Mairlyn's Photos - Dec 12 2025 - Diana Sweets

 

Anyone who lived in St. Catharines between the 1920s and the 1990s knows the name Diana Sweets.  It was a restaurant on St. Paul Street with ornate gumwood booths lining its interior.  It was in the Globe and Mail this morning, as the location has been renovated into a pizza shop and a music hall.   What remains of Diana Sweets interior has left the building long ago.  It went to the Harley-Davidson motorcycle store just off Glendale Avenue in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  It is a strange experience to see this reconstructed interior.  And stranger to experience it to the smell of motorcycle tires and leather jackets.  Back to St. Paul Street, the revitalization of this section of St. Paul Street includes Helliwell Hall - a brewery and concert hall.  It is at 107 St. Paul Street.  Downtown St. Catharines is now part of Brock University, with the Performing Arts Centre, student housing and apartments, and student pubs and restaurants.  No longer a bustling downtown of a mid-20th century town. Here are my pictures from the Harley Store site.  Everything seemed small in comparison to the size of tables and booths now.  It was familiar, though.  We went there on Saturdays with our grandmother who treated us to ice cream and french fries.  Or was it ice cream or french fries?

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There has been much stormy weather over the OSCAR event on Sunday.  I wonder how the two participants will  "weather the storm"  Dictionaries say: "If someone or something weathers the storm, they successfully deal with a very difficult problem. Here are the first few of 60 weather the storm quotes whose purpose according to the website is "to encourage you". “Stay strong and weather the storm.”                “The greater your storm, the brighter your rainbow.” “There are some things you can only learn in a storm.” “Those that can bend with the wind, will weather the storm.”  What follows these quotes?  Rainbow after the storm quotes. “After the storm comes the rainbow.” “The sun always shines after the storm.” “The greater your storm, the brighter your rainbow.”  “You have to be willing to endure the storm to enjoy and appreciate the rainbow that follows.”       And what about storm weather  and rainbow jokes? "You can’t weather a tree, but you can climate." "A tree’s limbs fell off in a storm, now it’s an amputree." "Since the storm was late, it started rushing. And now it’s a hurry-cane." "Rainbows that break the law end up going to prism." "Judy Garland knew where to find out the weight of a pie. Somewhere over the rainbow, weigh a pie."                   I took this picture of the Cosy Restaurant on Lake Street while waiting for the car at the dealership just last week.  I can remember it from my childhood.  It started out in 1964 as a coffee shop and expanded from there.  Lake Street was a pretty simple mixed retail and residential street back then.  Not now - a busy multi-lane car dealership and plaza isort of street.  This restaurant stands as reminder of the past.

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July 1 2021 - Fireworks and Phat Boy

 

I consider today, July 1st, to be the pinnacle of summer - it seems the midpoint of the year for me whether it is a leap year or not.  Close enough.  Mid-summer is also fireworks time.  "PHUN WITH PHATBOY: This name has become synonymous with the Big Boom Theory! Phatboy Fireworks is a leading retailer..."  That's it. So tantalizing to find out about this insultingly catchy named company.   That's all there is to find out about Phat Boy the fireworks company.  It is all over Canada with its retail and wholesale fireworks facilities.  I expect to find out about the Phat Boy name after I've done all these various searches.  It will pop up in the days to come.   Just like the screaming tunnel - there's an even longer tunnel in Brockville worth visiting. Tunnels everywhere via Pinterest.   This is QEW at Seventh Avenue St. Catharines.  We might call it overpass and roses.  This rose field in 2020 was harvested last fall.  There would have been close to or more than a million of little roses in the field - a heavenly scent.  But of course, gone now. I have to do a little drive about to find this year's fields.  They have to move every year.  I did think this was a telling picture - the highway that most people travel to go to Niagara Falls Canada or to Niagara Falls US and Buffalo.  Many more cars than roses travel this road.  Of course, little in the way of border crossing this year.  We've enjoyed the highway being less congested.

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Feng Shui That

What about feng shui and house shapes?  What is a bagu map?  I find out it is the feng shui energy map of your space and that it is one of the Five Arts of Chinese Metaphysics.  It discusses architecture in terms of invisible forces that bind the universe, earth, and humanity together, known as qi.  It is an ancient tradition. What about contemporary uses of feng shui? I found a Forbes article titled "Feng Shui Your Money".  It isn't really about feng shui - it is a catchy title. How about this article:  "Should You Feng Shui Your Hair?" - this is also in Forbes.  It is about Feng Shui Beauty techniques. A person's energy is analyzed and hair, colour and make-up are customized to reflect it. And another Forbes article about a lady who sells plants based on feng shui.  She has sold over 1500 on the Facebook Marketplace. She imparts feng shui and plant-rearing wisdom to the purchasers. Forbes has many articles on Feng Shui.  Here are a few more titles:  Desk for Success Attract Clients Giving Your Car's Feng Shui a Tune-Up Feng Shui for your portfolio A Healthy office a healthy mind Of course, here's the headline that draws attention:  Meet Donal Trump's feng shui master - The article is HERE.  She did the work in 1995 on the Trump International Hotel and Tower.  The common element in all these articles is how someone gained celebrity or wealth through the application of feng shui to their professional area.  Most interesting. Our picture today was taken at the 13th Street Winery in St. Catharines.  It is on the garden tour this weekend.

Stupid Bets

I was looking forward to researching stories of stupid bets.  However, they are what they say they are - people losing millions and billions of dollars at gambling and poker tables, etc in stupid ways. These stories are all told in a similar writing style that relies on swearing as an ingredient. It took some work to find stories which were intriguing and interesting.   Here are the ones I enjoyed about novels and movies: Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet with his publisher that he could write a decent story using 50 different words or fewer. It turned out to be the fourth best-selling children's book of all time.   Ernest Hemingway bet that he could write a story using six words.  He wrote: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. George Lucas made a bet about the Star Wars movie.  Lucas visited the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  He was whining about how Star Wars was not living up the vision hat he originally had, and was not going to do well at the box office. He made a bet that if Star Wars made more money, Spielberg would get 2.5 percent of Lucas' movie's profits for all eternity. Supposedly Spielberg says he still gets begrudging cheques in the mail.  The dollar value of the bet is $40 million.  The story HERE.  Now for two scientific wagers: Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman issued a pair of famous challenges to the scientific community in 1959. One required construction of a working motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch square; the second posed the challenge of shrinking the page of a book to 1/25,000th in scale so that it remained legible to an electron microscope. The prize for solving either of the two challenges: $1,000. Electrical engineer William McLellan claimed the first prize in 1960 after constructing a 250-microgram motor. The second reward wasn’t claimed until 1985 when a Stanford graduate student named Tom Newman inscribed the first page of A Tale of Two Cities literally on the head of a pin. Many physicists credit Feynman’s 1959 lecture, entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” with inspiring the field of nanotechnology that emerged decades later. And how far has nanotech come? In 2007, Israeli scientists etched the 300,000-plus words of the Bible onto an area the size of a grain of sugar. Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest astrophysicists of the 20th century, and placed a pair of high-profile bets as a sort of insurance policy against his own discoveries. He made the first wager with physicist Kip Thorne concerning the existence of black holes. Hawking bet Thorne in 1975 that the well-known X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1 did not harbor a black hole; Thorne disagreed.  After evidence mounted that the system had a black hole, Hawking finally conceded the bet in 1990, giving Thorne his “prize,” a subscription to a popular porn magazine — much to the consternation of Thorne’s wife. Hawking, however, was pleased to have lost, as his research was based on the premise that black holes were indeed real. Hawking lost a similar hedge bet against his own theory in 2004 with physicist John Preskill and Thorne on whether information can escape from a black hole, a phenomenon that scientists now term Hawking radiation. Hawking settled the bet by giving Preskill a copy of a sports encyclopedia. More famous scientific bets HERE.  I took the barn picture on Saturday - a lucky moment to have a clothesline display.  Where would one guess this barn is located?  I know this house and barn will be gone soon as it is located near the hospital in St. Catharines, and the street is being developed with fast food restaurants and commercial businesses.  On one side is a vineyard and new houses in the distance.  Back away for a wider view and there's a tourist information booth parked beside the house.

News About Nothing

Seeing Nothing was a great experience for millions yesterday. The headlines from yesterday's eclipse were varied.  These come from the UK Telegraph. Total solar eclipse sweeps across the US Donald Trump mocked for looking directly at the Sun Moon trolls sun on Twitter Britons left underwhelmed by partial solar eclipse Nasa Moon, NASA's official Twitter account about Earth's Moon, said: "HA HA HA I've blocked the Sun! Make way for the Moon. £SolarEclipse2017" while Hopkinsville Police in Kentucky, which saw solar enthusiasts descend on the town, tweeted "Please DO NOT call 911 just because your Wi-Fi service is not working." The headlines today include how to tell if there's been retinal damage after watching the solar eclipse.  Today's picture was taken at the new Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines - an art installation at the top of the stairs.

Brainstorm Betterment

What did people do before 1953 when brainstorming was popularized by Alex F. Osborn in several books in the 1940's.  He wanted creative ideas for ad campaigns and founded the two principles of  defer judgement, and reach for quantity. He founded 4 general rules 1. Go for quantity 2. Withhold criticism 3 Welcome wild ideas 4. Combine and improve ideas The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” A search to find the most famous brainstorming session produces no results.  The search on myths about brainstorming produces many hits.  And there are many articles denouncing the 'groupthink' approach that has momentum.  View this email in your browser

Diana Sweets

Diana Sweets was a restaurant on St. Paul Street, the main street of St. Catharines. Our grandmother took us there for sundaes on a Saturday.  The interior is Art Deco from the 1920's.  It was a favourite spot for many decades, but eventually closed in the late 1990's. Benny Cooperman the detective in the Howard Engel novels would eat there.   The interior was stored in a Buffalo warehouse for a number of years.  And by good fortune, the Harley-Davidson store owner bought it in 2008 and installed it in the store.   I went in yesterday to see this piece of St. Catharines history. I was not amongst my cohorts in the store - I immediately noticed the  women with 'big hair' under backwards baseball caps. But I made my way to the important corner where coffee and espresso are available. It was enjoyable to see the booths and counter, along with the stained glass sign and the waitress uniforms.   The St. Catharines Standard article on the wall is here and a youtube video is here.  The video that followed was St. Catharines 1954.  The Hotel Dieu Hospital is in that video - I had captured the demolition earlier in the year.  It is now a flat space, awaiting the start of a retirement complex.  The big news yesterday, though, was spotting a Bald Eagle in the trees on the Lake beside the restaurant, the Lakehouse.

I Hear Music...Mighty Fine Music

Wake Up on the Bright Side The question has come up of what do I miss about Toronto.  As I walked down James Street in St. Catharines, a young man was busking on his fiddle.  I realize how many musicians there are on Toronto streets and in the subway.  Music make it a vibrant place. Remember the fellow dressed in the horizontally-striped prison outfit who liked to play at the Bay Street subway walkway?  (no pictures of him as he always refused) Or the bagpipe player at Queen and University (I have pictures of him and what a loud sound).  There was Carl at the St. Lawrence Market  who played requests and would have me sing along (I bought his CD).  And the guitar player outside our LCBO with his little dog, whose portrait I took.  There's always some music resonating up the stairs at the Yonge and Bloom subway platform.  Music makes for a lively community. Many years ago we heard Justin Bieber busking at Stratford a few times.  Our friends Rick and Vicki are musicians and we all commented on how terrible he sounded.  Out of key and a whining singing voice.  We realized his identity years later when he was famous.  We had to laugh at the success of practising in public.

Dollars for Donuts

Wake Up on the Bright Side Something about donuts.  There are line ups at the Tim Hortons here for coffee and donuts.  So you can imagine the line up here in St. Catharines at Beechwood doughnuts.  Well, I can show you the line up and show you the donuts.  Fragrance fills the air around the donut shop, and people spill out the front door waiting to place their orders. Here's the website and Facebook page for this VEGAN Donut Shop. And if you are in the area they are located at 5 James Street.  However, if you are in the area, you likely already know about Beechwood and have checked it out.  St. Catharines has evolved since its settlement at the end of the 1700s when it started as a farming community with fertile soils and permanent streams (it was originally known as "The Twelve" after the major creek). The Welland Canal runs through St. Catharines so shipping and ship building have been a significant part of its history. Manufacturing became important in the 1900s with GM and other automotive companies moving in.  However, those days have finished and GM is closed. The historical buildings and vibrant downtown St. Catharines that I remember from my childhood fell into disrepair and poor redevelopment.  Recently, Brock University set sights on the downtown and built its large school of fine arts and performing arts in the old haircloth factory.  We went to the opening in the fall 2015.  Things are picking up and there are many restaurants for young people.  It seems there is a large vegan crowd at the university as there was a street vendor selling vegan hot dogs yesterday.