title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: Gautham then risks reaching Sultan, who threatens to kill Sreenidhi and attacks him. By the time Sultan raises a sword on Gautham, Zara shoots Sultan with a gun and rearranges the trident. She tells later that she fell in a place where there were no rocks and reached the other shore of the flow and reached the chamber through another stairway. The trio rejoices as they see the treasure in front of them. Gautham becomes the proud owner of 900 diamonds of his grandfather, and Zara fulfills Siddiqui's last wish by handing over the entire wealth to the Pakistan Government after Gautham refuses to take any one single coin of it as it belongs not to him, but the Government of Pakistan.


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: The film marks the second collaboration of Gopichand and Yeleti after "Okkadunnadu". Taapsee Pannu is cast in a lead role. The film was known under the working title "Jackpot" but was later renamed as "Sahasam". The film's first look was released on the eve of Ugadi in 2013.


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: The music composed by Sri, and lyrics were penned by Anantha Sreeram. The audio rights were secured by T-Series for 2 million. The audio was launched on 2 June 2013.


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: The Times of India wrote, "In a time where the beat comes over everything else in Telugu cinema music, the album of "Sahasam" will come as a surprise. This album is all about rhythm and melody and the lyrics are all in Telugu as well. The music director Sri has given a very classic feel to the whole record" and rated the album 3/5. Cinecorn.com wrote, "Sri delivers and delivers well even after such a long gap. Wish he composed more often" and rated the album 3.25/5. Musicperk.com wrote "Sahasam" is not really a commercial album but it definitely suits the film's genre. It has got the potential to go on to become a chartbuster, but the usual veteran composition might not work out in the modern-day music. Few listens may definitely pop you out of the mood" and rated it 6/10.


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: The film released worldwide on 12 July 2013, after being postponed several times, by Bluesky Cinemas to the entire Overseas and Reliance Entertainment in India, with a U/A Certificate from Central Board of Film Certification. The film received positive reviews from the critics from the day of release and was declared as a Super Hit at the box office as well as in Gopichand's career. The film was later dubbed and released in Hindi as "The Real Jackpot" in 2014.


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: "The Times of India" gave a review stating "Chandrasekhar Yeleti needs to be applauded for his tryst of an adventurous film – something that's unique in Telugu films." "Idlebrain.com" gave a review of rating 4/5 stating "I am giving it a rating of 4 for the guts of producers who came forward to make a different film and for the conviction of director to stick to the core subject and for not deviating from it for the sake of commercial elements" "123telugu.com" gave a review of rating 3.25/5. stating ""Sahasam" is not your average Telugu cinema. The plot, the setting and the execution are very fresh and novel. You can safely watch "Sahasam" for some desi "Indiana Jones" moments."


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: "Oneindia" gave a review of rating 3/5 stating ""Sahasam" is a unique entertainer in Telugu, which is a right blend of brilliant performances and rich production values. The movie will impress all classes of audiences except glamour and comedy lovers. Watch the movie for its technical brilliance." "APHerald.com" gave a review of rating 3/5 stating "Firstly we must appreciate director Chandra Sekhar Yeleti and Gopi bringing an adventurous film to Telugu audience after a long time. And should applaud for trying a non-commercial film beveling in the content during the time where commercial films ruling the industry. If you go without any expectation, "Sahasam" will surprise you and impressive without the doubt."


title: Sahasam (2013 film)

text: "SuperGoodMovies" gave a review of rating 5/5 stating "Gopichand’s "Sahasam" is a beautiful movie. Everyone must watch this movie. This is definitely a worthy watch for this rainy weekend."


title: Voltaic pile

text: The voltaic pile was the first electrical battery that could continuously provide an electric current to a circuit. It was invented by Italian chemist Alessandro Volta, who published his experiments in 1799. The voltaic pile then enabled a rapid series of other discoveries including the electrical decomposition (electrolysis) of water into oxygen and hydrogen by William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle (1800) and the discovery or isolation of the chemical elements sodium (1807), potassium (1807), calcium (1808), boron (1808), barium (1808), strontium (1808), and magnesium (1808) by Humphry Davy.


title: Voltaic pile

text: The entire 19th-century electrical industry was powered by batteries related to Volta's (e.g. the Daniell cell and Grove cell) until the advent of the dynamo (the electrical generator) in the 1870s.


title: Voltaic pile

text: Volta's invention was built on Luigi Galvani's 1780s discovery of how a circuit of two metals and a frog's leg can cause the frog's leg to respond. Volta demonstrated in 1794 that when two metals and brine-soaked cloth or cardboard are arranged in a circuit they produce an electric current. In 1800, Volta stacked several pairs of alternating copper (or silver) and zinc discs (electrodes) separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in brine to increase the total electromotive force. When the top and bottom contacts were connected by a wire, an electric current flowed through the voltaic pile and the connecting wire. The voltaic pile, together with many scientific instruments that belonged to Alessandro Volta, are preserved in the University History Museum of the University of Pavia, where Volta taught from 1778 to 1819.


title: Voltaic pile

text: On 20 March 1800, Alessandro Volta wrote to the London Royal Society to describe the technique for producing electric current using his device. On learning of the voltaic pile, William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used it to discover the electrolysis of water. Humphry Davy showed that the electromotive force, which drives the electric current through a circuit containing a single voltaic cell, was caused by a chemical reaction, not by the voltage difference between the two metals. He also used the voltaic pile to decompose chemicals and to produce new chemicals. William Hyde Wollaston showed that electricity from voltaic piles had identical effects to those of electricity produced by friction. In 1802 Vasily Petrov used voltaic piles in the discovery and research of electric arc effects.


title: Voltaic pile

text: Humphry Davy and Andrew Crosse were among the first to develop large voltaic piles. Davy used a 2000-pair pile made for the Royal Institution in 1808 to demonstrate carbon arc discharge and isolate five new elements: barium, calcium, boron, strontium and magnesium.


title: Voltaic pile

text: Because Volta believed that the electromotive force occurred at the contact between the two metals, Volta's piles had a different design than the modern design illustrated on this page. His piles had one extra disc of copper at the top, in contact with the zinc, and one extra disc of zinc at the bottom, in contact with the copper. Expanding on Volta's work and the electro-magnetism work of his mentor Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday utilized both magnets and the voltaic pile in his experiments with electricity. Faraday believed that all "electricities" being studied at the time (voltaic, magnetic, thermal, and animal) were one and the same. His work to prove this theory led him to propose two laws of electrochemistry which stood in direct conflict with the current scientific beliefs of the day as laid down by Volta thirty years earlier. Because of their contributions to the understanding of this field of study, Faraday and Volta are both considered to be among the fathers of electrochemistry. The words "electrode" and "electrolyte", used above to describe Volta's work, are due to Faraday.


title: Voltaic pile

text: The strength of the pile is expressed in terms of its electromotive force, or emf, given in volts. Alessandro Volta's theory of contact tension considered that the emf, which drives the electric current through a circuit containing a voltaic cell, occurs at the contact between the two metals. Volta did not consider the electrolyte, which was typically brine in his experiments, to be significant. However, chemists soon realized that water in the electrolyte was involved in the pile's chemical reactions, and led to the evolution of hydrogen gas from the copper or silver electrode.


title: Voltaic pile

text: The modern, atomistic understanding of a cell with zinc and copper electrodes separated by an electrolyte is the following. When the cell is providing an electrical current through an external circuit, the metallic zinc at the surface of the zinc anode is oxidized and dissolves into the electrolyte as electrically charged ions (Zn), leaving 2 negatively charged electrons () behind in the metal:


title: Voltaic pile

text: This reaction is called oxidation. While zinc is entering the electrolyte, two positively charged hydrogen ions (H) from the electrolyte accept two electrons at the copper cathode surface, become reduced and form an uncharged hydrogen molecule (H):


title: Voltaic pile

text: This reaction is called reduction. The electrons used from the copper to form the molecules of hydrogen are made up by an external wire or circuit that connects it to the zinc. The hydrogen molecules formed on the surface of the copper by the reduction reaction ultimately bubble away as hydrogen gas.


title: Voltaic pile

text: One will observe that the global electro-chemical reaction does not immediately involve the electrochemical couple Cu/Cu (Ox/Red) corresponding to the copper cathode. The copper metal disk thus only serves here as a "chemically inert" noble metallic conductor for the transport of electrons in the circuit and does not chemically participate in the reaction in the aqueous phase. Copper does act as a catalyst for the hydrogen-evolution reaction, which otherwise could occur equally well directly at the zinc electrode without current flow through the external circuit. The copper electrode could be replaced in the system by any sufficiently noble/inert and catalytically active metallic conductor (Ag, Pt, stainless steel, graphite, ...). The global reaction can be written as follows:


title: Voltaic pile

text: in which a vertical bar each time represents an interface. The double vertical bar represents the interfaces corresponding to the electrolyte impregnating the porous cardboard disk.


title: Voltaic pile

text: When no current is drawn from the pile, each cell, consisting of zinc/electrolyte/copper, generates 0.76 V with a brine electrolyte. The voltages from the cells in the pile add, so the six cells in the diagram above generate 4.56 V of electromotive force.


title: Voltaic pile

text: A number of high-voltage "dry piles" were invented between the early 19th century and the 1830s in an attempt to determine the source of electricity of the wet voltaic pile, and specifically to support Volta's hypothesis of contact tension. Indeed, Volta himself experimented with a pile whose cardboard discs had dried out, most likely accidentally.


title: Voltaic pile

text: The first to publish was Johann Wilhelm Ritter in 1802, albeit in an obscure journal, but over the next decade, it was announced repeatedly as a new discovery. One form of dry pile is the Zamboni pile. Francis Ronalds in 1814 was one of the first to realize that dry piles also worked through chemical reaction rather than metal-to-metal contact, even though corrosion was not visible due to the very small currents generated.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: António Agostinho da Silva Neto (17 September 1922 – 10 September 1979) was an Angolan politician and poet. He served as the first president of Angola from 1975 to 1979, having led the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the war for independence (1961–1974). Until his death, he led the MPLA in the civil war (1975–2002). Known also for his literary activities, he is considered Angola's preeminent poet. His birthday is celebrated as National Heroes' Day, a public holiday in Angola.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Neto was born at Ícolo e Bengo, in Bengo Province, Angola, in 1922. Neto attended high school in the capital city, Luanda; his parents were both school teachers and Methodists; his father, also called Agostinho Neto, was a Methodist pastor. After secondary school he worked in the colonial health services before going on to university. The younger Neto left Angola for Portugal, and studied medicine at the universities of Coimbra and Lisbon. He combined his academic life with covert political activity of a revolutionary sort; and PIDE, the security police force of the Estado Novo regime headed by Portuguese Prime Minister Salazar, arrested him in 1951 for three months for his separatist activism. He was arrested again in 1952 for joining the Portuguese Movement for Democratic Youth Unity. He was arrested again in 1955 and held until 1957. He finished his studies, marrying a 23-year-old Portuguese woman who was born in Trás-os-Montes, Maria Eugénia da Silva, the same day he graduated. He returned to Angola in 1959, was arrested again in 1960, and escaped to assume leadership of the armed struggle against colonial rule. When Angola gained independence in 1975 he became president and held the position until his death in 1979.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: In December 1956, the Angolan Communist Party (PCA) merged with the Party of the United Struggle for Africans in Angola (PLUA) to form the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola with Viriato da Cruz, the President of the PCA, as Secretary General and Neto as president.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: The Portuguese authorities in Angola arrested Neto on 8 June 1960. His patients and supporters marched for his release from Bengo to Catete, but were stopped when Portuguese soldiers shot at them, killing 30 and wounding 200 in what became known as the Massacre of Icolo e Bengo. At first Portugal's government exiled Neto to Cape Verde. Then, once more, he was sent to jail in Lisbon. After international protests were made to Salazar's administration urging Neto's release, Neto was freed from prison and put under house arrest. From this he escaped, going first to Morocco and then to Congo-Léopoldville.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: In 1962 Neto visited Washington, D.C., and asked the Kennedy administration for aid in his war against Portugal. The U.S. government turned him down, because it had oil interests in colonial Angola, choosing instead to support Holden Roberto's comparatively anti-Communist National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA).


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Neto met Che Guevara in 1965 and began receiving support from Cuba. He visited Havana many times, and he and Fidel Castro shared similar ideological views.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal during April 1974 (which deposed Salazar's successor Marcelo Caetano), three political factions vied for Angolan power. One of the three was the MPLA, to which Neto belonged. On 11 November 1975, Angola achieved full independence from the Portuguese, and Neto became the nation's ruler after the MPLA seized Luanda at the expense of the other anti-colonial movements. He established a one-party state and his government developed close links with the Soviet Union and other nations in the Eastern Bloc and other Communist states, particularly Cuba, which aided the MPLA considerably in its war with the FNLA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and South Africa. Neto made the MPLA declare Marxism-Leninism its official doctrine. As a consequence, he violently repressed a movement later called Fractionism which in 1977 attempted a coup d'état inspired by the Organização dos Comunistas de Angola. In December 1977 at their first congress, they changed their name to MPLA-PT (MPLA Partido do Trabalho) officially adopting the Marxist-Leninist ideology, requested by Nito Alves. Tens of thousands of followers (or alleged followers) of Nito Alves were executed in the aftermath of the attempted coup, over a period that lasted up to two years, although Agostinho Neto only ratified the death sentence of Nito Alves. After corresponding with several relatives of the disappeared, Neto decided to dissolve DISA for the "excesses" they had committed.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: According to his sons, the president Neto never assigned business or privileges to them, suggesting that despite a controversial presidency he never forgot his humble origins.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Neto died in a hospital in Moscow, while undergoing surgery for cancer, shortly before his 57th birthday. José Eduardo dos Santos succeeded him as president. The Angolan Civil War continued to rage for almost a quarter of a century more.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Agostinho Neto's poetic works were written chiefly between 1946 and 1960, largely in Portugal. He published three books of poetry during his lifetime. Several of his poems became national anthems. Poems included collections like "Sacred Hope", which was published in 1974 (Titled Dry Eyes in the Portuguese Version). Also, he was the first member voted into the Anglo Writers Union and The Center for African Studies in Lisbon. He was later awarded the Lotus Prize presented by the Conference of Afro-Asian Writers'


title: Agostinho Neto

text: Agostinho Neto died on Monday, 10 September 1979 in Moscow after travelling to the Soviet Union to undergo surgery for cancer and hepatitis. He was a week shy of his 57th birthday at the time of his death. Neto had a long battle with pancreatic cancer, as well as chronic hepatitis that ultimately took his life. Neto had been to the Soviet Union multiple times for treatment because of the high level of medical professionals there. Few people knew about his failing health because he and his colleagues thought it was better to hide this information, as to not show weakness.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: The public university of Luanda, the Agostinho Neto University, is named after him. A poem by Chinua Achebe entitled "Agostinho Neto" was written in his honor. An airport in Santo Antão, Cape Verde, is named after him, due to the beloved work he performed there as a doctor. For the same reason, the main hospital of Cape Verde in the capital Praia is named "Hospital Agostinho Neto" (HAN). There is also a morna dedicated to him. A street in New Belgrade in Serbia is named after him, the Dr Agostina Neta street.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: A street in Ghana (Agostinho Neto Road), which can be found in Airport City in the capital, is named after him.


title: Agostinho Neto

text: In 1973, during one of his few unofficial visits to Bulgaria, Neto met a woman with whom he had a daughter, Mihaela Radkova Marinova, who was raised in orphanages in Bulgaria. Neto's family has not recognised the child. A DNA test performed in 2013 concluded with 95% confidence that she is Neto's daughter.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond is a city in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, United States, and a part of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area in the central part of the state. The population was 94,428 according to the 2020 United States Census, making it the fifth largest city in Oklahoma.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The city borders the northern boundary of Oklahoma City. Public transportation is provided by Citylink Edmond bus service.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The Santa Fe rail line in Oklahoma Territory established a water and coaling station for steam engines at this location when the Santa Fe Railroad built into Indian Territory in 1887. The site for the station was chosen because it was the highest point on the line in Oklahoma County; train could more easily accelerate going downhill while leaving the station in either direction. The railroad then named the station for Edmond Burdick, the Santa Fe's traveling freight agent. When the town was formed after the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, early settlers decided to adopt the name. Though most of the remnants of the old railroad infrastructure are gone, the Santa Fe, now BNSF, freight line still runs through the same course.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The town of Edmond sprang up overnight during the great Oklahoma land run on April 22, 1889, when homesteads were staked around the Santa Fe station. The original plat for Edmond was prepared by the Seminole Town and Development Company, a newly formed syndicate with ties to the railroad. Many of the original streets were named for men associated with either the Santa Fe Railroad or the town syndicate. The first mayor and city officers were elected in May 1889, and Edmond's population was 294 in the 1890 census.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The first public schoolhouse in Oklahoma Territory, completed in August 1889, is in Edmond. It still stands as a historic monument on 2nd Street between Boulevard and Broadway and is open to the public on the first two Saturdays of each month or by appointment.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, the first church opened after the land run, was located on the southwest corner of East First and South Boulevard. The congregation still exists, although not in its original building or location.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: In December 1890, the territorial legislature established three universities: the state university in Norman, the agricultural and mechanical college in Stillwater, and a "normal" or teaching school in Edmond.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The first classes for the Territorial Normal School (University of Central Oklahoma) were held November 9, 1891, in the Methodist Church on the southwest corner of North Broadway and West Hurd. Old North, the Territorial Normal School's iconic first building, was opened for classes on January 2, 1893, and ahead of Oklahoma State University's Central Hall or Oklahoma University's Science Hall.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The "Edmond Sun", established by Milton W. "Kicking Bird" Reynolds on July 18, 1889, was the state's oldest continuous newspaper dating from Oklahoma Territorial days.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: In the early 20th century, Edmond was known as a sundown town. Racial covenants barred property sales to individuals of races other than white people or Native Americans in every neighborhood built between 1911 and 1949 except the Edmond Highway Addition in 1924. Racial housing covenants in the United States became unenforceable in 1948 after the Shelly v. Kraemer decision by the United States Supreme Court.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond was the site of a workplace shooting on August 20, 1986, in which 14 people were killed and six wounded by Patrick Sherrill, an ex-postman who then committed suicide. This event was the deadliest killing in a string of U.S. postal employee murder–suicides which inspired the slang term "going postal". A memorial to the victims of the attack stands outside the U.S. Post Office in downtown Edmond.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The city was the subject of a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals case challenging the depiction of a Christian cross on the city seal, raising issues concerning the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In May 1996, the Supreme Court let stand a Federal Appeals Court ruling ordering the city to remove the cross from the seal. Rather than replace the cross, the city council voted to leave the spot blank so as to "remind people of what was there," as well as this being the least expensive way to comply.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: A memorial service for famed Oklahoman baseball player Bobby Murcer was held in Edmond on August 6, 2008, at the Memorial Road Church of Christ. Among the some 2,000 attending the memorial were Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, and former Yankees manager Joe Girardi.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond is located just north of Oklahoma City in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and or 3.19% is water. Arcadia Lake on the east side of the city is a fishing spot for the Oklahoma City metropolitan area and contains bluegill, channel catfish, blue catfish, and largemouth bass. Twin Bridges Lake is a second lake in the city.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond lies in the Sandstone Hills region of Central Oklahoma, known for hills, blackjack oak, and post oak. The city falls into an ecological region known as the Cross Timbers.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond has a humid subtropical climate with frequent variations in weather during part of the year and consistently hot summers. Prolonged and severe droughts often lead to wildfires and heavy rainfall often leads to flash flooding and flooding. Consistent winds, usually from the south or south-southeast during the summer, help temper the hotter weather. Consistent northerly winds during the winter can intensify cold periods. Severe ice storms and snowstorms happen sporadically during the winter.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The city is located in Tornado Alley and is subject to frequent and severe tornadoes and hailstorms. The Oklahoma City metropolitan area is one of the most tornado-prone major cities in the world.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: According to estimates from ESRI: There are approximately 94,000 residents and approximately 37,000 housing units. Population estimates by race/ethnicity are 79.8% white, 5.8% black, 2.7% American Indian, 4.1% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 2.5% other race and 5% two or more races. 7.2% of the population is of Hispanic origin.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The population is 51.5% female and 48.5% male. The median age of residents is 36.3 years, lower than the Oklahoma median age of 37.8.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The supermarket chain Crest Foods is based in Edmond. The University of Central Oklahoma is a major employer. Some of Edmond's targeted industries include Wholesale Trade; Light Manufacturing; Information; and Professional, Scientific and Technical Services.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: According to the city's 2017 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city are:


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: The city of Edmond is making efforts to promote public art with murals, stained glass, and steel sculptures. On a portion of Main Street, statuary lines nearly every corner. On July 4, 2007, the city inaugurated a bronze statue of Nannita R.H. Daisey, believed to be the first woman laying claim on Oklahoma land in the first (1889) land run. In 2015 the Dave McGary sculpture of Chief Touch the Clouds was relocated to Edmond from Houston's Astrodome. The 18-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide sculpture is located on Second Street at the entrance of the University of Central Oklahoma.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Edmond residents have access to 57 Protestant and three Catholic congregations, six Latter-day Saint congregations, one Unitarian Universalist church, one Islamic mosque, and one Haziratu'l-Quds for followers of the Baháʼí Faith.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: A 163 foot tall cross sits at the Edmond Campus of Life.Church on the corner of Edmond Road and the I-35 Service Road. The church's pastor, Craig Groeschel, fought the city of Edmond to erect the cross, which the planning commission didn't want to allow because they considered it a billboard.


title: Edmond, Oklahoma

text: Rugby union is a developing sport in Edmond as well as in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. Edmond boasts two rugby clubs: The Edmond Rugby Club (aka "The Storm") and the University of Central Oklahoma Rugby Football Club.


title: Links (golf)

text: A links is the oldest style of golf course, first developed in Scotland. Links courses are generally built on sandy coastland that offers a firmer playing surface than parkland and heathland courses.


title: Links (golf)

text: The word "links" comes via the Scots language from the Old English word "hlinc": "rising ground, ridge" and refers to an area of coastal sand dunes and sometimes to open parkland; it is cognate with "lynchet". "Links" can be treated as singular even though it has an "s" at the end and occurs in place names that precede the development of golf, for example Lundin Links in Fife. It also retains this more general meaning in standard Scottish English. Links land is typically characterised by dunes, an undulating surface, and a sandy soil unsuitable for arable farming but which readily supports various indigenous browntop bent and red fescue grasses. Together, the soil and grasses result in the firm turf associated with links courses and the 'running' game. The hard surface typical of the links-style course allows balls to "run" out much farther than on softer turf course after a fairway landing. Often players will land the ball well before the green and allow it to run up onto the green rather than landing it on the green in the more targeted-landing style used on softer surfaces.


title: Links (golf)

text: Links courses tend to be on, or at least very near to, a coast, and the term is typically associated with coastal courses, often amid dunes, with few water hazards and few, if any, trees. This reflects both the nature of the scenery where the sport originated and the limited resources available to golf course architects at that time. Soil movement, for example, had to be done by hand, and thus was kept to a minimum, as was irrigation. Even today, some links courses do not employ a greens staff, use only basic machinery such as hole cutters without boards, resulting in a hole that is cut unevenly, and use grazing animals to keep the grass cropped.


title: Links (golf)

text: Although the term links is often used loosely to describe any golf course, few golf courses have all of the design elements of true links courses, including being built on linksland. The presence of a seaside location does not guarantee a links golf course. Many famous courses regarded as links do not, as presently constituted, have all of the necessary characteristics (e.g., Pebble Beach Golf Links, Old Head Golf Links at Kinsale, The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island). On the other hand, some courses located hundreds of miles from a seacoast, such as Whistling Straits, near Kohler, Wisconsin, on the Great Lakes, can have all of the characteristics of a seaside links except for proximity to saltwater.


title: Links (golf)

text: Links courses remain most common in Ireland and Great Britain, especially in Scotland. The Open Championship is always played on links courses, and this is one of the main features which differentiates it from the three major championships held in the United States. The first exception to this was the 2004 PGA Championship, which was played on a links-style course, Whistling Straits, located near Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The 2015 U.S. Open was played at Chambers Bay, a British links-style course in University Place, Washington. Royal Adelaide Golf Club is a links course in Adelaide, South Australia, and was partly designed by Alister MacKenzie, who said of the location, "One finds a most delightful combination of sand dunes and fir trees. I have never seen a seaside course possess such magnificent sand craters, as those at Royal Adelaide."


title: Links (golf)

text: The unique nature of links courses necessitates a distinct style of play. The challenges links traits present fall into two categories: topography, which tends to be characterised by uneven fairways, thick rough, and small, deep "pot bunkers"; and climatic, dominated by windy conditions created by their coastal location and lack of trees, and frequent intermittent rain squalls.


title: Links (golf)

text: Links topography favours a controlled style of golf, as hazards abound. Low and even bouncing shots allow balls to be skipped onto greens rather than high flights landed with strong backspin. Windy or blustery weather also calls for low, accurate shots. Damp conditions demand concentration and caution.


title: Links (golf)

text: As many traditional links courses consist of an "outward" nine in one direction along the coast, and an opposite "inward" nine returning, players often have to cope with contrasting wind patterns in each half of their round.


title: Excitable Boy

text: Excitable Boy is the third studio album by American musician Warren Zevon. The album was released on January 18, 1978, by Asylum Records. It includes the single "Werewolves of London", which reached No. 21 and remained in the American Top 40 for six weeks. The album brought Zevon to commercial attention and remains the best-selling album of his career, having been certified platinum by the RIAA and reaching the top ten on the US "Billboard" 200. A remastered and expanded edition was released in 2007.


title: Excitable Boy

text: "Excitable Boy" and "Werewolves of London" were considered macabrely humorous by some critics. The historical "Veracruz" dramatizes the United States occupation of Veracruz. It was the first song Zevon wrote with Jorge Calderón. Likewise, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" is a fictionalized account of former mercenary David Lindell's experiences in Africa. "Lawyers, Guns and Money" is a tongue-in-cheek tale of a young American man's adventures in Cold War-era Latin America. In addition, there are two ballads about life and relationships ("Accidentally Like a Martyr" and "Tenderness on the Block"), as well as the funk/disco-inspired "Nighttime in the Switching Yard".


title: The Buckinghams

text: The Buckinghams are an American sunshine pop band from Chicago. They formed in 1966 and went on to become one of the top-selling acts of 1967, charting their only five top 40 hits in the U.S. that year. The band dissolved in 1970, but re-formed in 1980 and they continue to tour throughout the United States.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 1965, guitarists Carl Giammarese and Nick Fortuna, along with bassist Curtis Bachman, were invited to join a band called the Centuries. Giammarese and Bachman, plus keyboardist Dennis Miccolis, later became members of another band, the Pulsations, whose members included drummer John Poulos and vocalists George LeGros and Dennis Tufano. After winning a local battle of the bands competition in late 1965, the Pulsations secured a job as the house band on WGN-TV's variety show called "All-Time Hits". The show's producers suggested they adopt a name reflective of the British invasion, which was popular at the time, and the band adopted the name "The Buckinghams", which was suggested by a security guard named John Opager at the station. The band liked the name because of its similarity to a hometown landmark, Buckingham Fountain.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In early 1966, LeGros was forced to leave after he was drafted. Right around the same time, bassist Bachman also left and Fortuna (now playing bass and soon briefly going under the surname of Fortune, after it was misspelled on the record jacket) returned after a stint with Jimmy V. & the Entertainers. The band then signed their first record contract with local label USA Records and recorded 12 songs that year. Several were released as singles, including "I'll Go Crazy", a song originally recorded by James Brown & the Famous Flames, and the Beatles' "I Call Your Name". However, it was their number one single "Kind of a Drag" that provided them with national exposure. "Kind of a Drag" was written by Chicago-based songwriter Jim Holvay, who had been performing with a group called The Mob, and spent two weeks at the top of the "Billboard" Hot 100 in February 1967. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. The co-producers of "Kind of a Drag" were the band's first personal manager Carl Bonafede and big band leader Dan Belloc, owner of the Holiday Ballroom in Chicago. The horns on the song were arranged by Frank Tesinsky and the engineer at the first recording sessions held at Chess Records in Chicago was Ron Malo. Following this, the band's debut album, also entitled "Kind of a Drag", was released on USA Records and featured the band's early recordings.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In late 1966, keyboardist Miccolis was replaced by Larry Nestor, who stayed in the band a short time and was in turn replaced by Marty Grebb at the close of 1966. Around this time the band members were introduced to James William Guercio, formerly the bassist and road manager for Chad & Jeremy, who then signed them to a management contract with Ebbins-Guercio Associates. The Buckinghams were courted by several record labels before deciding on promotion specialist Jim Scully, who quickly got them a new contract with Columbia (CBS) Records. Guercio, who became the group's producer, continued the group's "brass-rock" approach, and the band produced four more Top-20 hits in 1967: "Don't You Care" (#6), "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" (#5), "Hey Baby (They're Playing Our Song)" (#12), and "Susan" (#11), (three of which were written by Jim Holvay and Gary Beisbier). The same year, the Buckinghams were named by "Billboard" magazine as "The Most Listened to Band in America". Severe differences occurred between the Buckinghams and Guercio, particularly the producer's decision to add a psychedelic section to the song "Susan". The song included a short portion of Charles Ives' "Central Park in the Dark" and sounded very similar to the Beatles' song "A Day in the Life", with an orchestral crescendo. Many radio stations omitted this section, since it changed the song's tempo and veered radically from the melody. But the producer had the last word, and the released version kept the psychedelic section intact. The group currently does not include the psychedelic portion in their performances.


title: The Buckinghams

text: By mid-1968, the Buckinghams had parted company with Guercio and Columbia Records assigned staff producer Jimmy Wisner to work with the group on their fourth album, "In One Ear and Gone Tomorrow". The album featured material written by Grebb, Giammarese, and Tufano. Despite the release of a new single, "Back in Love Again", they were unable to duplicate their 1967 success without Guercio, who went on to take the "brass rock" concept further with Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago. Also, a "Buckinghams Day" in Chicago was cancelled when it was learned that some of the band members were arrested for possession of illegal drugs.


title: The Buckinghams

text: By late 1968, Grebb and Fortuna had left and were replaced by keyboardist John Turner and original bassist Bachman, who had gone on to join the band Saturday's Child after leaving the Buckinghams. There were no more hits, though, and the band dissolved in early 1970. Columbia released a double compilation record of their old material in 1975 called "Made in Chicago".


title: The Buckinghams

text: After the break-up, Tufano and Giammarese formed the duo Tufano & Giammarese and recorded three albums for Lou Adler's record label, Ode Records, forming a touring band in time for their second album. Drummer John Poulos, who had secured the Ode Records recording contract for the duo, became a manager of several rock bands, including the Boyzz from Illinoizz. Poulos died of drug-related heart failure on March 26, 1980.


title: The Buckinghams

text: Later in 1980, Chicago's WLS radio programming executive John Gehron called Giammarese with an invitation to reunite the Buckinghams for Mayor Jane Byrne's ChicagoFest event in August. Giammarese, Fortuna, and Tufano appeared with drummer Tom Osfar and keyboardist John Cammelot on the Navy Pier rooftop stage. Marty Grebb declined the opportunity to join them as he was touring with the group Chicago at the time. For the next two years the trio of original members performed at selected concerts in Chicago. When Tufano decided to return to California to resume a career in film voice work in early 1983, Giammarese and Fortuna committed to tour full-time as The Buckinghams.


title: The Buckinghams

text: The 1983 Buckinghams featured an expanded group that included Giammarese, Fortuna, John Duich (guitar), Tom Taylor (keyboards), Tom Scheckel (drums, percussion), and two female singers: Laurie Beebe Lewis (vocals, keyboards), who later joined the Mamas & the Papas, and Barbara Unger (keyboards, backing vocals).


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 1984 Duich, Taylor, and Unger were dropped and Giammarese, now handling lead vocal duties, went back to playing guitar as well and Cammelot rejoined on keyboards with Lewis on vocals and supporting keyboards. The following year the Buckinghams were part of the "Happy Together 85" Tour, along with the Turtles, the Grass Roots, and Gary Lewis and the Playboys. That same year they released their comeback album "A Matter of Time" on Red Label Records which included one single promo release "Veronica", and joined the Turtles on their US "Happy Together" tour with the Grass Roots and Gary Lewis and the Playboys. By early 1986, both Lewis and Cammelot left the group and were replaced by Bob Abrams (guitar, vocals) and Bruce Soboroff (keyboards, vocals).


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 1991, Sony Music Entertainment (the present-day owner of Columbia Records) released a new greatest hits compilation, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy: A Collection". Sony Music has continued to make the Buckinghams' Columbia recordings available, as well as their recordings previously issued by USA Records.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 1996, the Buckinghams celebrated the band's 30th anniversary with a concert at The Vic Theatre in Chicago. The show was filmed and released as a video entitled "Off Their Rocker" and included DJs Dick Biondi and John Records Landecker as hosts.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 2001, the Buckinghams were part of the "Solid Gold 60s" Tour along with Tommy James, the Turtles, Gary Puckett, and the Grass Roots. PBS featured the Buckinghams on "The Sixties Pop Rock Reunion" in 2004.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In January 2005, the Buckinghams performed at the Twilight on the Prairie Ball for one of President George W. Bush's Inaugural Balls in Washington, DC. In 2007, the Buckinghams signed with national label Fuel Records to release their studio CD "Reaching Back", which included eight new original songs written by Giammarese and new recordings of five of their top hits. A second CD, "Standing Room Only" (previously released as "Live and Well"), was also released on the Fuel Label. XM Radio recorded the Buckinghams in concert for their XM Performance Series on the "60s on 6" channel. The Buckinghams' music from yesterday and today remains in regular rotation on classic rock stations in U.S. formats as well as satellite radio and streaming Internet radio stations.


title: The Buckinghams

text: The Buckinghams released their first Christmas album on the BML label, "The Joy of Christmas", in November 2008. In December 2008, they debuted the single "Have a Little Faith" on WGN-TV in Chicago.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 2009, the Buckinghams performed at the Bipartisan Illinois Agricultural Ball for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The same year, Sony reissued the Buckinghams' first three albums for sale as digital downloads as part of their Legacy Music Series.


title: The Buckinghams

text: On February 9, 2010, the Buckinghams released a DVD/CD box set, "Up Close", showing them in concert at the Star Plaza Theatre in Merrillville, Indiana.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In May 2010, Abrams and Scheckel left the Buckinghams lineup to be replaced by Dave Zane (guitars, vocals) and Bruce (Rocky) Penn (drums, percussion, backing vocals), who had played with several groups, including the Cryan' Shames for a number of years. Scheckel went on to join Paul Revere and the Raiders.


title: The Buckinghams

text: On May 20, 2010 Giammarese and Fortuna were featured in the 25th Anniversary Happy Together Tour, joining the Turtles, the Grass Roots, Micky Dolenz, and Mark Lindsay in a 20+-city tour from California to New York, celebrating the silver anniversary of the original Happy Together Tour in 1985. In July 2011, concerts began for the second Happy Together Reunion Tour that included the Buckinghams, the Turtles, the Grass Roots, Mark Lindsay, and the Association. Later in 2011, it was announced that Carl Giammarese and Nick Fortuna would join the 2012 Happy Together Tour alongside the Turtles, Micky Dolenz, the Grass Roots, and Gary Puckett.


title: The Buckinghams

text: In 2011, Giammarese completed his solo CD "Journey", the companion to his biography "Reinventing The Buckinghams: My Journey".


title: The Buckinghams

text: On October 16, 2015, the Buckinghams took part in the filming of "Cornerstones of Rock: American Garage" which aired multiple times on WTTW Chicago. "Cornerstones of Rock" was created to be a nostalgic celebration of the Chicago-area "garage bands" that rose to national prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Jim Peterik and The Ides of March served as the house band for the evening, as many original members of these popular bands returned to the concert stage to play their greatest hits. In addition to the Buckinghams, the Cornerstones line-up included the Ides of March, the Cryan' Shames, the New Colony Six, the Shadows of Knight, the McCoys, and the American Breed.


title: The Buckinghams

text: Original lead singer Tufano continues to tour as a solo act, and also appears in a Bobby Darin show he created, "As Long as I'm Singing". Former keyboards/vocals/songwriter Grebb has played with the Fabulous Rhinestones, Lovecraft (formerly H P Lovecraft), Chicago, Bonnie Raitt, the Weight Band, and Dave Mason, and has also produced CDs for independent musicians, including Peach.


title: The Buckinghams

text: Giammarese and Fortuna have continued touring with band members Soboroff, Zane, Penn, and a horn section consisting of Carlo Isabelli (trumpet), Charles Morgan (trombone), and Dan Moffett (tenor saxophone). They perform regularly to festival audiences and have played sold-out shows, such as the Westbury Music Fair, Ram's Head, the Star Plaza and others. They remain acts for casino venues throughout the country and perform the national anthem at home games of baseball teams such as the Chicago Cubs and White Sox.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Angela's Ashes is a 1999 drama film based on the memoir of the same name by Frank McCourt. An international co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, it was co-written and directed by Alan Parker, and stars Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens, and Michael Legge, the latter three playing the Young, Middle, and Older Frank McCourt, respectively.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Frank McCourt and his family live in America, and shortly after the birth of their first daughter Margaret, she dies. Frank's mother Angela slips into depression, his drunkard father Malachy Sr. leaves for several days and they are left without food. Frank and his brother Malachy Jr. get help from his neighbors, who give food to them and their twin younger brothers Eugene and Oliver. The neighbors send a letter to Angela's relatives in Ireland for money to buy tickets to return to Ireland.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: After their return, Malachy Sr. tries to collect money for his military service, but as there is no record of it he is turned away. Both of the twins die shortly after their arrival. Malachy Sr. is unable to keep a job, and squanders their money on alcohol. He is too proud to beg or to collect much needed coal from the streets.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: The McCourt family's small house is at the end of a street, and the entire street shares one lavatory outside their front door. Angela has to beg for furniture from charitable organizations while Malachy Sr. signs up for the dole. The boys come home one day to find the downstairs has badly flooded, and their parents are upstairs where their new brother Michael has been born.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Malachy Sr. berates Angela for begging for clothes and boots for the boys and tries to prove his worth as a husband and father. The boys are tormented in school for their ratty shoes, so Frank hides his. His teacher reprimands the class for bullying Frank, and for taking pleasure in each other's misfortunes. Malachy Sr. looks for work daily but his "funny manner" and northern Ireland accent make him unsuccessful. Around Easter Malachy Sr. gets a job in Limerick, at the cement factory. He spends his earnings in the pub rather than on food for his family. One night, he arrives home singing old songs about Ireland, getting the boys out of bed and making them promise to die for Ireland. He oversleeps and loses his job the next day.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: At school the boys learn how to take communion bread/wafers. They are taken to church from school and are each told to go in for a first confession. Frank sleeps in on the day of his first communion and his grandmother reacts harshly, as she tries to rectify the situation, criticising Frank and Malachy Sr. Frank is eager to "make the collection", which is when young people who've just had their first communion wander around the town in their new communion clothes so the neighbours give them sweets and money.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Frank's grandmother takes the family to hers for a communion breakfast but Frank vomits it up. His grandmother marches him back to the church to confess. As Frank misses the collection he still wants to celebrate. He manages to sneak into the cinema with his friend Mikey's help. Frank's parents sign him up for Irish dancing, which he hates. He takes the money his mother gives him for the lessons and goes to the cinema, unknown to his parents. As a cover, he makes up dances at home for them.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Angela gives birth to another baby, Alphie, and Frank's grandparents send money which Malachy Sr. wastes at the pub. Angela sends Frank to the pub to loudly announce he'd stolen the money for the baby to shame him into coming home. When he arrives to collect his father, Frank decides not to try to bring Malachy Sr. home as a man that would steal money meant for his baby is beyond help.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Frank contracts typhoid and is near death, but recovers over two months. He enjoys his time in the hospital, reading Shakespeare without interruption. However, he is crestfallen to find his father at home with Alphie, meaning that he lost another job. Frank has to repeat a year of school as he missed so much time while in hospital. A composition he writes about Jesus being born in Limerick instead of Bethlehem so impresses the school to move him back into his grade.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: As World War II breaks out, Malachy Sr. goes to work at a factory in England to support the war effort. Angela tells the boys they only have to wait a few weeks for him to send them a telegram money order, but is soon forced to beg for leftovers from the church. Frank has to work as a teenager as his father sends no money and the family needs food. He delivers coal, but has to quit when he develops conjunctivitis from the coal dust.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Two days before Christmas, Angela is forced to beg for a food voucher again after Malachy Sr. fails to return from England. The next day, he comes home but without any money for the family. Angela, Frank, and Malachy Jr. accuse him of drinking it away. On Christmas Day, he returns to London. A week later, they receive a money order telegram, but none are sent after that, and he never again returned to his family.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: The family is evicted and Frank's grandmother dies of pneumonia. They move in with Laman Griffin, who doesn't charge them rent but makes Angela cook and clean for him. Frank does well in school but wants to drop out to get a job that pays weekly so he can go to the movies every weekend. When Frank discovers Angela has been sleeping with Griffin as part of their arrangement, he has a physical altercation with Griffin, then goes to stay with his uncle Pa and aunt Aggie.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Aggie buys Frank clothes for his new job at the post office delivering telegrams. He starts a relationship with Theresa, a girl he meets on his route, but she soon dies from consumption. Frank blames himself for her death, thinking God punished her for their premarital sex. He later delivers a telegram to moneylender Mrs. Finucane, who hires him to write nonpayment letters to borrowers in arrears.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Frank's uncle buys him his first pint at the pub, and he returns home drunk. Angela witnesses his return, berating him for being like his father. Angry, he lashes out at her for sleeping with Griffin and slaps her. Frank goes to confession and the priest reassures him that Theresa is in heaven and her death wasn't a punishment.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: When Frank discovers Mrs. Finucane dead in her home, he takes all of her money and her debt ledger. He destroys the ledger and buys a ticket to America on a boat out of Cork. The night before he leaves, his family witnesses a lunar eclipse and his uncle Pa tells him it is a sign of good luck. The film ends with Frank reaching America and seeing the Statue of Liberty.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Although set in Limerick, many street scenes were filmed in Cork. For example, the 'fleas in the mattress' scene was filmed at Farren Street, Blackpool and other scenes were shot at Roche's Buildings, Lower John Street and Barrack Street.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: With an estimated $25 million budget, the film grossed $13,042,112 in the US, making it a box-office bomb.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 52%, based on reviews from 87 critics, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The site's consensus states: "In spite of its attempts to accurately record Frank McCourt's memoirs, the onscreen adaptation fails to capture any of the drama or humor of his life". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 54 out of 100, based on reviews from 32 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: Michael Legge was praised for his portrayal of the adolescent Frank. In particular, he was said to excel in his role as an innocent teenager growing up with typical coming of age rites involving sexuality, maturity and peer pressure in a Catholic Irish setting.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: The film soundtrack was composed and conducted by John Williams, and features songs by Billie Holiday and Sinéad O'Connor with narration on tracks 2, 4–15 and 17 by actor Andrew Bennett. Williams was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2000 for his score but lost to "The Red Violin", scored by John Corigliano.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: "Angela's Ashes" was originally released in the United Kingdom and Ireland on VHS and DVD format on 17 July 2000, via Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. The DVD set retained the film's original aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with Dolby Digital 5.1, and included a number of special features, including, a behind-the-scenes featurette, cast and crew interviews, commentaries by Alan Parker and Frank McCourt, and two trailers. This set was again re-issued in 2003 with identical artwork, while the only difference being the redesigning of the BBFC certificate logo, which updated in 2002. A DVD box set release was made available on 8 September 2008, which included the DVD and the original book.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: The film was additionally released within multiple sets, including a three-tape VHS set which features the film with "Billy Elliot" and "Stepmom", on 15 September 2003, and a "Back 2 Back" VHS edition with "Billy Elliot" on 16 February 2004, The set containing the film with "Billy Elliot" and "Stepmom" was released once again as part of a "3 Disc Anthology" DVD set on 2 October 2005.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: On 31 October 2016, "Angela's Ashes" received its first-ever Blu-ray release via Final Cut Entertainment. It contains a newly remastered HD transfer, with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, as well as LPMC 2.0 audio. All special features from the previous DVD releases are included, with the inclusion of a new feature, "Alan's Ashes"—an interview with Alan Parker.


title: Angela's Ashes (film)

text: In the United States and Canada, the distribution rights are held by Paramount Home Entertainment. "Angela's Ashes" was first released on VHS format, while the film was released to DVD as part of Paramount's "Widescreen Collection" on 18 July 2000, and contained a non-anamorphic-widescreen letterboxed version. A "Special Edition" VHS was made available on 5 December 2000. The DVD received a re-issue on 20 September 2017.


title: Death Game

text: Death Game (also known as The Seducers) is a 1977 American psychological thriller film directed by Peter S. Traynor, and starring Sondra Locke, Colleen Camp, and Seymour Cassel. The film follows an affluent San Francisco businessman who finds himself at the mercy of two violent, deranged women whom he unwittingly allows into his home during a rainstorm.


title: Death Game

text: Traynor, a former California real-estate financier, entered a career in filmmaking as a producer in the early 1970s, funding his projects through local investors. He purchased the script for "Death Game" to serve as his directorial debut. The film was shot primarily inside a large Los Angeles home with a small budget in approximately two weeks during 1974 with a projected release the following summer. Production was allegedly plagued with on-set disputes among the first-time director and the cast, and eventually halted due to a federal investigation into Traynor's financing methods. The theatrical release of "Death Game" was delayed nearly two years.


title: Death Game

text: Critical reception for "Death Game" has been mixed among reviewers and motion picture journalists. While some read into the plot and violence as social commentary, others rejected it as meaningless exploitation. "Death Game" made unremarkable box office returns during its limited theatrical run, but found a greater audience with its home media releases in the years that followed. The film has been remade twice, including 2015's "Knock Knock", directed by Eli Roth and starring Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo. Traynor, Locke, and Camp all took part in this film's production.


title: Death Game

text: In October 1975, George Manning, a successful San Francisco Bay Area businessman, is left home alone on his 40th birthday while his wife Karen tends to a family emergency. A thunderstorm begins that evening and George is greeted at the door by two attractive young women, drenched from the rain. The ladies, who introduce themselves as Jackson and Donna, explain to him that they intended to reach an address for a party on the other side of town when their car broke down. He invites them inside to dry off and make a call for a friend to pick them up.


title: Death Game

text: After the three chat pleasantly for a while, Jackson finds her way to a bathroom sauna. Donna eventually joins her, and George, curious about where they had gone, walks in on them bathing in the hot tub. The happily-married man is then seduced and coerced into sex with the two strangers. The following morning George awakes to find his guests cooking breakfast. Surprised that they had not left the night before, George is given a vague excuse as to why they never departed.


title: Death Game

text: It quickly becomes apparent that the girls have no intention of leaving. They become uncooperative, obnoxious, and defiant of George as they begin rummaging through the house's contents, putting on his wife's clothes, and even vandalizing the property. George, increasingly upset over their unwelcome presence, threatens to call the police. He stops when Jackson claims that the two are actually underage, and if caught he could face charges of statutory rape, a lengthy prison sentence, and the dissolution of his family life and career. After narrowly avoiding the girls being discovered by a visiting client, George attempts to contact the authorities once again before Jackson agrees that they will leave on the condition that George drive them.


title: Death Game

text: George drops the two off at a city bus stop on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge and makes the trip home that night, glad the ordeal is seemingly over. However, his relief is short-lived, as Jackson and Donna ambush him inside his home and knock him unconscious. The duo ties George up with bedsheets and subject him to physical and emotional abuse while continuing to trash the inside of the house, and painting their faces with his wife's makeup. Their sadistic and often bizarre actions escalate as the night goes on.


title: Death Game

text: After George cries for help to a grocery delivery man, the girls usher the unfortunate courier into the living room, bludgeon him, and drown him in a fish tank. George's few struggles to escape fail. George tries to reason with his captors. At one point Jackson reveals to him that her unhinged behavior is due to her own father having sex with her. The girls hold a mock trial amongst themselves to determine if George should face punishment for the supposed sexual crimes he committed the previous evening.


title: Death Game

text: At midnight, Jackson, acting as both a witness and judge, announces his guilty verdict and sentences him to death at dawn. When the six o'clock hour rolls around, Donna holds a now-exhausted George down while Jackson proceeds to carry out his execution using a large cleaver. She spares his life at the last moment and the pair finally take off, laughing maniacally. As the women stroll gleefully through the neighborhood, they stumble into the street and—not paying attention to their surroundings—are struck head-on by a speeding van.


title: Death Game

text: Literary critic John Kenneth Muir found an underlying feminist theme in "Death Game" stemming from its depiction of male infidelity and suggested immoral father-daughter relations. Muir explained that the film's narrative consistently points to this motif, including the opening sequence featuring the song "Good Old Dad," the female leads constantly calling George "daddy," and Jackson admitting to being a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Muir saw the psychotic Jackson and Donna as the story's true protagonists. He further elaborated that the pair dish out a twisted form of justice against the average family man George, who is not only being punished for his own deeds, but is also serving as a surrogate for the society that made them that way. The film's director himself stated that the film "deals with the truth <nowiki>[...]</nowiki> a reflection of today's society," even implying the physical and mental superiority of women over the opposite sex. "Men often do recognize just how vulnerable they are in the hands of a woman," Traynor said, "and that's why a lot of us put them down."


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" was produced by independent company First American Films and was the directorial debut of Peter S. Traynor, a California real-estate magnate and former life insurance salesman who entered the motion picture industry as a producer only a few years earlier. In 1972, Traynor founded Centuar Films and partnered with director-producer Mark Lester to form the separate Lester-Traynor Films. As with Traynor's real-estate developments, "Death Game" and his two previous movies, "Steel Arena" and "Truck Stop Women", were funded largely using limited partnerships with California physicians as investors. "Death Game" was one of several Traynor movies in simultaneous production alongside the features "Bogard", "The Ultimate Thrill", and "Dr. Shagetz". Traynor also served as a producer of "Death Game" with Larry Spiegel.


title: Death Game

text: The original script for "Death Game" was written by Jo Heims, an associate of Clint Eastwood. Traynor purchased the script (then titled "Mrs. Manning's Weekend") from Heims and eventually had it rewritten by Anthony Overman and Michael Ronald Ross. Sondra Locke was attracted to the project after being told by her agent about a role for a "bad girl", a part she had not often played. 1944-born Locke was almost twice as old as the character; she had been lying about her age for years and projected a younger woman's personality in public. "Death Game" was one of the earliest film roles for Colleen Camp, who had recently left college and appeared mostly in small television roles and commercials up to that point. Actor Al Lettieri was originally set to play George Manning before the role went to Seymour Cassel, who was, in reality, only nine years older than Locke, while Locke was nine years older than Camp. Comic Marty Allen was also reported to have a cameo as the delivery man early in the movie's development.


title: Death Game

text: David Worth served as the film's cinematographer and editor. Jack Fisk was the production designer, while his wife, actress Sissy Spacek, worked as a set dresser. A young Bill Paxton also worked as a set decorator on "Death Game." The musical score was composed by Jimmie Haskell and features two original vocal themes: "Good Old Dad," with lyrics by Iris Rainer Dart and performed by the Ron Hicklin Singers; and "We're Home," with lyrics by Guy Hemric and performed by Maxine Weldon.


title: Death Game

text: The production budget for "Death Game" was $150,000 according to Worth. Filming took place in 1974, at which time the movie was known by numerous working titles including "Mrs. Manning's Weekend", "Mrs. Manning's Holiday", "Weekend of Terror", and "Handful of Hours". Principal photography took between thirteen and fifteen days. Traynor chose a large home in Hancock Park, Los Angeles, as a primary filming location, which the crew rented for $1,000 per week. Both Locke and Worth described the filming process for "Death Game" as extremely tumultuous. Locke claimed the original script for film was much more suspenseful and less exploitive, but that Traynor attempted to interject more comedic elements into the story. Locke criticized the director's lack of leadership, recounting he "didn't have any idea what he needed to be, was, or should be doing." She claimed his direction often consisted of simply telling the two lead actresses to "break something, or eat something". This gradually led to Cassel and Locke directing their own performances, as well as that of the less-experienced Camp. Tensions on set were high between Traynor and Cassel, as the actor constantly threatened to leave the production. After one scene involving the two female antagonists dumping large amounts of food on his character, Cassel was allegedly so angry he nearly hit the director. He also reportedly refused to loop his character's dialogue once filming wrapped, leaving Worth to dub the voice of George Manning in post-production.


title: Death Game

text: After the film's first director of photography was fired, Worth was brought on board as a replacement. Though initially reluctant due to the seemingly chaotic production, Worth took the job after learning that the cast included Locke and Cassel, both of whom had been nominated for an Academy Award for previous works. Worth shot most scenes in anamorphic widescreen using a 35 mm Panavison Panaflex handheld camera. Due to a limited budget and tight schedule, Worth found it more effective to simply sit down in a nearby chair to shoot close-ups of the actors rather than arduously set up a tripod each time. He also had to underexpose scenes featuring Locke because of her extremely fair complexion. The lead actress has expressed appreciation for Worth's photography of her in "Death Game". During the last days of filming, Locke suffered a black eye off the set and had to have her injury concealed by giving her character a large amount of makeup in the film's later scenes.


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" was originally set for an early summer 1975 release. However, the film was incomplete by this time and was among several studio projects put on hold due to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigating Traynor's financing methods. After settling with a consent decree several months later, Traynor sought help from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to finish "Death Game". The company granted the director $100,000 and helped secure Levitt-Pickman as the film's distributor. Editing took place over a three-week period, with Traynor and Worth working together some 15 hours per day, seven days a week to completion.


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" premiered theatrically at the Northway Shopping Center cinema in Colonie, New York, on April 13, 1977, in what Traynor described as a "test market" release. Thanks to the financial aid from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and distribution handling by Levitt-Pickman, "Death Game" was considered by Traynor as "a safe bet for drive-ins and as an urban cult attraction". The film subsequently opened in Fresno, California on June 3, 1977. According to "Variety" and "BoxOffice" reports, the film's limited theatrical run from May to October 1977 boasted "poor" to "fair" ticket earnings.


title: Death Game

text: Critical response to "Death Game" has been mixed dating back to its original 1977 release. At the time of the film's debut in New York, Doug Delisle of "The Times Record" recognized the potential for contrasting reactions in moviegoers, with viewers either possibly seeing it as "a relentlessly painful and violent film with no purpose, no reason for being" or as "a statement about man's currently violent place in society" and "the inevitability of fate, the inability of man to isolate himself from a hostile environment." Delisle labeled "Death Game" as an "antithesis of much of the rest of today's cinematic gore", noting that the film strives to depict pain that is personal rather than physical. "Traynor's violence is not of the slick, exploitative variety," he summarized. "He doesn't show volumes of blood staining the celluloid with potential box office bucks."


title: Death Game

text: Many journalists praised the film's structure and acting. Delisle stated that even with several plot holes, the film is "engrossing" and "extremely well-made" despite its modest budget, and that all three lead actors present "splendidly vivid and realistic portrayals" of their characters. Muir echoed this, proclaiming "Death Game" as "a riveting, sexual psycho-thriller, and well-directed and acted", finding it to have "the same discomforting adrenaline surge one feels in "The Last House on the Left" or "Fatal Attraction"". "BoxOffice" found the plot to have a "fascinating quality", whether based on true events or not. Rich Osmond of "Cashiers du Cinemart" stated that although he found much of the narrative "laughable and inept," he credited the lead actresses for conveying "genuinely creepy" moments in the film's second half. Others responded much more negatively to "Death Game." Critic Leonard Maltin denounced the plot entirely, calling it as an "unpleasant (and ultimately ludicrous) film about two maniac lesbians who—for no apparent reason—tease, titillate, and torture a man in his own house." "Variety" similarly dismissed it as "another grisly try at horror exploitation and, as such, looms as possibly a fast-turn-over item in a situation afflicted with the severest case of product shortage."


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" found somewhat greater prominence on cable television and in video rental stores in the years that followed. It received domestic VHS releases in the US by United Entertainment under the title "The Seducers" beginning in 1981. The distribution rights then went to VCI Entertainment and the film was re-released on VHS in 1984 and on DVD beginning in 2004. Finally, distribution was acquired by Grindhouse Releasing around 2010. "Death Game" has been given international distribution, such as a UK release from Brent Walker and an Australian release by Intervision Video. In 2022, the film was re-released on Blu-ray by Grindhouse Releasing in its original, anamorphic widescreen format.


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" has been remade twice. It was first adapted into the 1980 Spanish film "Vicious and Nude" (Spanish: "Viciosas al Desnudo"), directed by Manuel Esteba and starred Jack Taylor, Adriana Vega, and Eva Lyberten. This release's sex scenes and violence are much more explicit than in the 1977 original.


title: Death Game

text: "Death Game" was remade again as 2015's "Knock Knock", directed by Eli Roth and starred Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo. Some of the principal cast and crew of the 1977 film participated in the production of "Knock Knock". Peter S. Traynor, Larry Spiegel, Sondra Locke, and Colleen Camp were all credited as executive producers. Anthony Overman and Michael Ronald Ross are credited with the story. Camp also has a cameo in "Knock Knock".


title: Clock tower

text: Clock towers are a specific type of structure which house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another building. Some other buildings also have clock faces on their exterior but these structures serve other main functions.


title: Clock tower

text: Clock towers are a common sight in many parts of the world with some being iconic buildings. One example is the Elizabeth Tower in London (usually called "Big Ben", although strictly this name belongs only to the bell inside the tower).


title: Clock tower

text: There are many structures which may have clocks or clock faces attached to them and some structures have had clocks added to an existing structure. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat a structure is defined as a building if at least fifty percent of its height is made up of floor plates containing habitable floor area. Structures that do not meet this criterion, are defined as towers. A clock tower historically fits this definition of a tower and therefore can be defined as any tower specifically built with one or more (often four) clock faces and that can be either freestanding or part of a church or municipal building such as a town hall. Not all clocks on buildings therefore make the building into a clock tower.


title: Clock tower

text: The mechanism inside the tower is known as a turret clock. It often marks the hour (and sometimes segments of an hour) by sounding large bells or chimes, sometimes playing simple musical phrases or tunes. Some clock towers were previously built as Bell towers and then had clocks added to them. As these structures fulfil the definition of a tower they can be considered to be clock towers.


title: Clock tower

text: Although clock towers are today mostly admired for their aesthetics, they once served an important purpose. Before the middle of the twentieth century, most people did not have watches, and prior to the 18th century even home clocks were rare. The first clocks did not have faces, but were solely striking clocks, which sounded bells to call the surrounding community to work or to prayer. They were therefore placed in towers so the bells would be audible for a long distance. Clock towers were placed near the centres of towns and were often the tallest structures there. As clock towers became more common, the designers realized that a dial on the outside of the tower would allow the townspeople to read the time whenever they wanted.


title: Clock tower

text: The use of clock towers dates back to antiquity. The earliest clock tower was the Tower of the Winds in Athens which featured eight sundials and was created in the 1st century BC during the period of Roman Greece. In its interior, there was also a water clock (or clepsydra), driven by water coming down from the Acropolis.


title: Clock tower

text: In Song dynasty China, an astronomical clock tower was designed by Su Song and erected at Kaifeng in 1088, featuring a liquid escapement mechanism. In England, a clock was put up in a clock tower, the medieval precursor to Big Ben, at Westminster, in 1288; and in 1292 a clock was put up in Canterbury Cathedral. The oldest surviving turret clock formerly part of a clock tower in Europe is the Salisbury Cathedral clock, completed in 1306; and another clock put up at St. Albans, in 1326, 'showed various astronomical phenomena'.


title: Clock tower

text: Al-Jazari of the Artuqid dynasty in Upper Mesopotamia constructed an elaborate clock and described it in his "Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices" in 1206. It was about high, and had multiple functions alongside timekeeping. It included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar paths, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour. It was possible to re-program the length of day and night daily in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases. Al-Jazari's castle clock is considered to be the earliest programmable analog computer.


title: Clock tower

text: Some clock towers have become famous landmarks. Prominent examples include Elizabeth Tower built in 1859, which houses the Great Bell (generally known as "Big Ben") in London, the tower of Philadelphia City Hall, the Rajabai Tower in Mumbai, the Spasskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin, the Torre dell'Orologio in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy, and the Zytglogge clock tower in the Old City of Bern, Switzerland.


title: Clock tower

text: The tallest freestanding clock tower in the world is the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower (Old Joe) at the University of Birmingham in Birmingham, United Kingdom. The tower stands at tall and was completed in 1908. The clock tower of Philadelphia City Hall was part of the tallest building in the world from 1894, when the tower was topped out and the building partially occupied, until 1908.


title: Clock tower

text: Taller buildings have had clock faces added to their existing structure such as the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, with a clock added in 2000. The building has a roof height of , and an antenna height of . The NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building in Tokyo, with a clock added in 2002, has a roof height of , and an antenna height of .


title: Clock tower

text: The Abraj Al Bait, a hotel complex in Mecca constructed in 2012, has the largest and highest clock face on a building in the world, with its Makkah Royal Clock Tower having an occupied height of , and a tip height of . The tower has four clock faces, two of which are in diameter, at about high.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentinian journal "Sur", May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author's discovery of the mysterious and possibly fictional country of Uqbar and its legend of Tlön, a mythical world whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects and nouns, as well as Orbis Tertius, the secret organization that created both fictional locations. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5,600 words), the story is a work of speculative fiction.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The story alludes to many leading intellectual figures both in Argentina and in the world at large, and takes up a number of themes more typical of a novel of ideas. Most of the ideas engaged are in the areas of metaphysics, language, epistemology, and literary criticism.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The story unfolds as a first-person narrative and contains many references (see below) to real people, locations, literary works and philosophical concepts, besides some fictional or ambiguous ones. It is divided into two parts and a postscript. Events and facts are revealed roughly in the order that the narrator becomes aware of them or their relevance. The timing of events in Borges's story is approximately from 1935 to 1947; the plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminating in the postscript, set in 1947.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Borges and his friend and collaborator, Adolfo Bioy Casares, are developing their next book in a country house near Buenos Aires, in 1940. In an observation, Bioy quotes that "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men" from a heresiarch of a land named Uqbar. Borges, impressed with the "memorable" sentence, asks for its source. Bioy replies that he had read it in the chapter about Uqbar of the "Anglo-American Cyclopaedia", "a literal if inadequate reprint" of the 1902 edition of "Encyclopædia Britannica". They check the book and are unable to find the said chapter, to Bioy's surprise. The two then search for the name 'Uqbar' in numerous atlases and other encyclopedias, trying different alternative name forms, to no avail.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The following day, Bioy tells Borges he has found the chapter they were looking for in a different reprint of the same encyclopedia. The chapter, although brief and full of names unfamiliar to Borges and Bioy, entices their curiosity. It describes Uqbar as an obscure region, located in Iraq or Asia Minor, with an all-fantastic literature taking place in the mythical worlds of Mlejnas and Tlön. Afterwards, they keep searching for Uqbar in other sources, but are unable to find any mention.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The engineer Herbert Ashe, an English friend of Borges' father with a peculiar interest in duodecimal systems, dies of an aneurysm rupture. Borges inherits a packet containing a book, which was left by Ashe in a pub. That book is revealed to be the eleventh volume of an English-language encyclopedia entirely devoted to Tlön, one of the worlds in which Uqbar's legends are set. The book contains two oval blue stamps with the words Orbis Tertius inscribed in blue. From that point, as Borges reads the tome, part two comprehensively describes and discusses Tlön's culture, history, languages and philosophy.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The people of the imaginary Tlön hold an extreme form of Berkeley's subjective idealism, denying the reality of the material world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts." One of the imagined language families of Tlön lacks nouns, being centered instead in impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic adverbial affixes. Borges lists a Tlönic equivalent of "The moon rose above the water": "hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö", meaning literally "upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned." (Andrew Hurley, one of Borges' translators, wrote a fiction in which he says that the words "axaxaxas mlö" "can only be pronounced as the author's cruel, mocking laughter".) In another language family of Tlön, "the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective", which in combinations of two or more forms nouns: "moon" becomes "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orange-of-the-sky".


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: In the anachronistic postscript set in 1947, Borges remembers events that occurred in the last years.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: In 1941, the world and the narrator have learned, through the emergence of a letter, about the true nature of Tlön. It goes that a "benevolent secret society" was formed "one night in Lucerne or in London", in the 17th century, and had Berkeley among its members. That group, a society of intellectuals named "Orbis Tertius", studied "hermetic studies, philanthropy and the cabala" (an allusion to societies such as the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians), but its main purpose was to create a country: Uqbar. It gradually became clear that such work would have to be carried by numerous generations, so each master agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work to perpetuate an hereditary arrangement. The society is eventually persecuted, but reemerges in the United States two centuries thereafter. The American "eccentric" millionaire Ezra Buckley, one of the members of the restored sect, finds its undertaking too modest, proposing that their creation be of an entire world instead of just a country. He also adds that an entire encyclopedia about this world—named Tlön—must be written and that the whole scheme "have no pact with that impostor Jesus Christ." The new "Orbis Tertius", composed of three hundred collaborators, proceeds to conclude the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. An explanation of Uqbar is not explicitly given in the story.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: By 1942, Tlönian objects began to inexplicably appear in the real world. One of the first instances in which this occurs is when Princess Faucigny Lucinge received, via mail, a vibrating compass with a Tlönian scripture. Another instance is witnessed by Borges himself: a drunk man, shortly after dying, dropped coins among which a small but extremely heavy shining metal cone appeared. It is suggested that these occurrences may have been forgeries, but yet products of a secret science and technology.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: By 1944, all forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön have been discovered and published in a library in Memphis, Tennessee. The material becomes accessible worldwide and immensely influential on Earth's culture, science and languages. By the time Borges concludes the story, presumably in 1947, the world is gradually becoming Tlön. Borges then turns to an obsession of his own: a translation of Sir Thomas Browne's "Urn Burial" into Spanish.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Through the vehicle of fantasy or speculative fiction, this story playfully explores several philosophical questions and themes. These include, above all, an effort by Borges to imagine a world (Tlön) where the 18th century philosophical subjective idealism of George Berkeley is viewed as common sense and "the doctrine of materialism" is considered a heresy, a scandal, and a paradox. Through describing the languages of Tlön, the story also plays with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (also called "linguistic relativism")—the epistemological question of how language influences what thoughts are possible. The story also contains several metaphors for the way ideas influence reality. This last theme is first explored cleverly, by way of describing physical objects being willed into existence by the force of imagination, but later turns darker, as fascination with the idea of Tlön begins to distract people from paying adequate attention to the reality of Earth.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived. (Berkeley, a philosopher and, later, a bishop in the Protestant Church of Ireland, resolved that question to his own satisfaction by saying that the omnipresent perception of God ensures that objects continue to exist outside of personal or human perception.) Berkeley's philosophy privileges perceptions over any notion of the "thing in itself." Immanuel Kant accused Berkeley of going so far as to deny objective reality.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: In the imagined world of Tlön, an exaggerated Berkeleyan idealism "without God" passes for common sense. The Tlönian recognizes perceptions as primary and denies the existence of any underlying reality. At the end of the main portion of the story, immediately before the postscript, Borges stretches this toward its logical breaking point by imagining that, "Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater" by continuing to perceive it. Besides commenting on Berkeley's philosophy, this and other aspects of Borges's story can be taken as a commentary on the ability of ideas to influence reality. For example, in Tlön there are objects known as "hrönir" that arise when two different people find the "same" lost object in different places.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Borges imagines a Tlönite working his way out of the problem of solipsism by reasoning that if all people are actually aspects of one being, then perhaps the universe is consistent because that one being is consistent in his imagining. This is, effectively, a near-reconstruction of the Berkeleyan God: perhaps not omnipresent, but bringing together all perceptions that do, indeed, occur.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: This story is not the only place where Borges engages with Berkeleyan idealism. In the world of Tlön, as in Borges's essay "New refutation of time" (1947), there is (as Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid comment) a "denial of space, time, and the individual I." This worldview does not merely "bracket off" objective reality, but also parcels it separately into all its successive moments. Even the continuity of the individual self is open to question.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: When Borges writes "The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth or even an approximation to it: they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature," he can be seen either as anticipating the extreme relativism that underlies some postmodernism or simply as taking a swipe at those who take metaphysics too seriously.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: In the context of the imagined world of Tlön, Borges describes a school of literary criticism that arbitrarily assumes that two works are by the same person and, based on that, deduces things about the imagined author. This is similar to the ending of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", in which Borges's narrator suggests that a new perspective can be opened by treating a book as though it were written by a different author.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The story also plays with the theme of the love of books in general, and of encyclopedias and atlases in particular—books that are each themselves, in some sense, a world.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Like many of Borges's works, the story challenges the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It mentions several quite real historical human beings (himself, his friend Bioy Casares, Thomas de Quincey, et al.) but often attributes fictional aspects to them; the story also contains many fictional characters and others whose factuality may be open to question.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" also engages a number of other related themes. The story begins and ends with issues of reflection, replication, and reproduction—both perfect and imperfect—and the related issue of the power of language and ideas to make or remake the world.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: At the start of the story, we have an "unnerving" and "grotesque" mirror reflecting the room, a "literal if inadequate" (and presumably plagiarized) reproduction of the "Encyclopædia Britannica", an apt misquotation by Bioy Casares, and the issue of whether one should be able to trust whether the various copies of a single book will have the same content. At the end Borges is working on a "tentative translation" of an English-language work into Spanish, while the power of the ideas of "a scattered dynasty of solitaries" remakes the world in the image of Tlön.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Along the way we have stone mirrors; the idea of reconstructing an entire encyclopedia of an imaginary world based on a single volume; the analogy of that encyclopedia to a "cosmos" governed by "strict laws"; a worldview in which our normal notions of "thing" are rejected, but "ideal objects abound, invoked and dissolved momentarily, according to poetic necessity"; the universe conceived as "the handwriting of a minor god to communicate with a demon" or a "code system... in which not all symbols have meaning"; "hrönir", duplicates of objects called into existence by ignorance or hope, and where "those of the eleventh degree have a purity of form that the originals do not possess"; and Ezra Buckley's wish "to demonstrate to a nonexistent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world."


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Borges also mentions in passing the duodecimal system (as well as others). This ties into his description of Tlön's arithmetic, which emphasizes indefinite numbers, and holds that a number does not actually have any value or independent existence until it is counted/named. However, some may see the reference to the duodecimal system as inherently refuting of the changeability of things due to nomenclature—a number may be renamed under a different counting schema, but the underlying value will always remain the same.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: It is by no means simple to sort out fact and fiction within this story. The picture is further complicated by the fact that other authors (both in print and on the web) have chosen to join Borges in his game and write about one or another fictional aspect of this story either as if it were non-fiction or in a manner that could potentially confuse the unwary reader. Two online examples are the Italian-language website "La Biblioteca di Uqbar", which treats Tlön itself as duly fictional, but writes as if the fictional Silas Haslam's entirely imaginary "History of the Land Called Uqbar" were a real work.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: As a result, simply finding a reference to a person or place from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in a context seemingly unrelated to Borges's story is not enough to be confident that the person or place is real. See, for example, the discussion below of the character Silas Haslam.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: There in fact exists an "Anglo-American Encyclopedia", which is a plagiarism, differently paginated, of the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia, and in which the 46th volume is "TOT-UPS", ending on p. 917 with Upsala, and followed by Ural–Altaic in the next volume; Uqbar would fall in between. In the "11th" edition of the "Britannica", Borges's favorite, there is an article in between these on "Ur"; which may, in some sense, therefore "be" Uqbar. Different articles in the 11th edition mention that "Ur", as the name of a city, means simply ""the" city", and that "Ur" is also the aurochs, or the evil god of the Mandaeans. Borges may be punning on the sense of "primaeval" here with his repeated use of "Ursprache", or on the story's own definition of "ur" in one of Tlön's languages as "a thing produced by suggestion, an object elicited by hope".


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Uqbar in the story is "doubly" fictional: even within the world of the story it turns out to be a fictional place. The fictitious entry described in the story furnishes deliberately meager indications of Uqbar's location: "Of the fourteen names which figured in the geographical part, we only recognized three – Khorasan, Armenia, Erzerum – interpolated in the text in an ambiguous way." Armenia and Erzerum lie in the eastern highlands of Asia Minor (in and near modern Turkey, perhaps corresponding to Urartu), while Khorasan is in northeastern Iran, though there is also a Horasan in eastern Turkey. However, it was said to have cited an equally nonexistent German-titled book – "Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien" ("Legible and valuable observations over the Uqbar land in Asia Minor") – whose title claims unambiguously that Uqbar was in Asia Minor.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The boundaries of Uqbar were described using equally nonexistent reference points; for instance, "the lowlands of Tsai Khaldun and the Axa Delta marked the southern frontier". This would suggest that the rivers of Borges' Uqbar should rise in highlands to the north; in fact, the mountainous highlands of eastern Turkey are where not one but two Zab Rivers rise, the Great Zab and the Lesser Zab. They run a couple of hundred miles south into the Tigris.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: The only points of Uqbar's history mentioned relate to religion, literature, and craft. It was described as the home of a noted heresiarch, and the scene of religious persecutions directed against the orthodox in the thirteenth century; fleeing the latter, its orthodox believers built obelisks in their southerly place of exile, and made mirrors – seen by the heresiarch as abominable – of stone. Crucially for the story, Uqbar's "epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön."


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Although the culture of Uqbar described by Borges is fictional, there are two real places with similar names. These are:


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: "Tsai Khaldun" is undoubtedly a tribute to the great historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in Andalusia for a while; his history focuses on North Africa and was probably a major source for Borges. Additionally, "tsai" most likely comes from Turkish "çay" which is an uncommon word for river.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: Other places named in the story – Khorasan, Armenia, and Erzerum in the Middle East, and various locations in Europe and the Americas – are real. The "Axa Delta", mentioned in the same context as "Tsai Khaldun", appears to be fictional.


title: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

text: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" formed part of a 1941 collection of stories called "" ("The Garden of Forking Paths").