Latest news with #1925
Times
12-07-2025
- Times
A summer sunrise on Helvellyn
From The Times, July 12, 1925 The church clock struck one as we gently closed the door behind us and stepped out into dim deep-blue stillness, wondering whether enough light would be vouchsafed to make our way clear. A corncrake called at the bridge, but the beck was silent, and the quiet brooding over the dale was so complete that it gave us a curious sense of possession. The night was ours. No one seemed to be sharing the soft breeze that gently swept over the fields standing high in hay-grass, or the scents it brought. As we passed up the rough path with Tongue Ghyll murmuring below us, though a black wall of fell rose ahead we had the feeling we were walking towards the light. Now and again we seemed to be moving through pockets of warmer air, charged with scented fern and the indescribable sweetness that rises when dew has fallen on sun-baked sheep-nibbled turf. We crossed the beck that divides Seat Sandal from the Tongue, the stepping stones shining whitely, and began to climb up the long grassy slope. Two green glow-worm lights, almost startling in their beauty, shone at our feet, then another, and another, till we realized the ground beyond the beck on our left was dotted with scores of these tiny, stedfastly-glowing lamps. We crossed the rocky knoll that for so long had loomed up before us, dropped down to the hollow, and climbed up to the Hause Gap. Every moment the light increased, and even gave us sight of the saxifrages starring the bog near the rock where the Wordsworth brothers had their memorable parting. There was a hint of coming beauty in the roseate glow that was stealing over the sky to north-east. The top of Helvellyn, now only a few hundred yards distant, looked miles away. The black, jagged outline of Striding Edge appeared and disappeared. We waited, and there was a brilliant radiance behind a bank of clouds: then arrows of flaming rose, molten edges, dim forms and gleams, veiled pinnacles of fire, the whole panoply of world mystery shimmering as the great giant came forth from the uttermost part of the heaven. Imperceptibly colour came all round us. An hour later, just as we ended our walk, the sun appeared above the eastern rampart of fell and flooded the dale with glory. Explore 200 years of history as it appeared in the pages of The Times, from 1785 to 1985:
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Free of human logic': the modern artists inspired by surrealism's 100-year-old parlour game
Some time in the winter of 1925-1926, the French author André Breton and his comrades Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duchamp invented an old-fashioned parlour game. You write a word on a piece of paper, then fold it over so the next person can't see what you've written, and you end up with a strange sentence. The game is now known as Exquisite Corpse, after the result of their first go: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine). Exquisite Corpse gave Breton so much joy because it summed up the essence of the surrealist school of art he was trying to articulate at the time. In his first 1924 manifesto, he told budding surrealists to put themselves in 'as passive, or receptive, a state of mind' as they can and write quickly. Forget about talent, about subject, about perception or punctuation. Simply trust, he writes, 'in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur'. In the year of its centenary, the spirit of Breton's Exquisite Corpse is not just un-dead but frantically rattling the lid of its coffin from the inside. Several modern artists are continuing the surrealist tradition by composing with found materials (words, images, objects), drawn from the accidental debris of the everyday, to make the unexpected. For a recent show at Frith Street Gallery, the British artist Fiona Banner showed works made with discarded mannequin parts she'd found in an abandoned Topshop in north-west England. In a film, titled DISARM (Portrait), she has emblazoned words like 'disarm' on arms, 'obsolete' on soles, and 'delegation' on legs. At first she thought of it as a concrete poem or a Breton-esque poème objet. Then she realised, she says, that 'actually, it's more liquid than concrete'. For Banner, the power of Exquisite Corpse, 'its radical space', lies not in the finished sentence but on that fold. 'I think to not understand is a very important space,' she says. 'To be free of human logic.' Dimitri Rataud, a French actor turned artist, whose work is now on show at HIS Paris gallery, makes what he calls 'haikus marinières': surrealist-inspired concrete poems he finds by blacking out most of the words on a ripped-out page of a random book. The name itself is a word play: the pieces look like Breton tops AKA marinières because of the stripes. And the poems (et soudain … le bonheur – 'and suddenly … happiness') are as light as a feather on the breeze. The printed word, which he handles like a builder might a brick, is useful raw material. And each poem is but a moment. Rataud starts by tearing the cover off the book then opening it on the last page. He can never do the same thing twice. To his gallery's dismay, he refuses to make copies. Rataud is popular on Instagram, and you can of course see why: Breton tops, French romance, Japanese minimalism. And yet, these found poems are luminous, in the way they balance on that paper-thin edge between accident and intention. 'I've found extremely beautiful haikus in sordid books.' For the Paris surrealists of the 1920s – crawling out of the wreckage of the first world war – nonsense was a deadly serious matter. When the Centre Pompidou's exhibition, Surréalisme (a touring mega-show currently at the Hamburger Kunsthalle), opened in September 2024, co-curator Marie Sarré described the centennial movement as one of the most politically engaged of the avant gardes. 'Throughout its history, the political and the poetic ran in parallel,' she said. 'It wasn't an artistic movement or a formalism, but a collective adventure and a philosophy.' Contrary to other avant garde movements which embraced the notion of progress, it questioned everything. The surrealists were among the first anticolonialists, the staunchest anti-fascists, proponents of social revolution and proto-eco warriors. 'They asked the questions artists today are asking,' said Sarré. To wit, Malaysian-born artist Heman Chong, whose work is currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum. This survey exhibition is organised into nine categories: words, whispers, ghosts, journeys, futures, findings, infrastructures, surfaces and endings. One piece, 'This pavilion is strictly for community bonding activities only', reproduces a sign Chong found in a communal space within one of Singapore's Housing and Development Board block of flats. 'The sentence itself is nuts, right?' he says. 'That you would insist on community bonding activities, which means, literally, you cannot be there alone, right? Because you can't bond with anyone alone.' By contrast, he often makes installations with things people could secrete away – stacks of postcards; mountains of sentences from spy novels shredded on to the floor; a library of unread books. 'I would love it if people just take things out of their own accord,' says Chong. 'Coming from Singapore, which is an extremely paternalistic, authoritarian state, a lot of my work is not about telling people what they cannot do.' In November 2024, South Africa-based Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who is a long-term collaborator of William Kentridge, gave a performance lecture titled Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid. It collates several spoken word compositions and improvised works, which delve into the brutal flattening of colonial oppression: language stolen, names mangled, bodies which have learned to recognise different guns by the sounds they make. In one section, he performs, one by one, various unrelated sentences in the languages of isiZulu, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Venda, Xhosa. And then, 'the language of apartheid'. He stands stock still, in total silence, for two whole minutes. He recounts doing a workshop with children from Hillbrow, a part of inner Johannesburg beset by high crime and intense poverty. They were working on a performance of Aimé Césaire's 1939 masterwork, Return to My Native Land – a gut punch of a poem against colonialism, which Breton called 'the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. Mahlangu's students, who were witnessing crime and death and abandonment on the way to class, said: 'We experience surrealisms every day. We don't understand why people go to universities and study it. Our lives are surreal.' 'Surrealism offers ways to look awry at things,' says Patricia Allmer, an art historian at the Edinburgh College of Art. She recently co-curated The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. 'Because you can't encounter trauma head on, you have to find ways of seeing it, either as a distortion, through a distorting lens or from the side.' For Mahlangu, it is about 'bringing fluidity to what seems stable, and understanding that stability can be a weakness. It's constantly not answering the question, but questioning the answers, asking more questions.' In the 21st century, we may have grown wary of 'isms' in art. In a climate of constant technological and economic interruption, the promise of a transformative cultural revolution can feel suspicious; the most powerful movement in modern art, contended a recent article in the Art Newspaper, may be the art market itself. But it's worth remembering that when Breton first wrote about his ideas in 1924, he didn't think of it as a manifesto, just a preface to a book of poems he wanted to publish. And that's why Exquisite Corpse sums up surrealism's most lasting legacy to modern art today: a tool that taps you into something unexplored, a game for 'pure young people who refuse to knuckle down'.
New York Times
13-06-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
The offside law, Bill McCracken and, a century on, the decision that changed football forever
One hundred years ago today, at a meeting at 22 Rue de Londres, Paris, association football — soccer — changed forever. The International Football Association Board voted that Law 11 of the game, the offside law, would be altered from season 1925-26 so that two players would need to be between an attacker and the goal line to remain onside, not three as it had been previously. Advertisement This was arguably the most significant rule change since football was professionalised in the mid-1880s. It is possibly the most significant until the introduction of the back-pass rule in 1992. It may even have a claim to be the biggest moment in the history of the professional sport. Every organised match played since 1925 has had its geometry defined by the June 1925 offside law. The reason for the change was that matches had become clogged by offside procedures and decisions, with referees sometimes blowing their whistle 40 times in a game for offside alone. Newspapers referred to 'the eternal whistle'. The constant interruptions were affecting the game's flow and supporters' enjoyment was diminished. It may sound remarkably familiar given today's gripes over VAR. The aim of the altered law was to decrease interruptions and increase goalscoring. In this, it was a success. The June 1925 minutes of the IFAB meeting in Paris state, under the heading 'Present Law': '6. When a player plays the ball, any player of the same side who at such moment of playing is nearer to his opponents' goal line is out of play and may not touch the ball himself nor in any way whatever interfere with an opponent, or with the play, until the ball has been again played, unless there are at such moment of playing at least three of his opponents nearer their own goal-line.' Under the heading 'Proposed Alteration', it states: 'From the first sentence of Law 6, delete the word 'three' and substitute the word 'two'.' It appears a simple modification, yet its impact was dramatic and enduring. Perhaps the simplest way of explaining the pre-1925 situation is to say that defences were effectively allowed a spare defender, who was — by modern interpretations — not counted in offside calculations. In other words, assuming the goalkeeper was in his usual position, the offside line was determined by the penultimate defender, rather than the last defender. Advertisement Therefore, before 1925, the two defenders (the 'full-backs' in the 2-3-5 formation that was almost mandatory at the time) would not play in a line when defending. Generally, the defender closest to the ball would push up and close down, and would often find himself 15 or 20 yards in advance of his colleague, who basically acted as a sweeper. A 1937 book entitled Association Football by FNS Creek illustrates this point via the diagram below: The '2' and '3' in the 2-3-5 system are denoted by lines. Creek's point is that the attackers in positions 'A' and 'B' would, according to pre-1925 laws, be offside because of the position of the right-back. But in the post-1925 world, they were onside because of the position of the left-back. The point of the law change was to reduce the number of stoppages in the game, but it had a dramatic effect on goalscoring. On the first day of the new laws, Aston Villa defeated Burnley 10-0. 'With the law change, play initially lost its balance,' wrote John Cottrell in his 1970 book, A Century of Great Soccer Drama. 'The new law apparently favoured forwards even more than the old rule had assisted defenders. The immediate conclusion was that full-backs would have to play squarer and nearer their own goal.' There had been 4,700 goals scored in the four Football League divisions over the season just before the law change — afterwards, it rose to 6,373. There's a reason Dixie Dean's legendary 60-goal season for Everton came in the late 1920s. In this period, football was about goals, goals, goals. Some teams still wanted to hold an offside line, however, in roughly the modern manner, to prevent handing the initiative to the opposition. The problem was that two defenders were no longer sufficient when playing in that manner. Whereas previously opponents had to position themselves according to the position of the penultimate defender, knowing they would still have one final defender to beat, now they could keep players on the last line of defence. Long diagonal balls in behind were extremely effective, with the two defenders caught between covering the centre and the flanks. And therefore, defences adjusted. Most notably, Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman, after encouragement from one of his players, Charlie Buchan, used his centre-half — previously in the middle of the 'midfield three' — as a 'third back'. Herbie Roberts became known as a 'stopper' or 'policeman' centre-half, in stark contrast to the previously accepted style of a centre-half, which was to act as a dominating, attack-minded figure. Advertisement This move helped to transform Arsenal, at this point without a league title to their name, into the most successful club of the time. Their ploy was copied and the 'third back game', as it was then known, became the standard system. The 1925 offside rule, therefore, initially created incredibly attack-minded football, and then provoked considerably more cautious football. History does not just happen; people make history happen. What may seem from the 1925 IFAB minutes a dry and bureaucratic amendment stemmed from the flesh and blood of the game on the pitch. Offside was a talking point in British football for the years before and after the First World War — and it was British football shaping IFAB and the sport then, though the Paris venue for the 1925 meeting is an indication of expanded horizons. To reduce such a momentous decision to one individual would be an exaggeration. However, there were plenty in England who had been doing just that for some time — aiming fingers, verbal abuse and various objects at a certain William McCracken. McCracken was a Newcastle United player of such offside prowess and defensive influence that 'McCrackenism' became a term of reference. McCracken was a character; Hollywood handsome, a thinker and one of the greatest players to grace St James' Park. Over a period of 19 years, he made 432 Newcastle United appearances, placing him fifth, even today, on the club's all-time list. Between 1904 and 1911, McCracken was an essential element of the finest team in England — Newcastle won three titles and reached five FA Cup finals in those years. On top of that, along the way, McCracken gathered an unofficial title: 'The Offside King'. A biography bearing that title will be published soon, written by Newcastle United historian Paul Joannou, who is keen that McCracken receives due recognition. Advertisement 'I have not found anyone in terms of a footballer on the field who we can say is largely responsible for changing the game itself,' Joannou says. 'There have been one or two off the field, such as George Eastham and Jean-Marc Bosman. But McCracken, in forcing a change in legislation, is unique.' McCracken was not a Geordie. He was born in Belfast in pre-Partition Ireland in 1883. His first club was Distillery in inner west Belfast, close to his home on Nansen Street. Aged 20, he won the Irish League and Irish Cup with 'the Whites' before being quietly ushered across the Irish Sea by Newcastle as a director of Glasgow Rangers knocked on the door in Nansen Street and Liverpool's (Irish) director John McKenna waited at Anfield. McCracken was a wanted man, and to some, he stayed that way. Not the first imaginative, truculent Irishman to play the game, nor the last, McCracken's militancy and principles put him at odds with the Irish Football Association. They banned the best Irish footballer of his generation from playing for Ireland — for 12 years — for arguing Irish players should be paid the same rate as England's. McCracken took it on the chin. His personality was as vivid as his talent. In an early sports questionnaire, he said his ambition was to be 'King of Ireland'. By the end of his playing career, The Guardian newspaper had given him another name: 'The Irish Mephistopheles'. It was Don Davies who wrote that. Davies, an England amateur international, was to die in the Munich air crash in 1958 while covering Manchester United; he had seen McCracken play and he left a vibrant profile. Davies described McCracken as a 'setter of offside traps of unwonted slickness and cunning'. These were designed to force opponents 'to think — and that has never been a popular mission'. 'Crowds flocked to watch him, composed mainly of angry and prejudiced men, and few were there who had the patience to acknowledge the beauty of McCracken's technique in the abstract,' Davies wrote. Advertisement Davies partially understood the public antipathy toward McCracken — 'Who but a snake charmer would fall in love with a serpent?' — but his admiration was clear. It was shared on Tyneside. In a 1913 match report, the Sheffield Star referred to McCracken's display as 'one of those whole-hearted exhibitions that have made the rollicking son of Erin so popular at St James' Park'. Joannou makes the point that this appeal was and is unusual for a defender: 'He wasn't a goalscorer or a flamboyant midfielder. He was a full-back and very rarely are they the stars. But he's right up there.' McCracken called himself 'an overlapping wing-back before the term was invented', and Joannou says McCracken and his fellow Newcastle team-mates came to realise their need to perfect offside on a train journey back from a defeat at Notts County. 'Every club played the offside game and Notts County were a top-level side then,' Joannou says. 'Newcastle were caught offside all the time. This was 1907. On the train back from Nottingham to Tyneside, the club had what was called a 'council of war' — this was before managers — and the players themselves decided on how to play. After that drubbing, in offside terms, McCracken was one of the four or five players who were really scientific in their tactics. Over the next few weeks and seasons, they perfected the offside trap. 'They became the best in the land at it. As an individual, McCracken became the most hated man in football. 'There are lovely caricatures of him with his arm up, appealing for offside. But he ran into all sorts of arguments with other players and with referees, who didn't like it as they felt it was unsportsmanlike.' When football resumed after the First World War, so did McCracken, by then club captain. Newcastle finished eighth in the First Division in season 1919-20, but they had the best defensive record. McCracken was 37 by then and stayed at St James' for another three years. Then, in February 1923, a couple of days after his 40th birthday, second division Hull City offered him the post of manager on a five-year contract. Advertisement Hull were neither wealthy nor prestigious, but McCracken was there for eight years and took them to an FA Cup semi-final in 1930, lost on a replay to eventual winners Arsenal. In the quarter-finals, Hull had beaten Newcastle, Hughie Gallacher and all. The headline in Tyneside's Daily Chronicle was 'Newcastle In McCracken Trap'. The match report said: 'One of the most piquant features of the match was the frequency with which the visiting forwards were manoeuvred into offside positions — shades of William McCracken, now Hull's manager, who when at Newcastle, taught the rest of the football world how to play that game.' Distracted by the cup, Hull were relegated. But McCracken had made his mark. He had made another in the 1925-26 season. In the immediate aftermath of the IFAB Paris offside decision, as goals flew in everywhere — Newcastle conceded 75 that season, as opposed to 37 in McCracken's last in 1922-23 — there was one club bucking the trend. The club was Hull City. They began 1925-26 with a 0-0 draw against Derby County (who apologised for arriving late, having missed a train connection at Selby). Hull followed that with a 2-0 win at Southampton, then a 1-0 win at Bradford City. There were then 4-0 and 3-0 victories and, after five games in football's new world, a world created by the likes of McCracken, of the 92 clubs in the top four divisions, only Hull City had not conceded a goal. The local paper, the Hull Daily Mail, saluted 'the astute manager' and his players' 'intelligent interpretation' of the new offside clause. Davies was rather more lyrical: 'Chilly doubts again assailed observers. Not McCracken again, surely! But facts were facts and soon the alarming rumour spread, later confirmed by eye-witnesses, that the enterprising coach, critic and tactical adviser to Hull City Football Club was none other than our old friend the Irish Mephistopheles, William McCracken… the game's arch-obstructionist.' McCracken moved on from Hull to manage Gateshead, Millwall and Aldershot before returning to Newcastle United as scout, often in Ireland. He would begin reports, 'Here is the latest bulletin from the land of spuds and buttermilk.' He recommended a 17-year-old George Eastham, who was playing in the Irish League. Newcastle bought him and Eastham, too, would shape the entire sport via his contract dispute and victory. Advertisement Living in south London, at 75, McCracken then started scouting for Watford. He recommended they sign Pat Jennings from Newry Town, which they did for (apparently) £10. McCracken filed his last scouting report to Watford in 1971, from a reserve team game between Crystal Palace and Leicester City. He was 88. Visiting his son in Hull, he was 95 when he passed away in January 1979, quite a distance from Distillery and Paris 1925. Some remembered all of that, though, the Sunday Express announcing: 'Bill McCracken, the famous old Irish international full-back of Newcastle United, whose offside tactics led to a change in the laws of the game in 1925, has died.' McCracken died as he lived: onside.
CTV News
10-06-2025
- CTV News
Video Vault: Davis Day
The Video Vault features a 1985 story in which William Davis' son remembers the events of June 11, 1925 – 100 years later, the day is remembered as Davis Day.
Globe and Mail
07-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Why This Statistical Edge Favors CRWD, JNJ and LULU For the Coming Week
A critical problem within the standard practice of market analysis is that the methodologies often beg the question: the assertions assume the conclusion within the premise. For example, it's not uncommon to hear experts talk about price-to-earnings ratios of 15 being 'good value' or a head-and-shoulders pattern being 'bad' for the target stock price. Is the chart pattern or financial ratio a legitimate example of that which is being asserted? And if so, what is the empirical evidence that the event in question is predictive? Often, the answer is some dressed-up version of 'just because,' which then becomes a self-referential loop. A better approach is to analyze market breadth, which is basically the sequence of accumulation and distribution. In other words, market breadth is demand and demand benefits from the beautiful quality of binarism — it's either happening or it's not. Binary metrics are also discrete, meaning that they don't succumb to the non-stationarity problem of fundamental and technical analysis. While these latter approaches may offer heuristic insights, their relevance is incredibly fragile across vast stretches of time and sentiment regimes. That's because the metrics of comparison (such as share price) tend to drift or evolve, often quite dramatically. In contrast, the language of demand — of buying and selling — remains the same, whether we're talking about the market in 2025 or 1925. This discretized model — where the volatility of price action is compressed or abstracted into a binary genetic code — offers tremendous probabilistic insights. Last week, I identified three stocks using the model that signaled a higher-than-average propensity for upside. Comparing Monday's opening price to Friday's close, all three securities moved higher. Two of them at some point in the week exceeded the short strike price of the bull call spreads I discussed as prospective ideas. To be clear, the market is chaotic, which means losses are guaranteed to happen. My point? We have limited resources. So, with empirical data, I'd like to direct your attention to probabilistically compelling ideas. CrowdStrike (CRWD) Fundamentally, CrowdStrike (CRWD) presents arguably a no-brainer idea as a long-term investment because cybersecurity cannot be ignored. In late May, Victoria's Secret (VSCO) had to take down its website temporarily due to a data breach. It represented the latest high-profile example of the risks businesses face in the modern digitalized ecosystem. Given that nefarious online activities are unlikely to fade anytime soon, CrowdStrike enjoyed a shot of relevance, sending CRWD stock higher. Further, the equity is up almost 37% on a year-to-date basis, easily outperforming the benchmark tech index. Still, there could be some more upside remaining. In the past two months, CRWD printed a '6-4-U' market breadth sequence: six up weeks, four down weeks, with a net positive trajectory across the 10-week period. Notably, in 61.9% of cases, the following week's price action results in a gain, with a median return of 4.04%. Should the implications of the 6-4-U pan out as projected, CRWD stock could reach $487.33, possibly within a week or two. Based on the above market intelligence, aggressive traders may consider the 475/485 bull call spread expiring June 27. Using data available to Barchart Premier members, this transaction involves buying the $475 call and simultaneously selling the $485 call, for a net debit paid of $480. Should CRWD stock rise through the short strike price at expiration, the maximum reward is $520, a payout of over 108%. Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) At first glance, healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) doesn't particularly seem attractive. True, JNJ stock benefits from a Moderate Buy consensus rating from Wall Street analysts. On the other hand, the Barchart Technical Opinion indicator rates the equity as a 40% Sell. It's not the worst signal in the world but it's not exactly comforting either. Nevertheless, there's a chance that JNJ stock can break out of its sideways funk that it's been on since early April. As it stands, the security printed a 6-4-D sequence: six up weeks, four down weeks, with a net negative trajectory across the 10-week period. In 66.67% of cases, the following week's price action results in upside, with a median return of 1.33%. If the implications of the above pattern pan out as expected, JNJ stock could theoretically reach above the $157 level. Assuming the bulls maintain control of the market, a push above $158 isn't out of the question. With the above intel in mind, aggressive traders may consider the 155/157.50 bull call spread expiring on June 20, which is less than two weeks from now. Lululemon Athletica (LULU) For a high-risk, high-reward idea, speculators may consider Lululemon Athletica (LULU). As Barchart content partner Motley Fool mentioned, LULU stock crashed after the underlying company released its first-quarter earnings report. Actual results were so-so but the market seemed to reserve the bulk of skepticism toward President Donald Trump's tariffs policy, which appeared to contribute to a weak sales outlook. Whatever the case, LULU stock dropped nearly 20% on Friday. Not surprisingly, the financial publication ecosystem has largely labeled the security a name to avoid. However, from a statistical standpoint, Lululemon could be interesting. In the past two months, LULU stock printed a 6-4-D sequence: six up weeks, four down weeks, with a net negative trajectory across the period. In 60.71% of cases, the following week's price action results in upside, with a median return of 6.12%. That means if the implications of the above pattern pan out, LULU could hit $281.50 within a short time frame. For those who really want to swing for the fences (but do so rationally), the 275/280 bull call spread expiring June 27 is awfully tempting. This transaction calls for a net debit of $185 and if LULU stock rises through the short strike price at expiration, the maximum reward is $315, a payout of over 170%.
