Nov 15 2024 - Notre Dame Reopens

 

It is true - Notre Dame reopens on December 8th 2024.  No pictures so far - I guess it will be the great reveal.  There are lots of pictures online of various stages   There's the rooster back on top - it is said to be protecting a piece of Jesus Christ's crown of thorns.     It was under $1 billion US and 5 years to restore.   There's the picture of the rooster on top of the cathedral spire.  That went on in March after the cathedral's new spire was revealed in February. Is the crown of thorns with the rooster or somewhere in the cathedral?  I think in the cathedral. But there seem to be more pieces in other places - for example, it is listed as being in the Louvre. The pictures look like the whole crown of thorns is at Notre Dame...  too hard for us Lutherans to figure out. When we visited, I wasn't attuned to the purported sacred relics - crown of thorns, a piece of the cross and the Tunic of Saint Louis.   My background is German. Germans in Niagara are Mennonite or Lutheran, on average.  The Lutheran Church's focus was reading and studying the Bible. That would be because Luther was the one who defiantly translated the Bible from Latin into German so people (compared to priests) could read it and find out the messages for themselves.  The Catholic Church was corrupt at the time, and people found out that they didn't have to buy their way into Heaven with indulgences.   Without those indulgences would we have the grand legacy of the Catholic grand cathedrals.  I can't imagine how many beautiful catholic cathedrals there might be.  In France alone, they seem to be in every village, town and city.   Without any doubt, we will be celebrating the restoration of this 861-year-old masterpiece on December 8th.  Only five years to restore it compared to almost 200 years to build it.   How will it be reopened?  "After Macron’s speech, the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Laurent Ulrich, will officiate the reopening by knocking on the cathedral’s main door with his staff. In a symbolic gesture, he will “wake up” the cathedral’s grand organ, which will be accompanied by a musical performance, including a rendition of Bach’s Magnificat and a Te Deum." Brace for 20 million people a year to visit it.  That's astonishing!

This is the conservatory at the University of Guelph.  I found this in the archives, and used the generative AI to block out the building behind it to create this pleasant setting.  And then used the watercolour filter to create this nostalgic version.

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June 19 2024 - Who has interviewed 30,000 people

 

Jordan Mazer has a headline that he's interviewed 30,000 people.  Another article, by William Vanderbloemen, CEO of an executive search firm, says that he has interviewed 30,000 candidates in the last 15 years. That's a person an hour for 8 hours a day for 250 days a year for 15 years. Another writer on Pinterest says the same number - 30,000 interviews.  What is it about this number for job interviews?  You won't find anyone interviewing 40,000 people.  You will find instructions on how to interview 20,000 people a year.  That would be only 4 people a day.  Seems almost achievable, doesn't it.  (And what about the headline below that where Conan O'Brien and Wilt Chamberlain discuss the rumour that he's slept with 20,000 women)  30,000 seems to be a nice round number - here are more occasions of 30,000 people: Japanese Chefs feed 30,000 people Incredible crowd of 30,000 people gather China has buildings that house 30,00o people  Up to 30,000 people now displaced ... ordered to evacuate... 30,000 shock incidents per year that are non-fatal 30,000 people with cystic fibrosis  More than 30,000 newcomers expected to settle in... These wreaths have withered and departed quite a while ago - they were very cute on the greenhouse doors.

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Jan 7 2023 - One Week In

 

I didn't realize that antimatter is the most expensive material on Earth.  Only small amounts have been produced, and there is currently no way of storing it.  It would be $62.5 trillion per gram.   Then what? If you can't store it?  That turns out to be the NSAS estimate of what it cost to make rather than buy it.  What makes it so important? "Using a tiny amount of antimatter to set off a nuclear reaction—a.k.a., Antimatter Initiation Microfusion (AIM)—can be a great catalyst for bombs, but it can also be used theoretically to fuel spacecraft. Matter-antimatter annihilation releases the most energy per unit mass of any known reaction in physics. A spacecraft powered by this method would require as little as one microgram of antimatter, depending on the length of the mission."  That comes from Futurism.com. But if you paid $62.5 trillion how would get access to owning it? That is a little different than the question often asked - what would happen if you touched antimatter?  I think the answer is K-Boom! Here's a website that wants us to sign up on coinable.com to get your AntiMatter Governance Token.  It is on the rise this week!  Here's the website HERE. this is weird stuff to me.   Antimatter is an Ethereum-based application designed to be the gateway of DeFi derivatives and financial NFTs. Antimatter aims to be a permission-less protocol where users can design and deploy various perpetual options. Options derivatives are complex financial products that are difficult to use and have high barriers to entry that often deter many users. Therefore, Antimatter introduced more accessible products based on the original derivatives ecosystem to serve users conveniently. Very pretty display at the Niagara Falls Greenhouse. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Dec 25 2021 - Christmas Day and the Reveal

 

This is Christmas Day - the day of the big reveal.  What was that day?   Scholars have tried to figure this out and the closest that can be determined and not debunked is somewhere in the month of September.  We know now that the date of December 25 was established overtly by the Roman Catholic Church, and became the most significant of the Christmas traditions. There is much writing about the stories that became traditions rather than having a source in the Bible.   For example, the popular Nativity Scene is said to have started in the seventh century, and then made really popular by St. Francis of Assisi who set up a Nativity in his town where "miracles' were said to happen - healing sick animals, etc. I guess that culminated in the Saint aspect. The paintings of the Nativity reveal got more and more ornate over time.  One painting has a peacock that peers over the top of the manger to catch a glimpse of Jesus. One visual representation of Christmas settled on Three Wise Men/Kings/Magi along with the Star of Bethlehem.  The visual depictions over the centuries have developed to include camels (not likely say the historians) and how many kings remains unknown. Our gift-giving at Christmas is generally traced back to the gifts of the Three Wise Men to the infant Jesus.   That's a tradition many people appreciate. We'd have to zig-zag to get to Santa where the tradition follows another track.  I did find this excellent Santa joke: The 3 stages of man: He believes in Santa Claus. He doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. He is Santa Claus.   It is a rainy day here today so I went to last year's archives and found a snowy orchard scene on John Street followed by Millie the puppy racing about in the snow.

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Jan 1 2020 - New Day Ahead

All the world's clocks have turned to the new year.  This is the day we greet everyone with special greetings and wishes for a good life in the year ahead. Then we return to our regular daily greetings.  Here are some creative daily greetings I found on a blog, along with the blog's explanations.  Yo! This funny greeting came from 90s hip-hop culture. Today, it is commonly used in America. Are you OK? / Alright mate? It is a British slang version of “Hello. How are you?” If your friend asks you one of these questions, respond “Yeah, fine”. Howdy! This weird greeting is an abbreviation of “How do you do?” widely used in some regions of Canada and America. Sup? / Whazzup? All teenagers know that this greeting is a short version of “What’s up?” When we look ahead to what to expect from 2020, what comes to mind on a leap year is the Olympics.  The Summer Olympics begin on Friday July 24 and complete on Sunday, August 9 in Tokyo. The last time Tokyo had the Olympics was 1964.  What are our pictures today?  We visited the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls yesterday, and found this new sculpture installation.  Metal walls with multi-colour leds shining on them, making rainbow lines.  It is titled Niagara Strait and is by artist Gordon Reeve.  The oak leaf is sitting on lights in the snow.

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Buffalo Garden Walk

The 25th anniversary of the Buffalo Garden Walk was this past weekend.  More than 400 gardens are now on the self-guided, free walking tour in Buffalo.  It is a city of splendid Victorian architecture with Frederick Law Olmsted-designed parks.   Even in its first year in 1993 there were 29 gardens.  In 2019, Park Meadow and Parkside neighbourhoods joined the Walk to reach the over-400 mark.  This year's highlight is a book about the gardens.  Buffalo Style Gardens is authored by Sally Cunningham and Jim Charlier.  Sally is a garden writer and broadcaster. Jim is one of the main Buffalo Garden Walk ambassadors.  He is the owner of the Harry Potter themed garden - a memorable house and garden.   He claims that he does not love his tool shed more than his daughter.  This year I got to see the Buffalo and Erie Conservatory.  It is a massive structure designed by Lord & Burnham.  It is considered one of their greatest accomplishments. Our pictures show the diversity of Buffalo's garden architecture and style.  The great dome of the conservatory is followed by one of the Summer Street cottage gardens.

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What I Know About Scurvy

What do we know about vitamins? What grade in school would we learn about them? Mission Nutrition has lesson plans for grades 4-5. Other sites have plans for grade 9 to 12.  The lesson plans identify the 13 essential vitamins, what their purpose is, and what foods contain them. I can imagine today that there might be common vitamin deficiencies if people eat processed rather than fresh foods and vegetables. The vitamin I am most acquainted with is Vitamin C. We  learned about scurvy in history class.  It was a problem throughout the period of exploration and settlement in Canada.   I remember the cure was drinking coniferous needles boiled in water.  The explorers didn't stay with the cure, and significant numbers of scurvy deaths continued throughout the period. In the 1950s, mass production and marketing of vitamin supplements made them readily available.  Governments mandated supplementary vitamins in staple foods - flour and milk were the two common ones. So Vitamin C came into our houses in pill bottles. Our lesson plan today is to learn about Vitamin C. You will need: 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch 1 cup water iodine More water Eye dropper Medium sized bowl Several smaller bowls Crushed vitamin C tablet dissolved in 1 cup water Various beverages orange juice, orange soda, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, punch, etc. Mix 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch into 1 cup cold water; dissolve mixture by heating. Measure 1 cup water into a bowl add 1 teaspoon of the cornstarch mixture. Using an eye dropper add 4 drops of iodine and stir. The mixture should be a pale blue. Put 2 Tablespoons of the mixture into several small bowls. Using a clean eye dropper add the vitamin C solution to one of the blue mixtures. In another bowl add orange juice, another orange soda, etc. Make note of how many drops it takes before the blue color disappears. Discussion: Only foods with vitamin C will make the blue color disappear. The punch and orange soda do not have vitamin C.  If a food does not have vitamin C the solution will not change color. And today's picture makes me think of England with the beautiful setting of the Conservatory in Minneapolis.

Lucky 7 - Tie the Knot!

It is March 7th - and seven is generally considered a lucky number. Lucky Seven goes back to ancient Greece and the mathematician Pythagoras, who decreed the number seven lucky, which would cement in Western culture a belief that also reigns in Asian and the Middle East. Pythagoreans called the number 7 "the Septad". Seven is all around us:  there are Seven Seas, Seven Heavens, Seven Continents, Seven Colours in a Rainbow, Seven Notes on a musical scale, Seven Days in a week, Seven Wonders of the World and so on.  Are you old enough to remember celebrating 07/07/77? And more recently there's 07/07/07.  The website TheKnot.com had 38,000 couples register 07/07/07 as their wedding date.   A seminal paper was published in 1956 by the psychologist George A Miller called “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”. Miller claims that it is more than just coincidence that the number 7 seems to be all around us. Our immediate memory has been shown to perform well when remembering up to, and no more than, seven things. We can distinguish and make a judgement about seven different categories, and remember around seven objects at a glance. Looking up Lucky in Wikipedia, I found a reference to Ronald Regan's dog, Lucky.  Clicking the link, I came to the listing of pets of the presidents.   I was impressed with the range of Calvin Coolidge's pets.  The list is about 30 pets long.  Here are a few:  Goldy - a "yellow bird" Enoch - Goose Smoky - Bobcat Billy - Pygmy hippopotamus A wallaby Bruno - a black bear And here's his lucky pet:  Rebecca - Raccoon, intended for a Thanksgiving feast;  First Lady Grace had a tree-house built for her instead. I don't see any presidents with butterflies as pets.  Here's more from the Butterfly Conservatory.

Severe Weather Ceremony Cancelled Due to Severe Weather

Our headline is a real headline from the weather network today.  It appears that in Topeka, Kansas a "severe weather ceremony" was canceled due to freezing rain and ice.  The proclamation to be signed was about the importance of severe weather preparedness. The Weather Network was having some fun. What about the headlines at the side. Here's the link: Need snow removed in Russia?  Put Kremlin critic's name in it (This is about spray-painting the opposition leader's name on the snow, and it gets removed promptly) Read grasshopper found embedded in Van Gogh painting (From October 2017: “It is not unusual to find insects or plant material in a painting that was completed outdoors,” said paintings conservator Mary Schafer in a statement. “But in this case, we were curious if the grasshopper could be used to identify the particular season in which this work was painted.”) Your forecast:  Sunny, chance of 100-km-swath of butterflies (From October 2017:  "After putting out the call for help from birdwatchers on Twitter, the curious forecasters were able to determine the cause of the signal - a swath of Painted Lady butterflies some 110 km wide, spanning the entire width of Arapahoe County, east of Denver".) More from our Niagara Butterfly Conservatory.

Repeat Again

This is Groundhog Week!  The Groundhog Day movie is a movie on the theme of repetition.  What about unnecessary repetition?  Wouldn't that be what redundancy is?  Do you think Bill Murray's character felt the repetitions were redundant? Here are expressions that could be termed 'groundhog moments' in celebration of the movie.  Redundant is what they are: a moment in time – A moment is essentially a period of time. ATM machine – ATM already stands for “Automated Teller Machine” true fact – By definition, facts are true. join together – How else would something join? free gift – Because when’s the last time you had to pay for a gift? added bonus – The word bonus indicates something outside of what’s expected, so of course it’s added. end result – Results always come at the end. final outcome – Related to the above, an outcome signifies the end, or finality. plan ahead – Planning always refers to the future, or what’s ahead. repeat again – Ah, the irony here! close proximity – To be close to something is to be in proximity. past experience – Experience refers to what has happened in the past. most unique – Unique implies there’s nothing like it, so one cannot compare it to something else. rise up – When rising, there’s no other way to go but up. the reason why – A reason explains the why. new innovations – An innovation is something that did not exist before, i.e., it is new in and of itself. unexpected surprise – If you were expecting it, it wouldn’t be a surprise. advance notice – When giving someone notice, you’re always doing so in advance. What redundant phrase do you find yourself using most often? Are you having Groundhog moments? This wonderful list is courtesy of proofreadnow.com  The orchid arch at Longwood is twelve feet high and contains more than 600 orchids. The reconstruction of the Longwood Main Found Garden is shown in this youtube video time-lapse :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuioDG74Jk