Toots Thielemans

Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor, Baron Thielemans (29 April 1922 – 22 August 2016), known professionally as Toots Thielemans, was a Belgian jazz musician. He was mostly known for his harmonica playing, as well as his guitar, whistling skills, and composing. According to jazz historian Ted Gioia, his most important contribution was in "championing the humble harmonica", which Thielemans made into a "legitimate voice in jazz". He eventually became the "preeminent" jazz harmonica player.
His first professional performances were with Benny Goodman's band when they toured Europe in 1949 and 1950. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1951, becoming a citizen in 1957. From 1953 to 1959 he played with George Shearing, and then led his own groups on tours in the U.S. and Europe. In 1961 he recorded and performed live one of his own compositions, "Bluesette", which featured him playing guitar and whistling. In the 1970s and 1980s, he continued touring and recording, appearing with musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Werner, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Mina Mazzini, Elis Regina, Quincy Jones, George Shearing, Natalie Cole, Billy Joel, Paul Simon and Paquito D'Rivera.
Among the film soundtracks that Thielemans recorded are "The Pawnbroker" (1964), "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), "The Getaway" (1972), "Cinderella Liberty" (1973), "The Sugarland Express" (1974) and "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (1977). His harmonica theme song for the popular "Sesame Street" TV show was heard for 40 years. He often performed and recorded with Quincy Jones, who once called him "one of the greatest musicians of our time." In 2009 he was designated a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States.
Early years.
Thielemans was born in Brussels, Belgium, on 29 April 1922. His parents owned a cafe. He began playing music at an early age, using a homemade accordion at age three. During the German occupation of Belgium beginning in 1940, he became attracted to jazz, but was then playing on full-size accordion or a harmonica, which he taught himself to play in his teens.
After being introduced to the music of Belgian-born jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, he became inspired to teach himself guitar, which he did by listening to Reinhardt's recordings. At the time he was a college student majoring in math. By the war's end in 1945, he considered himself a full-time musician. He said in 1950, "Django is still one of my main influences, I think, for lyricism. He can make me cry when I hear him." During an interview in 1988, he recalled, "I guess I was born at the right time to live and adapt and be touched by the evolution in the jazz language."
He played in two Silverio Pisu's stories: "Giacomino passerotto vagabondo" and "Manolo gattino sognatore".
Career.
1940s–1950s.
In 1949 he joined a jam session in Paris with Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach and others. He first heard the faster bebop style of jazz from records by Parker and Dizzy Gillespie after they had reached Belgium after the war. They became his musical "prophets." As his small collection of jazz records grew, the music of Benny Goodman and Lester Young began to impress him the most.
During a visit to the U.S. in 1948, an agent of Benny Goodman heard him play at a small New York music club. Not long after he returned to his home in Belgium, he received a letter inviting him to join Goodman's band while they toured in Europe. He readily accepted the invitation and joined their tours in 1949 and 1950. During the tour, Goodman was "shocked" when he learned that these tours were the first time Thielemans had earned money from his playing. Although Thielemans was hired on as a guitarist, when Goodman's group debuted at the London Palladium, he played the harmonica due to union restrictions.
During those years, he also made his first record with fellow band member, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims. In 1951 he toured with singer-songwriter and compatriot Bobbejaan Schoepen, performing strictly as a guitarist.
Thielemans moved to the United States in 1952 where he was a member of Charlie Parker's All-Stars and worked with Miles Davis and Dinah Washington. In 1957 he became a U.S. citizen. From 1953 to 1959 he played guitar and harmonica with the George Shearing Quintet. With Shearing, he added whistling to his repertoire. While playing in Hamburg in 1960 on tour with Shearing, a young musician and observer —John Lennon— noticed that Thielemans played a Rickenbacker guitar. Lennon was impressed, and felt he had to have an American guitar, on the principle that "if was good enough for Thielemans it was good enough for me." Lennon and the Beatles helped make Rickenbacker world-famous.
In 1955, Thielmans he recorded his first album as a band leader, "The Sound." During the 1950s, Thielemans had dominated the "miscellaneous instrument" category in "Down Beat" magazine's poll. Jerry Murad, of Jerry Murad's Harmonicats recalls Thielemans's mastery:
From 1959 on he toured internationally with his small group along with intermittently recording in the studio. He recorded with singers and musicians including Ella Fitzgerald, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, Stephane Grappelli, J.J. Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Shirley Horn, Joe Pass, and jazz pianist Bill Evans, among others. Thielemans says that his recording with Evans's trio, "Affinity," (1979) was one of his favorites.
1960s–1970s.
Toots Thielemans wrote "Bluesette," a jazz standard, which he performed on harmonica or while playing the guitar and whistling in unison. He said, "If there's a piece of music that describes me, it's that song." First recorded by him in 1962, with lyrics added by Norman Gimbel, the song became a major worldwide hit. It has since been covered by over one hundred artists. Toots also wrote the ballad "Lady Fingers," which appeared on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's album "Whipped Cream and Other Delights."
He worked both as a bandleader and as a sideman, including many projects with composer/arranger Quincy Jones. In the 1960s he performed on television with Peggy Lee. In 1969 he recorded "Honeysuckle Rose Aquarela Do Brasil" with singer Elis Regina and performed with her on Swedish television special.
During his career he performed on many film soundtracks, such as "The Pawnbroker" (1964), "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), "The Getaway" (1972), "Turkish Delight" (1973), "Cinderella Liberty" (1973), "The Sugarland Express" (1974), "The Yakuza" (1974), "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (1977), "The Wiz" (1978), "Jean de Florette" (1986), and "French Kiss" (1995). His theme to the popular "Sesame Street" television show was heard for 40 years.
His music was heard on the Belgian television series "Witse," and in the Netherlands, for the "Baantjer" program. He composed the music for the 1974 Swedish film "Dunderklumpen!," in which he also provided the voice of the animated character Pellegnillot. His whistling and harmonica playing was heard on Old Spice commercials in the 1960s. He played harmonica on "Night Game" on Paul Simon's 1975 album "Still Crazy After All These Years".
1980s and later.
During the early 1980s Thielemans was a guest a number of times on "Late Night with David Letterman." He has performed with the bassist Jaco Pastorius, and in 1983 he contributed to Billy Joel's album "An Innocent Man," in the song, "Leave A Tender Moment Alone." (The two later collaborated on this selection in concert, and this was recorded on video.) A year later, he appeared on the Julian Lennon song "Too Late for Goodbyes" from the album "Valotte."
In 1984, he recorded with Billy Eckstine on the singer's final album ("I Am a Singer"), featuring ballads and standards arranged and conducted by Angelo DiPippo. In the 1990s, Thielemans embarked on theme projects that included world music. In 1998 he released a French-flavoured album titled "Chez Toots" featuring guest singer Johnny Mathis.
During those years, he often recorded songs as personal tributes to those who were influential during his career. On "Chez Toots", for example, he included "Dance For Victor," which he dedicated to his sometimes keyboard accompanist, Victor Feldman. Similarly, he recorded "Waltz for Sonny" as a tribute to saxophonist Sonny Rollins. In June 1998, at Germany's Jazzbaltica, he paid tribute to Frank Sinatra who died a month earlier. And during the first Caspian Jazz and Blues Festival in Azerbaijan in 2002, he performed his recorded version of "Imagine," his tribute to its writer, John Lennon.
Thielemans was well liked for his modesty and kind demeanor in his native Belgium, and was known for describing himself as a Brussels "ket," which means "street kid" in old Brussels slang.
Honours and awards.
Thielemans received a joint honorary doctorate from the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. In 2001, he was raised into the Belgian nobility by King Albert II and created "Baron" Thielemans for life, this in recognition of his contribution to music. Herewith, he chose the motto "Be yourself, no more no less".
In 2006, Thielemans was honoured by an all-star tribute concert for him at Carnegie Hall. Pianist Herbie Hancock and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera were among the performers. In 2009, he was awarded the highest U.S. honour that can be accorded to a jazz musician, the distinction of "Jazz Master," by The National Endowment for the Arts.
Honours.
A Brussels metro station under the Avenue de Stalingrad/Stalingradlaan is to be named after the musician.
Later life.
He was nominated for the title of the Greatest Belgian in 2005. In the Flemish version he finished in 20th place, and in the Walloon version he came 44th. On 23 January 2009, he joined guitarist Philip Catherine on stage at the Liberchies church (Belgium) in memory of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Django Reinhardt. In 2012, the Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts in New York celebrated Thielman's 90th birthday with, among others, Herbie Hancock, Eliane Elias, and Kenny Werner. He performed for the occasion and left the stage standing among his friends.
Because of health issues that led to show cancellations, Thielemans announced his retirement on 12 March 2014, cancelling all scheduled concerts. He was also hospitalized for a broken arm. His manager stated that Thielemans "wants to enjoy the rest he deserves." However, he did make one more stage appearance, unannounced, in August 2014, at the Jazz Middelheim Festival in Antwerp.
Death.
Thielemans died in Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium, at the age of 94.
After the announcement, the Netherlands-based jazz and pop orchestra Metropole Orkest, along with American musician Quincy Jones, performed at London's Royal Albert Hall in Thielemans' honor. Another concert was performed at the Grand Place, Brussels.
Thielemans was buried on 27 August 2016 in La Hulpe, just outside Brussels. Pianist Kenny Werner read a personal message from U.S. President Barack Obama for his widow, Huguette. It read: "Dear Huguette. I was deeply saddened when I heard about your husband's passing. I hope that shared memories will soften your suffering. Lift faith from the support of friends and family. Know that you will be in my thoughts for the next days. May Toots' music lead you and offer you consolation. I'm sure it will do this for all of us."
Toots Thielemans Collection.
In December 2016, the Music Division of the Royal Library of Belgium acquired the Toots Thielemans Collection. The collection consists of hundreds of sound recordings (78 rpm, vinyl records and CDs) and thousands of documents, such as photographs, press articles, scores, letters and concert programmes.
Material loss.
On June 25, 2019, "The New York Times Magazine" listed Toots Thielemans among hundreds of artists whose material may have been destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
Discography.
As sideman.
With John Denver
With Eliane Elias
With Bill Evans
With Michael Franks
With Dizzy Gillespie
With Peggy Lee
With Urbie Green
With Shirley Horn
With Billy Joel
With James Taylor
With Melanie
With Brook Benton
With Sheena Easton
With Diane Schuur
With Quincy Jones
With Sarah Vaughan
With Fumio Karashima
With Natalie Cole
With James Last
With Joe Lovano
With Jaco Pastorius
With Oscar Peterson
With George Shearing and Dakota Staton
With Elis Regina
With Julian Lennon
With Pat Metheny
With George Shearing
With Paul Simon
With Jay Anderson


MIX

MIX is a hypothetical computer used in Donald Knuth's monograph, "The Art of Computer Programming" ("TAOCP"). MIX's model number is 1009, which was derived by combining the model numbers and names of several contemporaneous, commercial machines deemed significant by the author. Also, "MIX" read as a Roman numeral is 1009.
The 1960s-era MIX has since been superseded by a new (also hypothetical) computer architecture, MMIX, to be incorporated in forthcoming editions of "TAOCP". Software implementations for both the MIX and MMIX architectures have been developed by Knuth and made freely available (named "MIXware" and "MMIXware", respectively).
Several derivatives of Knuth's MIX/MMIX emulators also exist. GNU MDK is one such software package; it is free and runs on a wide variety of platforms.
Their purpose for education is quite similar to John L. Hennessy's and David A. Patterson's DLX architecture, from "Computer Organization and Design - The Hardware Software Interface".
Architecture.
MIX is a hybrid binary–decimal computer. When programmed in binary, each byte has 6 bits (values range from 0 to 63). In decimal, each byte has 2 decimal digits (values range from 0 to 99). Bytes are grouped into words of five bytes plus a sign. Most programs written for MIX will work in either binary or decimal, so long as they do not try to store a value greater than 63 in a single byte.
A word has the range −1,073,741,823 to 1,073,741,823 (inclusive) in binary mode, and −9,999,999,999 to 9,999,999,999 (inclusive) in decimal mode. The sign-and-magnitude representation of integers in the MIX architecture distinguishes between “−0” and “+0.” This contrasts with modern computers, whose two's-complement representation of integer quantities includes a single representation for zero, but whose range for a given number of bits includes one more negative integer than the number of representable positive integers.
Registers.
There are 9 registers in MIX:
A byte is assumed to be at least 6 bits. Most instructions can specify "which" of the "fields" (bytes) of a register are to be altered, using a suffix of the form "(first:last)". The zeroth field is the one-bit sign.
MIX also records whether the previous operation overflowed, and has a one-trit comparison indicator (less than, equal to, or greater than).
Memory and input/output.
The MIX machine has 4000 words of storage (each with 5 bytes and a sign), addressed from 0 to 3999. A variety of input and output devices are also included:
Instructions.
Each machine instruction in memory occupies one word, and consists of 4 parts: the address (2 bytes and the sign of the word) in memory to read or write; an index specification (1 byte, describing which rI index register to use) to add to the address; a modification (1 byte) that specifies which parts of the register or memory location will be read or altered; and the operation code (1 byte). All operation codes have an associated mnemonic.
MIX programs frequently use self-modifying code, in particular to return from a subroutine, as MIX lacks an automatic subroutine return stack. Self-modifying code is facilitated by the modification byte, allowing the program to store data to, for example, the address part of the target instruction, leaving the rest of the instruction unmodified.
MIX programs are typically constructed using the MIXAL assembly language; for an example, see the page.


Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities

The Texas Academy of Leadership in the Humanities (TALH ) is a residential high school supported by disciplines of the humanities located at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. The Academy is one of only two residential programs for gifted and talented high school students recognized by the Texas State Legislature. The other residential program is the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. The dual-credit program, established by the Texas Legislature in 1993, allows high school juniors and seniors to attend college level classes in order to complete their high school requirements, while at the same time gaining credits that must be accepted by any Texas public college and are transferable to other universities subject to each university's transfer regulations.
Housing and classes.
TALH students are housed in Morris Hall. Students are required to return to the dorms, which have alarmed gates with a security guard on duty at night, by a curfew of 11:00 P.M. on weeknights and midnight on weekends. Students from the academy are fully immersed with the general undergraduate population at Lamar University. Students take a full-time schedule of college classes that must meet the Texas Education Agency (TEA) requirements in addition to the local university's requirements. Also students must take Humanities I and II which are open only to TALH students.
School information.
The program was created by the 74th Legislature of the State of Texas, then the statue was amended by the 75th Legislature in 1996. The class size is about thirty students with significant fluctuation in the gender ratio. Potential students must meet certain academic qualifications set out by the legislature to be considered for admittance. Prior to 1999, parents and/or guardians were required to pay the full cost of each semester as outlined by Lamar University- Beaumont. Currently, each student receives a scholarship which covers the cost of tuition but is responsible for room, board, and book costs. The students are required to live in a section of a dorm set aside for the academy by Lamar University.
Student life.
There are a variety of academy sponsored organizations and activities that take place throughout the year. Students are also allowed to join university sponsored clubs and organizations. However permission from the administration is required for some activities. In addition, all students are required to attend weekly community meetings and perform two hours of community service as part of the program. For community service students can start a new project or continue with one already established. Following are some student organizations, activities and community service opportunities.
Scholarships and extra activities.
Prior to 1999, parents or guardians were required to pay the full cost of each semester as outlined by Lamar University. Currently, all students attending TALH receive a 100% scholarship for full tuition but must pay the room and board fees of Cardinal Village. Students may qualify for financial aid and other scholarships.
TALH students are able to attend special programs such as operas and plays in local areas. They are also allowed to join any of the clubs and organizations that Lamar University has to offer. Fraternities and sororities are not accepted as clubs, and the students are not allowed to join them.


Myron J. Gordon

Myron Jules Gordon, (October 15, 1920 – July 5, 2010) was an American economist. He was Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. In 1956, Gordon along with Eli Shapiro, published a method for valuing a stock or business, now known as the Gordon growth model.
Early life and education.
Myron Jules Gordon was born on October 15, 1920 to Ukrainian-Jewish parents who had settled in New York. He was raised in Washington Heights and Brooklyn by his parents, Jack, a salesman, and Eva, a pianist. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941 with a degree in economics, after switching his major from journalism. He then served in the United States Army until 1946.
Academic career.
Gordon held a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1941), a M.A. from Harvard University (1947), and a Ph.D. from Harvard (1952). He was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University (1947–1952), then an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1952–1962) and a professor at the University of Rochester (1962–1970) prior to joining the University of Toronto in 1970. His contributions to the field of accounting (and the application of economics and mathematics to accounting) are especially significant and worthy to note. As a leading author of accounting textbooks, he helped educate generations of accounting, business, and management students.
Gordon served as President of the American Finance Association in 1975–1976. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1993, and received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree at McMaster University in 1993, and another at the University of Toronto in 2005.
Personal life.
During his time in the military, Gordon met and married his wife Helen Elizabeth Taylor, known as Betty. They had two sons, Joe and David. Though Gordon was of Ukrainian-Jewish descent and his wife was the daughter of Baptist missionaries, they became active members of the Unitarian Church.
Gordon died in 2010 at the age of 89, after multiple strokes and general ill health.


Otto Preminger

Otto Ludwig Preminger ( , ; 5 December 1905 – 23 April 1986) was an Austro-Hungarian-born theatre and film director.
He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre. He first gained attention for film noir mysteries such as "Laura" (1944) and "Fallen Angel" (1945), while in the 1950s and 1960s, he directed high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these later films pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with themes which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction ("The Man with the Golden Arm", 1955), rape ("Anatomy of a Murder", 1959) and homosexuality ("Advise & Consent", 1962). He was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. He also had several acting roles.
Early life.
Preminger was born in 1905 in Wischnitz, Bukovina, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine), into a Jewish family. His parents were Josefa (née Fraenkel) and Markus Preminger. The couple provided a stable home life for Preminger and his younger brother Ingwald, known as "Ingo", later the producer of the original film version of "M*A*S*H" (1970).
After the assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the Great War, Russia entered the war on the Serbian side. Bukovina was invaded by the Russian Army and the Preminger family fled. Like other refugees in flight, Markus Preminger saw Austria as a safe haven for his family. He secured a position as public prosecutor in Graz, capital of Styria. When the Preminger family relocated, Otto was nearly nine, and was enrolled in a school where instruction in Catholic dogma was mandatory and Jewish history and religion had no place on the syllabus. Ingo, not yet four, remained at home.
After a year in Graz, Preminger claims he was summoned to Vienna and offered an eminent position (roughly equivalent to that of the United States Attorney General), but was told that the position would be his only if he converted to Catholicism, which he refused to do. The next year, he relocated his family to Vienna, where Otto later claimed to have been born.
Career.
Theater.
Preminger's first theatrical ambition was to become an actor. In his early teens, he was able to recite from memory many of the great monologues from the international classic repertory, and, never shy, he demanded an audience. Preminger's most successful performance in the National Library rotunda was Mark Antony's funeral oration from "Julius Caesar". As he read, watched, and after a fashion began to produce plays, he began to miss more and more classes in school.
When the war came to an end, Markus formed his own law practice. He instilled in both his sons a sense of fair play as well as respect for those with opposing viewpoints. As his father's practice continued to thrive in postwar Vienna, Otto began seriously contemplating a career in the theater. In 1923, when Preminger was 17, his soon-to-be mentor, Max Reinhardt, the renowned Viennese-born director, announced plans to establish a theatrical company in Vienna. Reinhardt's announcement was seen as a call of destiny to Preminger. He began writing to Reinhardt weekly, requesting an audition. After a few months, Preminger, frustrated, gave up, and stopped his daily visit to the post office to check for a response. Unbeknownst to him, a letter was waiting with a date for an audition which Preminger had already missed by two days.
He juggled a commitment to university (attendance of which his parents insisted upon) and to his new position as a Reinhardt apprentice. The two developed a mentor-and-protege relationship, becoming both a confidant and teacher. When the theater opened, on 1 April 1924, Preminger appeared as a furniture mover in Reinhardt's comedic staging of Carlo Goldoni's "The Servant of Two Masters". His next appearance came the next month with William Dieterle (who would later move to Hollywood) in "The Merchant of Venice". Other notable "alumni" with whom Preminger would work the same year were Mady Christians, who died of a stroke after having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and Nora Gregor, who was to star in Jean Renoir's "La Règle du jeu" (1939).
The following summer, a frustrated Preminger was no longer content to occupy the place of a subordinate and he decided to leave the Reinhardt fold. His status as a Reinhardt muse gave him an edge over much of his competition when it came to joining German-speaking theater. His first theater assignments as a director in Aussig were plays ranging from the sexually provocative Wedekind "Lulu" plays, to the Berlin-tried, melodramatic, Sergei Tretyakov play "Roar China!", a pro-Communist Agitprop.
In 1930, a wealthy industrialist from Graz approached Otto with an offer to direct a film called "Die große Liebe" ("The Great Love"). Preminger did not have the same passion for the medium as he had for theater. He accepted the assignment nonetheless. The film premiered at the Emperor Theater in Vienna on 21 December 1931, to strong reviews and business. From 1931 to 1935, he directed twenty-six shows.
On 3 August 1932, he wed a Hungarian woman, Marion Mill. The couple married only thirty minutes after her divorce from her first husband had been finalized.
Hollywood.
In April 1935, as Preminger was rehearsing a boulevard farce, "The King with an Umbrella", he received a summons from American film producer Joseph Schenck to a five o'clock meeting at the Imperial Hotel. Schenck and partner, Darryl F. Zanuck, co-founders of Twentieth Century-Fox, were on the lookout for new talent. Within a half-hour of meeting Schenck, Preminger accepted an invitation to work for Fox in Los Angeles.
Preminger's first assignment was to direct a vehicle for Lawrence Tibbett. Preminger worked efficiently, completing the film well within the budget and well before the scheduled shooting deadline. The film opened to tepid notices in November 1936. Zanuck gave Preminger the task of directing another B-picture screwball comedy film "Danger – Love at Work". Simone Simon was cast but later fired by Zanuck and replaced with Ann Sothern. The premise was that eight members of an eccentric, wealthy family have inherited their grandfather's land, and the protagonist is a lawyer tasked with persuading the family to hand the land over to a corporation that believes there is oil on the property. One of the female members of the wealthy family provides the romantic interest.
In November 1937, Zanuck's perennial emissary Gregory Ratoff brought Preminger the news that Zanuck had selected him to direct "Kidnapped", which was to be the most expensive feature to date for Twentieth Century-Fox. Zanuck himself had adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. After reading Zanuck's script, Preminger knew he was in trouble since he would be a foreign director directing in a foreign setting. During the shooting of "Kidnapped", while screening footage of the film with Zanuck, the studio head accused Preminger of making changes in a scene; in particular, one with child actor Freddie Bartholomew and a dog. Preminger, composed at first, explained, claiming he shot the scene exactly as written.
Zanuck insisted that he knew his own script. The confrontation escalated and ended with Preminger exiting the office and slamming the door. Days later, the lock to Preminger's office was changed, and his name was removed from the door. Later, a representative of Zanuck offered Preminger a buyout deal which he rejected: Preminger wanted to be paid for the remaining eleven months of his two-year contract. He searched for work at other studios, but received no offers – only two years after his arrival in Hollywood, he was unemployed in the film industry. He returned to New York, and began to re-focus on the stage. Success came quickly on Broadway for Preminger, with long-running productions, including "Outward Bound" with Laurette Taylor and Vincent Price, "My Dear Children" with John and Elaine Barrymore and "Margin for Error", in which Preminger played a shiny-domed villainous Nazi. Preminger was offered a teaching position at the Yale School of Drama and began commuting twice a week to Connecticut to lecture on directing and acting.
William Goetz, who was running Fox in Zanuck's absence, was soon impressed with Preminger and offered him a new seven-year contract calling on his services as both a director and actor. Preminger took full measure of the temporary studio czar, and accepted. He completed production on schedule, although with a slightly increased budget, by November 1942. Critics were dismissive upon the film's release the following February, noting the bad timing of the release, coinciding with the war. Before his next assignment with Fox, Preminger was asked by movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn to appear as a Nazi once more, this time in a Bob Hope comedy, "They Got Me Covered".
Preminger hoped to find possible properties he could develop before Zanuck's return, one of which was Vera Caspary's suspense novel "Laura". Before production would begin on "Laura", Preminger was given the green light to produce and direct "Army Wives", another B-picture morale booster for a country at war. Its focus was on showing the sacrifices made by women as they send their husbands off to the front.
"Laura".
Zanuck returned from the armed services with his grudge against Preminger intact. Preminger was not granted permission to direct "Laura", only to serve as producer. Rouben Mamoulian was selected to direct. Mamoulian began ignoring Preminger and started to rewrite the script. Although Preminger had no complaints about the casting of the relatively unknown Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, he balked at their choice for the film's villain, Waldo, actor Laird Cregar. Preminger explained to Zanuck that audiences would immediately identify Cregar as a villain, especially after Cregar's role as Jack the Ripper in "The Lodger".
Preminger wanted stage actor Clifton Webb to play Waldo and persuaded his boss to give Webb a screen test. Webb was cast and Mamoulian was fired for creative differences, which also included Preminger wanting Dana Andrews to be a more classy detective instead of a gumshoe detective. "Laura" started filming on 27 April 1944, with a projected budget of $849,000. After Preminger took over, the film continued shooting well into late June. When released, the film was an instant hit with audiences and critics alike, earning Preminger his first Academy Award nomination for direction.
Peak years.
Preminger expected acclaim for "Laura" would promote him to work on better pictures, but his professional fate was in the hands of Zanuck, who had Preminger take over for the ailing Ernst Lubitsch on "A Royal Scandal", a remake of Lubitsch's own silent "Forbidden Paradise" (1924), starring Pola Negri as Catherine the Great. Before he suffered a heart attack, Lubitsch had spent months in preparation, and had already cast the film. Preminger cast Tallulah Bankhead, whom he had known since 1938 when he was directing on Broadway.
Bankhead learned that Preminger's family would be barred from emigrating to the U.S. due to immigration quotas, and she asked her father (who was Speaker of the House) to intervene to save them from the Nazis. He did, which earned Bankhead Preminger's loyalty. Thus when Lubitsch wanted to make the film into a vehicle for Greta Garbo, Preminger, although he would have been eager to direct the film that brought Garbo out of retirement, refused to betray Bankhead. They became good friends and got along well during filming. The film received generally lackluster reviews as the Ruritanian romance genre had become outdated, and it failed to earn back its cost of production.
"Fallen Angel" (1945) was exactly what Preminger had been anticipating. In "Fallen Angel", a con man and womanizer ends up by chance in a small California town, where he romances a sultry waitress and a well-to-do spinster. When the waitress is found killed, the drifter, played by Dana Andrews, becomes the prime suspect. Linda Darnell played the doomed waitress. "Centennial Summer" (1946), Preminger's next film, would be his first shot entirely in color. The reviews and box office draw were tepid when the film was released in July 1946, but by the end of that year Preminger had one of the most sumptuous contracts on the lot, earning $7,500 a week.
"Forever Amber", based on Kathleen Winsor's internationally popular novel published in 1944, was Zanuck's next investment in adaptation. Preminger had read the book and disliked it immensely. Preminger had another bestseller aimed at a female audience in mind, "Daisy Kenyon". Zanuck pledged that if Preminger did "Forever Amber" first, he could go to town with "Daisy Kenyon" afterwards. "Forever Amber" had already been shooting for nearly six weeks when Preminger replaced director John Stahl. Zanuck had already spent nearly $2 million on the production.
Only after turning to his revised script did Preminger learn Zanuck had recast Linda Darnell. Zanuck was convinced that whoever played Amber would become a big star, and he wanted that woman to be one of the studio's own. Zanuck had bought the book because he believed its scandalous reputation promised big box-office returns, and was not surprised when the Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film for glamorizing a promiscuous heroine who has a child out of wedlock, and successfully lobbied 20th Century Fox to make changes to the film. "Forever Amber" opened to big business in October 1947, and garnered decent reviews. Preminger called the film "the most expensive picture I ever made and it was also the worst".
Preminger maintained a busy schedule, working with writers on scripts for two planned projects, "Daisy Kenyon" (1947) and "The Dark Wood"; the latter was not produced. Joan Crawford starred in "Daisy Kenyon" alongside Dana Andrews, Ruth Warrick and Henry Fonda. "Variety" proclaimed the film "high powered melodrama surefire for the femme market". After the modest success of "Daisy Kenyon", Preminger saw "That Lady in Ermine" as a further opportunity. Betty Grable was cast opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The film had previously been another Lubitsch project, but after Lubitsch's sudden death in November 1947, Preminger took over. His next film was a period piece based on "Lady Windermere's Fan". Over the spring and early summer of 1948 Preminger turned Oscar Wilde's play into "The Fan" (1949), which starred Madeleine Carroll; the film opened to poor notices.
Challenging taboos and censorship.
Several of his films in this period dealt with controversial and taboo themes, thereby challenging both the Motion Picture Association of America's Production Code of censorship and the Hollywood blacklist. The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the comedy "The Moon Is Blue" (1953) on the grounds of moral standards. The film was based on a Broadway play which had inspired mass protests for its use of the words "virgin" and "pregnant". Refusing to remove the offending words, Preminger had the film released without the Production Code Seal of Approval. Based on the novel by Nelson Algren, "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955) was one of the first Hollywood films to deal with heroin addiction.
Later, "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), with its frank courtroom discussions of rape and sexual intercourse led to the censors objecting to the use of words such as "rape", "sperm", "sexual climax" and "penetration". Preminger made but one concession (substituting "violation" for "penetration") and the picture was released with MPAA approval, marking the beginning of the end of the Production Code. With "Exodus" (1960) Preminger struck a first major blow against the Hollywood blacklist by acknowledging banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. The film is an adaptation of the Leon Uris bestseller about the founding of the state of Israel. Preminger also acted in a few movies including the World War II Luft-Stalag Commandant, Oberst von Scherbach of the German POW camp "Stalag 17" (1953), directed by Billy Wilder.
From the mid-1950s, most of Preminger's films used animated titles designed by Saul Bass, and many had jazz scores. At the New York City Opera, in October 1953, Preminger directed the American premiere (in English translation) of Gottfried von Einem's opera "Der Prozeß", based on Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial". Soprano Phyllis Curtin headed the cast. Preminger also adapted two operas for the screen during the decade. "Carmen Jones" (1954) is a reworking of the Bizet opera "Carmen" to a wartime African-American setting while "Porgy and Bess" (1959) is based on the George Gershwin opera. His two films of the early 1960s were "Advise & Consent" (1962), a political drama from the Allen Drury bestseller with a homosexual subtheme' and "The Cardinal" (1963), a drama set in the Vatican hierarchy for which Preminger received his second Best Director Academy Award nomination.
Later career.
Laurence Olivier, who played a police inspector in the psychological thriller "Bunny Lake Is Missing" (1965), shot in England, recalled in his autobiography "Confessions of an Actor" that he found Preminger a "bully". Adam West, who portrayed the lead in the 1960s "Batman" television series, echoed Olivier's opinion. He remembered Preminger, who played Mr. Freeze, as being rude and unpleasant, especially when he disregarded the typical thespian etiquette of subtly cooperating when being helped to his feet, in a scene by West and Burt Ward.
Beginning in 1965, Preminger made a string of films in which he attempted to make stories that were fresh and distinctive, but the films he made, including "In Harm's Way" (1965) and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" (1970), became both critical and financial flops. Preminger's "Hurry Sundown" (1967) is a lengthy drama set in the U.S. South and was partly intended to break cinematic racial and sexual taboos. However, the film was poorly received and ridiculed for a heavy-handed approach, and for the dubious casting of Michael Caine as an American Southerner.
"Hurry Sundown" signaled a decline in Preminger's reputation, as it was followed by several other films which were critical and commercial failures, including "Skidoo" (1968), a failed attempt at a hip sixties comedy (and Groucho Marx's last film), and "Rosebud" (1975), a terrorism thriller which was also widely ridiculed. Several publicized disputes with leading actors did further damage to Preminger's reputation. His last film, an adaptation of the Graham Greene espionage novel "The Human Factor" (1979), had financial problems and was barely released.
Preservation.
The Academy Film Archive has preserved several of Otto Preminger's films, including "The Man With the Golden Arm", "The Moon is Blue", "The Cardinal" and "Advise & Consent".
Personal life.
Preminger and his wife Marion became increasingly estranged. He lived like a bachelor, as was the case when he met the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee and began an open relationship with her.
Lee had already attempted to break into movie roles, but she was not taken seriously as anything more than a stripper. She appeared in B pictures in less-than-minor roles. Preminger's liaison with Lee produced a child, Erik. Lee rejected the idea of Preminger's helping to support the child and instead elicited a vow of silence from Preminger: he was not to reveal Erik's paternity to anyone, including Erik himself. Lee called the boy Erik Kirkland after her husband, Alexander Kirkland, from whom she was separated at the time. It was not until 1966, when Preminger was 60 years old and Erik was 22, that father and son finally met.
In May 1946, Marion asked for a divorce, after meeting a wealthy (and married) Swedish financier, Axel Wenner-Gren. The Premingers' divorce ended smoothly and speedily. Marion did not seek alimony, only personal belongings. Axel's wife, however, was unwilling to grant a divorce. Marion returned to Otto and resumed appearances as his wife, and nothing more. Preminger had begun dating Natalie Draper, a niece of Marion Davies.
While filming "Carmen Jones" (1954), Preminger began an affair with the film's star, Dorothy Dandridge, which lasted four years. During that period he advised her on career matters, including an offer made to Dandridge for the featured role of Tuptim in "The King and I" (1956). Preminger advised her to turn it down, as he believed it unworthy of her. She later regretted taking his advice.
Death.
Preminger died in his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1986, aged 80, from lung cancer while suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He was survived by three children; his son, Erik, and twin daughters, from his marriage to Hope Bryce. Preminger was cremated and his ashes are in a niche in the Azalea Room of the Velma B. Woolworth Memorial Chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Awards.
Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. As the producer of the film, he received the nomination. He was twice nominated for Best Director: for "Laura" and for "The Cardinal". He won the Bronze Berlin Bear award for the film "Carmen Jones" at the 5th Berlin International Film Festival.
Further reading.
Journals
Books
External links.


Kwah language

Kwah (Kwa), also known as Baa ("Bàː"), is a Niger–Congo language of uncertain affiliation; the more it has been studied, the more divergent it appears. Joseph Greenberg counted it as one of the Bambukic languages of the Adamawa family. Boyd (1989) assigned it its own branch within Waja–Jen. Kleinewillinghöfer (1996) removed it from Waja–Jen as an independent branch of Adamawa. When Blench (2008) broke up Adamawa, Kwah became a provisional independent branch of his larger Savannas family.
Blench (2019) lists the locations of Baa as Gyakan and Kwa towns (located near Munga) in Numan LGA, Adamawa State, Nigeria. One Baa-speaking person (singular) is "raBáà" (sg.), and more than one would be "Báà" (pl.); the language is referred to by speakers as "nyaa Báà". The Baa varieties in each of the two towns differ primarily in phonology.
Baa traditional religion has two main deities, Gbandima and Kassimin.


Michael Klarman

Michael J. Klarman (born 1959) is an American legal historian and scholar of constitutional law.
Currently, Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School. Formerly, he was James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Elizabeth D. and Richard A. Merrill Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Early life.
Klarman grew up in Baltimore. His father was a public health economist. He is the brother of investor Seth Klarman.
Education.
Klarman holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a D.Phil. from Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) and an M.A. and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. After his graduation from law school, he clerked for then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she was on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Scholarship.
Klarman specializes in the constitutional history of race. He contends that the Supreme Court of the United States has historically been hostile to the rights of minorities and has not consistently enforced constitutional protections for them. Klarman argues that civil rights protections arise out of social mores from which the court takes its cue.
Klarman has also defended political process theory as a method of constitutional interpretation.


Kathryn Mann

Kathryn Mann is a mathematician who has won the Rudin Award, Birman Prize, Duszenko Award, and Sloan Fellowship for her research in geometric topology and geometric group theory. She is an assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Education and career.
Mann graduated from the University of Toronto in 2008, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and philosophy. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 2014. Her dissertation, "Components of Representation Spaces", was supervised by Benson Farb.
Mann was a Morrey Visiting Assistant Professor and National Science Foundation funded postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley from 2014 to 2016, postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 2015, a visiting professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University in 2016, and Manning Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Brown University from 2017 to 2019. She moved to Cornell University as an assistant professor in 2019.
Research.
Mann's research involves the symmetries of manifolds.
She has made significant progress on a problem posed by Étienne Ghys: when the symmetries of one manifold act nontrivially on a second manifold, must the first manifold have smaller or equal dimension to the second one?
She has also studied the rigidity of groups of symmetries of surfaces.
Recognition.
In 2016, Mann won the Mary Ellen Rudin Award for "her deep and extensive work on homeomorphism groups of manifolds". The Association for Women in Mathematics gave Mann their 2019 Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry, for "major breakthroughs in the theory of dynamics of group actions on manifolds". Also in 2019, the Wrocław Mathematicians Foundation gave Mann the Kamil Duszenko Award.
Mann has also been funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and by a Sloan Research Fellowship.


Hugh Brogan

Denis Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan (20 March 1936 – 26 July 2019) known as Hugh Brogan, was a British historian and biographer.
Early life.
The son of Sir Denis Brogan and Olwen Phillis Francis (Lady Brogan), OBE, archaeologist and authority on Roman Libya, he was educated at St Faith's School, Cambridge, Repton School, and St John's College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1959 and MA in 1964. From the time when he was a schoolboy, he was a frequent correspondent of J.R.R. Tolkien regarding the latter's works. Tolkien's published Letters include five addressed to Brogan; these are dated 7 April 1948, Christmas 1948, 18 September 1954, 11 September 1955, and 14 December 1955. A draft of a letter addressed to Brogan but not sent is also included.
Career.
Brogan was on the staff of The Economist from 1960 to 1963, and was elected a Harkness Fellow in 1962, then was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, from 1963 to 1974. He was then part of the department of history at the University of Essex from 1974 to 1998, first as a lecturer, then a reader, and finally as Professor of History from 1992 to 1998.


William Asher

William Milton Asher (August 8, 1921 – July 16, 2012) was an American television and film producer, film director, and screenwriter. He was one of the most prolific early television directors, producing or directing over two dozen series.
With television in its infancy, Asher introduced the sitcom "Our Miss Brooks", which was adapted from a radio show. He began directing "I Love Lucy" by 1952. As a result of his early success, Asher was considered an "early wunderkind of TV-land," and was hyperbolically credited in one magazine article with "inventing" the sitcom. In 1964, he began to direct episodes of "Bewitched", which starred his wife Elizabeth Montgomery. He produced the series from the fourth season
Asher was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, winning once for directing "Bewitched" in 1966. He was also nominated for the DGA Award in 1951 for "I Love Lucy".
Early life.
Asher was born in New York City to stage actress Lillian Bonner and producer Ephraim M. Asher (1887–1937), whose movie credits were mostly as an associate producer. His sister, Betty Asher, was an MGM publicist for Judy Garland. His father was Jewish, his mother Catholic. Asher's family moved to Los Angeles when he was around 3, where he often accompanied his father to the movie studio.
Asher's parents divorced when he was 11, resulting in a return to New York with his mother. He later recalled that this period was filled with turmoil, as his mother was abusive and an alcoholic. As a result of having to live in New York with his mother, he dropped out of school and, after working in the mailroom at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, joined the Army in 1941. He served in the Army Signal Corps for four years, stationed in Astoria, Queens New York City as a unit photographer.
Career.
Asher returned to California to direct "Leather Gloves" (1948), a low-budget film. He eventually gravitated to television (then a new medium), and gained a job writing short story "fillers" for various programs, which evolved into a series called "Little Theatre." From this work, he gained a contract with Columbia Pictures to work on a film musical for Harry Cohn.
Asher received an offer from CBS Studios to direct "Our Miss Brooks", starring Eve Arden, a television version of the radio show. In 1952, Desi Arnaz asked Asher to direct an episode of his series "I Love Lucy"; by that show's end in 1957, Asher had directed 110 of the series' 179 episodes, Asher later commented that even though the creators knew the show was good, they did not believe it would become an American icon. "When we did the show, we thought, 'That's it, we're done with it.' We never dreamed it would last this long. Lucille Ball, obviously, was one of TV's true pioneers."
Asher was considered an "early wunderkind of TV-land, blazing a path in the new medium" of television. Writer and producer William Froug described Asher as a "hyphenate of a different stripe, a director-producer", commenting that he was one of many "restless Hollywood professionals who, like nomads, drifted from job to job, always delivering competent, if not inspired work".
In addition to "Our Miss Brooks" and "I Love Lucy", Asher directed episodes of "The Colgate Comedy Hour", "Make Room for Daddy", "The Twilight Zone" (1959 TV series), "The Patty Duke Show", "Gidget", "The Dukes of Hazzard", and "Alice". Asher and Montgomery befriended President John F. Kennedy, and, together with Frank Sinatra, planned Kennedy's 1961 inaugural ceremony.
Asher's best-known work was "Bewitched", which he directed regularly over its entire eight-year run, although he was only credited as producer for its last five seasons. At that time, he was married to the show's star Elizabeth Montgomery. They divorced soon after the series' cancellation in 1972.
Asher also directed a number of theatrical release films, including "Beach Party", "Muscle Beach Party", "Bikini Beach", "Beach Blanket Bingo", and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini", for all of which he was also a co-writer. Television historian Wheeler Dixon later suggested that the Beach Party films were not only "visions of paradise" for the audience, but also for Asher, who used them "to create a fantasy world to replace his own troubled childhood."
Asher also directed movies made for TV. He later recalled his directorial years:
Asher received a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in November 2003.
Personal life.
Asher was first married in 1951 to Danny Sue Nolan, with whom he had two children; the couple divorced in 1961. Asher then married Elizabeth Montgomery in 1963, just before "Bewitched" began its run. They had three children and divorced in 1973. His third marriage was to Joyce Bulifant from 1976 to 1993. He adopted her son, actor John Mallory Asher. This marriage also ended in divorce. In his later years, Asher resided in Palm Desert, California, with Meredith Coffin Asher, his fourth and final wife.
Asher counted Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. as his friends, and would sometimes carouse with them in Las Vegas, flying there from Hollywood in Sinatra's plane, and then flying back to be at work at the studio at 5 AM.
Death.
Asher died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at age 90 on July 16, 2012.


Centre for Adult Education

The Centre for Adult Education (CAE), founded in 1947 as the Council for Adult Education, is an adult education institution based in Victoria, Australia. It runs short courses and nationally recognised training, as well as a Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) program. It is a statutory authority under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006. It is partly funded by the state government's Adult Community and Further Education Division.


Lach dialects

The Lachian dialects (Lach dialects, , , not to be confused with the Lechitic language group) are a group of West Slavic dialects that form a transition between the Polish and Czech language. They are spoken in parts of Czech Silesia, the Hlučín Region, and northeastern Moravia, as well as in some adjacent villages in Poland. Most Czech researchers consider Lach a dialect of Czech, whereas Polish dialectologists tend to ascribe Polish origins to Lach.
Lachian, which is close to the Polish language, is divided into numerous subdialects (Western, Eastern and Southern), it can therefore also be regarded as a dialect continuum, with limited mutual intelligibility between the eastern and western dialects. This dialectal differentiation is not typical for the Czech Republic, where there is a good deal of dialect leveling, especially in the west of the republic.
Most Lachs, especially younger speakers, now speak standard Czech, and use it as a written language, while Lach remains the language of everyday speech. Lachian contains many German loanwords, according to some sources, up to 8% of the vocabulary.
The poet Óndra Łysohorsky is probably the best-known writer in a Lachian dialect. Łysohorsky was notable for refusing to write in Standard Czech, instead writing in the local dialect of Upper Silesia. In doing so, he contributed significantly to the development of the Lach literary language.


Elkan Bauer

Elkan Bauer was an Austrian composer and friend and contemporary of Johann Strauss II born in Nikolsburg, on April 4, 1852.
Biography.
Despite being unable to neither read nor write music, he whistled melodies which were then transcribed and performed in the outdoor kiosks of Vienna. After being taken prisoner by the Germans in 1942, the Nazis burned all his possessions including his house, his documents and his scores. He was killed in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt at the age of ninety, on September 20, 1942. Miraculously, thanks to a cousin, who had fled with his family to England before the Kristallnacht, there survived two scores of his unpublished musical waltz ("Aeroplane waltz" and "Diana waltz"). The writer Elisa Springer, his maternal granddaughter, who wrote a book, "Das Schweigen der Lebenden" ("The Silence of the Living"), preserved these scores.


Bill Idelson

Bill Idelson (August 21, 1919 – December 31, 2007) was an actor, writer, director and producer widely known for his teenage role as Rush Gook on the radio comedy "Vic and Sade" and his recurring television role as Herman Glimscher on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in the 1960s.
Background.
Idelson was born in Forest Park, Illinois, his parents were Russian immigrants. He joined the U.S. Navy in World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals as a night fighter pilot. He later married actress Seemah Wilder with whom he had three sons, Paul, Howie and Jonathan as well as a daughter, TV writer and actress Ellen Idelson, who died in 2003.
Idelson died in 2007 from complications due to a hip injury. On his death, writer-director Norman Corwin told the "Los Angeles Times" Idelson was "a luminary, he stood out among the radio comedians." Creator of "The" "Dick Van Dyke Show" Carl Reiner, said Idelson was "a very subtle actor. He made no big movements, and every time you cut to him you could get a laugh."
Career.
Radio.
Idelson's acting career began in 1931 on Chicago's WGN radio, when he played Skeezix on "Uncle Walt and Skeezix", a radio drama based on the "Gasoline Alley" comic strip. One year later he landed the role of Rush on the long-running "Vic and Sade", playing the role until he joined the U.S. Navy. He also had the title role on "Cousin Willie" and portrayed Bill Clark on "Secret City", Hugo on "The Trouble with the Truitts", and Chuck on "That Brewster Boy".
After the war, his acting credits included radio and television versions of the daytime drama series "One Man's Family".
Television.
In "The Dick Van Dyke Show" Idelson played Herman Glimscher, the milquetoast boyfriend of Sally Rogers (Rose Marie). "Herman could never marry because his mother wouldn't sign off on it yet, and when he had a date with Sally Rogers he brought his mother a couple of times," show creator and co-star Carl Reiner told the "Los Angeles Times". He re-created the role in the first decade of the 21st century for a reunion show of "The Dick Van Dyke Show", with Herman finally married to Sally as she joins her former colleague Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) to write a new special for their megalomaniacal former boss, Alan Brady (Reiner).
Idelson guest starred on episodes of "Dragnet", "The Twilight Zone", "My Favorite Martian", "The Odd Couple", "Happy Days", "Perry Mason" and "Will & Grace", in which he appeared along with his wife and daughter.
He wrote the "Long Distance Call" episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1960) for CBS then several episodes of "The Dick Van Dyke Show", leading him to further writing work on "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.", "The Andy Griffith Show", "Get Smart", "The Odd Couple", "M*A*S*H" and "Happy Days". He received two Writers Guild Awards for best episodic comedy, one for an episode of "Get Smart" and the other for an episode of "The Andy Griffith Show".
His producing credits included "The McLean Stevenson Show", "The Bob Newhart Show", "Anna and the King" and "Love, American Style".
Film.
Idelson appeared as the head of a band organization in the film "Pete Kelly's Blues".
Writing.
He was the author of three books, "The Story of Vic and Sade", "Gibby" (an autobiographical novel about a fighter pilot) and "Bill Idelson's Writing Class".


Nathalie Anderson

Nathalie F. Anderson (born 1948) is an American poet and librettist. She is a 1993 Pew Fellow, and author of several books of poetry: "Following Fred Astaire", "Crawlers", "Quiver", "Held and Firmly Bound" (a chapbook), and "Stain". In collaboration with composer Thomas Whitman, she authored four libretti: "The Black Swan", "Sukey in the Dark", "Babylon" and "A Scandal in Bohemia"
Life.
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Anderson earned her bachelor's degree from Agnes Scott College in 1970, her master's degree from Georgia State University, and her Ph.D. degree from Emory University.
She has been teaching at Swarthmore College since 1982 and is currently a Professor in their Department of English Literature. She is also Director of their Program in Creative Writing as well as a Poet in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
Anderson runs Philadelphia's literary event listserv, Lit-Philly.
Some of Anderson's work has been featured in various print and online journals: Atlanta Review, Poetry Daily, Fox Chase Review, Natural Bridge, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The Recorder: The Journal of American Irish Historical Society, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Nimrod, Inkwell Magazine, The Louisville Review, and Southern Poetry Review.
On November 8, 2012, University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House inaugurated the Eva and Leo Sussman Poetry Program with poetry readings by featured guest writers and instructors, Nathalie Anderson, Elaine Terranova, and Joan Hutton Landis.


Stacy Levy

Stacy Levy (born 1960) is a sculptor who works with ecological natural patterns and processes, often using water and water flows as a medium. Many of her works address environmental problems at the same time that they make the functioning of the environment visible. Her studio is based in rural Pennsylvania, but she works on projects around the world.
Biography.
Stacy Levy studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
She graduated from Yale University with a BA in Sculpture, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University with a MFA in Sculpture.
Work.
Stacy Levy uses the language of landscape and art to tell the ecological story of a site, drawing on both art and science. Her projects reveal the sometime hidden natural world in the urban environment. Stacy’s work integrates art with site design to create memorable places alive with nature and sensation. Her projects distill the essence of nature and reveal its processes to the user. Stacy works closely with building architects, landscape architects, engineers, horticulturalists and soil scientists to create artworks that allow natural systems like the infiltration of rainwater, to function and thrive. Through a lyrical approach to natural science, Levy blends an understanding of sustainable design and ecological concepts and harnesses the ephemeral changes of weather and light with the lasting presence of sculpture.
From rivers to runoff, Levy has explored the many facets of water: urban watersheds, storm water, hydrologic patterns and water treatment. Her installation "Calendar of Rain" creates a year-long record of precipitation, collected daily in shimmering glass jars. Her project “Tide Poles” for the City of Yonkers' waterfront incorporates the use of LED technology to visually manifest the ebb and flow of the Hudson River tide. Her projects "Tide Field" and "River Rooms" at Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia offer visitors new ways to become more aware of and engage with changes in the river.
Levy has completed numerous rainwater pieces including a watershed rain terrace for Penn State University's new Arboretum, and a rain garden for Springside School with the Philadelphia Water Department and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. She has public commissions in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Tampa, Toronto and Niigata, Japan.
Recent works.
Spiral Wetland, 2013.
Lake Fayetteville, Fayetteville, AR
Spiral Wetland is an eco-art project supported by the Walton ArtCenter as part of the Artosphere Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Lake Fayetteville.
Spiral Wetland is made with native soft rush, "Juncus effusus", growing in a closed-cell foam mat anchored to the lake’s floor. The plants help remove excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from the lake water, and the mat adds shade for fish habitat. Inspired by "Spiral Jetty (1970)", Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork sited in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, this spiral is a working earthwork floating on the surface of the lake.
Tide Flowers, 2012.
Hudson River Park, Piers 34 and 25, New York, NY on hold
Hudson River Park Trust with Mathews Neilsen Landscape Architects
33 units 9’ wide Marine vinyl, steel, polycarbonate plastic, foam.
The Hudson River, brushing against the concrete and glass of the urban fabric, rises up and down twice a day with the eternal clock of the tides. This tidal activity connects us to the ocean, to the moon and to a daily schedule that is nature’s own.
Tide Flowers will register the tidal movement with a simple visual presence of brilliantly-colored flowers blooming at high tide and closing at low tide. Tide Flowers is made up of thirty-three flower units, each with six petals, attached to selected wooden piles on two piers. Twenty-five flowers will be placed in a field-like formation on selected pilings at the end of pier 25, visible from both the path and the new park. Eight additional tide flowers will be attached to pilings closer to the pathway to give park users a hint of the larger field of flowers beyond.
River Eyelash, 2005.
Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh, PA
3,000 painted buoys radiate out from the bulkhead of the Point State Park, like an eyelash for the city. The eyelash continuously changes formation in response to wind direction, speed of the currents and boat wakes.
Kept Out, 2009-2010.
Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, PA. Part of Edible Landscapes, curated by Amy Lipton
Kept Out consists of a pair of deer exclosures, the fenced areas to keep deer out: one built near the artist’s studio in a woodland in Pennsylvania’s Ridge and Valley region and the other at the woodlands edge of Schuylkill Center for Environmental and Education in the Piedmont ecosystem. Both sites face a great deal of deer pressure.
AMD&Art Project, 1995 -2005..
Vintondale, Vintondale, PA
Collaboration with Julie Bargmann, Landscape Architect. Robert Deason, Hydrogeologist and T. Allan Comp Historian
Acid mine drainage pollutes hundreds of miles of streams in Pennsylvania. At Mine Number Six in Vintondale, in the coal mining region of south central Pennsylvania, artists, landscape architects, scientists and historians collaborated on ways to treat AMD while interpreting the coal mining history and the passive treatment processes. This project creates a public park and water treatment facility.
Watermap: Friends’ Central School, 2003.
Wynnewood, PA
Tributaries of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers are deeply sandblasted into bluestone paved terrace. When it rains, the rainwater flows into the runnels of the tributaries and then into deeply inscribed Delaware River, creating a watershed in miniature.
Cloud Stones: Mineral Springs Park, Seattle Arts Council, 2004.
Seattle, WA
The highly polished black stone domes reflect the sky and the clouds formations. Text sandblasted around the domes tells of the types of weather which these cloud formations bring. The white domes have more of evening presence, and their text tells of the moon and stars. As the light fades at dusk, the white domes remain bright while the dark domes sink into the shadows.
Lotic Meander - Ontario Science Centre's Project Art, 2007.
"Lotic Meander" is a serpentine walkway that resembles a dried riverbed, located outside the Ontario Science Centre's Great Hall. Modelled on the meanderings of the Humber River, the snakelike stream is 91.4 metres long and winds along a path that takes up most of the Solar Patio. The piece is made from 116 granite slabs from India, and 8 nearly perfect hemispherical or hemiellipsoidal black domes carved from boulders imported from China. The highly polished domes are similar, in appearance, to the domes used to house surveillance cameras.
Along some of the curves of the path there are also nicely polished smooth round glass pebbles, in variously coloured translucent glass.
"Lotic" in the title refers to the ecosystems of different magnitudes of flowing water in nature.


Pennywhistle modem

The Pennywhistle was an early acoustic coupler modem originally designed and built by Lee Felsenstein in 1973, and later commercialized and offered for sale in 1976. It was one of the earliest modems available for hobbyist computer users. Like most acoustic coupler modems, the Pennywhistle was replaced by the Hayes Smartmodem and similar models from the early 1980s.
History.
Prior modem.
As part of the effort that would lead to the Community Memory bulletin board system, Lee Felsenstein had found an Omnitech modem ("or something like that"). Designed to operate at rates as high as 300 bits per second (bit/s), the modem was able to change its speed to match conditions or differences in the modems at either end. In general it was good for only 100 bit/s, the speed that was used for much of its operational life. The modem was attached to a Teletype Model 33 ASR machine at Leopold's Records in Berkeley, California and connected to the SDS 940 mainframe computer in San Francisco.
New design.
Felsenstein was unimpressed by the Omnitech design, especially its price of $300, and convinced himself he could design a better version. He found that one half of the design problem was easy; generating the proper tones for transmission was simple. The other half of the problem was much harder; listening to the incoming signal and discriminating between the tones for "one" and "zero". The traditional solution was to generate a local reference tone and compare it to the incoming signal, but this was subject to many problems, from noise or distortion on the line, to drifting of the local tone due to events as mundane as temperature changes.
Felsenstein found two key improvements that led to a dramatically less expensive and more reliable design. The first was to ignore the idea of a variable baud rate, which was useful in some contexts, but not when used purely for data communications over known-good lines. The other improvement, which would prove key to the design, was to use the incoming signal itself as the reference tone. While working at Ampex, Felsenstein had learned that the signal would always return to a "one" tone between sending bits of data; his new design looked for these signals and used them to resynchronize a local phase locked loop (PLL). The system stored the "one" voltage generated by the PLL on a capacitor and set the threshold voltage to a fixed offset. The capacitor would slowly recharge and be reset by the next "one' voltage.
These improvements meant the modem was able to follow changes in the reference tone no matter what the source of that drifting was, local or remote. It also eliminated the need for a local tunable oscillator, reducing the price of the system.
Commercialization.
In 1976, Felsenstein was visiting "the junk man", Marty Spergel of M&R Electronics. Felsenstein had been talking about building a design for a data terminal he called the Tom Swift Terminal, but the design wasn't ready for development. Felsenstein then asked if Spergel would be interested in a related project, a modem that he had previously designed. Spergel was able to cobble together a version of the modem for a price of $109.
The two then sent a copy of the schematics to Les Solomon at "Popular Electronics" magazine, where it was featured on the cover of its March 1976 issue. M&R offered the Pennywhistle in kit form for $129.95, or fully assembled for $225. It was offered for sale for several years. For comparison, the Novation CAT was listed at $179 in 1981 after several years of falling electronics prices.
Description.
Like other acoustic coupled modems, the Pennywhistle design was dominated by the two large rubber cups on the top of the device that were used to hold the handset of a standard Western Electric phone. The Pennywhistle had a "step" cut into the front of the case where the various control switches were located, and the RS-232 port projected directly out of the front of the case.


Parisa Mehrkhodavandi

Parisa Mehrkhodavandi is a Canadian chemist who is one of the inventors of Dinuclear indium catalysts and their use for (co)polymerization of cyclic esters.
Biography.
Parisa Mehrkhodavandi completed her undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of British Columbia in 1998. Following this, Mehrkhodavandi pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Richard R. Schrock. In 2002, Mehrkhodavandi graduated with her Ph.D. completing a thesis work focused on polymerization and catalysis. She conducted a post-doctoral research stint at the California Institute of Technology working together with John E. Bercaw and Robert H. Grubbs. Mehrkhodavandi returned to the University of British Columbia as faculty in 2005 and was later promoted to associate professor in 2013.
Over her career, Mehrkhodavandi has been recognized with numerous awards, including but not limited to:
Research.
Mehrkhodavandi’s research focuses on catalysis, where her group is pursuing new ligand design strategies. Her work has contributed to new synthetic routes for biodegradable polymers, and fundamental mechanistic insights. Her group has a specific interest in the formation of catalysts that would allow for enantioselective organic reactions/transformations, such as chiral dinuclear indium complexes. The group is also working on the development of biodegradable polyesters using these ligands along with cyclic esters. This is being done in 3 main ways: the first of which is the use of Lewis acid metal centers with chiral ligand supports to open cyclic lactones to ring-opening polymerizations. The second is the use of a chiral indium salen catalyst that allows for more precise iso-selectivity similar to chiral aluminum salen catalysts, but with higher activity than aluminum catalysts. The final method utilizes an ethoxy-bridged dinuclear indium catalyst that allows for the creation of diblock polymers due to its high activity and selective control.
Publications.
Mehrkhodavandi has published a significant amount of publications over her career. In recent works, Mehrkhodavandi writes about the role of the first alkoxide-bridged indium complex and the zinc analogues as important catalysts in the ring opening polymerization of lactides into polylactic acid. The article pertains to how the indium complex bearing either the chiral or achiral ligand allows for the polymerization of racemic lactide into a highly heterotactic polylactic acid and how the indium complex along with the chiral ligand polymerizes meso-lactide into virtually atactic polylactic acid. Mehrkhodavandi discusses the mechanisms of these reactions in detail, along with the synthesis of the catalysts and activity of the resulting polymers. In another paper, Mehrkhodavandi writes about the use of an indium catalyst as a catalyst for lactide polymerization that has both high activity and high enantioselectivity - other lactide polymerizations feature either high activity or high enantioselectivity. The results demonstrate site control as the primary factor behind the selectivity of the catalyst.


Bayot language

Bayot (Bayot Si James, Baiote, Bayotte) is a language of southern Senegal, southwest of Ziguinchor in a group of villages near Nyassia, and in northwestern Guinea-Bissau, along the Senegalese border, and in the Gambia.
The Kugere and Kuxinge (Essin) dialects of Senegal and the Arame (Edamme) and Gubaare dialects of Guinea-Bissau are distinct enough to be sometimes considered different languages.
Bayot is the most divergent of the Jola languages, in the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family.


Columbia University Science Honors Program

The Columbia University Science Honors Program (SHP) is a science program at Columbia University that runs during the school year for tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade high-school students.
Curriculum.
Since 1958, SHP has offered courses spanning the full range of the pure and applied sciences, from organic chemistry, neuroscience and physiological psychology, to computer programming in Java and calculus in the complex plane, as well as introductions to special relativity, quantum theory, particle physics and physical cosmology. The program was directed by educator Donald Barr from its inception until 1964, and during that period admitted students as young as ten years old. It boasts many famous alumni, including the creator of GNU, Richard Stallman, and several Nobel Laureates. The program was run by Professor Allan Blaer for many years, and has recently been taken over by Professor Jeremy Dodd.
Administration.
Classes are held each Saturday throughout the academic year, from September through May at Pupin Hall at Columbia University.
There are no tuition charges for the program, but students must provide their own transportation expenses, to and from Columbia's campus in New York City. The program receives funding from the university, and donations from corporations and foundations, as well individual donations from students.
Admission.
To apply to the SHP, students must go online to the Columbia SHP website; however, this was not the procedure in 1958 when the program started. The main portion of the application process is a rigorous, three-hour examination proctored in the Columbia University campus that contains questions in both mathematics and science. The exam is tripartite, consisting of a 50 question "easy" mathematics section, a 75 question survey science section, and a 15 question "challenge" mathematics section. The average acceptance rate for the program is usually around 10%. There are 300-400 participants in the program across all 3 grades (10,11,12).
Applications are mailed to schools within a 75-mile radius of Columbia's New York City campus, and there are several more requirements besides the test: A transcript of the student's grades, a recommendation by a science or math teacher, and a student essay are also required.


Russian dialects

Russian dialects are spoken variants of the Russian language.
Russian dialects and territorial varieties are divided in two conceptual chronological and geographic categories:
In Russia.
Depending on the presence or the absence of vowel reduction ("akanye" and/or "ikanye") and the pronunciation of Proto-Slavic *g, Russian is divided into two main dialectical divisions and the intermediate one:
The dialects of the southern Ural, Siberia and the Far East may be of all three groups, depending on where the settlers from European Russia came from. The dialects of the Lower Don and the Northern Caucasus are of the Southern Russian origin.
Dialects within Russia.
Central or Middle Russian.
Bashkort Russian.
Bashkort Russian is characterised by the adoption of native Bashkir and Tatar words such as айда replacing давай to mean "let's go".
Lake Peipus.
Lake Peipus dialect (Russian: Причудский говор) is a Russian language variety spoken on both sides of the Lake Peipus in Pskov Oblast, Russia and some counties of Estonia. It originated as a mix of Pskov and Gdov dialects of the Central Russian cluster. As many other dialects from this area, it is often considered to be transitional between Russian and Belarusian. Lake Peipus dialects also include some loanwords from the Estonian language.
The dialect has been studied and described by Olga Rovnova of the University of Tartu who has conducted fieldwork in Russian Old Believers' communities in Estonia.
Southern Russian.
Astrakhani Russian.
Astrakhani Russian is a collection of varieties of Russian spoken in the Astrakhan Oblast, predominantly by the ethnically mixed population — ethnic Russians (61%), Kazakhs (17%), Tatars (7%) among the main speakers, and include many other groups such as Azeris, "Dagestani" (by self-identification according to the 2010 census), Nogay, and Ukrainians.
Like Dagestani Russian, Astrakhan Russian refers to many different dialects varying depending on a speaker's native language, ethnicity, age, occupation, and other social factors. Even in the metropolitan area of Astrakhan where a person of a minority background is likely to grow up speaking only Russian, traces of their heritage language are still present.
Eastern Europe.
Moldovan Russian.
Moldovan Russian is characterised by differences in orthography, with the use of ("Moldova") instead of ("Moldavia") or ("Chisinau") instead of in government and media of Moldova. It is also characterized by Romanian loanwords. This change is also widely accepted by Russian-language media inside of Russia, as well. Russian is more often used as a second language and as the language of interethnic communication than as a first language in the country, which contributes to influence from the state language, Romanian.
Ukrainian Russian.
Odessan Russian.
The Russian language as spoken in Odessa is influenced by Yiddish and Ukrainian in grammar, vocabulary, and phraseology. As a result, many phrases sound inherently and uniquely humorous to Russian speakers and constitute a staple of Odessa humour. Also, the Odessa dialect of Yiddish has plenty of Russianisms.
Caucasus.
Abkhaz Russian.
Abkhaz Russian is characterised by the use of Abkhaz terms, orthographical differences, and patterns of speech that diverge from that of Standard Russian.
Chechen Russian.
Notable variety features include use of [у] in place of [в], such as in привет, pronounced [приуэт]. Additionally, "дон" is used as a filler word, similar to ну or короче in standard Russian.
Dagestani Russian.
Dagestani Russian (Russian: Дагестанский русский) is a regional variety of the Russian language spoken in Dagestan, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, and some of the neighboring regions including Astrakhan Oblast and Kalmykia. It is characterized by heavy influence from vernacular languages, mostly those belonging to the Northeast Caucasian and Turkic language families. It is considered a low prestige language and mostly used in informal domains. By some measures, it is considered an ethnolect.
Armenian Russian.
Armenian Russian is the regional variety of Russian spoken in Armenia and the partially-recognised Republic of Artsakh (as Artsakhi (Armenian) Russian), where parliament voted to establish Russian an official language in March of 2021.
There are some vocabulary differences to the variety of Russian as spoken in Armenia/Arstakh, such as:
Central Asia.
Kazakhstani Russian.
Most key word differences come in the form of toponyms of renamed cities after the 1991 independence of Kazakhstan. Not all renamings are manifested in the Russian language, such as with the city of Almaty, still known by its former name of Alma-Ata in Russian, because they sound similar. Other differences include names for authorities such as мажилис, мажилисмен which substitute the Russian word депутат. Акимат is a localised Russian construction of the borrowed word Аким, meaning "mayor", and given the traditional -ат suffix in standard Russian that is used for words such as секретариат and ректорат. Kazakhstani Russian is often classified as being influenced strongly by Kazakh and the use of Kazakh words.
Kyrgyzstani Russian.
Kyrgyzstani Russian is primarily characterised by orthographic differences. Киргизская Республика (Kirgiz Republic) and Киргизия (Kirgizia) are the standard Russian names, but the country is called Кыргызская Республика (Kyrgyz Republic) or Кыргызстан (Kyrgyzstan) in Russian by the local authorities. The difference between ы and и in naming is classified as a linguistic dispute and is not currently compulsory for Russian-language media to use.
There are also word differences, such as () replacing the standard ().
Other.
Alaskan.
Ninilchik Russian is an isolated dialect of Russian spoken in Alaska.
Israeli.
The Russian language in Israel, spoken by Russian repatriates, differs from the Russian language in Russia. Differences range from individual words (such as «йом ришон», "yom rishon", instead of «воскресенье» for Sunday; «матнас», matnas instead of «клуб» for club) and expressions (such as «брать автобус», "take a bus", instead of «ехать на автобусе», "go by bus"; «делать армию», ""make" an army", instead of «служить в армии», "serve in the army"), to phonetics and phraseology. This variant is called by Israelis and scholars "Rusit"/"Русит", from the Hebrew name of the Russian language.
Vocabulary.
Russian dialects usually preserve many archaic words and forms which dropped out of use or were replaced with Church Slavonic counterparts. In North Russian there are about 200 words of Uralic origin.