Marilyn's Photos - Feb 8 2026 - Olympics Next Day

 

I watched a women’s ski-jumping sort of thing yesterday.  It wasn’t the “Normal Hill Ski Jumping” listed in the events program.  It was a Ski Slopestyle event.  They went down backwards, and then landed along the way on these various pipes, everyone looking like they were falling off, then did a few flying bits twisting and turning off  jumps.  Here’s the formal description:  “approximately 1,700 feet long with six features and a vertical drop of 290 feet. The top of the course will test the athletes rail prowess with three different rail-based features.  Then the remaining three "booters will show off their jump skills.”  What is a rail?  Is this normal skiing? Sounds definitely in the abnormal range - with straight rails, rainbow rails, kinked rails and transfer rails. Skier “tricks” - that’s their terminology - include grinds, disasters and switch-ups.  (I thought the commentators were referring to real disasters.) And it isn’t finished as an Olympic event - there’s a snowboard slopestyle event.  I found it stressful to watch - every one of the skiers looked like they were falling off the rails and about to land ”splat“ somewhere with the emergency crews out.   This has to be a sport people do.  So if you were extraordinarily inclined and likely well-off, you can go slopestyle skiing at the elite level Livigno, Italy, Are, Sweden, Silvaplana, Switzerland, and in Olympic venues like Genting Snow Park, China. For the rest of the skiiers, major ski resorts have terrain parks with various levels of difficulty.   And how many people do this type of skiing?  “As a niche within the 200 million total skiers, dedicated slopestyle participants represent a smaller, but rapidly growing percentage of that total, particularly among younger demographics.” And what are the “booters” along the course where the skiers show off their skills? That’s the name for the large, man-made jumps.  They can be called “kickers” as well.   Shouldn’t there be some good jokes? Maybe because it is a recent thing and so scary there is nothing to make fun of.  It was in 1979 that freestyle skiing was recognized. Slopestyle skiing was differentiated in the 2000s. This was listed as a joke - I think it is a saying: The Rail Trick: "Ohhhh, that was a sick unanny two-sev on to pretz 540 off!" (Common sarcasm for when a trick goes horribly wrong). Here’s a nice meandering incline of snow.  This is at Peninsula Ridge Winery.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 7 2026 - Olympics Over-the-Hill

 

My theory goes like this:  the Olympics are over-the-hill.  That means over-weight in terms of costs to build, repetitively showing similar sport events, hyping themselves to the extreme, and focused on money from corruption within the Olympic organization and from excessive commercialization of the event. That’s what makes it old.  What makes it further over-the-hill are constant issues - logistical nightmares getting to the spread-out events, athlete safety, drug problems, the evolution to a non-amateur sport full of professionals competing, and the perennial scandals. It could well be that being older has led me to the stage of complaining -  that the Olympics are not what “they used to be”.  How will I find out?  I am going to take the easy route - ask AI to summarize all those opinion pieces that have weighed in on the subject.  The AI answer says that the 1960s Olympics - e.g. Grenoble Winter Games - is a matter of preference regarding nostalgia versus innovation. In 1968 it was the first time the Games were broadcast in colour. The stars of the event were Jean-Claude Killy and Peggy Fleming. It was considered an intimate setting and the competitions were held close-by.  (And may I add that there are no scandals listed that year.) In 2026 there are now 116 events with 12 mixed-gender competitions. The amateur vs professional aspect is obvious - 2026 is advertised as having faster and higher levels of performance.  My kind of example of then vs now is as follows.  Snoop Dogg is being paid $9 million dollars for 18 days of the Olympics.  What is he doing at the Olympics?  Are you ready?  He is there to “cheer alongside the athletes, their friends, and families” NBC said.  He is not the only celebrity: Stanley Tucci  (must be his travel series “searching for Italy”) - is serving as a roaming cultural reporter for NBC.  Elmo, Cookie Monster and Grover are involved in NBC coverage.  There are numerous brand ambassadors and “creators” paid for behind-the-scenes content via YouTube, Meta, and TikTok.  This isn’t that new: At the Paris Olympics, NBC spent over $50 million to bring various celebrities to Paris to boost ratings. Returning to my complaint and AI’s response that this is nostalgia vs. innovation.  I am confident that this year’s “innovation” would not have occurred in 1966.  Cathal Kelly reported this in the Globe and Mail today. Men’s ski jumping participants are reported to have injected their penises with acid to make them larger for the uniform fittings.  In other sports reporting babel-speak that’s “injecting their genitals to manipulate suits to make them more aerodynamic.”  When there is a little extra fabric, the travel distance will increase.  Will that be the biggest scandal/controversy at the Olympics?  We can watch it to find out or check out Wikipedia.  I expect it will be updated daily - it is  a reliable, timely source of information.  What we can say for sure is that all “eyes” are on the Olympics this week.

Marilyn's Photos - Feb 6 2026 - Dali-ing Around

 

The side-bar of “Favorites” no longer expands in Safari.  It has to be expanded every time I open up a Safari window.  That’s lots of times a day.  The other day I mistakenly clicked on news.  I hadn’t even opened news before. I got the BBC with the story of Dali and the Flying Cats.   The actual title of the photo is Dali Atomicus.  His famous Atomicus painting is on the right side of the picture. It wasn’t my favourite photo for the flying cats - their frozen in motion poses seemed anguished and injured to me and I envisioned cats making a horrible injured landing.   That was not the case.  I think the cats were owned by the photographer’s daughter working as an assistant on the photo. In an interview many decades after this 1948 picture she told the story of the staging and making of the picture by famous artist Halsman.  “The original, unretouched version of the photo reveals its secrets: An assistant held up the chair on the left side of the frame, wires suspended the easel and the painting, and the footstool was propped up off the floor. But there was no hidden trick to the flying cats or the stream of water. For each take, Halsman’s assistants—including his wife, Yvonne, and one of his daughters, Irene—tossed the cats and the contents of a full bucket across the frame. After each attempt, Halsman developed and printed the film while Irene herded and dried off the cats. The rejected photographs had notes such as “Water splashes Dalí instead of cat” and “Secretary gets into picture.”  That’s demonstrated in the series of photos below. I would like to quote the BBC article but it is nowhere to be found on their website.  This seems to be the passing nature of news on the internet these days.  Here and gone.  But there is always something else - a Youtube video referenced in the article I did find.  This is it HERE.  These two artists made many photos together, and all are strange and wonderful. So it turns out there were 26 takes and 26 catching of the cats and drying them off until that final take. So it turns out that yesterday’s picture of the Cheshire Cat Smile was in tune with the Dali story and not the second photo with my imaginary caption: “Three cats in hospital after famous photo shoot.”   That picture was taken the year I did the planter/pot garden for the Grimsby Animal Hospital to get them a Trillium Award.  You can see the pots at the wall of the building. That’s how Trilliums mostly work - very neat gardens with big bold colour and abundant pot plantings.

Marilyn's Photos - Feb 5 2026 - Top Dog

 

It makes sense to me that Top Dog the expression is thought to originate in the 19th century in dog fighting where the winning dog ends up on top of the losing dog.  It isn’t a great designation to be given, to my mind.  It implies fscrappy fighting, intense fighting and bitter combat.  Supposedly it carries a positive connotation today - that’s according to AI - with the claim that it celebrates success and achievement rather than aggression or violence. I say “claim” with skepticism of AI - it gives no sources for its information.  There’s one place where Top Dog is a wonderful designation - at Westminster Dog Show.  What a beautiful Doberman pinscher Penny is.  She seems as smart as her handler to me.  I think of Westminster as a British name/place.  It turns out the American Kennel Association named the show after a hotel bar where its founders met.  And is it more popular than the British Show - the Crufts Dog Show? I guessed so as I hear about the Westminster Show every year and only now learn about Crufts.  But let’s find out. The Crufts Show is considered the top dog show in size, international scope and status - as it is the world’s largest dog show. The U.S. Show is considered the “premier, elite and historic show in the U.S.”  This sounds like babble-speak to me.  Crufts has the Guinness World Record for the largest dog show - over 24,000 dogs from 44+ countries and 150,000 visitors. It has over 8.7 million TV viewership.  Westminster has 1,200 dogs from the U.S. plus 17 countries with over 2 million viewers.  So I guess the numbers would have Crufts as the Top Dog Show. And could anything top the dog show?  I think so. Remember the coronation?  The Cavaliers were the Dog of the Day. Perhaps this picture of a store front in Santa Fe might describe the mood of both of these Dog Shows.  A Big Grin and fun by all.

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Mairlyn's Photos - Feb 4 2026 - Billy Bob vs Bilbo

 

Billy Bob. This is a common, informal American male name that symbolizes a “good ol’ boy” archetype.   William Robert seems have the opposite effect - stilted, formal and associated with royal and noble lineages - makes one think of Britain. I wondered if Bilbo - the name of the protagonist in The Hobbit - was a shortened version of Bill and Bob (William and Robert).  That isn’t the case.  It is a “fantasy” name. Articles give reference to the Spanish word bilbo which is a type of rapier/sword from Bilbao, and to the Old English word bil means sword or tool. We can go to the source: Tolkien stated the name was of unknown meaning and that these were names based on sound symbolism and invented languages. I looked at a family tree of the Bagginses of Hobbiton and most of the names are fantasy names to me: Berylla, Mungo, Fastolph, Bungo, Belba, Rudigar, Longo, Otho, Lotho, and so on.  There is quite a study of the names in this academic paper HERE.   I include the link as it is so seldom now that I actually retrieve research papers on a topic. The paper is very interesting and explains the aspect of sound symbolism:  “…high front vowels indicating light (gleam, glimmer, glitter) and back vowels indicating darkness (gloom).”  I would expect that there are papers on the Hobit names and what they evoke in sound symbolism. And then we return to Billy Bob. This too seems to have sound symbolism.  The name gives the sense of rustic, unsophisticated, rural, and uneducated. So there we are with Billy Bob Thornton, accomplished actor, singer, songwriter, born William Robert Thornton, and as an actor using a rustic first name(s).  What a different presence would have been given by WIlliam Robert Thornton. But Billy Bob makes more sense when one looks at his biography. His father’s name was Billy Ray, according to Wikipedia, and he grew up in a shack in Arkansas with no electricity or plumbing. Take that along with the characters he has portrayed, and there’s some logic to it. No fantasy name there. I wonder when we will figure out Dolphin language.  There’s a job that would keep AI busy for a while.

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