Aug 12 2024 - The Rest of August

 

Seems like time to relax or maybe get ready for September when "things start" and  "gear up".  But for now - the middle of August - it will be the CNE in Toronto.  And what is the food news this year?  They are not telling yet.  The Ex starts in a few days so nothing has been announced.   They are highlighting past dishes - squid-ink Korean corndogs, ketchup and mustard ice cream - that was in 2022. Remember rainbow grilled cheese? What about the pickle lemonade.  These were from 2019.   There is a Food Truck Frenzy planned for 2024. It is paired with a Craft Beer Fest. Food Trucks have crazy names:   Philthy Philly Cheesesteak   Cheese Headz   Starving Artist Waffles   What a Jerk  Tuts Egyptian Street Food Compared to restaurants, food trucks have the edge on names:  Burger beast, Nibble nomad, flavour wagon, Rolling dough, Wandering wok.  You can get away with all kinds of fun names.   Here's a picture from a previous CNE Food Truck Frenzy and it looks like a  frenzy.      There's nothing like a canoe on a Northern lake.This is the sort of activity for August.

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Aug 7 2023 - So Many Cigars

 

Our Churchill ghost story yesterday included a cigar and whiskey.  The cigar and whiskey were considered attached to Churchill.  I thought there must be good Churchill cigar jokes. i get these notions wrong as often as I get them right.  So mostly I was wrong - there are lots of quotes but not much fun.  Here's the one that did make me think of a young Churchill: A salesman walked up to the door of a house and knocked. A young boy opened the door, smoking a cigar and holding a glass of scotch in his hand. The salesman asked, “Excuse me son... Are either of your parents home?” The little boy said, “What the heck do YOU think?” So how many cigars would he have smoked to always be smoking a cigar?  “The number of cigars he smoked is truly extraordinary,” says Fox, whose company sold its first cigars in 1787. Churchill was a client of the store (then called Robert Lewis) at London’s 19 St. James Street. Fox has handwritten ledgers, telegrams and other records that document that the soldier/statesman bought hundreds of thousands of cigars there. During one six-month stretch in 1964—the year before he died—Churchill bought 825 cigars: 250 in April, 275 cigars in June and 100 per month in July, August and September. “It was a pretty consistent pattern of what he was buying,” says Fox. And that wasn’t the only shop supplying him with cigars. “He was doing business with a lot of cigar stores,” says Fox, “but we were one of his largest suppliers.” “There was never a big, huge auction of cigars at the end of Churchill’s life. It wasn’t as if he was buying to collect,” says Fox. “He was buying to consume.” A box of cigars once owned by Sir Winston—along with the Romeo y Julietas it contained—is on display at Fox’s shop in London, under glass, along with a cigar case once carried by the Prime Minister.  This picture is one of my interpretations of Beamsville's August Restaurant's sign.

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Aug 30 2020 - The End of August is No Joke

 

The End of August.  This is a time of year.  Pivotal.  Summer's end, Autumn's beginning. Google doesn't retrieve very much: There's one song by Yanni.  There are no companies named End of August, no movies, no video games, no websites named endofaugust.com.  No restaurants or clothing companies.  Not enough ads for Google on this topic. With all the COVID related end of August announcements, it is hard to have any of these bittersweet ideas: back-to-school isn't the same this year as any time in the past.  Autumn in the past is full of new things - new schedules, schools, hobbies, social groups - all kinds of things 'start up' in September.     We're waiting to see if we can go into a building with more than 10 people.  I started exercising at the Y last week, and it will be outdoors for the near-term.     August turns out to be a great month for jokes. I went into the ocean of jokes on the Internet. Q: On the first day of school, what did the teacher say her three favorite words were? A: June, July & August. The doctor has given me two months to live. I've chosen August and December, because I like summer but don't want to miss Christmas. I celebrate Halloween in August.  When you show up at someone's door at night in August with a mask on, you get better stuff. A guy had an abusive girlfriend named Lorraine. Lorraine didn't know her boyfriend was cheating on her with a lovely girl named Clearly. In August Lorraine died. At the funeral, People wondered why the guy wasn't sad, and why he was so happy.  When they asked him why he was so happy at the funeral he sang..." I can see Clearly now, Lorraine is gone !" For Justin Bieber haters, please respect him as I owe him my life. Last year in August, I had been in a coma for 6 months. Then one day my nurse turned on the radio and his songs were playing. So i woke up and turned it off. Paddy had long heard the stories of an amazing family tradition. It seems that his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been able to walk on water on their 18th birthday.  On that special day, they'd each walked across the lake to the pub on the far side for their first legal drink.  So when Paddy's, 18th birthday came around, he and his pal Mick, took a boat out to the middle of the lake, Paddy, stepped out of the boat ... and nearly drowned!  Mick just barely managed to pull him back into the boat and safety.  Furious and confused, Paddy, went to see his grandmother.  'Grandma,' he asked, "Tis me 18th birthday, so why can't I walk 'cross the lake like me farder, his farder, and his farder before him?"  Granny looked deeply into Paddy's, troubled brown eyes and said, "Because ye farder, ye grandfarder and ye great-grandfarder were all born in January, when the lake is frozen, and ye were born in August, ya bloody idiot!" Swoosh to the end of August!

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Joking Around August

August is 3rd from the bottom of least favourite months.  Can you imagine not liking a month that can have extra weekends? August 2014 had 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. The Chinese call it 'Silver pockets full'.  The myth goes that this only happens every 823 years, but it is closer to every 11 years.  Chinese and many Asian cultures believe that this is the month to be grateful and appreciate the abundance you have while sharing what you have with others. this opens your pockets to receive more - thus the idea of pockets full of silver. At the other end of the spectrum, this comes from funny-jokes.com: This month's winner of loser of the month has to go to Mr Trevor Doyle who apparently fell asleep on the bus that was returning him to his open prison near Arklow, in the south of Ireland.  He became concerned that the bus would get him to the prison too late and he would miss the deadline for the end of his weekend release.  What did he do - he stole a car to get him back in time reports Jon Henley in the Guardian Diary. I think these two retrievals highlight August's reputation. These are the results of a search for "august jokes."   Here's Lilium Lancifolium. It isn't native to North America, but is long-lived and enduring.  Like peonies and lilacs, these were planted in farm garden and remained for decades. These are the ones with the little black bulbils up the stems.

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July 31st Last Day of Summer - really?

It seems true, doesn't it, that July 31st is the last day of summer.  We know that August will bring "Back to School" ad campaigns.  We are eternally going back to school regardless of our ages. So August has become an in-between month.  In the gardening realm, there aren't any garden tours.  Most garden societies don't have an August meeting.  Most of the garden centres have reduced stock and hours. The general state of things can be seen in the August celebrations:  sandwich month foot health month national catfish month romance awareness month national water quality month I found a 'get ready for kindergarten month'. What was notable in August each year was the arrival of the Eaton's Catalogue.  Janet and I would look at every page and decide on our favourite items amongst the products available.  Well, we didn't exactly look at every page.  We looked at all the ones related to house, home and apparel. This had no relationship to purchasing. Things were not often purchased from the catalogue, only rarely.  And definitely not by us.  But it became a consumer's bible, training us from an early age to discern between product design, features and price.  That now seems like a lot of training in making simple choices and decisions. I took this picture while visiting with the Buffalo Walk front porch gardener in yesterday's picture.  She was as surprised as I was to see this.

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From Summer to Winter

The last day of August seems as significant as the last day of the year.  In fact, there is a place on Earth where the temperatures today can be as cold as Christmas right now. Where is it?  Oymyakon, Russia.  I looked it up and today it is actually 19 degrees Celsius.  So where is the coldest place right now? I found a chart of the hottest and coldest.  There is a place in the Antartica that is currently -110.6 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end of the scale, the hottest place is Basrah-Hussen in Iraq at 119.3 degrees Fahrenheit.  I found these at the eldoradoweather.com site.  Antarctica isn't a place to most of us.  One can only imagine scientists living there.  The only visitors we can imagine are tourists.  That pretty well describes Antarctica.  It doesn't have a spring or fall - just summer and winter. It has no commercial industries, no towns or cities and no permanent residents.  There are numerous scientific bases - 65 in total. You can read about it here in Cool Antarctica.  So whoever is there now may be able to say that summer is turning to winter.   At the opposite end of the weather spectrum, things are quite different.  People live in Basra-Hussen in Iraq.  It is an ancient city.  It is one of the ports from which Sinbad the Sailor journeyed.  During the summer months, it is consistently one of the hottest cities on the planet, where temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit.  Add to that high humidity sometimes exceeding 90% because of tis proximity to the marshy Persian Gulf.   So I guess heat wins over cold in human habitation. A few pictures from Grimsby Beach's Painted Ladies today.  There's whimsy and fun on the Lake - no worries about the hottest or coldest there.

The Thought Express

What are racing thoughts? What speed should thoughts be?  Wikipedia tells us that racing thoughts is an expression that refers to the rapid thought patterns that often occur in manic, hypomanic or mixed episodes.  And I just expected to find out that sometimes we think fast and other times slower.  Instead the articles are about calculating how fast we think. The website "The Conversation" (Academic rigour, journalistic flair) has an article on the speed of thought. This article says that a given thought can be generated and acted on in less than 150 ms.  This article identifies a 'thought': "For our purposes, a “thought” will be defined as the mental activities engaged from the moment sensory information is received to the moment an action is initiated. This definition necessarily excludes many experiences and processes one might consider to be “thoughts.”" "In sum, although quantifying a single “speed of thought” may never be possible, analyzing the time it takes to plan and complete actions provides important insights into how efficiently the nervous system completes these processes, and how changes associated with movement and cognitive disorders affect the efficiency of these mental activities." Here's a great question on the internet: Is the speed of my thoughts/imagination, faster than the speed of light? And here's a fact: According to a particular study it was seen that close to 99% of the thoughts in a human mind tend to be repetitive, with just 1% left for any original or new thought. We're into the month of August and I found this  abstract interpretation of the restaurant August's sign, along with some abstracts from a restaurant ceiling in Toronto.

August Vacations

I don't think of August as a travel month.  I get the impression the travel industry thinks the same:  the articles give a few examples, and then skip ahead to September and autumn.  TripAdvisor's Travelers' Choice Awards says that the best vacations in the world are: Bali London Paris Rome New York City Barcelona Prague Phuket Dubai These all look like expensive vacations.  Back in 2012, the Globe and Mail had an article on how much is too much to spend on a yearly vacation? The article says that Canadian should allocate no more than 4 per cent of their after-tax income to yearly vacations. According to American Express, the average vacation expense per person in the United States is $1,145 per person or $4,580 for a family of four.  "In the States, financial experts suggest that the average family vacation costs between 5-10% of total income.  If your family makes $40,000 per year then experts say your yearly family vacation budget should average between $2,000-$4000." That's double what the Canadian article recommended to Canadians. It doesn't seem like there's an intersection between a trip to London and taking pictures of clouds as vacation activities.