Dec 16 2024 - Hot Frosty Please

 

If I were to make a dish named Hot Frosty - it would be a dessert and would have a frozen outside and a hot melted inside.  And I think maybe peppermint or vanilla flavours for the frozen mousse.  Melting chocolate on the inside and everything in a pool of hot dark chocolate. But that's not the Hot Frosty that's popular this year. And indeed it is "The Hot Frosty" not "A Hot Frosty" this year -  it is a Netflix movie in which actor Dustin Milligan shows off his abs when he comes to life from being a snowman. Who would guess big, fat, round balls of snow would transform into - well look below.  Seems like it is tempting to click on the visit button to find out more.     Here  is on plot summary: "Two years after losing her husband, Kathy (Lacey Chabert) magically brings a handsome snowman (Dustin Milligan) to life! Through his naïveté, the snowman helps Kathy to laugh, feel and love again, as the two fall for each other just in time for the holidays... and before he melts." There have been millions of views of this movie - that means a lot of talk and explanation of the movie..   Another:  A grieving widow and a little Christmas magic turn a six-pack-sporting snowman into a helpful household himbo in a delightful Christmas-themed romantic comedy. This one "explains" the ending:  It was only after Kathy fell in love with Jack that the universe granted her wish and helped him become completely human. His body temperature was no longer low, and for the first time, he experienced a shiver. Kathy was overjoyed, and she kissed Jack while the entire town cheered for them. Nothing is impossible on Christmas—a woman could fall in love with a snowman! Jack continued to live with Kathy. He gifted her a home repair manual, and she bought him tickets to Hawaii. He had always wanted to travel there, and now that there were no chances of him melting away, Kathy thought it was the perfect opportunity. And an actual review: Considering the current state of the world, how can I complain about a successful bit of holiday cheer and escapism? Hot Frosty embraces its ridiculous premise — yes, this is a hot snowman with abs — but adds enough holiday magic to make this more than pumping iron, Yuletide edition. The CBC Radio interviewed Russell Hainline who is the writer/author of this screenplay.  He also pens Hallmark movies.  He doesn't seem to worry that he's the writer of fluffy stuff - he seems to have a fun attitude all-round.  This started as a motion blur image of the pond at Charles Daley Park, and then it got the water colour plugin treatment.  It seems like a Winter Solstice-themed image now.

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Dec 21 2022 - Puppy Under the Christmas Tree

 

That little puppy under the Christmas tree.  CNN has advice for that. Their first piece of advice is that it is not a good surprise.  On the other hand, someone else says that seeing little Spot wriggle out of his wrapping paper can make for a lovely Hallmark moment.   Perhaps the Hallmark movie is a better bet.  These pictures popped up the other day - a demonstration on  "How Cats Rule over Everything".      Today's picture has to be the surprise abstract of the year.  This looks like an ocean beach landscape to me, with the waves on the shore.  The actual object is the entrance sculpture at the Horticulture Garden Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls.  It was a bright sunny day and the sun and clouds were reflecting in the wall.   The second picture shows the wall with the  the Niagara River in the background.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

June 20 2022 - Summering

 

It is time to summer somewhere.  That's a well-known notion.  Everyone wants to go somewhere where the skies are big, the lakes are clear, and the air smells of Eastern White Pine. We are into  the next 2 generations of cottagers.  A big boom started in the 1950s.  My grandfather built a cottage near Killbear Park in the late 1950s.  The landscape there was beloved by many immigrant Germans.  Before they took to cottage country,  it was inhabited by the wealthy or the eccentric.   The eccentric would be equivalent to off-the-grid types today.  Rustic, rudimentary living.  Often with the facilities of the 1920s and 1930s - no electricity, a refrigerator with a block of ice, and an outhouse.  Or maybe a generator, so they'd have some electricity. But a lot of decades have passed for cottage country to fill up.  Today cottage country is more in the realm of luxury living rather than rustic cabins. There's high demand for cottages that are built for the four seasons.  Multiple offers and high prices.   In Southern Ontario, we have many places within easy reach.  However there are many people to reach them.  Ontario has 10 million residents.  That's a lot of swimmers and boaters.  How well-off do you have to be to own a cottage today?  The average price of a Muskoka cottage is $737,890 in 2022.  That's up from $653,000 in 2021.  So I guess you need to have more than a little extra money.  And remember that's the average of all the cottages on all the lakes, not just the Muskoka Big Lakes. - which are Lake Joseph, Lake Muskoka and Lake Rosseau.   So once the money has been spent, what next? The next thing is how long is the commute and how bad the traffic is, or isn't.   And then how peaceful is a cottage?  With the jetskiers, motor boats, the power mowers, and so on all competing on the weekend. And would you relax?  Or would you be maintaining that "cottage" house, the dock, the boat, and so on?   It doesn't seem to matter, though.  The dream of that glorious sun sparkling on the lake as one skims the water in a motorboat.  That is quite an experience. Today's pictures give that sense.  They were taken in the Kingston area where Lake Ontario's shores get rugged and rocky with the granite terrain of cottage country.

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Dec 7 2020 - Christmas Thank You Notes

 

Since Millie has been taking up my mornings, I am writing the photo of the day post closer to noon.  I might end up with a High Noon quote or I just might schedule it each day. Today's question:  Is it proper etiquette to send thank you cards for Christmas gifts?   Here's the answer from Maralee McKee who is dedicated to helping you become the person you most want to be, particularly when it comes to contemporary etiquette, manners, and so on: You could send a thank you note to everyone who gave you a Christmas gift, but it's not necessary if you thanked them in person. However, there are three persons you really should write an after-Christmas thank you note to. Not only does Maralee McKee, The Etiquette School of America say you could, she says you should, write thank you cards to: 1. Persons who've made a positive impact in your life 2. Persons you work with personally and professionally 3. For any gift you received or party you attended but haven't thanked the person yet. And she instructs us to do it in hand-writing.   That's the tough part: I will have to learn to write again.  It seems odd to have lost a skill within my own lifetime - not any skill, but a daily living skill considered critical. I have lots of Christmas images.  This one is peeling paint on the side of a transport truck at Vineland Research when they were building the big greenhouses.  They are seeking to hybridize tastier winter greenhouse tomatoes.  You can see them in the dumpster - perfect little red tomatoes - hundreds of them.  I've been told to leave them there by one of the researchers who works there.

Sep 4 2020 - TV Appearances

 

According to a New Scientist article in early 2000s, women really do look fatter on television, while men look more hunky, say researchers at the University of Liverpool. They investigated differences between 2D images such as TV pictures and 3D images produced using stereoscopic cameras. It is a perceived wisdom in the broadcasting industry that TV cameras make people look about four kilograms(10 lbs)  heavier than they are.   Another article says:  "Your eyes are placed on your face horizontally, so you get a 'widescreen' view of the world," he said. "TV—specifically, NTSC—is nearly square (4:3), so you are significantly modifying your view of the world, not just by 'zooming in' and isolating the TV in your view, but also by changing your entire perspective." Watson said that it's not hard to see how your brain might try to compensate for this by stretching things out a little, therefore making people look wider. And other articles say that any camera will have this effect.  To highlight the way that focal length can affect the shape of the face, Business Insider's article showed a person's head in a series of nine portraits at 20mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 70mm, 105mm, 150mm, and 200mm.   Take a look at it HERE.   This is known as the Hitchcok zoom with it expanding out.   That article says that the best way to avoid extra pounds is to use 88mm to 135mm lenses.  I am right on it. I found this wonderful Georgian Bay scene in the archives.

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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.

What's Your This or That?

Need some more entertainment?  Can you imagine that question today?  We are avalanched with entertainment.  Suffocating in a sandpile a mile high of grains of entertainment sand. OK. Here is a simple game:  This or That Questions List.  A game from the past, but this one online has a noticeable  number of tech choices.  These seem inconsequential to me.  Netflix or YouTube is an example.  Or Facebook vs Twitter.  What is the personality preference or identity statement is there in these choices?   Dog or Cat? Netflix or YouTube? Phone Call or Text? Cardio or Weights? Facebook or Twitter? Ice Cream Cone or Snow Cone? iOS or Android? Form or Function? Pop or Indie? Cake or Pie? Swimming or Sunbathing? Big Party or Small Gathering? New Clothes or New Phone? Rich Friend or Loyal Friend? Football or Basketball? Work Hard or Play Hard? So I wondered if there was some discourse on this topic.  I do find the question being asked - at medium.com:   "Tribalism around tech decisions still exists, but feels less and less relevant. Even if your colleagues swear by Windows and you use Mac, chances are you’ll all be working on the same Google Sheet through a web browser. Tech’s maturation in the third millennium has been a force of flattening technological nuance to a point where pretty much everything can do the same things in mostly the same way. So the devices we carry and use for so much of every day end up looking basically the same too." "This increasingly strikes me as peculiar given the other objects we engage with daily. People’s clothes carry a mark of themselves. Their vehicles — from bicycles to Teslas — say something about them. And it’s rare to go to someone else’s house to find an identical print or poster hanging from their wall as the one’s you’ve got at home. When we all clearly have our own tastes and desires to manifest our identities through them, why are we all buying the same tech and using it in the same way?" Yes - there was a time - just past - when choosing Apple was an identity statement.  But now we're farther down the road.  Today this or thatis about which apps are you using and linking?  Things like are you using a different browser than Google such as Dolphin? Or deciding which messenger service to use.  I can see the mountain of apps.  Must-have apps for your iPhone from lifehack.org include: billguard -bank app and spending habits buffer - sends out your social media posts to designated sites such as facebook, twitter, instagram dashlane - saves payment and confirmation info that would be lost in your email fooducate - health app for the grocery store SleepCycle - measures your sleep cycle to adapt your alarm clock Myfitnesspal - looks like a fitbit, well sort of This is the landscape of the questions today.  And our image? Autumn Sumac gives the colour to this motion blur image.

Dec 25 2018 - The Red Umbrella

A red umbrella is a visual focal point in a photograph or painting.  It has been a symbol for raising funds and awareness for sex trade workers since 2001.   But our story today is how artists have used a red umbrella as a visual theme in their work. Here are a few images from the Red Umbrella Collection of artist Liz Hess.  Her site has more than 100 pictures featuring a red umbrella focal point. They are delightfully playful.     Here is another interpretation of the red umbrella - this one a sophisticated visual story.   This comes from a blog with the podcast of the title Open Your Umbrella - a spiritual journey blog.   There is a romantic red umbrella theme - and the  most prevalent setting for the romantic red umbrella is Paris, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.  Here's an iconic example:   Banksy's image of Banksy Girl with Balloon (2004), a whimsical image with a red balloon, comes up in the search.  It has a red umbrella style.  Th umbrella story started more than 4,000 years ago - Egypt, Assyria, Greece and China all had umbrellas in their ancient art, but not as a key theme. This image is by Anthonis van Dyck - Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, done in 1623.  It shows the visual dominance of the red umbrella in this portrait.     Our adventure with a red umbrella happened yesterday.  It was part of our winter walk. It demonstrates its compelling dominance in the winter snow scene.  Facebook Twitter Website Email

A White Christmas - What is It?

sn't Christmas the only moment in the winter when we want snow?  Yes! What makes snow such an essential part of the Christmas landscape?  What makes a White Christmas so desirable?  In fact, in the U.S. there is WCA - White Christmas Anticipation. The website bigthink shows the map of the U.S., Canada and Europe for the percent chance of a White Christmas. Did you know there's an official definition  of White Christmas? From Wikipedia:  "In most countries, it simply means that the ground is covered by snow at Christmas, but some countries have more strict definitions. In the United States, the official definition of a white Christmas is that there has to be a snow depth of at least 1 in or 2.5 cm at 7:00 a.m. local time on Christmas morning, and in Canada the official definition is that there has to be more than 2 cm (0.79 in) on the ground on Christmas Day at 7 am".   Our Environment Canada site has this chart - Amount of snowfall recorded in centimetres for major cities across Canada from 1955 - 2015.  Here are the Definitions of the columns: % Chance:  probability of a white Christmas (snow on the ground of 2 cm or more on Christmas morning at 7 a.m. EST) for full period of 61 years % Chance now:  for children today based on period 1996-2015 % Chance before:  for parents today when they were children based on period 1965-1984 Perfect Christmas:  snow on the ground of 2 cm or more on Christmas morning and snow in the air sometime Christmas day, i.e., a measurable snowfall on Christmas based on period 1955-2007 Snow depth now:  average depth of snow on the ground (cm) on Christmas morning from 1994 to 2015 At the bigthink site, it shows the maps of Canada, U.S. and Europe so you can see the distribution of White Christmases.  I hadn't realized how much of the U.S. has such a low probability of snow, and how much of Canada has a high probability of snow.  Our White Christmas distribution looks like a mirror reflection.  And the forecast for this Christmas? Grimsby has a freezing rain changing to snow warning today - and a white Christmas is forecast. Our pictures show last year's visit to the Guelph Arboretum on a very snowy day before Christmas.

The Forest Landscape

Hi everyone,

Motion blur that's done with the camera is a lot of fun.  The first is at Balls Falls last month just as we transitioned from fall into winter.  The fallen leaves are on the ground with a little snow, but there's no leaves left on the trees.  The colours are muted and for me, speak clearly ofo the Canadian landscape.

Our second image is a winter image from last November.  It has the added effects of colour through Topaz Lens Effects.