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Kopspijkers

Kopspijkers is a talk show that ran on the Dutch public television from 1995 to 2005 (first named Spijkers). A recipient, in 2003, of the annual Zilveren Nipkow best-show award from Dutch television critics, the programme was produced by the left-of-centre public broadcaster VARA. It was hosted by, hence the title.

Humorous in style, the show was particularly noted for its satirical sketches. Until 2001 it was 'normal' cabaret, but in September 2001 (which happened to be the week of the 9/11 terrorist attacks) the show started with imitations of famous people. These were much like those featured in the British TV programme Spitting Image, but used real actors. Political leaders like Jan Peter Balkenende, Wouter Bos and Gerrit Zalm were frequently impersonated. At first only Dutch people were impersonated, later also foreign celebrities (including Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela, John Kerry and Viktor Yushchenko) were impersonated. In recent episodes even historical characters, like Napoleon Bonaparte, Anne Frank, Plato and Joseph Stalin were imitated. Kopspijkers was amongst the most viewed programmes in the Netherlands. At the start of the Iraq War one of their sketches "BZN in Baghdad", went viral on the internet in the English-speaking world, and included BZN impersonators chroma-keyed into newsreel footage of combat and the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue

On several occasions, the imitations have caused controversies. The first imitation episode showed sensationalist TV presenter Willibrord Frequin chasing Osama bin Laden asking "why he had been so cowardly" and "why he sent thousands of people into death". Pim Fortuyn was often imitated, which led to accusations against Kopspijkers after he was assassinated. In November 2003 Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Minister Piet Hein Donner complained about the 'tasteless' imitations of members of the royal family. Queen Beatrix later said she had no problems with being imitated. In 2005, Jack Spijkerman decided to cancel his contract with VARA and sign with the newly formed channel Talpa. Though Spijkerman intended to finish the running season, VARA cut it short and cancelled the 4 remaining shows. Spijkerman made a similar (but commonly deemed of less quality) show on Talpa, called but after bankruptcy of the channel it disappeared of the Dutch TV.

In 2004 similar shows were broadcast in Germany and Belgium, but they weren't very popular.

title: Kopspijkers


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Ƒ

The letter F with hook (uppercase Ƒ, lowercase: ƒ) is a letter of the Latin script, based on the italic form of f; or on its regular form with a descender hook added. A very similar-looking letter, ⟨ʄ⟩ (a dotless j with a hook and a horizontal stroke), is used in the IPA for a voiced palatal implosive.

Regular
Ƒ is used in writing the Ewe language in a straight form to represent the sound, as distinct from the letter F, which represents an. It is also used in the Avatime, Lelemi, Nyangbo-Tafi, and Waci languages.

Italic
The minuscule italic ƒ, also called the florin sign, is used as a symbol for several currencies, including the former Dutch guilder, the Aruban florin, and the Netherlands Antillean guilder. It can be found as italic in non-italic fonts.

The italic ƒ has been used to denote mathematical functions, or to indicate aperture in photography (e.g. ƒ/2.8) in place of the more common italic f (in serif fonts) or oblique f (in sans-serif fonts). It can be represented with.

Appearance in computer fonts
Older fonts and character encodings included only the minuscule form for its use as an abbreviation. Unicode includes both the majuscule and the minuscule. Because of its origin, the italic ƒ (f with a hook) looks exactly like the italic f (f) in some typefaces. Ƒ and ƒ occupy code points and  in Unicode respectively, and may be entered by appropriate input methods.

On a computer running Microsoft Windows and using the Windows-1252 character encoding, the minuscule can be input using alt59 or 131.

The character has been used on the Macintosh to mean folder, in particular as part of a folder name. For example, the game Bugdom, when included on some Mac OS 9 installations, was contained in a folder called "Bugdom ƒ". This usage has died out with the advent of Mac OS X. The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop also used the character to indicate software dependencies, from which the folder usage derived (the folder contained the files required to run the program). The character is created on the Macintosh by pressing opt.

The character frequently appears in Japanese mojibake. The lead byte 0x83 appears before a Katakana character in Shift JIS, but if interpreted as Windows-1252 encoding, it becomes the ƒ character.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ƒ


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User:Robert McGuigan

I am a retired mathematics professor (50 year teaching career). My Erdos number is at most six. I am an avid amateur classical musician, a go player, and a philologist. I have published many translations from Japanese into English. I live in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I am fortunate to own two instruments made by Douglas Cox, viola opus #154 and violin opus #557.

title: User:Robert McGuigan


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Per mille

The phrase per mille indicates parts per thousand. The associated symbol is ‰, similar to a per cent sign % but with an extra zero in the divisor.

Major dictionaries do not agree on the spelling,  giving other options of per mil, per mill, permil,  permill, permille.

The word promille is the cognate in Dutch, German, Finnish and Swedish, and is sometimes seen as a loanword in English with the same meaning as per mille.

Computer systems
The code point for the glyph is included in the General Punctuation block of Unicode characters:. It may be typed using, , , or  according to operating system.

Blood alcohol concentration
Promille and permille are likely best known as shorthand terms for Blood Alcohol Concentration, where 1 promille corresponds to 1 gram of alcohol per liter of blood. Promille is used in the legal limits of blood-alcohol content for driving a road vehicle in some countries: for example: 0.5‰ or 0.8‰.

Sales and marketing
Cost per mille (CPM), the price of 1000 units, may be used for views of banner and display advertising, and for emails delivered by email service providers.

Insurance
In UK insurance usage, the cost per mille is the rate per £1000 of insured value. In India, the premium per mille is the rate expressed as thousandths of the sum assured.

Gradients

Gradients (in some countries in Europe) may be expressed as mm/m or m/km, and written with the per mille symbol.

Isotope ratios
Per mille may be used to express stable-isotope ratios—for example: "δ13C was measured at −3.5‰"

Charity fraction
In Italy, it is possible to nominate a charity or charities to receive "five per mille" (5‰) of personal taxation payments.

Property tax
Property taxation rates may be expressed as the millage rate (U.S.) or mill rate (Canada), from mill (currency), one thousandth of a dollar.

Quantile
Permille may also be used to express a 1000-quantile ("999th permille"), but this usage is rare and largely obsolete. Modern publications instead use fractional percentiles ("99.9th percentile").

Salinity
Seawater salinity is often expressed per mille. Average marine salinity is about 35 parts per thousand or 35‰ (3.5%).

Related units

 * Percentage point difference of 1 part in 100
 * Percentage (%) 1 part in 100
 * Basis point (bp) difference of 1 part in 10,000
 * Permyriad (‱) 1 part in 10,000
 * Per cent mille (pcm) 1 part in 100,000

title: Per mille


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Š

The grapheme Š, š (S with caron) is used in various contexts representing the sh sound like in the word show, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ or similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with ʃ or ʂ, but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. It represents the same sound as the Turkic letter Ş and the Romanian letter Ș (S-comma), the Hebrew and Yiddish letter ש, the Ge'ez (Ethiopic) letter ሠ, the Arabic letter ش, and the Armenian letter Շ(շ).

For use in computer systems, Š and š are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161 (Alt 0138 and Alt 0154 for input), respectively. In HTML code, the entities  and   can also be used to represent the characters.

Primary usage
The symbol originates with the 15th-century Czech alphabet that was introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus. From there, it was first adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830 to represent the same sound, and from there on into other orthographies, such as Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Slovene, Karelian, Sami, Veps and Sorbian.

Some orthographies such as Bulgarian Cyrillic, Macedonian Cyrillic, and Serbian Cyrillic use the "ш" letter, which represents the sound that "š" would represent in Latin alphabets. Moreover, Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin standard languages adopted Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š", while the same alphabet is used for Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter.

In Finnish and Estonian, š occurs only in loanwords.

Polish and Hungarian do not use š. Polish uses the digraph sz. Hungarian uses the basic Latin letter s and uses the digraph sz as equivalent to most other languages that use s.

Outside Europe, Syriac Latin adopted the letter but it, alongside other letters with diacritics, is rarely used. The alphabet is not used natively to write the language for which the Syriac alphabet is used instead.

The letter is also used in Lakota, Cheyenne, Myaamia and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree), Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay. It is used in the Persian Latin (Rumi) alphabet, equivalent to ش.

Transliteration
The symbol is also used as the romanization of Cyrillic ш in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration and deployed in the Latinic writing systems of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bashkir. It is also used in some systems of transliterating Georgian to represent.

In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian or, and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite  phoneme, as well as the  phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician  and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш.

title: Š


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Duane Chapman

Duane Chapman (born February 2, 1953), also known as Dog the Bounty Hunter, is an American television personality, bounty hunter, and former bail bondsman.

In 1976, Chapman was convicted of third degree murder, and sentenced to five years in a Texas prison. He had been waiting in a car while a friend went into a house to buy marijuana; the friend shot and killed Jerry Oliver, 69, in a struggle. Chapman served 18 months at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.

Chapman came to international notice as a bounty hunter for his successful capture of Max Factor heir Andrew Luster in Mexico in 2003 and, the following year, was given his own series, Dog the Bounty Hunter (2004–2012), on A&E. After Dog the Bounty Hunter ended, Chapman appeared in Dog and Beth: On the Hunt (2013–2015), a similarly formatted TV show, alongside his wife and business partner, the late Beth Chapman, on CMT. His latest series, Dog's Most Wanted, aired on WGN America in late 2019.

Childhood
Chapman was born May 2, 1953, in Denver, Colorado to Wesley Duane Chapman (1930 – 2000), a Korean War veteran, and Barbara Darlene Chapman (nee Cowell; 1934 – 1994), a Sunday school teacher associated with the Assemblies of God USA. His father was a welder but changed careers later in life, becoming a bail bondsman after Chapman became one. Chapman has three siblings: Jolene, Michael, and Paula. Though Chapman has claimed to have Native American heritage, records only support that he is of European heritage. He said while growing up, his father beat him.

At the age of 15, Chapman joined the Devils Diciples, an outlaw motorcycle club, and ran away from home.

Murder of Jerry Bowers
In the late hours of September 15, 1976, 23-year-old Chapman, 22-year-old Donald Kuykendall, 17-year-old Cheryl Fisher, and 19-year-old Ruben Garza armed themselves and drove to 1072 South Prairie Drive, the home of Jerry Bowers Oliver, a 34-year-old resident of Pampa, Texas. Oliver was known to sell marijuana and the group planned to rob him. Kuykendall entered Oliver's home while Chapman, Fisher, and Garza waited outside by their vehicle. Around 11:40 p.m., Kuykendall shot Oliver in the armpit at close range with a sawed-off shotgun and the group fled the scene. Police were called to Prairie Drive and Oliver, still conscious, gave officers Kuykendall and Chapman's names. Oliver died on September 16, 1976, while undergoing emergency surgery at Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo, Texas, around 3:30 a.m.

Police arrived at Chapman's residence at 501 Roberta Street on September 16, 1976 to arrest him. Chapman attempted to evade officers by leaving through the back door of his home but was caught and taken to the jail in Gray County. His bond was set at $10,000 (the equivalent of a $56,000 bond in 2024). Kuykendall, Fisher, and Garza were also arrested. Donnie Barton, who'd been with the group earlier that evening but did not go with them to Prairie Drive, told police the group had discussed their plan to steal marijuana from Oliver's home in front of him and that they referred to Oliver, an African American, by the N word.

On July 22, 1977, a grand jury of seven men and five women found Chapman, Kuykendall, and Garza guilty of murder. Though Chapman was outside when Kuykendall shot Oliver, he had brought his own weapon and supplied Kuykendall with shotgun cartridges and for that, the jury found him culpable. Fisher avoided going to trial by pleading guilty the week prior. Chapman was given a five-year prison sentence. He served 18 months at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas before being paroled.

In a 2007 interview with Fox News, Chapman said that while serving his sentence, he tackled an inmate about to be shot for attempting to escape, and a congratulatory remark by a corrections officer inspired him to become a bounty hunter later. As a result of his felony conviction, Chapman is prohibited from owning firearms and has been refused entry to the United Kingdom.

Capture of Andrew Luster
On June 18, 2003, Chapman made international news by capturing Max Factor cosmetics heir, Andrew Luster, who had fled the United States in the middle of his trial on charges of drugging and raping a number of women. Luster had been convicted in absentia on 86 counts, including multiple rape charges connected to assaults in 1996, 1997, and 2000. Chapman was assisted by his hunt team, which consisted of his son, Leland, and an associate, Tim Chapman (no relation). The three bounty hunters captured Luster in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where they had been living under assumed names. On their way to bring Luster to the San Diego jail, they were pulled over by Mexican police, and all four of them were jailed. Dog and Leland were arrested under suspicion of drug use. Once the authorities confirmed Luster's identity, he was sent to California to face his 125-year sentence.

Chapman and his team, still in the Mexican jail, were initially denied bail, but after his wife Beth alerted the media and aroused public opinion in the United States, they were granted bail. Once out of jail on bail, they followed their attorney's advice and fled the jurisdiction, thereby becoming international bail-jumpers. On September 14, 2006, days before the expiration of the statute of limitations, Chapman, along with his son Leland Chapman and associate Tim Chapman, were arrested by United States Marshals, and jailed in Honolulu on behalf of the Mexican government. Mexican authorities had charged all three with "deprivation of liberty," involving the 2003 arrest of Andrew Luster, because bounty hunting is illegal in Mexico. Since they did not obtain permission to leave the country while out on bail in 2003, the Mexican Government declared the three Chapmans fugitives from justice and tried to get them extradited to Mexico for sentencing. After spending one night in the federal detention center in Honolulu, Chapman told reporters "The federal marshals treated us with great respect. But let me tell you, you never want to go to a federal prison, because it's terrible."

The next day, September 15, 2006, Chapman appeared in a packed Honolulu courtroom with his ankles shackled. Although the judge agreed that the men were not a significant flight risk, he ordered that each wear an electronic monitoring device around the ankle. The three men were released on bail ($300,000 for Duane Chapman, $100,000 each for Leland Chapman and Tim Chapman). Chapman's lead attorney, Brook Hart, reportedly planned to argue that although the charge Chapman faced is a misdemeanor in Mexico, when translated into English, the charge of kidnapping became a felony under American law. Mexican authorities dismissed Hart's claim and insisted that Chapman had, in fact, been charged with a felony. An extradition hearing was set for November 16, 2006.

Chapman has speculated that his arrest was due in part to a possible prisoner exchange agreement between the Mexican and American authorities. According to Chapman, the federal agents "sold him out", by trading him in for a convicted Mexican drug lord. Duane, Leland, and Tim had their ankle bracelets removed so they could work. On October 11, 2006, reports surfaced of an open letter dated September 26, 2006, sent on Chapman's behalf by 29 Republican Congressmen to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The letter stated the authors' opposition to Chapman's extradition and requested that Rice deny Mexico's request for same. Subsequently, on October 20, 2006, lawyers for Chapman stated the Mexican federal court had granted them an order halting the criminal case against the bounty hunter until further evidence and witness testimony was gathered. A court hearing was held on December 23, 2006. The original hearing was postponed due to a report from a lower court having not yet been received. The court heard both sides of the story then decided to recess. Court proceedings then started on January 16, 2007, and the court had until Tuesday, February 6, 2007, but the deadline was extended.

On February 16, 2007, a Mexican federal court ruled there was no reason not to try Chapman on the charge of deprivation of liberty in Mexico. In response, on February 23, Hawaii State Representatives Gene Ward, Karen Awana, Rida Cabanilla, Lynn Finnegan, Barbara Marumoto, Colleen Meyer, Kymberly Pine, Joe Bertram, Ken Ito, Marylin Lee, and John Mizuno introduced House Concurrent Resolution 50, "Requesting the President of Mexico and the Second District Court of Guadalajara to drop extradition charges against TV Bounty Hunter, Duane 'Dog' Chapman". The resolution was passed by the International Affairs committee on March 7.

During this time, Chapman, along with his new attorney, William C. Bollard, appeared on numerous media shows. Some of these include: Larry King Live, Greta Van Susteren, Mark and Mercedez Morning Show on Mix 94.1 KMXB in Las Vegas, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet on WFLD, Fox 6 News San Diego, The Glenn Beck Program, and THE 9 on Yahoo!. Honolulu news outlet KHNL reported on August 1, 2007, the arrest warrant issued for Chapman and his associates might be invalidated, as a Mexican court had found the statute of limitations regarding the arrest had expired. The 15-page legal order was released in Spanish, and was translated and verified for legal accuracy. On September 29, 2006, Chapman received permission to have the electronic monitoring device removed temporarily so that he could travel to the East Coast for previously planned appearances. On August 2, 2007, the First Criminal Court in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, dismissed all criminal charges pending against Duane, Leland, and Tim Chapman, on the grounds the statute of limitations had expired. The order effectively canceled all pending charges. The prosecution appealed the ruling; this is standard practice in Mexico, according to A&E. On November 5, 2007, U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Kurren dismissed the extradition attempt, saying that even though the cases were appealed, the trio are no longer charged with any crimes.

Dog the Bounty Hunter
Chapman, after decades of bounty hunting, was featured on Take This Job, a program about people with unusual occupations. This led him and the show's production company to do a spin-off about his work in capturing bail fugitives, in particular Chapman's efforts in hunting down Andrew Luster in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. After Luster's jailing, Chapman was interviewed for the August 28, 2003, episode of the truTV television series Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice. By now Chapman's profile had come to the attention of the American public. It was during this time A&E decided to create an ongoing reality series around his bounty hunting job. On August 30, 2004, the first series of Dog the Bounty Hunter made its television debut, running for eight seasons before being canceled in 2012. The theme song was performed by Ozzy Osbourne.

In early October 2007, Chapman gained negative public attention after a private phone conversation between him and his son, Tucker, was sold to the National Enquirer. The conversation was about the relationship his son was having with a black woman. During the recording, Chapman can be heard referring to his son's girlfriend as a "nigger", discussing the word use in his household, and expressing his disdain for interracial relationships. Once the tape was made public, A&E announced it was suspending production of Chapman's TV series pending an investigation. On October 31, 2007, Chapman issued a public apology, but on November 2, 2007, A&E announced it was nonetheless removing the show from their schedule "for the foreseeable future." On February 19, 2008, A&E released a statement that said Chapman had "taken and continues to take the appropriate steps in reaching out to several African American organizations in an effort to make amends for his private comments," and announced that Chapman's TV show would return to production.

Dog and Beth: On the Hunt
On September 25, 2012, CMT announced it had ordered a new reality series which would begin airing in April 2013. The new series, titled Dog and Beth: On the Hunt, featured Chapman, his wife Beth, and Chapman's son Leland visiting failing bail bond agencies across the country, giving them advice on how to turn their businesses around, and assisting in the capture of their most wanted fugitives.

The show's pilot episode featured Chapman and his son Leland working together for the first time since Leland left the previous show in 2012. The show ran for three seasons, airing until its cancellation in 2016.

Dog's Most Wanted
In 2019, an additional spin-off featuring Dog and Beth called Dog's Most Wanted, airing for a single season.

Dog Unleashed
His new series, Dog Unleashed, was canceled in 2021, before it aired on the streaming service Unleashed. In October 2021 the production company sued Chapman for breach of contract saying that the show canceled after Chapman allegedly made racist and homophobic outbursts and also illegally used a taser during a shoot for a show in Virginia. Chapman has denied the accusations made in the suit.

Later work
In September 2021, Chapman became involved in the manhunt for Brian Laundrie following the killing of Gabby Petito.

Author
In 2007, Chapman released his autobiography, You Can Run But You Can't Hide (co-written with Laura Morton). The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

His second book, Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given was published in 2010, also co-authored with Morton.

In 2024, Chapman released Nine Lives and Counting: A Bounty Hunter’s Journey to Faith, Hope, and Redemption.

Other appearances

 * Chapman and Beth made appearances as themselves on the Canadian television series Corner Gas in 2008.

Personal life
Chapman's first marriage was to LaFonda Sue Honeycutt by whom he has two children, Duane Lee Chapman II and Leland Blane Chapman. Both sons would go on to work with Chapman at Da'Kine Bail Bonds in Honolulu, Hawaii, and appear on TV alongside their father. LaFonda filed for divorce from Chapman in 1977, after he was charged with homicide. She remarried Jim Darnell and had two daughters, Hannah and Britney, with him. His second marriage was to Ann Tegnell, with whom he has three children, Zebadiah Chapman, Wesley Chapman (born 1980), and James Robert "J. R." Chapman (born 1982). They met in 1979, shortly after Chapman was released from prison. Tegnell was 17 years old when she fell pregnant with Zebadiah and he feared that by having been intimate with a minor, he would be made to return to prison for violating his parole. To avoid potential legal ramifications, Chapman decided to propose to Tegnell, even though he did not love her. The two wed on August 22, 1979, in Colorado. Zebadiah was born prematurely on January 1, 1980 and died less than a month later. They divorced sometime after the birth of Wesley but later reconciled, resulting in her becoming pregnant with James. After they separated permanently, Ann was granted custody of Wesley and James and moved to Utah. Wesley was ultimately raised by his maternal grandmother, and both sons were kept from being able to communicate with Chapman. Wesley and James reunited with Chapman as adults.

His third marriage was to Lyssa Rae "Big Lyssa" Brittain (née Greene). The marriage was reportedly performed by a Native American chief in the Colorado mountains in 1982, and ended on November 20, 1991. The two had met just days prior in a bar, while Lyssa was still married to her husband, an Assemblies of God minister, though the two had since separated due to his infidelity. According to Chapman, he offered Lyssa $1,000 to have his child, to which she agreed. They had three children together, Barbara Katie Chapman (June 8, 1982 – May 19, 2006), Tucker Dee Chapman (September 8, 1983), and Lyssa Rae Chapman (June 10, 1987). The family lived in Denver, Colorado, in a home left to Chapman by his grandfather Mike, along with Duane Lee and Leland. According to Chapman's daughter Lyssa, she and her siblings reportedly endured a hard childhood, with incidents of sexual abuse and substance abuse plaguing the family.

His fourth marriage was to Tawny Marie Chapman. The two met in 1988, after Chapman arrested her on a drug possession charge, and she subsequently became his secretary. The two married in 1992, separated in 1994, and officially divorced in 2002. The two had no children together, though Chapman's children did refer to her as their mother during the couple’s relationship. In his autobiography, You Can Run But You Can't Hide, Chapman referred to the marriage as "a disaster from the start," alleging she was addicted to amphetamines.

His fifth marriage was to Alice Elizabeth "Beth" Barmore (née Smith; October 29, 1967 - June 26, 2019), with whom he had an on-again-off-again relationship, until the two married on May 20, 2006, at a Hilton hotel in Waikoloa Village, Hawaii. They had two children together, Bonnie Joanne Chapman (born December 16, 1998) and Garry Chapman (February 7, 2001), and Chapman adopted Beth's daughter from her previous marriage, Cecily Barmore-Chapman (née Barmore; born June 19, 1993). Chapman was also able to help Beth locate and reconcile with her son, Dominic Davis (born 1985), who was born to her when she was a teenager and subsequently placed for adoption. Dog and Beth operated Da'Kine Bail Bonds together. Beth died on June 26, 2019, at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, as a result of throat cancer. She had been diagnosed with the disease in 2017. In 2021, their daughter Bonnie accused Chapman of having been unfaithful to Beth throughout their marriage.

On August 23, 2021, TMZ reported that Chapman was engaged to Francie Frane. The two reportedly met six months after Beth's passing, and like Chapman, Frane had been recently widowed, having lost her husband, Robert "Bob" Frane in December 2018. They announced their engagement in May 2020 and married in Colorado on September 2, 2021.

Chapman has one child out of wedlock, his eldest child Christopher Michael Hecht (born 1972), who was born to his ex-girlfriend, Debbie White, while he was serving an 18-month prison sentence. Debbie kept her pregnancy from Chapman and died of suicide in 1978, leading the boy to be adopted by Keith and Gloria Hecht. Hecht has reportedly struggled with drug and alcohol addiction since at least 1991, and has a lengthy criminal history, including a history of hate crimes.

Political views
Chapman opposes bail reform and has joined movements in California, Vermont, New Jersey, and Colorado that seek to oppose or overturn bail reform laws. In 2021, Chapman opposed Senate Bill 62 (SB21-062), introduced in the Colorado General Assembly. The bill sought to restrict bail bondsmen in the state from issuing surety bonds for individuals arrested for misdemeanors, low-level felonies, and certain drug offenses, instead allowing the accused to arrange for their own release through personal recognizance, the goal being to lower the number of inmates in Colorado prisons. The bill did not pass.

In September 2022, at the Christian evangelical “Opening the Heavens” conference, Chapman called President Biden "little Hitler" and "that freak" who "stoled" [sic] the 2020 election. He predicted that Republicans would sweep the 2022 midterms and that "little Hitler" President Biden might commit suicide just like Hitler did after being "caught."

In April 2024, in a Fox News interview with Jesse Watters, Watters asked Chapman that if Donald Trump were re-elected as president of the United States, would Chapman like to be a "deportation czar," referring to the large population of illegal immigrants residing in the United States. Chapman said he "would like a job like that."

Controversies
On November 2, 2007, Reuters reported that A&E had made the decision to suspend production of the fifth season of Dog the Bounty Hunter after his son Tucker sold a recording of a private phone conversation in which Chapman referred to Tucker's girlfriend, an African American, as the n word to the National Enquirer. Chapman addressed the controversy in 2007, saying that while he knew he should not have used a racial slur, that no black person had ever told him they were offended by his use of the word. He addressed it again in 2021, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight host Kevin Frazier, denying that he was racist and saying he "had more black friends than Eminem."

On October 8, 2021, The New York Times reported that Chapman was being sued for US$1.3 million for breach of contract regarding his conduct while filming a television series that would've been titled Dog Unleashed. While searching for Brian Laundrie, Chapman reportedly in illegal possession of a taser and made homophobic and racist comments, resulting in the show's cancellation. While Chapman denied the claims against him, his daughter Bonnie said the allegations of homophobia and racism against him were true and his daughter Cecily called her father's search for Laundrie a "publicity stunt." Chapman then went onto say that Bonnie and Cecily were working for people who were seeking to get revenge by tarnishing his reputation.

In September 2022, at an Evangelical Christian conference in Council Bluffs, Iowa called "Opening the Heavens," Chapman gave a speech on stage in which he referred to U.S President Joe Biden as "little Hitler" and alleged that voter fraud was responsible for Donald Trump failing to win his re-election campaign.

Archived

 * A&E's "Dog the Bounty Hunter"
 * "Best In Show" - Hawaii Business Magazine
 * "Dog Inc." - Hawaii Business Magazine

title: Duane Chapman


text:
Right single quotation mark

The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 ) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark. This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing. There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.

The straight apostrophe ' (the "ASCII apostrophe", ) is even more ambiguous, as it could also be intended as a left or right quotation mark, or a prime symbol.

title: Right single quotation mark


text:
User:Richcasto

A random user. What? I'm not random; I'm predestined!

title: User:Richcasto


text:
8-Bit Theater

8-Bit Theater is a sprite comic, meaning the art is mainly taken from pre-existing video game assets, created by Brian Clevinger that ran from 2001 to 2010 and consisting of 1,225 pages. The webcomic was, at times, one of the most popular webcomics, and the most popular sprite comic.

The comic initially follows and parodies the plot of the first Final Fantasy game, following the "Warriors of Light" who are supposedly on a quest to find four elemental orbs to help them defeat Chaos. Instead, the characters mainly serve their own selfish interests, causing destruction in their wake.

The success of 8-Bit Theater contributed to the popularity in creating sprite comics, with one list recording over 1,200 sprite comics as of 2004. 8-Bit Theater allowed Clevinger to earn an income, and gain experience and exposure, which led to future works, such as Atomic Robo.

Creation
8-Bit Theater began in March 2001. It was one of the first sprite comics, a comic made by using pre-existing video game graphics. In one interview, Brian Clevinger said that he had had the idea of doing a sprite comic but had not acted on it until someone sent him a link to the sprite comic Bob and George which inspired him to try it himself. Clevinger also said that he lacked drawing skills, which made a sprite comic attractive. Clevinger used the comics as part of a college assignment, saying that "8-Bit Theater began as an excuse to essentially do nothing and get college credit for it". Clevinger originally intended to use 8-Bit Theater to adapt multiple NES games, such as Metroid and River City Ransom, but ultimately stuck with Final Fantasy because of the popularity of the manga based on the game.

8-Bit Theater uses sprites from the first Final Fantasy game for the NES, as well as other games, though Clevinger often altered the sprites, added effects, and created original backgrounds, as well as using other pre-existing images from the internet. The comic sometimes used 16-bit or 32-bit sprites to depict more powerful creatures. While most speech bubbles are white with black text, colored bubbles or text are sometimes used to give an impression of the voice. The use of video game assets was unauthorized use of copyrighted material, but as of 2004 Clevinger had not heard directly from the copyright owners of the images. In 2004, Clevinger said that if he was to do it over again, he would not have done a sprite comic because of the limitations of pre-existing art and the copyright issues, but continued to produce 8-Bit Theater because "it's paying the bills... And also, as much as I complain about the limiting factors, it's a lot of fun and I enjoy finding new ways to approach the material".

The comic also included original artwork created by Lydia Tyree and Kevin Sigmund, who contributed hand drawn art and custom sprites respectively. The final page of the comic, an epilogue, was drawn by Matt Speroni.

In a 2009 interview, Clevinger said that he typically spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings writing the comic, then spent the afternoons and evening putting the comic together. He used Adobe Photoshop to create the comic.

8-Bit Theater ended in 2010. Once completed, the comic had 1,225 pages.

Premise
8-Bit Theater started out as a loose retelling and parody of the plot of the first Final Fantasy game, and features exaggerated portrayals of characters from that game, including the main characters Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage. The group are ostensibly on a quest to find four elemental orbs to help them defeat Chaos, but the characters have no interest in the quest and mostly focus on furthering their own selfish goals. According to one reviewer: "The first change it makes to the plot of Final Fantasy is to turn the original protagonists into the three worst people in the world, plus Fighter. They lie, steal, and murder their way through the story, claiming to be heroes in the same way spam claims to be food. In their (very limited) defense, sometimes they just hurt people on accident... [the group goes] on a nine-year-tour of their world, marking their progress with new enemies, confused onlookers, and a whole lot of corpses". Clevinger described 8-Bit Theater in an interview as "a comic about the four people most ill-equipped to save the world who, through chicanery and brute ignorance, are the very people tasked with doing so. It's mostly a parody of fantasy and video game tropes, but a wide range of subjects are touched upon".

The comic points out and dissects many of the tropes used in role-playing video games, especially those from Japan. A significant portion of the humor results from creating reader anticipation for dramatic moments which fail to come; Clevinger said that "[his] favorite comics are the ones where the joke is on the reader". According to a reviewer, 8-Bit Theater "developed one of the most meta-textual, self-referential, self-deprecating encyclopedia of esoteric in-jokes".

Light Warriors
The four main characters are collectively known as the "Warriors of Light" or the "Light Warriors":

 * Black Mage (full name Black Mage Evilwizardington ): an ultra-violent, sadistic character who usually uses giant fireballs to respond to any situation. He attracts bad luck which causes innocent bystanders to be harmed. He often makes pathetic advances towards White Mage.
 * Fighter (full name Fighter McWarrior): a constantly stupid character. He has a childlike innocence that "somehow doesn't keep him from being the group's personal weapon of mass destruction".
 * Thief (also known as the Prince of Elfland): the most competent of the group. He is driven by greed and self-interest.
 * Red Mage (full name Red Mage Statscowski ): a min-maxer driven to gain the best stats possible.  A reviewer described him as having "a love-hate relationship with physics and logic, in that both hate him because he loves to snap natural laws like chicken bones in the grip of his truly impressive stupid ideas". He believes the world is a tabletop role-playing game.

Other notable characters

 * White Mage — a priestess specializing in white (healing) magic. White Mage was assigned by her order to protect fate and to help the Light Warriors save the world. She discreetly follows the Light Warriors around the world for a lengthy portion of the comic to achieve this goal.
 * Black Belt — a talented martial artist and travelling companion of White Mage. Black Belt had an extremely poor sense of direction, to the effect that the laws of physics and spacetime tended to rearrange themselves around him. He was killed by the Fiend Kary in the course of the series.
 * Sarda the Sage — an omnipotent wizard who forces the Light Warriors to retrieve the four elemental orbs. He claims to be "The Wizard Who Did It" and uses his powers in an immensely irresponsible and careless manner.
 * The Dark Warriors — the evil counterparts to the Light Warriors. A group of villains based on minor enemies from the game. They consist of Garland, Bikke the Pirate, Drizz'l the Dark Elf Prince, and Vilbert Von Vampire. They plot the downfall of the Light Warriors, but are depicted as even more inept than the Light Warriors themselves.
 * The Four Fiends — powerful elemental beings that guard their respective elemental orbs. They are Lich, Kary, Ur, and Muffin. They were individually killed by the Light Warriors, and then, following their resurrection as a group, killed by Black Mage.

Plot
8-Bit Theater opens with an introductory sequence that explains how the Light Warriors initially meet and decide to form an adventuring party in the kingdom of Corneria, where King Steve's daughter, Princess Sara, is being held captive by the knight Garland in the nearby Temple of Fiends. After her rescue, during which both the Light Warriors and Garland himself are shown as so incompetent that Sara has to orchestrate her kidnapping and rescue herself, the king has a bridge built that connects Corneria to the main continent.

Here the Light Warriors meet the witch Matoya, who blackmails them into recovering her stolen crystal. In the port town of Pravoka the party defeats the pirate Bikke (accompanied by Garland) and uses his ship to travel on to Elfland. There, they discover the King has been poisoned, apparently by the same person who stole Matoya's crystal, and Thief is the prince of Elfland. The Light Warriors retrieve the antidote and Matoya's crystal from the dark elf Drizz'l, who is shortly thereafter recruited by Garland and Bikke. Upon his recovery, the Elf King sends the Light Warriors to save Elfland by retrieving the Earth Orb from two undead beings, Vilbert von Vampire and his father Lich, the Fiend of Earth. Vilbert survives the battle and is later recruited into Garland's Dark Warriors, while Lich goes to hell. White Mage then sends the Light Warriors to meet Sarda the Sage, an omnipotent wizard who takes the Earth orb and proceeds to draft the group into quests for the other three elemental orbs.

The Fire Orb is held by Kary, the Fiend of Fire in Gurgu Volcano, who kills Black Belt before the group can defeat her and retrieve the orb. A subsequent side quest to the Ice Cave on Sarda's behalf, during which the Light Warriors encounter squid-like Doom Cultists, is ultimately fruitless. A second side quest, however, involves the Light Warriors meeting the dragon god-king Bahamut, who sends them to the Castle of Ordeals to obtain a rat tail. There, the Light Warriors each face their own internal demons: Sloth (Fighter), Pride (Red Mage), Greed (Thief) and a doppelgänger of Black Mage, who is the only thing that can represent his evil. The Light Warriors present the rat tail to Bahamut, only to find that it is an ingredient in a virility soup his girlfriend Matoya makes for him. The party is rewarded with class upgrades: Red Mage becomes a Mime, Fighter becomes a Knight, Thief becomes a Ninja, and Black Mage becomes a Blue Mage with some help from a Dark God.

Returning to the task of retrieving the elemental orbs, the Light Warriors travel to the cities of Gaia and Onrac and use a submarine provided by Sarda to reach the Sea Shrine, where they meet the Doom Cultists a second time. After defeating them, they accidentally summon the third Fiend, Ur (known in the game as Kraken). The Light Warriors kill Ur, retrieve the Water Orb and travel on to Lefein in search of the Air Orb, where they meet Dragoon, the last Dragon Knight, and the evil dragon Muffin, the fourth Fiend, who guards the Orb of Air. During a battle in Muffin's Sky Castle she is killed by Dragoon. The Sky Castle itself explodes after Fighter and Black Mage take the Air Orb.

Upon presenting the final orb to Sarda, he dismissively orders the Light Warriors to return to the Temple of Fiends, where they find that the Dark Warriors have made the temple their base of operations. During the night, Drizz'l summons the Four Fiends from Hell and has them confront the Light Warriors. Black Mage, using evil energy he absorbed from his doppelgänger, kills the fiends, absorbs their evil energies as well and turns on the other Light Warriors. Sarda interrupts the fight and reveals his intent to destroy the Light Warriors himself.

Sarda explains himself to be the grown-up version of a child that suffered great harm as a result of the Light Warrior's actions around the world. Young Sarda became so focused on revenge that he studied to be a great wizard and travelled back in time to the beginning of the universe to remake it without the Light Warriors; after discovering that changing the past was impossible even for him, he decides to settle for making the Light Warriors into the warriors of legend, for no other reason than to further humiliate them in defeat. Sarda absorbs the orbs' magic energy as well as Black Mage's evil energy and easily unmakes not only the Light Warriors' class changes, but also removes their original abilities. Sarda's power quickly becomes erratic and unstable, and Chaos, the King of Demons, takes the opportunity to possess Sarda's body and announce his plans to annihilate the universe.

However, before a final battle between the Light Warriors and Chaos can begin, he is destroyed off-panel by a group of four White Mages, a party combination that was dismissed in one of the earliest episodes as ineffectual for the game, and all credit for saving the world goes to a group of bystanders, the Dark Warriors. The Epilogue picks up three years later. White Mage visits Red Mage and Dragoon at a restaurant, where they have started up an extremely unsuccessful support group for sole survivors of ancient sects. Afterward, White Mage visits King Thief in Elfland, who has been trying to locate Black Mage and Fighter, in an effort to obtain more riches from their adventure. Black Mage and Fighter find themselves poor and out of work in a remote town, trying to make money by taking job postings in the town square. The epilogue ends with Fighter suggesting that they resume their search for the "Armor of Invincibility" that Fighter has been searching for since the beginning of the comic.

Readership figures
Around 2003/04, 8-Bit Theater was the most popular sprite comic on the web and was one of the most popular and successful webcomics of all. In 2009, Multiverse Comics described it as "massively successful" and "one of the bigger smash hits of the web-comic world".

Clevinger said in 2003 that standing out among webcomics was a big issue to success at that time, noting that he pulled in a lot of readers by being one of the first sprite comics, but said "a gimmick like that can only take you so far. And usually it takes you to a lot of first time visitors with no repeat traffic".

Reviews during its run
Writing for 1Up.com in 2005, Nich Maragos said that "it was unquestionably Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater that took [sprite comics] to its fullest expression and greatest popularity". Maragos said that "unlike a lot of the lesser sprite comic creators, Clevinger spices up what could very quickly become a repetitive gimmick with lots of effects, original backgrounds, and uniquely altered sprites to make sure the series never gets visually stale. In addition to keeping the look of the strip fresh, the effort put into the layouts and effects also helps the artist fend off accusations that he's merely ripping off existing work and passing it off as his own". Maragos did say that "the humor is often far more repetitive than the art. To compensate for this, Clevinger begun focusing more on story than jokes some time ago, but as a rule the quality of the writing hasn't become any sharper. A large component of the strip's popularity is love for the characters Clevinger uses".

Reviewers writing for Sequential Tart recommended 8-Bit Theater on multiple occasions. Donielle Ficca wrote in 2007 that "when I was introduced to 8-Bit Theater, I was transported back to my mom's basement playing role-play video games for hours at a time... Nearly every geek I know who loves older games absolutely loves 8-Bit Theater. It has grown and welcomed into its fold newer people that simply have a particular sense of humor. If you are at all interested in parody or video games this is one comic you should definitely check out".

Reviews of the completed comic
Writing for Comic Book Resources, Larry Cruz said, "[in sprite comics] every character is generally rendered in the same scale and the same sideways or three-quarters position from panel to panel, [so] sprite comics became the favorite style for the laziest webcomic creators. Clevinger could get away with it because he has a knack for writing dialogue that's clever at times, silly at times, but always full of personality".

Mikkel Snyder, a staff writer for Black Nerd Problems, said that 8-Bit Theater was the first webcomic he read and was "the comic that made me love comics". He described it as a "sprawling saga" which "thrived on Clevinger's love of video games and ability to use serialized webcomic formatting to tell this comedic tale".

Matthew Pardue reviewed 8-Bit Theater for the University of North Georgia's University Press blog. Pardue strongly recommended the comic, though noted the humor was highly dark, that the comic featured "(pixilated [sic]) violence, adult concepts, and some adult language", and said, "I personally think it takes some time for Clevinger to really hit his stride. His humor peeks through a little early on, but it only busts out in force after a few hundred strips".

Writing for Io9, Lauren Davis recommended 8-Bit Theater in a list of recommended completed webcomics for those that "enjoy video game-inspired comics (and/or Atomic Robo)".

Awards
8-Bit Theater won the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Best Fantasy Comic in 2002, and was nominated for two other awards. It was also nominated for a WCCA award in 2003.

Financial success
In 2002, Clevinger was supporting himself financially from the comic through T-shirt sales, advertisements, and a "donation" service by which readers could voluntarily send him money. Clevinger offered rewards for donating such as wallpapers.

Legacy
The success of 8-Bit Theater and another sprite comic Bob and George, along with their ease of creation, led to hundreds of other sprite comics. One list of sprite comics identified over 1,200 sprite comics as of 2004. Shaenon K. Garrity said in a history of webcomics: "With the success of sprite comics like Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater (2001) and clipart comics like Ryan North's Daily Dinosaur Comics (2003) and David Malki's Wondermark (2003), people discovered that they didn't need to be able to draw to be webcartoonists. The barn door flew open". However, no other sprite comic reached the popularity of 8-Bit Theater.

8-Bit Theater was Brian Clevinger's first experience writing a comic. His experience, as well as exposure through the comic, allowed him to write more comics, including Atomic Robo as well as writing for both Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

The comic was part of the Create a Comic Project, in which versions of the comic with dialog removed were provided to allow students to write their own, encouraging writing and creativity skills. An expansion pack for the board game Bargain Quest was released in 2019, based on characters and items from 8-Bit Theater.

In 2021, Clevinger launched a Kickstarter for the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book which collected every strip. The book was script-only due to copyright issues. It reached its initial goal on April 21.

title: 8-Bit Theater


text:
Cuba (disambiguation)

Cuba is a Caribbean island country.

Cuba may also refer to:

Places

 * Cuba Palace, in Palermo, Italy
 * Cuba Street, Wellington, a street and a quarter in the Central Business District of Wellington, New Zealand
 * Cuba, Portugal, a municipality and town in the district of Beja
 * La Cuba, a municipality in Teruel, Aragon, Spain
 * Avon (county), a defunct county in the west of England, where CUBA is an acronym for the "County that Used to Be Avon"
 * La Cuba, Cuba, a ward in Palma Soriano, Santiago de Cuba Province

United States

 * Cuba, Alabama
 * Cuba, former name of Iceland, California
 * Cuba, Georgia
 * Cuba, Illinois
 * Cuba, Indiana
 * Cuba, Owen County, Indiana
 * Cuba, Kansas
 * Cuba, Kentucky
 * Cuba, Minnesota
 * Cuba, Missouri, a city in Crawford County
 * Cuba, Lafayette County, Missouri, a ghost town
 * Cuba, New Mexico
 * Cuba (town), New York
 * Cuba (village), New York, in the town of Cuba
 * Cuba, Clinton County, Ohio
 * Cuba, Putnam County, Ohio
 * Cuba, West Virginia
 * Cuba City, Wisconsin
 * Cuba Lake, a reservoir in New York
 * Cuba Township, Becker County, Minnesota
 * Cuba Township, Lake County, Illinois
 * Cuba Township, Barnes County, North Dakota

People

 * Alberto Cuba (born 1962), a Cuban long-distance runner
 * Paul Cuba (1908–1990), an American football player
 * Cuba Gooding, Sr. (1944–2017), a soul singer
 * Cuba Gooding, Jr. (born 1968), a U.S. actor

Ships

 * Cuba, a New Zealand Company barque that brought surveyors to Wellington, New Zealand in 1840
 * SS Yorktown (1894), rebuilt in 1920 as the turbo-electric propelled passenger ship Cuba
 * SS Cuba (1920), formerly the German SS Coblenz (1897), renamed SS Cuba in 1920, that sank in 1923
 * SS Cuba (1923), a French liner requisitioned as a UK troopship in 1940 and sunk by GS U-1195 in 1945

Storms

 * 1910 Cuba hurricane, a category four hurricane that stalled west of Cuba, causing devastating flooding
 * 1924 Cuba hurricane, a category five hurricane that devastated western Cuba
 * 1932 Cuba hurricane, a category five hurricane that devastated Cuba

Other uses

 * Cuba (board game), see Havana (board game)
 * Cuba (film), a 1979 film
 * Cuba (song), a Gibson Brothers song
 * Cuba, a 1987 album by the band The Silos
 * Chinese University Basketball Association, a basketball league
 * Club Universitario de Buenos Aires, a sports club
 * A common name for Hemianthus callitrichoides, an aquatic plant
 * A Roman goddess; see List of Roman birth and childhood deities
 * A synonym for the legume genus Tachigali

title: Cuba (disambiguation)


text:
Craigellachie, British Columbia

Craigellachie (pronounced ) is a locality in British Columbia, located several kilometres to the west of the Eagle Pass summit between Sicamous and Revelstoke. Craigellachie is the site of a tourist stop on the Trans-Canada Highway between Salmon Arm and Revelstoke.

It was named after the village of Craigellachie on the River Spey in Moray, Scotland, the ancestral home of Sir George Stephen, the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). At a critical time in the railway's development, Stephen travelled to Britain to raise desperately needed capital funding; when he succeeded, he telegraphed his associates in Canada quoting the familiar motto of Clan Grant: "Stand fast, Craigellachie!"

The Canadian Craigellachie is most famous for being the site of the "Last Spike" of the CPR, driven by Sir Donald Smith, a director of the CPR, on November 7, 1885.

title: Craigellachie, British Columbia


text:
Oe

Oe or OE may refer to:

Language, linguistics, phonics and writing

 * Old English, the English language spoken in the Early Middle Ages
 * Œ or œ, a ligature of o and e used in the modern French and medieval Latin alphabets
 * Oe (digraph)
 * Open front rounded vowel or
 * Open-mid front rounded vowel or
 * Ö, a character sometimes representing 'oe', appearing in some Germanic, Turkic, and Uralic languages
 * Ø, a Northern European (Danish, Faroese, Norwegian) or Sami vowel, representing œ, 'oe' diphthong etc.
 * Ө, a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet

Places

 * Oe, Estonia, a village of Estonia
 * Ōe, Yamagata, a town of Japan
 * Oe District, Tokushima, a former district of Japan
 * Ōe, Kyoto, a former town of Japan
 * Oe (Attica), a town of ancient Attica, Greece
 * Oe, a shortcut for the Czech city Otrokovice
 * Olathe East High School, a high school in Olathe, Kansas, US

People

 * Ōe (surname), a Japanese surname
 * Kenzaburō Ōe, a major Japanese writer
 * Old Edwardian (OE), a former pupil of various schools named after a King Edward or St. Edward
 * Old Etonian (OE), a former pupil of Eton College, England

Groups and organizations

 * Ordem dos Engenheiros (OE), a Portuguese order of engineers
 * Order of Excellence of Guyana, the highest honour of Guyana
 * Okean Elzy, a Ukrainian rock band
 * OE, then-IATA code of Laudamotion, a former ultra low cost airline subsidiary of Ryanair Holdings

Science and technology

 * Cessna OE Bird Dog, a U.S. Marine Corps observation aircraft later redesignated O-1 along with the similar U.S. Army L-19
 * °Oe, a measurement on the Oechsle scale for the density of grape must
 * Oersted (Oe), a unit of magnetic field strength
 * On30 or Oe, a model railway gauge
 * OpenEmbedded (OE), a Linux-based embedded build system
 * Opportunistic encryption (OE), a means to combat passive wiretapping
 * Outlook Express, a former email program of Microsoft
 * Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a parasite of monarch and queen butterflies

Other uses

 * Odakyū Enoshima Line
 * OE, the aircraft registration prefix for Austrian aircraft
 * Overseas experience (OE), a New Zealand term for extended working holidays
 * Overview effect, the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts when viewing Earth from space
 * Object Explosion, an American animated webseries from 2018-2022

title: Oe


text:
Software development

Software development is the process used to create software. Programming and maintaining the source code is the central step of this process, but it also includes conceiving the project, evaluating its feasibility, analyzing the business requirements, software design, testing, to release. Software engineering, in addition to development, also includes project management, employee management, and other overhead functions. Software development may be sequential, in which each step is complete before the next begins, but iterative development methods where multiple steps can be executed at once and earlier steps can be revisited have also been devised to improve flexibility, efficiency, and scheduling.

Software development involves professionals from various fields, not just software programmers but also individuals specialized in testing, documentation writing, graphic design, user support, marketing, and fundraising. A number of tools and models are commonly used in software development, such as integrated development environment (IDE), version control, computer-aided software engineering, and software documentation.

Methodologies
Each of the available methodologies are best suited to specific kinds of projects, based on various technical, organizational, project, and team considerations. Another focus in many programming methodologies is the idea of trying to catch issues such as security vulnerabilities and bugs as early as possible (shift-left testing) to reduce the cost of tracking and fixing them.
 * The simplest methodology is the "code and fix", typically used by a single programmer working on a small project. After briefly considering the purpose of the program, the programmer codes it and runs it to see if it works. When they are done, the product is released. This methodology is useful for prototypes but cannot be used for more elaborate programs.
 * In the top-down waterfall model, feasibility, analysis, design, development, quality assurance, and implementation occur sequentially in that order. This model requires one step to be complete before the next begins, causing delays, and makes it impossible to revise previous steps if necessary.
 * With iterative processes these steps are interleaved with each other for improved flexibility, efficiency, and more realistic scheduling. Instead of completing the project all at once, one might go through most of the steps with one component at a time. Iterative development also lets developers prioritize the most important features, enabling lower priority ones to be dropped later on if necessary. Agile is one popular method, originally intended for small or medium sized projects, that focuses on giving developers more control over the features that they work on to reduce the risk of time or cost overruns. Derivatives of agile include extreme programming and Scrum. Open-source software development typically uses agile methodology with concurrent design, coding, and testing, due to reliance on a distributed network of volunteer contributors.
 * Beyond agile, some companies integrate information technology (IT) operations with software development, which is called DevOps or DevSecOps including computer security. DevOps includes continuous development, testing, integration of new code in the version control system, deployment of the new code, and sometimes delivery of the code to clients. The purpose of this integration is to deliver IT services more quickly and efficiently.

In 2009, it was estimated that 32 percent of software projects were delivered on time and budget, and with the full functionality. An additional 44 percent were delivered, but missing at least one of these features. The remaining 24 percent were cancelled prior to release.

Steps
Software development life cycle refers to the systematic process of developing applications.

Feasibility
The sources of ideas for software products are plentiful. These ideas can come from market research including the demographics of potential new customers, existing customers, sales prospects who rejected the product, other internal software development staff, or a creative third party. Ideas for software products are usually first evaluated by marketing personnel for economic feasibility, fit with existing channels of distribution, possible effects on existing product lines, required features, and fit with the company's marketing objectives. In the marketing evaluation phase, the cost and time assumptions become evaluated. The feasibility analysis estimates the project's return on investment, its development cost and timeframe. Based on this analysis, the company can make a business decision to invest in further development. After deciding to develop the software, the company is focused on delivering the product at or below the estimated cost and time, and with a high standard of quality (i.e., lack of bugs) and the desired functionality. Nevertheless, most software projects run late and sometimes compromises are made in features or quality to meet a deadline.

Analysis
Software analysis begins with a requirements analysis to capture the business needs of the software. Challenges for the identification of needs are that current or potential users may have different and incompatible needs, may not understand their own needs, and change their needs during the process of software development. Ultimately, the result of analysis is a detailed specification for the product that developers can work from. Software analysts often decompose the project into smaller objects, components that can be reused for increased cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability. Decomposing the project may enable a multi-threaded implementation that runs significantly faster on multiprocessor computers.

During the analysis and design phases of software development, structured analysis is often used to break down the customer's requirements into pieces that can be implemented by software programmers. The underlying logic of the program may be represented in data-flow diagrams, data dictionaries, pseudocode, state transition diagrams, and/or entity relationship diagrams. If the project incorporates a piece of legacy software that has not been modeled, this software may be modeled to help ensure it is correctly incorporated with the newer software.

Design
Design involves choices about the implementation of the software, such as which programming languages and database software to use, or how the hardware and network communications will be organized. Design may be iterative with users consulted about their needs in a process of trial and error. Design often involves people expert in aspect such as database design, screen architecture, and the performance of servers and other hardware. Designers often attempt to find patterns in the software's functionality to spin off distinct modules that can be reused with object-oriented programming. An example of this is the model–view–controller, an interface between a graphical user interface and the backend.

Programming
The central feature of software development is creating and understanding the software that implements the desired functionality. There are various strategies for writing the code. Cohesive software has various components that are independent from each other. Coupling is the interrelation of different software components, which is viewed as undesirable because it increases the difficulty of maintenance. Often, software programmers do not follow industry best practices, resulting in code that is inefficient, difficult to understand, or lacking documentation on its functionality. These standards are especially likely to break down in the presence of deadlines. As a result, testing, debugging, and revising the code becomes much more difficult. Code refactoring, for example adding more comments to the code, is a solution to improve the understandability of code.

Testing
Testing is the process of ensuring that the code executes correctly and without errors. Debugging is performed by each software developer on their own code to confirm that the code does what it is intended to. In particular, it is crucial that the software executes on all inputs, even if the result is incorrect. Code reviews by other developers are often used to scrutinize new code added to the project, and according to some estimates dramatically reduce the number of bugs persisting after testing is complete. Once the code has been submitted, quality assurance—a separate department of non-programmers for most large companies—test the accuracy of the entire software product. Acceptance tests derived from the original software requirements are a popular tool for this. Quality testing also often includes stress and load checking (whether the software is robust to heavy levels of input or usage), integration testing (to ensure that the software is adequately integrated with other software), and compatibility testing (measuring the software's performance across different operating systems or browsers). When tests are written before the code, this is called test-driven development.

Production
Production is the phase in which software is deployed to the end user. During production, the developer may create technical support resources for users or a process for fixing bugs and errors that were not caught earlier. There might also be a return to earlier development phases if user needs changed or were misunderstood.

Workers
Software development is performed by software developers, usually working on a team. Efficient communications between team members is essential to success. This is more easily achieved if the team is small, used to working together, and located near each other. Communications also help identify problems at an earlier state of development and avoid duplicated effort. Many development projects avoid the risk of losing essential knowledge held by only one employee by ensuring that multiple workers are familiar with each component. Software development involves professionals from various fields, not just software programmers but also individuals specialized in testing, documentation writing, graphic design, user support, marketing, and fundraising. Although workers for proprietary software are paid, most contributors to open-source software are volunteers. Alternately, they may be paid by companies whose business model does not involve selling the software, but something else—such as services and modifications to open source software.

Computer-aided software engineering
Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is tools for the partial automation of software development. CASE enables designers to sketch out the logic of a program, whether one to be written, or an already existing one to help integrate it with new code or reverse engineer it (for example, to change the programming language).

Documentation
Documentation comes in two forms that are usually kept separate—that intended for software developers, and that made available to the end user to help them use the software. Most developer documentation is in the form of code comments for each file, class, and method that cover the application programming interface (API)—how the piece of software can be accessed by another—and often implementation details. This documentation is helpful for new developers to understand the project when they begin working on it. In agile development, the documentation is often written at the same time as the code. User documentation is more frequently written by technical writers.

Effort estimation
Accurate estimation is crucial at the feasibility stage and in delivering the product on time and within budget. The process of generating estimations is often delegated by the project manager. Because the effort estimation is directly related to the size of the complete application, it is strongly influenced by addition of features in the requirements—the more requirements, the higher the development cost. Aspects not related to functionality, such as the experience of the software developers and code reusability, are also essential to consider in estimation. , most of the tools for estimating the amount of time and resources for software development were designed for conventional applications and are not applicable to web applications or mobile applications.

Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) supports software development with enhanced features compared to a simple text editor. IDEs often include automated compiling, syntax highlighting of errors, debugging assistance, integration with version control, and semi-automation of tests.

Version control
Version control is a popular way of managing changes made to the software. Whenever a new version is checked in, the software saves a backup of all modified files. If multiple programmers are working on the software simultaneously, it manages the merging of their code changes. The software highlights cases where there is a conflict between two sets of changes and allows programmers to fix the conflict.

View model
A view model is a framework that provides the viewpoints on the system and its environment, to be used in the software development process. It is a graphical representation of the underlying semantics of a view.

The purpose of viewpoints and views is to enable human engineers to comprehend very complex systems and to organize the elements of the problem around domains of expertise. In the engineering of physically intensive systems, viewpoints often correspond to capabilities and responsibilities within the engineering organization.

Fitness functions
Fitness functions are automated and objective tests to ensure that the new developments don't deviate from the established constraints, checks and compliance controls.

Intellectual property
Intellectual property can be an issue when developers integrate open-source code or libraries into a proprietary product, because most open-source licenses used for software require that modifications be released under the same license. As an alternative, developers may choose a proprietary alternative or write their own software module.

title: Software development


text:
Andrew Luster

Andrew Stuart Luster (born December 15, 1963) is heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune and a convicted sex offender. He is the great-grandson of cosmetics giant Max Factor Sr. In 2003, he was convicted of multiple sexual assaults using the date-rape drug GHB.

Early life
Andrew Luster is the son of Henry Luster, a psychiatrist, and Elizabeth Luster (née Shore). His mother was the adopted daughter of Max Factor, Sr.'s daughter Freda. He grew up in Malibu, California, and attended Windward School in Los Angeles.

After graduating, Luster moved to Mussel Shoals, California, living on a $1 million trust fund and living in a $600,000 cottage on the beach. According to the Los Angeles Times, this move and Luster's "freewheeling lifestyle" weakened his "already tenuous" ties to the Factor family, which was heavily involved in the arts and philanthropy.

Sexual assault charges and conviction
In 2000, Luster was arrested when a student at a local college told police that she had been raped at Luster's home. Upon investigation, police charged Luster with drugging three women with the date-rape drug GHB, sexually assaulting them, and video-taping the assaults, having found videotapes of the assaults when they searched his home. After paying $1 million bail, Luster failed to appear in court to defend himself against the charges in January 2003. Luster was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 124 years in prison.

Luster's legal case earned major attention due to his family's wealth, and in January 2003, the FBI issued a warrant for Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution. In June 2003, he was captured by American bounty hunter Duane "Dog" Chapman in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Both Luster and Chapman were subsequently arrested by Mexican police. Luster was handed over to American authorities. Chapman's felony kidnapping charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, and he fled Mexico when he was released on bail. Chapman later wrote that he believed his actions in Mexico were legal due to working closely with a Mexican police officer while in that nation, but the American judge in Luster's case refused to grant Chapman any reward or bond. Chapman also explained that during his pursuit of Luster, he consulted with "a forensic expert who specialized in sex crimes" who believed Luster's preference for raping unconscious, passive victims indicated a necrophile tendency that might lead to murder.

The California Court of Appeal refused Luster's appeal, citing that Luster had been a fugitive. Longstanding precedent holds that fugitives flout the court's authority, and thus forfeit their right to appeal. The California Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court later refused to overturn this ruling.

Prison sentence and civil suits
Luster is currently incarcerated at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, California. Under California law, since his crimes harmed other persons, he is required to serve at least 85% of his sentence before becoming eligible for release with time off for good behavior. Had his original sentence stood, Luster would not have even been considered for release until he served 105 years—effectively a life sentence.

In late 2009, Luster filed a petition for habeas corpus as the final possibility of having his case reviewed by another court on appeal. Luster was represented in that suit by Jay Leiderman and J. David Nick. The habeas corpus petition was granted in April 2012. On March 11, 2013, the Ventura County Superior Court vacated Luster's 124-year sentence but not his conviction, based on the trial judge's failure to state specific reasons for imposing consecutive sentences, and ordered a new sentencing hearing April 4, 2013.

On April 16, 2013, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Kathryne Stoltz reduced Luster's sentence to 50 years—48 years for the rapes and two years for the drug-related charges. Luster's lawyers have indicated there will be an appeal.

In 2016, opponents of California Proposition 57 released a brochure that stated that Luster could be released early due to the lack of clarity for what defines "violent crimes." In response to this brochure, California Governor Jerry Brown told Fresno County sheriff Margaret Mims that Luster was originally sentenced to 100 years in prison and was a registered sex offender, "and on both accounts would not be getting out." Brown's administration later clarified that since Luster would have to register as a sex offender, he would not be eligible for parole even if Proposition 57 passed.

Two of the victims won civil lawsuits against Luster, who was ordered to pay a total of $40 million. Luster subsequently sold most of his property and declared bankruptcy.

Media portrayals
After Luster fled the United States, a movie based on his crimes, A Date with Darkness: The Trial and Capture of Andrew Luster was produced with the intention of aiding in his capture by ending with a photo of him, and a request for witnesses to his whereabouts to notify authorities. Because the film was in production when Luster was captured, the ending was re-written to incorporate his capture.

On August 28, 2009, the true crime TV Series Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice aired an episode on the case in Season 3, Episode 4, "Evil Deeds".

On August 31, 2017, Investigation Discovery aired the first episode of Guilty Rich, which recounted the story of Andrew Luster's crimes, arrest, flight, and ultimate conviction and incarceration.

The case was also profiled in the sixth episode of the 15th season of Evil Lives Here.

title: Andrew Luster


text:
Yen and yuan sign

The yen and yuan sign (¥) is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Latin scripts. This character resembles a capital letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example: ¥50, or JP¥50 and CN¥50 when disambiguation is needed. When writing in Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese kanji and Chinese character is written following the amount, for example ５０円 in Japan, and ５０元 or ５０圆 in China.

Japan
After the institution of Japan's New Currency Act, from 1871 through the early 20th century, the yen was either referred to (in documents printed in Latin script) by its full name yen, or abbreviated with a capital "Y". One of the earliest uses of ¥ can be found in J. Twizell Wawn's "Japanese Municipal Government With an Account of the Administration of the City of Kobe", published in 1899. Usage of the sign increased in the early 20th century, primarily in Western English-speaking countries, but has become commonly used in Japan as well.

Code points
The Unicode code point is. Additionally, there is a full width character, ￥, at code point for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts.

There was no code-point for any ¥ symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned 5C (allocated to the backslash (\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code point A5 to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.

In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point 0x5C to the Latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII and also subsequently in Unicode. The JIS X 0201 standard was widely adopted in Japan.

Microsoft Windows
Microsoft adopted the ISO code A5 in Windows-1252 for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use the code page 932 character encoding, which is a variant of Shift JIS. Hence, 0x5C is displayed as a yen sign in Japanese-locale fonts on Windows. It is thus displayed wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character (for example, in C:¥ rather than C:\) and as the general escape character (¥n). It is mapped onto the Unicode (i.e. backslash), while Unicode  is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932, and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932, essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts. (Similarly in Korean versions of Windows, 0x5C was reassigned to hold the Won sign (₩) and has similar presentation issues.)

Mac OS
The symbol "¥" can be generated on most non-JP Mac OS keyboard layouts which do not have a dedicated key for it, typically through:

IBM EBCDIC
IBM's Code page 437 used code point 9D for the ¥ and this encoding was also used by several other computer systems. The ¥ is assigned code point B2 in EBCDIC 500 and many other EBCDIC code pages.

Chinese input methods
Under Chinese Pinyin input method editors (IMEs) such as those from Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing displays the full-width character ￥, which is different from half-width ¥ used in Japanese IMEs.

Native characters
The Japanese kanji 円 (yen), and Chinese character 元 and 圆 (yuan) are used when writing in Japanese and Chinese. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Singapore, although the currency is written with a dollar sign ($) (or HK$, NT$, MOP$ or S$ when necessary to indicate which dollar is meant) in Latin script, it is also rendered as 元 and 圓/圆 (yuan) when writing in Chinese. The name of the North Korean and South Korean won (₩) comes from the equivalent hanja 圓 (원, won).

Turkmenistan
In the 1993 Turkmen orthography, the Yen sign was used as the capital form of ÿ and represented the sound. It was replaced with Ý in 1999.

title: Yen and yuan sign


text:
Rio Grande Games

Rio Grande Games is a board game publisher based in Placitas, New Mexico. The company primarily imports and localizes foreign language German-style board games.

History
In 1995, Jay Tummelson began working for Mayfair Games. At that time, Mayfair had begun to import German-style board games for sale, without doing any localization. Tummelson first suggested that they incorporate an English translation, and then that they completely localize the game for American audiences. Tummelson acquired the rights for Detroit/Cleveland Grand Prix, Manhattan, Modern Art, Streetcar, and The Settlers of Catan, which were published together in 1996.

One part of the localization process was to create original art and components. Tummelson thought that a better solution would be to use the same artwork and components as the originals and to share the cost of printing with the European publishers, as well. In 1998, he founded Rio Grande Games to take that approach.

Since then, Rio Grande Games has published over 350 games and has had a significant effect on board gaming in the United States.

The most popular of the games published by Rio Grande Games are Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, Dominion, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy, Bohnanza, and Lost Cities. More recently, Rio Grande Games has begun publishing its own games and has even begun licensing its games to partners in other countries wanting to localize the games in their local languages. Thus, Race for the Galaxy will soon be seen in Chinese, Korean, and others, as well as its original English, French, and German.

Notable games
Rio Grande has published a number of award-winning games.

Spiel des Jahres
 * Dominion (2009)
 * Zooloretto (2007)
 * Thurn and Taxis (2006)
 * Niagara (2005)
 * Power Grid (2004)
 * Alhambra (2003)
 * Carcassonne (2001)
 * Torres (2000)
 * Tikal (1999)
 * Elfenland (1998)
 * Mississippi Queen (1997)
 * El Grande (1996)

Deutscher Spiele Preis
 * Dominion (2009)
 * Caylus (2006)
 * Louis XIV (2005)
 * Saint Petersburg (2004)
 * Amun Re (2003)
 * Puerto Rico (2002)
 * Carcassonne (2001)
 * Taj Mahal (2000)
 * Tikal (1999)
 * Löwenherz (1997)
 * El Grande (1996)

title: Rio Grande Games


text:
Port Colborne

Port Colborne is a city in Ontario, Canada that is located on Lake Erie, at the southern end of the Welland Canal, in the Niagara Region of Southern Ontario. The original settlement, known as Gravelly Bay, dates from 1832 and was renamed after Sir John Colborne, a British war hero and the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada at the time of the opening of the (new) southern terminus of the First Welland Canal in 1833. The city's population in 2021 was 20,033.

History
In pre-colonial times, Indigenous people of the Onguiaahra (Neutral Iroquois) lived in the area, due in part to the ready availability of flint and chert from outcroppings on the Onondaga Escarpment. This advantage was diminished by the introduction of firearms by European traders, and they were driven out by the Six Nations of the Iroquois around 1650 as part of the Beaver Wars.

Originally called Gravelly Bay, after the shallow, bedrock-floored bay upon which it sits, today's City of Port Colborne traces its roots back to the United Empire Loyalist settlements that grew up in the area following the American Revolution. Growth became focused around the southern terminus of the Welland Canal after it reached Lake Erie in 1833. The town was the location of the Port Colborne explosion, a grain elevator explosion in 1919 that killed 10 and injured 16.

As the population rose, Welland County was formed in 1845 from Lincoln County and Port Colborne was incorporated as a village in 1870, became a town in 1918, merged with the neighbouring Village of Humberstone in 1952, and was re-incorporated as a city in 1966. In 1970, Niagara Region municipal restructuring added Humberstone Township, further expanding the city.

In the year 1888, American tourists from the Southern states began building vacation homes on the lakeshore of the Western edge of the town. By 1890, an entire gated community of vacationers from the US South called Port Colborne their home during the summer months, naming the community The Humberstone Club. Over 30 grand summer homes, along with a variety of clubhouses and service buildings, were built along the lake in the following years, many of which still stand today on historic Tennessee Avenue. The southern architecture and style of these buildings would influence the design and construction of other historic buildings in the area. During the American Civil War, Varina Davis, wife of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, spent three years in the relative comfort and safety of the community.

Port Colborne was one of the hardest hit communities during the Blizzard of 1977. Thousands of people were stranded when the city was paralyzed during the storm, and the incident remains one of significance to the local population.

Environmental concerns
Emissions from Inco's base metal refinery, closed in 1984, resulted in soils contaminated with concentrations of nickel, copper and cobalt above the Ontario Ministry of the Environment's "soil remediation criteria." However, two studies, one in 1997 and another in 1999 found "[no] adverse health effects which may have resulted from environmental exposures." After a series of public meetings between the City, the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) and Inco, it was decided to perform a Community-Based Risk Assessment, a process designed to determine whether the contamination poses a threat to the current, past, or future residents of Port Colborne, and what Inco must do to clean up the contaminated areas.

Some residents launched a Class-Action Lawsuit against Inco in 2001 seeking $750 million in damages to health, property value, and quality-of-life. Although this suit failed to be certified in 2002, it was subsequently modified to limit the class, and focus solely on devaluation of property and was certified on appeal on November 18, 2005. A timeline of the case has been written from the point of view of the plaintiffs.

On July 6, 2010, the Ontario Supreme Court sided with the residents and awarded more than 7,000 households in Port Colborne a total of $36 million. Households in the Rodney Street area, in the shadow of the nickel refinery, were each awarded $23,000 while those living on the east and west sides of Port Colborne were each awarded $9,000 and $2,500 respectively. Vale appealed the ruling to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which found in 2010 that the plaintiff had not provided sufficient evidence of economic harm, raising the legal burden of proof but not invalidating Rylands v Fletcher as precedent law. In April 2012 the Supreme Court of Canada sided with Vale and denied the residents the awarded compensation. Court costs in the amount of CAD$1,766,000 were awarded the defendant by Henderson, J.

Communities
Communities within the city include:
 * Bethel - Chippawa Road and Yager Road
 * Cedar Bay - Cedar Bay Road and Vimy Road
 * East Village
 * Elco Beach - Wyldewood Road and Fireland 15
 * Gasline - Pinecrest Road and Vimy Road
 * Humberstone - Killaly Street and Highway 3
 * Lorraine - Weaver Road and Firelane 1
 * Nickel Beach - foot of Lake Road
 * Pine Crest Point - Pincrest Road and Firelane 2
 * Pleasant Beach
 * Sherkston
 * Sherkston Beaches
 * Shisler Point
 * Silver Bay
 * Sugar Loaf Point/Sugar Loaf Marina - west side of Gravelly Bay

Demographics
In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Port Colborne had a population of $20,033$ living in $8,710$ of its $10,219$ total private dwellings, a change of NaN% from its 2016 population of $18,306$. With a land area of 121.99 km2, it had a population density of in 2021.

Economy
Maritime commerce, including supplying goods to the camps for the labourers who worked on the first canal, ship repair and the provisioning trade, was, and still is, an important part of Port Colborne's economy. Like other cities in the region, Port Colborne was a heavily industrial city throughout most of the early 20th century. A grain elevator, two modern flour mills, a Vale nickel refinery, a cement plant operated by Port Colborne Canada Cement, and a blast furnace operated by Algoma Steel were all major employers.

As recently as 2017, Port Colborne has been successful attracting new industry, such as the agro-business operations of Casco Inc. and Jungbunzlauer, which process corn into products such as sweeteners and citric acid.

The International Nickel Company (now Vale) has long been one of the city's main employers, since the opening of a refinery in 1918. Taking advantage of inexpensive hydroelectricity from generating stations at nearby Niagara Falls, the refinery produced electro-refined nickel for the war effort, and grew to employ over 2,000 workers by the 1950s. Cutbacks in operations and increasing factory automation have reduced the workforce to its present-day (2018) total of 170.

Marine Recycling Corporation is a ship recycling firm, boasting of Green (environmentally friendly) services, located next to the Welland Canal at Gravelly Bay and operating since the 1970s.

A 2012 report indicates the following as the largest private sector employers, with a staff of over 50, in Port Colborne at that time:

 * Port Colborne Poultry (Pinty's Delicious Foods, now owned by Olymel), 229 employees
 * Vale Canada Limited, 200
 * J. Oskam Steel Fabricators Ltd., 150
 * IMT Partnership, 108
 * ADM Milling, 95
 * Thurston Machine Co. Ltd., 85
 * JTL Machine Ltd., 78
 * Jungbunzlauer Canada Inc., 74
 * Brennan Paving Ltd., 70
 * Ingredion Canada Inc., 70

Arts and culture
Port Colborne hosts the annual Canal Days festival in recognition of the important role played by the Welland Canal in the history of the city. Originating as a small fair held at the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum, it has grown to feature live music, an antique car show, fireworks, tall ships, a kite festival, and international foods. The festival also highlights Lock 8, which at 420 m, is one of the world's longest canal locks. Lock 8 keeps the water level on the Welland Canal constant independent of weather on Lake Erie. Hence the ships are only raised or lowered one to four feet depending on the current water level in Lake Erie. Much of the festival centres around West St., which runs parallel to the canal, and offers a view of the Clarence St. Bridge, built in 1929, it is one of only three remaining lift bridges on the canal today.

The Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum, located near the centre of town, is a resource for local history and archival research. In addition to a collection of historic buildings and artifacts, it opened the "Marie Semley Research Wing" to foster research into local history, named to commemorate the long-standing efforts of a local resident who devoted hours to the museum.

The community features theatre venues with the professional Lighthouse Festival Theatre (formerly Showboat) and the amateur Port Colborne Operatic Society. The company has been presenting annual productions since its inception in 1945.

The Port Colborne Lions Club, chartered in 1922, is one of the world's oldest Lions Clubs, and one of Canada's oldest service clubs in continuous operation. The club is still active within the community, hosting many yearly events including an annual Lions Club Carnival in the summer.

Kinnear House is a local heritage property associated with the jurist Helen Kinnear, the first woman in Canada to be appointed judge by the federal government, or to appear as counsel before the Supreme Court.

The "incredible shrinking mill" is an optical illusion produced when viewing the federal grain elevator in Port Colborne. When travelling east on Lakeshore Road, the mill appears to move farther away as one drives closer.

Attractions

Tourism is important to the Port Colborne's economy, aided by the city's proximity to Lake Erie beaches and marinas, and to Niagara Falls. In 2015, Port Colborne formed The Tourism and Marketing Advisory Committee to provide advice and recommendations for increasing this aspect of the economy. Described by the city as "Niagara's South Coast", Port Colborne features live theatre, golfing, multi-use trails, fishing, beaches, restaurants, recreation, a marina, and shopping districts along the Welland Canal.

Notable sites in Port Colborne include:

 * The Welland Canal
 * Port Colborne Port Promenade
 * The Friendship Trail
 * HH Knoll Lakeview Park
 * The Welland Canals Parkways Trail
 * Nickel Beach
 * Lock 8 Gateway Park
 * Sugarloaf Harbour Marina
 * Historical and Marine Museum
 * Vale Centre (twin pad arena and YMCA featuring pool, gyms and bocce courts)
 * Thomas A. Lannan Sports Complex

Education
There are two high schools in Port Colborne, Port Colborne High School (commonly called Port High) and the Lakeshore Catholic High School (formerly a public high school called Lockview Park Secondary School). Lockview closed in 1987.

Notable people

 * David Lametti, federal Minister of Justice
 * Tony Dekker, singer/songwriter of folk band Great Lake Swimmers
 * Jim Gregory, NHL General Manager (Toronto Maple Leafs)
 * Ted 'Teeder' Kennedy, NHL hockey player
 * Helen Kinnear, first woman appointed judge by the federal government
 * Joseph "Bronco" Horvath, NHL hockey player
 * Floyd G. Robinson, teacher and educator
 * Melissa McIntyre, actress (Degrassi: The Next Generation)
 * Don Simmons, NHL hockey player
 * Lynton 'Red' Wilson, former CEO of BCE Inc., chancellor of McMaster University, and officer of the Order of Canada
 * DeFranco Family, 1970s pop group
 * Francis William "Dinty" Moore, goaltender for the 1936 Canadian men's Olympic hockey team
 * Lieutenant Colonel Russell Lambert Boyle, Commanding Officer of the 10th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force. Killed at the 2nd Battle of Ypres, April 1915.
 * Alexis Davis, mixed martial artist
 * Elmer Iseler, choral conductor
 * Matt Craven, actor
 * Vance Badawey, politician

title: Port Colborne


text:
Section sign

The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or silcrow. In other languages it may be called the "paragraph symbol" (for example, Paragrafzeichen).

Use

The section sign is often used when referring to a specific section of a legal code. For example, in Bluebook style, "Title 16 of the United States Code Section 580p" becomes "16 U.S.C. §580p". The section sign is frequently used along with the pilcrow (or paragraph sign), ¶, to reference a specific paragraph within a section of a document.

While § is usually read in spoken English as the word "section", many other languages use the word "paragraph" exclusively to refer to a section of a document (especially of legal text), and use other words to describe a paragraph in the English sense. Consequently, in those cases "§" may be read as "paragraph", and may occasionally also be described as a "paragraph sign", but this is a description of its usage, not a formal name.

When duplicated, as §§, it is read as the plural "sections". For example, "§§13–21" would be read as "sections 13 through 21", much as pp. (pages) is the plural of p., meaning page. It may also be used with footnotes when asterisk *, dagger †, and double dagger ‡ have already been used on a given page.

It is common practice to follow the section sign with a non-breaking space so that the symbol is kept with the section number being cited.

The section sign is itself sometimes a symbol of the justice system, in much the same way as the Rod of Asclepius is used to represent medicine. For example, Austrian courts use the symbol in their logo.

Keyboard entry
The sign has the Unicode code point and many platforms and languages have methods to reproduce it.

 * Android:
 * ChromeOS (with International/Extended keyboard setting)
 * Emacs:
 * HTML:,  ,
 * iOS: (long press)
 * Linux: or Compose
 * MacOS:
 * TeX:
 * URL Encoding:  (Latin1) or   (UTF8)
 * Vim: ShiftShift (a Vim digraph)
 * Windows: Alt or Alt

Some keyboards include dedicated ways to access §:
 * Belgium: (key left of è)
 * Brazil:
 * Denmark:
 * France:
 * Germany: Shift
 * Hungary: Shift (on the left of 1)
 * Italy: Shift
 * Norway:
 * Portugal:
 * Romania: (Legacy);  (Standard/Programmers)
 * Spain:
 * Sweden: (key left of 1)
 * Switzerland: (key left of 1)
 * US international:
 * US Colemak: AltGr
 * United Kingdom (Mac): § (key left of 1)

Origin
Two possible origins are often posited for the section sign: most probably, that it is a ligature formed by the combination of two S glyphs (from the Latin signum sectiōnis). Some scholars, however, are skeptical of this explanation.

Others have theorized that it is an adaptation of the Ancient Greek παράγραφος (paragraphos), a catch-all term for a class of punctuation marks used by scribes with diverse shapes and intended uses.

The modern form of the sign, with its modern meaning, has been in use since the 13th century.

In literature
In Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, the § symbol is used repeatedly to mean "bureaucracy". In his English translation of 1930, Paul Selver translated it as "red tape".

title: Section sign