Jan 12 2025 - Pass the Times

 

Pass the time - as though it is an herb in a shaker and you can choose how much to put on your steak.  And you've got lots for later.  That leads us to Gordon Ramsay jokes.  I hadn't seen them before. Most of them are quotes, as in: “This lamb is so undercooked, it’s following Mary to school!” There’s enough garlic in here to kill every vampire in Europe.” “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because you didn’t f—ing cook it!”  “You put so much ginger in this, it’s a Weasley.” “This fish is so raw, he’s still finding Nemo.” "This food is so rich it ran as a Republican candidate for President in 2012." "Your meals are fit for a god because they are all burnt offerings." "Your damn rabbit is so undercooked it started to eat the salad we served with it." "This dish has so much grease John Trovolta was in it." "This soup is so watery it stopped the drought in California." And I conclude with this one: "Your food is so bad even a Canadian would insult you?" I've accompanied this dish of humour with a photo of the day that seems to resemble a side of beef.  Really it is driftwood on Salt Spring Island.  It must be the salt water that did this.

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Oct 8 2024 - What time is it, google?

 

That's one of the top 3 questions on a regular basis - what time is it google? The importance of time.  When did time become important?  Perhaps always.  So important that the Babylonians and Egyptians measured time at least 5,000 years ago.  Calendars organized communal activities and public events, scheduled shipments, and regulated cycles of planting and harvesting.  They used the solar day, the lunar month, and the solar year.   I guess I could manage the solar day - I have a few sundials in the garden as decorative elements.  It would take a lot of skill to accurately use a sundial.    There is so much invention in clocks and time pieces.  I read through the history in a breeze, but it is a substantial body of knowledge and engineering.  What is being worked on now?  NASA wants to come up with a way to keep track of time on the moon - an entire frame of time reference for the moon. " Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad quicker — 58.7 microseconds every day — compared to Earth. So the White House Tuesday instructed NASA and other U.S agencies to work with international agencies to come up with a new moon-centric time reference system."  And a funny thought: "Unlike on Earth, the moon will not have daylight saving time." From the New Scientist: "Any random sequence of events, such as the lapping of ocean waves on the shore, can become a clock – and physicists have now devised a mathematical procedure for making such an odd timepiece and for measuring its precision."  That article isHERE except you have to subscribe to read it. And from Euronews - Melting ice caps.  The human-caused consequence of climate change is slowing the speed at which the Earth rotates, increasing the length of a day... by a few milliseconds. And interspersed in the news about time is the news in Time Magazine.  It was going to be called Facts, but then the name was changed to Time with the slogan - "Take Time - It's Brief". That's the clock tower at Filoli Gardens, south of San Francisco.

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July 7 2024 - Summer "Time" Flying By

 

This is the start of what I call summer "time".  Everything gets faster - "time flies".  And then it is August - and that for me is the month before "school starts".  Not so much the zenith of summer.   "Tempus fugit (Classical Latin pronunciation: [ˈt̪ɛmpʊs̠ ˈfʊɡit̪]) is a Latin phrase, usually translated into English as "time flies". The expression comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit irreparabile tempus: "it escapes, irretrievable time". There's a calculation for time movement. This from a cbsnews.com article:  "From the standpoint of a clock or calendar, each standard temporal unit is exactly the same: Every minute contains 60 seconds; every day contains 24 hours. However, standard temporal units vary in what I’ve dubbed “the density of human experience” – the volume of objective and subjective information they carry." Time is perceived to pass slowly (high density) in situations where there is almost nothing happening or a great deal is happening. In other words, the complexity of the situation is either much higher or much lower than normal. The situation seizes our attention - filling each standard temporal unit with the experience of self and situation. Often things appear to move in slow motion. Time seems to pass quickly when the density of experience per standard temporal unit is abnormally low - a compression of time. Here's the CBSnew.com article explanation: "Say you have a busy day at work. You might be doing complex things, but they’re routine because you’ve been doing them for so long. Given that we behave more or less unthinkingly, each standard temporal unit contains very little memorable experience. The “density” of unique experience is low. And at the end of the day, time seems to have passed quickly. We’re pleasantly surprised to discover that it is already time to go home." The author says the routineness leads to forgetting experiences - for example,  from the entire day, month, etc. And doesn't that seem to apply to us as we get older.   Older people say - "how time flies".  I haven't heard a young person say this. Why is that?  An older person can recall something from 10 and 20 years ago (and more at my age) and realize how long ago that was - and with it the perception that time has passed so quickly.     This is the completion day of the Ontario Regional Lily Show.  I took this picture of my picture on the cover of the Let's Grow Lilies Handbook from a previous show.  It came from Brian's Lilycrest Gardens growing field. I started taking pictures of it in 2007.  The field was filled with thousands of plants and hundreds of thousands of blooms.

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Dec 22 2023 - Around the Clock

 

Do clocks seem simple to you?  Do you wonder why they are round, and why they divide time into two 12 hour chunks and not a full 24 increments? Sundials come in different shapes - round, square and "neither" - there are odd compositions- they all contain the "gnomon" - that's the pointy thing that casts the shadow.  There are vertical and horizontal sundials.  There are declining-reclining and declining-inclining dials.  There are a lot of variations.  There has been many thousands of years to figure these out and develop new variations.  Clocks have to be round for a scientific reason: It turns out to be because the circle is the most efficient shape for measuring time.   "This is because a circle has a constant circumference, which means that each point on the circle travels the same distance in the same amount of time. In other words, a clock with a circular face can accurately measure time regardless of where the hands are positioned." And what about the 12-hour clock? I had no idea that when the darkness came, a water clock was used for night-time.  What is a water clock?  It uses the flow of water to measure time.  Water clocks are old - 16th century BC old.   "There are two types of water clocks: inflow and outflow. In an outflow water clock, a container is filled with water, and the water is drained slowly and evenly out of the container. This container has markings that are used to show the passage of time. As the water leaves the container, an observer can see where the water is level with the lines and tell how much time has passed. An inflow water clock works in basically the same way, except instead of flowing out of the container, the water is filling up the marked container." How interesting our everyday things are.  Science project 101:  Build a water clock to show the drip, drip, drip of time. And humour and sundials? Queen Elizabeth and Sir David Attenborough are walking through the gardens at Buckingham Palace, when they come across a sundial in the shade of a tree. The Queen: Maybe we could move it...  Attenborough: Depends whether you want to know the time or not.  The Queen: Best leave it be then, as a joke. The best jokes are timeless, after all.

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Mar 19 2023 - The Arrow of Time

 

The Arrow of Time is an compelling metaphor.  It describes the "one-way direction" of time.  It was only in 1927 that it was developed by Arthur Eddington.  It remains an unsolved general physics question.  The "one-way direction" means that that time is asymmetrical.  If time were symmetrical then a video of real events would seem as realistic whether played forwards or backwards.  Wikipedia tells me that physical processes at the microscopic level are believed to be either entirely or mostly time-symmetric: if the direction of time were to reverse, the theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. Yet at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time. For me, the part that is fascinating is how each of us perceive time.  Our perception of time is as a continuous movement from the known past to the unknown future.   nd exceptions? This article from the BBC talks about people who have experienced time stopping - such experiences can be part of epilepsies or strokes. Another area that is under scrutiny is the experience of time seeming to stand still.  This most commonly happens with something like "a beautiful sunset, a mesmerizing song or a moving piece of artwork is able to fully captivate our attention. And for that brief period, time seems to stand still."   That's the presence of awe. According to Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker in a huffiest.com article HERE, "there are two things needed for someone to have a true awe experience: perceptual vastness -- you need to perceive that you've encountered something vast in number, size, scope, complexity or social bearing -- and a need for accommodation. You need to feel that you have to revise or update the way you think about or understand the world. While anything you encounter in daily life can evoke a sense of awe by meeting these two requirements, it is often artistic, musical, natural and spiritual elements that elicit such responses." So then it would likely be awe that would explain Carl Sagan's and Brian Cox's mesmerizing presence in their documentaries.   Spring has started at Cole's Garden Centre - their poly house is full of a spring bloom display. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Mar 11 2023 - Summer Time coming before Spring Time is here

 

Daily Savings Time is here this weekend.  It seems the change of time is to make summer more enjoyable/productive/save energy/ and sorts of "tangible" benefits.  All these benefits seems to have driven it to start earlier. Long summer evenings aren't arriving for another few months.  It used to be in April, but the US Department of Energy had the idea that there were would energy conservation so moved it to March for more savings.  That seems likely to be a theoretical wish rather than a real gain.   When did it originally start? On July 1, 1908, the residents of Port Arthur, Ontario, today's Thunder Bay, turned their clocks forward by 1 hour to start the world's first DST period. Other locations in Canada soon followed suit. On April 23, 1914, Regina in Saskatchewan implemented DST. The cities of Winnipeg and Brandon in Manitoba did so on April 24, 1916. It is up to the legislation in each municipality in Canada to decide on the use of DST. As a result, there are some locations don't follow the DST schedule of their in provinces and territories. For example, while British Columbia uses DST, some locations in the province do not. Since 2007, all provinces, territories, and locations in Canada using DST follow the same start and end dates as the United States. And that's how we got to changing the clocks so much earlier.  I wondered if there was any news on Scott Adams and Dilbert. There's no news.  He is on the Locals website.  It is Coffee with Scott Adams Community...open-minded people who like to learn about persuasion, politics and the operating code for reality while having some laughs. It is here.  You get to see a preview as it is a member only site. We are ignoring all the snow today and concentrating on trains instead. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Aug 7 2022 - Sheets and Pillowcases

 

Sheets and pillowcases used to be made of cotton.  That's it.  That's all.  In winter, they would dry on the line into white cardboard sheets.  "Freeze-dried and snow bleached."  Now when I go into Sleep Country, there's everything imaginable.   I got the bamboo pillow cases - bamboo is used to make rayon.  Very smooth and cooling. And the trend now about smooth, soft and cooling in sheets and pillow cases.   And what's available today?  Not just cotton.  ,Cotton sateen is available - again very smooth and extra soft.  Sateen is different than satin - it is cotton and has more vertical threads than horizontal, so  it is more fragile.  Satin has very thin, high-thread-count synthetic materials such as nylon, polyester, or acetate.   The smoothest cotton is Egyptian cotton - it has extremely high thread count.  Generally a  high thread count also means warmer.   What about flax linen - they are said to be soothing and breathable, lightweight and sourced from fields in France and Belgium.  Doesn't that sound like a vacation as you sleep? We live in the time of luxury linens available to everyone.  Remember when the Westin Hotel introduced the "Heavenly Bed"?  That was just over twenty years ago.  It kicked off the luxury bed linen for all trend.  Now we're advised on how often we should replace everything in the bedroom - pillows?  1 to 2 years, sheets? 2 years, and so on.  Toss, toss.  That's part of luxury living. And today's picture continues the investigation of time.  Isn't time  elusive and strange?  I checked out this article in space.com  for a better understanding of time. They let me know it is also illusive.  Complicated.  I went to work on the floral clock and gave time a few twists.

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July 26 2021 - Stay up late or get up early for Olympics Live!

 

What is the latest Olympics news?  There's 9 minutes ago, 31 minutes ago, 8 hours ago, and the NBC coverage is 23 hours ago.   It is 9:44pm in Japan now so there must be a lot of news overnight.  What a complicated thing this is - take COVID together with the time difference, and the Olympics is not able to be the live experience that was so spectacular in the past. Do you stay up late, or get up early? Here's the timing for Great Britain coverage of favoured events: Monday 26 July – Adam Peaty, 100m breaststroke final, 3am Tuesday 3 August – Laura Kenny, team pursuit final, 8am Wednesday 4 August – Sky Brown, skateboard park final, 1am For Canada, the CBC website has a headline that says the time difference story: "While you were sleeping:  Canada's 1st Olympic champion in Tokyo".  There's a feature box  on the site - While you were sleeping - All the news from Tokyo 2020 that happened while you slept. I guess this will be repeated when the winter Olympics are hosted by China.  Will it be COVID in the past?  That's the question on our minds. Isn't this such a pretty hand-painted "postcard" on one of the Painted Ladies' fences in Grimsby Beach.  Millie and I were there this morning.

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 26 2020 - How the Days Fly

 

"Time Flies when you're having fun."  Or: "How time flies." Alexander Pope's version: "Swift fly the years."   And the originator: Tempus fugit is a Latin phrase, usually translated into English as "time flies". The expression comes from line 284 of book 3 of Virgil's Georgics, where it appears as fugit inreparabile tempus: "it escapes, irretrievable time". I think that is September's experience.  Warm days, cool days, cold nights, then warm days again. So much happens in September that we are 'overrun' with the experience.  And it is an enjoyable one.  Here, in Niagara and Ontario where the leaves turn colour.  Perhaps less so other places, as it ranks only mid-way in the much quoted 2005 American poll.  Is it true that Albert Einstein said "Time flies when you are having fun"?  Here's what one article gives as the entire quote from Einstein:  "When You’re Having Fun Time is an interesting beast, because it is relative. Put your hand on a stove and time moves slowly. Boredom draws our attention to the passage of time which gives us the feeling that it's slowing down. Watch an excellent movie with someone you love and time flies by. Ultimately it may come down to how much you believe that time flies when you're having fun. Always choose your actions wisely!!!" I can't imagine Einstein using three exclamation marks.  But there is a low chance that I can prove this as I've just gone to the wikiquote.org website to look for the quote, and there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of quotes in the article on Einstein.  They list them by year, by event, by person, by disputed, by post-humous, and so on.  There are many quotes because he said many interesting things. So right now Summer and Fall sit side by side in the trees. Here is the green and red of a Sumac yesterday.  And then there will be none.  And we'll say:  "How time flies". Enjoy this wonderful weekend!

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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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Mar 23 2020 - The 96 year old lady sells house and guess what's inside story

The NY Times today:  "If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt." There is one of those 'leadlines' that has been appearing and reappearing for months - like"Best Lawyers in Grimsby." The picture was a decaying American farm house overgrown with trees and weeds, or a witch-like old woman close-up.  So I didn't pay attention.  Then yesterday, the picture was a nice house that looked like a Toronto house.  So I searched and got the dailymail.co.uk story.  I checked it out, as the daily mail is a newspaper and not one of those sites with names like this:  dailymotion.com, doyouremember.com, littlethings.com, finance101.com, trend-chaser.com, travelfuntu.com, and so on and so on - pages and pages.  Its own industry of ads. The story was in 2014, and the house is in Bloor West Village, one article says the house is on Jane Street.  That's my shopping neighbourhood when I lived in Toronto and I still visit.  The picture of the house in the collage shows a typical Toronto two-storey - located all over Toronto - and considered a nice house to live in. The story is about the interior as a time capsule of the 1950s/1960s, specifically, a pink palate interior, with a little turquoise thrown in.   Every room is perfectly decorated in the time period - completely and totally.  It was extremely well-maintained,  so one walked into a time capsule.  The article starts:  "It's as if I Love Lucy could have been filmed in any room."  Other articles say:  "Opens front door to reveal masterpiece lost in time."     So our "open the door and guess what they found" is revealed. Time capsule homes - this is a popular trend now:  finding homes that are time capsules of decorating styles.  Here's an article with an extensive gallery of examples, including our pink palace above. Each one has a name - Retro ranch, Illinois, 1960's fab four-bedroom house New Jersey, 1970s Palm Springs relic, 1960s holiday cottage, Australia.  I never got to the end, there were so many. Amongst these was an article with another 1960s time capsule home in Toronto - built by Toronto architect Gardiner Cowan.  This one was quite splendid, of natural materials,  grand spaces and light pouring through windows. It was listed for $2 million.  It wasn't far from Jane Street - Edenbrook Hill - just north of where we lived - two time capsules so close and so different.  The Edenbrook Hill house is on the Google Map and does not appear to be replaced with a grand modern house.   Our Jane Street house was listed at $699,000.  I wonder what the interior is now.  I like the pink breakfast nook, complete with pink African Violets. Our pictures today take on the time theme. The first comes from the Chinatown district along Broadview in Toronto.  The calendar was used to block the front door window.  And the second reminds us of Carl Sagan's words:  “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”