The Altera Centauri collection has been brought up to date by Darsnan. It comprises every decent scenario he's been able to find anywhere on the web, going back over 20 years.
25 themes/skins/styles are now available to members. Check the select drop-down at the bottom-left of each page.
Call To Power 2 Cradle 3+ mod in progress: https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/call-to-power-2/ctp2-creation/9437883-making-cradle-3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition
I wonder if we should give extra points to someone struck by a meteorite (or any space junk for that matter)
I'd consider that an "unnatural cause" and award the 20 bonus points.
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
Trevor Grills has died aged 54, after an accident at a concert hall in Guildford, Surrey, where he had been due to perform with the folk group Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends. He was a self-employed builder and carpenter with a fine tenor voice who found unexpected fame in his 50s when the amateur singers he worked with were signed to a major record label in a £1m deal.
It was a fairytale story, based around the north Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac, where Grills was born, and where he spent the rest of his life; he went to the local school, and attended Sunday school at the local chapel. His father was a carpenter and builder, and Trevor took over the family business, spending much of his time renovating the old cottages in the picturesque village that were bought by outsiders as second homes. He was also a footballer, playing on the wing for the village team, and because of his burly good looks he was known to the other Fisherman's Friends as "the housewives' choice", along with his group nickname of "Toastie".
Trevor Grills was an accomplished singer with a pure tenor voice. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex The group got together, 15 years ago, simply because they loved singing. Assembled in the village pub on a Friday night would be a group of friends who had known each other since school days, and who had gone on to become fishermen, lifeboatmen, coastguards, builders or artisans. They began to specialise in sea shanties, taking songs from Cadgwith in south-west Cornwall, where there is a strong shanty tradition, and adding in any other seafaring ballads from elsewhere in Britain and around the world, including Sloop John B and the rousing South Australia. Grills enthusiastically took part in the sessions, joining in the a cappella harmony singing, but for years he was reluctant to sing lead – although he would be acknowledged as having one of the finest voices in the group.
Steve Knightley, of the West Country folk group Show of Hands, first met Fisherman's Friends in the mid-90s, when they were rehearsing in the former Methodist chapel that is now a pottery run by their baritone singer Billy Hawkins. "They were friends for whom singing was as natural as having a beer," he says, "though they couldn't read music – they'd just find a harmony and cling on to it!" As for Grills: "He was an absolute gentleman, and the most accomplished of their singers, with a pure tenor voice. He was their star and blue-eyed boy, and they were all proud of him".
The men aimed to enjoy themselves, and never thought of becoming celebrities, but their fame gradually spread, thanks partly to Show of Hands, who invited the group to appear with them at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2001, and join them for the recording of their song Roots. Then came the deal with Universal, the recording of a top 10 gold album, appearances at major festivals including Glastonbury, and plans for a feature film about their remarkable story, to be directed by Nigel Cole, who was responsible for Calendar Girls and Made in Dagenham.
Knightley said: "They were never corrupted by the music business. They were too rooted to be altered like that. They just loved singing and were like a bunch of kids on the road."
Grills became famous within the group for what they called his "bloody miserable songs", one of which he performed at his final London concert, at the Royal Festival Hall, when Fisherman's Friends appeared alongside Show of Hands. One of the most powerful songs of the Fisherman's Friends set that night was the lament The Last Leviathan ("I am the last of the great whales, and I am dying") with Grills powerfully taking the lead, and his nine friends lined up on either side of him adding the chorus.
Just a few days later, he suffered head injuries in an accident at the G Live concert hall, in Guildford, that also caused the death of the band's tour manager, Paul McMullen.
Grills is survived by his wife, Lesley, and three sons, Mark, Paul and Josh.
• Trevor Grills, singer and builder, born 2 January 1959; died 11 February 2013
The teaching of jazz in conservatoires may now be commonplace, but for decades the art was informally learned by listening to records and sharing ideas. Many of the giants who shaped jazz as it sounds today learned from each other, and from the pioneers who preceded them. A rare few learned their music formally and informally in about equal measure. One of that handful was the trumpeter Donald Byrd, who has died aged 80.
Byrd spent much of his life in academic institutions studying everything from composition and music education to law, but his craft as a trumpeter was honed in one of the most famous of all road-going jazz finishing schools – Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Through the ranks of the Messengers, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, there passed a procession of stars-to-be, nurtured by the drummer Blakey's belief that the best young players to hire were the ones with the talent and determination to become bandleaders themselves. Despite a roster of Blakey trumpeters over the years that included Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Wynton Marsalis, one of the most celebrated of brass-playing Messengers was the gifted Byrd.
He was born in Detroit, Michigan, where he attended Cass technical high school. Byrd played in a military band while in the US air force, took a music degree at Wayne State University in Michigan and then studied music education at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He joined the Jazz Messengers in the mid-1950s. Byrd's trumpet predecessors in Blakey's company had already included the graceful, glossy-toned Brown and the Dizzy Gillespie-influenced Kenny Dorham, but the newcomer with his polished phrasing and luxurious tone was recognised as a technical master equal to both.
Donald Byrd joined the Jazz Messengers in the mid-1950s. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns He was even heralded as the new guiding light in jazz trumpet, and the acclaim intensified after Brown died in a 1956 road accident. Byrd's talent seemed to encompass some of Brown's spontaneous, narrative-generating strength and his exquisite tone, as well as Miles Davis's pacing, and the fire and penetrating attack of the first-wave bebop trumpeters inspired by Gillespie. After that racing start, Byrd eventually prioritised academic work over musical creativity – but until the arrival of the similarly skilled Freddie Hubbard, and his own withdrawal to the classroom, Byrd was briefly one of modern jazz's leading young trumpeters.
He was prolifically active in the late 1950s, in demand for sessions on the Savoy, Riverside and Blue Note labels, in the company of Max Roach, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver among others. At the end of the decade he was also leading or co-leading his own ensembles, mostly operating in the laconically pyrotechnical, blues-inflected hard-bop style. Byrd regularly worked with the bop pianist George Wallington and with the alto saxophonist and composer Gigi Gryce, and in 1958 he led a quintet including the Belgian saxophonist Bobby Jaspar on a European tour.
On his return to the US, Byrd teamed up with the excellent baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and the two continued to mine the hard-bop seam with various partners, including the then little-known pianist Herbie Hancock. Byrd sounded as polished as ever, but a shade predictable alongside more individualistic players such as Adams, or Wayne Shorter and Hancock, with both of whom he played on the 1961 album Free Form.
In the early 1960s, Byrd studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and though he periodically visited the Blue Note studios for steadily more easy-listening ventures in the 1960s, African-American musical history became his central preoccupation. He took up posts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the Hampton Institute in Virginia; Howard University in Washington; and North Carolina Central University. He was a pioneering force in establishing jazz studies in American colleges and conservatoires (evolving in the process into a leading African-American ethnomusicologist), regularly lectured for the New York outreach organisation Jazzmobile, and developed an education programme he called Music + Math = Art, to link the teaching of music and mathematics. Byrd later became a distinguished artist in residence at Delaware State University, from 1996 to 2001 and then from 2009, founding a $10,000 scholarship fund in his name.
At Howard, Byrd became chairman of the black music department in the 1970s. Dedicating himself to raising the status of black American music and securing equality for black players, he studied law as well as music to broaden the scope of the advice he could offer in his lectures and workshops. Byrd said in the 1970s that he was addressing "the plight of black musicians in academia … Until we get an integrated view of things with respect to black music, nothing is going to happen". It was this concern, rather than the material success and supposed musical dumbing-down for which he was lambasted, that probably influenced Byrd's decision to embrace the pop- and soul-influenced end of jazz. He wanted to draw attention to the situation of black music in colleges in the most high-profile way he could, even if the results did nothing to enhance the respect his musicianship had previously commanded.
Forming the Blackbyrds soul and funk band from a pool of his Howard University students, Byrd directed some lucrative if artistically unsteady forays into dancefloor jazz and fusion. His million-selling 1973 album Black Byrd made him a major star again, and brought Blue Note more income than the label had ever generated from any release before. But the follow-ups in 1975 and 1976 became increasingly bland.
In 1987, Byrd returned to jazz, recording for the experienced producer Orrin Keepnews's Landmark label, on a primarily hard-bop repertoire that by the final recording, A City Called Heaven (1991), was also including interpretations of Henry Purcell, and the voice of a mezzo-soprano. Byrd's old blazing virtuosity was gone but he could still be an affecting player of ballads, and his front-rank partners included the saxophonists Joe Henderson and Kenny Garrett, and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.
Byrd's legacy is his contribution to music education in a culture that spawned jazz but then neglected it – a role he pursued from the unique vantage point of having been a leading player in the idiom. His work has been sampled by pop and hip-hop artists including Public Enemy and Ice Cube, and many young musicians at work today owe their education, and the widespread acceptance of their art, to his tireless pursuit of stature and respect for jazz.
Byrd married Lorraine Glover in 1955.
• Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II, trumpeter and educator, born 9 December 1932; died 4 February 2013
My aunt, Freda Collier, who has died aged 97, became well-known in the early 1950s as part of the core team of Maurice Wilkins, John Randall and Rosalind Franklin (plus Franklin's PhD student, Raymond Gosling) working at King's College London on the structure of DNA. Freda was Franklin's x-ray photographer and headed the photographic laboratory at King's that produced the famous "photo 51" seen by James Watson from Cambridge University. Watson immediately realised that the molecule revealed was a double helix.
As Watson described later in his book The Double Helix (1968): "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race." After the announcement by Watson and his colleague Francis Crick in 1953 that the structure of DNA had finally been cracked, Freda travelled extensively in the US explaining the x-ray diffraction techniques used by the King's College team.
She was born Freda Ticehurst in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, the youngest of seven surviving children – five girls and two boys. Her early years as a photographer were at the General Electric Company in Wembley, north London, where Randall had previously worked, and it was he who persuaded her to join the King's College team in 1950.
Her fiance had been killed during the second world war, but later she met and married the distinguished Church Army captain Frank Collier and settled in Folkestone. There were no children of the marriage, but she enjoyed the company of her many nieces and nephews, and later in life the triplets of Lynne and Paul Jones – a family who lived across the road – who became her surrogate children. Lynne cared for Freda in the years after Frank's death in 2010.
Freda was a devout Christian and shared fully in the church life of her husband, raising thousands of pounds for charities in different parts of the world. Her forte and passion was propagating plants and selling them at coffee mornings. Her enthusiasm for life was infectious, as was her laugh. Her energy was boundless, and even in her late 80s and partially blind, she and Frank would set off by train for their annual holiday in Lugano, Switzerland, changing trains in Paris laden with luggage (Frank hated flying).
My aunt was the closest confidante of Franklin, who died of ovarian cancer in 1958 before the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962 for unravelling the structure of DNA. It was a great regret to Freda that Franklin's contribution to the discovery was never fully recognised. The eminent physicist JD Bernal once described my aunt's photographs as "among the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken".
Well-known actor who appeared in the long-running 'The Onedin Line':
James Onedin, the protagonist of the long-running BBC television series The Onedin Line, gained his splendid name from a sea nymph. After the programme's creator, Cyril Abraham, had read about mythological figure Ondine, he transposed the "e", thus making her a man. And what a man: Peter Gilmore, who played Onedin in 91 episodes from 1971 to 1980, had tousled hair, flinty eyes, hollow cheeks, mutton-chop sideburns racing across his cheek, lips pulled severely down, chin thrust indomitably forward to face down the brewing gale. He has died aged 81.
The sea captain did not so much talk as emit salty barks that brooked no demur. In 1972, while filming, Gilmore was buzzed by speedboats from the Royal Naval College. Still in character as Onedin, he yelled irascibly at the tyro sailors: "Taxpayers' money! Where are your guns? What use would you be if the Russians came?"
Like Horatio Nelson, Francis Drake and to a lesser extent the early 70s prime minister Edward Heath, the very cut of Gilmore's jib suggested that the British – if only in prime-time costume dramas – still ruled the waves. For many, Gilmore's name conjures up the stirring Adagio from Khachaturian's ballet Spartacus that was used on the opening credits. Madly and marvellously, Onedin set up a shipping line with sailing vessels in late-19th century Liverpool at a time when steamships were taking over the seaways.
By series two, his business model had seen off the sceptics but his wife, Anne, had died in childbirth. That plot twist was partly explained by the fact that the actor who played her, Anne Stallybrass, had decided to return to the theatre.
To honour his dead wife's memory, Onedin added a steamship to his fleet called the Anne Onedin and then allowed Kate Nelligan (as a coal-merchant's eligible daughter) and Caroline Harris (as a 20-something worldly wise widow) to vie for his affections. He spurned both, marrying his daughter's governess, Letty Gaunt, who died of diphtheria. By the eighth and last series, Onedin was married to a third wife, Margarita Juarez, and had become a grandfather.
Before Howards' Way, The Onedin Line was the BBC's nautical franchise: Abraham wrote five novels loosely based on his television scripts, while Gilmore was frequently asked to launch ships and was also bombarded with fan mail and advice from veteran sailors. He parlayed fame into reviving a former career as a singer, releasing in 1974 an album of sailor shanties called Songs of the Sea and in 1977 another called Peter Gilmore Sings Gently.
He regretted that he became too typecast as Onedin to get other lead roles. In 1978 he starred opposite Doug McLure in the film Warlords of Atlantis as an archaeologist searching for the fabled underwater city who ends up battling a giant octopus and other sea monsters.
Gilmore was born in the German city of Leipzig. At the age of six, he moved to Nunthorpe, near Middlesbrough, where he was raised by relatives, later attending the Friends' school in Great Ayton, north Yorkshire. From the age of 14 he worked in a factory, but later studied at Rada. While undertaking national service in 1950 he discovered a talent for singing and after his discharge joined singing groups who performed all over the country.
During the 1950s and 60s he became a stalwart of British stage musicals, appearing in several largely unsuccessful shows, including one called Hooray for Daisy! in which he was the chief human in a drama about a pantomime cow. He even released a single in 1960 as a spin-off from his performance in the musical Follow That Girl, opposite Susan Hampshire. In 1958 he appeared on the pop programme Cool for Cats, where he met the actor Una Stubbs, then one of the Dougie Squires Dancers, who were weekly tasked with interpreting hit songs in movement. The couple were married from 1958 until 1969.
His success at this time in British and US TV commercials led him to be cast in comedies, with 11 appearances in Carry On films, two of which – Carry On Jack (1963) and Carry On Cleo (1964) – gave him early nautical roles. In 1970 he married Jan Waters, with whom he starred in both stage and television productions of The Beggar's Opera, he playing the highwayman Captain Macheath.
The Onedin Line brought Gilmore the fame that had eluded him. In 1976, he and Jan divorced and he started living with Stallybrass, whom he married in 1987. In 1984 a new generation of viewers saw Gilmore as Brazen, the security chief of a distant human colony called Frontios in Doctor Who's 21st series. Brazen died heroically while helping the Doctor escape. Gilmore made his last stage appearance in 1987 in Michael Frayn's Noises Off and his last screen one in the 1996 television movie On Dangerous Ground.
He is survived by Anne and a son, Jason, from his first marriage.
• Peter Gilmore, actor, born 25 August 1931; died 3 February 2013
A death by natural causes, as recorded by coroners and on death certificates and associated documents, is one that is primarily attributed to an illness or an internal malfunction of the body not directly influenced by external forces. For example, a person dying from complications from influenza (an infection) or a heart attack (an internal body malfunction) would be listed as having died of natural causes. Old age is not a scientifically recognized cause of death; there is always a more direct cause although it may be unknown in certain cases and could be one of a number of aging-associated diseases.
In contrast, death caused by active intervention is called unnatural death. The "unnatural" causes are usually given as accident (implying no unreasonable voluntary risk), misadventure (accident following a willful and dangerous risk), suicide, or homicide.[1] In some settings, other categories may be added. For example, a prison may track the deaths of inmates caused by acute intoxication separately.[2] Additionally, a cause of death may be recorded as "undetermined".[3]
Unnatural death is a category used by coroners and vital statistics specialists for classifying all human deaths not properly describable as death by natural causes. Hence it would include events such as:
accident
execution
homicide
misadventure being attacked by insects, reptiles, fish, carnivorans, or other wildlife
adverse outcome of surgery (note that this is not failure of surgery)
suicide
terrorism
war
wiki
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
Hit by a space rock would go in the "accident" category, no?
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
Cardinal Józef Glemp, who has died aged 83, was head of the Roman Catholic church in Poland from 1981 until 2009, an era that saw the transition from communist to democratic rule in 1989 after many years of struggle by the church and the Solidarity trade union.
Problems dogged Glemp's ministry from the start. He was appointed primate and archbishop of Gniezno-Warsaw on the death of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, who had been in post since 1948. Wyszynski, a man with great moral authority, had seemed uniquely to embody Polish national aspirations. Any successor would have had a difficult time. Although Glemp had been close to him and had been his private secretary for 12 years (1967-79), the old man's charisma had not rubbed off on him. Small, timid and pious, Glemp was not an impressive figure. He had greatness thrust upon him, and the strain could be felt.
In 1981 Poland was undergoing the creative and hopeful turmoil of the Solidarity movement. Within six months of Glemp's appointment, martial law would be declared on the orders of the prime minister Wojciech Jaruzelski, and with it a brutal crackdown on Solidarity. From the outset, Glemp was less than sure-footed. He warned of the need to maintain "discipline" and "order", and saw himself as an honest broker between the two sides. But to some Catholics, he was simply playing the government's game, at the same time as being lukewarm towards every part of the Solidarity movement except the Polish farmers' union.
The imposition of martial law seemed to vindicate Glemp's cautious policy. He deplored police violence and pleaded for political prisoners to be released, but appeared to accept Jaruzelski's thesis that it had been necessary to impose military rule in order to avoid a Soviet invasion. It seemed like a discreditable form of "realism", but one practised by Catholic leaders in other parts of eastern Europe.
Poland, though, was different. Glemp's other big problem was simply that, from the time of his appointment until 2005, there was a Polish pope – John Paul II – to whom he constantly deferred. So the impression was created that the pope was the real ruler of the church in Poland, while Glemp was merely his local agent. Glemp's situation was made even worse because, while the pope on his world stage was free to make more heroic and challenging statements about Poland, Glemp, being nearer the Polish authorities, was cast in a more prudent role. This lost him the support of many priests.
He was criticised at a meeting of clergy early in 1982. They passed what in effect was a vote of no confidence in their primate. This was an astonishing turn of events; any cleric who had been so unwise as to challenge Wyszynski would have soon found himself relegated to a remote country parish.
Glemp tried to do just that in the case of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, an outspoken champion of Solidarity, but was blocked. In October 1984 the young priest was murdered by government agents, but Glemp could manage only to urge of a "spirit of Christian acceptance" in the wake of the death. It was one of many misjudgments. In 2010 Popiełuszko the martyr was beatified in Rome by Pope Benedict XVI.
Glemp was born in Inowrocław, about 140 miles west of Warsaw. His father worked in the salt mines, and died early as a result. During the Nazi occupation, Glemp was requisitioned for farm work. Ordained a priest in 1956, he was sent to Rome in 1968 to study canon law. His demeanour remained ever after that of a careful lawyer, weighing the balance of probabilities, rather than the prophetic churchman that Poles might have taken to their hearts.
After a long stint as Wyszynski's secretary, he was appointed bishop of Warmia in 1979, no doubt to prepare him for the succession as primate in 1981, and he was created a cardinal in 1983. Much of his energy in the early 80s was devoted to making possible Pope John Paul's second visit to Poland. The first, in June 1979, had been a triumph. The second, in June 1983, was a more restrained and sober affair. Though some Solidarity banners were unfurled and the pope occasionally used its terminology, the meetings did not become political rallies.
At the same time the pope also tried, not very successfully, to build up Glemp as a world figure by sending him on missions. In 1984 he visited Polish communities in Latin America. In a newspaper interview in São Paulo, Brazil, he remarked that Solidarity was "a bag containing many things, including oppositions Marxists, Trotskyites and later on careerists and party members". To many, again, this was too close to the Jaruzelski line and vocabulary for comfort.
When the pope made a third visit to Poland in 1987, he repeatedly spoke with approval of Solidarity, gave an audience to its leader Lech Wałesa, and visited the grave of Popiełuszko. By his next visit, in 1991, John Paul found a country transformed (and Wałesa in office as president).
In the new Poland, Glemp urged the creation of a Catholic political party, on the lines of the Christian Democrat movement elsewhere in Europe, but generated little enthusiasm. Instead he ended up ever more isolated from successive Polish governments after losing battles over the place of Catholic teaching and symbols in schools. His deeper disappointment – shared with John Paul II – was that his fellow countrymen so quickly turned their backs on Catholic teaching with the arrival of capitalism and consumerism.
Glemp also struggled and failed to counter repeated suggestions that he was antisemitic. These made international headlines in the late 1980s with plans to establish a small Catholic convent next to the former death camp at Auschwitz. Although the approval of Jewish leaders was sought and achieved, many saw the presence of the convent as a Catholic intrusion on a Jewish sacred site. Glemp's rough dismissal of their fears, in foolishly intemperate language, caused profound offence.
He suffered latterly from ill-health, but although there were rumours that he would take early retirement, he continued as archbishop of Gniezno-Warsaw until 2006 (and primate until 2009). Despite Glemp's enthusiastic support, his successor, Stanisław Wielgus, lasted only two days in office. After his links to communist-era secret police were revealed, he was forced to resign. It looked for all the world like another Glemp blunder.
• Józef Glemp, priest, born 18 December 1929; died 23 January 2013
LOS ANGELES, Calif. - Shadow Morton, a 1960s pop-song writer and producer whose biggest hits include "Leader of the Pack" and "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," has died. He was 71.
Family friend Amy Krakow confirmed with The Associated Press on Sunday that Morton, born George Francis Morton, died Thursday in Laguna Beach, California.
The Shangri-Las, a girls group from Queens, New York, gained fame after recording both "Remember" in 1964, and then "Leader of the Pack," which Morton co-wrote with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. The Shangri-Las became famous starting in 1964 with Morton's hits.
Morton was born in Brooklyn and moved to Long Island as a teenager.
Krakow said he is survived by three daughters, a sister and three grandchildren.
His death was reported Friday by The New York Times.
There's nothing wrong with the dream, my friend, the problem lies with the dreamer.
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