Gassing up

Revised testing methodology from the Environmental Protection Agency means substantially reduced gas mileage estimates for hybrid vehicles, as John Gartner reports. This reduction is in keeping with anecdotal reports that mileage estimates for hybirds had been inflated. As an example: while the previous estimates for the Toyota Prius were 60 mpg City/51 mpg Highway/55 mpg Combined, the new numbers are 48/45/46. (Remember that hybrids paradoxically get better mileage for EPA City conditions.)

What Gartner’s report doesn’t point out is that estimates for conventionally-powered cars are also being reduced. The old numbers for the 4-cylinder manual transmission Honda Accord were 26/34/29, dropping about 10% to 23/31/26.

Charlotte Church meets Enya meets Sarah Brightman

One more reason to read a book, a really long one, during pledge week: Claire Dederer explores the phenomenon that is Celtic Woman:

[Their popularity] may have something to do with the fact that they are Irish. Ireland is a country that does a lot of psychological heavy lifting for Americans. We’ve imbued the place with mysticism, greenness, quietude and rootedness. Milky-skinned maidens, singing beautiful music in front of a wall of ivy. It’s the very vision of what we want Ireland to be. Or at least what PBS viewers want Ireland to be.

At the park: 7

let's go outsideThe mergansers appear to be done with nesting for the season; birders on the boardwalk spied a hen with seven merglets feeding on the main pond. The Wood Ducks, on the other hand, are still hard at work slow-cooking their eggs. We have five active nests, including (unfortunately) a dump nest with 22 eggs in it.

Aloft, we saw a mini-kettle of three Red-shouldered Hawks picking up altitude. We heard or saw a couple of heron species, gnatchatchers, cuckoos, flycatchers, and vireos, but generally didn’t pause to take closer looks. On the walk back through the woods, Myra and I paused over a perplexing male tanager (most likely a Scarlet), along with a female; the male showed lots of streaky orange.

There are noticeably fewer Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) in the main wetland this year, so perhaps whatever control measures are in force are being effective.

Shoot

Peter Schjeldahl recaps performance artist Chris Burden’s career for The New Yorker. I don’t know how long the link will stay alive, but check out this pithy definition:

In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements. It was a silly game, in the end. Ultimate limits were discovered, most pointedly by Burden, whose influence on conceptual and installational artists, to this day, is immeasurable.

Some numbers: 1

I hadn’t seen statistics from RFB&D on the number of borrowers for some time, so I was interested to see the breakdown in the 2006 annual report: the organization reckons the total number of student listeners in the past year to be 147,000, of which 118.6 thousand are served through institutions and 28.3 thousand as individuals. 76.5% of our students have learning disabilities (including dyslexia), while 19.2% are blind or otherwise visually impaired. The education level brackets are 40.0% elementary school; 34.3% high school; 19.4% undergraduate; 6.2% graduate school and other. The numbers for college and graduate school surprise me, because most of what we record in the D.C. unit is at the college level.

Volunteer hours for the period were 390,021, resulting in 140,300 hours of recorded material and 5,831 new books produced. This fits with my micro experience: in a two-hour session, I can produce about 60 minutes of recording, covering 10 to 30 book pages. The organization-wide ratio of 2.8 hours of volunteer time per hour of material is pulled up by sessions that use both a reader and a director, and by the overhead of checking and production. Another way to look at these numbers is to figure 66.9 hours of volunteer time to produce one book on CD. Plus paid staff time, of course.

Gluten’s 15 minutes

Avoiding gluten in the diet is becoming fashionable, reports Kate Murphy.

“A lot of alternative practitioners like chiropractors have picked up on it and are waving around magic silver balls, crystals and such, telling people they have gluten intolerance,” said Dr. Don W. Powell, a gastroenterologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Sloane Miller, a 35-year-old freelance editor in New York, went on a gluten-free diet six months ago on the advice of her acupuncturist, even though a blood test and a biopsy indicated that she did not have celiac disease. Long plagued with gastrointestinal distress and believing that she might have an undetectable sensitivity to gluten, Ms. Miller said giving it up was “worth a try.”

Unfortunately, the inevitable backlash against this fad is likely to make life more inconvenient for those who legitimately suffer from CD.

Lafayette trip report: 4

Some non-birding props to hand out:

I had a nice meal, and a very nice couple of glasses of cabernet, at the Blue Dog Café. I had chosen it based on recommendations and its proximity to the hotel, unaware of its connection with the iconic canine of George Rodrigue. Heck, I didn’t even realize that Blue Dog was a Louisiana thing.

Solas on stageI slipped away from a couple of convention dinners and presentations to the Festival International de Louisiane, which (coincidentally?) was happening the same week as our birding event. Music on multiple stages, vendor booths from around the world, local food for $6 a hit—fabulous! My music choices ranged from local zydeco legends to Celtic and French gypsy-klezmer bands from Europe.

Under the rubric of the festival, I saw a staging of a version of Cody Daigle’s Life/Play, an experimental autobiographical blog-driven piece inspired by Suzan-Lori Parks’ 365 Plays/365 Days. It’s a little raw, some of the playlets are not much more than shoe-gazing, but there are some genuine theatrical moments there. I especially liked the Compliment Fairy, the dance (28 January) that The Guy does the night that his play is presented, and the fact that some of the bits are so unstageable that they work better with The Director reading the stage directions.

Thanks to local chain CC’s Coffee House for providing free wi-fi access.

I saw no pelicans on this trip!? But I did spy two road-killed armadillos on I-12.

Found art

One of the things that annoys me about Tina Howe’s Museum is that it calls for any number of unrealistic behaviors on the part of the museum-goers and guards, specifically (at least in the production I saw recently) for a couple of the viewers to become entranced by the view out the museum’s window. And yet, and yet…

I took a visual break from this year’s Artomatic, held this year on two floors of a Crystal City office building, lately the precincts of the Patent and Trademark Office. (I was particularly taken by Jennifer Foley’s photographs of decaying New England mills.) I looked out the eighth-floor window to the east, onto a parking structure by the airport, bracketed by hardwoods lining the parkway in the foreground and the river and some of the grimier bits of the District in the background. There was something about the sweep of the scene and the flat light of this overcast Saturday. I looked out on the top level of the parking structure, nearly full of cars blue-white-black with a occassional dot of red, none of them moving, the scene a frozen bit of hustle-bustle. The scene had the timeless grandeur of an image by Jeff Wall.

At the park: 6

Well, I thought that the big splash of the morning would be the Wood Duck nest that has been started in the new box hard by the boardwalk, the one that is easy to see but hard to walk to through the cattails and brambles. But other events were brewing. The park staff had designated today Wetlands Awareness Day.

Myra and I worked the upper wetland and then came down to lower Banyard Run. I came up to box #62 and carefully opened the box from the side. I spied the white teardrop-eye of a female Wood Duck. Now when we unintentionally find a hen in a box, she is just as likely to flush through the side door as she is through the entrance hole at the front of the box. So I took a step backwards, in case she went for that route, with optional gut evacuation. I stepped back, and then my world turned into a slow-motion backfall into a foot of water and six inches of mud, as I uttered imprecations all the way down.

Paul (nursing a recently-sutured foot) and Myra were sympathetic, but there isn’t much you can do to help out a guy who’s just found his own awareness of the wetland in the seat of his jeans. I splodged back to the parking area. At least the water wasn’t early-March cold the way it was the last time that I fell in.

Most of my gear is air-drying or in the laundry. Too soon to tell whether my optics suffered any permanent damage.

Why is it that this sort of thing never happens to Annie Dillard?