I was rereading J.D. Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which Sally had graciously printed from her copy of the New Yorker archives (19 June 1965), and there on page 111 was further evidence of Sarah and Adelaide’s favorite haberdasher. Jeez Louise, if their idea of fashion on the mid-1960s was the “Eton-style cap of Arnel triacetate and cotton blend in Oxford weave” (the ugly helmet on the right), they deserved to go out of business.
No hangers
Storing baseballs in a humidor may have reduced the number of home runs in Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, but not for the conventionally-assumed reason, argue Edmund Meyer and John Bohn of the University of Colorado at Boulder in a pre-print article. The soggier balls would actually travel farther; but this effect is overmatched by the enhanced grippiness of the balls’ surfaces, which would give the edge to pitchers.
More wheat and birds
The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to a press release by Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) that reports evidence of nesting activity by Long-billed Curlews (Numenius americanus) in fields of winter wheat.
Winter wheat acres have been increasing with continued success in Prairie Canada. Reduced pesticide input costs, the ability to spread the workload and improved marketing opportunities are factors in the crop’s expansion. These factors have contributed toward winter wheat providing superior financial returns compared to spring wheat alternatives. Producers involved in a recent DUC winter wheat program made $27/ac more on winter wheat than they did on spring wheat. The crop is of specific interest to DUC since it is seeded in the fall and remains generally undisturbed through the following growing season when most birds are nesting. It also provides a more attractive nesting habitat for ducks than spring-seeded cropland.
When the nesting-season starts for many species, winter wheat has already had a head start growing, and is ready to provide nesting cover for grassland birds early in the season. By the time winter wheat harvest begins, in mid-July in the Dakotas, for example, young birds nesting in the wheat fields are either developed enough to avoid harvest combines, or else have already fledged from the fields. In contrast, alfalfa, which reaches harvest height in May, is typically cut within the first 10 days of June – a dismal predicament for nesting birds and young in areas like the Dakotas….
U.S. farmers annually plant about 40 million acres in winter wheat. Across Canada, more than 1.2 million acres of winter wheat is grown. Is this great for birds? No, it’s a monoculture. Nevertheless, it is a somewhat attractive crop , and one that usually reaches a suitable height at the right time of year to benefit breeding birds. It is a crop that won’t be harvested until most nesting birds safely fledged their young. Winter wheat will never be a substitute for idled grassland, like CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) land, but if cropland goes into a rotation with winter wheat, there may actually be some benefits for certain ground-nesting birds. (It should also be noted that farmers usually don’t plant winter wheat in the same field in consecutive years.)
304 and counting
David Pogue calls the editors of Consumer Reports on the carpet for the factitious practice of citing search result hit counts to make a point.
“A Yahoo search for ‘cheap Gucci handbags’ returned almost 1 million results,” says an article about fake goods.
Dudes, let’s get this straight: you’ll get a staggering number of hits from ANY Internet search at all!On Google, “chicken armadillo” gets 595,000 hits. “Banana carburetor” gets 132,000 hits. “Liquefy purple warthogs” is just about the most ridiculous improbable phrase I could come up with, and even that one gets 303 results, for crying out loud.
Philanthropic graffiti
Charles Isherwood visits the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s newly-opened Harman Hall and is bemused by the tagging of every possible amenity in the place with the name of a corporate benefactor. For pity’s sake, the elevators and the coat check room have an underwriter.
Whatever happened to Anonymous?
…what became of those wealthy philanthropists who used to support arts organizations and other not-for-profit and charitable institutions without requiring that their names be slapped somewhere — anywhere, it sometimes seems — on a building?
He then turns to a favorable development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A group of anonymous donors contributed $85 million so that the business school would not bear a brand name. At least for the next 20 years.
Meanwhile, since I was graduated in 1977, my alma mater has sold the naming rights to its liberal arts, engineering, medical, and business schools like a cash-strapped city scrounging for ways to pay for its new baseball stadium.
Kit Marlowe
Rorschach Theatre turns in a gritty, muscular production of David Grimm’s tale of political intrigue and misplaced loyalty. The play elaborates upon the speculation that Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan playwright renowned in his own time but fated to be eclipsed in posterity by William Shakespeare, was a secret agent to the Queen, acting under orders from Sir Francis Walsingham. Grimm offers an explanation for Marlowe’s murder, namely that it was an assassination entailed by the plotting of Protestant against Catholic in the late sixteenth century. Grimm’s script, set in modern English and by turns bawdy, fantastical, and contemplative, combines prose passages with sections set in verse (there’s nothing quite like a heroic couplet to let you know that a scene is over).
Adam Jonas Segaller attacks the title role with naked gusto, and shows us an interesting selection of vocal timbres. He leads a foursquare supporting cast of nine men. The rough-hewn two-level set by Eric Grims has the right feeling of precarious doom, but is perhaps not well matched with the various fluids that are spilled onstage in the course of the evening. The rich yet subtle sound design is by Veronica Lancaster. Costumes by Emily Dere are generally suggestive rather than in-period, maybe boots and a close-fitting jacket, but the on-a-budget approach works, and doesn’t get in the way of the swordplay (of two kinds).
- Kit Marlowe, by David Grimm, directed by Jessie R. Gallogly, Rorschach Theatre, Washington
But that’s just me
Arnold Zwickly produces two rants after my own heart. First:
Why are people so incompetent at finding e-addresses and web addresses? The hypothesis I’ve developed is that the InterWeb—the conglomeration of the Internet and the World Wide Web—makes people lazy and stupid. Here’s this amazing resource, which allows people to track down all sorts of arcane information within (at most) minutes, yet the users have come to expect that sites will be designed to offer them a single-click route to whatever they want. That’s just lazy. And they seem to have lost the ability to search things out for themselves. The InterWeb has made them stupid.
But, in a subsequent parenthesis, he backs off a bit. Give ’em hell, Arnold! Contrariwise, but making the same point: earlier this week I watched a training video (basically a spoken narration over screenshots of a developer writing code) that involved a side trip to a popular download site. We watched the coder-narrator type the name of the download site into a search box and then click through the search results. Oy vey! Bookmarks and URLs are your friends, people!
Next, Zwickly talks more moderately about the bleed-through of technical language into general use, and the repurposing of common words like normal and mass for technical purposes. He uses a favorite bête noire of mine as an example:
The fact is that ordinary language is pressed into service in a number of ways to provide technical vocabulary, which then has a very specialized meaning in certain contexts, and at the same time technical vocabulary “leaks out” into ordinary language. People get the general drift of the technical vocabulary, but (usually not knowing either the etymology OR the context of its technical use) do their best to interpret what they hear.
And they get a lot of it wrong, from the point of view of people in the technical fields. Epicenter obviously refers to a location (of an earthquake)—to, in some sense, the central point where the earthquake took place. Besides center, there’s an extra element epi-, which clearly must contribute something. So the epi- adds extra stuff, probably something emphatic: the epicenter is, people reason, the EXACT center. (Technically, it’s the location on the earth’s surface OVER the place where the earthquake event happened, underground.) Now, getting all enraged about the common-language use of epicenter for the central point of an event—it seems to be standard now—is just as silly as getting all enraged about the common-language use of vegetables to refer to tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, eggplants, etc., all of which are technically fruits in one scheme of biological terminology.
I take his point, that it’s a question of degree. I don’t get bent about the proper use of fruit the way my agronomist ex probably does, but I haven’t given up on epicenter yet. When epi- changes its meaning from “upon” to “exactly,” something is lost: the ability to make sense of a related word like epidermis (“the layer above the dermis”) or epidemic (“a scourge upon the people”).
Tom Stoppard’s Henry says in Scene 5 of The Real Thing:
[Words are] innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so that if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more…. [Words] deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
Current Nobody
Melissa James Gibson’s modern-dress retelling of the Odyssey puts the emphasis on the war at home and leaves the violence offstage. In a gender reversal, it’s house husband Od who stays at home with baby daughter Tel while his photojournalist Pen (Christina Kirk) trots off to cover the war in Troy and takes 20 years to return home. Jesse Lenat does good work in the opening scene, sliding from supportive to slouch as the years drag on and it appears his wife is lost forever—the man can keen! Pen’s travels through the Mediterranean are digested into a slide show for a press conference, the archaic place names of her narration clanging incongruously. Back at home, Od’s “suitors” are an indie documentary film crew who come to film the reunion and seriously overstay their welcome. There’s perhaps a message about the corrupting influence of the camera’s eye in here somewhere, but it’s not well-developed. An understated Michael Willis as Bill the Delivery Guy (and doorman) does his best not to steal the show (“Less is more, Tel,” he deadpans). The one-act evening closes with a nice moment between Od and Tel, now a young women (Casie Platt) who leaves to pursue her own destiny.
- Current Nobody, by Melissa James Gibson, directed by Daniel Aukin, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Thinking about choices
Wyatt Mason reviews John Updike’s collection of book reviews and other essays, Due Considerations, for the December, 2007 number of Harper’s (I’m not sure how long this article will live outside the paywall):
Without coyness, Updike renders a stern judgment [a review of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey] based on telling quotation. He builds toward his findings in plain sight, earning him an authority that is based on his presentation of a plausible case. Rather than caring about books per se, which Heidi Julavits described as the central requirement for a book reviewer, Updike may be seen here caring about doing his job. The job in this case demanded that he point out flaws in the work of a fellow fiction writer and corroborate those points with evidence.
Although some readers are uneasy, a priori, with negativity, Salinger’s reputation has weathered Updike’s high-profile critique for a very simple reason: a text is not exhausted by a work of criticism, only informed by it. We leave Updike’s review thinking not about negativity, nor about Updike, but thinking, as good criticism makes us, about a writer’s choices. That we ultimately do or do not agree with Updike’s assessment is of no importance. That the assessment is clear and well-founded allows us to engage a point of view with which we can also, if we are so disposed, argue privately.
Kitteh ate my web site
Via Compiler: In the Bizzaro-world spirit of The Eater of Meaning, the next stage of the internet’s decadent development is the Lolinator, brought to you by the good(?) people at malevolent design. It doesn’t seem to deal with long sidebars very well, so take a look at what it’s done to my side project, IEFBR14.
That which we call a rose
bit-player laments the confusing system of names used to identify complexity classes.
The letter P generally stands for “polynomial” (except where it’s “probabilistic”). N usually denotes “nondeterministic” (but NC is “Nick’s Class”). Likewise the prefix D is for “deterministic” (except that it’s usually omitted, and sometimes it means “difference” or “dynamical” instead). B stands for “bounded-error” (except that BH is “Boolean hierarchy” and “BPd(P)” is “Polynomial Size d-Times-Only Branching Program”). Q is for “quantum” (except “QH” is the “query hierarchy” and “QP” is “quasi-polynomial time”).
The sad truth is, the naming conventions for furniture at Ikea make for a more consistent language than those of complexity theory.
Hmm. Maybe the math and CS guys should talk to the bioinformaticians that gave us Pokemon as the name of an oncogene, until (under threat of legal action) it was renamed Zbtb7.
Squeezing the melons
Adelaide and Sarah summon the names of a few defunct retailers in “Marry the Man Today.” Adelaide’s intro begins:
At Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s,
A lesson I’ve been taught:
You can’t get alterations
On a dress you haven’t bought.
Saks Fifth Avenue (founded by Andrew Saks, and hence no apostrophe) is still with us, after the usual bewildering chain of ownership exchanges. I didn’t know that Saks had merged with Gimbel’s by 1923, but maintaining its distinct branding. Middlebrow Gimbel’s, of course, has passed on. When I was in graduate school, I bought a great sweater from the downtown Philadelphia store.
The Philadelphia institution founded by John Wanamaker, now merged into Hecht’s and then Macy’s, once had a million-square-foot flagship store in New York at 770 Broadway. Klein’s would be S. Klein, On the Square, also long gone from Union Square.
But the real poser comes in the first bridge:
ADELAIDE: Slowly introduce him to the better things, respectable, conservative, and clean.
SARAH: Reader’s Digest!
ADELAIDE: Guy Lombardo!
SARAH: Rogers Peet!
ADELAIDE: Golf!
SARAH: Galoshes!
ADELAIDE: Ovaltine!
As punctuated in the libretto, Rogers Peet sounds like the name of a self-help guru from the first half of the century, someone like Norman Vincent Peale, Émile Coué, or Dale Carnegie. But it turns out to designate the merger of the businesses of men’s clothiers Marvin N. Rogers and Charles Bostwick Peet. Rogers, Peet & Co. was a nineteenth-century retailing innovator, introducing tags that identified fabric content and price (no haggling!) and a money-back guarantee. The final Rogers, Peet store closed in the mid-1980s.
Day off
Somewhat unconventionally, today is a company holiday for me. I made a decision not to schedule anything for today: no checklists, no appointments (except that Leta is coming over after her audition), no chores, no alarms. My bathroom needs cleaning, my to-do list is as long as it ever is, a big chunk of my files hosted at Comcast got clobbered in a recent migration and I will have to restore them, I have message from the resource manager at the Park that I haven’t answered for two weeks, but for today, I Don’t Give a Darn. I choose to celebrate that the backlog pile of magazine stories that must be read is empty, that my WATCH assignments for the year are complete, that I have a month of free evenings ahead of me. I think I’ll even skip reading blogroll today.
Still squeezing
So I hit the souvenir shop row along the the block with Ford’s Theater looking for a replacement squeeze coin purse, as the one I had from New York was getting hard and cracked. In the third shop, I found what I needed—only a choice of two colors, the popularity of this item must be sagging greatly. I squeezed it open, expecting to see some sort of “made someplace else” mark, but there was the old familiar pentagonal QUIKOIN U.S.A. mark.
Program inserts
We were called for a pickup rehearsal yesterday evening in preparation for this weekend’s run. It was a refreshingly productive hour. We reviewed only choreography, so we didn’t waste time clowning through the dialog (alas, a practice all too common in the amateur ranks). Really the point of the evening was to work Ivan into the show, as he is substituting for both Billy and Zach these next three performances. It’s not uncommon to see substitutes in the chorus/ensemble. Indeed, Kelly went on for Christy our opening weekend. A lot of the community theaters around here run four weekends for a musical, and it’s hard to keep a group of eight or twelve decent singer-dancers together for that long. It is certainly the case that the orchestra roster will vary weekend to weekend and night to night. A solo line that you’re used to hearing from a violin or trumpet one evening will come from the keyboard. There are directors who make a signature of this. RCP’s production of Barnum is storied for its who’s-on-tonight cast.
I’ve also seen substitutes in speaking roles, and in straight plays as opposed to musicals. It’s an interesting challenge to work with the different energy that you get from an actor that you’re less accustomed to.
I played Dr. Pinch in a production of The Comedy of Errors about ten years ago. The design concept for the show was sort of a comic-book post-modern Anything Can Happen Day. The multi-colored set incorporated a kid’s slide. In the world of this show, anachronism was a good thing. And there was a chorus of about eight without speaking parts; they were there to give some depth to the picture, and to participate in sight gags like a twelve-man double-take. So naturally the markeup of the chorus was fluid.
Dr. Pinch’s big scene is with Antipholus of Ephesus, whom he thinks is mad. Pinch tries to drive out the evil spirits:
I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight:
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!
Now David, my director, sometime during rehearsals gave me a battery-operated fan and said, “Use this for the exorcism, if you like, or find something else goofy.” And this eventually turned into “what is Gorsline going to pull out of his kit bag tonight?” I made an agreement with Angus (playing Antipholus) that he would see everything at least once during tech week, but once we were up, I would pull things out more or less at random. I had a rain stick, and a soap bubble pipe, and a couple of other things along with the mini-fan.
(This was not unlike the arrangement that Terry has with our director of The Foreigner that his Charlie would find a different “translation” of Froggy’s “Gomo rim jambo” every night.)
So, it must have been second weekend, and a young lady from England—Nikki I think her name was, first nanny that I met who wore Doc Marten’s—joined the chorus for her first performance. She told me afterwards that it was all she could do to keep her composure when I pulled out a hand-cranked egg beater and waved it over Antipholus like a security screener’s baton.