City officials are considering a rebid on the controversial lottery contract, marking the first time that the possibility has been acknowledged. The original bid, which was approved by the city in the spring, has been in limbo awaiting council approval ever since—the winners, the W2I partnership between gaming megalith Intralot and local investors Warren C. Williams and Alaka Williams, have come under fire from councilmembers for certain unsavory connections.

The deliberations have come in a memo [PDF] prepared this week by Jay Young of the D.C. Lottery Board at the request of Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi in anticipation of the likelihood that the contract will be rejected by default, seeing as it must be approved by early November or it will expire.

Here’s the money quote from the memo:

The negative impact of such a rejection on DCLB operations will be both extensive and lengthy. The rebid scenarios are fairly unattractive and filled with uncertainties and the prospect of inferior results. Most likely the current vendor contract for the gaming system will have to be extended and the timeframe for implementing a new system is now well into 2010. The net impact of this delay will be a steep decline in DCLB’s operating certainty and potentially a major decline in financial results.

The memo was mentioned yesterday in a scathing Washington Post editorial calling on Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray to bring the matter to a council vote.

What’s the problem with a rebid?

Well, for one, it would set a bad precedent, according to folks in the city contracting apparatus and people supporting the W2I bid, to have a group that won the contract fair and square not have their bid approved by the council. Furthermore, as Young says in his memo, the likelihood is that a rebid will result in a much, much worse deal for the District. Writes Young, “given the political imbroglio and media coverage…future offered pricing will be substantially higher than the previous submissions.”

An Intralot spokesperson told LL in July that his company would not be interested in rebidding, meaning that the likely only bidder would be current contract holder Lottery Technology Enterprises, a longstanding partnership between GTECH and local crony Leonard Manning.

LL’s position, for the record, is that this process has been bunk from the beginning. The conflict is rooted in a District contracting system that for decades has encouraged local and minority partnership with city contracts. It has its benefits, to be sure, but it also encourages mismanagement and cronyism, particularly in an arena as fraught as a lottery. It might be taboo in this town, but LL would prefer to see a rebid without any local participation at all. There’s no reason either Manning or the Williamses need to be involved with this thing.

Young’s memo is after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Another fictional true sports story hits theaters this weekend with the release of “The Express.”

It’s based on the life of Ernie Davis, a Syracuse running back and the first black player to win the Heisman Trophy.

Among the movie’s climactic scenes is one where Davis gets hit by a barrage of racial slurs and debris during the Orangemen’s game against West Virginia in his senior season.

As a letter writer to the Syracuse Post-Standard pointed out, the Syracuse/WVU game was played in Syracuse that year.

Is this gonna be “Remember the Titans” all over again?

Why oh why wasn’t Davis’ real life story good enough for Hollywood?

This employee of City Desk Operations Inc. has waited and waited for a snarky blog post from LL on the Harold Brazil arrest (holy #$%%@!). DCist expressed shock hours ago!

WTOP’s Mark Segraves had it first. The Post got the story too.

Damn. What a story. Former bubbling councilmember gets into a fight at a tattoo shop! Post has the details:

“Brazil, 59, entered the Jinx Proof Tattoo shop in the 3200 block of M Street NW with two women, one of whom went to the back of the store to receive a tattoo, police said. When Brazil tried to follow the woman, an employee told him only customers were allowed in the work area, which prompted an argument and then a fight.

It took three employees to subdue Brazil before officers were called at about 7:30 p.m., authorities said. He was arrested and charged with simple assault and taken to the 2nd District police station, said Assistant Police Chief Diane Groomes. Authorities released Brazil with a citation and a summons to appear in court at a later date, officials said. Brazil could not be reached for comment.”

Of course, City Desk demands some answers from Brazil about his conduct. But what we really want are some good jokes. Whoever submits the best joke wins a City Paper t-shirt?

(If you are unfamiliar with Brazil’s tenure on the council, go here).

*photo courtesy of the Washington Post.

Photos from youth football games at Dunbar Senior High School on October 4 prose here .

Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Shearer (A Mighty Wind, Spinal Tap) in a bloggheads exhange with Robert Wright (NAF, Nonzero) compares John McCain to a tazered possum:

In the category of dudes with day-jobs who write books, the scary travelogue/ history of vampires/Gothic New England/haunted houses seems to be the genre of choice. So when I got the new paper back edition of Eric Nuzum’s treatise on vampires, The Dead Travel Fast, I expected little more than an entertaining gift book. I made this assumption (a bad habit of mine) even though I already knew Nuzum was an intelligent and curious guy. And he had invited me to his birthday party. Also in attendance were: an Elvis impersonator from Potomac and the ashes of Nuzum’s cat. It takes a kind of mischievous fortitude to celebrate a shitty year (death of cat) by serenading your friends with a man in sequins.

Anyway. As soon as I brought the book home, my boyfriend ganked it, which of course made me want to read it. And it was very good. Nuzum possesses a rare willingness to endure awful things for the pleasure and enlightenment of the reader. So, in order to understand what it was like to be a vampire, he drank his own blood. He also watched every vampire movie he could find, 605 of them, including Rape of the Vampire, which has no rape.

I recently talked to Nuzum about his next book, Bring Me to Heaven: A ghost story about friendship, the search for truth, the downside of recreational drug use, guilt, punishment, a little girl in a blue dress, finding and losing true love, and one irrational fear. The book centers around the story of how Nuzum lost his mind during his freshman year of college. A lot of factors were at play: drug use, depression, social isolation. He also lost touch with reality, giving way to a delusion that haunted him for many years to come. Living in his parents’ attic, he became convinced that the ghost of a little girl (the Little Girl in the Blue Dress) was hiding in the next room, waiting to kill him. His fear and paranoia spun out of control, resulting in lost friendships, suicide attempts and hospitalization.

What’s interesting is Nuzum’s refusal to blame any person or trauma for his breakdown. Drugs and a pinch of mental illness may have pushed his unhinging along, but mostly, he walked himself over the edge. He says it all started with a fanciful childhood explanation for a thudding noise upstairs. Instead of forgetting the goof as he grew older, he slowly talked himself into believing it was true.

Nuzum got his shit together eventually, and went on to have a successful career in radio (he’s now an acquisitions executive at NPR). But he never got over that pesky fear of ghosts. So, he’s trying to get to the bottom of the phobia by visiting haunted places and writing about his experiences. His trips so far include stops in a town run by spiritualists in New York, a haunted hotel room in D.C. and the creepy Clinton Road in Newark, New Jersey. He has plans to visit an Ohio penitentiary, Rose Hall in Jamaica and even that attic in his hometown.

Nuzum is almost totally sick of talking about vampires. He’ll indulge the curious once more, on October 30 at the Barnes and Noble in Georgetown.

If you’re any kind of fan of crime and mystery novels, you’ll want to take a look at the Baltimore Sun’s book blog, Read Street, which is doing a knockout job covering this weekend’s Bouchercon. The blog invited a batch of writers attending the fest to weigh in on a topic of their choosing, and among them is Austin Camacho, the Springfield-based author of a batch of novels featuring detective Hannibal Jones. Jones, like Camacho, is black, and his essay tackles the question of whether race matters when it comes to character. The whole thing is worth a read, but here’s an excerpt:

Like most of his peers, Hannibal is not well-off financially, because in his world, being moral doesn’t pay very well. But how did our hero get to be this impoverished paragon? Surely his personal history shaped his character. The fact that Hannibal is a black man in a white man’s world shapes him just as much as the fact that he was raised by his mother after his father died in Vietnam and has little feel for the hip hop, red-black-and-green, whitey-distrusting culture of his neighbors. Hardboiled detectives are always outsiders, but in the case of black detectives it’s easy to understand why. White clients may expect them to have a hidden, anti-white agenda. Other African Americans, distrustful of authority figures in general, sometimes have a special resentment of black men who question them or try to associate them with crimes.

Come early November, when Mixtec celebrates its 29th28th anniversary in Adams Morgan, owner Pepe Montesinos plans to officially unveil the long-awaited deli/grocery/take-out shop next to his landmark Mexican restaurant. The take-away menu will include, interestingly enough, pizza and pastas. Don’t ask Montesinos why—unless you have an hour to hear his life story.

Allow me to save you the time: The Oaxacan native immigrated to the United States in 1965, with the grand idea that he would enroll at the Air Force Academy and become a fighter pilot. That dream proved elusive for a Mexican with limited connections. Instead, Montesinos started working as a waiter at the now-shuttered A.V. Ristorante Italiano in 1970 while studying business and economics at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore. Montesinos considered the late Augusto Vasaio, who founded A.V. in 1949, his mentor. “To me, AV. was one of the most important people in my life,” he says.

It was at A.V. that Montesinos realized the culinary connections between his native country and Italy. (Got another hour to spare? Ask Montesinos about the history of tomatoes.) It was then that Montesinos also realized he wanted a place of his own. “Every homework that I had [in college], I always wrote about the restaurant that I had in my mind,” Montesinos remembers.

His homework became reality in 1978, when Montesinos opened Enriqueta’s on M Street NW in Georgetown. It was an immediate hit in a town that had choked down one too many enchiladas smothered in Velveeta. “Put aside any Tex-Mex preconceptions. Enriqueta’s is an authentic Mexican restaurant with a menu listing a variety of styles of cooking, tastes and textures, only a few of them hot,” Phyllis Richman wrote in her 1979 Washington Post Dining Guide. “Enriqueta’s will teach you something you are glad to know about Mexican food.”

Two years later, in 1980, Montesinos opened Mixtec, then only a grocery store designed to help the budding restaurateur import much-needed ingredients from Mexico. The grocery morphed into a taqueria in 1982, which became a problem when Montesinos decided to open a second Enriqueta’s just a few doors down on Columbia Road. Mixtec and Enriqueta’s ended up competing against each other for D.C.’s limited Mexican dining dollar, since locals apparently couldn’t distinguish between a taqueria and the more fully developed menu at Enriqueta’s. In the mid-1980s, Montesinos—and here’s the important part, finally—transformed the second Enriqueta’s into Trattoria Garibaldi, a short-lived Italian spot.

Montesinos, in other words, is not just adding Italian food to his take-out operation for the hell of it. He has experience with the cuisine, has affection for it, and even feels a connection between his mother’s cooking back in Oaxaca and the stuff turned out in rustic Italian kitchens.

The line of pizzas and pastas at the new take-out shop will be Montesinos’ own attempt to keep the spirit of A.V. alive—both the restaurant and his old friend. Montesinos has even hired Virginia Williams, a cook at A.V. for 40 years, to make his pies and pastas, which will, of course, include that mouthwatering white pizza that you just had to order every time you stepped foot into A.V.’s. But Montesinos has also developed a few of his own pies, which could make you forget all about A.V.’s most famous round. Personally, I’m looking forward to a pair of Montesinos’ creations: one pie with tomatillos and roasted pork and another with Oaxacan mole.

Montesinos says he might also sell meatloaf and some traditional sandwiches. It may sound like yet another oddball addition to his Mexican operation, but it all makes sense to Montesinos, a man with his feet planted in three distinct cultures: his native Mexico, his adapted America, and the Southern Italy of his old mentor. “Eventually, we’ll do the three cuisines,” Montesinos promises, “the Mexican, the American, and the Italian concept.”

NOTE FROM LL: This item was originally posted at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday, but due to a technical issue, it was removed from the site hours later. Reposting here in full.

Today, in a letter [PDF] to Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry and his council colleagues, Acting Attorney General Peter Nickles slapped back attempts to subpoena records related to the circumstances surrounding the firing of Grayce Wiggins, who had been the District’s rent administrator.

Barry’s housing committee had sent the subpoenas in the past several weeks demanding documents related to Wiggins’ firing, as well as sworn statements from Wiggins’ supervisors at the Department of Housing and Community Development. Nickles’ letter says the employees “respectfully decline to appear, or produce the referenced documents” upon advice from Nickles’ office.

At a Sept. 25 hearing on the matter, Nickles had promised councilmembers the opportunity to review Wiggins’ personnel records in a private session, originally scheduled for the 29th. According to the letter, that meeting never happened, and Nickles had forwarded a list of eight conditions that had to be agreed to before the file and other documents would be released—essentially, that they would not be released to the public. Those conditions were not signed, Nickles says in his letter, and before the meeting could be rescheduled, the subpoenas were issued. Nickles writes Barry that such a stance is “at odds with the earlier impression you gave me that we were going to meet to work things out in a cooperative and informative spirit.”

The 10-page letter cites a number of legal bases for the decision, including deliberative process privilege, attorney-client privilege, executive communications privilege, restrictions on personnel records, and the defamation tort (citing a recent D.C. Court of Appeals decision on the issue).

Download the Nickles letter [PDF]

China to the rescue? Maybe.  Just consider the amount of household debt as a percentage of GDP between China, 13 percent,  and the United States, 100 percent.

Just in time for a recession: $14-a-bottle designer water.

District Heights home-builders collect $1 million from buyers, then never build the homes.

Slate takes a look at a Chinese village that’s taking advantage of the potential uses of human poop–as fuel and fertilizer. They call it “night soil.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates recommends the documentary on the Weather Underground.

Fair or unfair? Coates and Sullivan disagree on this charming video of some backwoods Americans talking about Obama. What are they sitting on? Giant hobby horse llama?

Yikes. The guy can really blow his top. Meanwhile, First Read has something that should make McCain just explode.

The Stranger’s Brendan Kiley offers 10 suggestions. No. 7? “Build bars.”

Photo by Flickr user A Clear Blue Sky

Boy, am I relieved. Turns out there’s a credible explanation for those frequent dark nights of the super-ego:

There have been more than 20 studies that suggest an increased rate of bipolar and depressive illnesses in highly creative people, says Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and author of the “An Unquiet Mind,” a memoir of living with bipolar disorder.

Experts say mental illness does not necessarily cause creativity, nor does creativity necessarily contribute to mental illness, but a certain ruminating personality type may contribute to both mental health issues and art.

“Unquestionably, I think a major link is to the underlying temperaments of both bipolar illness and depression, of reflectiveness and so forth,” Jamison said.

It’s good to know why–especially after reading Roy Clark’s essay about David Foster Wallace–I can’t get to sleep before 2 a.m. most nights, and why I write best when I’m absolutely miserable.

(Roy: just because you don’t believe in “tortured artist” syndrome doesn’t mean it ain’t real. Put that one in your column and smoke it!)

One of the problems faced by journalists contemplating the dismal future of our occupation is our general lack of qualification. Despite our skill at assessing the job performance of politicians, architects and socialites, we tend to find ourselves lacking in demonstrable job skills. We don’t know supply chain from matrix management. Not that I’ve been perusing the options, but I tend to stumble across openings for careers more frightening than the dark side, aka, PR.  Like this one, from First Class Referrals.

Update: Ok! I guess I’ve been coddled by the alt industry. Potentially NSFW. I guess. But come on. It’s craigslist.