Photo by pablo.raw
Good morning, Washington. You’d think the days leading to Christmas would be relatively smooth, but last night the penultimate week of 2011 kicked off with the news that Kim Jong-Il, the leader of North Korea, died over the weekend. I’m sure local angles will emerge over the next few days, but for now, here’s the Post’s sweeping obituary—it’s one of many—of the “Dear Leader,” whose regime was “strangely antic and utterly ruthless.”
Where They Are Now: The Post yesterday launched a three-part series on the lives of the “Seat Pleasant 59,” a group of Prince George’s County fifth-graders who in 1988 were promised college tuition by Bullets and Capitals owner Abe Pollin and photography executive Melvin Cohen. In the second installment today, Post scribe Paul Schwartzman checks up on how the students, now in their 30s, are doing. The kids, many of whom came from troubled backgrounds in one of the area’s poorest school districts, had big dreams. Some of their stories, like Darone Robinson’s wind around but are ultimately winning. Others, like William Smith’s, are just heartbreaking.
Party Block Anthem: Believe it or not, the Council might be trying to make something easier—applying for permits to throw block parties, Housing Complex reports this morning. Currently, it takes jumping through all sorts of regulatory hoops—including the “clean hands” certification required to open a business or obtain a liquor license—to be able to throw a block party. “That’s not an insurmountable level of paperwork, but it’s probably stymied more than a couple neighborhood efforts,” Lydia DePillis writes. Councilmembers Mary Cheh, Muriel Bowser and Phil Mendelsohn are behind a measure that would lift the Clean Hands rule.
Rough Roads: It was a bad weekend on area roadways, the Examiner notes, with five deaths from a series of car crashes that killed drivers and pedestrians alike. None of the collisions took place in the District, with three occurring in Montgomery County, one in Prince Georges’s and the other in Fairfax.
Briefly Noted: If you’re going to color them all the same, yellow or it doesn’t count … McDonnell putting lots on the table in coming budget fight … First part of the new 11th Street Bridge is open … House comes to its senses and screws pooch on payroll tax … Click here for pandas.
This Day in DCist: In 2010, Alexandria Public Schools hired the “Where’s the Beef?”—as in a Wendy’s double with fries and a Frosty—public-realtions guru, and there was chromium in the water. In 2009, Snowmageddon or Snowpocalypse or some other obnoxiously named storm laid into us, and with it, the birth of an everlasting meme.
