Author: DB

Watching a tutorial about underpainting, the tutor recommended an online paid-for application that can resize images. It’s called Rapid Resizer and it comes in a number of options, from $39 to $119 a year (with quarterly options) depending on what you need. The idea is that you sketch something and feed it into the application. Then you tell it what size you want – maybe five times bigger – and it converts and does it and prints onto a number of A4 sheets (or maybe there are American size paper sheets) and lay them out so you can make whatever you are making. It could be embroidery or stained glass, or anything when you need a bigger version.

I guess you could resize in Photoshop, but you still wouldn’t be able to print on four sheets so that the sheets fit together to make a whole.

A jeremiad is a long, mournful complaint or lamentation. It is a list of woes. More than that, it is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s deserved downfall because it will not change its ways.

Its origin is in the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.

“Put the Blame on Mame” is a song by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, originally written for the classic film noir Gilda (1946) in which it was sung by the title character, played by Rita Hayworth with the singing voice of Anita Kert Ellis dubbed in, while Glen Ford looked and fumed.

Anita Kert Ellis has a Wikipedia page in which she is named Anita Ellis, nee Kert, that describes the behind the scenes of Gilda:

For her work in Gilda, her role in the film was by greatly underplayed and even kept secret by the producers who wanted fans to believe Hayworth was the singer. They went as far as to put Rita Hayworth’s name in the credit of the soundtrack instead of Anita Ellis. Hayworth also bore some resentment towards the studio for not allowing her to sing her own parts and the embarrassment it caused when she was asked to sing by fans who thought she was the voice of Gilda. There were claims made that Hayworth had sung the acoustic guitar version  of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ but this was untrue. Ellis dubbed all of the vocal parts since both their voices could not be used, Ellis’s singing voice was too unlike Hayworth’s for Hayworth’s voice to be used in different parts of the film.

The iNews newspaper of 19 July 2022 reports on page 34 that elephant tusks and pangolin scales had been seized in Malaysia

Malaysian authorities said yesterday they seized a container of African elephant tusks, pangolin scales and other animal skulls and bones estimated to be worth 80 million ringgit (£15m).
The Customs Department said in a statement it discovered the contraband hidden behind sawn timber following checks on 10 July on a ship coming from Africa. This included 6,000kg of elephant tusks, 100kg of pangolin scales, 25kg of rhino horns and 300kg of animal skulls, bones and horns, it said.
Investigations are ongoing on the importer and shipping agent.
Ivory tusks, rhino horns and pangolin scales are believed by some to have medicinal properties and are in high demand in Asia.
The World Wildlife Fund said the illegal wildlife trade threatens the survival of many species and has led to a 60 per cent decline in population sizes of vertebrate species.

I looked up how much an average elephant tusk weighs, and its 23kg. So 46kg per elephant – which means that someone had killed 130 elephants to get that haul.

And around sixteen rhinos at 1.5 to 2.5kg per horn.

There is a huge variation in the number of scales on pangolins, varying with species, and an average of 0.47 kg per animal is very approximate, but let’s say 200 animals killed to make the weight of scales found.

Is that a lot? The United Nations page on pangolin scales shows that 69.3 tons of pangolin scales were seized in 2019. That’s 147,447 pangolins.

Given the temperature outside today, I looked up the definition of cooking, OU Torah says “The Torah forbids cooking on Shabbat. “Cooking” means making food edible by heating it to above 120° F (49° C).

Cooking includes:
You may not make soft food hard (such as cooking an egg).
You may not make a hard food soft (such as cooking meat).
You may not, in any manner, heat (to 120° F or above ) liquids that you will drink or foods with liquids-such as sauces and gravies – whether fully cooked or not.