Bees and flowers

I wish I could do this...

And do these wonderful flower paintings that Susan K. posted on her blog recently..

Raeside nails it again.

This is what I felt like doing but stuck it out until the end in the hopes that I might find some reason to vote.

I liked this comment from Frances Pugh:

Really, the "debate" format no longer works. Nobody seems to know how to actually debate and nobody seems to know how to moderate a debate. There are "Rules for Debate" which have not been in evidence for leaders' debates/ squabbles.
Time to change the format to something like the All Candidates meetings where questions can be asked, individuals can be addressed, and questions can be answered (or not).

Calamari

Elaine would have loved this joke. We always tried the calamari at any new restaurant we tried and were often disappointed. She would have liked the Four Olives calamari.

Thanksgiving approaches...six ways it's different from the US celebration.

Some of these things I didn't know!

(CNN)Thanksgiving comes to Canada first.
In many ways, it's not unlike its American counterpart. But if you can't bear the thought of a Thanksgiving without football and school pageants with Pilgrims and Native Americans, it's a whole new holiday.

Here are six ways Canadian Thanksgiving differs from the US holiday.

It honors a different Thanksgiving.
The date of the true first Thanksgiving is hotly contested. Some historians believe it occurred not in the US, but in Nunavut.
When Sir Martin Frobisher sailed from England to the Canadian territory in 1578, he and his crew celebrated with salt beef and mushy peas and thoroughly gave thanks for making it across the ocean safely.
The Pilgrims didn't arrive at Plymouth until 1621, but American Thanksgiving became a national holiday nearly a century before its Canadian counterpart did in 1879, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia.

It's in October
And on a Monday, to boot. Canadian Thanksgiving is observed on the second Monday of October every year, though many opt to feast on the weekend.
Its date has moved around several times, but in 1957, the government settled on October. The new date lined up with the completion of the Canadian harvest, and it's just early enough in the fall to beat the winter's biting cold, the Canadian Encyclopedia said.

It's not all about turkey
The American Thanksgiving stalwart is a Canadian staple, too, but celebrants often sub in with provincial delicacies.
Newfoundlanders might enjoy Jiggs' dinner, a boiled meat dish often paired with a split-pea pudding. In lieu of pumpkin pie, Ontarians often serve butter tarts, bite-sized pastry shells stuffed with a syrupy filling.
There are still plenty of seasonal vegetables, breads and beverages served. They're just prepared and presented in a uniquely Canadian way.

It's not observed nationwide
It's an official statutory holiday throughout Canada except in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Employers aren't required to pay their employees for the day off, so families often celebrate it the day before.

Football and parades are smaller affairs
As in the US, Thanksgiving in Canada brings with it football marathons, a nationally broadcast parade and plenty of family time. Those traditions are just a little pared down.
There's no department store-sponsored parade broadcast nationwide in Canada, but there is the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest Thanksgiving Day Parade. The German beerfest is televised on CTV with 120 floats and plenty of costumed characters.

Black Friday is out, Boxing Day is in
The Canadian equivalent of Black Friday takes place more than two months after Thanksgiving. On December 26, stores cut prices and open early in honor of Boxing Day.
The holiday originated in the UK -- and no, it's not a national celebration of pugilism. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, upper-class employers would share boxes of leftover presents or money with their servants, who were required to work on Christmas. The act of charity has evolved into a day of discounted shopping (and a convenient time to trade in an unwanted gift).

Prank calls

From "My clean sick sense of humour"

I seem to remember we only made these two prank calls but googling "prank calls" brings up lots.  I never made these alone, only with my friend, Linda. Of course, it was always her idea along with playing "knocky knock nine doors"....

Us: Is your refrigerator running?
Them: Yes
Us:You better catch it!! 

This was made to grocery stores.
Us: Do you have King Oscar in the can? (a brand of sardines)
Them: Yes
Us: Then you better let him out!

And it seems prank calls still exist. There are websites where you can download recordings to send to your friends and then tape their reactions. I'm not sure I would consider people who did this to me "friends".

https://www.prankdial.com

Free speech

From the blog of Seth Godin

How much is that piece of paper in the window?

Four years at MIT cost about $250,000 all in. Or, you could engage in more than 2,000 of their courses on their site, for free.

What’s the difference?

When you do education, you pay tuition, plus you pay with a focus on compliance. Traditional education requires that students trade in freedom of choice, coerced by tests and exams. And what do you get? You get an ‘A’ and you get a certificate.

The power of that certificate is extraordinary. Students (and their families) will go a lifetime in debt to get that paper. They’ll make choices about time and focus and geography for that paper, ignoring what’s ostensibly possible in exchange for the certainty of acquiring it.

Learning, on the other hand, is self-directed. Learning isn’t about changing our grade, it’s about changing the way we see the world. Learning is voluntary. Learning is always available, and it compounds, because once we’ve acquired it, we can use it again and again.

Most adults in the US read no more than a book a year. That’s because books aren’t assigned after you’ve got your paperwork done.

We’re surrounded by chances to learn, and yet, unless it’s sugarcoated or sold in the guise of earning a scarce credential, most of us would rather click on another link and swipe on another video instead.

The exception: People who have chosen to be high performers. Doctors, athletes, programmers and leaders who choose to make a ruckus understand that continuous learning is at the heart of what they’ll need to do.

“Will this be on the test?” is a question we learn from a young age. If you need to ask that before you encounter useful ideas, you’ve been trapped. It’s never been easier to level up, but the paper isn’t as important as we’ve been led to believe.

Reading

Itty Bitty Book Review: "Undue Influence"

"Undue Influence" by Anita Brookner

This is another author I sort of forgot about and then was reminded with the FB British Bookclub. When I posted that I was reading it, someone posted that she thought it was her best ever. I still have a few to catch up on but I just might agree. I wasn't too sure initially but was very impressed in the end. Well, like all good novels it's about a lot of things. The central character, Claire, is quite fascinating. She creates lives for the people she meets, and even people she really doesn't even really have contact with, and develops their personalities in her imagination. She's not quite so good about creating her own life although she feels she is in complete control but alas.

Stanley Park Brew Pub

When we were at The Sylvia the other day we walked over to take a look at the replacement for the Stanley Park Fish House. Maureen mentioned the seating looked pretty uncomfortable and it certainly isn't exactly what we like but I think they have added more chairs with backs at least and a number of the hard chairs have cushions added to them. I thought the menu looked rather interesting but just talking to Maureen last night and she isn't impressed by the food at all. The reviews are rather mixed. Apparently it's doing a great business so maybe everything will improve with time.

Lunch at The Sylvia yesterday

It was a gorgeous day and great to see our old haunts and even the Canada geese :)

The burger at The Sylvia was especially good...perhaps the best ever anytime, anywhere, for me.  The meat was cooked to perfection and all condiments and additions were just perfect. I asked the server if they had a new chef and she said the head chef helped in the kitchen for a while since it was particularly busy at lunch.  Perhaps he made the burger.

Sunflowers. sunsets and soup....three of my favourite things

John and Carol brought the sunflowers over....

And the sun set as usual.

I'm still tasting this amazing hot and sour soup Grace made from scratch last week...stock from neck and back bones and she brought some chili threads so those who like it hot (like Jim and Richard) could make it hotter and something to sour it more for those who like it more sour (me). Yum, yum, yum.

From the Britsh Bookclub on FB...names of groups of animals

I brought this up when I googled how these names came about. It was was from Quora. Makes some sense, I suppose.

"The terms used for assigning names to groups of animals are called 'terms of venery' in formal language. These 'terms of venery' derive from the English hunting tradition of the Late Middle Ages. This so-called 'hunting language' came to the English via the French. During this time, a specialized hunting vocabulary developed which put emphasis on sometimes even assigning different names to the same parts of different animals! "

Austen in Austin

This looks like a wonderful exhibit at the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin. This is where Jim has spent many weeks researching Huxley. They have so many wonderful collections I'm not surprised they have these Jane Austen materials. They recently bought Ian McEwan's papers. Well, that's what oil money can do!

The Ransom Center has its own unique history of collecting. Its holdings of Jane Austen offer a single-author window onto the evolution of modern collecting practices during the past half century. The Ransom Center, learning of my research, gave me the opportunity to curate their Jane Austen materials to tell the story of modern collecting in a special exhibition titled Austen in Austin. In 1957, when the Harry Ransom Center was founded, first editions of major writers were an acquisition priority for a library with world-class aspirations. Soon, the Ransom Center owned an enviable number of Jane Austen’s novels as rare firsts. Then, and as great writers are great readers, all manner of Austen copies began to arrive among the books and papers of other authors. Elsewhere, such unexpected “duplicates” of titles already owned in loftier editions might have been culled, but the Ransom Center held on to these books. Lucky for us, because these incidental catches of Austen now track her influence on other writers and artists.

The Austen in Austin section of the Stories to Tell gallery irreverently mixes high-value and low-value items from the Ransom Center collections. There are plenty of jaw-dropping first editions as well as a surprisingly large number of Austen family books. But there are also ordinary reprints made extraordinary by former owners plus rare commonplace versions of Austen’s novels, not the traditional stuff of collecting, that entered the Ransom Center as part of other scholarly archives or projects. Austen in Austin is on view through Feb. 2, 2020.

https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2019/09/26/why-are-some-books-collected-and-others-merely-read/?fbclid=IwAR0LltaQRbDqZwh1bLItKTan7_xu3Quke1xDEymKJJya8IRmNgvYIM8PGIc

Manchester Libraries posted this in The British Bookclub

So, of course, I had to google "cakes and books"....

This came up...might be interesting to read. I'm not familiar with it.

Review from Goodreads:

Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best

Most cats...

And then there was Oscar who jumped up on everyone but Jim was his favourite. You can see how Jim is very accomodating to him. He was his "assistant editor".

The Little Free Library Project

The Little Free Library is a nonprofit organization that aims to inspire people and help build community by encouraging people to install book exchanges in their neighborhoods. Since 2009, the organization helped install over 75,000 libraries in 88 countries and exchange millions of books annually, spreading the love for books everywhere. Recently, inspired by this project, one librarian from Idaho decided to create her own unique little library.

It was created by Sharalee Armitage Howard, an artist, librarian and former bookbinder from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Her family recently had to chop down a 110-year-old cottonwood tree standing in their yard and decided to not let its trunk go to waste by installing a tiny library inside it. They carved it from the inside and decorated it with a tiny shingled roof to give it a cozy, magical look

I pass these sometimes on my travels in Vancouver so must keep some books in the car so I can contribute something.
https://littlefreelibrary.org/start/

Some other examples. I especially love the British Phone Booth design since I imagine these phone booths like all phone booths will be a dying breed.

"The Testaments" made the Booker Short List of 6 novels.

For more than 50 years, the Booker Prize has recognized outstanding fiction in the English-speaking world and is considered one of the top literary awards. Each year, a panel of judges selects one novel as the year's best fiction work written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.

This year's longlist of 13 books was announced in July. "If you only read one book this year, make a leap. Read all 13 of these," said founder and director of Hay Festival Peter Florence, who also serves as the chair of this year's jury. "There are Nobel candidates and debutants on this list."

The shortlist was announced Tuesday, leaving six authors and their books in the running for the 2019 Booker Prize of £50,000 or roughly $60,325. 

The winner for 2019 award will be announced on October 14.

Here's the list of the authors who made the 2019 Booker Prize's longlist along with their books. The short-list authors have asterisks.

*Margaret Atwood (Canada), "The Testaments" (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

Kevin Barry (Ireland), "Night Boat to Tangier" (Canongate Books)

Oyinkan Braithwaite (UK/Nigeria), "My Sister, The Serial Killer" (Atlantic Books)

*Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK), "Ducks, Newburyport" (Galley Beggar Press)

*Bernardine Evaristo (UK), "Girl, Woman, Other" (Hamish Hamilton)

John Lanchester (UK), "The Wall" (Faber & Faber)

Deborah Levy (UK), "The Man Who Saw Everything" (Hamish Hamilton)

Valeria Luiselli (Mexico/Italy), "Lost Children Archive" (4th Estate)

*Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), "An Orchestra of Minorities" (Little Brown)

Max Porter (UK), "Lanny" (Faber & Faber)

*Salman Rushdie (UK/India), "Quichotte" (Jonathan Cape)

*Elif Shafak (UK/Turkey), "10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World" (Viking)

Jeanette Winterson (UK), "Frankissstein" (Jonathan Cape)

I got a laugh out of this

Adrian Raeside nails it again

Itty Bitty Book Review: "The Testaments"

"The Testaments" by Margaret Atwood

Well, of course I had to read this but I did approach it with a bit of trepidation since I thought it could be rather depressing. And also since I seem to have some depressing reading coming up for my two bookclubs. For October one is reading Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the other Hardy's Jude the Obscure. I have read both (albeit a million years ago) so I may just watch the movies:)

But back to "The Testaments". We know this is about the downfall of Gilead but how it all comes about is quite fascinating and Atwood uses quite a bit of humour surprisingly and it ends up being quite a thriller in the end. Like Kate Atkinson's "Big Sky", you know the bad guys are going to lose in the end but both authors spin a rather amazing yarn about how that happens.

I think the novel is really quite wonderful and an amazing achievement. I hope she wins the Booker and I really hope she will win the Nobel Prize for Literature at some time in the next few years. The Nobel Prize is only awarded to living authors. Her body of work and her contribution to Canadian Literature  deserves to be recognized with that honour.

I picked up Season One of the TV series of The Handmaid's Tale at the library today so will be interesting to view that. It certainly has had tremendous reviews.

Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing

We haven't been to the Audain Gallery in Whistler yet and now it's a must to see this wonderful new exhibit...can't miss that!

From The Vancouver Sun:

WHISTLER — When did Emily Carr become the Emily Carr loved by Canadians across the country?

A new exhibition at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler makes the visual argument that a big step in Carr’s transformation from someone with talent into one of Canada’s top artists occurred during her trip to France in 1910 and 1911. During those 16 months, Carr took lessons from artists who could teach her about a new approach to artmaking called modernism being followed by the avant-garde in Paris. The lessons paid off: Carr’s work was chosen for the 1911 exhibition in the city’s Salon d’Automne, arguably the top art show in the world at the time.

Kiriko Watanabe is co-curator along with Kathryn Bridge of the AAM exhibition, Emily Carr: Fresh Seeing, which opens Saturday.

Watanabe said the exhibition brings together 64 watercolours and paintings from numerous private and public collections. They’re arranged chronologically and include works that Carr made in France, as well as works she did immediately after returning to B.C. and going on a summer trip up the coast to the remote Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw communities.

“There was a window of time after she came back from France until she started visiting First Nations villages that summer,” Watanabe said at the museum. “That’s probably when she started looking at her old works, her watercolours, and started to incorporate colours and techniques she learned in France. You can see her confidence increasing.”

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/emily-carrs-trip-to-france-in-1910-11-led-to-breakthrough-for-artist