Heads up to new Washington residents and summer interns: you got here just in time for DC’s coolest and free-est event: five consecutive Mondays of outdoor movies on the National Mall. Everyone who’s anyone will be there.

Tonight’s Screen on the Green flick: Dr. No, a Bond movie that involves fire-breathing dragons and a woman named Honey Ryder, who is always referred to as “the beautiful Honey Ryder.”

A few SOTG tips from a veteran:

1) The movie starts at sundown but you want to get there a good two hours early to stake out a good spot big enough for all your homies and lay out a good picnic spread. (Note: the screen is set up at 4th Street NW, facing the monument, so plan your spot accordingly.)

2) Your back will hurt if you don’t have a chair but everyone behind you will hate you if you do have a chair. I recommend the Crazy Creek padded seats that don’t have legs, although after two hours in one you’ll probably lose all circulation in your legs.

3) Oh and about that picnic: nobody cares if you bring alcohol.

Enjoy! And even if you miss tonight, I expect to see each and every one of you out there for Superman on August 11!

Cherry blossom tourists and kite-flyers had a chance to get star-struck over a total nobody last weekend. Some guy you don’t know organized an “Improv Everywhere” event in which another guy you don’t know acted like a celebrity, and some 40 other people acted like paparazzi, bodyguards, photographers, and adoring fans; and in the end, all the randoms on the National Mall were following him around and taking pictures with their cell phone cameras. His fake girlfriend even got fake-mad when a fake-fan demanded that he sign her (real) boob.

The supposed singer of the supposed hit song “Trapped in My Heart” attracted dozens of hangers-on and fans-for-a day but failed at his ultimate mission of being allowed to go to the top of the Washington Monument without a ticket. Apparently the security guard nearly came to blows with the tour guide in the Abraham Lincoln costume over it. (You can always count on Honest Abe to reassure us that we’re all still created equal, and we all need a ticket to get to the top of the Monument.)

Together with the Freeze Action that happened in Union Station a couple weeks ago, this is almost enough to convince you that Washington is becoming absurdist-artsy-hip like we always dream it will.

Photo by Bruce Witzenburg.

One of the District’s gems is the bonsai hut at the Arboretum in Northeast. It’s actually called the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. You can gawk at those little trees for hours without so much as blinking.

Check out this gem:

Well, in the future, as it turns out, your access to this gem may be slightly curtailed, if we are to believe the awesome Mark Segraves of WTOP News. Segraves is telling us that budget cuts are imperiling the Arboretum’s staff and operating hours. If this actually comes to pass, and the U.S. National Bonsai and Penjing Museum becomes scarcer to me as a tourist, then some approps person on the Hill’s gonna hear from me!

Brock, I just gotta say sorry, man. You were an excellent guide to the Capitol this past Saturday, and your knowledge of the artwork inside the rotunda verges on ridiculous. And even your Jesuit priest-style habit of ending a fact with a question—e.g., “The statue of General Jackson was a gift of…what state?”—grew on me after a while.

So it only seemed fair of you to ask whether any of us had questions of our own. And when my toddler son said yes, and you asked him what it was, and I was waving my hands as if to say, No, no, don’t call on him—well, it’s understandable that you didn’t see that.

What I can’t figure out is why he then told you and the tour group, “I live in a car.”

And why I felt compelled to tell them we don’t.

John Trumbull, Surrender of Cornwallis, 1817-1820 (from the Capitol Rotunda collection)

Why is the Iwo Jima Memorial in Virginia? And why is there a copyright at the bottom of the statue? If copyrights are necessary for memorials, why don’t they all have them?

The “monumental” view of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol is why the National Parks Service decided on the Virginia location for the memorial, according to National Parks Service spokesman Bill Line, who notes that the memorial is actually called the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial since it is dedicated to all Marines who have died since 1775. Moreover, before construction began on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, no national war memorials were located on the National Mall (the lone war memorial on the mall was the D.C. World War I Memorial) since war memorials were thought better suited to be placed close to Arlington National Cemetery.

Officially dedicated in 1954, the memorial is based on a photograph by the recently-deceased Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Since the AP holds the copyright to the photograph as an “original work of art,” according to U.S. copyright law, the statue is considered a “derivative work” of the original. As a result, it is one of two monuments in the D.C. region with a copyright.

Monuments and memorials do not need copyrights, but if there is an inherent copyright issue at hand (like the Iwo Jima Memorial), or the memorial’s creator simply files the paperwork (as was the case with Korean War Veterans Memorial creator Frank Gaylord) a copyright will appear on the statue making it illegal for “Joe Blow or Suzy Creamcheese to take a picture of the statue …and sell it for cold, hard American cash,” Line says.

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?

Each time I head down to the Mall, I end up with a shoeful of pebbles and red eyes from dirt blowing in my eyes. I’ve also seen pebbles get caught in dog’s paws and provide an unnecessarily rough ride for people with disabilities. Why not just pave ’em?

People love the pebbled walkways, says National Parks Service Communications Officer Bill Line, who adds that pebbles are far more aesthetically pleasing than “unsightly” concrete sidewalks.

“I’ve been [a National Parks Service communications officer] for five years and I’ve heard numerous verbal compliments about how much people like the pebbled walkways,” he says, and in that time he has never encountered a request for pavement.

To change the look of the Mall by paving over the walkways would be committing blasphemy, he says.

“The reason we don’t pave the walkways is the same reason why we don’t go to the Black Hills and get rid of Teddy Roosevelt’s mustache or Abe Lincoln’s beard,” he adds.

Despite Line’s allegiance to the pebbled walkways, they’ve only been in place since 1975, when the National Parks Service laid them down in preparation for bicentennial celebrations.

In fact, the Mall didn’t begin to take its current shape until 1902, when the McMillan Commission, a Senate committee tasked with improving the “the entire park system of the District of Columbia,” submitted a report calling for the government to transform the Mall into a grand avenue in line with planner Pierre L’Enfant’s never-realized plans for the District. The Commission’s plan called for a European-style broad grass carpet running the entire length of the Mall grounds, bordered on each side by four rows of American elm trees, with public buildings bordering the whole.

Before that, the Mall had a sordid past as the military used the grounds for bivouacking and parading troops, slaughtering cattle, and producing arms. Later, the Mall was used as railroad depot, with tracks running north to south across the Mall.

Despite recent changes—including the addition of the National Museum of the American Indian and plans to add the National Museum of African-American History and Culture—Line says, “There are no pleas, no move afoot, and no discussion to pave the walkways.”

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?

Why the hell is there an aquarium in the basement of the Department of Commerce? And why is it so pathetic? It looks like a high-school science project.

The aquarium isn’t pathetic-it’s vintage. In fact, when the aquarium was built as an original part of the Department of Commerce Building in 1932, it was considered a “credit to the nation?[with] its high, cathedral-like vaulted ceilings, gleaming marble pools, and brass trim framing its exhibit tanks,” according to The National Aquarium Society’s official history.

But why build an aquarium in the Commerce Building in the first place? It was all about bureaucracy: At the time it was built, the National Aquarium was a part of the Fisheries Commission, which was a part of the commerce department. And since the building was state-of-the-art, it was the perfect place to display the Fisheries Commission’s collection of American fish, which they had been collecting for research since 1873.

And for 50 years, the aquarium attracted a steady stream of tourists and school children. But in 1982, the government decided to get out of the aquarium business, according to Robert Ramin, executive director of The National Aquarium in Washington, D.C. Rather than close their doors, the aquarium formed the National Aquarium Society, a private nonprofit, to find alternative financing, though the Department of Commerce volunteered to maintain the physical plant and continue to provide utilities to the aquarium.

In 2003, the National Aquarium in Baltimore gained operating control of the D.C. National Aquarium as a means of extending its presence closer to the source of federal funding. Under the agreement, Ramin says, the National Aquarium “complements Baltimore’s Aquarium as we celebrate America’s aquatic treasures.”

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?