Plotkin Is Back: The health problems that sidelined WTOP’s Mark Plotkin for more than three months have apparently been resolved–the man was back in the chair this morning on the Politics Program in fine old form. Especially fun: Listening to Virginia Del. Brian Moran squirm (yes, he audibly squirmed) while Plotkin asked why he hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate yet. —Mike DeBonis

Ira Glass is coming May 1 to a movie theater near you. Sort of. He’s actually coming to a theater near you via satellite from a theater near him in New York. But it’s live, people, the scripted pauses, the predictable story arcs, perhaps even the grating delivery of Sarah Vowell—it’ll all be in real time. I’m more of a Radio Lab fan myself, but never say I didn’t do anything for all you TAL junkies out there. For a mere $20, watch His Glassness debut “never-before-seen extraordinary, funny, and true stories from everyday life, show outtakes, and answer audience questions.” In HD. H-fucking-D!!

Tickets went on sale today for the 8 p.m. show at the following locations:

• Ballston Commons 12
  671 Glebe Road
  Arlington

• AMC Hoffman
  206 Swam Fox Road
  Alexandria

• AMC Tyson’s Corner 16
  1961 Chain Bridge Road
  McLean

• Lee Highway Multiplex Cinemas
  8223 Lee Highway
  Merrifield

• Fairfax Towne Center
  12110 West Ox Road

• Snowden Square
  9161 Commerce Center Dr.
  Columbia

V-v-v-v-vuh. (WTOP)

Something’s been missing from WTOP radio’s Politics Program With Mark Plotkin since earlier this year. That would be Mark Plotkin.

Since early January, the hourlong Friday morning show has been helmed by WTOP reporter Mark Segraves.

Plotkin, reached at his Glover Park home, says he hasn’t been feeling like his usual vigorous self lately. “I have some health concerns,” he says, “and I took some time off until I feel better again.”

He declined to elaborate or predict when he might return to his show, except to say, “I hope to come back very soon.” Plotkin has been working with WTOP producers and contributing occasional short analysis segments.

With perhaps the most bruising presidential nomination battle in a generation shaping up the past few months, LL and others have been surprised to find Plotkin, a inveterate political junkie, sitting on the sidelines.

“This is high season,” he says. “This is really an irony of all ironies.”

DC radio fixture Chris Core got canned from WMAL recently.

He used to be part of the AM-630’s’s feel-good duo, Trumbull & Core. But for the last several years, the station has been Hatemonger Central — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. — and Core tried like heck to blend.

Every time I heard Core, he was begging listeners to harass lawmakers who didn’t hate immigrants or gays.

He used every watt available, for example, to get the anti-immigrant movement focused on Herndon — he even hosted several on-air hate rallies from the tiny burg — and helped get the mayor thrown out for supporting a day labor center. He lobbied a Herndon councilmember to introduce a measure making English the official language there.

He gave listeners names and phone numbers of Montgomery County board of education members with directions to pester anybody who supported a sex education curriculum that acknowledged the existence of homosexuality. Like every other show at the station, Core’s became as predictable as it was hateful.

Core has now taken out big ads on dcrtv.com, the great local media news/gossip site, saying that he’s “available!” and asking for another radio job. If I owned a station, I would want Core on my staff, knowing he’ll say anything he’s asked to say, and very professionally.

Sorry, Silver Spring. NPR is staying in the District. According to an announcement today, the headquarters is transferring from Mass Ave to North Capitol—111 1111 N. Capitol NE, to be precise. Six-hundred D.C.-based staff will make the move to the BID of “NoMa, North of Massachusetts Avenue, an emerging area that has begun redevelopment into a multi-use area.”

According to NPR, their new digs were built in 1927 for Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone. The historic facade will stay, but a 10-story office tower will go up around it. Move-in date is sometime in 2012. I’ve heard that Mama Stamberg has accumulated A LOT of stuff through the years. Fortunately, she also has her own private interns who can start packin’ her boxes now.

And for Mr. Renaissance: Sharpen that pencil! CEO Ken Stern says, “A major factor in our decision was the opportunity to play a role in the revitalization of NoMa, much as we did 16 years ago as a pioneer in the Penn Quarter renaissance.”

Wolfgang Puck, the gnomish chef with the massive empire, finally launched a restaurant in D.C. last year with The Source, located next to the Newseum, which itself is taking its sweet time to open. Puck has been pretty busy, so it’s understandable that he has been slow to reach the nation’s capital. He first had to launch restaurants in Vegas, Hawaii and Atlantic City. He had to oversee his line of all-natural pizzas. He had to try to cut a deal with DIRECTV to include a can of his cooking spray with every satellite installation.

I guess it was only a matter of time before the celebrity-chef flock finally perched their toques in D.C. In just the past year or so, we’ve seen Laurent Tourondel open BLT Steak, Eric Ripert debut his WestEnd Bistro, and Puck spawn his Source. Puck is, by far, the most famous of the three. But is there any reason to visit his new place aside from the chance to kiss the ring of the godfather of California-style pizza? (Not that you’ll get much chance to do that, since chef Scott Drewno is the man in charge here.)

Well, that’s exactly what David Furst and I will be talking about tomorrow on Metro Connection. The conversation will look at The Source from a number of angles: from celebrity chef owners to the food on the plate to how the management doesn’t seem to understand that professional critics are not political fat cats (read: We don’t need our ears scratched or our asses kissed).

You can catch our conversation at 1 p.m. Friday, Jan. 18, on 88.5 FM.

On the way to work this morning, Big 100.3 started playing Jackson Browne’s “Boulevard.” Reflexively, I switched to 94.7, the Globe. But IT WAS PLAYING THE SAME SONG! “Boulevard” is one of those songs I’m pretty sure nobody actually likes; it just wormed its way into the classic rock canon by dint of Browne’s association with actually popular classic rockers like the Eagles and whoever played the No Nukes concert. And to have no choice but to listen to that or some crap on NPR was freaking deadly, man.

Veteran D.J. and legendary music scenester Tom Terrell passed away Nov. 29, Bobby Hill, program director for WPFW says, and he will be greatly missed.

“He was a musical genius,” Hill says. “He knew dates, he knew facts. Music was his love and he knew a lot about it.”

Terrell, who hosted a program for WPFW before moving on to WHFS, was planning a return to WPFW when he succumbed to cancer last week. “We were making plans in that direction and he was very much looking forward to it,” Hill says.

Hill last saw Terrell on July 29, when the 9:30 Club held a benefit in his honor. A press release circulated before the event described Terrell as “a close friend to and an early moving force for d.c. space and its non-profit off-shoot, District Curators Inc., as well as WPFW and the Nightclub 9:30.”

According to the release, he was a graduate of Howard University, an accomplished D.J., a radio programmer, concert promoter, tour manager, photographer, and music journalist for a slew of publications that included the Washington City Paper.

“In Washington he’s known for pioneering radio ‘Stolen Moments’ (WPFW), ‘Sunday Reggae Splashdown’ and ‘Cafe C’est What’ (WHFS), and is currently the jazz reviewer for NPR’s ‘All Things Considered,’” the release says.

“Tom’s passion for music transcended boundaries and was, as Duke Ellington used to say, beyond categories,” longtime friend and Birchmere promoter Michael Jaworek says. “He helped promulgate music wherever he encountered it.”

Details about services to be held in Terrell’s honor to follow.

Washington Times sportswriter John Mitchell has issued a public apology for last week’s outburst against Len Shapiro. Well, sort of.

For those not following the catfight: Mitchell, who didn’t like the non-appreciation Shapiro wrote for Sean Taylor when the Redskins star’s body was barely cold, called the Washington Post veteran a “racist, conniving skunk” and a “racist, conniving dog of a skunk” on the WOL-AM sports-talk show, The Sports Groove.

The burgeoning brouhaha got the sort of attention that writer-on-writer verbal violence typically gets in Internet media gathering spots.

And it sure looks like that attention inspired the posting Mitchell made over the weekend on his newspaper’s blog, which ranks among the least sincere and sorriest “I’m Sorry!”’s ever banged out on a keyboard.

Mitchell starts off his alleged mea culpa, written in the form of an open letter to Shapiro, sounding contrite. He writes that he “got caught up in the emotion of it all” and that the dog-calling diatribe he directed at Shapiro was “an egregious mistake.”

“Len, you didn’t deserve to be attacked like that,” Mitchell writes.

But before long Mitchell makes a U-turn, and begins arguing that, well, Shapiro probably did deserve the bash. Mitchell even adds that at least one important player on the local sports scene has his back, though this player apparently won’t put his name to this alleged backing of Mitchell.

“[O]ne Wizard who saw what I said reported on local blogs voiced his support of my position with a protracted hug and a handshake prior to the game in Philadelphia,” Mitchell wrote.

And before closing, Mitchell finishes his journey from “Forgive me!” to “Take that!” by informing Shapiro “you now appear to be dead wrong in your rush to judgment” about Taylor’s behaviors playing a role in his murder.

Meanwhile, Shapiro and Sports Groove host Mark Gray seem ready to let things pass. Shapiro was on Gray’s show live for 45 minutes on Friday night, and they told each other they weren’t totally proud of what was written in the paper or went out over the airwaves.

The only obvious sore feelings in the super-long segment came about 10 minutes in, when Gray identified Shapiro as a writer with “the Washington Times.”

“Washington Post, thank you!” Shapiro blurted, as if he found Gray’s innocent gaffe more painful than Mitchell’s blindside hits.

Breaking News: Mark Gray, host of the Sports Groove on WOL, says that he’ll have Leonard Shapiro of the Washington Post on his show tonight at 8:04 p.m.

Gray and guests have spent much of the week tearing into Shapiro for a column he wrote about Sean Taylor’s death. The highlight of the tearing-intoage being Washington Times basketball writer John Mitchell reaming Shapiro as both a “racist, conniving skunk” and a “racist, conniving dog of a skunk.”

Shapiro says this morning via email that Mitchell’s editor at the Times sports section has “apologized profusely” for the WOL outburst and told him that they are “contemplating some sort of disciplinary action against Mitchell.”

“I told [the Times] I really didn’t want [Mitchell] fired or even suspended,” Shapiro says, “but he at least owes me a phone call.”

Tonight, on the same airwaves he’s been taking a pounding, Shapiro will have a chance to fight back. Kudos to Gray for inviting the whipping boy of the week on the show, and to Shapiro for accepting despite all the hostility.

Should be a great listen, especially if Mitchell shows up to back up his slander.

Tyler Green’s excellent Modern Art Notes points to an interesting post at daddytypes.com, in which Greg Allen describes a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art with his three-year-old daughter. There, they collide with a docent attempting to explain Clyfford Still’s painting 1951-N to a group of middle-schoolers:

“Who wonders why this is here? Who wonders why it’s even art?” She waits and waits for sheepish hands to keep rising.

“Well, there are curators–do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum–curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn’t look like it’s about anything and it doesn’t make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes.

Allen blows a gasket about all this, finding this attitude destructive to inquisitive minds. But though the docent’s shut-up-and-take-it condescension is clear, this attitude routinely gets dispensed to adults too, even by Smart People. Over the weekend, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a brief story on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in which poet Paul Muldoon argued, in essence, that you may as well give up trying to understand the damn thing and just try to appreciate it as a sort of music. Why it’s OK to just bear with it with Finnegan’s Wake but not with Still isn’t quite clear to me, but then I haven’t pondered either very closely.

Maybe this is just the tyranny of the middlebrow, but Muldoon and that docent were at least engaging with the art in question. Howard Stern, however, recently reacted to avant-jazz as if he’d just touched a hot stove. And then called in his buddies to make wisecracks about how fuckin’ stupid the fuckin’ stove is.

A couple summers ago, my friend interned for The Roula & Ryan Show in Houston. As radio hosts at a typical Clear Channel pop station, they were actually a notch above the usual. But just weeks after being named “the Ultimate radio team” by Houston Chronicle readers, they were fired, because apparently that’s what happens at Clear Channel, my friend told me. To freshen things up, radio DJs—even at the height of their popularity—are forced out, she said. (After their unceremonious discharge, there was an online petition, signed by approximately 1250 people, calling for their rehiring. The team eventually got back on air at another Houston station, 104.1 KRBE.)

I was reminded of all of this earlier today, listening to Elliot In The Morning on DC 101. Around 9:15 a.m., Elliot started ranting about a letter sent to his office from Clear Channel, touting the corporate radio behemoth’s third-quarter earnings. Clear Channel made $1.7 billion during the last quarter, ending on September 30. Of that, Elliot said, upwards of $580 million were pure profit. In its letter, according to Elliot, Clear Channel praised its great employees for making it happen at the local level. Of course, because it’s Clear Channel, it’s no surprise that this fabulous news comes at a time when people in the office are being asked to take pay cuts. “Why would you send that out?” Elliot kept asking. “They will nickel and dime people to death here.” Awkward silences from co-host Diane followed. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes, certainly time enough for Big Brother at Clear Channel to notice.

Just revealed on the D.C. Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta: Carol Schwartz has resigned from the D.C. Republican State Committee. The at-large councilmember has belonged to the GOP for her entire political career, though she’s always gotten plenty of support from Democratic voters.

This seems to be not quite as clean a break as fellow at-large member David Catania made with the Republicans. Catania became an independent soon after George W. Bush expressed support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

UPDATE: Schwartz Chief of Staff John Abbot calls in to clarify that Schwartz is only rotating off the committee’s slate. Schwartz, he assures, is still very much a Republican.

Chefs have been slow to roll out their fall menus this year for one obvious reason—until recently, it’s been too fucking warm for squashes and heavy meats. If it weren’t such an environmental no-no, I’d argue for restaurants to start cranking up the AC in late September so that we can start slurping down soups.

Still, as I noted recently, some chefs are adamantly following the calendar, if not the weather, and have already introduced some fall dishes. Tomorrow on WAMU’s Metro Connection, host David Furst and I discuss some of the better options for autumn eating.

You can listen in at 1 p.m. at 88.5 FM on your digital tuner.