Author: David Gorsline

Get on the boss

Julie Sedivy summarizes recent work by William Labov: there is evidence that the spread of a vowel shift that’s working its way through the northern parts of the Rust Belt (sort of an Albany-Buffalo-Detroit-Milwaukee axis) is being curbed by more conservative speakers to the south and west.

Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say…. But I suspect that political ideology may become an anchor for accents to the extent that large social groups collectively identify themselves by their political beliefs….

So perhaps it’s not surprising that George W. Bush acquired a distinct Texan accent, despite having abundant exposure to people from the Northeast, or why Barack Obama sprouted a mild set of Chicago vowels, even though he was fully an adult before ever living there.

ᔥ The Morning News

At the park: 49

playing with contrastOn this morning’s nest box walk, we noticed a big patch of freshwater snails in the shallows off the boardwalk on the way to the observation tower, snails that we hadn’t seen even last week. I blasted the contrast in this image so that the snails are visible through the murky water.

new invasive?in the handUnfortunately, they appear to be Chinese Mystery Snails (Cipangopaludina chinensis), an invasive that is often introduced by aquarium dumping. This large snail species features an operculum, a trap door that the snail can close up to ward off drought and predators. Notice that there’s no snail sticking out of the shell in the image at the right.

Recent posts like this one from Brendan Fitzgerald suggest that this pesty algae-eating mollusk is a recent arrival in Virginia.

Some people consider the best way to deal with these intruders it to eat them.

Via

Scott M. Fulton III explicates the idea behind Maria Popova’s Curator’s Code project, and gives a name to a practice that I try to avoid (with little success): LWIR.

Popova proposes the Unicode ᔥ [CANADIAN SYLLABICS SH (U+1525)] as a shorthand for “via,” to indicate “a link of direct discovery,” and ↬ [RIGHTWARDS ARROW WITH LOOP (U+21AC)] to replace the various forms of “hat tip” that acknowledge indirect links and inspiration. I rather like these one-character squiggles of attribution, and the bookmarklet available at Curator’s Code makes it easy to snag them onto the clipboard. (Be it noted that the bookmarklet embeds its own link back to the project site.) I’ll give them a try; here’s hoping that G+ and Twitter play nicely with them.

Of course, half the time my trouble is making a note of my link source at the time I capture the link. It may be several days later when I get around to sharing the link. I use Instapaper’s summary field (available through the Edit link) to some advantage here.

And here I’d been using H/T incorrectly all along.

Civilization (all you can eat)

Sarah Marshall is monumental in the role of Big Hog in Jason Grote’s Civilization (all you can eat). It’s a fable (with more than a little debt to Orwell’s Animal Farm) in which most of the desperate, lonely people of its overlapping subplots are on the way down, while the hogs are are the way up. Grote usually dreams big, and here he swings from a scene watching the stars to a painfully frank confession at an open mic night. Daniel Escobar handles the latter with a deft touch, as he speaks of walking the waste paths of the city, noting every bit of trash along the verges.

All these scenelets make for a lot of scene transitions, and director Howard Shalwitz manages them skillfully. Nearly all the action takes place along a narrow strip downstage of a two-story barn wall marked with faded painted advertisements. Actors and set pieces always move on from stage right and go off to stage left, and the one-way movement begins to suggest a treadmill. And here’s something you don’t see much any more: the coffee shop tables, chairs, and people brazenly roll into view while the previous scene is still playing. Choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning contributes a fun dance with shopping carts for another scene change.

But it’s Marshall who’s the star. As the piggie who went to market and came back with a thousand-yard stare into our future, she will put you off your bacon for a while.

  • Civilization (all you can eat), by Jason Grote, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

The Language Archive

Forum Theatre offers a thoughtful comedy that follows the link between the words we use and the world that they create. George, a professional linguist (the multi-colored monologist Mitchell Hébert), preserves dying languages on tape, tracking down their last native speakers. Unfortunately, at home, relations with his wife Mary (the rock-steady Nanna Ingvarsson) are less successful: incapable of converting his love to words, George’s emotions are bracketed by quotation marks.

One of George’s interview subjects explains forcefully to him that the decay of a spoken language does not lead to the disappearance of a way of life; rather, it is the other way around, the disappearing world causing the language’s vanishing. And yet playwright Julia Cho leaves the question for us to decide, as the play often suggests the contrary, especially on the micro scale. George and Mary’s communication gap is neatly echoed by the argument between interview subjects Alta and Resten, a married couple and the last speakers of a vaguely north-central Eurasian tongue known for its musicality; their spat culminates in a mutual silent treatment. Covering several ensemble roles as well as those of Alta and Resten are Kerri Rambow and Edward Christian, and they do a fine job with each of them.

The play is enlivened by a few quirky breakings of the fourth wall, most notably the group Esperanto lesson that opens the second act.

  • The Language Archive, by Julia Cho, directed by Jessica Burgess, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

At the park: 48

Both of the new boxes that we mounted in mid-February are home to clutches of Hooded Merganser eggs. The crew of wildlife photographers were very grateful for the activity at new box #10, which is quite visible from the boardwalk. They tried to convince us to set up even more boxes, in racks condo-style; we politely thanked them for the suggestion.

reddeninggreeningDownstream of the observation tower along Barnyard Run, it still looks pretty brown, although the flush of maple flowers is apparent in the treetops. At the water level, duckweed is starting to green up.

I stuck around until the afternoon to join a different volunteer team, this one organized to whack away at some of the invasive alien Japanese Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Asiatic Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) that threatened to make a play for a sunny clearing. We worked in a section along the pond trail in the northwest section of the park, not accessible from the boardwalk trails but rather from the hike-bike trail with its trailhead on South Kings Highway.

statelyWe cleaned up vines in the vicinity of a stately Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera). I spent a good chunk of my time working over a patch of bittersweet that was more tenacious than Audrey II, all the while leaving the native Poison Ivy and Virginia Grape alone.

At the park: 47

Monitoring season began this morning, and we were rewarded with 4 Hooded Merganser eggs in box #13, while another merg was stationed in the entrance hole to brand-new box #4 (which we installed just two weekends ago!). She sat there for a couple of minutes, so we didn’t approach that box.

new beaver damTwo articles of new construction are visible in the image: the new weather-resistant, recycled-materials boardwalk, and the beaver dam. Our castorine friends have enlarged the pond around the first observation area, where the boardwalk enters the wetland. The gradient between the water levels I judge to be about 20 cm.

Per the Friends newsletter, the latest word on (man-made) dam construction for the wetland restoration project calls for ground-breaking in summer/fall of next year. The Park Authority has contracted with Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc. to provide final designs, acquire permits, and oversee construction.

Silver Line progress report: 22

I spent one of my votes on a write-in candidate in Metro’s poll on station names for the Tysons-to-Herndon section of the Silver Line: I plumped for “Freedom Hill” for the station on route 7 near the Westpark Drive intersection. I am very pleased that “Scotts Run” is in the running for the east-end route 123 station. Maybe they picked up on my suggestion.

Metro has a policy that requires that names be:

  • Relevant: Identify station locations by geographical features, centers of activity or be derived from the names of cities,communities, neighborhoods or landmarks within one-half mile (or walking distance) of the station;
  • Brief: Limited to 19 characters with spaces and punctuation, including both primary and secondary names;
  • Unique: Distinctive and not easily confused with other station names
  • Evocative: Evoke imagery in the mind of the patron

Take the poll and hold them to it!

As close as I’ll ever get to Ebbets

Via The Morning News, cartoon drawings by Gene Mack of the fourteen major league baseball stadiums of the 1946-47 seasons. So that’s what baseball in the Polo Grounds looked like.

Fourteen parks. But weren’t there sixteen teams? Yes, and the A’s (before they moved west) and Phillies shared Shibe Park, and the Cardinals and Browns (before they moved east to Baltimore) shared St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park.

And actually, fifteen parks are portrayed, because the Indians were transitioning from League Park to Municipal Stadium.