Jann 18 2025 - Discontinued!

 

Hershey is discontinuing their chocolate Cherry Blossom novelty candy.  It is a syrupy maraschino cherry encased in milk chocolate.  While I've never had a Hersey version, when I was a child we made them for Christmas every year.  I expect I've eaten hundreds of these treats.  While ours differentiated from Cherry Blossoms by being  dark chocolate, they were certainly syrupy.  I don't seem to have copied the chocolate centre recipe anywhere, but I can probably reproduce it without any conscious thinking. To make the syrup, one mixed icing sugar and butter to make a paste dough. Then one made it into a little flat circle in one's palm, placed the maraschino cherry in it, then wrapped it up around the cherry, finishing it with a toothpick in the top to carry it around.  This was then cooled for a day or two.  Once cool enough, it would be dipped in chocolate and placed on a wax paper cookie sheet to harden. That took place in the Cold Cellar. A day or so later, the toothpick would be removed and a little dollop of chocolate replaced the tiny hole.  Then the cherries have to ripen for a week or 2 for the sugar paste to turn to syrup.  I can tell you they tasted good before and after getting syrupy.    It makes me realize that this is one thing I know about that has been discontinued.  There are 39 discontinued things on Wikipedia that  were discontinued in 2024. I don't know most of them.  Food items were: Diet Coke with Splenda, Coca-Cola Cherry Vanilla, Super Bubble (a bubble gum), the McDonald's Grimace Shake and Fruit Stripe.  The other items look like technology items that have been replaced - iPhones, AirPods, lots of video games.    We consider that things might be discontinued, and somehow they are not forgotten.      I am catching up with past posts - I found a picture of a clock - this one was in Half Moon Bay, California.  Below that is a garden view at Filoli Gardens - nearby to Half Moon Bay.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

May 6 2024 - Breakfast at Tiffany's Today

 

Remember the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's?  A fantasy idea. Wait. Stop. There is a cafe there now called The Blue Box Cafe and the chef is Daniel Boulud.  Isn't that so perfect?  It is fulfilling the fantasy of the movie, it seems. As a room, it evokes the late 1950s early 60s to me.  I see women with white gloves sitting at the tables.   Could we could create this atmosphere ourselves with these blue boxes hanging from our ceilings?  They seem to be available from Amazon, Postmark (used), and Temu.   It is feasible now to get the blue boxes.  But that wasn't the case in the past. Tiffany doesn't sell the blue boxes: “Tiffany has one thing in stock that you cannot buy of him for as much money as you may offer; he will only give it to you. And that is one of his boxes.”. And that colour? "Since 1998, Tiffany Blue® has been registered as a color trademark by Tiffany and, in 2001, was standardized as a custom color created by Pantone® exclusively for Tiffany and not publicly available. No matter the medium the color is reproduced in, Tiffany's proprietary hue remains consistent and instantly recognizable." The name is 1837 Blue - named for the year Tiffany was founded.  Tiffany says the box is so desirable because: "It has long overflowed with promises:  of possibility, dreams, and, of course, love."  Sounds like Tiffany has fulfilled itself from the movie.    Well done.     I wonder if this clock was created by Tiffany - it is at the Flagler University in St. Augustine, Florida.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 22 2023 - Around the Clock

 

Do clocks seem simple to you?  Do you wonder why they are round, and why they divide time into two 12 hour chunks and not a full 24 increments? Sundials come in different shapes - round, square and "neither" - there are odd compositions- they all contain the "gnomon" - that's the pointy thing that casts the shadow.  There are vertical and horizontal sundials.  There are declining-reclining and declining-inclining dials.  There are a lot of variations.  There has been many thousands of years to figure these out and develop new variations.  Clocks have to be round for a scientific reason: It turns out to be because the circle is the most efficient shape for measuring time.   "This is because a circle has a constant circumference, which means that each point on the circle travels the same distance in the same amount of time. In other words, a clock with a circular face can accurately measure time regardless of where the hands are positioned." And what about the 12-hour clock? I had no idea that when the darkness came, a water clock was used for night-time.  What is a water clock?  It uses the flow of water to measure time.  Water clocks are old - 16th century BC old.   "There are two types of water clocks: inflow and outflow. In an outflow water clock, a container is filled with water, and the water is drained slowly and evenly out of the container. This container has markings that are used to show the passage of time. As the water leaves the container, an observer can see where the water is level with the lines and tell how much time has passed. An inflow water clock works in basically the same way, except instead of flowing out of the container, the water is filling up the marked container." How interesting our everyday things are.  Science project 101:  Build a water clock to show the drip, drip, drip of time. And humour and sundials? Queen Elizabeth and Sir David Attenborough are walking through the gardens at Buckingham Palace, when they come across a sundial in the shade of a tree. The Queen: Maybe we could move it...  Attenborough: Depends whether you want to know the time or not.  The Queen: Best leave it be then, as a joke. The best jokes are timeless, after all.

Here's a lily lover's Christmas card. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 24 2023 - That Doomsday Clock

 

What is it about that Doomsday Clock?  I can tell you as it has been around for my entire life.  It has been with us for 75 years, launched in 1947.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, comprised of world leaders and Nobel laureates, has given their estimate of how close the world is to collapse due to nuclear war, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.   That clock put my childhood under threat from actions I had no power over. Then it was nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  That was fire drills crouching under desks.  The image of that clock was very powerful to a child.  Destruction will automatically occur when it hits midnight.  How was I to interact with the threat of nuclear war? To me, a "threat horizon" was a thing - as real to a child as the rising and setting sun. It has always been set at minutes to midnight.  In 1947 it was 23:53.  It has fluctuated over the years, each time based on an event.  For example, the first fluctuation after the start of the clock was in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.  The clock got moved to 23:57 - that meant 4 minutes closer to doomsday. Nuclear devastation was the trigger back then.  in 2018, information warfare threats and other technology dangers were cited, such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare.   Now the clock is in hours, minutes and seconds. What would make it move to include milliseconds?   Significant is the inclusion of the threats of climate change and the pandemic.  These aren't on past clock changes.  They seem to add to the cultural distress. Moving away from catastrophe? They provide a list of  "Immediate, practical steps to protect humanity from the major global threats."   It is a big list.   And what bring this into our horizon? Watch the 2023 Doomsday Clock announcement today at 10:00am EST.  The subtitle on the headlines?  Will humanity tick closer to armageddon?   A child's experience of the Doomsday Clock was stressful back then.  It seems much worse for children now, with the presence of social media to make this a overwhelming visual nightmare.  Here are just some of the google-retrieved images.   Here's the floral clock in Niagara Falls. The warped view of a world shape might be a good interpretation of the Doomsday Clock. But there's lots of time on this clock before midnight. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Skipping Along

I hadn't skipped a rope since I was a little girl.  I do this now in exercise class.  It is lots of cardio activity with balance added to it, so more work and skill than jumping jacks.  

I wonder why skipping is not a sport for adults in comparison to the many sports that are considered mainstream. It has a world federation and championships, and is included in the Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic Games.  Will it make it to the Olympics?  I learn that it might make it in 2028.  

I am including the link to the Daily Mail's video of 11 year old Chinese athlete Can Xiaolin who is shown in the video HERE skipping at 216 skips in 30 seconds.  It is so fast that I can't see the rope. That was in 2015.  It put him in the Guinness Book of Records. There are a few videos - in 2017 and then 2018 where he is was 15 years old and he has the two world records at 222 jumps in 30 seconds and 1,1110 in three minutes. While he is the fastest skipper, he scored poorly on free style, so doesn't show up as the overall champion.  

Back to our question of when it will get to the Olympics. There was a jumping rope show at the London Games in 2012.  The video is HERE.  There's also a video with a Chinese acrobatic team using one of their members as the rope.  

There likely is lots of work to get to the Olympics in comparison to sports with the biggest fan bases.   Soccer has 4 billion fans, cricket has 2.5 billion fans, field hockey has 2 billion fans, tennis has 1 billion.  Baseball has a mere 500 million fans.  There aren't any statistics on the number of fans for jump rope.

I think today's image comes from the Ringling Museum - it seems to say time is flying and soon spring will be here.