I’ve acquired a couple new doorstops. I’m almost through the collection of Philip K. Dick novels.
I need to catch up on my Goodreads notes.
Colon
More fun with punctuation marks: I recently learned that the humble colon (:) is used in Swedish names as a mark of abbreviation, much as the apostrophe is used elsewhere. I first came across this usage through the name of one of the Ax:son Johnson family.
Upcoming: 62
Ooh ooh ooh: a new Hal Hartley film is rolling out.
The Thanksgiving Play
The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.
Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.
- The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Suzanne Beal, Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.
6K
6000 planets! How cool is that? When I was a boy, there were 9, er, 8.
Some links: 111
- Beaverslide: the OG, DIY, fix-it-yourself rangeland contraption.
It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere…
- ‘Godot’ Is a Puzzle, However You Pronounce It, by Alexis Soloski
Jonathan Kalb, a professor at Hunter College who met with Beckett, disagrees. “It’s actually not true that there is a definitive pronunciation,” he said in a recent interview. “The fact is, he was very tolerant of different pronunciations.”
KOFF-KOFF Just about the only variation of which he was tolerant.
- TIL where rapamycin came from.
- Repairing cobblestone streets in New York. By hand, of course.
- Collateral damage in the wars on choice and poor people: How ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ came to threaten primary care in rural Maine, by Selena Simmons-Duffin and When the G.O.P. Medicaid Cuts Arrive, These Hospitals Will Be Hit Hardest, by Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz.
The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions
The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions is a funny-sweet-bitter reflection of playwright Paula Vogel’s emotional journey with her mother, named in the play’s world as Phyllis Herman (the always watchable Kate Eastwood Norris). The “evictions” of the title refer to the series of house moves undertaken by the Herman family—mother, son Carl (the surprising Stanley Bahorek) and daughter Martha (steady Zoe Mann)—gradually stepping up from a cockroach-riddled basement custodial flat* to a spacious three-bedroom apartment, all in the D.C. metro area. As Martha says early in the play, there is a season for packing, and a season for unpacking.
It’s not clear in the text whether each change of domicile is entailed by formal proceedings, but that’s not important. Rather, we can read each eviction as a point in the Herman’s lives when something is lost, and maybe something found. As the various Herman family apartments gradually become airier and more spacious, equally so the living rooms become emptier of furniture, highlighting Phyllis’s rejection of her children and general isolation. The Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch over Me” recurs as underscoring: Phyllis never does find that Someone until the closing moments of the play.
Shawn Boyle’s projection designs are formidable, perhaps even triggering.
- The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, by Paula Vogel, directed by Margot Bordelon, Studio Theatre Mead Theatre, Washington
*Writing as someone who’s lived with cockroaches in Prince George’s County, I’m of the mind that you’re never really rid of them.
Leopold’s Preserve November 2025
A quick stroll in woods and meadows of a section of Leopold’s Preserve that I hadn’t seen before, led by Marion Lobstein and Claudia Thompson-Deahl. We stopped for a look at the ruins of the Brent family homestead. Red-legged Grasshoppers (Melanoplus femurrubrum) were still hopping.
Peter and the Starcatcher: an update: 1
Now, where was I?
The last time I was on stage was early summer 2016. I had some personal setbacks for about 18 months after that, so I went on a hiatus that turned into a four-year break. Then I was cast in a show, we were about two weeks into rehearsals, that was February 2020, and we know how that turned out.
So I am very glad to be back in the rehearsal room, working on Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher for The Arlington Players. It’s a sweet, silly, very theatrical prequel to the Peter Pan story, based on a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. There will be singing, and there will be pirates.
I will play Robert Falcon Scott, a character very loosely based on the historical figure. There are some screaming anachronisms around his presence in the play, and TBH I’m not really sure why he’s in this play. First table work session is tonight, maybe we will figure that out.
Also glad for a commute that doesn’t involve Beltway construction.
Violette’s Lock 2025
I’ve been to this bit of the C&O Canal at least once before back when I was starting to learn plants, probably more. Wednesday it was very quiet: I think we’re far enough upriver to be out of the flight paths for DCA. Sassafras showing fall reds and yellows, some lingering asters like Symphyotrichum cordifolium. I found an ichneumonid wasp, tentatively Coleocentrus rufus, and an oil beetle, Meloe sp. J. D. Pinto in BugGuide says, “It is difficult to distinguish females of Meloe americanus from M. impressus without examining pygidial structure (americanus females have a narrow apical flange).” (link added)
Some links: 110
- Opinion: Why I’m handing in my Pentagon press pass, by NPR’s Tom Bowman.
- DC’s lonely streetcar will shut down in March, alas.
- Things worth getting better at, or, 10x vs 10%, by John D. Cook.
There’s a perennial temptation to solve the problem you want to solve rather than the problem you need to solve.
- What Shakespeare’s Capulet is talking about when he shouts at his daughter, “Out you green-sickness carrion! Out you baggage/ You tallow-face!”
- When is a battle a massacre, and vice versa? And what is settler colonialism? Akim Reinhardt explains.
- RE:PUBLIC launches, a journalism project focused on one of the few issues with bipartisan support: public lands. (In the western US, I suspect that the degree to which people support public lands depends on how the question is framed.)
- Recently published research indicates that Blue Dasher dragonflies (Pachydiplax longipennis) can thrive in crummy, polluted urban environments.
Charlottesville overnight
I did a quick overnight to Charlottesville to visit two sites.
First up was James River State Park. This was supposed to be an easy stroll to get park #27 punched on my Trail Quest ticket. I didn’t intend to break out my camera with the long lens. But, walking along the River Trail, I found a damselfly that I didn’t recognize, so I scooted back to my car to get the camera. The damsel turned out to be male and female Smoky Rubyspots (Hetaerina titia). Pretty cool!
Then this morning I participated in a short two-hour bioblitz at the Nature Conservancy’s Fernbrook Natural Area. We worked in the parcel that was newly added to the property; it showed a long life as pasture and homestead, with a stupendous stand of bamboo! Fortunately, there were some natives to be found, and I added Paspalum laeve to the property’s iNaturalist project (as well as to my own list of species, I discovered to my slight surprise). And, alas, it looks like I am the first to document Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stoebe) at the site.
Negative space
Another view through a Tony Smith work, this time Smug (1973/2005), snapped during my first visit to Glenstone—a little bit Storm King, a little bit landscaped nature preserve, a little bit Dia:Beacon, a little bit Jeff Koons schlock. I was also taken by Brice Marden’s Moss Sutra and the Seasons (2010-2015), but after a smidge of YouTubing I’m of the mind that he was not the best explicator of his own work.
Occoquan Bay NWR
Yet another trip to Occoquan Bay NWR, this time led by Ken Rosenthal of Reston Association’s Walker Nature Center. The birding was rather slow; I lugged my scope to get some decent views of Bald Eagle and Osprey.
Otherwise, I picked up some new personal species records for iNaturalist, including Rough Cocklebur (Xanthium strumarium), Differential Grasshopper (Melanoplus differentialis), Sugarcane Beetle (Euetheola humilis), and Transverse-banded Flower Fly (Eristalis transversa) A lot of the interesting stuff was along the shore of the bay.
Interpunct
I was pleased to learn that one of my favorite obscure punctuation marks, middot, is actually used by certain written languages, and not just to separate syllables or words. In Catalan it’s called punt volat, “flying point,” and it marks off geminate Ls.