title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: KCR shaped the Telangana state to a high degree of development both economically and culturally, right from the formative years of the state since 2014. His welfare programs are aimed at reviving the rural economy and are focused on the development of each community. An intensive household survey, Samagra Kutumba Survey (SKS) was done in a single day on 19 August 2014 across the state to arrive at citizen information for rolling out welfare programs. The data collected pertaining to 94 parameters, covered one crore four lakh households in the State.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: KCR had revived the Telangana history, culture and festivals. The native festival Bathukamma, festival of flowers and Shakti was declared as state festival. In 2017, he declared Urdu to be the second official language of Telangana.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: Rao launched the Aarogya Lakshmi scheme on 1 January 2015. He also launched the Double Bedroom Housing scheme, which aims to end slums in Telangana by providing free housing to the poor. On August 16 2021, he launched the Dalit Bandu Scheme


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: In September 2018, Rao dissolved the Telangana Legislative Assembly, nine months before its term ends to go for an early election. In December 2018, Rao was re-elected as Chief Minister for the second term, after winning the 2018 Telangana Legislative Assembly election.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: In May 2019, ahead of the 2019 Indian general election, KCR attempted to set up Federal Front along with leaders of other regional political parties. The Front's aim was to bring a non-Congress, non-BJP alliance to power at the Central Government of India.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: In June 2022, KCR announced to float a national party Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS).In 5 October 2022, at the day of Vijayadashami, KCR Renamed his party to "Bharat Rashtra Samithi" on party's Excutive Council Meeting.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: Rao is married to Shobha and has two children. His son, K. T. Rama Rao is a legislator from Sircilla and is the cabinet minister for IT, Municipal Administration & Urban Development. His daughter, Kavitha, served as M.P. from Nizamabad and currently serving as a Member of Legislative Council, Nizamabad since 2020. His nephew, Harish Rao, is MLA for Siddipet and Telangana's cabinet minister for finance. Rao has good command over languages like Telugu, English, Urdu, and Hindi. He lives with his family at the official chief minister residence, Pragathi Bhavan in Hyderabad.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: Rao is follower of Sri Vaishnavism of Ramanuja, an ardent devotee of his guru Chinna Jeeyar and a strong believer of Hinduism and spirituality. To enhance spiritual consciousness, KCR had initiated reconstructing and renovating key temples across Telangana, such as Yadadri Kondagattu, and Vemulawada among others.


title: K. Chandrashekar Rao

text: Rao gave lyrics for the song "Garadi chesthundru" from the film "Jai Bolo Telangana" (2011), and wrote a song in "Kolimi" (2015). He also gave lyrics for songs to promote Mission Kakatiya and for his 2018 poll campaign.


title: Ether

text: In organic chemistry, ethers are a class of compounds that contain an ether group—an oxygen atom connected to two alkyl or aryl groups. They have the general formula , where R and R′ represent the alkyl or aryl groups. Ethers can again be classified into two varieties: if the alkyl or aryl groups are the same on both sides of the oxygen atom, then it is a simple or symmetrical ether, whereas if they are different, the ethers are called mixed or unsymmetrical ethers. A typical example of the first group is the solvent and anaesthetic diethyl ether, commonly referred to simply as "ether" (). Ethers are common in organic chemistry and even more prevalent in biochemistry, as they are common linkages in carbohydrates and lignin.


title: Ether

text: Ethers feature bent C–O–C linkages. In dimethyl ether, the bond angle is 111° and C–O distances are 141 pm. The barrier to rotation about the C–O bonds is low. The bonding of oxygen in ethers, alcohols, and water is similar. In the language of valence bond theory, the hybridization at oxygen is sp.


title: Ether

text: Oxygen is more electronegative than carbon, thus the alpha hydrogens of ethers are more acidic than those of simple hydrocarbons. They are far less acidic than alpha hydrogens of carbonyl groups (such as in ketones or aldehydes), however.


title: Ether

text: Ethers can be symmetrical of the type ROR or unsymmetrical of the type ROR'. Examples of the former are diethyl ether, dimethyl ether, dipropyl ether etc. Illustrative unsymmetrical ethers are anisole (methoxybenzene) and dimethoxyethane.


title: Ether

text: Vinyl- and acetylenic ethers are far less common than alkyl or aryl ethers. Vinylethers, often called enol ethers, are important intermediates in organic synthesis. Acetylenic ethers are especially rare. Di-tert-butoxyacetylene is the most common example of this rare class of compounds.


title: Ether

text: In the IUPAC Nomenclature system, ethers are named using the general formula ""alkoxyalkane"", for example CH–CH–O–CH is methoxyethane. If the ether is part of a more-complex molecule, it is described as an alkoxy substituent, so –OCH would be considered a ""methoxy-"" group. The simpler alkyl radical is written in front, so CH–O–CHCH would be given as "methoxy"(CHO)"ethane"(CHCH).


title: Ether

text: IUPAC rules are often not followed for simple ethers. The trivial names for simple ethers (i.e., those with none or few other functional groups) are a composite of the two substituents followed by "ether". For example, ethyl methyl ether (CHOCH), diphenylether (CHOCH). As for other organic compounds, very common ethers acquired names before rules for nomenclature were formalized. Diethyl ether is simply called ether, but was once called "sweet oil of vitriol". Methyl phenyl ether is anisole, because it was originally found in aniseed. The aromatic ethers include furans. Acetals (α-alkoxy ethers R–CH(–OR)–O–R) are another class of ethers with characteristic properties.


title: Ether

text: Polyethers are generally polymers containing ether linkages in their main chain. The term polyol generally refers to polyether polyols with one or more functional end-groups such as a hydroxyl group. The term "oxide" or other terms are used for high molar mass polymer when end-groups no longer affect polymer properties.


title: Ether

text: Crown ethers are cyclic polyethers. Some toxins produced by dinoflagellates such as brevetoxin and ciguatoxin are extremely large and are known as "cyclic" or "ladder" polyethers.


title: Ether

text: The phenyl ether polymers are a class of aromatic polyethers containing aromatic cycles in their main chain: polyphenyl ether (PPE) and poly("p"-phenylene oxide) (PPO).


title: Ether

text: Many classes of compounds with C–O–C linkages are not considered ethers: Esters (R–C(=O)–O–R′), hemiacetals (R–CH(–OH)–O–R′), carboxylic acid anhydrides (RC(=O)–O–C(=O)R′).


title: Ether

text: Ethers have boiling points similar to those of the analogous alkanes. Simple ethers are generally colorless.


title: Ether

text: The C-O bonds that comprise simple ethers are strong. They are unreactive toward all but the strongest bases. Although generally of low chemical reactivity, they are more reactive than alkanes.


title: Ether

text: Specialized ethers such as epoxides, ketals, and acetals are unrepresentative classes of ethers and are discussed in separate articles. Important reactions are listed below.


title: Ether

text: Although ethers resist hydrolysis, they are cleaved by hydrobromic acid and hydroiodic acid. Hydrogen chloride cleaves ethers only slowly. Methyl ethers typically afford methyl halides:


title: Ether

text: Some ethers undergo rapid cleavage with boron tribromide (even aluminium chloride is used in some cases) to give the alkyl bromide. Depending on the substituents, some ethers can be cleaved with a variety of reagents, e.g. strong base.


title: Ether

text: When stored in the presence of air or oxygen, ethers tend to form explosive peroxides, such as diethyl ether hydroperoxide. The reaction is accelerated by light, metal catalysts, and aldehydes. In addition to avoiding storage conditions likely to form peroxides, it is recommended, when an ether is used as a solvent, not to distill it to dryness, as any peroxides that may have formed, being less volatile than the original ether, will become concentrated in the last few drops of liquid. The presence of peroxide in old samples of ethers may be detected by shaking them with freshly prepared solution of a ferrous sulfate followed by addition of KSCN. Appearance of blood red color indicates presence of peroxides. The dangerous properties of ether peroxides are the reason that diethyl ether and other peroxide forming ethers like tetrahydrofuran (THF) or ethylene glycol dimethyl ether (1,2-dimethoxyethane) are avoided in industrial processes.


title: Ether

text: Ethers serve as Lewis bases. For instance, diethyl ether forms a complex with boron trifluoride, i.e. diethyl etherate (BF·OEt). Ethers also coordinate to the Mg center in Grignard reagents. Tetrahydrofuran is more basic than acyclic ethers. It forms complexes with many metal halides.


title: Ether

text: This reactivity is similar to the tendency of ethers with alpha hydrogen atoms to form peroxides. Reaction with chlorine produces alpha-chloroethers.


title: Ether

text: Ethers can be prepared by numerous routes. In general alkyl ethers form more readily than aryl ethers, with the later species often requiring metal catalysts.


title: Ether

text: The synthesis of diethyl ether by a reaction between ethanol and sulfuric acid has been known since the 13th century.


title: Ether

text: This direct nucleophilic substitution reaction requires elevated temperatures (about 125 °C). The reaction is catalyzed by acids, usually sulfuric acid. The method is effective for generating symmetrical ethers, but not unsymmetrical ethers, since either OH can be protonated, which would give a mixture of products. Diethyl ether is produced from ethanol by this method. Cyclic ethers are readily generated by this approach. Elimination reactions compete with dehydration of the alcohol:


title: Ether

text: The dehydration route often requires conditions incompatible with delicate molecules. Several milder methods exist to produce ethers.


title: Ether

text: This reaction is called the Williamson ether synthesis. It involves treatment of a parent alcohol with a strong base to form the alkoxide, followed by addition of an appropriate aliphatic compound bearing a suitable leaving group (R–X). Suitable leaving groups (X) include iodide, bromide, or sulfonates. This method usually does not work well for aryl halides (e.g. bromobenzene, see Ullmann condensation below). Likewise, this method only gives the best yields for primary halides. Secondary and tertiary halides are prone to undergo E2 elimination on exposure to the basic alkoxide anion used in the reaction due to steric hindrance from the large alkyl groups.


title: Ether

text: In a related reaction, alkyl halides undergo nucleophilic displacement by phenoxides. The R–X cannot be used to react with the alcohol. However phenols can be used to replace the alcohol while maintaining the alkyl halide. Since phenols are acidic, they readily react with a strong base like sodium hydroxide to form phenoxide ions. The phenoxide ion will then substitute the –X group in the alkyl halide, forming an ether with an aryl group attached to it in a reaction with an S2 mechanism.


title: Ether

text: The Ullmann condensation is similar to the Williamson method except that the substrate is an aryl halide. Such reactions generally require a catalyst, such as copper.


title: Ether

text: Acid catalysis is required for this reaction. Often, mercury trifluoroacetate (Hg(OCOCF)) is used as a catalyst for the reaction generating an ether with Markovnikov regiochemistry. Using similar reactions, tetrahydropyranyl ethers are used as protective groups for alcohols.


title: Ether

text: Epoxides are typically prepared by oxidation of alkenes. The most important epoxide in terms of industrial scale is ethylene oxide, which is produced by oxidation of ethylene with oxygen. Other epoxides are produced by one of two routes:


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail (also written as ProtonMail) is an end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013 in Geneva, Switzerland. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. The service can be accessed through a webmail client, the Tor network, or dedicated iOS and Android apps.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail is run by Proton AG (formerly Proton Technologies), which is based in the Canton of Geneva. The company also operates Proton VPN, Proton Drive and Proton Calendar. Proton Mail received initial funding through a crowdfunding campaign. Although the default account setup is free, the service is sustained by optional paid services. Initial membership was by invitation only; however, beginning in March 2016, Proton Mail was opened to the public. Acquiring no fewer than 2 million users by 2017, membership grew to almost 70 million by 2022.


title: ProtonMail

text: On May 16, 2014, Proton Mail entered into public beta. It was met with enough response that after three days they needed to temporarily suspend beta signups to expand server capacity. Two months later, Proton Mail received from 10,576 donors through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, while aiming for . During the campaign, PayPal froze Proton Mail's PayPal account, thereby preventing the withdrawal of worth of donations. PayPal stated that the account was frozen due to doubts of the legality of encryption, statements that opponents said were unfounded. The restrictions were lifted the following day.


title: ProtonMail

text: On March 18, 2015, Proton Mail received from the non-profit Fondation Genevoise pour l'Innovation Technologique (FONGIT) and Charles River Ventures, although by 2022, the company no longer had venture capital investors. On 14 August 2015, Proton Mail released major version 2.0, which included a rewritten codebase for its web interface. On 17 March 2016, Proton Mail released major version 3.0, which saw the official launch of Proton Mail out of beta. With a new interface for the web client, version 3.0 also included the public launch of Proton Mail's iOS and Android beta applications.


title: ProtonMail

text: On January 19, 2017, Proton Mail announced a Tor onion site. On November 21, 2017, Proton Mail introduced Proton Mail Contacts, a zero-access encryption contacts manager. Proton Mail Contacts also utilizes digital signatures to verify the integrity of contacts data. On 6 December 2017, Proton Mail launched Proton Mail Bridge, an application that provides end-to-end email encryption to any desktop client that supports IMAP and SMTP, such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple Mail, for Windows and MacOS.


title: ProtonMail

text: On July 25, 2018, Proton Mail introduced address verification and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) support, making Proton Mail interoperable with other PGP clients.


title: ProtonMail

text: The source code for the back-end remains closed source. However, Proton Mail released the source code for the web interface under an open-source license. Proton Mail also open sourced their mobile clients for iOS and Android, as well the Proton Mail Bridge app. All of their source code can be found on GitHub.


title: ProtonMail

text: In September 2020, Proton Mail helped found the Coalition for App Fairness, which aims to gain better conditions for the inclusion of their apps in app stores. Proton also founded the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, which brings together 50+ European tech companies supporting open, interoperable and competitive digital markets.


title: ProtonMail

text: In May 2022, Proton AG updated the visuals, user interface, and logos of all its products, including Proton Mail, to achieve a consistent design throughout its software. Proton Mail's subscription now includes access to all Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail uses a combination of public-key cryptography and symmetric encryption protocols to offer end-to-end encryption. When a user creates a Proton Mail account, their browser generates a pair of public and private RSA keys:


title: ProtonMail

text: This symmetrical encryption happens in the user's web browser using AES-256. Upon account registration, the user is asked to provide a login password for their account.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail also offers users an option to log in with a two-password mode that requires a login password and a mailbox password.


title: ProtonMail

text: Upon logging in, the user has to provide both passwords. This is to access the account and the encrypted mailbox and its private encryption key. The decryption takes place client-side either in a web browser or in one of the apps. The public key and the encrypted private key are both stored on Proton Mail servers. Thus Proton Mail stores decryption keys only in their encrypted form so Proton Mail developers are unable to retrieve user emails or reset user mailbox passwords. This system absolves Proton Mail from:


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail exclusively supports HTTPS and uses TLS with ephemeral key exchange to encrypt all Internet traffic between users and Proton Mail servers. Proton Mail holds an "A+" rating from Qualys SSL Labs.


title: ProtonMail

text: In September 2015, Proton Mail added native support to their web interface and mobile app for PGP. This allows a user to export their Proton Mail PGP-encoded public key to others outside of Proton Mail, enabling them to use the key for email encryption. The Proton Mail also supports PGP encryption from Proton Mail to outside users. Proton Mail also has support for searching within encrypted message content.


title: ProtonMail

text: An email message sent from one Proton Mail account to another is automatically encrypted with the public key of the recipient. Once encrypted, only the private key of the recipient can decrypt the message. When the recipient logs in, their mailbox password decrypts their private key and unlocks their inbox.


title: ProtonMail

text: Email messages sent from Proton Mail to non-Proton Mail email addresses may optionally be sent in plain text or with end-to-end encryption. With encryption, the message is encrypted with AES under a user-supplied password. The recipient receives a link to the Proton Mail website on which they can enter the password and read the decrypted message. Proton Mail assumes that the sender and the recipient have exchanged this password through a backchannel. Such email messages can be set to self-destruct after a period of time.


title: ProtonMail

text: Both Proton Mail and Proton VPN are located in Switzerland to avoid any surveillance or information requests from countries under the Fourteen Eyes, and/or under government surveillance laws such as the United States' Patriot Act or outside the bounds of law. The company claims that it is also located in Switzerland because of its strict privacy laws.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail currently supports two-factor authentication with TOTP tokens for its login process. As of October 2019, according to the official Proton Mail blog, U2F support for YubiKey and FIDO physical security keys is currently under development and will be available soon after the release of v4.0.


title: ProtonMail

text: In 2018 Nadim Kobeissi published an article arguing that as Proton Mail was generally accessed through a web client, "no end-to-end encryption guarantees have ever been provided by the Proton Mail service."


title: ProtonMail

text: In 2021, Proton Mail's security and cryptographic architecture were both independently audited by Securitum, a leading European security auditing company, who uncovered no major issues or security vulnerabilities, and the audit results were publicly published.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail limits data portability by locking support for external email client software through IMAP and POP3 protocols behind a paywall. As of 2021, users are unable to back up their email account locally without paying.


title: ProtonMail

text: Proton Mail maintains and owns its own server hardware and network in order to avoid utilizing a third party. It maintains two data centers, one in Lausanne and another in Attinghausen (in the former K7 military bunker under of granite) as a backup. Since the servers are located in Switzerland, they are legally outside of the jurisdiction of the European Union, United States, and other countries. Under Swiss law, all surveillance requests from foreign countries must go through a Swiss court and are subject to international treaties. Prospective surveillance targets are promptly notified and can appeal the request in court.


title: ProtonMail

text: Each data center uses load balancing across web, mail, and SQL servers, redundant power supply, hard drives with full disk encryption, and exclusive use of Linux and other open-source software. In December 2014, Proton Mail joined the RIPE NCC in an effort to have more direct control over the surrounding Internet infrastructure.


title: ProtonMail

text: From November 3-7, 2015, Proton Mail was under several DDoS attacks that made the service largely unavailable to users. During the attacks, the company stated on Twitter that it was looking for a new data center in Switzerland, saying, "many are afraid due to the magnitude of the attack against us".


title: ProtonMail

text: In July 2018, Proton Mail reported it was once more suffering from DDoS attacks. CEO Andy Yen claimed that the attackers had been paid by an unknown party to launch the attacks. In September 2018, one of the suspected Proton Mail attackers was arrested by British law enforcement and charged in connection with a series of other high-profile cyberattacks against schools and airlines.


title: ProtonMail

text: On 22 April 2020, Proton Mail confirmed on its Proton VPN Twitter that Proton Mail and Proton VPN are banned in China because it doesn't allow the government to spy.


title: ProtonMail

text: On November 15, 2019, Proton confirmed that government of the Republic of Belarus had issued a block across the country of Proton Mail and Proton VPN IP addresses. The block was no longer in place four days later. No explanation was given to Proton Mail for the block, nor for the block being lifted.


title: ProtonMail

text: On January 29, 2020, the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media reported that it had implemented a complete block of Proton Mail services within the Russian Federation. As a reason for the block, it cited Proton Mail's refusal to give up information relating to accounts that allegedly sent out spam with terror threats. However, Proton Mail claimed that it did not receive any requests from Russian authorities regarding any such accounts. In response to the block, the Proton Mail Twitter account recommended legitimate users circumvent the block via VPNs or Tor.


title: ProtonMail

text: In March 2020, the company announced that even though the Russia ban was not particularly successful and the service continues to be largely available in Russia without using a VPN, Proton Mail will be releasing new anti-censorship features in both Proton Mail and Proton VPN desktop and mobile apps which will allow more block attempts to be automatically circumvented.


title: ProtonMail

text: According to Proton Mail's transparency report, it is legally obligated to follow Swiss court orders if Swiss law is broken, and in 2020 Proton Mail received 3,572 orders from Swiss authorities and contested 750 of them. Due to the encryption utilized, Proton Mail is unable to hand over the contents of encrypted emails under any circumstances, but according to Proton's privacy policy, Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log IP addresses as part of a Swiss criminal investigation. For this reason, the company strongly suggests that users who need to hide their identity from the Swiss government use their Tor hidden service/onion site. In May 2022, Proton updated its privacy policy and made explicit a separate privacy policy for its Proton VPN service, which has a different treatment under Swiss law and has a strict no-logs policy which was also confirmed by an external audit.


title: ProtonMail

text: Notable cases involving Swiss court orders include a case involving death threats made against well-known immunologist Anthony Fauci and a case against French citizens charged with theft and destruction of property. After these cases, in October 2021, Proton Mail won an important Swiss court victory that confirmed that email services cannot be considered telecommunications providers, and consequently are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Thomas Patrick Lennon (born August 9, 1970) is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, director, and novelist. He plays Lieutenant Jim Dangle on the series "Reno 911!"


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon is an accomplished screenwriter of several major studio comedies with writing partner Robert Ben Garant. They wrote the "Night at the Museum" films, "The Pacifier", "Balls of Fury", and "Baywatch".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon was born on August 9, 1970 in Oak Park, Illinois. Of Irish and Scottish descent, he is the son of Kathleen (McSheehy) and Timothy Lennon. He graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1988.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: At the age of 16, he met friend and future co-star Kerri Kenney at Theatre Camp at Northwestern University. The two later attended NYU, where they joined a comedy troupe called The New Group.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: While Lennon was a member of The New Group, the comedy troupe changed its name to The State. As they performed their material at theaters and clubs in New York City, they worked on the MTV show "You Wrote It, You Watch It". This led to the self-titled series "The State" (1993–95), which was nominated for a 1995 Cable Ace Award for Best Comedy Series. That same year, they created a special for CBS called "The State's 43rd Annual All-Star Halloween Special".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Following the departure of "The State" from MTV, and failed long-term deals with both ABC and CBS, Lennon, along with Kenney, Robert Ben Garant and Michael Ian Black, went on to create and star in the Comedy Central program "Viva Variety" (1997–99). The show was based on a sketch that Lennon had written for the final season of "The State", called "The Mr. and Former Mrs. Laupin Variety Programme." "Viva Variety" received a 1997 Cable Ace Award nomination for Best Comedy Series. After "Viva Variety", Lennon, Kenney and Garant created and starred in "Reno 911!" (2003–09). The series was initially slated for Fox, but the channel rejected it for being too risque, and the program eventually ended up on Comedy Central.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon has appeared as a guest star in dozens of TV shows, including "The League", "Childrens Hospital", "Party Down", "New Girl", "How I Met Your Mother", "Comedy Bang Bang", "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23". One of his notable guest starring roles was as Joey Tribbiani's blackjack-dealing "identical hand twin" on the "Friends" fifth-season finale ("The One In Vegas," Pts. I and II). Additionally, he has appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", "The Tonight Show", "The Daily Show", "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", and at 31, had the second-highest number of appearances on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In 2008, Lennon started doing stand-up comedy, occasionally playing guitar and incorporating music. He has appeared on "The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail", "John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show", "The Jeselnik Offensive", and "The Benson Interruption". He was the guest on the first episode of Chris Hardwick's "The Nerdist Podcast", which was recorded in Lennon's garage.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In 2010, Lennon and Garant created and starred in a sitcom pilot for NBC called "The Strip". In May that year it was announced that NBC had decided not to produce it as a series.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In November and December 2011, Lennon filled in as guest voice for the robot sidekick Geoff Peterson on the CBS show "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon has also appeared in numerous films, including "Bad Teacher", "Memento", "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days", "", and "I Love You, Man", for which he and co-star Paul Rudd were nominated for a 2009 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss. In both Christopher Nolan's film "Memento" (2000) and "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012), Lennon played the role of a doctor.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon's voice acting work includes "Kim Possible", "Bob's Burgers", "Archer" and "Planet Sheen", in which he played the character of Pinter. He played Scribble in "Secret of the Wings" and "Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast". He supplied the voice of Eddie the Shipboard Computer in the film version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and plays the voice of Fearless Leader in the 2014 DreamWorks short film version of "Rocky and Bullwinkle." He is also the voice of Munk on "Dawn of the Croods" and the voice of Chief O'Hara in the Warner Brothers animated film "".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon was a producer of the 2013-2017 late-night panel game show, "@midnight", hosted by Hardwick, and appeared 17 times on the show as a panelist/contestant. He won the show seven times.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon played Felix Unger in 2015-2017 television series reboot of "The Odd Couple" opposite Matthew Perry, who played Oscar Madison. In 2016, he co-starred as a scientist in Paramount Animation's "Monster Trucks" and began a recurring role on the Fox action sitcom "Lethal Weapon" as Leo Getz, a character previously portrayed on film by Joe Pesci. At the 2016 People's Choice Awards ceremony, he participated in an on-stage sketch parodying the recent gaffe by Steve Harvey at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In 2020 and 2021, he has recurred in "Supergirl"’s fifth and sixth seasons as Mr. Mxyzpltk, taking over from Peter Gadiot.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In 2020, Lennon reprised his role as Lieutenant Jim Dangle in the seventh season of "Reno 911!" which aired on Quibi. He also appeared in the 2021 movie, "Reno 911! The Hunt for QAnon". The eighth season of the series, now titled "Reno 911! Defunded", premiered on The Roku Channel in February 2022.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon is a successful screenwriter and script doctor. Most of Lennon's screenplays are written in collaboration with writing partner Robert Ben Garant. Their films have earned over $1.4 billion at the worldwide box office.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Among Garant and Lennon's credits are the "Night at the Museum" films, the 2005 Disney comedy "The Pacifier" and the 2006 prison comedy "Let's Go to Prison".


title: Thomas Lennon

text: In 2010, FX Network ordered a pilot episode for a Garant/Lennon science fiction television comedy called "USS Alabama", set 1000 years in the future, aboard a United Nations Peacekeeping spaceship, the U.S.S. "Alabama". Garant and Lennon released a book about writing for film called "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can Too!" in 2011.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Garant and Lennon wrote, directed and starred in the 2013 film "Hell Baby" starring Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb. The film was produced by Darko Entertainment, and shot on location in New Orleans, Louisiana. "Hell Baby" premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Garant and Lennon are credited as story co-writers on the film version of "Baywatch" (2017).


title: Thomas Lennon

text: More recently, "The Machine", written by Garant and Lennon, is set to star Vin Diesel. Additionally, their script "Action No. 1" is in pre-production.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon has written three young adult novels titled "Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles", "Ronan Boyle and the Swamp of Certain Death", and "Ronan Boyle into the Strangeplace". "Ronan Boyle and the Bridge of Riddles" debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list. He wrote the book for the theatrical production of "Trading Places: The Musical!" which debuted at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in June 2022.


title: Thomas Lennon

text: Lennon lives in Los Angeles and Wisconsin with his wife, actress Jenny Robertson, and their son Oliver (born 2009). He is a fan of The Smiths and Morrissey, occasionally performing live with the tribute band "Sweet and Tender Hooligans" as a guitarist.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned in the American city of Chicago during October 8–10, 1871. The fire killed approximately 300 people, destroyed roughly of the city including over 17,000 structures, and left more than 100,000 residents homeless. The fire began in a neighborhood southwest of the city center. A long period of hot, dry, windy conditions, and the wooden construction prevalent in the city, led to the conflagration. The fire leapt the south branch of the Chicago River and destroyed much of central Chicago and then leapt the main branch of the river, consuming the Near North Side.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Help flowed to the city from near and far after the fire. The city government improved building codes to stop the rapid spread of future fires and rebuilt rapidly to those higher standards. A donation from the United Kingdom spurred the establishment of the Chicago Public Library.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The fire is claimed to have started at about 8:30 p.m. on October 8, in or around a small barn belonging to the O'Leary family that bordered the alley behind 137 W. DeKoven Street. The shed next to the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire. City officials never determined the cause of the blaze, but the rapid spread of the fire due to a long drought in that year's summer, strong winds from the southwest, and the rapid destruction of the water pumping system, explain the extensive damage of the mainly wooden city structures. There has been much speculation over the years on a single start to the fire. The most popular tale blames Mrs. O'Leary's cow, who allegedly knocked over a lantern; others state that a group of men were gambling inside the barn and knocked over a lantern. Still other speculation suggests that the blaze was related to .


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The fire's spread was aided by the city's use of wood as the predominant building material in a style called balloon frame. More than two-thirds of the structures in Chicago at the time of the fire were made entirely of wood, with most of the houses and buildings being topped with highly flammable tar or shingle roofs. All of the city's sidewalks and many roads were also made of wood. Compounding this problem, Chicago received only of rain from July 4 to October 9, causing severe drought conditions before the fire, while strong southwest winds helped to carry flying embers toward the heart of the city.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: In 1871, the Chicago Fire Department had 185 firefighters with just 17 horse-drawn steam pumpers to protect the entire city. The initial response by the fire department was timely, but due to an error by the watchman, Matthias Schaffer, the firefighters were initially sent to the wrong place, allowing the fire to grow unchecked. An alarm sent from the area near the fire also failed to register at the courthouse where the fire watchmen were, while the firefighters were tired from having fought numerous small fires and one large fire in the week before. These factors combined to turn a small barn fire into a conflagration.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: When firefighters finally arrived at DeKoven Street, the fire had grown and spread to neighboring buildings and was progressing toward the central business district. Firefighters had hoped that the South Branch of the Chicago River and an area that had previously thoroughly burned would act as a natural firebreak. All along the river, however, were lumber yards, warehouses, and coal yards, and barges and numerous bridges across the river. As the fire grew, the southwest wind intensified and became superheated, causing structures to catch fire from the heat and from burning debris blown by the wind. Around midnight, flaming debris blew across the river and landed on roofs and the South Side Gas Works.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: With the fire across the river and moving rapidly toward the heart of the city, panic set in. About this time, Mayor Roswell B. Mason sent messages to nearby towns asking for help. When the courthouse caught fire, he ordered the building to be evacuated and the prisoners jailed in the basement to be released. At 2:30 a.m. on the 9th, the cupola of the courthouse collapsed, sending the great bell crashing down. Some witnesses reported hearing the sound from a mile (1.6 km) away.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: As more buildings succumbed to the flames, a major contributing factor to the fire's spread was a meteorological phenomenon known as a fire whirl. As overheated air rises, it comes into contact with cooler air and begins to spin, creating a tornado-like effect. These fire whirls are likely what drove flaming debris so high and so far. Such debris was blown across the main branch of the Chicago River to a railroad car carrying kerosene. The fire had jumped the river a second time and was now raging across the city's north side.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Despite the fire spreading and growing rapidly, the city's firefighters continued to battle the blaze. A short time after the fire jumped the river, a burning piece of timber lodged on the roof of the city's waterworks. Within minutes, the interior of the building was engulfed in flames and the building was destroyed. With it, the city's water mains went dry and the city was helpless. The fire burned unchecked from building to building, block to block.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Finally, late into the evening of October 9, it started to rain, but the fire had already started to burn itself out. The fire had spread to the sparsely populated areas of the north side, having thoroughly consumed the densely populated areas.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Once the fire had ended, the smoldering remains were still too hot for a survey of the damage to be completed for many days. Eventually, the city determined that the fire destroyed an area about long and averaging wide, encompassing an area of more than . Destroyed were more than of roads, of sidewalk, 2,000 lampposts, 17,500 buildings, and $222 million in property, which was about a third of the city's valuation in 1871.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: On October 11, 1871, General Philip H. Sheridan came quickly to the aid of the city and was placed in charge by a proclamation, given by mayor Roswell B. Mason: "The Preservation of the Good Order and Peace of the city is hereby intrusted to Lieut. General P.H. Sheridan, U.S. Army."To protect the city from looting and violence, the city was put under martial law for two weeks under Gen. Sheridan's command structure with a mix of regular troops, militia units, police, and a specially organized civilian group "First Regiment of Chicago Volunteers." Former Lieutenant-Governor William Bross, and part owner of the "Tribune", later recollected his response to the arrival of Gen. Sheridan and his soldiers: "Never did deeper emotions of joy overcome me. Thank God, those most dear to me and the city as well are safe."


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: For two weeks Sheridan's men patrolled the streets, guarded the relief warehouses, and enforced other regulations. On October 24 the troops were relieved of their duties and the volunteers were mustered out of service.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Of the approximately 324,000 inhabitants of Chicago in 1871, 90,000 Chicago residents (1 in 3 residents) were left homeless. 120 bodies were recovered, but the death toll may have been as high as 300. The county coroner speculated that an accurate count was impossible, as some victims may have drowned or had been incinerated, leaving no remains.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: In the days and weeks following the fire, monetary donations flowed into Chicago from around the country and abroad, along with donations of food, clothing, and other goods. These donations came from individuals, corporations, and cities. New York City gave $450,000 along with clothing and provisions, St. Louis gave $300,000, and the Common Council of London gave 1,000 guineas, as well as £7,000 from private donations. In Greenock, Scotland (pop. 40,000) a town meeting raised £518 on the spot. Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Buffalo, all commercial rivals, donated hundreds and thousands of dollars. Milwaukee, along with other nearby cities, helped by sending fire-fighting equipment. Food, clothing and books were brought by train from all over the continent. Mayor Mason placed the Chicago Relief and Aid Society in charge of the city's relief efforts.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Operating from the First Congregational Church, city officials and aldermen began taking steps to preserve order in Chicago. Price gouging was a key concern, and in one ordinance, the city set the price of bread at 8¢ for a loaf. Public buildings were opened as places of refuge, and saloons closed at 9 in the evening for the week following the fire. Many people who were left homeless after the incident were never able to get their normal lives back since all their personal papers and belongings burned in the conflagration.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: After the fire, A. H. Burgess of London proposed an "English Book Donation", to spur a free library in Chicago, in their sympathy with Chicago over the damages suffered. Libraries in Chicago had been private with membership fees. In April 1872, the City Council passed the ordinance to establish the free Chicago Public Library, starting with the donation from the United Kingdom of more than 8,000 volumes.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The fire also led to questions about development in the United States. Due to Chicago's rapid expansion at that time, the fire led to Americans reflecting on industrialization. Based on a religious point of view, some said that Americans should return to a more old-fashioned way of life, and that the fire was caused by people ignoring traditional morality. On the other hand, others believed that a lesson to be learned from the fire was that cities needed to improve their building techniques. Frederick Law Olmsted observed that poor building practices in Chicago were a problem:


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Chicago had a weakness for "big things", and liked to think that it was outbuilding New York. It did a great deal of commercial advertising in its house-tops. The faults of construction as well as of art in its great showy buildings must have been numerous. Their walls were thin, and were overweighted with gross and coarse misornamentation.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Olmsted also believed that with brick walls, and disciplined firemen and police, the deaths and damage caused would have been much less.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Almost immediately, the city began to rewrite its fire standards, spurred by the efforts of leading insurance executives, and fire-prevention reformers such as Arthur C. Ducat. Chicago soon developed one of the country's leading fire-fighting forces.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Business owners, and land speculators such as Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, quickly set about rebuilding the city. The first load of lumber for rebuilding was delivered the day the last burning building was extinguished. By the World's Columbian Exposition 22 years later, Chicago hosted more than 21 million visitors. The Palmer House hotel burned to the ground in the fire 13 days after its grand opening. Its developer, Potter Palmer, secured a loan and rebuilt the hotel to higher standards, across the street from the original, proclaiming it to be "The World's First Fireproof Building".


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: In 1956, the remaining structures on the original O'Leary property at 558 W. DeKoven Street were torn down for construction of the Chicago Fire Academy, a training facility for Chicago firefighters, known as the Quinn Fire Academy or Chicago Fire Department Training Facility. A bronze sculpture of stylized flames, entitled "Pillar of Fire" by sculptor Egon Weiner, was erected on the point of origin in 1961.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: St. Michael's Church and the Pumping Station were both gutted in the fire, but their exteriors survived, and the buildings were rebuilt using the surviving walls. Additionally, though the inhabitable portions of the building were destroyed, the bell tower of St. James Cathedral survived the fire and was incorporated into the rebuilt church. The stones near the top of the tower are still blackened from the soot and smoke.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Almost from the moment the fire broke out, various theories about its cause began to circulate. The most popular and enduring legend maintains that the fire began in the O'Leary barn as Mrs. O’Leary was milking her cow. The cow kicked over a lantern (or an oil lamp in some versions), setting fire to the barn. The O'Leary family denied this, stating that they were in bed before the fire started, but stories of the cow began to spread across the city. Catherine O'Leary seemed the perfect scapegoat: she was a poor, Irish Catholic immigrant. During the latter half of the 19th century, anti-Irish sentiment was strong throughout the United States and in Chicago. This was intensified as a result of the growing political power of the city's Irish population. Furthermore, the United States had been distrustful of Catholics (or papists, as they were often called) since its beginning, carrying over attitudes in England in the 17th century; as an Irish Catholic, Mrs. O'Leary was a target of both anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment. This story was circulating in Chicago even before the flames had died out, and it was noted in the "Chicago Tribune"'s first post-fire issue. In 1893 the reporter Michael Ahern retracted the "cow-and-lantern" story, admitting it was fabricated, but even his confession was unable to put the legend to rest. Although the O'Learys were never officially charged with starting the fire, the story became so engrained in local lore that Chicago's city council officially exonerated them—and the cow—in 1997.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Amateur historian Richard Bales has suggested the fire started when Daniel "Pegleg" Sullivan, who first reported the fire, ignited hay in the barn while trying to steal milk. Part of Bales's evidence includes an account by Sullivan, who claimed in an inquiry before the Fire Department of Chicago on November 25, 1871, that he saw the fire coming through the side of the barn and ran across DeKoven Street to free the animals from the barn, one of which included a cow owned by Sullivan's mother. Bales's account does not have consensus. The Chicago Public Library staff criticized his account in their web page on the fire. Despite this, the Chicago city council was convinced of Bales's argument and stated that the actions of Sullivan on that day should be scrutinized after the O'Leary family was exonerated in 1997.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Anthony DeBartolo reported evidence in two articles of the "Chicago Tribune" (October 8, 1997, and March 3, 1998, reprinted in "Hyde Park Media") suggesting that Louis M. Cohn may have started the fire during a craps game. Following his death in 1942, Cohn bequeathed $35,000 which was assigned by his executors to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. The bequest was given to the school on September 28, 1944, and the dedication contained a claim by Cohn to have been present at the start of the fire. According to Cohn, on the night of the fire, he was gambling in the O'Learys' barn with one of their sons and some other neighborhood boys. When Mrs. O'Leary came out to the barn to chase the gamblers away at around 9:00, they knocked over a lantern in their flight, although Cohn states that he paused long enough to scoop up the money. The argument is not universally accepted.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: An alternative theory, first suggested in 1882 by Ignatius L. Donnelly in "", is that the fire was caused by a meteor shower. This was described as a "fringe theory" concerning Biela's Comet. At a 2004 conference of the Aerospace Corporation and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, engineer and physicist Robert Wood suggested that the fire began when a fragment of Biela's Comet impacted the Midwest. Biela's Comet had broken apart in 1845 and had not been observed since. Wood argued that four large fires took place, all on the same day, all on the shores of Lake Michigan (see Related Events), suggesting a common root cause. Eyewitnesses reported sighting spontaneous ignitions, lack of smoke, "balls of fire" falling from the sky, and blue flames. According to Wood, these accounts suggest that the fires were caused by the methane that is commonly found in comets. Meteorites are not known to start or spread fires and are cool to the touch after reaching the ground, so this theory has not found favor in the scientific community. Methane-air mixtures become flammable only when the methane concentration exceeds 5%, at which point the mixtures also become explosive, a situation unlikely to occur from meteorites. Methane gas is lighter than air and thus does not accumulate near the ground; any localized pockets of methane in the open air rapidly dissipate. Moreover, if a fragment of an icy comet were to strike the Earth, the most likely outcome, due to the low tensile strength of such bodies, would be for it to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere, leading to an air burst explosion analogous to that of the Tunguska event.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The specific choice of Biela's Comet does not match with the dates in question, as the 6-year period of the comet's orbit did not intersect that of the Earth until 1872, one full year after the fire, when a large meteor shower was indeed observed.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: A common cause for the fires in the Midwest in late 1871 is that the area had suffered through a tinder-dry summer, so that winds from the front that moved in that evening were capable of generating rapidly expanding blazes from available ignition sources, which were plentiful in the region.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: On that hot, dry, and windy autumn day, three other major fires occurred along the shores of Lake Michigan at the same time as the Great Chicago Fire. Some to the north, the Peshtigo Fire consumed the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, along with a dozen other villages. It killed 1,200 to 2,500 people and charred approximately 1.5 million acres (6,000 km). The Peshtigo Fire remains the deadliest in American history but the remoteness of the region meant it was little noticed at the time, due to the fact that one of the first things that burned were the telegraph lines to Green Bay.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Across the lake to the east, the town of Holland, Michigan, and other nearby areas burned to the ground. Some to the north of Holland, the lumbering community of Manistee also went up in flames in what became known as the Great Michigan Fire.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: Farther east, along the shore of Lake Huron, the Port Huron Fire swept through Port Huron, Michigan and much of Michigan's "Thumb". On October 9, 1871, a fire swept through the city of Urbana, Illinois, south of Chicago, destroying portions of its downtown area. Windsor, Ontario, likewise burned on October 12.


title: Great Chicago Fire

text: The city of Singapore, Michigan, provided a large portion of the lumber to rebuild Chicago. As a result, the area was so heavily deforested that the land deteriorated into barren sand dunes that buried the town, and the town had to be abandoned.


title: John Oates

text: John William Oates (born April 7, 1948) is an American musician, best known as half of the rock and soul duo Hall & Oates, with Daryl Hall. He has played rock, R&B, and soul music, acting as a guitarist, singer, songwriter, and record producer.


title: John Oates

text: Although Oates' main role in the duo is being the guitarist, he also co-wrote many of the top 10 songs that they recorded, including: "Sara Smile" (referring to Hall's then-girlfriend, Sara Allen), "She's Gone", and "Out of Touch", as well as "You Make My Dreams", "I Can't Go for That (No Can Do)", "Maneater", and "Adult Education". He also sang lead vocals on several more singles in the Hot 100, such as "How Does It Feel to Be Back", "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" (a remake of the 1965 song performed by the Righteous Brothers), and "Possession Obsession". In 1986, Oates contributed the song "(She's the) Shape of Things to Come" on the soundtrack to the 1986 film "About Last Night". He also co-wrote and sang backup on the song "Electric Blue", recorded by the Australian band Icehouse, which was a "Billboard" top 10 hit.


title: John Oates

text: Oates was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004, and in 2014 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a member of Daryl Hall & John Oates. His memoir, "Change of Seasons", was published in 2017.


title: John Oates

text: Oates was born in New York City. His mother, Ann De Palma, was an Italian immigrant originally from Salerno. His father, Al Oates, was born to an English father and Gibraltarian mother, who claimed Moroccan heritage. He was raised in North Wales, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.


title: John Oates

text: Oates attended North Penn High School and was co-captain of the 1965-66 wrestling team his senior year and was Section 2 champion in the weight class. Oates turned down wrestling scholarships and opted to attend Temple University instead because "it was in the city." Oates wrestled as a freshman at Temple and then "got tired of losing weight."


title: John Oates

text: In 1966, he recorded his first single, "I Need Your Love," with the Masters for Philadelphia-based Crimson Records. After graduating from North Penn High School in 1966, John enrolled in Temple University in Philadelphia, where he met Daryl Hall, a senior at Temple who was also a professional musician. The two were involved in several college bands, then formed the duo Hall & Oates, and by 1972, they had signed with Atlantic Records. Hall & Oates went on to record 21 albums (to date), which have sold over 80 million units worldwide, making them arguably the most successful duo in pop–rock history. They have scored ten number-one records and over 20 Top 40 hits and have toured the world for decades. Their involvement in the original Live Aid concert and the charity single "We Are the World", both in 1985, established them further as artists. Their influence on modern American pop music and considerable contributions have been acknowledged by numerous contemporary bands, including Gym Class Heroes and the Killers.


title: John Oates

text: In 1983, Oates was asked whether he regretted not pursuing his degree in journalism. He replied that he did not—and admitted that he had in fact never intended to finish it.


title: John Oates

text: Despite 30 years as a chart-topping performer and sought-after producer, Oates did not release a solo album until 2002's "Phunk Shui".


title: John Oates

text: Oates took part, along with Jamie Cullum, in the song "Greatest Mistake" by Handsome Boy Modeling School. The song appears on the 2004 album "White People".


title: John Oates

text: As reported by "Billboard" in 2008, Oates was shopping an animated series titled "J-Stache", created by Evan Duby at Primary Wave Music Publishing.


title: John Oates

text: In March 2010, Oates played with the indie rock band the Bird and the Bee as a surprise guest. The show was a medley of the Bird and the Bee songs, as well as classic Hall & Oates. The performance was dedicated to H&O bassist T-Bone Wolk who died on February 27, 2010.


title: John Oates

text: On October 1, 2011, Margo Rey charted at #24 on "Billboard"'s Adult Contemporary Tracks with the song "Let the Rain", which was co-written by Oates.


title: John Oates

text: On March 11, 2013, Oates released a new single, "Stand Strong", which he co-wrote with Teddy Morgan. "Stand Strong" is part of "Good Road to Follow", a set of original songs released as digital singles, one after the other. In 2015, Oates released "Another Good Road", a DVD and Live CD combination via PS Records / Warner Elektra, which also debuted as a television special on the Palladia music channel. The DVD was shot live in a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee, and features rare footage of his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.


title: John Oates

text: He released an album with his new backing band, "The Good Road Band", titled "Arkansas" on February 2, 2018. Oates commented that the album serves as a connection back to his pre-Hall & Oates music interest of traditional delta, country blues, and ragtime.


title: John Oates

text: Oates has used many instruments and effects throughout his musical career and endorses several manufacturers and brands. Some of the companies endorsed by Oates include, Taylor Guitars, Voyage Air Guitars, Neunaber Audio, LR Baggs, and Fishman.


title: John Oates

text: Oates has been married twice. His first wife was Nancy Hunter, a former model. He and his second wife Aimee Oates have a son, Tanner, who was born in 1996. They reside in Woody Creek, Colorado, as well as Nashville, Tennessee. Oates became friends with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson when he moved to Woody Creek in the late 1980s and the pair maintained a close bond until Thompson's death in 2005.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Allen Ellsworth Ludden (born Allen Packard Ellsworth; October 5, 1917 – June 9, 1981) was an American television personality, actor, singer, emcee, and game show host. He hosted various incarnations of the game show "Password" between 1961 and 1980.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Ludden was born on October 5, 1917, in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, the first child of Elmer Ellsworth and his wife Leila M. Allen. Ellsworth was a Nebraska native who worked as an ice dealer, while Allen was a Wisconsin native and housewife. Elmer Ellsworth died the next winter on January 6, 1919, at age 26, from the Spanish flu.


title: Allen Ludden

text: When Ludden was about five years old, his mother married Homer J. Ludden, an electrical engineer. Homer J. Ludden was the son of Franklin C. Ludden, a merchant and then the superintendent of the electric plant in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Allen was given his adoptive father's name and became Allen Ellsworth Ludden. The family lived briefly in the Wisconsin cities of Janesville, Elkhorn, Antigo, and Waupaca before moving to Texas when Ludden was nine years old. The Ludden family resided in Corpus Christi in 1940, appearing in the City Directory, where Allen is listed as a student, Homer an engineer, and Homer and Leila's son, Franklin C. Ludden, a mail clerk.


title: Allen Ludden

text: An English and dramatics major at the University of Texas (now known as the University of Texas at Austin), Ludden graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1940 and received his Master of Arts in English from the same university in 1941. He served in the United States Army as officer in charge of entertainment in the Pacific theater, received a Bronze Star Medal for unknown reasons, and was discharged with the rank of captain in 1946. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he began his career as an adviser for youth in teen magazine columns and on radio. His radio show for teenagers, "Mind Your Manners", received an honorable mention Peabody Award in 1950.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Ludden hosted many game shows, including the "College Bowl", but he was most well known for hosting both the daytime and prime time versions of "Password" on CBS and ABC between 1961 and 1975. His opening TV catch phrase, "Hi doll," was directed toward Tess White, mother of his wife, actress and television personality Betty White.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Ludden began hosting an updated version of the game, "Password Plus", on NBC, in 1979, but chemotherapy treatments for stomach cancer forced him off the show in late October 1980. Other shows hosted by Ludden include "Liar's Club", "Win with the Stars", and "Stumpers!" He also hosted the original pilot for "The Joker's Wild" and hosted a talk-variety show, "Allen Ludden's Gallery".


title: Allen Ludden

text: At the request of the publishers Dodd, Mead & Co., Ludden wrote and published four books of "Plain Talk" advice, plus a youth novel, "Roger Thomas, Actor" (1959), all for young readers. He received the 1961 Horatio Alger Award. He released an album called "Allen Ludden Sings His Favorite Songs" on RCA Records in 1964.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Ludden married Margaret McGloin on October 11, 1943. She died of cancer on October 30, 1961. They had a son, David, and two daughters, Martha and Sarah.


title: Allen Ludden

text: He proposed to Betty White, whom he had met on "Password", at least twice before she accepted. Their romance blossomed when they played summer stock theatre together, in the play "Critic's Choice" in 1962. They also appeared together in the romantic comedy "Janus" in 1963. They were married on June 14, 1963, and remained together until Ludden's death.


title: Allen Ludden

text: They appeared together in an episode of "The Odd Couple" in which Felix and Oscar appeared on "Password" and also as a couple on a season 4 episode of "The Love Boat".


title: Allen Ludden

text: After Ludden was diagnosed with stomach cancer in early 1980, he took a month-long leave of absence from "Password Plus" for chemotherapy treatment, with Bill Cullen filling in as host. On October 7, 1980, he slipped into a coma while on vacation in Monterey, California. It was initially reported that he had a stroke, but the coma was actually caused by high levels of calcium from medication taken to help fight the cancer. Tom Kennedy assumed duties as host of "Password Plus", and although Ludden hoped to return to the show, his cancer grew worse and he never returned. He died in Los Angeles on June 9, 1981, at age 63. Ludden was buried beside his father in the Ellsworth family plot in Graceland Cemetery in his hometown of Mineral Point, Wisconsin.


title: Allen Ludden

text: A walkway at the Los Angeles Zoo was named in his memory (Betty White was a board member at the Zoo), and an artificial lake in Mineral Point was named Ludden Lake in his honor. Betty White also donated a Labrador Retriever named "Ludden" to Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California, in memory of her late husband.


title: Allen Ludden

text: Ludden's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located on North side of the 6700 block of Hollywood Boulevard, next to Betty White's star. White accepted Ludden's posthumously awarded star on April 19, 1987, during an appearance on "This Is Your Life". The star was formally unveiled in a ceremony on March 31, 1988.


title: Allen Ludden

text: When Betty White was asked in an interview on "Larry King Live" whether she would remarry, she said, "Once you've had the best, who needs the rest?" She never remarried and died in 2021 at age 99.


title: Allen Ludden

text: The Allen Ludden Papers collection is located at the Free Public Library in his native Mineral Point, Wisconsin. The items include letters written or received by Ludden, typed radio scripts, newspaper and magazine clippings by or about Ludden, publicity photographs and personal photographs, and a broken pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The collection was donated by Betty White.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, in the Serpens constellation, some from Earth. They are named so because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed. Taken on April 1, 1995, it was named one of the top ten photographs from Hubble by Space.com. The astronomers responsible for the photo were Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen from Arizona State University. The region was rephotographed by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory in 2011, again by Hubble in 2014 with a newer camera, and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: Released in 2007, Chandra X-ray Observatory (AXAF) had observed the area in 2001; it did not find many X-ray sources in the towers but was able to observe sources at various X-ray energy levels in the area from young stars.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: The image is noted for its global culture impact, with "National Geographic" noting on its 20th anniversary that the image had been featured on everything from "t-shirts to coffee-mugs".


title: Pillars of Creation

text: The name is based on a phrase used by Charles Spurgeon in his 1857 sermon "The Condescension of Christ":


title: Pillars of Creation

text: In calling the Hubble's spectacular new image of the Eagle Nebula the "Pillars of Creation", NASA scientists were tapping a rich symbolic tradition with centuries of meaning, bringing it into the modern age. As much as we associate pillars with the classical temples of Greece and Rome, the concept of the pillars of creationthe very foundations that hold up the world and all that is in itreverberates significantly in the Christian tradition. When William Jennings Bryan published "The World's Famous Orations" in 1906, he included an 1857 sermon by London pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon titled "The Condescension of Christ". In it, Spurgeon uses the phrase to convey not only the physical world but also the force that keeps it all together, emanating from the divine: "And now wonder, ye angels," Spurgeon says of the birth of Christ, "the Infinite has become an infant; he, upon whose shoulders the universe doth hang, hangs at his mother's breast; He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak, that He must be carried by a woman!"


title: Pillars of Creation

text: The pillars are composed of cool molecular hydrogen and dust that are being eroded by photoevaporation from the ultraviolet light of relatively close and hot stars. The leftmost pillar is about four light years in length. The finger-like protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than the Solar System, and are made visible by the shadows of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which shield the gas behind them from intense UV flux. EGGs are themselves incubators of new stars. The stars then emerge from the EGGs, which then are evaporated.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: Images taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope uncovered a cloud of dust in the vicinity of the Pillars of Creation that Nicolas Flagey suggested could be a shock wave produced by a supernova. The appearance of the cloud suggests the supernova shockwave would have destroyed the Pillars of Creation 6,000 years ago. Given the distance of roughly 7,000 light-years to the Pillars of Creation, this would mean that they have actually already been destroyed, but because light travels at a finite speed, this destruction should be visible from Earth in about 1,000 years. However, this interpretation of the hot dust has been disputed by an astronomer uninvolved in the Spitzer observations, who argues that a supernova should have resulted in stronger radio and x-ray radiation than has been observed, and that winds from massive stars could instead have heated the dust. If this is the case, the Pillars of Creation will undergo a more gradual erosion.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: Hubble's photo of the pillars is composed of 32 different images from four CCD images in the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on board Hubble. The photograph was made with light emitted by different elements in the cloud and appears as a different color in the composite image: green for hydrogen, red for singly ionized sulfur and blue for double-ionized oxygen atoms.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: The "stair-shaped" missing part of the picture at the top right corner originates from the fact that the camera for the top-right quadrant has a magnified view; when its images are scaled down to match the other three cameras, there is necessarily a gap in the rest of that quadrant. This effect is also present on other WFPC2 images, and can be displayed at any corner depending on how the image has been re-oriented for publication.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 was replaced by the Wide Field Camera 3, and the former was taken back to Earth where it is displayed in a museum. It was replaced in 2009 as part of a Space Shuttle mission (STS-125).


title: Pillars of Creation

text: In 2010 Herschel Space Observatory captured a new image of the Pillars of Creation in far-infrared wavelengths, which allows astronomers to look inside the pillars and structures in the region, and come to a much fuller understanding of the creative and destructive forces inside the Eagle Nebula.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: In celebration of the 25th anniversary since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers assembled a larger and higher-resolution photograph of the Pillars of Creation which was unveiled in January 2015 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. The image was photographed by the Hubble Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, installed in 2009, in visible light. An infrared image was also taken. The re-imaging has a wider view that shows more of the base of the nebulous columns.


title: Pillars of Creation

text: In October 2022, it was unveiled that the James Webb Space Telescope captured a new image of the Pillars of Creation utilizing the NIRCam aboard the spacecraft. The image was able to capture ejections from the formation of young stars still in development in great detail, as seen by the red spots near the edges of the pillars.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Climax is a 2018 psychological horror film directed, written, and co-edited by Gaspar Noé, and featuring an ensemble cast of twenty-four actors, led by Sofia Boutella. Set in 1996, the film follows a French dance troupe holding a days-long rehearsal in an abandoned school; the final night of rehearsing is a success, but the group's celebratory after-party takes a dark turn when the communal bowl of sangria is spiked with LSD, sending each of the dancers into agitated, confused, and psychotic states.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film is notable for its unusual style and production, having been conceived and pre-produced in only four weeks and shot in chronological order in only 15 days: although Noé conceived the premise, the large majority of the film was unrehearsed on-the-spot improvisation by the cast, who were given no lines of dialogue beforehand and had almost complete liberty as to where to take the story and characters. "Climax" features unusual editing and cinematography choices, and includes several long takes, including one lasting over 42 minutes. The cast of the film consists almost exclusively of dancers who, aside from Boutella and Souheila Yacoub, had no previous acting experience.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: "Climax" premiered on 10 May 2018 in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Art Cinema Award. It was theatrically released in France on 19 September 2018 by Wild Bunch and in Belgium on 21 November 2018 by O'Brother Distribution. The film received positive reviews, with many critics praising its direction, cinematography, soundtrack, choreography, and performances, although some criticized its violence and perceived lack of story.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: In the winter of 1996, a professional French dance troupe, led by manager Emmanuelle and choreographer Selva, gathers in a rural, abandoned school to rehearse an upcoming performance. After succeeding in completing the elaborate closing piece of the dance, the group commence a celebratory after-party, dancing and drinking sangria made by Emmanuelle, while DJ Daddy provides music. The diverse group has several personal issues and share gossip about one another during the celebration.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: As the party progresses, the dancers get increasingly agitated and confused and eventually come to the conclusion that the sangria has been spiked with a hallucinogen, presumably LSD. At first they accuse Emmanuelle since she made the drink, but she points out that she drank it and is also suffering from its effects. Taylor, already resentful towards Omar for dating his sister Gazelle, points out that Omar, a teetotaler, has not touched the sangria and accuses him of being the one responsible. The group gets angry and locks him outside the building in freezing conditions.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Emmanuelle sees her young son, Tito, drinking the sangria and locks him inside an electrical room to protect him from the agitated dancers. Selva goes to the room of her friend Lou, who is also feeling ill despite not having drunk. Lou confesses that she did not drink because she is pregnant. Dom, strongly affected by the drug, enters the room, accuses Lou of spiking the drink and kicks her several times in the stomach, not believing her claim of being pregnant; Lou, injured, retching, and weeping, passes through an altercation between Alaia and Jennifer in the kitchen due to Jennifer's refusal to share her cocaine, during which Jennifer's hair is set aflame after Alaia pushes her against a portable stove.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: A frenzied Lou confronts Dom on the dance floor, but the group, all heavily affected by the LSD at this point, turns on her and accuse her of having spiked the drink. At first taking up a knife to defend herself, the taunts of the group cause Lou to have a breakdown, and she ends up punching herself in the stomach and slashing herself with the knife on her face and arm as the group encourages her to kill herself, before being comforted by Eva.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Emmanuelle, who has lost the key to the electric room in which Tito is locked, searches desperately for it to try to free her son, who is screaming for help due to hallucinations. When the school suddenly loses electricity and switches to red emergency lighting, someone laughingly shouts that Tito has electrocuted himself.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Ivana takes a heavily hallucinating Selva through the halls passing a distraught Eva in a shower, trying to wash off the blood from Lou's cuts. Entering Ivana's room, the two take shelter and begin to have sex. David discovers the two and is kicked out by Selva. David tries to enter DJ Daddy's room but is also evicted. Rejected, David encounters Gazelle and her brother Taylor, starting to have sex. Gazelle flees from Taylor and stumbles into the central hall where the remaining dancers have descended into drug-induced psychosis, dancing wildly, writhing on the floor, chanting in tongues, having sex, and physically assaulting one another. Taylor catches up to Gazelle and takes her to his room while David is attacked by another dancer who slams his head against the floor.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: When police arrive the next morning, they find all of the dancers either unconscious or dead. Omar has frozen to death outside while Emmanuelle has killed herself outside the electrical room out of grief. Tito's corpse lies beside the open door of the electrical junction cabinet. Gazelle wakes up next to Taylor, seemingly having forgotten the evening as Taylor instructs her not to say anything to their father. Eva is curled up naked in the shower cubicle. Jenniffer is splashing water on her burned scalp, screaming. Lou exits the building, and writhes outside in the snow, laughing uncontrollably, having gone insane.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: As the police search the building, Psyché, who has several books related to hallucinogens in her bag, and apparently suffering no ill effects from the acid, goes to her room and drops liquid LSD into her eye.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film is loosely based on the true story of a French dance troupe in the 1990s who had their alcoholic beverage spiked with LSD at an after-party; no further incidents took place during the actual event, unlike in the film. The idea of making a film based around dance came to Noé in late November/December 2017, when he was invited to a vogue ballroom by Léa Vlamos (who would eventually be a part of the film's cast): "I couldn’t believe the energy and the crowd – and then I thought, I’d love to film these kind of people. I’d also seen that movie by David LaChapelle called "Rize", about krumping. I was amazed by these young kids dancing like they were possessed by evil forces." Although he originally felt inspired to make a documentary film about dance, he came up with the idea of "Climax" in early January 2018. He used 1970s films for additional inspiration, including "The Towering Inferno", "The Poseidon Adventure" and "Shivers".


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: He stated that the film was "all about people creating something together, and failing in the second half. It’s like the [biblical] story of the Tower of Babel. Mankind can create big things. And then with the influence of alcohol, or some accident, everything falls. [...] I remember as a teenager when I was 14, I would host parties at my home. And I liked sangria, it was the first alcohol I ever drank. But you seriously don’t need drugs to lose control, alcohol is more than enough. I’ve seen so many more fights linked to alcohol – it can turn you crazy." In another interview, he claimed that the theme of the film was "a group [of] people creating something together and then collapsing." Noé, who had experience using LSD, claimed that the film was more about the impact fear can have on people than it was about drug abuse. He also denied that the film had any kind of moral agenda, pointing out that "It is not necessarily the most aggressive ones that get punished. It's mostly about a collective screw-up."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: In early January 2018, Noé had the idea of starting the production of "Climax" right away, and to make the film much faster than in typical productions. Producers Vincent Maraval (who had produced Noé's previous two films "Enter the Void" and "Love") and Edouard Weil agreed, under the condition that Noé would keep the production very short and film it for cheap. Noé stated: "The whole project happened very quickly. We started casting and preparing the movie at the beginning of January [2018], and we were shooting one month later in an abandoned school in a suburb in Paris. It was the most joyful and quick shooting I’ve ever done." He was able to quickly find a crew, made up of people that he had worked with before or had wanted to work with for a long time. The crew included cinematographer Benoît Debie, assistant director Claire Cobetta, and set decorator Jean Rabasse.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film was cast over the month of January 2018. It was mostly made of dancers with no acting experience, as Noé found the cast himself mostly in ballrooms, krumping battles, or on the internet. As vogue and krumping are largely individual dances, most of the cast had no experience dancing as a group, or in synchronization. When asked about the casting process for the film, Noe said "I went to see some voguing ballrooms and krump battles, and I was hypnotized by their body language. These guys, who are usually very poor, become stars onstage once a month in a ballroom or in a battle."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film's choreographer, Nina McNeely, is the one who had the idea of casting Sofia Boutella. The only cast members with acting experience were Sofia Boutella and Souheila Yacoub; Boutella had been a dancer for many years, although she had stopped dancing a few years before, and agreed to do it again for the film. One of the cast members was a contortionist in Congo whom Noé had heard of when searching for unusual dancers, and got into touch with before flying him to France. An agent brought up Yacoub when Noé asked for a dancer who would be "able to scream and shout on demand [...] I met her and we did a quick casting to see how much she could scream and dance... and she was excellent and I was like can you start on Monday... she thought I was joking at first." He recognized that the characters played by Boutella and Yacoub "would have been too hard [for] someone who is not really an actor, as they were more complicated psychologically."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: "Climax" was shot in 15 days in an abandoned school in Paris. Although Noé conceived a basic story, and gave the cast ideas as to where the story and characters could go, he did not write any lines, and let the cast improvise the dialogue and most of the situations in front of the camera; there were no rehearsals, and only the premise, the characters' basic personality traits, and the early dance scene had been planned beforehand. He stated that when the cast asked him for a script so they could learn their lines, he answered, "No, just come to the set and do whatever you want, I’ll never push you to do anything against your will and if you have any ideas please tell them to me." Noé did give several ideas to the cast, but let them be free to follow them or not: "I knew the start and the end point, but I didn’t know the in-between. For example, initially I thought Sofia Boutella’s character, Selva, would end up with a boy, then I thought maybe it could be a girl. When I met the Russian girl dancer and I asked Sofia if she minds ending up with her, she didn't... so the whole thing was quite organic. Then I didn’t know how the story of the DJ would end... oh maybe he ends with the young dancer... But everything was shot in chronological order, which keeps the door open for any kind of re-writing." He stated that "The mood on set was so joyful and friendly. People were not getting wasted. I asked them what you would enjoy doing in the movie? How would you want to shock an audience? I would never ask them to do, what they would not like doing. Tell me who you want to kiss? Who you want to smash? Who you want to insult? And I would ask the other person, would you mind if this person wants to do this or that. And of-course the reciprocal person was welcome to [propose] anything."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: After the opening scene and the audition tapes, the plot of the film starts with a long take lasting over 12 minutes, with the first five minutes consisting of a fully choreographed dance by the cast. The choreography had also not been rehearsed before shooting, with the cast improving the dance and adding to it with each take, with the help of McNeely and the rest of the crew. They eventually filmed sixteen takes, with the fifteenth being the one used in the film; Noé stated that the final two takes were the only ones good enough to be used. Another long take central to the film lasts over 42 minutes, almost half of the film's running time; Noé stated that "I was operating the camera but I had no idea how I was going to frame the scenes until immediately before I was on the set. I especially wanted the second half of the movie to be one continuous master shot, but how it was going to be I had no idea."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: About the opening shot, in which Lou is seen screaming in the snow and the end credits roll, Noé stated: "I look at [the film as] a book and there is a prologue, or at the end an epilogue, a bibliography, or an additional personal note. In the case of this movie, the first exaggerated scene with her being bloody, crying in the snow, it wasn’t meant to be. It was just snowing in Paris for two days and the second day, I thought about possibly taking advantage of the weather. We got a drone and filmed the girl in the snow from above. I didn’t know how to use that footage at first. Later in the movie when they open the door, I thought that could fit in with the previous footage, if we made it snow outside and make it look like they were locked in. So I got some snow machines to re-create the whole thing. When people mentioned that there was some reference to "The Shining" it wasn’t that at all. I liked the idea of getting rid of the credits at the beginning of the movie. I hate ending credits. I like movies from the 40s, 50s of which movies would end abruptly. So, I knew how I wanted to end the movie. I found like a satanic icon that I could put before the movie starts. Like an omen, that’s something is going to turn bad, there was going to be a big drama, that the world is going to turn to hell."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: There was no clear ending in mind while the actors were improvising. According to Noé, the only narrative directive given to the cast about the end of the story was that "the most fragile ones would die at the end! Only the strong survive." The interview tapes featured early in the film were not originally planned, but Noé's line producer suggested that the cast should have talked more in the film, and came up with the idea of interviewing them for possible extra footage for the home media release; it was eventually added to the film. Those scenes were also completely improvised.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: While he had also featured drugs in previous films, Noé decided to have a different approach in "Climax": "I didn’t want to do any visual or sound effects to reproduce the feeling you are having when you’re on drugs. I thought it would be funny to do it the other way, like shoot almost documentary style with long cuts, seeing how the effects of drugs and alcohol are experienced, how its seen from the outside. Like how it all shows and not how it feels." He also left the cast free to have their characters react to LSD in whichever way they preferred, as people can react very differently to it in real life: "They were all quite keen to get to the second part of the shoot, with the drugs and everything going crazy. I showed them all these videos; people high on LSD, mushrooms, crack, whatever. Then after, I asked each one how they would want to portray their own craziness."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The soundtrack features music by Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, Giorgio Moroder, Soft Cell, Dopplereffekt, Cerrone, and Chris Carter amongst others, as well as two original songs by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, who had previously composed the score to Noé’s "Irréversible".


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film premiered on 13 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival, screening in the Directors' Fortnight section where it won the Art Cinema Award.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: The film was released in France on 19 September 2018 by Wild Bunch Distribution and in Belgium on 21 November 2018 by O'Brother Distribution. It was released in the United Kingdom on 21 September 2018 by Arrow Films, and in the United States on 1 March 2019 by A24.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: For the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the promotional material for the film humorously addressed the polarising responses and controversies surrounding Noé's previous films, stating: "You despised "I Stand Alone", hated "Irréversible", execrated "Enter the Void", cursed "Love", come celebrate "Climax"."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: "Climax" grossed $817,339 in the United States and Canada, and $1.2 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $2 million, against a production budget of 2.9 million.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, "Climax" captures writer-director Gaspar Noé working near his technically brilliant and visually distinctive peak." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100 based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Noé's direction, Benoît Debie's cinematography, the film's music, and the performances (both in terms of acting and dance) were praised; Boutella, in particular, was singled out. However, some criticised the film's violence and story. Critics agreed that the film had a unique style, but while most found this to be a positive quality, other reviewers heavily disliked it.


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: In a positive review, Joseph Walsh of "Time Out" stated: "Inventive and seductive, this infernal chamber piece will be sure to divide opinion. The camera plunges into the chaos, melding physical theatre with a palette of fiendish reds and impish greens, all accompanied by throbbing techno. Part musical, part political treatise, and with more than a wink to Dante’s "Divine Comedy", Noé is at his most decadent and devilish." Hau Chu of "The Washington Post" also gave a positive review, stating that "Noé has made what might be his most accessible and, yes, tender film to date, teasing the idea of heavenly bliss - before heading straight to hell."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Ray Pride of Newcity gave a very positive review, stating: ""Climax" is a rude, refined, gyroscopic, hurtling mash-up... of heaven and hell [with] a bravura dance number with a ravishing range of bodies in orchestrations of sensual motion and the camera brandishing its lavish mobility for moments on end."


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Scott Craven of "The Arizona Republic" panned the film, rating it 1 out of 5 and stating, ""Climax" is actually two movies, one in which you hang out at a party with young dancers who are as wearisome as they are flexible, and the other with the same group on acid. Neither is the least bit interesting. [...] Gaspar Noe doesn’t care what you think. He makes movies to provoke, if not to inspire annoyance, even hate. When a mom locks her young son in an electrical closet (inside is a menacing circuit panel that, if animate, would swallow the child whole), even those without kids cringe as the boy screams for help. Noe laughs at your discomfort." He concluded saying: "You just have to figure out if it's a ride you want to take".


title: Climax (2018 film)

text: Regarding the overall positive response to "Climax", unlike most of his films which were more polarizing or controversial, Noé stated jokingly: "I must be doing something wrong. I have to take a long holiday and rethink my career." In another he claimed: "Even my father tells me it's his favorite film, and there's a lot of directors who told me it was my best film. I never worked so little on something and I was never congratulated so much."


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Cube is a 1997 Canadian independent science fiction horror film directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali. A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson, and Maurice Dean Wint star as individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: "Cube" gained notoriety and a cult following, for its surreal and Kafkaesque setting in industrial, cube-shaped rooms. It received generally positive reviews and led to a series of films. An American remake, currently on hold, is in development at Lionsgate, and a Japanese remake was released in 2021.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: In a pre-credits sequence, a man named Alderson wakes up in a mysterious a cube-shaped room. He enters another red-colored room, but is killed in a gory manner as a thin wire mesh cuts him into cubes and he falls apart. The bloody mesh retracts to its original position.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Five different people, Quentin, Holloway, Worth, Leaven and Rennes all meet in the same room. None of them know how they got here or why they are here, and also noticing mysterious sounds outside the room they are in. Quentin, who was exploring, warns the group there are rooms with traps in them. Leaven notices metal plates with 3 sets of numbers etched into them. Rennes, an escape artist of 7 prisons, theorizes that each trap could be set by motion detectors. He tests this by throwing his boot into a room, which initially works, but after jumping into a room, acid is sprayed onto his face, killing him. The group, horrified, realizes each trap is set by different sensors.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Quentin, questioning the cube, believes each person was chosen specifically to be there. He claims he is a divorced police officer, Leaven is a young mathematics student, and Holloway is a free clinic doctor. The nihilistic Worth describes himself as a office worker with a dreary life. Leaven hypothesizes that the rooms whose plates have prime numbers on them are trapped. On their journey, they come across a mentally disabled man named Kazan. Holloway insists they bring him along, much to Quentin's dismay. Quentin injures his leg in a trapped room deemed safe by Leaven. Tension rises among the group, as well as the mystery of the maze's purpose. In a fit of rage against Quentin, Worth admits he helped construct the cube, designing the outer shell. (which is also a cube). He claims it was for a shady bureaucracy, or company of sorts. He guesses that the original purpose has just been forgotten, and they have only been placed inside just to put it to use.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Worth's knowledge of the outher shell's dimensions let's Leaven to calculate that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across. This means the entire Cube has 17,576 rooms in total, much to the group's shock. She realizes that the numbers may indicte the Cartesian coordinates of each room. Following the theory, the group travels to the outer edge, but realize every room at the edge is trapped. Rather than backtrack, they go through a room with a sound-activated trap without making any noise. Kazan makes a noise, nearly causing Quentin's death. Quentin threatens Kazan and argues with Holloway, defending Kazan. She insinuates that Quentin may be an abusive husband who likes young girls.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: The group reaches the edge, finding a bottomless abyss separating the Cube from the outer shell. Being one of the lightest, Holloway tries to swing over to the outer shell, using a rope made of the group's uniforms tied together, with everyone else lowering her down. The Cube starts shaking, causing everyone to accidentally let go of the rope, and Quentin catches it last second. He pulls her up at first, but drops her, letting her fall to her death.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Quentin, becoming more unhinged, persuades Leaven to abandon Kazan and Worth. He attempts to make a sexual advancement on her, but Worth attacks Quentin. Quentin beats Worth savagely, and drops him into the room below. Worth starts laughing hysterically, realizing they are in the same room Rennes died, indicating they have been traveling in circles. Quentin is in horror, but Worth finds the room where Rennes died in is now gone, now being at the edge of the maze.Leaven deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers. Kazan is revealed as an autistic savant who can mentally calculate prime factorizations. With this newfound knowledge. Leaven guides the group to the edge cube, using Kazan's calculations. Worth then traps Quentin in the door, letting Leaven and Kazan escape from him. When Quentin finds them, he attempts to harm them, before Worth opens the hatch under him from the room below, falling and seemingly dying. The group travels to the bridge room where they open the exit hatch, seeing a bright light.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: Worth, stricken by guilt, no longer wishes to escape. As Leaven attempts to persuade him, she is killed by Quentin, who impales her with a hatch lever. Worth attacks Quentin out of anger, which the latter mortally wounds him. Kazan flees to the other side, and Quentin pursues him, but Worth grabs his legs, pinning him in between the hatch. The cubes start moving, splitting him in half. Worth, bleeding out, crawls to Leaven's corpse to die next to her.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: The cast is of Canadian actors who were relatively unknown in the United States at the time of the film's release. Each character's name is connected with a real-world prison.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: On casting Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, Natali's cost-centric approach sought an actor for a split-personality role of hero and villain. Wint was considered the standout among the cast and was confident that the film would be a breakthrough for the Canadian Film Centre.


title: Cube (1997 film)

text: An episode of the original "Twilight Zone" television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (first aired 22 December 1961), was reportedly an inspiration for the film. Other inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat", which was shot entirely in a lifeboat with no actor standing at any point.