Scoundrels

Back in the 1990s, I had a close friend who joined a multi-level marketing organization, a rather large one. One of the things she told me was that the company was experiencing strong growth overseas, in places like South Korea. Perhaps there is a connection to an anecdote that Barbara Demick tells in her book Nothing to Envy. The book recounts the recent economic implosion of North Korea through the lives of six defectors. And so maybe it can shed some light on one of the engines of that MLM growth.

Although South Korea did not expressly encourage defections, those that made it into the country could qualify for acculturation training and a generous one-time payment. But North Korean emigrés often remained naive about matters economical, starting with basics like how to balance a checkbook. Demick’s pseudonymous Dr. Kim, formerly a physician in the North Korean system, learns a hard lesson:

In March 2002, Dr. Kim arrived at Incheon Airport, euphoric at the prospect of of starting a new life. But these feelings did not last long. Dr. Kim was convinced by a man she met at church to invest most of the $20,000 resettlement in a direct sales operation in which she was supposed to peddle soap and cosmetics to acquaintances. Dr. Kim hadn’t learned enough in her month of orientation… she lost nearly all of the government stipend. (p. 259)

You can’t handle the truth

Via Bits, Paul Lamere notes that, if it chose to do so, Amazon.com could derive and publish metrics of how people actually read, page by page, their Kindle-powered e-books, leveraging the data collected by Whispersync. He suggests some useful categories:

Most Abandoned – the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on A Brief History of Time)

and similarly:

Dishonest rater – books that most frequently rated highly by readers who never actually finished reading the book…

Most attempts – which books are restarted most frequently? (It took me 4 attempts to get through Cryptonomicon, but when I did I really enjoyed it).

I dunno: is the world ready to learn that hardly anybody actually reads John Galt’s enormous monologue, the one towards the end of Atlas Shrugged?

At the park: 34

Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) is just starting to break through the leaf litter on the forest floor. Maples are heavy with blooms. The team spotted Rusty Blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) and Red-headed Woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) along lower Barnyard Run. Box #67 has become a dump nest, with 26 eggs by last count. New bird arrivals on the scene: Tree Swallow (Tachycineta bicolor) and Purple Martin (Progne subis) winging after insects over the pond; ants-at-a-picnic Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) deeper in the woods than usual; and Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) at the observation tower.

Don, beware

New peculiar spam comes in through the transom. What in the name of Michael J. Fox are they phishing for? Gullible drapers?

HELLO
MY NAME IS JOHN .

I AM NOT SURE THAT U CAN HELP ME WITH MY CURRENT PRODUCT , SO NOW , NOT
ONLY I WANT TO PURCHASE THE ITEMS ,,,, BUT YOU NEED TO CONDUCT BUSINESS
…WE WILL ALSO WORK TILL WE OFFER TRANSLATION PROGRAM

I WANT TO ORDER: CURTAINS

100% polyester knit

SIZE : 37″ w x 63 “L

Colors: White

AND I WOULD LIKE U TO EMAIL ME BACK WITH THE TOTAL PRICE OF 1 PIECE ,SO THAT I WILL KNOW HOW MUCH I AM GOING TO ORDER ….
AND ALSO I WILL LIKE U TO EMAIL ME WITH UR CELL PHONE NUMBER AND NAME , KINDLY ADVICE ME TO THE KIND OF
PAYMENT U ACCEPT ,,,I WILL BE HAPPY ON UR QUICK RESPONSES

N.B: I AM NOT THE 1 WHO IS GOING TO PAID FOR IT , IS THE WORK OF MY
MANAGER ,,,,SO I WILL INTRODUCE HIM TO U WHEN IT COMES TO PAYMENT …..

BEST

REGARDS

JOHN

At the park: 33

Adapted from my report to park staff and the nest box team:

A fast start to the season!

As of our third trip out, we have nesting activity in six boxes: #7, #13 (main pond), #77, #67, #61, and #68 (lower Barnyard Run). Three boxes are Hooded Merganser, two are Wood Duck, and one has 5 HM eggs and 2 WD eggs.

Alan and I cleaned out the squirrel drey from box #9 (and woke up a cranky squirrel, who promptly exited). We’ve been pulling trash from the run flowing into the main pond, but I think there is more to be found on the west bank. On the 14th, we spotted a Wood Duck pair standing on the boardwalk just beyond the observation tower.

Also on the 14th, Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe) made their first appearance. On the 21st, we watched an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) fishing over the main pond.

Diagram

He saw the inside of the [subway] car for what it was: a controlled environment, a staging area, planned down to the last detail by people he would never know or see. No surprises in here, Lowboy said to himself. No accidents. He studied each element of the car with his new eyes, imagining it as a kind of blueprint…. He would never meet the people who’d drawn the blueprint, never have a chance to question them, but he could learn things just by looking at the car. You could see, for example, that they were fearful men. The pattern on the walls, which he’d always taken to be meaningless, was actually made up of thousands of miniature coats of arms, symbols of the authority of the state. The interior of the car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers’ fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

—John Wray, Lowboy, p. 94

The Light in the Piazza

In their temporary digs in Crystal City, Arena delivers an effective, if modest, production of Guettel’s small-scale musical of an American mother and daughter on tour in post-war Italy, an abbreviated family unit in which daughter Clara may be less than she seems. The simple set is lit well by Michael Gilliam: moving instruments allow us to move adagio with Clara and her mother Margaret through the streets of Florence,—although elsewhere in the show, the projections of famous Florentine paintings against the set are sometimes a distraction.

Clara falls in (as American girls will do) with a charming, handsome Italian, one Fabrizio, who has an endearing partial command of English as well as the first act “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” sung by Nicholas Rodriguez with muscular brio. Indeed, some of the best music in the show is sung in Italian, especially the spiky second act opening quintet, “Aiutami.”

But the story, and the evening, belong to Hollis Resnik’s Margaret, who brings a mature clarity to “Dividing Day.” In the second act, when she cuts short a long-distance phone call to her husband Roy, she gives a little yelp, as if startled by her own determination to carry out her plans.

  • The Light in the Piazza, book by by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, directed by Molly Smith, Arena Stage, Arlington, Virginia

Please don’t tell my friends

So iTunes Music Store retrieved 50 versions of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but none of them were the one I heard in the Thai restaurant last night—sort of a warbly singer-songwriter chick with piano, Judy Tenuta having an argument with Tori Amos. But there was a karaoke version, and here’s where I had my epiphany. I would totally karaoke “Anarchy in the U.K.”

Type here

Gillian Andrews makes some thoughtful remarks about usability, “web literacy,” and human foibles in response to the Facebook login/ReadWriteWeb flap.

Interface designers aren’t helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren’t just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it.

* * *

The funny thing about the patterns in these misunderstandings is that they predate the Web…. Fans have been writing letters to the heroine of Romeo and Juliet at least since the release of the first movie in the 1930s; they arrive by the mailbag in Verona, Italy every year, despite the fact that if you’ve read through to the end, Juliet clearly isn’t in any state to write a letter back.

The forecast for 2010

John Brunner anticipates comment-driven media:

“… and Puerto Rico today became the latest state to ratify the controversial dichromatism provision of United States eugenic legislation. This leaves only two havens for those who wish to bear disadvantaged children: Nevada and Louisiana. The defeat of the baby-farming lobby removes a long-time stigma from the fair brow of the Junior-but-One State—a congenital stigma, one may say, since the J-but-O State’s accession to hoodness coincided almost to the day with the first eugenic legislation concerned with haemophilia, phenylketonuria and congenital imbecility…”

* * *

“One fraction of a second, please—participant breakin coming up. Remember that only SCANALYZER’s participant breakin service is processed by General Technics’ Shalmaneser, the more correct response in the shorter quantum of time…”

* * *
“Two participant breakins! Number one: sorree, friend, but no—we are not wrong to say Puerto Rico’s decision leaves a mere two havens for the dissident. Isola does enjoy statehood, but the whole area of the Pacific its islands occupy is under martial law and you don’t get a pass for other than martial reasons. Thanks for asking us, though, it’s the way of the world, you’re my environment and I am yours, which is why we operate SCANALYZER as a two-way process…”

* * *

“Number the other: dichromatism is what’s commonly called colourblindness, and it is sure as sidereal time a congenital disability. Thank you, participant, thank you.”

—John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (1968), “the happening world (1)”

Omnibus trip report

This past weekend threatened to burn me out on field work. A trip was rescheduled for Saturday, postponed by previous snows, and I put in some extra time towards my term project, also deferred due to weather.

another champgive 'em hell, TeddyOur final field trip for winter tree ID visited Glen Carlyn and Bluemont Parks along Four Mile Run (someone should put together a course on nothing but the natural history of the Four Mile Run watershed) and Theodore Roosevelt Island. Bluemont offers the county champion Chestnut Oak (Quercus montana); the slopes leading down from Harrison Street into Glen Carlyn feature Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia); and Roosevelt Island has Baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) on the marshy District side along with some magnificent American Elms (Ulmus americana) on the Virginia side. We took a lunch break at Teddy’s memorial. Elizabeth pointed out a trick for finding Black Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica): many of the trunks of mature trees have a sway about ten feet up, as if the tree is standing hip-cocked.

I picked up Leta and we hustled up to Little Bennett Regional Park in Clarksburg for a crepuscular show of American Woodcocks (Scolopax minor), on an outing led by Stephanie Mason. Beeent.

new box 80Sunday morning opened the work season at Huntley Meadows Park. Dave Lawlor and crew had already mounted three new boxes, including #80 here, so our job of filling and freshening with wood chips went fairly quickly. Melina and Larry found a Hooded Merganser nest already started; Alan and I evicted a squirrel from underused box #9.

brand newchipped and readyWe rarely see a pristine box, so I took snaps before and after the bedding went in.

homework 2homework 2Finally, an easy drive to Sky Meadows State Park to make some more IDs for my project. Mug shots of my two uncertain calls here: Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) on the left and Gray Birch (Betula populifolia) on the right.