Somehow, even though it’s still nice and warm outside, I’m starting to get the cravings that hit me every autumn. Thick, rich, bittersweet hot chocolate. This delicious combination cures all ills.

Last March I went with a bunch of girlfriends to Venice, a city renowned for its cioccolata calda, and we had the elixir every freezing day (and yet somehow managed to lose weight. Hmm… maybe Italian women don’t get fat either).

So I went out in search of this chocolate holy grail. A little mid-afternoon pick-me-up.

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Some choice quotes from Mayor Williams’ Blog:

Sept 12: “My faith is rewarded. There is a merciful God. I sat in for my monthly Ask the Mayor with WTOP and my friend Mark Plotkin was on vacation. Think of the kind of serene bliss they project on the Corona commercials and you know the feeling.”

Man, I know Plotkin asks hard questions, Mr. Mayor, but man, that’s pretty hardcore.

Sept 10: “I support additional capital funding for the schools recognizing that the remaining need, even after implementation of public-private partnerships and collocation with charters, will still be in excess of existing increases.

The question is how? Taking the dollars from the lottery to fund the increase isn’t the way to do it. Hello? This is the creative accounting that got Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, California, and yes, the District in the mess we faced, bottoming out in 1995.”

Lottery funds, bad, charter schools, good. Okay, Tony…but how do we pay for it? Hey, aren’t you the mayor? Shouldn’t you tell us?

Sept 7: “Speaking of books, I’m thumbing through the book reviews and I’ve come upon a book I really want to read – Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind? by Michael Eric Dyson. I’m assigning this to fellow bloggers and we’ll have a discussion of it.

Okay, deal. DC Bloggers, this is your chance to be part of Tony Williams’ Book Club. You can pick it up at Barnes and Noble or Amazon, or any other retailer in the greater DC area. We’ll read it together, Tony, sound good?

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In a move that only Coach Gibbs could make, Pat Ramsey’s riding the pine for the forseeable future. Ramsey has apparently now asked for a trade, but no one can reach him nor Gibbs to get the final scoop. Ah, the drama, the sweet sweet controversy, of a new football season in DC. Sure, we love of our football here, but we love it with the same back-stabbing fervor that we reserve for the train-wreck that is American politics: full of twists and turns, scandal and embarrassment, all manner of DC-isms crammed into 4 quarters a Sunday and the stalkerific week between them.

Of course, this week it’s bigger than ever, as the ‘Skins go up against their mortal enemy, The Dallas Cowboys. Watch this one folks, it’s way better than any reality tv show.

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I love to cook, but every time I’m faced with having to attack an onion, I freeze.

How the hell do you do it without collapsing into a blubbering pile of red-faced sneezy goo?
(Appetizing, I know…)
Not to mention the delicious yet messy mango, the prickly pineapple, or the wily chicken.

So, armed with a gift certificate to L’Academie de Cuisine, I set out to conquer the mysteries of kitchen knives Saturday afternoon.

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Three suits. Very, uh, milquetoast, shall we say. Cell phones out, binders in hand. Loitering on my block, 11th Street side. Scoping out buildings, taking notes, making calls. Looking down my alley.

Developers? Hmm. It’s disconcerting. My block is all residential, Victorians and little Federals. However, some company just demolished a similar row one block away… I wonder what’s up.

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Do you miss those fun flip cup competitions of college days past? How about post-kickball drink-a-thons? Maybe even a night spent flip cupping grandma?

What about beer pong? Are you so good you can sink balls at 20 paces with one bounce off the floor? Or do you just drink the pong-water as you loose to an Olympian?

Either way, and for both sports, you can go pro now. Dr. Dremo’s, the Arlington institution, is hosting Beer pong and Flip cup tournaments on their patio this year, and it would be a great place for a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser tournament amongst 50-100 of your closest friends.

Just be sure to get there fast, Dr. Dremo may not be here in 2006.

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Euan Blair, son of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is about to start a 6-month internship on the Hill, having just finished a degree in ancient history.

In order to avoid making political difficulties for dear old Dad, Euan will be spending three months with a Republican and three months with a Democrat.

A word of advice to our visitor- you can engage in all manner of scandalous behavior with the other interns, but don’t get involved with the Congresscritters or their senior staff. You don’t know where they’ve been.

And you’re welcome to guest-blog for us, as well…

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I did my football watching at my good friend Mike’s place today over in Falls Church, braving Sunday traffic for some incredible Italian Store sub sandwiches (any football watcher’s dream) and some Yuengling beer and some classic American Sunday activities. After the Steelers were done pasting the hapless Titans, I figured I would watch the ensuing shellacking of the 49ers from the comfort of my own couch, so I hopped in the car and headed back from Falls Church on Route 7. Then, as I headed Eastbound, approaching Patrick Henry Drive, I saw it happen. Metrobus Number 2013 (a 4B bus) swerved out of the turn lane it was in at 4:35pm, around the two cars in the turn lane ahead of it and parked itself blocking the turn lane and left eastbound lane of Route 7 in heavy Sunday traffic. I guess the driver decided that the two cars ahead of it just weren’t important enough to wait for. While I applaud dedication to schedule, I don’t think it’s more important than, you know, traffic laws.

Thanks WMATA for putting crazies in the driver’s seat of a multiple ton bus.

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I’ll ask you to bear with me for a second, by employment, I’m a technologist. That’s why, when I read stuff like this piece on the DC Schools CIO, I get really angry about government. The basics:

The DC Schools got a new system call DC STARS over the summer. It’s not working. At all. What’s more galling:

“In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,” Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system’s chief business operations officer.

I’m sorry, CIO Barlow, Unix isn’t hardware. It’s SOFTWARE. It’s the most solid operating system in the world. You’re a Chief Information Officer, this is stuff you should know. Besides, what happened to the testing phase of the software development? Why didn’t you, as CIO, you know, TEST this heavily? And besides, this is clearly just “cover your ass” maneuvering by someone who deserves to be fired. But, apparently, this being Washington, we just don’t do that anymore.

Pity.

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I sat in the lobby of the Los Angeles Marriott watching the disaster unfold in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. The next night, I began a 3000 mile journey in a world without air travel. We left Los Angeles on the train under cover of darkness bound for the Crescent City. Over the next three days, I met people from all over the nation. Those are the people I think of today. The man and his wife, the Pearsons, from South Carolina who asked if they could call their son on my phone. Bill, the geneaologist from Metairie coming back from Texas. The girl from the art institute, Sarah, who drew portraits of all of us. The staffing agent from Baltimore, Jim and the Art Professor Emeritus from NYU, Peter, that shared the car from New Orleans to Washington.

We drove into Washington on a perfect autumnal sunday morning almost a week later, watching the flags ripple from the Capitol, from the Senate office buildings. We knew we were going to be just fine.

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DSC_0130.jpg

Originally uploaded by rev_bri.

When I read Darpino’s entry yesterday on Apple-sauce wrestling, I was amazed, surprised and a bit dumbfounded. Girls. Wrestling in Apple-sauce. In our fair city. I just didn’t know what to say except perhaps “And it’s only $10 to watch!? Sweet!”

Well, I didn’t go, I ended up going to watch part of the Nats horrific loss at the hands of the Marlins, but DC photographer and flickr user rev_bri was there and got some good (some not worksafe..) photos from the event, including this beaut.

Somehow, I think he had more fun than I did.

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Well, the period between surcharges is over. The $1 surcharge that ended on the 4th may be gone, but now we’ve got a $1.50 surcharge per ride. The surcharge lasts 120 days, or, until January 7th, 2006. Yet another reason to take Metro, or walk. Cabs here just aren’t worth riding in, unless you’re totally hammered.

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I spent this morning in the lovely new GWU Hospital. Gleaming floors, expansive windows, huge Grecian urns and plasma TVs – wow. They really went all out, didn’t they? A far cry from the last time I was there, blood pouring out of a gash in my husband’s eyebrow, the result of his inadvertently walking into a steel staircase at Club Insomnia. That old emergency room was a real pit.

I was there for a CT Scan of my sinuses, a follow-up to my recent allergy testing. Now, I’m seriously claustrophobic. I’ll get off a too-crowded metro train and I cringe fighting through crowded platforms. I have nightmares about tunnels and being buried alive. No joke. So I was fearing this procedure, thinking it would be the one where you have to lie inside a coffin-shaped machine for forty minutes.

But when I entered the room, I saw just a rather silly-looking machine with what looked like a large donut on top. “Piece of cake,” I thought. Until I lie down with my neck immobilized at a weird angle, and then the donut flips over and rotates around until its edge is at my throat like a guillotine blade and all I can see is a whirling thing inside and the bench I’m lying on starts jerking closer and closer until my head is pinioned underneath what is now the Evil Donut Machine from Hell.

But hey, nice improvement to the facilities. I just need a drink now, and it isn’t even noon yet!

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This evening, on the way home from that godawful “effort” the Nats put forth against the Marlins, we came home a different way than usual. Driving along L St., we came to the intersection at 14th, where we wanted to turn right to go back down to 395 and home to Virginia (I know, I know, we’re suburban dwelling cretins with no city driving experience, if you want to toe that line, toe it elsewhere.), however, there’s a sign there that reads “No Right Turn 9pm-5am.”

We saw the same sign at 14th and K (we turned right anyway), and were similarly bewildered. During rush hour, I might be willing to let these signs slide as the product of a civil engineering board, designed to make traffic flow more smoothly, but I can’t come up with a pressing reason that a right turn, in a business district largely unpopulated after dark, would be hazardous to traffic. Can someone explain this to me?

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Oh you knew it was gonna happen, and in DC it doesn’t take long. Yep, there is already a Katrina-related protest:

Black Voices for Peace & The National Black Environmental Justice Network Co-Sponsoring:

MISMANAGEMENT OF HURRICANE KATRINA PROTEST
FRIDAY, SEPT. 9, 12-2:30PM, LAFAYETTE PARK

Join Black Voices for Peace and The National Black Environmental Justice Network as we demand accountability from the State and Federal Goverment and the Bush Administration and to protest the mistreatment of hurricane Katrina victims.
For more details call (202) 265-4919

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Not only did the Nats indeed provide tickets to Katrina evacuees (hat tip to Darpino and the news guy on the radio this morning), they also had an evacuee throw out the first pitch. Class. Thanks, Nats.

Meanwhile, evacuees are trying to get themselves back on their feet by looking for work. Spread the word to your HR departments, that the Department of Homeland Security is suspending I-9 enforcement (for affected workers ONLY) for 45 days to give displaced workers time to get their employment authorization paperwork in order. In practice, this means that anyone who escaped with a photo ID in their wallet showing their residence in a hurricane-affected area can legally be employed while they try to recover things like passports, birth certificates, and Social Security cards.

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Let’s see what today’s word of the day is. Ah! It’s Gouging!

Yeah, that’s right oil companies, we’re looking right in your direction. Gas prices in DC are now at $3.38 and not moving anywhere. After watching gas prices hike themselves up a good fifty cents last week, now we’ve seen some adjustments over the last few days, but we’re still above every other metropolitan, with the exception of New York City. Folks, this is just getting ri-goddamn-diculous.

Of course, if we’d done anything to increase our refining capacity since, oh, I dunno, before I born, perhaps this wouldn’t have become quite the fiasco that it’s turned into, but since we’re so short on refining capacity, losing even one refinery will cause gas supplies to dry up and spike the prices through the roof. Of course, most likely, the oil companies just don’t give a shit, and so the prices go up and more people think about mass transit and hybrid cars and even Wayan’s broke-ass bicycle. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the informal definition, per the Apple Dictionary that’s in OS X Tiger:

Thanks oil companies!

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I’m planning a trip to San Francisco for Webzine 2005 later this month, and as a good central valley kid, I’m going home to see my parents first. JetBlue had dirt cheap tickets ($200 roundtrip!!) from Dulles to Sacramento, and I can crash with my folks in Davis for a day before heading into the city. Not looking to sit in traffic, I took a look at the Amtrak Capitol Corridor between San Jose and Sacramento. Sure enough, I can get a roundtrip train ticket (and bus transfer into the city) for two people, for $68 between Davis and San Francisco’s Ferry Building. What’s the equivalent here? Well, there isn’t one. One way Metroliner service to Baltimore is $42. per person. For a roundtrip, you’re looking at $168, for two people, or, $100 more.

What gives, Amtrak?

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DCist is celebrating their first birthday today, but will be having the party next thursday at Stetson’s. No word on if they’ll have Cake yet, but there do appear to be drink specials on the outing. Congrats on a year’s worth of DCist, Rob and Mike, we know just how tricky that gets at times!

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Chief Justice Rehnquist’s funeral will be this afternoon at the Cathedral of St. Matthew in Northwest, and there are going to be a number of street closures and no parking areas along Connecticut Ave and M Street this afternoon. Thankfully the Post has made a map. He’ll be buried in Arlington National Cemetary, so I imagine there will be a funerary procession through downtown this afternoon as well. Please stop and pay your respects, this is one motorcade worth waiting for.

Godspeed, Justice.

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