Zombie (song)

"Zombie" is a protest song by Irish rock band The Cranberries. It was released in September 1994 as the lead single from their second studio album, No Need to Argue (1994). The song was written by the band's lead singer Dolores O'Riordan, and reached No. 1 on the charts in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany.

It won the "Best Song" award at the 1995 MTV Europe Music Awards.

Production

Zombie was written during the Cranberries' English Tour in 1993, in memory of two boys, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry, who were killed in an IRA bombing in Warrington.

Reception

The Rough Guide to Rock identified the album No Need to Argue as "more of the same" as the Cranberries' debut album, except for the song "Zombie", which had an "angry grunge" sound and "aggressive" lyrics. The Cranberries played the song on their appearance on the U.S. show Saturday Night Live in 1995 in a performance that British author Dave Thompson calls "one of the most powerful performances that the show has ever seen".

Zombie (album)

Zombie is a studio album by Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. It was released in Nigeria by Coconut Records in 1976, and in the United Kingdom by Creole Records in 1977.

The album criticised the Nigerian government; and it is thought to have resulted in the murder of Kuti's mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, and the destruction of his commune by the military.

Critical reception

In a 1981 review, music critic Robert Christgau gave the album an "A–" and found Kuti's English lyrics to be "very political" and "associative". He said that Kuti records "real fusion music — if James Brown's stuff is Afro-American, his is American-African." In a retrospective review, Allmusic's Sam Samuelson gave Zombie four-and-a-half out of five stars and called it Kuti and Africa 70's "most popular and impacting record".Pitchfork Media ranked it number 90 on their list of the 100 best albums of the 1970s.

The album was included in Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Controversy and fallout

Zombi 2

Zombi 2 is a 1979 zombie film directed by Lucio Fulci. The film was adapted from an original screenplay by Dardano Sacchetti to serve as a sequel to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, released in Italy as Zombi. It stars Tisa Farrow, Ian McCulloch and Richard Johnson, and featured a score by frequent Fulci collaborator Fabio Frizzi.

The film tells the story of a Caribbean island cursed by voodoo, whose dead residents rise as zombies to attack the living. A scientist's daughter journeys to the island after her father's boat turns up abandoned in New York City. Intended as a return to "classic zombie tales" by its writer, Zombi 2 was filmed in Italy, with further location shooting in New York and Santa Domingo.

Produced on a small budget of ₤410 million, the film earned several times its production costs back in international gross. It attracted controversy upon its United Kingdom release, becoming listed as a "video nasty"; however later years have seen a greater appreciation for the film from critics. Frizzi's score has also been released independently of the film, as well as being performed live on tour by the composer.

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: