Racquetball
Racquetball is a racquet sport played with a hollow rubber ball on an indoor or outdoor court. Joseph Sobek is credited with inventing the modern sport of racquetball in 1950, adding a stringed racquet to paddleball in order to increase velocity and control. Unlike most racquet sports, such as tennis and badminton, there is no net to hit the ball over, unlike squash, no tin to hit the ball above; the court's walls and ceiling are legal playing surfaces, with the exception of court-specific designated hinders being out-of-bounds. Racquetball is similar to 40×20 American handball, played in many countries, it is very similar to the British sport Squash 57, called racketball before 2016. Joe Sobek is credited with inventing the sport of racquetball in the Greenwich, Connecticut, YMCA, though not with naming it. A professional tennis and American handball player, Sobek sought a fast-paced sport, easy to learn and play, he designed the first strung paddle, devised a set of rules, based on those of squash and paddleball, named his game paddle rackets.
In February 1952 Sobek founded the National Paddle Rackets Association, codified the rules, had them printed as a booklet. The new sport was adopted and became popular through Sobek's continual promotion of it. In 1969, aided by Robert W. Kendler, the president-founder of the U. S. Handball Association, the International Racquetball Association was founded using the name coined by Bob McInerney, a professional tennis player; that same year, the IRA assumed the national championship from the NPRA. In 1973, after a dispute with the IRA board of directors, Kendler formed two other racquetball organizations, yet the IRA remains the sport's dominant organization, recognized by the United States Olympic Committee as the American national racquetball governing body. In 1974, the IRA organized the first professional tournament, is a founding member of the International Racquetball Federation; the IRA became the American Amateur Racquetball Association. In 2003, the USRA again renamed itself to USA Racquetball, to mirror other Olympic sports associations if Racquetball is not an Olympic sport.
Kendler used his publication ACE to promote both racquetball. Starting in the 1970s, aided by the fitness boom of that decade, the sport's popularity increased to an estimated 3.1 million players by 1974. Consequent to increased demand, racquetball clubs and courts were founded and built, sporting goods manufacturers began producing racquetball-specific equipment; this growth continued until the early 1980s, declining in the decade's latter part when racquet clubs converted to physical fitness clubs, in service to a wider clientele, adding aerobics exercise classes and physical fitness and bodybuilding machines. Since the number of has remained steady, an estimated 5.6 million players. In 1976, Ian D. W. Wright created the sport of racketball based on U. S. racquetball. British racketball is played in a 32-foot long by 21-foot wide squash court, using a smaller, less dynamic ball than the American racquetball. In racketball, the ceiling is out-of-bounds; the racketball is served after a bounce on the floor struck into play with the racket.
Scoring is like squash with point-a-rally scoring of up to 11 points. The British Racketball Association was formed on 13 February 1984, confirmed by the English Sports Council as the sport's governing body on 30 October 1984; the first National Racketball Championship was held in London on 1 December 1984. The sport is now played in countries where squash is played, Bermuda, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Sweden. Racketball is played in parts of North America. In 1988, the British Racketball Association merged with the Squash Rackets Association. England Squash & Racketball is now recognised by Sport England as the English national governing body for the sports of squash and racketball. There is now an established UK Racketball Tournament Series consisting of 8 events around the UK, which forms the basis of the national rankings along with the National Racketball championships held annually at The Edgbaston Priory Club. In 2016, World Squash Federation announced an international're-branding' of racketball as Squash 57, the 57 referring to the diameter of the ball, in order to emphasise both its membership of the'squash rackets' family, its distinctiveness from the U.
S. racquetball The International Racquetball Federation governs the World Racquetball Championships, which were first held in 1981 in conjunction with the first World Games. The second World Championships were played in 1984, since have been held biennially in August. Players from the United States have won the most World Championship titles; the IRF runs the World Junior Racquetball Championships that occur annually in either late October, or early to mid November, as well as the annual World Senior Racquetball Championships for players who are 35 years of age or older. Racquetball has been included in the World Games on five occasions: 1981, 1989, 1993, 2009 and 2013; the sport has a high appeal in the Americas, because of this racquetball has been included in the Pan American Games in 1995, 1999, 2003, 2011 and 2015. And will be part of the games again in Lima 2019
Matchbox
A matchbox is a box made of cardboard or thin wood and designed to hold matches. It has a coarse striking surface on one edge for lighting the matches contained inside. Go-to-bed matchbox, another form of matchbox Matchbook, another form of packaging for matches Phillumeny, the hobby of collecting matchboxes, other match related items Steele, H. Thomas. Close Cover Before Striking: The Golden Age of Matchbook Art NY: Abbeville Press, ISBN 0-89659-695-8
Bicycle Playing Cards
Bicycle Playing Cards is a brand of playing cards. Since 1885, the Bicycle brand has been manufactured by the United States Printing Company, which, in 1894, became the United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati. "Bicycle" is a trademark of that company. The name Bicycle was chosen to reflect the popularity of the bicycle at the end of the 19th century. Bicycle is a standard 52-card deck of black colored cards. Known as the French deck, each card may have one of the four suits: spades, clubs and hearts; the numbers on the cards range from 2 to 10 proceed onward to "Jack" "Queen", "King", "Ace". The "Ace" has been known to be the first card in a typical deck; the Bicycle trademark is printed on the Ace of spades. The current deck comes with the hand ranks of poker, two information cards, two jokers. Bicycle playing cards are sold in a variety of the most common being the Rider Back. There are a series of Vintage backs, pinochle, Pastel color cards and Lo Vision cards that are designed for the visually impaired.
These Lo Vision cards contain large numbers on the face in a light blue color. Other types of cards with varying backs and colors are produced for magic. During World War II cards were produced that, when submerged in water, could be peeled apart and both halves had a map on the inside; when all the cards were put together it made a large map. These were supplied to POWs. One deck is located in the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC and there may be one other in a private collection. Modern reproductions have been sold in limited editions; the company provided crates of Ace of Spades cards for U. S. soldiers in the Vietnam War. It was erroneously believed that the Viet Cong believed the Ace of Spades to be a symbol of death and would flee at the sight of the card. In actuality, the Ace meant nothing to the Viet Cong, but the belief that the enemy was afraid of the cards improved the U. S. soldiers' morale. The origin of the cards is attributed to a letter written by a Lt. Charles W. Brown in early 1966 to Allison F. Stanley, the President of the United States Playing Card Company.
Brown had read remarks from Congressman Craig Hosmer of California that the Viet Cong held superstitions of bad luck with pictures of women and the Ace of Spades. The Bicycle Ace of Spaces featured an image of the Goddess of Liberty combined with the spade. Upon conferring with other lieutenants, Brown asked for 1000 Aces for his company to use as calling cards for his company to leave for the enemy to see. Stanley was sympathetic to the soldiers and pulled cards from the production line to send free of charge; the story was reported by several news outlets including the Stars and Stripes where the myth was distributed throughout the military and more units requested cards. The symbol was included in official psychological warfare operations, thousands of special all aces decks were donated by the card company to soldiers that purposely scattered them throughout the jungle and villages during raids. Similar cards were produced during the Gulf War in 1991 prior to the invasion of Iraq by US forces.
Due to the short duration of the conflict, these cards never saw battle. Official website
Playing card
A playing card is a piece of specially prepared heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic, marked with distinguishing motifs and used as one of a set for playing card games, performing magic tricks and flourishes, for cardistry, in card throwing. Playing cards are palm-sized for convenient handling, are sold together as a deck of cards or pack of cards. Playing cards were first invented in China during the Tang dynasty. Playing cards may have been invented during the Tang dynasty around the 9th century AD as a result of the usage of woodblock printing technology; the first possible reference to card games comes from a 9th-century text known as the Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang, written by Tang dynasty writer Su E. It describes Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing the "leaf game" in 868 with members of the Wei clan, the family of the princess' husband; the first known book on the "leaf" game was called the Yezi Gexi and written by a Tang woman.
It received commentary by writers of subsequent dynasties. The Song dynasty scholar Ouyang Xiu asserts that the "leaf" game existed at least since the mid-Tang dynasty and associated its invention with the development of printed sheets as a writing medium. However, Ouyang claims that the "leaves" were pages of a book used in a board game played with dice, that the rules of the game were lost by 1067. Other games revolving around alcoholic drinking involved using playing cards of a sort from the Tang dynasty onward. However, these cards did not contain numbers. Instead, they were printed with forfeits for whomever drew them; the earliest dated instance of a game involving cards with suits and numerals occurred on 17 July 1294 when "Yan Sengzhu and Zheng Pig-Dog were caught playing cards and that wood blocks for printing them had been impounded, together with nine of the actual cards."William Henry Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which doubled as both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for, similar to trading card games.
Using paper money was inconvenient and risky so they were substituted by play money known as "money cards". One of the earliest games in which we know the rules is madiao, a trick-taking game, which dates to the Ming Dynasty. 15th-century scholar Lu Rong described it is as being played with 38 "money cards" divided into four suits: 9 in coins, 9 in strings of coins, 9 in myriads, 11 in tens of myriads. The two latter suits had Water Margin characters instead of pips on them with Chinese characters to mark their rank and suit; the suit of coins is in reverse order with 9 of coins being the lowest going up to 1 of coins as the high card. Despite the wide variety of patterns, the suits show a uniformity of structure; every suit contains twelve cards with the top two being the court cards of king and vizier and the bottom ten being pip cards. Half the suits use reverse ranking for their pip cards. There are many motifs for the suit pips but some include coins, clubs and swords which resemble Mamluk and Latin suits.
Michael Dummett speculated that Mamluk cards may have descended from an earlier deck which consisted of 48 cards divided into four suits each with ten pip cards and two court cards. By the 11th century, playing cards were spreading throughout the Asian continent and came into Egypt; the oldest surviving cards in the world are four fragments found in the Keir Collection and one in the Benaki Museum. They are dated to the 13th centuries. A near complete pack of Mamluk playing cards dating to the 15th century and of similar appearance to the fragments above was discovered by Leo Aryeh Mayer in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, in 1939, it is not a complete set and is composed of three different packs to replace missing cards. The Topkapı pack contained 52 cards comprising four suits: polo-sticks, coins and cups; each suit contained ten pip cards and three court cards, called malik, nā'ib malik, thānī nā'ib. The thānī nā ` ib is a non-existent title. In fact, the word "Kanjifah" appears in Arabic on the king of swords and is still used in parts of the Middle East to describe modern playing cards.
Influence from further east can explain why the Mamluks, most of whom were Central Asian Turkic Kipchaks, called their cups tuman which means myriad in Turkic and Jurchen languages. Wilkinson postulated that the cups may have been derived from inverting the Chinese and Jurchen ideogram for myriad; the Mamluk court cards showed abstract designs or calligraphy not depicting persons due to religious proscription in Sunni Islam, though they did bear the ranks on the cards. Nā'ib would be borrowed into French and Spanish, the latter word still in common usage. Panels on the pip cards in two suits show they had a reverse ranking, a feature found in madiao and old European card games like ombre and maw. A fragment of two uncut sheets of Moorish-styled cards of a similar but plainer style were found in Spain and dated to the early 15th century. Export of these cards, ceased after the fall of the Mamluks in the 16th century; the rules to play these games are lost but they are believed to be plain trick games without trumps.
Four-suited playing cards ar
Tennis ball
A tennis ball is a ball designed for the sport of tennis. Tennis balls are fluorescent yellow at major sporting events, but in recreational play can be any color. Tennis balls are covered in a fibrous felt which modifies their aerodynamic properties, each has a white curvilinear oval covering it. Modern tennis balls must conform to certain criteria for size, weight and bounce criteria to be approved for regulation play; the International Tennis Federation defines the official diameter as 6.54–6.86 cm. Balls must have masses in the range 56.0–59.4 g. Yellow and white are the only colors approved by the ITF, most balls produced are a fluorescent yellow known as "optic yellow", first introduced in 1972 following research demonstrating they were more visible on television. Tennis balls are filled with air and are surfaced by a uniform felt-covered rubber compound; the felt delays flow separation in the boundary layer which reduces aerodynamic drag and gives the ball better flight properties. The balls will have a number on them in addition to the brand name.
This helps distinguish one set of balls from another of the same brand on an adjacent court. Tennis balls begin to lose their bounce as soon, they can be tested to determine their bounce. Modern regulation tennis balls are kept under pressure until used. A ball is tested for bounce by dropping it from a height of 254 cm onto concrete; the ITF's "Play and Stay" campaign aims to increase tennis participation worldwide, by improving the way starter players are introduced to the game. The ITF recommends a progression that focuses on a range of slower balls and smaller court sizes to introduce the game to both adults and children; the slowest balls, marked with red, or using half red felt, are oversized and unpressurized, or made from foam rubber. The next, in orange, are unpressurized normal sized balls; the last, with green, are half pressured normal sized. Before the development of lawn tennis in the early 1870s, the sport was played as the courtly game of real tennis. England banned the importation of tennis balls, playing cards and other goods in the Act of Parliament Exportation, Apparel Act 1463.
In 1480, Louis XI of France forbade the filling of tennis balls with chalk, sawdust, or earth, stated that they were to be made of good leather, well-stuffed with wool. Other early tennis balls were made by Scottish craftsmen from a wool-wrapped stomach of a sheep or goat and tied with rope; those recovered from the hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall during a period of restoration in the 1920s were found to have been manufactured from a combination of putty and human hair, were dated to the reign of Henry VIII. Other versions, using materials such as animal fur, rope made from animal intestines and muscles, pine wood, were found in Scottish castles dating back to the 16th century. In the 18th century, 1.9 cm strips of wool were wound around a nucleus made by rolling a number of strips into a little ball. String was tied in many directions around the ball and a white cloth covering sewn around the ball. In the early 1870s lawn tennis arose in Britain through the pioneering efforts of Walter Clopton Wingfield and Harry Gem using Victorian lawns laid out for croquet.
Wingfield marketed tennis sets. After Charles Goodyear invented vulcanised rubber, the Germans had been most successful in developing vulcanised air-filled rubber balls; these were light and coloured red with no covering. John Moyer Heathcote suggested and tried the experiment of covering the rubber ball with flannel, by 1882 Wingfield was advertising his balls as clad in stout cloth made in Melton Mowbray. Before 1925, tennis balls were packaged in wrapped paperboard boxes. In 1925, Wilson-Western Sporting Goods Company introduced cardboard tubes. In 1926, the Pennsylvania Rubber Company released a hermetically sealed pressurized metal tube that held three balls with a churchkey to open the top. Beginning in the 1980s, plastic cans with a full-top pull-tab seal and plastic lid fit three or four balls per can. Pressureless balls come in net bags or buckets since they do not need to be pressure-sealed; each year 325 million balls are produced, which contributes 20,000 tonnes of waste in the form of rubber, not biodegradable.
Tennis ball recycling has not existed. However, in 2015 three companies joined together to create a recycling system that incorporates recycled tennis balls into a tennis court surface. Unlikely though it may seem, balls from The Championships, Wimbledon are now recycled to provide field homes for the nationally threatened Eurasian harvest mouse; the gift of tennis balls offered to Henry in Shakespeare's Henry V is portrayed as the final insult which re-ignites the Hundred Years' War between England and France. John Webster refers to tennis balls in The Duchess of Malfi. John Self in Martin Amis's novel, Money, is struck in the face by a tennis ball. International Tennis Federation's history of the rules of the tennis ball ITF Grand Slam Rules:Section I:The Ball
Ship
A ship is a large watercraft that travels the world's oceans and other sufficiently deep waterways, carrying passengers or goods, or in support of specialized missions, such as defense and fishing. A "ship" was a sailing vessel with at least three square-rigged masts and a full bowsprit. Ships are distinguished from boats, based on size, load capacity, tradition. Ships have been important contributors to human commerce, they have supported the spread of colonization and the slave trade, but have served scientific and humanitarian needs. After the 15th century, new crops that had come from and to the Americas via the European seafarers contributed to the world population growth. Ship transport is responsible for the largest portion of world commerce; as of 2016, there were more than 49,000 merchant ships, totaling 1.8 billion dead weight tons. Of these 28% were oil tankers, 43% were bulk carriers, 13% were container ships. Ships are larger than boats, but there is no universally accepted distinction between the two.
Ships can remain at sea for longer periods of time than boats. A legal definition of ship from Indian case law is a vessel. A common notion is, but not vice versa. A US Navy rule of thumb is that ships heel towards the outside of a sharp turn, whereas boats heel towards the inside because of the relative location of the center of mass versus the center of buoyancy. American and British 19th Century maritime law distinguished "vessels" from other craft. In the Age of Sail, a full-rigged ship was a sailing vessel with at least three square-rigged masts and a full bowsprit. A number of large vessels are referred to as boats. Submarines are a prime example. Other types of large vessel which are traditionally called boats are Great Lakes freighters and ferryboats. Though large enough to carry their own boats and heavy cargoes, these vessels are designed for operation on inland or protected coastal waters. In most maritime traditions ships have individual names, modern ships may belong to a ship class named after its first ship.
In the northern parts of Europe and America a ship is traditionally referred to with a female grammatical gender, represented in English with the pronoun "she" if named after a man. This is not universal usage and some English language journalistic style guides advise using "it" as referring to ships with female pronouns can be seen as offensive and outdated. In many documents the ship name is introduced with a ship prefix being an abbreviation of the ship class, for example "MS" or "SV", making it easier to distinguish a ship name from other individual names in a text; the first known vessels could not be described as ships. The first navigators began to use animal skins or woven fabrics as sails. Affixed to the top of a pole set upright in a boat, these sails gave early ships range; this allowed men to explore allowing for the settlement of Oceania for example. By around 3000 BC, Ancient Egyptians knew, they used woven straps to lash the planks together, reeds or grass stuffed between the planks helped to seal the seams.
The Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides had documented ship-faring among the early Egyptians: "During the prosperous period of the Old Kingdom, between the 30th and 25th centuries BC, the river-routes were kept in order, Egyptian ships sailed the Red Sea as far as the myrrh-country." Sneferu's ancient cedar wood ship Praise of the Two Lands is the first reference recorded to a ship being referred to by name. The ancient Egyptians were at ease building sailboats. A remarkable example of their shipbuilding skills was the Khufu ship, a vessel 143 feet in length entombed at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2500 BC and found intact in 1954, it is known that ancient Nubia/Axum traded with India, there is evidence that ships from Northeast Africa may have sailed back and forth between India/Sri Lanka and Nubia trading goods and to Persia and Rome. Aksum was known by the Greeks for having seaports for ships from Yemen. Elsewhere in Northeast Africa, the Periplus of the Red Sea reports that Somalis, through their northern ports such as Zeila and Berbera, were trading frankincense and other items with the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula well before the arrival of Islam as well as with Roman-controlled Egypt.
A panel found at Mohenjodaro depicted a sailing craft. Vessels were of many types; this treatise gives a technical exposition on the techniques of shipbuilding. It sets forth minute details about the various types of ships, their sizes, the materials from which they were built; the Yukti Kalpa Taru sums up in a condensed form all the available information. The Yukti Kalpa Taru gives sufficient information and dates to prove that, in ancient times, Indian shipbuilders had a good knowledge of the materials which were used in building ships. In addition to describing the qualities of the different types of wood and their suitability for shipbuilding, the Yukti Kalpa Taru gives an elaborate classification of ships based on their size; the oldest discovered sea faring hulled boat is the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, dating back to 1300 BC. The Phoenicians, the first to sail around
Mast (sailing)
The mast of a sailing vessel is a tall spar, or arrangement of spars, erected more or less vertically on the centre-line of a ship or boat. Its purposes include carrying sail and derricks, giving necessary height to a navigation light, look-out position, signal yard, control position, radio aerial or signal lamp. Large ships have several masts, with the configuration depending on the style of ship. Nearly all sailing masts are guyed; until the mid-19th century all vessels' masts were made of wood formed from a single or several pieces of timber which consisted of the trunk of a conifer tree. From the 16th century, vessels were built of a size requiring masts taller and thicker than could be made from single tree trunks. On these larger vessels, to achieve the required height, the masts were built from up to four sections, known in order of rising height above the decks as the lower, top and royal masts. Giving the lower sections sufficient thickness necessitated building them up from separate pieces of wood.
Such a section was known as a made mast, as opposed to sections formed from single pieces of timber, which were known as pole masts. Those who specialised in making masts were known as mastmakers. For square-sail carrying ship, the masts, given their standard names in bow to stern order, are: Sprit topmast: a small mast set on the end of the bowsprit. Shorter than the fore-mast. Sections: mizzen-mast lower—mizzen topmast—mizzen topgallant mastSome names given to masts in ships carrying other types of rig are: Bonaventure mizzen: the fourth mast on larger sixteenth century galleons lateen-rigged and shorter than the main mizzen. Jigger-mast: where it is the shortest, the aftmost mast on vessels with more than three masts. Sections: jigger-mast lower—jigger topmast—jigger topgallant mast Most types of vessels with two masts are supposed to have a main-mast and a smaller mizzen-mast, although both brigs and two-masted schooners carry a fore-mast and a main-mast instead. On a two-masted vessel with the main-mast forward and a much smaller second mast, such as a ketch, or a yawl, the terms mizzen and jigger are synonymous.
Although two-masted schooners may be provided with masts of identical size, the aftmost is still referred to as the main-mast, has the larger course. Schooners have been built with up to seven masts with several six-masted examples. On square-rigged vessels, each mast carries several horizontal yards from which the individual sails are rigged. Folding mast ships use a tabernacle anchor point—"the open socket or double post on the deck, into which a mast is fixed, with a pivot near the top so that the mast can be lowered", "large bracket attached to the deck, to which the foot of the mast is fixed. A two-masted merchant vessel with a sizable foresail rigged on a inclined foremast is depicted in an Etruscan tomb painting from 475–450 BC. An artemon the same size as the galley's mainsail can be found on a Corinthian krater as early as the late 6th century BC; the foremast became common on Roman galleys, inclined at an angle of 45°, it was more akin to a bowsprit, the foresail set on it, reduced in size, seems to be used rather as an aid to steering than for propulsion.
While most of the ancient evidence is iconographic, the existence of foremasts can be deduced archaeologically from slots in foremast-feets located too close to the prow for a mainsail. Artemon, along with mainsail and topsail, developed into the standard rig of seagoing vessels in imperial times, complemented by a mizzen on the largest freighters; the earliest recorded three-masters were the giant Syracusia, a prestige object commissioned by king Hiero II of Syracuse and devised by the polymath Archimedes around 240 BC, other Syracusan merchant ships of the time. The imperial grain freighters travelling the routes between Alexandria and Rome included three-masted vessels. A mosaic in Ostia depicts a freighter with a three-masted rig entering Rome's harbour. Special craft could carry many more masts: Theophrastus records how the Romans imported Corsican timber by way of a huge raft propelled by as many as fifty masts and sails. Throughout antiquity, both foresail and mizzen remained secondary in terms of canvas size, although large enough to require full running rigging.
In late antiquity, the foremast lost most of
