Author: David Gorsline

As droll as it gets

…perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006)

Silver Line progress report: 34

somewhat prematureA couple of months ago, signage in existing stations that the Silver Line will service began to be updated. In some cases, the line and its soon-to-be terminus are already identified, as here at East Falls Church, which is where it will join the Orange Line.

ready to unwrapElsewhere, signs are temporarily covered in Metro-brown wrappings (I suspect at underground stations where the adhesive isn’t exposed to the elements). But you can just pick out the “East” part of the station name, thanks to the bright light of my camera’s flash.

Chilly reception

One helpful side effect of the recent escaped polar vortex: the potential to check invasive insect species in the mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and northern tier states:

“The lethal temperature for the woolly adelgid is minus 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Richard S. Cowles, a scientist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state research center. “I was cheering a couple of days ago because most of the adelgids will be dying from the temperatures we saw.”

ᔥ The Morning News

Great Falls Park ramble

Leta was a good sport and went along with me on a New Year’s Day walk in Great Falls Park. I hadn’t expected that the trails would be muddy (we were just wearing sneakers, on our way to a party at Tel’s), so we picked our way more carefully than usual. And once we’d been to the Matildaville ruins (always a bit of a letdown), I hadn’t expected that Leta would want to scooch down the river trail. But we did, and I found some nice patches of Wild Oats to show her. And I think that my mystery plant, still in fruit, was Sweet Cicely.

playing alongShe liked the floods marker post.

Need to start making reservations

My WATCH assignments for 2014:

  • Funny Money, Cooney
  • Les Misérables, Schönberg/Boublil/Natel/Kretzmer/Nunn/Caird/Hugo
  • An Inspector Calls, Priestley
  • Black Coffee, Christie
  • Blues for an Alabama Sky, Cleage
  • Monty Python’s Spamalot, Du Prez/Innes/Idle
  • A Mid-summer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare

And the show TBD is very popular this year. I’m seeing it four times.

Some links: 68

Collecting a couple of birding-related links from various places:

  • Andrea Alfano explains how the conjunctivitis epidemic among House Finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) was tracked with citizen science observers through Project FeederWatch.

  • Christopher Cokinos calls out one of my particular bêtes noires: the indiscriminate use by sound designers of vocalizations of Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).

    One irony of this hawk’s cry becoming the popular call of the wild is that red-tails occupy a range of habitats we don’t normally think of as “nature.” I’ve seen red-tails flying over busy streets and perching on light poles by shopping centers while they tear apart chipmunks or mice.

    Where do I see this hawk most frequently? Posted up somewhere along the Beltway.

    Not to mention Hollywood’s ventriloquizing that puts this noble buteo’s voice in the beak of Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Leta doesn’t know much about birds, but she does know that this squeaky-voiced eagle really sounds like Mike Tyson.

I love ya Vermont, but this is still wrong

As of current estimates of population, 1 July 2013:

State of Wyoming

Resident men, women, and children: 582,658
Voting representatives in the U. S. Senate and U. S. House of Representatives: 3

State of Vermont

Resident men, women, and children: 626,630
Voting representatives in the U. S. Senate and U. S. House of Representatives: 3

District of Columbia

Resident men, women, and children: 646,449
Voting representatives in the U. S. Senate and U. S. House of Representatives: 0

North Dakota (723,393 and 3) is booming, but will D.C. catch her before full enfranchisement happens?

Still time to contribute

I tried to add a couple of causes to the list this year, especially locals like Casey Trees and Raptor Conservancy of Virginia, while maintaining my support levels for everyone else.

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2013. Please join me in supporting their work.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2013

This year’s big trip was to Minnesota, and I clicked over 400 on my life list. And, wow, I visited a lot of local spots this year.

A new top total for eggs at Huntley Meadows Park this year, and the wetland restoration project finally happened.

2012’s list. 2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

New venues, 2013

I found a couple of performance spaces in the Smith Center that I hadn’t been to before, unless I’ve lost track.

2012’s list. 2011’s list.

My year in cities, 2013

The year-end roundup posts continue. Overnight stays in 2013:

2012’s list. 2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.

The year in review, 2013

You know the drill. The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 5 January: WATCH assignments for 2013 are out.
  • 3 February: David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People.
  • 2 March: Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles.
  • 6 April: I’m back with NPR for a short gig, working on- and off-site.
  • 6 May: Seeking drama and humor in the living rooms of the privileged class, Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to Lyman and Polly Wyeth, retirees from 1960s-era Hollywood and old guard conservatives.
  • 2 June: Five last vocabulary builders from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie.
  • 3 July: Sand Box John keeps us up to date.
  • 1 August: Last Saturday’s field trips took us to two freshwater wetlands in southern P.G. County, one well-known among naturalists, the other decidedly off the beaten path.
  • 1 September: Big data collector/distributor Acxiom is proffering a measure of transparency and consumer opt-out. aboutthedata.com is set to launch on Wednesday.
  • 5 October: One of my favorite underrepresented photographic subjects, the porcelain convenience at Shorpy.
  • 3 November: Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups.
  • 1 December: Scott Weidensaul gives us a nudge to remember to look for bird-friendly certified shade-grown coffee.

The year in review, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

On deck: 11

only one shelf (for now)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.

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.