The earliest use I'm aware of, of the name ``Vanity Fair'' itself, is in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. That book, very popular in colonial America, is an extended allegory of a man making his progress toward Christian salvation. One of the stops along the way is Vanity Fair, which seems at first to be a fun festival, but turns out on closer inspection to be an occasion of many small degradations and hidden sadness (so I recall, less than three centuries after reading the book). Vanity Fair is the world in microcosm. Thackeray chose the name for a famous novel set during the Napoleonic wars.
In September 2000, an FAA rule took effect giving airlines three years to train its flight attendants to use portable defibrillators and put the devices -- smaller versions of the ones in ER's -- on all planes configured to carry 30 passengers or more. The devices weigh about five pounds, and nonmedical personal are usually certified with five or six hours of training.
Two studies in the October 26, 2000 issue of the NEJM reported good results with portable public defibrillators. The survival rate in a study of their use in airplanes was 40%. In a similar study in casinos, the rate was 53%, a number whose wider significance is discussed in this glossary.
One of Kurt Vonnegut's books (Rosewater, I think) eulogizes volunteer firemen as embodying the true spirit of greatness in America.
In those days, much of my family was living in Breslau, but the men generally went in for things like the Society for Rowboat Travel, however named. Once when my mom was a little girl, one of Graf Zeppelin's airships came to town, docking at an airfield that really was not much more than a marshy field. My mother wanted to wear her nice patent-leather shoes to this important event, but her mother didn't want her to. The ensuing argument delayed them so long that my mom never got to see the Zeppelin.
There was a joke going around after the shock of Sputnik in 1957 -- the President of the United States called in his experts and asked ``What happened? How did the Russians get so far ahead of us in rocket technology?'' His advisors answered:
Wernher von Braun was a member of the VfR as an engineering student in Berlin. More von Braun content at the V2 entry.
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the FAA banned VFR aviation over thirty US metropolitan areas. Aviation security legislation passed that Autumn included provisions for the lifting of those bans. In any event, on December 19 the FAA lifted the ban on most of those areas.
On that day also, firefighters stopped pouring water on the rubble at ground zero (the wreckage of the WTC), believing that the fire was finally, after 100 days, extinguished.
I will be the first to admit that I enjoy watching a weekly show where I find out that the guys from bands like Whitesnake or Kiss or Grand Funk Railroad wasted all their money on limos or women or drugs or all of the above and are now pasting up billboards or doing time or dead. But I hate it when they announce that they're going back to the studio, that they're planning a limited tour, that they're coming back. To me, the whole appeal of the show is to be reminded how terrific the present is precisely because none of these people are in it.
VH2 was a British sister channel of VH1. The main source of income for the channel was ringtone advertising. (My mind rejects this fact; I can't get even get it inside my head temporarily. I'm only just able to move it from one web resource onto this page. Thanks be to cut'n'paste.) Although everyone agrees that VH2 achieved a nonnegative audience share, the business model was apparently not cutting it in 2006, and on August 1, MTV2 was closed to make way for MTV Flux.
In the North American scheme, VHF channels are allocated in three smaller band segments within VHF: 2-4, 5-6, and 7-13, and the separation between adjacent subbands is smaller than the separation between adjacent channels within each subband. In other words, the frequency separation between channels 4 and 5, and between 6 and 7, is larger than those between other nominally adjacent channels.
Here's an FAQ.
Tutorials:
- from Michael C. Pierce and Robert K. Ware
- Viva vi! by Carl de Boor (in PostScript).
It's not pronounced `six' and it's not supposed to be pronounced `vai.' It's `vee eye.' (Vai is the name of a West African syllabary.)
An introduction and a reference manual can be found here.
See also vim (a freeware vi clone).
And just in case you missed it the last time: It's not pronounced `six' and it's not supposed to be pronounced `vai'! It's `vee eye.' For further clarification, visit a pronunciation guide for unix.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of US Virgin Islands territorial government links.
VI also stands for six, which sounds like sex. A natural thought about virgin islands.
However, either to conserve Ink or In a baldly insincere effort to be politically correcter than thou, the standard expansion of VIAL (given at the top of this entry) uses only the female forms of the agent nouns and capitalizes the first letter of the suffixes that indicate gender. It's like writing ``hostEsses'' to mean ``hosts and hostesses.'' Further curmudgeonly ruminations on this sort of stuff can be found at the gender-inclusive and CLC-CTC entries.
Incidentally, the capitalization of the pronoun dich is conventional. (Dich is the singular familiar form of `you' in the accusative case, cognate with English thee.) In letters and some other texts, German capitalizes all second-person pronouns. (First-person pronouns -- like ich [`I'] -- are not capitalized except as required by other grammatical rules: at the beginning of a sentence, say, or in noun use such as Freud's ``das Ich'' [`the ego'].)
The formal second-person pronouns are always capitalized. I suppose that one reason it occurred to me to mention this is the pronoun Ihnen, the formal second-person personal pronoun. It has (as the spelling indicates) the long i vowel instead of the short one that occurs in the feminizing suffix discussed above (plural form -innen). So these don't sound entirely the same, as they also do not quite look the same. [I refer to standard German pronunciation. Educated native speakers of German from Switzerland and southern Germany are effectively bilingual in the rather different standard and home dialects. (The phenomenon is known as diglossia.) Vowel quantity distinctions are different in the local German.] Anyway, a quick reading of the acronym expansion above nevertheless gives the impression of `Society of Engineer Agronomist-to-you and Nutrition Engineer-to-you.' (Needless to say, the word ``engineer,'' with its cognates, is used here as an aggrandizing courtesy title, as in the euphemism ``sanitation engineer'' for garbage collector.)
For your convenience, the organization has changed its name to SVIAL.
- aa
- Cosmo
- IAVCEI
- insurance agents
- pluton
Queen Victoria's birthday (May 24) was declared a holiday by the legislature of the united Canadas in 1845. It continued to be celebrated after Confederation in 1867, but in years when this fell on a Sunday, a proclamation was issued moving the celebration to the following Monday (viz., May 25). (Between 1845 and the end of the nineteenth century, I am pretty sure that May 24 fell on a Sunday in 1846, 1857, 1863, 1868, 1874, 1885, 1891, and 1896.)
The year she died (1901), the Canadian Parliament established the anniversary of her birth as a holiday. This continued until 1952. Since then, Victoria Day has been celebrated on the last Monday before May 25, which means that it can fall as early as May 18. I hate that kind of rule. Some dates you just know, and it feels silly to be celebrating almost a week early or late.
Victoria Day is celebrated primarily in parts of the British Commonwealth whose names begin with C: Canada, the Cayman Islands, and Caledonia. Regarding the last: it's actually celebrated in scattered parts of Scotland. When the Scots finally gain the complete partial independence they want -- complete self-government plus representation at Westminster, taxes no, subsidies yes -- I imagine they will celebrate not celebrating Victoria Day.
The famous Days I alluded to in the first sentence of the entry are Doris and Dorothy. Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in 1933. They advocated inefficient means of production (``worthy labor'').
Doris Day was a real famous actress, but she wasn't a real Day. She was born Doris Mary Ann von Kappelhoff and changed her name to Doris Day at the suggestion of band leader Barney Rapp sometime in the late 1930's. The name occured to him after he heard her sing ``Day by Day.'' Her signature song, however, was ``Que Sera, Sera.'' [That's the English spelling, by the way. In Spanish it's ``Que Será, Será.'' Any way you choose or look at it, though, her song involves two of something simple.]
A member of the Day family who is famous in Canada is Stockwell. He led the Canadian Alliance Party to second place in Canada's federal elections in November 2000. Canadian election campaigns are not perpetual, as in the US, but instead last only about a month. This might be going too far in the direction of brevity, leading to problems with name recognition. In the November 2000 campaign, Stockwell Day had only been party leader since July. A voter interviewed in Winnipeg, who said he couldn't vote for (Liberal leader) Jean Chrétien, was asked if he knew about Stockwell Day. He hesitated, and then asked ``when is it?'' Journalists live for these moments; they probably interviewed thousands of confused-looking street people just so they wouldn't have to make the story up. Therefore, I imagine that they also asked the obvious follow-up question, but that the interviewee did know about Victoria Day.
Even without the help of journalists, Stockwell Day kept his political performance well-stocked with opportunities for ridicule. (I make no claim regarding the fairness of the ridicule.) Two weeks before the election, a CBC-TV show called ``This Hour Has 22 Minutes'' found an amusing way to ridicule a CA reform proposal. As outlined in briefing books distributed to Alliance candidates, the proposal was that a petition by 3% of the electorate could force a national referendum on any issue, such as abortion, capital punishment, or immigration, or less pressing issues. On the show, comedian Rick Mercer urged viewers to log onto This Hour's website and subscribe to the proposition ``that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris.''
That 3% threshold then amounted to a bit under 400,000 voters. (I guess only registered voters count towards the electorate, and not those eligible to vote who might yet register in time.) The show has about a million viewers, the proposition was apparently popular with many of those viewers, and Canada is certainly among the most Internet-active countries. At one point, ``signatures'' were accumulating at a rate of 10,000 per hour, and in a few days the 400,000 threshold was far exceeded. It doubtless helped that there was no mechanism to prevent anyone from registering the same name and email address two or two hundred times. As the show's full name suggests, they might even be quantitatively challenged. Confusion can arise. Chrétien, who made the Day-name proposition part of his own campaigning, had occasional trouble getting the program name straight. At one rally, he called the show ``This Hour has 22 Hours'' until he was corrected by the audience. Later, at a MuchMusic interview, he tried ``This Hour has 20-20 minutes?''
Obviously, Canadian culture doesn't get any respect -- at least from some people. In fact, if you're an American, this is the first time you've heard of any of these people or events. They took place in C-A-N-A-D-A, a neighboring country. Canadian news is not reported in the US. Canadians consider Americans' inattention to Canada deplorable, either because it is inappropriate or because it is appropriate. Anyway, even without the news black-out, that month there was a riveting distraction stateside that sucked up the limited supplies of American attention: a close presidential election that took about four years to resolve.
Meanwhile back in Canada, Stockwell Day was getting walloped on the Doris issue. After a few days of this he decided to roll with the punches. The political counteroffensive seems to have begun on the Alliance campaign plane, which he'd dubbed ``Prayer Force One.'' (Hey, have I said anything about ridicule opportunities yet? I'll have to remember to mention that. Stockwell Day was made Minister of Public Safety in Stephen Harper's government.) Shortly after the plane took off on a flight from Edmonton to Brandon, Doris Day's voice came on over the intercom, singing ``Que Será, Será.'' Then Stockwell Day came dancing and singing into the section of the plane where reporters and cameramen were wearing their safety belts and facing their air-sickness bags. When they learned about this, the estimated 8.3 Americans who keep abreast of Canadian events all had the same horrifying flashback: Reform Party founder and presidential candidate H. Ross Perot dances to Patsy Cline's ``Crazy,'' election night 1996.
Shudder. Let's move on. Victoria Day is a Canadian holiday commemorating Queen Victoria's birthday or Monday, whichever comes sooner. We've covered Canada, now let's do Alexandrina Victoria. Crown Princess Victoria was 12 in August 1831 when, during parliamentary discussion of a grant to the Duchess of Kent (her mother), there was a suggestion that her name be changed to Elizabeth as something ``more accordant to the feelings of the people.'' There seems to have been some powerful support behind the idea, but the moment must have passed. In 1836, King William IV approved of a proposal to change it to Charlotte. To Victoria's delight and my relief, the proposal was dropped. ``The Charlottean Era'' doesn't have the same ring. The teenage princess acceded to the throne the very next year, and in 1840 married her beloved Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In a future episode of this entry, I will relate the Kaiser's clever remark when he heard about the House of Windsor. If you can't wait, you can read it now at the UK entry.
Some Days not mentioned in the foregoing entry are mentioned at this other Day-related entry.
- repeal of state criminal laws against Sodomy
- relaxation of prohibitions on Abortion
- making Divorce easier
Even in Greenwich Village, this was known as the SAD campaign.
He seems to have a talent for putting words in other peoples' mouths that they didn't say.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
The Buggles had a huge international hit in 1979 with ``Video Killed The Radio Star.'' On August 1, 1981, the video for this song became the first ever aired by MTV.
The definitions of the standards are general enough to allow, in principle, for arbitrary screen resolutions and field rates. In practice, however, each standard is used primarily in one mode: NTSC mostly uses 525 lines/frame and 60 Hz (i.e., 30 frames/sec); PAL and SECAM mostly use 625 lines/frame and 50 Hz. (Vide line frequency.) There are exceptions, however: Brazil uses PAL with 525 lines and 60 Hz (``PAL-M''). [The frame rate is half the stated frequency because alternate lines are interleaved: in successive raster scans the odd and even lines are rewritten alternately. This produces smoother-looking motion.]
It is not necessary that the frame rate equal the line frequency or divide it evenly or, in fact, that it have any particular numerical relation to it. For example, in 60 Hz NTSC encoding, a color sync signal is ``squeezed in'' by sending frames very-slightly-less frequently: the frame rate is 59.94 Hz.
The reason for using a frame rate equal to about half the line frequency is to minimize the effects of power line interference. For example, if power-line interference causes the image intensity to increase every 1/60th of a second and the frame rate is 30 per second, then the brightness is distorted at a fixed place on the screen. If the frame rate were 24/sec, common for movie film, then the bright region would drift up the screen (for a screen image that was scanned top-to-bottom). Note that the brightness distortion appears at one height rather than two, even though the frame rate is only half the frequency of the distortion signal; this is because of the way images are interleaved: at 30 frames per second, a full-screen image is projected every sixtieth of a second, but only at half density: odd and even lines are scanned alternately. A kind of line-frequency interference is seen in TV pictures of TV pictures: Given the 50 Hz that is prevalent in Europe, American television images recorded optically (i.e. by training a camera on a European screen) will show a pattern moving downward across the screen.
In Japan, which uses NTSC, half the country uses 50 Hz and half the country uses 60 Hz line voltage.
In addition to video encoding scheme, the broadcast encoding (audio signal) varies. PAL-I, -B, and -G are all PAL 625/50, but while -B is commonly used for VHF, for UHF Germany and the UK use -I, while Australia uses -G. [PAL-I uses 6 MHz sound-vision spacing; PAL-B uses 5.5 MHz (there are minor differences in the size of the vestigial sideband as well).]
Food for thought if you have a hard time imagining how speakers of East Asian
languages might have difficulty distinguishing /r/ and /l/. Note also that
in Czech, the sound we write zh (the s in
measure and vision) is written with a hachek on r.
And spare a thought (a nasty one; something involving their ancestors) for
those who pronounce régime as ``rih-JEEM'' with the j of Jim.
Cooke was originally named Alfred, but changed his name to Alistair because that's more pretentious. In Britain, Alistair Cooke was known for LfA, which I'm not going to define here so you might as well make up your mind to follow the link. In the US, Cooke had a long-time gig as the introducer-shill for episodes of a made-for-BBC-TV drama series called ``Masterpiece Theatre.'' Masterpiece Theatre had a thick patina of culcha, but was so extremely tedious that only viewers like you and the terminally pretentious elite could bear to watch it, and that only for pride. It was the Emperor's New Clothes of television. A few high-speed car chases and some nudity would have improved the claustrophobic, dreary ``Upstairs, Downstairs'' immensely. MT-watching was a leading cause of depression, alcoholism, and suicide in the pretentious classes, so let's have more of it.
According to Barbara Tuchman's book about the terrible fourteenth century, however, the term referred to any kind of peasant, although it excluded serfs. Over time, of course, the term took an increasingly negative connotation, and then denotation, as it came to have its current meaning.
In origin, the word simply referred to someone from a ville.
The tenth character indicates the year:
| Code | Year | Code | Year | Code | Year |
| A | 1980 | L | 1990 | Y | 2000 |
| B | 1981 | M | 1991 | 1 | 2001 |
| C | 1982 | N | 1992 | 2 | 2002 |
| D | 1983 | P | 1993 | 3 | 2003 |
| E | 1984 | R | 1994 | 4 | 2004 |
| F | 1985 | S | 1995 | 5 | 2005 |
| G | 1986 | T | 1996 | 6 | 2006 |
| H | 1987 | V | 1997 | 7 | 2007 |
| J | 1988 | W | 1998 | 8 | 2008 |
| K | 1989 | X | 1999 | 9 | 2009 |
Hmmm. It looks like they gave some thought to the distinguishability problem.
VIN is pronounced as an acronym sensu strictu (i.e., pronounced as a word, like laser) and also as an initialism (``vee eye en''). The acronym form often occurs as an AAP pleonasm. You could suppose it served as the model for ``PIN number,'' if heedlessness needed a model. Pronounced as an initialism, it is probably less likely to become (the corresponding entity) an a.-a.p. pleonasm. This unuseful paragraph is the electronic equivalent of motormouth -- just so you know.
CH2==CH--.
In common usage, `vinyl' is polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic.
The most prominent use of vinyl, for many years, was in audio discs called ``records,'' based on a largely mechanical analog encoding. Hence ``vinyl'' was used as an uncountable noun equivalent to records. Expressions like ``record company'' and ``gold record'' continue in use, but the physical medium used for storing and selling new music is now rarely ``records.'' For a different kind of record altogether, see the AREA entry.
--CH==CH--.
As written, this is a free radical. More commonly, the radical is bonded and ``vinylene'' refers to the CHCH functional group. One can't say that vinylene double-bonds, and its two bonds would each normally be sigma-type. Note, however, that in a molecule like cyclopropene (C3H4), both single bonds of a vinylene group are to the same atom (carbon, in this case).
The IUPAC-approved name is ethenylene, but no one really cares. All that matters is what Chemical Abstracts prefers.
CH2==C==.
As written, this is a free radical. More commonly, the radical is bonded (either double-bonded or twice single-bonded) and ``vinylidene'' refers to the CH2C functional group.
Most people are unaware of this, and municipalities have evidently begun (after a few short decades' delay) to make the system less mysterious. One approach is to use a longer, more explicit message than ``violation.'' Another, which I saw in the visitor parking meters at Purdue Calumet in August 1997, is making the VIOLATION flags the same color as the EXPIRED flags. Definitely check it out!
Cf. VVIP.
From what I can tell, ``very important personage'' was about as common an expression in the nineteenth century as ``very important person,'' and a novel published in 1946 gives ``very important personage'' as the expansion of V.I.P. (see the BF entry), but I think that today, the -age expansion is very aged indeed.
We have the preceding important information thanks to files released to APBNews.com under the FOIA. They also got some feedback from Hef, available in stream format at the site. He recalled ruefully that as a boy growing up in the 1930's, he had admired the FBI. A NYTimes article (page 7 of the October 8, 2000 Week In Review) picked up the story and mentions the apbnews item as a source; I'm not sure the NYT did any actual reporting beyond that. APBNews, also accessible at the domain apb.com, specializes primarily in crime and justice news, secondarily in safety issues. I had a hard time finding APBnews's Hoover/Hefner story with their search function, but I did learn about FBI vigilance to protect us all from Groucho Marxism. I suppose the name (apbnews, not Groucho) stems from the common police abbreviation APB.
To give the FBI devil its limited due, it was following up the groundless complaints of citizen cranks and repeatedly concluded that Groucho (which they often misspelled Graucho) Marx was not a subversive. In fact, he was a political coward, who quit some left-leaning Hollywood organizations when he heard that he was being described as a Cadillac Communist. Groucho Marx was not a Marxist.
Karl Marx once also said that he was not a Marxist. The comment is discussed in detail in Hal Draper's three-volume Karl Marx's Theory Of Revolution (1977), foreword of vol. 2, pp. 5-7. Karl Marx was objecting to the dogmatic or rigid application of his ideas by French Marxists whose discipleship he evidently did not approve. The quip was a favorite of Engels's, and it is only on his authority that we have it. Hmmm.
Eddy Mitchell and any number of others are credited with coining the witticism
Je suis marxiste -- tendance Groucho!
There was a common postage stamp in the Soviet Union, showing Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin standing shoulder to shoulder, at an angle to each other, each looking up into the inspirational distance at opposite corners of your envelope. After the fall of the Soviet Union, one of the former republics (Kazakhstan or maybe Uzbekistan, I think) issued a postage stamp that parodied that one, with Groucho Marx and John Lennon in place of Karl Marx and Lenin. One of the lyrics in Don McLean's ``American Pie'' was
And while Lennon read a book on Marx,
The FBI and the CIA investigated John Lennon more vigorously than Groucho Marx, trying to find an excuse to deport him. The FBI file on Frank Sinatra ran to 1275 pages and has been edited by Tom and Phil Kuntz into a 268-page book entitled The Sinatra Files: The Secret FBI Dossier. In one memo of that file, a G-man wrote ``Sinatra denied that he sympathized with Lenin and the Marx Brothers.'' More on Sinatra and the FBI at this point in the glossary, which for subtle reasons happens to lie within the KFC entry.
Given Vergil's signal service guiding Dante through Hell and back, it's not surprising that an Italian internet guide is called Virgilio.
The ``Virtual'' tag, which probably seemed kinda ``now'' when the original game appeared seven years ago, these days smells like a leftover of antiquated cyber-lingo.
This is from Videogames: The Ultimate Guide, based on reviews from Britain's best-selling game magazines. There's also an uncatty review of the original Virtual Pool, for a PS-1 platform, from February 1997. Those are the only games with names beginning in Virtual (not counting Virtua games).
It is now known that all these diseases, with the exception of pellagra, can be prevented and cured by the addition of certain preventive substances; the deficient substances, which are of the nature of organic bases, we will call vitamines; and we will speak of a beri-beri or scurvy vitamine, which means a substance preventing the special disease.
(Funk guessed, correctly, that pellagra was a vitamin-deficiency disease.) The neologism vitamine was self-evidently a compound of vita (Latin for `life') with -amine. The word vita is discussed at the CV entry and in detail at one A.M. entry. Its occurrence in the word vitamine was explained in an article in the Times Literary Supplement on, of all days, November 11, 1915: ``The point about vitamines is that without them the animal ceases to grow or becomes diseased on a physiologically pure diet.'' The ``physiologically pure diet'' referred to is one containing only the bulk nutrients -- protein, fat, and carbohydrates.
The amine business was a bit speculative on Funk's part. A reasonable guess, since the most common organic bases are all amines. Eventually it was recognized that not all of what Funk counted as vitamines were amines, and so the word vitamin was proposed and accepted. (A similar change could have been made in Spanish, but was not: amina is `amine' and vitamina is still the word for `vitamin.')
In English, the word vitamin is pronounced with primary accentual stress on the first syllable and perhaps some secondary stress on the last. The second and third vowels are typically shwas, but in careful pronunciation the third vowel is a short i. The first syllable has different vowels in British and American pronunciations. In Britain, the i is short; in American it's long. By ``long,'' of course, I mean that it is either the half-long i usually used before an unvoiced consonants by those who articulate different long i's, or it's just the undistinguished long i. (The half-long i is shwa followed by /i:/, the ordinary long i is /ai:/.)
Here is Edmund Wilson criticizing a practice of Van Wyck Brooks that he thinks Brooks borrowed from Léon Bazalgette.
``[Brooks] has attempted to convey the qualities of the literary personalities he deals with by compounding a kind of paste out of their writings. This paste he spreads on the page and expects it to give us the essence of his author. But, though sometimes, as in the case of an inferior figure like Longfellow, he does succeed in extracting thus a tone and a color which we should not easily catch in dipping into Longfellow himself, since it is necessary to boil down a good deal of such a poet in order to distinguish a flavor--on the other hand, with a first-rate writer like Emerson or Hawthorne or Thoreau, you simply get a sort of predigested sample which seems to have had all the vitamins taken out of it and which causes constant irritation to an admirer of these authors, because it gives the impression of a travesty that is always just off-key and off-color.
(This is from Wilson's essay ``Van Wyck Brooks's Second Phase,'' first published in the September 30, 1940 TNR, and reprinted in Classics & Commercials. Vide etiam obscure allusions.)
Still, these things don't make him a babe (in the technical sense, I mean) so how those blind Limey customs agents mistook LaToya for Michael on June 30, 1995, no one will ever understand.
Flash! According to the front page of the March 12, 1996 National Examiner, MJ's skin problem has gone into spontaneous remission! Stay tuned here, where we will not be keeping you posted! Send your own damn money to Lantana, Florida!
Okay, we relent. In November 1996, Jacko married his second wife, Debbie Rowe, whom he met and had known for fifteen years as an assistant to a dermatologist who has been treating him for vitiligo. (See, this entry really is about vitiligo!) Doctor and assistant often accompanied Jackson on his tours.
In 1984, before Elton John officially emerged from the closet, he married a sound engineer in Sydney. Interviewed on the reputedly ``nice'' Rosie O'Donnell talk show after Jackson and Rowe were married in Sydney, John commented that Australia was where ``all the loonies get married.''
According to vicious rumors [i.e., rumors that if true would be embarrassing, and if not true are still embarrassing] Rowe was impregnated artificially, and the marriage has not been consummated. [This situation suggests technical issues that we will not address.] If true, this would certainly simplify the matter of divorce. California is ``a community property state.'' It's not the only one. On the other hand, there was a prenuptial agreement (this is generally presumed, and frequently even described in detail).
This entry is losing its way. I disclaim any responsibility for this situation. I have an alibi. I was away at the time.
Michael Jackson is known by some as the ``King of Pop.'' Pop here does not stand for `father.' In any case, he seems to be some kind of royalty. For the story of another royal whose marriage was unconsummated, see the Audrey entry. For the story of one recent royal who appears to have consummated an LTR that is not a marriage (not that this is unusual) see the scurrilous nonsense at Stark Effect.
Oddly enough, there's another Kriman (cousin? Boris) on the web who has more to say about the treatment of vitiligo.
See also the Vitiligo Information Pages V.I.P.
Viz. is an abbreviation of the Latin adverb
videlicet, which originally meant something like ``clearly,'' and came
from the expression videre licet, meaning ``to be able to see.'' You
may ask: `where does the z come from?' What z? Oh! That
z. The one in the abbreviation. Well, this may be hard to believe, but
back in the Middle Ages, before the time when life started to get hectic, books
were reproduced by hand. Even monks, who have centuries to work, would get
writer's cramp, so they would come to another long and frequently-appearing
word like videlicet, peer down towards the end of it and think: `everyone knows
what the word is.' Like good sports they'd start out to write it, but by the
time they'd written v i they would begin to LOSE HEART, so they'd
just sort of write a squiggle that looks like a resistor in a circuit diagram,
except that those things didn't exist yet. Instead, they saw that it resembled
a z (especially a script z), so they got into the habit of
writing v i z