Everyone who chooses to become a journalist has to wonder from time to time whether they ought to have chosen a more lucrative career, or at least one with better prospects for stability. For many of us, this is one of those times. On top of that, like many journalists, I regard the rest of the working world as something of a mystery. What do all those people in offices do all day, other than not return my calls for comment?

So … I have always liked reading help wanted ads. Not that I’m looking, or anything, but I recently pulled up the classifieds at New York Social Diary, a blog about the New York elite, which occasionally deigns to feature a party or celebrity interview from lowly DC. I expected to find requests for personal assistants or gardening coaches. Instead, I found a bunch of nannies looking for work. Could it be that the hard times have forced wealthy house wives to take their own children to the park? Since nannying for the rich is one career other than journalism I have experience in, I’m glad that field looks pinched as well. I would want the temptation.

Everyone is gushing about the growing popularity of scooters. They get 65+ miles per gallon and are cheap to maintain and insure. Dealerships are selling out of popular models and buyers are acting like iPhone acolytes, making goofy plays to get what they want. My mechanic at Vespa Washington told me one guy recently got offered $6,000 cash for his Vespa by some dude on K Street. The dealership accepted a trade in of a 1965 Corvette (or was it a Mustang?) for a 50 cc Vespa.

There is one big downside, though, especially for us mishap-prone scooter owners: the wait for service is way longer than it was when the only scooter riders were mods and delivery men. If you want to schedule a tune-up at Vespa Washington, you’ll have to wait more than a month. In my case, I had to wait nearly a month for the shop to fix my ride after thieves tried to steal it and only succeeded in breaking the fork. It’s not as easy as just hiring more mechanics. There’s a shortage of qualified mechanics who know how to work on scooters. I wonder if they make more than journalists? Hmmmm.

Heather Ryan has a great essay in Salon this week about taking her kids to a soup kitchen. Ryan is a writer with a master’s degree and three children. She’s also broke and divorced. She doesn’t ask for pity, or wallow in purple descriptions of her shame and desperation. She just explains how it sucks to not be able to afford food for her family. She also admits her desire to spoil herself with little treats-like a $3 wedge of brie-to remind herself that she deserves better. As Jezebel points out, some Salon commenters fail to empathize with Ryan. They accuse her of choosing her writing career over her kids’ well-being and chastise her for splurging on that French cheese.

Jezebel says: Should only the wealthy and their offspring be allowed to make art because they can afford to? I think we’ll be missing out on a lot of exceptional writing if that’s the case.

Ryan’s essay itself is a good example of why we should encourage non-married, non-rich writers to take a risk or two. How often do we here first-hand accounts of what it’s like to struggle with money? Barbara Ehrenreich is awesome, but she’s just one example.

I think I come from a similar background to Ryan, or her kids. I grew up without much money, but always knew I deserved better. I endured the horrifying embarrassment of walking to the front of class to get my purple ticket for a free lunch. And I never went along on the trips to collect government cheese from some skeevy food pantry. I was horrified whenever we had to pay for groceries with food stamps. Still, my dad made me eat brie and sushi and I think that probably had something to do with my own, perhaps ill-advised, decision to go into the very lucrative field of journalism.

Last Thursday, Eastern Senior High School’s marching band paraded through the streets of Capitol Hill, west to Lincoln Park and then back on East Capitol Street. There was no actual event going on. The band was just practicing.

“Honestly, we do it a lot,” says staff band leader James Perry. “A lot of the times, the cars don’t mind. We never get any honks. They roll down the window and bop along.”

Although it’s the dead of summer, Eastern’s band convened every weekday last week, according to Perry. The reason: next Saturday, August 2, the group is expected to play in a parade for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival in Canton, Ohio.

The key word here is “expected.”

This year, six people will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Two of them are known for their time with the Washington Redskins: cornerback Darrell Green, and wide receiver Art Monk.

In April, the Eastern band was contacted by a parade coordinator, and asked to apply “to represent D.C.” as part of the festivities, says Perry. After the group was selected to play in the parade, Eastern students began raising money holding car washes and selling candy in school. The band does not plan to stay over in Canton. They’re just fund-raising for the bus ride, which amounts to $3,900. Roughly 65 to 70 musicians, as well as six dancers and six flag girls, will be going. Each student is responsible for raising $70 for his or her passage, says Perry.

The group was relying on paychecks from students’ jobs with the Department of Employment Services’ Summer Youth Program. But, when the District’s payment system failed, many were left with insufficient funds to cover their shares. As of the last count, the group had $500 total. Read the rest of this entry »

A new ranking of the country’s very worst insurers slams Allstate. The problem with the company, in the view of the American Association of Justice, is the following: “While Allstate publicly touts its ‘good hands’ approach, it has instead privately instructed its agents to employ a ‘boxing gloves’ strategy against its policyholders,” said American Association for Justice CEO Jon Haber. “Allstate ducks, bobs and weaves to avoid paying claims to increase its profits.”

So keep that in mind next time you see one of those feel-good commercials from this insuring behemoth.

The AAJ includes a total of 10 insurers on its Worst-of list, and one of them hits pretty close to home. No. 8 is UnitedHealth, Washington City Paper’s official health insurer effective this very month. I’ll be eating my broccoli and steering clear of traffic!

Full AAJ release after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just announced: Dave Jamieson, a former Washington City Paper staff writer, has just won the prestigious Livingston Award for his story “Letters From an Arsonist.” The story—a must read!—ran as the cover story on June 1, 2007. The award brings with it not just a rubber-chicken lunch, but $10,000.

It’s a big deal. The Livingston Awards, which are given out to journalists under 35 and are the nation’s largest all-media reporting prizes, are always a big deal. Jamieson, who won in the local reporting category, had to beat out heavyweights at the Washington Post and other fine publications and broadcast networks with more resources.

But this is no upset. His story exemplified what all great stories do. It uncovered—with rich details and new facts—the story of the arsonist who burned our city for years and years. The story provided a haunting, unforgettable profile of the man behind all those fires and also broke serious news. Through dogged investigative work, Jamieson uncovered that the man was responsible for more than the one death that had been previously reported—and had to inform the children of two of the victims that their parents did not die as the result of an “accidental” fire.

While most of you have read his piece, few of you have an idea of what Jamieson went through to get his story just right. The arsonist’s letters would come in batches and then suddenly stop. A trip out to the Indiana prison for a one-on-one interview came to nothing. But he stuck with it for a year.

The story is a testament to what journalism can do and should do more often. In this era of cutbacks and imperatives to blog!blog!blog! Jamieson proved that journalism is still best served by expert reporting and expert writing. There’s not a wasted sentence in his piece (credit should go to his editors Erik Wemple, Andrew Beaujon, and Jule Banville as well). If you want a textbook case of why this publication should still matter to District residents and its owners down south, this is it.

So today, we are inspired by Jamieson’s news. And we will continue to be inspired by Jamieson’s arsonist story and his feature pieces.

Congrats, man. You earned it.

(photo by Darrow Montgomery)

Happy New Year, working women! Tomorrow, celebrate Equal Pay Day, the date representing how far into the year a woman must work in order to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. Here’s wishing you many more productive 16-month fiscal years in the future.

The National Committee on Pay Equity places the current wage gap at 33% 23%—for every dollar an American man earns, a woman will earn 77 cents. The gap is closing. But unnmarried women advocacy group (and internal punctuation activists) Women’s Voices. Women Vote has some more detailed statistics on the salary gap between unmarried women and married men. According to their data, in 2006, unmarried women earned 56 cents to a married man’s dollar, while married women earned 62 cents to their husbands’ buck.

Also interesting to note is that unmarried men haven’t got shit on married men, either. Those ubiquitous “Marriage Works” ads ain’t lying: In 2006, an unmarried man earned 64 cents to a married man’s dollar.

So what are the unmarried, the female, and particularly, the unmarried female to do? According to an economist friend of mine, just “work in higher paying industries and not have children.” And if you’ve been hesitating to settle on a husband, now might be the time to do it! Alternately, NCPE has some tips for wage and salary negotiations.

I remember seeing my first Sacagawea dollar. It was summer 2001, and I was working at the Boogie Woogie Bagel Boy in Oakland, Calif. I thought it was a joke, like the $200 bill a guy tried to use the day earlier. It was, obviously, for real, and the rest of the summer rained golden dollar coins. It was exciting. In the fall, I came back East, and my Sacagawea spottings became fewer and fewer, until there seemed to be no Sacagaweas at all. I once worked in a bar in D.C. that had two Sacagawea coins permanently stationed in the corner tray of the cash register. The drawer always came up $2 short until someone remembered the coins. We didn’t know what to do with them. Give them as change? Take them home as tips? Include them in the drop? They seem like fake money. No one uses them. Are they just piling up in collectors’ houses?

During a little Sacagawea research, I stumbled upon this shocking information. There are presidential dollar coins! The Mint is releasing four a year. 2007 saw the unleashing of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. 2008 has already brought Monroe, with Adams (the other one), Jackson, and Van Buren close behind. I’ve never seen any of these coins. Have you? Why make money if no one’s going to spend it?

I want a sweet picture of the members of Congress pointing and laughing at the people who live in the capital of a nation that denies them one of the very rights this country was founded on. The rest of the country probably won’t get it, so you might as well add the old “Taxation Without Representation” line on there. (Yeah, I know we’ve got license plates that say that, but think nationally, dude!) If you want to work Blelvis, a bald eagle with a tear running down its beak, or some bullshit cherry blossoms in there, that’s cool with me, too. Fuck yeah!

While we’re at it, the D.C. quarter should be missing a chunk equal to about 1/5 the size of a regular quarter to symbolize how much of that quarter the federal government is taking out of our pockets without adequate representation. I’d say drill a hole in the center of the damn thing, but I think it’d be better just to have a pie-slice-shaped piece cut out—and make sure that the edges are sharp, so that people slice their fingers open and bleed all over themselves whenever they try to use it.

Thanks for the fucking quarter, douchebags. Now, about that $257.17 you took out of my check this week…

I’ve had a lot of problems with parking tickets lately. This morning I parked at a meter on M Street that wouldn’t take quarters. I put in all my nickels and dimes and went to the doctor’s office, hoping I’d be finished in the 26 minutes I had on the clock.

At the 21 minute mark it was clear I wouldn’t be done, so I went back to the car to move it to a working meter.

When I got behind the wheel, I saw a pile of money in the middle of the street. I got out of my car and hurried over to pick it up. The wet bills totaled $60.

I’ve found money on streets and sidewalks my whole life. There is a weird, powerful feeling that goes with finding money. I used to think I found money so often because I was special.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s and found a $10 bill on a sidewalk while walking in Buffalo that I realized I found money not because I was special, but because I had spent my whole life walking with my head down looking for it.

But today’s haul, which ranks among my biggest finds ever, gave me the old “I’m special!” feeling. I will use most of the $60 to pay a parking ticket I got in this same neighborhood a couple months ago, which was totally bogus. I think that’s why I found it.

Sure, the Washington Post has done its fair share of hard-nosed reporting on the construction of the Nationals stadium in Southeast. It’s gone deep on parking, finances, and the initial political opposition to the boondoggle.

But none of that good work is sufficient to clear the stink away from this morning’s Metro front offering on the wonderful evolution of the stadium’s design. If you’re one of those insufferable baseball nostalgists, a stadium architect, a member of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, and owner of the Nationals, or someone else who stands to benefit from the relocation of the Nats from RFK to this new site, you’ll find plenty to love in this piece.

Especially the ending, which goes like this:

In the meantime, the initial reviews of the design are raves. Students and teachers from the Academy of Construction and Design at Cardozo Senior High School were among the ballpark’s recent visitors.

“This is too cool,” said academy manager Shelly Morrison as she stepped out to the club level and got her first view of the playing field. “I don’t know too much about baseball, but I’ll come for the ambience.”

 Yeah, well initial reviews of just about every huge project in the District generally err on the ravey side. How much you wanna bet that I could find rave reviews for such historic D.C. archiflops as the old convention center? Or perhaps TechWorld?

Sorry, can I geeze for a moment? Looking through my Post this weekend, I was struck by how many merchants were offering very generous terms to finance the acquisition of HDTVs. Circuit City, for instance, offers 36 months interest free to anyone who spends more than $999 on a TV—the only catch is you have to sign up for Circuit City’s credit card. Best Buy is offering a similar deal as long as you let something called the Geek Squad into your home to install your purchase (buy online and install the TV yourself, and you can get a free massage chair instead).

Clearly, our economy is doomed. Anyone who takes out a three-year loan to buy a freaking TELEVISION needs to reexamine his or her priorities, stat, and any country whose economic well-being hinges on people having their priorities so screwed up is Rome just before the Vandals hit. Let’s say you buy the Sharp 52-inch AQUOS™ 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV for $3499.99 before instant savings of $350 at Best Buy. That’s only $87 a month for the next three years, plus you get a “free” Sharp Blu-Ray Disc™ player. Of course, in three years, that 1080p 120 Hz LCD HDTV will be worth a tenth of what you paid for it, technology will have marched grimly on, and you’ll be out the $600 you could have earned in a no-load mutual fund that tracks the market, even in a recession. Good thing you’ve got a massage chair.

The Washington Business Journal has an interesting piece in this week’s issue about the development potential of school properties on the closure list. “At the top of the list might be Hine Junior High School, a 131,300 square-foot Capital Hill building at the corner of Eighth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE that is set snuggly among Eastern Market, the Metro station of the same name and the Barracks Row retail corridor,” writes reporter Jonathan O’Connell. The article also mentions three sites in the prime-for-development Brookland area. (And O’Connell did track down one developer, Jim Abdo of Abdo Development, willing to go on record saying he was “very interested in looking at what’s available.”) At least four buildings look safe from bulldozers, according to the article, the Ward 8 schools: Wilkinson Elementary, Douglass Transition Center, Green Elementary, P.R. Harris Educational Center.

Photo credit: Darrow Montgomery

So it turns out merchants are not allowed to enforce minimums for credit card purchases — at least under the agreements they sign with MasterCard and Visa. Extra charges for using plastic are usually a no-no too, although stores may offer discounts for buying with cash. This information came as something of a revelation for someone who almost always forgets cash. But I’m not sure how little old me would enforce it. Threaten the barista?

I know the credit card companies bleed stores with fees for each transaction. But I’m a lazy consumer. I want my $1.50 coffee now.