IN: Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914 -  January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are arguably incorporated into Bluetooth technology, and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi.

On August 10, 1933, Lamarr married Mandl, an Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer who was reputedly the third-richest man in Austria. She was 18 years old and he was 33. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, she described Mandl as an extremely controlling husband who strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy and prevented her from pursuing her acting career. She claimed she was kept a virtual prisoner in their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau.  Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini, and although like Hedy, his own father was Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany, as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler attended lavish parties at the Mandl home. Lamarr accompanied Mandl to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and nurtured her latent talent in science.  Lamarr's marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. In her autobiography, she wrote that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris, but by other accounts, she persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner party, then disappeared afterward. She writes about her marriage:  I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife.... He was the absolute monarch in his marriage.... I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded--and imprisoned--having no mind, no life of its own.

Where did they meet?

OUT: 


IN: James Stanley Brakhage ( BRAK-@j; January 14, 1933 - March 9, 2003), better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. Over the course of five decades, Brakhage created a large and diverse body of work, exploring a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Interested in mythology and inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence.

Born Robert Sanders in Kansas City, Missouri on January 14, 1933, Brakhage was adopted and renamed three weeks after his birth by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage.  As a child, Brakhage was featured on radio as a boy soprano and sang in church choirs and as a soloist at other events. He was raised in Denver, Colorado, where he attended high school with the filmmaker Larry Jordan and the musicians Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. Together, Brakhage, Jordan, Tenney and Subotnick formed a drama group called the Gadflies.  Brakhage briefly attended Dartmouth College on a scholarship before dropping out to make films. He completed his first film, Interim, at the age of 19; the music for the film was composed by his school friend James Tenney. In 1953, Brakhage moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, then called the California School of the Arts. He found the atmosphere in San Francisco more rewarding, associating with poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, but did not complete his education, instead moving to New York City in 1954. There he met a number of notable artists, including Maya Deren (in whose apartment he briefly lived), Willard Maas, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage. Brakhage would collaborate with the latter two, making two films with Cornell (Gnir Rednow and Centuries of June) and using Cage's music for the soundtrack of his first color film, In Between.  Brakhage spent the next few years living in near poverty, depressed about what he saw as the failure of his work. He briefly considered suicide. While living in Denver, Brakhage met Mary Jane Collom (see Jane Wodening), whom he married in late 1957. Known as Jane Brakhage, she became his first wife. Brakhage tried to make money on his films, but had to take a job making industrial shorts to support his family. In 1958, Jane gave birth to the first of the five children they would have together, a daughter called Myrrena, an event Brakhage recorded for his 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving.

When was he born?

OUT: on January 14, 1933,


IN: Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Arabic: mndy'y@ Manda'iyah) is a gnostic religion with a strongly dualistic worldview. Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enos, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist. The Aramaic manda means "knowledge", as does Greek gnosis. According to most scholars, Mandaeaism originated sometime in the first three centuries AD, in Mesopotamia.

As noted above Mandaean theology is not systematic. There is no one single authoritative account of the creation of the cosmos, but rather a series of several accounts. Some scholars, such as Edmondo Lupieri, maintain that comparison of these different accounts may reveal the diverse religious influences upon which the Mandaeans have drawn and the ways in which the Mandaean religion has evolved over time.  In contrast with the religious texts of the western Gnostic sects formerly found in Syria and Egypt, the earliest Mandaean religious texts suggest a more strictly dualistic theology, typical of other Iranian religions such as Zoroastrianism, Zurvanism, Manichaeism, and the teachings of Mazdak. In these texts, instead of a large pleroma, there is a discrete division between light and darkness. The ruler of darkness is called Ptahil (similar to the Gnostic Demiurge), and the originator of the light (i.e. God) is only known as "the great first Life from the worlds of light, the sublime one that stands above all works." When this being emanated, other spiritual beings became increasingly corrupted, and they and their ruler Ptahil created our world. The name Ptahil is suggestive of the Egyptian Ptah--the Mandaeans believe that they were resident in Egypt for a while--joined to the semitic El, meaning "god".  The issue is further complicated by the fact that Ptahil alone does not constitute the demiurge but only fills that role insofar as he is the creator of our world. Rather, Ptahil is the lowest of a group of three "demiurgic" beings, the other two being Yushamin (a.k.a. Joshamin) and Abathur. Abathur's demiurgic role consists of his sitting in judgment upon the souls of mortals. The role of Yushamin, the senior being, is more obscure; wanting to create a world of his own, he was severely punished for opposing the King of Light. The name may derive from Iao has-sammayim (in Hebrew: Yahweh "of the heavens").

Why do they believe that?

OUT: