Some action in the comments section of David Montgomery’s Saturday Post story about bicycle commuting. I thought the piece was fine, even if it’s not the freshest idea out there. A lot of commenters are freaked about the lede (not about its florid style, mind you):

This is the summer of women on bicycles riding around town free as anything, wearing long dresses or skirts, sandals or even high heels, hair flowing helmet-free, pedaling not-too-hard and sitting upright on their old-school bikes, the kind with front baskets where they put their laptops, and handlebars that curve gently back in a bow shaped like the upper line of someone’s perfectly drawn red lipstick.

Specifically, the trouble is with the the “hair flowing helmet-free” part. I find the helmet vs. non-helmet debate dreary; people who pish-posh helmet use offer us a rare opportunity to test the theory of evolution at every sticky intersection.

The reason I hate this debate is that it turns a necessary conversation—should people in cities get around more by bike, and if so, how—into a mere safety question.

Plus, c’mon, it doesn’t take many trips through town to expose how flimsy the anti-helmet position is. A straight shot up 17th Street NW is rife with terror, from car doors opening (surprise!) to trucks in the bike lanes, to people who SCARE THE BEJESUS OUT OF YOU BY HONKING FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. And then there’s the vehicles that don’t see you before they back up (two times last month), the pedestrians who cross at you daring you not to swerve (though maybe that’s just my neighborhood), the pitted streets that threaten to turn you into a human cannonball…

But hey, argue about that all you like. We don’t have bike boxes, or car-free-streets days, or any number of good ideas for integrating cycling into daily life, but people droning on about helmets or cyclists running stop signs? Always available.

Photo by Flickr user kendra e

It’s sad to see Paul Lo Duca and Felipe Lopez go but hard not to be excited about the Nats’ new shortstop (I had trouble finding a photo; think this is him).

Exciting new changes around Nationals Park to come:

• Feeding Dmitri Young Ho Hos till he confesses to stealing your lunch: Probably not illegal
• Front-office hirings: Recent Patrick Henry College grads encouraged to apply
• There will be no appeal if you’re sent down to Potomac

From an anonymous tipster, not a wire report:

Guy leaves the Washington Post building, carrying a printout with the unmistakable header of something from the Post CMS. He starts editing it, using a nearby Express box as a writing surface.

Pedestrian squeezes past apparent staffer and pulls out an Express.

Postie: [Deadpan] You know, I strongly encourage you to buy the paper.

Pedestrian: [Totally taken off-guard] Um, I subscribe to the Sunday edition, I swear!

As you can see by this sticker, which is attached to its side, the refrigerator in the employee lounge (the good one, not the one for editorial) is important to this company. If for some reason you see this refrigerator anywhere besides the employee lounge, please let us know.

It shouldn’t be hard to spot—it has had the same metal bowl on top for the whole two years I’ve worked here. There used to be a magnet shaped like a laptop that said “You’ve got mail!” when you pressed a button, but some sharp-eyed nostalgia collector snapped that up. Now there’s a smiley-face magnet and a couple Alison Bechdel strips.

After the jump, some situations in which you might find our fridge.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I give up. What’s with the bike fixed to the fence at Euclid and Champlain Streets NW? Is it a protest against Christian Science? A demonstration of the little-heralded cantilevering abilities of U-locks? A prank played on a drunk friend? Telllllll meeeeeeeeee.

1. Post Reporter Hopes Protesters March on Post Building over Chandra Series by Erik Wemple

2. Where To Eat In Mount P? by Jason Cherkis

3. Chandra Series Posts Big Numbers for Washingtonpost.com by Erik Wemple

4. Hip-Shot: ‘The Naked Party’ by Brian Reed (Fringe & Purge)

5. D.C. Council Dance Party! by Mike DeBonis

6. New ShotSpotter Update by Ruth Samuelson

7. The Post That Will Not Die by Angela Valdez (seriously, what is going on with this thing? I’m not smart enough to figure it out)

8. Time to Chime In by Ted Scheinman (Fringe & Purge)

9. McD’s in Mt. P? by Angela Valdez

10. Purge Here: by Brian Reed (Fringe & Purge)

Photo by ehpien

You may have seen the bright yellow boxes around town: Bash, a new alternative-comics monthly, will debut Friday. “We’re in the air, dropping,” says Publisher John B. Van Meter.

The D.C. publication’s Web site has information for potential advertisers, a PDF of its prototype issue, and, somewhat less expectedly, a mailing address in Lexington, Ky., a city roughly 500 miles from the neighborhoods Van Meter says he’s targeting first: Adams Morgan, Georgetown, Bethesda.

Van Meter divides his time between Georgetown (he has family in this area) and Lexington, where he was an investor in Nougat, an arts monthly that folded in June. “You lose money in one magazine, you’ll jump into another,” says Van Meter.

Bash has a Lexington address, Van Meter says, because its “computer guy” (Managing Editor Jonathan T. Hampton) is there, but notes that Bash’s sales staff is “all Washington.”

“Last month I was in D.C. for three months,” says Van Meter. He says he’s been “up and down Connecticut knocking on doors” trying to sell ads, which he says is “one of the toughest things in advertising for a magazine that’s never been put out.”

Bash’s prototype features strips such as “Tiny Sepuku” and Van Meter’s own “Womb Wompers,” which stars talking fetuses. Van Meter was a cartoonist for Nougat before he put money into it. He says, laughing: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a cartoonist. Likely, that’s starting to show.”

The Great Passport Delay Crisis of 2007 appears to be over, or at least it was for me. Saturday, July 12, I brought my 10-month-old to the post office on South Eads Street in Arlington. We filled out the forms, paid $101.05, and even got his picture taken there (the preceding figure includes photo and money order fees). The clerk asked if we wanted expedited service, but we declined.

The passport arrived today. It was issued Tuesday. We may even have gotten it sooner had we not been on vacation; the envelope isn’t postmarked and was included with our held mail. Good work, State Department!

Fishbowl DC starts its “Hottest Media Types” contest tomorrow. I say call in the dogs and put out the fire, we have ourselves a winner already. Hubba hubba!

(I’m on deadline and don’t have time to read the story. I’m sure Wemple will get to it presently.)

1. Which WaPo Writers Are Pulling in 230K? by Erik Wemple

2. A Diner/Tryst Yoga Comedy: Plans for 14th and T Revealed by Jule Banville

3. Update: SIX Flagging by Dave McKenna

4. LNS Reality Show Update by Amanda Hess

5. Bolt Bus Is Bunk! by Angela Valdez

6. Allstate Gets a Spanking by Erik Wemple

7. City Paper Softball Team Seeks Real Competitors by Andrew Beaujon

8. 2000 Block of R Street NW, July 9 by Jule Banville

9. The Elusive Metal Shopping Cart by Brianne Downing

10. Isn’t Anyone Bothered by the Lara Logan Sex Scandal Coverage? by Angela Valdez

Photo by Flickr user Hello My Name Is Dev

With its 1001st issue, Entertainment Weekly unveiled a redesign of the entire magazine. I am not a foe of redesigns. Time’s for instance, has drawn all manner of ridicule, but I think it’s really good—it’s clean-looking (thank you, The Economist!), and it’s already shown that it can withstand the loss of ideas that don’t work, like that photo timeline on the opening spread, which teased stories that didn’t appear in the magazine. Hopefully, soon its Wiki-style flexibility will allow the loss of the shockingly predictable Pop Chart.

EW’s redesign, though, looks cheap. There’s an opening spread that looks like it wandered over from OK!, and I don’t think Sound Bites has been improved by floating the funny quotes comic-book-style, above photos of their speakers’ heads, but the real bummer is the way every article contains a boldface phrase. It’s extremely distracting. Maybe the point is to make it easier for publicists to find blurb gold like “absolutely marvelous,” but I suspect it’s born of a misguided attempt to make EW’s articles, which aren’t that long anyway, look more bloggy.

Curiously, the online versions of the reviews omit the goofy formatting. Stick with those for now.

Just in case you missed it—or specifically if one of Kornheiser’s research assistants, Googling for material, missed it—I’m pretty sure my boss called Tony Kornheiser a “wimp” on Kojo today. You can listen to the offending quote here. (I can’t; I don’t have RealAudio.)

This is a bike-friendly workplace. A lot of CP employees bike to work, or at least keep their bikes in the office. And I think it’s safe to say we’re all pretty freaked out about Alice Swanson’s death.

That tragedy has been discussed, with predictable results, on a lot of blogs. The comments tend to break along two lines: 1) cyclists need to obey the rules more; 2) vehicles need to watch out for cyclists more. So what do you do when there’s a case where, at the moment, it’s not clear that either Swanson or the truck that hit her were necessarily to blame?

Today on my way to work I was crossing the P Street NW bridge. An SUV with Maryland tags was waiting at the egress from the Rock Creek Parkway. The driver waited for me to cross but didn’t look the other way and hit a cyclist crossing from the other side. The cyclist shouted “Woah!” and hit the SUV’s grille; fortunately it seemed the car had just rocked forward and hadn’t gotten going. I called back to the cyclist to see if he was OK, and he said he was. At the next light I had to pull in front of the stopped SUV to turn left when it turned green. I gave him the stinkeye but he was very absorbed in whatever he was drinking through a straw.

I’m jumpy. I think everyone on two wheels is. And I don’t think there are any easy answers here.

Departing why.i.hate.dc blogger Rusty poses with two of his least favorite D.C. institutions—Smith Point and City Paper—in an interview with washingtonian.com. When asked what one thing he’d improve about Washington, a city he’s been hating on so much that he considers moving to Columbus, Ohio, a step up, “Eliminating the Washington City Paper once and for all.”

Really, all he’d ever have to do to fulfill that fantasy is to join a team that plays us at softball. As detailed on this blog, our softball team was overmatched in every contest we played this year. We forfeited our final game, not for a staff meeting—we tend to hold those on weekdays—but because most of the team had to volunteer at Crafty Bastards Silver Spring.

Never did quitting feel so good. I blogged a while back about the difficulty of getting up and driving for 45 minutes to get your bahookie thumped by some team with “video” in its name.

Thing is, I like playing softball. We all do. But serving as cannon fodder for the fine folks at the Gazette papers isn’t really all that fulfilling. So here’s what I’m thinking. Around town, there have to be publications staffed by people as hopeless as we are. Sculpture, I’m looking at you! Hey Preservation, preserve this!

I am proposing a league of wusses. DCist! We must at least stand a chance against you! National Geographic! Actually, I’ll bet those sturdy explorers at National Geographic could wallop us. But National Geographic Kids! Ranger Rick! Callin’ you out, too! Metro Connection! Current Newspapers!

1. Isn’t Anyone Bothered by the Lara Logan Sex Scandal Coverage? by Angela Valdez

2. WaPo Weighs New Politics Site by Erik Wemple

3. Blogger Shot in Adams Morgan by Angela Valdez

4. Bench Warrants Issued For Absent Jurors by Jason Cherkis

5. 311 Gets Sassy by Amanda Hess

6. Update: SIX Flagging by Dave McKenna

7. How’s the Water in Washington? by Brianne Downing

8. Brian Beutler Update by Angela Valdez

9. Weekend Would-Be Jumper on the Ellington Bridge by Jule Banville

10. Bus Operator Lobbies Against SW Depot by Erik Wemple

Photo of D.C.’s frequent-bead-thrower mayor by wharman