theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Genie Baskir gives the thumbs-up for August: Osage County at ShowBizRadio.
The entire talented ensemble replicates the bond of a family and they move around each other with a familiarity borne of generations of bloodline. …[Technical elements are] so ordinary and banal as to reinforce the idea that we really are all spying on the neighbors…
Sunday was a near-perfect day for a field trip to the Parkers Creek section of the American Chestnut Land Trust property in Calvert County on the western shore of the bay, led by Stephanie Mason. Chesapeake Bay’s not really visible from trails on this property, but you can sense it from the end of the Turkey Spur Trail.
We had the place nearly to ourselves. For a Coastal Plain site, the walking is remarkably hilly.
It was a middling day for birds. We watched a Green Heron stalking its lunch on Parkers Creek; had good looks at Prothonotary Warbler, Scarlet Tanager, and Northern Parula; heard Ovenbird (frequently), Wood Thrush, Hooded Warbler, Worm-eating Warbler, White-eyed Vireo.
At the lunch break, a skink mistook Ethan’s trousers for an extension of the log he was sitting on.
Some nice butterflies: Spicebush Swallowtail, several Zebra Swallowtails, and two Vanessa species, an American Lady and numerous Red Admirals.
Some good flowering plants to look at: the place is covered with Virginia Waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginianum). Stephanie explained an concept that I hadn’t latched onto before, the difference between a determinate inflorescence (the plant decides how many florets to make and it’s done) and an indeterminate inflorescence (flower ’til you drop, like we saw with Mysotis).
And some great ferns. The image of Ebony Spleenwort (Asplenium platyneuron) at the left is an attempt to show the dark brown rachis. New York Fern (Thelypteris noveboracensis), at the right, tapers to a point at both ends, like a New Yorker burning his candle. Hay-scented Fern is the other species in our area that forms large clonal colonies like New York Fern.
Stephanie made the call on this Netted Chain Fern (Woodwardia areolata), which is very similar in appearance to Senstive Fern. I need to learn to look for fertile fronds when I’m looking at ferns.
New words acquired via studio reading: a couple of intermodal transportation schemes that don’t appear to have moved beyond the coinage of cutesy names: fishyback and birdyback.
Fishyback service is named by analogy with piggyback service, and consists of carrying loaded truck trailers on boats or barges. The top search results that aren’t definitions are newspaper clippings from the 1950s—and the textbooks where I read about it in the first place. Perhaps the transportation scheme was pushed aside in favor of the containerized shipping that we know today. I did find an Egyptian shipping company that advertises the service.
Birdyback intermodal transportation is the same idea, but with the trailer carried by a cargo plane. Presumably in the cargo hold, not Space Shuttle-style.
Ben Zimmer antedates the Disney team’s most famous nonsense word, precious to user interface designers and testers worldwide, made canonical by Henry Spencer’s decalogue. With the primary accent on the “flaw,” the word appears in a 1931 humor column for a Syracuse University student newspaper under the byline of Helen Herman.
To illustrate my point about Deon’s word choices, here’s a word cloud of his entire text, common words omitted and one possessive collapsed.
Languagehat tracks down a near-nonce in Alan Hollinghurst:
I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: ‘Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation,’ the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa.
—The Stranger’s Child
Not to mention the Great Auk and other beefy birds.
Two trips to the park not to check nest boxes (though we did check a couple), but rather to assist Kat, who is surveying crayfish activity. We went 0-18 on the smokestack traps, but negative data is still data. And the reptiles and amphibians provided some alternative entertainment.
She has been using submerged basket traps like this one, baited with an opened can of sardines. But she was interested in finding other species, ones that don’t spend all their time in the water.
This weekend’s project was to trap crayfish in their burrows. The plan was to use a bit of fine mesh, attached with string to a bit of dowelling. Insert the mesh into the burrow, wait overnight, and pull up a critter in the morning. Unfortunately, this morning we found no crayfish entangled in the mesh. Instead, we found a couple of our traps pulled completely into a burrow and out another entrance. And one trap went missing altogether. Maybe one day it will turn up incorporated into an Osprey’s nest.
Meanwhile, songbirds are actively nesting. Great-crested Flycatchers and Red-eyed Vireos were audible; a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher is nesting in full view of the boardwalk, at the first wide spot. And Prothonotary Warblers (Protonotaria citrea) are active! Nests (probably dummies) are being constructed to the right of the trail, just after the fork and before it enters the wetland.
The beavers continue to work on dams at the upper end of the wetland. The past month’s dry conditions have dropped the downstream water level; the gauge reads only 0.28 m.
The body copy for David Seigel’s preview of August: Osage County is correct in the online edition; there was a kerfluffle with the print version, as betrayed by the semantic URL. It’s all good: get the show dates and the box office web address right, and spell my name correctly, and I’m happy.
Join the (first?) area Cricket Crawl on 24 August, a census of late summer crickets and katydids.
As Leta likes to remind me, the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle (or anything else powered by mains electricity, for that matter) depends on the underlying energy source used to produce the electricity, be it solar or nuclear or coal. Paul Stenquist previews an upcoming report from the Union of Concerned Scientists on the greenhouse gas impact of pure electric automobiles (Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf) across the country.
The study translates the effect into an apples-to-apples, miles-per-gallon comparison to conventional cars. Since cities in the Great Plains and upper Midwest get much of their electricity from CO2-spilling sources, driving an electric car charged up in the middle of the country is no better than driving an gasoline-powered econobox that gets 35 MPG. By comparison, in hydro-dependent southeast Alaska, you’d have to drive something that gets 112 MPG to best an electric vehicle.
I finally had a few minutes’ opportunity to pause at the old Woodies building for the beautiful ironwork that’s been recently repainted. As can be clearly read now, the manufacturer was the Snead & Co. Iron Works of Jersey City, N.J.
Snead also held several library shelving system patents. I distinctly remember what must have been their skeleton shelves (with a clever twist-lock bookend) in the stacks of Deering Library, the old library at Northwestern.
1st Stage delivers a clean, tight rendering of Leight’s memory play on the twilight of jazz bands. Patrick Bussinck gives a street-wise, wry reading to the narrator Clifford, one that’s much more connected than previous portrayals I’ve seen. Lee Mikeska Gardner makes the character arc of Clifford’s doomed mother Terry more distinct, albeit with a softened New England dialect. Director Michael Dove suits the play’s multiple locations to 1st Stage’s friendly space, using the house’s central aisle for entrances and conjuring a jail cell from two chairs. The atmospheric lighting by Stephanie P. Freed, relying on floor lamps and wall sconces to give us a cramped rent-controlled apartment or a downstairs jazz club, is exceptional.
Drag performer Joey Arias dresses up her cabaret act with inventive scrim projections and other effects by Basil Twist. Alas, Twist’s vintage puppets have more engaging personality than Arias’s persona. Unfunny banter, and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a gag based on a hand job. Arias does display some vocal skills, as well as an overworked deep squat move. She makes some wholly peculiar music choices, like George Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and the opening number, a cover of Led Zeppelin’s bombastic “Kashmir.” If the objective is something north of The Rocky Horror Show, what is realized is more like Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Mark Z. Danielewski looks for love on OkCupid.
The cardinal grosbeak, or Virginia redbird, is quite common in the same localities, though more inclined to seek the woods. It is much sought after by bird-fanciers, and by boy gunners, and consequently is very shy. This bird suggests a British redcoat; his heavy, pointed beak, his high cockade, the black stripe down his face, the expression of weight and massiveness about his head and neck, and his erect attitude, give him a decided, soldier-like appearance; and there is something of the tone of the fife in his song or whistle, while his ordinary note, when disturbed, is like the clink of a sabre.
—John Burroughs, “Spring at the Capital,” from Wake-Robin (1871)