This morning in the park surrounding the Dupont Circle fountain flocks of pigeons and other winged creatures seemed to be very interested in a pile of fleshy-looking stuff in the grass. This appeared to be gross. From my spot on a bench, I couldn’t figure out what it was the birds were munching on. This appeared to need a closer inspection.

There in the grass: a ginormous pile of authentic (to my eye) glazed Krispy Kremes, some of them sprinkled and frosted, their frosted parts sticking together in a congealed mass.

Birds everywhere where flying to and from with hunks of glazed doughnuts in their beaks. Squirrels scampered off with sticky bits of dough in their jaws. How could this happen? Is Krispy Kreme dumping their unwanted goods in the middle of Dupont Circle?

“We dump them in the trash right outside our door,” says Mercedes, a manager at the Krispy Kreme just off the circle at 1350 Connecticut Ave. NW. “People come after we’re closed and take them sometimes.” The store/bakery is not allowed to donate their extras, she says, so they dump what they can’t sell. Whatever happens from there is not their responsibility. So, take note: If you want some old Krispy Kremes before the pigeons get to them, hang out at the trash around 11 p.m. Consider this yet one more service provided to you by City Desk.

(photo by pohacco20)

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This photo posted today by the Chicago Tribune’s national legal correspondent James Oliphant—who had to come pick up his 3-year-old becuase of a bomb scare that turned out to be a fake homeless polar bear—looked oddly familiar. It’s all confirmed, of course. Sculptor Mark Jenkins, whose realistic tape sculptures we wrote about last October, has moved on from random women who appear to be sitting on buildings to Greenpeace. Four Jenkins-created homeless polar bears have been installed in D.C. causing the requisite stirs. We know about the one in Columbia Heights. Where are the other three?

While you’re thinking it over, check the reaction to Jenkins’ earlier piece, from the CP video archives:

Barton Seaver looked a little glassy eyed when he showed up for our scheduled lunch today at Surfside, the Glover Park seafood grill owned by his buddy, chef David Scribner. Seaver apologized for being slightly out of it; he’s battling a bug, he said, and was still feeling the effects of the medicinal hot toddy he sucked down last night (recipe below).

Seaver agreed to meet so we could talk about what his future holds. It has been, after all, more than two months since he split from Hook, the sustainable seafood house in Georgetown that he almost single-handedly designed, and I hadn’t heard a thing about his whereabouts. The funny thing, Seaver told me right after sitting down, is that within hours of resigning from Hook, he was presented with a chance to work for one of D.C.’s best-known and highest-end restaurants. He declined to make that phone call (or to name the restaurant publicly—sorry!)

He has his reasons for not wanting to jump back into the kitchen: He realized one day that he “hated” the people who were walking the streets at 6:30 p.m. “They were providing me with a reflection of my choices,” he said, choices that included working late and working weekends and working almost daily. “Everyone should have a reasonable work day. I just never had one.”

Seaver is striving for a reasonable work life, however, and it likely will not include running or cooking at a restaurant. “I’m really not interested in that,” he says. Instead, Seaver has a number of ideas and projects that he’s developing. Top among them are a pair of TV shows that he’s shopping—one a cooking show, the other a program “looking at the people behind sustainable food.” Seaver hopes to “follow the PBS model. That’s where I want to end up.”

No matter what Seaver ends up doing, however, he plans to move beyond a message of sustainability, a focus that he now believes may be too narrow. It’s not enough, Seaver thinks, to merely sustain, say, a fish stock at 6 percent of its historic population; we need to start rebuilding populations. One idea he has concerns a new way to rethink and refashion commercial aquaculture facilities so that we can “feed more people with fewer fish.” He also wants to take these new technologies to developing countries where they can start building their own new generation of aquaculture facilities–and start building whole new economies.

More immediately, of course, Seaver just wants to shake his cold.

Barton Seaver’s Medicinal Hot Toddy*
Your tea of choice (to your desired strength)
3 lemons cut in half and juiced
5 tbsp honey or maple syrup (Seaver prefers the syrup)
2 tsp cayenne pepper
3 tsp cinnamon ground or 1 cinnamon stick broken up
4 cups water.

Place all ingredients together, including the juiced lemon rinds and bring to a boil. Take off boil, strain, and drink.

Personal note from Seaver: I thought the toddy was great with a shot of Calvados in it. Bourbon, rum, or brandy would work well, too, depending on your preference.

* Cautionary note from blog author: Measurements are approximate. The poor dude was sick, after all, and not precisely measuring out every damn ingredient.

Photograph by Pilar Vergara

This past Sunday, in the company of several illustrious out-of-town friends, I paid visit to the orchids at the U.S. Botanic Garden. Truth be told, I’d never spent much time with these precious blossoms before, and on this day—like a lizard on a windowpane?—I was popeyed at their more than platitudinous beauty. “Oh, to be a bee,” I murmured as I communed with Their Delicacies and sought to avoid unseemly collisions with fellow voyeurs.

In fact, the U.S.B.G. plays host to so much more than orchids. On a lazy Sunday, the discerning gardengoer will find a mind-bending array of creatively christened and fussily labeled flora and fauna, including the Persian Shield, the Drunkard’s Dream, the Bat-Leaf Passionflower, the Never Never Plant, the Catnip-Leaved Lion’s Ear, the Poet’s Jasmine, the Fosperior Perfection, and—let us not forget—Giraffe’s Knees.

Stirring from my verdant reverie, I found one of my compatriots—a budding sketch artist, if you’ll indulge the pun—embroiled in an ambitious taxonomical endeavor. You will find the fruits of his efforts below the jump.

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Chevron’s got some cleaning-up to do in the city’s Lamond-Riggs neighborhood, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency released an order yesterday requiring the oil giant to take several steps to remediate a contaminated gas plume that leaked over time from a Chevron station in Chillium, Md., across the District line this quiet neighborhood in Northeast.

What can a gas plume do to a nice neighborhood like this? Well, in the words of the EPA, the threat is something called “subsurface vapor intrusion,” a term that figures big in a big EPA document on the mess.

Upon checking for subsurface vapor intrusion in Lamond-Riggs homes, the agency concluded that “there is elevation in benzene and MTBE vapor concentrations” in homes above the plume. In other words, Chevron’s plume has made it to the living room.

The EPA is requiring Chevron to take five steps that include expanding the “existing remediation system” and installing “individual vapor mitigations sytems” but that amount to a larger fiat: Clean this shit up!

Huck, a golden-retriever mix, recently jumped into Broad Branch, the small stream that runs along the Melvin Hazen trail, which is near the zoo in Rock Creek Park. Huck always jumps in Broad Branch. It’s part of his daily routine. What wasn’t part of his routine was coming home sick and lethargic because of something he swallowed in the water.

Huck’s owner, Tracy Sacks of Cleveland Park, describes the something as “oil/gasoline/petroleum stuff” and says Huck came home covered in it and was sick all night. So she made a few calls to the District Dept. of Environment, the National Park Service, and D.C. Fire & EMS describing the spill. To Sacks’ surprise, someone from the DOE called her back and even went down to the creek to check it out.

“He assessed that someone had dumped a couple gallons of turpentine, maybe five or six, and that it would wash away,” says Sacks.

So, thanks, to the fine citizen dumping chemicals into Rock Creek and its tributaries. Next time try the Benning Road Trash Transfer Station. It’s open every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. to take your hazardous, non-dog-friendly materials.

Juanita Cousins has the 411 on the recent Georgia Bigfoot discovery:

Turns out Bigfoot was just a rubber suit. Two researchers on a quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot say that the carcass encased in a block of ice—handed over to them for an undisclosed sum by two men who claimed to have found it—was slowly thawed out, and discovered to be a rubber gorilla outfit.

I want to say, “I told you so,” but I can’t—no, won’t—because I was hoping for something miraculous. The only thing that could possibly make me feel better? Learning that those two off-duty hick-a-billies hosed some “researchers” worse than they did me.

This weekend, my true love and I got Paul’d. Again. Getting Paul’d is what happens when you try and follow Paul Elliott’s convoluted directions, along with his purple prose, in his infamous (in some circles, anyway) 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Washington, DC. We’ve done about half the hikes in the book, which has its gems. But this is typical:

Touch not the electrified anti-deer fence….Look around. In the warm-weather months, deep in the sunny thickets, dragonflies seemingly hang like blue threads in the still air.

Instead of a simple trail map or enumerated directions, Elliott goes on and on in loping, interminable paragraphs, often starting hikes anywhere but where they should start. Go to parking lot A, walk around it thrice, then proceed to parking lot B where you will find charming cracks in the curb. Observe, then walk purposefully toward the trailhead… (I jest, but not by much.) The thing is, the guy’s got D.C. hikers by their SmartWools. The wonderful books and maps put out by the Potomac Appalacian Trail Club just don’t cover all the parks and hikes in our region. And, well, Sugarloaf and Rock Creek and Great Falls are nice and all, but sometimes you need variety. Sometimes, apparently, you need to get Paul’d.

For example: Elliott’s book is the only one I know of with a trail guide to Piscataway Park, an interesting spot in PGC, across from Mount Vernon on the Potomac. It’s full of marshy critters, farms, and people in colonial garb picking gourds. (I’m not kidding. We saw them do it yesterday.) But instead of taking the obvious trails, he has his intrepid readers going through open fields and following roads that curve to the right that don’t actually curve to the right. They dead-end. And I love this sentence: “Instead, turn right and walk about 50 yards uphill—to a sixth junction.”

Aaaaaarrrrgghh!!! Who wants to count “junctions” when you’re trying to take a walk in the woods??

Thanks, WTOP:

The feline is believed to be a Savannah cat, a domestic crossbreed of a short-haired cat and an African Serval cat.

“It’s something people have done over the years to create an extra-large pet kitty,” says Maryland Department of Natural Resources Wildlife and Heritage Service Director Paul Peditto.

Maybe this will stop all the bad Katie Couric-esque jokes on the previous post.

According to a “campus alert” sent today to University of Maryland students and staff, a “possible cougar” has been sighted on the College Park campus. The possible cougar has been described as “light tan and tawny brown, about 4 feet long with a 4 foot tail, and weighing about 50 pounds.”

Captain John Brandt of UMD’s Department of Public Safety confirms that the possible cougar was first sighted yesterday. “The first [sighting], which happened a day ago, was not reported to the police department,” says Brandt. “The person who made the report initially wasn’t believed. But then we got a call this morning, around 6 a.m., of another sighting [of the possible cougar].”

Since the release of the campus alert, Brandt says his department has received word of an additional possible cougar sighting. At press time, Brandt’s officers—and the campus’s video security system—have yet to spot the possible cougar.

The possible cougar is a new threat for UMD, says Brandt. “We have never dealt with this before,” he says. “Cougars are not an indigenous species of the state of Maryland. . . . They’re just not seen around here. We will get the occasional report of a coyote on campus, which usually will end up just being a fox.”

Brandt does not know where the possible cougar came from. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says.

Any sightings of the possible cougar should be reported to university police, at (301) 405-3555.

Full campus alert after the jump.

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Watch out, drug-sniffing dogs: You’ve got some competition.

According to an MSNBC.com article posted this morning, a turtle fitted with a GPS device meandered into a remote area of Rock Creek Park and led a National Park Service employee to a marijuana-growing operation.

A National Park Service employee was tracking a turtle with the gadget for research when the turtle wandered into a small marijuana field in a remote part of Rock Creek Park.

U.S. Park police were called and surveillance was set up to monitor the area. Police discovered a man taking care of about 10 marijuana plants in the field.

U.S. Park police and Montgomery County police arrested Isiah Johnson, 19, in Chevy Chase Wednesday.

Nice work, little turtle. I bet Mr. Johnson wasn’t expecting to be caught like that.