I’m well aware that I’m hitchin’ up the Andy Rooney pants in asking this, but: Is it just me, or has journalism renewed its love affair with the “drop dead” headline? There’s a ton of ‘em at the moment, mainly attached to the ongoing bailout negotiations:

Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead

However, it also encompasses Nobel Prize judges:

Nobel Chief to U.S. Novelists: Drop Dead

The Schwarzenegger administration:

Schwarzenegger to Seniors and Tenants: Drop Dead!

Hipster asshole pissing matches:

Hipsters to Real World Cast: Drop Dead!

And Sarah Palin:

The old girls’ club to Palin: Drop dead

I admit that I’ve been contributing to the problem; our eagle-eyed managing editor, Andrew Beaujon, caught me employing the headline device twice in the past few days. Clearly something is going on with journalists subconsciously. Maybe we miss the good old days of tabloid journalism, when you could put a shocker headline in print and people got excited about it, as the New York Daily News did when it first used the phrase in a headline. Maybe it’s just appropriate; that old headline referenced a bailout story, after all. Or maybe we’re just actively wishing each other ill in tough times.

Like all of those scantily-clad, cocktail-loving kids from the suburbs, rats enjoy fun times in Adams Morgan. Talk of their antics burbles up every few months or so on the neighborhood listserv, as it did recently, when Sid Binks chimed in with a post titled, “RATS Everywhere.”

Binks, 44, has lived in Adams Morgan almost half his life. To the residents (many of them newbies) who think the rat problem has gotten worse, Binks says, maybe, but it’s relative. D.C. did have a mild winter and maybe some rat families that would have died off, didn’t. But rats have been part of the fabric of Adams Morgan for as long as he can remember.

There was the time about two years ago when his nearly new car, parked on a concrete slab behind his house on Calvert Street, wouldn’t start. He took it back to Chevy Chase Acura and was told he had a problem: Rats had eaten through the insulation surrounding his ignition wires and the wires shorted out. The mechanic had seen this sort of thing before and offered a solution. “They wrapped the part of the car where rats can get at it with steel wool.” He hasn’t had a problem since. (Current service manager at the dealership, Mike Wang, says he was not aware of this practice but was glad to know Binks is still able to start his car.)

“I’ve exposed rats’ nests. I’ve killed babies,” says Binks. “I’ve stuck a hose down a hole—and the holes are fairly extensive—and turned it on. If they pop out, I bash them with a shovel.”

He’s installed and replaced a “rat fence” around his wooden fence. It’s like chicken wire, he says, “but the holes are a lot smaller….Over the years, gaps do appear and they find their way in. Once you get one, well…”

On and off for 10 years, he’s fought rat infestaions on his patio. He’s never found them in the house, but has a friend who discovered one in the toilet. “He took a plunger and drowned it.”

Every morning, he hoses rat crap from the alley, where he and his neighbors are careful about their trash. He uses poison sparingly because of the neighborhood dogs. He does put out rat traps. “One time one of those closed on my thumb and broke a blood vessel. You should have seen it,” he says.

“I’ve been at this a long time,” says Binks, and it’s given him some perspective. “I don’t like the whole thing, but I guess what you can say is that I’ve accepted it. It’s part of city living.”

(photograph by yours truly, taken many months ago outside Binks’ house on my way to work)

In a world without deep booming voiceovers, in a time when one man’s sonorous intonations will no longer keep us from completely losing it after watching 30 trailers in a row at the theater, what will we do?

Don LaFontaine died of of complications relating to pneumothorax, reports the Post Chronicle. A quick YouTube primer to the man and his work is below:

Virginia Tech unloads a small document dump spurred by a FOIA and the terms of the June 17 settlement that sheds light on what school officials were thinking in the wake of the school massacre. The Post discovers: school brass were concerned about their image!

The Post writes:

“Within a week of the incident, one memo shows, university officials had developed a media strategy that centered on three main messages: ‘We will not be defined by this event,’ ‘Invent the future’ and ‘Embrace the Virginia Tech Family.’”

School administrators handpicked sources for the media and coached them, and graded published stories from a rating ranging from positive to negative. None of this is much of a surprise. I was there covering the tragedy. If you wanted to get beyond the press conferences and well-staged interviews, it was easy. V-Tech is a huge campus with thousands of students and faculty. There were plenty of people willing to go off message. And the Post did amazing work according to our media critic. But I don’t blame the school for trying to manage the tragedy.

Still. This guy really is naive. The silliest suggestion came from an administrator who tried to get the school to coin its own tragedy phrase:

“A two-page memo from Chris Clough, who works in the University Relations office, is dedicated to the language choices the school had to make.

‘We likely will live with the label ‘Virginia Tech massacre,’ or ‘Virginia Tech tragedy’ for years to come in the media, however, we can use our own language in our own media to help prevent the event from defining us and may gain success in influencing history,’ he wrote.

Clough offered three suggestions on how to refer to the killings. The first is the ‘West AJ/Norris tragedy’ because it ‘confines the incident to specific locations within the university and doesn’t allow it to completely define the university,’ he wrote. Then there is the ‘Holocaust Day tragedy’ because the shooting fell on the same day as the Holocaust remembrance day Yom Hashoah. Finally, he suggests, the ‘Best and Brightest tragedy.’

If you thought Dupont Circle might lose one of its 50 Starbucks locations, you were wrong. If you thought Starbucks will not remain a building block in every neighborhood next to the FedEx/Kinko’s and CVS, you were wrong.

Of the 600 stores that will serve its last Strawberries & Creme Frappuccino, only one Starbucks will lose its District address: 2101 L Street NW.

In a surprise note, Starbucks is pulling out of a College Park address. I guess college kids have grown tired of burnt coffee.

[Read what an ex-Starbucks employee-turned CP writer thought of working there].

It’s kind of nice to know we’re worth that much, at least. But according to the AP, it’s apparently a million clams less than we used to be worth.

The Environmental Protection Agency uses this figure as part of their cost-benefit analyses, trying to determine whether life-saving environmental measures are, you know, worth it.

Our lives used to be worth $7.8 million to the EPA, so one would assume that they worked a little harder to protect them. But they just lost about 12% of their incentive to save our asses. Some number cruncher just made it statistically cheaper for the government to toxify the planet.

The devaluation of our lives has happened gradually over the past five years (and to be honest, we could sort of tell, right?)

If it makes you feel any better, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Ca.), head of the Environment and Public Works Committee, says she’ll introduce legislation to raise our value again.

That book you see up there? Not a children’s book. John-John’s Greatest Gift looks like it might be some guide to coping with a parent’s death through the story of John Kennedy Jr.—hey, stranger kids’ books are out there. But it is, in fact, the creepiest thing ever.

Written by North Potomac resident John B. Arnett Sr., the book speculates about the fate of John F. Kennedy Jr. after he died on July 16, 1999. (To be fair, it also speculates about the fate of his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, but her gift clearly wasn’t good enough to make the cover.) What happens? They enter a magical cloud-filled land populated entirely by Kennedys: “‘It’s Mom!’ I saw, and almost froze. ‘There’s Uncle Bobby, Grandma Rose!’”

Right. It rhymes too.

I’m struggling to figure out who the market for this might be. I suppose there are Kennedy followers not unlike the folks who obsess over British royalty, and those people might be wishing for more drawings of Jackie O with a halo. Perhaps you’re somebody who’s finished collecting every issue of George magazine and needs a little something more. Are you one of those people? Have at it.

A few months ago, I wrote a story about a man who believed the D.C. handgun ban would be determined unconstitutional once and for all by the Supreme Court.

Well, he was right!

The man, James Wiggins Jr., had long been licensed as a handgun instructor teaching security officers and others. But, he was so confident in his thinking that he was already marketing gun safety classes to D.C. residents. (That’s him up there, by the way, peeking out behind the target.)

Well, today, not surprisingly, Wiggins is in an awfully cheerful mood. He first called me around noon to say hello and discuss the news. Then, we talked again in the early afternoon.

Not only is Wiggins having his 15 minutes of fame after being featured on WUSA9 recently, he’s also ready to unveil new business plans. When Wiggins and I first chatted in late April, he mentioned that he was hoping to open up a gun range when the ban was officially overturned. At that point, he was pretty tight-lipped about the entire thing and unwilling to say too much. But not now!

“I’m going to be at the licensing place [DCRA] in the morning and start posing questions. Then, I’m going to have to hire a lobbyist,” he says.

Wiggins says he’s pulled together $30 million in financial backing, from private investors–”people I’ve trained,” he says, vaguely–for his new project. “I will try to put [this facility] on the MD/DC line. I’m definitely going for it. I’m going to call it the DC safety center. I can also teach you first aid, CPR.”

Oops. City Desk got scooped by everyone on this. So we searched for the best appreciation of Carlin’s talents we could find. This might be it.

This clip–and there are many on the web–might appeal to District readers as well:

The press is finally getting around to covering the Russert Death Coverage just as the ruminations/tributes are starting to slow. But I have to admit I am still mildly obsessed with Russert as dead-media-cult-figure. I can’t stop watching/reading about Russert.

I watched his show every Sunday but I admit I sometimes dreaded it or clicked away. Any time Biden was on. Any time Russert let a Republican and Democrat play policy ping-pong. I was changing channels. Still. The memorial service was good enough to watch twice. But can the media folk stop making a big deal about drinking Rolling Rock?

For this week’s all-consuming neighborhoods issue, I went over some of the dead people who stay in Rock Creek Cemetery in Petworth: Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, a former head of the National Geographic Foundation; and a guy responsible for giving the world Wonder Bread.

After I’d finished my piece, I learned, from a 1999 story in City Paper’s own archives no less, that a non-dead fellow whose celebrity towers over the already dead is scheduled to someday lay his head in my ‘hood : Gore Vidal has a burial plot and a stone with his name on it in the cemetery.

Gore Vidal in Petworth? Turns out he wants, or at least at some time wanted, to stay for all eternity next to Jimmie Trimble, his boyhood, umm, friend and fellow St. Albans alum. Trimble’s already got his place in Rock Creek Cemetery.

Wonder what that’ll do for property values in the neighborhood.

Yesterday, I joked that Councilmember Tommy Wells appeared to celebrate the death of an elementary school. It was a reference to an item posted on the Ward 6 councilmember’s website.

The Wells’ item detailed the closing of Anthony Bowen Elementary School and the efforts of the school and the community in easing their transition to Amidon Elementary School and Jefferson Junior High. In other words, one school is now being closed and its students are being forced to split into two different schools.

Last Friday, Bowen students and tons of other interested parties marched from their old school to Amidon. The Wells’ item describes the scene this way:

“A crowd of nearly 400 people marched from Bowen to Amidon, with children and adults wearing matching blue and white tee shirts identifying the occasion and major sponsors. Most waved small American flags. Leading the parade, wearing their traditional red and white uniforms and plummed white headdresses was the 12 member 3rd U.S. Army Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) ‘Fife and Drum Corps.’ based at nearby Fort McNair military base. Officers from the First District MPD escorted the group and provided a safe walking route with traffic controls. While drivers waiting to cross could have been annoyed by the long wait, many drivers were seen smiling at the sight.”

Wells’ office was not happy with my jab and called me to let me know. They saw this scene as an impressive show by a community trying to make the best of a tough deal. The change in schools is going to be difficult but at least everyone seems to be engaged in easing the transition.

But. No parade and free T-shirt is going to answer many of the questions parents may have about their kids’ new school.

Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon, I was again stuck in the rain. At least this time, I could take refuge in my car before most of the big drops fell. But jeez, not 30 seconds into riding back to WCP from Congress Heights (where myself and our resident filmmaker were doing some on-location business for our upcoming neighborhoods issue), I noticed an already downed tree.

Thirty seconds into a thunderstorm and a dead tree.

The tree was a neighborhood tree. It wasn’t part of the National Mall. It had been planted along a row of squat red brick apartments. It had survived the crack epidemic, neglect, and piss-poor area schools. And now because of a quickie thunderstorm it was gone.

That’s pretty weak. I saw more scattered leaves, branches, and tree guts along MLK Ave. And near the on-ramp to 295, the limbs of another tree were blocking the road. Weak.

I thought to myself: “D.C. has some pretty weak-ass trees.” Trees: Please step it up.

Well, allow LL to be the first to suggest it: If a recreational trail is ever built in Klingle Valley, it might be appropriate to name it in the memory of Tim Russert.

Russert lived in Woodley Park near the western end of the closed portion of Klingle Road NW. In the mid-’90s, he was perhaps the most famous advocate of closing the road to traffic for once and for all. He was a founding member of the Klingle Valley Park Association and helped organize cleanups of the decrepit road. For the pro-road crowd, he was a convenient figurehead for the perceived moneyed, elite, west-of-the-park interests on the other side.

Russert moved from Woodley Park to Spring Valley several years ago. Of course, only a few weeks before his death did it seem that his wish to see Klingle Road permanently closed might come true.

UPDATE, 6:35 P.M.: LL called the Sierra Club’s Jim Dougherty, a longtime anti-road activist. He says naming a trail after Russert would be a fine idea. He also points out LL wasn’t the only one to have the thought: Shortly after the death was announced, similar suggestions hit the Klingle Valley listserv.

Fenty on Russert: “On behalf of the residents of the District of Columbia, I want to extend our deepest condolences to the family of Tim Russert. He was a gifted journalist and a guide to the American political system for millions of television viewers. He was also a District resident and fixture in the nation’s capital for decades. We were privileged to have him be a part of our community, and will miss him greatly.”