Seems someone in the world of suburban Maryland quasi-governmental agencies has an excellent Spam filter.

The following e-mail comes from a Maryland resident who e-mailed the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission on Sunday night to say that the water wasn’t working.

Please note that this e-mail was directed to the commission’s emergency response center.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Barracuda Spam Firewall Date: Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 5:13 PM
Subject: **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**
To: [REDACTED]

Your message to: EmergencyCallCenter@wsscwater.com
was blocked by our Spam Firewall. The email you sent with the following subject has NOT BEEN DELIVERED:

Subject: Water Out

Final-Recipient: rfc822; EmergencyCallCenter@wsscwater.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.1
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.7.1 Message content rejected, UBE, id=19786-01-72
Last-Attempt-Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:13:23 -0400 (EDT)

This topic may be a bit unseemly, and I’m usually too apathetic (except, maybe, about foie gras) to start a movement, but someone has to say it. Ladies, you gotta stop this hovering over the toilet bullshit. Get your quad workout somewhere else. You hoverers are the ones causing the problem. You’re the ones splattering all over the seat. Leave aiming to the men. Sit down. The backs of your legs can’t pick up diseases. If everyone sits down, then the seat stays clean. Let’s work together. Let’s sit.

If you didn’t get your chance to wait in an impressive line of both people and idling cars to dump your hazardous waste for free last weekend, now you’ll have the chance to dump it all year long.

Your first (or second?) chance is tomorrow at RFK. The D.C. Department of Public Works will take household hazardous waste from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the stadium, a make-up date of sorts to accommodate District residents who did not get a chance to participate in last Saturday’s overwhelming semi-annual event.

DPW also announced that beginning May 17, weekly hazardous waste collections will happen on Saturdays at the Benning Road Trash Transfer Station, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Later this summer, Saturday dropoffs will shift to the Ft. Totten Trash Transfer Station.

Nancee Lyons, spokesperson for DPW, said she was baffled by last Saturday’s large turn out, but happy that people want to dispose of their hazardous waste responsibly.

“People were surprisingly in a positive mood as they made their way to the front of the line,” Lyons said on Monday, referring to the almost two-hour wait some people sat through. “Many people were just surprised to see so many cars there.”

Lyons also noted that DPW officials have been working with Mayor Adrian Fenty for the past year to start the weekly dropoff centers, saying, “all this event did was prove that there is a large need for these stations.”

Lyons’ advice: Keep your hazardous waste count low. Use the stuff up or give it someone else who can. If that’s not possible, here’s what you can get rid of through the DPW program:

• leftover cleaning and gardening chemicals
• small quantities of gasoline
• pesticides and poisons
• mercury
• thermometers
• paint and solvents
• spent batteries of all kinds
• antifreeze
• chemistry sets
• automotive fluids
• asbestos floor tiles

Items not accepted at the drop off site:

• ammunition
• bulk trash
• wooden TV consoles
• propane tanks
• microwave ovens
• air conditioners and other
• appliances
• radioactive or medical wastes

(photo by Bree Bailey)

—Whitney Boyd

You know the fifty-color fliers and postcards good neighbors leave on your windshield? The ones inviting you to those exclusive afterhours parties and special events? The ones that would make Luther Campbell nod in approval?

While I’m not sure who actually responds to this spam and goes to these things, I do know that they constitute an annoyance. How many of these cards have I tossed into the backseat of my car? Too many!

It’s not a shock that people have complained. Southwest residents have been up in arms over them for a while. They’ve started calling them “Booty Cards.” Kinda perfect.

And they got Councilmember Tommy Wells‘ attention. After months of effort, Wells—along with the D.C. attorney general’s office—has been able to at least banish one company from distributing them. Wells, in a press release, calls this a “partial victory” for Southwest residents—and D.C. citizens in general.

Although he considered them pornographic, Wells knew he couldn’t fight them on indecency issues. Instead, his office went after the company over the trash they produce. A smart move!

-”This is just one battle in a much larger effort,” explains Wells’ Chief of Staff Charles Allen.

Read the rest of this entry »

* The Post’s Dan Morse has the scoop on the “demonic pentagram” created by a map of D.C. streets, “one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” The tip comes via Lexington, South Carolina’s Cutting Edge Ministries (click to learn the “Secrets of the Dollar Bill!”) Morse ties in this evergreen crazies story by referring to John McCain’s penchant for calling D.C. the “City of Satan” when on the stump. But as Morse notes, “Satan and Washington go back.” Way back. It’s worth reading through his history of demonic Washington to get to the “avowed Satanist from Laurel.”

* In related news, our own Jule Banville isn’t the only one hating on the Pope bobblehead Metro ad. As it turns out, the Archdiocese of Washington doesn’t find it very funny, either. Quoth one Metro rider:

“The guy said thank heaven. When you’re religious or somewhat religious, you’re like you don’t want to play with our religion that much,” said Isabella Jones. [via WJLA]

* Well, some people like you! Mr. T in D.C. takes this opportunity to praise Metro.

* Prince of Petworth ponders the disabled trash can.

Photo by FredoAlvarez. 

Last time in Managing Your Rodent Infestation, we planted new snap traps, baited, once again, with delicious peanut butter. A while back, we switched to smooth butter after our mouse simply ate the chunks out of the chunky, leaving only the butter behind. Picky, picky!

Since setting our new traps, my roommate and I haven’t heard a squeak out of our as-yet-unnamed mouse. The traps are set, the peanut butter is creamy, but the mouse isn’t licking. What, wee rodent? Lost your appetite, have you? Or perhaps, sensing your impending doom at the hands of our advanced weaponry, you have retreated from our basement in order to seek your scrumptious protein-rich handouts elsewhere?

The mouse isn’t talking. But the public is! As it turns out, everybody’s a mouse extermination critic!

Read the rest of this entry »

Last time in Managing Your Rodent Infestation, my roommate and I identified that we had a problem, sampled several implements of torture, and asked for help. I think that’s pretty good progress. But despite our three-pronged assault (poison! stick! snap!) , with efforts concentrated largely in the Kitchen Theatre, the yet-to-be-named mouse is still using our basement as a giant mouse playground/poop depository. It grows bolder: Earlier this week, my roommate heard it investigating her closet. I’m afraid it may be time to extend our efforts to the bedrooms.

For now, though, we’ve decided to stay the course in the kitchen: this time, with upgraded snap traps. Yesterday, we replaced these:

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a mouse in my basement. The squeaky little guy isn’t too much of a bother, but it shits places, my roommate swears she’s allergic to it, and I fear it may breed. We’ve tried three methods of extermination since discovering our new roommate: First, we laid out poison; then, we set sticky traps; finally, we baited two snap traps with peanut butter. Here’s what we’ve found:

Poison: mildly uncomfortable at best! The only effect the posion seems to have on the situation is to make me nervous that the mouse will spread it around and feed it into my food supply … possibly intentionally.

Sticky traps: not very sticky! The other day, I dropped a take-out menu on the floor and accidentally palmed a sticky trap when I bent down to pick it up. I escaped handily. I didn’t even need to use my other hand to help free myself.

Peanut-butter-baited snap traps: delicious! Our basement mouse not only eats the peanut butter off our death machines: He licks them clean. The traps themselves don’t seem too interested in snapping. The scant information I could locate online concerning mouse tongue muscles suggests that they are “similar to limb muscles.” What does it all mean?

Can somebody help me out here? I am not covering my kitchen floor with upside-down duct tape. So, should we just go ahead and name the little guy and prepare to throw a mouse pups shower?

Last night, I awoke in the darkness to the sound of a low buzzing near my ear. A woman who was temporarily sleeping in my apartment was attempting to reach me by telephone. Though I questioned why she had called me from such close proximity, I answered.

“Hello,” I said.

“I found a mouse,” the woman informed me. As we were both stationed within the apartment, I could hear her voice clearly without the aid of the telephone. Still, we did not abandon the mechanism. “It ran under a pile of clothes,” she added.

Months earlier, my landlord spoke of a similar class of rodents that had invaded his home in search of shelter and food scraps. He informed me that though he had once been pestered by the vermin, he and his housemates had since been able to systematically locate, isolate, and delete the creatures. A housemate explained one particularly cruel game they had played: “All I had to do was corner the mouse into the sink,” she said. “Then, I took hold of the spray faucet and shot the mouse until it had drowned.”

I did not relate this to the woman over the telephone. “What should I do?” she asked me.

Several years ago, while living in the Los Santos province of Panama, I found the helix of my ear caught between the jaws of a large and brazen rat. I had been sleeping soundly at the time–lost in the midst of a strange, hallucinatory dream, the specifics of which I do not recall–when the rat approached, squeaked violently, and bit. After the modest flow of blood from my head confirmed that I was not, in fact, still hallucinating, I located a man outside my domicile for help. The man offered me illicit drugs, an oversized conch shell with which to conceal a gaping, rat-friendly hole in my bedroom wall, and an outdoor hammock as a temporary bed. I accepted two of his offers.

Back in my apartment, I considered the mouse. I had no drugs, nor shells; my sole hammock was folded deep within my closet, out of use during the cool winter months.

“Sleep on the futon,” I suggested to the woman. “I will call my landlord in the morning.”

I said goodbye today to my 2001 Toyota Corolla.

The Brookland mechanic shop that was warehousing my car told me I had to come and take whatever I wanted. They wanted my car out of their lot. They wanted it junked. I had until this afternoon. When I arrived, I didn’t need to give my name. The dude just said: “Are you Jason?” and then handed over my old keys.

Maybe they really didn’t like my car.

In the shop’s lot, the car took in sunlight through its shattered windshield. Inside, the Corolla’s spent airbags flapped over the steering wheel and glove compartment. It already looked like someone had gone through my shit. That person was probably me right after my accident.

For some reason, I decided to give the car something I had never given it before: a serious cleaning. I dug under the seats and tossed out the old water bottles, the yellowed newspapers, the brochures for seaside resorts. I balled up bits of gum wrappers, bank statements, and old notes and tossed them out. I filled two trash bags with the big stuff. I pocketed 15 cents, five mixtapes, a friend’s blanket, one whiffle-ball bat, one trash bag already filled with older junk, one pair of black socks, one tennis racket, and one BK Star Wars toy.

But my favorite find: one extremely moldy sandwich in a plastic container. Now I know why my car smelled sometimes.

I did not take the sandwich home with me.

Earlier this month, my next-door neighbors left a large wooden dresser on the side of the road, directly in line with their front door. The dresser was chipped, too big for my apartment, missing a couple knobs—and free. I hauled it inside. Free shit is free shit.

Several weeks passed.

Yesterday, I left the house to find a filing cabinet positioned where the dresser had been. I approached the cabinet eagerly. I shook it. I lifted it. I opened and closed each drawer. Ultimately, I decided to leave the filing cabinet—I have few files—but I did manage to recover some leftover magnet poetry from the inside of a drawer. (Until now, a single American flag magnet has precariously supported my refrigerator’s small collection of postcards and CVS receipts).

So far, I’ve managed to craft two phrases from it:

hence always ebb like banal space
hence always space like banal ebb

Free shit is free shit. But now that I have about a 50-50 chance of determining the magnet poetry phrase with which my next-door neighbors chose to adorn their tax returns, have I gone too far?

There’s no turning back now. Bring it on, next-door neighors: I’m in the market for a new wastebasket. I’d also like an ottoman.

One evening last month, a Glover Park resident lifted the lid of her basement toilet to find a drenched rat the size of a 20 oz. Coke bottle scurrying around the bowl. She screamed, slammed the lid, stacked books on top, ran upstairs, and Googled the phrase “what to do about a rat in the toilet.”

The Internet advised lubing the toilet with dishwasher detergent and flushing, so the woman and her husband doused the rat with Dawn. “We did a flush, and we could still hear him scrambling around,” she says. “Now he was all puffed up and angry.”

An exterminator friend instructed the couple to smash the rat’s head with a broomstick. But the husband and wife, worried the rat would jump out of the toilet and bite them, declined the advice. They piled the books back on the lid.

The next day, they poured two cups of bleach into the toilet, and waited for the scrambling to stop. After a few minutes, they poked the rat with barbecue tongs. “He was completely stiff and totally dead,” she says.

The woman, who declined to be named, says she learned an important lesson from the incident. “You better believe I flush that toilet once in the morning and once at night,” she says. And the lid stays down.

Dear Subway Sandwich Artist,

This will be the last letter I write to you.

I appreciate so much of what you have done for me. I appreciate that you facilitate my Eating Fresh. I appreciate your array of fresh-baked breads, and the variety of meat, cheese, and vegetable options you provide to place within them. I am neutral on the fact that you always inquire as to whether I would like to make my sandwich into a combo.

In better times, Subway Sandwich Artist, I would visit you up to twice a week. I would order a 6-inch turkey and swiss on wheat, with tomatoes, pickles, honey-mustard—but you know all this. You may have noticed, however, that as of late, the space between our meetings has grown long. Perhaps you’re wondering why I don’t come around much anymore. I’m sorry I never took the time to talk to you about this in person, but I think I can best express myself through this blog entry.

Subway Sandwich Artist, why are you so creepy?

Why do you see each step of our sandwich creation process as an opportunity to make borderline inappropriate comments accompanied by piercing eye contact? Why do you insist upon searching through the tray of tomatoes to find the “real good tomatoes”—“just for me”? Why do you always ask, as my sandwich approaches completion, if I’d like mayonnaise, knowing full well that I do not? Why do you stroke my hand ever-so-slightly when you hand me my change? Is it but a game to you?

Subway Sandwich Artist, why do you look at me in that special way when you ask if I want a 6-inch or a foot-long?

Cordially,

Amanda Hess

Shaw resident and provocateur Ray Milefsky is proposing a solution for how citizens can band together to clean up accumulated trash on city streets. On the Third District community Listserv, he writes: “I am thinking a trip to deliver it to Jack Evans’ and Mayor Fenty’s homes à la Michael Moore would be effective with cameras rolling and posting it on YouTube. The Washington Post seems to like these kinds of stories nowadays.”

Don’t forget TV news, Ray. At least one local news crew seems ready to pick up the trash delivery story. On Thursday, Channel 7 reporter Kris Van Cleave (above) e-mailed Milefsky: “If you go ahead with this plan to ‘relocate’ the debris, I’m pretty sure I can get a camera there. Would you please keep me posted?”

I was thrilled to read about Lia Pendarvis’s blog, The Lavatory Lady, on DCist yesterday. The blog rates District bathrooms according to a precise system of criteria, including cleanliness, soap and smell, to name a few. Thank God, I thought to myself after scanning her blog. I’m not the only one.

I started rating bathrooms sometime after toddlerhood. My father, an amateur child psychologist, told me my interest in bathrooms was part of a Freudian stage. Around the time kids start to control their own plumbing, he said, they get fascinated with pipes and toilets. I haven’t read much Freud, so I took him at his word.

For awhile, I toyed with a semi-official rating system. I placed all bathrooms on a scale of one to ten, considering things like the color of the tiles, the shine of the sink, and whether there were flowers in a vase somewhere. I abandoned the system sometime in elementary school, a crucial step in my efforts to be less of an uber-nerd by the time I got to high school. But my interest in bathrooms persists. These days, I rate them on a need-to-go basis. I hate the bathroom at Kramerbooks & Afterwords Café. It’s isn’t pretty, and the fact that you need a token to get in just adds insult to injury. I also hate the bathrooms at the Regal Gallery Place movie theater. Have you used the hand dryers there? The wind-gusts are practically dangerous and the noise is deafening. I’m not sure what my favorite bathroom is, but I like the one at the Hay-Adams Hotel. I recommend entering the lobby confidently before ducking downstairs to the bathrooms below.