‘District Taco Truck’
courtesy of ‘foodtruckapp’
Northwest-ers, you’re in luck! Not only is the Lobster Truck hitting up Friendship Heights today, but eatWonky is making an appearance in much-underserved Van Ness. Show them how much you need them, and maybe they’ll make their trek uptown a regular occurrence.

And if you’re not in the mood to chase down a moving target, District Taco opened their brick and mortar shop yesterday at 5723 Lee Highway in Arlington. Just in time for the winter months, though I think tacos taste better after standing in the snow for them.

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Photo by Author

I’m clearly a food cart convert, but there are some days when you want your hot dog to come from a place with a front door. Enter DC-3. From the folks behind Matchbox, the newest edition to Barracks Row is all hot dog, all the time. The dogs are all based on regional favorites, from the classic Chicago 7 (all-beef, poppy seed bun, tomato, pickle, relish, onions, peppers and mustard) to the not-so-classic Q’s Seoul Bulgogi & Kimchi (beef dog, Frankfurt loaf, rib-eye bulgogi and pickled kimchi). The menu even includes a nod to the D.C.-area with the Bay Bridge Pretzel Dog, an all-beef dog on a pretzel roll, slathered with crab dip and Old Bay.

The restaurant’s moniker comes from the plane of the same name, and the owners make sure you know it’s not a coincidence. Not only is there a giant DC-3 propeller hung on the wall, the menu is designed to look like an airline ticket. Unfortunately you won’t get any frequent flyer miles while you’re there, but who needs a free upgrade when you’ve got fancy hot dogs, right?

‘sunset’
courtesy of ‘choofly’

The Marine Barracks at Eighth and I Streets Southeast and the Marine Corps Memorial at Iwo Jima will be abuzz today with birthday celebrations for the United States Marine Corps, which was formed on this day in 1775 to assist Colonial ships as infantry-at-sea.  The Marines that are posted to the Barracks are certainly a part of the Barracks Row community on Capitol Hill, and we urge you to celebrate the men and women of the Marine Corps today, and every day.

Semper Fi, Marines.  Semper Fi.

‘fugly duckling.’
courtesy of ‘JASON ANFINSEN’

As WTOP depressingly reported, DC was ranked as the sixth least attractive city in the nation by Travel + Leisure’s America’s Favorite Cities survey. This poor showing should come as a surprise to absolutely no one who has lived here for more than five minutes. As someone once told me, Washington is the Hollywood for ugly people. We’ve got a lot of power and gravitas, but good looks we do not.

We also didn’t score very well for style or friendliness, but won with flying colors for museums/galleries (#1), historical sites/monuments (#1) and cultural getaways (#2). So I guess that makes us ugly but interesting. We’re the “but (s)he has a great personality” of cities, if you will. Better than nothing, right?

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courtesy of ‘julianne’s’

If you yell at someone in a convenience store till they try to flee on their moped, then chase them in your Lincoln Navigator and ram them… what would you call that?

If you’re the Virginia legal system you call it attempted murder.

If you’re a Washington Post writer, you call it “harassment.”

I can’t help but wonder what sort of neighborhood the headline writer lives in. What needs to be involved to move it up to “abuse” I wonder? Napalm? Here’s a tip, WaPo: if you’re afraid of sounding like a sexcrime-lover, you can still pretty safely call it “assault.”

The story on the WaPo crime blog is, instead, titled “Man harasses Va. sex offender” and I’ll add that I am SHOCKED that someone would use the information in the sex offender registry to engage in inappropriate and illegal behavior. Who could possibly have expected that if you published a list of the people who have finished serving their time, then combined it with addresses and photos, that you might incite citizens to take the law – or their vision of justice, anyway – into their own hands?

‘Sweetbites & DC Slices Trucks’
courtesy of ‘Mr. T in DC’
Food. Truck. Time. I don’t know what it is, but it looks like SW is starting to take over the food truck epicenter crown from K St. Times they are a-changin’.

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‘Curbside Cupcake Truck’
courtesy of ‘foodtruckapp’
Overwhelmed with all the food truck choices these days? Do you really just want a cupcake sometimes, but don’t want to have to do any Googling to find it? Well Curbside Cupcakes has got you covered. They have a nifty new program on their website that does the work for you. Just head to their site, and you can click on all the locations their truck hits on a regular basis that are of interest to you. When one of their trucks heads that way, they’ll send you an email to let you know, just in case you can’t smell the freshly baked cupcakes from a few stories up.

Alan Sonneman, The Last Washington Painting (Premonitions of the Corporate Wars), 1980. Oil on canvas, 54 x 102 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Collection of Tim Egert.

It’s common for people to move to DC, make their mark, then ride off into the sunset.  For many people this town is merely a stepping stone for their education or their career, a place to put a notch on their belt.  If you’ve lived here for less than a decade then you may not be hip to DC’s rich history, what made it the city that it is today.

As one would expect, the local art world looks nothing today as it did ten years ago, which looked nothing like it did twenty years ago.  Art galleries have moved from Georgetown to Dupont Circle to 14th Street to H Street, while others have disappeared from the map completely.  Artists of yesterday have moved to New York, stopped producing art, or passed on to artist’s heaven.  However one entity has been a common thread throughout, the Washington Project for the Arts, which is celebrating its 35th birthday with Catalyst.

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‘Sgt. Leonard Matlovich’
courtesy of ‘dbking’

For members of the Arlington Gay & Lesbian Alliance, Veterans Day came a little early. Yesterday, the group honored LGBT veterans at Congressional Cemetery, where they held a small service at the grave of Sgt. Leonard Matlovich. After serving three tours of duty in Vietnam, Sgt. Matlovich made waves in the 1970s as one of the first openly gay service members, which led to his discharge in 1975. His grave is inscribed with the words “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”

According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, 14,000 veterans have been discharged for their sexual orientation since the institution of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and an estimated 60,000 active members of the military are gay.

‘Alien Discovers Gallery Place – Chinatown Metro Stop’
courtesy of ‘[F]oxymoron’

Mapnificent is possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in a week. Using Google Maps and transit data, it highlights all the places you can get to from a given position in a specified number of minutes, and then lets you search the highlighted area with Google. So, you’re at your office and you want organize an office happy hour: drop the pin on your location, and move the slider to the maximum amount of time you’re willing to travel for alcohol. Then search for “bar” or “drinks” or “pizza” or whatever it is you need and watch the application plot them on a map, complete with (somewhat unreliable) links to Google Maps directions. If you have a friend in another part of town you want to invite, you can add a second origin point for that person and see where the overlap is.

Go play with it. But not, you know, for TOO long. You have to work before you get to have happy hour, after all.

Tom’s mention of Bones and Anacostia reminded me of an odd thing I noticed in AT&T’s “Rollercoaster” spot over the weekend.

In the very first vignette in the ad, a rollercoaster pulls into a subway station and all the suits board it. The sign on the wall of the subway station reads “Gallery Place-Chinatown Station-DC.” But the station they’re all standing in is manifestly NOT a Metro station. Continue reading →