Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-26/Featured content

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 09 August to 16 August.

Featured articles
featured articles were promoted this week.
 * American Pharoah (nominated by Montanabw, Vesuvius Dogg, Tigerboy1966, and Froggerlaura) A bay colt with a faint star on his forehead, American Pharoah is so named because his breeder and owner, Ahmed Zayat, is of Egyptian–American background. The mispelling of the name was allegedly the result of holding a competition on social media; the winning name was copied and pasted into an email sent to The Jockey Club, although the submitter claimed she knew how to spell "Pharaoh" and someone else must have transposed the vowels. American Pharoah won the three big US races in May and June 2015 at the age of three and a bit, and he was awarded the American Triple Crown, which hadn't been won since 1978. He retires at the end of this year, and aims to spend his retirement eating grass and doing elementary math. His owner has other ideas… stud life!
 * Fremantle Prison (nominated by Evad37) Fremantle Prison in the port of Fremantle, Western Australia, was built between 1851 and 1859 using convict labour. Originally housing prisoners transported from the British Isles, it was handed over to the colonial administration in 1886 to incarcerate locally sentenced men and women. Since its closure in 1991, three years after a riot caused substantial damage, the prison has been developed as a tourist attraction. It is a complex of cell blocks, a gatehouse, perimeter walls, cottages, and tunnels- these were sunk into the limestone rock on which the prison was built, and were used to supply water to the town from an aquifer. Convicts were required to pump the water by hand into a reservoir; known as "cranking", this task was used as a punishment for recalcitrants. Prisoners were often ordered to be flogged with a cat-o-nine-tails, but this punishment was unpopular with the prison staff- despite promises of extra pay, about a third of floggings weren't carried out. The last was in 1943, and the last hanging in 1964. The make-up of the prison population gradually changed. At the time of the gold rushes in the 1890s, there were a majority of white short-time prisoners; by the 1980s the numbers of those sentenced for violent crimes had increased, and about a third of inmates were Aborigines.


 * Last Gasp (Inside No. 9) (nominated by J Milburn) The Last Gasp was an episode of the comedy series Inside No. 9. A seriously ill young girl receives a visit from a singer, as arranged by a charity. The singer appears to die whilst blowing up a balloon. The parents think that the singer's "last gasp" imprisoned in the balloon might have some monetary value. However the singer isn't dead, so his assistant suffocates him with a pillow. Meanwhile the girl attaches the balloon to another helium-filled balloon and releases the two from her bedroom window. Eugene Wat de Omgang, TV critic of South African newspaper The Star described the episode as "hilarious ... I caught myself gasping more than once as its foul contents unfolded".


 * Serpens (nominated by StringTheory11) The constellation Serpens is associated in star atlases with the constellation Ophiuchus- the latter represents the god of medicine, Asclepius, who showed kindness to a snake. It licked his ears clean and taught him some secret knowledge. Serpens is divided in two parts by Ophiuchus; the snake winds itself through the legs of Asclepius. It contains all kinds of stuff, including the beautiful Hoag's Object, a classic ring galaxy with a high degree of symmetry.

Featured lists


featured lists were promoted this week.
 * List of Attorneys General of West Virginia (nominated by West Virginian) The attorney general of West Virginia is a citizen of that state, aged 25 or over, who is elected or appointed to the position as an "executive department-level state constitutional officer". They have to live in Charleston, do all kinds of legal stuff on behalf of the state, and sit on 13 different committees. A prerequisite for the position is that they have to know what "preneed burial statutes" are. For all this work, they're paid $95,000 a year (2012 rates). Since the post was created in 1863, there have been 34 incumbents.
 * List of Local Nature Reserves in Hertfordshire (nominated by Dudley Miles) A Local Nature Reserve (or local nature reserve for those of you who like things lower-cased) is a small patch of the Great British countryside which is under the stewardship or protection of a local authority. The sites are regarded as having local scientific interest, and where one can "derive great pleasure from the peaceful contemplation of nature." Here's a list of 42 LNRs in Hertfordshire, a county on the north border of Greater London. "Herts- you don't know where it is, but you know you want to be there"© Hertfordshire Tourist Board 1993.
 * List of awards and nominations received by Leonardo DiCaprio (nominated by FrB.TG) Leonardo DiCaprio is an American actor, who started his career by appearing in Santa Barbara (1990), a TV soap opera described by one critic as being "filmed inside a wardrobe". DiCaprio came out of the wardrobe to appear in films across a wide range of genres; for his work he's received "34 awards from 136 nominations", but no Oscars. In 2014 he received the Clinton Global Citizen Award, which somehow isn't in the list. In the same year Leonardo was also given a cast-iron "Oscar" statue and made an honorary member of the Chamber Theater in Chelyabinsk, Russia. They also offered him a non-speaking part as a servant in Oleg and Vladimir Presniakov's play Plennye Dukhi (Captive Spirits). Guess it's back to the wardrobe, Leo.
 * List of songs recorded by Lana Del Rey (nominated by Littlecarmen) Lana Del Rey has covered the whole alphabet (with the exception of E, X and Z) in her catalog of songs. We look forward to her covers of "Eye of the Tiger", "Xanadu", and "Zombie". Described as a "torch singer of the internet era", Del Rey says she chose her musical identity because it "reminded [her] of the glamour of the seaside". The smell of rotting seaweed, shingle piercing your flipflops, seagulls pinching your fish'n'chips, rain, rain, rain ... down on the west coast.