Mar 22 2023 - Day-Timers Gone By

 

What a great name for a calendar company - Day-Timers.  Do you know when they went out of business?  Likely not.  They didn't quite go out of business.  They merged with MeadWestvaco, laid off staff and moved locations to consolidate, and laid off a lot of people.  The original company, started in the 1940s was a family-run printing press hobby business changed forever. Everyone who worked in corporations had a day-timer in the 1970s to 1980s. That's just one story of a product that I used to be intimate with every day and now is gone.  There are many such companies that have disappeared over the last 10 years and we notice or don't notice them.  Do you know that Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus is gone - that was in 2017.  Just the Museum is there to remind us of their greatness. The A&P Supermarket - something familiar across Ontario - closed in 2015 and sold its locations. That was the Jane Parker in-house brand.  We enjoyed the spice cake my mother used to buy and pack in our lunches. Toys R Us - that familiar huge retail brand covering the front of the stores is gone - it had its ups and downs and finally was gone in 2017 - with $5 billion worth of debt and closing 800 locations.   We might have used a Compaq computer - gone in 2013 retired by HP after being acquired in 2002.   And all those neighbourhood Blockbuster video stores - that was 2010. There seemed to be one in every neighbourhood in west-end Toronto.  I guess I got to wondering about all of the change that seems to happen so often that I don't notice as last week Nordstrom announced it was selling its fixtures and furniture along with all its stock.  In the Eaton Centre it seems to me that it had the entrance to the subway food section.  I wonder what will happen there.  Here are the pictures - and the keywords tell me it is Saks 5th Avenue and not Nordstrom.  Something to find out.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Boo Is Gone

Boo was the social media sensation of a dog.  He was considered the 'world's cutest dog'. He died yesterday at 12.  He really is cute - he looks right at you with a smiley face.  Boo belonged to a San Francisco-based Facebook employee.  She created his Facebook page and posted 'cute' pictures which gathered more than 1.75 million Likes on Facebook.  Boo got a big boost when Khloe Kardashian wrote about him on her blog. Boo had his own book:  Boo:  The Life of the World's Cutest Dog. He became a celebrity for charities and the official pet liaison of Virgin America, featuring pictures of him and advice for people travelling with pets.   This is his poster picture.  Doesn't he look like a little teddy bear!   The Wikipedia entry on Boo identifies that in April 2012, Boo was the subject of a death hoax after #RIPBOO appeared on Twitter.  This is interesting in retrospect, given all the investigations of influencing in national elections of various countries.  And the increased use of social media to harass people with hoaxes and lies. It took only one post by Gizmodo writer Sam Biddle for the rumour to spread wide and be treated as fact.  Moreover, the Gizmodo writer pursued the hoax by continuing to post tweets of Boo's death in a duck pond - which the New York Times retweeted. And then Twitter followers played along with the hoax, including photoshopping a gruesome image of Boo's demise.  In retrospect now, this type of distortion and manipulation would have broadcast social media's vulnerability far and wide.  Is this different than in the past? A report by New Oxford says it is growing at a larger scale, despite efforts to combat it. Our storm story of yesterday has come about as fact. It is to continue during Sunday with blowing snow.  The Weather Network's chart is amusing.  It has the row names out of sync with the data.  So the hours of sun on Monday is 51, 23 on Tuesday, etc.  That's supposed to be the wind gust.  On the theme of white, here are some images from the Minneapolis Arboretum in September.