Month: September 2010

King decoded

Not particularly obscure (it’s in AHD), but a new word for me (and Firefox’s spell-checker): adscititious, “not inherent or essential; derivative.” Use it in a sentence? Why, yes, we can:

Despite my meager funds, I started bicycling each Saturday morning to the estate auctions I saw advertised in the paper, where I would take note of wonderful objects to covet, things that might answer my need to be an owner. However, the few crumpled dollars I had stuffed in my jeans kept my attention tied to the boxes of bric-a-brac and potpourri and nearflung gewgaws, which were always assigned to the very end of the auction, when the high-end collectors had already roped their prizes to the roof of the station wagon and driven off. I thrilled to crates of chilly hardware—coffee tins of rusty nails and mismatched bolts and buts, odd attachments, gimcrack, rickrack, and adscititious crap—because at least then my dollar or two would bring me something hefty, clumped, and durable, in good quantity, penny per pound. Sometimes my fifty-cent bid would be enough to claim it all, and I’d sweat to get it home by bike, understanding at last what I really meant by “adscititious crap.”

—William Davies King, Collections of Nothing, pp. 31-32

Riding the rails

When I interned in New York back in the late 1970s, my colleague/mentor Glen taught me how to ride the Long Island Rail Road in comfort. The rolling stock was fitted with five seats across, with the center aisle dividing them into a bench of three and a bench of two. Trouble was, there was really only enough room for four to sit easily. So what the two of us did, per Glen’s instructions, was to sit in the three-seat bench “and look big.”

The other thing I remember—dimly—about commuter rail in New York was the bar cars. It turns out that the tradition of alcohol service is still going strong in the New York metro, with the added assist of bar carts on or near the platforms. Michael M. Grynbaum reports on new data released by the MTA about differential tipple preferences between Metro-North and LIRR riders.

McPhee decoded

John McPhee drops a Celtic allusion into The Control of Nature to describe the severe hazard along the lower Mississippi. From the “Atchafalaya” section:

This threat to navigation could be called could be called an American Maelstrom—a modern Charybdis, a Corryvreckan—were it not so very much greater in destructive force.

The whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, off the west coast of Scotland, is better known by Britons than by me. Fans of the Powell-Pressburger films should know it, too.

On the other hand, this word looks like a McPhee nonce. It appears only one place else online, in a Jstor-protected source.

Wells fills a dish with a dark soil from burned chaparral. He fills the eyedropper and empties it onto the soil. The water stands up in one large dome. Five minutes later, the dome is still there. Ten minutes later, the dome is still there. Sparkling, tumescent, mycophane, the big bead of water just stands there indefinitely, on top of the impermeable soil. (“Los Angeles Against the Mountains”)

Presumably the sense of mycophane is “semi-transparent, like threads of mycelium.”

Flying

The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure is a rank of seven towers, each buff with a white crown. They are vertical on the upstream side, and they slope toward the Atchafalaya. Therefore, they resemble flying buttresses facing the Mississippi. The towers are separated by six arciform gates, convex to the Mississippi, and hinged in trunnion blocks secured with steel to carom the force of the river into the core of the structure. Lifted by cables, these tainter gates, as they are called, are about as light and graceful as anything could be that has a composite weight of twenty-six hundred tons. Each of them is sixty-two feet wide. They are the strongest the Corps has ever designed and built. A work of engineering such as a Maillart bridge or a bridge by Christian Menn can outdo some other works of art, because it is not only a gift to the imagination but also structural in the matrix of the world. The auxiliary structure at Old River contains too many working components to be classed with such a bridge, but in grandeur and in profile it would not shame a pharaoh.

—John McPhee, “Atchafalaya” (1989)

Mauritius

1st Stage’s less-is-more aesthetic, usually successful, doesn’t deliver the goods for Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a fighting-over-the-inheritance drama with overtones of American Buffalo. Indeed, what’s needed most to help this slight story—scams and counter-scams surrounding what could be an extremely valuable legacy of 19th-century postage stamps—is a trim to one-act length and more sharply drawn characters. As written, Mary (Amy Waldman), one of two sisters squabbling over the property, has only one note to play: “they’re my stamps; they’re not yours to sell.” Her ne’er-do-well sibling Jackie (Leigh Taylor Patton) does better, but the necessities of the plot require her to acquire information about her trove at unrealistically precise points in time. The casting of Roger Payano as the small-time stamp dealer Philip and of Edward Daniels as the small-time small-time Dennis unfortunately obscures the relationship between them.

  • Mauritius, by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Mark Krikstan, 1st Stage, McLean, Virginia

I get confused: 2

(With some help from Leta.)

  • William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies and several other books less well-remembered. No matter, he received a Booker and Nobel for his work.
  • William Goldman writes screenplays, including the magically popular The Princess Bride and the Penelope Ann Miller vehicle Year of the Comet. He is the source of the catchphrase “Nobody knows anything.”
  • James Goldman made the stage play The Lion in Winter and collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on Follies and Evening Primrose.

Still confused about the Goldmans? It’s not surprising: they’re brothers.

Bird Phenology Program

Consistent with another of my volunteer gigs (with Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic), I seem to have positioned myself as a wetware information transcriber. A couple of months ago I started working about an hour a week as a data entry volunteer for the North American Bird Phenology Program, based out of Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.

Phenology is the study of comings and goings in the natural world—what day of the year the swallows return to Capistrano, the lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, that sort of thing. Decade-to-decade trends in a particular location can provide additional evidence to researchers studying climate patterns, among other things.

There are a number of phenology programs active under the umbrella of the USA National Phenology Network. One of the broadest-scoped citizen science initiatives was organized in 1881 by Wells W. Cooke, and was later expanded by C. Hart Merriam of the newly-formed American Ornithologists’ Union. For 90 years, up to 3,000 field researchers submitted data on the arrivals and departures of migratory birds in North America, in sort of an ornithological Mass Observation Project. Data was collected on 2×5-inch slips; when the project was wound down in 1970 (as other means of collecting similar data evolved), the records base comprised 6 million of them. In 2003, Sam Droege began efforts to safeguard and digitize the slips.

Many of the records are on a GPO-issued form, designated 3-801 or Bi-801; this form was redesigned a couple of times to collect different data. But many more are simply hand-written slips in a particularly compact shorthand that identifies the species (often simply by a three-digit AOU number), the location and observer, and the dates that the bird was first seen in the course of the year; seen again; seen commonly; and last seen during the breeding or migration season.

As you would expect, the transcription of this data from scanned document images into a web form is not an automatable process. Enter the volunteer scribes. It takes me 30 seconds or more to copy out a card—up to several minutes if I have to puzzle out a location name (Google Maps is my BFF) written in faded fountain pen ink in a cursive handwriting style more suited to wedding invitations. The data collection protocol also provides for observer’s notes on whether the bird breeds in the area, is a winter resident, and assessment of abundance (one point on the scale is the quaintly labelled “tolerably common”)—all that, along with any other notes made by the observer, is to be transcribed into fixed fields or free text. Each observer seems to have a different approach to spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. The opportunity for transcription errors is therefore high, so each card is copied into the database twice, then compared.

There’s lots more to be done: the number of digitized cards only numbers in the few hundred thousands, so if you’re into birds or just have some spare cycles, I would encourage you to sign up for the program. You can request to transcribe cards only for a particular location or a particular species, or you can do what I do and just pull cards at random. I’ve copied slips filed from tiny, obscure places like Hadlyme, Connecticut and Rhoma, Texas; I’ve worked with a card prepared by A. W. Schorger, author of the definitive book on the Passenger Pigeon. No particular knowledge of birds is required; in fact, the procedures we follow call for a literal transcription of the record, no interpretation or corrections allowed. So even if I “know” that the common name of a bird has been changed in the past hundred years, my instructions are to copy what the observer wrote, and to let the researchers clean up the data later.

And that turns out to be a learning experience for me, too. Before I started transcribing, I wasn’t aware that Purple Martin (Progne subis) and Eastern Phoebe (Sayronis phoebe) once had simpler names in common use (Martin, Phoebe). And I had never heard of Holboell’s Grebe, which we know now as Red-necked Grebe (Podiceps grisegena).

Droege and his team have already begun to draft papers from the data, especially looking at patterns of Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) migrations. The San Francisco-area ABC affiliate put together a rather fine story on the program.

Travels with My Aunt

Bowler-hatted, gray-suited Henry Pulling is reunited with his eccentric aunt Augusta and begins a voyage to himself in this adaptation by Giles Havergal of Graham Greene’s novel, the sweet and saucy Travels with my Aunt. Generally narrated by Henry, the play’s gadget is that a quartet of men play Henry as well as 26 other characters, including the titular Mame-ish Augusta. The play’s reveal is perhaps never in doubt, but it gives the four actors a chance to cut loose, as in a hilarious scene between Lawrence Redmond and Nigel Reed as they play two old women cackling about their younger days organizing a Brighton wedding chapel for dogs. The mostly-reserved Bill Largess pulls most of the Henry duty. And any production that gives Michael Russotto the freedom to clown it up can’t be bad. James Fouchard’s formal yet flexible set hides some handy prop storage locations.

  • Travels with My Aunt. by Graham Greene, adapted for the stage by Giles Havergal, directed by Kasi Campbell, Rep Stage, Columbia, Maryland

Little Bennett Regional Park

Leta and I took a nature stroll along paths in Little Bennett Regional Park, on the southwest side of Little Bennett Creek. On this holiday weekend, the main entrance road was closed to all but campers, so we followed the suggestion at the contact station and parked at the maintenance yard and walked in. A better choice would have been to park in the lot at Wilson Mill along Route 121. This lot is connected to the trail network, despite what the map I received at the contact station said.

Indeed, following that map was a challenge, as it showed trails that weren’t there along with not showing trails that were. And since it’s the area is designed for camping, it’s full of short trails that don’t go in the direction you want. A little bit of climbing, not much; somewhat rocky footing with lots of white quartz cobbles exposed. About 4 miles round trip from the maintenance yard.

for scalemounds without nutsNevertheless, we did make it as far as the Mound Builder Trail to see the earthworks built by Formica exsectoides. We kept an eye on the ground to avoid stirring up the ants that scurried across the trail in sixes and sevens.

jack's clubsDogwood and spicebush were coming into fruit. We found some interesting mushrooms to confirm some of the IDs I learned in this summer’s class. I heard a Common Raven to go along with the usual mid-day forest bird residents. At a wet spot (relatively so: all the stream beds were dry), Leta spotted Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema sp.) in fruit.