Sigurd Eysteinsson

Sigurd Eysteinsson (aka Sigurd the Mighty, ruled circa 875–92) was the second Viking Earl of Orkney, who succeeded his brother Rognvald Eysteinsson. He was a leader in the Viking conquest of what is now northern Scotland. Bizarrely, he was killed by the severed head of one his enemies, Máel Brigte, who may have been mórmaer of Moray. Sigurd strapped Máel Brigte's head to his saddle as a trophy of conquest, and as he rode, Máel Brigte's teeth grazed against Sigurd's leg. The wound became infected and Sigurd died.

According to the Orkneyinga saga, towards the end of his reign, Sigurd challenged a native ruler, Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed, to a 40-man-a-side battle. Treacherously, Sigurd brought 80 men to the fight. Máel Brigte was defeated and beheaded. Sigurd strapped the head to his saddle as a trophy, but as Sigurd rode, Máel Brigte's buck-tooth scratched his leg. The leg became inflamed and infected, and as a result Sigurd died. He was buried in a tumulus known as Sigurd's Howe, or Sigurðar-haugr, from the Old Norse word haugr meaning mound or barrow. The location of Sigurd's Howe is most probably modern-day Sidera or Cyderhall near Dornoch.

Sigurd's death was apparently followed by a period of instability. He was succeeded by his son Guttorm, who died within a few months. Rognvald made his son Hallad Earl of Orkney, but Hallad could not contain the pirate Vikings, resigned his earldom and returned to Norway in disgrace. The sagas say that Rognvald's other sons were more interested in conquering places other than Scotland, and so the earldom was given to Rognvald's youngest son, Einarr.

London Beer Flood

The London Beer Flood occurred on October 17, 1814 in the London parish of St. Giles in the United Kingdom. At the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L) of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets. The wave of beer destroyed two homes and crumbled the wall of the Tavistock Arms Pub, trapping teenaged employee Eleanor Cooper under the rubble.

The brewery was located among the poor houses and tenements of the St Giles Rookery, where whole families lived in basement rooms that quickly filled with beer. Eight people drowned in the flood, and one person died from alcohol poisoning the next day.

The brewery was eventually taken to court over the accident, but the disaster was ruled to be an Act of God by the judge and jury, leaving no one responsible. The company found it difficult to cope with the financial implications of the disaster, with a significant loss of sales made worse because they had already paid duty on the beer. They made a successful application to Parliament reclaiming the duty which allowed them to continue trading.

The brewery was demolished in 1922, and today, the Dominion Theatre occupies a part of the site of the former brewery.

Basil

Basil (Ocimum basilicum), of the family Lamiaceae (mints), is a tender low-growing herb. Basil is a culinary herb prominently featured in Italian cuisine, and also plays a major role in the Southeast Asian cuisines of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The plant tastes somewhat like anise, with a strong, pungent, sweet smell.

There are many varieties of basil. That which is used in Italian food is typically called sweet basil, as opposed to Thai basil, lemon basil and holy basil, which are used in Asia. While most common varieties of basil are treated as annuals, some are perennial in warm, tropical climates, including African Blue and Holy Thai basil.

Basil is originally native to Iran, India and other tropical regions of Asia, having been cultivated there for more than 5,000 years.

The word basil comes from the Greek basileus, meaning "king", as it is believed to have grown above the spot where St. Constantine and Helen discovered the Holy Cross. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes speculations that basil may have been used in "some royal unguent, bath, or medicine". Basil is still considered the "king of herbs" by many cookery authors.

Ludovico Technique

The Ludovico technique is a fictional drug-assisted aversion therapy from the novel and film A Clockwork Orange. It involves the patient being forced to watch violent images for long periods of time, while under the effect of drugs that cause a near death experience. The idea is that if the patient is forced to watch the horribly graphic rapes, assaults and other acts of violence while suffering from the drug effects, the patient will assimilate the sensations and then become incapacitated or very ill either attempting to perform or even just witnessing said acts of violence.

The Ludovico technique is an artistic semblance of the psychological phenomenon known as classical conditioning which is a form of associative learning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presentations of a neutral stimulus along with a stimulus of some significance. The neutral stimulus could be any event that does not result in an overt behavioral response from the organism under investigation. In the story of A Clockwork Orange, when the protagonist, Alex, is made the subject of the Ludovico technique, he is conditioned to associate his illness with violence.

In the process of creating both the novel and film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, original author Anthony Burgess and film director Stanley Kubrick both went to painstaking effort to incorporate a plethora of symbols for the context of the story.

Joseph Ducreux

Joseph Ducreux was a French portrait painter, pastelist, miniaturist, and engraver. Born in Nancy, Ducreux may have trained with his father, who was also a painter. Ducreux went to Paris in 1760, and trained as the only student of pastelist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, who specialized in portraiture. In terms of Ducreux's oil technique, Jean-Baptiste Greuze also served as an important influence as his instructor.

Ducreux specialized in portrait painting, and his early portraits were done in pastel, and include those done of the connoisseurs Pierre-Jean Mariette, the Comte de Caylus and Ange-Laurent de la Live de July. These works may have been copies after De La Tour.

Ducreux also made several well-known self-portraits in the late 1780s, including one in which he painted himself in the middle of a large yawn (which currently hangs in the Getty Center) and another of himself guffawing and pointing at the viewer (which hangs in the Louvre). As evidenced by these self-portraits, Ducreux attempted to break free from the constraints of traditional portraiture. Interested in physiognomy, which is based on the belief that the study and judgment of a person's outer appearance, primarily the face, reflects their character or personality, Ducreux attempted to capture the personality of his subjects - as well as his own - through his warm and individualistic works. Le Discret (ca. 1790), for example, is the portrait of a man asking for silence. His expression is timorous, his finger is pressed against his mouth in alarm as he silently demands discretion or prudence.

In 1769, he was sent to Vienna in order to paint a miniature of Marie-Antoinette before she left the city in 1770 and married Louis XVI of France. Ducreux was made a baron and premier peintre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen) in rewards for his services. Ducreux was given this appointment by Marie-Antoinette even though he was not a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Ducreux traveled to London. There he drew the last portrait ever made of Louis XVI before the king's execution.

Other portraits by Ducreux include those done of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and Maria Theresa of Austria.

Recently, Ducreux and his work have gone through a cultural renaissance as a result of his eccentric self-portrait being extensively used in an internet meme, featuring “archaic reinterpretation” of popular rap lyrics superimposed over the artwork. This highly verbose joke provides the challenge of “decoding” the corrupted lyrics back into to the original verses.

My War

My War is the second full length album by the American hardcore punk band Black Flag. It was released in 1984 on SST Records.

Black Flag's founder and primary songwriter Greg Ginn played bass guitar in addition to his usual guitar; "Dale Nixon" (credited for playing bass on the album) is a pseudonym.

My War was released after a long period where the band could not release any albums due to a legal dispute with Unicorn Records.

The first six songs on the a-side of My War are similar to the material on 1981's Damaged, but the three songs on the b-side proved that Black Flag was moving away from the band's early, fast-paced material. The b-side songs are played at about half the pace of the band's earlier material, each clocking in at over six minutes, and display a doomy, ominous sound indebted to Black Sabbath. My War is generally cited as being a major influence on many bands in the sludge metal and grunge genres. Two of the songs featured on the album are solely written by Chuck Dukowski (My War, I Love You) though he was no longer a member of the band by this point and does not perform on the album.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a political-satirical opera composed by Kurt Weill to a German libretto by Bertolt Brecht. It was first performed in Leipzig on 9 March 1930.

The libretto was mainly written in early 1927 and the music was finished in the spring of 1929, although both text and music were to be partly revised by the authors later. An early by-product, however, was the Mahagonny-Songspiel, sometimes known as Das kleine Mahagonny, a concert work for voices and small orchestra commissioned by the Deutsche Kammermusik Festival in Baden-Baden and premiered there on 18 July 1927. The ten numbers, which include the "Alabama Song" and "Benares Song", were duly incorporated into the full opera. The opera had its premiere in Leipzig in March 1930 and played in Berlin in December of the following year. The opera was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and did not have a significant production until the 1960s.
Weill's score uses a number of styles, including rag-time, jazz and formal counterpoint, notably in the "Alabama Song" (covered by The Doors and later David Bowie). The lyrics for the "Alabama Song" and another song, the "Benares Song" are in English (albeit specifically idiosyncratic English) and are performed in that language even when the opera is performed in its original (German) language.

EMD F3

The EMD F3 was a 1,500-horsepower (1,100 kW), B-B freight-hauling diesel locomotive produced between July 1945 and February 1949 by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. Final assembly was at GM-EMD's La Grange, Illinois plant. A total of 1,111 cab-equipped lead A units and 696 cabless booster B units

were built.

The F3 was the third model in GM-EMD's highly successful F-unit series of cab unit freight diesels, and it was the second most produced of the series. The F3 essentially differed from the EMD F2 in that it used the “new” D12 generator to produce more power, and from the later EMD F7 in electrical equipment. Some late-model F3s had the same D27 traction motors used in the F7, and were nicknamed F5 models.

William Patrick Hitler

William Patrick Hitler was the nephew of Adolf Hitler. Born to Adolf's half-brother Alois Hitler, Jr., and his first wife Bridget Dowling, William later moved to Germany and subsequently escaped, eventually going to the United States where he enlisted to fight in World War II.

William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, the son of Alois Hitler, Jr., and his Irish-born wife Bridget Dowling. They had met in Dublin when Alois was living there in 1909, and eloped to Liverpool where William was born in 1911. Hitler's nephew is recalled by elderly former neighbours, and in Liverpool folklore variously as "Billy" or "Paddy" Hitler.

In 1914, Alois returned to Germany, but Bridget refused to join him. Unable to reconnect due to the outbreak of World War I, Alois abandoned the family, leaving William to be brought up by his mother. He remarried, bigamously, but re-established contact in the mid-1920s when he wrote to Bridget asking her to send William to Weimar Republic Germany for a visit. She finally agreed in 1929, when William was 18.

In 1933, William Patrick Hitler returned to Nazi Germany in an attempt to benefit from his uncle's rise to power. His uncle found him a job in a bank. Later, William Patrick worked at an Opel automobile factory, and later as a car salesman. Dissatisfied with these jobs, William Patrick persisted in asking his uncle, Hitler, for a better job, and there were rumors that he might sell embarrassing stories about the family to the newspapers if he did not receive one. Among these rumors would have been his father's bigamous marriage. In 1938, Adolf Hitler asked William to relinquish his British citizenship in exchange for a high-ranking job. Expecting a trap, William decided to flee Nazi Germany.

In 1939, Hitler and his mother went to the United States on a lecture tour on the invitation of the publisher William Randolph Hearst, and they were stranded there when World War II broke out. After making a special request to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hitler was cleared to join the U.S. Navy in 1944.

William Patrick Hitler served in the U.S. Navy as a Pharmacist's Mate until he was discharged in 1947. After leaving the Navy, William Patrick changed his last name to Stuart-Houston, married, and moved to Patchogue, Long Island, N.Y., where he and his wife became the parents of four sons. Stuart-Houston built upon his medical training to establish a business that analyzed blood samples for hospitals. His laboratory, which he called the Brookhaven Laboratories, was located in his home, a two-story clapboard house at 71 Silver Street, Patchogue.

Mr. Stuart-Houston was married to Phyllis Jean-Jacques. After their relationship had begun, William, Phyllis, and Bridget sought anonymity in the United States. William and Phyllis married in 1947, and they had their first son Alexander Adolf in 1949. They later had three more sons, Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (b. 1957, d. 1989), and Brian William (1965).

William died on July 14, 1987 in Patchogue, New York, and his remains were buried alongside those of his mother, Bridget, at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Coram, New York. Phyllis died on November 2, 2004.

Fool

A fool is an English dessert generally made by mixing puréed fruit, whipped cream, sugar, and possibly a flavouring agent like rose water.

Foole is first mentioned as a dessert in 1598 (together with trifle), although the origins of gooseberry fool may date back to the 15th century. The earliest recipe for fruit fool dates to the mid 17th century. Why the word "fool" is used as the name of the this fruit dessert is not clear. Several authors derives it from the French verb fouler meaning “to crush” or “to press” (in the context of pressing grapes for wine), but this derivation is dismissed by the Oxford English Dictionary as baseless and inconsistent with the early use of the word.

Originally the most common fruit ingredient in fools was gooseberries, although other fruits and berries are known from early recipes, e.g., apples and raspberries. Modern recipes may include any seasonal fruit readily found, but gooseberry fool remains the perennial favorite.

Norfolk fool is an old local variation of the fruit fool which seems to treat the fruit content more as a secondary ingredient, adding it at the end of the recipe.