mick laBriola

John Edward Prine (October 10, 1946 – April 7, 2020 Maywood, Il) was an American singer-songwriter of country-folk music. Widely cited as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation, Prine was known for his signature blend of humorous lyrics about love, life, and current events, often with elements of social commentary and satire, as well as sweet songs and melancholy ballads. He was active as a composer, recording artist, live performer, and occasional actor from the early 1970s until his death.

Born and raised in Maywood, Illinois, Prine learned to play the guitar at age 14. He attended classes at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music. After serving in West Germany with the U.S. Army, he returned to Chicago in the late 1960s, where he worked as a mailman, writing and singing songs first as a hobby. Continuing studies at the Old Town School, he performed at a student hang-out, the nearby Fifth Peg. A laudatory review by Roger Ebert put Prine on the map. Singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson heard Prine at Steve Goodman‘s insistence, and Kristofferson invited Prine to be his opening act. Prine released his eponymous debut album in 1971. Featuring such songs as “Paradise”, “Sam Stone” and “Angel from Montgomery“, it has been hailed as one of the greatest of all albums.

The acclaim Prine earned from his debut led to three more albums for Atlantic. Common Sense (1975) was his first to chart on the Billboard U.S. Top 100. He then recorded three albums with Asylum Records. In 1981, he co-founded Oh Boy Records, an independent label which released all of his music up until his death. His final album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, debuted at #5 on the Billboard 200, his highest ranking on the charts.

Prine struggled with health issues throughout his life, surviving cancer twice. He died in 2020 from complications caused by COVID-19. Earlier the same year, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns ( 9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third (“Organ”) Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.

As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death.

Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.

John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and musician. He gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history as the primary songwriters in the Beatles.

Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called “the smart Beatle”, Lennon initially was the group’s de facto leader, a role he gradually seemed to cede to McCartney. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band’s early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles’ career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with “All You Need Is Love“, his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration bed-in for peace, and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career.

Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums and several more films. After the Beatles disbanded, Lennon released his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles “Give Peace a Chance“, “Instant Karma!“, “Imagine“, and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)“. Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson‘s album Pussy Cats. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John (“Whatever Gets You thru the Night“) and David Bowie (“Fame“). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was murdered by Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album’s release.

As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his second-best-selling non-Beatles album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).

“Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.”

Marcus Garvey

The M100 galaxy, cataloged as Messier 100 and NGC 4321, is one of the most impressive and widely studied spiral galaxies in the sky. Located in the Berenice’s Hair constellation, approximately 53 million light years from us,
M100 is an important part of a large group of galaxies located in our cosmic neighborhood : Virgo cluster.

M100 is listed as a spiral galaxy, implying that it has well-defined and symmetrical spiral arms that move out from its central core. With a diameter of approximately 160,000 years light, this galaxy is considered one of the largest and most luminous in the Virgo cluster, making it larger than our Milky Way.

Its spiral arms are home to around 100 billion stars, with magnificent young massive blue stars, gaseous nebulae and dust clouds.
The arms are places where star formation is very active, supported by the vast reserves of gas present in the galaxy.

M100 is also notable for the large number of supernovae that have been observed within it. Over the past century, five supernovae have been observed, the most recent of which is SN 2006X, a Type Ia supernova, which was discovered in February 2006. Astronomers are very interested in Type Ia supernovae because they are a standard for measuring cosmic distances, which contributes to the study of the expansion of the universe.

Just like most spiral galaxies, M100 has an active galactic core that could host a supermassive black hole. Its rotation has been carefully studied to understand the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy.
Astronomers have discovered that the outer parts of the galaxy rotate at a faster rate than visible matter alone could explain, providing further evidence for the presence of dark matter.

We can observe several galaxies and cosmic objects in our image,
in particular the famous galaxy NGC 4312. It is a spiral galaxy of type SA(rs)bc, distant about 55 million light years from Earth. She too is a member of the Virgo cluster.

Compared to other spiral galaxies, NGC 4312 is distinguished by its inclination, offering an almost “edge-on” view, which makes the observation of its spiral structure more delicate.
NGC 4312 spans about 45,000 light years, making it a relatively small galaxy compared to M100.