Michael Agger at Slate writes about the financial return on blogging, and his findings validate every blogger’s secret fear: In the grand scheme of things, we ain’t worth shit. Unless, says Technorati, we’re raking in a 100,000 or more unique visitors a month. In which case median annual revenue is roughly (wtf?) $75K+. All I need is for 100,000 of my closest friends to check out my blog once a month, click on a few penile enhancement ads, and I’ll be set. So long Creative Loafing!

But wait–I could continue to blog here @ City Desk with Gawker’s pay model, which pays $6.50 for every thousand page views. I’d have a reason to get dressed in the morning, brush my teeth, shave my uni-brow, etc., etc. I’d feel compelled to offer City Desk readers my best writing, my wittiest quips, my most intimate anecdotes. And based on the page views I’ve earned thus far, I’d make about…$12 every seven days or so. Fuck yea! That’s enough for one pack of cigarettes a week and a dollar-menu item per day!

Disclaimer: Bloggers who are susceptible to reality checks and/or own firearms should avoid reading Agger’s piece at all costs. Mostly to keep from learning how much Perez Hilton makes in a year. (I think Agger may have a typo in his story, but if the number he puts forward–$111,000 per month–is accurate, then Perez Hilton makes over a million dollars a year. A Million Fucking Dollars For Drawing Semen On AP Photos. [Dear god, I haven't asked you for anything since my sophomore year of college when I came down with food poisoning and shit my pants/vomited into my lap in front of all my friends, and I asked you to kill them for laughing at me, but I'm asking you now: Let that stat be a typo.])

Regardless of how much PH makes, I know this: I should have gone to law school.

Last minute addendum: The following arrived in an email from boss-man Erik Wemple (new title: King of the Downers), which he excerpted from a Paul Farhi piece. “Newspapers that were hoping to be rescued by their online ad businesses woke up to a sobering reality in mid-2007. By then, it was becoming clear that online advertising wasn’t growing fast enough to make up for the rapid disappearance of print ads (see “Online Salvation?” December 2007/January 2008). In fact, at the moment, online ads aren’t growing at all. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2008. This may be as ominous a development as the meltdown of print. Online newspaper revenues had grown smartly in every quarter since the Newspaper Association of America began tracking them in 2003. No longer.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I have great hair, or a “great head of hair,” as my maternal grandmother likes to say. I don’t take after the men in my father’s family, where receding hairlines start in the men’s early 20s and wreak follicle havoc on through death; nor do I have hair like the men on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, where there was never much hair to do much with. But, like a lot of men (especially in the DC area) I suffered from a hair-related illness: I didn’t know how to ask for a good haircut, and too often I settled for bad ones as a result of trusting stylists to discern, perhaps via divination, exactly what I wanted them to do with their shears.

Some of us are especially bad about this. We treat haircuts like a chore, no more aesthetically significant than mowing the yard or picking out new drapes. “Take a little off the top,” we say. “Trim the sides,” we grumble. Or worse, we don’t ask for anything: “I don’t know, just do something with this,” we say as we wave a hand over our heads, as if swatting at swarming bees.

I used to be like that, and I suffered through years of weird and thoughtless haircuts as a result. Bowl cuts. Buzz cuts. Flat tops. Ambiguous messes. The caesar cut (before and after it was cool–not while Justin Timberlake had it). And then one day, I learned to talk about my hair. On an impulse, I asked my stylist how I could make my hair less dry and poofy.

“Do you use dandruff shampoo?” she asked.

My god, I thought. They really are telepathic!

“Yes, yes I do!”

“Well stop,” she said. “Use dandruff shampoo every other day, and then use something a little kinder to your hair on the other days. And condition every time, whether you use regular shampoo or anti-dandruff. And skip a day here and there so that your hair benefits from the scalp’s natural oils.”

And thus an appreciation for my hair was born. My stylist taught me other things, too. About layering (for that brief time when I wanted longish hair); which styles should be rounded in the back and which styles should be squared; why one should always get one’s sideburns trimmed; how to defeat my cowlick; which hair products to use and how to apply them.

So here’s my advice for DC men with hair and hair issues (sorry premature baldies, no list of advice will ease your pain):

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t hang out at the International Monetary Fund a whole lot, but I was there recently for a meeting, and boy, was I in for a treat in their women’s room: free feminine hygiene products! It’s big enough news when those little machines even function, but this one gives it out without even taking your money. I have to admit I took more than I needed. In fact, I have to admit I didn’t need any.

Is this how they make up for structural adjustment? I’ll take it!

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

Vigilance on Seaton Street.

Last time in Managing Your Rodent Infestation, we planted new snap traps, baited, once again, with delicious peanut butter. A while back, we switched to smooth butter after our mouse simply ate the chunks out of the chunky, leaving only the butter behind. Picky, picky!

Since setting our new traps, my roommate and I haven’t heard a squeak out of our as-yet-unnamed mouse. The traps are set, the peanut butter is creamy, but the mouse isn’t licking. What, wee rodent? Lost your appetite, have you? Or perhaps, sensing your impending doom at the hands of our advanced weaponry, you have retreated from our basement in order to seek your scrumptious protein-rich handouts elsewhere?

The mouse isn’t talking. But the public is! As it turns out, everybody’s a mouse extermination critic!

Read the rest of this entry »

Dude. Come on. There is a Starbucks not three minutes’ walk from here. Unless you’ve got some sort of infection, there is no reasonable excuse for this sort of urban-compact-shattering behavior.

Last time in Managing Your Rodent Infestation, my roommate and I identified that we had a problem, sampled several implements of torture, and asked for help. I think that’s pretty good progress. But despite our three-pronged assault (poison! stick! snap!) , with efforts concentrated largely in the Kitchen Theatre, the yet-to-be-named mouse is still using our basement as a giant mouse playground/poop depository. It grows bolder: Earlier this week, my roommate heard it investigating her closet. I’m afraid it may be time to extend our efforts to the bedrooms.

For now, though, we’ve decided to stay the course in the kitchen: this time, with upgraded snap traps. Yesterday, we replaced these:

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past two weeks, I heard this joke three times:

Q: What do you call a sword swallower with health insurance?
A: A Canadian!

Ba-dump-ching!

In this week’s Show and Tell, I spoke with two American sword-swallowing couples about their experiences with horrific, uninsured throat injuries! Palace of Wonders employees and traveling side-show act Tyler Fyre and Thrill Kill Jill (above) and Centreville, Va. performers Charon Henning and Alex Kensington were kind enough to share their incredible injury stories (and their lame industry jokes).

Says Palace of Wonders museum director James Taylor,

Self-deprecation is a necessary element to the side-show business. Performers use massive amounts of double entendree, because that’s the way to make most of these acts palpatable to the audience: They make it seem funny so that the crowds can get past the hairs standing on the backs of their necks.

Neck hairs, step right up: Click here for a sword swallowing, fire breathing audio slideshow with Tyler and Jill.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

In re my fucked-up leg:

Professional Diagnosis: egg-sized hematoma

Suggested Treatment: elevate leg, stay off leg, hot compress four times daily

(Treatment Already Underway Before Doc Visit: elevate leg, stay off leg, occasional hot compress)

Cost: $40 ($20 for doc visit; $20 for just-in-case X-ray)

I’m never consulting you people about my health again!

So I had a bike accident last Thursday—guy did a U-turn in front of me going westbound on the 1400 block of U Street NW. Cost me a $120 wheel, a sprained wrist, and a giant cool-ass bruise.

Well, it used to be a cool-ass bruise; now it’s getting a little annoying. There’s clearly a sac of blood and pus under there and it doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller. I’m thinking I should go get this thing drained. Then again, that’s a co-pay I’d just as well avoid. I throw my health upon the wisdom of the crowd!

You Decide: To drain or not to drain!

D.C. novelist Louis Bayard, who’s done some fine work for City Paper as a film reviewer, is moving on, taking a full-time-ish gig as a book critic for Salon.com. As he points out on his homepage, this shouldn’t affect his home-bound routines much:

I admit there are some advantages to my lifestyle. They are enumerated in descending order of importance.

1) I sometimes go a whole day without showering. Some days, I don’t shower at all.
2) I pass gas whenever I want to. It feels good.
3) I sing—really loudly.
4) I dance.
5) Every month or so, I get to have one of those Holly Hunter 20-second crying jags (from “Broadcast News”) without alarming anyone. Except my dog. Who can abide my singing but not my crying.

If you want to congratulate him in person, swing by Politics & Prose tomorrow afternoon, where he’ll take part in a panel discussion about the National Book Critics Circle awards and its recent recommendation project, Good Reads. Also on the panel: critic-blogger Scott McLemee, Washington Post Book World critic Ron Charles, critic and Author Author host Bethanne Patrick, and poet Michael Collier.

Last night, I awoke in the darkness to the sound of a low buzzing near my ear. A woman who was temporarily sleeping in my apartment was attempting to reach me by telephone. Though I questioned why she had called me from such close proximity, I answered.

“Hello,” I said.

“I found a mouse,” the woman informed me. As we were both stationed within the apartment, I could hear her voice clearly without the aid of the telephone. Still, we did not abandon the mechanism. “It ran under a pile of clothes,” she added.

Months earlier, my landlord spoke of a similar class of rodents that had invaded his home in search of shelter and food scraps. He informed me that though he had once been pestered by the vermin, he and his housemates had since been able to systematically locate, isolate, and delete the creatures. A housemate explained one particularly cruel game they had played: “All I had to do was corner the mouse into the sink,” she said. “Then, I took hold of the spray faucet and shot the mouse until it had drowned.”

I did not relate this to the woman over the telephone. “What should I do?” she asked me.

Several years ago, while living in the Los Santos province of Panama, I found the helix of my ear caught between the jaws of a large and brazen rat. I had been sleeping soundly at the time–lost in the midst of a strange, hallucinatory dream, the specifics of which I do not recall–when the rat approached, squeaked violently, and bit. After the modest flow of blood from my head confirmed that I was not, in fact, still hallucinating, I located a man outside my domicile for help. The man offered me illicit drugs, an oversized conch shell with which to conceal a gaping, rat-friendly hole in my bedroom wall, and an outdoor hammock as a temporary bed. I accepted two of his offers.

Back in my apartment, I considered the mouse. I had no drugs, nor shells; my sole hammock was folded deep within my closet, out of use during the cool winter months.

“Sleep on the futon,” I suggested to the woman. “I will call my landlord in the morning.”

I couldn’t help but notice the photo in the Post of the photographer at City Paper. It’s meta Darrow! Can you spot him??

Also noticeable: It’s harder than a rubber dildo to cover the Sex Workers Art Show and still abide by the vanilla rules of a mainstream newspaper. To wit:

“At the same time, it is very much about, well . . . that word.” (Translation: fucking)

“One performer, dancing to ‘God Bless the U.S.A.,’ pulls a chain of dollar bills from a place money should never be saved.” (Translation: her asshole)

Stay-tuned for the full-on, noneuphemized version from CP’s Show & Tell columnist, Amanda Hess, who has done her post-show homework about the artistes.