Monthly Archives: July 2010

The Daily Feed
By

DC Mythbusting: Air Conditioning Edition

Photo courtesy of
‘2010:103’
courtesy of ‘::FiZ::’

Yesterday, I saw a few discussions about the virtue and vice of air conditioning during a heat wave, and a popular myth emerged quickly: It is more energy conscious to shut off your air conditioner when you leave the house than it is to just adjust the thermostat up to 78-80°F. If you need air conditioning repair or tune up to get your home warm, check this Special Deals for AC Repair Services .

Something didn’t sound right to me, because the other day when I was talking to experts from The Duct Kings, they’d told me that there were enough measures to take during a heat wave that would prevent the AC from getting affected. I wrote to Pepco’s Andre Francis, their answer man in the public eye, to see if they would shed some light on the myth. Here’s what he said: Continue reading →

Entertainment, Music, We Love Music
By

The Winning Ticket: The Dead Weather

The Dead Weather
image courtesy of The Dead Weather.

As a way to say thanks to our loyal readers, We Love DC will be giving away a pair of tickets to a 9:30 Club concert to one lucky reader each week. Check back here every Wednesday morning at 9am to find out what tickets we’re giving away and leave a comment for your chance to be the lucky winner!

We are giving away tickets to another scorching hot show this week! This week’s prize: a pair of tickets to catch The Dead Weather at their sold out show at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday, July 13th.

Not that this Jack White/Alison Mosshart super-group really needs any introduction to those readers who would kill for these tix; but for those passer-bys that might want to roll the dice this week, I’ll say that The Dead Weather are a formidable foursome cranking out some of the very best and weirdest down-home, bad-mutha, rock-n-roll this side of the Mississippi. Masterminded by Jack White of The White Stripes, supported by multi-instrumentalists Dean Fertita of QOTSA and Jack Lawrence of The Greenhornes, and led by a reinvented femme-fatale, bad-ass in Alison Mosshart of The Kills; The Dead Weather have made two killer albums that offer a danger-cool sound all their own. Their sound is sweaty, bible-belt, sinning preachers; paint-peeled rocking chairs on rickety porches; sneaked belts of whiskey behind wood-sheds; Jim Thompson novel climaxes along thorny creek-beds littered with rusty Studebaker husks. In other words, their music is a dark, sexy, humid swirl of southern-tinged rock awesomeness and winning these tickets will be your passport to The Dead Weather’s night of swampy, foot-stomp, crazy.

For your chance to win these tickets simply leave a comment on this post using a valid email address between 9am and 4pm today. One entry per email address, please. If today doesn’t turn out to be your lucky day, check back here each Wednesday for a chance to win tickets to other great concerts.

For the rules of this giveaway…
Continue reading →

News, The Daily Feed
By

Grease Spill Causes U Street Havoc

Photo courtesy of
‘GREASE’
courtesy of ‘kschlot1’

According to DDOT, a grease spill has closed U Street NW from 9th to 16th, and 14th Street NW from T to V, as the road is currently unsafe. The grease makes the whole roadbed slippery like you would not believe. The grease may have come from a trash hauler, according to DDOT’s twitter account. The city is putting out sand for the moment, but will also have to clean the street before it can be reopened. Avoid the area by car.

Sports Fix, The Daily Feed
By

Nats Pick Up Ninth Inning Victory Over the Padres

Adam Dunn tags out a Padre
Photo by Cheryl Nichols / Nats News Network

By all the stats, the Padres are a far superior team to the Nationals, with a 13-game advantage on their record, superb starting pitching and an active offense.  Tonight, they were no match for the Washington Nationals and the record-setting heat at Nationals Park.  While that heat may usually come in the guise of Stephen Strasburg’s brutal fastball, tonight it came in the game time conditions.  The 99°F temperature at game time was the hottest game in the franchise’s post-move history, and it was significantly warmer before the game.

Continue reading →

Talkin' Transit, The Daily Feed, WMATA, WTF?!
By

Heat Kinks on Metro to Slow Evening Commute

Photo courtesy of
‘yup, it’s hot out’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

It sucks out there. It’s fit for neither man nor beast, and your evening commute is going to suck. Now, Metro has come out and said that it’s going to suck a bit more. There are some heat kinks in the rails, which Metro explains as: “Heat kinks form when overheated tracks expand and cannot be constrained by the cross ties and ballast support the track.”

The heat kink that we know about so far is on the Red Line between the New York Avenue & Rhode Island Avenue stations and is slowing trains between the two stations in an attempt to avoid calamity. Please expect the Red Line to suck more than usual, and I wouldn’t bet on any comfort on those trains at all. If you can, folks, a little extra deodorant wouldn’t kill you under these conditions.

Entertainment, Music, The Daily Feed
By

Rachel Levitin Live at Mid City Caffe


Photo by Shea Mulcahy

When I’m not covering Nats baseball or wandering about the District looking for a stellar concert to catch, I’m playing music.

Some of you might have noticed I played the Columbia Heights Community Market this past weekend. I do understand that the holiday weekend left most of you unable to attend and while I would’ve loved to catch up with any and all of our faithful We Love DC readers, I forgive you for retreating to various beaches or scouring town for fun Fourth festivities.

Luckily, there is another opportunity tonight for a meet up and gab session.

I’ll be performing live from Mid City Caffe at 7 p.m. this evening. Never been to Mid City? No problem. It’s near the U Street Metro and is located at 1626 14th Street NW.

This will be the second show in my current cause to raise organ donation awareness around the greater DMV area. Two of my albums including the new compilation album  “The Bourbon Taster EP” and my my 2005 debut album “Come As You Are” will be on sale with proceeds being donating to the National Kidney Foundation and Donate Life campaign.

The show is free, donations are encouraged if you feel like getting involved in a good cause, and otherwise the set list will make for quite the intimate evening.

Hope to see you there!

The Daily Feed
By

DCRA Launches One-Stop Shop for Property Info

Screen shot 2010-07-06 at 2.46.26 PM.jpg

DCRA, the city’s regulatory information agency, today launched a one-stop shop for permit verification, property ownership information and a bunch of other cool tools to find out about what the city thinks about where you live.  Want to make sure your landlord has a legit certificate of occupancy for your basement rental?  You can check that.  Want to make sure the house you’re buying has permits for the construction?  You can check that.

Give it a spin on your place, see what comes up! You can even check out the 2004 photo, which might be revealing for those of you with newer places. PIVS is part of the new DCRA website that launched in the new DC.gov templates today.

Business and Money, Essential DC, Food and Drink, Life in the Capital, News, The Daily Feed
By

Georgetown? More Like IceCreamtown.

Photo courtesy of
‘Thirty #115’
courtesy of ‘Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie’

With today’s opening of Georgetown Scoops, the NW neighborhood officially became IceCreamtown with 8 ice cream/froyo shops located all within a .5 mile radius of each other. The question now becomes when can you have too much ice cream? My answer today would be absolutely never.

Fashionable DC, Life in the Capital, The Features
By

The Devil Wore Hose

Photo courtesy of
”
courtesy of ‘erin m’

It’s oppressively hot this week. A scorcher. Another record-breaker in a year unfavorably full of cruel weather. Some of you will be able to go about your work day in “summer business casual,” but for others, you’ll soldier on in full battle gear. And for many women in our unfairly unfashionably maligned city, that means pantyhose.

Ugh. Really?

Though sales of pantyhose have been on the decline since the mid-nineties, there are still offices that require them for women’s dress year-round. The excuse normally given for such a dress code is that they give the wearer a “polished, professional look.”  As they are more precisely termed actual underwear, I find it a bit vulgar to be told by anyone other than my mother that I should be wearing pantyhose. Wear hose when the garment requires it – something form-fitting and unlined, for example – but with a knee-length lined skirt? If one is well-groomed there should be no need.

And in disgusting 100-degree weather, there is no need to wear pantyhose other than to cover what is bare – which implies that it’s wrong to bare your legs in an office. Why? I’m by no means a radical feminist, but I can’t stand rules with no discernible logic, and especially not rules that are based on perceptions rather than facts. After all, it’s not so long ago that business women in this city were told never to wear pantsuits, only suits with skirts. What was the logic there?

Let’s step back for some history, a fun fashion tangent on clothing codes, before we shred more hose. For example, high heels. Did you know high heels started out as a male fashion necessity?  Continue reading →

Music, We Love Music
By

Delta Spirit loves DC, and DC loves them back

Photo courtesy of
‘A Little Bit Softer Now’
courtesy of ‘Karon’

As far as I can tell, there’s a guy at every concert, ever, who takes it upon himself to yell “Freebird.” That Guy is always there, trying for a chuckle, being ignored, hoping, just hoping, that the band will hear his plea. That Guy, like everyone else who saw Delta Spirit at the 9:30 Club on Saturday night, had the time of his life this weekend. Because Delta Spirit’s just that kind of band: Americana rock shot straight through the decades that reminds your soul what fun is supposed to feel like. You want “Freebird?” Yeah, sure, they’ll give you “Freebird.” Because it’s fun, and that’s what their show is all about.

I got handed a copy of Delta Spirit’s last album, “Ode to Sunshine,” in 2008 (put ’em on my Top 5 that year, too). The music-obsessed friend who passed it along is probably personally responsible for a few dozen of the fans at Saturday’s show: each of us spread the word (over)enthusiastically to another few people, and I like to imagine the fandom spread across the city from person to person, like the flu in winter, only better. I tell you this by way of explaining that yes, I am a huge fan, and no, this is not an unbiased review of Saturday’s show. Based on the limited sample of fans-who-also-tweet, I am not alone in having put this one high on the list of best shows ever. (Karon Flage, whose photos you see illustrating this post, took my extra ticket on a whim never having heard of the band, and she left a convert, too.)

Continue reading →

The Daily Feed
By

Road Closures in Arlington for Sen. Byrd Funeral Processio

Photo courtesy of
‘goodbye to the Hill’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

If you’re planning to be driving through Arlington today around noon, you will want to check the road closures as there will be rolling blockades as the procession goes from around 3500 North Glebe Road to Arlington cemetery via Route 50.

The Senator, who died last week, is to be laid to rest early this afternoon with full honors.

All Politics is Local, The Daily Feed
By

Vince Gray meets with DC bloggers

Photo courtesy of
Photo by Dave Stroup, We Love DC

On Monday, DC Council Chair and candidate for mayor Vincent Gray sat down with DC bloggers at Ben’s Chili Bowl. For nearly ninety minutes, Gray answered questions posed by bloggers from DCist, We Love DC, Greater Greater Washington, Borderstan and the District Curmudgeon. The event was part of the Gray campaign’s effort to tap into new media, and it provided a chance to talk about topics including education, crime, poverty and transportation.

This was my first chance to meet with Gray, who is challenging the incumbent Mayor Adrian Fenty for the Democratic nomination for mayor. The meeting was interesting, and shed some light into Gray’s attitude towards DC government, as well as his campaign style.

Gray is an experienced politician and also a bit of a policy wonk. The first impression you get is that he knows what is going on, and that he doesn’t always need to fall back on talking points. It is obvious that Gray is running a campaign aimed directly at people who have felt left behind by Fenty. Gray stresses that he is a uniter, and that he wants to be the mayor of “all of the people, not just some of the people.” He aims to bridge the divide between rich and poor, Northwest and Southeast. He feels too many people have been left behind, and that too many people don’t feel invested in the city. Continue reading →

News, The Daily Feed
By

Electrical Fires on H Street, Penn Ave Plague Capitol Hill

Photo courtesy of


‘Eastern Market Manhole’
courtesy of ‘Kevin H.’

Two big electrical outages in DC plague the Capitol Hill neighborhood this morning.  An electrical fire in underground conduit at 12th and H Street NE, and a generator fire at 7th & Penn Ave SE, have put two commercial strips in Capitol Hill in a bit of trouble this morning.  

DC Fire & EMS responded with a Foam/Hazmat truck to 12th & H last night around 11pm as the underground electric conduits had caught fire.  While they were able to, with Pepco’s help, put out the fire there quickly, the damage was done, and much of that area is without power. If you’ve got plans for Granville Moore’s, Sticky Rice or The Black and The Red later, you may want to call in ahead and make sure they’ve gotten power back.

In addition, a generator at 650 Penn Ave SE overheated, and that means that corner of businesses, from Peregrine Espresso, around to at least the Yes! Organic Market are out currently out commission. Peregrine announced that they are closing until Pepco restores power.
Now, they’re contacting one of the best panel upgrade services to help them get their power back up.

News, The Daily Feed
By

Scorching Heat, Take Precautions

Photo courtesy of
‘By the light of 100 suns’
courtesy of ‘euphro’

The next two days, we’re in for some absolutely scorching heat. Capital Weather Gang is forecasting that we’ll hit 100 for Tuesday and Wednesday, and that relief, should it come, will mean low 90s again. In this sort of baking weather, please do try to look in on elderly or disabled people in your neighborhood.  Cooling Centers will be open from noon to six today and tomorrow, at One Judiciary Square, the Reeves Center, the King Office Building and 920 Rhode Island Ave NE to help those who are without any climate control.

The humidity will also play a factor in your discomfort on Wednesday, as the front begins to break. Today should be just awful, while tomorrow will be super extra extreme awful. Expect heat index values up near 110. While today’s 101°F forecast will not break the 103°F record set in 1999, tomorrow’s 100°F forecast will likely eclipse the 1991 record of 99°F.

Please take steps to make sure that you’re getting enough water today. If you’re looking for some exercise, take a swim, DC’s pools are free to all residents! Limit outdoor work during the heat wave, I promise the lawn can wait until Thursday or Friday when things will be a bit cooler. Look for storms by the weekend.

Business and Money, The Daily Feed
By

Will DC Save Money, Live Better With Wal-Mart?

Photo courtesy of
‘Welcome to Wal-Mart – We have blue light special’
courtesy of ‘kowitz’

I didn’t think I’d see the day that Wal-Mart would move into The District; but then again I never thought Costco would move into New York City or that Target would inhabit Columbia Heights.

The ongoing effort for the retail giant/labor union foe to build a location within Washington, DC may have come to a head this week. After announcing a deal to build a 2nd store in Chicago, the Washington Post is reporting that Wal-Mart is now close to finalizing a deal open a store in Northeast DC.

Anonymous sources within Wal-Mart told The Post that a deal should be in place by this fall to open a store on New York Avenue NE near the intersection of Bladensburg Road. The proposed site is 11 acres wide and wouldn’t need any zoning changes, a problem that came up for previous sites Wal-Mart has checked out. With a reputation like Wal-Mart’s, the corporation is looking for a location that would require the least amount of hassling. Right now the proposed piece of land is home to various auto parts shops and the Skylark Lounge, a strip club.

I wonder which would be more despised: a strip club or a Wal-Mart?

Continue reading →

The Daily Feed
By

Thank You, Engine 17

Engine 17, DC Fire/EMS

The sound of my neighbor beating a pot with a spoon woke us about 4:30 this morning.  Getting up to see, there was a low haze in the air, and an odd smell.  Donald was dragging his hose into the alley behind our place and spraying against the fenceline behind the house on the far side of the alley.  I opened the window and asked if he needed a second hose, and he shouted, “Yes!”

I threw on some pants and went out to spray down the woodpile, while Jackie called for the fire department.  We couldn’t have been spraying more than 5 minutes when Engine 17 came down the street to assist.  They dug through the woodpile and sprayed down the whole area and got the last of the embers out.

This is a quick reminder: launched fireworks are dangerous things, trebly so in this dry heat, as they have a tendency to ignite everything around them.  Keep it to the legal sort that don’t fly.  Keep a fire extinguisher nearby.

The Daily Feed
By

Stammen Struggles Early, Nats Try To Rally, Fall To The Mets


Photo by Ian Koski/Nationals Daily News

“A lot of good things happened in that game [today],” according to Nationals Manager Jim Riggleman, but the team still came up short with a 9-5 loss to the New York Mets in the Nation’s capital on Independence Day.

While Riggleman isn’t completely off base by saying the team had some positive moments (they did), there was still a dark cloud hovering over the Nats for the first 3.1 innings pitched. Starter Craig Stammen struggled to find control over his pitches and dug the Nats into a deep hole early in the game. Continue reading →

Entertainment, The Daily Feed
By

We Love DC Does Top Chef DC: Episode 3

Photo courtesy of
‘Ribs009’
courtesy of ‘photopete’

When we last found our culinary heroes they were faced with challenges that would strike fear into any Top Chef contestant: Dessert & Grilling. Desserts spell death to a Top Chef contestant but I’m surprised that so many of the contestants were hesitant over grilling.

I know guys who can’t cook but are able to roast a steak or burger over an open flame. I agree with Tom’s take on the episode that perhaps these contestants are great Chefs- but not necessarily good cooks.

I’m afraid that the days maybe numbered for DC’s local favorite Timothy Dean. He’s been in the bottom four twice and I wonder how long his status as “the local” will keep him from packing up his knives?

Continue reading →