“Hey Tiff, your assignment today, ” my boss said to me this morning, “is to use ‘Alfonso Soriano’ and ‘punk-ass bitch’ in the same sentence as many times as possible.”

“What happened?” my coworker asked. So we told him.

The Nationals want Soriano to play left field instead of second base, his usual position. So at an exhibition game, Soriano SITS ON HIS BITCH ASS and leaves left field empty, just to make a point. Because he’s a punk-ass bitch.

Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone, since he started whining before he even reported to Spring Training. Because he’s a punk-ass bitch.

And you know, it wasn’t the wisest move on the part of the Nats to bring in NINE second basemen, because then you have to move people away from their preferred positions, but you know, maybe the other 8 second basement aren’t punk-ass bitches.

Now, you know I generally leave the sportswriting here at Metroblogging DC to Tom, William, and occasionally even Desert Island Boy. But Alfonso Soriano’s punk-ass bitch behavior gets a rise out of even me, casual baseball fan that I am. Just as entertaining as my assignment for the day is the Post’s take on it, in which the Style section asks HR consultants for advice on how the Nationals and the punk-ass bitch can reach agreement.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

In a move that shocked precisely no one, the National Weather Service rescinded the early Winter Storm Warning when it turned out that their meteorologists were yet again absolutely, completely wrong about the storm that was coming into DC today. Turns out we might just get a wee bit of slush and a few flurries.

Oops. Their bad.

No word on whether or not Topper Shutt and his cabal of forecasters are behind this revocation.

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There was near-riot on the utility commission last week when BGE tried to jack up rates 72% for their customers this summer. Maryland State Curmudgeon, er, Controller, William Schaefer had kittens at the hearing, insinuating that perhaps the utility commissioners were in bed with the power companies, causing a lot of people to react as if they’d been slapped in public, in what might be my favorite public embarrassment campaign in recent history. But BGE has caved on their rates, promising lower increases for this summer’s customers though the final total increase isn’t yet available.

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Friend of Metroblogging DC Ben Domenech has started a new blog for the Washington Post called “Red America“, hoping to counter some of the accusations of bias on the part of Dan Froomkin’s “White House Briefing” which has been accused of severe Left bias by, well, anyone with eyes.

Anyhow, we wish Ben the best of luck with his new blog, and we’re hoping he’ll sneak us an invite to all the cool Post parties and happy hours.

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Bad: trying to sell four day old cupcakes at new pastry prices

Worse: trying to sell GREEN four day old bagels at new pastry prices. I guess the upside is that if they’re still trying to sell them a week from now they won’t have changed color.

I will never buy baked goods there again.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

With the Dominican Republic out of the World Baseball Classic, Alfonso Soriano (who lost his starting spot on the DR’s roster when they realized he can’t actually hit) came back to the Nats camp today, where he promptly refused to take the outfield position he was assigned by Manager Frank Robinson. The Nats are threatening something that I’ve literally not heard of in the 18 years that I’ve been following baseball: putting him on the Disqualified List.

I wasn’t even aware there was a Disqualified List, but essentially, it’s a bunch of the players who are too stupid and/or stuck up to follow the club’s instructions with regard to playing every day in accordance with their contracts. Getting put on this list makes your contract null and void and it’s unlikely that you’ll see even dollar one, according to the Collective Bargaining Agreement that they Players Union has with Major League Baseball.

Let’s see. $10,000,000 to play in Left Field instead of at Second… Or $0 to watch from home and maybe, if you’re lucky, get a contract with a club next season. Well, $0 + local cable service, or a bar tab somewhere in town. I dunno about you, but I’d take league minimum to play the outfield at RFK, even if it meant taking a bit of a pride hit, myself.

So, Mr. Bowden…we traded our leadoff hitter, a bench outfielder, and a pitching prospect to get this Bozo? How’s that supposed to work out?

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With venerable football commish Paul Tagliabue hanging it up after 16 years on the job, everyone’s wondering, “Who’s gonna fill Tags’ shoes?”

The best rumor we’ve heard yet: DC transplant and Secretary of State Condi Rice.

Says AOL Black Voices Columnist Roy Johnson:

Four years ago, she told The New York Times she’d definitely be interested in the gig, but “not before Paul Tagliabue is ready to step down. I want to say that for the record.”

Last year she told Jonathan Karl of ABC News: “I’m going to try to be a good Secretary of State and see if I can do this job well, and then we’ll see if the NFL is open.”

Besides, this way we can take over NFL Europe in time for the new season!

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Those wacky MOCs (Members of Congress to you) may be gone on recess this week (how quaint that they call it that, so kindergarten of them), but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a circus still in town.

Today at 1pm you can see actual elephants trudging along the “Pachyderm Parade” on the Hill, disembarking from a special circus train at Union Station and heading up to the DC Armory as part of the Ringling Brothers sojourn there this week, and then next week at MCI-I-mean-Verizon Center.

Now I was seriously traumatized as a child at the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus (“Hey, that isn’t a real unicorn! It’s a goat! Whaaaaaa!!!!”) but if you are fine with the spectacle of real elephants on the Hill instead of the usual kind, head on over.

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There’s a showdown coming between WMATA and Tourmobile over the Mall. The DC Circulator is expanding to include a route along Independence and Constitution along the Mall and stopping at each of the Museums as well as the National Gallery buildings. Each ride will cost only a dollar and service will start tomorrow, just in time for peak tourist season. But there’s a problem here. The District has given exclusive license for transit along the Mall to Tourmobile, who are currently raping the public for $20/day for transit around the monument, making boatloads of cash off the tourist industry.

Expect some serious lawsuit action to ensue. Me, I’m on the side of the free market, and removing the exclusive agreement with Tourmobile.

Bring on the new Circulator!

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Though my brackets are a complete and total mess, what a great mess it is. Georgetown and George Mason are into the Sweet Sixteen, upsetting Ohio State and UNC in the round of 32. Georgetown absolutely manhandled the Buckeyes today and I’m betting M Street is a bit of a mess with all kinds of people out and about. GMU’s game was a bit closer, but the upsets of the 2 and 3 seeds is a huge deal.

Way to go, GMU and Georgetown!

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Some folks in this town live the Pennsylvania Ave life, going between the Capitol and the White House and Foggy Bottom beyond. Some folks like and die on Wisconsin Ave between Georgetown and Bethesda. Me, I live and die on Route 7.

All six years that I’ve lived in the DC area, I’ve had this peculiar relationship with Route 7 in Northern Virginia. It’s four lanes, and it stretches from the Washington Masonic Memorial all the way out to Leesburg, where it’s called the Leesburg Pike and all the names in between. On that road is my Church, my Target, my dry cleaners, my Starbucks, my gas stations…the list goes on.

But I hate driving that road. There’s traffic up the ying-yang, but I can’t avoid it! If I want Elevation Burger, there’s no way around except the beltway. Heading to Church on Sunday? No way round. There’s just too much that lies along that critical corridor and so I sit there and suffer in my car, tuning in and tuning out. There must be a better way.

It strikes me, though, that we all have this bizarre dysfunctional agreement with our streets. With 14th St into the District. Mass Ave. Connecticut. 16th Street. They are the center of our lives, and yet we loathe them so. How’s that supposed to work?

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

On Friday, my car and I were involved in a little, er, “incident” with Arlington County. I learned a number of lessons during the odyssey I undertook in trying to straighten it out, and I thought I might share them with you.

Between Courthouse Metro and Virginia Square, there is only one Chevy Chase Bank. Only one, at the Virginia Square station. There are, however, FOUR IRISH BARS. And for it being lunchtime on St. Patrick’s Day, none of them looked particularly busy. Could it be that the Irish Bar Market in Arlington has finally been saturated?

WMATA actually has a cool Lost-and-Found ticketing system where you can input descriptive information about the item you lost, the day you lost it, and where, and they’ll check incoming items against the database for 30 days. Neat! The problem is, it takes several days for items to reach the Lost and Found office, which is in Silver Spring, and only open odd hours. And if you’re like me and lose your keys, you’re better off just going there, because no matter how much detail you give about your keys, they think all keyrings are the same. (Mine contains keys to my place, Tom’s place, my office, my car… I’m screwed.)

Arlington County employees are actually pretty friendly and helpful and efficient. DMV employees, on the other hand….

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Constantly passing all these historical locations is one of the things that’s odd about living here to this Miami boy. On a regular basis I drive up and down route 28 near Dulles airport and pass signs for civil war battlefields. A short drive south of my office is the location of the first land battle of the war. That feels a little odd, but there’s always history to go see if you’re willing to travel a bit. The truly odd feeling is getting halfway across the street in Clarendon on the way to a burrito and coming across a plaque about the Arlington Line. While I am standing under a streetlight and waiting for the DON’T WALK sign to fade, I am where about a thousand soldiers and forty canon waited for someone to shoot at two hundred and fifty years ago.

Compare that to spending most of your childhood in a house built on land that was swamp when Kennedy was assassinated and learning to drive on roads that weren’t planned yet when Nixon resigned. Comedian Eddie Izzard does a routine mocking Miamians for going on about restoring all the Art Deco to how it looked “over fifty years ago!” In our defense, though, before Henry Flagler took an interest in the Miami area in the 1890s there were less than 1,000 people in the area. Of course we were impressed by buildings half that old. We don’t get signs about what the citizenry were doing in that location two hundred years ago. We didn’t have citizens there two hundred years ago.

I like it up here, where the history comes from.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

The forsythia is in full bloom at 11th Street and Vermont Avenue.
What a happy color!
This is my annual signal to attack the hydrangea and the roses with my trusty pruning shears, in anticipation of a glorious spring.
Three days til it officially begins…

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For three years the selection of food at Pentagon Row has been pretty static with only a few exceptions. One seems to be cursed exclusively by my darling girlfriend and I – every time we go they change hands within a few months. Our of courtesy we’ve stayed clear for a while now. The other is the location that Wolfgang Puck Express moved into. They hung on a little longer but now they’re out and a new tapas restaurant is on the way.

It’s a good thing too. Till Tapeo opens we’re going to be limited to La Tasca, Jaleo, Cilantro, Jaleo, Oyamel, Jaleo and Las Tapas. Or the the non-Spanish tapas restaurants choices….

Okay, “limited” is the wrong word…

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I’ve come to really hate flying since 9/11. Take your shoes off. Take your jacket off. Take your laptop out. Take your camera out. Take your belt off. Your watch, too. Cellphone out of the pocket. Now walk through the metal detector…*beep*

A shout. Male Assist, Please!

The gang at Dulles are my least favorite, though BWI aren’t far behind. And of course, all of them aren’t protecting us for a damn. That’s right, they went 0 for 21 in detecting bomb-making materials as they passed through checkpoints. Way to go, TSA.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Sure, he may like to ogle pretty girls, and he may be all of 84 years old, but don’t let anyone tell you that William Schaefer isn’t still doing his job. Today, he took on Governor Ehrlich and the Utility Commission over electrical rates. Schaefer dripped with sarcasm in referring to the utility board and all but publicly accused the governor of getting in bed with the power companies as rates for Baltimore may go up by 72% this summer. Yikes!

Better yet? He’s running for re-election this fall. Awesome.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day!

Being of Danish-Italian descent, perhaps I can hardly lay claim to the wearing of the green (except the Vikings did actually found Dublin – oops, fighting words!). Then again, I am married to an Irish-American and I love Irish stout with a passion. So whatever, I have more cause than a scourge of green beer drinking hoopleheads.

Fritz Hahn has a great run-down of the events at area pubs if you are looking for ideas to celebrate. Though the wildest party spots aren’t always public – I suffered through four St. Patrick’s Days as a student at Cathaholic, I mean, Catholic University, where drinking at dawn was de rigeur (hearing girls vomiting in your dorm bathroom at 8am – priceless!). I pity sleepy Brookland…

So two bits of advice – one, don’t drink the aforementioned green beer. It has nothing to do with being Irish. A pox upon it. And two, if you’re going to abbreviate, it’s “St. Paddy’s Day,” not “St. Patty’s Day.” The saint, though blessed, was still a man.

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Good: A sunny day in March.

Better: An excuse to drive out an empty 66 in the middle of the day, iPod blasting.

Best: It’s warm enough to open the sunroof.

This was the scene Tuesday as I rushed out to Tyson’s for a client lunch. Today? 20 degrees colder. WTF?

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Now, I realize that Daily Candy is just trying to help out one of their sponsors, but are we as bad as the author there suggests? “Folks in these parts just don’t seem to take the same pride in their neighborhoods as those in other towns.”

Sure, we’re no Chicago or New York in terms of our love for neighborhoods and names, and the District doesn’t officially recognize the names of the neighborhoods here, but I’d say there’s some serious love for the neighborhood in DC. Jenn even feels bad she can’t get into the ANC meeting!

What say you readers? Are we as neighborhood apathetic as Daily Candy says? If you’re feeling like you want to represent, though, check out DistrictTees or Neighborhoodies.com.

This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs