Ensemble cast

An ensemble cast is made up of cast members in which the principal actors and performers are assigned roughly equal amounts of importance and screen time in a dramatic production. In Hollywood, the term has recently begun to be used as a replacement for the old term "all-star cast"; meaning a film with many well-known actors, even if most of them only have minor or supporting roles.

Structure

The structure of an ensemble cast contrasts with the popular Hollywood centralization of a sole protagonist, as the ensemble leans more towards a sense of “collectivity and community.”

Ensemble casts in film were introduced as early as September 1916, with D. W. Griffith's silent epic film Intolerance, featuring four separate though parallel plots. The film follows the lives of several characters over hundreds of years, across different cultures and time periods. The unification of different plot lines and character arcs is a key characteristic of ensemble casting in film; whether it's a location, event, or an overarching theme that ties the film and characters together.

Ensemble

Art

Math and Science

Technology

Black operation

A black operation or black op is a covert operation by a government, a government agency, or a military organization. This can include activities by private companies or groups. Key features of a black operation are that it is secret and it is not attributable to the organization carrying it out. The main difference between a black operation and one that is merely secret is that a black operation involves a significant degree of deception, to conceal who is behind it or to make it appear that some other entity is responsible ("false flag" operations).

A single such activity may be called a "black bag operation"; that term is primarily used for covert or clandestine surreptitious entries into structures to obtain information for human intelligence operations. Such operations are known to have been carried out by the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency,Mossad, MI6, ISI (Pakistan), RAW, MSS, and the intelligence services of other nations.

Etymology

"Black" may be used as a generic term for any government activity that is hidden or secret. For example, some activities by military and intel agencies are funded by a classified "black budget," of which the details, and sometimes even the total, are hidden from the public and from most congressional oversight.

Popular culture

Popular culture or pop culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society. The most common pop culture categories are: entertainment (movies, music, TV), sports, news (as in people/places in news), politics, fashion/clothes, technology, and slang.

Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and "dumbed down" in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result, it comes under heavy criticism from various non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, or corrupt.

History and definitions

The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, popular culture was associated with poor education and the lower classes, as opposed to the "official culture" and higher education of the upper classes.

The Crown

In jurisprudence in the Commonwealth realms, the Crown dependencies, and any of a realm's provincial or state sub-divisions, the Crown is the state in all its aspects, though the term is not only a metonym for the State.

The Crown is a corporation sole that represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, and judicial governance. It developed first in the Kingdom of England as a separation of the literal crown and property of the nation state from the person and personal property of the monarch. The concept spread through English and later British colonisation and is now rooted in the legal lexicon of the other 15 independent realms and the three Crown dependencies. In this context it should not be confused with any physical crown, such as those of the British royal regalia.

The term is also found in expressions such as crown land, which some countries refer to as public land or state land, as well as in some offices, such as minister of the crown, crown attorney, and crown prosecutor (other terms being district attorney, state prosecutor, or public prosecutor).