title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: Cronauer chases down Tuan, decrying his actions against American soldiers. Emerging from the shadows, Tuan retorts that the US army devastated his family, thereby making the United States his enemy, but comments that he still chose to save Cronauer's life at An Lộc, implying that he valued their friendship, before disappearing again. On his way to the Tan Son Nhat Airport with Garlick, under MP escort, Cronauer sets up a quick softball game for the students from his English class and says goodbye to Trinh. He gives Garlick a taped farewell message and boards the plane; Garlick – taking Cronauer's place as DJ – plays the tape on the air the next morning, it begins with Cronauer saying "Goodbye, Vietnam!"


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: The film was made on a production budget of $13 million. Williams was paid "less than $2 million" plus gross participation points.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: In 1979, Adrian Cronauer pitched a sitcom based on his experiences as an AFRS DJ. Although one of the most popular television programs of the era was the Korean War period piece "M*A*S*H", the networks were not interested, because they did not see war as comedy material. Cronauer then revamped his sitcom into a script for a TV movie of the week, which eventually got the attention of Robin Williams. Very little of Cronauer's original treatment remained after writer Mitch Markowitz was brought in.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: Commenting on the accuracy of the film, the real-life Cronauer commented "I'm very happy with it. Of course, it was never intended to be an accurate point-by-point biography. It was intended as a piece of entertainment, and (Williams) was playing a character named Adrian Cronauer who shared a lot of my experiences. But actually, he was playing Robin Williams." Commenting on his portrayal in the film, Cronauer said "Anybody who has been in the military will tell you that if I did half the things in that movie, I’d still be in Leavenworth right now. A lot of Hollywood imagination went into the movie. I was a disc jockey in Vietnam and I did teach English in my spare time. I was not thrown out of Vietnam; I stayed for my full one-year tour and I was honorably discharged." None of the people in the film are based on actual people Cronauer met, although he described them as stereotypes of military personnel who existed at the time. The scenes where Cronauer teaches his class to swear and use "street slang", his pursuit of a Vietnamese woman, and his Jeep being blown up in the jungle, among others, are constructs for the plot and never happened to Cronauer. He did, however, witness the bombing of a restaurant he had only recently left, and clash with Army censors when prevented from reporting it.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: According to Cronauer, he and Williams were forbidden by Levinson to meet each other because the director "was afraid that if Robin and I met, that Robin would somehow start to do an unconscious imitation of me, which would change his characterization." Williams and Cronauer eventually met at the film's New York premiere.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: "Good Morning, Vietnam" was one of the most successful films of the year, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of 1987.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: The film received acclaim from film critics. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel of the review show "Siskel and Ebert" awarded the film "Two Thumbs Up", with Ebert giving the film a four out of four star review in the "Chicago Sun-Times". Richard Corliss of "Time" called the film "the best military comedy since "M*A*S*H"", and named it one of the best films of the year. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called the film a cinematic "tour de force" and described Williams' performance as "the work of an accomplished actor". Much of the acclaim went to Williams' performance, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: The film was not without detractors. Hal Hinson of "The Washington Post", gave the film a negative review. While praising Williams, he felt the film was "compulsory and condescending", and that the film was merely "a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture."


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 89% based on reviews from 46 critics, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critical consensus states: "A well-calibrated blend of manic comedy and poignant drama, "Good Morning, Vietnam" offers a captivating look at a wide range of Robin Williams' cinematic gifts." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 67% based on reviews from 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of A−.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: Alex North's score was released by Intrada Records in 2017. As the complete work runs for just 17 minutes, it was paired with David Newman's "Operation Dumbo Drop".


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: The soundtrack album was certified platinum in the US. Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" was released as a single because of the film and reached #32 on the US Top 40, 20 years after its original release. The album won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album in 1989.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: The tracks titled "Adrian Cronauer" are comedy monologues performed by Williams in character from the film.


title: Good Morning, Vietnam

text: In 1992, Mark Frost wrote a sequel screenplay, "Good Morning, Chicago". The film would have featured Williams, reprising his role as Cronauer, as a journalist at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The project was eventually scrapped, due to disagreements between Williams, Levinson, and Disney, over the film's direction.


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: Nathalie Kelley is a Peruvian-born Australian actress, known for her role as Neela in the 2006 action film "", and for her roles in various television series including "Body of Proof" (2011–2012), "Unreal" (2015), "The Vampire Diaries" (2016–2017), "Dynasty" (2017–2018) and "The Baker and the Beauty" (2020).


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: Kelley was born in Lima, Peru, to a Peruvian mother and an Argentine father. They moved to Sydney when she was three. From a young age, she dreamed about being an actress. She attended North Sydney Girls High School.


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: In 2005, "Charmed" executive producers Brad Kern, Aaron Spelling and E. Duke Vincent developed a one-hour pilot for The WB titled "Mermaid". Kelley was cast as the series protagonist Nikki, a mermaid who is rescued by a young man when she washes ashore in Miami. The pilot was not picked up as a result of The WB and UPN merging into The CW; the resulting network passed on the show.


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: In June 2006, Kelley received her breakout role as Neela in the film "", the third installment of "Fast & Furious" franchise. In March 2008, Kelley appeared in the low-budget drama crime film "Loaded" alongside Jesse Metcalfe. In March 2011, Kelley had a small role in the retro comedy film "Take Me Home Tonight", which starred Topher Grace, Anna Faris and fellow Australian Teresa Palmer. The film was shot in Los Angeles in 2007 but its release was delayed by Universal Pictures for unknown reasons. The following month, Kelley appeared as the protagonist in the low-budget horror film "Urban Explorer", which follows a group of four urban explorers who explore an underground world beneath metropolitan Berlin.


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: In 2010, Kelley played the love interest in the music video for the Bruno Mars song "Just the Way You Are". In August 2011, Kelley signed on in a major recurring role in the second season of the ABC crime drama television series "Body of Proof". Kelley appeared as Dani Alvarez in ten episodes and made her final appearance in the episode "Going Viral Part One". In 2012, Kelley played a vampire princess in the video clip "Luna Llena" from Puerto Rican reggaeton duo Baby Rasta & Gringo. In 2014, she won a regular role in the Lifetime series "Unreal". From 2016 to 2017, Kelley appeared as Sybil in the final season of The CW television series "The Vampire Diaries".


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: Kelley starred as Cristal in the first season of The CW's "Dynasty" reboot, from 2017 to 2018. In 2020, she debuted in the lead role of Noa Hamilton in the ABC series "The Baker and the Beauty".


title: Nathalie Kelley

text: Kelley began dating Jordan "Jordy" Burrows in 2018. That April, she confirmed in an Instagram post that they were engaged, and they married on 29 April 2018. They separated in 2020.


title: Chav

text: "Chav" (), also "charver", "scally" and "roadman" in parts of England, is a British term, usually used in a pejorative way. The term is used to describe an anti-social lower-class youth dressed in sportswear. "Chavette" is a related term referring to female chavs, and the adjectives "chavvy", "chavvish", and "chavtastic" are used to describe things associated with chavs, such as fashion, slang, etc. In other countries like Ireland, "Skanger" is used in a similar manner. In Canada, in the province of Ontario (particularly used in Toronto associated with MTE), the term is "hoodman", an equivalent of the term "roadman" used in England. In the province of Newfoundland, "skeet" is used in a similar way, while in Australia, "eshay" or "adlay" is used.


title: Chav

text: Opinion is divided on the origin of the term. "Chav" may have its origins in the Romani word "chavi", meaning "child". The word "chavvy" has existed since at least the 19th century; lexicographer Eric Partridge mentions it in his 1950 dictionary of slang and unconventional English, giving its date of origin as c. 1860.


title: Chav

text: The word in its current pejorative usage is recorded by the "Oxford English Dictionary" as first used in a Usenet forum in 1998 and first used in a newspaper in 2002. By 2005 the term had become widespread in its use as to refer to a type of anti-social, uncultured youth, who wear excessive flashy jewellery, white athletic shoes, baseball caps, and sham designer clothes. The girls commonly wear clothing which exposes their midriff.


title: Chav

text: In his 2011 book, "", Owen Jones argued that the word is an attack on the poor. In the 2010 book "Stab Proof Scarecrows" by Lance Manley, it was surmised that "chav" was an abbreviation for "council housed and violent". This is widely regarded as a backronym. This interpretation of the word was used in a 2012 public statement by rapper Plan B as he spoke out to oppose the use of the term.


title: Chav

text: People talk about "chav behaviour" or "chav insults" and that sort of thing. Oh, don't believe the popular etymologies that you read sometimes in the press and on websites. I saw one the other day, people said, "It's an acronym, 'chav', from 'council house and violent'"—well, no, it isn't, that was made up in recent times.


title: Chav

text: It has also been suggested that the term is derived from the name of the town of Chatham, in Kent, but the "Oxford English Dictionary" thinks this is "probably a later rationalization".


title: Chav

text: Besides referring to loutish (ill-mannered) behaviour, violence, and particular speech patterns (all of which are stereotypes), the chav stereotype includes wearing branded designer sportswear, which may be accompanied by some form of flashy gold jewellery otherwise termed as "bling". They have been described as adopting "black culture".


title: Chav

text: In a case where a teenage woman was barred from her own home under the terms of an anti-social behaviour order in 2005, some British national newspapers branded her "the real-life Vicky Pollard" with the "Daily Star" running headlines reading, "Good riddance to chav scum: real life Vicky Pollard evicted", both referring to a BBC comedy character (see In the media below). A 2006 survey by YouGov suggested 70% of TV industry professionals believed that Vicky Pollard was an accurate reflection of white working-class youth.


title: Chav

text: Response to the stereotype has ranged from amusement to criticism, with some saying that it is a new manifestation of classism. "The Guardian" in 2011 identified issues stemming from the use of the terms "hoodies" and "chav" within the mass media, which had led to age discrimination as a result of mass media-created stereotypes.


title: Chav

text: In 2005 the fashion house Burberry, whilst deriding chavs, claimed that the widespread fashion in the UK of chavs wearing its branded style (Burberry check) was due to the widespread availability of cheaper counterfeit versions.


title: Chav

text: The large supermarket chain Asda has attempted to trademark the word "chav" for a line of confectionery. A spokeswoman said, "With slogans from characters in shows such as "Little Britain" and "The Catherine Tate Show" providing us with more and more contemporary slang, our "Whatever" sweets – now nicknamed chav hearts – have become very popular with kids and grown-ups alike. We thought we needed to give them some respect and have decided to trademark our sweets."


title: Chav

text: A BBC TV documentary suggested that chav culture is an evolution of previous working-class youth subcultures associated with particular commercial clothing styles, such as mods, skinheads, and casuals.


title: Chav

text: In a February 2005 article in "The Times", Julie Burchill argued that use of the word is a form of "social racism", and that such "sneering" reveals more about the shortcomings of the "chav-haters" than those of their supposed victims. The writer John Harris argued along similar lines in a 2007 article in "The Guardian". The widespread use of the "chav" stereotype has been criticised. Some argue that it amounts to simple snobbery and elitism. Critics of the term have argued that its users are "neo-snobs", and that its increasing popularity raises questions about how British society deals with social mobility and class.


title: Chav

text: The Fabian Society considers the term to be offensive and regards it as "sneering and patronising" to a largely voiceless group. On describing those who use the word, the society stated that "we all know their old serviette/napkin, lounge/living room, settee/sofa tricks. But this is something new. This is middle class hatred of the white working class, pure and simple. The Fabian Society have been highly critical of the BBC in using the term in broadcasts. Use of the term 'chav' was reported in "The Guardian" in 2011 as "class abuse by people asserting superiority". Writer Owen Jones also criticised the use of the term in his book "".


title: Chav

text: By 2004, the word was used in national newspapers and common parlance in the UK. Susie Dent's "Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report", published by the Oxford University Press, designated it as the "word of the year" in 2004.


title: Chav

text: Characters described as "chavs" have been featured in numerous British television programmes, as well as films. The character, clothing, attitude and musical interests of Lauren Cooper and her friends in the BBC comedy series, "The Catherine Tate Show," have been associated with the chav stereotype. The BBC comedy series "Little Britain" features the character Vicky Pollard (portrayed by Matt Lucas), a parody of a teenage female chav. In the British television series "Misfits", the character of Kelly Bailey is presented as a stereotypical chav. Lauren Socha, the actress who portrays Kelly, has described the character as being "a bit chavvy". "The Times" has referred to the character as "[a] chavvish girl", and the character has been said to possess a "chav accent".


title: Chav

text: In the "New Earth" episode of the BBC TV series "Doctor Who", the character Lady Cassandra is transplanted into Rose Tyler's body (Billie Piper). When Cassandra sees herself in a mirror, she exclaims "Oh my God... I'm a chav!" In "", the main character Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton) is introduced as a stereotypical chav.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The Airbus A300-600ST (Super Transporter), or Beluga, is a version of the standard A300-600 wide-body airliner modified to carry aircraft parts and outsize cargo. It received the official name of "Super Transporter" early on; however, the name "Beluga", a whale it resembles, gained popularity and has since been officially adopted. Its replacement, the BelugaXL, entered service in January 2020.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: Several major aircraft manufacturers are multinational, and it is not unusual for them to have plants in widely separated locations. Airbus is unique in that although it is today a standalone multinational corporation, it was originally a consortium formed by major British, French, German, and Spanish aerospace companies. The geographic location of Airbus manufacturing is not only influenced by cost and convenience; it is also a matter of aviation history and national interests. Historically, each of the Airbus partners makes an entire aircraft section, which would then be transported to a central location for final assembly; even after the integration of Airbus into a single firm, the arrangement remained largely the same, with Airbus partners becoming subsidiaries or contractors of the multinational pan-European company. The details vary from one model to another, but the general arrangement is for the wings and landing gear to be made in the UK, the tail and doors in Spain, the fuselage in Germany, and the nose and centre-section in France, with final assembly in either Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; or Seville, Spain.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: When Airbus started in 1970, road vehicles were initially used to move components and sections; however, growth in production volume soon necessitated a switch to air transport. From 1972 onwards, a fleet of four highly modified Aero Spacelines "Super Guppies" took over. These were 1940s-era Boeing Stratocruisers that had been converted with turbine engines and custom fuselages to carry large-volume loads for NASA's space program in the 1960s. Airbus' use of the Super Guppies led to the jest that "every Airbus is delivered on the wings of a Boeing". Over time, the Super Guppies grew increasingly unsatisfactory for Airbus's ferrying needs: their age meant that operating expenses were high and ever-increasing, and growing Airbus production required greater capacity than could be provided by the existing fleet.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: Various options were studied to serve as a replacement transport medium for the Super Guppies, including methods of surface transportation by road, rail, and sea; these alternatives were discarded in favour of a principally air-based solution as they were considered time-consuming and unreliable; in addition, the assembly line in Toulouse was not conveniently accessible by any of the surface methods. A key requirement of the new air transporter was the need to accommodate every major component being manufactured by Airbus, including the then-heaviest planned part, the wing of the larger Airbus A340 variants. A speedy development program was also required to have the prospective type take over duties from the Super Guppy fleet, scheduled to draw down in the mid-1990s.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: Several different types of aircraft were examined for potential use, including the Antonov An-124, Antonov An-225, Ilyushin Il-86, Boeing 747, Boeing 767, Lockheed C-5 Galaxy, and McDonnell Douglas C-17 Globemaster III; the use of any existing aircraft was eventually ruled out due to a lack of internal space for the desired components; the use of a piggyback solution was also dismissed as impractical. Boeing made an offer to convert several Boeing 767s for the requirement, but this was viewed as less advantageous than purpose-built aircraft using Airbus' existing twin-engined Airbus A300-600R.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In August 1991, Aérospatiale and DASA, two of the major Airbus partners, formed a 50/50 joint venture company, "Super Airbus Transport International" (SATIC), based in Toulouse, France, to develop a new-build replacement for the Super Guppy fleet. The selected starting point for the design was the Airbus A300, leading to the new airframe being designated as the A300-600ST Super Transporter. Following a pre-design period by SATIC, detailed design work was performed by Aérospatiale and DASA while subcontractors were selected to complete the 15 separate work packages; amongst these subcontractors, CASA was selected to produce the upper fuselage, Dornier provided the hydraulic systems, and Sogerma performed the final assembly work. The A300-600ST was not a like-for-like replacement, being larger, faster, and more efficient than the preceding Super Guppies. Airbus Industries elected to invest $1 billion into the program, this sum included the aircraft themselves, the cargo loading system, and program management.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In September 1992, construction work began on the first aircraft, the maiden flight of which took place in September 1994. Following a total of 335 flight hours being performed during the test program, restricted certification of the type was awarded by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in October 1995, enabling the A300-600ST "Beluga" to enter service shortly thereafter. In addition to the first aircraft, four more Belugas were constructed at a rate of roughly one per year; from start to finish, each airframe reportedly took roughly three years to complete. Modification work was performed at Toulouse using components provided by the Airbus assembly line. Originally a total of four aircraft were to be built along with an option for a fifth aircraft being available, which was later firmed up.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The fleet's primary task is to carry Airbus components ready for final assembly across Europe between Toulouse, Hamburg and nine other sites, and they do so 60 times per week. The Beluga fleet is owned by Airbus Transport International (ATI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Airbus Group that was established specifically to operate the type; through this organisation, the fleet is made available for hire by third parties for charter flight. In May 1998, ATI reportedly had an annual revenue target of $15 million to be achieved via leasing spare capacity. Over time, the Beluga has been used to carry a variety of special loads, including space station components, large and delicate artwork, industrial machinery, and intact helicopters. The A300-600ST's freight compartment is in diameter and long; maximum payload is 47 tonnes.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In late 1997, in response to the positive performance of the A300-600ST Super Transporter program, SATIC announced that they were in the process of evaluating several different prospective outsize freighter conversions; company chairman Udo Dräger indicated that a larger freighter based on the Airbus A340 could be developed in a similar manner to that of the A300-based Beluga. At the time, derivatives of both the Airbus A330 and the A340 were studied, including combining the upward-swinging hinged door of the Beluga with a conventional upper deck as an alternative to a side-mounted cargo door in traditional freighter missions. During the 1990s, as a result of reported inquiries to Airbus regarding the type, a niche market for selling Beluga-type aircraft to military customers and freight operators was also examined; but sales were considered 'unlikely' to take place by the late 1990s.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In November 2014, Airbus announced that it was proceeding with the development of a larger replacement based on the Airbus A330-200, planning to replace all of the old Belugas by 2025. The BelugaXL entered service in 2020. Airbus previously considered the A330-300 and A340-500, but each required too much of the limited runway 04 at Hawarden Airport near Broughton in Wales. In May 2015, Airbus confirmed that the new aircraft would have a wider cross-section than its predecessor and provide a 12% increase in payload. The BelugaXL is intended primarily for A350 work, designed to ship two A350 wings simultaneously. Of the five aircraft to be progressively assembled, the first two were considered essential to ramping up A350 production; the remaining three are to be introduced as the A300-600 Beluga fleet retires.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The A300-600ST Beluga shares many design similarities, although differing substantially in appearance, to the Airbus A300 upon which it was based. The wings, engines, landing gear, and the lower part of the fuselage remain identical to those used on the conventional A300, while the upper part of the fuselage forms an enormous horseshoe-shaped structure in diameter. In comparison with the Super Guppy, the payload was more than doubled and the volume increased by more than 30% The General Electric CF6-80C2 turbofan engines used are slightly uprated from those used on the standard A300 as well. The vertical stabilizer uses a modified Airbus A340 fin with a base extension while the tailplane was strengthened and fitted with auxiliary fins to maintain directional stability. The tailplane trim tank was also deleted.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: To provide access to the cargo area from the front without having to disconnect all electrical, hydraulic and flight control connections (and also avoiding the lengthy recalibrations before each flight that reconnection entailed), the standard A300 cockpit was relocated down below the cargo-floor level. By relocating the cockpit in this manner, loading times were reportedly halved from those encountered using the Super Guppy, which had needed to disconnect and reconnect such systems. Another reason for faster loading times was the adoption of a roll-on/roll-off loading system, as well as the ability to unload the aircraft in winds of up to 40 knots. The qualities and improved capabilities of the Beluga resulted in the costs associated with transporting Airbus components dropping to only one-third of those achieved by the Super Guppy.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The cockpit of the Beluga is pressurized but the cargo deck is not, making it inaccessible during flight and unsuitable for cargoes that require a pressurized environment, such as live animals. However, the cargo deck is fitted with a heating module to keep the cargo within an appropriate temperature range. On at least one occasion, a pressurized container has been used for cargo ("see Operational history"). The aircraft is operated by a crew of three – two pilots and a loadmaster.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The main deck cargo volume of the Beluga is greater than that of the C-5 Galaxy or the Antonov An-124 but still smaller than Antonov An-225. However, it is restricted by cargo-weight capacity of 47 tonnes, compared to 122.5 tonnes for the C-5 Galaxy and 150 tonnes for the An-124. Despite this width, the Beluga cannot carry most fuselage parts of the Airbus A380, which are instead normally transported by ship and road. The Beluga has been used to transport some A380 components.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In January 1996, the Beluga was formally placed into dedicated service, ferrying components from various aerospace sites to the final assembly lines in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg, Germany. On 24 October 1997, the last of Airbus Industrie's Super Guppy freighters was retired and its outsize cargo mission from that point onwards being exclusively performed by the new A300-600ST fleet. In 1997, the second year of Beluga operations, the fleet accumulated in excess of 2,500 flight hours across more than 1,400 flights. By 2012, the fleet was performing roughly 5,000 flight hours per year; Airbus expected this figure to double by 2017.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: Since entering service, the Beluga has been subject to several infrastructure upgrades. In 2011, Pau Pyrénées Airport, a site routinely visited by Belugas, became the first airport in Europe to deploy the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, which accurately guides the Beluga and other aircraft during landing. In 2015, a dedicated Beluga loading station was opened at Hawarden Airport, preventing high winds from disrupting future operations.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In addition to its primary supply duties to Airbus' production facilities, Belugas have often performed charter flights for various purposes. In 1997, ATI claimed that it had to reject eight out of ten requests for commercial Beluga flights, the fleet being able to spare only 130 flight hours for such duties that year. But as more Beluga aircraft were put into service, availability increased drastically, rising to 600 flight hours in 1998 and around 1,000 flight hours in 1999; this effectively enabled one of the five Beluga aircraft to spend much of its operating hours performing charter flights. Amongst the early customers chartering Beluga flights was Boeing.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In June 1997, a world record was set for the most voluminous payload to be carried by an aircraft when a Beluga was used to transport a chemical tank for a merchant vessel from Clermont-Ferrand to Le Havre, France. In February 2003, a single Beluga performed the farthest distance charter flight ever, having flown for 25 hours (not including refuelling stops) to transport two complete NHI NH90 helicopters along with a single Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopter from Marseille, France, to Melbourne, Australia, for the Avalon Airshow.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In 1999, a Beluga carried a large painting, "Liberty Leading the People" by Eugène Delacroix, which had hung in the Louvre in Paris since 1874. It was flown from Paris to Tokyo via Bahrain and Kolkata in about 20 hours. The large canvas, measuring high by long, was too large to fit into a Boeing 747. It was transported in the vertical position inside a special pressurized container provided with isothermal protection and an anti-vibration device.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: In 2004, a Beluga was used to deliver relief supplies to the Indian Ocean region following widespread devastation of coastal areas by a major tsunami. In 2005, the Beluga was employed to transport humanitarian aid and medical supplies from the United Kingdom and France to the Gulf Coast of the United States, in support of disaster-relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: The Beluga has seen recurrent use to transport bulky objects, including vehicles, for various different space programs. In 2001, sections of the unmanned Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) space vehicle were transported by a Beluga from Turin, Italy, to Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2004, multiple Beluga flights were made to Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, to deliver Astrium-built satellites. In 2009, a Beluga was used to convey the Tranquility module of the International Space Station from Turin to Kennedy Space Center, United States.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: A two-bay loading dock was opened in Toulouse in 2019, receiving 85-100 flights a week, as the five A300-600STs are operated 7,600 hours a year together.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: It encloses the forward section including the open large cargo door for less weather restrictions and faster 1h 20min turnaround down from 2h 30min.


title: Airbus Beluga

text: On 25 January 2022, Airbus announced a service offering outsize cargo transportation using its BelugaST fleet. Airbus Beluga Transport saw additional demand after sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 affected Russian-operated Antonov An-124 services.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 is the second-generation iPad Air tablet computer designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. It was announced on October 16, 2014, alongside the iPad Mini 3, both of which were released on October 22, 2014. The iPad Air 2 is thinner, lighter and faster than its predecessor, the first-generation iPad Air, and features Touch ID with the height, width and screen size the same as the iPad Air.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The first-generation iPad Pro replaced the iPad Air 2 as the flagship iPad model, with the 9.7 inch version releasing March 31, 2016, and the Air 2 being relegated as the mid-range iPad model.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 was discontinued on March 21, 2017, as was the iPad Mini 2, alongside the introduction of the iPad (5th generation), which replaced the Air 2 as the entry-level iPad model. Its successor, the third-generation iPad Air, was released on March 18, 2019. This iPad supported eight combined versions of iOS and iPadOS; that is, from iOS 8 to iPadOS 15, and is not supported by iPadOS 16 due to hardware limitations.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 was announced during a keynote on October 16, 2014, and was the first iPad to feature Touch ID. The theme of the keynote was "it's been way too long". The Air 2 began arriving in retail stores on October 22, 2014. The slogan for the device was "Change Is in the Air." With the release of the new iPad Pro, the slogan for the device was changed to "Light. Heavyweight."


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 originally shipped with iOS 8 pre-installed and includes a version of Apple Pay with the in-store NFC functionality removed. The included Touch ID sensor allows the user to pay for items online without needing to enter the user's card details.


title: IPad Air 2

text: iOS 8 comes with several built-in applications, which are Camera, Photos, Messages, FaceTime, Mail, Music, Safari, Maps, Siri, Calendar, iTunes Store, App Store, Notes, Contacts, iBooks, Home, Reminders, Clock, Videos, News, Photo Booth and Podcasts. The Apple App Store, a digital application distribution platform for iOS, allows users to browse and download applications made by various developers from the iTunes Store. Additional apps made by Apple itself are available for free download, which are iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes U, Find My iPhone, Find My Friends, Apple Store, Trailers, Remote, and the iWork apps (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers). Like all iOS devices, the iPad Air 2 can also sync content and other data with a Mac or PC using iTunes. Although the tablet is not designed to make phone calls over a cellular network, it can place and receive phone calls through an iPhone's cellular connection, using Apple's Continuity feature (supported on iOS 8 and later versions of iOS, and OS X Yosemite and later versions of macOS), or using a VoIP application, such as Skype.


title: IPad Air 2

text: On June 8, 2015, it was announced at the WWDC that the iPad Air 2 would support all of iOS 9's new features when it is released in Q3 2015. Air 2 users with iOS 9 will be able to use Slide Over, Picture in Picture and Split View. Slide Over allows a user to "slide" a second app in from the side of the screen in a smaller window, and have it display information alongside the initial app. Picture in Picture allows a user to watch video in a small, resizable, moveable window while remaining in another app. Split View allows a user to run two apps simultaneously in a 50/50 view.


title: IPad Air 2

text: It was revealed at WWDC 2019 that the iPad Air 2 would support iPadOS. It does lack the support for some features though such as Memoji Stickers, Apple's ARKit based applications and support for Sidecar in macOS Catalina, due to it having the Apple A8X Processor. Apart from this, most of the features that were introduced in iPadOS will work with this iPad, including support for external USB drives (using the camera connection kits), the redesigned split screen and multitasking interface (with support for two apps to be open at once) and support for Haptic Touch (no haptic feedback will be felt as the iPad family don't have Taptic Engines). Many people have described this iPad with this new software as a budget, and watered down version of its successor the iPad Pro.


title: IPad Air 2

text: With the release of iPadOS 13.4, the iPad Air 2 supports the new mouse and trackpad feature. It works by using the camera connection kits or via bluetooth. Bluetooth powered keyboards with a trackpad may also work depending on the manufacturer.


title: IPad Air 2

text: At WWDC 2020, the iPad Air 2 was revealed to support iPadOS 14. This makes it the first device to support seven generations of both iOS and iPadOS. It does though lack new features such as ARKit 4 and new Apple Pencil features. It does though support the improved Safari browser and new Messages app. The iPad mini 4 was also supported for the next generation of iPadOS 14.


title: IPad Air 2

text: On June 7, 2021 at the WWDC 2021, the iPad Air 2 was revealed to support iPadOS 15. This makes it the first device to support eight generations of software including both iOS and iPadOS.


title: IPad Air 2

text: On June 6, 2022 after iPadOS 16 was announced at the WWDC 2022, it was revealed that the iPad Air 2 will not be compatible with this new version of the operating system.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 inherits hardware similar to both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus with a major change in processor to the Apple A8X, the high-end 3-core variant of the Apple A8. The iPad Air 2 has 2 GB RAM (making the iPad Air 2 the first iOS device to have more than 1 GB RAM) and the PowerVR GPU has 8 cores. It also uses the Apple M8 motion co-processor which has a barometer and is the first generation of the iPad to inherit the fingerprint Touch ID sensor from the iPhone. In addition, compared to the iPad Air, it includes an improved 8-megapixel (3264×2448) rear-facing camera with 10 fps burst mode and slow motion video at 120 fps, similar to the iPhone 5S camera capabilities. The front-facing FaceTime HD camera has also been improved with a larger ƒ/2.2 aperture, which allows 81% more light in the image. Apple added a gold option to the existing silver and space gray color choices for the iPad Air 2, the previous existing colors were used on the preceding iPad Air.


title: IPad Air 2

text: Unlike its iPad predecessors, the mute/orientation lock switch has been removed to accommodate the reduced depth. Instead, the user must use the Control Center to access these functions.


title: IPad Air 2

text: It has a slightly smaller battery compared to the iPad Air, although Apple claims the same 10-hour battery life as before. The iPad Air 2 is available in 16, 32, 64 or 128 GB storage options with no storage expansion options. Apple has released a "camera connection kit" with an SD card reader, but it can only be used to transfer photos and videos to an iPad.


title: IPad Air 2

text: The iPad Air 2 received positive reviews. The Verge called the Air 2 "the best tablet ever made", giving it a score of 9.3 out of 10 while noting that it offered only "iterative improvement" and that there were "missed opportunities" in its design.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: Guido van Rossum (; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: Van Rossum was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he received a master's degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He received a bronze medal in 1974 in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He has a brother, Just van Rossum, who is a type designer and programmer who designed the typeface used in the "Python Powered" logo.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: Van Rossum lives in Belmont, California, with his wife, Kim Knapp, and their son. According to his home page and Dutch naming conventions, the ""van"" in his name is capitalized when he is referred to by surname alone, but not when using his first and last name together.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: While working at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Van Rossum wrote and contributed a glob() routine to BSD Unix in 1986 and helped develop the ABC programming language. He once stated, "I try to mention ABC's influence because I'm indebted to everything I learned during that project and to the people who worked on it." He also created Grail, an early web browser written in Python, and engaged in discussions about the HTML standard.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: He has worked for various research institutes, including the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). In May 2000, he left CNRI along with three other Python core developers to work for tech startup BeOpen.com, which subsequently collapsed by October of the same year. From late 2000 until 2003 he worked for Zope Corporation. In 2003 Van Rossum left Zope for Elemental Security. While there he worked on a custom programming language for the organization.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: From 2005 to December 2012, he worked at Google, where he spent half of his time developing the Python language.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: At Google, Van Rossum developed Mondrian, a web-based code review system written in Python and used within the company. He named the software after the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. He named another related software project after Gerrit Rietveld, a Dutch designer. On 7 December 2012, Van Rossum left Google.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: On 12 November 2020 Van Rossum announced that he was coming out of retirement to join the Developer Division at Microsoft. He currently holds the title Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: In December 1989, Van Rossum had been looking for a hobby' programming project that would keep [him] occupied during the week around Christmas" as his office was closed when he decided to write an interpreter for a "new scripting language [he] had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix/C hackers". He attributes choosing the name "Python" to "being in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of "Monty Python's Flying Circus")".


title: Guido van Rossum

text: He has explained that Python's predecessor, ABC, was inspired by SETL, noting that ABC co-developer Lambert Meertens had "spent a year with the SETL group at NYU before coming up with the final ABC design".


title: Guido van Rossum

text: On 12 July 2018, Van Rossum announced that he would be stepping down from the position of BDFL of the Python programming language.


title: Guido van Rossum

text: In 1999, Van Rossum submitted a funding proposal to DARPA called "Computer Programming for Everybody", in which he further defined his goals for Python:


title: Guido van Rossum

text: In 2019, Python became the second most popular language on GitHub, the largest source code management website on the internet, second only to JavaScript. According to a programming language popularity survey it is consistently among the top 10 most mentioned languages in job postings. Furthermore, Python has been among the 10 most popular programming languages every year since 2004 according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index and got the number one spot on the index in October 2021.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: The Birmingham Boys (also known as the Brummagem Boys or the Brum Boys) were a street gang whose power extended from the North of England to London's underworld, between the 1910s and 1930s. They lost control of the South East racecourses to the Sabini gang. In modern times they gained recognition due to the TV series "Peaky Blinders".


title: Birmingham Boys

text: Following the Gaming Act 1845, the only gambling allowed in England was at race tracks. The introduction of special excursion trains meant that all classes of society could attend the new racecourses opening across the country. Cash was concentrated in the hands of bookmakers, who employed bodyguards against protection gangs operating within the vast crowds.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: William "Billy" Kimber, born 1882 in Summer Lane, Aston in Birmingham, a brass caster by trade, was head of the Birmingham Boys. With gangs in Uttoxeter and Leeds he controlled racecourses in the Midlands and the North. For several years Kimber was probably the biggest organised crime boss in the UK. He set up a secondary base in Islington, North London to concentrate on the racetracks in the South of England, teaming up with London gang boss Charles 'Wag' McDonald.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: Kimber formed alliances with smaller organisations such as the Hoxton Gang and the Elephant and Castle Mob. Now at racecourses in the South East, one group the Brummies began to prey on were the Jewish bookies from London's East End, who turned to local underworld boss Edward Emmanuel, who in turn recruited the Italian Sabini Gang as protection.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: In March 1921, the Brummagems ambushed Sabini at Greenford Park Trotting Track. A few days later, Kimber was found shot and beaten in Kings Cross, London, having gone to visit Sabini. The violence escalated, but Sabini gained the upper hand when 23 Birmingham boys were locked up following the "Epsom Road Battle". In October 1940, Kimber was the president of the Devon and Cornwall Bookmakers’ Association. William Kimber died 63, in 1945, after a prolonged illness, at the Mount Stuart Nursing Home, Torquay.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: Kimber's gang believed that a group of Leeds bookmakers travelling in a Crossley tender at Ewell, near Epsom, on Coronation Cup day were in fact the Sabini Gang. The tender was rammed by a taxi, and 60 men set upon the occupants with hatchets, hammers, and bricks. The attack was led by a man with a revolver, and initial reports suggested it was a Sinn Féin riot. The gang had used taxis and a blue motor coach to both follow their victims and escape. The police located the coach at the George and Dragon pub (now the Kingston Lodge Hotel) on Kingston Hill and were able to muster 50 officers.


title: Birmingham Boys

text: In the BBC television series "Peaky Blinders" a fictionalised version of Billy Kimber was portrayed by Charlie Creed-Miles.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: "Triangle Strategy" is a turn-based tactical role-playing game in the vein of "Fire Emblem", "Tactics Ogre", or "Final Fantasy Tactics". The player takes turns moving characters from their party across a grid-based playing field in which computer-controlled opponents must be attacked and defeated. Each character has unique attributes and a set movement range per turn, as well as a number of special attacks and skills that consume a limited but rechargeable pool of Tactical Points per character. During the course of the campaign, levelling up characters by using them in battle will increase their attributes and unlock new special attacks and skills, and players can also upgrade individual attributes and their characters' class to make them more effective in combat. Along with the starting characters, a number of additional characters are recruited into the player's party during the course of the campaign. If a character in the player's party is defeated in combat they are removed from the battle but there is no permadeath.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: Players can use effective positioning of their units for more powerful attacks: for example, two characters placed on opposite sides of an enemy will attack the unit from both sides during the same turn, while an attack from behind or above the enemy will result in increased damage dealt. Doing so also rewards the player with Kudos points, which can be traded for character upgrade items or Quietus skills, which allow the player to execute one-time special actions during battle such as reviving a fallen party member or imbue all party members with increased movement.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: Parts of the environment may also be exploited by players during combat: a fire attack could be used to set fire to the ground to hinder movement, while during one stage players are given the option to destroy houses in a village in order to trap enemy units. The terrain may also affect elemental attacks to the players advantage; for example wet terrain may spread the range of a lightning attack, while a wind attack may be used to push enemies off cliffs. The game also features exploration stages with no combat in which the player can speak to NPCs to gain new information and find hidden items and money.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: The game features a storyline with branching paths, with four possible, unique endings. At various points the player and their party arrives at a major decision by consulting the Scales of Conviction, in which they vote for a specific outcome. Here, the player can persuade characters in their party beforehand to vote for a certain outcome which will alter the direction of the story. In addition, certain characters may only be recruited during a particular branching path. However, the game also employs a collapsing timeline, wherein branching paths only temporarily diverge the central story, before collapsing back into a central timeline. This is used until the final decision point, where the story splits into four distinctive endings. Despite this, the characters' roles in the story, character convictions, auxiliary story elements, and party members will vastly differ based on these choices.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: The game features a New Game Plus mode, which offers returning players an increased difficulty level as well as the option to see how their decisions affect the story and lead to different branching paths.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: The game takes place on the fictional continent of Norzelia. The story focuses on a new conflict thirty years after the "Saltiron War", a war between three countries of the continent – Glenbrook, Aesfrost, and Hyzante – that arose over fighting for the scarce resources of salt and iron. The game follows protagonist Serenoa Wolffort, the heir of House Wolffort, his childhood friend Roland, the second Prince of the Kingdom of Glenbrook, Serenoa's fiancée Frederica Aesfrost, the Princess of the Grand Duchy of Aesfrost, and the steward of House Wolffort Benedict Pascal, as they attempt to navigate their way through the conflict.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: Thirty years after the Saltiron War, Glenbrook and Aesfrost agree to share the newly discovered Grand Norzelian Mine in an effort to improve relations between the two countries. However, as Serenoa inspects the mines with Gustadolph's cousin Dragan, assassins attack and kill Dragan. Gustadolph then accuses Glenbrook of murdering Dragan, using his death as a pretext to stage a punitive campaign against Glenbrook and invading its capital. Serenoa and his party are too late to stop Gustadolph from killing King Regna and Prince Frani and capturing Princess Cordelia, leaving Roland as the sole heir to Glenbrook's throne. Determined to bring all of Glenbrook to heel, Gustadolph gives Serenoa an ultimatum: hand over Roland to him or face annihilation at the hands of his army. This represents the first of many choices Serenoa must make, including deciding on whether to enlist the aid of Hyzante to resist Aesfrost or collaborate with Aesfrost to repel an attempted invasion from Hyzante.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: Eventually, Serenoa and his party are able to drive Aesfrost from Glenbrook, and he, Roland, Frederica, and Benedict go about trying to rebuild the kingdom. However, Roland is met with the cruel reality of being king, as he executes many of his own nobles for misappropriating reconstruction funds. Serenoa's father Symon manages to recover from his illness and reveals to him that he is actually King Regna's illegitimate son who was secretly adopted by the Wolffort family to cover up the scandal. Frederica discovers that her people, the Rosellans, are being used as slave labor to harvest salt in Hyzante due to their ancestors possessing knowledge of sources of salt outside of Hyzante, which would have threatened Hyzante's salt monopoly. They also discover that the Grand Norzelian Mine contains salt, which would allow whoever holds to it bypass Hyzante's salt monopoly.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: It is at this point that Serenoa's comrades suggest differing plans of action. Roland advocates allying with Hyzante to destroy Aesfrost and avenge his family. Benedict recommends allying with Aesfrost to conquer Hyzante and break its hold over salt for good. Frederica implores him to help liberate the enslaved Rosellans and lead them back to their homeland of Centralia.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: The game was first announced under the working title of "Project Triangle Strategy" during a Nintendo Direct presentation on February 17, 2021. The presentation revealed the game as a collaboration between Square Enix and Artdink. Development is led by Square Enix producer Tomoya Asano, who had previously produced the "Bravely Default" and "Octopath Traveler" games. Asano noted that the change in direction from standard JRPG of past titles to a tactical RPG came from his desire to create a game with a more mature and adult story, something he felt was more conducive to a tactical RPG. First in-game footage of the game was also debuted on the same day, where it was shown to have the same "HD-2D" graphics style as Square Enix's "Octopath Traveler", where SNES-styled graphics are given a high definition and 3D visual effect. The game was developed using Unreal Engine 4. A free demo was also released to the public upon announcement.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: In September 2021, its final title was revealed to be "Triangle Strategy". Additionally, Square Enix announced they had surveyed players who played the demo, and made direct changes based on common input points. Changes from the demo include providing additional difficulty modes, alternate camera controls, and the ability to review past character dialogue. Additionally, tweaks to improving graphics and load times were made. The game's main campaign was originally aimed to be approximately 50 hours long, though Tomoya Asano later stated it should take "around 30 hours" to finish. The game was released on the Nintendo Switch on March 4, 2022.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: "Triangle Strategy" received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic.


title: Triangle Strategy

text: "Kotaku" liked the game's demo, praising the game's modern twists on an established genre, and how it set up a complex story. "Nintendo Life" enjoyed "Triangle Strategy" for its deep and satisfying combat system, excellent narrative, compelling characters and high replayability, while criticizing the voice acting and dialogue. "GamesRadar+" felt that although the battles were well designed, the story suffered from a lack of character development, "The rip-roaring pacing means Triangle Strategy never stops to let any one of these characters properly develop... there’s barely a moment where they just get to be themselves outside of fighting for their damn lives". "Polygon" criticized the story as overbearing, feeling it often took the momentum from the gameplay, "Other sequences actively undermine the momentum of the drama unfolding in the gameplay. Square Enix and Artdink so desperately want to control the narrative through exposition and dialogue that they constantly telegraph major combat twists and emergent possibilities".


title: Triangle Strategy

text: While disliking the voice acting, "The Washington Post" enjoyed the streamlined RPG mechanics, saying "Some players may find these lack of character customization options disappointing. However, I appreciated the fact that I didn’t have to worry about whether I had bought the latest weapons and armor after every story mission". "Nintendo World Report" felt that combat made interesting use of each environment, making the maps feel distinct gameplay-wise, "Elevation, pillars, ponds, and even mine carts can all play a role during combat... water can even be electrified to send out a shockwave of damage against everyone standing in it". Eurogamer criticized the pacing of the game, especially the dialogue sequences, "the distribution of time between each of those aspects is where Triangle Strategy can get tedious. A battle is often followed by over an hour of cutscenes".


title: Triangle Strategy

text: Upon release "Triangle Strategy" debuted at the top of the Famitsu sales charts in Japan, selling 86,298 physical copies in its first week. The game debuted at 7th place in the United Kingdom in the week after its release. On 18 March 2022, Tomoya Asano revealed on Twitter that two weeks after its release "Triangle Strategy" had sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan and Asia and 800,000 copies overall worldwide.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Iambic pentameter () is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as in "a-bove"). "Pentameter" indicates a line of five "feet".


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry. It was first introduced into English by Chaucer in 14th century on the basis of French and Italian models. It is used in several major English poetic forms, including blank verse, the heroic couplet, and some of the traditionally rhymed stanza forms. William Shakespeare famously used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets, John Milton in his "Paradise Lost", and William Wordsworth in "The Prelude".


title: Iambic pentameter

text: As lines in iambic pentameter usually contain ten syllables, it is considered a form of decasyllabic verse.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 12:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: It is possible to notate this with a "/" marking ictic syllables (experienced as beats) and a "×" marking nonictic syllables (experienced as offbeats). In this notation a standard line of iambic pentameter would look like this:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The term "iamb" originally applied to the quantitative meter of classical poetry. The classical terms were adapted to describe the equivalent meters in English accentual-syllabic verse. Different languages express rhythm in different ways. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the rhythm was created through the alternation of short and long syllables. In English, the rhythm is created through the use of stress, alternating between unstressed and stressed syllables. An English unstressed syllable is equivalent to a classical short syllable, while an English stressed syllable is equivalent to a classical long syllable. When a pair of syllables is arranged as a short followed by a long, or an unstressed followed by a stressed, pattern, that foot is said to be "iambic". The English word "trapeze" is an example of an iambic pair of syllables, since the word is made up of two syllables ("tra—peze") and is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable ("tra—PEZE", rather than "TRA—peze"). A line of iambic pentameter is made up of five such pairs of short/long, or unstressed/stressed, syllables.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row (as above), in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. However, there are some conventions to these variations. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, in contrast, often changes by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of the syllables in the foot. The following line from Shakespeare's "Richard III" begins with an inversion:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Besides inversion, whereby a beat is pulled back, a beat can also be pushed "forward" to create an indivisible 4-syllable unit: x x / /. In the following example, the 4th beat has been pushed forward:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Another common departure from standard iambic pentameter is the addition of a final unstressed syllable, which creates a "weak" or "feminine ending". One of Shakespeare's most famous lines of iambic pentameter has a weak ending:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: This line also has an inversion of the fourth foot, following the caesura (marked with "|"). In general a caesura acts in many ways like a line-end: inversions are common after it, and the extra unstressed syllable of the feminine ending may appear before it. Shakespeare and John Milton (in his work before "Paradise Lost") at times employed feminine endings before a caesura.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Here is the first quatrain of a sonnet by John Donne, which demonstrates how he uses a number of metrical variations strategically. This scansion adds numbers to indicate how Donne uses a variety of stress levels to realize his beats and offbeats (1 = lightest stress, 4 = heaviest stress):


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Donne uses an inversion (DUM da instead of da DUM) in the first foot of the first line to stress the key verb, "batter", and then sets up a clear iambic pattern with the rest of the line (da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM). In the second and fourth lines he uses strongly-stressed offbeats (which can be interpreted as spondees) in the third foot to slow down the rhythm as he lists monosyllabic verbs. The parallel rhythm and grammar of these lines highlights the comparison Donne sets up between what God does to him "as yet" ("knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend"), and what he asks God to do ("break, blow, burn and make me new"). Donne also uses enjambment between lines three and four to speed up the flow as he builds to his desire to be made new. To further the speed-up effect of the enjambment, Donne puts an extra syllable in the final foot of the line (this can be read as an anapest (dada DUM) or as an elision).


title: Iambic pentameter

text: As the examples show, iambic pentameter need not consist entirely of iambs, nor need it have ten syllables. Most poets who have a great facility for iambic pentameter frequently vary the rhythm of their poetry as Donne and Shakespeare do in the examples, both to create a more interesting overall rhythm and to highlight important thematic elements. In fact, the skilful "variation" of iambic pentameter, rather than the consistent use of it, may well be what distinguishes the rhythmic artistry of Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, and the 20th century sonneteer Edna St. Vincent Millay.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Several scholars have argued that iambic pentameter has been so important in the history of English poetry by contrasting it with the one other important meter (tetrameter), variously called "four-beat," "strong-stress," "native meter," or "four-by-four meter." Four-beat, with four beats to a line, is the meter of nursery rhymes, children's jump-rope and counting-out rhymes, folk songs and ballads, marching cadence calls, and a good deal of art poetry. It has been described by Attridge as based on doubling: two beats to each half line, two half lines to a line, two pairs of lines to a stanza. The metrical stresses alternate between light and heavy. It is a heavily regular beat that produces something like a repeated tune in the performing voice, and is, indeed, close to song. Because of its odd number of metrical beats, iambic pentameter, as Attridge says, does not impose itself on the natural rhythm of spoken language. Thus iambic pentameter frees intonation from the repetitiveness of four-beat and allows instead the varied intonations of significant speech to be heard. Pace can be varied in iambic pentameter, as it cannot in four-beat, as Alexander Pope demonstrated in his "An Essay on Criticism":


title: Iambic pentameter

text: In the first couplet, in phrases like "Ajax strives", "rock's vast weight", "words move slow", the long vowels and accumulation of consonants make the syllables long and slow the reader down; whereas in the second couplet, in the word "Camilla" all the syllables are short, even the stressed one.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The last line is in fact an alexandrine — an iambic hexameter, which occurs occasionally in some iambic pentameter texts as a variant line, most commonly the final line of a passage or stanza, and has a tendency, as in this example, to break in the middle, producing a symmetry, with its even number of syllables split into two halves, that contrasts with the "asymmetry" of the 5-beat pentameter line. Pope exemplifies "swiftness" partly through his use of contraction: two extra implied syllables squeezed into the metrical template between the first 2 ictuses:-


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Moreover, iambic pentameter, instead of the steady alternation of lighter and heavier beats of four-beat, permits principal accents, that is accents on the most significant words, to occur at various points in a line as long as they are on the even–numbered syllables, or on the first syllable, in the case of an initial trochaic inversion. It is not the case, as is often alleged, that iambic pentameter is "natural" to English; rather it is that iambic pentameter allows the varied intonations and pace natural to significant speech to be heard along with the regular meter.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Linguists Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser developed the earliest theory of generative metrics — a set of rules that define those variations that are permissible (in their view) in English iambic pentameter. Essentially, the Halle–Keyser rules state that only "stress maximum" syllables are important in determining the meter. A stress maximum syllable is a stressed syllable surrounded on both sides by weak syllables in the same syntactic phrase and in the same verse line. In order to be a permissible line of iambic pentameter, no stress maxima can fall on a syllable that is designated as a weak syllable in the standard, unvaried iambic pentameter pattern. In the Donne line, the word "God" is not a maximum. That is because it is followed by a pause. Similarly the words "you, mend," and "bend" are not maxima since they are each at the end of a line (as required for the rhyming of "mend/bend" and "you/new.") Rewriting the Donne quatrain showing the stress maxima (denoted with an "M") results in the following:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The Halle–Keyser system has been criticized because it can identify passages of prose as iambic pentameter. Other scholars have revised Halle–Keyser, and they, along with Halle and Keyser, are known collectively as “generative metrists.”


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Later generative metrists pointed out that poets have often treated non-compound words of more than one syllable differently from monosyllables and compounds of monosyllables. Any normally weak syllable may be stressed as a variation if it is a monosyllable, but not if it is part of a polysyllable except at the beginning of a line or a phrase. Thus Shakespeare wrote in "The Merchant of Venice", Act I, Scene 2:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: but wrote "vanishingly few" lines of the form of "As gazelles leap a never-resting brook". The stress patterns are the same, and in particular, the normally weak third syllable is stressed in both lines; the difference is that in Shakespeare's line the stressed third syllable is a one-syllable word, "four", whereas in the un-Shakespearean line it is part of a two-syllable word, "gazelles". (The definitions and exceptions are more technical than stated here.) Pope followed such a rule strictly, Shakespeare fairly strictly, Milton much less, and Donne not at all—which may be why Ben Jonson said Donne deserved hanging for "not keeping of accent".


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Derek Attridge has pointed out the limits of the generative approach; it has “not brought us any closer to understanding why particular metrical forms are common in English, why certain variations interrupt the metre and others do not, or why metre functions so powerfully as a literary device.” Generative metrists also fail to recognize that a normally weak syllable in a strong position will be pronounced differently, i.e. “promoted” and so no longer "weak."


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Nobody knows for certain where this metre came from. However, in the 19th century, the Swiss scholar Rudolf Thurneysen suggested that it had developed from the Latin hexameter. For there is a common type of hexameter which has two stresses in the first half and three in the second, for example:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The 3rd-century Christian African writer Commodian, who wrote irregular hexameters in a popular style, favoured this kind with five word-accents. Thurneysen quotes:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: When the pronunciation of the Latin changed to French, the number of syllables in many words was reduced. For example, "she came running" changed in the vernacular pronunciation to , and "listen, sirs" with seven syllables changed to with four. Final syllables in French were particularly subject to being lost, unlike in Spanish and Italian.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Another feature the accentual Latin hexameter has in common with iambic pentameter is that the position of the 1st and 3rd accents is not fixed; for example, the first accent can come either at the beginning of the verse or in second place, as in the pentameter.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Possibly the earliest example of iambic pentameter verse is the poem "Boecis" ("Boethius"), written in the Occitan dialect of the Limousin region in southern France about 1000 AD. An example is the following extract:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: In this metre, every line has two halves: the first half of the line has four syllables, but sometimes after the 4th syllable an extra unaccented syllable is added, as in lines 1 and 3 above; the second half has six syllables.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: This optional extra syllable in the middle of the line, as well as an extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line, are also seen in the 11th-century French poem, , of which an extract is as follows (see ):


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Also composed in iambic pentameter were the earliest of the Old French "chansons de geste" of the 11th to 13th centuries. Like the examples above, the poems usually had a caesura after the fourth syllable. One of the oldest is "The Song of Roland", which begins as follows:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: In this version of the metre as in the poems above, each line has two halves: the first half has four syllables (sometimes 5), while the second half has seven (sometimes 6); in the first half there are two stresses and in the second half three. In some places the final weak vowel -e is ignored, e.g. .


title: Iambic pentameter

text: This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born. In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form ("endecasillabo") because most Italian words have feminine endings. They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (normally accented) and the fifth (normally unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: There is now often no syntactic pause after the fourth syllable, and every line has eleven syllables. Another innovation common in Italian is synaloepha where a final and an initial vowel merge into one syllable, as in or above.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Giovanni Boccaccio's "Filostrato" of the 1330s, imitated by Chaucer in his "Troilus and Criseyde", has a similar rhythm. It begins as follows:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was Geoffrey Chaucer, who not only knew French, but also Italian, and he even visited Italy two or three times. His "Troilus and Criseyde", written in the 1380s, begins as follows, using lines sometimes of 11, and sometimes of 10 syllables. Quite often (but not in every line) there is a syntactic break after the fourth syllable, as in the French poems quoted above:


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Chaucer's friend John Gower used a similar meter in his poem "In Praise of Peace." This was written after Henry IV's coronation in 1399.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Chaucer's meter depended on the pronunciation of final "e"'s that even by his time were probably silent. It was soon forgotten that they were ever pronounced, so later readers could not recognize his meter and found his lines rough. His Scottish followers of the century from 1420 to 1520—King James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas—seem to have understood his meter (though final "e" had long been silent in Scots) and came close to it. Dunbar, in particular, wrote poems in true iambic pentameter.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: In England, the poems of the 15th and early 16th centuries are in a wide variety of meters. Thomas Wyatt, for example, often mixed iambic pentameters with other lines of similar length but different rhythm. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, on the other hand, used a strict ten-syllable line that was similar to the Old French line, with its pause after the fourth syllable, but typically had a regular iambic pattern, and had many of the modern types of variation. Thomas Sackville, in his two poems in the "Mirror for Magistrates", used a similar line but with few caesuras. The result was essentially the normal iambic pentameter except for the avoidance of the "Italian" line. It was Philip Sidney, apparently influenced by Italian poetry, who used large numbers of "Italian" lines and thus is often considered to have reinvented iambic pentameter in its final form. He was also more adept than his predecessors in working polysyllabic words into the meter. However, Sidney avoided feminine endings. They appear more often in the work of such masters of iambic pentameter as Edmund Spenser and Shakespeare.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: Iambic pentameter became the prevalent meter in English. It was estimated in 1971 that at least three-quarters of all English poetry since Chaucer has been written in this meter.


title: Iambic pentameter

text: There is some debate over whether works such as Shakespeare's were originally performed with the rhythm prominent, or whether the rhythm was embedded in the patterns of contemporary speech. In either case, when read aloud, such verse naturally follows an iambic beat. Scholars have explained that there are few stage directions in Shakespeare "because the verse serves that purpose. The dramatic action of the lines is related to the physical action required."


title: Iambic pentameter

text: The rhythm of iambic pentameter was emphasised in Kenneth Branagh's 2000 production of "Love's Labour's Lost", in a scene where the protagonists tap-dance to the "Have at you now, affection's men-at-arms" speech. In this case, each iamb is underscored with a flap step.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Alfie Solomons is a fictional character played by Tom Hardy in the British period crime drama "Peaky Blinders". He is the leader of a Jewish gang based in Camden Town and was introduced in Series 2.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: The exact details of the casting process have not been revealed, but the character of Alfie Solomons was not initially devised with Tom Hardy in mind. The character is based on a real-life Jewish gangster named Alfred Solomon. "Peaky Blinders" writer Steven Knight says, "We have portrayed him as funny but with an edgy character. The Jewish gangs of the East End would have been just as famous but for some reason history seems to have remembered Alfie Solomons. I don't know why. Maybe, he was prosecuted more often." In the series, Solomons is the leader of a Jewish gang based in Camden Town and runs an illegal distillery.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Alfie is introduced as the leader of a Jewish criminal gang and owner of an alcohol distillery. He is at war with Italian mob boss Darby Sabini (Noah Taylor). Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) tries to convince him to align with his brothers Arthur (Paul Anderson) and John Shelby (Joe Cole) against Sabini but is not successful. Tommy and John then meet with Billy Kitchen (Paul Bullion), of the Black Country Boys, who fought with them in the war. Tommy tells Billy to round up his men for them to go to work in Alfie's distillery. This results in an alliance with Alfie. Later, Alfie and Sabini meet and patch up their differences. Alfie then hosts a Passover Seder and invites an unaware Arthur and some of his men, who are soon slaughtered. Alfie has Arthur sent to prison. Following this, Tommy meets with Alfie to forget their differences and join forces once again. Alfie secures Arthur's release from prison as a result.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: During the dealings between Tommy, Arthur and John, the Russian royals and the Economic League political organisation, Tommy decides to tell the Russians about his suspicions regarding Father John Hughes (Paddy Considine). He hires Alfie to ensure that the Shelbys are given real Russian jewels as payment for their services. Things go well, but it is revealed that the Economic League knows of Tommy's plans. After some investigation, Tommy discovers that Alfie divulged the plans to Father Hughes of the Oddfellows, thereby betraying Tommy. During a confrontation, Tommy’s cousin Michael Gray (Finn Cole) kills Alfie's associate, but Alfie talks Tommy out of killing him.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Alfie organises for his nephew and protégé to fight Bonnie Gold (Jack Rowan) at a boxing match, in an attempt for the Shelbys to promote Bonnie, in exchange for the services of his father Aberama Gold (Aidan Gillen). Rival Sicilian American mob boss Luca Changretta (Adrien Brody) makes his way to London to present a plan to Alfie. Alfie will allow an Italian-American assassin to enter the arena, where the boxing match is being held, in exchange for Changretta selling Alfie's London-made bootleg liquor in New York City. Following an unsuccessful attempt on Arthur's life and Tommy's final outmanoeuvring of Changretta, Tommy confronts Alfie for his betrayal. Alfie reveals he knew Tommy would track him down and kill him if he (Tommy) survived, and that he (Alfie) has cancer. Tommy shoots Alfie in the face.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Alfie is revealed to be alive, living in Margate. His face is visibly scarred from Tommy's shooting, leaving him blind in his left eye. Alfie is acutely aware of the rise of fascist politician Sir Oswald Mosley (Sam Claflin), as well as Tommy's career in politics. Alfie agrees to help Tommy and Arthur assassinate Mosley for ten thousand pounds, giving Tommy a group of his men to create a protest during Mosley's speech. Tommy installs a sniper to kill Mosley; at home, Alfie listens to the event on radio, eager for Mosley's death, but in the end the IRA discovers the plot and kills the sniper before he can shoot Mosley.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Alfie is seen when Tommy visits him and announces the death of his uncle Charlie on the Cotton Club at the hands of Jack Nelson's (James Frecheville) gang from south Boston.


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Medium describes Alfie Solomons as 'The Scene-Stealingest Character Of All Time', commenting that "I’ve never understood if Alfie was meant to be a villain or comedic foil or some pick-a-mix of both, but I’ve never loved every second of someone’s screen time more." Tom French, writing for Den of Geek, praises the debut of the character and writes that he complements the others well, "Solomons is immediately engaging, coming across as eccentric, sadistic and damaged all at once. The performance evokes elements of Hardy roles of the past, and the character fits seamlessly into the world of "Peaky Blinders"." An article in "The Independent" praised Tom Hardy, saying that "Tom Hardy is such good value in the show, having created one of its most authentic-feeling characters despite barely being in it".


title: Alfie Solomons

text: Abby Robinson of Digital Spy was critical of the decision to 'resurrect' Alfie Solomons in series 5. She writes "[Now] we've seen multiple characters cheat death across [Peaky Blinder's] five-season run, which makes Alfie's entrance more of the same – and not in a good way." Christopher Hooton of "NME" also described Alfie's return as "a little like fan service" but went on to write "his scene in the [series 5] finale was irresistible and beautifully written".


title: Development hell

text: Development hell, development purgatory, and development limbo are media and software industry jargon for a project, concept, or idea that remains in development for an especially long time, often moving between different crews, scripts, game engines, or studios before it progresses to production, if it ever does. Projects in development hell generally have very ambitious goals, which may or may not be underestimated in the design phase, and are delayed in an attempt to meet those goals in a high degree. Production hell refers to when a film has entered production but remains in that state for a long time without progressing to post.


title: Development hell

text: The term can also apply generally to any project that has languished unexpectedly in its planning or construction phases, rather than being completed in a realistic amount of time, or otherwise having diverted from its original timely expected date of completion.


title: Development hell

text: Film industry companies often buy the film rights to many popular novels, video games, and comic books, but it may take years for such properties to be successfully brought to the screen, and often with considerable changes to the plot, characters, and general tone. This pre-production process can last for months or years. More often than not, a project trapped in this state for a prolonged period of time will be abandoned by all interested parties or canceled outright. As Hollywood starts ten times as many projects as are released, many scripts will end up in this limbo state. Less than two percent of all books which are optioned actually make it to the big screen. Development hell happens most often with projects that have multiple interpretations and reflect several points of view. Production hell refers to when a film has entered production but remains in that state for a long time without progressing to post.


title: Development hell

text: Television series can experience development hell between seasons, resulting in a long delay from one season to the next.


title: Development hell

text: Video game development can be stalled for years, occasionally over a decade, often due to a project being moved to different production studios, multiple iterations of the game being created and abandoned, or difficulties with the development of the game software itself.


title: Development hell

text: The concept artist and illustrator Sylvain Despretz has suggested that "Development hell doesn't happen with no-name directors. It happens only with famous directors that a studio doesn't dare break up with. And that's how you end up for two years just, you know, polishing a turd. Until, finally, somebody walks away, at great cost."


title: Development hell

text: With video games, slow progress and a lack of funds may lead developers to focus their resources elsewhere. Occasionally, completed portions of a game fail to meet expectations, with developers subsequently choosing to abandon the project rather than start from scratch. The commercial failure of a released game may also result in any prospective sequels being delayed or cancelled.


title: Development hell

text: If a film is in development but never receives the necessary production funds, another studio may execute a turnaround deal and successfully produce the film. For example, Columbia Pictures stopped production of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982). Universal Pictures then picked up the film and made it a success. When a studio completely abandons a film project, the costs are written off as part of the studio's overhead, thereby reducing taxable income.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Manic Street Preachers, also known simply as the Manics, are a Welsh rock band formed in Blackwood in 1986. The band consists of cousins James Dean Bradfield (lead vocals, lead guitar) and Sean Moore (drums, percussion, soundscapes), plus Nicky Wire (bass guitar, lyrics). They form a key part of the 1990s Welsh Cool Cymru cultural movement.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Following the release of their debut single "Suicide Alley", Manic Street Preachers were joined by Richey Edwards as co-lyricist and rhythm guitarist, the band became as a quartet. The band's early albums were in a punk vein, eventually broadening to a greater alternative rock sound, whilst retaining a leftist political outlook. Their early combination of androgynous glam imagery and lyrics about "culture, alienation, boredom and despair" gained them a loyal following.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Manic Street Preachers released their debut album, "Generation Terrorists", in February 1992, followed by "Gold Against The Soul" in 1993 and "The Holy Bible" in 1994. Edwards disappeared in February 1995 and was legally presumed dead in 2008. The band continued as a trio, and achieved commercial success with the albums "Everything Must Go" (1996) and "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours" (1998).


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The Manics have headlined festivals including Glastonbury, T in the Park, V Festival and Reading. They have won eleven NME Awards, eight Q Awards and four BRIT Awards. They were nominated for the Mercury Prize in 1996 and 1999, and have had one nomination for the MTV Europe Music Awards. They have reached number 1 in the UK charts four times: in 1998, with "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours" and the single "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next", in 2000 with the single "The Masses Against the Classes", and in 2021 with "The Ultra Vivid Lament". They have sold more than ten million albums worldwide.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Manic Street Preachers formed in 1986 at Oakdale Comprehensive School, Blackwood, South Wales, which all the band members attended. Bradfield and the slightly older Moore are cousins and shared bunk beds in the Bradfield family home after Moore's parents divorced.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: During the band's early years, Bradfield, alongside the classically trained Moore, primarily wrote the music while Wire focused on the lyrics. The origin of the band's name remains unclear, but the most often-told story relates that Bradfield while busking one day in Cardiff, got into an altercation with someone (sometimes said to be a homeless man) who asked him "What are you, boyo, some kind of manic street preacher?"


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Original bassist Flicker (Miles Woodward) left the band in early 1988, reportedly because he believed that the band were moving away from their punk roots. The band continued as a three-piece, with Wire switching from guitar to bass, and in 1988 they released their first single, "Suicide Alley". Despite its recording quality, this punk ode to youthful escape provides an early insight into both Bradfield's guitar work and Moore's live drumming, the latter of which would be absent from the band's first LP. The Manics intended to restore revolution to rock and roll at a time when Britain was dominated by shoegaze and acid house. The "NME" gave "Suicide Alley" an enthusiastic review, citing a press release by Richey Edwards: "We are as far away from anything in the '80s as possible."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: After the release of "Suicide Alley," Edwards joined the band on rhythm guitar and contributed to lyrics alongside Wire. Edwards also designed record sleeves and artwork and drove the band to and from gigs.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: In 1990 the Manic Street Preachers signed a deal with label Damaged Goods Records for one EP. The four-track "New Art Riot E.P." attracted as much media interest for its attacks on fellow musicians as for the actual music. With the help of Hall or Nothing management, the Manics signed to indie label Heavenly Records. The band recorded their first single for the label, entitled "Motown Junk".


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Their next single, "You Love Us", sampled Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" as well as Iggy Pop. The video featured Nicky Wire in drag as Marilyn Monroe and contained visual references to the film "Betty Blue" and to Aleister Crowley. In an interview with then-"NME" journalist Steve Lamacq, Edwards carved the phrase "4REAL" into his arm with a razor blade to prove their sincerity. He was taken to hospital and received seventeen stitches. "NME" subsequently ran a full-page story on the incident, including a phone interview with Richey on his motivations for doing it. A recording of the editorial meeting discussing whether or not they could publish the image was included as a b-side on the band's 1992 charity single Theme from M.A.S.H. (Suicide Is Painless), featuring Lamacq, the then-editor of "NME" Danny Kelly and James Brown (who went on to edit Loaded and the British version of GQ).


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: As a result of their controversial behaviour, the Manics quickly became favourites of the British music press, which helped them build a rabidly dedicated following.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Columbia Records of Sony Music UK signed the band shortly afterwards and they began work on their debut album.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The band's debut album, "Generation Terrorists", was released in 1992 on the Columbia Records imprint. The liner notes contained a literary quote for each of the album's eighteen songs and the album lasted just over seventy minutes. The album's lyrics are politicised like those of the Clash and Public Enemy, with the album's songs regularly switching from a critical focus on global capitalism to more personal tales of despair and the struggles of youth. About the musical style of the album Pitchfork writer Joe Tangari wrote that "Generation Terrorists" "walked a weird line between agit-punk, cock rock, romantic melodicism and glam, and was so obviously patterned after the Clash's "London Calling" that it was actually kind of cute."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Other tracks combine personal and political themes, implicating a connection between global capitalism and personal struggle; "Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds" was written as a critique of overseas banking credit policies, but also concerned Richey Edwards' issues involving overdrafts and refused loans. Marc Burrows of Drowned in Sound considered the song to be an accurate prediction of "global financial meltdown" and its effects on everyday life. The single "Motorcycle Emptiness", meanwhile, criticises consumerism as a "shallow dream" that makes human life overtly commercialised. "Little Baby Nothing", a duet between Traci Lords and Bradfield, was described by Priya Elan of the "NME" as a "perfect snapshot of [female] innocence bodysnatched and twisted".


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The record contained six singles and sold 250,000 copies. The success of 1996's "Everything Must Go" at the 1997 Brit Awards ensured that sales of "Generation Terrorists" and subsequent albums "Gold Against the Soul" and "The Holy Bible" enjoyed a late surge; the band's debut sold an extra 110,000 copies. The band also made a cover version of the song "Suicide Is Painless" which peaked at number 7 in the UK charts, spending 3 weeks in the Top 10, and giving the band their first ever Top 10 hit single.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The group's second album, "Gold Against the Soul", displayed a more commercial, grungy sound which served to alienate both fans and the band itself. It was released to mixed reviews but still performed well, reaching number eight in the UK album chart. The album presents a different sound from their debut album, not only in terms of lyrics but in sound, the band privileged long guitar riffs, and the drums themselves feel more present and loud in the final mix of the album. This sound would be abandoned in their next album and as for the nature of the lyrics they also changed, with Edwards and Wire eschewing their political fire for introspective melancholy. According to AllMusic, the album "takes the hard rock inclinations of "Generation Terrorists" to an extreme."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The band also stated that the choice to work with Dave Eringa again was important for this album: "We finished work in November and then just went straight into a demo studio and we came out about four weeks later with the album all finished. We were all happy with all the songs, we knew what they wanted to sound like, so we didn't want to use a mainstream producer because they've got their own sound and vision of what a record should be like. So we just phoned Dave up and said 'Look, come down, let's see how this works out', and everyone loved what we were doing, so we decided to stay with him."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The band have described "Gold Against the Soul" as their least favourite album and the period surrounding the album as being the most unfocused of their career. The band's vocalist and guitarist James Dean Bradfield has said "All we wanted to do was go under the corporate wing. We thought we could ignore it but you do get affected."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: By early 1994, Edwards' difficulties became worse and began to affect the other band members as well as himself. He was admitted into The Priory in 1994 to overcome his problems and the band played a few festivals as a three-piece to pay for his treatment.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The group's next album, "The Holy Bible", was released in August to critical acclaim, but sold poorly. The album displayed yet another musical and aesthetic change for the band, largely featuring army/navy uniforms. Musically, "The Holy Bible" marks a shift from the modern rock sound of their first two albums, "Generation Terrorists" and "Gold Against the Soul". In addition to the album's alternative rock sound the album incorporates various elements from other musical genres, such as hard rock, British punk, post-punk, new wave, industrial, art rock and gothic rock.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Lyrically the album deals with subjects including prostitution, American consumerism, British imperialism, freedom of speech, the Holocaust, self-starvation, serial killers, the death penalty, political revolution, childhood, fascism and suicide. According to "Q": "the tone of the album is by turns bleak, angry and resigned". There was also an element of autobiographic subjects, like in the song "4st 7lb" where the lyrics clearly tackle Richey's own experience and life. The song was named after 4 stones 7 pounds, or , because it is the weight below which death is said to be medically unavoidable for an anorexic sufferer.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: The title "The Holy Bible" was chosen by Edwards to reflect an idea, according to Bradfield, that "everything on there has to be perfection". Interviewed at the end of 1994, Edwards said: "The way religions choose to speak their truth to the public has always been to beat them down [...] I think that if a Holy Bible is true, it should be about the way the world is and that's what I think my lyrics are about. [The album] doesn't pretend things don't exist".


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: Ben Patashnik of Drowned in Sound later said that the album in the time of its release "didn't sell very well, but its impact was felt keenly by anyone who'd ever come into contact with the Manics", and that it is now a "masterpiece [...] the sound of one man in a close-knit group of friends slowly disintegrating and using his own anguish to create some of the most brilliant art to be released on a large scale as music in years [...] It's not a suicide note; it's a warning."


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: In support of the album the band appeared on "Top of the Pops", performing its first single, "Faster", which reached No. 16. The performance was extremely controversial at the time, as the band were all dressed in army regalia. Bradfield wore a "terrorist-style" balaclava. At the time, the band was told by the BBC that they had received the most complaints ever. The album eventually has sold over 600,000 copies worldwide and is frequently listed among the greatest records ever recorded.


title: Manic Street Preachers

text: In April and May 1994 the band first performed songs from "The Holy Bible" at concerts in Thailand and Portugal and at a benefit concert for the Anti-Nazi League at Brockwell Park, London. In June, they played the Glastonbury Festival. In July and August, without Richey Edwards, they played T in the Park in Scotland, the Alte Wartesaal in Cologne, the Parkpop Festival in The Hague and the Reading Festival. During September, October and December there was a headline tour of the UK and Ireland and two tours in mainland Europe with Suede and Therapy?. In December, three nights at the London Astoria ended with the band smashing up their equipment and the venue's lighting rig, causing £26,000 worth of damage.