Opus may refer to:
Opus was a Sunday strip drawn by Berkeley Breathed for a period of five years, 2003 to 2008. It was Breathed's fourth comic strip, following The Academia Waltz, Bloom County and Outland.
Set in Bloom County, the strip documented the adventures of Breathed's popular character Opus the Penguin, parodying both pop culture and politics along the way. It was launched with much fanfare on November 23, 2003, and was syndicated by Washington Post Writers Group. In early October 2008 the author declared he was terminating the strip because of his expectation that the United States is going to face tough times and his desire to depart from his most famous character "on a lighter note".
Opus is the title character and protagonist of the strip. Though he returned to Antarctica at the end of Outland, Opus traveled back home to Bloom County, only to find that time has changed everything and everyone he once held dear. His employment usually depended on the week's joke – since Opus began, he has so far been a political operative, a garbageman, and a newspaper ombudsman – but he was most often depicted as a syndicated cartoonist.
Opus is the eighth studio album of the music project Schiller created by the German electronic musician Christopher Von Deylen. The album was announced on July 1, 2013 (2013-07-01) and was released on August 30, 2013 (2013-08-30). On this album Schiller has collaborated with Russian operatic soprano Anna Netrebko, French pianist Hélène Grimaud and German classical oboist Albrecht Mayer. Opus is the first release of the new label "Panorama" by Deutsche Grammophon. The album reached in its first week number 1 of the German albums chart and number 6 in Switzerland and number 10 in Austria. These are the highest entries of Schiller in Austria and Switzerland and the fourth number-1-album of Schiller in Germany. Schiller has received a Gold award in Germany in December 2013 for 100.000 sold albums of Opus. In 2014 there will be a reedition of the album: Opus - White Album.
The album Opus combines electronic music with classical music such as Swan Lake. It's also inspired by and based on songs such as Gymnopédie no. 1 by Erik Satie, Edvard Grieg's Solveig's Song, Sergei Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini op. 43 and Claude Debussy's Reverie. After Schiller already released some singles with classical influences such as "Ein schöner Tag" (2000) with German singer Isgaard and "Time for Dreams" (2008) with Chinese pianist Lang Lang, it's the first completely classical inspired album of Schiller. Originally it was planned as a purely instrumental album, but then it was supplemented with vocals during the developing process. For the creation of the album Christopher von Deylen travelled to the Coachella Valley in California, USA. The performances of Anna Netrebko were recorded in the Dvorák Hall of the Rudolfinum in Prague, Hélène Grimaud's performances were recorded at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York City, Diana Tishchenko's and Albrecht Mayer's performances were recorded at the b-sharp Studios in Berlin.
South Pasadena (formerly Mission) is an at-grade light rail station in the Los Angeles County Metro Rail system. It is located at the intersection of Mission Street and Meridian Avenue in South Pasadena, California. The station is served by the Gold Line.
This station features the adjacent station art sculpture "Astride-Aside" (2003) by artist Michael Stutz. The station has a 122 space park and ride lot and there is a fee to park.
Formerly serving the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad, the original depot building was torn down in 1954 with the station's closure. The current structure was built with the reactivation of the line as a light rail station in 2003.
Gold Line service hours are approximately from 5:00 AM until 12:15 AM daily.
Mission grapes are a variety of Vitis vinifera introduced from Spain to the western coasts of North and South America by Catholic New World missionaries for use in making sacramental, table, and fortified wines.
The original European strain, until recently, had been lost, thus the grapes' being named "Mission grapes" since the Spanish missions are where they were generally grown. The grape was introduced to the Las Californias Province of New Spain, present-day California, in the late 18th century by Franciscan missionaries. Until about 1850, Mission grapes, or Criolla, represented the entirety of viticulture in California wines. At the present time, however, Mission represents less than 1000 acres (4 km²) of total plantings in the entire state. Most of the state's remaining plantings are in the Gold Country, the Central Valley, and Southern California.
Red and white wine, sweet and dry wine, brandy, and a fortified wine called Angelica were all produced from Mission grapes. Though Mission grape vines are heavy producers and can adapt to a variety of climates, table wine made from the fruit tends to be rather characterless, and thus its use in wine making has diminished in modern times. However as both contemporary accounts and those of the last two centuries attest, Angelica, the fortified wine made from the grape, is sometimes a wine of note and distinction. The Mission grape is related to the pink Criolla grape of Argentina and the red País grape of Chile.
Mission 66 was a United States National Park Service ten-year program that was intended to dramatically expand Park Service visitor services by 1966, in time for the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Park Service.
When the National Park Service was created in 1916, long-distance travel in North America was typically accomplished by train. There was no national road system, and airline travel was in its infancy. Railroads were closely involved in the development of visitor services at such parks as Grand Canyon National Park, Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park, and in many cases the railroads built and operated park visitor facilities.
With the development of the US highway system as a public works project during the Great Depression, many previously remote parks became accessible via good roads and inexpensive automobiles. The explosion in prosperity following World War II brought a tide of automobile-borne tourists that the parks were ill-equipped to receive. By the mid-1950s it was apparent that massive investment in park infrastructure was required. Mission 66 was conceived as the means to accommodate increased visitor numbers and to provide high-quality interpretation services.