Jan 3 2022 - Snubbed Already!

 

It is a Dog Eat Dog world.  So when it comes to cats, who knows? We had an immensely entertaining experience in Michael's on Saturday.  A cat in a bubble carrier. I'd never seen one of these - a plexiglass pet capsule travel container.   The cat met Millie.  It was indifferent.  I wonder what it thought of the store.

So who snubbed who in 2022?  That's the underside of the Dog Eat Dog world.  The most prolific and reported  "Snubbers" are the Oscars, the Golden Globes, The Grammys and the Emmys.  What will happen in 2023?  It has started off with one of Rolling Stone's "Lists"  and has excluded the following from its "200 Greatest Singers of All Time" - they like to write in German caps. . Celine Dion, Pink, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Hudson, Janet Jackson, Tony Bennett, Madonna, Nat King Cole, Dionne Warwick, John Legend, Rita Moreno and more. The headline is that Céline Dion fans are outraged that she has been left off the list entirely, with many taking to Twitter to share their frustration with Rolling Stone.  "Among those names that most experts would agree don't have a better singing voice than Celine Dion included many of the rockers on the list such as Ozzy Osbourne (#112), Glen Danzig (#199), Kurt Cobain (#36),  Bruce Springsteen (#77), Mick Jagger (#52), John Foggerty (#118), Patti Smith (#117), Chrissie Hynde (#114), Roger Daltry (#109), , Courtney Love (#125) and Joe Strummer (#130)." Tweeting frenzy ensued. That might help it find a CEO. I think they have "foggy" thinking like the  john Street orchard..

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Nov 24 2022 - Angels Sing

 

I get a quick sense of my generation (and age) when I search for a phrase.  Today's is "looking for angels".   What comes up is Skillet Looking for Angels - official music video and lyrics.  A mournful song about the woes of the world.    At the other end of the spectrum of angels is the long list of angel sightings, angel encounters and true stories, real pictures and videos.   The most recent fact-checked angel cloud sighting over Kyiv proves to be from around 2008.   But we so want angels with us in our lives.   The largest gathering of people dressed as angels is in the Guinness Book of Records.  There were 1,275 people gathered in Winnipeg on December 1st 2015.  There are sand angel records and snow angel records - 8,962 people flapping their arms and legs in unison on the State Capital grounds of North Dakota in 2007. I wonder about this after John Milton's Paradise Lost and the Angel escorting Adam and Eve from Paradise.  Where was the angel when they needed help?  Aren't angels supposed to be guardians not guards? Where to find the answer?  On Quora.  Lots of opinions and explanations are offered.  Here are the top two posts.  First from "Sherry Claire - Author has 798 answers and 858,500 views, and next from Dick Harfield with 25,700 answers and 68.8 Million answer views.   This is McLuhan's  global village now and here's the current approach to biblical questions with millions of people checking out the answers.   Just a few posts down comes Stu Lewis' answer - "Questions like this are sort of pointless. You could ask similar questions about any work of fiction or mythology. What if Gatsby had anticipated Wilson’s act of revenge and taken precautions rather than going for a swim? What if Hamlet had not been foolish enough to stab at the curtain before checking to be sure who was behind it? What if Macbeth had understood that a prophecty was bound to come true even if he sat back and waited for the inevitable rather than killing the king? The list is endless."    This is the John Street orchard on a winter foggy day a few years ago.  We've had a lot of mist and fog in the air this autumn and that makes for  beautiful sunrises in orange and peach tones.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Oct 31 2022 - X Marks the Spot

 

X - is any real number.  In fact, x is a lot of things.  Then why does x mark the spot? The common answer is that it was first recorded in 1813.   As the location on a map for hidden treasure.   Another repeated usage is that it was supposedly  put into common usage by the British army, who performed executions by marking a piece of paper with a black x and positioning it on the heart of someone sentenced to death.  This seems strange to me, more of a form of torture.  I would think the British army knew how to shoot accurately. Another reference is that at the height of Chicago gangsterism in the 1920s that the specific phrase x marks the spot took on specific meaning.  When newspapers started to abstain from publishing pictures of actual corpses in the scenes of murders, the x was used on the bodiless photos to indicate where it had been positioned. As a result, spotted came to mean ‘murdered’, in the slang of that time, and to be put on the spot took on a specific implication. These seem more like urban myths.  These seem so unsatisfying for a letter that has many applications.  And it has a long, long history.  I wondered why Wikipedia's entry was about movies.  I eventually found the most comprehensive history of the letter X at symbolsage.com HERE. The picture below comes from the article.  It is the unknown and the known, it is rejection and a kiss, it is death and danger.  So much going on with x.

The articles conclusion: "Each of the letters in the alphabet has a history, but X is the most potent and mysterious. Since its inception, it has been used to represent the unknown, and has more social and technical uses than any other letter in the English alphabet. Nowadays, we use the symbol in mathematics, to mark places on a map, to indicate our choice of candidates on a ballot, to indicate an error, and many more." That seems to me to be "spot on". And our photo?  Lake effects fog and mist yesterday morning shrouded the landscape.  I thought the pictures I'd taken would be poor, but it turns out with some processing, some of them are quite nice.

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Pacific Fog and Pizza

I looked at the water level of Lake Ontario yesterday and it is high this year.  The reports are that it is higher than in 2017, which was a record year.  That made some of the beaches off-limits along the Niagara shores of Lake Ontario in 2017. We had mist come in from the escarpment yesterday along with cool temperatures, and one could imagine it was a San Francisco day. It is being repeated this morning.  We in Grimsby are getting a small experience of what it is like in San Francisco. What makes fog a common occurrence along the pacific coastline? The temperature of the Pacific Ocean means there is a lot of evaporated moisture.  There is a marine layer of water vapour near the surface and this encounters the colder waters along the coast.  The result is fog. There are aerial pictures of fog entering San Francisco through the Golden Gate - a fascinating weather story.    What I notice this morning, beyond the weather, is that one of the headlines is about Pizza Pizza.  It changed its original pan recipe after four decades.  This was reported by CNN.  It has a new cheese blend, new sauce and is baked in a newly engineered pan designed to turn out a crispier crust.  Meanwhile, the news at Little Caesars Pizza is that vegan sausage has made its appearance in the Impossible Supreme Pizza.  What makes this national news? Maybe this is because 43% of consumers order at pizza at least once a week.  And don't forget the keto diet where cauliflower pizza crusts are on the rise. This is also a news item. Here's the beehive gazebo at Winterthur, with the peonies in the foreground.

I put butter in my coffee...2019 diet trends

Google trending searches for 2018 included topics like actors, athletes, people categories. We are mostly obsessed with people.  Here's a search I wouldn't have imagined - magnetic eyelashes.  The magnets lock together between the natural lashes and secure the false lash along the natural lash line.  So ingenious! Google has a diet theme.  Here are the top searches on diets: keto - eliminate all the carbs and put butter in your coffee not cream dubrow - interval eating to confuse the "satiety centre" noom - an app focused on behavioural change carnivore - foods that walked, swam or flew and pretty well nothing else - aka anti-vegan diet mediterranean - plant-based emphasis, olive oil, herbs, limited red meat That was in 2018.  What are healthline's predictions for the diet trends that will dominate 2019? gut health - balancing the microbiome plant proteins - new this year - dandelion greens, rainbow carrots, beets and amaranth intermittent fasting - easy to follow  keto diet - spotlight in 2018 will continue in 2019 hemp - anti-inflammatory effects bitter food - asparagus, cucumbers, detox the GI tract un-dieting - futility of dieting trend And they conclude with an eighth one - intuitive eating - the practice of increasing one's awareness and experience of eating.   So many news organizations have been covering diets.  U.S. News ranked diets on January 2nd, right in time for the resolutions - they ranked 41 diets overall.  That's a lot of diets to choose from. They are HERE.  The top three are: Mediterranean, DASH, Flexitarian and MIND (tied with Flexitarian). A few more of our winter ice and fog pictures from a few days ago.

Weather Alerts Every Which Way

Which alert to look for?  A Warning (red) a Watch (yellow) or a Statement (grey).  If we were north of Toronto in Barrie, there is both a wind and snow squall warning.  Here in Niagara, it is a wind warning so our map of Southern Ontario shows red in Niagara.  The colour code of red for danger has been use for quite a while. The British newspaper ,The Telegraph has an article about it, written in 2008.  Red is take action.  Orange is be prepared,  Yellow is be aware, and Green no severe weather.   Yesterday's satellite radar image showed green rain flowing from the south to the north, except at Grimsby - pink and red for freezing rain. Code systems using colours are common in hospitals.  While hospital system codes vary between countries and provinces,  code blue inevitably means cardiac emergency.  Doctor codes - paging Dr. Sinclair - uses a doctor's name as a code word for a dangerous situation or a patient in crisis.  There are a lot of potential crises in hospitals - the codes vary from flood, fire, gang activity, bomb, child abduction and so on. In comparison, the U.K. hospital codes are numeric - 2222 crash call, 3333 security alert, 4444 fire alert. But mostly where safety is involved, there are color codes for labelling and communicating - this is universal in all industries and businesses with any kind of safety concerns. Back to our weather - it has been on alert for most of the week.  We had to cancel the big closing evening of the Fantasy of Trees last night because of freezing rain, high winds, and black ice warnings.  And add to that a freezing fog earlier.  I didn't even know there is such a thing as freezing fog. So our pictures today show the John Street orchards, covered in ice an inch or two thick.  Everything is white, like an infrared landscape.  It was a surreal landscape - white from top to bottom.

A Foggy Brain

The Google search image today links to an announcement that NASA has discovered 7 Earth-like planets orbiting a star just 40 light-years away.  There's an article on it here.  They are being called the seven sisters of planet Earth. We had a day of fog yesterday.  These is an expression known as Brain Fog.  "It's a vague sense of what you're trying to retrieve, but you can't focus in on it and the effort to harness the thought can be as draining as physical activity." I won't give you the link as the web page  is full of junk and keeps shifting.  Wikipedia's entry for it is "clouding of consciousness." Our fog yesterday was perfect for orchard images.  I found the infra-red filter in Topaz Black and White Effects, and that's the result in the two bottom pictures.  They have an eerie snow-quality to them.  And how different the light was during the time I was out.  The first picture is taken towards the west with a blue fog, and the second picture is taken towards the east with the grey fog.  You can see the orchards are being worked on.  There are piles of branches on the ground. The third picture shows a row or corkscrew willow graft trees.  This looks like a corkscrew willow and pussy willow crop.  They may even be harvesting the pussy willows now as I could see the pussy willows on the stems..

Lake Effects - Or is it Affects...

"The Lake Effects" - that's the phenomenon that gave Buffalo the terrible snow storm last year.  The one with the snow that came up to house roofs. In Niagara, the Lake Effects are/is credited with 'giving rise to remarkable flavour distinctions between grapes of leakier sub-appellations and those from further inland. " Here's the link that describes more about this: http://www.vqaontario.ca/Library/Appellations/NiagaraPeninsula_Maps.pdf We've been experiencing Lake Effects with the recent rain.  These pictures show the fog effects at Vineland Estates winery.  Fog can role in before or after a rain.  The third picture is Moyer Road - the road that leads to Vineland Estates.  Isn't this a beautiful country road!   Facebook Twitter Website