Blizzard (disambiguation)

A blizzard is a severe winter storm condition characterized by low temperatures, strong winds, and heavy snow.

Blizzard or The Blizzard may also refer to:

Fictional characters

Film

Gaming

People

Sport

Amateur wrestling

Amateur wrestling is the most widespread form of sport wrestling.. There are two international wrestling styles performed in the Olympic Games under the supervision of United World Wrestling (UWW; formerly known as FILA, from the French acronym for International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles): Greco-Roman and freestyle. Freestyle is possibly derived from the English Lancashire style. A similar style, commonly called collegiate (also known as scholastic or folkstyle), is practiced in colleges and universities, secondary schools, middle schools, and among younger age groups in the United States. Where the style is not specified, this article refers to the international styles of competition on a mat. In February 2013, the IOC voted to remove the sport from the 2020 Summer Olympics onwards. On 8 September 2013, the IOC announced that wrestling would return to the Summer Olympics in 2020. The rapid rise in the popularity of the combat sport Mixed martial arts (MMA) has increased interest in amateur wrestling due to its effectiveness in the sport and it is considered a core discipline.

Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded February 8, 1991, under the name Silicon & Synapse by three graduates of the University of California, Los Angeles,Michael Morhaime, Frank Pearce, and Allen Adham and is currently a subsidiary of American company Activision Blizzard. Based in Irvine, California, the company originally concentrated primarily on the creation of game ports for other studios before beginning development of their own software in 1993 with the development of games like Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings. In 1994 the company became Chaos Studios then Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. after being acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates.

Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped out what would become their first breakthrough smash hit Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. Blizzard then went on to create several other successful video games, including other Warcraft sequels, the Diablo series, the StarCraft series, and also in 2004 the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. Their most recent projects include: the first expansion for Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, the online collectible card game Hearthstone, the fifth expansion for World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, the "Hero Brawler" Heroes of the Storm and the third and final expansion for StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. There are two titles that are currently in development: Overwatch, an upcoming multiplayer first-person shooter first announced at BlizzCon on November 7, 2014 that entered beta testing in the third quarter of 2015 and the sixth expansion for World of Warcraft: Legion. It was announced on August 6, 2015 at Gamescom 2015 and its beta testing phase is upcoming in 2016.

Winter

Winter is the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate climates, between autumn and spring. Winter is caused by the axis of the Earth in that hemisphere being oriented away from the Sun. Different cultures define different dates as the start of winter, and some use a definition based on weather. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. In many regions, winter is associated with snow and freezing temperatures. The moment of winter solstice is when the sun's elevation with respect to the North or South Pole is at its most negative value (that is, the sun is at its farthest below the horizon as measured from the pole), meaning this day will have the shortest day and the longest night. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates outside the polar regions differ from the date of the winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit (see earliest and latest sunrise and sunset).

The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Winter (dolphin)

Winter (born October 5, 2005) is a bottlenose dolphin at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, Florida, US, widely known for having a prosthetic tail. She is the subject of the book Dolphin Tale, and the 2011 film of the same name, a dramatization of her story, and the sequel Dolphin Tale 2. Winter was found in the coastal waters of Florida in December 2005, caught in a crab trap, which resulted in the loss of her tail. She was then taken to Clearwater Marine Aquarium. The loss of her tail caused her to swim unnaturally with her tail moving side to side instead of up and down. As a result, she was fitted with a silicone-and-plastic tail that enabled her to swim normally. She has since become a highly popular attraction at the aquarium, which led to the film's making. She lives in her pool with another dolphin, Hope, who is the subject of the 2014 sequel to Dolphin Tale, Dolphin Tale 2.

Injury and discovery

Winter was found in the ropes of a crab trap on December 10, 2005, in Mosquito Lagoon of the coastal waters of Florida. Winter received her name because she was found in December, traditionally considered a winter month, even though the exact date of her rescue (December 10) is actually within the American definition of autumn. The rope cut off the supply of blood to her tail. She was spotted and caught by a small fishing boat and a SeaWorld team (with assistance from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute), who brought her to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium.