With his final column, Marc Fisher examines the highlight reel from his career total of 1,250 columns for the Washington Post and an additional 1,200 posts for Raw Fisher. Fisher pores over the perennial debates at the heart of his column — failing schools, wishful transit schemes, cynical bureaucracy — and finds that Washington hasn’t changed much, even if the way we talk has. Underlining his discussion of the transition from newsprint to new media…

Last month was something cold, the Washington Post reports—real cold. A full three degrees chillier than normal and probably the coldest January in a decade. It might be difficult to believe today, with the temperature expected to crest a balmy 54 degrees, but the District isn’t past the worst of it yet. With ice still lingering from the last frost, the city can look forward to more snow tomorrow evening. Still, with one above-freezing day,…

Buried at the end of today’s Marc Fisher column is an exciting bit of news for baseball fans and half-smoke lovers alike: Fisher says that Ben’s Chili Bowl is going to have an outpost in the new Nationals Stadium. Unfortunately though, co-owner Kamal Ali tells DCist that the Ben’s stand at the stadium is far from a done deal. “We are in a good faith conversation with them, but it would be premature to say…

>> A non-rolling tennis ball catches a lot of parking tickets on Cliffbourne Place. [Marc Fisher] >> D.C. police are trying to identify a body found in the Tidal Basin. [NBC4] >> “A DC Team is in the Super Bowl again. The Beacon House Falcons are in Pop Warner Football’s Pee Wee Division Super Bowl on Saturday, December 8th at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex.” [Notions Capital] >> The District government expects to…

In most any public or private sector job, losing $31 million on your watch is a surefire way to get yourself fired. CFO Natwar Gandhi’s reputation for saving the city’s finances has thus far protected him from what is to date the District’s biggest corruption scandal. But his fortunes might be changing. Buried towards the end of an article from the Examiner today on an investigation into the tax refund scheme that milked the city…

The Post’s Marc Fisher alerted us to some exciting news on Wednesday: the possibility of Chuck Brown and Duke Ellington meeting in D.C. No, smelling salts aren’t involved. Rather, Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham is proposing naming sections of T Street NW and 7th Street NW after the two local music legends in Shaw. The renaming would coincide with the expected reopening of the historic Howard Theatre in 2008, a place where both…

Marc Fisher lets us know that longtime D.C. radio fixture Red Shipley, the host of WAMU’s Stained Glass Bluegrass program for 25 years, died over the weekend from cancer in Charlottesville. Shipley introduced two generations of Washington area music fans to legendary and contemporary bluegrass music, up until last month, when WAMU took all of its bluegrass programming off the air and put it on HD Radio. “Radio lost one of its own legends last…

Harry Jaffe: In writing something of a goodbye column to RFK Stadium, Jaffe recounts the many struggles the District overcame to attract a baseball team. And though plenty of people played important roles, he feels that one deserves extra attention — former Mayor Anthony Williams. “The hero of the piece has to be Williams, an unpopular mayor who — despite his wandering attention span — kept swinging away at an unpopular crusade to use public…

Although 192 protesters were arrested Saturday during the March to End the War and competing counter-protest by the Gathering of Eagles, by most measures turnout was low. The Post’s Marc Fisher notes in his column that the small numbers of people who marched over the weekend is more a measure of a lack of enthusiasm for protesting in this country, rather than a lack of strong feelings against the war — just visit any popular…

Marc Fisher: As the Senate gets ready to debate the District voting rights legislation, Fisher lists the dozen top reasons why senators from both parties should vote to enfranchise the city’s residents. The more and more we look into it, the better the case looks. Let’s hope the Senate agrees. Tom Knott: You know Knott’s verbal insanity is in good form when the title of his weekly column is “It’s Gathering of Eagles vs. nitwit…