Results tagged “greatamerican”

Via Consumerist, allow us to introduce you to the next Great American Hero: Mona Shaw, 75-year-old Manassas resident and fed-up potential Comcast customer. Potomac News has the great story about Shaw, who got a little hot under the collar after trying to change her phone service from Verizon to Comcast's Triple Play back in August. As hard as it might be to imagine, Shaw ran into some difficulty trying to get her Comcast service set...

For a struggling offensive team like the Nationals, there's no greater place to play a few games than the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. And lately for the Nats, there's no greater foil than whiny Wayne Krivsky's Reds. For those reasons, I had quite the time watching the Nats pound the stuffing out of the Reds in last night's 12-7 win. The club's long-slumbering lumber has finally awoken--aided by Cincy's teensy bandbox of a field....

Dine Out For Life On March 8 If you've been feeling guilty about all your meals out lately, get ready to wash that all away next week. The annual Dining Out For Life benefit will take place next Thursday, March 8. If you're unfamiliar with the charity affair, it's one day each year when dozens of area restaurants donate at least 25% of their profits to local charity Food and Friends. The event, which takes...

Whoooooosh! What's that giant sucking sound? Oh yeah - it's the sweet reverberation of another record store totally biting it and going out of business in this era of iTunes. In this case, we've got Tower Records bowing out of the business, a fact that, though it feels inevitable, saddens us all the same.

According to an AP article that ran in the Post,

On Friday, after a 29-hour auction, most of the bankrupt music retailer's assets were sold to liquidation firm Great American Group, which bid $134.3 million. The company outbid Albany, N.Y.-based retailer Trans World Entertainment by a mere $500,000.

Though Tower is a national chain, I have super fond memories of all the local stores scattered around the area. My particular favorite was the one on Route 7, where I bought my first-ever CD (Radiohead's The Bends), a purchase that sent me on the downward spiral of total music obsession and cost me a fortune spent on weekend shopping binges at the store during high school.

DCist Hemal has her memories of Tower too, saving her from Tysons purgatory:

I was working at the most soul crushing job ever in the paved hell of Tysons corner my first year out of school. I'd escape into the tower records two to three times a week during my lunch break and browse through the CDs, trying to reconnect with something artistic for a few minutes before I had to go back and be an office bitch.

And DCist Matt says:

I remember when my right-wing Christian ex-girlfriend broke up with me and I went out and bought Bad Religion's Against the Grain and a couple of other great punk records at Tower, and I remember thinking, "Aaah, freedom."

See? Even though Tower might have had insanely high prices, often-snooty employees, and happily shilled talentless Top 40 artists, it still managed to resonate with some people in the area. Well, maybe not with DCist Ian:

I'm hoping for a FUTURE Tower memory in which they eventually start having stuff marked down to the point where I can finally take revenge for years of having to take it in a very uncomfortable place from Tower once I reached the cash register.

Point taken. But still, I, personally, can say that I'll kinda miss it. And one more bonus: keep your eye out for out-of-business deals at the stores as the weeks go on.

Do you have any memories (good, bad, or ugly) of Tower Records?

"People keep asking me, 'What's wrong?' I'm going to have my numbers. People shouldn't worry about Jose Guillen."

Sometimes we at DCist find ourselves wandering around the Dupont and Logan neighborhoods, unsatisfied after an excursion to CakeLove. We roam between the new condos and the embassies until we realize that what we really have is CakeLust. Tonight, Share Our Strength's Great American Bake Sale promises to satisfy our cravings.

It'll be a party this evening on Barracks Row, the stretch of Eighth Street SE that'll be celebrating its Great American Main Street Award -- a great honor for its revitalizing streetscaping project. The festivities kick off at the Old Siam Restaurant (406 Eighth St. SE) at 6 p.m. with appetizers and drinks. While its name may have "Old" in it, Old Siam is the newest restaurant on the strip. In the process to revitalize...

Has any stretch of real estate in D.C. turned itself around as quickly as Barracks Row? In just over six years the stretch of Eighth Street SE south of Eastern Market and north of M Street SE. has seen rapid development changing the area from one infested with drug traffic and petty crime to a vibrant thoroughfare. Sure, the space still has some bleak spots, including a Popeye's with astonishingly bad service (even for a...

published his poignant poems of the Civil War, Drum Taps, and his elegies to Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," all while earning his living as a civil servant.

Since Washingtonians are wont to overlook any historical footnote, they're celebrating with a two-month long festival called "D.C. Celebrates Whitman: 150 Years of Leaves of Grass," held in commemoration of Leaves of Grass. (Which he did not write in D.C.) The events, which kick off next Tuesday with a poetry reading in Georgetown, include a dramatic reading of Leaves of Grass in its entirety, a walking tour of "Whiteman's Georgetown," a guided exploration of Whitman's meditation, and dramatic readings of "O Captain, My Captain!" at Ford's theater on April 14 and 15. Go check out the schedule and get your 19th century poetry on. All this leads us to wonder, when is the "D.C. Celebrates Longfellow" festival?

Looking for a last minute stocking stuffer for your conservative friends, or dartboard fodder for those on the left? Online magazine Salon yesterday pointed us to a great option -- the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's 2005 Great American Conservative Women calendar.