Aug 2 2020 - Paw Paw

How much overall forest cover remains in Southern Ontario? (  ) 25% (  ) 10% (  )  5% From the Quick Facts About Carolinian Canada below, you can see that it is just over 10% for forest cover.  I've heard estimates of less than 5% for native Carolinian forest left. 25% of Canada's population on 0.25% of its area More endangered and rare species than any other life zone in Canada A great diversity of wildlife of all kinds, including many species not found elsewhere in Canada. Less than 2% of the landscape is in public ownership 73% of the landscape is in highly productive agriculture. Forest cover has been reduced from 80% to 11.3% Forest interior has been reduced to just 2% Wetlands reduced from 28.3% to 5.1% The Paw Paw tree was once a prolific Carolinian fruit tree. I've seen it in a few gardens in Niagara.  Here's a conservation effort to increase its numbers: "As a forest restoration ecologist, Ben Porchuk walks the talk. His home garden is like a museum of rare and endangered Ontario plants. He has flowers and trees of every size and description, from the ultra rare cucumber tree (one of the last 100 of its kind) to a chinquapin oak. Almost all of them are native to the Carolinian zone, a thin humid sliver of the province that stretches across Ontario's southernmost fringe.  Among some of his most prized species is the pawpaw – North America's largest native tree fruit. "The taste is out of this world," Porchuk said. "It's like a banana, mango, custard combination."  Porchuk works for Carolinian Canada, a charity dedicated to preserving, protecting and restoring Ontario's Carolinian forest. Hundreds of years ago pawpaws grew in abundance in the Carolinian. Because of its rich taste, Indigenous people planted them near their communities and along many of their trade routes.  Today, the tree only grows in about a dozen places and is one of the rarest species in Canada.  "They're extremely limited now and extremely rare," Porchuk said, noting today's population of the tree is less than half of a per cent of its size before Europeans arrived.  In fact, it was Europeans who nearly wiped them out. Porchuk said settlers torched the landscape, clearing out vast sections of rare Carolinan forest, whether they intended to farm the land or not.  "They wanted to change the climate to have it less humid and warmer and drier to have less mosquitoes," he said. Here's the Betterphoto Finalist from last month's contest.

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The Henrys are coming for Deluxe, Ultraluxe and More

Treasure Islands promise the riches of wealth and that means being able to purchase luxury.  Owning luxurious things - that signifies reaching high achievements, success, or rank.  There is super deluxe and ultra deluxe to distinguish even further levels of quality.   First world people keep getting wealthier so there have to be more levels to climb to the top. In simple terms "luxurious" seems to be about how much it costs.  The most expensive "luxurious" yacht is $4.5 billion US.  The most expensive parking spots are in Manhattan for $1 million US. Can a parking spot be luxurious?  From the pictures shown, it appears it can be - valets waiting to open the door. Watches have symbolized luxury for centuries. The values of the most luxurious watches are in the $25 to $55 million range.  And prestige watches come with provenance - Paul Newman's Rolex Daytona sold for $17.8 million - only one in the world. Take hotels.  Sleeping and eating can easily be understood as luxurious experiences.   And status experiences are replacing luxury goods as a status symbol.  What about the most luxurious hotels in the entire world?  How many are there?  Are there 10, 20, 50? It looks like there are a few hundred - maybe 200 - 600 hotels. Rather than looking up each item, could we go to a luxury living website and find out what the top luxury items are?  The top blogs and websites are HERE.  And what for the future? With the U.S. having the heaviest concentration of millionaires - 41% - over 17 millionaires live in the U.S. This is followed by China with 3.5 million, Japan 2.8 million and the U.K. with 2.4 million.  Forbes says these wealthy people will change luxury. The Forbes article says: "Looking across this vast generational cohort, defined by Pew as 73 million strong in 2019 and born between 1981 and 1996, there is one segment in that cohort that is most important for luxury brands: the HENRYs (high-earners-not-rich-yet). With higher incomes relative to the majority of the population, between $100k and $250k in the U.S., HENRYs hold the space above the bottom 75th percentile but below the top 95th percentile, where luxury brand’s traditional ultra-affluent customers are found. Since true affluence comes with age, the millennials aged 23-to-38 in 2019 are only now beginning to hit their stride in terms of income and wealth."  This comes from Pamela N. Danziger whose first book was "Why People Buy Things They Don't Need" and has since written 8 more. our pictures today show the finalist winners from the Betterphoto contest last month.  They had a peeling paint contest category for the first time.  There's one that looks like a tree, another like angel wings, another is a pattern of locks, and finally I went to look at who came in first place - and it turns out to be one of my images.  It is the horizontal image  Ebb and Flow.  This was peeling paint on a cafe wall. Here it is on Betterphoto  HERE.

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.

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 - My Blue Flash Places 2nd in January contest

BetterPhoto Winners

2nd Place Digital Darkroom

Staff Favourite

Finalist in Flowers

BetterPhoto Winners    One of my favourite pictures won second place in the BetterPhoto January contest.  It's 'My Blue Flash' - I turned one of the lilies from Brian's Lilycrest Gardens Field into a blue lily, using software filters.  It placed second in the digital darkroom category.  Two more images placed in the contest - the pink dahlia placed as a staff favourite, and the Lotus image placed as a Finalist. I keep thinking the dahlia should place higher in the contest, and every month, I do some work on it and resubmit it.  It has to be that the judges don't like it as much as I do.  Never mind.

Frost Fantasy - A Betterphoto WInner

During the polar vortex in January there were unusual frost patterns on the conservatory greenhouse glass.  To me, these looked like fantasy gardens of plants reaching for the sun.

Here is the first place winner in the Betterphoto contest in January.