Mark Ronson

Mark Daniel Ronson (born 4 September 1975) is an English musician, DJ, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Although his debut album Here Comes the Fuzz failed to make an impact on the charts, his second album Version reached number two in the UK and included three top 10 singles. This success won him a Brit Award for Best British Male Solo Artist in 2008. His third studio album, Record Collection, was released on 27 September 2010, peaking at number two in the UK.

In 2014, Ronson achieved his first UK and US number one single with the Grammy-nominated "Uptown Funk," which featured vocals from Bruno Mars. In 2015 it won Ronson the Brit Award for British Single of the Year. His fourth studio album, the Grammy-nominated Uptown Special, was released in January 2015, and became his first UK number one album. Ronson has also produced multi-platinum, Grammy-winning albums for Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Early life

Ronson was born at the Wellington Hospital, St John's Wood, London, the son of Laurence Ronson, a real-estate speculator and music manager, and Anne Dexter. His parents are both Ashkenazi Jews (their ancestors being Jewish immigrants from Austria, Russia, and Lithuania); Ronson was brought up in Masorti Judaism and had a Bar Mitzvah. The family name was originally "Aaronson," but was shortened by Mark's grandfather Henry. He is the nephew of Gerald Ronson. Through his mother, he is also related to British Conservative politicians Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Leon Lord Brittan, as well as Odeon Cinemas founder Oscar Deutsch. He is not related to the late English guitarist Mick Ronson, who coincidentally fathered a son named Mark in 1975.

Kevin Parker

Kevin Parker may refer to:

Narcissus (plant)

Narcissus /nɑːrˈsɪsəs/ is a genus of predominantly spring perennial plants in the Amaryllidaceae (amaryllis) family. Various common names including daffodil,daffadowndilly, narcissus, and jonquil are used to describe all or some members of the genus. Narcissus has conspicuous flowers with six petal-like tepals surmounted by a cup- or trumpet-shaped corona. The flowers are generally white or yellow (orange or pink in garden varieties), with either uniform or contrasting coloured tepals and corona.

Narcissus were well known in ancient civilisation, both medicinally and botanically, but formally described by Linnaeus' in his Species Plantarum (1753). The genus is generally considered to have about ten sections with approximately 50 species. The number of species has varied, depending on how they are classified, due to similarity between species and hybridization. The genus arose some time in the Late Oligocene to Early Miocene epochs, in the Iberian peninsula and adjacent areas of southwest Europe. The exact origin of the name Narcissus is unknown, but it is often linked to a Greek word for intoxicated (narcotic) and the myth of the youth of that name who fell in love with his own reflection. The English word 'daffodil' appears to be derived from "asphodel", with which it was commonly compared.

P. Allen Smith

Paul Allen Smith is a television host, designer, gardening and lifestyle expert. He is the host of two public television programs, P. Allen Smith's Garden Home, and P. Allen Smith's Garden to Table and the syndicated 30-minute show Garden Style. His television show P. Allen Smith's Garden Home has been aired on PBS member stations and in syndication on other networks. Smith is one of America's most recognized garden and design experts, providing ideas and inspiration through multiple media venues. He is the author of the best-selling Garden Home series of books published by Clarkson Potter/Random House, including Bringing the Garden Indoors: Container, Crafts and Bouquets for Every Room and threcently published cookbook, Seasonal Recipes from the Garden, inspired by the abundance of food from his farm and a family of cooks. In 2014, Smith's television shows took the Taste Awards by storm with Smith returning to Little Rock with four Taste Awards.

Life and work

Born in Little Rock, and raised in McMinnville, Tennessee, Smith is a fourth-generation nurseryman and horticulturalist. Inspired by a childhood spent on the farm raising and showing livestock and poultry, he has led a life of promoting good stewardship of the earth. In 2009 Smith founded the Heritage Poultry Conservancy, an organization dedicated to the preservation and support of all threatened breeds of domestic poultry. He attended Hendrix College and received a Rotary International Scholarship to study garden design and history at the University of Manchester in England, where he also studied English gardens that had been visited by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in the 18th century.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Early life

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.