Fern says she can trace her family history back at least 145 million years.  That is quite a feat – I thought I was doing good to find some ancestors in England in the late 1700′s . Fern comes from a group with the beautiful, but tongue twisting name Pteridophyta. I come from a group of not so beautiful Fishmongers.

Fern knows advanced mathematics. She shows off her knowledge every time she raises another frond. Fronds are examples of  Fractals. You can see more of these mathematical wonders if you visit my Dill Flowers.

The more I learn about the plants in my yard, the more humble I feel.

For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat and wrong.
H.L. Mencken

Except in the case of the Simple Egg.

Fortunately nature recognized that the Egg was eggsactly the type of ineggspensive, eggstremely simple container needed for many housing situations.  With an eggsternal shell that would survive eggstreme conditions (barring eggsplosions), the egg was an eggsellent choice where eggsessive sharp edges were undesirable for the eggspectant mother when it was time to eggspell it.

I like eggs, and have written two other egg stories:

Precisely and Eggs-actly – simple mathematics to eggsplain the shape of an egg, plus an arithmetic lesson from Calvin and Hobbes.

Much Ado About the Devil – a bit about what you need to know about the devil and deviled eggs.

I eggspect some of you are eggsperts, and will add further egg insights via the comment section.

29.22% came from the United States
6.75% came from the UK
3.93%  came from Canada
2.22% came from Australia

I wondered how these statistics looked in comparison to the WordPress.com Blogging Sea, which has published such information on their Stats Page.  According to these figures, there are 70.5 million WordPress sites in the world, half of which WordPress hosts. 66% of the blogs hosted on WordPress are written in English. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t indicate which countries these English writers come from, so I thought I would do a quick survey of the last 50 blogs that were chosen by the editor of WordPress’s Freshly Pressed to see what countries are represented.  The results were:

38 from the United States (76%)
2 Americans currently living in Europe (4%)
6 from the UK (12%)
2 from Canada (4%)
1 from Australia (2%)
1 from Holland (2%)

Now I don’t know if these statistics reflect the actual percentages of WordPress bloggers in each country, or whether they reflect the preferences of the Freshly Pressed Editor.  I don’t know whether these stats would remain consistent over the course of a year or two.

These stats were, however, an eye opener for me. I had been under the assumption that every WordPress blogger who followed the Freshly Pressed guidelines had the same chance of being chosen as every other blogger. I hadn’t thought about the fact there might be other dynamics at work, such as a distribution based on country of origin. I also discovered that a significant percentage of Freshly Pressed blogs are written by relatively new bloggers, many having started blogging within the last few months.

This is all good information for me. According to my  research, my Canadian blog, which has been floating around for 2 years now, is statistically NOT likely to ever get Freshly Pressed – I’m getting long in the tooth, as it were! That is a much more comforting thought than the doubt that creeps in when all my blogging associates have been asked to the Pressed Prom and I haven’t.

I tell little stories, but other Canadians tell much larger ones.  The National Film Board of Canada hosts many of these on their website, and I invite you to listen to one of them from the actor Paul Gross: Remembrance.

A January Sunrise in 4% Country.

We are Canadians and we live in the land of  “The True North Strong and Free.” We may only be 4% of the blogging world, but our stories are are as big as the land we live in!

Things have settled down a bit today, so I can spend some time thinking about my position on the Stop Online Piracy Act:  SOPA/PIPA. The goal of the United States House of Representatives seems worthy enough. In the briefest terms, the intent of it is: “… H.R. 3261 allows the Attorney General to seek injunctions against foreign websites that steal and sell American innovations and products.”

The devil is in the details and the enforcing of this legislation could possibly restrict the rights and freedoms of  everyone, not just the pirates. In the end, the pirates will find other ways to keep doing business, leaving those who abide by the law holding yet another bag of restrictions.

Of course, I am a Canadian, so I don’t spend too much time worrying about yet another limitation on the rights of Americans. But this new legislation is being supported by the American Music and Movie industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the electronic and auto industries, groups that seem a bit like pirates themselves sometimes.

I  think the internet today is like the Old West – open, free, and dangerous if you don’t take responsibility for your own welfare. Maybe SOPA is akin to when the military moved in to make things safer for folks who should probably have just headed back East to where things weren’t quite so wild.

The responsibility for policing the internet belongs to each and every person who accesses it. There would be no desire for legislation like SOPA if there weren’t so many ‘law abiding’ individuals who are willing to buy cheap pirated product.

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My Similar Story relating to Copyright: Reblogging and Image Copyright, Part 2

Most people know what Stone Skipping is, but may not have heard about Gerplunking. “Gerplunk” – the sound a that a rock makes when it hits a body of water!

Ice makes gerplunking a challenge!

In 2009, winter weather arrived before we could close up the cabin. The water lines froze, making the shut down a challenge.  But a wonderful thing had happened at the lake and on the side channels of the river. A fairly thick layer of ice formed on the water, but there was also a large air pocket separating the ice from the water. Nature had created a drum, of sorts. We all spent a few hours skipping rocks over the ice. They made such an interesting series of sounds  as they bounced along the surface – “pock, tickety tock, tock, tock, tock, tock…” We counted the tock sounds, just as we would have counted the skips if they had been on water.

Of course, the grandchildren had to try to break the ice by heaving larger and larger rocks! Now and then they were rewarded with a satisfying “gerplunk”!

Elsewhere in the resort, immense icicles had formed on the trees from the spray of the water from the fountains.

Every little puddle of water had frozen into wonderful lacy creations, some so fragile they shattered with the least pressure.

It was a magical week-end – pock, tickety tock, tock, tock, tock…

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My Similar Cabin Story: Weekly Photo Challenge: Comfort 

Mosquito season is over. Not a single breath of wind disturbs the leaves that will soon blanket the woods and meadows.

The only human stirring along the edge of the little lake is me!  I capture the Peace and Tranquility with my camera, then, I do what the Grandchildren would expect me to do. I throw rocks in the water.

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My Similar Cabin Story: Weekly Photo Challenge – Opportunity

It is not like the roads were bad, but it is a fact of life in our part of the world that a fresh snow throws all the Worker Bees into a tailspin.

Worker Bees – that sparked the idea for this blog post. To start it off, I thought I would show you a poem and the attached art work from a Grade 1 class assignment I did. I didn’t make up the poem. I just had to copy it into my scribbler, then draw an appropriate illustration.

I don’t remember what I knew about bees at the time. Maybe we learned something about them in class. My drawing skills had taken me beyond stick figures, and I could sketch a reasonable impression of a bee, but I didn’t seem to know how to draw a dress.

For the next X-6 years, I didn’t pay much attention to what a bee really looks like. Then I bought a macro lens for The Car Guy’s camera.  It opened up a whole new world of little things made to look big!

This is the Hunt’s Bumble Bee (Latin Name: Bombus huntii). It is a beautiful fuzzy yellow critter with a rusty orange stripe and black rear end!

My drawing skills have not progressed much since Grade 1, but my computer skills have. Photoshop Elements let me turn the bee photo into a drawing.

But, I wanted to colour my drawing, and with just a bit more computer wizardry, my bee was transformed!

Enough fun for today! I have to get ready to make a trip to the big city to visit the dentist. Hope all the worker bees are safely in their hives when it is time for me to navigate the freeway!

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My Similar Insect Story: “I Can Hear You,” said the Moth

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon … And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air  … and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes of Crayolas.
Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things)

For the past few summers, the grandchildren have arrived at the cabin shortly after school lets out. Their invasion means the launch of the Summer Art Season. Crisp white or coloured construction paper, freshly sharpened pencils and pencil crayons, scissors, glue and the good old wax crayon – all stand ready for action.

This particular box of crayons is a mix of old ones and new ones; ones with sharp points and ones with rounded ends; ones with new paper covers and ones that have lost their paper; favourite colours and seldom used ones. The wax crayon is the tool of choice when a large swath of colour needs to be laid down!  At the end of each day, pictures are cleared off the dinner table, then sorted and stacked in the drawing cupboard where they await their fate. Some will see the light of day again on the door of a fridge. Some will take pride of place in a scrapbook, and some will get scanned and saved in a folder of cherished memories. Some, well, they still sit in a stack in the cupboard at the cabin.  I’ll see if the kids want to use them to light the first bonfire of the season -this could be the launch of a new tradition!

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My Similar Launch Story: Weekly Photo Challenge: Up – Hot Air Balloons being launched

I am, however, a bit touchy about the issue of other bloggers using my Photographs without permission. In a previous post, When Does Reblogging Violate Copyright?, I mentioned that one of my posts had been reblogged. I complained to WordPress about two things:
1. The reblog contained one of my photos, used without my permission.
2. The site that reblogged my post seemed to consist entirely of reblogged posts, without a single word of original content.

I haven’t received a reply from WordPress about my complaint, but when I checked the offending blog today, I saw that WordPress had dealt with the issue by removing the blog:

hello100blog.wordpress.com is no longer available.
This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.
WordPress.com

A WordPress Happiness Engineer, Erica V., (who was on the receiving end of my complaint), also wrote  some suggestions in The Daily Post for finding photos that are in the Public Domain – A Picture’s Worth.

Of course, I still don’t have an answer as to whether WordPress thinks Reblogging violates image copyright…

Hopefully everyone understands that it is a big NO-NO to copy photographs and images without permission. Of course, the consequences of doing this are probably about NIL unless someone discovers it and complains… Nonetheless, there are a number of image sources on the internet that don’t violate copyright. In addition to the ones Erica mentions, here are a few others to consider:

1. Wikimedia has an impressive list of  Public Domain Image Resources.

2. Microsoft Office has an Image database that lets you search for and download Clip Art, Photos, Sounds and Animations.

3. YouTube  is a popular source for interesting video, but embedding a YouTube video in your blog is not something you should do without taking a few precautions. The people who upload material to YouTube are expected to abide by the information presented on the Copyright Education page. Not all of them follow those rules, however. YouTube cannot, of course, review every video that is uploaded, so they depend on subsequent viewers to alert them to Copyright Violations.

Before a blogger embeds a YouTube video in their blog, they should also assess whether it violates copyright or not.  HubPages presents a comprehensive Copyright Infringement discussion.

Stanford University Libraries discusses Copyright and Fair Use.  It is very readable, and includes the  fact that Copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1923.  Gowlings discusses the similarities and differences between Canadian and American Copyright.

I know it all sounds quite complicated, and I know that now and then most bloggers are in violation of something. But that shouldn’t stop any of us from trying to do the right thing, not the easy thing…

It was an Open and Shut Case. The Confectioner had no trouble identifying the culprit who was making off with the Candy Canes…

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We decorated the Gingerbread Men on Boxing Day. In Canada, Boxing Day is December 26th, and at The Red House, it is the day that we normally cook The Wokadoo. And just what is a Wokadoo, you might ask? Many years ago, one of our young nephews was having trouble saying, or perhaps even remembering, the word ‘turkey’. But he was sure, when the bird was still alive, that it made some sort of noise and he was equally sure the sound was ‘cock a doodle doo’. But again, he couldn’t put his finger on that word exactly. The very best he could come up with, was that the bird I had in the oven was a ‘wokadoo’, and that is what I have called a turkey ever since.

This year, however, we didn’t cook a Wokadoo, opting out for a ham instead. A ham is quick and simple, and compliments the rest of the meal which was prepared by all the guests – pyrogy and holopchi (Ukrainian staples that have many names that can be spelled many ways.)

Our kitchen was a bee hive of activity with no less than 14 people mixing, rolling, stuffing, cooking. 20 pounds of potatoes, a big bag of flour, 2 big cabbages, pounds of bacon, onions, cheddar cheese…

And sinks full of dirty dishes. Bowls, platters, cookie sheets, pots, pans… all were washed over and over again, just to keep up with the pyrogy assembly line.

Once the pyrogy were stuffed, boiled and lined up on cookie sheets, they made their way out to the giant deep freeze, which is the snow bank on the back deck. When they were well chilled, some became dinner that night, while the rest were bagged and sent home with the guests.

Later that night, when the last dish was done, I surveyed the kitchen.  A plate full of Gingerbread Men were on the counter, their candy eyes imploring me to turn out the light and let them get some sleep.

Question: What did the gingerbread man put on his bed?
Answer: A cookie sheet.
Author Unknown

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ABC Gingerbread Men

Another Cookie Story: Gingerbread