Marilyn's Photos - Nov 10 2025 - Glass Skin

 

That got my attention - glass skin.  Let’s find out what glass skin is.  OK, even before that, what is K-Beauty.  Because glass skin is promoted as a K-Beauty trend.  Glass skin comes from the Korean phrase “yuri pibu” which translates to glass skin.  There are a lot of Korean culture trends now - K-pop likely being the best known.   All the pictures are very young, attractive Asian women.  “Luminous, smooth, and clear” - from within.  That’s how it is promoted by the experts who promote it, and the leader in the field is Alicia Yoon. She says that there are two key parts to achieving glass skin: “The first is to nurture it with ingredients that support overall skin health, like essential fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals. For hydration, you'll want to seek out humectants like hyaluronic acid or glycerin, and to calm and protect the skin, you'll want to load up on antioxidants. Secondly, target any specific issues with powerful-yet-gentle active ingredients to amplify your results. For instance, since many factors like excessive sun exposure, pollution, and other external and internal stressors can lead to both uneven skin tone and accelerated loss of firmness, Yoon says both brightening and firming ingredients (like retinol) are also great to incorporate into your skin routine.” Doesn’t this have that “influecer” tone to it? And I expect that there are a lot of products one is going to buy, and then one is going to spend a lot of time doing all sorts of “exact routines”.  I’d rather watch the snow storm than work on a beauty treatment.  And there’s lots of snow to watch right now. This picture was taken a year ago at Sunshine Express.  Today’s Chrysanthemums are white with snow on top and brown underneath from severe cold.  Time to get the winter greens.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 9 2025 - Weather Report

 

Is it a change in me or our general social consciousness.  I like looking at the weather report.  I don’t remember paying attention to the weather when I was younger.   But now, It is visually interesting with the wave of temperatures and icons to forecast what is to come.  And what is to come today?  Snow is light blue on the  radar picture - right now.  Look out the window and confirm - white on the ground.  And later it is forecast to be dark blue.  More white on the ground. Checking out the radar map has its own distractions.  Look how close Canada is to Greenland.  Only 26 km by water.  Zoom in and there are no place names in the area.  There are “Google questions” about the two such as:  Can you drive from Canada to Greenland  - you have to get to Ellesmere Island by methods other than roads, and then the sea ice isn’t viable for driving.   Can you take a ferry - There is no ferry between the two, but cruise ships are being sighted more frequently and that is a possible method of getting across.  But then Google has some really stupid questions, too.  If you ask it for some stupid questions it is up to the task. Can you just walk across the border between Canada and Greenland? Reality: While it’s a land border, it’s on a tiny, uninhabited, barren rock called Hans Island in the high Arctic.  There are no towns, roads, or facilities.  The island is remote and hostile to humans, making an informal crossing difficult and dangerous.  I consider that an excellent sort of answer in comparison to some of the questions/answers that are considered relevant.  And doesn’t it have a “tone” to it.  I think AI has been generating attitude in the answers these days. Here’s the map - we are so close to each other and we have such a long boundary - the longest maritime boundary in the world at 2,139 nautical miles.  Compare that to the Canada-U.S. boundary - 5.525 miles includes land and water. Isn’t this a cute garden in the snow image.  That’s a few months away still.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 8 2025 - Mason Jars

 

Mason jars must be an amazing brand. Invented by John Landis Mason in 1858, they’ve stayed with us a very long time.  I went looking for some at my thrift store so that I can vacuum seal the coffee beans for storage.  The first time I went there was only one small mason jar.  I need a few more for a pound of coffee.  The next time I went there were many large jars - they seemed quite old, likely before the 1950s.  The glass is thick and the seal at the top takes a glass lid and a heavy metal screw top, so is a bit complicated. I think they also required a rubber jar ring. Today mason jars have a thin metal lid with a metal ring screw top.  Surprise that my vacuum sealer doesn’t work on that indented top - so I’ll have to go looking for another one.  Mason jars now fit into the “accessory” category.  There must be at least 20 ways to use mason jars - cute and creative decorations, packaging bath salts, serving decorator drinks.  There are the chocolate cookies in a jar gifts - where all the ingredients are in a mason jar in layers.  Well, I hope not the eggs or the butter.   And then if chocolate chip cookies don’t have eggs and butter, can they really be cookies? Yesterday I wrote recursive instead of cursive when referring to writing by hand.  Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and author of  The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, was asked how he approaches the revision of his own writing.  His answer?  “recursively and frequently.”   So I would sympathize with young people today because they have both issues - not knowing cursive writing and then not knowing how to revise text with a recursive approach.   Gone are mason jars today from the grocery and the market shelves.  The single piece screw tops in the picture below are more efficient and cheaper for industrial and retail production.

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Mairlyn's Photos - Nov 7 2025 - Is my car a spy?

 

I don’t know why this topic comes to mind.  It seems like our personal data is constantly being used and then exposed by hackers.  Cars shouldn’t seem so vulnerable.  They seem separate from a computer.  But really, computers are everywhere and everything is connected, isn’t it? Car makers collect driver data.  Those known for extensive data collection are Tesla, Hyundai and Kia. Driving behaviour (braking, acceleration), voice commands, and sensitive information like geolocation are often shared with third parties like insurance companies and lenders.  The car companies themselves use the information to analyze safety concerns and product trends, provide support and service, conduct research and development, to improve, troubleshoot and evaluate the use of products and services, and to communicate with us owners.  This data is vulnerable to cyber attacks. Since the start of 2025, Hertz reported a 2024 cyberattack that exposed customer driver’s license and credit card information. In January 2025, Volkswagen reported a breach.  General Motors came under FTC action for sharing data. In March Hyundai notified owners that hackers gained access to personal information.   Keeping all this data secure is a big deal and the data being sold to third companies is worth pennies per car. Honda sold data for $1 million on roughly 1.7 million cars over a six-year period. That comes to 61 cents per car.  So little being made.   It just seems like it is collected because it can be collected. Some entrepreneurial employee came up with the idea and got the creative employee award.  I see this scenario replaying in company after company after company. Or it could relate to power over others. Take Tesla one of the great data collectors:  so much information is collected by Tesla that the Las Vegas police got key details about the truck’s driver identity and the explosion’s cause.  The articles doesn’t say how quickly they got the information, just that they got it without any effort. Who would have guessed that 50 years ago, when we were rolling up the windows by hand.  And now cars are a privacy nightmare spying on us. I figured out how to add a signature to images in Lightroom yesterday.  It only just occurred to me to do this for the watercolour images and the original art pieces. So I looked it up and it was quite easy to do. Here it is on one of my painter palette abstracts.  I take pictures of the artists’ watercolour palettes in the Monday morning sessions, then manipulate the images in Flexify, and assemble them into collage images.   Making a signature with a mouse in Photoshop is no easy task.  It makes me sympathetic towards young people who haven’t been taught recursive writing.

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Marilyn's Photos - Nov 6 2025 - Ask any question

 

Ask any question.  Today it is possible.  The most popular questions that people ask are “what to watch”, “what is my ip”,  “how to do … something” and “what time is it”.   At ahrefs.com you can find out the 100 most asked questions on Google globally.  What is today, what to watch, what is my ip, where is my train and how many days until Christmas. That’s across the planet.  In the U.S. the top questions include “who is winning the election” - there seems to be an election somewhere in the U.S. at any given moment. Here are some curious moments.  Seven hundred and fifty thousand people asked what dinosaur has 500 teeth.  Over 660,000 people asked how to decorate a fish tank.  Over 910,000 people want to know how many weeks there are in a year.  That one amazes me.  Consider the irony.  The person is literate, is using a keyboard so one can assume some wealth, and yet doesn’t know how many weeks in a year.   And then that dinosaur question… The dinosaur with over 500 teeth is such a popular question because it was an internet meme in early 2021 that challenged people to search for the answer.  It was part of a “Don’t Google” meme - that’s the same as the call to mental action of  “don’t think of a pink elephant” - in which you mentally picture a pink elephant.    “Nigersaurus taqueti, a sauropod that lived 110 million years ago. It had a unique, wide, and straight-edged muzzle with a "dental battery" of over 500 replaceable teeth for non-stop grazing on low-lying plants. “ The teeth were replaced every 14 days.  The Nigersaurus was known as the Mesozoic cow.  I looked out last night and saw the big moon, called a November beaver supermoon. It was surrounded by a sort of mist, so quite mystical.  This picture of the moon on our street comes from 2017.  Looks like a search light

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