ENJOYING NEUVILE-ASK & SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

Today, The Grandma got up early so as not to miss the plane that took her to Brussels where Joseph de Ca'th Lon was waiting for her to drive to Neuville-Ask where they plan to attend the France-Italy Six Nations match this afternoon.

It has been an intense morning of accumulated sleep and coffees, but now they will rest a little at the hotel, write this new post, watch the first half of the FA Women's Cup match between Manchester United and Chelsea, and Joseph will give her a summary (if possible) of their stay at the Olympic Games. Then, they will go to the Stade Pierre Mauroy where they hope to experience a great rugby spectacle, possibly the most honest sport and with the fairest play in the entire sports panorama.

Joseph is a fan of Ireland and The Grandma of the U.E. Santboiana where she has great friends like Toni, Susanna, Àngels or Mima, who have made her enjoy this spectacular sport. If you like rugby, any Six Nations match should be watched, and if possible, lived.

Tomorrow they will make a quick visit to Lile before returning to Basel and Barcelona, where both must continue with their respective lives.

Neuvile-Ask is a very beautiful city, where Picard is historically spoken, with a great sporting tradition where its women's basketball team stands out, but it is also one of the headquarters of the French national rugby team when it plays in the Six Nations. 

Neuvile-Ask in Picard or Villeneuve-d'Ascq in French  is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. With more than 60,000 inhabitants and 50,000 students, it is one of the main cities of the Lille metropolitan area (Métropole Européenne de Lille) and the largest in area after the city of Lille itself. It is also one of the main cities of the Hauts-de-France region.

Built up owing to the merger between the former communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers-lez-Lille, Neuvile-Ask is a new town and the cradle of the first automatic metro system in the world (VAL).

Neuvile-Ask is nicknamed the 'green technopole' thanks to the implantation of many researchers, including two campuses of the University of Lille and many graduate engineering schools, and companies in a pleasant living environment. Owing to its activity centres, its Haute Borne European scientific park and two shopping malls, Neuvile-Ask is one of the main economic spots of the Hauts-de-France region; multinational corporations such as Bonduelle, Cofidis and Decathlon have their head office there.

Outside its academic, scientific and business facilities, Neuvile-Ask is known for its sporting events, boasting two stadiums (Stade Pierre-Mauroy and Stadium Lille Métropole), some top division sports teams, its museums, its green spaces, and its facilities for disabled people.

Its name means new city of Ascq in French. Ascq is possibly derived from the Dutch word for ash. The name of the city is generally written without the customary (official) hyphen.

The city counts approximately 10 km2 of greenspace, lakes, forests and arable lands. It is located between Lille and Roubaix, at the crossroads of the principal freeways towards Paris, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels.

Development on what is now Neuvile-Ask can be traced back to the Celtic Gaul era, and are anchored in two feudal mounds, a Gallo-Roman site and a Carolingian one.

The area was selected in the 1960s to accommodate a new town then designated the name Lille-Est, which was to channel the growth of the agglomeration of Lille city and development of institutions based in the area. The commune of Neuvile-Ask was created in 1970 by the amalgamation of the communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers. Its name evokes at the same time the new (neuve) and the old: former commune Ascq and its memory as martyr town of 1 April 1944, date on which the Nazis massacred 86 men (Ascq massacre).

The city's merger with Lille was contentious and failed twice (1972 and 1976). The Hôtel de Ville was completed in 1977.

The Stade Pierre-Mauroy, also known as the Decathlon Arena-Stade Pierre-Mauroy for sponsorship reasons, is a multi-use retractable roof stadium in Neuvile-Ask, Metropolis of Lille, Northern France, that opened in August 2012. With a seating capacity of 50,186, it is the fourth-largest sports stadium in France and the home of French professional football club Lille.

Initially named Grand Stade Lille Métropole, the stadium was renamed on 21 June 2013, after the death of the former Mayor of Lille and former Prime Minister of France Pierre Mauroy (1928–2013).

The stadium, which hosted UEFA Euro 2016 and 2023 Rugby World Cup, can also be turned into an adjustable arena being expandable to 30,000 seats where indoor sports games and concerts take place. Therefore, multiple Davis Cup events, EuroBasket 2015 and 2024 Summer Olympics basketball and handball tournaments matches have been held in the building.

More information: Six Nations Rugby

 Rugby is a game that's constant. 
If you are not growing with it, 
you get left behind.

Owen Farrell

TV SERIES STAR TREK PREMIERES ITS 1ST EPISODE IN 1966

Today, The Grandma has been watching one of her favourite TV Series, Star Trek, whose first episode was ired on a day like today in 1966.

Star Trek is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. 

Since its creation, the franchise has expanded into various films, television series, video games, novels, and comic books, and it has become one of the most recognizable and highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

The franchise began with Star Trek: The Original Series, which debuted in the US on September 8, 1966, and aired for three seasons on NBC. It was first broadcast on September 6, 1966, on Canada's CTV network.

The series followed the voyages of the crew of the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel built by the United Federation of Planets in the 23rd century, on a mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. 

In creating Star Trek, Roddenberry was inspired by C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series of novels, Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and television westerns such as Wagon Train.

The Star Trek canon includes the Original Series, 11 spin-off television series, and a film franchise; further adaptations also exist in several media. After the conclusion of the Original Series, the adventures of its characters continued in the 22-episode Star Trek: The Animated Series and six feature films. A television revival beginning in the 1980s saw three sequel series and a prequel: The Next Generation, following the crew of a new starship Enterprise a century after the original series; Deep Space Nine and Voyager, set in the same era as the Next Generation; and Enterprise, set before the original series in the early days of human interstellar travel. The adventures of the Next Generation crew continued in four additional feature films.

In 2009, the film franchise underwent a reboot, creating an alternate continuity known as the Kelvin timeline; three films have been set in this continuity. The newest Star Trek television revival, beginning in 2017, includes the series Discovery, Picard, Short Treks, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds, streaming on digital platforms.

More information: Star Trek

Star Trek has been a cult phenomenon for decades. Fans of the franchise are called Trekkies or Trekkers. The franchise spans a wide range of spin-offs including games, figurines, novels, toys, and comics. 

From 1998 to 2008, there was a Star Trek–themed attraction in Las Vegas. At least two museum exhibits of props travel the world. The constructed language Klingon was created for the franchise. Several Star Trek parodies have been made, and viewers have produced several fan productions.

Star Trek is noted for its cultural influence beyond works of science fiction. The franchise is also notable for its progressive civil-rights stances. The Original Series included one of the first multiracial casts on US television.

As early as 1964, Gene Roddenberry drafted a proposal for the science fiction series that would become Star Trek. Although he publicly marketed it as a Western in outer space -a so-called Wagon Train to the stars -he privately told friends that he was modeling it on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, intending each episode to act on two levels: as a suspenseful adventure story and as a morality tale.

Most Star Trek stories depict the adventures of humans and aliens who serve in Starfleet, the space-borne humanitarian and peacekeeping armada of the United Federation of Planets. The protagonists have altruistic values, and must apply these ideals to difficult dilemmas.

Many of the conflicts and political dimensions of Star Trek are allegories of contemporary cultural realities. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology.

Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence.

The Star Trek media franchise is a multibillion-dollar industry, owned by Paramount Global. Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek to NBC as a classic adventure drama; he pitched the show as Wagon Train to the Stars and as Horatio Hornblower in Space.

The opening line, to boldly go where no man has gone before, was taken almost verbatim from a U.S. White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in 1957.

Star Trek and its spin-offs have proven highly popular in syndication and was broadcast worldwide. The show's cultural impact goes far beyond its longevity and profitability. 

Star Trek conventions have become popular among its fans, who call themselves trekkies or trekkers.

An entire subculture has grown up around the franchise, which was documented in the film Trekkies. 

Star Trek was ranked most popular cult show by TV Guide. The franchise has also garnered many comparisons of the Star Wars franchise being rivals in the science fiction genre with many fans and scholars.

More information: Smithsonian Magazine

 By creating a new world with new rules,
I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics,
and intercontinental missiles.
Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek:
we were sending messages and fortunately
 they all got by the network.
If you talked about purple people on a far off planet,
the television network never really caught on.
They were more concerned about cleavage. T
hey actually would send a censor down
to the set to measure a woman's cleavage
to make sure too much of her breast wasn't showing.

Gene Roddenberry