Oct 30 2021 - Adele Before and After

 

Adele is releasing a new album  - titled 30.  Her last was in 2015 and was titled 25.  Her album 21 became the world's biggest-selling album of the 21st century.  To say she's a leading artist with many awards is a factual understatement. She's the composer of Skyfall, the James Bond film music.   But what is the big story that everyone wants to talk about?   Her weight loss which got noticeable in 2019.   It is significant - 100 lbs over two years.   Health experts are 'wading in' over her diet and exercise regime.  This gets them lots of attention.  The Daily Mail in the UK is representative of the kinds of coverage she's gotten: "Why does Adele's face look SO different following her weight loss? Expert reveals how slimming makes the skin lose volume and the eyes and nose become more prominent Exclusive: Aeshetic expert  revealed how Adele's reported seven stone weight changed her face by allowing her features to become more prominent Leading aesthetics trainer Dr Chike said the loss of volume affects your features Dietician Kate Llewellyn-Waters explained her retained glow could be a result of a nutrient dense diet packed with antioxidants, high in anti-inflammatory foods  Adele reportedly lost seven stone on the 'green juice and 1000 calories-a-day" "Adele has lost the roundness around the cheeks and the jaw line, her features are more sharp and angular - charactersitic signs of a loss of facial volume and fat.  Her crow's feet have become more pronounced and her nasolabial folds have become deeper - these are all the signs of major weight loss. " Vogue's coverage has a self-help theme:  Adele's 7 weight loss secrets uncovered as she reveals truth behind her transformation. I appreciate the last one:  ignore the critics.  You can find lots of lots of pictures of her both ways - she's extremely photogenic with a kind of glow.     Here are the two Finalists in the Betterphoto contest for September.  We'll see if they get any further.  The winners get announced the last day of the month.

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Sep 1 2021 - Filthy Rich

 

Which question is more interesting?  Where did the expression filthy rich come from? What does filthy mean in slang? What's another word for filthy rich? How can I get filthy rich? Isn't that a quaint set of questions.   The combination of "filthy" and "rich" cannot be complimentary. It would have to mean getting rich by dishonourable means or worse.  To be covered in filth, or to be "stinking".  These are not good adjectives. The word lucre, in and around the 1400’s meant money or riches, but pointed to it negatively. The filthy part in this expression points out to something that has been done unduly. Foul or filthy lucre eventually changed to ‘filthy rich’.   In the 1900’s the phrase became more popular than it was originally. In 1929, an Ohio newspaper used the phrase to show the get rich quick attitudes that prevailed back then.  Today filthy rich is no longer used in just a negative way, it could be referring to the magnitude of richness too.  In fact, it isn't used much except as the name of a Fox series that was cancelled after a single season.  Here's the quote from the last episode: "Being rich makes you filthy, Margaret - and I was very rich."   Its second occurrence since 2020 is a documentary:  "Jeffrey Epstein:  Filthy Rich."  Between the two, they hold court on the Google retrievals for more than 10 pages.  Only Esquire has a headline from 2020:  "Jeff Bezos now worth US$200 billion, becomes filthiest of the filthy rich."   If filthy rich got overrun as a headline expression, what is the expression now?  There is an unending call to do things that take a lot of money so I would expect to find lots of articles on excessive spending by the far-too-weathly - things like trips to space.  So the headlines? We've moved on to mega-rich, super rich, and uber rich.  Filthy rich still shows up in the body of the articles. And what about you? You can go to the Times of India HERE to find out "How Rich are You?" However, you will find out where your position is in the households of India.  It would be very fun if it  give categories such as well-off, rich, really rich, Jeff Bezos rich.  That would be a good game. Here's Lilycrest Gardens today, and two finalists in the Betterphoto contest for July.

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May 29 2021 - What Cost $1 Billion? Crazy Stuff

 

Do self-made billionaires buy different things than other rich people? I wonder that with all the tech billionaires.  It doesn't seem so when you go through the items that you would "never imagine" excessive amounts of money buy. The headlines (and there are lots of them) are consistently full of superlatives:  10 of the weirdest things 16 craziest 13 strange 20 insane bizarre spending 15 outrageous These adjectives seem "outrageous" at first, but then reading through the lists, it seems that the superlatives are accurate.  Such strange and amazing things people create and buy. What caught my eye was the inclusion of Bill Gates in the list of outrageous things bought by the rich. What did Bill Gates buy? "Bill Gates and Leonardo da Vinci have a lot in common: They're both math geniuses who also changed history. It's only fitting, then, that the Microsoft founder would be interested in the musings of the original Renaissance man. In 1994, Gates spent $30.8 million to own the Codex Leicester, a 72-page manuscript that da Vinci compiled in the early 16th century, complete with the master polymath's diagrams, writings, sketches and ideas for future inventions." What was the cost:  $30 million in 1994 That seems modest in comparison to a $1.2 billion super yacht, a $1 billion house, and a $5 billion car collection - the three top items on every list.  In case you want to daydream (remember that's a relaxing activity), there are lists of things that cost 1 billion dollars.  For example:  A baseball team or the Solomon Islands (a country).   This is a Finalist in the BP contest this month - the 1st and 2nd place winners have yet to be announced, so it could move up.

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Apr 24 2020 - Catching Up on Winners

One of the fulfillment sites for my pictures is Redbubble, and they recently removed Groups from the site.  Groups had functionality to bring artists work together into portfolios based on themes.  The host would curate features on a regular basis and showcase member work.  Contests were a regular part of groups as well. This was interesting and fun to submit images to groups to see which ones would be featured and how many times.  With groups gone, I have moved this kind of activity over to Fine Art America, another fulfillment site I belong to.  This is supposedly the largest site - hundreds of thousands of artists and thousands of groups.  In comparison Redbubble is international and now oriented to graphic artists.  Fine Art America is US-based and oriented to fine art and photography.  Both print and deliver one's images on a wide variety of products with outstanding quality. With bad weather keeping me from the garden, I have spent a little time on my website, hosted by BetterPhoto.  What I liked about BetterPhoto is the monthly contest, and one could enter images every day and at the end of each month, winners are selected.  Going through my images, I see winning badges in recent monthly contests.  I have focused on other things and had not been checking on the winners anymore. First is a tulip image from December 2019, a Finalist.  It's a pleasant image with great details and clarity on the tulip petals, along with relatively good shapes of the leaves pointing up, and then contrasting vivid blur in the background. A favourite orchard image that was a Finalist in January, probably thanks to the beautiful Skylum sky I added. What makes it a favourite, though, are the overarching branches in the foreground outstretched as arms inviting you into the view. The Antithirum trio was a second place winner in January. These are wonderful flowers - very thick and veined, and with good colour variation.  With work in Photoshop and Topaz filters, the background is mostly removed just leaving lines of some leaves, so that the image is also a study in the movement of curves.  The heart shape of Antithirum flowers gives it an emotional element as well and the angle of the shot with their placement makes an interesting story.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://www.blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

White is Right

Porcelain turns white after being fired.  So toilets are white.  They are porcelain as it is extremely sturdy and easy to keep clean. Did you know that there are pubs in England that play Black Adder in the toilets?  I was able to find a Black Adder toilet quote. Red Baron: 'How lucky you English are to find the toilet so amusing. For us, it is a mundane and functional item. For you it is the basis of an entire culture.' The Red Baron proceeds to tell Black Adder that a fate that is worse than death awaits him:   von Richthoven: But, instead, an even worse fate awaits you. Tomorrow, you will be taken back to Germany . . . Black Adder: Here it comes! von Richthoven: . . . to a convent school, outside Heidelberg, where you will spend the rest of the war teaching the young girls home economics. Usually I get an email from betterphoto when my pictures are finalists and then winners. I was doing some work on my portfolio on betterphoto and found out that I'd won a Second Place in last month's contest, along with a Finalist for the collage of the Canadian flag. Here's the Second Place picture - little orchids at Longwood.

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Lily Lantern - Betterphoto Contest Winner

Lily Lantern is a second place winner in the flower category of Betterphoto's December contest.  The following three pictures are finalists.  You can see all the winners HERE.  Here's my question for today. If you listen to JazzFM you know these lyrics: "I hear babies crying, I watch them grow They'll learn much more than I'll never know And I think to myself what a wonderful world Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world" The voice you would likely associate with this is Louis Armstrong.  He's singing "What A Wonderful World" as though he's still with us. The songwriters are George Douglas / George David Weiss / Bob Thiele.   The song was initially offered to Tony Bennett, who turned it down.Then it was offered to Louis Armstrong. George Weiss recounts in the book Off the Record: Songwriters on Songwriting by Graham Nash that he wrote the song specifically for Louis Armstrong. Weiss was inspired by Armstrong's ability to bring people of different races together. The song was not initially a hit in the United States, where it sold fewer than 1,000 copies because ABC Records head Larry Newton did not like the song and therefore did not promote it. It reached number 1 and was the biggest selling album in the U.K. It gradually became a standard all over the world and is much used in movies and television. What I wondered about was how much "babies will learn that we'll never know".  In the song it is a sentiment, but now it is a fact.  In terms of fact Buckminster Fuller created the Knowledge Doubling Curve.  He noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century.  By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years.  On average human knowledge is now doubling every 13 months, and IBM predicts that it will double every 12 hours.  I wonder if this is quantity rather than quality.  Whichever way it lands, it is true that there is information and knowledge today that wasn't in existence 50 years ago.  To get an idea, I checked out Good Housekeeping's list of 40 things we didn't have 40 years ago - it's HERE.

Betterphoto Winner

Wake Up on the Bright Side What were the best April Fool's jokes in the news yesterday?  According to the bbq they included  1. Trump buys Irish high-rise If you believe the Irish Times, Dublin is to get its very own "Trump Tower". "Trump Dublin is expected to be completed by the end of 2018," it exclusively revealed.  Extra credit should go to whoever completed the joke with a fake tweet from Donald Trump: "Bought a small tower in Dublin, Ireland. We are going to build an awesome hotel in Dublin. It will be totally great. Love Ireland! Great country! #trumpdublin". 2. Russian hackers on demand Inspired by claims that Kremlin-sponsored hackers tried to rig the US election, Russia's foreign ministry shared "a new answering machine for Russian diplomatic missions abroad" on Facebook. 3. Germany to go GMT The scamps at the UK's German embassy tweeted that Germans would shortly vote to "leave, or remain in" Central European Time (CET). "A replica of the Shepherd Gate Clock in Greenwich would be placed atop the World Time Clock in Alexanderplatz, Berlin, in a frivolous symbolic gesture," the writer deadpanned. The clues were there for linguists, however - the surname of the "government spokesperson" quoted - Frau Sommerzeit - translates as "Summertime". Our images today were the two that placed in last month's betterphoto contest - the Magnolias were second place, and the calla lily a finalist. From Betterphoto:  With over 3900 entries in the contest, it is a big honor to be selected among the winners. To see your winning image - Spring Reverie - and the other excellent winning photos, visit:http://www.betterphoto.com/contest/winners/1702.asp View this email in your browser

Better photo 2nd Place Winner - Dezi!

One of the most intriguing, yet easy to accomplish adventures from yesterday's top 100 was to: Send a message in a bottle So I found the 10 most famous floating note discoveries and here's what the article says: "People have been putting messages in bottles for much longer than a century: in 310 BC, Greek philosopher Theophrastus put sealed bottles into the sea as part of an experiment to prove the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean. Oceanography is a common reason drift bottles are thrown overboard, but there are also some romantic and surprising stories of sending messages across the sea throughout history.  I've copied the top 3 most famous floating note discoveries: 1. FOUND BY: Konrad Fischer in the Baltic Sea, 2014 SENT FROM: Richard Platz in the Baltic Sea, 1913 TIME AT SEA: 101 years A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago, believed to be the world's oldest, was presented to the sender's granddaughter, a Hamburg museum has said. A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic Sea off the northern city of Kiel in March, Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg said. Mr Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to determine, based on the address, that it was 20-year-old baker's son Richard Platz who threw the bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913. 2, FOUND BY: Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper near the Shetland Isles, 2012 SENT FROM: Captain C. Hunter Brown near the Shetland Isles, 1914 TIME AT SEA: 97 years and 309 days A drift bottle released out to sea on June 10, 1914 by Captain C. Hunter Brown was recovered by UK fisherman Andrew Leaper almost 98 years later, on April 12, 2012. Brown was a scientist at the Glasgow School of Navigation studying the currents of the North Sea, and the bottle was one of 1,890 released on June 10, 1914. It is the current Guinness World Record holder for oldest message in a bottle. The message inside read: "Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office. You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea." The bottle was discovered 9.38 nautical miles from the position it was originally deployed. 3. FOUND BY: Matea Medak Rezic in Croatia, 2013 SENT BY: Jonathon (identity unknown) from Nova Scotia, Canada, 1985 TIME AT SEA: 28 years A 23-year-old kite surfer, Matea Medak Rezic, stumbled across a half-broken bottle while clearing debris from a Croatian beach at the mouth of the Neretva river in the southern Adriatic. Inside the bottle was a message from Jonathan, from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, who had written it 28 years earlier, honouring his promise to write to a woman named Mary. The message reads: "Mary, you really are a great person. I hope we can keep in correspondence. I said I would write. Your friend always, Jonathon, Nova Scotia, 1985." The bottle would have had to have travelled approximately 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean, entered the Mediterranean Sea, and then drifted into the Adriatic Sea. Jonathan and Mary's identity, and how the two knew each other, is unknown. Looking across the Twelve Mile Creek bridge towards Port Dalhousie, our 2nd place winner in the BetterPhoto contest.

Submitted for your approval - June is a Summer Month

June is astrologically in spring, and meteorologically in summer.  Perhaps gardeners are in the meteorological camp.  It is hard for me to consider the current garden a spring one.  Peonies, irises and lilacs all say summer to me.  The early roses are blooming.  Wisteria, laburnum, the Carolina Silverbell have finished.  This morning, I found some blossoms on my tiny Styrax - also known as Japanese Snowbell tree. I got to smell the sweet scent that they are known for. For those who watched television in the 1950's, there was a wonderful expression in Rod Serling's series The Twilight Zone.  It was: "Submitted for Your Approval".  I find out that it was only heard in three episodes.  It is a phrase that most of us associate with the series. This phrase came to my mind as I looked at my Finalist image of a tulip in the Betterphoto's April contest.   For me, a tulip embodies spring.  Having tulips in the garden in June seems out of synch with the season we're in - meteorologically early summer.  The phrase "submitted for your approval" came to mind.  It is an invitation to consider that we've arrived into summer.

Photo Finalist March 2016

There are bees boxes in every orchard that I looked at yesterday and I spent quite a bit of time looking at orchards.  I have something in common with bees -  I can imagine the experience a bee has with the thousands and millions of blossoms.  It is a good thing bees love to be busy.  Today's image is a Finalist in this month's Betterphoto (BP) contest.  The contest has 6400 entries each month with just under 600 finalist photos.  There are some remarkable winning images - here's the link to the contest results.  There's an 'all time' contest underway there, and I've been getting notifications of pictures placing in the Staff Favourites, etc. So something to look forward to there.  Participants on Betterphoto are primarily U.S.-based. So there are mostly images from the  United States - each day the scenes vary across the country, giving one the experience of a living travelogue.   Redbubble, another photography site, originated in Australia, so there are many Australian members and we get to see their distinctive landscape.  Right now we we move through Spring and they move through Autumn, so there's a contrasting experience in the seasons and landscape. I think of Marshall McLuhan'a expression 'The Global Village' and realize this is it.

Betterphoto 2nd Place Winner

Betterphoto's contest for February had 4700 entries.  My image of Peacock Feathers is one of the Second Place Winners this month int eh Details and Macro category.  Here's a link to all the contest winners. Looking at the calendar, what might we expect today on April Fool's Day? Here are two food jokes offered up on the internet: 1. Buy oreos for the office - then laugh at the bewildered and disappointed faces when they realize you've filled their cookies with toothpaste. 2. Replace the custard filling in donuts with mayonnaise. If you are inspired to participate and looking for jokes, this link has lots of possibilities here. View this email in your browser