Ultralight—the Thrill of Gliding

The literal meaning of ultralight is extremely lightweight if compared with others of its size and kind. In aviation and sports, it refers to a small, light, inexpensive aircrafts that has a single seat and which may essentially be considered as a hang glider. As there is an ultralight vehicle, which is usually a single-seat airplane, as the existence of an ultralight glider which is constructed as an ultralight sailplane or a slow-flying glider that has a pilot sitting outside of the aircraft rather than the vehicle’s fuselage. This ultralight glider is an unpowered aircraft used for sports and, most often, for fun. It is flown without an engine and has a place inside only for the pilot. It is typically so designed as to make it soar in open air and provide convenient, thrilling transport. In the United States, these unpowered ultralights are called paragliders, hang gliders, or airchairs or basic ultralight gliders (BUG) which are regulated by the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA).

In many countries, the more popular ultralight aircrafts are the hang glider, seaplane and the powered paraglider. The hang glider has wings made of fabric and aluminum alloy and is flown by a pilot strapped on a harness linked to the airframe which is in turn fastened to the wings. The ultralight seaplane has a fixed wing and has the ability to take off from and land on water. The powered paraglider is a favorite of many gliding hobbyists because it can be built easily by anyone from an available building kit. It has a motor attached to a wing and worn by the pilot while on flight.

How does a glider take off the ground? The most popular method is to get it dragged and lifted up by a powered airplane by tying the glider and the plane with a rope. Called “aero-tow,” this method is preferred by most pilots who can easily start the free flight once the rope is released upon takeoff. Another method is “winch-launching” which is lifting up the glider with the use of a land-locked engine and by connecting the winch or a hoisting machine to the glider with a long rope. Upon release of the rope, the pilot is now ready to experience the thrill of his free flight.

Yes, this is the thrill of gliding. Once in the air you will experience a winter wonderland flight in smoother air currents. You will see for yourself views to the horizons that are definitely clearer than summertime when there are humidity, dust and smoke. When there is no thermal air up there, you can stay soaring or can cruise anywhere you want even for cross-country travel up to 100 miles away from flight start. If you are on first flight, you can experience longer flight time, the smoothest and gentlest flight, most comfortable position in your aircraft and the best freedom to stay up in the air or fly for as long and as far as you want. If you are a hang gliding student, the flight prepares you to continue learning how to master flying an unpowered aircraft and learning advanced skills towards becoming an experienced pilot who can stay aloft solo for hours. The best experience for both gliding buffs and students is flying on the wind and feeling the air all around you as you soar with the birds in the sky without any worry about an engine breakdown or fuel exhaust. Fore more details click here.

Queen’s Card Play

The Queen Playing Card is a playing card with the picture of what appears to be a queen on its front surface. In a standard English deck of playing, the Queen of Hearts represents Elizabeth of York, who was the Queen Consort of Henry VII of England in the past. Card manufacturers in France have assigned each court card certain mythological or historical personages such as the Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades as the Biblical figure Judith and mythological figure Athena, respectively. The Queen of Diamonds is assigned the name Rachel, also a Biblical figure, and the anagram of Regina—Argine—to the Queen of Clubs. A complete set of playing cards that includes the four Queens is called a pack in the British English, and deck in American English. The face of each card bears markings that distinguish it from the other cards in the pack or deck but its back is identical with all the other cards.

Various Queen’s card games. The Queen’s card is played in a variety of card games. One is called The Queen, a two-player card game of four rounds. Its objective is to have the first player to score seven points or the player with the highest number of points as winner after four rounds. But the player with the most points wins the game if neither of them scores seven points at the end of the four rounds.  Using a standard 52-card deck, the game is played between two players opposite each other with a table between them and one of them serving as dealer for the first round. The Queen of Spades card game is played usually in a group of four to 10 persons, split into two teams by choice or randomly. The player has the objective of winning the game by being the first to get to 2,000 points. Teammates are not seated next to each other but are spaced so that a member of the opposite team will be between them.

Dark Queen play. This is another way to play the Queen’s card with the objective of getting rid of all the cards, especially the black Queen from the players. The game begins by taking the Queen of Clubs from the deck to leave the other black Queen in it. The cards are dealt evenly among the players who must see if they have matches which, if any, are put to the side. A player who has no match in his hand holds his cards to the player to his right. This process goes on until only one player is left with the only card which is the black Queen.

Queen Anne’s game. A variant of a commercial card game, this is played with a normal 52-card deck among an ideal number of four players. Each of them is dealt three cards with different values which must not exceed 99. If one has the card Queen, the value is plus or minus 20, but the King makes the total 99 regardless of the value of the other cards. Card 10 has a value of 10 and cards 2,3,4, 5,6,7,8 and 9 have their respective face value.

Faerie Queen solitaire. This uses 104 cards of two decks for a solitaire game, with the aces moved to the foundations or card files when they are available. A King is removed from the deck and placed on the first tableau or file of cards, where all cards are dealt from the stockpile up to the next King. The rule prohibits moving of cards from one tableau to the next before the deal is completed. Fore more details click here.

Poker Championships

Poker is a family of card games which involve individualistic or independent play and betting, with the winner determined by the combinations and ranks of the player’s cards. Poker games vary in terms of the number of cards dealt that are hidden until the end of each game. Betting has different ways in the game. In modern poker, betting begins with one of the players who makes an ante or forced bet during the first betting round. In a standard poker, a player bets that his cards or hand is the highest ranked among the other players. The hand consists of five cards but in a variant when the player has more than five cards, he plays the best five cards.

Poker game play rules. A poker player must know the rules of the game. In casual play, the right to deal a hand or the cards of a player rotates among all the players. In casinos, however, there is a house dealer who deals each hand but the dealer button which marks the right to deal is rotated among the players clockwise to determine the order of betting among such players. If a player bets without any opponent calling or matching the bet, the hand ends immediately without the need for the cards to be shown, and the bettors wins the pot. But at the end of the last round of betting, if there is more than one remaining player, a showdown is necessary to require players to reveal their previously hidden cards for the purpose of evaluating them, in which case, the best hand wins.

Poker variations. Poker has many variations but these variations seem to follow the same play patterns and use similar ranking systems. Card dealing and the right to deal the hand are important to classify the variations, such as straight poker, stud poker, draw poker, community card poker, and strip poker. Some of these variations are played in world championship games like the Strip Poker World Championship in London, England. This championship is held annually at Café Royal in Central London, with 10,000 sterling pounds in prize money for the winner, and another 10,000 going to a charity group chosen by the winner.

Other poker championships. There are countries that hold regular world poker championships. Australia is one where the Aussie Millions or Australian Poker Championship is held every year at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. Using the Texas Hold’em poker variant, the championship consists of a series of tournaments and is considered as the 6^th largest event in the world. The British Columbia Poker Championship is one of Canada’s biggest prize pools for tournaments in poker, which attract popular pokers from around the world. The Scottish Poker Championship is also an annual event at the Gala Maybury Casino in Scotland capital Edinburgh, offering affordable buy-ins for most poker championship participants. In Southern Indiana, United States, the Casino Center is the regular venue for the yearly Midwest Regional Poker Championship, which draws participation of popular poker players of Indiana state. One of such players is Vanessa Rousso, a French-US dual citizen who studies law at the University of Miami, and is said to have started playing poker at the age of five. An annual championship, the Australian Deaf Poker Championship is held regularly at the Adelaide Casino in South Australia for the deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing-impaired poker player participants. Fore more details click here.

Major Windsurfing Championships

Windsurfing is a sport on surface water that combines some elements of sailing and surfing sports. It uses a board typically two to three meters long powered by the wind on sail, as well as a rig that is linked to the board by a universal joint that can freely rotate. Records show that the water sport was originated by American inventor S. Newman Darby of Pennsylvania, United States after he invented the sailboard. Previously a non-competitive activity, windsurfing now has organized competitions at various levels all over the world. Formulas typical for competitive windsurfing have been adopted by organizers, like the Formula Windsurfing, Speed Sailing, Slalom or skiing on a wavy course, Course Racing, Wave Sailing, Super X and Freestyle. Together with the Olympic Windsurfing Class, the formulas are now among the disciplines that make up windsurfing.

Big windsurfing championships in many countries attract big-name windsurfers such as those in Australia, Singapore, North America, the Rhodes islands in Greece, Canada, Texas, U.S., and Portugal, among others. Some of these competitions have even drawn the participation of some of the world’s famous women windsurfers, among whom are Marina Alabau of Spain, Sofia Klepacka of Poland, Alessandra Sensini of Italy, Barbara Kendall of France, and Olga Maslivets of Ukraine.

The ISAF-SOL World Windsurfing Championship in Freemantle, Western Australia is organized by the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) and has already attracted the world’s best windsurfers and awarded 43 world, international and class titles to winners. In Singapore, the Asian Windsurfing Championship is organized by the Singapore Windsurfing Association in coordination with the International Windsurfing Association (IWA). Local and foreign windsurfers compete in 36 different categories and five different classes in this one of the biggest windsurfing championships in the Southeast Asian region.

The North American Windsurfing Championship is held for three days in a 10-race regatta or rowing and sailing races in Lake Waconia in Minnesota, US, during which races windsurfers earn points based on their finishes at the end of each race event.

The Canadian Windsurfing Championship is sanctioned by the Windsurfing Canada for three major disciplines of Course Racing, Freestyle and Wave Racing, and Slalom. This is to determine the country’s all-around champions in both men’s and women’s classes.

The Formula Windsurfing Grand Prix Regatta is held in Rhodes in Greece at the Talisos Beach, which is a perfect location for windsurfing competitions. The site is a major tourist destination and boasts of infrastructures that can support such events. Besides, the site is endowed with hospitable climate and constant side shore winds that are always welcome for competitors and spectators alike.

The Gulf Coast Windsurfing Championship in Houston, Texas, US has participants at age range of 12 to 78 in four races under usually gusty winds but rarely calmer winds from the north side of Texas. In addition, there is the Portimao Formula Windsurfing World Championship in Portugal which draws windsurfing competitors, both men and women, from such countries as Australia, United Kingdom, Brazil, Poland and Argentina, and some bright stars of the windsurfing firmament.Fore more details click here.

Habits to Combat Insomnia

What is insomnia?

Authorities say it is a person’s difficulty sleeping or a disorder characterized by continuing difficulty to fall asleep or to stay asleep. It is common among older persons or the elderly but can also occur at any age of an individual. Insomnia can be either short term that can last three weeks, or long term that lasts more than four weeks. Persons with long term insomnia stand to have memory problems, depression, irritability or an increased risk of a heart disease. The common patterns of insomnia that are encountered by some people are sleep-onset insomnia, nocturnal awakenings, middle-of-the-night insomnia, and terminal insomnia. The sleep-onset insomnia makes it difficult for a person to fall asleep in the early hours of the night usually because of anxiety disorder. You have this nocturnal awakenings insomnia if you find it hard to return to sleep once you have awakened in the middle of the night. Middle-of-the-night insomnia and terminal insomnia have symptoms of pain disorder or clinical depression, respectively. They can be classified as transient if they last for only about a week, acute if they have duration of one month, and chronic if the symptoms continue for more than a month.

The causes of insomnia vary according to its classifications. Transient insomnia may be caused by jet lag, changes in shift work, unpleasant or excessive noise, uncomfortable temperature, and stressful situations like loss of a loved one and unemployment, among others. The presence of an acute illness may also cause transient insomnia as may the uncontrolled physical symptoms of fever, pain, breathing problems, nasal congestion, diarrhea and cough, or withdrawal from drugs, alcohol or medicinal stimulants. The causes of long term and chronic insomnias include the following: (a) Anxiety, (b) Depression, (c) Mental, emotional and situational stress, (d) Schizophrenia or psychotic disorder, (e) Chronic pain and chronic fatigue syndrome, (f) Congestive heart failure, (g) Chest pain, (h) Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), (i) Nocturnal asthma, (j) Brain tumor and stroke, (k) Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, and (l) Disruptive periodic leg movements and loud snoring of a bed partner.

There are various ways to combat insomnia. These ways may be your own habits similar to those when you want to cure simple health problems like colds and influenza yourself. Among the most common ways to fight off insomnia is meditation, which is an effective therapy for calming one’s mind. Relaxation is another, with which one can indulge in worthwhile activities like reading good materials or listening to relaxing music. You should also make it habitual to consume meals in the right amount and proportion or take adequate exercise that can help induce sleep. Your early dinner habit, with the exclusion of oily and heavy foods will help for proper digestion and eventual sound sleep. When you prepare for sleep, see to it that your bedroom is cool, quiet and dim-lighted, and with open windows, if possible. Avoid the habit, if it is, of placing a clock that directly faces you in bed but keep your sleeping and waking times consistent. It may interest you to know that a blue lamp beside your bed and switched on as you go to sleep produces a blue light that helps induce a good sleep for you. Fore more details click here.