Jan 25 2024 - We Didn't Start the Fire

 

That song - We Didn't Start the Fire - is one of the songs we hear in Aquafit each week.  The acoustics in the high-ceiling pool resemble a church's.  Everyone sings along to their favourite songs, particularly the choruses and the backup vocals.  This is one of the songs that gets a lot of attention, along with Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline.  The Cool Down song is Hallelujah, which seems odd to me.  Everyone singing Hallelujah,  like a church moment.  It seems unusual to me that Billy Joel wrote We Didn't Start the Fire.  The story of the song is listed as this:  "Billy Joel wrote the song 'We Didn't Start the Fire' as a response to a comment about how much harder it was growing up in the 1980s as opposed to the 1950s. He wrote the lyrics before the music and included the song on his 1989 album Storm Front." What did Joel say about the melody of his song?  "It's really not much of a song ... If you take the melody by itself, terrible. Like a dentist drill." And it likely is the cover by Fall Out Boy released in 2023 that we hear in the class.  Wikipedia says it received negative critical reception.The song was once again brought to the forefront, and modern critics panned even the original song as one of Joel's worst in his entire catalog. All those old folks doing exercises in the YMCA pool just don't seem to agree.   And maybe opinion will change as we experience more fires around the globe with climate change.  It seems like the climate change anthem chorus now.

Here's another of the Arbutus bark close-ups.  Now that I've lost Topaz filters, I have to create special colour effects myself.  It seems to be going well.  I was able to really intensify the two colours on the left - the blue and green-yellow.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 14 2024 - Illiberally

 

What is it to be conservative?  averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.  (in a political context) favouring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas. What is it to be illiberal?   opposed to liberal principles; restricting freedom of thought or behaviour.  narrow-minded; prejudiced; bigoted; intolerant. not generous; mean. How does one distinguish between holding socially traditional ideas and restricting freedom of thought or behaviour?  The notion of tradition means that there is a dominant group: based on a way of thinking, behaving, or doing something that has been used by the people in a particular group, family, society, etc., for a long time.  I got to wondering whether there is a slide into political illiberalism from conservatism? And the answer from Wikipedia on the topic of illiberal democracy is this:   According to a 2020 study by the V-Dem Institute, the Republican Party has become more illiberal and populist in the last decade with a large increase under the leadership of Donald Trump.   I guess I am a few years behind in this trend:  the Guardian headline from 2021 is The Republican party is now an explicitly illiberal party. The Economist says that at the Republican party has lurched towards populism and illiberalism.  That was in 2020. There are many headlines and opinion pieces on this topic starting in 2020.  Time Magazine says:  First, we need to understand the urgency of the problem. By international standards, the current Republican Party is an illiberal anti-democratic nativist global outlier, with positions more extreme than France’s National Rally, and in line with the Germany’s AfD, Hungary’s Fidesz, Turkey’s AKP and Poland’s PiS, according to the widely respected V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute.  That was in 2021. That's my brief politics 101 seminar for a January Sunday morning.

This is Arbutus tree bark.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

News of the Weird

There is a News of The Weird.  Here are two recent stories:  You’re Screwed If you’ve experienced one (or more) flat tires in Sherburne County, Minn., over the last few weeks, News of the Weird is now able to tell you why. Jeffrey Caouette, 63, of Elk River admitted to authorities in late August that he had purchased 55 pounds of sheetrock screws (that’s more than 12,000 screws) and scattered them on local roads to “slow down” a person he believed was in a relationship with his ex-girlfriend. Specifically, KSTP reported, he put the screws on the road where he believed the man lived and on the roads between that house and the ex-girlfriend’s house, among others. The arrest complaint notes that Big Lake police have received more than 100 reports of damage from the screws, including to three of their own vehicles. Caouette was charged with first-degree property damage.  Eye of the Beholder In downtown Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, someone left a plate of macaroni and cheese, complete with fork, sitting atop a steel road barrier on Tuesday, Aug. 27, which caught the interest of a Reddit poster. No one knew where it came from or if someone would be back to retrieve it, but a day later, an anonymous citizen made it into an art installation, reported CTV News, by adding a museum-like tag beside it: Abandoned Snack (2019)—macaroni and sundried tomato on ceramic—Unknown Artist, reads the placard. Today we get a mid-shot of the Arbutus tree and its peeling bark.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com

Fear & Looting in Las Vegas

Isn't it ironic that 'fear and looting' retrieves 'fear and loathing' in google,  but that 'fear and loathing' is transformed to 'fear and looting' in spell checking.  That was in yesterday's story. There is such a thing as 'fear and looting' - in America, in Peru, in Egypt, the French Caribbean, in St. Martin, ini Johannesburg, and 'sex' is added to the article about stories of the Blitz.  One can play Fear & Looting at casinos as well. Is there anything to loot in Las Vegas?  Supposedly the Looting in Las Vegas article is about the 9% room tax to fund the convention centre and that there shouldn't be such a tax.  Then there is a more intriguing article about casino owner, Ted Binion's murder and the looting of his $3.5 billion coin and ingot collection buried in underground vaults. Real looting certainly happens in Egypt.  The underground global economy of illicit antiquities has been estimated at $2 billion per year. Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama counted 10,000 looting pits using high-resolution imagery from space.  She has done all kinds of discovery with satellite imagery - she used satellite imagery to detect possible remains of a Norse/Viking presence at Point Rosee, Newfoundland.  Parcak is an Egyptologist, and has been documenting tombs and collecting images and GPS coordinates to assemble a database to answer questions about ancient Egyptian life. National Geographic partially funds Parcak's work for the database. Her discoveries include the tombs at Lisht. She was  recognized with the 2018 Lowell Thomas award and is a 2016 TED Prize winner.  She has helped locate 17 lost pyramids, more than 1,000 tombs and more than 3,100 potential ancient settlements in Egypt.  Egypt's Minister of Antiquities denies these numbers. Her website says: "She aims to revolutionize how modern archaeology is done altogether, by creating a global network of citizen explorers, opening field schools to guide archaeological preservation on the ground, developing an archaeological institute, and even launching a satellite designed with archaeology in mind".  Here's her website HERE.  She invites us to become an explorer. My recent explorations on holiday were focused on Arbutus tree bark.  Here are a few of them.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com