Soda (TV series)

Soda is a French television series produced by CALT. The series follows Adam, an 18-year-old high school student as he struggles with amusing yet realistic everyday issues. His group of friends are always there to help him through it all.

Features

An episode lasts twenty four minutes, each divided into sequences of three minutes and a half The shooting takes place in Bry-Sur-Marne. Its title, Soda, is the anagram of the word “ados”(teenager in French) ( which is explicitly shown at the beginning of the first credits.)

Season 1

This season has been broadcast on M6 with 244 episodes.

Adam is a normal teenager, he lives a quiet life in high school (although he never gets good grades), he has two friends, Slimane and Ludovic. He is in love with the most beautiful girl of the high school, Jenna, who will never reciprocate his feelings. He is the oldest child in a middle-class family. His father, Michel, works in a bank and his mother Elizabeth (aka Babeth) is a beautician who has her own home business (her only regular customer is Malika, Slimane’s mother). Dreaming of having a golden life in the US, Adam thinks that this American Dream will fall straight into his hands so he has decided to do whatever he wants with his life, that is, not working in class, playing video-games again and again and doing bad pranks on the high school supervisors (Thierry and Patrick). However, his family compromises his American Dream by being very strict towards him, with his little sister’s bad tricks and by the numerous detentions gets by his high school’s director, Ms Vergneaux.

Paradise (Cody Simpson album)

Paradise is the debut studio album by Australian recording artist Cody Simpson, released on 28 September 2012 by Atlantic Records.

Background

On 12 June 2012, Simpson released Preview to Paradise, a four song teaser EP. The EP featured the songs "Got Me Good", "So Listen", "Wish U Were Here", and "Gentleman". All of the songs, besides "So Listen" were released as a part of Paradise. Simpson stated the reason behind only having a few collaborations on the album is because "I wanted my debut full length album to be a representation of me." It is rumored that Simpson could perform a one off song with JLS star Aston Merrygold once Surfers Paradise has been released.

Singles

On 25 May 2012, the lead single, "Got Me Good" was released as a teaser on Simpson's official website and radio. The accompanying music video was released on 5 June.

"Wish U Were Here", which features American YouTube singer Becky G, was the second official single off the album, released on 12 June 2012. The music video debuted on 7 August 2012. Four days later, three remixes of the song were released.

Paradise (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

Paradise is a historical novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah. The novel was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.

Plot

The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the turn of the Twentieth century. Yusuf's father is a hotelier and is in debt to a rich and powerful Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story Yusuf is pawned in exchange for his father's owed debt to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf joins Aziz's caravan as they travel into parts of Central Africa and the Congo Basin that have hitherto not been traded with for many generations. Here, Aziz's caravan of traders meets hostility from local tribes, wild animals and difficult terrain. As the caravan returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Aziz encounters the German Army as they sweep Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.

Major themes

African literary scholar J U Jacobs writes that Gurnah is writing back to Joseph Conrad's famous 1902 novel Heart Of Darkness. In Aziz's easterly journey to the Congo, Jacobs says that Gurnah is challenging the dominant Western images of the Congo at the turn of the twentieth century that continue to pervade the popular imagination.

Paradise (What About Us?)

"Paradise (What About Us?)" is a studio EP by Dutch symphonic metal/rock band Within Temptation from their sixth studio album Hydra. It was released on 27 September with three songs from the upcoming album in their demo versions and also accompanying a music video. Beside its digital release, the EP has also been released as a physical CD (only in Japan).

Background

At the end of May 2013, the band started the process of finalization of the song vocal lines. Next month, the band went on to record the first music video for the new album. On 12 July 2013, the band released a teaser trailer of the upcoming music video, but without any names revealed. Next month, the band announced the title of the lead single, in which was called "Paradise (What About Us?)", also uploading a teaser trailer revealing some of the song lyrics and a guitar solo in anticipation for the release. During the recording process of the song, the band came to a point of confusion in which they couldn't decide how to mix it, so the song was sent to several different mixers for the band's to choose the better one. They wanted a mix that was "pumping, heavy, big and melancholic" at the same time, and to make sure that nothing was left missing on the song. According to lead vocalist Sharon den Adel, the early idea was to put "a swingy dance beat with rap in all verses" but the band disliked the end result because it led to a place "a bit too much out of our comfort zone", and then they led it to a well-known territory, transforming the song into a "big symphonic, and heavy guitar cranking song."