Still time to contribute

I tried to add a couple of causes to the list this year, especially locals like Casey Trees and Raptor Conservancy of Virginia, while maintaining my support levels for everyone else.

These are the organizations and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2013. Please join me in supporting their work.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2013

This year’s big trip was to Minnesota, and I clicked over 400 on my life list. And, wow, I visited a lot of local spots this year.

A new top total for eggs at Huntley Meadows Park this year, and the wetland restoration project finally happened.

2012’s list. 2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list.

New venues, 2013

I found a couple of performance spaces in the Smith Center that I hadn’t been to before, unless I’ve lost track.

2012’s list. 2011’s list.

My year in cities, 2013

The year-end roundup posts continue. Overnight stays in 2013:

2012’s list. 2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.

The year in review, 2013

You know the drill. The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 5 January: WATCH assignments for 2013 are out.
  • 3 February: David Lindsay-Abaire puts aside the wacky characters and situations of some of his earlier work (Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers) and plays it straighter in his new Good People.
  • 2 March: Julian Elijah Martinez delivers a masterful performance as Daniel Reeves in Bill Cain’s 9 Circles.
  • 6 April: I’m back with NPR for a short gig, working on- and off-site.
  • 6 May: Seeking drama and humor in the living rooms of the privileged class, Jon Robin Baitz introduces us to Lyman and Polly Wyeth, retirees from 1960s-era Hollywood and old guard conservatives.
  • 2 June: Five last vocabulary builders from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie.
  • 3 July: Sand Box John keeps us up to date.
  • 1 August: Last Saturday’s field trips took us to two freshwater wetlands in southern P.G. County, one well-known among naturalists, the other decidedly off the beaten path.
  • 1 September: Big data collector/distributor Acxiom is proffering a measure of transparency and consumer opt-out. aboutthedata.com is set to launch on Wednesday.
  • 5 October: One of my favorite underrepresented photographic subjects, the porcelain convenience at Shorpy.
  • 3 November: Round House Theatre marks its return to more engaging, contemporary material with a balanced ensemble performance of Melissa James Gibson’s This, a romantic comedy-drama for grieving grownups.
  • 1 December: Scott Weidensaul gives us a nudge to remember to look for bird-friendly certified shade-grown coffee.

The year in review, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

On deck: 11

only one shelf (for now)The backlog has been reduced a bit, but there are new titles here (thanks, Leta!) and some more volumes on order. The play collections are probably the longest-tenured books on the shelf. I started the Kate Atkinson, hence I removed the dust jacket, but I only got about three pages in before something else tempted me more.

Peculiar muzak: 2

Crate & Barrel this afternoon, shopping for wine glasses: a live version of the Velvet Undeground’s “Femme Fatale.” It wasn’t the album version; I couldn’t tell whether it was another band covering it, but the vocalist did sound like Nico.

Two distinct problems

Charles Severance reflects on his experiences teaching MOOCs. In much the same way that John Markoff analyzes the situation (as I summarized earlier), Severance draws an important distinction between the objectives of conventional university training and those of massively open online courses. From the full article (behind a paywall):

My goal in a MOOC is to teach as many volunteer learners as I can and keep them engaged and learning as long as I can. In an on-campus course, my goal is to teach captive students as much as I can over a set 15 weeks. [Emphasis in original.]

Every $15 counts

One of my writing projects for Friends of the Migratory Bird/Duck Stamp has been to assemble profiles of National Wildlife Refuges across the country that owe their existence to the Duck Stamp. For many of our NWRs, virtually all of the property was both or leased with money from the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, and the money that hunters pay for Stamps goes into the MBCF.

To date, I have written up Camas NWR in Idaho, Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico, and Tamarac NWR in Minnesota.

Our target audience is mainly the birding community and bird-inflected readers, but I do slip a little natural history from other realms into my descriptions.

The Lyons

It may sound like faint praise to lead with compliments on the tech work, but the (uncredited) hair design for The Lyons is quite impressive. The razor-cut bob sported by Rita (Naomi Jacobson), bleached with the roots long grown out, tells us a lot about this grasping, reality-denying soon-to-be widow who bemoans the upholstery in her home as a “washed out shade of dashed hopes.” Her lonely, sad, self-destructive son Curtis (Marcus Kyd) wears a gravity-proof Tintin foreshock that is perhaps his most endearing quality.

Nicky Silver’s powers of invention in the realm of acidulated comedies of broken families are still strong. Granted, John Lescault’s dying patriarch Ben, confined to a hospital bed for the entirety of act 1, doesn’t get to do much but make up for the lifetime of swear words he’s never uttered until now. But director John Vreeke gives him a delicious slow comic take in reaction to a piece of deadly information revealed: who knew that a bed elevator could be funny?

Vreeke also gives Kimberly Gilbert’s Lisa (Ben and Rita’s other child) the time to let us see how shaken she is by her father’s imminent passing. In a monologue not always performed, done as an entr’acte under the house lights at the lip of the stage, Gilbert attends an AA meeting and receives the audience’s greeting. When the ultimate telephone call interrupts her story, her crushed, silent reaction is show-stopping.

  • The Lyons, by Nicky Silver, directed by John Vreeke, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.