What, no tears?
I’ve been scrubbing the spam comments from a blog that was left unattended for a short time. Sort of like scrubbing a toilet, but smellier. Amid all the filter-evading nonsense text and copy-paste from real articles written by honest people, this bit of non sequitur caught my eye:
Fantastic website. Lots of useful info here. I am sending it to a few friends ans also sharing in delicious. And naturally, thank you in your sweat!
Silver Line progress report: 24
V-DOT has released a set of aerial photos of the line’s silver band of concrete and steel looping through Tysons Corner.
the bareknuckle sun
“Three Lauds,” by Kimberly Johnson, at Poetry Daily.
At the park: 51
I finally got my recordkeeping caught up for the Wood Duck/Hooded Merganser nesting season. Heck, most of these birds are probably on their way to Florida and points south by now.
The birds made good use of the boxes this year, especially the two new ones that we installed in February. In 16 boxes, we had 12 nesting attempts, all of them successful. No dump nests: our largest clutch was a combined Wood Duck/Hooded Merganser nest with 18 eggs, of which 16 hatched.
The mergs continue to produce more than the woodies for the third year running. 70 HM eggs laid, 63 hatched; 57 WD eggs laid, 46 hatched. The count for the woodies is probably a little low, as we had one box where we never did get a complete egg count. The Wood Ducks made as many nests as the Hooded Mergansers (5 each, with 2 mixed), but their clutches were, on the average, smaller.
What we require is silence
Happy 100th to John Cage. His “Lecture on Nothing,” performed by Kaegan Sparks, is trending at UbuWeb.
Happens to us all
The Supreme Court’s building on 1st Street, N.E., gets a temporary wrapper.
Goldfish Thinking
Kathleen Akerley premieres another of her enjoyable head-scratchers. This time it’s a Law & Order procedural hopelessly warped by a shot of Viennese-school psychoanalysis, as well as automatic writing in the form of Mad Libs—all of it marked by Akerley’s signature physicality.
Heather Haney plays a young law student whose dreams (peopled by Caryl Churchillesque shapeshifters like a comic Chairman Mao [Jesse Terrill] with an inscrutable accent) threaten to overtake her waking life. She is prone to what you might call reverse auditory hallucinations, as she will make a cutting remark about someone and not remember having said it a moment later. Compelled to serve as her own Hercule Poirot—did she do something, say something, think something, awake or asleep, that caused a man to die?—she argues with a fellow student (the affable, goofy Michael Glenn) about which of her thoughts she can call her own, and which are archetypal bubblings from the collective unconscious.
Akerley explores the interesting theme of re-presentation through the metaphor of courtroom protocol that requires a defendant to remain silent and to express her thoughts only through her advocate, her mouthpiece, her representative. Abstruse as much of this is, nevertheless Akerley’s writing remains grounded and personal, as when she writes of a traffic altercation that ends uncertainly.
The necessities of the script’s many scene changes, as Haney’s law student slips from dreams to day and back again, at times tax Longacre Lea’s limited technical resources. And the significance of a point of law, the distinction between contractual acceptance (which occurs when given) and rejection (which occurs when received) still has me mystified.
- Goldfish Thinking, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington
Wolf’s milk
Hooray! It’s slime mold day at BPOTD!
One more dead copycat
Happy birthday, Charles “Yardbird” Parker, Jr. Tom Vitale has a encore story on the making of “Ko Ko.”
Just hit me
Listen to Ned Donovan: use a fight director. A good one.
“The contact slap is inherently unsafe. The slap to the face sends more actors to hospital emergency rooms every year than all of the other techniques of stage combat combined.”
Enroute: 2
A few ironweed (Vernonia sp.) plants are blooming in the Ridge Heights meadow.
yacc-ety yacc
Marking twenty years of an online identity: one of my comp.compilers Usenet newsgroup posts, from 25 August 1992, is still available in the archives. The book I recommended in the post, Schreiner and Friedman, Introduction to Compiler Construction with UNIX (Prentice-Hall, 1985), has not fared as well, going out of print.
Some ink: 7
David Cannon has some nice things to say about the first weekend of the Silver Spring Stage one-act festival.
Red roadster
Leta and I spotted this polyethylene-bodied Th!nk City electric vehicle getting a drink of juice in a local parking garage. The manufacturer has gone bankrupt four times in twenty years, but Electric Mobility Solutions AS has plans to restart production soon. Most of the U.S. production was to the state of Indiana for government fleet use. What’s this one doing in Silver Spring?