Some links: 97

  • Ooh, shiny, shiny.
  • Hilary Howard visits the Jewel Streets neighborhood of Brooklyn/Queens, at 4 feet above MSE. It’s not often that you see Phragmites australis growing on a street corner.
  • Yes, outdoor cats are a problem. Probably worse than you think.

    Just the amount of different insects and invertebrates that they are eating in their diet. We know that they eat insects. That wasn’t necessarily new, but we didn’t really have an idea that they were eating so many things. And I think our concern there is that most scientists that have done these studies in the past were not really looking for insects and they’re not taxonomists trained to understand insects.

  • Mary Pipher makes brightness in the dark. “We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.”

My year in cities, 2023

Finally some out of state travel!

Overnight stays in 2023:

Plus four nights in transit by train and plane. All told, I was on the road 26 nights. How ’bout that?

Widewater to Great Falls

A solstice walk, one of Stephanie Mason’s last walks as Senior Naturalist for Nature Forward. We were also joined by new Senior Naturalist Genevieve Wall. We pushed from the Old Angler’s Inn parking up to Olmsted Island and back: 4 miles round trip, and even though the walking is nearly flat, I was dragging a bit at the end. At Great Falls, the water was up and pumping: I felt a bit uneasy on the first footbridge, so close to the torrent.

low waterA couple of small takeaways: Wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) leaves resemble Corydalis, but you often find it growing on rocks; someone (Edwin Way Teale?) once described the twists of bare persimmon branches as “like mad snakes.” Widewater, incorporated into the C&O Canal, is an abandoned branch of the Potomac.

Sighted: one very chill juvenile RSHA.

Girl from the North Country

Girl from the North Country suffers from a surfeit of quirky, irascible, and damaged characters, and nearly as many subplots. In its favor, it’s good to hear songs (many we know, some we don’t) by Bob Dylan (if only, sometimes, as snippets) in new styles (hard rock, blues, gospel-ish) and arrangements. The reworking of “I Want You” as a duet is very fine. But in most cases, the songs are disconnected from the stories: rarely does someone, following the Rodgers and Hammerstein paradigm, sing to explain themselves, or to advance the plot, or because they just can’t help it. The medley opening the second act is particularly puzzling: why are we hearing these particular songs?

That said, Jill Van Velzer does well with “Sweetheart Like You,” giving us a good belt; Jay Russell as the unctuous Mr. Perry and Jeremy Webb as “Bible salesman” Reverend Marlowe are chewy antagonists. There are a couple of rousing 11:00 numbers, “Duquesne Whistle” and a few stanzas of “Hurricane” with an interpolation from “All Along the Watchtower.” And we appreciate that the show doesn’t take applause breaks; but by the same token, the pace of dialog in most of the book scenes is unnecessarily breakneck. Give us a chance to care about these people.

  • Girl from the North Country, written and directed by Conor McPherson, music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, orchestrated and arranged by Simon Hale, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington

Upcoming: 58

I’m back in the line as a primary judge for Silver Spring Stage for the 2024 WATCH adjudication year, so these are the shows I expect to see:

  • Galati/Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  • Elice/Barry/Pearson, Peter and the Starcatcher*
  • Sklar/Beguelin/Martin, The Prom
  • Stephens/Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Kreiger/Eyen, Dreamgirls
  • Lippa/August/Wallace, Big Fish
  • Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
  • ?/Stoker, Dracula
  • Robinette/Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

*I’m working Dance Nation for the Stage in March, so I will likely need to swap assignments.

And one TBD.

Wren

So I’m finishing Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren and it occurs to me to check what sort of bird an Irish person means by wren. And so I pull out my lightly used (only one trip to Europe so far) Svensson’s Birds of Europe, 2/e (2009) (pp. 336-337), and it is indeed the bird we call Winter Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes.

And the species account is hilarious, as field guides go. On the plate, calling out field marks, is one word: “unmistakable!” And the species account has this gem:

IDENTIFICATION Very small, and this reinforced by ludicrously small tail that is usually raised vertically, also by short neck.

I wonder what other tidbits are to be found in this guide.

My year in contributions, 2023

I finished my Giving Tuesday list a little early this year.

What organizations are worthy of support? Please give some consideration to this list.

These are the groups and projects to which I gave coin (generally tax-deductible), property, and/or effort in 2023.

Hey

As for spam coming in through the transom offering to redesign my web site or improve SEO (usually with a mouthful of abbreviations suggesting that A Honey of an Anklet can appear on Google’s first page of search results) (what are these slimies up to? do they just want steal my credentials so that they can take over this blog?), usually I just toss the e-mail in the bin. But for this message, apparently from an outlook.com address, there was something about the high ratio of dysfluency to text that called out to me.

Hey,

I am Peter, an experienced web designer. I was analyzing your website and found that your website design is quite complicated from the user’s perspective. Your users are finding your website it difficult to use your website.

You need to work on your UI/UX and make it simplistic and intuitive. And I believe, along with my team of designers and developers, I can help you in making your website attractive and engaging.

We offer a wide array of services:

• Website design and development

• Landing page design

• Website marketing

Website content creation services

• Web application development

• Mobile application development

• Digital marketing

If you are interested, then let me know your requirement, so I can assist you with best solution.

Regards,

Peter.

“… make [your UI/UX] simplistic…”—melts my crabby little heart.

Not once have I seen one of these stinkers offer a portfolio of their work. I am so tempted to engage, to ask for references, to pretend to do due diligence. Or at the very least to send the message back, copy edited. And then I come to my senses.

Public Obscenities

Public Obscenities makes use of some familiar tropes: a young man returns to the country of his heritage, images hidden away are revealed, someone who refuses a calling ascends to it, things that are thought of as authentic are perhaps not so. Chowdhury’s unique spin is that the locale is half a world away, in Kolkata, and big chunks of the dialogue are in Bangla.

Our traveler is Choton (the energetic Abrar Haque), who is accompanied by his boyfriend Raheem (Jakeem Dante Powell). While Choton gads about, interviewing citizens about language and marginalized communities in pursuit of an ill-conceived dissertation research project, Raheem quietly (perhaps too quietly) stays closer to Choton’s family home, making tender portraits with a disused twin-lens reflex camera. We’re reminded that the TLR can achieve intimate results because the photographer can maintain eye contact with the subject—or the subject might be unaware that a photograph is being made—as masters of the technology like Vivian Maier showed. Unfortunately, locked-down Rakeem, the character who accepts his calling, never really shows us what’s going on with him, which is perhaps a fault of writing, direction (Chowdhury directs his own script), or acting.

Golam Sarwar Harun, as Jitesh, one of Choton’s uncles, comes off best. Speaking little English, Jitesh quietly deals with the flurry of activity that has appeared in his house; he is encouraged to sing a lovely song that had Bangla-speakers in the audience audibly marking time with him.

Peiyi Wong’s effective unit set (Choton’s family home, well-lived-in right down to the slightly wobbly ceiling fan) accommodates subtitle projections; flavorful sound design by Tei Blow is there when we need it.

  • Public Obscenities, written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Woolly Mammoth Theater Company with co-presenter Theater for a New Audience, Washington

Ixnay

Beautiful ringing of the changes on synonyms for reject, in the sense of veto, in Sarah Vogelsong’s “Churchill Downs faces tough election night in Virginia:”

… voters decisively defeated both measures. Almost 59% of Manassas Park voters rejected the Rosie’s referendum, while almost 62% of Richmond voters nixed the casino project — a stark contrast to the 51%-49% split on the casino in 2021 when Urban One was the plan’s sole backer. (emphasis added)