March 30 2024 - Famous Easter Joke(s)

 

Are there any famous Easter jokes?  Would it be in the Comedy Hall of Fame? There's a National Comedy Hall of Fame and a Canadian Comedy Hall of Fame.  There are a some jokes, but it isn't a library of the most famous jokes.  These are the two I'll include:  Seinfeld:  "Proof that we don't understand death is that we give dead people a pillow."  Bob Newhart: "I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for those who like country music, denigrate means to 'put down." So back to Easter - historically, Easter was known for a tradition of laughter - risus paschals.  It was a medieval tradition where priests provoked the laughter of their congregations on Easter Day by telling crude jokes, making obscene gestures and putting on slapstick comedic performances.  That was stopped by the Pope in the 1600s.   Who would have guessed that Easter once had a lighter side.   I  have found the most famous Easter Joke: Three men died and are at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter tells them that they can enter the gates if they can answer one simple question. St. Peter asks the first man, "What is Easter?" He replies, "Oh, that's easy! It's the holiday in November when everyone gets together, eats turkey, and are thankful..." St. Peter shakes his head, and proceeds to ask the second man the same question, "What is Easter?"  The second one replies, "Easter is the holiday in December when we put up a nice tree, texchange presents, and celebrate the birth of Jesus." St. Peter looks at the second man, again shakes his head in disgust, and then peers over his glasses at the third man and asks, "What is Easter?" The third man smiles confidently and looks St. Peter in the eyes, "I know what Easter is. Easter is the Christian holiday that coincides with the Jewish celebration of Passover. Jesus was crucified on a cross and then buried in a nearby cave which was sealed off by a large boulder." St. Peter smiles broadly with delight.  Then the man continues, "Every year the boulder is moved aside so that Jesus can come out...and, if he sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter." here's a nice abstract pansy.

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Mar 29 2024 - Chocolate Crisis

 

We are short 374,000 tons this season, way up from a shortfall of 74,000 tons last season.  Chocolate prices have tripled.  West Africa is having the problem.  Ghana, specifically.  There is a virus that kills the trees.  Illegal mining pollutes the water and kills the trees.  But mostly the virus.  Some headlines call this a "chocolate meltdown."  The hope is Latin American countries will be able to step up production.  That will help Easter stay afloat. But what about a crisis that could happen daily?  That's the banana pandemic.  We only eat one variety of the thousands of bananas that grow - the Cavendish banana.  Every single Cavendish banana grown is a clone so they aren't adapting to conditions or becoming resistant to viruses.  Panama disease is a fusarium wilt, and just a few spores can lead the way to blighting an entire plantation.   Could it be possible that we will be eating something that looks and tastes like banana but is artificial?  There's a long way to go to get artificial banana flavours that taste like bananas.  Isoamyl acetate has been criticized widely for not tasting like bananas.  Or it tastes like a banana that we don't normally eat, given we only eat Cavendish.   Science Daily says the day will come (that was in 2008) when scientists will fine tune enzymes responsible for flavours in fruits and vegetables.   I guess there should be hope on this one too.  Or we'll be eating all colours and textures of bananas - sort of like the many carrots that are available again. Look up "Can we simulate bananas" and you get a lot of video games  - roblox banana simulator, simulation of giant banana orbiting the earth, turning people into bananas, and banana (pet simulator).   Is there a possible best banana joke in the world?  There certainly are claims for the best banana bread recipes in the world. Maybe the headline is the joke:  "45 banana jokes to get your whole bunch laughing" or "25 banana jokes for a bunch of laughs"   Q - What do you call the period of time between slipping on a banana and landing on your butt?  A - A bananosecond    We won't see a display like this one again at the Niagara Showcase greenhouse.  All that forcing of bulbs and probably not a long-lived display.   The last few years have seen the showcase greenhouse closed most of the winter and open in May.   This year, it is back to festivals all through the seasons. When I went a few weeks ago, the orchids on the white twig trees were artificial. Despite that  it was very beautiful.  That was part of a Cyclamen show and the replacement plants are all real for the orchid show on now.  I got my seasonal parking pass - it was a bit shocking last month to pay $25 for an hour's visit to the greenhouse.

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Mar 27 - How the Eggs Got into Easter

 

I have forgotten how eggs got into the Easter tradition or maybe I didn't really look into it. This comes from wikipedia and seems an astonishing sort of origin:  "The use of eggs as favors or treats at Easter originated when they were prohibited during Lent. A common practice in England in the medieval period was for children to go door-to-door begging for eggs on the Saturday before Lent began. People handed out eggs as special treats for children prior to their fast." What about chocolate and Easter?   "At that time, it was customary to save eggs until the end of the fast, and some eggs were also decorated. The chocolate egg appeared in the 18th century, when the idea of emptying eggs and filling them with chocolate was introduced as a way of marking the end of the fast."  According to Wikipedia chocolate eggs first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles, and chocolate eggs were produced in 1725 in France and continued thereafter. The big moment of the big chocolate egg is a highlight of Easter.  It is either British Chocolatier J.S. Fry & Sons or Cadbury who created the first modern chocolate Easter egg.  Definitely Cadbury is known for the  invention of machinery that made pure cocoa butter that could be moulded.  Most reports of when chocolate came to Easter dwell on this moment  - in 1875 Cadbury released their first line off chocolate Easter eggs - the hollow ones.  They were filled with sugared almonds. So I guess the story of Easter and chocolate is that it got into Easter through eggs.  The egg story is the complicated one to me.  Many legends and religious myths are part of this tradition.   I found some pictures of Koi in the Lightroom database, and have been editing them to showcase the Koi.

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Apr 9 2023 - Easter Golf

 

Tiger Woods has made the cut at the Masters.  That's 23 consecutive made cuts in Augusta and tying Fred Couples and Gary Player.  So it is 23 in 2023.  Today is a golf day.  That solves Easter for most Americans.  Most holidays are solved with a sports game.   That seems to make sense given how Easter - the word - is unclear.  It has unknown origins or uncertain ones at best.  Britannica says it parallels the word Ostern in German.  Likely it is uncertain as the closest expression is Eostre and that's the goddess of spring and fertility.  So it seems another win for Pagan traditions. Or is that a steal from pagan tradition to rationalize using the event to overlay a Roman Catholic event.  The Britannica entry continues that there is widespread consensus that it derives from alibis the Latin phrase that is the plural of alba which is albes and is dawn.  I thought alba was white How did eggs get involved?  "As the story goes, Ēostre had once saved a bird from the winter cold. The bird's wings had frozen and could not fly away. So she changed the bird into a rabbit, and since the rabbit was once a bird, it could lay eggs." And today we reveal our own social celebrations via the Guinness Book of Records for Easter - there's the largest chocolate Easter egg weighing in at 7,200 kg. Then the most expensive non-jewelled chocolate egg sold at auction for 7,000 pounds. The largest chocolate rabbit came in at 3,850 kg. And a real Flemish giant rabbit is the largest rabbit at 4 ft 3 inches long.   Which is its today?  Easter lilies or foot long hotdogs at Easterbrook's?   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 17 2022 - Turkey Day

 

If the Dutch had arrived on Repa Nui "Great Repa" on Thanksgiving, would it be named Turkey Island?  They arrived on Easter, and so appropriately, gave it the name Easter Island.  Even though it is one of the most remote islands on the planet, Europeans arrived in 1722, the Chileans raided it for slaves, and European diseases reduced the population from 2,000 - 3,000 when the Europeans arrived to 111 in 1877.  Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888, and it now has 7,750 residents, of whom 3,512 consider themselves Rapa Nui. It is fitting that Canada's version of the Moai are made of snow.  And that could happen on Easter somewhere in Canada every year.  That would be ironic synchronicity.  Enjoy an Easter egg hunt, chocolate, and festive dinners today.

Today's image comes from the Niagara Falls Greenhouse lawn.  Another image of the Spring ephemerals - Chinodoxa. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Apr 16 2022 - And Time for Canadian Easter

 

Is there anything distinctive about Easter in Canada similar to that distinctive way we call our Thanksgiving "Canadian Thanksgiving".   Yes, there are at least two Canadian Easter jokes that express what makes Canadian Easter Canadian.  They are below.   There is the new Pixar animation film, Turning Red, set in Toronto.  It is about a 13-year-old girl who transforms into a giant red panda when she gets too excited.  There are "easter eggs" throughout the movie/trailer.   “There are a couple of great Canadian Easter eggs in this trailer and we can't wait for Canadian audiences to see more when the film hits theatres next year,” Mason said Tuesday in a release. HERE's the trailer.  When you find them, let me know.  I don't see anything, but find the trailer very cute.  I wish they were just easter eggs and not some special message. There is one obvious difference between Easter in the US and Canada. We do not have mass congregations for Easter.  In the US, the President and First Lady host the White House Easter Egg Roll, a tradition dating back to 1878.  Approximately 30,000 people will take part this year.  The last time that anywhere near that many people congregated in Ottawa was in February with the Convoy Protest and we weren't at all pleased.

Today's image comes from the Niagara Falls Greenhouse lawn.  These are one of the Spring ephemerals - Chinodoxa. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

March 30 2021 - Homer's Odyssey #1

 

What is the most famous story ever told?  Google tell's me it is Homer's Odyssey. After that?  It seems to be Uncle Tom's Cabin.  The most popular authors of the top 100 stories were Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, with three stories each.  This list comes from the BBC HERE.  They describe the methodology - itself an interesting story. Top 100 The list was determined via ranked ballots and first placed into descending order by number of critic votes, then into descending order by total critic points, then alphabetically (for 73 to 100, the titles listed are tied).  1. The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC) 2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852) 3. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) 4. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949) 5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958) 6. One Thousand and One Nights (various authors, 8th-18th Centuries) 7. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-1615) 8. Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1603) 9. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez, 1967) 10. The Iliad (Homer, 8th Century BC) 11. Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987) 12. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri, 1308-1320) 13. Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare, 1597) 14. The Epic of Gilgamesh (author unknown, circa 22nd-10th Centuries BC) 15. Harry Potter Series (JK Rowling, 1997-2007) 16. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985) 17. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) 18. Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945) 19. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) 20. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert, 1856) At the other end of the spectrum, HERE's an article that describes how our modern technology would ruin the great classic storylines.  Here are the first three: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote checks Google maps and sees that the giants on the horizon are windmills. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Every day, @great_gatz creates an Instagram Story about his great, great life and religiously checks to see if Daisy has watched it. Ulysses by James Joyce  Autocorrect. Here's the best display ever for Easter at the Niagara Falls Greenhouses. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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April 12 2020 - And It's About Eggs

What about eggs?  How did eggs get to be part of Easter? The Christian interpretation of the egg is that it represents Jesus' emergence from the tomb and resurrection. But eggs have been a symbol of new life since ancient times.  The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians and Hindus all believed the world began with an enormous egg.  It is called the world egg, cosmic egg or mundane egg.   Some primordial being comes into existence by 'hatching' from the egg, sometimes lain on the primordial waters of the Earth.  The very earliest idea of 'egg-shaped cosmos' comes from Sanskrit scriptures. It continues through all ancient societies and into modern mythology and cosmology. With that long history of sacred celebration, what have people done with eggs that make the Guinness World Records stand up and pay attention?  Many irreverent things, all involving many people and many eggs. Largest egg structure - 48,230 eggs forming a pyramid. Largest East egg hunt - 501,000 eggs that were searched for by 9,753 children Largest Easter egg tree - 82,404 painted hen eggs Largest decorated egg - 49 ft 3 inches tall and decorated Most people dyeing eggs - 582 in Redmond, Washington Tallest chocolate Easter egg - 34 ft 1.05 inches I didn't colour eggs for Easter, but I did colour hosta leaves to create this  Nature's Impressions abstract.

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Easter Relics in the News

The perfect Easter Story timing:  The Crown of Thorns in residence at Notre Dame has been saved.  There are many press stories showing this beautifully gilded artifact - the "supposed and purported" original crown, considered priceless.  

The origins of the crown can be traced to texts dating back to about AD 530 that claim the crown was on show in the "Basilica of Mount Zion" — a hill in Jerusalem just outside the walls of the Old City — where it was believed to have been venerated for some time. 

Move on to the 1500's, with so many relics and so much veneration that  John Calvin, key figure in the Protestant Reformation published his Treatise on Relics in 1543.  He argued the veneration of relics had become idolatry. He pointed out there was no mention of the keeping of the relics of Christ or anyone else in the earliest church writings. The opposite was the case - a deliberate avoidance of these as they were considered idolatry.  

So on to more current authorities.  Professor Euan Cameron writes:

"Then there was the problem that so many relics existed in multiple versions across Europe:  one saint might have up to four full bodies dispersed in various places, besides body parts dispersed here and there."

And what about the relic itself - what is the  authenticity of the plant.  The speculation is that the original band of reeds ws held together by a thorny vine.  Wikipedia says that the bush the thorns came from is Ziziphus spina-christi, more popularly, the jujube tree.  The thorns were removed from the crown and kept in separate reliquaries.  The oldest known Ziziphus is located south of Jerusalem and is estimated to be about 2000 years old, just about the right age to be the 'very tree'. So it too is venerated.

This is a mere snippet of the long story of the Crown of Thorns.  Tomorrow we'll visit the current Easter story:  Where it's all about the bunny and not about the lamb.

Isn't this a beautiful display at the Niagara Falls Greenhouses?  This picture was taken a few years ago.