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AlokeKumar
Last seen: 18 hours ago
Aloke is a 53 year old guy from Calcutta(kolkata), WB, India
We live in a fantasy world. I know this because I live in that world, and I actually receive my e-mail there.And, sometimes when I don't ,I think I am having a bad dream.......
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Faberge, Peter Carl
Rated • 1 review • biographies • newworldencyclopedia.org
PETER CARL FABERGé
(1846-1920),
One of the greatest goldsmiths, jewelers, and designers in Western Decorative Arts. Jeweler to the Russian imperial court; creator of the stunning Easter eggs.
Peter Carl Fabergé was born in 1846 in St. Petersburg, the son of a master goldsmith. The French surname of the future jeweler derives from his family's Huguenot background; they left France during the seventeenth century, moving eastward from Germany to the Baltic before settling in Russia. Peter Carl, also called Carl Gustavovich in keeping with the Russian patronymic tradition, was educated in the local German-language school and later attended commercial courses at the Dresden Handelsschule. The combination of his astonishing craftsmanship and cosmopolitanism gave him entry to all European royal houses.
In 1861 young Carl set out on his requisite Grand Tour of the continent. He developed an abiding interest in renaissance and baroque designs and was especially influenced by the French rococo of the eighteenth century. His mastery of fine detail and ability to work in a variety of precious metals and jewels, including hardstone carving, contributed to his unique style Fabergé. In addition to his legendary eggs, whose matching of the delicacy of fine jewelry with technological innovations was epitomized by the miniature Trans-Siberian train that chugged through one of them, his oeuvre ranged from carved animals to icons to cigarette cases. His clients, primarily from the pan-European aristocracy, knew that he could be trusted not to repeat the specific designs .
Fabergé matched his exquisite style with a finely honed business acumen. From his renowned establish- ment in St. Petersburg on Bolshaya Morskaya Street, he published catalogs of his objets d'art. Employing the finest craftsmen, he expanded his enterprise drawing the attention of art collectors.
He left Russia in 1918 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1920. Fabergé lies buried in Cannes.
This spot is for my dear friend Faiena.
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Aurel Stein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rated • 1 review • archaeology, hungarian, central asia, biographies aurel stein • wikipedia.org
AUREL STEIN
( 1862 -1943)
A Hungarian archaeologist,who worked in Central Asia.
In my father's library stood an Elephantine Folio of a book . Larger in height than me, then aged around ten years. The book had a special attraction for me as it contained Buddhist paintings from the cave-temples of China,very well printed and a treat to the eye.This was my introduction to Sir Aurel Stein.
Stein was born in Budapest in a Jewish family. His parents had him and his brother, Ernst Eduard, baptised as Lutherans, while his parents and sisters remained Jews ,a common way at the time to ensure one's sons progress in life. He later became a British citizen and made his famous expeditions under British sponsorship.
Stein made four major expeditions to Central Asia - in 1900, 1906-8, 1913-16 and 1930. One of his significant finds during his first journey in 1900-1901 was the Taklamakan Desert oasis of Dandan Oilik where he was able to uncover a number of relics. Stein was inspired by Sven Hedin's 1898 work, Through Asia.He was also a professor at various Indian universities.
Stein collection of Chinese, Tibetan and Tangut manuscripts, Prakrit wooden tablets, and documents in Khotanese, Uyghur, Sogdian and Eastern Turkic is the result of his travels through central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s. Stein discovered manuscripts in the previously lost Tocharian languages of the Tarim Basin at Marin and other oasis towns, especially in Iran and Balochistan.
Stein's greatest discovery was made at the Mogao Caves also known as "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas", near Dunhuang. It was there that he discovered the Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest dated printed text, along with 40,000 other scrolls . In 1901 Stein was responsible for exposing forgeries of Islam Akhun. During his expedition of 1906-1908 while surveying in the Kunlun mountain range in western China, Stein suffered frostbite and lost several toes on his right foot.He died in 1943 and is buried in Kabul.
This spot is for my friend Denise, who is interested in Archaeology
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Ferdinand de Saussure (Swiss linguist) -- Britannica...
Rated • 1 review • biographies • britannica.com
FERDINAND de SAUSSURE
(1857-1913)
Is the creator of the modern theory of structuralism and the father of modern linguistics.
Saussure spent all but ten years of his life in Geneva, but his work has had more influence on French thought than that of any other Swiss national since Rousseau. Similarly intriguing is the fact that he never published his major work: the Cours de linguistique générale (1916) was constructed posthumously from lecture plans and student notes of the period 1907-11.
Ferdinand de Saussure was born on November 26, 1857, in Geneva, Switzerland, to a family with a long history of contributions to the sciences. A bright and eager student, de Saussure showed an early promise in the area of languages and learned Sanskrit, Greek, German, Latin, French, and English.
Inclined to follow his ancestors' footsteps into the physical sciences, he began attending the prestigious University of Geneva in 1875 to study chemistry and physics. However, by 1876 he had returned to the study of linguistics. De Saussure studied at the University of Berlin from 1878 to 1879 and then enrolled at the University of Leipzig to study comparative grammar and Indo-European languages. He published his first full-length book, Memoire sur le systeme primitive des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (Thesis on the original system of vowels in Indo-European Languages), in 1878.
Hailed by critics as a brilliant work, the book launched de Saussure's reputation as a new expert, contributing as it did to the field of comparative linguistics. The work also revealed an important discovery in the area of Indo-European languages that came to be known as de Saussure's laryngeal theory, which explained perplexing characteristics of some of the world's oldest languages. The theory would not enjoy widespread acceptance until the mid-20th century.
De Saussure published Remarques de grammaire et de phonetique in 1878. He completed his doctoral dissertation, on the use of the absolute genitive in Sanskrit in 1880.
De Saussure died from cancer at age 56 in 1913.
This spot is for my friend
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Roald Dahl
Rated • 1 review • biographies • rotfl.org
ROALD DAHL
(1916-1990)
A writer of both children's fiction and short stories for adults, Dahl has been described as a master of story construction with a remarkable ability to weave a tale.
Dahl was born in Llandaff, South Wales, to Norwegian parents, and spent his childhood summers visiting his grandparents in Oslo, Norway. After his father died when Dahl was four, his mother sent him to English schools, where he began a series of academic misadventures. After he and several other students were severely beaten by the headmaster for placing a dead mouse in a cruel store-keeper's candy jar, Dahl's mother moved him to St. Peter's Boarding School and later to Repton, a renowned private school. Dahl would later describe his school years as "days of horrors" which inspired much of his macabre fiction.
After graduating from Repton, Dahl took a position with the Shell Oil Company in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Africa. In 1939 he joined a Royal Air Force training squadron in Nairobi, Kenya, serving as a fighter pilot in the Mediterranean. Dahl suffered severe head injuries in a plane crash near Alexandria, Egypt; upon recovering he was transferred to Washington, D.C., as an assistant air attache. There Dahl began his writing career, publishing a short story in the Saturday Evening Post. In 1961, he published his first work for children, James and the Giant Peach, and for the remainder of his life continued to write for both children and adults. He died in 1990.
Critical response to Dahl's children's books has varied from praising him as a genius to declaring his works racist and harmful. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is his most popular and most controversial children's story. Many critics have censured this work for its alleged stereotyping and inhumanity, and have accused Dahl of racism for his portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas, for which Dahl changed their appearance and gave them a mythical homeland.
Critics have compared Dahl's adult-oriented fiction to the works of Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, and Saki. Praised by commentators as well crafted and suspenseful, Dahl's stories employ surprise endings and shrewd characters who are rarely what they seem to be.
.This spot is for my friend Valeria.
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Biography
Rated • 2 reviews • biographies, icon, film actress, marilyn monroe, sex symbol • ellensplace.net
MARILYN-MONROE
(1926-1962)
The film actress ,Marilyn Monroe epitomized the Hollywood sex symbol. Combined with her talent and untimely death to make her an enduring star and one of Hollywood's most recognizable icons.
The most endlessly talked-about and mythologized figure in Hollywood history, Marilyn Monroe remains the ultimate superstar, her rise and fall the stuff that both dreams and nightmares are made of. Innocent, vulnerable, and impossibly alluring, she defined the very essence of screen sexuality.
Norma Jean Baker, better known as Marilyn Monroe, experienced a disrupted, loveless childhood that included two years at an orphanage. When Norma Jean, born in 1926, was seven years old her mother, Gladys (Monroe) Baker Mortenson, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and hospitalized. Norma was left to a series of foster homes in June 19, 1942, and her husband, James Dougherty, joined the U.S. Merchant Marine in 194
During the war years Norma Jean worked at the Radio Plane Company in Van Nuys, California, but she was soon discovered by photographers. She enrolled in a 3-month modelling course, and in 1946, aware of her considerable charm and the potential it had for a career in films, Norma obtained a divorce. She headed for Hollywood, where Ben Lyon, head of casting at Twentieth Century Fox, arranged a screen test. In 1946, she signed a $125 a week, one-year contract with the studio. Ben Lyon was the one who suggested a new name for the fledgling actress - Marilyn Monroe.
During her first year at Fox Monroe did not appear in any films, and her contract was not renewed. In the spring of 1948 Columbia Pictures hired her for a small part in Ladies of the Chorus. In 1950 John Huston cast her in Asphalt Jungle, a tiny part which landed her a role in All About Eve. She was now given a seven-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox and appeared in The Fireball, Let's Make It Legal, Love Nest, and As Young as You Feel.
In 1952, after an extensive publicity campaign, Monroe appeared in Don't Bother to Knock, Full House, Clash by Night, We're Not Married, Niagara, and Monkey Business. After this the magazine Photoplay termed her the "most promising actress," and she was earning top dollars for Twentieth Century Fox.
In 1954, she married Yankee baseball player Joe Di Maggio. But the pressures created by her billing as a screen sex symbol caused the marriage to flounder, and the couple divorced in 1954.
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B.B. King
Rated • 1 review • biographies • rockhall.com
B. B. King
( 1925-present)
Known as the King of the Blues, an African American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter.
The seeds of Riley B. King's enduring talent were sown deep in the blues-rich Mississippi Delta, where he was born in 1925 near the town of Itta Bena. He was shuttled between his mother's home and his grandmother's residence as a child, his father having left the family when King was very young.
The youth put in long days working as a sharecropper and devoutly sang the Lord's praises at church before moving to Indianola -- another town located in the heart of the Delta -- in 1943.He grew up sharecropping in Mississippi and learned to play gospel music on the guitar when he was a teenager. In the late 1940s he turned to playing blues and moved to Memphis, Tennessee to start a music career.
After popular performances in clubs and on radio, he kicked off his recording career with "Three O'Clock Blues" (1951), a top hit on the R&B charts. King's early records in the '50s produced some R&B hits, but mainstream success eluded him. He and his band toured almost non-stop, performing hundreds of shows a year and building an audience. He finally had breakthrough success in the late 1960s, when white audiences began to discover rock's debt to the blues. Guitarists like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards sang his praises, and King began performing in rock and jazz clubs and had crossover hits like "Paying The Cost To Be The Boss" (1968) and "The Thrill Is Gone" (1970).
King has recorded more than 50 albums, won 13 Grammys and received dozens of awards and honors over the years, and he still performs four or five nights a week.
King is known for his distinctive sound, especially his use of the sliding "bent" note, and for calling his electric Gibson guitar "Lucille." His albums include Live At The Regal (1965), Blues Is King (1967), Deuces Wild (1997) and Blues On The Bayou (1998).
King owns night clubs in Memphis, Los Angeles and New York City... He originally called himself Beale Street Blues Boy, which he shortened to Blues Boy King and then B.B. King... In 1996 he published an autobiography, Blues All Around Me.
. This spot is for my friend Liza.
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