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The Vicar of Dibley

The Vicar of Dibley is a British sitcom. It consists of three series, which aired on BBC One from 10 November 1994 to 1 January 2000, and several specials, the most recent of which aired on 23 December 2020. It is set in the fictional Oxfordshire village of Dibley, which is assigned a female vicar following the 1993 changes in the Church of England that permitted the ordination of women. Dawn French plays the lead role of vicar Geraldine Granger.

In ratings terms, it is among the most successful British programmes in the digital era, with the Christmas and New Year specials entering the UK top 10 programmes of the year. The Vicar of Dibley received multiple British Comedy Awards, two International Emmys and was a multiple British Academy Television Awards nominee. In 2004, it placed third in a BBC poll of Britain's Best Sitcoms.

Background
The series was created by Richard Curtis and written for actress Dawn French by Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, with contributions from Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The main character was an invention of Richard Curtis, but he and French extensively consulted Joy Carroll, one of the first female Anglican priests, and garnered many character traits and much information.

Openings and epilogues
In earlier episodes, the opening credits were followed by a humorous village scene, such as a woman knitting directly from a sheep.

After the closing credits, Geraldine usually tells Alice a joke, which Alice either overreacts to, tries to interpret literally, or understands only after Geraldine explains it. There are a few exceptions to this in various episodes.

Guest appearances
Hugh Bonneville, Mel Giedroyc, Richard Griffiths, Miranda Hart, Alistair McGowan, Geraldine McNulty, Philip Whitchurch, Nathalie Cox, Nicholas Le Prevost, Brian Perkins, Peter Capaldi and Roger Sloman have all made one guest appearance each.

Pam Rhodes, Kylie Minogue, Rachel Hunter, Terry Wogan, Jeremy Paxman, Martyn Lewis, Darcey Bussell and Sean Bean each appeared as themselves in one episode.

Sarah, Duchess of York, Richard Ayoade, Orla Brady, Fiona Bruce, Annette Crosbie, Johnny Depp, Ruth Jones, Hilary Kay, Damian Lewis, Maureen Lipman, Jennifer Saunders, Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, Stephen Tompkinson, Dervla Kirwan, and Emma Watson have made guest appearances in short charity specials.

Episodes
The Vicar of Dibley has had 20 episodes as of 2007, with additional short reprises consisting of Comic Relief and the In Lockdown minis.

The first series was broadcast on BBC1 from 10 November to 15 December 1994, comprising six episodes. Following the first series, an Easter special and a Christmas special were broadcast in 1996. A four-episode second series was ordered and screened between 26 December 1997 and 22 January 1998. Subsequent episodes consisted of Christmas and New Year specials, followed by a third series of four episodes, also referred to as seasonal specials as they have the titles Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer airing from 24 December 1999 to 1 January 2000. After that came the two-episode "A Very Dibley Christmas", broadcast between 25 December 2004 and 1 January 2005, and the two-part finale, "A Wholly Holy Happy Ending", broadcast on Christmas Day 2006 and New Year's Day 2007.

The final two episodes, in which Geraldine finds love and marries, are officially the "last-ever" episodes, although there have been several reappearances of certain characters since in the form of charity specials.

Comic Relief and Lockdown specials
On 15 March 2013, French reprised her role as Geraldine Granger as part of her French and Saunders marathon on BBC Radio 2. She was interviewed by Chris Evans on his Pause for Thought section. The following year, on 29 March 2014, French appeared in character as Granger on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4.

There have been eight short charity TV specials: six for Comic Relief between 1997 and 2015 and a seventh in April 2020, in which French appeared on The Big Night In as part of a joint Comic Relief and Children in Need special to support those affected by COVID-19. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the segment was filmed at French's home. For Comic Relief 2021, Geraldine appeared in the Dibley vicarage, later lip-synching to "Juice" by Lizzo and appearing with the reverend Kate Bottley.

In December 2020, a series of short "lockdown" episodes of The Vicar of Dibley were broadcast. The series consisted of three short episodes followed by a compilation episode of the previous three episodes' material shown back-to-back, but including previously unseen material and scenes. The style was completely different to the main series, with Geraldine and Hugo breaking the fourth wall via video messaging, talking directly to the viewers as if they were the Dibley congregation. The same method was used for the 2020 and 2021 Comic Relief shorts, also made and set during the Covid pandemic.

Location and setting
The programme is set in the fictional Oxfordshire village of Dibley. Some villagers, including Alice, Jim, and Owen, speak with slight West Country accents, as were once common in Oxfordshire but are now less common. The series was filmed in the Buckinghamshire village of Turville, near High Wycombe, with the village's St Mary the Virgin Church doubling as Dibley's St Barnabus. The exterior location for David Horton's manor is in the village of Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire.

The opening titles show aerial shots of the M40 motorway's Stokenchurch Gap, the Chiltern Hills of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and the village of Turville.

Theme music
The theme music was a setting of Psalm 23 composed by Howard Goodall, and was performed by the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, with George Humphreys singing the solo. The conductor was Stephen Darlington. Two versions are used over the opening credits: one with a full choir and one with a solo. Goodall originally wrote it as a serious piece of church choral music. It has been released as a charity single, with proceeds going to Comic Relief. It also appears on Goodall's CD Choral Works, which additionally includes his theme for Mr. Bean, another popular comedy co-created by Richard Curtis. A snippet of The Vicar of Dibley's theme music was used in the Mr. Bean episode "Tee Off, Mr. Bean" and the music from Mr Bean plays during Sean Bean's cameo in The Vicar of Dibley episode "Spring".

Awards and accolades
The series also won the TV Choice Award for Best Comedy in 2005 and again in 2021 for the Lockdown Specials.

In May 2007, Richard Curtis received a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award for his humanitarian pursuits, as well as his creative work, including The Vicar of Dibley.

Home media
The Vicar of Dibley was released on DVD in Region 2 (UK) in 2001. In 2002, a DVD entitled The Best of The Vicar of Dibley was released featuring a 90-minute film of Dawn French talking to the producer, Jon Plowman, with clips from the series. A 2002 documentary narrated by Jo Brand, entitled The Real Vicars of Dibley, was also on the DVD. In 2005, a "complete collection" box set was released. This included all the then-aired episodes. The final two episodes and a 6-disc "ultimate" box set were released on 26 November 2007.

In Australasia (Region 4), all episodes have been released on DVD.

All episodes have been released on DVD in the United States and Canada (Region 1).

Adaptations
On 6 February 2007, Fox announced plans to adapt The Vicar of Dibley into an American sitcom titled The Minister of Divine. The series starred Kirstie Alley as a former "wild child" who returned to her hometown as its first female minister. The pilot was broadcast on Fox, but the series was not made.

The series has also been adapted into two stage plays by Ian Gower and Paul Carpenter, both incorporating plots from the TV episodes. The first is titled The Vicar of Dibley, and is concerned mainly with Alice and Hugo's engagement and wedding. The second, A Vicar of Dibley Christmas – The Second Coming, is based on the episodes "Dibley Live" and "Winter", in which the villagers set up a radio station and put on a nativity play at Owen's farm. A third adaptation by Steve Clark and David Lovesy, titled The Vicar of Dibley - The Holy Trinity , covers Baby Geraldine’s Christening, David Horton's brief wooing of Geraldine, and the Save Our Dibley campaign as a new reservoir threatens the village. Performance rights for all three are available through United Agents.

Possible return
In February 2016, it was reported that Dawn French was interested in returning to the role in a new series, The Bishop of Dibley, to follow on from the 2015 Red Nose Day Special. In December 2020, French opened up about the prospect of The Vicar of Dibley returning for a new series in 2021.

Comedy Classic: Vicar of Dibley
In December 2022, Channel 5 aired a 67-minute special retrospective for their "Comedy Classics" series. Actors and celebrities, including co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer, take a look back, discuss and pay tribute to the show.

title: The Vicar of Dibley


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Emoji

An emoji (plural emoji or emojis; 絵文字, ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.

Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵) + moji (文字); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the West and around the world. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the word of the year.

Evolution from emoticons (1990s)
The emoji was predated by the emoticon, a concept implemented in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fahlman when he suggested text-based symbols such as :-) and :-( could be used to replace language. Theories about language replacement can be traced back to the 1960s, when Russian novelist and professor Vladimir Nabokov stated in an interview with The New York Times: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket." It did not become a mainstream concept until the 1990s when Japanese, American and European companies began developing Fahlman's idea. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope point out that similar symbology was incorporated by Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois, into PLATO IV, the first e-learning system, in 1972. The PLATO system was not considered mainstream, and therefore Parello's pictograms were only used by a small number of people. Scott Fahlman's emoticons importantly used common alphabet symbols and aimed to replace language/text to express emotion, and for that reason are seen as the actual origin of emoticons.

The first emoji are a matter of contention due to differing definitions and poor early documentation. It was previously widely considered that DoCoMo had the first emoji set in 1999, but an Emojipedia blog article in 2019 brought SoftBank's earlier 1997 set to light. More recently, in 2024, earlier emoji sets were uncovered on portable devices by Sharp Corporation and NEC in the early 1990s, with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 harboring what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today.

Wingdings, a font invented by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, was released by Microsoft in 1990. It could be used to send pictographs in rich text messages, but would only load on devices with the Wingdings font installed. In 1995, the French newspaper Le Monde announced that Alcatel would be launching a new phone, the BC 600. Its welcome screen displayed a digital smiley face, replacing the usual text seen as part of the "welcome message" often seen on other devices at the time. In 1997, SoftBank's J-Phone arm launched the SkyWalker DP-211SW, which contained a set of 90 emoji. Its designs, each measuring 12 by 12 pixels were monochrome, depicting numbers, sports, the time, moon phases and the weather. It contained the Pile of Poo emoji in particular. The J-Phone model experienced low sales, and the emoji set was thus rarely used.

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emoji as part of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, used on its mobile platform. They were intended to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services. Due to their influence, Kurita's designs were once claimed to be the first cellular emoji; however, Kurita has denied that this is the case. According to interviews, he took inspiration from Japanese manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu (such as a water drop on a face representing nervousness or confusion), and weather pictograms used to depict the weather conditions at any given time. He also drew inspiration from Chinese characters and street sign pictograms. The DoCoMo i-Mode set included facial expressions, such as smiley faces, derived from a Japanese visual style commonly found in manga and anime, combined with kaomoji and smiley elements. Kurita's work is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Kurita's emoji were brightly colored, albeit with a single color per glyph. General-use emoji, such as sports, actions and weather, can readily be traced back to Kurita's emoji set. Notably absent from the set were pictograms that demonstrated emotion. The yellow-faced emoji in current use evolved from other emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work. His set also had generic images much like the J-Phones. Elsewhere in the 1990s, Nokia phones began including preset pictograms in its text messaging app, which they defined as "smileys and symbols". A third notable emoji set was introduced by Japanese mobile phone brand au by KDDI.

Development of emoji sets (2000–2007)
The basic 12-by-12-pixel emoji in Japan grew in popularity across various platforms over the next decade. This was aided by the popularity of DoCoMo i-mode, which for many was the origins of the smartphone. The i-mode service also saw the introduction of emoji in conversation form on messenger apps. By 2004, i-mode had 40 million subscribers, exposing numerous people to emoji for the first time between 2000 and 2004. The popularity of i-mode led to other manufacturers offering their own emoji sets. While emoji adoption was high in Japan during this time, the competitors failed to collaborate to create a uniform set of emoji to be used across all platforms in the country.

The Universal Coded Character Set (Unicode), controlled by the Unicode Consortium and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, had already been established as the international standard for text representation (ISO/IEC 10646) since 1993, although variants of Shift JIS remained relatively common in Japan. Unicode included several characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji, including some from North American or Western European sources such as DOS code page 437, ITC Zapf Dingbats or the WordPerfect Iconic Symbols set. Unicode coverage of written characters was extended several times by new editions during the 2000s, with little interest in incorporating the Japanese cellular emoji sets (deemed out of scope), although symbol characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji continued to be added. For example, Unicode 4.0 contained 16 new emoji, which included direction arrows, a warning triangle, and an eject button. Besides Zapf Dingbats, other dingbat fonts such as Wingdings or Webdings also included additional pictographic symbols in their own custom pi font encodings; unlike Zapf Dingbats, however, many of these would not be available as Unicode emoji until 2014.

Nicolas Loufrani applied to the US Copyright Office in 1999 to register the 471 smileys that he created. Soon after he created The Smiley Dictionary, which not only hosted the largest number of smileys at the time, it also categorized them. The desktop platform was aimed at allowing people to insert smileys as text when sending emails and writing on a desktop computer. By 2003, it had grown to 887 smileys and 640 ascii emotions.

The smiley toolbar offered a variety of symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such as MSN Messenger. Nokia, then one of the largest global telecom companies, was still referring to today's emoji sets as smileys in 2001. The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of The Smiley Company. He created a smiley toolbar, which was available at smileydictionary.com during the early 2000s to be sent as emoji are today.

Over the next two years, The Smiley Dictionary became the plug-in of choice for forums and online instant messaging platforms. There were competitors, but The Smiley Dictionary was by far the most popular. Platforms such as MSN Messenger allowed for customisation from 2001 onwards, with many users importing emoticons to use in messages as text. These emoticons would eventually go on to become the modern day emoji. It was not until MSN Messenger and BlackBerry noticed the popularity of these unofficial sets and launched their own from late 2003 onwards.

Beginnings of Unicode emoji (2007–2014)
The first American company to take notice of emoji was Google beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up of Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) in an attempt to standardise the emoji. The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread. Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from Apple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters. Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010.

Pending the assignment of standard Unicode code points, Google and Apple implemented emoji support via Private Use Area schemes. Google first introduced emoji in Gmail in October 2008, in collaboration with au by KDDI, and Apple introduced the first release of Apple Color Emoji to iPhone OS on 21 November 2008. Initially, Apple's emoji support was implemented for holders of a SoftBank SIM card; the emoji themselves were represented using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme and mostly resembled the SoftBank designs. Gmail emoji used their own Private Use Area scheme, in a supplementary Private Use plane.

Separately, a proposal had been submitted in 2008 to add the ARIB extended characters used in broadcasting in Japan to Unicode. This included several pictographic symbols. These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji or were subsequently classified as emoji.

After iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan. The Emoji application for iOS, which altered the Settings app to allow access to the emoji keyboard, was created by Josh Gare in February 2010. Before the existence of Gare's Emoji app, Apple had intended for the emoji keyboard to only be available in Japan in iOS version 2.2.

Throughout 2009, members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries gave feedback and proposed changes to the international standardization of the emoji. The feedback from various bodies in the United States, Europe, and Japan agreed on a set of 722 emoji as the standard set. This would be released in October 2010 in Unicode 6.0. Apple made the emoji keyboard available to those outside of Japan in iOS version 5.0 in 2011. Later, Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) added the character repertoires of the Webdings and Wingdings fonts to Unicode, resulting in approximately 250 more Unicode emoji.

The Unicode emoji whose code points were assigned in 2014 or earlier are therefore taken from several sources. A single character could exist in multiple sources, and characters from a source were unified with existing characters where appropriate: for example, the "shower" weather symbol (☔) from the ARIB source was unified with an existing umbrella with raindrops character, which had been added for KPS 9566 compatibility. The emoji characters named "Rain" ("雨") from all three Japanese carriers were in turn unified with the ARIB character. However, the Unicode Consortium groups the most significant sources of emoji into four categories:

UTS #51 and modern emoji (2015–present)
In late 2014, a Public Review Issue was created by the Unicode Technical Committee, seeking feedback on a proposed Unicode Technical Report (UTR) titled "Unicode Emoji". This was intended to improve interoperability of emoji between vendors, and define a means of supporting multiple skin tones. The feedback period closed in January 2015. Also in January 2015, the use of the zero width joiner to indicate that a sequence of emoji could be shown as a single equivalent glyph (analogous to a ligature) as a means of implementing emoji without atomic code points, such as varied compositions of families, was discussed within the "emoji ad-hoc committee".

Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) added another 41 emoji, including articles of sports equipment such as the cricket bat, food items such as the taco, new facial expressions, and symbols for places of worship, as well as five characters (crab, scorpion, lion face, bow and arrow, amphora) to improve support for pictorial rather than symbolic representations of the signs of the Zodiac.

Also in June 2015, the first approved version ("Emoji 1.0") of the Unicode Emoji report was published as Unicode Technical Report #51 (UTR #51). This introduced the mechanism of skin tone indicators, the first official recommendations about which Unicode characters were to be considered emoji, and the first official recommendations about which characters were to be displayed in an emoji font in absence of a variation selector, and listed the zero width joiner sequences for families and couples that were implemented by existing vendors. Maintenance of UTR #51, taking emoji requests, and creating proposals for emoji characters and emoji mechanisms was made the responsibility of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC), operating as a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee,

With the release of version 5.0 in May 2017 alongside Unicode 10.0, UTR #51 was redesignated a Unicode Technical Standard (UTS #51), making it an independent specification rather than merely an informative document. there were 2,666 Unicode emoji listed. The next version of UTS #51 (published in May 2018) skipped to the version number Emoji 11.0, so as to synchronise its major version number with the corresponding version of the Unicode Standard.

The popularity of emoji has caused pressure from vendors and international markets to add additional designs into the Unicode standard to meet the demands of different cultures. Some characters now defined as emoji are inherited from a variety of pre-Unicode messenger systems not only used in Japan, including Yahoo and MSN Messenger.

Corporate demand for emoji standardization has placed pressures on the Unicode Consortium, with some members complaining that it had overtaken the group's traditional focus on standardizing characters used for minority languages and transcribing historical records. Conversely, the Consortium recognises that public desire for emoji support has put pressure on vendors to improve their Unicode support, which is especially true for characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, thus leading to better support for Unicode's historic and minority scripts in deployed software.

In 2022, the Unicode Consortium decided to stop accepting proposals for flag emoji, citing low use of the category and that adding new flags "creates exclusivity at the expense of others". The Consortium stated that new flag emoji would still be added when their country becomes part of the ISO 3166-1 standard, with no proposal needed.

Cultural influence
Oxford Dictionaries named its 2015 Word of the Year. Oxford noted that 2015 had seen a sizable increase in the use of the word "emoji" and recognized its impact on popular culture. Oxford Dictionaries President Caspar Grathwohl expressed that "traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It's not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it's flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully." SwiftKey found that "Face with Tears of Joy" was the most popular emoji across the world. The American Dialect Society declared to be the "Most Notable Emoji" of 2015 in their Word of the Year vote.

Some emoji are specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing businessman, the shoshinsha mark used to indicate a beginner driver , a white flower used to denote "brilliant homework", or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles , dango , onigiri , curry , and sushi. Unicode Consortium founder Mark Davis compared the use of emoji to a developing language, particularly mentioning the American use of eggplant to represent a phallus. Some linguists have classified emoji and emoticons as discourse markers. In December 2015 a sentiment analysis of emoji was published, and the Emoji Sentiment Ranking 1.0 was provided. In 2016, a musical about emoji premiered in Los Angeles. The animated The Emoji Movie was released in summer 2017.

In January 2017, in what is believed to be the first large-scale study of emoji usage, researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed over 1.2 billion messages input via the Kika Emoji Keyboard and announced that the Face With Tears of Joy was the most popular emoji. The Heart and the Heart eyes emoji stood second and third, respectively. The study also found that the French use heart emoji the most. People in countries like Australia, France, and the Czech Republic used more happy emoji, while this was not so for people in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, where people used more negative emoji in comparison to cultural hubs known for restraint and self-discipline, like Turkey, France and Russia.

There has been discussion among legal experts on whether or not emoji could be admissible as evidence in court trials. Furthermore, as emoji continue to develop and grow as a "language" of symbols, there may also be the potential of the formation of emoji "dialects". Emoji are being used as more than just to show reactions and emotions. Snapchat has even incorporated emoji in its trophy and friends system with each emoji showing a complex meaning. Emoji can also convey different meanings based on syntax and inversion. For instance, 'fairy comments' involve heart, star, and fairy emoji placed between the words of a sentence. These comments often invert the meanings associated with hearts and may be used to 'tread on borders of offense.'

In 2017, the MIT Media Lab published DeepMoji, a deep neural network sentiment analysis algorithm that was trained on 1.2 billion emoji occurrences in Twitter data from 2013 to 2017. DeepMoji was found to outperform human subjects in correctly identifying sarcasm in Tweets and other online modes of communication.

Use in furthering causes
On March 5, 2019, a drop of blood emoji was released, which is intended to help break the stigma of menstruation. In addition to normalizing periods, it will also be relevant to describe medical topics such as donating blood and other blood-related activities.

A mosquito emoji was added in 2018 to raise awareness for diseases spread by the insect, such as dengue and malaria.

Linguistic function of emoji
Linguistically, emoji are used to indicate emotional state, they tend to be used more in positive communication. Some researchers believe emoji can be used for visual rhetoric. Emoji can be used to set emotional tone in messages. Emoji tend not to have their own meaning but act as a paralanguage adding meaning to text. Emoji can add clarity and credibility to text.

Sociolinguistically, the use of emoji differ depending on speaker and setting. Women use emoji more than men. Men use a wider variety of emoji. Women are more likely to use emoji in public communication than private communication. Extraversion and agreeableness are positively correlated with emoji use, neuroticism is negatively correlated. Emoji use differ between cultures: studies in terms of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory found that cultures with high power distance and tolerance to indulgence used more negative emoji, while those with high uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-term orientation use more positive emoji. An 6-country user experience study showed that emoji-based scales (specifically the usage of smileys) may ease the challenges related to translation and implementation for brief cross-cultural surveys.

Emoji communication problems
Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this misunderstanding is related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer; in other cases, the emoji that was sent is not shown in the same way on the receiving side.

The first issue relates to the cultural or contextual interpretation of the emoji. When the author picks an emoji, they think about it in a certain way, but the same character may not trigger the same thoughts in the mind of the receiver.

For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively, so that a smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude, as the orbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move, and the orbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of suppressing a smile.

The second problem relates to technology and branding. When an author of a message picks an emoji from a list, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same emoji in a different way. Small changes to a character's look may completely alter its perceived meaning with the receiver. As an example, in April 2020, British actress and presenter Jameela Jamil posted a tweet from her iPhone using the Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji (🤭) as part of a comment on people shopping for food during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Apple's iOS, the emoji expression is neutral and pensive, but on other platforms the emoji shows as a giggling face. Many fans were initially upset thinking that she, as a well off celebrity, was mocking poor people, but this was not her intended meaning.

Researchers from German Studies Institute at Ruhr-Universität Bochum found that most people can easily understand an emoji when it replaces a word directly – like an icon for a rose instead of the word 'rose' – yet it takes people about 50 percent longer to comprehend the emoji.

Variation and ambiguity
Emoji characters vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and objects. For example, following an Apple tradition, the calendar emoji on Apple products always shows July 17, the date in 2002 Apple announced its iCal calendar application for macOS. This led some Apple product users to initially nickname July 17 "World Emoji Day". Other emoji fonts show different dates or do not show a specific one.

Some Apple emoji are very similar to the SoftBank standard, since SoftBank was the first Japanese network on which the iPhone launched. For example, is female on Apple and SoftBank standards but male or gender-neutral on others.

Journalists have noted that the ambiguity of emoji has allowed them to take on culture-specific meanings not present in the original glyphs. For example, has been described as being used in English-language communities to signify "non-caring fabulousness" and "anything from shutting haters down to a sense of accomplishment". Unicode manuals sometimes provide notes on auxiliary meanings of an object to guide designers on how emoji may be used, for example noting that some users may expect to stand for "a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theater".

Controversial emoji
Some emoji have been involved in controversy due to their perceived meanings. Multiple arrests and imprisonments have followed usage of pistol, knife , and bomb emoji in ways that authorities deemed credible threats.

In the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics, the Unicode Consortium considered proposals to add several Olympic-related emoji, including medals and events such as handball and water polo. By October 2015, these candidate emoji included "rifle" and "modern pentathlon". However, in 2016, Apple and Microsoft opposed these two emoji, and the characters were added without emoji presentations, meaning that software is expected to render them in black-and-white rather than color, and emoji-specific software such as onscreen keyboards will generally not include them. In addition, while the original incarnations of the modern pentathlon emoji depicted its five events, including a man pointing a gun, the final glyph contains a person riding a horse, along with a laser pistol target in the corner.

On August 1, 2016, Apple announced that in iOS 10, the pistol emoji would be changed from a realistic revolver to a water pistol. Conversely, the following day, Microsoft pushed out an update to Windows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji as a toy ray-gun to a real revolver. Microsoft stated that the change was made to bring the glyph more in line with industry-standard designs and customer expectations. By 2018, most major platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation. Apple's change of depiction from a realistic gun to a toy gun was criticised by, among others, the editor of Emojipedia, because it could lead to messages appearing differently to the receiver than the sender had intended. Insider Rob Price said it created the potential for "serious miscommunication across different platforms", and asked "What if a joke sent from an Apple user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering? Or if a genuine threat sent by a Google user to an Apple user goes unreported because it is taken as a joke?"

The eggplant (aubergine) emoji has also seen controversy due to it being used to represent a penis. Beginning in December 2014, the hashtag #EggplantFridays began to rise to popularity on Instagram for use in marking photos featuring clothed or unclothed penises. This became such a popular trend that, beginning in April 2015, Instagram disabled the ability to search for not only the #EggplantFridays tag, but also other eggplant-containing hashtags, including simply #eggplant and #🍆.

The peach emoji has likewise been used as a euphemistic icon for buttocks, with a 2016 Emojipedia analysis revealing that only seven percent of English language tweets with the peach emoji refer to the actual fruit. In 2016, Apple attempted to redesign the emoji to less resemble buttocks. This was met with fierce backlash in beta testing, and Apple reversed its decision by the time it went live to the public.

In December 2017, a lawyer in Delhi, India, threatened to file a lawsuit against WhatsApp for allowing use of the middle finger emoji on the basis that the company is "directly abetting the use of an offensive, lewd, obscene gesture" in violation of the Indian Penal Code.

Early implementation in Japan
Various, often incompatible, character encoding schemes were developed by the different mobile providers in Japan for their own emoji sets. For example, the extended Shift JIS representation F797 is used for a convenience store (🏪) by SoftBank, but for a wristwatch (⌚) by KDDI. All three vendors also developed schemes for encoding their emoji in the Unicode Private Use Area: DoCoMo, for example, used the range U+E63E through U+E757. Versions of iOS prior to 5.1 encoded emoji in the SoftBank private use area.

Unicode support considerations
Most, but not all, emoji are included in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) of Unicode, which is also used for ancient scripts, some modern scripts such as Adlam or Osage, and special-use characters such as Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. Some systems introduced prior to the advent of Unicode emoji were only designed to support characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), on the assumption that non-BMP characters would rarely be encountered, although failure to properly handle characters outside of the BMP precludes Unicode compliance.

The introduction of Unicode emoji created an incentive for vendors to improve their support for non-BMP characters. The Unicode Consortium notes that "[b]ecause of the demand for emoji, many implementations have upgraded their Unicode support substantially", also helping support for minority languages that use those features.

Color support
Any operating system that supports adding additional fonts to the system can add an emoji-supporting font. However, inclusion of colorful emoji in existing font formats requires dedicated support for color glyphs. Not all operating systems have support for color fonts, so in these cases emoji might have to be rendered as black-and-white line art or not at all. There are four different formats used for multi-color glyphs in an SFNT font, not all of which are necessarily supported by a given operating system library or software package such as a web browser or graphical program. This means that color fonts may need to be supplied in several formats to be usable on multiple operating systems, or in multiple applications.

Implementation by different platforms and vendors
Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release of OS X 10.7 Lion, in 2011. Users can view emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications, which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any native application by selecting the "Edit" menu and pulling down to "Special Characters", or by the key combination Command. The emoji keyboard was first available in Japan with the release of iPhone OS version 2.2 in 2008. The emoji keyboard was not officially made available outside of Japan until iOS version 5.0. From iPhone OS 2.2 through to iOS 4.3.5 (2011), those outside Japan could access the keyboard but had to use a third-party app to enable it. Apple has revealed that the "face with tears of joy" is the most popular emoji among English-speaking Americans. On second place is the "heart" emoji, followed by the "Loudly Crying Face".

An update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 brought a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to those operating systems as part of the Segoe UI Symbol font. As of Windows 8.1 Preview, the Segoe UI Emoji font is included, which supplies full-color pictographs. The plain Segoe UI font lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them. Emoji characters are accessed through the onscreen keyboard's 😀 key, or through the physical keyboard shortcut Win.

In 2016, Firefox 50 added in-browser emoji rendering for platforms lacking in native support.

Facebook and Twitter replace all Unicode emoji used on their websites with their own custom graphics. Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for its Messenger service, where only the former provides complete coverage. Messenger now uses Apple emoji on iOS, and the main Facebook set elsewhere. Facebook reactions are only partially compatible with standard emoji.

Emoji versus text presentation
Unicode defines variation sequences for many of its emoji to indicate their desired presentation. "Emoji characters can have two main kinds of presentation:
 * an emoji presentation, with colorful and perhaps whimsical shapes, even animated
 * a text presentation, such as black & white"

Specifying the desired presentation is done by following the base emoji with either U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15) for text or U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (VS16) for emoji-style. As of version (2023), Unicode defines presentation sequences for 371 characters. However, the Unicode Technical Committee has since determined that unifying colourful emoji characters with textual symbols and dingbats was a "mistake", and resolved to allocate new code points rather than defining new presentation sequences.

Skin color
Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones for human emoji. These modifiers are called EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, -, -, -, and - (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF): 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿. They are based on the Fitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin color. Human emoji that are not followed by one of these five modifiers should be displayed in a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as bright yellow ( ■ ), blue ( ■ ), or gray ( ■ ). Non-human emoji (like ) are unaffected by the Fitzpatrick modifiers. , Fitzpatrick modifiers can be used with 131 human emoji spread across seven blocks: Dingbats, Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A, and Transport and Map Symbols.

The following table shows both the Unicode characters and the open-source "Twemoji" images, designed by Twitter:

Joining
Implementations may use a zero-width joiner (ZWJ) between multiple emoji to make them behave like a single, unique emoji character. For example, the sequence, , , , (👨👩👧) could be displayed as a single emoji depicting a family with a man, a woman, and a girl if the implementation supports it. Systems that do not support it would ignore the ZWJs, displaying only the three base emoji in order (👨👩👧).

Unicode previously maintained a catalog of emoji ZWJ sequences that were supported on at least one commonly available platform. The consortium has since switched to documenting sequences that are recommended for general interchange (RGI). These are clusters that emoji fonts are expected to include as part of the standard.

The ZWJ has also been used to implement platform specific emoji. For example, in 2016 Microsoft released a series of Ninja Cat emoji for their Windows 10 Anniversary Update. The sequence, , were used to create Ninja Cat (🐱👤). Ninja Cat and variants were removed in late 2021's Fluent emoji redesign.

In Unicode
Unicode specifies a total of 3,782 emoji using 1,424 characters spread across 24 blocks, of which 26 are Regional indicator symbols that combine in pairs to form flag emoji, and 12 (#, * and 0–9) are base characters for keycap emoji sequences.

637 of the 768 code points in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block are considered emoji. 242 of the 256 code points in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block are considered emoji. All of the 107 code points in the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block are considered emoji. All of the 80 code points in the Emoticons block are considered emoji. 105 of the 118 code points in the Transport and Map Symbols block are considered emoji. 83 of the 256 code points in the Miscellaneous Symbols block are considered emoji. 33 of the 192 code points in the Dingbats block are considered emoji.

Additional emoji can be found in the following Unicode blocks: Arrows (8 code points considered emoji), Basic Latin (12), CJK Symbols and Punctuation (2), Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement (41), Enclosed Alphanumerics (1), Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (2), Enclosed Ideographic Supplement (15), General Punctuation (2), Geometric Shapes (8), Geometric Shapes Extended (13), Latin-1 Supplement (2), Letterlike Symbols (2), Mahjong Tiles (1), Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (7), Miscellaneous Technical (18), Playing Cards (1), and Supplemental Arrows-B (2).

In popular culture

 * The 2009 film Moon featured a robot named GERTY who communicates using a neutral-toned synthesized voice together with a screen showing emoji representing the corresponding emotional content.
 * In 2014, the Library of Congress acquired an emoji version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick created by Fred Benenson.
 * A musical called Emojiland premiered at Rockwell Table & Stage in Los Angeles in May 2016, after selected songs were presented at the same venue in 2015.
 * In October 2016, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the original collection of emoji distributed by NTT DoCoMo in 1999.
 * In November 2016, the first emoji-themed convention, Emojicon, was held in San Francisco.
 * In March 2017, the first episode of the fifth season of Samurai Jack featured alien characters who communicate in emoji.
 * In April 2017, the Doctor Who episode "Smile" featured nanobots called Vardy, which communicate through robotic avatars that use emoji (without any accompanying speech output) and are sometimes referred to by the time travelers as "Emojibots".
 * On July 28, 2017, Sony Pictures Animation released The Emoji Movie, an animated movie featuring the voices of Patrick Stewart, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Anna Faris, T. J. Miller, and other notable actors and comedians. It was universally panned, and is considered to be one of the worst animated films.
 * On September 3, 2021, Drake released his sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy with album cover art featuring twelve emoji of pregnant women in varying clothing colors, hair colors and skin tones.

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

title: Emoji


text:
USS Hopper

USS Hopper (DDG-70) is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer guided missile destroyer of the United States Navy, named for the pioneering computer scientist Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.

Hopper is only the second US Navy warship to be named for a woman from the Navy's own ranks. This ship is the 20th destroyer of her class. Hopper was the 11th ship of this class to be built at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, and construction began on 23 February 1995. She was launched and christened on 6 January 1996. On 6 September 1997, she was commissioned in San Francisco.

Deployments
Hopper has participated in multiple deployments to East Asia and the Persian Gulf, including RIMPAC 98, three individual PACMEF deployments, an Expeditionary Strike Group deployment to the Persian Gulf in 2004, and a deployment to Southeast Asia in support of Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 2006. In addition, Hopper has been foremost in the field of Ballistic Missile Defense.

On 1 April 2002, Hopper departed for a six-month deployment to the North Persian Gulf.

On 12 November 2007, Hopper departed with the USS Tarawa (LHA-1) Expeditionary Strike Group for a scheduled deployment to the Fifth Fleet and Seventh Fleet.

On 6 January 2008, Hopper was involved in an incident with five gunboats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Hopper, along with USS Port Royal (CG-73), a guided missile cruiser, and USS Ingraham (FFG-61), a guided missile frigate, were entering the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz when the five Iranian boats approached them at high speed and in a threatening manner. The US Navy ships had been in the Arabian Sea searching for a sailor who had been missing from Hopper for 24 hours. The US Navy said the Iranian boats made "threatening" moves toward the US Navy vessels, coming as close as 200 yd. The US Navy received a radio transmission saying, "I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes." As the US Navy ships prepared to fire, the Iranians abruptly turned away, the US officials said. Before leaving, the Iranians dropped white boxes into the water in front of the US Navy ships. The US Navy ships did not investigate the boxes.

Officials from the two nations differed on the severity of the incident. The Iranians claimed they were conducting normal maneuvers while American officials claimed that an imminent danger to American naval vessels existed.

On 15 April 2011, Hopper departed from Pearl Harbor on a deployment to Asia and the Middle East.

On 22 June 2014, Hopper, with her Aegis Combat System, detected and tracked a test missile launched from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll using her onboard AN/SPY-1 radar, providing critical targeting data to a long-range ground-based interceptor (GBI) launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. GBI's protect the US from limited long-range ballistic missile attack.

In January 2018, Hopper performed a freedom of navigation cruise, sailing within 12 nautical miles of the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. China, which has held the rocky outpost since seizing it from the Philippines in 2012, registered a protest on the grounds that the US Navy should have notified China in advance of its approach and had "violated China's sovereignty and security interests".

Shield
"The shield has a background of blue. In the center is a gold lion with red talons."

Crest
"The crest consists of a lozenge with a silver star above the trident. Surrounding the lozenge is a wreath with lightning bolts stemming from the bottom. The crest is completed by the blue and gold framing."

Motto
"The motto is written on a scroll of white with red trim."The ships motto is "AUDE ET EFFICE" which can be translated to "DARE AND DO" within context of a command.

Seal
"The coat of arms in full color as in the blazon, upon a white background enclosed within a dark blue oval border edged on the outside with a gold rope and bearing the inscription 'USS HOPPER' at the top and 'DDG 70' in the base all gold."

title: USS Hopper


text:
MARC Train

MARC (Maryland Area Rail Commuter) is a commuter rail system in the Washington–Baltimore area. MARC is administered by the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) and operated under contract by Alstom and Amtrak on track owned by CSX Transportation (CSXT) and Amtrak. In, the system had a ridership of , or about per weekday as of , less than pre-COVID-19 pandemic weekday ridership of 40,000.

With trains on the Penn Line reaching a maximum speed of 125 mph, MARC has the highest top speed of any commuter railroad in the United States.

Operations
MARC has three lines that radiate from Union Station in Washington, D.C.: The Penn Line is the only line with weekend service, having 18 trains on Saturdays and 12 on Sundays. Service is reduced or suspended on certain federal holidays.
 * Penn Line – 58 weekday trains
 * Camden Line – 21 weekday trains
 * Brunswick Line – 18 weekday trains

All MARC trains operate in push-pull mode. The cab car is typically on the end of the train closest to Washington; on trains with diesel locomotives, this arrangement keeps exhaust further away from Union Station's terminal. Train lengths vary from the 3–5 cars to 10 cars on Penn Line rush hour trains. Shorter trains typically consist of all single level or all bilevel passenger cars while longer trains may have a combination.

The MTA contracts out operations and maintenance of MARC trains to Amtrak for the Penn Line and Alstom for the Brunswick Line and Camden Line.

Penn Line
The Penn Line is a 77 mi line that runs along the far southern leg of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C., and Perryville, Maryland, via Baltimore Penn Station. Most trains operate along a 39 mi stretch between Washington and Baltimore Penn, with limited service to Martin State Airport and Perryville. It is the fastest commuter rail line in North America, with equipment capable of operating at speeds up to 125 mph. Descended from Washington-Baltimore commuter routes operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad, it is by far the busiest MARC line, with almost twice as many trains and twice as many passengers as the other two lines combined. The Penn Line is the only electrified MARC line, and its only line that operates on weekends.

Camden Line
The Camden Line is a 39 mi line that runs on CSX-owned tracks between Washington, D.C., and Camden Station in Baltimore. It is descended from B&O commuter routes running between Washington and Baltimore. The B&O began operating over portions of this route in 1830, making it one of the oldest passenger rail lines in the U.S. still in operation.

Brunswick Line
The Brunswick Line is a 74 mi line that runs on CSX-owned tracks between Washington, D.C., and Martinsburg, West Virginia, with a 14 mi branch to Frederick, Maryland. It is descended from Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) commuter service between Washington and its northern and western suburbs.

Special Western Maryland service
MARC has run special weekend trips to and from Cumberland, Maryland, for Western Maryland residents to attend sporting events in the Washington–Baltimore area, and to facilitate tourist excursions to Western Maryland.

Intermodal connections
Nearly all stations served by MARC connect with local bus or Metrobus service. Washington Union Station, New Carrollton, College Park, Greenbelt, Silver Spring and Rockville offer connections to the Washington Metro subway, while Baltimore Penn Station and Camden Station both offer connections to the Baltimore Light RailLink. While the Baltimore Metro SubwayLink is not directly connected to the MARC system, its State Center station is not far from Baltimore Penn Station. Washington Union, Baltimore Penn, BWI Airport, Aberdeen, New Carrollton, Rockville, Harpers Ferry, and Martinsburg stations are shared with Amtrak service, and Union Station also offers a connection to the Virginia Railway Express system.

Origins
All three MARC lines date from the 19th century. Service on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) between Baltimore and Ellicott City began on May 24, 1830, over part of what is now the Camden Line. B&O service between Baltimore and Washington, the modern Camden Line route, began on August 25, 1835.

The B&O's main line was extended to Frederick Junction (with a branch to ) in 1831, to in 1832, to  and  in 1834, and  in 1842. The B&O completed its Metropolitan Branch in 1873; most service from Martinsburg and Frederick was then diverted onto the Metropolitan Branch to Washington, and the old main line became a secondary route. This established the basic route for what would become the Brunswick Line.

The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad (PW&B) completed its line between Baltimore and Philadelphia in December 1838, save for the ferry across the Susquehanna River, which was not bridged until the 1860s. Although the B&O was chartered with the unspoken assumption that no competing line would be built between Baltimore and Washington, the Pennsylvania Railroad-owned Baltimore and Potomac Railroad (B&P) was completed between the two cities in 1872. The PW&B was initially hostile to the Pennsylvania (PRR); however, the PRR acquired it in a stock battle with the B&O in 1881. The PW&B soon began operating PRR through service – the ancestor of Penn Line service – between Washington and Philadelphia in conjunction with the B&P. Meanwhile, the PRR ended B&O trackage rights over the PW&B in 1884, forcing it to open its own parallel route in 1886. The PW&B and the B&P were combined into the PRR's Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington Railroad in 1902.

The B&O ended local service on the Frederick Branch in November 1949. All B&O passenger service between Baltimore and Philadelphia ended in 1958; local service from Washington was curtailed to Camden Station. The B&O continued to offer local service to Brunswick plus long-distance service, while the PRR operated a mix of local, intercity, and long-distance service on the Northeast Corridor. Local service north of Baltimore on the PRR ended around 1964.

Public takeover
In the mid-20th century, passenger rail service declined owing to a variety of factors, particularly the advent of the automobile, even as commuting between suburban locations and urban business districts remained common. In 1968, the PRR folded into Penn Central, which took over its passenger operations. On May 1, 1971, Amtrak took over most intercity passenger service in the United States, including some of Penn Central's former routes. The B&O and Penn Central continued to operate their Washington–Baltimore and Washington–Brunswick commuter routes without subsidies.

Amtrak initially operated the Washington–Parkersburg West Virginian, later renamed Potomac Special. The Potomac Special was cut back to a 146 mile commuter-based Washington–Cumberland trip, the Blue Ridge, on May 7, 1973. In early 1974, the B&O threatened to discontinue its remaining unsubsidized commuter services, citing heavy losses. On March 1, 1974, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) began a 50% subsidy of the B&O's Washington–Brunswick and Washington–Baltimore service – the first state-sponsored commuter rail service to Washington. In 1975, the state signed an operating agreement with the B&O, under which the state provided rolling stock and reimbursed the railroad for all operating losses. On October 31, 1976, Amtrak introduced the Washington–Cincinnati Shenandoah and cut the Blue Ridge to a 73 mile Washington–Martinsburg trip. In the late 1970s, West Virginia began to fund the B&O shuttles between Brunswick and Martinsburg; the shuttles were soon incorporated as extensions of Brunswick service in order to secure Urban Mass Transportation Administration subsidies. In December 1981, MDOT purchased 22 ex-PRR coaches for use on B&O lines. The Maryland State Railroad Administration (SRA) was established in 1986 to administer contracts, procure rolling stock, and oversee short line railroads in the state.

Conrail took over the unsubsidized ex-PRR Baltimore–Washington service from Penn Central at its creation on April 1, 1976. MDOT began subsidizing that service after Conrail threatened to discontinue service on April 1, 1977. Prior to 1978, most ex-PRR Baltimore–Washington service was operated by aging MP54 electric multiple units, most dating back to the line's 1933 electrification. In 1978, Amtrak and the City of Baltimore negotiated with the New Jersey Department of Transportation to lease a number of new Arrow railcars to replace the MP54s. With funding from Pennsylvania and Maryland, Amtrak used some of the cars to initiate a Philadelphia–Washington commuter trip, the Chesapeake, on April 30, 1978. The Chesapeake stopped at some local stations but fewer than the Conrail service; it provided commuter service from north of Baltimore for the first time since the 1960s.

BWI Rail Station opened for Amtrak and Conrail trains on October 26, 1980. In August 1982, Conrail trains began stopping at Capital Beltway station, used by intercity trains since 1970. and stations were closed. Two additional round trips – one in the peak direction, and one reverse for commuters working in Baltimore – were added on July 5, 1983. On October 30, 1983, Amtrak and MARC moved from Capital Beltway into a new platform and waiting room at nearby New Carrollton station, which had been served by the Washington Metro since 1978. The Edmondson Avenue and Frederick Road stops in Baltimore were replaced by West Baltimore station on April 30, 1984.

In 1981, MDOT began installing highway signs to point drivers to commuter rail stations. The Northeast Rail Service Act of 1981 allowed Conrail to shed its commuter rail operations in 1983 in order to focus on its more profitable freight operations. On January 1, 1983, public operators (including Metro-North Railroad, NJ Transit, and SEPTA Regional Rail) took over Conrail commuter rail systems in the Northeast. MDOT began paying Amtrak to run the ex-PRR Washington–Baltimore service. That service was branded as AMDOT (Amtrak Maryland Department of Transportation). In October 1983, with low patronage and largely duplicated by the MDOT-subsidized service, the Chesapeake was discontinued. In 1984, the SRA introduced a unified brand for its three subsidized lines, MARC (originally short for Maryland Rail Commuter, later modified to Maryland Area Rail Commuter). Operations remained the same, but public elements such as schedules and crew uniforms were consolidated under the new name. MARC soon dubbed its three lines the Penn Line, Camden Line, and Brunswick Line.

Improved service
In October 1986, MARC began testing an Amtrak AEM-7 locomotive, aiming to replace the Arrows with push–pull trains. On February 27, 1989, MARC increased Washington–Baltimore service from 7 to 13 weekday round trips. A new park-and-ride station opened at, while the previous Bowie station was closed. Two more round trips were added in May 1989.

On May 1, 1991, MARC service was extended north from Baltimore to with intermediate stops at, , and. Between 1988 and 1993, MARC expanded service from 34 to 70 total daily trips across the system. In 1995, 800 parking spaces were added to Odenton station.

From 1989 to 1996, the Camden Line had high ridership growth and substantial changes to its stations. A new station at just off Route 32 was opened on July 31, 1989. MARC began service to Greenbelt station on May 3, 1993, seven months before Metro began serving the station. On January 31, 1994, MARC expanded midday service on the Camden and Brunswick lines, opened Laurel Race Track station to relieve a parking shortage at Laurel station, and closed the underused Berwyn station on the Camden Line. On December 12, 1994, Muirkirk station (originally planned as South Laurel) was opened to reduce congestion on nearby Route 1. In 1996, a $1.2 million project added 600 parking spaces at Savage station to relieve crowding. In July 1996, the Elkridge station was closed and replaced with Dorsey station, which has a larger parking area and a dedicated interchange with Route 100.

On April 30, 1987, the B&O was merged into CSX. CSX continued to operate Camden and Brunswick Line service. On July 6, 1987, MARC opened Metropolitan Grove station – the first new station on the Brunswick line in over a century.

1996 Silver Spring collision

On February 16, 1996, during the Friday evening rush hour, an eastbound train headed to Washington Union Station via the Brunswick Line collided with the westbound Amtrak Capitol Limited headed to Chicago via Pittsburgh. The collision occurred at Georgetown Junction on a snow-swept stretch of track just west of Silver Spring, Maryland. The crash left 11 people dead aboard the MARC train. Three died of injuries suffered in the impact alone, with the rest succumbing to the ensuing smoke and flames or a combination of the two. Engineer Ricky Orr and conductors Jimmy Major Jr. and Jim Quillen were among the victims. Eight Jobs Corps students also were killed during the accident.

The NTSB report concluded that the MARC crew apparently forgot the approach signal aspect of the Kensington color-position signal after making a flag stop at Kensington station. The MARC train was operating in push mode with the cab control car out front. The Amtrak locomotives were in the crossover at the time of the collision; the MARC cab control car collided with the lead Amtrak unit, F40PH #255, rupturing its fuel tank and igniting the fire that caused most of the casualties. The second unit was a GE Genesis P40DC #811, a newer unit that has a fuel tank that is shielded in the center of the frame. The official investigation also suggests that the accident might have been prevented if a human-factors analysis had been conducted when modifications to the track signaling system were made in 1992 with the closing of nearby QN tower.

Operations and maintenance contracting controversy
In June 2010, the MTA began looking for a new operations and maintenance contractor to replace CSX Transportation for the Camden and Brunswick lines.

Controversy arose when the French-owned and Montgomery County, Maryland-based Keolis, already operating Virginia Railway Express trains, was the only bidder for the contract. The bidding process was suspended in late 2010 due to lack of competition. Before bidding reopened in 2011, Maryland passed a law requiring Keolis' majority owner, French state railway company SNCF, to fully disclose its role in transporting Jews to concentration camps during World War II, at the request of Leo Bretholz and other Holocaust survivors. This disclosure would need to meet the satisfaction of the Maryland state archivist before Keolis would be allowed to place a bid for MARC service. Keolis faced similar issues while bidding for VRE operations in 2009 before eventually being awarded the contract. Keolis and SNCF lawyers claimed that all documentation required by the law had been produced long before.

In June 2011, the future of Keolis's ability to bid on the MARC contract remained up in the air with the new disclosure law in place. No other bidder had emerged to replace CSXT. On June 5, 2011, The Washington Post ran an editorial critical of the disclosure law. The Post claimed that SNCF has been working for years on digitizing its records, and the Maryland law may require items or formats counter to SNCF's current system and/or French law. The article also stated that some in the Maryland Attorney General's Office worried the law was not Constitutional, may risk retaliation towards Maryland firms overseas, and may risk federal funding for Maryland "by imposing arbitrary procurement demands on a single company".

MTA issued a new RFP for the operations and maintenance of MARC services on the Brunswick and Camden Lines on July 14, 2011, with a deadline for proposals on November 21, 2011. The terms specified a nearly six-year base contract with a five-year renewal option. On October 17, 2012, the $204 million contract was awarded to the Canadian company Bombardier Transportation, effectively ending the Keolis controversy. The pre-service transition period began on the Thursday of that week, during which time CSXT continued to operate MARC trains. The five-year renewal was exercised in 2018. The contract passed to Alstom in 2021 when they purchased Bombardier. Alstom was awarded a $401 million, five-year contract in April 2023, with two five-year extensions possible.

Rolling stock
The following tables summarize current and former MARC rolling stock.

2007 plan
In the first decade of the 21st century, MARC ridership increased significantly, and the system neared capacity for its current configuration. With the area population growing and the BRAC process poised to bring new jobs to Aberdeen Proving Ground and Fort Meade, both near MARC stations, the state saw the need to expand service. In September 2007, MTA Maryland unveiled an ambitious 30-year plan of system improvements. Though funding sources had not been established at that time, the plan represented the state's goals of increasing capacity and flexibility. Proposed improvements included:

 * 54 Bombardier MultiLevels were ordered to replace aging single-level cars.
 * Weekend service on the Penn Line. Service began on December 7, 2013, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., with some trips extending to Martin State Airport. There are nine round trips on Saturdays (three begin and three then later end at Martin State Airport) and 6 round trips on Sundays (two begin and two then later end at Martin State Airport).
 * Increased mid-day service and reverse commute service on the Camden and Brunswick Lines. As of 2015, there is a somewhat limited reverse commute service in effect on the Camden Line.
 * Extension of service past Union Station in Washington to L'Enfant Plaza and to Northern Virginia along VRE routes, thus relieving pressure on the Washington Metro
 * More daily trips east of Baltimore's Penn Station, including improved service to Aberdeen Proving Ground
 * Service beyond Perryville to Newark or Wilmington in Delaware, providing a connection to SEPTA commuter trains to Philadelphia and beyond
 * New or expanded tunnels along the Northeast Corridor in Baltimore
 * New stations in Baltimore, providing direct connections with the Metro Subway, and service to Johns Hopkins Hospital and Bayview Medical Center
 * Rapid transit-like service through Baltimore

Some of the proposals were foreseen to take years or decades to implement, however others such as Penn Line weekend service could have begun in a matter of months, yet budgetary shortfalls prevented this. In Spring 2009, to offset such budget shortfalls, ticket sales employees at most non-Amtrak stations were replaced with Amtrak "Quik-Trak" touchscreen ticket machines, and some train services were eliminated or scaled back. Ticket machines were also added to stations that were not previously staffed, such as. The only remaining staffed stations, Odenton and Frederick, remained staffed by Commuter Direct.

2010s: Initial Extension Proposal to Delaware
In 2017, the Wilmington Area Planning Council submitted ridership studies to Cecil County, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, SEPTA and the Delaware Department of Transportation for the extension of MARC service from Perryville to Newark, Delaware, and possibly Wilmington, via Elkton. The section from Perryville to Newark is the one of only three along the Northeast Corridor not covered by commuter train service (the others are between New London, Connecticut, and Wickford Junction, Rhode Island, and between New York Penn Station and New Rochelle, New York). The Route 5 bus operated by Cecil Transit formerly connected the two stations.

2020s: Extension to Delaware and Virginia Agreement
On April 13, 2023, MDOT announced an agreement with the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority and the Delaware Transit Corporation for expansion possibilities beyond the current termini of MARC train service. Expansion into Virginia would allow a one seat ride from Maryland to Alexandria, Virginia and to Newark, Delaware, with the latter being initially proposed in 2017 as advocated by Cecil County residents. The extension into Delaware would require further deliberations among regional partners, while the extension into Virginia would require replacing the Long Bridge over the Potomac to safely allow more train capacity, which is slated to be completed by 2030. In the short-term, a plan to allow VRE and MARC passenger tickets to be honored on each system is under consideration.

title: MARC Train


text:
User:Mikimoto~enwiki

検索オプション

title: User:Mikimoto~enwiki


text:
708 BC

The year 708 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as year 46 Ab urbe condita . The denomination 708 BC for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

Events and trends

 * Traditional founding date of the city of Croton (modern Crotone), Italy.

Births

 * Chuzi I, duke of Qin

title: 708 BC


text:
Paria, Gujarat

Paria is a village situated near Vapi in Valsad district, Gujarat, India. The town of Udwada, 5 km away from Paria, has a railway station which connects Paria to the Mumbai-Delhi line of the Western Railways.

Paria is under the Jyoti-Gram project of the Gujarat government.

title: Paria, Gujarat


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Vanessa (name)

Vanessa is a feminine given name.

It was invented by the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift for Esther Vanhomrigh, whom Swift had met in 1708 and whom he tutored. The name was created by taking "Van" from Vanhomrigh's last name and adding "Essa", a pet form of Esther. In 1726, the name Vanessa appeared in print for the first time in "Cadenus and Vanessa", an autobiographical poem about Swift's relationship with Vanhomrigh. Swift had written the poem in 1713, but it was not published until three years after Vanhomrigh died. Vanessa was adopted as the name of a genus of butterfly by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1807.

Vanessa was the 71st most popular name for girls born in the United States in 2007. It has been among the top 200 names for girls in the United States since 1953 and among the top 100 names for girls since 1977. It first appeared among the top 1,000 names for girls in the United States in 1950, when it appeared on the list in 939th place.

In Germany, Vanessa has been among the top 100 names for girls since 1976. The name became more and more popular and was the 7th most popular name for girls in the 1990s. In the following years its popularity dropped and the name is ranked in 42nd place for the decade 2000–2009.

Notable people with the given name

 * Vanessa Aleksander (born 1996), Polish actress
 * Vanessa Ament (born 1955), American foley artist and author
 * Vanessa Amorosi (born 1981), Australian singer
 * Vanessa Anderson, Australian teen whose death led to the Garling Report
 * Vanessa Angel (English actress) (born 1966), English actress and model
 * Vanessa Angel (Indonesian actress) (1992–2021), Indonesian actress, model and singer
 * Vanessa Baden (born 1985), American actress, writer, director, and producer
 * Vanessa Barrs, Australian veterinary scientist
 * Vanessa Bayer (born 1981), American actress, comedian and cast member from Saturday Night Live
 * Vanessa Beecroft (born 1969), Italian artist
 * Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), English artist and the sister of author Virginia Woolf
 * Vanessa Bell Armstrong (born 1953), American gospel singer
 * Vanessa Bell Calloway (born 1957), American actress
 * Vanessa Benelli Mosell (born 1987), Italian pianist
 * Vanessa Branch (born 1973), English-American model and actress
 * Vanessa L. Brown (born 1966), Democratic member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives who was convicted of bribery
 * Vanessa Bryant (born 1982), American philanthropist, nonprofit executive, and former model
 * Vanessa Carlton (born 1980), American singer, best known for her hit single "A Thousand Miles"
 * Vanessa Coleman (born 1988), American criminal convicted of facilitating the kidnap, rape, and murder of Channon Christian
 * Vanessa da Mata (born 1976), Brazilian singer
 * Vanessa Djomo (born 1998), Cameroonian footballer
 * Vanessa Downing (born 1958), Australian actress
 * Vanessa Duriès (1972–1993), French writer
 * Vanessa Erogbogbo, Ugandan economist
 * Vanessa Feltz (born 1962), English journalist and broadcaster
 * Vanessa Ferlito (born 1977), American actress
 * Vanessa Ferrari (born 1990), Italian gymnast
 * Vanessa García (born 1984), Puerto Rican freestyle swimmer
 * Vanessa George, English paedophile convicted in the 2009 Plymouth child abuse case
 * Vanessa Giacomo (born 1983), Brazilian actress
 * Vanessa Grigoriadis, American journalist
 * Vanessa Heleta, women's rights activist and Special Olympics organiser from Tonga
 * Vanessa Herrmann (born 1991), Thai actress and model
 * Vanessa Herzog (born 1995), Austrian speed skater
 * Vanessa Hessler (born 1988), American-Italian model and actress
 * Vanessa Hudgens (born 1988), American actress and singer
 * Vanessa Huppenkothen (born 1984), Mexican model, actress, and presenter
 * Vanessa King (born 1980), Canadian actress
 * Vanessa Kirby (born 1988), British actress
 * Vanessa Krasniqi (born 1994), Albanian-German singer
 * Vanessa Koutouan (born 1988), Ivorian women's rights activist
 * Vanessa Lachey (born 1980), American television personality, television host, and actress
 * Vanessa Lengies (born 1985), Canadian actress
 * Vanessa Lindores, Canadian actress who was a cast member on the Canadian sketch comedy TV series You Can't Do That on Television
 * Vanessa de Lisle, British fashion journalist
 * Vanessa Lloyd-Davies (1960–2005), British doctor, equestrian and soldier
 * Vanessa Mae (born 1978), Singapore-born British violinist and Olympic alpine skier
 * Vanessa Mai (born 1992), German singer
 * Vanessa Marano (born 1992), American actress
 * Vanessa Marcil (born 1958), American actress
 * Vanessa Marcotte (1989–2016), American murder victim
 * Vanessa Marques (born 1996), Portuguese football player
 * Vanessa Marquez (1968–2018), American actress
 * Vanessa Marshall (born 1969), American actress and voice actress
 * Vanessa Mdee (born 1988), Tanzanian singer and TV personality
 * Vanessa Merrell (born 1996), American actress (temporary role in Jane the Virgin) and YouTuber
 * Vanessa Morgan (born 1992), Canadian actress
 * Vanessa Paradis (born 1972), French actress and singer
 * Vanessa Porto (born 1984), Brazilian mixed martial artist
 * Vanessa Ray (born 1981), American actress
 * Vanessa Redgrave (born 1937), English actress and political activist
 * Vannesa Rosales (born 1989), Venezuelan activist and teacher
 * Vanessa Rousso (born 1983), American poker player
 * Vanessa C. Tyson, American political scientist
 * Vanessa Uri, birth name of Filipina actress Halina Perez (1983–2004)
 * Vanessa Ward (née Browne) (born 1963), Australian high jumper
 * Vanessa Watts (born 1987), West Indian cricketer
 * Vanessa White (born 1989), English singer with The Saturdays
 * Vanessa Estelle Williams (sometimes professionally Vanessa A. Williams) (born 1963), American actress
 * Vanessa Williams (sometimes professionally Vanessa L. Williams) (born 1963), American model, singer, songwriter, and actress
 * Vanessa R. Williams (born 1960), American gospel singer
 * Vanessa Zahorian (born 1978/1979), American ballet dancer

Fictional characters

 * Vanessa (King of Fighters), a character in SNK Playmore's The King of Fighters video game series
 * Vanessa (The Little Mermaid), a character in Disney's 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid, the name of the human form taken by the villain Ursula to seduce Prince Eric
 * Vanessa Diodati, a character in the anime series Symphogear
 * Vanessa Abrams, a character in the CW television series Gossip Girl
 * Vanessa Chamberlain Lewis, a character from CBS' longest-running soap opera, Guiding Light
 * Vanessa Doofenshmirtz, Dr. Doofensmirtz's daughter in the animated television series Phineas and Ferb
 * Vanessa Fisk, wife of mobster Wilson Fisk, Kingpin of Crime in the Marvel Comic Universe
 * Vanessa Gold, a character from the British soap opera, EastEnders
 * Vanessa Huxtable, a character in the American television sitcom The Cosby Show
 * Vanessa Ives, a character of tremendous power and importance in Penny Dreadful
 * Vanessa "Nessa" Jenkins, from the British comedy series Gavin & Stacey
 * Vanessa "Nessie" Kapatelis, supporting character in the Wonder Woman comic book series
 * Vanessa Kensington, British secret agent from the 1997 film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
 * Vanessa Lewis, a character in the Virtua Fighter video game series
 * Vanessa Villante, a character from the Australian soap opera, Neighbours
 * Vanessa Woodfield, a character from the British soap opera, Emmerdale
 * Vanessa "Ness" Carlysle, supporting character from Deadpool
 * Vanessa, a character from the animated series The Hollow
 * Vanessa Van Helsing, the titular main character of the television series Van Helsing
 * Vanessa Hysel, a character and minor antagonist in the 2018 Square Enix game Octopath Traveler
 * Vanessa, the protagonist of the mobile rhythm game Cytus and central character in the sequel Cytus II
 * Vanessa, the security guard in the 2021 game Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach
 * Queen Vanessa, an enemy from the 2017 video game A Hat in Time
 * Vanessa Lutz, a character from the 1996 film Freeway

title: Vanessa (name)


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Mo' Wax

Mo' Wax was a British record label founded by James Lavelle in 1992. The label was not co-founded by Tim Goldsworthy, as is often reported. Steve Finan became co-owner shortly after.

Mo' Wax came to recognition for being at the forefront of trip hop, turntablism and alternative hip hop during the mid-1990s. The label also released notable records covering techno, drum and bass and electro. Mo'Wax also helped the graffiti artist Futura 2000 regain popularity, by using his artwork on many of their releases in the 1990s.

Lavelle signed partial ownership of Mo' Wax over to A&M Records (now part of the Universal Music Group) in 1996. When their deal expired he signed with Beggars Group, who still own some of the catalogue.

The name derives from "Mo'Wax Please", the title of a column James Lavelle wrote in the magazine Straight No Chaser and the Oxford club night he ran. This in turn was influenced by the Freddie Roach LP, Mo' Greens Please on Blue Note records.

The original Mo' Wax logo as used on the early releases was designed by UK graphic designer Ian Swift "Swifty" and the label grew their reputation by featuring artwork contributions from Futura, Robert Del Naja (from Massive Attack), She One, Req1  and Kostas Seremetis. Ben Drury and Will Bankhead were the main designers responsible for the art direction and design of the label.

The label also released toys and art prints under their Mo' Wax Arts (MWA) imprint, and collaborated with artists such as Mark Gonzales, Mike Mills, and Money Mark.

The label shut in 2002 and was celebrated in 2014 with an exhibition titled "Urban Archaeology: 21 years of Mo' Wax".

In 2015, Lavelle licensed back the Mo'Wax label to release Elliott Power's "Murmur" single as a limited edition hand stamped 12" vinyl. On 26 February 2016, Elliott Power's debut album, Once Smitten, was released on Mo'Wax in collaboration with Marathon Artists. This is the labels most recent release.

Discography

 * MW 001 Repercussions – Promise
 * MW 002 The Federation – Flower to the Sun
 * MW 003 V.A. – Royaltie$ Overdue
 * MW 004 Marden Hill – Come On (12")
 * MW 005 RPM – Food of My De-Rhythm (12")
 * MW 006 The Federation – Life So Free (12")
 * MW 007 Mistura – Coast to Coast (12")
 * MW 008 Bubbatunes – This Is Just A Dance (12")
 * MW 009 Palm Skin Productions – Time & Space EP (12")
 * MW 010 V.A. – Jazz Hip Jap Project
 * MW 015 The Federation – Remix E.P. (12")
 * MW 018 RPM – 2000 / Sortie Des Ombres
 * MW 025 DJ Krush – Strictly Turntablized
 * MW 026 V.A. -Headz
 * MW 034 Money Mark – Mark's Keyboard Repair
 * MW 037 Rob Dougan – Clubbed to Death
 * MW 039 DJ Krush – Meiso
 * MW 046 Dr Octagon – Dr. Octagonecologyst
 * MW 059 DJ Shadow – Endtroducing.....
 * MW 061 V.A. – Headz 2A
 * MW 062 V.A. – Headz 2B
 * MW 064 Dr Octagon – Instrumentalyst (Octagon Beats)
 * MW 072 Luke Vibert – Big Soup
 * MW 073 Sukia – Contacto Espacial Con El Tercer Sexo
 * MW 077 DJ Krush – MiLight
 * MW 078 Liquid Liquid – Liquid Liquid
 * MW 080 Attica Blues – Attica Blues
 * MW 082 V.A. – The Original Artform
 * MW 085 UNKLE – Psyence Fiction
 * MW 088 DJ Krush – Holonic-The Self Megamix
 * MW 090 Money Mark – Push The Button
 * MW 099 Andrea Parker – Kiss My Arp
 * MW 101 V.A. – Time Machine (mixed by Psychonauts)
 * MW 102 Urban Tribe – The Collapse of Modern Culture
 * MW 104 Tommy Guerrero – A Little Bit of Somethin'
 * MW 105 Major Force West – 93–97
 * MW 110 V.A. – Quannum Spectrum
 * MW 112 Blackalicious – Nia
 * MW 115 DJ Assault – Belle Isle Tech
 * MW 121 DJ Magic Mike – The Journey (Era of Bass Part 1)
 * MW 122 Divine Styler – Wordpower, Vol. 2: Directrix
 * MW 129 Nigo – Ape Sounds
 * MW 132 South – From Here on In
 * MW 141 David Axelrod – David Axelrod
 * MW 143 Malcom Catto – Popcorn Bubble Fish
 * MW 145 V.A. – Now Thing
 * MW 152 Malcom Catto – Bubblefish Breaks
 * MW 155 Jordan Fields - Moments in Dub
 * MW 158 Tommy Guerrero – Soul Food Taqueria
 * MW 159 Parsley Sound – Parsley Sounds
 * MWU 001 UNKLE – Never, Never, Land

title: Mo' Wax