KVARESTO8
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Fairfax Cross County Trail, 41 miles: completed 2 July 2010.
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Monthly Archives: December 2008
On the run
Via The Great Beyond, the Carter Center announces that worldwide cases of nasty, painful Guinea worm disease (dracunculiasis) have fallen to 5,000 per year. With the goal of eradicating the disease completely, the Center announces a challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to raise $72 million, along with a pledge of £10 million from the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
Endemic in twenty countries of central Africa and the Indian subcontinent in 1986, the disease remains active in only six. Reported cases have dropped by about half from last year.
There were only 9,585 cases of Guinea worm disease recorded in 2007, reduced from 25,217 cases in 2006. In 2007, both the Ghanaian and Sudanese programs, which together accounted for more than 95 percent of all cases in 2007, achieved individual milestones, slashing cases by more than half compared to 2006.
In the first 10 months of 2008, only 4,410 cases of Guinea worm disease were reported in Sudan, Ghana, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Niger. Cases are expected to remain below 5,000 for the year. Two countries—Nigeria and Niger—already may have reported their last case. Today, southern Sudan, northern Ghana, and eastern Mali are the main foci of eradication efforts.
The disease is spread through drinking water. Like some other devastating diseases (malaria, for instance), Guinea worm disease can be controlled with relatively simple technology. Simple cloth water filters are key to eradication efforts.
Silver Line progress report: 2
I’m not quite ready to start a countdown to groundbreaking. However, via DCist, Adam Tuss reports the good that the Federal Transit Administration has approved the first phase of the Metrorail extension to Dulles Airport. Okays by OMB and the Secretary of Transportation are yet to come.
More mistakes
Jennifer 8. Lee tours the New York subway system with Paul Shaw, author of “The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway,” (linked previously) and takes lots of pictures.
Something I badly needed to do
Barry Blitt’s cover for this week’s New Yorker made me laugh out loud.
Q & A
Arthur C. Danto: Is there some kind of message you hope will come through your work?
Cindy Sherman: For people to not take anything for granted, to respect what they might not understand.
—Interview, December/January 2009
First past the post
So the reblogging game is to name your favorite films by these indie auteurs of the 30 years or so: the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Hal Ashby, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino. kottke.org adds Stanley Kubrick, P.T. Anderson, and Errol Morris to the list. All well and good, but a few of of these guys worked only one seam, and if this is to be a revealing personality test we need some directors with a wider range of material. Offhand, I can think of Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and Steven Soderbergh. So here’s my list:
- Coens: Blood Simple
- W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket
- Ashby: none (Harold and Maude is for adolescents)
- Smith: Dogma edges out Clerks
- Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, also by a slight margin
- Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey
- P.T. Anderson: Magnolia
- Morris: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
- Allen: Hannah and Her Sisters
- Altman: Nashville
- Soderbergh: sex, lies, and videotape
Some links: 31
Christopher Dykton is directing and choreographing Follies for The Arlington Players. In anticipation of auditions later this month, he is blogging his preparation and the backstory of the characters of the play—in formidably articulate detail.
Because music and dance are basically mathematical, the first step in choreographing is a rather dry one. You count. The song begins with counts and ends with counts. There are a limited number of counts to a song, and movement needs to fit to these counts. How much time a movement takes needs to be calibrated and it must fit the counts. Choreographers count and demand that their dancers count, and if you do not count it like the choreographer, you will be corrected. As a choreographer teaching a dance, you count my counts. It’s my way or the highway. I have the counts—you have to learn them. I don’t need interpretation—I need you to dance my counts. But if you do count it right and practice it over and over and over again, it may perhaps transcend to something that’s art and dance.
But first you count.
Two into one
Via The Economist, recent research published by Evan Preisser and Joseph Elkinton yields an interesting result to those concerned with the conservation of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees. From Virginia to Connecticut, the species has been getting clobbered by an invasive hemipteran, Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Adelges tsugae), native to Asia. However, comes another sap-sucker, Elongate Hemlock Scale (Fiorinia externa), also invasive, to feed on the hemlock. According to the paper, in experimental infestations, trees inoculated with both bug species fare better than those inoculated with just the adelgid.
