Dec 13 2024 - Most Popular at Christmas

 

There are many most popular things at Christmas - top of the list is gifts.  There's urgency in the ads - who knows which ones will "sell out" - given gift cards are the top of the list, it doesn't seem likely that they are going to sell out.   Do you know that the top selling toy of all time is Barbie (at a billion).  You can see the most wanted toys for Christmas over the decades or years - think Tickle Me Elmo, Cabbage Patch Kids, Furby, LEGO, and don't forget Rubik's Cube.  Shopping-wise, the experts say that it is Christmas-themed things - lights, decorations, trees, all that sort of stuff that actually sell the most at Christmas. Christmas decorations are on sale at the floral store year-round, but would you want to buy your Christmas decorations in July?  Michael's had an understanding this year of how popular Christmas items are and how to position Christmas items.  They had some Christmas trees and decor out before Halloween.  It was a heads-up on what's to come, and a nudge to the early birds to get going.  Christmas is a magnet for all kinds of things to be "beloved" and "most popular" at Christmas.  This comes in the form of "tradition" generally. With both a religious event with its traditions and a secular one - Santa and the presents that has generated its own traditions.  There are so many things that align to make special meaning.  Things like our favourite dinner, favourite dessert, favourite cookies and candies - candy canes in particular. And then expand out to Christmas experiences - Santa Claus Parades, Christmas concerts, Christmas movies. We don't do this the rest of the year to such an extreme.  Christmas is the ultimate event for us.  It makes me wonder what would that next level of mass celebration could look like.  Who knows? Here's a Floyd Elzinga sculpture with a few sparkles added.  That looks Christmas-y to me.  And isn't that because we've squished in the Solstice Celebration of lights into the holiday.

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Dec 27 2022 - FIFA vs Summer Olympics

 

Did FIFA overrun the Olympics in 2022?  It seems to be the headline for what major events happened this year.  It looks like Queen Elizabeth's death and funeral  is far behind the FIFA World Cup.  And even though the Tour de France has 3.5 billion viewers, so would be the biggest sporting event in the world, it only shows up in one article.  It is the World Cup and the Olympics that are compared.     So which is it?  FIFA or the Summer Olympics? Here are  Quora  answers:   1.  "Due to the fact that last Olympics Games and last FIFA World Cup were in the same country, it will be easier to compare both. During the Olympic Games, Rio de Janeiro received 1.2 millions visitors.  According to Rio’s city hall, 410 thousands of those were not from Brazil During FIFA world cup Rio received 886 thousands tourists, 471 thousands of those were foreign tourists." Of course FIFA world cup have more than one host city, so there were much more tourists than this. Also, Rio received less tourists from Brazil because there were lots of other cities hosting FIFA World Cup." 2. "If you talk about audience, both events are watched for about half of the Earth. Fifa World Cup reached 3.2 billions viewers, while Olympic Games 3.5 billions." Quora has many more answers, but most are opinion-based.  Here are more analytical articles' answers. 1. The number of countries participating: in the 2018 FIFA World Cup, 208+1 countries participated in qualifying events which narrowed down to 32 in the main event. Meanwhile, a total of 206 nations participated in the 2016 Rio Olympics. 2. Younger audiences show a preference for FIFA 3. Differences are observed based on gender.  The World Cup is the favourite event of men globally (55%) with the Summer Olympics at 52%.  For women it is Summery Olympics 47% and World Cup 35%. 4. Gamers are markedly more drawn to the World Cup than the overall population Finding out how many watched the 2022 series will likely take some time.  My bet is that FIFA wins. The expectation was over 5 billion people.  What do you think?

A swan at Charles Daley Park pond.

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Feb 03 2022 - Blue the Most Popular Colour - Even in China!

 

Blue is the most popular and loved colour by humans - preferred by more than 35% of the world's population. And that includes China, says one headline.  The distinction YouGovAmerica makes about China is: "colors like red, yellow and green are considered to be auspicious or lucky (though the distinction between blue and green found in English is a more modern development for the Chinese language)." I assume we could do a survey of articles to find U.S. biases and how they evolved. Subtle and not so subtle references like this that separate China out from the rest of the 10 countries surveyed as somehow not part of the crowd. That's one of my anecdotal  observations as I read articles every day.     Another survey has a hilarious description of what items might be the reference points for our colour preferences.   "According to research conducted by psychologists Stephen E. Palmer and Karen Schloss over the last seven years, the answer isn’t found in our DNA. Their study, published in 2010, posits that a person’s preference for a given color can be determined by averaging out how much that person likes all of the objects they associate with that color. Your inclination for orange, for example, depends on how you feel about pumpkins and traffic cones and Cheetos, among other things; for green, it varies according to your thoughts on grass and American dollar bills and broccoli." What do you think?  How many of the 10 countries might even recognize the word Cheetos?  I hope it is few to only one. That article is available HERE. And for a tour through the most popular colours of the decades, you can look at this article from jukebox HERE.  There is a lot of blue grunge to find everywhere - a few examples below.

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Follow Your Bliss

What are the most popular types of photography?  Portrait photography is #1, of course!  How many photographs do we take each day?  Goggle tells us that a 2014 estimate was 1.8 billion images every single day.  There are 14 trillion photos take annually, as of 2017.  Pictures flow on the internet highway.   In one second 8,523 Tweets were sent, 920 Instagram photos were uploaded, 1,541 Tumblr posts are maden.  There are 3,400,000 emails sent in a second, WhatsApp messages are 740,741, and Facebook posts are 54,977.   I went searching for the most popular photos in the world.  I find the most influential photos - these are mostly photos of death and dying in action - starvation, falling, people being shot (remember Vietnam images) etc. There  are 2 wonderful portrait- of Chez Guevera and Winston Churchill. So I am not able to find the most popular picture in the world. What about the most viewed picture in the world?  What is it?  It turns out to be the "Bliss' photograph on the wallpaper screen of the 1990s Microsoft computers.  Photographer O’Rear said: “I am turning seventy-six and realise how much the Microsoft ‘Bliss’ photograph has meant to my life.  “As the photographer of the most viewed photo in history, I have enjoyed every minute of the fame.” It is a picture he took out of the car window in Sonoma. I've always wondered about the strangely shadowed grass and how smooth and green the 'landscape' is.   Read more about this interesting story HERE  In the Silver Garden Conservatory at Longwood Gardens, these seem almost like a black and white pictures.