title: Alebrije

text: Originally, woodcarving was a solitary activity with all aspects done by one person, usually a male. As sales soared in the 1980s, the work began to be shared among family members. Women and children help mostly with sanding and painting, leaving men to contribute less than half of the work that goes into the figures. Despite this, pieces are still referred to as the work of one person, usually the male carver. There are exceptions to this. There are men who paint better than they carve and in the community of San Pedro Taviche, women collect and carve wood about as often as the men. In most cases, all the work on pieces is done by family members. Families may hire other relatives or strangers if faced with a large order. However, only the most established of carving families can have any permanent outside help and a number of these refuse to hire outsiders.


title: Alebrije

text: Almost all alebrije carvers in Oaxaca use the wood of trees from the genus "Bursera" (Family Burseraceae), with a preference for the species "B. glabrifolia", which is locally called copal or copalillo. This tree is typically found in dry tropical forests in Oaxaca and neighboring states. The exceptions are Isidro Cruz of Tilcajete, who uses "zompantle" ("Erythrina coralloides") and the Manuel Jimenez family, which carves in tropical cedar ("Cedrela odorata") imported from Guatemala.


title: Alebrije

text: Originally, carvers obtained wood from the local forests on their own. Copal trees are short and squat and do not yield much wood; every piece is used. Despite this, the success of woodcarving caused an unsustainable drain on local wild copal, and nearly all of the trees near Tilcajete and Arrazola have disappeared. This localized depletion soon gave rise to a copal wood market in Oaxaca, even though many of the copal trees in other parts are of a different subspecies, which has more knots. Obtaining wood is a complex exercise because negotiating with other municipalities requires navigating complex social, legal and economic norms, and in many cases, state and federal environmental authorities have stepped in to try to preserve wild copal trees in a number of areas. Some communities have simply refused to sell their wood. These difficulties has led to a black market in copal wood, with carvers purchasing most of their supplies from venders called "copaleros." Harvesting copalillo is not a complex task; trees are relatively small and the wood is soft. Trees are felled using an axe or chainsaw. Branches are cut with machetes. Most harvesting occurs on ejidal (communal) lands. Legal or not, the purchase of copal wood from other parts of Oaxaca is putting unsustainable pressure on wild populations in a wider area, forcing copaleros to go further to obtain wood and often to deal with angry locals and police who alternately seek bribes and enforce the law. Eventually, this led to about only six copaleros which control most of the wood being sold, and these supplies' being unreliable. The federal government states that most of the figures are made with illegally obtained wood.


title: Alebrije

text: Securing supplies of copal wood is a major concern for woodcarvers. Despite the fact that the cost of the wood is not particularly high, despite the effort, the main issue is reliability. Another issue for carvers is quality. Artisans will pay more for their wood only if they are sure they can pass the added cost onto their customers. A number of attempts to grow the trees for woodcarving purpose have been undertaken. Copal is a native tree species to the area, so it grows readily without much care. It takes anywhere from five to ten years for a tree to grow big enough to be harvested (branches or entire tree). Some of the efforts include reforestation efforts sponsored by groups such as the Rodolfo Morales Foundation in Ocotlan, and a number of families spend time planting trees during the rainy season. Some have begun copal plantations. However, current needs for the wood far outweigh what these efforts have been able to produce.


title: Alebrije

text: Another effort involves a program designed to manage wild copal supplies in a municipality called San Juan Bautista Jayacatlán. This arrangement has economic advantages for both the alebrije-makers and the owners of the forests where the wood is produced. It has not been developed sufficiently yet to affect the illegal harvest of wood, but its organizers hope that in time, it will become the more economical and preferred method. The difference between this program and others is that this works within the broader ethnobotanical context by promoting the management of the species within its native habitat. Jayacatlán is located next to the recently established biosphere reserve of Tehuacán-Cuicatlán. The benefit to Jayacatlán is to give the municipality a way to exploit its copal supplies and preserve its biodiversity at the same time. The benefit to carvers is to promote a reliable source of wood, as well as a trademark called "ecoalebrijes" to help them sell more alebrijes at a higher price. However, the wood from Jayacatlan is only sold to Arrazola and not to the other major center of Tilcajete. The enthusiasm of Arrazola's woodcarvers stems more from having a supply of good wood than from notions of ecology.


title: Alebrije

text: Of the three major carving towns, San Martin Tilcajete has experienced the most success. This success is mostly due to carver Isidro Cruz, who learned to carve when he was thirteen during a long illness in the late 1940s. His work was sold locally and eventually noticed by Tonatiúh Gutierrez, the director of expositions for the Mexican National Tourist Council, later a government agency in charge of promoting crafts. He encouraged Cruz to carve masks and later appointed him in charge of a state craft buying center. Cruz worked at this for four years, learning much about craft selling and getting others from Tilcajete connected to the market. Unlike other carvers, Cruz was open about his techniques and by the late 1970s, about ten men were carving and selling in Tilcajete. Cruz not only taught his methods to others, he was able to purchase many of his neighbors' works. Cruz's efforts stimulated new styles of carving, such as alebrijes, and their sale in the city of Oaxaca. By the 1980s, there were four families devoted to carving full-time, with the rest splitting their time between crafts and agriculture. Through the 1960s and to the 1980s, embroidered shirts, blouses and dresses were still a well-received craft from Tilcajete, but by the end of the 1980s, most families were involved in carving alebrijes.


title: Alebrije

text: Today, the carving of alebrijes is the economic base of Tilcajete. Every Friday on the main square is the "tianguis del alebrije" or weekly market selling wooden figures. The event allows visitors to purchase items from local craftsmen directly. There are usually also vendors selling other local products such as ice cream as well. Annually, the municipality holds its Feria del Alebrije (Alebrije Festival), which features alebrije sales and exhibitions, music, dance and theatre. There are also offerings of local and regional cuisine. More than 100 vendors attend, selling alebrijes, textiles, local dishes, artwork and locally made alcoholic beverages. It is sponsored by the Master Craftsmen Group of Tilcajete (Grupo de Maestros Talladoes de Tilcajete), which includes Hedilberto Olivera, Emilia Calvo, Roberta Ángeles, Juventino Melchor, Martin Melchor, Margarito Melchor Fuentes, Margarito Melchor Santiago, José Olivera Pérez, Jesús Melchor García, Vásquez, María Jiménez, Cira Ojeda, Jacobo and María Ángeles, Justo Xuana, Victor Xuana, Rene Xuana, Abad Xuana, Flor and Ana Xuana, Rogelio Alonso, who works in papier-mâché, and Doris Arellano, who is a painter.


title: Alebrije

text: Some of the better known artisans in Tilcajete include Delfino Gutierrez, sisters Ana and Marta Bricia Hernandez, the family of Efrain and Silvia Fuentes, Coindo Melchor, Margarito Melchor and Maria Jimenez. Delfino Gutierrez specializes in free-form elephants, frogs, turtles, armadillos and more which are sold in stores in Chicago, California, New York and Israel. The Hernandez sisters sell primarily from their home and known for their painting style. The Fuentes family gained fame from Efrain's carving talents. He was featured in an exhibit in Santa Fe, NM when he was only 13 and his work has been featured in at least one book. Margarito Melchor specializes in cats, and Coindo Melchor carves elaborate ox teams with bulls, driver, and a cart filled with animals and crops as well as creatures that have been described as "bird headed women." Maria Jimenez and her brothers specialize in saints and angels as well as some animals. Maria is the best known painter in the Oaxacan community. She says that she has about thirty designs that she has developed for carvings, many of which are related to when she made embroidered dresses.


title: Alebrije

text: The most successful artisan is Jacobo Angeles, whose work have been prominently displayed at The Smithsonian and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. It can also be found in numerous museums, art colleges and galleries in the world. Jacobo learned to carve from his father when he was twelve, and later was mentored by elders in his and other communities. While alebrijes designs have been innovative and incorporating modern elements, the Angeles family's designs focus on representations of Zapotec culture. This can be seen in the painted designs, based on influences such as the friezes of Mitla, and other ancient symbols as well as the continued use in aniline paints made from natural ingredients such as the bark of the copal tree, baking soda, lime juice, pomegranate seeds, zinc, indigo, huitlacoche and cochineal. Each year, Jacobo travels the United States to promote Oaxacan folk art in general to educational institution as well as a speaker at art institutions.


title: Alebrije

text: The making of alebrijes in Oaxaca was initially established in Arrazola by Manuel Jimenez. Jimenez began carving wooden figures since he was a boy tending animals in the 1920s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jimenez's work was being sold in the city of Oaxaca, which led them to being shown to folk art collectors such as Nelson Rockefeller. By the late 1960s, he was giving exhibitions in museums in Mexico City and the United States and tourists began visiting his workshop in the 1970s. He kept his carving techniques strictly within the family with only his sons and a son in law carving with him. For this reason, only six families were carving alebrijes in Arrazola as late as 1985. Jimenez died in 2005. Today, Jimenez's works fetch a minimum of US$100.


title: Alebrije

text: Many carvers and carving communities engage in specialties in order to have niches in the more competitive alebrije market in Oaxaca. In Arrazola, one of the community's specialty is the carving of complex animal bodies, especially iguanas out of one single piece of wood. Another way the community competes is through its annual festival "Cuna de los Alebrijes" (Cradle of the Alebrijes), which is held each year to promote its figures. This fair is cosponsored by the Secretary of Tourism for the state of Oaxaca. It occurs in the second half of December, during the Christmas season, with more than sixty artisans who make the figures. The goals are to draw more tourists to the town at this time and to make connections with stores, galleries and museums.


title: Alebrije

text: Like Tilcajete, Arrazola has a number of well known artisans. Marcelo Hernandez Vasquez and his sisters have been making alebrijes for eighteen years, and Juan Carlos Santiago is sought out for his penguins. Antonio Aragon makes small, finely carved, realistic deer, dogs, lions and cats, and Sergio Aragon specializes in miniatures.


title: Alebrije

text: One of the best known is Miguel Santiago, who sells about forty pieces a year. Some of these sales are individual pieces and others are multiple sets such as Frida Kalo surrounded by monkeys. Sets are usually sold to foreign buyers for between US$300 and $800 and have been sent to Europe, Japan and the United States. Sets often take more than a month to make and his work is considered to be in the high end of the market. Santiago's orders extend more than two years in advance. Santiago used to work with a brother and later with a nephew, but today he works mostly solo with his father to help. Another of the best known is one of the few female entrepreneurs in the market, Olga Santiago. She does not carve or paint, rather she hires others to do the work while she administrates. However, she signs all the pieces. Many of her carvers and painters are young men who leave quickly to form workshops of their own. While her workshop is not the only one run in this manner, hers is the newest and most successful. Olga's client base is tourists, which are often brought to her by tour guides, taxi drivers and the like for a commission, and wholesalers.


title: Alebrije

text: La Union Tejalapan has not had the same success as Arrazola and Tilcajete because they have not been able to attract as many dealers or tourists. However, a significant market remains for simple rustic pieces (pre-alebrije) and pieces painted with traditional aniline paints, which La Union specializes in. These are popular with those seeking non alebrije pieces such as saints, angels, devils, skeletons and motifs related to Day of the Dead. Alebrije pieces are also made, but are painted simply with one or two colors with few decorations. La Union artisans make multipiece rodeos, fiestas, and nativity scenes. Another rustic aspect to La Union pieces is that legs can be nailed onto the torsos.


title: Alebrije

text: The first alebrije carver from La union was Martin Santiago. In the 1950s and 1960s, Santiago worked in the United States for various periods working as an agricultural laborer in the Bracero Program. When this program ended, Santiago found that he could not support his family by farming and began selling woodcarvings to a shop owner in Oaxaca. This arrangement ended after a complex dispute. Santiago then began carving and selling on his own with his four brothers and for many years the Santiago family was the only carvers in the community.


title: Alebrije

text: Today there are a number of others involved in the craft. Aguilino Garcia sells fairly expensive skunks, crocodiles, armadillos, and palm trees. He has a reputation for working slowing but makes pieces that were selling for between 100 and 400 pesos in 1998. Better known is the husband and wife team of Reynaldo Santiago and Elodia Reyes, who have been carving since their marriage in the mid-1970s. Reynaldo is a nephew of Martin Santiago. Like in many other carving families, he carves while she paints. Their children are not involved in their business. While the couple make some large and medium-sized pieces, they specialize in miniatures (around seven cm), such as dogs, cats, giraffes, rabbits and goats which will for around 30 pesos each. Because La Union gets few tourists, the couple is mostly reliant on the store owners and wholesalers who buy from them. Today their major buyers are a wholesaler in California and a store owner in Texas.


title: Alebrije

text: Outside of Mexico City and Oaxaca, alebrijes are known and made but mostly as a hobby rather than as a significant source of work. Most of these alebrijes are made with papier-mâché, wire, cardboard and sometimes with other materials such as cloth. Alebrije workshops and exhibitions have been held in Cancún. Workshops on the making of alebrijes with the purpose of selling them have been held in Cuautla, Morelos. In Tampico, workshops are given by Omar Villanueva. He has also given workshops in Nuevo Laredo, Campeche, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Chetumal, Querétero and other places.


title: Alebrije

text: One alebrije craftsman in Cuautla is Marcos Zenteno, who has taught the craft to his daughter. He also gives workshops on the making of the craft to others. One of the major attractions at the Primer Festival Internacional de las Artes in Saltillo in 2000 were alebrijes, which came from workshops from Monclova, Sabinas, Parras de la Fuente and Saltillo.


title: Alebrije

text: An innovation in alebrijes are versions which are lighted, generally designed to be carried by a single person on the shoulders. Instead of cartonería, these alebrijes are made on movable metal frames, with LED lights and with cloth and/or plastic skin. This style of alebrije was first presented at a short parade dedicated to them in 2014 in Colonia Roma. These versions have been made in Mexico City by various artists, especially in workshops such as the Fábrica de Artes y Oficios Oriente. Exhibitions dedicated to the variation have attracted up to 6,000 people to the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City and have been displayed at Mexico International Festival of Lights.


title: Alebrije

text: "En Calavera: The Papier-mâché art of the Linares family" by Susan N. Masuoka (casebound) / (softcover) UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History


title: Beth Grant

text: Beth Grant (born September 18, 1949) is an American character actress. Between 2012 and 2017, she was a series regular on the television comedy "The Mindy Project" in the role of Beverly Janoszewski. She is also known for her role as Gracie Leigh in the CBS post-apocalyptic drama "Jericho" and as Marianne Marie Beetle in "Wonderfalls". She has also appeared on "Pushing Daisies", and "Mockingbird Lane".


title: Beth Grant

text: In film, she is best known for her roles as Mother at Farm House in "Rain Man" (1988), Miss Kettlewell in "Child's Play 2" (1990), Helen in "Speed" (1994), Loretta in "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" (1995), Kitty Farmer in "Donnie Darko" (2001), Pageant Official Jenkins in "Little Miss Sunshine" (2006), Carla Jean's Mother in "No Country for Old Men" (2007), and Peppy's maid in "The Artist" (2011). She starred in the films "Flatliners", "Sordid Lives", "Dear Lemon Lima", "Bad Words", "Jackie" (as Lady Bird Johnson), "Faults" (2014) and "Lucky" (2017). She later portrayed the recurring role of "The Woman with Hair but No Beard" in Netflix's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and the Cat Lady in Hulu's "Dollface".


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant was born on September 18, 1949, in Gadsden, Alabama. She grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina and graduated from New Hanover High School in Wilmington in 1967. Her father was a poultry specialist and salesman. Her mother worked as a manager for the North Carolina Employment Security Commission and was an activist for the Equal Rights Amendment. Grant credits her mother with providing her the inspiration to become an actress.


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant graduated from East Carolina University in 1973 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting and Directing and then moved to New York City to pursue a career in acting.


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant has appeared in dozens of films, including three Oscar Best Picture winners: "Rain Man"; "Speed"; "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"; "Love Field"; "Donnie Darko"; "A Time to Kill"; "Little Miss Sunshine"; "Child's Play 2"; "Daltry Calhoun"; ""; "Don't Tell Her It's Me"; "Matchstick Men"; "Factory Girl"; "The Wizard"; "Sordid Lives"; "The Rookie"; "All About Steve"; "No Country for Old Men", "Extract", "Crazy Heart", "Rango," "Hollywood to Dollywood" (as herself), and "Dance with Me".


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant has appeared in many TV shows, including "Coach"; "Everwood"; "Delta"; "The Golden Girls"; "Malcolm in the Middle"; "The X-Files"; "Friends"; ""; "Six Feet Under"; "Wonderfalls"; "Pushing Daisies"; "My Name Is Earl"; "Yes, Dear"; "King of the Hill"; "The Office"; "Angel"; "Judging Amy"; "Jericho"; ""; "Criminal Minds", "Sabrina The Teenage Witch"; "True Blood"; "How I Met Your Mother"; "Modern Family"; "The Mentalist"; and "The Mindy Project".


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant played the same character, Marianne Marie Beetle, in the short-lived show "Wonderfalls" and "Pushing Daisies", both created by Bryan Fuller, and portrays the similarly named "Marie" in "Mockingbird Lane", Fuller's re-imagining of "The Munsters".


title: Beth Grant

text: Inspired by Mindy Kaling, Grant is also in the process of writing a Broadway musical, set in 1969 Greenwich Village.


title: Beth Grant

text: Grant is married to actor Michael Chieffo and has one daughter, actress Mary Chieffo. Grant lives with her family in Los Angeles.


title: Onew

text: Lee Jin-ki (; born December 14, 1989), better known by his stage name Onew, is a South Korean singer, songwriter, actor and host. Born in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi-do, Onew was discovered at the 2006 SM Academy Casting and signed a contract with SM Entertainment the day after his audition. He debuted as the lead vocalist and leader of boy group Shinee in May 2008, who went on to become one of the best-selling artists in South Korea.


title: Onew

text: As a singer, he has participated in the original soundtracks for various TV series and released collaborations with various artists. He made his solo debut on December 5, 2018, with the release of his first extended play, "Voice", five days before his military conscription on December 10, 2018. The EP peaked at number two on South Korea's Gaon Album Chart. He released his second EP "Dice" on April 11, 2022, which peaked at number three on Gaon Album Chart. He made his solo debut in Japan on July 6, 2022, with the release of his first studio album "Life Goes On". Onew has also contributed to songwriting for both himself and Shinee.


title: Onew

text: As an actor, Onew was cast in multiple musicals, such as "Rock of Ages" (2010), "Shinheung Military Academy" (2019), and "Midnight Sun" (2021–2022) and participated in various television dramas, mostly known for the roles of Baek Su in JTBC's sitcom "Welcome to Royal Villa" and the cardiothoracic resident Lee Chi-hoon in the popular KBS2 drama "Descendants of the Sun" (2016).


title: Onew

text: Onew was discovered at the 2006 SM Academy Casting. He received great appreciation from Lee Soo-man, SM Entertainment's founder, at Girls' Generation's debut showcase. Lee Soo-man noticed him and wanted to hear him sing during a one-time on the spot audition. He signed a contract with the company the day after he auditioned. In 2008, he was chosen as the leader of the group Shinee, and the five-member boy group debuted on May 25, 2008 on SBS' "Inkigayo".


title: Onew

text: Shortly after debut, Onew contributed to singles for Lee Hyun-ji in 2008, for "Vanilla Love" and "Vanilla Love Part 2". In 2009, he recorded the song "One Year Later" with Girls' Generation member Jessica for the "Genie" EP. The same year, he also sang a duet with Kim Yeon-woo, "The Name I Loved", for Shinee's third EP "2009, Year of Us".


title: Onew

text: In 2010, Onew tried his hand at songwriting and, together with his bandmate Minho, wrote the lyrics for the song "Your Name" from Shinee's second studio album "Lucifer". In addition to music, Onew became an MC of two programs—KBS2's "Night Star", which he co-hosted alongside Shin Dong-yup, Yoon Jong-shin, movie director Jang Hang Joon, and Leessang's Gil, and MBC's "Show! Music Core". Since his first job as an MC, Onew has hosted various events, such as Dream Concert, Incheon K-Pop Concert and Mnet's special event in Taiwan called "Nihao Taiwan".


title: Onew

text: Onew starred in various musicals starting from 2010, debuting in the musical "Brothers Were Brave" alongside singer Lee Ji-hoon. He then starred in the Korean production of "Rock of Ages" playing the lead role, Drew. Onew has also showcased his acting skills via television like having a cameo role as a clumsy doctor in the drama "Dr. Champ". He appeared in the drama's final episode. He also had cameo roles in the dramas "", "Oh My God x2", "Pure Love" and sitcom "Royal Villa". In August 2012, Onew recorded a song titled "In Your Eyes" for the drama series "To the Beautiful You". Onew also sang the soundtrack "Moonlight" for the drama "Miss Korea". The song was released on January 3, 2014.


title: Onew

text: On January 14, 2014, his participation in the Borneo edition of the reality show "Law of the Jungle" was confirmed. He was also originally cast for the Brazil edition, but had to be replaced because of schedule conflicts. In addition to his group activities and his job as a MC, Onew gained experience in radio hosting and took over shows like "Kiss the Radio", a popular radio program aired on KBS Cool FM which is hosted by his labelmates Super Junior. In June 2014, he was originally planning to appear in the musical "Singin' in the Rain" but was unable to join as he underwent vocal cord surgery.


title: Onew

text: In 2016, Onew was cast in the drama "Descendants of the Sun", which starred Song Hye-kyo and Song Joong-ki. He portrayed first-year resident Dr. Lee Chi-hoon, a junior of Song Hye-kyo's character. The drama became a huge success, especially in China, where the series reached more than 2 billion views on the Chinese streaming site iQiyi. In Korea, the drama became a massive hit as well, surpassing more than 30 percent viewership ratings nationwide. Onew was awarded the Newcomer Scene Stealer Award at the 2016 Scene Stealer Festival for his role in "Descendants of the Sun". Onew was also confirmed for a new tvN program "Eat, Sleep, Eat" which serves local recipes through Southeast Asia. On August 12, Onew and Lee Jin-ah released a duet, "Starry Night", as part of SM Station, a digital music project by SM Entertainment. It is a pop jazz song which is the work of numerous artists, including Andreas Oberg, a Swedish guitarist and songwriter, and singer-composer Yoo Hee-yeol.


title: Onew

text: In October 2016, Onew wrote the song "So Amazing" for Shinee's fifth Korean studio album "1 of 1," and another song, "Beautiful Life", for its repackaged album, "1 and 1".


title: Onew

text: In May 2017, Onew and indie duo Rocoberry released the song "Lullaby" as part of SM Station. In June 2017, Onew was featured in Heize's music video for the song "I Don't Know You". In August 2017, shortly before the release of "Age of Youth 2", Onew was accused of sexual harassment and decided to leave the project after discussions with the production staff of the show. Onew went into hiatus and did not participate in the remaining shows of Shinee's 2017 concert tour in Japan. On April 6, 2018, after eight months of investigation, the prosecution dropped all charges against him.


title: Onew

text: In May 2018, Onew was featured in Kim Yeon-woo's fifth studio album in the song "Play the Field", which he helped write. This marked his first time contributing to songwriting for an artist other than Shinee.


title: Onew

text: Onew's debut EP, "Voice", was released on December 5, 2018, with the lead single "Blue". It included two songs co-written by Onew, "Shine On You" and "Illusion". The EP peaked at number two on South Korea's Gaon Album Chart. Onew was unable to promote the EP as he enlisted for his mandatory military service on December 10, 2018, just five days after its release.


title: Onew

text: In January 2019, Onew joined the military musical "Shinheung Military Academy", which tells the story of patriotic youths who fought to gain independence from Japan. On April 11, 2019, he performed part of the musical at the 100th anniversary of the establishment of South Korea's provisional government. Onew joined another military musical in August 2019 together with Exo member Xiumin. He was cast in the new army musical titled "Return: The Promise of That Day" as the young Seung-ho who fought during the Korean War. It is an original army musical and deals with the topic of excavating the remains of the heroic soldiers who sacrificed themselves to protect their country during the Korean War.


title: Onew

text: Onew was officially discharged from the military on July 8, 2020, 12 days earlier than his expected date of discharge in light of South Korea's efforts to combat COVID-19.


title: Onew

text: In January 2021, Onew resumed activities as part of Shinee. On February 4, 2021, Onew released a song titled "Shadow" as a soundtrack for the drama series "Breakup Probation: One Week". In May 2021, Onew was cast in the musical "Midnight Sun" as the male lead Ha-ram. For the musical soundtrack, Onew released two songs, "Meet Me When the Sun Goes Down" and "Good-bye Days" which is a duet with Kei. In July 2021, Onew appeared as a regular cast member on "Sea of Hope", a variety show where celebrities cook and sing for guests. On August 3, 2021, Onew released a song titled "Dear My Spring" as a soundtrack for the drama series "You Are My Spring". In September 2021, Onew joined the cast of "March of the Ants Chapter 5," a reality show about investing in the stock market. On October 5, 2021, Onew and Elaine released a duet, "Blue", as part of the soundtrack for the drama series "High Class".


title: Onew

text: In November 2021, Onew took part in the "Korea On Stage" project for which he visited and filmed singing performances at Yangdong Folk Village as part of The Cultural Heritage Administration and The Korea Cultural Heritage Foundation's tourist campaign to promote Korea's Cultural Heritage. In December 2021, Onew was cast in SM C&C Studio’s web variety show "Soldier Idol Camp" and short-form horror series "4 Minutes and 44 Seconds". On December 6, 2021, Onew and Punch released a duet, "Way", as part of SM Station. The single featured lyrics written by Onew alongside established songwriter Kim Eana. On December 27, 2021, Onew, alongside labelmates Kyuhyun and Taeil, released the song "Ordinary Day" for SM Entertainment's winter album "".


title: Onew

text: On February 27, Onew released a song titled "Mind Warning" as a soundtrack for the drama series "Forecasting Love and Weather". In March, it was announced that Onew would reprise his role as Ha-ram for the 2022 production of "Midnight Sun". In the musical soundtrack released on April 30, Onew participated in two songs, "The Sun is in My Eyes" and a duet, "A Melody Called You", with Kim Nam-joo.


title: Onew

text: On April 11, Onew's second EP, "Dice", was released with the lead single of the same name. This marked Onew's first solo comeback after his discharge from the military and his first time promoting as a soloist. He stated that he sought diversity with this EP; like the six-faced object, it consists of six tracks showing different aspects of him as a soloist. One of the tracks is "In the Whale", a special song showing his affection and gratefulness to fans, which Onew wrote lyrics for. The EP peaked at number three on Gaon Album Chart.


title: Onew

text: As a pre-release of his Japanese debut album, Onew released a digital EP, "Who Sings? Vol.1", on June 1. The EP includes four cover songs: Kazumasa Oda's "Kirakira", which was pre-released at midnight on May 18, Motohiro Hata's "Uroko", which was pre-released at midnight on May 25, Misia's "Everything", and Dreams Come True's "Yasashii Kissete".


title: Onew

text: On July 6, Onew released his first Japanese studio album, "Life Goes On" with the lead single of the same name which was pre-released on June 22. Before its physical release, the album was released digitally on June 29. The album contains 10 tracks including six original tracks and the four covers previously included in "Who Sings? Vol.1". On July 8, he embarked on his first solo concert tour in Japan, starting with a concert at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. The tour consisted of eight sold-out concerts stopping at four cities. Six concerts were originally scheduled, with two additional performances added later to accommodate demand, and took place on September 10 and 11 at Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo. On September 9, Onew released his Japanese single titled "Dance Whole Day" which was specially prepared to be performed at his last additional concerts. The single was later released in Korea on September 15. The last concert of the tour was broadcast live on TBS Television.


title: Onew

text: Onew is the only child of his parents. He became interested in music at a young age when he started to play the piano. Later, his passion inspired him to pursue a career in the music industry.


title: Onew

text: Onew graduated from the Gwangmyeong Information Industry High School. In his senior year, he ranked second in his grade and held the highest national score for his high school SATs exam. He started attending Chungwoon University where he majored in broadcasting music. After receiving his bachelor's degree he continued to attend the university for his master's degree which he earned in practical music.


title: Onew

text: Onew is one of the main vocalists of Shinee and is known for his distinctively unique vocal color and for his calm and understated voice, providing the strong vocal foundation of the group with fellow member Jonghyun. In June 2014, Onew underwent a vocal cord polyp removal and vocal fold mucosa reconstruction operation, which made him unable to sing for a few months. On December 2014, Kim Yeon-woo, Onew's vocal coach, revealed during a radio broadcast that Onew's condition had improved after the surgery. He also confirmed that Onew's vocal range "improved and he can make sounds comfortably too".


title: Onew

text: In order to support Onew in the musical "Rock of Ages", in 2010, his fans had donated 1.44 tons of rice, a common practice for fans in South Korea, with the expectation that the idol will then donate to a charity of their choice—Onew donated it to help feed North Korean children, which was prepared by the Child Development Program. Onew also donated 770 kg of rice to children in need in South Korea in May 2010. In 2016, Onew donated roughly 1.2 million won to the Korean Heart Association.


title: Onew

text: In August 2017, Onew was accused of sexual harassment. The victim stated that on August 12 in a night club in Gangnam, Onew, who was intoxicated, touched her leg two or three times as he tried to stand up, over the course of two hours while she was dancing on one of the club's multiple dancing platforms that was adjacent to where Onew was seated. However, she acknowledged that such incidents could happen under the influence of alcohol and withdrew the charge. Nevertheless, the case was forwarded to the prosecution as a recommendation for indictment without detention. After a four-month hiatus, Onew posted a letter of apology, which was accepted widely among his fans, but others called for him to step down from Shinee. On April 5, 2018, SM Entertainment announced that the charges against him had been dismissed by the prosecutors.


title: Onew

text: All songwriting credits are adapted from the Korea Music Copyright Association's database, unless otherwise noted.


title: Tigon

text: A tigon (), tiglon () (portmanteau of "tiger" and "lion"), or tion () is the hybrid offspring of a male tiger ("Panthera tigris") and a female lion ("Panthera leo"). They exhibit visible characteristics from both parents: they can have both spots from the mother (lions carry genes for spots – lion cubs are spotted and some adults retain faint markings) and stripes from the father. Any mane that a male tigon may have will appear shorter and less noticeable than a lion's mane and is closer in type to the ruff of a male tiger.


title: Tigon

text: It is a common misconception that tigons are smaller than lions or tigers. They do not exceed the size of their parent species because they inherit growth-inhibitory genes from both parents, but they do not exhibit any kind of dwarfism or miniaturization; they often weigh around , compared to ligers which often weigh from to It is distinct from the liger, which is a hybrid of a male lion and a female tiger.


title: Tigon

text: Guggisberg wrote that ligers and tigons were long thought to be sterile; in 1943, however, a 15-year-old hybrid between a lion and an "Island" tiger was successfully mated with a lion at the Munich Hellabrunn Zoo. The female cub was then raised to adulthood. Like the liger, male tigons are sterile while the females are fertile.


title: Tigon

text: At the Alipore Zoo in India, a tigoness named Rudhrani, born in 1971, was successfully mated to a male Asiatic lion named Debabrata. The rare, second generation hybrid was called a litigon. Rudhrani produced seven litigons in her lifetime. Some of these reached impressive sizes - a litigon named Cubanacan weighed at least , stood at the shoulder, and was in total length.


title: Tigon

text: Reports also exist of the similar titigon , resulting from the cross between a female tigon and a male tiger. Titigons resemble golden tigers, but with less contrast in their markings. A tigoness born in 1978, named Noelle, shared an enclosure in the Shambala Preserve with a male Siberian tiger called Anton, due to the keepers' belief that she was sterile. In 1983 Noelle produced a titigon named Nathaniel. As Nathaniel was three-quarters tiger, he had darker stripes than Noelle and vocalized more like a tiger, rather than with the mix of sounds used by his mother. Being only about quarter-lion, Nathaniel did not grow a mane. Nathaniel died of cancer at the age of nine years old. Noelle also developed a severe cancer, that killed her not long after she was diagnosed.


title: Tigon

text: As with the liger, the tigon is found only in captivity, because the habitats of the lion and tiger do not overlap. In the past, however, the Asiatic lion did coexist with the Bengal tiger in the wilderness of India, besides occurring in countries where the Caspian tiger had been, such as Iran and Turkey. In India, there is a plan to shift some lions from their current home of the Gir Forest to Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary, which has some tigers, but it has not been implemented as of December 2017, perhaps due to political reasons, as the Gujarat state government does not want any other state to have lions in the forests.


title: Ambigram

text: The term was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1983. Most often, ambigrams appear as visually symmetrical words. When flipped, they remain unchanged, or they mutate to reveal another meaning. "Half-turn" ambigrams undergo a point reflection (180° rotational symmetry) and can be read upside down, mirror ambigrams have an axial symmetry and can be read through a reflective surface (like a mirror or a mirroring lake), and many other types of ambigrams exist.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams are found in different languages, various alphabets and the notion often extends to numbers and other symbols. It is a recent interdisciplinary concept, combining art, literature, mathematics, cognition, and optical illusions. Drawing symmetrical words constitutes also a recreational activity for amateurs. Numerous ambigram logos are famous, and ambigram tattoos have become increasingly popular. There are methods to design an ambigram, a field in which some artists have become specialists.


title: Ambigram

text: The word "ambigram" was coined in 1983 by Douglas Hofstadter, an American scholar of cognitive science best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach".


title: Ambigram

text: Hofstadter describes ambigrams as "calligraphic designs that manage to squeeze in two different readings." "The essence is imbuing a single written form with ambiguity".


title: Ambigram

text: Hofstadter attributed the origin of the word "ambigram" to conversations among a small group of friends during 1983–1984.


title: Ambigram

text: Prior to Hofstadter's terminology, other names were used to refer to ambigrams. Among them, the expressions "vertical palindromes" by Dmitri Borgmann (1965) and Georges Perec, "designatures" (1979), "inversions" (1980) by Scott Kim, or simply "upside-down words" by John Langdon and Robert Petrick.


title: Ambigram

text: "Ambigram" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2011, and to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in September 2020.


title: Ambigram

text: The first Sator square palindrome was found in the ruins of Pompeii, meaning it was created before the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.


title: Ambigram

text: A sator square using the mirror writing for the representation of the letters S and N was carved in a stone wall in Oppède (France) between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, thus producing a work made up of 25 letters and 8 different characters, 3 naturally symmetrical (A, T, O), 3 others decipherable from left to right (R, P, E), and 2 others from right to left (S, N). This engraving is therefore readable in four directions.


title: Ambigram

text: Although the term is recent, the existence of mirror ambigrams has been attested since at least the first millennium. They are generally palindromes stylized to be visually symmetrical.


title: Ambigram

text: In ancient Greek, the phrase ("wash the sins, not only the face"), is a palindrome found in several locations, including the site of the church Hagia Sophia in Turkey. It is sometimes turned into a mirror ambigram when written in capital letters with the removal of spaces, and the stylization of the letter ().


title: Ambigram

text: A boustrophedon is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions.


title: Ambigram

text: Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern European languages, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew,


title: Ambigram

text: alternate lines in boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, the individual characters are reversed, or mirrored. This two-way writing system reveals that modern ambigrams can have quite ancient origins, with an intuitive component in some minds.


title: Ambigram

text: Mirror writing in Islamic calligraphy flourished during the early modern period, but its origins may stretch as far back as pre-Islamic mirror-image rock inscriptions in the Hejaz.


title: Ambigram

text: The earliest known non-natural rotational ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children's books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of reversible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when flipped upside down. The last page in his book "Topsys & Turvys" contains the phrase "The end", which, when inverted, reads "Puzzle". In "Topsys & Turvys Number 2" (1902), Newell ended with a variation on the ambigram in which "The end" changes into "Puzzle 2".


title: Ambigram

text: In March 1904 the Dutch-American comic artist Gustave Verbeek used ambigrams in three consecutive strips of "The UpsideDowns of old man Muffaroo and little lady Lovekins". His comics were ambiguous images, made in such a way that one could read the six-panel comic, flip the book and keep reading.


title: Ambigram

text: From June to September 1908, the British monthly "The Strand Magazine" published a series of ambigrams by different people in its "Curiosities" column. Of particular interest is the fact that all four of the people submitting ambigrams believed them to be a rare property of particular words. Mitchell T. Lavin, whose "chump" was published in June, wrote, "I think it is in the only word in the English language which has this peculiarity," while Clarence Williams wrote, about his "Bet" ambigram, "Possibly B is the only letter of the alphabet that will produce such an interesting anomaly."


title: Ambigram

text: In the Latin alphabet, many letters are symmetrical glyphs. Most obviously the letter O. The capital letters B, C, D, E, H, I, K, O, and X have a horizontal symmetry axis. This means that all words that can be written using only these letters are natural lake reflection ambigrams. For example, BOOK, CHOICE, or DECIDE.


title: Ambigram

text: The lowercase letters l, o, s, x and z are rotationally symmetrical, while pairs such as b/q, d/p, m/w, n/u, and in some typefaces h/y and a/e, are rotations of each other. Thus, the words "sos", "pod", "suns", "yeah, "swims", "dollop", or "passed" form natural rotational ambigrams.


title: Ambigram

text: More generally, a "natural ambigram" is a word that possesses one or more symmetries when written in its natural state, requiring no typographic styling.


title: Ambigram

text: The words "bud", "bid", or "mom", form natural mirror ambigrams when reflected over a vertical axis, as does "ليبيا", the name of the country Libya in Arabic.


title: Ambigram

text: The words "HIM", "TOY, "TOOTH" or "MAXIMUM", in all capitals, form natural mirror ambigrams when their letters are stacked vertically and reflected over a vertical axis.


title: Ambigram

text: The uppercase word "OHIO" can flip a quarter to produce a 90° rotational ambigram when written in serif style (with large "feet" above and below the "I").


title: Ambigram

text: Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form found in the natural world. Similarly, patterns in ambigrams are regularities found in graphemes.


title: Ambigram

text: As a consequence to this "natural" property, some shapes appear more or less appropriate to handle for the designer. Ambigram candidates can become ""almost" natural", when all the letters except maybe one or two are symmetrically cooperative, for example the word "awesome" possesses 5 compatible letters (the central s that flips around itself, and the couples a/e and w/m).


title: Ambigram

text: A symmetrical ambigram can be called "homogram" (contraction of "homo-ambigram") when it remains unchanged after reflection, and "heterogram" when it transforms.


title: Ambigram

text: In the most common type of ambigram, the two interpretations arise when the image is rotated 180 degrees with respect to each other (in other words, a second reading is obtained from the first by simply rotating the sheet).


title: Ambigram

text: Douglas Hofstadter coined the word "homogram" to define an ambigram with identical letters. In this case, the first half of the word turns into the last half.


title: Ambigram

text: A symmetrical ambigram is called "heterogram" (contraction of "hetero-ambigram") when it gives another word.


title: Ambigram

text: Visually, a heterogram ambigram is symmetrical only when both versions of the pairing are shown together.


title: Ambigram

text: The aesthetical appearance is more difficult to design, when a changing ambigram aims to be revealed in one way only, alternatively or separately, because symmetry generally enhances elegance.


title: Ambigram

text: Technically, there are twice more combinations of letters involved in a "hetero-ambigram" than in a "homo-ambigram". For example, the 180° rotational ambigram "yeah" contains only two pairs of letters: y/h and e/a, whereas the heterogram "yeah / good" contains four : y/d, e/o, a/o, and h/g.


title: Ambigram

text: A single word ambigram cannot be "hetero-", but a multiple words ambigram can be "homo-" type if the letters overlapse, like in "upsidedown" written attached, for example. The ambigram saying "upsidedown" one way and "upsidedown" again the other way, means it is a two words "homogram". But the ambigram saying "upside" one way and "down" after rotation, means it is a two words "heterogram".


title: Ambigram

text: There is no limitation to the number of words potentially associable, and full ambigram sentences have even been published.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams are exercises in graphic design that play with optical illusions, symmetry and visual perception.


title: Ambigram

text: Some ambigrams feature a relationship between their form and their content. Ambigrams usually fall into one of several categories.


title: Ambigram

text: "Half-turn" ambigrams or "point reflection" ambigrams, commonly called "upside-down words", are 180° rotational symmetrical calligraphies. We can read them right side up or upside down, or both.


title: Ambigram

text: A mirror ambigram, or reflection ambigram, is a design that can be read when reflected in a mirror vertically, horizontally, or at 45 degrees, giving either the same word or another word or phrase.


title: Ambigram

text: When the reflecting surface is vertical (like a mirror for example), the calligraphic design is a "vertical axis mirror ambigram".


title: Ambigram

text: The "museum" ambigram is almost natural with mirror symmetry, because the first two letters are easily exchanged with the last two, and the lowercase letter e can be transformed into s by a fairly obvious typographical acrobatics.


title: Ambigram

text: Vertical axis mirror ambigrams find clever applications in mirror writing (or specular writing), that is formed by writing in the direction that is the reverse of the natural way for a given language, such that the result is the mirror image of normal writing: it appears normal when it is reflected in a mirror. For example, the word "ambulance" could be read frontward and backward in a vertical axis reflective ambigram. Following this idea, the French artist Patrice Hamel created a mirror ambigram saying "entrée" ("entrance", in French) one way, and "sortie" ("exit") the other way, displayed in the giant glass façade of the Gare du Nord in Paris, so that the travelers coming in read "entrance", and those leaving read "way out".


title: Ambigram

text: When the reflecting surface is horizontal (like a mirroring lake for example), the calligraphic design is a "horizontal axis mirror ambigram".


title: Ambigram

text: The book "Ambigrams Revealed" features several creations of this type, like the word "Failure" mirroring in the water of a pond to give "Success", or "Love" changing into "Lust".


title: Ambigram

text: In a figure / ground ambigram, letters fit together so the negative space around and between one word spells another word.


title: Ambigram

text: In Gestalt psychology, figure–ground perception is known as identifying a "figure" from the back"ground". For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the "figure", and the white sheet as the "background".


title: Ambigram

text: In ambigrams, the typographic space of the background is used as negative space to form new letters and new words. For example, inside a capital H, one can easily insert a lowercase i.


title: Ambigram

text: The oil painting "You & Me" (US) by John Langdon (1996) belongs to this category. The word "me" fills the space between the letters of "you".


title: Ambigram

text: With Escher-like tessellations associated to word patterns, ambigrams can be oriented in three, four, and up to six directions via rotational symmetries of 120°, 90° and 60° respectively, such as those created by French artist Alain Nicolas. Some words can also transform in the negative space, but the multiplication of constraints often has the effect of reducing either the readability or the complexity of the designed words.


title: Ambigram

text: A chain ambigram is a design where a word (or sometimes words) are interlinked, forming a repeating chain.


title: Ambigram

text: For example, the chain "...sunsunsunsun..." can flip upside down, but not the word "sun" alone, written horizontally.


title: Ambigram

text: A chain ambigram can be constituted of one to several elements. A single element ambigram chain is like a snake eating its own tail. A two-elements ambigram chain is like a snake eating the neighbor's tail with the neighbor eating the first snake's, and so on.


title: Ambigram

text: Scott Kim's ""Infinity"" works, and that of John Langdon ""Chain reaction"", are also self-referential, since the first is infinite in the literal sense of the word, and the second, both reversible at 180° and interfering around the letter O, evokes a chain reaction.


title: Ambigram

text: A is a type of ambigram in which a word is written using the same glyph repeated in different orientations.


title: Ambigram

text: Perceptual shift ambigrams, also called "oscillation" ambigrams, are designs with no symmetry but can be read as two different words depending on how the curves of the letters are interpreted. These ambigrams work on the principle of rabbit-duck-style ambiguous images.


title: Ambigram

text: For example Douglas Hofstadter expresses the dual nature of light as revealed by physics with his perceptual shift ambigram "Wave / Particle".


title: Ambigram

text: "Quarter-turn" ambigrams or 90° rotational ambigrams turn clockwise or counterclockwise to express different meanings. For example, the letter U can turn into a C and reciprocally, or the letters M or W into an E.


title: Ambigram

text: A totem ambigram is an ambigram whose letters are stacked like a totem, most often offering a vertical axis mirror symmetry.


title: Ambigram

text: For example, in the , the letters M, A and I are individually symmetrical, and the pairing R/A is almost naturally mirroring.


title: Ambigram

text: When adequately stacked, the 5 letters produce a nice totem ambigram, whereas the whole name "Maria" would not offer the same cooperativeness.


title: Ambigram

text: The ambigrammist artist John Langdon designed several totemic assemblages, such as the word "METRO" composed of the symmetrical letter M, then section ETR, and below O; or the sentence "THANK YOU", vertical assembly of T, H, A, then of the symmetric NK couple, then finally Y, O, U.


title: Ambigram

text: A fractal ambigram is a sort of space-filling ambigrams where the tiled word branches from itself and then shrinks in a self-similar manner, forming a fractal.


title: Ambigram

text: In general, only a few letters are constrainted in a fractal ambigram. The other letters don't need to look like any other, and thus can be shaped freely.


title: Ambigram

text: A 3D ambigram is a design where an object is presented that will appear to read several letters or words when viewed from different angles.


title: Ambigram

text: Such designs can be generated using constructive solid geometry, a technique used in solid modeling, and then physically constructed with the rapid prototyping method.


title: Ambigram

text: The original 1979 edition of Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" featured two 3-D ambigrams on the cover.


title: Ambigram

text: Complex ambigrams are ambigrams involving more than one symmetry, or satisfying the criteria for several types. For example, a complex ambigram can be both rotational and mirror with a 4-fold dihedral symmetry. Or a spinonym that reads upside down is also a complex ambigram.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams exist in many languages. With the Latin alphabet, they generally mix lowercase and uppercase letters. But words can also be symmetrical in other alphabets, like Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Greek, and even in Chinese characters and Japanese kanji.


title: Ambigram

text: In Korean, 곰 (bear) and 문 (door), 공 (ball) and 운 (luck), or 물 (water) and 롬 (ROM) form a natural rotational ambigram. Some syllables like 응 (yes), 표 (ticket/signage) or 를 ("object particle"), and words like "허리피라우" (straighten your back) also make full ambigrams.


title: Ambigram

text: The han character meaning "hundred" is written 百, that makes a natural 90° rotational ambigram when the glyph makes a quarter turn counterclockwise, one sees "100".


title: Ambigram

text: In mathematics, a palindromic number (also known as a "numeral palindrome") is a number that remains the same when its digits are reversed through a vertical axis (but not necessarily visually). The palindromic numbers containing only 1, 8, and 0, constitute natural numeric ambigrams (visually symmetrical through a mirror). Also, because the glyph 2 is graphically the mirror image of 5, it means numbers like 205 or 85128 are natural numeral mirror ambigrams. Though not palindromic in the mathematical sense, they read frontward and backward like real ambigrams.


title: Ambigram

text: A strobogrammatic number is a number whose numeral is rotationally symmetric, so that it appears the same when rotated 180 degrees. The numeral looks the same right-side up and upside down (e.g., 69, 96, 1001).


title: Ambigram

text: In March 1961, artist Norman Mingo created an upside-down cover for "Mad magazine" featuring an ambigram of the current year. The title says "No matter how you look at it... it's gonna be a "Mad" year. 1961, the first upside-down year since 1881."


title: Ambigram

text: Tuesday, 22 February 2022, was a palindrome and ambigram date called "Twosday" because it contained reversible 2 (two).


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams with numbers sometimes combine letters and numerical digits. Because the number 5 is approximately shaped like the letter S, the number 6 like a lowercase b, the number 9 like the letter g, it is possible to play on these similarities to design ambigrams. A good example is the Sochi 2014 (Olympic games) logo where the four glyphs contained in 2014 are exact symmetries of the four letters S, o, i and h, individually.


title: Ambigram

text: As alphabet letters are glyphs used in the writing systems to express the languages visually, other symbols are also used in the world to code other fields, like the prosigns in the Morse code or the musical notes in music.


title: Ambigram

text: Similarly to the ambigrams of letters, the ambigrams with other symbols are generally visually symmetrical, either point reflective or reflective through an axis.


title: Ambigram

text: The international Morse code distress signal SOS is a natural ambigram constituted of dots and dashes. It flips upside down or through a mirror.


title: Ambigram

text: In morse code, the letter P coded and the letter R coded are individually symmetrical, like many other letters and numbers. Also, the letter G coded is the exact reverse of the letter W coded . Thus, the combination / coding the pairing G/W constitutes a natural ambigram. Consequently, meaningful natural ambigrams written in morse code certainly exist, like for example the words "wog" , "Dou" or "mom" .


title: Ambigram

text: In music, the interlude from Alban Berg's opera "Lulu" is a palindrome, thus the score made up of musical notes is almost symmetrical through a vertical axis.


title: Ambigram

text: In biology, researchers study the ambigrammatic property of narnaviruses by using visual representations of the symmetrical sequences.


title: Ambigram

text: Instead of simply writing them, ambigram lettering covers the art of drawing letters. In ambigram calligraphy, each letter acts as an illustration, each letter is created with attention to detail and has a unique role within a composition. Lettering ambigrams do not translate into combinations of alphabet letters that can be used like a typeface, since they are created with a specific candidate in mind.


title: Ambigram

text: The calligrapher, graffiti writer and graphic designer Niels Shoe Meulman created several rotational ambigrams like the number "fifty", the names "Shoe / Patta", and the opposition "Love / Fear".


title: Ambigram

text: The cover of the 7th volume of the typography book "Typism" is an ambigram drawn by Nikita Prokhorov.


title: Ambigram

text: The American type designer Mark Simonson designed poetic and humorous ambigrams, such as the words "Revelation", "Typophile", and the symbiosis "Drink / Drunk". The last one makes a visual pun when printed on a shot glass, sold commercially.


title: Ambigram

text: Since they are visually striking, and sometimes surprising, ambigram words find large application in corporate logos and wordmarks, setting the visual identity of many organizations, trademarks and brands.


title: Ambigram

text: The logo Sun (Microsystems) designed by professor Vaughan Pratt in 1982 fulfills the criteria of several types: chain ambigram, spinonym, 90° and 180° rotational symmetries.


title: Ambigram

text: The Swedish pop group ABBA owns a mirror ambigram logo stylized AᗺBA with a reversed B, designed by in 1976.


title: Ambigram

text: The Ventura logo of the Visitors & Convention Bureau's board, in California, cost and was created in 2014 by the DuPuis group. It uses a 180° rotational symmetry.


title: Ambigram

text: and the Malaysian mobile virtual network operator XOX. The student edition of the Tesco Clubcard used 180° rotational symmetry.


title: Ambigram

text: Because they are visual puns, ambigrams generally attract attention, and thus can be used in visual communication to broadcast a marketing or political message.


title: Ambigram

text: In France, a mirror ambigram "Penelope / benevole" legible through a horizontal axis became a meme on the web after its diffusion on Wikimedia Commons.


title: Ambigram

text: Penelope Fillon, wife of French politician and former Prime Minister of France François Fillon, is suspected of having received wages for a fictitious job. Ironically, her name through the mirror becomes benevole ("voluntary" in French), suggesting dedication for a free service. Shared tens of thousands of times on the social networks, this humorous ambigram made the buzz via several French, Belgian and Swiss medias.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams are regularly used by communication agencies such as Publicis to engage the reader or the consumer through two-way messages.


title: Ambigram

text: Thus, in 2021, male first names transformed into female first names are included in a Swiss advertising campaign aimed at raising awareness about gender equality. An intriguing catchphrase typography upside down invites the reader to rotate the magazine, in which the first names "Michael" or "Peter" are transformed into "Nathalie" or "Alice".


title: Ambigram

text: In 2015 iSmart's logo on one of its travel chargers went viral because the brand's name turned out to be a natural ambigram that read "+Jews!" upside down. The company noted that "...we learned a powerful lesson of what not to do when creating a logo."


title: Ambigram

text: Cinema posters sometimes seduce observers with ambigram titles, such as that of Tenet by Christopher Nolan, by central symmetry.


title: Ambigram

text: The American artist and writer Peter Newell published a rotational ambigram in 1893 saying "Puzzle / The end" in the book containing reversible illustrations "Topsys & Turvys".


title: Ambigram

text: In March 1904 the Dutch-American comic artist Gustave Verbeek used ambigrams in three consecutive strips of "The UpsideDowns of old man Muffaroo and little lady Lovekins". His comics were ambiguous images, made in such a way that one could read the six-panel comic, flip the book and keep reading. In "The Wonderful Cure of the Waterfall" (13 March 1904) an Indian medicine man says 'Big waters would make her very sound', while when flipped the medicine man turns into an Indian woman who says 'punos dery, eay apew poom, serlem big'. Which is explained as, 'poor deary' several foreign words that meant that she would call the 'Serlem Big'. The next comic called "At the House of the Writing Pig" (20 March 1904), where two ambigram word balloons are featured. The first features an angry pig trying to make the main protagonist leave by showing a sign that says; 'big boy go away, dis am home of mr h hog', up side down it reads 'Boy yew go away. We sip. Home of hog pig.' The protagonist asks the pig if it wants a big bun, upon which it replies 'Why big buns? Am mad u!', which flips into 'In pew we sang big hym'. Finally in "The Bad Snake and the Good Wizard" (1904 Mar 27) there are two more ambigrams. The first turns 'How do you do' into the name of a wizard called 'Opnohop Moy', the second features a squirrel telling the protagonist 'Yes further on' only to inform it that there are 'No serpents here' on his way back. In a 2012 Swedish remake of the book, the artist Marcus Ivarsson redraws "The Bad Snake and the Good Wizard" in his own style. He removes the squirrel, but keeps the other ambigram. 'How do you do' is replaced by 'Nejnej' (Swedish for no) and the wizard is now called 'Laulau'.


title: Ambigram

text: Oubapo, "workshop of potential comic book art", is a comics movement which believes in the use of formal constraints to push the boundaries of the medium. Étienne Lécroart, cartoonist, is a founder and key member of Oubapo association, and has composed cartoons that could be read either horizontally, vertically, or in diagonal, and vice versa, sometimes including appropriate ambigrams.


title: Ambigram

text: The British painter, designer and illustrator Rex Whistler, published in 1946 a rotational ambigram "¡OHO!" for the cover of a book gathering reversible drawings.


title: Ambigram

text: The artist John Langdon, specialist of ambigrams, designed many color paintings featuring ambigrams of all kinds, figure-ground, rotational, mirror or totem. Among other influences, he particularly admires M. C. Escher's drawings.


title: Ambigram

text: The Canadian artist Kelly Klages painted several acrylics on canvas with ambigram words and sentences referring to famous writers' novels written by William Shakespeare or Agatha Christie, such as "Third Girl", "The Tempest", "After the Funeral", "The Hollow", Reformation, Sherlock Holmes, and "Elephants Can Remember".


title: Ambigram

text: The German conceptual artist Mia Florentine Weiss built a sculptural ambigram , that has traveled Europe as a symbol of peace and change of perspective. Depending on which side the viewer looks at it, the sculpture says "Love" or "Hate". A similar concept was installed in front of the Reichstag building in Berlin with the words "Now / Won". Both sculptures are mirror type ambigrams, symmetrical around a vertical axis.


title: Ambigram

text: The Swiss sculptor Markus Raetz made several three-dimensional ambigram works, featuring words generally with related meanings, such as


title: Ambigram

text: These are anamorphic works, which change in appearance depending on the angle of view of the observer.


title: Ambigram

text: The OUI–NON ambigram is installed on the Place du Rhône, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the top of a metal pole. Physically, the letters have the appearance of iron twists. With the perspective, this work demonstrates that reality can be ambiguous.


title: Ambigram

text: Some ambigram sculptures by the French conjurer are reversible by a half-turn rotation, and can therefore be exhibited on a support in two different ways.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams are sorts of visual palindromes. Some words turn upside down, others are symmetrical through a mirror. Natural ambigram palindromes exist, like the words "wow", "malayalam" (Dravidian language), or the biotechnology company Noxxon that possesses a palindromic name associated to a rotational ambigram logo. But some words are natural ambigrams, though not palindromes in the literary acception, like "bud" for example, because b and d are different letters. As a result, some words and sentences are good candidates for ambigrammists, but not for palindromists, and reciprocally, since the constraint slightly differ. Authors of ambigrams also benefit from a certain flexibility by playing on the typeface and graphical adjustments to influence the reading of their visual palindromes.


title: Ambigram

text: Oulipo, "workshop of potential literature", seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. Georges Perec, French novelist and member of the Oulipo group, designed a rotational ambigram, that he called "vertical palindrome". Sibylline, the sentence "Andin Basnoda a une épouse qui pue" in French means "Andin Basnoda has a smelly wife". Perec did not care about punctuation spaces, but his creation flips easily with a classical font like Arial.


title: Ambigram

text: Visual palindromes sometimes perfectly illustrate literary contents. The American author Dan Brown incorporated John Langdon's designs into the plot of his bestseller "Angels & Demons", and his fictional character Robert Langdon's surname was a homage to the ambigram artist.


title: Ambigram

text: The fantasy novel Abarat, written and illustrated by Clive Barker, features an ambigram of the title on its cover.


title: Ambigram

text: A calligram is text arranged in such a way that it forms a thematically related image. It can be a poem, a phrase, a portion of scripture, or a single word. The visual arrangement can rely on certain use of the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting. The image created by the words illustrates the text by expressing visually what it says, or something closely associated.


title: Ambigram

text: In Islamic calligraphy, symmetrical calligrams appear in ancient and modern periods, forming mirror ambigrams in Arabic language.


title: Ambigram

text: The word "OK" turned 90° counterclockwise evokes a human icon, with the letter O forming the head and the letter K the arms and the legs. The Norwegian Climbing Club (acronym "OK") borrowed the concept of this natural calligram for their official logo.


title: Ambigram

text: As described by Douglas Hofstadter, ambigrams are visual puns having two or more (clear) interpretations as written words.


title: Ambigram

text: Multilingual ambigrams can be read one way in a language, and another way in a different language or alphabet.


title: Ambigram

text: Multi-lingual ambigrams can occur in all of the various types of ambigrams, with multi-lingual perceptual shift ambigrams being particularly striking.


title: Ambigram

text: Like certain anagrams with providential meanings such as "Listen / Silent" or "The eyes / They see", ambigrams also sometimes take on a timely sense, for example "up" becomes the abbreviation "dn", very naturally by rotation of 180°.


title: Ambigram

text: But on the other hand, it happens that the luck of the letters makes things bad. This is the case with the weird anagram "Santa / Satan", as it is with a rotational ambigram that has gone viral because of the paradoxical and unintentional message it expresses. Spotted in 2015 on a metal medal marketed without bad intention, the text "hope" displays upside down with a fairly obvious reading "Adolf", first name of the Nazi leader situated at the antipodes of optimism. This coincidence photographed by an Internet user was relayed by several media and constitutes an ambiguous image.


title: Ambigram

text: Recreational mathematics is carried out for entertainment rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity. An ambigram magic square exists, with the sums of the numbers in each row, each column, and both main diagonals the same right side up and upside down (180° rotational design). Numeral ambigrams also associate with alphabet letters. A "dissection" ambigram of "squaring the circle" was achieved in a puzzle where each piece of the word "circle" fits inside a perfect square.


title: Ambigram

text: Burkard Polster, professor of mathematics in Melbourne conducted researches on ambigrams and published several books dealing with the topic, including "Eye Twisters, Ambigrams & Other Visual Puzzles to Amaze and Entertain". In the abstract "Mathemagical Ambigrams", Polster performs several ambigrams closely related to his realm, like the words "algebra", "geometry", "math", "maths", or "mathematics".


title: Ambigram

text: Calculator spelling is an unintended characteristic of the seven-segments display traditionally used by calculators, in which, when read upside-down, the digits resemble letters of the Latin alphabet. Also, palindromic numbers and strobogrammatic numbers sometimes attract attention of mathematician ambigrammists.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigram tessellations and 3D ambigrams are two types particularly fun for the mathematician in geometry. Word patterns in tessellations can start from 35 different fundamental polygons, such as the rhombus, the isosceles right triangle, or the parallelogram.


title: Ambigram

text: Word puzzles are used as a source of entertainment, but can additionally serve an educational purpose. The American puzzle designer Scott Kim published several ambigrams in "Scientific American" in Martin Gardner's


title: Ambigram

text: "Mathematical Games" column, among them long sentences like ""Martin Gardner's celebration of mind"" turning into "Physics, patterns and prestidigitation".


title: Ambigram

text: In the word ""ambigram"", the root "ambi-" means "both" and is a popular prefix in a world of dualities, such as day/night, left/right, birth/death, good/evil. In "Wordplay: The Philosophy, Art, and Science of Ambigrams", John Langdon mentions the yin and yang symbol as one of his major influences to create upside down words.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams are mentioned in "Metamagical Themas", an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine "Scientific American" during the early 1980s.


title: Ambigram

text: Legibility is an important aspect in successful ambigrams. It concerns the ease with which a reader decodes symbols. If the message is lost or difficult to perceive, an ambigram does not work. Readability is related to perception, or how our brain interprets the forms we see through our eyes.


title: Ambigram

text: Symmetry in ambigrams generally improves the visual appearance of the calligraphic words. Hermann Rorschach, inventor of the Rorschach Test notices that asymmetric figures are rejected by many subjects. Symmetry supplies part of the necessary artistic composition.


title: Ambigram

text: For many amateurs, designing ambigrams represents a recreational activity, where serendipity can play a fertile role, when the author makes an unplanned fortunate discovery.


title: Ambigram

text: In magic, ambigrams work like visual illusions, revealing an unexpected new message from a particular written word.


title: Ambigram

text: In the first series of the British show "Trick or Treat", the show's host and creator Derren Brown uses cards with rotational ambigrams. These cards can read either 'Trick' or 'Treat'.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambiguous images, of which ambigrams are a part, cause ambiguity in different ways. For example, by rotational symmetry, as in the Illusion of "The Cook" by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1570); sometimes by a figure-ground ambivalence as in Rubin vase; by perceptual shift as in the rabbit–duck illusion, or through pareidolias; or again, by the representation of impossible objects, such as Necker cube or Penrose triangle. For all these types of images, certain ambigrams exist, and can be combined with visuals of the same type.


title: Ambigram

text: John Langdon designed a figure-ground ambigram "optical illusion" with the two words "optical" and "illusion", one forming the figure and the other the background. "Optical" is easier to see initially but "illusion" emerges with longer observation.


title: Ambigram

text: One of the most dynamic sectors that harbors ambigrams is tattooing. Because they possess two ways of reading, ambigram tattoos inked on the skin benefit from a "mind-blowing" effect. On the arm, sleeve tattoos flip upside-down, on the back or jointly on two wrists they are more striking with a mirror symmetry. A large range of scripts and fonts is available. Experienced ambigram artists can create an optical illusion with a complex visual design.


title: Ambigram

text: In 2015, an ambigram tattoo went viral following an advertising campaign developed by the Publicis group two years earlier. The "Samaritans of Singapore" organization, active in suicide prevention, has a 180° reversible "SOS" ambigram logo, acronym of its name and homonym of the famous SOS distress signal.


title: Ambigram

text: In 2013, this center orders advertisements that could be inserted in magazines to make readers aware of the problem of depression among young people, and the communication agency notices the symmetrical aspect of the logo. As a result, it begins to produce several ambigrammatic visuals, staged in photographic contexts, where sentences such as "I'm fine", "I feel fantastic" or "Life is great" turn into "Save me", "I'm falling apart", and "I hate myself". Readers noticing this logo placed at the upper left corner of the page with an upside-down typographical catchphrase rotate the newspaper and visualize the double calligraphed messages, which call out with the "SOS".


title: Ambigram

text: These ads are so influential that Bekah Miles, an American student herself coming out of a severe depression, chooses to use the "I'm fine / Save me" ambigram to get a tattoo on her thigh. Posted on Facebook, the two-sided photography immediately appeals to many young people, impressed or sensitive to this difficulty.


title: Ambigram

text: To educate its students, George Fox University in the United States then relays the optical illusion in its official journal, through a video totaling more than three million views and the information is also reproduced in several local media and international organizations, thus helping to popularize this famous two-way tattoo.


title: Ambigram

text: Less fortunate, another teenage girl, aged 16, committed suicide, with her also this ambigram found on a note in her room, "I'm fine / Save me", reversible calligraphy today printed on badges and bracelets, for educational purposes.


title: Ambigram

text: Adidas marketed a line of sneakers called "Bounce", with an ambigram typography printed inside the shoe.


title: Ambigram

text: Several clothing brands, such as Helly Hansen (HH), Under Armour (UA), or , raise an ambigram logo as their visual identity.


title: Ambigram

text: Mirror ambigrams are also sometimes placed on T-shirts, towels and hats, while socks are more adapted to rotational ambigrams. The conceptual artist Mia Florentine Weiss marketed T-shirts and other products with her mirror ambigram .


title: Ambigram

text: Likewise, the city of Ventura in California sells sweatshirts, caps, jackets, and other fashion accessories printed with its rotational ambigram logo.


title: Ambigram

text: The CD cover of the thirteenth studio album "Funeral" by American rapper Lil Wayne features a 180° rotational ambigram reading "Funeral / Lil Wayne".


title: Ambigram

text: The special edition paper sleeve (CD with DVD) of the solo album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard by Paul McCartney features an ambigram of the singer's name.


title: Ambigram

text: The Grateful Dead have used ambigrams several times, including on their albums "Aoxomoxoa" and "American Beauty".


title: Ambigram

text: Although the words spelled by most ambigrams are relatively short in length, one DVD cover for "The Princess Bride" movie creates a rotational ambigram out of two words "Princess Bride," whether viewed right side up or upside down.


title: Ambigram

text: The cover of the studio album "Create/Destroy/Create" by rock band Goodnight, Sunrise is an ambigram composition constituted of two invariant words, "create" and "destroy", designed by Polish artist Daniel Dostal.


title: Ambigram

text: The reversible shot glass containing a changing message "Drink / Drunk", created by the typographer Mark Simonson was manufactured and sold in the market.


title: Ambigram

text: The concept of reversible sign that some merchants use through their windows to indicate that the store is sometimes "open", sometimes "closed", was inaugurated at the beginning of the 2000s, by a rotational ambigram "Open / Closed" developed by David Holst.


title: Ambigram

text: Different ambigram artists, sometimes called "ambigrammists", may create distinctive ambigrams from the same words, differing in both style and form.


title: Ambigram

text: There are no universal guidelines for creating ambigrams, and different ways of approaching problems coexist.


title: Ambigram

text: A number of books suggest methods for creation, including "WordPlay", "Eye Twisters", and "Ambigrams Revealed", in English.


title: Ambigram

text: Computerized methods to automatically create ambigrams have been developed. Most of them function on the simplified principle of mapping a single letter to another single letter. Because of this weakness, most of them can only map a word to itself or to another word that is the same length and do not combine letters.


title: Ambigram

text: Thus, the generated ambigrams are in general of poor quality when compared to hand made ambigrams. More sophisticated techniques employ databases of thousands of curves to create complex ambigrams. Some ambigram generators are free, while some others require payment.


title: Ambigram

text: To explain visually the numerous types of possible ambigrams, Hofstadter created many pieces with different constraints and symmetries. Hofstadter has had several exhibitions of his artwork in various university galleries.


title: Ambigram

text: According to Scott Kim, Hofstadter once created a series of 50 ambigrams on the name of all the states in the US.


title: Ambigram

text: In 1987 a book of 200 of his ambigrams, together with a long dialogue with his alter ego Egbert G. Gebstadter on ambigrams and creativity, was published in Italy.


title: Ambigram

text: John Langdon is a self-taught artist, graphic designer and painter, who started designing ambigrams in the late 1960s and early 70s. Lettering specialist, Langdon is a professor of typography and corporate identity at Drexel University in Philadelphia.


title: Ambigram

text: John Langdon produced a mirror image logo "Starship" in 1972 or 1975, that was sold to the rock band Jefferson Starship.


title: Ambigram

text: Langdon's ambigram book "Wordplay" was published in 1992. It contains about 60 ambigrams. Each design is accompanied by a brief essay that explores the word's definition, its etymology, its relationship to philosophy and science, and its use in everyday life.


title: Ambigram

text: Ambigrams became more popular as a result of Dan Brown incorporating John Langdon's designs into the plot of his bestseller, "Angels & Demons", and the DVD release of the "Angels & Demons" movie contains a bonus chapter called "This is an Ambigram". Langdon also produced the ambigram that was used for some versions of the book's cover. Brown used the name Robert Langdon for the hero in his novels as an homage to John Langdon.


title: Ambigram

text: Blacksmith Records, the music management company and record label, possesses a rotational ambigram logo designed by John Langdon.


title: Ambigram

text: Scott Kim is one of the best-known masters of the art of ambigrams. He is an American puzzle designer and artist who published in 1981 a book called "Inversions" with ambigrams of many types.


title: Ambigram

text: Nikita Prokhorov is a graphic artist, typographer and professional ambigrammist. His book "Ambigrams Revealed" showcases ambigram designs of all types, from all around the world.


title: Ambigram

text: Born in 1946, Alain Nicolas is a specialist of figurative and ambigram tessellations. In his book, he performed many tilings with various words like "infinity", "Einstein" or "inversion" legible in many orientations. According to "The Guardian", Nicolas has been called "the world's finest artist of Escher-style tilings".


title: Blink-182 discography

text: This is a discography of the American pop punk band Blink-182, an American rock band. They have released eight studio albums, one live album, two compilation albums, three video albums, two extended plays (EPs), twenty-four singles, six promotional singles, and twenty-two music videos. Their recording material was distributed mainly by subdivisions of Universal Music Group, including Geffen Records, Interscope Records, and DGC Records. They have also released material under MCA Records, Cargo Music and its subdivision Grilled Cheese, Kung Fu Records, and BMG. The band currently consists of bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus, drummer Travis Barker, and guitarist and vocalist Tom DeLonge. Founded by Hoppus, guitarist and vocalist Tom DeLonge, and drummer Scott Raynor, the band emerged from the Southern California punk scene of the early 1990s and first gained notoriety for high-energy live shows and irreverent lyrical toilet humor. Blink-182 has sold over 13 million albums in the United States, and over 50 million albums worldwide. The band is known for bringing the genre of pop punk into the mainstream.


title: Blink-182 discography

text: The band recorded three demos, including the commercially available "Buddha", before signing to San Diego-based independent label Cargo Music in 1994. Cargo issued the band's debut album, "Cheshire Cat", in 1995. The band signed with major label MCA Records to co-distribute 1997's "Dude Ranch". The album was their first to chart on the "Billboard" 200, peaking at number 67. "Dude Ranch" also featured their first radio hit, "Dammit", which helped the album reach Platinum status in the United States. The following album, "Enema of the State" (1999), was met with more commercial success, reaching top ten positions in several countries, including the United States. Its singles, "What's My Age Again?", "All the Small Things", and "Adam's Song", became airplay and MTV staples. "All the Small Things" became the most successful of the three, reaching number-one on the Alternative Songs chart, but also became a crossover hit and peaked at number six on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. "Enema of the State" is Blink-182's most successful album, certified five times platinum in the United States for having shipped five million units. It has sold over 15 million worldwide.


title: Blink-182 discography

text: Their fourth album, "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket" (2001), reached the number-one spot in the United States, Canada, and Germany. In its first week, the album sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States, eventually being certified double Platinum by the RIAA. The first two singles, ("The Rock Show" and "First Date") achieved moderate success internationally, while its third and final single "Stay Together for the Kids" had a weaker impact. The eponymously titled "Blink-182" followed in 2003 and marked a stylistic shift for the group, infusing experimental elements into their usual pop punk formula, resulting in a more mature sound. The album spawned four singles: "Feeling This", "I Miss You", "Down", and "Always", with "I Miss You" having the greatest success and narrowly missing the top 40 of the "Billboard" Hot 100. "Feeling This" and "I Miss You", along with "All the Small Things" and "Bored To Death", remain the best-selling of the group's singles, which have all been certified Gold by the RIAA. DeLonge left the group in 2005, sending the band into what was termed an "indefinite hiatus."


title: Blink-182 discography

text: The trio reunited in 2009, and their sixth studio album, "Neighborhoods", was released in 2011. While it was a top ten success on many charts around the globe, it did not prove to be as successful as their last album, and its singles "Up All Night" and "After Midnight" had weaker success on the charts in comparison to previous releases. "Dogs Eating Dogs", an extended play containing new material, was self-released by the band after they departed their record label DGC in 2012, whom the group had been with since they reunited. After a second falling-out with DeLonge which resulted in his departure in January 2015, the band recruited Skiba as a replacement. The album's production was expedited without DeLonge, and their seventh record "California" was released in 2016. It was the band's first album to reach number-one on any chart since before the band's breakup, and their first ever in the UK; and each song from the album managed to reach chart positions in the US and the UK.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Batman is a 1943 American 15-chapter theatrical serial from Columbia Pictures, produced by Rudolph C. Flothow, directed by Lambert Hillyer, that stars Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as his sidekick Robin. The serial is based on the DC Comics character Batman, who first appeared in "Detective Comics" #27 in May 1939. The villain is an original character named Dr. Daka, a secret agent of the Japanese Imperial government, played by J. Carrol Naish. Rounding out the cast are Shirley Patterson as Linda Page, Bruce Wayne's love interest, and William Austin as Alfred, the Wayne Manor butler.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The serial's story line involves the Batman, a secret U. S. government agent, attempting to defeat the schemes of Japanese agent Dr. Daka operating in Los Angeles at the height of World War II. Serving Daka are his American henchmen.


title: Batman (serial)

text: "Batman" is notable for being the first appearance on film of Batman and for debuting story elements that quickly became permanent parts of the Batman character's mythos, such as the "Bat's Cave" and its secret entrance through a grandfather clock inside Wayne Manor. The serial also changed the course of how Alfred's physical appearance was depicted in future Batman stories. At the time "Batman" was released in theaters, Alfred was drawn as a portly gentleman in the comics. Subsequent issues suddenly depicted Alfred as slim and sporting a thin moustache, following actor William Austin's appearance.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The serial was commercially successful and in 1949, four years after World War II, spawned another Columbia chapter serial, "Batman and Robin". The entire first "Batman" serial was re-released theatrically in 1965 as "An Evening with Batman and Robin", and proved very popular (some theatres showed the chapters as a Saturday matinee). Its success inspired the action-comedy lampoon series "Batman" (and its 1966 theatrical feature film spin-off) starring Adam West and Burt Ward.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The Batman/Bruce Wayne (Lewis Wilson), and his ward, Robin/Dick Grayson (Douglas Croft), secret government agents following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, become aware of a Japanese sabotage ring operating in Gotham City. Bruce's girlfriend Linda Page (Shirley Patterson) asks for his help in finding her uncle, Martin Warren (Gus Glassmire), who was abducted by the ring after he was released from prison.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Dr. Tito Daka (J. Carrol Naish), the Japanese leader of the ring, plans to steal the city's radium supply to power his invention, a hand-held ray gun that can dissolve anything hit by its powerful beam. He forces from Warren the location of the vault where the radium is stored. Daka sends his American henchmen, along with a zombie that he controls by microphone via an electronic brain implant, to steal the precious metal. Batman discovers the plot and eventually routs the gang after a terrific battle.


title: Batman (serial)

text: In his secret Bat's Cave, the Batman interrogates one of Daka's henchmen, who reveals the radium was to have been taken to The House of the Open Door, located in the mostly deserted "Little Tokyo" section of Gotham City. Batman and Robin infiltrate the gang's lair (also Dr. Daka's laboratory), hidden inside a still-open business, a Fun House ride. There, they find Linda bound, gagged, and unconscious. After she is rescued by the Dynamic Duo, Daka transforms her uncle Warren into a zombie, and plots the derailment of a heavily laden supply train. Once again, Dr. Daka's sabotage efforts are stopped by the Batman and Robin.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Traps and counter-traps follow in the succeeding chapters, as the Dynamic Duo continue to thwart the plans of the Japanese agent and his henchmen. When Dr. Daka attempts to steal America's Victory Plans, the Batman and Robin finally prevail. They oversee the capture of Daka's men and finally the death of the Japanese agent, as he tries to escape and falls through his own hidden trapdoor into a pit full of hungry alligators.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The serial was made at the height of World War II and, like numerous works of popular American fiction of the time, contains anti-Axis powers sentiments, in this case, anti-Japanese ethnic slurs and comments. In a scene one of Daka's henchmen turns on him, saying, "That's the kind of answer that fits the color of your skin". Early narration in the first chapter (at minute 9:20-9:30) references the U.S. government policy of Japanese American internment to explain the abandoned neighborhood where Daka's headquarters are located, setting the serial's racial tone: "This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs, it has become virtually a ghost street."


title: Batman (serial)

text: Just like many other contemporary serials, "Batman" also suffered from a low budget. No attempt was made to create the Batmobile, so a black 1939 Cadillac Series 61 convertible was used, chauffeured by Alfred when Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were either in their civilian or Batman and Robin identities. It is driven "top-up" when it is the Batmobile, and "top-down" when it is Bruce Wayne's car. Batman's hometown of Gotham City, an analog of New York in the comics, becomes an analog of Los Angeles in the movie.


title: Batman (serial)

text: While many serials made changes as part of their adaptation, to the extent that they were "often 'improved' almost out of recognition", Batman "fared better than most and changes were minor". In this serial special utility belts were worn but never used, the villain was not taken from the comics' stories, there was no Batmobile, and Batman was a secret government agent instead of an independent crime-fighting vigilante. This last change was due to the time period's film censors, who would not allow the hero to be seen taking the law into his own hands.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Several continuity errors occur, such as Batman losing his cape in a fight but wearing it again after the film only briefly cuts away. The opening narration in chapter 1 states that Wayne Manor is in the fictional Gotham City, but his mail in chapter 5 is addressed to Los Angeles. In the first chapter, Batman, when hearing the name of Dr. Daka asks "who is that?" Then in the last chapter Batman tells Daka he and other enforcers have been looking for Daka since he killed two agents trying to deport him—an element never mentioned in any earlier chapter. In the transition between chapters 5 and 6, it is unclear how Batman survived the plane crash which killed two villains who were on the plane with him.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Press releases announced "Batman" as a "Super Serial", and it was Columbia's largest-scale serial production to date. The studio gave it a publicity campaign equivalent to a feature film.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Alfred, and Linda Page are the only characters from the comic books to appear in the serial. Alfred may have been created for the film and "previewed" by the comics (see above).


title: Batman (serial)

text: Captain Arnold is essentially the same character as Commissioner Gordon, who was already a fixture in the comics since Batman's debut appearance; the reason for this change is unknown.


title: Batman (serial)

text: "Batman" was first released to theaters one chapter per week, beginning on July 16, 1943. Columbia re-released it to theaters in 1954 and 1962.


title: Batman (serial)

text: In 1964, film buff Hugh Hefner screened all 15 chapters of the serial at the Playboy Mansion. The trendy event received much notice in the press, prompting Columbia to offer the unedited serial to theaters in 1965 as "An Evening with Batman and Robin" in one long, marathon showing. This re-release was successful enough to inspire the development, by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., under the auspices of producers William Dozier and Howie Horwitz), of the 1960s television series "Batman". The series starred Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, and was produced as a lampoon, being villain-driven and heavy on the action-comedy.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The serial was released on VHS in the late '80s by GoodTimes Entertainment, albeit in a heavily modified form which dubbed over most of the original serial's racist dialogue. Dan Scapperotti, a reviewer for the magazine "Cinefantastique", commented: "The revisions aren't surprising when you consider that Columbia is now owned by Japan's Sony Corporation. It appears that some of Daka's operatives escaped Batman's justice and were rewarded with positions at the new George Orwell department at Columbia. No doubt we can expect to see David Lean's "Bridge on the River Kwai" reissued as the story of a joyous Anglo-Japanese cooperative construction job interrupted by imperialistic American terrorists." Alterations made by Sony were limited to that of the soundtrack itself; there were no actual frames or scenes cut. Gary Owens provided a new narration track, while additional offensive lines were replaced by voice actors who sounded nothing like the people they were supposed to be imitating. GoodTimes split the whole serial into two separately available budget-priced tapes, recorded in LP mode. It was the only analog release of this serial. In October 2005, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment unveiled a two-disc DVD of the serial. This release restored the original racist dialogue, but—for reasons unknown—is missing several seconds in Chapter 2. Most notably, the "Next Chapter" sequence at the end is missing. The oddest omission is a shot of Robin angrily shaking his fist at Bruce as he talks to Linda on the phone. Instead, we see a brief snip from a previous scene of villains in a phone booth, somehow managing to still listen in despite it being a different call between two other parties. Ironically enough, the altered GoodTimes VHS release featured the aforementioned missing footage.


title: Batman (serial)

text: The image and sound quality of Sony's two-disc set is varied. The first episode is an upscale of the previous VHS transfer: very grainy, slightly cropped off, and with too high contrast in some scenes, such as the first establishing shot of Batman sitting at a desk amid a bunch of bats in the Bat's Cave. The rest of the episodes were restored as much as possible, with the result being solid pictures and good sound.


title: Batman (serial)

text: Mill Creek Entertainment released on February 4, 2014 "Gotham City Serials", a two-disc DVD set that contains both the 1943 serial and the 1949 "Batman and Robin" serial.


title: Batman (serial)

text: In 1989, the cable network The Comedy Channel aired the "Batman" serial uncut and uncensored. The cable network American Movie Classics did the same in the early '90s on Saturday mornings. Turner Classic Movies began airing the "Batman" serial every Saturday morning beginning in March 2015. Following the conclusion of the last episode, the channel continued the weekly slot with the 1949 "Batman and Robin" follow-up serial which, following an August hiatus, concluded in November 2015. June 2021, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) started airing "Batman" one chapter every Saturday morning at 9:30 am (EST) as part of a line up of serials the channel has been airing at that time slot.