April 21 2020 - May is Mayberry Month

Mayberry is in North Carolina.  The Andy Griffith Show made it come alive from 1960 - 1968.  The show was considered amusing and much loved. Here's the summary: Widower Sheriff Andy Taylor, and his son Opie, live with Andy's Aunt Bee in Mayberry, North Carolina. With virtually no crimes to solve, most of Andy's time is spent philosophizing and calming down his cousin Deputy Barney Fife. Creators: Sheldon Leonard, Aaron Ruben, Danny Thomas Stars:  Andy Griffith, Ron Howard, Don Knotts The top-rated episodes are: Convicts-at-Large Barney and Floyd are held hostage in a cabin by three escaped women convicts. The Pickle Story No one will admit to Aunt Bee's homemade pickles being the worst they've ever tasted. Andy switches them with store-bought ones to avoid eating hers, but her decision to enter them in the county fair... Barney's First Car It's a red-letter day in Mayberry when Barney decides to join the motoring world, but things go sour when his cream-puff turns out to be a lemon. Here's the strange joke that I found: Andy Griffith's family are undecided on funeral arrangements. They may cremate, they Mayberry Here's a picture from one of our stops on the way to Augusta, Maine a few years ago.

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April 15 2020 - Oriental and Occidental

Oriental and Occidental - East and West.  Isn't it interesting that "to orient" is to align or position relative to the points of the compass or other specified positions.  These come from the Latin word orient meaning "rising" and "east". Very little is written about Occidental - Western world (really Europe).  There's a town in California, an insurance company, petroleum company, even a constructed language Occidental language. But what caused the lack of use of Occidental and the excessive use of Oriental in the past?  It would be the orientation point - from Europe considered the West. Roman maps from 300 AD show the Orient as a place.  There was an Orient-Occident line - the Italian Peninsula's East Coast.  It shifted to the City of Rome around 600 AD. Any area below the city of Rome was considered the Orient. Over time "the Orient" shifted eastwards - it had to do so continually as Europeans travelled farther into Asia so had to name things the Near East and the Far East and so on. The Eurocentric viewpoint focuses on itself to the exclusion of a wider view of the world - it implicitly considered European culture as preeminent. So the term Orient and Oriental became derogatory and racist. Is it still allowed as an adjective? Looks like not - Oriental art retrieves beautiful, traditional cherry blossom and lotus images but under the titles Chinese art, Asian art, Japanese art. So we are left with the verb "to orient" and thinking about the compass and navigation. We have an abstract image of Toronto buildings - this is the metal fountain in the square off Adelaide Street at Yonge - it is a great reflector. I've spent lots of time taking pictures of its reflections.  Toronto has hit the news again with the most tower cranes in North America.  Toronto had 27 percent of them between January and March.   I wonder if I were to take this picture today, would there be a crane in the sky?

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Pi in the Face

Would you like a full year of fun holidays, silly and funny days? Today is International Sloth Day.  Sunday October 22nd is Caps Lock Day. There are many  sites claiming to have funny days - for example, daysoftheyear.com says that today is Information Overload Day. Most of the sites have today as Brandied Fruit Day. I wanted to find a really "Special" Day  and Huffington Post delivered on this: "That's the case with Pi Day, which commemorates the mathematical constant 3.14 (ad infinitum) on March 14 (3/14). Pi Day was inaugurated in 1988 by Larry Shaw at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where he worked as a physicist before his retirement. "Larry has a wonderful, quirky sense, and he realized that March 14 was 3/14, and we could celebrate the transcendental number pi," says Ron Hipschman, an educator at Exploratorium. "Then his daughter realized it was also Einstein's birthday." Pi, which expresses the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is an irrational number approximated by Archimedes and other mathematicians going back more than two thousand years ago. For scientists of all stripes who deal with formulas, pi has an almost magical power. It has an infinite number of digits that never repeat in any kind of pattern. Computer calculations so far have taken it out to about 30 trillion digits and counting. "The normal way we celebrate Pi Day is we do all kinds of pi- and circular-related events at the Exploratorium," says Hipschman, who helps co-ordinate the day's activities. Over the years, those events have included pizza-pie tossing contests, pie fights and pi digit memorization recitals, as in 3.14159 ... and onwards. A Pi Shrine was built at the top of a cylindrical building on the grounds of the interactive science museum and a brass plaque was installed honouring the number. "At 1:59, we have a pi procession where everybody carries a digital pi on a pie plate attached to a beater stick through the Exploratorium, up to the Pi Shrine, where we circumambulate the Pi Shrine 3.14 times while singing 'Happy Birthday' to Albert Einstein," he says. "And then we eat pie!" These two buildings are from a visit to Kingston last August.

More Golden Bone Stories

We are on a golden path - I don't know what the dog fountain's name is.  I've named it "The Golden Bone". People have had a lot of fun with this - there are many retrievals in google for the 'golden bone'.  I enjoyed the video title "Cue the music as Indiana 'Bones' rescues the Golden Bone.  Indiana Bones - Raiders of the Lost Bark. There is a Super Why Wooster's Journey To The Golden Bone.  Golden Bone Awards pop up in various places - the Strut Your Mutt charity drive in LA raised over $52,000 for pet rescue.   This title - "Academy Throws Golden Bone to World's Second Highest-Paid Actor." In 2016 Jackie Chan received an honorary Oscar. Another great title - BarkBox Golden Bone Contest - BarkPost. Our pictures are the beginning and closing views of the CN Tower in Toronto earlier this week.

Train Ride into Summer

It is train day today.  These pictures are from our Augusta, Maine trip in September.  The brick building is in Barre, Vermont.  Barre Gray granite has the desirable characteristics of fine grain, even texture and weather resistance. It is used for outdoor art sculptures. I assume that is also a 'code phrase' for cemetery headstones. Our train of the day shows the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes train going in reverse in its forest setting. I  can see in these pictures the dominance of the green of the forest in September.   Now just into November, the leaves are changing colour and falling so the green canopy has almost disappeared.  It will be replaced by the stark structural pattern of branches as we move closer and closer to winter.