title: Hepatitis B

text: Most vaccines are given in three doses over a course of days. A protective response to the vaccine is defined as an anti-HBs antibody concentration of at least 10 mIU/ml in the recipient's serum. The vaccine is more effective in children and 95 percent of those vaccinated have protective levels of antibody. This drops to around 90% at 40 years of age and to around 75 percent in those over 60 years. The protection afforded by vaccination is long lasting even after antibody levels fall below 10 mIU/ml. For newborns of HBsAg-positive mothers: hepatitis B vaccine alone, hepatitis B immunoglobulin alone, or the combination of vaccine plus hepatitis B immunoglobulin, all prevent hepatitis B occurrence. Furthermore, the combination of vaccine plus hepatitis B immunoglobulin is superior to vaccine alone. This combination prevents HBV transmission around the time of birth in 86% to 99% of cases.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Tenofovir given in the second or third trimester can reduce the risk of mother to child transmission by 77% when combined with hepatitis B immunoglobulin and the hepatitis B vaccine, especially for pregnant women with high hepatitis B virus DNA levels. However, there is no sufficient evidence that the administration of hepatitis B immunoglobulin alone during pregnancy, might reduce transmission rates to the newborn infant. No randomized control trial has been conducted to assess the effects of hepatitis B vaccine during pregnancy for preventing infant infection.


title: Hepatitis B

text: All those with a risk of exposure to body fluids such as blood should be vaccinated, if not already. Testing to verify effective immunization is recommended and further doses of vaccine are given to those who are not sufficiently immunized.


title: Hepatitis B

text: In 10- to 22-year follow-up studies there were no cases of hepatitis B among those with a normal immune system who were vaccinated. Only rare chronic infections have been documented. Vaccination is particularly recommended for high risk groups including: health workers, people with chronic kidney failure, and men who have sex with men.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Both types of the hepatitis B vaccine, the plasma-derived vaccine (PDV) and recombinant vaccine (RV) are of similar effectiveness in preventing the infection in both healthcare workers and chronic kidney failure groups. With one difference noticed among health worker group, that the RV intramuscular route is significantly more effective compared with RV intradermal route of administration.


title: Hepatitis B

text: In assisted reproductive technology, sperm washing is not necessary for males with hepatitis B to prevent transmission, unless the female partner has not been effectively vaccinated. In females with hepatitis B, the risk of transmission from mother to child with IVF is no different from the risk in spontaneous conception.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Those at high risk of infection should be tested as there is effective treatment for those who have the disease. Groups that screening is recommended for include those who have not been vaccinated and one of the following: people from areas of the world where hepatitis B occurs in more than 2%, those with HIV, intravenous drug users, men who have sex with men, and those who live with someone with hepatitis B. Screening during pregnancy is recommended in the United States.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Acute infection does not usually require treatment and most adults clear the infection spontaneously. Early antiviral treatment may be required in fewer than 1% of people, whose infection takes a very aggressive course (fulminant hepatitis) or who are immunocompromised. On the other hand, treatment of chronic infection may be necessary to reduce the risk of cirrhosis and liver cancer. Chronically infected individuals with persistently elevated serum alanine aminotransferase, a marker of liver damage, and HBV DNA levels are candidates for therapy. Treatment lasts from six months to a year, depending on medication and genotype. Treatment duration when medication is taken by mouth, however, is more variable and usually longer than one year.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Although none of the available medications can clear the infection, they can stop the virus from replicating, thus minimizing liver damage. As of 2018, there are eight medications licensed for the treatment of infection in the United States. These include antiviral medications lamivudine, adefovir, tenofovir disoproxil, tenofovir alafenamide, telbivudine, and entecavir, and the two immune system modulators interferon alpha-2a and PEGylated interferon alpha-2a. In 2015 the World Health Organization recommended tenofovir or entecavir as first-line agents. Those with current cirrhosis are in most need of treatment.


title: Hepatitis B

text: The use of interferon, which requires injections daily or thrice weekly, has been supplanted by long-acting PEGylated interferon, which is injected only once weekly. However, some individuals are much more likely to respond than others, and this might be because of the genotype of the infecting virus or the person's heredity. The treatment reduces viral replication in the liver, thereby reducing the viral load (the amount of virus particles as measured in the blood). Response to treatment differs between the genotypes. Interferon treatment may produce an e antigen seroconversion rate of 37% in genotype A but only a 6% seroconversion in type D. Genotype B has similar seroconversion rates to type A while type C seroconverts only in 15% of cases. Sustained e antigen loss after treatment is ~45% in types A and B but only 25–30% in types C and D.


title: Hepatitis B

text: It seems unlikely that the disease will be eliminated by 2030, the goal set in 2016 by WHO. However, progress is being made in developing therapeutic treatments. In 2010, the Hepatitis B Foundation reported that 3 preclinical and 11 clinical-stage drugs were under development, based on largely similar mechanisms. In 2020, they reported that there were 17 preclinical- and 32 clinical-stage drugs under development, using diverse mechanisms.


title: Hepatitis B

text: virus infection may be either acute (self-limiting) or chronic (long-standing). Persons with self-limiting infection clear the infection spontaneously within weeks to months.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Children are less likely than adults to clear the infection. More than 95% of people who become infected as adults or older children will stage a full recovery and develop protective immunity to the virus. However, this drops to 30% for younger children, and only 5% of newborns that acquire the infection from their mother at birth will clear the infection. This population has a 40% lifetime risk of death from cirrhosis or hepatocellular carcinoma. Of those infected between the age of one to six, 70% will clear the infection.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Hepatitis D (HDV) can occur only with a concomitant infection, because HDV uses the HBV surface antigen to form a capsid. Co-infection with hepatitis D increases the risk of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer. Polyarteritis nodosa is more common in people with infection.


title: Hepatitis B

text: A number of different tests are available to determine the degree of cirrhosis present. Transient elastography (FibroScan) is the test of choice, but it is expensive. Aspartate aminotransferase to platelet ratio index may be used when cost is an issue.


title: Hepatitis B

text: virus DNA remains in the body after infection, and in some people, including those that do not have detectable HBsAg, the disease recurs. Although rare, reactivation is seen most often following alcohol or drug use, or in people with impaired immunity. HBV goes through cycles of replication and non-replication. Approximately 50% of overt carriers experience acute reactivation. Males with baseline ALT of 200 UL/L are three times more likely to develop a reactivation than people with lower levels. Although reactivation can occur spontaneously, people who undergo chemotherapy have a higher risk. Immunosuppressive drugs favor increased HBV replication while inhibiting cytotoxic T cell function in the liver. The risk of reactivation varies depending on the serological profile; those with detectable HBsAg in their blood are at the greatest risk, but those with only antibodies to the core antigen are also at risk. The presence of antibodies to the surface antigen, which are considered to be a marker of immunity, does not preclude reactivation. Treatment with prophylactic antiviral drugs can prevent the serious morbidity associated with HBV disease reactivation.


title: Hepatitis B

text: At least 296 million people, or 3.8% of the world's population, had chronic HBV infection as of 2019. Another 1.5 million cases of acute HBV infection also occurred that year. Regional prevalences across the globe range from around 7.5% in Africa to 0.5% in the Americas.


title: Hepatitis B

text: The primary method of HBV transmission and the prevalence of chronic HBV infection in specific regions often correspond with one another. In populations where HBV infection rates are 8% or higher, which are classified as high prevalence, vertical transmission (usually occurring during birth) is most common, though rates of early childhood transmission can also be significant among these populations. In 2021, 19 African countries had infection rates ranging between 8-19%, placing them in the high prevalence category.


title: Hepatitis B

text: In moderate prevalence areas where 2–7% of the population is chronically infected, the disease is predominantly spread horizontally, often among children, or vertically. China’s HBV infection rate is at the higher end of the moderate prevalence classification with an infection rate of 6.89% as of 2019. HBV prevalence in India is also moderate, with studies placing India’s infection rate between 2-4%.


title: Hepatitis B

text: Countries with low HBV prevalence include Australia (0.9%), those in the WHO European Region (which average 1.5%), and most countries in North and South America (which average 0.28%).


title: Hepatitis B

text: Findings of HBV DNA in ancient human remains have shown that HBV has infected humans since at least ten millennia, both in Eurasia and in the Americas. This disproved the belief that hepatitis B originated in the New World and spread to Europe around 16th century. Hepatitis B virus subgenotype C4 is exclusively present in Australian aborigines, suggesting an ancient origin as much as 50,000 years old. However, analyses of ancient HBV genomes suggested that the most recent common ancestor of all known human HBV strains was dated to between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, pointing to a more recent origin for all HBV genotypes. The evolution of HBV in humans was shown to reflect known events of human history such as the first peopling of the Americas during the late Pleistocene and the Neolithic transition in Europe. Ancient DNA studies have also showed that some ancient hepatitis viral strains still infect humans, while other strains became extinct.


title: Hepatitis B

text: The earliest record of an epidemic caused by virus was made by Lurman in 1885. An outbreak of smallpox occurred in Bremen in 1883 and 1,289 shipyard employees were vaccinated with lymph from other people. After several weeks, and up to eight months later, 191 of the vaccinated workers became ill with jaundice and were diagnosed with serum hepatitis. Other employees who had been inoculated with different batches of lymph remained healthy. Lurman's paper, now regarded as a classical example of an epidemiological study, proved that contaminated lymph was the source of the outbreak. Later, numerous similar outbreaks were reported following the introduction, in 1909, of hypodermic needles that were used, and, more importantly, reused, for administering Salvarsan for the treatment of syphilis.


title: Hepatitis B

text: The largest outbreak of Hepatitis B ever recorded was the infection of up to 330,000 American soldiers during World War II. The outbreak has been blamed on a yellow fever vaccine made with contaminated human blood serum, and after receiving the vaccinations about 50,000 soldiers developed jaundice.


title: Hepatitis B

text: The virus was not discovered until 1966 when Baruch Blumberg, then working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), discovered the Australia antigen (later known to be surface antigen, or HBsAg) in the blood of Aboriginal Australian people. Although a virus had been suspected since the research published by Frederick MacCallum in 1947, David Dane and others discovered the virus particle in 1970 by electron microscopy. In 1971, the FDA issued its first-ever blood supply screening order to blood banks. By the early 1980s the genome of the virus had been sequenced, and the first vaccines were being tested.


title: Hepatitis B

text: World Hepatitis Day, observed 28 July, aims to raise global awareness of and hepatitis C and encourage prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. It has been led by the World Hepatitis Alliance since 2007 and in May 2010, it received global endorsement from the World Health Organization.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe is the common name for obligate hemiparasitic plants in the order Santalales. They are attached to their host tree or shrub by a structure called the haustorium, through which they extract water and nutrients from the host plant.


title: Mistletoe

text: The name mistletoe originally referred to the species "Viscum album" (European mistletoe, of the family Santalaceae in the order Santalales); it is the only species native to the British Isles and much of Europe. A related species with red rather than white fruits, "Viscum cruciatum", occurs in Southwest Spain and Southern Portugal, as well as in Morocco in North Africa and in southern Africa. The genus "Viscum" is not native to North America, but "Viscum album" was introduced to Northern California in 1900.


title: Mistletoe

text: The eastern mistletoe native to North America, "Phoradendron leucarpum", belongs to a distinct genus of the family Santalaceae.


title: Mistletoe

text: European mistletoe has smooth-edged, oval, evergreen leaves borne in pairs along the woody stem, and waxy, white berries that it bears in clusters of two to six. The eastern mistletoe of North America is similar, but has shorter, broader leaves and longer clusters of 10 or more berries.


title: Mistletoe

text: Over the centuries, the term has been broadened to include many other species of parasitic plants with similar habits, found in other parts of the world, that are classified in different genera and families such as the Misodendraceae of South America and the mainly southern hemisphere tropical Loranthaceae.


title: Mistletoe

text: The word 'mistletoe' derives from the older form 'mistle' adding the Old English word (twig). 'Mistle' is common Germanic (Old High German , Middle High German , Old English , Old Norse ). Further etymology is uncertain, but may be related to the Germanic base for 'mash'.


title: Mistletoe

text: Parasitism has evolved at least twelve times among the vascular plants. Molecular data show the mistletoe habit has evolved independently five times within the Santalales—first in the Misodendraceae, but also in the Loranthaceae and three times in the Santalaceae (in the former Santalalean families Eremolepidaceae and Viscaceae, and the tribe Amphorogyneae).


title: Mistletoe

text: The largest family of mistletoes, the Loranthaceae, has 73 genera and over 900 species. Subtropical and tropical climates have markedly more mistletoe species; Australia has 85, of which 71 are in Loranthaceae, and 14 in Santalaceae.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe species grow on a wide range of host trees, some of which experience side effects including reduced growth, stunting, and loss of infested outer branches. A heavy infestation may also kill the host plant. "Viscum album" successfully parasitizes more than 200 tree and shrub species.


title: Mistletoe

text: All mistletoe species are hemiparasites because they do perform some photosynthesis for some period of their life cycle. However, in some species its contribution is very nearly zero. For example, some species, such as "Viscum minimum", that parasitize succulents, commonly species of Cactaceae or Euphorbiaceae, grow largely within the host plant, with hardly more than the flower and fruit emerging. Once they have germinated and attached to the circulatory system of the host, their photosynthesis reduces so far that it becomes insignificant.


title: Mistletoe

text: Most of the Viscaceae bear evergreen leaves that photosynthesise effectively, and photosynthesis proceeds within their green, fleshy stems as well. Some species, such as "Viscum capense", are adapted to semi-arid conditions and their leaves are vestigial scales, hardly visible without detailed morphological investigation. Therefore, their photosynthesis and transpiration only take place in their stems, limiting their demands on the host's supply of water, but also limiting their intake of carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Accordingly, their contribution to the host's metabolic balance becomes trivial and the idle parasite may become quite yellow as it grows, having practically given up photosynthesis.


title: Mistletoe

text: At another extreme other species have vigorous green leaves. Not only do they photosynthesize actively, but a heavy infestation of mistletoe plants may take over whole host tree branches, sometimes killing practically the entire crown and replacing it with their own growth. In such a tree the host is relegated purely to the supply of water and mineral nutrients and the physical support of the trunk. Such a tree may survive as a "Viscum" community for years; it resembles a totally unknown species unless one examines it closely, because its foliage does not look like that of any tree. An example of a species that behaves in this manner is "Viscum continuum".


title: Mistletoe

text: A mistletoe seed germinates on the branch of a host tree or shrub, and in its early stages of development it is independent of its host. It commonly has two or even four embryos, each producing its hypocotyl, that grows towards the bark of the host under the influence of light and gravity, and potentially each forming a mistletoe plant in a clump. Possibly as an adaptation to assist in guiding the process of growing away from the light, the adhesive on the seed tends to darken the bark. On having made contact with the bark, the hypocotyl, with only a rudimentary scrap of root tissue at its tip, penetrates it, a process that may take a year or more. In the meantime the plant is dependent on its own photosynthesis. Only after it reaches the host's conductive tissue can it begin to rely on the host for its needs. Later it forms a haustorium that penetrates the host tissue and takes water and nutrients from the host plant.


title: Mistletoe

text: Species more or less obligate include the leafless quintral, "Tristerix aphyllus", which lives deep inside the sugar-transporting tissue of a spiny cactus, appearing only to show its tubular red flowers, and the genus "Arceuthobium" (dwarf mistletoe; Santalaceae) which has reduced photosynthesis; as an adult, it manufactures only a small proportion of the sugars it needs from its own photosynthesis, but as a seedling actively photosynthesizes until a connection to the host is established.


title: Mistletoe

text: Some species of the largest family, Loranthaceae, have small, insect-pollinated flowers (as with Santalaceae), but others have spectacularly showy, large, bird-pollinated flowers.


title: Mistletoe

text: Most mistletoe seeds are spread by birds that eat the 'seeds' (in actuality drupes). Of the many bird species that feed on them, the mistle thrush is the best-known in Europe, the "Phainopepla" in southwestern North America, and "Dicaeum" of Asia and Australia. Depending on the species of mistletoe and the species of bird, the seeds are regurgitated from the crop, excreted in their droppings, or stuck to the bill, from which the bird wipes it onto a suitable branch. The seeds are coated with a sticky material called viscin. Some viscin remains on the seed and when it touches a stem, it sticks tenaciously. The viscin soon hardens and attaches the seed firmly to its future host, where it germinates and its haustorium penetrates the sound bark.


title: Mistletoe

text: Specialist mistletoe eaters have adaptations that expedite the process; some pass the seeds through their unusually shaped digestive tracts so fast that a pause for defecation of the seeds is part of the feeding routine. Others have adapted patterns of feeding behavior; the bird grips the fruit in its bill and squeezes the sticky-coated seed out to the side. The seed sticks to the beak and the bird wipes it off onto the branch.


title: Mistletoe

text: Biochemically, viscin is a complex adhesive mix containing cellulosic strands and mucopolysaccharides.


title: Mistletoe

text: Once a mistletoe plant is established on its host, it usually is possible to save a valuable branch by pruning and judicious removal of the wood invaded by the haustorium, if the infection is caught early enough. Some species of mistletoe can regenerate if the pruning leaves any of the haustorium alive in the wood.


title: Mistletoe

text: There are 1500 species of mistletoe, varying widely in toxicity to humans; the European mistletoe ("Viscum album") is more toxic than the American mistletoe ("Phoradendron serotinum"), though concerns regarding toxicity are more prevalent in the US. The effects are not usually fatal. In parts of South Asia, they are frequently used as an external medicine. The active substances are Phoratoxin (in "Phoradendron") and Tyramine (in "Viscum") and their effects include blurred vision, diarrhoea, nausea and vomiting. Less commonly they cause cardiac problems; seizures, hypertension, and even cardiac arrest. Toxins are more concentrated in the leaves and berries of the plant, with teas prepared from the plant being particularly dangerous. While adults may suffer little effect, these are more pronounced in small children and in animals.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe has been used historically in medicine for its supposed value in treating arthritis, high blood pressure, epilepsy and infertility.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoes are often considered pests that kill trees and devalue natural habitats, but some species have recently been recognized as ecological keystone species, organisms that have a disproportionately pervasive influence over their community. A broad array of animals depend on mistletoe for food, consuming the leaves and young shoots, transferring pollen between plants and dispersing the sticky seeds. In western North America their juicy berries are eaten and spread by birds (notably Phainopepla, or silky-flycatcher) while in Australia the mistletoebird behaves similarly. When eaten, some seeds pass unharmed through their digestive systems; if the birds’ droppings happen to land on a suitable branch, the seeds may stick long enough to germinate. As the plants mature, they grow into masses of branching stems which suggest the popular name "witches’ brooms".


title: Mistletoe

text: The dense evergreen witches' brooms formed by the dwarf mistletoes ("Arceuthobium" species) of western North America also make excellent locations for roosting and nesting of the northern spotted owl and the marbled murrelet. In Australia the diamond firetail and painted honeyeater are recorded as nesting in different mistletoes.


title: Mistletoe

text: A study of mistletoe in junipers concluded that more juniper berries sprout in stands where mistletoe is present, as the mistletoe attracts berry-eating birds which also eat juniper berries.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe is relevant to several cultures. Pagan cultures regarded the white berries as symbols of male fertility, with the seeds resembling semen. The Celts, particularly, saw mistletoe as the semen of Taranis, while the Ancient Greeks referred to mistletoe as "oak sperm". Also in Roman mythology, mistletoe was used by the hero Aeneas to reach the underworld.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe may have played an important role in Druidic mythology in the Ritual of Oak and Mistletoe, although the only ancient writer to mention the use of mistletoe in this ceremony was Pliny. Evidence taken from bog bodies makes the Celtic use of mistletoe seem medicinal rather than ritual. It is possible that mistletoe was originally associated with human sacrifice and only became associated with the white bull after the Romans banned human sacrifices.


title: Mistletoe

text: The Romans associated mistletoe with peace, love and understanding and hung it over doorways to protect the household.


title: Mistletoe

text: In the Christian era, mistletoe in the Western world became associated with Christmas as a decoration under which lovers are expected to kiss, as well as with protection from witches and demons. Mistletoe continued to be associated with fertility and vitality through the Middle Ages, and by the 18th century it had also become incorporated into Christmas celebrations around the world. The custom of kissing under the mistletoe is referred to as popular among servants in late 18th-century England.


title: Mistletoe

text: The serving class of Victorian England is credited with perpetuating the tradition. The tradition dictated that a man was allowed to kiss any woman standing underneath mistletoe, and that bad luck would befall any woman who refused the kiss. One variation on the tradition stated that with each kiss a berry was to be plucked from the mistletoe, and the kissing must stop after all the berries had been removed. People have reportedly been poisoned and died from consuming mistletoe.


title: Mistletoe

text: From at least the mid-19th century, Caribbean herbalists of African descent have referred to mistletoe as "god-bush". In Nepal, diverse mistletoes are used for a variety of medical purposes, particularly for treating broken bones.


title: Mistletoe

text: Mistletoe is the floral emblem of the US state of Oklahoma and the flower of the UK county of Herefordshire. Every year, the UK town of Tenbury Wells holds a mistletoe festival and crowns a 'Mistletoe Queen'.


title: Mistletoe

text: One of the earliest references to mistletoe traditions in popular music is the 1952 hit "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus", which was originally sung by Jimmy Boyd and has been covered by many singers. The song was written by British songwriter Tommie Connor and recorded in the US. The 1958 US hit "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree" refers to couples wanting to stop beneath the mistletoe. "Ring Out, Solstice Bells" from the album "Songs from the Wood" (1977) by British rock group Jethro Tull refers to the Druid Ritual of Oak and Mistletoe. In 1988, the British singer Cliff Richard released a popular Christmas song called "Mistletoe and Wine". More recent Christmas songs referring to mistletoe traditions include "Merry Christmas Everyone" by Shakin' Stevens (1991), "All I Want For Christmas Is You" written and performed by Mariah Carey (1994), “Underneath the Mistletoe” written and performed by Sia (2017), and "Mistletoe" by Justin Bieber (2011).


title: Marie Kondo

text: Kondo has written four books on organizing, which have collectively sold millions of copies around the world. Her books have been translated from Japanese into several languages and her book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" (2011) has been published in more than 30 countries. It was a best-seller in Japan and in Europe, and was published in the United States in 2014.


title: Marie Kondo

text: In the United States and the United Kingdom, the profile of Kondo and her methods were greatly promoted by the success of the Netflix series "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo", released in 2019, which gained Kondo a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Competition Program. In August 2021, Netflix released a follow-up show, "Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo".


title: Marie Kondo

text: Kondo says that she has been interested in organizing since childhood. In junior school, Kondo ran into the classroom to tidy up bookshelves while her classmates were playing in physical education class. Whenever there were nominations for class roles, she did not seek to be the class representative or the pet feeder. Instead, she yearned to be the bookshelf manager to continue to tidy up books. She said she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day: "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."


title: Marie Kondo

text: She spent five years as an attendant maiden at a Shinto shrine. She founded her organising consulting business when she was 19 and a sociology student at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. In her senior year, she wrote her capstone thesis, titled "Tidying up as seen from the perspective of gender".


title: Marie Kondo

text: Kondo's method of organizing is known as the KonMari method, and consists of gathering together all of one's belongings, one category at a time, and then keeping only those things that "spark joy" (Japanese language ときめく "tokimeku," translated as equivalent to English "flutter, throb, palpitate"), and choosing a place for everything from then on. Kondo advises to start the process of tidying up by "quickly and completely" discarding whatever it is in the house that doesn't spark joy. Following this philosophy will acknowledge the usefulness of each belonging and help owners learn more about themselves, which will help them be able to more easily decide what to keep or discard. She advises to do this by category of items and not their location in the house. For example, all the clothes in the house should be piled up first, assessed for "tokimeku", and discarded if not needed, followed by other categories such as books, papers, miscellany, and mementos. Another crucial aspect of the KonMari method is to find a designated place for each item in the house and making sure it stays there.


title: Marie Kondo

text: Kondo says that her method is partly inspired by the Shinto religion. Cleaning and organising things properly can be a spiritual practice in Shintoism, which is concerned with the energy or divine spirit of things ("kami") and the right way to live ("kannagara"): Treasuring what you have; treating the objects you own as not disposable, but valuable, no matter their actual monetary worth; and creating displays so you can value each individual object are all essentially Shinto ways of living.


title: Marie Kondo

text: A two-part TV dramatisation was filmed in 2013 based on Kondo and her work, titled (). She has lectured and made television appearances. She released a series of videos teaching "the best way to fold for perfect appearance".


title: Marie Kondo

text: On 1 January 2019, Netflix released a series called "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo". In the series, Kondo visits various American family homes full of clutter and guides the families in tidying up their houses through her KonMari method. Following the release of her Netflix series, Kondo was the subject of various Internet memes. A clip of her saying "I love mess" included on "Time"s list of the ten best memes of 2019.


title: Marie Kondo

text: In August 2021, Kondo followed up "Tidying Up with Marie Kondo" with a similar series for Netflix titled "Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo".


title: Marie Kondo

text: Kondo married Takumi Kawahara in 2012. At the time they met, Kawahara was working in sales support and marketing at a corporation in Osaka. Once Kondo's career took off, he left his job to become her manager and, eventually, CEO of Konmari Media, LLC. The couple have two daughters, a son who born on 22 April 2021.


title: Marie Kondo

text: After getting married, they lived in Tokyo. The couple later moved to San Francisco, and as of 2022 Kondo and her family live in Los Angeles, California.


title: Eighth generation of video game consoles

text: The eighth generation of video game consoles began in 2012, and consists of four home video game consoles: the Wii U released in 2012, the PlayStation 4 family in 2013, the Xbox One family in 2013, and the Nintendo Switch family in 2017.


text: The generation offered few signature hardware innovations. Sony and Microsoft continued to produce new systems with similar designs and capabilities as their predecessors, but with improved performance (processing speed, higher-resolution graphics, and increased storage capacity) that further moved consoles into confluence with personal computers, and furthering support for digital distribution and games as a service. Motion-controlled games of the seventh generation had waned in popularity, but consoles were preparing for advancement of virtual reality (VR), with Sony introducing the PlayStation VR in 2016. Sony focused heavily on its first-party developers and console exclusives as key selling points, while Microsoft expanded its gaming services, creating the Xbox Game Pass subscription service for Xbox and Windows computers, and its xCloud game streaming service. Microsoft and Sony consoles saw mid-generation refreshes, with high-end revisions PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X, and lower-cost PlayStation 4 Slim and Xbox One S models that lacked some features. As of 2021, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One families had sold an estimated 116 and 51 million units, respectively.


text: Nintendo remained on a separate path from Sony or Microsoft in its blue ocean strategy. The Wii U was designed to be a more robust Wii to appeal to dedicated gamers, but its means and purpose were lost in how it was marketed. The Wii U substantially undersold Nintendo's projections, selling only 13.5 million units by its discontinuation in 2017, which drove Nintendo to release the Nintendo Switch by 2017, its design and marketing accounting for several of the faults of the Wii U while meeting a broad range of global demographics and possible gaming situations. Later, Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch Lite, a version that lacked the Switch's docking capabilities but had other component optimization and was otherwise compatible with all games. By December 2021, the two Switch models had shipped a combined 103.54 million units, outselling the Wii.


text: Handheld consoles fought against increasing pressure of mobile gaming. The Nintendo 3DS and 2DS succeeded the now-discontinued Nintendo DS line, while the PlayStation Vita was the successor to the PlayStation Portable. Combined shipped units of the Nintendo 3DS/2DS family had reached 75 million by September 2019, but the Vita was estimated to have only sold about 10 million by the end of 2015. Sony discontinued the unit in 2019 and stated it had no present plans for handheld systems. Nintendo discontinued the Nintendo 3DS in 2020, effectively ending production of handheld consoles outside of the Switch and Switch Lite.


text: The eighth-generation console market was also influenced by the lifting of China's ban on video consoles in 2015, as well as the growth of the mobile gaming sector. A number of retro microconsoles were also released during this period.


text: in November 2020, Sony released the PlayStation 5 and Microsoft the Xbox Series X and Series S. Considered to be their highly anticipated next-generation systems, they continue the trend from the eighth generation with overall general improved computational performance, graphical output, and strong backward compatibility support to minimize the disruption of upgrading to the new platform.


text: This generation was predicted to face competition from smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. In 2013, gaming revenue on Android overtook portable game console revenue, while remaining a distant second to iOS gaming revenue. In fiscal year (FY) 2013 (ending early 2013), Nintendo sold 23.7 million consoles, while Apple sold 58.2 million iPads in FY 2012 (ending late 2012). One particular threat to the traditional console game sales model has been the free-to-play model, wherein most users play free, and either a small number of dedicated players spend enough to cover the rest, or the game is supported by advertising.


text: The PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Wii U all use AMD GPUs, and two of them (PS4 and XBO) also use AMD CPUs on an x86-64 architecture, similar to common personal computers (as opposed to the IBM PowerPC Architecture used in the previous generation). Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony were not aware that they were all using AMD hardware until their consoles were announced. This shift was considered to be beneficial for multi-platform development, due to the increased similarities between PC hardware and console hardware. It also provided a boost in market share for AMD (which had faced increased competition from Intel in the PC market).


text: Various microconsoles (which are smaller and mostly Android-based) have been released since 2012, although they are seldom referred to as being part of the eighth (or any) generation of video game consoles. These microconsoles have included the Ouya, Nvidia Shield Console, Amazon Fire TV, PlayStation TV, MOJO, Razer Switchblade, GamePop, GameStick, and PC-based Steam Machine consoles. A number of microconsoles that were modeled as scaled-down versions of consoles from previous generations, running a selection of games from that console, were also released. These included the NES Classic Edition, the SNES Classic Edition, the PlayStation Classic, and the Sega Genesis Mini.


text: Cloud gaming options for the consoles also were developed in the eighth generation. PlayStation Now enables cloud gaming of PlayStation 2, 3, and 4 games to current PlayStation consoles and personal computers. Microsoft began developing a comparable service xCloud for Xbox and Windows games. Google released Stadia, a dedicated cloud gaming platform designed around reduced latency and advanced features not typical of these other cloud gaming options.


text: While earlier console generations generally lasted five to six years, the shift from seventh to eighth generation lasted about eight. Unusually, the prior generation's best-selling unit, the Wii, was the first to be replaced in the eighth generation. In 2011, Microsoft and Sony officials said they considered themselves only halfway through a ten-year lifecycle for their seventh-generation offerings. The companies also said the addition of cameras and motion-based controllers like Xbox's Kinect and PlayStation Move extended these systems' lifetimes. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that his company would release the Wii U due to declining sales of seventh-generation home consoles and that "the market is now waiting for a new proposal for home consoles". Sony considered making its next console a digital download-only machine, but decided against it due to concerns about the inconsistency of internet speeds available globally, especially in developing countries.


text: The introduction of the high-end PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X in 2016 and 2017, respectively, led to some journalists to call these machines part of a "half generation" step within the 8th generation, new consoles that would continue to drive sales without introducing a significantly different line of hardware that would segment their consumer base.


text: In 2020, Microsoft and Sony released their 8th-generation consoles: Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Both said they wanted a soft transition, meaning that the new hardware plays most or all of the platform's previous games. Microsoft said Xbox Series X can play all Xbox One games, including games from the Xbox 360 and original Xbox console that are playable on the Xbox One, and introduced its Smart Delivery program to update some Xbox One games to enable play on the Xbox Series X. Sony has said the "overwhelming majority" of PlayStation 4 games play on the PlayStation 5, and that many run at higher frame rates and resolutions.


text: The eighth generation of consoles also saw manufacturers re-enter the Chinese market. Since 2000, the Chinese government had banned the sale and distribution of video game consoles, citing concerns on their effect on youth. The ban led console gaming to a niche sector, including a black market for the purchase of these consoles, while also causing personal computing gaming to take off within China, including the spread of Internet cafes and PC bangs. This ban lasted through January 2014, where the Chinese government first opened up to allow the sale of consoles in the Shanghai Free-Trade Zone (FTZ). By July 2015, the ban on video game consoles was wholly lifted. Access to the Chinese video game market is lucrative, having an estimated 500 million potential players and representing over in revenues as of 2016.


text: Microsoft and Sony quickly took advantage of the lifting of the ban, announcing sales of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms within the FTZ shortly after the 2014 announcement. Microsoft established a partnership with BesTV New Media Co, a subsidiary of the Shanghai Media Group, to sell Xbox One units in China, with units first shipping by September 2014. Sony worked with Shanghai Oriental Pearl Media in May 2014 to establish manufacturing in the FTZ, with the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita shipping into China by March 2015. CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Andrew House explained in September 2013 that the company intended to use the PlayStation Vita TV as a low-cost alternative for consumers in an attempt to penetrate the Chinese gaming market.


text: Nintendo did not initially seek to bring the Wii U into China; Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime stated that China was of interest to the company after the ban was lifted, but considered that there were similar difficulties with establishing sales there as they had recently had with Brazil. Later, Nintendo had teamed up with Tencent by April 2019 to help sell and distribute the Nintendo Switch as well as aid its games through the Chinese government approval process led by National Radio and Television Administration.


text: In November 2010, Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aime stated that the release of the next generation of Nintendo would be determined by the continued success of the Wii. Nintendo announced its successor to the Wii, the Wii U, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011 on June 7, 2011. After the announcement, several journalists classified the system as the first eighth generation home console. However, prominent sources have disputed this because of its comparative lack of power and older disc media type with respect to the announced specifications for PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.


text: The Wii U's main controller, the Wii U GamePad, features an embedded touchscreen that can work as an auxiliary interactive screen in a fashion similar to the Nintendo DS/3DS, or if compatible with "Off TV Play", can even act as the main screen itself, enabling games to be played without the need of a television. The Wii U is compatible with its predecessor's peripherals, such as the Wii Remote Plus, the Nunchuk, and the Wii Balance Board.


text: The Wii U was released in North America on November 18, 2012, in Europe on November 30, 2012, and in Japan on December 8, 2012. It came in two versions, the "Basic Model" and the "Deluxe/Premium Model", at the price of $300 and $349 US Dollars, respectively. On August 28, 2013, Nintendo announced the production of the Basic model has ended and expected supplies to be exhausted by September 20, 2013. On October 4, 2013, the Deluxe/Premium model was price cut from US$349 to US$300.


text: The Wii U had lifetime sales of about 13 million, in sharp contrast with the Wii, which had over 100 million over its life. This financially hurt Nintendo, with several financial quarters running at a loss through 2014. Nintendo had anticipated the Wii U would sell similarly to the Wii, but it ended up selling worse than the GameCube and became Nintendo's least successful home console to date. Nintendo officially discontinued the Wii U on January 31, 2017 due to its commercial failure to make way for its second competitor, the Nintendo Switch, released one month later.


text: On February 20, 2013, Sony announced the PlayStation 4 during a press conference in New York City. The console places an emphasis on features surrounding social interaction. Gameplay videos can be shared via the PlayStation Network and other services. Users can stream games being played by themselves or others (either through the console, or directly to Twitch. The DualShock 4 is similar to the previous DualShock 3 controller with the addition of a touchpad and a "Share" button along with a Light-emitting diode bar on the front to allow motion tracking. The PlayStation Camera camera accessory is offered for the system, with stereo camera lenses up to 1280×800px resolution with support for depth sensing similar to Microsoft's Kinect. It also remains compatible with the PlayStation Move peripherals. Second screen capabilities are available through mobile apps and the PlayStation Vita, as well as cloud gaming streaming through the Gaikai service.


text: The PlayStation 4 was released on November 15, 2013, in North America and November 29, 2013, in Australia and Europe at US$399.99, A$549 and €399 respectively.


text: On May 21, 2013, Microsoft announced the Xbox One at an event in Redmond, Washington. The console focuses on entertainment, including the ability to pass television programming from a set-top box over HDMI and use a built-in electronic program guide, and the ability for computer multitasking by snapping applications (such as Skype and Internet Explorer) to the side of the screen, similarly to Windows 8. The controller has "Impulse Triggers" that provide Haptic technology feedback, and the ability to automatically record and save highlights from gameplay. An updated version of Kinect was developed with a 1080p camera and expanded voice controls. Originally bundled with the console it has since been excluded.


text: The Xbox One was released in North America, Europe, and Australia on November 22, 2013, at a launch price of US$499.99, €499 and A$599 respectively with Japan, and was later released in 26 other markets in 2014. It had two mid-generation upgrades, one cheaper option released in 2016 called the Xbox One S, and the other called the Xbox One X which added 4K gaming. Microsoft claimed that the Xbox One X was the "World's most powerful console" and 40% more powerful than any other console at the time of its release.


text: Production of the Xbox One family of consoles were discontinued shortly after the launch of their successor, the Xbox Series X and S, at the end of 2020.


text: Due to the commercial failure of the Wii U, along with competition from mobile gaming, then-president Satoru Iwata sought to revitalize the company by creating a new strategy for Nintendo that included embracing mobile gaming, and developing new hardware that would be attractive to a wider range of audiences. The hardware product was announced under the codename NX in a press conference held with DeNA on March 17, 2015, and fully revealed as the Nintendo Switch on October 20, 2016. It was released worldwide on March 3, 2017, competing with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.


text: The Switch is considered by Nintendo a home console that has multiple ways to play. The main unit, the Console, is a tablet-sized device with a touch-sensitive screen. It can be inserted into a Docking Station which allows games to be played on a connected television. Alternatively, two Joy-Con, motion-sensitive controllers comparable to the Wii Remotes, can be slotted onto the sides of the Console so the unit can be played as a handheld. Further, the Console can be set on a kickstand, allowing multiple players to see the screen and play games with separate Joy-Con. Additionally, Nintendo built the Switch on standard industry components, allowing for ease of porting games onto the system using standard software libraries and game engines rather than Nintendo's usual proprietary approaches. This enabled them to bring several third-party and independent game developers on board prior to launch to assure some third-party games in their software library.


text: Despite the Switch being significantly weaker in terms of processing power than its competitors, it was met with critical praise and commercial success. Nintendo had anticipated selling about 10 million Switches in the first year of release but ended up exceeding this projection with total first-year sales of over 17 million units, exceeding the Wii U's lifetime sales. In late 2017, the Nintendo Switch was the fastest selling console in US history, and in November 2018 it was the fastest selling of all the 8th generation consoles in the US.


text: A hardware revision, the Switch Lite, was announced on July 10, 2019 and was released on September 20, 2019. The unit integrates the Joy-Con onto the main console with a smaller form-factor, making the unit strictly handheld rather than a hybrid system. Further details are described below under Handhelds. An enhanced model was announced on July 7, 2021 and was released on October 8, 2021, featuring a 4K-ready dock, a 7-inch OLED screen, a wider and adjustable stand, enhanced audio, a wired LAN port built into the dock, and 64GB of internal storage.


text: A trend starting from the eighth generation of handheld systems is the general shift from dedicated handheld gaming consoles to mobile gaming on smart devices, such as smartphones and tablets. As such, smart devices have eroded sales of dedicated handheld gaming consoles, with analysts predicting that smart devices will replace handheld gaming consoles in the near future.


text: The Nintendo 3DS is a portable game console produced by Nintendo. It is the successor to the Nintendo DS. The autostereoscopic device is able to project stereoscopic 3D effects without the use of 3D glasses or any additional accessories. The Nintendo 3DS features backward compatibility with Nintendo DS series software, including Nintendo DSi software. Announcing the device in March 2010, Nintendo officially unveiled it at E3 2010, with the company inviting attendees to use demonstration units. The console succeeds the Nintendo DS series of handheld systems, which primarily competes with PlayStation Portable. It competes with Sony's handheld, the PlayStation Vita.


text: The Nintendo 3DS was released in Japan on February 26, 2011; in Europe on March 25, 2011; in North America on March 27, 2011; and in Australia on March 31, 2011. On July 28, 2011, Nintendo announced a major price drop starting August 12. In addition, as of September 2011 consumers who bought the system at its original price have access to ten Nintendo Entertainment System games before they are available to the general public, after which the games may be updated to the versions publicly released on the Nintendo eShop. In December 2011, ten Game Boy Advance games were made available to consumers who bought the system at its original price at no charge, with Nintendo stating it has no plans to release to the general public.


text: On June 21, 2012, Nintendo announced a bigger model of the 3DS called the Nintendo 3DS XL. Both screens are 90% larger than the original 3DS, but the resolution is the same. It also has a slightly longer battery life. It was released on July 28, 2012, in Europe and August 19, 2012, in North America as well as Australasia on August 23, 2012, and Brazil on September 1, 2012.


text: On August 28, 2013, Nintendo announced a low cost, 2D version of the 3DS called the Nintendo 2DS. This redesign plays all Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS games, albeit without a stereoscopic 3D option. Unlike previous machines of the DS family, the Nintendo 2DS uses a slate-like design instead of a clamshell one. The console launched on October 12 in both Europe and North America as well as Australasia.


text: On August 29, 2014, Nintendo announced an enhanced revision of the 3DS called the New Nintendo 3DS and New Nintendo 3DS XL. The newer system uses microSD cards rather than full-sized and has a second analog "nub" input, the C-stick, Super-Stable 3D™ (face-tracking technology that allows the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D display to constantly adapt to the user's exact eye position as the player shifts his or her arms and body) and an upgraded processor that allows for more advanced NN3DS-exclusive games (e.g., a 3D port of acclaimed Wii game "Xenoblade Chronicles") which cannot be played on the original Nintendo 3DS/2DS, although New Nintendo 3DS can still be played with all 3DS "and" most DS/i games. It was released in Japan on October 11, 2014; in Australasia on November 21, 2014; in Europe on February 13, 2015; in North America on February 13, 2015, for the XL version. The smaller version for North America was released on September 25, 2015, bundled with the game "". In April 2017, Nintendo announced the New Nintendo 2DS XL, released in Japan on July 13, 2017, and in North America on July 28, 2017. It is a streamlined version of the New Nintendo 3DS XL, with identical screen sizes, but with a thinner build and without stereoscopic 3D.


text: The PlayStation Vita is the second (and final) handheld game console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is the successor to the PlayStation Portable as part of the PlayStation brand of gaming devices. It was released in Japan on December 17, 2011 and was released in Europe and North America on February 22, 2012.


text: The handheld includes two analog sticks, a OLED/LCD multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, and supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional 3G. Internally, the PS Vita features a 4-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor and a 4-core SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as LiveArea software as its main user interface, which succeeds the XrossMediaBar.


text: The device is backward-compatible with a subset of the PSP and PS One games digitally released on the PlayStation Network via the PlayStation Store. The graphics for PSP releases are upscaled, with a smoothing filter to reduce pixelation.


text: Lifetime sales of the Vita have not been released by Sony but have been estimated between 15 and 16 million. Sony discontinued the PlayStation Vita on March 1, 2019, and has no plans for a successor.


text: Nintendo released the Nintendo Switch Lite, a hardware revision of the Switch, worldwide on September 20, 2019. Designed as a less expensive version of the Switch, the Switch Lite integrates the Joy-Con onto the hardware unit itself, eliminating some of the Joy-Con's features, which prevents a small number of games in the Switch's library that exclusively require television or tabletop modes from being used on the Switch. Additionally, the Switch Lite cannot be docked. The unit is smaller and lighter than the main Switch console, and uses updated lower-powered hardware that improves its battery performance. It otherwise supports all other features of the Switch, including its communication capabilities.


title: Pete Docter

text: Peter Hans Docter (born October 9, 1968) is an American animator, film director, screenwriter, producer, voice actor, and chief creative officer of Pixar. He is best known for directing the Pixar animated feature films "Monsters, Inc." (2001), "Up" (2009), "Inside Out" (2015), and "Soul" (2020), and as a key figure and collaborator at Pixar. He has been nominated for nine Oscars and has won three for Best Animated Feature—for "Up", "Inside Out" and "Soul"—making him the first person in history to win the category three times. He has also been nominated for nine Annie Awards (winning six), a BAFTA Children's Film Award and a Hochi Film Award. He has described himself as a "geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to draw cartoons".


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter was born in Bloomington, Minnesota, the son of Rita Margaret (Kanne) and David Reinhardt Docter. His mother's family is Danish American. He grew up introverted and socially isolated, preferring to work alone and having to remind himself to connect with others. He often played in the creek beside his house, pretending to be Indiana Jones and acting out scenes. A junior-high classmate later described him as "this kid who was really tall, but who was kind of awkward, maybe getting picked on by the school bullies because his voice change at puberty was very rough."


title: Pete Docter

text: Both his parents worked in education: his mother, Rita, taught music and his father, Dave, was a choral director at Normandale Community College. He attended Nine Mile Elementary School, Oak Grove Junior High, and John F. Kennedy High School in Bloomington. Unlike his two sisters, Kirsten Docter, who was the violist and a founding member of the Cavani String Quartet, and Kari Docter, a cellist with the Metropolitan Opera, Docter was not particularly interested in music, although he learned to play the double bass and played with the orchestras for the soundtracks of "Monsters, Inc." and "Up".


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter taught himself cartooning, making flip books and homemade animated shorts with a family movie camera. He later described his interest in animation as a way to "play God", making up nearly living characters. Cartoon director Chuck Jones, producer Walt Disney, and cartoonist Jack Davis were major inspirations.


title: Pete Docter

text: He spent about a year at the University of Minnesota studying both philosophy and making art before transferring to the California Institute of the Arts, where he won a Student Academy Award for his production "Next Door" and graduated in 1990. Although Docter had planned to work for Walt Disney Animation Studios, his best offers came from Pixar and from the producers of "The Simpsons". He did not think much of Pixar at that time, and later considered his choice to work there a strange and unusual one.


title: Pete Docter

text: Before joining Pixar, Docter had created three non-computer animations, "Next Door", "Palm Springs", and "Winter". All three shorts were later preserved by the Academy Film Archive. He was a fan of the company's early short films, but he knew nothing about them otherwise. He commented in an October 2009 interview, "Looking back, I kind of go, what was I thinking?"


title: Pete Docter

text: He started at Pixar in 1990 at the age of 21 after John Lasseter asked his former classmate the late Joe Ranft, who was one of Docter's teachers at CalArts, to recommend any students who would be a good fit for the company. Deciding to follow his instincts and what "felt right" at the time, he accepted the job offer from then obscure Pixar and began work there the day after his college graduation as the tenth employee at the company's animation group and its third animator. Docter instantly felt at home in the tight-knit atmosphere of the company. He has said, "Growing up ... a lot of us felt we were the only person in the world who had this weird obsession with animation. Coming to Pixar you feel like, 'Oh! There are others!'"


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter had been brought in with limited responsibilities, but John Lasseter quickly assigned him larger and larger roles in writing, animation, sound recording, and orchestra scoring. He was one of the three key screenwriters behind the concept of "Toy Story", and partially based the character of Buzz Lightyear on himself. He had a mirror on his desk and made faces with it as he conceptualized the character.


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter's fascination with character development was further influenced by a viewing of "Paper Moon", he told journalist Robert K. Elder in an interview for "The Film That Changed My Life".


title: Pete Docter

text: I like the more character-driven stuff, and "Paper Moon" brought that home to me in a way that I had not seen in live action, really focusing on the whole story just about characters. It was almost theatrical in the same way you might see a stage show because you're locked in a room. It's got to be about characters, and yet it was so cinematic, a film that couldn't be done in any other medium. It just kind of blew my socks off.


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter has been an integral part of some of Pixar's most seminal works, including "Toy Story", "Toy Story 2", "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc.", all of which received critical acclaim and honors. He contributed to these animated films as a co-author to the scripts, and worked with CGI stalwarts such as John Lasseter, Ronnie del Carmen, Bob Peterson, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, and Joe Ranft. Docter has referred to his colleagues at Pixar as a bunch of "wild stallions". He is also one of the five founding members of the Pixar Braintrust, which came together during the making of "Toy Story" (the other four being Lasseter, Stanton, Ranft and Unkrich).


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter made his directorial debut with "Monsters, Inc."—the first Pixar movie not directed by Lasseter—which occurred right after the birth of his first child, Nick. Docter has said that the abrupt move from a complete, single-minded devotion to his career to parenting drove him "upside down" and formed the inspiration for the storyline. In 2004, he was asked by John Lasseter to direct the English translation of "Howl's Moving Castle". Docter then directed the 2009 film "Up", released on May 29, 2009. He based the protagonist of "Up" partially on himself, based on his frequent feelings of social awkwardness and his desire to get away from crowds to contemplate. Following the success of "Up", Docter and fellow Pixar veterans John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich as well as long-time collaborator and director Brad Bird were honored with the Golden Lion Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Docter directed the 2015 film "Inside Out" to critical acclaim. His next film, "Soul", was released on Disney+ on December 25, 2020 to critical acclaim.


title: Pete Docter

text: In May 2009, Docter remarked retrospectively to "Christianity Today" that he had lived "a blessed life" so far. "The A.V. Club" has called him "almost universally successful". He has been nominated for eight Oscars (winning three), three Annie Awards (winning two), four BAFTA Film Awards (winning two), a British Academy Children's Award (which he won), and a Hochi Film Award (which he won). Accepting his first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, he said, "Never did I dream that making a flip book out of my third-grade math book would lead to this." Docter served as Vice-President of Creativity at Pixar Animation Studios through June 2018, and following Lasseter stepping down from the role, became the studio's chief creative officer. "TheWrap" reported that Docter planned to complete the film he was currently working on, which ultimately became "Soul".


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter is married to Amanda Docter and has two children, Nicholas and Elie. Elie has a speaking part in "Up" and was the inspiration for the character of Riley in "Inside Out".


title: Pete Docter

text: Docter is a fan of anime, particularly the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Docter has said that Miyazaki's animation has "beautifully observed little moments of truth that you just recognize and respond to". He is a fan of the work done by his competitors at DreamWorks as well. Referring to the competitive environment, he has said: "I think it's a much healthier environment when there is more diversity".


title: Pete Docter

text: During an interview in 2009, Docter confirmed that he is a Christian and said that it influences his work. However, he went on to say that he did not envision himself ever creating a Christian movie. About the relationship between his faith and his filmmaking, Docter has said:


title: Bobby Womack

text: Robert Dwayne Womack (; March 4, 1944 – June 27, 2014) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. Starting in the early 1950s as the lead singer of his family musical group the Valentinos and as Sam Cooke's backing guitarist, Womack's career spanned more than 60 years and multiple styles, including R&B, jazz, soul, rock and roll, doo-wop, and gospel.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack was a prolific songwriter who wrote and originally recorded, (with his brothers, the Valentinos), the Rolling Stones' first UK number one hit ("It's All Over Now") and New Birth's "I Can Understand It". As a singer, he is most notable for the hits "Lookin' for a Love", "That's the Way I Feel About Cha", "Woman's Gotta Have It", "Harry Hippie", "Across 110th Street", and his 1980s hits "If You Think You're Lonely Now" and "I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much".


title: Bobby Womack

text: Born in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood, near East 85th Street and Quincy Avenue, to Naomi Womack and Friendly Womack, Bobby was the third of five brothers. Friendly Jr. and Curtis were Bobby's older brothers, and Harry and Cecil were his younger brothers. They all grew up in the Cleveland slums, so poor that the family would fish pig snouts out of the local supermarket's trash. He had to share a bed with his brothers. His mother told him he could "sing his way out of the ghetto." Recalling his childhood, Bobby said, "we came up very poor. My kids have had a much better life than I'd ever thought of livin,'" and, "the neighborhood was so ghetto that we didn't bother the rats and they didn't bother us."


title: Bobby Womack

text: Raised Baptist, their mother played the organ for the church choir, and their father was a steelworker, part-time minister, and musician who played the guitar and also sang gospel. Their father repeatedly ordered his sons to not touch his guitar while he was away, yet all five brothers regularly played it while their father was at work. One night, eight-year-old Bobby broke a guitar string, then tried to replace the string with a shoelace. After Friendly deduced that Bobby (who was missing a shoelace) had broken the string, he offered Bobby the chance to play the guitar for him in lieu of a whipping.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Soon afterwards, Friendly bought guitars for all five of his sons. Because Bobby was left-handed, he flipped his guitar upside-down to play, not knowing that the guitar could have been restrung to accommodate a left-handed player.


title: Bobby Womack

text: By the mid-1950s, 10-year-old Bobby was touring with his brothers on the midwest gospel circuit as The Womack Brothers, along with Naomi on organ and Friendly Sr. on guitar. In 1954, under the moniker Curtis Womack and the Womack Brothers, the group issued the Pennant single, "Buffalo Bill". More records followed.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Sam Cooke, the lead singer of The Soul Stirrers, first saw the group performing in the mid-1950s. He became their mentor and helped them go on tour. They went on national tours with The Staple Singers. Even though Curtis often sang lead, Bobby was allowed to sing alongside him showcasing his gruff baritone vocals in contrast to his older brother's smoother tenor. During performances, Bobby would sometimes imitate the role of a preacher, which later became his nickname. At just 16, Bobby dropped out of high school.


title: Bobby Womack

text: At the beginning of the 1960s, Cooke formed SAR Records and signed the quintet to the label in 1961, where they released a handful of gospel singles. Then, Cooke changed their name to the Valentinos, relocated them to Los Angeles and convinced them to transition from gospel music to secular soul-and pop-influenced sound. Cooke produced and arranged the group's first hit single, "Lookin' for a Love", which was a pop version of the gospel song, "Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray", they had recorded earlier. The song became an R&B hit and helped land the group an opening spot for James Brown's tour. The group's next hit came in 1964 with the country-tinged "It's All Over Now", co-composed by Bobby. Their version was rising on the charts when The Rolling Stones covered it.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack was also a member of Cooke's band, touring and recording with him from 1961. The Valentinos' career was left shaky after Sam Cooke was shot and killed in a Los Angeles motel. Devastated by the news, the brothers disbanded and SAR Records folded. Womack attempted to start his solo career in 1965, first recording for Him Records and later the Chess Records subsidiary, Checker Records. Womack faced backlash after his marriage to Cooke's widow Barbara Cooke. He would go to radio stations and disc jockeys would throw away his records. He continued to work as a session musician. Between 1965 and 1968, he toured and recorded with Ray Charles.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Circa 1965, Womack relocated to Memphis where he worked at Chips Moman's American Studios. He played guitar on recordings by Joe Tex and the Box Tops. Womack played guitar on several of Aretha Franklin's albums, including "Lady Soul", but not on the hit song "Chain of Fools", as erroneously reported. His work as a songwriter caught the eye of music executives after Wilson Pickett took a liking to some of Womack's songs and insisted on recording them. Among the songs were "I'm a Midnight Mover" and "I'm in Love".


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1968, Bobby signed with Minit Records and recorded his first solo album, "Fly Me to the Moon", where he scored his first major hit with a cover of Barry McGuire' "California Dreamin'". In 1969, Womack forged a partnership with Gábor Szabó and with Szabó, penned the instrumental "Breezin'", later a hit for George Benson. Womack also worked with rock musicians Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin, contributing vocals and guitar work on the Family Stone's accomplished album "There's a Riot Goin' On", and penning the ballad "Trust Me", for Joplin on her album "Pearl". In fact, Womack was one of the last people to see Joplin alive, having visited her hours before she died at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles, California.


title: Bobby Womack

text: After two more albums with Minit, Bobby switched labels, signing with United Artists where he changed his attire and his musical direction with the album "Communication". The album bolstered his first top 40 hit, "That's the Way I Feel About Cha", which peaked at number two R&B and number 27 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in the spring of 1972.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Following "Communication", Womack's profile was raised with two more albums, released in 1972. The first was "Understanding", noted for the track "I Can Understand It", later covered by the funk band New Birth and a three-sibling lineup of Bobby's old group, the Valentinos, and two hit singles, "Woman's Gotta Have It" and "Harry Hippie". The latter song was written for Womack by Jim Ford in a country version, which Womack re-arranged in an R&B version. "Harry Hippie" later became Womack's first single to be certified gold. "Woman's Gotta Have It" became Womack's first single to hit number one on the R&B charts.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Another hit album released after "Understanding" was the soundtrack to the blaxploitation film "Across 110th Street". The title track became popular during its initial 1972 release and later would be played during the opening and closing scenes of the 1997 film, "Jackie Brown". In 1973, Womack released another hit album, "Facts of Life", and had a top 40 hit with "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," an older song Sam Cooke had done years before.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1974, Womack released his most successful single during this period with a remake of his first hit single, "Lookin' for a Love". His solo version of the song became even more successful than the original with the Valentinos, becoming his second number one hit on the R&B chart and peaking at number ten on the "Billboard" Hot 100, becoming his only hit to reach that high on the pop chart. The song was featured on the album "Lookin' for a Love Again" and featured the minor charted "You're Welcome, Stop on By", later covered by Rufus & Chaka Khan. Womack's career began stalling after Womack received the news of his brother Harry's death. Womack continued to record albums with United Artists through 1975 and 1976 but with less success than previous albums. In 1975, Womack collaborated with Rolling Stones member Ronnie Wood, on Wood's second solo album, "Now Look". In 1976, Womack organized a benefit at the Hollywood Palladium to raise funds for his friend, singer Jackie Wilson, who had suffered a heart attack.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack languished with his own recordings during the late 1970s but continued to be a frequent collaborator with other artists, most notably Wilton Felder of the Crusaders. After his son Truth Bobby died in 1978, Womack formed a production company named Truth. He hired a new co-producer and Keyboardist, Patrick Moten who worked with Ike Turner and Natalie Cole, and released the album "Roads of Life" on Arista Records in 1979.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1980, Wilton Felder released the album "Inherit the Wind" on MCA Records which featured Womack. He had a soulful song featuring on the Wilton Felder single "(No Matter How High I Get) I'll Still Be Looking Up to You", which was originally recorded in 1979 as a bonus track for the same 1980 album although it was officially released in 1985. This song became a soul classic, notably in the UK—Robbie Vincent at Radio London included the track as one of his all-time winners in October 1982. In 1981, Womack signed with Beverly Glen Records and had his first R&B top 10 single in five years—since the 1976 single "Daylight"—with "If You Think You're Lonely Now" that peaked at number three on the R&B singles chart. His accompanying album "The Poet" reached number one on the R&B album charts and is now seen as the high point of his long career, bringing him wider acclaim not only in the U.S. but also in Europe. He had two more R&B top 10 singles during the 1980s including the Patti LaBelle duet, "Love Has Finally Come at Last" (1984), and "I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much" (1985). In 1986, Bobby recorded soul song "Living in a Box" with new group Living in a Box.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1993 Bobby Womack and Lulu released song "I'm Back for more". Womack's solo career started to slow down after 1994. In the mid-1990s, he released his twentieth studio album, "Resurrection" on his close friend's Ronnie Wood's label. The album included session background work from admiring associates that included Rod Stewart, Ronald Isley, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. His remaining brothers from the Valentinos, Curtis, Friendly and Cecil, featured as background singers. Two singles from the album—a duet with Ronald Isley, "Tryin' Not to Break Down", and "Forever Love"—appeared on the Billboard R&B chart, but although the album contained two of Womack's best latter songs, "Cousin Henry" and "Don't Break Your Promise (Too Soon)", the album received a mixed critical reception. Judges sitting in the high court in London in 2003 ruled that Bobby Womack stole the song "Cry Myself to Sleep" which appeared on the album from Liverpool musician and songwriter Mark Thomas, who never received the outstanding royalty payments due to him.


title: Bobby Womack

text: A gospel album, "Back to My Roots", appeared at the end of the decade, but Womack largely concentrated on session and guest work for the next ten years.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1986, The Manhattans released the album "Back To Basics", which contained songs written and produced by Womack. Womack contributed vocals and acoustic guitar to the songs "Where Did We Go Wrong" (duet with Regina Belle), "I'm Through Trying to Prove My Love to You", "Mr D.J." and "Back into the Night".


title: Bobby Womack

text: He is the featured vocalist on June Yamagishi's "My Pleasure" album, on "Inherit The Wind", a track credited to Wilton Felder, and with Allen Toussaint on "Sputin", and he contributed vocals to Rae & Christian's version of "Wake Up Everybody". Other collaborations included "You Got What It Takes" with Diane Schuur, "Ain't Nothing Like The Lovin' We Got" with Shirley Brown, "Break the Chain" with Andrew Love & Wayne Jackson and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" with Jeanie Tracy.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1989, Womack sang on Todd Rundgren's "For the Want of a Nail" on the album "Nearly Human". In 1998, he performed George Gershwin's "Summertime" with The Roots for the Red Hot Organization's compilation album "Red Hot + Rhapsody", a tribute to Gershwin, which raised money for various charities devoted to increasing AIDS awareness and fighting the disease.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In October 1992, Womack held four tribute concert for his friend Eddie Kendricks. Womack planned the concert before Kendricks, who suffered from lung cancer, died on October 5, 1992. Womack headlined the concert; other performers included Chaka Khan, Mary Wilson, and Bill Withers.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 2010, Womack contributed lyrics and sang on "Stylo" alongside Mos Def, the first single from the third Gorillaz album "Plastic Beach". Womack was told to sing whatever was on his mind during the recording of "Stylo". "I was in there for an hour going crazy about love and politics, getting it off my chest," said Womack. He also provided vocals on the song "Cloud of Unknowing" in addition to the song "Bobby in Phoenix" on their December 2010 release "The Fall".


title: Bobby Womack

text: A new album was released on June 12, 2012, by XL Recordings. The album, "The Bravest Man in the Universe", was produced by Damon Albarn and Richard Russell. The first Song "Please Forgive My Heart" was offered as a free download on XL Recordings' official website on March 8, 2012. Contact Music reported that Womack was working on a blues album called "Living in the House of Blues", featuring collaborations with Stevie Wonder, Snoop Dogg, and Rod Stewart. In an interview with "Uncut", Womack revealed that the follow-up album would now be called "The Best Is Yet to Come" and feature Teena Marie and Ronnie Isley.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack sang a duet with Van Morrison titled "Some Peace of Mind" on Morrison's 1991 album, "Hymns to the Silence"; the song is also featured on Morrison's 2015 album "". Womack collaborated with Rudimental on "New Day", a song taken from their second studio album, "We the Generation". He had expressed an interest in working with the group, and they had exchanged ideas. Following Womack's death, his wife sent the group an a cappella vocal which he had recorded for them, and they pieced together the track.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Throughout his long recording career, many of Womack's songs have been covered by other artists. In addition to the famous Rolling Stones' version of "It's All Over Now", it has charted also with versions by Patti Drew in 1966 and as a duet between Womack and Bill Withers in 1975. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s other artists regularly recorded his songs. They included Ella Washington and Baby Washington, who recorded "I Can't Afford to Lose Him" in 1968, Jerry Butler, who released "Yes My Goodness Yes" in 1968, Margie Joseph, who issued "What You Gonna Do", and Roosevelt Grier, who had an R&B success with "People Make the World". One of his most famous songs, "Trust Me", was recorded by Janis Joplin and later by Winfield Parker amongst others. Whilst his songs are famous, Bobby Womack is not one of the most famous soul singers. The 1960s and 1970s were especially profitable years for Womack's songwriting, either solo efforts or in partnership with the likes of Darryl Carter and Jim Ford. Whilst working as a session musician with Wilson Pickett he regularly contributed songs, including the original version of "I'm In Love", later covered by Aretha Franklin. Another Atlantic Records artist, Percy Sledge, issued "Baby Help Me" in 1967. The J. Geils Band covered "Lookin' for a Love", released on several albums, including the live album "Blow Your Face Out".


title: Bobby Womack

text: In the following decade, Millie Jackson with "Put Something Down On It", Kokomo and New Birth with "I Can Understand It", Ronnie Wood with "I Got A Feeling", and George Benson with the instrumental "Breezin'", recorded versions of Womack songs. Lou Donaldson, the American jazz saxophonist, reinterpreted "You're Welcome To Stop On By" in 1974. The British singer Rod Stewart used the distinctive string arrangement from "Put Something Down On It" for his massive hit "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy". Other significant artists to record Bobby Womack songs include: Georgie Fame and Kelly Rowland and Vicki Sue Robinson, 1976 with "Daylight", Aretha Franklin and O V Wright's separate covers of "That's The Way I Feel About You" and reggae acts Dennis Alcapone, who issued a distinctive version of "Harry Hippie" entitled "Sorry Harry", and Triston Palma, who issued "Love Has Finally Come at Last" in 1984.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Jodeci's K-Ci Hailey, a notable admirer of Womack's work, covered "If You Think You're Lonely Now" in 1994. Hailey again covered Womack in 2006 with his rendition of "A Woman's Gotta Have It". The song is referenced in Mariah Carey's song "We Belong Together", a number one hit in June 2005. Carey sings "I can't sleep at night / When you are on my mind / Bobby Womack's on the radio / Singing to me: 'If you think you're lonely now.' " In 2007, R&B singer Jaheim interpolated the song as "Lonely" on his album "The Makings of a Man". Neo soul singer Calvin Richardson also covered many of Womack's tunes. "That's the Way I Feel About Cha" was covered by the late R&B musician Gerald Levert and fellow singer Mary J. Blige on Levert's 1998 album "Love & Consequences".


title: Bobby Womack

text: Film director Quentin Tarantino used "Across 110th Street" (which, in a different version, had been the title song of the 1972 movie) in the opening and closing sequences of his 1997 film "Jackie Brown". His work has been used in several other popular films, including "Meet the Parents" (2000), "Ali" (2001) and "American Gangster" (2007). A 2003 Saab commercial used Womack's interpretation of "California Dreamin." In 2005, "Across 110th Street" appeared in the hit Activision video game "".


title: Bobby Womack

text: On the 1994 release "1-800-NEW-FUNK", Nona Gaye covered "Woman's Gotta Have It", produced by Prince and backed by his band, New Power Generation.


title: Bobby Womack

text: During the spring of 1997, R&B singer Rome covered the original song from his self-titled debut album.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 2008, Kelly Rowland recorded her own version of his R&B hit "Daylight" with Travis McCoy of the Gym Class Heroes, which became a hit in the UK Singles Chart, where it was previously released as a single by Womack in 1976.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 2009, Calvin Richardson was chosen to record a tribute album to Womack to coincide with Womack's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Grammy-nominated album was entitled "". It reached No. 30 on the US R&B chart.


title: Bobby Womack

text: On February 26, 1965, 77 days after Sam Cooke's death, 20-year-old Womack and Cooke's widow Barbara Cooke, who was 10 years his senior, attempted to marry at the Los Angeles county courthouse. Womack wore one of Cooke's suits to the courthouse and the media was present to record the event, but their application was rejected. According to the "Los Angeles Sentinel", it was denied because Womack was under 21 years old and did not have his parents' permission to marry. They were finally married on March 5, the day after his 21st birthday. Their marriage was considered a scandal by some in the music business and Womack found himself ostracized in the soul music world. Womack's brothers turned against him, as did his audiences and disc jockeys. Cooke's family was also enraged. His brothers Charles and David Cook broke Womack's jaw during an attack at a hotel in Chicago. Womack later claimed he initially went to Barbara's side to console her following Cooke's death for fear that if she were left alone, she would "do something crazy."


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1970, Womack and Barbara separated after she discovered he was having an affair with his 17-year-old stepdaughter Linda Cooke (daughter of Barbara and Sam Cooke). In the ensuing tussle, Barbara fired a gun at her husband and the bullet grazed his head. Their divorce was finalized in 1971. According to Womack, Linda never spoke to her mother again.


title: Bobby Womack

text: On December 31, 1975, Womack married his third wife, 19-year-old Regina Banks. Together they had three children. In the early 1990s, Regina left him and went to New York. They later remarried in 2013.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack's firstborn from his marriage to Barbara, Vincent Dwayne Womack, was born in 1966. He committed suicide at the age of 21 by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Barbara had two daughters from her previous marriage to Sam Cooke, Tracy and Linda. She also had a son, Vincent Lance Cooke (1961–1963), who drowned in the family pool aged 18 months.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack had two sons, Truth Bobby (1978–1978) and Bobby Truth, and a daughter, GinaRe, with his wife Regina. Truth Bobby, whose name was suggested by Womack's friend Sly Stone, died aged 4 months old after falling into a coma when he was found "wedged between the wall and the bed." His death caused Womack to delve deeper into drug addiction. Bobby Truth got involved with gangs and was sent to a youth detention center at about 11 or 12 years old.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1974, Bobby's brother Harry Womack was fatally stabbed in the neck with a steak knife, by his girlfriend Patricia Wilson, in a jealous rage. She had found another woman's clothes in a room he was occupying at Bobby's house. It turned out that the clothes actually belonged to Bobby's girlfriend. After his death, Bobby established the 'Harry James Womack Memorial Scholarship Fund' in his memory. The $50,000 scholarship fund was to aid minority students complete college, because Harry had always "wished he had gone on and gotten a degree."


title: Bobby Womack

text: Bobby's former stepdaughter, Linda Cooke, co-wrote his 1972 hit song "Woman's Gotta Have It." They collaborated in the late 1970s for her planned debut album. She married Bobby's younger brother Cecil Womack, and the duo teamed up as Womack & Womack. The song "Baby I'm Scared of You" by Womack & Womack, from their album "Love Wars", was released as a single in 1983.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack opened up about his frequent drug use in his memoir, "Midnight Mover". Womack said he began using cocaine sometime in the late 1960s. He had become close friends with Sly Stone, and was an enthusiastic participant in Stone's infamous drug binges. Womack told "Rolling Stone" in 1984: "I was really off into the drugs. Blowing as much coke as I could blow. And drinking. And smoking weed and taking pills. Doing that all day, staying up seven, eight days. Me and Sly [Stone] were running partners."


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 1974, Womack experienced "temporary blindness" after he suffered a concussion from a blow to his head when he flipped backwards over an amplifier during a recording session.


title: Bobby Womack

text: His cocaine use turned into an addiction by the late 1970s. Womack partially attributed his drug addiction to his infant son Truth's death in 1978, which he said changed him forever. Throughout most of the 1980s, Womack struggled with a worsening addiction. During this period his career slowed down significantly, partly as a result of his drug usage. In 1985, after completing 14 one-nighters, Womack was hospitalized after experiencing a blood circulation problem in his left leg. Towards the end of the 1980s, he went into a rehabilitation center to get over his cocaine addiction, which he said he conquered.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack survived prostate cancer. A series of health problems would follow, including diabetes, pneumonia, colon cancer and the early signs of Alzheimer's disease.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack developed diabetes in his later years. It was revealed in March 2012 that Womack was diagnosed with colon cancer after Bootsy Collins reported it on his Facebook page. Womack announced afterwards that he was to undergo cancer surgery. On May 24, 2012, it was announced that Womack's surgery to remove a tumor from his colon was successful and he was declared cancer free. On January 1, 2013, Womack admitted that he struggled to remember his songs and other people's names, and later he was diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer's disease.


title: Bobby Womack

text: Womack died at his home in Tarzana, California at the age of 70 on June 27, 2014. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, in The Great Mausoleum, Memorial Terrace, Memorial Terrace Columbarium.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 2009, Womack was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, his original vocal group, his brothers, The Valentinos (Friendly Womack, Jr., Curtis Womack, Harry Womack and Cecil Womack), were not inducted with him.


title: Bobby Womack

text: In 2011, Womack received his first Grammy nomination for Best Short-Form Music Video for "Stylo" shared with Mos Def & Gorillaz.


title: Trapp Family

text: The Trapp Family (also known as the von Trapp Family) were a singing group formed from the family of former Austrian naval commander Georg von Trapp. The family achieved fame in their original singing career in their native Austria during the interwar period. They also performed in the United States before emigrating there permanently to escape the deteriorating situation in Austria during World War II. In the United States, they became well known as the "Trapp Family Singers" until they ceased to perform as a unit in 1957. The family's story later served as the basis for a memoir, two German films, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical "The Sound of Music". The last surviving of the original seven Trapp children, Maria Franziska, died in 2014 at the age of 99.


title: Trapp Family

text: Georg von Trapp had seven children at the time of the death of his first wife, Agathe Whitehead, and in 1927 he married Maria Kutschera, who was twenty-five years his junior, and had three more children with her. Both parts of the family were musical, and by 1935 the family was singing at the local church in Aigen, where they made the acquaintance of a young priest, Dr Franz Wasner, who encouraged their musical progress and taught them sacred music to add to the folk songs, madrigals and ballads they were already singing. While singing at their Salzburg home they were also heard by the German concert singer Lotte Lehmann, who persuaded them to take part in the song competition in Salzburg in 1936, for which they won a prize; after this, accompanied by Dr Wasner, the family toured and performed in Vienna and Salzburg, and undertook a European tour that encompassed France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and England.


title: Trapp Family

text: When Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, the family decided to leave, first for Italy (of which the Zadar-born Georg and thus the family were legally citizens). For some months in 1938, just after their flight, they lived in Warmond, near The Hague, Netherlands, as the guests of a Dutch banker, Ernest Menten. This episode is described by local historian Miep Smitsloo in her 2007 Dutch book 'Tussen Tol en Trekvaart' ('Between Toll and Canal'). In her account of the flight, Maria von Trapp does not mention this stay. From there they went to London and then to the United States, where they stayed until the expiration of their visas. After touring in Scandinavia, they returned to the United States on 1939-09-07 where they applied for immigrant status. They arrived with very little money, having lost most of the family fortune earlier during a 1935 banking collapse in Austria. Once in the United States they earned money by performing and touring nationally and internationally, first as the "Trapp Family Choir" and then, the "Trapp Family Singers", a change suggested by their booking agent Frederick Christian Schang. After living for a short time in Philadelphia and then Merion, Pennsylvania, where their youngest child Johannes was born, the family settled in Stowe, Vermont, in 1941. They purchased a farm in 1942 and converted it into the Trapp Family Lodge, initially called "Cor Unum" (Latin for "One Heart"). After World War II, they founded the Trapp Family Austrian Relief fund, which sent food and clothing to people impoverished in Austria. By now based permanently in the United States, the family performed their unique mixture of liturgical music, madrigals, folk music and instrumentals to audiences in over 30 countries for the next 20 years. They made a series of 78-rpm records for RCA Victor in the 1950s, some of which were later issued on RCA Camden LPs. There were also a few later recordings released on LPs, including some stereo sessions. The family singing group disbanded in 1957.


title: Trapp Family

text: Maria wrote an account of the singing family "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers" which was published in 1949 and was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film "The Trapp Family", which in turn inspired Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1959 Broadway musical "The Sound of Music" and then its 1965 film adaptation starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, which held the title of highest-grossing film of all-time for five years. The original seven Trapp children were: Rupert (1911–1992); Agathe (1913–2010); Maria Franziska (1914–2014); Werner (1915–2007); Hedwig (1917–1972); Johanna (1919–1994); and Martina (1921–1952). The later children were Rosmarie (1929–2022), Eleonore (1931–2021), and Johannes (b. 1939). The eldest daughter, Agathe (called "Liesl" in the film), published her own account of life in the Trapp family in 2003, "Memories Before and After The Sound of Music", which was later itself turned into the film "" in 2015.


title: Trapp Family

text: Two members of the group died while the group was still active, Georg in 1947 at age 67, and Martina, who died in childbirth in 1952 at age 30. At the time of its cessation in 1957, the group included a number of non-family members and "only Maria's iron will had kept the group together for so long." After the group's demise, Maria, Johannes, Rosmarie, and Maria Franziska went to New Guinea to do missionary work; later Maria returned to run the Trapp Family Lodge for a number of years.


title: Trapp Family

text: Of the remaining children in their later years, Rupert was already a medical doctor during World War II; Agathe spent many years as a kindergarten teacher in Maryland; Maria Franziska spent thirty years as a missionary in New Guinea; Werner became a farmer; Hedwig a music teacher; Johanna married and returned to Austria; Rosmarie and Eleonore both settled in Vermont; and Johannes followed his mother by managing the Trapp Family Lodge as a tourist resort. Maria died in 1987 and was buried with Georg and Martina in the family cemetery on the property. The original seven Trapp children had died by 2014, while only one of the later three children born to Georg and Maria, Johannes, is alive as of late August 2022. Eleonore "Lorli" von Trapp Campbell died on 17 October 2021, and Rosmarie died on 13 May 2022.


title: Trapp Family

text: The real-life Trapp family were a respected Austrian singing group throughout their career. However, their style was a world away from the Rodgers and Hammerstein-created, crowd-pleasing popular numbers as later included in the musical and film versions of their lives. Many of their studio recordings survive and have been reproduced as contemporary CD compilations. As for their live performances, in his 2004 essay "Family values: The Trapp Family Singers in North America, 1938-1956", Michael Saffle writes:


title: Trapp Family

text: On the other hand, press releases subsequent to 1941 advertised "rollicking folk songs of many lands," "gay, lilting madrigals," and "lusty yodels and mountain calls" as well as "exquisite old motets and masses," and bragged of "record cross-country tour[s]" and large numbers of engagements, which attested to their popular appeal and suggests that the religious content was only one of several contributing elements to this over their main period of popularity in America.


title: Trapp Family

text: According to Maria, under the management of F.C. Schang, "Our programs in the past had been mostly in Latin and German. Now we added English numbers. Among the English madrigals and folksongs we found some wonderful pieces like 'Sweet Honeysucking Bees,' 'Early One Morning,' and 'Just as the Tide Was Flowing;' and among the old American folksongs we found hidden treasures. Our program now had five parts: first, sacred music, selections from the ancient masters from the sixteenth and seventh centuries; second, music played on the ancient instruments: recorders, viola da gamba, spinet; third, madrigals and ballads; fourth, Austrian folksongs and mountain calls; fifth, English and American folksongs."


title: Trapp Family

text: Four grandchildren of Werner von Trapp (called "Kurt" in the film), great-grandchildren of Georg and step great-grandchildren of Maria, formed a singing group, "The von Trapps," and recorded five albums in a modern style between 2001 and 2016 before disbanding.


title: Queen Mary 2

text: RMS "Queen Mary 2 (also referred to as the QM2") is a British transatlantic ocean liner. She has served as the flagship of Cunard Line since succeeding "Queen Elizabeth 2" in 2004. As of 2022, "Queen Mary 2" is the only ocean liner (as opposed to a cruise ship) still in service.


title: Queen Mary 2

text: The ship was officially named "Queen Mary 2" by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 after the first of 1936. "Queen Mary" had in turn been named after Mary of Teck, consort of King George V. With the retirement of "Queen Elizabeth 2" in 2008, "Queen Mary 2" is the only transatlantic ocean liner in regular service between Southampton, England, and New York City, United States. The ship is also used for cruising, including an annual world cruise.