Oct 23 2024 - Lost Skills

 

There are a lot of skills that have disappeared within our own life span. Where they exist today, it is often as hobbies and creative pastimes, and not essential skills. Things like making pickles and canning fruits and vegetables.   I remember how quickly that stopped when home freezers became affordable in the 1960s.  Really good picked fruits/vegetables are now artisan items with a premium price. Baking bread.  That got left behind even a littler earlier - grocery stores sold industrial bread by the 1950s.  Then bread machines came along to automate things.  A double attack. Sewing, embroidery, knitting,  crocheting, and quilt-making.  Knitting and crocheting remain active pursuits.  Whenever I am in Michael's I walk the yarn aisle and marvel at all the textures and colours.  But take embroidery and quilt-making - they are no longer in the mainstream.  Remember doilies?  Once on every dresser.  And sewing clothes?  It is now a niche hobby. Basket weaving and chair caning.  I would guess that if we lived in Denmark, basket weaving would still be popular.  But here, not so much.  I would put basket weaving as a skill in homesteading times - the 1800s.   Food Storage in a cold cellar.  Those storage methods have been replaced with refrigerators and just-in-time grocery purchase.  They dropped cold cellars out of the standard house by the 1960s. Hand-washing clothes and using a clothes line to dry clothes.  You won't find clothes blowing the wind.  Long-gone.   Knot tying.  We can still manage shoe laces, but everything else is gone if you aren't a sailor.  Navigation.  Here's one that is pertinent today - we have a hard time following a map let alone use natural landmarks, the sun and stars to get places.   And perhaps the most important skill?  Entertaining yourself.  In ways that don't involve anything electronic.  Think of being without power.  That would be scary for many. No wonder the population is angry in Cuba. Learning to cook on an open fire, hand-washing clothes, having no food storage methods, and the insult of no entertainment.  Put that on top of the crushing U.S. embargo on trade that has existed since1962 and has ruined their economy.  In 2023, the U.N. General Assembly called for the 31st time on the U.S. to end the embargo.  That's a lot of persistence and resistance. Here's a picture of Cuba that Canadians typically enjoy.  That gorgeous turquoise water below a setting sun.

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Jan 14 2024 - Art Trends 2024

 

What do you think of what news there is in the art world today? There are 45 art magazines and publications listed for us to follow in 2024.  What do you think about the Hi_Fructose name? What about Art and Cake or Hyperallergic?  My knowledge is extremely low in this area so I wonder what is in the scope of an art magazine.  I think maybe visual arts.  But art has a broad scope -  not just painting but  music, literature, and dance.   Everything expressive.    I focused on traditional art - like visual art - painting, sculpture, etc. and what I find is that predicting 2024 trends in art is big business - just like Pantone and Benjamin-Moore predicting 2024 colours.  One site says colourful art - vibrancy beyond boundaries will take "centre stage in 2024" with "palettes that evoke emotions and spark joy."  Doesn't that sound like the patter of the Benjamin-Moore and Pantone sites.   It suggests that it is all about selling.  Expanding your art collection.   With the internet anyone can investigate the latests trends, ideas, and fashions.  So there are trends from the point of view of the museum and art gallery curators and from the point of view of art patrons and investors.  There are days worth of reading in this area. Something caught my attention:  What is considered vintage and antique? "New collectors are increasingly drawn to vintage and antique pieces that boast compelling backstories and originality—and for many, the works of the 20th century perfectly satisfy this interest."   This picture from our trip to Cuba caught my attention - as our street light was causing reflections on the street from the rain.  The temperature is dropping, though, and the clouds are racing by and soon to bring more rain and then snow. So maybe the next picture from January 2014 is what is in store - that was the polar vortex year and this was ice in the greenhouse. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

July 14 2022 - Garages

 

When did garages get built as part of houses?  It really started in the 1940s when cars replaced horses as transportation. Before that  carriage houses and barns are located separately - when one looks at the older heritage homes in Grimsby that's what is apparent.   Somehow garages brought to mind the  1954 movie, Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn, where the "garage" figures large in the beginning plot of the movie: "Sabrina Fairchild is the young daughter of the Larrabee family's chauffeur, Thomas, and has been in love with David Larrabee all her life. David, a three-times-married non-working playboy, has never paid romantic attention to Sabrina. Since she has lived for years on the Larrabees' Long Island, New York, estate with her father, to him she is still a child. Eavesdropping on a party at the mansion the night before she is to leave to attend the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Sabrina watches, follows, and listens as David entices yet another woman into a dark and vacant indoor tennis court. Distraught, she leaves her father a suicide note and then starts all eight cars in the closed garage in order to kill herself.  She is passing out from the fumes when Linus, David's older brother, opens the door, discovers her,  and carries her back to her quarters above the garage when she does pass out." The plot seems amusing with a nod towards royal family dealings: David's serious older brother, Linus, who runs the family business is relying on David to marry an heiress in order for a crucial merger to take place.  By the 1950s, North Americans became car owners with their garages.   Our own 1950s built house had a breezeway between the house and garage.  Of course, a garage for one car Here's a picture from our trip to Cuba, with Gerry boarding a steam engine.

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May 24 2021 - This, That and the Other - Name that Street

 

Do you notice street names?  One of my favourites is Decimal Place.  But it isn't the silliest street name or the most unusual: In Canada alone, there is This, That and The Other Street in Halifax Nova Scotia.   In Montana, you can drive along Bad Route Road.  In Canyon County Ideaho, there is a Chicken Dinner Road,   Justin Bieber Way in Forney, Texas, was named by a true Belieber. When 11-year-old Caroline Gonzalez won a competition to be mayor of her town for the day, she chose to use her power  and renamed one of the streets after her favourite pop star. There are log of profane names included in the "silly" names covered.  But that seems like a distraction from the truly strong names:  Error Place is in Cincinnati - a staircase going up a hill.   Duh Drive is in Bethlehem Pennsylvania.  Anyhow Lane is in Gansevoort, New York.  Psycho Path was voted the most bizarre street in America - it is in Traverse City, Michgan.   There are many more HERE in the mentalfloss article.   I subsequently found an article with whimsical street names - it is HERE.  They seem a big more appropriate - Gentle Rain Drive, Meditation Lane, Ben Hur Road, East Princess Boulevard, Tall Grass Circle, and so on.  It would be pleasant to arrive home at Daisy Lane. What other updates are there in the unusual names news?  The owners of the hobbit house Airbnb in Bridesville, B.C., announced on Saturday that they'd changed the rental's name from "Hobbitmountain Hole" to "Second Breakfast Hideaway" after they were threatened by Warner Bros. The company told them that the word "Hobbit" was copyrighted and could not be used in the Airbnb's name, according to an Instagram post from Wednesday, May 19.     Here's a street scene in Cuba.  I didn't look at the street names there at all. Just as well as there seems to be double names - original and new street names.  And then there are houses that don't have numbers.

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Feb 17 2021 - Somewhere It's Spring

 

What happens in spring?  The snow drops start to flower.  What else? It's the start of baseball's spring training today. "Pitchers and catchers will report February 17th with full squads due five days later." Spring starts in February as long as we move further south in North America - Winterthur Museum and Gardens near Philadelphia has flowers in bloom - Snowdrops, Witch hazel, fragrant white winter Honeysuckle, and early Hellebores. Further south, to Texas there are Redbud trees, Mexican plums, Texas mountain laurel and others that start to come into bloom in February. Britain has a much earlier spring than we do, even though it is further north so it has lots in bloom.  In UK cities cherry trees are bursting with blooms, English bluebells are carpeting the woods, and wisteria fragrance is in the air. But today, the news is about the first British blooming of an Amazonian flower - Selenicereus witti, a cactus known as Moonflower.  It will bloom for nine hours.  It starts with a sweet honeysuckle smell and ends with an unpalatable stink.   We're only a few weeks away from spring in Canada.   Victoria's flower count starts March 3rd so is only two weeks away.  In 2020 the bloomingest community was Saanich and citizens counted over 45 million blossoms.  It's Gerry's birthday today and here's a picture of him from a few years ago in Cuba. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Christmas Gadgets

These special offers are only available online!  These 19 Cool Gadgets have MILLIONS SOLD worldwide.  What are they? I've chosen just three - they are all available on Amazon in case you are inspired.  If you have one, let me know.  "FIXD Powerful Check Engine Light Diagnostics — Read and diagnose your check engine light, understand the severity of the issue, and clear that pesky light from your vehicle. FIXD translates your vehicle into simple English, empowering you to make the easy fix in many cases & saving you precious time. FIXD also saves you money by providing you with estimated repair costs up-front, allowing you to feel more confident during those trips to the mechanic. Muama Enence Voice Translation: Intelligent voice recognition technology to make cross language communication easier. Translate your speech into high quality foreign language text and transmit into voice output. Eliminate all obstacles in language communication, You can travel around the world more easily.   Peeps™ Glass Cleaners - With over 1.5 million sold, this gadget is a must have for everyone. Designed specifically for cleaning eyeglasses, sunglasses and reading glasses, Peeps is the world's safest and most tested lens cleaning technology. Peeps groundbreaking invisible carbon microfiber formula will have your glasses as clean as the day you bought them.  This is actually the same lens cleaning technology used by NASA. Then on to the Telegraph.co.uk site with just one remarkable selection:  the Combekk Thermometer Dutch Oven made from 100% recycled disused iron railway tracks. (It must have inspired my picture today.) And there are Oprah's recommendations. If you go to the Huffington Post article on her top favourite things, you get 20% off with the code OPRAH at Amazon.  Finding ourselves back at Amazon... I am organizing and consolidating photos, and Lightroom popped up with Cuba pictures.   What a contrast of colour compared to our Winter landscape now.

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Run Amok!

Wake Up on the Bright Side  Yesterday's word 'may' seemed to me to haver quite a few meanings, but it is nowhere near the word with the most meanings. 'Set' has 464 definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary.  'Run' is next with 396, 'Go' has 368, 'take' has 343, 'stand '334, 'get' has 289, 'turn' has 288, 'put' has 268 'fall' has 264 and 'strike' has 250. The Guinness Book of records says that 'set' has 430 senses listed.  It also has the longest entry in the dictionary with 60,000 words.   But 'run' over-ran the overs, according to Simon Winchester, an authority. 'Run' has 645 distinct meanings according to the author of The Professor and the Madman:  A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  His piece on it was titled "A Verb for Our Frantic Times". The top three are 'run', 'put', and 'set'. I would go with Simon's top three as he is working on this.  Here's the interview here in the article titled:  Has 'Run' Run Amok? It Has 645 Meanings ... So Far Our picture today was on the cover of "The New Quarterly" this month.  It is a quarterly journal of Canadian writing.  I wrote a paragraph about the image taken in Cuba and what I like about the image.  You can see the journal here.  This is what I wrote: A visit to Cuba provided the environment for great photographic fun for me. I found this tri-wheeled vehicle charming and distinctive. This image has many elements that I look for. The emotion of the scene is the anticipation of the person—looking towards something, waiting and seeking. Then the brilliant colour was there to be showcased. The triangulation of red in the background seems to move the eye to the yellow taxi, and then we focus on the text on the grill: “colonial”—so much said in that word. For me, an epic story is captured.

Converging Trains

It is a train day today with a visit to Cuba's images from 2012.  We have two images that show convergence and what contrasting landscapes - the Niagara peninsula vs Cuba.  I found a preview train video of Cuba's sugar trains here, and one can purchase the series.  It is part of the Globetrekker website and the series is Tough Trains (...some of the most epic and hard-core train journeys on the planet) and there are previews of The American Transcontinental Railroad, Bolivia, Siberia's Ice Trains, Vietnam, and India. There's also a DVD of Great Railway Journeys of Europe.  In the India preview Zay Harding is hanging on the outside of the train. I seem to recall that the largest employee group in the world is the Indian Railway, and the next is the British health care system.  So I set about doing some fact checking, and it turns out to be incorrect.  The largest employer is the US Department of Defense with 3.2 million employees, then the People's Liberation Army, China with 2.3m, Wal-Mart with 2.1m, McDonald's with 1.9m, the UK National Health Service with 1.7m, China National Petroleum Corporation, 1.6 m, State Grid Corporation of China, 1.5 and finally, Indian Railways, 1.4m.  This comes from forbes.com.  USA Today looked at the largest publicly traded employer and it is  Wal-Mart.

Fifty Years a Ruler

Black Friday sales reports violence across the U.S.  It seems regrettable that this shopping day has an association with the Black Friday label.  Black Friday 'days' commemorate catastrophic events such as scandals, stock exchange crashes, fire devastation, military operations, and so on. There's an entry for Black Friday 2016 for the United Kingdom - the day after the Brexit vote - when the financial markets lost 2 trillion dollars in the worst single day drop in history.  Fidel Castro has died at 90 so today's photos show scenes from Cuba.  Here is his most famous quote: "Condemn me.  It does not matter. History will absolve me" And an historical fact I'd forgotten: "Castro’s speeches, lasting up to six hours, became the soundtrack of Cuban life and his 269-minute speech to the UN General Assembly in 1960 set the world body’s record for length that still stood more than five decades later."

Live in Cuba…

Live Steam in Cuba I don't know what the glitch was but the third photo is now in this second send out - and relates to the description of the Simon Bolivar. The Sugar Mill that houses this steam locomotive museum and operating trains is a popular reference on the internet.  Here's one site that shows an extensive overview of pictures of the mill and locomotives:   http://web99.login-23.hoststar.ch/CubaN/Salado/Salado.htm I thought I'd find out about the locomotives and found this description and thought you might enjoy it:  "Simón Bolivar (Mill 448)  was one of a pair of mills of unusual 2'3½" gauge, east of Caibarién. While its locomotives were invariably scruffy, the 'bank at Bolivar' was one of the stiffest tasks on the narrow gauge in Cuba, a steep climb for empties up to the plateau south of the mill."

Tuesday Trains…Live in Cuba

Hi everyone,
There's a great interest in trains so today we're starting the regular feature of Tuesday Trains. 

Live Steam in Cuba The Sugar Mill that houses this steam locomotive museum and operating trains is a popular reference on the internet.  Here's one site that shows an extensive overview of pictures of the mill and locomotives:   http://web99.login-23.hoststar.ch/CubaN/Salado/Salado.htm I thought I'd find out about the locomotives and found this description and thought you might enjoy it:  "Simón Bolivar (Mill 448)  was one of a pair of mills of unusual 2'3½" gauge, east of Caibarién. While its locomotives were invariably scruffy, the 'bank at Bolivar' was one of the stiffest tasks on the narrow gauge in Cuba, a steep climb for empties up to the plateau south of the mill."