The Blessing (novel)

The Blessing is a comic satirical novel by Nancy Mitford, first published in 1951.

Plot summary

It is set in the post-World War II period and concerns Grace, an English country girl who moves to France after falling for a dashing aristocratic Frenchman named Charles-Edouard who lusts after other women. Their son Sigi aims to keep his parents apart by engineering misunderstandings.

Film adaptation

A 1959 film called Count Your Blessings was based in the novel. It starred Maurice Chevalier.

External links

Get the Blessing

Get the Blessing (previously known as The Blessing) are a jazz rock quartet based in Bristol, England, active since 2000. They were formed when Jim Barr (bass) and Clive Deamer (drums), the rhythm section from the trip hop group Portishead, teamed up with Jake McMurchie (saxophone) and Pete Judge (trumpet) over their mutual appreciation of Ornette Coleman. To date, they have released five albums, their debut All is Yes won best album at the 2008 BBC Jazz Awards. Their most recent album, Astronautilus, was released in 2015.

Music style

The group have been widely received as part of a new generation of groups that blend jazz and rock, which also includes Esbjörn Svensson Trio,Led Bib,Polar Bear, and Acoustic Ladyland. The music is mainly instrumental, although there have been guest singers (specifically Tammy Payne on "The Unnameable" and "Music Style Product"), and Deamer has sung a vocal version of "Bugs in Amber", entitled "Moot", live.

Reception

Their live performances have been described as "Technically audacious, mysterious and droll, the Blessing also provided an evening of instrumental entertainment that was unfailingly tuneful and readily accessible." Also as "coupl[ing] hard-hitting, high-volume rock with wailing jazz-horn choruses. The group's flat-out drive, fiery virtuosity and strong, anthemic tunes certainly grabbed the audience". The Guardian newspaper recently said "the spirit of John Coltrane sometimes seemed to hover over the ensuing horn laments and full-on free thrashes alike, and the handclapping Pentopia unlocked all of the gifted Deamer's capacity for subtle variation on metronomically spellbinding grooves."

The Blessing (rock band)

The Blessing was a British musical group led by William Topley, whose music featured elements of blues, gospel, soul, and rock. The group released two albums and had one UK Top 40 hit before disbanding.

History

The Blessing was founded in London in 1987, initially acting mostly as a blues and reggae cover band. The group eventually began writing its own material and recorded in keyboardist Mike Westergaard's studio, eventually landing a recording contract in 1989 with MCA Records. Their debut, Prince of the Deep Water, followed in 1991, with the lead single "Highway 5" reaching #42 on the UK Singles Chart. The single was remixed and re-released at the end of the year, and early in 1992 re-charted, this time peaking at #30.Prince of the Deep Water featured guest musicians Nicky Hopkins, Richard Tee, Jeff Porcaro, Rickie Lee Jones, and Bruce Hornsby, and went on to sell 125,000 copies.

For the follow-up full-length, Locusts & Wild Honey, Jimmy Miller was called in to produce three tracks, though he died before the album's release. One of the tracks he produced, "Soul Love", was released as the album's lead single, peaking at #73 on the UK Singles Chart. Due to the high cost of recording the group's first album and restructuring at label MCA, the band was seen as not sufficiently commercially viable and lost support from the label, splintering soon after. Topley secured a contract with Mercury a few years later as a solo artist.

Píča

Píča (Czech pronunciation: [piːtʃa]), sometimes short piča or pyča [pɪtʃa], is a Czech and Slovak profanity that refers to the vagina similar to the English word cunt. It is often represented as a symbol of a spearhead, a rhombus standing on one of its sharper points with a vertical line in the middle, representing a vulva.

The meaning is clear for most Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians. In some other languages it has other spellings (e.g. in the non-Slavic Hungarian language it is written as "picsa"), but has similar pronunciation and carries the same meaning and profanity. Drawing this symbol is considered a taboo, or at least unaccepted by mainstream society.

Symbol in culture

This symbol has occurred in a few Czech movies, including Bylo nás pět. In the 1969 drama The Blunder (Ptákovina), Milan Kundera describes the havoc, both public and private, that ensues after the Headmaster of a school draws the symbol on a blackboard.

Jaromír Nohavica confessed, in the 1983-song Halelujá, to "drawing short lines and rhombuses on a plaster" (in Czech: tužkou kreslil na omítku čárečky a kosočtverce).

Pa

PA, Pa, pA, or pa may refer to:

Linguistics

Military

Organisations

Other uses

P&A

P&A or P and A may stand for:

See also