For the cha-chingy print platform of Washington City Paper, I wrote this week about the "cigar bar" that Dan Snyder uses to sell club seats. Pick up a copy, read the story, respond to every paid personal ad, do the right thing.

You might have heard the Redskins are having trouble moving those pricey tickets. Even Dan Snyder's interns have been told of these troubles. So Snyder needs all the help he can get to fill his stadium, even if that means promoting a business that seemingly ignores societal trends and state laws. A business like the Montecristo Club.

That's the cigar bar on the Joe Gibbs Level at FedEx.

The Skins stadium had a cigar bar before Snyder bought the team, called Club Macanudo. But cigar bars, if you haven't heard, have been on the way out for a while now. And as of the 2008 season, anti-smoking laws in the state of Maryland and Prince George's County had taken hold, and regulators told the Redskins that they could no longer legally sell any food or drink in the cigar bar. So Club Macanudo disappeared. The team kept the smoking bar open, but stopped all non-tobacco retailing to comply with the law, which was meant to keep workers from sucking in second-hand smoke. Then last season, the Montecristo Club opened up in the same spot.

Snyder then told smokers of all stripes, cigarette and cigar, that they could still puff away and get boozey there -- so long as they paid for a premium seat.

To get past the new anti-smoking laws, the Redskins told the state and county regulators that their business was officially a tobacco shop, and therefore the Clean Indoor Air Act didn't apply. There is, in fact, an exemption in the state law for a tobacconist to stay in business. But to qualify, according to the letter of the law:

(i) The primary activity is the retail sale of tobacco products and accessories; and

(ii) The sale of other products is incidental.

The county allowed Snyder to operate his cigar bar, booze and all, last season. This despite the fact that there is nothing about Snyder's promotion of the Montecristo Club that makes the "bar" portion of "cigar bar" seem incidental. The Redskins promotional video for the Montecristo Club (scroll to the last video on the right) opens not with any smoking or tobacco, but with a shot of a bartender behind a full bar pouring a cold Bud Light into a glass for a patron.

Read more Dan Snyder Uses Smoke and Mirrors, Hold the Mirrors, to Sell Club Seats?

Remember the Paul Wellstone-esque video by Ward 1 Council candidate Bryan Weaver we highlighted here a few weeks ago? On Washington City Paper's Loose Lips blog, Jason Cherkis reports it's getting results—Councilmember Tommy Wells sent Weaver a $100 check after seeing the video. Wells hasn't given any money to his council colleague Jim Graham, who Weaver hopes to defeat in the Sept. 14 primary.

Read more Councilmember Tommy Wells Sends Check to Graham Challenger

Watha T. Daniel Library, Shaw, opening Aug. 2.  © 2010 Matt Dunn

Have you seen this car? Earlier today, Capitol Hill resident Jay Goodman Tamboli snapped a photo of this BMW parked on 4th Street SE between East Capitol and A streets and sent it out via Twitter. Take a closer look at the license plate. See the cover? It reads "DC's Not a State, Get Over It."And it completely covers up the "Taxation Without Representation" message on the plate in the process. A pretty bold declaration in a city that's been yearning for voting rights for years and years and years, eh?

We've heard there may be more such license plate covers on Capitol Hill, including what's been described as a Ford Excursion with Alaska plates. Does anyone have additional info? We'd love to hear from you.

So is such a license plate cover illegal? There are D.C. regulations on the books that dictate that license plates "shall be maintained free from foreign materials and in clearly legible condition." Five years ago, D.C. police started to enforce a law making license plate covers illegal. A cottage industry had sprang up selling tinted and clear plastic covers that could evade traffic enforcement cameras.

But are the anti-D.C. statehood covers—which only obscure the iconic protest message on D.C. plates, not the tag number itself—out of step with D.C. law? We have an inquiry in with the city and will report back when more information becomes available.

Longtime Washington City Paper readers may remember a feature called the Needle: every month, your friendly neighborhood alt-weekly would recap news and events in and around D.C., weigh how they affected quality of life in the region with pseudo-scientific numerical accuracy, and provide a score on a scale from 1 to 100. Starting today, we're bringing it back. Every weekday afternoon, right here on City Desk, City Paper will wrap up the important news of the day and assess how it affects life in the District, Maryland and Virginia, for better or for worse. We're starting with a baseline score of 50—dead smack in the middle. The items below will add to or subtract from that score. Let's get to it!

Read more The Needle: City Paper’s D.C. Quality of Life Index

On Housing Complex, Lydia DePillis asks whether there's any actual value to the top 10 lists that have proliferated in today's media age—you know, things like "best city for vegetarians," "best city for college grads," "best city for working mothers." Those lists actually exist, and as DePillis points out, they're basically just repurposed collections of general quality-of-life statistics.

Not long after her blog post went up, I received the following absurd press release, which I couldn't resist posting—even though, yes, I realize that means the terrorists publicists have won. Apparently not only is D.C. the second-best city for working moms, we're also the third-most irritated city in the country. An undoubtedly very scientific survey determined that Atlanta and Houston outrank us. (But as a one-time resident of Philadelphia, and someone with a lot of family living in Brooklyn, I'm not sure I agree with any ranking that doesn't put them up near the top.) The release is after the jump.

Read more Lists-R-Us

3000 Block of 14th Street NW, July 23

There goes the NFL!

Sure, the league is flying higher than ever now -- TV coverage of the NFL draft drew a bigger audience than the NBA playoffs this spring. But mark down July 28, 2010 as the day everything started rolling downhill.

That's the day the reports surfaced that the NFL has brought in Dan Snyder protege/partner-in-debacles Mark Shapiro.

Yesterday, the web site Sports By Brooks told us that Shapiro "is now consulting for the league on television matters - including NFL Network games and studio shows."

Good news for the NFL: The reliability of the Sports By Brooks' report is suspect. When giving Shapiro's bio, we're told, "Shapiro is currently running Six Flags after being lured away from Bristol by Redskins Owner Dan Snyder."

Well, now....As both my readers know well, Shapiro WAS running Six Flags -- until he and Snyder ran it straight into the ground. With CEO Shapiro and Chairman of the Board Snyder calling the shots, Six Flags filed for Chapter 11 more than a year ago.

When he was hired by Snyder in 2005, Shapiro said his salary would be tied to the value of Six Flags stock. He and Snyder then took Six Flags stock price from $11.93 per share down to nothingness. So during bankruptcy proceedings, Snyder and Shapiro wrote up an unbelievable golden parachute that gave Shapiro millions upon millions of dollars -- one $3 million payment was labeled a "success bonus," though Shapiro and Snyder's only success in four-plus years at the helm of Six Flags came in bankrupting the company --  while stockholders lost everything.

Snyder was bounced brutally from his chairmanship during the reorganization proceedings, while Shapiro got his comeuppance from the newly installed Six Flags board shortly after the company emerged from bankruptcy.

So while, sorry Sports by Brooks, Shapiro isn't running Six Flags, he is still Snyder's partner, and is now president of Dick Clark Productions. That's the company that Snyder bought for $175 million with money from his Red Zebra investment fund, then used the cash of Six Flags stockholders to defray the purchase price by 40 percent.

Read more Dan Snyder Protege Mark Shapiro to Work His Magic on the NFL?

Starting today, City Paper's political coverage has a new home on the Web—we've given Alan Suderman, our Loose Lips columnist, a blog of his very own. Fittingly enough, the first post on the new Loose Lips blog is today's edition of Loose Lips Daily. Go read it! And add it to your RSS readers, bookmarks, Prodigy start-up screen or whatever other means you use to peruse the Internets.

The LL blog will be a lot like the LL column and e-mail: you'll find news and commentary on D.C. government and politics (and, every now and then, Maryland and Virginia) and the people behind the scenes. We'll also be debuting some new recurring features on the LL blog and here on City Desk soon. While City Paper's political news will move over to the Loose Lips blog, you can still expect to find good stories about life in the District here on City Desk—and of course, plenty of illuminating photos by Darrow Montgomery and other photographers.

Feel free to leave us your thoughts on the changes, either in the comments on the blog or by e-mailing me at mmadden(AT)washingtoncitypaper.com. Enjoy!

Backstage at the Fringe Festival with Gigi Naglak and Meghann Williams.
Chlamydia dell'Arte: A Sex-Ed Burlesque

In a somewhat surprising move, the D.C. Chamber of Commerce has not endorsed incumbent Ward One Councilmember Jim Graham for re-election. Instead, the business folks have thrown their weight behind challenger Jeff Smith.

Graham campaign poo-bah Chuck Thies had this reaction via e-mail:

"Not surprising at all. What has the Chamber of Commerce ever done for Ward One?  They represent downtown business interests. Maybe Jeff Smith should move downtown.  He really doesn't seem to like living in Ward One."

You'd think Graham's close ties to the taxicab industry would have put him over the top. Zing! OK, that was a cheap shot. Apologies.

Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Chief Diane Groomes tells City Desk that District kids enrolled in the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) are still getting mugged on paydays. So far, five kids have been mugged on paydays and a sixth was mugged the day after a payday. The program started with knives and thefts. Washington City Paper recently reported that muggings and violence against jobs program kids became a common theme last summer. Officials had blamed the muggings on the fact that the kids were required to wear the now-infamous Mayor's Conservation Corps T-shirts.

Groomes isn't sure if the kids who were mugged this year were wearing T-shirts. She has recently suggested that the kids remain indoors during their lunch hours on paydays. Of the five muggings that have taken place on paydays, all of them occurred at 12:30 p.m.

*file photo by Darrow Montgomery.

A couple minutes after 4 p.m. yesterday, a water main break at the intersection of U Street and Florida Avenue NW caused a number of businesses to close early, and sent neighbors scrambling to protect their basements from flooding. The section between 16^th and 18^th Streets was closed to traffic for a couple hours as gallons of water gushed onto the street.

According to a D.C. WASA spokeswoman, the break was the result of a 12-inch coupling that popped off after crews had performed a routine valve replacement the night before. Water had already been shut off for much of the morning, but when water pressure returned around noon, the valve malfunctioned, causing the coupling to break. Businesses on the east side of 18^th Street between Florida Avenue and Columbia Road were forced to close early or endure expansive lakes of water.

Read more U Street Water Main Leaves Businesses High and Dry

Where a bench once stood in Turtle Park

Mary Wright, an ANC commissioner in 6B, has been trying to solve a crime. For some time now, she's been attempting to find out who stole benches from a tiny triangular patch of green located across the street from Eastern Market. "To my recollection, there were six," she says of the missing seating. Wright says the benches have been gone from the place known as Turtle Park for about a year.

Her top suspects aren't the kind Capitol Hillers are used to blaming, like the "loitering" juveniles ostensibly well-meaning neighbors rant about via listserv. No, Wright's suspects happen to be the well-meaning neighbors themselves.

"Neighbors around the area told me some other neighbors took the benches," she says.

And why would concerned citizens steal stuff from public land? To make it better, of course. Wright believes someone swiped the outdoor furniture in hopes of ridding the park of the homeless people who sometimes snooze on the equipment. Visiting the community, City Desk found others share her theory. (It has some historical roots—there was a similar dispute over alleged nuisance benches in Columbia Heights last year.)

Contacted about the theft, a flustered D.C. Parks and Recreation Department wasn't able to immediately figure out if Turtle Park ever had benches, much less where the missing ones got off to. "DPR will work with MPD and look into the situation," says spokesperson John Stokes. But a resident who earlier inquired to DPR about the benches tells Wright she got this message from the department: "The department does not know what happened to the benches. We did not remove them."

Scott Miller, who lives right around the corner from the park, remembers the benches, and noticed when they went away. No wonder: One of them stood in honor of his father. The bench, installed by his late mother, was placed in the park in 1986. "There was a memorial plaque on the back," Miller remembers.

This isn't the first time the bench went elsewhere. When it was first placed in the park, it vanished into a then-crime-plagued city. At that point, something surprising happened. Read more Did Capitol Hill Vigilantes Steal a Memorial Bench?

Updated 10:10 p.m.

Has Peter Nickles ever met a controversy he couldn't whitewash with one of his so-called investigative reports? From his fire-truck mini investigation to his assessment of the missing evidence in the Pershing Park case, Nickles has developed a reputation as a bulldog whose afraid to do much more than bark. Now comes WaPo's Mike DeBonis' fine reporting on Nickles' latest fact-finding mission. This time Nickles promised an exhaustive accounting of the failures at DYRS. DeBonis discovered that the investigation had been headed up by Nickles' deputy Robert Hildum--the man who has now taken over DYRS. [Hildum also  ruined two fire fighters' careers with a few lies]. Talk about a conflict of interest. But it gets worse. The report itself may have been riddled with problems:

DeBonis writes:

"The report I've obtained [PDF], dated May 20, is not so much an investigative report with findings, but a six-page memo that makes 'general observations' about the city's youth justice apparatus before delivering more than a dozen recommendations. It's entirely possible that a more detailed report has been completed in the meantime, but DYRS officials raised serious questions about the inquiry in an undated response [PDF] to the May 20 document. For instance: Because the OAG staffers tasked with investigating the agency didn't know how to use the DYRS computer system, the report based some of its recommendations on mistaken findings."

And to think WaPo's editorial board slammed critics of DYRS latest personnel moves as being too hasty! DYRS has become a huge problem, one that warranted more than a six page memo, and quick knee-jerk praise from WaPo's editorial board. At the very least, Councilmember Tommy Wells, whose committee deals with DYRS issues, tells City Desk that the Nickles Report could be a distraction in the city's efforts to reform DYRS and get the agency out of federal court oversight.

But Wells says he hasn't even seen "an official" copy of the report.

Read more DYRS Report: Another Peter Nickles Hatchet Job?