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Breakfast Of Champions
''Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday'' is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio, and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city, and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author. ''Breakfast of Champions'' deals with themes of free will, suicide, and race relations, among others. The novel is full of playful drawings made by the author. Plot ''Breakfast of Champions'' tells the story of the events that lead up to the chance encounter of Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the meeting itself, and the immediate aftermath. Trout is a struggling science fiction writer who, after their fateful meeting, becomes successful and goes on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, Nobel Prize; Hoover is a wealthy businessman who is going insane, sent over the brink by his encounter with Trout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut ( ; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American author known for his Satire, satirical and darkly humorous novels. His published work includes fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus years; further works have been published since his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army, U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was prisoner of war, interned in Dresden, where he survived the Bombing of Dresden in World War II, Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or Human sexual activity, sexual behavior between people of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" exclusively to people of the same sex or gender. It also denotes Sexual identity, identity based on attraction, related behavior, and community affiliation. Along with bisexuality and heterosexuality, homosexuality is one of the three main categories of sexual orientation within the heterosexual–homosexual continuum. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, scientists favor Biology and sexual orientation, biological theories. There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males. A major hypothesis implicates the Prenatal development, prenatal environment, specifically the organizationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Player Piano (novel)
''Player Piano'' is the debut novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., published in 1952. The novel depicts a dystopia of automation partly inspired by the author's time working at General Electric, describing the negative impact technology can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become hallmarks developed further in Vonnegut's later works. Plot While most Americans were fighting in the third world war, the nation's managers and engineers responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed factories to operate with only a few workers. Ten years after the war, most workers have no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ilium, New York
Ilium is a fictional town in eastern New York (state), New York state, used as a setting for many of Kurt Vonnegut's novels and stories, including ''Player Piano (novel), Player Piano'', ''Cat's Cradle'', ''Slaughterhouse-Five'', and the stories "Deer in the Works", "Kurt Vonnegut bibliography, Poor Little Rich Town", and "Look at the Birdie, Ed Luby's Key Club". The town is dominated by its major industry leader, the Ilium Works, which produces scientific marvels to assist, or possibly harm, human life. The Ilium Works is Vonnegut's symbol for the "impersonal corporate giant" with the power to alter humankind's destiny. The town has been compared to Zenith, the fictional setting in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel ''Babbitt (novel), Babbitt''. In one sense, the name may refer to Troy, New York because "''Ilium''" was the name the Romans gave to ancient Troy, although Troy is mentioned as a separate city in ''Player Piano (novel), Player Piano''. This name could also provide irony, for I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cat's Cradle
''Cat's Cradle'' is a satirical postmodern novel, with science fiction elements, by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's fourth novel, it was first published on March 18, 1963, exploring and satirizing issues of science, technology, the purpose of religion, and the arms race, often through the use of morbid humor. Synopsis Background The first-person everyman narrator opens the novel with "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John", though neither name appears again throughout the novel. The narrator is a professional writer who frames the plot as a flashback set in the mid-20th century, when he was planning to write a book called ''The Day the World Ended''. He describes his concept for that book as an account of what people were doing on the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Throughout, he also intersperses meaningful as well as sarcastic passages and sentiments from an odd religious scripture known as ''The Books of Bokonon''. Most of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bluebeard (Vonnegut Novel)
"Bluebeard" ( ) is a French folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in . The tale is about a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives and the attempts of the present one to avoid the fate of her predecessors. " The White Dove", " The Robber Bridegroom", and " Fitcher's Bird" (also called "Fowler's Fowl") are tales similar to "Bluebeard". The notoriety of the tale is such that Merriam-Webster gives the word ''Bluebeard'' the definition of "a man who marries and kills one wife after another". The verb ''bluebearding'' has even appeared as a way to describe the crime of either killing a series of women, or seducing and abandoning a series of women. Plot In one version of the story, Bluebeard is a wealthy and powerful nobleman who has been married six times to beautiful women who have all mysteriously vanished. When he visits his neighbor and asks to marry one of his daughters, they ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
God Bless You, Mr
In monotheistic belief systems, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic belief systems, a god is "a spirit or being believed to have created, or for controlling some part of the universe or life, for which such a deity is often worshipped". Belief in the existence of at least one deity, which interfers with the world, is called theism. Conceptions of God vary considerably. Many notable theologians and philosophers have developed arguments for and against the existence of God. Atheism rejects the belief in any deity. Agnosticism is the belief that the existence of God is unknown or unknowable. Some theists view knowledge concerning God as derived from faith. God is often conceived as the greatest entity in existence. God is often believed to be the cause of all things and so is seen as the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe. God is often thought of as incorporeal and independent of the material creation, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rabo Karabekian
Rabo Karabekian is a fictional character and the narrator and protagonist of the 1987 novel ''Bluebeard (Vonnegut novel), Bluebeard'' by American author Kurt Vonnegut. Karabekian is an Abstract expressionism, abstract expressionist artist who appears first in the 1973 novel ''Breakfast of Champions'' as the artist of the $50,000 painting ''Temptation of Saint Anthony in visual arts, The Temptation of Saint Anthony''. Vonnegut's 1987 novel ''Bluebeard'' is largely a fictional autobiography of Karabekian, and is told primarily as a first person narrative. Fictional biography Karabekian was born in 1916. His parents were survivors of the Armenian genocide. They moved to San Ignacio, California, where young Rabo's talent as an artist became apparent. However, although capable of incredible photorealism, his teacher generally felt his work had no soul (that is, it failed to invoke an emotion, emotional response in the viewer). His father was a cobbler who did repairs until he became ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eliot Rosewater
Eliot Rosewater is a recurring character in the novels of American author Kurt Vonnegut. He appears throughout various novels as an alcoholic, and a philanthropist who claims to be a volunteer fireman. He runs the Rosewater Foundation, an organization created to keep the family's money in the family. He is among the few fans of the novels of Kilgore Trout (another of Vonnegut's creations). ''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'' ''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,'' or, ''Pearls Before Swine,'' the first of Vonnegut's novels to feature the character of Eliot Rosewater, is also the one in which he is the most prominent. The 1965 novel follows much of his life as the liberal son of a rich, conservative Senator from Rosewater County, Indiana who founded the Rosewater Foundation. Eliot Rosewater is convinced that he should spend the family riches to help the poor and uses the Foundation to this end, an idea looked down upon by his father. Norman Mushari, an opportunistic former associate of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electric Chair
The electric chair is a specialized device used for capital punishment through electrocution. The condemned is strapped to a custom wooden chair and electrocuted via electrodes attached to the head and leg. Alfred P. Southwick, a Buffalo, New York dentist, conceived this execution method in 1881. It was developed over the next decade as a more humane alternative to conventional executions, particularly hanging. First used in 1890, the electric chair became a symbol of capital punishment in the United States. The electric chair was also used extensively in the Philippines. It was initially thought to cause death through cerebral damage, but it was scientifically established in 1899 that death primarily results from ventricular fibrillation and cardiac arrest. Despite its historical significance in American capital punishment, electric chair use has declined with the adoption of lethal injection which was perceived as more humane. While some states retain electrocution as a legal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yin-yang Symbol
In Chinese philosophy, a ''taijitu'' () is a Character (symbol), symbol or diagram () representing ''Taiji (philosophy), taiji'' () in both its monist (''Wuji (philosophy), wuji'') and its Dualism in cosmology, dualist (yin and yang) forms in application is a deductive and inductive theoretical model. Such a diagram was first introduced by Neo-Confucianism, Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhou Dunyi of the Song Dynasty in his ''Taijitu shuo'' (). The ''Daozang'', a Taoism, Taoist canon compiled during the Ming dynasty, has at least half a dozen variants of the ''taijitu''. The two most similar are the ''Taiji Xiantiandao'' and ''wujitu'' () diagrams, both of which have been extensively studied since the Qing period for their possible connection with Zhou Dunyi's ''taijitu''. Ming period author Lai Zhide simplified the ''taijitu'' to a design of two interlocking spirals with two black-and-white dots superimposed on them, became synonymous with the ''Yellow River Map''. This version wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biological Machine
Molecular machines are a class of molecules typically described as an assembly of a discrete number of molecular components intended to produce mechanical movements in response to specific stimuli, mimicking macromolecular devices such as switches and motors. Naturally occurring or biological molecular machines are responsible for vital living processes such as DNA replication and ATP synthesis. Kinesins and ribosomes are examples of molecular machines, and they often take the form of multi-protein complexes. For the last several decades, scientists have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to miniaturize machines found in the macroscopic world. The first example of an artificial molecular machine (AMM) was reported in 1994, featuring a rotaxane with a ring and two different possible binding sites. In 2016 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
