Terrence Vance Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, actor and former member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Gilliam has directed 13 feature films, including Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Brothers Grimm and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; the only "Python" not born in Britain, he became a naturalised British subject in 1968 and formally renounced his American citizenship in 2006. Gilliam spent his high school and college years in Los Angeles, he started his career as an strip cartoonist. He joined Monty Python as the animator of their works, but became a full member and was given acting roles, he became a feature film director in the 1970s. Most of his films explore the theme of imagination and its importance to life, express his opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarianism, feature characters facing dark or paranoid situations, his own scripts feature black tragicomedy elements, combined with surprise endings.

In 1988, Gilliam and the other Monty Python members received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. In 2009, Gilliam received the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement. Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice and James Hall Gilliam, his father was a travelling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to nearby Medicine Minnesota; the family moved to the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Panorama City in 1952. Gilliam attended Birmingham High School, where he was the president of his class and senior prom king, he was achieved straight A's. During high school, he began to avidly read Mad magazine edited by Harvey Kurtzman, which would influence Gilliam's work. Gilliam graduated from Occidental College in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. Gilliam told Salman Rushdie about defining experiences in the 1960s that, he said, set the foundations for his views on the world: I became terrified that I was going to be a full-time, bomb-throwing terrorist if I stayed because it was the beginning of bad times in America.

It was'66–'67, it was the first police riot in Los Angeles.... In college my major was political science, so my brain worked that way.... And I drove around this little English Hillman Minx—top down—and every night I'd be hauled over by the cops. Up against the wall, all this stuff, they had this monologue with me. It was, and I said, "No, I work in advertising. I make twice as much as you do." Which is a stupid thing to say to a cop.... And it was like an epiphany. I felt what it was like to be a black or Mexican kid living in L. A. Before that, I thought I knew what the world was like, I thought I knew what poor people were, suddenly it all changed because of that simple thing of being brutalized by cops, and I got more and more angry and I just felt, I've got to get out of here—I'm a better cartoonist than I am a bomb maker. That's why so much of the U. S. is still standing. Gilliam began his career as an strip cartoonist. One of his early photographic strips for Help! magazine featured future Python cast member John Cleese.

When Help! folded, Gilliam went to Europe, jokingly announcing in the last issue that he was "being transferred to the European branch" of the magazine, which, of course, did not exist. Moving to England, he animated sequences for the children's series Do Not Adjust Your Set which ran from 1967 to 1969, which featured Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin. Gilliam was a part of Monty Python's Flying Circus from its outset, credited at first as an animator and as a full member, his cartoons linked the show's sketches together and defined the group's visual language in other media, such as LP and book covers and the title sequences of their films. His animations mix his own art, characterised by soft gradients and odd, bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs from the Victorian era. In 1978, Gilliam published Animations of Mortality, an illustrated, tongue-in-cheek, semi-autobiographical how-to guide to his animation techniques and the visual language in them.

15 years between the release of the CD-ROM game Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time in 1994, which used many of Gilliam's animation templates, the making of Gilliam's film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam was in negotiations with Enteractive, a software company, to tentatively release in the autumn of 1996 a CD-ROM under the same title as his 1978 book, containing all of his thousands of 1970s animation templates as license-free clip arts for people to create their own flash animations, but the project hovered in limbo for years because Enteractive was about to downsize in mid-1996 and changed its focus from CD-ROM multimedia presentations to internet business solutions and web hosting in 1997. Around the time of Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the project had changed into the idea of releasing his 1970s animation templates as a license-free download of Adobe After Effects or similar files

The Venturi Eclectic is a zero emission car, running on solar sourced electric power, from the French/ Monegasque car manufacturer Venturi owned by Gildo Pastor. It functions as a small renewable energy production and storage plant and can be recharged at any outlet of the power grid, it was designed by Sacha Lakic. The Eclectic concept appeared at the Paris Motor Show in 2006, was mentioned in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2007, it is designed with 3 seats in a V-formation, with the driver at the apex, has open sides. It has a range of 50 kilometres and a maximum speed of 50 kilometres per hour; the Eclectic 2.0 is more compact. It has more limited accommodation but would be more driven in a crowded urban environment; the Eclectic 2.0 was first revealed at the 2008 Paris Motor Show. 2010 was a strategic year for Venturi with the launch of construction of an assembly plant for its electric vehicles in Sablé-sur-Sarthe. However, despite the planned production here of three types of electric vehicle the factory closed in 2015.

Venturi Eclectic listed at Electric Vehicle Info: Electric Car Model, Accessed 25 April 2018

"Spoon" is a song by krautrock group Can, recorded in 1971. It was released as a single with the song "Shikako Maru Ten" on the B-side. "Spoon" appeared as the final track to the band's album Ege Bamyasi that year. The song marked Can's first recorded use of drum machine coupled with live drums, an unusual feature in popular music at the time; the single reached #6 on the German chart in early 1972 due to being the signature theme of the popular German television thriller Das Messer. The single sold in excess of 300,000 copies. Due to the single's success, Can played a free concert at Kölner Sporthalle in Cologne on February 3, 1972."Spoon" was featured in Lynne Ramsay's 2004 film adaptation of Morvern Callar. American indie rock band Spoon took their name from this song, Can themselves used the name for their own record label Spoon Records. "Spoon" was remixed by System 7 for Can's 1997 remix album, Sacrilege. Elements of Sonic Youth's remix are sampled in Tyler The Creator's "Foreword" from his album Flower Boy