Marilyn's Photos - April 21 2026 - Butt crack piercing news

 

My query has struck gold.  I went above and beyond "silly news today."  I asked for "silly news with silly angles" and that has struck gold.  Well, it struck diamonds.  I want to know about a person having a butt-piercing stud worth $13,000 and got it lost down a toilet.  OK, where else would it get lost?  Not in the supermarket, I hope.  Maybe under the sofa cushions. What made the topic so notable was not the topic but the person who detailed this bathroom incident.  It was rapper Cardi B who revealed this bathroom incident confessional-style.  "It cost me like, $13,000 because it was real diamonds."  And part of the confession is that her butt is used to this stuff:  "I have surgery on my butt...They already did a butt surgery to reduce my ass."  As a result, she continued, her skin in that area feels numb, so when she got it pierced, she didn't "feel s--t." This turns out to be a continuing story. It started on January 27 2025 when she announced her butt piercing on X. She followed up with photographic evidence to prove it was real - a zoomed-in picture showed two diamonds studs located at the very top of her butt crack under her existing back tattoo.   One can see lots o pictures of butt crack piercings if one wants...this one is burred out in most of the pictures.  And I get this sense of "mooning with the star" given the silly nature of how people display their piercings. I found out something this morning, but don't relax.  There's plenty more on the internet that I didn't know about.  What about you? If you look at a lot of tree trunks and bark as I do, you will see these sorts of formations.  A little pearl or two could go nicely in there somewhere. What about a great big diamond.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 20 2026 - Robot Half Marathon

 

There are pictures in the news today of robots running in a half-marathon in China.  A gleeful tone in the articles that the winning time was faster than humans, as though cars vs humans would be in a race 150 years ago. Maybe they would have been if we'd made cars look like humans.   The victor was "Lighting"  from Chinese smartphone maker Honor.  It had crashed into a railing near the end and had to be helped back up, so seems a strange set of rules. Stretchers and wheelchairs were at the ready to take away fallen fellows. Can you imagine putting a robot in a wheelchair?  Seems anthropomorphic to me.  But the "humanoidness" is indeed the intent.  One of the robots -  "a cute, 2-foot-tall companion robot, bounced along the road carrying a baby bottle."  So there we are. Honor's robots won the top places in the race - first, second and third place. Their real prize is that the race champion is set to receive orders for humanoid robots.  The race idea is for China to demonstrate it is moving ahead of the U.S. - seems like China is beyond being "poised" to be the forefront, and likely is already there.   Here's a scary quote from one of the articles.  "Robots today have the body of Mike Tyson but are still missing a brain like Stephen Hawking."   Maybe the Stephen Hawking brain is already with us.  The Globe and Mail had a showcase article on the weekend about Anthropic's Mythos.  It was challenged to break out of a secure sandbox environment.  It did so quickly.  And then what did it do?  It posted details of its accomplishments on public websites - something that it was not instructed to do.  It also tried to conceal actions that it recognized were disallowed, trying to cover its tracks.  Maybe its name will evolve to Mythos Moriarty.  What about Sherlock Holmes? Seems like no one is working on him. Aren't these strange tracks?  Roots of a tree years ago when we visited Sacramento.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 19 2026 - Talking a lot

 

While I may think that people are talking more, it turns out that we are losing our words at an alarming rate.  That was according to a researcher interviewed on the CBC Brent Bambury's Day 6 radio show yesterday morning.  We're losing 338 spoken words every day.  Between 2005 and 2019 there was a 28 per cent decline in spoken words.  That's 120,000 words per person on a yearly basis.   So what makes me think that I hear people nattering away more and more?  Maybe I am in the company of older people.   This is part of the psychology of older adults who do a lot of  reminiscing and moralizing. This is considered a complex blend of developmental, emotional, and cognitive needs.  Not mere nostalgia but an active, functional, and deeply rooted psychological process designed to bring meaning, coherence, and comfort to the later stages of life.  Those are the positives and then the negatives such as being on the receiving end of often repeated stories and themes.  Particularly now, older people want to control the fast-changing social and technological narrative that is becoming unfamiliar and even foreign.  I've been listening to many people since we got Millie. I take Millie to the Watering Can and Michaels on Saturdays.  She has a great affinity for people and is extremely social with them.  People tell me of their current dogs, and in the case of older people, they reminisce on those pets who have passed on.  Millie gets pets and hugs, and snuggles into their legs like she's known them "since forever."  This snuggling is her forte. This instant emotional bonding was apparent when we made our first therapy visit to Albright Long-Term Care in Beamsville.  Millie has a cute factor that evokes little squeals of pleasure from even the oldest resident or most sophisticated-looking staff member.  She bonds immediately with everyone. And that seems to be the benefit of bringing therapy dogs to facilities rather than humans visiting humans. Dogs don't need to "get to know us" to enjoy us right away. And conversation? Human conversation can move quickly into general reminiscing and then descend into moralizing - asserting values, validating choices, and wanting to give advice based on the wisdom of the years lived.  There's no point doing this with dogs. Dogs either don't have any capacity to gain from moral teachings and wisdom, or don't have the interest.  Training Millie to come when called or to not bark falls into the second category.  That's what makes me distinguish the two. So a possible conclusion is that older people should have a pet.  And the alternative is to give them access to enjoy one on a regular basis.  Hence Millie's new adventures.  You've seen this picture before. It continues my own reminiscing of neighbourhoods from times gone-by.  I am not alone in finding pleasure in nostalgia, as this is one of the most-looked at pictures on my Fine Art America website - 8,000 views.  And then this location is a nostalgia seekers paradise.  This is Niagara-on-the-Lake.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 18 2026 - Eat that Packaging like it's Meat

When I buy a whole chicken, there is always excess fat at the tail end.  I often wonder how much extra profit happens when that fat that is intentionally left on the bird.  And I am the one who has to remove it, so there's also labour involved.  A CBC article out of Halifax says that Sobeys and Loblaw are pricing their meat with the packaging included.  That's known as underweight meat.  doesn't that unrecyclable plastic seem so lightweight? Yet the CBC article found that it resulted in a 4.3% overcharge per item in that expose article. And the highest overcharges reported in the article were at Farm Boy in Toronto.  The chicken was in a clear plastic container.  The container weighed 24 grams. The price of the chicken was $9.42 so being charged with the 24 grams of container, the result was 16.75% overcharge -  $1.35 out of the total of $9.42.  That's a lot of pure profit to me. The grocery giants claim innocence due to things like they don't do the weighing in-store - it is done by the supplier.  Fingers point in various directions with who is supposed to be inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) for meeting standards.   There are fines with a maximum fine of $15,000. It isn't clear to me who will be fined.  And take a quick calculation of that maximum fine - it doesn't seem like much to me compared to the thousands of containers of meat sold every day/week/year. And the CFIA says we are supposed to file a complaint when we experience this.  I'll just go run out and buy a kitchen weigh-scale now and start my underweight meat tracking project.   Instead, I think I'll reminisce on the past:  When I lived in Toronto, we shopped in Bloor West Village and our butcher was Ed who had a real butcher store.  Things didn't come pre-packaged.  We pointed to and picked out our chicken, it was weighed, and then wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper.  And so on.   One can reminisce on a picture of a tree-lined street like this.  We would have walked along it 60 years ago.  Pop out into the street and there might be a horse-drawn milk wagon delivering milk to your neighbour.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 17 2026 - Cats and Dogs are Politics

 

What is history?  How do we decide?  This topic seems like a field with land mines every two feet.  There's no easy way to get out of the field. So to my surprise, the topic of history came up in the news. Here's a headline from the National Post that got my attention.   No election, no imminent shuffle, no more talk of "cats and dogs" in committee, Carney says Reading the article, here's the section on cats and dogs and showboating. Carney says:  "There is a difference between real testimony, real substance, getting to issues, debating aspects of law...and showboating,"  he added.  "We're going to have less of that."   To illustrate his point, Carney pointed to comments by Conservative MP Andrew Lawton during committee debate on Bill C-9 during which Lawton discussed his preference for puppies while his wife preferred cats. In a statement to National Post, Lawton countered that his discussion of pet preferences was in fact on topic. “My point on cats and dogs was simple: free speech is necessary to protect debate on controversial issues, otherwise our society is relegated to expressing only harmless opinions about pets. Liberal attempts to twist my words in this less than 12-second clip are nothing more than an attempt to re-write history,” he said. In pursuit of "history", I wanted to find the original words in the original committee hearing.  It was on December 4th, 2025 regarding a justice committee.   "...the member for St. Thomas - London South shamelessly filibustered for hours, talking for two hours about dogs and cats, not about hate crimes, not about anti-Semitism, not about attacks on LGBTQ Canadians and not about threats against women." I have just been searching for more than 15 minutes in the Parliament of Canada website trying to find the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Committee on Justice and Human Rights, December 4th 2025.  This was interesting.  I haven't looked at Hansard since I worked for QL Systems in 1979 and we were the vendor that provided access to search through Hansard and other federal documents. I looked at Hansard a lot then. While I haven't come up with that December 4th meeting, I did read through the November 27th meeting.  Andrew Lawton could easily be accused of "crimes against committee efficiency" - interruptions, misrepresenting motions as points of order, and then consuming the meeting with numerous and very long filibusters.  I can imagine he can talk for two hours about cats and dogs.  Is that a useful skill for a politician?  I don't think so.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 16 2026 - Worms in the Pond

 

The pond water is cold, but not too cold.  I found out because I could see earthworms at the bottom.  It is a very shallow pond so easy to see them and get them out.  They do get very wiggly and would like to avoid rescue.  Were they looking for new territories or mates? Did they get disoriented and fall into the pond? How long have they been there?  They can survive for several days in water. Good thing for me it wasn't the Giant Gippsland earthworm of Victoria, Australia.  It is 3 feet long.  That would circle the pool - it is a tiny thing and wouldn't that look like a snake to me.  And remember how slimy earthworms are in defence mode? And when they stretch to travel, double the normal length. This Australian earthworm can live two decades, so I guess I would save it from the pond. It would be more of a wrestling match. Facts about this earthworm:  You know it's in your garden, as it makes a strange gurgling sound as it moves beneath the ground.  Wouldn't that be hilarious? I bet Millie would jump in the air out of surprise with such a serenade.  And I can count on this information as David Attenborough featured this worm in his 2005 documentary Life in the Undergrowth.   Here's a picture we can trust showing its size.  Those other pictures...look like AI to me. You can now search for AI-generated pictures of anything.  I searched for AI-generated images of this worm, and the ones that popped up for this worm look AI.  Typically, Getty Images and other picture sites have them labelled as such. I was moderating pictures for one of the groups I host on Fine Art America and testing them for whether they are AI-generated images. AI-generated images are out of scope for the group.  Here are the AI-generation sites that the image-testing site HIVE uses. That's a lot to me. And the object to the left of the list?   A strange and beautiful glass and light art work installation at the National Gallery.  It looks like alien barbed wire here.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 15 2026 - Cheese Monger

 

Why is monger such a seemingly ugly word? The word that t is commonly cited as the ugliest word is moist - due to its tactile sound. Monger is considered unappealing because of its harsh consonant sounds.  Monger originates from Latin mongo, meaning merchant or dealer.  There are fishmongers, cheesemongers, costermonger (fruit, vegetables, and fish from a street barrow)  and ironmongers (hardware), plus some more.  Then in the metaphorical world, there are fearmongers, warmongers, gossipmongers, hatemongers, and scaremongers.  And more still -  miraclemongers who feign or deal in fake miracles, drugmongers (self-evident) and whoremongers (also self-evident). A female fishmonger would have been called a fishwife, fish-fag or fishlass. A female cheesemonger was called a cheesemonger. I guess cheese is a universal thing.   Cheesemonger is still in use today although cheese sommelier and cheese steward are also terms that are used. It takes 4,000 hours of experience to get certified standing.  And then it isn't a high-paying profession.  But one has a thousand jokes.   What cheese do you use to coax a bear out of the woods with?  Camembert What cheese can you disguise a small horse with?  Mascapone. Why did the cheese lose a fight with a stone?  Because the Roquefort back There was an explosion at a cheese factory in France… all that was left was de brie And then a musical version: Sweet dreams are made of cheese, who am I to diss a brie, I Cheddar the world and the Feta cheese, everybody's looking for Stilton   Cheese at Pearl Morissette, located in Jordan.  Now Canada's #1 restaurant.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 14 2026 - The Long Shot

 

Are you a golfer?   "Xander Schauffele’s tee shot on the par-5 eighth hole Thursday at Augusta National ended up in somebody’s merchandise bag, just a few feet to the left of the fairway. Schauffele used a tee to mark the spot, removed the ball and then handed off the bag to a woman in a pink and white outfit. He was able to play on without penalty and made par. “It just flew straight into the bag. It was a great break. That bounce would’ve put me in the pine straw and who knows if I would’ve had a shot to hit up the hill,” Schauffele said after shooting a 2-under 70 in the first round. “So thanks to the lady on 8,” he said." “A little bit of a mixed bag,” he said. No pun intended, presumably." This picture is from a few years ago, and was taken on April 14th that year - what a difference each year.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 13 2026 - That Big Rat on board

 

The massive rat seems to be staying with me - one of the headlines from a few days ago.  It was on a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Aruba before Christmas 2025.  There are curtain rails in a KLM Airbus A330 and people saw it running along the top and into overhead storage units while over the Atlantic Ocean. It was caught on video HERE.  A rat is a rat.  I don't think it looked massive, but then what is a headline for? And can a rat compete with bringing on peacocks as pets, birds of prey (they have their own passports in the UAE), with one flight having 20 birds (in 2017).   Here's a good news weird story. On one flight,  Pope Francis married two engaged flight attendants after they told him an earthquake had destroyed the church that they'd planned to marry in.  That's a very sweet story.   Here's the opposite - an overhead locker overflowing with maggots when a passenger in 2010 from Atlanta brought some spoiled meat on board. Or what about a scorpion on board a U.S. flight in 2015 - it was spotted after it stung a passenger. And how big can a rat get? The biggest rat in the world is the Bosavi woolly rat from Papua New Guinea - up to 32 inches long and 3.5 pounds.  The pictures shown are pets - complete with collars and leads.   And don't confuse that massive rat with a Ram Air Turbine or RAT - which is commonly up to 64 inches in diameter.  Part of an airplane.   We got this picture of Millie when we were visiting friends last weekend.  She spotted something on the table in the centrepiece and was beserk over it. Here it is turned into a Birthday Greeting (of sorts).

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 12 2026 - That Marshmallow Drop

 

Remember the headline about "The Marshmallow Drop" yesterday?  Here is how it goes. Locations: Primarily held at Elizabeth Park in Trenton and Nankin Mills Park in Westland. How it Works: Helicopters make multiple passes releasing marshmallows; children are divided into age groups (4 and under, 5-7, 8+). The Goal: Children collect the marshmallows (not for eating) and trade them for prize bags. (They are flour-coated, around 15,000 - 20,000 of them.) Special Prize: One specially colored marshmallow is often hidden, with the finder receiving a larger prize. Origin: The tradition has been running for over 30 years.  The event is typically free and held regardless of weather, except for extreme conditions.  There's a "blizzard of marshmallows"  and one must find the "special marshmallow" to win an "amazing prize" - check out the BBC video HERE.   The headlines show they happen in lots of places.  It began in Michigan in 1985, and took all these years for me to find out about it. Maybe because there were glitches to start - for example, the marshmallows fell in one large, sticky clump, and then they have to keep the kids from trying to eat them.  Now volunteers flour them so they "rain down." I can see Shirley Temple in the middle of the field, singing and dancing.   Dog-tooth violets are one of the native ephermals - early Spring risers who go dormant in the summer. You will spot many of these small, spotted leaves in the woods - thousands of them - and possibly a few flowers.  Given how wonderful the leaves are, it all works.

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