Feb 21 2025 - Hockey Score hits the Happiness Index

 

I was at a Rotary event yesterday evening and it ended before 800pm because of the hockey game.  They were arguing yesterday about booing the national anthems.  And that hockey should or should not have any political expression.  I'd just listened to the CBC commentator express the notion that flags and anthems don't belong in the NHL and are not an appropriate expression.   BUT he said that this is the hockey game of the decade or even the most important hockey game since 1972 with the Canadaa-USSR hockey game.  Because of politics.  For those who are skeptical, here's the visual demonstration online.  "Scores" of news feeds covering the game.  Look at those verbs and how much they reveal about each news agency.       Everyone commented on the change in lyrics by the national anthem singer Chantal Kreviazuk.  Not many news stories included the change.  Rather than sing "true patriot love in all of us command," Kreviazuk changed it to "true patriot love that only us command." CBC made this observation:  "Nobody booed the Canadian anthem when it played the second time after the game, since virtually all of the American fans had left." What does yahoo sports say about all this?  "Since taking office last month, Trump has made repeated comments about turning Canada into the 51st state of the U.S. and has also threatened to hit the country with significant tariffs. Canada has not taken any of that well, and the result has been a hostile response to "The Star-Spangled Banner" any time it's played in a Canadian NHL arena. The matter has taken hold of the country's national pride so much that it elevated the meaning of the 4 Nations Face-Off for many, and the resulting games between the U.S. and Canada were played like an Olympic gold medal match." Our moment of victory.

Isn't this great garden art?  This picture popped up in the database - it was taken at the Buffalo Garden Walk.  This sun looks like (Diefenbaker?) - is he is smirking or making a fart face.  Both fit very well as our response to the hockey game.  Let's hope we have nerves of steel for the ride ahead.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Sep 22 2023 - This Day in History

 

It is 22 years since the catastrophic event of 9/11.  It had a lasting emotional toll in America and was catastrophic for Afghanistan and Iraq.   The role of media expanded to transmitting and amplifying tragic events live.  Airplane travel wasn't so safe anymore, and Muslims became the target of discrimination which has lasted for decades.  I wondered why there are no reflections this year in the Google retrievals. Google has become so aggressive in shaping and deciding what is retrieved that I have come to downgrade its integrity rating.  I hopped over to DuckDuckGo.com and find quite the list of reflections.  There was breaking news from CNN in which two more victims were identified through advanced DNA testing. That article says that 40% of the victims - 1,100 people remain unidentified.  So one would expect the timing of the identification was done to coincide with the anniversary.  That tells us a lot about how news is made for the media today.  I came upon this November image.  I expect this is along John Street in Vineland.  The sun was reflecting up into the sky and the road shone brilliantly with the reflections.  I think this vertical extension of light is called a sun pillar.

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May 22 2023 - DAY IN THE SUN

 

The May 24th weekend makes me think of the expression "Day in the Sun" - maybe because we have lots of days in the sun in the summer in Southern Ontario. "When you have your day in the sun, you have achieved the highest possible level of success. You are at your peak. You are having a heyday. You are at your pinnacle or zenith of success."   So I guess summer is our pinnacle season. Some people might say that I am being too ambitious for this weekend.  What about this expression - One swallow doesn’t make a summer:  "Although something good has happened, it doesn’t mean the situation will continue to be good, so you shouldn’t count on it" But then again, aren't we walking on sunshine starting this weekend? That means: "To be extremely happy" There seems to be a vast number of expressions and idioms in English.  Is it English or French with the most idioms of any language?  One would think there might be a count by country.  The one count I can find is English:  "There are at least 25,000 idiomatic expressions in English."  Ask that question about French and you are sent to the idiom dictionary to scroll through them all.  Here's a beautiful country road in Pennsylvania. Makes me think of the expression - Smooth Sailing.  Better yet:  Roads are made for journeys, not destinations. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 21 2021 - Short, Shorter and Shortest

The days are Short and the surname Short means exactly that - short in stature.  But the surname Shorter as a name turns out to mean a short-necked person - derived from the Anglo-Saxon word scorkhals meaning a person with a short neck.   There's a crest for the Short Family and it makes sense it is of Anglo-Saxon origin.  It derives from sceort - the Old English word for short.  The first record of the name was Ordic Scott in 1176 in Dorset.   Looking at the surname Short, it is Martin Short, the Canadian actor, who comes to mind.  His family is the Griffin and Quinn families from the Crossmaglen area of County Armagh in Northern Ireland.  His father was an illegal immigrant to the U.S. and made his way to Canada.  That's a very short through-line for heritage. My association of the Shorter name is with the famous Jazz Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and his surname would be related to the legacy of slavery in the U.S.  A number of his compositions are themed on slavery. He has been called a "Griot"  - a member of a class of travelling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.   Our shortest day is today - here we are at Winter Solstice - it is coming at 10:58 a.m.  While the full moon reached its peak on Saturday evening, it is very bright this morning, illuminating the back garden as a faint sun might do.  It turns out that we reached and touched The Sun - Our Sun - in 2021.  On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions at 18.8 solar radii (around 8.1 million miles) above the solar surface that told scientists it had crossed the Alfvén critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere.  It touched "the stuff the sun is made of".   "We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.” It dipped around 6.5 million miles into the sun's atmosphere, and reached the pseudostreamer - massive structures that rise above the sun's surface and can be seen from Earth during solar eclipses.  The next flyby is January 2022.   In all it will make 24 orbits of the sun over 7 years.  If the Probe stays functional the mission could be extended to 22 years and would capture the entire solar cycle.  This is the cycle that the sun's magnetic field goes through approximately every 11 years.  Something to consider given we live in the Sun's atmosphere.   As for the surname Shortest - I didn't find one yet, only the shortest name - supposedly N.  Yes, a single letter, usually spelled Ehn.  There's a huge list of the shortest surnames HERE.  They are all two letter names.  Here's a train image from one of the Model Railroad Conventions.  Could this be a Winter Solstice layout?  I don't ever recall another winter layout.

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The Restless Sun

The sun comes up every day - something  ordinary we don't think about much.  In the top stories today is a picture of the sun's surface - it looks like gold crackle paint.  Like something I'd find on an old rail car.   "The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawaii has released pictures that show features as small as 30km across. This is remarkable when set against the scale of our star, which has a diameter of about 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) and is 149 million km from Earth. The cell-like structures are roughly the size of the US state of Texas. They are convecting masses of hot, excited gas, or plasma. The bright centres are where this solar material is rising; the surrounding dark lanes are where plasma is cooling and sinking." See the convulsing sun picture HERE.  It made me think of California - land of sunshine inside the mountains on the coast. My father told me that you can plan a picnic for any day in the summer months in Fresno far in advance and always know it would be a sunny day.  He experienced the summer sun as unrelenting and he was happy to come back to Niagara. This is Filoli, south of San Francisco just inside the mountain range at Half Moon Bay.

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Login to Christmas

I saw three ships come log-ing in on Christmas Day on Christmas Day. Where did login come from? From ships - it comes from the 'chip log' that was used to record distance travelled at sea, recorded in a ship's log. As part of computers, its humble beginning was to keep a log of users' access to the system.  Today it is the all powerful gatekeeper: the act of logging in to a database, mobile device, or computer, especially a multiuser computer or a remote or networked computer system. a username and password that allows a person to log in to a computer system, network, mobile device, or user account.   Only Dictionary.com covers its problematic word form: "Many who are neither professionals in the computer field nor amateur tech enthusiasts condemn the use of the solid form login as a verb, and with reason. It doesn’t behave like a normal verb. You cannot say you have loginned, and you are never in the process of loginning. Moreover, you cannot even ask someone to login you; you must ask that person to log you in. Clearly, it is the two-word phrase log in that functions fully as an English verb and not the solid form. Normally, we would expect log in, the verb phrase and login, the noun to behave in the same way as similar pairs: blow out/blowout, crack down/crackdown, hang up/hangup, splash down/splashdown, turn off/turnoff,where the two-word phrase is a verb and the one-word form a noun. And yet, this gluing together of terms like login, logon, backup, and setup as verbs is common, especially in writing about computers. Not for everyone, however. Some well-known software companies, for example, carefully maintain the distinction in their programs and documentation." For such a common expression, there aren't very many jokes:   How do trees use twitter? They log in. Why did the tree fall on the computer? It wanted to log in. I tried joining a lumberjack site for some strength tips. I couldn't log in. Today's picture was in the Cuba images - part of a statue and a great image for tomorrow's  Winter Solstice at 11:19p.m. This angle makes the sun look like he is sad with a tear in his eye.  But actually, he has a smile, and knows that the shortest day will be done.

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News About Nothing

Seeing Nothing was a great experience for millions yesterday. The headlines from yesterday's eclipse were varied.  These come from the UK Telegraph. Total solar eclipse sweeps across the US Donald Trump mocked for looking directly at the Sun Moon trolls sun on Twitter Britons left underwhelmed by partial solar eclipse Nasa Moon, NASA's official Twitter account about Earth's Moon, said: "HA HA HA I've blocked the Sun! Make way for the Moon. £SolarEclipse2017" while Hopkinsville Police in Kentucky, which saw solar enthusiasts descend on the town, tweeted "Please DO NOT call 911 just because your Wi-Fi service is not working." The headlines today include how to tell if there's been retinal damage after watching the solar eclipse.  Today's picture was taken at the new Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines - an art installation at the top of the stairs.

I'll Take Mine Fried

I made it in time to capture the fiery foliage of the Cemetery Japanese Maple.  It is entwined around a headstone, which is not visible in these photos.  November is their month for vivid colour - as long as it doesn't get too windy.  That's always a dilemma here in Grimsby with the wind off the escarpment or the Lake. I planned to capture the large tree in front of one of our heritage homes and the leaves are gone - they dropped in one day.    And around the corner from me is the largest Japanese Maple I've seen in Niagara, with the glorious red colour on the tree and in the driveway. From the den garden website: "In Japan, maple trees are known as kaede (楓/"frog's hands"), as well as momiji (紅葉), which means both "become crimson leaves" and "baby's hands". Momiji is commonly used as the term for autumn foliage in general in Japanese, but it is also used as a term for maple trees. These names come from the appearance of the leaves, which resemble the hands of a baby or a frog. The scientific term for Japanese maples is Acer palmatum."   "In Japan's Osaka prefecture, the red and orange maple leaves are a sight to see during the fall. As is the case in the rest of Japan, people go out in droves to see the beautiful fall scenery. However, in Osaka, locals also go out in droves to collect the leaves and turn them into a deep-fried delicacy! Fried maple leaves are a very popular snack in Osaka, and apparently have been for at least a thousand years. The city of Minoh, located in the north part of the prefecture, is particularly famous for their fried leaves. The maple leaves are dipped and fried in tempura butter, which give them their unique taste. The secret of Minoh's success with fried leaves really isn't much of a secret at all. Chefs there usually store their leaves in barrels of salt for one year, which makes their leaves particularly tasty!"

Bungalow The Origins

Dezi has enjoyed the beach with running, a mistaken swim, and deciding shells were something to chase. As one drives along the coast, the original houses were the long Florida bungalow, and we wondered the origin of the word.  This was a surprise: 1670-80; < Hindi banglā literally, of Bengal The word bungalow was originally used to describe the temporary houses set up by English sailors traveling to India to work for the East India Company. These little houses were often just one story high with a thatched roof. Nowadays, the word bungalow can be used to describe any one story house. Think of the little cabin you slept in at summer camp — that’s a kind of bungalow. What words rhyme with bungalow?  Here are a few from Merriam-Webster Rhymes with bungalow acid snow, afterglow, aikido, alpenglow, apropos, art deco, art nouveau, audio, Baguio, Bamako, barrio, bay window, Bergamo, bibelot, Bilbao, black widow, blow-by-blow, body blow, bone marrow, bordereau, Borneo, bow window, buffalo, Buffalo, Bushido, buteo, calico, cameo, cachalot, cembalo, centimo, CEO, chassepot, cheerio, Clemenceau, cogito, comedo, comme il faut, counterflow, Cupid's bow, curaçao, Curaçao, curassow, curio, daimyo,

Sunrise Sunset or is it Sunset Sunrise

As the sun sets on summer our question of the day is:  Do Sunrises look different from sunsets?  Today we'll see fireworks as the sun sets on summer.  What about tomorrow? Natalie Wolchover writes: "You've woken up out of a coma. You yank the IV from your arm and stumble out of the hospital. The sun is perched on the horizon. Can you tell whether it's rising or setting? Contemplating this scenario while gazing sunward at dusk or dawn, we might feel as if we could sense the difference between the two times of day. But in real life, it's impossible to completely divorce our perceptions of the scene from our awareness of the hour. So, is there any objective way to distinguish an upward-trending sun from a downward one? According to atmospheric physicists David Lynch and William Livingston, the answer is "yes, and no." The first is in our heads. "At sunset, our eyes are daylight adapted and may even be a bit weary from the day's toil," Lynch and Livingston write. "As the light fades, we cannot adapt as fast as the sky darkens. Some hues may be lost or perceived in a manner peculiar to sunset. At sunrise, however, the night's darkness has left us with very acute night vision and every faint, minor change in the sky's color is evident." In short, you may perceive more colors at dawn than at dusk. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]" To read on see: http://www.livescience.com/34065-sunrise-sunset.html