To illustrate my point about Deon’s word choices, here’s a word cloud of his entire text, common words omitted and one possessive collapsed.
Author: David Gorsline
Flightless
Languagehat tracks down a near-nonce in Alan Hollinghurst:
I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: ‘Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation,’ the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa.
—The Stranger’s Child
Not to mention the Great Auk and other beefy birds.
At the park: 50
Two trips to the park not to check nest boxes (though we did check a couple), but rather to assist Kat, who is surveying crayfish activity. We went 0-18 on the smokestack traps, but negative data is still data. And the reptiles and amphibians provided some alternative entertainment.
She has been using submerged basket traps like this one, baited with an opened can of sardines. But she was interested in finding other species, ones that don’t spend all their time in the water.
This weekend’s project was to trap crayfish in their burrows. The plan was to use a bit of fine mesh, attached with string to a bit of dowelling. Insert the mesh into the burrow, wait overnight, and pull up a critter in the morning. Unfortunately, this morning we found no crayfish entangled in the mesh. Instead, we found a couple of our traps pulled completely into a burrow and out another entrance. And one trap went missing altogether. Maybe one day it will turn up incorporated into an Osprey’s nest.
Meanwhile, songbirds are actively nesting. Great-crested Flycatchers and Red-eyed Vireos were audible; a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher is nesting in full view of the boardwalk, at the first wide spot. And Prothonotary Warblers (Protonotaria citrea) are active! Nests (probably dummies) are being constructed to the right of the trail, just after the fork and before it enters the wetland.
The beavers continue to work on dams at the upper end of the wetland. The past month’s dry conditions have dropped the downstream water level; the gauge reads only 0.28 m.
Some ink: 4
The body copy for David Seigel’s preview of August: Osage County is correct in the online edition; there was a kerfluffle with the print version, as betrayed by the semantic URL. It’s all good: get the show dates and the box office web address right, and spell my name correctly, and I’m happy.
Upcoming: 31
Join the (first?) area Cricket Crawl on 24 August, a census of late summer crickets and katydids.
Plug in
As Leta likes to remind me, the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle (or anything else powered by mains electricity, for that matter) depends on the underlying energy source used to produce the electricity, be it solar or nuclear or coal. Paul Stenquist previews an upcoming report from the Union of Concerned Scientists on the greenhouse gas impact of pure electric automobiles (Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf) across the country.
The study translates the effect into an apples-to-apples, miles-per-gallon comparison to conventional cars. Since cities in the Great Plains and upper Midwest get much of their electricity from CO2-spilling sources, driving an electric car charged up in the middle of the country is no better than driving an gasoline-powered econobox that gets 35 MPG. By comparison, in hydro-dependent southeast Alaska, you’d have to drive something that gets 112 MPG to best an electric vehicle.
Snead & Co.
I finally had a few minutes’ opportunity to pause at the old Woodies building for the beautiful ironwork that’s been recently repainted. As can be clearly read now, the manufacturer was the Snead & Co. Iron Works of Jersey City, N.J.
Snead also held several library shelving system patents. I distinctly remember what must have been their skeleton shelves (with a clever twist-lock bookend) in the stacks of Deering Library, the old library at Northwestern.
Side Man
1st Stage delivers a clean, tight rendering of Leight’s memory play on the twilight of jazz bands. Patrick Bussinck gives a street-wise, wry reading to the narrator Clifford, one that’s much more connected than previous portrayals I’ve seen. Lee Mikeska Gardner makes the character arc of Clifford’s doomed mother Terry more distinct, albeit with a softened New England dialect. Director Michael Dove suits the play’s multiple locations to 1st Stage’s friendly space, using the house’s central aisle for entrances and conjuring a jail cell from two chairs. The atmospheric lighting by Stephanie P. Freed, relying on floor lamps and wall sconces to give us a cramped rent-controlled apartment or a downstairs jazz club, is exceptional.
- Side Man, by Warren Leight, directed by Michael Dove, 1st Stage Theatre, Tysons Corner, Virginia
Arias with a Twist
Drag performer Joey Arias dresses up her cabaret act with inventive scrim projections and other effects by Basil Twist. Alas, Twist’s vintage puppets have more engaging personality than Arias’s persona. Unfunny banter, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gag based on a hand job. Arias does display some vocal skills, as well as an overworked deep squat move. She makes some wholly peculiar music choices, like George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and the opening number, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s bombastic “Kashmir.” If the objective is something north of The Rocky Horror Show, what is realized is more like Plan 9 from Outer Space.
- Arias with a Twist, by Joey Arias and Basil Twist, directed by Basil Twist, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Weird public thick-book spine point
Mark Z. Danielewski looks for love on OkCupid.
Cardinalis cardinalis
The cardinal grosbeak, or Virginia redbird, is quite common in the same localities, though more inclined to seek the woods. It is much sought after by bird-fanciers, and by boy gunners, and consequently is very shy. This bird suggests a British redcoat; his heavy, pointed beak, his high cockade, the black stripe down his face, the expression of weight and massiveness about his head and neck, and his erect attitude, give him a decided, soldier-like appearance; and there is something of the tone of the fife in his song or whistle, while his ordinary note, when disturbed, is like the clink of a sabre.
—John Burroughs, “Spring at the Capital,” from Wake-Robin (1871)
No bathroom breaks?
That would do me in immediately.
Andrew T. Baker lays down the DC Metro Challenge. He recently traveled to all 86 stations, from Shady Grove to Largo Town Center, in 7:27:49. Can you do better?
The 1 mm forest
My final writing assignment for my current course, a book report on The Diversity of Life, by E. O. Wilson, is complete.
The hallmark of life is this: a struggle among an immense variety of organisms weighing next to nothing for a vanishingly small amount of energy.
—Wilson, pp. 35-36
Calling all botany geeks
I invite you to participate in the development of a Q&A site for questions about botany. The site would be part of the successful Stack Exchange network, of which Stack Overflow is the flagship.
One of the features of a Stack Exchange site that makes it successful is the liberal awarding of brownie points to users who constructively participate in the site. Jeff Atwood and his team have figured out the alchemy that makes a community-managed site work.
At this point, the proposed Botany site is in the stage of soliciting sample questions. Follow the link below and add your own!
Update: The proposal for this Q&A site has been closed, alas.
August: Osage County: an update: 1
I do expect that this will be the only series of posts with three colons in the title.
We are running big chunks of the show, generally off book and off prompt. This afternoon we did a full run, which means I get to relax and watch the stunning act 2 dinner scene.
Leta is in the show, but I have zero shared stage time with her. Rather, much of my scene work is with Lee; we have a once-in-a-while shared history that goes back to a silly hotel room farce called Birthday Suite that we did for the Players in 1994.
Since I have little text to work with, I can do some micro-level dialect work, aided by the audio archive of Oklahoma speakers developed by Paul Meier and the University of Kansas. Matt shared this link with the cast; I was more or less aware of the archive but I didn’t realize that the corpus was categorized by state. The unscripted samples are the best part; the researchers found ordinary people with some really interesting stories to tell ex tempore. The standard passage, “Comma Gets a Cure,” is sometimes distracting to the subjects, especially those who have actually taken a goose to the vet.