The least-noticeable Middle-Name Infographic

I'm someone who never had a middle name, but would this be better or worse?

©2015 James Mathurin

The most drawn-out day of Association Football Infographic

Now that I live in Australia, I have to clearly differentiate between the various codes of football. This is about the real one.

©2014 James Mathurin 

Music videos in the mountains

Cone Beat were a 1980's Irish band, a politically-oriented 4-piece, led by front man Mich Faighlty, ("nicknamed Moto"). On 15th April 1982, the band were travelling to film a video for their song, Ascension Day, when the private aeroplane they had rented was forced to touch down for an emergency landing in a remote expanse of snow in Poland. Although the video shoot was supposed to be filmed at Lublin Główny train station in the city of Lublin, Poland, Dave Moreign, their video director, decided to film it in the snowy hills where they had landed.

"The song was, well, OK," Moreign said in 1998, in an interview with Sight and Sound magazine, "And Moto's being a diva like always, so I says to the fellas, 'is there anyone here who wants to drag this bollocks out for another 3 days, or shall we just get it done while they're fixing the feckin' plane? An the vote was 3 to 1, so, yeah, we ended up making a bit of music history, if you want to call it that.'

Cone Beat fans meeting at the Snow Muzyka Skifarm, a Ski Resort set up by a local entrepreneur in order to capitalise on the annual pilgrimage of fans to the spot where the Ascension Day video was filmed. On 15th April every year, fans meet in order to re-enact the video. Since the addition of the chair-lift in 2000, some fans have used it to also re-enact the emergency landing of the plain, carrying papier-maché replicas of the entire plane, or pieces of the fuselage and wings. Photograph by KT Bell. 

 ©2013 James Mathurin 

The most drawn-out day of Association Football

The most drawn-out day of Association Football was in Poland, on Saturday 30^th November 1946. Due to the effects of war-time rubber rationing, only 5 balls were available for the whole of the national league, comprised of 19 teams. To cope with this, a one-off ruling was made that every time the ball went out of play at one match a ball-boy was chauffeured, with the ball, to the nearest stadium, so that that game would continue. After kicking off at 8am, the final whistle of the last game was sounded at 10:53 that night. The shortest game of the day had lasted 5 hours and 23 minutes, and one game had had a 42 minute half-time break, waiting for the next ball.

Karol Casimir, captain of Pelikan Radom, a club which does not exist now, but was the first club to kick off on this day of football. they actually managed 15 minutes before the ball was removed to be taken to anoher match. Speaking later, Casimir said,

"I was worried at first, as I knew other teams were waiting for our ball. One of my teammates, I won't name them, asked if we should kick the ball out deliberately, in order to allow other teams to start, but I told him that was not in the spirit of Pelikan, or the spirit of the game."

Photograph by Von Aisaider.

 ©2013 James Mathurin 

The least-noticed middle name

The world’s least-noticeable middle name is “ “. It is the middle name of Harold   Bashouka, born in 1967. Bashouka’s parents, Gibbe and Henkara, both of whom are judges in their native Poland, actually stipulated that on any official form, there must be an extra space between his forename and surname, or his initials can be represented as “H.   . Bashouka.” Speaking at Harold’s inauguration as President of the local Flint Collector’s club, Gibbe Bashouka explained, “We hoped that, by putting a little void into his name, we could encourage our son to stop and meditate every time he thinks about himself.”

This photograph of of Harold (l) and Gibbe (r) Bashouka is on display at the Warsaw Flint Collector's Association. The frame is inscribed "In commemoration of our third-greatest President, H. . Bashouka, and the parent whose name-based motivation pushed him to the heights which he achieved.". The photo is now property of U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograph-World-Sense-).

©2010 James Mathurin