title: Ann Summers

text: In 2000, Ann Summers acquired the underwear brand Knickerbox for an undisclosed sum. However, in 2014 they announced plans to sell the brand.


title: Ann Summers

text: The first Ann Summers shop was opened in 1970 in Marble Arch, London, from which it grew to six shops.


title: Ann Summers

text: Ann Summers was purchased in 1971 by brothers Ralph and David Gold, who turned it from a standard sex shop into an established high street brand and lingerie boutique. In 1981, David Gold installed his daughter Jacqueline Gold (who is the current Chief Executive of Ann Summers) and she introduced the Party Plan concept. The retail operations for all of Ann Summers' shops are managed from the Head Office in Whyteleafe, Surrey and, as of December 2010, Ann Summers operated 144 retail outlets across the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands and Spain.


title: Ann Summers

text: The shops offer lingerie, underwear, cosmetics, swimwear and sex toys. The stores sell two million Rampant Rabbits, a kind of vibrator exclusive to Ann Summers, per year.


title: Ann Summers

text: Jacqueline Gold initiated the Party Plan concept in 1981. Initially, the Ann Summers parties were as much a way of circumventing regulations restricting the display of sex toys as they were a marketing tactic, but their popularity quickly grew and Ann Summers now employs over 7,500 Party Organisers, coordinated from the Head Office in Surrey. There were around 4,000 Ann Summers Parties every week in the UK in 2003.


title: Ann Summers

text: The Ann Summers parties are exclusively women-only, and include the presentation of sex toys and lingerie in the informal setting of someone's home, usually the home of one of the attendees. It can also involve the perusal of a catalogue, and often there are party games.


title: Ann Summers

text: Due to the adult nature of the business, Ann Summers has frequently faced opposition, both legal and social. For example, in 2003, they won a legal battle to advertise for employees in job centres and an ASA complaint was rejected.


title: Ann Summers

text: They have also encountered opposition to their advertising. The company received a letter of complaint from Buckingham Palace, due to a non-endorsed advert featuring the Queen.


title: Ann Summers

text: In 2004, two complaints were upheld by the ASA. The ASA decided that the first ad was degrading to women, offensive and unsuitable for use as a poster. In the second case the ASA ruled that the use of a reference to the nursery rhyme "Ride a Cock Horse" was likely to attract the attention of children and that the advertisement was unsuitable for the medium in which it appeared.


title: Ann Summers

text: Additionally, Ann Summers in Perth, Scotland, was forced to close after the local people complained about the store (mostly from parents embarrassed by questions raised by their children), which also led to other problems with the store. Perth was originally the only UK town where an Ann Summers store failed to take off. However, in May 2007 the Middleton Grange, Hartlepool store which opened in November 2005 was closed after less than two years of trading due to poor sales.


title: Ann Summers

text: In 2006, Muslim groups complained about the release of a blow up doll named Mustafa Shag, claiming that the doll was offensive to Muslims as Mustafa was one of the names given to the Prophet Mohamed.


title: Ann Summers

text: In 2007, the company faced legal issues with Apple Inc due to its release of an electronic add-on to music players called the . The company has not backed down despite cease and desist orders by Apple. Also, a former director, who is now a Beate Uhse AG employee is pursuing a libel claim against Jacqueline Gold. An advert was banned from the London Underground in the same year.


title: Ann Summers

text: In 2010, Ann Summers' Halloween advert was banned by the Radio Advertising Clearance Centre, which decided the advert used "fairly overt sexual references in terms of sound effects."


title: Ann Summers

text: In 2011 an advertising campaign which featured a pastiche of a "Marks and Spencer" advert was withdrawn after a threat of legal action by M&S.


title: Parricide

text: Parricide refers to the deliberate killing of one’s own father and mother, spouse (husband or wife), children, and/or close relative. However, the term is sometimes used more generally to refer to the intentional killing of a near relative. It is an umbrella term that can be used to refer to acts of matricide and patricide.


title: Parricide

text: Matricide refers to the deliberate killing of one’s own mother. Patricide refers to the deliberate killing of one’s own father. The term parricide is also used to refer to many familicides (i.e. family annihilations wherein at least one parent is murdered along with other family members).


title: Parricide

text: Societies consider parricide a serious crime and parricide offenders are subject to criminal prosecution under the homicide laws which are established in places (i.e. countries, states, etc.) in which parricides occur. According to the law, in most countries, an adult who is convicted of parricide faces a long-term prison sentence, a life sentence, or even capital punishment. Youthful parricide offenders who are younger than the age of majority (e.g. 18 year olds in the United States) may be prosecuted under less stringent laws which are designed to take their special needs and development into account but these laws are usually waived and as a result, most youthful parricide offenders are transferred into the Adult Judicial System.


title: Parricide

text: Parricide offenders are typically divided into two categories, 1) youthful parricide offenders (i.e. ages 8–24) and 2) adult parricide offenders (i.e. ages 25 and older) because the motivations and situations surrounding parricide events change as a child matures.


title: Parricide

text: As per the Parricide Prevention Institute, approximately 2–3% of all U.S. murders were parricides each year since 2010. The more than 300 parricides occurring in just the U.S. each year means there are 6 or more parricide events, on average, each week. This estimate does not include the murders of grandparents or stepparents by a child – only the murders of their natal or legally adoptive parents.


title: Parricide

text: Youthful parricide is motivated by a variety of factors. Current research conducted by the Parricide Prevention Institute indicates the top five motives causing a child (aged 8–24 years old) to commit parricide are:


title: Parricide

text: It is a common misconception that youthful parricide offenders murdered their parent/s to escape egregious child abuse. This is actually not the case. In fact, this notion was challenged beginning in 1999 when Hillbrand "et al." suggested that child abuse is simply only one variable among myriad variables that lead to adolescent parricide, rather than the primary reason for youthful parricide occurrences. In a study published by Weisman "et al." (2002), they noted there was a remarkable absence of child abuse and emphatically stated that their research did not statistically validate the generalization that prior child abuse had prompted the majority of these crimes. In 2006 Marleau "et al." noted that in their study only 25% of all study participants had been subjected to any kind of family violence; refuting the generalization that child abuse is the primary motivator for parricide by youthful offenders. They called for more research on the alleged connection between child abuse and parricidal acts. Bourget "et al." (2007) noted many shortcomings in the extant literature and suggested alternative causes of parricide rather than accepting a general notion that child abuse was the primary cause of parricide by youthful offenders. In their commentary on methodological problems plaguing parricide research, Hillbrand and Cipriano (2007) noted the challenges posed by studies on parricide; acknowledging that most studies utilized very small sample sizes that should not have been generalized. This call for more research was answered by a study in 2019 when the study by Thompson and Thompson statistically invalidated the general theory that most adolescent parricides were the result of abuse of the child at the hands of the parents who had been murdered. Their research (N = 754) revealed that only 15% of youthful parricide offenders alleged abuse at the hands of the parent/s they had killed. A full 66% were not abused, did not allege abuse and were not perpetrators of abuse. Of the remaining population, 13% of the offenders had alleged abuse that was not substantiated (some of these children had lied about abuse and it could not be proven that abuse had occurred in other cases). Additionally, 6% of the youthful parricide offenders had been found to have actually abused their parent/s prior to the murder/s. Child abuse, while a factor present in some youthful parricide occurrences, is not the primary motivator for these murders. As noted above, issues of control are the most typical motive behind the murder.


title: Parricide

text: In the sixth century AD collection of earlier juristical sayings, the "Digest", a precise enumeration of the victims' possible relations to the parricide is given by the 3rd century AD lawyer Modestinus:


title: The Dinner Party

text: The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago. Widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork, it functions as a symbolic history of women in civilization. There are 39 elaborate place settings on a triangular table for 39 mythical and historical famous women. Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, and Georgia O'Keeffe are among the symbolic guests.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Each place setting includes a hand-painted china plate, ceramic cutlery and chalice, and a napkin with an embroidered gold edge. Each plate, except the ones corresponding to Sojourner Truth and Ethel Smyth, depicts a brightly colored, elaborately styled vulvar form. The settings rest on intricately embroidered runners, executed in a variety of needlework styles and techniques. The table stands on "The Heritage Floor", made up of more than 2,000 white luster-glazed triangular tiles, each inscribed in gold scripts with the name of one of 998 women and one man who have made a mark on history. (The man, Kresilas, was included by mistake, as he was thought to have been a woman called Cresilla.)


title: The Dinner Party

text: "The Dinner Party" was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and first exhibited in 1979. Despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues in six countries on three continents to a viewing audience of 15 million. It was retired to storage from 1988 until 1996, as it was beginning to suffer from constant traveling. Since 2007, it has been on permanent exhibition in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.


title: The Dinner Party

text: "The Dinner Party" was created by artist Judy Chicago, with the assistance of numerous volunteers, with the goal to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record."


title: The Dinner Party

text: The table is triangular and measures 48 feet (14.63 m) on each side. There are 13 place settings on each of the table's sides, making 39 in all. Wing I honors women from Prehistory to the Roman Empire, Wing II honors women from the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation and Wing III from the American Revolution to feminism.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Each place setting features a table runner embroidered with the woman's name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments, with a napkin, utensils, a glass or goblet, and a plate. Many of the plates feature a butterfly- or flower-like sculpture representing a vulva. A cooperative effort of female and male artisans, "The Dinner Party" celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, which have been framed as craft or domestic art, as opposed to the more culturally valued, male-dominated fine arts.


title: The Dinner Party

text: While the piece is composed of typical craftwork such as needlepoint and china painting and normally considered low art, "Chicago made it clear that she wants "The Dinner Party" to be viewed as high art, that she still subscribes to this structure of value: 'I'm not willing to say a painting and a pot are the same thing,' she has stated. 'It has to do with intent. I want to make art.'


title: The Dinner Party

text: The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles, called the "Heritage Floor", is inscribed with the names of a further 998 notable women (and one man, Kresilas, mistakenly included as he was thought to have been a woman called Cresilla), each associated with one of the place settings.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation donated "The Dinner Party" to the Brooklyn Museum, where it is now permanently housed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which opened in March 2007.


title: The Dinner Party

text: In 2018, Chicago created a limited edition set of functional plates based on the "Dinner Party" designs. The designs that were reproduced were Elizabeth I, Primordial Goddess, Amazon, and Sappho.


title: The Dinner Party

text: "The Dinner Party" took six years and $250,000 to complete, not including volunteer labor. It began modestly as "Twenty-Five Women Who Were Eaten Alive", a way in which Chicago could use her "butterfly-vagina" imagery and interest in china painting in a high-art setting. She soon expanded it to include 39 women arranged in three groups of 13. The triangular shape has long been a feminine symbol. The table is an equilateral triangle, to represent equality. The number 13 represents the number of people who were present at the Last Supper, an important comparison for Chicago, as the only people there were men. She developed the work on her own for the first three years before bringing in others. Over the next three years, over 400 people contributed to the work, most of them volunteers. About 125 were called "members of the project", suggesting long-term efforts, and a small group was closely involved with the project for the final three years, including ceramicists, needle-workers, and researchers. The project was organized according to what has been called "benevolent hierarchy" and "non-hierarchical leadership", as Chicago designed most aspects of the work and had the final control over decisions made.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The 39 plates start flat and begin to emerge in higher relief toward the end of the chronology, meant to represent modern woman's increasing independence and equality. The work also uses supplementary written information such as banners, timelines, and a three-book exhibition publication to provide background information on each woman and the process of making the work.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The first wing of the triangular table has place settings for female figures from the goddesses of prehistory through to Hypatia at the time of the Roman Empire. This section covers the emergence and decline of the Classical world.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The second wing begins with Marcella and covers the rise of Christianity. It concludes with Anna van Schurman in the seventeenth century at the time of the Restoration.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The third wing represents the Age of Revolution. It begins with Anne Hutchinson and moves through the twentieth century to the final places paying tribute to Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The "Heritage Floor", which sits underneath the table, features the names of 998 women (and one man, Kresilas, mistakenly included as he was thought to have been a woman called Cresilla) inscribed on white handmade porcelain floor tilings. The tilings cover the full extent of the triangular table area, from the footings at each place setting, continues under the tables themselves and fills the full enclosed area within the three tables. There are 2,304 tiles with names spread across more than one tile. The names are written in the Palmer cursive script, a twentieth-century American form. Chicago states that the criteria for a woman's name being included in the floor were one or more of the following:


title: The Dinner Party

text: Accompanying the installation are a series of wall panels which explain the role of each woman on the floor and associate her with one of the place settings.


title: The Dinner Party

text: In a 1981 interview Chicago said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work brought on the only period of suicide risk she had ever experienced in her life, characterizing herself as "like a wounded animal". She said she sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community and that friends and acquaintances took on administrative support roles for her, such as opening her mail, while she threw herself into working on "", the 1980 book documenting the project.


title: The Dinner Party

text: "The Dinner Party" prompted many varied opinions. Feminist critic Lucy Lippard stated, "My own initial experience was strongly emotional... The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings", and defended the work as an excellent example of the feminist effort. These reactions are echoed by other critics, and the work was glorified by many.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Just as adamant, however, were the immediate criticisms of the work. Hilton Kramer, for example, argued, ""The Dinner Party" reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art". He called the work not only a kitsch object but also "crass and solemn and singleminded", "very bad art... failed art... art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own".


title: The Dinner Party

text: Maureen Mullarkey also criticized the work, calling it preachy and untrue to the women it claims to represent. She especially disagreed with the sentiment she labels "turn 'em upside down and they all look alike", an essentializing of all women which does not respect the feminist cause. Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Mullarkey focused on several particular plates in her critique of the work, specifically Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Georgia O'Keeffe, using these women as examples of why Chicago's work was disrespectful to the women it depicts. She states that Dickinson's "multi-tiered pink lace crotch" was opposite the woman it was meant to symbolize because of Dickinson's extreme privacy. Woolf's inclusion ignores her frustration at the public's curiosity about the sex of writers, and O'Keeffe had similar thoughts, denying that her work had any sexed or sexual meaning.


title: The Dinner Party

text: "The Dinner Party" was satirized by artist Maria Manhattan, whose counter-exhibit "The Box Lunch" at a SoHo gallery was billed as "a major art event honoring 39 women of dubious distinction", and ran in November and December 1980.


title: The Dinner Party

text: In response to "The Dinner Party" being a collaborative work, Amelia Jones makes note that "Chicago never made exorbitant claims for the 'collaborative' or nonhierarchical nature of the project. She has insisted that it was never conceived or presented as a 'collaborative' project as this notion is generally understood ... The "Dinner Party" project, she insisted throughout, was "cooperative", not collaborative, in the sense that it involved a clear hierarchy but cooperative effort to ensure its successful completion."


title: The Dinner Party

text: "New York Times" art reviewer Roberta Smith declares that all the details are not equal. She believes that "the runners tend to be livelier and more varied than the plates. In addition, the runners grow strong as the work progresses, while the plates become weaker, more monotonous and more overdone, which means the middle two-thirds of the piece is more successful." With the runners becoming more detailed as the work progresses, Smith notes that the backs of the runners are difficult to see and they "may be the best and boldest parts of all." Similarly, Smith stated that "its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value".


title: The Dinner Party

text: Regarding the place settings, Janet Koplos believes that the plates are meant to serve as canvases, and the goblets offer vertical punctuation. She feels, however, that the "standardized flatware is historically incorrect early on and culturally skewed. The settings would be stronger as plates and runners alone."


title: The Dinner Party

text: In 1984, Hortense J. Spillers published her critical article, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words", wherein she critiques Judy Chicago and "The Dinner Party", asserting that, as a White woman, Chicago recreates the erasure of the Black feminine sexual self. Spillers calls to her defense the place setting of Sojourner Truth, the only Black woman. After thorough review, it can be seen that all of the place settings depict uniquely designed vaginas, except for Sojourner Truth. The place setting of Sojourner Truth is depicted by three faces, rather than a vagina. Spillers writes, "The excision of the female genitalia here is a symbolic castration. By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place..." Much like Spillers's critique, Alice Walker published her critical essay in "Ms." magazine noting "Chicago's ignorance of women of color in history (specifically black women painters), focusing in particular on "The Dinner Party"'s representation of black female subjectivity in Sojourner Truth's plate. Walker states, "It occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, can not imagine black women have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go."


title: The Dinner Party

text: Esther Allen further criticizes Chicago in her article "Returning the Gaze, with a Vengeance". Allen claims that "The Dinner Party" excludes women from Spain, Portugal, or any of these empires' former colonies. This means that several very prominent women of western history were excluded, such as Frida Kahlo, Teresa of Ávila, Gabriela Mistral, and more. Chicago herself responded to these criticisms, claiming that all of these women are included on the "Heritage Floor" and that focusing solely on who is at the table is "to over-simplify the art and ignore the criteria my studio team and I established and the limits we were working under". Further, Chicago states that, in the mid-1970s, there was little or no knowledge about any of these women.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Critics such as Mullarkey have returned to "The Dinner Party" in later years and stated that their opinions have not changed. Many later responses to the work, however, have been more moderate or accepting, even if only by giving the work value based on its continued importance.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Amelia Jones, for example, places the work in the context of both art history and the evolution of feminist ideas to explain critical responses of the work. She discusses Hilton Kramer's objection to the piece as an extension of Modernist ideas about art, stating, "the piece blatantly subverts modernist value systems, which privilege the 'pure' aesthetic object over the debased sentimentality of the domestic and popular arts" . Jones also addresses some critics' argument that "The Dinner Party" is not high art because of its huge popularity and public appeal. Where Kramer saw the work's popularity as a sign that it was of a lesser quality, Lippard and Chicago herself thought that its capability of speaking to a larger audience should be considered a positive attribute.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The "butterfly vagina" imagery continues to be both highly criticized and esteemed. Many conservatives criticized the work for reasons summed up by Congressman Robert K. Dornan in his statement that it was "ceramic 3-D pornography", but some feminists also found the imagery problematic because of its essentializing, passive nature. However, the work fits into the feminist movement of the 1970s which glorified and focused on the female body. Other feminists have disagreed with the main idea of this work because it shows a universal female experience, which many argue does not exist. For example, lesbians and women of ethnicities other than white and European are not well represented in the work.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Jones presents the argument regarding the collaborative nature of the project. Many critics attacked Chicago for claiming that the work was a collaboration when instead she was in control of the work. Chicago, however, had never claimed that the work would be this kind of ideal collaboration and always took full responsibility for the piece.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Artist Cornelia Parker nominated it as a work she would like to see "binned", saying, "Too many vaginas for my liking. I find it all about Judy Chicago's ego rather than the poor women she's supposed to be elevating – we're all reduced to vaginas, which is a bit depressing. It's almost like the biggest piece of victim art you've ever seen. And it takes up so much space! I quite like the idea of trying to fit it in some tiny bin – not a very feminist gesture but I don't think the piece is either."


title: The Dinner Party

text: In 1990, "The Dinner Party" was considered for permanent housing at the University of the District of Columbia. It was part of a plan to bring in revenue for the school, as it had proved to be very successful. The work was to be donated as a gift to the school, and it was to join an expanding collection of African-American art, including a large group of paintings by Washington abstractionist Sam Gilliam and works by Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence and Lois Mailou Jones, among others. These – along with works by a group of local white Color Field painters and some white UDC faculty members also in the university collections – were to become the core of what was presented in early 1990 as a ground-breaking multicultural art center, a hopeful coalition between artists of color, feminists and other artists depicting the struggle for freedom and human equality.


title: The Dinner Party

text: Judy Chicago donated "The" "Dinner Party" with the understanding that one of the school's buildings would be repaired to house it. The money for these repairs had already been allocated and did not come from the school's working budget. On June 19, 1990, UDC trustees formally accepted the gift of "The" "Dinner Party" by unanimous vote. Soon, however, reporters from the right-wing "Washington Times" began writing stories that claimed that "The" "Dinner Party" "had been banned from several art galleries around the country because it depicts women's genitalia on plates" and that the "Board of Trustees will spend nearly $1.6 million to acquire and exhibit a piece of controversial art." Misunderstandings about the monetary situation were emphasized and perpetuated by media sources. Eventually, the plans were cancelled owing to concerns that the collection would negatively affect the school's working budget.


title: The Dinner Party

text: The International Honor Quilt (also known as the International Quilting Bee) is a collective feminist art project initiated in 1980 by Judy Chicago as a companion piece to "The Dinner Party".


title: Nicki Aycox

text: Nicki Lynn Aycox (May 26, 1975 – November 16, 2022) was an American actress and musician, known for her roles in "Supernatural", "Cold Case", "Jeepers Creepers 2", "Perfect Stranger", and "".


title: Nicki Aycox

text: Aycox was born in Hennessey, Oklahoma. She had Native American ancestry and a younger brother, Steve. As a child, Aycox enjoyed singing and playing the piano.


title: Nicki Aycox

text: Her early acting appearances included "3rd Rock from the Sun", "USA High", "Boy Meets World", "The X-Files" and a recurring role in "Providence".


title: Nicki Aycox

text: In 2003, Aycox played Minxie Hayes, a psychic cheerleader, in "Jeepers Creepers 2". It was the sequel to the 2001 horror film "Jeepers Creepers". From July to October 2005, Aycox portrayed Private Brenda "Mrs. B" Mitchell on "Over There". The series followed a unit of the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division on its first tour of duty in occupied Iraq, and chronicled the war's effects on the soldiers' families in the United States.


title: Nicki Aycox

text: In 2006, Aycox guest starred in "Criminal Minds" as Amber Canardo, a sociopathic serial killer, in the episode "The Perfect Storm." Also that year, she portrayed Meg Masters, a recurring antagonist, in the first season of the WB (now CW) series "Supernatural". Executive producer Kim Manners had previously worked with Aycox in an episode of "Over There" that he directed, and hand-selected her for the role of Meg.


title: Nicki Aycox

text: In 2007, Aycox appeared in the thriller movie "Perfect Stranger", alongside Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, as a woman trying to blackmail a wealthy advertising executive. The following year, Aycox was in "", the second feature film installment of "The X-Files" franchise. Filming began in December 2007 and finished on March 11, 2008. In the same year, Aycox starred in "", the sequel to 2001's "Joy Ride".


title: Nicki Aycox

text: In July 2009, Aycox began to portray the character Jaimie Allen (an undercover LAPD police officer) in the TNT action/drama series "Dark Blue". It ended its run on September 15, 2010. Her final acting role was in the 2014 film "Dead on Campus".


title: Nicki Aycox

text: In 2015, Aycox released her debut EP, "Red Velvet Room", which contained five songs of her own original music.


title: Nicki Aycox

text: Aycox was married to Matt Raab. In a March 2021 Instagram post, Aycox revealed that she had been diagnosed with leukemia.


title: Nicki Aycox

text: Aycox died on November 16, 2022, at the age of 47. Tributes were paid by "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke, and by actors on the show, including Jim Beaver, Mark Pellegrino, Rachel Miner and Richard Speight Jr.


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", also known as "Tip Toe Through the Tulips with Me", is a popular song published in 1929. The song was written by Al Dubin (lyrics) and Joe Burke (music) and made popular by guitarist Nick Lucas. On February 5, 1968, singer Tiny Tim made the song a novelty hit by singing it on the popular American television show "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In".


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: "Crooning Troubadour" Nick Lucas topped the U.S. charts with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" in 1929, after introducing the song in the musical "talkie" film "Gold Diggers of Broadway". Lucas's recording held the number 1 position for 10 weeks. Other artists charted with the song in 1929, including Jean Goldkette (number 5), Johnny Marvin (number 11), and Roy Fox (number 18).


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: The song was recorded and then released in April 1968 by Tiny Tim on his album "God Bless Tiny Tim". Produced by Richard Perry, Tim's version charted at number 17 in the United States that year, becoming his signature song; which he would continue to perform throughout his career. Side B of the released single included the song "Fill Your Heart".


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: The song was used in "Sinkin' in the Bathtub", the first "Looney Tunes" cartoon short, in 1930. It is also heard in the opening scene of the 1945 film "Confidential Agent".


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: The song was sung on a 1966 episode of "The Lawrence Welk Show" with The Lennon Sisters as vocals although they were missing Peggy at the time.


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: The song is mentioned in the 1997 book "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". Vernon Dursley hums the song while boarding up small cracks around the front and back doors of his house so he can stop letters from Hogwarts reaching Harry.


title: Tiptoe Through the Tulips

text: Welsh indie pop band Los Campesinos! released a song title "Tiptoe Through the True Bits" in 2012, with the song's title being a reference to Tiptoe Through the Tulips.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: Brunello di Montalcino is a red DOCG Italian wine produced in the vineyards surrounding the town of Montalcino, in the province of Siena, located about 80 km south of Florence in the Tuscany wine region. Brunello, a diminutive of Bruno ("brown"), is the name that was given locally to what was believed to be an individual grape variety grown in Montalcino. In 1879 the Province of Siena's Amphelographic Commission determined, after a few years of controlled experiments, that Sangiovese and Brunello were the same grape variety, and that the former should be its designated name. In Montalcino the name Brunello evolved into the designation of the wine produced with 100% Sangiovese.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: In 1980, Brunello di Montalcino was among the four wines awarded the first "Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita" (DOCG) designation. Today it is one of Italy's best-known and most expensive wines.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: One of the first records of "Brunello" was a red wine that was made in the Montalcino area in the early 14th century. In 1831, marchese Cosimo Ridolfi (who was later appointed Prime Minister of Tuscany by the Grand Duke Leopold II) praised the merits of the red wines of Montalcino above all others in Tuscany. In 1865, an agricultural fair in Montalcino noted that the prize winning wine of the event was a "select red wine" known as a Brunello. In the mid-19th century, a local farmer named Clemente Santi isolated certain plantings of Sangiovese vines in order to produce a 100% varietal wine that could be aged for a considerable period of time. In 1888, his grandson Ferruccio Biondi-Santi—a veteran soldier who fought under Giuseppe Garibaldi during the "Risorgimento"—released the first "modern version" of "Brunello di Montalcino" that was aged for over a decade in large wood barrels.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: By the end of World War II, Brunello di Montalcino had developed a reputation as one of Italy's rarest wines. The only commercial producer recorded in government documents was the Biondi-Santi firm, which had declared only four vintages up to that point—1888, 1891, 1925, and 1945. The high price and prestige of these wines soon encouraged other producers to emulate Biondi-Santi's success. By the 1960s there were 11 producers making Brunello, and in 1968 the region was granted "Denominazione di Origine Controllata" (DOC) status. By 1970 the number of producers had more than doubled to 25, and by 1980 there were 53 producers. In 1980, the Montalcino region was the first Italian wine region to be awarded "Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita" (DOCG) designation. By the turn of the 21st century, there were nearly 200 producers of Brunello di Montalcino, mostly small farmers and family estates, together producing nearly 330,000 cases a year.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: In 2008, Italian authorities confiscated four producers' 2003 Brunello on charges that the producers had committed fraud by including foreign varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the wine that they then fraudulently labeled as Brunello di Montalcino, which by law may only contain Sangiovese grapes. Laboratory tests later confirmed that the confiscated wines were in fact Brunello except for a small portion that remained inconclusive.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: Montalcino has one of the warmest and driest climates in Tuscany with the grapes in the area ripening up to a week earlier than in nearby Montepulciano. It is the most arid Tuscan DOCG, receiving an average annual rainfall of around 700 mm, in contrast to the Chianti region which receives an average of 900 mm. As with all of the Northern Hemisphere, the north-facing slopes receive fewer hours of sunlight and are generally cooler than the south-facing slopes. Thus, vineyards planted on the north-facing slopes ripen more slowly and tend to produce wines that are racier and more aromatic. Vineyards on the southern and western slopes receive more intense exposure to sunlight and more maritime winds which produces wines with more power and complexity. The top producers in the area have vineyards on both slopes, and make use of a blend of both styles.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: The town of Montalcino is a small medieval village located about above sea level in the province of Siena. The wine district is centered to the northeast of the village in densely wooded and hilly terrain. Monte Amiata, the highest peak in Southern Tuscany, provides a sheltering influence from the southeast and tempers the region's climate and rainfall. Compared to the nearly of planted land in Chianti, Montalcino is a relatively small wine region with around planted. Vineyards in Montalcino are planted in varied soils—including limestone, clay, schist, volcanic soil and a crumbly marl known as "galestro"—at altitudes ranging from 149 m to 500 m. This diversity in "terroir" contributes to the vast range in quality and potential complexity of Brunello di Montalcino.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: According to Kerin O'Keefe: "although sangiovese excels in select parts of Montalcino, it does not perform as well throughout the whole denomination thanks to the dramatic differences within the large growing area". O'Keefe is in favor of putting subzones on the labels as this would greatly help consumers understand the stark differences among Brunellos from Montalcino's greatly varied territory, proposing 8 subzones: Montalcino North, Montalcino South, Castelnuovo dell'Abate, Camigliano, Tavernelle, Bosco, Torrenieri, Sant'Angelo.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: Brunello di Montalcino is made 100% from Sangiovese. Traditionally, the wine goes through an extended maceration period where color and flavor are extracted from the skins. Following fermentation the wine is then aged in oak. Traditionally, the wines are aged 3 years or more ""in botte""—large Slavonian oak casks that impart little oak flavor and generally produce more austere wines. Some winemakers will use small French barrique which impart a more pronounced vanilla oak flavor. There is a middle ground where the wine is aged in small barrique for a short time and then spends a longer sojourn in the traditional botte.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: Most producers will separate their production between a "normale" and "riserva" bottling. The "normale" bottles are released on the market 50 months after harvest and the "riserva" are released a year afterward. The current aging requirements were established in 1998 and dictate that Brunellos are to be aged in oak for 2 years and at least 4 months in a bottle before release. Winemakers who intentionally stray from these rules and regulations can possibly receive a conviction of commercial fraud accompanied by an imprisonment sentence of up to six years.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: In 2008, reports surfaced that Italian authorities were investigating claims that several major Brunello producers were adulterating their wines by using foreign or domestic grape varieties in violation of the DOCG regulations, which stipulate that only Sangiovese may be used to make Brunello. The prosecutor handling the investigation said he would bring commercial fraud charges that could result in imprisonment for the violators. The producers in question were suspected of adding wine made from non-approved grapes in order to make it more appealing to the international market. In response the U.S. government blocked imports of Brunello that did not have proof that they were in fact 100% Sangiovese. The scandal was coined "Brunellopoli" by the Italian wine press.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: The Sangiovese grape is the most widely planted grape in the Montalcino region and is the only permitted grape in the Brunello di Montalcino DOCG. The particular clones of Sangiovese are unique to the Montalcino region and have developed in adaption to that area's specific "terroir". The altitude and climate of the Montalcino region has provided an area where Sangiovese ripens more fully and consistently than anywhere else in Tuscany. These factors contribute to the body, color, extract and tannins commonly associated with Brunello di Montalcino. In contrast to Chianti, the other famous Sangiovese based wine of Tuscany, Brunello di Montalcinos have a more fleshy texture with common aromas and flavors of blackberry, black cherry, black raspberry, chocolate, leather and violets.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: Brunello is often compared with the Pinot noir wines of Burgundy with its smooth tannins and ripe, fruit driven character. The high acidity of the wine allows it to pair well with food, especially grilled meat and game. A large portion of Brunello sold in the United States is purchased in restaurants. The wine has become particularly popular in America with nearly 1 out of every 3 bottles of Brunello di Montalcino being sold in the US. Brunello di Montalcino are known for their ability to age with well made examples from exceptional vintages often showcasing development for several decades. Master of Wine Mary Ewing-Mulligan notes that most Brunellos often need at least 10 years before they shed their youthfulness and start to harmonize their flavors.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: In addition to Brunello di Montalcino, producers in the Montalcino region can produce wine under Rosso di Montalcino, Sant'Antimo and Moscadello di Montalcino DOCs as well as the generic "Indicazione geografica tipica" designation of Toscana IGT. Moscadello di Montalcino is a sweet white wine made from Muscat. The style was once widely produced in Montalcino but fell out of style following World War II. In the early 1980s, the wine estate of Castello Banfi attempted to revive the style by planting Muscat. The Sant'Antimo DOC was named for the 9th century abbey built by Charlemagne. In the 1970s, producers in Montalcino were influenced by the success of the "Super Tuscan" style of wine that was gaining international recognition for Chianti producers who deviated from DOC regulations with winemaking techniques such blending Cabernet Sauvignon with Sangiovese. In 1996, Italian authorities approved the Sant'Antimo DOC to allow Montalcino producers to produce DOC designated wines that were not 100% Sangiovese. These wines include blended "Bianco" and "Rosso" wines as well as varietally labeled Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot grigio, Pinot nero and Sauvignon blanc.


title: Brunello di Montalcino

text: The Rosso di Montalcino DOC was established in 1984 as a means of giving Brunello di Montalcino producers the flexibility to continue the tradition of long aging of the region's flagship wine. Rosso di Montalcino is made from 100% Sangiovese grown in the same delineated region as Brunello di Montalcino. However, the wine is required to spend only six months aging in oak and 1 year total aging before release. This allows Brunello producers to make an earlier releasing wine that can generate cash flow while their Brunello di Montalcino age for their complete duration. In less than ideal vintages some producers will relegate all their grapes to Rosso di Montalcino production and not make a Brunello. Wineries can also declassify their Brunello that has already been aging 2–3 years and release it as Rosso di Montalcino if the wine is not developing to their expectations. Rosso di Montalcino is typically lighter, fresher and more approachable upon release though some producers will make wines with more Brunello like characteristics. These "Baby Brunellos" are often 1/3 to 1/2 the price of Brunello di Montalcino.


title: Body positivity

text: Body positivity is a social movement focused on the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities, while challenging present-day beauty standards as an undesirable social construct. Proponents focus on the appreciation of the functionality and health of the human body, instead of its physiological appearance.


title: Body positivity

text: Body-positive advocates believe that size, like race, gender, sexuality, and physical capability, is one of the many ways that our bodies are placed in a power and desirability hierarchy. In other words, judgments about one's physical appearance inherently place one on a certain rung of a ladder that rates and values one's desirability, effectively increasing or reducing one's power in society. The movement aims to challenge unrealistic ideals of physical attractiveness, build positive body image, and improve self-confidence. A central belief advocated is that beauty is a construct of society and that this construct should not determine one's confidence or self-worth. Individuals are encouraged to love themselves to the fullest while not only accepting but even embracing their physical traits.


title: Body positivity

text: Body positivity has roots in the fat acceptance movement as well as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Body positivity differs from fat acceptance in that it is all encompassing and inclusive of "all" body types, whereas fat acceptance only advocates for individuals considered to be obese or overweight. The movement argues that neither fat-shaming nor skinny-shaming is acceptable, and that all body types can and should be celebrated.


title: Body positivity

text: Although body positivity is perceived as the celebration of one's physical appearance as it is, women are highly motivated to advocate the normalization of body hair, bodily fluids, menstruation, and to challenge preconceived ideas regarding a woman's appearance.


title: Body positivity

text: As part of the first wave of feminism from the 1850s-1890s, the Victorian Dress Reform Movement aimed to put an end to the trend of women having to modify their bodies through use of corsets and tightlacing in order to fit the societal standard of tiny waistlines. A minority of women participated in this tradition of conformity, but often ended up facing ridicule whether or not they were successful at shrinking their waistline. The practice of tight-lacing proved to have many negative health risks, and was also extremely uncomfortable for women who partook. Women were mocked for their egotism if they were not able to shrink their waistline, and they were criticized for too small a waistline if they were successful. This instilled a feeling of defeat in women during these times, as nothing they did seemed to satisfy their male counterparts. As part of the Victorian Dress Reform Movement, women also fought for their right to dress in pants. Acceptance of all body types – regardless of waist measurements – was the major theme of the Victorian Dress Reform Movement, and this was the first movement of its kind.


title: Body positivity

text: The origins of the body positivity movement date back to the Fat Acceptance movement of the 1960s.The idea of ending fat-shaming served as the seed of a larger project of accepting and celebrating all bodies and body types.


title: Body positivity

text: In 1967, New York radio host Steve Post held a "fat-in" in Central Park. He described the purpose of the event "was to protest discrimination against the fat." This moment is often cited as the beginning of the Fat Acceptance movement. Five Months after the "fat-in", Lew Louderback composed an essay entitled "More People Should be Fat!" as a result of him witnessing the discrimination his wife experienced as a result of her size. The piece initiated a new movement with goals of correcting fat-shaming, and the belief that being fat is always indicative of being unhealthy. The essay shed light on the discrimination fat people experience in America, and the culture surrounding fat-shaming. Louderback's contribution inspired the creation of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in 1969 by Bill Fabrey, with the mission of ending discrimination based on body weight.


title: Body positivity

text: The second wave of body positivity prioritized providing people of all sizes a place where they could comfortably come together and exercise. There were programs being made specifically for overweight people, such as "Making Waves". Home exercise programs like Genia Pauli Haddon and Linda DeMarco's home exercise video series "Yoga For Round Bodies" were also made for those who were not comfortable joining a wellness community. There were dangers in dieting that were found during the 90's. Dieting was found to be ineffective and causes more physical and psychological problems and does not actually solve anything. People sought help from dieting. They wanted to learn how to eat again. Chronic dieting had not proven to be effective. Dieting has been used as a ploy to get people's money and does not actually work, especially in the long term.


title: Body positivity

text: The current form of the body positivity movement arose around 2012 largely as a response to the increase in social media culture and advertisements. The rise of Instagram inspired a debate about cultural beauty standards, and the body positivity movement arose as a response and argument in favor of embracing all body types, loving one's body even with any flaws, and feeling confident about one's own body. Since 2012, there has been a heightened presence of the movement, although corporations have capitalized on the sentiments in order to sell products.


title: Body positivity

text: The movement challenged ideals including unblemished skin and slim "beach bodies." Model and feminist Tess Holliday founded '@EffYourBeautyStandards', which brought an outpour of support to the body positive movement. After founding the movement, the size-26 Holliday was signed to Milk Management, a large model agency in Europe, as their first model oversize 20. Instagram has been utilized as an advertising platform for the movement since. Pioneers connect with brands and advertisers to promote the movement. In 2016, Mattel released a new line of Barbie dolls under the name "Fashionistas" with three different body shapes, seven skin colors, twenty-two eye colors and twenty-four hairstyles to be more inclusive. Body artists have also helped promote and spread education about body positivity in the United States and United Kingdom, producing a number of notable outdoor nude painting displays for plus sized men and women.


title: Body positivity

text: The body positivity movement aims to change societal and individual perceptions of weight, size, and appearance to be more accepting of all bodies regardless of their diverse characteristics. An individual's perception of their body can greatly influence their mental health and overall well-being, particularly in teenagers. Poor body image, also known as body dissatisfaction, has been linked to a range of physical and mental health problems including anorexia, bulimia, depression, body image disturbance, and body dysmorphic disorder. Partakers are encouraged to view self-acceptance and self-love as traits that dignify the person.


title: Body positivity

text: The movement advocates against determining self-worth based on physical appearance or perceptions of one's own beauty. In the field of psychology, this is referred to as appearance-contingent self-worth, and can be highly detrimental to an individual's mental health. The degree to which one feels proud of their physical appearance is referred to as appearance self-esteem. People who fall under the appearance-contingent self-worth umbrella put great effort into looking their best so that they feel their best. This is can be beneficial when an individual feels that they look good, but is extremely negative and anxiety-inducing when they do not. Body positivity can be improved by implementing more self-care behaviors which can include a healthy diet or exercise; research has shown that participating in more self-care activities can reduce the risk of eating disorders and improve mental health.


title: Body positivity

text: The body positivity movement focuses largely on women, recognizing that women face more societal pressure to conform to beauty standards than men. Eating disorders are more common in women due to this social phenomenon. Nevertheless, men may face societal pressures to fit into a masculine physical ideal. Qualities that fit that mold are height, rectus abdominis muscle or "six pack abs", a broad upper body, muscular arms, shoulders, pectoral muscles, genital shape and size, etc. Men may face anxiety and pressure to shape their bodies to fit this mold and may struggle with body image disorders, including body dysmorphia, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Eating disorders in men are less commonly diagnosed and therefore less publicized. Although there is an underdiagnosis of body dysmorphic disorder, the clinical symptoms can affect people of any gender. While body positivity has largely been discussed with regard to women, the body positivity movement may uplift people of all genders and sexes - as well as ages, races, ethnicities, sexual preferences, and religions.


title: Body positivity

text: Due to social media the notion "every body is beautiful" came into being. The movement for body positivity has played a role in influencing marketing campaigns for major corporations. In 2004, Dove launched their "Real Beauty" campaign, in which advertisements depicted women of varying body types and skin tones in a manner that portrayed acceptance and positivity towards their bodies. On their website, Dove presents its "Dove Self-Esteem Project" as a mission for "helping young people reach their full potential by delivering quality body confidence and self-esteem education". The company also partners with and raises money for eating disorder organizations.


title: Body positivity

text: In 2017, the American women's underwear company Aerie launched a campaign called "Aerie"Real"", in which the company promised to not retouch or edit their models, encouraging body positivity and body-acceptance despite features such as cellulite, stretch marks, or fat rolls. Aerie has begun featuring body positive influencers in their photo shoots and advertising campaigns, as well as plus sized models. To accommodate the last, the brand has launched a plus size clothing line.


title: Body positivity

text: In 2019, Decathlon joined the efforts of other companies with their "#LeggingsForEverybody" campaign, stating their mission as "to boost body confidence and support you in your fitness journey".


title: Body positivity

text: Recently, paradigms on social media have been changing from pushing feminine beauty ideals to challenging those ideals through image related empowerment and inspiration. Several influencers such as AerieReal model Iskra Lawrence have been preaching body positivity, creating hashtags such as "#IWokeUpLikeThis", "#EffYourBeautyStandards", "#HonorMyCurves", "#CelebrateMySize", "#GoldenConfidence", and "#ImNoModelEither".


title: Body positivity

text: Social media plays a pivotal role in the body positivity movement, in part by providing education and exposure on different body types. Instagram and Facebook are some social platforms that, as of 2019, have body positive policies that cause advertisements for cosmetic surgery, weight loss supplements, and detox products, to be hidden from underaged demographics. In addition to promoting positive body image, these policies aim to curb the advertisement of supplements unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Social media platforms such as Instagram are frequently used to post body positivity content and fuel related discussion.


title: Body positivity

text: Although studies about social media and body image are still in their early stages, there seems to be a correlation between social media use and body image concerns. Body image tends to be positively or negatively affected by the content to which people are exposed on social media. The action of people uploading pictures of themselves appears to effectuate a negative body image.


title: Body positivity

text: The body positivity movement has been criticized for encouraging lifestyle habits that negatively affect one's health. A central complaint is that excessive approval of overweight and obese individuals could dissuade them from desiring to improve their health, leading to lifestyle disease. Among health professionals, agreement with the movement is very low. A 2012 study found that among a sample of 1,130 trainee dietitians, nutritionist, nurses and medical doctors, only 1.4% had "positive or neutral attitudes" regarding excess body fat. According to internist Aditi G Jha, M.D., "central obesity is the number one factor associated with diabetes, hypertension, and infertility, in their respective orders." The body positivity movement is sometimes discussed as a "denial of science".


title: Body positivity

text: The movement has also faced criticism from feminists. Gender scholar Amber E. Kinser wrote that posting an unedited photo of your body to a social media website, which is an example of an action associated with the movement, does little to prevent women's worth from being directly correlated to their physical appearance.


title: Body positivity

text: With the majority of the body positivity movement recently occurring on Instagram, a recent study found that 40 percent of body positivity posts were centered around appearance. With Instagram being a photo-sharing social media site, the effort to place the focus less on appearance has been criticized to be contradictory.


title: Body positivity

text: An additional criticism is that the movement puts too much emphasis on the role of the individual to improve their own body image, and not enough attention on identifying and eliminating the cultural forces, messages, beliefs, and advertising campaigns accountable for causing widespread body dissatisfaction.


title: Body positivity

text: Another criticism of the body positivity movement is that it can impair one's agency and authenticity. Researcher Lisa Legault argues that an undue emphasis on body positivity can “stifle and diminish important negative feelings.” She explains that negative feelings are a natural part of the human experience and that such feelings can be important and informational. She says “ignoring negative feelings and experiences exerts a cost to authenticity and self-integration." The movement, Legault argues, cannot make it seem like a person should only feel positive emotions. This expectation to have only positive feelings is sometimes called “toxic body positivity.” Moreover, a failure to achieve a genuine, confident sense of body positivity could be construed as a weakness, and this is another problematic aspect of the body positivity movement.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: The Avedis Zildjian Company, simply known as Zildjian (), is a musical instrument manufacturer specializing in cymbals and other percussion instruments. Founded by the ethnic Armenian Zildjian family in the 17th-century Ottoman Empire, the company relocated to the United States in the 20th century. Today, it is the largest cymbal and drumstick maker in the world.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: The company was founded in Constantinople in 1623 by Avedis Zildjian, an Armenian. Zildjian is now based in Norwell, Massachusetts. Zildjian is the oldest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world as well as one of the oldest continuously operating companies in the World. Zildjian sells cymbals, drumsticks, percussion mallets and other drum accessories under the Zildjian, Vic Firth and Balter Mallet brands.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: The first Zildjian cymbals were created in 1618 by Avedis Zildjian, an Armenian metalsmith and alchemist. Like his father, who was also a metalsmith, he worked for the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. He made an alloy of tin, copper, and silver into a sheet of metal, which could make musical sounds without shattering. Sultan Mustafa I gave Avedis eighty gold pieces as a bequest, in addition to officially recognizing the surname Zilciyan or Zildjian, meaning "Son of a Cymbal Maker" or "Family of Cymbalsmiths" in Armenian (with "zil" being Turkish for "cymbal", "ci" meaning "maker", and "ian" being the Armenian suffix meaning "son of"). In 1623 the Sultan granted him permission to leave the palace to start his own business in the Armenian sector of Constantinople, called Psamatia.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: Zildjian's shop manufactured cymbals for the "mehter", Ottoman military bands consisting of wind and percussion instruments, which belonged to the Janissaries. Mehter ensembles, which were known in the West primarily for playing in battle, also performed courtly music for Ottoman rulers. The Zildjians also produced instruments for Greek and Armenian churches, Sufi dervishes, and belly dancers of the Ottoman harem, who wore finger cymbals.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: After the death of Avedis, the business, and the secret for producing the metal, was handed down to several generations of male heirs. In the early 19th century, Haroutune Zildjian passed it on to his son Avedis II. In 1850, Avedis II built a 25-foot schooner, in order to sail cymbals produced in Constantinople to trade exhibitions such as the Great Exhibition in London, and to supply musicians in Europe. He died in 1865, and since his sons were too young, his brother Kerope II took over the company. He introduced a line of instruments called K Zildjian, which are used by classical musicians to this day. Kerope II died in 1909 in Constantinople.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: Following Kerope’s death, the business returned to Avedis’s side of the family. The eldest, Haroutune II, had become a lawyer and held a high position in the Ottoman government, thus he was not interested, and being a bachelor, he passed it to Aram. He was involved in the Armenian nationalist movement and resistance to the atrocities of the ruling Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. This was a time of political upheaval when the Ottoman Empire was in decline. Abdul Hamid II, also known as the ‘Bloody Sultan’ for his massacres of up to 300,000 Armenians in the mid-1890s, had reasserted Pan-Islamism.  Before Sultan Abdul Hamid II was finally deposed, there were several attempts to assassinate him. After being implicated in a 1905 failed plot to assassinate the Sultan, Aram fled to Bucharest, where he set up a small foundry.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: During Aram's exile, Kerope II's daughter Victoria oversaw the Constantinople factory. There are conflicting accounts, but it is thought that Aram returned there in 1926.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: Haroutune II's son Avedis III had left Turkey for the United States in 1909, and settled in Boston, where he established a family and a confectionary business. In 1927, he received a letter from his uncle Aram, informing him that he was to become heir to the family business, and Aram came to the US. In 1928, Avedis III, his brother Puzant, and his uncle Aram Zildjian began manufacturing cymbals in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Avedis Zildjian Co. was formed the following year in 1929.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: Avedis III sought out jazz drummers like Gene Krupa to understand their needs. The new cymbals he developed were widely adopted by swing and later bebop musicians, laying the foundations of the modern drum kit and playing technique.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: Sales of Zildjian cymbals dramatically increased after Ringo Starr used the product in The Beatles' appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964. This created an enormous backorder situation. In 1968, in order to address this backlog, a second plant, the Azco factory, was opened in Meductic, New Brunswick, Canada.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: In 1975, Zildjian began making K. Zildjian cymbals at the Azco plant. These were made until 1979. Within four years (1980), all K Cymbals were being made in the Norwell US plant, because the Ks demanded far more oversight. Armand worked with friends, the drummers Elvin Jones and Tony Williams to relaunch the K Series.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: In early 1977, Armand Zildjian was appointed President of the Avedis Zildjian Company by his father. Soon after, Robert Zildjian split from the company amidst conflict with his brother, Armand. In 1981, Robert started making Sabian cymbals in the Canadian Azco factory.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: In 2002, Armand died at age 81. The Zildjian alloy recipe passed to his daughters, Craigie and Debbie (14th generation), both of whom continue to run the family business from the current headquarters in Norwell, Massachusetts.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: In 2010, Zildjian acquired the Vic Firth Company and in 2018 acquired the Mike Balter Mallet company expanding the company's product offerings to include a full range of drumsticks and percussion mallets.


title: Avedis Zildjian Company

text: At one point, more drummers and bands used Zildjian than all other big name brands combined. Musicians using or having used the brand:


title: Divine providence

text: In theology, Divine Providence, or simply Providence, is God's intervention in the Universe. The term "Divine Providence" (usually capitalized) is also used as a title of God. A distinction is usually made between "general providence", which refers to God's continuous upholding of the existence and natural order of the Universe, and "special providence", which refers to God's extraordinary intervention in the life of people. Miracles generally fall in the latter category.


title: Divine providence

text: "Divine" evolved in the late 14th century to mean "pertaining to, in the nature of or proceeding from God or a god". This came from the Old French "devin" or "devin", with a similar meaning, and that from the Latin "divinus", meaning "of a god", in turn from "divus", with similar meaning, which was related the Latin "deus", meaning god or deity. The word providence comes from Latin "providentia" meaning foresight or prudence, and that in turn from "pro-", ahead" and "videre", to see. The current use of the word in the secular sense refers to foresight, or "timely preparation for eventualities", or (if one is a deist or an atheist) "nature as providing protective care".


title: Divine providence

text: Divine providence ( "Hashgochoh Protis" / "Hashgachah Pratit" lit. [Divine] supervision of the individual) is discussed throughout Rabbinic literature, and in particular by the classical Jewish philosophers. These writings maintain that divine providence means that God is directing (or even recreating) every minute detail of creation. This analysis thus underpins much of Orthodox Judaism's world view, particularly as regards questions of interaction with the natural world.


title: Divine providence

text: Augustine of Hippo is often associated with the doctrine of divine providence in the Latin West. Augustine held that the universe is under the continuous control and unifying governance of a single Supreme Being, since God's governance takes place over a vast multitude of relatively independent individuals differing in nature, function, and end.


title: Divine providence

text: Christian teaching on Providence in the High Middle Ages was most fully developed by Thomas Aquinas in the "Summa Theologica". The concept of providence as care exercised by God over the universe, his foresight and care for its future is extensively developed and explained both by Aquinas himself and modern Thomists. One of the foremost modern Thomists, Dominican father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, wrote a study of providence entitled "Providence: God's loving care for men and the need for confidence in Almighty God." In it, he presents and solves, according to Catholic doctrine, the most difficult issues as related to Providence.


title: Divine providence

text: The doctrine of providence in Eastern Orthodoxy is set out by St John of Tobolsk: "St. John Damascene describes it thus: 'Providence is Divine will which maintains everything and wisely rules over everything' ... It was not by chance that the iniquitous Israeli King Ahab was struck by an arrow that flew in between the seams of his armor. Truly that arrow was directed by the hand of God, just as was the one which struck Julian the Apostate; only for the soldier who let fly the arrow was it accidental. It was not by chance that swallows flew into the home of Tobit and blinded the righteous man. This happened at God’s command, in order to hold Tobit up as an example to succeeding generations, as we learn from the Angel who accompanied his son Tobias. Nothing happens by chance. It was not by chance that Caesar Augustus ordered the census to be taken in the year of Christ’s Nativity. It was not by chance that Christ met with the Samaritan woman at the well in Sychar and spoke with her. All this was foreseen and written down in the books of Divine Providence before the beginning of time.”


title: Divine providence

text: In Lutheran theology, divine providence refers to God's preservation of creation, his cooperation with everything that happens, and his guiding of the universe. While God cooperates with both good and evil deeds, with the evil deeds he does so only in as much as they are deeds, not with the evil in them. God concurs with an act's effect, but he does not cooperate in the corruption of an act or the evil of its effect. Lutherans believe everything exists for the sake of the Christian Church, and that God guides everything for its welfare and growth.


title: Divine providence

text: According to Martin Luther, divine providence began when God created the world with everything needed for human life, including both physical things and natural laws. In Luther's Small Catechism, the explanation of the first article of the Apostles' Creed declares that everything people have that is good is given and preserved by God, either directly or through other people or things. Of the services others provide us through family, government, and work, he writes, "we receive these blessings not from them, but, through them, from God." Since God uses everyone's useful tasks for good, people should look not down upon some useful vocations as being less worthy than others. Instead people should honor others, no matter how lowly, as being the means God uses to work in the world.


title: Divine providence

text: This term is an integral part of John Calvin's theological framework known as Calvinism, which emphasizes the total depravity of man and the complete sovereignty of God. God's plan for the world and every soul that he has created is guided by his will or providence. According to Calvin, the idea that man has free will and is able to make choices independently of what God has already determined is based on our limited understanding of God's perfection and the idea that God's purposes can be circumvented. In this mode of thought, providence is related to absolute free will. This concept remains prominent among many Protestant denominations that identify with Calvinism (e.g. the Reformed churches).


title: Divine providence

text: At the beginning of the 17th century, the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius formulated Arminianism and disagreed with Calvin in particular on election and predestination. Arminianism is defined by God's limited mode of providence. This mode of providence affirms the compatibility between human free will and divine foreknowledge, but its incompatibility with theological determinism. Thus predestination in Arminianism is based on divine foreknowledge, unlike in Calvinism. It is therefore a predestination by foreknowledge. From this perspective, comes the notion of a conditional election on the one who wills to have faith in God for salvation.


title: Divine providence

text: "Divine Providence" is a book published by Emanuel Swedenborg in 1764 which describes his systematic theology regarding providence, free will, theodicy, and other related topics. Both meanings of providence are applicable in Swedenborg's theology, in that providence encompasses understanding, intent and action. Divine providence relative to man is 'foresight', and relative to the Lord is 'providence'. Swedenborg proposes that one law of divine providence is that man should act from freedom according to reason, and that man is regenerated according to the faculties of rationality and liberty.


title: Divine providence

text: There is little theological literature on the term "providence" in LDS studies. As stated above, Reformed theology relates these terms to predestination, which does have more prominence in LDS theology, if only as a polemical term.


title: Divine providence

text: One particular text that could be interpreted as being related to such terms is in the Book of Abraham. As Abraham is shown the heavens, he is also shown the pre-mortal spirits of mankind.


title: Divine providence

text: The "making of rulers" above is explained as foreordination (in the chapter summary) as opposed to "predestination"


title: Divine providence

text: This differentiation balances free will (or free agency in LDS theology) against divine intervention. LDS scholar Richard Draper has described the church's position thus:


title: Divine providence

text: However, this does not imply a passive God. In fact, LDS theology favours a more active, interventionist God. In a recent General Conference, Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles articulates this, "Our lives are like a chessboard, and the Lord moves us from one place to another" Rasband continues by citing a well-known text from in the Book of Mormon in which Nephi finds his nemesis unconscious from inebriation in front of him, he concludes, "Was he fortunate to just happen upon Laban? Or was it by “divine design”? Although the text itself limits the interaction of the divine to the "Spirit" to commanding Nephi to "Slay him."


title: Divine providence

text: God also limits his involvement. Rasband interprets one particular passage from the Book of Mormon as saying that God (through his Spirit) will only intervene based on righteousness. Rasband concludes that, "When we are righteous, willing, and able, when we are striving to be worthy and qualified, we progress to places we never imagined and become part of Heavenly Father’s “divine design.”


title: Divine providence

text: In the United States Declaration of Independence it is cited, "with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor".


title: Divine providence

text: Those who believe in the inerrancy of the original biblical manuscripts often accompany this belief with a statement about how the biblical text has been preserved so that what we have today is at least substantially similar to what was written. That is, just as God "divinely inspired the text," so he has also "divinely preserved it throughout the centuries." The Westminster Confession of Faith states that the Scriptures, "being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical."


title: Divine providence

text: This is an important argument in the King James Only debates. Edward F. Hills argues that the principle of providentially preserved transmission guarantees that the printed Textus Receptus must be the closest text to the Greek autographs.


title: GoldSrc

text: GoldSrc ( ) is a proprietary game engine developed by Valve. At its core, GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of id Software's "Quake" engine. It originally made its debut in 1998 with "Half-Life", and would power future games developed by or with oversight from Valve, including "Half-Life" expansions, "Day of Defeat", and multiple games in the "Counter-Strike" series.


title: GoldSrc

text: GoldSrc was succeeded by the Source engine with the releases of "Half-Life: Source", "Half-Life 2", and "" in 2004. However, Valve continues to support the engine with periodic updates.


title: GoldSrc

text: The basis of GoldSrc is the engine used in the video game "Quake", albeit with heavy modification by Valve. While the engine served as the basis for GoldSrc, Gabe Newell has stated that a majority of the code used in the engine was created by Valve themselves. GoldSrc's artificial intelligence systems, for example, were essentially made from scratch. The engine also reuses code from other games in the "Quake" series, including "QuakeWorld" and "Quake II", but this reuse is minimal in comparison to that of the original "Quake".


title: GoldSrc

text: In 1997, Valve hired Ben Morris and acquired , a tool for creating custom "Quake" maps. The tool was later renamed to Valve Hammer Editor and became the official mapping tool for GoldSrc. The engine supports skeletal animation, which allowed for more realistic body kinematics and facial expression animations than most other engines at the time of release.


title: GoldSrc

text: Prior to the creation of the Source engine, the GoldSrc engine had no real title and was simply called "The Half-Life engine". When the need arose for Valve to work on the engine without risking introducing bugs into "Half-Life"s codebase, Valve forked the code from the Half-Life engine, creating two main engine branches: one gold master branch titled "GoldSrc" and the other "Src". Internally, any games using the original branch were referred to as "Goldsource" in order to differentiate it from the second branch, which evolved into the Source engine. Eventually, "GoldSrc" became something of a moniker for the engine and was adopted as the official title externally.


title: GoldSrc

text: Valve released versions of the GoldSrc engine for OS X and Linux in 2013, eventually porting all of their first-party games utilizing the engine to the platforms by the end of the year.


title: GoldSrc

text: "Half-Life" was Valve's debut title and the first to use GoldSrc. It received critical acclaim, winning over fifty PC Game of the Year awards. The game was followed up with two expansions, "" and "", both of which ran GoldSrc and were developed by Gearbox Software. "", an expansion pack for "Half-Life" only released on PlayStation 2, was released in 2001 alongside "Half-Life" debut on the platform. Unlike other games in the series, it never received an official version for Windows, however an unofficial version of the game was released by independent developers in 2008. "Half-Life: Decay" was the final iteration in the "Half-Life" series to run on GoldSrc, with all future entries in the series using the Source and Source 2 engines.


title: GoldSrc

text: Valve developed several games using the GoldSrc engine, many of which were based on original user-made modifications. Valve's "Team Fortress Classic", released in 1999, was developed primarily by two of the developers of the "Quake" mod "Team Fortress". "Counter-Strike" and "Day of Defeat" were also originally "Half-Life" modifications that Valve purchased the rights to and re-released as standalone titles. "Counter-Strike" evolved into its own series with the debut of the Japanese arcade game "Counter-Strike Neo" in 2003 and Valve's own follow-up in 2004, "", both of which run on the GoldSrc engine. Although Valve's further instalments in the series starting with "" use the newer Source engine instead, "Counter-Strike Online" and "", two spinoff titles released by Nexon in 2008 and 2014 respectively, utilize GoldSrc as their basis.


title: GoldSrc

text: The GoldSrc engine was also used for a variety of third-party games and modifications not directly developed by Valve. Rewolf Software used the engine for the game "Gunman Chronicles" in 2000, and the PC version of "" was developed by Gearbox Software using a modified version of GoldSrc in 2002.


title: GoldSrc

text: Unofficial, community-made modifications of GoldSrc have also been produced. Notable games include "Natural Selection", "Cry of Fear" and "Sven Co-op", with Valve's "Team Fortress Classic", "Counter-Strike", and "Day of Defeat" all being based on GoldSrc mods of the same names. "Cry of Fear" and "Sven Co-op" have since been released for free as standalone games on Steam, both of which use a licensed derivative of the engine with their own customisations.


title: At the Gates

text: At the Gates is a Swedish death metal band from Gothenburg, formed in 1990. The band was a major progenitor of Gothenburg-style melodic death metal alongside In Flames and Dark Tranquillity. Prior to their first disbandment in 1996, At the Gates released four albums, ending with and including "Slaughter of the Soul" (1995), which has been seen as a landmark in the mid-1990s Swedish death metal scene. After reuniting for a one-off tour in 2008, the band reformed once again in 2011, and they have since released three more albums: "At War with Reality" (2014), "To Drink from the Night Itself" (2018) and "The Nightmare of Being" (2021).


title: At the Gates

text: At the Gates were formed in late 1990 by former members of the death and black metal band Grotesque. They recorded a debut EP, "Gardens of Grief", for the Dolores record label. The EP led the label Peaceville Records to sign the band, and they released their debut album, "The Red in the Sky Is Ours" in 1992.


title: At the Gates

text: After the recording of their second studio album, "With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness", founding member and guitarist Alf Svensson left the band in 1993, to pursue tattoo artistry, graphic novel illustration and his solo electronic-opera-black metal project, Oxiplegatz. He was soon replaced by former House of Usher guitarist Martin Larsson, who the band knew from underground tape trading. The band continued touring Europe, and were filmed for a "Headbangers Ball" special feature in Nottingham, England in July 1993.


title: At the Gates

text: In 1994, At the Gates released their third album, "Terminal Spirit Disease", which was hailed as a breakthrough album.


title: At the Gates

text: The band continued touring and in 1995 released their most commercially and critically successful album: "Slaughter of the Soul", on Earache Records. The album is regarded as their strongest death metal effort, compared to previous albums. This album firmly rooted the band as one of the leaders of the Swedish metal scene, the "Gothenburg sound" of melodic death metal. The band received international attention for the album, gaining them several U.S. tours and heavy rotation of the music video for "Blinded by Fear" on MTV in the United States, but despite this international success, the Björler brothers departed in 1996. The remaining members decided it would be impossible to continue without them, so the band broke up.


title: At the Gates

text: When At the Gates broke up in 1996, drummer Adrian Erlandsson, bassist Jonas Björler, and guitarist Anders Björler formed The Haunted. Tomas Lindberg went on working with different bands including Skitsystem, The Crown, Lock Up, and Nightrage. Erlandsson left in 1999 to join Cradle of Filth. In 2001, Peaceville Records released an At the Gates retrospective called "Suicidal Final Art".


title: At the Gates

text: On 18 October 2007, At the Gates announced several reunion shows for mid-2008, including Getafe Electric Festival, Roskilde Festival, Ruisrock, Wacken Open Air, Graspop Metal Meeting, Sweden Rock Festival, Gods of Metal, Hellfest Summer Open Air and Bloodstock Open Air, as well as a tour of Japan with The Dillinger Escape Plan, Into Eternity, Pig Destroyer, and Mayhem in May 2008. Throughout July 2008, they toured the US and Canada on what was dubbed the "Suicidal Final Tour", and played their final UK show at Bloodstock Open Air on Sunday on 17 August 2008. They finished their last show in Athens, Greece, with guest The Ocean on 21 September 2008. The band's performance at Wacken Open Air in 2008 is available on "The Flames of the End" DVD boxed set, which also includes clips of songs from other venues and a documentary that covers the history of the band in its entirety.


title: At the Gates

text: On 21 January 2014, At the Gates released a video on YouTube showing a distorted video with lines of text on it, followed by text saying "2014", possibly hinting toward possible lyrics for an upcoming album. On 27 January, the band revealed on Facebook via a new cover photo and profile picture, that their confirmed fifth record would be titled "At War with Reality" and would be released in the fall of 2014 through Century Media.


title: At the Gates

text: When asked whether "At War with Reality" is At the Gates' final album or if the band will continue recording, Tomas Lindberg replied, "We can't say really. We have no plans of stopping but we've broken promises before so it's best not to say anything." In numerous recent interviews members of the band have expressed interest in doing a follow-up album. At the Gates concluded the touring cycle for "At War with Reality" in August 2016 with a festival appearance at "Elb Riot" in Hamburg, Germany.


title: At the Gates

text: On 8 March 2017, in an official statement released by the band, they announced that Anders Björler had departed from the band. Despite Anders' departure, they went on to confirm that they were working on a follow-up to 2014's "At War with Reality", which they were aiming to record and release in 2018. In September 2017, Jonas Stålhammar was announced as the new guitarist to take the place of Björler on a permanent basis, but he had joined too late to be involved in the writing process of the new album. They entered the studio to begin recording the album in November 2017, titled "To Drink from the Night Itself", which was released through Century Media Records on 18 May 2018.


title: At the Gates

text: At the Gates released their seventh studio album, "The Nightmare of Being", on 2 July 2021. While the album remains rooted in the Gothenburg metal tradition, it also features a wider range of musical styles, influences, and instrumentation. The ideas in the album are influenced by the writings of horror philosophers such as Thomas Ligotti and Eugene Thacker.


title: At the Gates

text: On 23 July 2022, At the Gates announced the departure of Stålhammar. On 5 October, the band announced that original guitarist Anders Björler had rejoined the band.


title: At the Gates

text: At the Gates' musical style has been described as melodic death metal and death metal. The band's early work presented a "progressive, complex way of crafting songs of dextrous["sic"] melodic fluidity and variation", which would influence progressive death metal, but also the black metal of Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger," for instance. Most of this material was composed by Alf Svensson, who, according to guitarist Anders Björler, fused the Swedish melancholy of Nordic folk music with death metal and classical music.


title: At the Gates

text: The style of later At the Gates "would inspire the whole Gothenburg region", but as Svensson had left the band, the commercial breakthrough "Slaughter of the Soul" was composed of more traditional song structures: "[...] a stripped-down, no-frills melodic death album that hit all the basic points of the style", or, as Deathmetal.org notes, a mere heavy metal album with "a basic sense of pentatonic harmonics."


title: At the Gates

text: At the Gates were nominated for a Swedish Grammy (Grammis) for "Slaughter of the Soul" in 1996, but didn't win.


title: At the Gates

text: They won the Swedish Grammy (Grammis) in February 2015 for the 2014 comeback album "At War with Reality".


title: The Sports Network

text: The Sports Network (TSN) is a Canadian English language sports specialty channel established by the Labatt Brewing Company in 1984 as part of the first group of Canadian specialty cable channels. Since 2001, it has been majority-owned by communications conglomerate BCE Inc. (presently through its broadcasting subsidiary Bell Media), with a minority stake held by ESPN Inc. via a 30% share in the Bell Media subsidiary CTV Specialty Television. TSN is the largest specialty channel in Canada in terms of gross revenue, with a total of in revenue in 2013.


title: The Sports Network

text: TSN's networks focus on sports-related programming, including live and recorded event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming. TSN was the first national cable broadcaster of the National Hockey League in Canada. Its stint has been interrupted twice by rival network Sportsnet, most recently as of the 2014–15 season under an exclusive 12-year rights deal. TSN holds regional television rights to four of the NHL's seven Canadian franchises.


title: The Sports Network

text: As of 2015, major programming rights held by TSN include exclusive coverage of the Canadian Football League and Curling Canada's national championships, coverage of the NBA and the Toronto Raptors, coverage of Major League Soccer and exclusive rights to Toronto FC and Vancouver Whitecaps FC, along with Canadian rights to the tournaments of FIFA (soccer) and the IIHF (ice hockey), the NFL (American football) (shared with sister network CTV), Formula One, NASCAR, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and the Grand Slam tennis tournaments, among others. TSN also receives programming through its minority partner, ESPN.


title: The Sports Network

text: The TSN licence currently comprises five 24-hour programming services; from its launch until 2006, TSN operated as a single, national service. In 2006, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled that TSN could operate multiple feeds with a limited amount of alternative national programming—this was followed by the launch of TSN2—a second 24-hour network under the TSN licence that was legally considered a west coast feed of TSN. As of 2010, TSN has been subject to deregulated Category C licensing by the CRTC, which allows multiple feeds to be operated under the TSN licence without restrictions on alternate programming; TSN used this new ability to operate an autonomous TSN2, along with part-time feeds for regional NHL coverage.


title: The Sports Network

text: On August 25, 2014, the primary TSN service was restructured into four 24-hour feeds—TSN1, TSN3, TSN4, and TSN5—with each designated as the primary TSN network for each region of Canada. TSN now essentially operates as a group of regional sports networks similarly to Sportsnet; the regional feeds air some common programming and simulcast major events, while all five channels can air programming autonomously—including alternative national events and studio shows, supplemental coverage of larger events, and regional programming (such as NHL games, restricted to the home team's market).


title: The Sports Network

text: Licensed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) on April 2, 1984, as the "Action Canada Sports Network", the channel was launched by the Labatt Brewing Company on September 1 of the same year as The Sports Network, or TSN. The network was founded under the leadership of Gordon Craig, a former employee of CBC Sports; alongside coverage of the then co-owned Toronto Blue Jays, TSN also reached a deal with ESPN (itself only 5 years old) shortly before launch to provide additional programs. Although reaching around 400,000 subscribers, TSN's early years were hindered by its initial status as a premium service, bundled in a high-cost package with movie channels such as First Choice and Superchannel, alongside competition with free-to-air sports broadcasts by CBC Television among others.


title: The Sports Network

text: To improve the prominence of the network, TSN sought to obtain the national cable rights to the National Hockey League—rights that, according to the league, were not sold under the current arrangement with CBC. However, the task was complicated by claims by CBC that it owned the cable rights to the NHL, along with the involvement of competing beer company Molson in Canadian NHL rights at the time. With the help of a Molson employee who was a friend of Gordon, a deal was reached between TSN, Molson, and the NHL to allow the network to broadcast games on cable.


title: The Sports Network

text: By December 1987, TSN had reached one million subscribers, but the network's staff sought wider distribution for the channel as part of basic cable service; the CRTC approved the network's request for permission to allow TSN to be carried as part of a basic cable lineup. Mike Day, producer of TSN's daily sports news program "SportsDesk" lamented about the shift to basic cable and the larger audience it would bring, commenting that "one night you're doing a news show that potentially has an audience of one million people, and the next day the potential is five million people."


title: The Sports Network

text: In 1991, TSN acquired rights to the IIHF World Junior Championship, otherwise known as the "World Juniors", which were previously broadcast by CBC. TSN's coverage, along with the recent "Punch-up in Piestany" incident and a strong performance by Canada at the tournament in the mid-1990s, helped to significantly heighten the profile of the tournament in the country (even more so than in other participating countries), to the point that it is, alongside U.S. college football bowl games, regarded as a traditional sporting event of the holiday season in Canada.


title: The Sports Network

text: Due to CRTC regulations on the foreign ownership of broadcasters, Labatt was forced to sell TSN and RDS upon its acquisition by Interbrew in 1995. Labatt's broadcasting assets were sold to a privately held consortium named NetStar Communications, the investors of which included a number of Canadian firms as well as ESPN Inc., which held an interest of about 30 percent. The same CRTC regulations prevented ESPN from establishing its own separate Canadian sports network outright, so acquiring a minority stake in TSN became ESPN's alternative plan to get into the Canadian market. The Sports Network launched its website TSN.ca on October 1, 1995.


title: The Sports Network

text: In 1997, the CRTC began permitting TSN to offer an "alternate feed", which could be used to provide a regional opt-out of the main TSN service for programming that must be blacked out in the rest of the country. Alternate programming could make up a maximum of 10% of the TSN schedule—an average of 2.4 hours a day.


title: The Sports Network

text: In 2000, after ESPN blocked two attempts by the Canadian partners to sell NetStar to Canwest, CTV Inc. acquired the Canadian partners' shares. CTV Inc. was acquired by Bell Canada and The Woodbridge Company (publisher of "The Globe and Mail" newspaper) as part of the joint venture Bell Globemedia in 2001. As a result of its purchase of TSN, CTV would be forced to sell its regional sports network CTV Sportsnet, eventually selling it to minority shareholder Rogers Media. Following the acquisition, TSN would move its operations to CTV's Agincourt complex in the Toronto district of Scarborough. This oddity would become an inside joke between personalities on both networks, who commonly referred to jumping between the two networks as "crossing the parking lot."


title: The Sports Network

text: Following the sale, TSN began to closer align its on-air imaging with that of ESPN; the most prominent effect of these changes came with the introduction of a new logo similar to that of ESPN, and the re-branding of TSN's flagship sports news program "SportsDesk" as "SportsCentre"—a Canadian version (in both format and spelling) of ESPN's "SportsCenter". The CRTC, however, objected to plans to rename TSN as "ESPN Canada", citing concerns that it would make it appear that ESPN had "de facto" majority control, or at the very least that TSN was ESPN's Canadian affiliate.


title: The Sports Network

text: TSN also launched a number of digital specialty channels in 2001; including a local version of ESPN Classic, the NHL Network— a network devoted to ice hockey and the National Hockey League, and WTSN—a channel dedicated to women's sports On August 15, 2003, TSN became one of the first two specialty television services in Canada (the other being fellow Bell property Discovery Channel) to be available in high definition. TSN's first live HD broadcast was of a Canadian Football League game between the Montreal Alouettes and Hamilton Tiger-Cats—it was to occur on the same day, but was delayed to August 16 due to a major electrical power failure that occurred the day prior.


title: The Sports Network

text: Beginning in 2006, the CRTC officially allowed TSN to operate national secondary digital feeds with limited amounts of alternative programming. Following this development, TSN began to use such a feed to broadcast additional programming that could not be aired on TSN due to scheduling conflicts or other events. On August 29, 2008, the feed evolved into a new 24-hour channel, similar to ESPN2, known as TSN2. Upon its launch, TSN2 was legally considered a west coast timeshift feed of TSN, although soon after TSN2 was launched, the CRTC announced a proposal to remove genre exclusivity protections for "mainstream sports" and "national news" channels in the near future. As a byproduct of the decision, TSN would be allowed to use streamlined conditions of licence (legally referred to as a Category C license as of September 2011), which state that the service may offer "multiple feeds" consistent with their licensed programming format, without any restrictions on alternate programming. TSN was officially permitted to use these streamlined conditions of licence on February 1, 2010.