On my daily MARC train trip to Baltimore last Tuesday evening, I fell into a head-hanging, drooling sleep so deep I nearly missed my station. By the time I reached home, the fever was on, and I was deep into my worst flu bout since elementary school.

Like a good worker, I called in sick on Wednesday, Thursday, and again on Friday, to spare my coworkers from my germs. After six days, countless cups of ginger tea, a quarter bottle of Tylenol, and the second season of The Wire, I was back on the MARC Monday morning, hoping I wouldn’t spook my fellow commuters with a coughing fit.

I shouldn’t have worried. Although I did let out a few raspy coughs into my handkerchief, the final notes of my sickness were nothing compared to sniffling, sneezing, and full-on hacking of many other riders. A bearded man a few rows ahead of me coughed for so long, I feared he would pass out. The train car rang with sickness all the way to D.C.

It’s going to be a long, germy winter for commuters. Have the rules changed and it’s now all right to go to work with a serious cold or even the flu? If so, I propose we follow certain Asian countries where the polite person with a cold covers his mouth in public with a hospital mask. At least on the MARC train.

The D.C. Department of Health has issued a health alert following a voluntary recall by the Campbell Soup Company of more than 72,000 cans of its Chunky soup.

The recall involves cans of Chunky Baked Potato with Cheddar and Bacon Bits. And not just ’cause this soup takes like shit. The soup is extra super chunky and may contain of hard plastic “that presents a choking hazard and could cause injury if swallowed,” according to the alert. So far three consumers have reported minor injuries “in and around their mouths.”

No word yet on how the plastic got into the soup, or how Campbell manages to sell 72,000 cans of this stuff when there’s no hard plastic in the recipe.

I didn’t think much of it, the first time. Then I began seeing them all over town—women toting two-toned pink Victoria’s Secret shopping bags filled with lunches, books, clothes…anything but underwear.

Old women, teenagers, all shapes and sizes, pink bags in hand. Last week a modest young woman with her head covered by a black scarf. Who would have guessed?

Perhaps, as a female coworker suggests, there are just as many, say, Nike bags doing hauling duty and I haven’t noticed? I don’t think so. So what is the appeal? It seems to be more than utility or ecological consciousness. The bags are toted for a reason, and it can’t be to make me fantasize about the carrier’s lacies. Right?

It seems I’m not the first pervert to wonder. On Yahoo Answers, one respondent thinks it has something to with detachable “crotch panels.”

I doubt it. And so does the clerk who answered the phone this afternoon at the Union Station VS. “I guess it’s just the wonderful color and the name brand that catches their eye,” she says.

Perhaps that’s it. If so, the company has scored an advertising feat. But what if you dig the bags but buy your knickers elsewhere? No problem. If you care little about false advertising, one eBay seller has the bags ten for $9.99.

Cynthia Pratt guesses at least 200 cars had to be moved from two blocks of Hobart Street NW in Mount Pleasant for tree trimming early this month. But as usual, some residents disregarded the no-parking signs. In the past, parking scofflaws were ticketed, and trimmers worked around the cars, says Pratt, who has lived on the street for more than 30 years. Not this time.

When the trimmers arrived, they saw the cars and left without starting their saws, Pratt says. But not before calling parking enforcement, which doled out $50 parking tickets. “They didn’t even try to do any work,” says Pratt, whose husband had taken their Toyota to work. “They could have done so much, but they just didn’t.”

When Pratt called the Urban Forestry Administration, she was told the contractor didn’t trim the trees because the contract said he had to cut them all at once. “We talked for a long time about what’s practical in the city,” Pratt says.

Erik Linden, a spokesman for District Department of Transportation, says the agency is looking into what happened on Hobart Street. “It appears that the job was not done, but that we were not necessarily informed that the job was not done,” Linden says, adding that DDOT sent the contactor a letter of warning.

Linden says the trimmers will be back to Hobart Street. Pratt hopes it will be soon. During winter storms, she says, falling branches from the 60-foot oaks will “make a mess out of somebody’s car.”

The mother of the 18-year-old Bowie State University student who went missing for eight days in September after crashing his car down a ravine in Beltsville says her son is still recovering in a Washington hospital.

Although Julian McCormick’s injuries at first seemed minor, Peggy McCormick says her son has “extensive tissue damage” caused by hanging from his seatbelt inside his wrecked Honda Civic. “It saved his life, but it done a lot of damage to him also,” she says.

Julian McCormick disappeared Sept. 1 and was found Sept. 8 on the side of the road by a motorist after freeing himself from the wreck. McCormick’s mother says she believes he spent the entire eight days at the bottom of the ravine where he told her he caught fish in a creek with his shoe. She says he was unconscious through much of the ordeal, which took place less than a mile from his family’s home.

Peggy McCormick says her son has undergone several surgeries, and she is unsure when he will be released.

Police on Monday arrested three juveniles in an armed-robbery scheme targeting construction contractors in Lincoln Park. Between 10 and 10:30 a.m. Monday, three men held up contractors at two work sites in the neighborhood, says David Kamperin, a D.C. police department commander. Each time, one of the men pulled a black pistol and robbed the workers of their wallets.

The three juveniles were arrested after a tip led police to a home on 19th Street NE, where a search warrant turned up a handgun.

The men were charged with armed robbery. One was also charged with a weapons violation. Kamperin says police are investigating whether they were involved in a rash of contractor hold-ups this year in the First District. Since January, there have been 34 armed robberies in the First District. Six victims were contractors.

City Desk readers solve the problems of District folk

The problem of the day is pinched from a woman named Laura who posted her canine struggle on the First District listserv. The crisis doesn’t compare with violent crime or auto theft, she writes, but “at what point does a barking dog legally become a nuisance?”

Laura says a small dog left in a yard in her neighborhood howls day and night, driving neighbors out of their heads.

“I’m wondering what my neighbors and I can do to keep what’s left of our sanity,” Laura writes. A good question. Any solutions for Laura?

The infamous pants suit isn’t going away, but Custom Cleaners, the dry cleaning business in Northeast where the Chung family may or may not have misplaced Judge Roy Pearson’s pants, is changing hands.

In a press release this morning, Christopher Manning, the attorney who represents the Chungs, announced the store has been sold “due to the revenue losses and emotional toll resulting from the Pearson v. Chung lawsuit.”

It was the second store the Chungs have closed since Pearson filed his $54 million lawsuit. Pearson lost the case in June but has filed an appeal. The Chungs will continue to run Happy Cleaners on 7th Street NW, according to the press release.

In this week’s District Line story “Think Locally, Hire Regionally,” I reported how D.C. workers have so far struck out in the construction of the new baseball stadium. But local employment numbers are not quite as bad as a task force set up to monitor them at first believed.

Due to a math snafu on the part of the stadium project labor agreement task force, I wrote that city workers have performed 23 percent of journeyman hours at the stadium. The labor agreement set the goal at 50 percent. In fact, District workers have performed 32 percent of those hours.

The shaky math was discovered when an aide to At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown had a go at the numbers. It seems the task force had been entering the wrong category of numbers into its equation since construction began.

Courtland Cox, D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission director for local, small, and disadvantaged business development, is happy about the jump but says it’s still not good enough for District workers. He expects the number to rise as construction continues.

At 11:30 a.m. today, a gunman fired at least 10 shots from the sidewalk at the corner of 5th and P Streets NW in Shaw. By 12:30 p.m., police had no evidence he hit anything.

As officers counted shell casings behind the tape, a group of neighbor told the story of the shooting. Rumor has it the shooter, a man described only by his long dreads, went gunning for a second man for snitching on him to police.

The sources, not surprisingly, refused to give their names. But one did offer an explanation as to how the gunner could fire 10 shots with no apparent victim. The target, said the woman, thumbing a Bible while sitting in her wheelchair, was protected by Jesus.

Further, Jesus, she believes, protected her when a car ran her down a month or so ago. The crash destroyed her wheelchair, but she escaped with only a few scratches.

“Me and my family pray,” she said, pulling up her sleeve to show a pair of praying hands tattooed on her arm, complete with red nail polish.

But Jesus, apparently, does not control this woman’s wrath. When her former sister-in-law arrived and tried to wheel her away from the group, the woman lost her cool. “If you don’t get away from me, I’m gonna drop this Bible and kick your ass,” she said.

This morning’s Examiner reports that the city failed to give fair warning to 20,000 motorists fined $100 each for mashing cell phones to their ears while driving.

The city did a poor job informing the drivers (many who come from the suburbs where the action is only bad form) that it’s banned in the District, the paper learned from a Police Complaints Board report released Thursday.

Well “boo f’in hoo,” as my colleague might put it.

Ignorance of a law is generally not a valid excuse for breaking it, the Examiner reporter writes in the second paragraph, and he is correct.

And law aside, only a driver from some Virginia dark holler (where even Verizon reception is spotty) could have missed the notion that driving one handed with a phone in your ear is felony bad judgment.

Perhaps at District borders we should install signs as Virginia does to advertise its radar detector law.

“Welcome to the District of Columbia,” the signs would read. “Leave your guns at home. If you’re going to smoke, step outside the bar. If you chat while driving, buy the dorky earpiece. Consider yourself warned.”

The Washington Post editors were stumped. No one could agree on the savviest way to fix the sensitive situation. How would they fill the white space below the fold in the Metro section?

Such must have been the crisis Monday that led to today’s absurd ramble on D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty’s bus trip to a news conference at Cardozo High School.

Since the conference was about urging residents to leave their cars at home, it wouldn’t do for Fenty to show up in a city Lincoln Navigator. So as in all good crisis/resolution yarns, our protagonist considered his options.

Metro? Nope. He’d have to walk a couple blocks. City-owned hybrid? Nope. Still runs part-time on gas. Cannondale? Nope. Yellowed pits in the button-down, shine on the dome.

Finally, our hero figured it out. He took the bus, which tag-team reporters David Nakamura and Nikita Stewart inform us “caused quite a stir.” Fenty even braved the rabble without his security detail. Someone asked the mayor for a business card. It was crazy.

And after Fenty finished the news conference, it was time to journey back to the Wilson Building sans auto. This time Fenty slummed in on the subway. Thankfully, our reporters left out that part of the narrative.

But it wouldn’t be a narrative without an ironic kicker to make reader think a little. Drum roll. By evening Fenty was back to the Explorer his Expedition.

Next time Metro editors are faced with a filling-the-paper crisis, I have a suggestion: Leave it blank and include a crayon.

CORRECTION: Due to an error by Joe Eaton, an earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the mayor’s ride.

Shaw resident and provocateur Ray Milefsky is proposing a solution for how citizens can band together to clean up accumulated trash on city streets. On the Third District community Listserv, he writes: “I am thinking a trip to deliver it to Jack Evans’ and Mayor Fenty’s homes à la Michael Moore would be effective with cameras rolling and posting it on YouTube. The Washington Post seems to like these kinds of stories nowadays.”

Don’t forget TV news, Ray. At least one local news crew seems ready to pick up the trash delivery story. On Thursday, Channel 7 reporter Kris Van Cleave (above) e-mailed Milefsky: “If you go ahead with this plan to ‘relocate’ the debris, I’m pretty sure I can get a camera there. Would you please keep me posted?”

A Utah-based technology school that since July has run classes at a Northern Virginia shopping mall is calling the expansion quits.

Neumont University, a private university that for less than two months offered computer science degrees from its spot next to the Old Navy in Dulles Town Center mall, told students last week that the school’s first semester would be its last.

The main reason for the shutdown is that the school’s planned move to permanent digs in an office building at 1 Dulles Town Center was stymied by “zoning issues and a number of other factors,” says Brock Holmes, senior vice president of marketing.

The school had planned to move from the mall to the new building in early 2008. With the new building on hold, the school decided the mall campus would not attract enough students to make the expansion work, according to Neumont’s Web site.

The 23 students currently enrolled at the mall have been offered free tuition at the Utah campus.

For his part, Howard Bender, who left the University of Maryland after 27 years to become academic director of the Virginia campus, said he surprised by the quick in-and-out of the Utah school.

“We were just as amazed as anybody that they would close it so quickly,” Bender says.

Online, students from both the Virginia outpost and the Utah mothership discussed the reasoning behind the closing.

“It’s hard to take you seriously when you’re a college that is in a mall next to something like a Panda Express,” quips one blogger.

“I would love to go to school where there was a Panda Express next door,” replies a commenter.

Perhaps that was part of the problem. Although the mall students had excellent access to fast food options including Chick-fil-A, Sbarro, and Taco Bell, the mall currently has no Panda Express.

They keep the water bongs out front at B & K News Stand in Adams Morgan, but sex and Tom Clancy, it seems, trump weed. For that you’ve got a pay a buck.

Several times during the past two weeks, I have stopped by the store looking, unsuccessfully, for the September issue of Outside.

Each time, after marveling that High Times isn’t the only stoner glossy, I’ve noticed the sign by the red saloon doors demanding a dollar to pass into the back room. Today, I paid up and took a look.

Here at City Paper, our spam filter doesn’t snag very many of the continual come-ons for penis enlargement, performance drugs, and all the rest. So I though I had a good idea of what was available.

Wrong. B & K has quite a collection of goods, from the traditional flesh-toned 19-inch double dong, to a shorter one that straps, inexplicably, to your chin. They also have the truly bizarre “clone a pussy,” a $39.99 plaster caster rip-off modeling set.

B & K might be a little late on their shipments of outdoor adventure mags, but their issues of Buttman and Tranny Times are contemporary, their collection of vintage Playboy and videos vast. The only pedestrian fare beyond the red doors is the rack of yellowed Clancy novels next to the stroke mags.

But why the special room? And why the dollar? I asked Tony, the guy behind the counter for an explanation. The entrance fee, he says, has something to do with window shoppers.

“You buy something you get your dollar back,” Tony says. “You just look I keep the dollar. It helps pay the rent.”

Fair enough. As a neighborhood museum of the bizarre, it might even warrant a buck.