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Mario Pinball Land

Mario Pinball Land, known in Europe and Japan as Super Mario Ball, is a pinball video game developed by Fuse Games and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance, released in 2004. It is the ninth Mario game for the Game Boy Advance and is considered a spin-off into the Super Mario series of games. The game was later re-released for the Wii U Virtual Console.

Gameplay
To proceed, Mario must collect enough stars to open specific doors, a gameplay element borrowed from Super Mario 64. There are 35 stars to collect in total. Mario must explore different areas to reach his aim of saving the princess. There are five different worlds, each guarded by a boss. The worlds consist of the Fun Fair (the main starting area), Grassy Greens, Frosty Frontier, Shifting Sands, and Bowser's Castle.

Plot
Mario and Princess Peach visit a funfair and wait in line to try a ride called the Air Cannon, where the rider is turned into a ball via the Spherasizer and shot out of the cannon. As Peach is about to take her turn, two Goombas kidnap her by aiming the cannon towards Bowser's Castle. To save Peach, Mario uses the Spherasizer to turn into a ball, allowing for the pinball action of the game.

Development
As Adrian Barritt and Richard Horrocks, veterans of the Pro Pinball series, had founded Fuse Games, they decided that, in the words of Barritt "we needed a bit of impact before they would even bother to speak to us". So they thought about a Mario pinball game, and produced a playable demo, featuring both the possible first area and the last one with a showdown with Bowser. Afterwards Barritt and Horrocks went to Seattle to pitch the idea to Nintendo of America executives, and were approved. As the resources were limited, Fuse decided not to develop the game for the GameCube, resorting to the Game Boy Advance instead. Barritt added that he considered the portable "[an] ideal platform for a pinball game, something that you can just pick up and knock the ball around for a bit" and stated that "with experience on systems like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System we knew we'd be able to push the hardware of the GBA very hard to its limits". Despite Fuse hiring more people, the whole game was created by a small team of only five people.

Mario Pinball Land was first announced under the working title of Mario Pinball in Nintendo's product release schedule on April 1, 2004, as one of two previously unannounced Mario titles for the GBA alongside an untitled new entry in the Mario Party series that would make use of the handheld's e-Reader peripheral, with a planned release date of May 24. Further details were later revealed during the 2004 E3 expo, with playable demos and a release date of October 4. The game's final name was announced in June 2004 on Nintendo's official website.

Reception
Mario Pinball Land received "mixed" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of three sevens and one eight for a total of 29 out of 40.

Most reviews praised the excellent graphics, but criticized the game for being pointlessly difficult and having overall poor gameplay. IGN's review in particular criticized the gameplay for having "bad table layouts with an overwhelmingly annoying 'playfield reset' element". The review concluded that "the gameplay itself is far more flawed and annoying than it is fun to play". Adrian Barritt later admitted that during development they wound up not making the game easy enough for pinball beginners as "you had to take the time to control the ball", which led to Fuse trying to not repeat the same mistakes in follow-up Metroid Prime Pinball. Not all reviews were negative, however, as GameSpot said that the game "combines Mario with pinball to create an interesting kind of adventure game".

Nintendo World Report gave the game a 7.5/10.

title: Mario Pinball Land


text: File:Twin Linear Aerospike XRS-2200 Engine.jpg

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


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Swanscombe railway station

Swanscombe railway station is a railway station that serves the village of Swanscombe in north Kent, England. It is 21 mi down the line from London Charing Cross.

History
The first station, a small wooden halt, was opened in 1908. In 1930 the present station was opened 840 yd east of the original.

The station is awkwardly located in a very deep chalk cutting, with a long staircase from the booking office leading to the up platform. The down platform is reached across a road overbridge and down another long flight of stairs. There is no step-free access to either platform. Passengers requiring step-free access are advised to use Greenhithe railway station.

The ticket office, on the 'up' side at road level, is located in a recent building. This is staffed only during part of the day; at other times a ticket machine is available and is located outside the ticket office. Until the 1980s, separate staffed ticket offices were located in buildings on each platform, suitably equipped with ticketing machinery. It was named and signed as Swanscombe Halt until the 1980s.

Services
Services at Swanscombe are operated by Southeastern and Thameslink using, , , and  EMUs.

The typical off-peak service in trains per hour is:
 * 2 tph to London Charing Cross via Sidcup
 * 2 tph to Luton via Woolwich Arsenal and Greenwich
 * 2 tph to Gravesend
 * 2 tph to Rainham via Chatham

Additional services, including trains to and from London Cannon Street via Woolwich Arsenal and Lewisham call at the station during the peak hours.

title: Swanscombe railway station


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Chinese character classification

Chinese characters are generally logographs, but can be further categorized based on the manner of their creation or derivation. Some characters may be analysed structurally as compounds created from smaller components, while some are not decomposable in this way. A small number of characters originate as pictographs and ideographs, but the vast majority are what are called phono-semantic compounds, which involve an element of pronunciation in their meaning.

A traditional six-fold classification scheme was originally popularized in the 2nd century CE, and remained the dominant lens for analysis for almost two millennia, but with the benefit of a greater body of historical evidence, recent scholarship has variously challenged and discarded those categories. In older literature, Chinese characters are often referred to as "ideographs", inheriting a historical misconception of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Overview
Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes—which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length. In some special cases, characters may denote non-morphemic syllables as well; due to this, written Chinese is often characterised as morphosyllabic. Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet, which generally represent phonemes, the distinct units of sound used by speakers of a language. Despite their origins in picture-writing, Chinese characters are no longer ideographs capable of representing ideas directly; their comprehension relies on the reader's knowledge of the particular language being written.

The areas where Chinese characters were historically used—sometimes collectively termed the Sinosphere—have a long tradition of lexicography attempting to explain and refine their use; for most of history, analysis revolved around a model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. More recent models have analysed the methods used to create characters, how characters are structured, and how they function in a given writing system.

Structural analysis
Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components, which are often independent characters in their own right, adjusted to occupy a given position in the compound. Components within a character may serve a specific function: phonetic components provide a hint for the character's pronunciation, and semantic components indicate some element of the character's meaning. Components that serve neither function may be classified as pure signs with no particular meaning, other than their presence distinguishing one character from another.

A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs, phonographs and signs—having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively, as well as classes corresponding to each combination of component types. Of the $3,500$ characters that are frequently used in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds.

The Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui (b. 1935) presents three principles of character function adapted from earlier proposals by Tang Lan (1901–1979) and Chen Mengjia (1911–1966), with semantographs describing all characters whose forms are wholly related to their meaning, regardless of the method by which the meaning was originally depicted, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledges the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs.

Pictographs
Most of the oldest characters are pictographs, representational pictures of physical objects. Examples include ('Sun'),  ('Moon'), and  ('tree'). Over time, the forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write. As a result, it is often no longer evident what thing was originally being depicted by a pictograph; without knowing the context of its origin in picture-writing, it may be interpreted instead as a pure sign. However, if its use in compounds still reflects a pictograph's original meaning, as with in, it can still be analysed as a semantic component.

Indicatives
Indicatives depict an abstract idea with an iconic form, including iconic modification of pictographs. In the examples below, the numerals representing small numbers are represented a corresponding number of strokes, directions are represented by a graphical indication above or below a line. Parts of a tree are communicated by indicating the corresponding part of the pictogram meaning 'tree'.

Compound ideographs
Compound ideographs, also called associative compounds, logical aggregates, or syssemantographs, are compounds of two or more pictographic or ideographic characters to suggest the meaning of the word to be represented. Xu Shen gave two examples: Other characters commonly explained as compound ideographs include:
 * , formed from and
 * , formed from (later reduced to 亻) and
 * , composed of two trees
 * , composed of three trees
 * , depicting a man by a tree
 * , depicting a hand on a bush (later written 採)
 * , depicting a hand above an eye
 * , depicting the sun disappearing into the grass, originally written as enclosing 日—later written 暮.

Many characters formerly classed as compound ideographs are now believed to have been misidentified. For example, Xu's example 信 representing the word ←  'truthful', is usually considered a phono-semantic compound, with  ←  as phonetic and  as a signific. In many cases, reduction of a character has obscured its original phono-semantic nature. For example, the character is often presented as a compound of  and. However this form is probably a simplification of an attested alternative form 朙, which can be viewed as a phono-semantic compound.

Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz have argued that no ancient characters were compound ideographs. Boltz accounts for the remaining cases by suggesting that some characters could represent multiple unrelated words with different pronunciations, as in Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the compound characters are actually phono-semantic compounds based on an alternative reading that has since been lost. For example, the character ←  'peace' is often cited as a compound of  with. Boltz speculates that the character 女 could represent both the word ←  'woman' and the word  ←  'settled', and that the  signific was later added to disambiguate the latter usage. In support of this second reading, he points to other characters with the same 女 component that had similar pronunciations in Old Chinese: ←  'tranquil',  ←  'to quarrel' and  ←  'licentious'. Other scholars reject these arguments for alternative readings and consider other explanations of the data more likely, for example viewing 妟 as a reduced form of 晏, which can be analysed as a phono-semantic compound with 安 as phonetic. They consider the characters 奻 and 姦 to be implausible phonetic compounds, both because the proposed phonetic and semantic elements are identical and because the widely differing initial consonants and  would not normally be accepted in a phonetic compound. Notably, Christopher Button has shown how more sophisticated palaeographical and phonological analyses can account for the examples of Boodberg and Boltz without relying on polyphony.

While compound ideographs are a limited source of Chinese characters, they form many created in Japan to represent native words. Examples include:
 * 'to work', formed from 人 'person' and 動 'move'
 * 'mountain pass', formed from 山 'mountain', 上 'up' and 下 'down'

As Japanese creations, such characters had no Chinese or Sino-Japanese readings, but a few have been assigned invented Sino-Japanese readings. For example, the common character 働 has been given the reading, taken from , and even borrowed into modern written Chinese with the reading.

Loangraphs
The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in the initial development of Chinese writing, and has continued throughout its history. Some loangraphs are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as  and. For example, the character was originally a pictograph of a wheat plant, with the meaning  'wheat'. As this was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese word 'to come', 來 was loaned to write this verb. Eventually, 'to come' became established as the default reading, and a new character was devised for 'wheat'. When a character is used as a rebus this way, it is called a, translatable as 'phonetic loan character' or 'rebus character'.

The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with the distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with the same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa.

As with Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform, early Chinese characters were used as rebuses to express abstract meanings that were not easily depicted. Thus, many characters represented more than one word. In some cases the extended use would take over completely, and a new character would be created for the original meaning, usually by modifying the original character with a determinative. For instance, originally meant 'right hand', but was borrowed to write the abstract adverb. Modern usage is exclusively the latter sense, while, which adds the radical, represents the sense meaning 'right'. This process of graphical disambiguation is a common source of phono-semantic compound characters.

Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as the various Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, as well as contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name is often used as a loangraph for its respective syllable. However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total: when transcribing into Chinese, loangraphs are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This is regularly done with corporate brand names: for example, Coca-Cola's Chinese name is.

While the word jiajie has been used since the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), the related term tongjia is first attested during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The two terms are commonly used as synonyms, but there is a distinction between jiajiezi being a phonetic loan character for a word that did not originally have a character, such as using for  ('east'), and  being an interchangeable character used for an existing homophonous character, such as using  for.

According to Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978), "One of the most dangerous stumbling-blocks in the interpretation of pre-Han texts is the frequent occurrence of loan characters."

Phono-semantic compounds
Phono-semantic compounds ( or ) represent most of the modern Chinese lexicon. They are created as compounds of at least two components:
 * a phonetic component via the rebus principle, with approximately the correct pronunciation.
 * a semantic component, also called a determinative or ''signific', one of a limited number of characters that supplies an element of meaning. In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary.

As in ancient Egyptian writing, such compounds eliminated the ambiguity caused by phonetic loans. This process can be repeated, with a phono-semantic compound character itself being used as a phonetic in a further compound, which can result in quite complex characters, such as 劇 (豦 = 虍 + 豕, 劇 = 刂 + 豦). Often, the semantic component is on the left, but there are other possible positions.

As an example, a verb 'to wash oneself' is pronounced, which happens be homophonous with 'tree', which was written with the pictograph 木. The verb could have simply been written 木, but to disambiguate it was compounded with the character for 'water', which gives some idea of the word's meaning. The result was eventually written as. Similarly, the determinative was combined with  to produce the water-related homophone.

However, the phonetic is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically. It was also often the case that the determinative merely constrained the meaning of a word which already had several. is a case in point. The determinative for plants was combined with. However, does not merely provide the pronunciation. In Classical texts, it was also used to mean 'vegetable'. That is, 采 underwent a semantic extension from 'harvest' to 'vegetable', and the addition of merely specified that the latter meaning was to be understood.

Sound change
Originally characters sharing the same phonetic had similar readings, though they have now diverged substantially. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of Old Chinese. Contemporary foreign pronunciations of characters are also used to reconstruct historical Chinese pronunciation, chiefly that of Middle Chinese.

When people try to read an unfamiliar compound, they will typically assume that it is constructed on phono-semantic principles and follow the rule of thumb to youbian dubian "read the side, if there is a side", and take one component to be the phonetic, which often results in errors. Since the sound changes that had taken place over the two to three thousand years since the Old Chinese period have been extensive, in some instances, the phono-semantic natures of some compound characters have been obliterated, with the phonetic component providing no useful phonetic information at all in the modern language. For instance, ('exceed'),  ('lose', 'donate'), 偷 ('steal', 'get by') share the phonetic 俞 ('agree') but their pronunciations bear no resemblance to each other in Standard Chinese or any other variety. In Old Chinese, the phonetic has the reconstructed pronunciation, while the phono-semantic compounds listed above have been reconstructed as  and  respectively. Nonetheless, all characters containing 俞 are pronounced in Standard Chinese as various tonal variants of, , , and the closely related and.

Simplification
Since the phonetic elements of many characters no longer accurately represent their pronunciations, when the Chinese government simplified character forms, they often substituted phonetics that were simpler to write, but also more accurate to the modern Standard Chinese pronunciation. This has sometimes resulted in forms which are less phonetic than the original ones in varieties of Chinese other than Standard Chinese. For the example below, many determinatives have also been simplified, usually by standardizing existing cursive forms.

Phonetic–phonetic compounds
A technique used with used to write Vietnamese and  used to write Zhuang with no equivalent in China created compounds using two phonetic components. In Vietnamese, this was done because Vietnamese phonology included consonant clusters not found in Chinese, and were thus poorly approximated by the sound values of borrowed characters. Compounds used components with two distinct consonant sounds to specify the cluster, e.g. 𢁋 (blăng; 'Moon') was created as a compound of 巴 (ba) and 陵 (lăng).

Signs
Some characters and components are pure signs, whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. and, whose forms do not give visual hints to the quantities they represent.

Ligatures and portmanteaux
There are a class of characters formed as ligatures of the characters making up multi-syllable words. These are distinct from ideographic compounds, which illustrate the meaning of single morphemes. More broadly, they represent an exception to the prevailing principle that characters represent individual morphemes. A ligature character often retains the word's multi-syllable pronunciation, but can sometimes acquire additional single-syllable readings. Ligatures with pronunciations derived as contractions of the original word can be additionally characterized as portmanteaux. A common portmanteau is, which is a graphical ligature of that is pronounced as a fusion of  and. However, this character was also created at an earlier date as, where it instead functions as a true compound ideograph that represents a single unrelated morpheme. is a common ligature of, and is usually read as. While its alternate readings in other varieties are portmanteaux, the reading used in Mandarin is not, as it was historically changed to an unrelated syllable to avoid sounding like one of the variety's expletives.

Traditional Shuowen Jiezi classification
The Shuowen Jiezi is a Chinese dictionary compiled c. 100 CE by Xu Shen. It divided characters into six categories according to what he thought was the original method of their creation. The Shuowen Jiezi ultimately popularized the six category model which would serve as the foundation of traditional Chinese lexicography for the next two millennia. Xu was not the first to use the term: it first appeared in the Rites of Zhou (2nd century BCE), though it may not have originally referred to methods of creating characters. When Liu Xin (d. 23 CE) edited the Rites he used the term 'six categories' alongside a list of six character types, but he did not provide examples. Slightly different versions of the sixfold model are given in the Book of Han (1st century CE) and by Zheng Zhong, as quoted in Zheng Xuan's 1st-century commentary of the Rites of Zhou. In the postface to the Shuowen Jiezi, Xu illustrated each character type with a pair of examples.

While the traditional classification is still taught, it is no longer the focus of modern lexicography. Xu's categories are neither rigorously defined nor mutually exclusive: four refer to the structural composition of characters, while the other two refer to techniques of repurposing existing shapes. Modern scholars generally view Xu's categories as principles of character formation, rather than a proper classification.

The earliest extant corpus of Chinese characters are in the form of oracle bone script, attested from c. 1250 BCE at the site of Yin, the capital of the Shang dynasty during the Late Shang period (c. 1250). They primarily take the form of short inscriptions on the turtle shells and the shoulder blades of oxen, which were used in an official form of divination known as scapulimancy. Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of modern written Chinese, and is already a mature writing system in its earliest attestation. Roughly one-quarter of oracle bone script characters are pictographs, with rest either being phono-semantic compounds or compound ideographs. Despite millennia of change in shape, usage, and meaning, a few of these characters remain recognizable to modern Chinese readers.

Over 90% of the characters used in modern written vernacular Chinese originated as phono-semantic compounds. However, as both meaning and pronunciation in the language have shifted over time, many of these components no longer serve their original purpose. A lack of knowledge as to the specific histories of these components often leads to folk and false etymologies. Knowledge of the earliest forms of characters, including Shang-era oracle bone script and the Zhou-era bronze scripts, is often necessary for reconstructing their historical etymologies. Reconstructing the phonology of Middle and Old Chinese from clues present in characters is a field of historical linguistics. In Chinese, historical Chinese phonology is called.

Derivative cognates
Derivative cognates are the smallest category, and also the least understood. They are often omitted from modern systems. Xu gave the example of 考 'to verify' with 老  'old', which had similar Old Chinese pronunciations of  and  respectively. These may have had the same etymological root meaning 'elderly person', but became lexicalized into two separate words. The term does not appear in the body of the dictionary, and may have been included in the postface out of deference to Liu Xin.

title: Chinese character classification


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User:Letatcest

Well.. I 'discoverd' Wikipedia about a year ago, have written some articles in the Dutch language, but I felt a little bit too anonymous writing as my IP-address.

So, now starting as my universal nickname Letatcest :) Now for anyone the challenge: what is it an abbreviation of?

title: User:Letatcest


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Category:Geography of Tibet

 * The Geography of Tibet — in Asia.

title: Category:Geography of Tibet


text:
Category:Glaciers of Tibet

 *  of Tibet — the  located within.

title: Category:Glaciers of Tibet


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Northfleet railway station

Northfleet railway station serves the town of Northfleet in the Borough of Gravesham in Kent, England. It is 21 mi down the line from London Charing Cross. Train services are operated by Southeastern and Thameslink.

The ticket office located on platform 2, on the 'down' side, is situated in the substantial station building. This is staffed between 06:00 - 10:00 Monday to Friday; at other times a ticket machine can be found outside the entrance, accepting card and contactless payments only.

There is no step-free access to platform 1 on the 'up' side. A foot tunnel connects the two platforms.

The station is very close to Ebbsfleet International station (the NNE entrance is only 334 yd from Northfleet's station), but passengers (using public transport) will find it far easier to access Ebbsfleet International from Gravesend or Greenhithe, as these stations are more accessible and offer easy access to Fastrack bus services. The walking route between the two stations is 0.6 mi or 0.8 mi and a suitable pedestrian link has not been built because of funding issues and objections from Land Securities.

Services
Services at Northfleet are operated by Southeastern and Thameslink using, , , and  EMUs.

The typical off-peak service in trains per hour is:
 * 2 tph to London Charing Cross via Sidcup
 * 2 tph to Luton via Woolwich Arsenal and Greenwich
 * 2 tph to Gravesend
 * 2 tph to Rainham via Chatham

Additional services, including trains to and from London Cannon Street via Woolwich Arsenal and Lewisham call at the station during the peak hours.

title: Northfleet railway station


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Apex (headdress)

The apex (plural: apices) was a cap worn by certain priests (the flamines and Salii) in ancient Rome.

The essential part of the apex, to which alone the name properly belonged, was a pointed piece of olive-wood called diminutively an apicula, the base of which was surrounded with a lock of wool. This was worn on the top of the head, and was held there either by fillets only, or, as was more commonly the case, was also fastened by means of two strings or bands,  or offendices, though the latter word is also interpreted to mean a kind of button, by which the strings were fastened under the chin.

The flamines were forbidden by law to go into public - or even into the open air - without the apex, and hence we find the expression of alicui apicem dialem imponere used as equivalent to the appointment of a Flamen Dialis. Sulpicius was deprived of the priesthood, only because the apex fell from his head whilst he was sacrificing.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the cap as being of a conical form. On ancient monuments it can appear round or conical.

The albogalerus, or albus galerus was a white cap worn by the flamen dialis, made of the skin of a white victim sacrificed to Jupiter, and had the apex fastened to it by means of an olive-twig.

From the word apex was formed the epithet apicatus, applied to the flamen dialis by Ovid.

title: Apex (headdress)


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Talk:Apex (headdress)

Text is derived from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Apex.html, which is stated to be in the public domain. Burschik 10:17, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

title: Talk:Apex (headdress)


text:
Category:Glaciers of Pakistan

 * Glaciers in Pakistan — the  located within northern Pakistan.

title: Category:Glaciers of Pakistan


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Brilliant Corners

Brilliant Corners is a studio album by American jazz musician Thelonious Monk. It was his third album for Riverside Records, and the first, for this label, to include his own compositions. The complex title track required over a dozen takes in the studio.

Recording
The album was recorded in three sessions in late 1956 with two different quintets. "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are" and "Pannonica", on which Monk played the celeste, were recorded on October 9 with saxophonists Ernie Henry and Sonny Rollins, bassist Oscar Pettiford, and drummer Max Roach. The former composition was titled as a phonetic rendering of Monk's exaggerated pronunciation of "Blue Bolivar Blues", which referred to the Bolivar Hotel where Pannonica de Koenigswarter resided; Monk had met her during his first trip to Europe in 1954.

On October 15, Monk attempted to record the title track with the same band during a four-hour session. The complexity of the title track became a challenge for Monk's sidemen, who attempted twenty-five takes, and led to tension between him and Henry, who nearly broke down mentally, and Pettiford, who exchanged harsh words with Monk during the session. Monk tried to make it easier on Henry by not playing during his alto solo. During one of the takes, producer Orrin Keepnews and others in the control room could not hear Pettiford's playing and checked his bass microphone for a malfunction, but ultimately realized that he was pantomiming his playing. Without a completed single take, Keepnews ultimately pieced together the album version from multiple takes.

On December 7, "Bemsha Swing" was recorded with Paul Chambers on bass and trumpeter Clark Terry, who replaced Henry, and Monk recorded a solo piano version of "I Surrender, Dear".

Composition
The title track has an unconventional song structure that deviates from both standard song form and blues structures, as well as from Monk's African-American music roots. Its ternary form employs an eight-bar A section, followed by a seven-bar B section, and a modified seven-bar A section, and features a double-time theme in each second chorus and complex rhythmic accents.

"Bemsha Swing" was the only composition on the album that Monk had recorded in a previous version.

Reception
According to Down Beat magazine, Brilliant Corners was the most critically acclaimed album of 1957. Nat Hentoff, the magazine's editor, gave it five stars in a contemporary review and called it "Riverside's most important modern jazz LP to date." Jazz writer David H. Rosenthal later called it a "classic" hard bop session. Music critic Robert Christgau said that, along with his 1958 live album Misterioso, Brilliant Corners represents Monk's artistic peak. In his five-star review of the album, Allmusic's Lindsay Planer wrote that it "may well be considered the alpha and omega of post-World War II American jazz. No serious jazz collection should be without it." Awarding a maximum four-star rating, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings included the album in its suggested “core collection” of essential recordings.

Legacy
In 2003, Brilliant Corners was one of fifty recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. It has also been included in the reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, with reviewer Andrew Gilbert saying it "marked Monk's return as composer of the first order." Because of its historical significance the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

Track listing
All tracks written by Thelonious Monk except where noted

Side One
 * 1) "Brilliant Corners" - 7:42
 * 2) "Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are" - 13:24

Side Two
 * 1) "Pannonica" - 8:50
 * 2) "I Surrender, Dear" (Harry Barris) - 5:25
 * 3) "Bemsha Swing" (Thelonious Monk, Denzil Best) - 7:42

Personnel
Musicians
 * Thelonious Monk – piano; piano and celeste on "Pannonica", solo piano on I Surrender Dear
 * Ernie Henry – alto saxophone on "Brilliant Corners", "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are" and in ensemble on "Pannonica"
 * Sonny Rollins – tenor saxophone (except "I Surrender Dear")
 * Oscar Pettiford – double bass on "Brilliant Corners", "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are" and "Pannonica"
 * Max Roach – drums (except "I Surrender Dear"); timpani on "Bemsha Swing"
 * Clark Terry – trumpet on "Bemsha Swing"
 * Paul Chambers – double bass on "Bemsha Swing"

Production
 * Orrin Keepnews – producer
 * Jack Higgins – engineer
 * Joe Tarantino – mastering

title: Brilliant Corners