Pixies

The Pixies are an American alternative rock band formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts. The group disbanded in 1993 in acrimonious circumstances, but reunited in 2004. The group currently consists of founders Black Francis (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Joey Santiago (lead guitar), and David Lovering (drums). Co-founder Kim Deal (bass, backing vocals) left in 2013 and was replaced by Kim Shattuck as live bass player for a few months, then by Paz Lenchantin for the band's 2014 tour. The Pixies achieved relatively modest popularity in their home country, but were significantly more successful in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe and Israel. The group is credited with having an influence on the alternative rock boom of the 1990s.

The band's style of music contains a range of elements, including psychedelia, noise pop, hard rock, surf pop, and surf rock. Black Francis is the Pixies' primary songwriter and singer. His lyrics feature a number of offbeat subjects such as extraterrestrials, surrealism, incest, and biblical violence.

Fairy (Artemis Fowl)

Fairies, in the fantasy series Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, are fictional beings, usually shorter than a human, who possess magic properties. The average height of a fairy is exactly 1 metre, one centimetre. All the fairies have retreated below the Earth to escape the destructiveness of the human race. Their underground civilization is centered on the capital city of Haven. Fairies are vernacularly known as the People, and live a life according to the Book of the People. There are 8 recognized families of fairies- Elves, Dwarves, Pixies, Gnomes, Gremlins, Goblins, Sprites and Demons. However, the centaurs have been mentioned several times, as with trolls, and the centaurs' cousins, the unicorns, were killed off, yet they are not recognized.

Races of Fairies and the eight families

The Eight Families

In Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony, it is said that 10,000 years ago, there were eight families (or species) of fairies. It is possible that Centaurs and Trolls used to live not underground but above ground, and were recruited by the fairies for the war against the Mud People (the term used by fairies to address humans). This would explain the links between many animals these two species have, and would explain why they don't have magic. Centaurs are also cousins of unicorns, so they couldn't be in the fairy family without the unicorns. The fairies, however, are mostly humanoid. Warlocks are also part of the fairy world. They are extremely magical fairies that originate under unknown circumstances.

Winx Club

Winx Club is an Italian animated television series made in 2003 on 19 August directed, created and produced by Iginio Straffi and his company Rainbow S.r.l. in co-production with Rai Fiction. It is part of the larger Winx Club franchise. The series is the first Italian cartoon to be sold in the United States. It is also broadcast in over 130 countries worldwide, and is Straffi's most successful creation. In June 2014, it was announced an agreement with China Central Television for the construction of a theme park dedicated to Winx in Beijing.

According to Iginio Straffi's website, "Winx Club is an action and fantasy show combined with comedic elements. In the mystical dimension of Magix, three special schools educate modern fairies, ambitious witches, and supernatural warriors or specialists, and wizards from all over the magical universe."

Plot

In the first season, Bloom, a teenager from Earth, discovers she has magical abilities when she saves Stella, a fairy princess. Stella persuades Bloom to enroll in Alfea, a school for fairies in the Magical Dimension. There, she meets roommate Flora and apartment mates Tecna and Musa; together they form the Winx. They encounter and befriend the boys from the Red Fountain school of Specialists. They also make enemies, mainly a trio of witches called the Trix. Together, the Winx go through many adventures and discover many secrets about Bloom's past while fighting their enemies and studying at Alfea. Their power in Season 1 is Winx.

-ana

-ana (more frequently -iana) is a suffix of Latin origin, used in English to convert nouns, usually proper names, into mass nouns, as in Shakespeareana or Dickensiana, items or stories related to William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens, respectively.

The recognition of this usage as a self-conscious literary construction, typically as a book title, traces back at least to 1740, when it was mentioned in an edition of Scaligerana, a collection of table talk of Joseph Justus Scaliger, from around 150 years previously. By that period Scaliger was described as "the father, so to speak, of all those books published under the title of -ana".

As grammatical construction it is the neuter plural, nominative form of an adjective: so from Scaliger is formed first the adjective Scaligeranus (Scaligeran) which is then put into the form of an abstract noun Scaligerana (Scaligeran things). In Americana, a variant construction, the adjectival form already exists as Americanus, so it is simply a neuter plural (suffix –a on the stem American-); the case of Victoriana, things associated with the Victorian period, is superficially similar, but the Latin adjective form is Dog Latin.

Anah

Anah or Ana (Arabic: عانة‎, ʾĀna), formerly also known as Anna, is an Iraqi town on the Euphrates river, approximately mid-way between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Persian Gulf. Anah lies from west to east on the right bank along a bend of the river just before it turns south towards Hit.

Name

The town is called Ha-na-atTemplate:Supsmall in a Babylonian letter around 2200 BC,A-na-at by the scribes of Tukulti-Ninurta c. 885 BC, and An-at by the scribes of Assur-nasir-pal II in 879 BC. The name has been connected with the widely-worshipped war goddess Anat. It was known as Anathō (Greek: Άναθω) to Isidore Charax and Anatha to Ammianus Marcellinus; early Arabic writers described it variously as ʾĀna or (as if plural) ʾĀnāt.

History

Ancient

Despite maintaining its name across 42 centuries, the exact location of the settlement seems to have moved from time to time. Sources across most of its early history, however, place Anah on an island in the Euphrates.

Its early history under the Babylonians is uncertain. A 3rd-millennium BC letter mentions six "men of Hanat" are mentioned in a description of disturbances in the Residency of Suhi, which would have included the district of Anah. It is probably not the place mentioned by Amenhotep I in the 16th century BC or in the speech of Sennacherib's messengers to Hezekiah, but probably was the site "in the middle of the Euphrates" opposite which Assur-nasir-pal II halted during his 879 BC campaign. It may also be mentioned in four 7th-century BC documents edited by Claude Hermann Walter Johns.

Ana (search dog)

Ana (July 4, 1995 - November 12, 2008) was a golden retriever search and rescue dog, known for having been the first graduate of the Search Dog Foundation's training program. Ana was one of the first search dogs to be deployed to the site of the World Trade Center.

Ana was born to a backyard breeder, and proved to be too active to work as an assistance dog. Bonnie Bergin, the Executive Director of the Assistance Dog Institute, decided that Ana might be better suited as a search and rescue dog, and suggested her to Wilma Melville, the head of the Search Dog Foundation. Ana was trained at a kennel in Gilroy, California, and, upon graduation, she was the first nationally certified Fire Department Disaster Search Canine and the first dog certified by the Search Dog Foundation.

Ana was assigned to the Sacramento, California Fire Department, where she was paired with fire captain Rick Lee.

Besides the World Trade Center search, Ana and Captain Lee were involved in several other searches, including the sites of collapsed buildings in Sacramento, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.