Category Archives: The Features

These are our features. They come back either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.

Sports Fix, The District
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Sports Fix Light: Take Heart, Redskins Fans

romosucks
Appropriate for Dallas Week by dharmabumx

I know, Sports Fix doesn’t usually air until Monday, but I’ve made a snap decision to run with it today because it’s Dallas Week. That’s right, it’s time for the Redskins, as they have several times over the last few years, to frustrate the Cowboys in new and unusual ways. As Skins’ Blogger Jamie Mottram wrote,

“But out of the ashes the feathered arrow flies. Starting with the Skins’ 14-13 midnight double-strike win on Monday Night in Big D three years ago, Washington has reversed and reheated the once-great rivalry by winning four out of six.”

Continue reading →

News, Sports Fix, The Daily Feed, The District
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DC Rollergirls Take On Charm City All-Stars

rollergirls.png

Since it looks like rain tomorrow, you might want to eschew the various outdoor Oktoberfests and head instead to Sterling to check out the DC Rollergirls as they take on the Charm City All-stars in a pre-season match. DC-based matches at the DC Armory start up on the 4th of October.

Good luck Rollergirls, give those Bal’mer girls something to say “hon” about.

Talkin' Transit, Technology, The Daily Feed, The District, WMATA
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Four Line Announcements


Four Line Announcements
Originally uploaded by brownpau

Paulo captured this shot of the new Metro sign format for announcements. The old side-scrolling versions are thankfully history as they were nearly impossible to read. Thankfully, Metro’s embracing some good IA these days and going for something that’s a bit more passenger friendly than the crawl, which tended to cause crowds of gawkers while the waited for the message to finish displaying.

Sports Fix, The Daily Feed
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Well, At Least Our 100th Loss Won’t Be Here


Rained out
Originally uploaded by afagen

Last night’s game at Nationals Park was rained out, saving the Nationals Fans from having to see the Nats’ 100th loss in person. That honor will fall to the Philadelphia Fans, most likely. Could I think of a better group of hooligans to punish the Nats like they deserve?

Nope. Stock up on batteries, guys, and make sure the aim’s true.

Food and Drink, Night Life, People, We Love Drinks
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We Love Drinks: The Saloon

The Saloon, U Street

I freely admit that I know next to nothing about beer. Oh, except that 12 ounces of Guinness is actually less calories than 12 ounces of Budweiser or Heineken (a fun fact to casually toss out when someone says, “I can’t drink stout, it’s too fattening!” Watch their world shatter). So for me, if I’m going to a bar that primarily serves beer, I want to be able to put myself in someone else’s capable hands. In my ‘hood, those hands belong to The Saloon at 12th & U.

Long before the Belgian beer craze hit DC (noticing a trend about trends in this town?), before lines at Marvin, Granville Moore’s, or bibles of beer at Brasserie Beck, there was The Saloon. Billed as having the “most unique selection of beer on tap”, it’s a completely unpretentious spot that will never get ruined, because there’s nothing the least bit trendy about it – it’s a true neighborhood tavern, dependable, honest, with comfortable bare bones and even a social conscience.

For years I’ve only gone to The Saloon for dinner, sitting at one of the plain wooden tables, always getting the classic bacon cheeseburger and fries. I’m convinced that The Saloon has the best fries in town, but that’s another story. Continue reading →

Technology, The Daily Feed, The Mall, We Love Arts
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The Con Artist’s Replica

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Want to get your stuff on display at the Smithsonian? Okay, without having to become all Andy-Warhol-famous? Compete for the Chance instead. This week’s challenge (one of six, I suspect) is called “The Con Artist’s Replica” and exhorts some creativity from the players:

Create a replica of something you desire but know you cannot have.

An ordinary con man might substitute such a replica for its model, but your replica will be more real than the original object of desire; we invite you to be a con artist.

Very slick. Get creative, win a cool spot in a curated exhibit!

All Politics is Local, Comedy in DC, Entertainment
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Comedy in DC: Sarah Palin Vlogs

Sarah Palin Vlog #8: LIBRARY!

When I was talking with Aparna Nancherla about She-Ha for the last Comedy in DC feature, we got onto the subject of women in politics, and whether or not this year of prominent female candidates would affect the careers of women in comedy. She pointed out the Sarah Palin Vlogs YouTube series, masterminded by Sara Benincasa and DC’s own Diana Saez, who plays the candidate’s fictional hair stylist/assistant/La Leche League liaison/campaign manager Dina Heath-Barr. 

While the appointment of Gov. Palin to the Republican ticket has certainly been a bonanza of material for Tina Fey, Palin’s distinctive hair, glasses, and accent make her an impression-worthy candidate for all manner of female comedians. Saez and Benincasa’s twist on the usual candidate humor, putting her in front of a webcam rather than a lectern and teleprompter, is a unique reflection of our current politics of personality- while it’s debatable whether American presidential elections have ever been about issues and policies rather than personal appeal, an campaign defined by text messages, Facebook fan pages, and other forms of hyper-personal expression is a particularly fine target for parodying with a portrayal of a candidate as the typical narcissistic camgirl. Thanks, Sara and Diana, for shattering the glass ceiling for YouTube bunnies everywhere.

In the interests of equal time and bipartisan mockery, We Love DC is happy to feature a good example of Democratic presidential ticket parody.  Send your suggestions to tiffany -at- we love dc dot com.

Travel
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We Love to Travel – But Waking Up At 3:30 am? Get Serious.

Plane taking off in the morning...

I’m a big fan of travelling. And thanks to this I have tried zipline Oahu, surfing in california and many other things around the world. When I go on vacation, or just away for work, I usually end up traveling out of Dulles airport.  That’s because I live in Arlington, so the two closest airports to me are Dulles and National.  And although I take National any time I can, Dulles still ends up being the most often used.

But, with airfare prices (and FEES, don’t get me started) going up all over the place, being flexible on travel times can save me and my company a lot of cash.  But some times that means flying out at 6:00 am.  Or some equally absurd time in the morning.

Now, do the math.  If you have to be at the airport for a 6:00 am flight, you need to be there an hour early, unless you’re boarding a private charter from Jettly.com.  That’s 5:00 am.  Earlier, if you want to check luggage for that great Hawaii vacation.  For anyone who lives near DC, in DC, or anywhere other than Reston, that means at least a 30 minute trip.  Fortunately the roads are pretty clear at 4:30 am, and the toll road helps.  Now, if I’ve done my math correctly, that means getting up at 3:30 am to get ready to leave.  At that point, why even go to sleep?

I, for one, don’t want to wake up at 3:30 am for a flight.  So is there a better solution?

Continue reading →

Business and Money, Talkin' Transit, Technology, The Daily Feed, WMATA
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Metro & Google?

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When I saw this morning on Google Maps that New York City’s Subway system was finally part of Google Transit, I got mighty curious: What’s Metro doing to work on this? So, I asked WMATA’s Lisa Farbstein what was going on. Metro’s response, via Lisa, was “We have been working with Google, however a formal agreement has yet to be finalized.”

It would be so delightful if I could point people at Google Maps to do the routing, as anyone who’s ever used the Metro Public Transit Mapping Tool would know. C’mon Metro, if New York can do it, we can too, yeah?

Entertainment, Penn Quarter, We Love Arts
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We Love Arts: Romeo & Juliet

Drew Eshelman as the Nurse. Photo by Scott Suchman.

Drew Eshelman as the Nurse. Photo by Scott Suchman.

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “Romeo & Juliet” is a perfectly acceptable production, with the usual beautiful sets and exquisite costumes one expects from them. But it’s a workhorse production, with nothing new to say or add to the performance history. That in itself isn’t really a problem – traditional mountings of plays allow one to reconnect on a basic level with text and character, and this would be a good introductory piece for say, a high school audience to view. But I expect more from STC.

I expected even more than usual, given the press materials’ quoting of director David Muse’s hope that an all-male cast would give a “fresh and dangerous and transgressive” approach to the production. But in this era, just doing an all-male cast is not going to give you transgressive. It isn’t even innovative anymore – companies such as the Globe and Propeller have been doing it for the last decade – a fact pointed out without irony by STC’s own materials (I kept waiting for the punchline in that article – “and now, DC finally catches on to the trend!”). There has to be something more to set it apart. So why do an all-male cast and leave almost everything else derivative and traditional? Oddly, this was the least testosterone-fueled production I’ve ever seen, the opening brawls lacking any sense of the explosive danger of the feud between Capulets and Montagues.

Matters aren’t helped by a Romeo and Juliet with absolutely no chemistry together. Continue reading →

Talkin' Transit, The Daily Feed
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Work Starts on Union Station Bike Center

Union Station Construction

The Union Station driveway by 1st St NE (directly above the Metro station) has been fenced off and is ready to be dug up for the upcoming Union Station Bicycle Center, a futuristic-looking glass-and-steel dome beside the Metro with secure bike racks, changing rooms, and storage lockers for DC bicyclists. DDOT expects to have the Center finished by next spring. Continue reading →

The Daily Feed, We Love Arts
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Congratulations Chimamanda Adichie!

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Wisconsin Book Festival by talatu-carmen

Our heartiest congratulations to the DC area’s only MacArthur Genius this year, Chimamanda Adichie! Adichie is a novelist living in Columbia MD, writing about her native Nigeria. Her latest, Half of a Yellow Sun, is set against the backdrop of the late 1960s Civil War in Nigeria, when the Igbo people seceded and formed Biafra. The MacArthur Genius grants are a $500,000 award, with no strings whatsoever, given annually to the people determined by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The are but three criteria for the grant: “exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”

Congratulations Chimamanda!

There were also two Baltimore-based winners this year, both at Johns Hopkins: Peter Pronovost, critical care physician, and Adam Riess, astronomer and cosmographer.

Featured Photo, Life in the Capital, Sports Fix, The District
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Featured Photo

Nation’s Triathlon by Noah Devereaux

Last week our fine city hosted the annual Nation’s Triathlon where competitors are challenged to swim 1.5K through the murky Potomac, bike 40K, and run 10K.  It’s a feat so easy that even our very own Mayor Fenty can do it.  I’m kidding of course.  The only way I could compete in this race is if it were a 51.5K bike ride.

This amazing shot by Noah Devereaux takes the sweaty, strenuous, and sometimes painful event and strips away the grit, replacing it with grace and beauty.  The perfect lane lines and tree-lined street capture your eye and lead it toward the majestic Capitol at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue.  The warm morning sun glimmers off the newly paved road and creates a shadow for the runner to compete against.  It takes months of dedicated preparation to compete in a race like this, but this photo makes it look like a mere jog through the park.

Monumental, The Hill
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Monumental: Lincoln Park

Nameplate

Lincoln Park on East Capitol Street between 11th and 13th is an idyllic little piece of real estate. Surrounded by old victorian rowhouses, the two-block wide park has plenty of grass and some lovely walking paths, and two monuments that I found fascinating. I decided not to choose which one, but rather share them both: the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial, and the Emancipation Memorial.

Continue reading →

Sports Fix, The Daily Feed, The District
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Deadbeat Lerners Still Haven’t Paid the Rent

Foul Ball

Okay. See. If you or I did this? We’d be on the street a long time ago. But we’re now six months after the start of the baseball season at brand new Nationals Park, and the Lerner Family still hasn’t paid the team’s rent.

Folks, this is ri-goddamned-diculous.

They owe the city $3.5M for the occupation of the ballpark and they haven’t paid a red cent anywhere. They haven’t even done the courteous thing and put the rent in escrow, near as I can find. Chance are, it’s over something monumentally stupid like Ted Lerner’s chair rocking ever so slightly in his multi-million dollar owner’s suite.

Pay up, Ted. Pay up. You owe this city its due.

Business and Money, Crime & Punishment, The Daily Feed, We Love Arts
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It’s actually okay, Mr Trump

Photo courtesy of NCinDC

enter here for the money, courtesy of NCinDC

Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts muddied the water a bit yesterday in the Reliable Source column and perpetuated an old misunderstanding. They close their article about Edwina Rogers and her practice of wrapping small gifts with dollar bills by saying “While uncut currency is legal tender (you can cut around the bills), slicing them in half (as Rogers does in the clip) is technically considered defacement.” Well, sure, and so is writing in the margins of your paperback so you can get back to the saucy parts later. Unfortunately they’re hinting at the common belief that using those penny mushing machines and other “money art” constitutes committing a federal offense and might somehow get you in trouble.

The Treasury addresses this directly themselves on their website.

This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the U.S. Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent.

So feel free to keep making those little folding paper dolls with your $100 bills, so long as you don’t try to spend them later.

Arlington, Talkin' Transit, The Daily Feed
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New Parking Stand


New parking stand
Originally uploaded by tbridge

You might’ve seen the new parking stands at the Courthouse parking lot, featuring space numbers, credit card machines, and time tags that you leave on your dashboard, but these machines are spreading rapidly. They showed up on Fairfax Drive near the new power substation recently, and are all marked with the “Coming Soon” text. The new boxes will transition all the meters on the street to 4 hour max meters. Many meters on the street are currently 12 hour meters, which means that they’re friendly to people who work in the surrounding area. Oh well, guess it’s just four hours for you, now!

All Politics is Local, Sports Fix, The Daily Feed, WTF?!
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On Chris Cooley’s Wang

By now, I’m certain, all of DC has seen Chris Cooley’s wang (SFW) as he was foolish enough to put it on his own blog on Saturday. By Sunday, everyone was chuckling at Cooley’s silliness. However, the best part of all this is the response from Cooley, in a post entitled “We’re Dumb”:

“All apologies from the website. We are very sorry that we showed a penis on our website all day yesterday. That was by no means our intention and we did not want to offend anyone. The picture wouldn’t have been up for so long, but we were in the middle of winning a big game. Once again, this was a complete accident and we regret not reviewing the post more closely. Thanks.”

Sorry about the penis. But we won! Go team!

Arlington, Talkin' Transit
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Talkin’ Transit: Busted

Photo courtesy of tbridge
Busted Ass Bus, courtesy of tbridge

Lately, strikes, cuts and hikes have one thing in common in transit around here. More specifically, the Fairfax Connector, Maryland budget woes, and VRE fare hikes.

Fairfax Connector: Today is Day 2 of the bus driver strike, where drivers are holding out for a new contract with better pension and health benefits. The old contract ended on Sunday.

Yesterday, the first day of the strike, saw 16 routes get canceled and eight others put on a reduced schedule. Servicing over 20,000 commuters a day, the strike only affects the routes serving southern Fairfax County as the striking drivers are from the Huntington garage. The Herndon-based drivers are under a different contract so there is no reduction of service from routes originating there.

Continue reading →