Persephone

In Greek mythology, Persephone (/pərˈsɛfəni/, per-SEH-fə-nee; Greek: Περσεφόνη), also called Kore or Cora (/ˈkɔəriː/; "the maiden"), is the daughter of Zeus and the harvest goddess Demeter, and is the queen of the underworld. Homer describes her as the formidable, venerable majestic princess of the underworld, who carries into effect the curses of men upon the souls of the dead. Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god-king of the underworld. The myth of her abduction represents her function as the personification of vegetation, which shoots forth in spring and withdraws into the earth after harvest; hence, she is also associated with spring as well as the fertility of vegetation. Similar myths appear in the Orient, in the cults of male gods like Attis, Adonis and Osiris, and in Minoan Crete.

Persephone as a vegetation goddess and her mother Demeter were the central figures of the Eleusinian mysteries that predated the Olympian pantheon and promised the initiated a more enjoyable prospect after death. Persephone is further said to have become by Zeus the mother of Dionysus, Iacchus, or Zagreus, usually in orphic tradition. The origins of her cult are uncertain, but it was based on very old agrarian cults of agricultural communities.

Lost Experience

The Lost Experience was an alternate reality game that was part of the American television drama Lost. The game was developed by ABC in the United States, Channel 4 in the UK, and Channel 7 in Australia. It was written by Jordan Rosenberg and created by the agency Hi-ReS!. The experience played out during Lost's second season in the United Kingdom and during the summer break in the United States until the launch of season 3. The Lost Experience, which was announced by the United Kingdom's Channel 4, Australia's Seven Network and the United States' ABC on April 24, 2006Damon Lindelof has verified the canonical status of The Lost Experience and the information provided therein.

ABC Entertainment's senior vice president of marketing, Mike Benson, described the game as a hybrid between content and marketing. This type of marketing was previously used by ABC for Lost's premiere in 2004. ABC created a website for the fictional Oceanic Airlines, the airline of the plane that crashed in the show's pilot episode.

Persephone (sculpture)

Persephone is an outdoor sculpture by artist Armand Toussaint created ca. 1840. The work sits within the center of a pool in Holcomb Gardens on the grounds of Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The sculpture depicts the Greek goddess Persephone. In 1993 the sculpture was examined by the Save Outdoor Sculpture! program produced by the Smithsonian Institution.

Description

Persephone depicts the Greek goddess Persephone standing on a limestone base in the center of a concrete octagonal pool. The bronze female figure is draped from the waist down. Her left hand is raised and holds a lit torch of bundled twigs. An inscription on the statue base reads on the left statue base:

The right side of the base is inscribed:

The front of the base is inscribed just before a 1950 founders mark:

Acquisition

The sculpture was made in France and was originally located at the Swift estate in Chicago, Illinois. It was purchased by J. I. Holcomb in 1950 and installed at the gardens.

Winter

Winter is the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate climates, between autumn and spring. Winter is caused by the axis of the Earth in that hemisphere being oriented away from the Sun. Different cultures define different dates as the start of winter, and some use a definition based on weather. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. In many regions, winter is associated with snow and freezing temperatures. The moment of winter solstice is when the sun's elevation with respect to the North or South Pole is at its most negative value (that is, the sun is at its farthest below the horizon as measured from the pole), meaning this day will have the shortest day and the longest night. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates outside the polar regions differ from the date of the winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit (see earliest and latest sunrise and sunset).

Winter (Tori Amos song)

"Winter" is a song by American singer-songwriter and musician Tori Amos, first released in 1992. The song was written about Amos' relationship with her father, who is a minister.

Release history

"Winter" was first released as the fourth single from Amos' debut studio album Little Earthquakes. It was released on March 9, 1992 by EastWest Records in the UK and Atlantic Records on November 24 in North America.

The song also appears on Amos' 2003 compilation, Tales of a Librarian. The music video can be seen on the two currently available video collections: Tori Amos: Complete Videos 1991–1998 and Fade to Red.

The single was released globally in a variety of formats with slightly differing artwork and track listings. The most commonly available version is the United States release, which is labeled as a "limited edition" release. That version comes in a digipak case with a compartment in which a "handwritten lyrics" insert is contained. The far more rare UK limited edition release features covers that would later appear on the Crucify EP which was released in the United States.

The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows: