Patience (play)

Patience is a play written and published in 1998 by Jason Sherman (Doollie.com). It is about Reuben, who one day loses everything. The play follows a path similar to David Mamet's play Edmond. It traces a psychological journey through Reuben's head while he tries to figure out how everything happened. The play was written at a time when the story would hit home for a lot of middle-aged, middle-class men.

Play Synopsis

Act 1

Patience (George Michael album)

Patience is the fifth studio album by British singer-songwriter George Michael, released in 2004. The much delayed follow-up to Older is considered Michael's comeback album since it was Michael's first album composed of original material since 1996, and his first for Sony Music Entertainment since 1990's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. The album spanned six singles. The first two, "Freeek!" and "Shoot the Dog", were already released in 2002 by Polydor, when the album was originally due.

Return to Sony

On 17 November 2003, George Michael re-signed with Sony Music Entertainment, the company he had left after a legal battle in which Michael claimed that his contract was stifling him and was keeping him in "professional slavery". As a result, his contract was sold by Sony to rival record companies Virgin Records and DreamWorks Records on 14 July 1995.

Chart success

Patience went on sale in most of the world in late March 2004 and debuted at number 1 on the UK Albums Chart, and at number 2 in Australia on 22 March. It became one of the fastest selling albums in the UK, selling over 275,000 copies in the first week. The record reached the top five on most other European charts. The album went on sale in the US on 18 May 2004, however it did not contain "Patience Pt. 2" and "Shoot the Dog". It debuted in the US at a rather disappointing 29 but after many TV specials such as on The Oprah Winfrey Show the following week it reached its chart peak of number 12. As of 2006, the album sold 381,000 in United States. It sold around four million copies worldwide, and contained six singles.

Patience (Guns N' Roses song)

"Patience" is a power ballad by American hard rock band Guns N' Roses, which appears on the album G N' R Lies and was released as a single in 1989. The song peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song is played using three acoustic guitars and was recorded in a single session by producer Mike Clink. A music video of the song was shot and appears on the band's music video DVD, Welcome to the Videos. The music and lyrics were both written by Izzy Stradlin.

Tesla guitarist Frank Hannon later implied that Guns N' Roses had copied Tesla's earlier work, stating that a demo by Tesla called "Better Off Without You" was "'Patience' note for note." Hannon later backtracked on his blog, saying "The song is a great song that they wrote themselves, and it is only the end part that has any similar part to the guitar chords we used. I apologize for any controversy or dis-respect I may have projected in my joking around with Eddie Trunk about this."

The motivation for the track is generally accepted to be the troublesome relationship between Axl Rose and his now ex-wife Erin Everly, though this was never stated in the album or interviews. According to bass guitarist Duff McKagan, "Axl came up with a great lyric, seemingly out of nowhere, that of course became the story and melody of that song." It has also been stated by the band that Izzy wrote the song about his ex-girlfriend Angela Nicoletti McCoy.

DATA (band)

DATA were an electronic music band created in the late 1970s by Georg Kajanus, creator of such bands as Eclection, Sailor and Noir (with Tim Dry of the robotic/music duo Tik and Tok). After the break-up of Sailor in the late 1970s, Kajanus decided to experiment with electronic music and formed DATA, together with vocalists Francesca ("Frankie") and Phillipa ("Phil") Boulter, daughters of British singer John Boulter.

The classically orientated title track of DATA’s first album, Opera Electronica, was used as the theme music to the short film, Towers of Babel (1981), which was directed by Jonathan Lewis and starred Anna Quayle and Ken Campbell. Towers of Babel was nominated for a BAFTA award in 1982 and won the Silver Hugo Award for Best Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival of the same year.

DATA released two more albums, the experimental 2-Time (1983) and the Country & Western-inspired electronica album Elegant Machinery (1985). The title of the last album was the inspiration for the name of Swedish pop synth group, elegant MACHINERY, formerly known as Pole Position.

Data (word)

The word data has generated considerable controversy on if it is a singular, uncountable noun, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.

Usage in English

In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g. "80 datums"); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with such plural determiners as these and many or as a singular abstract mass noun with a verb in the singular form. Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example) the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues, but "data" as a singular form is far more common.

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item given". In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common.

Data URI scheme

The data URI scheme is a uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. It is a form of file literal or here document. This technique allows normally separate elements such as images and style sheets to be fetched in a single Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request, which may be more efficient than multiple HTTP requests. Data URIs are sometimes referred to incorrectly as "data URLs". As of 2015, data URIs are fully supported by most major browsers, and partially supported in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Syntax

The syntax of data URIs was defined in Request for Comments (RFC) 2397, published in August 1998, and follows the URI scheme syntax. A data URI consists of: