Master of Laughter

The most famous line Bob Mankoff has written, was spoken by a cartoon executive at a desk: "No Thursday's out.  How about never - is never good for you?" He has stepped down as cartoon editor of the New Yorker, effective at the end of April. What will Mankoff do once May arrives? “I think I will rest on my plaudits for a while, if I can find them,” he says. “Last time I tried resting on them, I slipped and threw my back out, so I’m going to be cautious.” He founded the online Cartoon Bank - a way to make money by licensing the nine cartoons out of every 10 that got rejected, and to encourage and support cartoonists.  You can read his own Brief But Spectacular - the short PBS each week that showcases interesting people and their passions. Here's an excerpt of how he came to that famous line: "Often something that comes out of your own real-life experience, you don't directly use. You modify it within the form. I was on the phone and someone was brushing me off. So I just said to them, how about never? Is never good for you? Then I tweaked it to make it into a cartoon. That has the syntax of politeness, and yet the message is rude. And after 9/11: "The Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon came just a couple of months after 9/11. One woman is saying to another, "It's hard, but, slowly, I'm getting back to hating everyone." It is like Christmas for me yesterday on my trip to Martin Farms.  Bob Martin, known as the Veggie Guy, is a wholesale grower of all kinds of plants, flowers and vegetables.  He allows me to pick up left over plug trays - perhaps 20 rows x 8 plants each.  That would be around 150 plants per tray if it were full.  There are about 30 of these lining the driveway having come home yesterday.  So that would come to something like 4,000 little plants.  So you can understand what makes it like Christmas.   The panorama of the cherry blossoms across the street was both a great sight and amazing scent.

Stupid House, Smart House

Last week's Globe and Mail had an article about the stupid home vs. the smart home.  The writer was pleased his home was still stupid. I have a 'stupid' stove  it only has knobs.  It is without a digital clock, timer, read-out of oven temperatures, etc.  It had some catastrophic failures - there still are electronic components. So I was most intrigued with a smart house, and how that might be going. How do we know a smart home? It has a Nest Thermostat.  What a wonderful name for a company that makes smart home products.  What about a Wink home automation hub?  That's also a catchy device name. And then there is the Amazon Echo that controls other devices. Don't leave out the If This Then That Rules - another control device. The headlines that appear from a google search are also an entertainment: Don't bother trying to make your dumb house smart What smart homes are still so dumb Are smart homes just stupid? Will smart homes make us stupid lazy? The dumb state of the smart home My vote is cast without any experience whatsoever - smart homes are about witty names and clever ideas. I found a patch of mascari (grape hyacinth) on Ninth Street on Saturday.  And the second collage is last year and this year's Niagara Street cherry tree. What a contrast of blue sky vs gray sky.

Blossoming!

The news last week said that the asteroid that is coming 1.1 million miles distance from Earth is 'a reminder that somewhere out there an asteroid may have our name on it'.  It made me think of silly expressions, such as: "Don't worry if plan A fails, there are 25 more letters in the alphabet." We have arrived at Spring in Niagara.  We had warm weather on Sunday and Monday and the earliest blossoms opened.  Grapes, on the other hand, open with the lengthening days, so won't bloom for a few weeks yet. Our first picture of the blossom trail is shows migrant workers pruning the orchards.  "Migrant Dreams" is a documentary that profiles their plight - wages lower than our minimum wage, lack of health care, and living conditions that can be unsafe.  The circumstances are described in this article. I became aware of this because of the tireless work by Michael Hahn for the migrant workers.  Centred in Beamsville, he started out providing bicycles for transportation and now has expanded to clothing, a doctor's clinic, and other services they have difficulty accessing. A few weeks ago, I was part of the Grimsby Rotary Club's dinner for Niagara area migrants.  They come to Mike Hahn's home base - St. Albans church - on Sunday each week for a church service in Spanish, to visit the doctor in the one-room clinic, and to have a home-cooked meal.  It is very rewarding to be of service for an evening.  It goes a step towards awareness of the issues.  So now everywhere I go, I am so aware of our migrant workers and how many there are. our last two pictures show the row of corkscrew willows in spring sunshine vs fog - what a great demonstration of light creating emotion and story.

How Deep?

Our Earth Day celebration starts with the question:  What tree has the deepest roots?  Our answer came from Rochester's Neighbourhood Research Centre and they listed all kinds of records referenced from Trees are Good website:   The Oldest Tree known is a Redwood named Eternal God. The tree, found in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in California, has a height of 238 feet and a diameter of 19.6 feet. It is believed to be 12,000 years old, but this figure is disputed; others believe the tree to be only 7,000 years old, still a world record. The Most Massive Tree ever known was the “Lindsey Creek Tree”, a Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) with a minimum trunk volume of 90,000 cubic feet and a minimum total mass of 3630 tons. The tree blew over in a storm in 1905. The living tree with the greatest mass is “General Sherman”, a giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, in Sequoia National Park in California. It is 275 feet tall with a girth of 102 feet and 8 inches. The Tree Network with the Greatest Mass, a network of Quaking Aspen, (Populus tremuloides) growing from a single root system in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, covers 106 acres and weighs about 6600 tons (13,200,000 pounds). This clonal system is genetically uniform and acts as a single organism, changing color and shedding leaves in unison. The Greatest Girth of a tree was recorded in the late 18th century on Mount Etna in Sicily, Italy. A European Chestnut (Castanea sativa) known as the Tree of the Hundred Horses, had a circumference of 190 feet. It has since separated into three parts. The Tallest Deciduous Tree currently known in America is a Pecan in Mer Rouge, Louisiana. It stands over 160 feet tall and over 95 feet in spread. Deepest Roots. The greatest reported depth to which a tree’s roots have penetrated is 400 feet by a Wild Fig tree at Echo Caves, near Ohrigstad, Mpumalanga, South Africa. The Greatest Spread of a tree occurs on a Banyan tree in the Indian Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. It has 1,775 prop or support roots, a circumference of 1,350 feet, covers three acres, and dates from before 1787. The Tallest Tree known to have existed is an Australian Eucalyptus at Watts River, Victoria in Australia. It was reported in 1872 to measure 435 feet tall, but probably measured over 500 feet at some point in its life. The Tallest Living Tree is a Coast Redwood known as the “Mendocino Tree” found in Montgomery State Reserve, Ukiah, CA. It is about 367 feet and 6 inches tall with a 10.5 foot diameter and is over 1000 years old and still growing. The Fastest Growing Tree is an Albizzia falcata in Sabah, Malaysia. In 1974 it was found to have grown 35 feet and 3 inches in 13 months–about 1.1 inches per day. The Slowest Growing Tree is a White Cedar located on a cliff side in the Great Lakes area of Canada. At 155 years old, it is less than 4 inches tall. The Most Isolated Tree known is a solitary Norwegian Spruce on Campbell Island in the Pacific. Its nearest companion is over 120 nautical miles away in the Auckland Islands. The Most Dangerous Tree is the Manchineel Tree, Hippomane mancinella, of the Caribbean coast and the Florida Everglades. This species has had an evil reputation since the Spanish explorers first feared it in the 16th century. The entire tree exudes an extremely poisonous and caustic sap that was once used as arrow poison. Contact to the skin causes an eruption of blisters, contact to the eye can blind a person, and one bite of the fruit causes blistering and severe pain. The majestic Magnolia is blooming in Niagara.  This one is in Queenston, the historic town just downstream from Niagara Falls.

Easter Panies

The Easter Egg Roll at the White House took place.  Not being American I had no idea how complicated it is.  The news about it is that the Trump administration staff have no experience and are behind schedule.  About 35,000 people took part in the event during Barack Obama's time.  It has a tradition of being considered a big event.  Tickets are awarded to lottery winners in February so they can travel from out-of-town. However this year the lottery didn't happen till March, and people were notified at the end of March. All sorts of people get invitations that are behind schedule.  The company that manufactures the eggs had to remind the president to submit an order - on Twitter.  And then the organizer is supposed to be the First Lady, but Melania Trump lives in New York and hasn't appointed her full team yet. The only staffer with experience turns out to be Sean Spicer.  He portrayed the Easter Bunny in 2008. The story in the Guardian is full of puns - bedevilled, poached, fall foul, scrambling, poorly laid, being fried, crack under pressure. One has to be impressed with all the ways to cook eggs.  Today they are associated with breakfast.  The Lumberjack breakfast sounds like the most interesting of all the breakfast stories.   "While it has been a source of controversy where the lumberjack breakfast came from, the most cited source is that the lumberjack breakfast was first served in a Vancouver Hotel, in 1870. The breakfast consisted of eggs galore, assorted fried pork strips, slabs, slices, and flapjacks. It is said by Anita Stewart that the tradition of hearty cooking developed because of men needing the energy for manual labor." We look at abstracts of Pansy flowers, using extension tubes so one can get very close and follow the flow of the lines of these tiny petals.

Bees Come Down

I spotted the first blossom trees in Niagara.  But I have to admit I don't know what kind of blossoms they are.  I am thinking apricots.  I remember in 2012 when we had the mildest of winters, Ii saw apricots blossoms in March, and then there was cold weather so the crop didn't develop. I saw these trees across from the United Mennonite Home in Vineland. I went to Cherry Lane on Victoria Street, to see if there was anything blooming there.  Cherry Lane has quite a distinction.  This is a family where the tenth generation is farming.  But that isn't their fame.  What distinguishes their family is the development of the first red peach - Red Haven.  It's the best known one now. They also have a major processing and cherry brining facility. There's an overview of Niagara fruit growers here. Vineyards are showing the pink but at the ground level - this second picture is at Jordan Station. I think the flowers are a wild/weedy form of lamium.  I have a bit in my garden too. And I checked out my favourite weeping cherry tree on Niagara Street (across from Laura Secord High School) in St. Catharines, and the blossoms are showing pink. Have a Happy Easter and Passover Celebration.

Expressions of Twelve

How do expressions come about?  Why is twelve a dozen?  I summarize Wikipedia's explanation: A dozen is a grouping of twelve. It is a derivation from the cardinal number douze or twelve.  The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the moon or months in a cycle of the sun or year. There are many themes to words within words. I found a list of 12 words with their letters in alphabetic order.  There must be a large following for these things as I find many variations, articles, etc.  Here's the list: effort abhors ghosty accent beefily billowy biopsy chintz almost access bijoux aegilops These come from buzzed.com I thought you might enjoy the visual results that came up when I searched on this.  This looks like a beloved area in teaching, learning, and in games and puzzles. To reproduce this do a search in google for just images, and then scroll through the many creative representations.  Today our word lists are sandwiched between rust on a dumpster.

Of Fakes and Facts

On Friday, Google rolled out a fact-checking feature.  It sent me on a journey to find out about fake news.  The fact-checking feature pops up over hotly debated topics that appear in search results.  The example I used was the headline of the Woman Arrested for Training Squirrels to Attack Her Ex-Boyfriend.  The feature shows the headline, then the site that did the checking - snopes, and indicates if it is true or false.  This one was false.  It is an hilarious story, though. So I read a few articles, and find that this is a complicated and difficult one.  The best was the insightful article in the Harvard Business Review The U.S. Media's Problems are Much Bigger than Fake News and Filter Bubbles" Here is the conclusion of the article: "Which leads to my conclusion: Even if we could somehow push “reset,” we would have to expect the same sort of coverage that we got. The problems are too deep and structural for anything else. What’s the way forward? There are no easy answers to the question. This analysis mainly points to solutions that won’t work. Voluntary efforts at restraint by well-meaning journalists won’t work, because of advertising-based business models and competition. Eliminating fake news won’t change the fact that voters ignore ideas contrary to their beliefs. And it won’t solve the media’s structural challenges or change its incentives. Media companies, their regulators, and their customers — all of us — have to look for ways to confront these challenges. The stakes could not be higher." Our pictures today show the waterfront at Burlington with the view towards Toronto and then towards Niagara, showing the Burlington Bridge. I was there yesterday for a photography seminar.

Beards on Parade

We can all think of a few famous historical figures with beards,  What is a beard?  Little did I know that it is a 'collection' of hair that grows on the chin and cheeks of humans and some non-human animals.  What I wondered about is the driver for the popularity of male beards. Were these famous men with the trend at the time or against it?  Beard popularity has waxed and waned a few times in my own lifetime. So beards have been linked with notions of masculinity and male courage, and cultures have mandated it or on the opposite side, considered it uncivilized.  It comes and goes. Trends have swayed back and forth over the centuries.  In modern times, there have been prohibitions of beards - in jobs where breathing masks are required - airline pilots, firefighters, etc. And sports has some traditions that are interesting. The Playoff beard is a tradition common with teams in the NHL.   The story of beards os extensive and one can read it in the book "Of Beards and Men" by Christopher Oldstone-Moore.   The link provides a summary of the book. Today we look at two more barns in the St. Catharines area, and the last picture is an abandoned house on Sann Road at the Lake, which is clearly about to become a mansion near the lake.