Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
Vegetate to Close at the End of the Month
D.C. Police Seek Suspect in Series of Bank Robberies
Suspect in 9-Year-Old's Murder Found Dead in D.C. Jail
Wizards Owner Abe Pollin Dies at 85
Welcome back to work, Washington. We know many of our regular readers are off celebrating Independence Day already, taking vacation time for a few days to make this upcoming middle-of-the-week holiday less of an inconvenience. For those of you still at your desks, we salute your dedication to the American work ethic. For those of you who'll be heading to the airport some time this week, we were going to beg to be stuffed in your suitcases, but now we're not so sure. Washington's three area airports began randomly inspecting vehicles yesterday after two men drove a jeep containing propane gas into the entrance of the main terminal at Scotland's Glasgow Airport.
Metro's Look Set to Change in the Fall: Metro General Manager John Catoe's plan to replace Metro's carpeting with vinyl floors, change station lighting schemes and expand advertising on rail cars and in stations will be put into effect in the fall, when riders reportedly will first begin to notice the transition. Catoe says he's aware some of the changes will be controversial, says he wants to focus the agency's limited resources toward moving people to and from work and away from some of its more costly features.
D.C. Residents Can Block Access to Credit Info: A new law took effect Sunday that is aimed at preventing identity theft allows District of Columbia residents to place a security freeze on their reports. For consumers who use that option, loan agencies must get their explicit permission before running checks on them. D.C. police say there has been a 52 percent increase in reported cases of identity theft this year.
Briefly Noted: Schools Chancellor nominee Michelle Rhee goes before the D.C. Council for confirmation today ... Southeast woman dead from stray bullet ... Rockville train death investigated as suicide ... Area's first flex-fuel station opens in Georgetown ... Stray backpack shuts down Georgetown over weekend.
Photo by ellievanhoutte
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That flex-fuel gas station is in Glover Park...I don't understand why places that are clearly in Glover Park (Wisconsin & Calvert, primarily) are regularly said to be in Georgetown. It's not even the same ward, or the same zone for parking. People of Glover Park, assert your claim to Whole Foods, Sushi-Ko, and flex fuel!
Oh well, at least it's not Burleith- I'm sure they understand the it's-not-Georgetown complaint.
me utilizing a public transportation service with vinyl flooring? NEVER i say! guess that means i'll have to start having to 'copter in to work everyday again...
amen, dorktopia! you've hit on one of my pet peeves of DC reporting. it's especially annoying when they say "live from northwest". like that's a small, uniform place or something.
IMGoph and dorktopia: Now you know how people in the other 26 neighborhoods on DC's East Bank feel when their area is called "Anacostia."
Glover Park and Burleith are called "Georgetown" by real estate salesmen who think this adds value to properties there and are unaware that Georgetown proper has a higher incidence of crime.
Why are guest comments faded to light gray? And you can hide them? This is discrimination against anonymous comments!
you're right, Mike. i called Mike Grass out on that in the express once, and now they're great with neighborhood names. and they even do some meta-type stories on that once in a while too.
I believe that Chevron is actually called "Georgetown Chevron". So don't blame the newsmen or real estate agents.
And wrt Glover Park pride, the first step is to get them to agree on how it's pronounced. It's supposed to rhyme with lover not clover (this is according to the daughter of the man who the neighborhood was named after).
I was wondering what the correct pronunciation of "Glover" is...the way the metro bus announcement things say it is rhyming with "clover" but I don't necessarily trust them.
Reid,
You mean like Danny Glover...right.
That's got to suck for whoever absent-mindedly left their backpack to get exploded.
Vinyl floors I'm okay with (I think - we'll see how they implement them). My beef with the red lights in the Metro is that the contrast between the regular and the blinking light levels isn't terribly high - it's not as noticeable as the original lights (when they're working properly). And those brighter overhead lights in the Foggy Bottom station are just hideous - who wants to feel like they're walking into a bar at sidewalk sale time?
Thumbs down on the grey, smaller font for guest comments. Having the option to hide them is one thing, but to obviously devalue them even when people have chosen to see them is insulting, especially to those who have taken time to comment. Way to unnecessarily pressure people to register . . .
I'm in favor of the new approach to guest comments. Anyone who wants access to full commenting can do so within five minutes, assuming they set up an ad hoc Yahoo! or Hotmail account to receive the registration email, and in even less time if they just use an existing address. Reminds me a bit of the Milton strategy from "Office Space" -- forced into a smaller and smaller workspace until he cracks. So, in this case, "burn the building down" equals "register for a commenting account." It totally works!
just as i will never give in to sitting in a vinyl-filled train (i'm taking my copter into work from now on, remember?), i will never (NEVAH i say) register with DCist just to have a larger, black font for my comments.
red lights are a bad idea. I saw them recently and kept trying to ascribe some meaning to them. they're definitely less noticeable.
as for the guest comment font, they all look the same to me. am I missing something?
Yes RJ, the glover in Glover park rhymes with the glover in Danny Glover.
So is the next step to make guest posts white text on a white background?
But nobody who's actually from Glover Park pronounces it that way.
Guest #18-
The people who live on Houston Street in NYC pronounce it HOW-ston. Living somewhere doesn't make you immune from being insufferably wrong about how the place name is pronounced.
guest 19 -- Is that an across-the-board statement? I don't think people living in Paris or Wien or Köln or any number of other cities whose names we actually pronounce incorrectly (vs. your very subjective idea of what is correct or not) would appreciate that sentiment.
You mean it's not HOW-ston? Then what is it? I've always been told HYOO-ston is wrong.
And speaking of New York, if we're losing the carpet in favor of durable vinyl floors here, does that mean I can finally take my coffee on Metro in the mornings? Sometimes I take the bus instead of Metrorail just so I don't get dirty looks.
guest 21 -- I believe it's just as illegal to eat or drink on a Metrobus as it is the Metrorail (not that they usually enforce it, as long as you're not spilling it all over the place). And no, vinyl floors wouldn't change that, it would just make it easier to clean up the mess if it spills.
Guest #19 - Making smug comments about local's "mistaken" pronunciation does not make you right. NYC residents pronounce Houston Street perfectly correctly despite your desire to claim otherwise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Street_%28Manhattan%29#Pronunciation
"...it would just make it easier to clean up the mess if it spills."
It'd probably make the floor more slippery too, regardless of whatever...liquid... gets spilled on it. Ick.
Guest #22-
Your link doesn't exactly prove your point... It basically says that in addition to being unable to correctly pronounce the English sound "hou", New Yorkers aren't capable of spelling correctly, either. If the street's named after William Houstoun, why did they spell it "Houston?" You know, all those fancy extra letters change how things are pronounced...
For the record:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/02/AR2005100200819.html
And I suspect it's not a "mispelling" that led to NYC spelling it Houston instead of Houstoun. I imagine the reason they dropped the U was similar to the reason we dropped the U in color. It's actually surprising to read back about how we frequently made wholesale changes to American English spelling throughout the years (mostly to simplify). It's why we live along the Potomac and not the Potowmack.
Guset #25 -
The misspelling of Houstoun to Houston in no way changes the pronunciation of the first syllable. It is pronounced exactly the way any other word with an "ous" in the first syllable is pronounced; mouse, house, louse, joust, etc.