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Ernie Kovacs

Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.

Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Uncle Floyd, among others. Chase even thanked Kovacs during his acceptance speech for his Emmy award for Saturday Night Live.

While Kovacs and his wife Edie Adams received Emmy nominations for best performances in a comedy series during 1957, his talent was not recognized formally until after his death. The 1962 Emmy for Outstanding Electronic Camera Work and the Directors' Guild award came a short time after his fatal accident. A quarter century later, he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Kovacs also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television. In 1986, the Museum of Broadcasting (later to become the Museum of Television & Radio and now the Paley Center for Media) presented an exhibit of Kovacs's work, called The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. The Pulitzer Prize–winning television critic, William Henry III, wrote for the museum's booklet: "Kovacs was more than another wide-eyed, self-ingratiating clown. He was television's first significant video artist."

Early life and career
Kovacs's father, Andrew John Kovacs, was born in 1890 and emigrated from Tornaújfalu, Hungary, which is now known as Turnianska Nová Ves, Slovakia. Andrew sailed on the S.S. Würzburg via Bremen, arriving at Ellis Island on February 8, 1906, at age 16. He worked as a policeman, restaurateur, and bootlegger, the last so successfully that he moved his wife Mary, son Tom, and Tom’s half-brother Ernest Edward Kovacs into a 20-room mansion in the better part of Trenton.

Though a poor student, Kovacs was influenced by his Trenton Central High School drama teacher, Harold Van Kirk, and received an acting scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1937 with Van Kirk's help, appearing with Long Island, N.Y. stock companies. The end of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression resulted in difficult financial times for the family. When Kovacs began drama school, all he could afford was a fifth-floor walk-up apartment on West 74th Street in New York City.

During this time, he watched many "Grade B" movies; admission was only ten cents. Many of these movies influenced his comedy routines later.

A 1938 local newspaper photograph shows Kovacs as a member of the Prospect Players, not yet wearing his trademark mustache. Kovacs used his class vacation time to pursue roles in summer stock companies. While working in Vermont in 1939, he became so seriously ill with pneumonia and pleurisy that his doctors didn't expect him to survive. During the next year and a half, his comedic talents developed as he entertained both doctors and patients with his antics during stays at several hospitals. While hospitalized, Kovacs developed a lifelong love of classical music by the gift of a radio, which he kept tuned to WQXR. By the time he was released his parents had separated, and Kovacs went back to Trenton, living with his mother in a two-room apartment over a store. He began work as a cigar salesman, which resulted in a lifelong tobacco-smoking habit.

Kovacs's first paid entertainment work was during 1941 as an announcer for Trenton's radio station WTTM. He spent the next nine years with WTTM, becoming the station's director of special events; in this job he did things like trying to see what it was like to be run over by a train (leaving the tracks at the last minute) and broadcasting from the cockpit of a plane for which he took flying lessons. Kovacs was also involved with local theater; a local newspaper published a photograph of him and the news that he was doing some directing for the Trenton Players Guild in early 1941. The Trentonian, a local daily newspaper, offered Kovacs a column in June 1945; he named it "Kovacs Unlimited" (1945–50).

Start in television

In January 1950, arriving at NBC's Philadelphia affiliate, WPTZ, for an audition, wearing a barrel and shorts, got Kovacs his first television job. His first show was Pick Your Ideal, a fashion and promotional program for the Ideal Manufacturing Company. Before long, Kovacs was also the host of Deadline For Dinner and Now You're Cooking, shows featuring advice from local chefs. When Kovacs's guest chef did not arrive in time for the show, he offered a recipe for "Eggs Scavok" (Kovacs spelled backward). Kovacs seasoned the egg dish with ashes from his cigar. The sponsor was a local propane company. Hosting these shows soon resulted in his becoming host of a program named Three to Get Ready, named for WPTZ's channel 3 spot on television dials.

Premiering in November 1950, Three to Get Ready was innovative because it was the first regularly scheduled early morning (7–9am) show in a major television market, predating NBC's Today by more than a year. Prior to this, it had been assumed that few people would watch television at such an early hour. While the show was advertised as early morning news and weather, Kovacs provided this and more in an original manner. When rain was in the weather forecast, Kovacs would get on a ladder and pour water down on the staff member reading the report. Goats were auditioned for a local theater performance and tiny women appeared to walk up his arm. Kovacs also went outside of the studio for some of his skits, running through a downtown Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla suit in one; in another, he looked into a construction pit, saying it was deep enough to see to China, when a man in Chinese clothing popped up, said a few words in the language, and ran off. Despite its popularity, the weekly prop budget for the show was just $15. Kovacs once asked his viewers to send unwanted items to Channel 3; they filled the station's lobby.

The only character no one ever saw inspired more gifts; he was Howard, the World's Strongest Ant. From the time of his WPTZ debut, Howard received more than 30,000 miniaturized gifts from Kovacs's viewers, including a tiny, mink-lined swimming pool. Kovacs began his Early Eyeball Fraternal & Marching Society (EEFMS) while doing Three to Get Ready. There were membership cards with by-laws and ties; the password was a favorite phrase of Kovacs's: "It's Been Real". Kovacs continued the EEFMS on his morning show when he moved to WCBS in New York in 1952. The success of Three to Get Ready proved that people did indeed watch early-morning television, and it was one of the factors that caused NBC to create The Today Show. WPTZ did not begin broadcasting Today when it premiered on January 14, 1952; network influence caused the station to end Three to Get Ready at the end of March of that year.

During early 1952, Kovacs was also doing a late morning show for WPTZ named Kovacs on the Corner. Kovacs would walk through an imaginary neighborhood, talking with various characters such as Pete the Cop and Luigi the Barber. As with Three to Get Ready, there were some special segments. "Swap Time" was one of them: Viewers could bring their unwanted items to the WPTZ studios to trade them live on the air with Kovacs. The show made its debut on January 4, 1952, with Kovacs losing creative control of the program soon after it was begun. Kovacs on the Corner was short-lived; it ended on March 28, 1952, along with Three to Get Ready. Kovacs then began work for WCBS-TV in New York with a local morning show and a later network one. Both programs were canceled; Kovacs lost the local morning program for the same reason as Three to Get Ready—the broadcasting time was confiscated by the station's network in 1954.

Visual humor and characters
At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs's cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. In one of Kovacs's Philadelphia broadcasts, Oscar Liebetrau, an elderly crew member who was known for often sleeping for the duration of the telecast, was introduced to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." Kovacs was once knocked unconscious when a pie smashed into his face still had the plate under it.

Kovacs's love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Hepplewhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick swig of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the skit. Kovacs realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. He pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show.

Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common decades after his death. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle. He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet-paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved cigar smoker Kovacs sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking a cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters television commercial on his ABC game show, Take A Good Look.

One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant Barbara Loden's head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.

He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes (Kovacs, his wife, Edie Adams in gorilla suits; and frequently, the third ape was Kovacs' best friend Jack Lemmon) miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".

Kovacs used extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used-car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.

Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC during the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.

Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German radio announcer, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Hepplewhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout, and sardonic Hungarian cooking-show host Miklos Molnar. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons its instruments for a safe-cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio", but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch. Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's program Monitor beginning during late 1958, often using his Mr. Question Man character in his radio monologues.

Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started the late-night talk show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen and radio notables were often guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra director for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been dismissed by Godfrey the year before, together with fellow cast member, singer Julius La Rosa. In La Rosa's case, he hired a manager, defying an unwritten Godfrey policy. With Bleyer, Godfrey was angered when he found that Bleyer's record company Cadence Records had produced spoken-word material by Don McNeill, host of ABC's Don McNeill's Breakfast Club, which Godfrey considered competition to his show. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukulele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.

Kovacs's television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs was also the host of a program, Silents Please, which showed silent movies on network television, with serious discussion about the movies and their actors.

During the summer of 1957, Kovacs was a celebrity panelist on the television series What's My Line?, appearing in 10 of the season's 13 episodes. He took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of an automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "Are you – and this is just a wild guess – but are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's Lincoln automobiles. Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, leading the reporter to offer that as the reason for Kovacs leaving the series. Actually, Kovacs's participation ended because his contract was up—the summer season was over. Goodson and Todman valued Kovacs's presence in the summer series and kept him on as a guest panelist. According to What's My Line? producer Gil Fates, "We offered him a contract and a permanent place on the panel but, wisely, Ernie didn't want to tie himself down [to New York] at that point in a burgeoning career. He did his last show with us in November of that year, then went to California to work and live."

TV specials
He also did several television specials, including the famous Silent Show (1957), featuring his character, Eugene: the first all-pantomime prime-time network program. After the end of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis partnership, NBC offered Lewis the opportunity to host his own 90-minute color television special. Lewis opted to use only 60 minutes, leaving the network 30 minutes to fill; no one wanted this time slot, but Kovacs was willing to have it. The program contained no spoken dialogue and contained only sound effects and music. Featuring Kovacs as the mute, Charlie Chaplin-like character "Eugene", the program contained surreal sight gags. Kovacs developed the Eugene character during the autumn of 1956, when hosting the television series The Tonight Show. Expectations were high for the Lewis program, but it was Kovacs' special that received the most attention; Kovacs received his first movie offer, had a cover story in Life magazine, and received the Sylvania Award that year. In 1961, Kovacs and his co-director, Joe Behar, were recipients of the Directors Guild of America Award for a second version of this program broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network.

A series of monthly half-hour specials for ABC during 1961–62 is often considered his best television work. Produced on videotape using new editing and special effects techniques, it won a 1962 Emmy Award. Kovacs and co-director Behar also won the Directors Guild of America award for an Ernie Kovacs Special based on the earlier, silent "Eugene" program. Kovacs' last ABC special was broadcast posthumously, on January 23, 1962.

The Dutch Masters cigar company became well known during the late 1950s and early 1960s for its sponsorship of various television projects of Ernie Kovacs. The company allowed Kovacs total creative control in the creation of their television commercials for his programs and specials. He produced a series of non-speaking television commercials for Dutch Masters during the run of his television series Take A Good Look which was praised by both television critics and viewers.

While praised by critics, Kovacs rarely had a highly rated show. The Museum of Broadcast Communications says, "It is doubtful that Ernie Kovacs would find a place on television today. He was too zany, too unrestrained, too undisciplined. Perhaps Jack Gould of The New York Times said it best for Ernie Kovacs: 'The fun was in trying'."

Other shows had greater success while using elements of Kovacs's style. George Schlatter, producer of the later television series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, was married to actress Jolene Brand, who had appeared in Kovacs' comic troupes over the years and had been a frequent participant in his pioneering sketches. Laugh-In made frequent use of the quick blackout gags and surreal humor that marked many Kovacs projects. Another link was a young NBC staffer, Bill Wendell, Kovacs's usual announcer and sometimes a sketch participant. From 1980 to 1995, Wendell was the announcer for David Letterman.

The Music Man
Kovacs was also known for his eclectic musical taste. His main theme song was named "Oriental Blues" by Jack Newton. The rendition most often heard was a piano-driven trio version, but, for his primetime show during 1956, music director Harry Sosnik presented a full-blown big-band version. The German song "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" from The Threepenny Opera (anglicized to "Mack the Knife"), frequently underscored his blackout routines.

Kovacs was introduced to harpist-songwriter Robert Maxwell's recent instrumental "Solfeggio" in 1954 by Barry Shear, his director at DuMont Television Network. In the 1982 TV special Ernie Kovacs: Television's Original Genius, Edie Adams recalled that when Kovacs first heard "Solfeggio", he immediately knew how he wanted to use it. He conceived of three music-box-like apes in costume, who moved in time to the tune, and christened them The Nairobi Trio. Maxwell's 1953 record of "Solfeggio" became so identified with the ape act that the record was re-released in 1957 as "Song of the Nairobi Trio."

Kovacs matched an unusual treatment of "Sentimental Journey", by Mexican bandleader Juan García Esquivel, to video of an empty office in which various items (pencil sharpeners, water coolers, wall clocks) come to life in rhythm with the music; it was a variation on several famous animations of a decade earlier. The original three-minute presentation was outlined by Kovacs in a four-page, single-spaced memo to his staff. The perfectionist Kovacs describes in minute detail what had to be done and how to do it. The memo ends with this: "I don't know how the hell you're going to get this done by Sunday – but 'rots of ruck." (signed) "Ernie (with love)". Kovacs also made careful use of the shrill singer Leona Anderson—who had somewhat less than a classical (or even listenable) voice, by some estimations—in comic vignettes.

Kovacs used classical music as background for silent skits or abstract visual routines, including "Concerto for Orchestra", by Béla Bartók; music from the opera "The Love of Three Oranges", by Sergei Prokofiev; the finale of Igor Stravinsky's suite "The Firebird"; and Richard Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks"; and, from George Gershwin, "Rialto Ripples"—the theme to his shows—as well as parts of Gershwin's "Concerto in F". He may have been known best for using Joseph Haydn's "String Quartet, Opus 3, Number 5" (the "Serenade," actually composed by Roman Hoffstetter) for a series of 1960–61 commercials he created and videotaped for his sponsor, Dutch Masters.

For the show of May 22, 1959, Kovacs on Music, Kovacs began by saying, "I have never really understood classical music, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain it to others." He presented a gorilla version of Swan Lake which differed from the usual performance only in the persona of the dancers, along with giant paper clips moving to music and other sketches.

He also served as host on a jazz album to benefit the American Cancer Society in 1957, Listening to Jazz with Ernie Kovacs. It was a 15-minute recording featuring some of the celebrities of the art, including pianist Jimmy Yancey and old original New Orleans Jazz Trumpeter Bunk Johnson, soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, guitarist Django Reinhardt, composer/pianist/bandleader Duke Ellington and longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams. Both the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada have copies of this recording in their collections.

Works
Kovacs wrote a novel, Zoomar: A Sophisticated Novel about Love and TV (Doubleday, 1957), based on television pioneer Pat Weaver; it took Kovacs only 13 days to write. The book took its title from the Zoomar brand zoom lenses frequently used on television cameras at the time. In a 1960 interview, Edie Adams related that the novel was written after Kovacs' experiences with network television while he was preparing to broadcast the Silent Show. The 1961 British edition was retitled T.V. Medium Rare by its London-based publisher, Transworld.

While he worked on several other book projects, Kovacs's only other published title was How to Talk at Gin, published posthumously in 1962. He intended part of the book's proceeds to benefit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

During 1955–58, he wrote for Mad (his favorite humor magazine), including the feature "Strangely Believe It!" (a parody of Ripley's Believe It or Not! that was a regular feature of his television shows) and Gringo, a board game with ridiculously complicated rules that was renamed Droongo for the television show. Kovacs also wrote the introduction to the 1958 collection Mad For Keeps: A Collection of the Best from Mad Magazine.

Television guest star

Kovacs and Edie Adams guest starred on what turned out to be the final episode of The Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show, (syndicated as The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour or We Love Lucy) "Lucy Meets the Moustache", which was in rehearsals during the week of February 28 and filmed on March 3 for an April 1, 1960 network broadcast. "Lucy Meets the Moustache" was the last time Arnaz and Ball worked together and the last time their famous characters appeared in a first-run broadcast. According to Adams, Ball and Arnaz 'avoided contact and barely talked to each other in rehearsals and in-between scenes'. Adams also said that they were not told their episode was the last or that the famous couple was to divorce (Ball entered the uncontested divorce request March 4, 1960).

Kovacs also appeared in roles on other television programs. For General Electric Theater's "I Was a Bloodhound" in 1959, Kovacs played the role of detective Barney Colby, whose extraordinary sense of smell helped him solve many seemingly-impossible cases. Colby was hired by a foreign country to recover its symbol of royalty, a baby elephant, who was being held for ransom.

Films
Kovacs found Hollywood success as a character actor, often typecast as a swarthy military officer (almost always a "Captain" of some sort) in such films as Operation Mad Ball, Wake Me When It's Over and Our Man in Havana. While working in his first film role for Operation Mad Ball, Kovacs was filming a wild party scene after midnight; it was decided to use real champagne for realism. After a few hours of work, someone came up to Kovacs and remarked that he had been having quite a good time chasing starlets all night. Kovacs told the stranger to go to hell, since he was following the script; he later learned the stranger was Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. Kovacs and Cohn later became friends despite the way they had met, with Cohn giving Kovacs roles in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and It Happened to Jane (1959).

He garnered critical acclaim for film roles such as the perennially-inebriated writer in Bell, Book and Candle and as the cartoonishly-evil head of a railroad company (who resembled Orson Welles' title character in Citizen Kane) in It Happened to Jane, where he had his head shaved and his remaining hair dyed grey for the role. In 1960, he played the base commander Charlie Stark in the comedy Wake Me When It's Over and the con man Frankie Cannon trying to steal John Wayne's gold mine in the western comedy, North to Alaska. His own personal favorite was said to have been the offbeat Five Golden Hours (1961), in which he portrayed a larcenous professional mourner who meets his match in a professional widow played by Cyd Charisse. Kovacs's last movie, Sail a Crooked Ship (also 1961), was released one month before his death.

First marriage
Kovacs and his first wife, Bette Wilcox, were married on August 13, 1945. When the marriage ended, he fought for custody of their children, Elizabeth ("Bette") and Kip Raleigh ("Kippie"). The court awarded Kovacs full custody upon determining that his former wife was mentally unstable. The decision was extremely unusual at the time, setting a legal precedent. Wilcox subsequently kidnapped the children, taking them to Florida. After a long and expensive search, Kovacs regained custody. These events were portrayed in the television movie Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter (1984), which garnered an Emmy Award nomination for its writer, April Smith. Kovacs was portrayed by Jeff Goldblum.

Kovacs's first wife made a legal attempt to gain custody of her two daughters soon after his death. She began August 2, 1962, by claiming US$500,000 (equivalent to $ million in ) was her share of Kovacs's estate and charging that her ex-husband had abducted the girls in 1955; Kovacs had been granted legal custody of his daughters in 1952. On August 30, Wilcox filed an affidavit claiming that Kovacs's widow, Edie Adams, the stepmother to the girls, was "unfit" to care for them. Both daughters, Bette and Kippie, testified that they wanted to stay with their stepmother, Edie. Kippie's testimony was very emotional; in it she referred to Edie as "Mommy" and her birth mother as "the other lady." Upon hearing the verdict that the girls would remain in their home, Adams wept, saying, "This is what Ernie would have wanted. Now I can smile." Bette's reaction was "I'm so happy I can hardly express myself", after learning she and her sister would not be forced to leave Edie.

Second marriage
Kovacs and Adams met in 1951 when she was hired to work for his WPTZ show, Three to Get Ready. Her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts caught the eye of Kovacs's producer, and he asked her to audition for the program. A classically trained singer, she was able to perform only three popular songs. Edie said later, "I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it." Quoting Kovacs, "I wish I could say I was the big shot that hired her, but it was my show in name only – the producer had all the say. Later on I did have something to say and I said it: 'Let's get married.'"

After the couple's first date, Kovacs proceeded to buy a Jaguar car, telling Adams he wanted to take her out in style. He was seriously taken with the beautiful and talented young woman, courting her with imagination and flair. Kovacs's attempts to win Adams' affection included hiring a mariachi band to serenade her backstage at the Broadway musical she was performing in and the sudden gift of a diamond engagement ring, telling her to wear it until she made up her mind. Kovacs continued this romantic quest after the show went out of town.

Adams booked a six-week European cruise, which she hoped would let her make up her mind whether or not to marry Kovacs. After only three days away and many long-distance telephone calls, she curtailed her trip and returned to say "yes". They eloped and were married on September 12, 1954, in Mexico City. The ceremony was presided over by former New York City mayor William O'Dwyer and was performed in Spanish, which neither Kovacs nor Adams understood; O'Dwyer had to prompt each of them to say "Sí" at the "I do" portion of the vows. Adams, who had a middle-class upbringing, was smitten by Kovacs's quirky ways; the couple remained together until his death. (She later said about Kovacs, "He treated me like a little girl, and I loved it—Women's Lib be damned!")

Adams also aided Kovacs's struggle to reclaim his two older children after the kidnapping by their mother. She also was a regular partner on his television shows. Kovacs usually introduced or addressed her in a businesslike way, as "Edith Adams". Adams was usually willing to do anything he envisioned, whether it was singing seriously, performing impersonations (including a well-regarded impression of Marilyn Monroe) or taking a pie in the face or a pratfall if and when needed. The couple had one daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs, born June 20, 1959.

Kovacs and his family shared a 16-room apartment in Manhattan on Central Park West that seemed perfect until he went to California for his first film role in Operation Mad Ball. The experience of the totally different, laid-back lifestyle of Hollywood made a big impression on him. He realized he was working too much in New York; in California he would be able to work fewer hours, do just as well or better and have more time for Edie and his daughters. At the time, he was working most of the time and sleeping about two or three hours a night. Kovacs claimed that he realized it was time for a change when he was telling his girls a bedtime story and found himself thinking of using it for a show instead. Kovacs relocated his family there in 1957, after Edie finished work for the Broadway play Li'l Abner.

Death

In the early morning hours of January 13, 1962, Kovacs lost control of his Chevrolet Corvair station wagon while turning quickly and crashed into a power pole in West Los Angeles. He was thrown halfway out the vehicle's passenger side and died almost instantly from chest and head injuries. A photographer arrived soon after and images of Kovacs' body – with an unlit cigar on the pavement near his outstretched hand – appeared in newspapers across the United States.

In keeping with Kovacs's wishes, a simple service was held at the Beverly Hills Community Presbyterian Church. The pallbearers included Ernie's best friend Jack Lemmon, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billy Wilder, and Mervyn LeRoy. George Burns, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Buster Keaton and Milton Berle also attended. The pastor said that Kovacs had summed up his life thus: "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since." He is buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles. His epitaph reads "Nothing in moderation—We all loved him."

Tax evasion
A frequent critic of the U.S. tax system, Kovacs owed the Internal Revenue Service several hundred thousand dollars in back taxes, due to his refusal to pay the bulk of them. Up to 90% of his earnings were garnished as a result. His long battles with the IRS inspired Kovacs to invest his money in a convoluted series of paper corporations in the U.S. and Canada. He would give them bizarre names, such as "The Bazooka Dooka Hicka Hocka Hookah Company". In 1961, Kovacs was served with a $75,000 lien for back taxes; that same day he bought the California Racquet Club with the apparent hope of being able to use it as a tax write-off. The property had mortgages at the time of purchase which were later paid by his wife, Edie Adams.

His tax woes also affected Kovacs's career, forcing him to take any offered work to pay his debt. This included the ABC game show Take a Good Look, appearances on variety shows such as NBC's The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and some of his less-memorable film roles. He also filmed an unaired 1962 pilot episode for a proposed CBS series, Medicine Man (co-starring Buster Keaton; the pilot episode titled "A Pony for Chris"). Kovacs's role was that of Dr. P. Crookshank, a traveling medicine salesman in the 1870s, who was selling Mother McGreevy's Wizard Juice, also known as "man's best friend in a bottle". This was abandoned after his death, which occurred the day after filming some scenes in Griffith Park for the pilot. CBS initially intended to broadcast the show as part of a summer replacement program, The Comedy Spot, but decided against it due to problems with Kovacs' estate. The pilot is part of the public collection of the Paley Center for Media.

Some of the issues regarding Kovacs' tax problems were still unresolved years after his death. Kovacs had purchased two insurance policies in 1951; his mother was named as the primary beneficiary of them. The IRS placed a lien against them both for their cash value in 1961. To stop the actions being taken against her, Mary Kovacs had to go to Federal court. The court's early 1966 ruling resolved the issue, with the last sentence of the document reading: "Prima facie, it looks as if, within the limits of discretion permitted the government by the relevant statutes, an injustice is being done Mary Kovacs."

Adams, who married and divorced twice after Kovacs' death, refused help from celebrity friends who planned a benefit for the purpose. "I can take care of my own children," she said, and resolved to accept offers only from those who wanted to hire her for her talents. Adams eventually paid all of Kovacs's debts.

Lost and surviving work
Most of Kovacs's early television work was performed live: some kinescopes have survived. Some videotapes of his ABC specials were preserved; others, such as his quirky game show, Take a Good Look, were available mostly in short segments until recently, with the release of some complete, videotaped episodes. After Kovacs's death, Adams discovered not only that her husband owed ABC a great deal of money, but that some networks were systematically erasing and reusing tapes of Kovacs's shows or disposing of the kinescopes and videotapes. She succeeded in purchasing the rights to surviving footage with the proceeds from Kovacs' insurance policy and her own earnings after Kovacs' IRS debts were paid. In March 1996, Adams detailed her experiences before the National Film Preservation Board.

Adams first used some of the videotapes she had purchased for a 1968 ABC television special, The Comedy of Ernie Kovacs; to produce the show, she hired Kovacs's former producer and editor. The hour-long program was sponsored by Kovacs's former sponsor, Dutch Masters.

Most of Kovacs's salvaged work is available to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Library's Department of Special Collections: additional material is available at the Paley Center for Media.

Telecasts of edited compilations of some of his work by PBS (station WTTW, Chicago) under the title The Best of Ernie Kovacs in 1977, inspired the film. These broadcasts were made available on VHS and DVD. The DVD set features extras that are not in the VHS set. The series was narrated by long time friend, Jack Lemmon. The 1984 television film Ernie Kovacs: Between the Laughter helped return Kovacs to the public's attention, though the show emphasized his bid to retrieve his kidnapped children instead of his professional life. Jeff Goldblum portrayed Kovacs, Madolyn Smith portrayed Bette and Melody Anderson portrayed Adams in the movie. Edie Adams appeared in a cameo in this film, playing Mae West; it was one of the impressions she performed in shows with Kovacs.

During the early 1990s, The Comedy Channel broadcast a series of Kovacs' shows under the generic title of The Ernie Kovacs Show. The series included both the ABC specials and some of his 1950s shows from NBC. By 2008, there were no broadcast, cable, or satellite channels broadcasting any of Kovacs's television work, other than his panel appearances on What's My Line? on the Game Show Network.

On April 19, 2011, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection, six DVDs spanning Kovacs's television career. The company's website also offers an extra disc with material from Tonight! and The Ernie Kovacs Show, as well as a rare color kinescope of the complete 30-minute 1957 NBC color broadcast featuring "Eugene". On October 23, 2012, Shout! Factory released The Ernie Kovacs Collection: Volume 2 on DVD. The 49 surviving episodes of the game show Take a Good Look were released on DVD by Shout! Factory on October 17, 2017.

In 1961, Kovacs recorded a record album of poetry in the character of Percy Dovetonsils named Percy Dovetonsils Thpeakth, but was unable to release it due to contractual obligations with other record companies. After he was given the masters, Kovacs donated them to a Los Angeles area hospital. Adams was able to re-acquire the tapes in 1967, and they remained part of her private collection until her death in 2008. The tapes were labeled as movie material and were thought to be such until further examination proved they were Kovacs as Percy reading his poems with no music background. The album was finally released in 2012.

Kovacs was inducted posthumously into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia's Hall of Fame in 1992.

Partial filmography

 * Operation Mad Ball (1957) (with Jack Lemmon) as Capt. Paul Lock
 * Bell, Book and Candle (1958) (with James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon as Sidney Redlitch
 * It Happened to Jane (1959) (with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon) as Harry Foster Malone
 * Our Man in Havana (1959) (with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) as Capt. Segura
 * Wake Me When It's Over (1960) (with Dick Shawn) as Capt. Charlie Stark
 * Strangers When We Meet (1960) (with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak) as Roger Altar
 * North to Alaska (1960) (with John Wayne) as Frankie Canon
 * Pepe (1960) (with Cantinflas) as Immigration Inspector
 * Five Golden Hours (1961) (with Cyd Charisse and George Sanders) as Aldo Bondi
 * Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Robert Wagner) as Bugsy G. Foglemeyer aka The Captain

title: Ernie Kovacs


text:
Cara sucia (TV series)

Cara Sucia (English title:Dirty Face) is a Venezuelan telenovela written by Carlos Romero and Alberto Gómez and produced by Venevisión in 1992. The telenovela was distributed internationally by Venevisión International and was dubbed into English, Russian, Mongolian, Indonesian, and (Filipino) in the Philippines. Guillermo Dávila and Sonya Smith starred as the main protagonists with Gigi Zanchetta and Humberto García as the main antagonists.

Plot
Miguel Ángel González is a member of one of Caracas' richest families while Estrella is a poor but hard-working beautiful girl who sells newspapers in a corner everyday to earn a living. When they meet, they fall in love and begin a beautiful romance that leads to marriage. However, not everything is rosy for the couple. Miguel Ángel's parents Horacio and Rebecca are opposed to the relationship, and the obsessive passion Santa Ortigoza, Miguel Ángel's ex-girlfriend has over him. Horacio's declining mental health makes him become more and more dangerous, and he hides a secret from the past: many years ago, he murdered Estrella's mother because she rejected him and let her father be blamed for the crime. The secret is revealed once Leonardo Montenegro, Estrella's father, is released from prison and reunited with his daughter. Rebecca, Miguel Ángel's mother, begins to accept his relationship with Estrella once she learns about Horacio's secret and that she was wrong about Estrella being a gold digger, when it was actually Santa who was after their family's money.

Later, Horacio kidnaps Estrella and Miguel Ángel's twin boys, and during this time, he has begun loving them like his sons. He shoots himself after a police stand-off when the babies are wrestled away from him while Santa dies after her car is driven off a cliff.

Cast

 * Guillermo Dávila as Miguel Ángel González De la Vega / Miguel Ángel Guzmán De la Vega
 * Sonya Smith as Estrella Montenegro Campuzano / Estrella "Estrellita" Camacho /Estrella Campuzano
 * Gigi Zanchetta as Santa Ortigosa Lavarte
 * Adolfo Cubas as Antonio González De la Vega
 * Humberto García as Horacio González Ferrer
 * Eva Blanco as Candelaria Camacho Duval
 * Chony Fuentes as Rebeca De la Vega de González
 * Elio Rubens as Leonardo Montenegro
 * Helianta Cruz as Genoveva "Beba" Lavarte De Ortigoza
 * Alberto Marín as Padre Lombarito
 * Julio Capote as Fermín
 * Marcelo Romo as Carmelo
 * Simón Pestana as José Grigorio
 * Solmaira Castillo as Deyanira Falcón
 * Jenire Blanco
 * Elizabeth López as Federica Rangel
 * Rita De Gois as Carmen dos Santos
 * Marcelo Rodríguez as Agustín dos Santos
 * Hans Christopher as Víctor Iriarte
 * Mauricio González as Fernando Guzmán
 * Miguel Moly
 * Chumico Romero
 * Alexis Escamez
 * Hilda Moreno as Coralia Margarita Blanco
 * Coromoto Roche as Teresa
 * Deyanira Hernández as Eloisa
 * Gonzalo Contreras as Dr. Gordillo
 * José A. Urdaneta as Chuito (Jesús Camacho)
 * María A. Avallone as Karina González de la Vega
 * Enrique Oliveros as Oscar
 * Blanquita Vera
 * Ana Martínez as Asunción
 * Daniel Escamez
 * Solmaira Liendo
 * Joel de la Rosa as Fabián
 * Eduardo Luna as Kirikó (Ángel Vargas López)
 * Umberto Buonocuore † as Pepino
 * Lizbeth Manrique as Loly
 * Manolo Manolo † as Doctor
 * Israel Maranatha as El Gato
 * Svenn Luna as Police
 * Ileana Jacket as neighbor of Candelaria
 * Frank Méndez as Rocky
 * Mario Brito † as Juan
 * Susana Duijm †

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Cara sucia (TV series)


text:
Late Night

Late Night may refer to:

Entertainment

 * Late Night (film), a 2019 American comedy film
 * The Sims 3: Late Night, a 2010 expansion pack for The Sims 3

Television

 * Late night television, generally United States programming airing after 11:30 pm EST
 * Late-night talk show, the most common type of late night television in the United States
 * Late Night (franchise), an American late-night talk and variety show airing on NBC
 * Late Night with David Letterman (1982–93)
 * Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993–2009)
 * Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2009–14)
 * Late Night with Seth Meyers (2014–present)
 * Late night anime, anime series broadcast on television late at night or in the early hours of the morning

Music

 * "Late Night" (song), a 2013 song by Foals
 * "Late Night", a song by Syd Barrett from the album The Madcap Laughs, 1970
 * "Late Night", a song by Odesza from the album A Moment Apart, 2017
 * "Late Night", a 2020 song by Peakboy

 * Late Nite, a 1989 album by American guitarist Neal Schon

title: Late Night


text:
Talk:Solar box cooker

fire?

 * What fire? Solar box cookers don't catch fire... Kokiri 09:13, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

New article
I noticed a newly created article, Solar Panel Cooker, which seemed somewhat unintegrated and lacking in context, with no incoming or outgoing links. Knowing nothing about the topic, I thought someone here might be able to help. Thanks — Pekinensis 04:41, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Solar box cooker


text:
International Boxing Hall of Fame

The modern International Boxing Hall of Fame (IBHOF), located in Canastota, New York, honors boxers, trainers and other contributors to the sport worldwide. Inductees are selected by members of the Boxing Writers Association of America. The IBHOF started as a 1990 initiative by Ed Brophy to honour Canastota's world boxing champions, Carmen Basilio and Basilio's nephew, Billy Backus; the village of Canastota inaugurated the new museum, which showcases boxing's rich history. It is visited by boxing fans from all over the world.

An earlier hall had been created in 1954, when The Ring magazine's Boxing Hall of Fame was launched, located at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When that Boxing Hall of Fame was disbanded in 1987, it had a total of 155 inductees. , all but 13 of those 155 have also been inducted to the IBHOF. Beginning in 2020, the IBHOF began inducting female boxers for the first time since its inception.

The IBHOF is one of two recognised Boxing Halls of Fame with the other being the World Boxing Hall of Fame (WBHF), with the IBHOF being the more widely recognised institution.

Ceremonies are held each year to honour inductees, but were postponed in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19. Events are attended by many former world boxing champions, as well as boxing and Hollywood celebrities. Artist Richard T. Slone has been the official artist of the IBHOF since 1997, creating portraits of inductees and other works for the Hall.

Eligibility
Professional boxers become eligible for election into the International Boxing Hall of Fame three years after their retirement (previously used to be five years before 2019). Inductees are selected by members of the Boxing Writers Association of America and an international panel of boxing historians, based on criteria in five separate categories:

 * Modern: Retired boxers whose last bout was no earlier than 1989. Prior to a 2014 rule change, the category reflected boxers whose last bout was after 1943.
 * Old Timers: Until 2014, the rule was boxers whose last bout was no earlier than 1893 and no later than 1942. This category has since changed, similar to the Veterans Committee in baseball's Hall of Fame. It is now split into two categories.
 * Early Era: Boxers who fought from the beginning of Marquis of Queensbury Rules (1893) until 1942.
 * Late Era: Boxers who fought their bout from 1943 to 1988
 * Pioneers: Boxers whose last bout was in or prior to 1892. Generally, they are boxers who fought before the Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
 * Observers: Journalists, historians, writers and artists.
 * Non-Participants: People who made contributions to the sport of boxing apart from their roles as boxers or observers.

Old Timers
Records per ibhof.com unless otherwise stated.

Non-participants

 * Kenny Adams (2024)
 * Johnny Addie (2018)
 * Thomas S. Andrews (1992)
 * Ray Arcel (1991)
 * Bob Arum (1999)
 * Jarvis Astaire (2006)
 * Giuseppe Ballarati (1999)
 * George Benton (2001)
 * Ignacio Beristáin (2011)
 * Al Bernstein (2012)
 * A.F. Bettinson (2011)
 * Whitey Bimstein (2006)
 * Jack Blackburn (1992)
 * William A. Brady (1998)
 * Umberto Branchini (2004)
 * Teddy Brenner (1993)
 * Freddie Brown (2021)
 * Amilcar Brusa (2007)
 * Michael Buffer (2012)
 * Bill Cayton (2005)
 * John Graham Chambers (1990)
 * Don Chargin (2001)
 * Stanley Christodoulou (2004)
 * Gil Clancy (1993)
 * Irving Cohen (2002)
 * James W. Coffroth (1991)
 * Cuco Conde (2007)
 * Joe Cortez (2011)
 * Cus D'Amato (1995)
 * Lou DiBella (2020)
 * Jeff Dickson (2000)
 * Arthur Donovan (1993)
 * Mickey Duff (1999)
 * Angelo Dundee (1994)
 * Chris Dundee (1994)
 * Don Dunphy (1993)
 * Dan Duva (2003)
 * Lou Duva (1998)
 * Pierce Egan (1991)
 * Don Elbaum (2019)
 * Whitey Esneault (2016)
 * Shelly Finkel (2010)
 * Nat Fleischer (1990)
 * Richard Kyle Fox (1997)
 * Dewey Fragetta (2003)
 * Don Fraser (2005)
 * Eddie Futch (1994)
 * Billy Gibson (2009)
 * Charley Goldman (1992)
 * Ruby Goldstein (1994)
 * Bob Goodman (2009)
 * Brad Goodman (2023)
 * Murray Goodman (1999)
 * Dan Goossen (2020)
 * Joe Goossen (2023)
 * Bill Gore (2008)
 * Howard Grant (2019)
 * Abe J. Greene (2009)
 * Larry Hazzard (2010)
 * Barry Hearn (2014)
 * Akihiko Honda (2009)
 * Joe Humphreys (1997)
 * Sam Ichinose (2001)
 * Brad Jacobs (2023)
 * Jimmy Jacobs (1993)
 * Mike Jacobs (1990)
 * Jimmy Johnston (1999)
 * Guy Jutras (2019)
 * Jackie Kallen (2024)
 * J. P. Leo "Jack 'Doc' Kearns" McKernan (1990)
 * Don King (1997)
 * Klaus-Peter Kohl (2018)
 * Mills Lane (2013)
 * Tito Lectoure (1997)
 * Harold Lederman (2015)
 * A.J. Liebling (1992)
 * Hugh, Earl of Lonsdale (1996)
 * Harry Markson (1992)
 * John, Marquess of Queensberry (1990)
 * Jackie McCoy (2021)
 * Arthur Mercante (1995)
 * Dan Morgan (2000)
 * William Muldoon (1996)
 * Gilbert Odd (1995)
 * Tom O'Rourke (1999)
 * Mogens Palle (2008)
 * Dan Parker (1996)
 * George Parnassus (1991)
 * J Russell Peltz (2004)
 * Tex Rickard (1990)
 * Freddie Roach (2012)
 * Irving Rudd (1999)
 * Rodolfo Sabbatini (2006)
 * Lee Samuels (2019)
 * Lope Sarreal (2005)
 * Wilfried Sauerland (2010)
 * George Siler (1995)
 * Sam Silverman (2002)
 * Steve Smoger (2015)
 * Jack Solomons (1995)
 * Sylvester Stallone (2010)
 * Richard Steele (2014)
 * Fred Sternburg (2024)
 * Emanuel Steward (1997)
 * José Sulaimán (2007)
 * Sam Taub (1995)
 * Herman Taylor (1998)
 * Bruce Trampler (2010)
 * Rip Valenti (2012)
 * Lou Viscusi (2004)
 * Jimmy Walker (1992)
 * Frank Warren (2008)
 * Al Weill (2003)

Observers

 * Seth Abraham (2023)
 * Steve Albert (2018)
 * Dave Anderson (2008)
 * Teddy Atlas (2019)
 * Lester Bromberg (2001)
 * Jimmy Cannon (2002)
 * Harry Carpenter (2011)
 * Nick Charles (2024)
 * Ralph Citro (2001)
 * Howard Cosell (2010)
 * Tad Dorgan (2007)
 * Steve Farhood (2017)
 * Bernard Fernandez (2020)
 * Jack Fiske (2003)
 * Paul Gallico (2009)
 * Bill Gallo (2001)
 * Jim Gray (2018)
 * Reg Gutteridge (2002)
 * Thomas Hauser (2020)
 * W.C. Heinz (2004)
 * Jersey Jones (2005)
 * Hank Kaplan (2006)
 * Michael Katz (2012)
 * George Kimball (2021)
 * Joe Koizumi (2008)
 * Jim Lampley (2015)
 * Jay Larkin (2021)
 * Wallace Matthews (2024)
 * Mario Rivera Martino (2019)
 * Hugh McIlvanney (2009)
 * Larry Merchant (2009)
 * Harry Mullan (2005)
 * Barney Nagler (2004)
 * LeRoy Neiman (2007)
 * Damon Runyon (2002)
 * Tim Ryan (2023)
 * Budd Schulberg (2003)
 * Ed Schuyler (2010)
 * Herbert "Bert" Sugar (2005)
 * Stanley Weston (2006)

Women non-participants

 * Aileen Eaton (2002)
 * Lorraine Chargin (2018)
 * Kathy Duva (2020)
 * Dr. Margaret Goodman (2021)

title: International Boxing Hall of Fame


text:
Herringfleet

Herringfleet is a place and former civil parish, now in the parish of Somerleyton, Ashby and Herringfleet, in the East Suffolk district, in the north of the English county of Suffolk. It is located 5.5 mi north-west of Lowestoft. The parish was combined with Somerleyton and Ashby to create the parish of "Somerleyton, Ashby and Herringfleet" on 1 April 1987.

The western edge of Herringfleet is marked by the River Waveney. Prior to local government reorganisation in 1974, the former parish included the village of St Olaves to the north. This was combined with the parish of Fritton and the new parish of Fritton and St Olaves transferred to the county of Norfolk. Previously the entire area south and east of the River Waveney was part of Suffolk.

Prior to the loss of St Olaves, the population of the former parish was 262 at the 1961 United Kingdom census. At the 1981 census it was 58 and the current population of Herringfleet is estimated to be around 50. There is no village centre, with the population spread across a number of scattered farms and small settlements. Much of the land within the area of the former parish is owned by the Somerleyton Estate.

History
Herringfleet was occupied during the Roman period, and there have been archaeological finds made dating occupation to the neolithic period. According to the Domesday Book of 1086, a manor of one carucate was owned by the King.

The place-name ‘Herringfleet’ is first attested in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it appears as ‘Herlingaflet’. It appears as ‘Herlingefleth’ in the Feet of Fines in 1202, as ‘Herlingflet’ in 1254 in the ‘Valuation of Norwich’, and as ‘Heringflete’ circa 1255 in the ‘Calendar of Charters and Rolls in the Bodleian Library’. The name means “the stream of Herala’s people”.

During the medieval period, a ferry was established across the Waveney at St Olaves. St Olaves Priory was founded nearby in about 1216 by Roger Fitz Osbert as an Augustinian priory. It was dedicated to St Olav and operated until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537, controlling the Herringfleet parish church as well as those at Burgh St Peter and Hales as well as land at Tibenham. The site is largely in ruins, although the undercroft survives in good condition.

By around 1509 the first stone bridge across the Waveney had been built, possibly replacing a bridge first mentioned in 1298. This was replaced with a cast iron bowstring girder suspension bridge in 1847. The bridge is the only crossing point on the Waveney between Great Yarmouth and Beccles.

Henry Jerningham owned the priory site by 1546 and a Tudor manor house was built on the site. By the 18th century the manor was owned by the Leathes family, and Herringfleet Hall dates from this time, the new hall having been built to replace an older manor house to the south. A series of duck decoys are known to have been operated at Fritton Decoy at the north-east boundary of the former parish at this time, and are believed to date from the 17th century.

The Great Yarmouth to Beccles railway line opened in 1859 and passed through the former parish, with a station at St Olaves. This operated until 1959. On the western edge of the former parish, Herringfleet Windmill, a timber smock drainpipe windpump, was built in about 1820. It is a Grade II* listed building and is within the area of The Broads national park.

During World War II parts of the parish, including the area around Fritton Decoy, were used for training ahead of the Normandy landings in 1944. The 79th Armoured Division used the site for the testing and development of amphibious DD tanks from 1943, and it was used until 1947 as part of the British Army's Assault Training and Development Centre, and later became part of the Specialised Armour Development Establishment. Other areas in Herringfleet and the surrounding area were used as campsites for the units involved in training.

Church of St Margaret
The parish church, which is dedicated to St Margaret, is one of around 40 round-tower churches in Suffolk. It dates from the medieval period, with the tower thought to date from the 11th-century at the latest, with a possibility of it dating from the Anglo-Saxon period, although this is considered unlikely due to its construction in Caen stone. The parish came under the control of St Olave’s Priory after it was established in the 13th century.

The nave doorway dates from the 12th century and there are 12th- and 13th-century windows in both the nave and chancel. The church was restored from 1824 by the Leathes family, and contains Victorian stained glass windows as well as painted glass dating from as early as the 14th century. The church is a Grade I listed building.

Two bells hang in the tower, one cast by William and Alice Brend of Norwich in 1611, the other by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1837.

title: Herringfleet


text:
Una aventura llamada Menudo

Una aventura llamada Menudo is a 1982 film featuring teen boy band Menudo and Puerto Rican actress Gladys Rodríguez. The film's soundtrack received a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Album.

Synopsis
In Una aventura llamada Menudo, Menudo members are supposed to fly to Ponce, Puerto Rico for a concert. However, having before arrived at concert sites by way of airplane, helicopter, and fire truck, and deciding during a meeting that arriving by motorcycle would be too dangerous due to wild crowds, band member Ricky Meléndez then hires the services of a hot air balloon company, and during their balloon flight to the concert site, they have trouble and crash-land on a beach near a mansion.

Rodríguez's character, a big fan of Menudo who feels old and put aside by her young, hip nieces, lives in that mansion, along with her girls.

Looking for help, the Menudo guys arrive at the house, where they are given food and a room while they try to get in contact with their group director.

As the story develops, Menudo member Johnny Lozada falls in love with one of the girl residents, and Menudo members meet new friends, sing and dance their way through the story.

Soundtrack album
A Spanish language soundtrack album with the same title as the film was released in 1982. This is the eleventh album overall and the second album this line-up recorded together. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Performance.

Tracks
"Mi Banda Toca Rock", "Súbete A Mi Moto" and "Quiero Rock" appear as background (incidental) music in the film but do not appear on the soundtrack album. Rene Farrait, a former member who had already exited the group when the movie was filmed, also appears incidentally on the background, on a poster "Señora Mia" had of Menudo's "Quiero Ser" album's cover, which had been released in 1981. This album also contains the last two songs this version of the group (Menudo had over 30 members during its history, always grouped as a quintet) recorded together as a whole with Lluvia and Estrella Polar.

title: Una aventura llamada Menudo


text:
Venezuelan (disambiguation)

Venezuelan may refer to:
 * Something of, from, or related to the country of Venezuela
 * Venezuelan Spanish, the dialect of Spanish spoken in Venezuela
 * Venezuelan cuisine
 * Something of, from, or related to Venezuela, Cuba, a city in Cuba

title: Venezuelan (disambiguation)


text:
Talk:Rebel Alliance

Tzartzam wrote: ''luke skywalker isn't the "only loyal member" with training in the force! What about Yoda?!''

Untitled

 * Yoda was never involved with the Rebel Alliance in any way that I'm aware of -- Luke goes AWOL from the Alliance to track him down for one-on-one Force training. --Brion 08:48 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Is there any reference for the "or one of his clones" thing regarding the Emperor's death at Endor? As far as I am aware, nowhere is it suggested that it was other than the original Palpatine who died at Endor. If nobody comes up with a reference for the line, I'll remove it, seing as it's unnecessary and confusing. HWelles 10:23, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The Emperor did die at the Battle of Endor, however, he transferred his spirit into a clone body on Byss afterwards. There is no such thing as a "Clone Emperor", they are the same entity.

I have removed the infobox -- this is not a country, not even a fictional one. I wonder why it was put there in the first place. - Cymydog Naakka 17:34, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * I imagine that an infobox could be useful for the various political, military and social groups in the Star Wars universe. SparqMan 22:27, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The guy who rode with Lando in Jedi
Who is the Falcon's co-pilot in Jedi? Was he important in the Alliance?
 * A Sullustan, Nien Numb. He's not important enough for this article, but he might deserve an entry in the minor characters list-LtNOWIS 20:23, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Rebels were Terrorists
It's impossible to imagine that the Empire wouldn't classify the Rebels as a terrorist group. When the US says somebody is a terrorist, they are, because they've presumably killed a lot of innocents to further non-military goals. There were thousands of innocent Imperial subjects cleaning bathrooms and working computers on the Death Star, and the Rebels murdered them.

I think the Rebels oughta be listed as a terrorist group.

--The Lizard Wizard 05:47, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Shameful Entry
This entry is rife with inaccuracies and s just a mishmash of trivia or tidbits. For example, that entire first paragraph is a nice bit of EU knowledge, but not essential to the Rebel Alliance's history. We do know when the Rebel Alliance formed: with the Corellian Treaty where Garm Bl Ibliis' Corellian forces, Mon Mothma's Chandrillan forces and Bail Organa's Alderaanian forces joined together. Can we start fixing this stuff up? SparqMan 20:29, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

 * Sounds like something you have good knowledge about, considerably more then the average contributer. Thought about fixing it up yourself?  Oberiko 17:08, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yup, but I didn't want to the step on the toes of any contributers that were already involved. SparqMan 19:23, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * It's pretty mish-mash as is, with tons of pretty random edits. Seriously, one person actually giving this article a full structure (and filtering out innaccuracies) can only be a good thing. Oberiko 22:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'll take a stab at it. The problem is in distilling the article down to the essential details, and keeping it from being a collection of trivia.

The importance of the Empire in the galaxy
Why do we all embrace the rebellion as the good guys in the movie, they never fail or make mistakes. The Empire, the Republic and even the Separatists are the ones who always make mistakes and eventually fell. I much rather prefer the separatists to dominate the galaxy instead the rats of the Rebel Alliance. Perhaps I can sigle handly crush all the rebels an let the Empire rule the galaxy.

Good luck with that, but keep inaccuracies out of the article. --SparqMan 00:31, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

What was the point of that? Really, that had nothing to do with this article. This page isn't just to chat about want you think, this page was made to talk about the article. J.Nebulax 13:58, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

I do consider someone to write a precise article about this, because the user-writer is worshipping the rebels. I really want someone to change this article however. MoffJerjerod123, 04:26, July 31st 2005

I already wrote an article indicating that some rebel units enjoy fanatism and devotion to their ideals, someone deleted this article for unknown reasons and I do consider that person to look for more sources about the true nature of a rebel, not by believing that they are the "good guys in the movie" and they never make mistakes. MoffJerjero123, 5:30, July 31ts, 2005

Someone here must review the article from the starwars.com page to obtain some reference about the Rebellion and explain that some of its characters employ the same dictatorial powers as the Emperor. Anyone here is changing the article by saying that they are the best and never make any mistake. DarthPlaegis, 5:35, August 7, 2005

Killik Twilight
While "Killik Twilight" has only tangential importance in the new republic order series of novels, it has far greater importance in the dark nest trilogy. This topic should have its own article.

Rebels winning all the time
Haven't anyone noticed that the Rebel Alliance win a bit too much? I mean it's a little too obvious: the Empire has way better technology, weapons, and more. They always outnumber the rebels but the rebels keep winning!

This is an article about the Rebel Alliance and not a message board for your opinions. Rebels lost plenty of times. They lost Alderaan. Even though the Rebels destroyed the Death Star in Star Wars, they had to evacuate their base on Yavin and go on the run. They lost the Battle of Hoth where they lost their base, a lot of heavy equipment, and lives. Later they lost Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back. The Rebels were always on the run. 206.210.17.33 20:38, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

 * Also consider that our own history is filled with examples of technologically inferior groups making a stand against much better equipped oponents. A good example would be the Vietnam war. - Redmess (talk) 22:42, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Rebel Alliance Formation
Just a note about this: In the main article, it states that there is never a time given for the formation of this. However, if you get the DVD of Episode 3, and watch the deleted scenes, there is one in there showing the actual initial formation of the Rebel Alliance, which was removed only due to time issues.

Population
Does somebody know how many people are regarded as members of the Rebel Alliance? And where do how much live? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.182.216.102 (talk) 13:07, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with File:StarWarsHomeOne.jpg
The image File:StarWarsHomeOne.jpg is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here. In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Please check

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This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --12:11, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Founding and Force Unleashed
This article needs a serious going-over to weed out or separate different details that may or may not be relevant. For instance, the competing origins of the Alliance (Ep III and its surrounding EU vs. The Force Unleashed) need to better distinguished and context provided on how important one is in comparison to the other in the Star Wars canon. --Sephiroth9611 (talk) 17:17, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Sheldon's take on the Rebel Alliance on THE BIG BANG THEORY flawed.
In the episode of the BIG BANG THEORY: "The Zazzy Substitution" Sheldon claims he identifies with the Empire in lieu of the Rebel Allience as the RA has the DEATH STAR. I was surprised my this error. MotiveForcer EJ Levy — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.39.32.53 (talk) 23:00, 20 May 2012 (UTC)

Vader's rank
"Leia is held hostage for a time by the Emperor's second in command, Darth Vader."

This is untrue. We do not know what Vader's rank was, other than the Emperor's apprentice. However, it is clear that on the Death Star, Tarkin outranks him. "Vader, release him." "As you wish." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.69.143.11 (talk) 16:46, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Capital Coruscant?
The infobox indicates that the capital of the Alliance is, among others, Coruscant. When would this have been? As far as I know, the Alliance didn’t control Coruscant until they were the New Republic. (I ask because the statement was added to Wikidata, where – lacking the “various hidden bases” from the infobox – it looks wrong.) —DSGalaktos (talk) 13:26, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅ – I’ve removed Coruscant as base and instead added Dantooine, Yavin IV, and Hoth. —Galaktos (talk) 23:31, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Rebel Alliance becames al-Qaeda in Spanish main TV

 * RTVE=Radio Televisión Española (Spanish Broadcasting Corporation)_"http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=853830" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.35.115.59 (talk) 13:10, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Split?
Should the article split information about the Resistance into a new article? Blaylockjam10 (talk) 10:04, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

"Senior civil government and military high command"
This section should either be removed or populated with the people from higher on the list such as Mon Mothma because as it is, every single character in this subsection is now considered "Legends" by Lucasfilm, rendering this information outdated and inaccurate. 2601:249:4380:5A10:1CE8:284A:4D21:4326 (talk) 09:32, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Rebel Alliance


text:
Olaf Stapledon

William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Life
Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, the only son of William Clibbett Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said, Egypt. He was educated at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA degree in Modern History (Second Class) in 1909, promoted to an MA degree in 1913. After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1912. From 1912 to 1915 Stapledon worked with the Liverpool branch of the Workers' Educational Association.

During the First World War he served as a conscientious objector. Stapledon became an ambulance driver with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919; he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. His wartime experiences influenced his pacifist beliefs and advocacy of a World Government. On 16 July 1919 he married Agnes Zena Miller (1894–1984), an Australian cousin. They had first met in 1903, and later maintained a correspondence throughout the war. They had a daughter, Mary Sydney Stapledon (1920–2008), and a son, John David Stapledon (1923–2014). In 1920 they moved to West Kirby.

Stapledon was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929). However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel, Last Men in London, and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.

For the duration of the Second World War Stapledon abandoned his pacifism and supported the war effort. In 1940 the Stapledon family built and moved into a new house on Simon's Field, in Caldy, in Wirral. During the war Stapledon became a public advocate of J.B. Priestley and Richard Acland's left-wing Common Wealth Party, as well as the British internationalist group Federal Union. He supported implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report and spoke at the first public meeting of the Left Book Club's "Readers' and Writers' Group".

Some commentators have called Stapledon a Marxist, although Stapledon distanced himself from the label stating that - "I am not a Marxist, but I have learned much from Marxists, and I am not anti-Marxist", though he did refer to himself as a socialist.

After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours. Arthur C. Clarke, as Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, invited him to give a talk on the social and biological aspects of space exploration. He also travelled internationally, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław, Poland. He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York City in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement. After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.

Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium. His widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books. Stapledon Wood, on the south-east side of Caldy Hill, is named after him.

Works
Stapledon's fiction often presents the strivings of some intelligence that is beaten down by an indifferent universe and its inhabitants who, through no fault of their own, fail to comprehend its lofty yearnings. It is filled with protagonists who are tormented by the conflict between their "higher" and "lower" impulses.

Stapledon's writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanisław Lem, Bertrand Russell, John Gloag, Naomi Mitchison, C. S. Lewis, Vernor Vinge, John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction. Clarke wrote:

""In 1930 I came under the spell of a considerably more literate influence, when I discovered W. Olaf Stapledon's just-published Last and first men in the Minehead Public Library. No book before or since ever had such and impact on my imagination; the Stapledonian vistas of millions and hundreds of millions of years, the rise and fall of civilizations and entire races of men, changed my whole outlook on the universe and has influenced much of my writing ever since.""

Ideas such as a "supermind" composed of many individual consciousnesses forms a recurring theme in his work. Star Maker contains the first known description of what are now called Dyson spheres. Freeman Dyson credits the novel with giving him the idea, even stating in an interview that "Stapledon sphere" would be a more appropriate name. Last and First Men features early descriptions of genetic engineering and terraforming. Sirius describes a dog whose intelligence is increased to the level of a human being's. Stapledon's work also refers to then-contemporary intellectual fashions (e.g. the belief in extrasensory perception).

Last and First Men, a "future history" of 18 successive species of humanity, and Star Maker, an outline history of the Universe, were highly acclaimed by figures as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Algernon Blackwood, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf (Stapledon maintained a correspondence with Woolf) and Winston Churchill. In contrast, Stapledon's philosophy repelled C. S. Lewis, whose Cosmic Trilogy was written partly in response to what Lewis saw as amorality, although Lewis admired Stapledon's inventiveness and described him as "a corking good writer". In fact Stapledon was an agnostic who was hostile to religious institutions, but not to religious yearnings, a fact that set him at odds with H. G. Wells in their correspondence.

Together with his philosophy lectureship at the University of Liverpool, which now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive, Stapledon lectured in English literature, industrial history and psychology. He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of "spiritual values", which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context ("personality-in-community"). Stapledon himself named his spiritual values as intelligence, love and creative action. His philosophy was strongly influenced by Spinoza.

Stapledon is considered one of the forerunners of the contemporary transhumanist movement.

Film rights
Film producer and director George Pal bought the rights to Odd John and in 1966 Castle of Frankenstein magazine reported that David McCallum would play the title role.

In 2017 a multimedia adaptation of Last and First Men by Oscar-nominated Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was released, featuring narration by Tilda Swinton and a live score performed by the BBC Philharmonic.

In 2019, Justin McDonald and Kate Hodgson wrote, produced, and starred in a short film adaptation of Stapledon's "A Modern Magician." Directed by Mark Heller, the film also featured the voice of Brian Cox. It was the first-ever live-action adaptation of any of Stapledon's literary works.

Fiction

 * Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) (ISBN 1-85798-806-X)
 * Last Men in London (1932) (ISBN 0-417-02750-8)
 * Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (1935) (ISBN 0-413-32900-3)
 * Star Maker (1937) (ISBN 0-8195-6692-6) First Edition cover by Bip Pares
 * Darkness and the Light (1942) (ISBN 0-88355-121-7)
 * Old Man in New World (short story, 1944)
 * Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944) (ISBN 0-575-07057-9)
 * Death into Life (1946)
 * The Flames: A Fantasy (1947)
 * A Man Divided (1950) (ISBN 0-19-503087-7)
 * Four Encounters (1976) (ISBN 0-905220-01-3)
 * Nebula Maker (drafts of Star Maker, 1976) (ISBN 0-905220-06-4)
 * East is West (posthumous, 1979)

Non-fiction

 * A Modern Theory of Ethics: A study of the Relations of Ethics and Psychology (1929)
 * Waking World (1934)
 * Saints and Revolutionaries (1939)
 * New Hope for Britain (1939)
 * Philosophy and Living, 2 volumes (1939)
 * Beyond the "Isms" (1942)
 * Seven Pillars of Peace (1944)
 * Youth and Tomorrow (1946)
 * Interplanetary Man? (1948)
 * The Opening of the Eyes (ed. Agnes Z. Stapledon, 1954)

Poetry

 * Latter-Day Psalms (1914)

Collections

 * Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (1949)
 * To the End of Time: the Best of Olaf Stapledon (ed. Basil Davenport, 1953) (ISBN 0-8398-2312-6)
 * Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (ed. Sam Moskowitz 1979 ISBN 1-880418-06-1)
 * An Olaf Stapledon Reader (ed., 1997)

title: Olaf Stapledon


text:
Douglas Lenat

Douglas Bruce Lenat (September 13, 1950 – August 31, 2023) was an American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence who was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Austin, Texas.

Lenat was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine-learning program AM. He has worked on (symbolic, not statistical) machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge representation, "cognitive economy", blackboard systems, and what he dubbed in 1984 "ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at MCC and, since 1994, at Cycorp). He has also worked in military simulations, and numerous projects for the US government, military, intelligence, and scientific organizations. In 1980, he published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism. He authored a series of articles   in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence exploring the nature of heuristic rules.

Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI, and is the only individual to have served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both Microsoft and Apple. He was a Fellow of the AAAS, AAAI, and Cognitive Science Society, and an editor of the J. Automated Reasoning, J. Learning Sciences, and J. Applied Ontology. He was one of the founders of TTI/Vanguard in 1991 and member of its advisory board. He was named one of the Wired 25.

Background and education
Lenat was born in Philadelphia, United States, on September 13, 1950. When he was 5, the family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where his father, Nathan Lenat, owned a bottling plant. His father died when he was 13 and the family then returned to Pennsylvania, where he attended Cheltenham High School. His after-school job was cleaning rat cages and goose pens at Beaver College which motivated him to learn programming as a better occupation.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, supporting himself by programming, including the design and development of a natural language interface for a United States Navy online operations manual. He graduated with bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Physics, and a master's degree in Applied Mathematics, all in 1972.

For his senior thesis, advised in part by Dennis Gabor, was to bounce acoustic waves in the 40 mHz range off real-world objects, record their interference patterns on a 2-meter square plot, photo-reduce those to a 10-mm square film image, shine a laser through the film, and thus project the three-dimensional imaged object—i.e., the first known acoustic hologram. To settle an argument with Dr. Gabor, Lenat computer-generated a five-dimensional hologram, by photo-reducing computer printout of the interference pattern of a globe rotating and expanding over time, reducing the large two-dimensional paper printout to a moderately large 5-cm square film surface through which a conventional laser beam was then able to project a three-dimensional image, which changed in two independent ways (rotating and changing in size) as the film was moved up-down or left-right.

Lenat was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Stanford University, where his published research included automatic program synthesis from input/output pairs and from natural language clarification dialogues.

Research
Lenat received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, "AM: Discovery in mathematics as heuristic search" (published as Knowledge-based systems in artificial intelligence, along with the Ph.D. thesis of Randall Davis, McGraw-Hill, 1982) in 1976. His thesis advisor was Professor Cordell Green.

His thesis, AM (Automated Mathematician) was one of the first computer programs that attempted to make discoveries, i.e., to be a theorem proposer rather than a theorem prover. Experimenting with the program fueled a cycle of criticism and improvement. Many issues had to be dealt with in constructing such a program: how to represent knowledge formally, expressively, and concretely, how to program hundreds of heuristic "interestingness" rules to judge the worth of new discoveries, heuristics for when to reason symbolically and inductively versus when to reason statistically from frequency data, what the architecture—the design constraints—of such reasoning programs might be, why heuristics work, and what their "inner structure" might be. AM was one of the first steps toward demonstrating that computer programs can make novel and creative discoveries.

In 1976, Lenat started teaching as an assistant professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and commenced his work on the AI program Eurisko. The limitation with AM was that it was locked into following a fixed set of interestingness heuristics; Eurisko, by contrast, represented its heuristic rules as first class objects and hence it could explore, manipulate, and discover new heuristics just as AM explored, manipulated, and discovered new domain concepts.

Lenat returned to Stanford as an assistant professor of Computer Science in 1978 and continued his research building the Eurisko automated discovery and heuristic-discovery program. Eurisko made many interesting discoveries and enjoyed significant acclaim, with Lenat's paper "Heuretics: Theoretical and Experimental Study of Heuristic Rules" winning the Best Paper award at the 1982 AAAI conference.

A call for "common sense"
Lenat (working with John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC) published in 1984 an analysis of what were the limitations of his AM and Eurisko lines of research. It concluded that progress toward real, general, symbolic AI would require a vast knowledge base of "common sense", suitably formalized and represented, and an inference engine capable of finding tens- or hundreds-deep conclusions and arguments that followed from the application of that knowledge base to specific questions and applications.

The successes, and analysis of the limitations, of this AM and Eurisko approach to AI, and the concluding plea for the massive (multi-thousand-person-year, decades-long) R&D effort would be required to break that bottleneck to AI, led to attention in 1982 from Admiral Bob Inman and the then-forming MCC research consortium in Austin, Texas, culminating in Lenat's becoming Principal Scientist of MCC from 1984–1994, though he continued even after this period to return to Stanford to teach approximately one course per year. At the 400-person MCC, Lenat was able to have several dozen researchers work on that common sense knowledge base, rather than just a few graduate students.

Cycorp
The fruits of the first decade of R&D on Cyc were spun out of MCC into a company, Cycorp, at the end of 1994. In 1986, he estimated the effort to complete Cyc would be at least 250,000 rules and 1,000 person-years of effort, probably twice that, and by 2017, he and his team had spent about 2,000 person-years of effort building Cyc, creating approximately 24 million rules and assertions (not counting "facts").

Lenat continued to work on Cyc as CEO of Cycorp until his death. While the first decade of work on Cyc (1984–1994) was funded by large American companies pooling long-term research funds to compete with the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project, and the second decade (1995-2006) of work on Cyc was funded by US government agencies' research contracts, the third decade up through the present (2007–2023) has been largely supported through commercial applications of Cyc, including in the financial services, energy, and healthcare areas. One of these later projects was a learning by teaching application called Mathcraft.

Personal life and death
Lenat was married to Merle Baruch, with whom he had a daughter; they divorced and he later married Cycorp business manager Mary Shepherd. He died of bile duct cancer on August 31, 2023, at the age of 72.

Quotes

 * "Intelligence is ten million rules." This refers to the prior and tacit knowledge that authors presume their readers all possess (such as "if person x knows person y, then x's date of death can't be earlier than y's date of birth") not counting the vastly larger number of "facts" such as one might find in Wikipedia or by Googling.
 * "The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily take another two decades."
 * "Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing."
 * "Sometimes the veneer of intelligence is not enough."
 * “If computers were human, they’d present themselves as autistic, schizophrenic, or otherwise brittle. It would be unwise or dangerous for that person to take care of children and cook meals, but it’s on the horizon for home robots. That’s like saying, ‘We have an important job to do, but we’re going to hire dogs and cats to do it.'”
 * "What we needed, he says, is nothing less than an “AI Manhattan Project”, a full frontal assault on common sense: the challenge is to create an Encyclopédia of Common sense", Michio Kaku citing Lenat.

Writings

 * Lenat, Douglas B. "Computer Software for Intelligent Systems: An Underview of AI," in Scientific American, September 1984.
 * Lenat, Douglas B.; Clarkson, Albert; Kircmidjian, Garo (1983). "An Expert System for Indications & Warning Analysis". Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1. IJCAI'83. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.: 259–262.
 * Lenat, Douglas B.; Feigenbaum, Edward A. (February 1991). "On the Thresholds of Knowledge". Artif. Intell. 47 (1-3): 185–250. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(91)90055-O. ISSN 0004-3702.
 * Lenat, Douglas B.; Guha, R. V. (1990-01-01). Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems: Representation and Inference in the Cyc Project. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 9780201517521.
 * Lenat, Douglas B. From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL
 * Lenat, Douglas B. (2008-07-10). "The Voice of the Turtle: Whatever Happened to AI?". AI Magazine. 29(2). doi:10.1609/aimag.v29i2.2106. ISSN 0738-4602
 * Blackstone E.H., Lenat, D.B. and Ishwaran H. Infrastructure required to learn which care is best: methods that need to be developed, in (Olsen L., Grossman, C., and McGinnis, M., eds.) Learning What Works: Infrastructure Required for Comparative Effectiveness Research. Institute of Medicine Learning Health System Series, The National Academies Press, pp. 123–144, 2011.
 * Lenat DB, Durlach P. “Reinforcing Math Knowledge by Immersing Students in a Simulated Learning-By-Teaching Experience.”   J. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education., 2014
 * Lenat, Douglas B. (2016-04-13). "WWTS (What Would Turing Say?)". AI Magazine. 37 (1): 97–101. doi:10.1609/aimag.v37i1.2644. ISSN 0738-4602
 * See also many of the References, below.
 * Lenat DB, Durlach P. “Reinforcing Math Knowledge by Immersing Students in a Simulated Learning-By-Teaching Experience.”   J. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education., 2014
 * Lenat, Douglas B. (2016-04-13). "WWTS (What Would Turing Say?)". AI Magazine. 37 (1): 97–101. doi:10.1609/aimag.v37i1.2644. ISSN 0738-4602
 * See also many of the References, below.

title: Douglas Lenat


text:
Bertrand Delanoë

Bertrand Delanoë (born 30 May 1950) is a French retired politician who served as Mayor of Paris from 2001 to 2014. A member of the Socialist Party (PS), he previously served in the National Assembly from 1981 to 1986 and Senate from 1995 until 2001.

Early life and education
Delanoë was born 30 May 1950 in Tunis, at that time a protectorate of the French colonial empire, to a French mother and a French-Tunisian father. His father, a land surveyor, was atheist while his mother, a nurse, was Roman Catholic.

At 6 years old, Delanoë became a member of the "Petits Chanteurs des Sables", a Christian choral group associated with the Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois. At the age of 11, Delanoë witnessed the crisis of Bizerte between France and newly independent Tunisia. Bertrand Delanoë moved back to France with his family following Tunisian independence; after the military base in Bizerte was closed in 1963, Delanoë's family broke up. His mother came to live in Rodez, Aveyron with her son. After leaving school, Delanoë is said to have started studies in law at the University of Toulouse. According to Who's Who in France he has a diploma in economics.

Early political career
Delanoë has been involved in politics since the age of twenty-three as the secretary of the Socialist federation in Aveyron.

He was first elected to the Council of Paris in 1977. In 1993, he became the head of the city's Socialist Party branch. In 1995, he was elected to the Senate, where he was secretary of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence.

Mayor of Paris
Delanoë became Mayor of Paris on 18 March 2001, when control of the Council of Paris was won by a left-wing alliance for the first time since 1977 (election with universal suffrage). His predecessors were Jean Tiberi (1995–2001) and Jacques Chirac (1977–1995), who resigned after 18 years as mayor when he was elected President of the French Republic.

Delanoë won the mayorship of Paris at the head of a coalition of Socialists, Greens and Communists, over the conservative candidates Jean Tiberi and Philippe Séguin, who were unable to resolve their differences and thereby split the conservative vote. This success in a city which had traditionally been a stronghold of the right until the end of the 20th century was made all the more striking by setbacks to the left in the 2001 municipal elections that occurred more generally. It has been partially attributed with the weariness of the Parisian public with respect to various scandals of corruption and graft in the preceding administrations.

Delanoë was virtually unknown before the election of 2001, but soon gained fame for organising new and unusual events in Paris, such as the "Paris Beach" (Paris-Plages) on the banks of the Seine every summer in order to give Parisians who could not take a regular vacation a chance to relax, sunbathe and build sandcastles in the center of Paris. The program, especially popular with families with children, has been in place since 2002, and has since been copied by many other international cities.

As mayor, Delanoë's goals were to improve the quality of life, reduce pollution, and cut down on vehicle traffic within the city (including a plan for a non-polluting tramway to ease Parisian traffic) and pedestrian malls. He helped introduce a program called Vélib' (a portmanteau of "vélo" and "libre" meaning "free bicycles") which gave Parisians access to inexpensive rental bicycles available in stations all around Paris. The program has been enormously successful despite the fact that it still has a few logistical problems to be worked out. He outlined a plan for an autolib, whereby small cars would be shared. He was reelected in 2008 (57.7%) for a new six-year-term (2008–2014).

Ahead of the Socialist Party's 2008 convention in Reims, Delanoë publicly endorsed Martine Aubry as candidate to succeed François Hollande at the party's leadership.

In 2009, Delanoë criticized statements by Pope Benedict XVI, which were of the effect that condom use was unhelpful or even counter-productive in the fight against AIDS.

Ahead of the Socialist Party's 2012 convention in Toulouse, Delanoë endorsed Harlem Désir as candidate to succeed Aubry at the party's leadership.

Assassination attempt
Delanoë was stabbed on 5 October 2002 during the Nuit Blanche, a night of festivities in Paris, while mingling with the public. His assailant was a Muslim immigrant, Azedine Berkane, who reportedly told police that "he hated politicians, the Socialist Party, and homosexuals." Before being taken to hospital, Delanoë ordered that the festivities continue. Delanoë's wound was not life-threatening and he left the hospital after about two weeks.

Azedine Berkane was eventually permitted to leave the psychiatric hospital where he had been a patient after his doctors no longer considered him a threat. However, in early April 2007, he failed to keep a scheduled appointment with his doctors. Paris police recaptured him on May 22. He was returned to the psychiatric facility and placed into a high-security unit.

Olympic bid
The failure to secure the 2012 Summer Olympics for Paris on 6 July 2005 was Delanoë's first major setback as mayor. In the aftermath of the defeat in his Olympic bid, he accused British prime minister Tony Blair of unduly influencing the result in order to secure the games in London. However, Delanoë's popularity in fact rose during July 2005. The French public appeared to have laid more of the blame on President Jacques Chirac, who allegedly said that "the only worse food than British food is Finnish" which is widely believed to have offended two Finnish members of the International Olympic Committee.

Potential presidential bid
Delanoë was said to be considering challenging then-current president Sarkozy in the Presidential election in 2012. However, this plan suffered a setback in November 2008 when he lost the race for the party leadership to Lille mayor Martine Aubry.

Fake The New York Times letter
On 22 December 2008, The New York Times published a letter attributed to Delanoë criticizing Caroline Kennedy's candidacy for the United States Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. The newspaper later admitted that the letter, which had been sent by email, had not been properly verified, and was a fake.

Personal life
Delanoë was one of the first major French politicians to announce that he was gay, during a 1998 television interview (before being elected mayor). Although a long-time politician, Delanoë is visible at cultural affairs. He attends film festivals, and he is sometimes quoted in the media or appears on television to speak about his friendship with the late French superstar entertainer, Dalida.

Electoral mandates
National Assembly of France

Member of the National Assembly for Paris (26th constituency): 1981–1986. Elected in 1981.

Senate of France

Member of the Senate for Paris: 1995–2001 (resignation).

Council of Paris

Mayor of Paris: Elected in 2001. Reelected in 2008.

Councillor of Paris: Elected in 1977. Reelected in 1983, 1989, 1995, 2001, 2008.

title: Bertrand Delanoë