Go ahead and suggest to Arianne Bennett that restaurants are to blame for the rat problem in Adams Morgan (check the link for Part I of our story, about a resident who blames the rats). Bennett, who owns the Amsterdam Falafelshop with her husband, Scott, has heard it before.

Bennett considers herself a civilian expert on the subject and, in fact, has been known to sign off on the Adams Morgan Listserv as "Constant Fighter of Rats in the Alley."

There's plenty of evidence to suggest Bennett does know from rats. First, there's the "rat exclusionary work" she has personally overseen at her restaurant on 18th Street. Over here, the glue traps. There, the tracking powder. Rat fences line the patio, which is religiously hosed off with bleach or a similar cleaner; posted signs warn the falafel-eating masses to never feed pigeons (the rats with wings). Small holes, wherever they appear, are stuffed with steel wool; she finds some of them by crawling around in dark corners with a flashlight. Every crevice or potential crack in a basement wall she shares with an attached and abandoned building is pocked with spongey, yellow, non-rat-friendly Big Gap Filler. She uses the stuff on the outside cracks of her building and the one next door, as well. She has a professional "rat guy" who checks the place regularly; she knows how to direct-dial the District to get someone out pronto. She never leaves out open trash and patrols the alley to make sure her neighbors and fellow business-owners are similarly vigilant.

"I will stomp on a rat before I will allow it to come into my restaurant," she says. And she has. It's not pretty, she says.

If Bennett comes off as a touch more concerned about rats than your average restaurant owner, there's a good reason. She and Scott and their two Italian mastiffs live upstairs; so if there's a rat in the restaurant, there's a rat in the house. They also park their vehicle in the alley by the Dumpsters and have, as has the star or Rat Tale Part I, dealt with rats chewing through their car parts. Bennett's solution? Bleach. She hoses off the cement under her car every day. "It's the food smell," she says. "You have to get rid of that if you don't want them under there."

The Dumpsters, themselves, are unfixable, she says. There's a gap built into their design that prevents the lids from slamming on people's fingers. It's a like putting out a welcome mat for rats to get in, she says. "Unless someone designs a better Dumpster that I can afford," she says, she'll have to live with it.

And don't bother to publicly complain on Listservs and the like that the city needs to do more, as several people have done of late. "The old-timers are not surprised anymore," she says.

"Unless you're seeing a team of rats carrying a person down the street, you're not going to get the attention of the District government," she says. "It's like trying to hold back a tide right at your front door."

Like all of those scantily-clad, cocktail-loving kids from the suburbs, rats enjoy fun times in Adams Morgan. Talk of their antics burbles up every few months or so on the neighborhood listserv, as it did recently, when Sid Binks chimed in with a post titled, "RATS Everywhere."

Binks, 44, has lived in Adams Morgan almost half his life. To the residents (many of them newbies) who think the rat problem has gotten worse, Binks says, maybe, but it's relative. D.C. did have a mild winter and maybe some rat families that would have died off, didn't. But rats have been part of the fabric of Adams Morgan for as long as he can remember.

There was the time about two years ago when his nearly new car, parked on a concrete slab behind his house on Calvert Street, wouldn't start. He took it back to Chevy Chase Acura and was told he had a problem: Rats had eaten through the insulation surrounding his ignition wires and the wires shorted out. The mechanic had seen this sort of thing before and offered a solution. "They wrapped the part of the car where rats can get at it with steel wool." He hasn't had a problem since. (Current service manager at the dealership, Mike Wang, says he was not aware of this practice but was glad to know Binks is still able to start his car.)

"I've exposed rats' nests. I've killed babies," says Binks. "I've stuck a hose down a hole---and the holes are fairly extensive---and turned it on. If they pop out, I bash them with a shovel."

He's installed and replaced a "rat fence" around his wooden fence. It's like chicken wire, he says, "but the holes are a lot smaller....Over the years, gaps do appear and they find their way in. Once you get one, well..."

On and off for 10 years, he's fought rat infestaions on his patio. He's never found them in the house, but has a friend who discovered one in the toilet. "He took a plunger and drowned it."

Every morning, he hoses rat crap from the alley, where he and his neighbors are careful about their trash. He uses poison sparingly because of the neighborhood dogs. He does put out rat traps. "One time one of those closed on my thumb and broke a blood vessel. You should have seen it," he says.

"I've been at this a long time," says Binks, and it's given him some perspective. "I don't like the whole thing, but I guess what you can say is that I've accepted it. It's part of city living."

(photograph by yours truly, taken many months ago outside Binks' house on my way to work)

Quick! Bring your dogs to Marie Reed to poop all over the kickballers' field! Bring them to romp and dig into the baselines where kids from the learning center play! Clearly, this park belongs to dogs and their owners. Never mind there's only a single coat of paint over "NO" and "AT ANYTIME." No one paid any attention to the original sign anyway. Never mind there's an actual dog run up the hill at Walter Pierce. I get it. It's too far to walk. That would be, like, giving you and your dog way too much exercise. Maybe you've heard this all before. I know I have.

Yesterday, we blogged about the boundaries for the new "Shaw ShotSpotter" that actually covers parts of Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, U Street, Bloomingdale, Truxton Circle, and Park View. (Perhaps it graces the borders of lower Crestwood and lower Petworth, as well? D.C. has too many damn neighborhoods.)

Anyway, here's the graphic version of the rough boundaries of the coverage area, as approved by Captain Michael Eldridge, who is overseeing the technology.

Last week, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans sent out a press release about the installment---in Shaw---of new ShotSpotter sensors, which can pinpoint the origin of gunshots by picking up their sound.

I blogged about the news. One disbelieving commenter wrote in, with a very reasonable question: "Is it really here this time?"

Well, Capt. Michael Eldridge, who is overseeing the ShotSpotter technology, insists the sensors are up and running, though he refused to tell me where they are located, for good reason. (Every time I think about this, I see, flashing in my head, the opening credits of HBO's The Wire---you know, the part where the kids throw the rock at the security camera.)

So, according to Eldridge, the "Shaw ShotSpotter" will cover: north on 10th Street from New York Avenue, west on S Street to 16th Street, north again on 16th Street. The system does cover Kalorama Road, the 17th and Euclid Area, and continuing north on 16th Street, west on Spring Road and Rock Creek Church Road, south on 2nd Street, to New York Avenue.

Check out a map. That's a big, big area (significant chunks of Liquorridor and Land of the Loft, in CP terminology.)

ShotSpotter's coverage area is expanding significantly within the next few months, as the Washington Post originally reported.

Read More "New “Shaw ShotSpotter” Actually Covers Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant, U Street, and Shaw" »

My hair has gotten to that point, folks. It's time for a haircut.

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but there's a point—an actual length—in the afterlife of my hair follicles when all hell breaks loose. In January 2007, I was so sick of it (and it was long enough, after the split ends) to donate the majority of my locks to Locks of Love. Yes, I did revert to looking like my sixth-grade self, but it was worth it just to get rid of the horrible tangles that kept me in the shower for 30-45 minutes shampooing, conditioning, pulling strands apart, and repeating.

I'm not willing to get a cut as drastic as before (I've realized that chin-length bobs make me look a little chunky above the neck). I just need to take a couple inches off.

Which brings me to my main problem: decision-making. Sometimes (and when it really counts), I'm able to go confidently in the direction of my dreams...ahem. But for everyday decisions, like, say, where to eat for lunch in a new area or a new place to get my hair cut, it takes me awhile.

I asked colleagues the other day and scoured Yelp! looking for a quality salon with moderate prices and near Adams Morgan. I did a new search online this morning (with, of course, the same results and reviews) and chose a couple of places to call. I thought today would be the day. Thursdays can be relatively slower in terms of content, so I figured I could leave for a long lunch, get my hair cut, and come back beautiful and ready for a date tonight. And then I came to work and promptly forgot about it until I ran my fingers through my hair.

I was thinking Trim (close but expensive), Blondie's (a bit of a walk but moderate), Urban Escape (I could just tumble down the hill to get there), or Bang (more of a trek but moderate prices, I think). Any (helpful) suggestions?

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: