text: Devotees can take part in two special rituals that are conducted in the temple. One is the Nithya kalyanam (regular marriage) of the deity which is conducted every day. The other one is the Swarnapushpa archana (worship with golden flowers). It is conducted along with the morning worship rituals on every Thursday. Other notable rituals of similar nature are the Sahasranama archana (recital of thousand names), Garuda seva, and cow worship to name a few.


title: Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha temple, Simhachalam

text: Majority of the donations made to the Simhachalam temple are related to the conduction of festivals. The festivals are referred to with the name utsavas. Except for Kumara Punnami, almost all the utsavas are celebrated even today. The utsavas are divided into two categories: those governed by the "Agama" texts and the ones regulated by the customs and traditions ("sishtachara"). The performances and festivals are also classified into daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and annual ones. These are meant for the material and spiritual progress of humans apart from their yogakshema (well-being).


text: The festivals celebrated in Simhachalam have an influence of the Dravida Sampradaya, the customs followed in Tamil Nadu. The influence is observed in the way the deities are referred to as, and the usage of the word 'Thiru' for few things connected with the temple and its practices. Also, the celebrations take place at a time governed by the Suryamaana (sun-centric) system followed in Tamil Nadu, unlike that of Andhra Pradesh which follows Chaandramaana (lunar-centric) system. Kalyanotsava (celestial marriage) and Chandanotsava (sandalwood festival) are the two most important annual utsavas celebrated in the temple among others.


text: Kalyanotsava, the annual celestial marriage of Varaha Narasimha, is celebrated on the 11th day of the first quarter of the Indian lunar Chaitra month. This utsava is celebrated for five days. This utsava is not mentioned in any inscriptions of the temple. However, an inscription dated 1401 AD records the gift of a flag staff named the Garudaroha Kamba for celebrating the Divya mahotsavas (sacred key festivals). The gift was made on the fifth day of the bright fortnight of the Chaitra month. For the same reason, Kalyanotsava is considered as the mahotsava of Simhachalam. Also, the principal items used for mahotsavas in other South Indian Hindu temples are utilised for this marriage event. The Kalyanotsava begins with hoisting of the Garudadhwaja (flag of Garuda).


text: Kalyanotsava resembles the weddings seen in Hindu families. The procedure of this utsava consists of the following events in succession: Ankurarpanam (the formal start), Rathotsava (chariot ride festival), Avabhruta snana (purification ceremony), Bhaktotsava (rewarding a devotee), and sayana seva (sleeping ritual). Ankurarpanam happens on the 14th day; Brahma and the eight guardians of the directions are invoked by chanting hymns and sowing nine kinds of seeds in specially-made earthen pots. The priests make the mahasankalpa (great resolve). To mark this, they tie threads made of Kusha grass to their wrists and to those of the deities'. Preliminaries of the Kalyanotsava begin on the nightfall of the 15th day. Baliharana is performed not only in the temple but also extends over the entire village on the hill to appease the deities. Before entering the marriage hall, the deities are taken round the village on a ratha (temple car) pulled by devotees. This event is known as Rathotsava. The deities enter the marriage hall at around 10:00 pm and the marriage of Varaha Narasimha and his consorts is performed.


text: From the 12th day, the daily worship is performed in the usual day. Religious discourses on sacred Hindu texts take place in the morning. In the night, musical, recital and other similar entertainment activities are performed by scholars. The next day, priests invoke the guardians of directions and selected hymns are chanted. Purnahuti (last sacrificial rite) is offered to Agni, the fire god on the last day. After conducting the purification ceremony at Gangadhara, Bhaktotsava is celebrated. Bhaktotsava is celebrated by reciting the legends of Thirumangai (one of the 12 Alvars) in Telugu language. The Garudadhwaja is unhoisted to signify the end of Kalyanotsava. On the sixth day, the Telugu work "Lakshmi Narayana Samvadam", which is about a game of wit between Vishnu and Lakshmi, is read aloud. After its completion, the deities are put to bed by performing sayana seva.


text: Chandanotsava (sandalwood festival), also known as Chandan Yatra, is the most important festival celebrated in the temple. It is celebrated on the festival day of Akshaya Tritiya (April – May) in accordance to the temple's legend. On this day, the Sandalwood paste, commonly referred to as Chandanam, covering the moolavar throughout the year is removed. As a result, devotees can see the original form of the deity's idol for 12 hours once in the whole year.


text: Chandanam is applied to the moolavar on four days in a year: on Akshaya Tritiya and full moon days of the Vaisakha, Jyeshta, and Ashadha months. Every time, four "manugus" of Chandanam is applied. The sandalwood paste that covers the deity is removed early in the morning at 4:00 am. The prayers and abhisheka are completed by 6:00 am after which the devotees are allowed to enter the sanctum to see the original form of the deity's idol.


text: The evening ritual begins with a number of bathing services to the moolavar; the prominent ones are Chandanabhisheka (abhisheka with water mixed with sandalwood powder) and Sahasrakalasabhisheka (abhisheka with water from thousand metal pots). All the three food offerings (Balabhoga, Rajabhoga, and night offering) are served to the deity at a time to compensate their omission during the day. This festival was observed elaborately in the ancient days and at least 40 inscriptions record the gifts made by various people on this occasion.


text: Narasimha Jayanti is celebrated on the fourteenth day of the first half of the Vaisakha month (Vaisakha Suddha Chaturdasi). As Vishnu manifested as Narasimha from a pillar in the evening of this day to save Prahlada, the celebrations are held in the twilight. An inscription dated 1287 AD recorded the arrangements made by Raghavanayaka and his grandson for the food offerings to the deity for this day. Another one dated 1356 AD notes a donation of 20 ganda madas on Vaisakha Suddha Chaturdasi for food offerings. The celebrations commence at around 6:00 pm. Most of the rituals carried out in the sanctum are the same as that of an ordinary day. However, the Rajabhoga is served late in the evening. Respite is given after the sacred bath and selected chapters of the temple's legend related to the manifestation of Narasimha are read out. The utsava idol of the deity is placed on a special prepared seat in the assembly hall throughout the event.


text: The ten day Dussehra festival is celebrated as Navaratrotsava (Festival of nine nights) with Vijayadashami being the last day. These occur in the month of Ashvin and are conducted for the glory of the principal goddess Lakshmi. For the first nine days of the month, special rituals are carried out in Lakshmi's shrine in the temple. The utsava idol of the goddess, referred to as Chaturbhuja Thayar, is taken round the temple and is placed on a seat in the assembly hall. Sri Sukta is read aloud while performing a sacred bath to the deity. This is then followed by Pushpapuja (flower worship) and final offering. On the last day, Shami tree (prosopis cineraria) is worshipped and the deity is taken around the village on the hill. Elephant vehicle is used for the same and it marks the end of the celebrations.


text: Kamadahana (Burning of desire) occurs on the full moon day in the month of Phalguna. It is considered as an auxiliary festival (not specified by ancient texts) of the temple. Followers of Sri Vaishnavism consider Kamadahana as a self-purification ceremony; it bears no relation with the legend of Shiva burning Kamadeva to ashes. Dolotsava (swing ritual) is performed as a prelude to Kamadahana on the same day. It is celebrated to mark the death of the demon Holika. The importance given to this festival shows the influence of Orissan culture in Simhachalam.


text: Dolotsava starts in the afternoon as the deity's utsava idol is brought to the garden located at the foot of the hill. The deity is made to occupy a special seat and red powder is sprinkled on him as the priests chant the hymns. This procedure is referred to as Churnotsavam. The deity is then placed on the swing and are moved to and fro in a ceremonial way. The Kamadahana ceremony begins at 8:00 pm at a small hut built near the entrance of the temple. The hut houses the deity as the priests conduct a fire ritual. They offer sacrifices in an elaborate manner to burn every aspect of desire. The hut is then burnt, symbolically representing the annihilation of Kama (desire). This ceremony is one of the important utsavas conducted in the temple.


text: Krishna Janmashtami is an important utsava in the temple which celebrates the birth of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. It occurs on the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Sravana month. An inscription dated 1233 AD records a gift of 100 cows to provide milk to the temple's deity from that year's Janmashtami onwards. The utsava idol of Andal is taken round the temple and then made to occupy an ivory throne. After completing the bathing formalities and prayers, the chapter related to Krishna's birth in "Bhagavata Purana" is read aloud along with few sections of the "Dravida Prabandha".


text: To glorify the pranks Krishna made in his childhood, Utlotsava (basket festival) is celebrated. For the purpose, a basket with a kalasa and a coconut is tied near the precincts of the temple. Young people are challenged to break the basket which keeps eluding them. At the end of the festival, milk offered to the deity is distributed among the devotees. As the temple's practices are influenced by the Dravida Sampradaya, Utlotsava is celebrated a day after Janmashtami. It differs from the tradition of Telugu people, who celebrate Utlotsava as a part of Janmashtami on the same day.


text: Karthika Deepavali is a festival of lights celebrated on the full moon day of Karthika month. On this occasion, an array of innumerable oil lamps are used to decorate the temple. An inscription dated 1270 AD records Chittana Gopala's gift of 50 cows, two akhandadipas (perpetual lamps) and stands supporting them. Another one dated 1278 AD records a gift of 47 cows by Allada Nayaka. Festival begins in the evening. 12 earthen containers with oil and wick are placed on a mandala (zone). Eight of the twelve lamps are dedicated to the guardians of the directions. The remaining four are dedicated to Brahma, Narasimha, Shesha and Garuda. These four lamps are placed at the cardinal points of the temple.


text: In the last phase, a hut made of dried plantain leaves is erected. The utsava idol is taken around the temple and brought to the hut where fire worship takes place. Incense and camphor are offered to the deity and the hut is burnt. Amidst the recital of hymns, the deity is taken round the burning hut thrice and is taken back to the temple. However, there is no epigraphical evidence available in the temple which specifies the way this festival is celebrated.


text: Giripradakshina is an annual festival celebrated on the full moon day of the Ashadha month. It is based on the custom that the devotees can receive Narasimha's blessings by circumambulating around the hill on which he is seated. Devotees, majority of them hailing from the countryside, observe a fast on the day and offer pradakshinas to the hill. They cover a distance of and pay a visit to the sanctum after which they have dinner. Those who cannot afford to walk around the hill offer 108 pradakshinas in the temple. Another similar festival in Simhachalam is Grama pradakshina, where the utsava idol is taken to the villages nearby in a procession. An inscription dated 1242 AD records provision by Purushottama Nayaka for conducting this festival. Grama pradakshina is believed to be based on superstitions; people hoped that the utsava idol's entry would bring prosperity to the village and its inmates.


text: The minor festivals of the temple include Vaarotsavas (weekly festivals), Pakshotsavas (fortnightly festivals), Masotsavas (monthly festivals). There are two specific phases in these festivals: the Thiruveedhi festival where the utsava idol is taken on a procession and the performance of the appropriate service to the deity. These festivals also include the ones performed during the Grahanakalas (eclipses), Nakshatrotsavas (star festivals), Sankranthi (selstices) and Vishuvas (equinexes). The Pakshotsavas are held usually on the eleventh day (Ekadashi) of the two fortnights of every month. Many inscriptions have recorded the donations by various people to the temple on the occasion of Ekadashi days. The most important one among the Pakshotsavas is the Jalasayana Ekadashi. It is believed that Vishnu retires to sleep on the serpent bed for four months, starting from that day (the 11th day of the former fortnight of Ashadha) until Uttana Dwadasi (the 12th day of the former fortnight of Karthika).


text: Every month, special festivals are conducted in honour of the deity when one of the few auspicious nakshatras (stars) appear, which are known as Nakshatrotsavas. Vaishnavites consider Mrigashira, Punarvasu, Uttara and Sravana very auspicious among the 27 nakshatras. Sankaramanas, the festivals corresponding to the movement of sun in the heaven, are celebrated in the temple. Makar Sankranti and Karthika Sankranti are the major ones, followed by the relatively minor Vishnu Sankranti. Makaraveta (crocodile hunt) is celebrated a day after Makar Sankranthi. In the temple tank, the scenario of the Hindu legend Gajendra Moksha is recreated with the help of a mock crocodile hunt by the utsava idol. Teppotsavam (floating festival) is celebrated at the end of the Pausha month.


text: In addition, Simhachalam celebrates two annual festivals: Dhanurmasotsava and Adhyayanotsava. Dhanurmasotsava celebrates Andal's attempts to marry Lord Ranganatha, a form of Vishnu. She observed tapas (self disciplined meditation) for 30 days before being married unto the Lord. Those 30 days are celebrated for the entire month of Margashira by a special ritual at the Andal shrine. In Adhyayanotsava (study festival), the deity is conducted to the assembly hall where he is worshipped for 20 days. The 4000 verses of the Tamil text "Naalayira Divya Prabhandham" is read aloud along with other sacred texts, which lends the festival its name. This festival is divided into two phases: the first phases lasts for the first ten mornings of the fortnight. The eleventh day, which happens to be Vaikuntha Ekadashi, begins the second phase. The deity, seated on a specially made porch, is worshipped in the night during the second phase. Special services suited to each incarnation of Vishnu are offered during this phase.


text: Simhachalam is one of the 32 Narasimha temples in Andhra Pradesh which are important pilgrimage centres alongside Ahobilam, Antarvedi, Kadiri and Mangalagiri among others. It was regarded as an important centre of Vaishnavism in the medieval period along with Srikurmam and others. Diana L Eck, the author of "India: A Sacred Geography" (2012) noted that at Simhachalam, Narasimha's "frightening" violence is softened by worshipping him in conjunction with Varaha, who is usually considered as a peaceful deity. Varaha Narasimha is referred to with many names such as Simhadrinatha, Simhadri Appanna and Apparu. It is believed that the deity is capable of giving progeny to women and fulfilling wishes of devotees. It was observed that parents who begot children after praying here named their children after the Simhachalam temple and its deity.


text: Simhachalam is the second-largest after Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh in terms of income earned; as of 2013, the earnings stood at 60 crores (600 million). It is the first temple in the north coastal region of Andhra Pradesh and second in the entire state (after the Satyanarayana temple in Annavaram) to follow the cashless system. Point of sale systems. provided by the State Bank of India and Andhra Bank, are used for accepting donations and gifts from devotees.


text: Simhachalam temple found many literary references and lyrical works dedicated by anonymous writers; some of the latter are preserved in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai. The earliest known literary mention of the temple is found in "Lakshmi Narasimhapurana" written by Telugu poet Yerrapragada. He mentioned it as a place of pilgrimage visited by a sage on a holy tour. But Yerrapragada did not describe the temple as the work was focused on Ahobilam temple. Srinatha described the "Simhadri Thirunaal" event, a festive gathering at the temple. He described the various classes of ladies assembled at the gathering in his "Chatuvulu" (extempore poems).


text: Krishnamacharyulu wrote devotional "vachanas" (prose) in praise of Varaha Narasimha of Simhachalam. Written in churnika style, they are known as "Simhagiri Vachanas" and "Simhagiri Narahari Vachanas". He was the first Telugu poet to use "bhakti" (devotion) in Telugu literature and was succeeded by Annamacharya, Kancherla Gopanna and Tyagaraja. "Simhagiri Vachanas" had features of the Shatakam-style of poetry. It is believed that Krishnamacharyulu was inspired by Ramanuja's "Gadyatrayam" and opted for prose to reach the ordinary people. Krishnamacharyulu wrote 400,000 "vachanas" on copper plates of which 75 are available after he left for Srirangam. The "vachanas" begin with an invocation to the deity. "Simhagiri Vachanas" are recited by the local villagers near Simhachalam during special occasions. These "vachanas" also inspired many other poets to compose similar devotional prose including Pothana and Srinatha; the latter introduced 12 laudatory pieces showing Krishnamacharyulu's impact in his works "Bhimeswara Purana" and "Kasikandham".


text: Krishnadevaraya mentioned his visit to Simhachalam in his epic poem "Amuktamalyada". The king's visit was also documented by poets Allasani Peddana and Dhurjati in "Manucharitra" and "Krishnaraya Vijaya" respectively. The latter particularly mentions the event of Krishnadevaraya erecting a pillar of victory at Simhachalam. Pingali Suranna makes a mention of Simhachalam in "Kalapurnodayam" as a part of Manikandhara's pilgrims. Telugu poets Kuchimanchi Timmakavi and Kattamuri Kameswara Kavi composed prabandhas in favour of Varaha Narasimha, named "Simhasaila Mahatyam" and "Lakshmi Narasimha Charita" respectively. The story of Muslim invaders attacking Simhachalam and their defeat was documented in a satiric way by Kurmanatha Kavi in his work "Simhadri Narasimha Satakam". This work is popular among Narasimha's devotees and is cited to show the efficacy of devotion towards him.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory".


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: From Latin "res" ("thing") and -"fication", a suffix related to "facere" ("to make"). Thus "reification" can be loosely translated as "thing-making"; the turning of something abstract into a concrete thing or object.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Reification takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood or simplified; for example, when human creations are described as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Reification may derive from an inborn tendency to simplify experience by assuming constancy as much as possible.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: According to Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or "concrete" reality: "There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It is an example of what might be called the 'Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Whitehead proposed the fallacy in a discussion of the relation of spatial and temporal location of objects. He rejects the notion that a concrete physical object in the universe can be ascribed a simple spatial or temporal extension, that is, without reference to its relations to other spatial or temporal extensions.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: [...] apart from any essential reference of the relations of [a] bit of matter to other regions of space [...] there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. [... Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: William James used the notion of "vicious abstractionism" and "vicious intellectualism" in various places, especially to criticize Immanuel Kant's and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealistic philosophies. In "The Meaning of Truth", James wrote:


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Let me give the name of "vicious abstractionism" to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of "nothing but" that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. ... "The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names" is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: In a chapter on "The Methods and Snares of Psychology" in "The Principles of Psychology", James describes a related fallacy, "the psychologist's fallacy," thus: "The "great" snare of the psychologist is the "confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact" about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the "psychologist's fallacy" "par excellence"" (volume 1, p. 196). John Dewey followed James in describing a variety of fallacies, including "the philosophic fallacy", "the analytic fallacy", and "the fallacy of definition".


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: The concept of a "construct" has a long history in science; it is used in many, if not most, areas of science. A construct is a hypothetical explanatory variable that is not directly observable. For example, the concepts of "motivation" in psychology, " utility" in economics, and "gravitational field" in physics are constructs; they are not directly observable, but instead are tools to describe natural phenomena.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: The degree to which a construct is useful and accepted as part of the current paradigm in a scientific community depends on empirical research that has demonstrated that a scientific construct has construct validity (especially, predictive validity). Thus, in contrast to Whitehead, many psychologists seem to believe that, if properly understood and empirically corroborated, the "reification fallacy" applied to scientific constructs is not a fallacy at all; it is one part of theory creation and evaluation in 'Normal science'.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Stephen Jay Gould draws heavily on the idea of fallacy of reification in his book "The Mismeasure of Man". He argues that the error in using intelligence quotient scores to judge people's intelligence is that, just because a quantity called "intelligence" or "intelligence quotient" is defined as a measurable thing does not mean that intelligence is real; thus denying the validity of the construct "intelligence."


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Pathetic fallacy (also known as anthropomorphic fallacy or anthropomorphization) is a specific type of reification. Just as reification is the attribution of concrete characteristics to an abstract idea, a pathetic fallacy is committed when those characteristics are specifically human characteristics, especially thoughts or feelings. Pathetic fallacy is also related to personification, which is a direct and explicit ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: The rhetorical devices of metaphor and personification express a form of reification, but short of a fallacy. These devices, by definition, do not apply literally and thus exclude any fallacious conclusion that the formal reification is real. For example, the metaphor known as the pathetic fallacy, "the sea was angry" reifies anger, but does not imply that anger is a concrete substance, or that water is sentient. The distinction is that a fallacy inhabits faulty reasoning, and not the mere illustration or poetry of rhetoric.


title: Reification (fallacy)

text: Reification, while usually fallacious, is sometimes considered a valid argument. Thomas Schelling, a game theorist during the Cold War, argued that for many purposes an abstraction shared between disparate people caused itself to become real. Some examples include the effect of round numbers in stock prices, the importance placed on the Dow Jones Industrial index, national borders, preferred numbers, and many others.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: The Monad in Gnosticism is an adaptation of concepts of the Monad in Greek philosophy to Christian gnostic belief systems.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: The term "monad" comes from the Greek feminine noun "monas" (nominative singular, μονάς), "one unit," where the ending "-s" in the nominative form resolves to the ending "-d" in declension.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: In some gnostic systems, the Supreme Being is known as the Monad, the One, the Absolute, Aiōn Teleos (the Perfect Aeon, ), Bythos (Depth or Profundity, ), Proarchē (Before the Beginning, ), Hē Archē (The Beginning, ), the Ineffable Parent, and/or the primal Father.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: Prominent early Christian gnostics like Valentinus taught that the Monad is the high source of the Pleroma, the region of light constituting "the fullness of the Godhead." Through a process of emanation, various divine entities and realms emerge from the One. Arranged hierarchically, they become progressively degraded due to their remoteness from the Father. The various emanations of the One, totaling thirty in number (or 365, according to Basilides), are called Aeons. Among them exist Jesus (who resides close to the Father) and the lowest emanation, Sophia (wisdom), whose fall results in the creation of the material world.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: According to Theodoret's book on heresies ("Haereticarum Fabularum Compendium" i.18), the Arab Christian Monoimus (c. 150–210) used the term Monad to mean the highest god that created lesser gods, or elements (similar to Aeons). In some versions of Christian gnosticism, especially those deriving from Valentinius, a lesser deity known as the Demiurge (see also Neoplatonism, Plotinus) had a role in the creation of the material world separate from the Monad. In these forms of gnosticism, the God of the Old Testament, YHWH, is often considered to have been the Demiurge, not the Monad, or sometimes different passages are interpreted as referring to each.


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: According to Hippolytus of Rome, this view was inspired by the Pythagoreans, for whom the first existing thing was the Monad, which begat the dyad, which begat the numbers, which begat the point, begetting lines, and so on. Pythagorean and Platonic philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry condemned the "gnosis" that would later characterize Gnostic systems for their treatment of the Monad or One (see Neoplatonism and Gnosticism).


title: Monad (Gnosticism)

text: For a long time, legend persisted that a young man by the name of Epiphanes, who died at the age of 17, was the leader of Monadic Gnosticism. However, scholars think the legend may have come from misunderstanding of the Greek word "epiphanēs" which may have been mistaken as a personal name if in text, when in fact the Greek means "distinguished", as in a "distinguished teacher."


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: "Blackwater" is the ninth and penultimate episode of the second season of HBO's medieval fantasy television series "Game of Thrones", and the 19th overall. The episode was directed by Neil Marshall, his directorial debut for the series, and written by George R. R. Martin, the author of the "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels from which the series is adapted. It first aired on May 27, 2012.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The episode centers around the climactic Battle of Blackwater Bay, in which the Lannister army, commanded by acting Hand of the King Tyrion Lannister, defends the city of King's Landing against a naval invasion by the Baratheon army, commanded by Stannis Baratheon, who seeks to take the Iron Throne for himself. Unlike all previous episodes, "Blackwater" does not feature the storylines of characters outside of King's Landing, making it the first episode of the series to take place entirely in one location. The episode achieved a viewership of 3.38 million during its initial airing in the United States.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: "Blackwater" received acclaim from critics and audiences, with many praising the acting and visual effects in particular. At the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards, the episode won the awards for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Drama Series (One-Hour) and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Drama Series (One Hour), and was Peter Dinklage's choice to support his nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. The episode was also the recipient of the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: Davos leads Stannis's fleet into Blackwater Bay. Grand Maester Pycelle gives Cersei a poison to use should Stannis take the city. Outside the Red Keep, Bronn's carousing is soured by the Hound; their tension is interrupted by bells, indicating Stannis's fleet has been spotted. Varys brings Tyrion a map of the tunnels beneath King's Landing. King Joffrey leads his forces from the Red Keep and orders Sansa to kiss his sword, vowing to use it to kill Stannis. The noble ladies and children shelter at Maegor's Holdfast under Ser Ilyn Payne's watch. Cersei drunkenly mocks Sansa's innocence, warning she will be raped if the city falls.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: Stannis's fleet is confronted by a single unmanned ship, which Davos realizes too late is a trap: the ship, rigged with explosive "wildfire", kills scores of Stannis's men, seemingly including Davos and his son Matthos. Stannis orders his surviving army to attack the vulnerable Mud Gate. The defenders are routed; Lancel, injured, retreats to the Holdfast. Set on edge by his childhood fear of fire and disgusted by Joffrey's cowardice, the Hound deserts his post and renounces his allegiance to the Lannisters. Stannis himself storms the battlements as his men employ a battering ram. Cersei nearly learns Shae's true origins, while Sansa realizes Ser Ilyn's orders: to kill her and Cersei if the city falls.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: Cersei orders Lancel to bring Joffrey to safety; frightened, Joffrey orders Ser Mandon Moore take command. Tyrion rouses the defenders and leads them through a tunnel from Varys's map, flanking the Baratheon army from behind. Lancel demands the king return to battle, causing Cersei to assault him and depart with Prince Tommen. Sansa rallies the panicked ladies but is convinced by Shae to flee to her quarters. The Hound, hiding in Sansa's quarters, offers to take her north, but she appears to refuse.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: Tyrion's men defeat the surprised Baratheon forces before facing a larger group of Stannis's men. Tyrion is slashed across the face by Ser Mandon, who is killed by Tyrion's squire, Podrick Payne. On the Iron Throne, Cersei tells Tommen a story about "the mother lion and her little cub", referencing House Lannister and Cersei's relationship with her children. As Tyrion falls unconscious, he witnesses a surprise cavalry assault on Stannis’s army, led by Tyrion's father Tywin. Stannis unsuccessfully orders his men to stand their ground as he is dragged to safety. Cersei, about to give Tommen the poison, is startled by Tywin, who declares they have won.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The DVD and Blu-ray box sets of "Game of Thrones"s second season contain a 30-minute feature covering the production of the episode.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: "Blackwater" depicts the series's first large-scale war sequence: the confrontation between the Baratheons and the Lannisters towards which most of the season builds. For the season, HBO approved a budget of $6 million per episode, though showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss knew this would not be enough to depict the battle as described in the novels. Early proposals for the episode suggested the battle take place mostly offscreen, with viewers experiencing it through the eyes of Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark, receiving occasional updates from the battlefield as they sheltered in Maegor's Holdfast. However, Benioff and Weiss were not satisfied with this idea, believing that it was important the battle be shown. They eventually convinced HBO to approve a $2 million increase in the episode's budget as well as an extra week of filming in order to stage the battle onscreen. The final product costed about $8 million to produce.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: With their still-limited resources, producers decided not to stage the battle precisely as described in the novels, but rather to scale it down. Producers decided to set the battle at night to make it easier to hide any production errors and to save money on special effects. Benioff and Weiss resisted pressure to stage the battle exclusively on land, which would avoid the difficulties of filming on water, because they considered the naval confrontation to be essential to the season's principal storyline. Benioff and Weiss opted to craft the battle scenes around characters familiar to the audience, such as Tyrion Lannister and Sandor Clegane, to keep the audience engaged, while also avoiding expensive wide shots involving many extras. Benioff named "Saving Private Ryan", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Spartacus", "El Cid", and "Zulu" as influences on the episode's choreography.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The episode was written by George R. R. Martin, the author of the "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels on which the series is based. For the episode, Martin adapted material from chapters 58 to 63 (Sansa V, Davos III, Tyrion XIII, Sansa VI, Tyrion XIV, and Sansa VII) of his novel "A Clash of Kings". Martin said that "Blackwater" was much harder to write than the episode he wrote for the show's first season, "The Pointy End", because he was forced to weigh budget restrictions against the huge scope of the battle he described in the book.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: About a week before filming was set to begin, the episode's planned director had to leave the production because of a personal emergency, and a replacement had to be found quickly. Executive producer Bernadette Caulfield suggested they hire Neil Marshall for his experience as an action director. Marshall was aware of "Game of Thrones" and had unsuccessfully sought a directing role during the first season. Benioff and Weiss eventually settled on Marshall because of his work on "Centurion" and "Dog Soldiers", where he created intensive action sequences on a limited budget. Marshall was asked to direct the episode just two days before he was scheduled to appear on set. Marshall avoided watching the Battle of Helm's Deep in "" as it was, according to him, "an obvious comparison"; instead, he studied films such as "The Vikings" and "Kingdom of Heaven".


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The indoor scenes were filmed in Croatia. For the battle, Benioff described the sequence's filming as "pretty much a month straight of night shoots" that were "tough on the crew". Marshall said that the battle's filming took place at a quarry a few miles outside of Belfast, Northern Ireland, over the course of "very cold, rainy, muddy nights". Belfast's cold and wet climate was so harsh that weather machines were not needed to simulate the wind and rain, and Benioff insisted that the actors' exhaustion was not faked. For Stannis's fleet, the crew built a full-size battleship in the parking lot of the quarry, modeled after battleships used in the 14th century. It was the only physical ship the crew had for filming.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The episode contained more visual effects shots than any other episode up to that point. For the wildfire explosion, the special-effects department developed a catapult that fired bags of burning napalm, but they could not make the fire burn green, and Marshall was unsatisfied with the way it looked. The crew instead decided to color regular fire green in post-production. The final product was created by visual effects studio Pixomondo.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The song sung by the Lannister soldiers before the battle and played over the end credits, "The Rains of Castamere", was adapted from the "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels by series composer Ramin Djawadi. The end credits version was performed by the American indie rock band The National, and sung by their vocalist Matt Berninger. The song also appeared twice in the season two premiere, "The North Remembers", in which Tyrion can be heard whistling the melody during a small council meeting, and is later played in the background as Cersei confronts Petyr Baelish.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: According to the novels, the song is about Tywin Lannister's victory over vassals led by House Reyne of Castamere, who had rebelled against House Lannister, about 40 years before the events of the novels. The stanza of the song that was adapted for the series tells of the vassals' defiance-–"And who are you, the proud lord said / That I must bow so low?"–-and the subsequent obliteration of their houses: "But now the rains weep o'er his hall / With no one there to hear."


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: On the night of its premiere, the episode achieved a viewership of 3.38 million for its initial airing at 9:00pm, and an additional 0.83 million viewers for the rerun at 11:00pm. Viewer shares among the 18–49 demographic were 1.6 and 0.4 respectively. This represented a decrease of 13% in viewership from the previous episode, "The Prince of Winterfell", which set a new series record for viewership figures. James Hibberd of "Entertainment Weekly" attributed this to the premiere's coincidence with Memorial Day weekend, which often reduces television viewership by about 20%. In the United Kingdom, the episode was seen by 1.035 million viewers, making it the highest-rated broadcast that week.


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: "Blackwater" received critical acclaim and is generally cited as one of the best episodes of the series. Many reviewers used superlatives: for "Time"s reviewer, the episode was "possibly the best hour of TV" of the year", for "Rolling Stone" it was "the show's best episode yet", and "Entertainment Weekly" described it as "arguably the best battle sequence ever produced for television", surpassing those in HBO's World War II series "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific".


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: "IGN"'s Matt Fowler gave the episode a perfect 10 out of 10, calling it a masterpiece. Alan Sepinwall, who reviewed the episode for HitFix, called it "an epic battle, and an intimate hour" and continued "but what ultimately made Blackwater so impressive wasn't the scope, but the focus." Ed Cumming's review for "The Daily Telegraph" praised the episode as "an emerald inferno, as lethal as it was beautiful to watch".


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: Commentators praised the battle's emotional impact and epic scale. Although much reduced compared to its description in "A Clash of Kings", it still went beyond anything attempted by any other regular series, according to Emily VanDerWerff in "The A.V. Club". Lena Headey's performance as the increasingly cynical, drunk, and desperate Queen Regent Cersei was particularly noted. Sean Collins of "Rolling Stone" commented that the episode "gave actress Lena Headey her finest hour on the show so far". Writing for "The Guardian", Sarah Hughes described the performances of both Headey and costar Peter Dinklage as "wonderful", going on to say of Headey's Cersei that she "displayed a terrifying strength" and that her final scene with Tommen was "gut-wrenching". The episode also received praise for its unsentimental depiction of warfare as a harrowing and costly enterprise, with VanDerWerff interpreting it as a critique of "the sorts of political systems that perpetuate it".


title: Blackwater (Game of Thrones)

text: The episode's director, Neil Marshall, called the fan and critical reaction to the episode "overwhelming", adding that he's "never seen anything like it for a TV episode".


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang claimed he gained his break in radio by sending a postcard to a New York station requesting an audition, was accepted, and then bought his own ticket to New York from Chelsea, Massachusetts, with the money set aside for his mother's anniversary gift. Though his widow, JoAnne Stang, explained upon his death that this story was untrue, Stang did work on New York–based network radio shows as a teenager, appearing on children's programs such as "The Horn and Hardart Children's Hour" and "Let's Pretend". By 1940, he had graduated to teenaged roles, appearing as Seymour on "The Goldbergs". Director Don Bernard hired him in October 1941 to do the commercials on the CBS program "Meet Mr. Meek" but decided his constantly cracking voice would hurt the commercial so he ordered scriptwriters to come up with a role for him. He next appeared on the summer replacement show "The Remarkable Miss Tuttle" with Edna May Oliver in 1942 and replaced Eddie Firestone Jr. in the title role of "That Brewster Boy" when Firestone joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1943.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Comedian Henry Morgan made him a sidekick on his program in fall of 1946 and Stang appeared in similar roles the following year on radio shows with Eddie Cantor and Milton Berle. He also did the voice of Jughead for a short while on the "Archie Andrews" radio show when it was broadcast by NBC.


title: Arnold Stang

text: At this time Stang had appeared in a number of movies, including "Seven Days Leave", "My Sister Eileen", "So This Is New York" with Henry Morgan, and "They Got Me Covered". He had also appeared on the Broadway stage in "Sailor Beware", "All In Favor" and "Same Time Next Week", where he first worked with Berle.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang moved to television at the start of the Golden Age. He had a recurring role in the TV show "The School House" on the DuMont Television Network in 1949. He was a regular on Eddie Mayehoff's short-lived situation comedy "Doc Corkle" in fall of 1952 as well as comedy relief on "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" as Clumsy McGee. Then he made a guest appearance on Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater" on May 12, 1953 and joined him as a regular as Francis the Stagehand the following September, often berating or heckling the big-egoed star for big laughs. Stang also had guest roles on several variety shows of the day including "The Colgate Comedy Hour". In early 1951, Stang appeared on "Henry Morgan's Great Talent Hunt", a take-off of "The Original Amateur Hour", as "Gerard", supposedly recruiting "talent" for Morgan.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang starred in movie short subjects for producer Edward Montagne in the early 1950s. In 1964, when Montagne was producing his "McHale's Navy" spinoff "Broadside", he recruited Arnold Stang midway through production and gave him co-star billing. Stang joined the ensemble cast as outspoken master chef Stanley Stubbs.


title: Arnold Stang

text: In films, he had a substantial supporting role as the best friend Sparrow in "The Man with the Golden Arm" (1955) with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. In "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (1963) he played Ray, who, along with his partner Irwin (Marvin Kaplan), owns a gas station that Jonathan Winters destroys. He appeared in "Hello Down There" (1969). He partnered with Arnold Schwarzenegger (billed as "Arnold Strong 'Mr. Universe'") in the latter's first film, "Hercules in New York" (1969).


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang worked often as a voice actor for animated cartoons, and voiced the title role in "Top Cat". The show lasted one season in prime time, 1961–62, before going into reruns. Stang also provided the voice for Popeye's pal Shorty (a caricature of Stang), Herman the mouse in a number of Famous Studios cartoons, Tubby Tompkins in a few Little Lulu shorts, and Catfish on "Misterjaw". He also voiced the character Nurtle the Twurtle in the 1965 animated feature "Pinocchio in Outer Space".


title: Arnold Stang

text: On television he appeared in commercials for the Chunky candy bar, where he would list many of its ingredients, smile and say, "Chunky, what a chunk of chocolate!" He provided the voice of the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee in the 1980s and was also a spokesman for Vicks Vapo-Rub. As a pitchman for Alcoa aluminum window screens in the late 1960s, he was known for the tag line "Arnold Stang says don't get stung". Stang also appeared in "The Grave Robber," an episode of the popular horror anthology series "Tales from the Darkside", playing Tapok, an ancient Egyptian mummy who encounters some unscrupulous archaeologists who lure him into a game of strip poker.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang once described himself as "a frightened chipmunk who's been out in the rain too long." As for his distinctive squawky, nasal Brooklyn voice, he said "I'm kind of attached to it ... [it's] a personal logo. It's like your Jell-O or Xerox.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Arnold Stang reprised Top Cat in "Yogi's Treasure Hunt" and "Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats". Stang also appeared on an episode of "The Cosby Show" with guest star Sammy Davis Jr. (He also made a cameo appearance in Bill Cosby's 1990 film "Ghost Dad".) In one TV advertisement, he played Luther Burbank, proudly showing off his newly invented "square tomato" to fit neatly in typical square slices of commercial bread, then being informed that the advertising bakery had beat him to it by producing round loaves of bread. He played the photographer in the 1993 film "Dennis the Menace" with Walter Matthau. He also provided many voices for the Cartoon Network series "Courage the Cowardly Dog" and Turner Program Services' original series "Captain Planet and the Planeteers". He had a small role as Queasy the Parrot in the 1977 film "".


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang was in many Broadway stage productions, including "Front Page" with Peggy Cass in the 1969 revival.


title: Arnold Stang

text: In 1994, he guest-starred as the voice of Irwin the Mouse in the "Garfield and Friends" episode "Thoroughly Mixed-Up Mouse".


title: Arnold Stang

text: In 2004, Stang made his last appearance in an interview with animator Earl Kress about the making of "Top Cat". It is featured on the "Top Cat" DVD box set.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang and his wife JoAnne (née Taggart), lived in New Rochelle, New York, and in his later years Greenwich, Connecticut, moving toward the end of his life to Needham, Massachusetts. The couple had two children, David and Deborah. JoAnne Stang was a journalist known for writing profiles of prominent individuals in the entertainment industry.


title: Arnold Stang

text: Stang died of pneumonia at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts on December 20, 2009 at the age of 91. Although Stang was born in New York City in 1918, he often claimed Chelsea, Massachusetts, as his birthplace and 1925 as his birth year. His ashes were buried in Newton's cemetery. His wife, JoAnne Stang, died in September 2017, also at the age of 91.


title: Null character

text: It is present in many character sets, including those defined by the Baudot and ITA2 codes, ISO/IEC 646 (or ASCII), the C0 control code, the Universal Coded Character Set (or Unicode), and EBCDIC. It is available in nearly all mainstream programming languages. It is often abbreviated as NUL (or NULL, though in some contexts that term is used for the null pointer). In 8-bit codes, it is known as a null byte.


title: Null character

text: The original meaning of this character was like NOP—when sent to a printer or a terminal, it has no effect (some terminals, however, incorrectly display it as space). When electromechanical teleprinters were used as computer output devices, one or more null characters were sent at the end of each printed line to allow time for the mechanism to return to the first printing position on the next line. On punched tape, the character is represented with no holes at all, so a new unpunched tape is initially filled with null characters, and often text could be inserted at a reserved space of null characters by punching the new characters into the tape over the nulls.


title: Null character

text: Today the character has much more significance in the programming language C and its derivatives and in many data formats, where it serves as a reserved character used to signify the end of a string, often called a null-terminated string. This allows the string to be any length with only the overhead of one byte; the alternative of storing a count requires either a string length limit of 255 or an overhead of more than one byte (there are other advantages/disadvantages described in the null-terminated string article).


title: Null character

text: The null character is often represented as the escape sequence codice_1 in source code , string literals or character constants. In many languages (such as C, which introduced this notation), this is not a separate escape sequence, but an octal escape sequence with a single octal digit 0; as a consequence, codice_1 must not be followed by any of the digits codice_3 through codice_4; otherwise it is interpreted as the start of a longer octal escape sequence. Other escape sequences that are found in use in various languages are codice_5, codice_6, codice_7, or codice_8. A null character can be placed in a URL with the percent code codice_9.


title: Null character

text: The ability to represent a null character does not always mean the resulting string will be correctly interpreted, as many programs will consider the null to be the end of the string. Thus the ability to type it (in case of unchecked user input) creates a vulnerability known as null byte injection and can lead to security exploits.


title: Null character

text: In caret notation the null character is codice_10. On some keyboards, one can enter a null character by holding down and pressing (on US layouts just will often work, there being no need for to get the @ sign).


title: Null character

text: In documentation, the null character is sometimes represented as a single-em-width symbol containing the letters "NUL". In Unicode, there is a character with a corresponding glyph for visual representation of the null character, symbol for null, U+2400 (␀)—not to be confused with the actual null character, U+0000.


title: Null character

text: The Hexadecimal notation for null is codice_11 and decoding the Base64 string codice_12. also holds the null character.


title: Null character

text: In the Windows operating system the character can be typed in in some GUI applications, such as WordPad, by typing 2400 followed immediately by the key combination.


title: Null character

text: In all modern character sets, the null character has a code point value of zero. In most encodings, this is translated to a single code unit with a zero value. For instance, in UTF-8 it is a single zero byte. However, in Modified UTF-8 the null character is encoded as two bytes: 0xC0, 0x80. This allows the byte with the value of zero, which is now not used for any character, to be used as a string terminator.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Daniel Deronda is a novel written by Mary Ann Evans under the pen name of George Eliot, first published in eight parts (books) February to September 1876. It was the last novel she completed and the only one set in the Victorian society of her day. The work's mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with its sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist ideas, has made it the controversial final statement of one of the most renowned Victorian novelists.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: The novel has been adapted for film three times, once as a silent feature and twice for television. It has also been adapted for the stage, notably in the 1960s by the 69 Theatre Company in Manchester with Vanessa Redgrave cast as the heroine Gwendolen Harleth.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: The novel has two main strands of plot, and while the "story of Gwendolen" has been described as "one of the masterpieces of English fiction", that part concerned with Daniel Deronda has been described as "flat and unconvincing". All the same Daniel's story has had a significant influence on Zionism.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: "Daniel Deronda" contains two main strains of plot, united by the title character. The novel begins in late August 1865 with the meeting of Daniel and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town of Leubronn, Germany. Daniel finds himself attracted to, but wary of, the beautiful, stubborn, and selfish Gwendolen, whom he sees losing all her winnings in a game of roulette. The next day, Gwendolen receives a letter from her mother telling her that the family is financially ruined and asking her to come home. Gwendolen pawns a necklace and debates gambling again to make her fortune. However, her necklace is returned to her by a porter, and she realises that Daniel saw her pawn the necklace and redeemed it for her. From this point, the plot breaks off into two separate flashbacks; one gives us Gwendolen's history and the other Daniel's.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: In October 1864, soon after the death of Gwendolen's stepfather, Gwendolen and her family move to a new neighbourhood. It is here that she meets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt, a taciturn and calculating man who proposes marriage shortly after their first meeting. At first she is open to his advances, but upon discovering that Grandcourt has several children with his mistress, Lydia Glasher, she eventually flees to the German town where she meets Daniel. This portion of the novel sets Gwendolen up as a haughty and selfish, yet affectionate daughter, admired for her beauty but suspected by many in society because of her satirical observations and somewhat manipulative behaviour. She is also prone to fits of terror that shake her otherwise calm and controlling exterior.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Daniel has been raised by a wealthy gentleman, Sir Hugo Mallinger. Daniel's relationship to Sir Hugo is ambiguous, and it is widely believed, even by Daniel, that he is Sir Hugo's illegitimate son, though no one is certain. Daniel is an intelligent, light-hearted and compassionate young man who cannot quite decide what to do with his life, and this is a sore point between him and Sir Hugo, who wants him to go into politics. One day in late July 1865, as he is boating on the Thames, Daniel rescues a young Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, from attempting to drown herself. He takes her to the home of some of his friends, where they learn that Mirah is a singer. She has come to London to search for her mother and brother after running away from her father, who kidnapped her when she was a child and forced her into an acting troupe. She finally ran away from him after discovering that he was planning to sell her into prostitution. Moved by her tale, Daniel undertakes to help her look for her mother (who turns out to have died years earlier) and brother; through this, he is introduced to London's Jewish community. Mirah and Daniel grow closer and Daniel, anxious about his growing affection for her, leaves for a short time to join Sir Hugo in Leubronn, where he and Gwendolen first meet.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: From here, the story picks up in "real time". Gwendolen returns from Germany in early September 1865 because her family has lost its fortune. She is unwilling to marry, the only respectable way in which a woman could achieve financial security; and she is similarly reluctant to become a governess because it means that her social status would be drastically lowered from wealthy landed gentry to almost that of a servant. She hits upon the idea of pursuing a career in singing or on the stage, but a prominent musician tells her she does not have the talent. Finally, to save herself and her family from relative poverty, she marries the wealthy Grandcourt, despite having promised Mrs. Glasher she would not and fearing that it is a mistake. She believes she can manipulate him to maintain her freedom to do what she likes; however, Grandcourt has shown every sign of being cold, unfeeling, and manipulative himself.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Daniel, searching for Mirah's family, meets a consumptive visionary named Mordecai. Mordecai passionately proclaims his wish for the Jewish people to retain their national identity and one day be restored to the Promised Land. Because he is dying, he wants Daniel to become his intellectual heir and continue to pursue his dream to be an advocate for the Jewish people. Although he is strongly drawn to Mordecai, Daniel hesitates to commit himself to a cause that seems to have no connection to his own identity. Daniel's desire to embrace Mordecai's vision becomes stronger when they discover Mordecai is Mirah's brother Ezra. Still, Daniel does not believe that he is a Jew and cannot reconcile this fact with his affection and respect for Mordecai/Ezra, which would be necessary for him to pursue a life of Jewish advocacy.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Meanwhile, Gwendolen has been emotionally crushed by her cold, self-centred, and manipulative husband. She is consumed with guilt for possibly disinheriting Lydia Glasher's children by marrying their father. On Gwendolen's wedding day, Mrs. Glasher curses her and tells her that she will suffer for her treachery, which only exacerbates Gwendolen's feelings of dread and terror. During this time, Gwendolen and Deronda meet regularly, and Gwendolen pours out her troubles to him at each meeting. During a trip to Italy, Grandcourt is knocked from his boat into the water, and after some hesitation, Gwendolen jumps into the Mediterranean in a futile attempt to save him. She is consumed with guilt because she had long wished he would die and fears her hesitation caused his death. Coincidentally, Daniel is also in Italy having learned from Sir Hugo that his mother lives there. He comforts Gwendolen and advises her. In love with Daniel, Gwendolen hopes for a future with him, but he urges her onto a path of righteousness, encouraging her to help others to alleviate her suffering.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Daniel meets his mother and learns that she was a famous Jewish opera singer with whom Sir Hugo was once in love. She tells him that her father, a physician and strict Jew, forced her to marry her cousin whom she did not love. She resented the rigid piety of her childhood. Daniel was the only child of that union, and on her husband's death, she asked Sir Hugo to raise her son as an English gentleman, never to know that he was Jewish. Upon learning of his true origins, Daniel finally feels comfortable with his love for Mirah, and on his return to England in October 1866, he tells Mirah this and commits himself to be Ezra/Mordecai's disciple. Before Daniel marries Mirah, he goes to Gwendolen to tell her about his origins, his decision to go to "the East" (per Ezra/Mordecai's wish), and his betrothal to Mirah. Gwendolen is devastated, but it becomes a turning point in her life, inspiring her to finally say, "I shall live." She sends him a letter on his wedding day, telling him not to think of her with sadness but to know that she will be a better person for having known him. The newlyweds are all prepared to set off for "the East" with Mordecai, when Mordecai dies in their arms, and the novel ends.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: The depiction of Jews contrasted strongly with those in other novels such as Dickens' "Oliver Twist". Despite there being a Jewish-born Prime Minister (Benjamin Disraeli was baptised as a boy into the Church of England following his father's renunciation of Judaism), the view of Jews among non-Jewish Britons at the time was often prejudiced, sometimes to the point of derision or revulsion. In 1833 when the Jewish Civil Disabilities Bill came before Parliament the whole force of the Tory Party and the personal antagonism of King William IV was against the bill, which is reflected in opinions expressed by several of the non-Jewish Meyrick family in Chapter 32.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: On its publication, "Daniel Deronda" was immediately translated into German and Dutch and was given an enthusiastic extended review by the Austrian Zionist rabbi and scholar David Kaufmann. Further translations soon followed into French (1882), Italian (1883), Hebrew (1893), Yiddish (1900s) and Russian (1902).


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Written during a time when Restorationism (similar to 20th century Christian Zionism) had a strong following, Eliot's novel had a positive influence on later Jewish Zionism. It has been cited by Henrietta Szold, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and Emma Lazarus as having been influential in their decision to become Zionists.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: In 1948, F. R. Leavis in "The Great Tradition" gave the opinion that the Jewish sections of the book were its weakest, and that a truncated version called "Gwendolen Harleth" should be printed on its own. Conversely, some Zionist commentators have advocated the opposite truncation, keeping the Jewish section, with Gwendolen's story omitted.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: Contemporary readers might ask themselves whether the seemingly bifurcated structure of the novel arose from a wish to contrast inward-looking (Gwendolen) and outward-looking (Deronda, on the Jewish 'question') moral growth, with Deronda himself the fulcrum.


title: Daniel Deronda

text: An abridged (119 page) version for younger readers, by Philip Zimmerman, focusing on the Jewish elements, was published in 1961 by Herzl Press.


title: Give It Away (Red Hot Chili Peppers song)

text: "Give It Away" is a song by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers from the group's fifth studio album, "Blood Sugar Sex Magik". It was released as the lead single from their album in September 1991 by Warner Bros. Records. The music was written by guitarist John Frusciante and bassist Flea during a jam session months prior to the album recording sessions. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis wrote the song's most prevalent lyrical refrain in response to an experience he shared with former girlfriend Nina Hagen regarding altruistic behavior and the value of selflessness.


text: "Give It Away" went on to achieve international fame, reaching number one on the "Billboard" Modern Rock Tracks in late 1991, giving the band their first ever number one single. In 1992 the single charted inside the top 75 of the US Hot 100 in the wake of the huge success of the record's second single "Under the Bridge". "Give It Away" also became the band's first top ten hit in the United Kingdom, where it peaked at number nine on the UK Singles Chart; this did not occur until February 1994, nearly two and a half years after it was first released in the US.


text: The accompanying music video, which was directed by French film-maker Stéphane Sednaoui, was put into heavy rotation on music-television stations such as MTV and added to the band's success. Since its release, "Give It Away" has gone on to receive numerous accolades, including a Grammy Award for the Best Hard Rock Performance With Vocals in 1992. Steve Huey of AllMusic noted that while the single "didn't achieve the massive pop success of its follow-up, 'Under the Bridge' [...] it did become one of the band's most instantly recognizable songs."


text: Guitarist John Frusciante and bassist Flea wrote much of "Give It Away" during jam sessions in the early 1990s. Following the Chili Peppers' tour in support of "Mother's Milk" (1989), the duo spent time in a side project called H.A.T.E. with members of Fishbone. During their tenure in the group, the guitarist and bassist created the main riff and accompanying bassline for "Give It Away". The rhythm was played at several H.A.T.E. performances shortly thereafter, but when the side project disbanded Frusciante and Flea believed the track would be appropriate for the Chili Peppers' upcoming record. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis agreed, and upon hearing the rest of the Chili Peppers play the song he began chanting "give it away, give it away, give it away now". The phrase had been something the vocalist intended to incorporate into a song for the band's new record, but it was not until he heard the bassline that the lyrics fit. Kiedis said, "I was so struck by Flea's bass part, which covered the whole length of the instrument's neck, that I jumped up and marched over to the mic, my notebook in tow. I always had fragments of songs and ideas or even specific isolated phrases in mind."


text: The song was recorded between April and June 1991 at The Mansion in Los Angeles, California. Through the recording of "Give It Away" came a practice of crafting songs that the band would continue to use on every album following "Blood Sugar Sex Magik". When the group encountered difficulty in composing a bridge for the song, it developed a tool the members colloquially termed "face-offs". Flea and Frusciante were unable to come to an agreement on guitar or bass progressions, but separately crafted part of the song. The band then reconvened at a later time and chose the most appropriate inclusion. With "Give It Away", a chorus and verse had already been written but a bridge was lacking, so thus they partook in a "face-off".


text: The lyrical meaning behind "Give It Away" is centered on the philosophy of selflessness and altruistic behavior. The song is titled after its most prevalent lyrical phrase "give it away", which is taken from an experience Kiedis had with his former girlfriend—punk rock singer Nina Hagen—in the early 1980s. Hagen was several years Kiedis's senior and became a role-model during his drug addiction to heroin: "she realized how young and inexperienced I was then, so she was always passing on gems to me, not in a preachy way, just by seizing on opportunities." When Kiedis was looking through her closet he came across a jacket he liked, and commented to Hagen that it was "really cool". Upon expressing this, Hagen immediately told him to keep it. Her reasoning behind this selflessness was due to an attempt to constantly make her life more enjoyable, and explained to Kiedis that "if you have a closet full of clothes and you try to keep them all, your life will get very small. But if you have a full closet and someone sees something they like, if you give it to them, the world is a better place."


text: The act was something that affected Kiedis significantly because he had never before experienced such an enlightening ideology on life. Growing up in Los Angeles, he had always thought differently from Hagen. Instead of giving material possessions away and being free thinking, the vocalist believed one must take what one wants, as no one else will provide. Instead, he now adopted Hagen's philosophy: "It was such an epiphany that someone would want to give me her favorite thing. That stuck with me forever. Every time I'd be thinking 'I have to keep,' I'd remember 'No, you gotta give away instead.' When I started going regularly to [drug and alcohol] meetings, one of the principles I had learned was that the way to maintain your own sobriety is to give it to another suffering alcoholic. Every time you empty your vessel of that energy, fresh new energy comes flooding in." Flea's bassline for the song allowed Kiedis to recall this incident and he believed the music paired perfectly with the lyrics. During the verses, Kiedis departs from the idea of unselfishness and sings about a variety of topics including long-time friend River Phoenix, musician Bob Marley and various sexual themes including fertility and lust.


text: "Give It Away" is performed in the time signature of 4/4 time. The track begins with a distinctively "dry" guitar tone that is similar in style to the rest of the record. Producer Rick Rubin had a considerable influence on the sound of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" by removing much of the reverb and guitar layering that epitomized the band's previous album "Mother's Milk". This caused the record to contain simpler and dryer guitar and bass chords that were not filtered through guitar effects—those that did, however, were made with vintage electronics from the 1960s and 70s. For "Give It Away", along with the rest of the album, Rubin sought to achieve a sense of atmosphere that was similar to 60s records that were made without commercialism or viability in mind and to downplay on "big" sounds: "What you hear is what you get—there's not a lot of trickery. A lot of people want the biggest sound, with walls of guitar and huge drums. But I don't think those things matter." The song follows a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure; when Kiedis begins singing, Frusciante jumps into a funk-oriented riff that is repeated throughout the verse while Flea plays a bass line that uses virtually the entire length of the fretboard.


text: During the chorus, Kiedis sings "Give it away, give it away, give it away now" repeatedly over a more rapid guitar riff before Frusciante provides, according to Steve Huey of Allmusic, a "sudden contrast to Kiedis's hyperactivity in the form of a languid solo pre-recorded and dubbed backwards over the rhythm track." The solo was recorded in one take because Frusciante had developed a preference towards speedy execution and a raw feeling; according to Flea, "We did very little fix-up stuff. John's philosophy was that he would only play a solo twice. He'd play it once, and if he didn't like it or we didn't like it, he'd play it again—completely different. And that was it." "Give It Away" also makes use of other instruments like the jew's harp, which was played by band friend Pete Weiss. The song continues through several verses and choruses before reaching a bridge that introduces the outro, which consists of "a hard-rocking riff" that, according to Huey, strongly resembles the main riff from Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" from their 1971 record "Master of Reality". Kiedis repeats "Give it away now" for several measures before the guitar, bass and drums drop out.


text: "Give It Away" was released as the lead single from "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" in early September 1991, shortly before the record went on sale. Warner Bros. sought to premiere the song on a popular rock radio station in Texas, but were turned down when the format refused to air the track—they told employees at the label to "come back to us when you have a melody in your song". The band then embarked on a short press tour through Europe in order to promote the record; it was during this time that KROQ-FM, a Los Angeles-based modern rock station, began to place "Give It Away" on heavy rotation. According to Kiedis, "That was the beginning of the infusion of those songs into mass consciousness."


text: Critical reception to the song, much like the album, was highly positive. Jeff Vice of "Deseret News" noted "[this] dynamic first single that pays homage to Bob Marley, may start a new musical trend with its brilliant Rasta-funk." Patrick MacDonald of "The Seattle Times" commented that "["Blood Sugar Sex Magik"] includes one of the best songs the Peppers have done—'Give It Away', the first single. The hook is irresistible and the message, about 'material excess,' is delivered simply and straightforwardly." Steve Huey of Allmusic felt the song was enhanced by Kiedis's lyrics, which were "a free-associative mixture of positive vibes, tributes to musical heroes, and free love, and their literal meaning was often as difficult to understand as Kiedis's nasal, staccato enunciation. But that distinctive vocal style helped make the most comprehensible lines even catchier and more memorable, greatly enhancing the song's appeal." He continued by praising the track's music, "John Frusciante's guitar should not be underappreciated either; his noisy, scratchy funk-rock work add[s] depth and texture to the powerhouse rhythm section of Flea and Chad Smith." Jay Clarke of the "Richmond Times-Dispatch" felt "Give It Away" was "a journey into the funky world of Kiedis and Flea. This song invigorates better than the heaviest metal or the most hard-core rap." Tom Moon of "Rolling Stone" noted, "The pummeling 'Give It Away' [...] established a template for rock punctuated by the beatcentric relentlessness of hip-hop that would be appropriated by everyone."


text: Since the song's release, it has become a notable factor in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' success and has won a variety of accolades. "Give It Away" won a Grammy award at the 35th Ceremony in 1993 for the "Best Hard Rock Performance". In 1994 "Give It Away" was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's unordered list of the "500 Songs That Shaped Rock"; in 2002 "Kerrang!" placed the song at number 67 in their list of the "100 Greatest Singles of All Time"; in 2004 "Q" included it in their unordered list of the "1001 Songs You Must Own!"; and VH1 awarded the song the 50th spot in its 2009 compilation of the "100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs".


text: The music video for "Give It Away" was made by French fashion photographer and director Stéphane Sednaoui. Kiedis wanted the video to be visually distinct and readily identifiable but disliked much of the material Warner Bros. sent for him to choose from: "I started viewing reels and reels and reels of video directors but nothing looked good to me. Everything was the same, boring, homogenized, contrived shit." Upon finding Sednaoui's reel, however, the singer said it was "like nothing else. It was slower and poetic, shot in black and white. It seemed like authentic art, not something shot for MTV." He and Flea met with Sednaoui to talk about the video, for which the director proposed a "very desolated [and] very graphic landscape," while heavily focusing on the band members with little to no outside influence. It was decided that the video would be filmed in black and white while Sednaoui took the idea of painting the band members with silver acrylic from previous photo shoots he had done. The photographer recalls that he was "amazed by what [the band] gave me because they went far far far beyond what I was expecting and I think that's one of my best experiences in that regard". The overall mood of the video was intended to be a personification of the song, upbeat and lively.


text: Sednaoui experimented with a variety of cinematography techniques including wide-angle lenses, shots from below the subjects, superimposition, vertically-cut screens displaying different angles of the same shot, reverse film effects, multiple lighting situations and flashy clothing to convey his concept. Frusciante noted the feeling of the video to be extremely vibrant and over-the-top: "When it was us just painting ourselves silver and wearing these big silver boots and stuff, I mean it felt like glam rock or something."


text: The video begins with a wide-angle shot of Flea in a desert setting wearing pants with several gold-colored horns protruding from each leg. The bassist is standing in a meditative stance and brings his arms together above his head when the music begins to play. The video then transitions between a variety of shots edited together that consist of the four band members standing with their eyes closed; the band dancing around in a dimly lit setting; a ground view of Frusciante playing a reflective silver Fender Stratocaster in between his legs while wearing pants made up entirely of small pieces of mirror; the band members moving around with full makeup on; and the band members dancing frenziedly. Kiedis adopted a deliberately outlandish wardrobe which incorporated gold lipstick, revealing mesh shorts and bright silver boots.


text: During the backwards guitar solo, Frusciante was filmed waving a large aluminum ribbon; Kiedis was initially apprehensive about Sednaoui's desire for the guitarist to do so, believing he would tell the director "'Fuck you and take that dancing ribbon and shove it up your French ass, buddy' but [Frusciante] gladly went off and made love to the air with this dancing ribbon. He would have danced around for hours with that thing." The footage was edited in reverse to complement the solo. While some of the scenes were planned with a storyboard, much of it was improvised or made up on the spot over the two-day shoot. During a particular scene Kiedis began to move his tongue flamboyantly to dramatically accentuate the lyrics, which Sednaoui believed was extremely beneficial to the exuberant nature of the video. Where the video begins in what appears to be the daytime, it concludes at dusk with silhouettes of the band members running into the setting sun.


text: The video—which cost an estimated $140,000 to produce—was completed while Kiedis and Frusciante were on a promotional trip through Europe in support of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik". When the vocalist first saw it, he was "more hysterically ecstatic about that piece of visual footage than anything [the band had] ever done." Warner Bros. executives, however, were worried that the content would be "too weird" or "too artsy" for the general public and favored a more traditional premise in contrast to the experimental approach Sednaoui took. The video was ultimately released on September 4, 1991, without being edited by the record label; since then it has been widely credited as being a considerable factor in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' success and greatly increased their international popularity. Journalist Jeff Apter noted the video's "funky brew of goofy looks, a subtle invasive hook, Flea's spindly fingered baseline and Kiedis's crotch-hugging shorts made the clip essential viewing across MTV throughout the last few months of 1991." Steve Huey of Allmusic wrote in his review of the song that "MTV jumped all over the visually distinctive video." Nominated for three awards—"Best Alternative Video", "Breakthrough Video", and "Best Art Direction"—at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, it won the latter two.


text: "Give It Away" has been performed live by the band over 775 times, the most out of any of the band's songs and 29 years after its first performance; it remains a staple in the band's setlists, often closing the show. The band has performed the song on various talk shows and other events, including "Saturday Night Live" on March 6, 2006; as well as during the Super Bowl XLVIII halftime show on February 2, 2014.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: The zoo hypothesis speculates on the assumed behavior and existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial life and the reasons they refrain from contacting Earth. It is one of many theoretical explanations for the Fermi paradox. The hypothesis states that alien life intentionally avoids communication with Earth to allow for natural evolution and sociocultural development, and avoiding interplanetary contamination, similarly to people observing animals at a zoo. The hypothesis seeks to explain the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life despite its generally accepted plausibility and hence the reasonable expectation of its existence. A variant on the zoo hypothesis suggested by the former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist John Allen Ball is the "laboratory" hypothesis, where humanity is being subjected to experiments, with Earth being a giant laboratory.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: Aliens might, for example, choose to allow contact once the human species has passed certain technological, political, or ethical standards. They might withhold contact until humans force contact upon them, possibly by sending a spacecraft to planets they inhabit. Alternatively, a reluctance to initiate contact could reflect a sensible desire to minimize risk. An alien society with advanced remote-sensing technologies may conclude that direct contact with neighbors confers added risks to oneself without an added benefit. In the related laboratory hypothesis, the zoo hypothesis is extended such that the 'zoo keepers' are subjecting humanity to experiments, a hypothesis which Ball describes as "morbid" and "grotesque", overlooking the possibility that such experiments may be altruistic, i.e., designed to accelerate the pace of civilization to overcome a tendency for intelligent life to destroy itself, until a species is sufficiently developed to establish contact, as in the zoo hypothesis.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: The zoo hypothesis assumes, first, that whenever the conditions are such that life can exist and evolve, it will, and secondly, there are many places where life can exist and a large number of alien cultures in existence. It also assumes that these aliens have great reverence for independent, natural evolution and development. In particular, assuming that intelligence is a physical process that acts to maximize the diversity of a system's accessible futures, a fundamental motivation for the zoo hypothesis would be that premature contact would "unintelligently" reduce the overall diversity of paths the universe itself could take.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: These ideas are perhaps most plausible if there is a relatively universal cultural or legal policy among a plurality of extraterrestrial civilizations necessitating isolation with respect to civilizations at Earth-like stages of development. In a universe without a hegemonic power, random single civilizations with independent principles would make contact. This makes a crowded universe with clearly defined rules seem more plausible.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: If there is a plurality of alien cultures, however, this theory may break down under the uniformity of motive concept because it would take just a single extraterrestrial civilization to decide to act contrary to the imperative within human range of detection for it to be undone, and the probability of such a violation of hegemony increases with the number of civilizations. This idea, however, becomes more plausible if all civilizations tend to evolve similar cultural standards and values with regard to contact much like convergent evolution on Earth has independently evolved eyes on numerous occasions, or all civilizations follow the lead of some particularly distinguished civilization, such as the first civilization among them.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: A modified zoo hypothesis is a possible solution to the Fermi paradox. The time between the emergence of the first civilization within the Milky Way and all subsequent civilizations could be enormous. Monte Carlo simulation shows the first few inter-arrival times between emergent civilizations would be similar in length to geologic epochs on Earth. The zoo hypothesis assumes a civilization may have a ten-million, one-hundred-million, or half-billion-year head start on humanity, i.e., it may have the capability to completely negate our best attempts to detect it.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: The zoo hypothesis relies in part on applying the concept of hegemonic power to the Fermi paradox. Even if a first hegemomic non-interventionist grand civilization (first civilization) is long gone, their initial legacy could persist in the form of a passed-down tradition, or perhaps in an artificial lifeform (artificial superintelligence) dedicated to a non-interventionist hegemonic goal without the risk of death. Thus, the hegemonic power does not even have to be the first civilization, but simply the first to spread its non-interventionist doctrine and control over a large volume of the galaxy. If just one civilization acquired hegemony in the distant past, it could form an unbroken chain of taboo against rapacious colonization in favour of non-interference in any civilizations that follow. The uniformity of motive concept previously mentioned would become moot in such a situation.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: If the oldest civilization still present in the Milky Way has, for example, a 100-million-year time advantage over the next oldest civilization, then it is conceivable that they could be in the singular position of being able to control, monitor, influence or isolate the emergence of every civilization that follows within their sphere of influence. This is analogous to what happens on Earth within our own civilization on a daily basis, in that everyone born on this planet is born into a pre-existing system of familial associations, customs, traditions and laws that were already long established before our birth and which we have little or no control over.


title: Zoo hypothesis

text: Some critics of the hypothesis say that only a single dissident group in an alien civilization, or alternatively the existence of galactic cliques instead of a unified galactic club, would be enough to break the pact of no contact. To Stephen Webb, it seems unlikely, taking humans as reference, that such prohibition would be in effect for millions of years without a single breach thereof. Others say that the zoo hypothesis, along with its planetarium variation, is highly speculative and more aligned with theological theories. One possible counterargument to the dissident (rogue) group argument is that extraterrestrial artificial superintelligences dominate space, including space occupied by biological intelligences; moreoever, separate artificial superintelligences are assumed to tend towards a network of merged superintelligencies, thereby dissuading rogue behaviour.


title: Raasi (actress)

text: Raasi (born Vijaya) is an Indian actress who predominantly appeared in Telugu and Tamil films. She is credited as Manthra in Malayalam and Tamil films. She appeared in films such as "Subhakankshalu" (1997), "Gokulamlo Seeta" (1997) and "Pelli Pandiri" (1998). In 2020, she made her debuted in television with Telugu soap operas "Girija Kalyanam" (2020 -21) and "Janaki Kalaganaledu" (2021).


title: Raasi (actress)

text: Raasi was born as Vijaya on 1976 in West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, India. She married film director Sri Muni.


title: Raasi (actress)

text: At the age of 10, she started acting as a child actress in the 1986 Telugu film, "Mamatala Kovella" (1986).


title: Raasi (actress)

text: She also worked in the Hindi movies "Rangbaaz" (1996), "Jodidar" (1997) and "Suraj" (1997) with Mithun Chakraborty.


title: Raasi (actress)

text: In Telugu, Raasi rose to fame with "Subhakankshalu" (1997). She was labelled "traditional" after "Gokulamlo Seeta" (1997). Later, hits like "Snehithulu" (1998), "Pandaga" (1998), "Gilli Kajjalu" (1998), "Devullu" (2000) and proved her mettle as an actress. When Raasi's career started taking a nosedive, she took to doing item numbers in Telugu films like "Samudram" (1999).


title: Raasi (actress)

text: She debuted her first Tamil film "Priyam". Following a prolific year 1996, she received offers including the Vijay-starrer "Love Today" (1997) and the Ajith Kumar-starrer "Rettai Jadai Vayasu" (1997). A further opportunity to work with T. Rajender in a project titled "Ilam Kaadhalargal", however failed to materialise despite production work taking place. Some of her other movies in Tamil are "Periya Idathu Mappillai" (1997), "Ganga Gowri" (1997), "Thedinen Vanthathu" (1997), "Kondattam" (1998), "Kalyana Galatta" (1998), "Pudhu Kudithanam" (1999), "Kannan Varuvaan" (2000), "Kuberan" (2000) and "Simmasanam" (2000).


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Clemson () is a city in Pickens and Anderson counties in the U.S. state of South Carolina. Clemson is home to Clemson University; in 2015, "the Princeton Review" cited the town of Clemson as ranking #1 in the United States for "town-and-gown" relations with its resident university. The population of the city was 17,681 at the 2020 census.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Clemson is part of the Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson, South Carolina Combined Statistical Area. Most of the city is in Pickens County, which is part of the Greenville-Mauldin-Anderson Metropolitan Statistical Area. A small portion is in Anderson County.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: European Americans settled here after the Cherokee were forced to cede their land in 1819. They had lived at Keowee, and six other towns along the Keowee River as part of their traditional homelands in the Southeast. They migrated and settled in Tennessee and deeper into Georgia and Alabama, before most were subjected to forced Indian Removal in 1839 to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The community was originally named Calhoun. Clemson University, founded in 1889, has developed as a large public university that dominates the town and serves as a cultural center. Its campus developed south of the original town. This was renamed as Clemson in 1943, reflecting its identification with the university. A small, multi-block downtown has some housing, retail and restaurants.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The university provides housing for students, but many students live off campus in a wide variety of apartment complexes. Outside the downtown, there are few paved sidewalks, but some streets have bike paths. The city's comprehensive plan has a historic preservation component to apply to keep a range of structures in the area.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The Clemson (train) Depot, built in 1893, was renovated in 2001; it now houses the local chamber of commerce and visitor center. The station was temporarily closed in 2016 for a road project, but was reopened in 2019. U.S. Route 123 runs along the northern end of the city and its edges have been developed with typical suburban-style shopping centers.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Clemson University was founded as an agricultural college starting in 1889, on the former Fort Hill Plantation of statesman John C. Calhoun, which he had acquired by marriage. The plantation was originally owned by his mother-in-law, mother of his wife Floride. Floride Calhoun inherited the property after her mother's death in 1836 but, under South Carolina law, she likely lost any individual rights to it because of her marriage.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: In the meantime, Floride and John C. Calhoun had a daughter named Anna Maria. At age 21, she married Thomas Green Clemson. After her father John C. Calhoun died in 1850; his widow Floride Calhoun gained total ownership of Fort Hill Plantation.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Because Anna Maria was the only living child, she inherited a part of Fort Hill when Floride died in 1866. Anna Maria bequeathed Thomas G. Clemson a portion of the property in her will. When Anna Maria died in 1875, he inherited the plantation. He knew that Anna Maria had wanted the land to be used as the site of an agricultural college, so Thomas Green Clemson bequeathed land for such a college in his will. After his death in 1888, what developed as Clemson University was founded on that land.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Clemson is located at (34.684930, −82.814777) approximately west of downtown Greenville and north of Anderson. The city is situated near the northwestern corner of South Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains while also on the shores of Lake Hartwell.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of , of which is land and , or 5.85%, is water.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: Typical of the Upstate, Clemson has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen) characterized by hot, humid summers and cool winters. Precipitation is ample through the year, although it reaches a maximum in August and February; snowfall is typically sporadic with a normal seasonal (December through March) total accumulation of .


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The following places and buildings in Clemson are listed on the National Register of Historic Places:


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: In addition to Clemson University, the city is home to the South Carolina Botanical Garden, Fort Hill Plantation and Bob Campbell Geology Museum. Lake Hartwell, a reservoir, is a popular recreation area that borders the city on the west. The Blue Ridge Mountains are just from the city center.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 11,939 people, 5,061 households and 2,196 families residing in the city. The population does not reflect the additional on-campus population of Clemson University, which adds roughly 17,000 additional residents for eight months of the year.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The population density was 1,620.6 people per square mile (625.5/km). There were 5,679 housing units at an average density of 770.8 per square mile (297.5/km). The city's racial makeup was 80.98% White, 11.38% African American, 5.73% Asian, 0.11% Native American, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 0.73% from other races, and 1.05% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 1.82% of the population.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: There were 5,061 households, out of which 17.8% had children younger than 18 living with them, 35.2% were married couples living together, 5.9% had a female householder with no husband present and 56.6% were non-families. 28.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 7.7% had someone living alone who was 65 or older. The average household size was 2.30, and the average family size was 2.84.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: In the city, the population was spread out, with 14.5% younger than 18, 36.8% from 18 to 24, 20.4% from 25 to 44, 15.5% from 45 to 64, and 12.7% who were 65 older. The median age was 25 years. For every 100 females. there were 106.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and older, there were 107.5 males.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The median income for a household in the city was $26,892, and the median income for a family was $61,176. Males had a median income of $39,318 versus $28,663 for females. The per capita income for the city was $19,272. About 8.8% of families and 33.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 13.1% of those under age 18 and 8.4% of those age 65 or over.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The 2010 census shows Clemson's population rose to 14,089 in 2012, showing an increase of 0.9% over two years and three months (from April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2012). The population in 2010 consisted of 5,823 households with an average of 2.33 people living in each household. This household quantity includes 2,474 family households, 932 of which had children younger than 18. 37% of these households were married couples, 2.3% male householder with no wife present and 3.2% female householders with no husband present. The rest of these households were composed of non-family households (57.5%) and householders living along (31.3%).


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The city of Clemson had a population density of 1,869 persons per square mile. The number of housing units in the city was 6.925. The overall racial distribution of the city was 78.4% white, 8.9% black or African American, 0.3% American Indian and Alaska Native, 8.3% Asian, and 2.2% Hispanic or Latino.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The age distribution for Clemson is as follows: 4.1% under the age of 5 years, 3.3% 5–9 years, 4.4% 10–14 years, 4.3% 15–19 years, 32.6% 20–24 years, 14% 25–34 years, 8.8% 35–44 years, 8.8% 45–54, and 19.7% older than 55.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The median household income was $29,828 and the median family income was $77,704. The median earnings for a male worker (full-time) was $42,597, compared to the median earnings for a female worker (full-time), which was $32,524. The city of Clemson had a per capita income of about $23,906. 17.6% of the population was below the poverty line, 13.2% of that total being families.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: As of the 2020 United States census, there were 17,681 people, 6,751 households, and 2,571 families residing in the city.


title: Clemson, South Carolina

text: The city of Clemson operates the Clemson Police Department, Clemson University Fire Department and Pickens County EMS, for public safety needs. All departments are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Clemson University Fire Department has two stations. One is on campus at 1521 Perimeter Road while the second station is at 740 Issaqueena Trail. The Police Department is at 1198 Tiger Boulevard. Pickens County EMS Medic 4 is at 115 Commons Way in Central.