Marilyn's Photos - Nov 11 2025 - Sisters of Mercy

 

Leonard Cohen’s song “Sisters of Mercy” came to my mind. It has a beautiful melody. My remembrance of the lyrics was garbled, so I looked them up.  Always the sacred and profane together.  I looked up the background of the song. The quote from Cohen was  that two young women gave him shelter during a snowstorm in Edmonton.  AI explains it: “They were not lovers but provided a moment of comfort that inspired the ballad.  The phrase also likely refers to the broader concept of women who offer comfort, much like the Sisters of Mercy religious order founded by Catherine McAuley in Ireland in 1831. “  Another story is that he said they were two backpackers in the hotel lobby and he invited them to his room where they fell asleep and he wrote the song.  There are further variations on this as background to the song. There are many interpretations of the lyrics.  AI weighs in with its four-point overview of core theme, inspiration, symbolism and lyrics. Makes me think of first year English essays.  If you go to songmeanings.com website, you will find 24 interpretations/entries for the meaning of the lyrics. Reading through the comments is fascinating to a point - like reading more first year English student papers or listening to the discussion in an English class.  Are there Leonard Cohen jokes?  Here’s one of his own: “This is a song I wrote when I thought I might never be able to sing again - quite worrying when I never could sing in the first place.” Let’s make a guess of what this is.  It is the centre of a china “egg plate” - it has the indents for devilled eggs around the outside.  One of the watercolour artist uses it to mix paint, so you can see all the colours.

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

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!

Read past POTD's at my Blog: http://blog.marilyncornwell.com Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

s