Flip Flop - the summer sound

I heard this summer sound yesterday:  "flip flop, flip flop, flip flop".  The person ahead of me was walking along in her flip-flops.   So I asked everyone I talked to yesterday about flip-flops and when did they become part of our popular culture. My proposed answer was after the war with the great economic growth and the widespread adoption of popular culture trends in the U.S. and Canada.   That doesn't answer the question of where did they come from or how did it start?  What happened was the U.S. soldiers brought Japanese zori with them.  And this caught on in the 1950s during the postwar boom.  They were redesigned and changed into bright colours in keeping with the vivid 50s. In the 1960s they became associated with California beach style.  They have continued and expanded ever since, so much so that they are an accepted shoe style. They have an ancient beginning. There is a picture of thong sandals from the New Kingdom of Egypt dated 1550 - 1307 BC.  We know intuitively that this makes sense and that the Greeks and Romans wore versions of flip-flops.  I seem to know this from the sand and sandals epics we saw as children.  Or maybe they were wearing sandals in the movies.  I just checked - no flip-flops - fabulous sandals. Today there is discussion on flip-flops as casual wear.    Here's the advice on when not to wear them: Restaurants with cloth napkins Red carpet events Churches Funerals Business meetings First dates and blind dates Isn't that delightful? The advice seems consistent with when flip-flops originated in the 1950s.  Can you imagine deciding ahead of time what to wear in a restaurant "with cloth napkins."  And decide to wear "nice shoes" on a first date.  What is missing from the list?  Can you wear flip-flops to weddings?  Here you go...     Our picture today is a close-up of a leaf pattern.  This is the leaf of a Prayer Plant. Maranta leuconeura, also known as prayer plant, is a species of flowering plant in the family Marantaceae, native to the Brazilian tropical forests.

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Music Gets the Grade

The Globe and Mail has a front page article that a large scale study has shown music performance education in high schools increases overall grade performance.  This isn't the first time music has been heralded as a contributor to improving general intelligence and performance.   I was recently considering how expanded our studies of any field are.  I expected that the music field now would be much more complex than  fifty years ago when I was in school.  So I went to the University of Toronto (UofT) website to find out more.  And yes - this turns out to be a fascinating exploration of human progress.   Before we look at this, I did see something that I found amusing. One university in the U.K. offers a related masters - the applied acoustics, M.Sc. It was its terminology that got my attention.  "At a time when there is a shortage of highly qualified noise consultants in the UK, gaining this MSc in Applied Acoustics at University of Derby will give you a real edge in your acoustics career."  I quote this one because of use of the term 'noise'.  I had had veered off into the engineering realm of acoustic, noise, and vibration . So back to the UofT and on the topic of music.  This is the introduction and a list of the new courses for 2019-2020.  The full set of course descriptions are HERE. Home to a diverse and dynamic community of scholars, performers, composers, and educators, UofT Music offers a supportive community in one of the world’s most diverse and dynamic cities. We provide a superb learning environment, an internationally renowned teaching faculty, multiple performance halls, and an outstanding music library collection. With degrees and diplomas available in numerous areas of study, our array of courses and programs provides our 900 students an exceptional opportunity to explore various fields within music.” – Don McLean, Dean Here are their new courses for 2019-2020 MUS1069H – Remix Music, from Analogue to Digital MUS1070H – Music, Genre and Variation MUS1169H - Listening to Cities: Music, Sound, & Noise in Urban Environments MUS1280H - Analysis and its Futures in Ethnomusicology MUS2186H – (Un)Popular Music Education MUS2224H – Conducting for Composers MUS3316H - Cognitive Perspectives in Music Theory MUS3421H - Composing for Theatre MUS4439H - Flute-Guitar Masterclass MUS4616H - Topics in Interactive Media and Performance MUS4617H - The 21st Century Creative Performer: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry to Performance and Performance Practice One scrolls through the regular set of ensemble, performance, history, composition and theory courses. Past the many pages are course in music and health sciences - these are fascinating.  What about the Music & Health Doctoral Research Project? This is what a bus load of garden visitors looks like on a garden tour day. The Flamborough Society is a great group and were willing to pose for a group shot after visiting the three gardens on my street - my next door neighbour and the neighbour across from her.  All similar houses, similar plots and lots, and different garden designs.  People find it wonderful to see how different the gardens are.

Cruising into the Storm

Isn't that a great photoshopped picture on the left?  The perfect blue wave overcoming the luxury cruise ship on a seemingly sunny day.  There is a 6 minute video of a cruise ship during a hurricane level storm.  The one on the right seems more accurate - you can see everything sliding right then left then right HERE.    The Dailymail.com has an article on Norway launching an investigation into why a Viking Sky cruise ship set sail in a storm, and then lost power.  Thirteen hundred passengers were airlifted to safety.  That was in March 2019.  There are previous events similar to this. There are lots of videos inside the ship.  It is all HERE.   Here is an email message supposedly sent during the crisis: There's a 2013 article in the New York Times and it asks how normal are cruise mishaps.  They show the website cruisejunkie.com where cruise mishaps and accidents are tracked. The site lists events such as passenger kicked off ship, collision, propulsion problems, insensitivity to medical emergency (passenger had heart attack and ship crew wouldn't allow them to get medical attention on an island, then he died on board).  There are charts of illness outbreaks on cruise ships. What about these dumbest cruise questions. It makes sense as over 20 million people take cruises each year. 1. Does the crew sleep on board? 2. Why are the ruins in such poor condition - after a tour of the ruins in Rome 3. What do you do with the ice carvings after they melt? 4. How small does your face have to be to get a mini facial at the spa? 5. What time does the Midnight buffet start? 6.This is our family's first cruise ever… we have several cabins on different decks of the ship and our question is, do all of the decks go to the same ports of call? 7. Are these islands completely surrounded by water? There would be best sunset views on a cruise, so we'll go with that as our picture of the day.

Around the World of Last Names

If you go through the alphabet and come up with a last name for every letter... You would likely discover your country of origin and ethnicity.  The list of common surnames is organized by region - Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America.   And within each category is a listing of the most common names by country.  How many people in China have the name Wang/Wong?  In 2007 there were 92,881,000. In comparison, there are 2,376,207 people with the surname Smith in the U.S.A. in 2000.  Smith turns out to be the most popular last name in the U.S., Australia, and Great Britain, along with many English-speaking countries.  The last name of Wang means "king" in China.  That can be traced back to royal families who took the name of Wang when their kingdoms fell under the Qin dynasty.  The second most popular name in China is Li, and it means plum, plum tree or minister.  It became a popular name as a result of 'gifting' the name Li to trusted allies and warriors.  The practice of surname-gifting resulted in nearly 40% of Chinese people having the surnames Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Zhou, and Wu. I found a visual version of surnames - a map that shows the most common last name in every country.  Here it is.   What would you guess about surnames in the Arctic and Antarctica?  They are complicated jurisdictions.  In the Canadian Arctic, Innuit surnames were ignored with the government using a number system for people. It finally registered surnames starting in the 1960s.   I found no listings of common Innuit names. What about Antarctica? Only 80 people live in Antartica in the winter and 200 in the summer.  They live on King Georges Island.   How many people have been born there?  Wikipedia says at least 11 children have been born in West Antarctica.  These children are automatically the same citizens as their parents, accounting for their surnames. Here are some of the ferns along the living wall at Longwood Gardens.

May the 4th be with you!

In 1977 Star Wars was released to very receptive audiences.  Line-ups were the norm in Toronto.  But then, back then, line-ups was normal in Toronto for most movies, and even in winter.  It was a movie-going town with lots of great venues with big screens and great sound. Maybe that's how the TIFF festival got to Toronto - knowing the audiences were already there. There are many articles - 20 facts, 30 facts, and so on  - things you didn't know about Star Wars.  These seem to be tidbits for diehard fans. So I have turned to finding jokes, and Reader's Digest supplied some puns: Q: Which program do Jedi use to open PDF files? A: Adobe Wan Kenobi Q: Which website did Chewbacca get arrested for creating? A: Wookieleaks Q: Why did Anakin Skywalker cross the road? A: To get to the Dark Side. Q: Why is Yoda such a good gardener? A: Because he has a green thumb.  Q: How do you get down from a bantha? A: You don’t. You get down from a goose. Luke and Obi-Wan walk into a Chinese restaurant. Ten minutes into the meal, Luke’s still having trouble with the chopsticks, dropping food everywhere. Obi-Wan finally snaps, “Use the forks, Luke.” The Star Wars text crawl walks into a bar. “Get outta my pub!” the bartender yells. “We don’t serve your type here.” These are the gerberas from the greenhouse tour a few weeks ago.   I am so taken by their complex centres with tiny pistols and petals looking like confetti.

Britannia is a girl and so are her boats

A Maritime Museum in Scotland has announced that it has begun referring to boats as 'it'.  While the Museum Director says this had begun earlier, it was announced after continued vandalism of signs - where 'she' has been scratched out of information signs.  This is where everyone got involved.  It is part of the current social frenzy over free expression. The article in the Independent.co.uk demonstrated this with a nonsense sounding quote by the side against the change: "Political correctness is getting out of hand, the few are trying to bully the majority," said Harry Silvers. "There is room in this world for everyone." Not all cultures view boats the way the British do. It turns out that in Russia, boats have the opposite gender. The world authority on boats is a British firm - Lloyd's List. The weekly shipping publication which has been in print for more than 250 years,  abandoned centuries of seafaring tradition by calling all vessels "it" starting in 2002. It did it to bring the paper into line with most other reputable international business titles.   We have a simple black/white decision in English.  The week.com tells me that if we were in Luganda, "there are ten genders: people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, and mass nouns. But in Chinese, Finnish, and quite a lot of other languages, there are no genders at all."  It explains this in much more detail for those of you who love grammar.   This same article says this:  The problem is that the Old English word for "ship" (they spelled it scip) was neuter. The Old English word for "boat" (bat) was masculine. So was the word for "whale" (hwæl). And they didn't have a word for "car" (since people a thousand years ago didn't have cars). The use of the feminine pronoun in those instances isn't a holdover at all! It comes from more recent attitudes towards the things referred to.   Little did we know that this week's angry mob would include the Admiral Lord West. Switching topics.  We have continuing news each week on Grimsby coyotes: yesterday two people were bitten by coyotes walking along the street in town.  Coyotes live on the escarpment and above the escarpment - and anyone who has a house backing on to the escarpment hears them howling at night. These biting coyotes are living in the South Service Road and Maple Street area. They started chasing people on the town streets a few weeks ago, so the newspaper reports and warnings have been constant.  People have been pretty surprised - we're supposed to be the dominant species in town.  They don't realize that coyotes have no such rules.  Here's my boat of the day:

Those Rose Thorns

I am always victim to rose thorns in the garden. Enter garden, do a little work, get a rose thorn in the finger.  And the result?  Pain and swelling from the tiniest rose thorn.  Who do these tiny rose thorns hurt so much? Ask an expert: "DEAR DR. GOTT: Last spring, I contracted rose-thorn disease. Very painful and extreme swelling occurred in just one finger. I was in the hospital for days under sedation and on antifungal meds. I’m still having stiffness and swelling in that finger now and then. When will this go away? I must say, everything is not coming up roses here." DEAR READER: Rose-thorn (or rose gardener’s) disease has the technical name of sporothrix schenckii. It is a fungus that resides on hay, sphagnum mosses and the tips of rose thorns. It can cause infection, redness, swelling and open ulcers at the puncture site. The fungus can spread to the lymphatic system and move on to the joints and bones, where it ends up attacking the central nervous system and lungs when the thorn or thorns are deeply embedded.  Diagnosis can be complicated because the condition is relatively uncommon. When an ulcer does present, it is often mistaken by a physician as a staph or strep infection and gets treated accordingly.  It is only when the antibiotics prescribed fail to eradicate the ulcer that physicians look outside the box." Read the rest HERE. Doesn't it give this field of roses new meaning! Here's the upcoming meet and greet this Sunday in Hamilton on Dundurn St. S.