On deck

on deckI don’t think that my shelf of books on deck to be read has been this short in years—maybe not since I started doing theater. There are a couple of things here that I’ve started and put aside, and a couple of titles that I may bail on. Watson is a promotional copy, and Nagel and Newman is a re-read from graduate school days. I thought I was done with the Carter until I realized that I apparently had never read The Bloody Chamber, one of the volumes collected in Burning Your Boats.

Good thing that there is a box of books on its way from my bookseller!

Silver Line progress report: 3

Via DCist, Amy Gardner reports that Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters has given the final seal of Executive Branch approval for a Metro extension to Dulles Airport and beyond.

Peters’s action releases the project to Congress for a 60-day comment period. After that, the project qualifies for a $900 million federal transit grant that state, local and congressional leaders have said is essential to its success.

Also linkable: the Post‘s gateway to all its Dulles rail expansion coverage, illustrated with a great photo of cluttery traffic and street furniture by Ricky Carioti.

Let’s start the countdown.

A message from the diving bell

Une étrange euphorie m’a alors envahi. Non seulement j’étais exilé, paralysé, muet, à moitié sourd, privé de tous les plaisirs et réduit à une existence de méduse, mais en plus j’étais affreux à voir. J’ai été pris du fou rire nerveux que finit par provoquer une accumulation de catastrophes lorsque, après un dernier coup de sort, on décide de le traiter comme une plaisanterie. Mes râles de bonne humeur ont d’abord interloqué Eugénie avant qu’elle ne cède à la contagion de mon hilarité. Nous avons ri jusqu’aux larmes. La fanfare municipale s’est alors mise à jouer une valse et j’étais si gai que je me serais volontiers levé pour inviter Eugénie à danser si cela avait été de circonstance. Nous aurions virevolté sur les kilomètres de carrelage. Depuis ces événements, quand j’emprunte la grande galerie, je trouve à l’impératrice un petit air narquois.

—Jean-Dominique Bauby, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon, p. 31

My muddy translation, with help from my dictionary and Google Translate:

[Bauby has discovered his reflection in the glass of a vitrine displaying an effigy of Empress Eugénie, 19th-century patron of the hospital where Bauby is a patient.]

I was overcome by a strange euphoria. Not only was I an exile, paralyzed, half-deaf, dumb, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but what’s more I looked a fright. I was taken by a fit of the nervous giggles that can only end in disaster when, after a final stroke of fate, you take it all for a joke. At first, Eugénie was taken aback by my groans of delight before giving into the contagion of my hilarity. We laughed nearly to the point of tears. So then the local brass band struck up a waltz, and I felt so gay that I gladly stood up to invite Eugénie to dance, whether that made any difference [?]. We twirled down the miles of tiled floor. Since this affair, whenever I take a turn in the great hall, I find that the Empress has a mocking look.

Some arithmetic

I read about a program to convert marine waste—fishing nets and other gear—into energy. The claim is made that 1 ton of waste can power a household for 5 months. That number sounds high, but not completely unrealistic. Does it add up?

Well, a Department of Energy survey measures the typical American household’s consumption of electricity in 1993 at 9,965 kilowatt-hours per year, of which about half goes into heating and cooling, water heaters, and refrigerators, and the other half into other appliances. So 9,965/12 = 830 kWh per month.

Myself, I am somewhat more profligate, and I bought 16,290 kWh from Dominion Virginia Power for my all-electric home in 2008. Ah, but we read that mixed-fuel homes use less electricity than all-electric homes (as you would certainly expect); the average all-electric home burned 15,639 kWh/year in 1993.

At any rate, let’s use the 830 kWh/month figure, just to pick a number.

Now, how much energy can be extracted from something by burning it? Household waste has an energy density of 8 to 11 megajoules per kilogram. Bituminous coal, for comparison, comes in at 24 MJ/kg, wood at 6 to 17 MJ/kg, and gasoline at 46.4 MJ/kg. Plastics score in the coal-gasoline range. Let’s use 15 MJ/kg. Now for some conversions (with lots of roundoff):

1 ton of waste = 907 kilograms of waste
907 kg · 15 MJ/kg = 13,605 megajoules of energy
1 kWh = 3.6 · 106 joules, so
13,605 MJ · 1 kWh / 3.6 MJ = 3,780 kilowatt-hours per ton of waste

And our typical household will go through 830 kWh/month · 5 months = 4,150 kWh. So we’re in the ballpark, assuming the combustion of the waste is fairly efficient.

Makes me remember the can in the back yard of my grandparents’ house where we would burn the trash. How many watt-hours did we let escape?

On the record

In the latest of the don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass entries, Frank Rich assesses the George W. Bush legacy:

… [Karl] Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to My Pet Goat than The Stranger.

Although Rich’s assessment of the vocabulary in the document is a bit extreme, it is indeed rather picture-heavy and dominated by bullet points. I think it’s peculiar that the administration wants to take credit for the ridiculous Medicare Part D prescription drug program. At least the authors don’t have the balls to make any claims about George Bush’s dedication to preserving scientific intergrity.

Use it up

Via Birding Community E-Bulletin, Narasimharao Kondamudi et al. report the processing of used coffee grounds (10 to 20% oil by weight) into biodiesel, as explicated by ScienceDaily. The authors estimate that 340 million gallons of biofuel could be produced annually; the grounds after oil extraction remain suitable materials for garden fertilizer, feedstock for ethanol, and as fuel pellets.

Some lists: 4

I don’t remember what I was reading that started this scribbled list of foods I find unpleasant. Maybe it was my 100 things list. Anyway, it’s time to write it up.

Foods that I once thought were disgusting but now enjoy:

  • Peanut M&M’s: It took a while to convince me that all three tastes and textures weren’t repulsive, that they actually could go together.
  • Cream cheese (as on a bagel) and cheesecake: Blame my Midwestern upbringing for this one.

Foods that I really don’t like but will eat if there’s no alternative:

  • Melon: I eat a lot of this in fruit salad, and otherwise never.
  • Most salad dressings: Though I do like a nice vinaigrette.
  • Hummus.
  • Eggplant.
  • Brie, hot or cold.
  • That squidgy asparagus-and-artichoke dip: In other words, most of those mushy white gluppy things you get served as appetizers.

Foods that I eat mostly on a dare:

  • Organ meats.
  • Raw shellfish.
  • Sushi: Though my cousin introduced me to vegetable sushi the last time that I was in California, and that was yummy.

Foods that are imported from Yuckistan, don’t try to feed me these, if you and I are stranded with nothing to eat but this you’re going to be fat and happy:

  • Flavored Doritos, otherwise known as Doritos with crap on ’em: Doritos are perfectly nice corn chips. They should taste like corn and salt. Not something called “cool ranch.” What is that?
  • Blue cheese salad dressing: Hey! This stuff is spoiled.
  • Tomato soup: I like gazpacho. But hot pureed tomatoes take me back to a nastier time from my childhood, a time when I would be stuck each afternoon with a couple of bratty kids from the neighborhood until my mother got off work.
  • And the #1, super-icky food: Cottage cheese.

As you might suspect, there is a story to go with the cottage cheese.

For a time, when I started grammar school, I would go to day care at the end of the day until Mom got home. Or I would be there for the duration on one of those oh-so-inconvenient teacher work days when the rest of the world was on a normal schedule. Anyway, I don’t remember how it happened, maybe I missed my taxi, but I had a lunch on a tray at the day care center, and I was eating by myself. And at the corner of the tray, where a treat ought to be, was a scoop of something white. Could it be ice cream? Oh boy! Well, I ate the rest of my lunch like a good kid (don’t get my mother started on what a good child I was) and then I took a spoonful of the inviting white mound, the mound that was a little too perfectly white and round.

I don’t recall where that sour mouthful ended up. I was a good kid, so I probably swallowed it.

Watchlist

WATCH assignments for the calendar year were distributed over the holiday break. I’ve already done some horse trading to avoid having to see the same show twice in one year and to spare another judge from having to see a show that she loathes. Here’s what I have on my list to judge, subject to any additional schedule rearrangement.

  • Shining City, by Conor McPherson
  • Oliver!, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart
  • Moon over Buffalo, by Ken Ludwig: I haven’t judged this in a couple of years
  • Inspecting Carol, by Daniel Sullivan and Seattle Reportory Co.: I don’t know why the producing company chose to run this outside of the Christmas holiday season
  • Children of Eden, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
  • Pillowtalk: adapted from the screenplay, perhaps?
  • Six Degrees of Separation, by John Guare: I’m familiar with this one
  • The Art of Murder

Farily typical mix: two musicals, two farce/comedies, at least one murder mystery, two substantial dramas. Plus two shows to be announced later, one of them likely to be a musical. I’ll be seeing one company that is new to me, as well as another that has reconstituted itself.

The year in review, 2008

Meme via Pondering Pikaia: the first sentence of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 1 January: I really don’t spend as much time out in the field actively birding as I would like to, but I like to make time for Cornell’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which is held each February over the Presidents’ Day weekend.
  • 3 February: There’s a lovely passage in Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988) where something happens that you don’t often see: the dancers look down at their feet.
  • 2 March: The WB brings us seven sketches on the theme of love, some of them duets, others with more complex groupings.
  • 1 April: Bobolinks and other migratory songbirds are getting clobbered by pesticide use outside of the United States, beyond the protections offered (such as they are) by federal regulations, as Bridget Stutchbury notes in an op-ed piece for the Times.
  • 1 May: Try out a new movie download service.
  • 1 June: Joe Queenan gives me another megabook to strive to complete: Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities.
  • 1 July: But not a big surprise: following the recent closure of its Penn Quarter store, local independent bookseller Olsson’s has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reports DCist and Anita Huslin.
  • 1 August: Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke.
  • 1 September: Last holiday weekend of the summer and it’s time for the mountains!
  • 1 October: Expect to read more of this bad news in the future: DCist reports that Olsson’s Books and Records has converted its bankruptcy filing to Chapter 7 and closed all of its remaining stores, while Washington City Paper’s parent company has also sought bankruptcy protection.
  • 1 November: Steve Offutt road-tests the “invisible tunnel” connection between Farragut West and Farragut North.
  • 1 December: Via The Economist, recent research published by Evan Preisser and Joseph Elkinton yields an interesting result to those concerned with the conservation of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) trees.

The year in review, 2007.

The only trouble with this meme is that for several months after I’m self-conscious about my first-of-the-month post.

I really don’t spend that much space worrying about local bankruptcies. It’s just that the Olsson’s news would break at the end of each fiscal quarter.

Just imagine

Via ArtsJournal, Michael Simkins discloses lobby lies:

…what if it’s the biggest turkey before Christmas?

* * *

A third option is to shimmy your way through with platitudes that can be interpreted to taste. Examples include “Well, what about YOU then” or “It’s been an unforgettable experience” and my own favourite “Well, was that a great evening or what?”