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Nickel Plate Road

The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, abbreviated NYC&St.L, was a railroad that operated in the mid-central United States. Commonly referred to as the "Nickel Plate Road", the railroad served parts of the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Its primary connections occurred in Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Toledo.

The Nickel Plate Road was constructed in 1881 along the South Shore of the Great Lakes to connect Buffalo and Chicago, in competition with the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway. At the end of 1960, NKP operated 2170 mi of road on 4009 mi of track, not including the 25 mi of Lorain & West Virginia. That year it reported 9.758 billion net ton-miles of revenue freight and 41 million passenger-miles.

In 1964, the Nickel Plate Road and several other midwestern carriers were merged into the larger Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W). The goal of the N&W expansion was to form a more competitive and successful system serving 14 states and the Canadian province of Ontario on more than 7,000 mi of railroad. In 1982, the profitable N&W was itself combined with the Southern Railway, another profitable carrier, to form Norfolk Southern Corporation (NS).

Background
In the 25 years after the American Civil War, railway track mileage in the United States more than doubled, changing the face of America. Rail transportation meant that products made in the East could be shipped West for far less than previously. This allowed for economies of scale and larger, more efficient factories. The agricultural heartland of America was no longer confined to a market of a single day's wagon ride. Railroad and railroad construction became one of the largest industries. By 1881, one out of 32 people in the United States was either employed by a railroad or engaged in railroad construction.

Starting about 1877, two great railroad developers, William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, began competing for the railroad traffic along the south shore of the Great Lakes. By 1878, William Vanderbilt had a monopoly on rail traffic between Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Chicago, because he owned the only railroad linking those cities - the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway. In addition, he was the richest man in America at that time. By 1881, Jay Gould controlled about 15% of all U.S. railroad mileage, most of it west of the Mississippi River and he was considered the most ruthless financial operator in America. Gould's major railroad east of the Mississippi River was the 335 mi Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway (Wabash). The Wabash mainline ran from St. Louis, Missouri, to Toledo, Ohio, where it was forced to deliver its railroad traffic to William H. Vanderbilt's Lake Shore Railroad for delivery to the eastern United States.

Jay Gould and William Vanderbilt together oversaw all east–west rail traffic in the mid-west. The Seney Syndicate, owners of a 350 mi railroad, the Lake Erie and Western Railroad, were interested in tapping new sources of revenue. The stage was set for the creation of the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad.

Early years
The Seney Syndicate, headed by banker George I. Seney, met at Seney's New York City bank and organized the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railway Company on February 3, 1881. The original proposal for the NYC&StL was a 340 mi railroad west from Cleveland, Ohio, to Chicago, Illinois, with a 325 mi branch to St. Louis, Missouri.

On April 13, 1881, the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railway Company bought the Buffalo, Cleveland and Chicago Railway, a railroad that had been surveyed from the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, to Buffalo, New York, running parallel to William Vanderbilt's Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway.

The idea of an east–west railroad across northern Ohio was very popular with the people of Ohio. They wanted to break the high freight rates charged by Jay Gould and William Vanderbilt. No one was less popular in Ohio than William Vanderbilt since the December 29, 1876, collapse of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway's Ashtabula River trestle, where 64 people had been injured and 92 were killed or died later from injuries.

Another reason for the popularity of the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railway was the positive economic impact on any cities that a new railroad went through. During a newspaper war to attract the NYC&St.L, the Norwalk, Ohio, Chronicle Newspaper referred to it as a "... double-track, nickel-plated railroad." The railroad adopted the nickname and it became better known as the Nickel Plate Road.

It was decided that building would start along the surveyed route between Cleveland and Buffalo rather than build the branch to St. Louis. Five hundred days later, the Nickel Plate's 513 mi single-track mainline from Buffalo to Chicago was complete. The railroad was estimated to require 90,000 long tons (80,000 metric tons) of steel rails, each weighing 60 pounds per linear yard (30 kg/m) and 1.5 million oak crossties. Additionally, the railroad required 49 major bridges. It was characterized by long sections of straight track, mild grades, and impressive bridges. The Nickel Plate ran its first trains over the entire system on October 16, 1882.

During construction, Vanderbilt and Gould had watched with great interest. If either of them could acquire the Nickel Plate, they could end the threat to their railroads. If the Nickel Plate remained independent it would be able to create a substantial dent in both entrepreneurs' railroad earnings.

Vanderbilt tried to lower the value of the Nickel Plate by organizing a campaign to smear its reputation before a train ever ran on its tracks. If Vanderbilt was successful, he could scare the Seney Syndicate into selling to him or drive the railroad company into bankruptcy. However, Vanderbilt's plan came with two important risks. If he slandered the line, he risked chasing the Seney Syndicate into an alliance with Gould. The other risk was that his plan to smear the Nickel Plate's reputation might fail and it could quickly grow. Vanderbilt claimed the road was being built with substandard materials and it would use unsafe practices once completed. He succeeded in creating long-standing rumors about the line but failed to devalue the company or scare the investors.

The cost of construction was higher than expected and the Seney Syndicate began to negotiate with Gould to purchase the railroad, but unlike Vanderbilt, Gould lacked the capital. Frustrated at the failing talks, Gould broke off negotiations and gave up on his attempt to break Vanderbilt.

The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern era
In early 1881, Vanderbilt could have had the Nickel Plate for one million dollars, equal to $0 today. He realized if he allowed Gould to gain control of the Nickel Plate, his monopoly on rail traffic from Toledo, Ohio to the east would be broken. He decided he would do anything to keep the Nickel Plate out of Gould's hands.

On October 25, 1882, (a few days after the first trains ran) the Seney Syndicate sold the Nickel Plate to Vanderbilt for $7.2 million, equal to $0 today. Vanderbilt transferred it to his Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway. However, Vanderbilt had a problem: he could not run the business into the ground or it would fall into receivership and someone else would buy it. He could not close the Nickel Plate either because it cost a fortune to buy. So, the Nickel Plate Road did business, but just enough to keep it solvent. By the advent of the 1920s, the Nickel Plate was an obscure line that earned its keep through the transfer of freight from other rail connections. During the same period Vanderbilt's Lake Shore and Michigan Southern prospered and expanded.

Vanderbilt kept most of the rail traffic on his Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. Fewer trains on the Nickel Plate meant that they could move faster, so that is the railroad traffic they went after. By 1888 the Nickel Plate had been dubbed "The Meat Express Line." Observers at Fort Wayne, Indiana, reported six long meat trains every night and a couple of fruit trains during the day.

Vanderbilt consolidated many of his railroads into the New York Central Railroad. Over time, the Nickel Plate was reduced as a serious threat to the New York Central and other competing lines.

Unlike many railroads that established a primary repair shop site, the Nickel Plate maintained several "back shops" that were more or less equal in size. By the late 1800s, facilities that could handle major locomotive and car rebuilding were located at Stony Island Yard (outside of Chicago); Frankfort, Indiana; and Conneaut and Bellevue, Ohio. By the 1920s the shops had been consolidated primarily to Fort Wayne, Indiana; Conneaut, Ohio; Bellevue, Ohio; and Stony Island.

The Van Sweringen era
The Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland, Ohio, were the next owners of the Nickel Plate. Oris Paxton Van Sweringen and his younger brother Mantis James Van Sweringen were real estate developers who had constructed a rapid transit line from their development at Shaker Heights, Ohio, to downtown Cleveland. As early as 1909, the Van Sweringen brothers proposed a stub-end terminal on Public Square in downtown Cleveland. The Cleveland interurbans and traction companies were in favor of the new terminal and right-of-ways leading to it.

The Nickel Plate was the key. It traversed Cleveland from east to west, had a high level crossing of the Cuyahoga River Valley, and was adjacent to the proposed terminal. The Nickel Plate also provided a natural route to the proposed terminal for the Van Sweringen's rapid transit and the other traction lines.

Between 1890 and 1913, Cleveland had a fourfold increase in population. Civic and political leaders wanted to clean up the city and started many projects. One was a desire to consolidate all of Cleveland's railroad stations. The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Big Four Railroad shared a crowded lakefront Union Station. The Erie Railroad, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Nickel Plate Road, and the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad all occupied separate stations on the north bluff of the Cuyahoga River, just south of downtown. The city also encouraged the railroads to build grade separation throughout the city. The Nickel Plate started a grade separation project on the East Side of Cleveland in 1909 and finished in 1913. Cleveland approved a bond issue in 1910 to "depress" the Nickel Plate through the most congested part of the West Side.

The Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway was controlled by the New York Central Railroad's Alfred Holland Smith, a close friend of the Van Sweringens. He had guided the Van Sweringens and even financed their rapid transit to Shaker Heights. In late 1915, the Attorney General of the United States advised the New York Central that its control of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern and the Nickel Plate was in violation of the Federal antitrust laws. On February 1, 1916, Alfred Smith called his friends, the Van Sweringens, and offered them the Nickel Plate. They bought it for $8.5 million on April 13, 1916, equal to $0 today. In return for operating concessions and access to certain stations, they put up only a little over $500,000 (equal to $0 today) but they controlled 75% of Nickel Plate's voting stock.

The Van Sweringens had no intention of running the Nickel Plate. Alfred Smith was happy to give the Van Sweringens a vice-president of the New York Central, John J. Bernet, and some of his top men. Smith wanted to show that the Van Sweringens were not New York Central puppets, and the Nickel Plate needed to earn money to retire the $6.5 million in notes owed to the New York Central.

NKP president John Bernet era
During Bernet's reign, the Nickel Plate grew substantially. In 1922, the Nickel Plate purchased the Lake Erie and Western Railroad, giving it access to Sandusky, Ohio, and Peoria, Illinois. Later that year, on December 28, the Nickel Plate purchased the Toledo, St. Louis and Western Railroad, also known as the "Clover Leaf Route", finally giving the Nickel Plate access to the St. Louis area, as well as to the port in Toledo, Ohio.

Bernet also doubled the railroad's total freight tonnage and average speeds system wide, while cutting fuel consumption in half. Bernet left the Nickel Plate in late 1926.

Bernet returned to the Nickel Plate in 1933. In 1934, Bernet ordered 15 Berkshire locomotives, which would become legendary with the Nickel Plate. Bernet remained as the president of the company until his death in 1935.

On December 29, 1937, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway gained control of the Nickel Plate. One major factor was Frank Allen Brown, who was the assistant superintendent at this time. Brown held this position from 1937 to 1944.

World War II and post-war era
During World War II, the Nickel Plate, like all other American railroads, found itself helping with the war effort. The Nickel Plate ordered an additional 55 Berkshires during the war.

After the war, in 1947, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway ended its control of the Nickel Plate when it sold off its remaining shares. That year, the Nickel Plate also ordered 11 ALCO PA diesel-electric locomotives, named the "Bluebirds". These were the first locomotives for the Nickel Plate that were not painted black since the early 1900s.

In 1949, the Nickel Plate received its last Berkshire, #779, also the last steam locomotive built by the Lima Locomotive Works. Later that year, on December 1, the Nickel Plate leased the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway.

In 1960, the last steam locomotive was retired from service, officially "dieselizing" the Nickel Plate.

Passenger service
The Nickel Plate had a few long-distance night trains, whose names varied according to whether the train was west-bound or eastbound. The trains linked at Lackawanna Station in Buffalo to continue to Hoboken, New Jersey.
 * No. 5 City of Chicago (westbound) / No. 6 City of Cleveland (eastbound) (Chicago-Cleveland-Buffalo)
 * No. 7 Westerner (westbound) / No. 8 New Yorker (eastbound) (Chicago-Cleveland-Buffalo)
 * No. 9 Blue Arrow (westbound) / No. 10 Blue Dart (eastbound) (St. Louis-Muncie-Cleveland)

Merger with N&W, Norfolk Southern
The financial situation of American railroading continued to decline after World War II as the highway system improved and the US Interstate system was built. The Nickel Plate Road, together with the Wabash and several smaller carriers, merged with the profitable Norfolk and Western (N&W) on October 16, 1964.

N&W had merged with long-time rival Virginian Railway in the Pocahontas coal region in 1959, and grew through the mergers with other rail carriers including the Nickel Plate and Wabash railroads with operations in adjacent areas of the eastern United States to form a more competitive and successful system serving 14 states and a province of Canada on more than 7000 mi of road.

The profitable N&W was itself combined with the Southern Railway, another profitable carrier, to form Norfolk Southern Corporation (NS) in 1982.

Chicago terminals
By 1897 the Nickel Plate had obtained trackage rights over the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway from Grand Crossing to its own terminal on the east side of the LS&MS line to LaSalle Street Station, just north of 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road). By 1928 it used LaSalle.

Origin of the Nickel Plate nickname
In an address given to the Newcomen Society of the United States in Erie, Pennsylvania, on November 11, 1954. Lynne L. White (a former president of the Nickel Plate) said:

 * Through northern Ohio, already served by four railroads, location of the line developed intense rivalries among cities. Three routes were surveyed and communities along each proposed route vied in the raising of public subscriptions to donate rights-of-way. The road's general offices at Cleveland frequently were besieged by delegations hoping to bring about the routing of the line through their communities. During these inter-city rivalries was born the nickname for the New York, Chicago and St. Louis - The Nickel Plate Road - which rapidly became the name most commonly used.

 * Numerous legends have grown about when and how the name "Nickel Plate" was first applied. The accepted version is that it appeared first in an article in the Norwalk, Ohio, Chronicle of March 10, 1881. On that date the Chronicle reported the arrival of a party of engineers to make a survey for the "great New York and St. Louis double track, nickel plated railroad."

 * Later, while attempting to induce the company to build the line through Norwalk instead of Bellevue, Ohio, the Chronicle again referred to the road as "nickel plated" - a term regarded as indicative of the project's glittering prospects and substantial financial backing.

 * In 1882, the Nickel Plate recognized F.R. Loomis, owner and editor of the Norwalk Chronicle, as originator of the term and issued him Complimentary Pass No. 1.

 * Thus Norwalk named the road - but Bellevue finally got it.

To continue the tradition and preserve the history and name of the Nickel Plate Road, HGR Industrial Surplus, current owner of the former General Motors Fisher Auto Body site in Euclid, Ohio, on the Nickel Plate Road line dedicated its site as "Nickel Plate Station" on October 1, 2015.

Heritage unit
On March 28, 2012, Norfolk Southern unveiled NS 8100, a GE ES44AC locomotive painted in the paint scheme found on Nickel Plate Road's diesel locomotives. It was the third of twenty units to be painted in the colors of Norfolk Southern's predecessors.

title: Nickel Plate Road


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Manuel Pinto da Costa

Manuel Pinto da Costa (born 5 August 1937) is a Santomean economist and politician who served as the first president of São Tomé and Príncipe from 1975 to 1991. He again served as president from 2011 to 2016.

Life and career
Educated in East Germany, he is fluent in Portuguese and German. Until the early 1990s the MLSTP maintained extensive relations with Angola and the MPLA, with Pinto da Costa himself having enjoyed a friendly relationship with José Eduardo dos Santos, the President of Angola, extending back to when they were both young men.

In 1991, the legalisation of opposition political parties led to the country's first election under a democratic system. Pinto da Costa did not contest the election and instead announced he would retire from politics. The MLSTP did not present an alternative candidate and Miguel Trovoada was elected unopposed. Despite his previous declaration, Pinto da Costa returned to contest elections in 1996, but was narrowly defeated, taking 47.26% of the vote, by Trovoada. In 2001, he ran against incumbent president Fradique de Menezes, who won a majority in the first round.

Pinto da Costa was elected leader of the MLSTP in May 1998. He resigned from the party in February 2005 and Guilherme Posser da Costa was elected to succeed him.

In the July 2011 presidential election, he ran as an independent. He won the most votes in the first round but failed to receive the required majority. In a run-off round on 7 August, he defeated rival Evaristo Carvalho from the Independent Democratic Action party (Acção Democratica Independente, ADI), taking 53% of the votes. During the campaign, he focused on the need for political stability and promised to tackle widespread corruption. His bid was given the backing of most of the other major candidates, including former Prime Minister Maria das Neves, who claimed "Pinto da Costa's plan could bring more hope to our country". Some analysts, however, raised concerns that the former president's victory might trigger a return to the authoritarian rule seen during his previous period in power. He took office on 3 September 2011.

In 2016 election he qualified for the second round, but then boycotted the second round, so he stepped down and the opposition won.

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

title: Manuel Pinto da Costa


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Shane Rimmer

Shane Lance Deacon (May 28, 1929 – March 29, 2019), known professionally as Shane Rimmer, was a Canadian actor and screenwriter who spent the majority of his career in the United Kingdom. The self-proclaimed "Rent-A-Yank" of the British entertainment industry, he appeared in over 160 films and television programmes from 1957 until his death in 2019, usually playing supporting North American characters.

Among his best known roles were the voice of Scott Tracy in the original Thunderbirds series, Air Force Captain "Ace" Owens in Dr. Strangelove, Joe Donnelli and Malcolm Reid on Coronation Street, Edward R. Murrow in Gandhi, and Louie Watterson on the Cartoon Network series The Amazing World of Gumball. He also made several appearances in the James Bond film series. He made several on-stage appearances for the Royal National Theatre, and contributed scripts to Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Joe 90.

Early life
Rimmer was born Shane Lance Deacon in Toronto, Ontario to a British mother, Vera (née Franklin), and an Irish father, Thomas Deacon, who was a journalist. He had a younger sister, Noreen. He adopted his paternal grandmother's maiden name Rimmer and began his career on Canadian radio as a singer and disc jockey before becoming a television presenter.

Film
Rimmer appeared mainly in supporting roles, especially in films and television series produced in the United Kingdom. He emigrated to England in 1959, after initially performing as a cabaret singer.

His appearances include roles in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964), Rollerball (1975), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Gandhi (1982), Out of Africa (1985), Crusoe (1989), Spy Game (2001) and Batman Begins (2005).

During his career, Rimmer appeared uncredited in, among other films, You Only Live Twice (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Star Wars (1977) and Superman II (1980). He also is believed to have provided the voice for the character Hamilton (played by Robert Dix) in Live and Let Die (1973).

Television
Rimmer had a long-running association with TV producer Gerry Anderson, including the series Thunderbirds (1964–1966). He was the voice actor behind the character of Scott Tracy. He drafted the story for the series' penultimate episode, "Ricochet" (1966), from which writer Tony Barwick penned a script. Rimmer thought the studio rates for voices in those days were "absolutely deplorable". Years after working on Thunderbirds, Rimmer, along with fellow Anderson associate Matt Zimmerman, retained a solicitor. They informed him of the level of payment they received, and the solicitor then gained Rimmer and Zimmerman an immense raise in the residuals. He also appeared in an episode of Danger Man.

Rimmer also wrote scripts and provided uncredited voices for Anderson's subsequent Supermarionation productions Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–68), Joe 90 (1968–69) and The Secret Service (1969), appeared in episodes of the live-action series UFO (1970) and The Protectors (1972–74), provided voices for Space: 1999 (1975–77), and guest-starred in one of its episodes, "Space Brain" (1976). Later, he appeared in the un-televised 1986 pilot Space Police (which was adapted as a full TV series and renamed Space Precinct in the 1990s, though Ted Shackleford replaced Rimmer for the series) and provided the voice of the title character in Dick Spanner, P.I. (1987).

Rimmer and American actor Ed Bishop—himself an Anderson associate–would joke about how their professional paths frequently crossed, calling themselves "Rent-a-Yanks". They appeared together as United States Navy sailors in The Bedford Incident (1965) and as NASA technicians in the opening of You Only Live Twice (1967), as well as touring together on stage, including a production of Death of a Salesman in the 1990s. Rimmer and Bishop also appeared in the BBC drama-documentary Hiroshima, which was completed shortly after Bishop's death in 2005.

He was the second voice of Louie Watterson in the Cartoon Network series The Amazing World of Gumball from 2014 to 2019. The episode "The Agent" was his final role before his death in 2019.

Other work
Rimmer appeared once in Doctor Who (in the 1966 serial The Gunfighters), and twice in Coronation Street: as Joe Donnelli (from 1968 to 1970), who held Stan Ogden hostage before taking his own life, and Malcolm Reid (in 1988), the adoptive father of Audrey Roberts' son Stephen. Rimmer was the main character in "Alternative 3 " documentary 1977 hoax ITV Mars landing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmw1R5AsI58 He made many guest appearances in British TV series for ITV, including Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, as well as ITC's The Persuaders! In 1980, Rimmer played Edward Condon in the BBC mini-series Oppenheimer, which was rebroadcast in the United States in 1982, and appeared in the 1984 miniseries Master of the Game, opposite Dyan Cannon.

In 1989, Rimmer was reunited with Bishop and Zimmerman during the production of a BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. In 2012, he recorded a reading of Donald Cotton's Doctor Who novelisation of The Gunfighters for release in February 2013.

In 2010, Rimmer returned to the world of Thunderbirds with a 15-minute fan film simply entitled Thunderbirds 2010. He portrays Jeff Tracy in a voiceover on Thunderbird 3's radio, towards the end of the movie, instructing Scott and Alan to take the three astronauts they rescued in the movie to an intact space station, and return to Tracy Island in anticipation of a storm in the Pacific.

Rimmer played the role of Leo Carlin in the 2013 audio drama The Mighty Carlins by award-winning Canadian playwright Collin Doyle. The recording was produced by Wireless Theatre Company.

In 2014, Rimmer released his first fiction novel Long Shot, through amazon.co.uk/com. This marked his second foray into publishing, having released his autobiography From Thunderbirds to Pterodactyls four years previously.

In 2015, he played the role of "Anderson" in the science fiction short DARKWAVE: Edge of the Storm; this was released for free online the following year.

Personal life and death
Rimmer married Sheila Logan in 1963; the couple had three sons: Damien, Ben and Paul.

Rimmer died at Barnet Hospital in London on 29 March 2019, at the age of 89.

Selected filmography

 * A Dangerous Age (1957) as Nancy's Father
 * Flaming Frontier (1958) as Running Bear
 * The Day the Sky Exploded (1958) as John McLaren (voice)
 * Dr. Strangelove (1964) as Captain "Ace" Owens
 * The Bedford Incident (1965) as Seaman 1st Class
 * Thunderbirds Are GO (1966) as Scott Tracy (voice)
 * You Only Live Twice (1967) as Hawaii Radar Operator (uncredited)
 * The Dirty Dozen (1967) as American Soldier (uncredited)
 * Thunderbird 6 (1968) as Scott Tracy (voice)
 * The Persuaders! (1971) as Lomax
 * Diamonds Are Forever (1971) as Tom (uncredited)
 * Baffled! (1973) as Race Track Announcer / Commentator
 * Scorpio (1973) as Cop in Hotel (uncredited)
 * Live and Let Die (1973) as Hamilton (voice, uncredited)
 * Take Me High (1973) (uncredited)
 * S*P*Y*S (1974) as Hessler
 * Rollerball (1975) as Rusty, Team Executive
 * The 'Human' Factor (1975) as Carter, CIA Man
 * Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) as Colonel Alexander B. Franklin
 * Nasty Habits (1977) as Officer
 * Star Wars (1977) as Rebel Fighter Technician (uncredited)
 * Silver Bears (1977) as American Banker
 * The People That Time Forgot (1977) as Hogan
 * The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) as Commander Carter (USS Wayne)
 * Julia (1977) as Customs Officer (uncredited)
 * Warlords of Atlantis (1978) as Captain Daniels
 * The Billion Dollar Bubble (1978)
 * Superman (1978) as Naval Transport Commander (uncredited)
 * Hanover Street (1979) as Col. Ronald Barth
 * Arabian Adventure (1979) as Abu
 * Charlie Muffin (1979) as Braley
 * Superman II (1980) as Controller No. 2
 * The Dogs of War (1980) as Dr. Oaks
 * Priest of Love (1981) as Immigration Officer
 * Reds (1981) as MacAlpine
 * Gandhi (1982) as Commentator
 * The Hunger (1983) as Arthur Jelinek
 * Superman III (1983) as State Policeman
 * The Lonely Lady (1983) as Adolph Fannon
 * Gulag (1985) as Jay
 * Morons from Outer Space (1985) as Redneck (Melvin)
 * Reunion at Fairborough (1985) as Joe Szyluk
 * The Holcroft Covenant (1985) as Lieutenant Miles
 * Dreamchild (1985) as Mr. Marl
 * White Nights (1985) as Ambassador Smith
 * Out of Africa (1985) as Belknap
 * The Last Days of Patton (1986) as Dr. Col. Lawrence Ball
 * Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986) as Harvey Coward
 * Whoops Apocalypse (1986) as Marvin Gelber
 * The Bourne Identity (1988) as Alexander Conklin
 * A Very British Coup (1988) as Marcus Morgan
 * Crusoe (1989) as Mr. Mather
 * A Kiss Before Dying (1991) as Commissioner Malley
 * Company Business (1991) as chairman, Maxine Gray Cosmetics
 * Year of the Comet (1992) as T.T. Kelleher
 * Piccolo Grande Amore (1993) as Mr Hughes
 * A Kid in King Arthur's Court (1995) as Coach
 * Space Truckers (1996) as E.J. Saggs
 * One of the Hollywood Ten (2000) as Parnell Thomas
 * Spy Game (2001) as Estate Agent
 * The War of the Starfighters (2003) as Tantive Base Operative (voice)
 * Batman Begins (2005) as Older Gotham Water Board Technician
 * Mee-Shee: The Water Giant (2005) as Bob Anderson
 * Alien Autopsy (2006) as Colonel
 * Lovelorn (2010) as The Barman
 * Dark Shadows (2012) as board member 1
 * Darkwave: Edge of the Storm (2016) as Captain S. Anderson

title: Shane Rimmer


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Category:Kill Rock Stars

Category for people/articles that concern record label Kill Rock Stars.

title: Category:Kill Rock Stars


text: Category:Lists of dams

title: Category:Lists of dams


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Vic Aldridge

Victor Aldridge (October 25, 1893 – April 17, 1973), nicknamed "the Hoosier Schoolmaster", was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball who played for the Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Giants, and was known to be an excellent curveball pitcher. Before his playing career he was a schoolmaster, hence his nickname. His most significant actions as a player occurred during the 1925 World Series, where Aldridge completed and won games two and five, only to have the most disastrous first inning in the seventh game of the World Series ever. After his retirement from baseball, he served as a state senator in the Indiana General Assembly. Aldridge is a member of the Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame, inducted in 2007.

Personal life
Born in the small country town of Cale, Indiana, Vic Aldridge attended the Tempy primary school in Cale, Indiana which was a short walk from his home. He attended high school in Trinity Springs, Indiana where he played baseball on the Trinity Springs team. He graduated from Trinity Springs, Indiana. He then attended Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana. In 1914–1915 he taught school at the Pea Ridge School in Trinity Springs, Indiana. He also taught school in Miami County Indiana. He was married to Cleta B. Wadsworth of Indian Springs, Indiana.

Early career
Aldridge was a dependable second or third starter throughout most of his career. He was known for his curveball and pinpoint accuracy. Aldridge batted and threw right-handed. He began his pro career by signing a contract with Indianapolis of the American Association in 1915, but first played for Denver of the Western League and then Erie of the Central League. He played for Indianapolis in 1916 where he was scouted for the Chicago Cubs. He was sold to the Cubs on August 28, 1916.

Aldridge spent 1917 and 1918 with the Chicago Cubs, serving in the bullpen. In 1917 Aldridge played in thirty games, winning six games and losing six, with a 3.12 earned run average and two saves. In 1918 he played only three games, pitching only twelve innings, before joining the United States Navy during the final year of World War I. After returning from the war, he played for the Los Angeles Angels, an affiliate of the Cubs, in the Pacific Coast League. Aldridge returned to the Cubs for the 1922 season. He played the next three years for Chicago, with consistent performances. In 1922, 1923 and 1924 he played 36, 30 and 32 games respectively, with 16, 16 and 15 wins in the three seasons, with respective earned run averages of 3.52, 3.48 and 3.50. During this time his son Vic Aldridge, Jr. served unofficially as the Cubs batboy and even had a uniform donated by Mordecai Brown so he would look the part. In 1923 he was ejected from a game.

1925
Vic Aldridge was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates after the 1924 season on October 27, 1924, along with George Grantham and Al Niehaus, for Wilbur Cooper, Charlie Grimm and Rabbit Maranville. The change in stadiums prompted him to rely more on his fastball than his curveball, as he felt he needed to protect himself from home runs in Wrigley Field and its smaller field, thus using the curveball to reduce the risk of being homered against, but the larger field in Pittsburgh made fastballs safer to use, and thus a better pitch to rely upon. The next year, Aldridge won fifteen games (ninth highest total in the National League in 1925) and lost seven, for a .682 winning percentage that was the fourth highest for any NL pitcher that year. His finest moments were in the postseason that year when he pitched two complete game victories against the Washington Senators as the Pirates won the World Series. He won Game 2 of the series 3–2 on October 8, and Game 5 by a score of 6–3, the first two Pirates wins of the Series. Aldridge used the money from the World Series to buy a home in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Aldridge also started the seventh game on October 15. It had been raining for a week in Pittsburgh, and the sixth game had been rainy. The weather for the seventh was even worse, and the game was played in thick pea soup fog and drizzle, with a very wet pitching mound. It was hoped that Aldridge would continue his success in the first two games to the seventh, but it was not to be. Although noted for his consistency, in this game Aldridge was very wild; he had had only two days rest and he kept slipping on the slick pitcher's plate. Sam Rice was the first batter, and he hit a single. Then Bucky Harris came out, whose fly out was the only success Aldridge had during the game. Goose Goslin was walked after a wild pitch. Joe Harris was walked after a wild pitch advanced the baserunners. After a full count, Joe Judge was walked, scoring in one run. Then Ossie Bluege hit a single. Pirates manager Bill McKechnie had seen enough and relieved Aldridge. In total, Aldridge gave up three walks, two hits and two wild pitches, resulting in the Senators having a 4–0 lead in the first inning. The Pirates would rally to win the game and the World Series by a score of 9–7, the first time a team won the World Series after a 3–1 deficit. It was the worst start of the seventh game for a pitcher in Series history.

Late career
The 1925 proved to be the pinnacle of Aldridge's career. In 1926 he suffered a record of 10 wins and 13 losses, with a 4.07 earned run average. The year 1927 was better for Aldridge. He won fifteen games, losing only ten, with a 4.25 earned run average. Aldridge also played in the 1927 World Series, losing the second game of the series 6–2 as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig led the New York Yankees to a sweep of the Pirates in four games. He gave up all six runs in the $7 1/3$ innings he pitched. After several other players had ghostwritten newspaper articles for the Christy Walsh Syndicate, he wrote an article for a Pittsburgh newspaper, who bragged that it was Aldridge himself who wrote it.

After winning 15 games again in 1927, Aldridge expected a raise, but instead Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss traded him to the New York Giants on February 11, 1928, for Burleigh Grimes, citing Aldridge's 4.25 ERA in 1927 as a reason not to give him a raise. He held out for much of the year; by the time he returned, he was out of shape and pitched poorly. During the time Aldridge refused to report, Giants manager John McGraw threatened Aldridge with less pay, and at one point tried to trade him to the Cincinnati Reds. After the season, in which Aldridge's record was four wins and seven losses with a 4.83 earned run average after 119 innings pitched, he was sent to the Brooklyn Dodgers. However, Aldridge refused to report and retired from baseball instead. His final game was on August 29, 1928.

In total, Aldridge pitched 1,601 innings, won 97 games and lost 80, had 102 complete games and a combined earned run average of 3.76. Rogers Hornsby said that Aldridge had one of the three best curveballs he had ever seen, a curveball described by the Baseball Magazine as a "hard, sharp-breaking curve" that was one of the best curveballs in all of baseball. He also threw a screwball. His batting average was .229 (133-for-581), a respectable average for a pitcher. He hit two home runs with 60 RBI. Aldridge twice attempted to steal a base, once each in 1922 and 1926, and succeeded both times.

Post career
After his playing career ended, Aldridge attended law school at the Voorhees School of Law and served in the Indiana State Senate from 1937 to 1948. He was first elected on November 4, 1936, as a Democrat. He served as a schoolmaster full-time before his baseball career, hence his nickname "The Hoosier Schoolmaster".

Aldridge died in Terre Haute at age 79, and is buried in the New Trinity Springs Cemetery of Trinity Springs, Indiana. He was inducted into the Indiana Baseball Hall of Fame on January 19, 2007, as its 131st member; his granddaughter, Mary Turner, and grandson, Vic Aldridge III, accepted the award on his behalf.

title: Vic Aldridge


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File:New York Chicago and St. Louis Herald.png

Summary
New York, Chicago & St. Louis Herald

Heralds are "logos" or "slogans" used by railroad companies and displayed on their equipment.

"Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks. ... However, copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship. In some circumstances, an artistic logo may also be protected as a trademark." Excerpt from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

Use of such images on Wikipedia arguably meets Fair Use requirements. See also http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Licensing
== Fair use in New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad == It is believed that this image qualifies under fair use because:
 * The image depicts the official corporate logo for the entity described by the article.
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Base course

The base course or basecourse in pavements is a layer of material in an asphalt roadway, race track, riding arena, or sporting field. It is located under the surface layer consisting of the wearing course and sometimes an extra binder course.

If there is a sub-base course, the base course is constructed directly above this layer. Otherwise, it is built directly on top of the subgrade. Typical base course thickness ranges from 4 to 6 in and is governed by underlying layer properties. Generally made of a construction aggregate, it is spread and compacted to at least 95% relative compaction, thus providing a stable foundation for additional layers of material.

Aggregate base (AB) is typically a mix of different sizes of crushed rock 20 mm Aggregate Base, Class 2, is used in roadways and consists of rock particles of size 3/4 in and less. An aggregate is normally made from newly quarried rock, or it is sometimes allowed to be made from recycled asphalt concrete and/or Portland cement concrete.

title: Base course


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John Compton

Sir John George Melvin Compton, (29 April 1925 – 7 September 2007) was a Saint Lucian politician who became the first Prime Minister upon independence in February 1979. Having led Saint Lucia under British rule from 1964 to 1979, Compton served as Prime Minister three times: briefly in 1979, again from 1982 to 1996, and from 2006 until his death in 2007. He cofounded the conservative United Workers Party (UWP) in 1964; he led the party until 1996, again from 1998 to 2000, and again from 2005 to 2007.

Early life and education
Compton was born on 29 April 1925 in Canouan, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In September 1939, he was taken to Saint Lucia. While studying law and economics, Compton attended the University College of Wales from 1948 to 1949 and the London School of Economics from 1949 to 1951; he was called to the Bar on 7 August 1951.

Beginnings
Compton entered politics in 1954, successfully running for the Micoud/Dennery seat on the Saint Lucia Executive Council as an independent. He became the Council Member for Social Affairs in 1955, and served in this position until the Committee System was replaced by the Ministerial System in 1956. That same year, he joined the Saint Lucia Labour Party (SLP). He participated in a sugar workers' strike in 1957, and was fined for obstructing roads. Re-elected in 1957, Compton became Minister for Trade and Production in 1958; he was also appointed deputy leader of the SLP under George Charles. In 1960 he was reappointed Minister of Trade and Industry when Charles became the first Chief Minister. Although Compton was re-elected in 1961, he chose not to join the Executive Council. Objecting to the SLP's new ministers, he left the SLP instead and formed a new party, the National Labour Movement.

In 1964, Compton merged the National Labour Movement with another opposition party, the People's Progressive Party, to form the United Workers' Party (UWP). This new party won the 1964 general election, making Compton the new Chief Minister.

Administration under British rule, 1964–1979
In office, Compton worked for Saint Lucia's independence from British rule. When Saint Lucia became an Associated State of the United Kingdom on 1 March 1967, a move that placed the Saint Lucian government fully in charge of the island's internal affairs, Compton became St. Lucia's first and only Premier. At the conference from April to May 1966 that led to this change, Compton sharply criticized the British government for excluding certain issues, and accused it of favoring "second-class citizenship for people of another color". In 1968, he married Barbara Janice Clarke, with whom he would have five children.

Following the UWP's victory in the 1974 election, Compton pushed for negotiations leading to independence, which was achieved on 22 February 1979; Compton became the newly independent nation's first Prime Minister.

As Prime Minister and in opposition, 1979–1996
A few months after independence in 1979, the UWP was defeated in an election by the SLP, and Compton became Leader of the Opposition. The SLP government collapsed in October 1982, and the UWP won the subsequent election in November 1982; Compton became Prime Minister again. He also held the additional portfolio of Minister of Finance, Planning and Development. He remained in office until he retired in 1996; he was replaced by his chosen successor, Vaughan Lewis. Compton became a legal consultant.

In office, Compton's policies were conservative, pro-Western and anti-communist. He also worked for increased regional integration: upon leaving office in 1996, he voiced disappointment that the region's population remained a "divided people scattered over the Caribbean Sea".

After 1996
He was re-elected as the leader of UWP in 1998, however, he was replaced as leader by Morella Joseph in 2000. Compton then joined George Odlum to form the National Alliance, which did not have much success in the 2001 elections.

On 13 March 2005, the UWP elected Compton, then 80 years old, as its leader again at a party convention in Soufriere; he received 260 votes against 135 for Vaughan Lewis.

During the 2006 general election season, Compton parried media concerns about his age and campaigned actively, commenting that it was different from preparing to run in the Olympics. Despite opinion polls forecasting another term for the incumbent St Lucia Labour Party, Compton led the UWP to victory on 11 December 2006. He was elected to the seat from Micoud North over SLP candidate Silas Wilson. He was sworn in as Prime Minister on 15 December. His cabinet was sworn in on 19 December, with Compton as Prime Minister and Minister of Finance.

Illness and death
On 1 May 2007, Compton was hospitalized in New York City after suffering a series of strokes. He fell ill while visiting a doctor for a normal checkup.

On 16 May, Sports Minister Leonard Montoute, who was also the deputy leader of the United Workers Party, announced that Compton was unable to stand or walk on his own, and that the cabinet was preparing to select a successor.

Compton returned to Saint Lucia on 19 May. He temporarily resumed power in early June to oversee a cabinet reshuffle, in which he remained Prime Minister but gave up the finance portfolio to Acting Prime Minister Stephenson King. King said on 8 June that Compton's condition was improving. On 11 July, he attended a meeting with several cabinet ministers, the first time he had done so since the strokes.

In late July, it was announced that Compton would resign by the end of 2007. On 26 August, Compton was admitted to the Tapion Hospital in Castries because he was having trouble breathing due to pneumonia. While there, it was learned that he had suffered another stroke while recovering from the previous strokes. On 1 September, he was flown to Martinique for treatment of his pneumonia. While there, his condition worsened and he was placed on a ventilator. On 4 September, doctors decided that his condition was hopeless; on 5 September, he was returned to the Tapion Hospital in Saint Lucia to die. He died there on 7 September 2007. Acting Prime Minister King declared two weeks of mourning, beginning on 8 September.

A state funeral was held for Compton in Castries, at the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, on 18 September. Despite Compton's Anglican faith, the local Catholic church was used due to the large number of mourners and at the request of Sir John. The funeral services held in Micoud on 16 September and at the Minor Basilica on 18 September were in keeping with the requests of Sir John for his funeral service, including the hymns which were specifically requested by him. He was cremated on 19 September and his ashes spread in the Troumasse River at his estate in Mahaut upon his request.

The John Compton Dam in central Saint Lucia was renamed in his honor.

Personal life and family
In 1967 he married Janice Barbara Clarke the daughter of Saint Lucia's first Saint Lucian-born Governor, Sir Frederick Clarke. Out of this union, five children were born Janine, Shawn, Maya, Fiona and Nina.

Compton's first-born daughter Jeannine Compton-Antoine is a politician. In a by-election held on 26 November 2007, she won John Compton's constituency of Micoud North.

The fourth born daughter, Fiona Compton, is a London-based photographer who graduated from London College of Printing in 2005 with a BA in photography. She has worked for different UK publishing houses.

The fifth born, and second to youngest daughter, Nina Compton, is a chef and television star. In 2013, she participated in season 11 of the American reality cooking show Top Chef, where she was the runner-up and was voted the "fan favorite".

title: John Compton


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Skittles (confectionery)

Skittles are multicolored fruit-flavored lentil-shaped candies produced and marketed by the Wrigley Company, a division of Mars Inc.

Skittles consist of hard sugar shells imprinted with the letter 'S', similar to M&M's which have the letter 'M'. The interior consists mainly of sugar, corn syrup, and hydrogenated palm kernel oil along with fruit juice, citric acid, and natural and artificial flavors. Skittles are sold in a variety of flavor collections, such as Tropical, Wild Berry, Smoothie, and Sour.

History and overview
Skittles were first made commercially in 1974 by a British company. An animated television advertisement from that year bears the logo of the "Galaxy" company and is copyrighted by Jack Candies Ltd, a Mars distribution subsidiary. They were first introduced in North America in 1979 as an import confectionery. In 1982, production of Skittles began in the United States. Mars' Wrigley division acquired the Skittles company in 2008.

The name of the candy, Skittles, comes from the sports game of the same name, named as such for the resemblance of the sweet to items used in the game.

Skittles' "taste the rainbow" theme was created by the New York ad agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles.

On March 2, 2009, Skittles launched a web-based marketing campaign where the official website became a small overlay with options to view different social media sites in the main area, including its official YouTube channel, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account. The move was debated by people interested in social media.

In 2009, the production of Skittles ceased using animal-derived gelatin, making them suitable for vegetarians, vegans, and certain religious groups.

Skittles were involved in two political incidents in the 2010s. In the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, protestors used Skittles, which Martin had reportedly been carrying along with Arizona watermelon fruit-flavored juice drink, as a symbol during rallies. Though Mars' brief statement of condolences was criticized by some outlets, such as Adweek, for being too subdued, Mars' response in 2016 to a Skittles-based image macro (which was posted by Donald Trump Jr. on his Twitter feed as an analogy for immigration) was praised for its tact and directness. MWWPR said Mars' responses could influence public relations best practices.

In 2016, Skittles faced controversy over temporarily changing the color of the candies from the signature rainbow appearance to white in support of Pride month, LGBT rights and London Pride. The Wrigley Company, a separate representing party of the Skittles brand, mass-produced the limited-edition colorless candies. Skittles' rainbow themed packaging had also been altered temporarily to complement the achromatic confectionery within. On the back of each monochrome package, the Wrigley Company included an explanation for the company's marketing decision: "So this is kind of awkward, but we're just gonna go ahead and address the rainbow-colored elephant in the room. You have the rainbow... we have the rainbow... and usually that's just hunky-dory. But this Pride, only one rainbow deserves to be the centre of attention - yours. And we're not going to be the ones to steal your rainbow thunder, no siree." However, the message was met with confusion in some areas, with The Huffington Post publishing an article titled "Some People Think Skittles' All-White Pride Candies Are Racist", exploring the idea that by going all-white, the company failed to acknowledge the diversity defined by the LGBT community.

Every June, Skittles repeats the colorless marketing to spread Pride awareness and raise proceeds for an LGBT charity, such as the Switchboard helpline in the United Kingdom. For the 2020 Pride edition, Skittles changed the candy colors from a rainbow to all gray in the United States, with the tagline "Only one rainbow matters during PRIDE". However, the white color continued to be used in countries such as the United Kingdom.

Skittles' marketing has become known for its avant-garde viral marketing techniques, particularly in conjunction with the Super Bowl. In 2018, it produced a Super Bowl commercial that was viewed by only one person. In 2019, it conducted a pre-Super Bowl campaign featuring Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical, which was performed one time only at The Town Hall in New York City.

Skittles are commonly used to effectively treat hypoglycemia in diabetics.

The European Union's top food regulators found in 2021 that titanium dioxide, an additive found in Skittles, could damage DNA, which in turn could lead to cancer. This resulted in the EU phasing out sale of Skittles and other foods containing titanium dioxide starting February 7, 2022, with a full ban enacted August 7, 2022.

In July 2022, a lawsuit seeking class-action status was filed in California regarding the continued use of titanium dioxide as a coloring agent. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed without prejudice in November 2022.

In March 2023, Democratic California Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel introduced a bill to the California Assembly that will ban production, sales, and consumption of all foods and drinks (including Skittles, Pez, Sour Patch Kids, Campbell Soup, etc.) that contain titanium dioxide and 4 other harmful additives (which are propylparaben, red dye 3, brominated vegetable oil, and potassium bromate) across the State of California, all five of which have been linked to causing cancer and other health problems and at least three of these five harmful additives are already banned by the European Union from being used in food and drink products. If passed, California will become the first US state to adopt the European Union's ban on titanium dioxide and other cancer causing chemical additives from being used in food and drink products.

Varieties
Skittles are produced in a wide variety of flavors and colors, including sour varieties. Skittles has hinted at new flavor releases on its Facebook page, using such statuses as "Locking myself in the Rainbow kitchen until I see some results!" A 2011 posting contained confirmation of a new flavor: "Putting the last touches on a new Skittles flavor. Tweak the Rainbow."

In the United States and Canada, in 2013, Skittles replaced the lime-flavored Skittles with green apple, causing a backlash from many consumers. The lime flavor became part of the Darkside packets, which were discontinued in 2015 and followed up by the Orchards packets, which were discontinued in 2017. Lime was also part of the "Long Lost Lime" packets that came out in summer 2017 and 2018. The Darkside flavor was revived in 2019. In 2021, the "All Lime" packets containing only the lime flavor were released for a limited time. In September 2021, Skittles announced that the green apple-flavored Skittles would be replaced with the original lime flavor. In 2022, Skittles Gummies were released.

title: Skittles (confectionery)


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Peconic County, New York

Peconic County is a proposed new county on Long Island in the U.S. state of New York that would secede the five easternmost towns of Suffolk County: East Hampton, Riverhead, Shelter Island, Southampton and Southold, plus the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

It derives its name from Peconic Bay which is the dividing body of water separating the North and South forks of Long Island.

Peconic County has been discussed for more than 50 years – ever since Suffolk County moved its offices from the official county seat in Riverhead 32 miles west to Hauppauge, New York, in more densely populated western Suffolk County.

The big drive for the county was a difference in character between western Suffolk County which is predominantly a New York City bedroom community while the east end (or "East End") is dominated by home owners who want to preserve the area's more rural and upscale character.

In 1997, 71 percent of the east end voters approved a nonbinding resolution to secede. However, the New York State Assembly has never approved the enabling legislation. East End newspapers speculated that the Assembly was afraid that it would encourage a wave of secessions in the state including Staten Island seceding from New York City and perhaps even causing the division of upstate and downstate New York.

The secession movement has not been active in recent years.

Area and population
At the 2020 census, the five towns and the Shinnecock Reservation had a land area of 900.581 km$2$ (347.72 mi2), or about 38.12 percent of Suffolk County's land area. Its total population was 161,127 inhabitants, or about 10.56 percent of the county's population. Its average population density was 178.91/km$2$ (463.38/mi2). If the proposed secession were to occur, the surviving Suffolk County would have a land area of 1,462.001 km$2$ (564.482 mi2) and an adjusted 2020 census population of 1,356,575 inhabitants. It would be left with a population density of 933.51/km$2$ (2,417.78/mi2). As can be seen, the western part of Suffolk has more than five times the population density of its eastern neighbor.

title: Peconic County, New York


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Ehud Shapiro

Ehud Shapiro (אהוד שפירא; born 1955) is an Israeli scientist, entrepreneur, artist, and political activist who is Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With international reputation, he made contributions to many scientific disciplines, laying in each a long-term research agenda by asking a basic question and offering a first step towards answering it, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for fault localization; how to unify parallel, distributed, and systems programming with a high-level logic-based programming language; how to use the metaverse as a foundation for social networking; how to devise molecular computers that can function as smart programmable drugs; how to uncover the human cell lineage tree, via single-cell genomics;  how to support digital democracy, by devising an alternative architecture to the digital realm grassroots.

Shapiro was also an early internet entrepreneur, and a proponent of global digital democracy.

Shapiro is the founder of the Ba Rock Band and a founder of the Israeli political party "Democratit". He is a winner of two ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants.

Early life and education
Born in Jerusalem in 1955, Shapiro became acquainted with the philosophy of science of Karl Popper through a high-school project supervised by Moshe Kroy from the Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University. In 1979, Shapiro completed his undergraduate studies in Tel Aviv University in mathematics and philosophy. Shapiro's PhD work with Dana Angluin in computer science at Yale university attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's philosophical approach to scientific discovery, resulting in both a computer system for the inference of logical theories from facts; and a methodology for program debugging, developed using the programming language Prolog. His thesis, "Algorithmic Program Debugging", was published by MIT Press as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation, followed in 1986 by "The Art of Prolog", a textbook co-authored with Leon Sterling.

Career
Moving to the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1982 as a post-doctoral fellow, Shapiro was inspired by the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project to invent a high-level programming language for parallel and distributed computer systems, named Concurrent Prolog. A two-volume book on Concurrent Prolog and related work was published by MIT Press in 1987.

In 1993, Shapiro took leave of absence from his tenured position at Weizmann to found Ubique Ltd. (and serve as its CEO), an early Israeli Internet software startup. Building on Concurrent Prolog, Ubique developed "Virtual Places", a 2D metaverse and social networking software that included instant messaging, chat rooms, collaborative browsing, online events and games, and voice-over-IP. Ubique was sold to America Online in 1995, and following a management buy out in 1997 was sold again to IBM in 1998.

Shapiro attempted to build a computer from biological molecules, guided by a vision of "A Doctor in a Cell": A biomolecular computer that operates inside the living body, programmed with medical knowledge to diagnose diseases and produce the requisite drugs. Being a novice to biology, Shapiro realized his first design for a molecular computer as a LEGO-like mechanical device built using 3D stereolithography, which was patented upon his return to Weizmann in 1998. During 1999–2016, Shapiro's lab was designing and implementing various molecular computing devices.

In 2011, Shapiro designed an effective method of synthesizing error-free DNA molecules from error-prone building blocks, and founded the CADMAD consortium (Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing of DNA libraries):

In 2005, Shapiro presented a vision of the next grand challenge in human biology: To uncover the Human cell lineage tree. The history of how the human body grows from a single cell (the fertilized egg) to 100 trillion cells is captured by the cell lineage tree. In his TEDxTel-Aviv talk "Uncovering The Human Cell Lineage Tree – The next grand scientific challenge" Shapiro described the system and results obtained with it so far, and a proposal for a FET Flagship project "Human Cell Lineage Flagship initiative" for uncovering the Human cell lineage tree in health and disease. The international Human Cell Atlas project, initiated by Shapiro's former Ph.D. student Aviv Regev, aims to address the precursor question of describing all cell types in the human body.

Research
Popper suggested that all scientific theories are by nature conjectures and inherently fallible, and that refutation to old theory is the paramount process of scientific discovery. Shapiro's doctoral studies with Angluin attempted to provide an algorithmic interpretation to Popper's approach to scientific discovery – in particular for automating the "Conjectures and Refutations" method –  making bold conjectures and then performing experiments that seek to refute them. Shapiro generalized this into the "Contradiction Backtracing Algorithm" – an algorithm for backtracking contradictions. This algorithm is applicable whenever a contradiction occurs between some conjectured theory and the facts. By testing a finite number of ground atoms for their truth in the model the algorithm can trace back a source for this contradiction, namely a false hypothesis, and can demonstrate its falsity by providing a counterexample to it.

Shapiro laid the theoretical foundation for inductive logic programming and built its first implementation (Model Inference System): a Prolog program that inductively inferred logic programs from positive and negative examples. Inductive logic programming has nowadays bloomed as a subfield of artificial intelligence and machine learning which uses logic programming as a uniform representation for examples, background knowledge and hypotheses. Recent work in this area, combining logic programming, learning and probability, has given rise to the new field of statistical relational learning.

Algorithmic program debugging
Algorithmic debugging was first developed by Shapiro during his PhD research at Yale University, as introduced in his PhD thesis, selected as a 1982 ACM Distinguished Dissertation. Shapiro implemented the method of algorithmic debugging in Prolog (a general purpose logic programming language) for the debugging of logic programs.

In case of logic programs, the intended behavior of the program is a model (a set of simple true statements) and bugs are manifested as program incompleteness (inability to prove a true statement) or incorrectness (ability to prove a false statement). The algorithm would identify a false statement in the program and provide a counter-example to it or a missing true statement that it or its generalization should be added to the program. A method to handle non-termination was also developed. Since then, the approach of algorithmic debugging has been expanded and applied to many programming languages.

The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, begun in 1982, to create a computer using massively parallel computing/processing. It was to be the result of a massive government/industry research project in Japan during the 1980s. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with-supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence.

In 1982, during a visit to the ICOT, Shapiro invented Concurrent Prolog, a novel concurrent programming language that integrated logic programming and concurrent programming. Concurrent Prolog is a logic programming language designed for concurrent programming and parallel execution. It is a process oriented language, which embodies dataflow synchronization and guarded-command indeterminacy as its basic control mechanisms.

Shapiro described the language in a Report marked as ICOT Technical Report 003, which presented a Concurrent Prolog interpreter written in Prolog. Shapiro's work on Concurrent Prolog inspired a change in the direction of the FGCS from focusing on parallel implementation of Prolog to the focus on concurrent logic programming as the software foundation for the project. It also inspired the concurrent logic programming language Guarded Horn Clauses (GHC) by Ueda, which was the basis of KL1, the programming language that was finally designed and implemented by the FGCS project as its core programming language.

Ubique Ltd.
In 1993, Shapiro took a leave of absence from the Weizmann Institute to found and serve as CEO of Ubique Ltd., an Israeli Internet software startup. Ubique developed an early 2D metaverse and social networking software that included instant messaging, chat rooms, collaborative browsing, online events and games, and voice-over-IP. The company's first product, Virtual Places 1.0, was developed on top of Unix-based workstations and was announced on the same day that Netscape Communications announced it browser and server products. Virtual Places 2.0 was based on Windows 95 and PCs. Ubique was sold to America Online in 1995 for $14.5 million, bought back by its management in 1997, and sold again to IBM in 1998, where Ubique's technology was the basis of IBM's SameTime instant messaging product.

Molecular programming languages
In a paper published in 2002 in Nature magazine "Cellular abstractions: Cells as computation" Shapiro with his Ph.D. student Aviv Regev raised the question: Why can't the study of biomolecular systems make a similar computational leap? Both sequence and structure research have adopted good abstractions: ‘DNA-as-string’ and ‘protein-as-three-dimensional-labelled-graph’, respectively. They believed that computer science could provide the much-needed abstraction for biomolecular systems. Together Regev and Shapiro used advanced computer science concepts to investigate the ‘molecule-as-computation’ abstraction, in which a system of interacting molecular entities is described and modelled by a system of interacting computational entities. He developed Abstract computer languages for the specification and study of systems of interacting computations, in order to represent biomolecular systems, including regulatory, metabolic and signaling pathways, as well as multicellular processes such as immune responses.

The work (that initially used the π-calculus, a process calculus) was later taken over by IBM Cambridge in the UK (Luca Cardelli) that developed SPiM (Stochastic Pi Calculus Machine). In the last decade the field has flourished with a vast variety of applications. More recently, the field even evolved to a synthesis of two different fields – molecular computing and molecular programming. The combination of the two exhibits how different mathematical formalisms (such as Chemical Reaction Networks) can serve as 'programming languages' and various molecular architectures (such as DNA molecules architecture) can in principle implement any behavior that can be mathematically expressed by the formalism being used.

Doctor in a cell
By combining computer science and molecular biology, researchers have been able to work on a programmable biological computer that in the future may navigate within the human body, diagnosing diseases and administering treatments. This is what Shapiro termed a "Doctor in a cell". His group designed a molecular-scale computer made entirely of biological molecules that realized a mathematical model of programmable computer termed finite automata, which used its DNA input molecule as fuel. The molecular computer was also recognized in 2003 as a Guinness World Record for the smallest molecular computing device. The molecular computer was then extended with an input and output mechanism so that it can be programmed – in a test tube – to identify molecular changes in the body that indicate the presence of certain cancers, and release a drug molecular in response in case it does. The computer was then able to diagnose the specific type of cancer, and to react by producing a drug molecule that interfered with the cancer cells’ activities, causing them to self-destruct. For this work was a member of the 2004 "Scientific American 50" as Research Leader in Nanotechnology.

In 2009, Shapiro and Ph.D. student Tom Ran presented the prototype of an autonomous programmable molecular system, based on the manipulation of DNA strands, which is capable of performing simple logical deductions. This prototype is the first simple programming language implemented on a molecular-scale. If introduced into the body, this system has immense potential to accurately target specific cell types and administer the appropriate treatment, as it can perform millions of calculations at the same time and 'think' logically.

Shapiro's team aimed to make these computers perform highly complex actions and answer complicated questions, following a logical model first proposed by Aristotle over 2000 years ago. The team has also found a way to make these microscopic computing devices 'user-friendly' by creating a compiler – a program for bridging between a high-level computer programming language and DNA computing code. They sought to develop a hybrid in silico/in vitro system that supports the creation and execution of molecular logic programs in a similar way to electronic computers, enabling anyone who knows how to operate an electronic computer, with absolutely no background in molecular biology, to operate a biomolecular computer.

In 2012, Shapiro, Tom Ran and students succeeded in creating a genetic device that operates independently in bacterial cells. The device has been programmed to identify certain parameters and mount an appropriate response. The device searches for transcription factors – proteins that control the expression of genes in the cell. A malfunction of these molecules can disrupt gene expression. In follow-up research, Benenson and his team have produced a moleciular computer that cures a certain type of cancer in mice, with the goal of producing a cancer drug based on this method.

DNA editing
Shapiro designed an effective method of synthesizing error-free DNA molecules from error-prone building blocks. DNA programming is the DNA-counterpart of computer programming. The basic computer programming cycle is to modify an existing program, test the modified program, and iterate until the desired behavior is obtained. Similarly, the DNA programming cycle is to modify a DNA molecule, test its resulting behavior, and iterate until the goal (which is either understanding the behavior or improving it) is achieved.

Shapiro founded the CADMAD consortium, which aimed to deliver a revolution in DNA processing analogous to the revolution text editing underwent with the introduction of electronic text editors.This goal was eventually achieved by others and with a different technology – CRISPR gene editing.

Human cell lineage tree
In 2005, Shapiro and students presented a vision of the next grand challenge in Human biology: To uncover the Human cell lineage Tree. Inside each person is a cell lineage tree.

The challenge of uncovering the Human Cell Lineage Tree is reminiscent, both in nature and in scope, to the challenge faced by the Human Genome Project at its inception and, in fact, its results will decisively contribute to the functional translation and ultimate understanding of the genome sequence. A technological leap of a magnitude similar to the one that occurred during the Human Genome Project is required for the success of the human cell lineage project, and the biological and biomedical impact of such a success could be of a magnitude similar, if not larger than that of the Human Genome Project. In his TEDxTel-Aviv talk "Uncovering The Human Cell Lineage Tree – The next grand scientific challenge" Shapiro described the system and results obtained with it so far, and a proposal for a FET Flagship project "Human Cell Lineage Flagship initiative" for uncovering the Human cell lineage tree in health and disease. The goal of Human Cell Atlas project launched in 2016 by Shapiro's former Ph.D. student Aviv Regev and colleagues, is to identify the cell types in the human body. It is a necessary precursor to identifying the human cell lineage tree.

Equality in digital democracy
The Internet has revolutionized almost every domain of human endeavor, but not democracy. Puzzled by this singularity, Shapiro set to explore how an Internet revolution of democracy could take place. Consulting a founding document of modern democracy, the French 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Shapiro distilled from it the values that would need to be upheld by any digital democracy, with equality being first and foremost.

Subsequently, Shapiro and his team at Weizmann addressed the many dimensions of equality in digital democracy: Equality in voting, via Sybil-Resilient Social Choice [ref], which aims uphold democratic voting despite the penetration of sybils (fake and duplicate identities) into a digital community; equality in proposing; equality in deliberation and coalition formation; equality in constitution formation; and equality in community forking.

Grassroots digital democracy
Equality in governance of a digital community is meaningful only it also applies to the platform on which the community operates. The digital realm is dominated today two types of platforms: autocratic server/cloud-based (e.g. Facebook), and plutocratic proof-of-work/stake-based (e.g. Bitcoin/Ethereum), and, and lacks  a democratic alternative. To help remedy this, Shapiro presents a third alternative architecture for the digital realm, termed "grassroots digital democracy". Informally, a distributed system is grassroots if it can have autonomous, independently-deployed instances — geographically and over time — that can interoperate once interconnected. An example would be a servereless smartphone-based social network supporting multiple independently-budding communities that merge when a member of one community becomes also a member of another.

Grassroots applications may allow people to conduct their social, economic, civic, and political lives in the digital realm solely using the networked computing devices they own and operate (e.g., smartphones), free of third-party control, surveillance, manipulation, coercion, or value-extraction (e.g., by global digital platforms such as Facebook or Bitcoin).

Shapiro initiated in 2012 and led the "open party" (later "open community") project within the Public Knowledge Workshop, which aimed to provide foundations for the operation of an e-party espousing direct democracy via the internet [ref in source]. He further extended his concepts of e-democracy in his 2016 WEF lecture and Financial Times Opinion article. In 2020 he founded the political party Democratit - freedom, equality and fraternity.

title: Ehud Shapiro


text: Category:Unidentified serial killers

title: Category:Unidentified serial killers


text:
Red Rodney

Robert Roland Chudnick (September 27, 1927 – May 27, 1994), known professionally as Red Rodney, was an American jazz trumpeter.

Biography
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he became a professional musician at 15, working in the mid-1940s for the big bands of Jerry Wald, Jimmy Dorsey, Georgie Auld, Elliot Lawrence, Benny Goodman, and Les Brown. He was inspired by hearing Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to change his style to bebop, moving on to play with Claude Thornhill, Gene Krupa, and Woody Herman. He was Jewish.

He accepted an invitation from Charlie Parker to join his quintet. and was a member of the band from 1949 to 1951. Being the only white member of the group, when playing in the southern United States he was billed as "Albino Red" as a ruse to avoid prejudice against mixed race musical combos. During this time he recorded extensively.

During the 1950s, he worked as a bandleader in Philadelphia and recorded with Ira Sullivan. He became addicted to heroin and started a pattern of dropping in and out of jazz.

During 1969, Rodney played in Las Vegas with fellow Woody Herman colleague, trombonist Bill Harris, as part of the Flamingo casino house band led by Russ Black. Similar work continued through 1972.

In the early 1970s he was bankrupted by medical costs following a stroke. He returned to jazz. In 1975 he was incarcerated in Lexington, Kentucky for drug offenses. While jailed he gave music lessons to guitarist Wayne Kramer of the MC5.

He reunited with Ira Sullivan and performed with Dizzy Gillespie. From 1980 to 1982, Rodney made five albums with Sullivan. On these albums he started to play post bop jazz. He continued to work and record into the 1990s. He performed on a Charlie Parker tribute album by Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones. He provided an early showcase for saxophonist Chris Potter, who was a member of his group and only 19 years old when Rodney recorded Red Alert in late 1990.

He performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center and the JVC Jazz Festival. He worked as an adviser for Bird, a movie about Charlie Parker directed by Clint Eastwood. Michael Zelniker played him in the movie.

Rodney died on May 27, 1994, from lung cancer.

As leader

 * Modern Music from Chicago (Fantasy, 1956)
 * Red Rodney: 1957 (Savoy, 1957)
 * Red Rodney Returns (Argo, 1959)
 * Broadway (Status, 1965)
 * Bird Lives! (Muse, 1974)
 * Superbop (Muse, 1974)
 * Red Rodney with the Bebop Preservation Society (Spotlite, 1975)
 * The Red Tornado (Muse, 1976)
 * Yard's Pad (Sonet, 1976)
 * Red, White and Blues (Muse, 1978)
 * Home Free (Muse, 1979)
 * Live at the Village Vanguard (Muse, 1980)
 * Night and Day (Muse, 1981)
 * Spirit Within with Ira Sullivan (Elektra Musician, 1982)
 * The 3R's Richie Cole and Ricky Ford (Muse, 1982)
 * Sprint (Elektra Musician, 1983)
 * Hi Jinx at the Vanguard (Muse, 1984)
 * Social Call with Charlie Rouse (Uptown, 1984)
 * Alive in New York (Muse, 1986)
 * Red Giant (SteepleChase, 1988)
 * Red Snapper (SteepleChase, 1988)
 * Red Giant (SteepleChase, 1988)
 * No Turn on Red (Denon, 1989)
 * Code Red (Continuum, 1989)
 * Then and Now (Chesky, 1992)

As sideman

 * Dizzy Gillespie, To Diz with Love (Telarc, 1992)
 * Woody Herman, The Fourth Herd (Jazzland, 1960)
 * Clifford Jordan, Dr. Chicago (Bee Hive, 1985)
 * Lee Konitz, Live at Laren (Soul Note, 1984)
 * Gene Krupa, Gene Krupa's Sidekicks (Columbia, 1955)
 * Elliot Lawrence, The Uncollected Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra 1946 (Hindsight, 1982)
 * Charlie Parker, Bird at St. Nick's (Jazz Workshop, 1957)
 * Charlie Parker, Swedish Schnapps (Verve, 1958)
 * Ali Ryerson, Blue Flute (Red Baron, 1992)
 * Ira Sullivan, Ira Sullivan Does It All (Muse, 1983)
 * Bob Thiele, Louis Satchmo (Red Baron, 1992)
 * Claude Thornhill, The Uncollected Claude Thornhill and His Orchestra (Hindsight, 1977)

title: Red Rodney


text:
Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw

Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw (16 September 1916 – 23 May 1978) was the first Premier of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and previously served as Chief Minister, legislator, and labour activist.

Early life
Bradshaw was born in the Saint Paul Capisterre Village in Saint Kitts to Mary Jane Francis, a domestic servant, and William Bradshaw, a blacksmith. He was raised by his grandmother after his father moved to the United States when Bradshaw was nine months old. He attended St. Paul's Primary School and completed seventh grade, the highest level of primary education available in Saint Kitts at the time.

At 16, Bradshaw became a machine apprentice at the St. Kitts Sugar Factory, where he began to take interest in the labour movement. In 1940, he left the sugar factory following a strike for higher wages and joined the St. Kitts and Nevis Trades and Labour Union as a clerk. Bradshaw succeeded Joseph Matthew Sebastian as president of the union in 1944.

In 1963 he married Mildred Sahaley, a Kittitian-Lebanese woman. They had one daughter, Isis Carla Bradshaw. His first daughter, Etsu, is from an earlier relationship.

Political career
Bradshaw supported the cause of the sugar workers and was one of the political stalwarts of the country. In 1945 he became president of the recently created St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla Labour Party. He entered politics in 1946 and won a seat in the Legislative Council in the elections that year, later becoming a member of the Executive Council. In 1956 he was Minister of Trade and Production for St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. During the short-lived West Indies Federation (from 1958 to 1962), Bradshaw was elected to the Federal House of Representatives and held the post of minister of finance for the West Indies Federation.

After the break-up of the Federation, Bradshaw returned to St. Kitts from Trinidad. In 1966 he became Chief Minister, and in 1967 the first Premier of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, then an associated state of the United Kingdom. Under his leadership, all sugar lands, as well as the central sugar factory, were bought by the government. Opposition to Bradshaw's rule began to build. Opposition was especially great in Nevis, where it was felt that the island was being neglected and unfairly deprived of revenue, investment and services by its larger neighbour. Bradshaw mainly ignored Nevis' complaints, but Nevisian disenchantment with the Labour Party proved a key factor in the party's eventual fall from power. Opposition in Anguilla was even stronger, with the Anguillans evicting St. Kitts police from their island and holding referendums in 1967 and 1969, both times voting overwhelmingly to secede from St. Kitts-Nevis and remain a separate British territory.

In 1977 Bradshaw travelled to London for talks on independence with the British government.

Death
Bradshaw died on 23 May 1978 of prostate cancer at his home in Basseterre. He was succeeded by his Deputy Premier, Paul Southwell. He is buried in Springfield cemetery in Basseterre.

Legacy
In 1996, Bradshaw was posthumously awarded the title of First National Hero by the National Assembly of Saint Kitts and Nevis and is honoured annually on National Heroes Day, which is observed on his birthday. On the inaugural National Heroes Day in 1998, the Golden Rock Airport in Saint Kitts was renamed the Robert L. Bradshaw International Airport in his honor. In 2007, the Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw Memorial Park was dedicated at his birthplace in St. Paul's. On 17 September 2010, the Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw building was dedicated on the Windsor University School of Medicine campus in Cayon.

title: Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw


text:
Vallenato

Vallenato, is a popular folk music genre from Colombia. It primarily comes from its Caribbean region. Vallenato literally means "born in the valley". The valley influencing this name is located between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía de Perijá in north-east Colombia. The name also applies to the people from the city where this genre originated: Valledupar (from the place named Valle de Upar – "Valley of Upar"). In 2006, vallenato and cumbia were added as a category in the Latin Grammy Awards. Colombia's traditional vallenato music is Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, according to UNESCO.

Origins
This form of music originated from farmers who, keeping a tradition of Spanish minstrels (juglares in Spanish), used to travel through the region with their cattle in search of pastures or to sell them in cattle fairs. Because they traveled from town to town and the region lacked rapid communications, these farmers served as bearers of news for families living in other towns or villages. Their only form of entertainment during these trips was singing and playing guitars or indigenous gaita flutes, known as kuisis in the Kogi language, and their form of transmitting their news was by singing their messages.

The first form of vallenato was played with gaita flutes, guacharaca, and caja, and later adopted other instruments like guitars. These troubadors were later influenced by Europe's instruments: piano and accordion. Impressed by the sound of the accordion, troubadors probably later obtained accordions from Aruba and Curaçao. Vallenato was considered music of the lower class and farmers, but gradually started penetrating through every social group during the mid-20th century.

Don Clemente Quintero – a prominent member from the region's elite – was a lover of this music, usually accompanied by liquor, was a form of entertainment for this almost isolated region. He then decided to start a parranda (party) inside the very strict Valledupar Social Club with friends. This triggered an acceptance for the music and it became a regular feature at parties, carnivals and reunions, not for dancing, but for listening to these juglares stories.

Alfonso López Michelsen, a prominent Colombian politician, showed interest in the region as his ancestors and wife were born there. While a Senator, he pushed for the creation of the Department of Cesar and became, in 1966, its first governor. Once in office and together with writer and reporter Consuelo Araújo Noguera and vallenato composer Rafael Escalona, they created the Vallenato Legend Festival.

Instruments
Its three traditional instruments are:
 * the caja vallenata: a small drum held between the knees and played with bare hands. It was used by the African slaves brought by the Europeans. Similar to a tambora drum.
 * the guacharaca: a wooden, ribbed stick similar to a sugar cane, accompanied by a fork that when rubbed together emits a scraping sound. It's about 18 inches (45 centimeters) long and 1 inch (3 centimeters) in diameter. It was used by the aborigines to imitate the song of the guacharaca or guacharaco (one of the species of chachalaca), a bird from the region, to hunt and perform dancing rites.
 * the accordion: three-line button, German-origin accordion. It has three reeds per note and comes in different keys: ADG, GCF, and BbEbAb ("5 Letras"). Accordions in Colombia and Panama sometimes have custom made keys especially made for vallenato and cumbia.

The four rhythms
Vallenato consists of four beats or "airs" that are differentiated through their rhythmic structure and the melody chord structure the accordionist gives it. These are son, paseo, merengue, and puya. The son and the paseo have a time and the merengue and the puya a  time.
 * Son is played with heavy accentuation and cadence stressed on the low notes of the accordion on its left-hand side. It is normally mournful and slow.
 * Paseo is thought to be an offshoot of the son. Its speed can vary and today is the most widely recorded air.
 * Puya's main difference from the merengue is the length of its lyrics. In the last 40 years, accordion players have begun to play it faster, and each of the three instruments used in vallenato has a solo. It is considered the oldest of the four "airs", with roots in an ancient Indian dance of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
 * Merengue is often confused with a Dominican genre with the same name, probably brought by related African tribal groups. It has a more narrative style and was often used to play décimas, a 10-line format with internal rhymes brought by the Spanish in the 16th century.

Piqueria
The piqueria vallenata is a type of typical musical showdown Colombian Caribbean folklore and Vallenato. As in the contrapunteo Joropo burrowing, or trova paisa within the music, litigants demonstrate their improvisational skills in building verses that challenge their opponent. This type of musical confrontation arose as a result of chance encounters between vallenatos minstrels who roamed the northern part of Colombia brightening binges and to demonstrate their talent on the accordion and the art of improvisation faced with songs and rhymes. One of the most important meetings of the Piqueria was between Emiliano Zuleta and Lorenzo Morales, both vallenato accordionists. From this meeting came the popular song "La Gota Fría" ("The Cold Drop" in English), played in its most popular version by Colombian singer Carlos Vives.

Vallenato festivals
Many vallenato festivals are held annually in Colombia, such as:
 * The Vallenato Legend Festival: Every year by the end of April, in the city of Valledupar, the Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata (Vallenato Legend Festival) is celebrated. During the festival a contest takes place in which the best vallenato interpreters fight for the title of Rey Vallenato (Vallenato accordion King), "verseadores", new song composers, "guacharaqueros" and "cajeros" are also awarded within three categories; professional, aficionado and infant. The festival also includes record industry's orchestras shows.
 * Accordions' Cradle Festival: (Festival cuna de accordeones) This festival is celebrated every year since 1979, in Valledupar's neighboring town of Villanueva, in La Guajira. The Festival is similar to the Vallenato Legend Festival format, but also includes a category for the elderly accordion players over sixty years old.
 * Other Vallenato festivals
 * The Vallenato Festival in Bogotá, Colombia

Vallenato composers, singers and juglares
Thanks to the Vallenato Legend Festival, this musical genre became known through the region including regions of Venezuela, and when a popular telenovela, "Escalona", based on the life of Vallenato composer, Rafael Escalona was aired on national television (with vallenato superstar Carlos Vives as Escalona), vallenato became widely known in Colombia and internationally. Some renowned traditional vallenato performers are Guillermo Buitrago, Alejo Duran, Enrique Díaz, Emiliano Zuleta, Luis Enrique Martínez, Abel Antonio Villa and Lorenzo Morales. Other important characters such as Tobías Enrique Pumarejo and Rafael Escalona never played any instrument, but were important writers of very well known songs across Latin America. Other well-known Colombian musicians who sing vallenatos are Rafael Orozco Maestre, Miguel Morales, Diomedes Díaz, Jorge Oñate, Ivan Villazon, Nicolas "Colacho" Mendoza (accordion player and composer), Juan Humberto "Juancho" Rois (accordion player and composer), Omar Geles (accordion player and composer), Israel Romero, Peter Manjarrés, Silvestre Dangond, Los Gigantes Del Vallenato, Galy Galiano, and Lisandro Meza among others.

The current ambassador of the genre is Carlos Vives, who has progressively helped vallenato gain popularity worldwide by combining traditional vallenato music with pop/rock music, subgenre that has come to be known as "vallenato-pop".

Vallenato musical orchestras and groups
The traditional vallenato developed into a more orchestra type of musical group. Throughout the years, some groups started adding instruments and a group chorus to support the main singer, popularly and sarcastically known as "ay omberos". With these changes. Some of the instruments added or used by some orchestras were: the bass guitar, the congas drums, a Timbal set, drum kit, maracas, guache, electric piano, Spanish guitars, tambourine, cowbell, electric guitar, Saxophone, piano accordion, violins, among others. These groups also started fusioning local genres to the vallenato, usually with cumbia, porro sabanero, gaitas (group of gaita flute interpreters), merecumbe and joropo. Some groups seeking a wider audience started mixing vallenato with other international genres, like salsa, merengue, rock, classical music, reggae, reggaeton, ranchera, techno and house music. Some of these mixes did not become very popular because of their experimental sounds.

La Nueva Ola (The New Wave)
La Nueva Ola refers to the new generation of vallenato groups and orchestras that have created a distinctive sound for themselves while keeping some of the essences of their predecessors. Kaleth Morales is considered the leading artist of this young wave of vallenato musical groups, even after his death following a car accident on August 24, 2005. The leader is now Silvestre Dangond, who won five awards in Premios Nuestra Tierra in 2009. Other relevant artists are Silvestre Dangond, Peter Manjarrés and Martín Elías.

title: Vallenato