>> A police officer from the Seventh District is claiming his commander ordered him to give special treatment to a member of Mayor Fenty’s staff who was caught talking on her cell phone while driving. [Examiner] >> “District Fire and Emergency Medical Services officials are investigating the death this morning of a recruit who became ill during training exercises yesterday.” [WaPo] >> AOL plans to cut 2,000 more jobs, including 750 from their Dulles offices….

Of the numerous romantic notions surrounding the writing life, perhaps none dies harder than that of the solitary, ink-stained wretch plugging away at his or her latest work in some dilapidated garret, alone and unnoticed and oblivious to what’s going on around him or her. Writing may be a solitary act, but as any intellectually honest writer can tell you, writers need communities: first, because the realities of today’s writing life necessitate that one be…

Can’t anyone get D.C. right? Today the Post’s Reliable Source reports that Nicole Kidman’s newest thriller, The Invasion, makes a number of relatively amateur mistakes in trying to use the District as a backdrop, even though a good part of it was filmed here. Among those: – Kidman, who plays a D.C. psychiatrist, buys magazines at one of those big sidewalk newsstand kiosks — the ones all over New York but not on any corner…

>> Aramark, the ballpark concessionaire at RFK and other stadiums, is eliminating trans fat from its menu, and adding a number of “healthy” options such as veggie hot dogs, pasta salad and fruit cups. In related news, Baseball has been officially declared the least fun sport in America. [Baltimore Business Journal] >> Reigning MLS Defender of the Year and D.C. United backline stalwart Bobby Boswell is holding a launch party for his blog tonight…

Written by DCist Contributor Vince Wadhwani, of BuyIndie.net Joe. Bean. Murk. Black Venom. Go Juice. The Nectar of Life. Call it what you want, but we love our coffee. And when you talk coffee it’s hard not to think about the ever present Starbucks. Recently, they launched a service making it even easier to get your fix. Send a text message from your cell phone and get back the location of the three closest Starbucks….

We’d like to start this week’s run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn’t for them, the rest of us wouldn’t be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he’s working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,…

What do you do when you, the dutiful copy editor, is are forced to adhere to an in-house style that flies in the face of the rules of grammar you hold in such high esteem? You blog about it. Andrew Beaujon, the City Paper’s Copy Editor, seems to have had enough. In a witheringly comical post he published on the paper’s blog yesterday, Beaujon takes issue with the “serial comma.” He writes: I hate the…

For once, we could afford to buy a CD at Tower Records. Unfortunately, the pickings were slim and the occasion sad. In October the national record store chain succumbed to the pressure of its online competitors, selling the assets from its 85 stores to a liquidation firm and marking the end of a generation of music buyers who preferred to curiously browse through unknown bands at the advice of knowledgeable, if surly clerks. Since then,…

This Sunday marks the end of Daylight Saving Time, so when the last call bell rings at 2 a.m., set your watch back an hour and buy everyone another round. Any excuse for an extra hour of partying is fine with us, so let’s toast to Ben Franklin, but do it ironically, since he may have come up with the idea just so people would go to bed earlier. We hoped you saved all that…

It may not be possible to resolve the great Nearlington vs. Farlington debate. But there’s a compromise available: apparently we can start calling both halves of the county Smartlington. If for some reason we wanted to. Via the Examiner, it seems that Money Magazine has named Arlington the most educated city in the country thanks to an impressive 35.7 percent of its citizens holding graduate degrees (apparently this was enough to make up for the…