USA is the Mecca of Boxing

[!!Captain]

Bayliner boats!!!

Bayliner Boats

Bayliner, a Brunswick Corporation brand, and a member of the Brunswick Boat Group, is the acknowledged leader in recreational boating. Brunswick is one of the oldest U.S. corporations, with a proven record of stability and financial strength that extends to each of its divisions.

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[!!! Beowulf !!!]

Hosea (Hebrew: הוֹשֵׁעַ, Standard Hošeaʿ Tiberian Hôšēăʿ ; "Salvation of/is the Lord", Greek Ὠσηέ = Ōsēe) was the son of Beeri and a prophet in Israel in the 8th century BCE. He is one of the Twelve Prophets of the ***ish Hebrew Bible / Minor Prophets of the Christian Old Testament.

We know practically nothing about the life or social status of Hosea. According to the Book of Hosea, he married the ********** Gomer, the daughter of Diblatayim, at God's command. He lived in the Northern Kingdom in the period 740–725 BCE. In Ho. 5:8ff., there is a reference to the wars which led to the capture of the kingdom by the Assyrians (ca. 734–732 BCE). It is not certain if he has also experienced the destruction of Samaria, which is foreseen in Ho. 14:1.

Hosea's family life reflected the "adulterous" relationship which Israel had built with polytheistic gods. His children's names made them like walking prophecies of the fall of the ruling dynasty and the severed covenant with God. Hosea is often seen as a "prophet of doom", but underneath his message of destruction is a promise of restoration. The Talmud (Pesachim 87a) claims that he was the greatest prophet of his generation, which included the more famous Isaiah.

He is commemorated with the other Minor prophets in the Calendar of saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church on July 31.

[kayjay]

Johnson bar

Do you guys know what a Johnson bar is?

[rooq]

Do you guys know what a Johnson bar is?

no, but i know who Lady Bird Johnson is...


1912—, b. Karnack, Tex., originally named Claudia Alta Taylor. She married (1934) Lyndon B. Johnson and played an active role in his political career. As first lady (1963—69) she sponsored environmental causes and national beautification projects. A successful businesswoman, she bought (1943) a debt-ridden radio station in Austin, Tex., and built it into a multimillion dollar broadcasting company. She also owns and manages extensive ranching lands in Texas. She is the author of A White House Diary (1970).

[kayjay]

no, but i know who Lady Bird Johnson is...


1912—, b. Karnack, Tex., originally named Claudia Alta Taylor. She married (1934) Lyndon B. Johnson and played an active role in his political career. As first lady (1963—69) she sponsored environmental causes and national beautification projects. A successful businesswoman, she bought (1943) a debt-ridden radio station in Austin, Tex., and built it into a multimillion dollar broadcasting company. She also owns and manages extensive ranching lands in Texas. She is the author of A White House Diary (1970).

Poor Lady Bird, my dad has been mourning.

That bio isn't updated, the girl is dead.

[Oasis_Lad]

Traveling Wilburys

The Traveling Wilburys were a supergroup, comprised of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan.

History

Initially starting as a meal between Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, they got together at Bob Dylan's studio (Santa Monica, California) to record an additional track as a B-side for the single release of Harrison's "This Is Love". Tom Petty's involvement was by chance as Harrison had left his guitar at Petty's house. The song they came up with was "Handle with Care". However, the record company immediately realized it was too good to be released as a single "filler".

They enjoyed working together so much that they decided to create an album together. Written by all its members, the album was recorded over a ten-day period because Dylan was due to go on tour. Released in October 1988 (under various pseudonyms as half-brothers, supposed sons of Charles Truscott Wilbury, Sr.), the album Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 was in 1989 ranked #70 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. The death of band member Roy Orbison (on December 6, 1988) prevented further full collaborations; however, the band continued without him. The band even finished the video for "End of the Line". In the scene where the verse is sung by Orbison, the viewer is shown Orbison's guitar in a rocking chair followed by a photo of the late artist.

"Wilburys" was a slang term coined by Harrison and Lynne during the recording of Cloud Nine as a reference to recorded "flubs" that could be eliminated during the mixing stage (i.e., "'We'll bury' them in the mix"). The term was used again when the entire group was together. Harrison suggested "The Trembling Wilburys" as the group's name, but they decided to use "Traveling" instead.

After Orbison's death, there was undocumented speculation in the news media that Del Shannon might join the band, but his 1990 suicide precluded any possible involvement.

A charity single entitled "Nobody's Child", aimed at drawing attention to the orphaned children of Romania, followed in early 1990, also with an album with others. A second album titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3 was released in October 1990. However, the album met with less success. Some possible reasons for the skip from Vol. 1 to Vol. 3 include the fact that some consider Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever as Vol. 2 (Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison perform on the album), a nod to the many bootlegs titled "Volume 2" containing early studio mixes/alternative takes, to honor the death of Roy Orbison by not releasing the project started with Orbison, or as a simple joke. Harrison once claimed in an MTV interview that the band had written material for a Vol. 2, but the material was stolen before completion.[citation needed]. In the book in The Traveling Wilburys CD/DVD, the name is credited to 'George being George'.

[rooq]

the wilburys had a magnificent lineup.

[!!! Beowulf !!!]

Cantonese is a major dialect group or language of the Chinese language, a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Cantonese is spoken by 71 million people.[3] The area with the highest concentration are in Guangdong, some parts of Guangxi, southern Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau.[4] Other major groups include Chinese ********** in Southeast Asia and by many overseas Chinese of Guangdong and Hong Kong origin worldwide. The name is derived from Canton, a former romanized Western name for Guangdong.

Different dialects of Cantonese exist, the most widely spoken is the Guangzhou dialect, also referred to simply as "Cantonese". The Guangzhou dialect is the lingua franca of not just Guangdong province, but also the overseas Cantonese speaking diaspora. The Guangzhou dialect is also spoken in Hong Kong, one of the financial and cultural centres of China. In addition to the Guangzhou dialect, the Taishan dialect, one of the sei yap or siyi (四邑) dialects that come from Guangdong counties from whence a majority of Exclusion-era Cantonese-Chinese immigrants emigrated, continues to be spoken both by recent immigrants from Taishan and even by third-generation Chinese Americans of Cantonese ancestry alike.

Like other major varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is often considered a dialect of a single Chinese language for cultural or nationalistic reasons, though in practice Cantonese, like many other Chinese language varieties, is mutually unintelligble with many other Chinese "dialects". See Identification of the varieties of Chinese.

Dialects
There are at least four major dialect groups of Cantonese: Yuehai, which includes the dialect spoken in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau as well as the dialects of Zhongshan, and Dongguan; Sìyì (四邑, sei yap), exemplified by Taishan dialect, which used to be ubiquitous in American Chinatowns before 1970; Gaoyang, as spoken in Yangjiang; and Guinan 桂南 (Nanning dialect) spoken widely in Guangxi. However, Cantonese generally refers to the Yuehai dialect.

For the last 150 years, Guangdong Province has been the place of origin of most of the Chinese emigrants in western countries; one county near its center, Taishan (or Tóisàn, where the Sìyì or sei yap dialect of Cantonese is spoken), alone may have been the home to more than 60% of Chinese immigrants to the US before 1965, and as a result, Guangdong dialects such as sei yap (the dialects of Taishan, Enping, Kaiping, Xinhui; Counties) and what is now called mainstream Cantonese (with a heavy Hong Kong influence) have been the major spoken dialects abroad, particularly in western countries. The dialect of Zhongsan in Pearl River Delta is spoken by many Chinese immigrants in Hawaii, and some in San Francisco and in the Sacramento River Delta (see Locke, California); it is much closer to Cantonese than the Taishan dialect, but has "flatter" tones in pronunciation than Cantonese.

The dialectical situation is now changing in the United States; recent Chinese emigrants originate from many different areas including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South-east Asia. Those from mainland China and Taiwan all speak Standard Mandarin (putonghua/guoyu) and their native local dialects, which will include dialects of Min (Hokkien and other Fujianese dialects), dialects of Wu, dialects of Mandarin, and dialects of Cantonese. As a result Standard Mandarin is increasingly becoming more common as the Chinese lingua franca amongst the overseas Chinese.

In addition, there are at least three other major Chinese languages spoken in Guangdong Province— Standard Mandarin, which is used for formal occasions, education, the media, and as a national lingua franca; Min-nan (Southern Min) spoken in the eastern regions bordering Fujian, such as those from Chaozhou and Shantou; and Hakka, the language of the Hakka people. Standard Mandarin is mandatory through the state education system, but in Cantonese speaking households, the popularization of Cantonese-language media (Hong Kong films, television serials, and Cantopop, most notably), isolation from the other regions of China, local identity, and the existence of the non-Mandarin speaking Cantonese diaspora (including Hong Kong) ensure that the language has a life of its own. Most wuxia films from Canton are filmed originally in Cantonese and then dubbed or subtitled in Standard Mandarin or English or both.

Cantonese and Mandarin
Although Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/guoyu) is the standard and official language in mainland China and Taiwan and is spoken by nearly everyone with different variations in addition to their native local dialects (which includes Cantonese in Guangdong), Cantonese is one of the main languages in many overseas Chinese communities including Hong Kong, South-east Asia, North America, and Europe. This is because many of the emigrants and/or their ancestors originated from Guangdong before the widespread use of Mandarin, or from Hong Kong where Mandarin is not commonly used.

In some ways, Cantonese is a more conservative language than Mandarin, and in other ways it is not. For example many southern dialects including Cantonese have retained consonant endings from older varieties of Chinese that have been lost in Mandarin. On the other hand, Cantonese have split tones and merged other sounds.

The Taishan dialect, which in the U.S. nowadays is heard mostly spoken by Chinese actors in old American TV shows and movies (e.g. Hop Sing on Bonanza), is even more conservative than the Guangzhou/Hong Kong variants of Cantonese. It has preserved the initial /n/ sound of words, whereas post-World War II-born Hong Kong Cantonese speakers have changed it to an /l/ sound in many cases ("ngàuh lām" instead of "ngàuh nām" for "stewed beef" 牛腩) and more recently drop the "ng-" initial (so that it changes further to "àuh lām"); this seems to have arisen from some kind of street affectation as opposed to systematic phonological change. The common word for "who" in Taishan is "sŭe" (誰), which is almost the same as in Mandarin, whereas Cantonese has changed it to "bīn go" (邊個).

Cantonese sounds quite different from Mandarin, mainly because it has a different set of syllables. The rules for syllable formation are different; for example, there are syllables ending in non-nasal consonants (e.g. "lak"). It also has a different set of tones. Cantonese is generally considered to have 6 or 7 tones, the choice depending on whether a traditional distinction between a high-level and a high-falling tone is observed; the two tones in question have largely merged into a single, high-level tone, especially in Hong Kong Cantonese, which has tended to simplify traditional Chinese tones due to Westernization brought about by colonization and international commerce[citation needed]. Many (especially older) descriptions of the Cantonese sound system record a higher number of tones, e.g. 10. Two of the tones have merged in contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese and a last category has been eliminated chiefly because, in these accounts, a separate tone category is assigned to syllables ending in p, t, or k for each of the three pitch levels in which such syllables occur. Mandarin has four tones plus a "neutral" tone.

Cantonese preserves many syllable-final sounds that Mandarin has lost or merged. For example, the characters 裔, 屹, 藝, 艾, 憶, 譯, 懿, 誼, 肄, 翳, 邑, and 佚 are all pronounced "yì" in Mandarin, but they are all different in Cantonese (jeoi6, ngat6, ngai6, ngaai6, yik1, yik6, yi3, yi4, si3, ai3, yap1, and yat6, respectively). Like Hakka and Min Nan, Cantonese has preserved the final consonants [-m, -n, -ŋ -p, -t, -k] from Middle Chinese, while the Mandarin has been reduced to [-n, -ŋ]. For example, lacking the syllable-final sound "m"; the final "m" and final "n" from older varieties of Chinese have merged into "n" in Mandarin, e.g. Cantonese "taam6" (譚) and "taan4" (壇) versus Mandarin tán, "yim4" (鹽) and "yin4" (言) versus Mandarin yán, "tim1" (添) and "tin1" (天) versus Mandarin tiān, "hum4" (含) and "hon4" (寒) versus Mandarin hán. The examples are too numerous to list. Furthermore, nasals can be independent syllables in Cantonese words, e.g. "ng5" (五) "five," and "m4" (唔) "not".

A more drastic example is the character (學), pronounced *ɣæwk in Middle Chinese. Its modern pronunciations in Cantonese, Hakka, Taiwanese and Japanese are "hok6", "hok8" (pinjim), "ha̍k" (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) and "gaku" (Sino-Japanese), respectively, while the pronunciation in Mandarin is xué.

Differences also arise from Mandarin's relatively recent sound changes. One change, for example, merged [kʲ] with [tsɕ], and is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as Peking (Beijing), Kiangsi (Jiangxi), and ***ien (Fujian). This distinction is still preserved in Cantonese. For example, 晶, 精, 經 and 京 are all pronounced as "jīng" (jing1) in Mandarin, but in Cantonese, the first pair is pronounced "jing1", and the second pair "ging1".

However, Mandarin's vowel system is somewhat more conservative than Cantonese's, in that many diphthongs preserved in Mandarin have merged or been lost in Cantonese. Also, Mandarin makes a three-way distinction among alveolar, alveopalatal, and retroflex fricatives, distinctions that are not made by Cantonese. For example, jiang (將) and zhang (張) are two distinct syllables in Mandarin, but in Cantonese they have the same sound, "jeung1". (Both words have two pronunciations in [5]: zoeng1 and zoeng3.)

[!!! Beowulf !!!]

There are clear sound correspondences in, for instance, the tones. For example, a fourth-tone (low falling tone) word in Cantonese is usually second tone (rising tone) in Mandarin.

This can be partly explained by their common descent from Middle Chinese (spoken), still with its different dialects. One way of counting tones gives Cantonese 9 tones, Mandarin 4 and Middle Chinese 4 (later split into 8). Within this system, Mandarin merged the so-called "yin" and "yang" tones except for the Ping (平, flat) category, while Cantonese not only preserved these, but split one of them into 2 over time. Also, within this system, Cantonese is the only Chinese dialect known to have split its tones rather than merge them since the time of Late Middle Chinese.

Most universities in the US do not teach and have not historically taught Cantonese. Most only offer Chinese classes in Standard Mandarin because it is the official language of both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. In addition, Mandarin serves as the lingua franca used between people who do not speak the same dialect, and is spoken and understood by virtually everyone in mainland China and Taiwan. In addition, Mandarin was the court dialect formerly used in Qing Dynasty Imperial China. However, Cantonese courses can be found at some U.S. universities. Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Hawaii, Brigham Young University, San Jose State University, New York University and Cornell University are some examples. In Canada, where Cantonese is one of the most commonly spoken languages among immigrants, Cantonese courses can be taken in connection with various universities such as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. The language is also commonly taught in 'heritage language' programs in the public schools in areas where many children have parents who speak the language. It is easier for a Cantonese-speaker to understand Mandarin than for a Mandarin-speaker to understand Cantonese. This is because Cantonese speakers who do not speak Mandarin are educated to read and write in standard modern Chinese, but with Cantonese pronunciation when read aloud.

Judging by the recent posts, I can see that no one denies that the good ol' USA is the Mecca of Boxing...