Showing posts with label fantasy of trees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy of trees. Show all posts

Thursday, November 28, 2024

Nov 28 2024 - Fantasy of trees

 

The Rotary Club of Grimsby has been hosting the Fantasy of Trees for 25 years. There are about 30 trees and 20 wreaths up for raffle.  There are all kinds of gift certificates and other items for raffle and silent auction as well.   The event starts today and completes a week from Sunday on December  8th.

Each year, I make wreaths.  You can see the gallery of wreaths below.  There are some new designs with felt leaves, fabric flowers, real-look cedar and woven rope designs.  

I usually decorate one or two trees.  This year, a third tree was added so lots off decorating fun.

The Fantasy of Trees is held in the Grimsby Museum, a very pleasant gallery setting. With the sponsorship of trees, wreaths, etc, the raffle, and the silent auction, up to $20,000 is raised each year for local charities.  

Here's the website - https://fantasyoftrees.ca/


I look forward to Santa Day - Mr and Mrs Santa come as a team.  They do this yearly for a number of charities, and we were lucky to lock them in a few years ago to come every year.  Given the charity nature of the event, they are very committed to the event.  Last year, I got a picture of Millie with them in front of the Museum.  Let's see what happens this year.
 
The first tree was put together last year, with all the gold ornaments glued together in clusters.  
The second and third trees were done on the spur of the moment this year from contributed decorations, supplemented by purchases.  And below the purple tree is the gallery of wreaths created for there Fantasy this year - some with Kerry Vandermolen, this year's Chair.
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Friday, August 4, 2023

Aug 4 2023 - Christmas in July

 

We are past the timing for Christmas in July.  That’s July 25th.  I think it has become a Hallmark item now.  It used to be for Southern Hemisphere countries to have a wintery Christmas.  For the Northern Hemisphere it is considered an ironic celebration.  July parties with a Christmas theme seem like a silly and fun thing to do.

The Hallmark Channel runs "blocks of their original Christmas television films in July to coincide with the release of the Keepsake Ornaments in stores, thus literally making the event a Hallmark holiday (an accusation that Hallmark Cards officially denies).”

There are yearly traditions in various places - Venice - where they have summer celebrations of Christmas. Denmark is reported to have these celebrations.  It may be that our commercialization of various celebrations and traditions have made us resistant to such ideas.  Particularly with Hallmark making it obviously commercial.  

My reason for thinking about Christmas is that the Rotary’s Fantasy of Trees activities are underway. It is time to organize some of the decorations.  We will make a few more wreaths for the display, and start to look for Christmas ornaments and decorations on various themes.  That activity really starts in October.  There’s an overlap between Fall festivals - Thanksgiving and Halloween overlap with Christmas.  I found this out in the last few years.  There are very enthusiastic celebrators who go out early and get their Christmas purchasing done.  If you go into a Michaels store now, the fall decorations of pumpkins and autumn leaves are all on display.  


I went looking for a suitable image and little did I realize one I created in 2022 is perfect for the July theme. 
 

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Saturday, December 17, 2022

Dec 17 2022 - Pi in the Sky

 

I heard an interview with Darren Aronofsky, the director of the Move Pi.  (Not to be confused with Life of Pi). So I went and read the plot summary on Wikipedia HERE.  That is fascinating of itself.    Such imagination to created that set of circumstances and events.  The themes of the film are religion, mysticism and the relationship of the universe to mathematics. 

Coming up is the 25th anniversary of the movie.  Darren Aronofsky gets back the rights to the movie - he put that in the contract at the time of his directorial debut.  He said he is going to launch the refurbishment of the movie on Pi Day, March 14th.   This gives new meaning to Scientific American calling Pi Day the celebration  "Irrational exuberance".


And Pi?  What about it?  Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed as a fraction.  Pi is a transcendental number, a real number that is not algebraic, or in even more technical terms, a real number that cannot be a root of a polynomial equation with integer coefficients.

Where did Pi come from?  The earliest known reference to Pi comes from ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and the Babylonians (4,000 years ago). In ancient times, documents such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus found the area of a circular shape in a curious, three-step manner.  
Here is the explanation of the experiment from Scientific American:  

"Try a brief experiment: Using a compass, draw a circle. Take one piece of string and place it on top of the circle, exactly once around. Now straighten out the string; its length is called the circumference of the circle. Measure the circumference with a ruler. Next, measure the diameter of the circle, which is the length from any point on the circle straight through its center to another point on the opposite side. (The diameter is twice the radius, the length from any point on the circle to its center.) If you divide the circumference of the circle by the diameter, you will get approximately 3.14—no matter what size circle you drew! A larger circle will have a larger circumference and a larger radius, but the ratio will always be the same. If you could measure and divide perfectly, you would get 3.141592653589793238..., or pi."  

And how many digits are there?  More than six billion have been identified through computer computations.


Christmas themes at the Fantasy of Trees this year.
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Sunday, November 27, 2022

Nov 27 2022 - Writing to Santa

 

How is it possible to write to Santa?  Children don't learn recursive writing anymore.  

Do they pop off an email? Of course they do.

 What is Santa's email address?  Which one would you like?  Here's one  listed as santa@officialsantaemail.com,  
Or you can go online to Elfontheshelf.com/kids and choose the activities tae and then click on write to Santa and this will pop up.  

Wait!  You can email Santa at email santa.com and up pops the Naught or Nice List with Cassie K. in Calgary, Maya O. in Sydney and so on.  And the joke of the day?  What kind of money do they use in the North pole?  Cold cash!

More opportunities abound.  In Canada you can email to www.canadapost.ca/santascorner.

Would you be tempted to cover the bases and write to Santa via as many different emails as possible?  Would you ask for different presents with each email or the same one multiple times?  Which strategy would you go for?  

Yesterday, I put most of my raffle tickets into the ladder tree, hoping I will win the vintage ladder and can use it as a garden feature.

Santa visited Grimsby yesterday.  Here's a collage of our memories of Santa at the Fantasy of trees over the last few years.  

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Friday, December 10, 2021

Dec 10 2021 - How Many Decorations

 

This year I had the task of buying ornaments for one of the trees at Fantasy of Trees.  The sponsor representative decorated the tree with what I'd purchased.  

I hadn't done this before and realized I didn't know how many ornaments to buy or how much ribbon for a garland.  So off I went to the internet and got the expert advice.

The advice turns out to be this: For a tree under 9 feet, it is typical to have 10 to 20 ornaments per foot.  So the six foot tree would have somewhere around 60 to 120 dangling ornaments and whatever things of interest you decide to decorate it with.  That's a lot of stuff!  These are trees on display in a festival, so it seems to me that more is better, and variety and novelty would be important.

Artificial trees are complicated now - or perhaps diverse. There are more dimensions to account for than just height.  There's the circumference/shape - full, slim, pencil - from 48 inches down to 21 inches.  And then there's style of the evergreen - plastic tips in various evergreens, to single evergreen type. And the number of them to make a full-looking tree. And finally, there is the finishing - sparkled, cashmere, and flocked.  Cashmere is a light dusting of fake snow, and flocked as fully snow-covered.

A decorated tree is a visual composition, and wants to be created according to visual art rules.  It wants to have garland or ribbon of some sort to create lines for the eye to follow to view the tree. There are horizontal patterns, vertical and diagonal.  The old days of popcorn strings are replaced with fancy ribbons and faux fur. Tinsel is now considered optional and that likely is due to the garland taking dominance.

A tree wants a satisfying topper - sufficient to make the eye travel to the top and land there for a short time. There are far more approaches now than stars - tree toppers can be startling and fun. In addition, there should be  focal points in the visual pattern field.  These are larger items in the tree or perhaps signs with cute sayings.  They give the eye something to stop at and enjoy.

Finally the bottom of the tree needs a skirt with substance so the skinny stand doesn't show.  There are decorative tree collars that completely hide the bottom of the tree.  These look something like elegant barrels beneath the tree.  


My plaid theme meant that the Dollarama Store turned out to be my friend.  There were ornaments in the shapes of stars and covered in plaid.  There were Santas on sleighs wearing plaid, there were stockings by the fire in plaid, little winter boots, cute dogs, and elves.  Even oven mitts and towels for under the tree.  Everything under $4.00 and most things $2.00.   Tree skirts edged in plaid.  

This is a telling story about our disposable society and the industrial production of goods. There's an 80% chance that the artificial Christmas trees were made in China in one region with 500 Christmas goods factories.  




There's a long history of children's jokes about Christmas trees:

How do Christmas trees get ready for a night out?
They spruce up.

Where do young trees learn to become Christmas trees?
Elementree school.

What was the Christmas tree’s favorite thing about Star Trek?
The Captain’s log.

What did the Jedi say to the Christmas tree?
May the forest be with you.


 

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Dec 20 2021 - Bubble Wrap Calendar Countdown

 

I was looking at bubble wrap Christmas Countdown calendars, and what did I find?  Britain's most accident-prone street made safe...with bubblewrap.  

How did I miss this? It was a while ago - in January 2010.  A road in Worcester turns out to generate one of the highest number of accident claims in the entire UK. So as a publicity stunt, they used  1,500 square metres of bubble wrap to cover everything out in the open. It was a stunt to celebrate t
he 50th anniversary of BubbleWrap.  

That means bubblewrap (aka bubble wrap) has been around longer than I had imagined.  In 1957 two inventors tried to create a three-dimensional plastic wallpaper, and failed.  They took two shower curtains and sealed them together with air bubbles in between.  They thought it might be greenhouse insulation, but it didn't actually insulate. They then turned to packaging. Sealed Air was the company - makers of Bubblewrap - and many kinds of wrapping products including Bubble Wrap Brand Inflator Solution Set, inflatable pillows, inflatable pouches, and more recently plant-based packaging. 

I would expect that Sealed Air has been a leader in contributions to pollution with all the sealed packaging solutions they have produced.  Not so anymore. Now they have a large section on priorities and commitments towards environmental excellence, workplace diversity, and so on.  Here's an example:

"Commit to design or advance 100% of packaging solutions to be recyclable or reusable, eliminate waste by incorporating an average of 50% recycled or renewable content into solutions, and collaborate on advanced recycling technology and infrastructure all by 2025."

Seems a bit like something Greta Thunberg would judge to be "blah blah blah."   It is hard to know whether these are actual commitments or corporate jargon. One can go to many sites that have reviews from the employees on what the company is like to work for- glass door.cacomparably.com, careerbliss, zippia, and so on.  But then employees don't cover whether the company is actually fulfilling its commitments.  We leave that to Fortune 500 best companies reviews. That seems dubious to me.

The accident-prone street was one of the top ten publicity stunts of 2010.  The stunt took eight people more than 12 hours to complete.  People woke up to a bubble wrapped street.

It was covered in top publicity stunts, and it was fascinating to scroll through them.  I found a Richard Branson stunt: "donning a wedding dress for the launch of Virgin Brides."  Yes - it is a picture of him in drag - wedding gown, veil, earrings and makeup.  

The top 50 publicity stunts HERE

And our pictures? Cute details on the Fantasy trees this year.

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Monday, November 29, 2021

Nov 29 2021 - Alphabet Soup

 

Of course, alphabet has to be of greek origin -  alpha beta.  It is the first two letters of the alphabet.  

"letters of a language arranged in customary order," 1570s, from Late Latin alphabetum (Tertullian), from Greek alphabetos, from alpha + beta. Attested from early 15c. in a sense "learning or lore acquired through reading." Words for it in Old English included stæfræw, literally "row of letters," stæfrof "array of letters." 

This is a long evolution to get to an alphabet.  We think of the Egyptians and their hieroglyphics - there were around 800 characters growing to as many as 5,000 characters, and then simplifying things with the "publishing" of Hieroglyphic Bookhand.  It remains one of the most complicated "alphabets" in history.  

Early vowelless alphabets are called 
abjads and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.  They are not considered proper alphabets. 

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages since it recorded words phonemically.  

I am so impressed with scholars who were able to figure these out, and for archeologists who found that Egyptians wrote left to right and also in all directions. 


The Phoenician alphabet spread to the Italian peninsula, and gave rise to a variety of alphabets  - of course one of these became the Latin alphabet. It was spread far and wide across the Roman Empire, explaining its enduring continuation, especially since it occurred in intellectual and religious works.  No one was giving these up.

To get to the English alphabet takes a few giant steps - Old English, Middle English, and finally Modern English, starting in the mid 15th century.  The first English dictionary was titled Table Alphabeticall.

Here's a humorous story: 

It was a wise though a lazy cleric whom Luther mentions in his "Table Talk," — the monk who, instead of reciting his breviary, used to run over the alphabet and then say, "O my God, take this alphabet, and put it together how you will." [William S. Walsh, "Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities," 1892]

Here's some advice:
If "Plan A" didn't work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.  

Here's the injection of mathematics into things:
I was good at math until they mixed the alphabet into it.


Today we have more pictures from the Fantasy of Trees display.

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Nov 28 2021 - Getting to Know You

 

There were no classes in Greek when I went to school - not during school hours.  There was a boy in high school who took Greek after class - I don't recall what kind of offering this was.  He was a mot intellectual type and very pleased with such a distinctive undertaking. 

That's why we all got a jolt of Greek letter education this week to find out the Omicron is a Greek letter. It follow Nu and Xi.  Xi is the first name of the Chinese president, so this would be weird - retrieving COVID and the Chinese President on a Google search.  And why not "nu"? - it is too easily confounded with "new".  Can you imagine the automatic spellcheck fixing that all the time?  

But WHO says it is because the agency's best practices for naming diseases suggest avoiding "causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups."   So I guess Delta airlines is not anything to worry about.


We missed out on iota, as in not one iota - this expression comes from the Bible (Matthew 5:18): "For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished."

 

Greek letters svg Greek alphabet svg Greek letter svg files image 1



I see a this as a great Holiday gift and ornament on the tree this year - it could have circled variants "of concern".  It will be joined by the "Dog Pooping 2020" ornament made by a B.C. woman who can't keep up with demand. 

I can't see putting that on the next tree anywhere near the cookies and cakes and donuts below.  This is one of the holiday trees in the Fantasy of Trees this year.

Friday, September 17, 2021

Sep 17 2021 - School Buses

 

The school bus is everywhere I go in Niagara.  I don't remember them in St. Catharines when I went to school.  I assume that's because there were schools located within a few miles of each other.  As an urban community, that distance of walking to school was normal, expected and the only option. That's my guess.  Statistics confirm this.

These are US statistics from the Safety Administration:

  • In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
  • In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
  • In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
    • 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school 
  • In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
    • 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school

"The circumstances that have led to a decline in walking and bicycling to school did not happen overnight and have created a self-perpetuating cycle. As motor vehicle traffic increases, parents become more convinced that it is unsafe for their children to walk or bicycle to school. They begin driving them to school, thereby adding even more traffic to the road and sustaining the cycle. "

What I notice is that school buses pick children up all over the neighbourhood and all over the streets everywhere.  The bus in my neighbourhood stops at the corner of my street and then the very next street.  School buses operate as parent and chauffeur substitutes.  With all those buses, things are complicated now - there are 18,000 school buses in Ontario.  

There are equally complicated activities to return people to having their children walk to school.  Things like the Walking School Bus - you can imagine it means walking to school in groups under adult supervision using prescribed protocols.


I realize that school busing alone tells us how much effort there will be to reduce our carbon footprint and start to address climate change.  We depend on our complicated social order.

Today I am pitching the Fantasy of Trees wreaths for those of you who are fairly close by for pick up or delivery.  You can purchase one of the wreaths. I am partial to the Monarch Butterflies Wreath - it is a lovely gift.  Let me know if you might be interested.

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Thursday, December 5, 2019

Two-Faced Day

Big news yesterday:  Trump expressed unhappiness because of unkind things said about him by other world leaders.  His response:  Justin Trudeau was two-faced.  

Let's shine some light on "two-faced" expressions and quotes.

First, in the definition of two-faced comes this quote/expression:

"It's not surprising that politicians are so two-faced, but that people buy their phony facades."

This version has been spoken many times between the democrats and republicans throughout history:

"If you stop lying about me, I'll stop telling the truth about you"
~ Various

Finally, the last word should be given to this quote:

"Sweetie, if you're going to be two faced, at least make one of them pretty"
~ Marilyn Monroe

Big news follows today from the Globe and Mail: 

"Of course, Trudeau is two-faced on Trump. It’s part of the job for him and all other foreign leaders
 
Of course Justin Trudeau is two-faced in dealing with Donald Trump. Canadians know that. Don’t Americans know it? How can the U.S. President not know it, too?
Canadians have seen Mr. Trudeau smile and nod while sitting beside Mr. Trump as he threatened to damage the Canadian economy. Even Canadians with no love for Mr. Trudeau expect him to do his best to lather up the U.S. President with flattery when he is surprised or even appalled by what he says and does. When dealing with Mr. Trump, being two-faced is professionalism."  

And the article concludes that 'two-faced will continue to be part of the job.'


Here are two of our Fantasy of Trees Christmas trees.  The first is a lovely black and white tree decorated by Kerry Vandermolen, and the second the Bee Tree, decorated by Ruth Moffatt.
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Monday, December 2, 2019

Winter Comes Fast

Welcome to Meterological Winter.  Notice the 'logical' in the word that doesn't seem fair - we didn't want this much winter so soon.  Meteorologists and climatologists start winter on December 1st.  They want consistency - they don't want a season that varies between 88 and 94 days.  That's a lot of extra work to make things comparable.  Meterological seasons have been tracked since the late 1700s.  The term for measuring the winter season is "meteorological reckoning".  

And what happened in Niagara on our first day of winter?  We had rain, that formed ice, followed by power outages, and snow.  With scattered flurries predicted today, we could have more power lines felled from trees, and more power outages.   So I guess the start of winter this year has begun to fulfill the prediction of the Polar Coaster

As I looked through the news articles, an expression caught my attention:  "the highway looked like a skating rink".  That seems to me to be particularly Canadian.  Other expressions we can expect in winter:  cold snap, snowed under.  And last year's term was "bombogenesis" - a powerful nor-easter affecting the East Coast that brought heavy snow to the Canadian Maritimes.  And there is a soft snowflake that looks more like sleet than snow - it is called "graupel".   I found The Outdoor Swimming Society website and they have 35 ways to say it's cold.  There are words in the list such as brumal and hiemal.

Do you remember the expression snug as a bug?  I brought a wreath inside from the front door yesterday.  I wanted to put some decorations on it, and a fly few out of it, and then a walnut dropped off of it.  It seems the fly was no longer snug and the squirrel's secret stash is now gone.


I took this picture of Robert Walhout, Grimsby Rotarian and actor.  He was in the Lamplighter Play this year, in the role of the School System Superintendent.  He came costume to the Fantasy of Trees Celebration evening.
 
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