Cruciform

Henry Phillips received a patent for his screwdriver and screws on this day in 1936, as Randy Alfred summarizes. The fastener and tool were designed with power tools and automated assembly lines in mind, and indeed General Motors adopted the system for the 1936 Cadillac. Supposedly it’s harder to overtorque a Phillips screw.

The Phillips cam-out—when you’ve gone far enough and the tool pops out of the screw—has led to plenty of workshop profanity. And loosening a machine-driven Phillips screw with a hand-held screwdriver has apparently reminded many, judging from their language, of the tenacity of a female dog protecting its newborns.

Still, remember Henry Phillips gently. His screws are holding your life together.

Not to mention your set.

A job for the Horn Farm Paste Mob

bit-player asks an interesting question: are there any board positions in Scrabble that are stymied, i.e., in which no additional words can be formed? (Let’s stipulate a two-player game, and that only acceptable words are played. As we know, it’s perfectly legal to invent a word and play it, so long as your opponent doesn’t challenge it; it may be in your opponent’s interest not to challenge a bogus word.) I suspect that such a stymied position, if it exists, uses all four of the S’s. This is actually a two-part problem: find a board position and state of the players’ racks that is stymied, and (harder) find a board position that is stymied no matter how the remaining tiles are distributed.

In proportion

Gasoline prices in the United States continue to be a bargain compared to the rest of the industrialized world, as a short article by Bill Marsh (accompanied by a chart) points out, part of the Times‘s collection of stories this Sunday about consumer energy costs. Back when we were kids, and gas was less than half a buck per gallon, it was explained to us that prices in Europe were much higher (and efficient cars more popular) because of higher taxes. Prices have risen a lot since then, but I was mildly shocked to learn that U.S. taxes haven’t kept pace. Of the current national average pump price of $4.00 a gallon, only 49 cents (12.3%) is taxes. By comparison, Canadians pay $5.09 per gallon and $1.26 (24.8%) in taxes; in France, the comparable price is $8.78, of which more than half, $5.06, is taxes.

Incorruptible: an update: 2

We moved rehearsal props and set pieces into the theater now that the show before us, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, has closed. The cast got through their first run of Act 1, scene 2 off book, and everyone stayed focused and on task. No small accomplishment, what with two different crews doing construction (mainly deconstruction) work upstairs. Bang! Every time the crews move on to something else, we get a new leak or see daylight through the ceiling. It wouldn’t surprise me to come in one evening and see parts of the lighting grid on the floor.

Meanwhile Andy was making his own noise, working in the shop adjacent to build our set. And I’m trying to feed the cast lines in two different voices, a flutey one for John (Br. Felix) who was scheduled to be out, and a more commanding prompter’s voice, when needed.

The rush hour commute from Sterling to Silver Spring hasn’t been bothering me too much. I’ve started keeping track of how long the drive takes, to confirm my general observation that the congestion gets worse with each passing day of the week. So I more or less know what to expect, and I can be pleasantly surprised when I can get there in only a hour. (?!) The Traffic View of Google Maps helps a lot, too.

At the park: 19

Still one box unhatched as of this morning’s checks. Unfortunately, we’re writing up box #61 as a failed attempt: no eggs, but no shells, so most likely predated. Brief visits from unwanted deer flies as we walked out; I was wet over the tops of my boots as we walked through waist-high lizardtail (Saururus cernuus). Paul found an Orchard Oriole (Icterus spurius) in a bare tree in the middle of the Run.

A point of usage

“And your English lakes—Vindermere, Grasmere—are they, then, unhealthy?”

“No, Frau Liesecke; but that is because they are fresh water, and different. Salt water ought to have tides, and go up and down a great deal, or else it smells. Look, for instance, at an aquarium.”

“An aquarium! Oh, Meesis Munt, you mean to tell me that fresh aquariums stink less than salt? Why, when Victor, my brother-in-law, collected many tadpoles—”

“You are not to say ‘stink,'” interrupted Helen; “at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it.”

“Then ‘smell.’ And the mud of your Poole down there—does it not smell, or may I say ‘stink, ha, ha’?”

—E.M. Forster, Howards End, chap. 19

Good advice

Guest blogger Ann Hall advises the hiker on how to deal with t-storms in the field:

The chances for being caught in a thunderstorm at Dolly Sods are good. Avoid these storms if possible. If, however, you are caught in one of these storms make yourself as unattractive to lightning as possible, stay as dry as possible, then enjoy what you see and hear (since you’re already there).

Measure for Pleasure

Woolly Mammoth gives its audience a frisson of what it would feel like to be titillated by a contemporary Restoration comedy with David Grimm’s riff on the genre, Measure for Pleasure. The piece is a post-modern romp through 21st-century sexual tastes, framed by 17th-century theatrical conventions. There are flirtatious poses, elaborate asides, wanton butt shots, nearly unintelligible dialects, and a series of wigs, each one taller than the one before. (Cheers for costume and wig designer Helen Q. Huang!) Long passages are in rhymed verse.

The setting is mid-18th century, and it finds Will Blunt (the fine Joel Reuben Ganz), valet to Sir Peter Lustforth (company stalwart Doug Brown) in dissatisfied love with openly cross-dressing Molly Tawdry (Andrew Honeycutt). When Sir Peter and his randy, dissembling friend Capt. Dick Dashwood (Michael Gabriel Goodfriend, showing completely different colors than he did in this season’s earlier Stunning) both make a play for young Hermione Goode (Kimberly Gilbert), Will sets his cap for her as well (and dons the most fop-rageous hot pink outfit and platform shoes to woo her). Trouble is, Hermione is protected by her Puritanical guardian Tiberia Stickle, a role executed by Kimberly Schraf with a brogue so flinty it could cut peat.

The second act culminates in a set piece that involves a pagan marriage rite, presided over by Sir Peter in ridiculous crested headgear made from a bicycle helmet and the legs from half a dozen Barbie dolls. There is much chasing around the house, followed by much exchange of bodily fluids—and a resolution that reminds us that true love is what’s important.

More bits of fun to celebrate in this production: the set design, which features plaster pilasters that crumble to reveal the steel framework underneath; the tension between the traditional design elements (a wall of clocks for Lady Lustforth’s boudoir) and their 21st-century counterparts (high-top sneakers on the servants, a single electric light fixture); Goodfriend’s cartoon Italian dialect when he is in disguise as the music teacher Fidelio; and the script’s tag names. I really regret that we never get to meet Miss Stickle’s comrade, the Reverend Puke.

  • Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Good news/bad news

So the good news is that, inexplicably, Comcast fixed the redirects for the pages that I had hosted there, so the pages for Larry Shue and Wood Duck and the archives of pedantic nuthatch are back online. The bad news is that contractors working near my house (truth to tell, for Comcast’s competition) inadvertently cut the cable, so I’m without cable TV and internet until at least Tuesday. At least the hockey playoffs season is done.

An explanation

MOTHER MIRIAM RUTH. You’ll never find the answer to everything, Doctor. One and one is two, yes, but that leads to four and then to eight and soon to infinity. The wonder of science is not in the answers it provides but in the questions it uncovers. For every miracle it finally explains, ten thousand more miracles come into being.

—John Pielmeier, Agnes of God

Art:21

The last time I was in a museum bookstore, I noticed a DVD series called Art:21. This turned out to be a suite of documentaries on practitioners active in the first decade of this century, some of them mature artists like Richard Serra and James Turrell, others in mid-career like Sally Mann, still others that are rising talents and less well-known. It’s been running on PBS stations for a while, but I flat missed it, since I rarely watch broadcast. So I took a break from the line of Perry Mason episodes I’ve been going through and added the discs to my Netflix queue.

The films are selective and to the point. Each hour-long episode deals with four artists, about ten to fifteen minutes apiece. With a few exceptions, there are no voiceovers or interviewer questions: the films (carefully edited) allow the artists to tell their stories in their own words. Title cards superimposed on images of the work provide dates and a bit of context. Each episode carries a thematic title (“place,” “spirituality,” “identity, “consumption” from the first season), but the connection of each artist’s work to the theme is sometimes tenuous. Each episode is introduced by a framing segment, of highly variable quality; Laurie Anderson does a fine job introducing the series premiere, but a collaboration between Steve Martin and William Wegman is fluff.

What I find especially encouraging about the project is its selectivity—the refusal by the producers (Executive Director Susan Sollins and her staff) to pump out material just for the sake of making product. Each season consists of only four hours of programming, and the seasons are produced every other year. So, after eight years, we have sixteen hours of film covering 60-odd artists. I’m looking forward to watching it all.

Mucho agua

When today’s biggest storm blew through Sterling at 3:00, the wind and rain whistling on the gravel roof of our office building sounded like someone pulling romex through a tube. DCist has a series of posts on the carnage.

Trees were down all along the Georgetown Pike corridor, so I was detoured onto Utterback Store Road and Old Dominon Drive, but once I got to the Beltway, my commute to Silver Spring was rather easy. At the Stage, we had water in the building, but not for the expected reasons. Rather, a contractor working on the sidewalk upstairs had basically punched a hole in our ceiling. Fortunately for our productivity, the water was at the other end of the suite, in the green room, so we could work while a crew cleaned up.

Back at home, a couple of my clocks were flashing 12:00, but the power cut must have been only a flicker. And most importantly, the house remains watertight. Although the overgrown tuliptree in the back, quite sodden, now looks like it wants to climb onto the roof.