, 2010.


title: Little Fockers

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 9% based on 148 reviews and an average rating of 3.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As star-studded as it is heartbreakingly lazy, "Little Fockers" takes the top-grossing trilogy to embarrassing new lows." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 27 out of 100 based on 32 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Little Fockers

text: On each website, it is Streisand's lowest-rated film. "Empire" gave two stars out of five, summing up, "there are inevitably moments when Hoffman or Wilson get a laugh, but on the whole, it’s the same again, but weaker and with fewer good jokes."


title: Little Fockers

text: "Little Fockers" failed to match the opening-weekend gross of its predecessor, "Meet the Fockers". It opened first on its opening weekend on approximately 5,000 screens at 3,536 locations across US and Canada, bringing its five-day opening to $48.3 million. By comparison, "Meet the Fockers" made $46.1 million on the same weekend in 2004 for a five-day total of $70.5 million. "Little Fockers" grossed $148.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $162.2 million from other countries around the world, for a worldwide total of $310.7 million, making this the lowest grossing film in the trilogy.


title: Linear B

text: Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from the older Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, as is the later Cypriot syllabary, which also recorded Greek. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing. Linear B, deciphered by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris—based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober—is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have been deciphered.


title: Linear B

text: Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs. These ideograms or "signifying" signs symbolize objects or commodities. They have no phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence.


title: Linear B

text: The application of Linear B appears to have been confined to administrative contexts. In all the thousands of clay tablets, a relatively small number of different "hands" have been detected: 45 in Pylos (west coast of the Peloponnese, in southern Greece) and 66 in Knossos (Crete). Once the palaces were destroyed, the script disappeared.


title: Linear B

text: Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs as well as phonetic values and ideograms with semantic values. The representations and naming of these signs have been standardized by a series of international colloquia starting with the first in Paris in 1956. After the third meeting in 1961 at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, a standard proposed primarily by Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., became known as the Wingspread Convention, which was adopted by a new organization, the Comité International Permanent des Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM), affiliated in 1970 by the fifth colloquium with UNESCO. Colloquia continue: the 13th occurred in 2010 in Paris.


title: Linear B

text: Many of the signs are identical or similar to those in Linear A; however, Linear A encodes an as-yet unknown language, and it is uncertain whether similar signs had the same phonetic values.


title: Linear B

text: The grid developed during decipherment by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick of phonetic values for syllabic signs is shown below. (Note that "q" represents the labialized velar stops , not the uvular stop of the IPA.)


title: Linear B

text: Initial consonants are in the leftmost column; vowels are in the top row beneath the title. The transcription of the syllable, which may not have been pronounced that way, is listed next to the sign along with Bennett's identifying number for the sign preceded by an asterisk (as was Ventris' and Chadwick's convention). If the transcription of the sign remains uncertain, Bennett's number serves to identify the sign. The signs on the tablets and sealings often show considerable variation from each other and from the representations below. Discovery of the reasons for the variation and possible semantic differences is a topic of ongoing debate in Mycenaean studies.


title: Linear B

text: In addition to the grid, the first edition of "Documents in Mycenaean Greek" contained a number of other signs termed "homophones" because they appeared at that time to resemble the sounds of other syllables and were transcribed accordingly: "pa" and "pa" were presumed homophonous to "pa". Many of these were identified by the second edition and are shown in the "special values" below. The second edition relates: "It may be taken as axiomatic that there are no true homophones." The unconfirmed identifications of "*34" and "*35" as "ai" and "ai" were removed. "pa" became "qa".


title: Linear B

text: Other values remain unknown, mainly because of scarcity of evidence concerning them. Note that *34 and *35 are mirror images of each other, but whether this graphic relationship indicates a phonetic one remains unconfirmed.


title: Linear B

text: In recent times, CIPEM inherited the former authority of Bennett and the Wingspread convention in deciding what signs are "confirmed" and how to officially represent the various sign categories. In editions of Mycenaean texts, the signs whose values have not been confirmed by CIPEM are always transcribed as numbers preceded by an asterisk (e.g., "*64"). CIPEM also allocates the numerical identifiers, and until such allocation, new signs (or obscured or mutilated signs) are transcribed as a bullet-point enclosed in square brackets: [•].


title: Linear B

text: The signs are approximations since each may be used to represent a variety of about 70 distinct combinations of sounds within rules and conventions. The grid presents a system of monosyllabic signs of the type V/CV. Clarification of the 14 or so special values tested the limits of the grid model, but Chadwick eventually concluded that even with the ramifications, the syllabic signs can unexceptionally be considered monosyllabic.


title: Linear B

text: Possible exceptions, Chadwick goes on to explain, include the two diphthongs,  ("ai") and  ("au"), as in , "ai-ku-pi-ti-jo", for "Aiguptios" (, "Egyptian") and , "au-ke-wa", for "Augewās" ( "Augeas"). However, a diphthong is by definition two vowels united into a single sound and therefore might be typed as just V. Thus  ("rai"), as in , "e-rai-wo", for "elaiwon" (), is of the type CV. Diphthongs are otherwise treated as two monosyllables: , "a-ro-u-ra", for "arourans" (accusative plural of , "tamarisk trees"), of the types CV and V. Lengths of vowels and accents are not marked.


title: Linear B

text: ("Twe"),  ("two"),  ("dwe"),  ("dwo"),  ("nwa") and the more doubtful  ("swi") and  ("swa") may be regarded as beginning with labialized consonants, rather than two consonants, even though they may alternate with a two-sign form: "o-da-twe-ta" and "o-da-tu-we-ta" for "Odatwenta"; "a-si-wi-jo" and "a-swi-jo" for "Aswios" (). Similarly,  ("rya"),  ("ryo") and  ("tya") begin with palatalized consonants rather than two consonants: "-ti-ri-ja" for "-trja" (-).


title: Linear B

text: The one sign Chadwick tags as the exception to the monosyllabic rule is  ("pte"), but this he attributes to a development "pte"<"*pje" as in "kleptei"<"*klep-jei".


title: Linear B

text: Linear B does not consistently distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stop consonants (except in the dental series) and between aspirated and unaspirated stops even when these distinctions are phonemic in Mycenaean Greek. For example, "pa-te" is "patēr" (), "pa-si" is "phāsi" (); "p" on the other hand some times does not represent (like in the beginning of the following word) ("basileus", meaning in this period "court official or local chieftain") is "qa-si-re-u"); "ko-ru" is "korus" (, "helmet"), "ka-ra-we" is "grāwes" (plural of ), "ko-no" is "skhoinos" ("rope"). Exceptionally, however, the dentals are represented by a "t"-series and a "d"-series for unvoiced and voiced: "to-so" for "tosos" ( or ) but "do-ra" for "dōra" (plural of , "gift"). Aspiration, however, is not marked: "to-ra-ke" for "thōrākes" (plural of , "breastplate"). In other cases aspiration can be marked but is optional: "pu-te" for "phutēr" ("planter", from ), but "phu-te-re" for "phutēres" ("planters"). Initial aspiration may be marked only in the case of initial "a" and rarely: "ha-te-ro" for "hateron" (masculine ), and yet "a-ni-ja" for "hāniai" ().


title: Linear B

text: The "j"-series represents the semivowel equivalent to English "y", and is used word-initially and as an intervocalic glide after a syllable ending in "i": "-a-jo" for ("-aios"); "a-te-mi-ti-jo" for ("Artemitios"). The "w"-series similarly are semivowels used word-initially and intervocalically after a syllable ending in "u": "ku-wa-no" for "kuanos" (, "blue").


title: Linear B

text: The "r"-series includes both the /r/ and /l/ phonemes: "ti-ri-po" for "tripos" (, i.e. ) and "tu-ri-so" for "Tulisos" ().


title: Linear B

text: The "q"-series is used for monosyllables beginning with a class of consonants that disappeared from classical Greek by regular phonetic change: the labialized velar consonants (see under Mycenaean Greek). These had entered the language from various sources: inheritance from Proto-Indo-European, assimilation, borrowing of foreign words, especially names. In Mycenaean they are /kʷ/, /gʷ/, and rarely /kʷh/ in names and a few words: "a-pi-qo-ro" for "amphiqoloi" (); "qo-u-ko-ro" for "goukoloi" (, "cowherders"); "-qo-i-ta" for -.


title: Linear B

text: Some consonants in some contexts are not written (but are understood to be present), such as word-initial "s-" and "-w" before a consonant, as in "pe-ma" for "sperma" (, "seed"). The "pe-", which was primarily used as its value "pe" of grid class CV, is here being used for "sper-". This was not an innovative or exceptional use, but followed the stated rules. Syllable-final "-l", "-m", "-n", "-r" and "-s" are also not written out, and only word-final velars are notated by plene writing: "a-to-ro-qo" for "anthrōqos" (, "human being, person"). Here "a", being primarily of grid class V, is being used as "an-" and could be used for "al", "am", "ar", and so on.


title: Linear B

text: In the case of clusters of two or three consonants that do not follow the initial "s-" and "-w" rule or the double consonants:  ("ks" or "x"),  ("ps") and "qs" (which later did not exist in classical Greek), each consonant in the cluster is represented by a type CV sign that shares its consonant value: "ko-no-so" for "Knōsos", or "ku-ru-so" for "khrusos" (, "gold"). The vowels of these signs have been called "empty", "null", "extra", "dead" and other terms by various writers as they represent no sound. There were rules though, that governed the selection of the "empty" vowel and therefore determined which sign was to be used. The vowel had to be the same as the one of the first syllable following the cluster or, if at the end of the word, preceding: "ti-ri-po" with "ti-" (instead of "ta-", "te-" and so on) to match "-ri-". A rare exception occurs in words formed from "wa-na-ka", "wanax" (ϝάναξ, Homeric and Classical ἄναξ): "wa-na-ka-te" for "wanaktei" (dative), and "wa-na-ka-te-ro" for "wanakteros", the adjectival form. This exception may not have applied to all contexts, as an example of "wa-na-ka" that follows standard rules has emerged in Ayios Vasileios in Laconia. The text reads "wa-na-ko-to" (genitive) and is written on a sealing nodule dating to the late 14th or early 13th century, slightly earlier than other Linear B texts found on mainland Greece.


title: Linear B

text: They have no phonetic value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence, unlike Japanese kanji. Ideograms are typically at the end of a line before a number and appear to signify to which object the number applies. Many of the values remain unknown or disputed. Some commodities such as cloth and containers are divided into many different categories represented by distinct ideograms. Livestock may be marked with respect to sex.


title: Linear B

text: The numerical references for the ideograms were originally devised by Ventris and Bennett and divided into functional groups corresponding to the breakdown of Bennett's index. The groups are numbered beginning 100, 110, 120 etc., with some provision of spare numbers for future additions; the official CIPEM numberings used today are based on Ventris and Bennett's numbering, with the provision that three or four letter codes (written in small capitals), based on Latin words that seemed relevant at the time, are used where the meanings are known and agreed. Unicode (as of version 5.0) encodes 123 Linear B ideograms.


title: Linear B

text: The ideograms are symbols, not pictures of the objects in question; for example, one tablet records a tripod with missing legs, but the ideogram used is of a tripod with three legs. In modern transcriptions of Linear B tablets, it is typically convenient to represent an ideogram by its Latin or English name or by an abbreviation of the Latin name. Ventris and Chadwick generally used English; Bennett, Latin. Neither the English nor the Latin can be relied upon as an accurate name of the object; in fact, the identification of some of the more obscure objects is a matter of exegesis.


title: Linear B

text: Inscriptions in Linear B have been found on tablets, stirrup jars and other objects; they are catalogued and classified by, inter alia, the location of the excavation they were found in.


title: Linear B

text: Another 170 inscriptions in Linear B have been found on various vessels, for a total of some 6,058 known inscriptions.


title: Linear B

text: For several decades scholars have worked to join tablet fragments together, thus making the tablets and their information more complete while reducing their numbers as a whole.


title: Linear B

text: The oldest Linear B tablets are probably those from the Room of Chariot Tablets at Knossos, and date to the latter half of the 15th century BC. The Kafkania pebble, though from an earlier context, is not genuine. The earliest inscription from the mainland is an inscribed clay tablet found at Iklaina dating to between 1400 and 1350 BC.


title: Linear B

text: An amber seal incised with Linear B signs was found in 2000 by amateur archaeologists at Bernstorf near Kranzberg, southern Germany, and is of much debated authenticity.


title: Linear B

text: The Aegean is responsible for many of the early Greek language words that have to do with daily life such as words for tools and items that are seen every day. The sequence and the geographical spread of Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and Linear B, the three overlapping, but distinct, writing systems on Bronze Age Crete, the Aegean islands, and mainland Greece are summarized as follows:


title: Linear B

text: The Knossos archive was dated by Arthur Evans to the destruction by conflagration of about 1400 BC, which would have baked and preserved the clay tablets. He dated this event to the LM II period. This view stood until Carl Blegen excavated the site of ancient Pylos in 1939 and uncovered tablets inscribed in Linear B. They were fired in the conflagration that destroyed Pylos about 1200 BC, at the end of LHIIIB. With the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952, serious questions about Evans's date began to be considered. Most notably, Blegen said that the inscribed stirrup jars, which are oil flasks with stirrup-shaped handles imported from Crete around 1200, were of the same type as those dated by Evans to the destruction of 1400. Blegen found a number of similarities between 1200 BC Pylos and 1400 BC Knossos and suggested the Knossian evidence be reexamined, as he was sure of the 1200 Pylian date.


title: Linear B

text: The examination uncovered a number of difficulties. The Knossos tablets had been found at various locations in the palace. Evans had not kept exact records. Recourse was had to the day books of Evans's assistant, Duncan Mackenzie, who had conducted the day-to-day excavations. There were discrepancies between the notes in the day books and Evans's excavation reports. Moreover, the two men had disagreed over the location and strata of the tablets. The results of the reinvestigation were eventually published by Palmer and Boardman, "On the Knossos Tablets". It contains two works, Leonard Robert Palmer's "The Find-Places of the Knossos Tablets" and John Boardman's "The Date of the Knossos Tablets," representing Blegen's and Evans's views respectively. Consequently, the dispute was known for a time as "the Palmer–Boardman dispute". There has been no generally accepted resolution to it yet.


title: Linear B

text: The major cities and palaces used Linear B for records of disbursements of goods. Wool, sheep, and grain were some common items, often given to groups of religious people. A number of tablets also deal with military matters.


title: Linear B

text: As is often the case with cuneiform tablets, when the buildings they were housed in were destroyed by fire many of the tablets were baked which preserved them.


title: Linear B

text: The Greeks of the historical era were unable to decipher Linear B, but its ideograms are sometimes mentioned by ancient authors. For example, Plutarch gives an account of the Spartan king Agesilaus II (r. 400–360 BC) sending a bronze tablet with "many letters marvellously old, for nothing could be made of them" to Egyptian priests in the hope they could understand them.


title: Linear B

text: The British archaeologist Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was presented by Greville Chester in 1886 with a sealstone from Crete engraved with a writing he took to be Mycenaean. Heinrich Schliemann had encountered signs similar to these, but had never identified the signs clearly as writing, relating in his major work on Mycenae that "of combinations of signs resembling inscriptions I have hitherto only found three or four ..." In 1893 Evans purchased more sealstones in Athens, verifying from the antiquarian dealers that the stones came from Crete. During the next year he noticed the script on other artefacts in the Ashmolean. In 1894 he embarked for Crete in search of the script. Soon after arrival, at Knossos he saw the sign of the double axe on an excavated wall, considering this the source of the script. Subsequently, he found more stones from the various ruins being worn by Cretan women as amulets called "milk-stones", thought to encourage the production of breast milk.


title: Linear B

text: Starting in 1894, Evans published his theories that the signs evidenced various phases in the development of a writing system in "The Journal of Hellenic Studies", the first article being "Primitive Pictographs and a Prae-Phoenician Script from Crete". In these articles Evans distinguished between "pictographic writing" and "a linear system of writing". He did not explicitly define these terms, causing some confusion among subsequent writers concerning what he meant, but in 1898 he wrote "These linear forms indeed consist of simple geometrical figures which unlike the more complicated pictorial class were little susceptible to modification," and "That the linear or quasi-alphabetic signs ... were in the main ultimately derived from the rudely scratched line pictures belonging to the infancy of art can hardly be doubted."


title: Linear B

text: Meanwhile, Evans began to negotiate for the land purchase of the Knossos site. He established the Cretan Exploration Fund, with only his own money at first, and by 1896 the fund had purchased one-fourth of Kephala Hill, on which the ruins were located, with first option to buy the rest. However, he could not obtain a firman excavation permit from the Ottoman government. He returned to Britain. In January 1897, the Christian population of Crete staged its final insurrection against the Ottoman Empire. The last Ottoman troops were ferried off the island by the British fleet on 5 December 1898. In that year also, Evans and his friends returned to complete purchase of the site. By this time, the Fund had other contributors as well. In 1899, the Constitution of a new Cretan Republic went into effect. Once Arthur had received permission to excavate from the local authorities, excavation on the hill began on 23 March 1900.


title: Linear B

text: According to Evans's report to the British School at Athens for that year, on 5 April, the excavators discovered the first large cache ever of Linear B tablets among the remains of a wooden box in a disused terracotta bathtub. Subsequently, caches turned up at multiple locations, including the Room of the Chariot Tablets, where over 350 pieces from four boxes were found. The tablets were to long by to wide and were scored with horizontal lines over which text was written in about 70 characters. Even in this earliest excavation report, Evans could tell that "a certain number of quasi-pictorial characters also occur which seem to have an ideographic or determinative meaning."


title: Linear B

text: The excavation was over for that year by 2 June. Evans reported: "only a comparatively small proportion of the tablets were preserved in their entirety," the causes of destruction being rainfall through the roof of the storage room, crumbling of small pieces, and being thrown away by workmen who failed to identify them. A report on 6 September to the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland began to use some of the concepts characteristic of Evans's later thought: "palace of Knossos" and "palace of Minos". "Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography", 1900, notes that Evans took up Stillman's theme that the palace was the labyrinth of mythology in which the half-bovine son of King Minos lurked. In the report, the tablets are now called a "linear script" as opposed to the "hieroglyphic or conventionalized pictographic script". The linear script has characters that are "of a free, upright, European character" and "seem to have been for the most part syllabic". Evans reasserts the ideographic idea: "a certain number are unquestionably ideographic or determinative."


title: Linear B

text: The years after 1900 were consumed by excavations at Knossos and the discovery and study by Evans of tablets, with a projected comprehensive work on Cretan scripts to be called "Scripta Minoa". A year before the publication of volume I, he began to drop hints that he now believed the linear script was two scripts, to be presented in the forthcoming book.


title: Linear B

text: In "Scripta Minoa I", which appeared in 1909, he explained that the discovery of the Phaistos Disc in July 1908 had caused him to pull the book from the presses so that he could include the disk by permission, as it had not yet been published. On the next page he mentioned that he was also including by permission of Federico Halbherr of the Italian Mission in Crete unpublished tablets from Hagia Triada written in a linear script of "Class A". To what degree if any Halbherr was responsible for Evans's division of the "linear script" into "Class A" and "Class B" is not stated. The Knossos tablets were of Class B, so that Evans could have perceived Class A only in tablets from elsewhere, and so recently that he needed permission to include the examples.


title: Linear B

text: Evans summarized the differences between the two scripts as "type" or "form of script;' that is, varieties in the formation and arrangement of the characters. For example, he says "the clay documents belonging to Class A show a certain approximation in their forms to those presenting the hieroglyphic inscriptions ... the system of numerals is also in some respects intermediate between that of the hieroglyphic documents and that of the linear Class B."


title: Linear B

text: The first volume covered "the Hieroglyphic and Primitive Linear Classes" in three parts: the "pre-Phoenician Scripts of Crete", the "Pictorial Script" and "the Phaistos Disk". One or two more volumes publishing the Linear A and Linear B tablets were planned, but Evans ran out of time; the project required more than one man could bring to it. For a good many of the years left to him, he was deeply enmeshed in war and politics in the Balkans. When he did return to Knossos, completion and publication of the palace excavations took priority. His greatest work, "Palace of Minos", came out in 1935. It did include scattered descriptions of tablets. He died in 1941, soon after Nazi forces invaded Crete.


title: Linear B

text: The Knossos tablets had remained in the museum at Irakleion, Crete, where many of them now were missing. The unpublished second volume consisted of notes by Evans and plates and fonts created by Clarendon Press. In 1939, Carl Blegen had uncovered the Pylos Tablets; pressure was mounting to finish "Scripta Minoa II." After Evans's death, Alice Kober, assistant to John Myres and a major transcriber of the Knossos tablets, prompted Myres to come back from retirement and finish the work. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. added more transcriptions. The second volume came out in 1952 with Evans cited as author and Myres as editor, just before the discovery that Linear B writes an early form of Greek. An impatient Ventris and Chadwick declared: "Two generations of scholars had been cheated of the opportunity to work constructively on the problem."


title: Linear B

text: Despite the limited source materials, during this time there were efforts to decipher the newly discovered Cretan script. Australian classicist Florence Stawell published an interpretation of the Phaistos Disc in the April 1911 issue of "The Burlington Magazine". She followed this with the book "A Clue to the Cretan Scripts", published in 1931. Stawell declared all three Cretan script forms to represent early Homeric Greek, and offered her attempts at translations. Also in 1931, F. G. Gordon's "Through Basque to Minoan" was published by the Oxford University Press. Gordon attempted to prove a close link between the Basque language and Linear B, without lasting success.


title: Linear B

text: In 1949, Bedřich Hrozný published "Les Inscriptions Crétoises, Essai de déchiffrement", a proposed decipherment of the Cretan scripts. Hrozny was internationally renowned as the translator of Hittite cuneiform decades previously. His Minoan translations into academic French, though, proved to be considerably subjective, and incorrect.


title: Linear B

text: From the 1930s to 1950s there was correspondence between, and papers published by, various international academic figures. These included Johannes Sundwall, K. D. Ktistopoulos, Ernst Sittig and V. I. Georgiev. None of them succeeded with decipherment, yet they added to knowledge and debate.


title: Linear B

text: About the same time, Alice Kober studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking similar symbols in groups of threes. Kober noticed that a number of Linear B words had common roots and suffixes. This led her to believe that Linear B represented an inflected language, with nouns changing their endings depending on their case. However, some characters in the middle of the words seemed to correspond with neither a root nor a suffix. Because this effect was found in other known languages, Kober surmised that the odd characters were bridging syllables, with the beginning of the syllable belonging to the root and the end belonging to the suffix. This was a reasonable assumption, since Linear B had far too many characters to be considered alphabetic and too few to be logographic; therefore, each character should represent a syllable. Kober's systematic approach allowed her to demonstrate the existence of three grammatical cases and identify several pairs of signs that shared vowels or consonants with one another.


title: Linear B

text: Kober also showed that the two symbol word for 'total' at the end of livestock and personnel lists, had a different symbol for gender. This gender change with one letter, usually a vowel, is most frequent in Indo-European languages. Kober had rejected any speculation on the language represented, preferring painstaking cataloguing and analysis of the actual symbols, though she did believe it likely that Linear A and Linear B represented different languages.


title: Linear B

text: The convention for numbering the symbols still in use today was first devised by Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Working alongside fellow academic Alice Kober, by 1950 Bennett had deciphered the metrical system, based on his intensive study of Linear B tablets unearthed at Pylos. He concluded that those tablets contained exactly the same script as the Linear B found at Knossos, and he classified and assigned identification numbers to the Linear B signs as he prepared a publication on the Pylos tablets. Like Kober, Bennett was also an early proponent of the idea that Linear A and B represented different languages. His book "The Pylos Tablets" became a crucial resource for Michael Ventris, who later described it as "a wonderful piece of work".


title: Linear B

text: In 1935, the British School at Athens was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition at Burlington House, London. Among the speakers was Arthur Evans, then eighty-four years old. A teenage Michael Ventris was present in the audience. In 1940, the 18-year-old Ventris had an article "Introducing the Minoan Language" published in the "American Journal of Archaeology".


title: Linear B

text: After wartime service as a navigator with RAF Bomber Command, and a post-war year in Occupied Germany, he returned to civilian life, and completed qualification as an architect. Despite having no university qualification, Ventris continued with his amateur interest in Linear B, corresponding with known scholars, who usually but not always replied.


title: Linear B

text: Michael Ventris and John Chadwick performed the bulk of the decipherment of Linear B between 1951 and 1953. At first Ventris chose his own numbering method, but later switched to Bennett's system. His initial decipherment was achieved using Kober's classification tables, to which he applied his own theories. Some Linear B tablets had been discovered on the Greek mainland. Noticing that certain symbol combinations appeared only on the tablets found in Crete, he conjectured that these might be names of places on the island. This proved to be correct. Working with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek. This contradicted general scientific views of the time, and indeed Ventris himself had previously agreed with Evans's hypothesis that Linear B was not Greek.


title: Linear B

text: Ventris' discovery was of significance in demonstrating a Greek-speaking Minoan-Mycenaean culture on Crete, and thus presenting Greek in writing centuries earlier than had been previously accepted.


title: Linear B

text: Chadwick, a university lecturer in Ancient Greek philology, helped Ventris develop his decipherment of the text and discover the vocabulary and grammar of Mycenaean Greek. He noted:


title: Linear B

text: That any Linear B tablets are written in a language other than Greek still remains to be demonstrated; but that words and usages not exactly paralleled in later Greek occur is both certain and to be expected. But we must not resort to "non-Greek" whenever we come up against an insoluble problem.


title: Linear B

text: The first edition of their book, "Documents in Mycenaean Greek", was published in 1956, shortly after Ventris's death in an automobile accident. The Ventris decipherment did not immediately meet with universal approval.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux serves as its upstream source. All of Red Hat's official support and training, together with the Red Hat Certification Program, focuses on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to bear the name originally came onto the market as "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server". In 2003, Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS" and added two more variants, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat uses strict trademark rules to restrict free re-distribution of their officially supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux but still freely provides its source code. Third-party derivatives can be built and redistributed by stripping away non-free components like Red Hat's trademarks. Examples include community-supported distributions like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, and commercial forks like Oracle Linux.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription is available at no cost for development purposes. Developers need to register for the Red Hat Developer Program and agree to license terms forbidding production use. This free developer subscription was announced on March 31, 2016.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: There are also "Academic" editions of the Desktop and Server variants. They are offered to schools and students, are less expensive, and are provided with Red Hat technical support as an optional extra. Web support based on the number of customer contacts can be purchased separately.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: It is often assumed the branding ES, AS, and WS stand for "Entry-level Server", "Advanced Server" and "Work Station", respectively. The reason for this is that the ES product is indeed the company's base enterprise server product, while AS is the more advanced product. However, nowhere on its site or in its literature does Red Hat say what AS, ES, and WS stand for.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 there are new editions that substitute former Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES/WS/Desktop:


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are open source. Fedora is a free distribution and community project and upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a general purpose system that gives Red Hat and the rest of its contributor community the chance to innovate rapidly with new technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial enterprise operating system and has its own set of test phases including alpha and beta releases which are separate and distinct from Fedora development.Originally, Red Hat sold boxed versions of Red Hat Linux directly to consumers and business through phone support. The Fedora Project began in 2002 as a set of community supported packages for Red Hat Linux. However, the six month release cycle of Red Hat Linux was too disruptive for business users and Red Hat wanted a more reliable revenue stream. In 2002 Red Hat began releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on Red Hat Linux, but with a much more conservative release cycle and a subscription based support program. A year later, Red Hat discontinued the Red Hat Linux product line, merging it with the Fedora community packages and releasing the resulting Fedora distribution for free.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Fedora now serves as upstream for future versions of RHEL: RHEL trees are forked off the Fedora repository, and released after a substantial stabilization and quality assurance effort. For example, RHEL 6 was forked from Fedora at the end of 2009 (approximately at the time of the Fedora 12 release) and released more or less together with Fedora 14. By the time RHEL 6 was released, many features from Fedora 13 and 14 had already been backported into it. The Fedora Project lists the following lineages for older Red Hat Enterprise releases:


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: In addition, the Fedora project publishes a set of packages for RHEL called the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). EPEL packages can be expected to work in RHEL, but it is up to willing community members to maintain the packages and back port any upstream changes. As such, packages "may come and go" during the ten year lifespan of the RHEL release and Red Hat support plans do not include resolving issues caused by EPEL packages.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Originally, Red Hat's enterprise product, then known as "Red Hat Linux", was made freely available to anybody who wished to download it, while Red Hat made money from support. Red Hat then moved towards splitting its product line into "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" which was designed to be stable and with long-term support for enterprise users and Fedora as the community distribution and project sponsored by Red Hat. The use of trademarks prevents verbatim copying of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based completely on free and open source software, Red Hat makes available the complete source code to its enterprise distribution through its FTP site to anybody who wants it. Accordingly, several groups have taken this source code and compiled their own versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, typically with the only changes being the removal of any references to Red Hat's trademarks and pointing the update systems to non-Red Hat servers. Groups which have undertaken this include AlmaLinux, CentOS, MIRACLE LINUX, Oracle Linux, CloudLinux OS, Rocky Linux, Scientific Linux, StartCom Enterprise Linux, Pie Box Enterprise Linux, X/OS, Lineox, and Bull's XBAS for high-performance computing. All provide a free mechanism for applying updates without paying a service fee to the distributor.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are free but do not get any commercial support or consulting services from Red Hat and lack any software, hardware or security certifications. Also, the rebuilds do not get access to Red Hat services like Red Hat Network.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Unusually, Red Hat took steps to obfuscate their changes to the Linux kernel for 6.0 by not publicly providing the patch files for their changes in the source tarball, and only releasing the finished product in source form. Speculation suggested that the move was made to affect Oracle's competing rebuild and support services, which further modifies the distribution. This practice however, still complies with the GNU GPL since source code is defined as "[the] preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", and the distribution still complies with this definition. Red Hat's CTO Brian Stevens later confirmed the change, stating that certain information (such as patch information) would now only be provided to paying customers to make the Red Hat product more competitive against the growing number of companies offering support for products based on RHEL. CentOS developers had no objections to the change since they do not make any changes to the kernel beyond what is provided by Red Hat. Their competitor Oracle announced in November 2012 that they were releasing a "RedPatch" service, which allows public view of the RHEL kernel changes, broken down by patch.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: A number of commercial vendors use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a base for the operating system in their products. Two of the best known are the Console Operating System in VMware ESX Server and Oracle Linux respin.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Each release is given a codename which is selected by a vote of the developers. The codenames don't have a specific pattern (unlike Ubuntu or Debian).


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 was announced at Red Hat Summit on May 10, 2022 and was officially released on . In this version of the system introduced a Linux Kernel 5.14.0 and Gnome 40.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: RHEL 9 was the first to be based on CentOS Stream, itself based on Fedora Linux, while historically RHEL was based directly on Fedora Linux.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 ("Plow"), based on Fedora Linux 34, was released on November 3, 2021.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 ("Plow") was released on May 18, 2022. The name "Plow" was the Appalachian Trail nickname for Tim Burke, one of the founders of RHEL and retired leader of RHEL engineering.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 ("Ootpa") is based on Fedora 28, upstream Linux kernel 4.18, GCC 8.2, glibc 2.28, systemd 239, GNOME 3.28, and the switch to Wayland. The first beta was announced on November 14, 2018. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was officially released on .


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: With Release 8 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM has completed transition of POWER8 and POWER9 servers to


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The name "Ootpa" was a tribute to Larry Troan. His son, Eric Troan was Red Hat's first head engineer and his username was "ewt", so his father was given the name "ewt's pa", pronounced "Ootpa".


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ("Maipo") is based on Fedora 19, upstream Linux kernel 3.10, systemd 208 (updated to 219 in RHEL 7.2), and GNOME 3.8 (rebased to GNOME 3.28 in RHEL 7.6) The first beta was announced on 11 December 2013, and a release candidate was made available on 15 April 2014. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 was officially released.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was forked from Fedora 12 and contains many backported features from Fedora 13 and 14.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is at least seven years for versions 3 and 4, and spans at least 10 years for versions 5, 6, 7 and 8. The life cycle comprises several phases of varying length with different degrees of support. During the first phase ("Production 1"), Red Hat provides full support and updates software and hardware drivers. In later phases ("Production 2" and "Production 3"), only security and other important fixes are provided and support for new hardware is gradually reduced.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: In the last years of the support lifecycle (after seven years for version 4 and earlier, and after 10 years for version 5 and later), critical and security-related fixes are only provided to customers who pay an additional subscription ("Extended Lifecycle Support Add-On") that is available for versions 3, 4 and 5, and covers a limited number of packages. Red Hat only supports major version upgrades from version 6 to version 7 and from version 7 to version 8.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: To maintain a stable application binary interface (ABI), Red Hat does not update the kernel version, but instead backports new features to the same kernel version with which a particular version of RHEL has been released. New features are backported throughout the Production 1 phase of the RHEL lifecycle. Consequently, RHEL may use a Linux kernel with a dated version number, yet the kernel is up-to-date regarding not only security fixes, but also certain features. One specific example is the socket option which was added to Linux kernel 3.9, and was subsequently backported and became available since RHEL 6.5, which uses version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The Extended Update Support (EUS) allows an organization / company to choose when they change to a new minor version. For the first 6 months of the EUS channel / yum repo, features may be added, but then the channel is locked down so that only bug and security fixes are patched. The organization / company then has 24 months to move to a new EUS branch. EUS allows the organization / company to stay on a minor version if required by a third party application which is only tested with a particular minor version of RHEL, such as Oracle Database, IBM Db2, IBM Cloud Orchestrator, Hortonworks. There may also be extra costs associated with using the EUS repos/channels depending on the agreement the organization / company has with Red Hat. For more information on what is Included/Excluded from the EUS see.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: The standard base channel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, which is the most recent minor release aka rhel 7Y where y is the latest greatest.


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 ("Maipo") is based on Fedora 19, upstream Linux kernel 3.10, 10 June 2014, uses Linux kernel 3.10.0-123


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 ("Ootpa") is based on Fedora 28, upstream Linux kernel 4.18, systemd 239, and GNOME 3.28. The first beta was announced on 14 November 2018. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was officially released on .


title: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

text: In addition to normal OS updates, RHEL 8 also maintains application streams to allow for certain applications to be supported and updated independent of the base OS and to match the maintenance stream of the application vendor. Each application stream will be supported from two to five years with new versions only available during the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Full Support Phase. These apps should be expected to be updated frequently with shorter lifecycles than the base OS packages.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival (, "International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale") is an annual film festival held in Venice, Italy. It is the world's oldest film festival and one of the "Big Six" International film festivals worldwide, which include the Big Three European Film Festivals, alongside the Toronto Film Festival in Canada the Sundance Film Festival in the United States and the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia. The Festivals are internationally acclaimed for giving creators the artistic freedom to express themselves through film. In 1951, FIAPF formally accredited the festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: Founded by the National Fascist Party in Venice in August 1932, the festival is part of the Venice Biennale, one of the world's oldest exhibitions of art, created by the Venice City Council on 19 April 1893. The range of work at the Venice Biennale now covers Italian and international art, architecture, dance, music, theatre, and cinema. These works are experienced at separate exhibitions: the International Art Exhibition, the International Festival of Contemporary Music, the International Theatre Festival, the International Architecture Exhibition, the International Festival of Contemporary Dance, the International Kids' Carnival, and the annual Venice Film Festival, which is arguably the best-known of all the events.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The festival is held in late August or early September on the island of the Lido in the Venice Lagoon. Screenings take place in the historic Palazzo del Cinema on the Lungomare Marconi. The festival continues to be one of the world's most popular and fastest-growing.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: During the 1930s, the government and Italian citizens were heavily interested in film. Of the money Italians spent on cultural or sporting events, most of it went for movies. The majority of films screened in Italy were American, which led to government involvement in the film industry and the yearning to celebrate Italian culture in general. With this in mind, the Venice International Film Festival was created by Giuseppe Volpi, Luciano de Feo, and Antonio Maraini in 1932. Volpi, a statesman, wealthy businessman, and avid fascist who had been Benito Mussolini's minister of finance, was appointed president of the Venice Biennale the same year. Maraini served as the festival's secretary general, and de Feo headed its executive committee.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: On the night of 6 August 1932, the festival opened with a screening of the American film "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" on the terrace of the Excelsior Palace Hotel. A total of nine countries participated in the festival, which ended on 21 August.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: No awards were given at the first festival, but an audience referendum was held to determine which films and performances were most praiseworthy. The French film "À Nous la Liberté" was voted the Film Più Divertente (the Funniest Film). "The Sin of Madelon Claudet" was chosen the Film Più Commovente (the Most Moving Film) and its star, Helen Hayes, the best actress. Most Original Film (Film dalla fantasia più originale) was given to "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", and its leading man, Fredric March, was voted best actor.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: Despite the success of the first festival, it did not return in 1933. In 1934, the festival was declared to be an annual event, and participation grew from nine countries to seventeen. That year the festival also gave its first official awards, namely the Mussolini Cup for Best Italian Film, the Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film, and the Corporations Ministry Cup. Seventeen awards were given: fourteen to films and three to individuals. Five films received honorable mentions.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The third installment of the festival in 1935 was headed by its first artistic director, Ottavio Croze, who maintained this position until World War II. The following year, a jury was added to the festival's governing body; it had no foreign members. The majority of funds for the festival came from the Ministry of Popular Culture, with other portions from the Biennale and the city of Venice.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The year 1936 marked another important development in the festival. A law crafted by the Ministry of Popular Culture made the festival an autonomous entity, separate from the main Venice Biennale. This allowed additional fascist organizations, such as the Department of Cinema and the Fascist National Federation of Entertainment Industries, to take control of the festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The fifth year of the festival saw the establishment of its permanent home. Designed and completed in 1937, the Palazzo del Cinema was built on the Lido. The Palazzo has since been the site for every Venice Film Festival, with the exception of the three years from 1940 to 1942, when the festival was moved away from Venice for fear of bombing. However, Venice received almost no damage during that time.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The 1940s represent one of the most difficult moments for the festival itself. Nazi propaganda movie "Heimkehr" was presented in 1941 winning an award from the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture. With the advent of the conflict the situation degenerated to such a point that the editions of 1940, 1941 and 1942, subsequently are considered as if they did not happen because they were carried out in places far away from Lido. Additionally, the festival was renamed the Italian-German Film Festival (Manifestazione Cinematografica Italo-Germanica) in 1940. The festival carried this title until 1942 when the festival was suspended due to war.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The festival resumed full speed in 1946, after the war. For the first time, the 1946 edition was held in the month of September, in accordance with an agreement with the newly reborn Cannes Film Festival, which had just held its first review in the spring of that year. With the return to normality, Venice once again became a great icon of the film world.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: In 1947 the festival was held in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace, a most magnificent backdrop for hosting a record 90 thousand participants. The 1947 festival is widely considered one of the most successful editions in the history of the festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: In 1963 the winds of change blew strongly during Luigi Chiarini’s directorship of the festival (1963–1968). During the years of his directorship, Chiarini aspired to renew the spirit and the structures of the festival, pushing for a total reorganization of the entire system. For six years the festival followed a consistent path, according to the rigid criteria put in place for the selection of works in competition, and took a firm stand against the political pressures and interference of more and more demanding movie studios, preferring the artistic quality of films to the growing commercialization of the film industry.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The social and political unrest of 1968 had strong repercussions on the Venice Bienniale. From 1969 to 1979 no prizes were awarded and the festival returned to the non-competitiveness of the first edition due to the Years of Lead. In 1973, 1977 and 1978, the festival was not even held. The Golden Lion didn't make its return until 1980.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The long-awaited rebirth came in 1979, thanks to the new director Carlo Lizzani (1979–1983), who decided to restore the image and value the festival had lost over the last decade. The 1979 edition laid the foundation for the restoration of international prestige. In an attempt to create a more modern image of the festival, the neo-director created a committee of experts to assist in selecting the works and to increase the diversity of submissions to the festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: In 2004 an independent and parallel film festival, Giornate degli Autori, was created in association with the festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: To celebrate the 70th edition of the festival, in 2013 the new section "Venezia 70 – Future Reloaded" was created.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: In 2018 "Roma" by Alfonso Cuarón won the Golden Lion and became the first ever movie produced by Netflix to be awarded in a major film festival.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The president of the Venice Biennale represents the festival in front of its financial partner, the public authorities, and the media. He is chosen by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage every 4 years. The current president is Roberto Cicutto, appointed on 27 January 2020. Previously the post has been held for 12 years by Paolo Baratta (2008–2020).


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The director of the Festival is responsible for coordinating the events and is chosen by the president of the Venice Biennale and its delegates. The current director Alberto Barbera was appointed on 27 December 2011. On 27 October 2020 Barbera's term was renewed for 4 more years until 2024. He previously held the position from 1998 to 2002.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: This section is open to all "custom-format" works, with a wider view towards new trends in the expressive languages that converge in film.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: Starting from the 67th edition of the festival, four awards of the Orizzonti section have been established:


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The Giornate degli Autori (formerly Venice Days) is an independent and parallel section founded in 2004 in association with Venice Film Festival. It is modeled on the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Anac and 100autori which are both associations of Italian film directors and authors are engaged to support and promote the Giornate.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: All the debut feature films in the various competitive sections in the Venice Film Festival, whether in Official Selection or Independent and Parallel Sections, are eligible for this award. The winner will be awarded a prize of US$100,000, which to be divided equally between the director and the producer.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award, organized in collaboration with Jaeger-LeCoultre (2006-2020) and Cartier (2021- today). It is dedicated to personalities who have made a significant contribution to contemporary cinema.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The Mussolini Cup was the top award from 1934 to 1942 for Best Italian and Best Foreign Film. Named after Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, it was abandoned upon his ousting in 1943.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: This was awarded to Best Actor and Best Actress. It was later replaced by the Volpi Cup for actors and actresses.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: The first time this prize was awarded to Katharine Hepburn for her role in "Little Women" by George Cukor.


title: Venice Film Festival

text: In the first edition of the festival in 1932, due to the lack of a jury and the awarding of official prizes, a list of acknowledgements was decided by popular vote, a tally determined by the number of people flocking to the films, and announced by the Organizing Committee. From this, the "Best Director" was declared – Russian Nikolai Ekk for the film "Road to Life", while the film by René Clair "À Nous la Liberté" was voted Best Film.


title: Queen II

text: Queen II is the second studio album by the British rock band Queen. It was released on 8 March 1974 by EMI Records in the UK and


title: Queen II

text: Elektra Records in the US. It was recorded at Trident Studios and Langham 1 Studios, London, in August 1973 with co-producers Roy Thomas Baker and Robin Geoffrey Cable, and engineered by Mike Stone. It is significant for being the first album to contain elements of the band's signature sound of multi-layered overdubs, vocal harmonies, and varied musical styles.


title: Queen II

text: Described as "arguably the heaviest Queen album", "Queen II" marked the end of the first phase of the band's career. The album combines a heavy rock sound with art rock and progressive rock elements, and has been called "a pillar of grandiose, assaultive hard rock" by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "Queen II" is not a concept album but a collection of songs with a loose theme running throughout. The two sides of the original LP were labelled "Side White" and "Side Black" (instead of the conventional sides "A" and "B"), with corresponding photos of the band dressed in white or in black on either side of the record's label face. The white side has songs with a more emotional theme and the black side is almost entirely about fantasy, often with quite dark themes. Mick Rock's cover photograph was frequently re-used by the band throughout its career, including the music videos for the songs "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), and "One Vision" (1985).


title: Queen II

text: Released to an initially mixed critical reception, "Queen II" remains one of the band's lesser-known albums. Nonetheless, it has retained a cult following since its release, and garnered praise from critics, fans, and fellow musicians alike.


title: Queen II

text: Queen performed their first gig on 27 June 1970, but did not finish their self-titled debut album, "Queen", until November 1972. In the interim, the band had developed other, more complex material but elected to wait to record it until they had more freedom and experience in the studio. "Father To Son", "Ogre Battle" and "Procession" had all been premiered as early as 1972. "Seven Seas of Rhye" dated to Freddie Mercury's Wreckage days in 1969. "See What a Fool I've Been", the B-side to the "Seven Seas of Rhye" single and "White Queen (As It Began)" were left over from the Smile days. "Stone Cold Crazy", also from Mercury's Wreckage period, had been in the set list for years, but was held back and reworked for the third album, "Sheer Heart Attack". Portions of "The Prophet's Song" were also rehearsed during the "Queen II" sessions, but the song was not completed until the fourth album, "A Night at the Opera". Queen insisted that Trident Studios allow them to record at regular hours instead of studio down-time, as they had for the first album. The band approached David Bowie to produce, but he declined because he was then recording "Pin Ups" and working on songs for "Diamond Dogs". Robin Geoffrey Cable, with whom Mercury had worked during the "I Can Hear Music" session, was asked to produce "Nevermore" and "Funny How Love Is", and collaborate with Roy Thomas Baker on the ambitious "March of the Black Queen".


title: Queen II

text: After the commercial failure of the single "Keep Yourself Alive" from the first album, Queen decided it needed a single that did not take "too long to happen" (i.e., without a lengthy guitar intro). "Seven Seas of Rhye", recorded with the specific intention of being the album's leading single, began in a way designed to grab attention. Rehearsals for the "Queen II" sessions commenced on or around 26 July. (Due to management problems, the first album was finally released as the band prepared to record "Queen II".) During these rehearsals, the band were interviewed by Melody Maker and told the magazine that their new album would have a theme of "good versus evil". The band also ended its collaboration with John Anthony, who had co-produced the first album, due to clashes between Mercury and Anthony. On 3 August, the band performed at a gig in Newcastle, then returned to London for a pre-recording rehearsal on 4 August. Sessions began on 5 August with takes 1–12 of the finished version of "Seven Seas of Rhye". On 6 August, they started recording "Father To Son", working on takes 1–4. They continued to work on the album until 9 August, when they made promotional videos for "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Liar" from the debut album.


title: Queen II

text: According to the August 11 issue of Record Mirror, the band was scheduled to go back into the studio on 15 August. However, David Bowie and Ken Scott were producing "Pin Ups" in the studio Queen had been using. The band were put into Studio 2, with producer Robin Geoffrey Cable. Although this studio only had an 8-track tape machine at the time, Queen decided to work on backing tracks nonetheless. Takes of "Nevermore" were recorded that day, and "Funny How Love Is" was recorded on 16 August. Queen had to cancel a studio session on 17 August to perform a gig in Peterborough. They returned to London around 3:00 a.m. Roy Thomas Baker had also left (around 12–18 August) to work with a Danish client named Gasolin', who were recording their album "Gasolin' 3". On 18 August, Queen, Baker and Cable recorded the complex backing track for "The March Of The Black Queen". After taking a break for a bank holiday, the band began principal overdubbing on 28 August. Some backing tracks had to be cut into separate multi-tracks because of the extensive overdubbing. (The album's working title became "Over The Top" in reference to overdubbing.) During this period, John Deacon had to do his summer exams. In September, Brian recorded "Procession," which had its live premiere on 13 September when the band played at the Golders Green Hippodrome in London. (This was also their first recorded concert.)


title: Queen II

text: On 24 September the band did their first radio interview with Bob Harris. In early October, Queen met with photographer Mick Rock for the first time to discuss album concept art. They took a short break starting on 12 October to begin a promotional tour around Europe. On 18 October, the band returned to London to continue work on the album. On 3 November, Queen had their first publicity shoot with Mick Rock, producing the album's iconic cover image. Queen took another break from recording in November to tour with Mott The Hoople. Rehearsals began on 5 November and the tour started in Blackburn on 13 November. The band would come near London a few times in early December, and popped into the studio on their days off. The tour ended at the Hammersmith Odeon on 14 December, followed by a standalone gig at Leicester University on 15 December. Rough mixing for the album commenced on 17 December. Martin Hayman of "Sounds" visited the band on 22 December while they were finishing rough mixes for "Loser In The End", "Ogre Battle", and "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke".


title: Queen II

text: Queen went back into the studio in early January. At this point, all of the rough mixes had been finished, and the band were ready to move onto the final stages of production. According to studio documentation, most of the songs were mixed by 19 January, but still required equalization. Brian had also contracted gangrene from a tainted inoculation needle in mid-December, and couldn't attend some sessions. The band flew to Australia on 25 January and performed to an unruly crowd on 27 January that led to the band to storm off stage halfway through their set. On 31 January, Queen returned to London to complete the album. The last pressings were made on 20 February.


title: Queen II

text: The music of "Queen II" has been attributed to several genres, including art rock, hard rock, glam rock, heavy metal, and progressive rock. Music journalist and author Jerry Ewing described the album as displaying a "proggy art rock tendency". Daniel Ross of "The Quietus" described it as "the exact intersection" between the band's "murky, metallic beginnings" and "the absolute pop perfection incarnation of Queen, leather trousers and Formby pastiches."


title: Queen II

text: Rather than the conventional Side A and Side B, the album was split into "Side White" and "Side Black", dominated by May and Mercury compositions respectively. Although some have interpreted it as a concept album, Queen biographer Georg Purvis stated that it is "not a concept album but a collection of songs with a loose theme running throughout." Mercury later confirmed this in a 1976 "Sounds" interview, citing that "it just evolved to where there was a batch of songs that could be considered aggressive, or a Black Side, and there was a smoother side".


title: Queen II

text: The "White" side is very diverse: four of the five numbers were composed by Brian May, one of which is an instrumental. Freddie Mercury sings two songs; May sings one; and Roger Taylor sings the closing track, which is his only composition on the album. John Deacon played acoustic guitar on "Father to Son" in addition to normal duties on bass guitar. Mercury composed and sang all six songs on the "Black" side.


title: Queen II

text: "Procession" is a short instrumental piece (a funeral march) performed by Brian May on multi-tracked guitar. He recorded it by playing overlapping parts on the Red Special through John Deacon's custom-made amplifier (the Deacy Amp). Roger Taylor also contributes to this instrumental, using only a bass drum pedal.


title: Queen II

text: "Father to Son" was written by May and features heavy metal sections as well as a quiet piano part, which May also played. Like "Procession", "Father to Son" has parts with May on multi-tracked guitar played through the Deacy Amp. It is written from the father's perspective when talking or thinking about his son. Queen immediately added "Father to Son" to their live setlists. In 1975, it was dropped from live shows, but revived a few times in 1976. The song covers a two-octave range: Mercury (G3-A4), Taylor (G4-A5).


title: Queen II

text: Written by May in 1968, this song features contrasting acoustic and heavy metal sections. May explained that he conceived the idea for this song while reading "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. The song also had personal significance for May; he drew inspiration from a fellow student whom he revered and thought represented the idea of the "perfect woman". In a later interview he said, "I remember being totally in love with this girl from biology, and I never ever talked to her...I [was] dared to ask out this girl, and she became a lifelong friend, it's very strange...". The song features May playing his Hairfred acoustic guitar. The guitar had been given a replacement hardwood bridge, chiselled flat, with a small piece of fret wire placed between it and the strings, which lay gently above. The strings produce the buzzing effect of a sitar.


title: Queen II

text: "White Queen" was performed regularly between 1974 and 1977, and last performed in London in 1978. The live version usually included a long instrumental break that was not part of, or omitted from, the album version.


title: Queen II

text: This is the first Queen song to feature May on lead vocals throughout. It also features May on acoustic guitar and electric guitar and the last guitar solo (during the fade-out) features three solo guitars. This kind of complex guitar arrangement is typical of May; however, usually the guitars are harmonious, but in this case, all of the guitars play different parts.


title: Queen II

text: "The Loser in the End" was Taylor's sole contribution on the album both as a songwriter and lead vocalist. The original handwritten lyrics of the song, which were nearly shredded in 2004, are the oldest example of handwritten lyrics in the Queen archive.


title: Queen II

text: Mercury wrote "Ogre Battle" on guitar (as confirmed by May in several interviews) in 1971 and it was one of the earliest songs in the Queen set list despite not being recorded until the "Queen II" sessions. The band waited until they could have more studio freedom to do it properly.


title: Queen II

text: The song is one of Queen's heaviest works. The guitar riff and Taylor's drumming give it a very "thrash" sound. The ogre-like screams in the middle are Mercury's, and the high harmonies at the end of the chorus hook are sung by Taylor. As the title suggests, it tells the story of a battle between ogres, and features a May guitar solo and sound effects to simulate the sounds of a battle. The opening of the song is actually the end of the song played in reverse.


title: Queen II

text: A version of "Ogre Battle" was recorded in December 1973 for the BBC Radio 1 "Sound of the 70s" programme. An acetate was made of an edited version of the BBC recording without the long intro or any of the sound effects in the album version, potentially for release as a second single. However, other sources state that "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" was also considered for the second single.


title: Queen II

text: "Ogre Battle" was a staple of the band's live set up to and including the A Day at the Races Tour, and was only played a couple more times on the North American leg of the News of the World Tour before being dropped from the set for good.


title: Queen II

text: Mercury was inspired by Richard Dadd's painting "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" at the Tate Gallery in London. The fantasy-based lyrics make direct reference to characters and vignettes detailed in the painting and in Dadd's companion poem, "Elimination of a Picture & its Subject—called The Feller's Master Stroke." Characters include Queen Mab, Waggoner Will, the Tatterdemalion, and others. The use of the word "quaere" in the twice-repeated line "What a quaere fellow" has no reference to Mercury's sexuality, according to Roger Taylor.


title: Queen II

text: In some markets the album included a fold-out cover with a reproduction of the painting. Author Neil Gaiman wrote about the painting and the album on his blog:


title: Queen II

text: For the intricately arranged studio recording, Mercury played harpsichord as well as piano, and Roy Thomas Baker played the castanets. Taylor called this song Queen's "biggest stereo experiment", referring to the use of panning in the mix.


title: Queen II

text: The song was performed only a few times during the Queen II Tour, and there was thought to be no live recording of the song until 2014, when it was released on "Live at the Rainbow '74".


title: Queen II

text: The previous track ends with a three-part vocal harmony from Mercury, May, and Taylor which flows into Mercury playing the piano. This piano carries on to open this track making "Ogre Battle", "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" and the current track, into a medley. All the vocal parts were performed by Mercury, who added some contemporary piano "ring" effects as well. These effects were widely suspected to be synthesisers; however, they were created by someone plucking the piano strings while Mercury played the notes. "Nevermore" is a short ballad written by Mercury about the feelings after a heartbreak.


title: Queen II

text: Mercury had been working on this song even before Queen formed. In a 1974 interview with "Melody Maker", he said, "... that song took me ages to complete. I wanted to give it everything, to be self-indulgent or whatever." The multifaceted composition, the band's second longest (6:34), is one of two Queen songs (the other being "Bohemian Rhapsody") containing polyrhythm/polymeter (two different time signatures simultaneously 8/8 and 12/8) and a simpler polyrhythm around the end uptempo section, which is very rare for popular music. The lead vocals cover two and a half octaves (G2 – C5).


title: Queen II

text: May regards it as a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody", stating, "You've got to bear in mind that we'd already made 'My Fairy King' on the first album and we'd done 'The March of the Black Queen' on the second album, so we were well in tune with Freddie's excursions into strange areas, and that was something that we really enjoyed." Taylor recalled in a 1977 interview, "The tape went transparent, genuinely... It was 16-track... The tape had gone over the (recording) head so many times, overdubbing, that the oxide had worn off." A similar anecdote is told about the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sessions.


title: Queen II

text: Despite never being released as a single, it remains a favourite amongst Queen's fans. The full piece was too complicated to be performed live; however, the uptempo section containing the lines "My life is in your hands, I'll foe and I'll fie..." etc. was sometimes included in a live medley, with vocals by Mercury and Taylor, during the 1970s. The opening piano piece is only known to have been played live once, at Providence Civic Center on 14 November 1978 (likely in response to a fan shouting for the song near the beginning of the concert). After playing the intro the band quickly transitioned into "Bohemian Rhapsody". This was also the final time a "Queen II" track would be played live until the revival of "Seven Seas of Rhye" in 1984 for "The Works" Tour.


title: Queen II

text: This song ends with an ascending note progression, which climaxes in the first second of the following track. The song segues into the next track, "Funny How Love Is".


title: Queen II

text: "Funny How Love Is" was created in the studio. Mercury wrote it and played the piano while Robin Cable produced. It was produced using the "wall of sound" technique. The song was never performed live, largely due to the demanding high-register vocals from Mercury throughout the song.


title: Queen II

text: Mercury began developing "Seven Seas of Rhye" in 1969 when he was with the band Wreckage. He eventually fleshed the song out with contributions from May. In the documentary "Queen: Days of Our Lives", May recalled, "I've probably never spoken about this before, ever, but I remember 'Seven Seas of Rhye' being—it was Freddie's idea. He had this lovely little riff idea on the piano, and I think all the middle eighth is stuff that I did. So we definitely worked on it together. But when it came to the album coming out, Freddie went, 'I wrote that.' And we all went, 'Okay.' (Laughs) Because it didn't seem like that big a deal. But Freddie said, 'You know, I wrote the words and it was my idea, so it's my song.' The sort of unwritten law was the person who brought the song in would get the credit for writing that song, and the money for writing that song. Much, much later in Queen history, we recognized this fact."


title: Queen II

text: Along with "Lily of the Valley" from "Sheer Heart Attack", the song references a fantasy world or kingdom named Rhye. "It's really fictitious," Mercury told interviewer Tom Browne in 1977. "It's a figment of your imagination." A short, instrumental version of "Seven Seas of Rhye" was included as the outro on their first album, with the intent of starting this album with the full version. A similar idea occurred with the old music hall song "I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside", which is sung at the end of "Seven Seas of Rhye" here and whistled during the intro to the third album, "Sheer Heart Attack". Ken Testi recalled, "I joined in on the reprise at the end of 'Seven Seas of Rhye'. So did Pat McConnell and a whole bunch of us. I recall an awful lot of reverb, and Brian played the stylophone on it, but it was done in one day and we were all totally pissed at the time."


title: Queen II

text: "Seven Seas of Rhye" features a distinctive arpeggiated piano introduction. On the "Queen II" recording, the arpeggios are played with both hands, an octave apart, whereas on the abbreviated "Queen" recording, and most live performances, Mercury played the simpler one-handed version of these arpeggios. The theme also appears at the end of "It's a Beautiful Day (reprise)" on the band's final album "Made in Heaven" (1995).


title: Queen II

text: Rock photographer Mick Rock was engaged to create the album's artwork. In Rock's words, the band wanted to "graft some of [the trademark] decadent 'glam' sensibility" of his previous work with artists such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. According to Rock, Queen were looking to grab people's attention with the cover, especially since their first album had failed to do so. "They realised that if you could catch people's eyes you could get them interested in the music."


title: Queen II

text: The brief he received from the band conceived a black and white theme for the album. The cover features a photograph described by VH1 as "Queen standing in diamond formation, heads tilted back like Easter Island statues" against a black background. The iconic chiaroscuro image of Queen was inspired by a similar photograph of Marlene Dietrich from the 1932 film "Shanghai Express". "And of course no one was ever more 'glam' than the divine Ms Dietrich," Rock quipped. "It was just one of those flashes of inspiration that happens sometimes," Rock explained. "There was a feeling that [echoing the Dietrich pose] might be pretentious," but Rock convinced the band otherwise. "It made them look like much bigger a deal than they were at the time, but it was a true reflection of their music." Rock stated Mercury loved to quote Oscar Wilde. "Often, that which today is considered pretentious is tomorrow considered state of the art. The important thing is to be considered." Rock added, "To Freddie, that word [pretentious] was meaningless – 'But is it fabulous?' was all that mattered. Those were the days of androgyny, and Freddie was prepared to push it quite a way". Freddie added, "It doesn't have any special meaning, but we were fascinated with this type of thing, and the wardrobe we used at the time described it perfectly well". The image would later be brought to life for the "Bohemian Rhapsody" music video.


title: Queen II

text: To expand on the black and white theme, Rock made a second image of the band, dressed in white against a white background, that was used in the album's gatefold, advertising, and the "Seven Seas of Rhye" single sleeve.


title: Queen II

text: After the album's completion at the end of August 1973, Queen immediately added "Ogre Battle", "Procession" and "Father to Son" to their live set lists and toured extensively. Once again, however, EMI delayed the album's release since the first album had only just been issued in the UK and had yet to be released in the US. Other problems beset the album's release: the energy conservation measures put in place during the 1973 oil crisis delayed its manufacture by several months; then, when released, John Deacon was credited as "Deacon John", and the band insisted it had to be corrected.


title: Queen II

text: "Queen II" was released on 8 March 1974. The album enjoyed chart success in the UK, peaking at number five. It peaked at number 49 in the US, improving on their debut album "Queen", which peaked at number 83. In interviews the group promoted the album with a theme of "good versus evil," and made numerous public appearances to gain exposure: aside from touring in 1973, they performed BBC specials, broadcast a gig at Golder's Green Hippodrome on "In Concert" and appeared on John Peel's "Sound of the Seventies". However, despite the publicity, the group received negative reviews from the media, who criticised the band for being "excessive and self indulgent."


title: Queen II

text: "Seven Seas of Rhye", along with the non-album B-side "See What a Fool I've Been", was released as a single sooner than planned due to a fortuitous circumstance. In February 1974, David Bowie was unable to appear on the show "Top of the Pops" to perform "Rebel Rebel", and a replacement act was urgently needed. Queen were booked for the show and lip-synched "Seven Seas of Rhye". EMI then rushed the single into release on 23 February, just five days after the television appearance was confirmed. It was the band's first hit single, peaking at number 10 in the UK charts.