Not everyone knows D.C. well; it's not shocking. People come and go, they move here for work and go about their day and don't really think about the city. Sometimes, however, you just wonder what the hell is going on in their brains.
While we wait for the results of this full week of D.C. Council budget negotiations, a process that's at least partly colored by the most recent Marion Barry scandals, we thought it might be good for all of us to take a step back from complaining about our city's ineffectual political system ... and laugh about someone else's. DCist tech guru Tom Lee recently circulated these videos, compiled from the open public comment periods at sessions of the Santa Cruz City Council and the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in Santa Cruz, Calif., and we just can't stop watching them. Every community has its crosses to bear in the form of weirdos and busybodies who like to shove their way into local politics, but Santa Cruz appears to have more than its fair share. We hasten to add that the first 25 seconds or so of the audio portion of this video is NSFW.
Our new occasional series, "Secret History", features DCist contributor Brandon Gentry profiling classic D.C. rock albums as a way of looking back at the District's contributions to music over time. To start the series, he takes a look back at the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I (DeSoto, 1999).
DCist went to the official launch of Google Moon and geeked out over astronauts while celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.
What you're looking at above is a video of "what a train controller sees when a train is operating through a circuit that's been turned off for maintenance," according to WTOP. Now, perhaps it's just me, but: isn't it indicative of the current state of Metro that their train monitoring system is apparently running off an old Atari 2600? Can WMATA operators get Pitfall on that thing after the system closes for the night?
>> Start making those reservations: the Going Out Gurus got the tip that the next D.C. Restuarant Week will be August 24 to 30. The not-yet-updated RW site is here.
The Washington Post reports a groundbreaking revelation today: some residents of the U Street corridor are growing weary of the late night noise. According to the 2007 D.C. Economic Partnership report, the area houses more than 26,000 renters and owners, and the WaPo asks if a better live/play balance can be found in the neighborhood.
We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on DCist.
After skipping last week (apologies, readers) due to a trip and long flights, this week's Overheard is jam packed with extra overhearingness, at no extra cost! What a deal!
ESPN -- bastion of unbiased, scientific polling that it is -- offered this incredibly positive query last night to Sportscenter viewers: "If you had to pick, which home team's game would you be most likely to attend?" Of course, what they meant to say was, "Look, let's say you end up in Hell, and your infinite punishment is that you're forced to attend home games for one the worst professional franchises in each of the four major sports for all eternity: which one do you pick?" A majority of the country opted to go with the lowly Detroit Lions, because, you know, WOO FOOTBALL and all -- but look at us, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia! We're keeping it real with the Nats, the only team aside from the Lions to win a geographical area. (California, being far too cool to be associated with any of these loser squads, opted to go with the "None" option. Man, Kings fans in the state capital must be feeling great right about now.)
The Washington Project for the Arts held a synchronized swimming showcase and competition, dubbed WPA SynchroSwim, at the Capitol Skyline Hotel pool on Sunday, and DCist photographer Meaghan Gay stopped by to take in the action.
Any fan of the space program should recognize quite a few faces roaming around D.C. this week. Last night, the biggest gathering of Apollo astronauts in years arrived at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum for the annual John H. Glenn Lecture featuring the Apollo 11 crew, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, along with NASA's first Flight Director, Chris Kraft, and of course, astronaut and Senator John Glenn himself. The audience was filled with other Apollo astronauts, as well as the STS-125 crew that flew the space shuttle Atlantis to repair the Hubble Telescope in May.
Yes, the D.C. Real World cast meandered its way to RFK Stadium on Saturday night for United's 3-1 win. DCist was there to report on the match, but we also managed to document the reality show's entrance into the stadium. We were surprised when the castmembers were seated in the Barra Brava section of the stadium, certainly the most difficult for a camera crew to shoot in, what with the constant bouncing and all. Highlights of the evening included United supporters booing castmembers for reading chants off a piece of paper (obviously, singing and shouting "D.C. United" or "United" in rhythm is a very difficult thing to commit to memory), and Barra members arguing whether the filming was an annoying distraction from the game or just good PR for the team. The question now: will The Real World acknowledge D.C.'s baseball futility with a trip to Nationals Park?
Appropriate, not appropriate, legal, not legal; it seems like everyone is all atwitter about the proposal to christen the newly renovated park at 14th and Girard Streets NW as "Barack Hussein Obama Park". All the usual suspects -- Jim Graham, Gary Imhoff, neighborhood leaders, the Columbia Heights listserv, and so forth -- are involved, in what is surely a fantastic story to share with your out-of-town friends if you feel like showing off just how silly local politics can get around here.
We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on DCist.
>> Mayor Fenty on today's ribbon cutting at Park Place in Petworth, "economic development on Georgia Avenue ha[s] finally arrived.” [Prince of Petworth]
A Peeps store at National Harbor sounded pretty absurd on its face. What does a Peeps store do once Easter is over and the Post's uploaded its last Peeps Show image?
Written by DCist contributor Andrew Helms
Phillyist nominated the administrators of the suburban pool club that allegedly kicked out a number of urban youth on basis of their race as its assholes of the week.
If you consider yourself a Nationals devotee -- or even if you just find constant amusement in the walking joke that the team has become -- this column by Mike Wise in today's Post is a must-read: in it, Wise makes the case that former manager Frank Robinson got an incredibly raw deal when he was forced out at the end of the 2006 season.
We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on DCist.
There's a lot of dumb people out there -- you don't need me to tell you that. D.C. has a lot of smarties, but we can't all be people with big brains. Sometimes, however, you wonder if people think about what they're saying.
Capitol Hill's Lincoln Park was the first public space named in honor of President Lincoln, in 1867. A few years later, a statue commemorating the emancipation of American slaves was placed in the park, with none other than Frederick Douglass speaking at the unveiling. Thirty-five years ago the orientation of the statue -- originally toward the U.S. Capitol -- was reversed, so that Lincoln now faces the more recently installed statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, which was officially unveiled on July 10, Bethune's birthday, in 1974.
Friends may think Nakia Sanford's job as a professional basketball player is all play and no work, but the WNBA veteran knows better.
Most of the excitement, such as it was, about last night's poorly-attended match between the Washington Kastles and St. Louis Aces vanished when the main attraction, former star Anna Kournikova, was sidelined by a wrist injury. Or, at least, that would be true if the WTT was really about tennis, which it is not. Party tennis is right: the tour is obviously more entertainment than sport, focused on giving away T-shirts and Chipotle gift certificates and other such fun. Fans looking for an authentic tennis experience are advised, as always, to wait until next month's Legg Mason Classic.
The Washington Kastles, the local World Team Tennis franchise, played their 2009 home opener last night. Sadly, their 23-16 loss to the 1-2 Philadelphia Freedoms (whose star player Venus Williams was the big draw of the evening), pushed their record back to 0-3 overall. But World Team Tennis is not entirely about what's going on on the court or trivial things like win-loss records. In fact, we'd like to dub World Team Tennis as something more appropriate. Moving forward, we'll call it what it is: Party Tennis.
Some happy news from the part of Washington that is so Catholic it used to be called Little Rome. With the exception of papal visits to Washington, the concerns of the American Federal City and the Eternal City do not overlap all that often, but one long-time Washingtonian is about to assume the reigns of a powerful curial office in Rome. Fr. J. Augustine Di Noia, a Dominican priest and influential theologian, has been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI as Secretary of the Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.
Yesterday, we mentioned in the Morning Roundup that our DCist_Updates Twitter feed is officially one year old this week. We're not exactly gunning for Ashton Kutcher-like numbers here, but we are pleased to note that just today we reached 5,000 followers. Thanks so much to all of you who already follow and retweet us on a regular basis! For those of you who don't yet, know that DCist doesn't blast every post we write onto our Twitter feed. Instead, we try to keep you updated when breaking news hits or when especially interesting or popular posts go up (you don't want to miss Overheard in D.C., do you?). Twitter accounts are free, and you can follow DCist_Updates here.
A Capitol Hill institution, Trover Books, announced yesterday that it will be shutting its doors. Hill residents of the long-term and less permanent kind have long relied on the shop at 221 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, for political books, congressional directories, non-Washington newspapers, and candy and cigars. Joe and Anne Shuman founded their family store in 1958, passing the business on to their three sons. One of them, Andy Shuman, told DCist today that "business has been bad the last couple years and getting steadily worse," a decline that accelerated "as the economy has fallen apart." During a visit to the shop this morning, employees pointed to the postman who came in to deliver the mail: he also had some Amazon packages under his arm.
In case you didn't believe us when we said yesterday that Alexander Ovechkin was becoming "the guy" in the Washington sports scene, consider this: President Obama had high praise for the Caps star in a speech he delivered at Moscow's New Economic School this morning.
D.C. is just too real for the Real World.
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention this before Artomatic closes: our arts and managing editor Heather Goss took a quick photo of the above wall by Sarah Bever, which prominently features a few select members of the DCist commentariat.
It's the Fourth of July and news stories on the ground are about as light as Union Jack flags. Granted, Sarah Palin left folks with a real humdinger to consider over the beer cooler this weekend, considerably upping the ante in the absurd-Republican-governor-presser sweepstakes. Switching from self congratulation by way of sports analogy to bitter renunciations of her enemies, she sounded downright Nixonesque, as one friend observed.
251 comments later, and it appears as if closure in the case of Molly is getting closer. Molly's owners obtained surveillance photos from the Cleveland Park Petco, depicting a woman with the missing Vizsla, who was taken from in front of the Whole Foods at 14th and P on Monday night. According to Craigslist updates, Molly was seen at the pet supply store at 3505 Connecticut Avenue "[o]ne time on (6/29) Monday evening at 9pm and again this evening at 5pm." Additionally, the manager of the store "remembers the woman because she pissed her off and that she definitely appears to be a bit crazy....Petco has been authorized to hold onto Molly the next time they show up!!!" If you believe that you've seen Molly around Cleveland Park, her owners ask that you email them to take a look at the surveillance photos to see if you know the woman. [Ed. note: Many thanks to one of Molly's owners, who clarified via email that no one is sure whether the woman who was with Molly at Petco was her abductor; instead, she is simply the last person the dog has been seen with.]
Bartenders have an interesting job -- it's one of the few jobs where it's basically accepted to be grumpy sometimes (or all the time, at some bars). People have to wait for them, because they want their booze. They're frequently opinionated. Sometimes, they have a point.
We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on DCist.
In order to get a better idea of "what it's like to be at the game," the Post's online sports department is testing out a Nationals Park Twitter mashup during this weekend's home series against the Braves. If you want to participate, you can hashtag your tweets from the game with #natswp and #[section number] -- now, your report that "the guy next to me is really scarfing those nachos, gross #natswp #404" can be spread even farther around the interwebs! It's an interesting idea, to be sure, but the commenters on the Nationals Journal post which announced the project offer up some legitimate questions, ones this writer was also thinking about. What if the system was overloaded with rival tweets or notes from people who aren't even at the ballpark? How many people in attendance even know what Twitter is or how to use it? What about the fact that we're willing to bet that less than 140 characters is hardly enough to truly describe the hardball ineptitude that could be on display? Finally: is there really anything to gain from this? We'll see -- until the Post makes a decision to go live with the mashup on a consistent basis or not, you can check out the aggregate here.
>> And I, for one, welcome our new Real World overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted DCist blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to be spoken about carelessly in their camera-laden confession caves.
A tipster just texted that the D.C. Real World cast appears to be arriving as we speak -- she reports seeing a blonde girl with a suitcase walking through Dupont Circle, looking clueless and being trailed by a camera crew. Of course, there have been apparent dry-runs previously, but this one could be the real deal, and the RealWorldDCNewz Twitter feed reports similar sightings. Yikes?
Last August, we wrote about Marissa, a 19-month-old baby girl living in Annandale, Virginia, who was diagnosed at two months with a rare pediatric condition called Infantile Spasms (IS). IS is a type of epilepsy experienced in infancy that causes clusters of seizures and can lead to development problems. Marissa's father, Mike, who spearheaded a global online effort for IS awareness, recently e-mailed us with the sad news that Marissa has "taken a turn for the worse." Mike wrote, "She was recently hospitalized, and we discovered that she had constant seizure activity in her brain. 24/7. Non-stop." According to Mike, Marissa has been placed on a treatment that costs around $5,000 per day, per shot. The folks over at deviantART, an online community for artists, have announced the Fairfax Art Drive, in which artists can donate a portion of their commissions to Marissa and her family. A list of commissions can be found here. You can find more information about Marissa and her bunny, Fairfax, at Marissa's Bunny.
Check out local Singer/Songwriter Todd Wright's new project 40x40. He's writing recording and relea
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