theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
A leader from the 18 November 2010 number of The Economist:
Public behaviour still treats the internet like a village, in which new faces are welcome and anti-social behaviour a rarity. A better analogy would be a railway station in a big city, where hustlers gather to prey on the credulity of new arrivals. Wise behaviour in such places is to walk fast, avoid eye contact and be brusque with strangers. Try that online.
John D. submits a lovely post on the coming and going of the Woodward & Lothrop department store and its flagship building(s) on the block bounded by F and G and 10th and 11th Streets, N.W.
The large, new [Carlisle] building [at 11th and F] allowed for expanded lines of goods. In December 1888, Woodward observed to The Washington Post that “our new bric-a-brac department has led everything, and this trade has been truly phenomenal,” although the article frustratingly does not divulge what particular bric-a-brac was so irresistible.
In the early decades of the 20th century, two buildings replaced the Carlisle structure, filling in most of the block.
The escalator in Woodies, as I recall from the 1980s, was cramped and did nothing to stage the floor on which you were arriving. The handrail suggested a segmented worm. But, as an image in the post documents, it was at one time a technical marvel, an Electric Stairway connecting the levels of this emporium.
Paul Baicich and Wayne Petersen report in the current Birding Community E-Bulletin:
Researchers at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, are studying the risks and benefits to birds caused by human behavior and technology (e.g., alternative energy efforts, cats, windows, and communications) as they are perceived by Americans with varying interests in birds. The researchers do not expect those responding to the survey to know the degree of risk associated with each of these behaviors or technologies. Indeed, some consequences remain unknown. The responses on these perceived risks will help more fully understand public opinions and behavior. The responses are expected to provide tools to raise bird conservation awareness.
In the closing pages of the survey, the researchers share some statistics about avian mortality that are rather surprising.
Please take the 25-minute survey.
Robbins Barstow, Wethersfield, Connecticut’s prototype of the vlogger, has passed away. His 1956 Disneyland Dream, a home movie documentary of the family trip to Disneyland (by way of a 3M Scotch Tape contest), with narration added in 1995 (and more than a few corny jokes), is available through the Internet Archive. Disneyland Dream is one of the few amateur works named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
Mr. Barstow’s survivors include the original cast of Disneyland Dream: his wife, the former Margaret Vanderbeek, whom he married in 1942; his sons, David and Dan; and his daughter, now known as Cedar.
I scrambled out of bed early to get a couple of images of the evaporation fog over Lake Thoreau, as part of my meteorology class project. And since the lake is almost always a good photographic subject, I snapped a few more of the rising sun’s line across the treetops to the west.
MAX TARASOV. Arthur, no one come! You sell donut and no one wants donut anymore! People now, they eat yogurt and banana, not donut. And people who want donut can go to Duckin’ Donut and eat the shit cake! If they want coffee, they go to Starbuck and pay four dollars for caramel fuck-a-cheeto. You are only donut shop on North Side, you have said this. All the others close. Why? Because they are selling product no one want! Donut is like videotape, it is over! Time change everything, and donut has been left behind.
— Tracy Letts, Superior Donuts, act 1
Residents of Fairfax County (as well as the municipalities of Fairfax, Falls Church, Clifton, Herndon, and Vienna) are encouraged to complete a one-page anonymous survey prepared by the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax. What should we do to improve the community’s health? The survey closes November 15, so please help out my friend Marie and fill out a questionnaire today.
Stephen M. Walt reminds us just how much of a trainwreck on toast was George Bush’s presidency. Making waterboard a household word, Walt’s point #6, was perhaps the most reprehensible.
The United States would have been far better off had George W. Bush never decided to enter politics and instead had spent the last two decades running a baseball team. The former president wasn’t particularly good at that job either, but failure there would have had far fewer consequences for America and for the world.
If we still had such legal recourse, we could have sworn out a writ of de idiota inquirendo, but (alas) the only result of that 17th-century proceeding would be that W’s property would go right back to the King.
(Link via The Morning News.)
Our field trip for Dan Ferandez’s weather and climate class visited the Baltimore harbor by means of the pungy schooner Lady Maryland. Instructors/crew from the Living Classrooms Foundation cast a (educationally-permitted) trawl net, with a little help from us participants.
Then, as the boat tracked to and fro in sight of Fort McHenry, we examined the fauna that we’d brought up in the net. Some fish (not Rockfish, despite my overeager and uninformed ID, but rather Yellow Perch [Perca flavescens] and Spot Croaker [Leiostomus xanthurus]) that favor the brackish water of the estuary, and a couple of comb jellies (not visible in the image, but in the adjacent bucket).
A wee Blue Crab (Callinectes sapidus), as well as a full-grown one that had joined the choir eternal. And, of course, plastic rubbish, which at least was serving as substrate for some sea anemones.
For me, one takeaway was a reminder from the educators that partially full bottles of drinking water in a landfill isolate that resource from the hydrologic cycle. If you see a bottle of water that’s otherwise going to be trashed (rather than recycled), the least you can do is empty the bottle so that the water can return to the sea.
Any trip to the Baltimore harbor has to include a shot of the Domino Sugar plant. We see some thin bands of cumulus clouds trying to get themselves better organized. Leta tagged along so that she could loom over the Baltimore city skyline.
Via Greater Greater Washington, John Cambron posts an extensive set of photos of Silver Line (N route) construction at its junction with the K route of the Orange Line in Falls Church.
Richard Katz has just knocked off work on a construction job on White Street, in Tribeca, on page 198 of Freedom:
Darkness had fallen. The snow had dwindled to a flurry, and the nightly nightmare of Holland Tunnel traffic had commenced. All but two of the city’s subway lines, as well as the indispensable PATH train, converged within three hundred yards of where Katz stood.
For suitable values of “three hundred yards.” If Richard is still somewhere on White Street, he can’t be both within 300 yd of the 7th Avenue IRT (under Varick Street) and also within 300 yd of the F (under Essex Street). Even if we smear Richard along all of Canal Street, he is still not that near the stations of PATH trains (which take him home to New Jersey) at World Trade Center (to the south) and Christopher Street (to the north).
But let’s be generous, and place Richard in sufficient proximity to all the lines that run in Manhattan, one way or another, south of Canal Street, leaving the L (14th Street) and the 7 (42nd Street) as the “all but two.” And we still haven’t accounted for the G: it serves New York City, just not Manhattan.
My term project for my meteorology class is fairly simple: photograph and identify as many cloud types as possible. And thus the curse of learning to be a naturalist is further heaped upon my head: it’s not enough that I can’t walk down the street or into the woods without asking myself what kind of trees I’m looking at, without stopping to look at an outcrop of bedrock, without craning to get a better view of what’s flying around. Now I have to gawp at the clouds in the sky.
I grabbed this image of some rumbly-looking cumulus clouds from the heights of the parking deck at West Falls Church metro. I’m still looking for a good shot of cumulonimbus—unlikely now that the summer thunderstorm season has passed.
I recorded two more translation voiceovers: for another Peter Kenyon story, this one filed from Kurdish Iraq (I come in at about 1:30); and for Ofeibea Quist-Arcton’s report from Ghana (at about 2:40).
Via kottke.org, next month the University of Kansas will mount a production of A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream in Elizabethan era pronunciation, one of very few full productions ever staged. The English of Shakespeare’s period sounds tingly to me, so I welcome the effort.
I have one quibble with the rehearsal footage that Paul Meier and his students have made available: the team chose Dream because so many of the rhyming couplets don’t any more, neither in RP nor Standard American. But the performances are so focused on rhyme that pauses are introduced (however slight) at the ends of lines that are enjambed.