David Holder won’t be posting on his blog anymore. He died this morning.

He was 35.

David started the blog last year, after being diagnosed with lymphoma. He named it Dave Getting Stronger, because he knew this chapter of his life was going to have a happy ending.

I met David through my wife in the mid-1990s. There was no way to not like him. He’d rally crowds to play football at holidays and throw dance parties in the basement of his AU Park home at an age most people — well, me anyway — felt way too old to do either.

But for the last 14 months, the bad news just kept coming. He got the best medical care and had the best attitude — just read his posts. The guy was like a superhero of positivity. If cancer whipped David, it can win any fight it wants to.

Many of the times I saw David before the illness took over or read his blog after, I came away wishing I was more like him. I bet a lot of folks who knew him felt the same way.

In the warm-off-the-presses neighborhoods issue and a recent City Desk post, I named some of the dead VIPs buried 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. I also mentioned that Gore Vidal has already set up his burial plot there.

Well, turns out Tim Russert has joined the DVIP crowd there.

In a chat at washingtonpost.com, Dana Milbank was asked where Russert would be buried.

Milbank said the site was kept hush-hush, but “a birdie told me it’s Rock Creek Cemetery.”

It’s a beautiful place to take a walk or spend all eternity.

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?

I was told on Monday that Clem Florio is dead.

He was 78 and had pancreatic cancer. Clem was a longtime horse racing handicapper, at the Washington Post and at Pimlico and Laurel Park.

He was also a legend. There’s no way to do him justice in a blog post, or a book or a mini-series.

One small part of that legend: He was cited long ago in Sports Illustrated for making a scene in the Aqueduct press box in July 1972 because he wanted everybody to know that the two-year-old colt that just finished fourth in his maiden race was going to win the next year’s Kentucky Derby.

Two weeks later, after that same colt won in just his second start, Florio made an even bigger scene, yelling that this was the next Triple Crown winner. Again, at this point, Florio was talking about a two-year-old colt with two races, and one out-of-the-money finish.

A year later, the horse that Florio was yelling about, Secretariat, went out and made his crazy predictions come true.

I got to know Clem while I covered racing at Maryland tracks for a few years in the late 1990s.

Among the billion or so great stories he told me was one about agreeing to make a live race call of the 1973 Belmont Stakes for an Atlanta radio station. That race, a 31-length win for Secretariat to win the Triple Crown, is accepted as the greatest moment in horse racing history.

He shouldn’t have agreed to do the race call.

“So I’ve got one eye on Secretariat and one eye on the clock,” Clem told me, “and I’m giving my running commentary over the air: ‘And Secretariat with the lead, he goes around the turn in 1:09 and change…oh,boy!….He’s got the first mile in 1:30 and change…oh, that’s impossible!…oh, my!…oh…I gotta go!’ And I hung up the phone and just watched the race. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Nobody could. The station called me back and a guy says, ‘Clem, what the hell happened?’ I said, ‘Sorry, I got excited.’ That must have been great radio.”

I loved being around him. I’m not alone.

A year or so ago, my boyfriend bought a 1979 Chevy LUV truck from upstate New York. It was old. It was rusty. It had some holes. But it was a good little truck. It’d been through a lot. Who knows how much hay it hauled or how many bumpy back roads it traversed. That good little truck survived the drive from New York to D.C. And it survived little trips around the city. (Except for that one time it broke down in the Whole Foods parking lot, which I think it did on purpose out of protest.)

But this good little truck couldn’t survive Shaw.

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Despite pledges, Fairfax County officials still haven’t explained why they let Brandon Paul Gotwalt get away with beating and shooting unarmed Steve Cornejo in the Gotwalt was never arrested or charged with any crime related to the killing, which occurred in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Fair Oaks in June 2005. Cornejo’s survivors had to file a civil suit just to get the authorities to give them the killer’s name.

Former Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Horan, contrary to his normal routine, presented the case to a grand jury with no recommendation to indict — the Washington Post said Horan had only done that three times in his four decades in office. After the killing, Horan told the public that Gotwalt was saving a woman in distress when he confronted Cornejo, and fired his gun only in self defense.

But at trial for that civil suit, Cornejo’s lawyer produced two witnesses who testified they heard Cornejo plead for his life as Gotwalt hit him in the head with a gun and then shot him in the back. As for Horan’s Good Samaritan tale: There was no woman on the scene during the killing. Gotwalt admitted on the stand to being the aggressor in his confrontation with Cornejo. And testimony showed that after the shooting Gotwalt had ripped up and disposed of his bloody clothing and flushed it and spent shell casings down the toilet.

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I caught the end of the 6 O’Clock news on WJLA last night, the last few seconds of a piece on Tom Sarris’ Orleans House. I couldn’t hear what the anchors were saying, but I knew the place was only newsworthy if it was shutting down. I called up the Rosslyn landmark immediately.

Sure enough: “We’re closing on January 15,” said the woman answering the phone.

It’s being being torn down to make room for a another high-rise, she said. She sounded sad.

This hits me where I live. Or, well, lived.

I went to Orleans House before my prom in 1979. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I clearly remember being at that restaurant that night in a white tux, ordering prime rib (the “Mammoth Cut”) and eating jello from a huge salad bar shaped like a boat, and, though everybody in our foursome (all of whom I saw at a party in Centreville last Saturday, coincidentally) was either 16 or 17 years old, ordering a few bottles of wine. I also recall that the wine was Lancers, a mass-marketed brand in the ’70s, and that it came in a brownish clay decanter, just like in the ads, and that it cost $8 a bottle. I’d never ordered wine before.

I remember thinking this was the high life.

Before hanging up, I told the sad-sounding lady from Orleans House that I’ll miss the place. I think what I meant was: I miss 1979. Everything but the white tux…

Hilda Mason, who served more than 20 years on the D.C. Council, died Sunday morning at Washington Hospital Center. She was 91.

Mason was a longtime DCPS teacher, counselor, and administrator before gaining the Ward 4 school board seat in 1972. When At-Large Councilmember Julius W. Hobson died in 1977, Mason was appointed to finish his term. As a Statehood party member, Mason was elected to five additional full terms. She ran for a sixth, but was defeated by David A. Catania in 1998.

Here’s a couple of the tributes now rolling in. From DC Vote:

…Mason, who dedicated her life to the civil rights movement, was a staunch supporter of congressional voting representation and statehood for the District of Columbia.

Her ceaseless support for progressive issues, including human and civil rights, socio-economic opportunity, quality education, affordable and accessible housing, public transportation, and health care, had enormous impact of the residents of the District….

Hilda Mason and her late husband Charles were recently recognized as DC Vote Champions of Democracy, and her grandson, Stefan Nicholas, serves on the Board of Directors of DC Vote. He and his family are in our prayers.

From Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray’s office:

“Hilda Mason was the kind of champion for education in her time that drives people like me today,” said Chairman Gray. “Her brand of fortitude and tenacity is what we all aspire to in our public service.”