”
courtesy of ‘erin m’

My enthusiasm for the Washington Post Magazine on Sundays dropped about 15% once I no longer would find Tom Schroder’s column in the front, but the direction Howard Kurtz describes might pretty much stop me from reading it entirely. Kurtz is primarily writing about a story about Lindsay Ess of Richmond…. and that’s all I’m going to tell you about it, because it’s a great story and any elevator pitch wouldn’t do it justice.

Happily, you can just make up your own mind: Matt Mendelsohn‘s story and photos of Lindsay story ran in Sports Shooter in August, some months after WaPo chose not to run it as a cover story. Mendelsohn, in a Q&A about the piece, says simply “I was told by the publisher that advertisers wanted happier stories, not “depressing” ones.” In fairness to Weymouth, that’s at least the third stop in a game of telephone and it’s unclear how correct that summation might be.

Perfectly clear, however, is Kurtz’s direct quote from Executive Editor Marcus Brauchl:

Brauchli said that after becoming executive editor last year, he consulted with Weymouth, Post business executives and readers on what they wanted in the magazine. Based on those conversations, he concluded there were too many overly long, overly narrow stories.

Perhaps I’m not the reader WaPo is seeking, but those “overly” long and involved stories like Weingarten’s Pulitzer-winning piece, his piece that I expect to land him another one, Mendelsohn’s previous piece on wedding photography and the story on Lindsay that never made it to print are what make me pick up the mag every Sunday. I do flip through Parade, which sounds like the product they’re describing, but I do it in way less time than I have ever spent with the WaPo mag.

‘00090436’
courtesy of ‘Keith Allison’

Caps forward Tomas Fleischmann will miss the start of the regular season due to a blood clot in his leg. Team doctors believe the clot formed during his flight back to the Czech Republic at the end of last season. Caps officials have said that Fleischmann, who scored a career-high 19 goals last season, should return to regular practice in early October.

Once again, Ovie’s making headlines. At the start of camp over the weekend, the noticeably more buff Ovechkin told a crowd of reporters that the Caps would finish “[o]n top. On top of Pittsburgh, on top of everybody.”

With the additions of Mike Knuble and Brendan Morrison over the summer, the pieces are certainly falling into place. The big question still on everyone’s mind is on goaltender Jose Theodore, whom Coach Boudreau has already tapped as the starting netminder for the beginning of the season.

Watch for a full Caps preview here on WeLoveDC later this month.

‘Oh, my. Oh, my. Is *that* what they’re doing on Broadway these days?’
courtesy of ‘Ed Yourdon’

When I read this Examiner.com item about how DC’s men have the nation’s largest penises, about 8 different possible jokes I could make appeared, unbidden, in my mind. The problem is that all of them are outrageously inappropriate and offensive, even for the relatively scandalous standards of We Love DC.

So what I will tell you is this: When I sent the link to the We Love DC Authors mailing list to see if anyone wanted to write it up, the male writing staff immediately started congratulating each other.

Being married to a member* of the male staff, that’s all I will say about that.

*heh heh, she said “member.”

‘the offending photo’
courtesy of ‘nevermindtheend’

Streetsblog has the skinny on the highway projects that Senator McCain would like to kill the earmarks for, and among them is the fed money for extending the Metrorail out to Dulles Airport.

Interestingly, this is money that should probably come out of the FHA’s Highway Trust Fund‘s mass transit cash, but the HTF is having financial trouble – it’s needed cash infusions recently and last year. It’s filled by a federal tax on gasoline that’s set at a fixed rate, not a percentage of current prices. The rate hasn’t changed since 1993 (when gasoline was about $1.05) and this is the tax McCain suggested a temporary holiday from during the campaign last year.

‘Serious’
courtesy of ‘Mel B.’

Without question, the best thing in today’s Washington Post was this piece about a bit of security confusion when a House rep’s assistant wore a green Nats cap on his way back from an overseas trip.

An Israeli airport security guard pointed to the hat with the curly W team logo and demanded with a tone of disgust, “Why do you wear that?”

You wouldn’t think that the Mossad has much interest in American baseball and you’d be right. Click through for the comedy.

Kudos to Nick and Tyler Allard for their loyalty to the team, though. Not everyone’s willing to risk a cavity search out of loyalty.

‘Medication’
courtesy of ‘a.drian’

Virginia is looking to set a date to put convicted DC Sniper John Allen Muhammed to death, sometime around the middle of November. If you’re new-ish to the city, you might not remember the reign of terror that Muhammad and his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo put the city under, so go brush up on the series of events. Essentially, by shooting random people in random places in Maryland and Virginia, this town was seriously panicked for three weeks as the police tried to track Muhammad and Malvo. After three weeks, and a number of murders, they were finally caught off a tip.

9/11 didn’t scare me quite as much as these jokers did, and it’s probably about time we didn’t have to worry about Muhammad anymore. Perhaps there’s still hope for Malvo.