title: John Milius

text: "Texas Rangers" (2001) was eventually made, though Milius stated that his script was substantially rewritten.


title: John Milius

text: Milius suffered a major financial reversal in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his accountant embezzled from him an estimated $3 million.


title: John Milius

text: He tried to get a job as a staff writer on the TV show "Deadwood"; showrunner David Milch was reluctant as he did not consider Milius a staff writer. Milius pleaded that he needed the money in order to pay for his son's tuition at law school, so Milch simply paid the fees. Milius's career recovered when he helped create the BBC/HBO television series "Rome", which allowed him to repay Milch.


title: John Milius

text: He wrote some pilots which did not go to series—"Dodge City" (circa 2005)—a Western series for CBS, and "Saigon Bureau" (2008)—about the AIP Bureau of photojournalists in the Vietnam War, a collaboration with Chris Noth based on the book "Requiem". He also wrote a script about the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War, "The Chosin Few" for Mark Cuban's 2929 Entertainment, and "The Iron Horsemen", a motorcycle feature.


title: John Milius

text: In 2010 Milius was working on a new project, a film biography of Genghis Khan, and a proposed TV series called "Pharaoh", set during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, when he had a stroke. For a while he was unable to speak or move, but ultimately he recovered.


title: John Milius

text: In March 2011, Milius was a story consultant for the video game "Homefront", about a North Korean conquest of America.


title: John Milius

text: I've always been considered a nut. They kind of tolerate me. It's certainly affected me. I've been blacklisted for a large part of my career because of my politics—as surely as any writer was blacklisted back in the 1950s. It's just that my politics are from the other side, and Hollywood always veers left.


title: John Milius

text: He wrote a number of iconic film lines such as "Charlie don't surf" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning", from "Apocalypse Now", and the famous Harry Callahan one-liners delivered by Clint Eastwood, including "Go ahead, make my day" and "Ask yourself one question, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk?" Milius also had a hand in the monologue in the film "Jaws"; the sequence was performed by Robert Shaw. When Spielberg asked him to contribute to the screenplay for "Saving Private Ryan", Milius suggested the opening and closing scenes at Normandy cemetery where Ryan, now an elderly hero of World War II, in a moment of survivor guilt, asks his wife "Did I live a good life?"


title: John Milius

text: After his work on "Rough Riders" (1997), Milius became an instrumental force in lobbying Congress to award President Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor (posthumously), for acts of conspicuous gallantry while in the Battle of San Juan Hill. Milius made two films featuring Roosevelt: "The Wind and the Lion" (where he was played by Brian Keith) and the made-for-TV film "Rough Riders" (where Tom Berenger took the role).


title: John Milius

text: The character of John Milner from the 1973 George Lucas film "American Graffiti" was inspired by Milius, who was a good friend of Lucas while they were at USC film school. Likewise, the character Walter Sobchak in the 1998 film "The Big Lebowski" (portrayed by John Goodman) was partly inspired by Milius, a friend of The Coen Brothers. The novella "Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls" by Aleksandar Hemon features an episode with Milius, who is described as "sitting at a desk sucking on a cigar as long as a walking stick".


title: John Milius

text: Milius was also instrumental during the startup of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) organization: it was his idea to use the octagon-shaped cage, and his association with UFC helped provide interest and investors to the startup UFC.


title: John Milius

text: The best writer of the so-called USC Mafia, a tight-knit group that resuscitated—some say homogenised American cinema in the 1970s ... Raised on Ford, Hawks, Lean and Kurosawa, shaped by filmmakers as disparate as Fellini and Delmer Daves, Milius favours history books over comic books, character over special effects, and heroes with roots in reality, time, place and customs. Milius' stories reflect his own deeply held ethic, which embraces the values of tradition, adventure, spiritualism, honour and an intense loyalty to friends ... Although he privately chafes at his public image as a gun-toting, liberal baiting provocateur, he allows himself to be painted as such, at times even holding the brush. He plays the Hollywood game like a pro, yet sticks to his own rules; he is a romantic filmmaker who avoids love scenes; his movies contain violence, yet no death in them is without meaning.


title: John Milius

text: Never compromise excellence. To write for someone else is the biggest mistake that any writer makes. You should be your biggest competitor, your biggest critic, your biggest fan, because you don't know what anybody else thinks. How arrogant it is to assume that you know the market, that you know what's popular today—only Steven Spielberg knows what's popular today. Only Steven Spielberg will ever know what's popular. So leave it to him. He's the only one in the history of man who has ever figured that out. Write what you want to see. Because if you don't, you're not going to have any true passion in it, and it's not going to be done with any true artistry.


title: John Milius

text: Triple H, Retired WWE wrestler and current Head of Creative for WWE cites Milius as an inspiration in how to tell a compelling story within a wrestling match without having to rely on over-the-top action, as he stated that Milius didn’t rely on action in his work to tell a compelling story to the audience.


title: John Milius

text: For writing the "Apocalypse Now" screenplay, Milius and Francis Ford Coppola were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen (Though the film was an adaption of "Heart of Darkness", the Writers Guild considered it an original screenplay.).


title: John Milius

text: In 2007, Milius was the recipient of the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award. In his acceptance speech, he said that his favorites of his films were "The Wind and the Lion", "Big Wednesday", and "Conan".


title: John Milius

text: Milius has been married three times. He has two children with his first wife, Ethan Jedediah and Marco Alexander, Renee Fabri (m. January 7, 1967), and one child, Amanda Milius, with his second wife, Celia Kaye (m. February 26, 1978). Amanda is the director of the 2020 documentary "The Plot Against the President". His current marriage (since 1992) is to actress Elan Oberon.


title: John Milius

text: Milius is a self-proclaimed "Zen anarchist", but he also publicly aligns himself with conservative factions in Hollywood and he was interviewed in the documentary "". He has also been consultant to a military think tank, the Institute for Creative Technologies. Milius said:


title: John Milius

text: I'm not a reactionary—I'm just a right-wing extremist so far beyond the Christian Identity people like that and stuff, that they can't even imagine. I'm so far beyond that I'm a Maoist. I'm an anarchist. I've always been an anarchist. Any true, real right-winger if he goes far enough hates all form of government, because government should be done to cattle and not human beings.


title: John Milius

text: Milius has endorsed minimum wage laws and conscription. Milius was also quoted as saying that "it might not have been bad for this country" if Douglas MacArthur had "crossed the Mississippi like Caesar crossed the Rubicon and proclaimed himself Emperor Douglas the First." For years, Milius was a member of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association, where he was a leader (with Charlton Heston) in resisting a takeover attempt by advocates of the so-called Militia Movement.


title: John Milius

text: "I'd like to be Jack Hawkins in "Bridge on the River Kwai"", said Milius. "I call myself romantic. I believe in a lot of 19th-century ideals: chivalry, honor, loyalty, romantic love."


title: John Milius

text: In 2009, Milius signed a petition in support of releasing director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects."


title: Digital currency

text: Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital currencies include cryptocurrency, virtual currency and central bank digital currency. Digital currency may be recorded on a distributed database on the internet, a centralized electronic computer database owned by a company or bank, within digital files or even on a stored-value card.


title: Digital currency

text: Digital currencies exhibit properties similar to traditional currencies, but generally do not have a classical physical form of fiat currency historically that you can directly hold in your hand, like currencies with printed banknotes or minted coins - however they do have a physical form in an unclassical sense coming from the computer to computer and computer to human interactions and the information and processing power of the servers that store and keep track of money. This unclassical physical form allows nearly instantaneous transactions over the internet and vastly lowers the cost associated with distributing notes and coins: for example, of the types of money in the UK economy, 3% are notes and coins, and 79% as electronic money (in the form of bank deposits). Usually not issued by a governmental body, virtual currencies are not considered a legal tender and they enable ownership transfer across governmental borders.


title: Digital currency

text: This type of currency may be used to buy physical goods and services, but may also be restricted to certain communities such as for use inside an online game.


title: Digital currency

text: Digital money can either be centralized, where there is a central point of control over the money supply (for instance, a bank), or decentralized, where the control over the money supply is predetermined or agreed upon democratically.


title: Digital currency

text: In 1983, a research paper titled "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" by David Chaum introduced the idea of digital cash. In 1989, he founded DigiCash, an electronic cash company, in Amsterdam to commercialize the ideas in his research. It filed for bankruptcy in 1998.


title: Digital currency

text: e-gold was the first widely used Internet money, introduced in 1996, and grew to several million users before the US Government shut it down in 2008. e-gold has been referenced to as "digital currency" by both US officials and academia. In 1997, Coca-Cola offered buying from vending machines using mobile payments. PayPal launched its USD-denominated service in 1998. In 2009, bitcoin was launched, which marked the start of decentralized blockchain-based digital currencies with no central server, and no tangible assets held in reserve. Also known as cryptocurrencies, blockchain-based digital currencies proved resistant to attempt by government to regulate them, because there was no central organization or person with the power to turn them off.


title: Digital currency

text: Origins of digital currencies date back to the 1990s Dot-com bubble. Another known digital currency service was Liberty Reserve, founded in 2006; it lets users convert dollars or euros to Liberty Reserve Dollars or Euros, and exchange them freely with one another at a 1% fee. Several digital currency operations were reputed to be used for Ponzi schemes and money laundering, and were prosecuted by the U.S. government for operating without MSB licenses. Q coins or QQ coins, were used as a type of commodity-based digital currency on Tencent QQ's messaging platform and emerged in early 2005. Q coins were so effective in China that they were said to have had a destabilizing effect on the Chinese Yuan currency due to speculation. Recent interest in cryptocurrencies has prompted renewed interest in digital currencies, with bitcoin, introduced in 2008, becoming the most widely used and accepted digital currency.


title: Digital currency

text: Digital Currency is a term that refers to a specific type of electronic currency with specific properties. Digital Currency is also a term used to include the meta-group of sub-types of digital currency, the specific meaning can only be determined within the specific legal or contextual case. Legally and technically, there already are a myriad of legal definitions of digital currency and the many digital currency sub-types. Combining different possible properties, there exists an extensive number of implementations creating many and numerous sub-types of Digital Currency. Many governmental jurisdictions have implemented their own unique definition for digital currency, virtual currency, cryptocurrency, e-money, network money, e-cash, and other types of digital currency. Within any specific government jurisdiction, different agencies and regulators define different and often conflicting meanings for the different types of digital currency based on the specific properties of a specific currency type or sub-type.


title: Digital currency

text: A virtual currency has been defined in 2012 by the European Central Bank as "a type of unregulated, digital money, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers, and used and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community". The US Department of Treasury in 2013 defined it more tersely as "a medium of exchange that operates like a currency in some environments, but does not have all the attributes of real currency". The US Department of Treasury also stated that, "Virtual currency does not have legal-tender status in any jurisdiction."


title: Digital currency

text: According to the European Central Bank's 2015 "Virtual currency schemes – a further analysis" report, virtual currency is a digital representation of value, not issued by a central bank, credit institution or e-money institution, which, in some circumstances, can be used as an alternative to money. In the previous report of October 2012, the virtual currency was defined as a type of unregulated, digital money, which is issued and usually controlled by its developers, and used and accepted among the members of a specific virtual community.


title: Digital currency

text: According to the Bank for International Settlements' November 2015 "Digital currencies" report, it is an asset represented in digital form and having some monetary characteristics. Digital currency can be denominated to a sovereign currency and issued by the issuer responsible to redeem digital money for cash. In that case, digital currency represents electronic money (e-money). Digital currency denominated in its own units of value or with decentralized or automatic issuance will be considered as a virtual currency. As such, bitcoin is a digital currency but also a type of virtual currency. Bitcoin and its alternatives are based on cryptographic algorithms, so these kinds of virtual currencies are also called cryptocurrencies.


title: Digital currency

text: Cryptocurrency is a sub-type of digital currency and a digital asset that relies on cryptography to chain together digital signatures of asset transfers, peer-to-peer networking and decentralization. In some cases a proof-of-work or proof-of-stake scheme is used to create and manage the currency. Cryptocurrencies can allow electronic money systems to be decentralized. When implemented with a blockchain, the digital ledger system or record keeping system uses cryptography to edit separate shards of database entries that are distributed across many separate servers. The first and most popular system is bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic monetary system based on cryptography.


title: Digital currency

text: Most of the traditional money supply is bank money held on computers. They are considered digital currency in some cases. One could argue that our increasingly cashless society means that all currencies are becoming digital currencies, but they are not presented to us as such.


title: Digital currency

text: Currency can be exchanged electronically using debit cards and credit cards using electronic funds transfer at point of sale.


title: Digital currency

text: A number of electronic money systems use contactless payment transfer in order to facilitate easy payment and give the payee more confidence in not letting go of their electronic wallet during the transaction.


title: Digital currency

text: Central Bank Digital Currencies are a form of universally accessible digital money in a nation and hold the same value as the countries paper currency. Like cryptocurrency, CBCD's are held in the form of tokens. CBDC's are different than regular digital cash forms like in online bank accounts because CBDC's are established through the central bank within a country, with liabilities held by one's government, rather than from a commercial bank. Approximately nine countries have already established a Central Bank Digital Currency, with interest in the system increasing highly throughout the world. In these nations, CBDC's have been used as a form of exchange and a way for governments to try and prevent risks from occurring within their financial systems.


title: Digital currency

text: Digital Currency has been implemented in some cases as a decentralized system of any combination of currency issuance, ownership record, ownership transfer authorization and validation, and currency storage.


title: Digital currency

text: Per the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), "These schemes do not distinguish between users based on location, and


title: Digital currency

text: Since 2001, the European Union has implemented the E-Money Directive "on the taking up, pursuit and prudential supervision of the business of electronic money institutions" last amended in 2009.


title: Digital currency

text: In the United States, electronic money is governed by Article 4A of the Uniform Commercial Code for wholesale transactions and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act for consumer transactions. Provider's responsibility and consumer's liability are regulated under Regulation E.


title: Digital currency

text: Virtual currencies pose challenges for central banks, financial regulators, departments or ministries of finance, as well as fiscal authorities and statistical authorities.


title: Digital currency

text: As of 2016, over 24 countries are investing in distributed ledger technologies (DLT) with $1.4bn in investments. In addition, over 90 central banks are engaged in DLT discussions, including implications of a central bank issued digital currency.


title: Digital currency

text: In March 2018, the Marshall Islands became the first country to issue their own cryptocurrency and certify it as legal tender; the currency is called the "sovereign".


title: Digital currency

text: The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has determined virtual currencies are properly defined as commodities in 2015. The CFTC warned investors against pump and dump schemes that use virtual currencies.


title: Digital currency

text: The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ruling Notice 2014-21 defines any virtual currency, cryptocurrency and digital currency as property; gains and losses are taxable within standard property policies.


title: Digital currency

text: On 20 March 2013, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued a guidance to clarify how the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act applied to persons creating, exchanging, and transmitting virtual currencies.


title: Digital currency

text: In May 2014 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) "warned about the hazards of bitcoin and other virtual currencies".


title: Digital currency

text: In July 2014, the New York State Department of Financial Services proposed the most comprehensive regulation of virtual currencies to date, commonly called BitLicense. It has gathered input from bitcoin supporters and the financial industry through public hearings and a comment period until 21 October 2014 to customize the rules. The proposal per NY DFS press release "sought to strike an appropriate balance that helps protect consumers and root out illegal activity". It has been criticized by smaller companies to favor established institutions, and Chinese bitcoin exchanges have complained that the rules are "overly broad in its application outside the United States".


title: Digital currency

text: The Bank of Canada have explored the possibility of creating a version of its currency on the blockchain.


title: Digital currency

text: The Bank of Canada teamed up with the nation’s five largest banks – and the blockchain consulting firm R3 – for what was known as Project Jasper. In a simulation run in 2016, the central bank issued CAD-Coins onto a blockchain similar Ethereum. The banks used the CAD-Coins to exchange money the way they do at the end of each day to settle their master accounts.


title: Digital currency

text: In 2016, Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of China's central bank, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), wrote that "the conditions are ripe for digital currencies, which can reduce operating costs, increase efficiency and enable a wide range of new applications". According to Fan Yifei, the best way to take advantage of the situation is for central banks to take the lead, both in supervising private digital currencies and in developing digital legal tender of their own.


title: Digital currency

text: In October 2019, the PBOC announced that a digital renminbi would be released after years of preparation. The version of the currency, known as DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment), is based on cryptocurrency which can be "decoupled" from the banking system. The announcement received a variety of responses: some believe it is more about domestic control and surveillance.


title: Digital currency

text: In December 2020, the PBOC distributed million worth of digital renminbi to the residents of Suzhou through a lottery program to further promote the government-backed digital currency. Recipients of the currency could make both offline and online purchases, expanding on an earlier trial that did not require internet connection through the inclusion of online stores in the program. Around 20,000 transactions were reported by the e-commerce company JD.com in the first 24 hours of the trial. Contrary to other online payment platforms such as Alipay or WeChat Pay, the digital currency does not have transaction fees.


title: Digital currency

text: The Danish government proposed getting rid of the obligation for selected retailers to accept payment in cash, moving the country closer to a "cashless" economy. The Danish Chamber of Commerce is backing the move. Nearly a third of the Danish population uses MobilePay, a smartphone application for transferring money.


title: Digital currency

text: A law passed by the National Assembly of Ecuador gives the government permission to make payments in electronic currency and proposes the creation of a national digital currency. "Electronic money will stimulate the economy; it will be possible to attract more Ecuadorian citizens, especially those who do not have checking or savings accounts and credit cards alone. The electronic currency will be backed by the assets of the Central Bank of Ecuador", the National Assembly said in a statement. In December 2015, Sistema de Dinero Electrónico ("electronic money system") was launched, making Ecuador the first country with a state-run electronic payment system.


title: Digital currency

text: On Jun 9, 2021, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador has become the first country in the world to officially classify Bitcoin as legal currency. Starting 90 days after approval, every business must accept Bitcoin as legal tender for goods or services, unless it is unable to provide the technology needed to do the transaction.


title: Digital currency

text: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a real-time payment system for instant money transfers between any two bank accounts held in participating banks in India. The interface has been developed by the National Payments Corporation of India and is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India. This digital payment system is available 24*7*365. UPI is agnostic to the type of user and is used for person to person, person to business, business to person and business to business transactions.


title: Digital currency

text: Transactions can be initiated by the payer or the payee. To identify a bank account it uses a unique Virtual Payment Address (VPA) of the type 'accountID@bankID'. The VPA can be assigned by the bank, but can also be self specified just like an email address. The simplest and most common form of VPA is 'mobilenumber@upi'. Money can be transferred from one VPA to another or from one VPA to any bank account in a participating bank using account number and bank branch details. Transfers can be inter-bank or intra-bank.


title: Digital currency

text: UPI has no intermediate holding pond for money. It withdraws funds directly from the bank account of the sender and deposits them directly into the recipient's bank account whenever a transaction is requested. A sender can initiate and authorise a transfer using a two step secure process: login using a pass code → initiate → verify using a passcode. A receiver can initiate a payment request on the system to send the payer a notification or by presenting a QR code. On receiving the request, the payer can decline or confirm the payment using the same two step process: login → confirm → verify. The system is extraordinarily user friendly to the extent that even technophobes and barely literate users are adopting it in huge numbers.


title: Digital currency

text: Government-controlled Sberbank of Russia owns Yandex.Money – electronic payment service and digital currency of the same name.


title: Digital currency

text: Sweden is in the process of replacing all of its physical banknotes, and most of its coins by mid-2017. However, the new banknotes and coins of the Swedish krona will probably be circulating at about half the 2007 peak of 12,494 kronor per capita. The Riksbank is planning to begin discussions of an electronic currency issued by the central bank to which "is not to replace cash, but to act as complement to it". Deputy Governor Cecilia Skingsley states that cash will continue to spiral out of use in Sweden, and while it is currently fairly easy to get cash in Sweden, it is often very difficult to deposit it into bank accounts, especially in rural areas. No decision has been currently made about the decision to create "e-krona".


title: Digital currency

text: In her speech, Skingsley states: "The first question is whether e-krona should be booked in accounts or whether the ekrona should be some form of a digitally transferable unit that does not need an underlying account structure, roughly like cash." Skingsley also states: "Another important question is whether the Riksbank should issue e-krona directly to the general public or go via the banks, as we do now with banknotes and coins." Other questions will be addressed like interest rates, should they be positive, negative, or zero?


title: Digital currency

text: In 2016, a city government first accepted digital currency in payment of city fees. Zug, Switzerland, added bitcoin as a means of paying small amounts, up to , in a test and an attempt to advance Zug as a region that is advancing future technologies. In order to reduce risk, Zug immediately converts any bitcoin received into the Swiss currency. Swiss Federal Railways, government-owned railway company of Switzerland, sells bitcoins at its ticket machines.


title: Digital currency

text: In 2016, the UK's chief scientific adviser, Sir Mark Walport, advised the government to consider using a blockchain-based digital currency.


title: Digital currency

text: The chief economist of Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, proposed the abolition of paper currency. The Bank has also taken an interest in blockchain. In 2016 it has embarked on a multi-year research programme to explore the implications of a central bank issued digital currency. The Bank of England has produced several research papers on the topic. One suggests that the economic benefits of issuing a digital currency on a distributed ledger could add as much as 3 percent to a country's economic output. The Bank said that it wanted the next version of the bank’s basic software infrastructure to be compatible with distributed ledgers.


title: Digital currency

text: Government attitude dictates the tendency among established heavy financial actors that both are risk-averse and conservative. None of these offered services around cryptocurrencies and much of the criticism came from them. "The first mover among these has been Fidelity Investments, Boston based Fidelity Digital Assets LLC will provide enterprise-grade custody solutions, a cryptocurrency trading execution platform and institutional advising services 24 hours a day, seven days a week designed to align with blockchain's always-on trading cycle". It will work with Bitcoin and Ethereum with general availability scheduled for 2019.


title: Digital currency

text: Hard electronic currency does not have the ability to be disputed or reversed when used. It is nearly impossible to reverse a transaction, justified or not. It is very similar to cash.


title: Digital currency

text: Soft electronic currencies are the opposite of hard electronic currencies. Payments can be reversed. Usually, when a payment is reversed there is a "clearing time." A hard currency can be "softened" with a third-party service.


title: Digital currency

text: Many existing digital currencies have not yet seen widespread usage, and may not be easily used or exchanged. Banks generally do not accept or offer services for them. There are concerns that cryptocurrencies are extremely risky due to their very high volatility and potential for pump and dump schemes. Regulators in several countries have warned against their use and some have taken concrete regulatory measures to dissuade users. The non-cryptocurrencies are all centralized. As such, they may be shut down or seized by a government at any time. The more anonymous a currency is, the more attractive it is to criminals, regardless of the intentions of its creators. Bitcoin has also been criticised for its energy inefficient SHA-256-based proof of work.


title: Digital currency

text: According to Barry Eichengreen, an economist known for his work on monetary and financial economics, "cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are too volatile to possess the essential attributes of money. Stablecoins have fragile currency pegs that diminish their utility in transactions. And central bank digital currencies are a solution in search of a problem."


title: Digital currency

text: Digital Currencies have become popular due to their convenient nature. Many users believe digital currency allows them to transfer money quicker and in a simpler manner. Many countries have adopted forms of digital currency due to doubts in the strength of their banking systems and distrust in the state of their economy. Other users prefer digital currency due to the freedom it gives them in their spending habits. Due to the fact that regulation over digital currencies is weak, many users can go around typical rules and regulations that are upheld with fiat currencies. In times of financial predicaments within a country, digital currencies may also help protect a user's assets.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Kari Wahlgren (born July 13, 1977) is an American actress who has provided English-language voices for animated movies, TV series, and video games. She got her start in anime voice-overs as Haruko Haruhara in "FLCL", and would later land major roles in a number of shows and films: Robin Sena in "Witch Hunter Robin", Lavie Head in "Last Exile", Fuu in "Samurai Champloo", Scarlett in "Steamboy", Pacifica Casull in the "Scrapped Princess", Saya Otonashi in "Blood+", Michiru Satomi and Luca in "Immortal Grand Prix", Kagami Hiiragi in "Lucky Star", Saber in "Fate/zero", "" and "", and Celty Sturluson in the "Durarara!!" series.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: In American animation, she has provided voices for a number of series including "Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!", "Fish Hooks", "Phineas and Ferb", "Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz", "Ben 10", "", "", "Rick and Morty", "Bunnicula", "The Fairly OddParents", "Bunsen Is a Beast", and the Nickelodeon versions of "Winx Club" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". In video games, she voiced lead characters Ashe in "Final Fantasy XII" Shelke in "", and Raine Sage in "Tales of Symphonia".


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren was born and raised in Hoisington, Kansas. She was inspired as a child by the Disney Princesses and other voices in animation. Her parents were teachers, which encouraged her to support charities and organizations that promote reading and education later in her career. On her eleventh birthday, when she and her family were in California and toured the building for Focus on the Family, she was asked to do a bit role in their radio drama "Adventures in Odyssey", as an eleven-year-old character named Gloria McCoy.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren lived in Kansas City, Missouri, where she did some radio spots, then moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to work on her acting career. In an interview in "Lawrence Journal-World", she said that she was not getting much on-camera work, so she shifted her energies towards voice-over work, and that her experience with dialogue and Shakespeare classes helped a lot towards landing roles that involved various characters, some of which had accents or were from certain time periods.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren's debut anime role was Haruko Haruhara in a six-episode OVA series called "FLCL". In an interview with "Anime Tourist", she said that Haruko was the only character she got to audition for. She depicted her as close to the original dub but with some American interpretation to appeal to the audience, and depending on how she was drawn, she changed her voice range from cartoon and childlike to realistic. In a later review of the series, Bryce Coulter of Mania.com was impressed by her character work: "she definitely gives Haruko that twenty-something, sarcastic and almost punkish persona." In 2018, she voiced in the new "FLCL" seasons, including as main character Haruha Raharu in "FLCL: Progressive" and reprising Haruko in "FLCL: Alternative".


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren's next major anime dub role was in "Witch Hunter Robin", where she played the title character Robin Sena, a soft-spoken girl who joins a group of witch hunters, but harbors some magic abilities of her own. Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network said she was "pleasant, subtle and perfect for the role" and wished the supporting voice cast would demonstrate such subtleties. She voiced lead character Lavie Head in the steampunk fantasy series "Last Exile". Allen Divers of Anime News Network grouped her with the "better known names of the California voice-acting scene". She voiced title character Sakura Kinomoto in Bang Zoom!'s dubbing of "", which Divers praised that "the voice actors did a great job of matching the emotions of the original Japanese voices, including Sakura's trademark expression 'Hoe!'", something that was missing in previous English adaptations. In live-action works, she starred as Tinkerbell in an indie Peter Pan film rendition called "Neverland", released in 2003. Her character was described as a "sullen sidekick" and "drugged-out".


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: In 2004, she voiced a starring role in the animated feature film "Steamboy", among actors Anna Paquin, Patrick Stewart and Alfred Molina. She played Scarlett, a teenage granddaughter of the corporation's chairman, described as spoiled and cruel, and generally annoying. Peter Sanderson of IGN called Scarlett one of the most obnoxious characters he has ever encountered, and hardly stands up to her movie equivalent. She voiced Chika Minazuki in "Ai Yori Aoshi", a little cousin character. Way Jeng of Mania.com described her performance as energetic, yet innocent and simple, but contrasting to Wendee Lee's voicing of Tina Foster. In 2005, she voiced the female lead character Fuu Kasumi in "Samurai Champloo". Carlo Santos of Anime News Network thought the characters sounded "well-suited to their personalities", but was concerned that Fuu "falls into the habit of sounding like every other ditzy anime girl out there." In "Scrapped Princess", she voices the title character Pacifica Casull, who is hunted down because of a prophecy where she would cause the destruction of the world if she lives to see her 16th birthday. Theron Martin called her acting of "Pacifica's brattiness and deep sensitivity solidly pegged", although it is different from her Japanese counterpart as it "lacks some of the poutiness", and takes some time to get used to.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren has been involved in a number of video games. Her first voice-over role in video games was in "" where she played Willow Rosenberg. In the James Bond video game "From Russia with Love", released in 2005, she voiced a Bond girl that was paired with Sean Connery's original voice. In 2006, she landed leading roles of Ashe in "Final Fantasy XII" and Shelke in "Dirge of Cerberus – Final Fantasy VII". In an interview conducted by UFFSite and RPGSite, she recounts how she received notice of the roles on two consecutive days, and said that the franchise was like "the holy grail of video game acting". She portrayed Ashe with a bit of a regal tone, after the director encouraged her to do so following a class where she was doing Shakespeare. She describes her character as someone a girl would look up to as "intelligent, diplomatic, and can kick ass and look good doing it". In contrast, Shelkie was desired to be portrayed as very cold and emotionless, which she describes as "cold, but sympathetic." In 2007, she voiced the playable title character in the strategy-RPG "Jeanne d'Arc". Wahlgren voices the female Jedi Knight in the MMO "". She also voices several characters in the MMO Guild Wars 2, most notably Caithe.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren's involvement in animation voice-over took off in 2004 when she was cast in a lead role in the Disney/Jetix ensemble action superhero show "Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!" where she voiced Nova. The show ran for four seasons from 2004 to 2006. She would also pick up recurring villain roles such as Samantha Paine aka Magness in "A.T.O.M." and Charmcaster in "Ben 10", the latter of which would return in the show's sequels and related video games. In 2007, she voiced Tak's friend Jeera in Nickelodeon's computer graphics-animated series "Tak and the Power of Juju". She voiced little sister character Suzy Johnson in Disney’s hit series "Phineas and Ferb", and participated in the second season of the animated comedy "Lil' Bush" where she voiced Lil' Hillary and Lil' Condi.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Wahlgren became a regular cast member for "Fish Hooks", which premiered in 2010, where she voiced Shellsea and many supporting and guest characters. She landed the role of Tigress in the television adaptation "" (replacing Angelina Jolie); the series premiered in 2011 and has run over four seasons. Also in 2011, Wahlgren started voicing Faragonda in the Nickelodeon revival of "Winx Club". In 2012, she had the lead role of Allie Underhill in the action series "", which spanned 52 episodes, and picked up roles in other cartoon shows such as "Gravity Falls" and "". She voiced Meg, the starring love interest in the Disney short film "Paperman" which screened before "Wreck-It Ralph" in the theaters in 2012. In an interview with her school's alumni association, she said that she was asked to do the role because of her previous involvements in "Bolt" and "Tangled". Recording for the film took about 30 minutes, mostly of vocal sounds. The short went on to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: In 2015, she joined the cast of "Fairly OddParents" as a starring character Chloe Carmichael in its show's tenth season. She continued to voice Jessica and other characters for "Rick and Morty" which has concluded its third season, and voiced Amanda in the Butch Hartman-produced series "Bunsen Is a Beast" which aired on Nickelodeon in February 2017. In July 2017, she voiced Dorothy Gale in the animated television series "Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz" broadcast on Boomerang.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: Some of her work has garnered recognition, awards and nominations from websites that review anime and animation. Mania.com wrote that Wahlgren's performance as the straight-man character Kagami Hiiragi in "Lucky Star" was absolute sarcastic perfection, and named her the Best Overlooked Actress for 2008 in their annual Anime Dubbies Awards. Theron Martin liked Celty Sturluson, a headless dullahan character in "Durarara!!" who uses mostly body language and typed words. In his year-end awards for 2011, he selected Wahlgren the Best English Dub Performance – Female.


title: Kari Wahlgren

text: On the Behind the Voice Actors website, she was selected by the staff as the Voice Actress of the Year in 2012, and was nominated for 2011 and 2013. She received nominations in other categories: Best Female Lead Vocal Performer in an Anime Title for Celty in "Durarara!!" in 2011, Best Female Lead Vocal Performance in a Television Series – Action / Drama for Allie Underhill in "Kaijudo" in 2012, Best Female Lead Vocal Performance in a Television Series – Comedy / Musical for Tigress in "" in 2012, Best Female Lead Vocal Performance in an Anime Television Series/OVA for Saber in "Fate/zero", Best Female Supporting Vocal Performance in an Anime Movie/Special for Karina Lyle/Blue Rose in "Tiger & Bunny: The Beginning" in 2013, Best Female Vocal Performance in a Television Series in a Guest Role – Action/Drama for Letta Turmond in "" and Best Female Vocal Performance in a Video Game in a Supporting Role for Courtney Collins in "".


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: There are twelve provinces of the Netherlands (), representing the administrative layer between the national government and the local municipalities, with responsibility for matters of subnational or regional importance.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The most populous province is South Holland, with just over 3.7 million inhabitants as of January 2020, and also the most densely populated province with . With 383,488 inhabitants, Zeeland has the smallest population. However Drenthe is the least densely populated province with . In terms of area, Friesland is the largest province with a total area of . If water is excluded, Gelderland is the largest province by land area at . The province of Utrecht is the smallest with a total area of , while Flevoland is the smallest by land area at . In total about 10,000 people were employed by the provincial administrations in 2018.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The provinces of the Netherlands are joined in the Association of Provinces of the Netherlands (IPO). This organisation promotes the common interests of the provinces in the national government of the Netherlands in The Hague.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The members of the States-Provincial are elected every four years in direct elections. To a large extent, the same political parties are enlisted in these elections in the national elections. The chosen provincial legislators elect the members of the national Senate within three months after the provincial elections. The elections for the water boards take place on the same date as the provincial elections.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The last provincial elections were held in 2007, 2011, 2015 and in 2019. The next provincial elections are scheduled for 2023.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: To a large extent, the provinces of the Netherlands are financed by the national government. Also, provinces have income from a part of the Vehicle Excise Duty. Several provinces have made a large profit in the past from privatising utility companies originally owned or partly owned by the provinces. Essent, which was originally owned by six provinces and more than a hundred municipalities, was sold for around 9.3 billion euros.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The country of the Netherlands, being the largest part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, is divided into twelve provinces ("provincies" in Dutch) and three overseas special municipalities; Bonaire, Saba and Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean Netherlands that are not part of any province. Previously these were part of public bodies ("openbare lichamen").


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: Nearly all Dutch provinces can trace their origin to a medieval county or duchy, as can the provinces of regions in Belgium. Their status changed when they came under a single ruler who centralised their administration, reducing their powers. There were 17 in total: from these unified Netherlands, seven northern provinces from 1588 formed the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, namely Holland, Zeeland, Gelderland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel and Groningen.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: The Republic's lands also included Drenthe (one of the 17, but without the autonomous status of the others), and parts of the Duchy of Brabant, Duchy of Limburg and County of Flanders, which were considered to be "conquered lands" and were governed directly by the States General, hence their name Generality Lands. They were called "Staats-Brabant", "Staats-Limburg" and "Staats-Vlaanderen", meaning "governed by the States General". Each of these "Netherlands" had a high degree of autonomy, cooperating with each other mainly on defense and foreign relations, but otherwise keeping to their own affairs.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: On 1 January 1796, under the Batavian Republic, Drenthe and Staats-Brabant became the eighth and ninth provinces of the Netherlands. The latter, which had been known as Bataafs Brabant (English: Batavian Brabant), changed its name to Noord-Brabant, North Brabant, in 1815 when it became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which also contained (then) South Brabant, a province now in Belgium. This new unified state featured the provinces in their modern form, as non-autonomous subdivisions of the national state, and again numbering 17, though they were not all the same as the 16th century ones. In 1839, following the separation of Belgium, the province of Limburg was divided between the two countries, each now having a province called Limburg. A year later, Holland, the largest and most populous of the Dutch provinces, was also split into two provinces, for a total of 11. The 12th province to be created was Flevoland, consisting almost entirely of reclaimed land, established on 1 January 1986.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: During the Batavian Republic, the Netherlands was from 1798 to 1801 completely reorganised into eight new departments, most named after rivers, inspired by the French revolutionary example, in an attempt to do away with the old semi-autonomous status of the provinces. They are listed below, with their capitals and the territory of the former provinces that they mostly incorporated:


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: After only three years, following a coup d'état, the borders of the former provinces were restored, though not their autonomous status. They were now also called "departments" and Drenthe was added to Overijssel. In 1806 the Kingdom of Holland replaced the republic to further French interests. It was during this administration that Holland was first split in two, with the department of to the north and that of to the south. East Frisia, then as now in Germany, was added to the kingdom as a department in 1807 and Drenthe split off again making a total of 11 departments.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: When the Netherlands finally did become fully part of France in 1810, the departments of the kingdom and their borders were largely maintained, with some joined. They were however nearly all renamed, again mainly after rivers, though the names differed from their Batavian counterparts. Following are their names and the modern day province they mostly correspond to:


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: With the defeat and withdrawal of the French in 1813, the old provinces and their names were re-established, Holland was reunited and East-Frisia went its separate way. The 17 provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands were for a significant part based on the former French departments and their borders, in particular in what would later become Belgium.


title: Provinces of the Netherlands

text: There is continuous discussion within the Netherlands about the future of the provinces. Before 2014, the national government was planning to merge the provinces Flevoland, North Holland and Utrecht into a single province . Due to significant protest the plan was abandoned.


title: April

text: April is the fourth month of the year in the Gregorian and Julian calendars. It is the first of four months to have a length of 30 days, and the second of five months to have a length of less than 31 days.


title: April

text: April is commonly associated with the season of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the seasonal equivalent to October in the Northern Hemisphere and vice versa.


title: April

text: The Romans gave this month the Latin name "Aprilis" but the derivation of this name is uncertain. The traditional etymology is from the verb "aperire", "to open", in allusion to its being the season when trees and flowers begin to "open", which is supported by comparison with the modern Greek use of άνοιξη ("ánixi") (opening) for spring. Since some of the Roman months were named in honor of divinities, and as April was sacred to the goddess Venus, her Veneralia being held on the first day, it has been suggested that Aprilis was originally her month Aphrilis, from her equivalent Greek goddess name Aphrodite ("Aphros"), or from the Etruscan name "Apru". Jacob Grimm suggests the name of a hypothetical god or hero, "Aper" or "Aprus".


title: April

text: April was the second month of the earliest Roman calendar, before "Ianuarius" and "Februarius" were added by King Numa Pompilius about 700 BC. It became the fourth month of the calendar year (the year when twelve months are displayed in order) during the time of the decemvirs about 450 BC, when it also was given 29 days. The 30th day was added during the reform of the calendar undertaken by Julius Caesar in the mid-40s BC, which produced the Julian calendar.


title: April

text: The Anglo-Saxons called April "ēastre-monaþ". The Venerable Bede says in "The Reckoning of Time" that this month "ēastre" is the root of the word Easter. He further states that the month was named after a goddess "Eostre" whose feast was in that month. It is also attested by Einhard in his work, Vita Karoli Magni.


title: April

text: St George's day is the twenty-third of the month; and St Mark's Eve, with its superstition that the ghosts of those who are doomed to die within the year will be seen to pass into the church, falls on the twenty-fourth.


title: April

text: In China the symbolic of the earth by the emperor and princes of the blood took place in their third month, which frequently corresponds to April. In Finnish April is "huhtikuu", meaning "slash-and-burn moon", when gymnosperms for beat and burn clearing of farmland were felled.


title: April

text: In Slovene, the most established traditional name is "mali traven", meaning the month when plants start growing. It was first written in 1466 in the Škofja Loka manuscript.


title: April

text: The month Aprilis had 30 days; Numa Pompilius made it 29 days long; finally Julius Caesar’s calendar reform made it again 30 days long, which was not changed in the calendar revision of Augustus Caesar in 8 BC. Additionally in the Spanish colony, Las Islas Filipinas (now known as the Philippines), the month Aprilis had a significant meaning to the life of the natives as it was associated to the influence of the Chinese during the Spanish colonial period. The importance of this aspect to the lives of the natives was formerly associated to an event called "Abril na Ikaw" as it is closely linked to the famous trader, April Yu.


title: April

text: In Ancient Rome, the festival of Cerealia was held for seven days from mid-to-late April, but exact dates are uncertain. Feriae Latinae was also held in April, with the date varying. Other ancient Roman observances include Veneralia (April 1), Megalesia (April 10–16), Fordicidia (April 15), Parilia (April 21), Vinalia Urbana (April 23), Robigalia (April 25), and Serapia (April 25). Floralia was held April 27 during the Republican era, or April 28 on the Julian calendar, and lasted until May 3. However, these dates do not correspond to the modern Gregorian calendar.


title: April

text: The Lyrids meteor shower appears on April 16 – April 26 each year, with the peak generally occurring on April 22. Eta Aquariids meteor shower also appears in April. It is visible from about April 21 to about May 20 each year with peak activity on or around May 6. The Pi Puppids appear on April 23, but only in years around the parent comet's perihelion date. The Virginids also shower at various dates in April.


title: April

text: The "Days of April" ("journées d'avril") is a name assigned in French history to a series of insurrections at Lyons, Paris and elsewhere, against the government of Louis Philippe in 1834, which led to violent repressive measures, and to a famous trial known as the "procès d'avril".


title: April

text: "(All Baha'i, Islamic, and Jewish observances begin at the sundown prior to the date listed, and end at sundown of the date in question unless otherwise noted.)"


title: Kim Peek

text: Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie "Rain Man". Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, he is now thought to have had FG syndrome. The Utah Film Center's Peek Award honors his legacy.


title: Kim Peek

text: Laurence Kim Peek was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum, a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek's case, secondary connectors such as the anterior commissure were also missing. There is speculation that his neurons made unusual connections due to the absence of a corpus callosum, resulting in an increased memory capacity. According to Peek's father, Fran (Francis) Peek, Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. Peek read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life. He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, while reading the right page with his right eye. According to an article in "The Times" newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.


title: Kim Peek

text: Peek lived in Murray, Utah, and spent a considerable amount of his time reading at the Salt Lake City Library and demonstrating his capabilities at schools, with great help from his father.


title: Kim Peek

text: Peek did not walk until he was four years old, and even then in a sidelong manner. He could not button up his shirt and had difficulty with other ordinary motor skills, presumably due to his damaged cerebellum, which normally coordinates motor activities. In psychological testing, Peek yielded superior ability in the performance sub-tests and limited ability in the verbal sub-tests, leading his overall IQ of 87 not to be considered a valid measure of his cognitive ability.


title: Kim Peek

text: In 1984, screenwriter Barry Morrow met Peek in Arlington, Texas; the result of the meeting was the 1988 Academy Award-winning film "Rain Man". The character of Raymond Babbitt, although inspired by Peek, was depicted as being an individual with autism. Dustin Hoffman, who portrayed Babbitt in the film, met Peek and other individuals that displayed savant mannerisms, studying their characteristics and nature in order to play the role as accurately as possible. The movie led to a number of requests for appearances, which increased Peek's self-confidence. Barry Morrow gave Peek his Oscar statuette to carry with him and show at these appearances; it has since been referred to as the "Most Loved Oscar Statue" because it has been held by more people than any other. Peek also enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers that day. Peek also appeared on television. He traveled with his father, who took care of him and performed many motor tasks that Peek found difficult.


title: Kim Peek

text: In 2004, scientists at the Center for Bioinformatics Space Life Sciences at the NASA Ames Research Center examined Peek with a series of tests including computed tomography (CT scan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The intent was to create a three-dimensional view of his brain structure and to compare the images to MRI scans performed in 1988. These were the first tentative approaches in using non-invasive technology to further investigate Kim's savant abilities.


title: Kim Peek

text: A 2008 study concluded that Peek probably had FG syndrome, a rare X chromosome-linked genetic syndrome that causes physical anomalies such as hypotonia (low muscle tone) and macrocephaly (abnormally large head).


title: Kim Peek

text: Barry Morrow put his own Oscar statuette on permanent loan to Salt Lake City in memory of Kim Peek and put forward the money for the Peek Award, which "pays tribute to artists, media makers, and film subjects who are positively impacting our society's perception of people with disabilities" and is given out by the Utah Film Center.


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: The discography of Foo Fighters, an American rock band formed in 1994 by Dave Grohl, consists of ten studio albums, ten extended plays (EPs), six video albums, and 57 singles (including promotional releases). The current Foo Fighters line-up consists of Grohl (vocals and guitar), Rami Jaffee (keyboard), Nate Mendel (bass), Chris Shiflett (guitar) and Pat Smear (guitar).


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: In October 1994, Grohl recorded an album's worth of songs in which he played all instruments in Seattle's Robert Lang Studios. He chose the name "Foo Fighters" for the project to hide his identity and passed cassette copies of the sessions to personal friends. After those tapes attracted record label interest, Grohl signed with Capitol Records, who released the results as the album "Foo Fighters" in 1995. The album peaked at number 23 on the "Billboard" 200, earning a platinum certification in the United States and having lead single, "This Is a Call" on the top 10 of the UK and Australia. After extensive touring with a full-fledged band—along with Grohl were Mendel, Smear and drummer William Goldsmith—the band went into recording follow-up album "The Colour and the Shape", released in 1997. The record charted higher, reaching number 10 on the "Billboard" 200, and with certifications of Platinum in Australia and Canada and double platinum in the US. The "Everlong" single from the album has been certified 2× Platinum in the US.


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: Following the tour for "The Colour and the Shape", Foo Fighters left Capitol and Grohl decided to build a home studio in Alexandria, Virginia wanting a production away from studio interference, given the troubled recording of the previous album, which led to the departure of Goldsmith and Smear. Along with Mendel and new drummer Hawkins, Grohl recorded Foo Fighters' third album, "There Is Nothing Left to Lose", in 1999 and signed a distribution deal with RCA Records, which remains their label as of 2021. The band again got certifications of platinum in the US, Australia and Canada, and had its first single to chart on the US "Billboard" Hot 100 with "Learn to Fly".


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: Foo Fighters' fourth album, "One by One" (2002), marked the first studio foray with Shiflett and was their first to top the charts in the United Kingdom and Australia. The album's tour resulted in the band's first video album, 2003's "Everywhere but Home", featuring live concert footage from the "One by One" tour. Grohl led the construction of a professional studio in Los Angeles in 2004, and the band recorded its next two studio albums there: 2005's "In Your Honor", a top five hit in both the UK and Australia and origin of the band's highest-scoring single "Best of You", and 2007's "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace", which topped the charts in Australia, Belgium, Canada, and the UK and had three songs atop the "Billboard" Modern Rock Tracks chart. The former's tour of acoustic concerts resulted in the live album "Skin and Bones" (2006), while the latter tour had two gigs at Wembley Stadium recorded on the DVD "Live at Wembley Stadium" (2008). The band's first compilation, 2009's "Greatest Hits", became their sixth album to surpass 1 million copies sold in the United States.


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: In 2011, the album "Wasting Light" was released, recorded at Grohl's home in Los Angeles, and debuting at number one in twelve countries. The album's first single "Rope" holds the record for the most consecutive weeks at number one on the US Rock Songs chart. Their eighth studio album, "Sonic Highways", was recorded in eight different American cities and released in 2014. As of 2015 the band's eight studio albums have sold 12 million copies in the US alone. Foo Fighters' ninth album, "Concrete and Gold", was released on September 15, 2017 and became the band's second #1 album in the United States.


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: "Medicine at Midnight" is the tenth studio album by American rock band Foo Fighters. Originally scheduled for 2020, the album was delayed to February 5, 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Foo Fighters discography

text: Starting in 2019, the band has released their archive of B-sides and live performances in digital EPs called the "Foo Files".


Charles James Spencer-Churchill, 12th Duke of Marlborough (born 24 November 1955), styled Earl of Sunderland until March 1972 and Marquess of Blandford until October 2014, and often known as Jamie Blandford or Jamie Marlborough, is an English peer and the current Duke of Marlborough.


title: James Spencer-Churchill, 12th Duke of Marlborough

text: He is the eldest surviving son of the 11th Duke of Marlborough and his first wife, Susan Mary Hornby. As a member of the Spencer family, he is a distant relative of the war-time Conservative Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and of Diana, Princess of Wales, born Lady Diana Spencer. He is also a stepbrother of the late Christina Onassis, who was the stepdaughter of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was once married to U.S. President John F. Kennedy, by the second marriage of his father with Athina Livanos. He is also a descendant of the prominent American Vanderbilt family through his great-grandmother Consuelo Vanderbilt.


text: Born in Oxford, he was educated at Harrow School and the Royal Agricultural College. In a bid to safeguard the Blenheim Palace estate from the then Marquess's excessive behaviour, his father won a court battle in 1994 to ensure he never won control of the family seat, but their relationship may have improved later.


text: In 1995, he spent a month in prison for forging prescriptions. In September 2007, he was sentenced to six months in jail on two counts of dangerous driving and one of criminal damage following a "road rage" attack on another motorist's car. At the same time, he was banned from driving for three and a half years. In 2013, he was accused by a Sikh cab driver of abusing the driver with racist language.


text: In 2021, having ascended to the dukedom of Marlborough, he successfully stood for election to Woodstock Town Council.


text: On the death of his father in 2014, the "Oxford Mail" noted the new duke's "well-publicised drug addiction" and reported that a spokesman for Blenheim Palace had said "the Palace will remain under the control of trustees", but that the 12th Duke could himself become one of the trustees. "The Daily Telegraph" reported that "The responsibility of maintaining one of Britain's grandest country houses for future generations now passes to 58-year-old Jamie Blandford, as he is commonly known, following a remarkable turnaround in his relationship with his late father, who once described him as the 'black sheep' of his family."


text: On 24 June 2009, he appeared in a BBC Television documentary, "Famous, Rich and Homeless", in which famous people were filmed spending three nights in the open with nothing but a sleeping bag, though he refused to "sleep rough". He claimed that on the first night he slept in the car park of a five-star hotel, though his sleeping bag was discovered unopened, and on the second night he demanded to be housed in a hotel. He refused to participate further despite giving an assurance that he would sleep rough on the third night, and ended his participation on that night. Another participant, Hardeep Singh Kohli, said that Blandford's behaviour was "disrespectful to all the people out there".


text: His first wife was Rebecca Mary Few Brown (born September 1957, Bangor, Wales). They were married on 24 February 1990 at the Church of St Mary Magdalene, Woodstock. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1998. They had one son, who is now heir apparent to the Dukedom of Marlborough:


text: His second wife is Edla Griffiths (born 1968, Abergavenny, Wales), whom he married at Woodstock Register Office on 1 March 2002. They have two children:


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces or rapes Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. According to many versions of the story, Zeus took the form of a swan and had sexual intercourse with Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched. In other versions, Helen is a daughter of Nemesis, the goddess who personified the disaster that awaited those suffering from the pride of Hubris.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Especially in art, the degree of consent by Leda to the relationship seems to vary considerably; there are numerous depicions, for example by Leonardo da Vinci, that show Leda affectionately embracing the swan, as their children play.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The subject was rarely seen in the large-scale sculpture of antiquity, although a representation of Leda in sculpture has been attributed in modern times to Timotheus ("compare illustration, below left"); small-scale sculptures survive showing both reclining and standing poses, in cameos and engraved gems, rings, and terracotta oil lamps. Thanks to the literary renditions of Ovid and Fulgentius it was a well-known myth through the Middle Ages, but emerged more prominently as a classicizing theme, with erotic overtones, in the Italian Renaissance.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man. The earliest depictions show the pair love-making with some explicitness—more so than in any depictions of a human pair made by artists of high quality in the same period.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The fate of the erotic album "I Modi" some years later shows why this was so. The theme remained a dangerous one in the Renaissance, as the fates of the three best known paintings on the subject demonstrate. The earliest depictions were all in the more private medium of the old master print, and mostly from Venice. They were often based on the extremely brief account in the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid (who does not imply a rape), though Lorenzo de' Medici had both a Roman sarcophagus and an antique carved gem of the subject, both with reclining Ledas.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The earliest known explicit Renaissance depiction is one of the many woodcut illustrations to "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", a book published in Venice in 1499. This shows Leda and the Swan making love with gusto, despite being on top of a triumphal car, being pulled along and surrounded by a considerable crowd. An engraving dating to 1503 at the latest, by Giovanni Battista Palumba, also shows the couple in coitus, but in deserted countryside. Another engraving, certainly from Venice and attributed by many to Giulio Campagnola, shows a love-making scene, but there Leda's attitude is highly ambiguous. Palumba made another engraving, perhaps in about 1512, presumably influenced by Leonardo's sketches for his earlier composition, showing Leda seated on the ground and playing with her children.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: There were also significant depictions in the smaller decorative arts, also private media. Benvenuto Cellini made a medallion, now in Vienna, early in his career, and Antonio Abondio one on the obverse of a medal celebrating a Roman courtesan.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Leonardo da Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a painting, apparently never executed, of Leda seated on the ground with her children. In 1508 he painted a different composition of the subject, with a nude standing Leda cuddling the Swan, with the two sets of infant twins (also nude), and their huge broken egg-shells. The original of this is lost, probably deliberately destroyed, and was last recorded in the French royal Château de Fontainebleau in 1625 by Cassiano dal Pozzo. However it is known from many copies, of which the earliest are probably the "Spiridon Leda", perhaps by a studio assistant and now in the Uffizi, and the one at Wilton House in the United Kingdom (illustrated).


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Also lost, and probably deliberately destroyed, is Michelangelo's tempera painting of the pair making love, commissioned in 1529 by Alfonso d'Este for his palazzo in Ferrara, and taken to France for the royal collection in 1532; it was at Fontainebleau in 1536. Michelangelo's cartoon for the work—given to his assistant Antonio Mini, who used it for several copies for French patrons before his death in 1533—survived for over a century. This composition is known from many copies, including an by Cornelis Bos, c. 1563; the marble sculpture by Bartolomeo Ammanati in the Bargello, Florence; two copies by the young Rubens on his Italian voyage, and the painting after Michelangelo, ca. 1530, in the National Gallery, London. The Michelangelo composition, of about 1530, shows Mannerist tendencies of elongation and twisted pose (the "figura serpentinata") that were popular at the time. In addition, a sculptural group, similar to the Prado Roman group illustrated, was believed until at least the 19th century to be by Michelangelo.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The last very famous Renaissance painting of the subject is Correggio's elaborate composition of c. 1530 (Berlin); this too was damaged whilst in the collection of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, the Regent of France in the minority of Louis XV. His son Louis, though a great lover of painting, had periodic crises of conscience about his way of life, in one of which he attacked the figure of Leda with a knife. The damage has been repaired, though full restoration to the original condition was not possible. Both the Leonardo and Michelangelo paintings also disappeared when in the collection of the French Royal Family, and are believed to have been destroyed by more moralistic widows or successors of their owners.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: There were many other depictions in the Renaissance, including cycles of book illustrations to Ovid, but most were derivative of the compositions mentioned above. The subject remained largely confined to Italy, and sometimes France – Northern versions are rare. After something of a hiatus in the 18th and early 19th centuries (apart from a very sensuous Boucher,), Leda and the Swan became again a popular motif in the later 19th and 20th centuries, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatments.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Cy Twombly executed an abstract version of "Leda and the Swan" in 1962. It was purchased by Larry Gagosian for $52.9 million at Christie's May 2017 Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren along with other members of the Viennese Actionist movement, including Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, made a film-performance called "7/64 Leda und der Schwan" in 1964. The film retains the classical motif, portraying, for most of its duration, a young woman embracing a swan.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: There is a life-sized marble statue of "Leda and the Swan" at the Jai Vilas Palace Museum in Gwalior, Northern Madhya Pradesh, India.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: American artist and photographer Carole Harmel created the "Bird" series (1983), a Jean Cocteau-influenced collection of photographs that explored the "Leda and the Swan" myth in tightly cropped, voyeuristic images of a nude female and an undefinable birdlike creature hinting at intimacy.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Bristol Museum and Art Gallery currently exhibits Karl Weschke's "Leda and the Swan", painted in 1986. The Winnipeg Art Gallery in Canada has, in its permanent collection, a ceramic "Leda and the Swan" by Japanese-born American artist Akio Takamori. Genieve Figgis painted her version of Leda and the Swan in 2018 after an earlier work by François Boucher. Figgis’ contemporary version reinvents the idyllic romantic scene of lavish playfulness with a dark humor creating a scene of profanity and horror. There is a sculpture in neon lights depicting Leda and the Swan in Berlin, near Sonnenallee metro station and the Estrel hotel, designed by AES+F. Photographer Charlie White included a portrait of Leda in his "And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull" series. Zeus, as the swan, only appears metaphorically.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: A statue of an egg depicting the union of Swan/Zeus with Leda, is placed on the island Pefnos of Agios Dimitrios village, in the region of Messenia on the coast of the southern Peloponnese peninsula in Greece.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Ronsard wrote a poem on "La Défloration de Lède", perhaps inspired by the Michelangelo, which he may well have known. Like many artists, he imagines the beak penetrating Leda's vagina.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: "Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats composed in 1923 and first published in the "Dial" in June, 1924, and later published in the collection 'The Cat the Moon and Certain Poems' in 1924. Combining psychological realism with a mystic vision, it describes the swan's rape of Leda. It also alludes to the Trojan war, which will be provoked by the abduction of Helen, who will be begotten by Zeus on Leda (along with Castor and Pollux, in some versions of the myth). Clytaemnestra, who killed her husband, Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks at Troy, was also supposed to have hatched from one of Leda's eggs. The poem is regularly praised as one of Yeats's masterpieces. Camille Paglia, who called the poem "the greatest poem of the twentieth century," and said "all human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the 'white rush' of experience. For Yeats, the only salvation is the shapeliness and stillness of art." See external links for a bas relief arranged in the position as described by Yeats.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío's 1892 poem "Leda" contains an oblique description of the rape, watched over by the god Pan.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) also wrote a poem called "Leda" in 1919, suggested to be from the perspective of Leda. The description of the sexual action going on makes it seem almost beautiful, as if Leda had given her consent.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: In the song "Power and Glory" from Lou Reed's 1992 album "Magic and Loss", Reed recalls the experience of seeing his friend dying of cancer and makes reference to the myth, "I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs / trying to stop the cancerous spread / And it made me think of Leda and The Swan / and gold being made from lead"


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Sylvia Plath alludes to the myth in her radio play "Three Women" written for the BBC in 1962. The play features the voices of three women. The first is a married woman who keeps her baby. The second is a secretary who suffers a miscarriage. The third voice, a girl who is pregnant and leaves her baby, mentions "the great swan, with its terrible look,/ Coming at me," insinuating that the girl was raped. The play is about the disconnection of women in society and challenges societal expectations of childbirth.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Several references to the myth are presented in novels by Angela Carter, including "Nights at the Circus" and "The Magic Toyshop". In the latter novel, the myth is brought to life in the form of a performance in which a frightened young girl is forced to act as Leda in accompaniment with a large mechanical swan.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The myth is also mentioned in Richard Yates' 1962 novel "Revolutionary Road". The character Frank Wheeler, married to April Wheeler, after having had sex with an office secretary ponders what to say as he is leaving: "Did the swan apologize to Leda? Did an eagle apologize? Did a lion apologize? Hell no!"


title: Leda and the Swan

text: In Robert Galbraith's 2020 novel, Troubled Blood, one of the main characters Robin Ellacott, visits a painting gallery where she sees a painting of Leda and the swan done by one character who is an artist in the novel.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: In 1935, German-born movie star Marlene Dietrich wore a dramatically designed Leda costume to a Hollywood costume party. Designed by the acclaimed costume designer Travis Banton, a longtime Dietrich collaborator, the white tulle and feather dress featured a thigh-slit, a mid-length train and, most characteristically, a fabric and feather "swan" neck which coiled around Dietrich's own neck, as well a pair of large feathered wings, one stretching downwards across her chest and the other one upwards across her left shoulder.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: 66 years later, at the 2001 Academy Awards, Icelandic singer Björk wore a dress by Marjan Pejoski in nude mesh and a white tulle skirt. The skirt gradually narrowed upwards over the torso to turn into a swan-neck made out of fabric which coiled around the wearer's neck in exactly the same way as Dietrich's dress from 1935. Although Dietrich's costume remains largely unknown to the general public, Björk's dress "attained cult status instantly" and became an icon of red carpet culture. Yet, the reference to Marlene Dietrich's costume was rarely (if ever) mentioned at the time.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: In June 2021, Maria Grazia Chiuri as creative director for the French fashion house Dior, designed a collection strongly inspired by Hellenistic culture, the Olympic Games, and Ancient Greek Mythology, and showed it at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens as an homage to the Olympic tradition (the collection was shown a month before the beginning of the 2020 Summer Olympics). The collection's closing pièce de résistance was a Leda-inspired swan dress. The immediate visual similarity between Chiuri's swan Dress and Björk's swan dress sparked excitement on social media as most people inevitably thought the Dior dress was directly inspired by Pejoski's iconic 2001 creation. However, only a few days later, Dior openly defended the inspiration of the dress referring to it on its Twitter account as a recreation of a costume worn by Marlene Dietrich, who was, famously, an important and loyal client of the French brand during the 40s and 50s. Notably, Chiuri's 2021 Dior dress featured feathered swan-wings spanning over the chest and shoulder. This dramatic detail, taken directly from Dietrich's costume from 1935, sets Chiuri's dress for Dior entirely apart from Björk's red-carpet dress, and makes it, irrefutably, a reference to Dietrich's costume, and by extension, to the myth of Leda and the Swan.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: A version of the Leda and the Swan story is the foundation myth in the Canadian futuristic thriller television series "Orphan Black" which aired over 5 seasons from 2013 to 2017. A corporation uses genetic engineering to create a series of female clones (Leda) and a series of male clones (Castor) who are also brothers and sisters clones as they derive from one mother who is a chimera with male and female genomes.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: Musical artist Hozier released the single Swan Upon Leda in 2022, referencing the myth as a tool to advocate for reproductive rights.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: The Philadelphia cigar maker 'Bobrow Brothers' made a brand of cigars with the name 'Leda' which was sold at least into the 1940s. The cigar label depicted Leda and the Swan in a river.


title: Leda and the Swan

text: In April 2012 an art gallery in London, England, was instructed by the police to remove a modern exhibit of Leda and the Swan. The law concerned was Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, condemning 'violent pornography', brought in by the Labour Party government of 2005–2010.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza (officially the Comcast Building; formerly RCA Building and GE Building) is a skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Completed in 1933, the 66-story, building was designed in the Art Deco style by Raymond Hood, Rockefeller Center's lead architect. 30 Rockefeller Plaza was known for its main tenant, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), from its opening in 1933 until 1988 and then for General Electric until 2015, when it was renamed for its current owner, Comcast. The building also houses the headquarters and New York studios of television network NBC; the headquarters is sometimes called 30 Rock, a nickname that inspired an NBC sitcom of the same name. The tallest structure in Rockefeller Center, the building is the 28th tallest in New York City and the 60th tallest in the United States.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza's massing consists of three parts: the main 66-story tower to the east, a windowless section at the center, and a 16-story annex to the west. Though the building was designed to conform with the 1916 Zoning Resolution, it rises mostly as a slab, with setbacks mostly for aesthetic value. The facade is made of limestone, with granite at the base, as well as about 6,000 windows separated by aluminum spandrels. In addition to its offices and studios, 30 Rockefeller Plaza contains the Rainbow Room restaurant and an observation deck called Top of the Rock. 30 Rockefeller Plaza also includes numerous artworks and formerly contained the mural "Man at the Crossroads" by Diego Rivera. The entire Rockefeller Center complex is a New York City designated landmark and a National Historic Landmark, and parts of 30 Rockefeller Plaza's interior are also New York City landmarks.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza was developed as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center, and work on its superstructure started in March 1932. The first tenant moved into the building on April 22, 1933, but its official opening was delayed due to controversy over "Man at the Crossroads". The Rainbow Room and the observation deck opened in the mid-1930s, and retail space was added to the ground floor in the 1950s. The building remained almost fully occupied through the 20th century and was renamed for GE in 1988. Since the late 1990s, NBC has owned most of the lower floors, while Tishman Speyer has operated the rest of the building. 30 Rockefeller Plaza was extensively renovated in 2014 and was renamed for Comcast in 2015.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza is part of the Rockefeller Center complex in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. It was intended as the central structure of Rockefeller Center, both physically and symbolically. The land lot is nearly rectangular and covers , bounded by Sixth Avenue (officially Avenue of the Americas to the west, 50th Street to the north, Rockefeller Plaza to the east, and 49th Street to the south. The site has a frontage of on 49th and 50th Streets and a frontage of on Sixth Avenue. The main entrance is on Rockefeller Plaza, a private pedestrian street running through the complex, parallel to Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza's main entrance, below ground level, is the Lower Plaza. The building is assigned its own ZIP Code, 10112; it was one of 41 buildings in Manhattan that had their own ZIP Codes .


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: Across Sixth Avenue, the building faces 1221 Avenue of the Americas to the southwest, 1251 Avenue of the Americas to the west, and 1271 Avenue of the Americas to the northwest. Radio City Music Hall, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, and 50 Rockefeller Plaza are directly to the north. Across Rockefeller Plaza are the International Building to the northeast, La Maison Francaise and the British Empire Building to the east, and 1 Rockefeller Plaza and 608 Fifth Avenue to the southeast. In addition, 10 Rockefeller Plaza is to the south. The site was previously part of the campus of Columbia University, which retained ownership of most of the land well after the complex was built.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The northwest and southwest corners of 30 Rockefeller Plaza were built around two holdout structures on Sixth Avenue. The owners of the parcel on Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, at the southwest corner of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, had demanded an exorbitant price for their property. The holdout building had contained Hurley's restaurant, which had opened around the 1890s and subsequently became a popular meeting place for NBC performers and executives. The restaurant was connected by a direct passageway to 30 Rockefeller Plaza's studios. Rockefeller Center acquired the building in the mid-20th century and ended the restaurant's lease in 1975, but the new lessees continued to run Hurley's until 1999. , the holdout building contains Pebble Bar.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The other tenant, who occupied a plot on Sixth Avenue and 50th Street at 30 Rockefeller Plaza's northwest corner, never received a sale offer due to a misunderstanding. The grocer John F. Maxwell would only sell his property at 50th Street if he received $1 million. Because of a miscommunication, the Rockefeller family was told that Maxwell would never sell, and Maxwell himself said that he had never been approached by the Rockefellers. Consequently, Maxwell kept his property until his death in 1962, upon which Columbia bought the building; Rockefeller Center purchased the Maxwell family's lease in 1970.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza was designed by the Associated Architects of Rockefeller Center, composed of the firms of Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray; Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux; and Reinhard & Hofmeister. Raymond Hood was the complex's lead architect. The Associated Architects designed all of Rockefeller Center's buildings in the Art Deco style. Developed as part of the construction of Rockefeller Center, 30 Rockefeller Plaza opened in 1933 as the RCA Building. 30 Rockefeller Plaza is tall and was built as a single structure occupying the entire block between Sixth Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza. The design was influenced by Rockefeller Center manager John Todd's desire for the building to use its air rights to their maximum potential. 30 Rockefeller Plaza rises to a flat roof, unlike some of the other skyscrapers built in New York City around the same time. These included the Chrysler Building, 70 Pine Street, and 40 Wall Street, which used spires to reach their maximum heights. Hartley Burr Alexander, a mythology and symbology professor who oversaw Rockefeller Center's art program, led the installation of artwork throughout the complex. The building's artwork was designed around the concept of "new frontiers", depicting modern society.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The massing of 30 Rockefeller Plaza is designed in three parts. The easternmost section contains a 66-story tower with by two stories of retail on the west and east. The tower is surrounded by a shorter "U"-shaped section to the north, west, and south. Some sources give 30 Rockefeller Plaza's height as 70 stories, but this arises from a hyperbolic press release by Merle Crowell, the complex's publicist during construction. At the middle of the site was a windowless nine-story section, which housed NBC's studios. The western part of the site steps up again to a 16-story tower. The western section at 1250 Avenue of the Americas, formerly also known as RCA Building West, is accessed mainly from Sixth Avenue. The facade of the annex rises straight from the sidewalk, with notches at the corners, because the corner lots were private properties at the time of the building's construction in 1935.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The massing was influenced by the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which restricted the height that the street-side exterior walls of New York City buildings could rise before they needed to incorporate setbacks that recessed the buildings' exterior walls away from the streets. The base of the building could only rise to before it had to taper to a tower covering 25 percent of the site. The eastern tower appeared to violate this principle since it measured , but the base measured only . The base does not occupy its entire plot, which measures . The tower section was recessed so far into the block that it could have risen without any setbacks. Hood decided to include setbacks anyway, as they represented "a sense of future, a sense of energy, a sense of purpose", according to architecture expert Alan Balfour. Above the lowest stories, the north and south elevations rise straight up for 33 stories before setting back gradually. There are three setbacks each on the north, south, and east elevations.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: Hood also created a guideline that all of the office space in the complex would be no more than from a window, which was the maximum distance that sunlight could permeate the windows of a building at New York City's latitude. The setbacks on the northern and southern sides of 30 Rockefeller Plaza allow the building to comply with Hood's guideline. The setbacks correspond to the tops of the elevator banks inside; this arrangement is repeated on the facade of the International Building. Similarly, 30 Rockefeller Plaza also contains notches at its corners. The eastern elevation's setbacks were included exclusively for aesthetic purposes. By contrast, the layout and massing of Rockefeller Center's other buildings were intended to maximize rental profit.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza's limestone facade includes spandrels with quadruple-leaf motifs in a Gothic-inspired style. influenced the design of the rest of the complex. The first story is clad with Deer Island granite to a height of . The remainder of the facade contains Indiana Limestone and aluminum spandrel panels. Some of limestone, of granite, and 6,000 spandrels were used in the construction. The limestone covered . The limestone blocks are laid slightly irregularly and contain striations for visual effect. In addition, 10.38 million bricks were integrated into the facade.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza also had 6,045 windows upon its completion, with 19,700 panes between them, covering in total. Thirty-six of the windows measured and were storefront windows. Those on the mezzanine level were composed of panels flanked by smaller sidelights. Another 165 were casement windows, which had panes measuring ; most of these were above the 65th floor. The remaining 5,824 were casement windows measuring . About 5,200 of these windows contained Venetian blinds, which were installed by the Mackin Venetian Blind Company.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: At street level, the stonework is relatively sparsely decorated. The main entrance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza was designed as a loggia of three arches: one at the center, measuring high by wide, and two on the sides, measuring high by wide. Lee Lawrie designed the sculptural group "Wisdom, A Voice from the Clouds", for the lintels of the three arches. Lawrie's carved rendering of "Wisdom" is above the center arch, flanked by "Sound" on the left and "Light" on the right. The "Wisdom" frieze above the entrance is accompanied by an inscription reading "Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times", from Isaiah 33:6 (KJV). The sculptural groups are accompanied by polychrome decorations created by Léon-Victor Solon. Lawrie's three renderings are complemented by two limestone bas-reliefs by Leo Friedlander: one of Production on the north elevation and one of Radio on the south elevation.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 1230 Avenue of the Americas, the annex building to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, contains a marquee and two works of art on its exterior. The recessed entrance portal is filled with a mosaic mural, "Intelligence Awakening Mankind" by Barry Faulkner. The portal is topped by four limestone panels by Gaston Lachaise, each of which signifies an aspect of civilization as it related to the original Radio City complex. The two panels on either side of the entrance are entitled "The Conquest of Space" and "Gifts of Earth to Mankind"; these respectively depict aspiration and life, two qualities that Lachaise believed were most important to humanity. The two panels in the center are known as "Genius Seizing the Light of the Sun" (also known as "Invention Seizing the Light of the Sun") and "The Spirit of Progress". The panels are placed at the third story because, at the time of the building's construction, they could be seen from the elevated rail line above Sixth Avenue.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: 30 Rockefeller Plaza was designed with about of rentable space in total. The eastern tower contains the Rainbow Room restaurant on the 65th floor, while the Rockefeller family office occupied the tower's 54th through 56th floors until 2014. The tower is the headquarters of NBC and houses NBC Studios, NBC News, MSNBC, and network flagship station WNBC. 30 Rockefeller Plaza also contains offices for NBCUniversal Cable and, until 1988, the NBC Radio Network. Part of NBC's space also extends into the central part of the building.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The superstructure uses of steel. To transport visitors to the top floors, Westinghouse installed eight express elevators in the RCA Building. They moved at an average speed of and were so expensive that they constituted 13 percent of the building's entire construction cost. One elevator reached a top speed of and was dubbed "the fastest passenger elevator ride on record". These elevators cost about $17,000 a year to maintain by 1942. The mechanical core also contains emergency-exit staircases, though there are fewer staircases on upper floors. For example, building plans indicate that the 12th story has three sets of emergency staircases, while the 60th story has two sets of staircases.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The lobby's main entrance is from Rockefeller Plaza to the east, with revolving and double-leaf bronze-and-glass doors underneath a paneled bronze screen. The doors are topped by a cast-glass wall designed by Lee Lawrie, which measures high by wide. The wall is made of 240 glass blocks. Each glass block measures deep and across. Opposite the main entrance doors is an information desk made of Champlain gray marble. Four large ivory-marble piers with embedded light fixtures support the ceiling immediately above.


title: 30 Rockefeller Plaza

text: The lobby continues north and south from the information desk. Stairways at either end lead up to the mezzanine, while stairs and escalators lead downstairs to the basement. Extending west from either end are two corridors, which flank five north–south elevator banks. The elevator doors are made of bronze, and there are bronze and glass storefronts on the outer walls of these corridors. The floor is made of brass-and-terrazzo mosaic. The walls of these corridors are paneled in Champlain marble below the height of the storefronts and elevator doors. A bronze molding runs above the storefronts and elevators, while the walls are made of plaster above that height. The outer walls of the west–east corridors (adjacent to the mezzanines) contain bronze service doors, while the inner walls and the elevator-bank walls contain murals. The ceilings of the corridors are carried by rows of piers.