West decoded: 2

A goody with several examples online but no authoritative dictionary entry (and no etymology!):

In the suite occupied by Patricia Van Riis, lobster and champagne were the rule. The patrons of Powder River Rose usually ordered mountain oysters and washed them down with forty-rod. And so on down the list: while with Dolores O’Riely, tortillas and prune brandy from the Imperial Valley…

—Nathanael West, A Cool Million, ch. 18

Unless you count Mencken:

Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms…

The American Language, ch. 3

Ah, but OED comes through:

1889 FARMER Americanisms, * Forty Rod Lightning, whisky of the most villainous description, so called because humorously warranted to kill at forty rods.

Much snappier than 201-meter lightning. Forty rods are also equivalent to 1 furlong.

Not the kind of counter you want

It’s really sad that such a widget has a reason to exist, but that’s environmental disasters for you.

The animation first caught my eye, because I was running Flashblock in my browser, which cuts down on a lot of visual distractions. A little code reading tells me that spinning wheels are accomplished with plain old JavaScript, specifically, a jQuery odometer widget.

One more bit of internet geeking: I stumbled onto the Firefox feature that clicking a URL in the View Page Source window does another View Page Source in turn.

Monocacy River NRMA

I took a short out-and-back nature hike with Bob Pickett and ANS in the watershed of the Furnace Branch of the Monocacy River in Frederick County, just over the Montgomery County line. Destinations on this walk are the remains of Maryland’s extractive industrial past: a mill (perhaps used to mill limestone), a lime kiln, and two sandstone quarries, which provided the stone for the aqueduct that carried the C&O Canal over the Monocacy at its confluence with the Potomac.

Trails are not marked nor maintained: this is a hunting reserve. But, as one of us (Ann) pointed out, hunting pressure on the deer population has allowed the redevelopment of a healthy understory. Setting out on the trail, we soon found a couple of huge Hackberry trees (Celtis occidentalis) and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) fruit beginning to ripen. Numerous Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) and Acadian Flycatchers (Empidonax virescens) were heard, and one flycatcher, irritated at something, came out in the open. Alan found Spotted Wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) in bloom and a clump of Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora).

drill, baby, drillnew orchidsAfter some stream hopping and bushwhacking, we arrived at the quarry sites. An impressive block of quartzite is exposed: sources call it the Sugarloaf Mountain Quartzite (and indeed that mountain is just to the northeast). In a stony patch, Alan spotted an orchid with pretty leaves: Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera pubescens) beginning to shoot up flower stalks. We heard, then after some patient looking, saw a Worm-eating Warbler (Helmitheros vermivora): not a great look, but good enough for #361.

A sign of the times

sign onesign twoSeveral years ago I noticed these old fallout shelter markers on the apartment block at 1901-1907 15th Street, N.W. There are at least four affixed to the exterior. These Cold War mementos are badly faded now; it’s hard to know whether a capacity was ever marked on the signs.

I always meant to do some research and write up the story of these yellow and black sentinels. But it turns out that Bill Geerhart did a much better job than I ever could have done. See also this photo gallery of signs still visible in Milwaukee and elsewhere.

West decoded

Nathanael West slips an archaism into the mannered, allusive novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):

… all would agree that “Life is but the span from womb to tomb; a sigh, a smile; a chill, a fever; a throe of pain, a spasm of volupty: then a gasping for breath, and the comedy is over, the song is ended, ring down the curtain, the clown is dead.”

Easily decodable from context, borrowed from French, is volupty (stress on the first syllable), but what’s sort of interesting is that it leaves little online trace. It’s a word on the verge of extinction. The 1913 Webster dismisses it as “Voluptuousness. [Obs.],” the OED also marks it “Obs.” while Webster II (1960) gives it some life as “Pleasure; now, usually, sexual pleasure.” Harold P. Simonson, in his Beyond the Frontier (1989), slaps a sic on his quotation from old Nat.

Wilson decoded

We learned in grammar school how to multiply two-digit numbers with pencil and paper, but I’ve never heard this phrase, which metaphorically substitutes the placement for the arithmetical operation. In this passage from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, pedlar Selig is buying finished cookpots from artisan Seth at a dollar apiece, who is in turn buying raw materials (eight sheets of metal) from Selig:

SELIG: How many of them pots you got?

SETH: I got six. That’s six dollars minus eight on top of fifteen for the sheet metal come to a dollar twenty out of the six dollars leave me four dollars and eighty cents.

SELIG (Counting out the money): There’s four dollars… and… eighty cents.

—August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I:1

Or (6 · 1) – (8 · 0.15 ) = 4.80.

Brunner decoded

Bernd Brunner, in his Bears: A Brief History (trans. Lori Lantz), introduces the denizen of the Appalachian woods as the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) with the synonym baribal, a term unknown to me. Furthermore, as a 1982 query by A. Richard Diebold, Jr. indicates, it’s not at all clear where this word came from. Folk etymology suggests a loanword from a Native American language, but Diebold could find no evidence for this claim.

In the tunnel

Via The Morning News, Kathryn Schulz interviews Ira Glass on being wrong. We all know this, but it’s worth repeating once in a while:

…I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It’s not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process.

No thumbs up

ROTHKO: Of course you like it—how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has… listen to me now… significance.

—John Logan, Red, sc. 1

Twelve steps

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, [Arnold] Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution spintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, ch. 2, “Doctor Faust”

At the park: 37

Well, I had expected this to be the last post for nesting season, as boxes #2 and #6 had hatched out this trip, but Melina reports new eggs in boxes #67 and #68 along lower Barnyard Run—new since our last check before Memorial Day. We have records of nests hatching in July in past years. This might be one of those years, but it’s just as likely the eggs are “excuse-me” drops and will not turn into complete clutches.

showy globecheck the hindwingOn my way to box #2, just north of the boardwalk as you come out into the wetland, I found clumps of Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in bloom. The flowers attracted a small group of Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) who stopped for a nectar snack. The image at right doesn’t do justice to the bold coloring of this butterfly’s upperwings, but it does show the field marks on the under hindwing: silvered spots and the broad cream-colored band.