What is the deal with all of these metal carts I see everywhere? And where does one get one for less than $40? I’ve never seen one before moving to the East Coast, and I’m dismayed that everyone seems to have one (that is, except my roommate and me). I’ve been far too shy to stop random people on the sidewalks to inquire because I still haven’t figured out the friendliness rating of the District.

Please, tell me where to get one on the cheap. My womanly arms are going to grow out of proportion to the rest of my body pretty soon if I don’t get some relief from carrying gallons upon gallons of chocolate milk the two blocks home from the nearest market. (No, I don’t have a problem. I just like chocolate milk. There’s nothing wrong with that.)

About a week or so back Fox News’ Laura Ingraham visited Tryst in Adams Morgan to figure out what all those crazy people are doing in coffee shops with their newfangled laptops and their Twitterbook and whatnot. “Typing,” I would’ve said if they’d asked me, but Ingraham’s answer is closer to something like, “Spitting on the social contract by failing to hit on the people next to you.” (I had lots of brilliant points to make about how not all third places are created equal, and that third places don’t play the same role that they did in Fox News’ favorite decade, the 1850s, but screw it—I’m on deadline.)

Anyway, one of the people who Ingraham buttonholed is a City Paper contributor, Cherie Parker; “I hate Fox News,” she tells Ingraham in the clip. Understandably, Ingraham dismisses this as failing to be the genuine, neighborly exchange of ideas she was hoping for. Parker has copped to her crankiness, and confesses the deep secret of what she was doing when the news crew arrived: Blogging and surfing Craigslist. Surprise!

In recent weeks, softball games at Walter Pierce Park have been on the outs.

First, residents were concerned that errant fly balls would end up hitting passersby or kids playing basketball at the adjacent court. After the softball players altered the field, balls started flying into the parking lot behind right field.

On a recent Wednesday evening, Edan Lichtenstein, 30, got a phone call from a neighbor telling him that his Jetta’s hood had been struck by a ball. None of the players bothered to leave a note, he says. “It’s a pain in the ass more than anything,” he explains. “They should not be hitting [balls] toward buildings.”

ANC Commissioner Mindy Moretti says she’s received two other complaints from citizens whose cars have been dinged by softballs. “I know for sure three cars have been hit,” she says. “I’ve seen people back in the alley looking for softballs as well. I just think it’s a safety issue.”

This week, Moretti e-mailed the director of the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) writing that softball in the park should be reviewed. “It’s something that you wouldn’t normally expect,” she says. There’s no backstop there. It’s just not suitable for adult softball.”

DPR agreed. John Stokes, the department’s spokesperson, says that no permits are currently issued for softball there. “We’re putting up signs on the field that will say that baseball and softball are strictly prohibited and violators will be asked to leave. In addition, the DC Park Rangers will be monitoring the field to ensure that the baseball and the softball are not being played.” Stokes adds, however, that “playing catch is permitted.”

Every day lots of people cross the Duke Ellington Bridge between Adams Morgan and Woodley Park. My husband, for example, has done so basically every day of his life for the past 11 years. It wasn’t until Saturday, though, that he saw someone try to jump off.

While walking to the Marriott Wardman Park to Twitter, blog, and otherwise write about all of Saturday’s excitement, he watched someone yank his car to a stop right in the middle of the bridge. That’s odd, he said (paraphrasing here. I was in bed), and then he watched the driver sprint to the opposite side of the bridge and forcibly grab hold of another man’s leg. Shortly thereafter another man grabbed his other leg and the first man yelled: “Someone call 911.” Which my husband did. The dispatcher (paraphrasing again) said, “Well, do you have him?” They did; the samaritans said they needed no more samaritans, just the cops.

The incident reminded me of “Jumpers,” a story that ran a few years back in the New Yorker and describes what happens when a jumper jumps, in this case off the Golden Gate Bridge:

In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

The Ellington bridge is one of the few “suicide bridges” in the country that has barriers designed specifically to prevent the eggbeater treatment of a person’s organs. In this case, I think it worked.

If making a case to local legislators won’t change weekend parking rules in Adams Morgan, maybe a YouTube video with circa-1998 techno-rock will:

A very occasional series about escaped cats.

Poor Hugo. He was a street cat rescued from West Virginia and carted to D.C., only to bounce around to friendly and supportive, but ultimately temporary, foster parents. Then Vikram Chiruvolu, 31, who works at home writing a book about philosophies of physics and information theory, met Hugo, loved Hugo, adopted Hugo.

And then Hugo jumped from his third-floor window off Belmont Street NW, swinging onto a nearby branch and landing on a soft patch of brush below. He left behind his collar, as well as his soft cat bed, his favorite game (an extended fishing pole with a string attached), and one very sad Vikram, who had never had a pet before and had Hugo for only about 10 days. “He’s a terrific cat, really friendly and social. He’s the most puppy-like cat, just loved to play and be around people,” says Chiruvolu.

So Chiruvolu papered Adams Morgan and North Dupont Circle with fliers. His friend and adoption coordinator, Omkar Sawardekar—he fosters pets with the foster-only rescue outfit Homeward Trails—dutifully put lost-cat listings on Craigslist and offered a $100 reward. One fine fellow called and said he had a cat in a box and was going to kill it if he didn’t get 50 bucks. Sawardekar says he called the Humane Society.

The whole experience of losing Hugo has opened a “whole world of strangeness” regarding cats, says Chiruvolu. A woman in his neighborhood—she is like the “Jedi cat lady,” he says—sought him out and asked him if Hugo was a recently neutered male. She has six cats, see, and a garage set up as a playground for strays and she had recently smelled some urine she didn’t recognize.

“She had six cat traps on her front porch and told me how they worked,” says Chiruvolu. They then walked around the neighborhood together and the Jedi cat lady taught Chiruvolu “how to think like a cat. I think I almost got it.” But, alas, they did not find Hugo.

Chiruvolu did see him once, completely freaked out with his hair on end, possibly after a run-in with a fox. Hugo bolted past him and into an alley. This was about a month ago and it’s the last time Chiruvolu saw Hugo. If you’ve seen him, e-mail the info to comm-668928260@craigslist.org.

Obama is great for just being Obama, says Marc Fisher. “Win or lose,” the senator from Illinois has changed the way Americans view race, he writes in his most recent column. “It’s one thing to believe in a picture we’d like to be true — a society moving toward a colorblind ideal — and something entirely different to live each day with a personification of that ideal.” And which generation has advanced this new way of thinking? Not today’s youth, but the youth of yesteryear. That’s right: Boomers! They always get credit for everything.

While the District hopes to stop handguns from coming in, Mayor Ray Nagin from New Orleans is …

Logic schmogic. Maybe Roger Clemens and his former trainer are both telling the truth (check out the second photo), even though they are saying diametrically opposite things.

Do not slip while running in Adams Morgan. In some places, it’s a long way down.