The Beginnings of Sports

The Beginnings of Sports

People have always enjoyed competing against each other. In prehistoric times, a humor who could run fast and throw a stone or spear accurately was a valued member of the tribe.

The ancient Greeks included athletics in many of their religious festivals. In 776 BC, they held a festival of sport to honor Zeus, the greatest of the Greek gods. Athletes from all over the country gathered in a stadium in valley of Olympia to test their speed, strength and skill in the first Olympic Games. These games were held every four years, and for a long time only males were allowed to watch and take part in the races. The games continued  for several centuries after the Romans conquered Greece, until the Roman Emperor Theodosius I ended them in AD 394. Almost 1,500 years later, the ruins of the Olympic stadium were discovered by archaeologists. Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin suggested holding a modern, international Olympic Games. The first games of the new ear of the Olympics were held in Athens in 1896.

Hail the Champion

Today's victorious Olympic champions receive gold medals. Sporting heroes of ancient Greece were crowned with wreaths made from laurel leaves, as shown on this vase.

Race in Armor

The oddest foot race at the ancient Olympics – the hoplite race – was introduced in 520 BC. Contestants, naked except for their leg-protectors and helmets, had to carry their shields while they ran the race.

Sports in Ancient Greece. Photo by Elena.

Sporting spectacular

In 680 BC. Four-horse chariot races were added to the program of the 25th Olympic Games. As many as 40 chariots crashed, jostled and maneuvered their way around the course marked out in the hippodrome.

The Olympic Torch

The lighting of the flame is the high point of the opening ceremony at the modern Olympic Games. Since 1936, this custom has served as a reminder of the beginnings of this festival. A lighted torch is carried by relay runners from Olympia in Greece, site of the original Olympics, to the city where the modern games are to be held. This torch is used to light the Olympic flame that burns above the stadium throughout the festival. The flame is seen as a symbol of nations and athletes competing peacefully in the spirit of sport.

Discus Hero

Among the sports to have survived from the earliest Olympics is discus throwing. The ancient Greek vase shows a discus thrower placing or withdrawing the peg that is used to mark the distance the discus has been thrown. 

Central Park - New York

Central Park - Manhattan - New York

The  New York Central Park was established in 1857 on 778 acres of land acquired by the city of New York. In 1858, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect/landscape designer Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they titled the "Greensward Plan". Construction began the same year, and the park's first area was opened to the public in the winter of 1858. Construction north of the park continued during the American Civil War in the 1860s, and the park was expanded to its current size in 1873. 

After a period of decline in the early 20th century, Robert Moses started a program to clean up Central Park. Another decline in the late 20th century spurred the creation of the Central Park Conservancy in 1980, which refurbished many parts of the park during the 1980s and 1990s.

Here come some views of the park. All the pictures have been taken by Elena.

Central Park was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1963, which in April 2017 placed it on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The park is frequented by various migratory birds during their spring and fall migration on the Atlantic Flyway. 

In 1979, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis established the Office of Central Park Administrator, appointing to the position the executive director of another citizen organization, the Central Park Task Force.

Pond. The park contains several natural-looking lakes and ponds that have been created artificially by damming natural seeps and flows.

Medieval Fight.

Arch under a bridge.

Rocks in the park.

Simon Bolivar.

Lonely trails.

 There is a large area of woods in addition to seven major lawns, the meadows.

There is an all-volunteer ambulance service, the Central Park Medical Unit, that provides free emergency medical service to patrons of Central Park and the surrounding streets.

The 6 miles (9.7 km) of drives within the park are used by joggers, cyclists, skateboarders, and inline skaters, especially when automobile traffic is prohibited, on weekends and in the evenings after 7:00 pm.

The park has many minor grassy areas; some of them are used for informal or team sports and some set aside as quiet areas; there are a number of enclosed playgrounds for children.

Flowers-blue-and-white on the roof.

While planting and land form in much of the park appear natural, it is in fact almost entirely landscaped. 

Monument to Jose Marti, the Cuban prophet.

An enchanted forest. A beautiful landscape at dark purple sunlight or moonlight.

The Central park has its own New York City Police Department precinct—the Central Park Precinct—which employs both regular police and auxiliary officers.

First Civilizations

The First Civilizations

The first civilizations. Sumer and Egypt, flourished beside great rivers between 5000 and 500 BC. Sumerian village prospered on the flat plains watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, while the flooding waters of the River Nile left fertile silt for Egyptian farmers to sow their crops.

These large societies organized their resources. They developed irrigation systems to direct and control the floodwaters, and store them for later use. They invented the plow and the wheel, which they used for chariots and to make pottery. People made laws to govern society and developed their knowledge of subjects such as mathematics.

New groups in society, such as priests ans skilled craftspeople, began to emerge. The Egyptians and Sumerians exchanged local produce at regional centers, but they also traded outside their own countries for goods they needed, such as timber. They began to keep records of their trade, and early systems of writing developed. The fist civilizations were large and successful. They were the basis for the way society is organized today.

Jewels from afar

Trade in precious stones gave Sumerians jewelers new materials to use. This necklace is made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian from the Indus Valley.

Royal Skin

Egyptian royalty and priests sometimes wore the skins of exotic animals. Princess Nefertiabt wore the skin of a leopard.

Human Civilization. Photo by Elena.

Wind Power

By about 3200 BC, the Egyptian had invented sails to pwer their boats, rather than relying on oars. This enabled them to explore father for trade.

For the Queen's Court

The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut sent a trade expedition wodn the Red Sea to the ancient land of Punt. The Egyptians loaded their ships with frankincese trees, elephants' tusks, ebony, gold, spices and exotic animals such as panthers.

Written Words

Ancient people inscribed pictures on stone and clay to record events, actions, or details of trade. This stone tablet is a very early example of record keeping in Sumer. Its pictures show how much grain was traded. Pictographs, however, soon became more abstract symbols. The Sumerians developed wedge-shaped cuneiform (from the Latin for wedge) characters, which they wrote on clay tablets with a pointed instrument called a stylus. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus or inscribed their tombs and temples with a picture writing called hieroglyphs.  

The Dreamers

The Dreamers

By Stephen Baxter

From the beginning, even when the universe was still very young, there was life.

Life self-organized, from collections of more or less simple chemicals, blindly following the laws of chemistry and physics, guided by mathematical rules evidently inherent in reality. Microbial life, single-cell life, viral life... Some scientists used to think life could have emerged even when the Big Ban glow was still bright, and the whole universe was warm enough to be one big habitable zone.

On world with similar surface conditions, similar kinds of life emerged... Life spread, too, as rogue comets and asteroids blasted the surfaces of the young worlds, and handfuls of bugs buried deep in rock fragments survived chance journeys between the planets, and, more rarely, between the stars. Panspermia bubbles formed, worlds with similar conditions hosting related forms of life, sharing common origins. Across the Galaxy such bubbles jostled, and even permeated; world of warm-Earth life could share stellar systems with worlds of cold-Titan life, as you've seen for yourselves.

And life spread inward too, down into the guts of the world, following deep water flows, mineral seeps, leaks of heat energy, radioactivity... The interiors of worlds, too deep even for the immense bombardments of the young cosmos to do any damage, were warm, safe cradles in those early days, and life got down there pretty quickly – on Earth we found deep bugs all over the world, all of similar species. The deep rock is a static shelter, though, and relatively starved of energy. Life was slow to spread, even slow to procreate. To survive on such thin resources, living things learned to repair rather than to reproduce. But gradually a kind of complexity grew and spread, as the microbes gathered themselves into mutually supportive colonies, and the colonies combind into supercolonies.

A threshold was passed. Consciousness emerged.

The Dreamers. Photo by Elena.

On Earth, most of the biomass of the planet – most of its weight of living stuff – dwells in the deep subsurface rocks. For most of their history, humans never even suspected it existed. And it is aware, a constellation of huge, slow minds. These are the Dreamers. They remember their birth, when the universe was young.

And world after world woke up...

From the beginning the great communities of Dreamers apprehended something of the universe around them.

They sensed the early battering of their worlds by the debris of planetary formation. They were tugged by the subtle tides exerted by their worlds' parent stars and sister planets. They could feel the slow geological evolution of their host world – an evolution shaped from the beginning by life itself; there's evidence that the presence of life on a planet like Earth, for instance, even helps stabilize the formation of continents.

Even multicellular life, when it evolved – infrequently, sporadically – served as a kind of sensory mechanism for the living worlds.

For some worlds, given the right conditions, with an atmosphere reasonably transparent to the parent star's radiation, energy could pour down from the sky onto the land and into the upper layers of the oceans, and the familiar miracles of complex life could come about. Photosynthesis, a chemical means to exploit the energy of stellar radiation. Grand rebuildings of oceans and atmospheres through the injections of such gases as oxygen or methane. The evolution of secondary forms of life – like Earth's animals – to feed off those products. But the outer layers of complex planetary life, so important to creatures like humans, were all but an irrelevance to the Dreamers. They only ever amounted to a trivial fraction of any world's total biomass. And the complex creatures were usually not even aware of the noostrata that pemeated the rocks beneath their feet.

Yet, through the frantic reactions of the complex forms, animals and plants, to external events like asteroid strikes or stellar flares or supernova explosions, the Dreamers came to know the universe in more detail.

Even then, far back in cosmic time, the Dreamers began to get the first hints of the approach of the End Time.

And then there was communication, between Dreamer worlds.

Dreamers worlds. Illustration by Elena.

Expatriates

Expatriates

A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

By James Wesley, Rawles

Wyndhamites

“Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even mor so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.”

(Aaron Zelman and L.Neil Smith, Hope, 2001.

Wyndham, Western Australia – Late November, Western Australia – Late November, the Second Year

Peter and Joseph snugged up the mooring lines at the pier while Tatang shut down the engine. They began unloading the suitcases from Tiburon, carrying them up a ribbed aluminum gangway ramp, which had rollers at the end to adjust for the tide. A woman from the crowd stepped up the Rhiannon and  said, “My name is Vivian and you're all welcome to stay at our house in Wyndham East while you get things sorted out.”

“God bless you, ma'am,” Rhiannon replied.

They were told that the pier was primarily used for exports of live cattle, cattle hides, lead, and zinc. The barge nearby was laden with zinc ingots nominally bound for South Korea, but the shipment was delayed by the international financial turmoil. The pier operator offered them three nights of free anchorage at the pier or indefinite free anchorage amid the larger group of yachts farther out, where a skiff would be required to reach them. Tatang opted for the latter.

After they had unloaded the baggage and their two GPS receivers, they borrowed skiff from the harbormaster and anchored Tiburon using a permanent buoy at the fore and and a concrete anchor at the aft.

With the engine still hot, Tatang gingerly removed the Mitsubishi engine's fuel pump and wrapped it in rags and then a pair of bread bags. The pump went into his duffel bag. He told Jeffords, “Nobody is starting her motor without this.”

Expatriates. Photo by Elena.

Vivian soon had them and their bags loaded in her Toyota Estima minivan. Rhiannon was impressed with how quickly and with such wordless economy of motion the woman attached the baggage to the car's roof rack with bungee cords. She looked like she had a lot of experience doing it. Her full name, Alvis Edwards, was a broker in both salt and exotic hardwoods.

In just a few minutes, they were at Vivian's home in Wyndham East. It was a large house and one of the few in town that had a swimming pool. The great room was lined with taxidermied trophy heads from three continents – mostly from Africa. A childless couple, the Edwards' passion was big game hunting. Vivian told them that they had taken many hunting trips to Africa, Canada, the United States, and even Argentina. The floor was mostly covered with tanned hides of everything from bears to zebras. The backs of the couches were draped with gazelle hides. Joseph spent a long a long time examining the trophy mount collection of such magnitude before and they were fascinated. Tatang observed that it was like walking into a museum. To Rhiannon, it was reminiscent of living room of the house near Bella Coola where she had grown up, though her old house had a much smaller number of deer, elk, and caribou mounts.

(About the author: Former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and survivalist James Wesley, Rawles, is a well-known survival lecturer and author Rawles is the editor of SurvivalBlog.com – the nation's most popular blog on family preparedness. He lives in an undisclosed location west of the Rockies and is the author of the bestselling Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse; Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse; and a nonfiction survival guide, How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It).