Opus – Page 176 – Encyclopædia of the sublime

Roy Shaw

Roy Shaw is an English millionaire, real estate investor, author and businessman from the East End of London who was formerly a notorious criminal and Category A prisoner. During the 1970s-1980s, Shaw was a well known and respected figure in the criminal underworld of London and was frequently associated with the Kray twins. Shaw is perhaps best remembered today for his infamous careers as both a professional boxer and an unlicensed fighter, becoming a legend in bare-knuckle boxing and during which time he became arch-rival with the also legendary Lenny McLean.

Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe was an American athlete. Considered one of the most versatile athletes in modern sports, he won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball.

D. B. Cooper

D. B. Cooper is the name attributed to a man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the United States on November 24, 1971, received US$200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the plane.

Red rain

From July 25 to September 23, 2001, red rain sporadically fell on the southern Indian state of Kerala. Heavy downpours occurred in which the rain was colored red, staining clothes pink. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. Colored rain had been reported in Kerala in as early as 1896 and several times since then. Following a light-microscopy examination in 2001, it was initially thought that the rains were coloured by fallout from a hypothetical meteor burst, but a study commissioned by the Government of India concluded that the rains had been coloured by airborne spores from a locally prolific terrestrial green alga from the genus Trentepohlia.

Ada Blackjack

Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiat woman who lived for two years as a castaway on uninhabited Wrangel Island north of Siberia. She never asked for adventure, but it found her nonetheless. By 1921, the young Iñupiat woman found herself widowed with a young son. In order to earn money to care for him, she joined a dangerous expedition to a frozen island north of Siberia. After two tragic years, she was alone once more, trapped with ferocious bears amid a sea of ice.

Bernie Madoff

Bernie Madoff is a former stock broker, investment adviser, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

Sidney Reilly

Sidney Reilly, famously known as the Ace of Spies, was a Jewish Russian- or Ukrainian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service Bureau and later the Secret Intelligence Service. He is alleged to have spied for at least four nations. His notoriety during the 1920s was created in part by his friend, British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who sensationalized their thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1918.

Hal Lipset

Hal Lipset was the most respected and also the sleaziest private detective in America. Lipset began as an investigator in the U.S. Army. Later he became a pioneer in electronic surveillance techniques (Coppola's movie The Conversation was partly a portrait of Lipset), while remaining busy with a variety of cases that range from standard divorce snooping through insurance fraud to catching a jewel thief in Europe. Lipset had an apolitical approach to his work: according to him, guilt or innocence is the court's concern, not his; he worked for anyone who paid.

TransMedics

TransMedics is a medical device company. They have developed a technology capable of maintaining donor organs in a near-physiological state outside the body from donor to recipient: the heart is beating, lungs are breathing, and liver is making bile. The portable technology was designed to be transported in all modes of transportation typically used for organ retrieval, to reduce the time-dependent damage associated with cold storage.

Thomas Phillipps

Sir Thomas Phillipps was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer and inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and, when out of funds, borrowed heavily to buy manuscripts, thereby putting his family deep into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts. Philipps began his collecting while still at Rugby School and continued at Oxford. Such was his devotion that he acquired some 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts, arguably the largest collection a single individual has created, and coined the term vello-maniac.