Summer Madness is Ireland's largest Christian festival. It usually takes place over the first weekend in July at the Glenarm Castle, Ballymena.

Origins

The festival was commissioned nearly twenty years ago by the Church of Ireland Youth Department. It started out first at Castle Archdale, Lisnarick, County Fermanagh, then held in Gosford Forest Park, County Armagh, but due to the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001, the festival relocated to the King's Hall, where it has remained until 2011. It has since moved to the Glenarm Castle for the 2012 festival.

Target audience

The festival is aimed at young people, and consistently targets those aged 15–25, and also caters for ages 5–11. The festival generally attracts around 5000 visitors a year, and many of these choose to camp on site.

Amenities and facilities

Light of Worlds is the fifth studio album by the American R&B group Kool & the Gang. Released in 1974, it was later remastered by Polygram and was a second success for the band, reaching number 16 in the R&B Charts and number 63 in the Pop Charts. It was a landmark in the funk/jazz fusion genre of the 1970s.

Light of Worlds is regarded as Kool & the Gang's most spiritual and sophisticated work, produced in the wake of the success of their previous album, Wild and Peaceful. While it was their seventh album of original material, the Gang considered Light of the Worlds their ninth LP (counting two compilations), and therefore consciously chose nine songs for the album to represent the nine planets in the solar system. The album contains rock-inspired funk set to jazz-informed playing with afrobeat influences and a tinge of analogue synthesizing.

"Summer Madness" is considered to be the album's highlight, incorporating smooth melodies and a synthesizer. It was later released as a single, with a follow up titled "Winter Sadness" to the Gang's Spirit of the Boogie a year later. A remake of "Summer Madness" was released on the Gang's 1993 album Unite titled "WKOOL/Summer".

Coordinates: 10°S 52°W / 10°S 52°W / -10; -52

Brazil (ⁱ/brəˈzɪl/; Portuguese: Brasil [bɾaˈziw] ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: República Federativa do Brasil,  listen  ), is the largest sovereign state in both South America and the Latin American region. It is the world's fifth-largest country, both by geographical area and by population. It is the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, and the only one in the Americas.

Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, Brazil has a coastline of 7,491 km (4,655 mi). It borders all other South American countries except Ecuador and Chile and occupies 47.3 percent of the continent of South America. Its Amazon River basin includes a vast tropical forest, home to diverse wildlife, a variety of ecological systems, and extensive natural resources spanning numerous protected habitats. This unique environmental heritage makes Brazil one of 17 megadiverse countries, and is the subject of significant global interest and debate regarding deforestation and environmental protection.

"Aquarela do Brasil" (Portuguese: [akwaˈɾɛlɐ du bɾaˈziw], Watercolor of Brazil), known in the English-speaking world simply as "Brazil", is one of the most famous Brazilian songs, written by Ary Barroso in 1939.

Background and composition

Ary Barroso wrote "Aquarela do Brasil" in early 1939, when he was prevented from leaving his home one rainy night due to a heavy storm. Its title, a reference to watercolor painting, is a clear reference to the rain. He also wrote "Três Lágrimas" (Three teardrops) on that same night, before the rain ended.

Describing the song in an interview to Marisa Lira, of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, Barroso said that he wanted to "free the samba away from the tragedies of life, of the sensual scenario already so explored". According to the composer, he "felt all the greatness, the value and the wealth of our land", reliving "the tradition of the national panels".

Initially, he wrote the first chords, which he defined as "vibrant", and a "plangent of emotions". The original beat "sang on [his] imagination, highlighting the sound of the rain, on syncope beats of fantastic tambourins". According to him, "the rest came naturally, music and lyrics at once". He declared to have felt like another person after writing the song.

Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil or several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it became visible but still could not be reached.

Etymology of the name

The etymology of the names Brasil and Hy-Brasil is unknown, but in Irish tradition it is thought to come from the Irish Uí Breasail (meaning "descendants (i.e., clan) of Breasal"), one of the ancient clans of northeastern Ireland. cf. Old Irish: Í: island; bres: beauty, worth, great, mighty.

Despite the similarity, the name of the country Brazil has no connection to the mythical islands. The South American country was at first named Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross) and later Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross) by the Portuguese navigators who discovered the land. After some decades, it started to be called "Brazil" (Brasil, in Portuguese) due to the exploitation of native Brazilwood, at that time the only export of the land. In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology "red like an ember", formed from Latin brasa ("ember") and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium).