You’re My World is a ballad originally recorded in 1963 as Il mio mondo (My World) by Umberto Bindi, who co-wrote the Italian version with Gino Paoli. Subsequently, an English version was commissioned, and the lyrics were written by Carl Sigman as You’re My World. The song reached #1 in Australia (twice), Belgium, Mexico, Netherlands, South Africa and United Kingdom in recordings by Cilla Black, Daryl Braithwaite, Guys ‘n’ Dolls and Helen Reddy. Black’s and Reddy’s versions reached the U.S. Top 40 in 1964 and 1977, respectively. The song also reached #1 in France and Spain in the respective translations Ce monde and Mi Mundo, both sung by Richard Anthony.
A Lonely Place to Die (Carnaby Film Productions, 2011)
A Lonely Place to Die is a 2011 British action thriller film directed by Julian Gilbey and based on a screenplay from Julian and Will Gilbey. It stars Melissa George, Ed Speleers, Karel Roden, Eamonn Walker, Sean Harris and Kate Magowan.
A group of five mountaineers are hiking and climbing in the Scottish Highlands when they discover a young Serbian girl buried in a small chamber in the wilderness. They become caught up in a terrifying game of cat and mouse with the kidnappers as they try to get the girl to safety.
In April 2011, the film had its world premiere at the ActionFest film festival in Asheville, North Carolina USA, where it was awarded “Best Film” and “Best Director.”
After the Cannes film market in May 2011, Kaleidoscope Entertainment picked up the UK rights to release the film.
The film had its UK premiere on August 29, 2011, where it was the closing film of Frightfest. It was released in UK cinemas shortly thereafter on September 7. It was released in North America in November 2011, following a screening at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival on October 24, 2011.
Unknown Pleasures is the debut studio album by English rock band Joy Division, released on June 15, 1979 by Factory Records. The album was recorded and mixed over three successive weekends at Stockport’s Strawberry Studios in April 1979, and was produced by Martin Hannett, who incorporated a number of unconventional production techniques into the group’s sound. The cover artwork was designed by artist Peter Saville, using a data plot of signals from a radio pulsar. It is the only Joy Division album released during lead singer Ian Curtis’s lifetime.
Factory Records did not release any singles from Unknown Pleasures, and the album did not chart despite the relative success of the group’s non-album debut single Transmission. It has since received sustained critical acclaim as an influential post-punk album, and has been named as one of the best albums of all time by publications such as NME, AllMusic, Select, Rolling Stone, and Spin.
Unknown Pleasures was initially printed in a run of 10,000 copies, with 5,000 copies being sold within the first two weeks of release, and a further 10,000 copies being sold over the following six months. Initially, sales of Unknown Pleasures were slow until the release of Transmission, and unsold copies occupied the Factory Records office in the flat of label co-founder Alan Erasmus.
Following the release of Transmission, Unknown Pleasures sold out of its initial pressing, with this prompting further pressings. Unknown Pleasures created approximately £50,000 in profit, to be shared between Factory Records and the band; however, Tony Wilson spent most of these profits on Factory projects. By the conclusion of a critically acclaimed promotional tour supporting Buzzcocks in November 1979, Unknown Pleasures had neared 15,000 copies sold.
Unknown Pleasures failed to chart on the UK Albums Chart. However, following Curtis’s suicide in May 1980 and the release of their second album, Closer, in July, it was reissued and reached #71 at the end of that August. It fared better on the UK Indie Chart, placing at #2 on the first chart to be published in January 1980 and going on to top the chart following its reissue, spending 136 weeks on the chart in total. The 40th-anniversary reissue of the album charted at #5 in the UK Albums Chart when it was released in 2019, making Unknown Pleasures Joy Division’s highest-charting album.
Projectile launchers have historically spelled trouble for kids — a missile-shooting spaceship in the ’70s led to modern choking warnings — but somehow people keep buying them. Last year, China had to crack down on a craze for toothpick crossbows. (The tiny spears could pierce a can from more than 60 feet away, according to one video.) Even NERF got called out for its Nerf Zombie Strike Dreadbolt Crossbow in 2017.
The Green March was a strategic mass demonstration in November 1975, coordinated by the Moroccan government, to force Spain to hand over the disputed, autonomous semi-metropolitan province of Spanish Sahara to Morocco. At that time, the Spanish government was preparing to abandon the territory as part of the decolonization of Africa, just as it had previously granted independence to Equatorial Guinea in 1968. The Sahrawi people aspired to form an independent state. The demonstration of some 350,000 Moroccans advanced several kilometres into the Western Sahara territory. Morocco later gained control over most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it continues to hold.
In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. and France supported the claim of a Moroccan Sahara since they considered that after the Spanish intention to leave the territory, either the Sahara was occupied by Morocco or the other option was a puppet Sahara of Algeria (a regional rival of Morocco and with whom it had a war the previous decade), which was then a communist country in the Soviet orbit. That Algeria had achieved an exit to the Atlantic Ocean through Western Sahara would have cornered Morocco and would have produced a significant geopolitical change in favor of Algeria, and therefore of the communist bloc.
The Green March was condemned by the international community, notably in United Nations Security Council Resolution 380, as the march was considered an attempt to bypass the International Court of Justice’s Advisory opinion on Western Sahara that had been issued three weeks prior.
Morocco gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it still holds to this day. The refusal of the Saharawi people to submit to the Moroccan monarchy gave rise to the Western Sahara conflict, still unresolved today, and whose main episode was the Western Sahara War.
The Green March was a well-publicized popular march of enormous proportions. On 6 November 1975 approximately 350,000 unarmed Moroccans converged on the city of Tarfaya in southern Morocco and waited for a signal from King Hassan II to cross into the region of Saguia El Hamra. They brandished Moroccan flags and Qur’an; banners calling for the “return of the Moroccan Sahara,” photographs of the King and the Qur’an; the color green for the march’s name was intended as a symbol of Islam. As the marchers reached the border, the Spanish Armed Forces were ordered not to fire to avoid bloodshed. The Spanish troops also cleared some previously mined zones.
8th World Wonder is the debut single of American Idol finalist Kimberley Locke from her first studio album, One Love (2004). The single, written by Joel Parkes, Shaun Shankel, and Kyle Jacobs, debuted on the U.S. Billboard Singles Sales Chart at #1, making it the first non-Idol single to top the chart from any Idol finalist.The single was later nominated in the category for “Best Love Song” at the 2004 Teen Choice Awards. The release also features a brand new modern arrangement of Locke’s signature song from the show, Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
8th World Wonder is one of the longest-running Idol singles to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, spending 20 weeks on the chart and peaking at #49. It was Locke’s only single to chart on the Hot 100. Outside the United States, the song charted only in the United Kingdom, also reaching #49. In a recent Entertainment Weekly magazine, 8th World Wonder was listed as one of the top five songs to come out of American Idol.
Rudolf Diesel (March 18, 1858 – September 29, 1913)
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer who is famous for having invented the diesel engine, which burns diesel fuel; both are named after him.
Diesel was born at 38 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth in Paris, France in 1858 the second of three children of Elise (née Strobel) and Theodor Diesel. His parents were Bavarian immigrants living in Paris. Theodor Diesel, a bookbinder by trade, left his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1848. He met his wife, a daughter of a Nuremberg merchant, in Paris in 1855 and became a leather goods manufacturer there.
Shortly after his birth, Diesel was given away to a Vincennes farmer family, where he spent his first nine months. When he was returned to his family, they moved into the flat 49 in the Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. At the time, the Diesel family suffered from financial difficulties, thus young Rudolf Diesel had to work in his father’s workshop and deliver leather goods to customers using a barrow. He attended a Protestant-French school and soon became interested in social questions and technology. Being a very good student, 12-year-old Diesel received the Société pour l’Instruction Elémentaire bronze medal and had plans to enter Ecole Primaire Supérieure in 1870.
At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War the same year, his family was forced to leave, as were many other Germans. They settled in London, where Diesel attended an English-speaking school. Before the war’s end, however, Diesel’s mother sent 12-year-old Rudolf to Augsburg to live with his aunt and uncle, Barbara and Christoph Barnickel, to become fluent in German and to visit the Königliche Kreis-Gewerbeschule (Royal County Vocational College), where his uncle taught mathematics.
At the age of 14, Diesel wrote a letter to his parents saying that he wanted to become an engineer. After finishing his basic education at the top of his class in 1873, he enrolled at the newly founded Industrial School of Augsburg. Two years later, he received a merit scholarship from the Royal Bavarian Polytechnic of Munich, which he accepted against the wishes of his parents, who would rather have seen him start to work.
One of Diesel’s professors in Munich was Carl von Linde. Diesel was unable to graduate with his class in July 1879 because he fell ill with typhoid fever. While waiting for the next examination date, he gained practical engineering experience at the Sulzer Brothers Machine Works in Winterthur, Switzerland. Diesel graduated in January 1880 with highest academic honours and returned to Paris, where he assisted his former Munich professor, Carl von Linde, with the design and construction of a modern refrigeration and ice plant. Diesel became the director of the plant one year later.
In 1883, Diesel married Martha Flasche, and continued to work for Linde, gaining numerous patents in both Germany and France.
In early 1890, Diesel moved to Berlin with his wife and children, Rudolf Jr, Heddy, and Eugen, to assume management of Linde’s corporate research and development department and to join several other corporate boards there. As he was not allowed to use the patents he developed while an employee of Linde’s for his own purposes, he expanded beyond the field of refrigeration. He first worked with steam, his research into thermal efficiency and fuel efficiency leading him to build a steam engine using ammonia vapor. During tests, however, the engine exploded and almost killed him. His research into high compression cylinder pressures tested the strength of iron and steel cylinder heads. One exploded during a run in. He spent many months in a hospital, followed by health and eyesight problems.
Ever since attending lectures of Carl von Linde, Diesel intended designing an internal combustion engine that could approach the maximum theoretical thermal efficiency of the Carnot cycle. He worked on this idea for several years, and in 1892, he considered his theory to be completed. The same year, Diesel was given the German patent DRP 67207. In 1893, he published a treatise entitled Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat-engine to Replace the Steam Engine and The Combustion Engines Known Today, that he had been working on since early 1892. This treatise formed the basis for his work on and development of the diesel engine. By summer 1893, Diesel had realised that his initial theory was erroneous, which led him to file another patent application for the corrected theory in 1893.
Diesel understood thermodynamics and the theoretical and practical constraints on fuel efficiency. He knew that as much as 90% of the energy available in the fuel is wasted in a steam engine. His work in engine design was driven by the goal of much higher efficiency ratios. In his engine, fuel was injected at the end of the compression stroke and was ignited by the high temperature resulting from the compression. From 1893 to 1897, Heinrich von Buz, director of Maschinenfabrik Augsburg in Augsburg, gave Rudolf Diesel the opportunity to test and develop his ideas.
The first successful diesel engine Motor 250/400 was officially tested in 1897, and is now on display at the German Technical Museum in Munich.
Besides Germany, Diesel obtained patents for his design in other countries, including the United States.
He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1978.
On the evening of September 29, 1913, Diesel boarded the GER steamer SS Dresden in Antwerp on his way to a meeting of the Consolidated Diesel Manufacturing company in London. He took dinner on board the ship and then retired to his cabin at about 10 p.m., leaving word to be called the next morning at 6:15 a.m.; but he was never seen alive again. In the morning his cabin was empty and his bed had not been slept in, although his nightshirt was neatly laid out and his watch had been left where it could be seen from the bed. His hat and neatly folded overcoat were discovered beneath the afterdeck railing.
Ten days later, the crew of the Dutch pilot boat Coertsen came upon the corpse of a man floating in the Eastern Scheldt. The body was in such an advanced state of decomposition that it was unrecognizable, and they did not bring it aboard because of heavy weather. Instead, the crew retrieved personal items (pill case, wallet, I.D. card, pocketknife, eyeglass case) from the clothing of the dead man, and returned the body to the sea. On October 13, these items were identified by Rudolf’s son, Eugen Diesel, as belonging to his father.
There are various theories to explain Diesel’s death. Some people, such as his biographers Grosser (1978) and Sittauer (1978) argue that Rudolf Diesel committed suicide. Another line of thought suggests that he was murdered, given his refusal to grant the German forces the exclusive rights to using his invention; indeed, Diesel boarded the SS Dresden with the intent of meeting with representatives of the British Royal Navy to discuss the possibility of powering British submarines by diesel engine; yet he never made it ashore. But evidence is limited for all explanations, and his disappearance and death remain unsolved.
Shortly after Diesel’s disappearance, his wife Martha opened a bag that her husband had given to her just before his ill-fated voyage, with directions that it should not be opened until the following week. She discovered 20,000 German marks in cash (US$120,000 today) and a number of financial statements indicating that their bank accounts were virtually empty. In a diary Diesel brought with him on the ship, for the date September 29, 1913, a cross was drawn, possibly indicating death.
Afterwards, in the middle of 1950, Magokichi Yamaoka, the founder of Yanmar, the diesel engine manufacturer in Japan, visited West Germany, and learned that there was no tomb or monument for Diesel. Yamaoka and the people associated with Diesel began to make preparations to honour him. In 1957, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Diesel’s birth and the 60th anniversary of the diesel engine development, Yamaoka donated the Rudolf Diesel Memorial Garden (Rudolf-Diesel-Gedächtnishain) in Wittelsbacher Park in Augsburg, Bavaria, where Diesel spent his childhood.
The Dot is a 2003 picture book written and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds about a girl named Vashti who discovers her artistic talent. It is published by Candlewick Press.
Vashti is a girl who believes she can’t draw. When her art teacher notices that she left her assignment blank, Vashti is instructed to just “make a mark and see where it takes you.” Vashti is only able to make a small dot on her paper, but to her surprise, the teacher asks her to sign it and displays it in her office the next week. Believing that she can do better than just that, she starts drawing multiple, more elaborate and colorful pieces centered around the dot motif, earning widespread attention and realizing that she is indeed an artist.
Later in life, Vashti encounters a young boy who believes he can’t draw. After he claims that he can’t even draw a straight line, Vashti asks him to try his best at making one. While the result is imperfectly squiggly, she nonetheless instructs him to sign it, starting a whole new adventure in the process.
The Dot has been adapted into a film on July 1, 2004, produced by Weston Woods Studios and FableVision. It was awarded the 2005 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children’s Video.
A million educators and students celebrate around the world on September 15 (ish) – International Dot Day, a global celebration of creativity in the classroom based on Peter H. Reynolds’ award-winning book.
In the North African nations of Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, people understand couscous better than most. The dish originated here, and in 2020, UNESCO recognized not only the dish itself, but also the knowledge associated with how couscous is produced.
Couscous is a cereal, thus the process starts with a seed. The semolina that’s grown and harvested is rolled by hand to form those tiny rounded balls. It’s then steamed and finally cooked. Each of the four countries listed has a slightly different way of preparing and eating couscous, but one thing they all have in common is the ceremonial nature of the processes involved, which are transmitted down from parents to their children through observation.
There are special tools involved with making couscous too, including clay and wooden instruments that are manufactured by specialized artisans. The final stage in the couscous lifecycle – eating! – is also linked to important social and cultural practices. Traditionally shared from a large pot between family members and friends, couscous is a symbol for togetherness.
Try it for yourself: It’s hard to avoid couscous when traveling through North Africa – it’s a staple dish on almost every restaurant menu. Tagines are a particularly popular dish containing couscous. For an up-close look at how couscous is prepared, try enrolling in a workshop at a culinary school. Marrakesh is a popular place to take a short cooking class and learn the intricacies of this beautiful dish.
Adam-12 is an American television police procedural crime drama television series created by Robert A. Cinader and Jack Webb. The series follows Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers Pete Malloy and Jim Reed as they patrol the streets of Los Angeles in their police cruiser, designated “1-Adam-12”. Like Webb’s other series, Dragnet and Emergency!, Adam-12 was produced in cooperation with the real department it was based on (in this case the LAPD). Adam-12 aimed to be realistic in its depiction of police, and helped to introduce police procedures and jargon to the general public in the United States.
The series stars Martin Milner and Kent McCord, with several recurring co-stars, the most frequent being William Boyett and Gary Crosby. The show ran from September 21, 1968 to May 20, 1975 over seven seasons.
Set in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division, Adam-12 follows veteran Police Officer II Pete Malloy, Badge 744 (Milner) and Police Officer I Jim Reed, Badge 2430 (McCord). Malloy and Reed reported to shift supervisor Sergeant I William “Mac” MacDonald (Boyett). Several of their fellow officers were recurring characters; the most frequent were Officer Ed Wells (Crosby), Officer Jerry Woods (Fred Stromsoe), Detective Sergeant Jerry Miller (Jack Hogan), Officer Brinkman (Claude Johnson), and Motor Officer Gus Grant (William Elliott). Shaaron Claridge, an actual LAPD dispatcher, voiced one of two police dispatchers in the show.
At the start of the series, Malloy, seeking to retire after the death of his former partner three weeks prior, is assigned to field train Reed, an inexperienced rookie, as his partner. After Reed disobeys Malloy but safely arrests a group of armed suspects during a high-risk shooting call, Malloy decides to remain on the force to guide Reed during his nine-month probationary period. The first and second seasons are not in chronological order, with Reed’s stated time in the LAPD varying in each episode. Starting with the third season, the series was chronologically organized and Reed completed his probationary period, becoming a permanent police officer; Reed and Malloy remained partners. In later seasons, Malloy and Reed began patrolling other divisions and working in different assignments, occasionally explained as them filling in for other officers or being part of police programs.
The personal lives of Malloy and Reed came up on occasion and were often tied in to their duties, though they rarely extended past conversations in the cruiser or at the station. Malloy is a bachelor who has at least five girlfriends over the course of the series, the last being Judy (Aneta Corsaut), while Reed is married to a woman named Jean (played by several actresses, including Mikki Jamison and Kristin Nelson); in the second season, they have a son, Jimmy.
The police cars used in the series were central to the show; Webb “wanted the vehicle itself to be considered a character.” As patrol officers, Malloy and Reed spent much of their time in their cruiser, and their time driving on patrol or responding to a call was central to most episodes. Most officers in the series drove recent-model sedans, while Sergeant MacDonald always used a station wagon version of Adam-12‘s vehicle.
In the pilot episode, Adam-12 used a 1967 Plymouth Belvedere; for the rest of the first season, a 1968 Plymouth Belvedere was used instead, later updated to a 1969 Plymouth Belvedere for the second and third seasons. In the fourth season, Adam-12 used a 1971 Plymouth Satellite. Starting with the fifth season, and for the rest of the series, Adam-12 used a 1972 AMC Matador.