Question: Who portrays Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey?

On October 23, 2013, Jamie Dornan was selected to portray Christian Grey in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, taking over the role from Charlie Hunnam. Initially, the movie was set for release on August 1, 2014, but it was later postponed and finally premiered on February 13, 2015. In August 2014, it was revealed that Dornan would star as Dr. Allan Pascal in a Miramax supernatural thriller film titled The 9th Life of Louis Drax, based on a book with the same title. The film was released on September 2, 2016. Additionally, in November 2014, Dornan was ranked #3 in People Magazine's list of the Sexiest Man Alive.

Pellegrino appeared in season 7, episode 3 of The X-Files in November 1999. In 2001, he played an incompetent hitman in David Lynch's critically acclaimed Mulholland Drive. Pellegrino starred as Rita's abusive ex-con former husband Paul on Showtime's Dexter; and later as Lucifer on Supernatural and as the mysterious near-immortal Jacob on ABC's Lost. He has appeared on the television series Northern Exposure, ER, Without a Trace, NYPD Blue, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Knight Rider. He also is well known as the "Blond Thug" who stuffs The Dude's head down the toilet and drops his bowling ball, breaking the floor tile, in the cult film The Big Lebowski. He also is featured in National Treasure as the background FBI agent known as Agent Johnson. In 2005, Pellegino appeared in the Academy Award winning film Capote, playing murderer Dick Hickock.

Corbett played the leading role of Adam MacArthur, in 1997's short-lived Fox science fiction series The Visitor, for which he was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television. His character, who was abducted by aliens, finds his way back to Earth 50 years later endowed with special powers. From 2001 to 2002, he portrayed the love interest of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Aidan Shaw, in the HBO comedy series Sex and the City,[17] for which he received his second nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film.[18] In 2002, Corbett portrayed the male lead role of Ian Miller in the romantic comedy film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, alongside Nia Vardalos (who also wrote the screenplay), for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award.[19]

Hutchison's career began on the New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street and continued in the American series Power Rangers Jungle Fury. She also played Allison Dine, the girlfriend of crime figure Terry Clark in the Australian television series Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities also known as Underbelly: The Mr Asia Story,[2] and Amy Smart in the New Zealand television comedy-drama series Go Girls. In 2012, she starred in the Joss Whedon-Drew Goddard meta-fictional slasher film The Cabin in the Woods.

Sophia Jane Myles[1] (/səˈfaɪ.ə/;[2] born 18 March 1980) is an English actress, best known in film for portraying Erika in Underworld (2003), Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward in the live-action Thunderbirds film, Isolde in Tristan & Isolde and Darcy in Transformers: Age of Extinction, and has received critical acclaim for her television work, particularly as Madame de Pompadour in the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" and Beth Turner in Moonlight.

As a child, Christian Wolff is diagnosed with a high-functioning form of autism at Harbor Neuroscience, where he meets the doctor's daughter, Justine. Chris's father declines the offer for his son to stay at a sensory friendly environment, believing that Chris must overcome the hardships inherent in his condition, but Chris's overwhelmed mother abandons their family. Afraid that others will exploit his son, Chris's father—a US Army PSYOP officer—begins a brutal regimen of stoicism and martial arts training for both him and his brother, Braxton.

Dornan had a relationship with actress Keira Knightley from 2003 to 2005.[30] In 2010, he met English actress and singer-songwriter Amelia Warner and they got engaged in 2012, and married in 2013.[31] They have two daughters.[32][33] He owns houses in Cotswolds, England,[34] and in Hollywood Hills, California.[35]

Kyle Martin Chandler (born September 17, 1965) is an American actor, best known for his role as Gary Hobson on Early Edition and as Coach Eric Taylor in the drama series Friday Night Lights, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2011. He has starred in the films King Kong (2005), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), Super 8 (2011), Argo (2012), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Carol (2015), and Manchester by the Sea (2016).[1] In 2015, he began starring on Netflix's drama series Bloodline, for which he received his fourth and fifth Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

Pain & Gain is a 2013 American dark comedy crime film directed by Michael Bay and starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie. The film is loosely based on a story Pete Collins published in a 1999 series of Miami New Times articles and compiled in the book Pain & Gain: This Is a True Story (2013), which details the kidnapping, extortion, torture, and murder of several victims by an organized group of criminals comprising bodybuilders affiliated with the Sun Gym.[4][5] The film's title is a play on the common adage, frequently used in fitness: "No pain, no gain".

Rees began to work in television during the 1970s, appearing opposite Laurence Olivier in The Ebony Tower (1984). That same year, Rees portrayed Fred Hollywell in A Christmas Carol starring George C. Scott as Scrooge. From 1988 to 1991 he starred in the late 80s/early 90s British sitcom Singles, with co-star Judy Loe. From 1989 to 1991 and in 1993, he also appeared intermittently on the long-running American TV series Cheers as the English tycoon Robin Colcord. His later television appearances include My So-Called Life as substitute teacher Mr Racine, British Ambassador Lord John Marbury on The West Wing and James MacPherson on Warehouse 13.[4] His film career began in the 1980s. Rees played the Sheriff of Rottingham in the Mel Brooks movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).[4] Rees' later film appearances include Frida (2002), The Prestige (2006) and The Pink Panther (2006).[4]

By early 2013, several Hollywood studios were keen to obtain film rights to The New York Times bestselling Fifty Shades trilogy of novels.[17] Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount, Universal, and Mark Wahlberg's production company submitted bids for the film rights.[18][19] Universal Pictures and Focus Features secured the rights to the trilogy in March 2013.[5] Author James sought to retain some control during the movie's creative process.[20] James chose The Social Network producers Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti to produce the film.[4][21]


Question: Who portrays Ser Davos in Game of Thrones?

Liam Cunningham, an Irish actor born on June 2, 1961, is widely recognized for his role as Davos Seaworth in the HBO series Game of Thrones. Throughout his career, he has been nominated for prestigious awards such as the London Film Critics' Circle Award and the British Independent Film Award, and has twice been awarded the Irish Film & Television Award. Additionally, Cunningham has shared a BAFTA with Michael Fassbender for their work on the crime-drama short film Pitch Black Heist.

The seventh season of the fantasy drama television series Game of Thrones premiered on HBO on July 16, 2017, and concluded on August 27, 2017.[1][2][3] Unlike previous seasons that consisted of ten episodes each, the seventh season consisted of only seven.[4] Like the previous season, it largely consisted of original content not found in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, while also incorporating material Martin revealed to showrunners about the upcoming novels in the series.[5][better source needed] The series was adapted for television by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss.

Dominic Bernard Patrick Luke Monaghan (/ˈdɒmɪnɪk ˈmɒnəhæn/; born 8 December 1976) is a German-born English actor. Monaghan first gained fame for being Hetty Wainthropp's sidekick Geoffrey in Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996 -98). He then played Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck in Peter Jackson's epic film trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–03) based on the novel of the same name by J.R.R Tolkien, Charlie Pace on the television show Lost (2004–2010), and Chris Bradley in superhero film X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). He currently hosts the nature program Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan (2012–present).

Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames (born May 12, 1959) is an American actor of screen and stage known for his roles as Luther Stickell in the Mission: Impossible film series, as well as Pulp Fiction, Don King: Only in America, Rosewood, Con Air, Dawn of the Dead, and Bringing Out the Dead, as well as the voice of Cobra Bubbles in the 2002 film Lilo & Stitch. Rhames is a Golden Globe Award winner, as well as an Emmy Award and Screen Actors Guild Award nominee.

Jon Huertas is an American actor of Puerto Rican descent. He is best known for his role as Sergeant Antonio 'Poke' Espera in HBO's Generation Kill, Joe Negroni in the film Why Do Fools Fall in Love, and homicide detective Javier Esposito in Castle.

Aidan Gillen (/ˈɡɪlɛn/; born Aidan Murphy; 24 April 1968) is an Irish actor.

After Joffrey Baratheon's death, Stannis reprimands Davos for not being able to secure more men. Davos arranges a meeting with Tycho Nestoris, a representative of the Iron Bank of Braavos, and persuades him to give their financial backing to Stannis instead. Davos uses the money to hire ships and sellswords and the Baratheon army travels to the Wall, defeating the wildling army besieging it.

"Valar Dohaeris" is the third season premiere of the HBO fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 21st episode of the series. Written by executive producers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, and directed by Daniel Minahan, it aired on March 31, 2013.[1]

1 In seasons 6 and 7, Sebastian Croft portrays Ned Stark as a child and Robert Aramayo portrays him as a young man.
2 In season 5, Nell Williams portrays Cersei Lannister in a flashback scene.
3 In season 3, Daario Naharis is portrayed by Ed Skrein.
4 In season 1, Jaqen H'ghar appears in one scene, portrayed by an uncredited extra.
5 In seasons 1 and 2, Tommen Baratheon is portrayed by Callum Wharry.

Sansa Stark (season 1–present) portrayed by Sophie Turner. Sansa Stark of House Stark is the first daughter and second child of Eddard and Catelyn Stark. She was also the future bride of Prince Joffrey, and thus the future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms as well. Her direwolf is called Lady, she is the smallest of the pack. Sansa is naive and wants to live the life of a fairy tale princess and is unwilling to see the harsh realities of the kingdom's politics and rivalries. Her fantasy begins to shatter when Lady is killed, and the situation continues to worsen when her father is arrested for treason. She becomes a hostage to the Lannisters in order for them to have a legitimate claim for the North. Her naïveté is finally shattered when King Joffrey executes her father despite promising her that he would spare him. Sansa is forced to put up an act or endure Joffrey's cruelty. Throughout Season 2, she suffers under Joffrey's abuse until Tyrion puts a stop to it. By the Season 2 finale, Joffrey breaks his engagement with Sansa to marry Margaery Tyrell. However, she is still a hostage; but Petyr Baelish promises to help her return to Winterfell. In Season 3, she is married to Tyrion to secure the Lannisters the North should Robb Stark die. The marriage is unhappy and yet to be consummated, and after Robb's death – upon which Joffrey insists to be given his head to present to Sansa, a request coldly ignored by his grandfather – she is unable to speak to him. In Season 4, Sansa has been mourning her family for weeks and is starving herself in depression. She attends Joffrey's wedding with Tyrion and witnesses Joffrey's death. Dontos Hollard immediately spirits her away from the wedding, moments ahead of Cersei's orders to have her and Tyrion arrested. Dontos brings Sansa to a ship concealed in fog, and she is greeted by Petyr Baelish. Under the guise of making payment, Petyr has the fool killed by his archers, with Petyr explaining that killing Dontos was the only way to ensure his silence – her disappearance when Joffrey died, the execution of her father, deaths of her family and years of torment at the king's hand, will all be considerable motive for Sansa helping Tyrion murder Joffrey. Currently, a thousand of the City Watch are searching for her, Cersei thirsts for vengeance, and Tyrion himself stands trial. Sansa is assured she has finally escaped King's Landing and is safe with Lord Baelish, who takes her to her Aunt Lysa for shelter. Lysa takes Sansa in warmly and has her betrothed to her son, Robin. However, Sansa realises the worst is far from over when Lysa, who is smitten with Petyr, accuses Sansa of trying to seduce him, and she discovers that Robin is a spoiled and rude child, slapping him at one point. When Petyr unexpectedly kisses Sansa, Lysa becomes enraged and nearly pushes Sansa through the castle's Moon Door, but Petyr intervenes by pacifying Lysa and then pushing her through the Moon Door to her death before Sansa's eyes, making Sansa realise that Petyr may have romantic or lustful feelings for her. Sansa speaks up for Petyr when he is questioned about his involvement in Lysa's death, but Sansa reaffirms Petyr's claim that Lysa killed herself due to her own instability and insecurities. Afterward she told Petyr that her reason to protect him in the hearing was because she knew he was the only person she could count on to protect her, demonstrated by his initiative in getting her out of King's Landing while everyone else in power there only wanted to use her as a pawn. In Season 5, she and Petyr leave the Eyrie for a place Petyr promises where Cersei will never find her. At an In, Brienne of Tarth materializes unexpectedly and declares herself for Sansa. Petyr doubts that Sansa would want a sworn shield who let both of her previous masters die, even when Brienne reveals the true, somewhat unbelievable circumstances of Renly's death. Sansa seems inclined to agree, pointing out that Brienne was present at Joffrey's wedding, to which the warrior replies that neither of them wanted to be there. Sansa rejects Brienne's offer of service and watches as she handily defeats the guards and escapes. Petyr tells her that he has arranged for her to be married to Ramsay Bolton, the son of Lord Roose Bolton. This will put her back in Winterfell, which the Boltons now occupy as a reward for their role in the deaths of Robb and Catelyn. Though Ramsay initially seems interested in Sansa, his psychopathic nature quickly shows through, and Sansa is disgusted. She is also antagonized by Myranda, the kennelmaster's daughter, who is in a sexual relationship with Ramsay. Myranda frequently makes veiled threats to Sansa, and shows her what has become of Theon Greyjoy, who was Eddard Stark's ward and whom she grew up with. Sansa is horrified to find that after Ramsay emasculated him, he has taken on a submissive, sullen persona called Reek. After Sansa and Ramsay are wed, he brutally rapes her while forcing Reek to watch. Later, Sansa attempts to talk to Reek, who is unresponsive to her attempts to make him act like his old self by repeatedly calling him Theon instead of Reek. At one point, Reek mistakenly lets slip that her younger brothers, Bran and Rickon, are alive, when she had assumed that they were dead. This realization gives Sansa hope in the midst of her unfortunate situation. As Stannis Baratheon's army sneaks up on Winterfell and is greeted by the bulk of the Bolton forces, Sansa manages to escape her chamber but is stopped by Myranda, who threatens her with a bow. Reminding Sansa that she has nothing left to live for in Ramsay's custody, she is unexpectedly saved by Reek, who breaks his spell of subjugation by throwing Myranda over the bannister. The Bolton's return to Winterfell and, knowing the dire consequences Ramsay would have in place for the both of them when he finds Myranda's body, the couple flee to the wall in terror, where they make the jump off the ledge. In season 6, Sansa makes it to the Wall with help from Brienne and Podrick and reunites with Jon, while Theon returns home. After Jon receives a threatening letter from Ramsay demanding Sansa back, Sansa and Jon decide to fight back against Ramsay and retake the North. Sansa briefly meets with Petyr Baelish, but turns him down for his role in handing her to the Boltons. Realizing that with their meager forces they are still outnumbered, Sansa writes to Baelish for help and he arrives in time with the Vale Knights to smash the Bolton army and help Jon secure victory. After Ramsay is killed, Baelish admits to Sansa that he wants her to rule alongside him as his Queen, but Sansa turns him down. When Jon is named the new King in the North, Sansa notices Baelish glaring at her. In Season 7 Sansa finds some of Jon's decisions infuriating but remains loyal to him. She maintains her support of Jon even when he leaves Winterfell against her advice and the Northern Lords' objections, and even when some of them hint that they're ready to drop their support of Jon and name her their ruler. Sansa is overjoyed to see Arya and Bran return to Winterfell, though she is unnerved by how much they have changed: Bran's loss of humanity and Arya's ruthlessness. Petyr Baelish sees Arya as a threat to his influence with Sansa and attempts to drive a wedge between the sisters. He appears at first to be succeeding but at some point the three Starks realise what Baelish is doing. Sansa pretends to believe Baelish as he insinuates that Arya is plotting her murder. Then to his surprise she accuses him of various crimes in front of the Northern Lords, before finding him guilty and allowing Arya to execute him.

Pellegrino appeared in season 7, episode 3 of The X-Files in November 1999. In 2001, he played an incompetent hitman in David Lynch's critically acclaimed Mulholland Drive. Pellegrino starred as Rita's abusive ex-con former husband Paul on Showtime's Dexter; and later as Lucifer on Supernatural and as the mysterious near-immortal Jacob on ABC's Lost. He has appeared on the television series Northern Exposure, ER, Without a Trace, NYPD Blue, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Knight Rider. He also is well known as the "Blond Thug" who stuffs The Dude's head down the toilet and drops his bowling ball, breaking the floor tile, in the cult film The Big Lebowski. He also is featured in National Treasure as the background FBI agent known as Agent Johnson. In 2005, Pellegino appeared in the Academy Award winning film Capote, playing murderer Dick Hickock.


Question: Who hit the first home run in Houston's Astrodome?

On April 9, 1965, during the inaugural game at the Houston Astrodome between the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees, a capacity crowd of 47,879 spectators witnessed history. Notable attendees included President Lyndon B. Johnson, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, Texas Governor John Connally, and Houston Mayor Louie Welch. Governor Connally performed the ceremonial first pitch, and Yankees legend Mickey Mantle made his mark on the Astrodome's history by hitting both the first single and the first home run. The Astros emerged victorious with a 2-1 win over the Yankees.

The AL tied the score in the bottom of the sixth inning. With one out, Brooks Robinson hit a home run off of NL relief pitcher Ferguson Jenkins.[4] The score remained unchanged through the ninth inning, forcing the game into extra innings.

After two fairly successful seasons without a playoff appearance, the Astros were early favorites to win the 2004 NL pennant. They added star pitcher Andy Pettitte to a roster that already included standouts like Lance Berkman and Jeff Kent as well as veterans Bagwell and Biggio. Roger Clemens, who had retired after the 2003 season with the New York Yankees, agreed to join former teammate Pettitte on the Astros for 2004. The one-year deal included unique conditions, such as the option for Clemens to stay home in Houston on select road trips when he wasn't scheduled to pitch. Despite the early predictions for success, the Astros had a mediocre 44–44 record at the All-Star break. A lack of run production and a poor record in close games were major issues. After being booed at the 2004 All-Star Game held in Houston, manager Jimy Williams was fired and replaced by Phil Garner, a star on the division-winning 1986 Astros. The Astros enjoyed a 46–26 record in the second half of the season under Garner and earned the NL wild card spot. The Astros defeated the Braves 3–2 in the Division Series, but would lose the National League Championship Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Clemens earned a record seventh Cy Young Award in 2004. Additionally, the mid-season addition of Carlos Beltrán in a trade with the Kansas City Royals helped the Astros tremendously in their playoff run. Despite midseason trade rumors, Beltrán would prove instrumental to the team's hopes, hitting eight home runs in the postseason. Though he had asserted a desire to remain with the Astros, Beltrán signed a long-term contract with the New York Mets on January 9, 2005.

The Yankees struck first in Game 1 when Derek Jeter was hit by a pitch with one out in the first and scored on Bernie Williams's double two batters later. However, Arizona's Curt Schilling and two relievers held the Yankees scoreless afterward. They managed to get only two walks and two hits for the rest of the game, Scott Brosius's double in the second and Jorge Posada's single in the fourth, both with two outs.

Game 4 began as a pitcher's duel. The Yankees' Sonny Gray threw five scoreless innings, allowing only one hit while Astros' Lance McCullers Jr. threw six shutout innings with one hit. With the bases loaded in the top of the sixth, Yuli Gurriel hit a bases-clearing double off of David Robertson to put the Astros up 3–0. The next inning, a Starlin Castro fielding error allowed Marwin González to score, increasing the lead to 4–0. In the bottom of the seventh, Aaron Judge hit a solo home run, chasing McCullers from the game. Chris Devenski entered in relief only to allow a triple to Didi Gregorius and a sacrifice fly to Gary Sánchez, cutting the lead to 4–2. In the bottom of the eighth, Todd Frazier and Chase Headley both singled, with the latter tripping on his way to second base and evading José Altuve's close tag to remain safe at second. As Ken Giles entered the game, a Brett Gardner groundout made the score 4–3 before Judge doubled into left field, tying the game at 4–4. Gregorius singled and Sánchez doubled to complete the Yankees comeback, now up 6–4. Aroldis Chapman entered in the top of the ninth inning, pitching a 1-2-3 inning to get his first save of the series and third this postseason as the Yankees rallied to tie the series at two games all.[18]

On May 10, 2007, Griffey hit his sixth home run of the season and the 569th of his career, tying Rafael Palmeiro for ninth place on the career home runs list. He passed Palmeiro on May 13. Griffey tied Harmon Killebrew for eighth on the all-time list hitting his 573rd career home run on May 22. He then surpassed him on May 25.

From that point on the Yankees were in total control, with the New York offense continuing to hit and score runs long into the night. In the fifth, Jeter walked with one-out before back-to-back RBI doubles by Rodriguez and Sheffield made it 13â€“6 Yankees. In the seventh, Miguel Cairo and Sheffield singled off of Wakefield, who was relieved by Alan Embree. Matsui's single scored a run, Williams's double scored two, and Jorge Posada's double scored another. The Red Sox scored their last runs of the game in the bottom of the inning off of Vazquez on Jason Varitek's two-run home run after a leadoff single. Matsui also hit a two-run home run in the ninth off of Mike Myers.

April 15, 1968 saw a pitching duel for the ages. The Astros' Don Wilson and the Mets' Tom Seaver faced each other in a pitching duel that lasted six hours. Seaver went ten innings, allowing no walks and just two hits. Wilson went nine innings, allowing five hits and three walks. After the starters exited, eleven relievers (seven for the Mets and four for the Astros) tried to end the game. The game finally ended in the 24th inning when Aspromonte hit a shot toward Mets shortstop Al Weis. Weis had been perfect all night at short, but he was not quick enough to make the play. The ball zipped into left field, allowing Norm Miller to score.[21]

On August 17, the Red Sox recalled Ellsbury from Pawtucket for the second game of a doubleheader, where he led off and played center field.[30] He was optioned back to Pawtucket after the game.[31] When major league rosters expanded to 40 players on September 1, he was a September call-up by the Red Sox.[32] On September 2, he hit his first major league home run, a solo shot which landed in the Red Sox bullpen, in the bottom of the fourth inning run off Daniel Cabrera of the Baltimore Orioles.[33] A September 2007 article in The New York Times described him as a "cult hero" who brings "speed, improved defense, and unbridled enthusiasm."[34] Ellsbury was named MLB's American League Rookie of the Month for September 2007.[35] With fewer than 130 major league at-bats, he still qualified as a rookie for the 2008 season.

In the second game, Jon Lester and Rich Hill each pitched four scoreless innings before allowing solo runs in the fifth, a solo homer by Addison Russell in the top half and a two-out RBI single by Justin Turner after a leadoff double by Charlie Culberson. The bullpens kept the game tied until the bottom of the ninth when Turner hit a walk-off three run home run off of John Lackey after walks to Yasiel Puig off of Brian Duensing and Chris Taylor off of Lackey.[13] It was the Dodgers' first walk-off homer in the post-season since Kirk Gibson's homer in game one of the 1988 World Series, exactly 29 years prior.[14]

Robinson's home run against Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, who had earlier hit him in the head, helps clinch the National League pennant for the Dodgers, sending them to the World Series, which they would lose to the New York Yankees. A concluding postscript describes how Rickey, Robinson, and many of his teammates went on to have distinguished careers, including inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame, besides Chapman, who was fired and forbidden to join an MLB team forever due to his racism. (This was not, in fact, entirely true: Chapman was fired in the 1948 season due to the Phillies' losing record, but he later resurfaced as a major league coach with the Cincinnati Reds.) The notes also describe the entrance of other African Americans into the Major Leagues, beginning with the season after Robinson's debut.


Question: What's the movie with Justin Timberlake about time?

"In Time," a 2011 dystopian sci-fi action thriller, was directed and written by Andrew Niccol. The film features Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, and Cillian Murphy in a world where time is used as currency and people stop aging at 25, with a countdown clock on their arm indicating their remaining lifespan. It was released on October 28, 2011.

Safe Haven is a 2013 American romantic drama fantasy thriller film starring Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel and Cobie Smulders. It was released theatrically in North America on February 14, 2013. The film was directed by Lasse Hallström, and is an adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' 2010 novel of the same name. The film was originally set for a February 8 release.[5]

The film is the story of a broken-down former baseball player, Charley Benetto (Imperioli), who is now divorced and estranged from his own daughter, on the verge of a suicide who gets to spend one more day with his estranged departed mother (Burstyn), whom he had blamed for leaving his father. Throughout the course of the movie, she takes him to various points in his life and he learns what actually was going on to get a truer picture of his life.

The first ghost is the "Ghost of Girlfriends Past" in the form of Allison Vandermeersh (Emma Stone), one of his high school girlfriends and his first lover. Together, they revisit scenes from his past, focusing on his relationship with Jenny. In 1982, Connor and Jenny were very close as children; she gave him his first instant camera which he used to take her picture, promising to keep it forever. When Connor's parents died in a car accident, Jenny consoles Connor throughout the years without them, as she, his brother Paul and his uncle Wayne were all he had left. By middle school, the two were on the verge of romance, but Connor's hesitation at asking her for a dance caused Jenny to dance with and kiss another boy. Heartbroken, Connor was told by Wayne that he must avoid romance at all costs in order not to feel such pain again. For the next two years, Wayne schooled Connor in the art of seduction. When he next saw Jenny, at a high school party, Connor ignored her and kissed another girl named Allison, whom he had his first sexual encounter with. Several years later, as adults, Connor and Jenny rekindled their romance, but Jenny forced him to woo her for several weeks in an attempt to rid him of his womanizing ways. After they finally did have sex, Connor falls in love with her, but when he lies in bed with her to fall asleep beside her, he remembers his uncle Wayne's warnings about sleeping and spooning with the opposite sex after a night of passion. Realizing this, he panics, running out on her so he won't be hurt. The next morning, Jenny wakes up alone and broken-hearted. His relationships thereafter consisted of a series of very short flings.

The film is set in Los Angeles in the then-future of 1996. Harley Davidson (Mickey Rourke), dressed in biker gear, with ultra-short dyed hair, hears from the radio about a dangerous new street drug named "Crystal Dream". (The significance of this street drug does not become clear until later.) Harley goes into a rough bar and sees a cowboy-looking fellow (Don Johnson wearing a beard, cowboy hat and boots). He has scammed a fellow in a pool game but has to use strong measures when the fellow refuses payment. Harley helps him in this. We learn that they are old friends (later we learn the name he goes by is The Marlboro Man.) They visit a blues (old jazz?) bar in Burbank, which they both hold special. They go into a back room and meet Jack Daniels, an extremely-heavily-muscled lad, who immediately goes to fight Harley due to an old feud over a woman. After a manly exchange of blows and body slams, Harley tells him that he knows that the woman loves Jack and they make friends. Soon it is revealed that the bar is about to be demolished as the lease will not be renewed. "Suits" at Great Trust bank plan to replace it with a skyscraper. Harley, Marlboro, Jack and two friends decide to rob a bank to raise the money to ensure the bar's survival. A comely waitress hooks up with Harley. Marlboro borrows Harley's Harley and baits a motorcycle cop, with interesting results. In a bit of psychological revelation, we learn that he is in an intermittent amorous relationship with a beautiful woman, who tells him that she is going to settle down with another man, as she is not getting enough loving from him. He is conflicted by the news but later tells Harley that he is not the kind of man who has a wife. Harley arrives and takes her out for breakfast. An armored car is going down a street and meets a detour sign. Marlboro jumps on its back door and climbs to its roof (a visual parallel of train robbers crawling on the roofs of boxcars in old western movies). The contents of the armored car is heisted in a well-thought-out scheme, but the escape of Harley/Marlboro's gang is almost foiled by the appearance of a squad of black-trenchcoat-wearing (a la Matrix) machinepistol-firing soldiers. Jack drives a fiery motorcycle into the fray and allows them to escape. But they discover the goods they have stolen are a large amount of "Crystal Dream", not money. Chance Wilder (Tom Sizemore), president of the Great Trust branch, is obviously involved in drug dealing. Harley and Marlboro go to the bank. Showing considerable balls, Harley negotiates an exchange - the drugs for $2.5M. The exchange goes down smoothly in a visually-fascinating airplane graveyard, but then the bank's squad of soldiers finds them celebrating at the bar and it is not pretty, although Harley and Marlboro manage to escape with the money. In a running battle, Harley and Marlboro alternately flee and face off with steadily-declining elements of the squad until a final showdown in the penthouse suite of the Great Trust bank. The closing scene: Marlboro has gone back to rodeo bull-riding and Harley on his bike takes to the road, stopping only temporarily to pick up a ravishing and shapely hitchhiker who tells him she is going "no place special", a destination that Harley promises to take her. Much of the film was filmed in and around Tucson, Arizona and the "Boneyard" at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Newlyweds Antonio and Milly plan to move to Rome because Antonio's uncles have offered him a job in their family's business. After checking into their hotel, Milly decides to visit a salon before meeting Antonio's relatives. She becomes lost and loses her cell phone, but ends up at a film shoot where she meets Luca Salta, an actor she idolizes. He invites her to lunch. Back at the hotel, Antonio is worried Milly will be late for their lunch date with his aunts and uncles. Anna, a prostitute, then arrives, having mistakenly been sent to his room.

The film is an enactment of a book read to a sick boy—who is initially dismissive of the story—by his grandfather, with occasional interruptions of the scenes in this frame story.

The film takes place in two different times: the present and 11 years earlier. The two plot lines are told in parallel through flashbacks. In 2002, software engineer Alan Russell moves into a new house with his wife Marie, 10-year-old son Tim, and 12-year-old daughter Kaylie. Alan purchases an antique mirror to decorate his office. Unbeknownst to them, the mirror supernaturally induces hallucinations. Marie is haunted by visions of her own body decaying, while Alan is seduced by a ghostly woman named Marisol, who has mirrors in place of eyes.

Rob Horton is 12 years old and lives with his father in a Florida motel called the Kentucky Star. His father (named Robert), and Rob have recently moved to Lister, Florida, after the death of Robâ€™s mother, Caroline. Rob is quiet and often is bullied at school. Things begin to change when Rob discovers a tiger in the forest (locked up in a cage) while wandering the woods. He then meets a girl named Sistine Bailey who has recently moved nearby. Rob shows Sistine the tiger. Rob, who usually keeps his feelings locked away begins to involuntarily open up emotionally to Sistine. Though Sistine insists on letting the tiger go, Rob is wary of what will happen to it if he does. Rob finally relents and releases the tiger, letting it run into the woods. However, just moments later, Rob's father shoots the tiger dead. At the tiger's funeral, Sistine recites a part of William Blake's The Tyger. Rob and his father confront their unresolved feelings about Rob's mother and Rob begins looking forward to going to school with Sistine.

The episode was largely based upon the 1985 film Spies Like Us, which starred Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd,[8] and the movie is mentioned in the episode itself.[9] The episode was also based on the 1977 spy film Telefon about brainwashed Russian spies in the U.S. who can be activated by a special code phrase. When Peter has to go to the bathroom, he runs to Cleveland's empty home, which has been put up for sale since he left to live in Virginia with his new family. A montage of Peter going to the bathroom is shown, while Jennifer Lopez's "Let's Get Loud" plays. When Peter becomes aware that Cleveland's house is being rented by actors Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd, he mentions that he is honored to have dinner with "two of the three Ghostbusters." Chase then replies that he was not in that movie; Peter also notes that he is honored to meet "two of the Three Amigos," a movie starring Chase but not Aykroyd. After dinner, Stewie is seen drawing and coloring Sebastian the crab, a character from the Disney film The Little Mermaid. When Aykroyd and Chase ask Stewie and Brian if they want to be "spies like us", Stewie asks if they can be "spies like them" and points to Black Spy and White Spy from Spy vs. Spy, one of the head comic strip features of MAD magazine. When Aykroyd and Chase explain to Stewie and Brian how they were recruited as official spies by Reagan, a cutaway is shown of an event in which 1985 is awarded the "Awesomest Year of the 80's" prize and all characters spontaneously start dancing to the 1983 song "(Keep Feeling) Fascination." Later, Brian and Stewie agree to become agents, and Stewie asks if "Ron Howard's weird-looking brother is here."[3] There is a cutaway to The Brady Bunch, in which it is revealed Mike Brady killed his first wife, and housekeeper Alice walks in and demands a raise.

Steins;Gate takes place in the Akihabara district of Tokyo. On July 28, 2010, Rintarō Okabe and his friend Mayuri Shiina head towards the Radio Kaikan building for a conference, where Rintarō finds a girl named Kurisu Makise lying in a pool of blood.[39] As Rintarō sends a text message about the incident to his friend, Itaru "Daru" Hashida, he experiences a strange phenomenon and the people around him disappear, with no-one else noticing anything had changed.[40] After later running into Kurisu, who is strangely alive and well, and discovering the message he had sent to Itaru had arrived a week before he sent it,[41][42] Rintarō soon deduces that the 'Mobile Microwave' he and his friends had been developing is, in fact, a time machine capable of sending text messages to the past.[20][43] He and his friends soon learn that SERN, an organization that has been researching time travel for some time, has actually succeeded in sending humans into the past although they seem to have all resulted in the test subjects' deaths. Rintarō begins experimenting with "D-Mails" (Dメール, D mēru, short for DeLorean mail), which begin to cause major differences in the timeline. Kurisu also manages to create a device to send a person's memories through the microwave, allowing that person to effectively leap into the past.


Question: Who is the author of the poem "For Whom the Bell Tolls"?

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" is a novel penned by Ernest Hemingway and published in 1940. The narrative follows the journey of Robert Jordan, a young American serving in the International Brigades, who is part of a republican guerrilla unit during the tumultuous period of the Spanish Civil War. Jordan, as a skilled dynamiter, is tasked with the critical mission of destroying a bridge in preparation for an assault on the city of Segovia.

This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

Thayer, in a letter he wrote in 1905, mentions Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem. The author of the 2004 definitive bio of Kelly—which included a close tracking of his vaudeville career—did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author.[7][7]:9

Gaiman is godfather to Tori Amos's daughter Tash,[133] and wrote a poem called "Blueberry Girl" for Tori and Tash.[134] The poem has been turned into a book by the illustrator Charles Vess.[135] Gaiman read the poem aloud to an audience at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco on 5 October 2008 during his book reading tour for The Graveyard Book.[136] It was published in March 2009 with the title, Blueberry Girl.

Paul Revere (/rɪˈvɪər/; December 21, 1734 O.S. – May 10, 1818[N 1]) was an American silversmith, engraver, early industrialist, and Patriot in the American Revolution. He is best known for his midnight ride to alert the colonial militia in April 1775 to the approach of British forces before the battles of Lexington and Concord, as dramatized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" (1861).

The lyrics of the carol are taken from a poem written by Dix called "The Manger Throne".[1][2] The part of the poem that was utilized as the song's lyrics consists of three stanzas in total.[1] The first verse poses a rhetorical question in the first half, with the response coming in the second half. The second verse contains another question that is answered, while the final verse is a universal appeal to everyone urging them "to accept Christ".[3] The carol's melody has been described as "soulful",[1] "haunting and beautiful" in nature.[4]

Marnie Parsons describes the work as a "semiotic catastrophe", arguing that the words create a discernible narrative within the structure of the poem, though the reader cannot know what they symbolise. She argues that Humpty tries, after the recitation, to "ground" the unruly multiplicities of meaning with definitions, but cannot succeed as both the book and the poem are playgrounds for the "carnivalised aspect of language". Parsons suggests that this is mirrored in the prosody of the poem: in the tussle between the tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and trimeter in the last lines, such that one undercuts the other and we are left off balance, like the poem's hero.[17]

Newton likely introduced her to the writings of William Wordsworth, and his gift to her of Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of collected poems had a liberating effect. She wrote later that he, "whose name my Father's Law Student taught me, has touched the secret Spring".[39] Newton held her in high regard, believing in and recognizing her as a poet. When he was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her, saying that he would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw.[39] Biographers believe that Dickinson's statement of 1862—"When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned"—refers to Newton.[40]

Percy Dearmer (1867-1936) revised John Bunyan's (1628-1688) poem "To Be a Pilgrim" in 1906. It became a popular hymn when Canon Charles Winfred Douglas (1867-1944) set it to music in 1917. Here are Dearmer's lyrics, with the internal rhymes in bold. Notice that in these three quatrains the internal rhymes are also echoed in the line rhymes (also in bold).[3]

I Sing the Body Electric! is a 1969 collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. The book takes its name from an included short story of the same title, which took the title from a poem by Walt Whitman published in his collection Leaves of Grass.

During the 1980s, the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller performed a version of "Casey at the Bat" with Teller (the "silent" partner) struggling to escape a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over a platform of sharp steel spikes. The set-up was that Penn Jillette would leap off his chair upon finishing the poem, releasing the rope which supported Teller, and send his partner to a gruesome death if he wasn't free by that time. The drama of the performance was taken up a notch after the third or fourth stanza, when Penn Jillette began to read out the rest of the poem much faster than the opening stanzas, greatly reducing the time that Teller had left to work free from his bonds.


Question: Who penned the poem "For Whom the Bell Tolls"?

The title of Ernest Hemingway's novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" originates from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a collection of meditations and prayers penned during his recovery from a severe illness in 1624. Specifically, Hemingway draws from Meditation XVII, which discusses the interconnectedness of humanity and the significance of funeral bells. Hemingway includes a segment of this meditation, preserving Donne's original spelling, as an epigraph in his book.

Originally titled "A Child's Remembrance", the poem was first published in the Saturday Press on December 24, 1859.[2] The newspaper included this introduction: "Our readers may, if they choose, consider as our Christmas or New Year's present to them, the curious warble by Walt Whitman".[3]

On 10 September 1936, two years after the release of his first volume of poetry (18 Poems), Twenty-five Poems was published. It revealed Thomas' personal beliefs pertaining to religion and the forces of nature, and included "And death shall have no dominion".

The poem serves as an allegory about a king "in the olden time long ago" who is afraid of evil forces that threaten him and his palace, foreshadowing impending doom. As part of "The Fall of the House of Usher", Poe said, "I mean to imply a mind haunted by phantoms â€” a disordered brain" [1] referring to Roderick Usher.

Early in 1918, Hemingway responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and signed on to become an ambulance driver in Italy.[13] He left New York in May and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery.[14] By June, he was at the Italian Front. It was probably around this time that he first met John Dos Passos, with whom he had a rocky relationship for decades.[15] On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion, where rescuers retrieved the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments."[16] A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.

"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-Glass Land.

In 1963, the poem provided the title for a Roger Corman film of the same name. The actual plot of Corman's film The Haunted Palace comes almost entirely from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a novel by H. P. Lovecraft. By 1963, Corman had produced several highly lucrative films based on Poe's work, but Lovecraft was not at that time a well-known author; according to Corman on the DVD making-of featurette, the studio forced him to name this movie after one of Poe's poems (and included a Poe epigraph in the credits) so that audiences would believe it to be another film based on Poe's writings.

Thayer, in a letter he wrote in 1905, mentions Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem. The author of the 2004 definitive bio of Kelly—which included a close tracking of his vaudeville career—did not find Kelly claiming to have been the author.[7][7]:9

Troilus and Criseyde (Modern English: /ˈtrɔɪləs ən ˈkrɛsɪdə/) is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).

The phrase comes from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" (1837) and refers to the first shot of the American Revolution. According to Emerson's poem, this pivotal shot occurred at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, where the first British soldiers fell in the battles of Lexington and Concord.

The likeliest source is the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock' [1888]), he said, "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In a 1916 reminiscence,[25] American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages – mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"


Question: Where did the concept of a unicorn originate from?

The concept of the unicorn, a mythical creature with a single spiraling horn on its forehead, has roots in ancient history. It was featured in the seals of the Indus Valley Civilization and referenced by Greek writers such as Ctesias, Strabo, Pliny the Younger, and Aelian in their natural history accounts. Additionally, the Bible mentions an animal called the re'em, which is sometimes interpreted as a unicorn in certain translations.

This rhyme was played upon by Lewis Carroll, who incorporated the lion and the unicorn as characters in Through the Looking-Glass. Here, the crown they are fighting for belongs to the White King which, given that they are on the White side as well, makes their rivalry all the more absurd. Carroll subverts the traditional view of a lion being alert and calculating by making this particular one slow and rather stupid, although clearly the better fighter. The role of the Unicorn is likewise reversed by the fact that he sees Alice as a "monster", though he promises to start believing in her if she will believe in him. Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for the section caricature Benjamin Disraeli as the Unicorn, and William Ewart Gladstone as the Lion, alluding to the pair's frequent parliamentary battles, although there is no evidence that this was Carroll's intention.[2]

The Egyptian expression sema-tawy is usually translated as "The Uniter of the Two Lands" [1] and was depicted as a human trachea entwined with the papyrus and lily plant. The trachea stood for unification, while the papyrus and lily plant represent Lower and Upper Egypt.

Western culture was influenced by many older great civilizations of the ancient Near East, such as Phoenicia, Minoan Crete, Sumer, Babylonia, and also Ancient Egypt. It originated in the Mediterranean basin and its vicinity; Greece and Rome are often cited as its originators. Over time, their associated empires grew first to the east and west to include the rest of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coastal areas, conquering and absorbing. Later, they expanded to the north of the Mediterranean Sea to include Western, Central, and Southeastern Europe. Christianisation of Ireland (5th century), Bulgaria, Serbia (9th century), Kievan Rus' (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus; 10th century), Scandinavia (12th century) and Lithuania (14th century) brought the rest of present-day European territory into Western civilisation.

The elephant as the symbol for the Republican Party of the United States originated in an 1874 political cartoon of an Asian elephant by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly. This cartoon, titled "Third Term Panic", is a parody of Aesop's fable,[h] "The Ass in the Lion's Skin". It depicts an elephant (labelled The Republican Vote) running toward a chasm of chaos; frightening a jackass[i] in a lion's skin (labelled Caesarism) which scatters animals representing various interests. Although Nast used the elephant seven more times to represent the "Republican Vote", he did not use it to represent the Republican Party until March 1884 in "The Sacred Elephant".[40]

The period gave ancient Greek art ornamental motifs and an interest in animals and monsters that continued to be used for centuries, and were spread to Roman and Etruscan art.  Monumental and figurative sculpture in this style may be called Daedelic, after Daedalus, who was according to legend the founder of Greek sculpture. The period is characterized by a shift from the prevailing Geometric style to a style with different sensibilities, which were inspired by the East. The new style reflected a period of increased cultural interchange in the Aegean world, the intensity of which is sometimes compared to that of the Late Bronze Age.

The role of the Christ in Christianity originated from the concept of the messiah in Judaism. Although the conceptions of the messiah in each religion are similar, for the most part they are distinct from one another due to the split of early Christianity and Judaism in the 1st century.

Neighthan Rot (voiced by Josey Montana McCoy) is one of the new "hybrid" students of Monster High. He is the son of a zombie (father) and a unicorn (mother). He has long black hair with blue, yellow, and red highlights in a ponytail, and he wears a colorful shirt and pants whose color splash patterns seem remincient of anatomical models. Neighthan is somewhat clumsy, but he is a social monster who loves hanging out with his beast friends. He doesn't like monsters judging other monsters based on their appearances. He has the ability to heal thanks to his unicorn horn. He makes his first webisode appearance in "Graveyard Grates". He looks a little less like a unicorn because he only has a tail, a horn, and rainbow hair. From his zombie side, he has grey zombie-skin, and a marking on the left side of his face around his eye. Neighthan has human legs and feet instead of horse-like legs and hooves. He has a blue unicorn-horn, and wears a ponytail with a strand of hair coming down the left side of his face. He also wears a T-shirt with a rib cage on it and difficult multi-colors. He has romantic feelings for Frankie Stein, which seems to be mutual. Neightan was designed by Garrett Sander.[6]

The three-continent system was an idea devised in Archaic Greece, a time of Greek colonial expansion and trade throughout the Mediterranean and the spread of writing again. Writing is a prerequisite of written geography. It had been lost during the preceding Greek Dark Ages, a period of piracy at sea and defensive parochialism on land. The preceding Mycenaean Greece left scant record of some serving women from a locality in the later Asia Minor called Asia. Europe was mainly Greece, while Libya was a small region to the west of Egypt. There was no systematic definition of "continent;" however, the Greek mariners did make a distinction that was to become one: the islands, nēsoi, versus the mainland, ēpeiros.[6] One etymology relates ēpeir- to the same Indo-European root from which English "over" came.[7] The Armenian form means "bank, coast." The Greek form must be some sort of "overland," whether continuous land or a coast that looms over. In Latin it became continens terra, "the continuous land," shortened to just continens, stem continent-.

The first time the Primus/Unicron backstory appears is in the UK comic continuity, in the story "The Legacy of Unicron!", when Unicron recounts it to Death's Head. Per Unicron's telling of events, he was a primal force of evil at the dawn of the universe, who led a legion of Dark Gods against his mortal foe, Primus, Lord of the Light Gods. Events proceed to play out basically as described above, though the role of the Light and Dark Gods diminishes with each subsequent retelling of the story, until the current version, in which Primus and Unicron are alone, and have a unique origin.

Most scholars believe the Books of Samuel exhibit too many anachronisms to have been a contemporary account. For example, there is mention of later armor (1 Samuel 17:4–7, 38–39; 25:13), use of camels (1 Samuel 30:17), cavalry (as distinct from chariotry) (1 Samuel 13:5, 2 Samuel 1:6), and iron picks and axes (as though they were common) (2 Samuel 12:31). The historicity of the conquest described in the Book of Samuel is not attested, and many scholars regard this conquest as legendary in origin, particularly given the lack of evidence for the battles described involving the destruction of the Canaanite peoples. Most scholars believe that Samuel was compiled in the 8th century BCE (rather than the 10th century when most of the events described take place) based on both historical and legendary sources, primarily serving to fill the gap in Israelite history after the events described in Deuteronomy. This gap in the historical record is characteristic of the Late Bronze Age collapse; cultural memories of times before the disaster often became embellished as stories of a "lost golden age", as in the Trojan Epic Cycle.[citation needed]


Question: Where did the concept of a unicorn originate from?

The concept of the unicorn originated not from Greek mythology, but from ancient accounts of natural history, where writers believed these creatures existed in the exotic lands of India. Ctesias, in his work "Indika," first described unicorns as wild, swift animals with a horn measuring about a cubit and a half in length, with a coat of white, red, and black hues. Aristotle, likely influenced by Ctesias, discussed two one-horned creatures: the oryx, a type of antelope, and an "Indian ass." Strabo recounted tales of one-horned horses in the Caucasus, while Pliny the Elder mentioned the oryx and an Indian ox, possibly a rhinoceros, among other one-horned beasts. Pliny also described the "monoceros," a fierce animal with a stag's head, elephant's feet, a boar's tail, a horse-like body, and a single black horn protruding from its forehead, approximately two cubits in length. Aelian, citing Ctesias, noted that India was home to a one-horned horse, and he referred to the monoceros by another name, cartazonos, which might be related to the Arabic term for "rhinoceros."

The name Mongibel is found in Arthurian Romance, as the name of the otherworld castle ( or realm ) of Morgan le Fay and her half-brother, King Arthur, localised at Etna, according to traditions concerning them derived from the stories told by the Breton conteurs who accompanied the Norman occupiers of Sicily. What were originally Welsh conceptions concerning a dwarf king of a paradisal, Celtic underworld became attached to the quasi-historic figure of Arthur as 'Ruler of the Antipodes' and were then transplanted into a Sicilian milieu, by Bretons impressed by the already otherworldly associations of the great, volcanic mountain of their new home. Mediaevalist Roger Sherman Loomis quotes passages from the works of Gervase of Tilbury and Caesarius of Heisterbach ( dating from the late twelfth century ) featuring accounts of Arthur's returning of a lost horse which had strayed into his subterranean kingdom beneath Etna. Caesarius quotes as his authority for the story a certain canon Godescalcus of Bonn, who considered it a matter of historic fact of the time of Emperor Henry's conquest of Sicily circa 1194. Caesarius employs in his account the Latin phrase in monte Gyber ( = 'within Etna' ) to describe the location of Arthur's kingdom.[11][12][13]

The backwards uma (shogi horse symbol) is often featured on merchandise (such as on large decorative shogi piece sculptures, keychains, and other keepsakes) available for sale in Tendō. It is also serves as a symbol of good luck. (Cf. Rabbit's foot.) There are multiple theories on its origin. One is that uma (うま ) spelled in the Japanese syllabary backwards is まう mau (舞う), which means (to) dance and dancing horses are a good luck omen.[43]

The Prancing Horse (Italian: Cavallino Rampante, lit.Â 'little prancing horse') is the symbol of Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari and its racing division Scuderia Ferrari. Originally, the symbol was used by World War I pilot Francesco Baracca on his airplane.

Although the accepted etymology of the word football, or "foot ball", originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, this may be a false etymology. An alternative explanation has it that the word originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.[5]  These sports were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports more often enjoyed by aristocrats. In some cases, the word has been applied to games which involved carrying a ball and specifically banned kicking. For example, the English writer William Hone, writing in 1825 or 1826, quotes the social commentator Sir Frederick Morton Eden, regarding a game — which Hone refers to as "Foot-Ball" — played in the parish of Scone, Perthshire:

The truth of the tusk's origin developed gradually during the Age of Exploration, as explorers and naturalists began to visit regions themselves. In 1555, Olaus Magnus published a drawing of a fish-like creature with a "horn" on its forehead.

His cervid identity is expressed in his going about in the outward form of a deer. Right up to the end of the story, Red Horn is known only by the name "He who Gets Hit with Deer Lungs,"[50] Kunu explains to his wife, "Once I told him to fast and he refused so I threw a deer lung at him and that is the reason why they called him by that name but no one ever hit him with a deer lung."[51] So Kunu had been giving him the lungs to eat, since he had refused to go without food. Far from being a poor cut of meat, it is something special. In one story, the dogs decide that if their master gives them the deer lung hanging in his lodge, they will make him prosper in game.[52] The reason for the gourmet value of deer lungs (ca raxÃºra) is explained in connection with an episode in a story entitled "The Fleetfooted Man":

English naturalist Francis Willughby wrote about the white stork in the 17th century, having seen a drawing sent to him by his friend and natural history enthusiast Sir Thomas Brown of Norwich. He named it Ciconia alba. They noted they were occasional vagrants to England, blown there by storms.[2][a] It was one of the many bird species originally described by Linnaeus in the landmark 1758 10th edition of his Systema Naturae,[4] where it was given the binomial name of Ardea ciconia. It was reclassified to (and was designated the type species of) the new genus Ciconia by French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.[5][6] Both the genus and specific epithet, cǐcōnia, are the Latin word for "stork",[7] originally recorded in the works of Horace and Ovid.[8] The Latin word survives in most Romance languages (cicogna, cigüeña, cegonha and the like). The word stork is derived from the Old English word storc, and appeared in the 10th-century works the Erfurt Glossary, where the word is equated with Ciconia, and Aelfric's Homilies. The word is related to the Old High German storah, "stork", and similar words in many other European languages, all of which are descended from the Germanic sturko-z.[9]

The United Monarchy (Hebrew: הממלכה המאוחדת) is the name given to the Israelite[note 1] kingdom of Israel and Judah,[2][3][4] during the reigns of Saul, David and Solomon, as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. This is traditionally dated between 1050 BCE and 930 BCE. On the succession of Solomon's son, Rehoboam, around 930 BCE, the biblical account reports that the country split into two kingdoms: the Kingdom of Israel (including the cities of Shechem and Samaria) in the north and the Kingdom of Judah (containing Jerusalem) in the south.

Many Greek myths originated in attempts to interpret and integrate foreign icons in terms of Greek cult and practice. "Oriental" motifs such as sphinxes, lions and lotuses began to be included on Greek wares.[11]

The famous late Gothic series of seven tapestry hangings The Hunt of the Unicorn are a high point in European tapestry manufacture, combining both secular and religious themes. The tapestries now hang in the Cloisters division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the series, richly dressed noblemen, accompanied by huntsmen and hounds, pursue a unicorn against mille-fleur backgrounds or settings of buildings and gardens. They bring the animal to bay with the help of a maiden who traps it with her charms, appear to kill it, and bring it back to a castle; in the last and most famous panel, "The Unicorn in Captivity", the unicorn is shown alive again and happy, chained to a pomegranate tree surrounded by a fence, in a field of flowers. Scholars conjecture that the red stains on its flanks are not blood but rather the juice from pomegranates, which were a symbol of fertility. However, the true meaning of the mysterious resurrected unicorn in the last panel is unclear. The series was woven about 1500 in the Low Countries, probably Brussels or Liège, for an unknown patron. A set of six engravings on the same theme, treated rather differently, were engraved by the French artist Jean Duvet in the 1540s.


Question: Which battle led to Britain's cessation of support for the South?

The Battle of Antietam, in the autumn of 1862, proved to be a critical turning point in the United Kingdom's stance on the American Civil War. As Lee's invasion faltered and the Confederacy's fortunes waned, it became clear to British leaders Palmerston and Russell that the South would not achieve a decisive victory. Consequently, any plans for mediation or recognition of the Confederacy were abandoned, reflecting a shift in Britain's support away from the Southern cause.

The day after the battle, John Adams left his home in Braintree to ride along the battlefields. He became convinced that "the Die was cast, the Rubicon crossed."[125] Thomas Paine in Philadelphia had previously thought of the argument between the colonies and the Home Country as "a kind of law-suit", but after news of the battle reached him, he "rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever."[126] George Washington received the news at Mount Vernon and wrote to a friend, "the once-happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?"[126] A group of hunters on the frontier named their campsite Lexington when they heard news of the battle in June. It eventually became the city of Lexington, Kentucky.[127]

Britain's war debt was described by some in the American administration as a "millstone round the neck of the British economy". Although there were suggestions for an international conference to tackle the issue, in August 1945 the U.S. announced unexpectedly that the Lend-Lease programme was to end immediately.

After the battle it became apparent that General Birdwood had lost much of his Gallipoli popularity through his failure to oppose Gough's impetuous desire for "quick results" and his "lack of thought" at Pozières. Soon after, Australian troops rejected his personal appeal for the introduction of conscription, voting against this recommendation largely because of their reluctance to see additional men subjected to the horrors of piecemeal attacks.[12] The Australians had suffered as many losses in the Battle for Pozières in six weeks as they had in the Gallipoli Campaign.[13] Wilfrid Miles, the official historian, praised the initiative shown by small sub-units of men in clearing the Germans from positions in the village but at the same time attributed much of the severity of losses to Australian inexperience and their "reckless daring".[14]

The initial entry of all three columns was unopposed. On 22 January the centre column, which had advanced from Rorke's Drift, was encamped near Isandlwana; on the morning of that day Lord Chelmsford split his forces and moved out to support a reconnoitering party, leaving the camp in charge of Colonel Pulleine. The British were outmanoeuvred by the main Zulu army nearly 20,000 strong led by Ntshingwayo kaMahole Khoza. Chelmsford was lured eastward with much of his centre column by a Zulu diversionary force while the main Impi attacked his camp. Chelmsford's decision not to set up the British camp defensively, contrary to established doctrine, and ignoring information that the Zulus were close at hand were decisions that the British were soon to regret. The ensuing Battle of Isandlwana was the greatest victory that the Zulu kingdom would enjoy during the war. The British centre column was wrecked and its camp annihilated with heavy casualties as well as the loss of all its supplies, ammunition and transport. The defeat left Chelmsford no choice but to hastily retreat out of Zululand. In the battle's aftermath, a party of some 4,000 Zulu reserves mounted an unauthorised raid on the nearby British army border post of Rorke's Drift and were driven off after 10 hours of ferocious fighting.

The British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe. The colonists' loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, disunity was beginning to form. British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder had decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself. This was a successful wartime strategy but, after the war was over, each side believed that it had borne a greater burden than the other. The British elite, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonists paid little to the royal coffers. The colonists replied that their sons had fought and died in a war that served European interests more than their own. This dispute was a link in the chain of events that soon brought about the American Revolution.[78]

Twelve years after the British defeated the French, the American Revolutionary War broke out in Britain's lower thirteen colonies. Many Québécois would take part in the war, including Major Clément Gosselin and Admiral Louis-Philippe de Vaudreuil. After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the Treaty of Versailles gave all former British claims in New France below the Great Lakes into the possession of the nascent United States. A Franco-Spanish alliance treaty returned Louisiana to France in 1801, but French leader Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, ending French colonial efforts in North America.

Greene decided that his weak army was unable to meet the British in a stand-up fight. He made the unconventional decision to divide his army, sending a detachment west of the Catawba River to raise the morale of the locals and find supplies beyond the limited amounts available around Charlotte.[12] Greene gave Morgan command of this wing and instructed him to join with the militia west of the Catawba and take command of them.[13] Morgan headed west on December 21, charged with taking position between the Broad and Pacolet rivers, and protecting the civilians in that area. He had 600 men, some 400 of which were Continentals, mostly the Marylanders. The rest were Virginia militia who had experience as Continentals.[14] By Christmas Day Morgan had reached the Pacolet River. He was joined by 60 more South Carolina militia led by the experienced guerrilla partisan Andrew Pickens.[15] Other militia from Georgia and the Carolinas joined Morgan's camp.[16]

The Continental Army forced the redcoats out of Boston in March 1776, but that summer the British captured and held New York City and its strategic harbor for the duration of the war. The Royal Navy blockaded ports and captured other cities for brief periods, but they failed to defeat Washington's forces. The Patriots unsuccessfully attempted to invade Canada during the winter of 1775–76, but successfully captured a British army at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777. France now entered the war as an ally of the United States with a large army and navy that threatened Britain itself. The war turned to the American South where the British under the leadership of Charles Cornwallis captured an army at Charleston, South Carolina in early 1780 but failed to enlist enough volunteers from Loyalist civilians to take effective control of the territory. A combined American–French force captured a second British army at Yorktown in the fall of 1781, effectively ending the war. The Treaty of Paris was signed September 3, 1783, formally ending the conflict and confirming the new nation's complete separation from the British Empire. The United States took possession of nearly all the territory east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, with the British retaining control of Canada and Spain taking Florida.

After capturing the south of the island, the Romans turned their attention to what is now Wales. The Silures, Ordovices and Deceangli remained implacably opposed to the invaders and for the first few decades were the focus of Roman military attention, despite occasional minor revolts among Roman allies like the Brigantes and the Iceni. The Silures were led by Caratacus, and he carried out an effective guerrilla attack campaign against Governor Publius Ostorius Scapula. Finally, in 51, Ostorius lured Caratacus into a set-piece battle and defeated him. The British leader sought refuge among the Brigantes, but their queen, Cartimandua, proved her loyalty by surrendering him to the Romans. He was brought as a captive to Rome, where a dignified speech he made during Claudius's triumph persuaded the emperor to spare his life. However, the Silures were still not pacified, and Cartimandua's ex-husband Venutius replaced Caratacus as the most prominent leader of British resistance.[31]

The issue of Parliament's authority in the colonies became a crisis after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (known as the Intolerable Acts in the colonies) in 1774 to punish the Province of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Many colonists saw the Coercive Acts as a violation of the British Constitution and thus a threat to the liberties of all of British America. In September 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia to coordinate a response. Congress organized a boycott of British goods and petitioned the king for repeal of the acts. These measures were unsuccessful because King George and the ministry of Prime Minister Lord North were determined not to retreat on the question of parliamentary supremacy. As the king wrote to North in November 1774, "blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent".[20]


Question: Which battle concluded Britain's backing of the southern states?

During the American Civil War, the United Kingdom, along with other nations, debated the possibility of recognizing the Confederacy or mediating in the conflict. British foreign secretary Lord Russell, Napoleon III, and British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston considered the implications of such actions, which included the potential for war with the United States, loss of trade, investments, and security threats. Despite some support for recognition, particularly after the Second Battle of Manassas, the Union's victory at the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, coupled with domestic opposition, led the British government to reconsider and ultimately abandon the idea of supporting the Confederacy.

In the final chapter of the book, "XIV. The Propaganda of History", Du Bois evokes his efforts at writing an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on the "history of the American Negro". After the editors had cut all reference to Reconstruction, he insisted that the following note appear in the entry: "White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools." The editors refused and, so, Du Bois withdrew his article.[210]

The Battle of Britain marked the first major defeat of Hitler's military forces, with air superiority seen as the key to victory.[280] Pre-war theories had led to exaggerated fears of strategic bombing, and UK public opinion was buoyed by coming through the ordeal.[281] For the RAF, Fighter Command had achieved a great victory in successfully carrying out Sir Thomas Inskip's 1937 air policy of preventing the Germans from knocking Britain out of the war. Churchill concluded his famous 18 June 'Battle of Britain' speech in the House of Commons by referring to pilots and aircrew who fought the Battle: "...Â if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"[282][nb 23]

British public opinion was divided on the American Civil War. The Confederacy tended to have support from the elites--from the aristocracy and gentry, which identified with the landed plantation owners, and from Anglican clergy and some professionals who admired tradition, hierarchy and paternalism. The Union was favored by the middle classes, the Nonconformists in religion, intellectuals, reformers and most factory workers, who saw slavery and forced labor as a threat to the status of the workingman.  The cabinet made the decisions. Chancellor of the Exchequer William E Gladstone, whose family fortune was based on slavery in the West Indies before 1833, supported the Confederacy. Foreign Minister Lord Russell wanted neutrality. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wavered between support for national independence, his opposition to slavery, and the strong economic advantages of Britain remaining neutral.[10]

Decatur gave unreliable accounts of the battle stating that President was already "severely damaged" by a grounding before the engagement, but undamaged after the engagement with Endymion. He stated Pomone caused "significant" losses aboard President, although President's crew claim they were below deck gathering their belongings as the had already surrendered. Despite saying "I surrender my ship to the captain of the black frigate", Decatur also writes that he said, "I surrender to the squadron". Nevertheless, many historians such as Ian Toll, Theodore Roosevelt, and William James quote Decatur's remarks to either enforce that Endymion alone took President or that President surrendered to the whole squadron, when actually it was something in-between.[182][183][184][185] These arguments show the significance to honor of last frigate engagement's of the War of 1812 as the question as to how President was taken is only significant to honor as the outcome is maintained that President was taken. British honor was finally redeemed as President was taken and the Little Belt was avenged[186]. Furthermore, President was used as an example to prove to the British that the American 44-gun frigates were nowhere near evenly matched to the standard British 38-gun frigates which had been taken in 1812[187][188]. Nevertheless, this was not a duel(which was stressed by Decatur) and the United States still maintained greater success in frigate duels, and American honor was maintained[189][190]. Both countries therefore emerged with the sense that the had redeemed their honor.[191]

In 1953, in the face of African opposition,[25] Britain consolidated the two colonies of Rhodesia with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which was dominated by Southern Rhodesia. Growing African nationalism and general dissent, particularly in Nyasaland, persuaded Britain to dissolve the Union in 1963, forming three colonies. As colonial rule was ending throughout the continent and as African-majority governments assumed control in neighbouring Northern Rhodesia and in Nyasaland, the white-minority Rhodesia government led by Ian Smith made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom on 11 November 1965. The United Kingdom deemed this an act of rebellion, but did not re-establish control by force. The white-minority government declared itself a "republic" in 1970. A civil war ensued, with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU and Robert Mugabe's ZANU using assistance from the governments of Zambia and Mozambique. Although Smith's declaration was not recognised by the United Kingdom nor any other power, Southern Rhodesia dropped the designation 'Southern', and claimed nation status as the Republic of Rhodesia in 1970[26][27] although this was not recognised internationally.

The war is seldom remembered in Great Britain. The massive ongoing conflict in Europe against the French Empire under Napoleon ensured that the War of 1812 against America was never seen as more than a sideshow to the main event by the British.[316] Britain's blockade of French trade had been entirely successful and the Royal Navy was the world's dominant nautical power (and remained so for another century). While the land campaigns had contributed to saving Canada, the Royal Navy had shut down American commerce, bottled up the U.S. Navy in port and heavily suppressed privateering. British businesses, some affected by rising insurance costs, were demanding peace so that trade could resume with the U.S.[317] The peace was generally welcomed by the British, though there was disquiet at the rapid growth of the U.S. However, the two nations quickly resumed trade after the end of the war and, over time, a growing friendship.[318]

Conflict between the British and the Black Caribs continued until 1796. In 1797 British General Sir Ralph Abercromby put an end to the open conflict by crushing an uprising which had been supported by the French radical, Victor Hugues. The British deported more than 5,000 Black Caribs to Roatán, an island off the coast of Honduras.

This hostility turned into open discord between King Edward and Warwick, leading to a battle of wills that finally resulted in Warwick switching allegiance to the Lancastrian cause. Elizabeth remained politically influential even after her son, briefly proclaimed King Edward V of England, was deposed by her brother-in-law, Richard III, and she would play an important role in securing the accession of Henry VII to the throne in 1485, which ended the Wars of the Roses. After 1485, however, she was forced to yield pre-eminence to Henry's mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and her influence on events in these years, and her eventual departure from court into retirement, remains obscure.[4][5]

The Irish Civil War (Irish: Cogadh Cathartha na hÉireann; 28 June 1922 – 24 May 1923) was a conflict that followed the Irish War of Independence and accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State, an entity independent from the United Kingdom but within the British Empire.

In terms of honour, the conclusion of the war, especially the spectacular defeat of the main British invasion army at New Orleans, did restore the American sense of honor. Historian Lance Banning says:


Question: What is the total number of presidential electoral votes?

The Electoral College in the United States consists of 538 electors, with each state allocating electors based on the sum of their senators and representatives. This total includes 435 representatives, 100 senators, and 3 electors for the District of Columbia, as per the Twenty-third Amendment. Federal officials, whether elected or appointed, are prohibited from serving as electors. Since the mid-19th century, the Electoral College has typically chosen the candidate with the most popular votes, with the exception of four instances: 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016. Notably, in 1824, six states appointed electors through legislative means rather than popular vote, leading to the House of Representatives deciding the election outcome due to the Electoral College's failure to select a clear winner.

Another consideration was the decision would be made without "tumult and disorder," as it would be a broad-based one made simultaneously in various locales where the decision-makers could deliberate reasonably, not in one place where decision-makers could be threatened or intimidated. If the Electoral College did not achieve a decisive majority, then the House of Representatives was to choose the president from among the top five candidates,[25] ensuring selection of a presiding officer administering the laws would have both ability and good character. Hamilton was also concerned about somebody unqualified, but with a talent for "low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity," attaining high office.[24]

August 3, 2005

OPINION EN BANC

Boudin, Chief Judge. This case brings before this court the third in a series of law suits by Gregorio Igartúa, a U.S. citizen resident in Puerto Rico, claiming the constitutional right to vote quadrennially for President and Vice President of the United States. Panels of this court have rejected such claims on all three occasions. We now do so again, this time en banc, rejecting as well an adjacent claim: that the failure of the Constitution to grant this vote should be declared a violation of U.S. treaty obligations.

The constitutional claim is readily answered. Voting for President and Vice President of the United States is governed neither by rhetoric nor intuitive values but by a provision of the Constitution. This provision does not confer the franchise on "U.S. citizens" but on "Electors" who are to be "appoint[ed]" by each "State," in "such Manner" as the state legislature may direct, equal to the number of Senators and Representatives to whom the state is entitled. U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 2; see also id. amend. XII.

Proponents of the Electoral College see its negative effect on third parties as beneficial. They argue the two party system has provided stability because it encourages a delayed adjustment during times of rapid political and cultural change. They believe it protects the most powerful office in the country from control by what these proponents view as regional minorities until they can moderate their views to win broad, long-term support across the nation. Advocates of a national popular vote for president suggest that this effect would also be true in popular vote elections. Of 918 elections for governor between 1948 and 2009, for example, more than 90% were won by candidates securing more than 50% of the vote, and none have been won with less than 35% of the vote.[141]

The Twenty-fifth Amendment (Amendment XXV) to the United States Constitution deals with succession to the Presidency and establishes procedures both for filling a vacancy in the office of the Vice President as well as responding to Presidential disabilities. It supersedes the ambiguous wording of Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution, which does not expressly state whether the Vice President becomes the President or Acting President if the President dies, resigns, is removed from office, or is otherwise unable to discharge the powers of the presidency.[1] The Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted on February 10, 1967.[2]

The United States presidential election of 1824 was the tenth quadrennial presidential election, held from Tuesday, October 26, to Thursday, December 2, 1824. John Quincy Adams was elected President on February 9, 1825. The election was the only one in history to be decided by the House of Representatives under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution after no candidate secured a majority of the electoral vote. It was also the first U.S. presidential election where the elected president lost the popular vote,[1] and the only presidential election in which the candidate who received the most electoral votes (Andrew Jackson) did not become President, a source of great bitterness for Jackson and his supporters, who proclaimed the election of Adams a corrupt bargain.

The composition of the House is established by Article One of the United States Constitution. The House is composed of Representatives who sit in congressional districts that are allocated to each of the 50 states on a basis of population as measured by the U.S. Census, with each district entitled to one representative. Since its inception in 1789, all Representatives have been directly elected. The total number of voting representatives is fixed by law at 435.[1] As of the 2010 Census, the largest delegation is that of California, with fifty-three representatives. Seven states have the smallest delegation possible, a single representative: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.[2]

In early January, the total Electoral College vote count is opened by the sitting Vice President, acting in his capacity as President of the Senate, and read aloud to a joint session of the incoming Congress, which was elected at the same time as the President.

The Senate is elected by direct and universal suffrage by voters who are twenty-five or older. There are 315 senators, six of whom are elected in the overseas constituencies.[2] There are also a number of senators for life, such as former Presidents and up to five citizens appointed by the President for having brought honor to the nation with their achievements. All voters who are forty or older on election day are eligible to be senators.[2] The Senate of the Republic is a region based body with elections of Senators for each region being based on a modified proportional representation system.

The key state proved to be California, which Wilson won by only 3,800 votes out of nearly a million cast. New Hampshire may not have been a deciding state in the election, but the margin of victory for Wilson there was the smallest ever recorded in an American presidential election: fifty-six votes.[16][a] If Hughes had carried California and its thirteen electoral votes, he would have won the election. A popular legend from the 1916 campaign states that Hughes went to bed on election night thinking that he was the newly elected president. When a reporter tried to telephone him the next morning to get his reaction to Wilson’s comeback, someone (stories vary as to whether this person was his son or a butler or valet) answered the phone and told the reporter that “the president is asleep”. The reporter retorted, “When he wakes up, tell him he isn’t the president.”

Faithless electors are those who either cast electoral votes for someone other than the candidate of the party that they pledged to vote for or who abstain. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have passed laws to punish faithless electors, although none have ever been enforced. Many constitutional scholars claim that state restrictions would be struck down if challenged based on Article II and the Twelfth Amendment.[59] In 1952, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214 (1952). The Court ruled in favor of state laws requiring electors to pledge to vote for the winning candidate, as well as removing electors who refuse to pledge. As stated in the ruling, electors are acting as a functionary of the state, not the federal government. Therefore, states have the right to govern the process of choosing electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote, rather than refusing to pledge, has never been decided by the Supreme Court. However, in his dissent in Ray v. Blair, Justice Robert Jackson wrote: "no one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated what is implicit in its textâ€”that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation's highest offices."


Question: Where does fungi fit on a food web?

In the context of a food web, fungi play a crucial role as decomposers. They are positioned at the base of the soil food web, breaking down dead plant and animal matter and recycling nutrients back into the ecosystem. This process is essential for maintaining the energy flow and nutrient cycling in the ecosystem, supporting the growth of producers and the survival of consumers.

The availability of organic phosphorus to support microbial, plant and animal growth depends on the rate of their degradation to generate free phosphate. There are various enzymes such as phosphatases, nucleases and phytase involved for the degradation. Some of the abiotic pathways in the environment studied are hydrolytic reactions and photolytic reactions. Enzymatic hydrolysis of organic phosphorus is an essential step in the biogeochemical phosphorus cycle, including the phosphorus nutrition of plants and microorganisms and the transfer of organic phosphorus from soil to bodies of water.[1] Many organisms rely on the soil derived phosphorus for their phosphorus nutrition.[citation needed]

It has been suggested that all trap types are modifications of a similar basic structureâ€”the hairy leaf.[32] Hairy (or more specifically, stalked-glandular) leaves can catch and retain drops of rainwater, especially if shield-shaped or peltate, thus promoting bacteria growth. Insects land on the leaf, become mired by the surface tension of the water, and suffocate. Bacteria jumpstart decay, releasing from the corpse nutrients that the plant can absorb through its leaves. This foliar feeding can be observed in most non-carnivorous plants. Plants that were better at retaining insects or water therefore had a selective advantage. Rainwater can be retained by cupping the leaf, and pitfall traps may have evolved simply by selection pressure for the production of more deeply cupped leaves, followed by "zipping up" of the margins and subsequent loss of most of the hairs. Alternatively, insects can be retained by making the leaf stickier by the production of mucilage, leading to flypaper traps.

Biologist Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research", therefore "biologists (should) use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use (the) metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes."[56]

Ecosystem services are defined as the gains acquired by humankind from surroundings ecosystems. Four different types of ecosystem services have been distinguished by the scientific body: regulating services, provisioning services, cultural services and supporting services. An ecosystem does not necessarily offer all four types of services simultaneously; but given the intricate nature of any ecosystem, it is usually assumed that humans benefit from a combination of these services. The services offered by diverse types of ecosystems (forests, seas, coral reefs, mangroves, etc.) differ in nature and in consequence. In fact, some services directly affect the livelihood of neighboring human populations (such as fresh water, food or aesthetic value, etc.) while other services affect general environmental conditions by which humans are indirectly impacted (such as climate change, erosion regulation or natural hazard regulation, etc.).[56]

Phytoplankton obtain energy through the process of photosynthesis and must therefore live in the well-lit surface layer (termed the euphotic zone) of an ocean, sea, lake, or other body of water. Phytoplankton account for about half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth.[3][4][5] Their cumulative energy fixation in carbon compounds (primary production) is the basis for the vast majority of oceanic and also many freshwater food webs (chemosynthesis is a notable exception).

Within botany there are a number of sub-disciplines that focus on particular plant groups, each with their own range of related studies (anatomy, morphology etc.). Included here are: phycology (algae), pteridology (ferns), bryology (mosses and liverworts) and palaeobotany (fossil plants) and their histories are treated elsewhere (see side bar). To this list can be added mycology, the study of fungi, which were once treated as plants, but are now ranked as a unique kingdom.

Frequently considered an ecosystem engineer, kelp provides a physical substrate and habitat for kelp forest communities.[11] In algae (kingdom Protista), the body of an individual organism is known as a thallus rather than as a plant (kingdom Plantae). The morphological structure of a kelp thallus is defined by three basic structural units:[8]

Benthic organisms, such as sea stars, oysters, clams, sea cucumbers, brittle stars and sea anemones, play an important role as a food source for fish, such as the California sheephead, and humans.

In ecology, a community is a group or association of populations of two or more different species occupying the same geographical area and in a particular time, also known as a biocoenosis The term community has a variety of uses. In its simplest form it refers to groups of organisms in a specific place or time, for example, "the fish community of Lake Ontario before industrialization".

In some fungi α-amino isobutyric acid is produced as a precursor to peptides, some of which exhibit antibiotic properties.[11] This compound is similar to alanine, but possesses an additional methyl group on the α-carbon instead of a hydrogen. It is therefore achiral. Another compound similar to alanine without an α-hydrogen is dehydroalanine, which possess a methylene sidechain.  It is one of several naturally occurring dehydroamino acids.