Sinkhole, the cocktail! (Via Facebook)

Sinkhole, the cocktail! (Via Facebook)

Over at City Desk, Will Sommer pointed out a dispiriting aspect of the ongoing story of the sinkhole that ate the intersection of 14th and F streets NW. In less than 24 hours, the traffic jam-inducing maw went from a mere infrastructural nuisance to—what else, in this wired city of ours?—a meme.

Yes, you can actually buy stuff in commemoration of a still-unexplained 15-foot chasm that devoured the meeting of two major downtown thoroughfares. Ceiba, a restaurant a block north of the sinkhole, started selling this afternoon a concoction called the “Sinkhole de Mayo.”

On one hand, that’s a rather lazy pun. And on the other hand: Just stop it! This is why nobody takes D.C. seriously. Is a sinkhole so momentous that it deserves a special $5 cocktail featuring Appleton VX Rum, store-made sour mix, pineapple juice, and a shot of grenadine?


And if drinks aren’t enough, tomorrow you’ll be able to pad your wardrobe with memorabilia of this failure of road construction. ContraTees.com, a local apparel maker, says that it will begin selling T-shirts reading “I survived the downtown sinkhole of 2013.”

Meanwhile, some are even trying to politicize the sinkhole, which appears to have caused as much damage to our brains as it has to the 114-year-old sewer line at the bottom of the pit. Mother Jones correspondent David Corn was spotted near the sinkhole earlier today, with a camera crew tagging along. “I blame the Republicans,” he reportedly said, in an interview about a freaking sinkhole!

But, of course, the coup de grâce of any D.C. event is the parody Twitter account, right? Check:


At least someone had the good sense to park on the more generic, and presumptive, parody Twitter handle, @dcsinkhole. Thanks to Sam Unger, a staffer at the Center for American Progress with a noted distaste for Twitter parody, the dumb sinkhole tweets are being kept to a minimum.

Filed Under: ceiba, david corn, rant, sinkhole, twitter,