TIL, thanks to Arthur V. Evans’ recent Beetles of Eastern North America, that a Japanese Beetle (Popillia japonica) has five white tufts along each side of the abdomen. You can just make them out in this image I snapped a couple of summers ago at Black Hill of a Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus) munching on one of the beetles.
Author: David Gorsline
Updike decoded
Two notes from Rabbit Is Rich:
I’d never run across the expression “to pass papers” (chapter IV, p. 975 in the Everyman omnibus volume) to describe closing on a real estate transaction. Maybe it’s a Pennsylvania thing. It’s certainly descriptive.
And look who shows up in the closing pages of chapter V, p. 1040:
… the way his brain is going on reminds him of some article he read last year in the paper of Time about some professor at Princeton’s theory that in ancient times the gods spoke to people directly through the left or was it the right half of their brains, they were like robots with radios in their heads telling them everything to do, and then somehow around the time of the ancient Greeks or Assyrians the system broke up, the batteries too weak to hear the orders, though there are glimmers of still and that is why we go to church…
And then Harry uses a couple of epithets to remind us of when and where he grew up. But there, in mangled form, is a précis of the work of Julian Jaynes and his opus, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Pol Pot & Associates, LLP
Kathleen Akerley serves up another tasty, savory omelette of ideas, one so packed with themes that it would seem to spill off the plate.
What we seem to to have here is the story of six men, partners and paraprofessionals in a law firm, who escape the city to form an agrarian residence in the deep woods, a commune ruled by group votes and a collective job jar. I write “seem to have here” because one of the play’s emphases is the stretch between appearance and reality: one of the characters spends considerable effort to repaint their new home’s tables with a marbleized finish; at times, sounds are naturalistic and at others overamplified. And a seventh actor, sinister Jonathon Church, appears as multiple characters to disrupt the equilibrium of the group, threatening unusual rent increases and police inquiries. Is this a story of six guys who ran off to live in a treehouse, or a six rabbits in an experimental hutch? (The lawyers have taken on new nature-themed names, as in a monastic community, and one of them, Fiver/Fiber? [would that the web site had given us character names] brings to mind Watership Down.) The idea of the malevolent external manipulator is reinforced by various plot points involving the house’s dumb waiter (Mr. Pinter, your check is waiting for you).
Or is this a murder mystery, involving the death of a distinctly weird young lady (the flexible Kira Burri), with interrogations from Church as a police detective that read like questions in the monthly puzzle book’s logic problem? Burri is an oracular young lady who remains warm while dead and capable of moving about at will. Or, perhaps, is it an investigation of what it means to form and maintain a community? Does it naturally settle into layers in which some members are more equal than others (the play’s animal imagery is quite strong— Ravens, Mallards—and we hear echoes of Animal Farm throughout)? How does a flock of birds maintain its shape? How many make a group, and how many of them become a swarm?
Closely linked to this line of thought is the concept of the dictator who rises from the collective to become Brother No. 1, the Southeast Asian despot Pol Pot of the work’s title. Like Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now (lurking in an image of a Willard-like submerged hippopotamus that powers an anecdote about an office copy machine), what drives a visionary community leader like charismatic Michael Glenn’s Frog to madness, knocking out the skylights and building a self-powered flying machine?
Or is it, as the closing dialog suggests, a story about the friendship between two men? We have Michael John Casey’s in-control/not-in-control Hector, ex-office manager. Who is Achilles, and who Patroclus?
With a scrambled timeline and multiple scene resets, the play calls for the ensemble cast to swap out bits of Elizabeth McFadden’s set repeatedly—and they even manage to turn some of these tasks of stagecraft into entertaining bits.
And then there is the thread of Tarot, with the ambiguity of reading the significance of each card in the deck, each image comprising its own reversal. As Hector hints, is our Fool, the man-child Séamus Miller, perhaps the one who is really in charge?
- Pol Pot & Associates, LLP, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington
I am relieved
The states of North and South Carolina are completing the resurvey of their common boundary, using high- and low-tech means, as Stephen R. Kelly notes in a recent op-ed and Kim Severson reported some time back. The colonial-era border was intended to consist of two straight lines, the 35th parallel and a diagonal crossing up from the coast. But 18th- and 19th-century surveyors made a hash of it, resulting in today’s rumpled compromise.
The rework was not intended to smooth out any of the coarse wrinkles, like the wobble around the city of Charlotte, but rather to replace the notched trees, now dead, and wandering survey monuments (including one moved by a golf course in order to impress golfers [?!]) that had originally marked the boundary.
But rest assured! South of the Border is still where it “Otto B.”
Crooked Koger watch: 2
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Robert A. Koger (estranged [?] father of Jeffrey S. Kroger, who went to jail for embezzling homeowners association funds) has been sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for various fraudulent schemes involving flipping hotel properties. At least Dad hasn’t followed his son’s example, capping the bogus financial dealings with a shoot-em-up.
More biscuit crust, please
Awesome! If I ate like a Phainopepla (Phainopepla nitens), a frugivorous bird of the American Southwest in the Silky Flycatcher family, I would consume 42 pints of blueberries every day!
I didn’t need to take the quiz to figure this one out
Rewrite: an update
Tech rehearsals this week for Rewrite have been clean. Folks from the other three shows on the night have been watching the runs, and they seem to think the show is hilarious. This is one of my favorite costumes on the comfy scale: sweatshirt, baggy khakis, and boat shoes; Linus and Dan get to wear the sight gags. My third show for the Stage where most of my action is to sit and type gibberish—easy peasy. There’s one passage where the blocking still feels awkward, but it’s very short. I really like the way Tom Moran (the playwright) has crafted the Author’s texts (the Author is a mediocre-at-best novelist and we hear his first drafts): the Author’s “writing” is flabby and free-wheeling at the same time, and I hope that audiences will find it funny.
A milestone: 6
It’s been ten years since my first Wikipedia edit. I’ve been a lot more active in the last two years than the previous eight.
Epiphany in the gap between paragraphs
Middle age is a wonderful country, all the things you thought would never happen are happening. When he was fifteen, forty-six would have seemed the end of the rainbow, he’d never get there, if a meaning of life was to show up you’d think it would have by now.
Yet at moments it seems it has, there are just no words for it, it is not something you dig for but sits on the top of the table like an unopened dewy beer can.
—John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich
Work stoopage
It’s a good week for the clueless ones.
Here’s a snippet of an e-mail solicitation I received. At least I think I’m being solicited: it’s a little hard to tell.
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Head of Technical Department
Silver Line progress report: 39
Something that we’re still waiting for: silver-colored line markers in the rail cars’ destination signs. The 7000-series cars that will be trickling into service this fall will be equipped to show a Silver Line-ish hue, but Metro has not committed to retrofitting older cars.
The 1000s and 4000s will be retired in the next few years, so they probably won’t have retrofitted or new signs. But the 2000s, 3000s, 5000s, and 6000s will be carrying passengers for many years to come, and it might be helpful for those trains to be able to show the silver color on signs.
Truth in advertising
Reporting on the recent FDA food labeling standard for gluten-free foods, Allison Aubrey does a great job of unpacking the various consumer constituencies who care about gluten in their diet. The blog post doesn’t dwell on this point, so listen to the audio from the All Things Considered two-way with Audie Cornish. Aubrey identifies three groups:
- people who are on the gluten-free bandwagon and will fall off eventually;
- people who experience gluten sensitivity, who do better avoiding wheat and related grains, but can tolerate a little or a lot;
- people with true-blue celiac disease.
Aubrey identifies the third group as those for whom gluten is a real problem, not just something to be avoided casually. These are the three million people who, in her deft description for radio, suffer from a “chronic auto-immune disorder that can destroy the lining of the small intestine… even a little gluten can make them sick.”
The E does stand for Entertainment
Allan Savory gives a rubbish science TED talk and gets 2M page views. George Manbiot looks at the peer-reviewed literature and finds no evidence to back up Savory’s claims.
When faced with the claims of a Savory, Leta and I like to quote Brick Pollitt, in the last line of the play as Williams originally wrote it: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?”
Bloomsburg
Along the broad swath of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania’s Market Street (surprisingly, Market is not the north-south axis: rather, it’s the narrow nondescript Center Street two blocks over) can be found some lovely old street name signs suspended from scrolled brackets. There are variations and simplifications of this design (clips instead of hangers, utility poles instead of purpose-built supports), and eventually the newer signs give in to the conventional perforated post and crosstree design. But still, these that remain are graceful and quite fine.
At Market and Main across from the Civil War monument is this well-maintained fountain. The only flaw in its design is that there’s insufficient dallying space next to it: lingerers are likely to get wet.
Not all of the businesses on Main Street are thriving.