Author: David Gorsline

I’m OK with “yinz”

One more nuance in Shakespeare to look out for: pronoun choice. From John McWhorter’s latest column for the Times:

In Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Benedick, likely wanting to connote intimacy to Beatrice, tells her, “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” But a bit later, when he is addressing a more formal and even menacing matter, he switches to “you”: “Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?”

And an opportunity missed:

Old English’s pronoun for “she” was “heo,” which sounded so much like “he” that by the time Middle English was widespread in the 1200s, some dialects were using “he” to address both men and women. Yes, even long before the births of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, English was on its way to developing a new gender-neutral pronoun. But apparently that did not feel quite right to many speakers. Thus, speakers recruited one of several words that meant “the” at the time, “seo,” which became today’s “she.”

And shoeboxes

Doors, lumber, lighting instruments: theaters are grappling with supply chain issues.

The Crossing the Line festival presented by French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) came back for its fifteenth year, and this was the first year since the pandemic that they brought all international productions. Typically, they would ship their set pieces from France, but with the price of fuel so hiked up by inflation, the freight was out of their budget. “We decided to rebuild the sets here,” says programming manager Clementine Guinchat. “That’s when we realized the shop situation in New York was so crazy.”

At the park: 133

I am finally getting all the records together for last spring’s breeding season of Wood Ducks and Hooded Mergansers. My notes for the team:

Well, it’s been a minute since we last checked our boxes. Here’s the final spreadsheet:

The mergansers were much more efficient and effective, hatching and fledging 64 ducklings from 72 eggs laid in 5 clutches. By contrast, the Wood Ducks had a bad year: 12 nests started and 110 eggs laid, but a couple of big nest failures led to only 28 ducklings hatched and fledged.

We had two boxes with evidence of predation by Black Ratsnake. I wonder how the snakes have figured out their way around the predator guards.

There are some minor maintenance notes in the spreadsheet that I will follow up on next season.

Thank you for all your help!

I’m still working on the graph and the grand summary table.

VMN conference 2022

A few snaps and reports from this year’s Virginia Master Naturalist Program Statewide Conference and Volunteer Training, based in Virginia Beach.

I took a walk on my own at First Landing State Park. I found Downy Rattlesnake Plaintain (Goodyera pubescens) in fruit and a local specialty, American Olive (Cartrema americana) (formerly genus Osmanthus), in fruit. Some Spanish Moss. Otherwise, there’s not a lot of variety in this loblolly woods. Target practice at nearby Fort Story was momentarily alarming.

In fact, there are few natural places in Tidewater Virginia that are far from some sort of military installation. I don’t know that I learn to filter out the noise from the fighter jets.

there's onechoppyOn Friday, a group visited Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. I got a clear look at one of our up-and-coming non-native invasives, Murdannia keisak—the flowers are itty-bitty. But the real prize of this trip was found by Margaret C. and others in the group: Waterspider Bog Orchid (Habenaria repens), not well attested in Virginia.

tastyfuzzy and roundWe did some mushrooming at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Small surprise: it began as a WPA project! There is a Japanese Garden that I would like to come back to visit. Saturday’s entomology workshop was cancelled, so we visited Virginia Tech’s Hampton Roads AREC (Agricultural Research and Extension Center). Blackberries and kiwis in the research plots. Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls for dinner—maybe not an authentic recipe, but very tasty.

Sunday’s birding trip to Magothy Bay NAP was a bit of a bust, with only a couple flights of White Ibis appearing. I was informed that the local (Virginia) pronunciation is ma-GOE-thee, but Marylanders say MAG-uh-thee. I may have to break the news to the rest of the state.

Crooked CA watch: 6

Lest we forget: Carrie Johnson, “Justice Department filing on Mar-a-Lago documents puts Trump’s lawyers in focus:”

Former prosecutors who now defend white-collar criminal cases said it would be aggressive if the Justice Department were to prosecute Trump for lying to his attorneys, but that it’s happened before.

They point to a 2004 case involving the New York company Computer Associates. Executives there misled lawyers conducting an internal investigation into fraud at the business, knowing those statements would be passed along to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.