July 3 2024 - Twist Ties vs Plastic Clips...be it resolved

 

What is it that some bread has plastic clips and other bread has twist ties to close the plastic bag? "Our research showed moving to bag ties from clips was a cost-effective way to meet consumer preferences,” says David Margulies, a spokesman for Bimbo Bakeries, the mass-market baker that owns the Arnold brand. “So we made the switch during an equipment upgrade last May.” This is the bakery bag closure and reclosure market.  The plastic clip was invented in 1952.   "The twist-tie is less expensive, and it gives you a tighter closure, keeping your bread fresher,” says Mitch Lindsey, who’s been selling twist-tie machinery for Burford, the industry leader, for 30 years.  “And the bag is always secure inside the twist-tie. A lot of times you’ll see a bag that isn’t completely inside the plastic clip, and the clip can also damage or cut the bag.” Be it resolved The plastic clips have more post-bread uses than twist ties. Or is it:  Be it resolved The twist tie has more post-great uses than plastic clips.  Here is a combined list of post-bread uses: Are there any birthdays today.  Here's a Happy Birthday card,

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Mar 28 2023 - September is the time

 

The UN estimates there are around 385,000 birthdays each day around the world.  The top ten of birthdays is in September - the 9th is the most common, then the 12th and finally the 19th for the top 3.   Do you want to find out where your birthday falls in the list?  This is the calendar year with American births HERE.   The estimate is that 17.7 million people across the globe have a birthday each day.  One article tells me that would mean that 70.8 million eggs and 35.4 million cups of sugar would be needed to make a cake for every person every day. It seems to me that birthdays have evolved into a religious topic on the internet.  The questions seem to be about which religions do not allow birthday celebrations.  So it is easy to know who does not celebrate birthdays.  Jehovah's Witnesses - and that would be because of the pagan origins.  Everything is thrown in for them - Christmas, Easter, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and Halloween - probably everything. Highlighted is the country of Bhutan. It does not celebrate birthdays. The country believes that ‘’leading a happy life is much more important than how many years you’ve been alive on this planet.” They all turn one year older on January 1st every year. That's their simple solution.  On the opposite side of celebrations, the Japanese have many traditions starting with the birth of a baby.  Seven Days Old, One Month Old, One Hundred Days Old, One Year Old. And then there's the 7-5-3 - three lucky numbers in Japan.  This is an occasion to go to the Shrine on November 15th.  These are all described in this article HERE.    So wishing myself Happy Birthday along with the 384,999 babies joining the birthday throng today.  If I stuck to the U.S. it would be just under 12,000 new birthday cards to send out. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

pril 18 2022 - High Heels

 

High heels in 17th century Europe were associated with masculinity and high social status.  They began as a way of helping secure feet in stirrups. They have always been a way of appearing taller.      Industrialization made many more things possible.  So it is in the 20th century that shoe styles took off. The Second World War made pin-up images popular and they showcased high heels: High heels definitely took on a sultrier appearance. Women began sporting slingback heels, and higher and higher heels. Women’s footwear got that sleek update in the 1950s, when stilettos took off. A pin-up style photo of Joan Collins in white stiletto heels in 1957 still looks current today. The idea of shoes as a sex symbol took off, and the idea was that high heels could artificially increase a woman's femininity. Audrey Hepburn's Breakfast at Tiffany's outfit was completed with shoes named "kitten heels".  Princess Diana wore the "Princess  shoe".   How many types of heels are there? Here are a few: stacked heel continental heel setback heel cuban heel pantaloon heel angle heel  stiletto heels, and many more.  What do you think about high heel jokes?  There aren't very many and what's there is mostly profane, but this is the stand-out: The police chief asked, "Do you have any leads or suspects for the murder case?" The officer responded, "I'd like to interview the bartender wearing high heels and a leopard print dress." The chief frowned and said... "Please, just wear your police uniform."

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Sep 9 2021 - Birthdays and Anniversaries

 

This is the day of most birthdays in the planet.  So Happy Birthday wishes go out to many people today.   It could be millions of people! I wish my google searches were international and not North American focused today - that's a google challenge.  This is a very unhappy U.S. day of the anniversary of 9/11.  This event took almost 3,000 lives - which is not a huge number when it comes to catastrophes.  Compare that to Hurricane Katrina where almost 2,000 lives were lost, but that event pales in comparison.  9/11 has turned into the most catastrophic occasion in U.S. history in my lifetime.  The intensity of the event can be seen in the news that they are still pursuing and revealing the identifies of those killed - this is fresh news.  The search for bodies in Louisiana's Katrina was called off well before all of the bodies were recovered.   What a stark contrast is the reaction to nature's destruction compared to the destruction caused by radical Osama Bin Laden, motivated by  "naive beliefs" (according to the Britannica Encyclopedia).  Perhaps the sense of horror was made more severe by the nature of the event and the live coverage - the twin towers being hit and exploding.  Remember that being shown over and over?   It was concentrated, focused and intense.   It caused its own explosion of rage in the U.S. political-military leadership that cost an estimated $8 trillion, along with new levels of discrimination, racial profiling, and hate crimes in the U.S.  It is a sorry legacy that lives alongside the many poignant stories of loss of loved ones in the catastrophe.  So today is a solemn day with everyone remembering where they were and when they say the twin tower crash coverage, and then many observances in the U.S. over this event that changed its history and character. These pretty lilies come from the Lilycrest Gardens field - huge blooms, gorgeously scented.  They our this month's Happy Birthday card.

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Feb 17 2021 - Somewhere It's Spring

 

What happens in spring?  The snow drops start to flower.  What else? It's the start of baseball's spring training today. "Pitchers and catchers will report February 17th with full squads due five days later." Spring starts in February as long as we move further south in North America - Winterthur Museum and Gardens near Philadelphia has flowers in bloom - Snowdrops, Witch hazel, fragrant white winter Honeysuckle, and early Hellebores. Further south, to Texas there are Redbud trees, Mexican plums, Texas mountain laurel and others that start to come into bloom in February. Britain has a much earlier spring than we do, even though it is further north so it has lots in bloom.  In UK cities cherry trees are bursting with blooms, English bluebells are carpeting the woods, and wisteria fragrance is in the air. But today, the news is about the first British blooming of an Amazonian flower - Selenicereus witti, a cactus known as Moonflower.  It will bloom for nine hours.  It starts with a sweet honeysuckle smell and ends with an unpalatable stink.   We're only a few weeks away from spring in Canada.   Victoria's flower count starts March 3rd so is only two weeks away.  In 2020 the bloomingest community was Saanich and citizens counted over 45 million blossoms.  It's Gerry's birthday today and here's a picture of him from a few years ago in Cuba. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

MMMaple!

This is a big occasion - having a birthday this big is going to be fun.  The Stanley Cup will be on display in Rideau Hall in Ottawa today from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Stanley Cup Champions Mike Bossy, Paul Coffey, Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich, Bernie Parent and Bryan Trottier will be on-site from 2 p.m. to 3:45 p.m The public invitation: to take a picture of yourself with this oldest trophy, famous hockey players and the portrait of Lord Stanley in the background. Closer to home it is time to 'tap into spring' as the Sugarbush Maple Syrup Festival is on all over Ontario, Quebec and the North-Eastern U.S.  This is an emblematic crop  for us -  Agriculture Canada has developed a "flavour wheel" that details 91 unique flavours that can be present in maple syrup. These flavours are divided into 13 families: vanilla, empyreumatic (burnt), milky, fruity, floral, spicy, foreign deterioration or environment, maple, confectionery, plants forest-humus-cereals, herbaceous, or ligneous.  The questions that popped up for me were: Q Is maple syrup made in Europe? A Unusual -  sugar maples grow in north-east North America and production was developed by indigenous peoples.  North American Maple Syrup is exported to Europe for expatriate consumption. Q Why was it used by the abolitionists during the American Civil War instead of cane sugar and molasses? A Sugar and molasses were produced by slaves. Q Is the maple leaf on the Canadian flag a sugar maple? A Yes - that's the maple leaf we love so much. Q What about other types of maples -  can they produce maple syrup? A Yes - even the ubiquitous and weedy Manitoba maple, considered a scourge of urban gardens (despite being a native) can be tapped for syrup.  Like most maples it has half the syrup/sweetness of typical sugar maples. Even black walnut can be tapped. I've purchased birch syrup in the past.  There are 22 varieties of trees that can be tapped for syrup.  My Norway Maple out front is one of them.

Double Day

Here we are in 2017 and already a leap second was added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on December 31st 2016.  The  Earth's slowing rotation needed synchronizing.  A few things we can look forward to in 2017 according to cnn.com are:  Drones delivering food and maintaining inventory in Wal-Mart warehouses; an Italian surgeon planning to do the first head transplant; and milk made without cows.  In terms of anniversaries, it is 20 years since Diana died and a spring exhibition is planned of her most famous outfits. It is the 20th anniversary of the start of the Harry Potter novels.  Not an anniversary, but very notable is that the documents amassed by the JFK Records Act will be revealed to the public in October.  And don't forget that this is Canada's 150th birthday and the celebrations began on December 31st. The Mosaicanada display that was initially proposed for Niagara Falls will be in Ottawa.  These are large-scale sculptures made of plants.  OK the first spoiler alert of 2017 - the Mosaicanada site is French-only as it is actually situated in Gatineau, Quebec.  For those with January 1st birthdays, there are double wishes today. And we might as well start our Canada Birthday celebrations so we're well prepared for the July 1st day!

Your Favourite Day of the Year!

What's your favourite day of the year?  I would guess that for children it would be Christmas and their birthday. Halloween would be in the range too. I just read that another is 'any day I don't have to go to school' or the last day of school.  I saw another one that was humorous - Saturday and Sunday.  And today I read that the 'Dark Web' is linked to the terrorist attack in Nice. I hadn't heard the term before, so looked it up in Wikipedia: The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets, overlay networks which use the public Internet but which require specific software, configurations or authorization to access. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the Web not indexed by search engines, although sometimes the term "deep web" is confusingly used to refer specifically to the dark web. The services Wikipedia lists on these sites include: gambling, guns, abuse, porn, hacking, counterfeit, whistleblower, bitcoin, fraud, market, drugs.  Hacking hit close to home in June - a community services organizations in Grimsby was hacked and blackmail attempted with payment demanded in bitcoins. The organization refused. Too much to think about on a beautiful summer day with a great backyard picture to match.

The Birthday Paradox

The Birthday Paradox by Alan Bellows It was my birthday yesterday.  Here are a few highlights from the parade.  In the last picture, you can see the parade is over, and the clowns are resting in the tent. So to entertain you with Birthday trivia, Alan Bellows explains how the 'same birthday' stats work... Alan Bellows writes:  "I have never had a very good relationship with Mathematics. I used to think it was me... I thought that perhaps I was just a bit put off by Math's confident demeanor and superior attitude, and by its tendency to micromanage every tiny detail of my universe. But over time I have come to the realization that I'm not the source of the problem. Math, as it turns out, is out of its bloody mind. Consider the following example: Assuming for a moment that birthdays are evenly distributed throughout the year, if you're sitting in a room with forty people in it, what are the chances that two of those people have the same birthday? For simplicity's sake, we'll ignore leap years. A reasonable, intelligent person might point out that the odds don't reach 100% until there are 366 people in the room (the number of days in a year + 1)... and forty is about 11% of 366... so such a person might conclude that the odds of two people in forty sharing a birthday are about 11%. In reality, due to Math's convoluted reasoning, the odds are about 90%. This phenomenon is known as the Birthday Paradox. If the set of people is increased to sixty, the odds climb to above 99%. This means that with only sixty people in a room, even though there are 365 possible birthdays, it is almost certain that two people have a birthday on the same day. After making these preposterous assertions, Math then goes on to rationalize its claims by recruiting its bastard offspring: numbers and formulas. It's tricky to explain the phenomenon in a way that feels intuitive. You can consider the fact that forty people can be paired up in 780 unique ways, and it follows that there would be a good chance that at least one of those pairs would share a birthday. But that doesn't really satisfy the question for me, it just feels marginally less screwy. So I did something quite out of character: I crunched the numbers. The values rapidly become unmanageable, but the trend is clear: to see the charts - go to http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birthday-paradox/ Only calculating up to eight people, we see that of the three hundred fifteen quintillion possible combinations of birthdays the group has, 7.4% of cases-- or about one in thirteen -- result in two of them having the same birthday. As each person is added, the odds do not increase linearly, but rather they curve upwards rapidly. This trend continues up to around twenty-three people, where the curve hits 50% odds, and the rate of increase starts going down. It practically flattens out when fifty-seven people are considered, and the odds rest at about 99%. Though it may not be intuitive, the numbers follow the pattern quite faithfully." And there's more… So go to the site to see the charts and read the rest.  I liked the section about how the stats of the birthday paradox are used to hack into computers! From:  http://www.damninteresting.com/the-birthday-paradox/