Month: December 2011

Urban extremophile

Daniel Mosquin points to an exceptionally well-written piece by Adam Rogers for Wired: it tells the story of James Scott and a mysterious black mold that beset the neighborhood around a distillery. The fungus, a barrel-shaped beastie now named Baudoinia compniacensis has been known to science since the 19th century, but much of Scott’s task was isolating and culturing the organism and giving it a proper scientific name. Props to Rogers for explaining how binomial nomenclature works.

Skronk

Via Greater Greater Washington, a lovely podcast episode by Sam Greenspan and Roman Mars about the music of Metro escalators in need of lubrication.

… if you’re going to be subjected to some kind of sensory experience, of which you have no control every single day, then it’s to your benefit… Why not try to enjoy something? Because there’s enough things in life to be stressed out about.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2011

The Texas festival put lots of birds on my life list, while the California jaunt introduced me to some stunning water features.

2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

There’s a hole in that

Laura A. Tyson et al. report an artificial nest cavity design that European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) don’t seem to like, or at least the starlings at their northern Ohio field test site. The team tested PVC tubes with a diameter of 10 cm, mounted horizontally and capped at each end, the opening restricted to 5 cm. Bluebirds, swallows, and wrens like the plastic boxes just fine, but no starlings used any of the 100 structures in two years of testing.

Good seats still available

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin, property, and/or effort in 2011. Please join me in supporting their work.

First

Isabel Wilkerson revisits this year’s obituaries from 750 newspapers across the country. It was a year of “the first African-American to…” O the strides made in humble mundanity.

Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.

The year in review, 2011

Getting a bit of an early start on this post. Hey, Christmas is coming!

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 2 January: Bands of showers, clouds, and a little sunshine passed over us on Sugarloaf Mountain, on an ANS hike led by Cathy Stragar.
  • 2 February: Passive clauses are explained, defended by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
  • 1 March: “There was a certain coherency in [John Maynard] Keynes’s (the intellectual godfather of the IMF) conception of the [International Monetary] Fund and its role. “
  • 2 April: My term project, an analysis of the Comprehensive Plan for Fairfax County’s Area II, has been submitted for my class.
  • 1 May: When I hear on the radio the voice of an artist that I haven’t heard in a long time, it’s rarely happy news.
  • 4 June: Benjamin R. Freed covers Capital Talent Agency, Roger Yoerges and Jeremy Skidmore’s nascent representation outfit for local professional actors.
  • 1 July: Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship.
  • 1 August: Plays at this year’s CATF are dominated by grim themes of black-white race relations, with the concomitant issues of money, power, and social class.
  • 6 September: Metro map designers are floating the possibility that the line won’t be silver after all.
  • 2 October: My first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area.
  • 2 November: Two treasuries of Washington photography…
  • 4 December: This ratty old building, window glazing missing from the upper stories, most recently was put to temporary uses like political campaign offices.

The year in review, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Gwynne decoded

As far I can tell, Charles Goodnight is the only writer to use the name “Dirt Dauber” to refer to birds in the swallow family (Hirundinidae). Everyone else reserves that name for various species of wasp. From his The Making of a Scout, some frontier navigation wisdom:

‘The scout had to be familiar with the birds of the region,’ continued the plainsman, ‘to know those that watered each day, like the dove, and those that lived long without watering, like the Mexican quail. On the Plains, of an evening, he could take the course of the doves as they went off into the breaks to water. But the easiest of all birds to judge from was that known on the Plains as the dirt-dauber or swallow. He flew low, and if his mouth was empty he was going to water. He went straight too. If his mouth had mud in it, he was coming straight from water.’ (pp. 42-43)

Goodnight is cited in S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon, p. 198. David Sibley writes that American swallows of the genera Hirundo and Petrochelidon use mud to build nests. All are permanent Texas residents, at least by today’s distribution maps.

Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies

An entertaining, quite funny dollop of dark blackout comedy and Chicago-style audience abuse that brings these holiday tidings: “the world is a creepy place.” Of the six-member ensemble, Travis Turner stands out in a sketch in which he is called on to impersonate a domineering, supportive mother. Woolly company member Jessica Francis Dukes gets to show her musical chops with some serious belting. Maribeth Monroe is handy with a swiffer, cleaning up after an especially bloody scene. All four men of the ensemble do well with perhaps the deepest sketch of the evening, an exploration of race and cultural values as personified by Chicago’s two hapless baseball teams. And a hat tip to the evening’s followspot operator.

  • Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies, written and performed by Chicago’s The Second City, directed by Billy Bungeroth, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

84%

An op-ed piece by Nicholas K. Peart, reflecting on the five times this 23-year-old community college student has been stopped and frisked by police.

…last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means.