Some links: 19

Via Laura’s Birding Blog, David Sibley summarizes research about what kills birds. The design of the bar chart is unfortunate: Sibley is apparently trying to use bar lengths to represent estimated values in most cases and error ranges in others. Nevertheless, the take-away is that some of the high-profile causes of avian mortality (oil spills, collisions with wind turbines) are minor compared to the tolls taken by feral and domestic cats, and by collisions with windows.

Imprinting

Phllip Ball reviews a special number of the journal Homeopathy (published by Elsevier, a competitor) devoted to papers on “the memory of water.” He keeps the expected snarkiness in check, for the most part.

The procedures and protocols on display here are often unusual, if not bizarre, because it seems the one thing you must not do on any account is the simplest experiment that would probe any alleged ‘memory’ effect: to look for the persistent activity of a single, well-defined agent in a simple reaction—say an enzyme or an inorganic catalyst—as dilution clears the solution of any active ingredient.

Hellzapoppin

Jack Marshall and American Century Theater attempt a reconstruction of Olsen and Johnson’s chaotic music and comedy revue of 1938, Hellzapoppin. Whether the show matches the popular vaudeville-influenced mayhem of the original is a question for experts of the era to answer. Marshall’s show is nevertheless an entertaining evening for fans of Hee Haw-corny jokes; running gags that run on and on and on and on (a bellhop wanders in with a potted plant to be delivered to “Mrs. Kenney,” and each time he reappears the plant has grown by 18 inches); goofy patter songs (“He Broke My Heart (in Three Places)” is a geographical mouthful of American place names mastered by Esther Covington as Robin Finch); “anything can happen day” hijinks; stooges in the audience lobbing food items onstage à la Rocky Horror; Hexagon-style political satire; and merciless fourth wall breaking. Oh, and don’t forget the singalongs. There is also an unhelpful program that promises a recreation of the Battle of Hastings and readings from Remembrance of Things Past. Fortunately, these promises are not kept.

Bill Karukas plays the slightly more sophisticated and bemused Ole Olson, Dan Rowan to the Dick Martin of Doug Krenzlin’s lumpish but sporting Chic Johnson. As the two preside over the shenanigans, they’re at their most effective when they let us know, “yes, we know that bit is so old it’s collecting Social Security, just let it go and we’ll move on.” All in all, the songs of the revue fare better than the jokes, perhaps because they’re played more lightly; at times, the cast is just selling the jokes too hard. The blizzard of costume changes that the cast plows through every night is impressive, and maybe this accounts for the snug configuration of Gunston’s black box Theater One, with a minimum of audience seating. Anyhow, this is the only time in your life you’re going to get to hear Doodles Weaver’s silly version of “Eleanor Rigby” performed live (at least, let us hope so!), so relax and enjoy the show.

  • Hellzapoppin, concept and book by Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, directed by Jack Marshall, American Century Theater, Arlington, Virginia

Better view desired

Joshua Yaffa explains Clearview, the replacement typeface for highway signs, for the magazine section of the New York Times.

The timing of the piece is interesting, coming as it does in the first Sunday edition of the new, smaller 12-inch “broadsheet” format for the newspaper. Not all the sections have been redesigned to fit the new page size. The leading for the inside pages of the book review is particularly ugly, and there’s a subtle alignment flaw around around the illustration for Christoper Hitchens’ review of the last Harry Potter.

The other way of stopping

OMG, the fourth episode of “Mad Men” opens with three ad execs listening to an LP of Bob Newhart’s “Driving Instructor” routine! There’s also a passing reference to a TV series that I loved in my childhood, a Walter Brennan vehicle called “The Real McCoys,” and a lovely cameo by Robert Morse (resonant with what’s going on in Pete Campbell’s career). Excellent work!

They live and work among us

In the course of tracking down a reference to a recent presentation he made on API design, I found the birding category of Elliotte Rusty Harold’s Mokka mit Schlag. He found the Western Reef Heron that’s been hanging around in Brooklyn, and thoughtfully included directions to one of the hot spots from the D train Bay-50th St station.

Dispersing the blue smoke

Timothy L. Keiningham et al. publish peer-reviewed research that questions whether the Net Promoter Score metric (promulgated by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.) does a better job than other metrics of explaining business performance. Keiningham’s paper, “A Longitudinal Examination of Net Promoter and Firm Revenue Growth” says, from the abstract:

Using industries Reichheld cites as exemplars of Net Promoter, the research fails to replicate his assertions regarding the “clear superiority” of Net Promoter compared with other measures in those industries.

Stefan Kolle’s post includes an extended e-mail exchange with Keiningham, in which he is even more pointed in its criticism of Reichheld.

Not worried yet

Via The Morning News: Despite Anita Hamilton’s warnings, I’m finding it hard to get too worked up about the various services that scrape identifying personal information from the web. They do so poor a job of it, it’s not worth taking them seriously. ZoomInfo, for instance, knows of many different David Gorslines. What a career I have had, according to them: I’ve been employed by GFP Inc and by Birding magazine (I contributed one article); manager of an outfit called Stage; assistant director; squad leader (a particularly poorly-scraped page that had references to two different Daves); Member of the Advisory Board of WPA\C (I gave them some money); and, at some time in my life, I was Duke of Burgundy.

Photo novelty

I ordered a duck stamp (formally known as the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp), at the prompting of Paul Baicich. The smart thing that Paul has done is to locate a supplier for a plastic holder/carrier for the stamp that has a key ring; since the stamp costs $15 and you can’t use it for postage, the least you can do is hang it on your bins or your backpack. I tracked down his supplier information and product number (#92033) through Birdchick. But the gizmo is backordered for the next couple of weeks. The dealer is probably trying to figure out why this particular size of an 89-cent snapshot holder is so hard to keep stocked.

New creeps

Andrew Leonard is playing along with a Nigerian 419 scammer with a disturbing new angle: global warming. The correspondence from this crumbum “Zeeshan Ashraf” is alarmingly literate: I noted only one syntactic flaw, and he even managed the tricky affect/effect pair correctly. Still, as Leonard drily notes:

I find it a bit distressing that the original offer[s] of $610,000 for Individual and $950,000 for Corporate involvement have been knocked down to a paltry $250,000 and $500,000. Talk about your bait and switch! Now I’m not at all sure that I want to pursue this any further.

What gets in your way?

Jane Beard, professional actor and networker on the local scene for many years, is developing a book “to help performers break through some of the most common beliefs and fears which get in their way.” To that end, she is conducting an online survey (using one of Vovici’s competitors’ services, but no matter) to get input from performers about the barriers that they think are there. Most of the questions are checkoffs about the tapes we play in our heads while we’re trying to get work and then do work, like “the director is an idiot/inscrutable/unprepared,” or “there’s an insider list and I’m not on it,” or (one of my Top 40 hits) “what happens when everyone sees that I’m a fraud?” Jane’s intended audience is mainly performers working for pay, but the energy barriers that we put up know no professional/amateur division. If you perform for a live audience, help her out and take the survey by September 30.