Author: David Gorsline

I like the bubbly Canvasback, too

Rick Wright offers some of his unconventional picks for this season’s art competition for the Federal Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp.

This is not a decoy, not a duck, but the self-conscious simulacrum of a duck/decoy, and in its grotesque combination of the organic and the artificial, the living and the not, this figure brings together eloquently the concerns, shared and conflicting, of hunters and birders, reminding us all of where the duck stamp comes from and all the fine things it has led to over the years.

It might win, but it won’t. I predict that next year’s stamp will be pedestrian and placative, like all its predecessors. I’m still buying it, though.

Only the weapons are fake

Alexis Hauk profiles Robb Hunter, armorer and fight choreographer. Hunter worked on the epic fight in act 2 of Superior Donuts for Studio Theatre’s production.

Weapons alone don’t transform a decent fight scene into a meaningful one, though, and Hunter believes that each piece should say something about a character—or at least it should emerge from its environment. “I get a little sad when people are like, ‘We’re doing Macbeth. I need 12 swords and a few shields,” he says. “The audience doesn’t know what they’re missing—until you do it for them differently.”

Bocce balls

Brian Hayes meets Stanley Crawford and gets to know the New Mexico acequia system.

The water in an irrigation ditch is a shared resource, like the unfenced common pastures that so famously became so tragic in early-modern England. In fact, the irrigation ditch is even more vulnerable to selfish exploitation than a pasture that’s equally available to all: Those on the upper reaches of the ditch have it within their power to divert all the flow into their own fields, depriving those below. Yet they choose not to do so. What explains their forbearance?

Subject: Check Your Email and Respond within 48hours!

Geoffrey K. Pullum marks up a distinctly clumsy Nigerian scam e-mail message.

Strange though it may seem, the scammer’s best interests are served if the email doing the phishing is ludicrously incompetent and transparently suspicious. He isn’t after you or me; he’s after the poor, lonely, gullible, housebound pensioner next door, the rare uninformed shut-in who has never heard of Nigerian scams and for whom the dream of a windfall will be attractive enough to justify handing over a bank account authorization password.

Three and a half cents a pound

Mark Bittman visits an industrial-scale tomato farm in California, and finds it good.

The tomatoes are bred to ripen simultaneously because there is just one harvest. They’re also blocky in shape, the better to move along conveyor belts. Hundreds of types of tomatoes are grown for processing, bred for acidity, disease resistance, use, sweetness, wall thickness, ripening date and so on. They’re not referred to by cuddly names like “Early Girl” but by number: “BQ 205.”

I tasted two; they had a firm, pleasant texture and mild but real flavor, and were better than any tomatoes — even so-called heirlooms — sold in my supermarket.

Some links: 66

  • Steve Adair exlains the ducks-winter wheat connection in the upper Great Plains.
  • Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley visit the banding station and other research facilities at Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. When I was a beginning birder in the 90s, Susan and I visited Powdermill with a group led by Jane Huff, back when “the Bobs” (Mulvihill and Leberman) ran things. They’ve added a lot to the place since then. ᔥ Birdchat