Category Archives: Diary

Jillian Jiggs Storymob

Group shot of some of the great kids and their great costumes for the Storymob.

Yesterday we participated in a StoryMob. What’s that you ask?

“StoryMobs are where great kids’ books meet flash mobs with a dash of Mardi Gras thrown in. A story mob is inspired by an exceptional children’s book and allows for participation in a variety of ways. These may include costumes & props, copies of the book, simple choreography, musical instruments and vocal parts.”

I learned of it through our love of Fancy Pants Kids, whose Mompreneur Gretel Meyer Odell is one of the organizers of the StoryMobs in Toronto. We were eager to participate and lucky the timing worked out for us so we could enjoy this family friendly theatre-esque event in Toronto.

Jillian Jiggs Cover

Yesterday‘s book was Jillian Jiggs by Phoebe Gilman, which was a great choice due to all the dressing up that the characters in the book do, along with the refrain: “Jillian, Jillian, Jillian Jiggs, it looks like your room has been lived in by pigs!”.

I really wish I could have gotten video of the experience itself, but when you’re in the middle of it, as a reader (of two lines I was :-D) and costume changer of the kids, I wasn’t able too. Hopefully down the road a video will be released of it from some of the many other participants so you can see what it is like in true flash mob style. The passers-by who were walking the closed down Queen St for the Beaches Jazz Festival seemed to enjoy the street theatre they happened upon.

Thanks to children’s book store Ella Minnow for being a back-drop and anchor for the event.

The Children’s Bookstore we were performing in front of. Get it “LMNO”.

Their window display for the Storymob.

If you’re keen to try this out yourself, they will be organizing two more this summer here in Toronto. And yeah, why not start your own local one where ever you might be?

Update: More photos on the ‘official flickr‘, and Stephanie Mclellan’s blog (you have to go fullscreen to see them all) and facebook (if you can handle the gif formated images).

On the trail of a provocative image — “Mimesis in the Louvre”

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I came across the above image posted at Babes at the Museum, and they were requesting to identify the people in the photo as of February 2012. I decided to go on a bit of a hunt.

My conclusion is that the photo is the work of Charlotte Duberry, Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds, and Marina Lazzarotto and is an outtake shot during the rehearsal of commissioned performances at the Louvre, in front of Regnault’s The Three Graces (“Les Trois Grâces”) on a Tuesday sometime in 2010. An applicable title is “Mimesis in the Louvre”.

Now to document some of my search for those curious.

I started out using TinEye, as if it was an ‘official’ photo it was good chance it would be registered over there (and I was curious if it would trigger on the painting in the background). It returned 12 images, best guess being this post, but nothing official. I found a post over at blended.fr that claimed the photo was part of lingerie company La fille d’O‘s advertising but couldn’t find anything corroborating that. I found a blog post by Jim Harris over at Huffington Post about Facebook’s censorship of the image (what is art, vs what is porn? and many nice things said about the image), but again, no source information.

Next up was using Google Image Search. This led me to the trove that is tumblr. Its best guess was a post by Mr. Harris Tweed which he named “The Four Graces”, but then I was determined to try to find the first occurrence of the picture online. Via this line of inquiry I found a nice article here asking where the line between classical beauty is and just plain sexy. Using the date searches, leading back to the beginning of May 2011, I narrowed it down to this post at contraindicaciones which was the first I found listing some names of the participants: “Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds, Charlotte Duberry, Marina Lazzarotto, Sofia Senna” (also this post at Girls Who Like Porno). The earliest dated post I found was Feb 18, 2011 at murdermetonymy‘s tumblr, but again no source. Having some names in hand, and the location known due to the background image (though many attributed it to Rubens or Rapheal instead of Regnault, and one even named it as the Graces from Botticelli’s Primavera) I tried to confirm things.

I found a website for Nessa Norich which listed in her ‘Devised Works’ section a project called “The Three Graces”. There are images of a dance performed by three women in front of the painting. It is still difficult to confirm the faces of the participants though. Over on Marina Benitez Lazzarotto’s resume she too lists a theatre performance at the Louvre, so this connected four of the names I found from the other sites to the image’s location.

Finally I emailed my suspicions and received confirmation from Ms Benitez Lazzarotto that it was in fact a photo taken on her camera after hours while they were rehearsing for their respective shows.

“The girls in the photo from left to right are: Charlotte Dubery, Nessa Norich, Jessica Hinds and me. The picture was taken with my camera which i put on a timer. It was taken on a tuesday when the museum was closed and the three girls and i were rehearsing for Les Nocturnes du Louvre.” – Marina

So, there is a brief history of this meme.

And keeping it all current, if you like the talent Marina showed in creating this image, perhaps you’ll want to help her out making a movie? Crowdsource her over at IndieGoGo for her film project FLASH.

http://vimeo.com/69367078

Remembering Mr. George Duckett

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Today marks the one year ‘death day’ of my friend Mr. George Duckett (1930-2012). I’d like to share with you a letter I wrote to his kind widow this past winter after I had learned of his passing.

Dear Mrs. Duckett,

My name is Chris Nolan. You don’t know me, but I knew your husband from the Douglas Snow swimming pool. I was very sorry to learn of his passing, and wanted to tell you I’ll miss him.

For the past six years I’ve been taking my children to the pre-school swim Wednesday mornings, which is the same time as the senior swim. Mr. Duckett’s regular locker was across the aisle from ours, and we would chat as we were getting changed (the kids take a long time to get ready, and he was no speed demon himself). I used to look forward to his stories he’d tell: of his youth near the coast, of his time working on boats, his travels around Australia, his siblings back home, your trip to Hawaii when your kids were small, your grand kids both near and far, and many more. The elf and Santa craft he made for the kids one Christmas still sit on a shelf in their bedroom keeping watch over them.

I regret not making an effort to keep in touch when he took his break from swimming last year for his hip surgery, and then during the summer the senior swim doesn’t run, and then Douglas Snow was closed for renovations in the fall, only to re-open last month. Some of the other gentlemen asked after him, and I tried to tell myself he just didn’t know the pool had reopened yet, but I finally braced myself and looked online only to learn of his death this past summer.

I didn’t want to reopen any wounds by sending such belated condolences, but I did want to tell you of our time together, and that I’ll be keeping “Papa Duck”‘s memory alive with my kids too.

If you are the operator of a motor vehicle, please remember it is a powerful machine that requires vigilance.

Hyper Realistic Sculpture

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Today I was introduced to the realm of ‘Hyper Realistic Sculpture’. Demilked recently shared a new sculpture by Ron Mueck, which led me to look at a bunch of his previous works. Doing that led me to the human-animal hybrids of Patricia Piccinini, which reminded me of some of the characters in Jeff Lemire‘s Sweet Tooth. I’ve since looked at a bunch of other works by artists such as Evan Penny, Carole A. Feuerman and more. If you have some time, browse around some of this work, and if you are lucky enough find some on exhibit near you.

What is still sticking with me about the Ron Mueck work, is the different scales. He has very large ones, and very small ones too. Wow. To see more of the way he works, check out the site of photographer Gautier Deblonde who works with the artist in documenting his process and his installations.

The Boy

Big Man

Large Murray

The Long Awaited

Scale of the Universe and Powers of 10 resources

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The concept of the scale of the universe has come up multiple times with my kids, and our friends, so I thought I’d put together a few links and resources we’ve used.

There is the ‘classic’ video (film-strip style) from the Eames Office, Powers of Ten and now with its accompanying website.

There is the superb flash animation: Scale of the Universe 2 by Cary Huang and Michael Huang (the (at the time) 14-year-old htwins). [Hmmm… embedding it doesn’t work, sorry]

There is The Known Universe by American Museum of Natural History, which you can interact with via their Digital Universe 3D Atlas software (powered by Partiview) and presented by one of the makers at TED (Carter Emmart).

If you want to just think about really big numbers too, check out Numberphile‘s video of Googols and Googolplexs.

Peregrine Falcon chased a Canadian Goose

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Wanted to share a sighting of the peregrines at Mel Lastman Square today. One of them was chasing a canadian goose through the air down the middle of the square! It was wild. He chased him east, then down south around to North York Blvd between the Transamerica building and the board of education building. The bird appeared a minute or two later again so I suspect they didn’t capture it, but it was fancy to see.

My kids and I watched for 30 minutes or so, and one bird perched on the lights on the north side of the transamerica building (third pillar over, and on the right), and was joined by the other after 10 minutes or so, 5 pot lights away. Another 10 minutes or so passed and the first bird climbed along the ledge, and then squeezed behind a light and I never saw it come out from that spot. Made me wonder if a nest might be back there?

Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre failed to open as scheduled

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Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre in North York has been closed for “state of good repairs” since the beginning of September. They were scheduled to have all work complete by “Dec 31 2012”. We stopped in today with high-hopes that our long missed Wednesday morning pre-school swim time would be operational and it wasn’t. Work-men were still in the pool area. Equipment could be seen being moved around. The work fence and signage was still up outside. The pool was empty.

The recreation assistant we spoke to could only say it’ll be “soon”. Lessons are set to start on Saturday, and it’s my understanding it takes two and a half days to fill the pool… if I were you I’d expect phone calls from Parks & Rec telling you your first week of lessons (at least) will be postponed 😦

Update: Jan 3 — we received our phone call today tell us swim lessons would be postponed a week with a credit given to our parks & rec account (they can’t extend the lessons due to March Break schedules). For me information call Mrs Bain @ 416-395-7593.

Honestly, I had near zero expectation that a construction project for a government entity would ever be completed on time. Here’s hoping it was at least done on budget.

Koch Snowflakes

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Came across Sal‘s discussion of the Koch Snowflake (on wikipedia) yesterday.

Got a little obsessed and wanted to draw it programmatic like I did 20+ years ago when I first saw the Sierpinski Gasket on a NOVA tv show (which I re-did using Khan’s software a few months ago). After a few failed attempts (and a failing to recognizing my usage of sine and cosine), today I went and looked for someone else’s code just to get me through it (oh the aging brain!) and found N-Wing’s code over at everything2.

Here it is: Koch Snowflake Fractal (Doh, WordPress isn’t allowing me to embed the program right here in the blog).

Vi Hart shows them in her Triangle Party Doodling too if you like her style (who doesn’t?).

Cirque Sublime performs the 15th Annual Wishes and Dreams Fundraiser

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Last night Cirque Sublime performed at the Starlight Children Foundation‘s 15th Annual Wishes and Dreams Fundraiser in the Allen Lambert Galleria of Brookfield Place. The Starlight Children’s Foundation celebrated receiving nearly $2 million in donations from Brookfield Place’s tenants and suppliers.

Opening the show and performing the Holiday Lighting Ceremony was Ariana Shaw (my silks coach!) as the Starlight Princess.

Les Vitaminés (Cbastien Tardif and Vincent Dubé) next did a funny and skillful clowning static trapeze act.

Amy Neumann, in her first professional performance as an aerial artist, wowed the crowd with her aerial silks skills.

Jean-Francois Martel was next on stage where the large man entered a very large Cyr Wheel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LovgerJuNCw

Next up, Les Vitamines returned to the stage for their Balloon Ballet. (No video as my hands were full of kids instead of a camera).

And to conclude the acrobatics for the evening Duo Voltart (Damien Boudreau and Geneviere Cliche) do some astounding Hand to Hand (not my video as again, I was holding a kid instead of a camera).

Toronto is a great place for seeing Circus Arts! If you’re interested in trying it out recreationally, check out the Toronto School of Circus Arts.

You can have YouTube play all the above videos for you together using the playlist.

Our adventures this week in pictures and video 2012-45

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We started the week with some slightly crazed kids thanks to Halloween.

We also hadn’t gotten a lot of good video and me in my freaky tall blue creature halloween costume so we spent some time on the weekend putting it back on and trying things out.

Our circus school was closed last week so we missed our regular classes. It didn’t stop my son, as I found these videos he took of himself practicing the silks.

We stepped in to Kimberly Jackson on Queen Monday after our drop-in and we saw some really nice handcrafted wooden tables that they are having a sale on atm.

Tuesday I was trying to get the kids out of the house to play, but they just seemed to want to stay in. We ended up building some bridges out of Kapla blocks (beam and cantilever), and then put it into practice as I became a human beam bridge, and my daughter was the load.

They got some exercise by playing on their homemade trapeze they have in their bedroom.

We did get out of the house in the afternoon though and started raking our leaves — mostly to have a pile to jump in, and a few to add to our compost. Poor tree not getting fresh soil.

We discovered Richard Wiseman‘s Quirkology feed on Youtube and we proceeded to duplicate some of his puzzles and challenges.

Game wise we’ve been playing a lot of Mastermind.

Thursday we headed down to The 90th Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. We started out in the Spirit of the Horse area and watched the Toronto Police Mounted Unit, Elaine Ward demonstrate Western Style Dressage with her horse Maverick, and a Thoroughbred horse too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yBfwjsedvc

We continued the horse theme as we ate our lunch in the Horse Palace watching some of the competitors for the horse jumping warm up. My son spotted a horse he liked the look of and we followed them into the Ricoh Coliseum to see them compete. It was Onisha and her driver, Olympian, Reed Kessler as they were competing in the Brickenden Trophy International Jumper Class.