Rook (bird)

The rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a member of the family Corvidae in the passerine order of birds. Named by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, the species name frugilegus is Latin for "food-gathering".

Description

This species is similar in size (45–47 cm in length) to or slightly smaller than the carrion crow with black feathers often showing a blue or bluish-purple sheen in bright sunlight. The feathers on the head, neck and shoulders are particularly dense and silky. The legs and feet are generally black and the bill grey-black.

Rooks are distinguished from similar members of the crow family by the bare grey-white skin around the base of the adult's bill in front of the eyes. The feathering around the legs also looks shaggier and laxer than the congeneric carrion crow. The juvenile is superficially more similar to the crow because it lacks the bare patch at the base of the bill, but it has a thinner bill and loses the facial feathers after about six months. Collective nouns for rooks include building, parliament, clamour and storytelling. Their colonial nesting behaviour gave rise to the term rookery.

Rook (card game)

Rook is a trick-taking game, usually played with a specialized deck of cards. Sometimes referred to as "Christian cards" or "missionary poker", Rook playing cards were introduced by Parker Brothers in 1906 to provide an alternative to standard playing cards for those in the Puritan tradition or Mennonite culture who considered the face cards in a regular deck inappropriate because of their association with gambling and cartomancy.

Rook playing cards

The Rook deck consists of 57 cards: a blue Rook Bird card, similar to a joker, and 56 cards divided into four suits or colors. Each suit—black, red, yellow, and green—is made up of cards numbered one through fourteen. This fourteen-card, four-suit system is derived from the French tarot deck; removing the 21 atouts, or trumps, from that deck while keeping a 57-card French-suited deck that was re-faced to create the Rook deck. Though the culture-neutral deck was developed for the game Rook, many other games have evolved or existed previously that use the 56-card deck with or without the Rook, or — by removing the fourteens and the Rook — one can use the deck like a deck of standard playing cards. The cards 2-3-4 are not in the game.

List of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero characters (M–R)

This is an alphabetical List of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero characters whose code names start with the letters M-R.

Mace

Mace is the G.I. Joe Team's undercover operative. His real name is Thomas S. Bowman, and he was first released as an action figure in 1993. Mace was born in Denver, Colorado.

His primary military specialty is undercover surveillance. His secondary military specialty is intelligence. Mace has spent years undercover, working against Cobra and other criminal factions. He feeds information to fellow "Battle Corps" members, who then make the resulting raids and arrests.

Mainframe

Major Altitude

Major Altitude is the G.I. Joe Team's Battle Copter pilot. His real name is Robert D. Owens, and he was born in Rumford, Rhode Island. Major Altitude was first released as an action figure in 1991, as part of the Battle Copters line. He came exclusively with the "Battle Copter" vehicle. He was released again in 1993, as part of a mail-in special called "Terrifying Lasers of Destruction". He was packaged with a Cobra agent, another helicopter pilot, called Interrogator.

Rookie

A rookie is a person in his or her first year of a sport, or someone who is new to a profession, training or activity such as a rookie police officer, rookie pilot, a recruit, or occasionally a freshman.

Throughout sports

In some sports there are traditions in which rookies must do things or tricks are played on them. Some examples in baseball include players having to dress up in very strange costumes, or getting hit in the face with a cream pie; a traditional rookie's "hazing" procedure in American football involves taping players to a goalpost and dousing them with ice water, Gatorade, and other substances.

Auto racing

In NASCAR, rookies are denoted by a yellow stripe on the rear bumper of the car that is placed on both sides of the name or symbol of the manufacturer of the car.

Baseball

In order to qualify as a rookie in Major League Baseball, a player has to have had fewer than 130 at bats or fifty innings pitched in the majors, and also fewer than 45 days on the active rosters of major league clubs (excluding time on the disabled list or any time after rosters are expanded on September 1) in their previous seasons. Major League Baseball awards the best rookie with the Major League Baseball Rookie of the Year Award, as voted upon by the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Bird

Birds (class Aves) are a group of endothermic vertebrates, characterised by feathers, a beak with no teeth, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) ostrich. They rank as the class of tetrapods with the most living species, at approximately ten thousand, with more than half of these being passerines, sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds.

The fossil record indicates that birds are the last surviving dinosaurs, having evolved from feathered ancestors within the theropod group of saurischian dinosaurs. True birds first appeared during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, and the last common ancestor is estimated to have lived about 95 million years ago. DNA-based evidence finds that birds radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. Birds in South America survived this event and then migrated to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during periods of global cooling. Primitive bird-like "stem-birds" that lie outside class Aves proper, in the group Avialae, have been found dating back to the mid-Jurassic period. Many of these early stem-birds, such as Archaeopteryx, were not yet capable of fully powered flight, and many retained primitive characteristics like toothy jaws in place of beaks and long bony tails.

The finger

In Western culture, the finger or the middle finger (as in giving someone the (middle) finger or the bird or flipping someone off,) is an obscene hand gesture. It communicates moderate to extreme contempt, and is roughly equivalent in meaning to "fuck off", "fuck you", "shove it up your ass", "up yours" or "go fuck yourself". It is performed by showing the back of a closed fist that has only the middle finger extended upwards, though in some locales the thumb is extended. Extending the finger is considered a symbol of contempt in several cultures, especially Western ones. Many cultures use similar gestures to display their disrespect, although others use it to express pointing without intentional disrespect toward other cultures.

The gesture dates back to Ancient Greece and it was also used in Ancient Rome. Historically, it represented the phallus. In some modern cultures, it has gained increasing recognition as a sign of disrespect, and has been used by music artists (notably more common among hardcore punk bands and rappers), actors, celebrities, athletes, and politicians. Most still view the gesture as obscene. The index finger and ring finger besides the middle finger in more contemporary periods has been likened to represent the testicles.

Birds (Marius Neset album)

Birds (released March 25, 2013 in Oslo, Norway by the label Edition Records – EDN1040) is the 4'th album of the Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset.

Critical reception

The review by Neil Spencer of the British newspaper The Guardian awarded the album 5 stars, the review by Terje Mosnes of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet awarded the album dice 6, the review by Carl Petter Opsahk of the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang awarded the album dice 5, and the reviewer Ian Mann of the Jazz Mann awarded the album 4.5 stars

According to Mosnes, with this album, Neset takes further steps on his way to the Jazz sky. The brilliant compositions and the musical skills of this band are extraordinary. It is only to look forward to the next move of this great jazz musician and composer.

NRK Jazz critique Erling Wicklund, in his review of Neset's album Birds states:

BBC Music critique Peter Marsh, in his review of Neset's album Birds states:

Track listing

Personnel