Marilyn's Photos - Dec 21 2025 - Words of the Year

 

One of the words of the year is slop. That was what we saw with the AI cat videos. This is Mirriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”   Collins chose “vibe coding” which is AI turning language into code.  The Economist chose “TACO” - Trump Always Chickens Out.   Oxford chose “rage bait” - online content deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage for increased traffic and engagement, reflecting a shift in online culture towards emotional manipulation and attention-seeking tactics. Cambridge chose “parasocial”, an adjective describing one-sided relationships people form with celebrities, influencers and even AI, reflecting intense online fan culture, celebrity obsession, and the rise of AI companions.  Who is the Person of the Year? “Architects of AI” has been named time magazine’s 2025 person.  Not a person but persons.  “The potential of artificial intelligence roared into view with no turning back. “ “One of the cover images resembling the “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph from the 1930s shows eight tech leaders sitting on the beam: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the CEO of Google’s DeepMind division Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who launched her own startup World Labs last year.” In the picture they cut her off…notice the other end has lots of room. Here’s a frosty, icy orchard picture from the past.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 30 2025 - This is it

 

This is it - the holiday month.  That’s how I think of December.  It isn’t just the days around Christmas.  It seems to go on and on.  It turns out that there are 11 “religious” sorts of holidays in December.  There are four major religions celebrating something in the month.  The AI summary lists Yule as a Pagan and Wiccan festival and includes it in the four. It is named Yule. There are a few historical events celebrated in December. The first patent was granted for the toilet paper roll.  According to the inventor Joseph Gayetty, the toilet roll paper should go up and over.  He also invented toilet paper in 1857, naming it medicated paper for the water-closet. That’s in the western world.  In the East, there was toilet paper from the 600s AD. Moving on to more lofty events, it is Nobel Peace Prize month.  And didn’t Charles Dickens publish the Christmas Carol on December 19th, 1843 What excellent timing. By the 24th, the first edition of 6,000 copies was sold out and by January 2nd, a second edition of 3,000 was sold.    This morning’s light reveals a snow fall in the night.  It makes me think of this snow storm at the Niagara Falls Butterfly Conservatory garden quite a few years ago.

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Marilyn's Photos - Aug 4 2025 - Simple Math

 

It is simple math time. Here's the headline:    Easy-looking math sum leaves people confused - can you solve it without a calculator?  5+5 x 5+5  The article shows the two ways to go wrong.  In one method the answer is 100, and in the other the answer is 55. The article says to use the acronym PEMDAS - p stands for parenthesis, then exponents, multiplication and division and then adding or subtracting.   We who took arithmetic know the answer is 35 and we never learned the PEMDAS acronym. You can find all kinds of math tricks. One of the websites is  Interactive Mathematics and it has lots I didn't know about.  And these are real tricks.  We'd have to memorize them - and as I said, there are lots.  Some of them are fun - the butterfly method for adding and subtracting fractions.  Go take a look at them HERE.

Knowing how to do all of this is great  What will I use it for? We'd have to start doing some of the following every day: cooking and baking, budgeting and finances, shopping, time management, home improvement, driving, sports and games, travel, gardening (planting in rows) and so on.  The article concludes:  "Just think how often you encounter numbers in your daily routine." I didn't mean to work on a winter picture yesterday but this bridge over Wilket Creek at the Toronto Botanical Gardens seemed a perfect candidate for simplification in a watercolour image. Here's the original and the watercolour version.

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Feb 20 2025 - The King of Congestion

 

Donald Trump declared himself KING recently - in relation to ordering New York to stop its congestion fee system.  It doesn't seem possible to have two kings in the congestion world.  And that is not even considering Elon Musk. The real king of congestion and parking is Donald Shoup.  He is the author of The High Cost of Free Parking - 20 years ago - and he changed the urban parking landscape significantly.   He was a PhD and research economist at UCLA. He was inspired by a master's thesis that found that Los Angeles County employees were almost twice as likely to drive alone than federal employees in the Los Angeles Civic Centre.  Why?  It was free parking. Shoup had estimated that 700 million rot 2 billion parking spots existed in the U.S. - a ratio of 2.5 to 7 times as many parking spaces as registered vehicles.     His investigation and studies resulted in his theory that an 85% occupancy rate of on-street -parking spaces would be the most efficient use of public parking.  The expression "cruising for parking" was one of his findings - driving around to find the closest parking spot. Congestion was the result.  Parking cash-out was a solution he advocated.  As parking spaces are subsidized at work, he devised options for the employee the choice to keep the parking space, use the money to pay for transit or vanpool fares, or sae the money by carpooling, bicycling, etc.  He also advocated removing parking minimums for condos, etc.  These resulted in a bias towards owning cars and driving.  It was found that parking minimums failed to reduce or eliminate curb congestion and increased it. The expression of being the king of congestion comes with the full sentence that Donald Trump used.    "Long live the king" no longer can apply to Donald Shoup as he died a few weeks ago.   The declaration that Donald Trump actually made was:  LONG LIVE THE KING!   All upper case.  I looked it up and there's a name for that:  language intensity.  Surprise that this is meant to signal that something is important here and that there's intense emotion with the words.

This is the road to the Peninsula Ridge Winery restaurant.  The Kitchen House - a heritage site - is the actual focal point everyone knows.   The second picture shows  a different perspective with the road diagonally in front - and of course a spring view with the fruit trees in bloom.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Feb 2 2025 - Freeman Patterson

 

Freeman Patterson is one of Canada's foremost photographers.  He's still active in his late 80s, and sends out a regular newsletter.  This one had a startling story.  I have reproduced the introduction below:   "When you are reading this letter, you can safely assume that I’ve just celebrated an anniversary I never expected to celebrate – my 25th. On the last day of January 2000 Dr. Vivian McAlister O.C., his team, and a donor somewhere in Canada gave me a new liver. It was my second new liver in five days, the first having been rejected by my body immediately. Of course, I knew nothing about the events at the time nor for a long while after, as I was kept in an induced coma until well into March. When I was finally permitted to emerge from my long sleep, Dr. McAlister dropped by my bedside to tell me what all my family and friends had known for weeks. “You’ve had two liver transplants,” he told me, “not one,” adding these arresting words, “You’ve won the 649 national lottery five weeks in a row, you had less than one percent chance of surviving, you shouldn’t be here.” Sobering, incredibly challenging words to begin a new life, yet my odds of being born in the first place had been much greater. On the day I was conceived something approaching a trillion of my father’s sperm rushed to meet my mother’s egg. One sperm won the race; all its competitors died and were discarded by nature. That was the first lottery I won, the big lottery we all won – and the prize was the gift of life. So, celebrate with me. Celebrate your big win!" Read more HERE. And this is my Freeman Patterson tree image.  He's well-known for this placement of the tree in the lower part of the image.

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Sep 18 2024 - Seasonal Songs

 

Choir season has started and the music is handed out.  It may only be September but Christmas music has begun.  I seem to have forgotten this.  I seem to remember some other songs in the mix of the Christmas concert.   At least that isn't as onerous as filming Hallmark Christmas movies in the summer.  Where they have to wear cozy sweaters and winter coats.  But what about all the trees with leaves, the grass and flowers?  So I turn to BBC news whose article from 2006 describes David Tennant as Dr. Who, filming a Christmas special in 30 degrees Celsius heat.   "Extras milled about in scarves and woolly coats as shoppers in sunglasses looked on in sympathy. Asked by fans how he was coping, the Time Lord shouted back, "It's blinking boiling." "If it's summer, filming at night avoids the problem of each scene being in blazing sunshine. Although, with sunset so late, you have to work quite long days. If you do film during the day, there's the problem of the actors peering into the sun. We screen the area with a silk - much like a stretched-out parachute - to diffuse the sunlight."  And my answer to the foliage?  "There are tales - "perhaps not entirely apocryphal" - of crew spending several days picking leaves off trees." Here I am thinking about Christmas music when the headline is how many Burmese pythons have been caught in the Florida Python Challenge.  Now that gives invasive species a new meaning for us.

This is the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh.  Quite the wonderful botanic collection of tropical plants.

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Jan 10 20242 - Random Life hacks

 

Life Hacks.  This is a topic area all over the internet.  Generally hacks refer to doing things cheaper, easier, more efficient, and are not obvious.  For example: "If the gum is stuck on your hair, use peanut butter to remove it"  - that comes from the website with this table of contents:   100 Amazing Life Hacks (in Images!) 100 More Practical Life Hacks to Try Some Good Life Hacks Life Hacks To Do At Home Real Life Hacks Daily Life Hacks Life Hacks To Make Life Easier Everyday Life Hacks Life Hack Examples Helpful Hacks For Making Life Easier Final Thoughts I scrolled through the list and they fascinate me.  I did stop at this one: "Doritos are great for kindling if you can't find any" - I find this hilarious.  There are many fun ideas this very long list HERE.  They are inventive, silly things for one's every day.  There are  odd and unexplainable life hacks for which full instructions are needed.   One can just scroll down to the conclusion of Final Thoughts. Our author says that doing everyday errands again and again can get disappointing.  Easy life hacks handles this.  The author explains that they are stunts to make everyday work simpler.   And wouldn't that make us happier, too.  Who would guess that Life Hacks could be so impactful!  Now to get some gum.   Here's a crab apple tree that hadn't yet suffered from a freeze.  So far, we've had mostly rain, but I'm looking ahead to see what the next "Winter Wallop" forecast will be.  Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Dec 19 2023 - Everything Chocolate

 

What is the movie where everything is made of chocolate?  It is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - the 2005 version directed by Tim Burton.  The latest version has real chocolate - so won't that river be  chocolate? f And everything is edible, so they say, in this version compared to earlier versions.  But I read that it isn't a chocolate river this time.  It seems to be a scenic blue-and-white candy river where a chocolate boat floats on top.  We will have to find out for ourselves.   Do you want to know the names of the candies in the original movie?  They are HERE.  The article capitalizes every single letter of every chocolate/candy name: SQUELCHY SNORTER (1971) GOO-FILLED GOURD KICKED BY MIKE TEAVEE (2005) CHOCOLATE BIRD HATCHING FROM AN EGG IN GRANDPA JOE’S MOUTH (2005) HAIR TOFFEE (2005) HOVER CHOC (2023) PRINCE PONDICHERRY’S CHOCOLATE CASTLE (2005) HAIR REPAIR ECLAIR (2023) WONKA WHIPPLE-SCRUMPTIOUS FUDGEMALLOW DELIGHT (2005) There's a lot to a Wonka Chocolate Factory.

The old versions versus the new - everything is edible in the new version.  The Niagara Parks winter garden, or perhaps the winter blizzard garden. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca