‘Shower Head Water Drops 7-26-09 1’
courtesy of ‘stevendepolo’

That’s about the long and short of WMATA’s press release today about what they intend to do to deal with the possibility of OMGWTFPIG H1N1 outbreaks this fall. Unfortunately this is reassurance that leaves you less assured than before.

Metro is using an environmentally friendly disinfectant cleaner to wipe down surfaces throughout the Metro system to help keep riders and employees from catching the flu.

The disinfectant is used to clean and disinfect “contact-surfaces” in the Metrorail and Metrobus systems. Metrobuses and Metrorail trains and equipment are disinfected every week, and will undergo more frequent cleaning if necessary.

Then slightly lower:

Metro has taken several steps to protect its more than 1 million daily riders and 10,000 employees from contracting the H1N1 Flu.

So to be clear: 1 million individuals a day move through the metro system. Every seven days, the system gets wiped down with a disinfectant. So grab that handrail with assurance that no germs will have been on it for more than 377 hours.

At first I thought this might simply be a reassurance of what was already being done, not a claim that this was an improvement (from what, exactly? Prayer?) but further down the release there’s a list of bullet points following the assertion that “in preparation for a regional flu event, Metro has taken many actions.” One was “Increased the complete disinfection of the Metrorail, Metrobus and MetroAccess vehicle interiors at more frequent intervals;”

The Mayo Clinic says that most flu germs live outside the body for a time between a few seconds and 48 hours.

‘hello, gorgeous’
courtesy of ‘erin m’

If you’re one of the AT&T customers not getting your phone calls today because AT&T is sending them to your voicemail (or worse, your voicemail never picks up at all), you can wait out a solution by disabling 3G on your phone. If you’ve got an iPhone (and if you don’t, what the hell are you doing on AT&T?), this is in Settings > Network. Your phone will pick up the EDGE network and you’ll be able to get calls again.

”
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.

‘stop rewarding failure’
courtesy of ‘spiggycat’

I was out of town and missed all the protest-liciousness on the Mall this weekend (and the National Black Family Reunion, which kind of got overshadowed in the middle of it), and I’m really not going to get into a conversation about the merits of the various sub-demographics of protestors… I just wanted to share this photo, which depicts a sign I can actually get behind. Click through and look at the yellow sign held by the little girl on the left:

“STOP REWARDING FAILURE.”

That’s change I can believe in, y’all.

”
courtesy of ‘erin m’

DC’s Public Library system is facing the possibility of staff cuts due to continuing budget-tightening related to the economic downturn. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper says that she doesn’t expect it to come to that, but if the DCPL operating budget is cut any further, staffing is the only item left to cut. Interestingly, the construction budget for the last two years was such that new library facilities are nearing completion, leading to a situation where a new libary may be ready to open but not have enough staff to run it.

What I found most interesting in the article, however, was the steps Cooper  has been taking to ensure that DCPL stays relevant as traditional lending of paper books and periodicals has been in decline. I know I’m a slacker and haven’t checked out my local library lately- how about you?

‘Cheverly – Double Stop – 3-2-09’
courtesy of ‘mosley.brian’

I don’t like winter. There are a lot of reasons why, but one of the big ones is that heating and electricity bills go WAY up in those short, cold days. But for all you district residents, the District Department of Energy is trying to help. If you are a low-income resident, you can apply for a discount on your Washington Gas bill, get your old appliances replaced with Energy Star ones, and get weatherization assistance.

Their site, green.dc.gov, is helpful for everyone, though. Check out their strategies for saving energy and money, get your home audited to see how much energy you’re wasting, and calculate your greenhouse gas emissions. Now is the time to jump on this stuff, before you’re freezing your buns off AND wasting money.