Category Archives: Memes

Getting a bit of an early start on this post. Hey, Christmas is coming!

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

• 2 January: Bands of showers, clouds, and a little sunshine passed over us on Sugarloaf Mountain, on an ANS hike led by Cathy Stragar.
• 2 February: Passive clauses are explained, defended by Geoffrey K. Pullum.
• 1 March: “There was a certain coherency in [John Maynard] Keynes’s (the intellectual godfather of the IMF) conception of the [International Monetary] Fund and its role. “
• 2 April: My term project, an analysis of the Comprehensive Plan for Fairfax County’s Area II, has been submitted for my class.
• 1 May: When I hear on the radio the voice of an artist that I haven’t heard in a long time, it’s rarely happy news.
• 4 June: Benjamin R. Freed covers Capital Talent Agency, Roger Yoerges and Jeremy Skidmore’s nascent representation outfit for local professional actors.
• 1 July: Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship.
• 1 August: Plays at this year’s CATF are dominated by grim themes of black-white race relations, with the concomitant issues of money, power, and social class.
• 6 September: Metro map designers are floating the possibility that the line won’t be silver after all.
• 2 October: My first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area.
• 2 November: Two treasuries of Washington photography…
• 4 December: This ratty old building, window glazing missing from the upper stories, most recently was put to temporary uses like political campaign offices.

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

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

• 1 January: 11D points to a round-up of recommendations on the whats and the hows of purging books from your library.
• 6 February: The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to two reports: first, a recent summary by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center on the supply of and market for the SMBC’s branded Bird Friendly® Coffee.
• 2 March: Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg explores new crannies of curmudgeonliness.
• 1 April: Not to be outdone by The Flibbertigibbet in documentary comprehensiveness (although I yield in the area of single-minded devotion to the craft), herewith my theater viewing statistics for the past twelvemonth.
• 1 May: A local nonprofit company works to bring together two (seemingly incompatible) interests of mine: theater and nature.
• 5 June: We might be forgiven for wondering why Woolly Mammoth, having built its fabulous proscenium-styled performance space, enables its directors and designers to reconfigure it variously, as in the recent Full Circle and Clybourne Park.
• 2 July: Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail.
• 6 August: WordPress 3 and it’s time for a theme change.
• 2 September: Sweet profile by Lydia DePillis of Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert.
• 2 October: The concrete and support columns are beginning to resemble a station platform; conveniently, it’s right where the Wiehle Avenue stop will be.
• 2 November: My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible.
• 2 December: Wikipedia’s Silver Line entry recently achieved good article status.

The year in review, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

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

• 2 January: WATCH assignments for the calendar year were distributed over the holiday break.
• 2 February: wood s lot reminds us that it is James Joyce’s birthday.
• 1 March: Only a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening).
• 3 April: “Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens.”
• 1 May: Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stuart Jeffries explores the recent population explosion of bangs…
• 2 June: Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
• 2 July: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997, at a time when the city’s black upper-middle class is enjoying both economic good fortune and the prospect of genuine political power.
• 2 August: Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown.
• 6 September: Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park…
• 3 October: “At the heart of the Park idea is this notion…”
• 1 November: George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print…
• 2 December: I came across the following turn of phrase in Chapter 13 of So Big.

The year in review, 2008 and 2007.

Meme via Pondering Pikaia: the first sentence of the first post of each month from this blog:

• 1 January: I really don’t spend as much time out in the field actively birding as I would like to, but I like to make time for Cornell’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which is held each February over the Presidents’ Day weekend.
• 3 February: There’s a lovely passage in Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988) where something happens that you don’t often see: the dancers look down at their feet.
• 2 March: The WB brings us seven sketches on the theme of love, some of them duets, others with more complex groupings.
• 1 April: Bobolinks and other migratory songbirds are getting clobbered by pesticide use outside of the United States, beyond the protections offered (such as they are) by federal regulations, as Bridget Stutchbury notes in an op-ed piece for the Times.
• 1 May: Try out a new movie download service.
• 1 June: Joe Queenan gives me another megabook to strive to complete: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities.
• 1 July: But not a big surprise: following the recent closure of its Penn Quarter store, local independent bookseller Olsson’s has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports DCist and Anita Huslin.
• 1 August: Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke.
• 1 September: Last holiday weekend of the summer and it’s time for the mountains!
• 1 October: Expect to read more of this bad news in the future: DCist reports that Olsson’s Books and Records has converted its bankruptcy filing to Chapter 7 and closed all of its remaining stores, while Washington City Paper’s parent company has also sought bankruptcy protection.
• 1 November: Steve Offutt road-tests the “invisible tunnel” connection between Farragut West and Farragut North.
• 1 December: Via The Economist, recent research published by Evan Preisser and Joseph Elkinton yields an interesting result to those concerned with the conservation of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees.

The year in review, 2007.

The only trouble with this meme is that for several months after I’m self-conscious about my first-of-the-month post.

I really don’t spend that much space worrying about local bankruptcies. It’s just that the Olsson’s news would break at the end of each fiscal quarter.

Meme via Pondering Pikaia: the first sentence of the first post of each month from this blog:

• January 4: Via things magazine, a museum of strange and rarely used HTML tags.
• February 4: Charles Isherwood articulates why I was underwhelmed when I read Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia.
• March 1: Arthur Lubow submits an instructive profile of aptly-named photographer Jeff Wall, whose lightbox-mounted transparencies are measured in feet, not inches.
• April 1: After nearly a year of operating under dual and provisional corporate badges, we have a new company name, to be pronounced “vo-vee-see.”
• May 1: Ruth La Ferla profiles designer Santo Loquasto.
• June 3: I recorded Stuart Hart’s 1997 paper for Harvard Business Review, “Beyond Greening,” at the the studio yesterday, as part of a collection of articles on organization development.
• July 2: Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market.
• August 1: Via The Morning News: Michael Bloomberg can’t be bothered to take the local IRT and change at 59th Street.
• September 3: I had just a little time yesterday morning, before we scurried off to the theater, to get out for the first International Rock-Flipping Day, so I poked around in the wooded strip between my townhouse cluster and the middle school grounds.
• October 2: Once again WordPress has reworked the category system.
• November 2: Ben Schuman Stoler revisits the District boundary stones.
• December 2: Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty.