Defenestration (from
Neo-Latindefenestrā[1]) is the act of throwing someone or something out of a
window.[2]
The term was coined around the time of an
incident in
Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the
Thirty Years' War. This was done in "good Bohemian style", referring to the defenestration which had occurred in Prague's
New Town Hall almost 200 years earlier (July 1419), and on that occasion led to the
Hussite war.[3] The word comes from the
Neo-Latin[4]de- (down from) and fenestra (window or opening).[5]
By extension, the term is also used to describe the forcible or
peremptory removal of an adversary.[6]
Origin
The term originates from two incidents in history, both occurring in
Prague. In 1419, seven town officials were thrown from the New Town Hall, precipitating the
Hussite War. In 1618, two Imperial governors and their secretary were tossed from the
Prague Castle, sparking the
Thirty Years' War.[7] These incidents, particularly that in 1618, were referred to as the
Defenestrations of Prague and gave rise to the term and the concept.
The word itself is derived from
Neo-Latindefenestratio; with dē meaning "out" + fenestra meaning "window" + -atio as a suffix indicating an action or process.
Around the 9th century BC, Queen
Jezebel was defenestrated by her own eunuch servants, at the urging of
Jehu, according to the
Hebrew Bible. (
2 Kings 9:33)
It has been suggested by several chronicles (notably the Annals of Westhide Abbey) that
King John killed his nephew,
Arthur of Brittany, by defenestration from the castle at
Rouen,
France, in 1203.
In 1378, the crafts and their leader Wouter van der Leyden occupied the
Leuven city hall and seized the Leuven government. Most of the patricians left the city and fled to
Aarschot. After negotiations between the parties, they agreed to share the government. The patricians did not accept this easily, as it caused them to lose their absolute power. In an attempt to regain absolute control, they had Wouter van der Leyden
assassinated in
Brussels. Seeking revenge, the crafts handed over the patricians to a furious crowd. The crowd stormed the city hall and defenestrated the patricians. At least 15 patricians were killed during this defenestration of Leuven.
In 1383, to celebrate the
acclamation of
King John I, it was ordered for all churches of the realm to ring their bells. However, upon the lack of any ringing coming from the
capital's cathedral the populace of
Lisbon revolted and rammed their way inside the building.
Bishop Dom Martinho of
Zamora was accused of treason by the populace for being
Castilian and
schismatic and was, therefore, defenestrated from one of the bells towers. His corpse was assaulted and dragged to
Rossio Square, where it was left to rot and be eaten by dogs, until the populace had enough of its smell and buried it in the square.[8]
In 1483,
Prague's Old-Town
portreeve and the bodies of seven murdered New-Town
aldermen were defenestrated.
On May 16, 1562,
Adham Khan,
Akbar's general and foster brother, was defenestrated twice for murdering a rival general,
Ataga Khan, who had been recently promoted by Akbar. Akbar was woken up in the tumult after the murder. He struck Adham Khan down personally with his fist and immediately ordered his defenestration by royal order. The first time, his legs were broken as a result of the 12-metre (40-foot) fall from the ramparts of
Agra Fort but he remained alive. Akbar, in a rare act of cruelty probably exacerbated by his anger at the loss of his favorite general, ordered his defenestration a second time, killing him. Adham Khan had wrongly counted on the influence of his mother and Akbar's wet nurse,
Maham Anga, to save him as she was almost an unofficial regent in the days of Akbar's youth. Akbar personally informed Maham Anga of her son's death, to which she famously commented, "You have done well." She died 40 days later of acute depression.[9]
In 1572,
French King
Charles IX's friend, the
Huguenot leader
Gaspard de Coligny, was killed in accordance with the wishes of Charles' mother,
Catherine de' Medici. Charles allegedly said "then kill them all that no man be left to reproach me". Thousands of Huguenots were killed in the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre after soldiers attacked Coligny in his house, stabbed him, and defenestrated him.
In 1618, rebel Protestant leaders in Prague
defenestrate two Catholic Royal regents and their secretary, who survived the 20-metre (68-foot) fall out of the windows of
Prague Castle.
On June 11, 1903, a group of Serbian army officers murdered and defenestrated
King Alexander and
Queen Draga.
In 1922, Italian politician and writer
Gabriele d'Annunzio was temporarily crippled after falling from a window, possibly pushed by a follower of
Benito Mussolini.[10]
In March to April 1932,
Ivanovo region of
Soviet Union, due to ration cuts and labor intensification measures, strikes and spontaneous assemblies broke out. Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings with slogans like "Toss the Communists . . . out the window."[11]
On March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs
Jan Masaryk was found dead, in his pyjamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although some believe that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists. A 2004 police investigation into his death concluded that, contrary to the initial ruling, he did not commit suicide, but was defenestrated, most likely by Czechoslovak Communists and their Soviet
NKVD advisers for his opposition to the
February 1948 Communist putsch.[12]
On November 28, 1953, the U.S. biological warfare specialist
Frank Olson died after a fall from a hotel window that has been suggested to have been an assassination by the
CIA.[13]
On May 29, 1960, the Turkish physician and politician
Namık Gedik who served as the
minister of interior during the mid-1950s, committed suicide throwing himself out of a window in Ankara when he was in custody.[14][15][16] Gedik was arrested on 27 May 1960 immediately following the
military coup along with his colleagues. Some witnesses suggest he was beaten unconscious by a small group of young military officers and subsequently defenestrated.
On April 15, 1966, two suspects in the so-called
Bathroom Coup in
Sri Lanka, Corporal Tilekawardene and L. V. Podiappuhamy (otherwise known as Dodampe Mudalali), were said by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to have jumped to their deaths from the fourth floor of the CID building in the Fort. At the inquest, following receipt of new evidence, the magistrate altered the verdict of suicide to one of
culpable homicide.[18] The remainder of the suspects were acquitted.
In 1969, Italian
AnarchistGiuseppe Pinelli was seen falling to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station after being arrested because of claims of his involvement in the
Piazza Fontana bombing, of which he was later cleared.[19]
In 1977, as a result of political backlash against her son
Fela Kuti's album Zombie,
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was thrown from a second-story window during a military raid by one thousand Nigerian soldiers on Kuti's compound, the
Kalakuta Republic. The injuries sustained from the fall led Ransome-Kuti to lapse into a coma; she would remain in a coma for more than a year, and eventually succumb to her injuries on 13 April 1978.[21][22] Ransome-Kuti's death would be commemorated in her son's protest song "Coffin for Head of State".[23]
The
2000 Ramallah lynching included throwing the (already-dead) body of either Vadim Nurzhitz or Yossi Avrahami out of a second-floor window, after those two Israeli soldiers had been lynched.
On March 2, 2007, Russian
investigative journalistIvan Safronov, who was researching the Kremlin's covert arms deals, fell to his death from a fifth floor window. Friends and colleagues discounted suicide as a reason, and an investigation was opened looking into possible "incitement to suicide".[24]
In 2007 in Gaza, gunmen allegedly affiliated with
Hamas killed a
Fatah supporter by defenestration, an act repeated the next day when a Hamas supporter was defenestrated by alleged supporters of Fatah.[25]
In 2017, retired French physician and teacher Sarah Halimi
was killed in an attack on her home near Paris that ended with her being pushed from a third-floor window. Her death was widely perceived as an example of
Islamist terrorism and
antisemitism. Her assailant was ruled to be not criminally responsible due to having committed the act in a
psychotic episode brought on by his heavy use of
cannabis.
On September 1, 2022,
Ravil Maganov, a Russian businessman who criticized the country's
invasion of Ukraine, died after falling from a window of
a hospital in Moscow on the same day the hospital was visited by Russian President
Vladimir Putin.[26] Some people who knew Maganov well said his death was unlikely to have been a suicide, and some media hypothesized a connection with various other
suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople occurring around the same time.[27]
Notable autodefenestrations
For the suicide method of jumping from height, out of a window, see
Autodefenestration.
Autodefenestration (or self-defenestration) is the term used for the act of
jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window.
In the
Acts of the Apostles in the
New Testament, the accidental autodefenestration of a young man of
Troas named
Eutychus is recorded. The
Apostle Paul was travelling to
Jerusalem and had stopped for seven days in Troas. While Paul was preaching in a third-story room late on a Sunday night to the local assembly of Christian believers, Eutychus drifted off to sleep and fell out of the window in which he was sitting. The text indicates that Eutychus did not survive but was brought back to life after Paul embraced him. (
Acts 20:6–12)
In December 1840,
Abraham Lincoln and four other Illinois legislators jumped out of a window in a political maneuver designed to prevent a
quorum on a vote that would have eliminated the Illinois State Bank.[28]
During the
Revolutions of 1848, an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in
Cologne and two city councilors panicked and jumped out of the window; one of them broke both his legs. The event went down in the city's history as the "Cologne Defenestration".[29]
In 1961, while being arrested by communist secret service Polish activist
Henryk Holland jumped out of window, what led to his death. This event was then widely discussed by dissidents and theories of a possible murder were popular.[30]
In 1991, British informer
Martin McGartland was abducted by members of the
Provisional IRA. As he waited to be interrogated, McGartland escaped the IRA by jumping from a third floor window in a
Twinbrook flat where he was taken for interrogation following his abduction, and survived the fall.
On July 9, 1993, the prominent
Toronto attorney
Garry Hoy fell from a 24th story window in an attempt to demonstrate to a group of new legal interns that the windows of the city's
Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable. He performed the same stunt on several previous occasions – dramatically slamming his body against the window – but this time it popped out of its frame and he fell to his death. The accident was commemorated by a 1996
Darwin Award and has been re-enacted in several films and television shows.[31][32][33]
In 1995, the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze jumped from his Paris apartment to his death.[34]
In 1999, popular German Schlager singer
Rex Gildo committed suicide by jumping out of the window of his apartment building.[35]
In his poem Defenestration,
R. P. Lister wrote with amusement about the creation of so exalted a word for so basic a concept. The poem narrates the thoughts of a philosopher undergoing defenestration. As he falls, the philosopher considers why there should be a particular word for the experience, when many equally simple concepts do not have specific names. In an evidently ironic commentary on the word, Lister has the philosopher summarize his thoughts with, "I concluded that the incidence of
logodaedaly was purely
adventitious."[36][37]
There is a range of hacker witticisms referring to "defenestration". For example, the term is sometimes used humorously among
Linux users to describe the act of removing
Microsoft Windows from a computer.[38]
The graphic novel Watchmen starts with the murder of a retired superhero, who gets thrown out of his New York apartment window.
In the anime
Detective Conan, specifically episode 972, "The Target is the Metropolitan Police Traffic Department (Part Two)", a serial killer, targeting members of the metropolitan traffic police department, stuns then throws a victim from an apartment tower in broad daylight, leaving her to die from her wounds on the street.
In the movie The Departed, Billy Costigan, who is an undercover officer collecting evidence on the
Irish Mob, meets with his superior officer Captain Queenan at an abandoned building to plan an ending to their years-long undercover operation. An enemy spy in the police force collecting info for the Mob has Queenan followed, reveals his location to the Mob, and Queenan hurries Costigan off before he can be made out as an informant. When the Mob arrives at the building, they find Queenan alone on the third floor, who asks them for a lighter. The mobsters force him through the window, where he falls to his death mere inches from Costigan, who escaped to the street level; Queenan’s sacrifice saved the investigation.
In the television show Game of Thrones, in Season 1 Episode 1,
Jaime Lannister pushes
Bran Stark out of a tower at Winterfell after Bran witnesses Jaime and
Cersei Lannister, his twin sister, engaging in sexual relations. This paralyses Bran and triggers his journey to becoming the 'Three-Eyed Raven'. Later, in Season 6 episode 10, after learning of his wife's death in the explosion of the Great Sept,
Tommen Baratheon jumps out a window to his death.
^Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David P. (1996).
"1996 Darwin Awards: Lawyer Aloft". Darwin Awards.
Archived from the original on September 3, 2011. Retrieved September 5, 2011.
Defenestration (from
Neo-Latindefenestrā[1]) is the act of throwing someone or something out of a
window.[2]
The term was coined around the time of an
incident in
Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the
Thirty Years' War. This was done in "good Bohemian style", referring to the defenestration which had occurred in Prague's
New Town Hall almost 200 years earlier (July 1419), and on that occasion led to the
Hussite war.[3] The word comes from the
Neo-Latin[4]de- (down from) and fenestra (window or opening).[5]
By extension, the term is also used to describe the forcible or
peremptory removal of an adversary.[6]
Origin
The term originates from two incidents in history, both occurring in
Prague. In 1419, seven town officials were thrown from the New Town Hall, precipitating the
Hussite War. In 1618, two Imperial governors and their secretary were tossed from the
Prague Castle, sparking the
Thirty Years' War.[7] These incidents, particularly that in 1618, were referred to as the
Defenestrations of Prague and gave rise to the term and the concept.
The word itself is derived from
Neo-Latindefenestratio; with dē meaning "out" + fenestra meaning "window" + -atio as a suffix indicating an action or process.
Around the 9th century BC, Queen
Jezebel was defenestrated by her own eunuch servants, at the urging of
Jehu, according to the
Hebrew Bible. (
2 Kings 9:33)
It has been suggested by several chronicles (notably the Annals of Westhide Abbey) that
King John killed his nephew,
Arthur of Brittany, by defenestration from the castle at
Rouen,
France, in 1203.
In 1378, the crafts and their leader Wouter van der Leyden occupied the
Leuven city hall and seized the Leuven government. Most of the patricians left the city and fled to
Aarschot. After negotiations between the parties, they agreed to share the government. The patricians did not accept this easily, as it caused them to lose their absolute power. In an attempt to regain absolute control, they had Wouter van der Leyden
assassinated in
Brussels. Seeking revenge, the crafts handed over the patricians to a furious crowd. The crowd stormed the city hall and defenestrated the patricians. At least 15 patricians were killed during this defenestration of Leuven.
In 1383, to celebrate the
acclamation of
King John I, it was ordered for all churches of the realm to ring their bells. However, upon the lack of any ringing coming from the
capital's cathedral the populace of
Lisbon revolted and rammed their way inside the building.
Bishop Dom Martinho of
Zamora was accused of treason by the populace for being
Castilian and
schismatic and was, therefore, defenestrated from one of the bells towers. His corpse was assaulted and dragged to
Rossio Square, where it was left to rot and be eaten by dogs, until the populace had enough of its smell and buried it in the square.[8]
In 1483,
Prague's Old-Town
portreeve and the bodies of seven murdered New-Town
aldermen were defenestrated.
On May 16, 1562,
Adham Khan,
Akbar's general and foster brother, was defenestrated twice for murdering a rival general,
Ataga Khan, who had been recently promoted by Akbar. Akbar was woken up in the tumult after the murder. He struck Adham Khan down personally with his fist and immediately ordered his defenestration by royal order. The first time, his legs were broken as a result of the 12-metre (40-foot) fall from the ramparts of
Agra Fort but he remained alive. Akbar, in a rare act of cruelty probably exacerbated by his anger at the loss of his favorite general, ordered his defenestration a second time, killing him. Adham Khan had wrongly counted on the influence of his mother and Akbar's wet nurse,
Maham Anga, to save him as she was almost an unofficial regent in the days of Akbar's youth. Akbar personally informed Maham Anga of her son's death, to which she famously commented, "You have done well." She died 40 days later of acute depression.[9]
In 1572,
French King
Charles IX's friend, the
Huguenot leader
Gaspard de Coligny, was killed in accordance with the wishes of Charles' mother,
Catherine de' Medici. Charles allegedly said "then kill them all that no man be left to reproach me". Thousands of Huguenots were killed in the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre after soldiers attacked Coligny in his house, stabbed him, and defenestrated him.
In 1618, rebel Protestant leaders in Prague
defenestrate two Catholic Royal regents and their secretary, who survived the 20-metre (68-foot) fall out of the windows of
Prague Castle.
On June 11, 1903, a group of Serbian army officers murdered and defenestrated
King Alexander and
Queen Draga.
In 1922, Italian politician and writer
Gabriele d'Annunzio was temporarily crippled after falling from a window, possibly pushed by a follower of
Benito Mussolini.[10]
In March to April 1932,
Ivanovo region of
Soviet Union, due to ration cuts and labor intensification measures, strikes and spontaneous assemblies broke out. Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings with slogans like "Toss the Communists . . . out the window."[11]
On March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs
Jan Masaryk was found dead, in his pyjamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although some believe that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists. A 2004 police investigation into his death concluded that, contrary to the initial ruling, he did not commit suicide, but was defenestrated, most likely by Czechoslovak Communists and their Soviet
NKVD advisers for his opposition to the
February 1948 Communist putsch.[12]
On November 28, 1953, the U.S. biological warfare specialist
Frank Olson died after a fall from a hotel window that has been suggested to have been an assassination by the
CIA.[13]
On May 29, 1960, the Turkish physician and politician
Namık Gedik who served as the
minister of interior during the mid-1950s, committed suicide throwing himself out of a window in Ankara when he was in custody.[14][15][16] Gedik was arrested on 27 May 1960 immediately following the
military coup along with his colleagues. Some witnesses suggest he was beaten unconscious by a small group of young military officers and subsequently defenestrated.
On April 15, 1966, two suspects in the so-called
Bathroom Coup in
Sri Lanka, Corporal Tilekawardene and L. V. Podiappuhamy (otherwise known as Dodampe Mudalali), were said by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to have jumped to their deaths from the fourth floor of the CID building in the Fort. At the inquest, following receipt of new evidence, the magistrate altered the verdict of suicide to one of
culpable homicide.[18] The remainder of the suspects were acquitted.
In 1969, Italian
AnarchistGiuseppe Pinelli was seen falling to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station after being arrested because of claims of his involvement in the
Piazza Fontana bombing, of which he was later cleared.[19]
In 1977, as a result of political backlash against her son
Fela Kuti's album Zombie,
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was thrown from a second-story window during a military raid by one thousand Nigerian soldiers on Kuti's compound, the
Kalakuta Republic. The injuries sustained from the fall led Ransome-Kuti to lapse into a coma; she would remain in a coma for more than a year, and eventually succumb to her injuries on 13 April 1978.[21][22] Ransome-Kuti's death would be commemorated in her son's protest song "Coffin for Head of State".[23]
The
2000 Ramallah lynching included throwing the (already-dead) body of either Vadim Nurzhitz or Yossi Avrahami out of a second-floor window, after those two Israeli soldiers had been lynched.
On March 2, 2007, Russian
investigative journalistIvan Safronov, who was researching the Kremlin's covert arms deals, fell to his death from a fifth floor window. Friends and colleagues discounted suicide as a reason, and an investigation was opened looking into possible "incitement to suicide".[24]
In 2007 in Gaza, gunmen allegedly affiliated with
Hamas killed a
Fatah supporter by defenestration, an act repeated the next day when a Hamas supporter was defenestrated by alleged supporters of Fatah.[25]
In 2017, retired French physician and teacher Sarah Halimi
was killed in an attack on her home near Paris that ended with her being pushed from a third-floor window. Her death was widely perceived as an example of
Islamist terrorism and
antisemitism. Her assailant was ruled to be not criminally responsible due to having committed the act in a
psychotic episode brought on by his heavy use of
cannabis.
On September 1, 2022,
Ravil Maganov, a Russian businessman who criticized the country's
invasion of Ukraine, died after falling from a window of
a hospital in Moscow on the same day the hospital was visited by Russian President
Vladimir Putin.[26] Some people who knew Maganov well said his death was unlikely to have been a suicide, and some media hypothesized a connection with various other
suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople occurring around the same time.[27]
Notable autodefenestrations
For the suicide method of jumping from height, out of a window, see
Autodefenestration.
Autodefenestration (or self-defenestration) is the term used for the act of
jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window.
In the
Acts of the Apostles in the
New Testament, the accidental autodefenestration of a young man of
Troas named
Eutychus is recorded. The
Apostle Paul was travelling to
Jerusalem and had stopped for seven days in Troas. While Paul was preaching in a third-story room late on a Sunday night to the local assembly of Christian believers, Eutychus drifted off to sleep and fell out of the window in which he was sitting. The text indicates that Eutychus did not survive but was brought back to life after Paul embraced him. (
Acts 20:6–12)
In December 1840,
Abraham Lincoln and four other Illinois legislators jumped out of a window in a political maneuver designed to prevent a
quorum on a vote that would have eliminated the Illinois State Bank.[28]
During the
Revolutions of 1848, an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in
Cologne and two city councilors panicked and jumped out of the window; one of them broke both his legs. The event went down in the city's history as the "Cologne Defenestration".[29]
In 1961, while being arrested by communist secret service Polish activist
Henryk Holland jumped out of window, what led to his death. This event was then widely discussed by dissidents and theories of a possible murder were popular.[30]
In 1991, British informer
Martin McGartland was abducted by members of the
Provisional IRA. As he waited to be interrogated, McGartland escaped the IRA by jumping from a third floor window in a
Twinbrook flat where he was taken for interrogation following his abduction, and survived the fall.
On July 9, 1993, the prominent
Toronto attorney
Garry Hoy fell from a 24th story window in an attempt to demonstrate to a group of new legal interns that the windows of the city's
Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable. He performed the same stunt on several previous occasions – dramatically slamming his body against the window – but this time it popped out of its frame and he fell to his death. The accident was commemorated by a 1996
Darwin Award and has been re-enacted in several films and television shows.[31][32][33]
In 1995, the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze jumped from his Paris apartment to his death.[34]
In 1999, popular German Schlager singer
Rex Gildo committed suicide by jumping out of the window of his apartment building.[35]
In his poem Defenestration,
R. P. Lister wrote with amusement about the creation of so exalted a word for so basic a concept. The poem narrates the thoughts of a philosopher undergoing defenestration. As he falls, the philosopher considers why there should be a particular word for the experience, when many equally simple concepts do not have specific names. In an evidently ironic commentary on the word, Lister has the philosopher summarize his thoughts with, "I concluded that the incidence of
logodaedaly was purely
adventitious."[36][37]
There is a range of hacker witticisms referring to "defenestration". For example, the term is sometimes used humorously among
Linux users to describe the act of removing
Microsoft Windows from a computer.[38]
The graphic novel Watchmen starts with the murder of a retired superhero, who gets thrown out of his New York apartment window.
In the anime
Detective Conan, specifically episode 972, "The Target is the Metropolitan Police Traffic Department (Part Two)", a serial killer, targeting members of the metropolitan traffic police department, stuns then throws a victim from an apartment tower in broad daylight, leaving her to die from her wounds on the street.
In the movie The Departed, Billy Costigan, who is an undercover officer collecting evidence on the
Irish Mob, meets with his superior officer Captain Queenan at an abandoned building to plan an ending to their years-long undercover operation. An enemy spy in the police force collecting info for the Mob has Queenan followed, reveals his location to the Mob, and Queenan hurries Costigan off before he can be made out as an informant. When the Mob arrives at the building, they find Queenan alone on the third floor, who asks them for a lighter. The mobsters force him through the window, where he falls to his death mere inches from Costigan, who escaped to the street level; Queenan’s sacrifice saved the investigation.
In the television show Game of Thrones, in Season 1 Episode 1,
Jaime Lannister pushes
Bran Stark out of a tower at Winterfell after Bran witnesses Jaime and
Cersei Lannister, his twin sister, engaging in sexual relations. This paralyses Bran and triggers his journey to becoming the 'Three-Eyed Raven'. Later, in Season 6 episode 10, after learning of his wife's death in the explosion of the Great Sept,
Tommen Baratheon jumps out a window to his death.
^Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David P. (1996).
"1996 Darwin Awards: Lawyer Aloft". Darwin Awards.
Archived from the original on September 3, 2011. Retrieved September 5, 2011.