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Lough Corrib

Lough Corrib is a lake in the west of Ireland. The River Corrib or Galway River connects the lake to the sea at Galway. It is the largest lake within the Republic of Ireland and the second largest on the island of Ireland (after Lough Neagh). It covers 176 km² and lies mostly in County Galway with a small area of its northeast corner in County Mayo.

The first canal on the island of Ireland was cut in the 12th century. Known as the Friar's Cut, it allowed boats to pass from Lough Corrib to the sea at Galway.

Lough Corrib was designated a Ramsar site on 16 June 1996. It has also been designated a Special Area of Conservation.

Name
Loch Coirib is a corruption of Loch Oirbsean. According to placename lore, this refers to Oirbsen or Oirbsiu—another name for the Tuatha Dé Danann figure Manannán mac Lir—who is believed to have been a god of the sea. In Irish, the lough is also called An Choirib ("the Corrib").

Marine archaeology and charts
Surveys have been undertaken since 2007 by a local surveyor/cartographer to create up-to-date charts of Lough Corrib. These have uncovered a number of objects of historical significance, which have been investigated by the Underwater Archaeology Unit of the National Monuments Service. These include Bronze Age and Iron Age vessels (dugout canoes), the "Annaghkeen Boat" being 40 ft in length and intricately carved, the "Carrowmoreknock Boat", a well preserved 10th century vessel carrying three Viking battle axes, and the wreck of a Victorian pleasure yacht. The lake is hence of international importance as a marine archaeological site. All historic wrecks in the lough are protected, and a licence to dive them is required from the National Monuments Service.

Wildlife
The wildlife in Lough Corrib includes birds and hawks, otters, mink, stoat, frogs, and bats. Lough Corrib can be divided into two parts: a smaller shallower basin to the south and a larger deeper basin to the north. These two parts are connected by a narrow channel. In the southern and eastern parts of the lake, the lake bed is dominated by limestone bedrock covered by deposits of precipitated marl. The surrounding land is mostly pastoral farmland to the south and east and bog to the west and north. In addition to the lake basis, some areas of scientific interest adjoining the lake, e.g. woodland, callows grassland and raised bog, have been incorporated into the Special Area of Conservation.

Threats to ecology
In early 2007, large numbers of the protozoan parasite Cryptosporidium were detected in water from the lake, leading to contamination of the public water supply in Galway city and an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis. Another unwelcome visitor is the invasive species Lagarosiphon major (also known as 'curly-leaved waterweed' or 'South African pondweed') which is destroying fish habitat and the zebra mussel.

Cryptosporidium outbreak
On 21 March 2007, Cryptosporidium was confirmed to be present in the drinking water of Galway City, Moycullen, Oughterard and Headford, which had been instructed six days earlier to boil their water before drinking. The water taken from Lough Corrib was likely contaminated by migration of animal and human faeces. Controversy emerged when it was revealed that funds previously earmarked to improve Galway's water system had not been spent. Dick Roche, the Minister of the Environment, later announced allocation of additional funds to tackle the issue. Measures included upgrading existing water treatment and filtration systems, as well as the projected importing of water from nearby Luimnagh, Tuam, County Galway. This plant at Luimnagh has facilities for Cryptosporidium eradication and filtration.

The Community Care Organisation, Cope, delivered bottled water to their elderly clients from 30 March 2007. A lobby group was formed in April 2007 to highlight the issue.

Islands
While Lough Corrib is reputed to have 365 islands, a recent figure from the creator of the charts of the lake is 1,327. These islands include Inchagoil Island, midway between Cong and Oughterard. It is one of the largest of the wooded islands along Lough Corrib. The island has views of the Maumturk range, Joyce Country and the mountains of Connemara. There are some beaches and woods with walks around the island. There is evidence of an early monastic settlement, and two churches - Saint Patrick's and the 12th century church known as the "saints" church. St. Brendan of Clonfert is also said to have spent some time on an island in this lake after returning from his travels in Britain. There are several paths around the island, an old cemetery and remains of four or five cottages which housed the few inhabitants.

Another lake island is Caislean-na-Circe, between Maam and Doon. This section of Lough Corrib is free from islands except for the rock on which the ancient Hen's Castle of the O'Connor's and the O'Flaherty's stands. The castle was home of the pirate Queen Gráinne O'Malley, who lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth I of England. In 1225, the Lord Justice caused Odo O'Flatherty to give up Kirk Castle to Odo O'Connor, King of Connaught; for assurance of his fidelity. Cruises on the lough depart from Cong, Ashford Castle, Galway City, and Oughterard.

Influence on writers
Paul Féval's novel La Quittance de minuit (1846) is set in County Galway, near Lough Corrib.

William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, wrote a book about the lake, Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands (1867). He built a summerhouse on the banks of the lake, called Moytura House.

The Irish Times states that "the unspoilt countryside around Lough Corrib provided the inspiration" for The Hounds of the Morrigan, a children's novel by Pat O'Shea.

Annalistic references
See Annals of Inisfallen (AI)

 * AI1027.9 Muiredach Ua Flaithbertaig besieged Cathal, son of Ruaidrí, on Inis Crema in Loch Oirbsen, and divided his land despite him.

title: Lough Corrib


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Stun gun

Stun gun may refer to:

Weapons

 * Electroshock weapon, an incapacitating weapon that momentarily disables either a beast or a person with an electric shock
 * Directed-energy weapon, a weapon that emits energy in an aimed direction without projectile, if it causes unconsciousness
 * Various weapons in science fiction

Other uses

 * Nickname of South Korean mixed martial artist Dong Hyun Kim (born 1981)

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

title: Stun gun


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The Bevis Frond

The Bevis Frond is an English rock band formed in 1986 in Walthamstow, London, England. The band is fronted by Nick Saloman and has recorded many singles and albums on various independent labels.

Information
Saloman was originally in a band known as the Bevis Frond Museum in the late 1960s, and in the 1970s, whilst at college, he played guitar with a duo called Oddsocks. They released one album, Men of the Moment. In 1979 he formed a band called the Von Trap Family, who released the first single on his own Woronzow Records label. The early Von Trap Family recordings, comprising three sessions, were released on the Bevis Frond Bandcamp site for the first time in May 2010. The next release on Woronzow was in 1982, a 12" single by Room 13 with Saloman on guitar and future Bevis Frond drummer Martin Crowley. After Room 13 reached the end of its natural life, Nick Saloman had a bad motorbike accident that left him with a constriction of movement in his left arm. True to form, he had the arm set so that he could continue playing guitar. With the proceeds from a damages claim he bought a 4 track recorder and recorded some music which he decided to press as a limited release of 250 albums, more for the sake of just releasing an album than anything else. He was very surprised when Funhouse records in Kent phoned him up and asked for a couple of hundred copies as they had been selling the album quite briskly. Saloman's desire was to "record the kind of music I'd like to listen to… I wanted a Hendrix/Wipers/Byrds sound but with a distinctly British feel." Subsequent albums were also recorded in a home studio and released on Woronzow until 1988, when he signed a deal with Reckless Records for the UK and USA. All the early albums were finally re-released on CD and Reckless financed the recording and release of his sixth album, Any Gas Faster, using a professional studio for the first time, reuniting him with drummer Martin Crowley. This is also the point that he began touring. Another 1990 album, Magic Eye, was a collaboration with Twink of the Pink Fairies. In 1990, he returned to the studio to record his next album, New River Head, which featured guest musicians including Barry Dransfield and David Tibet. The next year he recorded London Stone, but Reckless were less than happy with the album, and in the ensuing friction, Saloman decided to release the album on Woronzow again.

Saloman continued to release albums regularly until the release of Hit Squad in 2004. A couple of years earlier he had signed a deal with Past and Present in the UK and Rubric Records in the US, after which most of his early albums were remastered and re-released with bonus tracks. This initiative faltered after a couple of years, and all the early albums up to and including London Stone were re-released (except Any Gas Faster).

In February 2010, a download site was set up for the Bevis Frond. The aim of this project is to make all the Bevis Frond material available for download in the best possible quality, and to make digitally available unreleased tracks and vinyl only tracks from throughout Saloman's career. Recent additions include all the studio sessions by the Von Trap Family. This project was completed in September 2010.

Early albums were usually entirely recorded by Saloman, while most later albums have been recorded by the contemporary touring band. For performances, the Bevis Frond usually has Adrian "Ade" Shaw on bass. Bevis Frond material is typically released on Woronzow Records label, and is frequently featured in the Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine and accompanying records and CDs. The Bevis Frond also record with and write much of the material for US singer Mary Lou Lord. The song "Lights Are Changing" was chosen for inclusion on Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1995.

After seven years without the appearance of new material, The Bevis Frond released a new album, The Leaving of London, on 10 October 2011. Recorded at Golddust Studios, it features a new drummer, Dave Pearce, formerly of Woronzow artists Psycho's Mum, along with regular contributors Adrian Shaw and Paul Simmons. Live shows in Europe and the UK to promote the album are scheduled for late 2011 and early 2012. In January 2012 the band toured Germany.

Following The Leaving of London, The Bevis Frond released White Numbers in May 2013, with a similar band line-up. In 2014 the compilation titled High In A Flat was released including that song, which had been released on the CD reissue of New River Head but not on the one-CD release earlier. Then, in September 2015, Nick released a new album titled Example 22.

Saloman and Simmons host a weekly radio program called "The Scene", covering music from the 1960s to the 1980s, usually nearly-forgotten tracks from their own extensive record collections. It is broadcast from 7:00 A.M to 8:00 A.M. on Friday mornings on MIT's radio station WMBR, 88.1 FM, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They use their knowledge of musicians' timelines, bands played in and with to connect songs they play to other musicians and other bands. Saloman is owner of Platform One Records, a vinyl record store in Bexhill, East Sussex, United Kingdom-chiefly selling used 'rock' vinyl.

Personal life
In 1991, Nick Saloman was a contestant on the Channel 4 game show Countdown. He is a supporter of Queen's Park Rangers F.C., prompting Richard Whiteley to joke "What do you get when you cross The Bevis Frond and Queen's Park Rangers? Rock bottom."

Saloman's mother Joanne was a schoolteacher to Adam Ant and is credited by Ant as first having encouraged him to be an artist. Saloman himself was also friends with Ant at school and later, according to Ant, would introduce him to "long hair, Jimi Hendrix and loud guitars, which he played wildly and not without skill."

Personnel
The Bevis Frond is essentially Nick Saloman, who does vocals and plays guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. He is also the producer.

The recording and touring band has included at various times:
 * Adrian Shaw (bass guitar)
 * Louis Wigett (bass guitar)
 * Bari Watts (guitar)
 * Ric Gunther (drums)
 * Paul Simmons (guitar)
 * Rod Goodway (guitar, vocals)
 * Andy Ward (drums)
 * Jules Fenton (drums)
 * Martin Crowley (drums)
 * Debbie Saloman (vocals)
 * Dave Pearce (drums)

Albums
In addition, Nick has also released three Bevis Frond CDs that were made available exclusively to the Yahoo! Bevis Frond community group. These CDs, titled Valedictory Demos, The Long Ones, and Clocks, were packed full of demos and unreleased songs.

Singles

 * "Sexorcist" (1990) Clawfist (split with Walkingseeds)
 * Snow EP (1991) Woronzow (free with Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine)
 * "High in a Flat" (free with Bucketfull of Brains magazine, split with Dream Syndicate)
 * Summer Holiday EP (1993) Woronzow
 * "Let's Live For Today" / "29th September" (1994) Helter Skelter, HS 94743
 * "Dolly Bug" / "Green Park Saturday" (1995) Damaged Goods, DAMGOOD 81
 * "Little Town Pier" / "Anything You Say" (1997) Spare Me, SM005
 * "Sister John" / "Off My Shoes" (1997) Distortion Records, DR-1033
 * "African Violets" (1988) B-side of a Flexi-Disc given away with Freakbeat fanzine Issue 4 - The A side was "History Hates No Man" by The Steppes (Band)
 * "You Wouldn't If You Knew" (2001) from Dean Quixote: The Soundtrack To The Film (various artists), SpinART, SPART 99
 * "Estate" (2011) Respect Vinyl
 * "Hard Meat At The Midnight Court" / "Number One Defender" (2012) Woronzow, WOO 59
 * "Fronds of the Fish" (2017) Fruits de Mer Records
 * "Fronds of the Fish II" (2019) Fruits de Mer Records

Related releases
Bevis Frond/Nick Saloman pseudonyms and collaborations:
 * The Von Trap Family - "Brand New Thrill" single (1980) Woronzow
 * Room 13 - "Murder Mystery" single (1982) Woronzow
 * Room 13 - Peaceful War album
 * Room 13 - Live at The Pits album
 * Bevis and Twink - Magic Eye album (1990) Woronzow
 * Magic Muscle - Gulp album (1992) Woronzow
 * Fred Bison Five - Beatroots album (1993) Woronzow
 * Todd Dillingham & Nick Saloman - Art Into Dust CD (1993) Voiceprint
 * Doctor Frond - Doctor Frond album (1998) Magic Gnome
 * Country Joe McDonald and The Bevis Frond - Eat Flowers and Kiss Babies album (1998) Woronzow
 * Nick and Nick and the Psychotic Drivers (1998) Contempo Records - Nick plays lead
 * Acid Jam 2 (2000) Rubric Records - Bevis Frond members wrote or play on almost all tracks
 * Scorched Earth - Fed To Your Head album (2001) Woronzow
 * Mary Lou Lord - "Lights Are Changing" cover from Mary Lou Lord
 * Mary Lou Lord - Baby Blue album 2004 (Rubric Records) Writing and production credits, plus guitar bass and harp.
 * Anton Barbeau - King of Missouri (2003) Anton Barbeau with The Bevis Frond

title: The Bevis Frond


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William Wilde

Sir William Robert Wills Wilde FRCSI (March 1815 – 19 April 1876) was an Anglo-Irish oto-ophthalmologic surgeon and the author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland. He was the father of Oscar Wilde.

Early life and career
William Wilde was born at Kilkeevin, near Castlerea, in County Roscommon, the youngest of the three sons and two daughters of a prominent local medical practitioner, Thomas Wills Wilde, and his wife, Amelia Flynne (d. c.1844). His family were members of the Church of Ireland, and he was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who went to Ireland with King William of Orange's invasion army in 1690, and numerous Anglo-Irish ancestors. He received his initial education at the Elphin Diocesan School in Elphin, County Roscommon. In 1832, Wilde was bound as an apprentice to Abraham Colles, the pre-eminent Irish surgeon of the day, at Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin. He was also taught by the surgeons James Cusack and Sir Philip Crampton and the physician Sir Henry Marsh. Wilde also studied at the private and highly respected school of anatomy, medicine, and surgery in Park Street (later Lincoln Place), Dublin. In 1837, he earned his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In the same year, Wilde embarked on an eight-month cruise to the Holy Land with a recovering patient, visiting various cities and islands throughout the Mediterranean. Porpoises were flung on board the ship, Crusader, and Wilde dissected them. Taking notes, he eventually composed a two-volume book on the nursing habits of the creatures. Among the places he visited on this tour was Egypt. In a tomb, he found the mummified remains of a dwarf and salvaged the torso to bring back to Ireland. He also collected embalmed ibises.

Once back in Ireland, Wilde published an article in the Dublin University Magazine suggesting that one of the "Cleopatra's Needles" be transported to England (eventually in 1878 one of the Needles was transported to London, and in 1880 the other one was brought to New York's Central Park). In 1873 he was awarded the Cunningham Gold Medal by the Royal Irish Academy.

Recognition
He ran his own hospital, St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, in Dublin and was appointed to serve as Oculist-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. At one point, Wilde performed surgery on the father of another famous Irish dramatist, George Bernard Shaw.

Wilde had a very successful medical practice and was assisted in it by his natural son, Henry Wilson, who had been trained in Dublin, Vienna, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Paris. Wilson's presence enabled Wilde to travel and he visited Scandinavia, where he received an honorary degree from Uppsala, and was welcomed in Stockholm by Anders Retzius, among others. King Karl XV of Sweden conferred on him the Nordstjärneorden (Order of the North Star). In 1853, he was appointed Surgeon Occulist in Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland, the first position of its kind, probably created for him.

He was awarded a knighthood in a ceremony at Dublin Castle on 28 January 1864 more for his involvement with the Irish census than for his medical contributions, although he had been appointed medical commissioner to the Irish census in 1841. In 1845, he became editor of the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, to which he contributed many articles.

There is a plaque at 2 Merrion Square, Dublin dedicated to Wilde.

Marriage and children
On 12 November 1851, Wilde married the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee, who wrote and published under the name of Speranza. The couple had two sons: William (Willie) and Oscar, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who died in childhood.

In addition to his children with his wife, Sir William Wilde was the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage: Henry Wilson, born in 1838, and Emily and Mary Wilde, born in 1847 and 1849, respectively, of different parentage to Henry. Sir William acknowledged paternity of his illegitimate children and provided for their education, but they were reared by his relatives rather than with his wife and legitimate children. Emily and Mary both died in 1871 following a Halloween party at which their dresses accidentally caught fire.

From 1855 to his death in 1876, William Wilde lived at No. 1 Merrion Square, now the headquarters of American College Dublin. The building is named Oscar Wilde House after William Wilde's son, who also lived at the address from 1855 until 1878.

Later life
Wilde's reputation suffered when Mary Travers, a long-term patient of his and the daughter of a colleague, claimed that he had raped her two years earlier. She wrote a pamphlet crudely parodying Wilde and Lady Wilde as Dr and Mrs Quilp, and portraying Dr Quilp as the rapist of a female patient anaesthetised under chloroform. She distributed the pamphlets outside the building where Wilde was about to give a public lecture. Lady Wilde complained to Mary's father, Robert Travers, which resulted in Mary bringing a libel case against her. Mary Travers won her case but was awarded a mere farthing in damages by the jury. Legal costs of £2,000 were awarded against Lady Wilde. The case was the talk of all Dublin, and Wilde's refusal to enter the witness box during the trial was widely held against him as ungentlemanly behaviour.

From this time onwards, Wilde began to withdraw from Dublin to the west of Ireland, where he had started in 1864 to build what became Moytura, his house overlooking Lough Corrib in Connemara, County Galway. He died aged 61 in 1876, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.

Publications

 * Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean, 1840.
 * The beauties of the Boyne and its tributary the Blackwater, 1849.
 * The closing years of Dean Swift's life, 1849.
 * The Epidemics of Ireland, 1851.
 * Practical observations on aural surgery and the nature and treatment of diseases of the ear, 1853.
 * Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands, first published 1867, republished 2002.
 * 'The Early Races of Mankind in Ireland', The Irish Builder, 1874.
 * Selected writings of Speranza and William Wilde, edited by Eibhear Walshe, 2020.

Books about

 * Victorian Doctor: the Life of Sir William Wilde, T.G. Wilson (Methuen, London, 1942.)

title: William Wilde


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Think Global

Think Global was a Norwegian electric car manufacturer located in Bærum, which manufactured cars under the TH!NK brand. Production of the Think City was stopped in March 2011 and the company filed for bankruptcy on June 22, 2011, for the fourth time in 20 years. The company was bought soon after by Electric Mobility Solutions AS and production ceased in August 2012 with no more announcements regarding future production. , a total of 2,500 units had been manufactured at Oslo-based TH!NK's production facility.

The Ford TH!NK was a line of electric vehicles produced by TH!NK Mobility, then an enterprise of the Ford Motor Company. The short-lived line included four models: the TH!NK Neighbor and the TH!NK City, small electric automobiles, and the TH!NK Bike Traveler and the TH!NK Bike Fun, electric-powered motorized bicycle. Ford sold its stock, and the resulting company, Think Global, produced electric cars in Norway until declaring bankruptcy in 2011.

History
The company was founded in January 1991 in Bærum, as "Pivco" (for Personal Independent Vehicle Company). The first practical prototype, the PIV2, like the vehicles that followed, were built around a chassis made of aluminum and carrying a body made of polyethylene thermoplastic rotomolded in one piece. The chassis were developed by Hydro Aluminium Tonder in Tønder in Denmark and were one of the main reasons that Ford later acquired 51% of the stock. 10 of 15 prototypes were built in time for the Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games in 1994. The battery technology was NiCd, driving a three-phase AC induction motor via the front wheels.

The PIV2 was followed by the PIV3, the City Bee (Citi in the US), introduced in 1995. 120 of these were produced, 40 of which participated in the San Francisco Bay Area Station Car Demonstration project from 1995 to 1998.

Based on the experiences from the prototypes, Pivco then went on to develop their first true production model, PIV4, later called the TH!NK, with Lotus Cars in a consulting role. The basic construction concept from the prototypes was retained, except that the roof was made of ABS plastic, and the lower frame chassis elements were made of steel. The production model had a range of 85 km (modified ECE101 cycle) between charges, and a top speed of 90 km/h.

Development took more time and resources than anticipated, so when development of the production model was finished in 1999, finances had dried up. The company was then acquired by Ford, who could start production of the TH!NK City. Ford even embraced the TH!NK concept, and marketed electrically driven bicycles as well as golf carts under the same brand.

The TH!NK city Electric Vehicle (EV) Demonstration Program Project was initiated late 2001, and completed in April 2005. US. Partners include Federal, State and Municipal agencies as well as commercial partners. Phase I, consisted of placement of the vehicles in demonstration programs, and it was completed in 2002. Phase II, the monitoring of these programs was completed in 2004. Phase III, the decommissioning and/or exporting of vehicles concluded in 2005. Phase I - the Program successfully assigned 192 EV's with customers (including Hertz) in the state of California, 109 in New York (including loaner and demo vehicles), 16 in Georgia, 7 to customers outside of the US and 52 in Ford's internal operations in Dearborn, Michigan for a total of 376 vehicles. Phase II – the monitoring of the operational fleet was ongoing and completed in 2004, and all vehicles were returned throughout 2004 and 2005. The Department of Energy (DOE) was involved with the monitoring of the New York Power Authority / TH!NK Clean Commute Program units through partnership with Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation (ETEC), which filed separate reports to DOE. The remainder of the field fleet was monitored through Ford's internal operations. Vehicles were retired from lease operation throughout the program for various operator reasons. Some of the vehicles were involved in re-leasing operations. At the end of the program, 376 vehicles had been involved, 372 of which were available for customer use while 4 were engineering prototype and study vehicles. At the end of leases, City vehicles have been decommissioned and/or exported to KamKorp in Norway. By April 2005, the last of the City vehicles had been returned and processed or exported to Norway.

Production ceased in 2002, after 1,005 units had been made. Many of these cars participated in station car projects in California and in New York City.

Probably due to changes in the California zero-emissions vehicle policy, Ford gave up THINK on January 31, 2003. The company was sold to KamKorp, owned by Indian businessman Kamal Siddiqi. Development of a successor to the City was subsequently halted. The used cars from US and UK have been re-exported to Norway where they are in high demand due to the government's policy to promote the use of electrical cars (EVs are exempt from taxes, have free parking, pass toll roads for free, and are allowed to drive in the bus lanes avoiding traffic congestion).

A controversy erupted when Ford decided to crush off-lease TH!NK City cars stockpiled in the U.S. After protesting by environmentalist groups, including a Greenpeace rally on the roof of Ford's Norway offices, Ford decided to ship the excess vehicles to Norway.

In 2004, the company turned its attention to development of the TH!NK public, a micro size electric bus to be rented to customers for inner city travel. By February 2006, prototypes of the vehicle had been developed, but the company went into receivership.

At the end of March 2006, Think Nordic was acquired by Norwegian investment group InSpire, which includes the original founder Jan Otto Ringdal and Jan-Olaf Willums - a Norwegian engineer educated at the renowned ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Polytechnic) and expert in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)- as partners. The company was renamed THINK Global.

For the next year, the THINK website showed a restyled "new THINK City" car which was under development. An open version of the car was also pictured but the company said it had no plans to put it into production.

In March 2007, a completely new website was posted, with many more images of the new car rendered into artist's impressions and various exterior/interior photographs. This site is presented in Norwegian and English.

The original English page reported: "The THINK city has ABS brakes, dual airbags, and meets all European and US safety requirements. It has a range of 170 km, a top speed of 100 km/h and has comfort and convenience features such as air conditioning, power steering, sun roof, electric windows and mirrors, and more".

In May 2007, Tesla Motors, maker of the electric Tesla Roadster, announced an agreement to sell 43 million dollars worth of its Li-ion battery systems to THINK Nordic for use in the next generation THINK City, but on 2 November 2007 it backed out of the deal.

The THINK assembly line was restarted in late November 2007 to start manufacturing the re-designed City car.

On March 5, 2008, General Electric, battery manufacturer A123 Systems and THINK Global announced that they had entered a partnership to enable global electrification of transportation. GE invested US$4 million in THINK and $20 million in A123 Systems to help A123 roll out batteries for THINK. A123 Systems and THINK at the same time signed a commercial supply agreement. The partnership was announced at the 78th annual international Geneva Motor Show.

Also at the 2008 Geneva motor show, THINK unveiled its future five-seater, 130 km/h concept car, the TH!NK Ox.

In July 2008, THINK introduced the THINK City for the first time in the UK.

As of August 2008, some 100 City cars had been manufactured for customers in Norway. It was reported that "the lean plant is ready for efficient production supported by the experts of Porsche Consulting".

On December 15, 2008, THINK suspended all vehicle production and laid off 50% of its staff pending negotiation of up to $29 million in funding for working capital, citing "urgent financial distress."

As of January 13, 2009, THINK Global received a bridge loan of 40 million Norwegian kroner (~$5.69 million) to continue operation. Much of that bridge loan came from one of its battery suppliers, EnerDel.

On August 27, 2009, THINK announced a successful recapitalization ($47 million) through existing and new investors, which allowed the company to exit court protection and resume normal business operations in terms of manufacturing and sales of the THINK City EV in Europe. Announced investors included battery manufacturer Ener1 in U.S. (31%); US venture capital firms RockPort Capital Partners (Boston); Element Partners (Philadelphia) and Kleiner Perkins (Palo Alto, CA) as well as Valmet Automotive based in Finland and Investinor (the venture capital sovereign fund of Norway). On the same day, the company also announced that the THINK City electric car would be produced in Valmet later that year. The deal also included engineering. Valmet invested around €3 million ($4.27 million) to the project, and became a minor shareholder of the company.

Production of the THINK City car at Valmet Automotive started on December 10, 2009, in Uusikaupunki, Finland.

On January 5, 2010, THINK announced plans to manufacture the THINK City in Elkhart, Indiana beginning in 2011.

On April 6, 2010, THINK announced plans to begin selling the THINK City in the U.S. in 2010.

December 2010, the first 15 THINK electric cars made in the Elkhart, Indiana, assembly plant were delivered to its customer – the state of Indiana – for government fleet use. This marks the first time that an American-made electric vehicle with Lithium-ion batteries has been purchased for U.S. fleet operation. The vehicles delivered were the THINK City model, which is a pure electric vehicle that produces zero emissions and is capable of traveling as far as 100 mi on a single charge.

“Our delivery today is part of a larger effort to help transform the U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet from one that is mostly dependent on imported oil, to one that is fueled entirely by domestically produced electric energy,” said Barry Engle, THINK CEO. Engle continued, “As part of that goal, we've made a strategic decision to target initially the many millions of fleet vehicles in operation in the U.S. market…These fleets can jumpstart vehicle electrification in America's cities and help push the industry past early adopters into mainstream consumer markets.”

Production of the Th!nk City was stopped in March 2011 and the company filed for bankruptcy on June 22, 2011, for the fourth time in 20 years.

Think Global's assets were bought by Electric Mobility Solutions AS in July 2011, including shares of wholly owned subsidiaries THINK North America and THINK UK. The new owners announced that production is scheduled to restart in early 2012 with a refined Think City. However, despite such announcements production ceased in August 2012. In January 2013, an email sent to existing Think City customer included the sentence "For 2013, our focus is on serving our customers, while developing the next model THINK EV." thus hinting that another Think EV is in development.

Ford TH!NK City

The two door Think City could seat a driver and a passenger and had a top speed of 56 mph. The car had an acceleration speed of zero to 30 mph in seven seconds and weighed 2,075 pounds. The model was 9.8 ft long, 5.25 ft wide, and 5.1 ft high.

TH!NK Neighbor
The Neighbor (part of Ford Th!nk) was designed to meet the NHTSA specification for Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. Design and manufacture was unrelated to the Th!nk City. The Neighbor was initially offered in two models, a two-seater and a four-seater, with a two-passenger utility truck version offered near the end of production. The TH!NK Neighbor had a fixed roof over an open enclosure; a rain cover was optionally available to protect the passengers from the elements. The normal top speed was governed to 25 mph per NHTSA requirements, and it also had a "turf" mode that set its maximum speed at 15 mph for golf course use. Many options were designed for use on the golf course: it featured a bag rack, a holder for scorecards, tees, and balls, and a club washer. Additionally, there was a trunk option for the four-passenger version that could double as a cooler. Overall, 7,162 total units were produced for the 2002 model year. 2,268 P20 ( 2 seater), 863 P21 (utility) and 4,031 P22 (4 passenger) units were built.

TH!NK city

The Th!nk City was a small two-seater or 2+2-seater highway capable electric car, with a top speed of 110 km/h and an in-town range of 160 km on a full charge. The Think City is available with either a Zebra Sodium (molten salt battery) battery or a lithium-ion battery, which both travel 100 miles, or 160 kilometres on a full charge, and based on the International Electrotechnical Commission's standards for electric cars.

After a failed start up in Norway in 2008, mass production was restarted in Finland in December 2009.

As of September 2010 the Th!nk City was sold in Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Austria, Switzerland and Finland.

It was one of the first three electric cars in the world to be crash-tested and highway-certified, together with the Tesla Roadster (2008) and the Mitsubishi i MiEV.

TH!NK Ox

The TH!NK Ox, presented at the 2008 Geneva Motor Show, was a concept five-seater electric car with a top speed of 130 km/h and a 100 kW motor.

The website for the Think Ox, now shut down, listed the top speed as 135 km/h (~84 mi/h) and the range as 250 km (~155 mi).

TH!NK open
TH!NK open was a 3-door, 2-seat concept car, where the roof has been removed. Top speed is 100 km/h, with the following ranges (90 to 203 km):

 * Range IEC (European standard for calculating range of electrical cars): 170 km (summer tires, heater off)
 * Range FUDS (American standard for calculating range of electrical cars): 180 km (summer tires, heater off)
 * Range FUDS winter (typical range in particularly cold conditions) : 90 km /winter tires, constant 4 kW heater
 * Range EU UDC (range during city driving only): 203 km

title: Think Global


text:
Dwarves (band)

The Dwarves are an American punk rock band formed in Chicago, Illinois and based in San Francisco, California as of 2009.

Formed as a garage punk band under the name Suburban Nightmare, their career subsequently saw them move in a hardcore direction before settling into an eclectic punk rock sound emphasizing intentionally shocking lyrics. They have been described as "one of the last true bastions of punk rock ideology in the contemporary musical age".

History
The original members of the Dwarves began making music together in the mid-1980s as teenagers in the Chicago garage rock outfit, Suburban Nightmare, which was compared to The Sonics, and which has been described as part of the Paisley Underground scene. This era of the Dwarves is captured on Lick It (the psychedelic years 83-86) a 34 track collection put out by Recess records in 1999.

The band became notorious for self-mutilation, on-stage sex, and taking hard drugs. Their live shows would often only last around fifteen minutes, occasionally cut short due to injury caused by spectators. The band's sound began to evolve beyond its early garage roots with their second (nine-minute long) LP, Toolin' for a Warm Teabag, which saw the band drifting towards a more truculent punk rock sound, influenced by GG Allin. Recess records issued Free Cocaine 86–88 in 1999, a 39-song collection that shows the band's transition to the nihilistic style that took them to the Sub Pop era. The band released Blood Guts & Pussy on Sub Pop in 1990. By this time the Dwarves had dropped their early psychedelic sensibilities and morphed into a hardcore punk band. The Blood Guts & Pussy LP was followed up by EP Lucifer's Crank released by No.6 Records, as well as another Sub Pop LP, the metal-punk Thank Heaven For Little Girls, both in 1991.

In 1993 the band issued a press release stating their guitarist HeWhoCannotBeNamed had been stabbed to death in Philadelphia. Though this later turned out to be a hoax, the band even went as far as to attach a tribute to the "late" guitarist on their 1993 Sub Pop-released album Sugarfix. Sub Pop did not respond well to the hoax and summarily dropped the band from its label. The Dwarves reformed in 1997, releasing The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking (described by Adam Bregman of AllMusic as "the beginning of a new Dwarves...one that plays real songs, had a set list, and left the club unbloodied"), and its 2000 followup The Dwarves Come Clean.

In 2004 the band released The Dwarves Must Die, its first LP for the indie label Sympathy for the Record Industry, which featured guest appearances from Dexter Holland (The Offspring), Nick Oliveri (Queens of the Stone Age), Nash Kato (Urge Overkill), and voice actor Gary Owens. Dahlia was assaulted by Josh Homme of QOTSA before a Dwarves show in Los Angeles in 2004, which saw Homme placed on summary probation for thirty-six months.

In other media
In the film Me, Myself & Irene, Jim Carrey is seen singing along to Dwarves "Motherfucker", which Dahlia later said he got "tens of thousands of dollars" for.

In 2000, the band offered the track "River City Rapist" to George W. Bush as his presidential campaign song. The Bush campaign did not use the song.

The Dwarves' cover of the Norwegian rock band Turbonegro's song "Hobbit Motherfuckers" from the Turbonegro tribute album "Alpha Motherfuckers" can be heard playing in the comic book store scene in the 2000s indie film "Ghost World" albeit without Blag Dhalia's profanity laden vocals. This song does not appear on the soundtrack album for the film.

In 2009, Blag and HeWhoCannotBeNamed were immortalised as Bobbleheads by Aggronautix.

Band members
Singer Blag Dahlia (a.k.a. Julius Seizure, born Paul Cafaro), and guitarist HeWhoCannotBeNamed (a.k.a. Pete Vietnamcheque) have always been the two core members of the group. The lineup has shifted around them, and currently consists of members "Rex Everything" on bass and vocals, "The Fresh Prince of Darkness" on guitar and "Snupac" on drums. Former members include "Dutch Ovens", "Gregory Pecker", "Chip Fracture", "Wholley Smokes", "Clint Torres", "Tazzie Bushweed", "Thrusty Otis", "Crash Landon", "Wreck Tom", "Hunter Down" and "Vadge Moore", among others. Drummer Josh Freese appears on many Dwarves recordings.

Musical style
The Dwarves are known for their simple, loud, yet nuanced punk repertoire, and controversial lyrics. Since the garage punk sound of their early days, they developed a more direct hardcore punk sound, often identified as "scum punk" due to the intentional perversity of the lyrics. Around the turn of millennium, the Dwarves developed more of a manic pop punk influence. Bits of hardcore, surf rock, pop, hip-hop, and rock 'n' roll all factor into the band's current punk rock sound.

Their shows have been notable for some aggressive fights on stage (with the audience and even a cop), and because HeWhoCannotBeNamed performs either in nothing but a jockstrap or totally nude, apart from his trademark "Rey Mysterio" wrestling mask.

Cover art
Many of the band's album covers are controversial, often featuring dwarf actor Bobby Faust with an assortment of naked women, sometimes with sacrilegious themes such as re-enacting the Crucifixion. Faust posed sodomizing a rabbit covered in blood for their 1990 album Blood Guts & Pussy - followed up a decade later, with a similar theme, this time covered in soap suds, for Come Clean.

Side projects

 * Former drummer Sigh Moan formed Specula with Specter Spec, releasing the Erupt album in 1995.
 * Blag Dahlia has worked as a producer for Joey Santiago's band The Martinis, and is also half of the duo The Uncontrollable with Nick Oliveri.
 * Blag Dahlia has also performed solo acoustic sets, which he described as his "camp counselor guy routine", released a bluegrass album, Blackgrass in 1995 under the name Earl Lee Grace.
 * Blag Dahlia was a part the side project Penetration Moon, which released a sole single, "Fifth a Day", in 1991.
 * Blag Dahlia has published two books, Armed to the Teeth with Lipstick (1998) and Nina (2006).
 * Blag Dahlia sings "Doing the Sponge" in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode The Chaperone, which originally aired on Nickelodeon October 2, 1999. "Doing the Sponge" is written by Salt Peter (Peter Straus), former bassist for the Dwarves.
 * Blag Dahlia's most recent side project is pop/rock band Candy Now!, which he formed with Angelina Moysov of Persephone's Bees.
 * HeWhoCannotBeNamed has released two solo albums, which have featured guest appearances from his fellow Dwarves members, including Blag Dahlia. "Humaniterrorist", a vinyl only release in 2012, and "Love/Hate", a compact disc-only release in 2013.
 * Blag Dahlia on Vocals recording The Who's "The Kids are Alright" with Peted on guitar of The Adicts and Cell Block 5
 * Blag Dahlia sings vocals on the Royce Cracker single "Who Put the Methamphetamine in Mr. Everything".
 * Rex Everything sings vocals on the Royce Cracker single "Doin' Whatche Say". The Royce Cracker Dwarves split 7-inch was released on Zodiac Killer Records (ZKR038) in 2009.
 * Marc Diamond plays guitar, and Andy Selway plays drums on the Royce Cracker single "Meth Stop Calling".
 * Snupac is the vocalist for hardcore punk band Get A Grip.

Albums

 * A Hard Day's Nightmare (as The Surburban Nightmare) LP (Midnight Records, 1985, MIR LP 109)
 * Horror Stories LP (Voxx Records, 1986, VXS 200.037)
 * Toolin' For A Warm Teabag LP (Nasty Gash Records, 1988, NG 001)
 * Blood Guts & Pussy LP (Sub Pop, 1990, SP 67)
 * Thank Heaven for Little Girls LP (Sub Pop, 1991, SP 126)
 * Sugarfix LP (Sub Pop, 1993, SP 197)
 * The Dwarves Are Young and Good Looking LP (Theologian Records, 1997, T53)
 * The Dwarves Come Clean LP (Epitaph Records, 2000, 86575 1)
 * How To Win Friends And Influence People (Reptilian Records, 2001, REP 068)
 * The Dwarves Must Die (2004)
 * The Dwarves Are Born Again (2011)
 * The Dwarves Invented Rock & Roll (2014)
 * Radio Free Dwarves (Riot Style Records / Greedy) (2015)
 * Take Back The Night (Burger Records / Greedy) (2018)
 * Concept Album (2023)

Compilations

 * Free Cocaine DLP (Recess Records, 1999, RECESS No. 51)
 * Lick It DLP (Recess Records, 1999, RECESS No. 52)
 * Greedy Boot 1 (2005) - only available from their website
 * The Dwarves Concept Album (Greedy, 2023)

Live

 * Toolin' for Lucifers Crank (1996)
 * Fuck You Up and Get Live (2005)
 * Radio Free Dwarves (2015)

EPs

 * Lucifer's Crank cassette EP (self issued, 1988, reissued on 7-inch by Rough Trade No.6 (Karbon), 1991, KAR 13/7)
 * We Kill Cock Throbbin' cassette-EP (self-issued, 1988)
 * Underworld / Lies / Down By The River (Sub Pop, 1993, SP 183B)
 * Fake ID, Bitch 10-inch Vinyl (2011)

Singles

 * "Lick It" 7-inch (Ubik, 1988)
 * "She's Dead" / "Fuckhead" 7-inch (Sub Pop SP50, 1990)
 * "Drugstore" / "Detention Girl" / "Astro Boy" / "Motherfucker" 7-inch (Sub Pop SP81, 1990)
 * "Sit on My Face" / "I Wanna Kill Your Boyfriend" (by Seizure) split 7-inch (Sympathy For the Record Industry, SFTRI 132, 1991)
 * "Lucky Tonight" / "Speed Demon" / "Dairy Queen" 7-inch (Sub Pop SP21/163, 1992)
 * "Anybody Out There" / "Who Cares" 7-inch (Sub Pop SP84/254, 1993)
 * "That's Rock 'n' Roll" / "I'm a Man" 7-inch (Sympathy For The Record Industry SFTRI 280, 1994)
 * Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (But Blondes Don't Like Cripples) 7-inch EP (Man's Ruin MR005, 1995)
 * "I Will Deny You" / "The Dwarves are Young and Good Looking" / "One Life to Live" 7-inch (Reptilian REP018, 1997)
 * "We Must Have Blood" / "Surfing the Intercourse Barn" 7-inch (Man's Ruin MR051, 1997)
 * Dwarves/Royce Cracker 7-inch Vinyl/CD (Zodiac Killer Records ZKR038, 2009)
 * "Trailer Trash" 7-inch (Recess Records, 2014)
 * "Get Up & Get High" 7-inch (No Balls Records, 2014)
 * "Gentleman Blag" 7-inch (Fat Wreck Chords, 2015)
 * "Fun to Try" 7-inch (Burger Records, 2015)
 * Dwarves/Svetlanas split 7-inch (Altercation Records, 2016)

Videos

 * Fuck You Up and Get Live DVD (2004)
 * FEFU DVD (2006)

Music videos

 * I'm a Living Sickness (1986)
 * Drugstore (1990)
 * We Must Have Blood (1997)
 * Over You (2000)
 * Salt Lake City (2004)
 * FEFU (2004)
 * Massacre (2005)
 * Stop Me (2011)
 * The Band That Wouldn't Die (2011)
 * You'll Never Take Us Alive (2012)
 * Devil's Level (2018)

Compilation appearances

 * 1999: Short Music for Short People (Fat Wreck Chords, track "The Band That Wouldn't Die")
 * 2017: Punk against Trump (Denizen Records, track "Trailer Trash" )

title: Dwarves (band)


text:
Coatepec, Veracruz

The municipality of Coatepec is located in the central region of the Mexican state of Veracruz. Its north latitude is 19° 27′, west longitude is 96° 58′, altitude of 1200.00 m, and surface of 202.4 km2. It represents the 0.338% of the current state. The municipal seat and largest community of the municipality is also called Coatepec. The Mexican census of 2020 reported a population of 55,720 in the city, while the municipality had 93,911 inhabitants. The municipality also includes many smaller communities within its boundaries. The largest of these are Tuzamapan, (8,300 hab.), Pacho Viejo (4,829 hab.), and Mahuixtlán (3,946 hab.).

Often called The Coffee Capital of Mexico, the name Coatepec comes from the Nahuatl coatl (serpent), and tepetl (hill), or "The Hill of the Snakes".

Coatepec was named a "Pueblo Mágico" in 2006.

Geography
Coatepec borders the municipalities of Xalapa and Tlalnelhuayocan (north); Teocelo and Jalcomulco (south); Emiliano Zapata (east); and Xico and Teocelo (west).

This municipality has four small rivers: the Pixquiac, the Pintores, the Sordo and the Hueyapan; all flow into the Pescados (La Antigua) River.

Climate
Coatepec's yearly median temperature is 19.5 °C (67 °F). Seasonal variations in temperature are moderate as elsewhere in central Mexico, whilst precipitation has more pronounced changes. The warmest month is May, when temperatures top 30 °C (86 °F) on average, although at night because of the high elevation the mercury drops to 15 °C (59 °F). The coolest month is January with temperatures varying from 9 °C (48 °F) to 22 °C (72 °F). Precipitation is at its lowest during the spring months (however still some rainfall falls from late cold fronts or early thunderstorm activity). Rainfall peaks at two times during the year, in June, at the beginning of the rainy season, and in September, towards the end of it. During these months precipitation exceeds on average 300 mm (11.8 in) and have been as high as over 25 in (640.7 mm in September 1974). The city's mild to warm temperatures have their extremes in 33 °C (92 °F) in May 1984 and -1 °C (28 °F) during February, 1976. There are 161 days with rain each year, while fog is common during the winter months.

Culture
Coatepec has many traditions, with the most important being The Feast of Sán Jerónimo, which the people celebrate on September 30 each year.

The foods in Coatepec that are the most popular with the local population and tourists alike include: Tamales, Chilaquiles, Emmoladas, Gorditas, Lupitas, Enfrijoladas, and others.

Products
Coatepec is known for its coffee, which both tastes and looks appealing.

title: Coatepec, Veracruz


text:
Kewet

Kewet was the brand name of a battery electric vehicle. Since 2007, it has been manufactured under the name Buddy by Elbil Norge in Oslo, Norway. From inception in 1991 through October 2013, total combined sales of the Kewet and Buddy totaled approximately 1,500 units, mainly in Norway. It is similar to the Citicar of the 1970s.

History
In 1971, Knud Erik Westergaard started KEW Industries in Hadsund, Denmark. The company produced industrial washing equipment and high pressure cleaners. In 1988, this company was sold, and Westergaard founded Kewet (Knud Erik Westergaard Elektrisk Transport) to produce electric cars. In 1991, the first cars emerged from the production facilities. In 1995, production was moved to Nordhausen in the former East Germany. But this move was unsuccessful. Kewet went bankrupt in 1998. In August 1998, Kewet International was formed. Shortly thereafter, rights to the Kewet vehicle were transferred to the Norwegian company, Kollega Bil A/S, which changed its name to Elbil Norge AS. Currently, Kewet Service provides spare parts and repairs Kewet vehicles in Denmark, while Consys develops various systems for electric vehicles.

Models
Six generations of the Kewet were produced:

 * Models 1 and 2 used 48 volt systems, 5 kW motors equipped with a four-speed manual transmission.
 * Model 3 was equipped with a 48 volt system, a 7.5 kW motor and a single-speed transmission.
 * Model 4 used 60 volt systems and a 10 kW motor.
 * Model 5 used 72 volt systems with a 12 kW motor. It was also available as a van.
 * Model 6 (Buddy) uses 72 volt systems with a 13 kW motor.

The car seats three, has a range of typically 50 to 80 km (~31 to 50 mi) between charges (150 km/~93 mi with Li-Ion), with a top speed of 80 km/h (~49.7 MPH), and features a 1.6 kW electric heater or an optional paraffin heater. The chassis is made of galvanized steel and the shell is made of GRP.

title: Kewet


text:
Frank Stella

Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City for much of his career before moving his studio to Rock Tavern, New York. Stella's work catalyzed the minimalist movement in the late 1950s. He moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he created works which emphasized the picture-as-object. These were influenced by the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. He developed a reductionist approach to his art, saying he wanted to demonstrate that for him, every painting is "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more", and disavowed conceptions of art as a means of expressing emotion. He won notice in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Stella was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.

Biography
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their three children. His grandparents on both sides had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century from Sicily. His father, Frank Sr., was a gynecologist, and his mother Constance (née Santonelli) was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting. His father painted houses to pay his way through medical school, with young Stella as his helper. Many years later he told an interviewer, "My father would make me sand the floor; we had to do the sanding and scraping before you could hold the brush and then paint on the wall. So it was that kind of apprenticeship and familiarity."

Stella went to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where Carl Andre, later to become a minimalist sculptor, was in the class ahead of him, but Andre said they never actually met. In his sophomore year, the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a teacher at the school, began teaching Stella how to paint. At this time Stella was particularly affected by the work of the artist Josef Albers, a Bauhaus color theorist, and Hans Hofmann, an influential proto-Abstract Expressionist. After entering Princeton University where he majored in history, played lacrosse and wrestled, Stella took art courses and was introduced to the New York art scene by painter Stephen Greene and art historian William C. Seitz, professors at the school who brought him to exhibitions in the city. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism.

In the 1970s, he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City. As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his upstate studio at Rock Tavern, New York, in the Hudson River Valley. The critic and essayist Megan O'Grady visited the studio in 2019, and writing for the New York Times Style Magazine, described it as a "hangar-like structure", its entrance marked by a piece of wood spray-painted with the name "Stella". She called the interior a "vast space more easily traversed by golf cart than on foot", divided into separate rooms for fabrication and display, with a curtain hanging in the rear behind which he kept his spray-painter, his industrial sander, and new works being assembled.

Late 1950s and early 1960s
After moving to New York City in the late 1950s, Stella began to create works which emphasized the picture-as-object. His visits to the art galleries of New York, where he was exposed to the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, had exerted a great influence on his development as an artist.

He created a series of paintings in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. At age 22 in late 1958, he used commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush to paint black stripes of the same width and evenly spaced on bare canvas, leaving the thin strips of canvas between them unpainted and exposed, along with his pencil-and-ruler drawn guidelines. These paintings, his response to the Abstract Expressionist movement that grew in the years following World War II, were devoid of color and meant to lack any visual stimulation.

Die Fahne Hoch! (1959), one of the "Black Paintings" series, takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!" or "Raise the Flag!" in English) from the first line of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied", the anthem of the Nazi Party. According to Stella himself, the painting has similar proportions as flags used by that organization.

Stella's work was a catalyst for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials he used in his paintings, disavowing any conception of art as a means of expressing emotion. He made a splash in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown in the Sixteen Americans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, along with works by Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Taking a reductionist approach to his art, Stella said he sought to demonstrate that he considered every painting as "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more". The same year, several of his paintings were included in the Three Young Americans showing at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. A year later, his first gallery show at art dealer Leo Castelli's New York gallery gained him few sales. Stella shared studio space with Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, both of whom had attended Phillips Academy, and scrounged a living by renting cold-water flats and painting houses.

Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work. In a 1964 radio broadcast of a discussion of contemporary art with fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, he summarized his concerns as a painter with the words, "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.... What you see is what you see." The much-quoted tautology, "What you see is what you see", became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.

From 1960, his works used shaped canvases, developing in 1966 into more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series (67). In 1961, Stella followed Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, to Pamplona, Spain, where she had gone on a Fulbright fellowship; they married in London that November. Upon their return to New York, Rose and Stella moved into an apartment near Union Square and had two children. After they split up in 1969, Rose began to reconsider her relationship with minimalism, and became a champion of less well-recognized painters.

Late 1960s and early 1970s
In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The same year, his began his Protractor Series (1967–71) of paintings, named after the common measuring instrument, a half circle protractor. These feature arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular-plan cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. He was especially intrigued by the arches and decorative patterns he observed in the architecture and art of Iran. His painting, Protractor Variation I (1969), now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity of his output after the late 1960s. This work typified his experimentation with shaped canvases, producing innovative paintings in which the imagery was set by their contours.

In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one. Stella was among those artists invited to participate in the problem-plagued 35th Art Biennale in Venice (1970) who joined a boycott by artists opposed to the US wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and withdrew their works from display at the American Pavilion.

In the following decade, as he began to adopt more unusual color schemes and shapes, Stella brought to his artistic productions the element of relief, which he called "maximalist" painting because it had sculptural attributes. He presented wood and other materials in his Polish Village series (1970–1973), executed in high relief. They were inspired by photographs and drawings he saw of wooden synagogues that the Nazis had burned down in eastern Poland during World War II.

Stella abandoned rational structures in the mid-1970s and began to explore new, individualistic paths. He replaced solid planes with sqiggles, lattices, and swirls of color. Composite features began to project from his canvases in all directions, while his wall-mounted paintings evolved into outlandish sculptures. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as his works became more uninhibited and intricate, his minimalism became baroque.

In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Series. He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas."

He married pediatrician Harriet McGurk in 1978.

1980s and afterward

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella produced a large oeuvre that grappled with Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick in a broad way. In this period of his career, as the relief of his paintings became increasingly higher with more undercutting, the process eventually resulted in fully three-dimensional sculptural forms that he derived from decorative architectural elements, and incorporating French curves, pillars, waves, and cones. To generate these works, he made collages or scale models that were subsequently enlarged to the original's specifications by his assistants, along with the use of digital technology and industrial metal cutters.

In 1993, he designed and executed for Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a 10,000-square-foot mural installation which covers the ceiling of the dome, the proscenium arch and the exterior rear wall of the building. The mural for the dome was based on computer-generated imagery. In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia at the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. A monumental sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark in 2012. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York, studio.

The Scarlatti K series, begun in 2006, consists of eight works by Stella from his Scarlatti Kirkpatrick polychrome sculpture series, for which he used a 3-D printer to create the metal and resin segments. The series title refers to the music of the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known for his short but exuberant Baroque period harpsichord sonatas (he wrote more than 500 of them), and to Ralph Kirkpatrick, the American musicologist and harpsichordist, who brought Scarlatti's work to the attention of the listening public, and in 1953 produced the authoritative scholarly catalogue of the sonatas. Stella was inspired by the sonatas, and his series works, like the sonatas, are given "K" numbers, but they allude to Scarlatti's music abstractly with visual rhythm and movement, according to Stella, rather than literal correlation. Stella continued producing new works in the series into 2012. These were shown at the Freedman Art Gallery that year, and commenting about his work in the series, Stella said, "If you follow the edges of the lines, there's a sense of movement, and when they move well and the color follows, they become colorful, and that's what happens in the Scarlatti—it builds up and it moves...". Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, showed Stella's work in an exhibition featuring computer-enabled pieces, Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital (2013-14).

By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures. The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits. His Jasper's Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at 7 World Trade Center in 2021. It was created to replace the large (each ten feet wide by ten feet tall) diptych of his paintings, Laestrygonia I and Telepilus Laestrygonia II, that had been displayed in the lobby of the original World Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City.

In late 2022, Stella launched his first NFT (non-fungible token) for his Geometries project in collaboration with the Artists Rights Society (ARS). It includes the right to the CAD files to 3D print the art works in the NFTs. Katarina Feder, director of business development at ARS, said, "We sold out all 2,100 tokens, and, importantly, brought in resale royalties for secondary sales, something that Frank has been championing for decades."

Artists' rights
On June 1, 2008, Stella, a member artist of the Artists Rights Society ) published with ARS president Theodore Feder an op-ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located".

In the op-ed, Stella wrote,

"The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a 'good faith, reasonably diligent' search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search. The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work."

Exhibitions
Stella's work was included in several exhibitions in the 1960s, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a second retrospective of Stella's work in 1970.

The exhibition "Frank Stella and Synagogues of Historic Poland", was on view at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw through June 20, 2016. The series of paintings on display, Polish Village (1970–74), had previously been exhibited at other venues, including the Fort Worth Museum of Dallas in 1978, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987, and the Jewish Museum in New York in 1983. The paintings were inspired by photographs and drawings he saw of wooden synagogues that the Nazis had burned down in eastern Poland during World War II. They came from Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka's book Wooden Synagogues (Arkady, 1959), and were themselves part of the exhibition.

In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

Collections
In 2014, Stella gave his sculpture Adjoeman (2004) as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. His works are in the collections of many major art institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the Tate; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Recognition
Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting. These six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.

In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center. In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Jena in Jena, Germany, where his large sculptures of the Hudson River Valley series are on permanent display, becoming the second artist to receive this honorary degree after Auguste Rodin in 1906.

He was heralded by the Birmingham Museum of Art for having created abstract paintings that bear "no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting".

Critical reception
Writer and curator Klaus Ottmann says many art critics were outraged when Stella's Black Paintings (1958–60) were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "16 Americans" (1959-1960) exhibition. Irving Sandler attributed the death of American gesture painting to the mortal blow dealt by these reductive and non-allusive paintings. According to Ottman, "Today, they are universally considered seminal works of 20th-century American art."

According to critic Megan O'Grady, art critics were shocked by the "Black Paintings", with their purposely flat affect, their extreme reductiveness, and their "refusal to appease". In her view, the young artist had been inspired by the artists he admired in New York, among them Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, and felt that he was allowed freedom to do whatever he wanted with painting. She writes that critics have always been disconcerted by the fact that "the godfather of Minimalist painting" became a forbear of modern baroque.

The art historian and critic Douglas Crimp writes that the notion of art as existing detached from everything else and autonomous proceeds from the logic of modernism, and is a notion maintained by contemporary painting into the 1980s. Painting is understood as having an origin and an essential nature, and its historical development as being a long, unbroken panorama. According to Crimp, the stylistic change that occurred during the late 1970s in Frank Stella's work embodied this art historical view of painting and how it operates to maintain the practice of painting. By his lights, Stella's shift to the "flamboyantly idiosyncratic constructed works" of this period was "a kind of quantum leap" compared to his breakout works of the late 1950s.

For Crimp it was Stella's earliest paintings which suggested to his fellows that the end of painting had at last arrived. He sees Stella as working in profound torment over the inferences made by those early works, moving ever further away from them, and disavowing them more vehemently with every new series. Crimp goes on to say the late 1970s paintings "are truly hysterical in their defiance of the black paintings; each one reads as a tantrum, shrieking and sputtering that the end of painting has not come".

When the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited its Frank Stella retrospective in 2015, art critic Jerry Saltz reminded viewers that Stella had declared "I don't make Conceptual Art. I need the physical thing to work with or against." Saltz advised them to think literally, and in terms of the space the works occupy and the nature of their surfaces, seeing color as an element of their structures. He described Stella as being one of "the first to deal as directly as possible with the perception of material, form, and color", "the first hard-core Minimalist painter", and "a forerunner to the Postminimalism that defined the late 1960s and 1970s". Saltz goes on to say "even though he's prone to cranking out a lot of work that looks like God-awful space junk, I always pay attention to this artist".

Art market
In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for one of Stella's works with the sale of his Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.

In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/Ascending Green Values (1977) was sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million with premium) in London. The painting was bought for $1.9 million in 2006 from the collection of Belgian art patrons Roger and Josette Vanthournout at Sotheby's.

Stella and the sport of squash
In the 1980s, Stella took up the game of squash after he injured his back while opening a garage door. His racquet was strung with five bright colors. He later had a squash court built at his horse farm in upstate New York, and formed close friendships with many squash players. In 1986 he told Nicholas Dawidoff, a writer for Sports Illustrated: "The advantage of squash is that I can forget about painting. A white blank and a ball; you don’t know where you are. It's like a snowstorm." Being interviewed in 1987 by Susan Orleans of The New Yorker, he quipped, "In art, you can keep getting better, but in squash you hit your level and that's just about it. Curtains. You’re finished. I hit my limit at about forty minutes of mediocre playing."

Speaking of Stella after his death, Ned Edwards, the executive director of the U.S. Squash Foundation, said that "Frank was a transformational figure for squash." The director of the Tournament of Champions, John Nimick, said, "Frank was a patron saint of our sport and various efforts to promote squash in New York City for forty years. He was a player, promoter, sponsor and creator of our perpetual trophy."

Personal life and death
From 1961 to 1969, Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael. At the time of his death, he was married to Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician. They had two sons, Patrick and Peter. He also had a daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages.

Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, on May 4, 2024, eight days before his 88th birthday.

Selected bibliography

 * Julia M. Busch: A Decade of Sculpture: the 1960s, Associated University Presses, Plainsboro, 1974; ISBN 0-87982-007-1
 * Frank Stella and Siri Engberg: Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997; ISBN 9780935640588
 * Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Frank Stella. Die Schriften Frank Stellas, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN 3-88375-487-0, ISBN 978-3-88375-487-1 (bilingual)
 * Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: Heinrich von Kleist by Frank Stella, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN 3-88375-488-9, ISBN 978-3-88375-488-8 (bilingual)
 * Andrianna Campbell, Kate Nesin, Lucas Blalock, Terry Richardson: Frank Stella, Phaidon, London, 2017; ISBN 9780714874593

title: Frank Stella


text:
38 Special (band)

38 Special, often stylized as .38 Special or spelled out as Thirty-eight Special, is an American rock band formed by singer-guitarists Donnie Van Zant and Don Barnes in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1974.

They are known for their hit songs, including "Hold On Loosely" and "Caught Up in You", among various other Top 40 hits on the US Billboard Hot 100 during the 1980s and early 1990s, including "Rockin' into the Night", "You Keep Runnin' Away", "If I'd Been the One", "Back Where You Belong", "Teacher, Teacher", "Like No Other Night", "Second Chance" and "The Sound of Your Voice".

1970s
Donnie Van Zant, the younger brother of Lynyrd Skynyrd co-founder and frontman Ronnie Van Zant, began playing music during his teen years, forming a band called Standard Production in 1968, which paved the way for Sweet Rooster, Donnie's first professional group that he formed in 1969 with guitarist Jeff Carlisi and bassist Ken Lyons, soon joined by drummer Steve Brookins. Carlisi left Sweet Rooster after graduating high school to study architecture at Georgia Tech and was replaced by Don Barnes in 1970. Brookins also left to work as a truck driver and Sweet Rooster was defunct by 1973.

Van Zant, Barnes and Lyons, while continuing their day jobs and working in other bands, began composing original songs. By 1974, they decided to form "the ultimate band" that would be their "one last shot" at success. Briefly, Van Zant was considering a higher-paying position for the railroad at which he worked, but was finally convinced by brother Ronnie to stick with music since it was "in his blood".

The new group comprised Van Zant, Barnes, Lyons, Brookins, second drummer Jack Grondin and a returning Carlisi. The band's name was thought up after an incident which found the boys practicing in a warehouse out in the middle of nowhere. When police arrived after being notified by locals of the noise, the band members were unable to come out because of a padlock on the door. One of the cops said, "That's all right. We'll let this .38 special do the talking", and shot off the lock.

Now that they had their name, the group spent most of 1975 and 1976 playing a steady grind of one-nighters, mostly in the South and the Midwest. Eventually, big brother Ronnie figured Donnie and the gang had paid enough dues and set them up with Skynryd's manager Peter Rudge, who also handled the Who and was tour manager for the Rolling Stones. Rudge quickly set the group up to open shows for popular acts such as Peter Frampton, Foghat and Kiss, and got them signed to A&M Records, who assigned Dan Hartman (of Edgar Winter Group fame) to produce their first album, .38 Special, which was released in May 1977.

Just before the record's release, bassist Ken Lyons decided to leave the band. He was replaced by their friend and original Lynyrd Skynyrd member Larry Junstrom.

Also in 1977, the band added two female backup singers, Carol Bristow and Dale Krantz. Krantz was replaced by Nancy Henderson (1979–1981), Lu Moss (1981–1984) and then Lynn Hineman (1986–1987), before backup singers were dispensed with in 1987.

In October 1977, Ronnie Van Zant was killed when Skynyrd's plane crashed. Donnie wrote "Take Me Back" as a tribute to his brother, which appeared on the band's second album, Special Delivery (March 1978), also produced by Hartman.

1980–1999
The band's first two albums had a strong Southern rock influence. By the early 1980s, .38 Special had shifted to a more accessible guitar-driven arena rock style without completely abandoning the Southern rock roots. This shift helped to usher in a string of successful albums and singles. Engineer Rodney Mills, who had worked with Atlanta Rhythm Section and others, assumed the producer's reins, and Survivor co-founder Jim Peterik became a frequent songwriting collaborator of the band's from 1979 on, which helped account for this change in sound and subsequent success.

"Rockin' into the Night", the title track from the group's third album (released in October 1979), which Peterik and his bandmates had originally written for Survivor, found its way to 38 Special's manager, Mark Spector, and was given to the band. Sung by 38's guitarist Don Barnes (who would sing lead vocals on all of the band's hits through 1987), the tune became their first song to receive national airplay, peaking at No. 43 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1980.

This paved the way for their platinum-selling fourth record, Wild-Eyed Southern Boys (January 1981), and its bigger hit "Hold On Loosely" (which reached No. 27 in 1981).

Their next release, Special Forces (May 1982), contained the Top 10 hit "Caught Up in You" (just like "Hold On Loosely", composed by Barnes, Carlisi, and Peterik), which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Rock Tracks chart, as did the single "If I'd Been the One" (October 1983) from their November 1983 release Tour de Force. "You Keep Runnin' Away" (August 1982) and "Back Where You Belong" (February 1984) continued the sequence of hit radio favorites.

In the fall of 1984, they had another hit with "Teacher, Teacher", from the soundtrack of the 1984 film Teachers, written by Jim Vallance and Bryan Adams. The song climbed to No. 4 on the Billboard Top Tracks Chart, spending ten weeks on the chart.

In 1984 38 Special toured with the up-and-coming Huey Lewis and the News, who were just breaking huge with their Sports album, and in 1986 they shared the bill with the soon-to-be-platinum-selling hard rock band Bon Jovi.

By 1987, Don Barnes had decided to leave the band to go out on his own. He recorded an album called Ride the Storm, which, though slated for release in 1989, was shelved after A&M Records was sold, and was not released until 2017 – some 28 years later.

In the meantime, the group moved on, bringing in guitarist Danny Chauncey, after drummer Steve Brookins also decided to leave, and singer/keyboardist Max Carl, from West Coast rhythm and blues group Jack Mack & the Heart Attack.

The next release, Rock & Roll Strategy (June 1988), saw the group playing down their heavy guitar sound and putting forth a more 1980s pop keyboard-oriented approach, led by Carl's more R&B-style voice. "Second Chance" (taken from Rock & Roll Strategy) was a No. 1 hit on Billboard's adult contemporary chart in early 1989.

Carl was also lead singer on "The Sound of Your Voice" (Billboard Hot 100 No. 33 in 1991) from Bone Against Steel (July 1991), which saw the group moving from A&M to the American iteration of the British label Charisma Records. That same year, Bobby Capps came aboard as keyboardist/co-singer, and drummer Scott Meeder replaced Jack Grondin after Grondin decided to leave the music business. The band found themselves without a home after Charisma folded in 1992.

After touring with the band through the spring of 1992, Max Carl decided to depart, making way for the return of Don Barnes. Since that time, the band has mostly concentrated on touring, with an occasional release of new material. Scott Hoffman took over the drum chair from Meeder later in 1992. Donny Baldwin (ex-Jefferson Starship) filled in for Hoffman on some 1996 tour dates after Hoffman was down with a broken arm, but Gary "Madman" Moffatt (formerly of Cactus) has been the band's drummer since 1997.

In early 1997, 38's long time guitarist/co-founder Jeff Carlisi, tired of the endless touring, decided to leave to form the Bonnie Blue Band, which led to the supergroup Big People, which also featured Benjamin Orr (from the Cars), Liberty DeVitto (from Billy Joel's band), Derek St. Holmes (ex-Ted Nugent) and Pat Travers. Unfortunately Big People failed to launch after the death of Benjamin Orr in 2000.

Through the small Razor & Tie label, 38 Special released "Fade to Blue" from the album Resolution (The last album to feature Carlisi, released in June 1997). The single hit No. 33 on the Mainstream Rock chart in 1997.

Since 1997's Resolution, two more releases have followed on the CMC International and Sanctuary Records labels, respectively A Wild-Eyed Christmas Night (September 2001) and Drivetrain (July 2004).

2000s–present
In 2007 .38 Special was the opening act on Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hank Williams Jr.'s Rowdy Frynds Tour. Also, on September 27, 2008, they filmed a CMT Crossroads special with country singer Trace Adkins, performing both artists' hits from over the years.

In 2009 .38 Special opened for REO Speedwagon and Styx as part of the "Can't Stop Rockin' Tour".

Van Zant missed a handful of shows in 2011, and in 2012 a notice was posted on 38 Special's website saying Donnie Van Zant would not tour with the band due to health issues related to inner-ear nerve damage, although he would continue to write and record with the band. In 2013, after nearly a year of missing performances, Van Zant officially left 38 Special after 39 years and retired from music.

In 2012 original bassist Ken Lyons died at age 59.

In 2014 longtime bassist Larry Junstrom was replaced by Barry Dunaway (a veteran of many classic rock groups, including Pat Travers Band, Yngwie Malmsteen and Survivor). Dunaway had previously filled in for Junstrom for a handful of shows in 2011, and a few shows in 2013 as well. Junstrom was then forced to retire due to a hand injury that required surgery.

Since 2019, the band's lineup has consisted of Don Barnes, keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Capps, drummer Gary Moffatt, Dunaway, and guitarist Jerry Riggs. This leaves Don Barnes as the only original member, although Barnes was absent from the band from 1987 until 1992.

Larry Junstrom died on October 6, 2019, at age 70.

In 2022 bassist Paul Drennan filled in for Barry Dunaway.

Current members

 * Don Barnes – lead and backing vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, harmonica, mandolin, keyboards (1974–1987, 1992–present)
 * Bobby Capps – keyboards, backing and lead vocals (touring member 1987–1992; 1992–present)
 * Gary "Madman" Moffatt – drums, percussion (1996–present)
 * Barry Dunaway – bass, backing vocals (2014–present; touring substitute 2011, 2013)
 * Jerry Riggs – lead guitar, backing vocals (2019–present)

Touring musicians

 * Carol Bristow – backing vocals (1977–1987)
 * Dale Krantz Rossington – backing vocals (1977–1979)
 * Nancy Henderson – backing vocals (1979–1980)
 * Lu Moss – backing vocals (1981–1984)
 * Lynn Hineman – backing vocals (1986–1987)

Touring substitutes

 * Donny Baldwin – drums, percussion (1996; filled in for Scott Hoffman)
 * Paul Drennan (Drennen) – bass, backing vocals (2022; filled in for Barry Dunaway)

Former members

 * Donnie Van Zant – lead and backing vocals, guitar (1974–2013)
 * Jeff Carlisi – lead guitar (1974–1997)
 * Jack Grondin – drums, percussion (1974–1991)
 * Steve Brookins – drums, percussion (1974–1987)
 * Ken Lyons – bass (1974–1977; died 2012)
 * Larry Junstrom – bass, occasional guitar (1977–2014; died 2019)
 * Steve McRay – keyboards, harmonica, backing vocals (1986–1987)
 * Max Carl – lead and backing vocals, keyboards, guitar (1987–1992)
 * Danny Chauncey – lead guitar, backing vocals, keyboards (1987–2019)
 * Scott Meeder – drums, percussion (1991–1992)
 * Scott Hoffman – drums, percussion (1992–1997)

Studio albums

 * 38 Special (1977)
 * Special Delivery (1978)
 * Rockin' into the Night (1979)
 * Wild-Eyed Southern Boys (1981)
 * Special Forces (1982)
 * Tour de Force (1983)
 * Strength in Numbers (1986)
 * Rock & Roll Strategy (1988)
 * Bone Against Steel (1991)
 * Resolution (1997)
 * A Wild-Eyed Christmas Night (2001)
 * Drivetrain (2004)

title: 38 Special (band)