What do smoking a cigarette outside the 9:30 Club and the recent “Access Hollywood” interview with Barack Obama’s family have in common? Read former City Paper editor David Carr’s column in today’s New York Times to find out–a good-humored look at what he calls “presidential blowback” (with a CP shout-out to boot).

Twelve parts? Mistakes in the investigation? Gary Condit?

Yeah, Washington Post put the region on time warp mode Sunday, introducing an investigative series on the unsolved murder of Chandra Levy, that most famous of Washington interns. In its own words, here’s how the Post justifies the spilling of so much ink:

The serial will show how the sensational nature of the media coverage quickly overwhelmed the investigation. It will expose the fleeting acts that later loomed large and will reveal undisclosed clues, meaningful and false: a DNA swab in a dark parking lot, Chandra’s last computer search, a conversation with a jailhouse informant who said he had the key to the case.

In the end, the serial will reveal how an enormous effort by the D.C. police, the FBI and prosecutors was undercut by a chain of mistakes, a misdirected focus and missed opportunities that allowed a killer to escape justice.

Trouble is, we pretty much knew that basic thematic outline. And this first chapter in the series is not much of a read for anyone who, well, has lived in this country for the past eight years or so: Remember that the Chandra case was not a local or regional story, but a national one–everyone who has cable is familiar with the narrative.

So the paper had damn well better have something more than just the revelation that the media attention overwhelmed the detectives. I’ll wait and see. But hold on–there’s one thing I am not going to play wait-and-see on, and it’s my up-to-hereness on interviews with Chandra Levy’s parents. I have nothing against them, and I feel terrible about what happened to them. However, over the past several years, I’ve heard plenty from them, plenty enough to need to hear no more. So you go ahead and listen to this interview clip that the Post posted; I’m not gonna.

The Washington Times has a pretty thorough presentation on the passing of beloved Tony Snow.

The New York Times throws tons of resources, with great results, at the meltdown of Fannie and Freddie.

Of course, yeah, I know, whatever: It’s been a week since Nadal beat Federer at Wimbledon. Which means that historians still haven’t quite had time to anoint this one as the best title match ever. But check out the highlights, and perhaps you’ll agree.

And what about this whole Brett Favre bullshit? This fave of broadcasters everywhere has jerked around his team time and again. Now he wants back on the gridiron. On Sunday, a rally of Packers fans pressured team owners to reinstate Favre as the starting QB. But the team knows better and is going with the “final” word on the matter that Favre delivered in March, when he said he was retiring. Good on the owners: They watched that game in January, against my New York Giants. Favre effectively ended that tilt by throwing an INT. How fitting.

The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild yesterday released a survey of salaries in the newsroom of the Washington Post. Most of the document is a snooze: A lot of editorial aides are earning salaries in the $30,000 range and a lot of reporters hover in high five-figure, low six-figure territory.

There is, however, one fun detail: Three employees in the category of “Reporter, Bureau Chief or Columnist” are pulling down between $230,000 and $239,000. As this this publication made clear last month, that salary is higher than the base pay of the paper’s tier of assistant managing editors.

So who are these three well-paid Posties? I’m guessing that two of them are Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, the ESPNers who have a leg up in just about any set of negotiations over compensation. Kornheiser, of course, took this year’s buyout offer.

The third?

Amanda Hesser is taking a buyout from the New York Times, which I’ve gotta imagine is going to totally screw up Amanda Hess‘ false positives on phone messages.

Wemple pulls no punches this week, upbraiding the Washington Hispanic for bush leaguery, the InTowner for mundanity, and the Post for inanity.

The saving grace? Shiho Fukada of the New York Times.

Next week: the long-awaited return of Ruth?

With coworker William Atwood Mitchell safely ensconced in the woods of southern Virginia, I find myself the interim chronicler of flailing attempts by the white & wizened columnists at the New York Times to hippen theyselves by synthesizing the pop lexicon.

Today: Roger Cohen, who in his incisive piece on the “Obama Connection” (”Obama uses the internet!  How very 21st century!”) brandishes the following nugget of an analogy in describing the Clinton people:

They’ve been left like deer blinded by the Webcam lights of the Obama juggernaut.

Yes, it seems the days of mixed-trope expurgation have given way to a hypersaturated, superwebby, aggressively hip, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mentality…sort of like packing as many inane hyperlinks as possible into a blog post, just because you can.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Roger Cohen. His Latin America reporting was serious.  And he’s done some sweet stuff during this campaign.  But come on…does everybody gotta kowtow to the putative demands of an online public?

You know, Roger, we’re not all as hip as you might think….

With Erik Wemple mysteriously absent this week, staff writer Amanda Hess stands in as FF covers an array of hot-button media issues. This week: gnomes in Frederick County, the New York Times on sex, politics, and fetid water, and the Post on criminal psychology.

Let the wall-banging commence!

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

*Good smackdown of Chelsea Clinton in Sunday’s Washington Post. The piece, by Postie Ian Shapira, asks whether the 28-year-old Chelsea represents the attitude and morays of her generation. Answer: No! She’s stiff, scared, and monotonic. Shapira asked Chelsea’s handlers to comment for the piece and got this response, which is absolutely classic: “This isn’t the time or place. This is the time to talk about her mother’s views.” Hate that. Just abhorrent.

*Longtime poverty reporter Alex Kotlowitz pens a long piece in the New York Times Magazine about the concept of a “violence interrupter,” a person who stops violence at its source. It’s a breakthrough of sorts that treats urban gang violence like a disease.

*Washington Times fronts an AP piece on the kerfuffle over HRC’s comment about how she’d “obliterate” Iran given the proper circumstances. Here, another AP story on how cancer survivors believe in humor.

*DCist lights up with comments on the most significant cultural event of the year in D.C.

*Hey, D.C. Education blog–thanks for catching up on the Excel Institute story.

Too much going down on an Easter weekend to waste any time in this space. Let’s get right into roundupping:

*Folks at Washington Post Co.’s Express appear to have had a nice weekend, as this feature on the ins and outs of ceviche is still fronting the commuter paper’s Web site.

*Don’t really understand why they’re doing it now, but Washingtonian chimes in with an essay on the turning points in D.C. history by a guy named Larry Van Dyne.

*The Washington Post has launched its 1,234th blog. It’s on lax.

*The Washington Times, for its part, is talking about just how the fighting between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama is boosting John McCain.

*Also, for the die-hards out there, D.C. institution and WAMU analyst Jonetta Rose Barras fronts the Outlook section of the Post with a piece in which she distances herself from the rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright.

It’s gotta be a slow news weekend if….

The Washington Post’s lead story is a preview of a Supreme Court hearing. Sure, this is an important–and local–one: District of Columbia v. Heller. It’ll decide whether the District’s draconian gun law passes constitutional muster in this day.

*In The Trail, Post staffer analyzes pitfalls of a hard push by Obama in Pennsylvania.

*And here’s an editorial decision sure to get considered in the media jury room known as Fuego/Frio: The Post mag runs a feature on street monuments.

*S.A. Miller of the Washington Times takes apart a bad week for the Dems, sans the glee and gloating that may have been attached to such a story years ago.

*New York Times does a nice job of framing the issue with the superdelegates v. pledged delegates. Seems that many of the former are drifting toward a stance that’ll follow the popular vote in the contest between Hillary and Obama.

The Hotness: The Post’s story on Anthony Williams taking the plunge and buying a condo; the New York Times for its well-rounded Spitzer coverage; and Harper’s for the Tasmanian devil/cancer piece (we’ll let Wemple explain).

The Notness: Sorry, District Chronicles, but cutline cutline just won’t cut it.

Got a story you’d like to see discussed on the next Fuego/Frío? Wondering why Harper’s started printing on index cards? Let us know in the comments.

This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured a conversation about education philanthropy with several education and charity experts. Among them was Joel Klein, who has been chancellor of the New York City school system since 2002. Klein also figures prominently in the D.C. education world since he recommended District chancellor Michelle Rhee for her job. Apparently, he’s still standing behind his selection because he mentioned her in the Times piece. The premise of the conversation is to discuss how an ignorant, but benevolent billionaire could properly invest his money in education.

“I would look for the most promising individuals and make heavy investments in them. Let’s say you choose Michelle Rhee, the new schools chancellor in D.C. That school system has long been one of the worst-performing in the country, and Michelle wants to really overhaul it. I think our philanthropist could make an eight-year bet on her. It’s the same kind of thing I would have wanted to have happen to us when we started six years ago in New York. To start, I’d give her a couple of million to do some planning. Then I’d ask her to sit down and show me what strategic investments she thinks a philanthropist could make in D.C. that the system itself, for whatever reason, is not going to make. And I would try to make three or four of these strategic bets around the country, on individuals who I thought had the talent, the longevity and the political support to make significant change feasible.”

Interestingly middle-named New York Times reporter and Chinese-food scholar Jennifer 8. Lee takes on Metro’s billboards promising rat-free transit in a post on the Times‘ City Room blog. “Unlike some subway systems (which will remain nameless), you don’t see rats the size of house cats roaming the Metro,” the ad reads.

Lee figures this is meant as an attack on New York’s transit system, and she’s probably right, though a Metro spokesperson denies it. Fine, whatever–inventing petty squabbles are what blog posts are for. To that end, can’t a Times star come up with better trash-talk than this?

“Washington’s system may be rat-free, but its subway map also has all the sophistication of Fisher Price.”

All travel destinations are not created equal–until they’re written up in some newspaper travel section or travel magazine. There, every grimy, crime-ridden city with one gorgeous building is suddenly a gloriously exotic locale. Occasionally, an article comes along illuminating the truth: some places are just no fun. In 2004, Slate published a brilliant five part series by Seth Stevenson called “Trying really hard to like India.” The introduction sets the tone: “It’s OK to hate a place. Travel writers can be so afraid to make judgments. You end up with these gauzy tributes to the “magic” of some far-off spot. But honestly, not every spot is magical for everyone. Sometimes you get somewhere, look around, and think, ‘Hey, this place is a squalid rat hole. I’d really rather be in the Netherlands.’ And that’s OK.”

I’m no world traveler, but the general sentiment seems dead-on. Now, it seems finally, there is a whole book acknowledging this fundamental reality: Smile When You’re Lying, Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer. Today, the New York Times has a glowing review of this memoir/non-fiction book by Chuck Thompson, a veteran freelance travel journalist. “Actual travelers exist in real time and have to deal with the kinds of troubles that don’t end up as body copy between splashy photos of a beach at dawn and coconut-encrusted prawns in honey-melon-okra dipping sauce at cocktail hour,” the Times quotes from Thompson’s book. As for overrated destinations, there’s a neat and tidy list included within the review: “New Zealand (’a junior varsity version of the Pacific Northwest’), Colorado (’Kansas with big hills’), Austin (’if it wasn’t surrounded by Texas, it’d be called Sacramento’) and the entire Caribbean (’a miasmic hellscape’).”

I’m a fan of the most e-mailed lists in the online versions of most newspapers. The lists provide a quick route around the top headlines (what editors think is important) to the stories readers enjoy.

Of course, when the people speak, crap sometimes settles to the top with the gems. Consider Sunday’s New York Times story on District elite shopping at Costco. The story nailed the top spot on the most e-mailed list on Sunday. As of this morning, it was hanging at number two.

The story, summed up, is this: Rich and influential Washington party folk buy wine, frozen Salmon and other stuff at Costco. Sometimes they serve it to their guests. How un-Camelot.

The story breaks off into snapshots of moneyed power folk and their Costco habits. There’s Sally Quinn, former Rumsfeld advisor Richard Perle, Vernon Jordan’s wife…all, gasp, buying in bulk.

Hey, that’s three people. It’s a trend. So in the great NYT trend story tradition, the writer waxes anthropological to explain the why of this amazing cultural shift. Perhaps it’s the result of rising oil prices and the crashed mortgage market? Or is Costco “reverse chic,” the Pabst of the power set?

Hard to know. Maybe they are just cheap, a few more examples of the well established frugal and rich phenomenon? I’ve lived in the area long enough to understand why Washingtonians might find this interesting. But the real mystery is why anyone else would care.