theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Washington’s National Theater quite recently gave up its rope-and-sandbags rigging system: it was one of the last of the “hemp houses.” Rebecca Cooper has the story for Washington Business Journal, and there is good video about the transition to the cables-and-counterweights system (less flexible, but standardized) that most hands know.
Going back a little farther in time, a documentary short from the 1950s shows IATSE Local 22 loading in the National’s touring show of My Fair Lady.
A message of hope from Vi Hart.
Dan Hurlin, who created the amazing Disfarmer, in preparation of a suite of Futurist plays by Fortunato Depero, Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed.
Don’t go up that green ramp, #1115!
The first of Metro’s 1000-series cars is taken out of service, to live on a nice farm.
To sweeten a Blue Saturday, Orkestra Obsolete plays New Order’s “Blue Monday” using only instruments and technology available in the 1930s.
ᔥ kottke.org and @tcarmody
Emily Graslie talks to Robb Telfer about his work to conserve Illinois’s only endemic flowering plant, Kankakee Mallow (Iliamna remota), to Langham Island in the Kankakee River.1
1 USDA PLANTS lists I. remota as a synonym for the more widely distributed Iliamna rivularis var. rivularis.
Featuring (now) full-time colleagues Alex and Maanvi.
And check out the cameo by Stacey at 1:39.
Chris Ware, Ira Glass, Nico Muhly, and John Kuramoto, d.b.a. “Phoobis,” create an animated cover for this week’s issue of The New Yorker. Guest-starring a former Secretary of State.
This showed up on VH-1 this morning. It’s easily the dullest, lamest video that the 80s has to offer.
If your cellphone rings in the middle of a John Cage concert, Paolo Angeli knows what to do with it: he’ll fine some way to wedge it into his baritone guitar.
A musicologist’s wet dream.
ᏍᏏᏉᏯ (Sequoyah) explains how Cherokee script has evolved and adapted with changes in technology.
From time to time I would remember a TV series from my childhood with a fairly simple premise: whatever the problem at hand might be, it could be solved by hopping into an airboat and zipping through the bayous to the other end of the county. Sky King of the wetlands, as it were. But the name of this series eluded me.
At long last, after a bit of stumbling about with the Googles, I turned up the name of the series: Everglades!. It ran for 38 episodes in 1961-62. Some sources connect it to Ivan Tors, producer of Sea Hunt and Flipper, which makes sense, because when I would describe this show to my friends, they would say, “Oh, you’re talking about Flipper.” But Flipper didn’t know how to pilot an airboat, as far as I can remember. (The IMDb entry says that ZIV Television Films produced Everglades!, but a Tors connection is not out of the question.)
An unsold television pilot of Larry Shue’s The Nerd was made in 1989 and aired in 1996. Some of the corners are rounded off—Rick isn’t nearly as obnoxious as he could be—but the basic comic situation of the dinner party with the Wal(d)graves is there.
Juicy views of the model board at NYC’s West Fourth Street control tower.
The spokesmen for the subway system walk that fine line between letting people know that the system is safe, but oh so riddled with technical debt.