Dec 19 2024 - Blow-Up Gnome

 

Remember the western movies where they had dynamite set to bring rocks down on the bad or good guys  with that dynamite detonator?  That's what comes to mind with a blow-up gnome. To be fair, the retrievals of blow-up gnome show happy balloon gnomes for the Christmas front yard.  Gnomes are "believed to help Santa deliver toys on Christmas Eve." Christmas gnomes are good beings. Take a simple turn right, and what do you find when you look for exploding gnomes? You get two things:  the world of lawn gnomes exploding in slow motion on videos or video game conversations about how to explode the gnomes.  Maybe the game is Explode Gnome - plants vs zombies:  garden warfare 2.   Keep exploring and here's a much more interesting topic:   "Peaceful Gnome" or "Project Gnome" - the project to explode nuclear devices underground as part of the nuclear testing in the US in 1958.  It was part of "Project Plowshare."  It was supposed to be testing to find  peaceful uses for nuclear bombs.  "Gnome" was placed 1,184 feet underground at the end of a 1,115 ft tunnel that was supposed to be self-sealing upon detonation.  Gnome was detonated on Dec 10, 1961 with the plan going otherwise than planned.  Smoke and steam began to rise from the shaft, releasing radiation which was detected off-site.  Big hole instead - 170 feet wide and 90 feet high. Read all the rest HERE in Wikipedia.  The hole was filled up, but you can still visit the site today and read its historical plaque.  That's in Loving, New Mexico.  A perfect name.

I don't have any garden gnomes, even though they are well-represented in historical gardens. My preference is for frogs and toads.  This one is at Butchart Gardens and part of the one of the bronze fountains there.

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May 22 - 2022 - Derecho in the Neighbourhood

 

I didn't know the word Derecho until it became a severe weather warning on our radios yesterday.  It made me point the car home. A derecho (pronounced similar to "deh-REY-cho") is a widespread, long-lived straight-line wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving severe showers or thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system. High wind speeds, hurricanes and tornado-force winds are common in these storms.  No wonder we got the big alerts yesterday.  Most of the big derechos in the past have occurred in the U.S. Derechos can be hazardous to aviation due to embedded microbursts, downbursts, and downburst clusters.  Generally "bursts" are a big part of the storms. I guess we've been very lucky in Ontario in the past where our worst worries are too much snow and ice in the winter.   The storm yesterday was reported to have almost 1000 km of damage from Michigan to Quebec City. There were 4 reported fatalities - mostly by trees falling.  At one point the winds reached 132 km/h at the Kitchener airport.   The worst derecho in history was in June 2012 where the winds reached 146 km/h and tracked across a large section of the Midwestern US into the mid-Atlantic states. There was $2.9 billion in damage and 22 deaths. It went on for more than a day. That storm is described in Wikipedia HERE.  May is supposed to be reserved for flowers - particularly the lilac festivals. We salute the arrival of summer on the Victoria long weekend with public and private fireworks.   Public Fireworks are back on this year.  This Niagara Falls Summer Fireworks says:  "Fireworks every night" - that's the headline.  Summer has arrived! Gerry and I were in Toronto on Niagara Street last week for a Ryerson (now Toronto Metropolitan University) lighting certificate graduate anniversary get-together.  It took place at a lighting store.  You can see the front door to the left in the first picture, and the lighting sculpture on the wall.  The lighting sculptures were wonderful. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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June 20 2021 - Hollywood Cigarette, please

 

Terry O'Reilly is a podcaster whose program "Under the Influence" covers advertising and marketing topics.  Yesterday he covered fake Hollywood brands.  His CBC podcast is HERE. Maybe you know all this - about Hollywood brand cigarettes and beer.  Cigarettes are the most interesting:  Red Apple is Quentin Tarantino's brand.  It is fake, and shows up exclusively in his movies.  It first showed up in Pulp Fiction in 1994. But the first appearance of the Hollywood brand of cigarettes is Alfred Hitchcock who brought Morley's to life in the movie Psycho.  That was in 1960.  The name Morley is a play on Marleys for Marlboro cigarettes.  It was created by a prop packaging service - The Earl Hays Press. This gets around clearance and fees for real brands. Where else did it occur? The MeTV article HERE says: "The brand would soon repeatedly pop up in tobacco form on The Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman, William Shatner and Telly Savalas all carry packs of Morleys in the classic fifth season episodes "In Praise of Pip," "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "Living Doll." The smokes also surface in "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" and "Stopover in a Quiet Town."   The brand's earliest known television appearance is April 5, 1961, on an episode of Naked City. At the opening of "Tombstone for a Derelict," a young punk played by Robert Redford offers a cigarette to a bum, before his gang murders the poor fellow. After the credits, the police show up, and a pack of Morleys is discovered as a key piece of evidence.  The really well-known appearance is Richie's "chocolate treat"  on the Dick Van Dyke show when Pickles the wife of Buddey Sorrell visits the Petries and pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse - "Here I brought you a pack of chocolate cigarettes".  And where do the cigarettes occur in Psycho? At the end of Psycho, Dr. Fred Richman shakes a smoke from a pack of Morleys before explaining what happened. I should have told you about this earlier, as you can buy a prop pack for $26.00 online.  Consider this a great gift - you can put it beside Jack's All Play and No Work Book from The Shining.   And what is this sculpture today?  It is at 13th Street Winery in their greatly expanded Sculpture Garden - Floyd Elzinga's pinecone scale cut-outs are in the in the bundles. They look like shovel pieces. And then consider Locust Lane Winery - can you see the skyline of Toronto on the left?  That Skydome half-circle is the marker.  Another great location.

Nov 22 2020 - A Timely Whale report

 

I must relay this story to you - just in case you haven't seen it.  It has been covered by a number of media outlets.  It started for me when I saw a small, humorous article in the Globe and Mail.  It covered the 50th Anniversary of the Blow Up the Dead Whale story.  The Globe's 'punch line' was that the town in Oregon where this strange event occurred on November 12  1970 has named a park Dead Whale Park in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 'blow-up' event.   So I was really intrigued when Day 6 on CBC said they were interviewing the reporter who covered the story for U.S. news in the first place.  His story was on preserved on tape and has gone viral every so often.  It has to do with his alliterative language during the live coverage. He says there isn't a day goes by without someone referencing this story and his report.  His son particularly likes to replay the lines to him. Paul Linnman was on-site in November 1970 to report on the explosion of a dead beached whale in Oregon. State highway officials decided that the only way to get rid of the decomposing marine mammal was with a half tonne of dynamite. It would 'dissipate' somehow. "As soon as we got out of the car and were still a good distance from the whale, and behind sand dunes, the smell hit us. I mean, this thing had been rotting for a few days and the smell is beyond description," he told CBC Radio's Day 6. "We realized things weren't necessarily going well when we started hearing chunks of blubber hitting the ground around us, which you can also hear in the video," he said.  (A car was destroyed - owned by Paul's friend.  His friendsaid the car dealer he got it from had a sign out front inviting people to get  - 'A Whale of a Deal'- Paul went and checked at the time and could confirm this) In his alliterative voice-over of the clip, Linnman quipped that “land-lubber newsmen” became “land-blubber newsmen … for the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.” His closing line: “It might be concluded that should a whale ever wash ashore in Lane County again, those in charge will not only remember what to do, they’ll certainly remember what not to do." The original newscast video is in the CBC story HERE.  Or HERE from the New York Post.   The sculpture on the lake shore in Kingston - with the Skylum sky - was a Betterphoto Finalist for September.  I'd just noticed it the other day.

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Sep 29 2020 - Sell That Meme

 

Can you sell memes?  And what is the Meme Economy?  You must be able to - that's because memes surpassed Christ in online popularity since 2016.  And the MemeEconomy (as it is known) has been with us for a few years already. Etsy tells us this: You can buy, sell, or trade your Memes, safe in the knowledge that ownership will be tracked securely – thus ensuring your memes are not plagiarized. On Etsy, you can sell whatever meme-inspired creation that you're able to whip up. In 2017, Reddit created a team to take on the Meme Stock Market: They called the trading tool NASDANQ, a cheeky financial system for an alternate universe where meme is king.  It is a system where you can buy shares in memes, betting on their success.  Go to the Meme Economy to buy, sell, share, make and invest in templates freely - scroll through the ads HERE on reddit.   I went to knowyourmeme.com where you can buy a lot of stuff considered best sellers.  I found it disconcerting that the most popular one is  'Epstein didn't kill himself' And you can scroll through the latest images of proposed memes.   I found Esquire's roundup of the best memes of 2020.  I think you have to scroll through yourself.  Find them HERE.   In retrospect, we had memes in our childhood - knock knock jokes and Alexander the Great jokes come to mind.  Here's how I know my age: the 6 oldest memes on the Internet came about in 2000.  They do reference the dancing baby of the 1990's.  Before that, we are part of history and fit into folklore.  How quaint! It was open house on the weekend at Floyd Elzinga's studio located in Beamsville.  He's the metal sculptor with the well-known pinecone sculptures.  Here's a small sample.

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Sep 5 2020 - Blackest Black is here

 

The blackest material ever made came about recently.  It is Vantablack, first developed in 2014.  It absorbs 99.8% of light.  It is made of carbon nanotubes.  These are rods of carbon that are much thinner than any human hair and so close together in a maze-like matrix that light goes in and can't escape. The name is a compound of the acronym VANTA (vertically aligned nanotube arrays). When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected amongst the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat. People have since become fascinated by how strange the supposed colour is. It creates the optical illusion of flattening features and rendering objects two-dimensional. Here's one writer's summary: "My colleague Mark Wilson saw a sample of Vantablack and found it deeply unsettling. “It has no reflection, no contours,” he writes. “It’s like part of the world has been Photoshopped away.” Vantablack made its space debut aboard a satellite in low-Earth orbit, where it absorbs stray light so the camera systems can image Earth more effectively.  There's a video HERE. Scientists who discovered the material worked with artist Diet Strebe and coated a radiant 16.78-carat yellow diamond worth $2 million.  The diamond is considered the most brilliant material on earth.  I don't know what it was worth after it was coated, but its brilliance is now invisible. Where can you find Vantablack now?  The BMW X6 Series car.  Vantablack isn't a pigment or a paint, so you can't buy a bucket of it and paint your walls or the car.  The nanotubes have to be grown in the Surrey NonSystems lab.  It can take 2 days to apply to an object.  So I wonder  how long it took to cover a car?   It wasn't really covered in the labs.  It was covered in a variant VBx2.  The article calls it a super black, non-reflective paint, so it couldn't have been coated in the lab.  I wondered things like how you would find the door to open it - there is a little silver dot in the picture.  And what would happen when dust and mud got on it.     I found one outdoor image - all the rest are in studios.  It looks like velvet to me. I found this sculpture at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines - It is "The Race" by William McElcheran.  His sculptures are sprinkled around downtown Toronto's financial district.  They too are in the dark and eerie range of experience.

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Aug 29 2020 - The Weeds will Win

 

Is Goldenrod a weed? Is Joe Pye Weed a weed?  Milkweed used to be considered a noxious weed.  I have Goldenrod in the front garden and it is just starting to show colour.  The bees will be around it soon. Some 'weeds' such as Goldenrod (Solidago species) and Joe Pye Weed (Eutrochium purpureum) are native species which support Canada's pollinating insects and birds and contribute to the ecosystem. We  know that Milkweed (Asclepias species), for example, provides a nursery for the offspring of Monarch butterflies.   And then there are the plants that are worrisome and are weeds that can kill everything around them:  Species like Dog-Strangling Vine (Vincetoxicum rossicum and Vincetoxicum nigrum), Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), and Japanese Knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) threaten biodiversity and have adverse effects on the environment. Common Reed (Phragmites australis) is all along the QEW and waterways.  It impacts recreational activities like swimming, boating and fishing and reproductive strategies of fish, turtles and birds. We've been told to stay away from species like Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) and Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans). They can have serious health impacts with exposure causing allergic reactions and dermatitis. All these invasive weeds make Goldenrod a pleasant plant.  I found a COVID gardening joke to distract us from invasives: Has anyone elses gardening skills improved during this quarantine like mine have? I planted myself on my couch at the beginning of March and I've grown significantly since. And then I found a cat and gnome joke: A garden gnome is busy destroying plants when suddenly a house cat appears.“What are you?” asks the cat. “I’m a gnome. I steal food from humans. I kill their plants, and I raise a ruckus at night to drive them crazy. I just love mischief! And what, may I ask, are you?” The cat thinks for a moment and says, “I guess I’m a gnome.” Here is that beautiful sculpture "Time" in Kingston on the harbour.  The weather of the October day that I took photos was raining with a solid gray sky. It takes a sunrise to move it to inspirational.

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Jan 1 2020 - New Day Ahead

All the world's clocks have turned to the new year.  This is the day we greet everyone with special greetings and wishes for a good life in the year ahead. Then we return to our regular daily greetings.  Here are some creative daily greetings I found on a blog, along with the blog's explanations.  Yo! This funny greeting came from 90s hip-hop culture. Today, it is commonly used in America. Are you OK? / Alright mate? It is a British slang version of “Hello. How are you?” If your friend asks you one of these questions, respond “Yeah, fine”. Howdy! This weird greeting is an abbreviation of “How do you do?” widely used in some regions of Canada and America. Sup? / Whazzup? All teenagers know that this greeting is a short version of “What’s up?” When we look ahead to what to expect from 2020, what comes to mind on a leap year is the Olympics.  The Summer Olympics begin on Friday July 24 and complete on Sunday, August 9 in Tokyo. The last time Tokyo had the Olympics was 1964.  What are our pictures today?  We visited the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls yesterday, and found this new sculpture installation.  Metal walls with multi-colour leds shining on them, making rainbow lines.  It is titled Niagara Strait and is by artist Gordon Reeve.  The oak leaf is sitting on lights in the snow.

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No Longer Cursive

Cursive is the term we used for writing script or longhand. There's formal and casual cursive.  There's looped, italic and connected.  Everything we know about cursive, though, is not very important - it has left the curriculum of today's school classrooms as we really aren't writing much anymore. What other skills are no longer needed? reading paper maps writing cheques and balancing a cheque book telephone etiquette sewing  ironing Add these to the list: long division or any arithmetic metric conversions finding true north clipping coupons remembering .... e.g. phone numbers I asked the all-important question: What are the replacement skills that we need to learn now? Here's one list I found: expert data analysis advanced social selling mobile expertise multi-platform UX (UX is user experience) design network and information security creative thinking It is the last one that worries me.  It is not in the same class as clipping coupons. I am warned that the fourth industrial revolution is here next year - in 2020 - bringing advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.  What will we need for these areas? And then I also wonder: what skills will seem like clipping coupons in 2030? Today's pictures are of the Kingston waterfront sculpture named "Time" - created by Kosso Eloul in 1973 to celebrate Kingston's Tercentenary.  There was so much driving rain though - you can see the spots on the lens.  There are too many to photoshop them away.

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