Aaron Myers remembers the 17-foot-long mock Metro station built in 1968 as a prototype for testing materials and construction techniques.
Author: David Gorsline
many Ways
Most of the low-quality posts on Stack Overflow you just ignore, edit, or flag, and then move on. (Sort of like the game Date, Screw, or Throw off a Cliff.) But this little illiterate gem, posted in response to the question “What is the best way to get a site visitor’s location?”, is jolie laide, definitely worth making fun of:
Thank youuu :) but the best and important ways to get more visitors are : add you website to directory Web like Altavista alltheweb DMOZ ..(must have a hight page rank) Add your website to The Big Search Engine Like Yahoo GOOGLE …( add url ) Make Rss To your website (feedcat …. feed rss …) share it in Facebook Twitter Google plus youtube and also Link In …myspace.. Do and change ads whit your friends mine share blog of your friend in your blog …(change ads it’s free ) and also ADS NOT FREE buy the area in the other website Or go to The big Company and to have more visitors trought BUY ADS like google Adwords like yahoo Adversing !… We have many Ways to get visitors you can visit us : www.REDACTED.blogspot.com or contact us : REDACTED@hotmail.fr
Myspace?!
The post has been flagged as spam, and will be gone soon from SO. Enjoy it here.
Dolly Sods Wilderness
The Dolly Sods tract in West Virginia is special to a lot of naturalists and other fans of the outdoors. Geologically, it’s on the eastern edge of the Appalachian Plateau province, where the Ridge and Valley province gives way to it. At an elevation of about 4000 feet, it’s just west of the eastern Continental Divide, hence part of the Ohio River watershed. The nutrient-poor, poorly drained soils support plant communities of sphagnum glades, blueberry heath barrens, and grassy balds—and that means some animal specialities can be found, too. Part of the Monongahela National Forest, parts of the area received wilderness designation in 1975. Since so many others have written about it, I was overdue for my first visit to the place.
The local spruce is Picea rubens. The tall, isolated trees here show the effect of growing in an environment where the wind is always blowing from the west: there’s no foliage on that side of the tree. I found cones only at the tops of trees; fortunately, this stunted example along the Rocky Ridge Trail has matured at only six feet in height, so that I could get a snap of the cones from eye level.
Any hike when you get to walk through a big patch of Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) in bloom is a good hike.
I saw a few small blueberries coming into ripeness; heard (and briefly saw) Black-throated Green Warbler (Dendroica virens) (actually, what I saw mght have been a Townsend’s); found lots of a cinquefoil that Wikipedia identifies as Three-toothed Cinquefoil (Sibbaldiopsis tridentata). As I walked on, I saw more laurel, more blueberries, more cinquefoil—a typical pattern of lower diversity under these extreme conditions.
The most common butterfly that I saw is dependent on blueberries. This Pink-edged Sulphur (Colias interior) found my gear an irresistible place to hang out for a while. And perhaps to spread some hormones about; I suspect this is a female, because a more strongly patterned male was pestering her.
The Bear Rocks Trail is the “oh, let’s do the longer 10 mile loop” trail. Well-marked, a fun little stream to cross. The saddle you drop into before rising to meet the Raven Ridge Trail feels like walking into Brigadoon.
Even a boardwalk over the wetter patches. This trail leaves you wondering about what all the fuss is about following trails in this wilderness, and about the quality of the Forest Service’s maps.
The Rocky Ridge Trail, on the west side of the tract, isn’t so clearly marked, at least not officially. The informal cairns (not quite to Boy Scout standards) keep you on the path.
The Dobbin Grade Trail, a repurposed railroad grade, is the “dear lord, let’s just get home, OK?” trail. Poorly marked; after normal rains, there are substantial patches that are nothing but bog. Mind you, the guidebooks warn about this. The problem is that there’s nowhere for rain runoff to go, turning the sphagnum into a spongey gumbo. The trick I learned (too late) is this: if it looks wet, use your stick to find rock under it. If you don’t, you go in the goop over your boots.
And I had my opportunity to reroute my return over the Raven Ridge Trail. But I can be stubborn sometimes.
I suspect that the Forest Service is trying to exercise benign neglect on this useful trail that connects to many others. I think they would like to discourage hikers from using the track, since trail users are forced off trail and into the veg whenever a wet spot appears, disrupting the life of the bog.
A longer walk than I originally planned, seduced as I was by the easy going on the Bear Rocks Trail. There is some climbing, but I didn’t track the elevation change. 7:45 for 10.8 miles, with a generous lunch break and birding from time to time. Overreached myself a little bit, as I had nothing left in the tank for the last mile or two, and I dropped plans of further hiking for the next day.
Note for next time: I used a chain motel back in Woodstock, Va. as my base camp for this trip. It’s a 2-plus-hour drive from Woodstock to the wilderness. Next time, I’d like to try one of the smart-looking cottages along route 55 in Petersburg, rented by the Smoke Hole Resort. From there, route 28/7 and the Forest Service roads into the wilderness is just five minutes away.
Update: There’s an orphaned article by Andy Hiltz about the area that has some useful information.
Update (8 May 2024): Andy Hiltz’s article, archived.
Dance
Gateway drug
Tawny Fletcher tempers her exuberant invitation to beginning birders with visits to experts Kimball Garrett and Alvaro Jaramillo.
Los Angeles County: home to Hollywood, the Sunset Strip and some of the awesomest birding hotspots in the country.
“It’s partly, of course, because there are so many people here that if a bird shows up, somebody’s going to find it,” explains Garrett. “But it’s mostly because of the diversity of habitat.” We’re talking mountains, marshes, coastline, chaparral, desert, oak woodland and more, people! That’s a lot of different kinds of food and shelter that are irresistible to a lot of different kinds of birds.
Close grouping
It was a dense white summer day and there were men in orange vests jackhammering along the middle of the broad street, with concrete barriers rimming the raw crevice and every moving thing on either side taking defensive measures, taxis in stop-and-start pattern and pedestrians sprinting across the street in stages, in tactical bursts, cell phones welded to their heads.
—Don DeLillo, “The Starveling”
June 16
Becky Hogge celebrates a double Bloomsday: not only is it the anniversary of James Joyce’s first, um, date with Nora Barnacle, but also this is the first year in which the text of Ulysses resides in the public domain—at least in the EU.
Late to bed
Interesting research from Jason D. Fridley that I may come back to when I take Carole Bergmann’s invasives class in August: Fridley conducted a three-year study comparing congeneric native and non-native shrubs and lianas in the Eastern deciduous forest. The non-natives’ competitive edge didn’t show itself in the spring; both aliens and natives leafed out at about the same time. But the foreign-born Euonymus, Lonicera, Viburnum, and other species dropped their leaves in autumn about a month later than the native woody plants.
Photo roundup
In the Hunters Woods Safeway, I found an indoor water dispenser like the outdoor ones that so charmed me in south Texas.
The National Gallery’s East Building is undergoing a multiyear project to renovate the pink marble panels that clad the building. The fancy falsework around the building is its own kind of temporary installation art. The elevator component reminds me a bit of Brancusi’s Endless Column.
The beavers in the park have built a lodge up onto the boardwalk. They have incorporated one of the benches into their organic architecture.
Leta and I were both enchanted by Caitlin Phillips’ room at Artomatic. Her wall treatment supports her exhibit of purses made from old book bindings. I’ve got a powder room in my house that is in need of some sprucing, and I’m tempted to try Phillips’s idea, but make it more permanent. I wonder whether a couple of coats of polyurethane over the book pages would provide sufficient durability and yet be reversible (whoever buys this house from me is unlikely to share my taste in bathroom reading).
Tick, tick
Allan Kosnin on the problems of conserving the instruments of 20th century music: Philip Glass’s Farfisa organ, Milton Babbitt’s RCA Mark II synthesizer, and something substantially lower-tech:
Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes (1962) should be the easiest of his scores to perform: all you have to do is wind up the 100 metronomes, start them at exactly the same time (O.K., that is not so easy) and let them wind down until the last one stops.
But try finding 100 windup metronomes these days.
Mr. Burns, a post-electric play
What is this? we ask ourselves ten minutes into Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. Some guys sitting around a campfire, telling stories that they remember badly, hoping that the creak in the woods they just heard is food and not an intruder? A surprisingly moving passage in which news is exchanged by summoning names from address books?
And yet, and yet. Out of such rude yet inherently theatrical materials, Anne Washburn recapitulates the development of culture: survivors of a generalized failure of the electric power grid keep themselves alive by quoting bits of Gilbert and Sullivan and episodes of Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. As the years roll along, quotation becomes invention; light comedy and satire becomes bloody, lyrical tragedy. Or, as my OTC put it, when there is no physical property to speak of (when your stage machinery is made of recycled blue plastic tarpaulins), there remains intellectual property.
Some engaging acting performances in the first act—James Sugg’s taciturn, Robert Mitchum-channelling Sam, the travelling Gibson (Chris Genebach) with hidden G&S skills—become absorbed into the ensemble playing of the second and third acts. Indeed, by act 3, set far in the future, we’ve dispensed with distinguishable characters at all. But it’s that third act towards which this play is driving, a marvelous palimpsest of bits of Western culture high and low (mostly low)—Brechtian songs, all of the actors in half masks, Britney Spears chartbusters—all of the theatrical wires showing because there’s no technology to make them disappear. The thrilling miracle of the end of the act is that there are juice-carrying wires at all.
- Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, by Anne Washburn, directed by Steven Cosson, music by Michael Friedman, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Some links links: 3
Research by Marc Barthelemy, as reported by Sarah Fecht, reveals that large subway systems, no matter how they came to be, share a few common topological and geometrical properties.
…an average of 20 percent of the stations in the core link two or more subway lines, allowing people to make transfers.
Against ovation inflation
Pretty much every show you attend on Broadway these days ends with people jumping to their feet and beating their flippers together like captive sea lions whose zookeeper has arrived with a bucket of fish.
Leta and I, between us, saw four fine shows on and off-Broadway last week. And we kept our seats for the applause for all of them. Messrs. Hoffman and Pryce could hear us just as well.
Snyders everywhere
A new insurance product, one that I wish there was no need for: A grantor of a conservation easement sells his property. The new owner (usually one with deep pockets, because conservation land trusts don’t use easements to protect economically valueless land) decides to do what he likes with the property, contracts be damned. The volunteer-run, cash-strapped trust (if it weren’t poorly funded, it would have bought the land outright) has to take the new owner to court, and that gets expensive.
Now, as Felicity Barringer reports, a new non-profit insurance company, Terra Firma, is there to offer a policy to the trust to mitigate the legal fees needed to defend the easement.
Land trusts usually win in court — though many cases are settled, according to alliance records. One common denominator: the wealth of the property owners challenging restrictions.
Death of a Salesman
Mike Nichols keeps the opening moments of Death of a Salesman quiet, soft, and slow, all the better to set off the fireworks to come. The performances here set a reference standard for Arthur Miller’s iconic work, though we do miss the scrim effects specified by the text. Andrew Garfield gives us a grittier, more street-wise Biff Loman; Molly Price does comic va-va-va-voom as The Woman. Philip Seymour Hoffman is grounded, stolid as Willy Loman as his American dream breaks apart under his feet. He is a bear at bay—until his closing beat, when he sprints to escape.
With one arguable exception, the underscoring by Alex North and Glen Kelly works very well here, giving the piece a bit of Tennessee Williams flavor. The compact set by Jo Mielziner keeps the playing spaces contained; for once, the Lomans’ kitchen is the size of a real kitchen for a house built in 1920.
What resonates with today’s audiences, evidenced by sympathetic chuckles, is the play’s critique of postwar consumption-driven economics; planned obsolescence is planned obsolescence, whether it’s a refrigerator that wears out just as the last installment payment is made, or today’s electronic gadgets with their forced upgrades. Willy Loman’s boss Howard (the wired-up gearhead Remy Auberjonois) would be less reprehensible were he pushing paperwork in his interview with Willy, rather than futzing with his new wire recorder.
- Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Mike Nichols, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York