David Gorsline – A Honey of an Anklet

Letters of recommendation: 1

Whenever I check into a motel, one of the first things I seek out is the literature display rack. I’ve grabbed info on antique malls,¹ directions to the Goo Goo Shop in Nashville, opening hours for the Tinkertown Museum in Albuquerque (I need to go back in season)—I don’t always find something interesting, but once in a while I find a peach, like the brochure for The Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Mich.

So how did those racks and all those brochures get there? Well, at least for here in the mid-Atlantic, I may have found the source. In a brilliantly meta moment, I picked up a rack card for TDS Brochure Distributors. (They’ve allowed their domain to lapse, so it’s possible that they’re no longer operating under that name.)

From the back of TDS’s card:

Embark on a journey of exploration in our captivating region! Pick up one of the brochures, rack cards, maps, or visitor guides displayed here, and let it whisk you away to an unexpected and thoroughly delightful experience. Consider extending your stay to uncover the full spectrum of exciting attractions in the area. Your getaway to unforgettable moments starts with a choice from this display!

¹Since my house is full, I really need to stay out of these places.

DeLillo decoded: 2

One more from Ratner’s Star (1976):

On the way home they sat in the next-to-last car. A tripping device failed to work and their train, braking late, ran into the rear of a stalled work train. Billy found himself on the floor of the car. Ahead was stunned metal, a buckled frame for bodies intersecting in thick smoke. Then there was a moment of superlunar calm. In this interval, just before he started crying, he realized there is at least one prime between a given number and its double. (p. 5)

What seven-year-old Billy has rediscovered is a variant of Bertrand’s Postulate.

Outgoing

Word is that Metro’s venerable, perplexing farecard machines are soon to be replaced. So here’s maybe a last look at the old machines at my local station.

The farecard machines have been retrofitted more than a couple of times. Originally, they accepted only cash and dispensed a paper farecard.¹ Now, credit/debit cards are accepted and what comes out is a laminated plastic stored value card.

Since there’s a rush hour premium added to the distance-based fare, it’s very easy to have insufficient funds on your card in order to exit (especially back in the old paper farecard days). (See the busy table of fares at the top of the machine.) Hence, the Exitfare machine, in original orange livery, which was designed to one purpose: top up your card so that you can exit. Fun fact: Exitfare was originally called Addfare, but riders would try to use it to add more than necessary to exit.

¹If you want to sound like a tourist, call it a ticket.

Clifton Institute Bioblitz August 2026 (Rappahannock): addendum

The view of the Blue Ridge from our bioblitz site last month.

Some links: 114

A double shot of Some Links this month.

And thus passes away the world’s only palindromic demonym: Nauru is now Naoero.
To-do list management tips from T. Rex.
The perspective of Reid Walker, a Native American, on land acknowledgements: too much and too little.

The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.
Anthony Conwright: Stop calling it the Civil War.

The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
The usual crap from 47: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws; Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason.
Jerry Cayford on a framework for eliminating gerrymandering.
A Letter from Mick Jagger to the Devil on the First Draft of “Sympathy for the Devil,” by John Moe.
Her legs went all the way up to the fringe of her baby-doll dress. Presumably further than that, but that’s where the bright polka dots distracted me from theorizing.
James Harbeck continues fighting the good fight for epicenter.
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead. Maybe my first experiment should be acting on some of the Personal Development links that I’ve posted, instead of just sharing them.

Birthday getaway 2026

A very short getaway, and a very short trip report to match.

I visited Hickory Hollow Natural Area Preserve in Lancaster County. I didn’t find evidence of the protected lady’s-slipper orchids, but then again, it was the wrong time of the year and I didn’t have any inside info. Crane-fly Orchids (Tipularia discolor) were blooming, however. It was a nice walk all the same. Finding Mutinus elegans was a nice surprise.

Chasing the next Virginia State Parks Trail Quest pin, I hit Caledon SP in King George County, and Culpeper Battlefields SP in Culpeper County, the latter visit “escrowed” until the park is built out and made part of the Trail Quest program. It would be nice to return to Caledon for a morning walk when I’m a little fresher and I can make it down the marsh trail to the river.

At Culpeper Battlefields, on the scraped out path to the top of Buford Knoll, I found a new-to-me robber fly, Triorla interrupta, and a new! to! me! tiger beetle, Cicindelidia punctulata. A few butterflies were flying, and some larger flying things were also in the air.

Still here

In about 1981, A. and I took a little trip to Garrett County, Maryland, the triangular bit at the western end of the state, wedged between West Virginia and Pennsylvania. We were hoping for cross-country skiing (we had recently moved from Minneapolis), but there was no snow, so we did a bit of unfocused hiking.

At the crossroads of U.S. 50 and U.S. 219, marked on the map as Red House, we found a roadside restaurant that served up buckwheat pancakes and this amazing link sausage—it was probably smoked, but then prepared like ordinary breakfast sausage. I don’t remember the name, but it was likely something like the Red House Inn.

A few years later, A. and I split up, and then somewhere in the mid 1980s I took a solo trip out U.S. 50 (I think I was driving Algernon) and stopped again at this roadside restaurant. Food still amazing.

And then time continued to pass, and the next time I was out that way I saw that the restaurant was closed. So it goes with mom and pop outfits. East-west traffic on U.S. 50 was perhaps beginning to decline with the opening of I-68 in the northern part of the county.

On my West Virginia trip with Mark Garland earlier this month, I passed by the place again. It has a new roof, but there are buttresses keeping the walls upright (not visible in the photo). Traffic on U.S. 50 was very sparse, again maybe due to the opening of four-lane U.S. 48 to the south.

The building is now a roadside church. It’s nice to remember my two visits from 40 years ago, and that wonderful sausage.

West Virginia highlands August 2026

We scuffled with lodging availability (nearby music festival), a road closure, pop-up thunderstorms, a park closed for an archery tournament, and limited opening hours for visitor centers, and still pulled off an enjoyable two days in the West Virginia highlands on a Nature Forward trip led by Mark Garland. The group visited sites in Blackwater Falls State Park and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge’s mascot is the Cheat Mountain Salamander (Plethodon nettingi).

The driving to this part of West Virginia follows the somewhat infamous Corridor H highway, signed as U.S. 48. The stretch between Wardensville (just over the Virginia line) and Davis is four lanes divided with intersections at grade, chopping through hills and bridging rivers and valleys.

Mark showed us two new butterflies for me, both in hand: Atlantis Fritillary (Argynnis atlantis) and Meadow Fritillary (Boloria bellona). Participant B. pointed out several nifty day-flying moths, among them Eusarca confusaria, Ctenucha virginica, and Common Ringlet (Coenonympha california). I found two lycophytes new to me, Hickey’s Tree-clubmoss (Dendrolycopodium hickeyi) and Staghorn Clubmoss (Lycopodium clavatum) (and). And we puzzled out the ID of a meadowhawk, at last landing on White-faced Meadowhawk (Symptetrum obtrusum).

Mark demonstrated attaching a BlūMorpho transmitter to a Monarch butterfly. Six hundredths of a gram with its own solar panel, and signals from nearby phones with Bluetooth active can be recorded. Wowee!

I hadn’t realized that the Blackwater River, flowing east to west across the region, is part of the Ohio River watershed. Traveling between the valley and my motel in Oakland, Md., I made a short side quest to visit the Fairfax Stone, marking the springs of the North Fork of the Potomac River, the Potomac of course flowing east to Chesapeake Bay.

I also passed through Thomas, W. Va., with a hippy-dippy line of shops along its riverfront. It would be cool to stop in the next time I’m in the area.

Clifton Institute Bioblitz August 2026 (Rappahannock)

Another successful bioblitz, this time to a new property in Rappahannock County. Someone spotted a (ordinarily nocturnal) Tetracha virginica in the parking lot just as we were getting organized, adding to my super-short list of tiger beetles observed. I got a lucky look at a Swarthy Skipper (Nastra lherminier), and the observation got a fave. I tried to focus on graminoids: perhaps my best showing was a Dichanthelium. Rush Skeletonweed (Chondrilla juncea) was a new non-native to me. I got a decent audio recording of Wood Thrush (Hylocichla musterlina).

And there’s always something interesting at the lights after dark. Red-bordered Emerald (Nemoria lixaria) was perhaps the fanciest moth of the night.

Adrift

An entertaining hour-and-a-half of low-tech shenanigans, Medieval style, with a good chunk of vaudeville schtick, from Happenstance Theater. Of the musical accompaniment, the hurdy-gurdy is a nice surprise. Sarah Olmsted Thomas’s demon character is goofily terrifying.

Adrift: A Medieval Wayward Folly, produced by Happenstance Theater, Bethesda, Md.

Clifton Institute NABA Butterfly Count 2026

Well, the good news is that the weather was pleasant. The bad news is that the weather was pleasant: cool, cloudy. Hence, very little butterfly activity. I did manage to find Tawny-edged Skippers (Polites themistocles) at two of our survey sites.

New butterfly observers Shanon and Kathy enjoyed the day immensely, so that was gratifying.

Of the non-butterfly species, I found a couple interesting moths (squeaking in to National Moth Week), including Wedgling Moth (Galgula partita). And the team found a handsome Common Green Darner (Anaz junius).

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2026

Best Line Wins does a good job of capturing the flavor of the best-loved sketches from the 1950s and 60s by Mike Nichols and Elaine May, without (as the dramaturg’s notes tell us) infringing on material that is still in copyright.

My Favorite Sociopath is a sharp satire of hypercompetitive journalism graduate students chasing (and besmirching) reputation in the early twilight years of news in print. I wonder what my newsroom colleagues would say. I wonder what Truman Capote would say.

In The Smoker, Lisa D’Amour spins a tale of striving (working-class, middle-class, artistic-class) out of a relatively recent opportunity for socializing, the front stoop nicotine break. There are some interesting doublets, among them two mishaps that fall from the skies. Regina Gibson is particularly winning as Kim, an opera singer with auditions but no gigs, who imagines a prospective hookup in sad detail.

In her interview in the program notes, D’Amour identifies why I am not always taken in by a new play:

[My mentor, Sherry Kramer]… told me that audiences will not tolerate didacticism. They will shut down and not listen. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being lectured to in a play. So this is part of the magic trick of writing a play. It’s a little bit of a sleight of hand. You’re trying to hide what you’re talking about in something very casual, and hopefully by the end of the play, the audience realizes what we were talking about the whole time.

To realize Refugee Rhapsody, cheers for the design and technical crew for accomplishing multiple playing spaces in the white box of Studio 112, chief among them a minimalist apartment for the uber-rich, all cream and ivory right down to the faux Mark Rothko on the wall. How do we frame someone else’s suffering, someone else’s disaster? The question is made concrete in the most theatrical elements of this play.

¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, braids together two story lines, a middle-aged woman’s last chance at IVF, and the Argentine military’s 1976 coup that suspended Peronism¹ and resulted in tens of thousands of desaparecidos.

A design/direction quibble: a few scenes consist of telephone calls between Annie and her OB-GYN, Dr. Cossi. Annie is where we can easily see her from three sides (in the often challenging Marinoff black box) but Dr. Cossi is at a corner between two of the seating areas, where she can’t easily be seen by many in the audience.

¹About which I am rather under-informed.

Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.
The Smoker, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by Shelley Butler
Refugee Rhapsody, by Yussef El Guindi, directed Zi Alikhan
Best Line Wins, by Beth Kander, directed by Jessica Kubzansky
¡VOS!, by Christina Pumariega, directed by Kimberly Senior
My Favorite Sociopath, by Aurin Squire, directed by Céline Rosenthal

Clifton Institute Bioblitz July 2026 (Rappahannock)

Our third visit to this property in Rappahannock County, and there were still some new pockets of habitat to explore. It got pretty muggy and hot in the afternoon, and I slowed down, but I didn’t feel incapacitated like I did last year.

My top observations:

In a heretofore unexplored meadow, American Harlequin (Xanthogramma flavipes), a syrphid fly, and Riley’s Clearwing Moth (Synanthedon rileyana), both species sporting “don’t mess with me” yellow and black stripes. On a bit of wood in that same meadow, fruiting bodies of Physarum viride.

At the lights after dark, Carolina Pine Sawyer (Monochamus carolinensis), a longhorn beetle, Four-spotted Owlfly (Ululodes quadripunctatus), a nocturnal predator in the Neuroptera, and a very handsome tussock moth, Halysidota sp. I gotta invest in a field guide for moths.

I didn’t lose anything this time, but there was an hour and a half of panic when I realized I didn’t have my flip phone. Did I not pick it up from the charger in the morning? Yup, I did not.

From 47’s arithmetic textbook

Ill-made ad from yesterday morning. The ad can’t decide whether I live in Woodbridge (on the other end of the county; how did it get Woodbridge from my IP address?) or ${city}$. And “up to -40% off” means that I’d be paying 40% more than the rack rate.

Happy decade: 2

20 years, posts have slowed down a bit. A random slice through the 3100+: every 100th post, counting backwards, first sentence, more or less.

25 June 2025: Sunday, more of the same heat.
24 July 2024: Florida’s Commissioner of Education thinks Jane Austen was an American.
30 August 2023: Reminders from John D. Cook and Valerie Tiberius that my next planning session should focus on deciding not to do something.
30 October 2022: One more nuance in Shakespeare to look out for: pronoun choice.
1 August 2021: “The Lost Episodes of I Love Lucy,” by Julian George.
13 August 2020: [Clem] Whitaker and [Leone] Baxter won nearly every [political] campaign they waged….
31 August 2019: More scouting of Rachel Carson Conservation Park, in preparation for next weekend’s walk.
30 September 2018: I attended the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this past week.
19 November 2017: Keegan Theatre delivers a solid production of this story of the accomplished businesswoman Marlene (Karina Hilleard), recently promoted to managing director of her employment agency, who may be having second thoughts about the sacrifices she has made to ensure her success.
25 November 2016: A message of hope from Vi Hart.
21 February 2016: David Crystal and Ben Crystal talk to Michael Rosen and Laura Wright of BBC Four’s Word of Mouth about Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP), with generous audio demonstrations.
30 July 2015: Mark Garland led two days of field trips to various off-the-map locations in southern New Jersey.
8 December 2014: State-of-the-art stormwater management—in Los Angeles?
17 June 2014: Joshua J. Tewksbury et al. make the case for restoring natural history’s importance to answering questions of public health, food security, and biology as a whole.
3 November 2013: Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups.
15 March 2013: Ian Bogost ends a call.
3 September 2012: Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers.
8 February 2012: Dear David L Gorsline: This letter is to acknowledge that Chase has received the funds to pay off your mortgage loan referenced above.
22 September 2011: Eric Fidler answers a question that’s been gnawing on my mind ever since my last ride down North Capitol Street from the Catholic campus: what’s with the brick silos and open fields between Michigan Avenue, N.W., and Channing Street, N.W.?
31 March 2011: Because there is no end, happy or otherwise.
24 October 2010: We had a good, if tiring, time over the last two days talking to the kids visiting the USA Science & Engineering Festival.
24 May 2010: James Ellroy’s editors let him down a few times in the early chapters of American Tabloid.
25 December 2009: Taking a couple of classes, plus a concerted effort to spend more time in the field and documenting it, means I have lots of field trip notes this year.
8 July 2009: The image from Henry Darger used in the cover design of the NYRB’s reissue of a novel from 1929 by Richard Hughes, is apparently all too appropriate, if we trust reviewer Andrew Sean Greer.
7 January 2009: HP is offering to buy back your used computer, PDA, printer, camera, or smartphone—anything with residual value, irrespective of manufacturer, report Gina Trapani and Candace Lombardi.
25 August 2008: I am not this guy, either.
4 April 2008: 60s spandex stunner Yvonne Craig—Batgirl, alter ego of Barbara Gordon, daughter to Police Commissioner Gordon—played by Neil Hamilton: Craig and Hamilton appeared as father and stepdaughter in a 1958 episode of Perry Mason titled “The Case of the Lazy Lover.”
30 October 2007: Fup, mascot of Powell’s Books, has passed away.
9 June 2007: A leader from the traditionally eco-skeptic Economist admits that recycling is “mostly worthwhile,” and proposes three steps to encourage the practice.
4 February 2007: Septime Webre and the Washington Ballet mix it up Latin style with live music—in the lobby, on stage, and in the pit—and Latin works by three choreographers, including a restaging of Webre’s own Juanita y Alicia.
14 September 2006: Tales from the computing trenches, back in the time when we wore those funny flat helmets: Jim Horning’s The Way It Was.