title: Same-sex relationship

text: Types of relationships vary from one couple to the next. As in heterosexual relationships, some same-sex relationships are meant to be temporary, casual, or anonymous sex. Other relationships are more permanent, being in a committed relationship with one another and not having sexual relationships with anyone else. Some are open relationships, and while committed to each other, allow themselves and their partner to have relationships with others. Other couples may be in secret, whether because of family upbringing, religion, pressure from friends/family, and other reasons.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: The names of legal same-sex relationships vary depending on the laws of the land. Same-sex relationships may be legally recognized in the form of marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, or registered partnerships.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Individuals may or may not express their sexual orientation in their behaviors. People in a same-sex relationship may identify as homosexual, bisexual, or even occasionally heterosexual.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Equally, not all people with a bisexual or homosexual orientation seek same-sex relationships. According to a 1990 study of The Social Organization of Sexuality, out of 131 women and 108 men who self-reported same-sex attraction, only 43 men (40%) and 42 women (32%) had participated in gay sex. In comparison, a survey by the Family Pride Coalition showed that 50% of gay men had fathered children and 75% of lesbians had children, and even more have had straight sex without having children.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: A sodomy law defines certain sexual acts as sex crimes. The precise sexual acts meant by the term sodomy are rarely spelled out in the law, but is typically understood by courts to include any sexual act which does not lead to procreation. Furthermore, "Sodomy" has many synonyms: buggery, crime against nature, unnatural act, deviant sexual intercourse. It also has a range of similar euphemisms. While in theory this may include heterosexual oral sex, anal sex, masturbation, and bestiality, in practice such laws are primarily enforced against sex between men (particularly anal sex).


title: Same-sex relationship

text: In the United States, the Supreme Court invalidated all sodomy laws in "Lawrence v. Texas" in 2003. 47 out of 50 states had repealed any specifically anti-homosexual-conduct laws at the time.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Some other countries criminalize homosexual acts. In a handful of countries, all of which are Muslim countries, it remains a capital crime. In a highly publicized case, two male teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, were hanged in Iran in 2005 reportedly because they had been caught having sex with each other.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Men who have sex with men (MSM) refers to men who engage in sexual activity with other men, regardless of how they identify themselves; many choose not to accept social identities of gay or bisexual.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: The term was created in the 1990s by epidemiologists in order to study the spread of disease among men who have sex with men, regardless of identity. As a risk category, MSM are not limited to small, self-identified, and visible sub-populations. "MSM" and "gay" refer to different things: behaviors and social identities. "MSM" refers to sexual activities between men, regardless of how they identify whereas gay can include those activities but is more broadly seen as a cultural identity. "MSM" is often used in medical literature and social research to describe such men as a group for clinical study without considering issues of self-identification.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: As with any sexual relationship, people may begin with various forms of foreplay such as fondling, caressing, and kissing, and may or may not experiment with other practices, as they see fit. Sex between males can include mutual masturbation, frot, intercrural sex, oral sex and anal sex.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Women who have sex with women (WSW) is a term used to identify women who have sex with other women, but may or may not self-identify as lesbian or bisexual. Sex between two females can include tribadism and frottage, mutual masturbation, cunnilingus, and the use of sex toys for vaginal, anal, or oral penetration or clitoral stimulation. As with any sexual relationship, people may begin with various forms of foreplay such as fondling, caressing, and kissing, and may or may not experiment with other practices, as they see fit.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Religions have had differing views about love and sexual relations between people of the same sex. A large proportion of the Abrahamic sects view sexual relationships outside of a heterosexual marriage, including sex between same-sex partners, negatively, though there are groups within each faith that disagree with orthodox positions and challenge their doctrinal authority. The Bible can also be understood literally, as homosexuality is viewed as sinful and problematic. Opposition to homosexual behavior ranges from quietly discouraging displays and activities to those who explicitly forbid same-sex sexual practices among adherents and actively opposing social acceptance of homosexual relationships. Support of homosexual behavior is reflected in the acceptance of sexually heterodox individuals in all functions of the church, and the sanctification of same-sex unions. Furthermore, liberal Christians may not consider same-sex relations to be sinful. Jews, Mainline Protestants and the religiously unafflicted tend to be more supportive of gay and lesbian relationships.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Some churches have changed their doctrine to accommodate same-sex relationships. Reform Judaism, the largest branch of Judaism outside Israel has begun to facilitate religious same-sex marriages for adherents in their synagogues. Jewish Theological Seminary, considered to be the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism, decided in March 2007 to begin accepting applicants in same-sex relationships, after scholars who guide the movement lifted the ban on ordaining people in same-sex relationships. In 2005, the United Church of Christ became the largest Christian denomination in the United States to formally endorse same-sex marriage.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: On the other hand, the Anglican Communion encountered discord that caused a rift between the African (except Southern Africa) and Asian Anglican churches on the one hand and North American churches on the other when American and Canadian churches openly ordained clergy in same-sex relations and began same-sex unions. Other churches such as the Methodist Church had experienced trials of clergy in same-sex relations who some claimed were a violation of religious principles resulting in mixed verdicts dependent on geography.


title: Same-sex relationship

text: Some religious groups have even promoted boycotts of corporations whose policies support same-sex relations. In early 2005, the American Family Association threatened a boycott of Ford products to protest Ford's perceived support of "the homosexual agenda and homosexual marriage".


title: Memorial Medical Center and Hurricane Katrina

text: Memorial Medical Center was heavily damaged when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, specifically Pearlington, MS on August 29, 2005. In the aftermath of the storm, while the building had no electricity and went through catastrophic flooding after the levees failed, Dr. Anna Pou, along with other doctors and nurses, attempted to continue caring for patients. On Wednesday, August 31, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt reassured the public that 2,500 patients would be evacuated from hospitals in Orleans Parish, although it wasn't clear at first where they would be moved to.


text: On September 11, 45 bodies were recovered from Memorial Medical Center, about five of whom had died before the disaster (originally thought to be eleven). Out of an estimated 215 bodies found in nursing homes and hospitals in New Orleans, Memorial had the largest number.


text: In July 2006, a Louisiana judge found probable cause to order the arrest of Pou and two nurses for second degree murder in the deaths of several of the patients, following a nearly year-long investigation by the office of Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti. However, a year later a grand jury in Orleans Parish refused to indict Pou on any of the counts.


text: Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, Foti's successor, said, "This is a prosecution that should never have been brought" forward.


text: In 2008, Caldwell testified before the Louisiana Supreme Court in support of the position taken by lawyers for Pou and other doctors and nurses from Memorial, who were fighting to keep the state's investigative records in the case sealed from public view. He said, "the case against Dr. Pou is probably over," but that new information could lead to a renewed investigation, so the files should remain secret. The following year, Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro testified in the same case that "human beings were killed as a result of actions by doctors" at Memorial after Hurricane Katrina. However, he explained that he did not plan to prosecute anyone. "Whether or not there was a homicide and whether or not there is a case that can be brought are different matters."


text: Pou, an associate professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at the LSU Health Sciences Center, was at Memorial Medical Center from before Katrina's landfall on Monday, August 29 until Thursday, September 1. By Wednesday, the hospital was surrounded by floodwaters, without sanitation, running out of food, experiencing indoor temperatures up to ,


text: The staff decided to evacuate the hospital. Patients on upper floors had to be carried down the stairs, and those evacuated by helicopter had to be carried up more stairs to the helipad on a separate building; several patients died while being moved. By Friday, about 2,000 patients, families and staff had been evacuated "under incredibly difficult circumstances".


text: The seventh floor at Memorial was leased to LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans. LifeCare provides long-term acute care for severely ill patients, aiming to improve their health to the point that they no longer need hospital care. Many of LifeCare's patients at Memorial were especially affected by the loss of electric power; seven were on ventilators.


text: One patient in particular, Emmett Everett, was alert and in the hospital awaiting surgery to relieve a chronic bowel obstruction, a condition not acutely life-threatening. He had fed himself breakfast that morning and asked the staff, "Are we ready to rock and roll?". One of his nurses later told investigators he had said, "Cindy, don't let them leave me behind." According to witnesses speaking to "The New York Times", Pou was alleged to have administered a lethal cocktail of drugs to Everett with the intent of ending his life. One person present during the event stated that Everett only died after having his face smothered with a towel. Everett was a paraplegic and weighed approximately ; for these reasons, according to staff who participated in the discussion, Pou allegedly didn't think the staff could reasonably assist him in the evacuation.


text: On September 11, mortuary workers recovered 45 bodies from the hospital. Toxicology tests were performed on 41 bodies, and 23 tested positive for one or both of morphine and the fast-acting sedative midazolam (Versed), although few of these patients had been prescribed morphine for pain. In the following weeks, it was reported that staff had discussed euthanizing patients. Some reports went further; Bryant King, an internist at Memorial, told CNN that he believed "the discussion of euthanasia was more than talk." LifeCare told the state Attorney General's office that nine of their patients might "have been given lethal doses of medicines by a Memorial doctor and nurses."


text: King publicly charged that one or more health care workers had killed patients, based on conversations with other health care workers. King told CNN that when he believed a doctor was about to kill patients, he boarded a boat and left the hospital. King explained his actions in terms of his opposition to Pou's alleged actions, arguing "I'd rather be considered a person who abandoned patients than someone who aided in eliminating patients."


text: At the request of the Louisiana AG's office, Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard investigated the cause of the deaths. Experts reported abnormal levels of morphine, midazolam (Versed), and/or Lorazepam in several bodies.


text: A number of forensic experts, including Cyril Wecht, Michael Baden, and James Young, agree that the administration of morphine and midazolam constituted homicide in many of the deaths on the seventh floor. Wecht thought eight of the nine deaths on the LifeCare floor could conclusively be ruled homicides, and Baden thought all nine constituted homicide. Young stated, "All these patients survived the adverse events of the previous days, and for every patient on a floor to have died in one three-and-a-half-hour period with drug toxicity is beyond coincidence." One of the experts, an internist, wrote that Everett was "in stable medical status with no clear evidence that death was imminent or impending". University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan also wrote in his expert report that all nine of the deaths constituted active euthanasia; the administration of the drugs was "not consistent with the ethical standards of palliative care that prevail in the United States," precisely in that the death of a patient must not be the goal of a doctor's treatment; and death, in his opinion, was the goal in these cases.


text: Having received these six reports indicating that at least eight of the nine deaths under investigation were homicides, Minyard sought the opinion of another expert, Steven Karch, who specializes in disputing drug toxicology tests performed after death. According to the "New York Times", Karch "had staked his career on advancing the argument that the level of drugs found in a cadaver may have no relationship to the levels just before death." The "Times" continued: "Karch flew to New Orleans, examined the evidence and concluded that it was absurd to try to determine causes of death in bodies that had sat at for 10 days. In all of the cases, he advised, the medical cause of death should remain undetermined." Having received this opinion, Minyard sought no further opinions.


text: Investigators believed up to two dozen patient deaths might have been homicides, but stated that they had difficulty acquiring the medical records needed to document the patients' conditions. Tenet Healthcare said it turned over all the patient records it had on the case. Investigators believed that of the two dozen possible cases, they initially had the strongest case in the deaths of four of the patients who had died on the hospital's seventh floor.


text: On July 17, 2006, Pou was arrested and charged with four counts of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of four LifeCare patients; nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry were arrested and charged, but charges were dropped in exchange for their testimony. In a statement, Tenet Healthcare, who owns the medical center, said "Euthanasia is repugnant to everything we believe as ethical health-care providers, and it violates every precept of ethical behavior and the law. It is never permissible under any circumstances."


text: State Attorney General Charles Foti announced the arrests the next day, at a widely televised news conference. He stated: "This is not euthanasia; this is plain and simple homicide".


text: Foti said he had probable cause to make the arrests based on eyewitness testimony, which was outlined in an affidavit that stated Pou and the nurses "intentionally (killed)" Emmett Everett Sr., 61; Hollis Alford, 66; Ireatha Watson, 89; and Rose Savoie, 90, by administering or causing to be administered lethal doses of morphine sulphate (morphine) and/or midazolam (Versed). One witness in the affidavit said they saw Dr. Pou request additional syringes filled with saline. According to Kristy Johnson, LifeCare's director of physical medicine, Pou told these patients that she was administering drugs to make them "feel better." The drugs injected are usually given for pain purposes, but not at the levels found in subsequent toxicology reports. One of Pou's lawyers, Rick Simmons, said she was "absolutely innocent" because "she volunteered for storm duty and stayed there for five days".


text: The arrests were controversial. In the words of "Times-Picayune" reporter James Varney, they "ignited a furious debate in New Orleans and elsewhere about whether sharp ethical boundaries can be drawn around decisions on patient comfort made in a crisis."


text: In February 2007, seven months after Pou's arrest, Minyard spoke with the media about the deaths of the LifeCare patients. He had not yet issued a determination of cause of death in any of the cases, leaving them classified as "undetermined".


text: The case against Pou and the two nurses appeared more questionable after Minyard announced that he had classified the patient deaths at Memorial as "undetermined," which means that on available evidence he could not classify the deaths as due to homicide or natural causes. Minyard told the media that he had retained some of the nation's leading experts as consultants in the case. "The New York Times" reported in August 2009 that Minyard privately came to the conclusion that Pou was responsible for the deaths of four of the nine patients: "I strongly do not believe she planned to kill anybody, but it looks like she did."


text: Assistant District Attorney Michael Morales said in 2009 that he and District Attorney Jordan "weren't gung-ho" about prosecuting the case, in part due to negative public reaction. In March 2007, a state grand jury was sworn in to consider the Memorial case. Unlike a typical grand jury, this one dealt with just one case, and functioned as an investigation instead of a review of evidence. The grand jury did not hear from Minyard's experts, some witnesses who had been present, or the Department of Justice investigator who had spent a year on the case and amassed 50,000 pages of evidence. The two nurses who had been arrested with Pou testified in her defense, after being compelled to testify in return for not being charged themselves.


text: The grand jury was sworn in on March 6, 2007, and prosecutors took the unusual step of having its meetings at an undisclosed location (i.e. away from the courthouse), in order to prevent the media from observing the identity of witnesses coming and going. The grand jury was selected to deal solely with the Memorial case, rather than the dozens to hundreds grand juries normally hear; prosecutors stated it could hear testimony for months.


text: The unusual moves prompted legal observers to speculate that the district attorney considered the evidence ambiguous and wanted to be able to assure the public of a thorough investigation if he decided to drop the case without bringing formal charges. Loyola University Law Professor Dane Ciolono told the media, "Doing it this way certainly speaks to the ambiguity of the evidence and the prosecutor's deliberation as to whether to seek an indictment. . . . Or it could be that he's made up his mind that he does not want to bring charges and wants the grand jury to provide his cover."


text: After several months, the grand jury concluded its work by declining to indict any of the suspects on any of the charges.


text: The former Louisiana Attorney General, Charles Foti, hired forensic pathologists as consultants to assess autopsies and other medical information. One of them, Steven Karch, later testified before the Louisiana State Legislature that every case "should have been declared undetermined, because it is impossible to do a scientific analysis of a cadaver that has been in the sun for 10 days." Karch said after he reached this conclusion, the attorney general's office told him not to submit further reports. Foti lost the 2007 election for state Attorney General after criticism for prosecuting Pou and the nurses.


text: Since then, the charges have been expunged, the State of Louisiana has agreed to pay Pou's legal fees of over $450,000, and several Louisiana lawmakers have apologized for the accusations against her.


text: A class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of non-Tenet employees, patients and relatives who were stranded at Memorial during the hurricane. The class action, "Elmira Preston et al. vs. Tenet Health Systems, Memorial Medical Center, et al.", Civil District Court No. 2005-11701 c/w 2006-8861, Division "A", alleged a number of failures by Tenet Corporation, ranging from a failed evacuation policy to the improper location of generators in the basement of the facility, which led to the loss of power.


text: Tenet Healthcare, while claiming no admission of liability, ultimately settled the case after jury selection began at a trial in 2011. The company set up a $25 million substantial settlement fund for all non-Tenet employees, patients and visitors who were trapped at Memorial during Katrina. To receive a share of the money, the eligible had to submit notarized claim forms indicating whether they had suffered injuries. Pou opted in for a share of the settlement.


text: LifeCare opted early on to pay undisclosed sums to family members of several deceased patients who sued.


text: Three lawsuits (Alford, Everett, and Savoie) initially filed against Pou and other parties were settled; the families had to agree to keep silent about the terms.


text: In the four years following Katrina, Pou helped write and pass three laws in Louisiana offering immunity to health care workers from most civil lawsuits (except in cases of intentional misconduct) for their efforts in future mass casualty situations.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: John Irving Bloom (born January 27, 1953), known by the stage name Joe Bob Briggs, is an American syndicated film critic, writer, actor, and comic performer. He is known for having hosted "Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater" on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, the TNT television series "MonsterVision" from 1996 to 2000, and "The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs" on Shudder beginning in 2018. In 2019, he was named the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards' Monster Kid of the Year.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: John Irving Bloom was born January 27, 1953, in Dallas, Texas, the son of Thelma Louise (née Berry) and Rudolph Lewis Bloom.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: He was raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, and by age 13 was a sportswriter at what was then the "Arkansas Democrat". He won a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he majored in English and wrote for the student newspaper, "The Vanderbilt Hustler". After graduating in 1975. he became a reporter for "Dallas Times Herald" and later wrote for "Texas Monthly" magazine. Taking a leave of absence from the newspaper in order to co-write (with Jim Atkinson) his many books, the true crime book "Evidence of Love" (later adapted as the TV-movie "A Killing in a Small Town"), he supported himself by writing movie reviews for the paper. There he created the humorous persona of "Joe Bob Briggs" to review exploitation films and other genre movies.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Briggs's acting persona is that of an unapologetic redneck Texan with an avowed love of the drive-in theaters. He specializes in humorous but appreciative reviews of B-movies and cult films, which he calls "drive-in movies" (as distinguished from "indoor bullstuff"). In addition to his usual parody of urbane, high-brow movie criticism, his columns characteristically include colorful tales of woman troubles and high-spirited brushes with the law, which inevitably conclude with his rush to catch a movie at a local drive-in, usually with female companionship. Briggs revealed in an interview that he intended the character to have an ambiguous sounding name and initially thought of calling himself "Bubba Rodriguez", but was told that the name Rodriguez would be perceived as racist and decided to go with "The whitest name I could come up with."


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the movie in question's "high points", including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with "-Fu"), the number of bodies, number of female breasts bared, the notional number of total pints of blood spilled, and for appropriately untoward movies, a "vomit meter".


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: A typical summarization would read "no dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking. Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Convenience-store dancing. Blindfold aardvarking. Blind-MAN aardvarking. Lesbo Fu. Pool cue-Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Tané McClure. Joe Bob says check it out."


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Originally, Briggs's film reviews were limited to pictures shown at local drive-ins. Later, after a tongue-in-cheek "battle" with his own convictions in "Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In", he also began reviewing films released on VHS and DVD.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: During the early 1980s when New York City was in the planning stages of redeveloping its run-down 42nd Street, Times Square area, which included closing many grindhouses showing B-movies on double and triple bills around the clock, as well as many porn theaters, Briggs encouraged a "postcard-Fu" campaign encouraging genre-film fans to write to city officials and pressure them into saving "the one place in New York City you could see a decent drive-in movie."


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In 1986, as a result of the stage show, Briggs was asked to be a guest host on "Drive-in Theater", a late-night B-movie show on The Movie Channel (TMC). This led to his hosting "Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater", which ran from 1986 to 1996, It was twice nominated for the industry's CableACE Award. Afterward the show ended, he hosted the TNT network's similar "MonsterVision" for four years through July 2000.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In the late 1990s he spent two seasons as a commentator on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" (under his given name, John Bloom), with a recurring segment called God Stuff. He appears in Frank Henenlotter's documentary "Herschell Gordon Lewis – Godfather of Gore".


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In 2018, the horror-themed subscription video on demand service Shudder, owned and operated by AMC, signed Briggs for a new series, "The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs", which premiered as a 13-film marathon on July 13, 2018. During the premiere, Shudder's servers crashed as a result of a large number of subscribers attempting to access the show. Shudder streamed two shorter marathons on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day 2018 Beginning in March 2020, the show returned to Briggs' old double-feature format. A second season consisting of 10 films premiered April 24, 2020. Season 3 began April 16, 2021.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Briggs was also a commentator for a Fox TV news magazine for two seasons. He also appeared in episodes of the Fox sitcom "Married... with Children" in season 8 and 9 as Billy Ray Wetnap, co-owner of Pest Boys Pest Control. He also wrote and performed in specials for Fox and Showtime, and collaborated with comedy writer Norman Steinberg on an unproduced NBC sitcom.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Briggs has written for "Newsweek", "National Lampoon", "Rolling Stone", "Playboy", "The Village Voice", and "National Review",


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: His two syndicated newspaper columns, "Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in" and "Joe Bob's America," were picked up by "The New York Times" Syndicate in the 1990s. For one year he wrote a humorous sex advice column in "Penthouse". In 2000 he started writing the "Drive-in" column again, this time for United Press International, along with a second column, "The Vegas Guy", which chronicles Briggs' weekly forays into the casinos of America.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Briggs was president of the Trinity Foundation of Dallas, a non-denominational, non-profit public foundation that serves as a religious watchdog group and publishes "The Door", a Christian satire magazine, on which Briggs was a regular columnist.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Under his given name, John Bloom, he co-wrote (with Jim Atkinson) the nonfiction book "Evidence of Love: The Candy Montgomery Story" (1984). The book recounts the 1980 Wylie, Texas murder case in which Montgomery killed her ex-lover's wife, Betty Gore, by striking her 41 times with an axe and whose highly publicized trial ended in an unexpected acquittal. The book was adapted into the CBS TV-movie "A Killing in a Small Town" (1990), starring Barbara Hershey, and is scheduled to be adapted as an HBO Max miniseries, "Love and Death".


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: As Joe Bob Briggs he has published five books of satire—"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In", "A Guide to Western Civilization, or My Story", "Joe Bob Goes Back to the Drive In", "The Cosmic Wisdom of Joe Bob Briggs", and "Iron Joe Bob", his homage to the men's movement and the nonfiction books "Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History" and "Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History".


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In 2016, again under his given name, he wrote the nonfiction book "Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story" in which he traces the conception, development, and launching of the Iridium satellite constellation and the race to save it from destruction.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In July 1985, his one-man show "An Evening with Joe Bob Briggs" debuted in Cleveland, Ohio. Later re-titled "Joe Bob Dead in Concert" for home release, the show evolved into a theatrical piece involving storytelling, comedy and music. The show was performed in more than 50 venues over the next two years, including Carolines on Broadway in New York and regular engagements at Wolfgang's and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, as well as at convention centers, theaters, music clubs and other comedy clubs. In 2019, Briggs began performing a new one-man show, "How Rednecks Saved Hollywood", at genre film festivals and revival movie houses.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Briggs has contributed audio commentaries to DVDs released by Media Blasters and Elite Entertainment including "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter", "The Double-D Avenger", Michael Findlay's "Blood Sisters", "Warlock Moon", "Samurai Cop", "I Spit on Your Grave", and several Ray Dennis Steckler films including "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" and "Blood Shack".


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: He appeared as himself in the 2008 novel "Bad Moon Rising" by Jonathan Maberry. Joe Bob is one of several real-world horror celebrities who are in the fictional town of Pine Deep when monsters attack.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In 1985, Briggs wrote a satirical column about the "We Are the World" video. The resulting controversy, which included accusations of racism towards Bloom, ended Bloom's position at the "Dallas Times Herald". His syndicated column changed distributors.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In May 2020, Briggs received backlash for writing articles published in the controversial "Taki's Magazine" in which he criticized the lengthiness of the LGBTQ initialism. He also lamented what he saw as stifling the free speech of White Pride groups in the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia, White Nationalist rally.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: In May 2020, Bloom contracted COVID-19 but did not make his condition known to the public. Discussing the experience on the podcast "Geek Tawk"—hosted by his "Last Drive-In" co-host Diana Prince (Darcy the Mail Girl)—in July 2020, Bloom stated, "Many people have had [COVID-19] and most of them were much worse off than me. [...] I wish everybody thought it was a death sentence, because then everyone would wear the fucking mask and then we would get rid of it."


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: Bloom was married to Joyce Karns from 1978 until divorcing in 1979, and married Paula Leigh Bowen in 1988.


title: Joe Bob Briggs

text: "Briggs" appeared on Ken Reid's "TV Guidance Counselor" podcast on June 16, 2016, as well as the podcasts "Frightday" on July 11, 2018, "Astonishing Legends Podcast" on December 9, 2018, and "The Last Podcast on the Left" on March 28, 2019.


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: , also known as Rust-Eater Bisco, is a Japanese light novel series written by Shinji Cobkubo and illustrated by K Akagishi, with world-building art by mocha. ASCII Media Works have released eight volumes since March 2018 under their Dengeki Bunko label. The light novel is licensed in North America by Yen Press. A manga adaptation with art by Rokudo


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: Takahashi was serialized online between April 2019 and March 2021 via Square Enix's online manga magazine "Manga UP!". It was collected in four "tankōbon" volumes. The second part of the manga with art by Sō Natsuki was serialized in the same magazine between December 2021 and October 2022 and has been collected in two "tankōbon" volumes. An anime television series adaptation by OZ aired from January to March 2022.


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: Set in post-apocalyptic Japan, the land is ravaged by rust, a deadly plague-like wind which affects everything it touches, including humans. It is believed to originate from mushroom spores and so Bisco Akaboshi, a Mushroom Keeper and archer whose arrows instantly grow mushrooms wherever they land, is a wanted criminal. He and his giant crab Akutagawa team up with the young doctor Milo Nekoyanagi to search the wastelands for the legendary "Sabikui", a mushroom said to devour all forms of rust.


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: A manga adaptation with art by Yūsuke Takahashi was serialized online between April 10, 2019 and March 2, 2021 via Square Enix's online manga magazine "Manga UP!". It was collected in four "tankōbon" volumes. The second part of the manga with art by Sō Natsuki was serialized in the same magazine between December 15, 2021 and October 28, 2022, and has been collected in two "tankōbon" volumes. The first part is licensed digitally in North America by Comikey.


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: During the "Kadokawa Light Novel Expo 2020" event on March 6, 2021, it was announced that the series will be receiving an anime television series adaptation by OZ. Atsushi Itagaki is directing the series, with Sadayuki Murai writing the series' scripts, Ai Asari and Ikariya designing the characters, and Takeshi Ueda and Hinako Tsubakiyama composing the series' music. It aired from January 11 to March 29, 2022, on Tokyo MX and other channels. The opening theme song is "Kaze no Oto Sae Kikoenai" (Even the Wind is Silent) by JUNNA, while the ending theme song is "Hōkō" (Howl) by Ryōta Suzuki and Natsuki Hanae as their respective characters. Funimation licensed the series outside of Asia. Muse Communication licensed the series in South and Southeast Asia; available to watch on iQiyi and also Muse Asia YouTube Channel. This series will air on Animax across Southeast Asia on May 17, 2022.


title: Sabikui Bisco

text: In 2019, the light novel ranked first in the overall ranking and in the new work ranking in Takarajimasha's annual light novel guide book "Kono Light Novel ga Sugoi!", in the bunkobon category, becoming the first series to do this. As of October 2021 the series has over 300,000 copies in circulation.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Gotthard Fedor August Heinrici (25 December 1886 – 10 December 1971) was a German general during World War II. Heinrici is considered as the premier defensive expert of the "Wehrmacht". His final command was Army Group Vistula, formed from the remnants of Army Group A and Army Group Center to defend Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Heinrici was born in 1886 at Gumbinnen in East Prussia, the son of a minister of the (Protestant) Evangelical Church in Germany. He came from a long line of East Prussian theologians, including his uncle Georg Heinrici and his grandfather Carl August Heinrici, and remained a devout Lutheran throughout his life. Following graduation from secondary school in 1905, he broke from family tradition and joined the army on 8 March 1905 as a cadet in an infantry division. From 1905 to 1906, Heinrici attended a war school. During World War I, Heinrici fought in the German invasion of Belgium and earned the Iron Cross 2nd Class in September 1914. Heinrici's division was then transferred to the Eastern Front. There, he fought in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes and the Battle of Łódź, receiving the Iron Cross 1st Class in July 1915.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: In May 1916, Heinrici took part in the Battle of Verdun. Beginning in September 1916, he served in General Staff positions with the XXIV Reserve Corps and the 115th Infantry Division. In March 1917, Heinrici was posted to the German General Staff. In September, he attended a General Staffs officer training course, and later served as a staff officer with VII Corps and the VIII Corps. In February 1918, Heinrici was posted to an infantry division, serving as a staff officer responsible for operations. In this position, he was awarded the Prussian Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords in August 1918.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Heinrici had two children, Hartmut and Gisela, with his wife Gertrude. He was a devout Protestant who regularly went to church. His religious faith and refusal to join the Nazi party made him unpopular with the Nazi hierarchy and led to clashes with Hitler and "Reichsmarschall" Hermann Göring, who scorned him. Because Heinrici's wife Gertrude had a Jewish parent, their children were labeled "Mischlinge" (partly Jewish) under Nazi racial law. However, Heinrici received a "German Blood Certificate" from Hitler himself, which validated their supposed "Aryan" status and protected them from discrimination.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: During the Battle of France, Heinrici's command was part of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb's Army Group C. He commanded the XII Army Corps which was part of the 1st Army. Heinrici's forces succeeded in breaking through the Maginot Line south of Saarbrücken on 14 June 1940.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: In 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Heinrici served in the 4th Army under Günther von Kluge as the commanding general of the XXXXIII Army Corps during the Battle of Białystok–Minsk, the Battle of Kiev and the Battle of Moscow. He received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross in 1941. Late in January 1942, Heinrici was given command of the 4th Army. On 24 November 1943 he was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross for his leadership during the Battle of Orsha, during which the 4th Army taking defensive positions near the Orsha region in Belarus, temporarily halted the advance of the Western Front led by General Vasiliy Sokolovsky. During the 4th Army's retreat, it inflicted heavy losses on the advancing Red Army. These successes contributed greatly to Heinrici's reputation as a defensive specialist. Later in 1943 he refused to obey an order to destroy the city of Smolensk by fire before the German army's retreat, and he was temporarily dismissed from his post as commander.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: General Gotthard Heinrici wrote in his diary:"Hampered by the snow and especially the snowdrifts, often shoveling ourselves out metre by metre, and traveling with vehicles and equipment that are by no means adequate for the Russian winter, behind us the enemy pressing on, concern to bring the troops to safety in time, to carry the wounded along, not to let too many weapons or too much equipment fall into enemy hands, all this was sorely trying for the troops and their leaders...Kitted-out with fabulous winter equipment, the Russians everywhere push through the wide gaps that have opened up in our front...The retreat in snow and ice is absolutely Napoleonic in its manner. The losses are similar."


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: In 1944, after the previous successes of the Red Army in Ukraine, Heinrici repeatedly argued for the retreat of Army Group Center and a concomitant shortening of the front line, Hitler rejected these plans at a staff meeting on 20 May 1944. On 4 June Heinrici was relieved of command of the 4th Army, which was later encircled east of Minsk and nearly destroyed during Operation Bagration.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: In the summer of 1944, after eight months of forced retirement, Heinrici was sent to Hungary and placed in command of the 1st Panzer Army; as well as the Hungarian First Army which was attached to it. He was able to keep the 1st Panzer Army relatively intact as it retreated into Slovakia. Later in 1944 during the Battle of the Dukla Pass, the 1st Panzer Army prevented Soviet forces from linking up with Slovak rebel forces of the concurrent Slovak National Uprising. Heinrici was awarded the Swords to the Oak Leaves of his Knight's Cross on 3 March 1945.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: On 20 March 1945, Adolf Hitler replaced Heinrich Himmler with Heinrici as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front. Indicating that he was ill, Himmler had abandoned his post on 13 March and retired to a sanatorium at Lychen. At this time, Army Group Vistula's front was less than 50 miles from Berlin.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Army Group Vistula consisted of two armies: the 3rd Panzer Army led by General Hasso von Manteuffel and the 9th Army led by General Theodor Busse. Heinrici was tasked with preventing a Soviet attack across the Oder River amid shortages of manpower and material. Only the terrain itself favoured Heinrici; he dug the 9th Army into three defensive lines atop Seelow Heights, overlooking the sandy, swampy banks of the Oder. Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army, which had fewer panzers than the 9th, was similarly positioned in the north to delay a possible flanking strike by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Byelorussian Front.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: On 16 April the Battle of the Oder-Neisse began. The Soviets attacked with about 1,500,000 men for what they called the "Berlin Offensive Operation". During the Battle of Berlin, Heinrici withdrew his troops westward and made no attempt to defend the city. By late April, Heinrici ordered the retreat of his army group across the Oder River. Hitler only became aware of the retreat of Army Group Vistula around 21 April, after a puzzling request by Heinrici, who sought permission to move his headquarters to a new site, which was further west than Berlin.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: On 28 April Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, was riding along the roads north of Berlin when he noticed that troops of the 7th Panzer Division and of the 25th Panzergrenadier Division were marching north, away from Berlin. These troops were part of General Hasso von Manteuffel's 3rd Panzer Army. As one of the two armies which made up Heinrici's Army Group Vistula, it was supposed to be on its way to Berlin. Instead, Heinrici was moving it northward in an attempt to halt the Soviet breakthrough at Neubrandenburg, contrary to orders of Keitel and his deputy, General Alfred Jodl. Keitel located Heinrici on a road near Neubrandenburg, accompanied by Manteuffel. The encounter resulted in a heated confrontation that led to Heinrici's dismissal by 29 April for disobeying orders.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Heinrici was replaced by General Kurt Student. General Kurt von Tippelskirch was named as Heinrici's interim replacement until Student could arrive and assume control of Army Group Vistula. Student was captured by the British before he could take command. The rapidly deteriorating situation that the Germans faced meant that Army Group Vistula's coordination of the armies under its nominal command during the last few days of the war was of little significance.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Heinrici was dismissed by Keitel for refusing to save Hitler. He was summoned to Berlin and would have complied had Captain Hellmuth Lang not persuaded him to "drive as slowly as you can" to Plön instead, informing him that he would be murdered in Berlin like Rommel (who had been Heinrici's adjutant, and later Lang's commander). Heinrici then gave himself up to British forces on 28 May.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: After his capture, Heinrici was held at Island Farm, a British prisoner of war camp at Bridgend, South Wales, where he remained, except for a three-week transfer to a camp in the United States in October 1947, until his release on 19 May 1948. In the 1950s, he helped create the Operational History (German) Section of the United States Army Center of Military History, established in January 1946 to harness the operational knowledge and experience of German prisoners of war for the United States Army. He was also featured prominently in Cornelius Ryan's 1966 book, "The Last Battle". Heinrici died in 1971 in Karlsruhe and was buried with full military honours at the Bergäcker cemetery in Freiburg im Breisgau.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Despite being married to a half-Jewish ("Mischling") woman, Heinrici supported many Nazi nationalistic and fascistic policies including the "Lebensraum" concept of territorial expansion, but disagreed with many of their racial policies. He was shocked by the anti-Jewish pogroms of "Kristallnacht", although this did not lead him to distance himself from the Nazi regime.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Heinrici, on receiving the Commissar Order, justified it as easing pressure on the front lines through the exercise of "preventive terror" in the rear. Heinrici wrote home to his family that the Soviet soldier fought "very hard", he concluded that Soviet soldiers were "a much better soldier than the Frenchman. Extremely tough, devious and deceitful." He repeatedly ignored "scorched-earth" orders, such as the order to destroy the historically significant city of Smolensk.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: As a military commander, historians have described him as the premier defensive expert of the Wehrmacht and a genius admired by his peers, whose present-day obscurity could be due to his being, in the words of Samuel W. Mitcham, "as charismatic as a 20-pound sack of fertilizer".


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: In 2014, Heinrici's private letters and diaries were published in the book "A German General on the Eastern Front: The Letters and Diaries of Gotthard Heinrici 1941-1942" edited by Johannes Hürter. In his writings, Heinrici revealed his growing doubts about Hitler's strategy and his mounting concern as the Wehrmacht was implicated in war crimes and the first actions of the Holocaust.


title: Gotthard Heinrici

text: Hürter writes that Heinrici proved to be a tough and capable commander who demanded as much of himself as his soldiers. As an army commander, Heinrici constantly maintained personal contact with combat troops on the front. In doing so, he corresponded to the Prussian-German (and also Hitler's) ideal of a high-ranking troop commander who led "from the front", and combined the skills of a general staff officer with the boldness of the front-line officer. Heinrici's personal writings from the Eastern Front bear eloquent testimony to this, as well as to the empathy and care he had for his soldiers, for whom he felt responsible. Regarding crimes committed in Heinrici's area of command in the Soviet Union, Hürter writes that despite Heinrici's growing respect for the fighting power of the enemy and a burgeoning understanding of the devastated population, it did not change the fact that war crimes such as the execution of commissars also occurred in Heinrici's area of command.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: Junior M.A.F.I.A. was an American hip hop group from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City. The backronym M.A.F.I.A. stands for Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes. They were formed and mentored by New York rapper The Notorious B.I.G. In 1995, they released their debut album, "Conspiracy". The success of the group's singles "Player's Anthem" (US #13) and "Get Money" (US #17) helped launch the career of Lil' Kim as a solo artist.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: The group disbanded shortly after the murder of The Notorious B.I.G., with Lil' Kim and Lil' Cease deciding to continue on with their solo careers. In 2005, three of the members (not including Lil' Kim) released a second album under the Junior M.A.F.I.A. name as a remembrance of the group.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: The members of Junior M.A.F.I.A. met as childhood friends of The Notorious B.I.G.. All the members were under the age of twenty when the group was formed. The group was formed from three separate groups and four individuals if not including The 6s, or 666, (Lil' Cease, Bugsy, Capone, Chico, and Nino Brown), The Snakes (cousins Larceny and Trife), (solo artist) Klepto/Kleptomaniac who was responsible for introducing The Notorious Big to Versace and Moschino styled rap lyrics, Mr. Bristal, Chico Del Vec, and Lil' Kim, (a.k.a. Big Momma and or The Lieutenant), the only female artist in the group. The 6s knew The Notorious B.I.G. before he was rapping. The Notorious B.I.G. acted as the "godfather" to the group.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: The group released their debut album, "Conspiracy", in 1995, under the NYC-based Big Beat Records and Undeas labels. The album was produced in a similar style to The Notorious B.I.G.'s debut, "Ready to Die" "successful[ly] [replicating]... the earlier record's strengths". B.I.G. featured on four of the album's tracks. The rhyme topics were hard-hitting, mostly addressing guns, money, and sex. The album featured production by DJ Clark Kent, EZ Elpee, Daddy-O, Akshun, and Special Ed. "Conspiracy" gained some positive reviews, but received criticism for some of its group members not showing enough individuality. It debuted at number eight on the US "Billboard" 200 chart, selling 69,000 copies in its first week of release and was later certified gold.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: The lead single "Player's Anthem", produced by DJ Clark Kent and featuring The Notorious B.I.G., went gold. The accompanying video showed the group flying on helicopters and Learjets whilst carrying out business under F.B.I. surveillance. The album also spawned the popular top twenty hit "Get Money", a duet featuring The Notorious B.I.G. and Lil' Kim, and its remix "Gettin' Money", which has Lil' Cease with B.I.G. & Lil' Kim. The single was certified platinum and helped Kim start her own solo career. "I Need You Tonight" (featuring Aaliyah) was the only single released from the album that did not feature The Notorious B.I.G. The music video featured the Klept, Lil' Kim, Trife and Aaliyah holding a house party at Kim's house while she was away.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: After the death of the Notorious B.I.G. in 1997, the crew became defunct. In an interview with the Notorious B.I.G., which was conducted in 1995 but appeared in a 2003 issue of "XXL Magazine", he claimed he was planning to retire from rap music in 2000 to manage the careers of Junior M.A.F.I.A. In 2005, three of the previous seven members of the group, Lil' Cease, Klept and Larceny (now known as Banger), released an album, "Riot Musik", under the Junior M.A.F.I.A. name. The album did not match their previous success, only making it to #61 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart and #50 on the Top Independent albums chart. On March 26, 2007, the trio released another album, "Die Anyway", but it did not appear on any album charts.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: Lil' Kim released four albums as a solo artist. The M.A.F.I.A. were referenced on her debut album, "Hard Core", on the song "M.A.F.I.A. Land" and featured on "Fuck You". Kim collaborated with Lil' Cease on her single "Crush On You (Remix)" and on the track "Big Momma Thang", from her debut album, also featuring Jay-Z. Lil' Cease's solo effort "The Wonderful World of Cease A Leo" was released in 1999 peaked at #26 on the "Billboard" 200. The lead single, "Play Around", featured Bristal, Lil' Kim and Puff Daddy and peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart. Some of the members of the group went on to other professions. Such as MC Klepto (real name Terrence Harding) is now a top New York City real estate broker @realestatedynamo_nyc, first working for Shark Tank celebrity investor Barbara Corcoran company Corcoran Group.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: In 2004, The Best of Junior M.A.F.I.A (Cleopatra) was released, as well as a DVD directed by documentary filmmaker, April Maiya, titled "Chronicles of Junior M.A.F.I.A"; a candid documentary dealing with the controversy and conspiracies surrounding The Notorious B.I.G and the Junior M.A.F.I.A. It included unreleased footage of studio sessions and home videos of life with the Notorious B.I.G. and his crew. The DVD release included a free mixtape. A follow-up DVD without the original director was titled "The Chronicles of Junior M.A.F.I.A. Part II: Reloaded" was scheduled to be released in 2005, but was halted when Lil' Kim filed a $6 million lawsuit against Lil' Cease, claiming she never granted permission for her name and image to be used.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: Lil' Cease and Banger (formerly known as Larceny) testified against Lil' Kim during a perjury trial in 2005, which resulted in Kim and the group's manager, D-Roc, being sent to jail. Following the case, Kim labeled the pair "snitches" on her 2005 album "The Naked Truth". On June 27, 2006, a second DVD was released that was not as successful as its predecessor, entitled "Reality Check: Junior Mafia vs Lil' Kim." The DVD featured the pair explaining their side of the story on the case.


title: Junior M.A.F.I.A.

text: In 2007, "Chronicles of Junior MAFIA" Director, April Maiya, teamed with D-Roc for a follow-up tell-all documentary titled "Life After Death: The Movie." The film vindicated Lil' Kim's convicted perjury and exposed facts behind Lil Cease and Banger being labeled as "snitches" in the perjury trial and Hot 97 shootout and corrected the shortcomings in the original 2004 release.


title: User agent

text: In computing, a user agent is any software, acting on behalf of a user, which "retrieves, renders and facilitates end-user interaction with Web content". A user agent is therefore a special kind of software agent.


title: User agent

text: Some prominent examples of user agents are web browsers and email readers. Often, a user agent acts as the client in a client–server system. In some contexts, such as within the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the term "user agent" refers to both end points of a communications session.


title: User agent

text: When a software agent operates in a network protocol, it often identifies itself, its application type, operating system, device model, software vendor, or software revision, by submitting a characteristic identification string to its operating peer. In HTTP, SIP, and NNTP protocols, this identification is transmitted in a header field "User-Agent". Bots, such as Web crawlers, often also include a URL and/or e-mail address so that the Webmaster can contact the operator of the bot.


title: User agent

text: In HTTP, the User-Agent string is often used for content negotiation, where the origin server selects suitable content or operating parameters for the response. For example, the User-Agent string might be used by a web server to choose variants based on the known capabilities of a particular version of client software. The concept of content tailoring is built into the HTTP standard in RFC 1945 "for the sake of tailoring responses to avoid particular user agent limitations".


title: User agent

text: The User-Agent string is one of the criteria by which Web crawlers may be excluded from accessing certain parts of a website using the Robots Exclusion Standard ("robots.txt" file).


title: User agent

text: As with many other HTTP request headers, the information in the "User-Agent" string contributes to the information that the client sends to the server, since the string can vary considerably from user to user.


title: User agent

text: The User-Agent string format is currently specified by section 10.1.5 of HTTP Semantics. The format of the User-Agent string in HTTP is a list of product tokens (keywords) with optional comments. For example, if a user's product were called WikiBrowser, their user agent string might be "WikiBrowser/1.0 Gecko/1.0". The "most important" product component is listed first.


title: User agent

text: During the first browser war, many web servers were configured to send web pages that required advanced features, including frames, to clients that were identified as some version of Mozilla only. Other browsers were considered to be older products such as Mosaic, Cello, or Samba, and would be sent a bare bones HTML document.


title: User agent

text: Before migrating to the Chromium code base, Opera was the most widely used web browser that did not have the User-Agent string with "Mozilla" (instead beginning it with "Opera"). Since July 15, 2013, Opera's User-Agent string begins with "Mozilla/5.0" and, to avoid encountering legacy server rules, no longer includes the word "Opera" (instead using the string "OPR" to denote the Opera version).


title: User agent

text: Automated web crawling tools can use a simplified form, where an important field is contact information in case of problems. By convention the word "bot" is included in the name of the agent. For example:


title: User agent

text: The popularity of various Web browser products has varied throughout the Web's history, and this has influenced the design of websites in such a way that websites are sometimes designed to work well only with particular browsers, rather than according to uniform standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) or the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Websites often include code to detect browser version to adjust the page design sent according to the user agent string received. This may mean that less-popular browsers are not sent complex content (even though they might be able to deal with it correctly) or, in extreme cases, refused all content. Thus, various browsers have a feature to "cloak" or "spoof" their identification to force certain server-side content. For example, the Android browser identifies itself as Safari (among other things) in order to aid compatibility.


title: User agent

text: Other HTTP client programs, like download managers and offline browsers, often have the ability to change the user agent string.


title: User agent

text: A result of user agent spoofing may be that collected statistics of Web browser usage are inaccurate.


title: User agent

text: "User agent sniffing" is the practice of websites showing different or adjusted content when viewed with certain user agents. An example of this is Microsoft Exchange Server 2003's Outlook Web Access feature. When viewed with Internet Explorer 6 or newer, more functionality is displayed compared to the same page in any other browsers. User agent sniffing is considered poor practice, since it encourages browser-specific design and penalizes new browsers with unrecognized user agent identifications. Instead, the W3C recommends creating standard HTML markup, allowing correct rendering in as many browsers as possible, and to test for specific browser features rather than particular browser versions or brands.


title: User agent

text: Websites intended for display by mobile phones often rely on user agent sniffing, since mobile browsers often differ greatly from each other.


title: User agent

text: Web browsers created in the United States, such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, previously used the letters U, I, and N to specify the encryption strength in the user agent string. Until 1996, when the United States government allowed encryption with keys longer than 40 bits to be exported, vendors shipped various browser versions with different encryption strengths. "U" stands for "USA" (for the version with 128-bit encryption), "I" stands for "International" the browser has 40-bit encryption and can be used anywhere in the world and "N" stands ("de facto") for "None" (no encryption). Following the lifting of export restrictions, most vendors supported 256-bit encryption.


title: User agent

text: In 2020, Google announced that they would be phasing out support for the User-Agent header in their Google Chrome browser. They stated that other major web browser vendors were supportive of the move, but that they did not know when other vendors would follow suit. Google stated that a new feature called Client Hints would replace the functionality of the User-Agent string.


title: Allusion

text: Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as opposed to indirectly implied) by the author, it is instead usually termed a reference. In the arts, a literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new context under which it assumes new meanings and denotations. It is not possible to predetermine the nature of all the new meanings and inter-textual patterns that an allusion will generate. Literary allusion is closely related to parody and pastiche, which are also "text-linking" literary devices.


title: Allusion

text: In a wider, more informal context, an allusion is a passing or casually short statement indicating broader meaning. It is an incidental mention of something, either directly or by implication, such as "In the stock market, he met his Waterloo."


title: Allusion

text: In the most traditional sense, "allusion" is a literary term, though the word has also come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts. In literature, allusions are used to link concepts that the reader already has knowledge of, with concepts discussed in the story. In the field of film criticism, a film-maker's intentionally unspoken visual reference to another film is also called an homage. It may even be sensed that real events have allusive overtones, when a previous event is inescapably recalled by a current one. "Allusion is bound up with a vital and perennial topic in literary theory, the place of authorial intention in interpretation", William Irwin observed, in asking "What is an allusion?"


title: Allusion

text: Without the hearer or reader's comprehending the author's intention, an allusion becomes merely a decorative device.


title: Allusion

text: Allusion is an economical device, a figure of speech that uses a relatively short space to draw upon the ready stock of ideas, cultural memes or emotion already associated with a topic. Thus, an allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the covert reference in question, a mark of their cultural literacy.


title: Allusion

text: The origin of "allusion" is from the Latin noun "allusionem" "a playing with, a reference to," from "alludere" "to play, jest, make fun of," a compound of "ad" "to" + "ludere" "to play." Recognizing the point of allusion's condensed riddle also reinforces cultural solidarity between the maker of the allusion and the hearer: their shared familiarity with allusion bonds them. Ted Cohen finds such a "cultivation of intimacy" to be an essential element of many jokes. Some aspect of the referent must be invoked and identified for the tacit association to be made; the allusion is indirect in part because "it depends on something more than mere substitution of a referent."


title: Allusion

text: The allusion depends as well on the author's intent; a reader may search out parallels to a figure of speech or a passage, of which the author was unaware, and offer them as unconscious allusions—coincidences that a critic might not find illuminating. Addressing such issues is an aspect of hermeneutics.


title: Allusion

text: William Irwin remarks that allusion moves in only one direction: "If A alludes to B, then B does not allude to A. The Bible does not allude to Shakespeare, though Shakespeare may allude to the Bible." Irwin appends a note: "Only a divine author, outside of time, would seem capable of alluding to a later text." This is the basis for Christian readings of Old Testament prophecy, which asserts that passages are to be read as allusions to future events due to Jesus's revelation in .


title: Allusion

text: Allusion differs from the similar term intertextuality in that it is an intentional effort on the author's part. The success of an allusion depends in part on at least some of its audience "getting" it. Allusions may be made increasingly obscure, until at last they are understood by the author alone, who thereby retreats into a private language (e.g. "Ulalume", by Edgar Allan Poe).


title: Allusion

text: In discussing the richly allusive poetry of Virgil's "Georgics", R. F. Thomas distinguished six categories of allusive reference, which are applicable to a wider cultural sphere. These types are:


title: Allusion

text: A type of literature has grown round explorations of the allusions in such works as Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" or T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land".


title: Allusion

text: In Homer, brief allusions could be made to mythic themes of generations previous to the main narrative because they were already familiar to the epic's hearers: one example is the theme of the Calydonian boarhunt. In Hellenistic Alexandria, literary culture and a fixed literary canon known to readers and hearers made a densely allusive poetry effective; the poems of Callimachus offer the best-known examples.


title: Allusion

text: Martin Luther King Jr., alluded to the Gettysburg Address in starting his "I Have a Dream" speech by saying 'Five score years ago..."; his hearers were immediately reminded of Abraham Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago", which opened the Gettysburg Address. King's allusion effectively called up parallels in two historic moments without overwhelming his speech with details.


title: Allusion

text: A sobriquet is an allusion. By metonymy one aspect of a person or other referent is selected to identify it, and it is this shared aspect that makes a sobriquet evocative: for example, "the city that never sleeps" is a sobriquet of (and therefore an allusion to) New York.


title: Allusion

text: An allusion may become trite and stale through unthinking overuse, devolving into a mere cliché, as is seen in some of the sections below.


title: Allusion

text: Andy Warhol, a 20th-century American artist most famous for his pop-art images of Campbell soup cans and of Marilyn Monroe, commented on the explosion of media coverage by saying, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."


title: Allusion

text: Today, when someone receives a great deal of media attention for something fairly trivial, they are said to be experiencing their "15 minutes of fame"; that is an allusion to Andy Warhol's famous remark.


title: Allusion

text: According to the Book of Genesis, God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, but Lot, the nephew of Abraham, was given time to escape with his family before the destruction. God commanded Lot and his family not to look back as they fled. Lot's wife disobeyed and looked back, and she was immediately turned into a pillar of salt as punishment for her disobedience.


title: Allusion

text: An allusion to Lot's wife or to a pillar of salt is usually a reference to someone who unwisely chooses to look back once they have begun on a course of action or to someone who disobeys an explicit rule or command.


title: Allusion

text: In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of Trojan king Priam, was loved by Apollo, who gave her the gift of prophecy. When Cassandra later angered Apollo, he altered the gift so that her prophecies, while true, would not be believed. Thus, her accurate warnings to the Trojans were disregarded, and disaster befell them.


title: Allusion

text: Today, a "Cassandra" refers to someone who predicts disasters or negative results, especially to someone whose predictions are disregarded.


title: Allusion

text: This phrase comes from a novel by Joseph Heller. "Catch-22" is set on a U.S. Army Air Force base in World War II. "Catch-22" refers to a regulation that states an airman's request to be relieved from flight duty can only be granted if he is judged to be insane. However, anyone who does not want to fly dangerous missions is obviously sane, thus, there is no way to avoid flying the missions.


title: Allusion

text: Later in the book the old woman in Rome explains that Catch-22 means "They can do whatever they want to do." This refers to the theme of the novel in which the authority figures consistently abuse their powers, leaving the consequences to those under their command.


title: Allusion

text: The poetry of T. S. Eliot is often described as "allusive", because of his habit of referring to names, places or images that may only make sense in the light of prior knowledge. This technique can add to the experience, but for the uninitiated can make Eliot's work seem dense and hard to decipher.


title: Allusion

text: The most densely allusive work in modern English may be "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson wrote "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" (1944) that unlocked some of Joyce's most obscure allusions.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular printing is a technology in which lenticular lenses (a technology also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as they are viewed from different angles.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Examples include flip and animation effects such as winking eyes, and modern advertising graphics whose messages change depending on the viewing angle.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Colloquial terms for lenticular prints include "flickers", "winkies", "wiggle pictures" and "tilt cards". The trademarks "Vari-Vue" and "Magic Motion" are often used for lenticular pictures, without regard to the actual manufacturer.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular printing is a multi-step process which consists of creating a lenticular image from at least two images, and placing it behind a lenticular lens. It can be used to create frames of animation, for a motion effect; offsetting the various layers at different increments, for a 3D effect; or simply to show sets of alternative images that appear to transform into each other. Once the images are collected, they are arranged in individual frame files, then digitally combined into a single file in a process called interlacing.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The interlaced image may be printed directly on the back (smooth side) of the lens, or on a substrate (ideally a synthetic paper) which is laminated to the lens. When printing on the backside of the lens, the critical registration of the fine "slices" of interlaced images must be absolutely correct during the lithographic or screen printing process to avoid "ghosting" and poor image definition.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The combined lenticular print shows two or more images by changing the angle from which the print is viewed. If a sequence of images is used, it can even show a short animation.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Though normally produced in sheet form by interlacing simple images or colors throughout the artwork, lenticular images can also be created in roll form with 3D effects or multi-color changes. Alternatively, several images of the same object, taken from slightly different angles, can be used to create a lenticular print with a stereoscopic 3D effect. 3D effects can be achieved only in a lateral (side-by-side) orientation, as each of the viewer's eyes must see them from a slightly different angle to achieve the stereoscopic effect. Other effects, like morphs, motion, and zooms work better (with less ghosting or latent effects) in top-to-bottom orientation, but can be achieved in both orientations.


title: Lenticular printing

text: There are many commercial processes in the manufacture of lenticular images, which can be made from PVC, APET, acrylic, and PETG, as well as other materials. While PETG and APET are the most common, other materials are becoming popular to accommodate outdoor use and special forming due to the increasing use of lenticular images on items such as gift cards. Lithographic lenticular printing allows for the flat side of the lenticular sheet to have ink placed directly onto the lens, while high-resolution photographic lenticulars typically have the image laminated to the lens.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular images saw a surge in popularity in the "aughts", from appearing on the cover of the May 2006 issue of "Rolling Stone" to trading cards, sports posters and signs in stores that help to attract buyers.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Each image is arranged (slicing) into strips, which are then interlaced with one or more similarly arranged images (splicing). These are printed on the back of a piece of plastic, with a series of thin lenses molded into the opposite side. Alternatively, the images can be printed on paper, which is then bonded to the plastic. With the new technology, lenses are printed in the same printing operation as the interlaced image, either on both sides of a flat sheet of transparent material, or on the same side of a sheet of paper, the image being covered with a transparent sheet of plastic or with a layer of transparent, which in turn is printed with several layers of varnish to create the lenses.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The lenses are accurately aligned with the interlaces of the image, so that light reflected off each strip is refracted in a slightly different direction, but the light from all pixels originating from the same original image is sent in the same direction. The end result is that a single eye looking at the print sees a single whole image, but two eyes will see different images, which leads to stereoscopic 3D perception.


title: Lenticular printing

text: There are three distinct types of lenticular prints, distinguished by how great a change in angle of view is required to change the image:


title: Lenticular printing

text: With static (non-motorized) lenticular, the viewer either moves the piece or moves past the piece in order to see the graphic effects. With motorized lenticular, a motor moves the graphics behind the lens, enabling the graphic effects while both the viewer and the display remain stationary.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Corrugated images that change when viewed from different angles predate the development of lenticular printing. A few examples from the paleolithic era exist in French caves. Tabula scalata or "turning pictures" were popular in England since the 16th century. Extant double paintings, with two distinct images on a corrugated panel, are known from the 17th century.


title: Lenticular printing

text: H.C.J. Deeks used a similar technique with minute vertical corrugations pressed into photographic paper and then exposed to two different images from two different angles. Under a 1906 patent H.C.J. Deeks & Co marketed a "Puzzle Post Card" or "Photochange Post Card". In 1907 a "Colorchange Post Card" followed, featuring identical pictures on each side of the corrugations that were sprayed with different "liquid pigment or coloring matter" on (parts of) each side.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The oldest known publication about using a line sheet as a parallax barrier to produce an autostereogram is found in an article by Auguste Berthier in the French scientific magazine "Le Cosmos" of May 1896. Berthier's idea was hardly noticed, but American inventor Frederic Eugene Ives had more success with his very similar "parallax stereogram" since 1901. He also patented the technique for a "Changeable sign, picture, &c." in 1903, which showed different pictures from different angles (instead of one stereoscopic image from the right angle and distance). Léon Gaumont introduced Ives' pictures in France and encouraged Eugène Estanave to work on the technique. Estanave patented a barrier grid technique for animated autostereograms. Animated portrait photographs with line sheets were marketed for a while, mostly in the 1910s and 1920s. In the US "Magic Moving Picture" postcards with simple 3 phase animation or changing pictures were marketed after 1906. Maurice Bonnett improved barrier grid autostereography in the 1930s with his relièphographie technique and scanning cameras.


title: Lenticular printing

text: On 11 April 1898 John Jacobson filed an application for US patent No. 624,043 (granted 2 May 1899) for a "Stereograph" of an interlaced stereoscopic picture and "a transparent mount for said picture having a corrugated or channeled surface". The corrugated lines or channels were not yet really lenticular, but this is the first known autostereogram that used a corrugated transparent surface rather than the opaque lines of most barrier grid stereograms.


title: Lenticular printing

text: French Nobel Prize winning physicist Gabriel Lippmann represented Eugène Estanave at several presentations of Estanave's works at the French Academy of Sciences. On 2 March 1908 Lippmann presented his own ideas for "photographie intégrale", based on insect eyes. He suggested to use a screen of tiny lenses. Spherical segments should be pressed into a sort of film with photographic emulsion on the other side. The screen would be placed inside a lightproof holder and on a tripod for stability. When exposed each tiny lens would function as a camera and record the surroundings from a slightly different angle than neighboring lenses. When developed and lit from behind the lenses should project the life-size image of the recorded subject in space. He could not yet present concrete results in March 1908, but by the end of 1908 he claimed to have exposed some Integral photography plates and to have seen the "resulting single, full-sized image". However, the technique remained experimental since no material or technique seemed to deliver the optical quality desired. At the time of his death in 1921 Lippmann reportedly had a system with only twelve lenses.


title: Lenticular printing

text: On 11 April 1898, John Jacobson filed an application for US patent No. 624,043 (granted 2 May 1899) for a "Stereograph" of an interlaced stereoscopic picture and "a transparent mount for said picture having a corrugated or channeled surface".


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 1912, Louis Chéron described in his French patent 443,216 a screen with long vertical lenses that would be sufficient for recording "stereoscopic depth and the shifting of the relations of objects to each other as the viewer moved", while he suggested pinholes for integral photography.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In June 1912, Swiss Nobel Prize winning physiologist Walter Rudolf Hess applied for a US patent for a "Stereoscopic picture" with a "celluloid covering having a surface composed of cylindrical lens elements". US patent 1,128,979 (published 16 February 1915) was one of several patents in different countries he would register for this technique. The company Stereo-Photographie A.G., registered in Zürich in 1914 and 1915, would produce pictures on transparencies through Hess' process. Few examples of these pictures are still known to have survived. They are circa 3 1/6 × 4 inches black and white pictures (with discolored or intentional hues) and labeled on their passe-partouts "Stereo-Photo nach W.R. Hess - Stereo-Photographie A.G. Zürich. Patente: "Schweiz / Deutschland / Frankreich / Italien / England / Oesterreich / Vereinigte Staaten angemeldet". The Société française de photographie has three lenticular "Stereo-photo" plates in their collection, three more were on auction in 2017.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Herbert E. Ives, son of Frederic Eugene Ives, was one of several researchers who worked on lenticular sheets in the 1920s. These were basically simpler versions of Lippmann's integral photography and had a linear array of small plano-convex cylindrical lenses (lenticules).


title: Lenticular printing

text: The first successful commercial application of the lenticular technique was not used for 3D or motion display but for color movies. Eastman Kodak's 1928 Kodacolor film was based on Keller-Dorian cinematography. It used 16 mm black and white sensitive film embossed with 600 lenses per square inch for use with a filter with RGB stripes. In the 1930s several US patents relating to lenticular techniques were granted, mostly for color film.


title: Lenticular printing

text: On 15 December 1936, Douglas F. Winnek Coffey was granted US patent 2,063,985 (application 24 May 1935) for an "Apparatus for making a composite stereograph". The description does not include changing pictures or animation concepts.


title: Lenticular printing

text: During World War II, research for military purposes was done into 3D imaging, including lenticular technologies. Mass production of plastics and the technique of injection moulding came about around the same period and enabled commercially viable production of lenticular sheets for novelty toys and advertisements.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The panoramic cameras, which were used for most of the early lenticular prints, were French-made and weighed about . In the 1930s they were known as "auto-stereo cameras". These wood-and-brass cameras had a motorized lens that moved in a semicircle around the lens' nodal point. Sheet transparency film, with the lenticular lens overlay, was loaded into special dark slides (about 10×15 inches or ), and these were then inserted into the camera. The exposure time was several seconds long, giving time for the motor drive to power the lens around in an arc.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Victor G. Anderson worked for the Sperry Corporation during World War II where 3D imaging was used for military instructional products, for instance on how to use a bomb sight. After the war Anderson started his company "Pictorial Productions Inc". A patent application for a "Process in the assembling of changeable picture display devices" was filed on 1 March 1952 and granted on 3 December 1957 (US patent 2,815,310. Anderson stated in 1996 that the company's first product was the "I Like Ike" button. The presidential campaign button's image changed from the slogan "I Like Ike" (in black letters on white) into a black and white picture of Ike Eisenhower when viewed from different angles. It was copyrighted on 14 May 1952. In December 1953 the company registered their trademark "Vari-Vue." Vari-Vue further popularized lenticular images during the 1950s and 1960s. By the late sixties, the company marketed about two thousand stock products including moving pattern and color sheets, large images (many religious), billboards, and novelty toys. The company went bankrupt in 1986.


title: Lenticular printing

text: "Look" magazine of 25 February 1964 introduced the publisher's "parallax panoramagram" technology with 8 million copies of a 10x12 cm black and white card with a photographic 3D image of an Edison bust surrounded by some inventions. A 10 x 12 cm full color picture of a model promoting Kodel followed on 7 April. The technique was soon trademarked as "xograph" by Cowles' daughter company Visual Panographics Inc. Magazines like "Look" and "Venture" published xographs until the mid 1970s. Some baseball cards were produced as xographs. Images produced by the company ranged from just a few millimeters (0.1 inch) to .


title: Lenticular printing

text: In the 1960s, more companies manufactured lenticular products, including Hallmark Cards (registering the "Magic Motion" trademark in 1964), Reflexa (Nürnberg, Germany), Toppan (Tokyo, Japan) and Dai-Nippon (Japan).


title: Lenticular printing

text: OptiGraphics Corporation of Grand Prairie, Texas was formed in 1970 and—under the guidance of Victor Anderson, working well into his 80s. The company trademarked "Magic Motion" in 1976. Optigraphics produced the lenticular prizes for Cracker Jack in the 1980s, 7-Eleven Slurpee lenticular sports coins from 1983 to 1987, and in 1986 it produced the first set of 3D traditional baseball cards marketed as Sportflics, which ultimately led to the creation of Pinnacle Brands. In 1999 Performance Companies bought OptiGraphics after Pinnacle Trading Card Company went bankrupt in 1998.


title: Lenticular printing

text: While lenticular images were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1980s OptiGraphics was the only significant manufacturer left in the US.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The techniques for lenticular printing were further improved in the 21st century. Lenticular full motion video effects or "motion print" enabled viewing of up to 60 video frames within a print.


title: Lenticular printing

text: After their first presidential campaign badge "I like Ike" in 1952, Pictorial Productions Inc. made many more similar political campaign buttons, including presidential campaign badge like "Don't blame me! - I voted democratic" (1956), "John F. Kennedy - The Man for the 60s" (1960), "I Like Ben" (1963) and "I'm for Nixon" (1968?).


title: Lenticular printing

text: Official "flasher" badges for pop stars like Elvis Presley were manufactured by Vari-Vue at least since 1956, including badges for Beatles, Rolling Stones' and other bands in the 1960s.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Pictorial Productions/Vari-Vue produced small animated picture cards for Cheerios in the 1950s, of which founder Victor Anderson claimed to have produced 40 million. He also stated that the cards were originally stuck to the outside of the packaging and were only put inside the boxes after too many cards were stolen before the boxes reached the store shelves.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Many different lenticular "tilt cards" were produced as prizes in Cracker Jack boxes. These were first produced by Vari-Vue (1950s-1970s), later by Toppan Printing, Ltd. (1980s), and Optigraphics Corporation (1980s-1990s).


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular images were used in many small and cheap plastic toys, often as gumball machine prizes. These include: miniature toy televisions with an animated lenticular screen, charms in the shape of animals with lenticular faces, "flicker rings", etcetera.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 1960 Takara's Dakkochan - a little plastic golliwog toy with lenticular eyes - originally intended for toddlers, became very popular with Japanese teenagers as a fashion accessory worn around the arm.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Around 1966 several companies started producing lenticular postcards. Common themes are winking girls, religious scenes, animals, dioramas with dolls, touristic sites and pin-up models wearing clothes when viewed from one angle and nude when viewed from another angle.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The lenticular picture on the album cover for the Rolling Stones' 1967 LP "Their Satanic Majesties Request" was manufactured by Vari-Vue, as well as the postcards and other promotional items that accompanied the release. Other lenticular LP covers include Johnny Cash's "The Holy Land" (1969) and The Stranglers' "The Raven".


title: Lenticular printing

text: From around the mid-1990s some lenticular cd covers were produced (mostly for limited editions), including Pet Shop Boys' "Alternative" (1995) with an image of Chris changing into Neil, "The Sacrilicious Sounds of the Supersuckers" (1995), Tool's "Ænima" (1996), Velvet Underground's "Loaded" 2CD version (1997), Kraftwerk "Expo2000" (1999) and David Bowie's "Hours" (1999). Ministry's 2007 "The last sucker" had an image of George W. Bush changing into a monstrous, alien-like face.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In August 1967 the trademark "Lentograph" was filed by Victor Anderson 3D Studios, Inc. (registered in October 1968). Lentographs were marketed as relatively large lenticular plates (16 x 12 inches / 12 × 8 inches), often found in an illuminated brass frame. Commonly found are 3D pictures of Paul Cunningham's biblical displays with sculpted figurines in dramatic poses based on paintings (Plate 501-508), a family of teddy bears in a domestic scene, "Plate No. 106 Evening Flowers", "Plate No. 115 Goldilocks and 3 bears", "Plate No. 124 Bijou" (a white poodle), "Plate No. 121 Midday Respite" (a taxidermied young deer in a forest setting), "Plate No. 213 Red Riding Hood". Also known are a harbor scene (Plate No. 114), "Plate No. 118 Japanese Floral", "Plate No. 123 Faustus" (a yorky dog)" and Plate No. 212 of a covered bridge.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 1967 Bhutan introduced lenticular 3D postage stamps as one of the many unusual stamp designs of the Bhutan Stamp Agency initiated by American businessman Burt Kerr Todd. Countries like Ajman, Yemen, Manama, Umm Al Qiwain and North Korea released lenticular stamps in the 1970s. Animated lenticular stamps have been issued since the early 1980s by countries like North Korea.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 2004 full motion lenticular postage stamps were issued in New Zealand. Over the years many other countries have produced stamps with similar lenticular full motion effects, mostly depicting sport events. In 2010 Communications agency KesselsKramer produced the "Smallest Shortest Film" on a Dutch stamp, directed by Anton Corbijn and featuring actress Carice van Houten.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 2012, Design Consultancy GBH.London created the UK's first 'Motion Stamps' for Royal Mail's Special Stamp Issue, "The Genius of Gerry Anderson". The minisheet featured four fully lenticular stamps based on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "Thunderbirds" TV series. The Stamps and their background border used 48 frame 'MotionPrint’ technology and were produced by Outer Aspect from New Zealand.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In August 2018 the United States Postal Service introduced "The Art of Magic" lenticular stamp, sold in a souvenir sheet of three. The stamp was designed to celebrate the art of magic and "by rotating each stamp, you can see a white rabbit popping out of a black top hat."


title: Lenticular printing

text: In August 2019 the United States Postal Service introduced a second stamp with lenticular technology, this time featuring the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus Rex. The USPS explained that "two of the four designs show movement when rotated. See the skeletal remains with and without flesh and watch as an approaching T. rex suddenly lunges forward."


title: Lenticular printing

text: In 2012, Dan Kainen's first "photicular" book "Safari" was published, with processed video images animated by having a lens sheet slide by turning the page, much like Rufus Butler Seder's "scanimation" process. It was followed by "Ocean" (2014), "Polar" (2015), "Jungle" (2016), "Wild" (2017), "Dinosaur" (2018) and "Outback" (2019).


title: Lenticular printing

text: A related product, produced by a small company in New Jersey, was Rowlux. Unlike the Vari-Vue product, Rowlux used a microprismatic lens structure made by a process they patented in 1972, and no paper print. Instead, the plastic (polycarbonate, flexible PVC and later PETG) was dyed with translucent colors, and the film was usually thin and flexible (from 0.002" or in thickness).


title: Lenticular printing

text: While not a true lenticular process, the Dufex Process (manufactured by F.J. Warren Ltd.) does use a form of lens structure to animate the image. The process consists of imprinting a metallic foil with an image. The foil is then laminated onto a thin sheet of card stock that has been coated with a thick layer of wax. The heated lamination press has the Dufex embossing plate on its upper platen, which has been engraved with 'lenses' at different angles, designed to match the artwork and reflect light at different intensities depending on angle of view.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Since at least the early 1930s many researchers have tried to develop lenticular cinema. Herbert E. Ives presented an apparatus on 31 October 1930 with small autostereoscopic motion pictures viewable by only small groups at a time. Ives would continue to improve his system over the years. However, producing autostereoscopic movies was deemed too costly for commercial purposes. A November 1931 "New York Times" article entitled "New screens gives depth to movies" describes a lenticular system by Douglas F. Winnek and also mentions an optical appliance fitted near the screen by South African astronomer R.T.A. Innes.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular arrays have also been used for 3D autostereoscopic television, which produces the illusion of 3D vision without the use of special glasses. At least as early as 1954 patents for lenticular television were filed, but it lasted until 2010 before a range of 3D televisions became available. Some of these systems used cylindrical lenses slanted from the vertical, or spherical lenses arranged in a honeycomb pattern, to provide a better resolution. While over 40 million 3D televisions were sold in 2012 (including systems that required glasses), by 2016 very little 3D content was offered and manufacturers had stopped producing 3D TV sets. While the need to wear glasses for the more affordable systems seemed to have been a letdown for customers, affordable autostereoscopic televisions were seen as a future solution.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Lenticular front sheeting and image-processing software are both sold for home computer printing, where the interlaced image backing is inkjet printed in photo resolution and affixed behind the lenticular sheet.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Creation of lenticular images on a commercial scale requires printing presses that are adapted to print on sensitive thermoplastic materials. Lithographic offset printing is typically used, to ensure the images are good quality. Printing presses for lenticulars must be capable of adjusting image placement in steps, to allow good alignment of the image to the lens array.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Typically, ultraviolet-cured inks are used. These dry very quickly by direct conversion of the liquid ink to a solid form, rather than by evaporation of liquid solvents from a mixture. Powerful () ultraviolet (UV) lamps have been used to rapidly cure the ink. This allowed lenticular images to be printed at high speed.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In some cases, electron beam lithography has been used instead. The curing of the ink was then initiated directly by an electron beam scanned across the surface.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Double images are usually caused by an exaggeration of the 3D effect from some angles of view, or an insufficient number of frames. Poor design can lead to doubling, small jumps, or a fuzzy image, especially on objects in relief or in depth. For some visuals, where the foreground and background are fuzzy or shaded, this exaggeration can prove to be an advantage. In most cases, the detail and precision required do not allow this.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Ghosting occurs due to poor treatment of the source images, and also due to transitions where demand for an effect goes beyond the limits and technical possibilities of the system. This causes some of the images to remain visible when they should disappear. These effects can depend on the lighting of the lenticular print.


title: Lenticular printing

text: This effect is also known as "banding". Poor calibration of the material can cause the passage from one image to another to not be simultaneous over the entire print. The image transition progresses from one side of the print to the other, giving the impression of a veil or curtain crossing the visual. This phenomenon is felt less for the 3D effects, but is manifested by a jump of the transverse image. In some cases, the transition starts in several places and progresses from each starting point towards the next, giving the impression of several curtains crossing the visual, as described above.


title: Lenticular printing

text: This phenomenon is unfortunately very common, and is explained either by incorrect calibration of the support or by incorrect parametrization of the prepress operations.


title: Lenticular printing

text: One of the main difficulties in lenticular printing is color synchronization. The causes are varied, they may come from a malleable material, incorrect printing conditions and adjustments, or again a dimensional differential of the engraving of the offset plates in each color.


title: Lenticular printing

text: In most cases, the phasing problem comes from imprecise cutting of the material, as explained below. Nevertheless, poor printing and rectification conditions may also be behind it.


title: Lenticular printing

text: Defects, in the way the lenticular lens has been cut, can lead to phase errors between the lens and the image.


title: Lenticular printing

text: The first image shows a cut which removed about 150 µm of the first lens, and which shows irregular cutting of the lenticular lenses. The second image shows a cut which removed about 30 µm of the first lens. Defects in cutting such as these lead to a serious phase problem. In the printing press the image being printed is aligned relative to the edges of the sheet of material. If the sheet is not always cut in the same place relative to the first lenticule, a phase error is introduced between the lenses and the image slices.