July 30 2021 - Mallfun or Mallfunction

 

I went to the Mall yesterday.  The one I went to was Mapleview in Burlington.  Whenever we drive by that Mall, I still see the original farm with old-style greenhouses on the vast grounds that are now parking lots.   That would be more than a year and a half since I'd been in a mall or most retail stores.  There are many kinds of places that we haven't been in since March 2019.   Malls and corporate office towers are very similar - shining granite and marble floors and walls in neutral colours.  Everything so clean and entirely impersonal.  The 'death of the shopping mall' has been in progress for years with the drop in revenue continuous.  Before February 2020, the drop in revenue per square foot was 42 per cent.  But then the pandemic came along.  Malls may not be going down yet.   I was there just as it opened at 11:00am and left just before 12:30pm.  It started to fill up as the 12:00 hour approached. The people that were there seemed impatient to get started with normal again.  Both young and old were there. There were quite a few 'super seniors' out for a look-see walk in the stores.  Yes, everyone was out for a stroll in the Mall.  Will this be part of a new normal?  What will the social environment be post-2019 pandemic?  Will Malls remain part of it?  I ask this as it is my generation that experienced the rise of the Malls.  Let's enjoy some of the shopping/mall jokes of the past.     What is cheaper and more effective than a psychiatrist? Going shopping at a mall. I saw a man with one arm shopping at a second hand store. I told him “you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.” An atheist comes into a mall And there is no parking spot, so he says "God, if you give me parking spot, I will convert myself and become Christian". Two minutes later he says "Nevermind I found one" I fell asleep at the mall today... I was counting customers leaving the Apple store There's a lot of fun in playing spin-the-dial on images with Flexifly - our Floyd Elzinga montage image has a few variations today.

July 29 2021 - Doggone Good Story

 

Our story of the day: Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road.  Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie gets out and asks the shepherd, 'If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?'  The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies, 'Okay.' The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Website, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms and pivot tables.  He then prints out a 150-page report on his high-tech  mini-printer, turns to the shepherd and says, ‘'You have exactly 1,586 sheep.' The shepherd cheers,  "That's correct, you can have your choicest sheep from the herd".  'The young man takes one of the animals which he likes most from the flock and puts it in the back of his Porsche.  The shepherd looks at him and asks, 'If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?'  The young man laughed and answers, 'Yes, why not?'  The shepherd says, 'You are an auditor.' 'How did you know?' asks the young man.  'Very simple,' answers the shepherd. " First, you came here without being wanted.  Secondly, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew.  Thirdly, you don't understand anything about my business..... Now can I have my DOG back? " Have you been to Brookfield Place in Toronto?  At the ground level is the soaring Allen Lambert Galleria, sometimes described as the "crystal cathedral of commerce." For me it is a modern cathedral dedicated to Jonah and the Whale.  There are glass panels on the floor, and in the food court below, this is the view of the walkers above - shadow walkers to me.  I've overlaid it with a peeling paint image in the first case, and transformed it with Flaming Pear's Flexifly in the second.

Feb 15 2021 - Chocolate Crimes

 

There isn't leftover chocolate at Valentine's. We overindulge in the gift  at Easter rather than Valentine's.  Or perhaps indulgence is the norm on Valentine's. Here's advice in preparation for the Easter leftovers.   "If you've ever tempered chocolate before (hopefully while consulting Kenji's excellent guide), you've likely had a good bit left over—whether you're dipping or coating candies, fruit, and cookies, it takes some extra chocolate to ensure you've got enough wiggle room to get the job done. Now, an extra ounce or two of leftover chocolate is easily managed with a guilty glance and a quick finger to the bowl, but if you've got more than that, it can be saved and reused for another project. Not for tempering, as it's likely tainted with cookie crumbs, swirls of butter, or traces of caramel, but for baking, where such contaminants are both tasty and harmless." Isn't this such delightful and enjoyable writing?  Such good times we can have reading about the chocolate crimes of lingering cookie crumbs or caramel. Did you know that there are such things as chocolate-related crimes?  Parade writer Daryl Chen says they occur all over the world. He has a wonderful sense of humour: WHAT HAPPENED:  Online flower shop delivered box of fruit to a Canadian woman, instead of the “chocolate lovers” basket that her sister had bought and paid for.  THE CRIME: Cruel and unusual deprivation of chocolate.  WHAT HAPPENED: On April 8, a news story was published that began with the following sentences:  “The driver was wearing his tennis shoes on the wrong feet, and he could lift his arms only halfway to his chocolate-covered face when officers stopped him at a Tucson fast-food restaurant.   He seemed impaired. Yet there was no alcohol in the 44-year-old’s system.”  THE CRIME: Damaging chocolate’s fine reputation; disturbing the peace with a somewhat misleading opener. There are more articles on chocolate crimes - here's an enjoyable example: "Leave it to the Swedes to have the most twee crime spree ever. In February 2015, criminals made off with almost a thousand dollars worth of chocolate in three separate raids. One shop owner believes "there is a market for buying chocolate bars and dividing them up into pick-and-mix pieces.” Is food crime on the rise?   There are 10 Common Crimes Against Pasta You Don’t Have to Commit (here). These get perpetrated every day!  I find out that when I oversauce my pasta, that's considered a crime. February always turns out to be a brightly coloured month for me in lightroom and photoshop.  Here's a blue theme with these montages using the same crackled blue background.   So many different effects - what do you think? Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 9 2021 - Alien Driveby?

  

It has recently occurred to me that there are unanswerable questions that I don't want or care about getting answered. Take a look at just a few of the dozens of unanswered / unanswerable questions:  How exactly did life begin?  Why do we dream? Is there a pattern behind prime numbers?  Can we travel through time?  Is our universe the only one?  What exactly is consciousness?  Where is all the antimatter? As soon as you ask for "exactly" something answers then it is going to get difficult to answer.  A question I don't consider important the unanswerable realm:  Where did I come from? But then I see a NY Times article and my curiosity is engaged. Did an alien life-form do a driveby of our solar system in 2017? The particular circumstance is a cigar shaped thing out there that was given the name Oumuamua — Hawaiian for “scout” — it was first noticed by a telescope on the island of Maui on Oct. 19, 2017, when it was already on its way out of the solar system, having passed closest to the sun a month before. It had come from outside the solar system, from the direction of the star Vega. Author of the book The First sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Avi Loeb argues that it is no more preposterous to suppose that Oumuamua was a lightsail, a thin material that gets its propulsive boost from sunlight or starlight, either launched in our direction or anchored like a buoy in space, where we ran into it on our planet’s travel around the galaxy. In which case the age-old question — are we alone in the universe? — has been answered. The NY Times quotes from Loeb's book “But the moment we know that we are not alone, that we are almost certainly not the most advanced civilization ever to have existed in the cosmos, we will realize that we’ve spent more funds developing the means to destroy all life on the planet than it would have cost to preserve it.” The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth  By Avi Loeb   Here are more montage images - I didn't have to bury the pictures in salt and vinegar potato chips to get the blue green copper verdigris colour.  Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 2 2021 - Polar Vortex takes on Groundhog

 

And we thought a groundhog was going to predict the winter weather. The Weather Network has scooped the news:     Air masses do battle in Ontario, setting the stage for a STORMY pattern in February.   How long will the Pandemic lockdowns go on before we term this the COVID Groundhog Day.  We can expect quite a few articles on the topic today. Groundhog Day is now defined in the English lexicon as a means to describe a monotonous, unpleasant, and repetitive situation. If that's the case, can you imagine how many stages we will be going through?  The script itself seemed to have a Groundhog Day experience. The script originated with writer Danny Rubin.  The script didn't initially sell.  Harold Ramis received the script:  "he admitted that he did not laugh while reading Rubin's script. He was interested in the underlying spirituality and romance present, but thought that it needed more humor. The pair discussed the core ideas in the script, raising parallels between it and the concepts of Buddhism and reincarnation.They also talked whether it was ethical for Superman—a superhuman being with the power to save the lives of countless people and prevent disasters—to effectively waste time on adventures with his partner Lois Lane." There were so many rewrites that reading about them seems wearying.  Rubin started, Ramis rewrote, then Rubin and Bill Murray rewrote. There was writing during the filming. Rubin has said that "the final film mainly resembles his script."  I consider that to be vague praise.    My favourite aspect of the movie is the different estimates of the time loop  - the studio's 2 weeks to 9 years to 34 years.  Rubin's estimate was 70 to 80 years.  Ramis' estimate is  10,000 years based on the traditional Buddhist doctrine of the time it takes for a soul to evolve to the next level.  "It is only when Phil stops using the loops to indulge his own desires and instead uses them to selflessly help others that he is freed." Is that the Pandemic message to be gained from this film?  A CNN writer today - Feb 2 2021 - thinks that we are in our own Act 3 - where Phil memorizes French poetry and learns to sculpt ice and play the piano.  I think that CNN writer is lost in the loop.  But here's the advice: "As we each pass or approach one year of lockdown, "Groundhog Day" still has lessons on how to manage our own loop. The last act of the film reminds us to focus on three areas that bring us closer to happiness if we can muster the effort. Do the right thing It's the little things Variety is the spice of life" Make a guess - where do you think we are in the cycle? Here's last year's snowstorm image demonstrating winter does repeat itself.  And then on to some montages - the first a Floyd Elzinga image overlaid with the blue copper grunge used previously. The last one is the weeping Cherry tree on Niagara street overlaid with a pastel abstract.   Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 30 2021 - Outdoor Learning

 

Do you remember the Norwegian schools that have the approach of teaching and learning in natural places - i.e. outdoors.  It is called Udeskole - outdoor school. The article HERE was published in 2013.   The winter temperatures in Norway are similar to Southern Ontario and Toronto is compared to Oslo.  The CBC covered a Norwegian day care that was outdoors all year, and everyone was happy and learning outcomes were high.   But can we do the same here?  It seems unlikely we'd be willing to suit up for a winter day's classroom outside, doesn't it?  And what can we do writing-wise in those big mitts.  (There's no update on Bernie Sanders' mittens fundraising total). We have wonderful summers here:  What if the school year was turned upside down here and students had the winter months for vacation and the rest of the year for school? That's a different sort of challenge.  It disrupts our routines, our sense of the normal, and gives rise to our ideas of what we're entitled to?   I can imagine these responses:  Parents: "We go to the cottage for the summer" and "What will I do with my children in the winter for sports and other activities?" Teachers:  "We want our summers off...to go to the cottage, too" and  "We need our PD and PA days and other vacation days during the year and not concentrated in the winter." What if the pandemic is longer than 2021?  What if there are variants for a while?  Could we change things significantly?  There is low flexibility and nimbleness in our institutional systems.  And our social norms are very set, too. It seems possible that the organizing structure for this is parents grouping together to take this idea on.  Could it even start this coming summer?    Today's images are montages - 2 images sandwiched together with Photoshop filters.  The first image is the overlay - it is grunge on a metal water fountain. The following pictures are the results of the sandwiching.  The first is a blue wall/corridor with the grunge image over top.  The next is a piece of rusting metal, and the third is rust on the wall of the Calamus 'rusty shed' - I've included the original so you can see how different the results are.   Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 28 2021 - Lucifer's the Name

 

Yesterday, Bernie Sander's big mittens crocheted doll raised over $40,000 U.S. and as of last night, the mittens and memes have raised $1.8 million for charity.  What might the final total be? And in the opposite direction: What about the Devil?  I find out it is mostly associated with Christianity  - in modern biblical translations, the Devil is the adversary of God and God’s people.   History.com tells me: It is common Christian belief that the Devil was once a beautiful angel named Lucifer who defied God and fell from grace. This assumption that he is a fallen angel is referenced to the book of Isaiah which says, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations.” Other biblical scholars, however, claimed Lucifer isn’t a proper name but a descriptive phrase meaning “morning star.” Still, the name stuck and the Devil is often referred to as Lucifer. From Wikipedia: Lucifer is the name of various mythological and religious figures associated with the planet Venus. Due to the unique movements and discontinuous appearances of Venus in the sky, mythology surrounding these figures often involved a fall from the heavens to earth or the underworld.  Interpretations of a similar term in the Hebrew Bible, translated in the King James Version as the proper name "Lucifer", led to a Christian tradition of applying the name Lucifer, and its associated stories of a fall from heaven, to Satan, but modern scholarship generally translates the term in the relevant Bible passage (Isaiah 14:12) as "morning star" or "shining one" rather than as a proper name, "Lucifer".  Present day translations have reverted back to morning star. I wonder what it is to be a Biblical scholar.  Is that the job? To take short passages and interpret them into large, expansive meanings?   And I haven't even gotten near to finding out about  making a deal with the Devil or selling one's soul to the Devil. That is my topic I wanted to research today... Another time. This week's assignment is montages - putting two images together to create something new, using Photoshop's "Blending modes".  Here are the results so far that have worked. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca