John Rogers (writer)

John Rogers is an American screenwriter. He is known as the creator of the television series "Jackie Chan Adventures" (2000–2005), "Leverage" (2008–2012), "The Librarians" (2014–2018), and "The Player" (2015).
Rogers co-wrote the films "American Outlaws" (2001), "The Core" (2003), and "Catwoman" (2004), and co-wrote the story for the film "Transformers" (2007).
Early life and education.
Rogers was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and attended McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. While at McGill, he wrote for the school's comedy magazine "The Red Herring".
Career.
Rogers wrote the first draft of the script for the live-action movie "Transformers", released in 2007. He wrote an early screenplay for "Catwoman" and created the cartoon series "Jackie Chan Adventures". He also co-wrote the science fiction adventure film "The Core". In 2004 Rogers wrote and executive-produced a television pilot based on the graphic novel "Global Frequency". Although the pilot was never aired on network television, it was leaked onto the internet and accrued an international fan base. He created and served as executive producer for the TNT television series "Leverage", which ran for five seasons from 2008 to 2012.
In addition to his work in television and film, Rogers has also written for the comic book industry. In March 2006, he launched an ongoing DC Comics series starring the new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes, with co-plotter Keith Giffen and artist Cully Hamner. Rogers stayed on the series for two years, until #25. Some of his earlier comics work was created for Boom! Studios, where he penned a number of short stories for genre-themed anthologies "Zombie Tales" (and its sequels "Zombie Tales: Oblivion" and "Zombie Tales: The Dead"), "Cthulhu Tales", "Pirate Tales", "Ninja Tales" as well as "What Were They Thinking?!", a series where contemporary writers wrote new humorous plots and dialogue over old stories. Rogers' last comics work to date is a fifteen-issue "Dungeons & Dragons" series for IDW Publishing.
Rogers has also worked on role-playing games, and is the author of "Feywild" chapter of the 4th edition "Dungeons & Dragons", "Manual of the Planes" (2008).


Joseph Goodman (game designer)

Joseph Goodman is a role-playing game designer and the owner of Goodman Games. He is best known for the "d20" adventure series, "Dungeon Crawl Classics" and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game.
Career.
Joseph Goodman has been a gaming professional since 1994, when he self-published "The Dark Library", a fanzine for his interest in miniatures games such as "Warhammer 40k". Heartbreaker Hobbies & Games later hired him as editor-in-chief of their own magazine, "Forge: The Magazine of Miniature Gaming". Goodman then started his own game publishing company, Goodman Games, with his first RPG being "". Despite success with "Broncosaurus Rex" and then moving to fantasy dungeon crawls, Goodman did not bring any game designers in house and continued to work with creators on a freelance basis. With Dungeon Crawl Classics, Goodman was trying to publish the sort of intelligent dungeon crawl adventures that he was interested in playing, and he wanted to serve the large part of the demographic market made up of older gamers. In 2004, Goodman also developed the "Dragonmech" setting, which he released under White Wolf's Swords & Sorcery label.
Works.
Writing credits include:


Christopher Guinness

Christopher Guinness (born 22 November 1981) is an animator and art director from Trinidad and Tobago. Graduating from Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada, he is a multi-award winner in the Caribbean advertising and animation circuit.
Career.
Guinness has worked at two agencies: McCann Erickson and Lonsdale Saatchi and Saatchi.
At McCann Erickson he took the job title of a graphic artist, winning the 2006 Animae Caribe Most Successful Commercial Animation Award for his work on the bmobile Passion Anime (Fifa World Cup 2006) television commercial. He would later win the AAF US National Gold ADDY Awards in the category of "Animation or Special Effects Video, Film", making him the first and only Caribbean national to date to win at the final stage of the ADDY Awards.
In 2007 after leaving McCann Erickson, Guinness took the position of Art Director at Lonsdale Saatchi and Saatchi. His work on the "it matters" campaign won the Western Union's North American/Caribbean advertising account in October 2007. The "it matters" campaign went on to win six Awards in 2008 at the 9th AAATT Advertising Awards including the "Best Integrated Campaign of the Year" award. Lonsdale Saatchi and Saatchi also won 33 awards that night. Guinness won 18 awards in 2009 at the CAF ADDY Awards including Best of Show Overall for the body of work on Western Union, Best of Show Print for the "it matters" Support Ad and Best of Show TV for the Blink Olympic Television Commercial.
In 2010 Guinness's work on Volvo gained him his second AAF US National ADDY Award in the category of "Video Sales Presentation". Animal Instinct, a spot for the 2010 FIFA world Cup garnered him a 2010 Animae Caribe Best Use of Animation in the Media Award, along with three CAF Gold ADDYs, the 2011 CAF Addys Judge's Choice for Creative Excellence, three 4AAF Gold ADDYs, the 2011 4AAF Charlie Award for Self Promotion, the 7th TIAF Best Advertisement Animation Award and a Silver ADDY at the AAF US National ADDY Awards. Recently, His short film "Pothound" for the TTSPCA was nominated for a 2012 Vimeo Award. Its follow up "Captain T&T" became the first film from the Caribbean to screen at the San Diego Comic Con International Film Festival.
Guinness now owns and operates a design, film and animation agency and has served as the President of the Caribbean Advertising Federation. He has won more than 90 awards locally, regionally and internationally.


Chaos Emeralds


Jika-tabi

 (lit., " that touch the ground") are a style of traditional Japanese footwear invented in the early 20th century. Similar to socks in both appearance and construction, have a divided toe; though they can be worn with traditional thonged footwear such as and , are mostly designed and made to be worn alone as outdoor footwear, resembling boots that reach roughly to the mid-calf. are also known as " boots".
History.
, brother of , founder of the major tyre company Bridgestone, is credited with the invention of in the early 20th century.
During the 1942 Battle of Milne Bay in Papua (now part of Papua New Guinea), the Allies of World War II faced the Japanese (Special Naval Landing Forces), who wore as part of their uniform. The distinctive tread marks left by the boots allowed Allied troops (mostly Australian troops with some American units) to follow the tracks, and thus Japanese soldiers, through the muddy forests. Examples of the boots worn by Japanese soldiers are held by the Australian War Memorial.
Use.
 are known as footwear commonly used by construction workers, farmers, gardeners, rickshaw-pullers and other labourers, due to the tough material and heavy-duty but flexible rubber soles they are made from.
Though they have faced competition by the introduction of steel-toe workboots in some industries, are still preferred by some due to the flexibility of the soles allowing the wearer a greater degree of grip than rigid-soled shoes allow. Other varieties of have been developed for specific labouring purposes, such as knee-high made entirely of rubber used by workers in rice fields and other wet and muddy environments.
In recent years, some manufacturers have introduced steel-toe and hard resin varieties of , which have been approved by the Japan Occupational Safety and Health Resource Center.
Outside Japan, are available from online and martial-arts shops, and are used by practitioners of the martial art of , especially when training outdoors. are also commonly worn for certain kinds of exercise, specifically cross country running, walking, and climbing.
Though typically worn for manual labour and exercise, are also worn for comfort and as a casual shoe. A variation of known as is so called due to commonly being worn for festivals; this variety features extra cushioning in the sole for comfort.
Appearances in media.
In recent years, have been seen in Hollywood movie productions. Examples include "The Wolverine", "47 Ronin", "Big Hero 6", "Star Trek", "" and "Black Panther". have also been seen in the short movie "Anima" from Thom Yorke (2019).


Shenmue II

Shenmue II is a 2001 action-adventure game developed by Sega AM2 and published by Sega for the Dreamcast. It was directed, produced and written by Yu Suzuki. Like the original "Shenmue" (1999), "Shenmue II" consists of open-world environments interspersed with brawler battles and quick time events. It features a day-and-night system, variable weather effects, non-player characters with daily schedules, and various minigames. The player controls teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki as he arrives in Hong Kong in 1987 in pursuit of his father's killer. His journey takes him to Kowloon and the mountains of Guilin, where he meets a girl who is part of his destiny.
Some of "Shenmue II" was developed alongside the original "Shenmue", which was the most expensive video game ever developed at the time. The Dreamcast version was only released in Japan and Europe; Microsoft secured console exclusivity in North America"," and released an enhanced port for the Xbox in 2002 and other territories in 2003.
"Shenmue II" received positive reviews for its story and scale, though reviews for the port were less positive, with critics finding its graphics lacking compared to other Xbox games. It has since appeared in several "greatest games of all time" lists.
"Shenmue II" sold poorly and further games in the series entered a period of development hell lasting over a decade. In 2018, Sega released high-definition ports of "Shenmue" and "Shenmue II" for multiple formats. "Shenmue III", developed by Suzuki's company Ys Net, was released in 2019 following a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Gameplay.
Like the original "Shenmue", the player controls teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki in his journey for revenge. Most of the game is spent exploring the game's open world, searching for clues, examining objects and talking to non-player characters for information. The game features a 3D fighting system similar to Sega's "Virtua Fighter" series; Ryo can fight multiple opponents at once and practice moves to increase their power. In quick time events, the player must press the right combination of buttons at the right moment to succeed.
"Shenmue II" adds several features. Players can ask for directions from passersby, and fast-forward the game's clock when waiting for a scheduled event to occur, such as a shop opening or character arriving. Unlike the first "Shenmue", taking a job is not part of the main story, and the player can choose how to earn money – for example, by gambling, arm wrestling, street fighting or running a pachinko stand. Ryo can spend money on items such as capsule toys or 1980s arcade games including "Hang-On", "After Burner," "Space Harrier", and "Out Run". The Dreamcast version allows the player to import their save data from the first "Shenmue", transferring money, items and martial arts moves.
Plot.
In 1987, teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki arrives from Japan in Wan Chai, Hong Kong on the trail of his father's killer, Lan Di, of the criminal Chi You Men organization. He searches for Master Lishao Tao, the only link to the whereabouts of Yuanda Zhu, a martial arts expert who sent Ryo's father a letter warning him of Lan Di's intentions. When Ryo finds Tao, whose real name is Xiuying Hong, she refuses to help, considering his quest for vengeance reckless. The two part ways, but Xiuying continues to monitor Ryo's progress.
Ryo encounters Wuying Ren, the wily leader of a street gang. Ren decides to help Ryo after deciding there may be money to be made in Ryo's mysterious phoenix mirror; Lan Di took the second mirror, the dragon mirror, when he killed Ryo's father. Wong, a street boy who admires Ren, and Joy, a free-spirited motorcyclist, assist Ryo in his journey.
Ren informs Ryo that Zhu is hiding from the Chi You Men in Kowloon Walled City, a densely populated, crime-ridden enclave of Hong Kong. They locate Zhu there but are ambushed by the criminal Yellow Head organization and Zhu is kidnapped. Ryo and his allies infiltrate the Yellow Head headquarters, but Wong and Joy are captured. Ryo defeats a powerful martial artist and rescues Joy. On the rooftop of the Yellow Head building, Ryo rescues Wong and Zhu from the Yellow Head leader, Dou Niu, as Lan Di departs by helicopter.
At Ren's hideout, Zhu reveals that Lan Di killed Ryo's father because he believes Iwao killed his own father. He also reveals that the mirrors will lead to the resurrection of the Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. Zhu advises Ryo to continue his search in Bailu Village in Guilin, where he says Lan Di is also heading.
In the mountains of Guilin, Ryo rescues a girl, Shenhua Ling, after she dives into a river to rescue a deer. Shenhua's family is connected to the legacy of the mirrors, and she seems to have magical abilities. They walk through the mountains to her village. At Shenhua's family home, a tree named Shenmue (Chinese for "sedge tree") is in bloom; she explains that her name means "flower of the Shenmue tree". The pair go to a stone quarry on the village outskirts to meet Shenhua's father, but find he is missing. They discover a cryptic note and sword; Ryo combines the sword with the phoenix mirror, triggering a device that reveals a large mural of the dragon and phoenix mirrors.
Development.
"Shenmue II" was developed by Sega AM2 and directed by Yu Suzuki. Part of the game was developed in tandem with the first "Shenmue", which was most expensive video game ever developed at the time, reported to have cost Sega US$70 million; in 2011, Suzuki said the figure was closer to $47 million including marketing. According to "IGN", "Shenmue II" was completed for "a much more reasonable sum".
Release and ports.
"Shenmue II" was released for Dreamcast in 2001 in Japan and Europe. The Japanese version included "Virtua Fighter 4" "Passport", promoting Sega's upcoming "Virtua Fighter 4". By 2003, the Dreamcast version had sold 100,000 copies, a tenth of the original game's sales.
Microsoft secured console exclusivity in North America for "Shenmue II", and released an enhanced port for Xbox on October 28, 2002. The port features an additional camera mode, optional filter effects, improved frame rate and lighting, and English-language voice acting. It also contains a DVD of "Shenmue: The Movie," a compilation film comprising cutscenes from the original "Shenmue", previously released in Japanese theaters.
A remake of "Shenmue" and "Shenmue II" featuring new models, textures and lighting was canceled in 2017. Instead, Sega released high-definition ports of both games for Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 21 August 2018. The ports include updated graphics and control options, improved user interfaces, and Japanese and English voices. Some details, such as product placement, are omitted, and cutscenes are presented in their original aspect ratio due to technical limitations.
Reception.
The Dreamcast version of "Shenmue II" received positive reviews. "GameSpot" found that it was "so much better than its predecessor, refining nearly every aspect of the original", with improved pacing and an "epic feel". Tom Bramwell of "Eurogamer" felt it was "probably the best swan song the Dreamcast could hope for", taking the console "to the very brink of its capabilities". "GamesMaster" felt that, like the first game, "Shenmue II" had some "tedious" elements, but praised the expanded scale and action.
Reviews of the Xbox version were less positive. "IGN" praised the story, but criticized the English-language voice acting and found the graphics lacking compared to other Xbox games. "Eurogamer's" Martin Taylor criticized it as a "lazy port" and concluded: "Your perseverance with the sluggish pacing can be rewarding, but "Shenmue II" consistently proves itself an ageing game with ageing looks." It was nominated for "GameSpot"s annual "Best Story on Xbox" award, but lost to "Dead to Rights".
"Shenmue II" was voted the tenth best game of all time by "IGN" readers in 2008. In 2013, "Den of Geek" ranked "Shenmue" and "Shenmue" "II" the joint-best Dreamcast games. In 2014, "Empire" ranked "Shenmue II" the 51st best game of all time.
Sequel.
After the commercial failure of the first two games, "Shenmue III" entered a period of development hell lasting over a decade. In September 2011, Suzuki left Sega to focus on his development studio Ys Net. In June 2015, he launched a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign develop "Shenmue III" with Ys Net for Windows and PlayStation 4, having licensed the rights from Sega. It was released in November 2019.


Floyd Hughes

Floyd Hughes is a British, Brooklyn-based production designer, storyboard artist and comic book illustrator. He is also an art professor at the Pratt Institute.
Early life.
Hughes was born in the East End of London, to Guyanese parents. He spent his early years working in London's Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed fantasy book and comic shop, situated deep in London's SoHo district, in the late 1970s. Then he had a stint in Forbidden Planets' first store in London's Denmark Street in the early 1980s.
Later career.
Hughes began his professional career in 1980 working as an artist/writer in British comics and magazines. Hughes' first professional work was published in a "2000 AD" Summer Special and his fanzine work had been in David Hornsby's "Apocolypse" fanzine published in the UK. In the early 80’s he produced concert stage artwork for The Clash and worked in the film and television industry as a storyboard artist, production illustrator and special make-up effects technician on films that include Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" and "", and "Highlander".
In 1988 he moved to New York City and continued his freelance career working in comics, illustration, film, music videos and as a designer for MTV Animation's "Downtown" and "Celebrity Deathmatch". Hughes illustrated the Marvel Comics mini-series "Hellhound" and served as art director on Russell Simmons Presents B.A.D Magazine, a project funded by Time Warner under its "Mad" brand. Hughes also produced on screen artwork for the movie "Antitrust "and pre- production illustrations for the Will Smith film "I Am Legend". Hughes also did two CD sleeve paintings for the AC/DC album "Ballbreaker".
In 1990 Hughes collaborated with music journalist Charles Shaar Murray on "Purple Days", a comic strip inspired by the life and times of Jimi Hendrix. "Purple Days" appeared in "Revolver", a 48-page magazine-sized comic book published in the UK.
In mid-2008, Hughes worked with director Spike Lee on a Burger King commercial starring P. Diddy. His graphic novel adaptation of fine artist Danny Simmons’ 2003 novel "Three Days As the Crow Flies" was published February 2008 by Simon & Schuster.
Hughes is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute School Of Art and Design in Brooklyn, New York, and was the recipient of the prestigious "Most Distinguished Teacher Award 2008/2009".
Hughes created storyboards for Spike Lee films, including Red Hook Summer (2012) and BlacKkKlansman(2018)
Books illustrated by Hughes.
"85, a novel." Written by Danny Simmons, illustrated by Hughes. Simon & Schuster, 2008. ()


Ranzuki

Ranzuki is a fashion magazine published monthly in Japan by Bunka-sha Publishing & Co.. A gal magazine, "Ranzuki" mainly targets women in their teens and shows its preference for dark-skin and "109" items.
History.
"Ranzuki" was first published in August 2000 with the name "Ranking Daisuki" (, lit. "Ranking Loving"). "Ranzuki" later spawned its special edition which became independent as "Jelly" in 2006.
Model.
"Ranzuki" features its regularly appearing models as "R's" and all of them usually appear on the magazine with their simple nicknames. The notable ones have included Yumi Yamanaka (Yumi-nyan), Aya Suzuki (Suzu), Takami Tsuha (Tah), Namino Hata (Nami-tee), Serika Nakayama (Serry), Yoko Kunieda (Yossan), Nicole Abe (Nikorun), Yui Minemura (Yuikichi or Yu-yu), Rika Mamiya (Rika-chu), Natsumi Saito (Natsuhmi), Arisa Kamada (Ari-chan), Rei Yasui (Rere).
Some of them have moved to the sister magazine "Jelly", including Maya Mori, Naomi Arai, Yuki Yamamoto, Mai Miyagi, and Miho Ishigami. Some have moved to "Vanilla Girl", a fashion magazine published by Bunka-sha the same publisher.


Roger Sprung

Roger Sprung (born August 29, 1930, in New York City) is an American banjo player and teacher best known for introducing authentic bluegrass banjo picking styles to the folk music community in the north and for the eclectic manner in which he has adapted bluegrass banjo techniques to music of other genres. His 1963 album Progressive Bluegrass may have been the first use of that title, later applied to a subgenre of bluegrass music by him and others.
Biography.
Beginnings.
Roger Sprung began playing music at the age of seven when an interest in the piano was sparked by his nanny who taught him to play a tune. Later, around age ten, Roger took formal piano lessons for about a year, but by then he had already taught himself to play by ear. He was introduced to folk music as a teenager in 1947 when his older brother took him to hear musicians perform in New York's Washington Square. After taking up the guitar Roger soon took up the banjo, teaching himself to play by ear with the aid of 78 rpm records by Earl Scruggs. He was also influenced by Pete Seeger and Paul Cadwell, as well as Tom Paley, from whom he took a few banjo lessons. In 1950, Sprung made the first of many trips to bluegrass country, accompanying mandolinist Harry West to Asheville, North Carolina. There he had his first exposure to such traditional country musicians as Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Samantha Bumgarner. These trips became a regular part of Sprung's musical life, and he passed along the styles and techniques he absorbed during them to his fellow musicians in the north. As bluegrass historian and performer Ralph Lee Smith wrote, "Banjo player Roger Sprung almost single-handedly introduced Southern bluegrass music to New York through his playing in Washington Square."
In 1953 Sprung joined Erik Darling and Bob Carey to form the Folksay Trio. The group recorded four tracks on an anthology album that also included performances by Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. One of the trio's songs, "Tom Dooley," would later be popularized by the Kingston Trio and become one of the best-selling folk song recordings of all time. Carey and Darling later joined Alan Arkin, who would go on to achieve fame as an actor, to form the highly successful folk group The Tarriers.
Sprung was also a familiar face in the mid-1950s Washington Square gatherings of folk musicians in Greenwich Village. When the first edition of The Village Voice featured a page one story about the music scene, Sprung was one of the players interviewed by John Wilcock for the article, and was featured in the lead sentence: "Roger Sprung, 25, runs a TV repair shop in Lake Mohegan, New York, but every week end during the summer he comes to the Village to play and sing folk music in Washington Square..." "Music Makers Quit the Square, But Only for the Wintertime"
In 1957, Sprung formed another group, The Shanty Boys, with Lionel Kilberg and Mike Cohen.
Career.
Over the past six decades, Sprung has performed with such legendary folk musicians as Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson as well as with more recent country music artists Willie Nelson, Wynonna Judd, and Tanya Tucker. He has recorded with Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians and toured with popular jazz singer Kay Starr. His television appearances include the Jimmy Dean, Garry Moore, and Dean Martin Shows, and he has performed at both the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. For the past quarter century he has performed with guitarist Hal Wylie and various other musicians as "Roger Sprung, Hal Wylie and the Progressive Bluegrassers." Sprung appears frequently at folk festivals and musical conventions, including the Philadelphia Folk Festival, at which he performed for 30 consecutive years, and the Union Grove Fiddler's Convention in North Carolina, where in 1970 he was winner of the banjo competition.
In the 1970s, he was a frequent visitor to the annual New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford, and a photo of fiddlers jamming with him was a frequently reprinted item in the contest's press kit, and on the home page of the revived contest in 1999.
In addition to his performing and recording career, Sprung sells and repairs banjos and has been teaching banjo and other instruments since 1950. Notable among his former students were Erik Darling and John Stewart, who became replacement members of The Weavers and the Kingston Trio, respectively.
Repertoire.
Sprung's recordings and concert appearances embrace a variety of musical genres. In addition to traditional bluegrass and ragtime music, his repertoire includes arrangements of Elizabethan and classical pieces, Broadway show tunes, jazz and big band standards, and holiday songs. Composers whose works he has arranged for banjo include Mozart, Weill, Sousa, Ernesto Lecuona, and Stephen Foster. Among the selections he has recorded are ones as musically diverse as "Hava Nagila", "Hello, Dolly," "Turkey in the Straw," "Jingle Bells," "Puff, the Magic Dragon," "The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise," and "Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter."
Sprung's instrument is a 1927 Gibson which he reconstructed himself using parts from two other Gibson banjos.


Cripple Creek (folk song)

"Cripple Creek" is an Appalachian-style folk song, often in old time arrangement for the fiddle, although it is played on stringed instruments such as the banjo. It has become a standard among bluegrass musicians and is often one of the first songs a banjo picker learns. Its time of composition is unknown, and there are theories supporting that the song is either about Cripple Creek, Virginia or Cripple Creek, Colorado during the gold rush. It was frequently recorded by early country musicians in the 1920s.
Score.
Simplified version of the basic melody (A part followed by B part).
<score>
\new ChordNames {
 \set chordChanges = ##t
 a4 a4|%1
 a4 a4|%2
 a4 a4|%3
 e4 a4|%4
 e4 a4|%5
 a4 a4|%6
 a4 a4|%7
 a4 a4|%8
 e4 a4|%9
 e4 a4|%10
\new Staff \relative c" {
 \key a \major \time 2/4
 \repeat volta 2 { %start repeat
 a'8 a16 a e8 cis | %1
 d8 fis e a,16 b | %2
 cis8 cis16 cis b8 a | %3
 }%end repeat
 \alternative{
 {e8 fis16 e a8 a16 a |} %4
 {e8 fis16 e a4 |} %5
 \break
 \repeat volta 2
 { %start repeat
 cis8 cis16 cis b8 a |%6
 cis8 cis16 cis e8 a,16 b |%7
 cis8 cis16 cis b8 a |%8
 } %end repeat
 \alternative{
 {e8 fis16 e a8 a16 b |} %9
 {e,8 fis16 e a4 \bar "|." |} %10
</score>
Lyrics.
The following are lyrics from a 1909 version included in the Journal of American Folklore, 1915.
When Cecil Sharp collected folksongs in the Appalachian Mountains in 1917 he found one version of "Cripple Creek":


TeAtrum VII

teAtrum 7 (or "teAtrum VII") is a German theatre company based in Frankfurt, Germany and Berlin. Until 2013, the most important venue in Frankfurt was located in an old landmarked factory building. Many productions of the theatre company take place on partly extraordinary locations: in cellar vaults, in schools and colleges, in the foyer of the Frankfurt Opera, in night clubs, former factory floors and storehouses.
The theatre company was founded in 1996 in Frankfurt and is now (since 2010) also based in Berlin, Germany. Experiments with language and speech, motion, dance, music, pictures, spaces, sounds and the usage of modern media (film, video, photography) are fundamental components of the productions.


M42 jacket

The combination of the Coat, Parachute Jumper and the Trousers, Parachute Jumper (known as the M42 jump uniform to collectors) and the high lace up Boots, Parachute Jumper collectively made up the uniform used by American paratroopers during the earlier and middle part of World War II.
M42 Jump Uniform description.
The M42 color was Olive Drab #3. The coat consisted of four front patch pockets with two button snaps on each, along with a unique dual-zippered knife pocket located on the upper lapel which was designed to contain a switchblade pocketknife. The trousers had five internal pockets and two large patch pockets located one on each thigh. The thigh pockets were also closed by two button snaps each. Due to the somewhat fragile nature of the uniform, however, the M42 was often reinforced with thicker, tougher canvas on the elbows, crotch and knees. The M42 was mostly worn by Paratroops assigned to Airborne units. The M42 was eventually phased out in favor of the new M1943 Uniform which was a darker green, OD #7. Despite this, various individuals chose to keep their M42s in order to show their veteran status.
The Corcoran jump boots were initially replaced by the Combat boots. This particular change was ferociously challenged by the airborne, as the double-buckled cuff at the top of the boots could allegedly sometimes catch parachute static lines and seriously injure a jumper, though they also preferred the Corcoran boots for the status that they gave above regular infantry. During operations, especially at night, adhesive tape or socks over the buckles were used to avoid any line entanglement or metallic shine reflection and the sound of buckles or loose lace ends.


Hilyard M. Brown

Hilyard M. Brown (February 16, 1910 – October 12, 2002) was an American art director. He won an Oscar in the category Best Art Direction for the film "Cleopatra".


Jim Morahan

Jim Morahan (26 December 1902 in Lambeth, London – 1976 in Sudbury, Suffolk) was a British art director. He began his career in film in 1936. He worked in a number of prominent British productions in the 1940s and 1950s, such as "Scott of the Antarctic" (1948), "Whisky Galore!" (1949), "The Blue Lamp" (1950), "The Man in the White Suit" (1951), "The Cruel Sea" (1953), "The Ladykillers" (1955) and "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" (1965). He earned an Academy Award nomination in 1949 for "Saraband for Dead Lovers".


Istvan Pely

Istvan Pely (born in 1974), is an American computer artist and game developer of Hungarian background. He currently works at Bethesda Game Studios, specializing in art direction and 3D graphics.
His interest in video games began when his father brought home an Apple IIe; Pely enjoyed playing adventure games such as "Dragon World" and "Wrath of Denethenor". He recalls that he "was really drawn to games as a storytelling medium, as well as an interesting challenge in the visual arts."
Pely began studying a computer science major at Loyola University Maryland. Having always been artistically inclined, he found computer science alone to be a bit too technical, while creating games was a "nice way to mesh technology and art." He instead completed a dual major at both computer and art departments. While still a student, he worked part-time as a multimedia consultant where he learned to work with many off-the-shelf packages such as 3D Studio, Photoshop, Premiere, and Director. Sacrificing his grades, with these tools he developed a Mac/PC adventure game called "Majestic Part I: Alien Encounter", and managed to get it published before graduating. Since then he has developed two more science fiction games independently: Symbiocom and Zero Critical.
Pely eventually decided to focus solely on 3D art. His project "Movkup" is an avenue for exploring fantastical mechanical/industrial design. Pely has been with Bethesda Softworks since 1998. As the lead artist of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, Pely was responsible for the overall visual style of the games, interface graphics, environments, and featured characters. Pely is a self-described “car nut” and having an interest in automotive design, he was also responsible for the design of the game's pre-war vehicles having the aerospace styling cues.
He married Hiu-Lai Chong, who worked as a character artist for "Fallout 3".


Trip Payne

Norman "Trip" Payne is an American professional puzzle maker. He is known by many as a three-time champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT). With his first victory in 1993, at the age of 24, Payne became the youngest champion ever in the tournament's history, a record he held until 2005.
Early life and education.
Payne was born in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He grew up in nearby Spartanburg, attending Spartanburg High School, and has been making puzzles professionally since publication in "Games" in November 1983. He attended Emory University in Atlanta, graduating with a degree in English in 1990.
Career.
Payne interned at "Games" during his college summer vacations, where one of his pseudonyms was the anagram "Art Pipeny"; he was expected to go on to work there full-time after college, but two days before his graduation, the magazine folded temporarily. In 1990 he also served on the four-person American team that won the International Crossword Marathon.
In 1992 he was awarded CROSSW RD Magazine's "Wynner Award" for creating the best unthemed crossword puzzle of the year.
After graduation, he moved to New York City and was editor-in-chief of "Herald Tribune Crossword Puzzles Only", "Large Print Crosswords", and "Crosswords & Other Word Games magazines", 1990–1991. He moved back to Atlanta in 1991 to embark upon a full-time freelance puzzlemaking career. He is a former contributing editor to "Games", "Games World of Puzzles", and "Crossword" magazines, and a former proofreader for Creators Syndicate, "Dell Champion Crossword Puzzles", and other magazines.
In 1999, Payne was the third contestant to appear on the U.S. version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", and was the first to earn $32,000.
In 2002, one of his crosswords was voted Puzzle of the Year by solvers of the "New York Times" crossword puzzle.
A member of the National Puzzlers' League since 1986, he served as vice president from 1991 to 1992 and hosted the group's annual convention in Atlanta in 1998. He created or co-created vast multi-puzzle team games for the 1991 and 1993 conventions.
In 2006, Payne was one of the crossword solvers profiled in the documentary "Wordplay". He also appeared briefly on a number of other television shows, including an episode of "Nightline" about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
In 2014, he won Lollapuzzoola's At-Home Division, edging out David Plotkin by five points. Mathematically, Plotkin would have finished first had both contestants competed at the live tournament in New York City.
Payne was the "Word Expert" on the CBS game show "Million Dollar Password". He authors the wordoku puzzle in "TV Guide". He also occasionally writes puzzles for "The New York Times", the "New York Sun", and the "Wall Street Journal", and usually creates one or two puzzle books per year for Sterling Publishing. He has been ranked among the top 50 Scrabble players in North America.
He made five crosswords a week for Yahoo!, Daily Crossword with Hints.
Publications.
Payne has also been published in "New York Newsday"; the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution"; the "New Yorker"; "Dell Champion Crossword Puzzles"; Creators Syndicate; United Feature Syndicate; the Simon & Schuster crossword puzzle book series; the "Expert's Book of Crosswords"; "Masterpiece Crosswords"; "Random House Ultrahard Crosswords"; and "Random House Editor's Choice Crosswords". Small magazines and by-mail crossword clubs for more dedicated solvers include "Tough Puzzles", "Tough Cryptics", "Cryptics Monthly", Uptown Crossword Club, and Crossword Puzzles of the Month Club.
Magazines that have run specially commissioned puzzles from Payne include "Golf Magazine", "Manhattan File", "American Times", "Out", and many more; corporate clients have included IBM, NPR, Amtrak, MetLife, Dodge, Fox TV, Hanna-Barbera, Fruit of the Loom, and Kleenex.


Tom Driberg

Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, Baron Bradwell (22 May 1905 – 12 August 1976) was a British journalist, politician, High Anglican churchman and possible Soviet spy, who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1942 to 1955, and again from 1959 to 1974. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain for more than twenty years, he was first elected to parliament as an Independent and joined the Labour Party in 1945. He never held any ministerial office, but rose to senior positions within the Labour Party and was a popular and influential figure in left-wing politics for many years.
The son of a retired colonial officer, Driberg was educated at Lancing and Christ Church, Oxford. After leaving the university without a degree, he attempted to establish himself as a poet before joining the "Daily Express" as a reporter, later becoming a columnist. In 1933 he began the "William Hickey" society column, which he continued to write until 1943. He was later a regular columnist for the Co-operative Group newspaper "Reynold's News" and for other left-leaning journals. He wrote several books, including biographies of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and the Soviet spy Guy Burgess. He retired from the House of Commons in 1974, and was subsequently raised to the peerage as Baron Bradwell, of Bradwell juxta Mare in the County of Essex.
Driberg made no secret of his homosexuality, which he practised throughout his life despite its being a criminal offence in Britain until 1967; his ability to avoid any consequences for his risky and often brazen behaviour baffled his friends and colleagues. Always in search of bizarre experiences, Driberg befriended at various times the occultist Aleister Crowley and the Kray twins, along with honoured and respected figures in the worlds of literature and politics. He combined this lifestyle with an unwavering devotion to Anglo-Catholicism. After his death, allegations were published about his role over many years as an MI5 informant, a KGB agent, or both. The extent and nature of Driberg's involvement with these agencies remain uncertain.
Early life.
Family background and childhood.
Driberg was born on 22 May 1905 in Crowborough, a small dormitory town about south of London. He was the third and youngest of three sons born to John James Street Driberg, a former officer in the Indian Civil Service, and his wife Amy Mary Irving Driberg (née Bell). The Driberg family had immigrated from Holland about 200 years previously; the Bells were lowland Scots from Dumfriesshire. John Driberg had retired in 1896 after 35 years in Assam, latterly as head of the state's police, and was 65 years old when his youngest son was born. For Tom Driberg, growing up mostly alone with his elderly parents was a stifling experience; he would later describe Crowborough as "a place which I can never revisit, or think of, without a feeling of sick horror".
At the age of eight Driberg began as a day-boy at the Grange school in Crowborough. In his autobiography he mentions in particular two aspects of his time there: learning the "facts of life" from other boys, with extensive experimentation, and his discovery of what he calls "exotic" religion—High Anglicanism. These experiences formed what he called two "conflicting compulsions", soon to be joined by a third—left-wing politics—to shape the ruling passions of his life.
Lancing.
In 1918, when he was 13, Driberg left the Grange for Lancing College, the public school near Worthing on the south coast where, after some initial bullying and humiliation, he was befriended by fellow-pupil Evelyn Waugh. Under Waugh's sponsorship Driberg joined an intellectual society, the Dilettanti, which promoted literary and artistic activities alongside political debate. He began to write poetry; his aesthetic education was further assisted by J. F. Roxburgh, "a magnetically brilliant teacher" who later became headmaster of Stowe School.
Lancing's Gothic chapel gave Driberg the religious atmosphere he sought, though he found the services disappointingly "moderate". By 1920 he was inclining to the political left and was in rebellion against his conservative upbringing. Finding the Labour Party too dull for his tastes, he joined the Brighton branch of the newly formed British Communist Party.
After Driberg had risen to responsible positions within the school (deputy head boy, head librarian, and chief sacristan, among others), his Lancing career ended suddenly in the autumn of 1923, when two boys complained about his sexual overtures. To avoid distressing the widowed Amy Driberg (John Driberg had died in 1919), the headmaster allowed him to remain in the school for the remainder of the term, stripped of his offices and segregated from all social contact with other boys. At the end of the term he was required to leave, on the pretext that he needed private tuition to pass his Oxford entrance examination which he had failed the previous summer. Back in Crowborough, after several months' application under the guidance of his tutor Colin Pearson, Driberg won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford.
Oxford.
Oxford in 1924 featured an avant-garde aesthetic movement in which personalities such as Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Cyril Connolly and, a little later, W. H. Auden were leading lights. Driberg was soon immersed in a world of art, politics, poetry and parties: "There was just no time for any academic work", he wrote later. With Auden, he discovered T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", which they read again and again, "with growing awe". A poem by Driberg, in the style of Edith Sitwell, was published in "Oxford Poetry 1926"; when Sitwell came to Oxford to deliver a lecture, Driberg invited her to have tea with him, and she accepted. After her lecture he found an opportunity to recite one of his own poems, and was rewarded when Sitwell declared him "the hope of English poetry".
Meanwhile, together with the future historian A. J. P. Taylor, Driberg formed the membership of the Oxford University Communist Party. During the General Strike of May 1926, most Oxford students supported the government and enrolled as special constables and strike-breakers. A minority, which included the future Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell and the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman, sided with the strikers, while Driberg and Taylor offered their services at the British Communist Party's headquarters in London. The Party showed no urgency to employ them, and Taylor soon left. Driberg, given a job distributing strike bulletins, was arrested by the police before he could begin and was detained for several hours. This ended his active role in the strike. Notwithstanding his extreme left-wing associations, he secured 75 votes (against the winner's 152) in the 1927 elections for the presidency of the Oxford Union.
Throughout his time at Oxford, Driberg followed his passion for Anglican rituals by regularly attending Mass at Pusey House, an independent religious institution with a mission to "[restore] the Church of England's Catholic life and witness". In spite of the prevalent Oxford homoerotic ethos, his sexual energies were largely devoted to casual encounters with working-class men, rather than to relationships with his fellow undergraduates. He experienced sexual relations with only one don, whom he met outside the university, unaware of the latter's identity.
One of Driberg's elaborate hoaxes was a concert called "Homage to Beethoven", which featured megaphones, typewriters and a flushing lavatory. Newspaper accounts of this event raised the interest of the occultist Aleister Crowley. Driberg accepted an invitation to lunch with Crowley for the first of several meetings between them, at one of which Crowley nominated Driberg as his successor as World Teacher. Nothing came of the proposal, though the two continued to meet; Driberg received from Crowley manuscripts and books that he later sold for sizeable sums. These various extracurricular activities resulted in neglect of his academic work. He failed his final examinations and, in the summer of 1927, he left Oxford without a degree.
"Daily Express" columnist.
"The Talk of London".
After leaving Oxford, Driberg lived precariously in London, attempting to establish himself as a poet while doing odd jobs and pawning his few valuables. Occasionally he had chance encounters with Oxford acquaintances; Evelyn Waugh's diary entry for 30 October 1927 records: "I went to church in Margaret Street where I was discomposed to observe Tom Driberg's satanic face in the congregation". Driberg had maintained his contact with Edith Sitwell, and attended regular literary tea parties at her Bayswater flat. When Sitwell discovered her protégé's impoverished circumstances she arranged an interview for him with the "Daily Express". After his submission of an article on London's nightlife, he was engaged in January 1928 for a six-week trial as a reporter; coincidentally, Waugh had undergone an unsuccessful trial with the same newspaper a few months earlier.
Within a month of beginning his duties, Driberg achieved a scoop with the first national newspaper reports of the activities in Oxford of the American evangelist Frank Buchman, whose movement would in time be known as Moral Re-Armament. Driberg's reports were generally abrasive, even mocking in tone, and drew complaints from Buchman's organisation about news bias. The trial period at the "Express" was extended, and in July 1928 Driberg filed an exclusive report on a society party at the swimming baths in Buckingham Palace Road, where the guests included Lytton Strachey and Tallulah Bankhead. This evidence of Driberg's social contacts led to a permanent contract with the "Express", as assistant to Percy Sewell who, under the name "The Dragoman", wrote a daily feature called "The Talk of London". Driberg later defended his association with an inconsequential society column by arguing that his approach was satirical, and that he deliberately exaggerated the doings of the idle rich as a way of enraging working-class opinion and helping the Communist Party.
Driberg used the column to introduce readers to up-and-coming socialites and literary figures, Acton, Betjeman, Nancy Mitford and Peter Quennell among them. Sometimes he introduced more serious causes: capital punishment, modern architecture, the works of D. H. Lawrence and Jacob Epstein, and the lesbian novel "The Well of Loneliness" by Radclyffe Hall, which had been denounced in the "Express" editorial columns as "infamous". By prior arrangement with Waugh, the column included a discreet announcement in September 1930 of Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism; Driberg was his only guest at the service. He further assisted Waugh in 1932 by giving him space in the column to attack the editor of the Catholic journal "The Tablet", after it had described Waugh's "Black Mischief" as blasphemous.
As William Hickey.
Sewell retired in 1932, leaving Driberg in sole charge of "The Talk of London" column. He grew increasingly frustrated with the trivial nature of his work. Following the intervention of "Express" proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, the column was relaunched in May 1933 as "These Names Make News", and its by-line changed to "William Hickey", after the 18th century diarist and rake. Driberg described the new feature as "...an intimate biographical column about ... men and women who matter. Artists, statesmen, airmen, writers, financiers, explorers..." Historian David Kynaston calls Driberg the "founder of the modern gossip column", although it soon began to move decisively away from chit-chat and towards social and political issues. The tone of the column was described by Driberg's ODNB biographer Richard Davenport-Hines as "wry, compassionate, and brimm[ing] with ... open-minded intelligence".
Beaverbrook, who had developed a fondness for Driberg, was amused by the disparity between his columnist's professed left-wing sympathies and "bon vivant" lifestyle. The proprietor knew of Driberg's persistent mismanagement of his personal finances, and on various occasions helped out with loans and gifts. During his time in London, Driberg had continued to indulge his taste for rough, casual sex; his memoir records many such instances. In the autumn of 1935 he was charged with indecent assault, after an incident in which he had shared his bed with two Scotsmen picked up late one night, in the bohemian district of London which Driberg had christened "Fitzrovia" in the Hickey column. Beaverbrook paid for a leading counsel, J. D. Cassels, and two unimpeachable character witnesses were recruited by the defence. Driberg was acquitted, and Beaverbrook's influence ensured that the case went unreported by the press. This was the first known instance of what writer Kingsley Amis called the "baffling immunity [Driberg] enjoyed from the law and the Press to the end of his days".
In the latter part of the 1930s Driberg travelled widely: twice to Spain, to observe the Spanish Civil War, to Germany after the Munich Agreement of 1938, to Rome for the coronation of Pope Pius XII and to New York for the 1939 New York World's Fair. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced in August 1939, he informed his readers that there would be "no war this crisis". Nine days later, after the German invasion of Poland precipitated the Second World War, he apologised for his mistake, and ended his first wartime column with the words "We're all in it". His opposition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and his support for the war in September 1939 may have been the reason for his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1941. An alternative explanation, proffered later, is that he was reported by Anthony Blunt for passing information on the Party to Maxwell Knight of MI5. Driberg and Knight were long-standing acquaintances who met frequently and, among other things, shared a mutual interest in the works of Aleister Crowley.
Driberg's mother had died in July 1939. With his share of her money and the help of a substantial mortgage, he bought and renovated Bradwell Lodge, a country house in Bradwell-on-Sea on the Essex coast, where he lived and entertained until the house was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1940. He continued to write the Hickey column, not always to his editor's satisfaction; his protestations against indiscriminate bombing of German civilians were particularly frowned on. In November 1941 he went to America and was in Washington on Monday 8 December, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to report President Roosevelt's speech to Congress announcing America's entry into the war.
Early parliamentary career.
Independent Member for Maldon, 1942–45.
When Driberg returned to Britain in March 1942 he found widespread public dissatisfaction with the government's conduct of the war. This mood was reflected in a series of parliamentary by-elections in which candidates supporting the wartime coalition government were defeated by Independents – the major parties had agreed to a pact under which they would not contest by-elections in seats held by their respective parties. Driberg, in his column, generally welcomed this trend, while questioning "the merit of some of the candidates likely to get in if the reaction against the Party machines continues". On 12 May 1942 the death was announced of Sir Edward Ruggles-Brise, the Conservative member for Maldon—the constituency in which Bradwell Lodge was situated. Next day, Driberg requested three weeks' leave from his column to fight the by-election. Contrary to the belief of prime minister Winston Churchill and others that Driberg was being "run" by Beaverbrook, the "Express" proprietor was unenthusiastic; an editorial on 25 May drew attention to Driberg's individual viewpoint and stated that "The "Daily Express" does not support his candidature".
Driberg's campaign slogan was "A Candid Friend For Churchill", personally supportive but critical of many of the prime minister's circle. The lacklustre campaign of his right-wing Conservative opponent helped to secure Driberg a wide range of support, from moderate Conservatives, Liberals and socialists. His fame as "William Hickey", and his stance as the only candidate with a home in the constituency, gave him a strong local profile. His previous Communist Party associations were not revealed. At the poll, on 25 June, he overturned a previous Conservative majority of 8,000 to finish 6,000 votes ahead of his opponent. In his war memoirs, Churchill called the result "one of the by-products of Tobruk"—which had fallen to Rommel on 21 June. Waugh, in his diary, remarked that the presentation of Driberg during the by-election merely as a journalist and churchwarden gave "a very imperfect picture of that sinister character".
On 2 July 1942 Driberg cast his first vote in the House of Commons, in support of Churchill against a rebel motion of censure on the government's conduct of the war. The rebels' case was put incompetently, which ensured that the motion gained only 25 votes, as against 477 cast for the government. Driberg delivered his maiden speech on 7 July, in a debate on the use of propaganda. He called for the lifting of the ban on the Communist Party's newspaper, the "Daily Worker", which he saw as a potentially valuable weapon of home propaganda.
In the following months he tabled questions and intervened in debates on behalf of various progressive causes. For example, on 29 September 1942 he asked the prime minister to "make friendly representations to the American military authorities asking them to instruct their men that the colour bar is not a custom in this country". He continued to write the Hickey column, and used his parliamentary salary to fund a constituency office in Maldon.
In January 1943, while in Edinburgh to campaign in another by-election, Driberg was caught by a policeman while in the act of fellating a Norwegian sailor. In his own account of the incident Driberg records that he escaped arrest by identifying himself as "William Hickey" and as a member of parliament. These disclosures evidently overawed the constable, who took no further action; indeed, Driberg says, the incident began a chaste friendship with the officer that endured for more than ten years. Meanwhile, Beaverbrook had become disenchanted with him, and did not intervene when Arthur Christiansen, the "Express" editor, sacked the columnist in June 1943 over a story detrimental to a government minister, Andrew Rae Duncan. Driberg subsequently signed up with "Reynolds News", a Sunday newspaper owned by the Co-operative Group, and undertook a regular parliamentary column for the "New Statesman". He also contributed to a weekly BBC European Service broadcast until, in October 1943, he was banned after government pressure. He reported the post-D-Day allied advances in France and Belgium as a war correspondent for "Reynolds News", and as a member of a parliamentary delegation witnessed the aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
Labour Member, 1945–55.
In the General election of July 1945 Driberg increased his majority at Maldon to 7,727. Before the election he had joined the Labour Party and had been welcomed by the local constituency party as their candidate. He was thus one of the 393 Labour MPs in the landslide election victory that replaced Churchill as prime minister with Clement Attlee.
Within a few days of his victory, Driberg left for the Far East, to report on the conditions of the allied troops in Burma. The Supreme Allied Commander, Lord Mountbatten, knew him slightly and made him an unofficial temporary special adviser. In this role he met the Patriotic Burmese Forces leader, Aung San, who impressed him as honest and incorruptible, "unlike some of the older Burmese politicians". Later, he visited Saigon and offered to mediate with Ho Chi Minh, who had recently declared an independent Vietnam state. Driberg later maintained that, had his offer been taken up, he might have prevented the Vietnam War.
Because of his journalism, Driberg was a well-known figure within the Labour Party generally, and in 1949 was elected to the party's National Executive Committee (NEC). In the February 1950 General Election he was again elected at Maldon, while nationally Labour lost 68 seats, reducing its parliamentary majority to six. With so small a majority, members' regular attendance in the Commons chamber became important; however, in August 1950 Driberg left the country for Korea, where Britain had joined the United States in a United Nations military expedition to repel the North Korean invasion of the South. Driberg and a few other left-wing MPs had objected to British involvement; In his "Reynolds News" column, Driberg had written of "Tories (Conservatives) who ... cannot help baying their delight at the smell of blood in the air", a comment that caused outrage in parliament among the Conservative members. Whatever his reservations, Driberg's war dispatches to "Reynolds News" were strongly supportive of the British troops. He participated in several night operations, and won respect from many of the soldiers for his courage despite, as one Marine put it "being a bit bent". He was away from parliament for three months, missing many critical House of Commons divisions, and on his return was severely censured by his fellow Labour MPs for neglecting his duties. His general standing in the party was unaffected; he had been re-elected "in absentia" to the NEC in September 1950.
In April 1951 the Labour government was hit by the resignations of three ministers—Aneurin Bevan, the future prime minister Harold Wilson, and John Freeman—over the imposition of prescription charges to pay for an increased armaments programme. Driberg was sympathetic to the rebels, though he tried to find a basis for compromise that would avoid resignations. The former ministers strengthened the small Labour group known as "Keep Left", in which Driberg was prominent; the group would henceforth be known as "Bevanites". In the October 1951 General Election the Labour Party was defeated, and Churchill resumed office; Driberg held on to his Maldon seat by 704 votes. Through the years of Labour government he had neither received nor sought office, having what historian Kenneth O. Morgan called a "backbench mindset". He still enjoyed aspects of his parliamentary life, such as in 1953 when he showed the American singing sensation Johnnie Ray round the House of Commons; his attempts to seduce the singer were politely resisted. However, he needed to earn more money, and in the spring of 1952 responded to a suggestion that he should write a biography of Beaverbrook. The press lord was amenable, and work began in the summer of 1953. The project extended over several years, by which time Driberg was no longer in parliament; he had announced in March 1954 that he was standing down from Maldon, which at the General Election of May 1955 fell, as he had expected, to the Conservatives.
Marriage.
On 16 February 1951 Driberg surprised his friends by announcing his engagement to Ena Mary Binfield (née Lyttelton). A former Suffolk county councillor, she worked as an administrator at the Marie Curie Hospital in London and was well known in senior Labour circles; she had met Driberg in 1949, at a weekend party given by the government minister George Strauss. According to her son, she was fully aware of Driberg's sexual preferences, but looked forward to some political excitement, and "thought they could do a useful job as Mr. and Mrs." Driberg's motives are less clear, but he told his friend John Freeman that he needed someone to run Bradwell Lodge, to which he had returned in 1946 after its release by the RAF.
At Driberg's insistence, Ena, a non-practising Jew, was baptised into the Church of England before the wedding at St Mary's, Bourne Street on 30 June 1951. The bride entered the church to a chorale arranged from the Labour Party anthem "The Red Flag"; this was followed by a nuptial mass described by Driberg's biographer Francis Wheen as "outrageously ornate". Four hundred guests then attended an elaborate reception at the House of Commons.
In the ensuing years Ena tried hard to adapt to Driberg's way of life and to control his wayward finances, but with little success. He continued his frequent travels and casual homosexual liaisons, and was hostile to her efforts to control or change any aspect of his life. In 1961 she wrote to him: "I have tried for ten years to make a compromise with you in your extraordinary mode of life and have now given up." Thereafter they often lived apart, though they never formally separated. Even after a final breach in 1971, they remained legally married.
Later career.
Out of parliament.
On leaving parliament in 1955, Driberg's main task was to complete the Beaverbrook biography. Although Beaverbrook had initially promised no interference with the text, he changed his mind when he began to read Driberg's drafts. In the course of a prolonged disagreement, Beaverbrook accused his biographer of being driven by "malice and hatred". When the manuscript was finally cleared for publication, much of the objectionable material had been removed; nevertheless, Beaverbrook used the "Daily Express" to campaign against the book and denounce its hostile tone. Evelyn Waugh, to whom Driberg sent a copy, expressed disappointment that the work was in fact "a honeyed eulogy".
In an effort to build his post-parliamentary career, Driberg turned briefly to creative writing, but without success. In his more familiar field of journalism he caused a sensation by flying to Moscow in August 1956 to interview Guy Burgess, the former British diplomat who in 1951 had defected to Russia with his colleague Donald Maclean. The pair had emerged in Moscow in February 1956, to give a brief press conference. Driberg had known Burgess in the 1940s, and the two shared similar homosexual inclinations; this acquaintance was sufficient to secure the Moscow interview. On his return home Driberg rapidly wrote a book from the interview material, the serial rights of which were sold to the "Daily Mail". Critics drew attention to the book's relatively sympathetic portrayal of Burgess; some believed the book had been vetted by the KGB, while others saw it as part of an MI5 plot to trap Burgess into revealing secret information for which he could be prosecuted should he ever return to Britain.
In 1956 Driberg convened a group of Christian socialists that met regularly at the Lamb public house in Bloomsbury to discuss issues such as imperialism, colonialism, immigration and nuclear disarmament. The group's dispatches, "Papers from the Lamb", led to the foundation in 1960 of the Christian Socialist Movement. Although no longer an MP, Driberg remained a member of the Labour Party's NEC and was active in party affairs. In 1957, in the face of antagonism from trade union leaders repelled by his lifestyle, he became Labour Party chairman, a largely ceremonial role. He travelled widely during his year in office, generally as a "Reynolds News" correspondent but using the party title to advantage whenever he could. Thus, in a 1958 visit to Moscow to interview space scientists, he obtained two meetings with Nikita Khrushchev.
In his final speech as chairman, to the party conference in 1958, Driberg angered the Conservatives and their press supporters by referring to the Tory ideology as not essentially different from the German "Herrenvolk" philosophy. He had been contemplating for some time a return to the House of Commons, and in February 1959 was adopted as a candidate by the safe Barking constituency. In the General Election of October 1959, which delivered a 100-seat majority to Harold Macmillan's Conservative government, he won at Barking with a majority of exactly 12,000.
Member for Barking, 1959–74.
A dominant issue when Driberg returned to Westminster was that of the use or outlawing of nuclear weapons. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had been launched on 17 February 1958, though Driberg's involvement with the issue predated CND by three years. On 2 March 1955, in an amendment to a House of Commons motion, he had called for Great Britain to "regain the moral leadership of the world by taking an initiative ... that may lead to the outlawing of ... thermo-nuclear weapons".
In October 1960 he supported the unilateralist motions passed at the Labour Party conference, and fought unsuccessfully in the NEC for them to be adopted as party policy. The conference motion was reversed the following year, but he continued to pursue the matter in parliament. On 29 May 1962 he urged that Britain not be a party to the renewal of nuclear tests, and in a speech on 23 July he said: "The unilateral abandonment of testing—or, better still, a test ban agreement—would be the most valuable first step towards general and complete disarmament."
According to his colleague Ian Mikardo, Driberg was less than enthusiastic about his duties in Barking—"a very, very bad constituency MP". Even his strongest supporters acknowledged that he attended as few local events as possible. In the Commons chamber he was a regular speaker on issues that concerned him, in particular disarmament, church affairs and racial discrimination. He supported the lowering of the voting age to 18, and the broadcasting of parliamentary debates; he opposed increases to judges' salaries, and the extension of Stansted Airport. After the General Election of 1964, which narrowly returned Labour to power under Harold Wilson, he was not offered a place in the new government, and soon found himself in opposition to Wilson's policies on Vietnam, the Common Market, immigration and other major issues. He joined with Mikardo and other dissidents to form the "Tribune Group", with the aim of promoting more left-wing policies. The group's influence lessened after March 1966, when in another General Election Wilson increased his majority to 98.
Driberg embraced enthusiastically the climate of the 1960s and the social and cultural freedoms that the decade introduced. In 1963 he met the Kray twins, prominent London gangland figures, and began a lengthy friendship with them and their associates. In July 1964 two backbench Conservative MPs reported to their Chief Whip that Driberg and Lord Boothby (a well-known Conservative peer) had been importuning males at a dog track, and were involved with gangs of thugs.
At parties which Driberg and Boothby attended at the Krays' flat, "rough but compliant East End lads were served like so many canapés", according to Wheen. While Driberg avoided publicity, Boothby was hounded by the press and forced to issue a series of denials. After the twins had been convicted of murder in 1969, Driberg frequently lobbied the Home Office about their prison conditions, requesting that they be given more visits and allowed regular reunions. Driberg was impressed with Mick Jagger, to whom he was introduced in 1965, and tried hard over a number of years to persuade the singer to take up active Labour politics. He also began a long association with the satirical magazine "Private Eye", supplying it with political gossip and, under the pseudonym "Tiresias", compiling a regular, highly risqué prize cryptic crossword puzzle which on one occasion was won by the wife of the future Archbishop of Canterbury.
In 1964 Driberg published a critical study of Moral Re-armament, which brought him attacks from the movement on the basis of his homosexuality and communist past. Although he made money from this book, throughout the 1960s he was beset by financial problems. When "Reynolds News", which had evolved into the "Sunday Citizen", finally folded in 1967, he became fully dependent on his parliamentary salary and casual journalism. He had long considered selling Bradwell Lodge, preferably to the National Trust on a basis that would allow him to continue living there. However, the Trust required the property to be mortgage-free and endowed with a substantial fund to cover future repairs, neither of which terms could be arranged. In the event the house remained unsold until 1971. As the 1970 election approached, Driberg wished to retire from parliament, and asked Wilson to appoint him as ambassador to the Vatican. Wilson refused, citing Driberg's age—at 65 he was beyond the retirement age for senior diplomats. Against his will, but with few other sources of income available to him, Driberg fought the June 1970 General Election. He was returned for Barking with a comfortable though reduced majority; nationally, Wilson's government was defeated by Edward Heath's Conservatives.
Retirement, ennoblement and death.
Hampered by age and declining health, Driberg became less active politically, and in 1972 was voted off Labour's NEC. The sale of Bradwell Lodge to a private buyer removed his main burden of debt, and he rented a small flat in the Barbican development in the City of London. In February 1974, at the age of 68, he retired from the House of Commons with the intention of writing his memoirs. Still short of income, he first completed a biography of his fellow-journalist Hannen Swaffer, which was indifferently received—"a feeble potboiler", according to Davenport-Hines. Friends organised an elaborate 70th birthday party for him on 21 May 1975; "one duke, two dukes' daughters, sundry lords, a bishop, a poet laureate—not bad for an old left-wing MP", Driberg observed to a guest.
In November 1975 he was granted a life peerage, and on 21 January 1976 was introduced to the House of Lords as Baron Bradwell, "of Bradwell juxta Mare in the County of Essex". On 14 April he tabled a motion in the Lords calling on the government to consider the withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland, but won little support. His health was failing, though he continued to work on his memoirs. His final contribution to the House of Lords was on 22 July, in a debate on entry vouchers for the dependents of immigrants.
Three weeks later, on 12 August 1976, while travelling by taxi from Paddington to his Barbican flat, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The funeral was held on 19 August at St Matthew's, Westminster; he was buried in the cemetery attached to St Thomas's Church, Bradwell.
Allegations of treachery.
After the publication of his relatively sympathetic portrait of Burgess in 1956, Driberg had been denounced as a "dupe of Moscow" by some elements of the press. Two years after Driberg's death, the investigative reporter Chapman Pincher alleged that he had been "a Kremlin agent of sympathy" and a supporter of Communist front organisations. In 1979 Andrew Boyle published "The Climate of Treason", which exposed Anthony Blunt and led to a period of "spy mania" in Britain. Boyle's exhaustive account of the Burgess–Maclean–Philby–Blunt circle mentioned Driberg as a friend of Burgess, "of much the same background, tastes and views", but made no allegations that he was part of an espionage ring.
In this atmosphere, Pincher published "Their Trade is Treachery" (1981), in which he maintained that Driberg had been recruited by MI5 to spy on the Communist Party while still a schoolboy at Lancing, and that he was later "in the KGB's pay as a double agent". Other writers added further details; the former British Intelligence officer Peter Wright, in "Spycatcher" (1987), alleged that Driberg had been "providing material to a Czech controller for money". The former Kremlin archivist Vasili Mitrokhin asserted that the Soviets had blackmailed Driberg into working for the KGB by threatening to expose his homosexuality. In a 2016 biography of Burgess, Andrew Lownie reports that Driberg was "caught in a KGB sting operation" at a Moscow urinal, and as a result agreed to work as a Soviet agent.
The weight of information, and its constant repetition, made an apparently strong case against Driberg, and former friends such as Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, became convinced that he had indeed betrayed his country. Other friends and colleagues were more sceptical. According to ex-Labour MP Reginald Paget, not even the security services were "lunatic enough to recruit a man like Driberg", who was famously indiscreet and could never keep a secret. Mitrokhin's "blackmail" story is questioned by historian Jeff Sharlet, on the grounds that by the 1950s and 1960s Driberg's homosexuality had been an open secret in British political circles for many years; he frequently boasted of his "rough trade" conquests to his colleagues. The journalist A. N. Wilson quotes Churchill commenting years before that "Tom Driberg is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name".
Pincher, however, argued that as homosexual acts were criminal offences in Britain until 1967, Driberg was still vulnerable to blackmail, although he also claimed that the MI5 connection secured Driberg a lifelong immunity from prosecution. Driberg's colleague Michael Foot denied Pincher's claim that Margaret Thatcher, when prime minister, had made a secret agreement with Foot to protect Driberg if Foot, in turn, would remain silent about the supposed treachery of Roger Hollis, another of Pincher's recently dead targets.
Wheen asserts that Pincher was not an objective commentator; the Labour Party, and its supposed infiltration by Communist agents, had been his target over many years. Pincher's verdict on Driberg is that "in journalism, in politics and intelligence ... eventually, he betrayed everybody". Wheen argues that Driberg's greatest vice was indiscretion; he gossiped about everyone, but "indiscretion is not synonymous with betrayal". Driberg's Labour Party colleague, Leo Abse, offers a more complex explanation: Driberg was an adventurer who loved taking risks and played many parts. "Driberg could have played the part of the spy with superb skill, and if the officers of MI5 were indeed inept enough to have attempted to recruit him, then, in turn, Tom Driberg would have gained special pleasure in fooling and betraying them".
Appraisal.
In his will Driberg had stipulated that at his funeral his friend Gerard Irvine, an Anglo-Catholic priest, should deliver an "anti-panegyric" in place of the normal eulogy. Irvine obliged, with a detailed assessment of Driberg against the Seven Deadly Sins, finding him guilty of Gluttony, Lust and Wrath, but relatively free from Avarice and Envy and entirely untouched by Sloth. Pride, Irvine maintained, was in Driberg's case mitigated by "the contrary virtue of humility". Ena did not attend the funeral; she gave a single press interview in which she expressed "huge respect for Tom's journalistic skills, political power and championship of the underdog". She added that if her admiration for him did not extend to their personal life together, that was a private matter.
Driberg prided himself on being an exception to a rule propounded by Cyril Connolly, that the war between the generations is the one war in which everyone changes sides eventually. Mervyn Stockwood, in his address at the funeral service, praised Driberg as "a searcher for truth", whose loyalty to the socialist cause was beyond question. This verdict was echoed by Michael Foot, who in a postscript to Driberg's memoir wrote of Driberg's "great services" to the Labour Party in the various offices that he occupied. Foot believed that Driberg's homosexual passion, rather than bringing him fulfilment, had "condemned him to a lifetime of deep loneliness". "The Times" obituarist described Driberg as "A journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual", the first time, according to journalist Christopher Hitchens, that the newspaper had ever defined a public figure specifically as homosexual.
Nevertheless, Driberg's incomplete memoir "Ruling Passions", when published in June 1977, was a shock to the public and to some of his erstwhile associates, despite advance hints of the book's scandalous content. Driberg's candid revelations of his "cottaging" and his descriptions of casual oral sex were called by one commentator "the biggest outpouring of literary dung a public figure has ever flung into print." The comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore depicted Driberg as a sexual predator, wearing "fine fishnet stockings" and cavorting with a rent boy, in a sketch, "Back of the Cab", which they recorded in 1977.
More vituperation followed when Pincher's allegations of Driberg's links with the Russian secret service were published in 1981; Pincher christened him "Lord of the Spies". However, Foot dismissed these accusations as typical of the "fantasies of the secret service world that seem to have taken possession of Pincher's mind". Foot added that Driberg "had always been much too ready to look forgivingly on Communist misdeeds, but this attitude was combined with an absolutely genuine devotion to the cause of peace".
In his 2004 biographical sketch, Davenport-Hines describes Driberg as "a sincere if eccentric Christian socialist who detested racism and colonialism", who at the same time "could be pompous, mannered, wayward, self-indulgent, ungrateful, bullying and indiscreet". As to the apparent contradiction between sincere Christianity and promiscuous homosexuality, Wheen argues that "there had been a recognisable male homosexual subculture in the Anglo-Catholic movement since the late nineteenth century". This theme is explored in a paper by David Hilliard of Flinders University, who maintains that "the [19th century] conflict between Protestantism and Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England was ... regularly depicted by Protestant propagandists as a struggle between masculine and feminine styles of religion".
In 2015 Simon Danczuk MP claimed that a retired Metropolitan Police detective sergeant had told him that Tom Driberg had been identified as a child abuser by police in 1968, but that no charges were pressed after the Director of Public Prosecutions Norman Skelhorn had been advised that proceeding with the case would not have been in the public interest.
Driberg throughout his life was a devout Anglo-Catholic; Wheen suggests that Evelyn Waugh, in "Brideshead Revisited", may have had Driberg in mind when the novel's protagonist Charles Ryder is warned on arrival at Oxford to "beware of Anglo-Catholics—they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents."
Driberg was the subject of a play, "Tom and Clem", by Stephen Churchett, which was staged at London's Aldwych Theatre in April 1997. The action takes place during Driberg's brief visit to the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 and deals with the contrast of compromise, represented by the pragmatic Clement Attlee, and post-war idealism, personified by Driberg. Michael Gambon's portrayal of Driberg, as "a slovenly, paunchy Bacchus with a mouth that can suddenly gape like a painfully-hooked fish", won special praise from "The Times" critic Benedict Nightingale.
Bibliography.
Driberg wrote or compiled the following books:


DFA minimization

In automata theory (a branch of theoretical computer science), DFA minimization is the task of transforming a given deterministic finite automaton (DFA) into an equivalent DFA that has a minimum number of states. Here, two DFAs are called equivalent if they recognize the same regular language. Several different algorithms accomplishing this task are known and described in standard textbooks on automata theory.
Minimal DFA.
For each regular language, there also exists a minimal automaton that accepts it, that is, a DFA with a minimum number of states and this DFA is unique (except that states can be given different names). The minimal DFA ensures minimal computational cost for tasks such as pattern matching.
There are two classes of states that can be removed or merged from the original DFA without affecting the language it accepts to minimize it.
DFA minimization is usually done in three steps, corresponding to the removal or merger of the relevant states. Since the elimination of nondistinguishable states is computationally the most expensive one, it is usually done as the last step.
Unreachable states.
The state formula_1 of a deterministic finite automaton formula_2 is unreachable if no string formula_3 in formula_4 exists for which formula_5. In this definition, formula_6 is the set of states, formula_7 is the set of input symbols, formula_8 is the transition function (mapping a state and an input symbol to a set of states), formula_9is its extension to strings (aka extended transition function), formula_10 is the initial state, and formula_11 is the set of accepting (aka final) states. Reachable states can be obtained with the following algorithm:
let reachable_states := {q0};
let new_states := {q0};
do {
 temp := the empty set;
 for each q in new_states do
 for each c in Σ do
 temp := temp ∪ {p such that p = δ(q,c)};
 end;
 end;
 new_states := temp \ reachable_states;
 reachable_states := reachable_states ∪ new_states;
} while (new_states ≠ the empty set);
unreachable_states := Q \ reachable_states;
Unreachable states can be removed from the DFA without affecting the language that it accepts.
Nondistinguishable states.
Hopcroft's algorithm.
One algorithm for merging the nondistinguishable states of a DFA, due to , is based on partition refinement, partitioning the DFA states into groups by their behavior. These groups represent equivalence classes of the Myhill–Nerode equivalence relation, whereby every two states of the same partition are equivalent if they have the same behavior for all the input sequences. That is, for every two states and that belong to the same equivalence class within the partition , and every input word , the transitions determined by should always take states and to equal states, states that both accept, or states that both reject. It should not be possible for to take to an accepting state and to a rejecting state or vice versa.
The following pseudocode describes the algorithm:
P := {F, Q \ F};
W := {F, Q \ F};
while (W is not empty) do
 choose and remove a set A from W
 for each c in Σ do
 let X be the set of states for which a transition on c leads to a state in A
 for each set Y in P for which X ∩ Y is nonempty and Y \ X is nonempty do
 replace Y in P by the two sets X ∩ Y and Y \ X
 if Y is in W
 replace Y in W by the same two sets
 else
 if |X ∩ Y| <= |Y \ X|
 add X ∩ Y to W
 else
 add Y \ X to W
 end;
 end;
end;
The algorithm starts with a partition that is too coarse: every pair of states that are equivalent according to the Myhill–Nerode relation belong to the same set in the partition, but pairs that are inequivalent might also belong to the same set. It gradually refines the partition into a larger number of smaller sets, at each step splitting sets of states into pairs of subsets that are necessarily inequivalent.
The initial partition is a separation of the states into two subsets of states that clearly do not have the same behavior as each other: the accepting states and the rejecting states. The algorithm then repeatedly chooses a set from the current partition and an input symbol , and splits each of the sets of the partition into two (possibly empty) subsets: the subset of states that lead to on input symbol , and the subset of states that do not lead to . Since is already known to have different behavior than the other sets of the partition, the subsets that lead to also have different behavior than the subsets that do not lead to . When no more splits of this type can be found, the algorithm terminates.
Lemma. Given a fixed character c and an equivalence class Y that splits into equivalence classes B and C, only one of B or C is necessary to refine the whole partition.
Example: Suppose we have an equivalence class Y that splits into equivalence classes B and C. Suppose we also have classes D, E, and F; D and E have states with transitions into B on character c, while F has transitions into C on character c. By the Lemma, we can choose either B or C as the distinguisher, let's say B. Then the states of D and E are split by their transitions into B. But F, which doesn't point into B, simply doesn't split during the current iteration of the algorithm; it will be refined by other distinguisher(s).
Observation. All of B or C is necessary to split referring classes like D, E, and F correctly-- subsets won't do.
The purpose of the outermost if statement (if Y is in W) is to patch up W, the set of distinguishers. We see in the previous statement in the algorithm that Y has just been split. If Y is in W, it has just become obsolete as a means to split classes in future iterations. So Y must be replaced by both splits because of the Observation above. If Y is not in W, however, only one of the two splits, not both, needs to be added to W because of the Lemma above. Choosing the smaller of the two splits guarantees that the new addition to W is no more than half the size of Y; this is the core of the Hopcroft algorithm: how it gets its speed, as explained in the next paragraph.
The worst case running time of this algorithm is , where is the number of states and is the size of the alphabet. This bound follows from the fact that, for each of the transitions of the automaton, the sets drawn from that contain the target state of the transition have sizes that decrease relative to each other by a factor of two or more, so each transition participates in of the splitting steps in the algorithm. The partition refinement data structure allows each splitting step to be performed in time proportional to the number of transitions that participate in it. This remains the most efficient algorithm known for solving the problem, and for certain distributions of inputs its average-case complexity is even better, .
Once Hopcroft's algorithm has been used to group the states of the input DFA into equivalence classes, the minimum DFA can be constructed by forming one state for each equivalence class. If is a set of states in , is a state in , and is an input character, then the transition in the minimum DFA from the state for , on input , goes to the set containing the state that the input automaton would go to from state on input . The initial state of the minimum DFA is the one containing the initial state of the input DFA, and the accepting states of the minimum DFA are the ones whose members are accepting states of the input DFA.
Moore's algorithm.
Moore's algorithm for DFA minimization is due to . Like Hopcroft's algorithm, it maintains a partition that starts off separating the accepting from the rejecting states, and repeatedly refines the partition until no more refinements can be made. At each step, it replaces the current partition with the coarsest common refinement of partitions, one of which is the current one and the others are the preimages of the current partition under the transition functions for each of the input symbols. The algorithm terminates when this replacement does not change the current partition. Its worst-case time complexity is : each step of the algorithm may be performed in time using a variant of radix sort to reorder the states so that states in the same set of the new partition are consecutive in the ordering, and there are at most steps since each one but the last increases the number of sets in the partition. The instances of the DFA minimization problem that cause the worst-case behavior are the same as for Hopcroft's algorithm. The number of steps that the algorithm performs can be much smaller than , so on average (for constant ) its performance is or even depending on the random distribution on automata chosen to model the algorithm's average-case behavior.
Brzozowski's algorithm.
Reversing the transitions of a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) formula_12 and switching initial and final states produces an NFA formula_13 for the reversal of the original language. Converting this NFA to a DFA using the standard powerset construction (keeping only the reachable states of the converted DFA) leads to a DFA formula_14 for the same reversed language. As observed, repeating this reversal and determinization a second time, again keeping only reachable states, produces the minimal DFA for the original language.
The intuition behind the algorithm is this: After we determinize formula_13 to obtain formula_14, we reverse this formula_14 to obtain formula_18. Now formula_19 has the same language as formula_12, but there's one important difference: there are no two states in formula_19 from which we can accept the same word. This follows from formula_14 being deterministic, viz. there are no two states in formula_14, which we can reach from the initial state through the same word. The determinization of formula_19 then creates powerstates (sets of states of formula_19), where every two powerstates formula_26 differ ‒ naturally ‒ in at least one state formula_27 of formula_19. Assume formula_29 and formula_30; then formula_27 contributes at least one word to the language of formula_32 which couldn't possibly be present in formula_33, since this word is unique to formula_27 (no other state accepts it). We see that this holds for each pair of powerstates, and thus each powerstate is distinguishable from every other powerstate. Therefore, after determinization of formula_19, we have a DFA with no indistinguishable or unreachable states; hence, the minimal DFA formula_36 for the original formula_12.
If formula_12 is already deterministic, then it suffices to trim it, reverse it, determinize it, and then reverse it again. This could be thought of as starting with formula_14 in the process above (assuming it has already been trimmed), since the input FA is already deterministic (but keep in mind it's actually not a reversal). We reverse and determinize formula_14 to obtain formula_36, which is the minimal DFA for the "reversal" of the language of formula_12 (since we did only one reversal so far). Now all that's left to do is to reverse formula_36 to obtain the minimal DFA for the original language.
The worst-case complexity of Brzozowski's algorithm is exponential in the number of states of the input automaton. This holds regardless of whether the input is a NFA or a DFA. In the case of DFA, the exponential explosion can happen during determinization of the reversal of the input automaton; in the case of NFA, it can also happen during the initial determinization of the input automaton. However, the algorithm frequently performs better than this worst case would suggest.
NFA minimization.
While the above procedures work for DFAs, the method of partitioning does not work for non-deterministic finite automata (NFAs). While an exhaustive search may minimize an NFA, there is no polynomial-time algorithm to minimize general NFAs unless P=PSPACE, an unsolved conjecture in computational complexity theory which is widely believed to be false. However, there are methods of NFA minimization that may be more efficient than brute force search.


Shoe Zone

Shoe Zone (stylised as shoezone) is a footwear retailer in the United Kingdom and Ireland which sells shoes at low prices. It has over 500 stores in different cities and towns throughout the UK and Ireland and over 4,000 employees. The company has an annual turnover of £241 million. The company's headquarters are located in Leicester, England.
History.
The company was founded in England in 1980 when brothers Michael and Christopher Smith bought controlling shares in a footwear company, Bensonshoe, that had been founded by their grandfather. The company acquired Leicester based Tylers in 1986 adding a further 61 branches to the business. By 2000, the company had 184 branches and late that year acquired The Oliver Group plc which added a further 258 stores to its portfolio.
On 8 September 2007, Shoe Zone bought the shoe retailer Shoefayre for an undisclosed sum from its parent, The Co-operative Group, adding 300 stores to Shoe Zone's portfolio. On 28 November 2009, it bought Leicester-based Stead & Simpson and converted many stores to the Shoe Zone brand.
In 2021 the company made headlines when Finance director Peter Foot was replaced by Terry Boot
Operations.
The company sells approximately 20 million pairs of footwear per year. Shoe Zone also has a small charity branch known as the Shoe Zone Trust which donates a proportion of the company's profits to cancer research and charitable organisations. They also helped Children In Need raise nearly £200,000.


Greg Benage

Gregory Benage is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
Career.
Greg Benage worked for Biohazard Games, publishers of "Blue Planet" (1997). Fantasy Flight Games arranged to publish a new edition of Jeff Barber's and Benage's "Blue Planet", and as part of the arrangement FFG wanted one of the Biohazard team to come over to Fantasy Flight; Benage agreed, and FFG spent 2000 pushing out an entirely new line of "Blue Planet" products. Since the original mechanics of the game had never been very polished, Benage decided to rewrite them entirely, which resulted in a brand new "Synergy" system. Benage assisted lead designer Rob Vaughn on FFG's "Fireborn".
Benage has written novels in the Eldernost fantasy series.


Georges de Paris

Georges de Paris (24 or 28 September 1934 – 13 September 2015) was a French tailor who is often referred to as having been the President of the United States' unofficial tailor or the tailor to the Presidents. Paris fashioned suits for every American President from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama.
Biography.
De Paris was born in Marseilles, France in 1934. He eventually moved to the United States and lived in Washington, D.C. with a young woman in 1960. After their separation, he found himself homeless, reportedly bathing in the Potomac. He managed to save money to buy a sewing machine and his reputation grew until President Johnson ordered his suits at the suggestion of Otto Passman. He also enjoyed wine and cheese, especially after work at the Washington, D.C. restaurant Old Ebbitt Grill.
De Paris died at the age of 81 in Arlington, Virginia on 13 September 2015 of prostate cancer.


Saltwater sandals

Saltwater sandals are a popular type of footwear sold mainly in western and southern markets of the United States. Saltwater sandals are made of specially treated natural leathers are distinguished by their interlink strap design with an adjustable buckle strap around the ankle.
History.
Saltwater sandals originated in the early 1940s as an alternative to traditional children's leather sandals as a way to cope with leather shortages in World War II. The sandals were made primarily from scrap leather left over from making men's shoes.
Manufacturing.
The original saltwater sandals were made by the Hoy Shoe Company of St. Louis, MO, the Hoy Shoe Company continues to produce them.
Trends.
Saltwater sandals have been a summer staple in the children's footwear category for more than 60 years. More recently, the Hoy Shoe Company introduced Sun-San Salt-Water Sandals for women. In the November 4, 2007 issue of New York Magazine, fashion editor Sarah Bernard compared saltwater sandals to Crocs and UGG boots and identified saltwater sandals as the emerging Ugly Shoe Trend for 2008.


Lionel Couch

Lionel Couch (1913–1989) was a British art director. He was nominated for two Academy Awards in the category Best Art Direction.
Selected filmography.
Couch was nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Art Direction:


Stance (brand)

Stance is an American sock, underwear and T-Shirt brand founded in December 2009. Stance is headquartered in San Clemente, California. As of March 2015, the company had sold over 36 million pairs of socks and raised over $115 million from investors.
In early January 2015, Stance began raising $50 million to fund their expansion into the underwear market. In April 2016, Stance raised an additional $30 million in a funding round that valued Stance at $400 million and was led by Mercato Partners and included August Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Sherpa Capital as returning investors.
Stance was named the official sock of the NBA and MLB in April 2015 and May 2016, respectively.
The company has 18 US retail stores in Irvine, Las Vegas, Cabazon, Livermore, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Orlando, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Clemente, San Diego, Tulalip, New Jersey, Chicago, and Minnesota. In October 2018, Stance opened their first International store in Covent Garden, London, England.
History.
Stance was founded in 2009 by Jeff Kearl, John Wilson, Aaron Hennings, Ryan Kingman and Taylor Shupe. The original founders saw an opportunity to address a category of fashion they felt had been overlooked by many brands and the majority of the industry.
The company first began shipping product in August 2010, and now ships over 15 million pairs of socks each year. Stance has raised a significant amount of venture capital and is sold in over 40 countries worldwide.
In March 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the company had raised $50 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firms and that the brand would be expanding into men’s underwear. In April 2015, the NBA announced that Stance had been named the official on-court sock of the NBA starting in the 2015-2016 season. As part of the deal, Stance would be allowed to display its logo on all socks worn on-court by players, a first in NBA history for apparel companies. Stance opened its first store in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City in November 2015.
In 2015, Stance posted a 356% employee increase from the previous year, reaching 114 employees, at its San Clemente headquarters. Stance was listed No. 24 on the Orange County Business Journal’s list of the 51 Biggest Based in Orange County Apparel Businesses.
Between 2017 and 2020, the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs.
The brand won Best Socks of the Year in 2017 with their tribute to rapper, Gucci Mane.
Sponsorship.
Stance’s brand ambassadors are called "Punks and Poets". They include musicians, athletes, designers, artists, stylists, writers and photographers.