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Billy Bragg is an English musician who blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs. His lyrics mostly deal with political or romantic themes. His music career has lasted more than 30 years and he has collaborated with the likes of Johnny Marr, Michelle Shocked, and Kirsty MacColl.

In 1977, Bragg formed the punk rock/pub band Riff Raff and toured London’s pubs and clubs. He became disillusioned with his music career and joined the British Army in May 1981. After buying his way out, Bragg began constantly performing concerts and busking around London, playing solo with an electric guitar. After recording and releasing Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy and Brewing Up with Billy Bragg in 1983 and 1984 respectively, he released Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, which became his first top ten album.

With Workers Playtime, released in 1988, Bragg added a backing band and accompaniment. The album Don’t Try This at Home was released in 1991 and included the song “Sexuality,” which made it into the United Kingdom Singles Chart. Bragg released the album William Bloke in 1996 after taking time off to help raise his son. Bragg, the band Wilco and Natalie Merchant record an album of unrecorded lyrics of Woody Guthrie’s to music.

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Titanic is a 1997 disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. It features Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, two members of different social classes who fall in love about the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the ship.

The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some supporting characters (such as members of the ship’s crew) are based on real historical figures. Production of the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the real wreck of the RMS Titanic. He envisioned the love story as a means to engage the audience with the real-life tragedy. A reconstruction of the ship was built in Baja, California. Titanic became, at the time, the most expensive film ever made, costing approximately $200 million with funding from Paramount Pictures and 20^th Century Fox.

Originally slated to be released on July 2, 1997, post-production delays pushed back Titanic’s release date to December 19, 1997. As a result, the press believed that the film would fail and cause the downfall of both studios. Despite low expectations, the film was both a major critical and commercial success, winning 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and becoming the highest-grossing film of all time with a worldwide gross of approximately $1.8 billion.

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The “Piltdown Man” is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex in England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human.

The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.

The Piltdown Man hoax succeeded so well because at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment had believed that the large modern brain had preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery had provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and cultural prejudice also played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists.

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Born in Orange County, California, Mike Mills is the bass player of the band R.E.M. Though known primarily as a bassist, piano player and background singer, his musical repertoire includes many other keyboard, guitar, string, wind and percussion instruments. He also contributes to much of the band’s songwriting.

As a young boy, Mills moved with his family to Macon, Georgia. His father Frank was a singer who appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, while his mother Adora was a piano teacher, which helped Mills develop a love of music at an early age. He met and formed a band with drummer friend Bill Berry in high school. They met Peter Buck and Michael Stipe after starting at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Mills, Berry, Buck, and Stipe decided to drop out of college and focus on their band, now called R.E.M. The band quickly developed a following and were soon signed to I.R.S. Records. Mills is responsible for the songwriting of some of R.E.M.’s songs, including “Find the River”, “Why Not Smile”, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” He is known for his collection of Nudie suits that he often wears on stage and were first seen in the 1994 video for “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and then regularly on the subsequent 1995 Monster tour.

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The Boston Tea Party was an act of direct action by the American colonists against the British government in which they destroyed many crates of tea belonging to the British East India Company and dumped it in Boston Harbor. The incident has been seen as helping to spark the American Revolution and remains to this day one of the most iconic events in American history.

The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies. One of the protestors was John Hancock, a wealthy Bostonian, who organized a boycott of tea from China. Bostonians suspected the removal of the Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British parliament to squash American freedom. The evening before the tea was due to landed, Captain Roach appealed to the Governor to allow his ship to leave without unloading the tea.

The Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as either Mohawk or Narragansett Indians and armed with small hatchets and clubs, headed toward Griffin’s Warf, where lay Dartmouth, and the newly-arrived Beaver and Eleanor. Casks of tea were brought up from the hold of the deck, the casks were opened and the tea dumped overboard. By dawn, over 342 cases or 90,000 lbs of tea worth an estimated $1.87 million had been consigned to the waters of Boston Harbor.

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Gemini 6A was a manned spaceflight in NASA’s Gemini program. It was the fifth manned Gemini flight, the thirteenth manned American flight and the twenty-first spaceflight of all time. It was the last United States spacecraft to be flown using batteries as the primary power source.

Gemini 6 was originally intended to be the first mission to dock with an Agena Target Vehicle. However, after a failure in the Agena Target six minutes after its launch, the mission was canceled. NASA decided to substitute an alternate mission: a meeting in space of two Gemini spacecraft. Gemini 6A would launch eight days after the launch of Frank Borman and Jim Lovell’s Gemini 7.

Walter Schirra and Thomas Safford made it into orbit three days later in the Gemini 6A. Using guidance from the computer as well as his own piloting, Schirra performed the space rendezvous with the companion spacecraft in orbit on the afternoon of December 15. Once in formation, the two Gemini capsules flew around each other, coming within a foot of each other, but never touching. One of Gemini’s primary goals – orbital rendezvous – had been achieved.

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Nostradamus was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book Les Porpheties, the first edition of which appeared in 1555.

Since the publication of this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus has attracted an enthusiastic following, who, along with the popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events. In contrast, most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’ quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power.

None of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus’ quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance. Interest in the work of this prominent figure of the French Renaissance is still considerable, especially in the media and in popular culture and the prophecies has, in some cases, been assimilated to the results of applying the alleged Bible Code, as well as to other purported prophetic works.

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The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Raping of Nanking, was an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army. The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted well into the next six weeks.

Japanese officials lied about civilian death figures and still refuse to reveal them properly today. During the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson, and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. The executions began under the pretext of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians. A large number of women and children were also killed. Most bodies were bound with their hands tied behind their backs.

The total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning or by throwing them into the Yangtze River. In addition to the number of victims, some Japanese nationalists have even disputed whether the atrocities ever happened even though the Japanese government has acknowledged that the incident did occur.

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Dan DeCarlo was an American cartoonist best known as the artist who developed the look of Archie Comics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, modernizing the characters to their contemporary appearance an establishing the publisher’s house style. He is also generally recognized as the creator of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and Josie and the Pussycats.

Previous to Archie, DeCarlo had a remarkable 10-year run on the humor title Millie the Model for Atlas Comics, writing and drawing the slapsticky adventures of Millie Collins and her red-headed friendly nemesis Chili Storm. He was born in New Rochelle, New York and attended New Rochelle High School, followed by Manhattan’s Art Student League from 1938 to 1941, when he was drafted into the United States Army.

Stationed in Great Britain, DeCarlo worked in the motor pool and as a draftsman. He also painted company mascots on the noses of airplanes. In addition to his comic book work, he drew freelance pieces for the magazines The Saturday Evening Post and Argosy. DeCarlo was nominated for the Shazam Award for Best Penciller in 1974. He won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Best Comic Book in 200 for Betty and Veronica.

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Wall Street is a 1987 American film directed by Oliver Stone and features Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, a young stockbroker desperate to succeed, and a wealthy but unscrupulous corporate raider named Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) whom he idolizes. After the success of Platoon, Stone wanted film school friend and Los Angeles screenwriter Stanley Weiser to research and write a screenplay about quiz show scandals in the 1950s. During a story conference, Stone suggested making a film about Wall Street instead.

Reportedly, the character of Bud Fox is said to be a composite of Owen Morrisey, who was involved in a $20 million insider trading scandal in 1985, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, and others. Gordon Gekko was a composite of Boesky, corporate raider Carl Icahn, art collector Asher Edelman, agent Michael Ovitz, and Stone himself. Stone cast Daryl Hannah as Fox’s materialistic girlfriend, but she had problems relating to her character and struggled with the role. Stone also had difficulties with Sean Young, who made her opinions known that Hannah should be fired and that she should play that role instead.

The film was well-received critically and commercially. In addition, Douglas won an Academy Award for Best Actor. Over the years, Weiser has been approached by numerous people who told him that the film changed their life and wanted to be like Gekko.

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