title: 4 Minutes

text: "4 Minutes" was used in the film "Get Smart" (2008), in a scene and its film credits. It was one of the songs covered by the cast of "Glee" during the April 20, 2010 episode "The Power of Madonna". The fictional character Kurt Hummel, portrayed by Chris Colfer, sang Madonna's parts while Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) sang Timberlake's. In the episode, the song is performed during a routine by the high-school cheering squad, accompanied by the school band. The version was released both as a digital download single and on the EP, "". The "4 Minutes" cover charted on the Hot Digital Songs of "Billboard" at number 55 on May 8, 2010, while reaching number 89 and number 70 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and Canadian Hot 100, respectively.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn ( , ; ; Old Prussian: "Alnāsteini" ) is a city on the Łyna River in northern Poland. It is the capital of the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, and is a city with county rights. The population of the city was estimated at 169,793 residents in 2021.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn is the largest city in Warmia, and has been the capital of the voivodeship since 1999. In the same year, the University of Warmia and Masuria was founded from the fusion of three other local universities. Today, the Castle of Warmian Cathedral Chapter houses a museum and is a venue for concerts, art exhibitions, film shows and other cultural events, which make Olsztyn a popular tourist destination.


title: Olsztyn

text: The most important sights of the city include the medieval Old Town and the St. James Pro-cathedral (former St. James Parish Church), which dates back more than 600 years. The market square is part of the European Route of Brick Gothic and the pro-cathedral is regarded as one of the greatest monuments of Gothic architecture in Poland.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn, for a number of years, has been ranked very highly in quality of life, income, employment and safety. It currently is one of the best places in Poland to live and work. It is also one of the happiest cities in the country.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 1334, a watchtower was established on the Łyna River. In 1346, the forest was cleared at the location for a new settlement, mentioned in a historical document from 1348. The following year, Teutonic Knights began the construction of an Ordensburg castle as a stronghold against the Baltic Prussians. Allenstein was granted municipal rights by the cathedral chapter of the Bishopric of Warmia in October 1353. The German "Allenstein" referred to the river's Baltic Prussian name "Alna", which meant a hind. Local Poles, having arrived along with German settlers, called it "Holstin" and "Olsztyn", which are Polonizations of the German name. The castle was completed in 1397. The town was captured by the Kingdom of Poland during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War in 1410, and again in 1414 during the Hunger War, but it was returned to the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights after hostilities ended.


title: Olsztyn

text: The city joined the Prussian Confederation in 1440, and rebelled against the Teutonic Knights in 1454 upon the outbreak of the Thirteen Years' War to join the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland under King Casimir IV Jagiellon. In 1454, upon the request of Confederation, King Casimir IV signed the act of incorporation of the region to the Polish Crown, and the townspeople took the castle and recognized the Polish king as the rightful ruler. Although the Teutonic Knights recaptured the city the following year, it was retaken by Polish troops in 1463. The Second Peace of Thorn in 1466 confirmed Allenstein as part of the Kingdom of Poland. Administratively it was located in the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia within the autonomous province of Royal Prussia and Greater Poland.


title: Olsztyn

text: From 1516 to 1521, Nicolaus Copernicus lived in the town castle as an administrator and then in Mehlsack (Melzak, now Pieniężno). Copernicus was in charge of the Polish defences in the Siege of Allenstein during the Polish-Teutonic War of 1519–21. He also started and managed the repopulation of the region, inviting a new wave of Polish settlers from Mazovia. The town along with Warmia then entered what is considered golden age of the region, when crafts and trade developed, thanks also to the city's location on the Warsaw-Königsberg trade route. During this period, the city was still visited several times by Copernicus, as well as leading figures of Polish Renaissance, writers, royal secretaries and diplomats: Johannes Dantiscus, called the "father of Polish diplomacy", and Marcin Kromer, who was also a historian and music theorist. St. James' Pro-Cathedral, one of the most distinctive landmarks of the cityscape, was completed at that time.


title: Olsztyn

text: Prosperity was halted in the 1620s, when the town suffered a fire and an epidemic. In 1626, during the Swedish invasion, clerics from Frauenburg (Frombork) took refuge in the town, which the Swedes did not reach. The city was sacked by Swedish troops later, in 1655 and 1708, during the next Polish-Swedish wars, and its population was nearly wiped out in 1710 by epidemics of the bubonic plague and cholera.


title: Olsztyn

text: The town became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772 after the First Partition of Poland and its economy initially collapsed. Poles became subject to extensive Germanisation policies. A Prussian census recorded a population of 1,770 people, predominantly farmers, and Allenstein was administered within the newly created Province of East Prussia.


title: Olsztyn

text: On February 3 1807, the Battle of Allenstein took place. The French Army clashed with the Imperial Russian army. On that day, Allenstein was visited by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon gathered enormous forces in the city and planned to engage the Russians and Prussians in a decisive battle. The Russian army was stationed in Jonkowo, but retreated after the French attack. Thanks to the victory at Allenstein, Napoleon's army was able to move north and a few days later the general Battle of Eylau took place.


title: Olsztyn

text: The growth of the city started again after it became a district seat in 1818, a significant influx of German settlers began and by 1825, the town was inhabited by 1,341 Germans and 1,266 Poles. In the early 1830s the city suffered from a cholera epidemic and a hunger crisis, however afterwards it flourished again, when despite Germanisation policies it was administered by Polish mayor Jakub Rarkowski from 1836 to 1865. Under Rarkowski the city was expanded and modernized, and the mayor also hid Polish insurgents in the city during the January Uprising. The first German-language newspaper, the "Allensteiner Zeitung", began publishing in 1841. Polish historian Wojciech Kętrzyński was arrested in Jomendorf (the present-day district of Jaroty), and imprisoned in the city's High Gate in 1863 for smuggling weapons for the Polish January Uprising in the Russian Partition of Poland. The town hospital was founded in 1867.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 1871, with the unification of Germany, Allenstein became part of the German Empire. Two years later, the city was connected by railway to Thorn (Toruń). Despite Germanisation attempts the city remained an important Polish centre. Its first Polish language newspaper, the "Gazeta Olsztyńska", was founded in 1886. Allenstein's infrastructure developed rapidly: gas was installed in 1890, telephones in 1892, public water supply in 1898, and electricity in 1907. The Provincial Mental Sanatorium Kortau was established in 1886 just south of Allenstein (today part of Olsztyn-Kortowo). In 1905, the city became the capital of Regierungsbezirk Allenstein, a government administrative region in East Prussia. From 1818 to 1910, the city was administered within the East Prussian Allenstein District, after which it became an independent city.


title: Olsztyn

text: Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Russian troops captured Allenstein, but it was recovered by the Imperial German Army in the Battle of Tannenberg.


title: Olsztyn

text: After the defeat of Germany in World War I, the East Prussian plebiscite was held in 1920 to determine whether the populace of the region, including Allenstein, wished to remain in German East Prussia or become part of Poland, which had just regained independence. In order to advertise the plebiscite, special postage stamps were produced by overprinting German stamps and sold on 3 April of that year. One kind of overprint read , while the other read inside an oval whose border gave the full name of the plebiscite commission. Each overprint was applied to 14 denominations ranging from 5 Pfennigs to 3 Marks. The Polish community faced discrimination, Polish rallies were dispersed, the participants were threatened and beaten. In March, Polish activist died in Allenstein, a few weeks after being attacked by the German militia in nearby Szczytno in Masuria. He was buried in Allenstein, however, his grave was soon devastated by local German nationalists. The presence of a Royal Irish battalion ensured a relative peace in Allenstein. The plebiscite, held on 11 July, produced 16,742 votes for Germany and 342 votes for Poland.


title: Olsztyn

text: In the interwar period, numerous Polish organisations operated in the city, including the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association, Union of Poles in Germany, a People's Bank ("Bank Ludowy"), local Poles organised a school, library, puppet theatre. The Polish Consulate also operated. After the January 1933 Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Poles and Jews in Allenstein were increasingly persecuted. In 1935, the German Wehrmacht made the city the seat of the "Allenstein Militärische Bereich". It was then home of the 11th and 217th infantry divisions and 11th Artillery Regiment. At the same time, the football club SV Hindenburg Allenstein played in Allenstein from 1921 to 1945.


title: Olsztyn

text: Beginning in 1936, members of the Polish minority was increasingly persecuted, especially members of the Union of Poles in Germany. In early 1939, many local Polish activists were expelled. In May 1939, the Gestapo confiscated 10,000 Polish information leaflets in the headquarters of the "Gazeta Olsztyńska". In August 1939, Germany introduced martial law in the region, which allowed for even more blatant persecution of Poles. In August and September 1939, the authorities carried out mass arrests of local Poles, including the chairman of the local Polish bank and his assistant, the chief of the "Rolnik" Cooperative, and the principal of the local Polish school.


title: Olsztyn

text: Nazi Germany co-formed the "Einsatzgruppe V" in the city, which then entered several Polish cities and towns, including Grudziądz, Mława, Ciechanów, Łomża and Siedlce, to commit various atrocities against Poles during the German invasion of Poland that began World War II in 1939. German troops invaded Poland also from Olsztyn (then called Allenstein). After the German invasion of Poland, local Poles were also subjected to mass executions and deportations to occupied Poland. Arrested Poles were held in a local prison and then forced to remove Polish signs and inscriptions in the city, while the German population gathered and insulted them. The "Gazeta Olsztyńska" was abolished by the German authorities, the newspaper's headquarters was demolished and the editor-in-chief Seweryn Pieniężny was arrested and executed in the along with co-publisher Wojciech Gałęziewski and the "Rolnik" Cooperative chief Leon Włodarczyk, while Pieniężny's wife was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The last pre-war Polish consul in Allenstein, Bohdan Jałowiecki, along with the consulate staff, was imprisoned in the Hohenbruch and Soldau concentration camps, and then murdered. Polish teachers were deported to the Dachau concentration camp.


title: Olsztyn

text: During the war five forced labour camps were established in the city. On 12 October 1939, the Wehrmacht established an area headquarters for one of its military districts, Wehrkreis I (headquartered at Königsberg), that controlled the environs of Allenstein, including Lötzen (now Giżycko), and Ciechanów in occupied Poland. As part of the "Aktion T4", Nazi Germany conducted medical experiments on the patients of the psychiatric hospital in the present-day district of Kortowo, in which at least 5,000 people were killed.


title: Olsztyn

text: On 22 January 1945, near the end of the war, the city was plundered and burned by the conquering Soviet Red Army, and much of its German population fled. The remaining population was subjected to various crimes, including murder, rape and looting. The Soviets also murdered the remaining patients and staff of the psychiatric hospital, who were either burned alive or shot. Remains of three Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses at Olsztyn's St. Mary's Hospital and were killed by Soviet soldiers in 1945 were excavated in October 2020.


title: Olsztyn

text: On 23 May 1945, the Soviets established a Polish administration in the region which aroused British and American protest. The Polish rule was accepted under the preliminary provisions of the Potsdam Conference. In October 1945, the remaining German population was expelled, to be replaced by new Polish settlers, mostly those expelled from pre-war Polish regions of Vilnius, Grodno and Volhynia, annexed by the Soviet Union, as well as settlers from the Warsaw, which had been destroyed by German forces during World War II. Reconstruction and removal of damages lasted until the 1950s.


title: Olsztyn

text: In December 1945, a match factory was launched in Olsztyn, as the city's first post-war industrial plant of national importance. A tyre factory was founded in Olsztyn in 1967. Its subsequent names included OZOS, Stomil and Michelin. City limits were greatly expanded in 1966 and 1987.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 1956, Olsztyn was the site of the largest Polish demonstation of support for the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. On the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, in 1973, a planetarium was opened in Olsztyn. In 1989 the former "Gazeta Olsztyńska" headquarters was rebuilt and re-opened as a museum. In 1991 Pope John Paul II visited the city. In 1999 the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn was established, which is now one of the largest universities in northeastern Poland.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn became the capital of the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship in 1999. It was previously in the Olsztyn Voivodeship.


title: Olsztyn

text: The Olsztyn Castle was built between 1346–1353 and by then it had one wing on the north-east side of the rectangular courtyard. Access to the castle leads from the drawbridge over the river Łyna, surrounded by a belt of defensive walls and a moat. The south-west wing of the castle was built in the 15th century, the tower situated in the west corner of the courtyard, from the middle of the 14th century, was rebuilt in the early 16th century and had a round shape on a square base and was 40 meters high. At the same time, the castle walls were raised to a height of 12 meters and a second belt of the lower walls was built. The castle walls were partly combined with city walls, which made the castle look like it had been a powerful bastion defending access to the city.


title: Olsztyn

text: The castle was owned by Warmia Chapter, which until 1454, together with the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia, was under the military protection of the Teutonic Knights and their Monastic State in Prussia.


title: Olsztyn

text: The castle had played a huge role in the Polish-Teutonic wars by then. After the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, the Poles took it after a few days siege. In the Thirteen Years' War (1454–66) it was jumping from rule to rule. The Knights threatened the castle and the town in 1521, but the defense was very effective. They contained one failed assault. There is a connection between the history of the castle, the city of Olsztyn, and Nicolaus Copernicus. He prepared the defense of Olsztyn against the invasion of the Teutonic Knights.


title: Olsztyn

text: In the sixteenth century, there were two prince-bishops of Warmia that stayed there: Johannes Dantiscus – the first sarmatian poet, endowed with the imperial laurel wreath for "Latin Songs" (1538, 1541) and Marcin Kromer, who wrote with equal ease in Latin and Polish scientific and literary works (1580). Kromer consecrated the chapel of St. Anna, which was built in the south-west wing of the castle. In the course of time, both wings of the castle lost military importance, which for residential purposes has become very convenient. In 1779, Prince-Bishop Ignacy Krasicki stopped here as well.


title: Olsztyn

text: After the Prussian annexation of Warmia during the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the castle became the property of the state board of estates (War and Domain Chamber, Kriegs- und Domänenkammer). In 1845, the bridge over the moat was replaced by a dam better connecting the castle with the city. In 1901–1911 a general renovation of the castle was performed, however, several sections of the building were violated at the same time where they changed the original look of the castle e.g. putting on window frames in a cloister. The tower was crowned in 1921 and again in 1926 in the halls of the castle, became a museum.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 1945, the whole castle became home to the Masurian Museum, which today is called the Museum of Warmia and Masuria. In addition, there are also popular events held within the frameworks of the Olsztyn Artistic Summer and so-called "evenings of the castle" and "Sundays in the Museum".


title: Olsztyn

text: Although Jews were permitted to trade in the city itself and its fairs during the medieval times, yet they were restricted from trading freely in the villages surrounding the town. In 1718, Bishop Teodor Andrzej Potocki imposed a ban on Jewish trade in the city as well. The ban, even if continued by successive bishops, proved not to be particularly successful in the light of repeated complains by the local merchants about Jewish dealing in animal leather and similar products as the one recorded in 1742. Permanent Jewish settlement can be dated to 1780 when the Jews were finally permitted to settle in the city albeit outside the immediate city walls. In 1814, the Simonson brothers opened the first Jewish store. Yet, the growth of the Jewish community worried city authorities that attempted to curb it with various restrictions and punitive measures. For example, in 1850, a new laws were issued imposing fines and imprisonment on anyone harbouring a 'wandering' Jew in their home.


title: Olsztyn

text: The roots of the Jewish congregation in the town can be traced to 1820. Shortly after that date, an official prayer room was established on Richterstrasse. In 1877, the congregation bought a plot of land on Liebstädterstrasse and built a synagogue there. A Jewish cemetery was built on Seestrasse (present-day Grunwaldzka). At its peak, the town's Jewish population reached 448 people (1933).


title: Olsztyn

text: During the "Kristallnacht", the town synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis, only to be later used as a bomb shelter. Today, the site of the former synagogue is occupied by a local sports club.


title: Olsztyn

text: By 1939, only 135 Jews were left in the city. The remainder fled the country. Those who still lived in the town by 1940 were deported to Nazi concentration camps. In June 1946, 16 Holocaust survivors settled in the city and in 1948, the congregation had 190 worshipers. Most of them emigrated to Israel throughout the next few decades. There is no current trace of the Jewish cemetery.


title: Olsztyn

text: The city was the birthplace of world-famous Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. In town, Mendelsohn planned the mourners' chapel (called the Mendelsohn house) next to the cemetery. The building is currently restored. In addition, it was the birthplace of German Socialist and SPD leader Hugo Haase. Frieda Strohmberg, an Impressionist, lived and worked in the city from 1910 to 1927. Documentation of the Jewish owned shops in town exists.


title: Olsztyn

text: More than half of the forests occupying 21.2% of the city area form a single complex of the Municipal Forest (1050 ha) used mainly for recreation and tourism purposes. Within the Municipal Forest area are situated two peat-land flora sanctuaries, Mszar and Redykajny. Municipal greenery (560 ha, 6.5% of the town area) developed in the form of numerous parks, green spots and three cemeteries over a century-old. The greenery includes 910 monuments of nature and groups of protected trees in the form of beech, oak, maple and lime-lined avenues.


title: Olsztyn

text: The city is situated in a lake region of forests and plains. There are 15 lakes inside the administrative bounds of the city (13 with areas greater than 1 ha). The overall area of lakes in Olsztyn is about 725 ha, which constitutes 8.25% of the total city area.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olszytn has an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification: "Cfb") using the isotherm or a humid continental climate (Köppen climate classification: "Dfb") using the isotherm.


title: Olsztyn

text: There are many smaller districts: Jakubowo, Karolin, Kolonia Jaroty, Kortowo II, Łupstych, Niedźwiedź, Piękna Góra, Podlesie, Pozorty, Skarbówka Poszmanówka, Słoneczny Stok, Stare Kieźliny, Stare Miasto, Stare Zalbki, Stary Dwór, Track. These do not have council representative assemblies.


title: Olsztyn

text: The historic central district of Olsztyn is the Old Town ("Stare Miasto"), which contains various historic buildings and structures, including:


title: Olsztyn

text: Death metal act Vader, regarded as one of the first and most successful death metal bands from Poland.


title: Olsztyn

text: The Michelin Polska tyre company (former Stomil Olsztyn) is the largest employer in the region of Warmia and Masuria. Other important industries are food processing and furniture manufacturing.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 1939, due to poor economic situation throughout the interwar period and the city's growing population, a trolleybus line began operation, partially replacing the original tram network. During the Second World War the cars were mainly driven by women.


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn has train connections to various major cities in Poland, including Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Poznań, Bydgoszcz, Białystok, Wrocław, Łódź, Toruń, and various towns in the region, including Elbląg, Iława, Działdowo and Ełk. Olsztyn Główny is the main railway station in the city. Plans exist to demolish the current building and replace it with new infrastructure, contrary to previous information about the current building being renovated.


title: Olsztyn

text: Historically, the city's first tram line was built in 1907 and gradually expanded over the years. It ceased operation in 1965.


title: Olsztyn

text: In 2006, authorities considered the reintroduction of trams in the city to address transport problems and subsequently concluded feasibility studies on the matter in 2009. An long tram network was built between 2011 and 2015. The contract was signed in 2011 and construction commenced in 2012. It was a first new tram system built in Poland in 55 years; 15 low-floor Tramino trams were ordered from Solaris in September 2012.


title: Olsztyn

text: A long extension is planned and Turkish manufacturer Durmazlar had been selected to supply 24 trams for the network.


title: Olsztyn

text: The region and city is served by Olsztyn-Mazury Airport with scheduled international passenger flights. It is located in Szymany, 10 km off Szczytno and 58 km south of the city of Olsztyn. The airport operates flights to London, Dortmund, Kraków and seasonal flights to Rzeszów and Wrocław.


title: Olsztyn

text: The Memorial of Hubert Jerzy Wagner, an international volleyball friendly tournament, was organized in Olsztyn from 2003 to 2008. The Tour de Pologne, one of UCI World Tour races, was organized in Olsztyn numerous times, most recently in 2008 (as of 2019).


title: Olsztyn

text: Olsztyn belongs to the Federation of Copernicus Cities, an association of cities where Copernicus lived and worked, such as Bologna, Frombork, Kraków, and Toruń. The main office of the federation is situated at Olsztyn Planetarium and Astronomical Observatory, located on St. Andrew's Hill (143 m) in a former water tower erected in 1897.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Vincent Edward Brothers (born May 31, 1962) is an American mass murderer convicted of killing his wife, their three children and his mother-in-law. Brothers was the former vice principal of John C. Fremont Elementary School in Bakersfield, California and holds a Master's degree in education from California State University Bakersfield and a Bachelor's degree from Norfolk State University.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Brothers, who had months earlier married his wife for the second time, was convicted of killing her, their new baby, two toddlers and his mother-in-law on July 6, 2003. He attempted to create an alibi by flying to Columbus, Ohio under the pretext of visiting his brother. He drove his rental car to Bakersfield, murdered his family members, and returned to Ohio. Forensic analysis of the rental car showed insects native to states west of the Rocky Mountains and odometer readings that supported the round-trip to California. Brothers was convicted of first-degree murders with special circumstance of multiple murder and was ultimately sentenced to death.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Brothers first gained national attention after the July 6, 2003 deaths of his wife, Joanie (née Harper), his sons, Marques (four) and Marshall (six weeks), his daughter, Lyndsey (two), and his mother-in-law, Earnestine Harper. Earnestine (70) was a mother of five children and civil rights activist. Joanie (39) worked for the Bakersfield school system and was a division one basketball official. Vincent and Joanie married in 2000, but had the marriage annulled in September 2001 due to Brothers' infidelity. They remarried in January 2003 when Joanie was pregnant with their third child. Vincent moved out of the house in April 2003.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Joanie, her mother and the children were last seen at church on July 6, 2003, and their bodies were discovered on Tuesday, July 8 in what appeared to be a staged break-in. Brothers had turned himself in to authorities in North Carolina where he was visiting his mother, but was released after a few hours due to lack of evidence at that time. Brothers returned to Los Angeles on July 11, 2003. He did not attend the memorial service for his wife, children, and mother-in-law, but attended their funeral on Wednesday, July 16. Although considered the only suspect from the beginning, he was not arrested until April 2004.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: During the trial in 2007, the "biggest criminal trial in Bakersfield in decades", prosecutors emphasized Brothers' past marriage difficulties. Joanie Harper previously divorced him in 2000, but the couple remarried in Las Vegas in 2003. Brothers was also known to have extramarital affairs, and further compromised his case by lying while on the witness stand. According to Lisa Green, a Kern County deputy district attorney, Brothers killed his family because they were a financial burden and he lied on the stand 41 or more times.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Brothers had flown to Columbus, Ohio for a long July 4 holiday weekend, drove a rental car approximately 2,000 miles to Bakersfield to kill his family after they returned home from church on July 6, and drove back to Ohio and North Carolina. The trip was intended to be an alibi, but several hundred dead insects found on the rental car and odometer readings showed that Brothers had driven to Bakersfield. Although Brothers stated that he flew to Columbus to visit his brother and had not traveled to California from Ohio, expert witnesses from the University of California-Davis' Bohart Museum of Entomology stated that some insects found on the rental car's radiator and air filter were from states west of the Rocky Mountains. Lynn Kimsey, a UC-Davis professor of entomology and museum director, stated that, "The insects we found were consistent with two major routes to get to California from the East," and court testimony showed that the round trip accounted for the 4,500 miles on the rental car.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: On May 15, 2007, Brothers was convicted of the first-degree murders of his five family members after jurors heard testimony from 137 witnesses. Brothers is believed to have used a .22-caliber gun and "a stabbing weapon". His conviction carried the special circumstance of multiple murder. On May 29, 2007, the jury returned a sentence of death. According to sheriff's department spokesman Sgt. Ed Komin, detention deputies found that Brothers had hid handmade handcuff keys in his hair and had placed his leg restraints on one leg, which rendered them ineffective. He was returned to Lerdo Jail under additional security measures.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: On September 27, 2007, the Superior Court Judge Michael Bush sentenced Brothers to death based upon the jury's verdict and ordered Brothers to pay restitution. He was later placed into the custody of the California Department of Corrections and placed on death row at San Quentin State Prison.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Brothers had been married four times, was briefly incarcerated for spousal abuse, and has a surviving daughter, Margaret Kern Brothers, who was the daughter of his girlfriend while attending California State University Bakersfield. In 1988, Brothers was convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse. He received a six-day jail sentence and was put on probation. He married for a second time in 1992 and the following year his wife sued for divorce claiming that he threatened to kill her and was violent. In 1996, Brothers sexually harassed a woman who worked at the school where he worked as vice principal. She claims that during a visit to his home he hit her and was dissuaded by the police from filing a formal complaint against a man considered a "respected community leader". During an investigation by the school, Brothers denied the allegations and was warned of the effect of such behavior on his career, but he was not formally disciplined.


title: Vincent Brothers

text: Harper family members received an undisclosed amount in a wrongful death suit to recoup the costs of funeral expenses and ensure that any monies of King Ross Brothers went to the only surviving child of Vincent Brothers and Joanie's stepdaughter. Margaret Kern Brothers disowned her father and changed her surname following the mass murder.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Kerak Castle () is a large medieval castle located in al-Karak, Jordan. It is one of the largest castles in the Levant. Construction began in the 1140s, under Pagan and Fulk, King of Jerusalem. The Crusaders called it "Crac des Moabites" or "Karak in Moab", as it is referred to in history books. It was also colloquially referred to as "Krak of the Desert".


title: Kerak Castle

text: Pagan was also Lord of Oultrejordain and Kerak Castle became the centre of his power, replacing the weaker castle of Montreal to the south. Because of its position east of the Dead Sea, Kerak Castle was able to control bedouin herders as well as the trade routes from Damascus to Egypt and Mecca. His successors, his nephew Maurice and Philip of Milly, added towers and protected the north and south sides with two deep rock-cut ditches (the southern ditch also serving as a cistern). The most notable Crusader architectural feature surviving is the north wall, into which are built immense arched halls on two levels. These were used for living quarters and stables, but also served as a fighting gallery overlooking the castle approach and for shelter against missiles from siege engines.


title: Kerak Castle

text: In 1176 Raynald of Châtillon gained possession of Kerak Castle after marrying Stephanie of Milly, the widow of Humphrey III of Toron (and daughter-in-law of Humphrey II of Toron). From Kerak Castle, Raynald harassed the trade camel trains and even attempted an attack on Mecca itself. In 1183 Saladin besieged the castle in response to Raynald's attacks. The siege took place during the marriage of Humphrey IV of Toron and Isabella I of Jerusalem, and Saladin, after some negotiations and with a chivalrous intent, agreed not to target their chamber while his siege machines attacked the rest of the castle. The siege was eventually relieved by Baldwin IV of Jerusalem.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Saladin besieged Kerak again in 1184. Saladin attempted to fill the ditches that prevented siege engines from getting in range of the castle wall. However, just like the first siege of Kerak, Saladin and his men left before a reinforcing crusader army could come to the castle’s aid. This siege only lasted four weeks.


title: Kerak Castle

text: The last siege of the 12th century was led by Sa’d Al-Din, Saladin's nephew, in 1188. Unlike the sieges before it, the Muslim army was not under the threat of crusader reinforcements. The year before Saladin had defeated an outnumbered crusader army at the Battle of Hattin and therefore the crusaders could not gather enough troops to reinforce Kerak. The Muslim army cut off supplies to the castle, and Kerak surrendered several months after. When the castle had fallen, it is believed that it was due to lack of arms, not a lack of food. With the fall of Kerak, the Castle of Montreal, which had been replaced as the centre of the lordship by Kerak, surrendered soon afterward.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Under the Ayyubid Dynasty, Kerak served as the administration centre for all of the regions of Jordan. When Saladin's brother, al-'Aldil was awarded control of the castle, he made it the site of one of his treasuries. Kerak would continue to serve as the home of a royal treasury for the remainder of the Ayyubid Dynasty. During some internal conflict by members of the Ayyubid Dynasty in the 1230s and 40s, Kerak was one of the three princedoms that was able to remain independent. The castle was retaken by the Egyptian Sultan al- Salih Ayyub in 1249. Kerak was so important to the Ayyubids that it is recorded that only the governors of Kerak and Damascus were allowed to carry their official correspondences on red paper.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Under An-Nasir Dawud, much of the defenses of Kerak were expanded and improved in 1244-45. In 1227, the Sultan of Damascus al-Mu'azzam 'Isa, commissioned the construction of a tunnel that ran from the castle into the town.


title: Kerak Castle

text: By 1263, Kerak was under the rule of the Mamluk Sultan Baybars. In 1263, the Mamluk sultan Baibars enlarged and built a tower on the northwest corner. Under the Mamluks, Kerak continued to remain an important administrative centre. Ibn 'Abd al-Zahir stated that the castle held four ministries: the ministry of the army, the ministry of finance, the ministry of Kerak and the chancery. Due to the castle's importance, it also maintained a significant military force, which under the rule of al-Mughith, contained at least 700 horsemen.


title: Kerak Castle

text: During the Ottoman Empire, it played an important role due to its strategic location on the crossroads between the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and Greater Syria.


title: Kerak Castle

text: In 1834, the leaders of the peasants' revolt in Palestine took refuge in Kerak. Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt besieged the castle, and destroyed much of its fortifications in the process.


title: Kerak Castle

text: In 1893, the Ottoman authorities reestablished control over the area by appointing a mutasarrıf (governor) resident in Kerak Castle with a garrison of 1400, including 200 cavalry. Parts of the castle were reused. Some of the destruction that had occurred to the structure was due to locals removing stones containing potassium nitrate ("saltpetre"), which is used to make gunpowder. Medieval historian Paul Deschamps studied Crusader castles in the 1920s. Amongst the important research done by Deschamps, in 1929 he and architect Francois Anus created the first accurate plans of Kerak Castle.


title: Kerak Castle

text: On December 18, 2016, the castle was the site of a terrorist attack. Fourteen people were killed and 34 were injured, the majority being Jordanian security forces and local civilians. A Canadian tourist was also killed.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Kerak Castle is an example of one of the first castles built by the Franks that used a fortified tower structure and is a notable example of Crusader architecture, a mixture of west European, Byzantine, and Arab designs. Many early Frankish castles that predate Kerak were merely towers built along the crusader states during the early years of crusading. In the second half of the twelfth century, the growing Muslim threat made crusaders update their castle design and prioritize defensive elements.


title: Kerak Castle

text: While Kerak Castle is a large and strong castle, its design is less sophisticated than that of concentric crusader castles like Krak des Chevaliers, and its masonry is comparatively crude. Many of its defenses were destroyed and rebuilt during its conquest by the Ayyubids and Mamluks.


title: Kerak Castle

text: Kerak Castle is a prime example of a spur castle, a castle built on top of a mountain to take advantage of the natural topography, as it is built on the southern end of a plateau surrounded on three sides by steep hills. This had the advantage during a siege of concentrating an attack on only one side of the castle, so the defenders could locate most of their manpower there.


title: Kerak Castle

text: The castle also used man-made fortifications, including ditches and thick stone walls. Because Muslim armies started to move with siege weapons such as siege engines, Frankish castles started adapting by building thicker and more solid walls. A "Byzantine ditch", a ditch or moat to keep siege engines at a safer distance, was constructed near the castle. There is another ditch near the town which is much deeper but less wide, to the west of the castle (now almost completely filled-in). It also has a glacis, an artificial slope made of steep, slippery masonry at the base of the walls that hindered attackers in their attempt to climb the walls and kept them exposed for longer to the defenders.


title: Kerak Castle

text: The crusaders used rough-shaped volcanic stone to build large walls around the perimeter of the castle. After Sa'd al-Din captured Kerak, the Muslims used limestone from nearby quarries to repair and expand the castle. Both the Muslim and Christian stonework show signs of draft masonry, stone blocks which are smooth on the edges, but the centre portion is left rough and raised.


title: Kerak Castle

text: The castle walls are strengthened with rectangular projecting towers, pointing to the fact that it was one of the earlier castles constructed by crusaders, it was only later on in the crusades that the transition to round towers in the curtain wall was made to help with visibility. At Kerak, the towers are much closer together than at other castles, theoretically to help with visibility problems. The towers were also placed at regular points along the wall; this is called the Byzantine tower structure—the square towers at Kerak are identical to the ones used by the Byzantine empire.


title: Kerak Castle

text: A chapel was built on the east side of the castle, about half-way along the length of the curtain wall.


title: Kerak Castle

text: While Kerak Castle had historically been used to protect the assets of crusader states in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, today its job is much more mundane. The city bordering on Kerak Castle is home to roughly 170,000 people and is a "lively tourist destination." Many people travel along the ancient King's Highway to stop at Kerak on their way to other tourist sites. in 1985 the World Heritage Committee decided that Kerak should not be an UNESCO site as there were "more representative examples of crusader castles". This is in part because the castle is not in the best condition and there are multiple examples of crusader castles in the Transjordan that are in better repair.


title: Kerak Castle

text: In December 2016, Kerak was the target of a terror attack that left 14 dead, including two civilians and a Canadian citizen. It is said that after clashing with police, the terrorists withdrew into the castle and held civilian hostages. There are not many references to Kerak Castle in popular-culture today, however it did play a large role in the 2005 film "Kingdom of Heaven".


title: Kerak Castle

text: In the lower court of the castle is the Karak Archaeological Museum, which was opened in 2004 after renovation work. It introduces local history and archaeology of the region around Kerak Castle – the land of Moab – from prehistory until the Islamic era. The history of Crusaders and Muslims at Kerak Castle and town is introduced in detail.


title: Masseduction

text: Masseduction is the fifth studio album by American musician St. Vincent, released on October 13, 2017, through Loma Vista Recordings. The album peaked at number 10 on the "Billboard" 200, becoming her first top ten album in the United States. The album also received universal acclaim and was the fourth-most mentioned in critics' year-end lists for 2017. At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, "Masseduction" won the award for Best Recording Package and Best Rock Song for its title track, and was also nominated for the Best Alternative Music Album.


title: Masseduction

text: "New York" was released as the lead single from the album on June 30, 2017. The album was announced on September 6 along with a pre-order and the release of the second single, "Los Ageless". The announcement was followed by a series of cryptic, satirical promotional clips Clark (St. Vincent) posted to her social media. Clark hosted a press conference on Facebook Live to announce the album, which was in the style of the sarcastic earlier clips. "Pills" was released as the third single on October 10. The album was promoted on two different tours: the Fear the Future Tour saw St. Vincent performing solo to prerecorded tracks in theatres, while the I Am a Lot Like You! Tour saw her performing with her band mostly in festivals around the world.


title: Masseduction

text: The album was produced by Clark and Jack Antonoff at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, with additional recording at Rough Consumer Studio in Brooklyn, and Compound Fracture in Los Angeles. It features contributions from Doveman on piano, Kamasi Washington on saxophone, Jenny Lewis on guest vocals, and beat production from Sounwave, as well as pedal steel by Greg Leisz and Rich Hinman, and additional guitar and vocals from her uncle and aunt Tuck & Patti, respectively. Model and actress Cara Delevingne, whom Clark had dated before they split in 2016, provided back-up vocals.


title: Masseduction

text: "Masseduction" has been described as the "culmination of years of writing, with songs crafted from voice memos, text messages, and snippets of melodies that came to Clark while traveling the globe." Clark has stated that the album focuses on themes of power, sex, drugs, sadness, imperiled relationships and death. In a press release, she stated: "every record I make has an archetype. "Strange Mercy" was Housewives on Pills. "St. Vincent" was Near-Future Cult Leader. "Masseduction" is different, it's pretty first person. You can't fact-check it, but if you want to know about my life, listen to this record."


title: Masseduction

text: Musically, the album has been characterized as "futuristic" pop, electropop, glam rock and new wave, while also incorporating ambient rock, "industrial-tinted techno", psychedelic rock, electronic rock and dream pop. It consists of guitar and piano, synths and strings, and drum beats "that punch with purpose".


title: Masseduction

text: At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 88, based on 38 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". According to the site, the album was the fourth-most mentioned in critics' year-end lists for 2017. John Murphy of "musicOMH" praised the album, saying "it's clear that Clark has not only raised the bar but moved it several notches up. "Masseduction" is a remarkable record, a certain contender for album of the year and demonstrable proof that Clark is an artist working at the height of her powers," continuing: ""Masseduction" is nothing less than an absolutely towering achievement. A year after we all mourned the loss of creative geniuses like David Bowie and Prince, we should be thankful that one of their spiritual successors in Annie Clark is on fine form."


title: Masseduction

text: El Hunt of "DIY" wrote, "Along with the equally exceptional "St. Vincent" which came before it, this is the moment that St. Vincent enters the fabled realm reserved for the greats." Claire Biddles of "The Line of Best Fit" stated that "ultimately, "Masseduction" defies explanation and critique, rendering the critic a dead weight in the dust of its ever-accelerating sucker-punch of ideas." "Drowned in Sound"s Jude Clarke said, "You wouldn't want one track or note to be changed or left out. It's a genuine masterpiece: complex, funny, sexy, bleak, uplifting, inspiring and enthralling from start to finish." AllMusic critic Heather Phares said ""Masseduction" delivers sketches of chaos with stunning clarity. It's the work of an always savvy artist at her wittiest and saddest." "The A.V. Club"s Annie Zaleski wrote that Clark "perfects her fractured, futuristic pop vision on "Masseduction"" and that she "captures this emotional roller-coaster in her remarkably genre-agnostic music".


title: Masseduction

text: The record made many appearances on best of the decades list. "Uproxx" listed "Masseduction" as the 14th best pop album of the 2010s.


title: Masseduction

text: In the United States, "Masseduction" debuted at number 10 on the "Billboard" 200, becoming St. Vincent's first album to peak in the top ten of the chart. It sold 29,000 units in its first week, 25,000 of which were in traditional album sales. The album debuted at number six in the UK, selling 7,610 copies including streaming.


title: Masseduction

text: MassEducation is an acoustic reworking of "Masseduction", released on October 12, 2018 by Loma Vista Recordings. It was recorded with pianist Thomas Bartlett over two days during mixing sessions of "Masseduction", and features sparse piano-driven renditions of the album's songs. It was promoted by a reworking of "Slow Disco" entitled "Slow Slow Disco".


title: Masseduction

text: Nina Kraviz Presents Masseduction Rewired is a remix album curated by Russian DJ Nina Kraviz. It features remixes of "Masseduction" tracks from a variety of producers including Jlin, Laurel Halo, Population One, Midland, Pearson Sound and Kraviz. It was released by Loma Vista on December 13, 2019.


title: Alliterative verse

text: In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic "Beowulf", as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German "Muspilli", the Old Saxon "Heliand", the Old Norse "Poetic Edda", and many Middle English poems such as "Piers Plowman", "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", and the "Alliterative Morte Arthur" all use alliterative verse.


title: Alliterative verse

text: While alliteration can be found in many poetic traditions, it is 'relatively infrequent' as a structured characteristic of poetic form. The extensive use of alliteration in the so-called "Kalevala" meter of the Finnic languages provides a close comparison, and may derive directly from Germanic-language alliterative verse.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The poetic forms found in the various Germanic languages are not identical, but there is sufficient similarity to make it clear that they are closely related traditions, stemming from a common Germanic source. Knowledge about that common tradition, however, is based almost entirely on inference from later poetry.


title: Alliterative verse

text: One statement we have about the nature of alliterative verse from a practising alliterative poet is that of Snorri Sturluson in the "Prose Edda". He describes metrical patterns and poetic devices used by skaldic poets around the year 1200. Snorri's description has served as the starting point for scholars to reconstruct alliterative meters beyond those of Old Norse. There have been many different metrical theories proposed, all of them attended with controversy. Looked at broadly, however, certain basic features are common from the earliest to the latest poetry.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliterative verse has been found in some of the earliest monuments of Germanic literature. The Golden Horns of Gallehus, discovered in Denmark and likely dating to the 4th century, bear this Runic inscription in Proto-Norse:


title: Alliterative verse

text: This inscription contains four strongly stressed syllables, the first three of which alliterate on /x/ and the last of which does not alliterate, essentially the same pattern found in much later verse.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Originally all alliterative poetry was composed and transmitted orally, and much went unrecorded. The degree to which writing may have altered this oral art form remains much in dispute. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus among scholars that the written verse retains many (and some would argue almost all) of the features of the spoken language.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The core metrical features of traditional Germanic alliterative verse are as follows; they can be seen in the Gallehus inscription above:


title: Alliterative verse

text: Some of these fundamental rules varied in certain traditions over time. Unlike in post-medieval English accentual verse, in which a syllable is either stressed or unstressed, Germanic poets were sensitive to "degrees" of stress. These can be thought of at three levels:


title: Alliterative verse

text: If a half-line contains one or more stress-words, their root syllables will be the lifts. (This is the case in the Gallehus Horn inscription above, where all the lifts are nouns.) If it contains no stress-words, the root syllables of any particles will be the lift. Rarely, even a proclitic can be the lift, either because there are no more heavily stressed syllables or because it is given extra stress for some particular reason.


title: Alliterative verse

text: If a lift was occupied by word with a short root vowel followed by only one consonant followed by an unstressed vowel (i.e. '(-)CVCV(-)) these two syllables were in most circumstances counted as only one syllable. This is called resolution.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The patterns of unstressed syllables vary significantly in the alliterative traditions of different Germanic languages. The rules for these patterns remain imperfectly understood and subject to debate.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliteration fits naturally with the prosodic patterns of early Germanic languages. Alliteration essentially involves matching the left edges of stressed syllables. Early Germanic languages share a left-prominent prosodic pattern. In other words, stress falls on the root syllable of a word, which is normally the initial syllable (except where the root is preceded by an unstressed prefix, as in past participles, for example). This means that the first sound of a word was particularly salient to listeners. Traditional Germanic verse had two particular rules about alliteration:


title: Alliterative verse

text: The precise reasons for this are debated. The most common, but not uniformly accepted, theory for vowel-alliteration is that words beginning with vowels all actually began with a glottal stop (as is still the case in some modern Germanic languages).


title: Alliterative verse

text: The need to find an appropriate alliterating word gave certain other distinctive features to alliterative verse as well. Alliterative poets drew on a specialized vocabulary of poetic synonyms rarely used in prose texts and used standard images and metaphors called "kennings".


title: Alliterative verse

text: Old Saxon and medieval English attest to the word "fitt" with the sense of 'a section in a longer poem', and this term is sometimes used today by scholars to refer to sections of alliterative poems.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Old English classical poetry, epitomised by "Beowulf", follows the rules of traditional Germanic poetry outlined above, and is indeed a major source for reconstructing them. J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Translating "Beowulf"" analyses the rules as used in the poem. Some patterns of classical Old English verse begin to break down at the end of the Old English period. Moreover, Thomas Bredehoft has argued that an alternative system of non-classical Old English poetry with looser constraints existed alongside this classical verse. In Bredehoft's reading, this poetry is epitomized by the homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham traditionally described as being in 'rhythmical prose'. This section of the article, however, focuses on the classical form.


title: Alliterative verse

text: As described above for the Germanic tradition as a whole, each line of poetry in Old English consists of two half-lines or verses with a pause or "caesura" in the middle of the line. Each half-line usually has two accented syllables, although the first may only have one. The following example from the poem "The Battle of Maldon", spoken by the warrior Beorhtwold, shows the usual pattern:


title: Alliterative verse

text: Clear indications of Modern English meanings can be heard in the original, using phonetic approximations of the Old English sound-letter system:


title: Alliterative verse

text: In addition to the rules outlined above, Old English poetry had constraints limiting the lengths of verses and the number and distribution of lifts and dips. However, there is still no consensus on what precisely the constraints were, and they must have varied slightly from one poem to another. The most widely used system for classifying Old English prosodic patterns is based on that developed by Eduard Sievers and extended by Alan Joseph Bliss. Sievers' system is a method of categorization rather than a full theory of meter. It does not, in other words, purport to describe the system the "scops" actually used to compose their verse, nor does it explain why certain patterns are favored or avoided. Sievers divided verses into five basic types, labeled A–E. The system is founded upon accent, alliteration, quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. Another popular system is that of Geoffrey Russom, which is predicated on a theory of meter involving two metrical feet per verse. Another is that of Thomas Cable, based on the idea that each verse contains four syllables, with specific rules for the addition of extra unstressed syllables.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Single 'half-lines' are sometimes found in Old English verse; scholars debate how far these were a characteristic of Old English poetic tradition and how far they arise from defective copying of poems by scribes.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliteration is the principal ornamental feature of Old English poetry. Two stressed syllables alliterate when they begin with the same sound. In addition to the general rules for alliteration in Germanic poetry listed above, there are some further complications due to sound-changes in Old English:


title: Alliterative verse

text: The first stressed syllable of the off-verse, or second half-line, usually alliterates with one or both of the stressed syllables of the on-verse, or first half-line. The second stressed syllable of the off-verse does not usually alliterate with the others.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Just as rhyme was seen in some Anglo-Saxon poems (e.g. "The Rhyming Poem", and, to some degree, "The Proverbs of Alfred"), the use of alliterative verse continued into Middle English. Layamon's "Brut", written in about 1215, uses a loose alliterative scheme. Starting in the mid-14th century, alliterative verse became popular in the English North, the West Midlands, and a little later in Scotland. The Pearl Poet uses a complex scheme of alliteration, rhyme, and iambic metre in his "Pearl"; a more conventional alliterative metre in "Cleanness" and "Patience", and alliterative verse alternating with rhymed quatrains in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". William Langland's "Piers Plowman" is an important English alliterative poem; it was written between "c". 1370 and 1390. The form of alliterative verse changed gradually over time. From "Piers Plowman":


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliteration was sometimes used together with rhyme in Middle English work, as in "Pearl" and in the densely structured poem "The Three Dead Kings". Middle English alliterative poets invented some innovative structures; the Pearl Poet, for instance, often adds a third alliterating word to the first half-line (e.g. "Sir Gawain" l.2, "the borgh brittened and brent || to brondez and askez"), and the medial pause is not always strictly maintained.


title: Alliterative verse

text: After the fifteenth century, alliterative verse became fairly uncommon; possibly the last major poem in the tradition is William Dunbar's "Tretis of the Tua Marriit Wemen and the Wedo" (c. 1500). By the middle of the sixteenth century, the four-beat alliterative line had completely vanished, at least from the written tradition: the last poem using the form that has survived, "Scotish Feilde", was written in or soon after 1515 for the circle of Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby in commemoration of the Battle of Flodden.


title: Alliterative verse

text: J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), a scholar of Old and Middle English, used alliterative verse extensively in both translations and original poetry. Most of his alliterative verse is in modern English, in a variety of styles, but he also composed Old English alliterative verses. Tolkien also wrote alliterative verse based on other traditions, such as the "Völsungasaga" and "Atlakviða", in "The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun" (2009), and "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son" describing the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon (1953). His Gothic "Bagme Bloma" ("Flower of the Trees") uses a trochaic metre, with irregular end-rhymes and irregular alliteration in each line; it was published in "Songs for the Philologists" (1936). He wrote a variety of pieces of alliterative verse in Old English, including parts of "The Seafarer". A version of these appears in "The Notion Club Papers." He also made translations including about 600 lines of "Beowulf" in verse.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The 2276-line "The Lay of the Children of Húrin" (c. 1918–1925), published in "The Lays of Beleriand" (1985) is written in Modern English (albeit with some archaic words) and set to the "Beowulf" meter. Lines 610-614 are given here:


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliterative verse is occasionally written by other modern authors. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) wrote a narrative poem of 742 lines called "The Nameless Isle", published posthumously in "Narrative Poems" (1972). Lines 562–67 read:


title: Alliterative verse

text: W. H. Auden (1907–1973) wrote a number of poems, including "The Age of Anxiety" (published 1947), in a type of alliterative verse modified for modern English:


title: Alliterative verse

text: Other poets who have experimented with modern alliterative English verse include Ezra Pound in his version of "The Seafarer", and Alaric Watts, whose famously complex "The Siege of Belgrade" combines alliteration with both rhymed meter and abecedarian verse. Many translations of "Beowulf", in keeping with the source material, use alliteration: among recent translations that of Seamus Heaney loosely follows the rules of modern alliterative verse, while those of Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy follow them more closely.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The inherited form of alliterative verse was modified somewhat in Old Norse poetry. In Old Norse, as a result of phonetic changes from the original common Germanic language, many unstressed syllables were lost. This lent Old Norse verse a characteristic terseness; the lifts tended to be crowded together at the expense of the weak syllables. In some lines, the weak syllables have been entirely suppressed. From the "Hávamál":


title: Alliterative verse

text: The various names of the Old Norse verse forms are given in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. The "Háttatal", or "list of verse forms", contains the names and characteristics of each of the fixed forms of Norse poetry.


title: Alliterative verse

text: A verse form close to that of "Beowulf" was used on runestones and in the Old Norse Poetic Edda; in Norse, it was called "fornyrðislag", which means "old story metre". The Norse poets tended to break up their verses into stanzas of from two to eight lines (or more), rather than writing continuous verse after the Old English model. The loss of unstressed syllables made these verses seem denser and more emphatic. The Norse poets, unlike the Old English poets, tended to make each line a complete syntactic unit, avoiding enjambment where a thought begun on one line continues through the following lines; only seldom do they begin a new sentence in the second half-line. This example is from the "Waking of Angantyr":


title: Alliterative verse

text: "Fornyrðislag" has two lifts per half line, with two or three (sometimes one) unstressed syllables. At least two lifts, usually three, alliterate, always including the main stave (the first lift of the second half-line). It had a variant form called "málaháttr" ("speech meter"), which adds an unstressed syllable to each half-line, making six to eight (sometimes up to ten) unstressed syllables per line. Conversely, another variant, kviðuháttr, has only three syllables in its odd half-lines (but four in the even ones).


title: Alliterative verse

text: Change in form came with the development of "ljóðaháttr", which means "song" or "ballad metre", a stanzaic verse form that created four line stanzas. The odd numbered lines were almost standard lines of alliterative verse with four lifts and two or three alliterations, with cæsura; the even numbered lines had three lifts and two alliterations, and no cæsura. This example is from Freyr's lament in "Skírnismál":


title: Alliterative verse

text: A number of variants occurred in "ljóðaháttr", including "galdralag" ("incantation meter"), which adds a fifth short (three-lift) line to the end of the stanza; in this form, usually the fifth line echoes the fourth one.


title: Alliterative verse

text: These verse forms were elaborated even more into the skaldic poetic form called "dróttkvætt", meaning "courtly metre", which added internal rhymes and other forms of assonance that go well beyond the requirements of Germanic alliterative verse and greatly resemble the Celtic forms (Irish and Welsh). The "dróttkvætt" stanza had eight lines, each having usually three lifts and almost invariably six syllables. Although other stress patterns appear, the verse is predominantly trochaic. The last two syllables in each line had to form a trochee (there are a few specific forms which utilize a stressed word at line-end, such as in some "docked" forms). In addition, specific requirements obtained for odd-numbered and even-numbered lines.


title: Alliterative verse

text: The requirements of this verse form were so demanding that occasionally the text of the poems had to run parallel, with one thread of syntax running through the on-side of the half-lines, and another running through the off-side. According to the "Fagrskinna" collection of sagas, King Harald III of Norway uttered these lines of "dróttkvætt" at the Battle of Stamford Bridge; the internal assonances and the alliteration are emboldened:


title: Alliterative verse

text: The bracketed words in the poem ("so said the goddess of hawk-land, true of words") are syntactically separate, but interspersed within the text of the rest of the verse. The elaborate "kennings" manifested here are also practically necessary in this complex and demanding form, as much to solve metrical difficulties as for the sake of vivid imagery. Intriguingly, the saga claims that Harald improvised these lines after he gave a lesser performance (in "fornyrðislag"); Harald judged that verse bad, and then offered this one in the more demanding form. While the exchange may be fictionalized, the scene illustrates the regard in which the form was held.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Most "dróttkvætt" poems that survive appear in one or another of the Norse Sagas; several of the sagas are biographies of skaldic poets.


title: Alliterative verse

text: "Hrynhenda" or "hrynjandi háttr" ('the flowing verse-form') is a later development of "dróttkvætt" with eight syllables per line instead of six, with the similar rules of rhyme and alliteration, although each "hrynhent"-variant shows particular subtleties. It is first attested around 985 in the so-called "Hafgerðingadrápa" of which four lines survive (alliterants and rhymes bolded):


title: Alliterative verse

text: The author was said to be a Christian from the Hebrides, who composed the poem asking God to keep him safe at sea. ("Note": The third line is, in fact, over-alliterated. There should be exactly two alliterants in the odd-numbered lines.) The metre gained some popularity in courtly poetry, as the rhythm may sound more majestic than dróttkvætt.


title: Alliterative verse

text: We learn much about these in the "Hattatal": Snorri gives for certain at least three different variant-forms of hrynhenda. These long-syllabled lines are explained by Snorri as being "extra-metrical" in most cases: the "main" form never has alliteration "or" rhyme in the first 2 syllables of the odd-lines (i.e., rhymes always coming at the fourth-syllable), and the even-lines never have rhyme on the fifth/sixth syllables (i.e.: they cannot harbor rhyme in these places because they extra-metrical), the following couplet shows the paradigm:


title: Alliterative verse

text: Then, the variant-forms show unsurprising dróttkvætt patterns overall; the main difference being that the first trochee of the odd-lines are technically not reckoned as extrametrical since they harbor "alliteration", but the even-lines' extra-metrical feature is more or less as the same. The 2nd form is the ""troll-hrynjandi"": in the odd-lines the alliteration is moved to the "first" metrical position (no longer "extra-metrical") while the rhyme remains the same (Snorri seems to imply that "frumhending", which is placing a rhyme on the first syllable of any line, is preferably avoided in all these forms: the rhymes are always preferred as "oddhending", "middle-of-the-line rhymes") — in the even-lines the rhyme and alliteration are not juxtaposed, and this is a key feature of its distinction (the significant features only are marked in bold below):


title: Alliterative verse

text: The next form, which Snorri calls "ordinary/standard hrynhenda", is almost like a "combination" of the previous — alliteration always on the first metrical-position, and the rhymes in the odd-lines juxtaposed (all features in bold in this example):


title: Alliterative verse

text: There is one more form which is a bit different though seemed to be counted among the previous group by Snorri, called "draughent". The syllable-count changes to "seven" (and, whether relevant to us or not, the second-syllable seems to be counted as the extra-metrical):


title: Alliterative verse

text: As one can see, there is very often clashing stress in the middle of the line ("Vápna hríd velta...//..Vægdarlaus feigum...", etc.), and "oddhending" seems preferred (as well as keeping alliterative and rhyming syllables separated, which likely has to do with the syllabic-makeup of the line).


title: Alliterative verse

text: Alliterative poetry is still practiced in Iceland in an unbroken tradition since the settlement, most commonly in the form of rímur. The most common alliterative "ríma" form is "ferskeytt".


title: Alliterative verse

text: The Old High German and Old Saxon corpus of "Stabreim" or alliterative verse is small. Fewer than 200 Old High German lines survive, in four works: the "Hildebrandslied", "Muspilli", the "Merseburg Charms" and the "Wessobrunn Prayer". All four are preserved in forms that are clearly to some extent corrupt, suggesting that the scribes may themselves not have been entirely familiar with the poetic tradition.


title: Alliterative verse

text: Two Old Saxon alliterative poems survive. One is the reworking of the four gospels into the epic "Heliand" (nearly 6000 lines), where Jesus and his disciples are portrayed in a Saxon warrior culture. The other is the fragmentary "Genesis" (337 lines in 3 unconnected fragments), created as a reworking of Biblical content based on Latin sources.


title: Alliterative verse

text: However, both German traditions show one common feature which is much less common elsewhere: a proliferation of unaccented syllables. Generally these are parts of speech which would naturally be unstressed — pronouns, prepositions, articles, modal auxiliaries — but in the Old Saxon works there are also adjectives and lexical verbs. The unaccented syllables typically occur before the first stress in the half-line, and most often in the b-verse.


title: Alliterative verse

text: This leads to a less dense style, no doubt closer to everyday language, which has been interpreted both as a sign of decadent technique from ill-tutored poets and as an artistic innovation giving scope for additional poetic effects. Either way, it signifies a break with the strict Sievers typology.


title: Alliterative verse

text: In more recent times, Richard Wagner sought to evoke old German models and what he considered a more natural and less over-civilised style by writing his "Ring" poems in "Stabreim".


title: Alliterative verse

text: The trochaic tetrametrical meter that characterises the traditional poetry of most Finnic-language cultures, known as "Kalevala" meter, does not deploy alliteration with the structural regularity of Germanic-language alliterative verse, but "Kalevala" meter does have a very strong convention that, in each line, two lexically stressed syllables should alliterate. In view of the profound influence of the Germanic languages on other aspects of the Finnic languages and the unusualness of such regular requirements for alliteration, it has been argued that "Kalevala" meter borrowed both its use of alliteration and possibly other metrical features from Germanic.


title: NFL Top 100 Players of 2021

text: NFL Top 100 Players of 2021 is the eleventh season in the NFL Top 100 series. It premiered on August 15, 2021, and concluded on August 28, 2021. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was named the number one player.


title: NFL Top 100 Players of 2021

text: Arizona Cardinals tackle D. J. Humphries criticized the list and its voting process, disagreeing with the placement of players such as J. J. Watt and DeAndre Hopkins.


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: John Crawford (born Cleve Allen Richardson; September 13, 1920 – September 21, 2010) was an American actor. He appeared in a 1961 episode of "The Twilight Zone", called "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim", and in several "Gunsmoke" episodes. He had a key role in the 1975 film "Night Moves", a crime thriller starring Gene Hackman, and played the mayor of San Francisco in 1976's "The Enforcer", the third "Dirty Harry" film featuring Clint Eastwood.


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: Crawford was born in Colfax, Washington, and studied at the School of Drama at the University of Washington. In films from the 1940s, Crawford appeared in bit parts for many years before playing leads in several films in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s and early 1960s.


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: When he returned to the United States, he played supporting roles in several films but was more prolific on TV in character roles, in scores of series such as "State Trooper" (in the episode "The Last Stage Robbery"), "Gunsmoke" (14 episodes between 1959 and 1974), "The Twilight Zone", "Combat!", "The Fugitive", "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", "Wheels", "The Dukes of Hazzard", "The Incredible Hulk", "The Time Tunnel", "Lost in Space", "", "", "Hogan's Heroes", "The Rockford Files" and most notably as Sheriff Ep Bridges on CBS' "The Waltons".


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: Crawford co-wrote the screenplay of the film "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" (1970), directed by Sam Peckinpah. In addition to appearing with James Arness in 14 episodes of "Gunsmoke", he was in two episodes of Arness' subsequent western series "How the West Was Won" (1976–79) and in two episodes of Arness' subsequent police detective series "McClain's Law" (1981–1982).


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: His other notable silver screen turns include the investigating State Trooper in "I Saw What You Did" (1965), the Chief Engineer in "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), Callahan in "The Towering Inferno" (1974), and as Brian Deering in "The Boogens" (1981).


title: John Crawford (actor)

text: Crawford died from a stroke eight days past his 90th birthday. According to "Variety", he died in Newbury Park, California and was survived by his longtime companion and former wife, Ann Wakefield.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: India's Got Talent 9, is the ninth the Indian reality TV series "India's Got Talent". It premiered from 15 January 2022 on Sony TV. Kirron Kher judging the show for the ninth time along with Manoj Muntashir, Shilpa Shetty and Badshah who are the judges of the season 9. This season will be hosted by Arjun Bijlani. Flute & beat-box duo Divyansh & Manuraj was announced as the winner on 17 April 2022.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: The format of the show had changed, unlike the previous seasons. This year due to pandemic, 'Producer's Auditions' were cancelled and instead of that, 'Online Auditions' took place via Sony LIV app. A participant selected in online auditions perform infront of the judges.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: Each participant that reaches this stage of auditions is held offstage from the main performing area in a waiting room, and given a number that denotes when they will perform. Upon being called before the judges, the participant is given 2-3 minutes to demonstrate their act, with a live audience present for all performances. Each judge is given a buzzer, and may use it during a performance if they are unimpressed, hate what is being performed, or feel the act is a waste of their time; if a participant is buzzed by all judges, their performance is automatically over. At the end of a performance, the judges give constructive criticism and feedback about what they saw, whereupon they each give a vote - a participant requires a majority vote approving their performance to proceed to the next stage, otherwise they are eliminated from the program at that stage. Many acts that move on may be cut by producers and may be forced to forfeit their place due to the limited slots available. Filming for each season always begins when the Judges' Auditions are taking place, with the show's presenter standing in the wings of each venue's stage to interview and give personal commentary on a participant's performance.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: The Golden Buzzer returned for the fifth time. A judge can use golden buzzer in auditions twice, sending the acts directly to "Top 14", escaping Judge Cuts.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: After auditions and judge cuts, six acts along with 8 golden buzzer acts compete in a weekly competition with act(s) eliminating each week till finale. There were wild cards also, Public gets to choose 1 wildcard out of judges cuts eliminated acts; where as judges choose 1 act from eliminated top 14 acts to compete in quarter-finals.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: In Finals, for the first time in Got talent history, ""Golden Buzzer"" was used as an appreciation key.


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: Of the 53 selected participants that took part, only 14 (6 culling, 8 golden buzzers) made it past this stage in the quarter finals. In 8 quarter finals, with all contestants appearing in each one, eliminating 1 or 2 weekly in each; the wildcard act chosen by the judges was dance group "'Euphony"', after they lost judges' vote in second quarter final; another wildcard act was chosen by the public using SonyLIV application on their phones. The following below lists the results of each participant's overall performance in this series:


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: "Golden buzzer returned for its fifth series. This year the golden buzzer acts went straight to Top 14. In Finals, "Golden Buzzer" was used as an appreciation key."


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: Guests: Symphony Legends Band (Lata Mangeshkar world tour team) Suresh Mukund (Choreographer of Kings United India & Winner of Season 3).


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: "This episode featured 'The HE Man', Dharmendra, and so, was called, 'Dharmendra Ji Special'. All the Top 14 Quarter Finalists performed on his songs and requested the audience to vote for them at the end of their performances".


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: Guest: Jackie Shroff"This episode featured 'Jackie Shroff ', and hence was called 'Jackie Shroff Special' The Top 14 quarter finalists performed and requested to vote. On 20th February, after all performed elimination took place in which 3 contestants with lowest votes were called and with an anonymous vote, judges chose to save one of them."


title: India's Got Talent (season 9)

text: Pre-Finale episode had no judges. Bijli (Arjun Bijlani) & Julie (Sugandha Mishra) presented the show in a comedic way. The Top 7 finalists showcased their pre-recorded acts & were talked about the conditions when they returned to their hometown i.e. how people welcomed them. No voting took place in this episode.


title: NBA on ABC

text: The NBA on ABC is an American presentation of National Basketball Association (NBA) games produced by ESPN, and televised on ABC. After the ABC Sports division was integrated with its cable sister network in September 2006, broadcasts have since primarily used the "NBA on ESPN" branding and graphics instead of "NBA on ABC" name.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC originally broadcast NBA games from 1965 to 1973. In 2002, NBA games returned to the network as part of a contract signed with the league, along with ESPN.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC televises games throughout the regular season, currently starting with Saturday night game in mid December, followed by a full slate of game on Christmas Day, and continued by a slate of "NBA Saturday Primetime" games and "NBA Sunday Showcase" afternoon games from January through March. ABC then airs up to nine games during the first five weeks of the NBA playoffs, and is the exclusive broadcaster of the NBA Finals.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC first signed a deal with the NBA to become the league's primary television partner in 1964; the network's first game telecast aired on January 3, 1965 (a game between the Boston Celtics and Cincinnati Royals). ABC's initial alliance with the NBA first came about due to ABC Sports head Roone Arledge's search for live programming that could diminish the ratings of "CBS Sports Spectacular", and ABC's own anthology program, "Wide World of Sports" a boost with sponsors. ABC initially paid the NBA only $650,000 for the rights annually.


title: NBA on ABC

text: For much of the 1960s, ABC only televised Sunday afternoon games, including during the NBA Playoffs. This meant that ABC did not have to televise a potential NBA Finals deciding game if it were played on a weeknight. In 1969, ABC did televise Game 7 of the Los Angeles Lakers–Boston Celtics series in prime time on a weeknight. The following season, ABC aired the 1970 NBA Finals in its entirety, making it the first Finals series to have all games televised nationally.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Commentators for the original "NBA on ABC" included play-by-play announcers Keith Jackson and Chris Schenkel, and analysts Jack Twyman, Bob Cousy and Bill Russell. On April 8, 1967, a strike by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) forced ABC Sports producer Chuck Howard and director Chet Forte to call Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals between Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers, as its regular announcing team were members of the union. Curt Gowdy also served on play-by-play for half of the 1967–68 season.


title: NBA on ABC

text: The first nationally televised Christmas Day NBA broadcast occurred in , when ABC broadcast a game between the Los Angeles Lakers and San Diego Rockets from the then-San Diego Sports Arena in San Diego. Jerry Gross and Jack Twyman called that particular broadcast for the network. ABC would continue to televise Christmas games through . The remainder of these broadcasts were based from Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Chris Schenkel did play-by-play for ABC during this period with the exception of , when Keith Jackson held that responsibility. Jack Twyman remained as color commentator for the broadcasts up until , when the position was assumed by Bill Russell.


title: NBA on ABC

text: By 1969, ABC's NBA contract worth only $3 million. To put things into proper perspective, in 1969, Major League Baseball's television contract with NBC was worth $16.5 million while the National Football League cost CBS about $22 million. What that meant is that ABC had made a bargain in purchasing the television rights to the NBA, considering the league's steady ratings. To give you a better idea, ABC's ratings for the NBA rose from a 6.0 in 1965 to an 8.2 in 1968.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC was by this time, coming increasingly under fire for what perceived to be a less than spectacular presentation of the NBA. "Sports Illustrated"s Frank Deford in particular, singled ABC out for their coverage of the 1971 NBA Finals. Deford felt that ABC was making a mistake in trying to cover the NBA the same way that they covered a football game, because they were two different games. On that end, Deford wrote that neither ABC's announcers nor cameras were able to isolate the important phases of the game. He added that replays were used only to second-guess officials rather than "capture the grace and precision of the performers". Meanwhile, Deford also criticized play-by-play man Chris Schenkel in regards to his failure to appreciate the nuances of the game and their halftime shows, which Deford saw not innovative or imaginative.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC lost the broadcast rights to the NBA to CBS after the 1972–73 season, with the network's initial tenure with the league ending with its last NBA Finals game on May 10, 1973. ABC filled the void left by losing the NBA by counterprogramming "Wide World of Sports" on Sundays against CBS' NBA coverage.


title: NBA on ABC

text: On December 15, 1973, ABC aired what is considered to be the first telecast of a regular season college basketball game by a major broadcast network (between UCLA and North Carolina State in St. Louis). ABC televised this game using its former NBA announcing crew of Keith Jackson and Bill Russell.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Bill Russell also provided color commentary for ABC's coverage of basketball at the Summer Olympics in 1972 and 1976. Russell worked alongside Frank Gifford, Bill Flemming (who (filled in for Gifford while he did wrestling in 1972), and Curt Gowdy.


title: NBA on ABC

text: And then in the 1977–78 NCAA Division I men's season, C.D. Chesley (who controlled the rights to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) at the time) wanted NBC to televise select ACC games as part of its national package as it had done the previous few years. However, NBC wanted to feature intersectional games. This action greatly upset Chesley, who wound up selling the rights to the ACC Tournament final to ABC. ABC would televise the 1978 ACC Tournament final as part of "Wide World of Sports". The game, called by Jim Lampley and Bill Russell, marked the first time Duke University's Blue Devils basketball team played on national television.


title: NBA on ABC

text: For ABC's final Summer Olympics to date, which were the 1984 games from Los Angeles, Keith Jackson provided the play–by–play alongside Digger Phelps (men) and Ann Meyers (women).


title: NBA on ABC

text: ABC wouldn't begin broadcasting college basketball on a more regular basis until January 18, 1987. In the early years of ABC's regular college basketball coverage, Keith Jackson and Dick Vitale were the primary announcing crew, while Gary Bender was the secondary play-by-play announcer behind Jackson. Meanwhile, Al Michaels did regional games during this period.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Also beginning in 1987 and continuing through 1989, ABC broadcast the McDonald's Open. Gary Bender and Dick Vitale provided the commentary for ABC's broadcasts. Supplemental coverage was provided by TBS.


title: NBA on ABC

text: From the 1984–85 through 1989–90 seasons, the ABC Radio Network was the official, national radio broadcaster of NBA games, succeeding the Mutual Broadcasting System. ABC Radio was in return, supplanted by Public Interest Affiliates' (or PIA's) NBA Radio Network.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Commentators included Fred Manfra on play-by-play and Oscar Robertson (from 1984 to 1985 through 1985–86), Dick Vitale (from 1986–87 through 1989–90) and Earl Monroe (from 1988–89 through 1989–90) on color commentary. Other announcers included Marv Albert (1989 All-Star Game) and Chick Hearn (1988 All-Star Game) on play-by-play and Rod Hundley (1987 and 1989 All-Star Games), Johnny Most (1988 All-Star Game), and Dave Barnett (1986 All-Star Game) on color commentary.


title: NBA on ABC

text: In late 2001, the NBA was in the midst of putting together a new broadcast and cable television deal. At the time, conventional wisdom was that NBC would renew its existing broadcasting contract with the league. An October 5, 2001, "Sports Business Daily" article cited "The New York Times" sports columnist Richard Sandomir regarding the possibility of ESPN joining with ABC in obtaining a portion of the contract:


title: NBA on ABC

text: The negotiations were closely watched by those in the business world, as it was the first time that a major sports league crafted a television deal in the new economic environment since the September 11 terrorist attacks a few months before. Declining ratings for NBC's NBA game telecasts had already led many to believe that the NBA's next television rights fee would be lower than previous years, and the economic recession made that a likely scenario. As predicted, NBC's offer to the league was lower than the previous agreement's amount. Had the NBA agreed to the network's offer, it would have been the first sports league to experience a decline in rights fees. However, the NBA rejected NBC's offer and after the network's exclusive negotiating period with the league expired, ABC and ESPN stepped in. On January 22, 2002, the NBA signed a six-year deal with The Walt Disney Company and Turner Sports, which renewed an existing deal with TNT and allowed ABC and ESPN to acquire the rights to air the league's games. ABC and ESPN reportedly paid an average of about US$400 million a season. Technically, ESPN pays the NBA for its broadcast rights and "buys" time on ABC to air select games (this is noted in copyright tags during the end credits at the conclusion of the telecasts, saying "The preceding program has been paid for by ESPN, Inc.") In all, the contract allowed the NBA to increase its rights fees by 25%.


title: NBA on ABC

text: In 2006, after ABC Sports became ESPN on ABC the "NBA on ABC" started to be produced by ESPN with ESPN graphics. All broadcasts have an "on ABC" suffix on their titles after this rebrand.


title: NBA on ABC

text: In June 2007, and again in October 2014, the NBA renewed its television agreement with ESPN, as well as TNT, with the current contract extending through the 2024–25 season.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Primary commentating team: Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy. Secondary commentating team: Mike Tirico and Hubie Brown.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Saturday games called by Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy unless otherwise noted. Sunday games called by Mike Tirico and Hubie Brown unless otherwise noted. This was the first season of "NBA Saturday Primetime", which replaced "NBA Sunday Showcase" doubleheaders.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Saturday games called by Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy unless otherwise noted. Sunday games called by Mark Jones and Hubie Brown unless otherwise noted.


title: NBA on ABC

text: All games called by Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy with Rachel Nichols on sideline unless otherwise noted.


title: NBA on ABC

text: All "NBA Saturday Primetime" games called by Mike Breen, Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy with Lisa Salters courtside unless otherwise noted.


title: NBA on ABC

text: All 3:30PM ET "NBA Sunday Showcase" games called by Dave Pasch and Hubie Brown unless otherwise noted.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Each season, ABC begins its NBA coverage with a Christmas Day tripleheader except in 2004 and 2006, when the network broadcast only one game, and 2002, 2003 and 2007–2016 when the network broadcast a doubleheader, and 2021-present when it carried a "NBA Saturday Primetime" on the second Saturday in December each year). From 2004 to 2006, ABC insisted on carrying a Christmas game between the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Lakers. Since 2009, ABC's Christmas Day triple header has featured a music video featuring Mariah Carey performing her hit 1994 single "All I Want for Christmas Is You." In 2010, Carey was featured singing "Oh Santa!"


title: NBA on ABC

text: Following the initial Christmas game telecasts, Sunday afternoon coverage of regular season games begins in mid-January or early or mid February. The number of Sunday afternoon regular season games that ABC normally covers is significantly lower than what NBC broadcast during its tenure with the league. In its first season of coverage, ABC aired 14 regular-season games, in comparison to NBC's yearly average of 33 games. That number increased to 18 games in the next two seasons ( and ), and 20 games in the season. For , ABC decreased the number of game telecasts it aired during the season to 19. In a 2002 interview with Jim Rome, NBA commissioner David Stern commented about the number of league games broadcast on ABC:


title: NBA on ABC

text: By contrast to Stern's assessment, media analysts and many fans found that the cable-heavy television deal made many games unavailable and, in addition, devalued the league. Starting with the second round of the playoffs, TNT's NBA coverage becomes exclusive, meaning that no locally produced league broadcasts can compete against the TNT telecasts (though commensurate with the move to sports rights to cable, few over-the-air local stations currently carry NBA coverage). Because of this, fans of teams in the playoffs who do not have a cable television subscription are unable to watch most playoff games. In addition, ABC's coverage is always exclusive, including during the regular season. If an ongoing game airs opposite one televised by ABC, it cannot be televised in the local market, which has the side effect of causing some games to not be aired on television at all. "Sports Business Daily" quoted "Houston Chronicle" writer Jonathan Feigen regarding the structuring of the NBA's deal with ABC:


title: NBA on ABC

text: On July 17, 2015, ESPN announced that ABC would add a series of eight of Saturday night games to its slate of broadcasts in the 2015–16 season. The first of these games will air on January 23, 2016, and will air mostly bi-weekly until the end of the regular season. As a result of this change, ABC will no longer have regular Sunday doubleheaders until 2021 (due to the length of the NBA Sunday Showcase schedule being reduced).


title: NBA on ABC

text: In addition, unlike NBC or its preceding rightsholder CBS, ABC does not televise the NBA All-Star Game (TNT having exclusive television rights to the game itself and most other events held during All-Star Weekend). Also unlike the other networks, ABC rarely televises either of the NBA's Conference Finals series outside of game 1. TNT airs one Conference Final exclusively each year — the Western Conference Finals in 2003 and every even-numbered year since 2004 and the Eastern Conference Finals in every odd-numbered year since 2005 while ESPN will get the other. Except in 2004, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019, and 2020 (when the network did not air any games from that round at all), ABC airs Conference Final matches – whichever one to which ESPN holds the rights in a given year – held on weekends. Due to the checkerboard schedule of the NBA Playoffs (in which games are scheduled every other day), this is limited to one game per Conference Final (until 2022), as series do not often reach a sixth or seventh game (for example, the network aired only Game 3 of the 2009 Western Conference Finals; ABC was scheduled to air the Sunday Game 7 of the series; however, the Los Angeles Lakers won the series in Game 6).


title: NBA on ABC

text: Outside of the Conference Finals, ABC generally airs playoff games throughout the first five weeks of the NBA Playoffs, in addition to a number of special prime-time playoff games, usually televised on Friday or Saturday nights. However, since 2019, Friday night first round playoff games on ABC are considered non-exclusive and may co-exist with broadcasts of regional sports networks of the teams involved. In 2005, ABC aired the first non-cable Memorial Day game in three years, when the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs battled in Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals. Prior to the most recent NBA television deal, Memorial Day playoff games had become a yearly tradition on network television.


title: NBA on ABC

text: In its first year of coverage, ABC used the same graphics package as partner network ESPN, with the "score bug" being the only difference between the two networks' packages. This habit had already been put into practice by the network in regards to its NHL and college basketball coverage. However, ABC did utilize its own graphics (though they were similar in resemblance to ESPN's at the time) for college football and other sports broadcasts. For the 2003–04 season, ABC established new graphics for its NBA broadcasts, in an effort to differentiate its telecasts from ESPN's. On February 5, 2006, ABC established another new graphics package, including a horizontal scoreboard (similar to that introduced the previous fall for its final season of "Monday Night Football") for the network's NBA telecasts.


title: NBA on ABC

text: ESPN, along with partner network ABC, began using graphics packages inherited by ESPN's "Monday Night Football" broadcast starting in 2006, featuring a score banner with an oblique red and white design. The graphics were later replaced in April 2009 with a more compact grey design, with panel-like lower thirds and a permanent "stats bar" located underneath the score and time. This was replaced in 2010 with an updated appearance based on another redesign adopted by "Monday Night Football" in late 2009, featuring a more metallic appearance that would later be adopted by other ESPN properties, along with the addition of yellow lights beneath a team's name to indicate remaining timeouts. At the start of the 2011–12 season, an updated version of the design was adopted with a more translucent appearance, and the addition of a "BONUS" indicator under a team's score if they have reached enough fouls to initiate the Bonus situation. Starting with the 2013 Western Conference Finals, a newly designed banner featuring 3-dimensional renditions of the team logos were used. During the 2015 NBA Finals, the graphics were updated with gold coloring, patterned backgrounds, and a modern, unified font. At the start of the 2015–16 season, however, ESPN reverted to the banner used since 2013. On May 17, 2016, the aforementioned updated graphics package from the previous year's NBA Finals returned for the 2016 Eastern Conference Finals and again for the 2016 NBA Finals.


title: NBA on ABC

text: Beginning with the 2016 NBA preseason on October 4, 2016, the graphics were updated again, this time, they are formatted for the full 16:9 letterbox presentation. The score bar, which is significantly larger than the previous one (used since the 2013 Western Conference Finals), was given a complete overhaul, with a numerical representation of timeouts replacing the "lights" used since the 2010–11 season and a permanent "stats bar" being moved to the right side of the score bar. The new, co-branded "NBA on ESPN" logo is now seen as an overlay on the upper left hand corner of the 16:9 screen. As was the case the previous two years, the gold coloring and patterned backgrounds were used again for the 2017 NBA Finals. Notably, this is the first time that both ESPN and ABC have used the full 16:9 frame for its graphics in the networks' NBA coverage.