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Armed with a keen eye and a terrible singing voice, writer Brian Raftery sets out across the globe, tracing karaoke's evolution from cult fad to multi-million dollar phenomenon. In Japan, he meets Daisuke Inoue, the godfather of karaoke; in Thailand, he follows a group of Americans hoping to win the Karaoke World Championships; and in New York City, he hangs out backstage with the world's longest-running heavy-metal karaoke band. Along the way, Raftery chronicles his own time as an obsessive karaoke fan, recalling a life's worth of noisy relationships and poor song choices, and analyzing the karaoke-bar merits of such artists as Prince, Bob Dylan and Fugazi. Part cultural history, part memoir, Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life is a hilarious and densely reported look at the liberating effects of a good sing-along.

From a veteran culture writer and modern movie expert, a celebration and analysis of the movies of 1999—“a terrifically fun snapshot of American film culture on the brink of the Millennium….An absolute must for any movie-lover or pop-culture nut” (Gillian Flynn). In 1999, Hollywood as we know it exploded: Fight Club. The Matrix. Office Space. Election. The Blair Witch Project. The Sixth Sense. Being John Malkovich. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. American Beauty. The Virgin Suicides. Boys Don’t Cry. The Best Man. Three Kings. Magnolia. Those are just some of the landmark titles released in a dizzying movie year, one in which a group of daring filmmakers and performers pushed cinema to new limits—and took audiences along for the ride. Freed from the restraints of budget, technology, or even taste, they produced a slew of classics that took on every topic imaginable, from sex to violence to the end of the world. The result was a highly unruly, deeply influential set of films that would not only change filmmaking, but also give us our first glimpse of the coming twenty-first century. It was a watershed moment that also produced The Sopranos; Apple’s AirPort; Wi-Fi; and Netflix’s unlimited DVD rentals. “A spirited celebration of the year’s movies” (Kirkus Reviews), Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is the story of not just how these movies were made, but how they re-made our own vision of the world. It features more than 130 new and exclusive interviews with such directors and actors as Reese Witherspoon, Edward Norton, Steven Soderbergh, Sofia Coppola, David Fincher, Nia Long, Matthew Broderick, Taye Diggs, M. Night Shyamalan, David O. Russell, James Van Der Beek, Kirsten Dunst, the Blair Witch kids, the Office Space dudes, the guy who played Jar-Jar Binks, and dozens more. It’s “the complete portrait of what it was like to spend a year inside a movie theater at the best possible moment in time” (Chuck Klosterman).

Armed with a keen eye and a terrible singing voice, writer Brian Raftery sets out across the globe, tracing karaoke's evolution from cult fad to multi-million dollar phenomenon. In Japan, he meets Daisuke Inoue, the godfather of karaoke; in Thailand, he follows a group of Americans hoping to win the Karaoke World Championships; and in New York City, he hangs out backstage with the world's longest-running heavy-metal karaoke band. Along the way, Raftery chronicles his own time as an obsessive karaoke fan, recalling a life's worth of noisy relationships and poor song choices, and analyzing the karaoke-bar merits of such artists as Prince, Bob Dylan and Fugazi. Part cultural history, part memoir, Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life is a hilarious and densely reported look at the liberating effects of a good sing-along.

To Yeats, as well as to Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and other major writers, as Erich Auerbach put it in Mimesis, "Antiquity means liberation and a broadening of horizons, not in any sense a new limitation or servitude." That is why Greco-Roman themes can be endlessly stimulating, why Yeats could call the Greek and Roman writers "the builders of my soul." Brian Arkin's thematic consideration of Yeat's subject matter under philosophy, myth, religion, history, literature, visual art, and Byzantium, allows us to see coherently how Yeats exploited this material and how, especially in his middle and later periods, he transformed and metamorphosed subject matter from Homer, Phidias, Plato, Plotinus, and Sophocles, and from the myths of Dionysus, Helen of Troy, Leda, and Zeus, to exemplify his central preoccupations. Irish Literary Studies Series No. 32.

Applied statisticians often need to perform analyses of multivariate data; for these they will typically use one of the statistical software packages, S-Plus or R. This book sets out how to use these packages for these analyses in a concise and easy-to-use way, and will save users having to buy two books for the job. The author is well-known for this kind of book, and so buyers will trust that he’s got it right.

Applied statisticians often need to perform analyses of multivariate data; for these they will typically use one of the statistical software packages, S-Plus or R. This book sets out how to use these packages for these analyses in a concise and easy-to-use way, and will save users having to buy two books for the job. The author is well-known for this kind of book, and so buyers will trust that he’s got it right.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria" by Brian Oswald Patrick Donn-Byrne. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

"Blind Raftery and his Wife" is an incredible biographical novel of the Irish poet Antoine Raftery, about him wandering the Irish countryside. During the time of the South Sea Bubble, Raftery, a blind Irish poet/folk singer, marries Hilaria, a Spanish woman, and then they commence their travels.

The autobiography of the recording artist Brian Phelps "Frostbite", including his world travels, his military stint and his searching for truth, himself and the like. This story covers 15 years, countless miles and almost as many "cast members" as "War and Peace".