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

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.

This weekend I came across the greatest find since moving to D.C. Caveat: My interests tend to skew less toward record stores and more toward woodland creatures. If yours do, too (hey, I know it’s a stretch, but the blog is lookin’ light today, OK?), you should check out Prince William Forest Park. Once you have your immigration papers in order, that is. They don’t like them illegals there, you know, but there are 15,000 acres, so it’s easy enough to get lost no matter who you are. That’s what’s great about this place.

From D.C., the park is only about 35 miles down the road, right off I-95 and the Marine Corps training site at Quantico. That means that in less than an hour, you could be set up at a wonderful campsite deep in the woods for 15 bucks a night. The Oak Ridge Campground inside the park has nearly 100 sites and is located 5.5 miles down wooded roads from the visitor center. Stop in there to get a great map of the park. Each of the three campground loops has decent bathrooms and a water spigot; Loop A has a shower, even, for those who do that sort of nonsense while camping. There are no hookups, however, a blessed deletion for tent campers (there won’t be any retirees and their obnoxious RVs anywere nearby. In fact, having had a few bad experiences with the RV/generator crowd, I found this place with the help of The Best in Tent Camping: Virginia: A Guide for Car Campers Who Hate RVs, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos). One aspect the book fails to play up is the spaciousness of the sites, especially compared to some of the puny ones inside Shenandoah National Park. Each comes with a fire ring and a pole to hang a lantern.

Beware the raccoons, though; they’re cheeky, so hide your grub. Also, I found a tick on my person, quickly tweezed off and killed, so bring some spray, but for god’s sake don’t whine about ticks. Just be careful.

Best of all: There are 37 miles of hiking trails maintained by the Potomac Appalacian Trail Club; several nice ones start right at the campground. The North Valley Trail includes a lovely stretch along Quantico Creek to Lake Quantico Falls and the former Pyrite Mine, abandoned in 1920 after workers went on strike for a 50-cent raise. Apparently, they don’t like them unions in Prince William, either.

You know the fifty-color fliers and postcards good neighbors leave on your windshield? The ones inviting you to those exclusive afterhours parties and special events? The ones that would make Luther Campbell nod in approval?

While I’m not sure who actually responds to this spam and goes to these things, I do know that they constitute an annoyance. How many of these cards have I tossed into the backseat of my car? Too many!

It’s not a shock that people have complained. Southwest residents have been up in arms over them for a while. They’ve started calling them “Booty Cards.” Kinda perfect.

And they got Councilmember Tommy Wells‘ attention. After months of effort, Wells—along with the D.C. attorney general’s office—has been able to at least banish one company from distributing them. Wells, in a press release, calls this a “partial victory” for Southwest residents—and D.C. citizens in general.

Although he considered them pornographic, Wells knew he couldn’t fight them on indecency issues. Instead, his office went after the company over the trash they produce. A smart move!

-”This is just one battle in a much larger effort,” explains Wells’ Chief of Staff Charles Allen.

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Today marks the beginning of the peak days for the cherry blossoms. The National Park Service predicts the trees around the Tidal Basin will be their prettiest from March 27 to April 3.

In honor of the season, here is some cherry blossom poetry by D.C. poet Judith Harris via Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.

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The National Park Service is taking its sweet, federal time making improvements at Lincoln Park, the largest and most popular park in Capitol Hill. First, in late October, NPS blocked half of it off with a chain-link fence and gave no warning or explanation. Then, when pressed by D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells’ office for information, officials even boasted a little bit: “The contract period is for 90 days, however, we anticipate the project taking less than half of that time.”

So, doing the math, the renovation should have been finished by Feb. 19 at the latest. Instead, half of the park remains closed as construction equipment sits idle. Until Tuesday, no work had happened for several weeks.

The feds have two excuses: “a contract modification due to changes with the base material” and the weather.

“When the temperature falls below 40 degrees you really can’t pour concrete,” says NPS spokeswoman Janet Braxton.

Advisory neighborhood commissioner Nick Alberti, whose district includes the northeast half of the park, thinks bad weather is a lame excuse.

“I’m stunned that they would schedule a repaving project during the 3 coldest months,” Alberti writes in an e-mail. “It was either very poor planning or disingenuous to assure us that the park would reopen by Feb 19th.”

Park Service facility manager Frank Young reports that all work should be finished by April 30.

Hey, remember William Morva? The Dude-Ball-playing, barefoot, raw-meat-eating coffeeshop regular of Blacksburg? It took a jury under four hours to give him the death penalty. Can’t get enough? Check out Roanoke Times‘ online package “Homicide on the Huckleberry,” if purely for the title alone. —Jule Banville

You call that a bonsai photo, Wemple? THIS is a bonsai photo.

Cynthia Pratt guesses at least 200 cars had to be moved from two blocks of Hobart Street NW in Mount Pleasant for tree trimming early this month. But as usual, some residents disregarded the no-parking signs. In the past, parking scofflaws were ticketed, and trimmers worked around the cars, says Pratt, who has lived on the street for more than 30 years. Not this time.

When the trimmers arrived, they saw the cars and left without starting their saws, Pratt says. But not before calling parking enforcement, which doled out $50 parking tickets. “They didn’t even try to do any work,” says Pratt, whose husband had taken their Toyota to work. “They could have done so much, but they just didn’t.”

When Pratt called the Urban Forestry Administration, she was told the contractor didn’t trim the trees because the contract said he had to cut them all at once. “We talked for a long time about what’s practical in the city,” Pratt says.

Erik Linden, a spokesman for District Department of Transportation, says the agency is looking into what happened on Hobart Street. “It appears that the job was not done, but that we were not necessarily informed that the job was not done,” Linden says, adding that DDOT sent the contactor a letter of warning.

Linden says the trimmers will be back to Hobart Street. Pratt hopes it will be soon. During winter storms, she says, falling branches from the 60-foot oaks will “make a mess out of somebody’s car.”

There are fewer smells better than a crackling campfire in the woods, fewer pleasures more distinct than a pitched tent, a cold beer, and conversation. And there are even fewer inventions as genius as the humble pie iron.

Although my fiance and I recently acquired as a gift a fancy camping stove, I’m not entirely convinced we need it. The possibilities with a pie iron—two cast-iron squares, roughly the size of a piece of bread, hinged at the top and attached to long handles—are awesome to contemplate. With this one primitive piece of equipment, some wood, a couple of ingredients, and a little patience, you’ve got every meal covered: breakfast (try store-bought biscuit dough with cheese and a slice of turkey stuffed in the middle), lunch (some nutty bread, a slice of Swiss and a marinated Portobello) and dinner, the always-reliable pizza pocket (bread, sauce, cheese, and whatever else you like). Apply cooking spray to your iron, stack your ingredients, close it up, and stick it in the fire. That’s it. A few minutes later, you can flip out a neat, toasty package encasing simple ingredients, made melty and smoky from open-fire cooking.

Pie irons are sold in most camping stores, although I’ve never bought one. Pizza pockets were, I think, my first solid food as a child and the pie iron (a Tonka toaster) I inherited has been in my family for 30 years or more.

But if you don’t have one, don’t sweat it. Just get outdoors. Three-day weekends with near-perfect weather are too rare to sit inside your air-conditioned apartment. Camping in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania is super fun…and close!

Earlier this week the Workingman Collective—local artists Janis Goodman, Tom Ashcraft, and Peter Winant—installed 30 bird habitats on 14th Street NW between P and U Streets. The project, titled Site, Cite, Sight, was commissioned by WPA/Corcoran as part of SiteProjects DC, which places a variety of art projects onto that stretch of 14th. You can see the collective’s members in that picture on the right. What’s with the orange jumpsuits? It’s about “interaction with the community,” says Goodman. “When we’re out there in our coveralls, people can come to us and ask us what we’re doing.” Adds Winant: “We’re recognized as doing something that’s an art piece, rather than graffiti artists.”

Site, Cite, Sight, Ashcraft says, is meant to draw city dwellers’ attention to the distinctions between “the environment and the built environment”: the habitats are designed for the Eastern Bluebird, the Black-capped Chickadee, and the Downy Woodpecker, three of the hardest-hit species from the West Nile Virus. (Specific habitat designs are “mainly a matter of the size of the openings,” says Goodman.) The Workingman Collective specializes in work that deals in this sort of urban-natural intersection. In April 2006 the group went to Butte, Mont., to draw a five-mile chalk line that “represents commitment, delineates territory and marks what’s cut and what’s kept.” Earlier this year Ashcraft and Winant headed to the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., to install Pine, a wooden ping-pong table intended in part to revitalize a little-used campus quad.

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I belong to one formal organization: the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. I’m not really a joiner, but it would be kind of rotten to not at least fork over membership dues to the PATC since I spend most weekends hiking the trails its members built and maintain. (In addition to taking care of 240 miles of the A.T., the PATC maintains just about all the trails in both Rock Creek Park and Shenandoah National Park, in addition to other popular spots, like Billy Goat).

So when my boyfriend and I started getting the newsletter advertising all the trails that need “overseers,” guilt got the better of us and we signed up to clean the mucky, garbage-ridden River Trail in Great Falls Park. But not because we are of pure heart. The greatest benefit of joining the PATC, we found out, is being able to rent the club’s members-only cabins. And the biggest benefit of signing up to clean the mucky, garbage-ridden River Trail is being able to get to the best ones first. (Trail overseers get, at least once a year, a good head start on dibs.)

Exhibit A: Glass House, a lovingly maintained cabin built in 1950 and donated to the PATC by noted D.C. geologist Jewell J. Glass, a club member from 1930 until her death in 1966. The cabin (there are twin bunks that sleep eight) inside George Washington National Forest is wrapped by a fantastic deck and a giant screened-in porch. The view’s better than TV, trust me, and great hiking starts right outside the door. We did a nice 12-miler to Signal Knob on Saturday and returned to the best reward: ice-cold beer from the cabin’s new fridge and an appreciative toast to the River Trail…and Dr. Glass.

In April, thousands of cherry trees on the banks of the Potomac will open their petals.

Sponsored by Target.