Author: David Gorsline

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.

cornercreditI 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

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)

 

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!

Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Botany

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.

at home with the Westons 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.

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.