I really, really apologize for the mutilation of Elton John. Except that I don’t. Livan Hernandez is off to the Diamondbacks for two prospects, Garrett Mock and Matt Chico. Neither look like the Ace that Hernandez had become off and on, but each would be a solid 3 or 4 starter in another year, and that’s what the Nats need: long-term plans instead of short-term attempts at success. Tough to think that yesterday’s 3-2 loss, with a no-decision for Livo, will be his last start in our colors before he heads to Phoenix. Of course, it was iconic of his career here: an excellent outing spoiled by defense and a lack of significant offense, so I suppose it was appropriate.

Good luck, Livan, we’ll miss you.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

I wonder what will happen to the true dive bars when DC goes smoke-free in 2007. And will we start talking about nightlife in terms of B.B. and A.B. – before the ban and after the ban?

Seriously, I’m not out to start a resurgence of the whole smokers v. nonsmokers war again. It’s just that I was at Townhouse Tavern for a few hours Saturday night, relaxing with friends, and that bar is a living breathing ash organism. I honestly can’t remember whether anyone was smoking vape juice or not – it doesn’t matter, even my pores had a nicotine high.

What will happen to places like Townhouse, with no ventilation system to speak of other than strategically placed fans, the ash of ages clinging desperately to every conceivable surface, a bar so permeated with smoke residue that your very soul is suffused with nicotine upon leaving?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
Obviously, nothing much. Townhouse has outside patio seating so smokers can still inhale there after the ban. But I wonder how long it will actually take for the smoky interior to cleanse its carcinogenic fumes, if ever.

Continue reading →

How is this for a Metrorail serenade? A “singing escalator” at the Woodley Park Metro Station. Nice!

I hope this isn’t what WMATA had in mind when it put out a call for artisits. Woops, no, that was for the new NoVA stations.

Hmm, maybe it’s the first Metro Entertainment Program? I bet singers, dancers, musicians, theater groups and other entertainers could make quite a show with the escalator singing in the background.

Have you heard this escalator sing? Might it be in the key of Pavarotti or Prince?

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This weekend there are a pair of festivals hitting the area, meaning the beginnings of the summer fair season are upon us again. Take advantage of this weekend’s less-awful weather and head out to either the Alexandria Irish Festival or the U St “Dog Days” sidewalk festival.

The Irish Festival runs all day on Saturday in Waterfront Park in Alexandria (within a good walk of the King St. Metro) and will feature all manner of Gaelic things including music, crafts, and things that will make you want to pick right up and go to Ireland for your next vacation. Pro-Tip? Stop at Murphy’s on the way home for a Guinness or ten.

The Dog Days Sidewalk Sale features a ton of great shopping (part of the DC Tax Holiday, too!) and events in the U St. neighborhood. Starting at 8am Saturday, there’s a dog show at the African American Civil War Memorial, incredible discounts from businesses throughout the area including Boundless Yoga, Cakelove, Home Rule, Pop, Viridian, Simply Home, Millenium and Meeps Village. That’s not the whole list, so check the main schedule page on the MidCityLive website.

Are you going to the festival? What are you up to?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Not Duke University, but DC’s own Duke Ellington. WTOP News is reporting that the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities ignored the public vote on which famous DC residents to put into statue form in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Each of the states gets to choose two statues of famous residents, and the District has managed to be a part of that group. However, the DC Commission ignored the popular vote (which selected Frederick Douglass and Duke Ellington) and have chosen their own two figures to be memorialized: Frederick Douglass and Pierre L’Enfant.

Of course, the criteria for candidates included being a citizen of the United States, which promptly rules out L’Enfant because he was a French citizen. But, since they’re throwing out the public vote in favor of their own private ballot, it really doesn’t matter.

Want to speak up about this gross miscarriage of statuary justice? Drop them an Email or better, call them up at 202.724.5613 and tell them that we want Duke Ellington instead of Pierre Had to Have Funky Diagonal Streets To Confuse the Tourists and Cabbies.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Or better yet, “neighborhoods you’ll never live in,” this interesting little map I found on Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space is a very telling.

Note how the high-dollar folks are concentrated along the Potomac River, elevating it more than say Connecticut Avenue or Route 66, as the wealth artery through our fair city.

My only question is why the big pink patch below Route 66, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

What might that be, and why?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

How should a WMATA Metrobus driver alert police, in a subtle way, to say an altercation on his bus? A phone call would be too obvious. A little red “alert” button? Not yet installed.

A casual “Emergency – Call Police” on the route sign? Perfect!

This was the scene at 15th Street and Irving Streets NW a few days ago. A DC MPD police car sped to the scene and boarded the bus lickety-quick.

Response apparently all for naught as folks exited and boarded the bus casually and once the police talked with the driver and walked the bus’s length, the police officer left.

The bus, still flashing “Emergency – Call Police” drove on.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

We finally did it, we finally hit 100!

If we can coax out another degree from the mercury column, we’d officially break the 1930 record, as it is, we’re tied with the record. Tomorrow? Thunderstorms and much cooler, only 93! Then the weekend will feel much less like fiery demise. Ahhhh, the heat wave! Tell us your great heat wave stories in the comments.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

So it’s the day before your birthday, you’re about to get in your truck at the Landover Metro Station, when you get a bad feeling. You know something is about to go down and then it does. A boy, say 10-12 years old grabs your cell phone and makes a run for it.

What do you do? How do you react in that split second as the little punk dissapears with the cell phone your father gave you for graduation? If you are Tiffany of GoldenTimeofDay there is only one reaction:

I take off after him…purse, work bag and all….in a black dress and flip flops…running across the entire Landover Parking Lot yelling:

“STOP THAT LITTLE BOY HE STOLE MY PHONE…“

And Tiffany, in flops and all, catches the little brat and goes all Paul Kersey on the boy, spraying a can of Whoop Ass on him. While you can read the blow by blow on her post about the attempted robbery, her central question is one I wonder often too:

what is happening to our kids? Why….why….why….

Now we have a new body for the penal system, a young one at that. A fresh-faced phone snatcher, who may one day, be the purse snatcher, the real-gun robber that sparks a Crime Emergency in years to come.

Until then, heads up if you headed out east on the Orange line. It seems these mini-thieves are targeting Nextel phones for the resale value.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Jon Stewart’s coming to the Merriweather Post Pavilion next month for an “intimate ” show with, like, several thousand of your closest friends. The worst of it? The ticket prices. Sure, Merriweather’s a great location out in the area around Columbia, MD, but is it worth $85 a head to go? With $10 of that going to Ticketmaster couched as a “convenience” fee? (To whom are those fees convenient, exactly?)

I like the man, but I just don’t think I can come up with the bucks to shell out the $85 for decent seats, or even the $50 for the lawn seats. He’s funny, but damn if that’s not a lot of money just to see controversial.

Of course, if you’re a 9:30 club subscriber you know that the presale is on and the password might just have something to do with a former coworker of his who now has his own show. But we were never here. And you certainly didn’t hear it from us.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Dana Milbank has apparently been going through Senatorial Trash, specifically that of Barbara Boxer’s office on the Hill, stealing her phonetic pronunciation guides and the detritus of meetings with other Senators. With all the foofaraw surrounding the difference between journalism and blogging, if journalism means digging through trash, count me firmly in the blogger camp until that rule is lifted.

Bob Levey and Dana Milbank may be trashhounds, but I prefer to leave mine on the curb to be taken away. (Hat Tip to Mr. Mortman)

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

While I’m on video egg checking just how hot it is, others are finding the heat too hot to handle. First up is Gridskipper, who denounced my egg-frying skills with this missive:

One, it is actually hot and, more importantly, the street is no place to fry an egg on a hot day…the best place to fry an egg would be on a dark rooftop, not on the street.

Shocked that the normally fun and playful Gridskipper went snarky on the Kings of Snark, I investigated and found the root cause of Gridskippers bitchiness. From the Head Grid himself:

[Your comments ability request] shall be granted though sadly not tonight since the heat somehow f[**]ked the internet for the entire lower east side.

Ouch, sorry about that Gridskipper. Folks in DC can feel your pain today too. From this morning’s Alert DC Utility Outage email:

PEPCO reports scattered outages for the District, in locations of upper Northwest and some parts of Northeast. PEPCO stated that 3,824 customers are affected and the problem could possibly be a tripped feeder. PEPCO units are working on the problem now. EMA will continue to monitor.

That would be 3,824 now sweltering Internet-less readers without their favorite websites, Metroblogging DC and Gridskipper.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Yes, you, little brown one. It is so nice to see you back in Metrorail stations, small, squat, and silent. You do what you do without protest.

You take in my refuse, my trash, my waste without emotion, without care. And so you should.

WMATA spent $800,000 on buying you and your friends, bomb-proof trash cans that can hold my used Express or an express bomb.

Wait, my used Express should go in your friend, the newspaper recycle bin, the one exiled outside the station proper.

Oh well, do not fret, do not feel lonely. I still like you, I still use you. My little trashy friend.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Back in February and March, I touched on the battle over Source Theater’s future, and the future of arts development in my rapidly revitalizing ‘hood. Now it appears that the outcry of locals and the theater community over the possibility of a billiards bar in that spot has borne real fruit. As detailed by the Post today, the building will be bought by the Cultural Development Organization (CuDC) for development into a performing arts space.

Being the skeptic that I am, I was a little surprised that art won over pool cues, and more than a little, ah, skeptical over the potential for success, especially given the legacy of debts and accusations of mismanagement that have dogged the Source, a once successful and nationally known small theater that was the proving ground for several Washington theater professionals.

But it’s still an exciting idea to me, adding an arts venue to one of the more interesting blocks in town. As I’ve said before, I want it all for my 14th Street – shops, bars, restaurants, art galleries, theaters, concert halls – more more
more! One only has to look at Studio’s impact on Logan Circle’s revitalization to see what a successful “art fuels development” plan can do.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs Continue reading →

We here at Metroblogging DC know its hot outside. We see the heat waves coming off the street even from our high-up offices. We heed the Code Red’s from the Weather Service and dream about winter.

And we hear you bitching about the heat. We can hear you moaning now, maybe even going so far as to utter, “It’s hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement.” So we did a little test, a little mid-day experience to record just how hot it is really.

Watch, learn, enjoy, just how hot it is today:

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

You’ve seen his stunning photography in the Metroblogging DC Flickr Group, and we often use his photos in our stories, but do you know the story behind the man behind the photos? Recently, I interviewed the amazing maxedaperture, aka Max C, about his photography, which on a hot day like today, is so apropos.

Surprisingly, Max just recently picked up photography as a hobby in the last year and a half. A natural? Maybe. Dedicated? That’s for sure. To quote him:

What draws me to photography is that it’s a combination of art and technology. The artist in me likes to find the best composition of a shot as well as what I think would make for an interesting photo, while the geek in me likes to say, “I should probably shoot this at f/2 or bump up the ISO since it’s dark and I need a faster shutter speed.” As time goes on, both of those aspects are becoming more and more second nature to me.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs Continue reading →

So I’m reading the WashPost article about Aaron J. Burroughs, a junior varsity assistant coach at Bowie High School who is accused of pimping out a 15 year old girl. And while I am horrified at his actions with the minor, he apparently was selling her since September, I am amazed at the man’s industry.

Let’s take a look at Mr. Burroughs jobs:

• He’s most well known as a junior varsity assistant coach at Bowie High School, a time consuming if not so lucrative occupation. This is also were he may have met the girl he’s accused of prostituting in the District.
• He’s also a Metrobus driver, and even got busy with the girl in the Bladensburg Metrobus yard
• He stands accused of being a pimp, selling the girl for sex at $150 a tryst out of the Budget Inn on New York Ave NE
• And last but not least, to quote the Post: “He also admitted to having two pounds of marijuana in his vehicle, saying he supplemented his income by selling the drug”

“Supplemented his income”?? That man has four job! He would make the Hedleys of In Living Color proud of his work ethic if not his chosen professions. Me, I’m just surprised it took all four jobs to support his home in Crofton and his bus yard sex Range Rover.

There’s gotta be more uses of his money, he’s sure not spending it on his defense. Not only did he admit to most of the child sexual abuse charges, he’s being represented by the Public Defender.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

So I’m driving through Montgomery County today to deal with a family crisis, when I decide I need to change lanes. I signal, check my mirrors, glance over my shoulder, and start to move. Suddenly, I have to jump back into my lane because there’s a car right where I’m trying to merge to.

It’s a MoCo cop, and he’s giving me the look of death. Hey look, don’t hang out in my blind spot when you see me signaling and we won’t have these problems.

I’m not sure if I’m relieved that he didn’t pull me over or appalled at the stunning lack of professionalism when he flipped me the bird as I pulled in behind him.

Fuck you too, asshole.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Well, it’s August, Congress is out of session and life is slowing down to a heat-induced crawl. How about doing something a bit unique with your time? Come join Metroblogging DC! We’re accepting applications all month starting today and running through the 31st. While the position doesn’t pay, it does come with the occasional beer, concert ticket or cool invite. We only ask that applicants be willing to post 12 posts a month (roughly 3 per week) for us here at Metroblogging DC.

If you are interested, please apply here and we’ll be in touch. Or, feel free to email tom at metroblogging dot usual TLD for businesses.

Come! Join our Merry Band!

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Are you headed to the Dupont Circle Metro Station this evening? If so, I bet you’ll not want to do my usual “Free Stairmaster Challenge” and climb the 155 steps of the Q Street North Exit at max speed.

No, you’ll want to relax and stay cool as you’re taken to the surface.

Um, good luck with that. It seems that one escalator is unavailable there and both mezzanine to platform elevators are unavailable for an extended capital improvement project.

Before you start to bitch, guess what? Metrorail will be launching Operation H2O this afternoon and giving out 7,000 bottles of water from 2pm until 7pm or they run out.

That should be enough to keep you cool, apparently only 4,620 passengers exit the Dupont Circle Q Street side on average.

Next, give love to Metro Interim General Manager Dan Tangherlini who says:

“Distributing water to passengers after they climb up our escalators is our way of saying thank you to our loyal customers, and to also thank them for their patience while we make these repairs.”

Dan, you got our love and our thirst.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs