Monday, July 31, 2006

Bugger!

Saturday, parker's piece. Cricket ensues against Saaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuttttttoooonnnnnn. Or at least that's how their village name sounded to me.
we lost, again. I smashed my finger. Bugger. Still, could be worse, I could have got a duck!

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Buying some quality

I am in the market for a new DVD player with speakers. At the minute a deal at cUrry'S seems to be the best bet. Looking to spend around £150-£200. Any ideas?

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Makes my team's middle order look good

Another few days after losing yet another games this season, comes this news.
All out for nought!

The pitch might have been a nightmare, but no runs!

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

more gazing

First of all - Newcastle actually bought a player the other day - Damien Duff from Chelskov for £5million. A good piece of business for a change, well done Fat Fred. Here's hoping he plays more games than the last big signing we made.
Secondly - Played cricket on saturday, we lost, i batted in the rain for an hour and then fielded in the rain for two hours. ARSE! Now my throat hurts and I seem to be sniffing all the time.
Thirdly - If I have to listen to more big brother related gossip, I think i'll scream. NOT EVERYBODY IS INTERESTED IN A BUNCH OF DESPERATE MEDIA WHORES.

rant over.

Quickie though - I am due to make the cricket teas on saturday. Any ideas for different sandwich fillings?

Sunday, July 23, 2006

3

three years gone, older now. wiser now. it's a shame.

still, Newcastle got through to the UEFA Cup last night, 3-0 away. I thought we had no goal scorers - waitaminute - i've seen Luque and Shola play - we haven't got any strikers.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

More stuff - I know nobody actually reads this so.......

Hey ho - been not so busy at work but getting homke very knackered after swimming to hence no posts - I will get back to my occasional series on cambridge colleges at the weekend (if the bandwidth is okay after all - but that is another story).

so, I was bored at lunchtime the other day and started going through my cricket stats for NCI. What a total shower of shite they are - here for your viewing pleasure through the magic of a pencil and a piece of paper.

2003 - Debut season
1st Game - Vs Harwick and SHepreth - scored 7 runs
vs Willingham - Did not bat
Vs Newmarket - scored 2
Vs Cottenham - scored 32 not out - that's better
vs Fordham - Scored 98 - much better (still should have had a ton though)
vs Sawston - scored 7 - arse
vs Hardwick & Shepreth - 47 - better
vs Comberton - Did not bat
vs Fordham - scored 1 - bugger
so all told - scored 194 runs at an average of 32.33.

2004 - start of the nightmare
vs Fordham - 24 runs
vs Sawston - 7 runs
vs Hardwick & Shepreth - 10 runs
vs Hissssssston - 6 runs
vs Granta Vths - 0 runs - first duck
vs Camden - 2 runs
vs Hisssssston - 8 runs
vs Girton - 30 scored - better
vs Newmarket - 8 runs
vs Milton - 0 runs - 2nd duck
all in all - 95 runs at an average of9.5.

2005 - it gets even worse
vs Pymoor - 1 run
vs WImblington - did not bat - scherby scored 154 though!
vs Doddngton - 27 runs
vs Isleham - 4 runs
vs Milton - 13 runs
vs WImblington - 13 runs
vs Pymoor - 12 runs
vs Coton - 13 runs
vs Doddington - 0 runs - 3rd duck
vs March - 2 runs
85 runs at an average of 9.44 - pitiful

2006 - my knee is knackered in January and I shouldn't be playing - however, we are frequently short so I thought i'd play a couple of games
vs Sawston - 19 runs
vs Dullingham - 51 runs - the day I top-edged a ball into my own chin - see earlier pics for that
vs Whittlesford - OLD TEAM - 7 runs
vs Whittlesford - 30 runs
vs March Town - 37 not out

this year is working a lot better -= well onward to better scores hopefully

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Short again

Been busy this week - not many posts to think about. However, yesterday the team were short again so I was promoted to the threes in their game against the plastic-pitch meisters of March.

So, the firsts won, the seconds won (who had over half of the threes) and the thirds and fourths lost. but I did something I have never done before. I carried my bat from opening till the end. didn't score many runs but now I now that if needed I can block up an end and allow the other batsman to score.

excellent.

Friday, July 07, 2006

Star Wars

Just been sent this from Will b

He's just sent me this
Star Wars Genius
"What the hell is an ALuminium Falcon"?

Damo

The 7th of July

Just a quickie here.
I do not support terrorism, and I definitely do not support suicide bombers. But...........

1 - The UK will become more and more of a target for terrorists if the Prime Minister continues to support George W Bush in his war on all muslims.
2 - The UK forces will continue to be in danger when we say nothing about the USC Army's continued war crimes in Iraq.(14 year old girl raped and then her and her family murdered by a squad of marines?, the massacre of an entire family in Haditha?, Guantanamo Bay?, Extraordinary Renditions?) - funny that they are not in the news anymore (BBC impartiality - my arse).
3 - The UK will become more and more of a target for terrorists if we continue to stand idly by while Israel continues to murder innocent civilians in Palestine. Here's something the media didn't report too much of - the Kidnapped Israeli soldier was kidnapped in revenge for a kidnapping attempt by the Israeli army two nights beforehand. funny how that wasn't on the news.
4 - The UK soldiers in Afghanistan will continue to be killed by the Taliban as they are defending their homeland against foreign aggressors. All the UK has to do is to pull out of there and let the americans stay there. Also, at least if the UK pulls out of Iraq and Afghanistan then the US will have to start actually trying to hit their enemies, as they are sooooooo good at killing British soldiers in acts of friendly fire.
anyway - rant over for now.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Cambridge Colleges - Part 3 - Clare College



You know the form by now, so here goes.

Clare College.



Clare College is the second oldest of Cambridge’s thirty-one colleges. It was founded in 1326, and generously endowed a few years later by Lady Elizabeth de Clare (Lady de Burgh), a granddaughter of King Edward I (1272-1307). In 1336 King Edward III (1327-77) granted licence ‘to his cousin Elizabeth de Burgo’ to establish a collegium; although it was in the first instance referred to unspecifically as ‘the House of the University of Cambridge’, it became known as Clare Hall as early as 1339 (the present ‘Clare’, dates from 1856).

The original endowment consisted of estates at Great Gransden and Duxford, and provided for the maintenance of a maximum of fifteen ‘Scholars’ (subsequently to be called ‘Fellows’), of whom no more than six were bound strictly by priestly orders. Provision was also made for ten ‘poor scholars’ (pauperes or ‘students’), who were to be maintained by the college up to the age of twenty. In 1359, a year before her death, Lady Elizabeth de Clare instituted a set of statutes by which the new college was to be governed. The remarkably enlightened attitude to learning and university education in these statutes has guided the college for nearly seven centuries: ‘the knowledge of letters ... when it hath been found, it sendeth forth its students, who have tasted of its sweetness, fit and proper members in God’s Church and the State, to rise to diverse heights, according to the claim of their deserts.’

The history of Clare in its earliest days in the later fourteenth century is not well recorded (a fire in 1521 destroyed most of the college’s early documents), and there only exists little more than a list of names of those who were the college’s Masters, of whom the first was Walter de Thaxted. During the fifteenth century, however, the college fought successfully to remain independent of the jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop of Ely. In 1439, a generous bequest by William Bingham provided for the maintenance of a chaplain and twenty-four scholars housed in what was called ‘God’s House’ (the location of which lies beneath the present Old Schools); so, within a century or so of its foundation, Clare Hall had begun to grow in size.
In the early sixteenth century, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47), the nation was in turmoil as a result of the royally-driven movement to religious reform and rejection of papal control of the Church. Debate in Cambridge was as fierce as anywhere, and from the debate emerged one of the principal leaders of the English Reformation, and one of Clare’s greatest alumni, namely Hugh Latimer (1485-1555), who was elected as a Fellow of Clare in 1510, while still an undergraduate. Latimer was renowned for his blameless life, practical tact and trenchant oratory, and he soon rose to national prominence as a result of his preaching in favour of reform.

He became royal chaplain to Henry VIII in 1534 (and to Anne Boleyn) and bishop of Worcester in 1535; he was one of the king’s advisers who supported the dissolution of the monasteries. At the time of the violent counter-reformation under Queen Mary (1553-8), Hugh Latimer refused to recant his protestant beliefs, and, together with Nicholas Ridley (bishop of London), he was burned at the stake in Oxford on 16 October 1555. Although he is known to history as one of the ‘Oxford Martyrs’, he was in fact a Cambridge product and a Fellow of Clare college.

In spite of the turmoil caused by the Reformation, Clare Hall continued to grow in size and wealth during the sixteenth century. A number of endowments of land at Potton, Everton and Gamlingay allowed for an increase in the number of scholarships, and it soon became evident that the college buildings were inadequate to house the increasing numbers of its fellows and scholars. The present college buildings which surround the ‘Old Court’ were built over a period of seventy-seven years, from the mid-seventeenth-century to the early eighteenth (1638-1715). There is no record of the architect who designed these beautiful buildings, the prospect of which, looking across King’s College lawns, is one of the most famous in England. The building programme was prompted by the acquisition of land belonging to King’s across the river to the west of the college (Butt’s Close); accordingly the first new buildings to be constructed were the East and South Ranges (1638) and then the bridge (1639-40). The North and West Ranges, including the hall, were built in 1686-8, and the programme was completed with the construction of the Master’s Lodge in 1715. (The present chapel dates from a somewhat later time; its foundation stone was laid in 1763.)
Shortly after the completion of the North Range, accommodation for the Fellows’ Library was planned (1689-90); it was fitted out in something resembling its present form before 1738. The library possesses some thirty-five incunabula (books printed before 1500) and about 400 books printed in England before 1640; and although books continued to be acquired during the course of the eighteenth century, the Fellows’ Library is essentially a fossil of the seventeenth century. The thirty or so medieval manuscripts which the Library possesses are the result of acquisition in post-medieval times - most of them were acquired as a result of a bequest by John Heaver (d. 1670).

William Whiston (1667-1752) was Isaac Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University; and John Moore, sometime bishop of Ely (1707-14), is best known for the large collection of medieval manuscripts which he bequeathed to the University Library. It was also during the eighteenth century that the college numbered among its fellowship its only Poet Laureate: William Whitehead, who held that position - not, it must be said, with great distinction, judging from the subsequent reputation of his poetry - from 1757 to 1785.

It was during the twentieth century, particularly in the decades after the Great War, that numbers of students grew substantially, to the point where further accommodation became a necessity. Memorial Court was built during the 1920s to a design of Giles Gilbert Scott and dedicated in 1926. Much later the Forbes-Mellon library, intended principally for undergraduate use, was constructed in the large and open court of Memorial Court.

Notable Alumni -
Peter Ackroyd - Actor
Sir David Attenborough - Naturalist and TV pioneer.
Lord Charles Cornwallis - General in the USC War of Independence.
Nicholas Ferrar - Religious Leader
Seigfried Sassoon - War Poet
Richard Stilgoe - Musician
William Whiston - Lucasian Chair of Mathematics after Sir Isaac Newton
Andre Wiles - Celebrated thinker who proved Fermat's last theorem.

There are a lot more notable alumni, but that will have to do for now.

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Cambridge Colleges - Part 2 - Churchill College



Today's post is on Churchill College.
















In 1955 on holiday in Sicily soon after his resignation as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill discussed with Sir John Colville and Lord Cherwell the possibility of founding a new institution. Churchill had been impressed by MIT and wanted a British version, but the plans evolved to the more modest proposal of creating a Scientific and Technological based college within the University of Cambridge. Winston Churchill wanted a mix of non-scientists to ensure a well rounded education and environment for scholars and fellows.

The first postgraduate students arrived in October 1960, and the first undergraduates a year later. Full College status was received in 1966.

The bias to science and engineering remains as policy to the current day, with the statutes requiring approximately 70% science and technology students amongst the students. The college statutes also stipulate that one-third of Junior Members of the college should be advanced (postgraduate) students.

In 1958, a 42 acre (170,000 m²) site was purchased to the west of the city centre, which had previously been farmland. After a competition, Richard Sheppard was appointed to design the new college. Building was completed by 1968 with nine main residential courts, separate graduate flats and a central building consisting of the dining hall, buttery, combination rooms and offices.

In the centre of the college is the Churchill Archive Centre, opened in 1974 to provide a home to Sir Winston’s papers (and also more recently endowed with papers from Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock alongside those of eminent scientists, including Rosalind Franklin.
At the farthest end of the college is Churchill College Chapel. The idea of having a religious building within a modern, scientifically-oriented, academic institution deeply annoyed some of the original fellows, reputedly leading to the resignation of Francis Crick in protest. Eventually a compromise was found: the chapel was sited away from the other buildings, and funded and managed separately from the rest of the College itself, being tactfully referred to as "the Chapel at Churchill College". The chimney of the heating system at the front of the college substitutes visually for the missing chapel tower.

According to an anecdote, Crick had agreed to become a fellow on the basis that no chapel be placed in Churchill. A donation was later made byLord Beaumont of Whitley to Churchill College for the establishment of one, and the majority of fellows voted for it. Winston Churchill reputedly wrote to Crick, saying that no-one need enter the chapel except under free will so it need not be a problem. Crick, in short order, replied with a letter containing 10 guineas saying that if that were the case, here were 10 guineas for the establishment of a brothel.

Notable Alumni
Sir Christopher Frayling - Writer and Educationalist
Mike Gascoyne - Technical Director of the Toyota Formula One Team
Diarmid MacCulloch - historian
Ian Steward - Mathematician

Also, Churchill College grounds are the home base of the NCI (Cambridge New Chesterton Institute) Cricket Team's First Team.

Thanks To WikiPedia and The Cambridge University Website for this info.

Sunday, July 02, 2006

Cambridge Colleges - Part 1





















Part one of my ideas on Cambridge Colleges. So here goes.

Christs College - 1437ad
Christ's College was first established as God's House in 1437ad by William Byngham, a london priest for training grammar school masters. It received it's first Royal Charter in 1446 and was moved to it's present site in 1448 when it received it's second Royal Licence. In 1505 it was renamed Christ's College when endowed by Lady Margaret Beaufort (Mother of Henry VII).

Famous Alumni are :-
John Milton (1608-1674) - poet.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) - Naturalist, scientist.
Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979) - Soldier, Politician and Victim of the IRA.
Jan Smuts (1870-1950) - Soldier, Boer War Hero, Politician.
C P Snow (1905-1980) - Politician
David Mellor - Politician
Colin Dexter - Novelist
Simon Schama - Historian
Dr Rowan WIlliams - Current Archbishop of Canterbury
William Paley (1743-1805) - Author, Theologian and Philosopher

Following the death of her third husband, and the accession of her son as King Henry VII, the Lady Margaret Beaufort turned her energies to good causes. No doubt at the suggestion of her confessor, Bishop John Fisher, she decided to enlarge God's House. In 1505, with a royal charter from the King (see picture above), the College was re-founded as Christ's College. Lady Margaret has been honoured ever since as the Foundress.
Surviving the twists and turns of the Reformation, Christ's became one of the leading Puritan colleges of Elizabethan Cambridge. In 1625 it admitted the young John Milton, who would become a leading Puritan apologist of the Civil War and one of the greats of 'English' literature. The Garden still boasts what is known as 'Milton's Mulberry Tree'. The boom in student numbers in the seventeenth century required new accommodation, beyond the original College around what is now 'First Court'. The result was the beautiful 'Fellows' Building., built in the early 1640s after an appeal to Fellows and Old Members. This raised some five million pounds in today's money and we still have the list of donors.
Over the next century or so, Christ's was noted for several eminent scholars who sought to harmonise traditional Christian faith with the new truths of natural science. These included Cambridge Platonists such as, Ralph Cudworth, and William Paley, whose Evidences of Christianity (1794) remained set reading in Cambridge until the twentieth century.

But Paley's synthesis of religion and science was soon to be overturned by another Christ's man - Charles Darwin, who came up in 1828, and lived in Paley's old rooms in First Court. On the Origin of Species was published some thirty years later, but the young Darwin's interest in botany and geology was nurtured at Cambridge. The bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 2009 is another major anniversary that the College will be actively celebrating.

Like the rest of Cambridge, life at Christ's was transformed by the Victorians, with more rigorous exams, the rise of experimental science and the opening of the University to non-Anglicans. The first half of the twentieth century was scarred by two world wars, whose effect is movingly commemorated on the plaque in the Chapel. The College of the 1930s is evoked (and caricatured) in the celebrated novel The Masters (1951) by the scientist and author, C.P. Snow.
After 1945 Christ's shared in the general boom in higher education, with new blocks to complete Third Court and then New Court designed by Sir Denys Lasdun. Among its intellectual dynamos were Lord Todd, the Nobel prize-winning chemist, James Meade, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Sir John Plumb, the celebrated historian.

600 up





Yesterday I hit my 100th run of the season (in 4 innings), and my 600th run in NCI colours.
I feel okay. Bowled for ten overs straight and had a bit of fun. still injured but ready for more.
anyway, have some photos.















Coming up will be a new series of posts on the city I now call home. Cambridge.

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Poor Showing

well, it's come to this. The "players" in my cricket team have cried off injured today. Leaving our firsts with hardly anybody. a load of players from the twos have cancelled and the threes have had their game cancelled. The fours are playing with ten due to NCI only having 32 players available out of 139 in the whole club.

Maybe there's something else going on today that has grabbed their attention.
wonder what that is?????????????????????????