Emoji Dick

It seems to me that Emoji are everywhere.  They have been with us since the late 1990's, and originated in Japan on Japanese mobile phones. Apple included them in 2011. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the Word of the Year.  There is an Emojipedia, which was created in 2013.  There's a World Emoji Day on July 17th each year.  Here a most remarkable Emoji implementation:  In 2014, the Library of Congress acquired an emoji version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, created by Fred Benenson". Here's how he did this: "Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji. This is what the Emoji Dick website says about the book: "Each of the book's approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker (a marketplace of web workers). These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book. In total, over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book. Each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote per translation." The funds to pay the Amazon Turk workers and print the initial run of this book were raised from eighty three people over the course of thirty days using the funding platform Kickstarter." Isn't this stranger than truth, and fancier than science fiction?  So perhaps today's pictures fit the theme.  They are 'made up' with the Topaz Glow filter.  Can you guess what they are?  Scroll to the last picture and original source can be seen to be branches and twigs.   Our giggling emoji concludes the post.

Ice in the Garden

I loved the crab apple tree next door - with the ice on the apples, they looked like candy apples ready to eat.  Here are a few of the images.

Autumn Abstracts

I was in Niagara this past week and stopped along Highway 8 so that I could take some photos of the beautiful fields of purples, yellows and browns with asters and teasels everywhere.

Here are some of the images.