In the pantheon of D.C. area weird religious places to go and gawk, you’ve got the George Washington Masonic Memorial, the Oz-like LDS Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center and now L. Ron Hubbard’s house.

A bold, swanky sign went up less than a week ago in front of 1812 19th Street NW in Dupont, site of the “founding church” of Scientology that Hubbard set up in 1955. The house belonged to the church until the mid-’70s, when it was sold and reverted to a residence. It was repurchased by the Church of Scientology three years ago, according to acting director of the L. Ron Hubbard House and chairman of the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard, Bill Runyon. It took about a year to restore the house to L. Ron’s use of it in 1957, which is around when he performed the first Scientology marriage there and a few years before the FBI raided it, seeking clues about suspected ties to Communism. And now you can, by appointment, “walk through the Hubbard Communications Office, past the desk where Ron’s personal secretary typed his policies and technical bulletins and transcribed his recorded lectures.”

It sounds scintillating, doesn’t it? Tours have been offered for a few months now, but there was only a small temporary sign announcing their arrival until Runyon and friends convinced the city and the ANC to approve the new sign. Hubbard, who was a teenager on the streets of D.C., tearing it up as a young Eagle Scout, is a fascinating figure whose history has long been up for debate. Check out his Wiki. Can’t make time for the tour? Stay tuned. I’m going on Friday. It’s part of my passive-aggressive attempts to figure out my only brother, who envisions himself the L. Ron for a new age. Be afraid, folks. I know I am.

Book blogger Maud Newton recently launched a feature on her site in which readers and writers weigh in on their favorite bookstores. This week it’s been all about D.C.: Yesterday former Post Book World Deputy Editor Chris Lehmann praised one Dupont Circle haunt, Books for America, and today Sean Carman makes a case for Kramerbooks.

Lehmann is more in the right, I think–I’m not so quick to dismiss Kramerbooks as “a yuppie pick-up venue decorated haphazardly with Times bestsellers,” but it is a frustratingly noisy place to casually browse in. And as much as I appreciate Books for America as an excellent place to pick up good fiction cheap, it’s—how to put this?—nowhere near disorganized enough to be one of my favorite used bookstores.

I confess I’m spoiled. My taste in used-book shopping was refined in San Francisco, where for a brief, beautiful moment in the mid-’90s there were five stores within a ten-minute walk from my apartment. (Among them were Aaben Books, Acorn Books, and A Novel Idea—in SF, competition among bookstores to be near the top of the phone listings is apparently fierce.) All of them were untidy to some extent—some parts of one store that shall remain nameless had book stacks that resembled (and smelled like) mulch piles, and I suspect its second floor was intermittently used as a crash pad. But with used books, the element of surprise is crucial, which is why I loved those places, and neither Books for America or Kramerbooks scratch that itch. (Stephen Elliott has blogged for Newton about another SF store, Adobe Books—see?—that to my mind is the all-time champion on that front.)

I haven’t been in D.C. long enough to find the slovenly bookstore of my dreams. Any suggestions?

“I recently moved to Dupont from across town,” a Restaurant Rater wrote recently, “and it was partially for this restaurant.” The object of this rater’s affection? Circa at Dupont.

Nothing’s coming to mind for me, but what about you? Any local restaurant(s) you would relocate to be closer to?

Last fall, I immodestly proposed a remake of the square that includes the Q Street entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. One reason the time was right, I noted, was that Riggs Bank had been absorbed by PNC, a Pittsburgh institution. That meant less need for local office space for the bank, so that the retail buildings on the west side of the 1500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, which Riggs converted to office space in 1997, could return to their previous use.

None of my more extravagant ideas for the square are on anyone’s public agenda, but the shops on that block are coming back. According to the Washington Business Journal, local retail broker John Asadoorian has been hired to lease the space that was once home to Kemp Mill Records, Beadazzled, Burrito Brothers, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, various ice cream parlors, and Rascals (a gay bar). There’s 20,000 square feet of available space, most of it behind façades clearly designed for retail use.

At $100 per square foot, the shops won’t rent to small, independent, or start-up businesses. But however corporate the block’s new retailers, they’ll create activity that will enliven the area. It never made sense to have a retail dead zone at the center of the one of the city’s liveliest neighborhoods, and next to one of its busiest Metro stations.

Of course, the original flip to office space didn’t have to happen. If the city had instituted the sort of retail requirements that exist in most well-planned cities, Riggs would never have been able to convert the Connecticut Avenue frontage to offices. So the return of shops to one side of one block doesn’t say anything about the larger issue of lively retail corridors. Citywide, D.C.’s retail strategy is still based on wishful thinking and the kindness of strangers.

After tolerating the Euro scene at Russia House Friday night, we wandered across the street to the Royal Palace, a strip club at Connecticut and Florida Avenues NW. My first experience at a D.C. nudie bar had been so pleasant, I thought I’d continue my tour.

Sorry to say, I was a bit disappointed. The girls were subpar. I’d describe them as a little on the thicker side. A stomach fold is acceptable for a dancer, but not full-on rolls. The slim ones, while a few were quite pretty, just didn’t have the moves or the rhythm to hold our attention. I think we just continued a conversation from across the street, about writing or something. The waitress didn’t help either. I’d ordered my usual dirty-old-man scotch-and-soda and was sipping it, mindful of the vodka martinis I’d already consumed, and she kept coming by to ask me if the drink was too strong. “We make our drinks really strong here,” she said, implying I didn’t have the fortitude to handle the cocktail—or the performances. A Scottish man with us at one point remarked that the dancer in front of us, leggy, pretty and uncoordinated, had an ass like Serena Williams‘. I think he’d had one too many.

On a trip to Georgetown the next evening—long story—I got a glimpse of an even grimmer performer:

Earlier this week the Workingman Collective—local artists Janis Goodman, Tom Ashcraft, and Peter Winant—installed 30 bird habitats on 14th Street NW between P and U Streets. The project, titled Site, Cite, Sight, was commissioned by WPA/Corcoran as part of SiteProjects DC, which places a variety of art projects onto that stretch of 14th. You can see the collective’s members in that picture on the right. What’s with the orange jumpsuits? It’s about “interaction with the community,” says Goodman. “When we’re out there in our coveralls, people can come to us and ask us what we’re doing.” Adds Winant: “We’re recognized as doing something that’s an art piece, rather than graffiti artists.”

Site, Cite, Sight, Ashcraft says, is meant to draw city dwellers’ attention to the distinctions between “the environment and the built environment”: the habitats are designed for the Eastern Bluebird, the Black-capped Chickadee, and the Downy Woodpecker, three of the hardest-hit species from the West Nile Virus. (Specific habitat designs are “mainly a matter of the size of the openings,” says Goodman.) The Workingman Collective specializes in work that deals in this sort of urban-natural intersection. In April 2006 the group went to Butte, Mont., to draw a five-mile chalk line that “represents commitment, delineates territory and marks what’s cut and what’s kept.” Earlier this year Ashcraft and Winant headed to the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., to install Pine, a wooden ping-pong table intended in part to revitalize a little-used campus quad.

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My wife and I were sitting at a two-top at Al Tiramisu, chef’s Luigi Diotaiuti’s dark, subterranean Italian operation in Dupont Circle. I was staring at a portrait-quality drawing of Giuseppe Verdi, whose graying, haunted mug seemed to be accusing me of a life-time devotion to rock ’n’ roll. There was a glass-encased display of miniature grappa bottles to my left, as some sort of Italian music wafted overhead. I halfway wished I could switch places with my wife, Carrie, so I could have my back to the wall. It feels that authentic here.

I was drawn to the prosciutto di Parma antipasto because, according to the menu, it comes with “homemade cherry mozzarella.” But when I asked the waiter if the fresh cheese was indeed made in-house, he instead explained that the “cherry” adjective indicates the size of the mozzarella, not the flavor. So I tried my question again, and the waiter shook his head no, no, no. The mozzarella is not made in-house, he insisted.

Carrie and I shrugged it off and ordered the antipasto anyway, which was utterly delicious.

This morning, I called Diotaiuti to double-check about the mozzarella. After all, why advertise it as homemade if it’s not? The chef explained that the waiter was confused. The buffalo mozzarella is imported from Italy; the cherry mozzarella is made in-house with fresh cow-milk curds.

Shortly before 8:45 this morning, Susana Ricca walked out of the Jurys Hotel in Dupont Circle in search of a bagel. She didn’t make it to Firehook Bakery, less than a block away.

Just as she made it to the sidewalk across Q Street, Ricca heard a loud crunching bang to her left and caught the blur of a black Mercedes Benz careening her way. Ricca leaped a knee-high steel fence and landed in a street garden.

Good thing, too. The Benz took out the fence and landed halfway in the garden with Ricca. An Argentinean tourist who was in town with her husband and a daughter, Ricca escaped without a bruise.

An hour after the crash, a tow truck was still trying to yank the Benz from the garden as Charita Roberts watched, speeding ticket in hand. It was the cab driver’s fault, she said. The cabbie was driving down Q Street when Roberts says she stopped at the intersection at 19th Street and pulled out. The cabbie struck her in the front fender, sending the C280 across the sidewalk. She thought the cab should have stopped for the pedestrians at the crosswalk.

For her part, Ricca, a sprightly women a few years past middle age, seemed still in shock. “She’s lucky she’s not dead,” said a beautician from Diego’s Hair Salon, who caught the accident in a series of mirrors inside the shop.

Standing on the sidewalk with her family, Ricca was now on the way to the Smithsonian after resting back at the hotel.

“She’s always praying,” her daughter said. “She’s very Catholic. She’s very lucky in every sense.”

As reported earlier this week in the Washington Post, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts recently introduced their supposedly health-conscious whole wheat glazed donut. If you live in NW DC, you can simply trot over to the Krispy Kreme store in Dupont Circle on Connecticut Avenue to give this dandy of a donut a try. But, as Uweekly.com reports, if you’re the NBC affiliate in Augusta, Ga., you may be willing to go to much greater extremes to satisfy your sweet tooth.

The Brickskeller, 2/26, 10:56 p.m.:

A mouse runs through the dining room and hops in the fake fireplace. No one else notices.

Thinking of heading to Dupont Circle’s Cloud tonight for some appetizers and aperitifs? Think again. The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board served the swank Dupont Circle “restaurant” with a summary suspension yesterday, forcing it to close its doors and halt operations. The suspension comes after a patron was stabbed at Cloud on Feb. 16.

According to the suspension notice, the victim was stabbed three times, twice after security had already intervened in the altercation between the two club patrons. “The victim was extremely intoxicated, having been served at least six alcoholic beverages in the establishment,” the suspension notice says. At the time of the attack, security was being provided by Mad Power Unit, a promotional outfit associated with the nightclub Pearl, whose license was also revoked by the board following a spate of violent incidents.

In addition to Thursday night’s stabbing, the summary suspension details a litany of other violent incidents that have taken place over the course of the last two years at Cloud, many of them involving patrons who were hit by glass bottles and rushed to the hospital.

To make matters worse, the suspension letter says that when alcohol administration investigators arrived at the scene Thursday night, they discovered Cloud was providing entertainment, even though it had not gotten board approval to do so.

Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration director Maria Delaney says the board made the decision to suspend Cloud’s license on Wednesday “because of the pattern of violence” at the establishment. It delivered the suspension notice the next day.

Safeway ordered a new fleet of shopping carts for its store at 17th and Corcoran Streets NW last year. The company paid a little less than $100 apiece for carts smaller and easier to handle than their forerunners. But they weren’t all fitted with the security system that makes the wheels lock when they pass a boundary. So in the last few months, at least 17 carts have disappeared from the “Soviet Safeway.”

“The manager told me, anecdotally, that some customers have seen ‘em in apartment buildings, or that some customers have said they’re good for laundry,” says Safeway spokesperson Craig Muckle.

Some of those customers live in the R Street Apartments a few blocks away at 15th and R Streets. One resident says he often sees two of the carts in front of the building when he goes to work before dawn; they’re always gone when he returns. Another man says that neighborhood kids and homeless people claim the carts for their own. “They ain’t no adults out there stealin’ no shoppin’ carts,” he says.

Resident Andrea White has spotted a couple of the carts herself. “I heard they all over D.C.,” she says. “Somebody been takin’ them things.”