Jan 17 2024 - Crown for a Day

 

A king's hat is a crown and a symbol of supremacy and dominance.  There is a precursor to the crown - a broadband called a diadem.  Dominance comes in the form of authority and legitimacy.  Whatever the King says, goes.   But what about the rest of the hats of the world?  Go way back in the time machine to find out that they were religious or ceremonial head coverings.  Like the King's crown, they conveyed social status and military rank.  So hats have always represented authority and power.   Then there are all kinds of customs of submission - the Christian tradition of men removing hats and women must keep their heads covered - both signs of submission and respect.  And what about the U.S. military custom of removing all military hats during the National Anthem?  That's the U.S. Flag Code - not a law, but a custom.  Then there's when everything changed - the baseball cap.  Complex structures have been replaced entirely.  I can't think of the last time I saw a man with a structured felt hat. There's the wonderful hat store in Jordan with them, but not on anyone's head. I expect my generation is the cause of this.  One article is titled:  A sadly brief history of hat wearing in 20th Century Britain.  Another is:  Why Did Men Stop Wearing Hats?   There likely isn't much of a history of hats after 1990 other than the snapback hat.   It seems to be here for a long time.  Like t-shirts, isn't it?

Here's another Arbutus trunk picture.  That colour is so amazing.

Sep 28 2022 - Land of Lakes

 

Canada has the most lakes in the world.  We have 62% of them.  There are more than a million lakes n the world with a size of over 0.1 sq. km.  According to a 2016 study, the 10 countries with the most lakes in the world are:  Canada - 879,800 Russia - 201,200 USA - 102,500 China - 23,800 Sweden - 22,600 Brazil - 20,900 Norway - 20,000 Argentina - 13,600 Kazakhstan - 12,400 Australia - 11,400 And looking at the size of lakes, this article shows the size of the world's largest lakes in comparison to each other . It shows the size of the Great Lakes if they were to exist in India, Europe and Australia.      It is interesting to actually see the comparisons, but mostly the information I retrieved about lakes is political or scientific.   What might be interesting about lakes besides all this size and depth information? The Guinness Book of Records with its 2,524 entries for lakes - here are the tongue-twisters: 1. the largest lake on an island in a lake.  that's Manitou Lake.   2. the largest lake on an island in a lake on an island?  It is nameless on Baffin Island.   3. the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake - that's Treasure Island on Lake Mindemoya which in turn sits on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron.  4. Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.  This is a small islet, measuring four acres, lies in a small lake on a slightly larger island within a bigger lake on Canada's Victoria Island.  It says that it is likely that no human has ever set foot on the island, but satellite images confirm its status and size. 5. the largest island in a lake.  that's Manitoulin Island.  Our last one is not from Canada - the largest island on another island in a lake on an island is Samosir in the Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia.  Another texture abstract today.

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Nov 15 2021 - Choosing Marrs Green

 

There's a favourite everything and anything if you search the internet.  That seems to be an easy way to post something and then show sufficient ads to generate revenue.  Most of the articles just make things up.  But here's a question:  do we have a favourite colour? It turns out to be Marrs green  - it is a shade of green that in 2017 won 'The World's Favourite Colour', a major global survey by British paper merchant G . F Smith.It is a rich teal hue. The color was submitted by Annie Marrs, a UNESCO worker from Dundee, who was inspired by the River Tay. The survey received 30,000 submissions from over 100 countries via online polling since it launched in January 2017.  Marrs green became the 51st shade of the un-coated paper range, Colorplan.   What's notable about Dundee, the city Annie Marrs comes from?  Starting in 2018, the Dundee City Council signed up to the EU Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.  Their target was 40% emission reduction by 2030. They have already achieved a 28% reduction with low carbon projects.  It has the largest EV fleet of any local authority in the UK and has 75 charging posts/stations. It is participating in the most ambitious hydrogen fuel deployment along with 30 European cities to build hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and large scale deployment of fuel cell buses.  There is a global covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy with North America - Canada.  You can see the Global Covenant of Mayors in Canada HERE.  Burlington, Hamilton, and  St. Catharines in our area are all on the list.  That one is HERE. And going to St. Catharines' website, one of their activities is to replace their fleets with electric vehicles. I guess it is more and faster is what is needed now. Back to Marrs Green.  Here's a screen shot from my computer.  It shows Photoshop's  the Color picker over my favourite montage texture (the back of the water fountain at the Cloud Garden).  I've used this a lot for in the montage series of images.   Isn't it on target with Mars Green.  One can go into the colour picker and match up with Marrs Green - Red - 0 , Green and Blue are 140.  You can see the little circle, and then the new and current colours are Mars Green.  The grunge image's very bottom colours match to Marrs Green.

Nov 9 2020 - The Exception

 

Our weather in November has been the exception this year.  Yesterday was a summer's day.  Today it will again  be summer in November.  And the forecast is the same for Tuesday.  That is 20 degrees compared to the daily average of 9 degrees.   In the world of averages, November turns out to be an indistinct month in Grimsby's weather.  The coldest month is January, the driest month is January, the snowiest month is January.  We've passed the rainiest month - that's September.  November does have the distinction of lake effects snow possibilities.  That's how Snowvember came about in 2014.  There's a Youtube video of the snow engulfing Buffalo.   In the water temperature information, it says that March has the coldest water temperature at 2.7 degrees Celsius and August the highest at 21.7 degrees.   In the information for travel to Grimsby, it lists all the cities that can reach Grimsby by plane.  What an interesting array of cities - London, Athens, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Lahore, Paris, Ottawa, and so on.  Maybe the ads for travel are the reason for this unusual 'mix'.  I can't imagine taking them up on the offer to work from home at an exotic location or retire to an exotic location.  We're looking at the bark of a Scotch Pine at Gage Park.  So many colours and textures.

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Oct 8 2020 - How Deep?

 

How deep is the deepest hole drilled into the Earth? It is 7.5 miles or 12,262 kilometres.  Where is it?  It is in Murmansk, Russia.  The Kola Superdeep Borehole, as it is known, did not get through the Earth's crust - it is 25 miles thick below the land. They wanted to drill 9 miles but discovered such intense heat, they stopped.  This was in 1992.  It took 20 years to accomplish this - to get about a third of the way through the continental crust.   The American effort started in 1958 off the coast of Mexico and was discontinued in 1966.  They had reached only 183 metres.  German scientists reached about 6 miles below the surface of Bavaria in the 1990s. They discontinued when they hit seismic plates and found temperatures of 600 degrees Fahrenheit.  The Japanese drilled almost 2 miles into the ocean floor.   Below the crust is the mantle, and it holds the imprint of the geological record of the Earth's history.  There were two-billion-year-old fossils from single-celled marine organisms at 4.4 miles down.  The Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Russia ran its course.  No single country could take on the activity as costs spiralled with the need to invent technology to accomplish the task.   The effort now underway to reach the mantle is being led by the Center for Deep Earth Exploration, owners of the drilling vessel Chikyu. They expect the project to take dozens of years and one-billion dollars. The effort and funding is collaborative with Japan, US, European, China, Australia, India, New Zealand and Brazil participating.  What is the scientific prize they are seeking? “The ultimate goal of the [new] project is to get actual living samples of the mantle as it exists right now,” says Sean Toczko, programme manager for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science. “It’s the difference between having a live dinosaur and a fossilised dinosaur bone.” The bbc article is HERE. Our picture today is an abstract taken of the bottom of a boat in Florida.

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Twitter Presents Mutiny on the Bounty

There was a cruise ship Mutiny on the Bounty via Twitter reported on the Weather Network on the weekend.  The ship had missed its fifth scheduled port of call in a two-week vacation to Iceland, Amsterdam, Norway and Ireland due to bad weather. This would be a scenario from hell.  Passengers board the cruise ship with the expectation of luxury and pampering that they consider they've paid for, and end up roughing it with the toilets out of order and confined to a floating hotel with few or no stops.  The staged protests with signs that said "Refund! Refund! Refund!" There have been far worse cruise ship experiences.  Perhaps the passenger twitter reports made this one distinct, along with the organized protests and angry confrontations sent out via twitter regularly. Guinness Book of Records doesn't have records for the worst vacations or cruise ship incidents.  It has the worst roads, longest journey by car, barefoot, wheelchair, all the continents, skateboard journeys, and so on. The usual strange variations on travel. To find out the worst cruise ship experiences/incidents, we go to one of the sensationalist articles - a good example is HERE. Today's picture is a close-up of a carved wooden sculpture in the RBG gardens.

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Hobby On!

A prelude to my post today is to ask you to contact me if you experienced a gap in receiving the Photo of the Day.  At the  beginning of October, the percentage of opens dropped significantly.  In the last day or two, I've received emails from recipients welcoming me back to Photo of the Day.  I have sent out posts every day, so I've concluded that some of the email systems such as sympatico had problems which have now been fixed. If you find yourself in this situation in the future, the photo of the day is posted on my blogs - blog.marilyncornwell.com and opengardensniagara.blogspot.com Today I decided to explore our interests and past-times.  I didn't need to do much work at all.  Did you know that the following are actually identified as hobbies: Tatooing vehicles - self-evident but still strange Mooing - competition in Wisconsin, recently won by a ten-year-old boy Faking your own death  - known as pseudocide - variations exist and the most famous one is one man whose hobby is acting out murder scenes - calls himself Dead Body Guy Competitive dog grooming - dogs dyed various colours and trimmed weirdly to look like flamingoes, clowns, leopards, parrots, etc making them look like freaks - particularly since the groomers dress the same  Tape art - using old cassette tape, adhesive tape, duct tape, etc to make  to make pictures, particularly street art - has a society and website - this one is worth looking at  Trainspotting - an ordinary hobby - but Train Surfing is extraordinary - jumping on the outside of a passenger train and hitching a ride Navel fluff collecting -the yuk one in the list - again one strange man who has done this for more than 20 years so has evidence of his interest  Extreme ironing - ironing things in strange places - mountains, rivers, skydiving...a yearly competition to prove it exists Hikaru Dorodango - this is polishing dirt - take a ball of mud, draw the moisture out of it while coating it with finer and finer layers of soil after which you start to work the dirt by polishing it by hand into a sphere.  This is a Japanese art and the word means 'mud dumpling'. You can read about it at Wikipedia HERE.  News-Bombing - there is only one person doing this - he is an ugly man in the UK who goes to live news broadcast locations to stand in the background behind the journalist - making a point about allowing ugly people on-screen There are new and amazing things to discover about us humans that I could not have imagined possible. We are both funny and bizarre I found these exposed tree roots with their complex swirling shapes and textures in Minneapolis.

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Russia - A Nation of Humour!

Did you know there is a very long tradition of Russian Political jokes?  I find this out from Wikipedia.  The jokes start with Imperial Russia and conclude with Post-soviet Russia.  They are HERE.  A Bloomberg article with the best jokes is HERE. Bloomberg's article, as with Wikipedia, demonstrates that Russian humour about the way the country is run is an unbroken tradition from the czarist era to the present day.  The article's author, like me, finds that many of them aren't funny.  But there are some great jokes in the article.  Here is Reagan's joke. "The CIA-Reagan Soviet joke pipeline was no secret at the time. One from a list declassified in 2013 was a particular favorite — Reagan told it repeatedly, once adding he’d shared it with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and gotten a laugh from him. The CIA version goes like this: An American tells a Russian that the United States is so free he can stand in front of the White House and yell, “To hell with Ronald Reagan.” The Russian replies: “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan,” too. Two more from Wikipedia: A Gulag joke: Three men are sitting in a cell in the (KGB headquarters) Dzerzhinsky Square. The first asks the second why he has been imprisoned, who replies, "Because I criticized Karl Radek." The first man responds, "But I am here because I spoke out in favor of Radek!" They turn to the third man who has been sitting quietly in the back, and ask him why he is in jail. He answers, "I'm Karl Radek." A Stalin joke: Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. "Who sneezed?" Silence. "First row! On your feet! Shoot them!" They are shot, and he asks again, "Who sneezed, Comrades?" No answer. "Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!" They are shot too. "Well, who sneezed?" At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, "It was me! Me!" Stalin says, "Bless you, Comrade!" and resumes his speech. Our pictures today come from Moyer Road - this is the road that Vineland Estates Winery is located on.  This silver barked bush along the side of the road is very photogenic as it is.  It becomes the texture for an abstract pattern created in photoshop.

The Universality of Curves

It is Ukrainian Christmas today.  With many Ukrainians in Niagara and Ontario, there's a tradition for the rest of us to leave our Christmas trees up for this date.  Ours came down earlier, due to the activities of Baxter the cat.  He started to consider the tree something to take down himself, perhaps a desire to get into the cat Christmas videos.   Our pictures today focus on curves.  As I take pictures of urban decay, I find that the shapes, patterns and lines of wear and tear are the same as those in nature's own processes.  The first picture is wear and tear  on a billboard sign.  The plastic material wears away in arcs and curves.  The second picture is ice, with some abstract filters applied to create the extreme colours.  It too has formed in arcs and curves. I found this explanation for the puddle freezing into ice: "The shallowness of this puddle suggests that it rapidly froze; only a thin water layer remained below the puddle. Then the fast-falling temperatures likely caused the ice to contract, which produced the cracking. Continued cooling widened the cracks. The ring pattern shows that the main direction of the stress force was radial, but the scalloped pattern along the rings shows that some stress varied with angle around the center. The small amount of water that didn't freeze rose into the cracks due to the hydrostatic pressure of the ice above and capillary action. Water in the rings then froze and expanded, and as it did it widened the rings and also directed the remaining small amount of liquid to the top of the ice. The slight bulges on the bottom of the rings were remnants of its last contact with the deepest water. In other words, the unfrozen water at the bottom of the puddle was, in essence, pushed and suctioned into the cracks." from Douglas Stith's website

Garden Etiquette # 4 - Playing with Henry Moore Sculpture

This might appear to be Garden Etiquette # 4 - don't play on the sculptures by famous artists.  The Henry Moore sculpture in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario gets a lot of wear and tear, and takes it well. Children were playing on it last week when I was there. A close-up view of the sculpture reveals the detailed textures that form the skin of what seems to be such a smooth surface.  And with some processing, the variation of colour really shows.  It is the reflections of the signs on Dundas street along with the sky.

AGO Henry Moore Exhibit - June 2014

I've visited the Henry Moore sculpture in front of the AGO many times.  Its texture is so complex.  I marvel at something new every time.  Most people take their pictures in front of this beautiful sculpture, but for me this abstract below gives a sense of how wonderful the experience of sculpture in the outdoor landscape is and how much there is for the photographer to interpret.

Here is the Henry Moore exhibit within the art gallery.  The monochrome setting again highlighted the wonderful forms and texture of his work.

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