The backlog has been reduced a bit, but there are new titles here (thanks, Leta!) and some more volumes on order. The play collections are probably the longest-tenured books on the shelf. I started the Kate Atkinson, hence I removed the dust jacket, but I only got about three pages in before something else tempted me more.
Author: David Gorsline
Peculiar muzak: 2
Crate & Barrel this afternoon, shopping for wine glasses: a live version of the Velvet Undeground’s “Femme Fatale.” It wasn’t the album version; I couldn’t tell whether it was another band covering it, but the vocalist did sound like Nico.
Two distinct problems
Charles Severance reflects on his experiences teaching MOOCs. In much the same way that John Markoff analyzes the situation (as I summarized earlier), Severance draws an important distinction between the objectives of conventional university training and those of massively open online courses. From the full article (behind a paywall):
My goal in a MOOC is to teach as many volunteer learners as I can and keep them engaged and learning as long as I can. In an on-campus course, my goal is to teach captive students as much as I can over a set 15 weeks. [Emphasis in original.]
Silver Line progress report: 33
The first of the 7000-series rail cars has arrived at the yard at Greenbelt. Dan Malouf has the pic.
Holidays, be happy
Really? There’s an app for that?
Robert Simonson gets a briefing from Jeff Whiting, creator of Stage Write, an iPad app for recording choreography and blocking. Alas, at $199, this is definitely a prosumer-priced product.
Better directions
Recently I bemoaned the bad route-finding by Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire. If Williams had had this map, he never would have sent Blanche down the Canal Street line trying to get to Elysian Fields.
And counting
Chandler Robbins promotes the Christmas Bird Count in a short video produced by National Audubon Society.
Every $15 counts
One of my writing projects for Friends of the Migratory Bird/Duck Stamp has been to assemble profiles of National Wildlife Refuges across the country that owe their existence to the Duck Stamp. For many of our NWRs, virtually all of the property was both or leased with money from the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, and the money that hunters pay for Stamps goes into the MBCF.
To date, I have written up Camas NWR in Idaho, Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico, and Tamarac NWR in Minnesota.
Our target audience is mainly the birding community and bird-inflected readers, but I do slip a little natural history from other realms into my descriptions.
The Lyons
It may sound like faint praise to lead with compliments on the tech work, but the (uncredited) hair design for The Lyons is quite impressive. The razor-cut bob sported by Rita (Naomi Jacobson), bleached with the roots long grown out, tells us a lot about this grasping, reality-denying soon-to-be widow who bemoans the upholstery in her home as a “washed out shade of dashed hopes.” Her lonely, sad, self-destructive son Curtis (Marcus Kyd) wears a gravity-proof Tintin foreshock that is perhaps his most endearing quality.
Nicky Silver’s powers of invention in the realm of acidulated comedies of broken families are still strong. Granted, John Lescault’s dying patriarch Ben, confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of act 1, doesn’t get to do much but make up for the lifetime of swear words he’s never uttered until now. But director John Vreeke gives him a delicious slow comic take in reaction to a piece of deadly information revealed: who knew that a bed elevator could be funny?
Vreeke also gives Kimberly Gilbert’s Lisa (Ben and Rita’s other child) the time to let us see how shaken she is by her father’s imminent passing. In a monologue not always performed, done as an entr’acte under the house lights at the lip of the stage, Gilbert attends an AA meeting and receives the audience’s greeting. When the ultimate telephone call interrupts her story, her crushed, silent reaction is show-stopping.
- The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, directed by John Vreeke, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.
Row your boat
Rain gone, and in sun again we could hear the consumption of an island. Large pieces of the bank fell thunderously into the water, because the Yukon had decided to yaw. We passed a deep fresh indentation in the shore where a dozen tall spruce had plopped at once. They were sixty-foot trees, and so much of the ground that held them had fallen with them that they now stood almost vertically in thirty feet of river. Ordinarily, as a river works its way into cut-bank soil the trees of the bank gradually lose their balance and become “sweepers”—their trunks slanting downward, their branches spread into the water. The islands of the Yukon have so many sweepers that from a distance they look like triremes.
—John McPhee, Coming into the Country (1977), pp. 279-280
Maybe there’s a chance for Moose Murders
Patrick Healy reports on the state of the Broadway musical export market—to South Korea.
… Guys and Dolls, it turns out, works in Korean, so long as Miss Adelaide is played by an actress nearly 10 years older than her Nathan Detroit, to reflect the trend of older women dating younger men in Seoul.
Birds 1, drones 0
Nicholas Lund compiles videos of birds sticking it to UAVs.
So add “environmental mayhem” to the list of things the FAA needs to consider before developing rules for Amazon’s drone delivery, or else be prepared to receive books scarred by talon swipes and beak pecks.
Caveat lector
Jennifer Richler posts a good piece about what to expect from good popular science writing—and what to expect from yourself, the reader.
…when you finish reading a piece of science writing, you [should not] think, “‘Wow, I better make some serious changes to the way I eat/talk to my children/use my credit cards,’ but rather ‘Hmmm, I wonder how likely it is that this advice will turn out to be worth following.’” That curiosity should spur you to seek out good information continually. Over time, if the research appears to converge on a particular conclusion—the overwhelming consensus that there is no link between autism and vaccines, for example—then you should probably take it seriously.
Keep looking
Scott Weidensaul gives us a nudge to remember to look for bird-friendly certified shade-grown coffee. I will confess that I tend to grab anything that’s labelled organic at the market; my excuse is that coffee with the Smithsonian’s label (or with related labels like the Rainforest Alliance’s) is (surprisingly) more difficult to find where I shop than it used to be. Need to look harder.