title: Lake Tahoe

text: When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, the first casino at the lake had already been open for years. First built on the North Shore in Crystal Bay by Robert Sherman in 1926, the Cal-Neva Lodge became the property of Norman Henry Biltz and was sold to Bill Graham and Jim McKay in 1929.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The Cal-Neva was rebuilt after a fire in 1937 and expanded several times, most noticeably in 1969 when the high-rise hotel was built. Along the way, Frank Sinatra owned the property in the early 1960s, shared his cabins with the likes of Sam Giancana and Marilyn Monroe, and sold out at the height of the area's popularity.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: Other casinos at the North Shore include the Crystal Bay Club, first built in 1937 as the Ta-Neva-Ho; the Tahoe Biltmore, and the Nugget. The Hyatt Regency is found at Incline Village.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: At South Shore, Bill Harrah purchased the Stateline Country Club, which had stood since 1931 and built Harrah's Tahoe. Other casinos include Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Lake Tahoe, Harveys Lake Tahoe, and Bally's Lake Tahoe.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: Lake Tahoe can be reached directly by car, and indirectly by train or air. The nearest passenger train service is the Amtrak station in Truckee, and is served by Amtrak's train, the "California Zephyr," which runs daily between Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area. The closest scheduled passenger airline service is available via the Reno-Tahoe International Airport (RNO). South Tahoe Area Transit Authority is primary mass transportation provider.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: Visitors can reach Lake Tahoe under ideal conditions within two hours from the Sacramento area, one hour from Reno or thirty minutes from Carson City. In winter months, chains or snow tires are often necessary to reach Tahoe from any direction. Traffic can be heavy on weekends due to tourists if not also from weather.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The primary routes to Lake Tahoe are on Interstate 80 via Truckee, U.S. Route 50, and Nevada State Route 431 via Reno. Most of the highways accessing and encircling Lake Tahoe are paved two-lane mountain roads. US 50 is a four-lane highway (from the canyon of the South Fork American River at Riverton, over the Sierra Nevada at Echo Summit, and into the Lake Tahoe Basin, is a mainly two-lane road) passing south of the lake and along part of the eastern shore.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: California State Route 89 follows the western shore of the lake through the picturesque wilderness and connects camping, fishing and hiking locations such as those at Emerald Bay State Park, DL Bliss State Park and Camp Richardson. Farther along are communities such as Meeks Bay and Tahoe City. Finally, the highway turns away from the lake and heads northwest toward Truckee.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: California State Route 28 completes the circuit from Tahoe City around the northern shore to communities such as Kings Beach, Crystal Bay, and into Incline Village, Nevada where the road becomes Nevada State Route 28. Route 28 returns along the eastern shore to US 50 near Spooner Lake.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The Ponderosa Ranch of the TV series "Bonanza" was formerly located on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. The opening sequence of the TV series was filmed at the McFaul Creek Meadow, with Mount Tallac in the background. In September 2004 the Ponderosa Ranch closed its doors, after being sold to developer David Duffield for an undisclosed price.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The 1974 film "The Godfather Part II" used the lakeside estate Fleur de Lac as the location of several scenes, including the elaborate First Communion celebration, the Senator's shakedown attempt of Michael, the assassination attempt on Michael, Michael disowning Fredo, Carmela Corleone's funeral, Fredo's execution while fishing, and the closing scene of Michael sitting alone outside. Fleur de Lac, on the western California shore of Lake Tahoe, was formerly the Henry Kaiser estate. The surrounding lakeside area has been developed into a private gated condominium community and some of the buildings of the "Corleone compound" still exist, including the boathouse.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The 2014 film "Last Weekend", starring Patricia Clarkson and directed by Tom Dolby and Tom Williams, used the west shore lakefront home of Ray and Dagmar Dolby as the primary location for its interiors and exteriors. The house, built in 1929, was also the site for the exteriors for "A Place in the Sun", starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. The 1988 film "Things Change" was also filmed here.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: British rock band A's song "Here We Go Again (I Love Lake Tahoe)" and the accompanying music video centers around the band's love for the lake and the surrounding holiday locations.


title: Lake Tahoe

text: The lake is the setting for Kate Bush's song of the same name from the album 50 Words for Snow. In the song, a woman who drowned in the lake is reunited with her beloved dog in the afterlife. The song was accompanied by a video written and directed by Bush.


title: The Other Guys

text: The Other Guys is a 2010 American buddy cop action-comedy film directed by Adam McKay, who co-wrote it with Chris Henchy. It stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg with Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, Ray Stevenson, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in supporting roles.


title: The Other Guys

text: This film is the fourth of five collaborations between Ferrell and McKay, following "" (2004), "" (2006), and "Step Brothers" (2008), and followed by "" (2013). "The Other Guys" is the only one not to be co-written by Ferrell. It is also the first of three collaborations between Ferrell and Wahlberg, who later reunited in "Daddy's Home" (2015) and "Daddy's Home 2" (2017).


title: The Other Guys

text: The film was released in the United States on August 6, 2010. It was well received by critics and grossed $170 million worldwide.


title: The Other Guys

text: Allen Gamble and Terry Hoitz are both officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Allen is a mild-mannered forensic accountant while Terry is a hot-tempered detective who has been partnered with Allen ever since he mistakenly shot Derek Jeter during the World Series, earning him the nickname "Yankee Clipper". They receive no respect from the other officers, particularly fellow detectives Martin and Fosse.


title: The Other Guys

text: Everyone in their precinct except for Terry idolize cocky detectives Chris Danson and P. K. Highsmith, who are considered New York City's best policemen even though they frequently cause millions of dollars in property damage catching petty criminals. During a pursuit, they leap to their deaths after attempting to "aim for the bushes", which causes the precinct to wonder why they did it and who will take their place.


title: The Other Guys

text: Allen and Terry investigate a scaffolding permit violation by British multi-billionaire Sir David Ershon but wind up uncovering a much bigger plot by Ershon to cover the losses incurred by his client, Lendl Global. Lendl CEO Pamela Boardman has hired a team of mercenaries led by Roger Wesley to make sure Ershon pays her back.


title: The Other Guys

text: Terry and Allen go to Allen's house to talk through the case and have dinner. Terry develops a slight crush on Allen's wife Sheila, while not believing she is truly with Allen because of her beauty. When they visit Allen's ex-girlfriend, Christinith, to gain their police evidence, she and her husband want him to have sex with her. Meanwhile, Terry unsuccessfully attempts to reconnect with his ex-fiancée Francine, who had walked out on him due to his anger issues.


title: The Other Guys

text: During their investigation, Allen and Terry are wounded due to an unsuccessful attempt at scaring them off via the bombing of an accounting office when they come in to investigate it. Allen confides in Terry about how he ran a college dating service in his past, though he insists that he was never a pimp. He stopped the service because he was deep into his dark alternative personality, "Gator", and wound up in the hospital, where he met Sheila. When Sheila tells Allen she is pregnant, he reverts to his dark personality, which causes her to kick him out.


title: The Other Guys

text: Their investigation comes to a halt when Ershon's attorney, Don Beaman, learns of Ershon's plan to cover his losses, leading Wesley to kill him and make it look like suicide. Angered at their lack of progress, Captain Gene Mauch splits up the partners, sending Terry to traffic duty and Allen to beat patrol.


title: The Other Guys

text: Despite Terry's anger, Allen still works the case on his own. After he learns that Danson and Highsmith died investigating a staged theft during which Wesley broke into an accounting firm next door, he finds credible evidence and earns his gun back from Mauch. Allen then convinces Terry to rejoin him. They meet Mauch at Bed Bath & Beyond, his second job, where he admits he has been holding off on the case because Ershon has high-profile connections that could ruin him, so he allows them to finish the case off-the-books.


title: The Other Guys

text: They go to an investment meeting Ershon is having and realize that the $32 billion Ershon seeks is really coming from the NYPD pension fund. They escape with Ershon to his private apartment, and he tells them that the money from the pension fund is already in his account, ready to be transferred. Later that night, Allen and Terry finally reconcile with their loved ones. Allen apologizes to Sheila using her mother as an intermediary and she welcomes him back in. Terry also apologizes to Francine for letting his anger rule his life.


title: The Other Guys

text: The next morning, they drive to the bank to stop the transfer, evading Wesley's team, groups of Chechen and Nigerian "investors" to whom Ershon owes money, and police officers who are told Allen and Terry have gone rogue. Reaching the bank, they halt the transfer. Wesley arrives and, as a delaying tactic, shoots both officers and Ershon in their arms. Mauch finally arrives with backup, rescuing them and arresting Ershon for embezzlement, and Wesley for multiple counts of murder. Ershon's arrest leads to a stock market crash and the subsequent federal bailout of Lendl Global.


title: The Other Guys

text: Terry marries Francine, and Allen reunites with his wife. The narrator finishes off by stating that the true heroes are the everyday people who work to make a difference, not the ones who appear in the newspaper or on television.


title: The Other Guys

text: McKay described the genesis as an "accident, in a way", stemming from a dinner he and Ferrell had with Wahlberg. After noticing the actors' chemistry, McKay wrote producer Kevin Messick an email hypothesizing a possible film starring the two, giving a cop film as an example of what he thought would work. Messick suggested developing that idea into a film.


title: The Other Guys

text: Principal photography for the film began on September 23, 2009, in New York City. Additional scenes were filmed in Albany and Staten Island, New York.


title: The Other Guys

text: Stunt coordinator Brad Martin said in a "Wall Street Journal" interview that for Gamble's car they used three Priuses, including one with a racing engine so large it had to go in the back seat.


title: The Other Guys

text: In July 2010, Wahlberg and Ferrell appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con International to promote the film.


title: The Other Guys

text: During an episode of "Big Brother", the house guests competed in a luxury challenge to see an advance screening of the film. Although they weren't actually in the house, both Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg made an on-screen video appearance.


title: The Other Guys

text: During the August 4, 2010 episode of "America's Got Talent", the week's contestants saw an advance screening of the film and met Ferrell and Wahlberg.


title: The Other Guys

text: During the week leading up to the release date, the film was promoted on TruTV programs, specifically "". During the Season 2 premier for the MTV reality series "Jersey Shore" on July 29, 2010, special segments were shown during the commercial breaks of the show's cast broken down on a highway, discussing several movies, as part of a promotional tie-in; with "The Other Guys" being one of them.


title: The Other Guys

text: In its first day of release, "The Other Guys" grossed $13.1 million, placing first for Friday. It had a large opening weekend take of $35.5 million, placing it at #1 for the weekend of August 6–8, 2010, unseating "Inception". The film ended up grossing $119.2 million in North America and $51.7 million in other territories, making for a worldwide total of $170.9 million.


title: The Other Guys

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 78% based on 205 reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "A clever parody of cop-buddy action-comedies, "The Other Guys" delivers several impressive action set pieces and lots of big laughs, thanks to the assured comic chemistry between Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg." On Metacritic, the film was assigned a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: The Other Guys

text: The film was praised as "a highly entertaining movie filled with witty dialogue and over-the-top action." Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" praised the film, saying, "Don't let anyone spoil the wildly hilarious surprises. Ferrell and Wahlberg will double your fun. Guaranteed." Some critics praised "The Other Guys" as the best police film of the year, comparing the film to the critically panned "Cop Out", with Richard Roeper stating, "Note to Kevin Smith: THIS is how you do a spoof of the buddy-cop genre," and Stephen Whitty of "The Star-Ledger" said in his mixed review, "Measured against this year's other police farce—remember "Cop Out"?—it looks absolutely heroic."


title: The Other Guys

text: "The Other Guys" also received the "Best Comedy Film" award for 2010 at the first annual Comedy Awards.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Michael Bolotin (born February 26, 1953), known professionally as Michael Bolton, is an American singer and songwriter. Bolton originally performed in the hard rock and heavy metal genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, both on his early solo albums and those he recorded as the frontman of the band Blackjack. He became better known for his series of pop rock ballads, recorded after a stylistic change in the late 1980s.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton has sold more than 75 million records, and recorded eight top 10 albums and two number-one singles on the "Billboard" charts, as well as winning six American Music Awards and two Grammy Awards.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton began recording in 1975 at The Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This first album was self-titled using his original family name of Bolotin. Early in his musical career he focused on hard rock, with his band Blackjack once opening for heavy metal artist Ozzy Osbourne on tour. It was rumored that in 1983 Bolton auditioned for, but was denied, the lead vocalist position with Osbourne's former band, Black Sabbath. Bolton later stated this was untrue, saying "That rumor about me auditioning for Black Sabbath was only a rumor, I don't know how on earth it started."


title: Michael Bolton

text: After anglicizing his family name to Bolton, he gained his first major hit as a songwriter, co-writing "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" for Laura Branigan, previously best known for singing the pop hit "Gloria". Narrowly missing the Top 10 on the US pop chart, Branigan took the song to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart for three weeks in 1983. The two sought to work with each other again, and their next collaboration was when Bolton co-wrote "I Found Someone" for Branigan in 1985. Her version was only a minor hit, but two years later, Cher resurrected the song, and with it her own singing career. Bolton co-wrote several other songs for both singers. Bolton recorded his own rendition of "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" in 1988, which reached number one on the Hot 100.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton achieved his greatest success in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a singer on the adult contemporary/easy listening charts. One of his first major hits was his 1987 interpretation of the Otis Redding classic "(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay". Redding's widow, Zelma Redding, said she was so moved by Bolton's performance "that it brought tears to my eyes. It reminded me so much of my husband that I know if he heard it, he would feel the same." Always interested in soul and Motown classics, Bolton's success with that song encouraged him to tackle the standard "Georgia on My Mind", with which he had another hit. In 1991, Bolton released the album "Time, Love & Tenderness" which featured his Grammy Award-winning cover version of "When a Man Loves a Woman".


title: Michael Bolton

text: As a singer, he has performed with other artists such as: Lucia Aliberti, Patti LaBelle, José Carreras, Tony Cetinski, Ray Charles, Celine Dion, Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Wynonna Judd, BB King, The Lonely Island, Luciano Pavarotti, Percy Sledge, and Zucchero. As a songwriter, he has written and collaborated on several songs for other artists as well.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton's last Top 40 single in the US in his own right was the 1997 hit "Go the Distance" (featured in the Disney animated motion picture "Hercules"), which peaked at No. 1 on the US adult contemporary chart. He hired conductor Larry Baird (orchestral musical director/conductor/arranger for The Moody Blues, Three Dog Night, Al Jarreau, etc.) for his 2001 tour.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In 2006, Bolton and Nicollette Sheridan (his fiancée at the time) sang a duet, "The Second Time Around", for the album "Bolton Swings Sinatra". In March 2007, Bolton toured South Africa for the first time. He was the headline act at Jacaranda 94.2 FM's two-day concert.


title: Michael Bolton

text: For "Over the Rainbow", an album which was recorded in five days, Bolton recorded the song "New York, New York", which was also on his "Bolton Swings Sinatra" album. This was for an episode of the TV series, "Challenge Anneka". The proceeds from the album went to children's hospices across the UK.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton performed a duet entitled "Il Mio Amico" with the Italian singer Anna Tatangelo at the Sanremo Music Festival 2008. The song was originally sung by Tatangelo alone, but the duet version contained English lyrics as well.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton's album "Only a Woman Like You" was released in 2001. The title song was co-written by Shania Twain. Bolton released his album "One World One Love" in the UK on September 21, 2009. The first single, "Just One Love", was released one week earlier.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In 2011, Bolton was featured as a guest vocalist in The Lonely Island's song "Jack Sparrow" on their "Turtleneck & Chain" album. His performance with the comedic hip-hop trio focused on his (intentionally) off-topic chorus and miscommunication with the group, and the video featured him dressed in costumes as Jack Sparrow from "Pirates of the Caribbean", Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, and Tony Montana from "Scarface".


title: Michael Bolton

text: As of February 2015, Bolton was working on the recording of a new studio album. He has collaborated with Indian musician A. R. Rahman for a song which was recorded in February 2011 for "Gems – The Duets Collection".


title: Michael Bolton

text: In 2013 Bolton released the album "", which featured duets with Kelly Rowland, Melanie Fiona and Orianthi.


title: Michael Bolton

text: He contributed "Upbeat Inspirational Song About Life" and its reprise to "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies", which was released on July 27, 2018. He also voices the Tiger that sings the song in the film.


title: Michael Bolton

text: He competed in the "American Song Contest", representing Connecticut and performing the song "Beautiful World", with his first performance in the first week, on March 21, 2022. Bolton made it to the finals, coming in seventh.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton has made a number of cameo appearances in feature films and television, usually appearing as himself, such as in "Meet Wally Sparks", "Two and a Half Men", and "The Nanny". Although he has been rumored to have appeared as an extra in "Dune" as a "spice-eyed" drummer, Bolton has stated in interviews that it is not him.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In August 2006, Bolton was one of Lucy Lawless's duet partners on the Fox network's program "Celebrity Duets", which Simon Cowell's Syco Productions Company produced for the network.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton was a contestant on the 11th season of "Dancing with the Stars". He and his dance partner Chelsie Hightower were the second couple to be eliminated, on September 28, 2010.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In 2015, Bolton starred in a Pizza Hut commercial as himself singing "Jingle Bells" while the family opens up their pizza order.


title: Michael Bolton

text: On May 10, 2018, it was announced that American Dream: Detroit (Exclusive), Michael Bolton film, would premiere on Tuesday, May 15, 2018 in Redford Theater. Despite Bolton being born in Connecticut, he fell in love with the city of Detroit and wanted to highlight its recent economic comeback. This documentary features interviews with several business moguls, singers and other Detroit natives, including Christopher Ilitch, Jerry Bruckheimer, Francis Ford Coppola, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and Alice Cooper. This "Love-Letter to Detroit" film is reported by the Crain's (a local business publication) in an article titled "Michael Bolton to appear at Redford Theatre for Detroit documentary premiere", written by Annalise Frank.


title: Michael Bolton

text: On February 24, 1992, the American R&B group the Isley Brothers filed a lawsuit against Bolton, claiming his 1991 hit song "Love Is a Wonderful Thing" plagiarized their 1966 song of the same name.


title: Michael Bolton

text: A Los Angeles jury ruled in favor of the Isley Brothers on April 25, 1994. The jury determined there were five instances in which Bolton's song plagiarized the Isleys' tune. Bolton, co-writer Andrew Goldmark, and Sony Publishing were ordered to turn over more than $5 million in profits from the sales of Bolton's version of the song to the Isley Brothers. It was the largest award in history for plagiarism in the music industry.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton, Goldmark and Sony appealed the verdict, and the court fight continued for nearly seven more years. The case concluded on January 22, 2001, when the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the appeal of a May 2000 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals in San Francisco.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Under the Ninth Circuit ruling, the Isleys were to be paid $4.2 million from Sony Music, $932,924 from Bolton, $220,785 from Goldmark, and the balance from Bolton and Goldmark's music publishing company.


title: Michael Bolton

text: A previous similar lawsuit, regarding his hit composition "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You" was settled in Bolton's favor, helped in part by testimony from the singer Laura Branigan.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton describes himself as a "rebel Jew". He was raised in a liberal interfaith family, describing his childhood home as decorated with both a Hanukkah menorah and a tree. His grandparents kept a kosher household, and originally the family name was Bolotin. He left Hebrew school at age 12 when his rabbi forbade him from returning unless he stopped joking around. Nevertheless, Bolton became bar mitzvah at age 13 and maintains some Jewish beliefs. "I don't want to get on the wrong side of the Creator," Bolton said.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton was married to Maureen McGuire from 1975 to 1990. They are the parents of three daughters, each born two years apart: Isa, Holly, and Taryn. He became a grandfather for the first time in October 2010, through his daughter Taryn. As of February 2019, he has six grandchildren, who range in age from 2 to 8.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton was introduced to actress Nicollette Sheridan in 1992 by adult contemporary/jazz saxophonist Kenny G. Bolton and Sheridan dated until 1995, stopped dating, then reunited in 2005 and became engaged in March 2006; however, it was confirmed in August 2008 that they had broken off their engagement.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In 1993, Bolton established The Michael Bolton Foundation, later renamed The Michael Bolton Charities, to assist women and children at risk from the effects of poverty as well as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. In the late 1990s the group was heavily criticized for the incredibly low percentage of contributions that went towards charity work. In 1995 only 15% of the 2.6m USD the foundation raised went to charity with most of the funds paying for a concert headlined by Bolton himself. Bolton and the foundation have had a long running relationship with former Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland with Rowland steering state funding to the organization. In 1995 Bolton performed at a fundraiser for Rowland soon after the foundation received a grant of $300,000 from the state. In 2014, Bolton wrote a letter to the judge overseeing Rowland's sentencing in a campaign coverup trial in the name of the foundation, stating "We, at The Michael Bolton Charities, believe John Rowland has much to contribute to our community and that given the opportunity, John will continue his work on behalf of women and children at risk." The foundation accepts grant proposals by invitation only.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton also serves as the honorary chairman of Prevent Child Abuse America, the national chairman for This Close for Cancer Research, and a board member for the National Mentoring Partnership and the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital.


title: Michael Bolton

text: On July 25, 1993, Bolton played against Michael Jordan in a televised charity softball game at the Chicago White Sox stadium, Comiskey Park. Bolton's team, The Bolton Bombers, won the game 7–1 against Jordan's team, Jordan's Air Force. The Bolton Bombers were composed of Bolton and his band, while Jordan's Air Force was composed of celebrities including Magic Johnson, Chris Chelios, Ahmad Rashad, Mark Harmon, MC Hammer, Tom Selleck and Stacey King, with Bo Jackson as coach.


title: Michael Bolton

text: In March 2003, Bolton joined with Lifetime Television, Verizon Wireless, and many others to lobby on behalf of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, urging legislation to provide more assistance for victims of domestic violence, such as affordable housing options.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Bolton has received the Lewis Hine Award from the National Child Labor Committee, the Martin Luther King Award from the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor from the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce also recognized Bolton with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his musical and charitable contributions.


title: Michael Bolton

text: Since 1975, Bolton has released 24 studio albums and 35 singles. Nine of his singles have peaked at No. 1 on either the "Billboard" Hot 100 or the Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks charts in the US.


title: GIF

text: The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. It is in widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability between applications and operating systems.


title: GIF

text: The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make GIF less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.


title: GIF

text: GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.


title: GIF

text: CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression. Since this was more efficient than the run-length encoding used by PCX and MacPaint, fairly large images could be downloaded reasonably quickly even with slow modems.


title: GIF

text: The original version of GIF was called 87a. This version already supported multiple images in a stream.


title: GIF

text: The two versions can be distinguished by looking at the first six bytes of the file (the "magic number" or signature), which, when interpreted as ASCII, read "GIF87a" or "GIF89a", respectively.


title: GIF

text: CompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64. GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM.


title: GIF

text: While GIF was developed by CompuServe, it used the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression algorithm patented by Unisys in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between Unisys and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard. In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.


title: GIF

text: The feature of storing multiple images in one file, accompanied by control data, is used extensively on the Web to produce simple animations.


title: GIF

text: The optional interlacing feature, which stores image scan lines out of order in such a fashion that even a partially downloaded image was somewhat recognizable, also helped GIF's popularity, as a user could abort the download if it was not what was required.


title: GIF

text: In May 2015 Facebook added support for GIF. In January 2018 Instagram also added GIF stickers to the story mode.


title: GIF

text: As a noun, the word "GIF" is found in the newer editions of many dictionaries. In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Press recognized "GIF" as a verb as well, meaning "to create a GIF file", as in "GIFing was the perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics". The press's lexicographers voted it their word of the year, saying that GIFs have evolved into "a tool with serious applications including research and journalism".


title: GIF

text: The pronunciation of the first letter of "GIF" has been disputed since the 1990s. The most common pronunciations in English are (with a soft "g" as in "gin") and (with a hard "g" as in "gift"), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter "G". The creators of the format pronounced the acronym "GIF" as , with a soft "g", with Wilhite stating that he intended for the pronunciation to deliberately echo the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often quip "choosy developers choose GIF", a spoof of Jif's television commercials. However, the word is widely pronounced as , with a hard "g", and polls have generally shown that this hard "g" pronunciation is more prevalent.


title: GIF

text: "Dictionary.com" cites both pronunciations, indicating as the primary pronunciation, while "Cambridge Dictionary of American English" offers only the hard-"g" pronunciation. "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary" and Oxford Dictionaries cite both pronunciations, but place the hard "g" first: . The "New Oxford American Dictionary" gave only in its second edition but updated it to in the third edition.


title: GIF

text: The disagreement over the pronunciation has led to heated Internet debate. On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Awards ceremony, Wilhite publicly rejected the hard-"g" pronunciation; his speech led to more than 17,000 posts on Twitter and dozens of news articles. The White House and the TV program "Jeopardy!" also entered the debate in 2013. In February 2020, The J.M. Smucker Company, the owners of the Jif brand, partnered with the animated image database and search engine Giphy to release a limited-edition "Jif vs. GIF" (hashtagged as #JIFvsGIF) jar of peanut butter that had a label humorously declaring the soft-"g" pronunciation to refer exclusively to the peanut butter, and "GIF" to be exclusively pronounced with the hard-"g" pronunciation.


title: GIF

text: GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors, such as logos. This takes advantage of the format's lossless compression, which favors flat areas of uniform color with well defined edges. They can also be used to store low-color sprite data for games. GIFs can be used for small animations and low-resolution video clips, or as reactions in online messaging used to convey emotion and feelings instead of using words. They are popular on social media platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.


title: GIF

text: Conceptually, a GIF file describes a fixed-sized graphical area (the "logical screen") populated with zero or more "images". Many GIF files have a single image that fills the entire logical screen. Others divide the logical screen into separate sub-images. The images may also function as animation frames in an animated GIF file, but again these need not fill the entire logical screen.


title: GIF

text: GIF files start with a fixed-length header ("GIF87a" or "GIF89a") giving the version, followed by a fixed-length Logical Screen Descriptor giving the pixel dimensions and other characteristics of the logical screen. The screen descriptor may also specify the presence and size of a Global Color Table (GCT), which follows next if present.


title: GIF

text: An image starts with a fixed-length Image Descriptor, which may specify the presence and size of a Local Color Table (which follows next if present). The image data follows: one byte giving the bit width of the unencoded symbols (which must be at least 2 bits wide, even for bi-color images), followed by a linked list of sub-blocks containing the LZW-encoded data.


title: GIF

text: Extension blocks (blocks that "extend" the 87a definition via a mechanism already defined in the 87a spec) consist of the sentinel, an additional byte specifying the type of extension, and a linked list of sub-blocks with the extension data. Extension blocks that modify an image (like the Graphic Control Extension that specifies the optional animation delay time and optional transparent background color) must immediately precede the segment with the image they refer to.


title: GIF

text: The linked lists used by the image data and the extension blocks consist of series of sub-blocks, each sub-block beginning with a byte giving the number of subsequent data bytes in the sub-block (1 to 255). The series of sub-blocks is terminated by an empty sub-block (a 0 byte).


title: GIF

text: This structure allows the file to be parsed even if not all parts are understood. A GIF marked 87a may contain extension blocks; the intent is that a decoder can read and display the file without the features covered in extensions it does not understand.


title: GIF

text: GIF is palette-based: the colors used in an image (a frame) in the file have their RGB values defined in a palette table that can hold up to 256 entries, and the data for the image refer to the colors by their indices (0–255) in the palette table. The color definitions in the palette can be drawn from a color space of millions of shades (2 shades, 8 bits for each primary), but the maximum number of colors a frame can use is 256. This limitation seemed reasonable when GIF was developed because few people could afford the hardware to display more colors simultaneously. Simple graphics, line drawings, cartoons, and grey-scale photographs typically need fewer than 256 colors.


title: GIF

text: Each frame can designate one index as a "transparent background color": any pixel assigned this index takes on the color of the pixel in the same position from the background, which may have been determined by a previous frame of animation.


title: GIF

text: Many techniques, collectively called dithering, have been developed to approximate a wider range of colors with a small color palette by using pixels of two or more colors to approximate in-between colors. These techniques sacrifice spatial resolution to approximate deeper color resolution. While not part of the GIF specification, dithering can be used in images subsequently encoded as GIF images. This is often not an ideal solution for GIF images, both because the loss of spatial resolution typically makes an image look fuzzy on the screen, and because the dithering patterns often interfere with the compressibility of the image data, working against GIF's main purpose.


title: GIF

text: In the early days of graphical web browsers, graphics cards with 8-bit buffers (allowing only 256 colors) were common and it was fairly common to make GIF images using the websafe palette. This ensured predictable display, but severely limited the choice of colors. When 24-bit color became the norm, palettes could instead be populated with the optimum colors for individual images.


title: GIF

text: A small color table may suffice for small images, and keeping the color table small allows the file to be downloaded faster. Both the 87a and 89a specifications allow color tables of 2 colors for any "n" from 1 through 8. Most graphics applications will read and display GIF images with any of these table sizes; but some do not support all sizes when "creating" images. Tables of 2, 16, and 256 colors are widely supported.


title: GIF

text: Although GIF is almost never used for true color images, it is possible to do so. A GIF image can include multiple image blocks, each of which can have its own 256-color palette, and the blocks can be tiled to create a complete image. Alternatively, the GIF89a specification introduced the idea of a "transparent" color where each image block can include its own palette of 255 visible colors plus one transparent color. A complete image can be created by layering image blocks with the visible portion of each layer showing through the transparent portions of the layers above.


title: GIF

text: To render a full-color image as a GIF, the original image must be broken down into smaller regions having no more than 255 or 256 different colors. Each of these regions is then stored as a separate image block with its own local palette and when the image blocks are displayed together (either by tiling or by layering partially transparent image blocks), the complete, full-color image appears. For example, breaking an image into tiles of 16 by 16 pixels (256 pixels in total) ensures that no tile has more than the local palette limit of 256 colors, although larger tiles may be used and similar colors merged resulting in some loss of color information.


title: GIF

text: Since each image block can have its own local color table, a GIF file having many image blocks can be very large, limiting the usefulness of full-color GIFs. Additionally, not all GIF rendering programs handle tiled or layered images correctly. Many rendering programs interpret tiles or layers as animation frames and display them in sequence as an animation with most web browsers automatically displaying the frames with a delay time of 0.1 seconds or more.


title: GIF

text: Note that the hex numbers in the following tables are in little-endian byte order, as the format specification prescribes.


title: GIF

text: The image pixel data, scanned horizontally from top left, are converted by LZW encoding to codes that are then mapped into bytes for storing in the file. The pixel codes typically don't match the 8-bit size of the bytes, so the codes are packed into bytes by a "little-Endian" scheme: the least significant bit of the first code is stored in the least significant bit of the first byte, higher order bits of the code into higher order bits of the byte, spilling over into the low order bits of the next byte as necessary. Each subsequent code is stored starting at the least significant bit not already used.


title: GIF

text: This byte stream is stored in the file as a series of "sub-blocks". Each sub-block has a maximum length 255 bytes and is prefixed with a byte indicating the number of data bytes in the sub-block. The series of sub-blocks is terminated by an empty sub-block (a single 0 byte, indicating a sub-block with 0 data bytes).


title: GIF

text: A slight compression is evident: pixel colors defined initially by 15 bytes are exactly represented by 12 code bytes including control codes.


title: GIF

text: The encoding process that produces the 9-bit codes is shown below. A local string accumulates pixel color numbers from the palette, with no output action as long as the local string can be found in a code table. There is special treatment of the first two pixels that arrive before the table grows from its initial size by additions of strings. After each output code, the local string is initialized to the latest pixel color (that could not be included in the output code).


title: GIF

text: For clarity the table is shown above as being built of strings of increasing length. That scheme can function but the table consumes an unpredictable amount of memory. Memory can be saved in practice by noting that each new string to be stored consists of a previously stored string augmented by one character. It is economical to store at each address only two words: an existing address and one character.


title: GIF

text: The LZW algorithm requires a search of the table for each pixel. A linear search through up to 4096 addresses would make the coding slow. In practice the codes can be stored in order of numerical value; this allows each search to be done by a SAR (Successive Approximation Register, as used in some ADCs), with only 12 magnitude comparisons. For this efficiency an extra table is needed to convert between codes and actual memory addresses; the extra table upkeeping is needed only when a new code is stored which happens at much less than pixel rate.


title: GIF

text: Decoding begins by mapping the stored bytes back to 9-bit codes. These are decoded to recover the pixel colors as shown below. A table identical to the one used in the encoder is built by adding strings by this rule:


title: GIF

text: Shorter code lengths can be used for palettes smaller than the 256 colors in the example. If the palette is only 64 colors (so color indexes are 6 bits wide), the symbols can range from 0 to 63, and the symbol width can be taken to be 6 bits, with codes starting at 7 bits. In fact, the symbol width need not match the palette size: as long as the values decoded are always less than the number of colors in the palette, the symbols can be any width from 2 to 8, and the palette size any power of 2 from 2 to 256. For example, if only the first four colors (values 0 to 3) of the palette are used, the symbols can be taken to be 2 bits wide with codes starting at 3 bits.


title: GIF

text: Conversely, the symbol width could be set at 8, even if only values 0 and 1 are used; these data would only require a two-color table. Although there would be no point in encoding the file that way, something similar typically happens for bi-color images: the minimum symbol width is 2, even if only values 0 and 1 are used.


title: GIF

text: The code table initially contains codes that are one bit longer than the symbol size in order to accommodate the two special codes "clr" and "end" and codes for strings that are added during the process. When the table is full the code length increases to give space for more strings, up to a maximum code 4095 = FFF(hex). As the decoder builds its table it tracks these increases in code length and it is able to unpack incoming bytes accordingly.


title: GIF

text: The GIF encoding process can be modified to create a file without LZW compression that is still viewable as a GIF image. This technique was introduced originally as a way to avoid patent infringement. Uncompressed GIF can also be a useful intermediate format for a graphics programmer because individual pixels are accessible for reading or painting. An uncompressed GIF file can be converted to an ordinary GIF file simply by passing it through an image editor.


title: GIF

text: The modified encoding method ignores building the LZW table and emits only the root palette codes and the codes for CLEAR and STOP. This yields a simpler encoding (a 1-to-1 correspondence between code values and palette codes) but sacrifices all of the compression: each pixel in the image generates an output code indicating its color index. When processing an uncompressed GIF, a standard GIF decoder will not be prevented from writing strings to its dictionary table, but the code width must never increase since that triggers a different packing of bits to bytes.


title: GIF

text: If the symbol width is , the codes of width fall naturally into two blocks: the lower block of codes for coding single symbols, and the upper block of codes that will be used by the decoder for sequences of length greater than one. Of that upper block, the first two codes are already taken: for CLEAR and for STOP. The decoder must also be prevented from using the last code in the upper block, , because when the decoder fills that slot, it will increase the code width. Thus in the upper block there are codes available to the decoder that won't trigger an increase in code width. Because the decoder is always one step behind in maintaining the table, it does not generate a table entry upon receiving the first code from the encoder, but will generate one for each succeeding code. Thus the encoder can generate codes without triggering an increase in code width. Therefore, the encoder must emit extra CLEAR codes at intervals of codes or less to make the decoder reset the coding dictionary. The GIF standard allows such extra CLEAR codes to be inserted in the image data at any time. The composite data stream is partitioned into sub-blocks that each carry from 1 to 255 bytes.


title: GIF

text: For the sample 3×5 image above, the following 9-bit codes represent "clear" (100) followed by image pixels in scan order and "stop" (101).


title: GIF

text: After the above codes are mapped to bytes, the uncompressed file differs from the compressed file thus:


title: GIF

text: The trivial example of a large image of solid color demonstrates the variable-length LZW compression used in GIF files.


title: GIF

text: The code values shown are packed into bytes which are then packed into blocks of up to 255 bytes. A block of image data begins with a byte that declares the number of bytes to follow. The last block of data for an image is marked by a zero block-length byte.


title: GIF

text: The GIF Specification allows each image within the logical screen of a GIF file to specify that it is interlaced; i.e., that the order of the raster lines in its data block is not sequential. This allows a partial display of the image that can be recognized before the full image is painted.


title: GIF

text: An interlaced image is divided from top to bottom into strips 8 pixels high, and the rows of the image are presented in the following order:


title: GIF

text: The pixels within each line are not interlaced, but presented consecutively from left to right. As with non-interlaced images, there is no break between the data for one line and the data for the next. The indicator that an image is interlaced is a bit set in the corresponding Image Descriptor block.


title: GIF

text: Although GIF was not designed as an animation medium, its ability to store multiple images in one file naturally suggested using the format to store the frames of an animation sequence. To facilitate "displaying" animations, the GIF89a spec added the Graphic Control Extension (GCE), which allows the images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays, forming a video clip. Each frame in an animation GIF is introduced by its own GCE specifying the time delay to wait after the frame is drawn. Global information at the start of the file applies by default to all frames. The data is stream-oriented, so the file offset of the start of each GCE depends on the length of preceding data. Within each frame the LZW-coded image data is arranged in sub-blocks of up to 255 bytes; the size of each sub-block is declared by the byte that precedes it.


title: GIF

text: By default, an animation displays the sequence of frames only once, stopping when the last frame is displayed. To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB). This block, placed immediately before the sequence of animation frames, specifies the number of times the sequence of frames should be played (1 to 65535 times) or that it should repeat continuously (zero indicates loop forever). Support for these repeating animations first appeared in Netscape Navigator version 2.0, and then spread to other browsers. Most browsers now recognize and support NAB, though it is not strictly part of the GIF89a specification.


title: GIF

text: The following example shows the structure of the animation file "" shown (as a thumbnail) in the article's infobox.


title: GIF

text: The animation delay for each frame is specified in the GCE in hundredths of a second. Some economy of data is possible where a frame need only rewrite a portion of the pixels of the display, because the Image Descriptor can define a smaller rectangle to be rescanned instead of the whole image. Browsers or other displays that do not support animated GIFs typically show only the first frame.


title: GIF

text: The size and color quality of animated GIF files can vary significantly depending on the application used to create them. Strategies for minimizing file size include using a common global color table for all frames (rather than a complete local color table for each frame) and minimizing the number of pixels covered in successive frames (so that only the pixels that change from one frame to the next are included in the latter frame). More advanced techniques involve modifying color sequences to better match the existing LZW dictionary, a form of lossy compression. Simply packing a series of independent frame images into a composite animation tends to yield large file sizes. Tools are available to minimize the file size given an existing GIF.


title: GIF

text: Metadata can be stored in GIF files as a comment block, a plain text block, or an application-specific application extension block. Several graphics editors use unofficial application extension blocks to include the data used to generate the image, so that it can be recovered for further editing.


title: GIF

text: All of these methods technically require the metadata to be broken into sub-blocks so that applications can navigate the metadata block without knowing its internal structure.


title: GIF

text: The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) metadata standard introduced an unofficial but now widespread "XMP Data" application extension block for including XMP data in GIF files. Since the XMP data is encoded using UTF-8 without NUL characters, there are no 0 bytes in the data. Rather than break the data into formal sub-blocks, the extension block terminates with a "magic trailer" that routes any application treating the data as sub-blocks to a final 0 byte that terminates the sub-block chain.


title: GIF

text: In 1977 and 1978, Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel published a pair of papers on a new class of lossless data-compression algorithms, now collectively referred to as LZ77 and LZ78. In 1983, Terry Welch developed a fast variant of LZ78 which was named Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW).


title: GIF

text: Welch filed a patent application for the LZW method in June 1983. The resulting patent, US4558302, granted in December 1985, was assigned to Sperry Corporation who subsequently merged with Burroughs Corporation in 1986 and formed Unisys. Further patents were obtained in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada.


title: GIF

text: In addition to the above patents, Welch's 1983 patent also includes citations to several other patents that influenced it, including:


title: GIF

text: In June 1984, an article by Welch was published in the IEEE magazine which publicly described the LZW technique for the first time. LZW became a popular data compression technique and, when the patent was granted, Unisys entered into licensing agreements with over a hundred companies.


title: GIF

text: The popularity of LZW led CompuServe to choose it as the compression technique for their version of GIF, developed in 1987. At the time, CompuServe was not aware of the patent. Unisys became aware that the version of GIF used the LZW compression technique and entered into licensing negotiations with CompuServe in January 1993. The subsequent agreement was announced on 24 December 1994. Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services.


title: GIF

text: Following this announcement, there was widespread condemnation of CompuServe and Unisys, and many software developers threatened to stop using GIF. The PNG format (see below) was developed in 1995 as an intended replacement. However, obtaining support from the makers of Web browsers and other software for the PNG format proved difficult and it was not possible to replace GIF, although PNG has gradually increased in popularity. Therefore, GIF variations without LZW compression were developed. For instance the libungif library, based on Eric S. Raymond's giflib, allows creation of GIFs that followed the data format but avoided the compression features, thus avoiding use of the Unisys LZW patent. A 2001 "Dr. Dobb's" article described a way to achieve LZW-compatible encoding without infringing on its patents.


title: GIF

text: In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of certain non-commercial and private websites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500. Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. Nevertheless, Unisys was subjected to thousands of online attacks and abusive emails from users believing that they were going to be charged $5000 or sued for using GIFs on their websites. Despite giving free licenses to hundreds of non-profit organizations, schools and governments, Unisys was completely unable to generate any good publicity and continued to be condemned by individuals and organizations such as the League for Programming Freedom who started the "Burn All GIFs" campaign in 1999.


title: GIF

text: The United States LZW patent expired on 20 June 2003. The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on 18 June 2004, the Japanese patents expired on 20 June 2004, and the Canadian patent expired on 7 July 2004. Consequently, while Unisys has further patents and patent applications relating to improvements to the LZW technique, LZW itself (and consequently GIF) have been free to use since July 2004.


title: GIF

text: Portable Network Graphics (PNG) was designed as a replacement for GIF in order to avoid infringement of Unisys' patent on the LZW compression technique. PNG offers better compression and more features than GIF, animation being the only significant exception. PNG is more suitable than GIF in instances where true-color imaging and alpha transparency are required.


title: GIF

text: Although support for PNG format came slowly, new web browsers support PNG. Older versions of Internet Explorer do not support all features of PNG. Versions 6 and earlier do not support alpha channel transparency without using Microsoft-specific HTML extensions. Gamma correction of PNG images was not supported before version 8, and the display of these images in earlier versions may have the wrong tint.


title: GIF

text: For identical 8-bit (or lower) image data, PNG files are typically smaller than the equivalent GIFs, due to the more efficient compression techniques used in PNG encoding. Complete support for GIF is complicated chiefly by the complex canvas structure it allows, though this is what enables the compact animation features.


title: GIF

text: Videos resolve many issues that GIFs present through common usage on the web. They include drastically smaller file sizes, the ability to surpass the 8-bit color restriction, and better frame-handling and compression through codecs. Virtually universal support for the GIF format in web browsers and a lack of official support for video in the HTML standard caused GIF to rise to prominence for the purpose of displaying short video-like files on the web.


title: GIF

text: In April 2014, 4chan added support for silent WebM videos that are under 3 MB in size and 2 min in length, and in October 2014, Imgur started converting any GIF files uploaded to the site to video and giving the link to the HTML player the appearance of an actual file with a codice_2 extension.


title: GIF

text: In January 2016, Telegram started re-encoding all GIFs to MPEG-4 videos that "require up to 95% less disk space for the same image quality."


title: Eric Burdon

text: Eric Victor Burdon (born 11 May 1941) is an English singer. He was previously the lead vocalist of R&B and rock band the Animals and funk band War. He is regarded as one of the British Invasion's most distinctive singers with his deep, powerful blues-rock voice. He is also known for his aggressive stage performances.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2008, he was ranked 57th in "Rolling Stone"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s list of "The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time".


title: Eric Burdon

text: Eric Burdon was born in 1941 in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His father, Matt, was originally from Tyneside. His mother, Rene, was originally from Ireland and moved to Scotland before settling in Newcastle in the 1930s. He also had a younger sister, Irene. Burdon later recalled that his middle name "Victor" had been chosen after encouragement from the Lord Mayor, who offered new mothers £25 if their new-borns were given a patriotic "war name."


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon states he often had a divided loyalty in his sense of place and identity. He was born to a lower middle class family; his father did electrical work in some of the clubs Burdon would later play. Because of his father's line of work in electrical repair, the Burdon family had a TV by the time Eric was 10. In his autobiography, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", he recalls the electrifying moment of first seeing Louis Armstrong on TV which began his love for blues music. This led him to take up the trombone. Realizing that he was not that good a player, however, he took up singing and went to Newcastle Art College. In his song "When I Was Young," he states he met his first love at 13, who was very experienced while he was not. He also says he smoked his first cigarette at 10 years old and would skip school with his friends to drink Newcastle Brown Ale.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon describes his early school years as a "dark nightmare" that "should've been penned by Charles Dickens." Due to the river pollution and humidity in Newcastle he suffered asthma attacks daily. During primary school, he was "stuck at the rear of the classroom of around 40 to 50 kids and received constant harassment from kids and teachers alike." He goes on to say his primary school was "jammed between a slaughterhouse and a shipyard on the banks of the Tyne. Some teachers were sadistic – others pretended not to notice – and sexual molestation and regular corporal punishment with a leather strap was the order of the day."


title: Eric Burdon

text: By the time he got to secondary school, a teacher by the name of Bertie Brown was responsible for getting him into art school and changing his life forever. There he first met John Steel, the original drummer for the Animals. He also met a lot of other "young rebels" who shared his interest in jazz, folk, and movies.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon started out his young adult life as one of a group of people who hung out at the local jazz club, The Downbeat. He describes his friends as "like a motorcycle gang ... without the motorcycles" – they were tough, hard-drinking, and listened to American music. Burdon and fellow rocker and guitarist, American Jimi Hendrix, became very close friends in the mid sixties and remained so up until Hendrix's death in 1970; Burdon was in fact the person Hendrix's girlfriend called when she found him overdosed on drugs. Burdon was also a good friend of the Beatles' John Lennon and was mentioned in one of their songs, "I Am the Walrus" as "the eggman." Burdon states, "The nickname stuck after a wild experience I'd had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrite capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of others." Lennon, finding the story amusing and hilarious, replied, "Go on, go get it, Eggman," incorporating the incident into his song in tribute to the unique experience.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon was lead vocalist of the Animals, formed during 1962 in Newcastle upon Tyne. The original band was the Alan Price Rhythm and Blues Combo, which formed in 1958; they became the Animals shortly after Burdon joined the band. The Animals combined electric blues with rock; in the US they were considered one of the leading bands of the British Invasion. Along with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Hollies, the Dave Clark Five, and the Kinks, the group introduced contemporary British music and fashion to American audiences. Burdon's powerful voice can be heard on the Animals' singles "The House of the Rising Sun", "Baby Let Me Take You Home", "I'm Crying", "Boom Boom", "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", "Bring It On Home to Me", "We Gotta Get Out of This Place", "It's My Life", "Don't Bring Me Down", "See See Rider", "Help Me Girl", "Monterey", and "Sky Pilot".


title: Eric Burdon

text: The Animals' keyboardist Alan Price left the band in May 1965, and drummer John Steel followed in April 1966. Burdon has often attributed the disintegration of the band to conflict with Price, specifically that Price had claimed sole rights and ownership to "House of the Rising Sun". Burdon and drummer Barry Jenkins reformed the group as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Their first studio album was "Eric Is Here", which featured the hit single "Help Me Girl", released in December 1966, in which Burdon and drummer Jenkins teamed up with Animals' keyboardist Dave Rowberry, Animals' original bassist Chas Chandler, and Animals' original guitarist Hilton Valentine, and session musicians arranged and conducted by Horace Ott. According to Peter Dunbavan, "Help Me Girl" included Hammond organ and brass with great effect and is too often overlooked today. Then followed a more psychedelic incarnation of the group that featured future Family member John Weider and was sometimes called Eric Burdon and the New Animals. Keyboardist Zoot Money joined during 1968 until the band broke up in 1969. This group's hits included the ballad "San Franciscan Nights", the grunge–heavy metal-pioneering "When I Was Young", "Monterey", the anti-Vietnam anthem "Sky Pilot", "White Houses" and the progressive cover of "Ring of Fire".


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1975, the original Animals reunited and recorded a studio album called "Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted", released in 1977. In May 1983, the Animals reunited with their original line-up and released the studio album "Ark" on 16 June 1983, along with the singles "The Night" and "Love Is for All Time". A world tour followed, and the concert at Wembley Arena, London, recorded on 31 December 1983, was released in 1984 as "Greatest Hits Live (Rip It to Shreds)". Their concert at the Royal Oak Theatre in April 1984 was released in 2008 as "Last Live Show"; the band members were augmented by Zoot Money, Nippy Noya, Steve Gregory and Steve Grant. The original Animals broke up for the last time at the end of 1984.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Although the band Burdon formed in the late 1960s was sometimes called Eric Burdon and the New Animals, it was not until 1998 that the name Eric Burdon and the New Animals was officially adopted. The 1998 band had bassist Dave Meros, guitarist Dean Restum, drummer Aynsley Dunbar and keyboard guitarist Neal Morse. They recorded "Live at the Coach House" on 17 October 1998, released on video and DVD in December that year. In 1999 they released "The Official Live Bootleg No. 2" and in August 2000 "The Official Live Bootleg 2000", with Martin Gerschwitz on keyboards.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In June 2003, he formed another Eric Burdon and the Animals, with keyboardist Martin Gerschwitz, bassist Dave Meros, guitarist Dean Restum, and drummer Bernie Pershey. They broke up in 2005. During 2008 Burdon toured again as Eric Burdon and the Animals with a variable line-up of backing musicians.


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 13 December 2008 Burdon lost a three-year legal battle to use the name "the Animals" in the UK, with drummer John Steel owning the rights, in the UK only, as a result. Steel was a member in the band's heyday and left in 1966, before the band broke up three years later; he later played in various reunion versions of the band with Burdon. Burdon still toured as Eric Burdon and the Animals, but was prevented from using the name "the Animals" in Britain while the case was under appeal. On 9 September 2013 Burdon's appeal was allowed, with him then entitled to use the band name in the UK.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2016, Burdon formed the current line-up of the Animals, including Johnzo West (guitar and vocals), Davey Allen (keyboards and vocals), Dustin Koester (drums and vocals), Justin Andres (bass guitar and vocals), Ruben Salinas (saxophone and flute), and Evan Mackey (trombone).


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1969, while living in San Francisco, Burdon joined forces with California funk rock band War. In April 1970, the resulting studio album was titled "Eric Burdon Declares "War"" which produced the singles "Spill the Wine" and "Tobacco Road". A two-disc set entitled "The Black-Man's Burdon" was released in September 1970. The singles from their double album, "Paint It Black" and "They Can't Take Away Our Music", had moderate success during 1971. During this time Burdon collapsed on the stage during a concert, caused by an asthma attack, and War continued the tour without him.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1976, a compilation album, "Love Is All Around", released by ABC Records, included recordings of Eric Burdon with War doing a live version of "Paint It Black" and a cover of the Beatles' song "A Day in the Life". The band also featured ex-NFL star Deacon Jones who coined the term "quarterback sack" and sang on the band's 1975 song "Why Can't We Be Friends?"


title: Eric Burdon

text: Eric Burdon and War were reunited for the first time in 37 years, to perform an Eric Burdon & War reunion at the concert at the Royal Albert Hall London on 21 April 2008. The concert coincided with a major reissue campaign by Rhino Records (UK), which released all the War albums including "Eric Burdon Declares "War"" and "The Black-Man's Burdon".


title: Eric Burdon

text: The version of the band that performed alongside Burdon in 2008 at the Royal Albert Hall was not the original band but a reformed one led by the only original member, keyboardist Lonnie Jordan. This was due to a court injunction. The remaining surviving members of WAR perform as "The LowRider Band".


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon began a solo career in 1971 with the Eric Burdon Band, continuing with a hard rock–heavy metal–funk style. In August 1971, he recorded the studio album "Guilty!", which featured the blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon and Ike White of the San Quentin Prison Band. In 1973, the band performed at the Reading Festival. At the end of 1974, the band released the album "Sun Secrets" followed by the album "Stop" in 1975. Burdon moved to Germany in 1977 and recorded the album "Survivor" with a line-up including guitarist Alexis Korner and keyboardist Zoot Money; the album also had a line-up of four guitarists and three keyboardists and is known for its interesting album cover, which depicts Burdon screaming. The album was produced by former Animals bassist Chas Chandler. The original release included a booklet of illustrated lyrics done in ink by Burdon himself.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In May 1978, he recorded the studio album "Darkness Darkness" at the Roundwood House in County Laois, Ireland, using Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio and featuring guitarist and vocalist Bobby Tench from the Jeff Beck Group, who had left Streetwalkers a few months before. The album was eventually released in 1980. During January 1979, Burdon changed his band for a tour taking in Hamburg, Germany and the Netherlands.


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 28 August 1982, the "Eric Burdon Band" including Red Young (keyboards) performed at the Rockpalast Open Air Concert at the Lorelei, Germany. Following this Burdon toured heavily with his solo project from March 1984 to March 1985, taking in UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia. In 1986, Burdon published his autobiography titled "I Used to Be an Animal, but I'm Alright Now".


title: Eric Burdon

text: In March 1979, he played a concert in Cologne and changed the band's name to Eric Burdon's Fire Department, whose line-up included backing vocalist Jackie Carter of Silver Convention, Bertram Engel of Udo Lindenberg's "Panik Orchester" and Jean-Jaques Kravetz. In mid 1980, they recorded the album "The Last Drive". "Eric Burdon's Fire Department" toured Europe with this line-up and Paul Millns and Louisiana Red made special appearances in Spain and Italy. By December 1980, the band had broken up.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In April 1981, Christel Buschmann began to film "Comeback" with Burdon as the star. They created a new Eric Burdon Band whose line-up included Louisiana Red, Tony Braunagle, John Sterling and Snuffy Walden. This band recorded live tracks in Los Angeles. They also recorded in Berlin with another line-up, the only remaining member being John Sterling. In September 1981, the final scenes of "Comeback" were shot in the Berlin Metropole and Burdon and his band continued to tour through Australia and North America. A studio album titled "Comeback" was released in 1982. The 1983 album "Power Company" also included songs recorded during the "Comeback" project.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1988, he put together a band with 15 musicians including Andrew Giddings – keyboards, Steve Stroud – bass, Adrian Sheppard – drums, Jamie Moses – guitar and four backing vocalists to record the studio album "I Used to Be an Animal" in Malibu, in the United States. In 1990, Eric Burdon's cover version of "Sixteen Tons" was used for the film "Joe Versus the Volcano". The song, which played at the beginning of the film, was also released as a single. He also recorded the singles "We Gotta Get out of this Place" with Katrina and the Waves and "No Man's Land" with Tony Carey and Anne Haigis. Later in 1990, he had a small line-up of an "Eric Burdon Band" featuring Jimmy Zavala (saxophone and harmonica), Dave Meros (bass guitar), Jeff Naideau (keyboards), Thom Mooney (drums) and John Sterling (guitar) before he began a tour with the Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and they appeared at a concert from Ventura Beach, California, which was released as a DVD on 20 June 2008.


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 13 April 2004, he released a "comeback" album, "My Secret Life", which was his first album with new recordings for 16 years. When John Lee Hooker died in 2001, Burdon had written the song "Can't Kill the Boogieman" the co-writers of the songs, on the album, were Tony Braunagel and Marcelo Nova. In 2005, they released a live album, "Athens Traffic Live", with special DVD bonus material and a bonus studio track and disbanded in November 2005. He began a short touring as the "Blues Knights".


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 27 January 2006, he released his blues–R&B album "Soul of a Man". This album was dedicated to Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker. The cover of the album was a picture which was sent to Burdon a few years before. Burdon then formed a new band, with the following members: Red Young (keyboards), Paula O'Rourke (bass), Eric McFadden (guitar), Carl Carlton (guitar) and Wally Ingram (drums). They also performed at the Lugano Festival and in 2007 he toured as the headlining act of the "Hippiefest" line-up, produced and hosted by Country Joe McDonald.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon, at 71, recorded an EP with Cincinnati garage band the Greenhornes called, simply, "Eric Burdon & the Greenhornes". The album was recorded at an all-analogue recording studio, and released on 23 November 2012 as part of Record Store Day's "Black Friday".


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2013, Eric Burdon came out with a new album called, "Til Your River Runs Dry". The lead single off the album was called "Water" and was inspired by a conversation he had with former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1991, Burdon and Brian Auger formed the "Eric Burdon – Brian Auger Band" with the following line-up: Eric Burdon – vocals, Brian Auger – keyboards, vocals, Dave Meros – bass guitar, vocals, Don Kirkpatrick – guitar, vocals and Paul Crowder – drums, vocals. By 1992, Larry Wilkins replaced Kirkpatrick and Karma Auger (Brian's son) replaced Crowder and in 1993 they added Richard Reguria (percussion). The live album "Access All Areas" was then released. In 1994 the "Eric Burdon – Brian Auger Band" disbanded. Burdon then formed the "Eric Burdon's i Band". The line-up included Larry Wilkins, Dean Restum (guitar), Dave Meros (bass) and Mark Craney (drums).


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1995, Burdon made a guest appearance with Bon Jovi, singing "It's My Life"/"We Gotta Get out of This Place" medley at the Hall of Fame. He also released the album "Lost Within the Halls of Fame", with past tracks and re-recordings of some songs from "I Used to Be an Animal". In October 1996, Aynsley Dunbar replaced Craney on drums. "The Official Live Bootleg" was recorded in 1997 and in May that year Larry Wilkins died of cancer. He also released the compilation albums "Soldier of Fortune" and "I'm Ready" which featured recordings from the 1970s and 1980s.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1996, the lead singer of Brazilian rock band Camisa de Vênus, the vocalist Marcelo Nova worked in partnership with the former lead singer of the Animals. Burdon and Nova composed the song "Black & White World" and sang in a duet on "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on the Camisa de Venus album , produced by Burdon.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2000, he recorded the song "Power to the People" together with Ringo Starr and Billy Preston for the motion picture "Steal This Movie!". On 11 May 2001, the Animals were inducted into the Rock Walk of Fame on Burdon's 60th birthday. On 3 March 2002, the live album "Live in Seattle" was recorded. Ex-War member Lee Oskar made a guest appearance on the album. In 2003 he made a guest appearance on the album "Joyous in the City of Fools" by the Greek rock band Pyx Lax, singing lead vocals on "Someone Wrote 'Save me' On a Wall".


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2001, his second critically acclaimed memoir, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", written with author and filmmaker J. Marshall Craig, was released in the US, followed by editions in Greece, Germany and Australia; it covers the British Invasion, moving to Los Angeles and Palm Springs, and various anecdotes about Rock and Roll stardom.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2004, in his studio album My Secret Life, besides presenting the song composed in partnership with the Brazilian rocker Marcelo Nova "Black & White World", Eric Burdon shed to the English and re-recorded two songs of Marcelo Nova: "A Garota da Motocicleta" turned "Motorcycle Girl" while "Coração Satânico" became "Devil's Slide".


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 7 June 2008, Burdon performed at the memorial service of Bo Diddley in Gainesville, Florida. During July and August 2008, Burdon appeared as the headline act of the "Hippiefest". He also recorded the single "For What It's Worth" with Carl Carlton and Max Buskohl.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2008, "Rolling Stone" ranked Eric Burdon No. 57 on the list of the 100 Greatest Singers of all Time.


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 22 January 2009 he first performed with his new band, including keyboardist Red Young, guitarist Rick Hirsch, bassist Jack Bryant and drummer Ed Friedland. For a few months he was sick and did not perform except in the United States. On 26 June, he began his European tour. The band included Red Young (keyboards), Billy Watts (guitar), Terry Wilson (bass), Brannen Temple (drums) and Georgia Dagaki (cretan lyra).


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 28 January 2013, Burdon performed on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", backed by the Roots. Fallon hyped Burdon's current album, "Til Your River Runs Dry".


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 23 July 2013, he guested onstage with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Cardiff Millennium Stadium, performing "We Gotta Get Out of This Place".


title: Eric Burdon

text: On 29 September 2021, Burdon performed on the Greek TV show "Mousiko kouti" hosted by Nikos Portokaloglou and Rena Morfi.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2008, an adjudicator determined that John Steel owned "The Animals" name in Britain, by virtue of a trademark registration Steel had made in relation to the name. Eric Burdon had objected to the trademark registration, arguing that Burdon personally embodied any goodwill associated with the Animals name. Burdon's argument was rejected, in part based on the fact that he had billed himself as Eric Burdon and the Animals as early as 1967, thus separating the goodwill associated with his own name from that of the band.


title: Eric Burdon

text: Burdon wanted to act in the film "Blowup" (1966). Director Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to use him as a musician in a club scene, but Burdon turned the role down because he had acted in films before in which he sang songs. He disbanded the Animals and went to California, where he met Jim Morrison of the Doors and decided he wanted to go into acting. Later, he turned down major roles in "Zabriskie Point" and "Performance" (both 1970).


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1973, he formed the Eric Burdon Band and recorded the soundtrack for his own film project, "Mirage". He spent much money to make this film, produced as a film for Atlantic. The film and the soundtrack were to be released in July 1974, but somehow they never were. The soundtrack was released in 2008.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1979, he acted in the TV film "The 11th Victim", then in the German film "Gibbi Westgermany" (1980). In 1982, he starred in another German film, "Comeback", again as a singer. In 1991, he made a cameo appearance in "The Doors".


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1998, he played himself in the Greek film "My Brother and I", followed by a bigger role in the German film "Snow on New Year's Eve" (1999).


title: Eric Burdon

text: In the following years, he was credited in many documentaries and in an independent film called "Fabulous Shiksa in Distress" (2003), along with Ned Romero and Ted Markland.


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 2007, he performed the traditional "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" in the drama festival film "The Blue Hour" and in a documentary about Joshua Tree, called "Nowhere Now" (2008).


title: Eric Burdon

text: In 1967 Burdon married Angela "Angie" King, an Anglo-Indian hippie and model connected to the music scene. The next year she left him for Jimi Hendrix, and she and Burdon divorced in 1969. She was murdered in 1992 by an estranged boyfriend.


title: Jill St. John

text: Jill St. John (born Jill Arlyn Oppenheim; August 19, 1940) is an American former actress. She may be best known for playing Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl of the 007 franchise, in "Diamonds Are Forever". Additional performances in film include "Holiday for Lovers", "The Lost World", "Tender Is the Night", "Come Blow Your Horn", for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, "Who's Minding the Store?", "Honeymoon Hotel", "The Liquidator", "The Oscar", "Tony Rome", "Sitting Target" and "The Concrete Jungle".


title: Jill St. John

text: On television, St. John has appeared in such top rated shows as "Batman", "The Big Valley", "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In", "Hart to Hart", "Vega$", "The Love Boat", "Fantasy Island", "Magnum, P.I." and "Seinfeld". During her Hollywood heyday she was almost equally famous for her high-profile social life and frequent romantic associations with prominent public figures. St. John is married to actor Robert Wagner and has known him since she was 18 years old. They share credits on nearly a dozen screen and stage productions, notably the miniseries remake of "Around the World in 80 Days".


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John was born Jill Arlyn Oppenheim in Los Angeles on August 19, 1940, to Edward Oppenheim, a restaurateur from New York, and his philanthropist wife Betty (née Goldberg), from Philadelphia. She has no siblings. St. John grew up with many cousins, her mother being one of eight surviving children, all of whom had left the East Coast for California following her grandmother's sudden death in 1920, when Betty, the youngest, was seven. St. John's parents married in 1934. Her maternal grandparents were Russian, of partial Jewish descent, while her paternal great-great-grandparents emigrated from Hessen, Germany.


title: Jill St. John

text: Raised in Encino, St. John was a member of the Children's Ballet Company with Natalie Wood and Stefanie Powers. All three would later marry or co-star with actor Robert Wagner. When she was 13, her stage mother Betty changed Jill's last name to the more marketable St. John.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John began acting on radio at age six. In December 1949, at age nine, she made her screen debut in "The Christmas Carol", the first full-length TV movie. Also that year, she joined the cast of "Sandy Dreams", a TV show for children featuring Richard Beymer.


title: Jill St. John

text: At age 11, she appeared in two episodes of "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show". She had a small role in the film "Thunder in the East" (1951) and was in episodes of "Sky King", "Fireside Theatre", and "Cavalcade of America".


title: Jill St. John

text: She attended Powers Professional School and received her high school diploma from Hollywood Professional School in the spring of 1955 at age 14. With a reported IQ of 162, at age 15 St. John enrolled at UCLA's Extension School.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John was 16 in May 1957 when Universal Pictures signed her to a contract for seven years starting at $200 a week. Her major studio film debut was in "Summer Love" (1958) starring John Saxon. She also appeared on TV in episodes of "The Christophers", "Schlitz Playhouse", and "The DuPont Show of the Month" (an adaptation of "Junior Miss"). She said her idol was Kay Kendall.


title: Jill St. John

text: St John then signed a contract with 20th Century Fox who tried to build her into a star. She played the daughter of Clifton Webb in "The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker" (1959) and "Holiday for Lovers" (1959), then was put in an adventure movie, "The Lost World" (1960).


title: Jill St. John

text: Fox picked up their option on her. Warner Bros. borrowed her for "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1961), then she had a supporting role in "Tender Is the Night" (1962).


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John had a key role in "Come Blow Your Horn" (1963), where she starred opposite Frank Sinatra. She received a Golden Globe Award nomination as Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her performance in the film.


title: Jill St. John

text: "I'm a comedienne," she said in 1963. "I've never pretended to be a dramatic actress. But I'm very funny."


title: Jill St. John

text: She followed this with a series of comedies: "Who's Minding the Store?" (1963) with Jerry Lewis, "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?" (1963) with Dean Martin and "Honeymoon Hotel" (1964) with Robert Morse and Nancy Kwan.


title: Jill St. John

text: "Now I play the sexy comedienne, which is my forte" she said in 1964. "Comedy is what I've always wanted to do."


title: Jill St. John

text: She guest-starred on television shows like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", "Burke's Law", "The Rogues", and "Theatre of Stars". In 1964, she guest-starred with Lauren Bacall and Bacall's then husband, Jason Robards, Jr., in the episode "Take a Walk Through the Cemetery" of the drama series "Mr. Broadway". She also appeared in some variety specials with Bob Hope.


title: Jill St. John

text: MGM gave her the female lead in a spy spoof "The Liquidator" (1965) with Rod Taylor, and she was in "The Oscar" (1966) with Stephen Boyd.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John appeared in the first and second episodes of the television series "Batman" (1966) as the Riddler's moll Molly. She became the first person to die in an episode of Batman in that second episode. She was also in an episode of "The Big Valley" at that time.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John signed a contract at Universal. She was in a TV movie "Fame Is the Name of the Game" (1966), and had a supporting role in "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" (1967) with Robert Wagner.


title: Jill St. John

text: She did the Bob Hope comedy "Eight on the Run" (1967), then made "Banning" (1967) with Wagner and "The King's Pirate" (1967) with Doug McClure.


title: Jill St. John

text: In 1966, she said her goal "was to be at a point where I have so proved myself as an actress that I can be more discriminating in the roles I choose. I want to be able to choose the parts I know I can do next." St. John nearly landed a starring role in "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967), which instead went to Sharon Tate.


title: Jill St. John

text: She was reunited with Sinatra in "Tony Rome" (1967) and did a TV movie "The Spy Killer" (1968), which was popular enough for the sequel "Foreign Exchange" (1970). She guested on "The Name of the Game". "Decisions! Decisions!" (1971) was a TV movie St. John did with Bob Newhart and Jean Simmons.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John achieved her biggest success starring as diamond smuggler Tiffany Case, the love interest of James Bond in "Diamonds Are Forever" (1971), opposite Sean Connery. She was the first American to play a Bond girl. The character Tiffany is argumentative, abrasive, loud, and brash when compared to previous Bond girls who were more demure.


title: Jill St. John

text: She did the TV movies "Saga of Sonora" (1973) and "Brenda Starr" (1976) (playing the title role), and guest-starred on "Vega$", "The Love Boat", "Magnum, P.I.", "Fantasy Island", and "Matt Houston". She also appeared in the pilot episode for "Hart to Hart".


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John did the TV movies "Two Guys from Muck" (1982) and "Rooster" (1982) and was top-billed in the feature "The Concrete Jungle" (1982), a woman in prison film in which she played Warden Fletcher. She had a small role in "The Act" (1983).


title: Jill St. John

text: During 1983–1984, she starred with Dennis Weaver on the short-lived soap opera "Emerald Point N.A.S.", in which she played Deanna Kinkaid, Thomas Mallory's conniving former sister-in-law. It also starred another James Bond girl Maud Adams.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John and Robert Wagner were in "Around the World in 80 Days" (1989); "Something to Believe In" (1998); and "The Calling" (2002). They made brief cameo appearances as themselves in Robert Altman's Hollywood satire "The Player" (1992).


title: Jill St. John

text: In 1997, the couple appeared together at the end of "The Yada Yada" episode of the television sitcom "Seinfeld".


title: Jill St. John

text: In 2014, St. John played Mrs. Claus in the TV movie "Northpole" alongside Wagner, who played the part of Santa Claus. The film marked her first acting role after a 12-year absence from the screen.


title: Jill St. John

text: In 1972, St. John largely left Hollywood behind and moved to Aspen, Colorado, where she focused on personal interests and cooking.


title: Jill St. John

text: Her interest in cooking eventually led to her becoming a culinary personality, appearing in monthly cooking segments on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America" and her writing a column in "USA Weekend" magazine through the 1980s. This culminated in authoring "The Jill St. John Cookbook" (1987), a collection of healthy recipes and some anecdotes.


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John also developed a handmade Angora sweater business, and became interested in orchid growing, skiing, hiking, river rafting, camping, and gardening. In 1987, she said "I'm a mountain gal now. I love the outdoors and I love harvesting and using fresh vegetables and herbs."


title: Jill St. John

text: St. John is founder of the Aunts Club, a Rancho Mirage-based group of women who contribute at least $1,000 per year to provide financial support for a child.


title: Jill St. John

text: Between marriages, St. John dated entertainment, sports, and political personalities including Ben Barnes, Gianni Bulgari, Sammy Cahn, Michael Caine, Oleg Cassini, Barry Coe, Sean Connery, Ahmet Ertegun, Robert Evans, Glenn Ford, David Frost, Jack Haley Jr., Bill Hudson, Henry Kissinger, Sidney Korshak, Sandy Koufax, Peter Lawford, George Lazenby, Jim Lonborg, Trini López, Tom Mankiewicz, George Montgomery, Jack Nicholson, Hugh O'Brian, Ogden Mills Phipps, Roman Polanski, Alejandro Rey, Tom Selleck, Frank Sinatra, U Thant, Robert Vaughn, Giovanni Volpi, Adam West and David L. Wolper. St. John has also had amorous relationships with criminal court judge Jerome M. Becker, ski instructor Ricky Head, Olympic ski champion Brownie Barnes, plastic surgeon Steven Zax, investment broker Lenny Ross, Chicago businessman Delbert W. Coleman and Brazilian entrepreneur Francisco "Baby" Pignatari. She was engaged to Miami real estate developer Robert Blum in 1974, but called off the engagement.


title: Jill St. John

text: In July 2007, Wagner and St. John sold the Brentwood ranchette they had lived on since 1983, for a reported $14 million and relocated to their vacation home in Aspen. They retain a condo in L.A.


title: Jill St. John

text: Mutual animosity between St. John and her husband's former sister-in-law, actress Lana Wood, extends back to 1971, when Sean Connery was simultaneously involved with both women during the filming of "Diamonds Are Forever". The pair's half-century feud has been highlighted by two well-documented public altercations: one in September 1999, when St. John refused to be photographed with Wood at a Bond girl reunion for "Vanity Fair" magazine, and another in February 2016, when Wood crashed an event honoring St. John in Palm Springs and confronted Wagner over the reopened death case of her sister Natalie, who mysteriously drowned in 1981 while yachting with Wagner off the coast of Santa Catalina Island.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with "X" or "O". The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: Tic-tac-toe is played on a three-by-three grid by two players, who alternately place the marks X and O in one of the nine spaces in the grid.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: There is no universally-agreed rule as to who plays first, but in this article the convention that X plays first is used.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: Players soon discover that the best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is often played by young children who may not have discovered the optimal strategy.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: Because of the simplicity of tic-tac-toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly or to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity) or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space. If played optimally by both players, the game always ends in a draw, making tic-tac-toe a futile game.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: The game can be generalized to an "m","n","k"-game, in which two players alternate placing stones of their own color on an "m"-by-"n" board with the goal of getting "k" of their own color in a row. Tic-tac-toe is the 3,3,3-game. Harary's generalized tic-tac-toe is an even broader generalization of tic-tac-toe. It can also be generalized as an "n" game, specifically one in which "n" equals 3 and "d" equals 2. It can be generalised even further by playing on an arbitrary incidence structure, where rows are lines and cells are points. Tic-tac-toe's incidence structure consists of nine points, three horizontal lines, three vertical lines, and two diagonal lines, with each line consisting of at least three points.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: Games played on three-in-a-row boards can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where such game boards have been found on roofing tiles dating from around 1300 BC.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: An early variation of tic-tac-toe was played in the Roman Empire, around the first century BC. It was called "terni lapilli" ("three pebbles at a time") and instead of having any number of pieces, each player had only three; thus, they had to move them around to empty spaces to keep playing. The game's grid markings have been found chalked all over Rome. Another closely related ancient game is three men's morris which is also played on a simple grid and requires three pieces in a row to finish, and Picaria, a game of the Puebloans.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: The different names of the game are more recent. The first print reference to "noughts and crosses" (nought being an alternative word for 'zero'), the British name, appeared in 1858, in an issue of "Notes and Queries". The first print reference to a game called "tick-tack-toe" occurred in 1884, but referred to "a children's game played on a slate, consisting of trying with the eyes shut to bring the pencil down on one of the numbers of a set, the number hit being scored". "Tic-tac-toe" may also derive from "tick-tack", the name of an old version of backgammon first described in 1558. The US renaming of "noughts and crosses" to "tic-tac-toe" occurred in the 20th century.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: In 1952, "OXO" (or "Noughts and Crosses"), developed by British computer scientist Sandy Douglas for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, became one of the first known video games. The computer player could play perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: In 1975, tic-tac-toe was also used by MIT students to demonstrate the computational power of Tinkertoy elements. The Tinkertoy computer, made out of (almost) only Tinkertoys, is able to play tic-tac-toe perfectly. It is currently on display at the Museum of Science, Boston.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: When considering only the state of the board, and after taking into account board symmetries (i.e. rotations and reflections), there are only 138 terminal board positions. A combinatorics study of the game shows that when "X" makes the first move every time, the game outcomes are as follows:


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: A player can play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe (to win or at least draw) if, each time it is their turn to play, they choose the first available move from the following list, as used in Newell and Simon's 1972 tic-tac-toe program.


title: Tic-tac-toe

text: The first player, who shall be designated "X", has three possible strategically distinct positions to mark during the first turn. Superficially, it might seem that there are nine possible positions, corresponding to the nine squares in the grid. However, by rotating the board, we will find that, in the first turn, every corner mark is strategically equivalent to every other corner mark. The same is true of every edge (side middle) mark. From a strategic point of view, there are therefore only three possible first marks: corner, edge, or center. Player X can win or force a draw from any of these starting marks; however, playing the corner gives the opponent the smallest choice of squares which must be played to avoid losing. This might suggest that the corner is the best opening move for X, however another study shows that if the players are not perfect, an opening move in the center is best for X.