Patrick Rylands was chief designer at Ambi Toys for more than 30 years, and responsible for some of the most-loved baby and toddler toys. He combined simplicity of design with movement, sound and bright primary colours to ensure that children grew up knowing exactly how to fit three miniature plastic ducks in one big one.
Rogelio Naranjo was a Mexican cartoonist.
The book is about a young lad, Nils Holgersson, whose chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that, he liked best to make mischief.
Hendrick Avercamp was a Dutch painter. He was deaf and mute.
Romeo Is Bleeding is a 1993 darkly comic police story starring Gary Oldman and Lena Olin, directed by Peter Medak. The film's title was taken from a song by Tom Waits.
Vela was the name of a group of satellites developed by the United States to detect nuclear detonations to monitor compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty by the Soviet Union.
B. Traven was the pen name of a writer who wrote his books originally in the German or English language and whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are unknown or are subject of dispute among literary scholars. What is only certain is that B. Traven lived for the most part of his life in Mexico, where the action of the majority of his novels and short stories is also set. There are many, sometimes fantastic, hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven. Scholars usually identify him with the theatre actor and anarchist known as Ret Marut, who lived in Germany in the early 20th century and who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are also speculations that Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus, modern-day Świebodzin in Poland.
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe and South America since 1994. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon. An example: January 1995, Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Slovenian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent. The victim of the prank is a famous missing person's prime-time show on the Italian state television. They send out a crew and spend taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. They go as far as London, where novelist Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association pose as close friends of Kipper's. The hoax goes on until "Luther Blissett" claims responsibility for it.
Karosta was constructed in 1890-1906 as a naval base for the Russian Tsar Alexander III, and later served as a base for the Soviet Baltic Fleet. When the Russian army left Latvia in 1994 after Latvian independence, Karosta became largely uninhabited and most structures fell to ruin. In the late 1990s, the area was troubled by high unemployment, street crime and drug problems. Some remaining residents are considered neither Latvian nor Russian and hold alien passports.
Midnight is an extremely scarce, early, bedsheet, crime magazine that initially featured a mixture of fiction, true confessions, and exposes, but later became all fiction under the names Midnight Mysteries and Midnight Mystery Stories. Some of the early issues were destroyed by court order as being too risque.