title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The "Gangs of Wasseypur" franchise promoted a fake electoral campaign through the streets of Mumbai and Delhi to market the second instalment of the political thriller. In several areas of the two cities, political posters had been plastered, in which the two opposing contestants from the movie Ramadhir Singh and Faizal Khan, vied for votes.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The main cast of "Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2" shot with the cast of Afsar Bitiya. Actors Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Faisal Khan) and Huma Qureshi (Mohsina) made a special appearance on the show. The show was aired on 7–8 August 2012.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: As a part of the marketing campaign, the 'Wasseypur Patrika', a fictitious newspaper was made available online.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: "Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2" received mostly positive reviews. It is rated 7/10 on the Hindi film review aggregator website ReviewGang.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: International critics have given "Gangs of Wasseypur", the first mainstream Bollywood film to be selected for the Director's Fortnight, rave reviews following its world premiere at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. "Gangs of Wasseypur" premiered at the 65th Cannes Film Festival on the evening of 22 May 2012 as the most highly anticipated Indian film. Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "an extraordinary ride through Bollywood's spectacular, over-the-top filmmaking".


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: "Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2" opened to a poor to medium response at most places in the country. The opening was around the 30% mark on average. The business of two days including paid previews is nett. The film showed a little growth on its third day and collected around . The film has collected around nett in nine days plus paid previews. The first part of "Gangs of Wasseypur" was not a huge hit and this has led to the second part doing lesser business. Its net collection stands at


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: Although not a huge hit by any standard, the meagre combined budget of allowed the 2 films to be commercially successful, with net domestic earnings of (of the 2 parts combined). Even on its own, the net domestic collections of far exceeds the individual budget of "Part 2" i.e. , making it a successful commercial venture.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The film mainly draws its story from the real life gang wars that took place in the Dhanbad area. There are several events in the film which differ from the actual documented events. The character of Faizal Khan, played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, dies in the climax. The character is based on Fahim Khan, who was not killed but is currently in jail in Hazaribagh and has been sentenced to life imprisonment. In the film, Sardar Khan marries a Bengali Hindu woman but in real life, the woman was maintained as a mistress. Most of the gang wars were between the gangs of Wasseypur and not with the Singh family led by Ramadhir Singh (played by Tigmanshu Dhulia) as depicted. The Singhs had been instrumental in instigating the gang wars, but never participated in them.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: Another scene in the movie depicts a Muslim girl being kidnapped by Singh's men. In reality, the victim was a local Hindu girl and the kidnappers were a few goons from Wasseypur. Members of the Singh family threatened all Wasseypur residents with retaliation if the girl was not returned within 24 hours. The girl was eventually returned as the Singhs were regarded with fear in Wasseypur.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The character of Ramadhir Singh is based on Surajdeo Singh. In the film's climax, Singh is brutally killed by Faizal Khan but in real life, Surajdeo Singh was poisoned in his native village during an election campaign in June 1991. Allegedly, Suresh Singh had him poisoned both to avenge the murder of BP Sinha and so that Suresh could become the undisputed coal king of Dhanbad.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The character of Faizal Khan's friend Fazlu is based on Sabir Alam. In the film, Fazlu is killed and decapitated by Faizal Khan. In real life, Sabir Alam and Fahim Khan were childhood friends turned enemies. Sabir was awarded the life sentence in 2007 for the murder of Fahim Khan's mother and aunt, and is currently out on bail in Wasseypur.


title: Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2

text: The mafia's downfall in Dhanbad didn't come from gang wars but rather it came from the differences between Kunti Singh, the widow of Surajdeo Singh, and his three brothers – Baccha Singh, Rajan Singh and Ram Dhani Singh – which gave others an opportunity to make space for themselves.


title: Williams Street

text: Williams Street Productions, LLC, d/b/a Williams Street and formerly known as Ghost Planet Industries, is an American animation and live action television production studio owned by the Warner Bros. Television Studios division of Warner Bros., a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery. The studio is the in-house production arm of Adult Swim (the programming block on Cartoon Network). Mike Lazzo and Keith Crofford oversaw operations for the building for most of its existence.


title: Williams Street

text: In December 2019, co-founder Lazzo retired from the company, with business partner and co-founder Crofford retiring the following year. Michael Ouweleen was named president in 2020.


title: Williams Street

text: The current name of the company originates from the location of its headquarters building – which is also the home office for Adult Swim – at 1065 Williams Street NW in Atlanta, Georgia near the current offices of TBS and TNT on Techwood Drive. The facility began as a carpet factory and was purchased by Turner as overflow offices for, among other things, set building and woodworking facilities, as well as CNN Field Engineering. Soon after CNN moved into the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta in the early 1980s, other Turner operations moved into the Techwood campus, an old country club which became the first headquarters for CNN. The street is named for early Atlanta settler Ammi Williams.


title: Williams Street

text: The company's original name, Ghost Planet Industries, came from Space Ghost's fictional planet, where the animated talk show "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" was purportedly filmed.


title: Williams Street

text: The studio's production logo features a wavy, blurred gray image of Space Ghost's fictional studio, with the words "Williams Street" beneath it. The soundtrack of Jack Webb's Mark VII Limited's production logo – a rumbling drum roll and two clinks of a hammer – is often used while the GPI/Williams Street production card is shown.


title: Williams Street

text: In its early years, the Williams Street logo would often be followed by and the copyright byline against a black or white background. This was changed, in 2001, to a drawing of a skull and crossbones with the CN checkerboard logo for its teeth, accompanied by Matt Maiellaro yelling "SKULL!!!". On some programs, the yell is slowed down, on earlier episodes of "Squidbillies", it is replaced with one of the actors on the show saying "Skull", as the skeleton of character Early Cuyler briefly flashes instead of the regular logo. The logo was created by Linda Simensky. In 2012, the inclusion of the Cartoon Network logo was removed and the copyright byline moved to beneath the Williams Street logo.


title: Williams Street

text: Williams Street formed their own music label, Williams Street Records. The label was created after Jason DeMarco, Adult Swim's vice president of strategic marketing and promotions, worked on Danger Doom, a project with Danger Mouse and MF Doom in 2005. Danger Mouse had previously worked on the music for "Toonami" and wanted to do an album that sampled that work. The group suggested the idea to Mike Lazzo; the project was successful. Williams Street Records now releases a majority of the music related to their shows. The label is managed by DeMarco.


title: Williams Street

text: 1065, the street number for Williams Street, is also the hull number for "FishCenter Live"s USS "FishCenterprise" (a parody of the s USS "Enterprise").


title: Petroglyph

text: A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions of the technique to refer to such images. Petroglyphs are found worldwide, and are often associated with prehistoric peoples. The word comes from the Greek prefix , from meaning "stone", and meaning "carve", and was originally coined in French as .


title: Petroglyph

text: Another form of petroglyph, normally found in literate cultures, a rock relief or rock-cut relief is a relief sculpture carved on "living rock" such as a cliff, rather than a detached piece of stone. While these relief carvings are a category of rock art, sometimes found in conjunction with rock-cut architecture, they tend to be omitted in most works on rock art, which concentrate on engravings and paintings by prehistoric or nonliterate cultures. Some of these reliefs exploit the rock's natural properties to define an image. Rock reliefs have been made in many cultures, especially in the ancient Near East. Rock reliefs are generally fairly large, as they need to be to make an impact in the open air. Most have figures that are larger than life-size.


title: Petroglyph

text: Stylistically, a culture's rock relief carvings relate to other types of sculpture from the period concerned. Except for Hittite and Persian examples, they are generally discussed as part of the culture's sculptural practice. The vertical relief is most common, but reliefs on essentially horizontal surfaces are also found. The term "relief" typically excludes relief carvings inside natural or human-made caves, that are common in India. Natural rock formations made into statues or other sculpture in the round, most famously at the Great Sphinx of Giza, are also usually excluded. Reliefs on large boulders left in their natural location, like the Hittite İmamkullu relief, are likely to be included, but smaller boulders described as stele or carved orthostats.


title: Petroglyph

text: In scholarly texts, a "petroglyph" is a rock engraving, whereas a "petrograph" is a rock painting. In common usage, the two words are synonymous. Both types of image belong to the wider and more general category of rock art or parietal art. Petroforms, or patterns and shapes made by many large rocks and boulders over the ground, are also quite different. Inuksuit are also not petroglyphs, they are human-made rock forms found only in the Arctic region.


title: Petroglyph

text: Petroglyphs have been found in all parts of the globe except Antarctica, with highest concentrations in parts of Africa, Scandinavia and Siberia, many examples of petroglyphs found globally are dated to approximately the Neolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary (roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago).


title: Petroglyph

text: Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, following the introduction of a number of precursors of writing systems, the existence and creation of petroglyphs began to suffer and tail off, with different forms of art, such as pictographs and ideograms, taking their place. However, petroglyphs continued to be created and remained somewhat common, with various cultures continuing to use them for differing lengths of time, including cultures who continued to create them until contact with Western culture was made in the 19th and 20th centuries.


title: Petroglyph

text: Many hypotheses exist as to the purpose of petroglyphs, depending on their location, age, and subject matter. Some petroglyph images most likely held a deep cultural and religious significance for the societies that created them. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent a type of symbolic or ritualistic language or communication style that remains not fully understood. Others, such as geocontourglyphs, more clearly depict or represent a landform or the surrounding terrain, such as rivers and other geographic features.


title: Petroglyph

text: Some petroglyph maps, depicting trails, as well as containing symbols communicating the time and distances travelled along those trails, exist; other petroglyph maps act as astronomical markers. As well as holding geographic and astronomical importance, other petroglyphs may also have been a by-product of various rituals: sites in India, for example, have seen some petroglyphs identified as musical instruments or "rock gongs".


title: Petroglyph

text: Some petroglyphs likely formed types of symbolic communication, such as types of proto-writing. Later glyphs from the Nordic Bronze Age in Scandinavia seem to refer to some form of territorial boundary between tribes, in addition to holding possible religious meanings. Petroglyph styles have been recognised as having local or regional "dialects" from similar or neighboring peoples. Siberian inscriptions loosely resemble an early form of runes, although no direct relationship has been established.


title: Petroglyph

text: Petroglyphs from different continents show similarities. While people would be inspired by their direct surroundings, it is harder to explain the common styles. This could be mere coincidence, an indication that certain groups of people migrated widely from some initial common area, or indication of a common origin. In 1853, George Tate presented a paper to the Berwick Naturalists' Club, at which a John Collingwood Bruce agreed that the carvings had "... a common origin, and indicate a symbolic meaning, representing some popular thought." In his cataloguing of Scottish rock art, Ronald Morris summarized 104 different theories on their interpretation.


title: Petroglyph

text: More controversial explanations of similarities are grounded in Jungian psychology and the views of Mircea Eliade. According to these theories it is possible that the similarity of petroglyphs (and other atavistic or archetypal symbols) from different cultures and continents is a result of the genetically inherited structure of the human brain.


title: Petroglyph

text: Other theories suggest that petroglyphs were carved by spiritual leaders, such as shamans, in an altered state of consciousness, perhaps induced by the use of natural hallucinogens. Many of the geometric patterns (known as form constants) which recur in petroglyphs and cave paintings have been shown by David Lewis-Williams to be hardwired into the human brain. They frequently occur in visual disturbances and hallucinations brought on by drugs, migraine, and other stimuli.


title: Petroglyph

text: Recent analysis of surveyed and GPS-logged petroglyphs around the world has identified commonalities indicating pre-historic (7,000–3,000 BCE) intense auroras, or natural light display in the sky, observable across the continents.


title: Petroglyph

text: The Rock Art Research Institute (RARI) of the University of the Witwatersrand studies present-day links between religion and rock art among the San people of the Kalahari Desert. Though the San people's artworks are predominantly paintings, the beliefs behind them can perhaps be used as a basis for understanding other types of rock art, including petroglyphs. To quote from the RARI website:


title: Petroglyph

text: Using knowledge of San beliefs, researchers have shown that the art played a fundamental part in the religious lives of its painters. The art captured things from the San's world behind the rock-face: the other world inhabited by spirit creatures, to which dancers could travel in animal form, and where people of ecstasy could draw power and bring it back for healing, rain-making and capturing the game.


title: Petroglyph

text: Kethaiyurumpu, Tamil Nadu. Situated 28 km north west of Dindigal, Tamil Nadu nearby Idaiyakottai and six km south west of Oddanchartam has revealed several petroglyphs mostly represent abstract symbols on two rocks, which looks like a temporary rock shelter were noticed adjacent to a Murugan temple which is in ruins on top of the Kothaiyurumbu hill.


title: Petroglyph

text: During recent years a large number of rock carvings has been identified in different parts of Iran. The vast majority depict the ibex. Rock drawings were found in December 2016 near Golpayegan, Iran, which may be the oldest drawings discovered, with one cluster possibly 40,000 years old. Accurate estimations were unavailable due to US sanctions.


title: Petroglyph

text: Petroglyphs are the most ancient works of art left by humankind that provide an opening to the past eras of life and help us to discover different aspects of prehistoric lives. Tools to create petroglyphs can be classified by the age and the historical era; they could be flint, thighbone of hunted quarries, or metallic tools. The oldest pictographs in Iran are seen in Yafteh cave in Lorestan that date back 40,000 and the oldest petroglyph discovered belongs to Timareh dating back to 40,800 years ago.


title: Petroglyph

text: Iran provides demonstrations of script formation from pictogram, ideogram, linear (2300 BC) or proto Elamite, geometric old Elamite script, Pahlevi script, Arabic script (906 years ago), Kufi script, and Farsi script back to at least 250 years ago. More than 50000 petroglyphs have been discovered, extended over all Iran's states.


title: Petroglyph

text: The oldest reliably dated rock art in the Americas is known as the "Horny Little Man." It is petroglyph depicting a stick figure with an oversized phallus and carved in Lapa do Santo, a cave in central-eastern Brazil and dates from 12,000 to 9,000 years ago.


title: WXXX

text: WXXX (95.5 FM, "95 Triple X") is a radio station licensed to South Burlington, Vermont, and serving the Champlain Valley of Vermont and New York. On air and in advertisements the station is known as "95 Triple X." The station is owned by Sison Broadcasting, and it airs a contemporary hit radio/Top 40 format. Studios and offices are on Mallets Bay Avenue in Colchester, Vermont.


title: WXXX

text: From the 1950s into the late 1970s the WXXX call sign was assigned to an AM station at 1310 kHz in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. (That station is no longer on the air.)


title: WXXX

text: On November 16, 1984, WXXX (95 Triple-X) first signed on the air. The first song was "Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones. WXXX was at first authorized by the Federal Communications Commission to operate at 3,000 watts on 95.3 MHz. At that time it was owned by several well-known Vermont broadcasters including Howard Ginsberg, John Hughes and John Nichols. They sold the station in 1986 to a Boston-based company. It was subsequently sold again to Atlantic Ventures, another Boston-based firm. After that it was purchased by the owners of 620 WVMT in Burlington, Vermont. In the early 1990s WXXX upgraded its signal, increasing power to 25,000 watts and moving one notch up the dial to 95.5 MHz. Although the station is licensed to South Burlington, WXXX's offices and studios are located in Colchester along with co-owned WVMT. WXXX and WVMT were sold in October 2018 to Vox AM/FM LLC pending FCC approval; Vox began operating the stations under a local marketing agreement on January 1, 2019. The next day, as part of some major lineup changes, 95 Triple X began carrying Elvis Duran and the Morning Show. It is worth noting that in 2005 Elvis Duran referenced the previous morning show for copying Phone Taps and using them as their own.


title: WXXX

text: WXXX was the birthplace of many radio careers including Jonny Brooks, Lana Wilder, Jon "Jag" Gay, Mel Allen, Jonathan Channell, Michael Czarny, Michael Maze, Artie The One Man Party, Matthew "LA" Reid, Michael Mann, Troy Shannon, Keith Rice, Johnny "John Lucas" Grinnell, Scott Osbourne, Jeffrey Thomas, Lisa B., Joshua "J.B. Goode" Goodman, Dena Yasner, Kenny Benson, Robert Dawes, Skipper Church, Walt Speck, Joe Taylor,"Mark In The Morning" Esbjerg, Rob Poulin and Kenan Guarino.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: Bad Trip is a 2021 American hidden camera comedy film directed by Kitao Sakurai. The film follows two best friends (Eric André and Lil Rel Howery) who take a road trip from Florida to New York City so one of them can declare his love for his high school crush (Michaela Conlin), all the while being chased by the other's criminal sister (Tiffany Haddish), whose car they have stolen for the trip.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: "Bad Trip" was scheduled to premiere at South by Southwest on March 14, 2020, and receive a theatrical release by Orion Pictures on April 17, 2020, but was postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was accidentally released on Amazon Prime Video on April 17 and pirated prior to its official release. The film was later sold to Netflix. It was released on March 26, 2021 by Netflix. "Bad Trip" received generally positive reviews from critics.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: In small-town Florida, Chris is working at a car wash when a woman, Maria, arrives. Chris tells the man whose car he's washing that she is his high school crush. He begins to vacuum the car but the overpowered vacuum sucks his clothes off, leaving him naked. He panics and hides in the car. The man has a conversation with Maria, attempting to get her number for Chris, but she declines and leaves.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: Chris' best friend, Bud, is working at a computer shop, where his sister, Trina, pulls up in her car. After having a conversation with two customers, she begs Bud for money but he refuses. Although on house arrest, she robs the store and removes her ankle tag, gives money to the two customers, warning them not to snitch. Later, Chris and Bud talk about Trina, Maria, and going on big adventures.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: One year later, a plumber enters Chris' house and Chris surprises him by rising from a bathtub full of beer cans. Chris realises he's late and runs to his new job at a smoothie shop, causing chaos along the way. Maria enters the shop and they have a conversation, where she reveals she runs an art gallery in New York City. She gives him her card for the gallery. Looking at the card causes him to lose focus and accidentally catch his hand in a smoothie blender, splattering blood everywhere.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: He later asks advice from an old man, who tells him to follow Maria to New York. Chris then sings a musical number called "I Saw a Girl Today" to the confusion of everyone around him. Talking with Bud on the bus, they make the ultimate plan for a road trip to New York. Chris gets the idea to steal Trina's car, which Bud first opposes, but Chris reminds him that Trina's in jail.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: Bud pays to remove the car from an impound. Meanwhile, Trina escapes from jail. She finds out her car was taken and plans to kill Bud and Chris, stealing a police car to hunt them down. Chris and Bud wreck a gas station pump, go drinking at a bar where Chris vomits uncontrollably and falls off a high ledge after having too many shots, and visit a zoo where Chris is raped by a gorilla after breaking into its enclosure to take a selfie with it.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: They later crash Trina's car and get into a big argument, ending their friendship, until an ROTC recruiter tells Chris some words of wisdom. Chris finds Bud on a bus back to Florida and they make up, finally making it to Maria's art gallery. Trina sees her damaged car and finding Maria’s business card covered with Chris' blood, she continues to hunt them down. After Chris declares his love for Maria, she rejects him before Trina drives through the art gallery wall, attacking Chris with various pieces of art.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: Trina chases Chris down, dangling him off the gallery roof, but Bud saves him by finally standing up to her. She embraces him, proud that he finally stood up for himself. Chris and Bud return to Maria's gallery, but she is distraught at the chaos and demands that they leave. The film ends with them deciding to cross-dress as white women at an environmentalist fundraising gala, which they had discussed while reviewing "White Chicks" earlier in the film, with Trina joining them as a white man.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: They perform the DMX song "Party Up" on stage, much to the discomfort of everybody else. Behind-the-scenes footage plays during the closing credits, showing the reactions of the people who appeared throughout the film upon being told they are part of a hidden camera prank.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: During the conceptualisation of the film, André attended Robert McKee's story seminars and consulted Jeff Tremaine and Nathan Fielder. When the film was finished, André screened it before release for comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a veteran of hidden camera prank shows and films.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: "Bad Trip" was scheduled to have its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 14, 2020, but the festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The film was also scheduled to be released theatrically by MGM's Orion Pictures on April 17, 2020, but it was pulled from the schedule due to the movie theater closures because of the pandemic restrictions. It had previously been scheduled for a theatrical release in October 2019, as well as February 2020. The film was accidentally released digitally on Amazon Prime Video for a brief time on April 17, 2020. It was taken down soon afterwards, but was available long enough to be leaked onto file-sharing platforms such as The Pirate Bay.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: In May 2020, it was announced that MGM had sold the film to Netflix. The leak reportedly did not affect the sale. Netflix released the film on March 26, 2021.


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: This released on DVD & Blu-ray on TBA by 20th Century Studios Home Entertainment (through Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment).


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on reviews from 69 critics, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "With ingeniously gross hidden-camera bits that often find their unsuspecting marks at their best, "Bad Trip" turns out to be a surprisingly uplifting ride." According to Metacritic, which calculates a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on 17 critics, the film received "generally favorable reviews".


title: Bad Trip (film)

text: Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave the film 3 1/2 out of 4 stars, and called it "an excellent showcase for Eric André" and wrote that it "shows an evolution in the hidden camera subgenre, given its warming spirit about people." Michael Phillips of "Chicago Tribune" gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and wrote, ""Bad Trip" has the blithe advantage of the easygoing complementary personalities at its center."


title: FIDE world rankings

text: The International Chess Federation (FIDE) governs international chess competition. Each month, FIDE publishes the lists "Top 100 Players", "Top 100 Women", "Top 100 Juniors" and "Top 100 Girls" rankings of countries according to the average rating of their top 10 players and top 10 female players. The Elo rating system is used.


title: FIDE world rankings

text: Juniors are considered to be players who will remain under the age of 21 years for the duration of the current calendar year.


title: FIDE world rankings

text: Girls are considered to be female players who will remain under the age of 21 years for the duration of the current calendar year.


title: FIDE world rankings

text: Every month, FIDE publishes a list ranking federations according to the average rating of their top 10 players. The top 20 federations were ranked as follows on 1 August 2022:


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The litter is a class of wheelless vehicles, a type of human-powered transport, for the transport of people. Smaller litters may take the form of open chairs or beds carried by two or more carriers, some being enclosed for protection from the elements. Larger litters, for example those of the Chinese emperors, may resemble small rooms upon a platform borne upon the shoulders of a dozen or more people. To most efficiently carry a litter, porters either place the carrying poles directly upon their shoulders or use a yoke to transfer the load from the carrying poles to the shoulders.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A simple litter consists of a sling attached along its length to poles or stretched inside a frame. The poles or frame are carried by porters in front and behind. Such simple litters are common on battlefields and emergency situations, where terrain prohibits wheeled vehicles from carrying away the dead and wounded.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Litters can also be created quickly by the lashing of poles to a chair. Such litters, consisting of a simple cane chair with maybe an umbrella to ward off the elements and two stout bamboo poles, may still be found in Chinese mountain resorts such as the Huangshan Mountains to carry tourists along scenic paths and to viewing positions inaccessible by other means of transport.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A more luxurious version consists of a bed or couch, sometimes enclosed by curtains, for the passenger or passengers to lie on. These are carried by at least two porters in equal numbers in front and behind, using wooden rails that pass through brackets on the sides of the couch. The largest and heaviest types would be carried by draught animals.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Another form, commonly called a sedan chair, consists of a chair or windowed cabin suitable for a single occupant, also carried by at least two porters in front and behind, using wooden rails that pass through brackets on the sides of the chair. These porters were known in London as "chairmen". These have been very rare since the 19th century, but such enclosed portable litters have been used as an elite form of transport for centuries, especially in cultures where women are kept secluded.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Sedan chairs, in use until the 19th century, were accompanied at night by link-boys who carried torches. Where possible, the link boys escorted the fares to the chairmen, the passengers then being delivered to the door of their lodgings. Several houses in Bath, Somerset, England still have the link extinguishers on the exteriors, shaped like outsized candle snuffers. In the 1970s, entrepreneur and Bathwick resident, John Cuningham, revived the sedan chair service business for a brief amount of time.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In pharaonic Egypt and many other places such as India, Rome, and China, the ruler and divinities (in the form of an idol like lord Krishna) were often transported in a litter in public, frequently in procession, as during state ceremonial or religious festivals.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The instructions for how to construct the Ark of the Covenant in the Book of Exodus resembles a litter.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Ancient Rome, a litter called "lectica" or "sella" often carried members of the imperial family, as well as other dignitaries and other members of the rich elite, when not mounted on horseback.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The habit must have proven quite persistent, for the Third Council of Braga in 675 AD saw the need to order that bishops, when carrying the relics of martyrs in procession, must walk to the church, and not be carried in a chair, or litter, by deacons clothed in white.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In the Catholic Church, Popes were carried the same way in Sedia gestatoria, which was replaced later by the popemobile.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A palanquin is a covered litter, usually for one passenger. It is carried by an even number of bearers (between two and eight, but most commonly four) on their shoulders, by means of a pole projecting fore and aft.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The word is derived from the Sanskrit "palyanka", meaning bed or couch. The Malay and Javanese form is "palangki", in Hindi and Bengali, "palki", in Telugu "pallaki". The Portuguese apparently added a nasal termination to these to make "palanquim". English adopted it from Portuguese as "palanquin".


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Palanquins vary in size and grandeur. The smallest and simplest, a cot or frame suspended by the four corners from a bamboo pole and borne by two bearers, is called a doli. Larger palanquins are rectangular wooden boxes eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high, with openings on either side screened by curtains or shutters. Interiors are furnished with bedding and pillows. Ornamentation reflects the social status of the traveller. The most ornate palanquins have lacquer paintwork and cast bronze finials at the ends of the poles. Designs include foliage, animals, and geometric patterns.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Ibn Batutta describes them as being "carried by eight men in two lots of four, who rest and carry in turn. In the town there are always a number of these men standing in the bazaars and at the sultan's gate and at the gates of other persons for hire." Those for "women are covered with silk curtains."


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Palanquins are mentioned in literature as early as the "Ramayana" (c. 250BC). Indian women of rank always travelled by palanquin. The conveyance proved popular with European residents in India, and was used extensively by them. Pietro Della Valle, a 17th-century Italian traveller, wrote:


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Being transported by palanquin was pleasant. Owning one and keeping the staff to power it was a luxury affordable even to low-paid clerks of the East India Company. Concerned that this indulgence led to neglect of business in favor of "rambling", in 1758 the Court of Directors of the company prohibited its junior clerks from purchasing and maintaining palanquins. Also in the time of the British in India, "dolis" served as military ambulances, used to carry the wounded from the battlefield.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In the early 19th century, the most prevalent mode of long-distance transport for the affluent was by palanquin. The post office could arrange, with a few days notice, relays of bearers to convey a traveller's palanquin between "stages" or stations. The distance between these in the government's "dak" (Hindi: "mail") system averaged about , and could be covered in three hours. A relay's usual complement consisted of two torch-bearers, two luggage-porters, and eight palanquin-bearers who worked in gangs of four, although all eight might pitch in at steep sections. A passenger could travel straight through or break their journey at dak bungalows located at certain stations.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Until the mid-19th century, palanquins remained popular for those who could afford them, but they fell out of favor for long journeys as steamers, railways, and roads suitable for wheeled transport were developed. By the beginning of the 20th century they were nearly "obsolete among the better class of Europeans". Rickshaws, introduced in the 1930s, supplanted them for trips around town.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Modern use of the palanquin is limited to ceremonial occasions. A "doli" carries the bride in a traditional wedding, and they may be used to carry religious images in Hindu processions. Many parts in Uttar Pradesh, India like Gorakhpur and around places Vishwakarma communities has been involved in making the "dolis for wedding" processions. The last known doli making dates back around 2000 by Sharmas(Vishwakarmas) in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Han China the elite travelled in light bamboo seats supported on a carrier's back like a backpack. In the Northern Wei Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Song Dynasty, wooden carriages on poles appear in painted landscape scrolls.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A commoner used a wooden or bamboo "civil litter" (), while the mandarin class used an "official litter" () enclosed in silk curtains.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The chair with perhaps the greatest importance was the bridal chair. A traditional bride is carried to her wedding ceremony by a "shoulder carriage" (), usually hired. These were lacquered in an auspicious shade of red, richly ornamented and gilded, and were equipped with red silk curtains to screen the bride from onlookers.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Sedan chairs were once the only public conveyance in Hong Kong, filling the role of cabs. Chair stands were found at all hotels, wharves, and major crossroads. Public chairs were licensed, and charged according to tariffs which would be displayed inside. Private chairs were an important marker of a person's status. Civil officers' status was denoted by the number of bearers attached to his chair. Before Hong Kong's Peak Tram went into service in 1888, wealthy residents of The Peak were carried on sedan chairs by coolies up the steep paths to their residence including Sir Richard MacDonnell's (former Governor of Hong Kong) summer home, where they could take advantage of the cooler climate. Since 1975 an annual sedan chair race has been held to benefit the Matilda International Hospital and commemorate the practice of earlier days.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Korea, royalty and aristocrats were carried in wooden litters called gama (가마). "Gama"s were primarily used by royalty and government officials. There were six types of "gama", each assigned to different government official rankings. In traditional weddings, the bride and groom are carried to the ceremony in separate "gama"s. Because of the difficulties posed by the mountainous terrain of the Korean peninsula and the lack of paved roads, "gama"s were preferred over wheeled vehicles.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: As the population of Japan increased and less and less land remained available for the grazing of animals, restrictions were placed upon the use of horses for non-military purposes, with the result that human-powered transport grew increasingly important and eventually came to prevail.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: "Kago" (Kanji: 駕籠, Hiragana: かご) were often used in Japan to transport the non-samurai citizen. "" were used by the warrior class and nobility, most famously during the Tokugawa period when regional samurai were required to spend a part of the year in Edo (Tokyo) with their families, resulting in yearly migrations of the rich and powerful (Sankin-kōtai) to and from the capital along the central backbone road of Japan.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Somewhat similar in appearance to kago are the portable shrines that are used to carry the "god-body" (goshintai), the central totemic core normally found in the most sacred area of Shinto Shrines, on a tour to and from a shrine during some religious festivals.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Traditional Vietnam employed two distinct types of litters, the "cáng" and the "kiệu". The "cáng" is a basic bamboo pole with the rider reclining in a hammock. More elaborate cáng had an adjustable woven bamboo shade to shelter the occupant. Dignitaries would have an entourage to carry parasols.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The "kiệu" resemble more of the sedan chair, enclosed with a fixed elaborately carved roof and doors. While the cáng has become obsolete, the "kiệu" is retained in certain traditional rituals a part of a temple devotional procession.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Thailand, the royalty were also carried in wooden litters called wo ("พระวอ" Phra Wo, literally, "Royal Sedan") for large ceremonies. Wos were elaborately decorated litters that were delicately carved and colored by gold leaf. Stained glass is also used to decorate the litters. Presently, Royal Wos and carriages are only used for royal ceremonies in Thailand. They are exhibited in the Bangkok National Museum.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In traditional Javanese society, the generic palanquin or "joli" was a wicker chair with a canopy, attached to two poles, and borne on men's shoulders, and was available for hire to any paying customer. As a status marker, gilded throne-like palanquins, or "jempana", were originally reserved solely for royalty, and later co-opted by the Dutch, as a status marker: the more elaborate the palanquin, the higher the status of the owner. The "joli" was transported either by hired help, by nobles' peasants, or by slaves.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Historically, the palanquin of a Javanese king ("raja"), prince ("pangeran"), lord ("raden mas") or other noble ("bangsawan") was known as a "jempana"; a more throne-like version was called a "pangkem". It was always part of a large military procession, with a yellow (the Javanese colour for royalty) square canopy. The ceremonial parasol ("payung") was held above the palanquin, which was carried by a bearer behind and flanked by the most loyal bodyguards, usually about 12 men, with pikes, sabres, lances, muskets, keris and a variety of disguised blades. In contrast, the canopy of the Sumatran palanquin was oval-shaped and draped in white cloth; this was reflective of greater cultural permeation by Islam. Occasionally, a weapon or heirloom, such as an important keris or tombak, was given its own palanquin. In Hindu culture in Bali today, the tradition of using palanquins for auspicious statues, weapons or heirlooms continues, for funerals especially; in more elaborate rituals, a palanquin is used to bear the body, and is subsequently cremated along with the departed.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In pre-colonial Philippines, litters were a way of transportation for the elite ("maginoo", "ginu", "tumao"); "Rajahs", "Lakans", "Datus", sovereign princes ("Rajamuda") and their wives use a "Sankayan" or "Sakayan", a wooden or bamboo throne with elaborate and intricate carvings carried by their servants. Also among their retinue were "payong" (umbrella)-bearers, to shade the royalty and nobility from the intense heat.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Princesses ("binibini", "dayang dayang") who were sequestered from the world were called "Binukot" or "Binocot" (“set apart”). A special type of royal, these individuals were forbidden to walk on the ground or be exposed to the general populace. When they needed to go anywhere, they were veiled and carried in a hammock or a basket-like litter similar to bird's nests carried by their slaves. Longer journeys required that they be borne inside larger, covered palanquins with silk covers, with some taking the form of a miniature hut.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Spanish-colonial Philippines, litters remained one of the options of transportation for the Spanish inhabitants and members of the native principalia class.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Southern Ghana the Akan and the Ga-Dangme carry their chiefs and kings in palanquins when they appear in their state durbars. When used in such occasions these palanquins may be seen as a substitutes of a state coach in Europe or a horse used in Northern Ghana. The chiefs of the Ga ("mantsemei") in the Greater Accra Region (Ghana) use also figurative palanquins which are built after a chief's family symbol or totem. But these day the figurative palanquins are very seldom used. They are related with the figurative coffins which have become very popular among the Ga in the last 50 years. Since these figurative coffins were shown 1989 in the exhibition "Les magicians de la terre" in the Centre Pompidou in Paris they were shown in many art museums around the world.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: From at least the 15th century until the 19th century, litters of varying types known as "tipoye" were used in the Kingdom of Kongo as a mode of transportation for the elites. Seat-style litters with a single pole along the back of the chair carried by two men (usually slaves) were topped with an umbrella. Lounge-style litters in the shape of a bed were used to move one to two people with a porter at each corner. Due to the tropical climate, horses were not native to the area nor could they survive very long once introduced by the Portuguese. Human portage was the only mode of transportation in the region and became highly adept with missionary accounts claiming the litter transporters could move at speeds 'as fast as post horses at the gallop'.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Portuguese and Spanish navigators and colonisers encountered litters of various sorts in India, Mexico, and Peru. Such novelties, imported into Spain, spread into France and then to Britain. All the European names for these devices ultimately derive from the root "sed-", as in Latin "sedere", "to sit", which gave rise to "seda" ("seat") and its diminutive "sedula" ("little seat"), the latter of which was contracted to "sella", the traditional Classical Latin name for a chair, including a carried chair.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Europe this mode of transportation met with instant success. Henry VIII of England (reigned 1509–1547) was carried around in a sedan chair—it took four strong chairmen to carry him towards the end of his life—but the expression "sedan chair" did not appear in print until 1615. Trevor Fawcett notes (see link) that British travellers Fynes Moryson (in 1594) and John Evelyn (in 1644–45) remarked on the "seggioli" of Naples and Genoa, which were chairs for public hire slung from poles and carried on the shoulders of two porters.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: From the mid-17th century, visitors taking the waters at Bath would be conveyed in a chair enclosed in baize curtains, especially if they had taken a heated bath and were going straight to bed to sweat. The curtains kept off a possibly fatal draft. These were not the proper sedan chairs "to carry the better sort of people in visits, or if sick or infirmed" (Celia Fiennes). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the chairs stood in the main hall of a well-appointed city residence, where a lady could enter and be carried to her destination without setting foot in a filthy street. The neoclassical sedan chair made for Queen Charlotte (Queen Consort from 1761 to 1818) remains at Buckingham Palace.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: By the mid-17th century, sedans for hire had become a common mode of transportation. London had "chairs" available for hire in 1634, each assigned a number and the chairmen licensed because the operation was a monopoly of a courtier of King Charles I. Sedan chairs could pass in streets too narrow for a carriage, helping to alleviate the crush of coaches in London streets, an early instance of traffic congestion. A similar system later operated in Scotland. In 1738 a fare system was established for Scottish sedans, and the regulations covering chairmen in Bath are reminiscent of the modern Taxi Commission's rules. A trip within a city cost six pence and a day's rental was four shillings. A sedan was even used as an ambulance in Scotland's Royal Infirmary.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: Chairmen moved at a good clip. In Bath they had the right-of-way: pedestrians hearing "By your leave" behind them knew to flatten themselves against walls or railings as the chairmen hustled through. There were often disastrous accidents, upset chairs, and broken glass-paned windows.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In Great Britain, in the early 19th century, the public sedan chair began to fall out of use, perhaps because streets were better paved or perhaps because of the rise of the more comfortable, companionable and affordable hackney carriage. In Glasgow, the decline of the sedan chair is illustrated by licensing records which show twenty-seven sedan chairs in 1800, eighteen in 1817, and ten in 1828. During that same period the number of registered hackney carriages in Glasgow rose to one hundred and fifty.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: The wealthy are recorded to have used sedan chairs in the cities of colonial America and the early period of the United States. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin, at the time 81 years old, gouty, and in generally declining health, is noted to have travelled to meetings of the United States Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair carried by four prisoners.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: In various colonies, litters of various types were maintained under native traditions, but often adopted by the colonials as a new ruling and/or socio-economic elite, either for practical reasons (often comfortable modern transport was unavailable, e.g. for lack of decent roads) and/or as a status symbol. During the 17–18th centuries, palanquins (see above) were very popular among European traders in Bengal, so much so that in 1758 an order was issued prohibiting their purchase by certain lower-ranking employees.


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A similar but simpler palanquin was used by the elite in parts of 18th- and 19th-century Latin America. Often simply called a "silla" (Spanish for seat or chair), it consisted of a simple wooden chair with an attached tumpline. The occupant sat in the chair, which was then affixed to the back of a single porter, with the tumpline supported by his head. The occupant thus faced backwards during travel. This style of palanquin was probably due to the steep terrain and rough or narrow roads unsuitable to European-style sedan chairs. Travellers by "silla" usually employed a number of porters, who would alternate carrying the occupant. The porters were known as silleros, cargueros or silleteros (sometimes translated as "saddle-men").


title: Litter (vehicle)

text: A chair borne on the back of a porter, almost identical to the "silla", is used in the mountains of China for ferrying older tourists and visitors up and down the mountain paths. One of these mountains where the "silla" is still used is the Huangshan Mountains of Anhui province in Eastern China.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: A heavy machine gun (HMG) is significantly larger than light, medium or general-purpose machine guns. HMGs are typically too heavy to be man-portable (carried by one person) and require mounting onto a weapons platform to be operably stable or tactically mobile, have more formidable firepower, and generally require a team of personnel for operation and maintenance.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: There are two generally recognized classes of weapons identified as HMGs. The first are weapons from World War I identified as "heavy" due to the weight and cumbersomeness of the weapons themselves, which prevents infantrymen from transporting on foot, such as the M1917 Browning machine gun. The second are large-caliber (12.7×99mm, 12.7×108mm, 14.5×114mm, or larger) machine guns, pioneered by John Browning with the M2 machine gun, designed to provide increased effective range, penetration and destructive power against covers, vehicles, aircraft and light buildings/fortifications beyond the standard-caliber rifle cartridges used in battle rifles and medium or general-purpose machine guns, or the intermediate cartridges used in assault rifles, light machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. HMGs also have more felt recoil, compared to light and medium machine gun variants.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: The term was originally used to refer to the generation of machine guns which came into widespread use in World War I. These fired standard rifle cartridges such as the 7.92×57mm Mauser, .303 British or 7.62×54mmR, but featured heavy construction, elaborate mountings, and water-cooling mechanisms that enabled long-range sustained automatic fire with excellent accuracy. However, these advantages came at the cost of being too cumbersome to move quickly, as well as requiring a crew of several soldiers to operate them. Thus, in this sense, the "heavy" aspect of the weapon referred to the weapon's bulk and ability to sustain fire, not the cartridge caliber. This class of weapons was best exemplified by the Maxim gun, invented by the American inventor Hiram Maxim. The Maxim was the most ubiquitous machine gun of World War I, variants of which were fielded simultaneously by three separate warring nations (Germany with the MG 08, Britain with the Vickers, and Russia with the PM M1910).


title: Heavy machine gun

text: The modern definition refers to a class of large-caliber (generally .50 or 12.7mm) machine guns, pioneered by John Moses Browning with the M2 machine gun. These weapons are designed to provide increased range, penetration and destructive power against vehicles, buildings, aircraft and light fortifications beyond the standard rifle calibers used in medium or general-purpose machine gun, or the intermediate cartridges used in light machine guns. In this sense, the "heavy" aspect of the weapon refers to its superior power and range over light- and medium-caliber weapons, in addition to its weight. This class of machine gun came into widespread use during World War II, when the M2 was used widely in fortifications, on vehicles and in aircraft by American forces. A similar HMG capacity was later fielded by the Soviets in the form of Vasily Degtyaryov's DShK in 12.7×108mm. The ubiquitous German MG42 general-purpose machine gun, though well-suited against infantry, lacked the M2's anti-fortification and anti-vehicle capability, a fact that was noted and lamented by the Germans. The continued need for a longer-range machine gun with anti-materiel capability to bridge the gap between exclusively anti-infantry weapons and exclusively anti-materiel weapons has led to the widespread adoption and modernization of the class, and most nations' armed forces are equipped with some type of HMG.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: Currently, machine guns with calibers smaller than 10mm are generally considered medium or light machine guns, while those larger than 15mm are generally classified as autocannons instead of HMGs.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: In the late 19th century, Gatling guns and other externally powered types such as the Nordenfelt were often made in a variety of calibers, such as 0.5-inch and 1-inch. Due to their multiple barrels, overheating was not so much of an issue, but they were also quite heavy.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: When Maxim developed his recoil-powered machine gun using a single barrel, his first main design weighed a modest 26 pounds (11.8 kg) and fired a .45-inch rifle-caliber bullet from a 24-inch barrel. A famous photo of Maxim showed him picking it up by its 15-pound tripod (6.8 kg) with one arm. It was similar to present-day medium machine guns, but it could not be fired for extended periods due to overheating. As a result, Maxim created a water jacket cooling system to enable it to fire for extended periods. However, this added significant weight, as did the change to more powerful rifle cartridges.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: There were thus two main types of heavy, rapid-fire weapons: the manually powered, multiple-barrel machine guns and the single-barrel Maxim guns. By the end of the 19th century, many new designs such as the M1895 Colt–Browning and Hotchkiss were developed, powered by gas operation or recoil operation. Also, rather than the heavy water jacket, new designs introduced other types of barrel cooling, such as barrel replacement, metal fins, heat sinks or some combination of these.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: Machine guns diverged into heavier and lighter designs. The later model water-cooled Maxim guns and its derivatives the MG 08 and the Vickers, as well as the American M1917 Browning machine gun, were all substantial weapons. The .303 Vickers, for example, weighed 33 lb (15 kg) and was mounted on a tripod that brought the total weight to 50 lb (23 kg). The heavier designs could, and in some cases did, fire for days on end, mainly in fixed defensive positions to repel infantry attacks. These machine guns were typically mounted on tripods and were water-cooled, and a well-trained crew could fire nonstop for hours, given sufficient ammunition, replacement barrels and cooling water. Carefully positioned HMGs could stop an attacking force before they reached their objectives.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: However, during the same period a number of lighter and more portable air-cooled designs were developed weighing less than 30 lbs (15 kg). In World War I they were to be as important as the heavier designs, and were used to support infantry on the attack, on aircraft, and on many types of vehicles.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: The lightest of the new designs were not capable of sustained automatic fire, as they did not have water jackets and were fed from comparatively small magazines. Essentially machine rifles with a bipod, weapons like the Lewis Gun, Chauchat and the Madsen were portable by one soldier, but were made for single and burst fire.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: The medium designs offered greater flexibility, either being fitted with a bipod in the light machine gun role or on a tripod or other weapon mount as medium machine guns. An example was the Hotchkiss M1909 machine gun weighing 27.6 lb (12.2 kg) fitted with a mini-tripod and using linkable 30-round ammunition strips, but there was also a belt-fed version.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: This type of multipurpose machine gun would be further developed, and later given names such as "universal machine gun", and later "general-purpose machine gun", and would eventually supplant the water-cooled designs. These later designs used quick-change barrel replacement to reduce overheating, which further reduced the weapon's weight, but at the cost of increasing the soldier's load due to the extra barrels. Some earlier designs like the Vickers had this feature, but it was mainly for barrel wear, as they normally used water cooling. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that quick barrel replacement for cooling purposes became more popular in weapons such as the ZB vz. 30, the Bren, the MG34 and the MG42.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: The heavier designs continued to be used throughout World War II and into the 1960s, but were gradually phased out in favor of air-cooled designs. The mediums were now used both as medium machine guns while mounted on tripods and as light machine guns while mounted on bipods. This was possible in part because a heavy, static MG position was not a very effective tactic in vehicle-centered warfare, and the significantly lighter air-cooled designs could nearly match the capabilities of the water-cooled versions.


title: Heavy machine gun

text: Gatling-type machine guns such as the Minigun and GShG-7.62 reappeared after World War II. These are typically mounted on ships and helicopters because of their weight and large ammunition requirements (due to their extremely high rate of fire.) The need for sustained automatic fire on the ground, however, is now nearly entirely filled by air-cooled medium machine guns.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: In the special case of a finite simple graph, the adjacency matrix is a (0,1)-matrix with zeros on its diagonal. If the graph is undirected (i.e. all of its edges are bidirectional), the adjacency matrix is symmetric.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The relationship between a graph and the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of its adjacency matrix is studied in spectral graph theory.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix of a graph should be distinguished from its incidence matrix, a different matrix representation whose elements indicate whether vertex–edge pairs are incident or not, and its degree matrix, which contains information about the degree of each vertex.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: For a simple graph with vertex set , the adjacency matrix is a square matrix such that its element is one when there is an edge from vertex to vertex , and zero when there is no edge. The diagonal elements of the matrix are all zero, since edges from a vertex to itself (loops) are not allowed in simple graphs. It is also sometimes useful in algebraic graph theory to replace the nonzero elements with algebraic variables. The same concept can be extended to multigraphs and graphs with loops by storing the number of edges between each two vertices in the corresponding matrix element, and by allowing nonzero diagonal elements. Loops may be counted either once (as a single edge) or twice (as two vertex-edge incidences), as long as a consistent convention is followed. Undirected graphs often use the latter convention of counting loops twice, whereas directed graphs typically use the former convention.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix of a bipartite graph whose two parts have and vertices can be written in the form


title: Adjacency matrix

text: where is an matrix, and and represent the and zero matrices. In this case, the smaller matrix uniquely represents the graph, and the remaining parts of can be discarded as redundant. is sometimes called the "biadjacency matrix".


title: Adjacency matrix

text: Formally, let be a bipartite graph with parts , and edges . The biadjacency matrix is the 0–1 matrix in which if and only if .


title: Adjacency matrix

text: If is a bipartite multigraph or weighted graph, then the elements are taken to be the number of edges between the vertices or the weight of the edge , respectively.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: An -adjacency matrix of a simple graph has if is an edge, if it is not, and on the diagonal. The Seidel adjacency matrix is a -adjacency matrix. This matrix is used in studying strongly regular graphs and two-graphs.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The distance matrix has in position the distance between vertices and . The distance is the length of a shortest path connecting the vertices. Unless lengths of edges are explicitly provided, the length of a path is the number of edges in it. The distance matrix resembles a high power of the adjacency matrix, but instead of telling only whether or not two vertices are connected (i.e., the connection matrix, which contains boolean values), it gives the exact distance between them.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The convention followed here (for undirected graphs) is that each edge adds 1 to the appropriate cell in the matrix, and each loop adds 2. This allows the degree of a vertex to be easily found by taking the sum of the values in either its respective row or column in the adjacency matrix.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix of a directed graph can be asymmetric. One can define the adjacency matrix of a directed graph either such that


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The former definition is commonly used in graph theory and social network analysis (e.g., sociology, political science, economics, psychology). The latter is more common in other applied sciences (e.g., dynamical systems, physics, network science) where is sometimes used to describe linear dynamics on graphs.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: Using the first definition, the in-degrees of a vertex can be computed by summing the entries of the corresponding column and the out-degree of vertex by summing the entries of the corresponding row. When using the second definition, the in-degree of a vertex is given by the corresponding row sum and the out-degree is given by the corresponding column sum.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix of a complete graph contains all ones except along the diagonal where there are only zeros. The adjacency matrix of an empty graph is a zero matrix.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix of an undirected simple graph is symmetric, and therefore has a complete set of real eigenvalues and an orthogonal eigenvector basis. The set of eigenvalues of a graph is the spectrum of the graph. It is common to denote the eigenvalues by formula_2


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The greatest eigenvalue formula_3 is bounded above by the maximum degree. This can be seen as result of the Perron–Frobenius theorem, but it can be proved easily. Let be one eigenvector associated to formula_3 and the component in which has maximum absolute value. Without loss of generality assume is positive since otherwise you simply take the eigenvector formula_5, also associated to formula_3. Then


title: Adjacency matrix

text: For -regular graphs, is the first eigenvalue of for the vector (it is easy to check that it is an eigenvalue and it is the maximum because of the above bound). The multiplicity of this eigenvalue is the number of connected components of , in particular formula_8 for connected graphs. It can be shown that for each eigenvalue formula_9, its opposite formula_10 is also an eigenvalue of if is a bipartite graph. In particular − is an eigenvalue of any -regular bipartite graph.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The difference formula_11 is called the spectral gap and it is related to the expansion of . It is also useful to introduce the spectral radius of formula_12 denoted by formula_13. This number is bounded by formula_14. This bound is tight in the Ramanujan graphs, which have applications in many areas.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: Suppose two directed or undirected graphs and with adjacency matrices and are given. and are isomorphic if and only if there exists a permutation matrix such that


title: Adjacency matrix

text: In particular, and are similar and therefore have the same minimal polynomial, characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, determinant and trace. These can therefore serve as isomorphism invariants of graphs. However, two graphs may possess the same set of eigenvalues but not be isomorphic. Such linear operators are said to be isospectral.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: If is the adjacency matrix of the directed or undirected graph , then the matrix (i.e., the matrix product of copies of ) has an interesting interpretation: the element gives the number of (directed or undirected) walks of length from vertex to vertex . If is the smallest nonnegative integer, such that for some , , the element of is positive, then is the distance between vertex and vertex . A great example of how this is useful is in counting the number of triangles in an undirected graph , which is exactly the trace of divided by 6. We divide by 6 to compensate for the overcounting of each triangle (3! = 6 times). The adjacency matrix can be used to determine whether or not the graph is connected.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The adjacency matrix may be used as a data structure for the representation of graphs in computer programs for manipulating graphs. The main alternative data structure, also in use for this application, is the adjacency list.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: The space needed to represent an adjacency matrix and the time needed to perform operations on them is dependent on the matrix representation chosen for the underlying matrix. Sparse matrix representations only store non-zero matrix entries and implicitly represents the zero entries. They can for example be used to represent sparse graphs without incurring the space overhead from storing the many zero entries in the adjacency matrix of the sparse graph. In the following section the adjacency matrix is assumed to be represented by an array data structure so that zero and non-zero entries in a matrix are all directly represented in storage.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: Because each entry in the adjacency matrix requires only one bit, it can be represented in a very compact way, occupying only |"V" | / 8 bytes to represent a directed graph, or (by using a packed triangular format and only storing the lower triangular part of the matrix) approximately |"V" | / 16 bytes to represent an undirected graph. Although slightly more succinct representations are possible, this method gets close to the information-theoretic lower bound for the minimum number of bits needed to represent all -vertex graphs. For storing graphs in text files, fewer bits per byte can be used to ensure that all bytes are text characters, for instance by using a Base64 representation. Besides avoiding wasted space, this compactness encourages locality of reference.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: However, for a large sparse graph, adjacency lists require less storage space, because they do not waste any space to represent edges that are "not" present.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: An alternative form of adjacency matrix (which, however, requires a larger amount of space) replaces the numbers in each element of the matrix with pointers to edge objects (when edges are present) or null pointers (when there is no edge). It is also possible to store edge weights directly in the elements of an adjacency matrix.


title: Adjacency matrix

text: Besides the space tradeoff, the different data structures also facilitate different operations. Finding all vertices adjacent to a given vertex in an adjacency list is as simple as reading the list, and takes time proportional to the number of neighbors. With an adjacency matrix, an entire row must instead be scanned, which takes a larger amount of time, proportional to the number of vertices in the whole graph. On the other hand, testing whether there is an edge between two given vertices can be determined at once with an adjacency matrix, while requiring time proportional to the minimum degree of the two vertices with the adjacency list.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a 1986 American psychological horror crime film directed and co-written by John McNaughton about the random crime spree of a serial killer who seemingly operates with impunity. It stars Michael Rooker in his debut as the nomadic killer Henry, Tom Towles as Otis, a prison buddy with whom Henry is living, and Tracy Arnold as Becky, Otis's sister. The characters of Henry and Otis are loosely based on convicted real life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: "Henry" was filmed in 1985 but had difficulty finding a film distributor. It premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1986 and played at other festivals throughout the late 1980s. Following successful showings during which it attracted both controversy and positive critical attention, the slasher film was rated "X" by the MPAA, further increasing its reputation for controversy. It was subsequently picked up for a limited release in 1990 in an unrated version. It was shot on 16mm in less than a month with a budget of $110,000.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The original poster artwork was a painting by Joe Coleman. It was considered too extreme and, after being withdrawn, was replaced by the current official poster.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Henry is a psychopathic drifter who murders scores of people – men, women, and children – as he travels throughout America. He migrates to Chicago, where he stops at a diner, eats dinner and later murders the elderly proprietors of a liquor store and several women.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Otis, Henry's prison friend, picks up his sister Becky at O'Hare International Airport and brings her back to the apartment that he shares with Henry. Later that night, Becky asks Henry about the murder of his mother, the crime that landed him in prison. Henry tells her that he stabbed his mother because she abused and humiliated him as a child, often having sex in front of him (which contradicts his other statements, in which he claims to have shot her or killed her with a bat). Becky reveals that her father raped her as a teenager. Henry discloses that he is disturbed by sexual violence against women and forms a seemingly protective bond with Becky. When Otis makes an incestuous pass at Becky, Henry violently threatens him and makes him promise not to do it again. Becky indicates a romantic interest in Henry, but he seems repulsed by her overtures.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The next day, Becky gets a job at a salon. Henry and Otis go out that night and pick up two prostitutes whom Henry murders by breaking their necks. Otis is shocked and disturbed and confronts Henry about his murderous lifestyle. Henry invites him to adopt his philosophy of murder, trying to convince him of a relativistic nature of killing. Otis worries that the police might catch them, but Henry assures him that everything will work out.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: After Otis destroys his old TV out of frustration, Henry takes him to a fence to buy a new one. The rude man ridicules them for having little money and berates them for refusing to buy his black-market goods. Having found an excuse to indulge his murderous impulses, Henry stabs the fence repeatedly with a soldering iron nearby. When the man fights back, Otis grabs an electrical cord and chokes him. Henry then smashes a TV onto his head. At Henry's urging, Otis smiles as he plugs in the damaged TV, electrocuting the man. They then steal a high-end TV and a camcorder and return home undetected.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: When Otis is punched by a teenage boy whom he tries to sexually assault while selling him marijuana, he complains to Henry that he wants to murder the boy. Henry convinces Otis to abandon the grudge for fear of being caught if he were to harm the boy, since he has been seen near the boy before. Bolstered by the thrill of their previous homicide, the two embark on a killing spree. They set a trap for drivers on Lower Wacker Drive, faking a broken-down car, then fatally shooting a man who pulls over to help. Henry advises Otis to employ a different "modus operandi" for each murder so that the police will not connect them to one perpetrator. He also explains the importance of being on the move; by the time that police realize that they are looking for a serial killer, he can be long gone. Henry says that he will have to leave Chicago soon. Later on, they watch a recording of a home invasion in which they murdered a family of three. Otis begins to molest the mother's corpse until Henry objects.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Becky quits her job in order to return home to her daughter after hearing that her ex-husband has been jailed for murder. Otis and Henry argue after their camera gets destroyed while Otis is filming female pedestrians from the window of Henry's moving car. Otis goes for a drink while Henry returns to the apartment. Becky tells Henry her plans, and they decide to go out for a steak dinner. Afterward, she tries to seduce him, but they are interrupted by Otis. Henry leaves to buy cigarettes and get some air. On his way back he encounters a woman walking her dog and is tempted to murder her, but abandons the idea. When he returns to the apartment, he finds Otis raping and strangling Becky. Henry fights Otis, but Otis gets the upper hand. As Otis prepares to kill Henry, Becky stabs him in the eye with her comb. While Becky is in shock, Henry grabs the comb and brutally murders Otis, then dismembers the body in the bathtub.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Henry and Becky dump trash bags containing Otis's body parts into the river and leave town. Henry suggests that they go to his sister's ranch in San Bernardino, California, promising Becky that they will send for her daughter when they arrive. In the car, Becky confesses that she loves Henry. "I guess I love you too," Henry replies. They book a motel room for the night. The next morning, Henry leaves the motel alone, gets into the car and drives away without Becky. He stops at the side of the road to dump Becky's blood-stained suitcase in a ditch, then drives away.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 1984, executive producers Malik B. Ali and Waleed B. Ali of Maljack Productions (MPI) hired John McNaughton, a former delivery man for their video-equipment-rental business, to direct a documentary about gangsters in Chicago during the 1930s. "Dealers in Death" was a moderate success, and was well received critically, so the Ali brothers kept McNaughton on as director for a second documentary about the Chicago wrestling scene in the 1950s. A collection of vintage wrestling tapes had been discovered, and the owner was willing to sell them to the Ali brothers for use in the documentary. However, after financing was in place, the owner doubled his price and the brothers pulled out of the deal. With the documentary canceled, Waleed and McNaughton decided that the money for the documentary could instead be used to finance a feature film. The Ali brothers gave McNaughton $110,000 to make a bloody horror film.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: McNaughton knew that the budget would be too small for a horror film about aliens or monsters and was unsure how to proceed until he saw an episode of "20/20" about the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton decided to film a fictional version of Lucas's crimes.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In the meantime, the Ali brothers brought Steven A. Jones into the project as a producer, and Jones hired Richard Fire to work as McNaughton's co-writer. With the producer, writer and director in place and with the subject matter decided, the film went into production.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: "Henry" was shot on 16mm in only 28 days in 1985. The film cost $110,000 to produce, and costs were cut by employing family and friends whenever possible and having those on screen use their own possessions. For example, the dead couple in the bar at the start of the film are the parents of director John McNaughton's best friend, while the bar itself is where McNaughton had once worked. McNaughton's close friend Mary Demas plays three different murder victims: the woman in the ditch in the opening shot, the woman with the bottle in her mouth in the toilet and the first of the two murdered prostitutes. The four women whom Henry encounters outside the shopping mall were played more of McNaughton's close friends. The woman hitchhiking was a woman with whom McNaughton used to work. The clothes that Michael Rooker wears throughout the film were his own (apart from the shoes and socks). The 1970 Chevrolet Impala that Henry drives belonged to one of the film's electricians. Art director Rick Paul plays the man shot in the layby, storyboard artist Frank Coronado plays the smaller of the attacking bums, grip Brian Graham plays the husband in the family-massacre scene and executive producer Waleed B. Ali plays the clerk serving Henry toward the end of the film.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Rooker remained in character for the duration of filming, even off set, not socializing with any of the cast or crew during the month-long shoot. According to costume designer Patricia Hart, she would not know from one minute to the next if she was talking to Rooker or to Henry, as he would sometimes speak about his childhood and background as if he were Henry. When Rooker's wife discovered that she was pregnant, she waited until filming had stopped before she told him.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Because the production had so little money, the producers could not afford extras, so all of the people in the exterior shots of the streets of Chicago are simply unknowing pedestrians going about their business. For example, in the scene in which Becky emerges from the subway, two men at the top of the stairs are in a heated discussion; the men were really arguing and refused to move, so McNaughton included them in the shot.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: After filming was finished, there was so little money left that the film had to be edited on a rented 16 mm flatbed that was set up in editor Elena Maganini's living room.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: MPI did not plan a theatrical release for "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer". McNaughton sent copies of the film to prominent film critics, hoping to attract attention and thus a distributor. Vestron was the first distributor to show an interest, but it pulled out over home-video distribution disputes with MPI and fears of a potential lawsuit because of the film's use of real names. The film premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival on September 24, 1986.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 1988, MPI hired Chuck Parello, who worked to have the film be released in theaters. The film played at several festivals throughout 1988 and 1989, where it attracted increasing amounts of attention, and Roger Ebert wrote positively of it at the Telluride Film Festival in 1989. Atlantic Entertainment Group expressed interest in releasing the film theatrically but mandated that it have an MPAA "R" rating. The MPAA rated the film "X," which was popularly associated with pornographic films at the time. Because of the "X" rating, Atlantic pulled out.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In Ebert's review of the film, he writes that the MPAA told the filmmakers that no possible combination of edits would have qualified their film for an R rating, indicating that the ratings issue did not simply involve graphic violence. He also said that the film was an obvious candidate for the proposed "A" rating for non-pornographic films intended for adults. Ultimately, the film, along with Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" and Pedro Almodóvar's "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!", were the impetus for the creation of an adults-only rating for non-pornographic films, NC-17. Following further controversy over the rating, Greycat Films picked up the film for distribution after it was screened at the 1989 Boston Film Festival.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The film's theatrical premiere occurred on January 5, 1990 in Boston, where it grossed $50,504 over the weekend. On March 30, it opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York and in Austin, Texas, grossing $17,888 for the weekend. In its theatrical run, the film eventually grossed $609,000, in part because of the continued controversies. McNaughton credited the MPAA's refusal to accept any cuts as his opportunity to release it uncut, as he would have made cuts had the MPAA requested them.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In the UK, the film has had a long and complex relationship with the BBFC. In 1991, distributor Electric Pictures submitted the film for classification with 38 seconds already removed (the pan across the hotel room and into the bathroom revealing the semi-naked woman on the toilet with a broken bottle stuck in her mouth). Electric Pictures performed this edit without the approval of director John McNaughton, because the company feared that including such an extreme image so early in the film would turn the board against them. The film was classified "18" for theatrical release in April 1991, after 24 seconds was cut from the family massacre scene (primarily involving the shots in which Otis gropes the mother's breasts before and after killing her).


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 1992, Electric Pictures submitted the pre-cut theatrical print of the film to the BBFC for home-video classification, once again without the shot of the dead woman. In January 1993, the BBFC again classified the film "18," but the board also removed four seconds from the scene in which the TV salesman is murdered, meaning that a total of 42 seconds was removed from the home-video release. However, BBFC director James Ferman overruled his own team and demanded that the family-massacre scene be trimmed down to almost nothing, removing 71 seconds of footage. Additionally, Ferman reedited the scene so that the reaction shot of Henry and Otis watching TV now occurred midway through the scene rather than at the end. The total time cut from the film was thus 113 seconds.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 2001, Universal Studios Home Entertainment submitted the full uncut version of the film for classification for home-video release. The BBFC waived the four seconds cut from the murder of the TV salesman, and 61 of the 71 seconds from the family-massacre scene (it refused to reinstate the 10 seconds of the scene in which Otis molests the mother after she is dead). Additionally, the board partly approved the 38-second shot of the dead woman on the toilet, but demanded that the last 17 seconds of the shot be removed. Based upon this, Universal decided to remove the shot entirely.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 2003, Optimum Releasing again submitted the full uncut version of the film for classification for a cinema release, and later for a home-video release. In February 2003, the BBFC passed the film completely uncut, and in March 2003 the uncut version of the film was officially released in the UK for the first time.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: A parallel censoring of the film happened in New Zealand, where the film was originally banned outright by the Film Censor in 1992. A censored version was subsequently released on home video with cuts to the family-massacre sequence. The film was finally released uncut on DVD in Australia in 2005. In 2010, another DVD release was approved, apparently without cuts in New Zealand for the first time.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Critical reception at the film's premiere was mixed, and the resulting debate over the film's themes and morality helped to raise its profile. The film's subsequent theatrical release was able to capitalize on the positive reviews that it had received throughout its controversial festival showings, and its theatrical reception was more positive. Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 89% of 62 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating is 7.90/10. The consensus reads, ""Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" is an effective, chilling profile of a killer that is sure to shock and disturb." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews."


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Critics who liked the film tended to focus on the freshness it had brought to the saturated horror genre. Roger Ebert, for example, called "Henry" "a very good film" and a "low-budget tour de force," and wrote that the film attempts to deal "honestly with its subject matter, instead of trying to sugar-coat violence as most 'slasher' films do." Elliott Stein of "The Village Voice" stated, "the best film of the year... [it] recalls the best work of Cassavetes." "Siskel & Ebert" described it as "a powerful and important film, brilliantly acted and directed." Dave Kehr of the "Chicago Tribune" said it was "one of the ten best films of the year" and that it "combines Fritz Lang's sense of predetermination with the freshness of John Cassavetes." In a review from 1989, "Variety" wrote the film "marks the arrival of a major film talent" in McNaughton.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The film is listed in the reference book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", which says ""Henry" evokes horror through gritty realism and excellent acting. The film is not fun to watch, but it is important in that it forces viewers into questioning our cultural fascination with serial killers."


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The film was recognized by the American Film Institute in 2003 for its AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains list.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In prison, Henry Lee Lucas confessed to over 600 murders, claiming that he committed about one murder per week from his release from prison in 1975 until his arrest in 1983. While the film was inspired by Lucas' confessions, the vast majority of his claims turned out to be false. A detailed investigation by the Texas attorney general's office ruled out Lucas as a suspect in most of his confessions by comparing his known whereabouts to the dates of the murders to which he confessed. Lucas was convicted of 11 murders, but law-enforcement officers and other investigators have overwhelmingly rejected his claims of having killed hundreds of victims. The Texas attorney general's office produced the "Lucas Report," which concluded that reliable physical evidence linked Lucas to three murders.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: Others familiar with the case have suggested that Lucas committed between two and 40 murders. Lucas confessed to almost every unsolved murder brought before him, often with the collusion of police officers who wanted to clear their files of unsolved and cold cases. Lucas reported that the false confessions ensured better conditions for him, as law enforcement officers would offer him incentives to confess to crimes that he did not commit. Such confessions also increased his fame with the public. Lucas was ultimately convicted of 11 murders and sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified female victim known only as "Orange Socks." His death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Texas governor George W. Bush in 1998. Lucas died in prison of heart failure on March 13, 2001.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: The character of Henry shares many biographical concurrences with Lucas himself. However, as the opening statement makes clear, the film is based more on Lucas' violent fantasies and confessions rather than the crimes for which he was convicted. Similarities between real life and the film include:


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In the UK, the film was first released in its uncut form in 2003 by Optimum Releasing. The DVD contains a commentary by director John McNaughton (recorded in 1999), a censorship timeline, comparisons of the scenes edited by the BBFC with their original uncut version, two interviews with McNaughton (one from 1999, one from 2003), a stills gallery and a biography of Henry Lee Lucas (text).


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: In 2005, a special 20th-anniversary edition two-disc DVD was released by Dark Sky Films in the U.S. The DVD includes a newly recorded commentary from McNaughton, a 50-minute making-of documentary, a 23-minute documentary about Henry Lee Lucas, 21 minutes of deleted scenes with commentary by McNaughton, a stills gallery and prints of the original storyboards. Its reversible cover features the banned original poster art by Joe Coleman. The film was first released on Blu-ray disc in 2009 by MPI Media Group.


title: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

text: A sequel, "", was released in 1996. The film was directed by Chuck Parello and starred Neil Giuntoli as Henry with Kate Walsh and Penelope Milford in supporting roles.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer-artist Jim Steranko, she first appeared in the "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." feature in "Strange Tales" #159 (August 1967).


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Lisa Rinna portrayed the character in the 1998 film "", and Julia Louis-Dreyfus portrays Fontaine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in the Disney+ series "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" (2021), and the films "Black Widow" (2021), "" (2022), and the upcoming film "" (2024).


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: The Contessa appeared prominently throughout creator Jim Steranko's run of the "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." feature that ran through "Strange Tales" #168 (May 1968) and in the same-name comic-book series that began the following month.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: An agent who threw S.H.I.E.L.D. chief Nick Fury for a loop upon their initial meeting, she quickly became his love interest, and was featured in a silent, one-page seduction sequence in "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." #2 that famously had two panels changed, at the behest of the Comics Code Authority. In the third-to-last panel, de facto Marvel art director John Romita, Sr. redrew a telephone that had been taken off the hook for privacy, placing the receiver back in the cradle; in the last panel, an image was removed and replaced with a closeup of an item from earlier in the page — a phallic long-barreled gun in a holster:


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: The story was reprinted as published in "Nick Fury Special Edition" #1 (Dec. 1983). When reprinted again, in "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Who Is Scorpio?" (Marvel Enterprises, 2001; ), however, Steranko's original final panel was reinserted. In a black-and-white long shot with screentone shading, the couple is beginning to embrace, with Fury standing and the Contessa on one knee, getting up.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine was a member of the European jet set and a citizen of Italy. After both her parents were killed for aiding some unspecified resistance movement, the Contessa found her life meaningless. Desiring to carry on in their places so their deaths would not be in vain, she eventually was contacted by the international espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and entered a training program to become an agent.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: She first encountered its executive director, Nick Fury, aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.'s airborne headquarters, the Helicarrier, toward the end of her training, impressing Fury by tossing him head-over-heels with a judo throw after his uttering an untoward remark about female agents. The two eventually became lovers, and their relationship continued for many years.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: As a result of the Contessa's remarkable talents and skills in many areas, she quickly became a leading member of S.H.I.E.L.D. She was also at one point appointed as the leader of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Femme Force.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: She was eventually reassigned to the position of S.H.I.E.L.D. Liaison to the United Kingdom. In that capacity, she was tasked with providing support to British superhero Union Jack, Israeli superhero Sabra, and Saudi superhero Arabian Knight in thwarting a Radically Advanced Ideas in Destruction (RAID) terrorist attack on London, England. Shortly thereafter, she worked with Commodore Lance Hunter and on creating the British version of the Superhuman Registration Act. She then met with Joseph Hauer, Pete Wisdom, Captain Britain, and Union Jack to brief them on the Act's ramifications on the British superhuman population.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: At some point, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine approached Amanda Armstrong where she informed her that her late father was an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. She accepted Valentina's offer while using her band as a cover for her double life.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: It is revealed that shortly after the Secret War, a Skrull agent posed as Contessa de la Fontaine in order to spy on Nick Fury and learn as many secrets as possible. However, Fury grew suspicious and killed the agent, who then reverted to her true shape, thus revealing the Invasion to Fury.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: After the death of Captain America, a second impostor posing as the Contessa approached Dum Dum Dugan with the intent of learning the location of Fury, whom the Skrulls are seeking. After he reveals he does not know, the impostor stabs Dugan with claws resembling those of the X-Man, Wolverine. After Dugan's body is thrown into the ocean, the impostor takes his place.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Both Dugan and the Contessa are later shown alive and healthy. They are freed from captivity along with the other humans kidnapped and replaced by Skrulls.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: In the premiere of the "Secret Warriors" series, where Nick Fury is fighting back against Norman Osborn's H.A.M.M.E.R., it is shown Hydra has always controlled S.H.I.E.L.D., right from the start. Fontaine becomes the new Madame Hydra, and is revealed to have been a Russian mole recruited into S.H.I.E.L.D. She is working for the formerly Soviet espionage group called Leviathan. This betrayal is known to Fury, who is working on bringing down Hydra and Leviathan. Fontaine kills the current Madame Hydra, who is revived in a new form. After her defeat, Nick Fury tries to rescue Contessa from jail.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: In the alternate universe MC2 imprint, the Contessa is a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who encounters Spider-Girl.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: In the Ultimate Marvel Universe, Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine is the chairman of the OXE Group, currently the largest holding company in the World. She is part of the secret Kratos Club, a group of industrial multimillionaires whose goal is to use their influence to ensure that the right things get done, no matter what.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: In recent history leading up to Earth X, she was still an active member of S.H.I.E.L.D. when Norman Osborn takes control of the United States of America. When Nick Fury refused to deal with Osborn, Osborn had created the parasitic Hydra creatures from information he gained from the Bloodstone files. The Hydra were sent to attack and take down SHIELD's helicarrier, causing it to crash. Many S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, Contessa among them, were transformed into host bodies for the Hydra organism.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Like all people infected with the Hydra, Contessa was killed and her body usurped by the Hydra parasite that clings to the chest of her body. While her soul was transported to the Realm of the Dead where it would relive moments of her history, her physical body became a member of the Hydra group led by the "Madam Hydra" which controlled the body of She-Hulk.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Most Hydra's ended up in New York, where they would be seemingly killed by the Skull's invading army, however the group would survive and return to a secret base. There, the Hydra would be banished to Limbo by Captain America, who armed with Rom's blaster.


title: Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

text: Contessa's soul would be inducted in Mar-Vel's army of the dead in a final battle against Death, Thanos and Mephisto. Later she would be granted a place in Mar-Vel's Paradise, following this her current whereabouts are unknown.