Running Commentary 11/11/2024

Hello,

It's November, which means it's once again the anniversary of A Running Commentary, which began in early November of 2020. I've been at this for four years now, keeping pretty well to a weekly schedule. I still have rather few subscribers, but my goal with this and with The Edwards Edition generally isn't really to build an audience but to build a corpus, and I think I've done well at that so far. One more year and I hit five, which feels like a decent milestone for a website project.

Anyway...

Watching...

Elementary

I've watched more of the show; I'm up into the middle of Season 3, and I have a few more thoughts about things:

• The show hinted at Watson writing down Sherlock's cases in one episode, but otherwise she's still not a chronicler. She's essentially an original character at this point, which is fine because, again, Watson is a kind of redundant character on-screen. She becomes a detective in her own right in the second season, winding up working separately from Sherlock in the inter-season bit when Sherlock goes back to London for a bit. When he comes back in Season 3, the show doesn't waste a lot of time having them upset with each other, but it also doesn't team them back up too quickly either. It's handled pretty well, I think.
• Kitty shows up as the New Watson that Sherlock picked up as a protege in London. She starts out kind of one-note but it quickly becomes clear that there's a story between her and Sherlock as interesting as the story between Watson and Sherlock, it's just one we haven't seen. It gets hinted at slowly before we fully see things in her send-off episode. Things are left open for her to come back to the show, but it does seem like she left just as the show ran out of things for her to do.
• This show has an...interesting take on Mycroft. Rhys Infans did a great job performing the character, but the show's vision of Mycroft really differed from Doyle's. Here, Sherlock holds Mycroft greatly in contempt, which is not entirely undeserved. Mycroft does not seem particularly smart, even though he's usually depicted as smarter than Sherlock. Still, like with Watson, he kind of becomes his own thing for the show pretty quickly.
• And the other classic Holmes story character we get is actually a combo of two characters – spoilers – Irene Adler and Professor Moriarty. This actually works really well. Moriarty is, traditionally, Holmes's greatest adversary, but Adler is famously the only person to ever outsmart him in Doyle's works. The show combines these two things into Jamie Moriarty, the criminal mastermind who Sherlock can't really defeat. Natalie Dormer gives the best performance in the whole show so far. As I understand, she doesn't recur much past Season 2, which is disappointing, but true to Doyle.

Eating...

Spiced Green Tomato Jam

My father found this recipe out of a need to do something with unripe tomatoes left on the vines before a frost. What came out of it looked like salsa verde but tasted like a tangy spiced cider. It’s well-suited to its season, as the spice profile is quite autumnal; while the bulk of it is tomatoes, green tomatoes don’t taste anything like ripe tomatoes. Honestly it’s very strange stuff, but once you get your head around it, it’s quite good. I asked him for the recipe to share in my recipe book (linked in the top-page menu); he got it from googling and finding a recipe from Sarah Penrod, a TV personality; he says he didn't add any salt, as Penrod suggested, so I didn't feature salt in my copy of the recipe.

This isn’t really the sort of thing for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. It’s quite sweet, but also quite intense. I’ve found it’s good on bread, biscuits, or the like; I think it might serve well as a sort of chutney with pork chops, etc., as well.

Ingredients

• 3-4 lbs green tomatoes
• 28 oz. sugar
• the zest and juice of 1 large lemon
• 3 sticks cinnamon
• 2 inch piece of fresh ginger, minced
• 1/4 tsp allspice

Procedure

1. Rough chop the green tomatoes and ginger, just so they will fit into a food processor or blender.
2. Process or blend into a puree.
3. Pour the puree and sugar into a large pot over medium-high heat.
4. Add the lemon zest and juice, cinnamon, and allspice.
5. Bring to a low boil, and simmer steadily for 30 min to an hour. It should be thick and the flavor should be well blended.
6. Can jam in the appropriate manner.

Bird of the Week

The history of American birding has a pretty established canonical story by this point. Something you'll hear in some form or another all over: Europeans found a whole New World of birds, just as they were really developing a system for classifying living things; thus a sort of Gold Rush to find and describe new birds ensued, culminating in Audubon; Florence M. Bailey advise people to look at birds through binoculars and then Roger Tory Peterson told them what to look for when they did so, and thus modern birding was born. That's mostly true but it is simplified and like all simplified things it leaves things out. There's more little stories in burning history often if people gaining a greater understanding of how to interact with birds, or how not to. Take for instance the case of the rails, such as today's bird; the Virginia Rail.

Rails are a kind of swamp hen, related most closely to coots and galinules, but quite different in appearance. They are, generally speaking, a mottled brown with vertical stripes running over their flanks; there is a bit of a color variance, not to mention size variance, distinguishing the many species from one another. Rails are found throughout the world; seven species are found in North America. Of these most widespread is the sora but close behind is the Virginia rail, which is the only one which I have seen. I count myself lucky to have spotted one, even if it was partly obscured by reeds because rails are exceedingly shy. They do not often venture out of the reed-beds in which they live.

What they will do is make noise. That's how I found the Virginia rail; I was watching ducks from across a bed of cat tails when I heard a distinct beep-beep, beep-beep from amongst the reeds. I went looking at where the noise was coming from and saw a shadow between the shoots. Through my binoculars, I saw that it was a bird with a gray face, orange bill, and white stripes on its dark flanks. Mostly a birder's encounter with a rail begins and ends with hearing its call. Unless they climb up the reed shafts or, more rarely, dart out into the open, they are essentially impossible to see. Rails are narrow creatures, their bodies flattened like those of fish, allowing them to slip deftly between stocks without rustling and bending them as they go. Virginia rails are actually among the easier rails to spot; the yellow rail, a smaller, mainly Canadian bird of sedge marshes is infamous for never leaving the shade of tall grasses. Not for any reason save a) to travel during migration, presumably since it can't walk through reeds from Manitoba all the way to the Gulf Coast where it winters or b) to escape certain death. They won't flush when merely approached by a few people; that takes more elaborate measures.

Enter the "rail buggy". In Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, near Galveston, Texas, one could once take a ride aboard a tractor equipped with great skookum tires that would crush through the marsh, sending yellow and black rails scattering ahead, flying for their lives. Birders aboard the rail buggy could then clearly spot the rails, checking them off their life list. The rail buggy was overt animal cruelty, and was destructive to the supposedly protected wetland besides, so it was retired in the late '80s¹, but until then it had been popular. Birders thought no more of risking trampling rails under heavy tires than those who came a hundred years before had thought of shooting songbirds in order to get a close look at them.

As American birding, and birding generally, has developed, people have learned not just the what and where and which of birds, but have also come to care more for their well-being. Bailey's opera-glass method, the protection of the bald eagle, and the removal of the rail buggy are but a few episodes from this history, which is ongoing. The Anahuac remains a prime spot for seeking rails, though people now do so on foot, braving the mud and having to look a little harder but rewarded by finding birds and states other than mortal terror.²

"Rail" as a term for birds comes from the middle French "râel", which referred to the water rail of Europe.³ "Virginia" referred initially not to the state but to a much larger area claimed by Britain as their territory in North America; it was in this region that the bird was first encountered by English-speakers. The species was actually only first formally described in 1819,⁴ though it had been written of earlier by the English naturalist George Edwards (no relation) who called it the "American water rail" and said it was to be found in Pennsylvania.⁵ Virginia itself was so named after Queen Elizabeth I, sponsor of the colony in the last Tudor monarch of England, having never married and thus having never produced any birthright heirs. Whether Elizabeth was truly a lifelong virgin is disputed (and was during her lifetime), but she may well have been, either coming by her asexuality naturally or, as has been suggested, in response to abuse as a girl by her mother's second husband.

To science, the bird is Rallus limicola with the genus name being a Latinization of "rail", not a word originally found in Latin, and with the species name meaning "mud-dweller", not an untrue epithet but not one providing much distinction among rails.⁶

Curation Links

The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights | Chantel Tattoli, The Paris Review

A very brief history of the paperweight, the nominally practical item that is often made as a remarkable exercise in glassworking moreso than simply to weigh down paper, something that is becoming less-and-less important in the digital age. Their ornamentation, once unnecessary, may become their key to survival into the future.

A lifetime of love for the charismatic narwhal | Nicola Jones & Martin Nweeia, Knowable Magazine

Interview with Martin Nweeia, a dentist and top expert on narwhals, the small whales with long unicorn-esque tusks that seem hardly real. “There are so many properties of the narwhal tusk that defy every principle I ever learned in dental school. The diet of the narwhal includes some pretty large fish. This whale has the capability of producing more than a dozen teeth in its mouth, but it genetically shuts this off — says ‘No, we don’t need those teeth. Instead, what we’d rather have is this giant tusk that erupts into the ocean.’”

Fictional parasites very different from our own | Abhishaike Mahajan, Seeds of Science

[FICTION] Medical textbook accounts of parasites which thankfully do not actually exist.

See the full archive of curations on Notion