Raymond Orteig was the New York City hotel owner who offered the Orteig Prize for the first non-stop transatlantic flight between New York City and Paris. Orteig was born in the village of Louvie-Juzon in the region of Béarn in southern France. After spending part of his childhood looking after his father's sheep in the Pyrenees he emigrated at age 12, arriving in New York City on 13 October 1882 with 13 Francs in his pocket to join an uncle living in New York City, he started working as a bar porter at Wengler's Restaurant on New York City. Gaining experience he moved on to a position as waiter and as a maitre'd at Martin Hotel on University Place on Ninth Street. By the time the owner Jean-Baptiste Martin moved uptown in 1902 Orteig was in a position to buy the hotel, which he renamed the Hotel Lafayette. In conjunction with a partner he was able to lease the rundown Brevoort Hotel on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Eight Street in Greenwich Village and refurbish it; the Lafayette became a favourite gathering spot for airmen during and after World War I and Orteig became acquainted with many of them including French officers on temporary duty in the United States to help build the US Air Force.

After the end of the World War I, whenever he could, he and his family would spend the summer in Louvie-Juzon. This lifelong interest in the region of his birth lead to him expanding his business interests by the purchase of the Henri IV Hotel in Pau. By his mid fifties Ortieg was in semi-retirement with daily operations at his establishments under the management of his three sons and his business partner Elie Daution. In 1925 the partnership undertook a $200,000 refurbishment of the Brevoort Hotel, his support of and numerous charitable activities made him a leading figure in New York City's French community. This led to him being made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1919 he attended a dinner in New York City organised by the Aero Club of America in early 1919 honouring the American flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker. Many of the speeches involved Franco-American friendship and Rickenbacher had looked forward to the day that the two countries were linked by air. Inspired by Rickenbacher's speech Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to the first person of any Allied country to fly in one flight in either direction between New York City and Paris.

The offer was made in a letter to Alan Ramsay Hawley president of the Aero Club of America on Thursday 22 May 1919. At the time relations were strained between America and France by negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference so as well the encouragement of air travel and the public relations value to his business Orteig hoped that it would assist in a rapprochement between his adopted and native countries, his offer was accepted by the Aero Club. The prize was valid for 5 years. After its original term had expired Orteig reissued the prize on 1 June 1925 by depositing $25,000 in negotiable securities at the Bryant Bank with the awarding put under the control of a 7-member board of trustees. Orteig and his wife were on holiday in Pau, when he received a message from his son Raymond Jr that Charles Lindbergh had departed on his attempt. Orteig travelled to Paris, arriving just before the Spirit of St. Louis touched down, he was able to meet Lindbergh at the American Embassy on 22 May 1927, eight years to the day since he had first offered the prize.

Upon his depart from Paris to Belgium Lindbergh dropped a message of thanks to the local citizens from the Spirit of St. Louis as he flew over the Place de la Concorde; the message was attached to a French flag. Upon being retrieved the flag was presented to Orteig who displayed it on the wall of the Lafayette until his family removed it in protest at Lindbergh's involvement in the America First Movement. Upon Lindbergh's return to America Orteig presented the prize to him on 16 June 1927 at a ceremony held in the reception hall of the Breevort Hotel in New York City. Over the preceding decade, the Orteig Prize became an inspiring incentive and marked a major shift in aviation progress during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Orteig died on 6 June 1939 in French Hospital in New York City after a long illness, with 500 people attending his funeral, he was married to French American Marie Ruisquès, by whom he had three sons, Raymond Jr and Jean. The two oldest children married daughters of his longtime business partner Elie Daution.

Bak, Richard. The Big Jump - Lindbergh and the Great Atlantic Air Race. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Pp. 325 pages. ISBN 978-0-471-47752-5. Lalanne, Alain.'Du Béarn a New York, Raymond Orteig, Histoirie d'un mecene de l'aviation. Pau: Editions Marrimpouey. ISBN 2853021521. in French

Secundus the Silent was a Cynic or Neopythagorean philosopher who lived in Athens in the early 2nd century, who had taken a vow of silence. An anonymous text entitled Life of Secundus purports to give details of his life as well as answers to philosophical questions posed to him by the emperor Hadrian; the work enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages. Secundus is known only from an anonymous Life of Secundus. We are told; when he was an adult he decided to test the proposition. So he returned home dressed as a Cynic philosopher with long hair and a beard, unrecognisable to his own mother, he persuaded her to agree to sleep with him for fifty gold pieces. After he had spent the night with her, doing nothing more than sleeping chastely in her bed, he told her who he was. Shamed, his mother hanged herself, Secundus, blaming his own tongue for the trouble he caused, committed himself to a lifelong vow of silence, for which reason he is described as a Pythagorean philosopher. Having heard about this silent philosopher, Hadrian summoned him and threatened to execute him if he did not speak.

Secundus refused to speak, Hadrian, impressed by this resolve, relented. Secundus did, agree to answer twenty questions by writing the answers on a tablet; these questions and answers are given in the anonymous text. A typical response is the answer to question 17: What is Poverty? A good thing, hated, the mother of health, a hindrance to pleasures, a way of life free of worry, a possession hard to cast off, the teacher of inventions, the finder of wisdom, a business that nobody envies, property unassessed, merchandise not subject to tariff, profit not to be reckoned in terms of cash, a possession not interfered with by informers, non-evident good fortune, good fortune free of care. How much of the story of Secundus' life is accurate is impossible to say; the questions and answers are just one example of several such compositions which survive, including a similar question and answer conversation between Hadrian and Epictetus. There was a Rhetorician of the same period called Secundus of Athens, mentioned by Philostratus.

Whether he could be the same person as this Secundus is unknown. The oldest evidence for the existence of the Greek biography is a papyrus fragment from the 3rd Century; the complete text is only found in a single manuscript from the 11th Century, the other Greek manuscripts contain only the questions and answers. Willelmus Medicus a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, brought the complete manuscript from Constantinople to France in 1167, he made a Latin translation. An abridged version of this translation was placed by Vincent of Beauvais into his popular encyclopedia Speculum Historiale in the 13th century. In the early 14th Century, the Liber de Vita et Moribus Philosophorum, a popular biographical presentation of ancient non-Christian spiritual life, dedicated a chapter to Secundus, he was so well known that his bust with a quote was carved in the Gothic choir stalls of Ulm Minster. The popularity of the material in the Middle Ages was connected, among other things, with the fact that Secundus' readiness to die reminded readers at that time of the attitude of Christian martyrs.

Late medieval translations of the Latin text of the biography include: two German, two Spanish, six French, an Icelandic, four Italian versions. Some translations are free, as partial elements of larger works; the popularity of the work in the Middle Ages, is testified by translations in other languages: Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopic. Ben Edwin Perry, The Silent Philosopher: The Greek Life of Secundus, critically edited and restored so far as possible, together with translations of the Greek and Oriental versions, the Latin and Oriental texts, a study of the tradition. American Philological Association Philological Monographs. ISBN 0-8295-0038-3 Ben Edwin Perry, Secundus: The Silent Philosopher, in William Hansen, Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21157-3 S. P. Brock, "Secundus the Silent Philosopher: Some Notes on the Syriac Tradition," Rheinishes Museum für Philologie, Neue Folge, 121. Bd. H. 1, 94–100. Overwien, Oliver. "Secundus the Silent Philosopher in the Ancient and Eastern Tradition."

Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond. Brill, 2016. 338-364

Quay Valley was a proposed 75,000-resident solar power city in Kings County, California, to have been developed by GROW Land and Water LLC, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2008, the developers of Quay Valley Ranch put the project on hold pending signs of an economic recovery. Planned as the largest new town in California on private land, as of April 2010, the Quay Valley project was tied up in litigation over water rights and it was unknown at that time if the project would move forward. In 2014, a court suit about water rights was settled in favor of the project. On December 6, 2017, The Kings County Community Development Department received a formal withdrawal of the application from Quay Hays for the Quay Valley project. Quay Valley would have used clean and renewable energy generated from an on-site 600-megawatt power plant; as proposed, the city would have consisted of about 50,000 units on 12,000 acres built over 25 years, housing 150,000 residents, using solar power for electricity.

An entertainment destination district, a medical center, theme parks and an international motor speedway complex were proposed. The project proposal was subsequently scaled down to 7,200 acres, 25,000 dwelling units and 75,000 residents; the planned community was organized by over 250 Planning Team Members by Kings County Ventures LLC. In July 2007, the Quay Valley planning team established a 50-acre on-site research ranch to test numerous new methods and systems which will help determine what may work best for the build out of Quay Valley. By April 2010, Kings County Ventures, LLC, the original project proponent, had been disbanded, but the partnership was still registered as active in California in 2015. Quay Hays' latest organization, GROW Land and Water LLC, filed a lawsuit in December 2009 in connection with the sale of land by McCarthy Family Farms to another party that included the attached water rights. Quay Valley proponents had planned to use that water for the proposed new city. California law requires that new cities demonstrate that they have sufficient water supplies to survive a five-year drought.

Greg Gatzka, Director of the Kings County Community Development Agency, said in April 2010 that the application before his agency to build the project had been inactive for a year and a half. Gaztka added that the project had yet to meet several key requirements in addition to the water issue, including a financial feasibility study and a detailed infrastructure plan; the scarcity of venture capital financing has been cited as another obstacle. Nonetheless, Quay Hays said. On December 12, 2017, Greg Gatza, Kings County Director of Community Development, reported at a meeting of the Kings County Board of Supervisors that on December 6, 2017, his department had received a formal withdrawal from Quay Hays on the Quay Valley project. On April 1, 2014, a Kings County jury awarded a $128.6 million verdict in favor of Kings County Ventures and GROW and against McCarthy Family Farms for breach of contract involving the sale of the water rights and against developer John Vidovich and Sandridge Partners for intentional interference of two contracts involving water for the Quay Valley Ranch project.

In February 2015, Quay Hays submitted an application to the Kings County Community Development Department to rezone 7,500 acres for housing and commercial development at the site. The project comprises 25,000 dwelling units to house 75,000 people, plus themed resort hotels and restaurants, a business park and university research park, restored wetland habitat, trails for nature walks and agriculture in a combination described as the "new ruralism." Some features included including a race track, have been deleted. As to water supply, Hays said that they have some state water rights and are working on acquiring more, he added that the project would use half the water that would be used due to water reuse. Greg Gatzka, the Kings County Community Development Agency director, said "there are a whole lot of questions that will have to be addressed."In March 2015, Dirk Ahlborn, the CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies in El Segundo, California announced a plan to build a 5-mile hyperloop test system at the Quay Valley site.

Ahlborn indicated that construction could begin in 2016 to be completed in 2017 with the first rides to begin in 2018 if his company can raise $100 million in funding. The company has said that this track will be a working and operational creation of the hyperloop, but that running speed will be reduced on the shortened track from Hyperloop's full potential, it is not decided whether a 5-mile loop or straight section will be constructed, it may cross the Interstate bisecting the site. Ahlborn said. Quay Hays expects to break ground on the new community in 2016, including a working version of the Hyperloop, estimated to cost $100–150 million. In March 2016, Hays submitted a Preliminary Design Plan for Quay Valley to the Kings County Community Development Agency. On December 6, 2017, The Kings County Community Development Department received a formal withdrawal from Quay Hays of the application for the Quay Valley project terminating the proposal. Hoge, Patrick. "Entrepreneur has big, green ideas for a new little town / Quay Valley Ranch: Businessman wants to build solar-run community in the middle of nowhere in Kings County".

San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved March 5, 2015. Lindt, John. "Developer

The Princess Diaries, Volume VII: Party Princess, released in the United Kingdom as The Princess Diaries: Seventh Heaven, is a young adult book in the Princess Diaries series. Written by Meg Cabot, it was released in 2006 by Harper Collins Publishers and is the seventh novel in the series; when Mia Thermopolis bankrupts the student government buying high-tech recycling bins, she needs to raise $5000 soon, so that she can pay for the seniors' commencement ceremony. All her friends mention selling candles, but Mia refuses, so Grandmere comes up with a solution: a musical, Braid! Written and directed by Grandmere, starring Mia and her friends, portraying the achievements of Mia's famous Genovian ancestor, Rosagunde. Mia is quite worried to be cast as the lead, she attempts to drop out, but Grandmere threatens to tell the seniors that Mia had bankrupted the student government.'Braid!' results in a new-found friendship, between Mia and'The Guy Who Hates It When They Put Corn In The Chili', aka J.

P. - Mia's on-stage love interest, who turns out to be an aspiring screenwriter. Another drama in her life enters the story when Michael mentions his parents are going away for the weekend and he plans on having a party. Mia starts to worry, she asks her archenemy, Lana Weinberger, how to act like a "Party Girl". Mia does what Lana says and it all ends in tragedy. After she drinks and'sexy dances' with J. P. her relationship with Michael seems to be on rocky ground as Michael's parents are splitting up and he is being an absent boyfriend. Her friendship with J. P. seems to be going the same way thanks to Lilly's new literary magazine,'Fat Louie's Pink Butthole', which includes'No More Corn!' A story Mia wrote about J. P. killing himself. However, Principal Gupta bans the magazine and confiscates all the copies, as Lilly has submitted five explicit stories to it, meaning that J. P. never sees Mia's story. Mia's friendship with Lily hits a rough patch after Mia kisses J. P. as a sign of gratitude for being a supportive friend and Lily stops speaking to Mia.

The play is performed at the Aide de Ferme, a benefit for Genovian olive oil farmers that Grandmere puts on. Everyone, anyone attends, before the last scene, Mia is worried about her on-stage kiss with J. P, but Michael shows up in J. P.'s costume and gives her a perfect kiss and they talk about their problems, once again, their relationship appears to be strong. Grandmere raises enough money to help the Genovian farmers and Mia, solving her problems

Bánh tráng or bánh đa nem, a Vietnamese term, sometimes called rice paper wrappers, rice crepes, rice wafers or nem wrappers, are edible Vietnamese wrappers used in Vietnamese cuisine in finger foods and appetizers such as Vietnamese nem dishes. The term rice paper wrappers can sometimes be a misnomer, as some banh trang wrappers are made from rice flour supplemented with tapioca flour or sometimes replaced with tapioca starch; the roasted version is bánh tráng nướng. Vietnamese banh trang are rice paper wrappers, they are made from steamed rice batter sun-dried. A more modern method is to use machines that can steam and dry the wrapper for a thinner and more hygienic product, suitable for the export market. Vietnamese banh trang wrappers come in various textures and types. Textures may vary from thin, soft to thick. Banh trang wrappers come in various shapes, though circular and squared shapes are most used. A plethora of local Vietnamese ingredients and spices are added to Vietnamese banh trang wrappers for the purpose of creating different flavors and textures, such as sesame seeds, coconut milk and durian, to name a few.

Southern Vietnamese term for rice wrappers, which are commonly used overseas. These banh trang wrappers are made from a mixture of rice flour with tapioca starch and salt; these wrappers are light in texture. They are used for chả giò and gỏi cuốn. There are certain rice wrappers products that are for frying. Bánh đa nướng or bánh tráng nướng are roasted or grilled rice crackers; some can be thicker than the standard rice wrapper and can include sesame seeds. It is used in dishes like Mì Quảng as a topping. Not be confused with the street food dish from Đà Lạt with the same name; this is a northern Vietnamese term for rice paper. There is a special variety that contains only rice flour and no tapioca starch and salt. Brown bánh đa nem may contain cane syrup; these wrappers are thin and translucent. They do not required to be soaked with water before usage; when fried, they are crispier and not as chewy like its southern counterpart. It is used as a wrapper when making nem cua bể; these banh trang wrappers are made from green beans, vegetable oil and salt.

These wrappers are thin. They are lacy, net-like wrappers used for deep-fried cha gio rolls; these banh trang wrappers are made from rice starch adding sesame seeds. Its texture resembles that of a rice cracker; these banh trang wrappers dried shrimps. Its texture resembles that of a rice cracker. Bánh tráng sữa are made by adding milk; this type of banh trang is softer, supposed to melt on your tongue. Bánh tráng dẻo are malleable sheets, they come in different flavors. Thin sheets made from only tapioca starch, they are more sticky when activated with water. These banh trang wrappers are made by adding bananas, its texture resembles that of a rice cracker. These banh trang wrappers are made by adding coconut milk, rice flour, sesame seeds, water; the texture resembles that of a cracker, similar to the sesame banh trang. Bánh tráng phơi sương are wrappers with flexible two layered rice paper. Banh trang wrappers are used in Vietnamese nem dishes; these wrappers are eaten dried, baked or soaked. They are served rolled or baked, in salads and stirred fried Vietnamese dishes.

The light, translucent traditional banh trang wrappers are used for various Vietnamese rolls, more the goi cuon. Though used in fresh rolls, Northern Vietnamese cuisine use these wrappers in chả giò, a crispy, fried springroll. Traditional banh trang wrappers are used to wrap common Vietnamese dishes such as banh xeo, bò 7 món and cá nướng and dipped into a sauce; the traditional banh trang wrappers are used to make a Vietnamese salad dish called bánh tráng trộn. Woven banh trang wrappers are deep-fried to make aesthetically appealing cha gio. Sesame banh trang wrappers are baked or soaked in water, depending on individual textural preference served with salads, mi Quang and various other dishes. Banh trang wrappers are found in countries outside Vietnam with Vietnamese diaspora