Category: Metaposting

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.