The one-drop rule of classifying race gets a drop-kick in the Washington Post, courtesy of Marie Arana, the editor of the Post’s Book World section.

And the big news for the next couple of days will focus on the playoff chances of the Redskins, who lost to this blogger’s favorite team on Sunday at FedEx Field. The sports commentariat will make much of the Skins’ continued offensive woes and perhaps a little bit about the Giants very good offensive line. But to me, the story line is Clinton Portis. Here’s a phenomenal back, a team-first sort of fellow, who this week showed his dedication by playing banged up. Specifically, sore ribs, sprained knee, and a bum hip. After Portis suffered a tough hit in the Giants game, commentator Moose Johnston said something to the effect that Oh, he’ll be back. He’s a warrior. That’s high praise from a former baller, and Portis no doubt basks in the adulation of everyone who says he’s such a tough guy.

But when is all this madness going to end? When will people wake up and say, hey, this is exactly the scenario, and the mentality, that lands former NFL players in arthritis wards and psych wards for the rest of their natural lives. I mean, yeah, sore ribs–everyone’s gotta play with those. But the hip and the knee? Those are joints, people, and joints are delicate affairs. Going hard against Justin Tuck and Kenny Phillips with already bad joints will do two things: Shorten Portis’ career and make it more likely that he’ll feel every step he takes for the rest of his life. I look forward to the day that teams recognize that their backups are generally worth more than their injured starters, and that it’s inhumane to cast them as heroes for risking lifelong injuries.

Post riffs on the odd fate of the acorn.

Key point for motorists around town: Alternate-side street-sweeping-related ticketing is over for the winter. Park on either side, despite what the signs say. Here’s the quirky part of the DPW announcement: “Residents and business owners will be notified when street sweeping resumes again in the spring of 2009.” Hey, DPW, can’t we agree on a date certain for the resumption of the ticketing? Can’t we agree on, like, March 16 or something. Or does City Desk have to break the news of the resumption, just as we did this year’s suspension date?

Flash of Genius, the film version of inventor Robert Kearns‘ life, comes out this weekend, starring Greg Kinnear.

I don’t know what’s in the movie, but I got to know the real Kearns, who lived in Montgomery County and on the Eastern Shore, back in the late 1980s.

I wrote for a small chain of automotive trade papers at the time, and his tale was more David vs. Goliath than anything I’d ever come across.

When I met him, Kearns had already spent years fighting pretty much every car manufacturer in the world for stealing his idea for intermittent windshield wipers. The design patents on the pertinent technology were good for 17 years back then, but had expired by the time his lawsuits went to trial.

Yet Kearns won his first infringement cases, against Ford and Chrysler if memory serves, with verdicts totaling about $30 million.

Read More “Brush With Genius: Me and the Windshield Wiper Guy” »

• FIRST NO. 1: A SPEEDING TICKET

I have been driving for 23 years. I have never gotten a speeding ticket, a minor but not inconsiderable source of pride. I’m not a candyass on the road, but I’m not a maniac, either. What you get from me as a fellow driver is alertness, consideration, and sweet, sweet moderation. I go with traffic.

That last technique has never let me down. Until Friday. I was driving with my family up 16th Street NW. We were on our way to celebrate my train-obsessed oldest child’s fourth birthday with a visit to the railroad heaven of Strasburg, Pa.

I take full responsibility for causing the officer holding a radar gun, standing in the middle of the road, to dodge the Metrobus blowing past me at far greater speed to whistle and motion me into a parking lot, where I was issued a ticket for going 36 miles per hour in a 25 zone.

I do not dispute the facts of this ticket, nor do I blame the police, to whose fraternal order I will continue to donate $25 every year, even if the sticker they send me as a result didn’t work as whispered. I blame myself, but I do think this is a lame way to get my first ever speeding ticket.

• FIRST NO. 2: ROAD RAGE DIRECTED AT CYCLISTS

A cyclist myself, I am very sensitive to the need to share the road (and yes, I am aware of the cognitive disconnect necessary to blaze through the city at 36 mph despite this philosophical bent). However.

Crossing the street in the railroad heaven of Strasburg, Pa., on Saturday, takes a long time. Walk signals are not lighted until traffic in all directions in the town’s main intersection is halted. As I was crossing the street, my 11-month-old strapped to my chest, a cyclist on a supremely ugly yellow carbon fiber bicycle shouted “Heads up, heads up!” as he tried to blow through the red light that was giving us our walk sign and, by extension, my family. I said “Hey, we have a walk sign,” and he grunted and sailed through the intersection. I shouted “And you have a red light!” at his rapidly disappearing form.

Ever since, I’ve been angry at cyclists. I mean, here I am week in and out, posting about some road outrage or another, and then I nearly get mowed down by a member of my tribe, albeit one clad in yellow spandex that matched his horrendously ugly plastic bicycle. For the rest of the weekend, I fantasized about road rage.

Photo by Flickr user frankh

This might be my final installment into the saga that is the life of Captain Melvin Gresham—a D.C. Police Department official who appears to always be in the center of intrigue and controversy. According to his civil-suit complaint filed in June, Gresham is a hero/whistle blower/all-around standup cop. To cop sources, he’s a supervisor who needs some leadership training asap.

“I had to bang heads with him, very disagreeable is the way he investigated things. He never has any proof. When we go to arbitration against him, he loses most of the arbitrations. We’ve had several arbitration hearings with our members and he’s lost. All the evidence is, ‘What I heard.’ Nothing ever of substance. He never has any real evidence against anybody. When you’re a policeman, you have to have solid facts,” says one veteran officer.

Gresham has his followers. Many of whom have commented on this post and our last installment.

The current Gresham dustup stems from a traffic accident. The allegation: Gresham got into a fender bender and pressured an officer to change the accident report in his favor.

In Gresham’s complaint, he addresses the accident on page 10, bullet-point No. 23. Or rather, he dances around the allegations, focusing mainly on picking apart the testimony and character of Lt. Mike Smith.

The complaint hones in on anonymous letter (was it written by Smith?), Smith’s believing that Gresham is a very rich man, and the allegation that Smith admitted to “tampering” with evidence. “Lt. Smith was off duty and had no actual basis for interjecting himself into the investigation,” the complaint states.

The complaint notes that the police department withdrew the charges against Gresham. “However, Chief Lanier insisted on serving Cpt. Gresham an official reprimand.” The reprimand addresses the very serious allegation of witness intimidation:

According to the complaint, the reprimand reads:

“Internal Affairs Agent Denise Garrett investigated the alleged misconduct. Agent Garrett determined that your demeanor and subsequent confrontation with the reporting officer was intimidating and may have jeopardized the impartiality of the accident investigation.”

Read More “More Gresham: Part Four” »

LL is going to take the departure of D.C. Department of Transportation Director Emeka Moneme as an opportunity to mention a problem that he knows is being solved by Moneme’s old agency in a thoughtful and thorough manner but has been such a longstanding menace to LL’s quality of life that he feel compelled to rant about it to no particular end.

Seriously, what the hell is up with Columbus Circle?

OK, DDOT, LL knows that you’re aware of the problems and you’ve done a painstaking redesign, but let me tell you: As he rides his bike across the cracked and bus-deformed asphalt in front of Union Station, almost popping his tire there for the 900th time in his life, He had to wonder: What in AASHTO is taking so long?

The thing isn’t just a menace to cyclists (which it has been for years). When LL drives through there at night, he can never tell if he’s in the proper lane, seeing as (a) the lane markings are severely worn and (b) the lighting is piss-poor. Seriously, coming off Mass Ave from the west after dusk, it’s suddenly like you’re on a desolate stretch of rural interstate highway at 3 a.m. (That probably has something with special lighting regs for the federal core, but Jesus, it’s dark!)

A WTOP article from last summer suggested this whole thing could be done by 2009. DDOT spokesperson Karyn LeBlanc says design work on the plan—which isn’t just about repaving, but re aligning lanes, including “intermodal” features, etc—is now 90 percent complete, and designs will be presented for approval by the federal Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission in September. Best case scenario, reconstruction starts in January; most likely, LeBlanc says, it won’t kick off till later in spring.

Yarrrgh!

I just got hit by a car. I was biking across Euclid at 16th Street NW, and everything seemed to be in order: I was in the crosswalk, Euclid had a red light, I had a walk signal. Prime crossing time, I thought, dutifully looking both ways. Nevertheless, a bouncy old Cadillac, which was stopped at the intersection long before I started crossing, still managed to lurch forward just as I rolled in front of it, thereby hitting me.

It’s not a huge deal. I didn’t fall over; I didn’t lose consciousness; I simply extricated myself from his grill and made my way to the corner.

What surprised me most was my own reaction to the incident. I’ve never been hit by a car before, but had you posited the scenario to me in the hypothetical, I would have certainly imagined myself enraged and vengeful. This morning, however, once the hypothetical became a gruesome reality, I found myself timid and awkward. As I waited at the corner for the light to change, I could not bring myself to make eye contact with the driver who had just hit me. Even though I was in the right of way, I still hung my head in a backwards kind of shame. It felt like the moment after a drunken hookup at a bar that both parties regret and neither wants to talk about.

So, in order to take my mind off a mildly throbbing right hamstring, I wonder: was I wrong? Should I have put this irresponsible motorist in his place? Pounded his hood? Kicked his windshield? Twisted his tailpipe?

And the question that is truly pestering me: if I, the hapless victim, was catapulted into such a moral quandary after this encounter, what is going through the driver’s head? Anything? Anything at all?

Former ANC 5B-10 commissioner Kathy Henderson tends to draw strong reactions from the people she encounters. She’s a scrapper, known for throwing all her energy into filing complaints, writing letters and putting politicians on the spot. When she relinquished her seat last year to run for city council, she had her teenage daughter, India, run in her place (Henderson told me she “told” her daughter to run). And ever since India won the seat, her mom has exhibited masterful control over the young comish, marching her out of one meeting so a quorum wouldn’t be met. Henderson has also been a vocal supporter of those controversial police checkpoints and a vocal opponent of bars and loitering kids.

Like her or not, you can’t deny Henderson has had particularly bad luck with her car, a 1991 blue Mercury Capri. First someone torched it, then, last November Henderson got a ticket for parking it in the median of Pennsylvania Avenue to attend a police oversight hearing–even though she’d put her “official business” placard on the dashboard. Now her well-known car is the object of what Henderson sees as vengeful slander. When a poster on the Fifth police district listserv ranted about the reckless driver behind the wheel of vehicle that fit the description of Henderson’s car (“blue capri with howard univ stickers in back window and dents on the back left…dc license of ‘anc 5b__ __’.”), Henderson fired right back: “I find your timing suspect and wonder why you did not immediately call the police? I suspect that your true motive is some ridiculous attempt to embarrass me in a public forum.”

Henderson hasn’t responded to my email so far.

Via the increasingly indispensible Streetsblog, this story about how Philadelphia is planning to paint optical illusions on streets around town to slow down drivers. They’re cheaper than speedbumps, apparently, and they have the added benefit of scaring the bejesus out of drivers who suddenly see three triangles floating in front of them. Why stop with triangles? Imagine how effective trompe l’oeil dragons, or maybe a realistic portal to hell would be?

If you own a fruit stand in Philadelphia or are engaged in the business of moving large panes of glass across the street, this may be cause for concern.

LL was hanging out outside the office a few minutes ago when another City Paper employee passed and said, “Marion Barry blocked me in.”

Indeed, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry is currently appearing on WPFW-FM, with whom we share our Adams Morgan building, speaking about his personal health issues and issues in the African-American community on the Heal DC program.

Behold his champagne Mercedes E320, complete with Ward 8 councilmember plates, on the City Paper’s cramped parking deck:

After the employee went down to the radio offices to complain, an aide came out to move the car into a proper space.

Oh, and here’s a tidbit from the interview: “I don’t ever want to be mayor again. I don’t even want to hear that word,” he said. “I just want to be mayor-for-life.”

UPDATE, 1:45 P.M.: Here’s some detail from the rear bumper, which shows some damage, which may or may not be related to the whole bus run-in thing.

Friday night I drove to Chincoteague, Va. It was an opportunity not just to try out the GPS unit my wife just bought but also to try Mike DeBonis’ Best Crosstown Shortcut. These opportunities were soon at war.

“Recalculating…recalculating” said the GPS’ voice over and over as we brazenly ignored its attempts to get us to New York Avenue NE. After about 10 minutes, my oldest son was holding his ears and asking us to turn down the “robot lady,” who finally succumbed to DeBonis’ shortcut four blocks before South Dakota Avenue NE. Too bad for it, because the route was AMAZING. I couldn’t have crossed the District more quickly if I was a freaked-out Spotsylvania dentist hauling ass from the convention center.

Is there any way to program shortcuts into these units? Or are you stuck with the bog-standard routes, all of which seem to favor staying in traffic for a long, long time? I liked having the GPS when I was traveling, but I ended up muting it on the way home.

That would be Delegate and Republican senatorial candidate Bob Marshall of Prince William County. Today, on WTOP’s Politics Program With Mark Plotkin, Marshall was a guest, and Plotkin asked what he, as the junior senator from Virginia, could do to help Virginia’s notorious transportation problems.

Volunteered Marshall, I’d build I-95 through D.C.

Let’s set aside for a moment that Marshall is proposing building a potentially six-or-more lane freeway through a jurisdiction he would not have been elected to represent. And let’s ignore the billions of dollars it would cost. Maybe even we can forget that such a road would, if not destroy their homes and parkland, disrupt the lives of hundreds of District and Maryland residents for years. And we’ll even forget this would have unproven effects of Virginia traffic. How ’bout the fact the people stopped this more than three decades ago and no credible proposal for an inner-city highway has been proposed in D.C.—or virtually anywhere else in America—since.

The way portrayed it, Marshall said it would simply be a matter of dusting off plans prepared in the early 1970s, and in fact proposed doing so to former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and former Mayor Marion Barry some years ago. The excellent Web site Roads to the Future describes what those plans entailed:

If I-95 had been completed according to the original plans, it would have continued from the Center Leg to north of New York Avenue, and it would have junctioned the North Leg of the Inner Loop, turned east, and followed the North Leg, which would have paralleled the New York Avenue corridor, about a block to the north of it. At the B&O Railroad corridor (today’s CSX Transportation), I-95 would have turned northward as the North Central Freeway, following the railroad corridor to beyond the Brookland area, being tunneled (cut and cover) for 3/4 mile from south of Rhode Island Avenue to north of Michigan Avenue, then leaving the railroad corridor at Fort Totten Park, heading northeast into Maryland as the Northeast Freeway, passing west of Hyattsville and College Park before junctioning I-495 at the I-95/I-495 interchange that was completed in 1971. I-95 would have had 10 lanes on the North Leg and North Central Freeway, and 8 lanes on the Northeast Freeway.

Plotkin seemed as taken aback at the idea as LL, and he asked Marshall to confirm that he was in fact proposing pushing a freeway through the middle of residential Washington.

Marshall confirmed he was, “along with a corridor for light rail, correct,” he said.

Oh, light rail (along a corridor already served by Metro’s Red and Green lines)—it’s all good, then, Bob.

Richard McCann, author and creative-writing professor at American University, recently worked on a novel about a car. It’s called In the Belly of the Beast, and you can read it at the Web site for Lexus Magazine. Lexus, like the car.

Earlier this week Galleycat and a handful of other literary blogs took notice of Belly, in which nine well-known writers were commissioned to write an Exquisite Corpse-style novel about an East-to-West road trip in a spanking new IS F. The prose leans toward the puffy, shading close to outright shilling. Consider this line from Arthur Phillips‘ first chapter: “You cannot be more officially grown-up than accepting a wedding proposal and a job offer in the same week and then buying yourself a sweet Lexus sedan with your own money.”

McCann was invited to write about that sweet Lexus last fall. “[The editor was] looking for writers who could give him geographic coverage across the country,” he says. So McCann, a D.C. guy, got to write Chapter 2 of the trip, in which the road-tripping couple heads down to the District. (Jane Smiley, author of the L.A.-set novel Ten Days in the Hills, gets the final chapter, as yet unpublished.)

McCann didn’t discuss specific dollar figures, but he said that writing the 983-word chapter constituted “a great payday.” But he’s not hearing the argument that doing so might constitute some kind of a sellout—a criticism that Fay Weldon absorbed in 2001 when she was paid by high-end jeweler Bulgari to mention the brand name a dozen times in her novel The Bulgari Connection. “It’s a very lavish, extremely beautifully made lifestyle magazine,” he says. “And I was moved by the assumption that it’s readership would want to read stories. A lot of magazines have stopped publishing short stories.”

Also, while the novel inevitably is meant to boost the profile of the IS F, Lexus didn’t give him any strict guidelines about how to write about the car.

“The only rule was that the car could not break down,” McCann says.