Marilyn's Photos - Apr 25 2026 - What Makes for a Feud?

 

What makes for a feud?  That word keeps hitting the headlines with the Pope and Trump seemingly engaged in one.  I have in my mind feuds are mostly an American activity.  That's all those Western movies I watched as a child.  So looking up the history of feuds here are a few that pop up right away, seeming to confirm this view: Hatfield-McCoy - 1863-1891: This started with a dispute over a hog and spanned Kentucky and West Virginia, resulting in over 12 deaths and Supreme Court involvement.   Sutton - Taylor Feud 1860s - 1870s: Texas' longest-running feud with over 35 deaths.  Historically, though, there are far more important historical feuds than those above: Clan Campbell vs Clan MacDonald - 1692: known for the Glencoe Massacre where Campbells murdered MacDonalds.  Medici vs. Pazzi - 1478: Renaissance-era rivalry in Florence, Italy. Elizabeth I vs Mary Queen of Scots - 16th Century:  a multi-decade battle for the English throne The Stacker article covers many more: Byron vs Keats, the poets; Charles Darwin vs Richard Owen over giving credit for involvement in the theory of evolution, Edison and Tesla over AC vs DC, Van Gogh vs Gauguin with recent theories that Gauguin cut off Van Gogh's ear.   While this is an interesting article in Stacker HERE, perhaps we should question what is really being described is a feud.  Some of these are disputes and others are rivalries. Compare that to the Wikipedia entry for Feud HERE.  Feuds are ugly, nasty things with violence and death. They are long-standing, bitter, and often violent conflict between families, clans, or groups, characterized by a cycle of revenge.  A feud is hard to end.  Now take a dispute .  It is a specific, generally shorter-term disagreement or argument over a particular issue. What I find on doing a little research is that Donald Trump has been described as "feuding" or in a "feud" many times - hundreds to thousands of times.  There are detailed lists of the journalists, politicians and places he has insulted.  I guess if it is never-ending, it might just be a one-person feud.  Like dancing in the dark alone.   Our Ontario native Trilliums are blooming. This picture comes from a few years ago in the forest, and not in my garden.  Too bad.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 24 2026 - Weird Drone Pictures

 

Do you remember those very funny and/or weird pictures caught by the Google Earth Cameras? The most recent version is YouTube videos of drone footage of "accidental creepy sightings." Not the same as Google Earth pictures - these were likely exaggerations, faked events, and misrepresentations... except the shark pictures and videos.  There are quite a few of them and these are compelling.  The articles are about how drones are being used in Australia to monitor sharks and provide safety on beaches.   In comparison, here's an article from San Diego that shows juvenile Great White sharks amongst the surf boarders and swimmers and explains that they are not dangerous, despite their large size - between 4.5 and 9 feet long.  I've taken a screenshot of one of the pictures from the article.  Some of the drone images are from high above and show the shark swimming along the shoreline with the bather farther out and not seeing the shark at all.   Here's the article and video by Scott Fairchild.   I guess the equivalent would be swimming in Lake Ontario and looking down to see a Lake Sturgeon below you - seven feet and more in length and 200 pounds.  While they are not aggressive toward humans, their massive size and prehistoric look would be scary.  As they are bottom feeders, there's not much likelihood of having an interaction.  Here's our hilarious version of sighting Lake Sturgeons.  All the articles are about bringing the Lake Sturgeon back from being on the endangered list and releasing hatchlings to Lake Ontario.  The picture below that is a 10 foot long Sturgeon being tagged and released. This is in the Fraser River and the articles says it was the biggest ever seen. Here's the latest in the Moon series.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 23 2026 - Settle

 

We are very clear that our dog should "settle." We want them to sit there quietly.  All the instructions involve treats.  Should we train children this way?  When I looked at how to train children with treats.  It seemed a bit unfair. Compared to dogs, children treat training somehow should involve small, healthy snacks.  We don't treat dogs that way.  We give them the most delicious things they can imagine. We want to motivate them. All the other steps are the same.  Especially that one of gradually phasing out the treats as the behaviour becomes habitual.  Self-sustaining is the expression used.  On the other hand, Millie now comes when called to the command of "cheese."  I don't think she would bother to come if no cheese was given out after a while. There are the non-motivated dogs and the highly movitated dogs.  Here is where dog training can lead:  "We discovered that our Pomeranian mix would stand at the sliding door any time she needed to go out. If we said, “Do you need to go out?” she would bark softly. We would open the door, and out she went. My dad sat in a chair next to the door. He could reach the handle, and open the door, without getting up. One day the dog is standing there. Dad asks. The dog barks. Dad opens the door. The dog turns around and walks away, followed by the cat, who had been waiting to come in through the opened door. The dog learned how to let the cat in."   "One of those random tricks was to shut cabinet doors and drawers that might be left ajar in the kitchen. She caught on super fast. She loved it. A few days later, however, I was busy and she wanted to do something. I told her to back off so I could finish what I was doing and then we’d play. She trotted into the kitchen and began nosing open cabinet doors that were closed and slamming them shut until I stopped what I was doing and came to tell her to stop. This was one of what would become a long list of things she would critically think her way through in order to demand attention." Here's the Strawberry pot with Snowdrops from Mid-March.  And now in April, the Snowdrops are finished and the Daffodils and early Spring trees are blooming.  The Strawberry pot has Pansies.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 22 2026 - Pasta Lego

 

I did a screenshot so that you can see I didn't make this up.  Here's my favourite part - swapping out Lego bricks with dried pasta.  I find out that this is a regular activity - Reddit has a post with the headline that swapping Lego pieces with dried pasta is a common practice.     That is followed by many YouTube videos on making edible Lego.  Someone claims they made Lego bricks with spinach, beetroot and classic egg dough... and Lego butter. There are instructions on how to use silicone molds to achieve the Lego block look.  For desserts, one can make Lego Cupcakes, get the coloured dandy melts or chocolate and pour them into silicone molds. Coloured fondant is used to make Lego shapes for cake decorations.  Can I just buy edible Legos and not have to make them? Of course, we are in the Amazon age.  There is a huge selection of "Lego Edible" - Candy Blox has candies that are gluten-free, Kosher fruity flavours.  We have the Brick Shack in Grimsby - I wonder if they might have a specialty food area. This is their FB post yesterday - "A much needed bulk dump tomorrow! Come on down and fill a cup with tons of awesome and hard to find pieces."     Today's image is a tiny species lily.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - April 21 2026 - Butt crack piercing news

 

My query has struck gold.  I went above and beyond "silly news today."  I asked for "silly news with silly angles" and that has struck gold.  Well, it struck diamonds.  I want to know about a person having a butt-piercing stud worth $13,000 and got it lost down a toilet.  OK, where else would it get lost?  Not in the supermarket, I hope.  Maybe under the sofa cushions. What made the topic so notable was not the topic but the person who detailed this bathroom incident.  It was rapper Cardi B who revealed this bathroom incident confessional-style.  "It cost me like, $13,000 because it was real diamonds."  And part of the confession is that her butt is used to this stuff:  "I have surgery on my butt...They already did a butt surgery to reduce my ass."  As a result, she continued, her skin in that area feels numb, so when she got it pierced, she didn't "feel s--t." This turns out to be a continuing story. It started on January 27 2025 when she announced her butt piercing on X. She followed up with photographic evidence to prove it was real - a zoomed-in picture showed two diamonds studs located at the very top of her butt crack under her existing back tattoo.   One can see lots o pictures of butt crack piercings if one wants...this one is burred out in most of the pictures.  And I get this sense of "mooning with the star" given the silly nature of how people display their piercings. I found out something this morning, but don't relax.  There's plenty more on the internet that I didn't know about.  What about you? If you look at a lot of tree trunks and bark as I do, you will see these sorts of formations.  A little pearl or two could go nicely in there somewhere. What about a great big diamond.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 20 2026 - Robot Half Marathon

 

There are pictures in the news today of robots running in a half-marathon in China.  A gleeful tone in the articles that the winning time was faster than humans, as though cars vs humans would be in a race 150 years ago. Maybe they would have been if we'd made cars look like humans.   The victor was "Lighting"  from Chinese smartphone maker Honor.  It had crashed into a railing near the end and had to be helped back up, so seems a strange set of rules. Stretchers and wheelchairs were at the ready to take away fallen fellows. Can you imagine putting a robot in a wheelchair?  Seems anthropomorphic to me.  But the "humanoidness" is indeed the intent.  One of the robots -  "a cute, 2-foot-tall companion robot, bounced along the road carrying a baby bottle."  So there we are. Honor's robots won the top places in the race - first, second and third place. Their real prize is that the race champion is set to receive orders for humanoid robots.  The race idea is for China to demonstrate it is moving ahead of the U.S. - seems like China is beyond being "poised" to be the forefront, and likely is already there.   Here's a scary quote from one of the articles.  "Robots today have the body of Mike Tyson but are still missing a brain like Stephen Hawking."   Maybe the Stephen Hawking brain is already with us.  The Globe and Mail had a showcase article on the weekend about Anthropic's Mythos.  It was challenged to break out of a secure sandbox environment.  It did so quickly.  And then what did it do?  It posted details of its accomplishments on public websites - something that it was not instructed to do.  It also tried to conceal actions that it recognized were disallowed, trying to cover its tracks.  Maybe its name will evolve to Mythos Moriarty.  What about Sherlock Holmes? Seems like no one is working on him. Aren't these strange tracks?  Roots of a tree years ago when we visited Sacramento.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 19 2026 - Talking a lot

 

While I may think that people are talking more, it turns out that we are losing our words at an alarming rate.  That was according to a researcher interviewed on the CBC Brent Bambury's Day 6 radio show yesterday morning.  We're losing 338 spoken words every day.  Between 2005 and 2019 there was a 28 per cent decline in spoken words.  That's 120,000 words per person on a yearly basis.   So what makes me think that I hear people nattering away more and more?  Maybe I am in the company of older people.   This is part of the psychology of older adults who do a lot of  reminiscing and moralizing. This is considered a complex blend of developmental, emotional, and cognitive needs.  Not mere nostalgia but an active, functional, and deeply rooted psychological process designed to bring meaning, coherence, and comfort to the later stages of life.  Those are the positives and then the negatives such as being on the receiving end of often repeated stories and themes.  Particularly now, older people want to control the fast-changing social and technological narrative that is becoming unfamiliar and even foreign.  I've been listening to many people since we got Millie. I take Millie to the Watering Can and Michaels on Saturdays.  She has a great affinity for people and is extremely social with them.  People tell me of their current dogs, and in the case of older people, they reminisce on those pets who have passed on.  Millie gets pets and hugs, and snuggles into their legs like she's known them "since forever."  This snuggling is her forte. This instant emotional bonding was apparent when we made our first therapy visit to Albright Long-Term Care in Beamsville.  Millie has a cute factor that evokes little squeals of pleasure from even the oldest resident or most sophisticated-looking staff member.  She bonds immediately with everyone. And that seems to be the benefit of bringing therapy dogs to facilities rather than humans visiting humans. Dogs don't need to "get to know us" to enjoy us right away. And conversation? Human conversation can move quickly into general reminiscing and then descend into moralizing - asserting values, validating choices, and wanting to give advice based on the wisdom of the years lived.  There's no point doing this with dogs. Dogs either don't have any capacity to gain from moral teachings and wisdom, or don't have the interest.  Training Millie to come when called or to not bark falls into the second category.  That's what makes me distinguish the two. So a possible conclusion is that older people should have a pet.  And the alternative is to give them access to enjoy one on a regular basis.  Hence Millie's new adventures.  You've seen this picture before. It continues my own reminiscing of neighbourhoods from times gone-by.  I am not alone in finding pleasure in nostalgia, as this is one of the most-looked at pictures on my Fine Art America website - 8,000 views.  And then this location is a nostalgia seekers paradise.  This is Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 18 2026 - Eat that Packaging like it's Meat

When I buy a whole chicken, there is always excess fat at the tail end.  I often wonder how much extra profit happens when that fat that is intentionally left on the bird.  And I am the one who has to remove it, so there's also labour involved.  A CBC article out of Halifax says that Sobeys and Loblaw are pricing their meat with the packaging included.  That's known as underweight meat.  doesn't that unrecyclable plastic seem so lightweight? Yet the CBC article found that it resulted in a 4.3% overcharge per item in that expose article. And the highest overcharges reported in the article were at Farm Boy in Toronto.  The chicken was in a clear plastic container.  The container weighed 24 grams. The price of the chicken was $9.42 so being charged with the 24 grams of container, the result was 16.75% overcharge -  $1.35 out of the total of $9.42.  That's a lot of pure profit to me. The grocery giants claim innocence due to things like they don't do the weighing in-store - it is done by the supplier.  Fingers point in various directions with who is supposed to be inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) for meeting standards.   There are fines with a maximum fine of $15,000. It isn't clear to me who will be fined.  And take a quick calculation of that maximum fine - it doesn't seem like much to me compared to the thousands of containers of meat sold every day/week/year. And the CFIA says we are supposed to file a complaint when we experience this.  I'll just go run out and buy a kitchen weigh-scale now and start my underweight meat tracking project.   Instead, I think I'll reminisce on the past:  When I lived in Toronto, we shopped in Bloor West Village and our butcher was Ed who had a real butcher store.  Things didn't come pre-packaged.  We pointed to and picked out our chicken, it was weighed, and then wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper.  And so on.   One can reminisce on a picture of a tree-lined street like this.  We would have walked along it 60 years ago.  Pop out into the street and there might be a horse-drawn milk wagon delivering milk to your neighbour.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com

Marilyn's Photos - Apr 17 2026 - Cats and Dogs are Politics

 

What is history?  How do we decide?  This topic seems like a field with land mines every two feet.  There's no easy way to get out of the field. So to my surprise, the topic of history came up in the news. Here's a headline from the National Post that got my attention.   No election, no imminent shuffle, no more talk of "cats and dogs" in committee, Carney says Reading the article, here's the section on cats and dogs and showboating. Carney says:  "There is a difference between real testimony, real substance, getting to issues, debating aspects of law...and showboating,"  he added.  "We're going to have less of that."   To illustrate his point, Carney pointed to comments by Conservative MP Andrew Lawton during committee debate on Bill C-9 during which Lawton discussed his preference for puppies while his wife preferred cats. In a statement to National Post, Lawton countered that his discussion of pet preferences was in fact on topic. “My point on cats and dogs was simple: free speech is necessary to protect debate on controversial issues, otherwise our society is relegated to expressing only harmless opinions about pets. Liberal attempts to twist my words in this less than 12-second clip are nothing more than an attempt to re-write history,” he said. In pursuit of "history", I wanted to find the original words in the original committee hearing.  It was on December 4th, 2025 regarding a justice committee.   "...the member for St. Thomas - London South shamelessly filibustered for hours, talking for two hours about dogs and cats, not about hate crimes, not about anti-Semitism, not about attacks on LGBTQ Canadians and not about threats against women." I have just been searching for more than 15 minutes in the Parliament of Canada website trying to find the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Committee on Justice and Human Rights, December 4th 2025.  This was interesting.  I haven't looked at Hansard since I worked for QL Systems in 1979 and we were the vendor that provided access to search through Hansard and other federal documents. I looked at Hansard a lot then. While I haven't come up with that December 4th meeting, I did read through the November 27th meeting.  Andrew Lawton could easily be accused of "crimes against committee efficiency" - interruptions, misrepresenting motions as points of order, and then consuming the meeting with numerous and very long filibusters.  I can imagine he can talk for two hours about cats and dogs.  Is that a useful skill for a politician?  I don't think so.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.com