theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
The months-long debate over whether to build a Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport below ground through Tysons Corner has pushed the construction schedule back about a year, state officials said yesterday.
Groundbreaking is now projected for November 2007, perhaps early ’08; completion of Phase I to my part of Reston in 2012.
Via The Morning News, the Nietzsche Family Circus.
Via Monkey Bites, Gary Anthes reports the results of a Computerworld survey of IT managers at 352 companies. The short answer: COBOL is still with us:
62% of the respondents reported that they actively use Cobol. Of those, three quarters said they use it “a lot” and 58% said they’re using it to develop new applications.
What brought me up short in this story (which seemed to feature a disproportionate number of state agencies) was the finding that the average age of a COBOL programmer is about 50. HR managers are concerned about COBOL new hires: those that have the skills are nearing retirement age. I touched my last COBOL compiler in 1997 and wrote my last app in the language in 1990. Heck, I didn’t realize that Computerworld was still around.
Catalyst Theater Company brings Bertolt Brecht’s chilling satire of the early career of Adolf Hitler to the friendly confines of the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Written in exile from Germany while World War II still burned, Arturo Ui imagines Hitler as a comical gangster who sets out to organize the vegetable-sellers’ rackets in Chicago. With a thick Bronx accent, Arturo Ui and his henchmen are figures of fun out of a bad Jimmy Cagney movie—at least until the death toll begins to mount and Ui invades neighboring Austria (or Cicero, as the play would have it).
Scot McKenzie’s inhabiting of Ui is at its most frightening when he pauses in a climactic monologue and just stares us down. This before launching a stunning Hitlerian tirade that swamps the black box theater and the handful of cast members who provide background applause.
The evenly-matched ensemble cast of eight executes multiple duties, serving as scene shifters, lighting operators, and a three-piece orchestra. Some of the scene shifts take longer than we would like, but most transitions are covered by slide-show projections that establish the connection between events in the play and those in 1930’s Germany. Standouts include Grady Weatherford’s sotted Fish, scapegoated for the play’s Reichstag Fire stand-in; as well as Scott McCormick and his robust baritone, placed in the service of Butcher, Giri, and other roles, and a brisk second-act opening song.
Via Bookslut, Chris Ware’s recent serial, the magnificent Building Stories, is being archived online by The Independent.
Via Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard, David R. Tribble annotates Edsger Dijkstra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.”
Dijkstra seems to imply that iterative looping (inductive) statements are intellectually harder to grasp than recursion, which is the kind of thing only a mathematician would say.
So I’m working my way through Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and the Fred F. French Building keeps making recurring appearances along with the atomic bombs and piles of garbage and various movies and Bobby Thomson’s home run. And I asked, “Who was Fred F. French?” in much the same way that the character Rochelle does. Well, James Morrison answers the question.
Via The Morning News, Karen Karbo has some suggestions for surviving school fund-raising season. Season, heck: it’s year-round around here. It’s to the point that I dread running the Saturday afternoon gauntlet of kids at the supermarket entrance. I’ve still got wrapping paper that I bought from a colleague three jobs ago.
The fire hydrants in my neighborhood got a fresh coat of paint recently, so their spiffy colors really pop out. Every so often, it’s good to be reminded of these stubby sentinels, in their shiny red and silver livery, posted every few hundred feet or so, a line of defense against conflagration.
So I went down into the basement yesterday evening to check something in a book (the end of Willie Stark), and then I went over to the workroom side to make sure that the sump pump was working and everything was dry. (A couple days of steady rian for us.) I didn’t turn the light on, but I could see something in the bottom of the utility sink, like a big crumpled up leaf. Now every once in a while a camel cricket will get trapped in the sink. I’ll run the water in the sink, and the cricket will hop around angrily, and I will ignore it. “Hey, you were the one who hopped into the sink.” Sometimes I will feel compassionate, and I will catch the cricket and let it outside.
But this was a lot bigger than a cricket. So I turned the light on, and there in the sink, stiffer than a porn star, was a dead mouse. How did it get there? Did it crawl into the basement to escape the rain? Has it been living in my house for some time? Are there more mice that I need to worry about? How long has it been there? The last time I remember being in the basement was Sunday to do laundry. I think it was Sunday. Was it dying already when it got trapped in the sink? What’s it doing in my utility sink? A dead mouse.
We have some technicalities to work out yet, but CRMSurveyor has gone live.
For the remainder of the month, I’m taking a short class from Mitchell Hébert through Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s education program. My scene partner Michelle and I are working on the gentleman caller scene from Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Part of the assigned prep work is journaling the process: we’re writing both about the life of these two characters, as well as what’s going on with us as we do the work—what barriers and fears are we fighting through? So most of my introspection about the class is going into the paper journal, rather than into the blogosphere. But that’s okay: the point of this journaling exercise is to get at messy stuff, stuff not for public consumption. And, considering reactions to some earlier posts of mine, it’s probably just as well that I keep most of my rehearsal hall thoughts to myself.
That said, I’m enjoying the class. With the exception of vipassana meditation, most of the techniques are familiar to me. What I’ve been missing for a while is the imposed structure of applying them to the preparation of a role.
David A. Fahrenthold updates the status of the local population of northern snakeheads in the Potomac River and its tributary creeks, where the fish is an alien species.
…Snakeheads are thriving. Virginia state scientists who use electric current to stun and capture fish in these creeks used to catch one snakehead every five hours. This year, they got 6.9 fish an hour, nearly 35 times more.
But the snakeheads don’t appear to have had a serious impact on the river’s largemouth or smallmouth bass, which are also top predators in the river. Scientists say they believe this might be because the snakeheads prefer shallower water or different prey.
Plays that trade on the theme of Marilyn Monroe (Oates’s Miss Golden Dreams, Russell’s Blood Brothers) are rarely successful, though I can’t articulate why. Perhaps they mistake icon for import. Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany likewise fails to impress.
Despite some highly theatrical technical elements—a flying actor; basketballs dropping from the sky; and an overwhelming set piece in the third act that involves revealing the back wall of the theater, painted as the Stars and Stripes three stories high while Vietnam War dead are delivered home by forklift—Irving’s black comedy of faith leaves us wondering why this story had to be told. It is the story of diminutive Owen, a “boy with a wrecked voice” who has premonitions of his own death and a heroic sacrifice. In a setting of New England grotesques out of Thornton Wilder, and told in tightly cued overlapping scenes, preternaturally spiritual Owen takes on the role of a wise child. The trouble is that Irving, Bent, director Blake Robison, and actor Matthew Detmer have given Owen a comically squeaky voice more appropriate to Burr Tillstom and Fran Allison’s clown puppet Ollie. Owen’s pronouncements of wisdom against the tradition-bound clerics of his hometown are flat and trite; he comes off as a grating smartass more at home on Saturday morning television. Maybe the idea worked better in the book.
The play picks up some momentum in the third act with an unsettling visitation by Lenny Bruce and Owen goes off to war. Too little, too late.