Vivere il Mare

Santa Lucia Caraibi

Santa Lucia Caraibi

Suspense: The Dead Sleep Lightly / Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble / Fear Paints a Picture

The Three Witches or Weird Sisters are characters in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth (c. 1603--1607). Their origin lies in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Other possible sources influencing their creation aside from Shakespeare's own imagination include British folklore, contemporary treatises on witchcraft including King James I and VI's Daemonologie, Scandinavian legends of the Norns, and ancient classical myths concerning the Fates, the Greek myths of the Moirai and the Roman myths of the Parcae. Portions of Thomas Middleton's play The Witch were incorporated into Macbeth around 1618.

Shakespeare's witches are prophets who hail the general Macbeth early in the play with predictions of his rise as king. Upon committing regicide and taking the throne of Scotland, Macbeth hears the trio deliver ambiguous prophecies threatening his downfall. The witches' dark and contradictory natures, their filthy trappings and activities, as well as their intercourse with the supernatural all set an ominous tone for the play.

In the eighteenth century the witches were portrayed in a variety of ways by artists such as Henry Fuseli. Since then, their role has proven somewhat difficult for many directors to portray, due to the tendency to make their parts exaggerated or overly sensational. Some have adapted the original Macbeth into different cultures, as in Orson Welles's performance making the witches voodoo priestesses. Film adaptations have seen the witches transformed into characters familiar to the modern world, such as hippies on drugs or goth schoolgirls. Their influence reaches the literary realm as well in such works as The Third Witch and the Harry Potter series.

Come and Go, a short play written in 1965 by Samuel Beckett, recalls the Three Witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth. It features only three characters, all women, named Flo, Vi, and Ru. The opening line: When did we three last meet? [28] recalls the When shall we three meet again? of Macbeth: Act 1, Scene 1.[29] The Third Witch, a 2001 novel written by Rebecca Reisert, tells the story of the play through the eyes of a young girl named Gilly, one of the witches. Gilly seeks Macbeth's death out of revenge for killing her father.[30]

J. K. Rowling has cited the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth as an influence in her Harry Potter series. In an interview with The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, when asked, What if [ Voldemort ] never heard the prophecy?, she said, It's the 'Macbeth' idea. I absolutely adore 'Macbeth.' It is possibly my favourite Shakespeare play. And that's the question isn't it? If Macbeth hadn't met the witches, would he have killed Duncan? Would any of it have happened? Is it fated or did he make it happen? I believe he made it happen.[31] On her website, she referred to Macbeth again in discussing the prophecy: the prophecy (like the one the witches make to Macbeth, if anyone has read the play of the same name) becomes the catalyst for a situation that would never have occurred if it had not been made.[32] More playfully, Rowling also invented a musical band popular in the Wizarding world called The Weird Sisters that appears in passing in several books in the series as well as the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The third Harry Potter movie's soundtrack featured a song by John Williams called Double Trouble, a reference to the witches' line, Double double, toil and trouble. The lyrics of the song were adapted from the Three Witches' spell in the play.

The Groucho Marx Show: American Television Quiz Show - Door / Food Episodes

Contestant teams usually consisted of one male and one female, most selected from the studio audience. More Groucho:

Occasionally, famous or otherwise interesting figures were invited to play (e.g., a Korean-American contestant who was a veteran and had been a prisoner of war during the Korean War).

After his signature introduction of Here he is: the one, the only... by Fenneman and finished by a thunderous GROUCHO! from the audience, Marx would be introduced to the music of Hooray for Captain Spaulding, his signature song. After which, Groucho would be introduced to the contestants and engage in humorous conversation for a lengthy period of time where Groucho both improvised his responses and employed prepared lines written by the show's writers using preshow interviews.

Some show tension revolved around whether a contestant would say the secret word, a common word revealed to the audience at the show's outset. If a contestant said the word, a toy duck resembling Groucho with a mustache and eyeglasses, and with a cigar in its bill, descended from the ceiling to bring a $100 bill. A cartoon of a duck with a cigar was also used in the opening title sequence. In one episode, Groucho's brother Harpo came down instead of the duck, and in another a model came down in a birdcage with the money. Marx sometimes slyly directed conversation to encourage the secret word to come up. The duck was also occasionally replaced with a wooden Indian figure.

After the contestants' introduction and interview, the actual game began. Couples chose from a list of 20 available categories before the show, then tried to answer a series of questions within that category. From 1947--1956, couples were asked four questions.

1947--1953 -- Each couple began with $20, wagering part or all of their bankroll for each question.
1953--1954 -- Each couple now began with $0, but selected values from $10 to $100 (in $10 increments). A correct answer added the value of the question to their bankroll, while an incorrect answer did nothing. According to co-director Robert Dwan in his book As Long As They're Laughing, Guedel changed the scoring format because too many couples were betting, and losing, most or all of their money.
1954--1956 -- The format was slightly altered to start each couple with $100. Incorrect answers now cut their bankroll to that point in half.
1956--1959 -- Two couples (reduced from three) answered questions until they either gave two consecutive incorrect responses or answered four consecutive questions correctly for a prize of $1,000.
1959--1961 -- For the last two seasons, couples picked four questions worth $100, $200, or $300 each, potentially winning up to $1,200. Winning at least $500 qualified the team to go for the jackpot question.

From 1947--1956, if the couple ended with $25 or less, Marx asked an elementary consolation question for a total of $25 (later $100) which did not count toward the scores. The questions were made easy in hopes that nobody would answer incorrectly, and included such examples as Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?, When did the War of 1812 start?, How long do you cook a three-minute egg?, and What color is an orange? The question about Grant's Tomb became such a staple of the show that both Marx and Fenneman were shocked when one man got the question wrong by answering No one. As the contestant then pointed out, Grant's Tomb is an above ground mausoleum.


In all formats, one of the two players on the team could keep their half of the winnings while the other risked their half. In this case, all amounts being played for were divided in half.

1947--1956 -- The highest-scoring couple was given one final question for the jackpot, which began at $1,000 and increased by $500 each week until won (reaching $6,000 at least once, in 1952). In the event of a tie, the tied couples wrote their answers on paper and all couples who answered correctly split the jackpot.
1956--1957 -- For a brief period following the format change, couples who won the front game could wager half on another question worth $2,000.
1957--1959 -- Winning couples now faced a wheel with numbers from 1--10, selecting one number for $10,000. If the number selected was spun, a correct answer to the jackpot question augmented the team's total winnings to that amount; otherwise, the question was worth a total of $2,000.
1959--1961 -- For the last two seasons, the format was slightly altered to eliminate the risk and add a second number for $5,000.

Calling All Cars: Alibi / Broken Xylophone / Manila Envelopes

The radio show Calling All Cars hired LAPD radio dispacher Jesse Rosenquist to be the voice of the dispatcher. Rosenquist was already famous because home radios could tune into early police radio frequencies. As the first police radio dispatcher presented to the public ear, his was the voice that actors went to when called upon for a radio dispatcher role.

The iconic television series Dragnet, with LAPD Detective Joe Friday as the primary character, was the first major media representation of the department. Real LAPD operations inspired Jack Webb to create the series and close cooperation with department officers let him make it as realistic as possible, including authentic police equipment and sound recording on-site at the police station.

Due to Dragnet's popularity, LAPD Chief Parker became, after J. Edgar Hoover, the most well known and respected law enforcement official in the nation. In the 1960s, when the LAPD under Chief Thomas Reddin expanded its community relations division and began efforts to reach out to the African-American community, Dragnet followed suit with more emphasis on internal affairs and community policing than solving crimes, the show's previous mainstay.

Several prominent representations of the LAPD and its officers in television and film include Adam-12, Blue Streak, Blue Thunder, Boomtown, The Closer, Colors, Crash, Columbo, Dark Blue, Die Hard, End of Watch, Heat, Hollywood Homicide, Hunter, Internal Affairs, Jackie Brown, L.A. Confidential, Lakeview Terrace, Law & Order: Los Angeles, Life, Numb3rs, The Shield, Southland, Speed, Street Kings, SWAT, Training Day and the Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour and Terminator film series. The LAPD is also featured in the video games Midnight Club II, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, L.A. Noire and Call of Juarez: The Cartel.

The LAPD has also been the subject of numerous novels. Elizabeth Linington used the department as her backdrop in three different series written under three different names, perhaps the most popular being those novel featuring Det. Lt. Luis Mendoza, who was introduced in the Edgar-nominated Case Pending. Joseph Wambaugh, the son of a Pittsburgh policeman, spent fourteen years in the department, using his background to write novels with authentic fictional depictions of life in the LAPD. Wambaugh also created the Emmy-winning TV anthology series Police Story. Wambaugh was also a major influence on James Ellroy, who wrote several novels about the Department set during the 1940s and 1950s, the most famous of which are probably The Black Dahlia, fictionalizing the LAPD's most famous cold case, and L.A. Confidential, which was made into a film of the same name. Both the novel and the film chronicled mass-murder and corruption inside and outside the force during the Parker era. Critic Roger Ebert indicates that the film's characters (from the 1950s) represent the choices ahead for the LAPD: assisting Hollywood limelight, aggressive policing with relaxed ethics, and a straight arrow approach.