Marilyn's Photos - May 30 2026 - Polka Dots in Microtones

 

I saw some polka dot fabric in Michael's last week, and admired the black and white pattern.  Then later in the week I saw a picture of the rock duo from Saguenay, Quebec, Angine de Poitrine.  They are playing in a black and white polka dot scenario - background, clothes, everything wonderfully polka dotted.   The description of the rock duo is more interesting than polka dots, though.  Viral, virtuosic math-rock duo, with complex rhythms, playing on custom microtonal guitars and basses.   Everyone's excited, including the CBC with this video HERE. That's Elamin Abdelmahmoud one of CBC's regular radio shows covering current arts and entertainment.  His name fascinates me every time I hear him say it.  Say that a few times. This is the duo with their promotional image - their name translates roughly to a medical condition with chest pain. And what is it about microtonal guitars?  One article says that microtuning is sometimes used to make specific scales or chords sound more harmonious. Another says that microtonal songs sound unusual, "spicy" or slightly unsettling to the ears.  It is hard to consider this given my decades of the visual experience of the piano and its black and white keys.  Are children receptive to microtonal music?  Very young children have no preconceptions so are happy with everything.  By the age of 4, there is learning and training, so it is said that if microtonal sounds are paired with fun, cartoonish animations or playful games, children will view it as a fun experience.   Cue the polka dots.  The pattern's repeating, balanced circles evoke playfulness and whimsy.  So there we are with the Angine de Poitrine duo who perform in fun, Muppet-like papier-mache masks and polka-dots.  They play daytime, all-ages shows catering to a younger audience and they make fun, growling and rhythmic sounds that kids find highly engaging.   The excited reviewers say it sounds like SpongeBob, that they are completely listenable and impossibly inviting, and someone on YouTube claims to have just turned 70 and these two guys "blew my mind." I seem to make a lot of polka dot pictures - this one was named Half Note Polka Dots.

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Marilyn's Photos - May 29 2026 - Animal Sentience Yes or No

 

Continuing on the theme of being middle old (70 to 80 years old) and what it means in terms of progress:  here's something that is known now.  As a child I thought this was the case: animals possess sentience.  We figured this out through our dogs and cats and birds.  Over the decades the scientific community has also figured this out.  And yes - crabs, lobsters, and fish feel pain, and need to be treated properly.  Surprise!  Throwing lobsters alive into steaming pots does cause an excruciatingly painful death that they fully experience. So here we are this many decades later accepting that mammals and birds have clear emotions, social bonding and complex cognitive behaviours.  It took quite a while, though. Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 was a key milestone and that seems like a long time ago to me.  It was in the last 60 years that conclusive research into animal emotions came about. We have progressed in our scientific and behavioural research methods. With the acknowledgement of pain, comes an increase in Veterinarian bills.  We prescribe pain medication for cats and dogs after medical procedures.  What about this information that before the late 1980s - many doctors believed babies could not feel pain or would not remember it.  They performed major surgeries with only muscle relaxants or paralytics instead of true anesthesia.  I can't imagine being a  parent having my baby operated on without anesthesia - some sort of barbaric throw-back in the medical mindset is how I consider this.  It took research in the late 1980s to prove that babies experienced pain, and things changed quickly for human babies.  The veterinary professional began recognizing and treating animals for pain starting in the 1980s.   In this area of sentience, Millie spends an hour or so on Thursday afternoons visiting residents in one of the long-term care homes in the area. Isn't it ironic that dogs don't have human language and visits don't involve conversations, yet  eyes light up when they see Millie each week.     Look at little Millie as a puppy compared to Millie now.

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Marilyn's Photos - May 28 2026 - Aliens Yes or No

 

There is something good about being middle old (70 to 80 years old).  I can look back on things I thought would be known by now.  The title says it - have aliens visited the Earth? And what we got? The Fermi paradox - "the stress and tension between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence." Carol Sagan made the paradox public in 1963 in a footnote of a paper. It was originated by Enrico Fermi who asked simple but seemingly unanswerable questions.  "How many atoms of Caeasar's last breath do you inhale with each lungful of air."  Fermi blurted a question variously recalled as: "Where is everybody?" (Teller), "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski). According to Teller, "The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that, in spite of Fermi's question coming out of the blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was talking about extraterrestrial life." After the many calculations, Fermi concluded that we should have been visited long ago and many times over. Are we living in the sticks far removed from the metropolitan area of the galactic centre? - that was Fermi's follow-up.  There's much history in this area. Wikipedia covers this extensively HERE.  scrolled  and scrolled and the very last paragraph.  It is on Conspiracy theories:  alien life is already here, unacknowledged and/or deliberately concealed.  To read more on this we go to this Wikipedia entry HERE. Again, we can scroll and scroll.  There is so much investigation by so many different governments, scientists, thinkers and professionals with no conclusive evidence.  Or no evidence that has been made public, feeding conspiracy theories gaining momentum over time.   Can we imagine what it would have been like to see a newspaper heading one morning that read:  "We are not alone."   Our meeting with Aliens would be a Carl Sagan moment about butterflies, don't you think? "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

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Marilyn's Photos - May 27 2026 - Volcano vs Fireball Meteor

 

A fireball meteor fell near the side of a volcano that was erupting. All around good photos. There were livestreams monitoring the ongoing eruption so they captured the event.  Sometimes we can say "Thank goodness for reddit."  The video coverage is HERE without all the newscasters.  Even the New York Times let us see this one without a requirement to subscribe.  Their coverage HERE is from the other side. Lighting inspired by volcanoes and meteors.

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Marilyn's Photos - May 26 2026 - When Retirement Began

 

The FIRE State of Mind revolves around "retirement"  and how soon one can live off passive income. For my generation, there was no discussion of passive income and being able to save 50 - 90% of one's income. Investing in the stock market was risky and our wages weren't high enough to allow for that level of saving. So our discussion was where would we work to provide us for retirement. And many people chose work and companies based on that.  For example, many of our peers became teachers so they could have the summer off and retire with generous retirement benefits.  People working for larger organizations would be able to retire with excellent retirement income provided by company pension plans.   Our basics were taken care of by government to some extent. The government's "old age security" came into being in 1951. The Canada Pension Plan came into being in 1966. Retirement thinking hit a zenith with my baby boomer generation.   I hadn't realized how retirement thinking had evolved. The idea of retirement in the past was directly related to worker productivity.  Older workers were considered less productive and were a liability.  They needed to be sent off to pasture. Companies created the incentive of retirement income to get rid of old employees. Wikipedia says William Osler espoused this belief - the ages between 25 and 40 were the 15 golden years of plenty. Workers between forty and sixty were tolerable, and after sixty the average worker was useless.  This sounds like it relates to hard physical work to me.  That was what most people did in the beginning of the 20th century. That view held for a long time and drove mandatory retirement.  The age of 65 stood for decades and still defines government pension payouts.  We've moved past that time now.  FIRE supporters have taken us to a new place. In the 1930s most people lived in rural settings and basically were in a subsistence living off the land scenario.  Here we are now in urban areas in companies and professions not doing hard physical labour. So it is interesting that we generally agree that we don't like working in companies.  The FIRE supporters have figured this out. There are those who have "retired" in their 30s and others in their 40s and 50s.  What are they doing during the later part of Osler's "golden years of plenty?"   Reddit to the rescue.  It asks the question:  "For those of you who retired early, what has been your FIRE experience?" So I read through a few dozen and started to see the similarities and trends.  I would summarize these anecdotal responses as generally being lists of activities and state of mind - e.g. doing this or that, working out at the gym, eating better, feeling happier.   And then there is much discussion on purpose in life.  That's a common theme for all ages in retirement.   Too late now to consider FIRE.  I am now in the mid-age of retirement  - ages 70 to 80.  Isn't this an amazing picture - from the Jacksonville, Florida botanic garden.  The tree in the foreground is painted blue and the tiger is painted on the wall behind.

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