July 31 2024 - Running with the Ball

 

We love to run. And with a ball in our hands, it seems even more fulfilling.  It starts very young, I think. That's my theory to explain why there are so many ball running sports.  Whether the ball is in our hands, that's a big item of comparison.  Here's what the summaries are for how the sports differ: Football, rugby, and soccer each have rules and regulations specific to them. In football, 11 players are on the field for the 60-minute game, and points range from 6 points (touchdown) to 1 point (kick). In rugby, 15 players are on the field for the 80-minute game, and the ball cannot be passed forward in a game. In soccer, 11 players are on the field for the 90-minute game, and players cannot use their hands.  Soccer is a game where a player predominantly soccers the ball around. Rugby is a game where the players predominantly throw the ball backwards and run forwards and may be tackled. Football is a game which involves some kicking of the ball. Rugby is the most brutal and dangerous of all three sports The scoring systems of Football and Rugby are very similar Rugby players use the least amount of equipment between all three sports Substitutions in Rugby are only available upon serious injuries It looks like Football has different variations in different countries.  It seems to me that American and Canadian football are substantially different than football in Commonwealth-based countries.  Is that the case? What are some questions people ask? Is rugby harder than football? Rugby often stands out as a tougher and more challenging game Is rugby more posh than football? There are two types of rugby: Rugby League and Rugby Union. In England, Rugby Union is often viewed as a middle/upper class version of football (soccer) and is sometimes called 'rugger'.  Why is rugby less popular than football?  The complexity of the game Why do Americans insist on calling the game they play with their hands "football" and the game they play with their feet "soccer"?  ... many answers follow...all very entertaining HERE. Maybe balls and running extends to many species.  What about balls and dogs?  I found this joke below in a search on my MAC. Here is a soccer ball - this one was in the financial district a few years ago at the BMO headquarters - they were promoting young people's soccer sponsorship.

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Jan 8 2022 - Getting to Beijing in 2022

 

What is the status of sports in 2022?  The Olympics is slated to start Friday Feb 4 and finish on Sunday Feb 20th.   We'll all be at home again, but what will there be to watch? The big news this week was Tennis star Novak Djokovic. His lawyers filed court papers Saturday in his challenge against deportation from Australia.  They show the tennis star tested positive for COVID-19 last month and recovered, grounds he used in applying for a medical exemption to the country's strict vaccination rules. But it has since emerged that the Victoria state medical exemption, allowed for people who tested positive for the coronavirus within the last six months, was deemed invalid by the federal border authorities. And the Olympics? We've known for a short time that the NHL opted out of the 2022 Olympics. Various diplomats will not be there - while it was billed as a boycott, maybe that's now looking like self-preservation. And athletes are testing positive so won't be able to compete in their finals to get to the Olympics.  Such a strange turn of events, given there was so much hype that the athletes want their 'chance to compete'.   Here's what the Canadian Press said yesterday: "The Beijing Games open in exactly one month, but the competition has already started. The challenge: getting the country's top athletes to China without testing positive for COVID-19, an ominous and invisible threat that few could have seen coming just a few weeks ago. If an athlete tests positive for COVID-19 in the next month, they must provide three negative PCR tests and then submit that documentation to the Beijing Olympic committee (BOCOG). It's up to BOCOG to clear the athlete to travel to China. All participants are also required to provide two negative PCR tests before boarding their flight to Beijing, within 96 and 72 hours of travel." Various aspects are covered in the article HERE.  Not just athletes themselves, but the cancellation of qualifications is a problem.  And then one reads about teams in 'bubbles' to stay safer.  Staff for the event are scheduled to report to the Beijing bubble on Tuesday and then have no contact with the outside community.  It would seem that the Olympics Committee and China are determined to win against the Pandemic.  With or without athletes there for competition.   Here are some experiments with Filter Forge software - another distortion program.  The original is the first picture - in camera multi-exposure of our translucent plastic garbage can in the sun

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Aug 2 2021 - When sports isn't fun

 

It is weird to me is that there is no time limit on sports events.  I found an article on all the longest occurring sports events. There's a tennis match that took 11 hours covering 3 days. A baseball game in 1981 started at 7 pm and continued until 4 am and it wasn't finished. That game was stopped and started back up in two months and had 32 innings. In the Olympics, the notable record is for the longest wrestling match in the history of the games. It took more than 11 hours.  Alfred Asikainen vs. Martin Klein (1912) is considered one of the most epic of sporting battles. It had a political sub-plot: Estonian wrestler Martin Klein (who had decided to represent Russia) met Finland's Alfred Asikainen at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Despite Russia having dominion over Finland, the Finnish were allowed to fly their own flag, much to the chagrin of the Russians.  When the two wrestlers met in the semi-finals, neither wanted to let their respective motherlands down. Their 11 hour and 40 minute duel was almost inevitable. In the end it was the Russian who came out on top.  Klein was so exhausted he couldn't fight in the final the next day, automatically handing the gold medal to a Swedish wrestler. Asikainen, on the other hand, returned home a nationalist hero. Today we have an interpretive lily picture - the lilies have mostly finished blooming in the field. The tomatoes take over our attention now.

April 20 2021 - Sports headlines

 

Somewhere in the history of sports writing came this question:  "Do you ever wonder why a grammatically correct sentence you’ve written just lies there like a dead fish?" And the answer to this worry was the hundreds of sports verbs.  To be fair, describing 'actions' in an interesting way takes some creativity.   There is a universal love and appreciation of sports.  It has been magnified in the 20th century with newspaper, radio and television.   I am biased and had thought it is about keeping the reader's/viewer's attention to the written words or the replay. Something that's already happened seems a bit like getting leftovers for dinner, so how to make leftovers appealing?. I thought I would find dozens of articles on the funniest sports writing - the most extreme verbs and sentences, etc.  This is because there are numerous articles on the sports verb. There are hundreds of words full of activity and action awaiting the writer and announcer. But actually finding them proved elusive.  A article says that the worst column written about sports ever published was by celebrated N.Y. Times writer, David Brooks on Jeremy Lin.  But it isn't bad writing.  A sports writer apologizes for "worst piece of sports journalism ever" - he used a framing device of a real person who had been  abducted and held captive for 18 years to review sports activities in the 18 year period that the person missed.  That might be tops on horrible mistakes. There's lots on the best in sports, the greatest sports moments - are the 200, 51 or 21?  Are you ready for the greatest sports headlines ever?  Most are unrepeatably bad taste and sexist - sex-oriented puns on player surnames.  Think "balls" and you can imagine the treasure trove.  So they might in fact be the "worst". My conclusion for the day:  Oh well, that was worth a try.  Here's the miniature world of alpine rock garden displays.     Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Apr 5 2020 - Sportscasters Triumph

Sportscasters are doing all kinds of interesting things to keep themselves busy. This article has Nick Heath's everyday play-by-plays.  They have titles such as "International's 4x4 Pushchair Formation Final. Live." and "After the lunch break now..."  His Twitter Account is HERE.  I scrolled down to a retweet in which Michael Spicer is interacting with a President Trump announcement.  HERE. While Sports is all quiet, there still is a sport that is proceeding - wrestling. The top google search is WrestleMania 36 with over 1 million searches.  Its distinction is that it went ahead without an audience.  I gather in wrestling, the audience has a significant role, and wrestlers wrestle/play to the audience.  I learned all this from the CBC in an interview with a wrestling news journalist.  It turns out that the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is famously eccentric Vince McMahon.  He is now 'treating COVID like it's a sneeze'.  Part of his eccentricity is his phobia/bias against sneezing which is well documented. What else did I learn about wrestling?  I learned it may be included in 'sports', but it is more in the range of circus/fantasy action character events.  Here's how I got to this conclusion:  "In a recent segment, crossover star John Cena confronted Bray Wyatt, a children's puppet show host who wrestles as a killer clown alter-ego called The Fiend." "Pro wrestling fans never know which version of Reagan Belan they're going to get when she first steps into the ring on any given night:  My last show, I was a unicorn. I've been Mrs. Potato Head. I've been a senior citizen. I have a tag team called The Monarchy, where I am Queen Elizabeth and my tag-team partner is Queen Victoria," said Belan, a.k.a. Glory S. Gamms, when performing for Vancouver's Glam Slam Wrestling league." Our picture today is a garden in Niagara-on-the-Lake with a nice arbour and garden gate.  Rather than a driveway it now has a fountain.

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March 30 2020 - It's Hendrix with a Right

There haven't been any sports games for months now.  The CBC did an interview with Colorado Avalanche commentator Conor McGahey.  That's because he has been recording play-by-play of fans' pet fights.  He says its is harder than a hockey game:   "[Cats are] a little less predictable because hockey fights, you know the sequence … and it's a little bit easier to predict," he said. "With cats, you have no idea what they're going to do. Maybe they don't know what they're going to do either. "They got paws, they got tails, they just stop in the middle for 30 seconds and stare at each other, and they just bring the punches back out of nowhere."  The hashtag is #Keepinghockeyalive - scroll down to see Moxie and Sagan, then Indy and MJ, and go down to Hendrix vs Jack - that's the one that the CBC played on the radio that got me interested. It's all here   Today's picture is a driftwood log on Salt Spring Island.

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From Major to Minor

We've completed Children's Day and move on to adults.  We go from the minors to the majors with the expression "age of majority". "The age of majority is a legally fixed age and idea of adulthood which is different in different places.  It may not match the actual maturity of a person's body or mind.  The age of majority is 18 in the vast majority of jurisdictions, but ages as low as 15 and as high as 21 exist in some". ~ Wikipedia And from Duhaime's Law Dictionary: "An age generally specified by statute, at which time, upon an individual is given the full gamut of legal rights and responsibilities generally available to an adult of sound mind". There seem to be a number of definitions and uses of the terms major and minor. There are minor and the major leagues in baseball. Association football (soccer) also has this distinction and terminology.  Minor leagues in North America are professional sports leagues which are not regarded as the premier leagues in those sports. Most have minor teams but don't refer to their professional league as 'major'.  In sports, the ideal path is to go from minor to major.  Someone could get demoted and end up in the minors after a career in the majors. In music, though, major and minor have more flexibility. We definitely can go from major to minor.  We go from the brighter, cheerier sound, to the minor scale with its darker, sadder sound.  We can turn major key songs into minor key songs and vice versa.  We can swing back and forth in one song.  Much more flexibility in music than there is in sports or legal definitions of age. Our pictures today are made with Flaming Pear's India Ink and Flood filters.  I had them a few years ago and forgot to replace them with my latest computer.  What a delight to find them again.

Notre Dame University - The Biggest Marching Band in Practise

Hi everyone,

We stopped in South Bend, IN on our first day of travelling to Kansas City (well Overland Park, south of Kansas City).  Our hotel was at the entrance to the University.  It's a glorious place with its famous football team. The sports stadium is the biggest structure on the campus, and everywhere it's 'Those Fighting Irish'.  I could hear fabulous music coming from the campus and knew this was special.  It was the marching band practise.  There must have been at least 500 musicians all in sections/rows numbered and organized.  There were 3 conductors on ladders and a loudspeaker system.  The sound was fantastic and the music was wonderful.  I didn't include the picture of the official coming towards me to ask my affiliation.  'Amateur photographer' was my reply.  'With any newspapers?' was the quick comeback.  I can imagine the level of coverage this band gets.