Via the Washington Post this a.m. comes news that the latest round of property-tax assessments has increased slightly citywide. But the variations from block to block provide the really interesting story.

For instance: Brentwood, for the second straight year, posts big increases in assessments. Guess the garbage isn’t stinking quite as much as in the past.

Another for instance: Assessments in LeDroit Park have gone down just a hair, by 1.7 percent. What’s gone wrong over there? Did someone’s cornice fall off? Or did someone in the tax office decide, Hey, Florida Avenue is still a dump?

And while I’m on a property-tax rant, I pose the following question to our world of D.C.-philes out there. Who in this vast universe actually knows, off the top of your head, which neighborhoods fall into the tax office’s “Old City I” designation and its “Old City II” designation?
Yes, these terms are used to cover all those neighborhoods in the the city’s gentrification plume. Yet no one, I maintain, has any clue where the boundaries lie.

If you’re out there, Mr. or Mrs. “Old City I and Old City II,” catch up with me in the comments section. If you can convince me that you have this nailed, and you don’t work in the tax office, I’ll give you a Washington City Paper T shirt plus a $25 money order, even if the latter has to come out of my own pocket, because I haven’t cleared this one with corporate yet.

And merely Googling the tax office’s definitions isn’t going to get you there. I want a phoner interview with you too.

There’s been a lot of laughter around these parts about our new ownership’s commitment to something it calls the “Urban Explorer.” This is a person, apparently, who needs a Creative Loafing product to navigate the recesses of darkest Charlotte. Some people here think it’s racist; most just think it’s dumb.

Old Navy, apparently, delivers the last laugh to our bosses with its spring line.

P.S. Watch the ad.

You call that a bonsai photo, Wemple? THIS is a bonsai photo.

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!

Dear everyone taking time to enjoy the outdoors today:

What a beautiful day! No better time to dust off that exercise gear and hit the Rock Creek Trail. Just one teensy request: Could those of you walking in groups please move to the right when you hear the polite “ding” that signals a cyclist’s desire to pass you? That way, those of us who use the trail all year long won’t find themselves cursing good weather.

Thanks,
The Truly Hard-Freaking-Core

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.”

Due to budget cuts, as of the current issue of City Paper Charles Steck will no longer be taking the photos for my column, Cheap Seats. He had worked with City Paper as a freelance photographer since the late 1980s, and shot pretty much everybody I’ve written about for the last 11 years.

The photo Charles took of Stead Park’s resident free-throw shooter Robert Triolo in 2006 is as good as good gets.

I’ve been thinking about that shot a lot this week.

So I’m in need of a cold weather hobby. Some of my friends have gotten into knitting. The pluses are that you meet new women (something that’s hard in D.C., especially among journalists). Also, there’s often wine and snacks. The minuses: it’s hard and I’m not sure it’s very useful. I like scarves and all… I’m just not sure I’d make one worth wearing.

But last night I discovered a new and exciting hobby: lock-picking! The tools are sort of illegal in DC. But we did it in Virginia, and used bobby pins and a metal shim from a pen. I now have calluses on my fingers and mild obsession. And I didn’t even pop the lock. Like knitting, lock-picking is hard, but it’s totally useful (for good, not evil) and kind of exotic. Now to find a lock-pick-n-bitch.

If you’re like me, the holiday season can get pretty stressful. Sure, social gatherings are fun, but trying to make chit-chat with all those family members, business contacts, and new acquaintances can be a real chore. Not this year. A friend of mine picked up a fun little ice-breaker at a church rummage sale that might help us out. I give you “Ungame”:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve exhausted myself trying to facilitate polite conversation between children, gray-haired women, and mustachioed dudes in vests. Thank goodness for Ungame. Shall we play? Go on, you start. Yes, you in the vest. Pick a card:

Thanks for sharing. That was fun, non-threatening, and non-competitive. And don’t we all know a little bit more about hitchhiking now?

Hey, little one, it’s your turn. Go on:

Hmm. Well, that’s a little bit heavy, isn’t it? Why don’t we just put that card back in the deck. Maybe we’ll tackle that one later, once you find out what “suicide” means. Go on, Grandma, it’s your turn. Tell us:

That’s certainly topical. It’s alright, pick again. With Ungame, there are oodles of topics to choose from. How about this one:

I suppose there’s no harm in rehashing the will again, just to be sure. Oh, don’t feel down, Grandma. It’s just a game. Pick again:

Thanks for playing, Grandma. What do you say we pull one last card and call it a day?

I think we all learned a lot about each other today.

Tuesday night, I had the privilege of attending Musselman’s Apple Sauce Presents: The Music of Seal on Ice. I had been anticipating the event for weeks–ever since I first set my eyes on the event’s glorious promotional shot, pictured at right.

Damn you, mastermind photoshop artists: You have fooled me once again with your impressive fonts and your smirking representations of Seal. Sure, Seal–a towering vision in white–finessed the mic. Yeah, people skated or whatever. But the whole thing came off as a little bit half-assed, less a true marriage of Seal and Ice than a hastily-assembled feature for television that didn’t require any pesky unionized writers (check out the broadcast on New Years Day, NBC, 4-6 p.m. EST). When a skater’s bottom grazed the ice or Seal led the audience in a markedly off-rhythm clap, you could almost hear the event promoters sighing, “Meh. We’ll fix it in editing.”

Moments of synergy–at one point, a skater sailed over to Seal’s stage, where the two exchanged a sick high-five–were rare. Mostly, the event suffered from a serious lack of focus. Given the expanse of the Verizon Center ice rink, it was hard to tell where to look: Do you choose to watch Brian Boitano shimmy across the ice while swathed in restrictive skin-tight leather pants? Or do you choose to watch Seal triumphantly pump his fist while “Amazing” builds to finale? One thing’s clear: Nobody should ever have to make that choice.

But midway through the program, The Music of Seal on Ice made the choice for me. In an astonishing turn, Seal disappeared backstage for a staggering five songs while skaters performed their routines to canned Seal records. Playing recorded Seal while Seal is in the building is like staging an ice dance routine without any axels: It’s just bullshit. I’m interested to see how NBC deals with this; I’m betting they just loop one clip of Seal clapping his hands over his head and stomping his foot to the songs he didn’t actually sing. Just add in the “15 to 20 seconds of [forced] enthusiastic applause” the Verizon Center audience was instructed to record, and TV viewers won’t know the difference.

Still, the male audience member who screamed, simply, “Yeahhhh, Seeeeeaaaaaal!” across the arena after each song had a point: When everything’s said and done, Seal’s awesome. New single “Amazing” is a surprisingly catchy dance number, his back catalogue is stronger than you’d think, and his package alone has the power to make supermodels fall in love with him and want to have his babies.

Near the end of the show, when Seal serenaded Kristi Yamaguchi to “Kiss From a Rose,” everybody in that arena felt it. This time, the 15 to 20 seconds of enthusiastic applause was uncued.

City Paper isn’t having a Christmas party this year. Seems ho ho ho’s are in short supply in our corner of the media universe.

There was a time when the CP soiree was a highlight of the holidays around these parts. The mobs around the funky food tables always included local and national tv people and folks with big bylines and city councilmembers, mayors, way too many courier-looking types and artsy weirdos and musicians, and (during very special years) maybe even Mark Jenkins.

Perhaps someday we’ll all get together again to be barraged by industrial music at 747 volumes.

But this year’s a wash. So as all you folks who mooched off CP in years past prepare to close up shop for the holidays, please think of us. Look around your workplace for any of your party’s leftovers.

We’ll take your carrot sticks and half-empty tubs of hummus, the remains of your meats-on-a-stick trays, and all those disposable styro coolers still sitting under the tables in your conference room with room-temperature white wine and beer bottles swimming in dirty ice water.

Box it all up and send it over. Unless, of course, you were going to ship this stuff to Darfur….

CORRECTION: Mark Jenkins, who has logged several thousand bylines in this paper since the 1980s, informs me via email that he has “never attended a City Paper Xmas party.”

My brother’s in town from Chicago, and last night I was driving him to his hotel room. We went down Wythe Street in Old Town, not far from where our parents used to live, on North Columbus, and we were remarking on how odd it was to see white people walking their dogs on Wythe Street in Old Town at 11:20 p.m. We got to his hotel, realized he’d left his bag at our place, and went back home, back up Wythe. A block before the Metro stop, I heard a THUNK against the rear gate of my Toyota, then saw some kids running away. I got out and saw I’d been egged! On the way back to the hotel, my brother and I drove slowly down the block, looking to jump out and try to scare the behayzeus out of the kids. He rolled up—this is so embarrassing—the current issue of the City Paper, Jason Bourne–like, to resemble a weapon. We rolled past the low-rises, but it was all getting a bit Herc and Carver, and anyway, lucky for us, we never found ‘em. I’m pretty sure if we ran at those kids they’d just laugh at the old guys wielding newspapers. Our bluff called, we’d be forced to retreat to the omeletmobile.

It was a real pain to scrub the egg off the back. That stuff dries quickly.

The Palisades and Foxhall neighborhoods are lovely places. They’re in the city, but not really in the city at the same time. A bus takes them downtown without transferring (city amenity). They have nice yards (not-city amenity). There are restaurants and shops within spitting distance (city). Trees are everywhere (not-city). They live in bungalows and Tudor-style residences (not sure how to classify that one.)

Well, anyhow, residents of these high-priced hoods are flexing their non-city civic muscles these days, in opposition to a plan to locate 41 new town houses on a large property on MacArthur Boulevard. Via the Dupont Current comes this quote from resident Benjamin Shaffer: “This is too dense of a development.”

Oh yeah, 41 new homes: Four-lane Mac Blvd. is going to be sooo congested now. The Mac Safeway, where you can often roll grapefruits down the aisles without hitting anyone, is going to be backed up to the seafood counter. But look on the brights side: With all these new residents, perhaps there’ll be enough of a demographic to open the movie theater again!