Marilyn's Photos - Sep 21 2025 - The Thankful Aisle

 

Autumn starts tomorrow in the afternoon.  The pumpkins and Fall leaves are in the aisles of Michael's Craft Stores.  These are ones you put away each year and bring back out.  Not the real ones - they are on display at the Watering Can. So many wonderful colours, textures and shapes in the real world of pumpkins.   I take Millie to Michaels and the Watering Can each Saturday and she gathers up 100 hugs or more.  Michaels hugs start in the parking lot.  She sees someone coming towards the store and intercepts them with a wagging tail and then a sit waiting for a word, followed by a pat and a hug. We stopped in an aisle that was being loaded up with new goods and I looked at the aisle name - "Thankful."  Everything with those words everywhere, along with the other homey synonym "grateful."  Not the other synonyms.  Can you imagine if they had a "Thankful and Synonyms" aisle - that would be: relieved, pleased, glad and grateful.  Sounds like Elves names. That was very entertaining to find that aisle name. Stores have aisle names that are functional, describing product categories. But searching around and looking a bit, I found  aisle names that can make us laugh.   The last picture has an aisle for Millie.  She'd have a little red Michael's jacket on, would be sitting on a miniature sofa, and she'd be giving out the hugs with little dog bone shaped candies.

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Marilyn's Photos - Sep 20 2025 - FIFA tickets

 

In the news is the headline that the World Soccer Cup ticket presale drew more than 4.5 million applicants worldwide.   "The presale, open to Visa cardholders over the age of 18, was the first crack at FIFA's worldwide ticket lottery for the 48-team, 104-match World Cup that kicks off next June." It makes one wonder how many people will just show up, given that the highest number of applicants came from the three co-host countries. To get tickets requires luck - it is a random draw and people are notified by via email starting Sept. 29th.  And there's no guarantee they will get thickets.   If you want to go for a hospitality package, that's another thing to apply for.  There are seven CanadaRed tiers ranging from free to $5,000 per year. That's still no guarantee of tickets.   And what is the CanadaRed supporters' group?  It seems to be levels of sponsorship that to become part of a soccer support community aimed at "growing the game."  Oh, and also, access to soccer events and "experiences", depending on the sponsorship level. That would include next year's big event. Because my knowledge of the cost of sports tickets is so low, I wondered how high things can go.  Well, in 2016 for the MLB World Series of the Cubs vs Indians, the most expensive ticket purchased was $1.17 million.  The top ten highest prices involve American sports/games - boxing, the Super Bowl, and NBA Finals.  There's one FIFA World Cup Final, Wimbledon Men's Final, and a recent NHL Stanley Cup Final.  As an example, NBA's season tickets are known as the most expensive.  The average season ticket is almost $47,000.  The top price is $200,000 for the Los Angeles Lakers.  For ticket prices around the sporting world, here's a survey article, with its sarcastic comment:  "We aren't sure why players describe momentous sporting moments as priceless, because the records tell a completely different story." Here's a seasonal flower - the Autumn Crocus - Colchicum.  Looks like a spring crocus.

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Marilyn's Photos - Sep 18 2025 - Clanker Work

 

ClankerNews.com - I've checked and I don't see it as a website. It is parked free, courtesty of GoDaddy.com.  There should be a website as there is a lot of clanker news.   Brookfield announced it has partnered with Figure AI to develop humanoid robots to fold laundry.  That's what the Globe and Mail said today.  I hadn't thought of Brookfield as owning laundromats and dry cleaning facilities. It would be hotels, hospitals and dry cleaning establishments who do lots of laundry.  Somewhere in those Brookfield assets worth $1 trillion, there must be laundry. I thinkof the cleaning people one sees in places like First Canadian Place.  They are discreet, but they are present, dusting the little ledges and shining the marble walls. Tomorrow it will be the clankers.  Wait! It isn't tomorrow - it is today.  A Sacramento laundromat  introduced AI robot for folding laundry - the news came out yesterday.  "Monster Laundry in Midtown Sacramento has become the first laundromat in North America to use an AI robot, named Sophy Swiftfold, to assist with folding laundry, aiming to lighten the workload for its attendants. "This is the first laundry in all of North America to have a production folding robot," said Craig Taylor, co-owner of Monster Laundry. The owners say the robot assists in folding, which typically takes over an hour, allowing attendants to process additional loads." Say it and it happens.   Yes, there still are track roads in orchards.  We haven't paved everything yet.

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Sep 17 2025 - The Clankers are real

 

It started with Star Wars, and the video game in 2005 used the term clanker for robots. Since then it has slowly gained traction until now, in 2025, it is a negative and derogatory term.  It represents both skepticism and resistance to artificial intelligence. In 2025, the sentiment has become mainstream. That's likely because no one has been spared the experience of a customer service chatbox.  It makes me think of the self-checkout at Shoppers Drug Mart which asks "How did we do today?" I usually reply with:  You didn't do anything, I did all the work.   Clanker has made mainstream news with viral coverage on TikTok and Instagram.  There seems to be a social need for an ethnic slur for AI.  Robot racism and robophobia is here. It is us vs them now.  Here's the worry that psychologists are highlighting: "A popular iteration of the meme features people pretending to apologize to their future robot overlords for past anti-robot transgressions, including use of the "c-word." There are no Readers' Disgest jokes about clankers.  There are no clanker jokes for children.  Nothing comes up with the top 50 clanker jokes, top 25 or even to 5 clanker jokes.  That's because these aren't related to humour.  They are equivalent to ethnic jokes and slurs. What you will find is a long list of articles trying to explain what's going on with them.   And there are more developing - wireback, cogsucker, tin-skinned, along with "toasters" and "chrome jobs."    I wondered about the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.  There aren't good jokes about him either.

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Marilyn's Photos - Sep 16 2025 - Nailed It

 

The expression "Nailed it" seems perfect to me.  It has visual and auditory expression - hammer going up and coming down with a nice bang and the nail going into wood perfectly. What a vague description of its origins in Google and then repeated by all the websites. It wants the expression to be notable in the 1970s as a slang phrase. The only origins credit is given to Horace for using a phrase that translates to 'nailed it'. Phrasefinder says that it first appeared in Britain in writing the 15th century  - in Olde English, so quite the  quote.  It doesn't actually seem to relate to our current interpretation and relates to hitting the nail on the head and not to nailing it.  That's the closest I've come to finding out the origins.  Here's the quote - see if you would have figured out half of the words.  If you have, I am sure you've "nailed it."   “Yyf I here any mor thes materys rehersyd, I xal so smytyn ye nayl on ye hed that it schal schamyn alle hyr mayntenowrys.” In modernised English, that reads as: “If I hear any more these matters repeated, I shall so smite the nail on the head that it shall shame all her supporters.” What a blast from the past - more than 50 years ago in Year 1 English at University when we had to study Chaucer.  Looking up the words like a foreign language test.  This was so that we could appreciate Chaucer as the father of English literature. Did we get a sense of understanding literary history, language development and the cultural context of early English writing?  That's what we were supposed to have learned.  And a water lily picture today.

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