Oct 14 2024 - Snowbird Burdens and Blues

 

It is the season of Snowbird Sob Stories. There are up to 500,000 such stories - that's the number of Canadian homeowners in Florida.   The Friday CBC call in show at noon had the topic of snowbirds and Florida after the hurricane. I wanted to boo-hoo for them and the increase in costs of insurance and house repair.  There is a sense of people living in a fantasy realm where things should be as they want them to be.  Perhaps there is some kind of  snowbird mental freeze.  Like eating ice cream too quickly.  But wait.  The Globe and Mail pops up with a story today that gives me a formal term that might apply here - Kayfabe.  What is kayfabe?  It is a professional wrestling term for staged performances that are combined with real wrestling to give an illusion that everything is real.  It is compared with the "fourth wall" in acting.  As in the "suspension of disbelief".  Maybe Kayfabe applies to quite a few things. Here's the headline that backs me up: "Kayfabe in Postmodernist Heterotopic Society" "Postmodernism challenges traditional narratives and structures, emphasizing the fluidity of meaning and the constructed nature of reality. Heterotopia, a concept introduced by Michel Foucault, refers to spaces that exist outside of regular societal norms, where alternate realities or truths coexist. In today’s postmodernist heterotopic society, kayfabe becomes increasingly relevant as the lines between reality and fiction blur." I think this is a word that is going to get a lot of use.     I found this picture of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Autumn.  I can see the street sign - Gage Street.  This is one of the pretty streets there.  I had to remove all the poles, etc.  And in doing that we can live in the illusion of an old-fashioned town, where things are simpler and calmer.

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July 10 2022 - Gardens

 

A garden walk is a non-curated garden tour.  It means the gardeners self-select, volunteer, their gardens.  All kinds and variations get volunteered.  Some exquisite, and others less so.  They may be close by or farther away to reach. Each typically comes with the gardener available for conversation and questions or to relay the history of the house and garden.   A garden tour is curated - a committee decides the number of gardens, their style and size, and location is a consideration, seeking clusters of houses so that it is easy to get around. The Niagara-on-the-Lake Horticultural Society had a garden walk yesterday - over 30 gardens volunteered themselves.  I saw less than half of them.  It was the distance to get around to them all that took the time.  It would have been a full and packed day to get to all 30.  That's part of the enjoyment - to see as much as one can. It is immediately clear  how much more diverse the gardens are than on a curated garden tour.  What the public might want and expect given the've paid some money.  This  is in the forefront of the organizers' minds.  When that's not the case, we can welcome all manner of gardens -  smaller and larger houses and gardens - some starting out, others mature..  Two were on the lake-front street and one on the water with its huge boat, swimming and infinity pool.  The view across the river is wonderful as the river narrows there. So we have the contrast of  what was Niagara-on-the-Lake and what is now.  The first picture today is a picture one might have taken 75 years ago. A screen door with a view of  the stained glass transom windows.  These were the houses of Niagara-on-the-Lake back then. Seaside/lakeside cottages and homes.  It wasn't the pretty town it is now.  The next porch - this is a new house only a few years old.  It is built in the style of the grander stone cottages. It has a contemporary interior.  Its porch looks like a luxury hotel to me.  It is beautiful and elegant.  This represents the town of today - a destination location for the rich who are attracted to the restored architecture set in quaint streets meant for walking and biking.

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July 9 2022 - Racing Racing

 

There are all kinds of races and racing.  We like being fast. race to  race up to race into race around And just plain "race'.   There are many variations on racing jokes, so I picked a few. My friend owned a racing snail. It never won any races so he removed the shell to make it go faster. Sadly it didn't work, if anything it made it more sluggish. I realized why Scandanavians are the fastest runners in the world...all their races start near the Finnish line. A man walks into a bar and is about to order a beer when he's interrupted by the bar phone ringing. The bartender answers. A voice asks, "Is your refrigerator running?" The bartender replies with a sigh. "Yes" The voice replies,"Good. Mine too. I'll see you at the refrigerator races tomorrow." As a hedge-fund manager gets out of his brand-new Audi, a truck goes racing by, taking off the door.“My Audi! My beautiful silver Audi is ruined!” he screams. A police officer on the scene shakes his head in disgust. “I can’t believe you,” he says. “You’re so focused on your possessions that you didn’t even realize your left arm was torn off when the truck hit you.” The hedge fund manager looks down in absolute horror and screams, *“Oh no! My Rolex!”

This is Paradise Grove in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It has some ancient oaks predating the War of 1812, and there are remnants of tallgrass prairie.  Another tallgrass prairie is at the Butterfly Conservatory.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 19 2022 - Status Quo or Quo Vadis

 

Would you ever have associated status quo with COVID-19?  How strange to consider this might continue to be the "current state of things".  Typically there are those who want to disrupt the status quo and those who want to maintain the status quo because it benefits them.   Will we or can we "exit the pandemic"? As though we can turn right or take an off-ramp and leave it behind on the highway? The experts are ahead of us and are weighing in on what's to come.  One of them is Seema Yasmin,  a journalist and doctor interviewed HERE on what needs to change. Her first item was supporting the mental health of health care workers.  The second is the need to improve scientific literacy among the public. "Something we’ve had to do is get people up to speed on the evolving — rapidly evolving — science as we are learning it,” Yasmin said. “We’re building bridges and we cross it. And we’re sharing that information with the public, realizing it’s not hitting home. We’re not communicating it well.   And that shows how difficult it is in a crisis to get the public up to speed when you haven’t had investment in education,” she added. “I think so many of these things are not quick fixes that we want to hear about, but they are paradigm shifts and they are generational issues that will take time to fix.” America's  "dreaded mask issue" was on the table:  On Monday, American immunologist Anthony S Fauci said while it was difficult to predict as yet what could be the new normal, he does not think that people will roam around with their masks on forever.  I wonder if that is a quote or the journalist used the verb "roam". The Endemic transition is being debated. Six medical experts close to the White House published three op-eds in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that the time had come for a new approach to the pandemic—one that sets aside the campaign for eradication in favor of living with the disease.  Covid-19, one op-ed argued, should no longer even be tracked on its own but monitored together with other respiratory viruses, such as the flu. Something that we've lived in is the State of Emergency,  Here's the latest on this: “A ‘new normal with COVID’ in January 2022 is not living without COVID-19,” Ezekiel Emanuel, of the University of Pennsylvania, Celine Gounder, of N.Y.U., and Michael Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote. But they believed that the long era of emergency—the one defined by a wartime feeling and frequent briefings from Anthony Fauci—should draw to a close.   Just last week, a cat was returned home after nearly 12 years of going missing. Vaughan Animal Services picked her up and scanned the microchip to find the owner who now lives in Kitchener.   This cat very much owned the street in Niagara-on-the-Lake a few years ago during a garden tour.

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Jan 02 2022 - No Match for the Greeks and Romans

 

I just read the history of humans from Ancient Greece to the 18th Century in the online Encyclopedia Britannica.  It happened when I asked this question: Did human intelligence peak a few thousand years ago with the ancient Greeks? And I thought this fantasy.  Maybe we are descended from a different branch of human tree - perhaps the Germanic branch rather than the Ancient Greek branch. The Germanics are characterized as 'barbaric' compared to how much is written about the astonishing accomplishments of the Greeks.  So many inventions in all areas.  We can't but wonder how things fell backwards and so far backwards.   The Encyclopedia Britannica tells me generally that it turns out that overpopulation, starvation, climate catastrophes and so on that caused migrations/wars that resulted in great upheavals of Europe and eventually the weakening of Rome.   But more significant, the rise of Christianity spread across the western world to become the governing force.  It organized activities around faith and moral behaviour, and demonized all that went before.  It cast out a lot of intellectual activities. It was faith vs. reason. "Christianity appeared on a planet that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal sacrifice.  And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions for purges and pugilism." That comes from Catherine Nixey's book The Darkening Age:  the Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Here's the original view by Edward Gibbon in his classic 18th century book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.   It is quoted in a Guardian article HERE.  A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its “exclusive zeal for the truth of religion”, a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a class of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty. The Enlightenment view is that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilization’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). So there we are with our answer.  And an insight into the state of our societies today:  the clash of faith vs. reason continues.  One of Niagara-on-the-Lake's heritage homes on John Street.  This is the back view during a garden tour.  I guess this house's architecture got me thinking about the Greeks.

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July 7 2021 - Iron Out Crepey Skin because the Next Stop is Immortality

 

How crepey is your skin?  It depends how old you are, doesn't it?  And how much sun exposure there was/is. This is an ever-repeating advertisement with a clearly very old pair of thighs at the seashore - one crepey leg and one fine.  It turns out there are a lot of possible treatments - like topical retinoids, fractional laser treatment, ultrasound, cryolipolysis (cool sculpting), fillers, all sorts of things. The best expression so far is:  How to "iron out" crepe skin - and of course, it concludes with: Do this every morning.  This is the anti-aging market - it is projected to reach $610 million by 2025.  The breakthroughs that are referenced are tissue regeneration therapies. Regrowing kidneys is a target. Will there be 'extraordinary' breakthroughs in anti-aging research?  Because being 120 years old with crepey skin doesn't seem that appealing. Next stop:  Immortality seems more a tag line than a reality to be enjoyed.   The Atlantic asked that question: what happens when we all live to 100?  The article seems a rather depressing outline of what happens when older people control/dominate society.  Think judges sitting on the bench into late age and for long times.  The article highlights the Buck Institute, a private, independent research facility dedicated to extending the human life span.  They've succeeded with worms, so far.   There are experts who hold positive views of how aging can unfold.  Aubrey de Grey thinks that people will live into their thousands.  That's his famous quote - that the person to do so is alive today.  He also says that they will be able to regenerate to a 'younger age', like repairing a car.  He's working fast and hard on the research to fulfill this.  He wouldn't say what age he would like to be or will chose to be.  What if he's the thousand-year-old person - doing research into eternity.   I am looking forward to being able to enjoy Niagara-on-the-Lake again. As we move to less restricted stages, it will be great to photograph the beautiful gardens and historical buildings.

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Apr 5 2020 - Sportscasters Triumph

Sportscasters are doing all kinds of interesting things to keep themselves busy. This article has Nick Heath's everyday play-by-plays.  They have titles such as "International's 4x4 Pushchair Formation Final. Live." and "After the lunch break now..."  His Twitter Account is HERE.  I scrolled down to a retweet in which Michael Spicer is interacting with a President Trump announcement.  HERE. While Sports is all quiet, there still is a sport that is proceeding - wrestling. The top google search is WrestleMania 36 with over 1 million searches.  Its distinction is that it went ahead without an audience.  I gather in wrestling, the audience has a significant role, and wrestlers wrestle/play to the audience.  I learned all this from the CBC in an interview with a wrestling news journalist.  It turns out that the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is famously eccentric Vince McMahon.  He is now 'treating COVID like it's a sneeze'.  Part of his eccentricity is his phobia/bias against sneezing which is well documented. What else did I learn about wrestling?  I learned it may be included in 'sports', but it is more in the range of circus/fantasy action character events.  Here's how I got to this conclusion:  "In a recent segment, crossover star John Cena confronted Bray Wyatt, a children's puppet show host who wrestles as a killer clown alter-ego called The Fiend." "Pro wrestling fans never know which version of Reagan Belan they're going to get when she first steps into the ring on any given night:  My last show, I was a unicorn. I've been Mrs. Potato Head. I've been a senior citizen. I have a tag team called The Monarchy, where I am Queen Elizabeth and my tag-team partner is Queen Victoria," said Belan, a.k.a. Glory S. Gamms, when performing for Vancouver's Glam Slam Wrestling league." Our picture today is a garden in Niagara-on-the-Lake with a nice arbour and garden gate.  Rather than a driveway it now has a fountain.

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Who is that Mansard of the Roof?

How is it that the Mansard roof is named after Francois Mansard.  The word mansard has the French origin of mansard  and the English origin of "Mansard, Francois".  The earliest known example is credited to Pierre Lescot on part of the Louvre, built around 1550.  It was named after the person who popularized it in the early 17th century. A search on roof shapes will retrieve dozens of different ones.  And then there are ones that have no name to describe their unusual shape.  Here's the Lighter Side of Real Estate's 12 most unique roofs.  In comparison, the BBC article is about the world's most unusual rooftops - typically with gardens.  It is HERE.   I thought that perhaps the Guinness Book of Records might give us insight into roofs.  Here are a few records involving roofs: Longest cantilever roof Largest reinforced concrete cement flat roof span Longest roof span covered by a single metal corrugated sheet ... and then it moves on to other roof-related items: Most consecutive donut spins while standing on the roof of a car Fastest time to flip 10 cars on the roof Fastest time to break 1,000 roof tiles (male) (female) And then an array of records involving centipedes, slime, the loudest drummer... these might really be advertisements/news items. I refrained from reading the centipede one. Here's our pretty roof from the Niagara-on-the-Lake garden tour over the weekend. The house is located on the most prestigious place on the street facing the Lake with the view of the American historic fort.  However this gazebo seems like an unlikely lover's rendezvous:  it sits under a chestnut tree and it faces away from the lake.  Perhaps there is a story in this.

Buckets and Buckets of Bucket-Lists

We are living longer - by 2030 baby boomers will swell the ranks of age 65 and older from 13 percent to 18 percent.  Genes account for one-fourth to one-third of longevity says the author of the Longevity Project, Howard Friedman.  The advice for older people involves exercise, eating well, etc.  There are lots of bucket lists too things to do before you die - 20, 50, 100, things - pick a number. There are even lists of things to do before you are 20 and before you are 12.  I found the list from the Globe and Mail for 50 things to do before you're 12. There are twenty of them. 1. Climb a tree 2. Roll down a really big hill 3. Camp out in the wild 4. Build a den 5. Skim a stone 6. Run around in the rain 7. Fly a kite 8. Catch a fish with a net 9. Eat an apple straight from a tree 10. Play conkers 11. Throw some snow 12. Hunt for treasure on the beach 13. Make a mud pie 14. Dam a stream 15. Go sledging 16. Bury someone in the sand 17. Set up a snail race 18. Balance on a fallen tree 19. Swing on a rope swing 20. Make a mud slide I enjoyed this list - it reminds me of what it was to be a child - these seem to be things that children think of doing by themselves, without any prompting from adults.  Gathered together, they make a fine summary of what children do with almost nothing, and still have fun. The list for 100 things to do before you die  seem to mostly involve spending a lot of money - e.g. see the Mona Lisa, visit Stonehenge, visit Brazil, the Grand Canyon, France, sleep in a castle, visit Machu Picchu, The Great Sphinx, and so on.  Our picture today shows an interesting and most unusual focal point on the Niagara-on-the-Lake garden tour.  I've never seen an iron cross as a focal point in a garden before.   One will occasionally see Celtic crosses - these are a traditional garden element. The close-up of this one had praying angels facing the vertical portion of the cross.

Feels Like

"Feels Like" has become a standard weather phrase.  The temperature at 7:00am is 26 and feels like 37, with a heat warning, and possible thunderstorm.  I noticed the difference between the cooler Niagara-on-the-Lake and warmer Grimsby yesterday. Our pictures show the Town Library garden. Accuweather reports that its RealFeel temperature was created in the 1990s by Joel N. Myers, Michael A. Sternberg, Joseph Sobel, Elliot Abrams and Evan Myers. "The RealFeel Temperature is an equation that takes into account many different factors to determine how the temperature actually feels outside. It is the first temperature to take into account multiple factors to determine how hot and cold feels. Some of the components that are used in the equation are humidity, cloud cover, winds, sun intensity and angle of the sun. Humidity is a large contributor to determining the RealFeel, but the time of the day also is important, due to the angle of the sun. In the morning the low angle of the sun gives off less heat because the energy is spread out, according to AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Dan Kottlowski. In the afternoon, the sun is overhead and the sun's energy is more direct and gives off more energy, making it feel warmer. "The RealFeel takes into consideration the angle of the sun and its affects on an object or the body," Kottlowski said." Other sites distinguish  between the calculation for wind chill and heat index.  An interesting fact is that humid and heat indexes are based on temperature measurements taken in the shade and not the sun, so extra care must be taken while in the sun.

Celebrating the Emerald Isle with Green

Hi everyone,
It's a sunny spring day here in Grimsby and also St. Patrick's Day!  Today's post combines the Emerald Isle Green and Niagara's spring flowers.  The lovely little yellow flowers below are Winter Aconites, and this image was taken last weekend in the beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake.  That town gets prettier with every day that goes by. 

Enjoy your Sunday and celebrate St. Patrick's Day in style!

Parasols in Dreamy Glades

Leaves in Flames

This is a Fine Spring Morning

Marilyn

The Blossom Trail

Here are some of the flowering trees in the Niagara region this week!

Royal Botanical Garden Arboretum:

Lakeshore Road, Niagara-on-the-Lake:

 Royal Botanical Garden Arboretum: