Feb 13 2024 - So Many Valentines

 

It seemed unusual to me that there are a few Saint Valentines through history. There there are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, so I guess there are a few repetitions of names.  It turns out that the Eastern Orthodox Church also has saints, and some Protestant churches recognize saints.  Only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches venerate Saints.   I was surprised to find out that Wikipedia says that there are Lutheran saints. I was raised in the Lutheran church, and this turns out to be news to me. We had no saints whatsoever.  Maybe there is a difference between German and North American traditions.  I looked at the list of Lutheran saints. There are lots of names in the list.  Could John Donne really be a saint? He is listed as writer poet and Anglican cleric.  Of course he is the first of the metaphysical poets.  But a saint? That aside, I guess if there are that many saints, then a saint can be connected to every significant cultural event.   So here we are on the day to celebrate romantic love, friendship and appreciation. And our current practices are very interesting. Did you know that a quarter of pet owners give Valentine's Day gifts to their pets?  And that the only year that billions of candy hearts were not produced was in 2019 - that was because the company was sold. And what about the tradition of sending letters to Juliet or Romeo and Juliet in Verona, Italy.  I think the Juliet Club takes care of responding to the letters on her behalf.  Yes, and red roses in flowerography, the language of flowers,  do symbolize love.

This is the cute little bubble house in Buffalo, and often used as the mascot for the Buffalo Garden Walk.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 27 2024 - Tunnel Vision vs Tunnel Style

 

We know what tunnel vision is.  How did tunnel style get its name and what is it, anyway? GQ knows what it is and that means men's fashion.  They say that the best place to see "buzzy designer" clothes is in the maze-like underbelly of your local sports arena.  It is the pre-game and post-game strut of NBA players.  Some players work with luxury brands and others have their own brands or work with stylists to create unique designs.  There's the"plug" for clothes - a person who sources and sells merchandise to players. “If you’re on the road and have somebody pull up with thousands of clothes, and you can pick whatever you want, that’s very efficient,” said Kuzma.  And these are not sweat pants and t-shirts.  These are strange and compelling outfits that won't be seen outside the tunnel on the street. So we find this place of athletics and fashion - the stuff of celebrity coverage.  It seems like a high-pressure place to be for NBA players.   Tunnel vision?  we thought it meant a visual impairment or a mental limitation didn't we?  But you can buy vintage clothes from the 60s, 70s, and so on from this independent sweatshop-free company.   Other than these two fashion stories, tunnel as a topic is about boring machines and underground projects.  Elon Musk has a tunnel company named The Boring Company.   It is a SpaceX subsidiary.  There have been numerous project completed and then there are numerous criticisms of his claims for faster and cheaper and then whether there are safety features in the constructed projects. Musk's conception was that tunnels would be a better version of ground transportation systems.  He was wanting to fix Los Angeles traffic.

So our first image of tunnel style is 2019 and our second image is 2023.  Do we see a difference?  Love those fuzzy shoes that match the fuzzy jacket.` And today's image is our photographer's cottage in Grimsb Beach - what a contrast with the tunnel style above. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Sep 15 2023 - Dos and Don'ts - Deadnaming

 

New words and phrases - Deadnaming.  This is the act of "referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name." Deadnaming may be unintentional, or a deliberate attempt to deny, mock or invalidate a person's gender identity.  This a a delicate area - intentional and unintentional.  The article references published authors who have transitioned and their former name appears in bibliographic records.  Long will live bibliographic data. Along with this is the expression "Lavender linguistics".  This was advanced by William Leap in the 1990s and refers to the everyday language practices in LGBT communities. There is a LGBT lexicon known as Polari.  It is associated with actors, circus and fairground showmen, professional wrestlers, merchant navy sailors, criminals, sex workers and now the gay subculture.  Wikipedia has a Glossary of the terms HERE.  I seem to be travelling down roads that go off into all kinds detours of linguistic and social norms.  TheNew York Times Advice Column on the weekend had the question over who gets to keep the clone dog when the couple is splitting up.  They have the older dog who was cloned and the puppy clone.  The advice was to keep the dogs together.  There were other options provided for sharing the dogs. The question also revolved around who paid for the cloning and how that played into the decision.  Are you ready?  The cloning cost $50,000.    Then on the opposite page was the weddings showcase - where people who have recently gotten married cover their ornate, extravagant, ludicrously crazy stories of falling in love, getting engaged, and having weddings.  It was the story of two transgender bixsexual men who got together that got my attention.  So complicated to me to be both transgender and bixsexual.   Here's a love story in Grimsby Beach, with Olive Oil adorning a tool shed.

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Sep 12 2023 - International Students

 

Who has the most international students?  The US - almost 1 million in 2020 - China and India The UK - almost 551,000 in 2020 - China, India and the European Union Australia - 458,000 - China, India and Nepal Canada - 431,000 - India, China and France China - 377,000 from Korea, Thailand and Pakistan Compared to the statistics above, a CBC articles says that there were 800,000 international students in Canada in 2022.   Who in Canada brought in the most international students?  Conestoga College - 21,000 in 2022.  Did you know that 62% of the post-secondary student permit approvals were at the college level - not the University level. What about the universities?  The 2022 #1 rank was University Canada West with 10,110 permits approved, then University of Toronto with 7,050.  And who is University Canada West?  It is a private institution in Vancouver, established in 2004.    This has been in the news in the last few months and weeks - the housing crisis and the problem of international students finding jobs to sustain their stay.   The ever-increasing numbers have happened in order to shore up the revenues of post-secondary education institutions, particularly in Ontario.  Doug Ford reduced tuition fees in 2018 in Ontario.  That's the trigger that prompted the significant increase in international students - institutions had to make up the gap in revenues.  He said it was to "keep more money in the pockets of Ontario students and families".  Instead, it has led to the shift to international students who bring in much higher tuitions - now 3/4 of tuition revenue.  India seems to be supporting our postsecondary institutions. This combines with the cascading effect of lack of student housing and jobs to support so many students.  Is this a Canadian issue?  It seems to be everywhere.  A Guardian article highlighted Canada, and then turned to Scotland with students homeless, Turkey students homeless, and California using offshore barges. UK has the issue. This housing issue has been decades in the making.  "The 2008 financial crisis is widely linked to housing policy failures in North America and Europe."  That's from a 2017 article HEREoutlining the depth and scale of the international housing crisis.   Where is Canada in this?  The Canadian "crisis" can be tracked back to 1987 when the federal government decided it shouldn't be involved in housing, and gave it to the provinces along with the funding.  However, not all the provinces spent the money on housing.   So we'll be seeing a lot more on the international student crisis along with the housing crisis in the coming months.   The "good old days" when Grimsby Beach's Painted Ladies were lake-side cottages.

Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

July 18 2023 - Ticket Prices of Live Show

 

PBS had a fund-raising show on the other night and advertised tickets for the next live concert at $400.  I was aghast.  But then I shouldn’t be as prices have been going up for years.   Post-pandemic prices are higher as well.  The average ticket price is now $146.51 - I don’t know what they averaged, but it seems that anything “live” is expensive.  People point to Ticketmaster as having a monopoly on pricing.  That was most apparent during the Taylor Swift  ticket release in November 2022.  The criicism is over dynamic pricing.  Prices go up and down according to demand and competition.  That’s how Ticketmaster works - it sets price based on demand - the more people waiting in line for tickets, the higher the prices go. So it is more about ticket prices going up rather than coming back down.  Live Nation continues to buy up venues and centralize control.  Toronto’s Opera House is now under their control.  That was just a few days ago.  Do you want to see the list of venues that they manage the tickets to or own?  It is a long, long list. Here it is on their website:   https://www.livenation.com/venues How quickly corporations grow to gargantuan size and reach.  Captalism reigns supreme.

Here’s one of the Painted Ladies Houses decorations.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Oct 23 2022 - Voting Tomorrow

 

We voted online for the municipal election earlier this week.  So simple, so easy, like magic.  But the headlines say there is a lack of provincial standards for online voting technology.  And the 2018 elections had problems, causing an extension of the hours for voting.  That doesn't seem to spark much cuiosity on my part. Look at the picture below - that got my attention!

The province's education minister having to ask for a professional review of teacher dress codes.  A viral social media post with this picture showed a teacher wearing prosthetic breasts - of a size beyond anything we've known before.   If I were a student what would I do?  This looks some kind of gender presentation issue to me. You can imagine that there have been numerous complaints and protests and that the Ontario Department of Education Minister has to figure things out.   It turns out that the teacher  is transgender.  Kayla Lemieux, (an exemplary teacher by all accounts), identified as male up until recently. According to reports, Lemieux transitioned over the summer, and now identifies as female. This year, she arrived at school wearing the aforementioned prosthetic, which one commentator described as “effectively a fetish outfit,” under a tight-fitting, form-revealing top.  I find this curious that it is being named an "attire" problem.  There's nothing wrong with the shirt to me - it is what is under it.  What if a female to male transgender starting wearing a giant penis in tight pants to work.   There's another scenario that is a challenge. No journalists so far have pointed this out.  No one wants to have to mention transgender issues.   I guess "attire" is also a code word for transgender body image presentation.   I head off to a scientific site to give me the transgender 101 information. "Often, as people are in the process of figuring out what feels most comfortable for themselves, they may experiment with styles and looks. They may later relax into more comfortable clothes, or clothes that reflect their own personal sense of style, rather than basing their choices on rigid cultural norms."  This from ovc.ojp.gov on transgender presentation.  "Body image can play a role in how people express their gender. Transgender people generally have an even more uncomfortable or negative relationship with their bodies than non-transgender people... Some create a literal armor to hide or alter their bodies or to create a different bodily contour: Some FTMs (or other people on the trans-masculine spectrum)— Bind their chests.  Wear baggy or multiple layers of clothing to help flatten the appearance of their chest. Wear self-made or store-bought penile prosthetics.  Use prosthetics to allow them to urinate while standing.  Slouch or intentionally gain weight to add mass to their midsection, altering their feminine contour. Some MTFs (or other people on the trans-feminine spectrum)— Use breast or hip forms to create a more feminine contour.  "Gaff" or "tuck" (i.e., pull back their genitals to create a smoother line).  Wear wigs. Dress in a highly stereotypical feminine way to create an outward appearance of undeniable femaleness. " So here we are - right in the middle of one transgender teacher's body image crisis.  News of the day:  voting machines vs transgender teacher body image crises.  Vote! Today's pictures are a random selection - based on a search for file number 0001. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

August 18 2021 - World's Silliest Questions

 It popped into my head:  what are the silliest questions we might ask?  We've looked at life's unanswerable questions.  Is there an overlap?  Not according to the Thoughtcatalog.com website.  And typically, the internet portrays questions as "silly" or "crazy" while they often fall into ignorant and stupid.  I expect that the majority likely come from children using the internet as an encyclopedia.  And the minority come from people posing to be stupid so they can ask such outrageous things.  the questions that are circulated come from Yahoo Answers.  Here are a few stand-outs that made me laugh:

• Should I tell my parents I’m adopted?
• Do midgets have night vision?
• If I eat myself will I get twice as big or disappear completely?
• Does it take 18 months for twins to be born? Or 9?
• Do you think NASA invented thunderstorms to cover up the sound of space battles?
• How big is the specific ocean?
• Why are the holes in cats fur always in the right places for their eyes?

The questions I consider non-silly and no laugh happens move over to the list of ignorant and stupid,  Most often grammar and spelling are deficient, punctuation is ever-present, and swear words  limit the content significantly.

There is an entry in Wikipedia about stupid questions.  It begins with Carol Sagan's words: "There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism.  But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question".  

Carl didn't experience the full force of the internet and Yahoo Answers, did he?  He died in 1996. Since then the pile of stupid questions has grown large enough that they've been classified: 

• Those questions that have already been answered, but the asker wasn't listening or paying attention.
• Questions that can be answered on one’s own with complete certainty. After all, information found online or from other sources can be wrong, so it never hurts to check.
• Questions of which the answer should be painfully obvious to any person with a pulse who has lived on this Earth for more than a decade.
• Questions that include ridiculous or hypothetical assumptions.
• Questions asked by someone who already knows the answer but is trolling the person they are asking.
   

So I moved on, and went cherry picking in the list of silly/stupid questions and to find these two and think we might move them to unanswerable /existential questions:

• What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?
• If the world is going to end, do you buy, sell, or hold stocks? 

On to our picture of the day: we're again visiting the Grimsby Beach Painted Ladies today.  This is 13 Fair Ave. Here's the story of the area's houses:

In 1846, Methodists gathered on the shore of Lake Ontario on land owned by J.B. Bowslaugh in a ten day temperance rally that evolved into a significant Chautauqua site.   
 
Grimsby Beach continues to echo with the charms of its storied past. In fact, these cottages built for the summer residence of a temperance camp, remain the most prominent connection to the rich history of the area. Now, the intricate fretwork and colors of the cottages inspire a vibrant mood at the beach which is a reminder of the spirit that inhabited the area.

 

From Summer to Winter

The last day of August seems as significant as the last day of the year.  In fact, there is a place on Earth where the temperatures today can be as cold as Christmas right now. Where is it?  Oymyakon, Russia.  I looked it up and today it is actually 19 degrees Celsius.  So where is the coldest place right now? I found a chart of the hottest and coldest.  There is a place in the Antartica that is currently -110.6 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end of the scale, the hottest place is Basrah-Hussen in Iraq at 119.3 degrees Fahrenheit.  I found these at the eldoradoweather.com site.  Antarctica isn't a place to most of us.  One can only imagine scientists living there.  The only visitors we can imagine are tourists.  That pretty well describes Antarctica.  It doesn't have a spring or fall - just summer and winter. It has no commercial industries, no towns or cities and no permanent residents.  There are numerous scientific bases - 65 in total. You can read about it here in Cool Antarctica.  So whoever is there now may be able to say that summer is turning to winter.   At the opposite end of the weather spectrum, things are quite different.  People live in Basra-Hussen in Iraq.  It is an ancient city.  It is one of the ports from which Sinbad the Sailor journeyed.  During the summer months, it is consistently one of the hottest cities on the planet, where temperatures regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius or 122 degrees Fahrenheit.  Add to that high humidity sometimes exceeding 90% because of tis proximity to the marshy Persian Gulf.   So I guess heat wins over cold in human habitation. A few pictures from Grimsby Beach's Painted Ladies today.  There's whimsy and fun on the Lake - no worries about the hottest or coldest there.