Roland’s crossword puzzle this morning had a reference to chisenbop, a manual reckoning system where you use your fingers like the beads of an abacus. I hadn’t heard about chisenbop for decades, not since I saw a TV ad for a book that would teach your kids how to count on their fingers. I think Fred MacMurray was the celebrity spokesman, but I could be wrong.

And I was thus reminded of Jakow Trachtenberg’s Speed System of doing multiplication and other arithmetic without pencil and paper. Somebody told me about it when I was a kid, I checked the book out of the library and devoured it. I don’t really remember any of it, except that multiplying by 12 was especially easy. Trachtenberg developed the system while he was held in a concentration camp in World War II and, if you will, didn’t have anything better to do with his time. The book is still in print.

Via Botany Photo of the Day comes word of the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz. In honor of National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, participants

… from across the country will choose a wild or not-so-wild area and find how many of each different species—plant, animal, fungi and anything in between—live in a certain area within a certain time.

Silver Spring Stage is getting a badly-needed makeover of the flooring and ceilings of its backstage areas, and some of the shabbier partitions are coming down, too. Decades of hard use have reduced the tile to a crumble, as you can see. I’ve been helping out shifting the movables from one place to another as the workmen move through. The new tile flooring is functional if bland, but it looks so much better than what it replaced—I promise to post an “after” picture soon.

We’re seeing one or two exceptionally dark eggshells in a couple of the boxes this season. Pictured is the interior of box #2. New spring arrivals include Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) flowering on the forest floor and the broken-glass tinkle of a singing Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) in the treetops at the parking lot.

• A headset does not fit over a cheap hairnet without shredding it.
• Performing a relaxation exercise (yoga Corpse pose) on the deck—while sound is running through its cues (thunder, fire exits announcement, a eggshell crack for the elephant bird that sounds like a chainsaw) and while lights has one of the electric pipes pulled in to change an instrument—requires great concentration.
• When you’re looking for the high note, close your eyes, relax (!), and just let go.
• And most of all,
  

  When you’re jouncing along
  On a road full of ruts,
  Getting jeered by a throng
  And performing for nuts,
  Tell yourself how lucky you are!

Podcast documentary of the life and works of John Coltrane.

The recently ex- management company of my housing cluster is in deep kimchee with Commonwealth authorities.

Arena Stage has announced its 2007-08 season, starting off with a world première of 33 Variations, a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, directed by Moisés Kaufman.

kottke.org explains the appeal of Twitter, or lack thereof.

If your friends are not on Twitter, I can’t imagine it would be that interesting.

Via kottke.org, massively abusing regular expressions and successive divisions by potential factors to determine whether a number is prime in one line of Perl code.