Jan 05 2025 - Water Stories

 

I've been sorting through all my photos of the past that involve water waves and reflections.  With features in Lightroom, these can be enhanced to show the textures and colours more vibrantly.  There's a headline today about foaming waves in Fort Erie. It made it to MSN with a video of waves hitting the pier in Port Stanley.  What is the significant of foam?  The National Ocean Service says that waves foam when air is mixed into dissolved organic matter in water, creating bubbles.  What are the strange waves and things that occur to water?   Most of the weirdest wave headlines are targeted to surfers.  But I remember the Ontario photographers who captured a face in the waves - I've included it below - it is by Cody Evans.  This was Lake Erie.

There's a 2018 story by Brian Hansel who captured a storm event on Lake Superior and has pictures in which the waves seem to have faces.  I sort of see them, maybe.  Not like the one above.      This next one is from Britain - at the Sunderland Roker Pier.   isn't it amazing - so many pictures of waves with faces.  But then, I see faces in lots of places - it seems to me to be a normal thing - its is called face pareidolia "fools the grain" - there are parts of our brain dedicated to processing real faces.  We use that part a lot so process lots of things into faces.

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Nov 14 2024 - Play Nice

 

"Play nice" is an idiom applied to children - to not cause trouble, to play without arguing and share toys. It is a parental expression.  If said to adults, it implies they are being childish.   Adults generally are not told to "play nice."   So what did Trump and Biden do in the Oval Office?  The Independent says they "played nice."   Isn't that a loaded expression!  Was this referring to their age of behaviour or that they are adults being childish.  Both interpretations are scathing.  And then that was the part the press saw - the greetings lasted a few minutes. One headline says 29 seconds.   There were two more hours with the two in the Oval Office.   That wouldn't have been "play" where they were to be having fun.  That would have been "work."  Here's a chart on children's play.  Children around 4 would be told to "play nice"  when you interpret this chart. And looking at the chart, doesn't "Play" now seems elusive?  This looks like learning and growing stages.  Babies making movements with their arms, doesn't seem like play to me.  Especially a 3 month old.  Oh well, it seems like play is even more elusive to me.  And given that the word is used in so many things now - sports games, intellectual games, online games, music - it is everywhere.

Another blue water wave image today.

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Aug 29 2024 - Robert F. Kennedy Jr's dead worm in his brain

 

How did I miss this May 2024 news item?   It is so weird and strange, who would believe it? Robert F. Kennedy revealed that he had a dead tapeworm in his brain.  That occurred in 2012 and recently covered in the news in May 2024.  "A worm... got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died." These words..."They were spoken by a U.S. presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, uncovered and reviewed by The New York Times, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he sought medical attention after experiencing mental fogginess and memory loss. Eventually, he said, a doctor helped him determine a brain abnormality found on a scan was caused by a worm. He now tells The Times he has recovered with no long lasting consequences." Doctors initially suspected that he had a brain tumor, but it turned out to be a parasite infection – specifically, a pork tapeworm larva lodged in his brain. Pork tapeworms don't eat brain tissue, but they do absorb its nutrients.  There are unpleasant details about the disease.  The summarizing paragraph of the article does a great job summing things up: " It’s all pretty grisly, if you don’t fancy a worm setting up camp in your brain"  Read all about it HERE.  I wonder which part of the brain was affected. Kennedy's anti-vaccine stance, and his spreading of false or misleading information on vaccines has been called out by many fact-checkers and scientists.  I've wondered if he is missing some basic logic sense.  Maybe he is.  Could this get any weirder?  Yes it can. The BBC site with an article on RFK Jr his this as the bottom article: "Scrutiny over claims RFJ Jr cut off dead wale's head"  The article is HERE.   Here's a gorgeous blue - it is an abstract of water waves.

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Feb 4 2023 - Sad Dog Day

 

Sad Day after the wonders of Groundhog Day. Fred la Marmotte was found dead before he could predict which way winer is going.  I wouldn't expect he died just before.   The assumption is that he died during hibernation.  Somehow the map still has a prediction for him.  That turns out to be quite the norm. Missing groundhog, human substitution. That was the fate of Wiarton Willie (IV) in 2020.  The Wiartons were the albino groundhogs.  It wasn't publicly announced until November 2021.  His replacement became the first brown groundhog to assume the role.  There have been quite a few "Willies" since the original died in 1999 after 22 years - a very long time for a groundhog.   Here's the Wiarton Groundhog Day reported origin: The story of Wiarton Willie dates back to 1956. A Wiarton resident named Mac McKenzie wanted to showcase his childhood home to his many friends, so he sent out invitations for a "Groundhog Day" gathering. One of these invitations fell into the hands of a Toronto Star reporter. The reporter travelled to Wiarton looking for the Groundhog Day event. None of the townspeople knew about a festival, but one suggested he check at the Arlington Hotel, the local watering hole. There the reporter found McKenzie and his friends partying and was invited to join them. The next day, the reporter lamented to McKenzie that he needed some kind of story to take back to justify his expenses. So McKenzie grabbed his wife's fur hat, which had a large button on the front, went out to the parking lot, dug a burrow in the snow and pronounced a prognostication (which no one remembers). The picture of Mac and the hat ran in the February 3, 1956 edition of the Toronto Star. A year later, about 50 people arrived for the festival. Half were reporters from various media, including the CBC and Canadian Press. Seizing on the opportunity, McKenzie invented a festival that has been added to over the years. In May 2003, two of Wiarton II's Wee Willies (successors in training) disappeared. They were found dead in the burrow where they resided with Willie. Because groundhogs are known to be territorial animals, Willie was suspected of killing the two, an allegation that was never proven. Francesca Dobbyn, who looked after the groundhogs, informed her immediate supervisor who chose not to inform the Wiarton city council of the incident, fearing bad publicity; the council agreed to allow Dobbyn to keep her job despite the scandal. Our picture today is ripples in the sand on the beach in Florida. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 18 2023 - The Ghost of Bereavement

 

Yesterday I recalled a CBC interview with Emily Urquart, bestselling author and journalist, and the daughter of acclaimed Canadian painter Tony Urquhart.  She was interviewed by CBC on the subject of ghost sightings related to grieving death.  She had this experience - seeing her brother in passing strangers after he had died.   "I don’t remember the first time I saw my brother in a passing stranger, but I do know that it went on for years." As a journalist, she decided to investigate the area - known as post-bereavement hallucination.  This area has been studied for five decades and is found across cultures.  She writes that in Scandinavian folklore there is a belief hat the unsettled dead wander into the lives of the living. Here is a compelling excerpt from her Longreads.com article which is HERE:  "The living, for their part, are more likely to experience visitations from their lost loved ones if the death was traumatic, sudden, unexpected, or untimely. This might explain why I have never seen my grandmother, who died peacefully at 96, in the faces of passing nuns or in the eyes of the blue-hairs at the bus stop. Tragedies, the personal, and in particular those on a mass scale, tend to breed ghosts, like those seen in post-tsunami Japan. A few months after the disaster, a taxi driver picked up a young woman near Ishinomaki station in Japan’s Fukushima district. She asked the driver, a man in his 50s, to take her to Minamihama district, but he protested, telling her there was nothing left in that region. “Have I died?” The woman asked. The driver, stricken, turned to face his passenger, but, of course, she was gone and his cab was empty. This was one of seven cases of ghost passengers documented by a sociology student, Yuka Kudo in her study.   Urquhart covers many of these stories and folklore tales in her book Beyond the Pale:  Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes.  Emily is Jane Urquhart's daughter.  A family of writers and painters of great talent.

Here's a visual explorations of the edges of things. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

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Dec 6 2022 - More on the Meteor

 

What might the latest be on the Niagara Meteor?   There are no stories of finding fragments.  But there still could be.   This isn't the first time a meteor has crash-landed in Grimsby.  In Oct 2009, one came down smashing through a car windshield in Grimsby.  The meteor parts were recovered, so it was an exciting event.  It was covered again in 2013 as scientists were still recovering fragments.  As of mid-2010 there were 13 fragments recovered. What about the one  that crashed through a house roof and landed on the bed?  That was in October 2021 in B.C. and the rock was 2.8 pounds.  Moreover, the occupant was sleeping in bed at the time.  One headline read:  "Woman rocked awake..." The one with lots of news coverage happened In 1954 in Alabama.  Ann Hodges, 34 was hit by a meteorite - she was napping when it broke through the ceiling, bounced off a radio and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise (or maybe a "grapefruit"-sized bruise).  It was captured in pictures at the time.  The meteor was 8.5 pounds.   Hodges became an overnight celebrity, but hated the attention.  She and her husband disagreed over selling the meteorite, and they divorced. She died at only 52 of kidney failure.  The meteorite is now appraised at over a million dollars - she's the known as the only person who was ever hit by a meteorite and lived to tell about it. When that meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere, it broke apart. One fragment hit Hodges while another was located a few miles away by a farmer. Julius Kempis McKinney discovered the fragment while driving a mule-drawn wagon and later sold it for enough money to buy both a house and car, according to the Decatur Daily.   Too bad about Ann's experience. Our Niagara meteor in November was a "fireball"  - A fireball is a meteor generally brighter than the planet Venus in the morning or evening sky, according to the American Meteor Society.   We await some stories of fragment discoveries - they are expected to be located between Grimsby and Vineland, and possibly St. Catharines.

The walkway to the Metro Convention Centre used to have neon sculptures on the wall.  The last time I walked there, they weren't lit, and seemed to be demising.  The time before, the security guard told me I wasn't allowed to take pictures  This was the first time I was there and I found this motion blur picture in the set.

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Oct 17 2022 - Not Bathing

 

When the Mayflower arrived, the Pilgrims were noted for their bad smell.  They washed their hands and faces on a daily basis, but that was it. That was the 17th century when it was a practice to not wash and that  underwear "would keep the body clean."  The hosting Indigenous peoples disagreed, but couldn't persuade them to get clean. It was a combination of morality and disease.  The issue was bath houses: "It doesn’t seem as if most church organizations had a big problem with the bathing itself, just the perceived immorality exhibited at many bath houses. For example, 6th century Pope Gregory I is known to have encouraged Christians to bathe regularly. And, as alluded to, Muslim and Jewish groups were likewise known to be even more fastidious than their Christian brethren about keeping clean." "As to why (bathing decreased), around the mid-14th century - about 60% of the European population died within about seven years or so - not too dissimilar to “The Snap”,  but in this case because of the Black Death. This saw the former popular practice of people communing in bath houses together start to become decidedly less popular for a time, though it seems to have picked back up after. "Twenty-five years ago, nothing was more fashionable in Brabant than the public baths. Today there are none… the new plague has taught us to avoid them" "There doesn’t seem to be a time in recorded history that people are known to have ceased bathing in some form altogether, with the record for the least hygienic not going to our ultra distant ancestors like medieval peoples or those before, but to our more recent ones, with the abandoning of better hygiene by some groups around the 16th century and beyond thanks to widespread disease and the development of more prudish attitudes." And let's check out our current times.  We also have our kings and queens who boast of not bathing, and gave the impression the majority of the population held their "beliefs". It is celebrities who make these similar boasts today - I guess they send above like "kings and queens":  "The tiny yet influential sector of the population who popularized juice cleanses and jade eggs—are touting the skin-care benefits of not washing. “You should not be getting rid of all the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day,” Shepard argued.  “It’s insane.”  Or, as Gyllenhaal described his strategic non-showering: “helpful for skin maintenance.” And bathing their children: “Now, here’s the thing: If you can see the dirt on them, clean them. Otherwise, there’s no point,'” Kutcher added. On to Kristen Bell: “I’m a big fan of waiting for the stink. Once you catch a whiff, that’s biology’s way of letting you know you need to clean it up.” It moves on to a racial theme:  “Celebrity white folks bragging about not showering have the privilege of not worrying about stereotypes they’re inherently ‘dirty,’ said journalist Jemele Hill. “Black folks don’t have that luxury. *Most* of us were raised to be obsessively clean because we always have to ‘present well’ for white folks.”  Bathing seems to remain a very important topic - who could guess there would be a "no bathing" movement now. Today's pictures are motion blur on the highway amongst the pines.

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Oct 10 2022 - Rogue Waves

 

The Weather Network insert videos shows a rogue wave in Miami.  That was Sep 30th.  Six people were injured when people were swept off the boardwalk, into the waves and some of them over the fence into the rock wall and down to the water below.    I found the twitter video which doesn't have the ads, etc.  HERE  There's a lot in Wikipedia on Rogue Waves.   The one that changed it all was the Draupner wave.   "The Draupner wave (or New Year's wave) was the first rogue wave to be detected by a measuring instrument. The wave was recorded in 1995 at Unit E of the Draupner platform, a gas pipeline support complex located in the North Sea about 160 kilometres (100 mi) southwest from the southern tip of Norway. The rig was built to withstand a calculated 1-in-10,000-years wave with a predicted height of 20 metres (64 ft) and was fitted with a state-of-the-art set of sensors, including a laser rangefinder wave recorder on the platform's underside. At 3 pm on 1 January 1995, the device recorded a rogue wave with a maximum wave height of 25.6 metres (84 ft). Peak elevation above still water level was 18.5 metres (61 ft).The reading was confirmed by the other sensors.The platform sustained minor damage in the event. In the area, the significant wave height was approximately 12 metres (39 ft), so the Draupner wave was more than twice as tall and steep as its neighbors, with characteristics that fell outside any known wave model. The wave caused enormous interest in the scientific community." The causes of rogue waves is still under active research.  And there are now measurement devices to capture the size. How high can they get?  130 feet high in the eyeball.   In 2006, researchers from U.S. Naval Institute theorised rogue waves may be responsible for the unexplained loss of low-flying aircraft, such as U.S. Coast Guard helicopters during search and rescue missions.  In 2019, Hurricane Dorian's extratropical remnant generated a 30-metre (100 ft) rogue wave off the coast of Newfoundland. These seem unimaginable, but here we are now with cameras that are capturing the extent of the waves.  For example, it is theorized that the SS Edmund Fitzgerald (1975) – Lost on Lake Superior was sunk by a rogue wave. Another nearby ship, the SS Arthur M. Anderson, was hit at a similar time by two rogue waves and possibly a third, and this appeared to coincide with the sinking around ten minutes later. One of my favourite pictures - motion blur waves.

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Fenn 12 2022 - Rogue Waves on the Radar

 

Waves are definitely on the brain - Waves of COVID, waves to truck convoys, waves of democracy.  It is waves in nature that got my attention yesterday.    A rogue wave in B.C. was covered by the weather network news.  It is a record-breaking wave that was measured November 17 2020 and has since been determined to be the biggest rogue wave ever measured on the Canadian west coast.  It was 17.6 m tall  - that's a four story building. You can see the spike on the chart below.  This is a once in 1300 years occurrence.   The same article said that on the other side of Canada, waves produced during 2004's Hurricane Ivan rose to more than 28 metres tall and one in particular was 30 m. That's an 8 storey building.  Here's the chart of the BC rogue wave.   This famous painting - the Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusi is considered to be an example of a large rogue wave. I went looking for the biggest wave in recorded history - it is a tsunami wave. That is different than a rogue wave.  It was recorded July 9 1958 in Alaska and reached 1,720 feet high - the comparison given in the article is the Empire State Building which is 1,250 feet tall. The wave was caused by an earthquake - it is known as the Lituya Bay Tsunami.  "As the giant mountain of water started traveling across the entire length of the T-shaped Lituya Bay, it reached a peak height of 1,720 feet (524 meters) near the Gilbert Inlet and destroyed everything around.  Soil, plants, and trees were snapped off, and the shorelines were completely obliterated." While the Alaska wave was caused by a tsunami,  the 2020 BC wave was a rogue wave.  Rogue waves are considered sneaker waves.  They don't seem to have a single distinct cause, but occur where physical factors such as high winds and strong currents cause waves to merge and then create a single exceptionally large wave.   Here are my little waves on the Lake Ontario Shore.

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