Ooops, Did I Do Thaaaaaaat?: Can Steve Urkel from “Family Matters” and Franz Kafka be used in the same post? Why yes, they can. In what the Post describes as a “series of Kafkaesque legal arguments,” the District government is trying to deny any wrong doing in accidentally tearing down a Marshall Heights apartment building that was supposed to be renovated for affordable housing. Ooops! The owner of the building wants $1.9 million to replace the structure. The city wants to settle for $150,000. The bureaucratic mess is of course hard to follow. See if you can draw up a flow chart.

D.C. Voting Rights Cause Gains Strength in Congress: The Post reports that Republican Reps. Tom Davis of Virginia, Dana Rohrabacher of California and Ralph Regula of Ohio have co-written a letter with the District’s delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, touting a new study sponsored by DC Vote that shows that 82 percent of Americans support voting rights for the District of Columbia. But as the Post reports, voting rights isn’t on the agenda for this session of the 109th Congress.

Mercury Closings Updates: When we heard that Hardy Middle School in Burleith (or Georgetown as the AP, via WJLA reports) was closed down because of a mercury spill, we thought there was a serial mercury terrorist was on the loose in the capital. But the incident at Hardy seems to be an innocent science class mishap. Cardozo High … That’s another story. They’re relocating classes to the University of the District of Columbia after the most recent mercury discovery.

Briefly Noted: Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial begins to take form … Thefts at the Archives! Staunton man sells artifacts on eBay … Smokers paradise on Route 15 … And the weather is pretty ugly out there.