A Honey of an Anklet

No more elephant hunting

Last week I donated Alberta, my venerable Ford Explorer, to one of my local public radio stations. She and I had a good run: we traveled (usually on birding/hiking trips) to Louisiana, Key West, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, twice to the beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Cape May, several trips to Delmarva. She carried set pieces to a theater competition in Geneva, N.Y.; we took Mom birding in southeastern Indiana; during nesting season, my waders were always in the cargo area.

The biggest body damage she sustained was a scrape in the driver’s side rear fender: I ran into a support column in an otherwise empty parking structure in Vienna. Another time, a driver banged into her in Falls Church, but he nosed down and hit her square in the hub cap: you can’t see the damage at all.

It was the multiple trips to the shop that did her in: she was on her third transmission; we repaired the brakes last October only to have them fail again in May. But we still got past 200K miles before Della came on the scene, and we finished up with 208469.4. I will miss her.

Trash

Christopher Kompanek profiles Tony-winning designer Donyale Werle, who specicializes in using salvaged, recycled, and upcycled materials in her sets.

“You get this stuff and you wrestle with it,” [Werle] explains. “Materials and colors can be anything. All the time, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve got. This is what’s in front of us. How do we use it?’”

Postcards from Ohio: 1

Leta and I took a quick road trip to Ohio last week. First stop was Bexley in the Columbus suburbs to visit friends. On our way out of town we stopped at the Cherbourg Bakery, which makes an excellent line of tasty treats, all of them gluten-free and Leta-friendly.

Next to our parking space on Main Street, we found a mileage marker from the original National Road. We had covered the 254 miles from Cumberland much more quickly than those who traveled before us. Distances from Wheeling, to the east, and nearby Columbus, just 3-1/2 miles to the west, are somewhat legible in this image. (Point and shoots don’t do well with inscribed stone.)

After the blight

Helen Thompson reports on current efforts, via breeding and “cisgenic” techniques, to re-establish chestnuts in the Eastern forest.

Pretty bird

Five North American birds that I find exceptionally beautiful to look at. I’ve been fortunate to see all of these, at one time or another.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus). The bright red in the axils is something special.
American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). The adult male is a delicate sonata of rufous, black, and slate blue.
Sanderling (Calidris alba). It’s the grayscale basic plumage that I find especially fine.
Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris). The male is a little flashy: a guilty pleasure.
Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus). I like the subtle iridescence of all the grackles. The Great-tailed has the mostest in the tail department.

In the heart of the Gothamic metropolis

Some time ago, I made a note that a link to The Nation’s profile of Ben Katchor had gone missing, and I collected some new links to replace it with. Since then, the link has revived; but that shouldn’t stop me from sharing links to Robert Birnbaum’s interview for The Morning News—and Birnbaum’s earlier interview for Identity Theory. Hmm, maybe Birnbaum is as obsessed with Katchor as I am.

A sample of Katchor’s strips for Metropolis Magazine is available online.

The waxwing slain

Toronto’s glass-and-steel skyline is an architect’s delight, but quite deadly to fall migrant birds. Despite Canadian government regs that make newly-built towers less lethal, there is still great room for improvement. Ian Austen tours the city, and picks up a few carcasses, with Michal Mesure and volunteers for the Fatal Light Awareness Program.

At least the train goes to Airport

Yuck. Ersatz D.C. Metro system with a nonsensical map and extra helpings of brown and muddy orange in the color scheme.

The producers of TV’s Leverage slapped some signs on a Portland light rail station and rolling stock to make it look part of the Metro system—excuse me, the District of Columbia Subway Transit System. Perhaps the silliest sign is the one posted in the Washington Park station (the only fully underground station in that system): it says “DC Subway.” How many signs do you see inside a subway station that tell you, yes, you are indeed in a station of the system you are traveling on? Fox forbid that I should step out of a Chicago Red Line car at Jackson and need the reassurance that I’m not, in fact, somewhere on Boston’s T?

Holly Down in Heaven

Forum Theatre continues its investigations into questions of faith with Kara Lee Corthron’s Holly Down in Heaven. The Holly of the title (the self-possessed) is a precocious 15-year-old who has placed herself in what she describes as religious exile for the term of her unintended pregnancy. Self-banished to the basement, she bickers with her tutor Mia (Dawn Thomas) and manipulates her preternaturally doting father (affable KenYatta Rogers) (a Steve Douglas lacking in tough love), but her deepest conversations are with the heterogeneous members of her extensive doll collection. And these dolls talk back, led by a marionette of Carol Channing (manipulated and voiced by the skilled Vanessa Strickland), the only therapist whose advice the fragile Holly will heed. We are cautioned against false gods, but it’s not the dolls that constitute Holly’s idolatry; rather, perhaps it is her own believed self-sufficiency.

As perhaps we would expect, Mia has issues of her own, which Thomas divulges (nay, it’s more like an evisceration) in a bravura second-act monologue. (And she does a fine Carol Channing riff, too.) But it’s the off-the-beaten-track storytelling of the puppets that’s the real charmer of this show. So strong are these alter egos of Holly that they conduct their own colloquy at the end of the first act, without Holly even being in the room.

Holly Down in Heaven, by Kara Lee Corthron, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

Switcher

A voice for centrism, former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has died. Of his short-lived run for the presidency in 1995, he quipped,

“I was the only one of nine people in New Hampshire who wanted to keep the Department of Education.”

Some links: 62/a

Two recent articles pertaining to food labeling: First, Gustave Axelson recaps the labels vying for your attention as you shop for bird-friendly coffee.

…coffee sellers don’t always advertise that their coffee is Bird Friendly. “Probably about only 10 percent of coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms carries the Bird Friendly stamp on the package,” said Robert Rice, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

For example, Starbucks and Whole Foods sell some coffee from Bird Friendly certified farms. But they don’t see the need to make room on their packaging for a separate label that appeals to a relatively small—and silent—minority: birders.

Next, Mark Bittman proposes labels for packaged food that put the information you need right up front. A caption to the print version of the story recommends scanning the standardized list of ingredients in today’s packaging, not necessarily reading it in full:

…if the list of ingredients spans an entire paragraph, chances are you don’t need it.

I like Bittman’s red-yellow-green color codes, and I like the prominence of the Welfare measure. It would be nice to give more visibility to ingredients to which various consumers are allergic or intolerant.