Simon Langley 2.0

Taken from the Worksopian December 1933

The match of the season. Trent held an unbeaten record in all matches since 1931, when the fifteen has beaten them here and had not scored less than 30 points in any school match this year. The team, however, rose to the occasion in a remarkable fashion and all played  their best game. It was clear from the start that the Trent backs were fast and clever, A. Obolensky, on the right wing being particularly dangerous, but the School’s forwards were so energetic and the tackling so deadly that they were seldom allowed to get far. In the first few minutes the school pressed hard and J.B. Wentworth-Smith was nearly over. A. Obolensky ran well for Trent but was splendidly tackled by G.H. Stephens on two occasions and Worksop returned to the attack, when F.T. Hopkinson just missed with a drop goal and half-time came with no score. The school pack kept Trent penned in their 25 for the greater part of the second half and after W.R. Andrews had nearly scored, F.T. Hopkinson scored a good try far out. Trent made efforts but R.S. Rennie spear tackled A. Obolensky in great style and a strong run by G.H. Stephens put the school on the attack again. C.W. Walton had a good attempt at a drop but this ended the scoring although the school continued to press, the pace of the Trent backs and S. Harrision’s saving getting them out of some awkward situations.

Worksop College 3 - Trent College 0

Worksop College XV: R.S. Rennie, J.B. Wentworth-Smith, P.L. Bichard, K. Hall, G.H. Stephens, R.B. Green, C.W. Walton, K.R. Dixon, J.C.R. Venables, W.A.C. Johnson, W.R. Andrews, R.S. Stephens, T.F. Gaskall, J.J. Wood, F.T. Hopkinson.

Rugger retrospect - taken from the Worksopian December 1936

This has been a most successful season, one of the best for many years, in spite of several unfortunate injuries, which necessitated continual changes in the side and scarcely allowed the XV to settle down at all. Actually, we have only had our full team out in one match during the whole season, but in spite of that we have up to date won nine out of twelve games against strong opposition, two of our really outstanding victories being to defeat Waterloo A at home and Wrekin away, with only 14 men on each occasion; while in our recent match with Denstone, when we lost a man again in the first ten minutes and with 14 were extremely unlucky to lose by a margin of two tries to a goal and a penalty goal, is still in everybody’s mind as a fine display by the team, which unfortunately did not get its reward, moral victory though it may have been.

Our success has been based on a fine pack of forwards, intelligent and hard working, admirably led by P.A. Kingston; outstanding amongst them have been H.F. Barker, J.C.B. Teale, R.D. Maddock and D. Collinge, but is is really unfair to make comparisons in such a fine eight. An unfortunate accident deprived us of D. Coleman for nine matches altogether, and his thrust and leadership in the backs has been difficult to replace, but P.E.F. Rhodes and J.S. Pinkney have always been dangerous in attack and R.I. Knox has been consistently good at scrum-half. Our other casualty, L.A. Stredwick, on the right wing, has also been off for nine matches and without him we lacked a little essential pace on the wings.

With a full side out, the backs have played excellent football and some of their tries obtained by fast passing and quick backing have been really good. The defence too has been good throughout, R.F. Davies being very sound at back, and tackling and the covering very satisfactory. At Epson, we were unfortunate to lose H.F. Barker early in the game and this, combined with the cleverness of the Epson stand-off, made our defence look worse than it really was. With most of our three-quarters returning and a number of promising forwards coming on, the prospects for next season are more than bright.

Results

F.N. Baird, D.N. Youens
R.F. Davies, R. Grain, R.D. Mattock, C.S. Harden Esq, D Collinge, D.J. Hunting, P.J. Hill.
J.B.C. Teale, D.E.C. Coleman, P.A. Kingston (Capt), H.F. Barker, P.E.F. Rhodes.
J.S. Pinkney, R.I. Knox.

I think the following article about a mummified cat found in the wall of a Devon house is very interesting. If was the owner of the house I would leave the cat where it is.

I wonder why people thought cats could fend off evil spirits, weird!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8011361.stm

Some of my personal favourites

Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted - Bill Stickers is innocent!

Jesus wepped
At the advertising agency which lost the Schwepps account

I thought clap was a form of applause until I discovered Smirnoff

The grave of Karl Marx is just another communist plot
Charing Cross Road

God is dead - Nietszche
Nietszche is dead - God
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher who wrote critical texts on morality and religion

Don’t let them cut hire education
Camberwell School, 1977

One would think to read all this wit,
Shakespeare himself came here to shit

An excellent quaffer called Rafferty,
Went into a gentlemen’s lafferty,
The walls caught his sight,
Quoth he: ‘Newton was right,
I am now the centre of Grafferty!’

A road sign in Lincolnshire:
TO MAVIS ENDERBY AND OLD BOLINGBROKE
To which someone added:
The gift of a son

Kentucky Freud Chicken - Mother-fucking good
Camden

On a Norfolk village poster advertising a talk on ‘What to do if you are going bald’
Someone has added:
Prepare to meet thy dome

Cricket retrospect - taken from the Worksopian July 1936
Undoubtedly the outstanding feature of the season has been the weather; never has the rain been so persistent, and we have unfortunately had many matches scratched as a result. Starting with only one colour from last year, it was natural to expect the XI to show inexperience in their opening matches, and throughout the season the batting has been uneven - at times good, at other times definitely uncertain; too many of the side play slightly across the line of flight and this invariably leads to disaster. Some of the performances have been excellent, however notably against M.C.C., Sheffield Collegiate and the Craven Gentlemen - and there is no reason to suppose that with approximately seven of the XI again available next year the batting should not be as consistent and sound throughout the sides it has been spasmodically good this season. For P.N. Harvey, W.P.J. Walker, D.E.C. Coleman, W.D. McConnell, K. Hall and captain, G. Martyn have all played excellent innings at times.

The bowling, while lacking in variety, has proved very steady - the brunt of the attack having fallen on G. Martyn, P.E.F. Rhodes and F.E. Warburton, who have all done well, as at the moment each has taken 23 wickets at a cost of just over 12 runs a-piece. They have been fortunate in having the assistance of the best fielding seen for many years at the School. The standard in all the matches has been exceptionally high and has done much to make up for deficiencies elsewhere.

J.B.C. Teale, W.S.P. Ward, K. Farnes Esq., K. Hall, W.D. McConnell
P.E.F. Rhodes, D.E.C. Coleman, G. Martyn (captain), P.N. Harvey, F.E. Warburton
W.J.P. Walker, J.G. Dudley

Interestingly at the 1936 College Sports, K. Hall broke the College cricket ball throwing record with 105yds 1ft 9in (96.32m) - which I personally think is rather impressive. I would not mind betting that no Worksop College student has thrown as far since.

Has anyone else noticed it is really difficult to find shops in London that sell discus and hammer shoes?

I have found a rather good shop in North London called Milett Sports that stocks quite a few varieties. They also do javelin spikes, track spikes and running shoes. Well worth a visit!

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Here are some pictures of some graffiti in Newark, Nottinghamshire. The pictures were taken a few years back off Lincoln Road.

I am currently building a mobile optimised (optimized if you are from the US…) site and thought I would share a few tips and tricks I have learnt along the way. There are not a great deal of sites that deal with mobile optimised page building, so here are my tips:

• Never use tables for layouts!
• Try and keep you coding as simple as possible, avoid inline style, JavaScript and server side scripting where possible.
• Don’t use background images - nearly all mobile browsers will not display them.
• If you want to use rounded corners for boxes then I would strongly advise using Alessandro Fulciniti’s Nifty Corners technique (which is brilliant) - this is supported on the vast majority of mobile browsers I have tested.
• Don’t set a width on your page elements - especially the page wrapper. If you do then the mobile browsers make a real hash of the content. If your pages appear too wide in the browser (this often happens on the Blackberry browser) add the following meta data to the <head> tag:

  <meta name=“viewport” content=“width=320″ />
  
  <meta name=“viewport” content=“initial-scale=1.0″ />
  
  <meta name=“viewport” content=“user-scalable=false” />

• For some reason mobile browsers really don’t like divs that are floated left, try and avoid this if you can, however floating lists seems to work
• Try and wrap text around images, mobile browsers tend to interpret this quite well
• Bulleted lists often get the style stripped out, so if you use list-style-image to set your bullet image don’t be surprised if it does not work. One solution for this is to set the list style to none and insert the image before the text. This way even if the bulleted list is displayed (which on quite a few browsers it will be) at least the image is displayed as well
• Make sure you test your pages on various devices, browser combinations, not just on an iPhone!

Download Microsoft Photo Editor here

Now I am not a fan of Microsoft at all, however Microsoft Photo Editor has one really useful function that I have yet to find in another program.

Basically it allows you to select a colour (or colours within a set tolerance) to be made transparent within an image. This is really useful and a really quick way of getting rid of a solid background colour. Of course this is not very useful when you have a background colour that is of varied colours - but never the less useful all the same.

To do this, select the transparent colour picker:

Select the tolerance:

And what do you know, the area you selected (or at least the area you selected within the tolerance) is now transparent.

Can this be done in Photoshop? If so I’d love to know how!!

A very random, but very useful tip I read today. If you want to know whether an egg has gone off (or not), drop it in a cup of water, if it floats it is off. This is because as an egg goes off, gas is produced thus making it more buoyant.

A tip to save money in the credit crunch!