Babylon

Babylon (𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 Akkadian: Bābili or Babilim; Arabic: بابل‎, Bābil) was a significant city in ancient Mesopotamia, in the fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The city was built upon the Euphrates and divided in equal parts along its left and right banks, with steep embankments to contain the river's seasonal floods. Babylon was originally a small Semitic Akkadian city dating from the period of the Akkadian Empire c. 2300 BC.

The town attained independence as part of a small city state with the rise of the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in 1894 BC. Claiming to be the successor of the more ancient Sumero-Akkadian city of Eridu, Babylon eclipsed Nippur as the "holy city" of Mesopotamia around the time Amorite king Hammurabi created the first short lived Babylonian Empire in the 18th century BC. Babylon grew and South Mesopotamia came to be known as Babylonia.

The empire quickly dissolved after Hammurabi's death and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. After being destroyed and then rebuilt by the Assyrians, Babylon became the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 609 to 539 BC. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the city came under the rules of the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid empires.

Return to Babylon

Return to Babylon is a black-and-white silent film about the silent movie era. It was directed by Alex Monty Canawati. It stars an ensemble cast of Jennifer Tilly, María Conchita Alonso, Ione Skye, Debi Mazar, Laura Harring, and Tippi Hedren.

Plot

Photographed with a hand-cranked camera and scored with music of the roaring twenties, this silent film strings together the lives of the most famous and infamous stars of the 1920s, including Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Lupe Vélez, Fatty Arbuckle, and William Desmond Taylor.

Background

Features locations in and around Hollywood, California, including the original home of Rudolph Valentino - Falcon Lair, the Norma Talmadge estate and the Canfield-Moreno Estate, as well as the Magic Castle in the Hollywood Hills.

The feature was shot using 19 rolls of 16mm film supposedly found sitting on a sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

Reports of paranormal activity

The film has garnerned a reputation for being haunted. This is because of reports that the actors faces can be seen "morphing" into grotesque shapes in certain shots. Other reports include actors having elongated and webbed fingers, full bodied apparitions, seeing the faces of dead actors manifest in shots, and shadows resembling demons or skeletons. Much of cast and crew had confirmed many of these reports and stated they experienced odd events during production, with Jennifer Tilly in particular describing feeling "watched" and "touched" by unseen forces during filming.

Ghost

In folklore, mythology, and modern media such as literary fiction, a ghost (sometimes known as a spectre [British English] or specter [American English], phantom, apparition, spirit, spook, or haunt) is the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living. Descriptions of the apparition of ghosts vary widely from an invisible presence to translucent or barely visible wispy shapes, to realistic, lifelike visions. The deliberate attempt to contact the spirit of a deceased person is known as necromancy, or in spiritism as a séance.

The belief in manifestations of the spirits of the dead is widespread, dating back to animism or ancestor worship in pre-literate cultures. Certain religious practices—funeral rites, exorcisms, and some practices of spiritualism and ritual magic—are specifically designed to rest the spirits of the dead. Ghosts are generally described as solitary essences that haunt particular locations, objects, or people they were associated with in life, though stories of phantom armies, ghost trains, ghost ships, and even ghost animals have also been recounted.

Sonic Rush

Sonic Rush (ソニック・ラッシュ, Sonikku Rasshu) is a 2005 platform handheld video game developed by Sonic Team and Dimps exclusively for the Nintendo DS as part of Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog series. It was released on November 15, 2005 in North America, November 18 in the PAL region, and November 23 in Japan. It is a 2D platform game, but Sonic's and Blaze's sprites are rendered in 3D, creating a 2.5D effect. Boss battles, along with a Sonic-exclusive special stage, are entirely 3D. The game's storyline follows the intertwining adventures of a new character, Blaze the Cat, and the series' main character, Sonic the Hedgehog. They respectively battle Doctor Eggman and his doppelgänger Eggman Nega at certain points throughout the game.

The game was announced under the working title Sonic DS at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2004, and under Sonic Rush at E3 2005. The game's 2.5D format was based on Sonic Team's idea to combine elements from 2D and 3D games in the series. Upon release, Sonic Rush was positively received by critics, with praise stemming from the game's music and similarity to older games in the series and criticism stemming from its overall quickness. A sequel, Sonic Rush Adventure, was later created and released in 2007.

Be Still

Be Still may refer to:

See also