May 26 2022 - Write a Review

 

Today everyone is invited into the experience of being an expert. What is the invitation?  "Write a review" is the headline everywhere.  "Share your experience."   There are lots of tips for writing a review.  The article with 8 tips says that the last one is to proofread your review.  Ha Ha!  Would that be possible for most people now?   The stated motivation why companies want us to write a review - interaction leads to sales and profits.   Trustpilot goes about answering the question of why people write product/customer reviews in this article HERE.   "The top three reasons customers write reviews are to help others make a better buying decision, to share an experience, or to reward a company for good performance. This ranking held true for both men and women internationally." That sounds so positive and rational.  But they continue on to further reasons - the ones we're suspecting are the real drivers - I call these the "ego responses": “Reviews are kind of like an on-demand emotional type of thing” - quote from a surveyed shopper In the words of one reviewer: reviews are “a great way to voice your opinion and let people know about your experiences when dealing with companies and businesses around the country - fabulous!” "Reviews can also serve to feed the ego, by giving reviewers the opportunity to be recognized and acknowledged by their peers." This is rather banal article.  There's a lot more to the Trustpilot article on "Bad reviews:  Why people write them, and what they expect."  That one is HERE with lots of charts - all kinds of analysis.  What a contrast - positive reviews don't get that kind of attention at all.    More light fixtures - seeming like the galaxy to me. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

May 22 - 2022 - Derecho in the Neighbourhood

 

I didn't know the word Derecho until it became a severe weather warning on our radios yesterday.  It made me point the car home. A derecho (pronounced similar to "deh-REY-cho") is a widespread, long-lived straight-line wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving severe showers or thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system. High wind speeds, hurricanes and tornado-force winds are common in these storms.  No wonder we got the big alerts yesterday.  Most of the big derechos in the past have occurred in the U.S. Derechos can be hazardous to aviation due to embedded microbursts, downbursts, and downburst clusters.  Generally "bursts" are a big part of the storms. I guess we've been very lucky in Ontario in the past where our worst worries are too much snow and ice in the winter.   The storm yesterday was reported to have almost 1000 km of damage from Michigan to Quebec City. There were 4 reported fatalities - mostly by trees falling.  At one point the winds reached 132 km/h at the Kitchener airport.   The worst derecho in history was in June 2012 where the winds reached 146 km/h and tracked across a large section of the Midwestern US into the mid-Atlantic states. There was $2.9 billion in damage and 22 deaths. It went on for more than a day. That storm is described in Wikipedia HERE.  May is supposed to be reserved for flowers - particularly the lilac festivals. We salute the arrival of summer on the Victoria long weekend with public and private fireworks.   Public Fireworks are back on this year.  This Niagara Falls Summer Fireworks says:  "Fireworks every night" - that's the headline.  Summer has arrived! Gerry and I were in Toronto on Niagara Street last week for a Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University) lighting certificate graduate anniversary get-together.  It took place at a lighting store.  You can see the front door to the left in the first picture, and the lighting sculpture on the wall.  The lighting sculptures were wonderful. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Sep 23 2021 - A School Named?

 

School names face examination.  That's a headline in the Toronto Star yesterday that public schools in Manitoba are examining their names.  My high school was named Laura Secord Secondary School, and speaks for itself as having a good provenance. The names of other schools have come under a lot of scrutiny. A headline for quite a few years has been the name of Ryerson University.  Professors there have been signing the University name as "X" in protest for quite a while.  Both Gerry and I taught at Ryerson - a great institution for continuing education on timely and current topics.  The protest is all about one of the main architects of the education system - Egerton Ryerson.  He was a Canadian educator and Methodist minister who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian Public school system.  It turns out that he was a great influencer of the segregation of education of people of non-white status.    He created reforms in the mid-1800s that included creating school boards, making textbooks more uniform, and education free.  But Ryerson's views on the education of non-white males was extremely troublesome.  For example, he opposed the participation of girls at grammar schools in the province, and ended co-educational instruction at the Upper Canada Academy.  Women were to be wives and mothers. He recommended in 1847 that indigenous peoples should be educated in separate boarding schools that were denominational, English-only and agriculturally/industrially oriented. Ryerson had ideas for segregating everyone who wasn't a colonial white male.  In 1847, he made recommendations to control Indigenous children's future to become agricultural and industrial workers.  In 1850, under the same act that established separate schools for Catholics and Protestants, he forced Black children into segregated schools. In 1862, he defined vagrant and neglected children of the poor as candidates for industrials schools so to avoid their inevitable future of becoming criminals. In 1868, he took aim at the deaf and blind needing to be segregated. The Toronto Star article details the above HERE.  Ryerson University will be changing its name - it took a few years - a strong campaign and violently toppling the Ryerson statue.  It is going to take a lot of activity to dismantle a systemic naming bias, and this is a great first step. And our picture?  a beautiful lighting project on the Image Arts Building at Ryerson about 5 years ago.  This was created by some of Gerry's graduates in the lighting program there.

July 11 2021 - Does a singer vocalize?

 

Which would you rather be?  A vocalist or a singer?  The definition of a vocalist is "a singer, typically one who regularly performs with a jazz or pop group?  And the definition of singer?  it is "a person who sings, especially professionally."  Not much thought in these definitions, coming from established dictionaries. I can't see people around the editorial table arguing the nuances here.  I think they went for coffee instead. Add to that there is such poor internet coverage: There are many people's opinions attempting to distinguish things.   Often it is best to move on. I did wonder if that is  how the Singer Sewing Machine got its name?  Because of the whirring song of the stitching? No - it got its name from Isaac Merritt Singer.  In 1891 it launched its first musical advertising campaign: “The sun never sets on a Singer sewing machine at work!”  Singer became one of the companies which used "jingle" in their marketing activities for the first time. The song “MERRY SINGER”, composed dedicatedly for Singer, made great contributions to reputation of Singer. The surprise hit of the day, though, is finding singing and sewing jokes: What's the difference between a puppy and a singer-songwriter? Eventually the puppy stops whining. Did you hear about the opera singer who threw the game-opening baseball? They say he had perfect pitch. Captain Jean-Luc Picard needed to mend his torn uniform, but his old Singer was broken. So he took it down to the repair shop...and said, "make it sew." I write songs about sewing machines I'm a Singer Songwriter I come from a very musical family Even the sewing machine's a singer I thought this was such a beautiful wall at Pearl Morrissette in the dining room.  And then the heart shape of the New Zealand hill picture makes it seem like the world is a happy place.

Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Lighting the Christmas Tree

Wondering about the interesting news of 2019, a "Noel" retitled "Noeel" Christmas story popped up:     "An electric eel in Chattanooga, Tenn., is sparking a little holiday cheer.  Every time Miguel Wattson the electric eel releases a jolt of electricity, a festively-decorated Christmas tree next to his tank at the Tennessee Aquarium flickers and glows.  "There is a sensor directly in his exhibit that picks up when he produces electricity," Aquarist Kimberly Hurt, who cares for the electric eel, tells NPR.  The aquarium had already connected the sensor to a soundboard and a light board to correspond with Wattson's bursts, says Hurt. "It'll light up the board. It also does make some noise so people can hear when he's producing electricity." So it wasn't a huge leap to also have Wattson's sensors connected to a Christmas tree, for a seasonal spin on the display." More on the story and video footage of the electric eel here. Brian's lily field faces a farm house and garage. I got to wondering what it might look like with a scenic view - facing west to mountains.  Here's an interpretation.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

To the Light

This is Family Day Weekend, so there are a lot of family events on everywhere.  The Distillery District in Toronto has the Light Festival on until March 3rd. You can see the highlights of the 2018 Festival in their gallery HERE.  It "will transform the neighbourhood into one of the largest open-air galleries in North America, lighting up the long winter nights with distinctive works from local and international light artists." Yelp has more pictures HERE.  And there are some YouTube postings such as this one HERE - it doesn't have ads.  If you go to TripAdvisor, there are 7,490 traveler reviews and 4,062 candid photos.  That's a lot of scrolling... There is a Winter Light Exhibition on at Ontario Place. This is surprising, given its semi-dormant status, but maybe I haven't been keeping up with its news.  This is also an art installation display with information about each piece on display.  There is one titled The Greenhouse - "it glows in the dark of winter, rich with greenery and blooming plants, yet simultaneously engulfed by a fire that's ablaze within". We were at the Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines last night for the Oscar Peterson Jazz Festival concert.  The walls of the theatre light up and have a wonderful presence in the space creating an indoor light festival.

Light Painting

I did lots of light painting in 2008 and 2009 and found this motion blur and light painting image.  I want to add more painting and water colour brush strokes to images to give them a fine art sense.  I hope that  my subscription to Filter Forge will be the answer.  Here's one of the results below.