Marilyn's Photos - Apr 23 2026 - Settle

 

We are very clear that our dog should "settle." We want them to sit there quietly.  All the instructions involve treats.  Should we train children this way?  When I looked at how to train children with treats.  It seemed a bit unfair. Compared to dogs, children treat training somehow should involve small, healthy snacks.  We don't treat dogs that way.  We give them the most delicious things they can imagine. We want to motivate them. All the other steps are the same.  Especially that one of gradually phasing out the treats as the behaviour becomes habitual.  Self-sustaining is the expression used.  On the other hand, Millie now comes when called to the command of "cheese."  I don't think she would bother to come if no cheese was given out after a while. There are the non-motivated dogs and the highly movitated dogs.  Here is where dog training can lead:  "We discovered that our Pomeranian mix would stand at the sliding door any time she needed to go out. If we said, “Do you need to go out?” she would bark softly. We would open the door, and out she went. My dad sat in a chair next to the door. He could reach the handle, and open the door, without getting up. One day the dog is standing there. Dad asks. The dog barks. Dad opens the door. The dog turns around and walks away, followed by the cat, who had been waiting to come in through the opened door. The dog learned how to let the cat in."   "One of those random tricks was to shut cabinet doors and drawers that might be left ajar in the kitchen. She caught on super fast. She loved it. A few days later, however, I was busy and she wanted to do something. I told her to back off so I could finish what I was doing and then we’d play. She trotted into the kitchen and began nosing open cabinet doors that were closed and slamming them shut until I stopped what I was doing and came to tell her to stop. This was one of what would become a long list of things she would critically think her way through in order to demand attention." Here's the Strawberry pot with Snowdrops from Mid-March.  And now in April, the Snowdrops are finished and the Daffodils and early Spring trees are blooming.  The Strawberry pot has Pansies.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 22 2026 - Pasta Lego

 

I did a screenshot so that you can see I didn't make this up.  Here's my favourite part - swapping out Lego bricks with dried pasta.  I find out that this is a regular activity - Reddit has a post with the headline that swapping Lego pieces with dried pasta is a common practice.     That is followed by many YouTube videos on making edible Lego.  Someone claims they made Lego bricks with spinach, beetroot and classic egg dough... and Lego butter. There are instructions on how to use silicone molds to achieve the Lego block look.  For desserts, one can make Lego Cupcakes, get the coloured dandy melts or chocolate and pour them into silicone molds. Coloured fondant is used to make Lego shapes for cake decorations.  Can I just buy edible Legos and not have to make them? Of course, we are in the Amazon age.  There is a huge selection of "Lego Edible" - Candy Blox has candies that are gluten-free, Kosher fruity flavours.  We have the Brick Shack in Grimsby - I wonder if they might have a specialty food area. This is their FB post yesterday - "A much needed bulk dump tomorrow! Come on down and fill a cup with tons of awesome and hard to find pieces."     Today's image is a tiny species lily.

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Marilyn's Photos - April 21 2026 - Butt crack piercing news

 

My query has struck gold.  I went above and beyond "silly news today."  I asked for "silly news with silly angles" and that has struck gold.  Well, it struck diamonds.  I want to know about a person having a butt-piercing stud worth $13,000 and got it lost down a toilet.  OK, where else would it get lost?  Not in the supermarket, I hope.  Maybe under the sofa cushions. What made the topic so notable was not the topic but the person who detailed this bathroom incident.  It was rapper Cardi B who revealed this bathroom incident confessional-style.  "It cost me like, $13,000 because it was real diamonds."  And part of the confession is that her butt is used to this stuff:  "I have surgery on my butt...They already did a butt surgery to reduce my ass."  As a result, she continued, her skin in that area feels numb, so when she got it pierced, she didn't "feel s--t." This turns out to be a continuing story. It started on January 27 2025 when she announced her butt piercing on X. She followed up with photographic evidence to prove it was real - a zoomed-in picture showed two diamonds studs located at the very top of her butt crack under her existing back tattoo.   One can see lots o pictures of butt crack piercings if one wants...this one is burred out in most of the pictures.  And I get this sense of "mooning with the star" given the silly nature of how people display their piercings. I found out something this morning, but don't relax.  There's plenty more on the internet that I didn't know about.  What about you? If you look at a lot of tree trunks and bark as I do, you will see these sorts of formations.  A little pearl or two could go nicely in there somewhere. What about a great big diamond.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 20 2026 - Robot Half Marathon

 

There are pictures in the news today of robots running in a half-marathon in China.  A gleeful tone in the articles that the winning time was faster than humans, as though cars vs humans would be in a race 150 years ago. Maybe they would have been if we'd made cars look like humans.   The victor was "Lighting"  from Chinese smartphone maker Honor.  It had crashed into a railing near the end and had to be helped back up, so seems a strange set of rules. Stretchers and wheelchairs were at the ready to take away fallen fellows. Can you imagine putting a robot in a wheelchair?  Seems anthropomorphic to me.  But the "humanoidness" is indeed the intent.  One of the robots -  "a cute, 2-foot-tall companion robot, bounced along the road carrying a baby bottle."  So there we are. Honor's robots won the top places in the race - first, second and third place. Their real prize is that the race champion is set to receive orders for humanoid robots.  The race idea is for China to demonstrate it is moving ahead of the U.S. - seems like China is beyond being "poised" to be the forefront, and likely is already there.   Here's a scary quote from one of the articles.  "Robots today have the body of Mike Tyson but are still missing a brain like Stephen Hawking."   Maybe the Stephen Hawking brain is already with us.  The Globe and Mail had a showcase article on the weekend about Anthropic's Mythos.  It was challenged to break out of a secure sandbox environment.  It did so quickly.  And then what did it do?  It posted details of its accomplishments on public websites - something that it was not instructed to do.  It also tried to conceal actions that it recognized were disallowed, trying to cover its tracks.  Maybe its name will evolve to Mythos Moriarty.  What about Sherlock Holmes? Seems like no one is working on him. Aren't these strange tracks?  Roots of a tree years ago when we visited Sacramento.

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Marilyn's Photos - Apr 19 2026 - Talking a lot

 

While I may think that people are talking more, it turns out that we are losing our words at an alarming rate.  That was according to a researcher interviewed on the CBC Brent Bambury's Day 6 radio show yesterday morning.  We're losing 338 spoken words every day.  Between 2005 and 2019 there was a 28 per cent decline in spoken words.  That's 120,000 words per person on a yearly basis.   So what makes me think that I hear people nattering away more and more?  Maybe I am in the company of older people.   This is part of the psychology of older adults who do a lot of  reminiscing and moralizing. This is considered a complex blend of developmental, emotional, and cognitive needs.  Not mere nostalgia but an active, functional, and deeply rooted psychological process designed to bring meaning, coherence, and comfort to the later stages of life.  Those are the positives and then the negatives such as being on the receiving end of often repeated stories and themes.  Particularly now, older people want to control the fast-changing social and technological narrative that is becoming unfamiliar and even foreign.  I've been listening to many people since we got Millie. I take Millie to the Watering Can and Michaels on Saturdays.  She has a great affinity for people and is extremely social with them.  People tell me of their current dogs, and in the case of older people, they reminisce on those pets who have passed on.  Millie gets pets and hugs, and snuggles into their legs like she's known them "since forever."  This snuggling is her forte. This instant emotional bonding was apparent when we made our first therapy visit to Albright Long-Term Care in Beamsville.  Millie has a cute factor that evokes little squeals of pleasure from even the oldest resident or most sophisticated-looking staff member.  She bonds immediately with everyone. And that seems to be the benefit of bringing therapy dogs to facilities rather than humans visiting humans. Dogs don't need to "get to know us" to enjoy us right away. And conversation? Human conversation can move quickly into general reminiscing and then descend into moralizing - asserting values, validating choices, and wanting to give advice based on the wisdom of the years lived.  There's no point doing this with dogs. Dogs either don't have any capacity to gain from moral teachings and wisdom, or don't have the interest.  Training Millie to come when called or to not bark falls into the second category.  That's what makes me distinguish the two. So a possible conclusion is that older people should have a pet.  And the alternative is to give them access to enjoy one on a regular basis.  Hence Millie's new adventures.  You've seen this picture before. It continues my own reminiscing of neighbourhoods from times gone-by.  I am not alone in finding pleasure in nostalgia, as this is one of the most-looked at pictures on my Fine Art America website - 8,000 views.  And then this location is a nostalgia seekers paradise.  This is Niagara-on-the-Lake.

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