No Steam Room, Hot Tub and Backstroke Blues: Friday, March 6th!

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. -Anais Nin

In downtown LA: Hi, took Angels Flight down to Grand Central Market for lunch then heading to the Broad Art Gallery. ❤️ Angels Flight: Chloë had never been before and was always quite jealous that we had visited funicular and adjacent market a number of times. Former is the site of a murder in one of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch detective series, a family favourite. Facility was closed for almost ten years, I believe, undergoing renovations, and that is one of the main reasons Chloë wasn't able to ride it when we were down in LA.  

  

Hi Sir Patrick and Lady Dar. It was good to chat and thanks for your usual newsy email and pics. All going well and really looking forward to seeing you all again. To confirm, I am arriving on Sunday March 22 at Kelowna on Air Canada. Thanks again for coming to pick me up. I leave on Thursday. Dep Penticton at following Tuesday. Hope it fits well with your sport etc. Best wishes. Jamie. 

Hi Sir James! Thanks for the flight information! Just send a quick message, or give us a call, from Vancouver, before you leave, just to make sure everything is on track. The Tinsel Towners are back on Saturday, coming in on the same flight you will take when you leave Penticton! Must away to clean up the house so that I don't have to suffer Lady Dar's royal ire! Fondestos to Lady Patrizzia and you, Sir James! Travel safely. Stay well. Cheers, Patrizzio! Pics: Jazz Night: Marian and Tim Dunn. Thursday Night Jazz Band. Vees hockey sweater!

Hello Fartograms, Here are my (belated) photos of a great snowshoe into the Secret Canyon and onto the 3 Bears. If the sun shines that Winter Wonderland is truly amazing. Lots of snow this year. Please click on the Flickr link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99264714@N02/albums/72157713364493168

Assume you now know how Flickr works, just click away, you can download if you wish in any resolution, and the opposite arrows allow you to go into full screen mode. The ESC button always gets you out. Enjoy! Cheers, Aart Dronkers    

I, [Maya], wanted to share a story with you from Winnipeg Sun: ON THE ROCKS: Gunnlaugsons grandma and biggest fan celebrates 88th birthday in style by watching curling at the Brier KINGSTON, Ont.; On Tuesday night at an East Side Marios in Kingston, Jeannette Gunnlaugson celebrated her 88th birthday with her grandson Jason, his curling teammates and about 20 family and friends. https://winnipegsun.com/curling/on-the-rocks-gunnlaugsons-grandma-and-biggest-fan-celebrates-88th-birthday-in-style-by-watching-curling-at-the-brier Hi Maya! Thanks for the link to The Brier! What a marvellous 88th birthday for your Grandmother Jeannette! Hip Hip Hooray! Fondestos to one and all. Stay well. Cheers, Patrizzio!

 

Hi Pat, So this is where your Mom’s name came from?! Thanks for your update and nice pics today. Hi to all. Love Jane  Rosalind P. Walter, the First ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ Is Dead at 95: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/rosalind-p-walter-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare Hi Calamity and Whirlygig! Thanks for the link to Rosita! Yes, you are spot on! She worked on making wing struts for fighter planes, I believe, in Fort William/Port Arthur, in 1943, along with a cousin. Quite a story. Dusty was on a destroyer, making runs to Murmansk while they were riveting for victory. Back in Dauphin they were married when Dusty was on leave after VE Day. He signed up for the Pacific Theatre but was discharged, in Halifax, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Then the Baby Boomers! [A daughter of privilege who worked on an assembly line during World War II, she became a principal benefactor of public television, her name intoned on a host of programs.] Trust everyone is well. The Tinsel Towners are back tomorrow. Fondestos to one and all. Stay well. Cheers, Patrizzio!

The Jealous Curator: Make Art, Not Excuses:There are so many talks about how to become more creative, but this isn’t one of those. Danielle Krysa, an author and artist, will delve into all of the excuses we make -- excuses that prevent creativity from finding its way into our lives, and the self-doubt that we often allow to run the show and all of the scary things that come along with that. Everyone makes excuses — everyone has an inner critic — everyone can be creative if they want to be… unless of course you DON’T want to be creative, then by all means, get working on those excuses and what ifs. 

Danielle Krysa is the writer/curator behind the contemporary art site, The Jealous Curator (est.2009). She has a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and a post-grad degree in graphic design from Sheridan College in Ontario. Danielle is also a mixed media artist, and the author of several books: “Creative Block”, “Collage”, “Your Inner Critic Is A Big Jerk”, “A Big Important Art Book — Now with Women”, and most recently, “A Big Important Artist - A Womanual”. March 11th, 2020 | 7:00-9:00pm

Hi all, Great day of snowshoeing on Thursday.  We are hoping to fit in another couple of snowshoe events before the snow is depleted. So, on Thursday, March 12^th, we will: -meet at 0900 at Cherry Lane north parking lot in Penticton (0840 at IGA parking lot in Summerland)  -carpool and drive up the Apex Road to the cattleguard at the trailhead for Green Mountain -snowshoe up to the top of Green Mountain, ramble around the top meadows for a while, and return to the  vehicles. -retire to a location for debriefing and coffee (likely “The Edge” at Apex.) -return to Penticton. Interested?  If so, please let me know.
 

One more small matter….On Thursday, March 19^th, Carol and I will be away visiting family.  Would someone like to lead a snowshoe outing on that day?  You get to choose the destination and lead the troops!  And I will send out the notice for you.  If you think you can help, please let me know at your earliest convenience. Many thanks, Jim

Joan of Arc, the "Maid of Orleans," appeared during the Hundred Years' War between France and England and helped turn the tide of that war in France's favor. More importantly, in a time when the boundaries between England and France were unclear and ever-changing, and those whom we now consider Frenchmen fought on both sides of the conflict, her rhetoric and actions helped forge a separate and clear national identity for the French: "The Maid of Orleans was a myth in her own time and has been seen as something of a mystery ever since -- which has enabled her to be adopted for political propaganda purposes by right, left and centre, if most recently by the Front National, which congregates annually before her gilded statue in the Rue de Rivoli. 

However, she becomes much less mysterious when placed back in her medieval context, even if the bare facts of her short life of nineteen years are strange enough. An illiterate but shrewd country girl who heard the voices of various saints telling her she had been chosen to expel the English from France, she put on male clothing for protection and made her way in 1429 to Chinon to see Charles VII. Since the English and their Burgundian allies controlled almost all of the north, including Paris and Reims, the king, indecisive and suspicious as he was, was in dire straits. Having given him a secret message from her voices -- probably that he was not a bastard, though even his own mother Isabeau had said that he was -- she was questioned at length by priests and had her virginity checked. She was then attached in April 1429 to a small force sent to attempt to relieve the besieged city of Orleans, a key stronghold on the Loire without which Charles would be unable to proceed to the traditional coronation at Reims.

"The listless English army having left a gap in their defences, her unit was easily able to enter the city with fresh supplies. The over­cautious commander Jean d'Orleans regarded her as something of a nuisance, excluded her from war councils and tried to keep her out of the action, but Joan was irrepressible. She inspired the troops, kept them from swearing, dictated defiant ultimatums to the enemy in which she described herself as 'Joan the Maid, the envoy of the King of heaven', and took part in several actions, in one of which she was lightly wounded. There is no doubt that her courage and conviction as standard-bearer -- she is not thought to have fought with a sword -- made a decisive contribution to the lifting of the siege, which was achieved in nine days. But while her magic seemed to go on work­ing for a while, she was captured by the Burgundians the following year, sold on to the English and, under pressure from the clerics of the Sorbonne, tried in Rauen as a heretic. She performed well in a prolonged battle of wits, but was condemned and burnt at the stake -- to be rehabilitated in 1456 and made a saint in 1920. ...

Saint Joan of Arc

"There were Frenchmen on both sides in this dynastic war of succession, [but] she always referred to the enemy as the English and, indeed, in her rehabilitation trial of 1456 it was assumed that she had been engaged in a war of national liberation from the English. What she symbolized was a new patriotism, a new sense of essential differ­ence from what would from now on be the 'hereditary enemy', in fact the emergence of a nation from the wreckage of the old feudal order. And this new status was formalized by Charles VII, once he began to capitalize on his victory, when he forced the Vatican in 1438 to accept the Gallican principle of the financial and organizational indepen­dence of the French Church." A Brief History of France, Revised and Updated, Cecil Jenkins, Little, Brown Group, 2017  

 

Coco Chanel and World War II: "In 1923, Misia, the Russian-born wife of the painter Jose Maria Sert, ruled the heart of Parisian bohe­mian society. Misia was also the inseparable friend of Coco Cha­nel. She boosted Chanel's rise to the dizzy heights as czarina of the Paris fashion world, with her low-waisted, brief-skirted, and 'infinitely graceless chemise frock.' 

 

[Illustration shows a woman, possibly Coco Chanel, wearing a large hat with feathers, shooting at large white birds with a rifle; two dogs labeled "French Milliner" place the dead birds on a pile at her feet.]    

But Chanel's real genius be­gan with the use of simple fabrics like jersey, felt berets, and straw hats, reminiscent of Chanel's childhood in the French coun­tryside. So, when Chanel hit upon this nostalgic note, it caught on. Essentially Chanel was a milliner, and wearing a Chanel hat during wartime became a show of patriotism. Through her long affair with 'Bendor,' Hugh Grosvenor, duke of Westminster, she became accepted among the British upper crust just as she had with the Parisian beau monde who wintered on the Riviera. Cha­nel elbowed aside Poiret, just as he had given Jeanne Paquin the push. But when Chanel disembarked from Bendor's yacht, Flying Cloud, 'brown as a cabin boy,' she shattered the last of the Vic­torian taboos and introduced her longest-lasting fashion -- the suntan. ...

"[Later, in World War II when Paris was threatened by the invasion of Germany,] when there was no immediate bombardment of Paris, ... 'Paul Rey­naud, [the French] Treasury Minister, broadcasted a speech ... in which he asked all non-mobilized people and the wives of the mobilized to do the impossible and reopen their shops or trades. He said it was the duty of all who could work and had not gone into the army, to help bring back money to France.' ... Coco Chanel notoriously resisted the call to return to work by closing her entire business in response to the declaration of war. Why, when others like the Italian couturier Schiaparelli and the Spaniard Balenciaga announced midseason collections? That sum­mer Edna [Woolman Chase] had seen Chanel at Solange d'Ayen's home. Edna thought Chanel looked nervous and depressed. Chanel admitted,'I'm afraid, madame, I'm afraid.' What Edna hadn't known was why Chanel seemed so afraid. Since 1938, Chanel, a notorious anti-Semite, had been the lover of the Nazi spy Baron Hans von Dincklage.

"Dincklage, an Abwehr (military intelligence) agent, had been resident in France since 1933 as part of Hitler's silent army of cul­tural spies working to influence France's right-wing intelligentsia. Chanel's pillow talk with Dincklage drifted from her Place Vendome apartment straight to the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and then on to Hitler. Given Chanel's prior rela­tionship with the Duke of Westminster, she was deemed a valu­able asset to the Nazi cause. She feared that the Allied forces might defeat Hitler. Then where would she be? At the very least ostracized, and her label worthless. At worst she could be tried for high treason and executed if found guilty. So against any patriotic feelings she undoubtedly had, Chanel hoped for Hitler's victory. Once the so-called phony war was over the following May, Cha­nel moved into the Ritz -- like all good collaborators -- with her lover. ...

"With the liberation of Paris in August 1944 came access to the French couturiers. Those who stayed in business had done so by agreeing to the Nazi edicts. Chanel, while not making clothes for the Nazis, had been an archcollaborator, and hightailed it for Swit­zerland until the dust settled -- which in her case would be 1954. Surprisingly -- shockingly, even -- Chanel's collaboration with the enemy didn't make the American headlines. Instead it was her vi­olation of the General Limitation Order, L-85, by the use of 'Vo­luminous sleeves, widely flaring skirts, the heavy use of elaborate trimmings.' The U.S. War Production Board (WPB), uninterested in true collaboration, held Chanel up as an example of extrava­gance." Condé Nast, Susan Ronald, St. Martin's Press, 2019.