Max Beerbohm ( 1872 ? 1956 )

Sir Henry Maximilian “Max” Beerbohm was born in London, son of a well-to-do Lithuanian-born grain merchant. His family gave him he nick-name of Max and that is what he signed himself in his work and was known as for the rest of his life.

Beerbohm was educated at Charterhouse School and Merton College, Oxford but finished without taking a degree as he was already well recognized as a caricaturist and humourist.

He had an incapacity to draw hands and feet but was very good at heads and his dandified figures with inflated heads quickly became his trade-mark. The Times newspaper in 1913 described him as ?the greatest of English comic artists and he was variously hailed as ?the English Goya? and “the greatest portrayer of personalities in the history of art?

Henry Bateman (1887 – 1970)

Bateman was born in New South Wales, Australia of English parents who came back to England soon after he was born. He studied art at Westminster School of Art and the Goldsmith Institute.

His style matured early in life and by the age of 17 it was already established. He achieved a deal with Tatler magazine but is best well-known for his ?The Man Who??.? series of cartoons. These showed hapless people who had committed mostly upper class social faux pas. ?The Man Who lit his Cigar before the Loyal Toast? is a prime example.

Sir David Low (1891 – 1963)

Sir David Alexander Cecil Low was born in New Zealand and taught at Dunedin and Christchurch. He started his professional career in New Zealand and in fact his first effort was published whilst he was just 11 years of age.

He later moved to Australia and subsequently to England and by 1927 was working for The Evening Standard. He is best well-known for his caricatures depicting Hitler and Mussolini both before and during World War II. In fact, generations of New Zealand school children learned about the origins of the Second World War using textbooks illustrated by Low.

He was particularly hated by Hitler and after the war it was discovered that his name was in the ?Black Book? which listed those who the Nazis wished to arrest when they had occupied Britain.

Low was knighted in 1962, a year before his death. His obituary spoke of him as “the leading cartoonist of the western world”

Ronald Searle (b. 1920)

Ronald William Fordham Searle was born in Cambridge and began drawing at the prodigiously early age of five and was working professionally by the age of 15. The War interrupted his art studies and he enlisted in the Royal Engineers .

He was serving in Singapore when he was captured by the Japanese. He was a prisoner of war for the rest of the war eventually working on the notorious Siam-Burma ?Death Railway?. He created, in secret, many drawings depicting conditions in the camps which survived detection by being hidden under the mattresses of dying prisoners.

He returned to England at the end of the war and produced a prodigious volume of work in the 1950?s and 60?s. However he is best known as the creator of ?St Trinians School?.

Gerald Scarfe (b. 1936)

Gerald Anthony Scarfe was born in London and as a child was severely asthmatic. During his early bed-ridden years he busied himself by drawing. He began his working life in advertising but by the early 60?s his caricatures were appearing in ?Private Eye? and this led to a job with the ?Daily Mail?.

But it was his work with the British rock group Pink Floyd for which he is best known especially the illustration for the cover of their 1979 album ?The Wall?.

Searle also provided the caricatures for the opening and closing sequences of the well-liked BBC comedy ?Yes Minister? and in 1998 he drew caricatures of Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecombe, Joyce Grenfell, Les Dawson and Peter Cook which featured on a set of five British postage stamps commemorating British comedians.

If you want one of our unique, hand-painted, custom cartoons or caricatures from photos supplied by you please click on one of these links History Of Rugby. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Custom Cartoons.

When you comprehend those easy facts, the way to avoid injury appears clearer – keep running about and playing or if you do not fancy that, take other exercises frequently. Back injury happens most frequently in the workplace, so individuals say, but what is not a workplace. Is cooking and cleaning at home not work?

Do not think that you are at far less risk at home than in the office, on the shop floor or on a construction site. Back injury is normally the result of doing something in an incorrect fashion for a long period of time – bad posture or bad technique – but it can also be caused by lifting a box onto or down from a shelf on one occasion.

The best approach is to prevent back injury ever occurring because once you have it, you will sorely regret it and have a difficult job getting rid of it. So, how do you go about preventing back injury?

Firstly, you should reduce the stress that you put on your back by normalizing your weight and by learning how to manoeuvre heavy items in the right manner and adopting right postures.

Secondly, you should attempt to strengthen the muscles in your back so that they are more cheerfully equipped to deal with the unavoidable stresses of daily life. Rather than only talking about back muscles we should include stomach muscles too.

So, starting with posture: walk tall, adopt a military bearing and do not slouch. Similarly when sitting. Do not just fall into a chair like a sack of potatoes; hold your back straight and strive not to lean to one side or the other all the time. Sit near to your desk so that you do not have to lean over to reach which might encourage slouching and rounded shoulders and back.

Learn how to sit at your desk. Your feet should be flat on the floor (or a foot stool); your thighs should be parallel with the floor. The desk or seat should be of such a height that you can place your arms on it with the forearms parallel to the floor without reaching up or slouching over. Get up and walk about for a minute or two each hour.

Your car seat should be adjusted to be right for you too, particularly if you drive a lot. Be wary of weights and bulky or awkward items. Even the shopping. Learn how to manhandle them with the minimum amount of danger. Get help if you think you might require it.take it from me, in the case of backache, prevention is far better that cure, if you can find one.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a range of subjects, but is now involved with sciatica pain management. If you would like to know more, please go to our web site at Sore Back Remedies

This state of affairs is awful enough, but there are also people out there who get their thrills out of composing and releasing viruses to infect our computers and screw up our lives. I am not talking about criminals, we have always had to put up with them, I mean kids and others who write and release viruses to damage our computers for fun.

These days, a lot of families are dispersed because members have travelled to other cities to study or work and sometimes this means going to other countries too. Most of these people rely on computers and the Net to stay in touch. A infection could mean the disruption of these contacts and even the obliteration of family photo albums.

You might come to the conclusion that we rely on computers too much and lots of people would agree with you, especially those who have lost crucial information to computer viruses. At worst, you could have your identity stolen and have our financial life completely disrupted, but even losing your computer for a couple of days whilst it is repaired ‘in the shop’ is bad enough.

In my case, this would mean loss of income, for others it may mean a violation of privacy or even theft. So, what should we do to safeguard ourselves?

Antivirus software is the solution.

Antivirus software used to mean a program to scan files coming into your computer, but these days it means far more. Decent AV software will now include a firewall to protect your computer from being hacked and a malware scanner to stop incoming files from dropping trojans and worms etc onto your hard disk.

These small programs can read the keys that you press and send the information back to their creator. These key presses can be analyzed to disclose your preferences on search engines (in order to spam you) or your log in particulars to your bank (in order to steal from you).

So, you have to install either a good antivirus software suite, which will include all of the above or you could get the components individually. Not so long ago, you would have had to purchase all these things, but now some are built into Windows. Windows now comes with a firewall and antivirus software, which will also scan email.

This is powerful enough for most users, but if you want to take your computer’s safety to another level, you ought to add a dedicated malware scanner, of which there are loads of good free ones. If you consider that it takes too much time to run two or three separate programs and keep them up to date or if you would like a higher level of protection, you may consider purchasing an AV software suite.

There are lots of decent ones like Norton, Nod, Kaspersky and others which cost little more than $30 a year for absolute peace of mind.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the cheap antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

The first documented reference to the game in the history of cricket is to be discovered in the records of a 1598 court case concerning a disagreement over a school’s ownership of a plot of land. A 59-year old coroner, John Derrick, testified that he and his school friends had played ‘creckett’ on the site fifty years earlier.

The school was the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, and Mr Derrick’s report proves beyond reasonable doubt that the game was being played in Surrey around 1550.

The first mention of it being played as an adult sport was in 1611, when two men in Sussex were prosecuted for playing cricket on Sunday instead of going to church. This was in the same year that a dictionary defined cricket as a boys’ game and this implies that adult participation was a recent development.

With all the recent press coverage of the pressure of gambling upon the outcome of cricket matches, it is astonishing that historically, gambling played a very substantial part in the development of the game in England. Cricket had definitely become a major gambling sport by the end of the 17th century.

There is a newspaper account of a “great match” played in Sussex in 1697 which was 11-a-side and played for the high stakes of 50 guineas a side. 50 guineas would be the equal of GBP5,000 to GBP 6,000 in today?s terms.

The present day system of County teams came about as a result of well-off gamblers forming their own teams in order to fortify their bets and began to employ local experts from village cricket as the first professionals. It is believed that the first ?County? game took place in 1697 between Sussex and another county.

Cricket was introduced to North America via the British colonies in the 17th century, and in the 18th century it spread to other regions of the British dominated world. It was introduced to the West Indies by colonists and to India by the British East India Company in the first half of the century.

The early colonists took it to Australia soon after 1788 followed by New Zealand and South Africa in the early years of the 19th century.

It might come as a shock to lots of people that the very first International cricket game took place between the United States and Canada in 1844 (Canada won by 23 runs) and the very first overseas tour was by a party of leading English professionals who toured North America in 1857.

The first English tour of Australia was in 1862, with the first Australian tour of England being by a team of Australian Aborigine players in 1868.

In 1877, an England touring team in Australia played two matches against full Australian XIs that are now thought of as the very first Test matches. The next year, the Australians toured England for the first time and were a magnificent success.

No Tests were played on that tour but more soon followed. At The Oval in 1882, there was played what was to become the most well-known match of all time which gave birth to The Ashes.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the London 2012 Olympics mascot. Click a link if you are interested in the 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

Cruising at sea, calling into a different port each day or two soon becomes a way of life, so short cruises can be a little exasperating. A fortnight is all right but a month is much better.

Imagine it, a different language and a different culture every day for weeks! The Mediterranean Sea is not thought of as a large sea, but it has to be the most diverse area in the world, because there are countries like Portugal, Spain and France to the northwest; the Middle East is represented by Turkey and The Lebanon in the northeast; Arabic countries like Egypt and Lybia line the northeastern coast of the African Mediterranean and Arabic/Berber countries like Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco bring us back to within miles of Spain on the northwestern African Mediterranean shoreline.

In fact, the Mediterranean Sea covers about 2.5 million square kilometres and has over 120 large seaports around it. The variety of food, culture and language is pretty extraordinary. If you are searching for variety, you will absolutely find it when cruising the Mediterranean Sea.

If you get a kick out of history, then you will not be disappointed by the ruins from the immense Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires that spread around the region prolifically. I should not think that there is a single area without something to remind the population about the power of the Roman army 2,000 years ago.

There are dozens of different Mediterranean cruises available lots of them specializing in one particular aspect or area of the Mediterranean. Some go for romantic destinations others specialize in Greek, Roman or Egyptian history.

The last Mediterranean cruise I went on was actually two cruises back-to-back. I flew into Barcelona from my home town. I did not have to take care of my baggage from my hometown until I saw it on my bunk on the cruise liner. That was a great touch. On the first leg of the cruise we steamed east to Sicily and then north along the Italian coast to the French Riviera and back to Spain.

The second leg went east to Sardinia and then south to Africa and returned along the coast calling into Tunisia and Malta on the way back to Spain. They were two completely different cruises on the same ship and separated just by a week from one another.

The luxury and the dining experience was wonderful and I discovered the saying to be true that you can expect to gain about a pound in weight every two days unless you take plenty of exercise, so make sure you pack your swimming costume, even if you do choose to leave your exercise kit at home.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the Bikini Cup D. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Swimwear for Big Busts.

If you can get a friend to organize a baby shower for you or if someone offers to do it, the invitations ought to be sent out a month or two before the birth day, so that the mother is not in too much uneasiness and is not likely to have the baby during the party.

It is nice to have handmade baby shower invitations. There are two ways that you can do this: either design the invitation card yourself and have it printed out or choose a template at the printers. Both approaches give acceptable results.

If you have the invitations printed to a standard size, you can purchase cheap envelopes at a budget stationery office, but if you go for some weird size, ask the printer to provide the envelopes too.

Standard details like the date, the time, the venue, your name and the baby’s name can all be printed but you will have to write or type the recipient’s name in personally. Add your phone number too so that people can ask questions if they have any. If you would like the party (and the presents) to have a theme, you ought to state that on the invitation. Perhaps the card could be in the same theme too.

In fact, if you would like to go down that path, you could download a suitable image off the Internet, say, a scene from Peter Rabbit, and give that to the printer so that they can print that onto your card.

People are very busy these days, so make sure you give your friends at least a month to book you in and get a fitting present for the shower. If you would like to be fairly sure how many people are coming, enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard in with the invitation, so that they can let you know easily.

If you are searching for items to do during the party, you could get the guests to suggest names for your baby and guess the sex or weight of it too. You could use a cross on a chain as a pendant to see if it the movement predicts a boy or girl and how many people get the same movement. You could also discuss themes for the child’s nursery when it is born, one for if it is a boy and one for if it is a boy.

Owen Jones, the writer of that article, writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with the satin baby blankets. If you want to know more, please visit our website at Woollen Blankets.

For example, my next door neighbour had a cat, but felt lonely when her daughter moved away, so she permitted the cat to to have young. Now she has six cats. But cats are not like dogs. My dog stays in my garden not upsetting anyone apart from by barking if a stranger walks past the gate However, that is his job and he is not only telling me but the neighbours as well. These six cats do not stay in their own garden though, so we have all acquired six cats whether we want them or not.

The first problem I became aware of was that birds stopped coming to pick my dog’s bowl clean in the afternoon. Then I saw a cat eating a lizard, a beautiful nine inch specimen and then I remembered not seeing a lot of lizards lately. There is one lizard, the Tokay, that they have completely wiped out – I used to listen to them calling at night, but no more.

Cats also dig up flowers when they defecate and use furniture as clawing boards, so I do not want these destructive animals in my garden. But how do you keep cats out of your garden?

Walls are rarely protection against cats, but cats will often prowl along the bottom of walls and if they come across a hole, they will probably go in out of inquisitiveness, so repair all low-level gaps in your fences. There is not much you can do about the top of your wall other than putting broken glass or electrified wiring up there, but that is not a good idea.

Some dogs are good at keeping cats away, but not all. My dog got a nasty and totally unexpected swipe of claws across his nose one day. He used to chase them when they were kittens, but now they have grown up, he only growls to tell me a cat is on the property. I cannot blame him.

In Australia, many gardeners reckon that transparent bottles full of water bewilder cats, so they stay away, but in my experience, only Australian cats react in that way.

A row of prickly bushes or flowers along the base of a wall where cats regularly come in works. At the bottom of high walls too, where the cat cannot see them until he is on top of the wall. I often see cats mewing (in frustration, I hope) on the top of one of my walls. The only way down is to go back.

If you still cannot keep cats out, then you will need to train them not to come in. This is easiest accomplished by using a few methods. If cats are using your flower pots are conveniences, try smearing the pots with pepper, lavender, lemon, mustard, or tobacco. Or you could leave a mothball in each pot. Some of these will have the desired result for you, others will not.

Then there are industrial repellents, but I do not want to resort to them. However, if you have a big garden and a big problem, it might be the only way. There are also high frequency sound emitters. Humans cannot hear them, but almost all animals can, so I think that that is deplorable as well.

At night, motion-activated exterior lighting is a great shock to cats. Cats have very sensitive night vision so a quick flash from a floodlamp really puts them off a garden.

The best deterrent is water. You can buy motion-activated sprinklers, which are excellent at keeping cats out of your garden, but I like to sit in my office or in the garden with a powerful water pistol and squirt them by hand. The lizards have not come back yet, but nor do the cats quite so often either.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of subjects, but is at present involved with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

One of the many themes to pick from is the Texas Style. We all know that everything in Texas is done on a large scale, so you would be forgiven for thinking that landscaping in the Texas Style would necessitate a huge garden.

It is possibly easier to carry out your landscaping in the Texas Style in a larger garden, but it just depends how you go about it.

The first things to remember are that Texas is very hot and so the terrain closely resembles wilderness. Plants and shrubs are thin on the ground, so to speak. Landscaping in the Texas Style is what you might call minimalist gardening.

You will have to make use of every square inch of your property, if you only have a small plot and the average temperature will have to be fairly warm in the daytime although it is good if it gets chilly at night. This will allow you to grow many of the plants that flourish or at least grow in Texas. One good thing about Texan plants is that when they do bloom, they really do show a lot of colour.

One of the kinds of plant that you are sure to have success with is the cactus. There are many varieties of cactus, so you should not have too much difficulty finding several types that will grow in your garden in order to produce a Texan dry climate look, as long as it does not rain every other day where you live.

Cacti yield magnificent flowers when they blossom, but they have big thorns, so if you have young children, the Texas Style garden may not be for you for a few years yet.

Once you have your flora sorted out, you can begin looking for accessories. You can pick up ideas from the old cowboy films and from magazines, but a few suggestions are: a chow wagon style barbecue area with a canvas hood; some broken wagon wheels; a well, working or not (it could even be a fish pond that looks like a well); boulders and wooden fence posts.

Boulders are usually overlooked by gardeners but there are some intriguing stones, boulders and rocks in all kinds of shapes and colours. Boulders with fossils in them are great conversation starters. Smaller rocks can be used to create a rock garden and this will expand the choice of plants that you can grow in your Texas Style garden. You will be able to plant succulents, small cacti and other small plants that frequently grow in this austere environment.

Lighting should be low and subtle so that you can see the stars at night. You could even have a camp fire with log seating or you can achieve this look by using low powered solar lighting. Solar powered lighting will also save you from having to have an electrician wire up your garden.

When you have finished landscaping in the Texas Style, do not forget to get pleasure from it by eating outside as often as you can. Barbecues, steaks and Texmex food are the order of the day.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with outdoor accent lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

However, the improved productivity that power tools deliver comes at a price: 1] you have to pay for the electricity that drives the equipment and 2] there is an increased risk to the operative’s health and safety. The cost of the electricity should be more than easily covered by the increased productivity, but health and safety is often overlooked until it is too late.

People seem to not comprehend the potential dangers of an inexpert person using a power tool. For example, a slip with a hand saw, usually means an ugly joint, but a slip with a power saw can cost a finger; a miss while hammering a nail home can cost a bruised finger or an ugly dent, but a slip with a nail gun can be like having a bullet in the leg.

This is why insurance companies have made it imperative for firms employing trades people to send their workers on health and safety courses. Claims from inexpert workers was becoming ludicrous as inexpert trades people gave up their old hand tool in favour of the powered alternative.

It caused a great deal of commotion in the Eighties and Nineties in the building industry among employers and employees alike to have to send people on courses about how to use power tools. In Britain, employers were not allowed to let a carpenter use a rotary saw, for instance, unless he or she could prove that they had been taught to use one. Most individuals were of the opinion that the health and safety people had gone too far.

But there were fewer accidents; less time off work due to injury and fewer claims against the insurance firms.

There was tremendous opposition in our building firm from the workforce, when we declared that nobody could sign out a power tool unless he/she had a valid safety certificate to confirm training in the use of that particular piece of apparatus.

We also had a joinery shop, where traditionally each carpenter could go to create anything he needed. Then this policy came in and only one carpenter out of forty was permitted to use the power tools. All of a sudden there was a rush to get safety certificates. The new laws had hurt people’s pride.

They thought that they were being told that they did not know their trade, but once they were disqualified from using power tools, they were made to look like inexpert apprentices again. So there was a rush to get a certificate and power tool companies would send a safety specialist to the workplace to train all the relevant tradesmen in the use of their power tools free of charge and pass out certificates.

Then our firm decided to get their ISO 9000 certificate and power tools had to be given certificates of inspection as well. So now we had to employ someone to look after the power tools.

Just tradesmen with certificates of competence could sign out a power tool and a power tool could only be signed out if it had a certificate to prove that it had been passed ‘safe to use’ within the last two months. All power tools had to have a certificate of reliability attached to it, a set of safety rules and a pair of safety glasses. That covered the firm from accusations of negligence.

That was 15-20 years ago in the building industry in the UK. I am not saying all this as a history lesson, but more to point out that people can go to a shop and buy or hire very hazardous power tools without having to establish competence. Professionals at work have to establish that they and the tools are up to the job, but the public does not.

I am not in favour of a new layer of bureaucracy, but I do want to make people aware of the danger of not knowing how to use power tools correctly and without even the most fundamental safety equipment.

Do not use power tools without safety glasses is the first rule. Shield your eyes from splinters and flying debris at all costs. A professional would, so so should you.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, yet is now involved with Uvex Safety Glasses. If you would like to know more, please visit our site at Safety Glasses Bifocal

This means that Moroccan furnishings and decor has Berba, Arabic, French and Spanish influences. These Mediterranean influences are obvious in traditional and contemporary Moroccan furniture.

When combined with Moroccan decor and colours, Moroccan furniture can change your home. Walls are normally emulsioned plain white or cream and lightly decorated with old carpets or tapestries with one or two photos or paintings hanging between them.

Reds and browns are the principal colours. Poignant writings from the Koran or other Arabic philosophers are often written out in bold script and framed.

Moroccan decorations such as lamps, lanterns, mirrors, benches, vases, mosaic end tables, ottomans, rugs and ceramics can add that remarkable local flavour to the decor, setting off the solid timber or padded cloth furniture.

Pillows feature large in Moroccan interior and garden decor, but they also use settees and seats in the European fashion. Morocco is famous for its leather craft and leather is frequently used to cover chairs, sofas and footstools or poufes.

Scatter rugs are important for sitting on and they are taken out and beaten each day to keep them clean as Morocco is a hot, sandy and dusty country if you travel a couple of miles inland from the coast. Camels are still used for transport in rural areas and camel hair is turned into rugs, blankets and wall coverings.

Moroccans like tiles and mosaics and Arabic style tiles are quite distinctive if you want to use them in your bathroom and kitchen. If you want to dine in Moroccan style, they usually dine at a very low round table with the main dish in the centre from which everybody helps themselves, although in a family, some members will feed others too.

Following tradition and hygiene, you may only touch food with your right hand, although everyone will have washed both hands before coming to the table. Bread, rice and couscous feature highly in Moroccan food as does potatoes, carrots, lamb and chicken.Water is served during the meal and tea and coffee afterwards frequently with very sweet cakes sprinkled with icing sugar and syrup.

Individuals relax at home wearing long, loose-fitting garments and lounge on benches or on rugs on the floor surrounded by cushions. In the evening, lighting will be low provided by low wattage bulbs concealed behind red and brown stained glass or cloth. Candles, scented or not also feature a great deal in living rooms and bedrooms unless someone wants a stronger light to read by.

Candles in wall sconces are common methods to highlight special areas and light up corridors and some doorways. Frequently these sconces do not hold candles, but hold scented oil with a floating wick which is less expensive to leave burning between the hours or twilight and bed time.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, but is now concerned with outdoor dining tables. If you want to know more, just visit our web site at Solid Oak Dining Tables.

However, contemporary research into the history of golfing has uncovered references to a game very similar to modern day golfing being played in China during the period of the Southern Tang dynasty, at least 500 years before golfing was first mentioned in Scotland.

It has been suggested that the game was first exported to Europe and later Scotland by Mongolian travellers in the later Middle Ages.

In Scotland the first recorded documentary evidence for golf was in an act of the Scottish parliament in 1457 which prohibited the playing of ?gowf? and football in case they detract from the necessary military exercise of archery practice. In a subsequent ban of 1491 golfing was described as ‘an unprofitable sport’!. Something which Tiger Woods is probably ignorant of!

There are reports in the accounts of a Scottish lawyer, Sir John Foulis of Ravelston, that he played golf at Musselburgh Links on 2 March 1672, and this has been accepted as proving that The Old Links, Musselburgh, is the oldest golf course in the world. Mary, Queen of Scots is supposed to have played there in 1567.

The Company of Gentlemen Golfers, later renamed The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers set down the oldest surviving rules of golf in 1744. Their “Articles and Laws in Playing at Golf, known as the Leith Rules, after the course at which they played sustain the club’s claim to be the world?s first golf club, though an almanac published around a century later is the first record of a rival claim that The Royal Burgess Golf Society had been set up in 1735.

The directions in the Leith Rules formed the basis for all subsequent codes, for instance needing that “Your Tee must be upon the ground” and “You are not to change the Ball which you strike off the Tee”

After King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603 the spread of golf to be a world wide sport commenced. He and his courtiers played golf at Blackheath, London, from which the Royal Blackheath Golf Club traces its origins.

The spread of golf world wide was began by Scottish soldiers, expatriates and emigrants who took the sport to British colonies and elsewhere.

The Royal Calcutta Golf Club (1829) and the club at Pau (1856) in south western France are significant reminders of these trips and are the oldest golf clubs outside of the British Isles and the oldest in continental Europe respectively.

Evidence of early golf in the United States includes an advertisement published in the Royal Gazette of New York City in 1779 for golfing discotheques and balls, and the notice of the annual general meeting for a golfing club in Savannah published in the Georgia Gazette in 1796.

However, as in England, it was not until the late 19th century that golfing started to become firmly established. There are several competing claims to be the oldest club, but what is not contested is that in 1894 delegates from the Newport Country Club, Saint Andrew’s Golf Club, Yonkers, New York, The Country Club, Chicago Golf Club, and Shinnecock Hills Golf Club met in New York City to kind what was to become the United States Golf Association (USGA).

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on lots of topics, but is at present concerned with the London 2012 Olympics mascot. Click a link if you are interested in the 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

Wales has a tradition of folk music which is closely linked with Scottish and Irish folk music. There are several forms of musical gathering that are comparable to those in other Celtic countries in the United Kingdom. For instance there is the twmpath (folk dance session), g?yl werin (folk festival) and noson lawen (a traditional party comparable to the Gaelic “C?ilidh”).

Modern Welsh folk musicians have often resurrected traditions which had been suppressed or forgotten, and have competed with imported and indigenous rock and pop trends. This has been especially true since the 1990′s.

Despite modern Welsh trends in music, Wales will always be connected with Male Voice Choirs such as the Morriston Orpheus Choir and Treorchy Male Voice Choir which benefit from world wide fame.

These choirs were often made up of workers from one village or one coal mine and so it was fairly natural for men to sing when one village played against another, especially if that game was Wales’ national sport of rugby. The first time the Welsh National Anthem, ‘Yr Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ (‘The Old Country of my Fathers’, normally translated as ‘Land of My Fathers’), was sung at an International sporting event was in 1905

Along side the choirs, brass bands developed in villages, working men’s clubs, churches and at work especially in South Wales where brass bands are still very popular. In fact, the Cory Band is one of the most successful brass bands in the world.

There were more than a few world famous Welsh singers in the Twentieth Century and some of them are still singing to packed audiences worldwide. Ivor Novello was one of the first who became well-known during the First World War as a singer songwriter. Then there was Geraint Evans and Delme Bryn-Jones during the Second World War.

After that, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey started their singing careers in the 1950′s and are still singing fifty years later. There were also popular bands in the Seventies and Eighties such as Man and Budgie and solo singers such as Shakin’ Stevens, nnie Tyler and John Cale (Velvet Underground).

In more recent times, we have seen the Manic Street Preachers, Catatonia, Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci; the last two bands being famous for many their songs’ words being in Welsh.

There have always been operatic singers as well such as Rebecca Evans, Aled Jones, Bryn Tervel and Charlotte Church. Cardiff holds the ‘Singer of the World’ competition and the Wales also has its very own Eisteddfod, where Pavarotti performed for years. It was because of Wales tradition as a nation of singers that Paul Robeson visited Wales in the Fifties

If you are interested in dogs or Welsh corgi puppies, or even Wales in general, please go to our website at Welsh Products Online

Cotton is all right for the job, but it ought to be the lowest you will go. No polyester or other man-made textiles. If you do use these cheap textiles and spend weeks making your first quilt, you will only regret it. If you make mistakes, but the cloth is decent at least there will be that one saving grace.

Once you have chosen your cloth, you can select the style or design that you want. This may seem backwards, and that is OK. If you want, you can choose the style first and then a fabric to match, but I would recommend that you simply stick with cotton for your first quilt.

Next, you have to get hold of a pattern. This is very easy. You can either become a member of a local quilting group, where people will give you conventional patterns or sell you modern ones; or you can go on line and search Google or Yahoo for ‘free quilt patterns’ or you can visit to your local craft shop and buy one that suits your requirements.

You will also require a good set of tools to make your quilt. It is a good idea not to scrimp on these tools as they are not expensive; will make your job a lot easier and will last a very long time. You will require at least one rotary cutter. ‘At least one’ because the large blade cutters are very good for straight cuts whereas a small blade cutter is better for corners or shapes. By the way, these rotary cutters look like pizza cutters.

Because these cutters are sharp, you will also require a cutting board. This can be as simple as a sheet of plywood, trimmed to suit your table top or you can merely lay it on the floor. Without a board, you will damage your table or carpet. You will also need dress-maker’s scissors and large shears. Further requirements are pins, needles, cotton, straight edges and markers.

Your pattern will explain batting and a back cloth and you should pay a great deal of attention to the suggestions in your pattern.

This article cannot be a ‘teach yourself quilting’ manual, but I hope that it has shown you that you do not require a great amount of equipment to make very acceptable bedding quilts. However, with only a little variation of the pattern, you could make some beautiful duvet covers. Not many people make duvet covers, so you could either make them exclusively for yourself or sell them.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now involved with king size duvets. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Modern Throw Pillows For Sale.

This is not so easy in a domestic situation especially with regard to a house fire – you cannot realistically pretend that you have a house fire but you cannot merely set fire to bits of it either, so the next best thing is to have a checklist to prevent fires occurring yet to go through the checklist on a ordinary basis – say, weekly.

Many house fires begin in the kitchen, so you could begin there:

1] Is the oven clean? The rings and the oven have to be clean or the fragments can catch fire.

2] Are the curtains so long that possible become blown onto a hot ring if the window is open? This is a frequent cause of kitchen fires, especially if you hang new curtains in the winter or spring and do not realize that the wind can blow them into the rings until the summer whilst you open the windows

3] Are the flexes on your electrical devices all right? Check for fraying or wear and tear. Are any of the electrical sockets overloaded? It is not a good idea to use adapters in the kitchen – stick to the principle of one plug in one socket and a pretty good habit is to unplug anything you are not using, even the kettle or the coffee percolator

The home’s heating system is a fire risk, after all it is meant to be hot, so check it:

1] All heaters ought to be switched off while there is no one to keep an eye on them, with the exception of central heating. Turn bar fires off if you go out or go to bed and always fix a guard in front of open fires if you leave the room. ‘Fix’ a guard with clips, do not only stand one in front of the fire because a falling log or lump of coal can knock a guard over.

2] Can curtains or other textiles blow into the fire or get heated to the point of combustion? Occasionally, people pull their chair or couch up to the fire but fall asleep or go to bed leaving the chair to heat up.

3] Is the chimney clean? Soot can and does catch fire so have your chimney cleared or inspected regularly.

4] Likewise with the furnace, is it clean and soot-free?

5] If you use gas, are the bottles stored outside the house?

5) Is the furnace been wiped and inspected every year?

6) Are the propane tanks yet fuels stored outside the house?

Then there are general points:

1] Do you have a house fire safety evacuation drill? Do you have a muster purpose, so that everybody knows that everyone is out of the house and safe?

2] Are electric leads, cables and extension leads in good condition? Do you have any under carpets? If so, you ought to not really, so check them for wear.

3] Are any sockets overloaded? Are all devices that are not in use unplugged?

4] Do you have smoke detectors? Do you check that they are working? Do you have a spare battery in case one fails?

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is now concerned with Oakley safety glasses. If you would like to know more, please visit our site at Safety Glasses Bifocal

As far as only sport goes, Pattaya offers horse riding, swimming, diving, wind surfing, golf, tennis and jet skiing among others. However, unlike most sporting towns or cities, it does not start to go to sleep when the sun goes down.

The bars, restaurants, discos and strip bars begin to open in profusion at around four o’clock. The bars are of each persuasion to suit each niche market.

There are Welsh bars, American bars, Irish bars, Lady Boy bars and each other type of bar you can think of. Likewise with the restaurants, there are specialized restaurants for each country. There are bush game restaurants, Chinese, Japanese, American, French, German and fish restaurants. In fact there are thousands of restaurants and bars all trying to become unique.

I am sure that you could stay in Pattaya for months without going the same bar or eating the same sort of food twice. This is just as well because there are representatives from each country in the world there as well. You will hear English, Russian and every European and Asian language spoken in Pattaya on a regular basis.

Pattaya receives over one million visitors a year. Most of these visitors are men, and the local government is attempting to do more to appeal to women and families by relocating the girlie bars back away from the beach.

Despite it being quite large, you can stay in your favourite part of Pattaya yet find nearly everything you desire near-by. However, if you do have to get about, nothing could be simpler. Most individuals merely hop on a ‘Baht Bus’. These small open-backed pick-ups can be seen going around the city by quite predictable routes when you understand the layout of the city.

The ‘fixed fare’ is ten Baht for as far as you want to go on the route, although some drivers will endeavor to trick more out of you if you go a long distance. Thais pay five Baht. If you do not feel confident enough to predict where the bus is going, you could get on one of the thousands of motorcycle taxis.

They are dearer at about forty to sixty Baht, but they will go anywhere you like. Get a quote before you set off to avoid disappointment on both sides. If you do not want to hire a car, there are other alternatives. You could hire a motorcycle or motorbike. A motorcycle costs around 100 Baht a day at the cheapest, but beware the traffic in Pattaya it can be fairly chaotic.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now involved with Songkran – the old Thai New Year. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Package Holidays to Thailand.

Popular home wood working projects include clothes hangers, bird tables, wine racks, garden furniture and interior furniture like shelving, cupboards and display cabinets. Even teenagers can start to learn on simple projects building up their competence steadily. If you go for popular wood working projects, you will have no problem selling the items you make either.

Wooden objects for home and garden use are traditional and hard-wearing. People value them more highly than an item that has been stamped out by a machine or welded together on a production line. This applies even to something as straightforward as a swing seat. Everyone would choose the wooden one, even if it were a little more costly.

This is especially true of interior furniture like display cabinets. Whoever heard of someone displaying a fine bone china tea set in a metal display cabinet? The very thought of it is ridiculous, isn’t it? So, if you want to decorate your home and garden well, you pick items made of wood and so does everyone else. Therefore, if you want to sell the goods you make, choose popular wood working projects.

Hardwood is the best wood to use, but it is the most expensive and sources of many hardwoods are protected. This makes them scarce. Teak is one such hardwood that is scarce and very expensive, but teak furniture is one of the most highly valued by aficionados.

Whether you are just starting out or fairly experienced has an effect on the type of popular wood working projects you should undertake. Here are some popular wood working projects placed approximately in order of the competence level need to accomplish them.

Garden swing seats always look good hanging from a tree in the garden. They are not hard to make look nice and they sell easily. Bird tables go down well too. There are many different designs of bird table to pick from: with a little house or without, with climbing perches or not, with a hole for a bathing bowl or not, etc, etc..

Dog kennels are superb popular wood working projects. Every dog owner wants a kennel for their dog to lie in to take refuge from the sun, wind and rain, while it is outside. Dogs come in all different sizes, so you could make your kennels to order and they need not be of hardwood. Garden benches are not too tricky, but you can increase the style by making them more elaborate and making them from soft or hardwood.

More competence is usually needed to work on popular wood working projects for indoors, but you could begin with made-to-measure clothes hangers or mug trees. Curtain rods can be as ornate as you like too, but a set of matching curtain rods for a room of house would sell well. Wine racks are popular too.

Going up the scale of ability levels, you could construct stools for the breakfast bar and even a kitchen table. Going further up the ladder of popular wood working projects, there would be a dining room table with six or eight matching chairs. The pinnacle of indoor furniture is the intricate, glazed display cabinet. That has to be magnificent, because people use them to show off their most highly prized possessions and they are being looked at all the time.

If you are interested in popular wood working projects like these, it is a good idea to acquire a set of woodworking plans for your project from a reputable source.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with a favourite subject, bench woodworking plans. If you are interested in Desk Woodworking Plans, please click through to our site, where we have 14,000 wood working plans.

They are not that difficult to keep either. As with all fish ponds, you need to maintain the quality of the water, but that is not so much of a problem when you know what you are doing. Once you have got the water right, the rest will follow more or less automatically, although you will have to check it often.

Having said that, you ought to not merely hurry out in to the garden, dig a hole and fill it with fish. You need to buff up on the topic first, but there is so much information on koi on the market, that you will have no problem in that respect. There is also lots of information on the Internet.

The first thing to do is dig a hole for your pond, but it better not to have it consistently deep. It should be three or four feet deep at one end and a foot or so deep at the other. The koi will overwinter and sleep in the deeper water, but only the fry will feel comfortable in the shallow end. They will take refuge there to avoid being eaten by the larger fish. Like most fish, koi are cannibals.

Once your pond has been dug out, fill it with water and leave it for a week. Use this week to test your water features such as the water pumps, the filter and the fountain. If you are losing water strive to plug the leak. If you have to keep topping up the water level from the hosepipe, you will probably run into hardship with chlorine.

After a week, the chlorine in that tap water will have dissipated and any surplus oil in your pond apparatus will have been flushed out, so you can put aquatic plants in. Plant them in pots so that you can move them easily if necessary. You ought to also construct some underwater caves for the fish to conceal themselves in.

When you are happy that everything is working well and that the environment is stable (this is easier to do in larger ponds), you can think about buying some koi.

You have to decide why you would like to have koi. Do you want to show them and possibly earn some money? In that case you will have to start with expensive fish, but if you just want to sit and watch them, the cheapest ones are all right. You can probably ask a friend to give you a dozen anyway.

If you procure your fish in the breeding season, you will probably get a couple of gravid (pregnant) females anyway.

A word of warning: fish regulate their environment better than we do. A given amount of water will only hold a precise number of inches of fish. So, as an example, say that every ten gallons of water will be sufficient for ten inches of fish and you have 200 gallons that is 200 inches of fish, which is 20 x 10 inch fish or 40 x 5 inch fish. As the fish grow, they will die to maintain this ratio, so do not buy too many until you understand this ratio.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on numerous subjects, but is at present involved with finding a koi pond contractor. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, just go to our web site now for some fantastic deals.

One of the other good things about quilt making is that it is so flexible. If there is more than one way to skin a cat, there are thousands of ways of sewing a quilt.

Patch work quilts are one of the most gorgeous and traditional quilts to use to keep you warm at night. They are also one of the cheapest ways of making a quilt, but they are not the easiest of quilts to begin with. Matching all the squares in a patch work quilt is not quite as easy as it seems. The easiest way to begin is to buy two big squares of fabric that you like.

However, there is a great tradition in Europe and America of sewing patch work quilts. The craft of doing this has even become a social gathering in the United States. If you would like to get started sewing patch work quilts, you could join a group if you live in America or you could join an Internet group that specializes in making quilts. Do a search on line and you will find what you are searching for.

There is such a lot of choice if you would like to make a quilt. For example, you could create the top of the quilt either totally smooth or totally fluffy or totally smooth or a mixture of all or some of them. Then you can have the underside as a extraordinary cloth as well or you could simply use a sheet or preferably something a bit more rugged.

If you are thoroughly intimidated by the idea of making a full-size quilt, you could try making a quilt for a baby. Okay, you might not have a baby and you may certainly not be planning having one, but you could make one for the practice and hold onto it to give to a special person in your life who is having a baby or only sell it through a local shop or even eBay.

Once you are confident about constructing and selling quilts for babies’ cots or toddlers’ beds, you could upgrade them a bit and offer to embroider your name and the baby’s name on the quilt. Later still, you could accept orders for custom quilts, manufactured to the requirements of the orderer.

Constructing quilts, particularly babies’ quilts is a decent way of earning money from home for people who cannot leave home a lot. People such as work at home mothers and fathers, the elderly and the poor in health.

Owen Jones, the author of that piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with the chenille throw blankets. If you want to know more, please visit our website at Woollen Blankets.

Bed bugs are a part of the arachnid or spider family, although bed bugs are parasites that suck blood, not all bodily fluids. They will dine on most warm-blooded animals and there is some evidence that humans are not their first preference of prey.

The most widespread form of bed bugs are known as Cimex lectularius by their Latin name. They are quite small but very fast moving bugs and they are members of the spider family, although many of them do not look like spiders at all. Rather, most of them look like little beetles, until they have gorged themselves, after which they can hardly move and are at their most vulnerable.

Bed bugs feed in a similar way to mosquitoes. They insert a tube into the skin of its victim and suck blood out. It is not a great deal to you, about a quarter of a millilitre, but is a lot to them. It allows them to live and procreate.

Bed bugs, unlike their relatives the ticks, are not known to convey any diseases. In fact, they are one of the few insects that do not pass on a disease.

A bedbug bite is comparable to an ant bite in appearance, but it will itch similar a mosquito bite. You will most likely experience a slight swelling with a red dot in the centre and an itch. Not much more.

You can check for bed bugs pretty easily by soaking a bar of soap in a little water for half an hour while you lie on your bed reading a magazine. Then get up and fetch the soap, wet-side down and fling back the bed clothes. Dab up the bed bugs, if there are any with the soft soap. This is a speedy method of getting rid of a small number of bed bugs, but cannot be seen as a resolution.

With regards to the annihilation of an infestation of bed bugs, it depends where you live. If you are in a hotel, the bar of soap will be proof enough of a problem and it is the hotel manager’s duty to provide a solution. If they do nothing, report the hotel to the neighbourhood tourist bureau.

If you live in rented accommodation, it is your landlord’s responsibility to solve the predicament. If he or she is reluctant, then go to the city hall and seek advice.

If the issue is in your own home, then take the skirting boards and architraves off. Spray or paint very powerful insecticide onto the wall and refix the woodwork. If you are still concerned, seal the woodwork off on all sides with mastic or silicone.

These measures will ensure that your house will be free of bed bugs.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on quite a few subjects, but is currently concerned with natural tick repellent. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at tick Repellent For Dogs.

However, what do you do if you toil on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most precious resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you need to have reliable backups and several of them.

The problem is that computers do not really break down very often so we become lulled into the false feeling of security that we can make backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs when you are about to lose all your data, which may be your entire earnings stream.

For instance, say you make websites for a living and update them frequently so that the search engines find them interesting. What would occur if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You might say that you would download them from your Net host and begin again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed website.

That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would become less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your earnings would plunge. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You failed to make proviso for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how often you backup your data on physical media, you will always be running a risk because anything physical, any item is prone to failure and deterioration. CD’s do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost tons of data that I thought was safe on CD’s and hard drives are prone to fail with no notice at all.

Even if you do overcome these issues of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your livelihood, your data would be gone forever. All that hard effort. Your source of earnings. Gone. Forever.

There is a different alternative and that is not to hold your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the best in safe storage providing the best value recovery planning for computer data.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

The difficulty with any web site, and a blog is merely a specialized kind of website, is marketing it. It should not be a problem for any business to come up with pieces and information related to the business and its products. We will come back to advertising your business blog later in this article.

As the number of people reading your blog grows, you will have to become aware of what form of information you give them. It is better to be more than less open. You should use your blog to create customer loyalty and this is most easily gained if visitors think that they can trust you. You ought to be honest to gain peoples’ trust.

Request feedback on your products and your service. This a great free manner of learning your shortcomings, otherwise you would have to commission a survey. Request of your readers to leave comments and delegate someone to read and reply to each comment

Think of your blog as your firm’s booth at the biggest and longest lasting exposition that it will ever feature in. Attempt to create each piece helpful to the reader by providing some little known details or facts on your products or related items.

For example, if your company makes crampons for climbing, write about the latest mountaineering expeditions. If you sell tropical fish, compose articles on which fish can happily live together.

You will need to tell visitors that you have a blog. There are a number of good ways to promote a web site or a blog. One of the best methods is … writing articles. So, you could write articles on composing articles like I am doing now, or almost certainly better still, publish the pieces that you compose for your blog as independent, stand-alone articles in article directories with your blog URL at the bottom of the article.

These articles will get picked up by web site authors if they are interesting enough. This will give you back links to your website, the number of which Google uses to determine how popular your website is and this determines your rank in their search engine. Because Google is by far the most popular search engine in the world, it is crucial to rank highly in Google.

Add an RSS button to your blog and then people can have your posts sent to their inbox without having to check whether you have updated your blog. This is useful for the blog because no post will be missed by those who have picked up your RSS feed.

You can learn how to create a business blog by visiting web sites that teach the subject. They are usually free so you do not have much to lose.

If you are interested in trying Business Blogging, please visit our web site on Blogging For Beginners.

You could adapt and implement the fire safety code from work for your home use, and just like in work, you will have to make certain that everybody in your household knows and knows your fire safety code. Adopting a home fire safety code will hugely increase your family’s chances of surviving a home fire.

The specialists at the fire station are known as Fire Prevention Officers. Fire prevention officers frequently give talks on fire prevention techniques at schools, offices and seminars. It is also often possible to have a one-on-one interview with a fire prevention officer but they will also visit you in your home for more specific advice in some regions.

The chief fire prevention officer has to train new recruits and schedule public buildings for check ups depending on their location, age and usage. You could use the same criteria to assess the risks in your own home.

For example, older houses tend to have more timber in them and smaller windows which means that it may catch fire more easily, it might burn faster and it might be more problematic to escape from because of the smaller windows, which may even be jammed.

Only to give you an concept of what a building’s fire code can be like, I will give some examples below. You can apply some of these concepts to the ‘fire code’ for your home, according to what sort of building you occupy.

Firstly, buildings in numerous countries have maximum occupancy numbers for every residential building, particularly for commercially rented buildings. You may not just keep partitioning accommodation in order to cram in more tenants (and get more rent). This maximum is a strict law and must be adhered to.

If you live in or rent out a commercial property, then all exits ought to be clearly labeled with lit signs which can be seen through smoke. They also have to have a battery back-up in case the wires get burned through. These buildings also have to have a certain number of fire extinguishers and there might even have to be a number of different sorts, eg: water hoses, sand buckets, fire blankets and regular extinguishers.

There also have to be smoke detectors and a building-wide fire alarm system. Make sure that flammable materials are stored in a safe place and that fire drills are carried out regularly. Everybody should know their muster point and which doors should be closed and which ones left open.

Many of the suggestions above are true laws for commercial and some residential buildings, so if you do not want to fall foul of the law, be sure you know your obligations.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is now involved with Safety Glasses USA. If you would like to know more, please visit our site at Safety Glasses Bifocal

RC car racing is highly exciting, but there is scarcely any risk to the driver or the fans. The rest is all there: thrills, spills, crashes, speed, skids, fires, gambling, etc.. The best drivers and the best builders are famous within their sport and are treated like mini stars. Some of these RC cars go very fast and they can accelerate and take corners faster than their full-scale counterparts.

There are two basic sorts of RC cars which are differentiated by their power source.

Electric RC Cars: this is the most prevalent sort of RC car, probably because parents buy them for children and a newcomer to the sport may purchase one to see whether he likes it or not.

The largest advantage of the electric RC car is that they are silent, which is a big plus point if your children use their cars in the garden. It is also important if you would like to attach a camera or a video recorder to it for filming timid, wild animals like birds.

They are also less expensive than other kinds of model cars and smokeless, which means that you can practice manoeuvres inside if it is raining.

Some disadvantages are that the batteries of an electric RC car wear down. This means that the car will become slower and that the speed of the car will be regulated by the charge of the batteries not the power of the engine.

Batteries are expensive too and rechargeable batteries are very expensive to purchase. The batteries might run down whilst the car is some distance away.

Liquid Fuel RC Cars: there are two types of liquid fuel RC cars: those that run on a special mix known as Nitro and those that run on petrol. These cars are a lot faster than battery cars and they run for much longer too.

They are also cheaper to run. These facts make the liquid fuel RC car the choice of real enthusiasts, racers and car builders alike.

Petrol and Nitro are cheap in comparison with batteries and the amount that the engines of these cars get through is almost insignificant anyway.

However, they come with disadvantages too. They have an internal combustion engine, so they produce smoke, which means that they must not be used indoors and they are loud. Most racers would declare that this adds to the thrill of a race and they are probably right.

These model RC cars were meant to race and the public loves to see them doing it.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present involved with remote controlled cars as a hobby. If you have an interest in model or toy RC cars, just go over to our website now at 1/5 Scale RC Cars

However, it is not merely inexpensive, it is healthy and instructive. All children should go camping either with their parents or the scouts in order to learn something of nature before they get locked into a career to pay the mortgage and forget that there is life outside the city. You know, there are inner city kids that do not know that milk comes from cows? How ridiculous is that?

So, if you are going to take an education in nature by the horns, you will have to have certain camping gear. Inexpensive though camping equipment is relative to the equipment required for other activities, most people still have to be a little cautious how much they spend.

If you fall into that category, then this article is for you. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, it is worth pointing out that if you have the money, you can do worse than just going down to the local sports shop or camping shop and buying all your kit from them. Buy everything you require in one go and ask for a discount. if anything ever goes wrong they will remember you as a big spender and fix it for you straight away.

However, the remainder of have to be a bit more careful with the cheque book. If you know a bit concerning camping equipment from your parents or from the scouts and do not mind second-hand, then car boot sales and garage sales can be just the thing.

Frequently people are selling stuff because their kids have left home and they are having a clear out or perhaps they have had more children and the pup tent is no longer any use to them.

I sold a lovely tent not so long ago for peanuts because I knew that I would never need it again. The beauty of these sales is that you can put the tent up or get the seller to put it up for a closer inspection. Look for rot, sniff for mildew, check the number of pegs and guide lines et cetera, but do not get carried away with perfection, you can buy extra pegs, lanyard and a mallet, but you do not want to have to sew up holes or replace zips or fly screen.

Classified ads are another good source of equipment, but pick the item up yourself so that you know where to take it back if you do not have the opportunity to inspect it properly before handing over the money.

EBay and Amazon are also pretty good, but you have to do some research on the manufacturers’ names and the regular retail prices otherwise you might end up purchasing a costly copy, a kiddies’ toy tent or merely junk.

One of my favourite stores to browse is the Army and Navy Surplus store. Try going into an A&N and coming out empty-handed. If the equipment in there is good enough for our troops to risk their lives with, it’s decent enough for a week in the Poconos.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with the egg crate foam mattress pad. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Egg Crate Mattress Pad For Sale.

The government’s and the airlines’ reaction to those acts of terrorism have resulted in enormous hikes in the degree of security at airports and rightly so, but travellers are also put off by the long queues and invasive searches at airports. This difficulty is even worse at busy airports and during holiday periods such as whilst schools are closed.

Car travel is also an alternative, but then you have to carry out your own driving and that brings its own issues, especially if you are with children and particularly if you are a single parent. Besides that, travelling by train is a vacation in its own right. Your trip begins the moment you put your bags in the rack and find your seat.

Once you have sat down, given the kids a colouring book and a can of soda, you can sit back, relax and just snooze or look out of the window at the scenery flying past. Most of your problems are over until you get to where you are going. Your kids cannot get lost or wander off and they are very safe from predators.

Furthermore, trains seats are usually much more roomy than the equivalent airline seats. Economy seats in a train are much more comfortable than economy seats in an airplane. You can also get up and walk about which makes long journeys much more comfortable.

The vista is also better from a train than a plane. After all, clouds are clouds are clouds, but you can see all sorts of things out of the window of a train. There are also sleeping and dining carriages to break up the trip, but there is usually also attendant service in your seat, if that is what you want. Simply push the button and someone will come to take your order.

Have you heard of the Orient Express, the Flying Scotsman or the Trans-Siberian Express? What romantic visions they summon up. Contemporary trains may not have the nostalgia or the steam locomotives of the Thirties, but they are still fantastic to travel on.

You can book your seats on a train trip much the same as you would on a plane, which means that if you get up to go to the bathroom or dining carriage, your seat will still be empty when you return. This is a colossal plus factor, because it is annoying if someone takes your seat.

The next time that you make a decision to go away, think again about going by train. You can leave your car at the station or you can even take it with you on the train, if you want. You will not regret having given the rail network a opportunity, because the likelihood are that you have forgotten how handy and inexpensive they are.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a lot of topics, but is presently involved with American Flyer train sets. If you would like to know more about train sets for kids, please go over to our website for some great offers.

A vacation in Hawaii is thought to be very costly because of the high profile it has in films and TV series like ‘Hawaii 5-0′, but it is possible to find fairly reasonable holidays in Hawaii, if you do a little research. Search the Internet for last minute package deals and if that fails, try putting together your own holiday from various cut-price components.

You may be pleasantly surprised how much it costs to have a holiday in Hawaii compared to a equivalent one in say, St. Croix, Barbados or even Florida. Look for actual hotels or guest houses in regions that are just outside the tourist traps and you will almost certainly get a better price. Lots of these hotels have their own web site and so offer seasonal or last minute discounts directly to private patrons.

Hawaii is one of the most beautiful locations in the area and indeed in the world. The coast is famous for its natural beauty – the swimming and diving are legendary, but the hinterland is beautiful as well, if you like walking, riding or driving by jeep. There are magnificent volcanoes, waterfalls and forests.

Hawaii has been turned into a paradise for sports people of all kinds. There is very little that you could choose to do and cannot on Hawaii. There is ample chance for most land, sea and air sports ranging from mountaineering, to diving to hang-gliding. You can rent Jeeps, mountain bikes, yachts and even a helicopter.

Most visitors take a vacation in Hawaii for water sports such as swimming, diving, snorkeling, fishing and water skiing, but power boating and yachting or just sailing a dinghy is common enough too.

There are also lots of natural and man-made historical sights to see on all the islands, but the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on Big Island is just about the most well-known although most of the smaller island such as Kauai, Lanai, Maui, Molokai and Oahu all have their attractions too. It is only a case of reading up on Hawaii before you go and attempting to choose a hotel in a spot that makes your interests easily available.

There are lots of web sites and books on Hawaii to help you with your investigation, but you can also travel around easily once you get there, so that you could have a week on one island and a week on another offering different hobbies as a specialty.

This can all be arranged fairly easily if you put your tour together yourself, but it may be more awkward if you endeavor to patch two package vacations together. You will not regret your holiday in Hawaii whether you go alone, with the family or as part of a group.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several subjects, but is now involved with the Bikini Cup D. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Swimwear for Big Busts.

It so happens that, sometimes, people forget to set automatic updates of the virus database, sometimes the antivirus software is not set up properly and sometimes it just gets switched off by accident or by software.

It is not extraordinary for automatic antivirus software updates to be switched off by accident or design. It has happened to me two times this year already. Luckily, Windows 7 warned me and I took notice of that admonition and, most importantly, I fixed the problem.

This is the most important point. If your computer warns you about something, particularly regarding security, do not put off doing something about it. In fact, drop what you are doing and fix the problem immediately.

If you leave you computer open to assault by malevolent software, you will suffer. It is no good imagining that you are safe because you do not do online banking or because you do not have sensitive information on your computer, because you have.

Your friends and colleagues entrusted you with their email addresses and names on the understanding that you safeguard their confidentiality.

A lot of malware just looks for the addresses in your email client software. Then it will harvest those details and spam your friends to distraction. Two of my friends let that happen this year and the only answer for both of them was to get a new email address and reformat their hard drive.

For instance, I was getting financial advice from my next door neighbour’s ten-year old kid. It was spam coming from Eastern Europe but it was prepared as if it came from him. He had been hacked and his address book had been copied to spammers. I had hundreds of junk email for months.

And do not think that you can merely create a filter to send it to the bin. You cannot, because they forge the email headers so that it seems to your anti spam software that every email comes from a new address, the result of which is that your spam filter does not recognise it as spam.

This is bad enough, but it can get a lot worse. Spyware can sit on your computer reading the keys that you press and transmitting the data back to the boss so that they can spam you on what you just typed.

Does that sound familiar? Today you send email to a friend saying that you are going to repaint and the next day you receive unsolicited email advertising on paint and wallpaper.

If all this sounds familiar, then you ought to take action. Type ‘free anti virus software’ into a search engine and set it up properly. If you have AV software already, check the settings. You need to enable automatic updates.

If you leave your computer always on that is all you have to do, but if you switch it off while not in use, set the updates to take place when you switch it on.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

Therefore there are a few things to watch out for if you want to buy garden furniture on line. Some of these suggestions will apply to other items as well especially heavy items.

Be wary of shipping charges because some companies will strive to hide the fact that they can be horrendous. If delivery charges are an extra, do not forget to add these fees on to the cost of the garden furniture before you evaluate prices. Some businesses will talk some claptrap about an order processing fee in an effort to mask their delivery fees. These companies are being dishonest and you should avoid them like the plague.

Try to switch off to the words ‘discount’ and ‘sale price’ until you have added up all the costs and you have compared this total with the total cost of a comparable item. Similarly, be very suspicious of comparisons between list price and sale price. Manufacturers often ‘recommend’ a high list price purposely so that the retailer can offer a discount. It is very common practice, but designed to deceive.

Beware of ‘price snobbery’. If you see two retailers selling exactly the same items of garden furniture but at widely different prices, do not be automatically convinced that the cheaper one must be inferior. Instead, look around the cheap web site for extra costs. Do not forget that most retailers buy from the same manufacturers.

Do not trust any firm that says that they will not be beaten on price because they are the cheapest on the Internet or that they will undercut anyone you can prove is cheaper. They have no proof that they are the cheapest and if you prove that they are not they will decrease their price only to you because you caught them in their lie. These people are liars.

Companies that make a big issue out of fast service are not really giving you anything. Every company likes a fast turn-around because they can bank the check earlier and the warranty finishes sooner as well. You will find out how good their service is if you have difficulties. Empty promises and blowing one;s own trumpet mean nothing. Self praise is no praise.

You can check up on the firm’s customer service record by typing the company’s name, city of business and the word ‘complaints’ or ‘problems’ into Google. You will soon be able to determine for yourself whether you are dealing with a reputable firm or not. Purchasing garden furniture on line is the same as buying anything else expensive on line: it is up to the buyer to beware before parting with his money because it might be hard to get it back if there is a difficulty.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on a variety of subjects, but is now involved with farmhouse dining tables. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Solid Oak Dining Tables.

Therefore, if you are accelerating to cruising speed for motorway driving; going up hill or overtaking, the car will probably use its liquid fuel engine but then as you ease off the accelerator to, say, cruise down the motorway; go down the other side of the hill or to drive in slow traffic, the computer will turn off the liquid fuel engine and turn on the electric engine.

The electric engine can be regarded as free to run, because it runs off batteries which are recharged by the car whilst it is using petrol or diesel and at some other times, such as while it is braking (and the alternators are recharging in both modes). You should never have to recharge your car’s batteries overnight as they do with forklift trucks.

There are in essence two kinds of hybrid cars: the semi hybrids and the full hybrids.

The semi hybrids have the same sort of set up: two engines, one running on liquid fuel and the other running on batteries, but the electric motor is not capable of running the car on its own. It is there to ‘assist’ the petrol or diesel engine.

In this type of hybrid, the electric motor is called an ‘assist’. These semi hybrids will save money on fuel, but whilst the car is moving, you are burning fuel all the time.

The main difference when it comes to the full hybrid is that both engines are capable of powering the car autonomously. Whilst you are running on electricity, you are running at zero expense to your wallet and at zero expense to the environment, unless you are actually pushing the car and then both engines might be working in union.

This changing of power sources is done robotically without any intrusion from the driver. In the case of the Prius, for instance, this remarkable achievement is accomplished by what Ford calls its Hybrid Synergy Drive. Other firms have their equivalent to the HSD.

In order to get the most out of these full hybrids, you actually need to be doing an ‘average amount’ of driving under ‘average’ or ‘mixed’ circumstances. For instance, if you are driving in traffic, the car will try to use the electric engine, but if all you do is drive in inner city traffic jams the batteries will soon become depleted and you will be driving on liquid fuel all the time, which sort of negates the main reason for spending a great deal extra on a hybrid in the first instance.

The car needs to travel on open motorways in order to recharge its batteries so that it can utilize them once it gets back into town. If you just drive in town traffic, you may be better off getting a little run around instead.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now involved with how to compare tyre prices. If you want to know more, please visit our website at Car Tyres For Sale.

Some people prefer to live in the recently decorated apartment or house for a while to get a feel for what will suit the ambiance first. However, sooner or later, you will just have to bite the bullet and start traipsing around the malls and the Internet. Catalogues and brochures are a decent starting place and a fund of free ideas. Next come the monthly ‘Home’ magazines. Show rooms in the big stores and on the Internet can generate ideas as well.

Are you attracted to timber? Many people are and it has become an increasingly rare and therefore valuable resource, especially the hardwoods and even more particularly the foreign hardwoods like teak and mahogany.

Some home-grown hardwoods are just as dear, think of walnut and then you just have the ordinarily expensive ones like cherry, oak, cedar, maple and willow. Less expensive, although still not cheap are pine and birch.

If you like the gorgeous dark colour of mahogany but cannot afford it, you could always stain a cheaper timber the colour of mahogany. It is not difficult and you can achieve very satisfactory results. One tip that all interior designers give though, is not to have different colour timbers in the same room.

You can mix different types of timber, but they should all be near enough the same colour. If you have different colours either move some pieces of furniture to a different room or stain the lighter ones to match the darker ones. The other way around does not work, you cannot stain something lighter.

If you do not want to commit yourself to going into debt to get all you new furniture at once (and who can blame you), it is a good idea to buy the one article of furniture you see somewhere that you really, really like. Say a beautiful table or cabinet or suite of chairs. There is no necessity to be too practical here as you probably already have something to sit on, eat off, put things in and stand the TV on.

The point is that you are no longer happy with the items of furniture that you have and want to change them. Buy your lovely thing and throw something out. Keep your eyes open for the next lovely thing that matches your first lovely thing and as soon as you have the money, buy it and throw something else out. You will have a patchwork quilt of a house for a while but if you tackle the house room by room, you will get there soon enough.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a range of subjects, but is now involved with large dining tables. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Solid Oak Dining Tables.

The people of Andorra have the second highest life expectancy in the world (82 years at birth). Although Andorra is not in the European Union, it uses the Euro because it is easier for everyone. Andorra is a very prosperous nation because it is a tax haven and its 85,000 inhabitants are hosts to more than 10,0000,0000 tourists a year.

Most of those tourists are skiers or are interested in skiing. So, it goes without saying that the quality of skiing in Andorra is of world class proportions. For people who are not interested in skiing, the views are breath-taking and the clean mountain air is a tonic, which makes Andorra popular with ramblers and hikers. If you are touring the area, you can visit France or Spain from Andorra within several hours, depending on the weather.

The skiing industry in Andorra has come a long way since the first ski lift was installed in 1956. Most of the skiing tourists come from France, Spain and Britain. Although nowhere in the south of France can be considered cheap, Andorra levies hardly any tax on goods so this reduces the costs quite a bit. Perfume, cigarettes and alcohol are particularly cheap compared with its neighbours.

The largest skiing resort by far in Andorra is Grandvalira which has 193 ski slopes serviced by 66 ski lifts. Andorra in general and Grandvalira in particular has a reputation of being good for beginners and families. This is because numerous of the slopes are quite gentle and the area specializes in ski schools and training. Grandvalira alone has seven separate training centres and more than 450 qualified skiing instructors. Snowboarding is also taught at many of these schools.

Vallnord is another of Andorra’s famous resorts. Vallnord has perhaps a wider range of ski slopes than Grandvalira, since it also caters for the advanced skier. It is smaller than Grandvalira with just 50 different slopes and 30 ski lifts, but that helps give it a more intimate, isolated atmosphere than its enormous competitor.

There are also training schools at Vallnord and it is a centre from which you can sight-see and tour. If you want to ski, but also travel around, it is best not to take your own skis. You can travel by bus or by car, although you really should have some experience before driving through snowy mountains, where the weather can become treacherous at the blink of an eye.

If you travel by coach, you can hire skiing apparatus and clothing wherever you decide to come to a halt. Nowhere is far from anywhere in Andorra as the whole principality covers less than 200 square miles, but the weather can be a hazard to drivers who are not used to mountain weather conditions.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now involved with short ski breaks. If you would like to know more, please go over to our web site at Ski Package Holidays.

The earliest references to hurling in Ireland is in early Irish laws dating from the fifth century. Hurling played a prominent part in early Irish mythology. Legendary Irish heroes such as Cuchulainnt and Fionn Mac Cumhail and his Fianna are both written of as taking part in hurling.

Hurling is, basically, a stick and ball game. The game is thought to be allied to the games of shinty that is played primarily in Scotland, cammag on the Isle of Man and bandy that was played formerly in England and Wales.

The stick was, and indeed, still is known as a hurley and the ball a sliotar. Early Irish lawn Law stated that the son of a r? (local king) could have his hurley hooped in bronze, while others could only make use of copper. It was illegal to impound a hurley.

The object of the game is for players to use the hurley to hit a small ball through the opposition’s goalposts either over the crossbar for one point, or under the crossbar into a net defended by a goalkeeper for one goal, which is the same as three points.

The sliotar can be caught in the hand and carried for not more than four steps, struck in the air, or hit on the ground with the hurley. It can be kicked or slapped with an open hand (the hand pass) for short-range passing. A player who wants to carry the ball for more than three steps has to bounce or balance the sliotar on the end of the stick and the ball can only be handled twice while in his possession.

The English occupation of Ireland led to many statutes prohibitting or restricting the playing of hurling as it diverted people from archery practice. The earliest of these goes back to the 13th century.

However, it was the Eighteenth Century that came to be known as the ?The Golden Age? of hurling as members of the Anglo-Irish landowning gentry frequently kept teams of players on their estates and challenged each other’s teams to matches for the amusement of their tenants.

Tales of colourful hurling games from this era continue to be collected from contemporary Irish storytellers and newspapers of the period. The contemporary age of hurling In Ireland dates from the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association formed in 1884 in Thurles, County Tipperary under the illustrious patronage of Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Cashel and Charles Parnell.

The 20th Century saw greater organisation in hurling. The all-Ireland Hurling championship came into existence along with the provincial championships. Cork, Kilkenny and Tipperary dominated hurling in the 20th Century with every one of these counties winning more than 20 All-Ireland titles each. Wexford, Waterford, Clare, Limerick, Offaly, Dublin, and Galway were also strong hurling counties during the 20th Century.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several subjects, but is at present involved with London Olympics 2012 venues. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

Young Johnny will not touch ‘rabbit food’ – he wants meat and little Jenny does not want sandwiches again, because she had them for lunch. So, what can you do?

The crockpot can come to the rescue quite perfectly. Because it cooks over a long time without much heat, so the kitchen will not warm up much. You can put a casserole or a stew in there in the morning before going to work and let it cook all day and then, when you are back, you can simply knock up a salad for those who do not want a heavy meal.

It covers all the bases without costing any extra time on your behalf. Not just that, but if no one fancies what is in the crockpot, nothing is lost because it can be warmed up again the following day.

Using a crockpot to cook in this fashion will also save a great deal on electricity. Why? Not only for the cooking of the food in the crockpot, but also because if you cooked a traditional meal in the summer heat, you would need to switch on the air conditioning and the extractor fan.

This means that utilizing the crockpot to help supply an alternative or even the main meal during the summer is a win-win situation whichever way you look at it and it is cheaper as well.

That takes care of the main meal, but if there is more agreement in your family and you know from the start that everyone will eat a salad, you could use the crockpot to prepare a sweet. Or you could purchase a second crockpot.

Regrettably, crockpot cooking has acquired the reputation of just being good for preparing stews, but the fact is that this is very far from the truth. You can use it for roasting a joint or baking a cheesecake with loads of choices in between.

Two more benefits of cooking with a crockpot are:

Firstly, if you cook in a hurry, there is a predisposition to use rice or pasta as a filler instead of vegetables, whereas if you can prepare the vegetables a while before hand it is simpler to include them

Secondly, there is just one pan to clean after eating instead of two or three or more. This saves more time and energy as well.

You almost certainly have never been shown how to use your crockpot for cooking anything more difficult than a stew, so perhaps the first thing to do is buy yourself a decent crockpot recipe book which teaches a wide variety of meals including sweets and breads.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the 2 quart crock pot. If you have an interest in cooking or crock pots, please go over to our website now at Large Crock Pots

However, it is not all one-sided. There are also benefits to the owner of the pool of installing a pool safety fence. The foremost benefit of such a fence is safety. If you have young children or grand-children, you do not always have the time to supervise them playing in the pool, so a fence is a way of allowing the kids to play in the garden while excluding them from the dangerous pool.

Kids can be scallywags, all adults know that even if some parents think that their own children are not, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone else thinks they are. Our children know that they have to behave in front of us, but what happens while they know that we are not looking? You know, you were a kid yourself once. I climbed the fence into the municipal outdoor pool more than once when I was a teenager and usually after a few beers.

The fact is that if you have an unprotected pool, there is a good chance that the local kids will use it when you are away and these days that means negligence on behalf of the pool owner. Whether that is right or wrong, it is like that and if someone should drown in your pool, you would be in big trouble, unless you could prove that your took reasonable measures to prevent unauthorized access to your pool.

A security pool fence is just about the cheapest way of doing this, although fences can be easily scaled as I full-well know. However, having a fence shows that you have considered the problem and that you have tried to deter intruders.

There are quite a number of acceptable styles of pool fencing but it may vary from district to district, so it is first worth checking whether there are any local minimum standards in force in your region. Other than that, there are choices of wire, timber and steel. Wire can include mesh fences as well.

Wood almost certainly looks the best and gives the most options. If you want total privacy, you can have a full fence or if you would like to be able to see out, you could go for hit-and-miss vertical boarding. I do not like mesh, personally. I have painted tens of miles of fencing in my time and there always seems to be litter caught in the mesh. Iron railings are nice too, but pretty costly.

Whichever sort of fence you go for, grow a continuous wall of the prickliest, thorniest bushes you can find about the base of it. Pyracanthas are good and the berries attract birds – wild birds, that is. Let them grow to three or four feet high and they will deter drunks and afford the ladies some privacy while lying around the pool.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now involved with speedo swimming costumes. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Swimwear for Big Busts.

On their 1882 tour to England only one test match was played at The Oval in August. The wicket was virtually impossible to play on and Australia, who batted first, made just 63 runs. England, in response, played a little better but by scoring 101, did accomplish a first innings lead of 38 runs.

In Australia?s second innings Hugh Massie?s 55, struck at a run a minute, enabled the tourists to make 122 runs . This had the effect that England required a mere 85 runs for victory. But they had not made allowance for Fred Spofforth, dubbed ?The Demon Bowler? who refused to acknowledge defeat.

?This thing can be done? he declared and promptly succeeded in taking down the England batting. He took his final four wickets for only two runs and England lost the match by only seven runs.

This defeat sent shock waves throughout the English sporting establishment and a number of fake obituaries appeared in the sporting press, including the most famous one which appeared in ?The Sporting Times? on 2 September. It went as follows :

?In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P.

N.B.-The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

Therefore this was the first reference in print to ?The Ashes?. The England tour of Australia later that year was captained by Ivo Bligh who was afterwards to be the Earl of Darnley. Bligh said that he would ?regain the ashes? and this he went on to do with England winning the three match series by two games to one.

However the expression ?the Ashes? did not really catch on until 1903 when Pelham (or ?Plum?) Warner took a team out to Australia with the same promise of recapturing the ashes. This England did by winning the series 3 -2 . The Australian press latched on to the expression and this time it stuck.

An ?urn? to contain the ashes was created and presented to Bligh during the 1882-83 tour. It is said to contain the ashes of a cricket bail. It was presented to Bligh by a group of Victorian ladies including Bligh?s future wife.

The urn is a small terracotta vase about six inches high and may initially have held scent. It is so fragile that it is now kept permanently at the MCC headquarters at Lords.

There is a general conviction that the urn and its contents represent the official trophy played for by England and Australia, but it is in fact a private memento owned by the Darnley family and is just on loan to the MCC.

The trophy really played for is a larger Waterford glass reproduction, but the original ?Ashes urn? still stays one of the most well-known sporting icons in the world.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with tickets for London Olympics. Click a link if you are interested in 2012 London Olympics Volunteers.

There is a very broad choice of designs of garden furniture – a style to suit every person and complement every garden. So, before rushing down to the garden centre, it is worth considering for a while what you would like to accomplish with your open-air seating area. Do you want a theme? Do you want to entertain or dine there? Or do you just want to sit peacefully, take pleasure in your garden and read a magazine?

Indeed, the answer may well be a combination of all those variables. If you simply want to sit there with a drink and a book, you may be satisfied to just buy a couple of chairs and a small table, but if you want to have guests or take family meals outside, you may prefer a more substantial table. A large oak table would be quite costly, but it would look magnificent and last for a decade or more.

If you choose a table, you will have to have chairs to match, but do you want loungers as well? They could be of plastic and kept in the shed until wanted.

You will probably need some form of shade. This can be given by folding, even removable umbrellas or by overhanging trees or shrubs. Wisteria or clematis can do the job too and cost you almost nothing.

Do you intend cooking in this space? If you do, what and how? Do you fancy a barbecue pit or a proper hob and oven? A lot of people in regions where the climate permits are doing a great deal of cooking outside in a carbon copy of an indoor kitchen, but without all the walls.. If you plan the outdoor kitchen carefully, you will be able to use it in the rain too. I find it lovely not to have kitchen smells in the house and cooking out of doors is a good experience as well.

If it gets nippy in the evenings then you can think about buying some patio heaters. They are not expensive to buy or to run and one standard patio heater can keep quite a group of people warm. (By the word ‘standard’ here, I mean upright, like a lamp post).

Lighting is the last large consideration in the list when choosing garden furniture. There are actually two kinds of garden lighting to mull over: lighting to see by and lighting to lure insects away. Again, you could use standard lamps to light up your patio. They shine their light far enough so that you can still look at your garden after dark or you could have individual wall light on dimmers.

The one light I would definitely have is a mosquito lantern. Hang this away from where you sit, because they do attract insects to them which they then electrocute with a pleasing zap.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on a number of subjects, but is now involved with visual comfort lighting. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Outdoor Wall Lamps.

If you are journeying far from the beaten track, then adequate supplies of food and water are the prime concerns naturally. You will also have to have adequate suitable clothing for the season of the year and the place you are travelling in.

However, keep in mind, that some locations are chilly at night no matter what time of the year it is, so a few jumpers or light jackets will come in useful if you are driving in the mountains, in the north (in the northern hemisphere) or along the coast.

Once you have the prerequisites to survive, there are a few luxury safety items, that you might find useful. The first of these is the cell phone. There might or may not be adequate coverage where you are going, but the likelihood are that it will work somewhere near, if you have to use it. Be certain that you have a charger that works in the RV and a hands free kit if possible.

The luxury of all luxuries is a GPS unit – Global Positioning System – so that you do not get too lost, if you are out in the wilderness or even in some huge, unknown metropolis looking for the hotel you booked into over the Internet for a couple days break from the road.

If you are renting your RV, there is probably a GPS system on board, but if you are taking your own vehicle, you may consider purchasing a mobile phone that also has GPS built into it. These hand held devices are plenty accurate to get you back on track.

However, they are electrical devices and as such can break down at any moment, especially when you especially require them, so make sure that you have a current road map as well.

While you are on holiday, the weather is quite important – in fact it can make or break a holiday, so why not take a portable weather radio with you? A weather radio is exactly what it implies. It is a radio that specializes in picking up weather broadcasts – especially local ones.

This is very convenient indeed, particularly if where you are heading is not experiencing the sort of weather you are searching for. It allows you to modify your destination without having to get there first. These functional devices often come with other tools built in like a torch and a timer (alarm clock).

Make sure that your RV has an adequate set of vehicle repair tools including gloves and safety goggles. Gloves are practical for keeping your hands clean if you have a repair to make and safety goggles come in very handy if you have to swap a wheel in a dust, rain or snow storm.

The last thing on our list, but not the least important, is a good First Aid Kit. When choosing a First Aid kit, comprehensive is definitely better than small.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with Oakley safety glasses. If you would like to know more, please visit our site at Safety Glasses Bifocal

The bouncy house always goes down well with children. You could hire a bouncy house for the day and hang hearts and flowers around the outside. Check on the Net first that the firm hiring out the bouncy house is a member of your country’s governing body for bouncy house rental firms.

You could divide the children into teams and hold various races. One race could be the ‘Race of Hearts’, in which the kids have to run to the finishing line and back with a stuffed heart (or pillow) between their knees. It always results in lots of laughter.

Another race could be to ‘Wrap Mummy’ in which every team gets a couple of rolls of paper kitchen towel and they have to wrap up someone like a mummy as a gift. You could add bows and a name and address tag as well.

The teams could play ‘Mr and Mrs’ in which the compare gives a famous name and the teams have to click a clicker, bang a gong or ring a bell if they know the answer. The compare may say: ‘Samson’ the reply is ‘Delilah’; ‘Hilary Clinton’ – ‘Bill Clinton’; ‘Queen Elizabeth’ – ‘Prince Phillip’. You get the idea.

Split along gender lines, you could play the ‘King and the Queen of Hearts’. Do you remember those round sweets with a heart on them and a romantic saying in the heart? Well, they do not cost a great deal for a colossal bag of them. Give each child 50 or so and get them to stack them one on top of the other.

Whoever builds the tallest tower in a minute goes through to the next round. Two boys against each other and two girls until there is only one girl and one boy left. They can eat the sweets, naturally.

You could put a target on the ground, say one of your heart-shaped cushions, give each child an uninflated sausage-shaped balloon and put his or her name on it. Then the children stand in a circle around the heart, say twelve feet away, inflate their balloon and let them fly (without a knot in). The first one to land on the heart denotes the winner. Or the nearest to it. You could have one go each per round or they could fire at will until someone wins.

You could play Valentine’s Day bingo. This can become as elaborate as you have time for. You could create your own cards with hearts etc on them; if the children are young, you could call out pictures instead of numbers, but the funniest of all is if the caller makes up some Valentine’s Day slang to go with each number.

For example, when calling bingo numbers in Britain, it is common to say: ‘Legs 11′ and a great deal of players will whistle; ‘two little ducks, 22′ and somebody always says ‘quack, quack’. Each number has its own saying and they are used with minor variations everywhere. You could make up your own like: ‘two hairy legs, number 11′ or ‘two beautiful legs, number 11′.

If you cannot think of something suitable for each number, just do as many as you can – they always get a laugh and that is what it is all about when you are organizing a St Valentine’s Day party for kids.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several subjects, but is now concerned with the bouncy castles for sale. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Bouncy House Rentals

Guns though are specific tools, as are all tools really, but they have such an evocative reputation. Some people are violently against them yet others uphold their legal right to hold them in a world where a higher percentage of criminals hold guns than innocent civilians.

Criminals will not toe the line by definition, but for the rest of us gun holders, it is quite vital to demonstrate that we are responsible – that we know how to be safe towards others with our firearm. It is a of dispelling fear in non-shooters and displaying that we are not all red-neck, gung ho idiots.

So, the first law is: always to regard a gun as if it were loaded. You never, ever point a gun at anyone in jest. Several famous individuals have been killed in shooting accidents. OK, frequently when they were stoned, but ‘being out of it’ is no excuse whatsoever for behaving irresponsibly. Do not point a gun at anyone you do not want to threaten – and that means threaten really big time!

There is never, ever any valid excuse for having to point a gun at anyone in jest or accidentally. Whilst loading a gun, it should be held so that the barrel is pointing away from anyone, even yourself.

If you want to pass a gun to someone, either you have to know them well or you do not do it. Whether the gun is loaded or not. The number of times I have been handed a loaded gun is incredible and I cannot put it down to my charisma.

If you must show off your gun, unload it in front of your friend and check that it is unloaded in front of your friend. If he or she does not know about guns, at least you are demonstrating how to check the safety of the gun and that you are responsible.

One means of demonstrating or reminding yourself that a gun is safe is to fasten a ribbon to a blank case and put that in the cylinder of a revolver and take the magazine out of a semi-automatic. Always hand a revolver over for viewing with the cylinder flipped out so that the person can establish that the chambers are empty bar the one with the ribbon.

Never, ever play about with guns if you are under the influence of alcohol or drugs – it is too easy to make mistakes that can land you in gaol and regretting the incident for the remainder of your life, because the one injured or killed in these circumstances is normally a friend – someone you were having a great time with.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is now involved with Oakley safety glasses. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Safety Glasses Bifocal

Dengue, in its most common form has an incubation phase of about |five to eight days from the start of fever. It is worth noting that a person has fever for about four to seven days and it is common for most people to recover without any major complications. However, long term effects and complications cannot be fully ruled out in all cases, with some taking many months to recover and some having fatal recurrences.

This arises particularly in regions where dengue is endemic and there is the chance of repeated infections and relapses. The most serious of effects or complications are dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS).

Dengue hemorrhagic fever known as Hemorrhagic dengue, Dengue shock syndrome, Philippine hemorrhagic fever, Thai hemorrhagic fever or Singapore hemorrhagic fever can lead to dengue shock syndrome and is fatal in around 1/20 cases that have a re-infection.

The severity of the impact of dengue in the form of dengue hemorrhagic fever rests in essence on one contracting a different virus after building immunity to one particular sort of virus. The risk factors increase with having antibodies to dengue virus from a prior infection, being younger than 12, female, or Caucasian.

Look out for the effects of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the person being not only restless and irritable, but also becoming sweaty and developing shock-like symptoms. Minute spots of blood and bleeding could take place on the skin with substantial patches below the skin and minor injuries resulting in severe bleeding. Some of the early symptoms that might become noticed are decreased appetite, fever, headache, joint pain, malaise, muscle pain, and vomiting.

Then you could notice more acute indications like restlessness followed by skin discoloration caused by the flow of blood into the tissues from ruptured blood vessels in mucous membranes especially in the mouth. There could also be a sweeping rash followed by flat round spots caused by internal bleeding in the skin from the capillaries.

This dengue situation could worsen and show up as a shock-like state, cold clammy extremities, and sweatiness. A GP could examine the patient and find other indications like enlarged liver, reduced blood pressure, red eyes, swollen glands, and weak and rapid pulse.

The treatment might include a cure of the indications and a transfusion of fresh blood or platelets to correct bleeding concerns, IV fluids and electrolytes to right electrolyte imbalances and oxygen therapy for treating the unusually low blood oxygen level and hydration with intravenous (IV) fluids to treat dehydration. In addition, supervision in an intensive care unit is usually essential.

It is vital to get to your medical professional in time during recurrent attacks and to make sure of personal hygiene and cleanliness at home and its environs. Using fully-covering clothing, mosquito netting, mosquito repellent containing DEET and avoiding travelling while mosquitoes are prevalent would help to contain dengue.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several subjects, but is currently involved with Electronic Bug Killer devices. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at electronic insect killer