Nov 26 2024 - What Working Class?

 

"The working class" - this phrase is relentless in American writing and social discourse.  Particularly about how the Democrats failed to reach the "working class." Whatever is it, anyway?  "The working class" seems to me to be obsolete in the developed world in the 21st century.   As a term, it originated in the 1700s, and by the late 18th century, European society's wealthy members used this term as a weapon against those at the bottom of society.  "Working-class" became a derogatory expression for a host of social, moral and ethical failings.  Even that this was a self-created problem, and I guess people deserved to be working class. That was then. Starting in the late 19th century into the 20th century saw political unrest and change to rectify unfairness.  Changes in social programs came about - consider in Canada that there is now health, pension, unemployment insurance and social support programs. But something bothers me about the election analysis in the U.S.  Who is this working class that the Democrats didn't seem to reach?   Are you ready for the definition?  This from Wikipedia: "Economists and pollsters in the United States generally define "working class" adults as those lacking a college degree, rather than by occupation or income. Other definitions refer to those in blue-collar occupations, despite the considerable range in required skills and income among such occupations... There is considerable ambiguity over the term's meaning." Besides this education level, what seems to be the focus is differentiating between the working class and the middle class and analyzing the cultural qualities.    As I read through the Wikipedia coverage, it is all very detailed and theoretical.  It seems to have spiralled into chaos.  So I wonder who is going to come up with a new model to describe social groups.  A re-look at class systems seems in order now.  Gone will be this simple world of upper, working, and middle classes.  What will it be?  Maybe similar to the five social classes in the Philippines - rich, upper middle income, middle class, lower middle and low income, then poor.

Elevator only descending.  That's the mood of voters everywhere.  Or what about blue skies ahead, hopefully, maybe?

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Sep 7 2023 - Unruly Fans

 

In the headlines today is news of American tennis fans screaming from the stands and interrupting play.  A fan using language from Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime was thrown out this year.  Last year two men were engaged in giving one of them a haircut.  That was considered unruly. So I guess there are people over-involved in the game and those under-involved.  Somehow, they are at the game - who knows if they are there to watch the players play.  Everyone seems to have unruly fans.  Adele had the problem in July.  At a baseball game in Washington, unruly fans were pulling up chunks of grass.   What was the unruly fan doing at a Maple Leafs game in April?  The young fan was spotted eating "liquorice with mayo" during the game.  I guess he was dipping liquorice sticks into a jar of mayonnaise.  Supposedly fans were left in "shock".  I guess they weren't at the CNE this year with its special food fare.   It seems to be a part of sports - one can go to Wikipedia to find a year by year listing of unruly/violent incidents at sports games. It goes way back to the 1800s.  It is HERE. Its most recent entry is December 17 2022 in Melbourne, Australia.  There are other articles ranking the NFL's rowdiest/most annoying/obnoxious, and most arrested fans.  And hop over to the Guinness Book of Records.  What do you get for a search on unruly fans?  You get the loudest crowd roar in a sports stadium.  Would that be unruly?  It was 142.2 dbA in Kansas City in 2014.   Here's a view that could only be from a plane - between the clouds at sunset.

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Aug 10 2023 - Angels Calling

 

Angels Calling is a song by The Tenors. It is played regularly on the Zoomer FM classical music radio station - “Beautiful music for a crazy world.” It is one of those songs requested as a tribute to a loved one who has passed away.    Can’t you hear the angels calling, me up?  Up above? Can’t you hear the angels calling me home?  Me home? Where is home? From Wikipedia:  "In the New Testament, the existence of angels, just like that of demons, is taken for granted. They can intervene and intercede on behalf of humans. Angels protect the righteous (Matthew 4:6, Luke 4:11)They dwell in the heavens (Matthew 28:2, John 1:51), act as God's warriors (Matthew 26:53) and worship God (Luke 2:13). In the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus, angels behave as psychopomps." And a psychopomp?  That’s a guide of souls.  Their role is not to judge the deceased but to simply guide them.   That’s the key to this song seems.  It is compelling and comforting as it gives the sense in the music and lyrics of being guided and taken care of.   How would you know when you look up that you are being guided by the angels?   I think these are the clouds that go with the song.  That guide one up.

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Sep 22 2022 Near Death experiences to Hell

 

Did you know there are lots of articles on "terrifying visions of Hell by survivors of near-death experiences?"  I didn't.  These descriptions come from the website therichest.com A few survivors who have had a near-death experience and were sent to hell have said that they remember feeling extremely sleepy. They claim it was as if they were being forced to close their eyes losing the ability to remain conscious. Many of the NDE survivors who have seen hell say that they moved right through walls and doorways as if on their way to someplace. They claim that they remember being inside of a spiral vortex filled with darkness falling to their inevitable demise. Imagine standing there feeling your skin begin to burn from the extreme heat as the doors swing open inviting you and your soul in. Hearing stories about endless amounts of corpses, skeletons, and skulls from near-death experience survivors who have seen hell are rather common. Walking the path into the deep dark pits of hell would be a traumatic experience for any person.  ...seeing was other people that had a significant part of their body missing.  ...stories from people who have passed on and then returned that some of them were unable to speak. Some of them claim they were consumed with an uncontrollable fear. People who have died and been to hell and back tell of how they experienced an intense sort of anger unlike they had ever felt before taking a hold of them.   After returning from their near-death experience those that have seen hell describe a putrid, toxic smelling hell where corpses lay rotting all over the landscape  Many of hell's NDE survivors speak of begging and pleading for their life and to return home. Survivors of hellish NDEs report being dragged, beaten, and tortured by Satin's most viscous monsters. The extensive Maclean's article on near death experiences - HERE - focuses primarily on Heaven experiences.  It covers Bill Wise's 23 Minutes in Hell.  "A California realtor, Wiese was sleeping peacefully on the night of Nov. 22, 1998, when God pitched him into hell at 3 a.m., so that—Wiese later decided—he could warn others of their peril. He landed abruptly in a five-by-three-metre cell, shared with two gigantic, evil, reptilian beasts who proceeded to smash him against the walls before shredding his flesh... At precisely 3:23 a.m., Jesus rescued Wiese and returned him home, where he landed, terrified, on his living room floor." And what expression is in the Maclean's article?  Heaven Tourists.  Can you imagine planning your NDE experience?  Heaven our Hell.  Choose.

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Jan 1 2021 - Recess Please

 

Recess and dismissal arrived in my mental inbox.  A recess is a period in which a group of people are temporarily dismissed from their duties.  It is interesting that this term about a group of people would have been used for children.  And that recess is common in two areas:  primary school and parliament/government breaks.  There is much written about the need for small children to have breaks or recesses - playtime, social time, physical activity.  The results of studies show that "The best way to improve children's performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it." But there is very little written about adults having recess.  A coffee break is the closest thing - and that wasn't playtime.  A bit of minor exercise. Maybe we were supposed to have recess at lunch.  But lunch turned into eating at one's desk as the decades rolled on.  Lots of work and little play during our day. My observation of adult "play" is that it is comprised of rigid sports games and social activities.  Everything has a lot of rules.  Adults reveal in difficult and harsh activities.  Lots of combat and competition. Consider this: there is no Olympic moment for swinging on a swing or sliding down a slide.   Imagine skipping.  These are not action-packed, combative and competitive activities that make for adult worlds records.  We laugh these off as simple and silly.  As an example, even my dog Millie can slide down a slide. I became aware of the fun of childrens'play activities in the high intensity interval training class at my Y.  It includes rope skipping, medicine ball throwing and rope ladder hopscotching.  I realized I hadn't done any of these things since I was a child.  They are fun to do. When and how did we stop... It may be that we rejuvenate recess for adults ass we make our way through the Pandemic.   Things like Red rover, hide-and-seek, musical chairs, leap frog, kickball, dodgeball, Simon says.  That would be an excellent New Year's Resolution: More play, less work to keep Jack on track. Between Sea and Sky - this is the seahorse at the Winterthur Pond in poised in that magic space between water and sky.

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May 11 2020 - Snowbirds vs White Mercedes

The Snowbirds flew right over our houses yesterday.  They are heading out west after this.  The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds are doing the same in the U.S. - they flew over New York City and New Jersey for 35 minutes.  We got a 'swoosh' - I was able to get 8 shots so not even 35 seconds. Look at the stunning Canadian Press picture of the flight in Toronto yesterday.  I would expect the photographer Frank Gunn has taken that picture of the skyline from the Toronto Islands a few times.       How fast does a Snowbird jet fly? 190 km/hour - 590 km/hour.  How fast was the 19-year-old driving the Mercedes on the QEW in Burlington on Saturday night?  308 km/hour.  What was he charged with?  Stunt driving and street racing.  Stunt driving carries fines up to $10,000 and six months in jail, and a loss of licence for up to two years. I expect no Mother's Day will never be the same for that family.  Tomorrow is the start of road safety week.  Here' the philosophical quote from the Officer. "You may think you're in control until that moment you're out of control," said Schmidt. You can see that the sky was a flat grey yesterday, so we give thanks to Luminar4 for these California sunsets showing off the Snowbirds' formation.  How far apart are they?  The separation between aircraft can be as little as 1.9 metres in some of the formations.

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April 15 2020 - Oriental and Occidental

Oriental and Occidental - East and West.  Isn't it interesting that "to orient" is to align or position relative to the points of the compass or other specified positions.  These come from the Latin word orient meaning "rising" and "east". Very little is written about Occidental - Western world (really Europe).  There's a town in California, an insurance company, petroleum company, even a constructed language Occidental language. But what caused the lack of use of Occidental and the excessive use of Oriental in the past?  It would be the orientation point - from Europe considered the West. Roman maps from 300 AD show the Orient as a place.  There was an Orient-Occident line - the Italian Peninsula's East Coast.  It shifted to the City of Rome around 600 AD. Any area below the city of Rome was considered the Orient. Over time "the Orient" shifted eastwards - it had to do so continually as Europeans travelled farther into Asia so had to name things the Near East and the Far East and so on. The Eurocentric viewpoint focuses on itself to the exclusion of a wider view of the world - it implicitly considered European culture as preeminent. So the term Orient and Oriental became derogatory and racist. Is it still allowed as an adjective? Looks like not - Oriental art retrieves beautiful, traditional cherry blossom and lotus images but under the titles Chinese art, Asian art, Japanese art. So we are left with the verb "to orient" and thinking about the compass and navigation. We have an abstract image of Toronto buildings - this is the metal fountain in the square off Adelaide Street at Yonge - it is a great reflector. I've spent lots of time taking pictures of its reflections.  Toronto has hit the news again with the most tower cranes in North America.  Toronto had 27 percent of them between January and March.   I wonder if I were to take this picture today, would there be a crane in the sky?

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April 11 - The Moon Has So Many Places in the Sky

When I look up out the window I see the moon ver the computer in the south.  Just a few days ago, during the Supermoon it was in the west over the back garden.  It is always somewhere different.  I never know where to look.  What makes it do this? "To keep the Moon in the same place at the same time every night, (i.e. to be able to say “It’s 2am - so the moon must be over the church”), the Moon would have to have an orbital period that was a fixed fraction of a day (i.e. a whole day, half a day etc). It doesn't." The moon orbits around the earth every 27.322 days.  And it orbits west to east and the earth rotes west to east, so all things in the sky move east to west. I hadn't thought about our rotation. Why don't I experience the earth move in its rotation when I jump up?  Here's a 'smart version' of my question: "If I'm standing at the equator, jump, and land 1 second later, the Earth does NOT move 1000mph (or .28 miles per second) relative to me, since my velocity while jumping is also 1000mph.  However, the Earth is moving in a circle (albeit a very large one), while I, while jumping, am moving in a straight line.  How much do I move relative to my starting point because of this? I realize it will be a miniscule amount, and not noticeable in practise, but I'd be interested in the theoretical answer." I don't need to look further - the question itself is sufficient to answer my own sufficiently. Here are some jumping jokes: My neighbor tried to wager money on whether I could jump the row of bushes between our properties... But I don't like to hedge my bets What do you call it when a thousand rabbits jump backwards? A receding hare line What does a janitor say when he jumps out of the closet? Supplies! We see a lovely bed of peonies blooming at Winterthur last May.  Winterthur is near Longwood, both south of Philadelphia.  Winterthur has America's greatest naturalistic garden and foremost Museum of American decorative and fine art objects.

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Jan 19 2020 - How Many Points in a Star?

How many points are there in a star?  The symbol or emblem we call the star has five points and comes from classical heraldry.  My Topaz star filter lets me choose how many stars I want.  So what about all the rest? There are stars that are symbolic - star scoring systems, indicating the quality of something - a hotel or a movie. Stars make up the symbol of medals - for war accomplishments and all kinds of achievements.  What about the stars in typography - our well known asterisk is a star. Religions use stars - the Star of David, the Star of Ishtar, the Marian star are a few.  And finally, geometry has all the stars you could ask for - a star polygon is a star drawn with the number of lines equal to the number of points. Why do so many newspapers have Star in the name?  The Hartford Courant has looked at this question and says that only about 60 terms combined in different ways are used to name almost all of the U.S. daily papers. The article is HERE. They fail to mention star.  Edwin Battistella has a blog post explaining the rationale of various news names: "Contents and delivery play a role in names, but the newspapers also use names to position themselves with readers. In colonial times, we find names like the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, the Massachusetts Spy, and the Green Mountain Patriot.  Later newspapers, from about the 1830s on, took a more public-interest role as watchdogs, like the Philadelphia Public Ledger, The Christian Science Monitor, The Charlotte Observer, The Roswell Record, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more." I have found a joke with today's topics combined: Trump asks his aides how the press has rated his performance yesterday. His assistant opens the newspaper to a headline: A complete ****show! - four stars, mr. President! Today's train images have been given sky replacements with the lumina sky replacement filter from Skylum.  The first image was at Strasburg a few years ago on a very rainy afternoon. Typically the sky is dense grey without any interest during a heavy rain.  So the sky filter was effective. The next two images are layouts at one of the conventions.  They had plain blue backdrops before sky replacement magically changed things.  It does seem like magic!

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s

Help Me Headlines

Why do parrots make such great news?  We just don't expect them to make the headlines with a desperate cry to help.  But wait, today I again saw the "Help Me" headline - so let's see what it's about. CNN recently carried a story of concerned drivers who called police in California after seeing a child hold up a sign with a plea for help - "Help me, she's not my mom!! Help!!"   Poor mother got stopped by police in Sacramento,  who found out it was "a hoax" and "a joke".  The police quote: "This is a reminder that parents need to keep an eagle eye on their children." That was it for children hoax news.  There weren't any other articles like this. What I did find, though, was the "Momo Challenge Hoax" which was covered widely in the press.   The 'Momo Challenge" -  the stories about 'momo' were that she would appear on children's phones unexpectedly and set dangerous challenges to harm themselves.  She's a zombie looking doll figure with bulging black eyes and the body of a chicken. (The original figure has been traced to a Japanese special-effects company Link Factory).   It turns out to have been images that has been found edited into unofficial copies of children's cartoons on YouTube.  Snopes investigated it and identified it as "far more hype or hoax than reality", but warned the images could cause distress to children. Here's the BBC Story on it. On our immediate horizon is the call for a 5 to 10 centimetre snowfall, followed by rain today.  It has dropped from the earlier warning level of 15 cm. In comparison, Newfoundland experienced 51 cm of snow yesterday and today is getting more - up to a total of 75 cm is expected. This will include gusts of wind as high as 120 km per hour.  They are in a state of emergency. So to bring things around to calmness, I found a wonderful image of Notre Dame Cathedral that I'd taken 15 years ago - of course with a new sky.

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