Showing posts with label violets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violets. Show all posts

Friday, May 9, 2025

Marilyn's Photos - May 9 2025 - Vulgar Language

 

One of the articles in the Globe and Mail today compares  the relationship between presidents and prime ministers.  It had a quote from Lyndon Johnson that was vulgar to me - Lyndon Johnson yelling at Lester Pearson to not come into his house and piss on his rug when Pearson suggested the bombing of Vietnam should be paused.  That was an example of a difficult relationship. 

We have a difficult relationship now.  And it seems that quoting Trump or showing a video clip often comes with vulgar language.  Is this the new normal in the U.S in the Trump second term?  I guess the answer is yes.  Trump's first term brought  many articles on his vulgar language.  Most of the articles point to Lyndon Johnson as the most vulgar president in U.S. history.  

Quoted expressions that demonstrated how vulgar he was are in the Nation Post article  HERE.  Its main theme was Trump's vulgarity in 2018.  

Once I started to look, for Johnson's vulgar expressions, it is clear that they are not collected in  one place - they are scattered.  No one seems to want to gather them together for history.  

I don't remember any of these expressions when I was young.  I would remember them as they are distinctively shocking.  Why didn't our newspapers have any of these in print?  Maybe newspapers thought they were protecting us.  Maybe they were protecting Lyndon Johnson. Maybe protecting themselves from lawsuits. 

There is even "the story where Lyndon B. Johnson showed "jumbo" to a ..." group of journalists.  That was in response to questions about Vietnam. 

Here's a "what if" scenario:  can history repeat itself on something like this?



Little violets in the lawn.

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    Thursday, June 1, 2023

    June 1st 2023 - Who Invented the Lawn?

     

    Someone had to invent the lawn.  Certainly indigenous people had better things to invent and hybridize - corn, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, and so on.  We have much to thank them for in our current food crops. 

    Lawns?  They are a creation of a "sea of green."  - mostly a visual aesthetic - also a surface for sports. The term lawn started to appear in the 16th century.  And what does the original word mean?  It means heath, barren land, or clearing.  Exactly.

    We can guess it is the aristocracy that made lawns popular - this was particularly the case in England where that damp climate made lawn-growing easily possible.  For our perfect lawns of today, we have to skip to the Palace of Versailles where  André Le Nôtre designed the gardens and included a small area of grass called the tapas vert - "green carpet".  

    And then the lawnmower!  What they did before to achieve the "green carpet" seems tortuous.  

    Somehow, over time, the greatest lover of lawns is the United States, according to a Scientific American article.  

    "Americans have taken their landscape aesthetic around the world. American communities in Saudi Arabia have lawns in the middle of the desert. American embassies and consulates around the world have lawns. And when the Cultural Revolution swept through China, any lawns that had been established under American and British influence were pulled out. Lawns are American..."

    The most famous lawns in the world?

    • Buckingham Palace
    • Chateau de Versailes
    • The White House
    • Champ de Mars
    • Wimbledon Centre Court
    • Lord's Cricket Ground

    and finally,
    Windows XP wallpaper

    "Yes, this is a real place, and it’s located in Sonoma County in California. National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear snapped it on his way home before submitting it as a stock photo. Called Bliss, it’s probably graced the insides of more than one billion PCs across the world. Don’t worry Miimo, you can’t catch the blue screen of death from eating the grass."
     

    This is the lawn a few houses down- full of violets, dandelions and creeping charlie.  A delight in the spring.

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    Friday, March 5, 2021

    Mar 5 2021 - Shirley Temple - Midget at Large

     

    The Shirley Temple Story Development team was composed of 19 writers who were dedicated to writing stories for the 4 movies a year she made starting in 1934. Those movies between 1934 and 1938 made her the top box office draw.   

    Hollywood espouses and spreads myths and rumours.  Here are a few propagated about her - some by the Fox press department.  

    Claims she had no formal acting or dance training, enrolling her in Dancing school.

    Claims circulated that she was not a child but a 30 year old dwarf, a rumour so prevalent that the Vatican dispatched a Father to investigate.  Even more eerie, it was graham Green writer/author who suggested she was a midget.  Shirley's parents sued and won. 

    Numerous rumours about her teeth - whether hers, or she had all her adult teeth, or that they had been filed to make them appear like baby teeth.  

    Her hair was a subject of various rumours - fans pulled at it to find out if it was a wig, rumours were that it wasn't blonde. 

    Do you know that Shirley Temple Black was married to Conrad Black?  Shocking that he should have the same name as our famous Canadian baron of the corporate world.  That would be an excellent rumour, too.


    As I looked through Conrad Black (the Canadian) biography, I found that his real-life story was the stuff of myths.  Supposedly he had his wife change her name from Shirley to Joanna in preparation for when he became a British Lord.  Lady Shirley did not suit him as dignified enough.  The next year, she left him for a Priest who she married after he left the Clergy.  That's just one item out of dozens.  There's more HERE

    Here's a lawn that makes the bees happy.  It is full of violets. 

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      Tuesday, March 5, 2019

      Humans will be Hybrids

      Ray Kurzweil, Director of engineering at Google, spoke those words in 2015.  I heard them quoted by T Bone Burnett in a CBC interview yesterday.  He is a legendary American record producer, musician  and songwriter.  He says he had a recurring dream in his youth

      "When I was a kid I had a recurring nightmare from the time I was five until I was fifteen that these stormtroopers dressed all in black, looking kind of like Darth Vader really, came into our church and would start cutting each person's right hand off and replacing it with a new hand that would be their memory and their guide and their communication system, and it was this amazing new thing. But it was a nightmare - I would wake up from it every night in a cold sweat, that they're doing this. Then the other day, I picked up my iPhone and I realised, oh, they didn't have to cut off our hands. They just put it in our hands, you know? This is what they're doing – we're living in a surveillance state. This beautiful communication system that we developed, that was supposed to destroy all of these old, archaic structures, and a lot of them needed to be destroyed to be sure. It's funny because my empathies are so with the anarchists on one hand, but on the other hand, there is this deep history and it's the only way we remember who we are."  This quote is from a quietus interview HERE

      Back to Kurzweil: what he predicted is that humans will be hybrids in the 2030s - our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, where computers will augment our existing intelligence. It will happen via nanobots - tiny robots made from DNA strands.  

      The Globe and Mail story yesterday has a story about brain augmentation:  "For the past four years, Morgan Barense and her research team have been developing a virtual hippocampus, using digital technology to mimic a brain structure that is critical for consolidating memories. Their result is a phone-based app, called the Hippocamera, designed to allow Alzheimer’s patients to compensate for damage to this area of the brain.
      A core function of the hippocampus is something called “hippocampal replay,” she explains. That is, the hippocampus acts like a movie projector, replaying memories over and over in high speed. Over time, with repeated broadcasts, the cortex, or the large outer portion of the brain, learns these memories, she says.
      The Hippocamera, then, is like an external movie projector, designed with only two modes: record and replay. It allows users to record short video clips of daily events they wish to remember, prompting them to first give a brief verbal description. In the replay mode, the videos are shown in high-speed with audio of the user’s verbal description played over top."  There we are - a step in the journey to human hybridization.  

      In just over a month from now early spring flowers will be blooming. Victoria being well ahead of us starts its Victoria's Flower Count tomorrow.