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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Get the Lowdown

Is there something where you'd like to really know how it works?  You want to get the truth, facts, and most pertinent information about something.  That's what it means to 'get the lowdown'.  What about the favourite smells in the world?  The UK's top 20 include: 1. Freshly baked bread 2. Bacon 3. Freshly cut grass 4. Coffee 5. Cakes baking in the oven 6. The Seaside 7. Freshly washed clothes 9. Fish and chips 10. Fresh flowers 11. A real Christmas tree 12. Roses 13. Vanilla 14. Scented candles 15. Log fires 16. Lavender 17. Lemon 18. Chocolate 19. Barbeques 20. Cinnamon Compare that with Reader's Digest 8 favourite smells: 1. pine 2. citrus 3. sunscreen 4. fresh-cut grass 5. flowers 6. rosemary 7. peppermint 8. baby powder How about what scientists have found that smell good to nearly everyone? This comes from https://io9.gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-five-things-that-smell-good-to-near-5515453 1. lime (fruit) 2. grapefruit (fruit) 3. bergamot (similar to an orange in scent) 4. orange (fruit) 5. peppermint 6. freesia (flower) 7. amyl acetate (a molecule that smells like apples and bananas) 8. cassia (similar to cinnamon) 9. mimosa (flowering tree) 10. fir (tree) This last list comes from tests of smells on people in Israel and Ethiopia. They considered these groups culturally diverse so the results are considered general across all populations. Our picture of the day is from the garden tour - this one an invitation to appreciate a garden masterpiece.

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.

June 10 - Hiving Off

What about the expression hive off? It must come from hive as in a bee hive.  You can see it visually - taking a chunk of a bee hive. The definition gives no reference to a bee hive:  "to transfer or be transferred from a larger group or unit, to transfer profitable activities o or unit." When we think of it, there are many expressions that are directly inspired by bees. Some are still in use while others seem to have become dated. the birds and the bees Lessons about sex, such as are typically taught to children or young adults.  put the bee on (someone) To ask or pressure someone for a loan or donation of money. Primarily heard in US. Jane's good-for-nothing brother always comes around our place every couple of weeks to put the bee on us for a few bucks.The alumni association of my old university puts the bee on me once or twice a year looking for a donation queen bee  A woman who has authority or is in a dominant or favored position over her peers. An allusion to the (typically) lone egg-laying female of a bee colony. Martha fancies herself a queen bee after her promotion, but she's only an assistant supervisor. You'll have to ask the queen bee before you put through any more orders on the company card. be (as) busy as a bee  To be very busy. I'm currently choreographing three plays, so I'm as busy as a bee. Can we meet next week instead? I'm busy as a bee right now. a bee in (one's) bonnet  An obsession, often with something that is strange or  asource of agitation. Ever since the blizzard last year, dad has had a bee in his bonnet about moving to a warmer climate. It seems that Mike still has a bee in his bonnet over thec riticism he got in the staff meeting. the bee's knees  Dated slang. Something or someone highly enjoyable, desirable, or impressive, especially in a fancy or elaborate way. Tom's new Cadillac is really the bee's knees! Boy, that singer last night was the bee's knees, wasn't she? Today's picture is an unusual orchid in the Longwood Garden orchid house.

Follow Your Bliss

What are the most popular types of photography?  Portrait photography is #1, of course!  How many photographs do we take each day?  Goggle tells us that a 2014 estimate was 1.8 billion images every single day.  There are 14 trillion photos take annually, as of 2017.  Pictures flow on the internet highway.   In one second 8,523 Tweets were sent, 920 Instagram photos were uploaded, 1,541 Tumblr posts are maden.  There are 3,400,000 emails sent in a second, WhatsApp messages are 740,741, and Facebook posts are 54,977.   I went searching for the most popular photos in the world.  I find the most influential photos - these are mostly photos of death and dying in action - starvation, falling, people being shot (remember Vietnam images) etc. There  are 2 wonderful portrait- of Chez Guevera and Winston Churchill. So I am not able to find the most popular picture in the world. What about the most viewed picture in the world?  What is it?  It turns out to be the "Bliss' photograph on the wallpaper screen of the 1990s Microsoft computers.  Photographer O’Rear said: “I am turning seventy-six and realise how much the Microsoft ‘Bliss’ photograph has meant to my life.  “As the photographer of the most viewed photo in history, I have enjoyed every minute of the fame.” It is a picture he took out of the car window in Sonoma. I've always wondered about the strangely shadowed grass and how smooth and green the 'landscape' is.   Read more about this interesting story HERE  In the Silver Garden Conservatory at Longwood Gardens, these seem almost like a black and white pictures.

June 7 - Humour in the Bulletin

There are hundreds of thousands of churches and millions of church goers.  With services are every week stretching far into the past, the Church Bulletin Humour collected over the years is abundant:

1. Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Methodist. Come hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.
2. The Rev. Merriwether spoke briefly, much to the delight of the audience.
3. Applications are now being accepted for 2 year-old nursery workers.
4. The pastor will preach his farewell message, after which the choir will sing, “Break Forth Into Joy.”
5. Next Sunday Mrs. Vinson will be soloist for the morning service. The pastor will then speak on “It’s a Terrible Experience.”
6. The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the church basement on Friday at 7 p.m. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
7. At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?”. Come early and listen to our choir practice.
8. Ushers will eat latecomers.

If you would like to see funny church signs go to this website HERE.  It also has funny church bulletin bloopers.

This year's sea horse at Winterthur is a midnight scene.

June 6 - English vs Language Families

We in the English-speaking group don't think about other language families.  English seems to be dominant in so many areas that we might not even think about other languages. How many language families are there?  There are 141 language families and 7,111 living human languages within the 141 different families.   Membership of languages is established by comparative linguistics.  Just like plants - they are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship.  We also don't think about which is the most-spoken language.  That's because English is dominant in many communications.  It's 983 million speakers fall behind Mandarin Chinese with 1.1 billion speakers.  Next is Hinustani at 544 million.  Another retrieval says that there are 1.121 billion speakers of English and 1.107 billion speakers of Chinese.  Or perhaps there are as many as 1.5 billion using English to some extent.  The native English speakers number 375 million. What would the scenario be like if Chinese surpassed English in Global speakers?  How would that change things?   When I worked in computers, the universal language for comments and descriptions is English - computer code is required to have English descriptors.  I worked on a project where the software was developed in Morocco and it was written in French, so it would not be allowed in a government department given it failed this mandatory requirement.  I wonder how many fields and professions require English for similar things. I would think that STEM would be the area that requires a common set of standards and practises.  The Oxford-Royale.co.uk side says this is the case - 80% of scientific texts are written in English.  Academia, Online businesses, Tourism, Diplomacy, management consultancy and finally Finance are the top areas that require good English.  So I guess that covers a lot of jobs around the world. Look at the 'trunk' on this bonsai azalea at Longwood.

June 5 - Hierarchy or Harem

I was listening to a conversation about a person's past job as a dental hygienist and that she didn't enjoy it.  I thought about it for a flash of a moment.  A traditional dental office would have one man at the top and numerous women with lesser qualifications vying for his attention.  The scenario that came to mind is 'harem'.  I took this over to google.  It shows up in the form of a question on reddit: Why do many dentist office have exactly one man and a harem of women?  This is reddit, and the answers are no match for the question.  They typically are 'smart remarks', opinion comments, and strange responses that don't relate to the topic. I found another article with the headline:  Hygienist fights 'harem system' in dentistry:  KINGSTON, Pa. -- An oral hygienist who says she probably has more experience cleaning teeth than any dentist is fighting Pennsylvania's dental establishment for the right to practice without a dentist looking over her shoulder. 'I doubt there's a dentist alive who has done as many cleanings as I have,' oral hygienist Susan Edwards said. 'And he wouldn't do as good a job as I do because he needs your business.' At her Kingston home she operates an independent oral hygiene office, identified only by a white shingle that hangs outside. Though she's had 1,500 clients in the past 34 months, there's not a dentist in sight -- much to the dismay of the state dental establishment, which two weeks ago ordered her license revoked."   The article is HERE.  But that's not the case here in Ontario.  Independent dental hygienist practices have been allowed since 2007.   The Canadian Dental Association says that there are 400 independent dental hygienists across Canada. There are listings and directories of independent hygienists. However, it seems to be a limited work scope to maintain itself as an independent service.  My expectation is that most hygienists will continue operating in the current dental industry structure - one or a few owners at the top, followed by varying levels of clinical positions. Look at this hydrangea at Longwood - full of surface texture and brilliant colours.

Hopscotch through the Book

"If, while hopping through the court in either direction, the player steps on a line, misses a square, or loses balance, the turn ends. Players begin their turns where they last left off. The first player to complete one course for every numbered square on the court wins the game."  The rules of hopscotch are complicated - it is an ancient game played all over the world.    Today's Hopscotch is interesting. There are many sites that are retrieved with the term hopscotch.  At the site HopscotchCanada.com one can find children's activities nearby. - there are lots of STEM Camps - there is a continuing connection to mathematics and thinking skills. And continuing on this theme - this site: "Hopscotch is the only activity I can think of where she uses both her left and right brain." —SAYEED (PARENT) "I am THRILLED that there is a safe, interesting, engaging place for children to learn to code. This app really allows his creativity to shine, and his five year old little sister has become so interested in the app, and doesn't even know what coding is. THANK YOU, and keep up the good work!"  — Mom, C. to 10 year old son These recommendations are not from children with chalk on the sidewalk out front of their homes.  This is an app for iPads and iPhones for children ages 7 - 13 to make their own software and then use it (generally as games).  All of this is at gethopscotch.com  The intriguing connection of this complex game and mathematics achieved prominence in Hopscotch, a novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, written in 1963. In it, "Oliveira is a wandering soul, a man obsessed with memory because the only thing that keeps him going is the question of whether or not any path he could have chosen would have led him to the same place.  The book is split into 56 regular chapters and 99 “expendable” ones. Readers may read straight through the regular chapters (ignoring the expendable ones) or follow numbers left at the end of each chapter telling the reader which one to read next (eventually taking her through all but one of the chapters). A reading of the book in that way would lead the reader thus: Chapter 73 – 1 – 2 – 116 – 3 – 84 – 4 – 71 – 5 – 81 – 74 – 6 – 7- 8, and so on." "Throughout its 500+ pages, Cortazar’s work is full of typographical, linguistic, and conceptual experiments that add to the book’s appeal while avoiding the tinge of gimmickry. Take, for instance, chapter 34, written entirely in the following manner:" "In September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my And the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent like this." You can read more about the novel at quarterlyconversation.com HERE.  Here's a common sight in Niagara - shrub Wisteria.  This one is on our street.

Yo-yoing and Juggling

Are yo-yos gone or in steep decline?  There is a national yo-yo day in June and I wonder if it will be celebrated.  It is an ancient game - the Greeks had yo-yos - a child playing with one is depicted on a terracotta vase.  Before the twentieth century, they were referred to as bandalores.  Yo-yos were extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960s.   Today there are associations and conventions, so the professionalism is well-developed.  The world yo-yo contest will be in Cleveland in August 2019.  The competition circuit has 33 countries involved - competitors travel around the world.   What sports are similar to it?  Are yo-yo skills like juggling skills?  There is an International Jugglers' Association with the IJA Festival coming up at the end of June and the convention will be in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  It started out at an International Brotherhood of Magicians convention in Pittsburgh in 1947.  There are lots of programs to train for yo-yoing and for juggling.  But I still wonder how many people are active yo-yoers.  On the other hand, juggling has some statistics.  One of them is that it is estimated that 21 percent of people can juggle.  There is a chart on reddit where someone had fun with estimating how many balls could be juggled by the population: Balls People  3 200M  4 5M  5 500K  6 50K  7 10K  8 1K  9 200  10 40  11 10  12 2 Busker Festivals have both yo-yoers and jugglers.  At last year's Toronto International BuskerFest, they had the Guinness World Record attempt for yo-yoing by Michael Francis. His website doesn't have a further reference that he broke the record, but he has two Guinness world records, including the coin rolling record in 2016.   June is the month of sweet smells.  Lily of the Valley, Lilac and Wisteria scents float through the neighbourhood this weekend.

According to one survey, May is considered the favourite month of the year, October second.  June and December that are tied for third.  With our cool spring, June will be on top this year for us.  So as we launch into our favourite month, I went looking for crazy and strange business, retail and company names.  Here are just three: Analtech Where it's located: Newark, Delaware What it does: Manufacturer of thin layer chromatography plates. How it got its name:Portmanteau of the words "analytical" and "technology." About: Analtech distributes its products to more than 40 countries and 6 continents. McJunkin Where it's located: Charleston, West Virginia What it does: Manufacturer of pipes and valves. How it got its name: Jerry McJunkin was the original co-founder of McJunkin Supply Company in 1921. About:McJunkin Red Man employees around 3450 people and and is #493 on the Fortune 500. Ass Compact Where it's located: Germany What it does: Specialist magazine for Capital and Risk Management How it got its name: This one is anyone's guess.  The rest of the companies are HERE.   There are many articles on this topic.  A picture tour of oddly named business and companies is HERE.  This article has Butt Drilling, Wally's Private Parts, Turd Baby, My Dung, Big Dick's Halfway Inn, AssCompact (see above), Glory Hole Center, Anal Jewelry Center, Beaver Cleaners, The Golden Shower Restaurant, and so on.  Huffington Post took on the challenge and found Goin' Postal.  It is followed by a restaurant with the name of Sam and Ella's.  How about Passmore Gas & Propane?  Even the websites themselves have crazy names - at chive.com they showed these pictures of business names: Mustard's last stand, British Hairways, Lettuce Eat, Juan in a Million, Lord of the Fries, and so on. Another site named Pleated-jeans.com had Jurassic Pork, Surelock Homes, Carl's Pane in the Glass - all as picture stories.  What if you want to create a crazy business name?, I found biznamewiz.com and  typed in my name to get over 15,000 whacky combinations such as: Marilyn Crispy Cornwell Aristotle Cornwell Behold Marilyn Craze Marilyn Sixth Man Our pictures today show the interesting flowers of Anthurium, blooming at Longwood Gardens.

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.

Peony Flower Crops

Brian's Lilycrest Gardens hybridizing field is at the Houtby Farm, a grower of pussy willows, peonies and gladiolus.  This field, below, shows the Styer's Peony Festival At their Chadd's Ford Nursery when we were visiting on Victoria Day weekend.  We saw the signs, so followed them to the growing field with thousands of plants and flowers in bloom. The celebration tent is in the top left, so you can see how large the field is.  There are over 100 varieties on over 25 acres.  Styer's have seven farms, and originated with botanist J. Franklin Styer, a Pennsylvania Quaker. He was a pioneer in hybridizing and propagating peonies. His father is credited with bringing the mushroom industry to Kennett Square, where Longwood is located.  What made me surprised?  As a cut flower farm, I could see lots of flowers blooming.  I don't get to see that many flowers in the Houtby fields. While one can see some peonies in bloom in the rows, they mostly are picked at the right bud stage, and then placed into cold storage.  Peonies last in cold storage until August - they are a prime wedding flower.  The Gladiolus crop hardly ever has colour in the field - they are picked as soon as the smallest hint of colour shows. Like many things, the floral industry is now global.  In the past, roses were grown in greenhouses in Niagara as flowers were grown locally, near their markets. Now roses are grown in Ecuador and Colombia.  Colombia accounts for almost 60% of all flowers imported to the U.S.A.  The Netherlands is losing ground as the centre of production for the European floral market. However, it remains the leader in hybridization and culture, and technology advances come from the Netherlands for the greenhouse growers.

May 26 - Roadmapping

What do you think of this roadmap of American living?  In my work, strategic roadmaps helped organizations transition and transform.  This one is a current state map that contrasts the political and social status of the U.S.   There is a wide spectrum of visual representations, aka maps, now.   We can go to visual complexity.com and find all kinds of projects.  I looked for ones that might reveal things about U.S. politics but didn't see anything that general.  What I did find was a diverse collection of visual representations.  Every one of these pictures expands and shows the results of analysis through visual representation.  You can read about the project and author HERE.  Here is the author's introduction: VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.   We found these two historic stone buildings in Delaware, near Mount Cuba.

May 25 - Left and Right

Left and Right have been hijacked in Google and now retrieve left and right wing politics. One has to look for relative direction to find left and right.   I repeated the search and there's some 'smarts' in Google that now retrieves both concepts.  I knew they were watching me. So in relation to my question about direction, Wikipedia says that: "In situations where a common frame of reference is needed, it is common to use an egocentric view."  I had thought of left and right simply.  I find there are many paragraphs in Wikipedia on this.     I was drawn to the paragraph on Geometry of the natural environment: "The right-hand rule is one common way to relate the three principal directions. For many years a fundamental question in physics was whether a left-hand rule would be equivalent. Many natural structures, including human bodies, follow a certain "handedness", but it was widely assumed that nature did not distinguish the two possibilities. This changed with the discovery of parity violations in particle physics. If a sample of cobalt-60 atoms is magnetized so that they spin counterclockwise around some axis, the beta radiation resulting from their nuclear decay will be preferentially directed opposite that axis. Since counter-clockwise may be defined in terms of up, forward, and right, this experiment unambiguously differentiates left from right using only natural elements: if they were reversed, or the atoms spun clockwise, the radiation would follow the spin axis instead of being opposite to it." This means there is proof of the right-hand rule in nature. There are human cultures with no words denoting the egocentric directions. We use backwards, forwards, up, down and left, right.  They might say "move a bit to the east".   Betterphoto tells me that one of my images won second place in the landscape category.  Here it is - a picture from Winterthur a few years ago.  No azaleas blooming so beautifully this year.

May 24 - Dog Tails Know

I am wondering about dog tails, and find these are the four questions that google has showcased: Do dog tails help them balance? How do tails help dogs? Do dogs have feelings in the tails? Do dogs know they have tails? These are hilarious questions.  First the final question's answer:  Here are a few reasons dogs chase their tails... Oftentimes, dogs will chase their tails because they are a bit bored; it's a way for them to have fun and expend some energy. This is especially true for puppies, who may not even realize that their tail is actually a part of their body, but see it as a toy. Balance: Some do, some don't. However, while most dogs technically don't need their tails for balance, some rely on them to do their jobs. Working dogs are often bred to use their tails when performing certain tasks, and in some breeds, that means carefully maintaining balance while performing their particular job. How to tails help dogs? For the most part, canines and felines use their tails to communicate — from the wide, sweeping wag of a happy dog to the quick tail swish of an annoyed cat. In canines, a tail may also serve as a type of rudder to help stabilize dogs in the water.    Here are the other questions from Google.  I must make a side-comment on Google's "grammarisms" such as "? ..." Who decided that? Here are our questions: Why do dogs lick people? ...  Why is my dog's nose always wet? ...  How much better is a dog's sense of smell than our own? ...  Why do dog feet smell like corn chips? ...  Is my dog's mouth really that clean? ...  Are pit bulls actually dangerous? ...  Do dogs get jealous? ...  Who cleans up after guide dogs? Our concluding jokes: Where does a dog get a new tail? At the retail store I just watched my dog chase his tail for ten minutes, and I thought to myself: "Wow, dogs are easily entertained." Then I realized: I just watched my dog chase his tail for ten minutes. Q: How is a dog and a marine biologist alike? A: One wags a tail and the other tags a whale. A country road in Delaware.