Palace of Wonders update: Last night’s “Weirdo Show” benefit for local side-show jack-of-all-trades Johnny Anderson raised $1,700. Proceeds will go toward Anderson’s surgical bills. -Amanda Hess

Both people who read my column from last week asked the same question afterwards:

Why would the city’s new tennis team build a stadium when DC already has a fabulous, huge facility designed just for that purpose at Carter Barron?

Well, here’s why.

To quote my hero, Bob Mould: Makes no sense at all…

Mark Leventhal started a weight loss service for lawyers (WARNING: mildly intoxicating/annoying music plays when you open this link).

Why, I wondered after reading a press release about said service, do lawyers need their own weight loss service? This deserved a phone call.

It takes a lawyer to understand lawyers, Leventhal said—to know how to harness and work with the being that is Lawyer and make that Lawyer lose weight. For example, a lot of weight loss plans involve group meetings. But lawyers, it seems, don’t like to admit to weakness in public, so this program has no group meetings—instead, lawyers check in with Leventhal every day to talk one-on-one. But lawyers are also very rules oriented—more so than regular people. Leventhal can tell lawyers they have to keep detailed food diaries, and unlike regular people who say OK and then don’t, the lawyers will actually do it.

Plus, there’s the lifestyle stuff—like that lawyers go to lots of dinner meetings—and Leventhal’s program takes these lifestyle things into account. So when a lawyer is going to a dinner meeting, Leventhal calls the restaurant ahead of time to find out from the chef what on the menu isn’t too fatty. That way the lawyer knows what to order, and won’t be embarrassed in public by having to ask the waiter for low cal recommendations—but also won’t sabotage his (Leventhal’s lawyers are mostly men) weight loss goals.

As soon I was starting to come around—maybe lawyers really do need their own weight loss programs?—Leventhal let slip the most delightful thing that has set my mind a-reeling for the last few hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the first day of World Cocktail Week! Go celebrate!

Headline of the day: “Great tits cope well with warming,” courtesy of the 13-year-olds over at BBC News.

I was in Falls Church maybe a half hour ago and the ground shook. I went outside and everybody on the block was in their front yards wondering what happened. Dogs are barking.

What happened?

I just spotted workers putting finishing touches on DC’s newest shticky museum, the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which opens May 23 on 7th and F streets NW. A brief perusal of the museum’s website leads me to believe the exhibits will not probe any of the moral murkiness in the history of crime. The museum is a project of John Walsh, of America’s Most Wanted, and looks pretty focused on the classic good guy-bad guy stories. I do have to say I can’t wait to take the promised lie detector test. They also have fun items I do not wish to try out: an electric chair, a gas chamber and a $17.95 ticket price. Crossing my fingers for a press preview.

People at the Washington Post have been glowing of late because of the six Pulitzer Prizes they won.

Today, however, marks an even greater feat than the Pulitzer Public Service award. Post columnist Marc Fisher grabbed the two most sought-after distinctions in all of publishing: Best Columnist in the Washington City Paper’s Readers Poll and Best Columnist in the Washington City Paper Staff Picks.

After reaching the pinnacle of his profession, it’s natural to wonder what’s left for the prolific Fisher. Perhaps, yes, the buyout.

Another bad week for Dan Snyder’s theme park chain. Six Flags announced that it will not be building a Dark Knight roller coaster at its New England outpost after all.

Six Flags started construction on the $7.5 million coaster this winter without bothering to get zoning and construction permits from the town of Agawam, Mass., where the park is located.

Agawam officials in February ordered Six Flags to stop work on the project until they got the permits.

And, yesterday, after months of debate during which it turned out that there were safety and other issues with the unapproved plans, Six Flags decided to scrap the coaster project, and will instead be tearing down everything built thus far.

In place of Dark Knight, Six Flags disclosed yesterday, the New England park will debut something called ”Glow in the Park,” an attraction described by the company as ”a phenomenal nighttime extravaganza that will blow our guests away.”

Wall Street, alas, wasn’t blown away by ”Glow in the Park”: Six Flags stock (SIX) closed at $1.56 a share yesterday, which, if I’m reading the charts correctly, is its lowest closing price in history. Investors might also be fleeing SIX because of other recent headlines regarding the threat of bankruptcy, the three class action suits related to 500 cases of Norovirus traced to Six Flags’ upstate New York park, or testimony in the lawsuit from that sordid case of a kid getting her feet chopped off last summer on the Superman Tower of Power ride at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom. 

In any case, the same stock sold for $11.80 in the spring of 2006, as Snyder took over the board of directors and put his management team and marketing strategy in place. 

In SEC filings, Snyder’s Red Zone LLC,  an investment group which includes several top Redskins officials, claimed ownership of 10.9 million shares of Six Flags stock. Assuming they’ve still got them, as of the close of yesterday’s markets the Ashburn office pool had lost $111,616,000.

Again: They’ve lost $111.616.000.

Keep the dial right here for all the breaking news in Snyder’s Six Flags soap opera.

(photograph by Darrow Montgomery)

When Julie Tate’s name appears in the Washington Post, it’s generally surrounded by predictable text. The predictable text sits at the footer of the story, and often at the footers of long and complicated stories. The predictable text, always in italics, reads like this:

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

The formulation is simple and brief, in the best of newspaper traditions.

And in light of recent events, it may be one of the grandest understatements in journalism. On April 7, the Post won six Pulitzer Prizes, a one-year record for the paper and just one shy of the all-time mark set by the New York Times. The six-pack was bound together by a masthead that loves investigative reporting and a company with a history of ponying up for journalism.

Another thread was Tate, who was involved in four of the six prizes—the series on Vice President Dick Cheney, the stories on private security contractors in Iraq, the series on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the breaking news coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. When the Post newsroom was celebrating the awards, the 38-year-old Tate was called upon to share the limelight with the by-lined honorees. Read the rest of this entry »

A group of libertarian bloggers and journalists had themselves a little iPod dance party at the Jefferson memorial this weekend. They were soundlessly boogieing to honor their free-thinking hero when Park Police approached and “forcefully asked us to leave.” One girl kept dancing as her friends were led away and got herself arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She’s been released but her blogging friends have chronicled the hilarity here, here and here.

There was a block party on Pennsylvania Avenue this morning–complete with confetti cannons, a very smart bald eagle, several acrobatic roller-skating newsies, and a bevy of young women with televisions affixed to their brassieres–all in celebration of the long-awaited opening of the Newseum.

One moment of irony stuck out amid the fanfare, when a man handed several schoolchildren signs expressing opposition to the Iraq war. The kids displayed them proudly–that is, until a woman who seemed to be their chaperone brusquely confiscated the anti-war signage.

“You can’t give signs like this to kids,” she growled, and tossed the posters aside.

The kids looked disappointed. I comforted them, and told them that she had no right to take the signs away. She scowled at me. The scene was brought into vivid relief by the 50-ton marble tablet directly behind the children and their ward, on which is engraved none other than the First Amendment.

For more pictures of the Newseum’s opening, along with some words from Gene Policinski (vice president of the First Amendment Center), check out the slideshow below.

This just hit my voicemail:

“Yes, I’d like to make a comment about the elections. I think Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race. She is a poor candidate. She has poor judgment and has the wrong focus. Barack Obama should be the next president of the United States and this country would be fortunate to have him as such.”

As to why this person would leave this on the voicemail of a paper that covers politics only on the local level, we’ll have to wait for the next call!

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.

Today’s dispatch in Raw Fisher is worth a look. It’s essentially a nicely placed elbow by Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher at the world’s most annoying sense-of-place guru, Richard Florida.

Florida is the renowned author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” a book that essentially advised dying cities to promote amenities that attract professionals in, well, the “creative class”–artists, software geeks, and the like.

Fisher notes that Florida has ditched the District, where he used to live in the Forest Hills neighborhood, in favor of Toronto, where he apparently got a great job offer. Fisher savages Florida’s observation that in his new Toronto neighborhood, kids mobbed his front door on Halloween night, whereas in Forest Hills he got virtually no Trick-or-Treat traffic. The columnist lays low the thinker with this flourish:

For reasons that always baffled me, this great bard of urban vibrancy, a latter-day Jane Jacobs (the spiritual grandmother of the smart-growth movement), chose to live in about as anti-urban a city setting as could be had, nowhere near a Metro station, way up on a hill, in a beautiful setting right near Rock Creek Park, but well away from any of the amenities he preaches for in his books. Of course he didn’t see kids on Halloween–what halfway intelligent kid would waste his time wandering around in a dark neighborhood of widely separated houses well off the main drag?

In the end, says Fisher, Florida chooses his home base not so much on the basis of his written beliefs about strong urban communities, but on the basis of the best job offer. Just like the rest of us, in other words.