The hunt goes on. Two days ago, Eric Wills reported on City Desk that Manassas, Virginia Bigfoot researcher William Dranginis was “highly skeptical” that Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer of Georgia had a real Bigfoot body in their possession. Good call. Wired reports that yesterday’s much-hyped press conference came and went without a corpse to show.

At this point, all signs appear to point to some combination of hoax, scam, or publicity stunt. And a transparent one at that, according to Wired: “Casting further doubt on the pair’s announcement is analysis by several bloggers showing that their photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to a commercially available Bigfoot costume.”

Isn’t that always the way? Well, at least there’s a consolation prize, in the form of the Most Topical Bigfoot Description Ever:

“According to the team, the Bigfoot creature is 7-feet 7-inches tall, weighs over 500 pounds and has feet that are over 16 inches long, or about size 24. By comparison, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps is 6 feet 4 inches tall, weighs 165 pounds and has size 14 feet. Phelps is also nearly hairless, while Bigfoot appears to be covered in fur.”

For more on the Georgia Bigfoot press conference, see the Wired article. For more on Dranginis’s closer-to-home Bigfoot quest, see City Paper’s story “Hot For Creature.” For more on Michael Phelps, wait about ten minutes and someone near you will start talking about him.

Irate craiglist poster seeks justice and a masked rider known as BILL:

“I would like to compare the images in a ticket I received versus other vehicles. If you have a Camera ticket FROM DC I would appreciate you sharing the Citation Number and Pin Number.

To show how dumb the DMV is, they sent me a ticket for someone riding a scooter because their tag match a vanity tag that I USED TO own, FOR MY CAR, and had turned in.

Oh, ya, if you’ve seen this scooter, that would be great to know too.”

Helpful photos show the salient details:

Will anyone step up to put this case of mistaken identity to rest? Are you out there, BILL? Are you willing to let another man take the fall for your crime?

You may notice a few changes on City Desk this morning: avatar placeholders in the comments, new formatting on the footers of blog articles and in the sidebar, etc. These are due to a much-needed upgrade that took place last night.

The avatars are not currently enabled, since we’re still figuring out how to handle user profiles across our blogs. This is something we want to do, but we’re working incrementally to get the infrastructure in place. The present upgrade was intended to close a few security holes in our Wordpress software and get the publishing interface up to date. Some snazzy new front-end stuff will follow, but there are no major changes in that area today.

Questions? Comments? Gripes? All are welcome.

The Washington Post’s blog coverage of the Supreme Court’s handgun unbanification is generating plenty of comments. Best comment so far:

“I believe guns are unnecessary. I’ve lived in the District for over 5 years and have successfully defended my home from armed intruders with a Samurai sword on two seperate occaissions. Throwing stars and nunchucks are also very effective against guns. If you practice two to three hours a day and are fearless, you will not fail.”

Posted by: razorsedge | June 26, 2008 11:44 AM

My scooter was stolen last Thursday afternoon, brazenly purloined from the motorcycle parking area of my Arlington apartment complex.

Sucks, right? Yeah, sure, you don’t care. That’s cool. But here’s a funny thing:

On Thursday night, City Paper held a party downtown to celebrate Dave Jamieson’s receipt of the Livingston Award for his amazing story “Letters From an Arsonist,” which chronicled the career of a prolific serial arsonist in D.C.

I had planned on attending this event, but ended up pulling an all-nighter at the office on Wednesday in order to get the online version of Hoods & Services going. (Check out the Rankinator–it sort of works!) By 2 p.m. Thursday, I was running on fumes. Party or sleep? I chose sleep, scooted home and passed out.

Wrong choice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coworker Max Linsky cruelly Brookrolled me this afternoon with a column entitled “The Alpha Geeks.” The bulk of the piece is a whirlwind rehash of the evidence supporting what Brooks calls an “ascent of nerdism in modern America,” a thesis which I don’t disagree with, but don’t find particularly novel either. At the tail end of the big F, though, Brooks suddenly whips out the Holy Grail of overloaded culture references:

“Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.”

This statement has already started to gain memetic momentum, and it may be destined for greatness. But what does it mean? Is there really a metaphor here, or did Brooks simply pluck the words at random from the bestsellers section of the paradigmatic axis? I consider myself a pretty standard-issue geek, and I can’t parse it.

As much as I hate to validate David Brooks’s business model by thinking about anything he’s ever written ever, I’m going to have to print this sentence out and tape it to the wall next to my monitor, to ponder as a sort of koan until I achieve geek enlightenment. Or until I finish writing this Wordpress tag-conversion plugin. Whichever comes first.

Behold: the Arlington County Police Department MySpace page.

According to Thursday’s press release from the ACPD, the goal of this project is to get kids to add the police as a friend, warding off sexual predators as vampires to garlic. From the release:

“We don’t want to mislead any kids or their parents into thinking this will completely protect them online,” said Chief Scott. “But if they add a link to our page, hopefully the police emblem will scare off anyone with unscrupulous motives.”

I don’t really have an opinion about how effective this strategy will be. But I will commend the interns who designed the page. From the S.W.A.T. soundtrack to the “black and yellow on bright blue” color scheme, they’ve really captured the essence of the MySpace aesthetic. Coupled with the actual content of the page (safetey tips and whatnot), their profile has a pretty decent hip-to-be-square thing going on. If they can keep it fresh by adding interesting content on a regular basis, and ideally put a human face on it, they might have a shot at building something that’s meaningful to the kids they’re reaching out to.

Now where’s our Twitter-based crime blotter?

Continuing our expansive coverage of the biggest story in Adams Morgan, this time in musical form:

Pretty much sums it up, right?

We’re deep into tallying the votes from our Best of D.C. Readers’ Poll, in preparation for next week’s issue. The paper ballots have been entered and now we’re sorting out the winners. With over 50,000 nominees, it’s been more than a little tedious and occasionally surprising. Some examples:

• “Best Outdoor Venue” There are exactly as many ways of spelling “Merriweather Post Pavillion” as there are people who voted for Merriweather Post Pavillion. But we persevere.
• “Best Caps Player” One popular nominee’s last name is spelled with at least one and not more than three instances of the letters “c,” “k,” “i”, “o,” “v,” “e,” “n” and “h,” but the final order of these letters appears to be a matter of personal preference.
• “Best Jumbo Slice” Many people simply voted for “Jumbo Slice.” Well, okay.
• “Best Art Gallery” Someone voted for “Hooters.”
• “Best Exhibit” Without naming the overall winner or even the runners-up, we can reveal that Ansel Adams was soundly beaten by Stephen Colbert.

Five days late, but moving fast!