Drumhead

A drumhead or drum skin is a membrane stretched over one or both of the open ends of a drum. The drumhead is struck with sticks, mallets, or hands, so that it vibrates and the sound resonates through the drum.

History

Originally, drumheads were made from animal hide and were first used in early human history, long before records began.

In 1957, Remo Belli and Sam Muchnick together developed a polymer head (also known as Mylar) leading to the development of the Remo drumhead company.

Despite the benefits of plastic heads, drummers in historical reenactment groups such as fife and drum use animal skin heads for historical accuracy. Skin heads are used on most hand drums, including djembes, frame drums, bongos and congas, although in recent years, companies such as Remo have begun manufacturing synthetic counterparts for certain hand drums such as congas. Another common material used for drumheads is aramid fiber, such as kevlar. More durable fiber heads, such as kevlar heads, are used mostly in marching percussion.

Head (watercraft)

The head (or heads) is a ship's toilet. The name derives from sailing ships in which the toilet area for the regular sailors was placed at the head or bow of the ship.

Design

In sailing ships, the toilet was placed in the bow for two reasons. Firstly, since most vessels of the era could not sail directly into the wind, the winds came mostly across the rear of the ship, placing the head essentially downwind. Secondly, if placed somewhat above the water line, vents or slots cut near the floor level would allow normal wave action to wash out the facility. Only the captain had a private toilet near his quarters, at the stern of the ship in the quarter gallery.

In many modern boats, the heads look similar to seated flush toilets but use a system of valves and pumps that brings sea water into the toilet and pumps the waste out through the hull in place of the more normal cistern and plumbing trap to a drain. In small boats the pump is often hand operated. The cleaning mechanism is easily blocked if too much toilet paper or other fibrous material is put down the pan.

News style

News style, journalistic style or news writing style is the prose style used for news reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television.

News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience. The tense used for news style articles is past tense.

News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event—who, what, when, where and why (the Five Ws) and also often how—at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid", to refer to the decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs.

News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics relative to the intended audience: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.

The related term journalese is sometimes used, usually pejoratively, to refer to news-style writing. Another is headlinese.

Parts of a sail

In sailing the parts of a sail have common terminology for each corner and edge of the sail.

Triangular sails

The corners

In a triangular sail, the highest point is called the head. The halyard, the line which raises the sail, is attached to the head. The lower two corners of the sail, on either end of the foot (the bottom edge of the sail), are called the tack (forward) and clew (aft). The tack is shackled to a fixed point on the boat, such as the gooseneck in the case of a Bermuda rigged mainsail, or the deck at the base of a stay, in the case of a jib or staysail.

The clew is movable and is positioned with running rigging. A symmetrical sail may be said to have two clews.

The clew of a jib or other headsail is the free corner (not attached to any standing rigging), to which port and starboard jib sheets are attached to control the angle of the sail.

In a sail with a boom (such as a mainsail on a sloop), the clew is attached to the boom, and can often be tightened along the boom using the outhaul to adjust the sail shape.

Drum (2004 film)

Drum is a 2004 film based on the life of South African investigative journalist Henry Nxumalo, who worked for the popular Drum magazine, called "the first black lifestyle magazine in Africa." It was director Zola Maseko's first film and deals with the issues of apartheid and the forced removal of residents from Sophiatown. The film was originally to be a six-part television series called Sophiatown Short Stories, though Maseko could not get the funding. The lead roles of Henry Nxumalo and Drum main photographer Jürgen Schadeberg were played by American actors Taye Diggs and Gabriel Mann, while most of the rest of the cast were South African actors.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2004, and proceeded to do the rounds of international film festivals before going on general release in South Africa in July 2006. It was released in Europe, but failed to get a distributor for the USA where it went straight to DVD.

The film was generally well received critically. Most of the negative reviews were based on the quality of Maseko's directing and Jason Filardi's screenwriting. It was awarded Best South African Film at the Durban International Film Festival, and director Maseko gained the top prize at the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO).

Drum (American magazine)

Drum (corporately styled DRUM) was an American LGBT-interest magazine based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Published monthly beginning in 1964 by the homophile activist group the Janus Society and edited by Clark Polak, Drum took its title from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer."

Drum differed from earlier homophile magazines in that it included a combination of news and erotica. Beginning in April 1965 it featured the first ongoing gay-themed comic strip, the erotic parody comic Harry Chess: That Man from A.U.N.T.I.E. by "A. Jay". In December 1965, Drum published the first full-frontal male nude pictorial in an American magazine.DRUM also took a more militant editorial and political stance than other publications of the day. This combination quickly led to a monthly circulation of 10,000, the largest circulation at the time for any magazine of its kind.

In 1967, a federal grand jury indicted Drum editor Polak on 18 counts of publishing and distributing obscene material. In exchange for avoiding a prison sentence, Polak agreed to cease publishing Drum and relocate from Philadelphia to Los Angeles.

Drum (Wales)

Drum (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈdrɨm]) (Welsh: Y Drum = the ridge) is a summit in the Carneddau mountains in north Wales, 2 km north-east of Foel-fras. It is 770 m (2,526 ft) high. It is also known as Carnedd Penyborth-Goch.

Its eastern slopes are drained by the Afon Tafolog, a tributary of Afon Roe which flows through the village of Rowen before joining the River Conwy.

References

Coordinates: 53°12′25″N 3°56′09″W / 53.20682°N 3.93595°W / 53.20682; -3.93595