Wikipedia article of the day for January 21, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Never Forget You (Mariah Carey song). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: “Never Forget You” is a song recorded by American singer Mariah Carey (pictured) for her third studio album Music Box. Carey co-wrote the slow jam with Babyface and the pair produced it with Daryl Simmons. Columbia Records released the song on January 21, 1994, as the B-side to “Without You” and promoted it to American urban contemporary radio stations as the album’s fourth single. The lyrics lament the end of a romance. Strings, synthesizers, and percussion characterize the composition; Jermaine Dupri altered them for remixes. Music critics deemed “Never Forget You” unremarkable and derivative. The song peaked at numbers one and three on the US urban contemporary radio charts published by Radio & Records and the Gavin Report, respectively. It also reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and number seven on the Billboard Hot R&B Singles chart. Combined with “Without You”, the single sold 600,000 copies in the US throughout 1994.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 20, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Theodore II Laskaris. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Theodore II Laskaris (1221/1222–1258) was a Byzantine emperor who ruled the Empire of Nicaea from 1254 until his death. Nicaea was a successor state to the Byzantine Empire, after crusaders captured the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. Theodore began to write treatises on theological, historical and philosophical themes in his youth. From around 1242, he was co-ruler with his father, and his relationship with some prominent aristocrats grew tense. Succeeding his father in 1254 Theodore replaced many aristocratic officials and generals with loyalists, including some of low birth. In 1256, he repelled a Bulgarian invasion of Thrace and Macedonia and forced Epirus to cede Dyrrachium on the Adriatic Sea. Epirus allied with Serbia and Sicily, and jointly invaded Nicaea in 1257; Nicaea’s new generals could not resist the invasion. Theodore died in 1258, leaving an underage son, John IV. Michael Palaiologos seized the regency, and usurped the throne soon after.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 19, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Homeworld. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Homeworld is a real-time strategy video game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sierra Studios (co-founder pictured) in 1999 for Microsoft Windows. The science fiction game follows exiles on a spacecraft-constructing mothership who aim to reclaim their ancient homeworld, encountering pirates, mercenaries, traders, and rebels along the way. The player’s fleet carries over between levels, and can travel in a fully three-dimensional space. Alex Garden of Relic served as the game’s director, and Luke Moloney was lead programmer. Metacritic lists Homeworld as the highest rated computer game of 1999 and the third-highest on any platform for the year, although critical opinions were divided on its plot and high difficulty. The game sold over 500,000 copies in its first six months, and received several awards and nominations for best strategy game of the year and best game of the year. Gearbox Software purchased the game rights in 2013 and released a remastered collection in 2015.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 18, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Mark Baldwin (baseball). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Mark Baldwin (1863–1929) was an American right-handed professional baseball pitcher who played seven seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB). Born in Pittsburgh, Baldwin made his professional debut for a Cumberland, Maryland, team in 1883. He made his MLB debut for the Chicago White Stockings in 1887. Baldwin signed with the Columbus Solons of the American Association in 1889, and led the league in innings pitched (513+2⁄3), losses (34), strikeouts (368), and walks (274). In 1890, he played for the Chicago Pirates of the Players’ League and was the league leader in games played as a pitcher (58), innings pitched (492), wins (33), strikeouts (206), complete games (53), and walks (249). He later played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Giants, then went on to a career as a physician. In 346 career MLB games, he pitched to a 154–165 win–loss record with 295 complete games. Baldwin set the single-season MLB wild pitches record with 83 that still stands today.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 17, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Handel’s lost Hamburg operas. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: The music for three of the four operas written by the youthful composer George Frideric Handel (pictured) between 1703 and 1706, when he lived in the German city of Hamburg, is lost apart from a few orchestral fragments. Only the first, Almira, has survived complete. He was able to get Almira and the less successful Nero performed at Oper am Gänsemarkt, the opera house, during the temporary absence of the theatre’s director, Reinhard Keiser. Handel’s last two Hamburg operas, Florindo and Daphne, were not produced before Handel left the city. No music that can be definitively traced to Nero has been identified, although some of it may have been used in later works, particularly Agrippina, which has a similar plot and characters. Fragments of music from Florindo and Daphne have been preserved without the vocal parts, and some of these elements were incorporated into an orchestral suite first recorded in 2012.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 16, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Adamson Tannehill. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Adamson Tannehill (1750–1820) was an American military officer, politician, civic leader, and farmer. Born in Maryland, Tannehill was among the first to join the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, becoming commander of the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment. He then settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was active in the state militia, rising to the rank of major general in 1811. He also served as a brigadier general of United States Volunteers in the War of 1812. Tannehill held several local, state, and national offices, including one term as a Democratic-Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1813 to 1815. He was president of the Pittsburgh branch of the Bank of the United States from 1817 until his death. He also served on the founding boards of several civic and state organizations. Tannehill died in 1820 and was buried at his Grove Hill home outside Pittsburgh. He was later reinterred in Allegheny Cemetery (gravestone pictured).

Wikipedia article of the day for January 15, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is WWJ-TV. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: WWJ-TV (channel 62) is a television station broadcasting in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is owned and operated by the CBS News and Stations group, with studios in the suburb of Southfield. Channel 62 was founded as WGPR-TV in 1975 by William V. Banks as the first Black-owned television station in the continental United States. It produced its own shows and helped launch the careers of Black television hosts and executives such as Pat Harvey, Shaun Robinson, Sharon Dahlonega Bush, and Amyre Makupson. In 1994, when a major affiliation switch threatened to leave CBS without an affiliate station in Detroit, the network moved to buy WGPR-TV and dropped the existing programming in favor of CBS and syndicated programs, later changing the call letters to WWJ-TV. The station’s original studios (pictured) are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and preserved as a museum that opened on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2017. A full news department began operation in January 2023.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 14, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Fleetwood Park Racetrack. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Fleetwood Park was a 19th-century American harness racing track in the Bronx, New York City. The races were a popular form of entertainment, drawing crowds as large as 10,000. The one-mile (1.6 km) course described an unusual shape, with four turns in one direction and one in the other. For the last five years of operation, Fleetwood was part of trotting’s Grand Circuit, one travel guide calling it “the most famous trotting track in the country”. The track operated under several managements between 1870 and 1898, most notably the New York Driving Club, consisting of many wealthy New York businessmen, including members of the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families as well as former US president Ulysses S. Grant and Robert Bonner, owner of the New York Ledger. Economic pressures forced the track to close in 1898, and within two years the property was being subdivided into residential building lots. The meandering route of modern 167th Street runs along a portion of the old racecourse.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 13, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Carucage. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Carucage was a medieval English land tax based on the size of the taxpayer’s estate. It was levied six times: by Richard I in 1194 and 1198, John in 1200, and Henry III in 1217, 1220, and 1224. The taxable value of an estate was initially assessed from the Domesday Book survey, but other methods were later employed, such as valuations based on the sworn testimony of neighbours or the number of plough-teams (example depicted) the taxpayer used. Carucage never raised as much as other taxes, but it helped fund the ransom for Richard’s release in 1194, the tax John paid to Philip II of France on land he inherited in that country, and the cost of Henry III’s military campaigns in England and continental Europe. The tax was an attempt to secure new sources of revenue when new demands were being made on royal finances. Unlike the older danegeld tax, carucage was an experiment in revenue collection and only levied for specific purposes.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 12, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is SMS Prinz Adalbert (1901). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: SMS Prinz Adalbert was an armored cruiser built in the early 1900s for the German Kaiserliche Marine, and was named after Prince Adalbert of Prussia, the former commander-in-chief of the Prussian Navy. Her class included a second ship, Friedrich Carl. Prinz Adalbert was built at the Imperial Dockyard in Kiel. Her keel was laid in April 1900 and she was commissioned on 12 January 1904. She served as a gunnery training ship and made several visits to foreign countries. After the outbreak of World War I in July 1914 she served in the Baltic Sea, and after her sister ship was sunk in November 1914, she became the flagship of a cruiser squadron in the Baltic, conducting operations against Russian forces. She was torpedoed twice by British submarines in 1915. On the second occasion she sank quickly with heavy loss of life; from a crew of 675 men, only 3 were rescued. This was the worst German naval disaster in the Baltic during the war. (This article is part of a featured topic: Armored cruisers of Germany.)

Wikipedia article of the day for January 11, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Rock parrot. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: The rock parrot (Neophema petrophila) is a species of grass parrot native to Australia. Described by John Gould in 1841, it is a small parrot 22 to 24 cm (8+3⁄4 to 9+1⁄2 in) long and weighing 50 to 60 g (1+3⁄4 to 2 oz) with predominantly olive-brown upperparts and more yellowish underparts. Its head is olive with light blue forecheeks and lores, and a dark blue frontal band line across the crown with lighter blue above and below. The sexes are similar in appearance, although the female tends to have a duller frontal band and less blue on the face. The preferred habitats are rocky islands and coastal dune areas from Lake Alexandrina in southeastern South Australia westwards across coastal South and Western Australia to Shark Bay. Unlike other grass parrots, it nests in burrows or rocky crevices mostly on offshore islands such as Rottnest Island. Seeds of grasses and succulent plants form the bulk of its diet. The species is not threatened, but it has suffered in the face of feral mammals.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 10, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is The Firebird. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: The Firebird is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; the original choreography was by Michel Fokine, who collaborated with Alexandre Benois and others on a scenario based on the Russian fairy tales of the magical Firebird and the blessing and curse it possesses for its owner. Set in the evil immortal Koschei’s castle, the ballet follows Prince Ivan, who battles Koschei with the help of the Firebird. It was an immediate success, catapulting Stravinsky to international fame and leading to future collaborations between Diaghilev and Stravinsky, like Petrushka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). Other choreographers have reinterpreted the music with new productions, settings and themes. Stravinsky’s 1919 concert suite remains the most popular today. A film version with the original choreography, featuring what is now the Royal Ballet, was created in 1959.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 9, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Communication. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Communication is usually understood to be the transmission of information. Many models of communication describe it in terms of a source using a coding system to express ideas in the form of a message. The message is sent through a channel to a receiver who decodes it to understand it. For verbal communication, the message is articulated in linguistic form, including regular speech and writing. Nonverbal communication, including body language, touch, and facial expressions, does not rely on a linguistic system. The history of human communication was shaped by the development of technologies such as writing, printing, radio, and the internet. Communication also happens among animals and plants, for example when birds sing to attract mates. Interspecies communication occurs between distinct species, such as flowers using distinctive colors to signal to bees where nectar is located. The main discipline investigating communication is called communication studies.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 8, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. is a landmark 1948 New York Supreme Court decision. It was the first case in the United States dealing with moral rights in authorship. The Soviet composers Dmitri Shostakovich (pictured), Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, and Nikolai Myaskovsky sued Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation for using their compositions in the film The Iron Curtain. Although their compositions were in the public domain in the United States, the composers argued that the film violated their moral rights by using their works in a manner contrary to their beliefs. The court rejected the composers’ argument, holding that there was no clear standard for adjudicating moral rights and that moral rights conflict with free use of public domain works. The decision has been criticized for misunderstanding moral rights and praised for upholding the right of the public to use public domain works over the rights of authors to censor uses that they disagree with.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 7, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Daisy Bacon. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Daisy Bacon (1898–1986) was an American pulp fiction magazine editor and writer, best known as the editor of Love Story Magazine from 1928 to 1947. She was hired in 1926 to assist with “Friends in Need”, an advice column in the magazine, by Street & Smith, a major pulp magazine publisher. Two years later she was promoted to editor. Love Story was one of the most successful pulp magazines, and Bacon was frequently interviewed about her role and her opinions of modern romance. Street & Smith gave Bacon other magazines to edit, including Ainslee’s in the mid-1930s and Pocket Love in the late 1930s. From 1940 to 1947 she took over as editor of Romantic Range, which featured love stories set in the American West, and in 1941 she was also given the editorship of Detective Story. In late 1948 she became the editor of both The Shadow and Doc Savage, but Street & Smith shut down all their pulps the following April.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 6, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Supernova. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: A supernova is a powerful explosion of a star, usually a star that is unable to produce sufficient energy from nuclear fusion to counteract its own gravity. Its remnant will become a diffuse nebula, neutron star or black hole. The peak optical luminosity of a supernova can be comparable to that of an entire galaxy before fading over several weeks or months. Supernovae occur in the Milky Way on average about three times every century; the last one directly observed was Kepler’s Supernova (remnant pictured) in 1604. The most recent naked-eye supernova from another galaxy was SN 1987A, the explosion of a blue supergiant star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of the Milky Way. Supernovae can expel several solar masses of material at velocities up to several percent of the speed of light. They are a major source of cosmic rays, and also the chemical elements from oxygen to rubidium on the periodic table. White dwarfs can also produce supernovae, if they gain enough mass to trigger runaway fusion.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 5, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Kyla (Filipino singer). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Kyla (born January 5, 1981) is a Filipino singer-songwriter. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including eleven Awit Awards and three MTV Pilipinas Music Awards. She gained recognition in 2000 with her debut album Way to Your Heart and its single “Hanggang Ngayon”, which won the International Viewer’s Choice Award for Southeast Asia at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards. She has collaborated with musicians such as American singer-songwriter Brian McKnight and English boy band Blue. Outside of music, she has starred in the drama series Dear Friend (2009) and Villa Quintana (2013–2014), and has expanded her career into reality television as a presenter of the talent competition show Popstar Kids (2005–2007) and as a judge in the variety show singing contest Tawag ng Tanghalan (since 2016). Kyla’s music is primarily influenced by R&B and soul, and she has been credited with helping to redefine the genres in the Philippines. (This article is part of a featured topic: Overview of Kyla.)

Wikipedia article of the day for January 4, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Robert Nimmo. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: Robert Nimmo (1893–1966) was a senior Australian Army officer and the chief military observer (CMO) of the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) from 1950 until his death. Nimmo graduated early from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, to participate in World War I, serving with the Australian Light Horse. He remained in Australia in training and staff roles early in World War II. He then administered command of Northern Territory Force before commanding the logistics effort for the Bougainville campaign, and served as a senior staff officer on First Australian Army headquarters in New Guinea. He commanded a brigade of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, then returned to Australia to lead Northern Command. In 1950, he was made Commander of the British Empire, retired from the army, and was appointed as CMO of UNMOGIP, where he remained until he died on 4 January 1966. Nimmo was the first Australian to command a multinational peacekeeping force.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 3, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is Brooklyn Dodgers 1, Boston Braves 1 (26 innings). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: A 1–1 tie in 26 innings was played by the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves on May 1, 1920, at Braves Field in Boston, still the most innings played in a Major League Baseball (MLB) game. Leon Cadore of Brooklyn and Joe Oeschger of Boston each pitched 26 innings, also a one-game record. Brooklyn scored its only run in the fifth inning, as did Boston in the sixth, and, though both teams threatened to score again several times, the game remained deadlocked. With darkness starting to fall and no artificial lighting, the umpires called a halt after the 26th inning. Other records included Charlie Pick’s 11 at bats in a game without a base hit and first baseman Walter Holke’s 42 putouts. There have been claims that the long pitching appearances ruined the arms of Oeschger and Cadore; this was not so as both pitched several more years in MLB and Oeschger won 20 games in 1921. Their shared record of 26 innings pitched in an MLB game has been repeatedly cited as one that will never be broken.

Wikipedia article of the day for January 2, 2024

Wikipedia article of the day is The Masked Singer (American TV series). Check it out: Article-Link Summary: The Masked Singer is an American reality singing competition television series that premiered on Fox on January 2, 2019. It is part of the Masked Singer franchise and features celebrities singing songs while wearing costumes to conceal themselves. The program employs panelists who guess the celebrities’ identities. In most episodes, after the last performance, a vote of the panelists and the audience eliminates a contestant, who is then revealed. The costumes were inspired by haute couture and designed in the first six seasons by Marina Toybina (pictured), who won a Costume Designers Guild Award and two Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The first five seasons received the highest Nielsen ratings for a non-sports program in the key demographic of adults 18–49. Its success has been credited to the growth of the Masked Singer franchise and interest in adapting South Korean reality television series and other television formats centered on costumes. The tenth season premiered in September 2023.