Bliss

Bliss may refer to:

People

Bliss (short story)

Bliss is a modernist short story by Katherine Mansfield first published in 1918. It was published in the English Review in August 1918 and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories.

Plot summary

Bliss (image)

Bliss is the name of the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. It is an image of a rolling green hill and a blue sky with cumulus and cirrus clouds. The landscape depicted is in the Los Carneros American Viticultural Area of Sonoma County, California, United States.

Overview

Former National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, a resident of the nearby Napa Valley, took the photo on film with a medium-format camera while on his way to visit his girlfriend in 1996. While it was widely believed later that the image was digitally manipulated or even created with software such as Adobe Photoshop, O'Rear says it never was. He sold it to Corbis for use as a stock photo. Several years later, Microsoft engineers chose a digitized version of the image and licensed it from O'Rear.

Over the next decade it has been claimed to be the most viewed photograph in the world during that time. Since it was taken, the landscape in it has changed, with grapevines planted on the hill and field in the foreground, making O'Rear's image impossible to duplicate for the time being. That has not stopped other photographers from trying, and some of their attempts have been included in art exhibits.

Assembly (film)

Assembly is a 2007 Chinese war film written by Liu Heng and directed by Feng Xiaogang. It starred Zhang Hanyu, Deng Chao, Yuan Wenkang, Tang Yan, Wang Baoqiang, Liao Fan, Hu Jun, Ren Quan and Li Naiwen. The film, ostensibly portraying an anti-war theme, was first released on 20 December 2007. It won the 2008 Hundred Flowers Awards and the 2009 Golden Rooster Awards for Best Film.

Plot

The story begins in 1948 during the Huaihai Campaign of the Chinese Civil War. Gu Zidi, a PLA captain, commands his 9th Company in siege to a town defended by NRA forces. The company captures the town despite sustaining heavy casualties in an ambush. After witnessing his political commissar being brutally killed by an enemy field gun operator, Gu orders the surrendering NRA prisoners-of-war to be shot, but his command is met mainly with refusal. Gu is imprisoned as punishment. He quickly befriends his cellmate, Wang Jincun, an army teacher and pacifist who is jailed for showing cowardice on the battlefield. Gu's superior, Colonel Liu Zeshui, soon sends Gu and his remaining 46 men off on a new assignment: to defend to the last man (with limited resources) the regiment's flank — an old mine on the south bank of the Wen River — and to not retreat until he hears the bugle call for assembly with the regiment. Gu also receives permission to take Wang as his new political commissar.

Assembly (MBTA station)

Assembly (originally Assembly Square in some planning documents) is a rapid transit station on the MBTA's Orange Line, located in the eastern portion of Somerville, Massachusetts. It is an infill station, located on a section of the Orange Line that has been active since 1975. The station, which opened on September 2, 2014, was the first new station on the MBTA subway system since 1987.

Assembly Square station is meant to provide convenient access to the stores at Assembly Square - a major retail and residential development located on the site for a former Ford assembly plant - and the adjacent Assembly Square Marketplace. The Assembly Square project is estimated to generate 45,000 new vehicle trips each day, and the station was intended to reduce the number that use private automobiles by diverting travelers to mass transit. Ridership is projected to reach 5,000 riders per day in 2030.

Station layout

Assembly station is in the rear of the Assembly Square development, on the existing Orange Line tracks near the Mystic River.

Assembly (John Foxx album)

Assembly is the title of an 18-track compilation album by British recording artist John Foxx, issued in 1992. It contains tracks from the artist's first four albums – Metamatic, The Garden, The Golden Section and In Mysterious Ways as well as tracks which had not been previously issued in an album format. The album was remastered for CD by Foxx himself, and although was the first time many of his solo tracks had appeared on CD there were no new tracks and none of the tracks remain exclusive to this release.

The sleeve of "Assembly" features one of Foxx's Cathedral Oceans images, although in 1993, none of the music from that project had yet been made available. The CD booklet contains sleeve notes written by John Foxx himself where he describes each phase of his work over the eighties.

Track Listing