title: Canal du Midi

text: Originally the engineer planned and built a third reservoir, the Naurouze, but it was abandoned in 1680 due to its excessive silting. Pierre-Paul Riquet had dreamed of the construction of a new city around this basin that never saw the day. A floodway was quickly dug to drain the Naurouze basin from the south.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Other reservoirs were also built at Carcassonne to supply the lower part of the canal to the Mediterranean. So the waters of the Fresquel, the Cesse, and the Orbiel augmented those of the canal. On the other hand, the waters of the Orb at Beziers provided additional flow to part of the canal. In 1957 the Cammazes dam with a capacity of 20 million cubic metres of water was filled on the Sor which completed and finalized the supply network. This lake provides drinking water to more than 200 communes in the region. Of the 20 million cubic metres, 4 million are reserved for feeding the Canal du Midi.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The first locks built on the Toulouse plain by Pierre-Paul Riquet were experimental and were not satisfactory. They consisted of rectangular locks with wooden stilts as foundations for the side walls. This form did not properly restrain the lateral material when the lock was empty. They then collapsed on themselves. He redefined the shape of his locks to rounded side walls, thicker, and more resistant to the lateral pressure of the earth. The dimensions of the locks were then large enough for the time. Because of these rounded forms, the architecture of the locks in the Canal du Midi is called Baroque style.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The locks were built in stone and sealed with lime. They are closed by two double leaf doors. The doors, originally timber with the fewest possible metal parts, are subject to severe moisture stress and pressure. They had a "vantelle" (valve) controlled by a rack and pinion that allowed the draining of water from the lock chamber.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The nominal size of the locks built by Pierre-Paul Riquet was long, wide at the door, wide in the centre of the lock and an average of in height. In the 20th century, many locks were changed and therefore no longer have the original features.


title: Canal du Midi

text: At the town of Béziers there is a staircase of eight locks at Fonsérannes to bring it to the river Orb. The locks had to be cut from solid rock, and descended a hillside whose gradient varied. All the locks had to contain the same volume of water, but could not have precisely the same shape. Nonetheless, they were built successfully without a need for repair. This amazing piece of engineering was subcontracted out to two illiterate brothers, the Medhailes, and was built by a workforce composed mainly of women.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Some of the locks on the canal are architectural gems. For instance, the Agde Round Lock has three doors: two doors provide access to each side of the channel and the third provides access to the Hérault going to the Mediterranean. This system allows triple access while protecting the canal from river flooding. Similarly, the canal has several multiple locks – i.e. with multiple locks attached to one another. This system saves doors and foundations in areas where the slope is greatest. The best known of these locks is Fonserannes Lock which has eight chambers.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Today most of the locks are electrified which replaced the manual opening of the sluices and lock gates.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Several ports were built at regular intervals along the route of the canal in order to load and unload goods and also to provide stopping-places for travellers. Toulouse has two ports: the port de l'Embouchure is located at the junction of the Canal du Midi, the Canal de Brienne, and the Lateral canal of the Garonne while Port Saint-Sauveur is located in the centre of town near the "Hall of Grains". There were two other ports in Toulouse but they were destroyed for urban development. So the "Port des Minimes" and the "Port Saint-Etienne" were replaced by towpaths.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Castelnaudary has a port of called "Grand Basin" built between 1666 and 1671. It served as a stopover halfway between Toulouse and Sète. Cybelle island in the middle of the basin was used to protect the barges from the wind. Carcassonne is today a major tourist stop on the canal and has a port built in 1810 at the time when the city was connected to the canal. The port of Trèbes is a major port which has numerous moorings for boats. There are also the ports of Homps which was one of the most important on the canal and Le Somail which was a popular place for rest and recreation. Finally, just before its arrival at the Mediterranean Sea, the canal has two ports: the port of Agde where there is the old hotel of the "Administration of the Canal", and the port of Onglous at Marseillan which is the last port before Sète and its royal canal giving access to the sea.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Newer ports were built such as Ramonville-Saint-Agne, called Port-Sud, which has many residential barges and is set directly overlooking the harbour, and Port-Lauragais located near Avignonet-Lauragais on a service area of the A61 autoroute.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Several aqueducts were built along the route of the Canal du Midi. They allow the canal to cross rivers that could disrupt the water flow in the canal. In fact, the rivers flowing into the canal cause an overflow of water during flooding and fill the canal with silt. Some aqueducts date from the time of Pierre-Paul Riquet, but most were built after the completion of the canal in particular due to improvements recommended by Vauban. The canal has the following aqueducts (in order from Agde to Toulouse):


title: Canal du Midi

text: Pierre-Paul Riquet and the engineers who followed him over three centuries built many other structures on the Canal du Midi, of which the most important are listed here:


title: Canal du Midi

text: The canal is a long ribbon of water stretching through the landscape and attracts many animal species. Several species of fish such as bream breed in the canal, and others reproduce in its feeding rivers and spend part of their life in the canal. Molluscs such as anadontes, a kind of freshwater mussel, and corbicules, a kind of freshwater clam, occur in the canal. Invasive Coypu (River rat or nutria) and Muskrats introduced from the Americas burrow into the banks, which they damage. Finally, many animals and birds come to drink water from the canal.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The canal is also a very vegetated place. In the beginning, Pierre-Paul Riquet planted trees to stabilize the banks of the canal especially where it overlooked the surrounding lands. The willow was widely used for its rapid growth. The engineer also planted irises on the side of the canal to reduce subsidence of its banks. In the 18th century, the trees planted along the canal become a source of income. So mulberries were planted for rearing silkworms. Then, with the end of the silk culture in 1772, the mulberry trees were replaced by the poplar from Italy which was the most productive wood. Structures and lock-keepers' houses were decorated with fruit trees. At the Revolution plantations around the canal had approximately 60,000 trees when there were only 45,000 at the beginning. It was under the First Empire that plane trees began to be planted to replace the cut trees, which are today the dominant variety along the canal.


title: Canal du Midi

text: However, for several years, plane trees have been infected with canker stain, a disease caused by a microscopic fungus called "Ceratocystis platani". The first outbreaks were detected in 2006 with the number of infected plane trees reaching 83 in 2008 and 153 in 2009. Selective tree-felling campaigns have been conducted to try to stop the spread but with no effect. In addition, there is no effective treatment against the disease. In 2011, 211 places and 1,338 diseased trees have been identified. In 15 to 20 years all 42,000 plane trees of the Canal du Midi will have to be felled and replaced mainly by other species (ash, lime), after initial experiments with a variety of plane-tree resisting the parasite.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The Canal du Midi was one of the great achievements of the late 17th century. Riquet understood the hydraulic system of the Montagne Noire and had controlled it to serve the Canal du Midi. King Louis XIV, who was the sponsor, also left it as a mark of his commitment to grandeur.


title: Canal du Midi

text: The canal was also magnified by the "Encyclopedia or Reasoned Dictionary of Science, Arts, and Crafts" by Diderot and D'Alembert in 1765 who highlighted its value and greatness. They compare it to Roman constructions. Another encyclopedia writer, Joseph Jerome Lefrancois Lalande lauded the architectural and hydraulic achievement in his work "The navigation canals and especially the Canal de Languedoc" in 1778. Similarly, Bernard Forest de Bélidor congratulated the designer in "Hydraulic Architecture". The canal became an example in Europe as throughout the Age of Enlightenment it was the only canal of this size in Europe.


title: Canal du Midi

text: Finally the American Thomas Jefferson, politician, architect, and future president of the United States, came to study the Canal du Midi in 1787. As the United States Ambassador to France he envisaged the construction of a similar work to link the Potomac River to Lake Erie.


title: Kaashmora

text: Kaashmora ( Deadly spirit) is a 2016 Indian Tamil-language horror masala film written and directed by Gokul. It features Karthi in dual roles for the second time after "Siruthai" as the protagonist and antagonist respectively alongside Nayanthara, and Sri Divya. The film features soundtrack composed by Santhosh Narayanan, cinematography handled by Om Prakash and edited by V. J. Sabu Joseph.


title: Kaashmora

text: Kaashmora and his family are con artists who cheat people in the name of black magic and dark spirits. One day, a PhD research student named Yamini joins Kaashmora, only to gather evidence and expose him to the public. Kaashmora's fame brings him to a superstitious and fraudulent minister. Kaashmora earns the minister's trust. When the income tax department raids the minister's house, the minister asks his henchmen to transfer all of the illegal money to Kaashmora's house. Seeing this as an opportunity to escape and settle abroad, Kaashmora's family escapes with the money. Meanwhile, Chelapathy Rao seeks Kaashmora's help and brings him to a haunted bungalow in the outskirts of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In the bungalow, Kaashmora is haunted by actual ghosts.


title: Kaashmora

text: Back in Chennai, the minister learns that Kaashmora is a fraudster and sends his henchmen to kill his family. The henchmen try to get Kaashmora from the bungalow but are unable to do so as the ghost beats them all and drags Kaashmora and his family inside the bungalow. Inside, they meet a broker who got trapped inside the bungalow for a long time. The broker says that the bungalow was once a princess's palace. Ever since her death, residents and owners of the bungalow had met with an ill-fate. He also tells that there are 13 ghosts in the bungalow. The trapped people meet the ghost of Raj Nayak, the head of all 12 ghosts. Raj Nayak asks Kaashmora to help him, and his subordinates reach the spiritual world. He then locks them in the castle. That night, a young girl in Kaashmora's dream leads him to a locked door within the castle.


title: Kaashmora

text: Waking up, Kaashmora follows the same route, but is stopped by Yamini, who reveals to him that Chelapathy Rao, the man who led him here, died 75 years ago, and it was his ghost that led Kaashmora, as well as Yamini, to the bungalow. Kaashmora searches the castle and gets hold of an old book that dates back 700 years. Raj Nayak was a self-obsessed warlord and a womanizer. The king remained silent and did not interfere with Raj Nayak's growing atrocities because of his military prowess. One day, Princess Rathna Mahadevi elopes with her lover, who is the enemy kingdom's prince. The king announces that he will marry off Rathna and give away half of his kingdom to the man who finds her. Raj Nayak kills the prince and forcibly brings Rathna back. He demands to be wed to the princess and wants the other half of the kingdom as dowry. When opposed, he kills the crown prince and the king. Raj Nayak then marries Rathna and crowns himself King. However, Rathna has other plans. She and her friends seduce Raj Nayak and his subordinates. While Raj Nayak's subordinates are burned alive, Raj Nayak is beheaded by Rathna. However, he kills her before dying. Before breathing her last breath, Rathna places a curse on the 13 men, preventing them from reaching the spiritual world.


title: Kaashmora

text: Since then, Raj Nayak and the other 12 ghosts had haunted the palace and its occupants. An exorcist once had predicted that Raj Nayak and the other ghosts would reach eternal power if they are able to sacrifice the lives of five people belonging to the same family with the same birth star (Rohini). The sacrifice should be performed by a lady who is the only woman in her generation. This should happen during the Navakaali Pournami that occurs once every millennium. Kaashmora recollects that his family members all have the same birth sign and that Yamini is the only woman in her family.


title: Kaashmora

text: That night, Navakaali Pournami occurs, and Raj Nayak forces Kaashmora and his family to a guillotine. The young girl from Kaashmora's dream appears, and turns out to be Rathna's reincarnation. While Rathna and Raj Nayak fight each other, Kaashmora fends off the subordinate ghosts with the help of a magical sword. Rathna's conscience leads him to a chamber within the castle where Raj Nayak's remains are. Using the sword, Kaashmora destroys the remains, making Raj Nayak vulnerable. Rathna destroys Raj Nayak's spirit, and it goes to the underworld. The other spirits flee the castle to the spiritual world. Kaashmora and his family get out of the castle, and he claims that he has destroyed the spirits and cleansed the centuries-haunted bungalow. Kaashmora's family tells the politician that the money stolen from the politician has been kept by the ghost.


title: Kaashmora

text: Production was begun in the first week of May 2015. Karthi plays two roles: a king (Raj Nayak), a youth (Kaashmora). Nayanthara plays a princess and Sri Divya as a research student, and Vivek was cast as Karthi's father. Karthi learnt horseriding in preparation for the film.


title: Kaashmora

text: The music for the movie was composed by Santhosh Narayanan. Other crew includes the art director Rajeevan, editor V J Sabu Joseph, and cinematographer Om Prakash. The film was marketed as a mix of action and comedy.


title: Kaashmora

text: It's been said that the "3D Face scan" technology has been used in this film. Karthi's face has been 3D scanned for an important sequence which will be running 15 minutes. Kaashmora comprises 80 minutes of VFX scenes. Director Gokul says that, 360-degree omnidirectional camera rig is used for shooting a particular sequence and this is the first time for an Indian movie to use this technology. This technology covers entire 360 degree, approximately entire sphere. Omnidirectional cameras are used where large visual field coverage is needed, such as in panoramic photography. This camera is used in this movie to shoot a song and few scenes. Art direction team has erected 17 sets in and around Chennai to make simultaneous filming process and to save time.


title: Kaashmora

text: The soundtrack album is composed by Santhosh Narayanan, collaborating with Karthi for the second time after "Madras" (2014). The audio rights were purchased by Think Music. The album featuring six tracks, features lyrics written by Lalithanand and Muthamil in the original Tamil version. The soundtrack album was launched on 7 October 2016, in Chennai, along with the theatrical trailer of the film, was released.


title: Kaashmora

text: The Tamil version of the soundtrack album received positive reviews. Indiaglitz rated the album 3.5 out of 5 stars, stating that "The entire album has a tinge of echo to it, the depth of which lands the right notes for a supernatural score. With two karaoke tracks thrown into the kitty, Kashmora is a delightful album. It needs no introduction that Santhosh Narayanan is a musical genius; we have seen this right from his debut, to the recently blockbuster success, Kabali. Adding one more feather to his hat, Sathosh has struck the chord, yet again, as being one-of-a-kind." "The Times of India" rated the album 3 out of 5, and stated that "This one's not a usual Santhosh fest, but works in some parts!" Behindwoods rated the album 2.75 out of 5, summarised it as "Kaashmora has the magical spell, the experimental tint, and the typical Santhosh Narayanan flavor."


title: Kaashmora

text: Kaashmora was released worldwide on 28 October 2016 with Thenandal Films bought the distribution rights. The satellite rights of the film were sold to Jaya TV. Digital rights of the film were bought by Amazon Prime Video.


title: Kaashmora

text: The film collected in Tamil Nadu in first day.The film collected more than worldwide in two days. The film collected in Tamil Nadu and approximately in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala in first weekend. The film collected in overseas, in United States, in Canada, in UK, in UAE, in France, in Malaysia, in Australia, in New Zealand, international collection of and worldwide. Total ₹90.16 crore World Wide


title: Ali Alexander

text: Ali Alexander (born Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar in ) is an American far-right activist, social media personality, and conspiracy theorist. Alexander is an organizer of Stop the Steal, a campaign to promote the false conspiracy theory that widespread voter fraud led to Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election. He also helped to organize one of several rallies that preceded the January 6 United States Capitol attack.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander was born in 1984 or 1985, one of two children born to a Christian African-American mother, Lydia Dews, and a Muslim father, who he says was an exchange student from a "prominent family" in the United Arab Emirates. His father left when he was two years old, and his mother raised him by herself in Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated from Fossil Ridge High School, where he was a self-described "conservative political junkie".


title: Ali Alexander

text: According to Alexander, he attended the Criswell College, a Southern Baptist institution of higher learning in Dallas, planning to become a minister, before transferring to the University of North Texas. Alexander later said in an interview, "I discovered I really can't do this whole college thing."


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander went by his birth name until he renamed himself "Ali Alexander" partway through his career as an activist.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander has been variously described as a Republican operative, far-right personality, right-wing provocateur, and part of the New Right. The "New York Observer" wrote in 2018 that Alexander "has a history of dog whistling to the nationalist wing of the MAGA movement". Alexander has worked with other far-right personalities including Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Jacob Wohl, and Laura Loomer.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander emerged in right-wing politics around the same time as the Tea Party movement, which came to prominence in the late 2000s. At the time, he used the name Ali Akbar. According to "Salon", Alexander began working in politics in 2007 as a staffer for the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign. Alexander created and became the CEO of a group called the National Bloggers' Club, which he described as a non-profit. However, he never registered the group with the Internal Revenue Service. In 2014, Alexander was involved with the Black Conservatives Fund, which was described by Lamar White as a "mysterious" political action committee that "appear[ed] to have largely been a proxy for former Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory". In 2015, Alexander worked as the digital director for Republican Jay Dardenne's Louisiana gubernatorial campaign. Around the time of the 2016 United States presidential election, Alexander was affiliated with a political action committee to which Robert Mercer donated $60,000. Alexander also helped to create a right-wing website titled "Culttture", since defunct.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander is a familiar social media personality among American conservatives. In early 2019, he was known for his livestream videos published via Periscope, in which he discussed his conservative and pro-Trump opinions. In July 2019, Alexander attended a social media summit at the White House, an event attended by a mix of politicians and far-right pundits. As of August 2019, Alexander had over 100,000 Twitter followers. In 2018, Jack Dorsey spoke with Alexander regarding whether it was advisable to ban Alex Jones from Twitter, stating that Alexander had "interesting points" to make. Alexander rejected the idea of banning Jones. Twitter initially declined to ban Jones, but later banned him in September 2018 after multiple social networks took such an action. Alexander himself was briefly banned from Twitter in January 2019, which he said was because he had tweeted at Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, "I would *literally* put you down if you came near me, Marxist. I would call 911 to come retrieve your body. Have a Good Friday!" He was unbanned later that day. In January 2021, following the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, Alexander was banned from Twitter, as was the Twitter account for the Stop the Steal campaign.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander also used the alt-tech service Parler, on which he had 41,000 followers before Parler went offline on January 11, 2021.


title: Ali Alexander

text: In February 2021, on a Trovo livestream, Alexander began soliciting donations to build a "MAGA mega-city" and another planned community in South America called the "City of Alexander". He also stated he would organize further Stop the Steal rallies and that he was creating "tools of creation and tools of chaos". He also called for the abolition of the free press, labeling them "systems that control us," and challenged law enforcement to combat if they attempted to arrest him.


title: Ali Alexander

text: After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Twitter banned Alexander's personal account and a Stop the Steal account on January 10. Alexander was also banned from PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon following the riot, and permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram.


title: Ali Alexander

text: KXAS-TV reported that after Alexander had been banned by PayPal, he continued to earn money through the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. In a campaign titled "Protection and Team for Ali Alexander", he raised more than $30,000 over the days following the Capitol riot. KXAS-TV reported that the site had also been used by extremists including members of the Proud Boys to raise money to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6. GiveSendGo later temporarily suspended Alexander's account after a payment processor used by GiveSendGo refused to process payments for Alexander. Although GiveSendGo restored Alexander's account, they said that the processor's refusal to provide services might result in Alexander being permanently banned from their platform.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander is a conspiracy theorist who has promoted multiple unfounded and discredited claims, including that widespread electoral fraud led to Biden's victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Alexander describes himself as the "national organizer" of the campaign. He began to organize large rallies in Washington, D.C., to protest the results of the election, sometimes feuding with other organizers over who should be given credit, and solicited donations online to fund the events.


title: Ali Alexander

text: In February 2019, Alexander arranged for himself and two fellow conspiracy theorists, Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, to travel to Minneapolis, Minnesota. The trio filmed an online documentary about their trip, called "Importing Ilhan", in which they investigated the baseless theory that Ilhan Omar, U.S. Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district and a Somali-American, had married her brother to grant him U.S. citizenship. During the trip, Alexander accompanied Wohl to a police station, where Wohl filed a police report in which he claimed he and his companions had been receiving "terroristic threats" on Twitter. Later reports indicated the threats appeared to have been falsified by Wohl himself, and Alexander publicly distanced himself from Wohl.


title: Ali Alexander

text: In August 2019, Alexander gained media attention for what "The Washington Post" said had been described as a "birther-like" campaign against then-Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. That month, he tweeted Harris was "not an American Black", further claiming that "I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting". "The New York Times" wrote that in the tweet, Alexander had "falsely claimed Senator Kamala Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans". Donald Trump Jr. retweeted the claim, then deleted it.


title: Ali Alexander

text: In 2020, Alexander founded Stop the Steal, a campaign promoting the conspiracy theory that falsely posits that widespread electoral fraud occurred during the 2020 presidential election to deny Donald Trump victory over Joe Biden. Among the conspiracy theories that Alexander promoted as part of Stop the Steal was a claim, dubbed "#Maidengate", that people had voted twice by using their married name in one state and their maiden name in another.


title: Ali Alexander

text: According to "The Daily Dot", the 2021 Epik data breach revealed that Alexander was tied to 122 separate domains, many of which pushed "Stop the Steal".


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander was among the people who encouraged Trump supporters to rally outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the day of the Electoral College vote count. Alexander named his rally the "Wild Protest" after Trump tweeted that protests during vote counting "will be wild". The rally was one of at least four pro-Trump rallies planned for that date and location. He planned the rally with Caroline Wren, a former Trump campaign fundraiser, who had been hired by Publix supermarkets heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli to manage her donation of $300,000 of the approximate total of $500,000 spent on the event.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander announced in several livestreams in December 2020 that he had also organized his rally with Representative Andy Biggs, as well as Representatives Paul Gosar and Mo Brooks. In one livestream on Periscope, Alexander said, "We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting." Before January 6, Alexander self-identified as an "official originator" of the rally; he was later identified as a "founder" of Wild Protest and the probable creator of a since-deactivated website devoted to the event. He reportedly encouraged attendees of the Wild Protest, which occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington, D.C., not to wear face masks.


title: Ali Alexander

text: "The Daily Beast" reported that "Alexander led a host of activists in ratcheting up the rhetoric" before January 6, and that Alexander's posts "grew more menacing" as the date approached. Alexander tweeted on December 7, 2020, that he would "give [his] life for this fight", a tweet that was retweeted by the Arizona Republican Party with the addition, "He is. Are you?" "ProPublica" identified a December 23 Parler post of Alexander's, in which he wrote "If D.C. escalates ... so do we", as "one of scores of social media posts welcoming violence" before the attack.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander was scheduled to speak on January 5 at Freedom Plaza, just west of the White House. "The Guardian" named Alexander as among the people active in inciting the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, leading chants of "victory or death". At 4:30p.m. on January 6, about two hours after rioters entered the Capitol building, Alexander posted a video of himself looking out on a crowd outside the Capitol, in which he said, "I don't disavow this. I do not denounce this." He also said in the video that most of the people at the Capitol had been peaceful, and he applauded those who didn't enter the building.


title: Ali Alexander

text: After the attack on the Capitol, Alexander said he did not support what had happened, and that he wished people had not entered, or even approached, the Capitol building. "The Daily Beast" reported that Alexander had gone into hiding after the attack, and taken down a website promoting his rally. In September 2021, a hack of the internet services company Epik revealed that the day after the Capitol attack, Alexander had worked to hide his ties to over 100 domains, many of which were related to "Stop the Steal". Twitter banned Alexander's personal account and a Stop the Steal account on January 10. Alexander was banned from PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon following the riot, and permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram. According to Reuters, Alexander continued to post "violent rhetoric" online following the attack. On a February 2021 livestream, Alexander said he would "meet on the battlefield" any law enforcement that attempted to arrest him. According to a February 20 "Washington Post" report, Alexander was among several far-right people under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for possible ties to and influence on those who were physically involved in the riot at the Capitol. On October 7, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack issued a subpoena requesting records and testimony from Alexander.


title: Ali Alexander

text: After January 6, a Biggs spokesperson said Biggs had had no connection with Alexander; Biggs himself later said that Alexander had exaggerated Biggs' and other members' involvement. A Brooks spokesperson said Brooks had "no recollection of ever communicating in any way with whoever Ali Alexander is".


title: Ali Alexander

text: Alexander said in April 2022 that he would cooperate with the Justice Department investigation into the attack, after receiving a subpoena from a federal grand jury that was investigating broad categories of people involved in Trump rallies prior to the attack. Alexander was close to longtime Trump associate Roger Stone, with whom he spoke about "logistics" and the "warring factions" of rally organizers prior to the attack. Alexander gave the January 6 committee all of his communications with Stone from the day of the attack. On June 24, 2022, Alexander testified for nearly three hours before a federal grand jury.


title: Ali Alexander

text: On August 30, 2022, Alexander stated to the "Nebraska Examiner" that he would be at the Capitol again on January 6, 2025, with the purpose of being there for "whatever the Congress certifies". He intends to hold a "peaceful event", commenting that in the 2024 United States presidential election, "there's going to be a winner [and] there's going to be a loser." In that same interview, Alexander commented that he does not regret being at the attack, though expressed that he wished "he asserted himself" on January 6. Alexander additionally commented that he is facing $100,000 in "legal fees", and is currently facing a lawsuit brought against him by Capitol police officers.


title: Ali Alexander

text: Following Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's victory over Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian general election, Alexander called for a military coup in Brazil. "Take to the streets, brothers of Brazil!" he wrote on the social-media app Truth Social. "Military standby. Peacefully and patriotically!"


title: Ginger Banks

text: Banks started webcamming in 2010 at the age of 19 while studying chemical engineering. Initially, Banks was ashamed to disclose her career and lied about her job; this contributed to her suffering from depression. She eventually quit school not wanting to deal with the reactions of her peers after she became popular. She became an advocate who speaks out about the damaging and discriminatory treatment that sex workers in the industry regularly face.


title: Ginger Banks

text: In 2018, Banks alleged that John Stagliano, the owner of Evil Angel, had groped her without their consent while directing a scene. In June 2020, Banks filed a police report against Stagliano over the alleged groping.


title: Ginger Banks

text: Banks was one of the targets of a harassment campaign against pornography performers by an Instagram user. Instagram had disabled her account in November 2018, and the user took credit for her deactivation through reporting her and others for violating its community guidelines. Her account was reactivated months later, and Banks admitted censoring her postings due to her wariness at being deactivated again. She believes that removing sex workers from social media marginalizes them by removing their marketing channels.


title: Ginger Banks

text: In June 2017, Banks posted a video on YouTube that compiled allegations of sexual assault against Ron Jeremy by members of the adult industry. While the allegations against Jeremy have stemmed back decades, it wasn't until the video and when the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations came to light that the accusations began to get noticed outside the industry. Banks was motivated to take a stand against Jeremy after speaking with dozens of women who alleged he had assaulted them at conventions and learning that others had known about and normalized these incidents with a, "Yeah, that's Ron." Jeremy argued that Banks' video compiled allegations that distorted the interactions with the women who had “buyer's remorse.” Jeremy was banned from several industry shows after Banks' social media campaign and the Free Speech Coalition, an industry trade group, rescinded its Positive Image Award that it had originally presented to him in 2009.


title: Ginger Banks

text: Banks made a video in 2018 hoping to appeal to Bernie Sanders after he had voted in support of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA). She wanted him to think about the dangers that SESTA/FOSTA would create for the sex work industry and asked him to consider fighting for the rights of sex workers.


title: Ginger Banks

text: Banks started a petition demanding Mindgeek to remove Porn Fidelity videos from its tube platforms after accusations of sexual misconduct surfaced against producer Ryan Madison by several performers. The Porn Fidelity and Teen Fidelity channels were removed from Pornhub, but the videos were still findable on the Mindgeek sites.


title: Ginger Banks

text: Banks and other sex workers spoke out against the intentions of TraffickingHub's campaign to shut Pornhub down. The campaign had accused Pornhub of exploiting and profiting from sex-trafficking and other non-consensual content exploiting women and children. TraffickingHub's parent organization, Exodus Cry, opposes the decriminalization or legalization of sex work and seeks to abolish porn. Sex work advocates accuse the group of peddling a narrative of sex workers as victims. Banks started a petition for Pornhub to improve its verification process so that content can't be uploaded without the creator's consent.


title: Animal Magnetism (Scorpions album)

text: Animal Magnetism is the seventh studio album by German rock band Scorpions, released in 1980. The RIAA certified the record as Gold on 8 March 1984, and Platinum on 28 October 1991.


title: Animal Magnetism (Scorpions album)

text: In the 2001 remaster edition by EMI, an extra track "Hey You" (rare single), sung by Rudolf Schenker is included (although Klaus Meine sings the chorus). The song was originally recorded during the "Lovedrive" sessions in 1978 and released two years later as side-A (together with "The Zoo" as side-B). A shorter remix from 1989 was used on the 2001 and 2015 reissues instead of the longer original single version.


title: Animal Magnetism (Scorpions album)

text: "Lady Starlight" is the only song in the entire Scorpions discography so far (as of 2018) to include an arrangement for strings and orchestral winds.


title: Animal Magnetism (Scorpions album)

text: The album cover was created by Storm Thorgerson of the design firm Hipgnosis and, as with earlier Scorpions album sleeves, courted controversy. However, unlike several of their previous album sleeves the controversy did not result in the cover being replaced with an alternate sleeve. Recalling the cover photo, Thorgerson remarked, "That one was funny. I don't think we figured it out. We just knew there was something rude somewhere."


title: Animal Magnetism (Scorpions album)

text: Scorpions bassist at the time, Francis Buchholz, recalls that, "Hermann came up with the title for the album "Animal Magnetism" and we all liked it because it's an interesting title. So we had this guy Storm who was doing album covers for Pink Floyd, I think he did the one with the guy with the flames. So Storm came up with the idea for the "Animal Magnetism" cover, I personally didn't like it, but the rest of the band loved it. I liked the dog though."


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: The ninth season of the American sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" premiered on CBS on Monday, September 21, 2015. The season returned to its regular Thursday night time slot on November 5, 2015 for the season's seventh episode. The season concluded on May 12, 2016. On March 12, 2014, "The Big Bang Theory" was renewed for an additional three years, extending it through the 2016–17 season for a total of ten seasons. Laura Spencer was upgraded to the main cast during the season as Dr. Emily Sweeney, after being a recurring cast member for two seasons.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: Like the previous season, the first six episodes of the ninth season aired on a different night due to to "Thursday Night Football" games. In May 2015, CBS announced at its annual upfront presentation, that the series would begin its ninth season on Mondays, before returning to the Thursday slot once the football games ended.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: Filming for the ninth season began on August 5, 2015, according to posts on Twitter by several of the cast members including Melissa Rauch and Kunal Nayyar.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: Laurie Metcalf reprised her role as Sheldon's mother Mary in episodes 1 and 24, and Keith Carradine returned as Penny's father Wyatt in episode 3.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: Sheldon's maternal grandmother Constance, whom he calls "Meemaw", made her first long-awaited appearance in episode 14 and was portrayed by June Squibb and Leonard's father Alfred also made his first long-awaited appearance in episode 24 and was played by Judd Hirsch.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: This was the first season to feature every main cast member of the show, including former main cast member Sara Gilbert, who made a guest appearance in the 200th episode.


title: The Big Bang Theory (season 9)

text: The ninth season received mixed reviews. John Doyle of "The Globe and Mail" criticized the humor, writing that "The show isn't funny any more. The same tired jokes go around in circles. It's dated and stale", while Tom Eames of "Digital Spy" criticized the relationship between characters Leonard and Penny, writing that they "certainly don't have some passionate, Ross and Rachel-style 'will they / won't they' romance, with fans dying to see them together. Even now they're married, it's a weirdly anti-climactic payoff - and it doesn't quite feel right that they're together." Ashley Bissette Sumerel of TV Fanatic wrote that "For a rather serious season premiere, "The Matrimonial Momentum" is still a lot of fun".


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: The Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) () is a Saudi conglomerate holding company, based in Riyadh. The KHC is a publicly listed company on the Tadawul (Saudi stock exchange). The KHC consists of a select team of experienced investment specialists directed by its founder and chairman, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and chief executive officer, Eng. Talal Ibrahim Al Maiman. The company describes itself as a diversified investment company, whose main interests are financial services, real estate, tourism and hospitality, media, entertainment, petrochemicals, aviation and technology.


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: The company is known for hiring the first Saudi female commercial pilot, Captain Hanadi Zakaria al-Hindi, who trained at the Mideast Aviation Academy in Jordan.


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: Kingdom Holding is an active investor in sub-saharan Africa through Kingdom Africa Management, a private equity firm and subsidiary based in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria. Kingdom Africa is run by J. Kofi Bucknor and focuses on growth equity investments.


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: In 2007, the company committed to purchasing an Airbus A380 "Flying Palace" for $485 million, however according to the Kingdom Holding's chief financial officer the plane has been sold.


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: In April 2010, the company sold part of its stake in Raffles Holdings International in a deal worth about $847 million to a group of investors, including an affiliate of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.


title: Kingdom Holding Company

text: In August 2011, the company announced plans for the construction of Jeddah Tower, which will become the tallest building in the world.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: A Prairie Home Companion is a weekly radio variety show created and hosted by Garrison Keillor that aired live from 1974 to 2016. In 2016, musician Chris Thile took over as host, and the successor show was eventually renamed "Live from Here" and ran until 2020. "A Prairie Home Companion" aired on Saturdays from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota; it was also frequently heard on tours to New York City and other U.S. cities. The show is known for its musical guests, especially folk and traditional musicians, tongue-in-cheek radio drama, and relaxed humor. Keillor's wry storytelling segment, "News from Lake Wobegon," was the show's best-known feature during his long tenure.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Distributed by Minnesota Public Radio's distribution arm, American Public Media, "A Prairie Home Companion" was heard on 690 public radio stations in the United States at its peak in spring 2015 and reached an audience of four million U.S. listeners each week. The show borrowed its name from a radio program in existence in 1969 that was named after the Prairie Home Cemetery near Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota. It inspired a 2006 film of the same name, written by and featuring Keillor.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The Saturday-evening show was a partial spin-off of "A Prairie Home Morning Show" with Keillor and Tom Keith, which ran from 6 to 9 a.m. on Minnesota Public Radio and was continued by Keith and Dale Connelly for many years as "The Morning Show".


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: After researching the "Grand Ole Opry" for an article, Keillor became interested in doing a variety show on the radio. On July 6, 1974, the first live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" took place on Minnesota Public Radio. That show was broadcast from St. Paul in the Janet Wallace Auditorium of Macalester College. Twelve audience members turned out, mostly children. The second episode featured the first performance on the show by Butch Thompson, who became house pianist. Thompson stayed with the program until 1986 and frequently performed on the show until its 2016 conclusion.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: In 1978, the show moved into the World Theater in St. Paul, which Minnesota Public Radio purchased and renovated in 1986 and renamed the Fitzgerald Theater in 1994. This is the same venue the program used to the end.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: "A Prairie Home Companion" began national distribution in May 1980. Because National Public Radio (NPR) rejected the show due to its president Frank Mankiewicz perceiving the show as too expensive and insulting towards small towns, the show was initially distributed through a public radio satellite system that had been completed by June 1980 and allowed NPR member stations to distribute programs outside the NPR network. In 1983, Minnesota Public Radio president William Kling started a new company to distribute "A Prairie Home Companion" called American Public Radio, which would later be renamed Public Radio International in 1994.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The show went off the air in 1987, with a "final performance" on June 13, and Keillor married and spent some time abroad during the following two years. For a brief time, the show was replaced—both on the air and in the World Theater—by "Good Evening", hosted by Noah Adams, a live variety show designed by ex-"Prairie Home" and "All Things Considered" staffers to retain the audience Keillor had cultivated over the years. However, many stations opted instead to continue "APHC" repeats in its traditional Saturday time slot.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: In 1989, Keillor returned to radio with "The American Radio Company of the Air" (renamed "Garrison Keillor's American Radio Company" in its second season), broadcast originally from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The new program featured a broadly similar format to "A Prairie Home Companion", with sketches and musical guests reflecting a more New York sensibility, rather than the country and folk music predominant in "APHC". Also, while Keillor sang and delivered a regular monologue on "American Radio Company", Lake Wobegon was initially downplayed, as he felt it was "cruel" to talk to a Brooklyn audience about life in a small town. During this period, Keillor revived the full "APHC" format only for "annual farewell performances." In the fall of 1992, Keillor returned to the Fitzgerald Theater with "ARC" for the majority of the season, with Lake Wobegon and other "APHC" elements gradually but unmistakably returning to prominence.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The following year, on October 2, 1993, the program officially reverted to the "A Prairie Home Companion" name and format.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The show was originally distributed nationally by Minnesota Public Radio in association with Public Radio International. Later, its distributor was Minnesota Public Radio's distribution unit, American Public Media.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Singer Sara Watkins of San Diego, California, hosted the January 15, 2011, broadcast. The format was the same, but Keillor appeared only as a guest actor and to deliver the "News from Lake Wobegon". He claimed he had taken the chance to see the show being performed for himself. It was reported that this could be the beginning of a trend toward Keillor's eventual retirement, and on March 16, 2011, Keillor stated in an interview with the AARP that he would most likely retire from the show by the time he turned 70 in August 2012.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: In September 2011, Keillor told "The Tuscaloosa News" that his last broadcast would be recorded in "early July 2013", and that instead of a permanent replacement host, there will be "a whole group of people. A rotation of hosts", but in December 2011 Keillor said he had changed his mind and reconsidered his plans to retire because he still enjoyed hosting the show.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: On February 7 and 14, 2015, mandolinist Chris Thile hosted the show (like Sara Watkins, a member of Nickel Creek). As when Watkins hosted, the format remained largely unchanged, but Keillor did not make an appearance. Instead, storyteller Tristan Jimerson appeared on the February 7 show and comedienne/storyteller Elna Baker on the February 14 show. Thile's band Punch Brothers performed on the February 7 show. Thile was named permanent host of the show in late June 2015, and took over as permanent host on October 15, 2016.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: When Keillor formally announced his departure from "APHC" at the show's airing on July 21, 2015, he indicated that Thile would succeed him as permanent host in 2016. Keillor recorded his final regular episode as host live at the Hollywood Bowl before an audience of 18,000, on July 1, 2016; it was aired on the following day. The episode was titled "" (), and was a vocal duet show of "time-honored American ballads, British Invasion romps, country-western weepers, and Broadway classics," guest-starring Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, Heather Masse, and Christine DiGiallonardo, alongside the "Royal Academy of Radio Actors," Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Fred Newman, and the "APHC" band, with music director and pianist Rich Dworsky and Bernie Dresel (drums), Larry Kohut (bass), Richard Kriehn (mandolin and fiddle), and Chris Siebold (guitar).


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Barack Obama recorded a telephone call into the show, which ran on the Saturday broadcast, and Keillor performed his last "Lives of the Cowboys" sketch as regular host, with regulars Scott, Russell, and Newman, and including a series of duets with the guests Masse, O'Donovan, Jarosz, DiGiallonardo, and Watkins.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: While the July 2 Hollywood Bowl performance was the last regular episode of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor also hosted a final live performance titled "The Minnesota Show" at the Minnesota State Fair on September 2, 2016, including the last-ever "Guy Noir" and "News from Lake Wobegon" segments.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: On November 29, 2017, Minnesota Public Radio terminated its contract with Keillor because of "allegations of his inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him." Because Keillor still owned artistic rights and the trademark to the show's name, MPR also announced that it would change the name, which was announced as "Live from Here" live on the December 16, 2017, broadcast of the show. MPR also announced it would cease distributing reruns of "A Prairie Home Companion" featuring Keillor. Keillor stated he had been "fired" from MPR, but he had technically not been employed by MPR/APM since 2002, working instead as an independent contractor. When it was announced in 2019 that "Live from Here" was going to be based in and broadcast out of New York City, many Minnesotan fans publicly complained that the radio show was losing its Midwestern style. "Live from Here" was canceled in 2020.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: On April 13, 2018, Minnesota Public Radio posted a message stating its intent to reinstate the free online archives of "A Prairie Home Companion" and "The Writer's Almanac". The portion of the PrairieHome.org website containing the archives was restored later in the year.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: From the show's inception until 1987, its theme song was Hank Snow's hit "Hello Love". After 1987, each show has opened with Spencer Williams' composition "Tishomingo Blues" as the theme song, with lyrics by Garrison Keillor that were written especially for "A Prairie Home Companion".


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Music was a main feature of the program; the show was a significant outlet for American folk music of many genres, especially country, bluegrass, blues, and gospel, but it also had guest performers from a wide variety of other styles of music, including classical, opera, and music from a number of different countries. The country musician and former record company executive Chet Atkins appeared on the show many times, as did singer-songwriters Mark Knopfler (lead guitarist and frontman of the bands Dire Straits and the Notting Hillbillies) and Jeff Lang. Folk/gospel duo Robin and Linda Williams had been regular guests since 1976, and often join Keillor and another female performer, often Jearlyn Steele, to form "The Hopeful Gospel Quartet". Peter Ostroushko, Greg Brown, Jean Redpath, and Prudence Johnson, among others, were recurring guests on the program between 1974 and 1987. The Wailin' Jennys and Andra Suchy were also recurring guests, and when the show travelled, Keillor generally featured local musicians and acts.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Greetings from members of the audience to friends and family at home (frequently humorous) were read each week by Keillor just after the show's intermission, at the top of the second hour. Birthdays and anniversaries of famous composers and musicians were also observed.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Keillor and the ensemble performed comedy skits. Notable skits and characters often recur, such as the satirical "Guy Noir, Private Eye", which parodied film noir and radio dramas. Guy Noir's popularity was such that the first few notes of the theme or the first lines of the announcer's introduction ("A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets ...") often drew applause and cheers from the audience. Also regularly featured were the adventures of Dusty and Lefty, "The Lives of the Cowboys".


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: One of the show's best-known features was Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon", a weekly storytelling monologue, claiming to be a report from his fictitious hometown of Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve ... where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average". The opening words of the monologue usually did not change: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, my hometown, out on the edge of the prairie." Keillor often poked fun at central Minnesota's large Scandinavian-American and German-American communities, and many of his fictional characters have names that reflect this. The "News from Lake Wobegon" did not have a set structure, but featured recurring characters and places such as the Chatterbox Café, the Sidetrack Tap, Pastor Ingqvist of the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church and his successor Pastor Liz, Father Emil of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Roman Catholic Church (a parody of Our Mother of Perpetual Help), the Lake Wobegon Whippets sports teams, various members of the Bunsen and Krebsbach families, and an assortment of nearby "Norwegian bachelor farmers".


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: In-jokes are sprinkled through the show, such as "Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin", a made-up word that's been used both for places and for people's names. The components of this made-up word are portions of Native American place names in the New England region of the United States, most of them in Maine (i.e.: Piscataqua, Passamaquoddy, and Androscoggin).


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Once a year the program featured a special "joke show", which generally included the Lake Wobegon monologue and musical acts, but with other skits replaced by the performers taking turns telling jokes. Humorists such as Paula Poundstone and Roy Blount Jr. often made guest appearances on those shows, and listeners and audience members were encouraged to submit jokes for use on the air. Portions of such shows were incorporated into a book and CDs.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The show creates advertisements for fictional products, performed in the style of live old-time radio commercials. The show acknowledges its actual underwriters at the beginning, end, and middle (break) of the show.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: "Prairie Home"s most prominent "sponsor" is the fictitious "Powdermilk Biscuits". Before he and the band performed the product's jingle every week ("Has your family tried 'em, Powdermilk?"), Garrison Keillor would extol Powdermilk's virtues in this way:


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Among its other "sponsors", Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie (and Frozen Rhubarb Pie Filling) has been prominent, with ads featuring the Bebop-A-Reebop jingle, performed to the tune of "Shortnin' Bread":


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The jingle is usually sung after a bombastic, sound-effect-enhanced tale of woe, and is immediately followed by Keillor asking, "Wouldn't this be a great time for a piece of rhubarb pie? Yes, nothing gets the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth quite like Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie."


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Other prominent "sponsors" include Bertha's Kitty Boutique, whose locations in the fictional "Dales" shopping centers ("Roy 'n' Dale, Airedale, Teasdale, Clydesdale, Chippendale, Mondale, and all the other fine shopping centers") allude to various real people and things, and The Catchup Advisory Board—its name a portmanteau of the common "catsup" and "ketchup" spellings—which has the tagline "Catchup: For the good times."


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: In addition, the recurring segment "The Lives of the Cowboys" featured its own Western-themed sponsors, including Prairie Dog Granola Bars ("healthier than chewing tobacco and you don't have to spit") and Cowboy Toothpicks ("the toothpick that's guaranteed not to splinter").


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: While much of the show is directed toward radio comedy, a portion is usually devoted to some more sentimental and sometimes dark stories put together by Keillor and others. The program occasionally also features political satire. At the beginning of the June 5, 2004, show (broadcast from Meadowbrook Musical Arts Center in Gilford, New Hampshire), Keillor announced that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan had died. A member of the audience hooted and cheered loudly, but Keillor, a staunch Democrat, gave the Republican Reagan a warm tribute in the form of a gospel song. Similarly, in a 2002 show airing the weekend after the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, Keillor changed the format of the show, starting it off with Wellstone's favorite segment, Guy Noir, skipping even the show's theme song.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Regularly appearing actors included Tim Russell (beginning in 1994) and Sue Scott (beginning in 1989). When the show resumed as "The American Radio Company of the Air" in November 1989, radio comedian Bob Elliott, half of the longtime radio and comedy television duo Bob and Ray, became a regular cast member. Actor Bill Perry was a member. Walter Bobbie made frequent appearances, as early as 1989, and continuing through 2006–2007. Ivy Austin was a regular contributing comedienne (and vocalist) in the early '90s. Prudence Johnson has performed frequently on the show as an actress (and a singer). Mark Benninghofer joined the cast as a substitute actor for a brief time after Russell broke his ankle in February 2009, forcing him to take a month of medical leave. Erica Rhodes had been an occasional guest on the show, beginning in 1996 when she was 10 years old. Serena Brook joined the cast in October 2016 when Chris Thile became host.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: The sound effects artists on the show, Tom Keith and Fred Newman, primarily used mouth sounds for their effects, supplemented by props. Keith engineered the first two seasons of the show and then joined the cast, working until he retired in 2008. Newman took over full-time after Keith left the show.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Regular musicians in Guy's All-Star Shoe Band include Richard Dworsky, a composer who appeared weekly as pianist, bandleader, and music director, Gary Raynor on bass and bass guitar, Peter Johnson on percussion, Jevetta Steele on vocals, and Andy Stein on violin, tenor and bass saxophones, and vocals. When the Shoe Band had a horn section, Keillor referred to them as the Shoe Horns.


title: A Prairie Home Companion

text: Released on June 9, 2006, "A Prairie Home Companion" is a film about "a dying radio show that bears striking similarities to 'A Prairie Home Companion,'" with the actual "APHC" home venue, the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul chosen to serve "as set piece, soundstage and framing device". The film was written by Garrison Keillor and directed by Robert Altman, and shot digitally, with camera by Altman's son, Robert Altman Jr.; the film stars Keillor, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, John C. Reilly, Lindsay Lohan, Maya Rudolph, Woody Harrelson, Virginia Madsen, and L.Q. Jones. "APHC" regular Rich Dworsky appears as the bandleader, and served as the film's pianist, conductor, arranger, and composer. The film depicts the unnamed radio program's behind-the-scenes activities, and the relational dynamics within the cast over its anticipated, imminent cancellation. The antagonist, Axeman, "who has come to shut the show down", is played by Tommy Lee Jones. As described in a 2005 on-set piece by David Carr for "The New York Times", the film set's atmosphere had The film, which makes no reference to Lake Wobegon, is of feature length, with its financing provided by GreeneStreet Films, River Road Entertainment, and local Minnesota sources. Its award nominations (2006, unless noted) include the Berlin International Film Festival-Golden Bear award for best film, the National Association of Film Critics-Bodil Award for Best American Film, the Film Independent (film association) Independent Spirit Award for Best Director, the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Screenplay, the International Press Academy-Satellite Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, the Independent Filmmaker Project-Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Ensemble Performance, the Broadcast Film Critics Association-Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Cast, and the Casting Society of America-Artios Award for Best Casting for Feature Film (Comedy); its wins include the Yomiuri Shimbun (film association) Hochi Film Award (2007) for Best Foreign Film. In addition, Meryl Streep was nominated for an International Press Academy-Satellite Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Motion Picture), and won the National Society of Film Critics Awards for the same category.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Oleg Vladimirovich Blokhin, or Oleh Volodymyrovych Blokhin (, ; born 5 November 1952), is a former Ukrainian and Soviet football player and manager. Regarded as one of the greatest footballers of his generation, Blokhin was formerly a standout striker for Dynamo Kyiv and the Soviet Union.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: He holds the all-time top goalscorer record for both Dynamo Kyiv (266 goals) and the Soviet Union national team (42 goals), as well as being the overall top goalscorer in the history of the Soviet Top League (211 goals). He is also the only player to have been capped over 100 times for the Soviet Union and holds Dynamo's appearance record with 582 appearances during his 18-year spell at the club. With Dynamo, Blokhin won eight Soviet league titles, five national cups and two European Cup Winners' Cups. He also competed for the Soviet Union at the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games and 1982 and 1986 FIFA World Cups. During his playing career he won the Soviet Footballer of the Year award three times and the Ukrainian Footballer of the Year award nine times (both records). In 1975, he was named European Footballer of the Year, winning the Ballon d'Or, becoming the second Soviet and the first Ukrainian player to achieve such a feat.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: As a coach, he has had two spells in charge of the Ukraine national team, managing the team at the 2006 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2012.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: In 2011, Blokhin, together with Igor Belanov and Vitaliy Starukhin were named as "the legends of Ukrainian football" at the Victory of Football awards.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Blokhin was born in Kyiv, the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, in 1952. His mother Kateryna Adamenko was multiple champion of USSR in the pentathlon, sprint and long jump. He was born to a Russian father and Ukrainian mother. His father was a police officer, a World War II veteran, and a competitive sprinter. Owing to his parents, Blokhin quickly mastered sprint, and by the age of 16 ran 60 m in less than 7 seconds, and 100 m in 11.0 seconds.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Blokhin was one of the greatest players in the world throughout the 1970s, hitting the target regularly through a period of great success at his hometown club Dynamo Kyiv and becoming the greatest goalscorer in the history of the Soviet League, which was one of Europe's strongest. Normally a forward or winger, Blokhin was most renowned for possessing exceptional pace.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Blokhin played during most of his career for Dynamo Kyiv, becoming the USSR national championship's all-time leader and goalscorer with 211 goals, as well as making more appearances than any other player with 432 appearances. He won the championship 8 times. He led Dynamo to the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup in 1975 and 1986, scoring a goal in each final. Blokhin is also the USSR national football team's most capped player with 112 caps, as well as their all-time leading goalscorer with 42 goals; he played in the 1982 and 1986 FIFA World Cups where he scored one goal in each. He was one of the first Soviet players to play abroad, signing for Austria's Vorwärts Steyr in 1988, he also played in Cyprus with Aris.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: In 1979 Blokhin played a couple of games for the Ukraine at the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: After retiring as a player, Blokhin coached Greek clubs Olympiacos (Under him they won the Greek Cup and the Greek Super Cup in 1992), PAOK, AEK Athens, and Ionikos.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: He began serving as the head coach of the Ukraine national team in September 2003. Under his leadership, Ukraine qualified for a major tournament for the first time as an independent nation, reaching the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. Ukraine reached the quarter-finals of the tournament, losing to eventual champions Italy. Following the side's failure to reach UEFA Euro 2008, Blokhin stepped down as coach on 6 December 2007.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: On 14 December 2007, he was named head coach of FC Moscow. The club finished 9th (from 16) and after the season ended Blokhin was fired from the club. At the end of the season, Blokhin announced that if he knew how things would go in FC Moscow, he would have never signed there. This was because the club released many important players without Blokhin's permission yet still had many high expectations. Others said that the reason Blokhin failed in FC Moscow was that he and the press didn't have a friendly relationship, and because of that the press was constantly attacking Blokhin and that damaged his status among the players.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: On 21 April 2011, Blokhin was again appointed head coach of the Ukraine national team. He led the team in UEFA Euro 2012 on home soil, beating Sweden but exiting at the group stage after defeats to France and England.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: On 25 September 2012, Dynamo Kyiv signed Blokhin to lead the club for the next four years. His final matches in charge of Ukraine were World Cup qualifiers against Moldova and Montenegro in October 2012. Blokhin was dismissed as Dynamo's manager by the club's President Ihor Surkis on 17 April 2014 because of the "unsatisfactory results of the team". The day before, in a press conference after Dynamo had lost a match against Shakhtar Donetsk, Blokhin had already stated that he had decided to resign. Under his leadership Dynamo never qualified (a rare occasion for the club) for the UEFA Champions League and performed poorly in the UEFA Europa League. In his first year his team finished third in the Ukrainian Premier League and in his second year (when he was fired) Dynamo was seven points behind Ukrainian Premier League leaders Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk and Shakhtar Donetsk.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: In 1998 Blokhin was elected to Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) for Hromada. He joined Hromada while still being a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In 2002, Blokhin was elected to Verkhovna Rada for a second term. In October 2002, he joined the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Blokhin's father, Vladimir Ivanovich Blokhin, is a native of Moscow, a veteran of the World War II, survivor of the Leningrad blockade, and a former Soviet law enforcement agent. Vladimir Blokhin later worked as a sports functionary for the Soviet Dynamo Society. Blokhin's mother Katerina Zakharivna ("née" Adamenko) is from a village in Borodianka Raion. She originally worked at a Kyiv sewing factory, but eventually discovered hidden athletic talents and became the Soviet champion in track and field as well as pentathlon. After retiring from sports, she became a staff member at one of Kyiv's universities.


title: Oleg Blokhin

text: Blokhin was married to Irina Deriugina, a top coach and former world champion in rhythmic gymnastics, but the couple divorced in the early 1990s. Blokhin and Deriugina have a daughter, singer Iryna Blokhina, who wrote and performed the Euro 2012 anthem.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The Armistice of 22 June 1940 was signed at 18:36 near Compiègne, France, by officials of Nazi Germany and the Third French Republic. It did not come into effect until after midnight on 25 June.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: Signatories for Germany included Wilhelm Keitel, a senior military officer of the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces), while those on the French side held lower ranks including General Charles Huntziger. Following the decisive German victory in the Battle of France (10 May – 21 June 1940) during World War II, this armistice established a German occupation zone in Northern and Western France that encompassed about three fifths of France's European territory, including all English Channel and Atlantic Ocean ports. The remainder of the country was to be left unoccupied, although the new regime which replaced the Third Republic was mutually recognized as the legitimate government of all of Metropolitan France except Alsace-Lorraine. The French were also permitted to retain control of all of their non-European territories. Adolf Hitler deliberately chose Compiègne Forest as the site to sign the armistice due to its symbolic role as the site of the 1918 Armistice with Germany that signaled the end of World War I with Germany's surrender.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The best, most modernised French armies had been sent north and lost in the resulting encirclement; the French had lost their best heavy weaponry and their best armored formations. Between May and June, French forces were in general retreat and Germany threatened to occupy Paris. The French government was forced to relocate to Bordeaux on 10 June to avoid capture and declared Paris to be an open city the same day.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The proposal of a Franco-British Union to shore up support for Paul Reynaud's government following the fall of Paris split support. With many pro-Armistice ministers in the cabinet, such as the Deputy Prime Minister Pétain, and the commander-in-chief of the French Army General Weygand, Reynaud resigned on 16 June. Petain became Prime Minister. While French resistance continued with the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle, the surrender of Metropolitan France ended any further attempts by the British to unite the two countries.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: By 22 June, the German Armed Forces ("Wehrmacht") had losses of 27,000 dead, more than 111,000 wounded and 18,000 missing. French losses were 92,000 dead and more than 200,000 wounded. The British Expeditionary Force suffered 68,000 casualties, with around 10,000 killed.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: When Adolf Hitler received word from the French government that it wished to negotiate an armistice, he selected the Compiègne Forest as the place for the negotiations. Given that Compiègne had been the site of the 1918 Armistice, which ended World War I with Germany's surrender, Hitler used the location as a supreme moment of revenge for Germany over France. He decided that the signing should take place in the same rail carriage, the Compiègne Wagon, where the Germans had signed the 1918 Armistice. In the last sentence of the preamble, the drafters inserted: "However, Germany does not have the intention to use the armistice conditions and armistice negotiations as a form of humiliation against such a valiant opponent", referring to the French forces. In Article 3, Clause 2, the drafters stated that their intention was not to heavily occupy North-West France after the cessation of hostilities with Britain.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: William Shirer, who was present on that day, reported, "I am but fifty yards from him. [...] I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph." Then, on 21 June 1940, in the same railway carriage in which the 1918 Armistice had been signed (removed from a museum building and placed exactly where it was in 1918), Hitler sat in the same chair in which Marshal Ferdinand Foch had sat when he faced the representatives of the defeated German Empire. After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler – in a calculated gesture of disdain for the French delegates – exited the carriage, as Foch had done in 1918, leaving the negotiations to the chief of the "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht" (High Command of the Armed Forces), General Wilhelm Keitel. The negotiations lasted one day, until the evening of 22 June 1940: General Huntziger had to discuss the terms by phone with the French government representatives, who had fled to Bordeaux, mainly with the newly nominated defence minister, General Maxime Weygand.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: Adolf Hitler had a number of reasons for agreeing to an armistice. He wanted to ensure that France did not continue to fight from French North Africa, and he wanted to ensure that the French Navy was taken out of the war. In addition, leaving a French government in place would relieve Germany of the considerable burden of administering French territory, particularly as he turned his attentions towards Britain. Finally, as Germany lacked a navy sufficient to occupy France's overseas territories, Hitler's only practical recourse to deny the British use of them was to maintain a formally independent and neutral French rump state.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: According to William Shirer's book "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", French General Charles Huntziger complained that the armistice terms imposed on France were harsher than those imposed on Germany in 1918. They provided for German occupation of three-fifths of France north and west of a line through Geneva and Tours and extending to the Spanish border, so as to give Nazi Germany's "Kriegsmarine" access to all French Channel and Atlantic ports. All people who had been granted political asylum had to be surrendered and all occupation costs had to be borne by France, approximately 400 million French francs a day. A minimal French Army would be permitted. As one of Hitler's few concessions, the French Navy was to be disarmed but not surrendered, for Hitler realized that pushing France too far could result in France fighting on from the French colonial empire. An unoccupied region in the south, the "Zone libre", was left relatively free to be governed by a rump French administration based in Vichy. The Vichy regime also administered the occupied zones (other than Alsace-Lorraine) albeit under severe restrictions.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: This was envisaged to last until a final peace treaty was negotiated. At the time, both French and Germans thought the occupation would be a provisional state of affairs and last only until Britain came to terms, which was believed to be imminent. For instance, none of the French delegation objected to the stipulation that French soldiers would remain prisoners of war until the cessation of all hostilities. Nearly 1,000,000 Frenchmen were thus forced to spend the next five years in prisoner of war camps (about a third of the initial 1,500,000 prisoners taken were released or exchanged as part of the "Service du Travail Obligatoire" forced labour programme by the Germans, before the war ended).


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: A final peace treaty was never negotiated, and the unoccupied zone was occupied by Germany and its Italian ally in Case Anton following the invasion of French North Africa by the Allies in November 1942.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice required the French state to turn over to German authorities any German national on French territory, who would then frequently face deportation to a concentration camp (the "Surrender on Demand" clause). Keitel gave verbal assurances that this would apply mainly to those refugees who had "fomented the war", a euphemism for Jews, and especially German Jews who until then had enjoyed asylum in France. Keitel also made one other concession, that French aircraft need not be handed over to the Germans.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The French delegation—led by General Charles Huntziger—tried to soften the harsher terms of the armistice, but Keitel replied that they would have to accept or reject the armistice as it was. Given the military situation that France was in, Huntziger had "no choice" but to accede to the armistice terms. The cease-fire went into effect at 00:35 on 25 June 1940, more than two days later, only after another armistice was signed between France and Italy, the main German ally in Europe.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The armistice did have some relative advantages for the French, compared to worse possible outcomes, such as keeping the colonial empire and the fleet, and, by avoiding full occupation and disarmament, the remaining French rump state in the unoccupied zone could enforce a certain "de facto" independence and neutrality vis-à-vis the Axis.


title: Armistice of 22 June 1940

text: The Armistice site was demolished by the Germans on Hitler's orders three days later. The carriage itself was taken to Berlin as a trophy of war, along with pieces of a large stone tablet. The Alsace-Lorraine Monument (depicting a German Eagle impaled by a sword) was also destroyed and all evidence of the site was obliterated, except notably the statue of Ferdinand Foch: Hitler ordered it to be left intact, so that it would be honoring only a wasteland. The railway carriage was later exhibited in Berlin, and then taken to Crawinkel in Thuringia in 1945, where it was destroyed by SS troops and the remains buried. After the war, the site and memorials were restored by German POW labour.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: The Vigil is a 2019 American supernatural horror film written and directed by Keith Thomas in his feature directorial debut. It stars Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman, Fred Melamed and Lynn Cohen, and follows a young man who is tasked with keeping vigil over a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community, only to be targeted by a malevolent spirit known as a (Hebrew found in the Talmud: מזיקין).


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: "The Vigil" premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019. The film received a limited theatrical release in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand in July 2020, before being released internationally on August 5, 2020. It was released in the United States on February 26, 2021 by IFC Midnight.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: The film opens with an unidentified boy forced by a man in a black Nazi uniform to shoot a young woman in a forest, as a strange figure approaches them in the background.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: The film then cuts to Yakov Ronen, a man who has left the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. He is struggling to deal with an unspecified traumatic event in his past and to pay his rent due to not having a job. He is approached by Reb Shulem, a member of his former Orthodox Jewish community, to keep vigil over Rubin Litvak, a Holocaust survivor who had died recently. Shulem had previously hired a Shomer, but that individual had left due to being "afraid", and Ronen had prior experience with keeping vigil. Ronen accepts the job after negotiating a higher fee. That night, Ronen and Shulem meet with Litvak's widow, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease and reluctantly accepts Ronen as a Shomer, and Shulem informs Ronen that the mortuary men will arrive in five hours.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Ronen begins his vigil then he starts to hear strange noises and sees a shadowy figure in the house's dining room. He finds a photo of Litvak and his family with a similar shadowy figure behind them, before briefly going to sleep; he has a nightmare about his younger brother being tormented by some older men. Upon waking up, Ronen experiences additional strange events, such as the lights flickering while texting his friend Sarah, and finds a video on his phone sent by an unknown number. The video shows Mrs. Litvak approaching Ronen and touching his face while he is asleep; the video file vanishes from his phone a few seconds later.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Ronen has a conversation with Mrs. Litvak, who explains that she drove their children away. Ronen then finds a television in the basement, playing a video recording of Litvak and his wife. In the recording, Litvak explains that he was haunted by a , a malevolent spirit, since his time in Buchenwald, that it latches onto a "broken person" and that its true face must be burned by dawn on the first night of its appearance to banish it. The "Mazzik" appears behind Ronen, and he flees from the basement. Ronen gets a call apparently from his physician, Dr. Kohlberg, and from his dead brother, who asks: "Why did you let me die?"


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Ronen leaves the house to get Shulem, though Mrs. Litvak warns him that he has been in the house for too long. However, Ronen experiences cracking bones while walking down the street, and is confronted by the "Mazzik". Ronen hastily returns to the house, and falls down the steps after being startled by the "Mazzik" appearing in front of the door. A flashback then reveals that Ronen's brother was killed in a car accident after escaping from the men who were tormenting him, and Ronen has felt guilty about his death ever since.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: With Mrs. Litvak's assistance, Ronen confronts the "Mazzik", which has shapeshifted its true face to look like Ronen's. After initially hesitating, Ronen sets its true face on fire, and then banishes it when it begins to make Litvak's body contort loudly. A flashback reveals that Litvak was the boy forced to shoot the young woman in the opening scene; the pain Litvak felt after the shooting caused the "Mazzik" to latch on to him.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: On the next morning, the mortuary men arrive to collect Litvak's body, and Shulem asks Ronen to attend morning prayers with him; Ronen declines his offer, saying "not today". As he leaves the house, a dark figure (presumably the "Mazzik") is seen following Ronen out of the house and heading down the street behind him.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: The film received a limited theatrical release in the United Kingdom and Ireland in July 2020 through Vertigo Releasing. It began screening in select theaters in New Zealand on July 16, and was released internationally on August 5, 2020. In October 2020, IFC Midnight acquired the film’s distribution rights for the United States from Blumhouse and set it for a February 26, 2021, release.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Upon release in the UK and Ireland, "The Vigil" grossed £30,302 ($39,500 USD) from 97 sites over its opening weekend.


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critics consensus reads: "Consistently clever and creepy, "The Vigil" mines richly atmospheric supernatural horror from a deep well of religious traditions." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 69 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: "Variety"s Dennis Harvey gave the film a mostly positive review, calling it an "effectively creepy, small-scale chiller that does a nice job eking suspense from its simple story and limited setting." Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave the film a grade of B, praising Davis's performance and writing that, "even as "The Vigil" settles into a familiar routine, it tackles that task with a polished, at times even elegant approach to a haunted house formula."


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Jordan Mintzer of "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote that writer-director Keith Thomas "keeps the tension high throughout most of the movie, even if some of his scare tactics can feel redundant", and that he "transforms Orthodox culture into gory material for a slightly elevated horror flick". Phil Hoad of "The Guardian" gave the film a score of 3 stars out of 5, writing that the film "doesn’t examine rising antisemitism, so it doesn’t have the same contemporary punch as "Get Out" had regarding Black Lives Matter, or "The Invisible Man" for #MeToo", but added: "it is all the same an authentically Jewish and reasonably competent chiller." Joe Lipsett of Bloody Disgusting wrote that ""The Vigil" doesn't exactly break the mould of demonic spirit films, though its sound design, lighting and lead performance certainly make it a solid entry."


title: The Vigil (2019 film)

text: Brian Tallerico of "RogerEbert.com" gave the film a mostly negative review, writing: "Sadly, director Keith Thomas doesn't trust his own themes or visual sense, swallowing his entire film up in abrasive sound design and a reliance on jump scares." Barry Hertz of "The Globe and Mail" described the film as "the cinematic equivalent of first-timer gefilte fish", adding: "In writer-director Keith Thomas's bid to add a layer of thematic novelty to a familiar genre, he has come up with a mish-mash that will satisfy only those with extremely acquired tastes."


title: RBX

text: Eric Dwayne Collins (born October 8, 1967) better known by his stage name RBX (standing for "Reality Born Unknown"), is an American rapper and songwriter from Long Beach, California.


title: RBX

text: Contrary to popular belief, Collins is not related to funk legend Bootsy Collins, although the two are close friends.


title: RBX

text: RBX joined Death Row Records in 1992 with his cousins Snoop Dogg and Daz Dillinger. A former college student and retail manager, Collins declined to sign blank contracts like his Death Row brethren. His tenure on the label would be brief but memorable. Having made commanding cameos on The Chronic in 1992 and Doggystyle in 1993, RBX left the label in 1994 and signed with the lesser known Premeditated Records. He released The RBX Files in 1995, his debut solo album that was produced by former Chronic production team member Greg "Gregski" Royal.


title: RBX

text: The album abandoned the popular West coast G-Funk style in favor of a "gritty, dungeon-like" sound more associated with New York. The single "A.W.O.L." was an attack on Death Row, Suge Knight, Dre, and others, with X comparing the dubious business practices there to the days of Ruthless Records, Jerry Heller, and Eazy-E. In a YouTube interview with VladTV he talked about an altercation over food between him and Suge Knight, in which Knight pulled out a gun.


title: RBX

text: In 1996, RBX visited Dr. Dre at home and apologized for his harsh words on record and in magazines and immediately signed to Dre's new Aftermath label. He was featured on the 1996 compilation "Dr. Dre Presents... The Aftermath" on the solo song "Blunt Time" and the group track "East Coast/West Coast Killaz" with KRS-One, B-Real, Scarface and Nas, with both songs produced by Dre. Lost in the infamous reshuffling of Aftermath in 1998, RBX once again went solo and released his follow up album "No Mercy, No Remorse" on an independent label in 1999. He reappeared with Aftermath to cameo on Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" in 2000.


title: RBX

text: In 2022, RBX began work with Los Angeles based producers Sccit & Siavash The Grouch on his comeback album “XHibernator”. The Labcabin Records release is set to include features from Spice-1, MC Eiht, Fatlip, Project Pat, Eligh, Cold 187um, Krayzie Bone, Butch Cassidy (singer), Smoov-E & more. On April 20th, 2022, RBX assisted Fatlip with the release of a single for Fatlip’s forthcoming album, “Torpor”, in the Sccit & Siavash The Grouch produced song titled “Wake Up”. The single was accompanied by a music video, which was themed around the Los Angeles homeless epidemic.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: The 13th Floor Elevators was an American rock band from Austin, Texas, United States, formed by guitarist and vocalist Roky Erickson, electric jug player Tommy Hall, and guitarist Stacy Sutherland. The band was together from 1965 to 1969, and during that period released four albums and seven singles for the International Artists record label.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: The Elevators were the first band to refer to their music as psychedelic rock, with the first-known use of the term appearing on their business card in January 1966. The 2005 documentary "You're Gonna Miss Me" specifically credits Tommy Hall with coining the term "psychedelic rock." Their contemporary influence has been acknowledged by 1960s musicians such as Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Peter Albin of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Chris Gerniottis of Zakary Thaks.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: The 13th Floor Elevators debut single "You're Gonna Miss Me", a national "Billboard" No. 55 hit in 1966, was featured on the 1972 compilation "". Seminal punk rock band Television played the Elevator's song "Fire Engine" live in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the 13th Floor Elevators influenced bands such as Primal Scream, the Shamen, Lime Spiders and Spacemen 3, all of whom covered their songs, and 14 Iced Bears who use an electric jug on their single "Beautiful Child". In 2009, International Artists released a ten CD box set entitled "Sign of the 3-Eyed Men", which included the mono and new, alternative, stereo mixes of the original albums, together with two albums of previously unreleased material and a number of rare live recordings.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: The 13th Floor Elevators emerged on the local Austin music scene in December 1965, where they were contemporary to bands such as the Wig and the Babycakes and later followed by Shiva's Headband and the Conqueroo. The band formed when Roky Erickson left his group the Spades, and joined up with Stacy Sutherland, Benny Thurman, and John Ike Walton who had been playing Texas coastal towns as the Lingsmen. Tommy Hall was instrumental in bringing the band members together, and joined the group as lyricist and electric jug player. The band's name developed from a suggestion by drummer John Ike Walton to use the name "Elevators". Clementine Hall added "13th Floor". In addition to an awareness that a number of tall buildings in the US lack a designated 13th floor, it was noted that the letter "M" (for marijuana) is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: In early January 1966, producer Gordon Bynum brought the band to Houston to record two songs to release as a single on his newly formed Contact record label. The songs were Erickson's "You're Gonna Miss Me", and Hall-Sutherland's "Tried to Hide". Some months later, the International Artists label picked it up and re-released it.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: Throughout the spring of 1966, the group toured extensively in Texas, playing clubs in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. They also played on live teen dance shows on TV, such as "Sumpin Else", in Dallas, and "The Larry Kane Show" in Houston. During the Summer, the IA re-release of "You're Gonna Miss Me" became popular outside Texas, especially in Miami, Detroit, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In October 1966, it peaked on the national "Billboard" chart at the No. 55 position. Prompted by the success of the single, the Elevators toured the west coast, made two nationally televised appearances for Dick Clark, and played several dates at the San Francisco ballrooms The Fillmore and The Avalon.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: The International Artists record label in Houston, also home to contemporary Texas underground groups such as Red Krayola and Bubble Puppy, signed the Elevators to a record contract and released the album "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators" in November 1966, which became popular among the burgeoning counterculture. Tommy Hall's sleeve-notes for the album, which advocated chemical agents (such as LSD) as a gateway to a higher, 'non-Aristotelian' state of consciousness, has also contributed to the album's cult status.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: During their California tour, the band shared bills with Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Great Society (featuring Grace Slick), and Moby Grape. On returning to Texas in early 1967, they released a second single, "Levitation", and continued to play live in Austin, Houston and other Texas cities. In November 1967, the band released a second album, "Easter Everywhere". The album featured a cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". However, shortly before work began on "Easter Everywhere", Walton and Leatherman left the band and were replaced by Danny Thomas on drums and Dan Galindo on bass, because of disputes over mismanagement of the band's career by International Artists and a fundamental disagreement between Walton and Hall over the latter's advocacy of the use of LSD in the pursuit of achieving a higher state of human consciousness. As a result, they were not credited in the "Easter Everywhere" sleevenotes, despite having appeared on "(I've Got) Levitation" and "She Lives (In a Time of Her Own)". Despite the lengthy studio work and resources utilized, "Easter Everywhere" was not the success the band and International Artists had hoped for. Lacking a hit single and released too late in the year, it sold out its original run, but was never reprinted, suggesting somewhat disappointing sales. Record label paperwork indicate that the band's debut album sold upwards of 40,000 copies during its original run, while "Easter Everywhere" may have sold around 10,000 copies.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: At one point around 1967, Erickson was a roommate of future cult musician Townes Van Zandt. Erickson insisted that he join the Elevators on bass, even though he was a guitarist who had never played bass before. He auditioned for Hall, but Hall rejected him.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: While the band were unable to repeat their national success, they were still a powerful presence on the Texas rock music scene. Chris Gerniottis, ex-lead singer of Zakary Thaks has spoken repeatedly of how the Elevators stood apart from all the other bands on the regional scene, and they continued to influence these bands during the late 1960s. Following the local popularity of the track "Slip Inside This House", an edited version was released as a single in early 1968 and was played frequently on Houston radio.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: Meanwhile, the Elevators had lost their bass player Dan Galindo, who went on to another International Artists band, the Rubiayat. Duke Davis briefly replaced Galindo, before the band's earlier bassist Ronnie Leatherman returned in the Summer of 1968. As documented in a lengthy interview and article in the Texas underground music magazine "Mother" No. 3, the band worked all Spring of 1968 on their new album, which at one point was to be called "Beauty and the Beast". However, because of an unstable member line-up and the increasingly erratic behavior of the psychedelicized Tommy Hall and mentally fragile Roky Erickson, little of value came out of these sessions. The live shows had lost their original energy, and often the band would perform without their lead singer Erickson, due to his recurring hospital treatments at the time. The last concert featuring the "real" Elevators occurred in April 1968.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: International Artists put out a "Live" LP in August 1968, which was composed of old demo tapes and outtakes dating back to 1966 for the most part, with fake applause and audience noise added. Around this time, the original 13th Floor Elevators disbanded, as the nucleus of Erickson-Hall-Sutherland had been reduced to guitarist Stacy Sutherland only. Sutherland brought some of his own songs for a final set of studio sessions, which led to the dark, intense posthumous album "Bull of the Woods". Initially disliked by many Elevators fans, it has found a substantial fan-base today, with some even rating it the band's best LP. These final sessions consisted of Sutherland on guitar, Ronnie Leatherman on bass, and Danny Thomas on drums. "Bull of the Woods" was largely the work of Stacy Sutherland. Erickson, due to health and legal problems, and Tommy Hall were only involved with a few tracks, including "Livin' On", "Never Another", "Dear Doctor Doom", and "May the Circle Remain Unbroken". A few live gigs were played around Texas during the second half of 1968, until an article in "Rolling Stone" magazine in December 1968 declared the band gone. International Artists pulled together the various studio recordings from 1968 and, with the assistance of drummer Danny Thomas, added some horn arrangements, which became the "Bull of the Woods" album, released in March 1969. The final 13th Floor Elevators record released by International Artists was a reissue of the "You're Gonna Miss Me" single in mid-1969.


title: The 13th Floor Elevators

text: Singer Janis Joplin was a close associate of Clementine Hall and the band. She opened for the band at a benefit concert in Austin, and considered joining the group prior to heading to San Francisco and joining Big Brother and the Holding Company.