March 2, 2011
LVMH (Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton) is a French holding company and the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate. It is the parent of around 60 sub-companies that each manage a small number of prestigious brands including Dom Pérignon, Belvedere Vodka, Marc Jacobs, and TAG Heuer. These daughter companies are, to a large extent, run autonomously. The group was formed after mergers brought together champagne producer Moët et Chandon and Hennessy, a leading manufacturer of cognac. In 1987, they merged with fashion house Louis Vuitton to form the current group.
Christian Dior, the luxury goods group, is the main holding company of LVMH, owning 42.38% of its shares, and 59.3% of its voting rights. Bernard Arnault, majority shareholder of Dior, is Chairman of both companies and CEO of LVMH. His successful integration of various famous aspirational brands into the group has inspired other luxury companies into doing the same. Thus Gucci (now part of the French conglomerate PPR) and Richemont have also created extended portfolios of luxury brands. The oldest of the LVMH brands is wine producer Château d’Yquem, which dates its origins back to 1593.
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March 2, 2011
John Galliano (b. 1960) is a British fashion designer who was head designer of French haute couture houses Givenchy and Christian Dior. He led Dior from 1996 to 2011, when he was abruptly dismissed following his arrest over an alleged anti-Semitic tirade in a Paris bar.
The same day, a video surfaced of Galliano on a similar rant in the same bar the previous December. He was convicted of making ‘public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity,’ and fined €6,000.
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March 2, 2011
News Corporation is the world’s third-largest media conglomerate (behind The Walt Disney Company and Time Warner). The company’s Chairman & Chief Executive Officer is Rupert Murdoch. News Corp was created in 1979 by Murdoch as a holding company for News Limited (which he inherited in 1952 following the death of his father, Sir Keith Murdoch). The main asset left to him was ownership of the Adelaide afternoon tabloid, The News.
News Ltd. made its first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when it purchased the San Antonio Express-News. Soon afterwards it founded the National Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976 it purchased the New York Post. In 1981 News Corp bought half of the movie studio 20th Century Fox, buying the other half in 1984. In 1996, Fox established the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news station to compete against Ted Turner’s rival channel CNN. In 2007 News Corporation reached an agreement to purchase Dow Jones, publishers of The Wall Street Journal, for an estimated $5.6 billion.
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March 2, 2011
Pleo is an animatronic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus. It was designed by Caleb Chung, the co-creator of the Furby.
Chung selected this species of dinosaur because its body shape, stocky head, and relatively large cranium made it ideal for concealing the sensors and motors needed for lifelike animation. Each Pleo ‘learns’ from its experiences and environment through a sophisticated artificial intelligence and develops an individual personality.
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March 2, 2011
Marvel vs. Capcom is a series of fighting games created by Capcom in which characters created by Marvel Comics and Capcom’s own characters appear together. While it was the first Vs. series involving Capcom, the Marvel brand exists to distinguish it from Capcom’s other Vs. series with SNK (Capcom vs. SNK), and Tatsunoko Production (Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars).
The Marvel characters depicted in these games were often based on their incarnations in various 1990s animated series (particularly X-Men), and were often voiced by the same voice actors.
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March 2, 2011
Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) was a Latvian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected the label, and even resisted classification as an ‘abstract painter.’ 1946 saw the creation of Rothko’s transitional ‘multiform’ paintings. He gradually transitioned from surrealistic, myth-influenced works of the early part of the decade to the highly abstract, Clyfford Still-influenced forms of pure color. For Rothko, these blurred blocks of various colors, devoid of landscape or human figure, let alone myth and symbol, possessed their own life force. They contained a ‘breath of life’ he found lacking in most figurative painting of the era.
He started with the application of a thin layer of binder mixed with pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas on which he painted significantly thinned oils, creating a dense mixture of overlapping colors and shapes. His brush strokes were fast and light. Rothko used several original techniques that he tried to keep secret even from his assistants. Electron microscopy and ultraviolet analysis showed that he employed natural substances such as egg and glue, as well as artificial materials including acrylic resins, phenol formaldehyde, and modified alkyd. One of his objectives was to make the various layers of the painting dry quickly, without mixing of colors, such that he could soon create new layers on top of the earlier ones.
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March 1, 2011
Ubuntu [ooh-boon-too] is a free operating system that uses the Linux kernel (the central component of most computer operating systems). The word ‘ubuntu’ is an old African word meaning ‘humanity.’ With an estimated global usage of more than 12 million users, Ubuntu is designed primarily for desktop use, although netbook and server editions exist as well. Web statistics suggest that Ubuntu’s share of Linux desktop usage is about 50%, and indicate upward-trending usage as a web server.
Ubuntu is sponsored by the UK-based company Canonical Ltd., owned by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. Canonical generates revenue by selling technical support and services tied to Ubuntu, while the operating system itself is entirely free of charge.
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March 1, 2011
Ubuntu Cola [ooh-boon-too] is a soft drink certified by The Fairtrade Foundation, a charity based in the United Kingdom that works to empower disadvantaged producers in developing countries by tackling injustice in conventional trade, in particular by promoting and licensing the Fairtrade Mark, a guarantee that products retailed in the UK have been produced in accordance with internationally agreed Fairtrade standards.
Ubunto Cola is made with Fairtrade sugar from Malawi and Zambia, and is the first UK cola to be Fairtrade certified. It is available for sale in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and online, in cans, 500 ml PET plastic bottles, and 275 ml glass bottles.
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March 1, 2011
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as ‘the flagship of the left.’ Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City. It has bureaus in Washington, D.C., London, and South Africa, with departments covering Architecture, Art, Corporations, Defense, Environment, Films, Legal Affairs, Music, Peace and Disarmament, Poetry, and the UN. The publisher and editor is Katrina vanden Heuvel.
According to its founding prospectus of 1865, ‘The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.’ Notable contributors have included Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Bertrand Russell, Hunter S. Thompson, Leon Trotsky, George Orwell, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, and John Maynard Keynes.
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March 1, 2011
The Weekly Standard is an American neoconservative opinion magazine published semi-weekly since 1995 by News Corporation. Currently edited by founder William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard has been described as a ‘redoubt of neoconservatism’ and as ‘the neo-con bible.’
Many of the magazine’s articles are written by members of conservative think tanks located in Washington, D.C.: the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. The magazine’s website blog, titled the ‘Daily Standard,’ is edited by John McCormack and Daniel Halper and produces daily articles and commentary.
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March 1, 2011
The Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) formerly known as the Lunar Electric Rover (LER) is a vehicle designed by NASA for extra-vehicular activity on a planetary surface or in-space missions. The SEV is the size of a small pickup truck, it has 12 wheels, and can house two astronauts for up to two weeks. The pressurized module contains a small bathroom with privacy curtains and a shower head producing a water mist for sponge baths. It also contains cabinets for tools, workbench areas and two crew seats that can fold back into beds.
The SEV consists of a chassis and cabin module, and will allow the attachment of tools such as cranes, cable reels, backhoes and winches. Designed for 2, this vehicle is capable of supporting 4 in an emergency. With wheels that can pivot 360 degrees, the SEV is able to drive in any direction. This vehicle is designed to be used with or without the pressurized module. Astronauts can enter and exit without space suits directly from an airlock docking hatch, or through a suitport without the need to depressurize the habitat module.
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February 28, 2011
Herman’s Hermits is an English pop band, formed in Manchester in 1963. For a brief time the group rivalled the Beatles on the charts, and was the top-selling pop act in the U.S. in 1965. The group’s manager and producer, Mickie Most (who controlled the band’s output), emphasized a simple, non-threatening and clean-cut image, although the band originally played R&B numbers. This helped Herman’s Hermits become hugely successful in the mid-1960s but hampered the band’s creativity, relegating Noone, Hopwood, Leckenby and Green’s original songs to quickly recorded B-sides and album cuts.
Their first hit was a cover of Earl Jean’s ‘I’m Into Something Good’ (written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King), which reached No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart and No. 13 in the US in 1964. They never topped the British charts again, but had two US Billboard Hot 100 No. 1’s with ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ and ‘I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am’ (a British music hall song dating from 1911). These songs were aimed at a US fan-base, with Peter Noone exaggerating his Manchester accent; the band was not fond of either song and they were never released as singles in Britain.
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