Yes, that’s a 6′8 statue of Abraham Lincoln carved out of mild cheddar on Constitution in front of the American Pharmacists Association building. You are not hallucinating.

For each of the past three years, CHEEZ-IT has sponsored a massive cheese carving of some patriotic theme in honor of Independence Day. Cheese sculptor Troy Landwehr has been their go-to-cheesehead, creating a Mount Rushmore and a Signing of the Declaration of Independence in the last two years. The choice to carve Lincoln in pasteurized dairy product is to honor the 14th president’s bicentennial year.

The sculpture took about 40 hours in a near-freezing room to complete, says Landwehr. It started as a 1000-pound round, and the completed sculpture weighs about 700 pounds. Landwehr prefers to work in mild cheddar over other cheeses because it has the right texture and consistency for carving. Even sharp cheddar is too crumbly. (I swear to God I’m not making this up.)

CHEEZ-IT staff assisted passerby with taking photos with Cheese Lincoln, and passed out single-serving bags of CHEEZ-ITs. Unfortunately, American Pharmacists Association staff did NOT pass out leaflets on cholesterol management.

View even more photos of Cheese Lincoln on Flickr.

We have had a great many questions about where we got these awesome heart/DC flag t-shirts that we wore to the party last night, did we have them made custom, where can other people get them, etc.

Ask, and you shall receive: We got these fine garments from DC artist Lara’s Etsy shop. As you can see, they are available in a variety of color combinations. She has a few other DC-themed designs in her shop as well, so be sure to poke around.

I know you’re all coming to the We Love DC 1st Anniversary Party tonight, but once that’s over, you’ll need some other entertainment to distract you from humidity, hordes of tourists, Metro problems, dognappers, and all the other stuff that goes along with the height of summer in DC. So here’s what’s happening in comedy:

Erin Jackson is headlining the Improv Thursday and Friday this week. Jackson is a particular success story for DC Comedy, as she took the first-ever DC Improv Comedy School standup class, and went on to appear on Last Comic Standing, and now she’s returning to the Improv as a headliner.

Last week I mentioned 3 Chord Comedy at the Velvet Lounge on Friday, July 10th. I still think you should check that out, as it’s a pretty outstanding lineup for a mere $2.

On Saturday, July 11th (and several dates thereafter), SpeakeasyDC will be putting on The Sin Show as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. The performers will tell stories themed around the seven deadly sins. Speakeasy specializes in storytelling rather than standup, but this show in particular caught my eye as it features Seaton Smith, who is certainly one of the most artistically versatile comics in the area. You can hear a sample of his (still very funny) storytelling stylings in SpeakeasyDC’s StoryCast.

This is Molly. She’s a 4 year old Vizla who was tied up outside the P Street Whole Foods last night around 6:00 PM for a few minutes. When her person came back out to pick her up, Molly was gone, apparently stolen by someone with NO CONSCIENCE AT ALL. Seriously, who steals a dog?

Molly is about 60 pounds, with reddish-brown fur, and is friendly and will respond to her name. If you have any info about her disappearance, please contact Tyler and Laurel at findmollydog@gmail.com. There’s a reward for her safe return.

(contact information updated at dog owners’ request, and because some people just HAVE to be jackasses to pet owners)

Bread for the City is working on “filling the food gap” from when their food pantry went way over budget in May. When a food pantry goes over budget, it’s because there’s a greater need in the community for food assistance, and because donations may not be coming as freely. Food pantries get pinched from both sides in a recession. Every little bit helps, so if you can, send them some money today, and don’t forget to join us at our first anniversary party next week, where we’ll be accepting cash donations for Bread for the City at the door.

Continuing in our proud tradition of blogging about amusing license plates, I present this one, found by Friend-of-We-Love-DC Mike Hill. There are so many possible applications of this:

ZOMG! That jackass just cut me off!

ZOMG! I just spilled my coffee in my lap!

ZOMG! I missed my exit!

Okay, so this photo is from a previous year’s Folklife Festival, but give me a break: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival starts tomorrow! YAY!  I get sort of ridiculously excited about this, since visiting the Festival generally involves beating sun, ridiculous humidity, and not nearly enough bottled water… but it also involves music and dancing and craft demonstrations and pretty much every awesome thing I can think of about having a cultural treasure like the Smithsonian in our back yard.

This year’s themes are Giving Voice: The Power of Words in African-American Culture, Las Americas, and Wales. So there promises to be lots of good spoken word performance as well.

The festival opens tomorrow, June 24th, and will continue through June 28th, then pausing and picking up again July 1st-5th.

Here at We Love DC, we are on the record as being big fans of cute baby animals. Oh yes, there is no National Zoo press release with photos that we will not ooh and aah over if it contains exotic baby critters. 

So with that in mind, I present this representative photo of recently-posted Flickr photos of the clouded leopard cubs, now 12 whole weeks old.  And I would just like to say:

I WANT TO RUB HIS BELLEH.

So by now, your Community Supported Agriculture share has started generating produce. And if you planted spring crops in your garden, you might be harvesting some food. (Unless you’re mrmoonpie, who was WAY AHEAD of all of us, because he is too cool.) And the farmers’ markets are starting to fill out with actual farm produce, rather than jars of last year’s preserved produce.

If you’ve jumped as enthusiastically into the fresh-and-local food as we have in the Bridge house, this probably means that you’re shoving stuff into your fridge when you don’t quite know what to do with it.   So far we’ve gotten an enormous bunch of kale, a large bunch of spinach, more asparagus than we know what to do with, and strawberries coming out of our ears, plus a couple of bunches of spring onions, and that’s JUST from the CSA.  Here are some tips on how to enjoy what’s in season in these couple of weeks now, as well as preserving it for later. Post your suggestions in the comments, or let us know what else you’ve got that you don’t know what to do with.

Kale is a great excuse to eat bacon. I know, bacon needs no excuse, but if you’ve been dialing back on the bacon consumption for health reasons, kale is a good reason to stick a few slices into your diet this week. The vitamins in dark, leafy greens like kale and spinach are most accessible to your body when consumed with a little fat, which is why kale and bacon are such traditional partners. If you don’t eat bacon, don’t worry- butter or olive oil will also do just fine.

Cut the stems out of your kale and blanch it for a couple of minutes in boiling, salted water, and then rinse it thoroughly in cold water. This takes some of the bitterness out.  Then, fry up a couple of slices of bacon (just a couple), and cook your kale in the drippings. If you’ve got spinach, you can add it after the kale has started to cook down a bit- this is a great way to stretch spinach, since it has this annoying tendency to cook down to NOTHING.

If you’ve got too much kale to enjoy all at once this way, after you blanch it and cool it, you can squeeze out as much water as possible, and freeze it (get as much air out of the freezer bag as possible to prevent freezer burn. You can thaw it out and cook it later, or throw it in a soup over the winter.

Asparagus is extremely flexible. You can grill it, roast it, saute it, or blanch it and eat it with vinaigrette. My personal favorite thing to do with asparagus is a trick from Mark Bittman: blanch the asparagus, cool it, and then toss it with some arugula or baby spinach in olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. Line up some prosciutto slices on your work surface so that they overlap into a sheet, and then roll it up around some of the asparagus and greens. Slice it into bite-size pieces. Seriously, go watch the video, it’s easier than it sounds. You can even blanch the asparagus in advance- put it in an airtight container and it’ll keep for several days.

To preserve asparagus, you can pickle it or can it, but easiest is probably just to freeze it- blanch it, wrap it tightly in plastic, and stick it in your freezer. It’ll last a couple of months this way.

Wasting strawberries is a moral failing. Strawberry season lasts what, 3 weeks? And once you’ve had a perfectly ripe strawberry, picked right off the vine when it’s red, the ones you find at the grocery store are never the same. So even if you come home with too many of them, find a way to eat them all. Consuming them fresh is easy- plain, with sugar, with whipped cream, on ice cream, in lemonade, etc.

Preserving them is a little trickier, but it can be done. To properly freeze a whole berry, you need dry ice, since it will freeze them fast enough that ice crystals don’t damage the structure of the flesh. That’s a giant hassle. So I suggest preparing them in ways where the cellular structure doesn’t matter. Cut them up, sprinkle them with sugar, let them macerate (get soft and yield juice) for a while, and then put the whole bit into a freezer-safe container until February, when what you want is something that reminds you of warm weather. Defrost the sauce and eat it on ice cream. Instant cure for the winter blues. You can also use this in smoothies. Homemade ice cream is also a good choice, and the Post’s foodblogger Kim O’Donnel posted a recipe for strawberry frozen yogurt that’s more like sorbet, if you want to avoid the caloric value of ice cream. And I haven’t even gotten into canning yet, mostly because strawberries don’t last long enough in our house for me to experiment with canning them soaked in booze.

Velvet Lounge, July 10

Okay, so first I have to get this Dylan-with-an-arrow-through-his-head thing out of the way. There’s this show at the Velvet Lounge on July 10th. It’s called 3 Chord Comedy, and it is, as the image above implies, comedy in a venue that generally focuses on music. It starts at 7PM, and the cover is a mere $2. Remember all those videos I showed you a couple of weeks ago? You can see several of those comics live at this event- Jake Young, Hampton Yount, and Seaton Smith. I promise, Jake has more than 42 seconds of material, no matter what his clip implies.  Also appearing will be Eli Sairs, Aparna Nancherla, and Justin Schlegel, whose only clips on YouTube seem to be a voiceover about horse genitalia and an interview for some Toyota advertising campaign. So you know, call that one an adventure and check out the clips from the other comics, all of whom are regularly performing professionally around the area. You should go, because  July 10th is a Friday, it’s on U Street, and it’s only $2, which is about as cheap as planned showcase gets.

Meanwhile, THIS Friday, Tig Notaro will be headlining at the Arlington Drafthouse, and Tyler Sonnichsen will be opening. That’s a well-matched lineup; Notaro does really laid back material that requires the audience to pay attention, and Tyler’s stuff is pretty cerebral, so that show should fit together really well.

In the meantime, since it’s summer reruns season, I recommend that you enjoy Seaton Smith’s new web series, Annoy Charlie Smith, Inc. It’s full of suspense, twists, and no actual danger. I guarantee the DC geography is better than in 24.

For those of you who are into political metaphors turning not-so-metaphorical, Congress will be playing its annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park. Tickets are $10 and ticket proceeds benefit the Washington Literacy Council and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. The Republicans are defending their title, and the Democrats will be trying to take ONE MORE THING from them (seriously guys, the White House, Congress, and upcoming SCOTUS nominations aren’t enough? You have to kick a party when it’s down?).

Hey, at least THIS bad DC baseball benefits charity.

The DC Board of Elections & Ethics has rejected the proposed referendum on whether or not DC can recognize gay marriage as a violation of DC’s Human Rights Act. Furthermore, the City Paper reports, the board’s order rejecting the referendum specifically points out that it was Marion Barry’s amendments to the referendum regulations way back in 1978 that forbid referendums and ballot initiatives from being used to interfere with civil and human rights. Marion Barry, who is against gay marriage because he is “a politician who is moral.”

Go read the whole order.

Friend-of-We-Love-DC Ketzirah Carly will be saying Kaddish for Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard killed in yesterday’s shooting, in front of the Holocaust Museum tomorrow evening. You can learn more about it on her blog, and let her know if you’ll be joining her. Even if you’re not Jewish and don’t know the Kaddish, I’m sure you’ll be welcome.

So, on a lark, I signed up for a Bollywood dance class. I figured I’d get to listen to some music I’m not familiar with, work out on a predictable schedule, and have a little fun. I even signed up for my dance studio’s recital, figuring that if I was going to put all that effort into learning, I might as well perform. But I didn’t really invite anyone to attend- first of all, I’m 30 years old and felt a little weird talking about my dance recital. Secondly, the last dance recital I went to was an interminable bore- class after class of tiny kids who couldn’t remember the steps, progressing up into teenagers, and finally getting to the experienced classes at the end of the night. Hearing that our show was going to last two and a half hours, I decided I didn’t want to subject them to it.

Now I feel bad, because I completely underestimated the appeal of a recital put on by a studio specializing in world dance styles. My friends probably would have enjoyed it quite a bit. Flamenco! Belly dance! Salsa! Bollywood! Hip-hop! (hey, American styles have to be represented too). Scarves! Veils! Ankle bells! Cheering and whooping like would never happen at the ballet. (Oh, and by the way, my class’ performance went very well and rocked the house just as much as everyone else’s.)

So if Jenn’s enthusiasm for her belly dance class or my Twitter-gushing about Bollywood class has sparked any interest at all, I’ve got a roundup of how to find a class that works for you.

In the District, there’s Joy of Motion, which offers classes in belly dance, as well as hip-hop, breakdance, and more traditional disciplines.  Flashpoint provides space to companies offering instruction in Latin American dance and belly dance. Dhoonya Dance, based in Arlington, occasionally offers Bollywood workshops in that space as well, though their classes are scattered throughout the Virginia suburbs. At Born 2 Dance in Vienna, for example. Which, being outside the Beltway, is a little farther out for what I’d usually write about here, but it’s where I take classes and I really like them, so there. They offer not just multiple levels of Bollywood, Hip-Hop, Salsa, and Belly Dance, but also Persian dance, which I had not previously seen. (It’s kind of like belly dance, but not. You should see some.) And of course, there’s Saffron Dance in Clarendon.

But that brings me to probably my most important tip for finding a dance class that works for you. Go to some performances. When you see a troupe you particularly enjoy, or when a friend comes gushing to you about this great show they saw, check out the company’s website. Unless they’re with some city’s metropolitan ballet touring company, most professional dancers don’t just perform for a living. So when you find a performer or company that you like, chances are, they offer classes as well. Go to their website, figure out where they teach (it’s frequently more than one location), and pick a class that works for you. Usually, the company or studio will let you observe or even participate in a class before committing to a full session. Which is how I ended up taking classes in Vienna rather than Clarendon- I dropped-in to one in Vienna and became instantly fond of the instructor.

And then prepare to wear a sequin-covered costume while your friends cheer you on. It’s fun, I promise.

Harvey Milk-protege Cleve Jones is planning a march on Washington for gay rights on October 11th, National Coming Out Day.

While I wish Jones well, and suppose that a national day of protest in DC would be a good rallying point/photo op for gay rights supporters, I’m also kind of shrugging my shoulders. I mean, look how successful the ANSWER, Code PINK, and March for Life protests have been. (That was sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell.)

But in any case, I’m confident that the home of the Dupont Circle drag races and Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend will give our protesting guests a warm welcome, no matter how ministers from Maryland feel about them.

Via Facebook, I’ve been following the adventures of a high school friend who is enrolled in trapeze school. Every couple of days she posts new pictures of herself engaging in some astonishing midair feat, and it always gives me a welcome couple minutes of respite to daydream about the circus in the middle of my day. I had started hearing rumblings that we were getting a trapeze school here in DC. I looked into it, and the Trapeze School of New York was looking for a location for their DC branch, so I held off blogging about.

Well. Guys, we’re getting a TRAPEZE SCHOOL. The school’s temporary location will be outdoors, at 9th and H Streets NW, near Gallery Place. That means you can go over there and watch trapeze class- it’s visible from the street. I have just found my new entertainment. They’re hoping to secure a permanent location in the next few months near Nationals Park.

I welcome this development wholeheartedly. DC needs more stuff like this. Trapeze School Founder Jonathon Conant says, “Beneath the surface, trust me, DC is a lot weirder than everyone thinks.” Truer words were never spoken.

Classes start this weekend. YES!

A comedian acquaintance and I were lamenting the challenges of acceptably promoting local comedy recently, and something we both noted was the utter lack of demo clips that are professional and showcase the comedian to his or her best ability. I’ve seen  it happen in We Love DC’s very own comment section, where a promising comic gets written off by the commenters after viewing a couple of crappy videos of an open mic that takes place in an echo-y classroom on some college campus. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to get a decently produced video until you’re performing in clubs, and it’s hard to get booked in clubs without a decently produced video. But that’s a rant for another time. 

So I decided to stay up late and find you some videos of comics who have made me fall out of my seat laughing.  Most have been produced well, so that you can evaluate the comedy without being distracted by poor sound, a room unsuited for comedy performance, or other factors that frequently beset eager young comics. Put your headphones on if you’re at work, though. Maybe you don’t want your boss hearing this.

Jake Young - Demo Clip for the Geek Comedy Tour:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Seaton Smith - DC Improv
Click here to view the embedded video.

Hampton Yount - Winning the 2008 DC Improv competition
Click here to view the embedded video.

Erin Jackson - Last Comic Standing Semifinals
Click here to view the embedded video.

Jimmy Meritt - Hosting at the DC Improv
Click here to view the embedded video.

Mike Blejer - 2008 DC Improv Finals
Click here to view the embedded video.

City Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) introduced a bill today that would include the homeless in DC’s hate crimes law.  As broad as DC’s bias crimes law is, I’m actually surprised the homeless aren’t already protected by it. Since the strongest reason for hate crimes laws is to deter crimes that particularly terrify an entire class of people in the community, it seems like a no-brainer to add protection for a group of people who already have an uneasy relationship with the police and other members of the community, and who frequently are homeless because of issues that would also prevent them from reliably reporting a crime or identifying an assailant.

Via MovingMomentarily comes the story of a couple who got engaged right on a Metro escalator:

“We went down to the metro platform, I was beaming and looking at my ring and a woman standing near us asked if we had just gotten engaged. I said “Yes! It’s kind of strange to tell you first since we don’t even know you!” but she was very excited for us and said congratulations several times.”

I’m sure some of you are thinking that you would never accept a proposal that came in a Metro station, but since a park ranger was the first person to know about our engagement… I think it’s adorable. And since she said yes, I’m guessing she agrees.

I thought for a moment that I was reading the Onion. The Virginia DMV is in the process of banning smiling in your drivers’ license photos. Due to some face-recognition technology being implemented in DMV systems, you’ll need to adopt a “neutral expression” when your picture is taken, or the system, programmed to detect your terrorist-loving grin, will reject the photo.

So when your teenager gets her license, she’s not allowed to look happy about it. The face-recognition software works better on faces wearing the same expression.   Which is just dandy, really- technology that can’t identify a face that’s smiling is going to be used by all manner of law-enforcement agencies to identify suspects, by comparing that oh-so-high-quality DMV photo with the crisp and sharp images from ATM cameras and suchlike. Because I know that when I’m knocking over a liquor store, what I’m wearing is a “neutral expression.”