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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April 17 2021 - It Jiggles

 

"If you ride in a car over bumpy roads holding a bowl of Jello on your lap, you can watch it jiggle until you reach your destination."  That demonstrates how to use "jiggle" in a sentence.   Jello is a part of North American culture. By 1930, there appeared a vogue in American cuisine for congealed salads, and the company introduced lime-flavoured Jell-O, to complement the add-ins that cooks across the country were combining in these aspics and salads. Popular Jell-O recipes often included ingredients like cabbage, celery, green peppers, and even cooked pasta. These are well-known childhood memories for most of us. One savory recipe collected by the Des Moines Register, published in Iowa, is for a tomato soup gelatin salad. The salad, served chilled, is made from lemon gelatin, tomato soup, cream cheese, stuffed olives combined with various other ingredients and seasonings. This is not a memory for me. Did you know that Jell-O is popular among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)? The Mormon Corridor region, which has the highest Mormon populations, was nicknamed the "Jell-O Belt."  In 2002, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City issued a commemorative pin featuring green Jell-O. And the Jello jokes: I was arrested for having jello in the shape of a gun in my bag The officers charged me for having a congealed weapon What's the difference between The Sahara and Jello One is an inhospitalble desert and the other is an in hospital dessert. Why is a box of Jello mix always substantially larger than the contents within? You need to allow some wiggle room. Did you hear the joke about jello? Took a while to set in but it sure gave me a jiggle Oh oh - the breaking news is that we're not supposed to travel far from home.  How far are the orchard blossoms?  Definitely Burlington isn't home so will I be able to visit RBG?  We missed the cherry blossoms last spring with the gardens closed.   Can I even drive through Niagara Falls?  I don't think so this year.  And all those daffodils and the Magnolia Allee to be missed another year. Is it essential to go to Harvest Barn or 13th Street Bakery in St. Catharines for cherry tarts? Here are a few more images from the John Street orchards for today's photos.   Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Apr 16 2021 - The Moors

 

For me the Moors means Sherlock Holmes. We watched the Hound of the Baskervilles last evening, and the Moors played heavily in the plot.  Low-growing vegetation on acidic soils - temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands, and of course heath and heather. There are moorland habitats in tropical Africa, norther and western Europe and South America.  We in Canada have tundra where the subsoil is permafrost and these two are closely related. The Moors have inspired many artists and writers - even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - they played their fictional 1994 Quidditch World Cup final was hosted on the moor. But I would think the most famous is The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is the third of Doyle's four crime novels, voted one of the most popular books ever written, and is the most popular of the Sherlock stories.  It is set on Dartmoor in Devon.  This is the first appearance since his apparent death in The Final Problem.  The book incorporates five plots and was serialized so that every chapter ended in a cliffhanger.  The inspirations are themselves stories of mystery and murder.  The legend of Squire Richard Cabell of Brook Hall was the fundamental inspiration of a hellish hound and cursed country squire.  He was described as a monstrously evil man who had sold his soul to the Devil, rumoured to have murdered his wife, and when he died, a phantom pack of hounds came across the moor to howl at the tomb.  The myths and legends of Dartmoor include pixies, a headless horseman, the 'spectral hounds' and a large black dog. There is a supposed big cat known as the Beast of Dartmoor. There is even the notion that during the Great Thunderstorm of 1638, the village of Wildecombe-in-the-Moor was visited by the Devil.   How could Dartmoor's moors have so much  mythology and legendary?  It is an ancient place with a long history of inhabitants.  Even the moors have a long vegetation history: Some of the moors were naturally occurring and others were forests in Mesolithic times. It is proposed that humans began to clear it by 10,000 B.C. and efforts intensified after that.  Human settlements have occurred over thousands of years archaeological findings have been studied in many places on the Moor. Acidic soil would destroy organic remains, but the granite that was used for buildings has been studied at length. There are surviving farms in operation today from the Medieval period.  There is the well-known camping joke about Holmes and Watson.  So I went in search of something else and found this: Tesla, Oscar Wilde, and Sherlock Holmes walk into a bar. The punchline of this joke was patented and then hidden by Thomas Edison.    The blossoms have begun - here we are yesterday on John Street between Vineland and Beamsville.  With the Multiple exposures, the sense of blossoms is present, but it takes a clear image for them to really show.  There's that dark April sky - it needs some cloudy interest. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

May 27 2020 - Duchess Prospero

We watched a Stratford production on television last night, thanks to COVID-19.  Their season would have started this week. We say Martha Henry play Prospero in The Tempest in the 2018 season of Stratford.  She was 80 years old.  Her first season was 44 years before that and she played Miranda to William Hutt's first Prospero in The Tempest.  What a wonderful experience for her of completion. The original play has Prospero as a duke rather than a duchess. Was it even possible to have a duchess? It did seem to me that it is more traditional for a duchess to be the wife or widow of a duke.  But it was possible for a duchess to hold the rank equivalent to a duke in her own right and there are 16 Italian duchesses listed in Wikipedia. Prospero portrayed as a woman is strikingly in contrast with the play's otherwise male roles/cast.  Wikipedia includes a section on the feminist interpretations of the play. "The Tempest is a play created in a male dominated culture and society, a gender imbalance the play explores metaphorically by having only one major female role, Miranda. Miranda is fifteen, intelligent, naive, and beautiful." That must have been a tricky area to address in the staging of the play and for Martha Henry to give meaningful interpretation of the character. There would have been many explorations and workshops to bring this version alive. And the last of our pear trees on John Street were blooming a few days ago.  You can easily recognize a pear with its vertical structure.  All the other fruit trees have an open vase shape.

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Blossoming in Progress

I saw some signs outside businesses on May the 4th - May the Force be with you.  So a belated May the Fourth be with you greeting.  May 4th is the official Star Wars Day celebrating the Star Wars franchise.  There were quizzes, great deals online, and a CBC article on people who admitted publicly that they were not fans and didn't care about THE FORCE. Our first blossoms opened this week.  I made the rounds to some favourite locations and was happy to capture these yesterday.  The first two pictures are at Scott Street and Stewart Road on the NOTL-side of the canal.  The last one is at John Street at Maple Grove where John does the jog.