Aug 16 2023 - It's Countdown Time

 

We count down everything. So it makes sense that there is a TV show in the UK that has this name. It has been on since 1982.   On 26 March 2010, Queen Elizabeth II congratulated Countdown for amassing 5,000 episodes. On 5 September 2014, the programme received a Guinness World Record at the end of its 6,000th show for the longest-running television programme of its kind during the course of Series 71. It is a game show where contestants attempt to make the longest word possible from nine randomly chosen letters, four numers rounds in which contestant must use arthimetic to reach a random target figure from six other numbers and the conundrum, a buzzer round in which the contestants compete to solve a nine-letter anagram.  The show has a resident lexicographer.   During the series heats, the winning contestant returns the next day until they either lose or retire with eight wins as an undefeated "Octochamp". The best eight contestants are invited back for the series finals, which are decided in knockout format. Contestants of exceptional skill have received national media coverage and the programme, as a whole, is widely recognised and parodied within British culture. Wow!  That’s no North American TV show.  Neither Canadians or Americans would have any idea of what to make of an “Octochamp”. This is a wonderful game show with brilliant contestants and many of them children.  See the full description HERE at Wikipedia.  I hadn’t thought of the Outtakes Section where words deemed unsuitable are cut out.  But there are lots over the long history - particularly the “wanker” word. - A round in which Dictionary Corner offered the word gobshite - In 1991 contestants Gino Corr and Lawrence Pearse both declared the word wankers - A round where an anagram of the word fucked appeared on the board in the string "A U O D F C K E G", although neither player chose to use the word and Dictionary Corner was able to find two seven-letter words that could have been made from the board's offerings - On 2 February 2017, the board for the letters round was "M T H I A E D H S", and with both players offering sevens, Dictionary Corner found the word "shithead", which was bleeped out in the audio and censored on-screen with the poo emoji Don’t you think this image of the chessboard at the Bathurst Street Park seems on topic?

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Dec 15 2022 - Countdown to Everything

 

Have we always counted down to significant events?  My guess is "No".  What do you think?  So looking it up, it turns out that Fritz Lang filmmaker used it to "create suspense?  Who would guess that?  And yet it makes great sense, as we use it to create excitement and anticipation for the upcoming festival of Christmas.  Our social order now orients to the number of shopping days. Fritz Lang's movie was a science fiction "Woman in the Moon" and the countdown was to create suspense in then story's lunar-bound rocket launch.  It seems to me that Fritz Lang spoke it and NASA fulfilled it.   I am thinking of New Year's Eve countdowns, and the U.S. Time Square Ball started in 1907.  The Babylonians recorded their New Year's celebration over 4,000 years ago.  They were celebrating the spring equinox in late March.  The Romans moved the date to January 1st when Caesar fixed the calendar so it was better synced with the seasons. It started with Janus, the God of new beginnings.  Things went bumpy for a while with the Church trying to dissociate from the Roman holiday, but it returned to January 1st eventually. There is a website - your countdown.to/everything - which shows the countdowns to various things, including movie releases. There are 4,253 countdowns in their list and the top one is Avatar the movie, followed by Christmas Eve. In the middle is the countdown to the year 2023 - I wonder whose timezone it is based on. The Y2K Countdown pretty well topped the list of countdowns for anyone who was here in 2000. We are now used to countdowns for anything and everything.  Any top "N" list now is presented in countdown format.  It builds excitement as to who/what will be identified as number 1.  It works. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 18 2020 Countdown to ?

 

We live in a countdown social environment.  This year the Countdown to Coronavirus Vaccine has replaced both Countdown to Christmas and Countdown to New Years.   The ads for countdown timers are unending. My favourite is itsalmo.st (doesn't that look like a visual tongue twister).  The site is It's almost - and describes itself as a snazzy free countdown tool.   The countdown itself is fairly recent. It came into our social fabric in 1952 (1953 also given), according to Merriam-Webster.  It got its boost from rockets, television, and broadcast engineering, mostly.  On record for its first use is the Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang. Lang, best known for his movies Metropolis and M, was working on a science fiction film called Woman in the Moon that featured a dramatic rocket launch, preceded by a countdown of the final ten seconds before launch.   In sports, Cambridge University's rowing race was known for using a countdown to signal the start of the race.  No date is given for this.   The military had the expression zero hour, used from 1915 onwards, Implied is a countdown. They also had D-Day H-Hour and T-Time to refer to start time. It is associated with the dropping of the first atomic bomb, zero hour and ground zero. Given how we have a countdown on the alert everywhere, I thought there would be some good countdown jokes, but I was disappointed.  Here it the one I chose: Every year on New Year's Eve, when everyone's counting down the final 10 seconds to ring in the new year, I get up off the couch and stand up. I stand up and raise my left leg and just leave it raised for a little while until the countdown finishes and midnight strikes - that way I always start the new year off on the right foot. Today's picture is one of the pretty Christmas trees at last year's Fantasy of Trees event.

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Countdown to Solstice

Have humans always counted down this much in the past?  I have a sense that we're a bit frenetic with counting down to various events, moments  occasions, etc. Are we counting down? Yes - we're counting down to the Solstice on Saturday Dec 21 at 11:19pm EST.  And between then and the year-end there are meteor showers, the Moon at perigee (closest point along orbit to the earth), the new moon on December 26th, the conjunction of the Moon and Saturn, conjunction of the Moon and Venus.  Looking at the sentence I've written, I then started to wonder about capitalizations. So I went over to one of the authorities - the MLA Style Center.  This isn't simple:  When Merriam-Webster indicates that a term is “capitalized” or “usually capitalized,” the MLA capitalizes the term in its publications. When Merriam-Webster indicates that a term is “often capitalized,” our practice varies. We usually lowercase sun, moon, and earth, but, following The Chicago Manual of Style, when the does not precede the name of the planet, when earth is not part of an idiomatic expression, or when other planets are mentioned, we capitalize earth: The earth revolves around the sun. The astronauts landed on the moon. The space shuttle will return to Earth next year. The four planets closest to the sun—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—compose the inner solar system. I shouldn't worry about this - most people are mediocre at writing a sentence.  But let's find out what the norms are.  It doesn't make sense for planets to be lower case and countries to be capitalized as proper names.  So I checked out  the NASA Style Guide "HERE" - it references the Chicago Manual of Style as the authority.  I can't access it, though.  However the NASA guidelines are clear. So I decided on the NASA guidelines and not the MLA Style Center even though I am not writing a scientific paper. So I can move on to some Moon jokes and hope I have the correct capitalizations to match the NASA style guidelines: Q: What holds the Moon up? A: Moonbeams. Q: How do you know when the Moon is going broke? A: When it's down to its last quarter. Q: What did the Moon say to his therapist? A: I'm just going through a phase. Q: How does a man on a moon get his haircut? A: Eclipse it.  And we haven't even got to winter, and I am referencing Percy Bysshe Shelley for our picture today:  "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

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Hallmark's Version of the Advent Calendar - Countdown to Christmas

Do you know about the Hallmark Channel?  It is very popular with feel-good movies.  It began its around-the-clock 24/7 Christmas movie schedule on Friday, Oct. 25th.  Search on Countdown to Christmas and Hallmark comes up for pages and pages. I didn't know about the channel until it came to town - to Grimsby - to make one of its movies.  And then there was our Main Street dressed up in snow and Christmas trees at the beginning of October.   Christmas in Montana - New 2019 Before the holidays, Sara goes to Montana to help resistant Travis save his ranch. Can time on the ranch help restore her faith in Christmas in time for a miracle? Stars Kellie Martin, Colin Ferguson. There are no pictures with Grimsby in the background pretending to be Montana on the website.  But you can go to the Niagarathisweek.com  coverage of it with Teddy's Food, Fun & Spirits looking excellent. The Hallmark Channel has evolved from an originally religious channel.  It was overhauled into a family channel in the late 1999's.  In 2015 Mariah Carey directed and starred in a Christmas movie and show which turned out to be the most viewed show ever.  The Countdown to Christmas programming had started in 2009. It took flight in 2016. So here we are a few years later with 24/7 Christmas from October to January 1st:  The end of the Countdown season culminates with the broadcast of the Tournament of Roses Parade.   Our snow day pictures show the Japanese Maple with its snow-covered leaves.  Many of my trees such as theSeven Sons Flower Tree have all their leaves and are just starting to turn autumn colours.  The big Japanese Maple Versacolour out back has hardly begun to change colour.  The second plant is Ironweed, one of our natives for bees and butterflies.

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Count Down 2016!

What would you like to count down?  Would it be the New Year 2016 in New York, in Sunnyvale, in Las Vegas?  Would it be the Olympic Games in 2016?  Or the NHL Winter Classic? More likely we're counting down to the first snow storm. The forecast today is scattered flurries this morning.  There's a Southern Ontario storm watch. So I guess we'll be watching the ice and or snow this morning, possibly, and maybe. Going shopping seems unlikely: After a check of the headlines, the theme I take is that Boxing Day/Week shopping is stressful and dangerous. Below is hydrangea flowers in winter, and weathered wood.

Countdown Starts Again

Christmas Day The Day After.  Now we start another countdown and this one is more like a countdown rather than a countup. As an aside, the Christmas Day clock is now at 364 and ticking away.  So if you loaded it on your smart phone, it can keep you company for another year. We know that today's the day to get our gifts (boxes) from the 'boss".  Too bad the tradition didn't carry through to modern day and there would be a bonus from our corporate employers. Perhaps South Africa understood that this tradition was better left behind.  It renamed Boxing Day to Day of Goodwill in 1994. Other countries call this Second Christmas Day: In some European countries, most notably Germany, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and those in Scandinavia, 26 December is celebrated as the Second Christmas Day. What should we do on the Second Christmas Day? "Many people spend the second day of Christmas in much the same way as Christmas Day."  So we'd be having a second or third turkey dinner today. Here are two views of Jordan Harbour from last year.

Counting how many ways to countdown to Christmas

I wanted to find out interesting things about the countdown to Christmas. I put in the search words days count down till Christmas. But the results of my google search told me How Many Ways to Countdown Christmas.  There are a lot of websites and apps to countdown. The results were fun, so here are a few: There are a few Christmas Countdown websites -   christmasdaycountdown -with lots of snow in that scene, then the official Your Christmas Countdown is on Facebook.  It is full of ads for presents.  It too has a Christmas countdown website yourchristmascountdown and you can personalize the countdown by adding your name. And another site named days.to and it has pictures of Santa with the countdown 'shown in America/New_York timezone.' Heading over to Google play we can get a 3D Christmas Countdown.  There's a listing of the new options such as: added Tree Brightness option Improve colours for tree The reviews include the following: My daughter ask everyday how many days till Christmas. This app helps her know it on her own.  All she has to do is look at my phone and it tells it. Awsome but needs some work😏 Yay Christmas! But the app needs to get more options. Shouldn't you be able to change the tree color with out buying a new app?.99 I don't have to buy a new app!!!!!!!!!!🙌😖 I might go for the Christmas Countdown Widget so that I can countdown in different ways -  such as heartbeats.

Burning Man Countdown

Somewhere in our minds is the "Countdown to September".  It may be Labour Day, which signals the ending of summer, or the start of school. There are all sorts of apps for counting down to Labour Day, to September 1st, to January 1st, etc. What about the countdown app that is the Burning Man Countdown.  I checked out their important dates and upcoming events. The 'Burning Man Community' has events centred in Nevada and San Francisco. They are a 'network of people inspired by the values reflected in the Ten Principles and united in the pursuit of a more creative and connected existence in the world." So my two images today, charred stumps that land on Lake Ontario's shores seem fitting for this theme.  The first image seemed to me to be 'first step' .  Perhaps it is an escapee of the 'burning man community'. http://burningman.org/countdown/