Monday, April 30, 2007

Football

Football is the name given to a number of different, but related, team sports. The most popular of these world-wide is association football (also known as soccer). The English word "football" is also applied to American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby union and rugby league), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules) is to a greater or lesser extent referred to as "football" and sometimes "footy" by its followers.
These games involve:
a large spherical or prolate spheroid ball, which is itself called a football. a team scoring goals and/or points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field and either into a goal area, or over a line. the goal and/or line being defended by the opposing team. players being required to move the ball mostly by kicking and — in some codes — carrying and/or passing the ball by hand. goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts. offside rules, in most codes, restricting the movement of players. in some codes, points are mostly scored by players carrying the ball across the goal line. in most codes players scoring a goal must put the ball either under or over a crossbar between the goalposts. players in some codes receiving a free kick after they take a mark/make a fair catch. Many of the modern games have their origins in England, but many peoples around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball since ancient times.

Village

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet, but smaller than a town or city[1]. Though generally located in rural areas, the term urban village may be applied to certain urban neighbourhoods. Villages normally are permanent with fixed dwellings, however transient villages[2] can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, as against being scattered broadly over the landscape (‘dispersed settlement’).
Throughout the human past, villages have been the usual form of community for agricultural societies, and even for some non-agricultural societies. Towns and cities were few, and were home to only a small proportion of the population. The Industrial Revolution caused many villages to grow into towns and cities; this trend of urbanisation has continued and hastened since, though not always in connection with industrialisation. Villages have thus been eclipsed in importance, as units of human society and settlement.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Fashion and the process of change

Fashion, by definition, changes continuously. The changes may progress more quickly than in most other fields of human activity. For some, modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unreasonably. Others, especially young people, enjoy the diversity that changing fashion can apparently offer, seeing the constant change as a way to satisfy their wish to experience "new" and "interesting" things. Note too that fashion can change to enforce regularity, as in the case where so-called Mao suits became the national uniform of mainland China.