Harold Lloyd

Harold Clayton Lloyd, Sr. (April 20, 1893 – March 8, 1971) was an American actor, comedian, film director, film producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer who is most famous for his silent comedy films.

Harold Lloyd ranks alongside Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as one of the most popular and influential film comedians of the silent film era. Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and "talkies", between 1914 and 1947. He is best known for his bespectacled "Glasses" character, a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s-era United States.

His films frequently contained "thrill sequences" of extended chase scenes and daredevil physical feats, for which he is best remembered today. Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock high above the street in Safety Last! (1923) is one of the most enduring images in all of cinema. Lloyd did many of these dangerous stunts himself, despite having injured himself in August 1919 while doing publicity pictures for the Roach studio. An accident with a bomb mistaken as a prop resulted in the loss of the thumb and index finger of his right hand (the injury was disguised on future films with the use of a special prosthetic glove, though the glove often did not go unnoticed).

Beverly Hills, California

Beverly Hills is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, surrounded by the cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood. Originally a Spanish ranch where lima beans were grown, Beverly Hills was incorporated in 1914 by a group of investors who had failed to find oil, but found water instead and eventually decided to develop it into a town. By 2013, its population had grown to 34,658. Sometimes referred to as "90210", one of its primary ZIP codes, it is home to many actors and celebrities. The city includes the Rodeo Drive shopping district and the Beverly Hills Oil Field.

History

Early history

Gaspar de Portolá arrived in the area that would become Beverly Hills on August 3, 1769, travelling along native trails which followed the present-day route of Wilshire Boulevard.

The area was settled by Maria Rita Quinteros de Valdez and her husband in 1828. They called their 4,500 acres (18 km²) of property the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. in 1854, she sold the ranch to Benjamin Davis Wilson (1811–1878) and Henry Hancock (1822–1883). By the 1880s, the ranch had been subdivided into parcels of 75 acres (0.30 km²) and was being rapidly bought up by anglos from Los Angeles and the East coast.

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Harold (improvisation)

Harold is a structure used in longform improvisational theatre. Developed by Del Close and brought to fruition through Close's collaboration with Charna Halpern, the Harold has become the signature form of Chicago's iO Theater and the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York and Los Angeles. It is now performed by improv troupes and teams across the world.

The Committee, a San Francisco improv group, performed the first Harold in Concord, California in 1967. They were invited to a high school and decided to do their improvisations on the war in Vietnam. On the way home in a Volkswagen Bus, they were discussing the performance, when one of them asked what they should call it. Allaudin (Bill) Mathieu called out "Harold", which was a joking reference to a line from A Hard Day's Night where a reporter asks George Harrison what he calls his haircut and he answers "Arthur". Close later remarked that he wished he had chosen a better name.

When The Committee disbanded in 1972, improv company Improvisation, Inc. was the only company in America continuing to perform Close's "original" Harold: a 45-minute free-form piece that would seamlessly move from one "Harold technique" to another. In 1976, two former I-Inc performers, Michael Bossier and John Elk, formed Spaghetti Jam, performing in San Francisco's The Old Spaghetti Factory through 1983. Spaghetti Jam performed Harolds while also turning Spolin games and Harold techniques into stand-alone performance pieces (i.e., shortform improv).

Mystery meat navigation

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".