Showing posts with label water lilies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label water lilies. Show all posts

Saturday, August 5, 2023

Aug 5 2023 - Gangsters

 

From such an innocent beginning in Old English gang "a going, journey, way, passage". Old Norse Gangr was "a group of men, a set".  And so on.  Why are there so many American gangsters? Al Capone, Mad Dog Coll, Vito Genovese, John Dillinger, Meye Lansky, James Burke, Bugsy Siegel, Sam Giancana and Bay Face Nelson. These are all from the 20th Century.  

Was Jimmy Hoffa such a gangster.  He was involved with organized crime and convicted or jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy and mail and wire fraud.

Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance?  There are at least two rumours  about the lack of body to be found - that he was killed and then incinerated or that he was killed and then dissolved in an acid vat.  And then there are lots more ideas from various cohorts on how he was killed and where.

Why is this still important?  Why did the FBI continue to search for his remains?  In 2003, 2004, 2006, 2013 - each of these years had searches for his remains.  It is so interesting that so much recent effort has been put into the question.  His murders are very old, in their 80s, 90s, or passed on.

At the time, there were theories put forward by various mafia members. They are all gruesome.  They perpetuate the fascination with his disappearance. None were proved.

And there still is something to squeeze out of the story of Jimmy Hoffa's death.  It comes from Fox News on June 4 2023. 

"Suspect Gabe Briguglio speaks with Fox News about the murder of Jimmy Hoffa: Exclusive"

Gabe Briguglio, who has been under the suspicion of murdering Jimmy Hoffa after nearly five decades, spoke with Eric Shawn in an exclusive Fox News interview.  

He says the FBI, federal prosecutors and the media were all hoodwinked by a lying mob informer who misdirected the investigation in its early stages with self-serving, fabricated claims that only served to damage the investigation. The result, he says, has been a false narrative cemented in the American public’s mind of what happened and who was responsible.

About his involvement, he says:  "I have all the proof in the world that I wasn't even involved in anything and what I was doing I was doing, what I said I was doing."

That seems in character for a gangster.


Here is the Royal Botanical Gardens water lily pond.

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Sunday, July 16, 2023

July 16 2023 - Lily Show Weekend

 

It was the Ontario Lily Show yesterday at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington.  RBG is again under renewal.  I can’t help but contrast the funding in the U.S. and in Canada.  I expect that it isn’t that the US receives more government funding. It is that there are more super-rich people there who support and fund their favourite institutions.  Brian was recently in Chicago and commented that the Chicago Botanical Gardens were large and  perfect with immaculate maintenance.  

That’s not the case with RBG.  It isn’t that I want immaculate gardens, but when gardens are presented as ornamental display gardens, then they end up with the expectations of an ornamental garden. That means weeding and caretaking that matches with this ornamentalist approach.  It is like having a lawn and then maintaining it poorly - not mowing it regularly and having major weed infestations.  

With that, there still is great delight in the Royal Botanical Gardens displays.  The lily ponds are beautiful and the rose garden is a showplace.  Its renovation a few years ago make it more inclusive of all kinds of plants and has been very successful. 

The Lily Show has decilned in numbers of lilies each year.  Members are growing older, the lily beetle has diminished interest in growing and showing lilies, and competitive flower shows have dwindled in numbers and interest. - young people have other inclinations.   It still remains a wonderful show and in particular, the floral arrangements are creative and beautiful.
 

Isn’t the black water of the RBG lily pond so amazing! 
 



 

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Wednesday, July 6, 2022

July 6 2022 - Water Slides On High

 

What is a slip 'n slide?  Maybe a water slide.  I've never been on a water slide.  They came on the scene after my childhood.  

The old Guinness World Record for a water slide was 2,021 feet long.  How long is a mile? There's 5,280 feet in a mile.  So this is half a mile.  It is a similar to the distance from my house to Cole's Florist and Garden Centre.  That's a lot of water in a tube.

The current record is 1,111 metres or 3,645 feet - in the rainforest in Malaysia.  Two people go together and it is somewhere between three minutes and four and a half minutes long,  given the various reports.  One article says that it is like coasting across twelve football fields.  And that article complained it is too long. It is a 70 meter slope.  Here's the overhead picture to give you the sense of it.  There are pictures of the open parts and it looks like there are places with 6 lanes. 

Actually I was wondering about much simpler things - playground slides.  I was thinking of Millie, our dog, who goes down the little kid slide in the park.  It is cute.  I think of these slides as more "normal".  But that's not the case. The pictures of playground slides show strange  and unusual designs - they are the longest and the tallest, etc.  They are also called tube slides.

The longest is located in London at  580 feet long. It doesn't look fun to me.  The picture makes it look creepy.  

For for all these "thrill rides", there are articles about tragic accidents.  Those show up over and over. 


But if we turn to the biggest and "best" playgrounds in the world, that's a more interesting story.  HERE's the article with pictures. They seem to be amazingly creative designs.
 

I have to check out the Royal Botanical Gardens soon to see how the water lilies are doing.  They dye the water black so with a little extra photoshop work, one has quite an interesting image. 
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Friday, June 26, 2020

June 26 2020 - Trudeau Vs Mulroney

Our two favourite political dynasties in Canada have been in the news on the topic of racism.  The most recent is Ben Mulroney.  He made the headlines apologizing for his wife Jessica over her much-publicized 'negative interaction' - a euphemism for 'racist interaction' with Sasha Exeter.  

The lead line in one story reads: "Who needs the police force when the Laurentian elite can just abuse you directly?"  And then there's the name dropping - Megan Merkle's name - as she and Jessica were friends.  Jessica is quoted as "having deployed a classic defence: that she had a Black friend. As I told you privately, I have lived a very public and personal experience with my closest friend where race was front and centre,” she wrote in response to Ms. Exeter’s video, referring to Meghan Markle.   Markle has been reported to have 'cast her adrift'.

 Editorials consider Ben Mulroney's involvement in his wife's problems to be a strategic one - to be about protecting the "Mulroney brand'.  I think that came from John Doyle of the Globe and Mail who recounted a situation where he was on the receiving end of Mulroney dynasty pressures and complaints related to coverage of Ben. 

On the other side of the dynasty ring is Justin Trudeau.  Remember not so long ago - in September 2019 - he apologized for a picture showing him in blackface at a party in 2001.   He expressed "deep regret, declared that his privileged background left a blind spot to such racist acts and insisted he was no longer the man in the photo." That was just before the election, too.

It's easier to see privilege and racism way up there.  Makes me nervous to think about Stephen Harper's children, now in their twenties, and what we could expect there.  And then there's the Ford family.  

Seeing as there's no easy answer on this topic, let's go on to the image of the day.  What do you think of this water lily?  It seems to be on its side in the water. I would think the water lilies just got placed into the gardens at RBG as they were all lying at the top like this - in tangled messes.  They would have come from deeper water ponds, so their stems are too long.  

I went about some photoshop hair-cutting and trimming, to form them into a very nice composition. Then it took some dyeing to make the water consistently black.  Sounds like a COVID-19 hair salon appointment.
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Thursday, February 27, 2020

Feb 27 - Chocolate Month Completing

Our winter months' celebration days are colour-coded.  Christmas is red and green, Valentine's Day is red, St. Patrick's Day is green.  As we move into Easter, it is pastel colours, but not a dominant  colour theme.  We go on to Victoria Day - and abandon colour coding.  We pop up with the national flag of red and white on July 1st, but don't worry about colours until Christmas again.  We do sprinkle a little orange in for Thanksgiving and Halloween, as though in readiness for the darker, colder, and starker days of winter.

I became aware of this at the long-term care home yesterday, where the St. Patrick Day display is up with its shiny, green hats and clover leaves replacing February's red hearts.

February being the chocolate highlight month, I can let you know that February concludes with a chocolate theme - it is National Chocolate Soufflé Day tomorrow, February 28th.   And while February has a high concentration of chocolate celebration days, there are chocolate festivals, fairs and celebrations all year long, and national chocolate days throughout the entire year.  Here are two stories that popped up:
What is the longest chocolate truffle?  A choo-choo.
This 111-ft 8-in-long (34.05-m) chocolate choo-choo was put on display at Brussels South railroad station in Belgium on November 19, 2012. The tasty train was crafted from Belcolade chocolate by master chocolatier Andrew Farrugia (Malta) as part of Brussels Chocolate Week. A jazz band provided the musical accompaniment on the day, with the keyboard player tinkling away on a grand piano that was also made from chocolate!
The Chocolate Fashion Show. This is an annual chocolate trade show in Paris in October - the link is HERE. You can see the dresses, purses, decorations on shoes - chocolate creations everywhere. 

We enjoy summer skies by Skylum today with pictures from the Minneapolis Arboretum.
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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Jan 29 2020 - Eyefull

I was at the Optometrist yesterday and I wondered about the eye. He told me that the human eye has the fastest metabolic rate in the human body because of the rate it is regenerating images.  I hadn't realized that seeing takes up 50% of the brain's functionality.

What about these facts? 
  • If the human eye were a digital camera it would have 576 megapixels.
  • We spend about 10% of our wake time with our eyes closed.
  • An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
  • Dolphins can sleep with one eye open.
  • Birds, cats and dogs have three eyelids.
  • Humans can see more shades of green than any other colour.
  • The world’s most common eye colour is brown.
  • The eye has over 2 million moving parts.
There are colours that are too complex for the human eye to comprehend. These are known as “impossible colours”, which cannot be perceived due to being outside the strength of our three types of cone cell in the retina. However, some of these colours can be seen by mixing colour signals from the two eyes, or by looking at special “fatigue templates”.  

When I looked at this picture of waterlilies at Longwood Gardens I was amazed at the how many flowers are in each cluster. 
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Friday, March 30, 2018

Birds have feathers

Birds are outside singing beautifully, and warm with their feathers.  Most primates have fur or something that keeps them warm (e.g. fat).  And we are alone among the 5,000 or so mammals in that we are naked.

We were made humorously aware of our sensitivity to nakedness when we saw the Cirque de Machine this week.  They are an acrobatic troupe from Quebec.  One of their routines had the 4 acrobats standing naked behind towels.  They exchanged and folded them and did amazing things, keeping us in suspense,  yet always keeping them covered.  


Scientists have a few reasons why humans became less and less hairy in six million years.  The latest theory is that fur was shed to get rid of external parasites. The advertisement of bare skin says "no fleas, lice or ticks on me!'.  Earlier theories had to do with not needing fur as we were more aquatic (like whales) and not needing fur as we lived in hot areas.   One theory, outlined in the independent.co.uk said it was to keep our brains cooler.

And when did humans lose their fur? We distinguish it as fur, as we are covered in hair - about 5 million follicles on our body.  The theory on that was developed based on needing dark skin in Africa.  So as humans lost their fur, they needed the gene MC1R to keep their skin darker. In a few generations this version of the gene would have made a clean sweep through the population.  Based on the number of these 'silent mutations' in Africa, they calculated that the last sweep occurred 1.2 million years ago, when the human population consisted of a mere 14,000 breeding individuals.  This is a very interesting Scientific American article HERE.  


And when did we move on to wear clothes?  Supposedly the evidence comes from the evolution of lice, who evolved from head lice to clothing lice around 170,000 years ago.  

Here's the website for our fun acrobatic troupe where you can see a short video HERE with a momentary segment from the towel act.  

Sunday, June 12, 2016

What are the Fun Facts?

WHAT ARE THE FUN FACTS TODAY?

This comes from thefactsite.com:  "If you’re bored and have ten minutes to kill, then why not check out this awesome list of the top one hundred most random and fun facts.  
  1. Banging your head against a wall burns 150 calories an hour.
  2. In the UK, it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day!
  3. Pteronophobia is the fear of being tickled by feathers!
  4. When hippos are upset, their sweat turns red.
  5. A flock of crows is known as a murder.
  6. “Facebook Addiction Disorder” is a mental disorder identified by Psychologists.
  7. The average woman uses her height in lipstick every 5 years.
  8. 29th May is officially “Put a Pillow on Your Fridge Day“.
  9. Cherophobia is the fear of fun.
  10. Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water."
I admit that I found the first fact a little bizarre as something fun. 

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Crystal Ball

These water reflections were taken a few years go at the Missouri Botanical Garden.  This is a vast botanical garden and research centre with many interesting gardens.  This centre court water garden had Chihuly glass balls amongst the lily pads.  

Friday, August 14, 2015

Frogs into Princes

So today we wonder how frogs and princes got associated together.  This wonderful frog was in the pond of a garden we toured in May.  

Here's what I found about the frog metaphor from frog-life-cycle.com:

In fairy tales and many folklore stories, the frog is one of the main creatures that appear.  Whether the frog is being kissed to turn into a prince or the frog’s eyes are being boiled in a pot and stirred by a witch, there are many different frog myths that are constantly floating around in all sorts of different stories.

Long ago in medieval Europe, the frog was something to be attributed to the devil because of their use in many witch spells.  Frogs are definitely not the sign of the devil, they are actually some of the most harmless creatures in the world and are definitely should not be associated with Satan any longer.   

Another misconception about frogs is the fact that if you touch one, you will develop warts instantly.  Warts have now been proven to be caused by a human internal viral infection, but way back when, toads and frogs were handled by glove-wearing humans or not handled at all.

While frogs have gotten a bad reputation a lot of the time, there are still quite a few countries and cities that hold the frog up high.  For instance, Egyptians take the frog as a symbol of life and fertility since millions of them were born after the inundation of the Nile.  They had many different myths about there being a frog-goddess named Heget (which means frog in Egyptian).  Heget was essentially a woman’s body with a frog’s head and this goddess was highly-respected and sought after, even though she was just a myth.

In China, the frog represents the lunar yin.  They have even created a frog spirit, Ch’ing-Wa Sheng, which is associated with healing and good fortune, which is one of the main reasons why you will see a lot of frog relics around businesses and in homes.   

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

In the Depths

Now that summer is here, it is time for road work, garden construction and other fix-it projects.   Benny's big truck with the bob cat has just pulled up in front of the house and will be digging up the driveway next door and redoing it.  The beginning of summer construction on the roads and in your yards is perhaps the 12th fact of the Summer Solstice you may not have been aware of.

My interest in the depths of ponds is today's subject.  This pond, with its dark green/blue colour treatment in the water makes the whites of the Koi and the green water lily pads stand out in contrast.  They give a sense of mystery to the water's depths.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Dahlia Season

Dahlia Season...It's here and the flowers are as big and beautiful as last year.  Here's the start of dahlia portraits.  Two very different dahlias with different treatments.  


The first is like an exquisite wedding dress.  Each petal in the centre is folded like some expensive silk handkerchief.  As the petals mature, these folds disappear into gorgeous curls that open up into beautiful spirally tubes.  I chose a colour treatment that would make this white dahlia look like an antique white silk.



This second portrait pays homage to water lily dahlias.  I haven't been able to shoot my own water lilies, as the racoons buzz the top of the flower petals each time one comes close to blooming, and it's not nice enough for a traditional floral portrait, nor funky enough for something on the pop art side.  So here's my water lily portrait, with a deep blue ocean in the background to this lovely pink and green water lily dahlia.





Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Longwood Gardens Visit









I went to Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia, PA on the weekend.  We stayed with friends in Reading, PA about an hour away.  With the head, there was a mist each morning, so I had a chance to take some photos of the lovely picket fences and house lines in Roger and Irene's neighbourhood.   

At the Longwood entrance are some beautiful flower gardens - this year there was a bed of verbena bonariensis.  The butterflies were constant on the bed, so gave me the opportunity to get a few butterfly shots as well.

The big attraction this time of year is the water lily courtyard.  There are hundreds of flowers and likely a hundred varieties of water lily, plus all kinds of water garden plants.  I'm posting a sampling of the water lilies on display.

More to come...