Charles Beaumont was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic Twilight Zone episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but penned the screenplays for several films, among them 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder, The Masque of the Red Death. Novelist Dean Koontz has said, "Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Beaumont is the subject of the documentary, Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man, by Jason V Brock. Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, the only child of Charles Hiram Nutt and Violet "Letty" Nutt, a homemaker, a scenarist at Essanay Studios, his father was 56. Letty is known to have dressed young Charles in girls' clothes, once threatened to kill his dog to punish him; these early experiences inspired the celebrated short story "Miss Gentilbelle", but according to Beaumont, "Football and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world".
School did not hold his attention, his last name exposed him to ridicule, so Charles Nutt found solace as a teenager in science fiction. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to join the army, he worked as a cartoonist, disc jockey and dishwasher before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. During his time as an illustrator, he used the pseudonyms Charles McNutt and E. T. Beaumont, before settling on the name Charles Beaumont, he soon adopted this name and used it both and professionally for the rest of his life. In 1954, Playboy magazine selected his story "Black Country" to be the first work of short fiction to appear in its pages, it was at about this time that Beaumont started writing for television and film. Beaumont was energetic and spontaneous, was known to take trips at a moment's notice. An avid racing fan, he enjoyed participating in or watching area speedway races, with other authors tagging along, his cautionary fables include "The Beautiful People", about a rebellious adolescent girl in a future conformist society in which people are obligated to alter their physical appearance, "Free Dirt", about a man who gorges on his entire vegetable harvest and dies from having consumed the magical soil he used to grow it.
His short story "The Crooked Man" presents a dystopian future wherein heterosexuality is stigmatized in the same way that homosexuality was, with heterosexual people living furtively like pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian people. In the story, a heterosexual man meets his lover in a gay orgy bar. Beaumont wrote several scripts for The Twilight Zone, including an adaptation of his own short story, "The Howling Man", about a prisoner who might be the Devil, the hour-long "Valley of the Shadow", about a cloistered Utopia that refuses to share its startlingly advanced technology with the outside world. Beaumont scripted the film Queen of Outer Space from an outline by Ben Hecht, deliberately writing the screenplay as a comedic parody. According to Beaumont, the directorial style is not informed by his satiric intent, he penned one episode of the Steve Canyon TV show, "Operation B-52", in which Canyon and his crew attempt to set a new speed record in a B-52 accompanied by a newsman who hates Air Force pilots.
Beaumont was much admired by his colleagues. Many of his stories have been re-released in the posthumous volumes Best of Beaumont and The Howling Man, a set of unpublished tales, A Touch of the Creature. In 2004, Gauntlet Press released the first of two volumes collecting Beaumont's Twilight Zone scripts. A book-length biography of Beaumont, titled Trapped in the Twilight Zone: The Life and Times of Charles Beaumont, is due to be published by Centipede Press in late 2020. In 1963, when Beaumont was 34 and overwhelmed by numerous writing commitments, he began to suffer the effects of "a mysterious brain disease" which seemed to age him rapidly, his ability to speak and remember became erratic. While some people attributed all of this to Beaumont's heavy drinking, his friend and colleague John Tomerlin disagreed: "I was working with Chuck at the time, we were good enough friends for me to know that alcohol by itself could not account for the odd mental state that he was in.""He was well," his friend and colleague William F. Nolan would recall.
"He was thin, kept having headaches. He used, he had a big Bromo bottle with him all the time". The disease affected his work. "He could sell stories, much less write. He would go unshaven to meetings with producers. Got to be able to think on your feet, which Chuck couldn't do anymore; the condition might have been related to the spinal meningitis. His friend and early agent Forrest J Ackerman has asserted an alternative, that
Amblyeleotris periophthalma, the broad-banded shrimp goby or the periophthalma shrimp goby, is a marine benthic species of goby native to reef environments of the Indo-West Pacific, Red Sea included. A. periophthalma is a small fish. Its body is lengthened and cylindrical; the background coloration is whitish and banded with large brown stripes whose color intensity varies from an individual to another. A multitude of small brownish dots are distributed on the superior part of the body. Eyes are prominent; the mouth is big and in the shape of an inverted "U". A. periophthalma can be found on sandy substrates in lagoons or on external reef slopes at depths of from 3 to 35 metres, though between 10 to 20 m. A. periophthalma lives in symbiosis with alpheid shrimps in burrows. The shrimps maintain the burrows which are the dens for both animals; the goby is like a watchman that warns in case of potential danger which benefits the shrimp because it has poor vision. A. periophthalma has a carnivorous diet and eats small crustaceans or small fishes passing close to its burrow.
WoRMS entry Photograph Photos of Amblyeleotris periophthalma on Sealife Collection
The Mümling is a river of Hesse and Bavaria, Germany. It lends its name to the Mümlingtal in Odenwald. In Bavaria it is sometimes called Mömling in official documents, it is a left tributary of the Main. The Romans named this river Nemaninga, after it the Numerus Brittonum et exploratorum Nemaningensium unit in Obernburg. In the 9th century, this river was first mentioned with the name Mimininga; the name Mümling belongs to the so-called "pra-european hydronyms" as a twin-form of Neman River. Beerfelden Erbach Michelstadt Zell im Odenwald Bad König Mümling-Grumbach Höchst im Odenwald Breuberg Mömlingen Eisenbach Obernburg List of rivers of Bavaria List of rivers of Hesse Cycling trail "R1" Mümlingtal Water level at Michelstadt, water level at Hainstadt, HND Bayern Upper course and tributaries of the Mümling, Natura 2000 Hessen
Prayer Before Birth is a poem written by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice at the height of the Second World War. Written from the perspective of an unborn child, the poem expresses the author's fear at what the world's tyranny can do to the innocence of a child and blames the human race for the destruction, gripping the world at the time. Unlike most of his countrymen, MacNeice opposed Ireland's neutral stance in the war, disdaining the lack of opposition to fascism. To this effect, he published a poem called "Neutrality" in 1943, which criticized his country's stance and spent the war years in London, contributing to the war effort by writing propaganda for the BBC. Prayer Before Birth first appeared in print in 1944, the first poem in MacNeice's volume Springboard; the poem is an agonized plea from the mouth of an unborn infant in its mother's womb. The unborn baby pleads with God to hear him out; the child seeks protection from the Divine and begs forgiveness for all the deeds of evil that it shall commit once it is out of the mother's protective care.
Dramatic in intensity, the poem makes a sweeping statement on the deplorable state of the world. Living is a painful experience, being born is a terrifying one; the child's plea is a representation of the poet's anguish and fear in a world that has metamorphosed into a hell. The poet paints a picture of a world devoid of compassion and remorse through the haunting appeal of the unborn infant; the poem reflects the poet's utter dejection and hopelessness expressing the thought that the world will not correct itself, but perpetuate its evils in an ever-ascending spiraling pattern of violence. The foregone conclusion that the child will live a life of treason and its apology proffered in advance for its death after it has lived as a "lethal automaton", offers a picture of a world akin to nothing but hell. MacNeice makes use of alliteration and assonance: "strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me" to create rhythm in the poem; the repetition of "I am not yet born" is used to give it the ritualised quality of a prayer.
The author talks of being a "cog in a machine" - this shows that he feels that society will mould the child to become part of everything else around him, he will be worthless, insignificant and a part of an entire collaboration. The uses “I” and “me” as the first and last words of each stanza contributes to an assertion of individuality in a time of mass mobilisation and of the mass extermination of individuals who belonged to the wrong category; the poem contains many religious themes and overtones through the use of double-imagery.
Roulette is a casino game named after the French word meaning little wheel. In the game, players may choose to place bets on either a single number, various groupings of numbers, the colors red or black, whether the number is odd or or if the numbers are high or low. To determine the winning number and color, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction spins a ball in the opposite direction around a tilted circular track running around the outer edge of the wheel; the ball loses momentum, passes through an area of deflectors, falls onto the wheel and into one of 37 or 38 colored and numbered pockets on the wheel. The winnings are paid to anyone who has placed a successful bet; the first form of roulette was devised in 18th century France. Many historians believe Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine; the roulette mechanism is a hybrid of a gaming wheel invented in the Italian game Biribi. The game has been played in its present form since as early as 1796 in Paris.
An early description of the roulette game in its current form is found in a French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. The description included the house pockets, "There are two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage." It goes on to describe the layout with, "...two betting spaces containing the bank's two numbers and double zero". The book was published in 1801. An earlier reference to a game of this name was published in regulations for New France in 1758, which banned the games of "dice, hoca and roulette"; the roulette wheels used in the casinos of Paris in the late 1790s had red for the single zero and black for the double zero. To avoid confusion, the color green was selected for the zeros in roulette wheels starting in the 1800s. In 1843, in the German spa casino town of Bad Homburg, fellow Frenchmen François and Louis Blanc introduced the single 0 style roulette wheel in order to compete against other casinos offering the traditional wheel with single and double zero house pockets.
In some forms of early American roulette wheels, there were numbers 1 through 28, plus a single zero, a double zero, an American Eagle. The Eagle slot, a symbol of American liberty, was a house slot that brought the casino extra edge. Soon, the tradition vanished and since the wheel features only numbered slots. According to Hoyle "the single 0, the double 0, eagle are never bars. In the 19th century, roulette spread all over Europe and the US, becoming one of the most famous and most popular casino games; when the German government abolished gambling in the 1860s, the Blanc family moved to the last legal remaining casino operation in Europe at Monte Carlo, where they established a gambling mecca for the elite of Europe. It was here that the single zero roulette wheel became the premier game, over the years was exported around the world, except in the United States where the double zero wheel had remained dominant. In the United States, the French double zero wheel made its way up the Mississippi from New Orleans, westward.
It was here, because of rampant cheating by both operators and gamblers, that the wheel was placed on top of the table to prevent devices being hidden in the table or wheel, the betting layout was simplified. This evolved into the American-style roulette game; the American game was developed in the gambling dens across the new territories where makeshift games had been set up, whereas the French game evolved with style and leisure in Monte Carlo. During the first part of the 20th century, the only casino towns of note were Monte Carlo with the traditional single zero French wheel, Las Vegas with the American double zero wheel. In the 1970s, casinos began to flourish around the world. By 2008, there were several hundred casinos worldwide offering roulette games; the double zero wheel is found in the U. S. Canada, South America, the Caribbean, while the single zero wheel is predominant elsewhere. In 2016, The Venetian Las Vegas introduced the first triple-zero wheel, which has since spread to a few additional casinos.
The sum of all the numbers on the roulette wheel is 666, the "Number of the Beast". Roulette players have a variety of betting options. Placing inside bets is either selecting the exact number of the pocket the ball will land in, or a small range of pockets based on their proximity on the layout. Players wishing to bet on the'outside' will select bets on larger positional groupings of pockets, the pocket color, or whether the winning number is odd or even; the payout odds for each type of bet are based on its probability. The roulette table imposes minimum and maximum bets, these rules apply separately for all of a player's inside and outside bets for each spin. For inside bets at roulette tables, some casinos may use separate roulette table chips of various colors to distinguish players at the table. Players can continue to place bets as the ball spins around the wheel until the dealer announces no more bets or rien ne va plus; when a winning number and color is determined by the roulette wheel, the dealer will place a marker known as a dolly, on that winning number on the roulette table layout.
When the dolly is on the table, no players may place bets, collect bets, or remove
Catholics is a 1973 television film known as Conflict, A Fable of the Future and The Visitor was directed by Jack Gold. Based on the novel of the same name by Brian Moore, who wrote the screenplay for the film, it stars Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen and Cyril Cusack and was presented on the ITV Sunday Night Theatre; the film is rated 4.5 out 5 stars in DVD & Video Guide 2007. Brian Moore's original novel was written in 1972; the film is set in the futuristic year of 2000. In defiance of the Sacrosanctum Concilium from the edicts of the Second Vatican Council, a future Fourth Vatican Council, a group of monks from a monastery located on an island offshore the Republic of Ireland conducts the traditional Tridentine Mass in Latin on the Irish mainland; these traditional masses are so popular that groups from all parts of the world make pilgrimages to attend the masses and express their displeasure at the changes in the Roman Catholic Church. This future Vatican Council destroys the mystery of the Mass, denies Transubstantiation, insists that priests only wear clerical clothing on ceremonial occasions.
The Vatican is outraged at the beginnings of a potential counter reformation when an upcoming Interfaith dialogue is about to take place in Singapore. The Father General sends out Father Kinsella, a strong adherent of Liberation theology to order the monks to change their ways or face transfer to other monasteries. Martin Sheen as Father Kinsella Trevor Howard as The Abbot Raf Vallone as Father General Cyril Cusack as Father Manus Andrew Keir as Father Matthew Godfrey Quigley as Father Walter Michael Gambon as Brother Kevin Leon Vitali as Brother Donald Seamus Healy as Brother Pius John Kelly as Brother Paul John Franklyn as Brother Martin Patrick Long as Brother Sean Cecil Sheridan as Brother Malachy Tom Jordan as Father Terrence Liam Burk as Brother Daniel Richard Oliver as Brother Alphonsus The film was shot on Sherkin Island with many interiors shot in Cahir Castle. Catholics on IMDb