The Naked Truth (Lil' Kim album)

The Naked Truth is the fourth studio album by rapper Lil' Kim, released on September 27, 2005. This album was released on the first day of Kim's sentencing, in which she went to jail for nearly a year on perjury charges. It was her last studio album released by Atlantic Records before deciding to part ways in 2008. Two official singles were released from the album: "Lighters Up" as the lead single released in September 2005 while "Whoa" served as the second and final single in February 2006. The Naked Truth is still the only female rap album to be rated with 5 mics by The Source.

Reception

Critical reception

The album received generally positive reviews and was given a score of 66 out of 100 by Metacritic, with 5 star ratings from The Source (in which she became the first female rapper to ever receive the coveted 5 mics rating as a solo artist), Vibe Magazine, and The Village Voice and less than favorable reviews from The New York Times and Allmusic. Blender Magazine gave the album four stars calling it her 'strongest work since her pheromone-thick 1996 debut'. While the album did receive several 5 star ratings, Pitchfork Media journalist Jess Harvell, who gave the album a positive 7.8 rating stated "The Naked Truth may be better than 80% of the other rap albums to be released in 2005, but that doesn't make it another Ready to Die."

QUIET

QUIET is an astronomy experiment to study the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. QUIET stands for Q/U Imaging ExperimenT. The Q/U in the name refers to the ability of the telescope to measure the Q and U Stokes parameters simultaneously. QUIET is located at an elevation of 5,080 metres (16,700 feet) at Llano de Chajnantor Observatory in the Chilean Andes. It began observing in late 2008 and finished observing in December 2010.

QUIET is the result of an international collaboration that has its origins in the CAPMAP, Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) and QUaD collaborations. The collaboration consists of 7 groups in the United States (the California Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Miami, Princeton University and Stanford University), 4 groups in Europe (the University of Manchester, the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie Bonn, the University of Oslo and the University of Oxford) and one group in Japan (KEK; the first time a Japan group has been involved in CMB studies). Other members of the collaboration are from the University of California, Berkeley, the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Yoko (album)

Yoko is Beulah's final album, released on Velocette Records in 2003. For the album, the band toned down the happy melodic horn tones of their last album, The Coast Is Never Clear, in favor of a darker approach.

Before its release in September, the album appeared on the internet on July 4, 2003, due to an advance copy being leaked. To counteract this, the band, along with Velocette and Insound, offered a limited edition EP burned onto CD-R, which included demos and alternate versions of songs from Yoko. This EP was limited to 200 copies and was called Rarities, Demos & Besides.

Also released after the initial release of Yoko was a new version only sold on the Yoko tour and at independent record stores called Demo. It was an unmastered, unmixed copy of Yoko as recorded in the homes of band members Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan. The album was produced in limited numbers by Velocette.

Track listing

All songs written by Miles Kurosky, except where noted.

Paradise

Paradise (Persian: پردیس, Paradise garden) is the term for a place of timeless harmony. The Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace, and the perfect state that will be restored in the World to Come.

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both, often compared to the miseries of human civilization: in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, a land of luxury and idleness. Paradise is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, in contrast to this world, or underworlds such as Hell. In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead. In Christian and Islamic understanding, Heaven is a paradisaical relief. In old Egyptian beliefs, the otherworld is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell. For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity. The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss. In the Zoroastrian Avesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, in cosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil.

Paradise (Cody Simpson album)

Paradise is the debut studio album by Australian recording artist Cody Simpson, released on 28 September 2012 by Atlantic Records.

Background

On 12 June 2012, Simpson released Preview to Paradise, a four song teaser EP. The EP featured the songs "Got Me Good", "So Listen", "Wish U Were Here", and "Gentleman". All of the songs, besides "So Listen" were released as a part of Paradise. Simpson stated the reason behind only having a few collaborations on the album is because "I wanted my debut full length album to be a representation of me." It is rumored that Simpson could perform a one off song with JLS star Aston Merrygold once Surfers Paradise has been released.

Singles

On 25 May 2012, the lead single, "Got Me Good" was released as a teaser on Simpson's official website and radio. The accompanying music video was released on 5 June.

"Wish U Were Here", which features American YouTube singer Becky G, was the second official single off the album, released on 12 June 2012. The music video debuted on 7 August 2012. Four days later, three remixes of the song were released.

Paradise (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

Paradise is a historical novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.

Plot

The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the turn of the Twentieth century. Yusuf's father is a hotelier and is in debt to a rich and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story Yusuf is pawned in exchange for his father's owed debt to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf joins Aziz's caravan as they travel into parts of Central Africa and the Congo Basin that have hitherto not been traded with for many generations. Here, Aziz's caravan of traders meets hostility from local tribes, wild animals and difficult terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Aziz encounters the German Army as they sweep Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.

Major themes

African literary scholar J U Jacobs writes that Gurnah is writing back to Joseph Conrad's famous 1902 novel Heart Of Darkness. In Aziz's easterly journey to the Congo, Jacobs says that Gurnah is challenging the dominant Western images of the Congo at the turn of the twentieth century that continue to pervade the popular imagination.