Aesthetics of Everywhere

16: Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. He’s also won a number of other distinguished awards and recognitions, including the Tony Award. His 1971 play, Old Times, is running at the Shakespeare Theatre (Lansburgh Theatre) through July 3rd. Listen to the Radiolab podcast I linked to last week before you go – Karim Nader’s research into memory is relevant to the structure and dialogue of the play.

17: Meridian Hill is thus named because it lies on the exact longitude of the original DC milestone marker placed by Major Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker on April 15, 1791. In fair weather, Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park) is the gathering place of many DC residents on Sunday afternoons for a weekly outdoor drum circle. It was deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1994 as ”an outstanding accomplishment of early 20th-century Neoclassicist park design in the United States.”

And ever wonder why overheard cell-phone conversations are so much more annoying than conversations overheard in person?

18: Meat can be grown in labs for human consumption. This one turned into a full-fledged blog post, In Vitro-meat: More research, more questions.

19: I learned how to play cornhole. Two ‘cornhole boards’ are set up at a set distance from each other, and players take turns throwing beanbags, attempting to throw the beanbag through the hole on the board (3 points) or land the beanbag on the board itself (1 point). It’s played groups of two. First group to 21 points wins, but there’s something that I’m still not sure about with certain points being cancelled out: I think that happens when two players from opposite teams who are throwing from the same side make the same move (both land it on the board, or both get the beanbag through the hole). It’s a fun, casual game, though many get quite competitive about it and play in leagues. One of my coworkers even builds his own custom cornhole boards.

20: There are many difficulties associated with maintaining a saltwater tank, including risk of death (!) from zoanthids. People often buy live rocks for these marine aquariums, in which case you aren’t really sure what organisms you’re introducing into your saltwater environment… there are often ‘hitchhikers’ living on the rocks. There’s a story my roommate mentioned about a guy who tried to rid his tank of aiptasia (considered a pest in aquarium communities) by boiling the rocks. However, what he didn’t realize was that there were zoanthids on the rock, which released toxins into the water vapor he inhaled as the rocks boiled in his kitchen. In general, saltwater tanks are considered more challenging to keep than freshwater tanks, as they’re more expensive and time-consuming.

21: Pink Amazonian river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) are the largest and most intelligent of the freshwater dolphin species, with a brain capacity 40% larger than ours. They start off as a greyish color and their skin becomes more translucent as they mature, giving them their characteristic pink coloration due to the presence of capillaries close to the surface of the skin. These dolphins have humps on their backs rather than dorsal fins, an unfused vertebrae in the neck that allows them to turn their heads around 180 degrees while feeding, and rely on their great eyesight and sonar to navigate through sometimes very murky river waters. They’re found mostly in the Orinoco River system of South America.

22: The Mississippi River transports a lot of important cargo, especially for the Midwest. A neighbor mentioned that she didn’t realize how important the river is for transporting goods in that region, having never lived there. I’m the same way – never lived in the Midwest, and I never really thought that rivers were still such an important shipping method. The majority of the cargoes are made up of grains from the Midwest and petrochemicals from the Gulf of Mexico. Recent flooding on the Mississippi caused a temporary halt in barge traffic and the effects rippled throughout the region, including lots of damage to homes and businesses.

Flood waters from the Mississippi River pour over a levee on the Yazoo River, a tributary to the Mississippi River, north of Vicksburg, Miss., May 13. Thousands of residents who live along or near the river from Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to evacuate, and thousands of acres of prime farmland have been covered by the record-setting rising waters. (Chris Todd / EPA)