title: Peer pressure

text: A similar large-scale field experiment conducted by Todd Rogers, Donald P. Green, Carolina Ferrerosa Young, and John Ternovski (2017) studied the impact of a social pressure mailing in the context of a high-salience election, the 2012 Wisconsin gubernatorial election. Social pressure mailers included the line, “We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.” This study found a treatment effect of 1.0 percentage point, a statistically significant but far weaker effect than the 8.1 percentage point effect reported by Gerber, Green, and Larimer. The 2017 study's effects were particularly sizable for low-propensity voters.


title: Peer pressure

text: An experiment conducted by Diane Reyniers and Richa Bhalla measured the amount donated by a group of London School of Economics students. The group was split into individual donators and pair donators. The donation amounts were revealed within each pair; then, the pair was given time to discuss their amounts and then revise them as necessary. In general, pair subjects donated an average of 3.64 pounds (Sterling) while individuals donated an average of 2.55 pounds. Furthermore, in pairs where one subject donated significantly more than the other, the latter would on average increase the donation amount by 0.55 pounds. This suggests that peer pressure "shames" individuals for making smaller donations. But when controlling for donation amount, paired subjects were significantly less happy with their donation amount than individual subjects—suggesting that paired subjects felt coerced to donate more than they would have otherwise. This leads to a dilemma: charities will do better by approaching groups of people (such as friends); however, this could result in increased donor discomfort, which would impact their future donations.


title: Peer pressure

text: Organizational researchers have found a generally similar phenomenon among large corporations: executives and managers of large companies look to similar organizations in their industry or headquarters city to figure out the appropriate level of corporate charitable donations, and those that make smaller donations might be seen as stingy and suffer damage to their reputations.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Nusantara (), officially the Capital City of Nusantara (, IKN), is the future capital of Indonesia, set to be inaugurated on 17 August 2024, coinciding with the Indonesian Independence Day. The planned city will replace Jakarta, the national capital since independence in 1945. Located on the east coast of the island of Borneo in what is currently part of the province of East Kalimantan, the city is expected to encompass an area of , featuring a hilly landscape, forest, and a bay. Nusantara is expected to be formed as a new province splitting from East Kalimantan, similar to that of the capital region of Jakarta.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Construction of Nusantara started in July 2022, clearing land and laying down access roads, with construction of the first phase—Government Central Area zone, comprising government offices, schools, hospitals and shopping malls—beginning the following month. Initially, 100,000 workers from all over Indonesia will be sent to the Nusantara location to begin construction by July 2022. After being criticized by local mass organizations from East Kalimantan for importing workers from outside the province, President Joko Widodo ordered Nusantara Capital City Authority to multiply the workers to between 150,000 and 200,000 workers to ensure participation of local workers for work in Nusantara construction.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: The word "nusantara" is derived from Old Javanese. The Old Javanese word is a compound of "nusa" () + "antara" (), which can be roughly translated as 'the outer islands' (from Java island perspective) which initially refers to the region archipelago as translation of Sanskrit "Dwipantara" of the same meaning by Singhasari before referring to territories of the Majapahit empire that have since transformed and developed into modern-day Indonesia.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: "Nusantara" was chosen as the new capital city name of Indonesia to embody the national vision known as (; 'The Vision of the Indonesian archipelago') and is also a reflection of the country's status as an archipelagic state. Based on local Kutainese oral tradition as recorded in the historical manuscript "Salasilah Kutai" (), before the area was named as "Kutai" in 13th century, it was also called "Nusentara" ().


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: In April 2017, the Joko Widodo (Jokowi) administration considered moving the capital from Jakarta, with plans to finish assessing potential alternative sites for Indonesia's new capital by the end of 2017. According to an official from the Ministry of National Development Planning of Indonesia (Bappenas), the government was determined to move the Indonesian capital out of Java. Shortly after the plan was announced, Jokowi visited two alternative locations in Kalimantan, Bukit Soeharto in East Kalimantan and the Triangle Area near Palangka Raya in Central Kalimantan. In April 2019, a 10-year plan to transfer all government offices to a new capital city was announced. The National Development Planning Ministry recommended the three provinces of South, Central, and East Kalimantan that met the requirements for a new capital, including being relatively free from earthquakes and volcanoes.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: On 23 August 2019, Jokowi submitted Presidential Letter No. R-34/Pres/08/2019, which was enclosed with two directives: (1) Presidential Study Report on Capital Relocation, and (2) Request on DPR Support for Capital Relocation. During his 2019 state of the union address at the parliament on 26 August, Jokowi announced the plan to relocate the capital to Kalimantan. Parts of Kutai Kartanegara Regency and Penajam North Paser Regency in East Kalimantan are to be carved out to create a new provincial-level planned city in a more central location within Indonesia. The plan is part of a strategy to reduce developmental inequality between Java and other islands in the Indonesian archipelago and to reduce Jakarta's burden as Indonesia's primary hub. The National Development Planning Ministry estimated the relocation cost to be () and that the government intended to cover 19% of the cost, the remainder coming mainly from public-private partnerships and direct investment by both state-owned enterprises and the private sector. At the same time, will be allocated to saving Jakarta from sinking in the next decade.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: In early September 2021, the Bill for Capital Relocation was completed. On 29 September the same year, the Jokowi administration submitted an omnibus bill for the capital relocation to the People's Representative Council (the lower house of Indonesia's parliament). Amongst many items prescribed in the bill, it contained the plan for the formation of the Capital Authority (), a special agency responsible to the new capital and answerable to the President. The new agency possesses ministry-like qualities in that the office holder would be appointed by the President, but with special governing capabilities akin to a provincial governor. It will also regulate how the Capital Authority will manage its funding, taxation, retribution, and assets.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Due to the plan being submitted in the middle of Jokowi's second term as president, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) re-issued the Constitution of Indonesia amendment to re-establish the MPR's ability to establish Principals of State Policies (), similar to the New Order's MPR's State Policies Outline (). This was to provide security and sustainability to the project and ensure its continuation after Jokowi was no longer in the presidency. Based on the results of the KedaiKOPI Survey Institute survey in August 2019, 95.7% of respondents from Jakarta expressed their rejection of the plan to move the capital city to East Kalimantan. On 17 January 2022, during a Special Committee Meeting, Minister of National Development Planning Suharso Monoarfa said the new nation's capital would be named Nusantara.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Following the inauguration of Bambang Susantono as CEO of the capital, provinces across the country ceremonially send piece of soil and water from historically or culturally significant sites in their respective province to be part of the new capital's cornerstone and jug for its groundbreaking. Central Kalimantan brought pieces of soil from a hill where Tjilik Riwut, a national hero from the province and respected Dayak figure, was said to be meditating. East Kalimantan brought water and soil from Kutai Lama, where the historical Kutai Kartanegara kingdom was found. North Maluku brought a combination of soil and water from four main historical sultanates in Maluku, otherwise known as Maluku Kie Raha, which are Jailolo, Ternate, Tidore, and Bacan. East Nusa Tenggara province brought soil from seven regencies in the province, while Bengkulu brought soil from the location where Sukarno was exiled. South Kalimantan brought water and soil from former residences of respected ulemas in the province, Zainal Ilmi and Syekh Muhammad Al-Banjari. Southeast Sulawesi presented soil and water from the site of the historical Sultanate of Buton in Baubau. East Java also did a similar thing from sites of the former Majapahit Empire.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: The Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing organized a capital city design contest in late 2019. The winner, ('Forest Archipelagic Country') by URBAN+ was officially announced on 23 December 2019. The government undertook to collaborate on the design of the winning team with that of the second- and third-placed teams, as well as international designers, to sharpen the final design process up to 2020. Designers from at least three countries, namely China, Japan, and the United States had offered to be involved in the design. The name, which had been suggested about three months earlier, is aligned with the winner's main concept.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: The city is designed for sustainability, targeting 80% of mobility to be supported by public transport, cycling, or walking. Surrounded by the forests of Kalimantan, it will draw all of its energy from renewable sources, allocating 10% of its area to food production.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: In March 2022, the Ministry again organized a design contest on four structures, namely the vice-presidential palace, the legislatures' office complex, the judiciary's office complex, and a complex set for public worship next to Lake Pancasila.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Nusantara is situated on the east coast of Borneo, the world's third largest island. The city shares land border with the province of East Kalimantan and has the coastal line in the east to Makassar Strait and in the south to Balikpapan Bay. The city features a hilly landscape and was formerly an industrial forest whose concession was owned by Sukanto Tanoto.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Nusantara encompass an area of , consisting of designated as the government central area (), as the capital region (), and the rest as the extended capital region (). Nusantara metropolitan area will include the surrounding East Kalimantan regencies and cities, such as Balikpapan and Samarinda.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Nusantara is managed by a corporation named the Nusantara Capital City Authority (). Its formation is different from other cities in Indonesia, as those were considered autonomous, self-governing settlements which are separate from the central government. Meanwhile, the Capital Authority is a corporation directly answerable to the central government, a ministry-level agency and its head a cabinet-level official.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: Since 10 March 2022, the authority has been headed by Bambang Susantono and assisted by deputy head Dhony Rahajoe.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: To achieve the target for 80% of mobility supported by non-private transportation, an extensive network of public transportation in the new capital is planned. The city puts an emphasis on dense, walkable development and will be served by a citywide network of cycling paths, a metro system consisting of two rail lines, a bus rapid transit system, and autonomous minibuses acting as feeder service.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: An airport rail service will connect the new capital to the existing Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan Airport in Balikpapan, along with a commuter rail network to serve Balikpapan and Nusantara. A new intercity and regional rail system will be constructed to connect the new capital with the neighboring cities of Samarinda and Balikpapan as part of the larger plan for a Trans Kalimantan Railway network connecting the entire Indonesian side of Borneo Island with rail service.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: A new airport located in Penajam, will serve as the primary international airport to Nusantara. A planned toll road will be built connecting the government central area to the airport, away.


title: Nusantara (planned city)

text: It will also be served by the neighboring Aji Pangeran Tumenggung Pranoto Airport located at Samarinda, the neighbouring city of the new capital, and Balikpapan's Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan Airport.


title: Maya calendar

text: The Maya calendar is a system of calendars used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and in many modern communities in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.


title: Maya calendar

text: The essentials of the Maya calendar are based upon a system which had been in common use throughout the region, dating back to at least the 5th century BC. It shares many aspects with calendars employed by other earlier Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Zapotec and Olmec and contemporary or later ones such as the Mixtec and Aztec calendars.


title: Maya calendar

text: By the Maya mythological tradition, as documented in Colonial Yucatec accounts and reconstructed from Late Classic and Postclassic inscriptions, the deity Itzamna is frequently credited with bringing the knowledge of the calendrical system to the ancestral Maya, along with writing in general and other foundational aspects of Mayan culture.


title: Maya calendar

text: The Maya calendar consists of several cycles or "counts" of different lengths. The 260-day count is known to scholars as the "Tzolkin", or "Tzolkʼin". The Tzolkin was combined with a 365-day vague solar year known as the Haabʼ to form a synchronized cycle lasting for 52 Haabʼ, called the "Calendar Round". The Calendar Round is still in use by many groups in the Guatemalan highlands.


title: Maya calendar

text: A different calendar was used to track longer periods of time and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This is the "Long Count". It is a count of days since a mythological starting-point. According to the correlation between the Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya researchers (known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, or GMT, correlation), this starting-point is equivalent to August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6, in the Julian calendar (−3113 astronomical). The GMT correlation was chosen by John Eric Sydney Thompson in 1935 on the basis of earlier correlations by Joseph Goodman in 1905 (August 11), Juan Martínez Hernández in 1926 (August 12) and Thompson himself in 1927 (August 13). By its linear nature, the Long Count was capable of being extended to refer to any date far into the past or future. This calendar involved the use of a positional notation system, in which each position signified an increasing multiple of the number of days. The Maya numeral system was essentially vigesimal (i.e., base-20) and each unit of a given position represented 20 times the unit of the position which preceded it. An important exception was made for the second-order place value, which instead represented 18 × 20, or 360 days, more closely approximating the solar year than would 20 × 20 = 400 days. The cycles of the Long Count are independent of the solar year.


title: Maya calendar

text: Many Maya Long Count inscriptions contain a supplementary series, which provides information on the lunar phase, number of the current lunation in a series of six and which of the nine Lords of the Night rules.


title: Maya calendar

text: Less-prevalent or poorly understood cycles, combinations and calendar progressions were also tracked. An "819-day Count" is attested in a few inscriptions. Repeating sets of 9 days (see below "Nine lords of the night") associated with different groups of deities, animals and other significant concepts are also known.


title: Maya calendar

text: The "tzolkʼin" (in modern Maya orthography; also commonly written "tzolkin") is the name commonly employed by Mayanist researchers for the Maya Sacred Round or 260-day calendar. The word "tzolkʼin" is a neologism coined in Yucatec Maya, to mean "count of days" (Coe 1992). The various names of this calendar as used by precolumbian Maya people are still debated by scholars. The Aztec calendar equivalent was called "Tōnalpōhualli", in the Nahuatl language.


title: Maya calendar

text: The tzolkʼin calendar combines twenty day names with the thirteen day numbers to produce 260 unique days. It is used to determine the time of religious and ceremonial events and for divination. Each successive day is numbered from 1 up to 13 and then starting again at 1. Separately from this, every day is given a name in sequence from a list of 20 day names:


title: Maya calendar

text: Some systems started the count with 1 Imix, followed by 2 Ikʼ, 3 Akʼbʼal, etc. up to 13 Bʼen. The day numbers then start again at 1 while the named-day sequence continues onwards, so the next days in the sequence are 1 Ix, 2 Men, 3 Kʼibʼ, 4 Kabʼan, 5 Etzʼnabʼ, 6 Kawak and 7 Ajaw. With all twenty named days used, these now began to repeat the cycle while the number sequence continues, so the next day after 7 Ajaw is 8 Imix. The repetition of these interlocking 13- and 20-day cycles therefore takes 260 days to complete (that is, for every possible combination of number/named day to occur once).


title: Maya calendar

text: The earliest known inscription with a Tzolkʼin is an Olmec earspool with 2 Ahau 3 Ceh - 6.3.10.9.0, September 2, -678 (Julian astronomical).


title: Maya calendar

text: The Haabʼ was made up of eighteen months of twenty days each plus a period of five days ("nameless days") at the end of the year known as "Wayeb"' (or "Uayeb" in 16th-century orthography). The five days of Wayebʼ were thought to be a dangerous time. Foster (2002) writes, "During Wayeb, portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolved. No boundaries prevented the ill-intending deities from causing disasters." To ward off these evil spirits, the Maya had customs and rituals they practiced during Wayebʼ. For example, people avoided leaving their houses and washing or combing their hair. Bricker (1982) estimates that the Haabʼ was first used around 550 BC with a starting point of the winter solstice.


title: Maya calendar

text: The Haabʼ month names are known today by their corresponding names in colonial-era Yukatek Maya, as transcribed by 16th-century sources (in particular, Diego de Landa and books such as the "Chilam Balam" of Chumayel). Phonemic analyses of Haabʼ glyph names in pre-Columbian Maya inscriptions have demonstrated that the names for these twenty-day periods varied considerably from region to region and from period to period, reflecting differences in the base language(s) and usage in the Classic and Postclassic eras predating their recording by Spanish sources.


title: Maya calendar

text: Each day in the Haabʼ calendar was identified by a day number in the month followed by the name of the month. Day numbers began with a glyph translated as the "seating of" a named month, which is usually regarded as day 0 of that month, although a minority treat it as day 20 of the month preceding the named month. In the latter case, the seating of Pop is day 5 of Wayebʼ. For the majority, the first day of the year was 0 Pop (the seating of Pop). This was followed by 1 Pop, 2 Pop as far as 19 Pop then 0 Wo, 1 Wo and so on.


title: Maya calendar

text: Because the Haabʼ had 365 days and the tropical year is 365.2422 days, the days of the Haabʼ did not coincide with the tropical year.


title: Maya calendar

text: A Calendar Round date is a date that gives both the Tzolkʼin and Haabʼ. This date will repeat after 52 Haabʼ years or 18,980 days, a Calendar Round. For example, the current creation started on 4 Ahau 8 Kumkʼu. When this date recurs it is known as a Calendar Round completion.


title: Maya calendar

text: Arithmetically, the duration of the Calendar Round is the least common multiple of 260 and 365; 18,980 is 73 × 260 Tzolkʼin days and 52 × 365 Haabʼ days.


title: Maya calendar

text: Not every possible combination of Tzolkʼin and Haabʼ can occur. For Tzolkʼin days Imix, Kimi, Chuwen and Kibʼ, the Haabʼ day can only be 4, 9, 14 or 19; for Ikʼ, Manikʼ, Ebʼ and Kabʼan, the Haabʼ day can only be 0, 5, 10 or 15; for Akbʼalʼ, Lamat, Bʼen and Etzʼnabʼ, the Haabʼ day can only be 1, 6, 11 or 16; for Kʼan, Muluk, Ix and Kawak, the Haabʼ day can only be 2, 7, 12 or 17; and for Chikchan, Ok, Men and Ajaw, the Haabʼ day can only be 3, 8, 13 or 18.


title: Maya calendar

text: A "Year Bearer" is a Tzolkʼin day name that occurs on 0Pop, the first day of the Haabʼ. Since there are 20 Tzolkʼin day names, 365 days in the Haabʼ, and the remainder of 365 divided by 20 is 5 (), the Tzolkʼin day name for each successive 0Pop will be 5 later in the cycle of Tzolk'in day names. Similarly, since there are 13 Tzolk'in day numbers, and the remainder of 365 divided by 13 is 1 (), the Tzolk'in day number for each successive 0Pop will be 1 greater than before. As such, the sequence of Tzolk'in dates corresponding to the Haab' date 0Pop are as follows:


title: Maya calendar

text: Thus, the Year Bearers are the four Tzolkʼin day names that appear in this sequence: Ik', Manik', Eb', and Kab'an.


title: Maya calendar

text: "Year Bearer" literally translates a Mayan concept. Its importance resides in two facts. For one, the four years headed by the Year Bearers are named after them and share their characteristics; therefore, they also have their own prognostications and patron deities. Moreover, since the Year Bearers are geographically identified with boundary markers or mountains, they help define the local community.


title: Maya calendar

text: The classic system of Year Bearers described above is found at Tikal and in the Dresden Codex. During the Late Classic period a different set of Year Bearers was in use in Campeche. In this system, the Year Bearers were the Tzolkʼin that coincided with 1 Pop. These were Akʼbʼal, Lamat, Bʼen and Edznab. During the Post-Classic period in Yucatán a third system was in use. In this system the Year Bearers were the days that coincided with 2 Pop: Kʼan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak. This system is found in the Chronicle of Oxkutzcab. In addition, just before the Spanish conquest in Mayapan the Maya began to number the days of the Haabʼ from 1 to 20. In this system the Year Bearers are the same as in the 1 Pop – Campeche system. The Classic Year Bearer system is still in use in the Guatemalan highlands and in Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.


title: Maya calendar

text: Since Calendar Round dates repeat every 18,980 days, approximately 52 solar years, the cycle repeats roughly once each lifetime, so a more refined method of dating was needed if history was to be recorded accurately. To specify dates over periods longer than 52 years, Mesoamericans used the Long Count calendar.


title: Maya calendar

text: The Maya name for a day was "kʼin". Twenty of these kʼins are known as a "winal" or "uinal". Eighteen winals make one "tun". Twenty tuns are known as a "kʼatun". Twenty kʼatuns make a "bʼakʼtun".


title: Maya calendar

text: The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from the Mayan creation date 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumkʼu (August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar -3113 astronomical dating). But instead of using a base-10 (decimal) scheme, the Long Count days were tallied in a modified base-20 scheme. Thus 0.0.0.1.5 is equal to 25 and 0.0.0.2.0 is equal to 40. As the winal unit resets after only counting to 18, the Long Count consistently uses base-20 only if the tun is considered the primary unit of measurement, not the kʼin; with the kʼin and winal units being the number of days in the tun. The Long Count 0.0.1.0.0 represents 360 days, rather than the 400 in a purely base-20 (vigesimal) count.


title: Maya calendar

text: Since the Long Count dates are unambiguous, the Long Count was particularly well suited to use on monuments. The monumental inscriptions would not only include the 5 digits of the Long Count, but would also include the two tzolkʼin characters followed by the two haabʼ characters.


title: Maya calendar

text: Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar was the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm would take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 was simply the day that the calendar went to the next bʼakʼtun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date of the start of the next b'ak'tun (Long Count 14.0.0.0.0) is March 26, 2407. The date of the start of the next piktun (a complete series of 20 bʼakʼtuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, is October 13, 4772.


title: Maya calendar

text: Many Classic period inscriptions include a series of glyphs known as the Supplementary Series. The operation of this series was largely worked out by John E. Teeple. The Supplementary Series most commonly consists of the following elements:


title: Maya calendar

text: Each night was ruled by one of the nine lords of the underworld. This nine-day cycle was usually written as two glyphs: a glyph that referred to the Nine Lords as a group, followed by a glyph for the lord that would rule the next night.


title: Maya calendar

text: A lunar series generally is written as five glyphs that provide information about the current lunation, the number of the lunation in a series of six, the current ruling lunar deity and the length of the current lunation.


title: Maya calendar

text: The Maya counted the number of days in the current lunation. They used two systems for the zero date of the lunar cycle: either the first night they could see the thin crescent moon or the first morning when they could not see the waning moon. The age of the moon was depicted by a set of glyphs that mayanists coined glyphs D and E:


title: Maya calendar

text: The Maya counted the lunations. This cycle appears in the lunar series as two glyphs that modern scholars call the 'C' and 'X' glyphs. The C glyph could be prefixed with a number indicating the lunation. No prefixing number meant one, whereas the numbers two through six indicated the other lunations. There was also a part of the C glyph that indicated where this fell in a larger cycle of 18 lunations. Accompanying the C glyph was the 'X' glyph that showed a similar pattern of 18 lunations.


title: Maya calendar

text: The present era lunar synodic period is about 29.5305877 mean solar days or about 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes and 2+/ seconds. As a whole number, the number of days per lunation will be either 29 or 30 days, with the 30-day intervals necessarily occurring slightly more frequently than the 29-day intervals. The Maya wrote whether the lunar month was 29 or 30 days as two glyphs: a glyph for lunation length followed by either a glyph made up of a moon glyph over a bundle with a suffix of 9 for a 29-day lunation or a moon glyph with a suffix of 10 for a 30-day lunation. Since the Maya didn't use fractions, lunations were approximated by using the formula that there were 149 lunations completed in 4400 days, which yielded a rather short mean month of exactly / = 29+/ days = 29 days 12 hours 43 minutes and 29+/ seconds, or about 29.5302 days.


title: Maya calendar

text: Some Mayan monuments include glyphs that record an 819-day count in their Initial Series. These can also be found in the Dresden codex. This is described in Thompson. More examples of this can be found in Kelley. Each group of 819 days was associated with one of four colors and the cardinal direction with which it was associated black corresponded to west, red to east, white to north and yellow to south.


title: Maya calendar

text: The 819-day count can be described several ways: Most of these are referred to using a "Y" glyph and a number. Many also have a glyph for Kʼawill the god with a smoking mirror in his head. Kʼawill has been suggested as having a link to Jupiter. In the Dresden codex almanac 59 there are Chaacs of the four colors. The accompanying texts begin with a directional glyph and a verb for 819-day-count phrases. Anderson provides a detailed description of the 819-day count.


title: Maya calendar

text: During the late Classic period the Maya began to use an abbreviated short count instead of the Long Count. An example of this can be found on altar 14 at Tikal. In the kingdoms of Postclassic Yucatán, the Short Count was used instead of the Long Count. The cyclical Short Count is a count of 13 kʼatuns (or 260 tuns), in which each kʼatun was named after its concluding day, Ahau ('Lord'). 1 Imix was selected as the recurrent 'first day' of the cycle, corresponding to 1 Cipactli in the Aztec day count. The cycle was counted from katun 11 Ahau to katun 13 Ahau. Since a katun is days long, and the remainder of 7200 divided by 13 is 11 (), the day number of the concluding day of each successive katun is 9 greater than before (wrapping around at 13, since only 13 day numbers are used). That is, starting with the katun that begins with 1Imix, the sequence of concluding day numbers is 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 1, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 13, 11, ..., all named Ahau. The concluding day 13 Ahau was followed by the re-entering first day 1 Imix. This is the system as found in the colonial Books of Chilam Balam. In characteristic Mesoamerican fashion, these books project the cycle onto the landscape, with 13 "Ahauob" 'Lordships' dividing the land of Yucatán into 13 'kingdoms'.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Laura is a 1944 American film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. It stars Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb along with Vincent Price and Judith Anderson. The screenplay by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt is based on the 1943 novel "Laura" by Vera Caspary. "Laura" received five nominations for the Academy Awards, including for Best Director, winning for Best Black and White Cinematography.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: In 1999, "Laura" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best mystery films of all time, and it also appears on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: New York City Police Department detective Mark McPherson is investigating the murder of a young, beautiful, highly successful advertising executive, Laura Hunt, killed by a shotgun blast to the face just inside the doorway of her apartment. He first interviews charismatic newspaper columnist Waldo Lydecker, an imperious, effete older man who relates how he met Laura and became her mentor. She had become his platonic friend and steady companion, and, wishing more, he used his considerable fame, influence, and connections to advance her career. McPherson also questions Laura's parasitic playboy fiancé, Shelby Carpenter, a "kept man" tethered to her wealthy socialite aunt, Ann Treadwell. Treadwell is tolerant of her Shelby's infatuation with Hunt, apparently out of her practical acceptance of Carpenter's need for the affection of a woman closer to his own age. Bessie Clary, Laura's loyal and highly distraught housekeeper, is also questioned by McPherson. Through the testimony of Laura's friends and reading through her letters and diary McPherson becomes obsessed with her – so much so that Lydecker finally accuses him of falling in love with the dead woman. He also learns that Lydecker was jealous of Laura's suitors, using his newspaper column and influence to keep them at bay.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: One night, the detective falls asleep in Laura's apartment in front of her portrait. He is awakened by a woman entering with her own key and is shocked that it is Laura. She finds a dress in her closet that had belonged to one of her models, Diane Redfern. McPherson concludes that the body assumed to have been Laura was in fact Redfern, drawn there for a liaison by Carpenter while Laura was away in the country. Now, with Laura still alive, unmasking the killer becomes even more urgent. At a party celebrating Laura's return McPherson arrests Laura for the murder of Redfern. Upon questioning her, he becomes convinced both that she is innocent and that she does not love Carpenter. He goes to search Lydecker's apartment, where he becomes suspicious of a clock that is identical to the one in Laura's apartment. On closer examination, he finds it has a secret compartment. McPherson returns to Laura's apartment. Lydecker is there and notices a growing bond between Laura and the detective. Lydecker insults McPherson and is sent away by Laura, but pauses on the stairwell outside. McPherson examines Laura's clock and finds the shotgun that killed Diane, but leaves it there. Laura is confronted with the truth that Lydecker is the murderer.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: McPherson and Laura kiss, then he locks her into her apartment, warning her to admit no one. After he leaves, Lydecker, who had slipped in, retrieves the shotgun, emerges from another room and attempts to kill Laura, saying that if he cannot have her no one can. She deflects his shot and flees just as McPherson arrives, and Lydecker is shot down by McPherson's sergeant. As he dies, Lydecker whispers "Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, my love."


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Otto Preminger was looking for a theatrical project to direct and first became aware of Vera Caspary's story when her agent offered him the first draft of a play called "Ring Twice for Laura." Preminger liked the high-society setting and the unusual plot twist, but he felt the work needed a major revision and offered to rewrite it with its author. Caspary and he disagreed about the direction they should take it, and she opted to collaborate with writer George Sklar, instead. Marlene Dietrich expressed interest in portraying the title character, but without the attachment of Dietrich or another major star, Caspary was unable to find a producer willing to finance a national tour or a Broadway run and abandoned the project.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Caspary eventually adapted the play for both a novel with the same title and a sequel, which she titled simply "Laura". They were both purchased by 20th Century Fox for $30,000. Fox announced George Sanders and Laird Cregar as the leads.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Interim studio head William Goetz, serving in that capacity while Darryl F. Zanuck was fulfilling his military duty, assigned Preminger the task of developing the books for the screen. Preminger began working with Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt. Recalling the differences of opinion Caspary and he had, Preminger opted not to involve her until the first draft was completed. He sensed the more interesting character was not Laura, but Waldo Lydecker, and expanded his role accordingly. Caspary was unhappy with the plot changes, though.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Zanuck, with whom Preminger previously had clashed, returned to the studio and was angered to discover Goetz had rehired his nemesis. In retaliation, he announced that Preminger could produce "Laura" but not direct it and assigned him to helm "In the Meantime, Darling" instead. Several directors, including Lewis Milestone, were offered and rejected "Laura" until Rouben Mamoulian finally agreed to direct.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Mamoulian immediately ignored all of Preminger's directives as producer and began to rewrite the script. To Preminger's dismay, he cast Laird Cregar, known for his portrayal of Jack the Ripper in "The Lodger", in the key role of Lydecker. The producer felt casting an actor with a reputation for playing sinister roles would lead the audience to become suspicious of Lydecker earlier than necessary. He favored Clifton Webb, a noted Broadway actor, who had not appeared before the cameras since 1930, and who at that time was performing in the Noël Coward play "Blithe Spirit" in Los Angeles.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Fox casting director Rufus LeMaire and Zanuck both objected to Webb because of his effeminate mannerisms, which were exactly what Preminger felt suited the character. Preminger filmed the actor delivering a monologue from the Coward play, and Zanuck agreed that Webb was perfect for the role. Zanuck was similarly campaigning for actor Reginald Gardiner to play the role of Shelby, though Fox contractee Vincent Price finally got the role.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Filming began on April 27, 1944, and from the start, Mamoulian had problems with his cast. He offered relative newcomers Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews little support, allowed theatrically trained Judith Anderson to play to the balcony instead of reining in her performance, and virtually ignored Webb, who had learned that the director was unhappy with his casting.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: After viewing the early rushes, Zanuck called a meeting with Mamoulian and Preminger, each of whom blamed the other for the problems on the set. Preminger finally convinced Zanuck that the material needed a more subtle approach than Mamoulian was willing to give it, and the defeated studio head, in frustration, reluctantly allowed Preminger to dismiss Mamoulian and direct the film himself. Preminger immediately hired a new cinematographer and scenic designer and replaced the portrait of Laura – a crucial element of the film; Mamoulian's wife Azadia had painted the original portrait, but Preminger replaced that with an enlarged photograph (taken by Fox photographer Frank Polony) of Tierney, lightly dabbed with oils to give it the ethereal effect he wanted.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Preminger initially experienced resistance from his cast, who had been led to believe Preminger was unhappy with their work by the departing Mamoulian. "Once we got used to Otto, we had a pretty easy time", Vincent Price recalled in a July 1989 interview. Filming was completed on June 29, slightly over budget, but within the projected timetable.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Zanuck was unhappy with Preminger's first cut of the film and insisted it be given a new ending, in which it was revealed Lydecker had imagined the entire story, but following a screening of the Zanuck version, columnist Walter Winchell approached the studio head and told him, "I didn't get [the ending]. You've got to change it." Having lost again, Zanuck relented and allowed Preminger to reinstate his original finale, telling him, "This is your success. I concede."


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Once the principal photography had been completed, Preminger hired David Raksin to score the film. The director wanted to use "Sophisticated Lady" by Duke Ellington for the main theme, but Raksin objected to the choice. Alfred Newman, music director for Fox, convinced Preminger to give Raksin a weekend to compose an original tune. Furious, Preminger gave Raksin that weekend, but threatened him with dismissal in case he failed.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Inspired by a "Dear John" letter he received from his wife over the course of that weekend, Raksin composed the haunting theme, also titled "Laura", for which Johnny Mercer later wrote lyrics. It eventually became a jazz standard recorded by more than 400 artists, including Stan Kenton, Dick Haymes, Woody Herman, Nat King Cole, The Four Freshmen, Charlie Parker, Billy Eckstine, and Frank Sinatra. Even Spike Jones did a parody version of the song. Preminger was so pleased with Raksin's score that he not only did not dismiss Raksin, but also collaborated with him on four additional films.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: In 1993, Fox Records released a 27-minute suite of Raksin's score on an album paired with Bernard Herrmann's score for "Jane Eyre." In 2013, Kritzerland released the complete Raksin score, along with test demos and the suite from the original album as bonus tracks.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Rotten Tomatoes reports that "Laura" has a 100% fresh rating, based on 60 reviews, with a weighted average of 8.76/10. The site's consensus reads: "A psychologically complex portrait of obsession, Laura is also a deliciously well-crafted murder mystery."


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: Joseph LaShelle won the Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography. Otto Preminger was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director, but lost to Leo McCarey for "Going My Way". Clifton Webb was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Barry Fitzgerald in "Going My Way". Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost to Frank Butler and Frank Cavett for "Going My Way". Lyle R. Wheeler, Leland Fuller, and Thomas Little were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Interior Decoration, but lost to Cedric Gibbons, William Ferrari, Paul Huldschinsky, and Edwin B. Willis for "Gaslight".


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: In 1999, "Laura" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the film on Region 1 DVD on March 15, 2005. It is in format with audio tracks and subtitles in English and Spanish. Bonus tracks include commentaries by film historian Jeanine Basinger, composer David Raksin, and author Rudy Behlmer; a deleted scene; the original theatrical trailer; and "Gene Tierney: A Shattered Portrait" and "Vincent Price: The Versatile Villain", two episodes from "A&E Biography". In a deleted scene (1:06) with benefactor Webb, "... the beautiful Tierney was placed in a more feminine role model, and in the end it was decided to delete her for the cinema release of the film". The scene was restored on January 14, 2019, and presented as an "extended version" on DVD releases. The film became available on Blu-ray on February 5, 2012. Eureka Entertainment released the movie on Blu-ray in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2019. Four of the five radio adaptations were included as extras on the disc (with the 1950 episode of The Screen Guild Theater omitted).


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: "Laura" was adapted as a radio play for two different episodes of "Lux Radio Theater", the first starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Vincent Price (February 5, 1945), and the second starring Gene Tierney and Victor Mature (February 1, 1954). It was also adapted for the May 30, 1948, broadcast of "Ford Theatre" with Virginia Gilmore and John Larkin. In addition, "Laura" was presented twice on "The Screen Guild Theater" (August 20, 1945, and February 23, 1950), both episodes starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: In 1955, the movie was remade as a presentation of the drama anthology series "The 20th Century Fox Hour", starring Dana Wynter in the title role. Robert Stack played McPherson and George Sanders played Lydecker. The director was John Brahm. The script was written by Mel Dinelli.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: "Laura" was also adapted for a television production produced by David Susskind, aired on January 24, 1968, starring Lee Radziwiłł in Gene Tierney's part. Sanders returned in Clifton Webb's role, and Stack in Dana Andrews's. The show was taped in London and the teleplay was written by Truman Capote. It met with unanimous negative reactions, which was attributed to Radziwiłł's poor acting.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: An episode of "Magnum, P.I." titled "Skin Deep", written by joint series creator Donald P. Bellisario, used a similar premise. Ian McShane guested as the Lydecker type, an insanely jealous film producer, and Cathie Shirriff guest-starred as the episode's version of Laura Hunt, the prominent actress Erin Wolfe, whose apparent suicide investigator Magnum (Tom Selleck) is investigating. As McPherson does in "Laura", Magnum learns that, in reality, his investigation subject is not dead. "Cold Case" does the same thing but with a gender reversal in the season 3 finale, titled "Joseph".


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: An episode of "" titled "Aquiel" was likewise inspired by "Laura". In one early draft of the murder mystery episode, the writers struggled with the fact that their initial solution for the mystery seemed too close to the plot of "Basic Instinct". Producer Michael Piller suggested they instead look to "Laura" as a blueprint. The script was adjusted accordingly, featuring a character in a detective role falling in love with a supposed murder victim through her personal logs, only to discover that she was, in fact, alive.


title: Laura (1944 film)

text: In 2005, a Bollywood remake titled "Rog" was released, directed by Himanshu Brahmbhatt and starring Irrfan Khan and Ilene Hamann.


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: Queen of Hearts (, The Queen) is a 2019 Danish drama film directed by May el-Toukhy, and starring Trine Dyrholm and Gustav Lindh. The Danish and English film titles obliquely refer to the Queen of Hearts character in the children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which is mentioned repeatedly in the film. The film was selected as the Danish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, but it was not nominated. The film won the 2019 Nordic Council Film Prize.


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: Handsome Anne is a lawyer shown working on three cases of rape and violent abuse of young women. She is married to a physician, Peter, and they have two young twin daughters, Frida and Fanny. Peter's teenage son from his past marriage is Gustav, who lives in Sweden with his mother Rebecca. The family plans for Gustav to move in with Anne and Peter. Gustav arrives and Anne cannot refrain from flirting with him. Gustav begins to conflict with Peter, pushing for the right to move out on his own despite being a minor. One day, Anne returns home to find there has been a burglary. The incident is reported to the police, but afterwards Anne finds an item in Gustav's laundry that was in her bag, stolen during the break-in. She realizes he was responsible for the robbery and confronts Gustav with the evidence. However, Anne promises to keep the matter a secret if Gustav does his part in the household. From then one Gustav actually cheerfully joins in the social life of the family, for instance reading the Danish version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland aloud for the young twin girls, which Anne herself also does. (The film title alludes obliquely to the Queen character in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.) Time passes and one night, Gustav brings his girlfriend Amanda home. Anne hears the couple having sex and is aroused.


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: Peter and Anne entertain guests on their balcony, but Anne leaves the group to take Gustav to a bar. There, she kisses him. Later at night, she enters his bedroom and seduces him by initiating sex. The two begin a sexual relationship; Gustav interviews Anne with a tape recorder, asking her various questions including about her first sexual relationship. Anne says it was with someone she should not have had sex with - like we have? asks Gustav, but she does not want to talk about it. The family celebrates Frida and Fanny's birthday. When Anne and Gustav step away, Gustav kisses her. A guest, Anne's sister Lina, witnesses the encounter and, upset, leaves the party. Anne fears Lina will tell Peter, and breaks off her relationship with Gustav.


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: Gustav and Peter leave to spend time at their cabin in the woods. After their return Peter tells Anne that Gustav wants to go to a boarding school, and had told his father what had happened between Anne and himself. After a pause Anne hysterically denies the accusation, saying Gustav hates her for ending Peter and Rebecca's marriage. She also tells Peter that Gustav was responsible for the burglary. Anne, Peter, and Gustav then sit down together, where Anne continues to deny the affair. Gustavs departs for a boarding school. Much later Gustav visits the office of Anne and threatens to report her for the illegal affair, but she replies he is not a credible witness and never will be believed. He calls on her house at night asking for his father but he is rejected by Anne who leaves him weeping on the ground. At a party for Anne Peter is called with the message that Gustav goes missing from his school. Peter is called to Stockholm by the police. It turns out a hunter has discovered Gustav's body near the cabin, where he froze to death. When Anne tells Peter that Gustavs death is not his fault, Peter violently silences her. The family of Peter, Anne and the two young girls in black drive in silence in their car, presumably to Gustav's funeral.


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: In reference to the sex scenes, Trine Dyrholm said, "We had the first meeting about the nude scenes very early on with both the producer and the director. They told us what they had in mind. And we agreed that you could go to the producer along the way if there was something someone didn't want to go along with. We were even sent storyboard illustrations of the scene frame by frame, and the prosthetics that would be used were made. I would almost compare working on nude scenes here to working on a stunt scene. When you have to do that kind of scene, it's always a bit awkward, but because it was such a safe working space and everything was agreed in advance, it worked."


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of based on reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Led by an exceptional performance from Trine Dyrholm, "Queen of Hearts" is a bold and uncompromising look at the darkness that can lie within family, directed with formidable skill by May El-Toukhy." Especially Dyrholm's performance was praised. Guy Lodge of "Variety" magazine called it "[A] sleek, engrossing melodrama..."


title: Queen of Hearts (2019 film)

text: The film won nine Robert Awards, including Best Danish Film. It also won four Bodil Awards, including Best Danish Film.


title: Mark Heap

text: Mark Heap (born 13 May 1957) is an English actor and comedian. He is known for his roles in television comedies, including, "Brass Eye", "Big Train", "Spaced", "Jam", "Green Wing", "Friday Night Dinner", "Upstart Crow" and "Benidorm".


title: Mark Heap

text: Heap was born in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, India, to an English father and American mother, the youngest of four boys. He began his acting career in the 1980s as a member of the Medieval Players, a touring company performing medieval and early modern theatre, and featuring stilt-walking, juggling and puppetry. His brother, Carl Heap who is also an actor, was the artistic director of the company. After its demise, he became part of the street theatre duo "The Two Marks" (with Mark Saban) who appeared on television shows "Ghost Train", "Saturday Live" and "3-2-1".


title: Mark Heap

text: Heap has appeared in a variety of television comedy roles, often playing eccentric and self-deluded characters and drama including struggling artist Brian Topp in "Spaced", the pompous Dr. Alan Statham in "Green Wing", and various roles in the sketch show "Big Train", many scenes of which he improvised, most notably performing a barefoot gymnastics routine to "Montagues and Capulets.


title: Mark Heap

text: He has worked in a number of ventures with Chris Morris, appearing in "Jam", its radio predecessor "Blue Jam", and the documentary parody series "Brass Eye". He voiced the lead character of Eric Feeble in the animated comedy "Stressed Eric". Other recurring roles included Terry Roche in Paul Whitehouse's comedy-drama "Happiness" and Derek Few in "How Do You Want Me?". He played Harry in the short-lived Rob Grant TV series "The Strangerers", aired in 2000. He also guested in the second series of the BBC comedy "Look Around You" as Leonard Hatred.


title: Mark Heap

text: He appeared in the 2007 BBC One drama "Hotel Babylon" as an unsuccessful businessman who became a bellboy. Between 2008 and 2010 he appeared in 32 episodes of the BBC period drama ""Lark Rise to Candleford"" as head postman Thomas Brown, as well as super villain Lightkiller in an episode of the sitcom "No Heroics". He also appears as the father of Chris Miles in the Channel 4 programme "Skins". Heap played the love interest of the main character in the second series of the BBC comedy "Love Soup". He played the role of Charles Dickens in the 2009 BBC Two drama "Desperate Romantics". He also played Jessica Hynes' husband in the one-off comedy "Lizzie & Sarah", written by Hynes and Julia Davis.


title: Mark Heap

text: In 2010, Heap appeared as Bob Stevens, the leader of a rambling group in the BBC4 series "The Great Outdoors". He also appeared as a psychiatrist in Miranda Hart's comedy "Miranda" on BBC2. In October 2010, he appeared as Robin in the four-part BBC drama "Single Father". Heap played Jim Bell in the Channel 4 sitcom "Friday Night Dinner" alongside Simon Bird, Paul Ritter, Tom Rosenthal and Tamsin Greig. He also played Andrew Thorogood in the BBC Four comedy "Holy Flying Circus" and Jonas in the 8th episode of E4's sci-fi comedy-drama "Misfits" series 3. He also appeared as a misguided church minister in the BBC Series "The Indian Doctor" during an outbreak of smallpox.


title: Mark Heap

text: He joined the cast of the Sky1 original series "Spy" for its second series commencing in October 2012, replacing Tom Goodman-Hill as Philip Quil, Judith's partner and Marcus' headteacher. He appeared in the spin-off episode of "Outnumbered", the Christmas special episode, aired on 24 December 2012 in which he portrayed Norris, for this single episode. He played the owner of a pet crematorium in Sue Perkins's 2013 comedy "Heading Out". Mark also had a leading role in BBC Radio 4's adaptation of Gogol's 'Dead Souls.' He starred as Robert Greene in three series of "Upstart Crow" (2016–2018), a BBC 2 sitcom about Shakespeare, written by Ben Elton. His co-stars included David Mitchell, Harry Enfield, Rob Rouse, Gemma Whelan and Liza Tarbuck. He also appeared as Dr. John Hall in the stage show based on the programme.


title: Mark Heap

text: Heap also starred in recent series of the sitcom "Benidorm", in which he played the character Malcolm Barrett, the controlling and manipulative boyfriend of Pauline Maltby.


title: Mark Heap

text: Heap's 2020 roles continued, playing headmaster and husband in ITV's "The Trouble with Maggie Cole" alongside Dawn French.


title: Mark Heap

text: In 1983, Heap made a brief appearance as a torch-juggler in the James Bond film "Octopussy". He played Duncan, Rik Mayall's hapless personal assistant, in "Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis" (1997). He played a school teacher in the 2002 film "About a Boy". He made a cameo appearance with Kevin Eldon in Tim Burton's 2005 "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". He played supporting roles in "Confetti" (2006), "Tunnel of Love" (2004), "Stardust" (2007), and "The World's End" (2013). In 2008 he co-starred in the surreal science fiction film "Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth".


title: Mark Heap

text: In 2008 Heap played the role of Widmerpool in a Radio 4 serialisation of Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time". He played Eliza's husband in 2006 Radio 4 play "The Eliza Stories" and appeared as Marmite the Dwarf in the short-lived Radio 4 sitcom "The Sofa of Time". He starred in the music video for Four Tet's single "Smile Around the Face" in 2005, contributed a multitude of character voices in the audiobook "Do Ants Have Arseholes?". In 2012 he starred as Martin in the Radio 4 play "Cordite for Breakfast", a comedy about Napoleonic-era battle re-enactments. In March 2013, he appeared as Rincewind in a 4-part Radio 4 adaptation of Terry Pratchett's "Eric". He also played the angel Aziraphale in the 2014 BBC radio adaption of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens".


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Vietnamese folk religion (, sometimes just called , Chữ Hán: ) is the ethnic religion of the Vietnamese people. About 86% of the population in Vietnam are associated with this religion.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Vietnamese folk religion is not an organized religious system, but a set of local worship traditions devoted to the , a term which can be translated as "spirits", "gods" or with the more exhaustive locution "generative powers". These gods can be nature deities or national, community or kinship tutelary deities or ancestral gods and the ancestral gods of a specific family. Ancestral gods are often deified heroic persons. Vietnamese mythology preserves narratives telling of the actions of many of the cosmic gods and cultural heroes.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The Vietnamese indigenous religion is sometimes identified as Confucianism since it carries values that were emphasized by Confucius. is a distinct form of Vietnamese shamanism, giving prominence to some mother goddesses into its pantheon. The government of Vietnam also categorises as a form of Vietnamese indigenous religion, since it brings together the worship of the or local spirits with Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, as well as elements of Catholicism, Spiritism and Theosophy.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The Vietnamese folk religion was suppressed in different times and ways from 1945, the end of the dynastic period, to the 1980s. The destruction, neglect, or dilapidation of temples was particularly extensive in North Vietnam during the land reform (1953–1955), and in reunified Vietnam during the period of collectivisation (1975–1986).


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Debate and criticism of cultural destruction and loss began in the 1960s. However, the period between 1975 and 1979 saw the most zealous anti-religion campaign and destruction of temples. On the eve of the Đổi Mới reforms, from 1985 onwards, the state gradually returned to a policy of protection of the religious culture, and the Vietnamese indigenous religion was soon promoted as the backbone of "a progressive culture, imbued with national identity".


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: In the project of nation-building, the public discourse encourages the worship of ancient heroes of the Vietnamese identity, and gods and spirits with a long-standing presence in folk religion. The relationship between the state and the local communities is flexible and dialogical in the process of religious renewal; both the state and the common people are mutual protagonists in the recent revival of Vietnamese folk religion.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: In Vietnamese folk religion, (chữ Hán: ) has a meaning equivalent to holy and numen, that is the power of a deity to affect the world of the living. Compound Sino-Vietnamese words containing the term indicate a large semantic field: "sacred", "prodigious manifestation" (see xian ling), "responsive (to prayers, etc.)" (see "ganying"), "efficacious", "spirit of a person", "spirit of a dead person before 'going over, "spirit of a dead person that has 'gone over. These concepts derived from Chinese "ling". is itself a variation of , meaning "constitutive principle of a being", "essence of a thing", "daemon", "intelligence" or "perspicacity".


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Linh is the mediating bivalency, the "medium", between âm and dương, that is "disorder" and "order", with order (, "yang" in Chinese) preferred over disorder (, "yin" in Chinese). As bivalency, is also metonymic of the inchoate order of creation. More specifically, the linh power of an entity resides in mediation between the two levels of order and disorder which govern social transformation. The mediating entity itself shifts of status and function between one level and another, and makes meaning in different contexts.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: This attribute is often associated with goddesses, animal motifs such as the snake (an amphibian animal), the owl which takes night for day, the bat being half bird and half mammal, the rooster who crows at the crack between night and morning, but also rivers dividing landmasses, and other "liminal" entities. There are gods such as , and gods such as Trần Hưng Đạo. is a "cultural logic of symbolic relations", that mediates polarity in a dialectic governing reproduction and change.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Linh has also been described as the ability to set up spatial and temporal boundaries, represent and identify metaphors, setting apart and linking together differences. The boundary is crossed by practices such as sacrifice and inspiration (shamanism). Spiritual mediumship makes the individual the center of actualising possibilities, acts and events indicative of the will of the gods. The association of linh with liminality implies the possibility of constructing various kinds of social times and history. In this way, the etho-political (ethnic) dimension is nurtured, regenerated by re-enactment, and constructed at first place, imagined and motivated in the process of forging a model of reality.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The Vietnamese folk religion fosters Confucian values, and it is for this reason often identified as "Confucianism". Temples of Literature () are temples devoted to the worship of Confucius that in imperial times also functioned as academies.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Taoism is believed to have been introduced into Vietnam during the first Chinese domination of Vietnam. In its pure form it is rarely practiced in Vietnam, but can still be seen in places with Chinese communities such as Saigon, where there is a community of Cantonese/Vietnamese Taoist priest residing in the Khánh Vân Nam Viện Pagoda. Elements of its doctrines have also been absorbed into the Vietnamese folk religion. Taoist influence is also recognisable in the Caodaist and Đạo Mẫu religions.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: According to Professor Liam Keelley during the Tang dynasty native spirits were subsumed into Daoism and the Daoist view of these spirits completely replaced the original native tales. Buddhism and Daoism replaced native narratives surrounding Mount .


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The Cao Đài faith ( "Way of the Highest Power") is an organised monotheistic Vietnamese folk religion formally established in the city of Tây Ninh in southern Vietnam in 1926.The full name of the religion is Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ ("Great Way [of the] Third Time [of] Redemption"). Followers also call their religion Đạo Trời ("Way of God"). Cao Đài has common roots and similarities with the Tiên Thiên Đạo doctrines.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Cao Đài (, literally the "Highest Lord" or "Highest Power"), is the highest deity, the same as the Ngọc Hoàng, who created the universe. He is worshipped in the main temple, but Caodaists also worship the Mother Goddess, also known as the Queen Mother of the West (Diêu Trì Kim Mẫu, Tây Vương Mẫu). The symbol of the faith is the Left Eye of God, representing the dương (masculine, ordaining, positive and expansive) activity of the male creator, which is balanced by the yin (âm) activity of the feminine, nurturing and restorative mother of humanity.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Đạo Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương ("Way of the Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain") is a religious tradition with Buddhist, Taoist, Confusianism, Zen, Yiguandao elements, originally practiced by the mystic Đoàn Minh Huyên (1807–1856) and continued by Huỳnh Phú Sổ, founder of the Hòa Hảo sect. The name itself refers to the Thất Sơn range on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, where Huyên claimed to be a living Buddha.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: During a cholera epidemic in 1849, which killed over a million people, Huyên was reputed to have supernatural abilities to cure the sick and the insane. His followers wore amulets bearing the Chinese characters for Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương, a phrase that became identified, retrospectively, with the religion practiced by Huyên, and the millenarian movement associated with the latter. The faith has roughly 15,000 adherents mostly concentrated in the provinces of An Giang, Đồng Tháp, Bà Rịa–Vũng Tàu, Long An, Sóc Trăng, Vĩnh Long, Tiền Giang and Bến Tre.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: As a distinct movement with its own priesthood (made of shamans capable of merging the material and the spiritual world), temples, and rituals, was revived since the 1970s in North Vietnam and then in the newly unified country. In the pantheon of the is viewed as the supreme, originating god, but he is regarded as abstract and rarely worshipped. The supreme goddess is . The pantheon of the religion includes many other gods, both male and female.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The or is a group of five religions that have Tiên Thiên Đạo roots in common with, yet pre-date and have influenced, Caodaism. means the "Way of Light". They are part of the broad milieu of Chinese-Vietnamese religious sectarianism. After the 17th century, when the Ming dynasty saw its power decline, a large number of Minh sects started to emerge in Cochinchina, especially around Saigon.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The Chinese authorities took little interest in these sects, since, at least until the early 20th century, they limited their activities to their temples. They were autonomous structures, focusing on worship, philanthropy and literature. Yet they had embryonic Vietnamese nationalistic elements, which evolved along the development of their political activity in the early 20th century.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Five movements appeared in southern Vietnam in the 19th and 20th centuries: Minh Sư Đạo ("Way of the Enlightened Master"), ("Way of the Enlightened Reason"), ("Way of the Temple of Light"), ("Way of the Foreseeable Kindness") and ("Way of the New Light").


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The founder of was Âu Kiệt Lâm (1896–1941), an intellectual of half Chinese and half Vietnamese blood, and a shaman, capable of transcending the cultural barriers of the two peoples. The primary deities of the pantheon of the sects are the Jade Emperor () and the Queen Mother of the West ().


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Symbolic, liturgical and theological features of the sects were shared with the Caodaist religion. From 1975 onwards, the activities and temples of some of the religions have been absorbed into sects of Caodaism, while others, especially and , have remained distinct.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The ("School of Teaching Goodness") emerged in the 1990s in the Vĩnh Bảo District, a rural area of the city of Hải Phòng. A local carpenter known simply as "Master Thu" claimed to have been visited at night by the spirit of 16th-century sage Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, who ordered him to build a shrine in his honor. Thu owned some land, where he built and inaugurated in 1996 a shrine to Khiêm. By 2016, it had attracted more than 10,000 visitors, and Thu had organized around the channeled messages of Khiêm a new religious movement with thousands of followers.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Some of the most popular Deities are: Kinh Dương Vương and his son Lạc Long Quân (who, with his wife Âu Cơ, gave rise to the Vietnamese race), The Four Immortals (Tản Viên Sơn Thánh, Thánh Gióng, Chử Đồng Tử, and Liễu Hạnh), the Four Palaces' Goddesses (Mẫu Thượng Thiên, Mẫu Thượng Ngàn, Mẫu Thoải, and Mẫu Địa), Đức Thánh Trần, Sơn Tinh and Thủy Tinh, Bà Chúa Kho, Bà Chúa Xứ, Thần Nông, Ngọc Hoàng, Bà Đen, Quán Thế Âm, Táo Quân, the Bà mụ, Kim Quy and others. The Vietnamese mythology is the body of holy narrative telling the actions of many of these Deities.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The of the gods, as it is appropriated for social construction, is also appropriated in self-cultivation. It provides a locus for dialectical relations, between the individual and his or her social others, and between the self and the spirits, to intersect and overlap. This is especially true of the experiences provided through shamanic practices such as .


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Within the field of self-cultivation, action of self-empowering is expressed in a cluster of Vietnamese terms: "to correct", "to improve", as in "self-perfecting with meditation", "to cultivate gentleness/wisdom", or "to correct", "to repair"; the word "to repair", "to correct", as in "correction", "repair", or "to cure an illness"; the word "to rescue", as in "to cure", "to heal", in "to save souls", and "to save the country".


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: The practice of self-cultivation knits together the individual and the social in an orientation of discourse and action. The individual project gives rise to a matrix of potentials, with which the individual deals with personal crises by constructing new meanings, seen as modalities of perfectibility.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Vietnamese temples are generically called (meaning "temple") in Vietnamese language. In the northern regions, the miếu are temples hosting the "main worship" of a deity and usually located at secluded places, while or are temples for "emissary" or "secondary worship" located nearer or within habitation places. In southern regions the two categories tend to blur. Nhà thờ họ are family shrines of northern and middle Vietnam, equivalent to the Chinese ancestral shrines.


title: Vietnamese folk religion

text: Another categorisation proposed by observing the vernacular usage is that miếu are temples enshrining nature gods (earth gods, water gods, fire gods), or family chapels (); are shrines of tutelary Deities of a place; and are shrines of deified heroes, kings, and other virtuous historical persons. Actually, other terms, often of local usage, exist. For example, in middle Vietnam one of the terms used is cảnh, and in Quảng Nam province and Quảng Ngãi province a native term is khom.


title: John Constable

text: John Constable (; 11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".


title: John Constable

text: Constable's most famous paintings include "Wivenhoe Park" (1816), "Dedham Vale" (1821) and "The Hay Wain" (1821). Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful. He became a member of the establishment after he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 52. His work was embraced in France, where he sold more than in his native England and inspired the Barbizon school.


title: John Constable

text: John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex. Golding Constable owned a small ship, "The Telegraph", which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary, and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant, Abram Newman. Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was intellectually disabled and John was expected to succeed his father in the business. After a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham, Essex. Constable worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.


title: John Constable

text: In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk and Essex countryside, which was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. These scenes, in his own words, "made me a painter, and I am grateful"; "the sound of water escaping from mill dams etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things." He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized "Hagar and the Angel" by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.


title: John Constable

text: In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue a career in art, and Golding granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections, and studied and copied old masters. Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael. He also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist.


title: John Constable

text: In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College (now Sandhurst), a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter:


title: John Constable

text: His early style has many qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the old masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain. Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins. He made occasional trips farther afield.


title: John Constable

text: By 1803, he was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy. In April he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman as it visited south-east ports while sailing from London to Deal before leaving for China.


title: John Constable

text: In 1806 Constable undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District. He told his friend and biographer, Charles Leslie, that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits, and Leslie wrote:


title: John Constable

text: Constable adopted a routine of spending winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in summer. In 1811 he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings.


title: John Constable

text: To make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found dull, though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted occasional religious pictures but, according to John Walker, "Constable's incapacity as a religious painter cannot be overstated."


title: John Constable

text: Another source of income was country house painting. In 1816, he was commissioned by Major-General Francis Slater-Rebow to paint his country home, "Wivenhoe Park, Essex". The Major-General also commissioned a smaller painting of the fishing lodge in the grounds of Alresford Hall, which is now in the National Gallery of Victoria. Constable used the money from these commissions towards his wedding with Maria Bicknell.


title: John Constable

text: From 1809, his childhood friendship with Maria Elizabeth Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love. Their marriage in 1816 when Constable was 40 was opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt. He considered the Constables his social inferiors and threatened Maria with disinheritance. Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, solicitor to George IV and the Admiralty, was reluctant to see Maria throw away her inheritance. Maria pointed out to John that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances he had of making a career in painting. Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure. After they died in quick succession, Constable inherited a fifth share in the family business.


title: John Constable

text: John and Maria's marriage in October 1816 at St Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating) was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast. The sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. At the same time, a greater emotional range began to be expressed in his art.


title: John Constable

text: Three weeks before their marriage, Constable revealed that he had started work on his most ambitious project to date In a letter to Maria Bicknell from East Bergholt, he wrote:


title: John Constable

text: The picture was "Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River)". It was the largest canvas of a working scene on the River Stour that he had worked on to date and the largest he would ever complete largely outdoors. Constable was determined to paint on a larger scale, his objective not only to attract more attention at the Royal Academy exhibitions but also, it seems, to project his ideas about landscape on a scale more in keeping with the achievements of the classical landscape painters he so admired. Although Flatford Mill failed to find a buyer when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, its fine and intricate execution drew much praise, encouraging Constable to move on to the even larger canvases that were to follow.


title: John Constable

text: Although he managed to scrape an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first important canvas, "The White Horse", described by Charles Robert Leslie as "‘on many accounts the most important picture Constable ever painted"'. The painting (without the frame) sold for the substantial price of 100 guineas to his friend John Fisher, finally providing Constable with a level of financial freedom he had never before known. "The White Horse" marked an important turning point in Constable’s career; its success saw him elected an associate of the Royal Academy and it led to a series of six monumental landscapes depicting narratives on the River Stour known as the ‘six-footers’ (named for their scale). Viewed as ‘the knottiest and most forceful landscapes produced in 19th-century Europe’, for many they are the defining works of the artist's career. The series also includes "Stratford Mill", 1820 (National Gallery, London); "The Hay Wain", 1821 (National Gallery, London); "View on the Stour near Dedham", 1822 (Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Los Angeles County); "The Lock", 1824 ("Private Collection"); and "The Leaping Horse", 1825 (Royal Academy of Arts, London).


title: John Constable

text: The following year, his second six-footer "Stratford Mill" was exhibited. The Examiner described it as having "‘a more exact look of nature than any picture we have ever seen by an Englishman’". The painting was a success, acquiring a buyer in the loyal John Fisher, who purchased it for 100 guineas, a price he himself thought too low. Fisher bought the painting for his solicitor and friend, John Pern Tinney. Tinney loved the painting so much, he offered Constable another 100 guineas to paint a companion picture, an offer the artist didn’t take up.


title: John Constable

text: In 1821, his most famous painting "The Hay Wain" was shown at the Royal Academy's exhibition. Although it failed to find a buyer, It was viewed by some important people of the time, including two Frenchmen, the artist Théodore Géricault and writer Charles Nodier. According to the painter Eugène Delacroix, Géricault returned to France ’quite stunned‘ by Constable’s painting, while Nodier suggested French artists should also look to nature rather than relying on trips to Rome for inspiration. It was eventually purchased, along with "View on the Stour near Dedham", by the Anglo-French dealer John Arrowsmith, in 1824. A small painting of Yarmouth Jetty was added to the bargain by Constable, with the sale totalling £250. Both paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon that year, where they caused a sensation, with the Hay Wain being awarded a gold medal by Charles X. The Hay Wain was later acquired by the collector Henry Vaughan who donated it to the National Gallery in 1886.


title: John Constable

text: Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal: "What he says here about the green of his meadows can be applied to every tone". Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 "Massacre de Scio" after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good.


title: John Constable

text: A number of distractions meant that "The Lock" wasn't finished in time for the 1823 exhibition, leaving the much smaller "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds" as the artist's main entry. This may have occurred after Fisher forwarded Constable the money for the painting. This both helped him out of a financial difficulty and nudged him along to get the painting done. "The Lock" was therefore exhibited the following year to more fanfare and sold for 150 guineas on the first day of the exhibition, the only Constable ever to do so. "The Lock" is the only upright landscape of the Stour series and the only six-footer that Constable painted more than one version of. A second version now known as the ‘Foster version’ was painted in 1825 and kept by the artist to send to exhibitions. A third, landscape version, known as "‘A Boat Passing a Lock’" (1826) is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts. Constable’s final attempt, "The Leaping Horse", was the only six-footer from the Stour series that didn’t sell in Constable’s lifetime.


title: John Constable

text: Constable’s pleasure at his own success was dampened after his wife started displaying symptoms of tuberculosis. Her growing illness meant that Constable took lodgings for his family in Brighton from 1824 until 1828, in the hope the sea air could restore her health. During this period Constable split his time between Charlotte Street in London and Brighton. This change saw Constable move away from large scale Stour scenes in favour of coastal scenes. He continued painting six-foot canvases, although he was initially unsure of the suitability of Brighton as a subject for painting. In a letter to Fisher in 1824 he wrote


title: John Constable

text: In his lifetime, Constable sold only 20 paintings in England, but in France he sold more than 20 in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby: "I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad."


title: John Constable

text: In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the seaside"), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarreled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet.


title: John Constable

text: "Chain Pier, Brighton" was his only ambitious six-foot painting of a Brighton subject, it was exhibited in 1827. The Constables persevered in Brighton for five years to aid Maria’s health, but to no avail. After the birth of their seventh child in January 1828, they returned to Hampstead where Maria died on 23 November at the age of 41. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding, "hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel—God only knows how my children will be brought up...the face of the World is totally changed to me".


title: John Constable

text: Thereafter, he dressed in black and was, according to Leslie, "a prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts". He cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life. The children were John Charles, Maria Louisa, Charles Golding, Isobel, Emma, Alfred, and Lionel. Only Charles Golding Constable produced offspring, a son.


title: John Constable

text: Shortly before Maria died, her father had also died, leaving her £20,000. Constable speculated disastrously with the money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication. He was hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers. Constable collaborated closely with mezzotinter David Lucas on 40 prints after his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint. Constable said, "Lucas showed me to the public without my faults", but the venture was not a financial success.


title: John Constable

text: This period saw his art move from the serenity of its earlier phase, to a more broken and accented style. The turmoil and distress of his mind is clearly seen in his later six-foot masterpieces "Hadleigh Castle" (1829) and "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" (1831), which are amongst his most expressive pieces.


title: John Constable

text: He was elected to the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52. In 1831 he was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students.


title: John Constable

text: He began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a three-fold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.


title: John Constable

text: In 1835, his last lecture to students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and called the Academy the "cradle of British art", was "cheered most heartily". He died on the night of 31 March 1837, apparently from heart failure, and was buried with Maria in the graveyard of St John-at-Hampstead Church in Hampstead in London. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in this family tomb.)


title: John Constable

text: Bridge Cottage is a National Trust property, open to the public. Nearby Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's Cottage (the house visible in "The Hay Wain") are used by the Field Studies Council for courses. The largest collection of original Constable paintings outside London is on display at Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich. Somerville College, Oxford is in possession of a portrait by Constable.


title: John Constable

text: Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told Leslie, "When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture".


title: John Constable

text: Constable attributed his gift 'to all that lay on the Stour river', however, biographer Anthony Bailey attributed his artistic development to the influence of his well to do relative, Thomas Allen and the London contacts he introduced Constable to.


title: John Constable

text: Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method. He was never satisfied with following a formula. "The world is wide", he wrote, "no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other."


title: John Constable

text: Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public. The oil sketches of and , for example, convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an "avant-garde" painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.


title: John Constable

text: Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical "Stonehenge", 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted. When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title: "The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period."


title: John Constable

text: In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions. The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London; , for example, prompted a critic to write: "the atmosphere possesses a characteristic humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish for an umbrella".


title: John Constable

text: The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air, with the notable exception of the oil sketches Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes made in Rome around 1780. To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape. One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is "Seascape Study with Rain Cloud", painted about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea. Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows", 1831, and in "", 1833.


title: John Constable

text: To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that the sky was "the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment" in a landscape painting. In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; Constable's annotations of his own copy of "Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena" by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology. "I have done a good deal of skying", Constable wrote to Fisher on 23 October 1821; "I am determined to conquer all difficulties, and that most arduous one among the rest".


title: John Constable

text: Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie, "My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up". He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.


title: John Constable

text: In 2019 two drawings by Constable were unearthed in a dusty cardboard-box filled with drawings; the drawings sold for £60,000 and £32,000 at auction.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: The Great Siege of Malta (Maltese: "L-Assedju l-Kbir") occurred in 1565 when the Ottoman Empire attempted to conquer the island of Malta, then held by the Knights Hospitaller. The siege lasted nearly four months, from 18 May to 13 September 1565.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: The Knights Hospitaller had been headquartered in Malta since 1530, after being driven out of Rhodes, also by the Ottomans, in 1522, following the siege of Rhodes. The Ottomans first attempted to take Malta in 1551 but failed. In 1565, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Sultan, made a second attempt to take Malta. The Knights, who numbered around 500 together with approximately 6,000 footsoldiers, withstood the siege and repelled the invaders. This victory became one of the most celebrated events of sixteenth-century Europe, to the point that Voltaire said: "Nothing is better known than the siege of Malta." It undoubtedly contributed to the eventual erosion of the European perception of Ottoman invincibility, although the Mediterranean continued to be contested between Christian coalitions and the Muslim Turks for many years.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: The siege was the climax of an escalating contest between the Christian alliances and the Islamic Ottoman Empire for control of the Mediterranean, a contest that included the Turkish attack on Malta in 1551, the Ottoman destruction of an allied Christian fleet at the Battle of Djerba in 1560, and the decisive Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: By the end of 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Sultan, had forcibly ejected the Knights from their base on Rhodes after the six-month siege of Rhodes. From 1523 to 1530 the Order lacked a permanent home. They became known as the Knights of Malta when, on 26 October 1530, Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Knights, sailed into Malta's Grand Harbour with a number of his followers to lay claim to Malta and Gozo, which had been granted to them by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in return for one falcon sent annually to the Viceroy of Sicily and a solemn Mass to be celebrated on All Saints Day. Charles also required the Knights to garrison Tripoli on the North African coast, which was in territory that the Barbary corsairs, allies of the Ottomans, controlled. The Knights accepted the offer reluctantly. Malta was a small, desolate island, and for some time, many of the Knights clung to the dream of recapturing Rhodes.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: Nevertheless, the Order soon turned Malta into a naval base. The island's position in the centre of the Mediterranean made it a strategically crucial gateway between East and West, especially as the Barbary corsairs increased their forays into the western Mediterranean throughout the 1540s and 1550s.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: In particular, the corsair Dragut was proving to be a major threat to the Christian nations of the central Mediterranean. Dragut and the Knights were continually at loggerheads. In 1551, Dragut and the Ottoman admiral Sinan decided to take Malta and invaded the island with a force of about 10,000 men. After only a few days, however, Dragut broke off the siege and moved to the neighbouring island of Gozo, where he bombarded the Cittadella for several days. The Knights' governor on Gozo, Gelatian de Sessa, having decided that resistance was futile, threw open the doors to the Cittadella. The corsairs sacked the town and took virtually the entire population of Gozo (approximately 5,000 people) into captivity. Dragut and Sinan then sailed south to Tripoli, where they soon seized the Knights' garrison there. They initially installed a local leader, Aga Morat, as governor, but subsequently Dragut himself took control of the area.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: Expecting another Ottoman invasion within a year, Grand Master of the Knights Juan de Homedes ordered the strengthening of Fort Saint Angelo at the tip of Birgu (now Vittoriosa), as well as the construction of two new forts, Fort Saint Michael on the Senglea promontory and Fort Saint Elmo at the seaward end of Mount Sciberras (now Valletta). The two new forts were built in the remarkably short period of six months in 1552. All three forts proved crucial during the Great Siege.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: The next several years were relatively calm, although the "guerre de course", or "running battle", between Muslims and Christians continued unabated. In 1557 the Knights elected Jean Parisot de Valette Grand Master of the Order. He continued his raids on non-Christian shipping, and his private vessels are known to have taken some 3,000 Muslim and Jewish slaves during his tenure as Grand Master.


title: Great Siege of Malta

text: By 1559 Dragut was causing the Christian powers such distress, even raiding the coasts of Spain, that Philip II organized the largest naval expedition in fifty years to evict the corsair from Tripoli. The Knights joined the expedition, which consisted of about 54 galleys and 14,000 men. This ill-fated campaign climaxed in the Battle of Djerba in May 1560, when Ottoman admiral Piyale Pasha surprised the Christian fleet off the Tunisian island of Djerba, capturing or sinking about half the Christian ships. The battle was a disaster for the Christians and it marked the high point of Ottoman domination of the Mediterranean.