Sep 22 2020 - At War With Flu

 

Surges, spikes, flattening lines - that's our language with COVID.  We've had a lot of metaphors this spring and summer - mostly war metaphors.  So I went looking for the others:  The evil trickster - "The corona viruses therefore need some clever tricks to survive." and "While not technically alive, there's an evil genius to viruses that never ceases to amaze me". A bullet train - Andrew Cuomo "The infection forecaster said to me, 'We were looking at a freight train coming across the country.' "We're now looking at a bullet train." Flattening the curve - here are the variations on the theme take the heat out of transmission breaking chains of infection – or better “BREAK THE CHAIN“ controlled burn starving the virus of fuel slow it in its tracks and push it back (Leo Varadkar) Boris Johnson: send the coronavirus packing and: remove the invisibility cloak from the invisible virus through testing and: turn the tide keeping the lid on  Hockey time - FAUCI: "It’s the old metaphor – the Wayne Gretzky approach. You know, you skate not to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. If we don’t do very serious mitigation now, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to be weeks behind, and the horse is going to be out of the barn.” Trump's first description of the  Pandemic:  "It's just like a regular flu" and then he moved on to war imagery "an invisible enemy".  In opening up - "the people of our country should think themselves as warriors." So it isn't surprising to find that the virus has a brand personality. It is the subject of an academic research paper by George Rossolatos: Ontological Metaphors We Get Sick By:  a Brand Storytelling Approach to the COVID19 Pandemic. Transformations and consequences in society due to covid-19 pandemic. I was shocked to see Sumacs in St. Catharines yesterday that were orange and red, as I await Grimsby's Autumn colours.  Here's a nostalgic picture of the Grimsby Farmer's Market when it was on Main Street.

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Sep 16 2020 - Existential Dilemma

 

Existentialism was a dominant philosophy in theatre plays written from the 1940s through the 1960s.  We enjoyed theatre of the absurd - there was much comedy infused in it. The original idea of existentialism is a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual subject as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.  The view of the existentialist, the individual's starting point has been called "the existential angst" or a sense disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. The notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. Because of the world's absurdity, anything can happen to anyone at any time and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the absurd.   Global catastrophic risk has become associated with the risks to all of human kind, and we've now named the highest risk level -  existential risk - the one leading to the destruction of all humanity.  e An existential risk one that either destroys humanity entirely or prevents any chance of civilization's recovery. So the question is whether COVID-19 can destroy humanity in its entirety.  The risk levels of of COVID-19 and of Climate Change are being distinguished at the most serious levels: between existential and global catastrophic risk.   The philosophical version can be found in many jokes: After my existential crisis, I decided to take a job as a feeder at the local dolphinarium Now I’m serving a youthful porpoise Why did the dictionary have an existential breakdown? He couldn’t find the meaning of life Existential Java: I mixed de-caf coffee with regular coffee and they must have cancelled each other out because now I feel nothing If I had a dollar for every time I had an existential crisis Would it even matter? What do you think?  COVID-19 vs Climate Change.

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Sep 14 2020 - Late Bus

 

Among the listings of daily horoscopes for today - perhaps Monday is a busy horoscope day - is this headline from country94.ca - Late Bus - Bus 545 serving the Saint John area, is 90 minutes late.  Nothing else. There isn't a 545 route.  It has to be the number of a specific bus.  I wonder where it is located in its lateness.  The headline reads like Bus 545 is a very badly behaved bus. Bloomberg news says that transit travel seems safe in Japan and France with no COVID cases identified there.  The Globe and Mail says: "Populous Asian cities may offer positive news. In Hong Kong, where ridership fell less than elsewhere, total cases in the city remained relatively low. It was the same story in Tokyo and Seoul. That suggests riders on some of the world’s busiest transit systems did not propel the spread of virus. It makes sense, since riders were masked and unlike locations such as bars, nobody’s there to socialize." Here in Ontario there is lots of day to day transit COVID news.  School bus routes have been cancelled across Ontario with driver shortages.  It turns out about 60 per cent of bus drives are over 60 and are at risk. In Toronto, transit users, students and parents gathered on Saturday with a cardboard COVID-19 East bus to demand transit funding to increase bus service in Scarborough. They were demonstrating to fix the TTC overcrowding.   Back in May, there was a flurry of predictions on the future of public transit post-COVID.  Now public transit services have adjusted routes and vehicles.  There's a wait and see if the COVID cases go up with back to work and back to school activities.  The Globe and Mail  update on what's ahead for mass transit in Canada is HERE. Our picture today shows some of the figures for model railroad layouts. These are very little people.

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Sep 8 2020 - Halloween Candy

 

Did you notice that Halloween candy is for sale?  There wasn't even any squash at the market yet.  I did see a massive pumpkin out on display on Greenlane, one of my favourite blossom trail roads.  Could this candy be for sale now because the manufacturers predict that there will be a limited Halloween?  I see lots of potato chips - the one 'candy' that we buy pretending it is for Halloween and snack on. And then go buy more stuff.   But it turns out that Halloween is already in the works this year.  There is pent-up energy for some fun and parents are getting creative this year. From a CTV new article HERE in August:   "Halloween falls on a Saturday under a full moon and on the last day of daylight savings time this year, a seemingly perfect convergence for a memorable fright night. Epidemiologist Raywat Deonandan says if the virus caseload is higher in October than where it is now, trick-or-treating is “probably not a great idea.” But if it's the same or lower, then “we can probably manage some semblance of trick-or-treat.” "Paige Cody of Ottawa is taking a creative stay-at-home approach. The mother of two youngsters plans to throw Easter and Halloween together for a Harry Potter-themed candy hunt. She’s told her daughter, 8, and son, 3, that they won’t be trick-or-treating but they will dress up as the wizarding characters, wave their wands, and fill their cauldrons with candy. She plans to hide baking ingredients, too, and to follow the sugary scavenger hunt with family time in the kitchen." Did you know that 44 percent of Canadians consider Halloween their favourite holiday? And an average $100 - $200 is spent?  I think Halloween this year is going to overrun Thanksgiving.  Pile on the pumpkins! A swimming koi today for our picture of the day.

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Sep 3 2020 - Olympics Next Year?

 

Our summer had a big gap when the Olympics were cancelled.  What an event of people: There are almost 15,000 paid staff working on an Olympic event.  And then there are almost 14,000 volunteers, and 23,000 contractors.  Vancouver's Olympics in 2014 had 57,700 personnel. And then there are 11,000 or so athletes.   With a COVID-19 perspective, it now seems unlikely to bring this number of people together next year.   Just 6 months ago,  the Olympic worries were finding host cities, dealing with doping and drugs, and transgender athletes, to name a few.   Here's one summary or where the future seemed headed:  "Athletes are stronger and more fit than ever before, and at every Olympics we seem to be witnessing more and more exhibitions of athletic greatness. Meanwhile, transgender athletes are challenging gender regulations, host cities are going bankrupt, and genetic researchers predict an entirely synthetic human embryos in 10 years. How are these trends going to affect our future Olympics?" The 2021 Games are scheduled to open July 23 2021. The hope/expectation expressed so far is that a vaccine will be developed by then.  Australia's John Coates says that October is the crucial time to decide if 2021 will happen.  A vaccine would be needed well in advance of the July start to allow the Olympic staff to prepare and for athletes to train and compete for Olympic inclusion.  It seems like the Olympics will be in the news starting soon. We're looking at a pretty butterfly today - I noticed that the Monarchs have started migrating.

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July 3 2020 - Selling Wildly

What has been selling wildly during COVID-19?  First off was toilet paper.  Then eggs, flour, yeast.  And that meant that bread makers sold out too.  Also rice cookers, vacuum sealers, soda makers.  Grocery stores all of a sudden had a lot of snack food - Oreos and Cheetos, and lots of potato chips and popcorn. There was an immediate rush of suspect websites looking to cash in on COVID-19 products - Shopify registered 500 new e-commerce sites, according to the New York Times.   Bicycle sales have spiked-  or is it skyrocketed?.  Swimming pools from tiny to large are all sold out too..   Office supplies went up for those working. When not working?  All the hobbies - from gardening to crafts, feeding the birds, and getting furry pet friends.   What plummeted were car sales - yet it seems to me that car sales may go up now - driving seems so safe compared to transit. Our pictures today tell a story - the beautiful blossom trail looks ragged to me in the summer.  Or maybe I find the ragged fields under moody skies.  I have to show you this pair of houses on Sann Road at the Lake - the first road east of Beamsville's Ontario street.  There's a mushroom cloud size house  next to the tiny summer cottage sitting on a lot not more than 15 feet wide.

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May 1 2020 - The Might Niagara Roars Alone

I drove through Niagara yesterday taking pictures of the first orchard blossoms.  My favourite orchards have over-arching branches of old trees that almost touch in the middle.  And orchards of apricots and early peach trees  are starting their bloom right now. I drove through Niagara-on-the-Lake. It is under its own special emergency orders due to the return of residents from their winter residences.  It tells you how many of them there are and how popular Niagara-on-the-Lake is as a destination residence of the rich.  (Its preferred real estate vendor is Sothebys).  Niagara-on-the-Lake without tourists - that was the sight. What does it look like? Divine - it is like travelling  back in time 60 years to when I was a child rather than the busy tourist destination full of cars and people everywhere.  It makes one wonder if they shouldn't close the main street and turn it into a tourist plaza. That would take some planning given the streets in and out. Yet it was beautiful and could be done with parking at the Fort George end of the town along with the big tourist buses are not allowed in town. Niagara-on-the-Lake is serious about the no congregating order - the benches overlooking Lake Ontario had been partially dismantled - the planks had been removed so there's nowhere to sit. The drive down the River Road is legendary - it makes the top ten list for drives in Canada.  Spring has flowering fruit trees and daffodils along the drive. What did Niagara Falls have? It was missing thousands of people, and with their absence one could appreciate the thousands of daffodils in the misty, foggy Spring day.  Niagara Falls has a long horticultural heritage that shines in the Spring.  I stopped in front of the Niagara Parks Police Station and quickly took some pictures of the gardens towards the misty Falls.  I was stunned by the emptiness but did not go exploring - I was concerned there would be police charges and fines for being there.

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Mar 13 2020 - Waves Coming

What are the tallest waves that lighthouses experience?  We saw a documentary on lighthouses of New York State along Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.  All the footage was shot in sunlight.  Everything looked so quaint, especially the lighthouse homes that are now private residences. Following that I saw a picture of Roker Pier Sunderland in the North Sea and the wave was so large and wide that only the top of the lighthouse showed.  One can go see pictures of waves crashing onto people HERE.  The first picture shows two men at a lighthouse about to be hit by a 30 foot wall of water.  It says they were rescued. Maybe these pictures are so compelling because they remind me of the massive impact of COVID-19 - it is like these pictures and is just about to happen. The news today says Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the wife of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has tested positive for the virus.  The Prime Minister is working from home for 14 days.  Ontario's public schools will be closed from March 14 through April 5. We usually go see the Home Show and Canada Blooms next week - it too is suspended.  The list of suspended and cancelled events is getting long. I received an email with forwarded advice from Stanford - this has been checked, and Stanford says it does not come from them and is not good advice.  Here's the link.  This is at theverge.com. They say that one should go to WHO's website for information. The myth busters are HERE.  I guess there are all kinds of things floating on social media by now. I remember writing an article for the Garden Tripod on conservatories and found a folder on my computer full of working greenhouse pictures amongst the Photo of the Day files.  Here are Niagara Falls, Langdon Hall and Sonnenberg Gardens working greenhouses.

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