Nov 8 2022 - Kingdoms

Are there any kingdoms today?  Yes.  There are currently 36 constitutional kingdoms, one absolute theocratic kingdom, and 5 absolute kingdoms. "a politically organized community or major territorial unit having a monarchical form of government headed by a king or queen" The kingdom that dominates public consciousness is the United Kingdom.  What a political and social reach that one has.   Can the Vatican City be a kingdom?  It is termed an Absolute Theocracy.  It falls into the second definition:  the spiritual reign or authority of God. Kingdom seems like a structure from the past along with a video game of the present.  I wonder how many video games have kingdom in the name or as part of the structure of the game.   There are all kinds of Kingdom video games - there is even a Kingdom Come. There is a Virtual Vatican where the video game lets you play Pope.  or if it is a video game, is it now kingdom with no capitalization? So here we are at Disney Orlando - home of the Magic Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom - the other parks lack the kingdom designation.    Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

 

Sep 25 2021 - School Facts vs Mascot Names

 

What are the kinds of things that make for fun facts about schools around the world? The highest elevation, the oldest, largest, the smallest, school on a boat, getting to school on a zip-line, Summer vacations at Christmas, longest school day with the shortest year - these are all at school advisory.  All curious and interesting.   One school in the Philippines is made of recycled pop bottles. It is given the distinctive name of Bottle School.  It took about 9,000 bottles and dozens of volunteers to build the structure. Each bottle was filled with sand, water and straw to keep them sturdy. Then, a cement-like substance was used to hold the bottles in place as they were stacked on top of each other to create walls.  Looking at the picture I would guess this is a school bus garage rather than a school. Another school in India has 56,000 students on a daily basis.  But I think this is a matter of definition as it has 18 campuses.  So it sounds like a city that has trouble naming each school building as an entity. Just looking at organization functioning and structure I can't imagine there is one principal for 56,000 students.  Then we come down to 'earth' from these novelties.  In our area, there is a grand new 'super school' in progress of being built.  It is just east of us at the border of Grimsby and Beamsville.  These are mega schools serving a broad geographic area. The new super school has a big billboard out in front of the construction site with howling/roaring blue wolves.  It says Home of the Wolfpack - it is an aggressive and violent image of 3 snarling wolves. If mascots are intended to portray and represent behaviours and traits, this school is going to need a lot of help managing violent student behaviour.    Or maybe the mascots will be alienating and they will have to spend a lot of time getting students back into class. Mascots are a hot topic in the US - there are colleges that have live mascots. These bring the schools a lot of bad press about cruelty to animals. There's a story of one live mascot trying to kill another one.  And then there are the articles pointing out that most mascots are male - even on products like cereal. Female and gender neutral mascots are few.   Isn't that one of our social quandaries now? When we identify something that is explicitly discriminatory or not in line with our social values, there's much work to clearly define the issue and then to unravel it.  Think of Ryerson University and the X Campaign.   How many Xs would there be everywhere if we applied the same approach?  For me, it would start with a big X on the three snarling wolves out front of the West Niagara Super school. This is an image of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles - the Frank Gehry designed building.

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Dec 11 2020 - Listen to the Piano

 

Remember the Good News Network website.  They have a story on a piano made of living plants.  It uses flora as biological antennas that perceive changes in frequency when touched.  This is translated into voltage.  The voltage is transformed into sound and activates the input of current from the electrical network into the circuit.  The result is a show of light and music.   Doesn't this sound like a high school science project that turned into a start-up company now worth millions? The ‘green piano’ was launched in August in Spain’s Ibiza Biotechnological Botanical Centre.   You can listen to it HERE. They are playing Greensleeves.  You can find out more about the Ibiza Botanical Technology centre HERE. It is an arboretum with aloe vera plants and aloe vera products, along with scientific discovery areas.  Their website calls the piano a "vegetable piano". Let's have some fantasy today for our picture - nothing like a Disney castle.

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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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WDW Modelling

What makes a model look real - is this a train day or something else?   When I saw these pictures I thought they looked just like model railroad layouts.  What made me think this? There's a story that is laid out by the elements in the scene - the boat, the clothes on the line or the native tee-pee and mini-village.  In a model, there's a compression of space, so that the elements are closer together than normal and the spacing of elements is artful.  Then there are usually more things happening in the scene - in the bottom picture there's a lot going on with all the little groups. These are full scale models at Disney World on the Riverboat Ride.  I guess that's part of the enchantment of the Disney experience - the sense of the created landscape set in real life so fun.  What are the WDW secrets?  Here are some WDW facts: Ever notice there isn't a lot of gum stuck on rides, trees, waiting areas in WDW?That's because they don't sell it on property, just for this reason. There are more than 20,000 different colors of paint used in Walt Disney World. On the Keys to the Kingdom tour they mention that in WDW no trash can will ever be more than 30 steps away from you.  It seems that Walt went to other parks when he was designing the park and counted how long a person would hold onto a piece of trash before dropping it on the ground.  He came up with 30 steps. Small pipes shoot the trash through the utilidors under the Magic Kingdom at 60 mph.

Serene in Cool Waters

Underwater

Underwater  We all expect to see Dolphins in Florida and we did when we visited the Clearwater Marine Rescue Aquarium where the famous tail prosthetic was developed for the dolphin Winter.  The story was turned it into a movie, and while it hasn't made the Aquarium money it does bring in the visitors.  (This is not Winter in the picture). When we visited Disneyland, this was one of the highlights of the Animal Kingdom - a hippopotamus underwater.  It brings to mind the expression 'what lurks below'. I thought this one had a  buddha expression - serene in the cool waters.