Acute

Another Words Words Words post, or more accurately, a Marks Marks Marks post: Jeff Z. Klein reports on the recent move by Montréal Canadiens equipment manager to include diacritics in players’ name bars on the backs of their sweaters. The explanation by Pierre Gervais as to why the marks hadn’t been rendered in the past is a bit weak, but no matter:

Gervais said the accents were made possible by technology. Until recently, the strip of cloth for name bars was too shallow.

“I would have had to sew the accent mark onto the uniform itself, above the name bar,” said Gervais, who started working as a Canadiens equipment manager in 1987. “Until a few years ago, we used to reuse the uniforms, so I couldn’t do it.”

Wakefield Park grasses

Alan Ford led a workshop on grass ID at Wakefield Park for the Potowmack Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society. Tips and reminders of some training that I took from Cris Fleming a couple of years ago. Grasses are sneaky hard to get into good focus with my happy snap camera, so most of my images remain on my hard drive.

Five gleanings:

  • Look for a bend in the awn to identify Indian Grass to species, Sorghastrum nutans.
  • When you see arundinacea or its derivatives in a species name, it’s a hint that the organism is large, with a reference to the large Bamboo Orchid, Arundina sp.
  • Broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus var. virginicus) is an early colonizer. When you see it give way to Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) (purple sheaths alternating with green internodes), you’re dealing with a well-established meadow.
  • Leersia virginica is a lookalike for the invasive Japanese Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum). The stilt-grass pulls up out of the ground easily, but Leersia does not.
  • Look and feel for stiff horizontal hairs on the sheath of Deer-tongue Grass (Dicanthelium clandestinum). Some of the panic grasses have recently been moved into the genera Coleataenia and Dicanthelium (twice-flowering [each year]).

not so purple nowI did get an acceptable image of the jizz of the delicate open panicles of Purple Love Grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), a species that many people love and that I have trouble recognizing.

At the park: 62

whacking and hackingtoo much of a good thingA different sort of management project at the Park today: the central wetland has an overabundance of Cattail (Typha sp.). This is definitely a native, but it can be invasive. And it’s not as if we are facing a monoculture; it’s just that we have a lot of the stuff. With the rearrangement of ponding as a result of the wetlands restoration project, the professional management staff is concerned lest the well-established patch expand into the nearby woods that will soon be flooded. So they asked the RMV team to help out. The objective of today’s work was not to reduce the patch, but rather to discourage it a bit—to keep it in check.

two of manyWe spent a couple of hours clipping the tops of the plants, removing the mature fruits, many of which are already distributing seed. Good weather, great snacks as always from M.K., and many, many bags of cattail heads.

Sparkle

Margalit Fox’s obit for Imero Fiorentino, the lighting designer who made Richard Nixon look less bad in the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates, has this delicious second lede paragraph:

The maestro behind those feats was Imero Fiorentino, a lighting director who for more than half a century orchestrated the play of luminescence and shadow on television shows, in commercials and at live performances, illuminating — or not — everything from jowls to Jell-O to ginger ale.

Longwood Gardens

conservatory cutiewaiting for a friendLeta and I spent most of our time at Longwood Gardens in the controlled environment of the conservatory, while the rain washed the outside. One of the destination plants of the conservatory is this single individual bread palm, Encephalartos woodii; the species is extirpated in the wild. Each of this cycad’s bright orange cones, each larger than a loaf of bread, is a pollen strobilus.

Short

Holy Fox! Alice Munro will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature!

In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Ms. Munro said that she was “amazed, and very grateful.”

She added, “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians,” she said. “I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.”

Unboxed Ware

boxed Wareunboxed Ware 1My copy of Chris Ware’s Building Stories has been sitting on a shelf—well, lying on the floor propped up against a shelf—for months, too pretty to unwrap. This afternoon I finally had some time to clear off the coffee table and take a few snaps of the unpackaging.

unboxed Ware 2Also solved today: I made horizontal space on a shelf where I can store the book once I’ve finished devouring it.

unboxed Ware 3I like big books and I cannot lie.

WalkingTown DC 2013

My job as volunteer assistant on my two WalkingTown DC tours today called for logistics, crowd control, and passing out evaluation forms—and it kept me busy, but I did grab two quick snaps of inside Washington.

pluginsFirst, Steve Livengood pointed out the communications equipment that TV people use for their standups outside the Senate side of the Capitol, nicely concealed by a low barrier wall, and out of frame when the cameras are rolling.

unlovedCarolyn Crouch took us through the good, the bad, and the dismal of the 1960s-era L’Enfant Plaza urban renewal project. Perhaps the low point of the dismal is this stairway that connects D Street, S.W. to the elevated L’Enfant Promenade. As we ascended the weirdly-treaded steps, vague noises of something like sandblasting could be heard from the behind the tarps that you see. Or perhaps they’re concealing a hellmouth.

Al dente

Marcella Hazan, author of one of the two cookbooks that I actually cook from, has passed. She did prickly so well.

When Mrs. Hazan arrived in New York in 1955, Italian food was still exotic, served in restaurants with straw-covered Chianti bottles and red-checked tablecloths….

The culture shock nearly crushed her. She was appalled by canned peas, hamburgers and coffee she once described as tasting no better than the water she used to wash out her own coffeepot at home.

Silver Line progress report: 32

coming soon to your towninadvertent selfieSandbox John gave me the tip that signage was in place at the Wiehle station. The typography appears to be a mix of the heavier-weight Helvetica that has been used in the system from the start (over the station entrance) and a lighter weight on the pylon. I’m also seeing this fresh-looking lighter weight in new platform location signs along the Blue and Orange Lines downtown; the signs set aside empty space for the Silver Line route information to be added when the Line goes live.

John also reports:

The north end of the pedestrian bridge at the Wiehle-Reston East station is a little interesting. It just ends at the corner of the plaza of the Comstock Partners Reston Station property. No sloping canopy like at the bottom of the escalators at the entrance pavilions. There also is no entrance pylon marking its purpose. Adjacent to the end of the pedestrian bridge is a set of stairs that descend to the loading dock access road to the buildings that have not been built yet. Not sure why it is there, best guess is it there to allow access to the north side of the station from the location where the fire trucks would connect fire hoses from the fire hydrant to the dry standpipe.

Golden ages

Michael Bourne makes the provocative claim that the best of Broadway these days is on cable TV.

You can measure the Golden Age of American theater in many ways, but I would mark it from the 1944 debut of The Glass Menagerie to the opening night of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962…. [F]or a short time after the Second World War, American commercial theater hit that elusive sweet spot where popularity meets ambitious social and artistic agendas.

I would contend that the best of Broadway has moved to Off-Broadway, and the best of Off has moved to Off Off.

ᔥ The Morning News