Oct 18 2022 - Mobility Routines

 

Our extraordinarily fit instructor in yesterday's exercise class told us to go look into Mobility.  And then she demonstrated by holding a bar horizontally with both hands up above her head and reaching up over behind her head and bringing it down behind her back.  It was strange.   So what are Mobility Drills?  These are exercises that are specifically geared towards training your range of motion around joints. They involve actively moving, contracting and relaxing muscles through the joints range of motion.  Some of these may isolate, while others involve multi-joint movement patterns.   Mobility is more complex than flexibility: "To speak scientifically, mobility is “proprioception” – our perception and awareness of our body’s positions and movements. Mobility training, then, includes a range of exercises designed to increase your range-of-motion, control muscles surrounding each joint, and help you move more actively. Flexibility, on the other hand, is the stretching and lengthening of our muscles. When you can increase the stretch and length of your connective tissue, you can help your body through a full range of movements without causing injury, stiffness and pain."  That distinction is  from evofitness.com Here are a few of the routines in this link HERE.  Child’s Pose to Downward-Facing Dog Frog Pose to Deep Squat  Chest and Shoulder Opener  Hitchhiker Hamstring and Hip OpenerArm and Shoulder Circles Hip Circles Aren't these names for exercises curious, interesting, or even alarming?  Go check out the unlimited names for fitness classes  and routines - people are creative and there seem to be lots of people involved in this area. Here are some silly fitness class names: Power Hour. Curls n' Crunches. Fab & Fit & Fun. Abs Fab / Fab Abs. Walk this Weigh. Wishful Shrinking. Move it, Shake it, Lift it. Why so many ideas?  Think FITBIT/Smart Watch - it wants you to create nicknames for your workouts.   This is Chrysanthemum time at all the botanic gardens.  Here's the Longwood Gardens' Thousand Flower Tree - one Chrysanthemum plant!  The spider mums are from last year's show in Hamilton.

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Nov 8 2021 - My Dog and Me

 

I have never wondered what the difference is between dog urine and human urine.  But somehow, people seem to ask this question  a lot as it comes up at the top of Google question/answers. Cuteness.com wants to answer this.  Millie was pleased as the site had videos of dogs running in their first snow fall.  Here's what they say: The only difference between dog urine and human urine is that they come out of differing species.... Dog urine contains water, bacteria, ammonia, uric acid and dog hormones.  It's these hormones that are different from human urine.   Any dog nose can smell these hormones to know the sex, health and even the breed of the dog that urinated. When the dog urine dries, it does so in tiny crystals that can release their smelly messages when they are moistened again from humidity or being sniffed through a dog's wet nose.  How did we get the expression 'pee' - that's the command I use for Millie when she is sent outside.  It is 18th century euphemistic use of the initial letter of piss.  Shakespeare was  among the first to use the letter "P" to stand in for the word "piss," in Twelfth Night. The letter sound, written since at least 1880 as "pee," has been in use ever since. And piss? This from the New Republic: "To piss derives ultimately from the Vulgar Latin verb pissiare. The proper Latin verb meaning to urinate was mingere, which gives us medical words like micturition. Via the medieval French verb pissier (12th century), to piss crops up in many medieval English texts, including Chaucer." And if one wants to emphasize to Millie that she really is to go pee, then it is "go pee-pee".   This is considered a reduplicated form of pee.  And French and German have these versions, too - e.g. pipi in French. And here's our joke on the topic: When you really have to pee, you're Russian to the bathroom, when you walk out, you're Finnish, so what are you while you're inside?  European! This is the Japanese Garden display at the Chrysanthemum Festival.

Nov 7 2021 - The Earth vs earth or aka The earth's earth

 

It is odd that we use earth as soil and as our place of existence - the planet we live on. It seems strange that we didn't "reserve" the name of our planet.  We did that with the other planets. My thinking is reversed.  We should look at how things evolved. The name Earth comes from English/German which means the ground.  The Old English words 'eor(th)e and 'earth' or in German 'erde'. One site says: "Earth has different names in different languages. It’s called ‘terra’ in Portuguese, ‘dünya’ in Turkish and ‘aarde’ in Dutch, just to name a few with their own etymology. However, the common thread in all languages is that they were all derived from the same meaning in their origins, which is ‘ ground’ or ‘soil’." Sciencefocus says:  The Greeks and Romans named most of the planets in the Solar System after particular gods, and we have kept those names in English. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, all unknown in classical times, were named by the modern astronomers who discovered them, but still after Greek and Roman gods. So Earth is the one exception. Its name, according to the official gazetteer of planetary discovery, comes from the Indo-European base ‘er’, which produced the Germanic noun ‘ertho’, the modern German ‘erde’, Dutch ‘aarde’, Danish and Swedish ‘jord’, and English ‘earth’. Livescience says: One interesting fact about its name: Earth is the only planet that wasn't named after a Greek or Roman god or goddess.  And we don't know who first used the world for the planet.  A mystery. More Chrysanthemums today.

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Oct 26 2021 - Flower-Powered Steam

 

Yesterday was a windy, rainy day.  The waves on the Lake were significant.  I'd reserved my spot for the Hamilton Chrysanthemum Show at Gage Park.  So I drove off through the sheets of rain and wind towards Hamilton.   And it was worth it.  Niagara grows millions of pots of garden mums for the outdoor display garden this time of year.  These are mostly hardy mums.  But there are even more than the myriad of colours and shapes in our gardens.  Check out a flower competition and one can see how they organize by bloom type and shape. We got to see all the types in an exhibition format.  Beautifully grown flowers - big pompom varieties, spider and thistle, spoon, anemone and the regular sorts of single and semi-double.  And then there were displays with mosaic culture art around themes to give drama to the experience.  There was 20,000 square feet of displays, themed around past years so the overall show was a Trip Down Memory Lane.  There were 200 varieties on display, plus hundreds of varieties of companion plants to make the display interesting and entertaining.   How does that compare with Longwood Gardens' display?  It claims to be the biggest Thousand Flower Tree outside of Asia with more than a thousand flowers each year on a single-stem plant.  It is a beautiful display with an amazing grand conservatory setting. You would guess that other festivals in Asia are larger.  Korea has the Dream Park Chrysanthemum Festival.  It is outside in a 860,000 square meter space. That's massive. There are numerous festivals in China.  Kaifeng Chrysanthemum Festival in China is a month long. It has over 1.6 million pots on display.  Japan too has numerous festivals with one of the festivals over 100 years old.  Asian countries have a particular fondness and love of Chrysanthemums. One of the things that is so lovely is that we humans mark our opening and closing garden seasons with flowers - the beautiful Cherry Blossom and Bulb Festivals announce Spring, and Chrysanthemums close off the Fall.  Maybe we mark every season with flowers - Christmas has its decorated trees and Poinsettias.  And the winter?  The exotic Orchid Festivals. And add to the fun - somehow, it is Train Day everywhere you go - flower festivals included!

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Nov 15 2020 - Who Looks Like Famous Villains?

 

How does one get to be a Villain (with a capital V)?  One is in a film, novel, or play - one is a character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot.   There seem to be a lot of variations - the false donor, beast, authority figure, traitor, and so on. There are real life villains:  Nero, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden are listed. But the deeds of real life villains are unspeakable and shouldn't be covered first thing in the morning.  The deeds of fictional villains are interesting in the plot of the novel. Disney has a lot of villains - and there are  artists who reimagine Disney Villains in various ways - look no further than bored panda villains.  How would Disney Villains decorate their bedrooms, what would they look like as children, what if they were creepier, and so on.  Here's the article on people who look like cartoon characters - that is, 25 real life Disney Characters.  The first few are excellent.     Here's a November Birthday card.

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Nov 14 2020 - Villains in Port Dover?

 

And what happened in Port Dover? Yes - they (the bikers) 'descended on this otherwise sleepy Lake Erie town'. It was very subdued and quiet - 600 was the number given compared to last year there were 75,000 in Port Dover for September's 13th day. My interest has turned to villains.  The first villain I remember is Lex Luthor - these excerpts are from Wikipedia: "Lex Luthor originally appeared in Action Comics No. 23 (cover dated: April 1940). He has since endured as the archenemy of Superman. Lex Luthor was originally a mad scientist, but since the late 1980s, he has more often been portrayed as a power-mad business magnate, the CEO of LexCorp.  He ranks as number 4 in the 100 Greatest Villains of All Time." "Following Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985-1986), DC reboots its universe yet again, creating the "Post-Crisis" reality. In the 1986 limited series The Man of Steel, John Byrne redesigned Lex Luthor from scratch, intending to make him a villain that the 1980s would recognize: an evil corporate executive. Byrne intentionally chose to base this new depiction of Luthor on businessmen Donald Trump and Ted Turner." There are a number of through-lines to Donald Trump except for the origins of poverty:  "As originally presented in the Post-Crisis version of the DC Comics Universe, Lex Luthor is a product of child abuse and early poverty."   On his character, Wikipedia observes: "Whether he is a mad scientist, corrupt businessman, or both, Luthor's ego is a defining trait in all his incarnations; he believes he is entitled to both popularity and power. While each incarnation initially wants the adoration of others and control over either Smallville or Metropolis, the goal eventually rises to control over Earth and possibly universal domination." I reminisced through the Chrysanthemums at Gage Park last month. What a beautiful creation each one is.

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Oct 31 2020 - On Holiday Time

 

This year's Halloween feels like gridlock: it is Halloween on a Saturday with the time change from daylight savings time tonight - and if you look up - it is a full moon.  Isn't it even supposed to be a blue moon? How often does the time change with Halloween? It looks like the last one was And a full moon!  A full noon on Halloween is around every 19 years.  And the time change on the same day? It looks like the last one was 2015, and then before that 2009.  In 1982 Toronto, Saskatoon and Halifax made kids go trick-or-treating on the Saturday October 30th so they wouldn't be in the dark.  There's a movement to make Halloween on the last Saturday of October to extend the party time, etc.   Perhaps with the Pandemic, we aren't used to so much happening at once.  And with the Pandemic, there's so little happening that this seems like a lot.   Who helps the little pumpkins cross the road safely? The crossing gourd. What type of plants do well on all Hallow’s Eve? Bam-BOO What do you call a witch’s garage? A broom closet. What kind of food would you find on a haunted beach? A sand-witch! What was the witch’s favorite subject in school? Spelling. Here we are with the ever-lasting supply of Chrysanthemums from the Hamilton Gage Park Show. Its theme was First Responders - so there was a bus, and an ambulance as backdrops.

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Oct 30 2020 - Dogs have the best costumes

 

With Halloween on a Saturday, there is an unspoken, clear message to adults to participate in the fun.  What a dilemma as our enthusiasm seems to have diminished over time.  Even to figure something simple out - and then looking through ideas for seniors turns out to be a stroll through unfunny and then poor taste. The pet ideas, in comparison, are hilarious. We don't need to tell you who they are dressed up as.   Today's stroll through history puts things in perspective, sort of. It was this day in 1995 when the Quebec referendum happened with 93.52% voter participation and a narrow defeat with 50.58% voting no and 49.42% voting yes.  Do you remember the relief back then?  I hope the same will happen next week over the U.S. election.   There was lots of enjoyment yesterday with the big display at the Hamilton Gage Park Chrysanthemum Show.  With pre-booked timed entries, it wasn't crowded.  It was so much more enjoyable than in past years.  Here is a small sampling of the beautiful flowers and displays.

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Oct 29 2020 - From May Till September

 

How long does it take to grow the Chrysanthemum tree at Longwood Gardens.  Longer than from May till September.  It is a year-long process.  The tree this year has 1,100 blooms and took 1,800 hours of labour.   The art of creating the cascading mums is outlined HERE on the Longwood site.   They have grown them into shield, fan, tree, spiral, and cloud forms as well.  How do they train such brittle stems? "Often, the branches coming off the main stem need to be bent sharply in order to conform to the spiral frame, so our staff must first allow the plants to wilt and then break the internal part of the plant. The resulting flexibility allows us to get the branch going in the right direction and set the plant to the frame with wire." And what about the bonsai chrysanthemum trees on display? Longwood says they start training in May. The Niagara Falls Showcase Greenhouse, Hamilton's Gage Park and Toronto's conservatories have all travelled to Longwood to learn the art of Chrysanthemum growing and training.  So while I can't get to Longwood's display this year,  the smaller shows nearby will have equally beautiful displays. The Chrysanthemum is beloved here for late Autumn display.  We in the Northern Hemisphere experience the season progression to winter.  So Thomas Hardy's Chrysanthemum poem sentiment might apply to us:   Why should this flower delay so long     To show its tremulous plumes?  Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,     When flowers are in their tombs. Our pictures of Chrysanthemums  come from a previous visit to Longwood.  They use the Flaming Pear flexibly to create the mirror balls of flowers.

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Wheresomeness

When searching for odd words, such as wheresomeness, one retrieves equally odd results.  Here's a quote from a short poem: "Every morning dawns with an ache, a pang of wheresomeness and shallow water." In terms of definitions, "Ness" is an English suffix  forming abstract nouns denoting quality and state - darkness, goodness, kindness, preparedness. There are places, organizations, people, and myths where "Ness" occurs.  One could be named Ness Ness as it is a given and surname.  And if one were an Irish princess from mythology one could be Ness Ness Ness.   Typically a movie or toy character pops up with names that are unusual.  Ness is a game and a playable character in Super Smash Bros.4.  There's nesstheband and their tag line is "whatever's unclear to you, it's the same for me - ness." And there are many products on Amazon with "Ness" in their names - from Scottish clothing to soup ladles, hats, mirrors, motorcycle handlebars, and cat litter pans.   Today our pictures show the Chrysanthemum display at the Niagara Showcase Greenhouses.  It is a popular festival every year throughout the world.  Longwood Gardens has the thousand flower tree display right now. Japan has Chrysanthemum Day - one of five ancient sacred festivals.  Korea, Germany, China, and more have displays where Chrysanthemums are used in mosaic culture displays. The Niagara Parks display always has a Romantic section with pinks, purples and whites, and a contrasting primary colour display section.

Hamilton's Gage Park Chrysanthemum Festival

This week marks the opening of Hamilton's Gage Park Chrysanthemum Festival.  I have a fondness for Chrysanthemums and seem to get to a festival every year, so I am looking forward to Hamilton's.  They told me they visited Longwood Gardens to learn the techniques of growing and training.  You can see the amazing spirals down below - these are at Longwood Gardens.  There will be more to report later in the week…you can find information at their website:

http://hamiltoninbloom.com/hamilton-fall-garden-mum-show/

November is Chrysanthemum Month

Many people think of November as a sad time because the flowers are gone from the garden.  It's true that the gardens are losing their charm, the trees their leaves, and the cold winds are starting to blow.  I go indoors in November to the Conservatories and Greenhouses to find the Chrysanthemum Celebrations.  Today's images are from the Centennial Greenhouse in west-end Toronto, where there's a beautiful Chrysanthemum Festival on during November.

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