At the park: 15

greening upOn Sunday’s trip, we saw the results of hatching in three boxes. Myra and Chris were rewarded with views of chicks in two of them! The foliage has really greened up in the past couple of weeks, after what feels like ten days of rain. The patch and glue job on my right boot did not hold up, but fortunately I have another right (from my previous pair, which is lacking a left). New birds spotted or heard in the park: Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes), Solitary Sandpiper (Tringa solitaria), Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica), Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina), White-eyed Vireo (Vireo griseus), Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia), and lifer #358 for me, Northern Waterthrush (Seiurus noveboracensis). Good ears, Paul!

Some links links: 2

Via things magazine: a thought-provoking post by Jeffrey Zeldman on the “outsourcing” of personal web page content:

[Imagine] a 1990s site whose splash page links to sub-pages. Structurally, its site map is indistinguishable from an org chart, with the CEO at the top, and everyone else below. …to re-use the org chart analogy, a site like Jody’s is akin to a single-owner company with only virtual (freelance) employees. There is nothing below the CEO. All arrows point outward.

I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m outsourcing my content, but it’s certainly the case that I’m managing a growing number of multiple online personalities. And I really like the simplicity of my TypeKey profile: that’s the URL that I include in my professional resume.

Briefly noted

…in last week’s Economist:

  • “Nauruan” is probably the only proper adjective that is also a palindrome.
  • Dubai is selling the naming rights to some of its metro stations and its two lines.

    Dubai Metro Naming Rights offers you unmatched impact and visibility to take your brand to new levels of saliency and success. What’s more, it is an immersive marketing opportunity that allows you to communicate and interact with your consumers at various touch points spread across the station/Metro network.

  • A panmictic population is one in which all individuals are potential partners.

Bad, bad, ghastly, and bad

Via ArtsJournal: a Rochester, N.Y. artists’ group is giving staged readings of the notorious stinker, Moose Murders, reports Campbell Robertson. The play closed after its opening performance on Broadway in 1983.

The number of people who claim to have seen the [Broadway] show, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, seems to have multiplied beyond physical possibility, like those who claim to have seen the Beatles at Shea Stadium or Game 5 of the 1956 World Series.

Not so green

Willie D. Jones reports on research (preliminary, apparently not yet published) by the Virginia Water Resources Research Center that compares various energy sources and means of power generation in their efficiency of water consumption. That certain high-tech darlings of alternative energy, like ethanol, are relative water hogs is less surprising than the wide spread of computed values, spanning four orders of magnitude. While natural gas requires only 38 liters of water per 1000 kilowatt-hours generated, biodiesel was measured at 180.9 to 969 kiloliters of water per 1000 kW-h. On the generation side, the range is from 260 l/kW-h for hydroelectricity to 31000 to 74900 l/kW-h.

One more dang toolbar

I added Operator to my Firefox add-ons. Operator discovers microformat markup embedded in a web page: you can do some cool stuff, like extract contact information published as an hCard and export it to your address book, or you can discover what tags are used on a page, or you can add event information posted at Upcoming to your Google calendar.

I added this hCard to my Elsewhere page (and then punched it up to get the HTML to validate):

David Gorsline

Reston, Virginia USA

And now, if you have Operator installed, you will see my info in the Contacts dropdown.

The expectation is that Firefox 3 will have microformats support built in.

Constructive criticism

…[William Faulkner] didn’t seem remote to everybody in being our great writer. I know a story about him, though he never knew anybody knew of it, I’d bet. Mississippi is full of writers, and I heard this from the person it was told to. A lady had decided she’d write a novel and got along fine till she came to the love scene. “So,” she told my friend, “I thought, there’s William Faulkner, sitting right up there in Oxford. Why not send it to William Faulkner and ask him?” So she sent it to him, and time went by, and she didn’t ever hear from him, and so she called him up. Because there he was. She said, “Mr. Faulkner, did you ever get that love scene I sent you?” He said yes, he had got it. And she said, “Well, what do you think of it?” And he said, “Well, honey, it’s not the way I’d do it—but you go right ahead.” Now, wasn’t that gentle of him?

The Good Woman of Setzuan

What an apt commodity has Bertolt Brecht charged his character Wong with selling, for Wong is a seller of water, a commodity as free as the falling rain yet one of the most precious economic commodities. Wong (or Wang, in my editions) (nimbly played by Ashley Ivey) serves as narrator for this parable of Shen Te, a lowly prostitute who receives a gift from the gods because she is the one good person they can find. But alack, Shen Te must invent an alter ego for herself, a ruthless businessman named Shui Ta, in order to hold on to her gifts so that she can remain good.

Constellation Theatre Company puts its stamp on the play with music and dance interludes. The play is designed to be interrupted by fourth-wall-breaking monologues and other bits of presentational, anti-realistic theater. Costumes (designed by Yvette M. Ryan) and makeup are particularly effective, especially for the three gods (Catherine Deadman, John Geoffrion, and Kenny Littlejohn) who descend to earth in search of a good person. Katie Atkinson, as Shen Te/Shui Ta, does not give us two characters that are completely physically distinct from one another, but she shines in a passage that calls for her to change her costume and makeup before our eyes: Das Lied von der Wehrlosigkeit der Götter und Guten (“The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People” in the Manheim translation), which repeats the haunting line, “Why don’t the gods do the buying and selling?” (in the Bentley translation). The final ascension of the gods, returning to heaven having been defeated by the world’s exigencies, in a swirl of smoke and clangor of gongs, is also very fine.