Does this picture make you sad? I call it Last Robin of Spring

One time in an edit meeting, Erik Wemple said I'd make a terrible profile subject. Drawing a line on a piece of paper, he put me at one end and Jonathan Rees at the other. Rees was too nuts, he said (paraphrasing here) and I was too boring. The ideal City Paper subject, he posited, straddled the center of this continuum. He was right about all three things, so I'll try to keep this goodbye brief.

This is the best job I've ever had. I choose that superlative carefully. Here, I've been privileged to work with the best reporters and critics, the best photographer, the best co-workers, and the best stories I've ever known. I came here from magazines, where fact-checkers sweep up behind writers whose primary talent is being good at parties. I took my first correction not long after landing and realized I had learned next to nothing about journalism in the previous decade. The joy of this job isn't turning out product reviews between languid lunches, it's telling stories well and getting the details right, week after week, day after day.

Here I learned to despise trend pieces and Q&As, but more important I learned that often the best way to tell a big story is through a small one. I learned that puns don't work as headlines on the Internet (just try searching for an old District Line EVEN IF you know the jokey hed! (e.g.: 1, 2). And I learned the importance of chronicling crushed dreams.

Like this one! After City Paper was purchased by Creative Loafing in July 2007, it became a different place. We lost half of our staff to budget cuts, and those and the recession let the air out of many of the paper's cherished traditions–great copy-editing and general-assignment writers, for example. For a while, we mourned. Then we started finding the humor in the situation (some people never got the joke, which to me is the hallmark of a good City Paper comedy piece). Then we tried to figure out what we could do well given the circumstances. Results have been mixed, but Internet-wise, I'm proud of where we stand in relation to our early attempts.

I'm going to miss this project, you know, the one where we keep trying to figure out how to inject the alt-weekly DNA into what's now a daily, vertical-driven publication. And I'll miss the bike commute (new office is too close to my house). But mostly I'm gonna miss the people I worked with, even the ones who sometimes made me bash my head into my screen. For all of you, here's another anecdote from a meeting: In a plenary session, one person who has managed this company said that life was like a crap sandwich. The more bread you have, he said, the less crap you have to eat. I wish my coworkers, their sharp new editor, and the people on our business side nothing but bread.

I will stay in touch with them, but it'll be harder to stay in touch with the readers, who I love in a way that may not always be apparent to those of you who've called to yell at me. (Except the guy who screamed for 27 minutes and threatened to "expose" me after I said I didn't know why our receptionist had trouble transferring me his call: You, pal, can kiss my ass.) Now I'm gonna become one of you, which is more comfort than one usually gets in a goodbye. I'll miss the view from this side of the WordPress interface, but I can't wait to see what the people with the best job in the world do next.

NICK CLEGG! I can't stop bolding it, or thinking of his curiously large forehead, which furthers my theory that the English are more closely related to Early Man than the rest of us! If his Liberal Democrats (NOT A BAD THING IN BRITAIN, APPARENTLY) avoid two-ways and go for three-ways, Nick Clegg could be prime minister! OF BRITAIN!

Hey, are you freaked out about Nick Clegg? Join the club! So are a bunch of humans who don't like liberals or Democrats. Like this Nile Gardiner person, who is pissed that Nick Clegg doesn't like that Death Cab album. From Gardiner's list of five reasons not to be happy about Nick Clegg:

2. Clegg is not an Atlanticist.

Nile, OK, it didn't have a "Styrofoam Plates," but it's still pretty good!

OH MY GOD I'M TALKING ABOUT NILE GARDINER WHEN I COULD BE TALKING ABOUT NICK CLEGG! Maybe the fever's breaking.

Here are some things that happened yesterday, none of which involved Nick Clegg:

Caps win. Oh vraiment? The Nats lose, but in an interesting way, notes Adam Kilgore:

They are 7-0 when their starter pitches at least five innings, and they are 0-7 when their starter does not....Their last four starting pitchers — Liván Hernández, Jason Marquis, Craig Stammen and Olsen — have respectively recorded 27, 0, 24 and 6 outs.

Is that not interesting to you? GO BACK TO BRITAIN AND MARRY NICK CLEGG.

"These 'Had to Be There' stories are really interfering with my plans to write a morning roundup," he said, finding only his cat was paying attention. (Ewa Beaujon, his wife of 11 years, was preoccupied with the British police drama she was streaming from Netflix via the couple's Wii.) "I understand the ambition to write 'Talk of the Town-style pieces,'" Beaujon, whose obsession with the Style section has comprised, over the years, two unsuccessful attempts to join its staff, continued out loud, making no headway with the household's other awake biped. "But these feel...forced. Like that Haiti benefit when Justin Timberlake covered Leonard Cohen."

That morning, Beaujon had read Dan Zak's piece about the Skee-Ball "set" at the Iron Horse Tap Room, and he'd generally liked its color and tone. Still he was bothered that Skee-Ball, Inc. uses capital letters and a hyphen and that a Post copy editor must have approved Zak's use of "skeeball." Has it gone generic? Beaujon wondered, searching the International Trade Association's Trademark Checklist for clarity and finding none.

And so began 90 minutes of constructing riffs for the following morning's roundup. You can tell Monica Hesse is itching to hit the "wacky" button but mostly holds off, he thought, scanning her duckling piece for the moment she could no longer restrain herself:

After dismissing several single males as parental candidates, they spotted two mallards that appeared to be a couple, though you never can tell with ducks. "Maybe they were enjoying being single," Levy says. They worried about suddenly saddling these unsuspecting ducks with 10 children; just look at what happened to Jon and Kate Gosselin when their family exploded.

He set those words as a blockquote in his paper's blogging application and admired the small details Hesse used to advance her slice-of-life narrative. His wife asked him to add Season 4 of Wire in the Blood to their Netflix Instant Queue.

Zak, he thought, brings his hand down much faster.

Zip, pop, plunk, woooh!

Zip, pop, plunk, woooh!

More thoughts while writing the blog post: Should I do that riff about the Phillies owing 57.1 percent of their wins to the Nationals? Would anyone chuckle at that Crocs-comeback story I read earlier? Should I mention that the top Google result for "Had to Be There" is still comfortably owned by a Jimmy Buffett live album? Say something about tax day?

Beaujon's wife gasped in surprise at a twist in the plot. It was 12:18 a.m. "Bed?" he offered. "I'm just waiting for you," she said.

Everyone I've ever worked with, including me, has at one point or another proposed bringing in some "Talk of the Town-style pieces." This ambition fails to take into account that if the "Talk of the Town-style piece" were feasible, maybe they'd exist in a publication other than the New Yorker, where such pieces are called "Talk of the Town pieces."

So is the Washington Post heading for a Queequeq quagmire with its new "Had to Be There" feature? Or is it Ahab's day, finally? Read the memo below.

In tomorrow's paper, Style will launch a new occasional feature called Had to Be There (as in "You had to be there," name courtesy of David Montgomery). A brainchild of the Style GA writers, the feature is aimed at bringing a greater sense of place and the "Other Washington" to Style, offering glimpses of people engaged in all sorts of happenings throughout the region. You could think of it as a sort of DC-area Talk of the Town. The pieces, which will generally be secondaries/page rounders, will run anywhere from 10-25 inches. They will be strongly voiced and visual, almost cinematic in the unfolding of action. And they will be reported pieces, not unreported or purely observational essays. Taken collectively, we hope this feature will give that proverbial traveler from Cleveland a rich sense of everyday life in this region. The first piece, by Dan Zak, is about a Skeeball craze at a DC bar.

Anyone with an original idea is welcome to try his or her hand at one. Lynn or I would love to work with you. Although we should be able to assign art ahead of time for most of these, we're also open to serendipity, in the event you just happen to stumble upon the perfect one-time piece. Or if you know something that would be perfect but can't do it yourself, let us know that, too.

Lynn Medford (Ext. 4-6340) and Sydney Trent ( Ext. 4-4208)

In Virginia, gays can't get any kind of official recognition. But celebrations of institutionalized racism can! Yesterday, Gov. Bob McDonnell apologized for declaring April "Confederate History Month" (Note: south of the Mixing Bowl, the term for this is "month") without mentioning that...whole slavery thing. Getting smacked by Sheila Johnson may have speeded the apology.

Brag Bowling, a "commander" in an organization called Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), advocated strongly for the proclamation, as he believes it will boost tourism in the commonwealth. And if you look at the Facebook profile of someone named Brag Bowling who is "a fan of" groups such as the SCV–Sam Davis Youth Camp and the Southern Legal Resource Center, Inc. ("Defending the Rights of Southerners to Honor Their Culture and Heritage"), you will see he is also friends with Kirk David Lyons.

Lyons, the chief legal counsel of the SLRC, likes to wear kilts, has a fascinating history of alliances with white-power groups, and is currently campaigning for people who are proud of their Southern heritage to give their race on census forms as "Confederate Southern American."

SCV has been split between moderates–who do dope-swoons about the days when people owned people–and neo-confederates, who trend a little more rightward. In 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report reported that a man named Bragdon Bowling "is connected directly to Lyons through an apparently clandestine circle within the SCV — what members call the 'John Wilkes Booth Camp'."

I predict tourism will be up!

ITEM: Naked Guy is free!

Nats lose. Wizards lose. The Haynesworth signing does not seem to be working out.

That BB gun at St. Albans? Police say it belonged to a St. Albans student, which means you and your future boss will probably have a good laugh about his colorful youth someday. Also interesting: that piece mentions it's illegal to own a BB gun in D.C. Yeah, you wouldn't want people running around with those.

TheWashCycle has more on an April 8 meeting to discuss the Sherman Avenue redesign, which is planned to make the artery more bike-friendly. I'm trying to track down the cyclist to get his or her side of this. My e-mail address is at the bottom of this post.

UPDATE 11:54 Three eyewitnesses tell me the cyclist was struck by a news van. I'm waiting for confirmation from the station they told me the van belonged to. One guy said the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet and ran a red light. He said there was a lot of blood.

UNLESS IT'S FREE, LIKE OURS. And in that issue Washington City Paper continues its obsession with Kennedy Street NW, with a Mike Riggs breakout in the Goods & Services section that does not appear to have made the leap to the Web. Good thing DC Mud has the story about a "smelly, gray, leaking liquid" oozing from the former site of a building on the 800 block.

PROPS TO THE POST. Clarence Williams, Keith L. Alexander, and Paul Duggan's piece about the Southeast shootings is a must-read. Fenty got booed at a vigil! Tom Jackman continues to rule the Dirk Smiler coverage (Fischer, that'll teach you to go on vacation). Among yesterday's value-added weirdnesses: Cara Cottle, Smiler's girlfriend who is charged with killing him, worked for conservative activist Richard Viguerie. Peter D. Greenspun, Cottle's lawyer, would not tell Jackman whether Viguerie was paying for Cottle's defense. (As usual, the comments are a world unto themselves, with goths and trolls debating the mechanics of "chocking.") ONE MORE! David Malitz dug up David Mills' 1992 Sister Souljah profile. You know, that one.

TWO DAYS TILL IPAD! Is it gonna rule? It's so gonna rule!

My morning ride through Rock Creek Park is one of the best parts of my day, and it's even better in the rain, when joggers and other distractions are few and I can ride in a head-clearing Zen state.

But the bike path is covered with squishable threats to this Zen state. Namely, worms, who for whatever reason, crawl out in the rain. If you want to avoid them, you end up swerving around like Monsieur Hulot. If another cyclist is approaching, avoiding worms is downright dangerous! So this is my question: Is it OK, morally, to flatten a worm when your safety and that of others is not in question? Or should one ride in a state of vegetarian terror?

"I get it if Wemple doesn't want to read about my kids," Dvorak writes. "That's fine. Lots of readers also don't want to hear about homeless teens when I write about them, either."

Dvorak casts Wemple's blurb as an assault on the very act of writing about children.

"The fact is," she writes, "the business of raising humans is an inextricable part of our daily world, whether we're parents or not. And, too often, we shun writing or even talking about it because our workplace culture doesn't want to hear that every coin has two sides. "

I don't think Wemple's point is that she shouldn't write about her kids. His point is she's not that great at it. But you read the item and decide. The Post, of course, doesn't provide a link to the piece she's writing about.

Tomorrow Agent Zero will face sentencing for what's, depending on your view, either a practical joke gone very wrong, the worst public-relations campaign in history, or a fine argument against informal gambling. The Great Michael Lee writes the definitive primer on the Hibachi's time in D.C. Which may not be over, if our readers have their way! More from us: Gil's guns, Gil's text messages, Gil's unsuccessful video-game character, Gazo the Pranksta.

Ken Cuccinelli isn't the only hero of the tea party movement. There's the hero who cut Bo Perriello's gas line. Bo's brother, Tom, is a congressman from Virginia who voted yes on the health-care overhaul. Then there's the hero who faxed (faxed?) Rep. Bart Stupak a picture of a noose, and all the nameless heroes around the country who've put bricks through Democratic Party offices across the country. Heroic Mike Vanderboegh, a militia-movement vet who's found the tea-party folks strangely accommodating, encouraged such acts! Philip Rucker's Post article says Vanderboegh didn't respond to questions Wednesday, but Vanderboegh's blog says he just did a lengthy interview with a Washington Post reporter, so I look forward to hearing more from this American hero.

Oh hey, P.S. Suck it Ken Cuccinelli: George Mason reaffirms nondiscrimination policy toward gays.

Man makes guinea-pig hat, faces jail time. His neighbors saw him wearing the hat, which includes the animal's head.

Washington City Paper food columnist Tim Carman has been nominated for a Beard Foundation Award. This is unfolding via Twitter, so I'm not certain which of Tim's articles made the cut, but I believe this tweet refers to Specifics announced! The nom is (indeed) for Tim's May 2009 piece "How Not to Hire a Chef." Congrats, Tim, this is huge and well-deserved.

Did you rage this weekend? If not, did you get your living room spackled, sanded, and primed? Did you spend so much time listening to 105.9 the Edge that you found yourself thinking things like, On third listen, I adjudge that the bass line of "Living on a Prayer" is the most important part of the song? Are you me?

No? THEN LET'S RAGE!

1) RAGE AGAINST HEALTHCARE; RAGE AGAINST ANTI HEALTHCARE RAGERS. Universal-healthcare proponents had two victories this weekend, one courtesy a vote and another courtesy some Tea Party protesters who went Mel Gibson on members of congress. It reminds me of what a friend said about John Rocker after he flamed out: "Put a redneck in front of a microphone, this is what happens." This friend lives in the same town as John Rocker and avoids microphones.

2) RAGE AGAINST IMMIGRATION NONACTION. Of all the things Obama hasn't gotten done, this is...one of them.

3) RAGE AGAINST THE WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. And yes, in case you were wondering, this protest did bring out the guy on stilts dressed like Uncle Sam.

4) RAGE IN RUSSIA. This was rage against Putin, in 11 cities, but they called it Day of Wrath because dayofrage.com was taken.

5) RAGE AGAINST THE WASHINGTON POST Oh my god if I read one more Andy Alexander item about this I'm gonna write in to complain. March 9. March 11. Today. I am not celebrating this celebration of the "celebration" of gay marriage!

6) MARYLAND RAGES AGAINST WINNING. On the plus side, no reports of a riot as of Sunday night at 11:13.

7) RAGE AGAINST OUTSIDE-THE-BELTWAY TYPES: Arlington man wins National Marathon. Arlington way to go!

8) NATS RAGE AGAINST JESUS and send him to Pennsylvania. Hope you like pretzels, Jesus!

9) NOT RAGE BUT FASCINATING: T.C. Williams in Alexandria sends 80 percent of its students to college. It's in the top 4 percent of U.S. high schools for AP placement. And it's been deemed "persistently low achieving" and faces radical surgery. In today's Outlook, T.C. teacher Patrick Welsh writes a typically sharp column about the school, torching Alexandria for enrolling "newly arrived" 18- to 20-year-old immigrants in high school; "Had we done as Arlington and Fairfax counties do and offered them enrollment in an adult education program, their Standards of Learning scores would not have counted, and it's very unlikely that T.C. would have gotten the 'persistently low achieving' label. We would also be serving those students better." He also briefly tells the story of Alexandria's star-crossed effort nearly 13 years ago to create an alternative school for kids who aren't making it in T.C. Activists thought it was racist; the plan sunk.

Photo by Flickr user ep_jhu

Alex Chilton is dead. Avoid conversations with middle-aged ex-indie rockers today. We will be morose and more unbearable than usual.

Other stuff happened yesterday:

Mike Shanahan will do great things in Washington. Joe Gibbs says so, and he talks to God (with any luck, he won't deliver Alex Chilton's eulogy). To wit: Shanahan's Skins signed Rex Grossman!

In other D.C. sports weirdness, Elijah Dukes got released by the Nats. Twitter war!

THE CEREAL BOWL IS COMING! Reasons to support this exciting new restaurant:

1. I have a bowl of cereal with a cut-up banana every morning. Why mess with perfection at lunchtime?
2. If you have kids, you'll appreciate the option.
3. Good fuel-up spot before hitting Supercuts.
4. It'll drive many people you know coconuts if you pretend to be psyched about it.

JIM GRAHAM wants to stop employers from running credit checks on most potential hires. Companies that favor such checks, such as the one I work for, argue that they help weed out unreliable people. Kind of like subprime mortgages did? ALSO: More effective than a Google search?

IF THERE'S A GOD, why did he take Alex Chilton and leave us with Ken Cuccinelli? If you had any qualms about RoVa losing ground to NoVa, Cuccinelli will put your mind at ease. Idiot birther homophobes will always be ready to govern. The Virginia attorney general is just concerned about the law—and the pressing problem of people not getting discriminated against. You gotta prioritize, I guess. And if his next priority makes Tea Partiers curl their toes in pleasure, that's just lagniappe.

WARRIOR PRIDE The principal of my alma mater is leaving. Jay Mathews has a nice tribute.

WHAT'S THAT? YOU WANT TO ENJOY ONE MORE ALEX CHILTON SONG?

R.I.P.

There was a time when Washingtonians who like their water from the tap and those who prefer it in bottles got along just fine. That time was called "last week."

Last night at American University's Wechsler Theater, the university's Center for Environmental Filmmaking hosted a screening of Tapped, a film about the environmental costs of bottled water. On Monday, the International Bottled Water Association, which is not thrilled with Tapped, e-mailed the university. Tom Lauria, the IBWA's vice president for communications, wrote that the trade group "will be there to set the record straight, both in terms of the pre-production conduct of 'Tapped' producers and the faulty information they provide to viewers." Lauria demanded a seat on the panel discussing the film cautioned that "We have many relevant comments, corrections and observations of concern to film students, and it may prove to be smoother program if AU accommodates authoritative voices who find flaws in this very problematic and false depiction of bottled water companies, as opposed to having serious issues shouted from the aisles."

Chris Palmer, the director of AU's Center for Environmental Filmmaking, invited Lauria to join the discussion, with the caveat that he wouldn't be allowed to dominate it. He read Lauria's e-mail to the room before the panelists spoke.

In an interview yesterday before the panel Lauria said he has a "little bit of a personal ax to grind" with the filmmakers; he arranged an interview for them with IBWA's president, Joseph Doss, whom he said the filmmakers "did pretty much of a hatchet job" on. In a way, he said, he was happy the showing was at American: "The film was not picked up by Sundance," he said. "It is reduced to college road shows."

"Was it rejected by Sundance?" said Stephanie Soechtig, the film's director, yesterday. "Yes. As were 3,000 other films. It was, however, selected by the International Documentary Association to be considered for an Academy Award. We didn't get nominated, but it's the thought that counts."

The IBWA "posts comments to almost every article written about us," Soechtig said. "Yet they can never specifically discredit any of our facts."

The trade group, she said, is "desperate to contain this message and discredit this message. Much like when the tobacco industry was going down and Tom Lauria swooped in to do the same thing with them."

Lauria used to be a spokesperson for the Tobacco Institute, a trade group that dissolved in 1998. Soechtig was in Los Angeles yesterday preparing for a 30-day tour to promote Tapped's March 22 DVD release, but this fact still came up last night.

“I wonder, when you worked for the Tobacco Institute, if you started your presentation with, ‘I love cigarettes,’” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, a group that lobbies students, restaurateurs, and legislators to use tap water.

It was a hard left jab on a night that was quite entertaining if you always thought of drinking water as a rather gentle subject. “It takes a vivid imagination to believe this film,” Lauria told the room. “No one's against tap water. You can’t shower in bottled water." Critics of his industry, Lauria said, effectively want to take away people's right to drink water.

Hauter showed off a reusable bottle filled with tap water and threw a couple more elbows at Lauria's résumé.

“Would you knock that off?” Lauria said. “How dare you…judge” people for where they choose to get their water, he blustered.

"How dare YOU?" an audience member blustered back.

Christopher O'Brien, the university's director of sustainability, said his favorite beverage was actually beer.