Mar 30 2023 - Oshawa the Port

 

I had no idea that Oshawa had a Port.  It has opened for the season.   "The Port of Oshawa is Durham Region’s gateway to the world, handling more than 500 vessels carrying over 3 million metric tons of cargo over the past decade.  On average the port handles $23 million worth of cargo annually, from salt and steel products to asphalt and grain. The movement of cargo through the Port of Oshawa supports 294 jobs and generates $6 million in federal and provincial taxes annually." So I checked out Port Colborne in terms of ceremonies as it is the gateway to the Welland Canal. They had a top hat opening this week like Oshawa. The St. Niagara Independent writes: "Per the City of Port Colborne, there are two caps involved in the annual top hat ceremony.  The first hat is loaned for ceremonial purposes only from the Port Colborne Historical and Marine Museum. It’s a turn-of-the-century Tress & Co beaver felt fur hat that was anonymously donated to the museum. When not being used for the canal opening, the hat is stored in an acid-free box at the climate-controlled Captain John W. Sharpe Heritage Resource Centre. The second top hat is a keepsake for the captain of the first downward-bound vessel. It’s embroidered on the inside with a special message and the date. "   The pretty orchid picture from the show last month has made its way into a series of patterns using Flexify.  Here are two of them. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 29 2022 - goodgoodgood

 

There are a few good news websites, and I guess there are quite a few.  I found this one -goodgoodgood.co - it must have had trouble find a "good" website name. What was the good news of 2022?  I found it hard to figure out so abandoned that when I saw these children's t-shirts for the nth time in the last few days.   They are creepy optical illusions, I suppose. There are good news websites, and I guess there are quite a few.  I found this one -goodgoodgood.co - it must have had trouble find a "good" website name. What was the good news of 2022?  I found it hard to figure out from the website.  I abandoned that when I saw these children's t-shirts for the nth time in the last few days.   They are creepy optical illusions or perhaps the latest in aliens arising.    This may be the new t-shirt trend.  Will it become on the the top seller in 2023?  What are the most imports T-shirts historically.  Here they are: Kiss Me, I'm Irish‍. I “Heart” NY. I'm With Stupid. Keep Calm and Carry On. The Rolling Stones. Vote For Pedro. Jurassic Park / Ghostbusters‍ Charlie Brown‍ What about those Kevin t-shirts I see around?  Which Kevin is this?  Is it one of the 25 famous people named Kevin - e.g. Kevin Hart, Kevin Durant, Kevin Gates, Kevin Alvarez, or Kevin Joans.  Lots named Kevins.   Could it be Kevin's Famous Chili?  This is a popular scene from The Office.   But I suspect this Kevin falls a distant third to the most famous fictional Kevins.   I  think the contest for the top Kevin is between Kevin in Home Alone vs Kevin the Minion in Despicable Me.   Kevin in Home Alone has a fashion designer for a mom and a securities company executive for a dad (or maybe a day trader).  There's a Home Alone family tree.  That's how important Kevin is.  He's like Royalty. Kevin the Minion has the occupation of "henchman".   His family tree is listed as the Gru Family.   That's the father and children - I guess the Despicable One Family.  What about the Minion Family - they are a males species of fictional yellow creatures.  Can they have a family tree?  How important is Kevin, the Minion?  While we know they left their home country of Switzerland in favour of a new life in America during the late 1960s,  they have in fact existed since the beginning of life on Earth. Which t-shirt to get - the creepy puppy t-shirt or a Kevin  t-shirt? This is a carved  stone pathway at Bellevue Botanic Garden, outside Seattle.  I colourized the sections to bring out the surface textures.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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 27 2021 - Inside Hillary Clinton's mansion where she lives with her partner

 

What a bizarre headline.  It looks like the algorithm did a search on popular celebrities and filled in the name to the standard headline.  It always has a mansion and a partner. On the other hand, the Cintons do have a mansion. Location of Whitehaven in Washington, D.C. Whitehaven is a Clinton family-owned mansion in Washington, D.C. used by Hillary Clinton when she is in residence in the capital. (The primary Clinton home is in Chappaqua, New York.) Built in 1951, the Georgian-style house is located near Washington's Embassy Row. And there are lots of headlines about their homes: "A look at Hillary and Bill Clinton's homes" HERE. This is a NY Times article, so may be inaccessible to you. There are lots of homes, and the price they paid for each one is identified.   It turns out their house purchasing is very popular in the headlines. Of course, she was running for president when many of these articles appeared.  And they have owned a lot of houses, and do own a number of properties that are fascinating.  Perhaps the articles are ironic, given the ultimate home for any American is the White House.   Too bad she didn't become President, it would have made for great decorating news. These pictures were created from the Lily Plates that Brian had me taken pictures of.  They went through the Flexifly plugin with the Mandelbrot output.  To me they look like something the White House would use as China.

 

There are enough articles about photoshopping butts and bellies, fingers and feet, two right legs and missing armpits.  It is all revealed HERE.  I am fascinated by how sloppy the mistakes are. For example, in one, LeBron James has no bottom part of a body. And then I came across this version of photoshopping.  The before was the supposed portrait of Isabella d' Medici but it turns out that was the photoshopped painting.  Then it was was restored.  The 'after' is the original painting.   130-year-old paint was removed from the top of 400-year-old paint. What a difference there is.   The makeover occurred in the 19th century.  There isn't an explanation for why it was overpainted.  The article covering the story had this to say:  'Originally identified as a Bronzino painting of Eleanor of Toledo, who married into the Medici family, the portrait looked more like the artwork on a Victorian biscuit tin lid than the output of the Italian Mannerist. Lulu Lippincott, the CMA’s curator of fine arts, convinced that the piece was no Old Master, passed it along to chief conservator Ellen Baxter, asking the conservation studio to confirm that it was a fake." They were delighted with the results of the activity. And then there is Isabella's story - to me a tragic one.  Isabella was the daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici. Her marriage to the powerful Roman Orsinis family's Paolo Giodordano I Orsini was arranged when she was 11 and they married when she was 16, but her husband immediately left and went on about his responsibilities.  She stayed in her father's household.  Her affair with the cousin of her husband turned out to be a big problem. When her father died, she died shortly after, supposedly murdered by her husband on the instructions of her own brother.    That's a lot of intrigue.   I found this the other day and thought it looked like pretty jewellery.  It uses the Flaming Pear plug-ins to create the patterns from boat paint grunge.

Fear & Looting in Las Vegas

Isn't it ironic that 'fear and looting' retrieves 'fear and loathing' in google,  but that 'fear and loathing' is transformed to 'fear and looting' in spell checking.  That was in yesterday's story. There is such a thing as 'fear and looting' - in America, in Peru, in Egypt, the French Caribbean, in St. Martin, ini Johannesburg, and 'sex' is added to the article about stories of the Blitz.  One can play Fear & Looting at casinos as well. Is there anything to loot in Las Vegas?  Supposedly the Looting in Las Vegas article is about the 9% room tax to fund the convention centre and that there shouldn't be such a tax.  Then there is a more intriguing article about casino owner, Ted Binion's murder and the looting of his $3.5 billion coin and ingot collection buried in underground vaults. Real looting certainly happens in Egypt.  The underground global economy of illicit antiquities has been estimated at $2 billion per year. Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama counted 10,000 looting pits using high-resolution imagery from space.  She has done all kinds of discovery with satellite imagery - she used satellite imagery to detect possible remains of a Norse/Viking presence at Point Rosee, Newfoundland.  Parcak is an Egyptologist, and has been documenting tombs and collecting images and GPS coordinates to assemble a database to answer questions about ancient Egyptian life. National Geographic partially funds Parcak's work for the database. Her discoveries include the tombs at Lisht. She was  recognized with the 2018 Lowell Thomas award and is a 2016 TED Prize winner.  She has helped locate 17 lost pyramids, more than 1,000 tombs and more than 3,100 potential ancient settlements in Egypt.  Egypt's Minister of Antiquities denies these numbers. Her website says: "She aims to revolutionize how modern archaeology is done altogether, by creating a global network of citizen explorers, opening field schools to guide archaeological preservation on the ground, developing an archaeological institute, and even launching a satellite designed with archaeology in mind".  Here's her website HERE.  She invites us to become an explorer. My recent explorations on holiday were focused on Arbutus tree bark.  Here are a few of them.

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com

A Cloud of Amaryllis

Yesterday's Amaryllis seemed like a gathering, a drift, or a cloud.  There is a wealth of creative collective noun names for birds - yet flowers which are plentiful have only a few collective nouns. There are bunches, bouquets, sprays, gardens, beds, patches, drifts,  clumps and nosegays.For something that is so prominent on the planet.  Here's a few of our familiar collective nouns and what they describe: Bevy - of girls, ladies, swans, doves, beauties Caravan - of merchants, pilgrims, travellers Cluster - of grapes, islands, nuts, stars, rings Colony - of people, ants, badgers, beavers, penguins, rabbits, rats, seals, frogs, gulls, vultures Flight - of aircrafts, arrows, bees, birds, insects, locusts, stairs, steps Herd - of cattle, deer, swine, antelope, boar, buffalo, chamois, chinchillas, donkeys, elephants, elk, giraffes, gnus, goats, hippopotami, horses, kangaroos, llamas, moose, oxen, pigs, seals, swans, walruses, whales, yaks, zebras (when pasturing or driven together) And in reverse, we can see some of the collective nouns that describe something. Crows: Murder, congress, horde, muster, cauldron Soldiers - army, brigade, company, division, platoon, squad, unit Trees - forest, grove, orchard, stand, thicket Birds - flock, flight, parcel, pod, votary, brace, dissimulation Buffalo - a herd, group, gang or obstinacy Cats - a chowder, pounce, kindle, letter, intrigue, clutter, comfort, chowder, colony Someone has 'gathered' these collective nouns together for our enjoyment.  It is James Lipton - An Exaltation of Larks - The Ultimate Edition More Than 1,000 Terms. (free delivery worldwide from Britain) The back cover copy is a delight in itself: An "exaltation of larks"? Yes! And a "leap of leopards", a "parliament of owls", an "ostentation of peacocks", a "smack of jellyfish", and a "murder of crows"! For those who have ever wondered if the familiar "pride of lions" and "gaggle of geese" were only the tip of a linguistic iceberg, James Lipton has provided the definitive answer: here are hundreds of equally pithy, and often poetic, terms unearthed by Mr. Lipton in the Books of Venery that were the constant study of anyone who aspired to the title of gentleman in the fifteenth century. When Mr. Lipton's painstaking research revealed that five hundred years ago the terms of venery had already been turned into the Game of Venery, he embarked on an odyssey... Our image today was taken during the polar vortex a few years ago - frost on the conservatory glass in the shape of nature's own patterns - a Christmas tree.

The Absence of Evidence

Nine continues to be part of our investigations today.  We know that 'dressed to the nines' means to be dressed flamboyantly.   What is the origin of this phrase.  From phrases.org.uk comes this most interesting explanation "Nine is the most troublesome number in etymology. There are several phrases of uncertain parentage that include the word. Examples are,  cloud nine, nine days' wonder and the infamous whole nine yards. We can add 'dressed to the nines' to that list." There is no proof of the origins however frequent the repetition of the derivation of the phrase:  "One theory has it that tailors used nine yards of material to make a suit (or, according to some authors, a shirt). The more material you had the more kudos you accrued, although nine yards seems generous even for a fop." So the conclusion: "It seems clear that 'the Nine' that Rawlett was referring to were the Nine Muses. It is just as clear that 'dressed to the nines' is merely an extension of 'to the nine/s' and that we could equally well 'dance to the nines' or 'etymologise to the nines'. The search for the link between 'nines' and dress sense has unearthed no convincing candidates. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but I'll stick my neck out here and say, with this phrase and with the other 'nines' phrases, 'nine' doesn't refer to anything specific - it just means 'a lot'." Our pictures today bring together the Florida composites with reflections of the Toronto skyline buildings in a curved metal fountain at Victoria Street and Adelaide.  I've admired the sculptures in this area for many years.  As I was walking by on Wednesday, there were wonderful warped geometric abstracts. The first picture is a black and white version of one of the reflections.  This picture has been combined with the Florida composites from January. What would you call this series?

Where's the Elephant

The Elephant in the Room - this expression had its origins in 1814.  Ivan Andreevich Krylov, poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. Dostoevsky referred to this story in his novel 'Demons.'  Mark Twain is credited with the first widely disseminated conceptual reference in his 1882 story "The Stolen White Elephant". There are related expressions - for example, skeleton in the closet.  There are elephant jokes.  Wikipedia says: An elephant joke is a joke, almost always an absurdriddle or conundrum and often a sequence of such, that involves an elephant. Elephant jokes were a fad in the 1960s, with many people constructing large numbers of them according to a set formula. Sometimes they involve parodies or puns. Four examples of elephant jokes are: Q: Why did the elephant paint its fingernails red? A: So it could hide in a cherry tree. Q: How can you tell that an elephant is in the bathtub with you? A: By the smell of peanuts on its breath. Q: How can you tell that an elephant has been in your refrigerator? A: By the footprints in the butter. Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? A: Time to build a new fence.

More Marvelling

This is the time of year when we think of leaves.  We don't much think about them in the summer - they're green like most of nature, they're on the trees and plants around us, so are ordinary.  In the Fall, they start their downward journey. We see them underneath our feet on a path, in a stream, bunched in doorways where the wind puts them.  They interrupt our view of normal things. I didn't notice the underside of these coleus leaves until last week, when I took some cuttings to start plants for next year.  The upper-side is deep red-black and a perfect foil for chartreuse in the planter display.  I didn't realize the same drama was on the underside of the leaves themselves.  It is one of those marvels.  Go to Google today to play their 'defeat the ghost game'.   I wonder what they do with the statistics.  Here's a site that shows some of the amazing Google numbers - 2 trillion searches annually seems amazing to me.

Summer Jokes

When I found these summer jokes online, they made me think of television from the 1950's.  This was a time when television was filled with vaudeville comedians and simple, fun jokes were everywhere - from stars such as Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, George Burns, and so many more. Summer Jokes Q: What did the pig say at the beach on a hot summer's day? A: I'm bacon! Q: What do you call six weeks of rain in Scotland? A: Summer! Q: How do you prevent a Summer cold? A: Catch it in the Winter! Q: What do you call a french guy in sandals? A: Phillipe Phloppe. Q: When do you go at red and stop at green? A: When you're eating a watermelon. Q: How do men exercise at the beach? A: By sucking in their stomach everytime they see a bikini. Q: How hot is a Los Angeles summer? A: So hot that I saw a fire hydrant chasing a pack of dogs! Q: How do you know your city is suffering from a heatwave? A: Every fat guy sweating in the city smells like Bacon!  source: jokes4us.com

Water thats Wavy and Flowery

Today's images carry on the theme of water reflections.  This is a great time of year with the Autumn colour reflections.  The top two images are similar in their reflections. It is the bottom one that fascinates me - where there seem to be 'daisies' in the water. I remember this part of physics got terribly complicated in Grade 7 or 8.  Or was it grade 9?  Perhaps someone receiving this will reply with the explanation of this pattern.

New Portfolio Series - Surface Attention

Today's images are fallen palm leaves - this is the part that attaches to the trunk and then the leaves extend out from there.  These pieces are quite large and fell in heavy winds.  Regular garden maintenance in a Florida garden means a landscape crew with a chainsaw cutting these off as they want to stay on the tree. I thought these images would be a good representation of  'golden moments' with their beautiful colour and soft flowing lines.  This is a tribute to the Blue Jays win yesterday as they triumphed on in the Rogers Centre on their own home 'playing surface'. The topic of 'surface' is a second subject of today's post.  It is a new series in my portfolio named 'Surface Attention'.  It is an indepth look at surface as the subject of the image.  This is about the visual and tactile quality of a surface in combination with the size, shape, and arrangement of its parts.  The Marvelling the Mushroom Series explored the underside surface of mushrooms with emphasis on line. This series expands that exploration.  If you'd like to see a wide range of photographic art images on this subject, hop over to the Redbubble group that I host: Surfaces and Textures The Featured Work image at the bottom shows a sample of what the group showcases.