title: Ulugh Beg

text: In 1437, Ulugh Beg determined the length of the sidereal year as 365.2570370... = 365 6 10 8 (an error of +58 seconds). In his measurements over the course of many years he used a 50 m high gnomon. This value was improved by 28 seconds in 1525 by Nicolaus Copernicus, who appealed to the estimation of Thabit ibn Qurra (826–901), which had an error of +2 seconds. However, Ulugh Beg later measured another more precise value of the tropical year as 365 5 49 15, which has an error of +25 seconds, making it more accurate than Copernicus's estimate which had an error of +30 seconds. Ulugh Beg also determined the Earth's axial tilt as 23°30'17" in the sexagesimal system of degrees, minutes and seconds of arc, which in decimal notation converts to 23.5047°.


title: Ulugh Beg

text: In mathematics, Ulugh Beg wrote accurate trigonometric tables of sine and tangent values correct to at least eight decimal places.


title: Ulugh Beg

text: In 1447, upon learning of the death of his father Shah Rukh, Ulugh Beg went to Balkh. Here, he heard that Ala al-Dawla, the son of his late brother Baysunghur, had claimed the rulership of the Timurid Empire in Herat. Consequently, Ulugh Beg marched against Ala al-Dawla and met him in battle at Murghab. He defeated his nephew and advanced toward Herat, massacring its people in 1448. However, Abul-Qasim Babur Mirza, Ala al-Dawla's brother, came to the latter's aid and defeated Ulugh Beg.


title: Ulugh Beg

text: Ulugh Beg retreated to Balkh where he found that its governor, his oldest son Abdal-Latif Mirza, had rebelled against him. Another civil war ensued. Abdal-Latif recruited troops to meet his father's army on the banks of the Amu Darya river. However, Ulugh Beg was forced to retreat to Samarkand before any fighting took place, having heard news of turmoil in the city. Abdal-Latif soon reached Samarkand and Ulugh Beg involuntarily surrendered to his son. Abd-al-Latif released his father from custody, allowing him to make pilgrimage to Mecca. However, he ensured Ulugh Beg never reached his destination, having him, as well as his brother Abdal-Aziz assassinated in 1449.


title: Ulugh Beg

text: Eventually, Ulugh Beg's reputation was rehabilitated by his nephew, Abdallah Mirza (1450–1451), who placed his remains at Timur's feet in the Gur-e-Amir in Samarkand, where they were found by Soviet archaeologists in 1941.


title: Ulugh Beg

text: Soviet anthropologist Mikhail M. Gerasimov reconstructed the face of Ulugh Beg. Like his grandfather Timurlane, Ulugh Beg is close to the Mongoloid type with slightly Europoid features. His father Shah Rukh had predominantly Caucasoid features, with no obvious Mongoloid feature.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making several trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with his first novel "The Sheltering Sky" (1949), set in French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1947, Bowles settled in Tangier, at that time in the Tangier International Zone, and his wife Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Ceylon during the early 1950s, Tangier was Bowles's home for the remainder of his life. He came to symbolize American immigrants in the city.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried near family graves in Lakemont Cemetery, in upstate New York.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, as the only child of Rena (née Winnewisser) and Claude Dietz Bowles, a dentist. His childhood was materially comfortable, but his father was a cold and domineering parent, opposed to any form of play or entertainment, and feared by both his son and wife. According to family legend, Claude had tried to kill his newborn son by leaving him exposed on a window-ledge during a snowstorm. The story may not be true, but Bowles believed it was and that it encapsulated his relationship with his father. Warmth in his childhood was provided by his mother, who read Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe to him – it was to the latter that he later attributed his own desire to write stories, such as "The Delicate Prey", "A Distant Episode", and "Pages from Cold Point".


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles could read at age 3 and was writing stories by age 4. Soon, he wrote surrealistic poetry and music. In 1922, at age 11, he bought his first book of poetry, Arthur Waley's "A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems". At age 17, he had a poem, "Spire Song", accepted for publication in the literary journal "transition". This Paris-based publication served as a forum for leading proponents of modernism – Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein and others. Bowles's interest in music also dated from his childhood, when his father bought a phonograph and classical records. (Bowles was interested in jazz, but such records were forbidden by his father.) His family bought a piano, and the young Bowles studied musical theory, singing, and piano. When he was 15, he attended a performance of Stravinsky's "The Firebird" at Carnegie Hall, which made a profound impression: "Hearing "The Firebird" made me determined to continue improvising on the piano when my father was out of the house, and to notate my own music with an increasing degree of knowing that I had happened upon a new and exciting mode of expression."


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles entered the University of Virginia in 1928, where his interests included T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", Prokofiev, Duke Ellington, Gregorian chant, and blues. He also heard music by George Antheil and Henry Cowell. In April 1929, he dropped out without informing his parents, and sailed with a one-way ticket for Paris and no intention of returning – not, he said later, running away, but "running toward something, although I didn't know what at the time." Bowles spent the next months working for the "Paris Herald Tribune" and developing a friendship with Tristan Tzara. By July, he returned to New York and worked at Duttons Bookshop in Manhattan, where he began work on an unfinished book of fiction, "Without Stopping" (not to be confused with his later autobiography of the same title).


title: Paul Bowles

text: At the insistence of his parents, Bowles returned to studies at the University of Virginia but left after one semester to return to Paris with Aaron Copland, with whom he had been studying composition in New York. Copland was a lover as well as mentor to Bowles, who would later state that he was "other than Jane the most important person in my life": when their affair concluded, they remained friends for life.


title: Paul Bowles

text: It was during the autumn of 1930 in Paris that Bowles began work on his own first musical composition, the "Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet", which he finished the following year. It premiered in New York at the Aeolian Hall on Wigmore Street, 16 December 1931. The entire concert (which also included work by Copland and Virgil Thomson) was panned by New York critics. (Bowles's first-known composition was completed earlier in Berlin: an adaptation as piano music of some vocal pieces by Kurt Schwitters.)


title: Paul Bowles

text: In Paris, Bowles became a part of Gertrude Stein's literary and artistic circle. On her advice, he made his first visit to Tangier with Aaron Copland in the summer of 1931. They took a house on the mountain above Tangier Bay. Bowles later made Morocco his full-time home, and it inspired many of his short stories. From Tangier he returned to Berlin, where he met British writers Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. (Isherwood was reportedly so taken with him that he named a character Sally Bowles in his novel after him.) The next year, Bowles returned to North Africa, traveling throughout other parts of Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1937, Bowles returned to New York. Over the next decade, he established a solid reputation as a composer, collaborating with Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, and others on music for stage productions, as well as orchestral pieces.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1938, he married Jane Auer, an author and playwright. It was an unconventional marriage; their intimate relationships were reportedly with people of their own sex, but the couple maintained close personal ties with each other. During this time the couple joined the Communist Party of USA but soon left the organization after Bowles was ejected from the party.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles has frequently been featured in anthologies as a gay writer, although he regarded such categories as both absurd and irrelevant. After a brief sojourn in France, the couple were prominent among the literary figures of New York throughout the 1940s. Bowles also worked under Virgil Thomson as a music critic at the "New York Herald Tribune". His zarzuela, "The Wind Remains", based on a poem by Federico García Lorca, was performed in 1943 with choreography by Merce Cunningham and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. His translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's play "Huis Clos" ("No Exit"), directed by John Huston, won a Drama Critic's Award in 1943.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1945, Bowles began writing prose again, beginning with a few short stories including "A Distant Episode". His wife Jane, he said, was the main influence upon his taking up fiction as an adult, when she published her first novel "Two Serious Ladies" (1943).


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1947, Bowles received a contract for a novel from Doubleday; with the advance, he moved permanently to Tangier. Jane joined him there the following year. Bowles commented:


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles traveled alone into the Algerian Sahara to work on the novel. He later said, "I wrote in bed in hotels in the desert." He drew inspiration from personal experience, noting years later that, "Whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so." He titled the novel "The Sheltering Sky", from a song, "Down Among the Sheltering Palms", which he had heard every summer as a child. It was first published by John Lehmann Limited in England, in September 1949, after Doubleday rejected the manuscript.


title: Paul Bowles

text: I sent it out to Doubleday and they refused it. They said, "We asked for a novel." They didn't consider it a novel. I had to give back my advance. My agent told me later they called the editor on the carpet for having refused the book – only after they saw that it was selling fast. It only had to do with sales. They didn't bother to read it.


title: Paul Bowles

text: A first American edition, by New Directions Publishing, appeared the following month. The plot follows three Americans: Port, his wife Kit, and their friend, Tunner, as they journey through the Algerian desert. The reviewer for "TIME" magazine commented that the ends visited upon the two main characters "seem appropriate but by no means tragic", but that "Bowles scores cleanly with his minor characters: Arab pimps and prostitutes, French officers in garrison towns, [and] a stupidly tiresome pair of tourists—mother & son." In "The New York Times", playwright and critic Tennessee Williams commented that the book was like a summer thunderstorm, "pulsing with interior flashes of fire". The book quickly rose to the "New York Times" best-seller list, going through three printings in two months.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1950, Bowles published his first collection of short stories. Titled "A Little Stone" (John Lehmann, London, August 1950), it omitted two of Bowles's most famous short stories, "Pages From Cold Point" and "The Delicate Prey". British critic Cyril Connolly and writer Somerset Maugham had advised him that if they were included in the collection, distribution and/or censorship difficulties might ensue. The American edition by Random House, "The Delicate Prey and Other Stories" (November 1950), did include these two stories.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In an interview 30 years later, Bowles responded to an observation that almost all of the characters in "The Delicate Prey" were victimized by either physical or psychological violence. He said:


title: Paul Bowles

text: Yes, I suppose. The violence served a therapeutic purpose. It's unsettling to think that at any moment life can flare up into senseless violence. But it can and does, and people need to be ready for it. What you make for others is first of all what you make for yourself. If I'm persuaded that our life is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we've built up over the millennia, can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be affected by that assumption. The process of life presupposes violence, in the plant world the same as the animal world. But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction.


title: Paul Bowles

text: He set his second novel, "Let It Come Down" (John Lehmann, London, February 1952), in North Africa, specifically Tangier. It explored the disintegration of an American (Nelson Dyar) who was unprepared for the encounter with an alien culture. The first American edition by Random House was published later that same month.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles set his third novel, "The Spider's House" (Random House, New York, November 1955), in Fez, immediately prior to Morocco's gaining independence and sovereignty in 1956. In it, he charted the relationships among three immigrants and a young Moroccan: John Stenham, Alain Moss, Lee Veyron, and Amar. Reviewers noted that the novel marked a departure from Bowles's earlier fiction in that it introduced a contemporary political theme, the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism. The UK edition (Macdonald) was published in January 1957.


title: Paul Bowles

text: While Bowles was concentrating on his career as a writer, he composed incidental music for nine plays presented by the American School of Tangier. The Bowles couple became fixtures of the American and European immigrant scene in Tangier. Visitors included Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. William S. Burroughs, and the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso followed in the mid-1950s and early 1960s. In 1951, Bowles was introduced to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, having first heard the musicians when he and Brion Gysin attended a festival, or "moussem", at Sidi Kacem. Bowles described his continued association with the Master Musicians of Jajouka and their hereditary leader Bachir Attar in his book, "Days: A Tangier Journal".


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1952, Bowles bought the tiny island of Taprobane, off the coast of Ceylon. There, he wrote much of his novel "The Spider's House" and returned to Tangier in the warmer months. He stayed in Sri Lanka most winters.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1957, Jane Bowles suffered a mild stroke, which marked the beginning of a long and painful decline in her health. Her condition preoccupied Paul Bowles until Jane's death in 1973.


title: Paul Bowles

text: During the late 1950s, Morocco achieved independence. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and sponsorship from the US Library of Congress, Bowles spent the months of August to September 1959 traveling throughout Morocco with Christopher Wanklyn and Mohammed Larbi, recording traditional Moroccan music. From 1959 to 1961, Bowles recorded a wide variety of music from the different ethnic groups in Morocco, including the Sephardic Jewish communities of Meknes and Essaouira.


title: Paul Bowles

text: During these years, Bowles also worked at translating Moroccan authors and story-tellers, including Mohamed Choukri, Ahmed Yacoubi, Larbi Layachi (under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi), and Mohammed Mrabet.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In the autumn of 1968, invited by friend Oliver Evans, Bowles was a visiting scholar for one semester at the English Department of the San Fernando Valley State College, (now California State University, Northridge). He taught "Advanced Narrative Writing and the Modern European Novel."


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1970, Bowles and Daniel Halpern founded the literary magazine "Antaeus," based in Tangier. It featured many new, as well as established authors. Bowles's work was also represented, including his story "Afternoon with Antaeus."


title: Paul Bowles

text: After his wife's death, on 4 May 1973 in Málaga, Spain, Bowles continued to live in Tangier. He wrote regularly and received many visitors to his modest apartment.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In the summers of 1980 and 1982, Bowles conducted writing workshops in Morocco, at the American School of Tangier (under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts in New York). These were considered successful. Among several students who have become successful authors are Rodrigo Rey Rosa, the 2004 Winner of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature, and Mark Terrill. Bowles designated Rey Rosa as the literary heir of his and Jane Bowles's estates.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1982, Bowles published "Points in Time", subtitled "Tales From Morocco", a collection of stories. Divided into eleven parts, the work consists of untitled story fragments, anecdotes, and travel narratives. These stories are not included in either "The Stories of Paul Bowles" (Ecco Press) or "Collected Stories and Later Writings" (The Library of America).


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1985, Bowles published his translation of Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "The Circular Ruins". It was collected in a book of 16 stories, all translated by Bowles, called "She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her". This Borges story had previously been published in translations by the three main Borges translators: Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner, and James E. Irby.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1988, when Bowles was asked in an interview about his social life, he replied, "I don't know what a social life is ... My social life is restricted to those who serve me and give me meals, and those who want to interview me." When asked in the same interview how he would summarize his achievement, he said, "I've written some books and some music. That's what I've achieved."


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles had a cameo appearance at the beginning and end of the film version of "The Sheltering Sky" (1990), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Bowles's music was overlooked and mostly forgotten for more than a generation, but in the 1990s, a new generation of American musicians and singers became interested in his work again. Art song enthusiasts savor what are described as "charming, witty pieces."


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1994, Bowles was visited and interviewed by writer Paul Theroux, who featured him in his last chapter of his travel book, "The Pillars of Hercules".


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1995, Bowles made his final return to New York, invited to a "Paul Bowles Festival" at Lincoln Center celebrating his music. The music was performed by Jonathan Sheffer leading the Eos Orchestra. A related symposium on Bowles's work and interview were held at the New School for Social Research. A Canadian documentary on his life, "" won Best Documentary at the 27th Annual International Emmy Awards in New York City.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Visitors in 1998 reported that Bowles's wit and intellect endured. He continued to welcome visitors to his apartment in Tangier but, on the advice of doctors and friends, limited interviews. One of the last was an interview with Stephen Morison, Jr., a friend teaching at the American School of Tangier. It was featured in the July/August 1999 issue of "Poets & Writers" magazine. On June 6, 1999, Irene Herrmann, the executrix of the Paul Bowles Music Estate, interviewed him to focus on his musical career; this was published in September 2003.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles died of heart failure on November 18, 1999, at the Italian Hospital in Tangier, aged 88. He had been ill for some time with respiratory problems. His ashes were buried in Lakemont, New York, next to the graves of his parents and grandparents.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles lived for 52 of his 88 years in Tangier. He became strongly identified with the city and symbolized American immigrants. Obituary writers typically linked his life to his residency there.


title: Paul Bowles

text: When Bowles had first visited Tangier with Aaron Copland in 1931, they were both outsiders to what they perceived as an exotic place of unfamiliar customs. They were not bound by any local rules, which varied among the many ethnic groups. Tangier was a Moroccan and international city, a longtime trading center, with a population made up of Berber, Arab, Spanish, French and other Europeans, speaking Spanish, French, Berber and Arabic, and professing a variety of religions. Politically it was under the control of a consortium of foreign powers, including the United States. Bowles was entranced by the city's culture.


title: Paul Bowles

text: By his return in 1947 the city somewhat changed, but he still found it intriguing. In 1955, anti-European riots erupted as Moroccans sought independence. In 1956, the city was returned to full Moroccan control.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles first studied music with Aaron Copland. In the fall of 1931, following an introduction from Copland, he entered the studio of Virgil Thomson.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Bowles had thought of himself first as a poet, having published some verse in his brief time at the University of Virginia in the pages of "transition". Unfortunately, the quality of his poetry eluded any of the intellectuals he would later encounter in Paris. Among them was Gertrude Stein, from whom he received the sobriquet, "the manufactured savage," and who begged him to give up writing poetry.


title: Paul Bowles

text: However, his music of the time, demonstrated by a propensity for Ravel-like piano improvisations, charmed both Copland and Thomson, alike. In his book, "Copland On Music" (Doubleday & Company, New York, 1960), Copland remarked:


title: Paul Bowles

text: For Copland the allure of Bowles's music would never diminish. In later years he was recorded as having said, "Paul Bowles' music is always fresh; I've never known him to write a dull piece."


title: Paul Bowles

text: However, the precocity of Bowles's early musical efforts would later belie a lack of professional training and discipline. Copland had tried in New York to teach him harmony, but had found him to be a stubborn pupil. In Paris Bowles approached Nadia Boulanger for lessons, and Thomson recommended him to Paul Dukas. In the end, he would work with neither.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Apart from irregular consultation with Vittorio Rieti, Bowles never received any formal instruction in music, despite the best efforts of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson to persuade him otherwise. However, the self-taught composer, with assistance from Thomson, found success in New York as a producer of incidental music for the theatre. He collaborated with the likes of George Balanchine, Joseph Losey, Leonard Bernstein, Elia Kazan, Arthur Koestler, José Ferrer, Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams.


title: Paul Bowles

text: During the Second World War he turned his hand to writing as a reviewer for the "New York Herald Tribune", where Thomson then served as music critic. Bowles was well-suited to the work, according to Thomson, "because he wrote clearly and because he had the gift of judgment."


title: Paul Bowles

text: Following Virgil Thomson's retirement from his critic's post in 1954, reminiscing on his wish Paul Bowles had taken over the position, Bowles remarked, "I don't think I could have handled it, any more than I could have followed a career in composition. I lacked the musical training that [Virgil] and Aaron had."


title: Paul Bowles

text: After the war, eventually settling in Tangier, Morocco, Bowles continued his musical and literary pursuits, gradually letting go of the former and becoming what Virgil Thomson described as, "a novelist and story writer of international repute."


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles referred to Tangier as "a place where it is still hard to find a piano in tune." Regarding his establishment as an author in Morocco, Bowles said:


title: Paul Bowles

text: Little by little I was aware of there being atmospheres which I could only portray by writing about them. I was unable to express my emotions in their entirety through music. My music was joyful as I was myself. The more nocturnal side to my personality, I managed to express through language.


title: Paul Bowles

text: With the success of the book, "The Sheltering Sky", Bowles struck his first blow for independence. In time this break from the composition of music would see Bowles's earlier exploits overshadowed completely by his acclaim as a writer of prose.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Only in the decade before his death was there a renewed interest in his musical output from the 1930s and '40s. This movement may have culminated in May 1994, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, with the presentation of a live concert performance, and at which the then 83-year-old Paul Bowles was in attendance. The program included a number of Bowles's original songs and pieces for piano, plus musical tributes and portraits of the composer by Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, and Phillip Ramey. At least as regards the past neglect of his own catalogue, this ongoing revival may serve as proof of Bowles's own words: "Music only exists when it is played."


title: Paul Bowles

text: Renewal of respect for Paul Bowles's music has led to several commercial recording projects. In 2016 the Invencia Piano Duo (Andrey Kasparov and Oksana Lutsyshyn), in collaboration with Naxos Records and its American Classics division, released two CDs of Bowles's complete piano works.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Volume one opens with pieces inspired by Latin American themes, evocative of the composer's interest in the culture and his fluency in the Spanish language. The second of the two volumes closes with arrangements of "Blue Mountain Ballads" (1946), set for piano duet by Dr. Andrey Kasparov, and three miscellaneous pieces, set for two pianos by the American piano duo of Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. The latter three arrangements were uncovered in the Gold and Fizdale Collection, held in the Peter Jay Sharp Special Collections, Lila Acheson Wallace Library, The Juilliard School. Dr. Kasparov reconstructed the original manuscripts which permitted these duets to be recorded for the very first time.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles was a pioneer in the field of North African ethnomusicology, making field recordings from 1959 to 1961 of traditional Moroccan music for the US Library of Congress. The collection includes dance music, secular music, music for Ramadan and other celebrations, and music for animistic rituals. Bowles realised that modern culture would inevitably change and influence the practice of traditional music, and he wanted to preserve some of it.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Instrumentalists and singers have come into being in lieu of chroniclers and poets, and even during the most recent chapter in the country's evolution – the war for independence and the setting up of the present regime – each phase of the struggle has been celebrated in song.


title: Paul Bowles

text: The total collection of this recorded music is known as "The Paul Bowles Collection"; it is archived in the US Library of Congress, Reference No. 72-750123. The Archival Manuscript Material (Collection) contains 97 x 2-track 7" reel-to-reel tapes, containing approximately sixty hours of traditional folk, art and popular music, one box of manuscripts, 18 photographs, and a map, along with the 2-LP recording called "Music of Morocco" (AFS L63-64).


title: Paul Bowles

text: In the 1960s Bowles began translating and collecting stories from the oral tradition of native Moroccan storytellers. His most noteworthy collaborators included Mohammed Mrabet, Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi (Larbi Layachi), Mohamed Choukri, Abdeslam Boulaich, and Ahmed Yacoubi.


title: Paul Bowles

text: He also translated writers whose original work was written in Spanish, Portuguese and French: Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isabelle Eberhardt, Roger Frison-Roche, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Giorgio de Chirico, Si Lakhdar, E. Laoust, Ramon Beteta, Gabino Chan, Bertrand Flornoy, Jean Ferry, Denise Moran, Paul Colinet, Paul Magritte, Popul Buj, Francis Ponge, Bluet d'Acheres and Ramon Sender.


title: Paul Bowles

text: Paul Bowles is considered one of the artists to have shaped 20th-century literature and music. In his "Introduction" to Bowles's "Collected Stories" (1979) Gore Vidal ranked the short stories as "among the best ever written by an American", writing: "the floor to this ramshackle civilization that we have built cannot bear much longer our weight. It was Bowles's genius to suggest the horrors which lie beneath that floor, as fragile, in its way, as the sky that shelters us from a devouring vastness".


title: Paul Bowles

text: Critics have described his music, in contrast, "as full of light as the fiction [is] of dark ... almost as if the composer were a totally different person from the writer." During the early 1930s, Bowles studied composition (intermittently) with Aaron Copland; his music from this period "is reminiscent of Satie and Poulenc." Returning to New York in the mid-30s, Bowles became one of the preeminent composers of American theater music, producing works for William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and others, "show[ing] exceptional skill and imagination in capturing the mood, emotion, and ambience of each play to which he was assigned." Bowles said that such incidental music allowed him to present "climaxless music, hypnotic music in one of the exact senses of the word, in that it makes its effect without the spectator being made aware of it." At the same time he continued to write concert music, assimilating some of the melodic, rhythmic, and other stylistic elements of African, Mexican, and Central American music.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In 1991, Bowles was awarded the annual Rea Award for the Short Story. The jury gave the following citation: "Paul Bowles is a storyteller of the utmost purity and integrity. He writes of a world before God became man; a world in which men and women in extremis are seen as components in a larger, more elemental drama. His prose is crystalline and his voice unique. Among living American masters of the short story, Paul Bowles is sui generis."


title: Paul Bowles

text: The historic building of the American Legation in Tangier includes an entire wing devoted to Paul Bowles. In 2010, they received a donation of furniture, photographs and documents compiled by Gloria Kirby, a permanent resident of Tanger and friend of Bowles.


title: Paul Bowles

text: In addition to his chamber and stage compositions, Bowles published fourteen short story collections, several novels, three volumes of poetry, numerous translations, numerous travel articles, and an autobiography.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Ruby is a demon on The CW Television Network's "Supernatural" portrayed mainly by actresses Katie Cassidy and Genevieve Cortese. Created by the writers to expand on the characterization of demons within the series, she first appears in the third season, wherein she assists series protagonists Sam and Dean Winchester in fighting her fellow demons. By the fourth season, she has won Sam's trust and begins training him to kill demons with his psychic powers, though Dean remains fearful of ulterior motives. The character is killed at the end of the fourth season. In the fifteenth season, Ruby returns through flashbacks and a visit to the Empty, the angels' and demons' afterlife.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Though the fans at first reacted negatively towards Cortese replacing Cassidy after the third season, Cortese and creator Eric Kripke felt that they became more accepting as the fourth season progressed. While fan response to the character was mixed overall, critical reception was generally negative. A common criticism was underwhelming performances by Cassidy and Cortese.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Debuting in the third season premiere "The Magnificent Seven", Ruby (Katie Cassidy) trails Sam Winchester—a hunter of supernatural creatures—and eventually rescues him from a group of demons, whom she kills with her unique demon-killing knife. She reveals her identity to Sam in "The Kids Are Alright", but claims to be different from other demons and wants to help Sam fight them. In return for his cooperation, she promises to save his brother Dean from the Faustian deal he had made to resurrect Sam in the second season finale "All Hell Breaks Loose: Part 2". However, she refuses to tell Sam her motives. Though he distrusts her and Dean wants to kill her before she can harm them, Sam decides to let her continue to help him with both saving Dean and fighting the hundreds of other demons who—like Ruby—escaped Hell in the second season finale.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Ruby's credibility builds throughout Season 3. In "Sin City", she restores power to the Colt for the Winchesters to use in their war against demons. The episode "Malleus Maleficarum" provides her backstory, revealing that she had been a witch during the Plague who sold her soul to a demon. She confides in Dean that, unlike other demons, she still remembers what it is like to be human, citing this trait as the reason she is helping the brothers against other demons. She returns in "Jus in Bello" to save the brothers from an attacking horde of demons. Upon learning that they have lost the Colt, she decides to perform a spell that will destroy all the demons in the area, including herself. However, because the spell requires a human virgin's heart, Dean does not allow her to perform it. Although the plan he comes up with instead saves himself and his brother, the people they leave behind get killed by demons pursuing Sam and Dean, which Ruby uses to rebuke the brothers for not listening to her.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Contrary to her promise to Sam, Ruby tells Dean that she cannot actually save him from Hell and that she had lied to Sam to get him to listen to her. However, in the season finale "No Rest for the Wicked", she tells Sam that she had lied to Dean and that she truly can help Sam save him. Her plan is to train Sam to harness his latent demonic abilities so that he can use them to kill Lilith, the demon who holds the contract for Dean's soul. Believing that Ruby is trying to manipulate Sam into giving in to his dark side, Dean tricks her into a devil's trap—a mystical symbol capable of rendering demons powerless—and leaves with Sam to face Lilith. Ruby frees herself and tracks the brothers down during their campaign, but gets expelled from her host body by Lilith and thus is not present at the confrontation between Lilith and the brothers, with her whereabouts at the time unclear. The fourth season episode "I Know What You Did Last Summer" states that she had been sent back to Hell. Eventually, Ruby returns and offers Sam her help in taking revenge on Lilith for Dean's death in "No Rest for the Wicked" as well as in stopping Lilith's apocalyptic plans. To appease Sam, who dislikes her using a living host against the host's will, Ruby takes possession of a body recently declared to be dead (Genevieve Cortese). They have sex together at least once, and she brings him out of his downward spiral towards self-destruction. Consequently, Sam now trusts Ruby implicitly.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Ruby begins training Sam in using his demonic abilities to exorcise (and later, kill) demons, and continues to do so in secret following Dean's resurrection by the angel Castiel in the fourth season premiere. The episode "On the Head of a Pin" reveals that she is feeding Sam her demonic blood to boost his powers, and by "The Rapture", he has become addicted to drinking her blood. In the following episode "When the Levee Breaks", Sam and Dean have a heated confrontation over Sam's trust in her and the negative influence she has on him, leading to a vicious fight which ends in Sam strangling Dean and Dean severing ties with Sam. In the season finale "Lucifer Rising", Ruby insists that she and Sam must murder a demonically-possessed woman despite the woman being alive and pleading for them to let her go, as Ruby argues that Sam needs to also drink the woman's blood in order to be able to kill Lilith; Sam eventually agrees. In the episode's climax, Ruby keeps Dean from interfering while Sam succeeds in killing Lilith. Afterward, Ruby reveals that she is a double-agent working for Lilith who has just tricked Sam into setting the demons' revered god Lucifer free with Lilith's death. With Sam's help, she is killed by Dean with her own knife.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: In season 15's "Destiny's Child," the Winchesters learn from the angel Anael that she and Ruby occasionally worked together when they had common interests and Anael gave Ruby the Occultum, supposedly to sell it for a lot of money. Anael claims that Ruby hid it in Hell and was killed before she could sell it off, but this proves to be a trap as Anael hires demons to kill Sam and Dean. Needing the Occultum to continue with their plan to kill God, Castiel has Jack send him into the Empty so he can ask Ruby herself where to find it. The Shadow, the being that rules the realm, reluctantly allows Castiel to talk to Ruby who takes on the form she had when she died. Ruby reveals that, in reality, Anael approached her with the suggestion that they hide in the Occultum until the Apocalypse was over. Ruby never told the angel where she hid the Occultum, but offers Castiel the location in exchange for his help in getting out of the Empty since that would effectively resurrect Ruby. Sympathetic with Ruby due to his own time in the realm, Castiel agrees to at least try, which the demon accepts. Ruby whispers the Occultum's location in Castiel's ear before disappearing. However, Ruby fails to mention the hellhounds she left to guard the Occultum, causing Dean to think Ruby was trying to kill them like Anael did before they decipher Ruby's clues and locate the artifact.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Prior to Ruby's introduction in the third season, series creator Eric Kripke summarized the character as "ruthless and a little crazy and rough around the edges", calling her "[a] little unhinged" because she lacks the "moral conscience" that Sam and Dean have. Katie Cassidy, the actress who portrayed Ruby in the third season, described her as a "kick-ass, bad-ass" ally of Sam and Dean's who "also likes to stir up a little trouble." According to Cassidy, Ruby is "mysterious", "manipulative", and in control of her situation, being "always 10 steps ahead of everybody else". On this, Cassidy proclaimed that Ruby "knows what she wants, and she's out to get it". Actress Genevieve Cortese, who played the character in the fourth season, deemed Cassidy's incarnation "very tough" and "hard to get close to".


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: In taking over the role, Cortese felt "conflicted over where Ruby is now versus where she's come from" and explained that her own portrayal of the character was a "total 180 from [how she was] last season", being calmer and "more fear-driven"; after a discussion with Kripke on the character's mindset, Cortese saw Ruby as being in a "lonely, desperate" situation. She tried to make Ruby seem "as innocent as possible" to make viewers question her true allegiance, and to "bring more of a humanity" to Ruby than Cassidy had. For example, taking from the third season finale in which Dean is sent to Hell, Cortese portrayed the character as having some guilt over his death, even though Ruby was not responsible for it. The actress also acknowledged that Ruby was likely manipulating Sam when she claimed to remember how it felt to be human, but suggested that there was also an element of truth to her character's words.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Cortese believed that Ruby fell in love with Sam over the course of the season, though she questioned whether this was "true love" or her being "in love with what he can do". As Cortese noted, "He has something she can nurture. It's almost like a mother bear and her cub [in terms of] how protective she is... Sam's all [Ruby has], so it's almost like giving birth, in a weird, messed-up way." She stated that the sex scene between her character and Sam was "about two people who are so broken and sad" and compared it to similar sex scenes from the film "Monster's Ball". Although Ruby eventually reveals herself as a traitor, Kripke wrote her final scene with the intention of depicting Ruby as "the opposite of evil" and to show that Ruby does care about Sam, despite her manipulation of him to free Lucifer; Kripke explained that, in Ruby's mind, she had to lead Sam down that path because "it was for his own good".


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Ruby was described as a "demon hunter" in press releases prior to her debut so that her true demonic nature would surprise the audience. The writers created Ruby to change the perception of demons into more of a grey area, rather than the prevalent belief of "black and white", "They're evil, we're good" approach previously used in the series. However, the writers also planned for Ruby to impact the brothers negatively by facilitating the story arc of Sam falling into evil—which had been set up in the second season, but without follow-through—and causing a fracture in their relationship. Knowing this, the writers were amused by fans questioning why they were "trying to make [Ruby] likable". Despite Ruby's overall betrayal of the brothers, writer Sera Gamble commented, "[Ruby] brought the idea that you can't just dismiss demons as things that need to be killed right away. They could be useful, and while fundamentally untrustworthy, there might be cause to trust them in a given situation."


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Fearing that introducing the character as an "[accessory] to the boys" would hinder their chances of successfully integrating her into the series, the writers intended that Ruby should be "a character in [her] own right" and deemed her an antagonist "with [her] own interests and [her] own motives" rather than a love interest to Sam or Dean, which they felt had been their mistake in their introduction of the widely disliked Jo Harvelle in the second season. While they were not planning on a romance between Ruby and either of the Winchesters in the third season, however, they were open to the possibility in the future, with Kripke saying, "If the chemistry is there, and we see the sparks, and we want it to happen, and the fans want it to happen, it'll happen." Due to "protective and occasionally nervous" fans, Kripke meant to introduce Ruby in "small doses". Wanting fans to know the show would always be about Sam and Dean, and nothing else, he stated, "[Ruby and Bela are] there for important plot elements, but it's not the Ruby and Bela show, nor is it about the four of them cruising around in the Impala together. It's about the guys."


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Cassidy originally auditioned for the role of Bela Talbot, but ultimately received the part of Ruby. As opposed to using traditional demonic abilities such as telekinesis, Ruby instead relies on conventional martial arts and her demon-killing knife. Cassidy trained in kickboxing alongside Bela's actress Lauren Cohan to be able to perform Ruby's martial arts skills, prompting her to attempt as many of the fight scenes as she could rather than rely on her stunt double. Before filming for the third season began, she and Cohan decided to watch previous seasons together to catch up on the show. Cassidy also prepared by looking to Sharon Stone's performance in the film "Basic Instinct" for inspiration due to Ruby's manipulative ways. As Cassidy explained, "[Stone's character] always has the power, and there's this mystery about her." Costume designer Diane Widas had Ruby dressed in dark colors so that she would blend into shadows, also giving her pleather jackets and narrow jeans to allow Cassidy to be more active. Because of Cassidy's height difference with the lead actors—she is 5'7" while Sam's actor, Jared Padalecki, is 6'4"—she had to wear tall, spiky high heels that at times made her lose balance.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Kripke cited budgetary reasons for Cassidy's departure after the third season. According to Cassidy, however, Warner Bros.'s uncertainty about what direction to take Ruby in prompted her to leave when the opportunity to star in the series "Harper's Island" arose. To "make the best out of a bad situation", Kripke and the writers planned for Ruby to take on a new host every few episodes for the fourth season. They believed this would "keep [viewers] guessing", and provide a "cool character that most shows don't have the ability to do". Auditions for an unnamed "love interest" were held to recast Ruby with a new actress, and Cortese was hired for the part. She was then informed that she would actually be playing Ruby. Before the first episode she was in aired, however, she was said to be playing "a small-town waitress" named Kristy who had become "romantically involved" with Sam after Dean's death. Cortese played the first of what was expected to be many incarnations of Ruby, but an impressed Kripke ultimately chose to keep her in the role because she "brought a lot of the different colors and vulnerabilities to Ruby that [he] was really looking for". Although Cortese viewed DVDs of Cassidy's portrayal, she tried to make the character her own at the producers' request rather than emulate Cassidy. She was not as concerned with how Ruby was received by the audience—stating "if people don't like her, they don't like her"—as much as she was with using her performance to "answer questions" about Ruby and her relationship with the Winchester brothers, such as why Sam and Dean were continuing to work with Ruby in the fourth season.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: "BuddyTV" staff columnist Don Williams felt the addition of Ruby was a "cheap ploy" to attract teen male viewers, that the character distracted viewers from the "brotherly bond that made the show so special in the first place," and that Cassidy "was cast more for her looks than her acting prowess." However, he later admitted Ruby "remains one of the more interesting and ambiguous evildoers on the series." Although IGN's Diana Steenbergen had looked forward to Ruby's introduction, she ultimately found the third-season incarnation a "wasted" character who did little to improve the series. Her main concerns consisted of Ruby's "unlikable and manipulative" qualities and her tendency to make the Winchesters "look stupid." Cassidy "never quite [pulled off]" the "tough chick" persona of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"s Faith or "Battlestar Galactica"s Six. "TV Guide"'s Tina Charles, however, liked Ruby's action-packed introduction in "The Magnificent Seven." She was "intrigued" by the character in "The Kids Are Alright," and felt Cassidy was "doing a good job." Ruby made a "plausible addition" to "Malleus Maleficarum," with Charles finding it "cool" to learn Ruby's backstory due to its implications for Dean's storyline. Karla Peterson of "The San Diego Union-Tribune" thought Cassidy "wasn't awful" in "The Magnificent Seven." Though "not great enough for Ackles to really play off of" in "Malleus Maleficarum," the actress was "good enough to make her weaker acting chops kind of work for her." While under the impression that Ruby had been killed off in "No Rest for the Wicked," Peterson wrote that the character "got gone just as [she was] getting interesting" and deemed her a "decent traveling [companion]."


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: In her debut, Cortese impressed Peterson "even less than the old Ruby." While Peterson was accepting of the sexual relationship between Ruby and Sam, she felt the "seduction came out of nowhere" in "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Contributing to this problem was Cortese's inability to "pull it off," making the "whole thing [feel] gratuitous and clumsy." Conversely, Peterson enjoyed the performances of actresses Anna Williams and Michelle Hewitt-Williams as Ruby's temporary hosts in the episode; the former was "great," while she found the latter "sassy" and "[missed] her already." She "loved" Ruby's death in the finale, describing it as "a beautiful thing." Similar to Peterson, "BuddyTV"'s Williams considered Cortese's acting "a bit distracting," but noted she improved over time. Steenbergen considered Cortese an "acceptable Ruby," but wrote that the actress' portrayal was often "too girlish to connect with the previous incarnations of the character." In contrast to Williams, Steenbergen felt that Cortese "seemed out of her depth in the acting department" towards the end of the season. Ruby's seeming betrayal of Anna Milton in "Heaven and Hell" would "have added some welcome layers to her character" in Steenbergen's opinion, but the character's true intentions made the character development "less exciting." However, Steenbergen deemed Ruby's overall deceit of Sam a "great revelation."


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Like "BuddyTV"'s Don Williams, fans were very wary at first of bringing in female characters to the male-dominated show. To make matters worse, Kripke wrote a lackluster scene intended solely for the audition process. Fans quickly came across it on casting sites, and developed the feeling that the character "really [looks like she sucks]." However, Kripke believed that fans would change their minds about Ruby after learning that she was a demon. By the middle of the third season, Kripke felt enough fans were "responding positively to vindicate the character," and that most were "finally embracing her" by the third season finale, with Cassidy's version of Ruby even being dubbed a "fan favorite" later on. When the character returns in the fourth season, she is very different from her third season counterpart. Cortese felt that while the drastic change made fans angry, the flashbacks provided in "I Know What You Did Last Summer" shed some light on Ruby's new mindset and made fans more accepting of the character. However, the overall criticisms towards Cortese's performance made her reluctant to return for an episode in the sixth season, although she eventually accepted when she learned she would be portraying herself.


title: Ruby (Supernatural)

text: Despite the generally negative reception to Cortese in the role, fans voted her version of Ruby the 32nd sexiest female character in fantasy and science fiction film and television in a 2012 poll by "SFX" for the Top 200 Sexiest Characters In Sci-Fi, making her the highest-placing female "Supernatural" character in the list, beating out Jo Harvelle at number 53 and Ellen Harvelle at number 77.


title: Maiko

text: A is an apprentice geisha in Kyoto and Their jobs consist of performing songs, dances, and playing the or other traditional Japanese instruments for visitors during banquets and parties, known as .


title: Maiko

text: Apprentice geisha in other locations in Japan are known by other terms, such as for apprentices in Tokyo. The traditions of apprentice geisha in these areas vary from those in Kyoto, sometimes to a considerable degree, including an apprentice's appearance and the structure of their apprenticeship.


title: Maiko

text: In the morning, take lessons in the traditional arts. At night, they go out to work. They dance, sing, play the , and serve visitors at exclusive (teahouses).


title: Maiko

text: originated from women who served green tea and (Japanese dumpling made from rice flour) to people who visited the Kitano Tenman-gū or Yasaka Shrine in teahouses in Kyoto roughly 300 years ago.


title: Maiko

text: During their career, will wear different kinds of (traditional Japanese hairstyles) depending on rank, formality and occasion. These hairstyles are then decorated with seasonal and occasional (traditional hair ornaments).


title: Maiko

text: Most , unlike geisha, use their own hair with the addition of extensions, though apprentices in different areas of Japan may also use wigs. using their own hair have their hair restyled every week, meaning they must sleep on a special pillow known as a – a raised wooden block with a pillow – in order to maintain it.


title: Maiko

text: Most also wear a style of kimono known as a . are typically anywhere from long, and often feature a lightly-padded hem to create weight allowing the skirt to trail along the floor. When walking outside, hold their up either with their hands, or by tying it in place with a small cord so that it does not drag along the ground. The style of worn by most features long, -style sleeves, and may feature tucks sewn horizontally into the sleeves and vertically along the shoulders; this is a holdover from before WWII, when often began their training at a young age, and would thus have the tucks taken out as they grew.


title: Maiko

text: Some outside of Kyoto, and in particular in Tokyo, wear instead of ; these apprentices (sometimes known as ) may also wear a wig instead of having their own hair styled.


title: Freestyle rap

text: Freestyle is a style of improvisation, with or without instrumental beats, in which lyrics are recited with no particular subject or structure and with no prior memorization. It is similar to other improvisational music, such as jazz, where a lead instrumentalist acts as an improviser with a supporting band providing a beat. Freestyle originally was simply verse that is free of style, written rhymes that do not follow a specific subject matter, particular beat, or predetermined cadence. The newer style with the improvisation grew popular starting in the early 1990s.


title: Freestyle rap

text: In the book "How to Rap", Big Daddy Kane and Myka 9 note that originally a freestyle was a spit on no particular subject – Big Daddy Kane said, "in the '80s, when we said we wrote a freestyle rap, that meant that it was a rhyme that you wrote that was free of style... it's basically a rhyme just bragging about yourself." Myka 9 adds, "back in the day, freestyle was bust[ing] a rhyme about any random thing, and it was a written rhyme or something memorized". Divine Styler says: "in the school I come from, freestyling was a non-conceptual written rhyme... and now they call freestyling off the top of the head, so the era I come from, it's a lot different". Kool Moe Dee also refers to this earlier definition in his book, "There's A God On The Mic":


title: Freestyle rap

text: There are two types of freestyle. There's an old-school freestyle that's basically rhymes that you've written that may not have anything to do with any subject or that goes all over the place. Then there's freestyle where you come off the top of the head.


title: Freestyle rap

text: In old school hip-hop, Kool Moe Dee claimed that improvisational rapping was instead called "coming off the top of the head", and Big Daddy Kane stated, "off-the-top-of-the-head [rapping], we just called that 'off the dome'when you don't write it and [you] say whatever comes to mind".


title: Freestyle rap

text: Referring to this earlier definition (a written rhyme on non-specific subject matter), Big Daddy Kane stated, "that's really what a freestyle is" and Kool Moe Dee refers to it as "true" freestyle, and "the real old-school freestyle". Kool Moe Dee suggests that Kool G Rap's track "Men At Work" is an "excellent example" of true freestyle, along with Rakim's "Lyrics of Fury".


title: Freestyle rap

text: Since the early 1990s onwards, with the popularization of improvisational rapping from groups and artists such as Freestyle Fellowship through to fresh fest competitions, "freestyle" has come to be the widely used term for rap lyrics which are improvised on the spot. This type of freestyle is the focus of Kevin Fitzgerald's documentary, "", where the term is used throughout by numerous artists to mean improvisational rapping.


title: Freestyle rap

text: Kool Moe Dee suggests the change in how the term is used happened somewhere in the mid to late 1980s, saying, "until 1986, all freestyles were written", and "before the 1990s, it was about how hard you could come with a written rhyme with no particular subject matter and no real purpose other than showing your lyrical prowess."


title: Freestyle rap

text: Myka 9 explains that Freestyle Fellowship helped redefine the term"that's what they say I helped doI helped get the world to freestyle, me and the Freestyle Fellowship, by inventing the Freestyle Fellowship and by redefining what freestyle is... We have redefined what freestyle is by saying that it's improvisational rap like a jazz solo".


title: Freestyle rap

text: Although this kind of freestyling is very well respected today, Kool Moe Dee states that this was not the case previously:


title: Freestyle rap

text: A lot of the old-school artists didn't even respect what's being called freestyle now... any emcee coming off the top of the head wasn't really respected. The sentiment was emcees only did that if they couldn't write. The coming off the top of the head rhymer had a built-in excuse to not be critiqued as hard.


title: Freestyle rap

text: Many rappers learn to rap through improvised freestyling, and by making freestyling into a conversation or a rhyming game which they play frequently as a way to practice, as described in the book "How to Rap". Reasons for freestyling include entertainment, as a therapeutic activity, to discover different ways of rapping, promoting oneself, increasing versatility, or as a spiritual activity. Improvised freestyling can also be used in live performances, to do things such as giving something extra to the crowd and to cover up mistakes. To prove that a freestyle is being made up on the spot (as opposed to something pre-written or memorized), rappers will often refer to places and objects in their immediate setting, or will take suggestions on what to rhyme about.


title: Freestyle rap

text: Freestyles are performed a cappella, over beatboxing (as seen in ""), or over instrumental versions of songs. Freestyling is often done in a group setting called a "cypher" (or "cipher") or as part of a "freestyle battle". Due to the improvised nature of freestyle, meter and rhythm are usually more relaxed than in conventional rapping. Many artists base their freestyle on their current situation or mental state, but have a ready supply of prepared lyrics and rhyme patterns they can use as filler. Freestyling can also be used as a songwriting method for albums or mixtapes.


title: Freestyle rap

text: A freestyle battle is a contest in which two or more rappers or MCs compete or "battle" each other using improvised lyrics. It is a prominent part of contemporary hip hop culture, with precursors in poetic battles over the millennia in genres as diverse as Japanese haikai and Norse flyting. In a freestyle battle, each competitor's goal is to "diss" their opponent through clever lyrics and wordplay, with heavy emphasis being placed upon the rapper's improvisational ability. Many battles also include metaphorically violent imagery, complementing the "battling" atmosphere. It is considered dishonorable or shameful to recite pre-written or memorized raps during a freestyle battle, because it shows the rapper to be incapable of "spitting" spur-of-the-moment lyrics. A live audience is key, as a large part of "winning" a battle is how an audience responds to each rapper. Appointed judges may be used in formal contests, but in most cases, the rapper who receives the largest audience response is viewed as the victor.


title: Freestyle rap

text: In modern times, with the rise of leagues such as King of the Dot and Ultimate Rap League, most battles are written, with some freestyling incorporated into the verses. This allows for more intricate rhymes and insults.


title: Freestyle rap

text: As hip-hop evolved in the early 1980s, many rappers gained their fame through freestyle battles. Battles can take place anywhere: informally on street corners, on stage at a concert, at a school, or at events specifically meant for battling (such as Scribble Jam or the Blaze Battle).


title: Freestyle rap

text: A "cypher" or "cipher" is an informal gathering of rappers, beatboxers, and/or breakdancers in a circle, in order to jam musically together. The term has also in recent years come to mean the crowd which forms around freestyle battles, consisting of spectators and onlookers. This group serves partly to encourage competition and partly to enhance the communal aspect of rap battles. The cypher is known for "making or breaking reputations in the hip hop community; if you are able to step into the cypher and tell your story, demonstrating your uniqueness, you might be more accepted". These groups also serve as a way for messages about hip hop styles and knowledge to be spread, through word-of-mouth and encouraging trends in other battles.


title: Blazon

text: In heraldry and heraldic vexillology, a blazon is a formal description of a coat of arms, flag or similar emblem, from which the reader can reconstruct the appropriate image. The verb "to blazon" means to create such a description. The visual depiction of a coat of arms or flag has traditionally had considerable latitude in design, but a verbal blazon specifies the essentially distinctive elements. A coat of arms or flag is therefore primarily defined not by a picture but rather by the wording of its blazon (though in modern usage flags are often additionally and more precisely defined using geometrical specifications). "Blazon" is also the specialized language in which a blazon is written, and, as a verb, the act of writing such a description. "Blazonry" is the art, craft or practice of creating a blazon. The language employed in "blazonry" has its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax, which becomes essential for comprehension when blazoning a complex coat of arms.


title: Blazon

text: Other armorial objects and devices – such as badges, banners, and seals – may also be described in blazon.


title: Blazon

text: The noun and verb "blazon" (referring to a verbal description) are not to be confused with the noun "emblazonment", or the verb "to emblazon", both of which relate to the graphic representation of a coat of arms or heraldic device.


title: Blazon

text: The word "blazon" is derived from French "blason", "shield". It is found in English by the end of the 14th century.


title: Blazon

text: Formerly, heraldic authorities believed that the word was related to the German verb "blasen", "to blow (a horn)". Present-day lexicographers reject this theory as conjectural and disproved.


title: Blazon

text: Blazon is generally designed to eliminate ambiguity of interpretation, to be as concise as possible, and to avoid repetition and extraneous punctuation. English antiquarian Charles Boutell stated in 1864:


title: Blazon

text: However, John Brooke-Little, Norroy and Ulster King of Arms, wrote in 1985: "Although there are certain conventions as to how arms shall be blazoned ... many of the supposedly hard and fast rules laid down in heraldic manuals [including those by heralds] are often ignored."


title: Blazon

text: A given coat of arms may be drawn in many different ways, all considered equivalent and faithful to the blazon, just as the letter "A" may be printed in many different fonts while still being the same letter. For example, the shape of the escutcheon is almost always immaterial, with very limited exceptions (e.g., the coat of arms of Nunavut, for which a round shield is specified).


title: Blazon

text: Because heraldry developed at a time when English clerks wrote in Anglo-Norman French, many terms in English heraldry are of French origin. Some of the details of the syntax of blazon also follow French practice: thus, adjectives are normally placed after nouns rather than before.


title: Blazon

text: A number of heraldic adjectives may be given in either a French or an anglicised form: for example, a "cross pattée" or a "cross patty"; a "cross fitchée" or a "cross fitchy". In modern English blazons, the anglicised form tends to be preferred.


title: Blazon

text: Where the French form is used, a problem may arise as to the appropriate adjectival ending, determined in normal French usage by gender and number.


title: Blazon

text: The usual convention in English heraldry is to adhere to the feminine singular form, for example: "a chief undée" and "a saltire undée", even though the French nouns "chef" and "sautoir" are in fact masculine. Efforts have however been made, for example by J. E. Cussans, who suggested that all French adjectives should be expressed in the masculine singular, without regard to the gender and number of the nouns they qualify, thus "a chief undé" and "a saltire undé".


title: Blazon

text: Full descriptions of shields range in complexity, from a single word to a convoluted series describing compound shields:


title: Blazon

text: "Quarterly I. Azure three Lions' Heads affronté Crowned Or (for Dalmatia); II. chequy Argent and Gules (for Croatia); III. Azure a River in Fess Gules bordered Argent thereon a Marten proper beneath a six-pointed star Or (for Slavonia); IV. per Fess Azure and Or over all a Bar Gules in the Chief a demi-Eagle Sable displayed addextré of the Sun-in-splendour and senestré of a Crescent Argent in the Base seven Towers three and four Gules (for Transylvania); enté en point Gules a double-headed Eagle proper on a Peninsula Vert holding a Vase pouring Water into the Sea Argent beneath a Crown proper with bands Azure (for Fiume); over all an escutcheon Barry of eight Gules and Argent impaling Gules on a Mount Vert a Crown Or issuant therefrom a double-Cross Argent (for Hungary)".


title: Stream cipher

text: A stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream (keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystream, to give a digit of the ciphertext stream. Since encryption of each digit is dependent on the current state of the cipher, it is also known as state cipher. In practice, a digit is typically a bit and the combining operation is an exclusive-or (XOR).


title: Stream cipher

text: The pseudorandom keystream is typically generated serially from a random seed value using digital shift registers. The seed value serves as the cryptographic key for decrypting the ciphertext stream. Stream ciphers represent a different approach to symmetric encryption from block ciphers. Block ciphers operate on large blocks of digits with a fixed, unvarying transformation. This distinction is not always clear-cut: in some modes of operation, a block cipher primitive is used in such a way that it acts effectively as a stream cipher. Stream ciphers typically execute at a higher speed than block ciphers and have lower hardware complexity. However, stream ciphers can be susceptible to security breaches (see stream cipher attacks); for example, when the same starting state (seed) is used twice.


title: Stream cipher

text: Stream ciphers can be viewed as approximating the action of a proven unbreakable cipher, the one-time pad (OTP). A one-time pad uses a keystream of completely random digits. The keystream is combined with the plaintext digits one at a time to form the ciphertext. This system was proved to be secure by Claude E. Shannon in 1949. However, the keystream must be generated completely at random with at least the same length as the plaintext and cannot be used more than once. This makes the system cumbersome to implement in many practical applications, and as a result the one-time pad has not been widely used, except for the most critical applications. Key generation, distribution and management are critical for those applications.


title: Stream cipher

text: A stream cipher makes use of a much smaller and more convenient key such as 128 bits. Based on this key, it generates a pseudorandom keystream which can be combined with the plaintext digits in a similar fashion to the one-time pad. However, this comes at a cost. The keystream is now pseudorandom and so is not truly random. The proof of security associated with the one-time pad no longer holds. It is quite possible for a stream cipher to be completely insecure.


title: Stream cipher

text: A stream cipher generates successive elements of the keystream based on an internal state. This state is updated in essentially two ways: if the state changes independently of the plaintext or ciphertext messages, the cipher is classified as a "synchronous" stream cipher. By contrast, "self-synchronising" stream ciphers update their state based on previous ciphertext digits.


title: Stream cipher

text: In a synchronous stream cipher a stream of pseudorandom digits is generated independently of the plaintext and ciphertext messages, and then combined with the plaintext (to encrypt) or the ciphertext (to decrypt). In the most common form, binary digits are used (bits), and the keystream is combined with the plaintext using the exclusive or operation (XOR). This is termed a binary additive stream cipher.


title: Stream cipher

text: In a synchronous stream cipher, the sender and receiver must be exactly in step for decryption to be successful. If digits are added or removed from the message during transmission, synchronisation is lost. To restore synchronisation, various offsets can be tried systematically to obtain the correct decryption. Another approach is to tag the ciphertext with markers at regular points in the output.


title: Stream cipher

text: If, however, a digit is corrupted in transmission, rather than added or lost, only a single digit in the plaintext is affected and the error does not propagate to other parts of the message. This property is useful when the transmission error rate is high; however, it makes it less likely the error would be detected without further mechanisms. Moreover, because of this property, synchronous stream ciphers are very susceptible to active attacks: if an attacker can change a digit in the ciphertext, they might be able to make predictable changes to the corresponding plaintext bit; for example, flipping a bit in the ciphertext causes the same bit to be flipped in the plaintext.


title: Stream cipher

text: Another approach uses several of the previous "N" ciphertext digits to compute the keystream. Such schemes are known as self-synchronizing stream ciphers, asynchronous stream ciphers or ciphertext autokey (CTAK). The idea of self-synchronization was patented in 1946 and has the advantage that the receiver will automatically synchronise with the keystream generator after receiving "N" ciphertext digits, making it easier to recover if digits are dropped or added to the message stream. Single-digit errors are limited in their effect, affecting only up to "N" plaintext digits.


title: Stream cipher

text: Binary stream ciphers are often constructed using linear-feedback shift registers (LFSRs) because they can be easily implemented in hardware and can be readily analysed mathematically. The use of LFSRs on their own, however, is insufficient to provide good security. Various schemes have been proposed to increase the security of LFSRs.


title: Stream cipher

text: Because LFSRs are inherently linear, one technique for removing the linearity is to feed the outputs of several parallel LFSRs into a non-linear Boolean function to form a "combination generator". Various properties of such a "combining function" are critical for ensuring the security of the resultant scheme, for example, in order to avoid correlation attacks.


title: Stream cipher

text: Normally LFSRs are stepped regularly. One approach to introducing non-linearity is to have the LFSR clocked irregularly, controlled by the output of a second LFSR. Such generators include the stop-and-go generator, the alternating step generator and the shrinking generator.


title: Stream cipher

text: An alternating step generator comprises three LFSRs, which we will call LFSR0, LFSR1 and LFSR2 for convenience. The output of one of the registers decides which of the other two is to be used; for instance, if LFSR2 outputs a 0, LFSR0 is clocked, and if it outputs a 1, LFSR1 is clocked instead. The output is the exclusive OR of the last bit produced by LFSR0 and LFSR1. The initial state of the three LFSRs is the key.


title: Stream cipher

text: The stop-and-go generator (Beth and Piper, 1984) consists of two LFSRs. One LFSR is clocked if the output of a second is a 1, otherwise it repeats its previous output. This output is then (in some versions) combined with the output of a third LFSR clocked at a regular rate.


title: Stream cipher

text: The shrinking generator takes a different approach. Two LFSRs are used, both clocked regularly. If the output of the first LFSR is 1, the output of the second LFSR becomes the output of the generator. If the first LFSR outputs 0, however, the output of the second is discarded, and no bit is output by the generator. This mechanism suffers from timing attacks on the second generator, since the speed of the output is variable in a manner that depends on the second generator's state. This can be alleviated by buffering the output.


title: Stream cipher

text: Another approach to improving the security of an LFSR is to pass the entire state of a single LFSR into a non-linear "filtering function".


title: Stream cipher

text: Instead of a linear driving device, one may use a nonlinear update function. For example, Klimov and Shamir proposed triangular functions (T-functions) with a single cycle on n-bit words.


title: Stream cipher

text: For a stream cipher to be secure, its keystream must have a large period, and it must be impossible to "recover the cipher's key" or internal state from the keystream. Cryptographers also demand that the keystream be free of even subtle biases that would let attackers "distinguish" a stream from random noise, and free of detectable relationships between keystreams that correspond to "related keys" or related cryptographic nonces. That should be true for all keys (there should be no "weak keys"), even if the attacker can "know" or "choose" some "plaintext" or "ciphertext".


title: Stream cipher

text: As with other attacks in cryptography, stream cipher attacks can be "certificational" so they are not necessarily practical ways to break the cipher but indicate that the cipher might have other weaknesses.


title: Stream cipher

text: Securely using a secure synchronous stream cipher requires that one never reuse the same keystream twice. That generally means a different nonce or key must be supplied to each invocation of the cipher. Application designers must also recognize that most stream ciphers provide not "authenticity" but "privacy": encrypted messages may still have been modified in transit.


title: Stream cipher

text: Short periods for stream ciphers have been a practical concern. For example, 64-bit block ciphers like DES can be used to generate a keystream in output feedback (OFB) mode. However, when not using full feedback, the resulting stream has a period of around 2 blocks on average; for many applications, the period is far too low. For example, if encryption is being performed at a rate of 8 megabytes per second, a stream of period 2 blocks will repeat after about a half an hour.


title: Stream cipher

text: Some applications using the stream cipher RC4 are attackable because of weaknesses in RC4's key setup routine; new applications should either avoid RC4 or make sure all keys are unique and ideally unrelated (such as generated by a well-seeded CSPRNG or a cryptographic hash function) and that the first bytes of the keystream are discarded.


title: Stream cipher

text: The elements of stream ciphers are often much simpler to understand than block ciphers and are thus less likely to hide any accidental or malicious weaknesses.


title: Stream cipher

text: Stream ciphers are often used for their speed and simplicity of implementation in hardware, and in applications where plaintext comes in quantities of unknowable length like a secure wireless connection. If a block cipher (not operating in a stream cipher mode) were to be used in this type of application, the designer would need to choose either transmission efficiency or implementation complexity, since block ciphers cannot directly work on blocks shorter than their block size. For example, if a 128-bit block cipher received separate 32-bit bursts of plaintext, three quarters of the data transmitted would be padding. Block ciphers must be used in ciphertext stealing or residual block termination mode to avoid padding, while stream ciphers eliminate this issue by naturally operating on the smallest unit that can be transmitted (usually bytes).


title: Stream cipher

text: Another advantage of stream ciphers in military cryptography is that the cipher stream can be generated in a separate box that is subject to strict security measures and fed to other devices such as a radio set, which will perform the XOR operation as part of their function. The latter device can then be designed and used in less stringent environments.


title: Channel catfish

text: The channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) is North America's most numerous catfish species. It is the official fish of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Tennessee, and is informally referred to as a "channel cat". In the United States, they are the most fished catfish species with around 8 million anglers targeting them per year. The popularity of channel catfish for food has contributed to the rapid expansion of aquaculture of this species in the United States. It has also been widely introduced in Europe, Asia and South America, and it is legally considered an invasive species in many countries.


title: Channel catfish

text: Channel catfish are native to the Nearctic, being well distributed in lower Canada and the eastern and northern United States, as well as parts of northern Mexico. They have also been introduced into some waters of landlocked Europe (Czech Republic and Romania) and parts of Malaysia and almost as many parts of Indonesia. They thrive in small and large rivers, reservoirs, natural lakes, and ponds. Channel "cats" are cavity nesters, meaning they lay their eggs in crevices, hollows, or debris, to protect them from swift currents. In Canada, the species is largely, though not exclusively, limited to the Great Lakes watershed from Lake Nipigon southward.


title: Channel catfish

text: Channel catfish possess very keen senses of smell and taste. At the pits of their nostrils (nares) are very sensitive odor-sensing organs with a very high concentration of olfactory receptors. In channel catfish, these organs are sensitive enough to detect several amino acids at about one part per 100 million in water. In addition, the channel catfish has taste buds distributed over the surface of its entire body. These buds are especially concentrated on the fish's four pair of barbels (whiskers) surrounding the mouth — about 25 buds per square millimeter. This combination of exceptional senses of taste and smell allows the channel catfish to find food in dark, stained, or muddy water with relative ease. They also possess a Weberian apparatus, which amplifies sound waves that would otherwise not be perceivable. Channel catfish's barbels have been falsely thought to sting people when touched, but they do have spines on its pectoral and dorsal fins that if not handled carefully, it can puncture skin.


title: Channel catfish

text: A member of the American catfish genus "Ictalurus", channel catfish have a top-end size of about 40–50 pounds (18–23 kg). The world record channel catfish weighed 58 pounds, and was taken from the Santee-Cooper Reservoir in South Carolina, on July 7, 1964. Realistically, a channel catfish over 20 lb (9 kg) is a spectacular specimen, and most catfish anglers view a 10-lb (4.5-kg) fish as a very admirable catch. Furthermore, the average size channel catfish an angler could expect to find in most waterways would be between 2 pounds (1 kg) and 4 pounds (2 kg), and between 12 in (31 cm) and 24 in (61 cm).


title: Channel catfish

text: Channel catfish often coexist in the same waterways with its close relative, the blue catfish, which is somewhat less common, but tends to grow much larger (with several specimens confirmed to weigh above 100 lb).


title: Channel catfish

text: As channel catfish grow longer, they increase in weight. The relationship between length and weight is not linear. The relationship between length (L, in cm) and weight (W, in kg) for nearly all species of fish can be expressed by an equation of the form:


title: Channel catfish

text: Invariably, b is close to 3.0 for all species, formula_2 is the length of a typical fish weighing 1 kg. For channel catfish, b = 3.2293, somewhat higher than for many common species, and formula_3 cm.


title: Channel catfish

text: Catfish have enhanced capabilities of taste perception, hence called the “swimming tongue”, due to the presence of taste buds all over the external body surface and inside the oropharyngeal cavity. Specifically, they have high sensitivity to amino acids, which explains their unique communication methods as follows. The catfish has a facial taste system that is extremely responsive to L-alanine and L-arginine. More specifically, their facial taste system senses heightened levels of L-amino acids in freshwater. Feeding behavior to food is due to amino acids released by food. This is reported to cause maxillary and mandibular barbell movements, which orient the catfish's posture and food search. When the food stimulates the taste receptors, it causes more excitation which see as exaggerated biting, turning, or mastication.


title: Channel catfish

text: Adult channel catfish, over 45 cm (17.7 in), consume fishes such as yellow perch and sunfish. The diet of adults consists of snails, clams, crustaceans (such as crayfish), snakes, frogs, small fish, insects, aquatic plants, algae, seeds, grains, nuts, and even small birds and small mammals occasionally. Younger channel catfish are more consistently omnivorous, eating a large variety of plants and animals.


title: Channel catfish

text: The channel catfish is adapted to limited light conditions. Members of the genus "Ictalurus", which inhabit muddy waters, do not depend solely on visual cues. Instead, they are known to rely heavily on chemotaxic cues. Sound production may be another important means of communication among channel catfish and other species living in turbid habitats.


title: Channel catfish

text: The North American channel catfish is an ostariophysan, or a bony fish occupying a freshwater habitat. These fishes are known to produce club cells and alarm substances for communication purposes. Both the fish's habitat and the presence of chemosensory cells covering the body are presumably the results of favored selection for this method of communication. Catfishes are capable of producing and recognizing individual specific pheromones. Through these pheromones, a catfish can identify not only the species and sex of a conspecific, but also its age, size, reproductive state, or hierarchical social status.


title: Channel catfish

text: Territoriality in channel catfish is identifiable by a change in body odor, which is recognizable by other members of the same species. This chemical change in the amino-acid composition of the skin mucus can be noted by chromatographic methods, and are not long-lasting; rather, they last only long enough to communicate to other fish in the vicinity. Changes may be the result of the release of the contents of the club cells. These cells do not open directly to the surface of the skin, but injury caused by fighting and other agonistic behaviors may release the cells’ contents. Since catfish have a dominance hierarchy system, information relative to the change of status of any fish is important in recognition of the social strata.


title: Channel catfish

text: In the channel catfish, while a communication signal is directed toward the receiver and contains a specific message, an information signal is a part of the general existence of the individual or the group. For example, release of an alarm signal will communicate danger, but the individual's recognition odor is only an information signal identifying one fish from another. With regards to the function and contents of the club cells, the club cells may serve different functions throughout the fish's lifecycle. Variation in the contents of the club cells’ information signals therefore may change with the species’ needs at different stages of life.


title: Channel catfish

text: All species of catfishes can generate sound through stridulation, and many produce sounds through drumming. Stridulation consists of the clicking or grinding of bony parts on the fish's pectoral fins and pectoral girdle, and drumming consists of the contraction of specialized sonic muscles with subsequent reverberation through the swim bladder. Variability in the sound signals created by the channel catfish depends on the mechanism by which the sound is produced, the function of the resultant sound, and physical factors such as sex, age, and temperature. This variation may result in increased complexity of the outgoing signal and may allow for increased usefulness of the signal in interspecies communication. In the channel catfish, sounds are produced only by pectoral stridulation, as this species does not express sonic muscles. However, the swim bladder may still be used to help with audition.


title: Channel catfish

text: Due to the high density of water, sound travels 4.8 times faster and over longer distances under water than in air. Consequently, sound production via stridulation is an excellent means of underwater communication for channel catfish. The pectoral spine of the channel catfish is an enlarged fin ray with a slightly modified base that forms a complex articulation with several bones of the pectoral girdle. Unlike the other pectoral fin rays, the individual fin segments of the spine are hypertrophied and fused, except for at the distal tip. The surface of the spine is often ornamented with a serrated edge and venomous tissues, designed to deter predators. Sounds produced during fin abduction result from the movement of the base of the pectoral spine across the pectoral girdle channel. Each sweep of sound consists of a number of discrete pulses created by the ridges lining the base of the pectoral spine as they pass over the rough surface of the girdle's channel. The stridulation sounds are extremely variable due to the range and flexibility of motion in fin use. Different sounds may be used for different functions in communication, such as in behavior towards predators and in asserting dominance.


title: Channel catfish

text: In many channel catfish, individuals favor one fin or another for stridulatory sound production (in the same way as humans are right-handed or left-handed). The first ray of the channel catfish pectoral fin is a bilaterally symmetrical spinous structure that is minimally important for movement; however, it can be locked as a defensive adaptation or used as a means for sound production. According to one scholar, most fish tend to produce sound with their right fin, although sound production with the left fin has also been observed.


title: Channel catfish

text: The inferior division of the inner ear, most prominently the utricle, is considered the primary area of hearing in most fishes. The hearing ability of the channel catfish is enhanced by the presence of the swim bladder. It is the main structure that reverberates the echo from other individuals’ sounds, as well as from sonar devices. The volume of the swim bladder changes if fish move vertically, thus is also considered to be the site of pressure sensitivity. The latency of swim bladder adaptation after a change in pressure affects hearing and other possible swim bladder functions, presumably making audition more difficult. Nevertheless, the presence of the swim bladder and a relatively complex auditory apparatus allows the channel catfish to discern different sounds and tell from which directions sounds have come.


title: Channel catfish

text: Pectoral stridulation has been considered to be the main means of agonistic communication towards predators in channel catfish. Sudden, relatively loud sounds are used to startle predators in a manner analogous to the well-documented, visual flash display of various lepidopterans. In most catfish, a drumming sound can be produced for this use, and the incidences of the drumming sounds can reach up to 300 or 400 per second. However, the channel catfish must resort instead to stridulation sounds and pectoral spine display for predator avoidance. In addition to communication towards predators, stridulation can be seen as a possible alarm signal to other catfish, in the sense of warning nearby individuals that a predator is near.


title: Channel catfish

text: Channel catfish are omnivores, and can be caught using a variety of natural and prepared baits, including crickets, nightcrawlers, minnows, shad, freshwater drum, crawfish, frogs, bullheads, sunfish, chicken liver, hot dogs, and suckers. Catfish have even been known to take Ivory soap as bait and even raw steak.


title: Channel catfish

text: Juglines, trotlines, limb lines, and bank lines are popular methods of fishing for channel catfish in addition to traditional rod-and-reel fishing. Another method uses traps, either "slat traps" — long wooden traps with an angled entrance — and wire hoop traps. Typical bait for these traps include rotten cheese and dog food, or "stink bait", and old rotted shad work well. Catches of as many as 100 fish a day are common in catfish traps. An unusual method practiced in the Southeastern United States is noodling – catching catfish by hand.


title: Channel catfish

text: When removing the hook from a catfish, anglers should be mindful of the sharp spines on the pectoral and dorsal fins.


title: Channel catfish

text: The channel catfish is one of only a handful of ostariophysan freshwater fish species whose genomes have been sequenced. The channel catfish reference genome sequence was generated alongside genomic sequence data for other scaled and unscaled fish species (other catfishes, the common pleco and southern striped Raphael; also common carp), in order to provide genomic resources and aid understanding of the evolutionary loss of scales in catfishes. Results from comparative genomics and transcriptomics analyses and experiments involving channel catfish have supported a role for secretory calcium-binding phosphoproteins (SCPP) in scale formation in teleost fishes.


title: Channel catfish

text: In addition to the whole nuclear genome resources above, full mitochondrial genome sequences have been available for channel catfish since 2003. Other studies of genetic diversity, outcrossing, etc. in channel catfish have focused primarily on inbred lines and farm strains of relevance to the aquaculture of this species. For example, earlier studies have compared the genetic diversity of domestic versus wild populations of channel catfish using AFLPs.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Not Fade Away is a 2012 American drama film and the first directed by "The Sopranos"' creator, David Chase. It was released on December 21, 2012.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: In his late teens, Douglas Damiano lives with: his father Pat, who suffers from psoriasis and is physically rough with Douglas; his mother Antoinette, who frequently grows hysterical and threatens suicide; and his sister Evelyn, the film's narrator. Douglas sees his friend Eugene Gaunt singing and playing lead guitar for a band in high school, and resolves to join the band to earn the affections of a Grace Dietz. Douglas gets his chance when the band's drummer, Schindewulf, is drafted to go to Vietnam.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: In the wake of the "British Invasion", Gene is trying to remodel his band after The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and he believes Douglas is suited to this style.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: The band's membership fluctuates. With an awkward bass player losing his position, the core of the band is Douglas, Gene, and their friend Wells. Gene is the lead singer and guitarist, Wells plays rhythm guitar, and Douglas plays drums and sings backup vocals.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: At a party Gene accidentally swallows a joint while trying to smoke it through a toilet paper roll, and is unable to sing. Douglas takes over on lead vocals, and the band's members later agree that he is superior to Gene.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Gene feels threatened by Douglas and tries to keep the spotlight on himself. During one concert he juggles firecrackers in protest of the war, but fumbles and burns his scalp, humiliating himself and the band. Douglas goes to Gene's house to formally kick him out of the band, and they end up fighting until Gene's father restrains his son.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Douglas gets involved with Grace after a couple of heart-to-heart conversations, but their relationship suffers when Wells reveals that Grace used to blow him (and others) regularly. Douglas and Grace have an argument in which she wrongly accuses him of sleeping with her sister Joy. Joy, an eccentric deeply invested in the counter-culture movement, develops increasing friction with her father, who ultimately has her committed to a mental hospital. After this, Douglas and a grief-stricken Grace get back together.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Douglas initially tells his father that he intends to join the army and get an ROTC scholarship, but abandons these plans after the Vietnam War begins. He drops out of college to pursue his musical career full-time, which drives a rift between himself and Pat. Pat learns that his psoriasis is actually mycosis fungoides cancer, and he begins to mellow somewhat, sharing a dinner with his son and revealing a personal secret that involves Douglas' mother.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Meanwhile, two years after the band's inception, Douglas and Wells get the opportunity to audition for Jerry Ragovoy. They recruit Gene back into the band for the audition, although Gene tells them he wants a "featured" credit on their performance of an original song, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre". Ragovoy sees potential in the band, but outlines a rigorous work schedule, described as "rock and roll boot camp", before he's ready to sign them to a contract. He states that great music is "ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration," a sentiment earlier expressed to Douglas by his father. The band members are disillusioned with this prospect, Douglas in particular.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: While test-driving Gene's motorcycle, Wells swerves into a tree, breaking multiple limbs. This postpones their potential record deal for another year. Douglas, who is losing interest in the rock and roll lifestyle, decides to go to film school, which takes him and Grace to California. While at a party in Los Angeles, Douglas sees Charlie Watts leaving the house and hears a rumor that Mick Jagger is in the bathroom with several women, although nobody at the party actually sees Jagger.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Douglas tries to hitchhike home and is invited into the car of a strange woman wearing frightening face paint, who comments that he looks lonesome. Unsettled, Douglas refuses the ride and walks home after briefly windowshopping at a music store, Music City at Hollywood's Sunset and Vine. Looking around the downtown scene, he looks to the sky and witnesses again the illuminated clouds that so inspired him before. Smiling, Douglas walks down the street and off camera. His sister Evelyn enters the scene and addresses the camera directly, commenting that she is writing an essay about America's two biggest innovations: nuclear weapons and rock 'n roll. She speculates as to which one will win in the end, then dances to The Modern Lovers' song "Roadrunner", performed by The Sex Pistols, in the middle of the street.


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: "Rotten Tomatoes", a review aggregator, reports that 68% of 92 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 6.50/10. The site's consensus reads, "Exuberant and bittersweet, "Not Fade Away" is a coming-of-age story set to a British Invasion beat that occasionally meanders but mostly charms."


title: Not Fade Away (film)

text: Keith Uhlich of "Time Out New York" named "Not Fade Away" the second-best film of 2012, citing it as proof that Chase's work on "The Sopranos" was "no fluke". In 2020, Uhlich named it the eighth-best film of the 2010s.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 1974

text: The Eurovision Song Contest 1974 was the 19th edition of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. It took place in Brighton, United Kingdom and was organized by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and host broadcaster British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), who agreed to host the event after , having won in both and , declined to host it for a second successive year on the grounds of expense. The contest was held at the Brighton Dome on 6 April 1974 and was hosted by Katie Boyle for the fourth and final time (having hosted the 1960, 1963 and 1968 editions).


title: Eurovision Song Contest 1974

text: Seventeen countries took part in the contest, with being absent and competing for the first time this year.


title: Eurovision Song Contest 1974

text: The winner was with the song "Waterloo", performed by ABBA, who would later go on to become one of the best-selling acts in pop music history.