Scratch (horse)

Scratch, also known as Scratch II (foaled 1947) was a French Thoroughbred racehorse and sire best known for winning the Prix du Jockey Club and the classic St Leger Stakes in 1950. Scratch won the Solario Stakes in England as a two-year-old and emerged as one of the best of a very strong generation of French-trained colts in the following year. He won the Prix de Guiche and Prix Greffulhe in the early part of the year and then defeated the year's outstanding three-year-old colt Tantieme in the Prix du Jockey Club. In the autumn of 1950 he won the St Leger by defeating Vieux Manoir, who had beaten him in the Grand Prix de Paris. He won the Prix Jean Prat as a four-year-old before being retired to stud where he had an unremarkable record as a sire of winners in Europe and South America.

Background

Scratch was a chestnut horse with a white star and a white sock on his right hind leg bred by his owner Marcel Boussac. He was sired by Pharis, the undefeated winner of the 1939 Grand Prix de Paris. Scratch's dam Orlamonde was an unsuccessful racehorse but produced several other winners including Damno, who won the Prix d'Arenberg. Orlamonde's dam Naic was a half sister of the Prix du Jockey Club winner Ramus and also produced the Grand Prix de Deauville winner Jock. Scratch was sent into training with Charles Semblat at Chantilly.

Scratch monkey

Scratch monkey is a term used in hacker jargon, as in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey", a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or devices. It is used to refer to any temporary configuration changes to a computer during any risky operation, which include a replacement for some precious resource or data that might otherwise be destroyed.

The meaning is based upon the use in the 1970s of a scratch tape or other storage device, which was available for temporary use, to temporarily store a copy of valuable data or provide extra storage space in case a program required that space. If a problem occurred, the valuable data could be recovered from its sole remaining copy.

The phrase "always mount a scratch monkey" originated from two tales by technicians about maintenance that was performed on computer equipment. The technicians were unaware that the computer was connected to five laboratory monkeys, and the routine maintenance procedures caused the death of three of the monkeys.

Gobots

GoBots was a line of transforming robot toys produced by Tonka from 1983 to 1987, similar to Transformers. Although initially a separate and competing franchise, Tonka's Gobots became the intellectual property of Hasbro after their buyout of Tonka in 1991. Subsequently, the universe depicted in the animated series Challenge of the GoBots and follow-up film GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords was established as an alternate universe within the Transformers franchise. While Hasbro now owns the fictional side of the property (character names, bios, storyline), the actual toys and their likenesses were only licensed from Bandai in the 80s, were not covered by the Tonka acquisition, and are not available for Hasbro use.

History

The Gobot toyline was based on figures produced by Popy of Japan (later Bandai), named Machine Robo. In another similarity to Transformers, Tonka decided to make the figures sentient robots, rather than human-piloted mecha as they had been in Japan, and divided them into two factions – the good Guardians and evil Renegades (although early figures were simply described as ‘Friendly’ or ‘Enemy’ on the packaging). The figures were all given individual names, in contrast to the simple designations they received in Japan.

Gridlock

Gridlock is a type of traffic jam where "continuous queues of vehicles block an entire network of intersecting streets, bringing traffic in all directions to a complete standstill". The term originates from a situation possible in a grid plan where intersections are blocked, preventing vehicles from either moving forwards through the intersection or backing up to an upstream intersection.

The term gridlock is also incorrectly used to describe high traffic congestion with minimal flow (which is simply a traffic jam), where a blocked grid system is not involved. By extension, the term has been applied to situations in other fields where flow is stalled by excess demand, or in which competing interests prevent progress.

Cause

The traditional form of gridlock is caused by traffic heading in one direction across an intersection. This traffic is then stopped, by sometimes too much capacity for the roadway or an accident, blocking the intersection. The drivers in the other direction then go into the blocked intersection trying to get through. In many jurisdictions, drivers are prohibited from entering an intersection at a green light if there is no room for them to clear the intersection. If drivers follow this rule of the road, gridlock will be prevented and traffic will only be slow in the direction that is actually congested. One method of reducing gridlock is to aggressively enforce penalties for vehicles that block intersections.

Gridlock (disambiguation)

Gridlock is the inability to move on a transport network.

Gridlock may also refer to:

Gridlock (band)

Gridlock is a San Francisco based experimental electronic band originally created by Mike Wells in 1994. A year later, Mike Cadoo joined up, and the duo released their first two demos, Sickness and Frozen, and soon signed to Pendragon Records in 1997.

Their style was originally akin to the sound of Skinny Puppy with less vocals and an ambient aspect not normally found in industrial at the time. Eventually, they took on more and more ambient and futuristic electronic sounds and slowly lessened their industrial edge whilst removing any trace of vocals.

On March 24, 2005, the band announced its dissolution on its website, but promised to continue making music under Wells' and Cadoo's respective side projects. Their last recorded material to be released was two tracks on the 2006 Hymen Records compilation Travel Sickness.

Discography

Full Length Albums and EPs