On deck: 2

on deck: 2I rotated a couple of volumes to a backlog shelf to make room for some new fiction coming in. I’m reading my way through the Updike Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy about as fast as he published them. The Queneau is a re-read: someone pointed out that even though it’s published as a novel, it’s laid out like a play, or perhaps a screenplay, so I’m wondering whether it’s actually stageworthy.


All My Sons: an update: 3

So we had a solid opening weekend and now is the time of cleaning costumes. Although I have to deal with my own socks, we otherwise have the luxury with the Players of a team responsible for laundering and dry cleaning everything else. (Though I don’t know how Tina is going to deal with the suspenders that are sewn onto my suit pants.)

I’ve been sleeping well, but I felt the need for a power doze offstage during the end of Act I. My blood sugar just falls off the table mid-afternoon, I guess. In the James Lee, there are two more or less comfortable places to hang out between scenes: the interior loading dock area, just offstage left, furnished with a few chairs and a scary second-hand couch; and the makeup room downstairs, which usually has the outside door open for a breeze. Where you don’t want to be, at least in the summer, is stage right, in the shallow wing space with hardly anything to sit on; or downstairs in “the hole,” the combination lumber storage and dressing area. The hole is also where the dimmer packs for the lighting equipment are. The very hot dimmer packs.

The rest of this character’s accoutrements are fun, too. I have a tight-fitting pair of Harry Truman spectacles scrounged from somewhere: good thing that I don’t have to read anything through them, because they’re bifocals with a strong reading correction. And Beth has become my bow tie wrangler—just one of her jobs along with hair and makeup.

Soldiers Delight

For the holiday, I took a run up I-95 to Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, northwest of Baltimore, for a nature stroll.

Stepping on to the trail at the visitors center, in a trice I lost the trail and wandered on to an interpretive trail still under development. The downed trees across the trail and the ticks that tried to hitch a ride on my legs should have been a clue. I had to double back and walk back on the verge of Deer Park Road, and I was caught in a passing rain shower, for my sins.

Choate Mine TrailI had better luck following the trails on the east side of Deer Park Road. Nevertheless, had I brought my hiking boots instead of my birding shoes, I would have been glad of the added support. Birdlife included lots of Field Sparrows and Eastern Towhees and a plus-sized Blue-gray Gnatcatcher; best sighting for the trip was a small group of Cedar Waxings (Bombycilla cedrorum). Heard a possible chat and Pine Warbler.

pink familySoldiers Delight is underlaid by serpentine rock, which yields thin soils short on nutrients and long on toxic metals like chromium, so the plant communities are distinctive, as well as the animals that depend on them. Most of the wildflowers will have to wait until my ID skills improve, but here I’m pretty sure that we are looking at Serpentine Chickweed, a subspecies of Cerastium arvense, found in one of the grassland areas.

downstreamIn the woods, I found a Little Wood-Satyr (Megisto cymela), described as abundant in my field guides but nevertheless new for me.

All My Sons: an update: 2

Yesterday evening we did our first full tech run with all elements present—well, nearly so, since we didn’t have either of the two boys who are doubling Bert. I have a rather natty seersucker suit for a costume (and it’s apparently a venerable piece among the Players); my project for the weekend is learning how to tie my bow tie. I need to get my hair trimmed: I will run up to my salon in Bethesda on Tuesday at lunch, a day when I really don’t have the slack to spare. Every tech week has its special challenge, and this one’s turns out to be dealing with Chip and his dancing all over the deck taking publicity pictures while the scene is running. Beth is pushing against my instincts for what sort of colors my scene in Act 3 should have. The principals are doing great work. It’ll be a pretty good show.

Curling flower spaces

Via kottke.org, a surprisingly hard book quiz: identify the title from its Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases. I scored only 12 (plus one near miss) out of 69 books (20th century, mostly originally in English, everything from high art to genre fiction), and I’m not telling you the ones I missed that I should have recognized. Here’s one of the easier ones: “inner party, three superstates, chinless man, chocolate ration, varicose ulcer.” I should have remembered this one, but it’s been a while since I read the book: “plait round, plaited cord, extra button.”

Context and perspective

From Rebecca Mead’s profile of Christian Scheidemann, conservator of contemporary art and specialist in non-traditional materials, in the 11 May 2009 New Yorker. Scheidemann is in the process of replacing one of the tree stumps that are part of the late Ree Morton’s Sister Perpetua’s Lie (one had succumbed to rot) in preparation for a gallery showing. Unfortunately the replacement stump of White Oak (Quercus alba) turned out to be infested with beetles, so the conservator called on an exterminator, Jimmy Tallman.

The remaining question was whether the stump needed to be shipped to the shop, which would take up precious time, or whether Tallman could transport it himself, in his van. “What’s the value?” Tallman asked, with a note of uncertainty in his voice.

“Ten dollars,” Scheidemann said.

Tallman looked relieved. “That’s good,” he said. “Because I had one lady, a customer, and I took her antique table out with me, and it turned out to be worth twenty thousand dollars.”

“This will eventually be part of an invaluble installation,” Scheidemann said. “But I think we gave ten dollars for the cutting. So right now it’s worth ten dollars.”

Conspicuous by its absence

Linton Weeks reviews the current state of (online) surveys and survey software.

Then came the Internet, interactive voice recognition and other methods of collecting data that involve less cost and quicker turnaround times for corporations thirsty for consumer information.

There are two salient reasons for the burgeoning survey industry, [Nancy Mathiowetz, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research] says. First, the corporate desire to make empirically based decisions “requires the collection of data to examine satisfaction, how people view products, etc. Second, the marginal cost of data collection — for some modes of data collection — has dropped.”

A new botany tool, perhaps

Anne Eisenberg reports on a prototype digital field guide, an iPhone app (from a team including Peter N. Belhumeur of Columbia Univ. and W. John Kress of the Smithsonian) that identifies tree species on the basis of scanning a single leaf specimen.

“We believe there is enough information in a single leaf to identify a species,” [Kress] said. “Our brains can’t remember all of these characteristics, but the computer can.”

We might call this an active field guide, as opposed to passive guides like National Geographic’s Handheld Birds for the Palm Tungsten platform, which leave the identification decisions to the user.

I’m skeptical. Plant identification is hard (at least it is for this birder), even though the plant just sits there, and you can examine leaves in the hand as long as you like. It’s not for nothing that the discipline has evolved elaborate ID keys that consider opposite vs. adjacent branching structures, leaf texture, bud scars, characteristics of flowers and fruits, geographic distribution, and more. Ironically, the screenshots accompanying the story demonstrate the identification of a leaf from that tricky genus, Quercus. A more realistic assessment comes from P. Bryan Heidorn with the National Science Foundation:

The computer tree guide is good at narrowing down and finding the right species near the top of the list of possibilities, [Heidorn] said. “Instead of flipping through a field guide with 1,000 images, you are given 5 or 10 choices,” he said. The right choice may be second instead of first sometimes, “but that doesn’t really matter,” he said. “You can always use the English language — a description of the bark, for instance — to do the final identification.”

At the park: 30

I had intended to show Dirk the nest box with Tufted Titmouse eggs in it, but we were surprised to find that the eggs had already hatched and the nest comprised six gaping, blind mouths.

As for the intended residents, Box #13 hatched out 13 Wood Duck eggs. A merganser family of hen and three ducklings, practicing diving, was spotted this morning; possibly this is the same family of thirteen that hatched on 17 April.

Four boxes in a row along lower Barnyard Run are due to hatch out soon, probably this week. We then have two remaining boxes to hatch in June: #2 at the head of the main pond (Hooded Merganser) and #68 at the far end (Wood Duck).

New bird arrivals detected over the past couple weeks: Chimney Swift, all three swallows, Wood Thrush, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Acadian Flycatcher, and a Brown-headed Cowbird chasing insects in the parking lot as bold as any urban Rock Dove.

A puzzle inside a puzzle

In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom has gone into his father’s trade, operating a Linotype machine. There’s a couple of passages in the book where John Updike reproduces the lines of hot type that Harry sets for a local tabloid, including his mistakes. So we come, in Part II, to this passage, typed while Harry is particularly agitated:

Police authorities  revealed Saturday  that they are

holding for questioning two black minors and Wendell

Phillips, 19, of 42B Plum Street, in connection with

the brutal assault of an  unidentified sywsfyz kmlhs

the brutal assault of an  unidentified elderly white

woman late Thursday night.

The letter substitutions make sense when you look at Ottmar Mergenthaler’s keyboard: Harry’s left hand has slipped one column to the right.

Except for one thing: sywsfyz should be sywsfyq. The key to the right of y is q, not z. My text is the Everyman Angstrom tetralogy. Where did the mistake creep in?

Red Herring

Fairfax County’s newest professional company turns in a balanced ensemble performance of John Hollinger’s waterfront sendup of assumed identities, 1950s-era Commies, and the G-women who chase them. 1st Stage meets the challenges inherent in the script—lots of little scenes scattered across “Boston, Wisconsin, and the South Pacific”—with a masterful yet inexpensive set design (uncredited) built from a palette of packing crates and plywood and a crew of two period-costumed Grips (Kate Karczewski and Conor Dinan) who perform most of the scene shifting. Thus an entire kitchen is conjured from a waist-high box, a mixing bowl, and a package of oatmeal. The cast of six doubles up to cover seventeen speaking roles, each with a clearly distinguished dialect. Wireless audio embedded in several of the moving set pieces is also a nice touch to localize the sound of a radio or television.

Hollinger’s script offers some tasty technical turns to the actors, including a second-act opener that hinges on the audio delays on an overseas telephone call: the bit calls for syllable-level timing from Katie Foster as Lynn and Lucas Beck as James. The playwright sometimes strains to put a comic button on the end of each of those little scenes, and the plot left a few of us mystified at intermission.

  • Red Herring, by John Hollinger, directed by Jessica Lefkow, 1st Stage, Tysons Corner, Virginia

1st Stage’s performance space is a generously-ceilinged black box with good sight lines (seating about 140) in an industrial park. The company’s web site, unfortunately, is overburdened with Flash effects and rather opaque when it comes to providing information.

At the park: 29

The subject of my term paper for the Introduction to Ecology class that I recently completed is Huntley Meadows Park. The paper is a little long on data and short on analysis, but I’m happy with it. From the introduction:

Huntley Meadows Park comprises approximately 1,425 acres (577ha) of freshwater wetland and surrounding forest in southern Fairfax County, Virginia. Managed by the Fairfax County Park Authority (FCPA), it is the County’s largest park, and features the largest (70+ acres, 28+ ha) non-tidal marsh in the area. Bounded by housing subdivisions to the north, east, and south, and government installations to the west and southwest, the Park is an island of blue and green prized by casual strollers and scientific specialists alike. It is particularly valued by naturalists for the unique diversityof the habitat to be found there, especially considering its urban/suburban surroundings. Guidebook writers and editors like Scott Weidensaul [Weidensaul92] and David W. Johnston [Johnston97] have singled out the Park for special attention, noting that its mix of woods and water makes it a popular spot for Big Day birders; Weidensaul calls the Park’s very existence “utterly improbable,” encroached on as it is by the busy traffic corridors of U.S. 1 and Interstates 95 and 495. The main entrance to Huntley Meadows Park is only three miles from the Huntington terminus of Metro’s Yellow Line, and hence the Park is a short trip from anywhere in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.