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.

Unless you’re a jerk, the yearly arrival of the giant pain in your ass known as the D.C. Superpages is not as welcome as, say, the SI Swimsuit Issue. Fear not, City Deskers! I have the answers!

To get off the delivery list, call 1-800-888-8448. Pick option No. 2. Wait for someone to answer. Tell her it’s 2008 now and you use the tubes if you need a number. Voila! NOW: They’re coming this week, so you better hurry up if it’s not already too late. If it is and you need to purge last year’s and this year’s, the Mayor’s Call Center promises the city will recycle the monstrosities if you throw them in with regular recycling.

Go forth and save the earth.

Photo by Rich Anderson

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.

Question: when it’s 90 degrees outside does it really need to be below freezing in your office? What’s the logic behind Arctic indoor temperatures in the middle of July?

I blame men’s workplace fashion. If offices would stop forcing men to wear jackets and ties maybe they wouldn’t need the air conditioning up so high. Call me second wave, but I’ve got to assume that men are still setting the standards for indoor climate control.

Note that the U.S. Capitol is the worst A/C freak in D.C. They can kill the global warming legislation if they want; they should just turn up the indoor temperature a little bit for some green brownie points. A Capitol maintenance guy told one Capitol Hill reporter (who keeps a space heater in her office even in July) that the lawmakers would complain that it was too warm and so he sets it as low as it will go – 58 degrees.

Earlier this month, the New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy article on the clandestine doings of London guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds.

If you’re not familiar with this rogue tilling movement, Reynolds supplies a neat explanation of the practice to writer Jon Mooallem. Guerrilla gardening, he says, is ” the cultivation of someone else’s land without permission.”

Gardeners like Reynolds home in on forgotten properties, whether public or private, in order to work horticultural wizardry over them, transforming formerly crappy parcels into botanical wonderlands or small farms. The movement, for which Reynolds has become the default spokesperson, has attracted its share of devotees. Reynolds’ Web site boasts impressive before-and-after guerrillla garden pics sent to the flora guru from such places as Toronto, Portland, Ore., and Brisbane, Australia. “There are hundreds of us around the world discreetly digging at night. Some like me improve their cities, some make the countryside that little bit more colorful, and some live off the vegetables they illicitly grow in roadside verges,” writes Reynolds on his site.

Scanning the site’s photos and extensive guerrilla garden map (evidently there’s a “dig” in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and finding no mention of the District might lead one to conclude that insurgent gardening is just one more vintage-clothed hipster phenomenon a decidedly Brooks Brothers D.C. is missing out on.

Not so. In what was a vacant lot across from Marcus Popetz’s two-story house in east Columbia Heights, a lot that was, as the 32-year-old computer engineer puts it, “attracting drug users, trash, etc…everything a normal nuisance property does” now grow tomato, squash, and cucumber plants.

According to Popetz, two years ago he and some other residents who’d been working on beautification projects around the neighborhood began thinking about what to do with the large, eyesore of a plot just adjacent to the playground of Bruce Monroe Elementary school. “We looked into who owned it,” Popetz writes in an email “and the city did a lien to clean it once they found that the owner was a corporation [that] hadn’t paid back taxes in 20 years. We cleaned it a couple of times and then started to think about planting flowers and then the idea sorta ballooned into a garden from there.”

Unlike celebrity guerrilla gardener Reynolds, who, in his recently published book– as the Times mag reports– makes “references to horticultural ’sleeper cells’ and ’shock and awe’ plantings,’” Popetz doesn’t act as if he’s involved in environmentally responsible espionage. There’s been no night-time gardening or “seed bombs” at the plot on Columbia Road. Popetz and crew (made up of the garden’s co-leader Sara Eigenberg and at any given time six to eight other gardeners) have never really tried to hide their work.

Though technically, the community-oriented green thumbers are trespassing, no one seems to mind, especially not the neighborhood kids who help weed or the senior citizens who get handed surplus veggies. And the city, which is still trying to locate the owner’s of the abandoned lot the guerrillas commandeered, has not only failed to give the gardeners any grief but erected a gate to help protect the project.

“It’s completely illegal, we don’t have any ownership, but morality is on our side,” says Popetz. In a neighborhood where dark, empty lots create the perfect hideaway for gunmen (which happened once in the lot, Popetz remembers), who could argue with him? Asked whether the Columbia Heights gardeners have–like many other guerrilla gardeners–a political agenda, Popetz snorts, “The grandest political aspiration we have,” he says, “is to keep the garden going.”–Rend Smith

I recently moved to the District from the other Washington (as in, I flew over Monday night), and while chatting up the sublettor as he packed the last of his things, he mentioned that he was taking his Brita filter with him. I haven’t gotten a chance to talk to my new roommate about this situation, but I’m concerned.

I never felt comfortable drinking water straight from the tap in my house in Seattle. Early on in my two-year stay in that house off campus, I filled a glass from the kitchen faucet and was dismayed and a bit disgusted to find swirling gray water almost touching my lips. From then on, I used botted water, even to cook.

My parents’ house in eastern Washington (the state) has great water, but I think that’s because we have well water.

When I visited friends in New Jersey and New York City earlier this year, I heard all about how great tap water is in the city, and yes, I definitely agree. The water in NYC is pretty darn swell. NYC is so big and still has awesome water, it would be logical to thing that D.C. water filtration systems would be of high quality as well.

What do you think? Should I buy a water filter on my way home from work tonight? Is tap water in D.C. rivaling NYC in water taste, purity and clarity? Are Brita filters so common in the District that it’s unheard of to drink straight from the tap? Does everyone know something that I, mere “newbie,” haven’t discovered yet? Or are filters for the health-conscious Seattleites and other West-Coasters who move east and fear for the worst?

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.

It’s thunderstorm season. I should know that. I’ve lived here forever. And yet, recently, I have often found myself stuck without an umbrella, covering head and shoulders with an old T-shirt or an old issue of this fine publication (the wider pages would have come in handy; the smaller edition just doesn’t cut it). I usually end up cursing the rain.

Screw you rain, I will say. Or worse.

During the last major T-storm, I was riding back to work on a Metro bus. We had just passed 14th and Irving Streets NW when the bus pulled over and idled. A minute passed. The rain beat hard on the bus roof. Ping. Ping. Ping. Finally, a man sweating through his undershirt hollered to the bus driver a serious what-the-hell-is-going-on!

The bus driver complained that the doors had stopped working. He couldn’t close the doors. He said he could close them but not through the authorized way. He had to call the home office.

The home office told him he had to wait for repairs. The rain started to sound a lot meaner. We could wait it out on the bus or leave. I left. I ended up running home—five long blocks—and getting soaked. Awesome.

Last night, I was all the way across town at the D.C. Jail when the rain hit. Can I confess something? I started to get scared. I thought about bailing, pulling over and waiting out the thunder and lightning around 10th and S Streets NW. I am genuinely freaked that a tree will topple onto my car and I will die. I kept thinking: Which are the ugly streets without old trees?

Thank God for the new Target complex. No old trees!

So I stuck with it and made it home and even found a parking space. I picked up an old hoodie from the trunk of my car, wrapped it around my head, and scampered home. My pants and backpack got soaked. But I was just glad to be home.

So for the first time in my life the other day I’m early for a meeting—this one is in Farragut North, and so I decide to kill time in the park across the street until I could be awkwardly tardy as is my wont. And in the park is the usual melange of office workers, homeless guys, bike messengers, and pigeons. And then I notice something out of place—can you spot it in this photo?

It’s a pair of mallard ducks, there in a waterless park, roaming around by the tree. Now I’ve been seeing mallards around the city, and I have to admit that every time I see ducks in the city it catches my attention, but until now I’ve only seen them in watery areas, like Dupont Circle, so I’ve figured they caught my attention not because they’re wildly out of place but because I’m a little ADD and everything catches my attention at some point or another. But this pair of ducks seemed especially notable—because why would a pair of mallard ducks hang around the Farragut North park where there’s no water? So I e-mailed this question to some duck experts at Ducks Unlimited, and here’s what they said:

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About a hour ago, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty showed up at Fort Reno park, along with a gaggle of District and federal officials, to sound the all clear for arsenic.

A little recap: On May 14, the National Park Service closed the park after U.S. Geological Survey scientists discovered a test sample taken there, prompted by a map outlining areas with “distressed vegetation,” well exceeded the federal safe levels for arsenic.

So the Environmental Protection Agency did some more tests and the USGS retested the original sample they had taken. All of those tests—121 readings taken with an X-ray florescence meter and 33 soil samples—turned up no evidence of unsafe levels of arsenic.

As for what caused the false positive, USGS spokesperson Michael Gauldin said a “number of factors” could be responsible and says his agency is undertaking an “aggressive review” of the matter.

However, Fort Reno’s toxicity problems are not quite over. NPS honcho Adrienne Coleman announced that one of the test readings revealed high amounts of lead in the soil in one small patch of ground in the northwest corner of the park. That approximately 150-square-foot area, she says, has been cordoned off and the soil will likely be dug out and hauled away. There is no indication as to what caused the lead contamination. George Hawkins, director of the District’s environment department, said folks shouldn’t “be overly concerned” about the lead.

But otherwise, all the cyclone fencing is down, the grass was in the process of being freshly cut, and kids from adjacent Wilson Senior High and Deal Middle Schools were milling about.

Before the press conference, a beret black-newsboy-cap-wearing Fenty picked up one Deal student’s cell phone and sent the good news to whoever was on the line: “Fort Reno is safe! They can do backflips, play football, whatever. It’s safe!”

UPDATE, 5:45 P.M.: Mayoral press secretary Dena Iverson calls LL to report that Fenty was not wearing a beret, but rather a “black newsboy cap.” LL apologizes for his lack of fashion sense.