In his column this week, LL held forth on the glories of budget earmarks—in particular, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s move to porkify money from ballpark-related development.

LL said of Fenty’s move, “Don’t expect much opposition on the D.C. Council,” and explained how At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown had appropriated dollars for his own favorite groups, “all but ensuring that the budget will continue to be nicely porked with ballpark dollars for years to come.”

Well, seems LL was dead wrong: According to draft budget legislation being passed around the John A. Wilson Building yesterday—a draft that reflected changes made during a six-plus hour closed-door meeting of councilmembers Wednesday—the council plans to cut out the mayor’s “community benefits” maneuver when they take up the budget next Tuesday. No word on exactly what happened, but it looks like Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s followed through on his pledges to get a handle on earmarks. Also no word yet on how the $2.23 million projected to flow into the community benefit fund will actually be spent.

Other tidbits from the draft legislation:

What’s out? A provision that would require city agencies to closely track their employment positions….language that would have made DCPS subject to the same budget-hearing procedures as any other agency….several provisions concerning youth services, including one that would establish a central “Office for Youth Mentoring” and another that would required training in child-abuse reporting….the proposed “budget reserve,” which would be used to pay settlements and judgments and other unforeseen city expenses.

What’s in? The watered-down “Healthy DC” plan….the $10 million for Ford’s Theatre….the Klingle Road closing provision.

More to come.

If you didn’t get your chance to wait in an impressive line of both people and idling cars to dump your hazardous waste for free last weekend, now you’ll have the chance to dump it all year long.

Your first (or second?) chance is tomorrow at RFK. The D.C. Department of Public Works will take household hazardous waste from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the stadium, a make-up date of sorts to accommodate District residents who did not get a chance to participate in last Saturday’s overwhelming semi-annual event.

DPW also announced that beginning May 17, weekly hazardous waste collections will happen on Saturdays at the Benning Road Trash Transfer Station, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Later this summer, Saturday dropoffs will shift to the Ft. Totten Trash Transfer Station.

Nancee Lyons, spokesperson for DPW, said she was baffled by last Saturday’s large turn out, but happy that people want to dispose of their hazardous waste responsibly.

“People were surprisingly in a positive mood as they made their way to the front of the line,” Lyons said on Monday, referring to the almost two-hour wait some people sat through. “Many people were just surprised to see so many cars there.”

Lyons also noted that DPW officials have been working with Mayor Adrian Fenty for the past year to start the weekly dropoff centers, saying, “all this event did was prove that there is a large need for these stations.”

Lyons’ advice: Keep your hazardous waste count low. Use the stuff up or give it someone else who can. If that’s not possible, here’s what you can get rid of through the DPW program:

• leftover cleaning and gardening chemicals
• small quantities of gasoline
• pesticides and poisons
• mercury
• thermometers
• paint and solvents
• spent batteries of all kinds
• antifreeze
• chemistry sets
• automotive fluids
• asbestos floor tiles

Items not accepted at the drop off site:

• ammunition
• bulk trash
• wooden TV consoles
• propane tanks
• microwave ovens
• air conditioners and other
• appliances
• radioactive or medical wastes

(photo by Bree Bailey)

—Whitney Boyd

Following a full day of surgery—Earth Day, natch—a couple of D.C. cosmetic surgeons started crunching the numbers. Just how much carbon is used in the disposal of sucked-out fat?

Considering that an average of 7 pounds of fat is sucked out per surgery and that national surveys estimate Americans undergo 450,000 liposuctions and tummy tucks annually, that’s about 3 million pounds of yellow, goopy fat to get rid of. Each pound of fat is about 78 percent carbon, but because no one has yet figured out how to make biodiesel out of it in a way that people will, uh, stomach, the fat gets incinerated, pushing about 1,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Drs. Navin Singh and Marwan Khalifeh, senior partners at Ivy Plastic Surgery Associates in Chevy Chase, D.C., figured out that creates the pollution equivalent of driving 2 million miles.

So they’re trying to do something about it. Their office is paperless; they’re energy conscious and all of that. But there’s only so much they can do with fat, so to offset handing about 160 pounds of fat per month over to a medical waste disposal service, Singh and Khalifeh are purchasing carbon credits.

Singh calls it a “baby step” for his industry. “The first incentive is to conserve, reuse, recycle. We do as many of those things as possible, but when we can’t, you have to go for a lazier way and purchase credits.”

The surgeons got online at carbonfund.org and signed up to spend about $100 to $200 a month on carbon credits, which will (they hope) go to companies and nonprofits involved in pollution reduction, protecting existing forests, planting trees, etc. “You do wonder if this is legitimate or if someone is taking our money and not doing anything, so we spread it around with different companies while we figure this out,” says Singh.

Something else they figured out: If people actually jogged off the weight, that would be cheaper and better for their health, but not actually better for the environment. “They would just liberate that carbon into the air by burning it off,” says Singh.

(photo by keizie)

So, you may have heard that our Best of D.C. issue is out. If you haven’t heard: Are you living out of a box in Rock Creek Park or something? Go get one! Even though the issue is the largest in memory for the City Paper, there were some items that just wouldn’t fit. To wit: the classic D.C. Go-Go Band, Mambo Sauce. All of Mambo Sauce (of “Welcome to D.C.” fame and the stars of local label Red C Records) were included in our Classic D.C. Archetypes feature, but didn’t make it to the print issue. For this, we are sorry, because these people are pretty, they’re talented, and they love them some D.C., so here they are, along with their answers to the burning question: What is the Best of D.C.?

Andy White: Ben’s Chili Bowl

Black Boo: We’ve got our own swagger. We march to the beat of our own drum.

Keyboard Chris: We have our own form of music native to our area (until Mambo Sauce spreads it to the rest of the world)!

Pep: Go-Go!!!

Twink: My family

Yendy: The city’s rich African-American history.

An admirable act of transparency at Slate, where writers who supported the invasion of Iraq discuss how they feel about said support five years on.

In this spirit of openness, I decided to reexamine my blog posts over the past year. Here’s some things I could have done better.

1. “Summary Lovin’” was way too meta.

2. Making fun of one of our new owner’s franchise properties was perhaps an example of thrill-seeking.

3. I actually like the Keurig now.

4. It’s best not to engage the DCeiver at all.

5. I ran out of jokes long before I ended this feature.

6. Atlanta’s nickname isn’t “The Big ‘A.’” That’s actually the nickname of Akron, Ohio.

7. Athitakis dresses much better than this.

8. Despite many tries, I’ve never managed to draw the ire of Ron Paul supporters, and I am totally jealous of how easily Cherkis does it.

This is my apology to the Earth. I needed new mascara. Honest, I did. I was scraping the bottom of the tube so hard the bristles were bent. The only thing I was putting on my lashes was big chunky globs. It was not pretty. I put it off as long as I could, but it was time for new mascara. And, yes, I know what I should have done. I should have taken my lash-less self down to Macy’s and bought my little tube of Bad Gal Lash. I probably could have found the time. But it didn’t feel like I had the time. There was work and more work and cookies to bake and friends in town. This was the height of the holiday season! So I ordered my mascara online. I thought the $5 I was paying in shipping was the only crime I was committing. But, no, my teeny tiny tube of macara came in this box:

I’m sorry. I have learned my lesson. I will never order makeup again.

Due to an error by Editorial Assistant Aaron Leitko, the music listings for the Red and the Black are listed incorrectly in this year’s edition of the Washington City Paper’s annual Fall Arts Guide.

The Red and the Black listings appearing in the Fall Arts Guide were pulled from the venue’s Web site. The site’s main calendar page lists this fall’s scheduled concerts up to mid-October. A link to a “full calendar” leads to a different calendar page with a pull-down menu; although the pull-down menu offers options to see the monthly schedules of upcoming shows for September, October, November, and December 2007, selecting those options actually leads to archives of performances that occurred in September, October, November, and December 2006. (The year “2006” is prominently displayed at the top of the archived performance schedules.) These schedules were mistakenly used as the primary sources for the Red and the Black’s listings in this year’s Fall Arts Guide; as a result, the listings are inaccurate.

In the effort to bring our readers the most up-to-date and dependable listings information in each weekly edition of the paper, it is the policy of the City Paper’s Listings Department to obtain such information from only the most reliable of sources (paid advertisements submitted by the venue, direct correspondence with venue managers and event coordinators); when information is obtained from less-reliable sources (Web sites, out-of-house publicists), it is to be more highly scrutinized. That same policy applies to the annual Fall Arts Guide, but was not followed in this instance.

The correct listings information for upcoming shows at the Red and the Black can be found on the main calendar page of the venue’s Web site, as well as in each weekly edition of the City Paper.

Sorry, Ben Tausig fans. A reader (who must have been going nucking futs trying to solve last week’s puzzle) called in to let us know that we ran the wrong grid last week. I asked the production department about it but they were too busy ordering unwanted pizzas to John Sugg’s house. So I think it’s best that we just post the correct grid (answers in this week’s paper—no peeking!) and tiptoe away…

To all the people I hit in the face while throwing Frisbees for City Paper in the Capital Pride Parade: I’m sorry. I was aiming for your hands. I really was. But it was impossible to control those little discs. If you don’t believe me, try throwing one from your own moving vehicle; I swear you won’t hit what you aim for.

To all the people who deserved a Frisbee but didn’t get one: I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. Yes, I was trying to throw at a diverse cross-section of readers, but we all have our faults. Mine was that I usually threw to pretty girls.

To all the people who bucked the police line, dashed toward the wheels, or otherwise endangered their lives to grab a Frisbee: You make me uneasy about the human condition.

With the advent of YouTube, there is simply no excuse for the error I made in my pick in this week’s paper of this weekend’s U.S. Air Guitar Championships at the 9:30 Club.

In it, I refer to Slash’s “cliffside heroics in the video for ‘November Rain.’” My valued colleague Aaron Leitko disabused me of this illusion. Slash doesn’t play the solo in “November Rain” on the side of a cliff; he plays it on a wind-swept plain outside the church where Axl gets married! (And it’s a good thing he does it during the service, since the reception gets rained out, some hippie stage-dives on the cake, and then the bride dies.)

My apologies to true heshers everywhere, none of whom would be caught dead making such a boneheaded blunder. I’ll atone by spending the entire weekend listening to Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds.

Incidentally, does anyone have any idea what video I was actually thinking of? Please tell me it’s not Aerosmith.

Anyone reading Amanda S. Miller’s fine cover story in this week’s paper (”From Here to Paternity,” 3/16) would see these words at the end of page 23: “They’re at the school to stand guard at the doors of the middle school’s lunchroom and”

Unfortunately, we never learn why those guys are standing at the lunchroom doors. As we were preparing our final pages last night, a last-minute correction a few paragraphs earlier pushed the end of that sentence to the top of page 24, but we still sent the old version of page 24 to the printer.

The sentence should read: “They’re at the school to stand guard at the doors of the middle school’s lunchroom and control the flow of traffic.”

The paragraph that begins at the top of page 24 (”When Jones stops in the main office…”) should then follow. My apologies to Amanda for marring her first cover story and to our readers for leaving them hanging.

Due to a production snafu, we ran last week’s Ink Well crossword, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and Red Meat comic a second time in this week’s issue. We apologize to all the Ben Tausig, Lynda Barry, and Max Cannon aficionados for the inconvenience.

Here are the correct items for your enjoyment:

• Ink Well Crossword, by Ben Tausig (PDF)
• Ernie Pook’s Comeek, by Lynda Barry (JPEG)
• Red Meat, by Max Cannon (JPEG)