Saturday 29th November 2014……. of course….sports!!!!

My sports day started at 7am with live soccer from England whilst having breakfast and then I went down to the courts for two hours of great tennis with Loren we both really enjoy this time me perhaps a little more as he had to go to the Losers restaurant again!!!!!

Came home and had some lunch whilst watching another live soccer game from England…and then I went to get Sara and her sister Lorraine who is here for a two week holiday……we first went to

 

 

Sanctuary of Atotonilco in Mexico

The Sanctuary of Atotonilco (Santuario de Atotonilco) is a church complex and a World Heritage Site, designated along with nearby San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. The complex was built in the 18th century by Father Luis Felipe Neri de Alfaro who, according to tradition, was called upon by a vision of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head and carrying a cross. The main feature of the complex is the rich Mexican Baroque mural work that adorns the main nave and chapels. This was chiefly the work of Antonio Martinez de Pocasangre over a period of thirty years. The mural work has led the complex to be dubbed the "Sistine Chapel of Mexico."^[1] The complex remains a place of worship and penance to this day, attracting as many as 5,000 visitors every week.

 

This is a beautiful church and all the ceilings are covered in murals!!!

We then drove about 15 miles to the town of Delores Hidalgo which is known for a few things including the shrine to one of it’s musical hero's!!!!

 

José Alfredo Jiménez

 

Background information

Born
(1926-01-19)January 19, 1926
Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Mexico

Died
November 23, 1973(1973-11-23) (aged 47)

 

José Alfredo Jiménez (Spanish pronunciation: [xoˈse alˈfɾeðo xiˈmenes]; January 19, 1926 – November 23, 1973) was a Mexican singer-songwriter in the mariachi style whose songs are considered an integral part of Mexico's musical heritage.

Jiménez was born in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, and had no musical training according to singer Miguel Aceves Mejía. He did not play an instrument and did not even know the Spanish terms for "waltz" and "key". Nonetheless, he composed more than 1,000 songs. Among the most famous are "Me Equivoqué Contigo", "Ella", "Paloma querida", "Tú y la mentira", "Media vuelta", "El Rey", "Sin Sangre en las Venas", "El jinete", "Si nos Dejan", "Amanecí en tus Brazos", "Llegando a ti", "Tu recuerdo y yo", El Hijo del Pueblo", "Cuando el Destino", "El caballo blanco", "Llegó Borracho el Borracho" and "Que te vaya bonito", as well as "Camino de Guanajuato", where he sang about his home state of Guanajuato.

 

José Alfredo Jiménez' tomb in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, attracts visitors from around the world.

In addition to his own recordings, many of his songs have been recorded by renowned artists from around the Spanish-speaking world, most notably by the following artists: Miguel Aceves Mejía, Antonio Aguilar, Luis Aguilar, Lola Beltrán, Vikki Carr, Gualberto Castro, Rocío Dúrcal, Alejandro Fernández, Pedro Fernández, Vicente Fernández, Los Relámpagos Del Norte con Cornelio Reyna y Ramón Ayala, Los Tigres del Norte, Manolo García, Little Joe Hernández & The Latinaires, Julio Iglesias, Pedro Infante, the Mexican rock group Maná, Luis Miguel, Jorge Negrete, Sunny Ozuna & The Sunliners, María Dolores Pradera, Javier Solís, and Chavela Vargas. In addition, Joaquín Sabina paid homage to Jiménez with his song, "Por el Bulevar de los Sueños Rotos" ("On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams"). The country artist Luke Tan recorded a disc of his favorite Jiménez songs in Spanish, including some English translations.

Like many of his contemporary stars, such as Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, and Javier Solís, Jiménez died young. He was only forty-seven years old when he died in Mexico City, of complications resulting from cirrhosis of the liver.

One of his last appearances on Mexican television occurred in 1973, just months prior to his death, where he introduced his last song, Gracias, accompanied by his wife, singer Alicia Juarez. It was his way of thanking the public for all of the affection they had shown him throughout his career as one of the most prolific and highly regarded composers and singers Mexico has ever produced.

It really is amazing to see…

  On the huge serape all the names of his songs are imprinted!!!!!

The other thing the town is known for is pottery and the girls loved this store!!!!

  This is the warehouse where they make the pottery and package them for shipment!!!

I bought this

After I dropped the girls off came home in time to watch my Brother’s soccer team in England take a beating and now it is Hockey night in Canada….told you it was a sports day!!!

 

A sad article taken from the BBC web site…..

 

Phillip Hughes died after he was struck at the top of the neck by a short-pitched delivery .

Phillip Hughes: Why does a death in sport hit us so hard?

Young men of 25 die every day - in crashed cars, on battlefields, in cancer wards.

When it happens in a sporting arena it is no more tragic, but its impact is both more universally felt and somehow far more shocking.

Elite sportsmen are our real-time superheroes, capable of physical wonders beyond the rest of us, seemingly unbound by many of the same biological constraints.

Watching them can make us feel immune to the real world. Sport becomes our great escape from its darker mortal realities, an alternative playground where the language is one of battles and great victories but from which everyone walks away to fight another day.

 

 

Phillip Hughes: BBC Sport looks back at Australia batsman's career

Its tragedies and losses aren't real, even if the hype would sometimes make you believe they were. So when the illusion shatters, as it has with the death of Australian batsman Phillip Hughes, it is utterly unexpected and difficult to accept.

We know there is danger in sport, in repeatedly ducking a hard ball bowled at 90 miles an hour or driving a twitching rocket of a Grand Prix car.

It is what fires much of our admiration. It also makes an accident like the one that killed Hughes, or that cost Ayrton Senna his life at San Marino in 1994, all the harder to comprehend.

These were ones who were supposed to be invulnerable to the odds, who could flourish where logic suggested it was impossible.

We mourn the person and empathise with their families. We also mourn the sporting loss: the World Cups Munich air disaster victim Duncan Edwards could never light up, the races and world titles Senna would never win, the Test centuries Hughes will never score.

Because sportsmen's lives are quantifiable in a way that others aren't. They are known to us like friends. They are deaths with statistical eulogies.

The WBO super-middleweight rematch between Chris Eubank (left) and Michael Watson at White Hart Lane in 1991 left Watson fighting for his life

In the records of races won or goals scored or wickets taken comes an understanding of what they have achieved and what they could have gone on to do.

With their premature loss comes bewilderment. Hughes's final scorecard will forever read 63 not out: a lovely start, not enough, not yet.

Cricket, like all other sports, is rich in fables of the miracle comeback or improbable recovery.

Hughes himself had been involved in one of its most famous, when his 81 not out in a last-wicket partnership with teenage debutant Ashton Agar almost won his side an unfathomable victory in the first Ashes Test in the summer of 2013.

It conditions us to expect the same from its protagonists off the pitch. These men and women are fighters, used to taking on the odds, to cocking a snook at reason and precedent.

So it was that when news first broke of Hughes's collapse at the Sydney Cricket Ground, hope spread almost as quickly as the distress.

Perhaps the recent tragic accidents to F1 drivers Michael Schumacher and Jules Bianchi, devastating though they have been to both men and their families, have also inured us to the stark medical logic of severe brain trauma.

The induced comas of Schumacher and Bianchi slowly, painfully slowly, presaged a partial recovery. Medical experts in Sydney may have feared the worst. Many others, misguidedly, did not.

For Sean Abbott, the 22-year-old whose delivery struck Hughes the fatal blow, these will be overwhelming hours.

Ayrton Senna's death at Imola in 1994 still haunts Adrian Newey, then chief designer at Williams

Hughes's death was not Abbott's fault. Neither was Senna's down to Adrian Newey, the chief designer at his Williams team, yet the Briton is still haunted by that calamitous day two decades on.

Some of those who have shared his awful predicament have been able to fight their way out through strong logic and the forgiveness of those they hurt.

Chris Eubank, a far more intelligent man than his cartoonish public persona suggests, may not have been capable of quite the same ruthlessness in the ring after his fight with Michael Watson in September 1991 left his opponent with permanent brain damage.

But neither did he regret the upper cut that put Watson in a coma for 30 days - only its outcome. Why? Because had he not thrown that punch, in a contest that had brought both men close to the edge, he would have failed in his responsibilities as a professional boxer.

He was there to fight, just as Abbott was there to bowl. That was the element he could control. The consequences were not.

Not everyone is blessed with Eubank's capacity to recover.

Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini was a 21-year-old lightweight world champion when he fought South Korean Duk Koo Kim for his WBA belt in November 1982.

A brutal contest ended in the 14th round, when 44 unanswered punches from the American left his opponent on his knees. Kim collapsed in the ring, suffered two blood clots on the right side of his brain and died in hospital four days later. The referee, Richard Green, killed himself the following year. Kim's mother, equally unable to cope, took her own life four months after Green.

Thirty years later, it is still the defining moment in Mancini's life. He is still approached by strangers, asking to see the hand that threw the final punch, still has dreams in which he attempts to embrace Kim.

"It's still too painful to talk about it," he said in 2007. "I just don't want to keep reliving it. There have been a lot of prayers, a lot of thoughts. But you never get over it. You never understand."

For cricket, the trials are likely to come much sooner. Next July, when Australia and England's fast bowlers charge in to the opposition openers on the first day of the Ashes series, how will supporters in Cardiff react if, as happened on the first morning of the 2005 series, a short-pitched ball hits a batsman flush on the head?

Ray Mancini, pictured in his final fight against Greg Haugen in 1992, was only 21 when a WBA lightweight title fight resulted in the death of Korean Duk Koo Kim

When Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting were struck at Lord's nine years ago, it was greeted with roars of approval from around the ground. Hindsight has anointed it the moment Australia's all-conquering team knew they were in a fight, a symbolic and physical blow from which they would struggle to recover.

That series was no one-off. Australia's thumping Ashes victory last winter was in large part based on Mitchell Johnson's ability to intimidate England's batsman with short, hostile bowling. The West Indies built an era of dominance around the same strategy.

Hughes's death was a terrible freak. But its consequences are there for all of us - for his family, for Abbott, for Johnson and other fast bowlers, and for us as supporters, reminded of our own vulnerabilities by someone we supposed exempt from them.

 

Blessings to all….

 

Yashi Kochi!!!!!