While playing softball down by the FDR memorial this evening, my team was a little shocked when we saw a park policeman not only issue a ticket to an illegally parked beemer, but bring in a tow truck. It wasn't until the tow truck had scraped it's bed underneath the beemer that a spandex-clad DC Council Member Vincent Gray came sauntering over to talk the cop out of taking his car away.

When someone on our softball team started taking pictures of the cops talking with Vincent Gray, one of the officers was angry. He walked over to us and demanded that I open our cooler, which was closed. Since there were empty beer cans inside, he wrote me a ticket for an open container. But I was not holding an open container, and I told him the cooler was not mine. There were several other softball teams nearby also drinking, but he only bothered us because one of our teammates took pictures of them letting Councilman Gray off the hook.

Another cop later told me that the officer who gave me the ticket was not allowed to order me to open the cooler. I wish I had known that at the time!

This is just one anonymous person's version of events, of course. Chairman Gray's communications director, Denise Reed, said that what happened was the car was quickly removed from the tow truck after Gray spoke to the officer, because it had originally been loaded on to the truck only due to "an error on the part of the U.S. Park Police." A spokesperson for the U.S. Park Police declined to comment on whether that was true or not, explaining that towing cars is such a small, routine part of what the Park Police does that it wasn't worth commenting on.

UPDATE: It's worth noting, as one commenter did, that the D.C. council did in fact vote to exempt itself from all parking tickets in 2002.

Photo by dctreehugger, via the DCist Tip line

There's been all kinds of crazy stuff found on Google's new StreetView application, which we wrote about before - guys who appear to be peeing on the side of the road, climbing fences into houses, and so on. While D.C. won't be getting StreetView for a little while longer, there is still some strange stuff to be seen with good ol' Google Maps.

Joyriding has long been a problem in D.C., where (usually) kids steal cars and drive them around before dumping them, but rarely do we actually see it, and ever rarer do we see it from the air. Browsing Google Maps, we spotted this, a car that looks like it was driven all over the baseball diamond at the Douglass Recreation Center in Southeast. When the photo was taken (2005 according to Google Earth, which shows the same image) the center was closed.

In other photos, the car is in different locations around the field. For example, this one from Microsoft's Local Live website, which seems earlier based on the construction, shows a car in deep centerfield, parked on some kind of gravel lot or sandbox, while in this shot, which seems to be the most recent, a car is near the playground. (The Local Live site doesn't work on Firefox, which we're sure is not on purpose).

It's also possible these are different cars altogether. They all look like four door sedans, but one in the earliest image the car looks reddish and appears to have its hood open, while in other shots the car looks yellow or white. The different colors could have come from the time of day the aerial photos were taken, but it's also possible this was the cool spot to ditch cars in 2005. It's too bad these photos are so old, otherwise Google Maps or Local Live could theoretically be more useful in locating stolen cars than D.C.'s crime cameras.

Image from Google Maps

We've certainly noticed these ads in metro stations recently. Slogans like "It's Better in Baltimore" and "Get In on It", accompanied by images of spacious back yards and comfortable train commutes contrasting with cramped D.C. apartments and Beltway traffic. And we have to admit, as much as we're die hard D.C. enthusiasts, it's a compelling campaign that hits right where we feel it most: this is a great city, but are you ever going to be able to afford to buy real estate here? If recent economic predictions come true, odds are good that you won't. And that's exactly what the people behind the Live Baltimore campaign are hoping you'll think about when you spot their ads.

The Examiner has a profile up of the organization's efforts to entice Washingtonians to make the move to Baltimore. They quote Anna Custer, executive director of Live Baltimore, which is spending $150,000 on a campaign to get people like you to make the switch: “Last year, the average price of a home in Baltimore was $182,000, while the price in D.C. was $555,000 ... and there are a lot more doable options for them to get to D.C.” It's tough to argue with numbers like that.

More and more, we feel like we hear about friends of friends who are buying up cheaper property in Baltimore and moving there, but we thought we'd ask you: Are these ads, and their promise of a less expensive way of life, making you think about it all? Or is living right in the center of D.C. worth the possibility that you may be a renter for a lot longer than you'd like?

Browsing around the site a few days ago, we were struck by how much the photo of local informercial crazy guy Matthew Lesko resembled Ward 1 Council member and club shutter-downer Jim Graham — there's the poofy silver hair, the 1950s glasses, the bowtie. It would only be better if Graham rode around in a question mark-covered Scion. But it got us thinking: who else in D.C. looks like somebody else? So after the jump is our first Separated at Birth. And let us know in the comments if you can think of any other lookalikes.

I've been getting a rather large volume of email asking for an update on the Shiloh Baptist Church properties I posted about every day for a week back in May. As you'll recall, the city condemned four properties on 9th St. NW owned by Shiloh Baptist Church, and ordered them to complete repairs on the buildings by a date certain (we originally estimated the date being May 31, but it turned out they were only counting business days, so the actual deadline was June 5). These properties have been neglected for decades and a source of great frustration for the Shaw neighborhood, due to their unsafe, unsanitary conditions.

To date, four days past the official deadline set by the city for repair work to be completed, no work has even started despite promises to comply by the church leadership. Mayor Fenty has said that should Shiloh fail to complete the required repairs, he would order the work done and place on a lien on the properties to force the church to pay for them. DCRA spokesperson Karyn-Siobhan Robinson tells us that as of today, no action has been taken on the properties, but that the D.C. Board for the Condemnation of Insanitary Buildings will hold its regular semi-monthly meeting at DCRA this Wednesday, June 13, and the Shiloh properties are on the agenda. We'll be sure to update on Thursday when we know what happened at the meeting.

On December 30, 2004, D.C. Public Libraries closed four branches — the Anacostia, Benning, Tenley-Friendship and Watha T. Daniel/Shaw neighborhood branches — announcing replacement libraries in 18 months. That schedule was upended by DCPL management changes, leaving those communities without functioning libraries, and D.C. residents everywhere complaining about the sad state of a city that seemed to have the wrong priorities. But over the last few months, things have started to turn around. First, interim libraries in temporary trailers finally began opening up. The Tenley Interim Library opened at the end of 2006, The Anacostia Interim Library opened in late March, and now the Benning Interim Library and the Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Interim Library (pictured in progress above) are both set to open by the end of this month.

In April, DCPL also announced that demolition contracts were finally in place to level the old branch buildings, which will eventually make way for new libraries. Demolition at all four sites is scheduled to be completed by the end of July, which will certainly be a welcome sight for neighborhood residents tired of looking at those sad, boarded up old libraries.

The Mayor's office has also indicated that a final schedule for rebuilding has been put together, with the new libraries projected to open in 2010. There have been an endless series of community meetings on different designs for the new libraries over the last 3+ years, but there will be more over the course of this year. We'll continue to keep you posted.

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,

Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;

The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,

I sit by the restless all dark night - some are so young;

Some suffer so much - I recall the experience sweet and sad...

Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1876

The selection actually cuts off the last two lines of the poem, which read, in a parenthetical: "(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested, Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)" We want to believe the omission was related to space and not because city leaders thought it was too gay.