Cricket

Cricket has been a structured adult game since the 17th century when it first took the fancy of English gentlemen lying low in their country estates at the time of the Civil War. It became fashionable after the restoration under the sponsorship of powerful aristocratic patrons.

By the later eighteenth century control of this fashionable and profitable new leisure activity was in the hands of a number of gentlemen's clubs. By the nineteenth century these had evolved into county organizations which, led by Marylebone Cricket Club, subsequently dominated English cricket. Their influence spread throughout the British Empire and survived the transition to the Commonwealth.

In England, the emerging public schools, believing that cricket fostered qualities of manliness and leadership, proclaimed it to be more than a game, in fact an institution. Poets and parsons praised its ethical qualities. By the turn of the century cricket had come to assume profound political significance, especially for imperialists. An Indian prince declared it to be the finest flower of Empire, and in Australia cricket captains played a leading part in welding together the separate colonies into a nation.

After the First World War, the dream-world began to crumble. At home the golden age gave way to unromantic but remarkably effective professionalism. The Test matches survived bodyline and grew in importance.

The Second World War was no more than a temporary interruption of play. After the War was over, despite the world's having changed for worse again, the spiritual significance of cricket was reasserted with undiminished enthusiasm. A well-loved Australian Prime Minister described it as a fine art as well as a game. A great British Prime Minister, and a socialist told of his childhood indoctrination with the belief that cricket was a religion and W.G. next to the Almighty.

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Foot ball

Football did not actually begin to take on any constancy of rules and limitations until it was chosen up as a sport in the seven major public schools of England in the early 1800’s. Six of the seven schools were mostly playing the same game while the seventh, Rugby School established in 1567 was playing a markedly different version of football.
The other schools moved in front cleansing their rules and ultimately their game became known as association football or soccer, which was played back then much as it is today. Rugby School went in a diverse direction. Rugby School come into views to have been lost in history, but what is known is that by the 1830's, running with the ball at Rugby School was in common use and 18 foot goal posts had been added with a cross bar at 10 feet above the ground.
The addition of the cross bar was accompany by a rule that a goal could only be achieved by the ball passing over the bar from a place kick or drop kick. Actually this was completed to make scoring easier from additional out and also to avoid the horde of defenders standing in and overcrowding the mouth of the goal.

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Bill Gates

Any one, who wants to study the progress of the computer, particularly software, is conscious of what might be called the Legend of Bill Gates, who’s unattractive, DOS OS, acquired from someone else, but endorsed to fame by then leading IBM to avoid the antitrust breakup that had then just hit AT&T, came to dominate the market. In Boca Raton, where the IBM PC was urbanized, some of us used to fun that PC, meant "piece of crap," and that is still true of Micro Soft, especially some of its recent invention farces! It is possibly among the least innovative companies in history. [See the film, "Pirates of Silicon Valley" for a small part of this story.]
Bill Gates and his hirelings such as Michael Kinsley, continue to endorse that legend, with what has become a fabric of lies, around the supposed smarts of Gates' and his newly discovered "Creative entrepreneurship." When he accepted his voluntary degree from Harvard, the drop-out expediently mislaid the role of his dead mother Mary, in talking IBM's CEO into giving DOS a shot. IBM's organization choose DOS over the advice of its own engineers accurately because of its poor quality as they predictable, wrongly it turned out, they could take over the OS feature as well as hardware, after the heat was off with respect to antitrust.

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