There is no place to donate to the cause. We have not sought foundation support.
The major projects are about awareness and healing, but though we'd qualify for foundation support, we'd rather they support direct efforts.
If you want to support the documentation projects, there are books available and we look for volunteers and information.
There has never been a single ad for any published book, but word spread organically.
Dream Writer Lady Ariarose DWAR at Your Service Forever Friends Faithfully
Join us on a captivating journey through our literary world,
where stories inspire healing and connection in every page.
From Infant to Mature Reader
Are You Ready to Set Sail A Ship is Being Loaded See You at The Dock
Current redirects:
dreamwriterariarose.com
dreamwriterladyariarose.com
violeteyesaga.com
violeteyessaga.com
dwarteacherscorner.com
dwarchildrenscorner.com
When funds permit
The Ships Will
Have Private Docks
Currently we can afford
One Site, but the
Structure is Getting Planned
The Animal Celebration-The Dimming Lights - The Animal Extinction Project - One Writer Seeks Help to Document the Over 40,000 Animals facing Extinction **The Growing Greens-The Same Author Documenting All Plants ** And What is Wrong? Documenting All Medical Conditions to fight MisInformation
Seeking Publishing for it and The Violet Eye Saga
The Sports Page
Then and Back
Written By Lord Sinjin
(With Lady Ariarose sliding in like this)
Here we go into various sports histories.
Pick your sport to jump sections you're interested in only one for the day. There are activities woven in and its great spending time playing..
(Understand lacrosse is a religious sport in origin. I am a person open to all people from wherever they are. But some might take exception to my personal take on religion. I am just open to all people. But my beliefs are mine but that is it they are just mine.)
This was written after writing the page and we did check references and found that historical pictures on some contained nudity and there is also religious beliefs. Art has a place and this would be historical accurate we moved the reference sheet to a pdf file for teachers and parents to view and give to their charges when they approve of the use of the site. We cannot determine the maturity of viewers.
But we remain a family friendly site that values all people regardless of age, race, sex, gender, or any other 'qualification' one might choose to list.
Wrestling probably did not start as a sport. I always imagine a caveman going up against some creature and slamming it down. Successful there, he came back to the cave and talked to his fellows in the group about the success. Hunting lesson likely and then argument settling.
But it may be the oldest sport that ever existed because it requires nothing except two people and the ground beneath their feet. Cave paintings estimated to be fifteen to twenty thousand years old found in southern France show wrestler holds and positions that are still recognizable today. This predates writing, organized civilization, and every other documented sport by a significant margin. But I do bet it was teaching tools. Like a teacher uses a chalkboard...
(Sinjin it might be a whiteboard.)
Oh yeah, whiteboard in the modern era, whatever. But the point is the teacher draws out stuff to teach you. A football coach makes plays with moves before you ever get on the field. You need some understanding of it to make sense, but the people are teaching this or recording the history or both. Cave painting seems to be a bit of history record too or storytelling, and I do not believe they delved into fantasy plays often.
As human civilization developed, wrestling continued on. Why? It is one of the most versatile defensive tools in the shed. I do believe the military has never stopped teaching basic hand-to-hand, and get a knife is hand to hand, but real hand to hand is no weapons. Just you facing them when they might have something more dangerous than a knife. You must use your smarts, and wrestling is good at times.
By around 2600 BCE the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia were producing bronze statuettes of wrestlers. Imagine that kids, sort of like maybe your figurines to play with. Little statues telling a story.
One small bronze figure of two wrestlers was found in the ruins of what is now Iraq near Baghdad. It sits in a museum today as one of the oldest known sports artifacts on earth.
(Or possibly a testament of a fight.)
Yes, my love, it could well have also been a story, but for sure it is a sport.
(One of the most ancient.)
Wrestling also appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest written stories in human history, where it features as a test of strength and character between the story's central figures.
Wrestling
(Kid's Challenge: Were they playing a sport or using it to defend themselves? Wrestling applies both ways, sometimes sport, sometimes defense.)
It is a well-documented technique. In ancient Egypt, wrestling was documented extensively on tomb walls. The most significant collection is at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt, dating to around 2000 BCE, where over four hundred individual wrestling scenes are painted across tomb walls. Historians studying these images recognized that nearly every single technique shown is still used in modern wrestling.
The holds, throws, takedowns, and reversals painted four thousand years ago match what is taught and competed today. The scenes are arranged sequentially, almost like an ancient instructional manual. Wrestlers are shown with referees gesturing for fairness, suggesting organized rules existed even then. Wrestling in Egypt was not just sport. It was part of military training, featured in royal festivals, and painted on tomb walls as a promise of eternal strength in the afterlife.
The ancient Greeks formalized wrestling as an Olympic event in 708 BCE. Records of champions were kept from that point forward. The philosopher Plato was an accomplished wrestler who won prizes in his youth. His name may itself be a wrestling nickname meaning broad, referring to his build.
The Greek myth of Zeus and Cronus wrestling for possession of the universe at Olympia was said to be the divine origin of the Olympic Games themselves. Greece also developed Pankration, a nearly no-rules combination of wrestling and striking that was one of the most-watched events in the ancient Olympics.
Wrestling traveled through Rome, through the Middle Ages, and into the nineteenth century, when it split into the organized competitive styles we know today. Greco-Roman wrestling, emphasizing upper-body holds, and freestyle wrestling, allowing leg attacks, both appeared in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. Wrestling has been in the Olympics in some form for over two thousand seven hundred years.
FORE!!!!!
(I'm chuckling as he just clacked his tongue and swung. He did used to play this next one.)
I did, I did. I worked as a caddy one summer. It was fun enough. Good to know the sport and I should play it sometime if Dad ever wants to go. I'm not much into golf but it is cool.
(Kids he is more into it than he admits. Ha, you should see him when his Dad has it on. He knows more and I think he has techniques.)
What were you saying my Love? Oh never mind. Golf started because humans had an irresistible urge to hit something with a stick toward a target. Not exactly elegant, but kids have you been there walking a good long while? You grab a branch and smack a rock, not to exactly do more than see where it goes. Hear that sound? And then you start doing it with more purpose. Instead of just smacking it, you hit a ball with your stick toward a target.
And suddenly you challenge another kid to it in the fewest hits possible. That is it. That is the whole game. And people have been playing versions of it for a very long time.
The earliest well-documented ancestor of golf was played in the Netherlands and is called Colf, a word that simply meant club or stick. A Flemish poet mentioned it in a manuscript as far back as 1261. Dutch artwork from the period frequently shows people playing it in town streets, across open fields, and on frozen canals in winter when the ice provided a long flat surface. The rules were simple.
Hit a leather ball toward a target several hundred yards away. Fewest strokes wins. It was enormously popular and also somewhat dangerous to anything nearby.
Kids be careful with your stones if you go out and do it. I may have broken a few windows and had to work to pay them off. Yep, I was working as a tiny child paying off broken windows and also earning a little money. My parents had me working real young.
(I know, and though it is good you paid what you broke, that early labor was hard on you. It's why there are child labor laws. Better all around to have your parent help you aim and learn where to hit. Get permission and there is less trouble.)
Speaks the woman who has never been a boy. Boys get into all sorts of mischief.
(Don't encourage mischief and get kids in trouble.)
Heee hee heee. One of us is the responsible grandparent.
(And the other goes and gets ice cream for breakfast, or would if our kids were fool enough to leave them alone with just you.)
Hum....m maybe that is it, but ice cream is good dairy and then you add in something like oh cake, then I have the episode from some show, can't remember. The man was a doctor…and a comedian….it escapes me.
But what doesn't escape me is the city of Brussels banned Colf in 1360. Anyone caught playing paid a fine of twenty shillings or had their overcoat confiscated.
The city of Haarlem built a dedicated field outside the city walls in 1389 specifically for Colf because playing it inside the walls had become too hazardous to windows, fences, and passersby.
FORE!!! Watch your head, stone flying, kids. It is dangerous and I admit it. Be careful when doing random fun things that get us in trouble.
(Yep it was also used in defense, hit stone to target. A little melon meets a stone flying hard OUCH.... Squashed melon with a hole. Be careful and get your parents to set up a space and use golf balls over stones.)
Golf
The game traveled to Scotland, likely through trade connections between Dutch ports and Scottish coastal towns. On Scottish coastal grasslands it evolved into something distinctly its own.
Scottish players were enthusiastic enough about it that they played it instead of practicing archery, which was a matter of national defense at the time. This caused a remarkable series of royal responses.
King James II banned golf along with football in 1457, citing the need for military readiness. King James III reaffirmed the ban in 1471. King James IV banned it yet again in 1491, describing it as unprofitable.
But ha ha ha, people were doing it anyway. Fun things like that people tend not to stop just because they put down the royal mandate.
(Kids you ever do something against the rules? Yep bet you have. KID CHALLENGE: What was something you did that you weren't supposed to do? How did it turn out? Do you regret it or would you do it again? Some rules should be broken it's true, but as kids I don't recommend it. Before acting, you need to know all the consequences.)
Which is why we never just told our kids no.
(Yep, we told them what disobedience might land them, from the positive to the negative and deeply serious consequences, and also when it was purely a financial decision. Money was tight for us often, but no had to be the answer at times.)
Yes and when that is the reason the kids tended to mind better, but they still got themselves into scraps.
(And faced the negative consequences and we formed the backup plan. Kids will do naughty things, but if you don't know why it's a no, how can you make an informed decision? They were well informed, still in trouble, and eventually trusted me more.)
Yeah and some things can't be stopped. Kids imagine it. Three separate kings over three decades could not get people to stop playing. The bans were largely ignored. When Scotland and England signed the Treaty of Glasgow in 1502 and the immediate threat of war eased, the ban was finally lifted. King James IV, the same king who had banned it, promptly purchased a set of golf clubs from a bow-maker in Perth.
His is the first recorded golf equipment purchase in history.
The first formal written rules for golf appeared in 1744 in Edinburgh, published by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. The eighteen-hole format now standard everywhere in the world was established in 1764 at St. Andrews in Scotland when the course was reorganized from twenty-two holes to eighteen.
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, founded in 1754, became the governing authority for the rules of golf worldwide. That original eighteen-hole course at St. Andrews still exists today and is still actively played, making it one of the oldest continuously used sports venues on earth.
Golf spread internationally in the nineteenth century carried by Scottish emigrants and British soldiers. The United States Golf Association was established in 1894. The Masters Tournament began in 1934 at Augusta National. The sport that three Scottish kings declared unprofitable is now played by tens of millions of people on courses on every inhabited continent.
Sometimes kids being told no makes it more fun to do it anyway.
(But the consequences of doing whatever is always on our shoulders.)
Pop….pop….pop….you never know for sure where it is going. Your eyes are watching wondering where it will land. And then it lands inside barely, outside barely. Just on the edge and that is why I find tennis exciting.
Tennis is older than most people realize, and its entire vocabulary is borrowed from the French and Arabic origins of the game. The word tennis itself comes from the French tenez, meaning hold or receive.
Tenez was the call the server made to the other player before serving. Racket traces back to the Arabic word for the palm of the hand. And think, kids, what that racket is sort of doing: it's hitting those inside crosses that are latticed across the outer frame. Doesn't it seem more a palm now?
Deuce comes from a French phrase meaning two points away from game.
Love for zero is disputed in origin but was in use centuries ago. The scoring system of fifteen, thirty, forty goes back to medieval French gaming traditions, possibly derived from the quarters of a clock face.
The game began in twelfth-century France as Jeu de Paume, which means game of the palm. Monks in monastery cloisters and courtyards took breaks between prayers by hitting a handmade ball back and forth with their bare hands across a rope or net.
(That had to hurt.)
I am sure it really smarted, but it was recreational, physical, and apparently very enjoyable. It spread rapidly. Players began wrapping their hands for protection, then added gloves, then strung gut across wooden frames to make primitive rackets. By the fourteenth century walled indoor courts were being built specifically for the game. King Charles V of France built one in the Louvre Palace in 1368.
The game caught on ferociously among European royalty and nobility. King Henry VIII of England was famously devoted to it and had courts built at Hampton Court Palace that still exist today. Imagine that, all the way from King Henry VIII's time those courts exist.
In 1437 King James I of Scotland died indirectly because of tennis. He had tried to escape assassins through a drain outlet beneath a tennis court, but it had recently been blocked to prevent tennis balls from rolling into it.
(Which is a reason to have such things openable from both directions. A gate: simple building logic. But not all people think all the way through things, which, kids, is why parents tell you no sometimes. Ask them if they don't mind to explain the consequences of a no.
Some will say no means no and leave it. Ask another person why your parent may have said no and have them explain it to you. Understanding bad outcomes happen is important. But get that parents don't always have time to explain a command. Mostly, though, my kids trusted me when those moments arose. I explained later why but not in that moment. And get this, NO does mean no. My kids were told they were free to tell me no and I did honor that.)
Tennis
I do too. No has to be honored by all parties even if sometimes refusal of things gets complicated. Like the refusal to eat veggies.
(Yeah, it was complicated. But we explained what not eating them would do....kids, no veggies makes the stomach hurt after a time. Ah the lovely things of the power of NO.)
Yep. It was fun times later. Pain, such pain.
Now back to tennis. They started to move it indoors and that came with its complex rules about walls, galleries, and angled roofs, and it became known as Real Tennis or Court Tennis. It was so associated with aristocracy that the French Revolution damaged its popularity in France, as many of the courts belonged to nobles who were no longer doing well.
However, Real Tennis made one of history's most unexpected appearances. On June 20, 1789, French revolutionaries who had been locked out of an important Estates-General meeting gathered in a real tennis court near the Palace of Versailles.
There they swore the Tennis Court Oath, pledging to continue meeting until France had a new constitution. Historians regard it as a decisive early moment in the French Revolution. A game monks invented to fill time between prayers became the location of a turning point in modern history.
Real Tennis never disappeared entirely. It survives today on fewer than fifty historic courts scattered across France, Britain, the United States, and Australia. The Real Tennis World Championship has been held annually since 1740, making it the oldest ongoing annual world championship in any sport.
The outdoor version arrived in the 1870s. A British major named Walter Clopton Wingfield took the concept onto grass, added rubber balls that could bounce on an outdoor surface, and patented a portable version in 1874. He originally called it Sphairistike, ancient Greek for ball games. His friends persuaded him to change the name to lawn tennis. The All England Croquet Club held the first Wimbledon tournament in 1877 to raise money for lawn repairs. Spencer Gore won. About two hundred spectators watched. The tournament now draws tens of thousands of spectators and hundreds of millions of television viewers worldwide.
Aria why are you laughing?
(Real Tennis and Tennis.... I think they are both real tennis. I don't see them fictionally playing the other. It's real, both of them?)
HA HA HA.
The heart is pumping and the legs are buckling and still someone is running full on out down to the end or goal. And you watch that final attempt to get the goal that means victory or defeat. Soccer!
That black and white ball going down the field to that white net is the most watched sport on earth today. Billions of fans follow it just as billions of people play it. And almost none of them know that the trail behind it leads back more than two thousand years to a leather ball stuffed with feathers in ancient China.
The earliest documented kicking sport is Cuju, played in China during the Han Dynasty from approximately 206 BCE to 220 CE. The ball was leather stuffed with feathers or hair and players kicked it through a small net or opening without using their hands.
Cuju began as military training to keep soldiers fit and agile, then spread beyond the army to become a popular court pastime with official fields, rules, and organized competitions. It spread from China across East and Southeast Asia, with variants appearing in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Meanwhile in the Mediterranean world, the Greeks played Episkyros and the Romans developed their own ball game called Harpastum. Harpastum was fast, rough, and beloved by soldiers. It was played on a smaller field with an emphasis on keeping possession of the ball and preventing the other side from getting it. Players tackled, wrestled, and ran with it.
Roman soldiers brought Harpastum to Britain during the occupation. Historians note that Harpastum and the various Greek and Roman ball games were probably more direct ancestors of rugby and American football than soccer, but they demonstrate how widespread the appeal of ball games was across the ancient world.
And sometimes that is how things connect in sports. One leans one way and another a different way. It's about getting that fun, getting that training, and getting a way of thinking about things. But we can trace the pair back to those early sports.
What connects most directly to modern soccer is what happened in medieval Britain. Folk football, also called mob football, was played across England from at least the ninth century. It was the game of ordinary people, and it had very few rules. Entire towns played against each other.
Soccer &
Football
Imagine that, entire towns. Hum, challenge my love?
(Yes, challenge. Does that include girls and women? Often when they say entire towns they still mean all the men, but does it clarify anywhere if they mean women included?)
Doubt they do, women were very protected but who knows for sure. But man the goals could be miles apart. They often used landmarks like a church door or a mill at opposite ends of a parish. The number of players was unlimited.
You could kick the ball, carry it, throw it, or wrestle for it. Games started on festival days, often Shrove Tuesday before Lent, and could last all day. They crossed fields, roads, streams, gardens, and market squares. Property was damaged regularly. People were hurt. The chaos was part of the appeal.
English kings and authorities tried repeatedly to ban it. Edward III banned football in 1363. Subsequent monarchs issued similar prohibitions. None of it worked. The game was too embedded in community life and too loved to be stopped by royal decree. A famous example from Dorking in Surrey shows the determination of players. In 1897 an attempt to enforce a ban on the Shrove Tuesday game brought in one hundred police officers. They joined the game instead. The game survived into the twentieth century.
The transformation into modern soccer came in 1863 when the Football Association formed in England and established the first unified rules. The critical decision was separating the kicking game from the handling game, which led simultaneously to association football, called soccer in some countries, and rugby football. The FA Cup, the oldest national football competition in the world, began in 1871. FIFA was founded in 1904. The first World Cup was held in 1930. The sport that started with a feather-stuffed ball in Han Dynasty China and ran through medieval English towns with no rules became the planet's most popular game.
(Final Soccer Challenge: who won the World Cup in the last game year and who did they defeat to get it? What was the score? Do you already know?)
All up to you. Sink it clean. No net. You're there at the free-throw line, and the entire arena is watching. You've practiced and practiced for this moment, or you haven't, and it will show either way. Even if you don't make it, the practice will show in the twitch of the hands but that is okay either way, you do your best with this moment. My wife knows all about practice.
(I am a dyslexic writer. I have to study constantly and write constantly, but it took me what over 20 years, and I still need help. I have no issues asking for help and studying to improve my craft.)
Dedication and practice don't mean perfect performance.
(No, they don't. It means striving to get there. Kid Challenge: Who is considered the best free thrower? What is his percentage on the line? How about the other points? Can we find that out? They always talk about free throw percentage, but I never hear about two point, three, and half court percentages. Every single thing requires practice. Who is the best on the others?)
My love, you know that all too well.
(I do, but that doesn't mean I don't throw down some good words. Just as others have thrown down some good advice.)
Good advice, my love. I've got some from other voices.
"You have to go through good times and bad times to get where you're trying to go." – Allen Iverson
"Excellence is a habit. You are what you repeatedly do." – Shaquille O'Neal
"No one knows how big your potential is, how big your heart is when you start." – Muggsy Bogues
Basketball has one of the clearest origin stories in all of sports. In December 1891 a Canadian physical education teacher named James Naismith was working at a YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts. He needed an indoor game his students could play during winter.
He nailed two peach baskets to a gymnasium balcony ten feet off the ground, wrote thirteen rules on two pages, and organized the first game.
The peach baskets had closed bottoms, which meant someone had to climb up and retrieve the ball every time a point was scored until someone eventually cut the bottoms out. That gymnasium is still standing in Springfield and is now a museum.
What history added to that story came from three thousand years earlier and an ocean away.
The Mesoamerican ball game is one of the oldest known team sports on earth. It was played by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations across Central America for approximately three thousand years.
Basketball
The earliest known ball court, at Paso de la Amada in Mexico, has been dated to approximately 1400 BCE. Over thirteen hundred ball courts have been found across Mesoamerica, from what is now the American Southwest all the way south to Nicaragua.
Almost every major city in the ancient Mesoamerican world had at least one. The game was not casual recreation. It carried profound religious, ceremonial, and political significance for the people who played it. The ball represented celestial bodies. The court represented the cosmos. Formal games were ritual events.
The Maya called their version Pok-A-Tok. The Aztecs called theirs Tlachtli. The ball was solid natural rubber, a material that astonished European visitors who had never seen anything bounce before. It weighed up to nine pounds and could cause serious injury. Players used their hips, elbows, and knees to keep it in play and could not let it touch the ground.
Later versions of the game added vertical stone rings mounted on the side walls of the court. Getting the ball through the ring was extremely difficult and rare, given that the rings at sites like Chichen Itza are mounted approximately twenty feet off the ground and the ball could not be thrown by hand. When it happened it was considered a decisive moment in the game.
No direct connection between Pok-A-Tok and basketball has ever been established. James Naismith is not known to have had any knowledge of the ancient Mesoamerican game. The two traditions developed completely independently. What is remarkable is that two civilizations separated by thousands of years and an entire ocean both arrived independently at the same core idea. Get a ball through a ring mounted above the ground. Have two teams. Score points. Play the game.
The Spanish conquistadors banned Pok-A-Tok in the sixteenth century because of its deep religious significance to the people who played it. A descendant version called Ulama has survived in isolated parts of Mexico and is still played today, giving it a continuous history of over three thousand years. The great ball court at Chichen Itza in Mexico is still standing and can be visited.
(Kids not all things need complex history. Sometimes you just start playing and that is something beautiful. Challenge: think of a game and twelve or so rules for it. History or just imagination, give it a name, and run it by your gym teacher and see if they A) see that it'd be safe to play as obviously people have DIED doing it, and then see if maybe they can get some parents together to try it first. A few more rules might be added for various reasons but then...maybe you all could play it. Who knows, you might even be the next Bacon Ball.)
Bacon Ball my love, sounds tasty. Make me some bacon.
(Later possibly. Kids he forgot his please, eventually he might remember.)
King Ralph…my favorite ever cricket game to watch…it was over in a few minutes. Cricket is one of great patience depending on how "long" it is. Traditional cricket is played over five days and can end in a draw. Imagine all that investment.
(Imagine all of that strategy.)
I do love strategy games, but I do want in general an outcome not a draw.
(Says the man that loves a good chess game. Not that I can give you one.)
You should study chess more.
(Should, too busy writing. And the people I played with I'd catch cheating and that ruins it.)
Yeah cheaters ruin every game, but a draw is actually considered proof of great players. A draw is acceptable.
Cricket is one of the world's most followed sports, beloved across England, South Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, and beyond. Its origin story begins not with a ball and wicket on a manicured pitch but with a milkmaid and a stool in a Sussex field.
The legend of Stoolball says that milkmaids, waiting for their husbands to return from the fields, began throwing stones at their upturned milking stools to pass the time. Someone started hitting the stones away.
Someone else tried to catch them. Whether that specific story is literally true, Stoolball was a real game documented in England from at least 1450.
The earliest written reference appears in a list of games banned from churchyards around that year, which tells us two things at once. The game existed, and people were already playing it somewhere they probably should not have been.
The hand became a bat. The fielding side grew to eleven players. Innings were established. Rules were formalized.
Cricket and Stoolball
Kids AI Fun
Do you
think by
the description this is stoolball?
Cricket appeared in the sixteenth century, more than a hundred years after the earliest records of Stoolball, and historians widely discuss the connection between them even if the exact line of development cannot be traced precisely.
One linguistic thread runs directly between them. The upright posts of a cricket wicket are called stumps to this day. Some historians note that stob and stow, regional variant names for Stoolball itself, both meant stump or tree stump in certain local dialects. The game may have carried its name for the target right into the vocabulary of cricket.
Cricket became formalized in England through the eighteenth century. The Laws of Cricket were first written down in 1744. The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787, became the governing authority for the laws of the game and remains so today.
The sport spread across the British Empire and took particularly deep root in the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The first international cricket match was played between the United States and Canada in 1844. Test cricket, the longest form of the game played over five days, began in 1877.
Today, cricket has approximately two and a half billion fans worldwide, making it the second most watched sport on earth after soccer.
Stoolball itself never disappeared. It is still played today primarily in Sussex, England. It received official recognition as a sport in 2008. The organization governing it is called Stoolball England.
Aria you're laughing again.
(It's the game's name. I always think of little crickets playing cricket and I can't help it. Crickets playing Cricket. Go ahead teachers, have your class draw it and see if anyone holds their laughter even while drawing it. Delightful moment that would be.)
Baseball… I love this sport…I find it among the most challenging and strategic games because the best hitters don't hit that great. It's a game where you struggle and struggle perfecting and still come up short.
(Baseball is a difficult sport but do they know where it comes from?)
Baseball has a complicated origin story. For a long time, the official American story was that a man named Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.
That story was popularized by a commission in 1907 that was not particularly rigorous in its research. Historians have since established fairly conclusively that it is not accurate. The real story is messier, older, and considerably more interesting.
Stoolball, the same game that contributed to cricket, also contributed to baseball. Even if it was done by Abner.
Stoolball had multiple versions, some of which involved running around several stools or posts to score, it served as one tributary feeding into a larger stream of bat-and-ball-and-running games.
English settlers brought stoolball to America and it was being played in Plymouth Colony on Christmas Day in 1621, noted with disapproval by Governor William Bradford in his diary.
(Ha so many leaders disliked sports... geez wonder? Now kids think why did leaders often say no to certain sports? Teachers, a good little project: why were certain sports banned by leaders? And how did villages adapt to those bans?)
Yes, my love, a good thing to figure out for oneself what they think was that reason. And you know I am not sure stoolball is related that much to baseball.
Rounders was another game and I think it impacted folks more. A bat-and-ball game played in England and Ireland with bases arranged in a rough circuit and batters running between them, Rounders was documented in England by the early eighteenth century.
The word baseball itself appeared in print in England in 1744 in a children's book alongside a woodcut illustration of a game resembling three-base stoolball or rounders, along with a rhyme called Base-Ball. This is the earliest known use of the word in print and it was in England, not America.
In America, these games mixed together with local variations under various names including Town Ball, Round Ball, Goal Ball, and Baseball. Different towns played by different rules. Imagine that you go play another town's baseball, and you're playing, and each side has a different view.
Baseball
The Melting
Pot
And I love you too.
(Teacher a challenge. Think of something, anything, and group students together. Each of them have a rule that agrees with one of the others but each has a different rule, say a sentence and have them all correct it according to their rules.
And tell them why grammar rules became more consistent as how hard is it to follow it across all of them. The more groups you have the more crazy the final sentences will come out showing why grammar rules and rules in general need stabilized across a region.)
Yes, my love, and it can be a nasty business when two sets came into conflict. Disputes about which rules were correct were ongoing. In 1845 a man named Alexander Cartwright, playing with the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in New York, helped formalize a set of rules that became foundational. Diamond-shaped field. Three strikes. Three outs per inning. Ninety feet between bases. Foul territory. These rules spread and the game cohered.
The National Association of Base Ball Players, the first organized baseball league, formed in 1857. The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first openly all-professional team in 1869. The National League formed in 1876.
The American League formed in 1901. The first modern World Series was played in 1903. The White Sox, it should be noted here for the record, have won it. Twice.
Baseball is one of the clearest examples in sports history of how games do not evolve in clean straight lines. Multiple games from multiple places and traditions fed into each other over centuries, people argued constantly about the rules, and eventually someone wrote them down definitively enough that the argument mostly stopped. The result became America's pastime.
(Kids who is your favorite baseball player? Oh Marcus…)
Ha ha you called me my other penname. No matter, anyway love, my favorite player changes all the time. But probably Babe Ruth.
(Babe Ruth…hum….makes me think of a certain chocolate bar.)
Don't Aria.
(I won't, a diabetic lady does avoid it in general, but I do love a good chocolate bar.)
This one I have never watched, but it is very popular and I about kicked it out of the page for lack of personal knowledge of it.
(Honey let's research it.)
Kids, sometimes research will make something interesting and other times less interesting. Let's explore.
We sent Claude Sonnet 4.6 out for some research and this is what it came out with:
__________________________________
Lacrosse is the oldest organized sport continuously played in North America and one of the oldest living team sports anywhere on earth.
For the Haudenosaunee people, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, it is not simply a sport. It is the Creator's Game, a sacred gift woven into their creation story and their spiritual identity.
The Haudenosaunee say lacrosse is older than the earth itself because in their origin story a game is played in the Sky World before the earth exists. When Haudenosaunee players take the field today they believe their ancestors are playing alongside them in the Sky World simultaneously.
_________________________________
Okay, that is the first bit, and what have I learned about something new?
Sky World origin story. Something they felt was beyond their reach. This means that it was very religious and deeply felt. I am sure the players are moved deeply.
(It makes me think about some of the dreams that hit me.)
Love sometimes it does when you describe them like you're tapping into something far ancient.
(Doesn't mean it's true or real.)
But it feels real, and that is what these people felt. It was something beyond them and that is perfectly valid and spiritual.
(Indeed. Everyone's beliefs and faith are very real to them and shouldn't be just dismissed. Although it can be stated what they believe happened instead. That is fair. But everyone's beliefs are theirs and precious.)
Quite right. Now let's get the next few paragraphs.
_________________________________
The game as played by the Haudenosaunee and many other Native nations across North America was unlike anything European observers had seen. Fields had no fixed boundaries.
Goals could be set hundreds of yards or several miles apart, sometimes natural features like trees or boulders at opposite ends of a vast open space. Teams ranged from a dozen players to several hundred men. Games lasted hours or days.
Players used wooden sticks with netted baskets to carry, pass, and throw a small deerskin ball. Passing was considered somewhat cowardly in some traditions. Dodging an opponent was seen as unsportsmanlike. The game was fast, physical, and intensely competitive.
It was played to honor the Creator, to train young warriors, to heal the sick through the spiritual power of the game, and sometimes to settle disputes between nations as an alternative to going to war. Ceremonies, prayers, and rituals accompanied formal games.
The scale and spiritual weight of traditional lacrosse had no equivalent in European sporting tradition.
__________________________________
Once more this is about the spiritualism and why it was important. They were communing with the CREATOR. My wife interestingly calls God The Creator in her belief situation. Are you tapping into this ancient time my love?
(The use of calling him The Creator is more because I believe God is known by many names. Each faith has one for him. Jews believe they have his true name for example and it is sacred to them.
Lacrosse
There are other religions. I propose something that will give me a lot of flack by religious leaders and instead of arguing over faith, I will instead tell everyone what you believe is your belief and I will not validate or invalidate anyone's beliefs.
Instead I believe The Creator made many paths to heaven for he has a diverse people. There is the truest path to him, but it is up to the individual to find it and lead it. Anyone telling you the path must be listened to and decided on with an open mind.
I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. My beliefs are mine and I demand no one to accept them for themselves.)
My wife, your heart is just open to everyone even atheists.
(Even them. I just find it a bit weird that nothing came before. If I am wrong at least I have a shot in my beliefs. What does nothing happens get them? Besides one thing: full non-accountability of what happens in this life. I think many of them are scared to think of that, but I can't be sure and do not judge. They could be right too. Let's continue...)
Suits me just fine.
__________________________________
French Jesuit missionaries working in the St. Lawrence Valley in the 1630s were among the first Europeans to observe the game. Jean de Brébeuf wrote about it in 1637, describing the Huron people playing it near present-day Ontario.
He named it lacrosse because the stick resembled the bishop's ceremonial cross carried in religious processions. The name stuck even though it described the equipment from an outside observer's perspective rather than anything the players called it.
European settlers and colonists began playing the game by the early eighteenth century, though they were consistently unable to beat Native teams.
Formal rules were eventually written by George Beers, a Montreal dentist, in 1867, who shortened game length, reduced player numbers, and standardized equipment. That same year he took a mixed team of white and Haudenosaunee players to England for exhibition matches. Queen Victoria watched one of these matches in 1876 and wrote in her diary that the game was very pretty to watch and involved much running.
Lacrosse appeared at the Olympic Games in 1904 and 1908. It was played as a demonstration sport in 1928, 1932, and 1948 and then disappeared from the Olympic program for decades. The International Olympic Committee granted it full recognition in 2021. Lacrosse is returning to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028, over a century after its last full Olympic appearance.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy competes internationally in lacrosse as a sovereign nation, recognized by World Lacrosse as such. They are the only Indigenous group in the world recognized by an international sports governing body as a sovereign nation. Traditional ceremonial medicine games of lacrosse are still played in Haudenosaunee communities today for the purpose of healing the sick.
__________________________________
My love it is a deeply religious game.
(That it is.)
Honey, tell me based on your dreams what is the truest path.
(I will tell even you, my love, that the Truest Path is one every person must find and decide for themselves. I believe someone died for my sins. I believe that I have been baptized appropriately. Great wars have been fought over the smallest of contingencies. I will not start a war over mine. Nah, let people believe in their faith. You are a Catholic and proud and that for you is the religion you need.)
But what if I am wrong and you know and don't tell me.
(My love I told you to go and read all the religions and find the one that speaks to you. I believe there are many paths and no matter the religion much is left to translations not all accurate even. So, I say again, look for yourself. My religion is mine. Your religion is yours. It's different spices added to the dish, and I'd never just add pepper. I also add salt, garlic, oh and a list to what I cook. There is not a spice I would do away with even though I have an ulcer and cannot take hot flavors and despise bland foods. Ha ha ha.)
Yes you are too unique a combo to like seasonless dishes. HA HA HA But honey we have not challenged anyone.
(I beg to differ. The challenge is there for all readers. It's about finding what your beliefs are. It might be okay if the school allows religious discussion to talk about their faith. But they could also just research a few. It's more appropriate for high schoolers or university students as not all religions are exactly nice. Heck some endorse all sorts of things I find terrible.
And if a religion is promoting killing non-believers, I'd ask myself if that is a belief system that should be followed at all. I'd question it personally, but that is their beliefs and as long as they don't force their beliefs onto others I'm okay.
Killing the infidel happens in some, and I am like how did you get them to agree with you with that approach?
Though such a dive is rather dangerous and many parents I would see objecting to such a notion as exploring faiths in general as they are teaching theirs. This was why religion and schools are separated. In a religious private school, if a child had outside beliefs, I'd see it being a mass problem for all concerned.
But a personal exploration of your personal religion and explaining some of the beliefs and customs with no flack back, I'd understand. At college, yes you might be able to openly discuss everyone's if the minds are open. But faith is a powder keg, and it might start a war on campus.)
Many wars have been fought, that is sadly true my love.
(Yes, many brutal wars over something as small as sprinkled or immersed. My beliefs are mine, and I'd rather never start a war over them.)
I don't see how someone who is open to everyone would even start a war over being that accepting.
(I am stating that we might all be wrong and right and we should stop killing people who disagree. People who are vastly sure only their path exists might well find my take ... distressing. Plus, I will not say what my full beliefs are because I will not get into the round robin.
Sprinkled, immersed, splashed by the River Jordan, bathed in the great Chocolate Fountain....)
Ha ha ha.... the great Chocolate Fountain.
You really want chocolate.
(I do ever since someone mentioned Babe Ruth. But I'd settle for a Ding Dong.)
We come to the end of the page...
My love, it’s been an interesting journey, but we have more sports out there, but this is a big page and the White Sox are playing.
(Go watch your game. Enjoy, we have two more pages to do over the next few days)
True and it’s nice we have someone pull research even if it’s AI. I want a human assistant as soon as we can. The internet is so unreliable for internet and you know the AI is pulling the pages.
(I do and it can be dangerous internet research. And that is why we do as much cross checking and have it give all its sources and at least read them. I’ll do that while you watch baseball as crosschecking is vital.)
You’re working a ton these days.
(15 hour days most days. I get my four hours in.)
Babe they want you to sleep more. The world wants you to sleep more as that half sleep you do is not restful.
(It’s not but go watch your game.)
Okay, kids I am signing off. Go outside and play some if the weather is good. All reading makes a dull mind.
(Yes, it's good to exercise. Mister, when was the last time you exercised?)
I do need to start, but I am fully retired and relaxing. I’ve been working since tot years.
(I know love. I know. But you're not walking a plant anymore.)
You should walk with me.
(I should and will when maybe I’m not working, how many hours a day with how much sleep? And you want more there. Ha ha ha. Even with workers freeing a bit more time. Chances are though, I’d still be too busy creating to get out. Ah well, I do dance in my chair.)
Ha ha ha. Crazy Aria… you are crazy but I love you.
(I know. I’d tell you to talk Chewy on a walk as he needs to do it too.)
Chewy does a sit.
(Yep he does. Kids … I think we proved we all do around here these days. But seriously, exercise is great. That is one of the reasons why I dance in my chair.)