theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Inspired by a lite-jazz something I heard in Chick-Fil-A that sounded for a moment like #3.
A Warning:
There will be no gunfire in this production.
There will be no smoking of cigarettes during this production.
No strobe light will be used.
There will be no intermission.
There will be no strong language.If you are looking for any of the above when attending the theatre, we are sorry to disappoint you. However, we do encourage you to remain.
What there WILL be before you on the stage is a celebration. It is a celebration of the very essence of what makes live theatre such an exciting and engaging art form. There will be two actors acting.
They will use no props. They will not change costumes. The set will not spin around them. They will use their considerable talents to create for you eight characters—both seen and unseen—as they relay one of the greatest ghost stories ever told.
Have I seduced you? Well. God be with you.
—Kathy Feininger, director’s notes to Round House Theatre’s production of The Turn of the Screw, January 1999
And yet… I must also note that this production was excellently, if minimally, designed, by a team of established talents in the D.C. theater community: Elizabeth Jenkins McFadden (scenic), Rosemary Pardee (costume), Ayun Fedorcha (lighting), and Tom McCarthy (sound).
Virginia Heffernan worries at the problem of how to quote message board posts.
Via Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, the above image is a word cloud assembled by Wordle from the content of the last two-plus years of posts made to this blog—more precisely the 300 most common words, net of noisewords like and and the. Most of the work went into stripping all the markup from the posts, starting from a WordPress backup.
After much virtual knuckle-scraping, I have managed to mount the folders from a networked hard drive running Samba from my Windows XP laptop.
The Post reprinted my complete plug for Huntley Meadows Park in the background material for its Fairfax County Community Handbook.
Leta (via Lori) turned up a Top 10 list of saints incorruptible.
Amy Cortese spotlights Blaine Brownell’s transmaterial.net, a blog (and associated books) of green building materials and other technological innovations in construction. She singles out plans by Serious Materials to introduce EcoRock, a carbon-neutral gypsum board replacement.
A typical gypsum drywall plant consumes one trillion to two trillion B.T.U.’s of natural gas a year, according to [Kevin] Surace [of Serious Materials].
Later this year, his company—backed by $65 million in venture capital funding—plans to offer a zero-carbon drywall called EcoRock. It looks and performs like traditional drywall and will be priced comparably, but it uses no heat in its creation. Instead, the mix of ingredients, which Mr. Surace would not disclose but said were mainly materials diverted from landfills, are heated through a chemical reaction. “This is brand-new materials science,” he said.
A grim little poem from Allen Grossman:
Water. Well-water
is real cold.
No stove, pigs or not,
is hot enough to bring
well-water to blood heat.
For that you need a heart.
…with an allusion to the first verses of Amos 8:
Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit. Then said the LORD unto me, The end is come upon my people of Israel; I will not again pass by them any more. And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day, saith the Lord GOD: there shall be many dead bodies in every place; they shall cast them forth with silence.
Adam DuVander explains the new bit.ly service: it’s TinyURL with an API.
We can see the end of the tunnel. Sonya brought in the remaining props yesterday evening; all we have left to do is to pack the body bags and to dress up the letters. Andy and Andrea simplified the intermission changeover, so Leta and I got through it in seven minutes. The light board is new to me, and I like it better: compared to the previous one, it’s a lot easier to jump back into a cue when you have wandered off somewhere you don’t want to be. (As happened yesterday when I double-bumped the GO to start the second act.) Overall, last night’s run was pretty clean; a little more polishing and cleanup and we’ll be ready for a preview audience on Thursday. I’m not yet sure who my sound operator will be tonight, but we can deal. Neil put together a kit of pictures for the press (link updated 18 August 2008).
Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room.
Ian Frazier’s vintage “Laws Concerning Food and Drink…” hits the spot.
(Link via Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard.)
Henry Phillips received a patent for his screwdriver and screws on this day in 1936, as Randy Alfred summarizes. The fastener and tool were designed with power tools and automated assembly lines in mind, and indeed General Motors adopted the system for the 1936 Cadillac. Supposedly it’s harder to overtorque a Phillips screw.
The Phillips cam-out—when you’ve gone far enough and the tool pops out of the screw—has led to plenty of workshop profanity. And loosening a machine-driven Phillips screw with a hand-held screwdriver has apparently reminded many, judging from their language, of the tenacity of a female dog protecting its newborns.
Still, remember Henry Phillips gently. His screws are holding your life together.
Not to mention your set.
bit-player asks an interesting question: are there any board positions in Scrabble that are stymied, i.e., in which no additional words can be formed? (Let’s stipulate a two-player game, and that only acceptable words are played. As we know, it’s perfectly legal to invent a word and play it, so long as your opponent doesn’t challenge it; it may be in your opponent’s interest not to challenge a bogus word.) I suspect that such a stymied position, if it exists, uses all four of the S’s. This is actually a two-part problem: find a board position and state of the players’ racks that is stymied, and (harder) find a board position that is stymied no matter how the remaining tiles are distributed.
But not a big surprise: following the recent closure of its Penn Quarter store, local independent bookseller Olsson’s has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports DCist and Anita Huslin. My list of favorite things in D.C. keeps getting shorter.