Prefab walls are being dropped into place at the Wiehle Avenue work site—I saw the first one going in last weekend. The terra cotta with gray accent course will be an attractive change from the classic concrete look.
Who’s a fraud?
Stephen Marche mounts a spirited attack on a bit of Hollywood folderol, and digs out a more uncomfortable truth:
… antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skeptics like himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” … Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.
Philosophical spaces
Alva Noë looks at Richard Serra.
Seeing, or any other kind of conscious experience, happens not in the private caverns of our minds, but out there, with others, in environments that we make, and that then in turn surround us and compel.
New camera
A new camera, and I’d always wanted to take some snaps from the 7th floor roof deck. Looking north, two domed houses of worship are visible, the golden United House of Prayer for All People, and on the distant heights, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The long horizontal roofline is Galbraith A.M.E. Zion Church.
Looking down into K Street, N.W., the vacant pavement, once a parking lot, has been fenced off for several weeks. Perhaps some new construction is afoot. Looking beyond to New York Avenue, N.W., the green awning marks the location of the old A. V. Ristorante; its aggressive street-level awning used to span the wide sidewalk. Also notice the backside of the billboard, inflected toward Maryland-bound commuters.
Looking to the southeast down Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., the white dome will be familiar to some. The sloping red brick roofline is the Pension Building, home to the National Building Museum.
On the radio: 7
Stacey tapped me for a bit of a challenge: voiceovers for five audio clips (at NPR we call them “actualities”) from Zhou Youguang, to be part of Louisa Lim’s profile of him for today’s All Things Considered. Zhou headed up the committee that devised the pinyin system, thereby reforming the Roman transcription of Chinese characters. Stacey asked for an older man’s voice, seeing as how Zhou is 50 years older than me (his spelling system was published when I was two years old). Older, but spry and mirthful. I hope I gave her what she was looking for; in any event, the completed piece sounds like magic.
I think this is the only time that I will voiceover someone who has his own Wikipedia article. I am deeply honored to have worked on the story.
At the park: 45
Some late-season nesting activity led to some late-season recordkeeping, so here we are in October with final results for the spring nesting season of Hooded Merganser and Wood Duck at Huntley Meadows Park.
We took five boxes down that had not seen nesting activity for five years or more.
This was another year that was not kind to the Wood Ducks, with a 5-year-low 37 ducklings fledged. We saw five mixed-clutch nests this year, out of a total thirteen clutches. Perhaps we are getting better at distinguishing the two species’ eggs.
Summary numbers: 51 hatched/76 laid Hooded Merganser, 37 hatched/82 laid Wood Duck. This year’s raw data worksheet and the 30-year historical summary are available.
Advice to the players
Via A Blog Supreme, two pages from Thelonious Monk’s notebook from 1960:
Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by.
Own closest relative
Via Leta, Carl Zimmer reviews a lot of recent research on slime molds (myxomycetes). Eye-popping photographs by Steven L. Stephenson, especially the shiny black knobby bundles of Metatrichia vesparia.
Silver Line progress report: 20
It looks like the running title for these posts won’t have to change: a (rough) draft Metro system map colors the line to Dulles Silver and uses the abbreviation SV.
Titular
So I was writing an online squib that referred to the 1959 horror film by Georges Franju, known as Eyes without a Face in English. And I was surprised that the National Gallery capitalizes visage in the French version of the title, Les Yeux sans Visage. Now I thought I knew the rules for title capitalization in French, but it turns out that (a) I had never learned them properly (see what comes of getting your information from kids on street corners) and (b) there are three different conventions that various authorities follow. Laura K. Lawless explains.
The convention I taught myself was rule III, sentence capitalization: Les yeux sans visage. It’s the most egalitarian. Rule I, first noun and its adjectives, accounts for many of the titles that I see that confuse me: Les Yeux sans visage. Looks unbalanced. Rule II, all important nouns, strikes me as quintessentially French, since it calls for a judgment of which nouns are important: Les Yeux sans Visage. Sort if like the way taxes are assessed in France.
(By the way, some people capitalize the English title as Eyes Without a Face. I say that without is a preposition and I say the hell with it.)
Rose River loop
Feeling the need to walk along fast-moving mountain water, I plotted a coathanger circuit hike using the Dark Hollow Falls and Rose River Trails in Shenandoah National Park, following only blue and yellow blazes—no white. The trails in this area offer quick access to a couple of fine water features.
A nice wash of fall color was on display, the reds provided primarily by maples. The Dark Hollow Falls Trail is built for lots of traffic, and it’s very popular. It’s a little less popular with the Bambi-peepers who are making the 600-foot return climb from the falls back to the parking lot.
Walkers become more scarce below the falls, where the descending trail follows Hogcamp Branch to its junction with the Rose River. Some muddy downslopes made me glad that I am carrying my stick with me on a more regular basis. I didn’t spend a lot of time botanizing, but I did find a little patch of Partridgeberry with some fruits still remaining. A couple of Downy Woodpeckers, a Common Raven to break up the quiet. On the return climb, a mixed flock with Dark-eyed Juncos.
For a return leg, I like the fire road, rather than the recommended horse trail on the other side of Skyline Drive. This way, I can stop at the Cave family cemetery to pay my respects.
Elevation change 1200 feet, distance 5+ miles, a fairly easy 3:20.
Zombie tree
It’s not quite as tall as it was in June, but the Paulownia tomentosa that I cut down to a one-inch stump has sprouted up again. Looks like I’ll have to dig up the roots to get rid of the damn thing.
And I need to take Leta somewhere other than the side yard for photo ops.
Ad novam vitam
He took a large, stout manila envelope from his sixties G Plan sideboard. “Everything’s here. New passports, birth certificates. An address in Ilkley—no point in pretending you’re not from Yorkshire, open your mouth and you’ll betray yourself—utility bills to that address, you’ll be able to set up a new bank account wherever it is you’re going. France is it? You should go somewhere that doesn’t extradite. New national insurance number as well, and as a little extra, you’ve got a profile on Facebook and you’ll be pleased to hear that you have seventeen friends already. Welcome to the brave new world, Imogen Brown.”
—Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p. 323
Merriam to Robbins to Kaufman
Laura Erickson surveys more than a century’s worth of North American birding field guides.
A quantum leap in field guide quality took place in 1966, when the Golden guide to field identification Birds of North America was published by Western Publishing.
This was co-authored by Chandler Robbins and Bertel Bruun, illustrated by Arthur Singer, and edited by Herbert Zim. The “Golden Guide” made a great many innovations—in fact, I’d argue that this guide included more valuable innovations than any field guide before or since.
Mad Forest
Forum Theatre finds its way through the deep woods of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a fantasia on the events in Romania before, during, and after December, 1989, when the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed.
Acts 1 (before) and 3 (after) unfold in short, elliptical scenes, often wordless. A priest might converse with an angel, or a vampire with a dog, or merely a father with his wife, the family radio turned up to deafening volume lest the security police listen in. Everywhere is uncertainty: who fought whom during the regime change, and with what motive? Someone says, “we don’t know who we know,” while another explains an architect’s artifice of arranging for sunlight in an enclosed space.
The crux of the play is the compelling Act 2, in which the ensemble cast directly address the audience with the house lights turned up, each actor performing a single character’s monologue of what happened that December. From time to time, the voices overlap, bringing forth the image from Churchill’s epigraph, in which ancient Bucharest’s wooded plain, braided by multiple streams, was seen by outsiders as a place of madness. Matt Dougherty has an especially effective turn as a bulldozer driver and construction worker (on the job that became the Palace of the Parliament) sidelined by the political upheaval.
- Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.