Waltham, MA

Billed by the Chamber of Commerce as the "Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution", and an early center for the Labor Movement, Waltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for much 19th century industrial city planning. The city is now a center for research and higher education. The population was 59,226 at the 2000 census. The name Waltham means 'home in the woods'.

Waltham is commonly referred to as Watch City because of its association with the watch industry. This is due to Waltham Watch Company, which opened its factory in Waltham in 1854. It was the first company to make watches on an assembly line. It won the gold medal in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Over 40 million watches, clocks and instruments were produced by Waltham Watch Company until it closed in 1957.

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SIDEBAR: Waltham Supermarket on Main Street, established in 1936, was a large historic grocery store that closed in the 1990s. However, the building continues to be a supermarket, occupied by Shaw's, then Victory, and now Hannaford.

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Notable residents

• Aerosmith-- During the 70's Boston area rock band Aerosmith had a studio in Waltham known as "The Wherehouse". It was located off of Lexington Street behind now defunt hardware store "Moe Blacks". The Wherehouse is credited on Aerosmiths 1978 album "Live Bootleg" as the recording site for "Come Together".
• John A. Bailey –- Inventor of the drink through container lid and vacuum forming pioneer. Waltham native
• Ryan Gallant -- Professional Skateboarder
• Abbie Hoffman -- Bestselling author, radical political activist, founder of the Youth International Party
• Jeff Lazaro -- Former Boston Bruins forward notched 14 goals and 23 assists in 3-year NHL career with the Bruins and Ottawa Senators; 1986 Waltham High School graduate
• Noelle LeBlanc -- lead singer/guitarist of Island/Def Jam Records' hard rock/power pop quartet Damone; Waltham native and current resident
• Paul Pierce -- Boston Celtics captain who is a 6-time NBA All-Star as a guard/forward
• Derek Regan -- Founder and CEO of CriminalWatchDog.com. Waltham native and current resident.
• Carroll Spinney -- voice of "Big Bird" and "Oscar the Grouch" on Sesame Street.
• Antoine Walker -- 3-time NBA All-Star forward currently with the Minnesota Timberwolves, was captain of the Boston Celtics and has also played with the Dallas Mavericks, Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat; former resident
• Sockington -- Leader of Socks Army, first feline to surpass 500,000 Twitter followers.

Wes Craven & Scream

Wesley Earl "Wes" Craven (born August 2, 1939) is an American film director and writer, perhaps best known as the creator of many horror films, including the famed A Nightmare on Elm Street series featuring the iconic Freddy Krueger character. He is also the director of the Scream films.
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The Scream film series is a series of cult horror films directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, and later Ehren Kruger, which began in 1996. The main plot involves a psychopathic serial killer wearing a Halloween costume attempting to kill Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) and various other characters involved in her life. Each film begins with the gory murder of a couple and takes off from there leading to the revelation of the killer's identity and the final battle between Sidney and the killer. They revitalized the slasher film genre in the mid 1990s, in a similar way to Halloween (1978) in the 1970s, by using a standard concept with a tongue-in-cheek approach that successfully combined straightforward scares with dialogue that satirized slasher film conventions. The first film became a major commercial success upon its release, and was one of the highest grossing films of 1996. It was also highly acclaimed by many critics worldwide, who appreciated the film's tongue-in-cheek approach.

The Dakota

The Dakota, constructed from October 25, 1880 to October 27, 1884,^[3] is an apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City.

The architectural firm of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was commissioned to do the design for Edward Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The firm also designed the Plaza Hotel.^[4]

The building's high gables and deep roofs with a profusion of dormers, terracotta spandrels and panels, niches, balconies and balustrades give it a North German Renaissance character, an echo of a Hanseatic townhall. Nevertheless, its layout and floor plan betray a strong influence of French architectural trends in housing design that had become known in New York in the 1870s.

According to popular legend, the Dakota was so named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. However, the earliest recorded appearance of this account is in a 1933 newspaper story. It is more likely that the building was named "The Dakota" because of Clark's fondness for the names of the new western states and territories.^[5] High above the 72nd Street entrance, the figure of a Dakota Indian keeps watch. The Dakota was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
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The building is best known as the home of former Beatle John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, starting in 1973, and as the location of Lennon's murder by Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980. As of 2009, Ono still has an apartment in the building. The Strawberry Fields memorial was laid out in memory of Lennon in Central Park directly across Central Park West. Every year, Ono marks the anniversary of Lennon's death with a now-public pilgrimage to the memorial
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Several movies, including Rosemary's Baby and Vanilla Sky directed by Roman Polanski and Cameron Crowe respectively, use the exterior of the Dakota. Interiors of the building portrayed in the films had to be shot on a soundstage as the Dakota does not allow filming inside.^{[citation needed]}

The Dakota has also been mentioned specifically in several novels including Time and Again by Jack Finney, The Hard Way by Lee Child, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child's novels about the character Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, Harlan Coben's novels about Horne Lockwood III, and the book series The Baby-Sitters Club.

Several bands and artists also mention the Dakota in their songs, most often in reference to John Lennon. Some of those songs are performed by Tim Curry, Nas, Hole, Christine Lavin, Brand New, and O.A.R., along with a reference in the musical The Last Five Years.^{[citation needed]}

It is also quite plausible that the residence of Dr. Niles Crane on the TV show Frasier - the Montana, is based on the Dakota.

Video footage of the building is sometimes used when going into and coming out of commercial breaks during the court show Judge Judy.

Maus

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a memoir by Art Spiegelman, presented as a graphic novel. Parts of the story were originally published in the magazine RAW between 1980 to 1991. The complete story was published in two volumes: the first in 1986 ("My Father Bleeds History") and the second in 1991 ("And Here My Troubles Began").^[1] The graphic novel as a whole took thirteen years to complete. It recounts the struggle of Spiegelman's father to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew and draws largely on his father's recollections of his experiences. The book also include one of his earlier comics. The book also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992, it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award. All people are presented as anthropomorphic animals (for example, all Jews are depicted as mice, hence the name Maus which is German for "mouse"). The New York Times described the selection of Maus for the honor: "The Pulitzer board members ... found the cartoonist's depiction of Nazi Germany hard to classify."

Animals Used:

• The Jews are represented by mice.
• The Germans are represented by cats.
• The Poles are represented by pigs.
• The Americans are represented by dogs.
• The Roma (Gypsies) are represented as gypsy moths (found on page 133 of Maus II, page 293 of The Complete Maus).
• The French are represented by frogs.
• The Swedes are represented by reindeer (found on page 125 of "Maus II").
• The British are represented by fish (found on page 131 of Maus II, page 291 of The Complete Maus).
• Two children of a Jew and a German are shown as a mouse with cat stripes (found on page 131 of Maus II, page 291 of The Complete Maus).
• The background of page 34 of Maus I (pages 36 and 171 of Complete Maus) also depicts a rabbit, a moose, a horse, an elephant, a goat and a llama all of which are unspecified as a group.

The animals are symbolic of the different nationalities and races for a number of reasons:^[3]:

• The Jews, as mice, satirizes the Nazi portrayal of Jews as vermin. Also, this may symbolize the resourcefulness many Jews exhibited during the Holocaust and the inability of the Nazis to completely wipe out such a species. At some point in the narrative, the author is questioned by an Israeli Jew, depicted as a rather stuffy mouse who has gained some weight. When asked what particular animal he would have chosen to represent the Israelis, Spiegelman answers: "I have no idea... porcupines?"
• After the comic was released in Poland many Poles found it offensive to be represented by pigs. However, there are many Polish characters who are portrayed sympathetically or positively such as the Spiegelmans' governess or Mrs. Motonowa who hides Vladek and Anja at great personal risk. Spiegelman explained that he chose pigs in good faith because of their resemblance to famous American cartoon characters like Miss Piggy and Porky Pig. The choice may also reflect the traditional agricultural Polish way of life.^[4][5]
• The French being frogs would appear to be a direct reference to an oft-used nickname, itself a lampoon of the fact that the French are supposedly renowned for eating frogs: it is also, however, suggested that Spiegelman wanted a certain amount of sliminess about the French, as he says to his (French) wife: "Bunnies are too innocent for the French... Think of the years of anti-Semitism."

With the exception of the Americans (dogs), the animal characters are all drawn alike. For instance, most of the Jewish mice resemble each other regardless of sex or age. Clothing and other details are used in order to tell them apart: Spiegelman himself, for instance, is always wearing a white shirt and a black sleeveless overshirt; his French wife, Françoise (herself portrayed as a mouse, because she converted to Judaism), wears a striped t-shirt, and Vladek's girlfriend before Anja, Lucia, has very noticeable breasts (Maus, vol. 1, p. 15). While wandering the streets of their Nazi-occupied town, the Jews wear pig masks in order to show the trouble they went through to pass themselves off as non-Jewish Poles.

The use of animals in the graphic novel may seem incongruous, but instead of creating social typecasts, Spiegelman lampoons them and shows how foolish it is to classify a human being based on nationality or ethnicity.^[6] His images are not his: they were "borrowed from the Germans... Ultimately what the book is about is the commonality of human beings. It's crazy to divide things down along nationalistic or racial or religious lines... These metaphors, which are meant to self-destruct in my book — and I think they do self-destruct — still have a residual force and still get people worked up over them."^[7]

The use of animals may also be used in order to detach the reader from real life. This may have been done to appeal to a younger generation of readers, yet still telling a story of survival and death during the Holocaust. But instead of fully detaching the reader from the book, he shows a human aspect by illustrating how his father tells his story and by showing the emotions and relationships of the characters throughout.

Full House

Full House is an American television sitcom that ran from September 22, 1987 to May 23, 1995 on ABC. Set in San Francisco, California, it chronicles widowed father Danny Tanner (Bob Saget) who, after the death of his wife in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, enlists one of his best friends Joey Gladstone (Dave Coulier) and his brother-in-law Jesse Katsopolis (John Stamos) to help raise his three daughters, and later on in the series Jesse's wife Rebecca Donaldson (Lori Loughlin) joins the household.

The series was created by Jeff Franklin (who would later create Hangin' with Mr. Cooper, which was placed directly after Full House on Tuesdays in 1992 and on which Stamos and the Olsen twins guest starred) and executive produced by Franklin, along with Thomas L. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, who also produced the popular ABC sitcoms Happy Days Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Bussom Buddies, Perfect Strangers, Family Matters, and Step by Step.

The series was produced by Jeff Franklin Productions and Miller-Boyett Productions, in association with Lorimar-Telepictures (1987-1988), Lorimar Television (1988-1993), and then by Warner Brothers Television (1993-1995). It is also the only videotaped sitcom produced by Miller-Boyett Productions; all other Miller-Boyett comedies were shot on film.

Start at the Beginning

Wikipedia is a free,^[5] multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 13 million articles (2.9 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website.^[6] Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger,^[7] it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.^{[3][8][9][10]}

Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies,^[11] and target its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.^[12] Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy are also an issue.^[13] Other criticisms are centered on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information,^[14] though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived.^[15][16]

Jonathan Dee, of The New York Times,^[17] and Andrew Lih, in the 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism,^[18] have cited the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource.

When Time magazine recognized You as its Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of three examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube and MySpace.^[19]