Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail. This marker is somewhere between miles 28.5 and 29, downstream from Lake Accotink.
Author: David Gorsline
At the park: 38
A couple of late-starting second broods in #67 and #68 unfortunately did not pan out, and we cleaned those boxes. This was a boom-bust year for Wood Duck: lots of eggs laid, but two nests completely failed, including the 31-egg dump in #67. Final summary numbers: 61 hatched/68 laid Hooded Merganser (5 nests), 53 hatched/113 laid Wood Duck (10 nests, plus 2 eggs in a HM nest).
Of the 19 boxes we have deployed, #77 and #8 are ready for replacement.
The detail-voracious can see the raw data worksheet for the project. The historical summary is probably more interesting.
Metaposting note: my WordPress dashboard says that this is the 1000th post at AHoaA.
Upcoming: 25 bis
Elizabeth Blair previews this year’s Contemportary American Theater Festival and talks to founder Ed Herendeen:
This year the festival is doing two world premieres. One of them could almost be called a musical.
“I cannot tell you the excitement and the buzz and the fear that we have — it’s good fear — producing the Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show,” Herendeen says.
Hitch your house
Jon Kalish reports on the Vermont/California tiny house movement.
Some links: 48
Another option for DIY sound designers looking for scene transition music: Rumblefish’s Music Licensing Store. I haven’t priced the fees, but the prospect of pre-cleared music “for any project” would benefit community theater directors looking to take a play into the competitive festival circuit.
in the dark among the L-pipes
“The Sink,” by Catherine Bowman, in this week’s New Yorker, witty wordlists jumbled together.
West decoded: 2
A goody with several examples online but no authoritative dictionary entry (and no etymology!):
In the suite occupied by Patricia Van Riis, lobster and champagne were the rule. The patrons of Powder River Rose usually ordered mountain oysters and washed them down with forty-rod. And so on down the list: while with Dolores O’Riely, tortillas and prune brandy from the Imperial Valley…
—Nathanael West, A Cool Million, ch. 18
Unless you count Mencken:
Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms…
The American Language, ch. 3
Ah, but OED comes through:
1889 FARMER Americanisms, * Forty Rod Lightning, whisky of the most villainous description, so called because humorously warranted to kill at forty rods.
Much snappier than 201-meter lightning. Forty rods are also equivalent to 1 furlong.
Not the kind of counter you want
It’s really sad that such a widget has a reason to exist, but that’s environmental disasters for you.
The animation first caught my eye, because I was running Flashblock in my browser, which cuts down on a lot of visual distractions. A little code reading tells me that spinning wheels are accomplished with plain old JavaScript, specifically, a jQuery odometer widget.
One more bit of internet geeking: I stumbled onto the Firefox feature that clicking a URL in the View Page Source window does another View Page Source in turn.
Monocacy River NRMA
I took a short out-and-back nature hike with Bob Pickett and ANS in the watershed of the Furnace Branch of the Monocacy River in Frederick County, just over the Montgomery County line. Destinations on this walk are the remains of Maryland’s extractive industrial past: a mill (perhaps used to mill limestone), a lime kiln, and two sandstone quarries, which provided the stone for the aqueduct that carried the C&O Canal over the Monocacy at its confluence with the Potomac.
Trails are not marked nor maintained: this is a hunting reserve. But, as one of us (Ann) pointed out, hunting pressure on the deer population has allowed the redevelopment of a healthy understory. Setting out on the trail, we soon found a couple of huge Hackberry trees (Celtis occidentalis) and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) fruit beginning to ripen. Numerous Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) and Acadian Flycatchers (Empidonax virescens) were heard, and one flycatcher, irritated at something, came out in the open. Alan found Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) in bloom and a clump of Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora).
After some stream hopping and bushwhacking, we arrived at the quarry sites. An impressive block of quartzite is exposed: sources call it the Sugarloaf Mountain Quartzite (and indeed that mountain is just to the northeast). In a stony patch, Alan spotted an orchid with pretty leaves: Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera pubescens) beginning to shoot up flower stalks. We heard, then after some patient looking, saw a Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivora): not a great look, but good enough for #361.
A sign of the times
Several years ago I noticed these old fallout shelter markers on the apartment block at 1901-1907 15th Street, N.W. There are at least four affixed to the exterior. These Cold War mementos are badly faded now; it’s hard to know whether a capacity was ever marked on the signs.
I always meant to do some research and write up the story of these yellow and black sentinels. But it turns out that Bill Geerhart did a much better job than I ever could have done. See also this photo gallery of signs still visible in Milwaukee and elsewhere.
West decoded
Nathanael West slips an archaism into the mannered, allusive novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):
… all would agree that “Life is but the span from womb to tomb; a sigh, a smile; a chill, a fever; a throe of pain, a spasm of volupty: then a gasping for breath, and the comedy is over, the song is ended, ring down the curtain, the clown is dead.”
Easily decodable from context, borrowed from French, is volupty (stress on the first syllable), but what’s sort of interesting is that it leaves little online trace. It’s a word on the verge of extinction. The 1913 Webster dismisses it as “Voluptuousness. [Obs.],” the OED also marks it “Obs.” while Webster II (1960) gives it some life as “Pleasure; now, usually, sexual pleasure.” Harold P. Simonson, in his Beyond the Frontier (1989), slaps a sic on his quotation from old Nat.
Wilson decoded
We learned in grammar school how to multiply two-digit numbers with pencil and paper, but I’ve never heard this phrase, which metaphorically substitutes the placement for the arithmetical operation. In this passage from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, pedlar Selig is buying finished cookpots from artisan Seth at a dollar apiece, who is in turn buying raw materials (eight sheets of metal) from Selig:
SELIG: How many of them pots you got?
SETH: I got six. That’s six dollars minus eight on top of fifteen for the sheet metal come to a dollar twenty out of the six dollars leave me four dollars and eighty cents.
SELIG (Counting out the money): There’s four dollars… and… eighty cents.
—August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I:1
Or (6 · 1) – (8 · 0.15 ) = 4.80.
Bloomsday: 2010
In honor of Mr. Bloom’s walk, a link to notes on Luciano Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), spoken-word electronica from 1958 that uses the text of the overture to the “Sirens” chapter. Alas, no licit streams or MP3s of the piece appear to be available.
Smoke-free is important
Leta gets her first press as a playwright for her adaptation of the collectivist folk tale.
Stone Soup is a very funny and entertaining theatre experience for young viewers that is laid back and professional at the same time.
Some links: 47
Finca El Porvenir, a group of farms between 1,000–1,600 m in elevation on the slopes of Cerro El Tigre, part of the isolated Sierra Tecapa–Chinameca range in eastern El Salvador, has been awarded the first Coffee Conservation Award, a recognition program from Roast magazine and other partners.