Leeches!
Leeches! is a 2003 horror film directed by David DeCoteau.
Plot
Members of a college swim team take anabolic steroids to enhance their performance. While on a daytrip to a local lake, a couple of the members pick up some leeches, which feed on the steroids in their blood. The leeches end up washed down a shower drain, where they grow to enormous size and return for more feedings.
Following the deaths of several members of the team and a college administrator, the few surviving team members and one of their girlfriends hatch a plan to kill off the monster leeches. They will draw them to the campus swimming pool by having one of the swimmers act as bait. Then they'll electrify the pool, electrocuting the leeches. Tragically, the team coach, who's been infested by a leech, attacks them, delaying the electrification just long enough to allow the leeches to kill one last swimmer. Finally the coach is subdued and the switch is thrown, frying the leeches.
As the film ends, a surviving swim team member, in true mad scientist fashion, is revealed to have had a hand in creating the leeches and is shown to have breeding stock left.
Leech
Leeches are segmented worms that belong to the phylum Annelida and comprise the subclass Hirudinea. Like the oligochaetes, such as earthworms, leeches share a clitellum and are hermaphrodites. Nevertheless, they differ from the oligochaetes in significant ways. For example, leeches do not have bristles and the external segmentation of their bodies does not correspond with the internal segmentation of their organs. Their bodies are much more solid as the spaces in their coelom are dense with connective tissues. They also have two suckers, one at each end.
The majority of leeches live in freshwater environments, while some species can be found in terrestrial and marine environments, as well. The best-known leeches, such as the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, are hematophagous, feeding on vertebrate blood and invertebrate hemolymph. Most leech species, however, are predatory, feeding primarily by swallowing other invertebrates. Almost 700 species of leeches are currently recognized, of which some 100 are marine, 90 terrestrial and the remainder freshwater taxa.
To be announced
To be announced (TBA), to be confirmed (TBC), and to be determined (or to be decided, TBD) are placeholder terms used very broadly in event planning to indicate that although something is scheduled or expected to happen, a particular aspect of that remains to be arranged or confirmed.
TBA vs. TBC vs. TBD
These phrases are similar, but may be used for different degrees of indeterminacy:
Other similar phrases sometimes used to convey the same meaning, and using the same abbreviations, include "to be ascertained", "to be arranged", "to be advised", "to be adjudicated", "to be done", "to be decided", and "to be declared".
Use of the abbreviation "TBA" is formally reported in a reference work at least as early as 1955, and "TBD" is similarly reported as early as 1967.
ANSI escape code
In computing, ANSI escape codes (or escape sequences) are a method using in-band signaling to control the formatting, color, and other output options on video text terminals. To encode this formatting information, certain sequences of bytes are embedded into the text, which the terminal looks for and interprets as commands, not as character codes.
ANSI codes were introduced in the 1970s and became widespread in the minicomputer/mainframe market by the early 1980s. They were used by the nascent bulletin board system market to offer improved displays compared to earlier systems lacking cursor movement, leading to even more widespread use.
Although hardware text terminals have become increasingly rare in the 21st century, the relevance of the ANSI standard persists because most terminal emulators interpret at least some of the ANSI escape sequences in the output text. One notable exception is the win32 console component of Microsoft Windows.
History
Almost all manufacturers of video terminals added vendor-specific escape sequences to perform operations such as placing the cursor at arbitrary positions on the screen. One example is the VT52 terminal, which allowed the cursor to be placed at an x,y location on the screen by sending the ESC character, a y character, and then two characters representing with numerical values equal to the x,y location plus 32 (thus starting at the ASCII space character and avoiding the control characters).
TBC (disambiguation)
TBC may refer to:
