Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U. S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, along with American Decca's first president Jack Kapp and American Decca president Milton Rackmil. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca and the link between the UK and U. S. Decca labels was broken for several decades; the British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre. Both wings are now part of the Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, a media conglomerate headquartered in Paris; the US Decca label was the foundation company that evolved into UMG. The name dates back to a portable gramophone called the "Decca Dulcephone" patented in 1914 by musical instrument makers Barnett Samuel and Sons; the name "Decca" was coined by Wilfred S. Samuel by merging the word "Mecca" with the initial D of their logo "Dulcet" or their trademark "Dulcephone".

Samuel, a linguist, chose "Decca" as a brand name. That company was renamed the Decca Gramophone Co. Ltd. and sold to former stockbroker Edward Lewis in 1929. Within years, Decca Records was the second largest record label in the world, calling itself "The Supreme Record Company". Decca continued to run it under that name. In the 1950s, the American Decca studios were located in the Pythian Temple in New York City. In classical music, Decca had a long way to go from its modest beginnings to catch up with the established HMV and Columbia labels; the pre-war classical repertoire on Decca was select. The 3-disc 1929 recording of Delius's Sea Drift, arising from the Delius Festival that year, suffered by being crammed onto six sides, being indifferently recorded and expensive. However, it won Decca the loyalty of the baritone Roy Henderson, who went on to record for them the first complete Dido and Aeneas of Purcell with Nancy Evans and the Boyd Neel ensemble. Heinrich Schlusnus made important pre-war lieder recordings for Decca.

Decca's emergence as a major classical label may be attributed to three concurrent events: the emphasis on technical innovation, the introduction of the long-playing record, the recruitment of John Culshaw to Decca's London office. Decca released the stereo recordings of Ernest Ansermet conducting L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, including, in 1959, the first complete stereo LP recording of The Nutcracker, as well as Ansermet's only stereo version of Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat, which the conductor had led at its first performance in 1919. John Culshaw, who joined Decca in 1946 in a junior post became a senior producer of classical recordings, he revolutionised recording -- in particular. Hitherto, the practice had been to put microphones in front of the performers and record what they performed. Culshaw was determined to make recordings that would be'a theatre of the mind', making the listener's experience at home not second best to being in the opera house, but a wholly different experience.

To that end he got the singers to move about in the studio as they would onstage, used discreet sound effects and different acoustics, recorded in long continuous takes. His skill, coupled with Decca's sound engineering capabilities, took the label into the first flight of recording companies, his pioneering recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen conducted by Georg Solti was a huge artistic and commercial success. Solti recorded throughout his career for Decca, made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. Among the international honours given Solti for his recordings were 31 Grammy awards – more than any other recording artist, whether classical or popular. In the wake of Decca's lead, artists such as Herbert von Karajan, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti were keen to join the label's roster. However, Culshaw was speaking, not the first to do this. In 1951, Columbia Records executive Goddard Lieberson partnered with Broadway conductor Lehman Engel to record a series of unrecorded Broadway musical scores for Columbia Masterworks, including what Engel, in his book The American Musical Theatre: A Consideration, termed "Broadway opera", in 1951, they released the most complete Porgy and Bess recorded up to that time.

Far from being a mere rendering of the score, the 3-LP album set used sound effects to realistically recreate the production as if the listener were watching a stage performance of the work. Until 1947, American Decca issued British Decca classical music recordings. Afterwards, British Decca took over distribution through its new American subsidiary London Records. American Decca re-entered the classical music field in 1950 with distribution deals from Deutsche Grammophon and Parlophone. American Decca began issuing its own classical music recordings in 1956 when Israel Horowitz joined Decca to head its classical music operations. To further American Decca's dedication to serious music, in August 1950, Rackmill announced the release of a new series of disks to be known as the "Decca Gold Label Series", to be devoted to "symphonies, chamber music, opera and chor

Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is a 1991 combat flight simulator video game by Electronic Arts. Chuck Yeager was a technical consultant in the game and his digitized voice is featured in the game, giving encouragement and praise before and after missions; the game is characterized for its balance of an action laden gameplay which focuses on classical dog fights and a simple yet realistic flight model. The game was available for MS-DOS, ported to the Macintosh; the latter version is considered superior as its graphical display is at a much higher resolution, multi-player network play is supported, saved movies may be exported in QuickTime format. The game features three modes: Free Flight, which put the user in a selected airplane in a non-hostile environment. All missions are based upon actual missions ranging from strafing attacks of World War II, the open dogfights of modern air warfare, the combat missions of Vietnam, which included bomber escorts; the name of the actual pilot involved and the outcome of the encounter are told to the player, as a way for the player to judge air combat prowess.

This feature separated the game from other similar games of its time, influenced future work on flight simulations. However, famous battles in the wars are not included. For World War II, the missions are based on the European Theater of Operations. Computer Gaming World in 1991 said that Chuck Yeager's graphics and flight models impressed a Vietnam War combat pilot, predicted that it would be "popular with both flight sim veterans and newcomers". A survey in the magazine that year of strategy and war games gave it four and a half stars out of five, a 1993 survey in the magazine of wargames gave the game three-plus stars, and a 1994 survey gave the Macintosh version four stars out of five. In 1994, the magazine stated that Hellcats Over the Pacific and F/A-18 Hornet had better graphics on the Macintosh but Chuck Yeager's flying was more realistic, despite the lack of a rudder; the magazine concluded that it "is worth a test flight for we Mac-types who must live on a thin diet of top-flight games".

In 1996, the magazine ranked it as the 35th best PC game of all time. In 1994, PC Gamer US named Air Combat the 9th best computer game ever; the editors wrote, "It may not have the most realistic flight models in the world, the plane and ground graphics show their age, but there's no denying that Chuck Yeager's Air Combat succeeds wildly where it counts most — in creating a realistic sense of flight." That same year, PC Gamer UK named it the 47th best computer game of all time, writing that it "offers the perfect hour or two of dogfighting."In 1998, PC Gamer declared it the 23rd-best computer game released, the editors called it "classic" and a "golden oldie". Chuck Yeager's Air Combat at MobyGames Chuck Yeager's Air Combat can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive

Quarrington is a village and former civil parish, now part of the civil parish of Sleaford, in the North Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, a non-metropolitan county in the East Midlands of England. The old village and its church lie 1.2 miles south-west from the centre of Sleaford, the nearest market town, but suburban housing developments at New Quarrington and Quarrington Hill link the two settlements. Bypassed by the A15, it is connected to Peterborough, as well as Newark and King's Lynn. At the 2011 Census and Mareham ward, which incorporates most of the settlement, had an estimated population of 7,046. Quarrington was a rural community during the early and middle Anglo-Saxon period while mills along the River Slea in the Middle Ages gave the village its alternative name of Millthorpe; the Bishop of Lincoln and Ramsey Abbey held manors in Quarrington after the Norman Conquest, but the Carre family of Sleaford were the principal land-owners between 1559 and 1683, when its estate passed by marriage to the Marquesses of Bristol.

Although the growth of Victorian Sleaford saw the town encroach into the parish's boundaries, the old village remained a small cluster of farm buildings and cottages for much of its history. The sale of most of the surrounding farmland by successive Marquesses of Bristol in the late 20th century led to the rapid development of residential estates on Quarrington Hill and in New Quarrington which have engulfed the original settlement. Low crime rates, affordable housing, high standards of living and access to good schools have attracted home-buyers to the area, contributing to a sharp rise in the population; the medieval St Botolph's Church, a grade II* listed building, lies at the heart of the old village and remains a hub for the Anglican community. The village's primary school serves local children, who continue their secondary education in one of Sleaford's three secondary schools; the nearest railway station on the Grantham to Skegness and Peterborough to Lincoln lines is in Sleaford. In the 19th century, the most common employment was in agriculture and more than half of the village's population were farm labourers.

By 2011, most residents were employed in the wholesale and retail trades, public administration and defence, human health and social work, manufacturing. Scattered Palaeolithic and Bronze Age materials have been discovered in and around Quarrington but while nearby Old Sleaford is known to have been settled in the Iron Age and occupied by the Romans, there is little evidence for sustained pre-Saxon settlement at Quarrington. Between 1992 and 1995, archaeologists evaluating 34 trenches across 13 hectares of land around the village uncovered 56 ditches or gullies, a number of postholes, a large collection of pottery sherds and "extremely rare" evidence of metalworking from the 6th–7th centuries; the site has been dated to the 5th–9th centuries, representing an early and middle Anglo-Saxon settlement. Although noted for its metalworking and its size, the archaeologists concluded that it "displayed all the signs of a typical rural community", reflecting how "the vast majority" of the Anglo-Saxon population lived.

Analysis of animal bones revealed that sheep-farming replaced pig-rearing at the site during this period. A small early Anglo-Saxon cemetery containing inhumations was uncovered in the parish in 2000. Ramsey Abbey was granted the manor of Quarrington by Jol of Lincoln, a monk, in c. 1051. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded the abbey's manor consisted of one carucate and six bovates and had two churches. Local historians Christine Mahany and David Roffe concluded that one of the churches was at Old Sleaford, where the abbey held a manor as sokeland of Quarrington. A thegn, held another manor in Quarrington before the conquest, but it had been granted to the Bishop of Lincoln by 1086 and consisted of nine carucates and two and a half bovates plus 60 acres of meadow and two mills. A separate village, Millthorpe was recorded, but the archaeologists Fiona Walker and Tom Lane suggest this may have been an alternative name for Quarrington. Amongst the bishop's tenants was Hugh de St Vedasto or Vedeto, who held a knight's fee in c.

1200–10. His family were prominent tenants in the village. Henry Selvein, a knight, held Quarrington of the abbey and in c. 1166 granted the lands to Haverholme Priory. Quarrington's medieval name was recorded in the Domesday Book as Corninctune or Cornunctone, from the Old English cweorn and tun, meaning "miller's homestead", reflecting the importance of the watermills which were built along the River Slea. Bardi had owned 10 mills in Sleaford and Quarrington before Domesday, the 11 or 12 in existence by 1086 represents the largest cluster of mills in Lincolnshire. Mahany and Roffe suggest that Quarrington was a specialised part of his compact estate, geared in particular to milling. Excavations have revealed medieval pits and pottery in the village, with ditches reflecting a predominantly agricultural use of the land. In the Lay Subsidy of 1334, Quarrington and Millthorpe were valued at £4 10s. 4½d. Below average for its wapentake; the Bishop of Lincoln alienated his lands at Quarrington to the Crown in 1547.

Mary I granted them to Edward Clinton, 9th Baron Clinton and Earl of Lincoln, who sold them to Robert Carre of Sleaford in 1559. Carre acquired numerous manors, including Old and New Sleaford, during the mid-16th century and they passed through marriage fr