Liberty of London is a luxury department store in London dating from 1875. The store's interior was made from the timbers from two ancient battle ships. The decks were used for the flooring. In all, there was 24,000 cubic feet of ship timbers.
My thoughts of Liberty are around its fabric print design and production. Liberty used the finest silks and cottons in the making of its beautiful floral designs. Liberty prints were readily available in Toronto in the 1970s into the 1980s. But those stores are now gone - Eaton's, Simpsons, and the Hudson's Bay. standalone fabric stores are gone from regular shopping places. There is a single Fabricland in St. Catharines on Welland Avenue, and that is unusual.
I went online to see if they still make the prints that I had worn. Yes, there is one of my favourites - poppy and daisy still available. It is part of Liberty Fabrics’ Classics collection which started in 1979, created to champion the most well-known and iconic designs from the Liberty archive all year around.
And the price? It is $62.00 a metre at 1.36m width. Ouch if you wanted to make anything to actually wear.
Here's are the Editor's Notes:
Poppy and Daisy is a fine-lined and meadowy layout, which has been part of the Liberty archive since the 1910s. An archetypal Liberty floral, it would have originally been a wood block print.
Our Tana Lawn™ cotton is a fabric built by obsession, perfected into a modern masterpiece of production through a bespoke process that has evolved over a century. Printed in our very own Liberty Printing Mill, located between Milan and Lake Como in northern Italy, Tana realises unmatchable fluidity with a silk-like touch, unique print quality and striking colour vibrancy. Machine washable and durable enough for daily wear, it can be used to create everything from simple separates to spectacular statement pieces.
Here's the screen print of the lovely design.
And this picture? A print from Liberty Village in Toronto.
What do people do for Mother's Day to get in the Guinness Book of Records?
The oldest mother to conceive naturally turns out to be Dawn Brooke, of the U.K. in 1997. That's a record about giving birth rather than about Mother's Day. And that's where the Guinness Book of Records goes for Mothers.
Here's the weird one: In 2008, when she was 56, Jacelyn Dalenberg agreed to be a surrogate mom for her daughter, Kom Coseno. Jacelyn successfully carried and delivered three healthy granddaughters, who were delivered by C-section at a Cleveland hospital.
That makes her the oldest woman to give birth to grandchildren.
And then there's the record for the most number of children - in the 1700s (supposedly and highly unlikely) - the wife of Feodor Vassilyex (she has no first name on record) is claimed to have given birth to 69 children - 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets.
But that's all about giving birth.
Are there strange celebrations? Yes, in Peru, they visit their mothers who have past at the cemeteries. In Australia, they give "mums" to mums (chrysanthemums). Mexico's Mother's Day starts with Las Manzanitas serenade. In Nepal, they visit Mata Tirtha Pond - which is dedicated to showing love and respect to mothers, living and deceased. Ethiopia has a three-day celebration for Mother's Day. Thailand combines its celebration of their queen with Mother's Day. In Japan it is red carnations that are traditional on Mother's Day.
Aren't these all sort of sweet, but tame? Compare that to Chicago breaking the record for the biggest game of catch on Father's Day with 2,000 people participating.
Do you remember the Monty Python movie with the "you must find me a shrubbery" scene? It is "Scene 17: How to Find that Perfect Shrubbery" and you can read it HERE. And I recommend you read it as it is hilarious.
My favourite moment is Roger the Shrubber's short but excellent "soliloquy":
"Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say 'ni' at will to old ladies. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history."
Scene 18 follows with an escalation of the shrubbery demands:
"First you must find... another shrubbery! Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must place it here, beside this shrubbery, only slightly higher so you get a two layer effect with a little path running down the middle."
I have found a third scene that could be inserted. A decades later sequel to the movie. This comes from the middle-sized garden weekly blog, and this week is showcasing blobberies.
Here's the possible scene:
"And now build us a blobbery. One with balls, clouds and lollipops. They give a garden structure and interest all year round. And they are easy to clip and maintain."
"And mix them together – different types of plants as blobs – and sometimes they’ll merge together over time."
Wouldn't that be a perfect sequel to the shrubbery scene?
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?
There's a Kafkaesque story where a woman from Guatemala and her two U.S.-born children made a wrong turn in Detroit to go to the nearest Costco. They ended up on the international bridge connecting them to Windsor. Of course they were detained as she is not a U.S. citizen without legal status.The woman's mistaken-GPS story is not uncommon. More than 200 people have been detained at the same location since January with more than 90 percent mistakenly driving onto the bridge's toll plaza. It doesn't say so but I wonder if they were all looking for the nearest Costco - which turns out to be on the Canadian side of the bridge.
There are some "epic failures" of GPS failures. The article points to human failure in continuing to follow the instructions despite what they are seeing. Salon magazine covered them in 2014 HERE.
GPS sends elderly German man into sand pile.
Girls drive down boat launch into lake.
Japanese tourists drive rental car into Pacific Ocean.