text:
Talk:YMCA

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 August 2021 and 11 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bmart20.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:13, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Volunteering
I wanted to apply to work in a shop nearby 82.132.212.114 (talk) 12:52, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

I need support from other Wikipedian.
I am new as a Wikipedian and can embarrass myself. Not really having tried to edit a topic yet. Remember this as you evaluate my example of improvement. Two or three rejection I can deal with though I dislike.

In one Biblical Church the saved were called Christian. The meaning of Christian inhabits that of meaning Christianity as if it were member being in the Church within their church building. Unless other than the nature of things "Christian" has a general meaning most read and most accept as common. When a title in a persons past life explains past and present ( and may be explains future ) circumstance a person commits to being this. Any person can commit even when that person is smaller than any title offered and has no title. A person commits to a title making a person committed to and carrying out all work associated with this title by the person accepting this title which proves the person with the title. Past present and future, the meaning is the same for as long as the title sticks when the title is kept.

I am not saying that there is no need for denoting reference to single or multiple belief, and a the title Christian within the title Young Mens Christian Association. ( This is not to disgrace those who are Christian. ) and since Christian are protected in the United States Of America from any type of harm, mind, body, and soul, it is not only wrong to use Christian in differently but punishable.. An example of this punishment is comparable with a member having said or done some small wrong within the large Church, catches hell outside the church. This being offensive to the person harmed is by Church decision to be refunded to the offended in the manner agreed on by both. Christian is a title only, and one people in the United States Of America take seriously. The Wikipedian who used "Christian" here has to some degree, small or large, offended the Christian. If small enough, a simple "I am sorry, I apologize" after fixing the problem,  often makes things right. Leroy 11-28-1952 (talk) 04:03, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Ohio is not in Canada
Under the YMCA in Canada title, there is a photo of the YMCA in Columbus, Ohio. It should probably be replaced by a photo of a YMCA in Canada. The one in Sudbury, Ontario is nice. 174.94.26.254 (talk) 15:24, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Help me pls
My name is Sandeep and I am in ItalyI believe and obey Jehovah and read the Bible dailyI came to Italy from India two years ago todayAnd now my documents are corrupted and I have no choiceI inspire daily and read that God's Holy BibleMy age is 23 yearsPlease help me I want to do Jehovah's work in ItalyAnd I want to go to church on Saturday and SundayPlease, I believe in God, will you help me to make my documents 188.11.120.163 (talk) 01:23, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

No reference to gay subculture?
Shouldn't there be a reference to the fact that YMCA's were initially setup for the purpose of being outlets for the gay community prior to the cultural shift of acceptance? 203.46.132.214 (talk) 03:12, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:YMCA


text:
Category:Universities and colleges in West Virginia

This category is for the universities and colleges in the U.S. state of West Virginia.

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


text:
Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Влади́мир Серге́евич Соловьёв; 28 January 1853 – 13 August 1900) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer, and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.

Life and work
Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow; the second son of the historian Sergey Mikhaylovich Solovyov (1820–1879); his elder brother Vsevolod (1849-1903), became a historical novelist, and his younger sister, Polyxena (1867-1924), became a poet. Vladimir Solovyov's mother Polyxena Vladimirovna (née Romanova, d. 1909) belonged to a family of Polish origin and among her ancestors was the philosopher Gregory Skovoroda (1722–1794).

In his teens, he renounced Eastern Orthodoxy for nihilism, but later his disapproval of positivism saw him begin to express some views that were in line with those of the Orthodox Church. From 1869 to 1873 Solovyov studied at the Imperial Moscow University, where his philosophy professor was Pamfil Yurkevich (1826-1874).

In his 1874 work The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (Кризис западной философии (против позитивистов), Solovyov discredited the positivists' rejection of Aristotle's essentialism, or philosophical realism. In Against the Positivists he took the position of intuitive noetic comprehension, or insight. He saw consciousness as integral (see the Russian term sobornost) and requiring both phenomenon (validated by dianoia) and noumenon validated intuitively. Positivism, according to Solovyov, validates only the phenomenon of an object, denying the intuitive reality that people experience as part of their consciousness. As Solovyov's basic philosophy rests on the idea that the essence of an object (see essentialism) can be validated only by intuition and that consciousness as a single organic whole is done in part by reason or logic but in completeness by (non-dualist) intuition. Solovyov was partially attempting to reconcile the dualism (subject-object) found in German idealism. In 1877, Solovyov moved to Saint Petersburg, where he became a friend and confidant of the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). In opposition to his friend, Solovyov was sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church. He favoured the healing of the schism (ecumenism, sobornost) between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It is clear from Solovyov's work that he accepted papal primacy over the Universal Church,  but there is not enough evidence,, to support the claim that he ever officially embraced Roman Catholicism. As an active member of Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia, he spoke Hebrew and struggled to reconcile Judaism and Christianity. Politically, he became renowned as the leading defender of Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s. Solovyov also advocated for his cause internationally and published a letter in The London Times pleading for international support for his struggle. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him as "a friend of the Jews" and states that "Even on his death-bed he is said to have prayed for the Jewish people". Solovyov's attempts to chart a course of civilization's progress toward an East-West Christian ecumenism developed an increasing bias against Asian cultures—which he had initially studied with great interest. He dismissed the Buddhist concept of Nirvana as a pessimistic nihilistic "nothingness", antithetical to salvation and no better than Gnostic dualism. Solovyov spent his final years obsessed with fear of the "Yellow Peril", warning that soon the Asian peoples, especially the Chinese, would invade and destroy Russia.

Solovyov further elaborated this theme in his apocalyptic short-story "Tale of the Antichrist" (published in the Nedelya newspaper on 27 February 1900), in which China and Japan join forces to conquer Russia. His 1894 poem Pan-Mongolism, whose opening lines serve as epigraph to the story, was widely seen as predicting the coming Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.

Solovyov never married or had children, but he pursued idealized relationships as immortalized in his spiritual love-poetry, including with two women named Sophia. He rebuffed the advances of the Christian mystic Anna Nikolayevna Schmidt, who claimed to be his divine partner. In his later years, Solovyov became a vegetarian, but ate fish occasionally. He often lived alone for months without a servant and would work into the night.

Influence
It is widely held that Solovyov was one of the sources for Dostoevsky's characters Alyosha Karamazov and Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov. In Janko Lavrin's opinion, Solovyov has not left a single work which can be considered an epoch-making contribution to philosophy as such. And yet his writings have proved one of the most stimulating influences to the religious-philosophic thought of his country. Solovyov's influence can also be seen in the writings of the Symbolist and Neo-Idealist writers of the later Russian Soviet era. His book The  can be seen as one of the philosophical sources of Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). It was also the work in which he introduced the concept of 'syzygy', to denote 'close union'.

Sophiology
Solovyov synthesized a philosophy based on Hellenistic philosophy (see Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) and early Christian tradition with Buddhist and Hebrew Kabbalistic elements (Philo of Alexandria). He also studied Gnosticism and the works of the Gnostic Valentinus. His religious philosophy was syncretic and fused philosophical elements of various religious traditions with Orthodox Christianity and his own experience of Sophia.

Solovyov described his encounters with the entity Sophia in his works, such as Three Encounters and Lectures on Godmanhood. His fusion was driven by the desire to reconcile and/or unite with Orthodox Christianity the various traditions by the Russian Slavophiles' concept of sobornost. His Russian religious philosophy had a very strong impact on the Russian Symbolist art and poetry movements of the Silver Age and his written arguments in favor of the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Holy See played an instrumental role in the formation of the Russian Greek Catholic Church. His teachings on Sophia, conceived as the merciful unifying feminine wisdom of God comparable to the Hebrew Shekinah or various goddess traditions, have been deemed a heresy by Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and as unsound and unorthodox by the Patriarchate of Moscow. This condemnation, however, was not agreed upon by other jurisdictions of the Orthodox church and was directed specifically against Sergius Bulgakov who continued to be defended by his own hierarch Metropolitan Evlogy until his death.

In his 2005 forward to Solovyov’s Justification of the Good, the Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart wrote a defense of Sophiology including a specific defense of Solovyov's later thought:

"It is important to note that, in Solovyov’s developed reflections upon this figure (and in those of his successor Sophiologists,’ Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov), she was most definitely not an occult, or pagan, or Gnostic goddess, nor was she a fugitive from some Chaldean mystery cult, nor was she a speculative perversion of the Christian doctrine of God. She was not a fourth hypostasis in the Godhead, nor a fallen fragment of God, nor a literal world-soul, nor an eternal hypostasis who became incarnate as the Mother of God, nor most certainly the ‘feminine aspect of deity.’ Solovyov possessed too refined a mind to fall prey to the lure of cultic mythologies or childish anthropomorphisms, despite his interest in Gnosticism (or at least in its special pathos); and all such characterizations of the figure of Sophia are the result of misreadings (though, one must grant, misreadings partly occasioned by the young Solovyov’s penchant for poetic hyperbole). In truth, the divine Sophia is first and foremost a biblical figure, and ‘Sophiology’ was born of an honest attempt to interpret intelligibly the role ascribed to her in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, in such a way as to complement the Logos Christology of the Fourth Gospel, while still not neglecting the ‘autonomy’ of creation within its very dependency upon the Logos."

Sobornost
Solovyov sought to create a philosophy that could through his system of logic or reason reconcile all bodies of knowledge or disciplines of thought, and fuse all conflicting concepts into a single system. The central component of this complete philosophic reconciliation was the Russian Slavophile concept of sobornost (organic or spontaneous order through integration, which is related to the Russian word for 'catholic'). Solovyov sought to find and validate common ground, or where conflicts found common ground, and, by focusing on this common ground, to establish absolute unity and/or integral fusion of opposing ideas and/or peoples.

Death
Intense mental work shattered Solovyov's health. He died at the Moscow estate of Nikolai Petrovitch Troubetzkoy, where a relative of the latter, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, was living.

By 1900, Solovyov was apparently a homeless pauper. He left his brother, Mikhail Sergeevich, and several colleagues to defend and promote his intellectual legacy. He is buried at Novodevichy Convent.

Quotes
"But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man's common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life."

Selected works
English translations
 * The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics. University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0268108939
 * The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism, Compiled 2016 by Lindisfarne Books, ISBN 0-940262-73-8 ISBN 978-0-940262-73-7
 * The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists, 1874. Reprinted 1996 by Lindisfarne Books, ISBN 0-940262-73-8 ISBN 978-0-940262-73-7
 * The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (1877)
 * The Critique of Abstract Principles (1877–80)
 * Lectures on Divine Humanity (1877–91)
 * The Russian Idea, 1888. Translation published in 2015 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, ISBN 1508510075 ISBN 978-1508510079
 * A Story of Anti-Christ (novel), 1900. Reprinted 2012 by Kassock Bros. Publishing Co., ISBN 1475136838 ISBN 978-1475136838
 * The Justification of the Good, 1918. Reprinted 2010 by Cosimo Classics, ISBN 1-61640-281-4 ISBN 978-1-61640-281-5
 * The Meaning of Love. Reprinted 1985 by Lindisfarne Books, ISBN 0-89281-068-8 ISBN 978-0-89281-068-0
 * War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ, 1915. Reprinted 1990 by Lindisfarne Books, ISBN 0-940262-35-5 ISBN 978-0-940262-35-5
 * Russia and the Universal Church,. Reprinted 1948 by G. Bles. (Abridged version: The Russian Church and the Papacy, 2002, Catholic Answers, ISBN 1-888992-29-8 ISBN 978-1-888992-29-8)
 * 103 pages

title: Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)


text:
Kit's Coty House

Kit's Coty House or Kit's Coty is a chambered long barrow near the village of Aylesford in the southeastern English county of Kent. Constructed circa 4000 BCE, during the Early Neolithic period of British prehistory, today it survives in a ruined state.

Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe. Although representing part of an architectural tradition of long barrow building that was widespread across Neolithic Europe, Kit's Coty House belongs to a localised regional variant of barrows produced in the vicinity of the River Medway, now known as the Medway Megaliths. Of these, it lies near to both Little Kit's Coty House and the Coffin Stone on the eastern side of the river. Three further surviving long barrows, Addington Long Barrow, Chestnuts Long Barrow, and Coldrum Long Barrow, are located west of the Medway.

They were among the first ancient British remains to be protected by the state, on the advice of General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments. The site is now under the ownership of non-departmental public body English Heritage, and is open to visitors all year round.

Kit's Coty can be reached on foot along a track that appears at the junction where the Pilgrim's Way and Rochester Road meet. The chamber is encircled by iron railings. It lies approximately 2 kilometres north of another of the Medway Megaliths, Little Kit's Coty House.

The name "Kits Coty" allegedly means "Tomb in the Forest" according to signs at the site, possibly related to the Ancient British *kaitom, later *keiton, meaning "forest". The site is the namesake of Kitscoty, a village in Alberta, Canada. The inclusion of the term "House" in the site's name has confused some visitors, who have gone to the site expecting a built dwelling.

Context
The Early Neolithic was a revolutionary period of British history. Between 4500 and 3800 BCE, it saw a widespread change in lifestyle as the communities living in the British Isles adopted agriculture as their primary form of subsistence, abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had characterised the preceding Mesolithic period. This came about through contact with continental societies, although it is unclear to what extent this can be attributed to an influx of migrants or to indigenous Mesolithic Britons adopting agricultural technologies from the continent. The region of modern Kent would have been a key area for the arrival of continental European settlers and visitors, because of its position on the estuary of the River Thames and its proximity to the continent.

Britain was largely forested in this period; widespread forest clearance did not occur in Kent until the Late Bronze Age (c.1000 to 700 BCE). Environmental data from the vicinity of the White Horse Stone, a putatively prehistoric monolith near the River Medway, supports the idea that the area was still largely forested in the Early Neolithic, covered by a woodland of oak, ash, hazel/alder and Maloideae. Throughout most of Britain, there is little evidence of cereal or permanent dwellings from this period, leading archaeologists to believe that the Early Neolithic economy on the island was largely pastoral, relying on herding cattle, with people living a nomadic or semi-nomadic life.

Medway Megaliths

Across Western Europe, the Early Neolithic marked the first period in which humans built monumental structures in the landscape. These structures included chambered long barrows, rectangular or oval earthen tumuli which had a chamber built into one end. Some of these chambers were constructed out of timber, although others were built using large stones, now known as "megaliths". These long barrows often served as tombs, housing the physical remains of the dead within their chamber. Individuals were rarely buried alone in the Early Neolithic, instead being interred in collective burials with other members of their community. These chambered tombs were built all along the Western European seaboard during the Early Neolithic, from southeastern Spain up to southern Sweden, taking in most of the British Isles; the architectural tradition was introduced to Britain from continental Europe in the first half of the fourth millennium BCE. Although there are stone buildings—like Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey—which predate them, the chambered long barrows constitute humanity's first widespread tradition of construction using stone.

Although now all in a ruinous state and not retaining their original appearance, at the time of construction the Medway Megaliths would have been some of the largest and most visually imposing Early Neolithic funerary monuments in Britain. Grouped along the River Medway as it cuts through the North Downs, they constitute the most southeasterly group of megalithic monuments in the British Isles, and the only megalithic group in eastern England. The archaeologists Brian Philp and Mike Dutto deemed the Medway Megaliths to be "some of the most interesting and well known" archaeological sites in Kent, while the archaeologist Paul Ashbee described them as "the most grandiose and impressive structures of their kind in southern England".

The Medway Megaliths can be divided into two separate clusters: one to the west of the River Medway and the other on Blue Bell Hill to the east, with the distance between the two clusters measuring at between 8 and 10 km. The western group includes Coldrum Long Barrow, Addington Long Barrow, and the Chestnuts Long Barrow. The eastern group consists of Smythe's Megalith, Kit's Coty House, Little Kit's Coty House, the Coffin Stone, and several other stones which might have once been parts of chambered tombs, most notably the White Horse Stone. It is not known if they were all built at the same time, or whether they were constructed in succession, while similarly it is not known if they each served the same function or whether there was a hierarchy in their usage.

The Medway long barrows all conformed to the same general design plan, and are all aligned on an east to west axis. Each had a stone chamber at the eastern end of the mound, and they each probably had a stone facade flanking the entrance. They had internal heights of up to 10 ft, making them taller than most other chambered long barrows in Britain. The chambers were constructed from sarsen, a dense, hard, and durable stone that occurs naturally throughout Kent, having formed out of sand from the Eocene epoch. Early Neolithic builders would have selected blocks from the local area, and then transported them to the site of the monument to be erected.

These common architectural features among the Medway Megaliths indicate a strong regional cohesion with no direct parallels elsewhere in the British Isles. Nevertheless, as with other regional groupings of Early Neolithic long barrows—such as the Cotswold-Severn group in south-western Britain—there are also various idiosyncrasies in the different monuments, such as Coldrum's rectilinear shape, the Chestnut Long Barrow's facade, and the long, thin mounds at Addington and Kit's Coty. These variations might have been caused by the tombs being altered and adapted over the course of their use; in this scenario, the monuments would be composite structures.

The builders of these monuments were probably influenced by pre-existing tomb-shrines they were aware of. Whether those people had grown up locally, or moved into the Medway area from elsewhere is not known. Based on a stylistic analysis of their architectural designs, the archaeologist Stuart Piggott thought that the plan behind the Medway Megaliths had originated in the area around the Low Countries; conversely, Glyn Daniel thought their design derived from Scandinavia, John H. Evans thought Germany, and Ronald F. Jessup suggested an influence from the Cotswold-Severn group. Ashbee noted that their close clustering in the same area was reminiscent of the megalithic tomb-shrine traditions of continental Northern Europe, and emphasised that the Medway Megaliths were a regional manifestation of a tradition widespread across Early Neolithic Europe. He nevertheless stressed that a precise place of origin was "impossible to indicate" with the available evidence.

Design and construction

The surviving part of the monument represents three stones covered by a capstone. The H-shaped entrance to the tomb survives. It is made of sarsen (a fine-grained, crystalline sandstone) and consists of three orthostats supporting a horizontal capstone. The archaeologist Timothy Champion suggested that these stones "give some idea of the scale of the sculpture". The front part of the chamber, as well as a possible façade, are now gone.

The mound and flanking ditches have largely been ploughed flat but remain visible from aerial photographs. A 1981 survey found the mound to be circa 70 metres long and 1 metre high. Champion suggested that in total, the long-barrow would have been about 80m long. As a result of chalk rubble in the plough soul, it estimated that it had once been c.11 to 15 metres wide. An area of dark soil suggested that there had been a wide ditch on the southern side.

Ashbee noted that various worn pottery sherds had been found in the soil on the barrow. In 1897, John Evans recounted as having found a leaf-shaped arrowhead—likely of Neolithic date—near to the site.

The General's Tombstone
At the western end of the monument was a megalith known as "the General's Tombstone", which was destroyed in 1867. This may once have been part of the long barrow's structure.

Damage and dilapidation
Ashbee suggested that when the barrow was being slighted, the kerbstones might have been dragged away or buried under the ditches.

Folklore, folk tradition, and modern Paganism
In 1722, the antiquarian Hercules Ayleway noted—in a letter written to his friend, the fellow antiquarian William Stukeley—a local belief that the Lower Kit's Coty House and Kit's Coty House were erected in memory of two contending kings of Kent who died in battle.

In 1946, Evans recorded a local folk tale that held that the chamber at Kit's Coty House was erected by three witches who lived on Blue Bell Hill. According to this story, a fourth witch helped them put the capstone on.

Several modern Pagan religions are practised at the Medway Megaliths, the most publicly visible of which is Druidry. Research conducted among these Druids in 2014 revealed that some Druidic ceremonial activity had taken place at Kit's Coty.

Antiquarian and archaeological investigation

Kit's Coty House was briefly mentioned in John Twyne's De Rebus Albionicis (written c.1550, but not published until 1590), and in William Camden's Britannia (1586): Camden reported the popular tradition that it was the tomb of the 5th-century British prince Catigern, supposedly killed at the Battle of Aylesford in 455.

In 1590, a group of antiquaries visited the site. One of them, John Stow, wrote: "It was one great flat stone in the mydst standinge up right, & ij othar the lyke or greatar stones, on eche syd one in closynge the ij edge sydes of the mydle stone, and then one greatar flat stone lyenge flat over and above the othar thre. And about one quoyts cast from this monument lyethe one othar very greate stone, moche parte therof in the erthe."

Stow published a version of this report in his Annals in 1592; while another of the group, William Lambarde, published his own description in the 1596 edition of his Perambulation of Kent, drawing a comparison with Stonehenge. Camden described the monument in greater detail from personal observation in the expanded 1610 English translation of Britannia:

"under the side of a hill I saw foure, huge, rude, hard stones erected, two for the sides, one transversall in the midest betweene them, and the hugest of all piled and laied over them in manner of the British monument which is called Stone-heng but not so artificially with mortis and tenents. Verily the unskilfull common people terme it at this day, of the same Catigern, Keiths or Kits Coty house."

In 1659, Thomas Philipot wrote about the site, again describing it as the tomb of Catigern.

The antiquarian John Aubrey made mention of the monument in his unpublished manuscript on British archaeological sites, the Monumenta Britannica. There he included a drawing of the site produced by the classical scholar Thomas Gale. Aubrey then directly cited Philipot's earlier work. There is no direct evidence that Aubrey visited the site but Ashbee thought it "inconceivable that he did not" given that he made frequent visits to Kent, using a road which would have taken him very close to Kit's Coty House.

William Stukeley visited the site in 1722 and was able to sketch the site whilst it was still largely intact. Before this, Samuel Pepys also saw it and wrote:

"Three great stones standing upright and a great round one lying on them, of great bigness, although not so big as those on Salisbury Plain. But certainly it is a thing of great antiquity, and I am mightily glad to see it."

Stukeley included four engravings of Kit's Coty House in his two volumes of Itinerarium Curiosum. A 1722 print of the site showed the chamber, mound, and the General's Tombstone.

In c.1783, James Douglas set one of his workmen to dig on the western side of the monument, and produced a watercolour painting illustrating the scene.

In 1880, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie included the stones at Addington in his list of Kentish earthworks. In 1893, the antiquarian George Payne mentioned the monument in his Collectanea Cantiana, describing it as a "fallen cromlech" and noting that there were various other megaliths scattered in the vicinity, suggesting that these were part of the monument of another like it, since destroyed.

In his 1924 publication dealing with Kent, the archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford, then working as the archaeological officer for the Ordnance Survey, listed Kit's Coty House alongside the other Medway Megaliths and reprinted one of Stukeley's engravings of it.

The author George Orwell visited the site on 21 August 1938, as detailed in his domestic diary of that date. He describes it as "a druidical altar or something of the kind. ... The stones are on top of a high hill & it appears they belong to quite another part of the country." The stones are actually well down the slope of Blue Bell Hill, 1.32 km to the north.

In January 1981, Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit carried out a survey of the site.

Management by English Heritage
Ashbee suggested that Kit's Coty House was "the best known" of the Medway Megaliths, while Champion thought it "perhaps the best-known monument in Kent". In 2005, Philp and Dutto referred to Kits Coty as an "important monument" that was "amongst the best known in Britain".

title: Kit's Coty House


text:
Millennium Actress

Millennium Actress (千年女優) is a 2001 Japanese animated drama film co-written and directed by Satoshi Kon and produced by Madhouse. Loosely based on the lives of actresses Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, it tells the story of two documentary filmmakers investigating the life of a retired acting legend. As she tells them the story of her life, the borderline between cinema and reality gradually becomes blurred.

Plot
Ginei Studios, a prestigious but bankrupt film studio, goes out of business. Television interviewer Genya Tachibana and his cameraman Kyoji Ida prepare for a retrospective interview with Chiyoko Fujiwara, the studio's best known star, who thirty years prior retired from acting and became a recluse. When they meet, Tachibana gives Chiyoko a key he believes she lost at the studio, prompting her to reflect on her life.

As Chiyoko begins, the film becomes a surreal story within a story wherein events from Chiyoko's life are interwoven with scenes from films she has appeared in, while Tachibana and Ida appear within them as documentary filmmakers. As a teenager, she was given the key by an artist and political dissident opposing the Sino-Japanese War. She helped him escape from the authorities and after his departure, decided to become a film actress in the hope that he would recognize and find her. Her quest continues for decades and Chiyoko becomes famous, acting in films ranging from jidaigeki to kaiju. Despite not hearing from the mysterious artist, she never loses hope.

Chiyoko loses the key one day during filming and resigns to marrying Junichi Ōtaki, a director at the studio. Years later, Chiyoko finds the key hidden in their home and confronts her husband about it; former lead actress Eiko Shimao reveals that she stole it out of jealousy and gave it to Junichi. One day, the former military policeman who had been pursuing the artist comes to Chiyoko to atone for his sins during the war, and gives her a letter from the artist. He tells Tachibana, who was working as a studio assistant at the time, that the artist was tortured and killed after his arrest. Though she does not receive this information, Chiyoko abandons her search for the artist, accepting that she is no longer the girl the artist once knew.

In the present, an earthquake strikes during the interview, upsetting Chiyoko's fragile health. On her hospital deathbed she reflects on her life, telling Tachibana that despite never seeing the man again, she realized that the search for him was what she loved most.

Production
Millennium Actress is the second film directed by Satoshi Kon and his first original work, after the highly acclaimed Perfect Blue. It was planned by Masao Maruyama and produced by Taro Maki. The film is partly based on the life of Japanese actress Setsuko Hara, although it was produced and released more than a decade prior to her death.

Following the release of Perfect Blue, Kon considered adapting the Yasutaka Tsutsui novel Paprika (1993) into his next film. However, these plans were stalled when the distribution company for Perfect Blue, Rex Entertainment, went bankrupt.

The project for Millennium Actress came from the words "Let's make a movie that looks like a trompe l'oeil" by Taro Maki, who decided to produce Kon's film because he thought his previous work was amazing. The script writing began with a sentence that Kon came up with: "An old woman who was once touted as a great actress is supposed to be recounting her life story, but her memories get confused and the various roles she played in the past begin to blend into it, creating a tumultuous story." The structure of the story was decided at the rough plot stage when Kon fleshed out this sentence, and the last scene remained intact in the finished film. He then worked with the scenario writer, Sadayuki Murai, and the producer to develop the episodes and detailed character settings to be included in the plot.

Unlike the previous film, which he was hired to direct, this one was his original project, so he was able to express his own opinions, and decided to put more emphasis on the sound, especially the music, and asked Susumu Hirasawa, who had been adored for a long time, to compose the music. There were about 250 staff members in total, and the production period was about two years. The 20 or so main staff members were almost the same as in the previous work, with only the animation director changing. In the previous work, the character design was done by Hisashi Eguchi and the animation director by Hideki Hamasu, but in this work, both were done by Takeshi Honda. The reason for this is that the animation director is a very important and burdensome position, and the animators who have the skills and abilities that Kon would like to work with are usually those prefer to draw key frames rather than the animation director, making it difficult to ask them to continue their work. For the character designs, Honda was chosen because he is someone who draws elegant pictures that can appeal to those outside of the animation community and is genuinely talented in the animation industry, in order to make sure that the movie would have reach audiences both within and outside the spectrum of animation fandom. Some of the character designs were done by Kon himself, and all the posters of Chiyoko in the movie were also drawn by Kon.

This is Kon's last movie to utilize cel animation, as his later works were produced using digital ink-and-paint among other digital methods. And most of the scenes are drawn based on Kon's layout.

The budget was initially 130 million yen, and the final budget was around 100 million and a few tens of millions of yen, one of the lowest production costs for an animated film in Japan.

Release
The film was released in North America on September 12, 2003, distributed by DreamWorks' arthouse and foreign movie publishing company Go Fish Pictures, with a total of six screens.

Theatrical anime distribution company Eleven Arts acquired the North American rights and re-released the film theatrically in its original Japanese language version on August 13, 2019, and in an all-new English dubbed version on August 19, 2019.

Box office
Commercially, the film performed modestly on its US release earning $18,732 on its opening weekend and $37,285 during its full three-week release. The film was shown almost exclusively in New York and Los Angeles and received a minimal advertising campaign from Go Fish Pictures, a division of DreamWorks SKG. Although the scale of the release was not large, the merit of the theatrical release was not only in the box-office revenue, but also in the fact that critics would view the film and publish reviews and criticisms in general newspapers, magazines and websites, which would raise awareness of the work and reach an audience outside of the hardcore anime fandom.

Theme
Millennium Actress began with a request to make a trompe l'oeil movie like the previous Perfect Blue. However, it was only a film technique, not a film theme. Both works share the same methodology of "blurring the boundary between fiction and reality," and both works are like two sides of the same coin for Kon. The previous film focused on the negative side of human nature, while this film focuses on the positive side. The previous film depicted the gradual blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality, while this film seamlessly connects fiction and reality from the beginning, and shows the characters freely moving back and forth between fiction and reality. The technique of mixing fiction and reality was used to express the protagonist's uneasy inner world in the previous film, and used in this film for a fun adventure, turning the film from psycho-horror and suspense to a tricky and humorous entertainment.

In the previous film, he tried to confuse the audience by depicting the inner turmoil and chaos of the main character through the mixture of fiction and reality, but in this film, his intention is not to confuse the audience, but to let the audience enjoy the mixture of fiction and reality itself. He aimed to create a film a kind of The Adventures of Old Lady Blowing Smoke by mixing fiction and reality to the point where it becomes meaningless to distinguish between them.

There are various kinds of trompe l'oeil paintings, but one example that Kon gave to the staff was Utagawa Kuniyoshi's ukiyoe "At first glance he looks very fierce, but he is actually a kind person" (みかけハこハゐがとんだいゝ人だ). At first glance, it appears to be the face of a single person, but upon closer inspection, one can see that many people are intertwined, and he likened this characteristic of the painting, "non-faces coming together to form a face," to the concept of this work, "lies piling up to reveal the truth.

The film has a complex structure in which the staff members who visit the legendary actress for an interview experience her life story in a fictional world where the actress' past and the movies she appeared in intersect, making the story a mixture of reality and fiction as well as a tribute to various classic movies. The main character is modeled on Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, and the movies that appear in the film include a period piece in the style of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, a film by Yasujiro Ozu, a chanbara (sword fighting) story featuring Kurama Tengu, a monster story that borrows images from Godzilla, and a science fiction story.

The story follows the personal story of Chiyoko Fujiwara, an elderly actress, and gradually becomes a muddle of reality, dreams, and movies. Each episode repeats a series of scenes of "chasing, running, and falling" in different situations and times. Her life, the sum of all of these, also repeats various setbacks and revivals while continuing to chase after Man with Key, who is almost an illusion. This work is basically a repetition of the same episode, a cyclical story like Boléro in music. Kon said that this idea of a fractal structure owes a lot to the music of Susumu Hirasawa. The story also reflects the hospitalization Kon experienced after his debut as a manga artist, and the frustration and struggle he felt at that time: "Everything is ruined, but can I still make a comeback?" This film is famous for making many audiences feel betrayed by Chiyoko's last line. Kon said that the process of human growth is a repetition of death and rebirth, in which the values we have accumulated up to that point become unacceptable in a new phase, and even if we rebuild them once they are broken, they become unacceptable again in a new phase, and he involved the audience in the fractal of the film by asking them whether they would be able to get up and continue to "chase, run, and fall" even after they "fell" at the end of the film.

Kon said, "There is no single solution - that's what I want most for my work to be. I want people to see it in many different ways."

Critical reception
Millennium Actress was favorably received by critics, gaining a 93% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan said of the film "as a rumination on the place movies have in our personal and collective subconscious, Millennium Actress fascinatingly goes where films have not often gone before". Kevin M. Williams of the Chicago Tribune gave the movie 4 stars and put his feelings for the film this way: "A piece of cinematic art. It's modern day Japanese animation at its best [...] It's animated, but it's human and will touch the soul of anyone who has loved deeply". In February 2004, Cinefantastique listed the anime as one of the "10 Essential Animations", stating that it "represents a new maturity for anime, one where the technical achievements of 40 years are finally put at the full service of an emotionally rich story."

Awards
Millennium Actress received the Grand Prize in the Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival, tying with Spirited Away. Additionally, it won the awards of Best Animation Film and Fantasia Ground-Breaker at the 2001 Fantasia Film Festival. It was awarded the Feature Film Award at the 8th Animation Kobe. The movie took home the prestigious Ofuji Noburo Award at the 2002 Mainichi Film Awards, and was honored with the Orient Express Award at the 2001 Festival de Cine de Sitges in Spain. The film was nominated for four Annie Awards in 2004, including Outstanding Direction and Writing. It was also promoted by its studio as a contender for the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but it was not nominated.

title: Millennium Actress


text:
Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned

Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned is the fourth studio album by English electronic music group the Prodigy. It was first released on 11 August 2004 in Japan, on 23 August 2004 in the United Kingdom by XL Recordings, and on 15 September 2004 in the United States by Maverick Records. Recorded almost entirely using Propellerhead Reason and mastered with Pro Tools, the album contrasts with the group's previous releases, and features a larger use of vocals than their previous album The Fat of the Land (1997). Keith Flint and Maxim Reality do not provide any contribution to the official record, which leaves Liam Howlett as the sole band member to do so for a first and last time in the group's history.

The title is a play on the name of the Walter Mosley novel Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Despite achieving commercial success upon release, the album is among the band's lowest sellers. As a result, XL and Maverick dropped the group after the release of the compilation album Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005.

Background
In 1996, the Prodigy rose to fame outside their native UK with "Firestarter", the lead single from The Fat of the Land, which was released in 1997 and topped several charts, including the Billboard 200. The band ended the tour that promoted the album, taking a break from touring and recording and writing material for their fourth studio album. To coincide with the departure of Leeroy Thornhill during the period, the band shut down their official website for over two years, with its home page replaced with a logo of the band and the text "We will be back" set against a black background, leading to rumours that the band went on hiatus. The website was relaunched prior to releasing a new single in 2002.

The single released in that year, and one of the songs intended to be featured on the album was "Baby's Got a Temper". Generating controversy upon release for the lyrics by Keith Flint, which heavily focused on the misuse of the drug rohypnol, the song was met with mostly negative reviews from critics. Liam Howlett has since disowned the song. Despite its apparently low popularity, the song reached the top five of the Canadian Singles Chart and UK Singles Chart. It was intended to be released as a single from the then-upcoming album. Eventually, the group went in another direction, and the plan to include the song on the album was cancelled. Because it was left a non-album single, in 2008, the band's official website's discography classified it as an EP.

Recording
Pre-production was done at Mews Recording Studios, while recording began in September 1998 and ended in April 2004. Unlike their predecessors, which featured contributions from the entire band, with Keith Flint only appearing on the group's third album at the time, Liam Howlett recorded the album mostly by himself in similar vein to Experience (1992), using the Propellerhead Reason program installed on his Macintosh laptop. Moet Mastered, Damian Taylor, and Emily Lazar mastered the album via Pro Tools on the same computer.

Although the production process started in 1998, Howlett disliked the sound of the new album. He initially took a break in 2000, to "go out with my mates and get drunk". He returned to Essex in 2001 to resume work on the record, but after six songs were written, he hired producer Neil McLellan, moving to a house after four months and then returning to the original studio:

"My studio is crammed with equipment, but I ended up feeling I was being overcome by it all—it was just too much. I used to go to bed every night thinking 'Tomorrow, I'm going to write the tune. Tomorrow is going to be the day', but nothing ever happened. Eventually Neil McLellan pointed out that we'd been in the studio for four months without having anything to show for it. [...] Nat (his wife and All Saints member) was doing her own record so we weren't spending a lot of time together, but there were always dogs to stroke and videos to watch and gardens to walk 'round, so I didn't ever feel like I was at work—I was too laid-back. [...] Neil [McLellan] said we had to get out, get back to London. I knew I physically couldn't sit in my room any more, and for the first time in my life I listened to someone else and realised I actually needed help. It wasn't that I needed help with the writing, just that I needed help finding the right headspace to get into the right frame of mind. I wanted to write a good album—one I was happy with—but to do that I knew I'd have to jerk myself out of [the] situation I was in and start again."

Howlett purchased and brought a laptop, a copy of the Reason program and selected a "Thermionic Culture Phoenix valve compressor and Culture Vulture distortion unit, a Korg Micro Keyboard, a Manley Laboratories valve EQ and a 1970s Korg MS20 analogue keyboard". He would write the songs in "his bed", and then create them using the equipment. After the recording was finished, Taylor, Mastered and Lazar mixed the album with Pro Tools, completing development on the album.

Of the three members of the Prodigy, only Howlett is present on the album musically. Actress Juliette Lewis, Oasis frontmen Liam and Noel Gallagher, Kool Keith of the Ultramagnetic MCs, who was previously featured on "Diesel Power" from The Fat of the Land, American rapper Twista, Shahin Badar, American hip hop musician Princess Superstar and the Magnificent Ping Pong Bitches were guest musicians on the album. "This album is about reminding people what The Prodigy was always about—the beats and the music", Howlett wrote on a blog of a fansite after finishing the album. He also noted that his intention was to use vocals mostly as an extension of the sound rather than the main focal point, as was the case on The Fat of the Land.

Composition
Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned is a shift in style that differs from previous releases. Although it was recorded heavily using Propellerhead Reason, the album features contributions from various musicians.

The album opens with "Spitfire", named after and a tribute to the World War II plane of the same name. The song, which features Juliette Lewis on backing vocals, was featured on the soundtrack of the 2005 horror film House of Wax. "Girls" begins with a sample from "Style of the Street" by Broken Glass. When the beats and bass enter, its structure changes from that of an industrial hip hop song to excessive distortion and noise. The vocal samples used in this track are from D. Train song "You're the One for Me". "Memphis Bells" segues from "Girls", and includes Princess Superstar on vocals.

Other tracks include elements unusual for a song from the Prodigy. "Get Up Get Off" features Twista (who co-wrote the song) on lead vocals. "Hotride" (whose music video was rejected by Howlett after completion) interpolates elements from "Up, Up and Away", while "Wake Up Call" was about waking up in the morning and getting "back on tour". "Action Radar"'s beat was influenced by early hip hop music, but Howlett does not mention this, even in the booklet.

"Medusa's Path" was inspired by "[Damian] Taylor's parents'" trip to Iran. This song is a six-minute instrumental that shares elements from "Elahaye Naz", and samples a remix of a Jaydee song titled "Plastic Dreams". What Howlett called "analogue shit" was the synthesizer that was used for "Phoenix". When "Medusa's Path" segues to this track, the synthesizer enters. The song is accompanied by a repeating sample of the Shocking Blue song "Love Buzz". Following the track is "You'll Be Under My Wheels", the second time Kool Keith collaborated with the band, though his only lyrics are "I rock, I roll." "You'll Be Under My Wheels" would be later used for the soundtrack of the 2005 racing video game Need for Speed: Most Wanted and the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. "The Way It Is", samples Michael Jackson's 1983 single "Thriller", follows, while the album's final track, "Shoot Down", includes a sample from "My World Fell Down", a song performed by Sagittarius. This sample had been used earlier on the unreleased live track "Trigger".

Promotion
"Girls" was released on 30 August 2004 as the lead single from Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, entering the UK Singles Chart at No. 19. "Hotride", released on 1 November 2004 in the United Kingdom, was not eligible to enter the UK charts as the CD was released in extended play format with three additional B-sides, and so did not conform to chart regulations. "Spitfire" was released on 4 April 2005 as the album's third and final single. "Memphis Bells", released on 28 June 2004, was exclusively available online as a digital download via a website promoting the album, in a limited edition of 5,000 copies. Each copy was a combination of customer-chosen instrumental, rhythmic, and melodic options, of which 39,600 choices were available. Five mixes were sold in three file formats, WAV, two audio mixes in MP3, and a 5.1 DTS surround sound mix and all were free of digital rights management. The experiment was a success, with all copies being sold out in over 36 hours, despite server problems from the demand.

Release
Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned debuted at the top spot on the UK Albums Chart in its first week, and performed well in Australia, reaching number five on the ARIA Album Chart. However, with three singles, the album did not have any major hits worldwide. A limited edition of 5,000 copies of the album was released, sporting a black, inverted cover variant and no other extras. In Japan and the United States, the album contained a reworked version of "Girls", entitled "More Girls", which features Maxim Reality on vocals. It was promoted by a promotional double A-sided 12" vinyl of "Girls" and "Memphis Bells", released in very limited numbers on 21 June 2004, as well as a tour that lasted over two years.

Reception
The album was released to mixed reviews, despite being commercially successful. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 53, based on 23 reviews. Drowned in Sound critic Adam Anonymous described the album's overall sound thus: "while Howlett may show his age occasionally throughout Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, minus the circus-freak sideshow, all that remains is some very slightly contemporary dance music to get down to." Tim O'Neil of PopMatters felt that the album, while "not bereft of highlights", is nonetheless "the first Prodigy album that does not in some way build of its predecessor, and it suffers". In contrast, Pitchfork, as well as Rolling Stone, Q, The Guardian, AllMusic and several other publications were more critical, stating that the album sounded like an underdeveloped recording.

In February 2012, French electronic duo Justice included it in the NME list of "100 Great Albums You've Never Heard".

Track listing
Sample credits
 * "Girls" contains elements from "Style of the Street" performed by Broken Glass licensed courtesy of Abyss Music Ltd. Written by J. Martinez/F. Cooke, published by Abyss Music Ltd, and elements from "You're the One for Me" written by Hubert Barlay Eaves III/James Williams, published by Zella Music (BMI) and Blue Image Music (PRO) (and as administrator fro Diesel Music (BMI)), both divisions of Unidisc Music Inc.
 * "Hot Ride" contains elements from "Up Up and Away" written and composed by Jim Webb. Published by EMI Sosaha Music Inc/Jonathan Three Music Co.
 * "Medusa's Path" contains elements from "Elahaye Naz" composed by Rooholah Khaleghi and performed by Gholamhossein Banan, the copyright in the composition and sound recording of which is owned by Iran Seda Art and Cultural Company. This title includes a sample of "Plastic Dreams (Hohner Retro Mix)" performed by Jaydee licensed courtesy of, division EMI Music BV. Written by Robin Albers, published by TBM Publishing/EMI Music Publishing Holland BV.
 * "Phoenix" contains elements from "Love Buzz" performed by Shocking Blue licensed courtesy of Red Bullet Productions BV written by Robert van Leeuwen and published by Nada Music BV.
 * "The Way It Is" based upon "Thriller" written by Rod Temperton and published by Rodsongs/Almo Music Corp (ASCAP).
 * "Shoot Down" contains elements from "My World Fell Down" performed by Sagittarius under licence from Sony Music. Written by John Carter/Geoff Stephens. Published by Carter-Lewis Music Pub. Co. Ltd.

Notes
 * $undefined$ signifies vocals written by
 * "You'll Be Under My Wheels" is stylised as "You'll Be UNDER MY WHEELS".

Personnel
The Prodigy
 * Liam Howlett – production, programming, keyboards, synthesizers, sampling, guitar, bass guitar, engineering, mixing
 * Maxim Reality – vocals on "More Girls"
 * Keith Flint – vocals on "Hotride" (El Batori Mix)

Additional musicians, co-producers and engineers
 * Neil McLellan – co-production, additional programming, engineering, mixing
 * Damian Taylor – Pro Tools engineer
 * Matt Robertson – additional programming, "stab creation" on "Spitfire", guitar on "Phoenix", "recreation work" on "The Way It Is"
 * Juliette Lewis – vocals on "Hotride", "Spitfire" and "Get Up Get Off"
 * Ping Pong Bitches – vocals on "Girls"
 * Princess Superstar – vocals on "Memphis Bells"
 * Twista – vocals on "Get Up Get Off"
 * Shahin Badar – vocals on "Get Up Get Off"
 * David Pemberton – additional production on "Get Up Get Off"
 * Kool Keith – vocals on "Wake Up Call" and "You'll Be Under My Wheels"
 * Hannah Robinson – additional vocals on "Hotride" and "Wake Up Call"
 * Scott Donaldson – guitar on "Hotride"
 * Louise Boone – additional vocals on "Wake Up Call", "Action Radar", "Phoenix", "The Way It Is"
 * Jim Hunt – flute on "Wake Up Call"
 * Paul "Dirtcandy" Jackson – vocals on "Action Radar"
 * Mike Horner – guitar on "Action Radar" and "Shoot Down"
 * Jim Davies – guitar on "You'll Be Under My Wheels"
 * Rinse – "recreation work" on "The Way It Is"
 * Liam Gallagher – vocals on "Shoot Down"
 * Noel Gallagher – bass guitar on "Shoot Down"
 * Jan "Stan" Kybert – additional production on "Shoot Down"
 * Emily Lazar – mastering (at The Lodge)
 * House & Cook – sleeve artwork

title: Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned


text:
Picasa

Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by Idealab) in 2002. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the word casa (Spanish for "house") and "pic" for pictures.

Native applications for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and macOS were available. Linux support was provided by bundling the Windows version alongside the Wine compatibility layer. An iPhoto plugin and a standalone program for uploading photos were available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

In July 2004, Google acquired Picasa from Lifescape and began offering it as freeware. The name was also registered by Google as an LLC. On February 12, 2016, Google announced it was discontinuing support for Picasa Desktop and Picasa Web Albums, effective March 15, 2016, and focusing on the cloud-based Google Photos as its successor. Picasa Web Albums, a companion service, was closed on May 1, 2016.

Windows
, the latest version of Picasa is 3.9, which supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, and has Google+ integration for users of that service. Version 3.9 also removed integration with Picasa Web Albums for users of Google+.

Linux
Since June 2006, Linux versions have become available as free downloads for most distributions of the Linux operating system. It is not a native Linux program but an adapted Windows version that uses the Wine libraries. Google has announced that there will be no Linux version for 3.5. Currently, Google has only officially offered Picasa 3.0 Beta for Linux.

On April 20, 2012, Google announced that they were deprecating Picasa for Linux and will no longer maintain it for Linux.

To use latest version of Picasa on Linux, Linux users can use Wine and install Picasa for Windows. Linux users can use other programs to upload to Picasa Web Albums, including Shotwell and Digikam.

Mac OS X
On January 5, 2009, Google released a beta version of Picasa for Mac (Intel-based Macs only). Also, a plugin is available for iPhoto to upload to the Picasa Web Albums hosting service. There is also a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploading tools for OS X 10.4 or later. The Picasa for Mac is a Google Labs release.

Organization and editing
For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags, facial recognition, and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction, and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing, and image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting up page layouts. There is also integration with online photo printing services. Other simple editing features include adding text to the image. Picasa supports Google's WebP image format as well as the JPG format and most Raw image format (RAW files). A user can view and edit RAW files and save the finished edit (as JPG, or other forms) without any changes to the original RAW file.

Keywords
Picasa uses picasa.ini files to keep track of keywords for each image. In addition to this, Picasa attaches IPTC Information Interchange Model (IPTC) keyword data to JPEG files, but not to any other file format. Keywords attached to JPEG files in Picasa can be read by other image library software like Adobe Photoshop Album, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, digiKam, Aperture, and iPhoto.

According to the Picasa Readme, Picasa can parse Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) data. However, it cannot search local files for existing XMP keywords.

Searching
Picasa has a search bar that is always visible when viewing the library. Searches are live, so that displayed items are filtered as one types. The search bar will search filenames, captions, tags, folder names, and other metadata.

Picasa also has an experimental feature that allows searching for images that contain certain colors with the "color" operator.

Viewing
Picasa has no separate view window. There is only an "edit view" with a viewing area. Fullscreen view is available in slideshow mode, by holding down the ctrl+alt keys while in "edit view", or by pressing the Alt Gr key. This feature is also available through the context menu of Windows Explorer, and provides a way to start the Picasa editor as well.

Backup
In Picasa 2 and earlier versions, changes to pictures made in Picasa overwrite the original file, but a backup version of the original is saved in a hidden folder named "Originals" in the same folder as the original picture ( on Mac OS X).

In Picasa 3, changes to pictures made in Picasa are saved to a hidden file  in the same folder as the original picture. This allows multiple edits to be performed without altering the original image. Viewing the picture in Picasa or using the Picasa Photo Viewer will apply modifications on the fly, whereas viewing through other programs (such as Windows XP's Photo and Fax Viewer) will display the original image. Changes can also be made permanent using the "Save" function, where the original file is backed up in a hidden folder  located in the same folder as the original picture and the modified version is written in its place.

Face recognition
On August 15, 2006, Google announced it had acquired Neven Vision, whose technology can be used to search for features within photos such as people or buildings. Google applied this technology for face recognition, and this functionality was launched on Picasa Web Albums on September 2, 2008.

Neven Vision incorporates several patents specifically centered around face recognition from digital photo and video images.

Geotagging
Since June 2007, Picasa can write geographic coordinates to Exif metadata, thus geotagging an image.

Since version 3.5 of Picasa, geotagging may be done directly inside Picasa, in the Places panel.

The geotagging functionality is described in the Picasa User's Guide.

Picasa Web Albums
Besides Google+, Picasa also integrated with Picasa Web Albums, an image hosting and sharing web service. The service allowed users with a Google account to store and share their photos on the service. Users with a Google+ account received unlimited storage for photos of a resolution less than 2048x2048 pixels; all others received unlimited storage for photos of a resolution less than 800x800.

Hello
Hello by Google's Picasa was a free computer program that enabled users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs. It was similar to an instant messaging program because it allowed users to send text, but Hello focused on digital photographs. Users could opt to view the same pictures as their friends in real-time. One of the advantages claimed at the website is that photos could be shared through firewalls.

The service was canceled at the end of 2006, and users were instructed to try the Picasa "Blog This" functionality for uploading pictures to their blogs. According to the official website, the Hello project was shut down on May 15, 2008.

Discontinuation
On February 12, 2016, Google announced that the Picasa desktop application would be discontinued on March 15, 2016, followed by the closure of the Picasa Web Albums service on May 1, 2016. Google stated that the primary reason for retiring Picasa was that it wanted to focus its efforts "entirely on a single photos service" the cross-platform, web-based Google Photos. While support for the desktop version of Picasa ended, Google stated that users who downloaded the software, or who chose to download it prior to the March 15th deadline could still be able to use its functionality, albeit with no support from Google.

title: Picasa


text:
Billy Coutu

Wilfrid Arthur "Billy" Coutu (March 1, 1892 – February 25, 1977), nicknamed "Wild Beaver", was a Canadian professional ice hockey defenceman who played ten seasons in the National Hockey League for the Montreal Canadiens, the Hamilton Tigers, and the Boston Bruins. He is the only player ever to have been banned from the NHL for life, as a result of his attack on a referee in 1927.

While a member of the Montreal Canadiens, Coutu was one of the players hospitalized during the cancelled 1919 Stanley Cup series, won the Stanley Cup in the 1923–24 NHL season, and was captain of the team in the 1925–26 NHL season. After his eviction from the NHL, Coutu played a total of four years in the Canadian-American Hockey League (C-AHL) and American Hockey Association (AHA), then coached the C-AHL's Providence Reds.

Personal life
Billy Coutu's last name is sometimes incorrectly spelled "Couture", an error which appears in many NHL history books and, for a time, even showed up on the Montreal Canadiens website. Several hockey history books, including The Hockey News "Habs Heroes" by Ken Campbell incorrectly attribute his name to a photograph of teammate Louis Berlinguette. He and his family pronounced their name "Kootoo", which was sometimes confused with "Couture".

Coutou's brother, Louis, was a trapper, who in 1928 discovered a message in a bottle from a survivor of the shipwreck of the SS Kamloops.

Coutu's wife Gertrude was the sister of Wilhemina Aird Stewart, the mother of Mary Morenz, wife of Hockey Hall of Fame member Howie Morenz and grandmother to their daughter Marlene Geoffrion, wife of Bernie Geoffrion, another Hall of Famer. Howie Morenz played with Coutu on the Canadiens.

Playing career
Coutu turned professional with the Canadiens in 1916–17, the last season of the NHA. He stayed with the Canadiens when the new NHL formed for 1917–18. During the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1919, Coutu and four other teammates contracted influenza and were hospitalized. The 1919 Stanley Cup series was cancelled.

After playing the 1920–21 NHL season with the Hamilton Tigers, Coutu was traded back to Montreal prior to the start of the 1921–22 NHL season, along with Sprague Cleghorn, in exchange for Harry Mummery, Amos Arbour, and Cully Wilson, in the NHL's first multiple-player trade.

Wearing No. 9, Coutu was named Canadiens captain in 1925–26, replacing Sprague Cleghorn. After the 1925–26 NHL season, Coutu was deemed expendable and traded to the Boston Bruins in exchange for defenceman Amby Moran who ultimately played just 12 games for the Canadiens.

During his first practice with the Bruins, Coutu body-slammed Eddie Shore. Coutu's forehead hit Shore's skull, severing Shore's ear. Shore visited several doctors who wanted to amputate the ear, but finally found one who sewed it back on. After refusing anaesthetic, Shore used a mirror to watch the doctor sew the ear back on. Shore claimed Coutu used his hockey stick to cut off the ear, and Coutu was fined $50; Shore later recanted and Coutu's money was refunded. At the end of Game 4 of the 1927 Stanley Cup Finals, Coutu started a bench-clearing brawl, apparently at the request of coach Art Ross, by assaulting referee Jerry Laflamme and tackling referee Billy Bell in the corridor. As a result, he was expelled from the NHL for life; the longest suspension to date. On October 8, 1929, the suspension was lifted allowing Coutu to play in minor professional leagues, where he played into his late 30s with Minneapolis and also coached for several years. He never played in the NHL again, although the lifetime ban was lifted in 1929–30 and Coutu was reinstated in 1932–33 at the insistence of Canadiens owner Leo Dandurand.

Transactions

 * November 24, 1916 – Signed as a free agent by Montreal Canadiens (NHA).
 * November 26, 1917 – Rights retained by Montreal Canadiens after NHA folded.
 * November 27, 1920 – Loaned to Hamilton Tigers by Montreal Canadiens as part of trade of Jack McDonald, Harry Mummery and Dave Ritchie to Hamilton for Jack Coughlin, Samuel (Goldie) Prodgers and Joe Matte.
 * January 26, 1921 – Returned to Montreal Canadiens from loan to Hamilton Tigers.
 * November 15, 1921 – Fined $200 and suspended by Montreal Canadiens for rough play.
 * March 8, 1923 – Missed seven games due to a broken wrist suffered in a game vs. Toronto St. Patricks.
 * January 21, 1925 – Suspended two games and fined $100 by NHL for misconduct.
 * January 19, 1926 – Suspended one game and fined $100 by NHL for tripping referee Jerry Laflamme vs Ottawa Senators.
 * October 22, 1926 – Traded to Boston Bruins by Montreal Canadiens for Amby Moran.
 * April 13, 1927 – Suspended for life from the NHL for assaulting referee Jerry Laflamme, tackling referee Billy Bell, and starting a bench-clearing brawl after a Stanley Cup game.
 * January 5, 1928 – Traded to New Haven (C-AHL) by Boston with Pat (Nobby) Clark for cash.
 * January 28, 1928 – Suspended for the season by C-AHL for hitting George Redding of Boston with his stick in January 23, 1928 game.
 * January 29, 1928 – Suspension lifted by C-AHL and changed to a $200 fine.
 * August 19, 1928 – Traded to Minneapolis (AHA) by New Haven (C-AHL) for cash.
 * November 8, 1928 – Released by Minneapolis (AHA).
 * October 8, 1929 – Lifetime suspension from NHL lifted.
 * October 2, 1934 – Named manager of Providence (C-AHL).
 * March 24, 1935 – Ejected from C-AHL game for abusing referee Jack Cameron.

title: Billy Coutu


text:
Farragut Square

Farragut Square is a city square in Washington, D.C.'s Ward 2. It is bordered by K Street NW to the north, I Street NW to the south, on the east and west by segments of 17th Street NW, and interrupts Connecticut Avenue NW. It is the sister park of McPherson Square two blocks east. It is serviced by two stops on the Washington Metro rail system: Farragut North on the Red Line and Farragut West on the Blue, Orange, and Silver Lines.

Designed by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, Farragut Square is a hub of downtown D.C., at the center of a bustling daytime commercial and business district. The neighborhood includes major hotels, legal and professional offices, news media offices, travel agencies, and many restaurants including two underground food courts. Sometimes events are scheduled for the lunchtime crowds which gather in and around the square, such as the free Farragut Fridays series, held every Friday from 9 a.m. to dark from July through September, which features outdoor work and relaxation spaces, among other attractions. The park is the scene of popular D.C. pastimes like outdoor movies and yoga in the park. With its heavy pedestrian traffic, it also serves as a popular site for food trucks, leafleting, TV camera opinion polls, and for commercial promotions and political activity such as canvassing and demonstrations.

The most prominent institution on the square is the Army Navy Club on the southeast. Since the commercial building boom of the 1960s, there is little residential property in the area, and the square is mostly quiet after business hours. Many of the sandwich shops and coffeehouses that cater to neighborhood workers close before the dinner hour, as do the many street vendors. In recent years, however, especially since the 2003 rehabilitation of the park, movie screenings and similar evening activities have become more common, as have nightclubs in adjacent downtown areas.

Monday through Friday, several food trucks congregate on streets surrounding Farragut Square.

Statue
In the center of the square is a statue of David G. Farragut, a Union admiral in the American Civil War who rallied his fleet with the cry, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" He was the "First Admiral in the Navy." Its only inscription is "Farragut." The statue was sponsored by an act of Congress, authorizing $20,000 on April 16, 1872. It was sculpted by Vinnie (Ream) Hoxie and dedicated April 25, 1881 by President James A. Garfield and First Lady Lucretia Garfield.

The statue and park are maintained by the National Park Service and administered as part of its National Mall and Memorial Parks unit. A proposal to build an underground parking garage below it was rejected in 1961.

title: Farragut Square


text:
George Dvorsky

George P. Dvorsky (born May 11, 1970) is a Canadian bioethicist, transhumanist and futurist. He is a contributing editor at io9 and producer of the Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He was chair of the board for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and is the founder and chair of the IEET's Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, a group that is working to secure human-equivalent rights and protections for highly sapient animals. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

Dvorsky is a secular Buddhist, progressive environmentalist, ancestral health advocate, and animal rights activist. Primarily concerned with the ethical and sociological impacts of emerging technologies, specifically, "human enhancement" technologies; he seeks to promote open discussion for the purposes of education and foresight. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including technoscience, ethics, existential risks, artificial intelligence, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and futurology, from a democratic transhumanist perspective.

Uplift ethics
Dvorsky presented an argument for non-human animal biological uplift at the IEET Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights conference at Stanford University in May 2006; and wrote the first published article in defence of the Ashley Treatment in November 2006,  and subsequently the only bioethicist cited by Ashley X's parents in their defense.

Existential risk
Dvorsky also presented an argument warning of the decline of democratic values and institutions in the face of existential and catastrophic risks at the Global Catastrophic Risks: Building a Resilient Civilization conference in November 2008.

Dysonian SETI
Dvorsky, along with Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury, published a critique of SETI in the May 2012 Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) arguing that SETI techniques and practices have become outdated. In its place, Dvorsky, Ćirković, and Bradbury advocated for what they called Dysonian SETI, namely the search for those signatures and artefacts indicative of highly advanced extraterrestrial life.

Space development
Dvorsky has written extensively in favor of space exploration and has both promoted and criticized various Megascale engineering concepts.

Dyson sphere
Dvorsky gained some notoriety in 2012 after writing about Dyson spheres, hypothetical structures intended to collect the entire energetic output of a star with solar power collectors. While Dvorsky presented it as a solution to humanity's resource needs including power and living space, Forbes blogger Alex Knapp and astronomer Phil Plait, among others, have criticized Dvorsky's article.

"Dismantling Mercury, just to start, will take 2 x 1030 joules, or an amount of energy 100 billion times the US annual energy consumption ... [Dvorsky] kinda glosses over that point. And how long until his solar collectors gather that much energy back, and we’re in the black?"

"At one AU – which is the distance of the orbit of the Earth, the Sun emits 1.4 x 103 J/sec per square meter. That’s 1.4 x 109 J/sec per square kilometer. At one-third efficiency, that’s 4.67 x 108 J/sec for the entire Dyson sphere. That sounds like a lot, right? But here’s the thing – if you work it out, it will take 4.28 x 1028 seconds for the solar collectors to obtain the energy needed to dismantle Mercury. That’s about 120 trillion years."

Other publications including Popular Science, Vice, and skeptical blog Weird Things followed up on this exchange. None of them note the above numerical inaccuracies, although Weird Things does point out Plait's misunderstanding regarding bootstrapping, which Knapp agreed with in an update to his post. James Nicoll noted in his blog that Knapp seriously underestimated the area of a sphere.

title: George Dvorsky


text:
Talk:Free Protestant Episcopal Church

'''We have given copyright clearance to all our homepages. +Bishop Primus Horst-Karl F. Block, D.D.,LL.D., Ph.D. THE INTERNATIONAL FREE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH'''

Copyright Clearance
Glad to see the copyright release. Even so, a Wikipedia article should never be just a recapitulation of a group's home page, IMHO. Very few homepages would qualify as NPOV, or meet other stylistic or content guidelines.

Hope that the Bishop-Primus will contribute to the discussion. 207.69.140.20 16:52, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Possible source
See  Doug Weller  talk 13:18, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

title: Talk:Free Protestant Episcopal Church


text:
User:ShaunMacPherson/Archive1/

Archive 1

title: User:ShaunMacPherson/Archive1/