>> Artists Virgil Marti and Pae White, whose new conceptual piece has recently been installed in the lobby of the Hirshhorn, will give a Meet the Artists talk in the museum’s Ring Auditorium. [7th St. and Independence Ave. SW, Free, 7 p.m.] >> U Street neighborhood residents get the bait-and-switch from Mayor’s office. Until a day ago, Mayor Fenty was scheduled to meet tonight. Now the Cardozo/Shaw Neighborhood Association will settle for Deputy Mayor Neil…

In the area around the D.C. Courthouse on Indiana Avenue NW near Judiciary Square, and we suspect elsewhere in the city, there are massive plumes of steam coming from the grates in the sidewalk. We usually don’t pay any attention to the steam that regularly comes up from the grates around town, but thanks to the cold, cold, Vostok-esque weather, these are reaching higher than the surrounding buildings. Walking through them is like flying in…

For this week’s Monument, Memorials and Statues feature, we thought it’d be timely to feature the Japanese American Internment Memorial. Rep. Robert Matsui, the Democrat of California who passed away over the weekend at age 63, was one of the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned in camps across the country during World War II. (See SFist for more on Matsui’s passing.) The memorial in the nation’s capital is one of the more recent additions to sites…