Guardian Angels will be handing out safety tips for the Holidays on Black Friday November 25, 2011. We will also be doing escorts from stores to cars and public transportation. We will be looking for snatch and grabs, pickpockets, car break ins, and crimes of opportunity. If we witness a crime in progress we will make a citizens arrest. Our goal is for the general public to not become a victim this Holiday Season. The Guardian Angels will start handing out safety tips at the Columbia Heights metro station (5am-10am) at the corner of (14th and Irving street, NW) After 10 we will patrol metro trains and hand out safety tips at other metro stations. Criminals beware, we know who's been naughty this year.

No word on whether Postie Dan Zak will compose a poem to mark the occasion.

Photo by Mr. T in DC via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

"These 'Had to Be There' stories are really interfering with my plans to write a morning roundup," he said, finding only his cat was paying attention. (Ewa Beaujon, his wife of 11 years, was preoccupied with the British police drama she was streaming from Netflix via the couple's Wii.) "I understand the ambition to write 'Talk of the Town-style pieces,'" Beaujon, whose obsession with the Style section has comprised, over the years, two unsuccessful attempts to join its staff, continued out loud, making no headway with the household's other awake biped. "But these feel...forced. Like that Haiti benefit when Justin Timberlake covered Leonard Cohen."

That morning, Beaujon had read Dan Zak's piece about the Skee-Ball "set" at the Iron Horse Tap Room, and he'd generally liked its color and tone. Still he was bothered that Skee-Ball, Inc. uses capital letters and a hyphen and that a Post copy editor must have approved Zak's use of "skeeball." Has it gone generic? Beaujon wondered, searching the International Trade Association's Trademark Checklist for clarity and finding none.

And so began 90 minutes of constructing riffs for the following morning's roundup. You can tell Monica Hesse is itching to hit the "wacky" button but mostly holds off, he thought, scanning her duckling piece for the moment she could no longer restrain herself:

After dismissing several single males as parental candidates, they spotted two mallards that appeared to be a couple, though you never can tell with ducks. "Maybe they were enjoying being single," Levy says. They worried about suddenly saddling these unsuspecting ducks with 10 children; just look at what happened to Jon and Kate Gosselin when their family exploded.

He set those words as a blockquote in his paper's blogging application and admired the small details Hesse used to advance her slice-of-life narrative. His wife asked him to add Season 4 of Wire in the Blood to their Netflix Instant Queue.

Zak, he thought, brings his hand down much faster.

Zip, pop, plunk, woooh!

Zip, pop, plunk, woooh!

More thoughts while writing the blog post: Should I do that riff about the Phillies owing 57.1 percent of their wins to the Nationals? Would anyone chuckle at that Crocs-comeback story I read earlier? Should I mention that the top Google result for "Had to Be There" is still comfortably owned by a Jimmy Buffett live album? Say something about tax day?

Beaujon's wife gasped in surprise at a twist in the plot. It was 12:18 a.m. "Bed?" he offered. "I'm just waiting for you," she said.

"I love how it's young but at the same time intellectual," he says. "You can walk down the street and you meet 10 different people and everyone has their own cause and purpose." —Mike Manning of The Real World: D.C., quoted in Dan Zak's piece on the show's house.

Isn't it amazing how someone can live here for such a short time and effortlessly nail D.C.'s essence?

Manning's experience of meeting 10 people? If you substitute "sob quietly in your office" for "walk down the street" and "recently crushed dream" for "cause and purpose" (and stretch out the time required to meet 10 people to three-and-a-half years) THIS HAS BEEN EXACTLY MY EXPERIENCE.

MOREOVER, the house, as Zak notes, "feels like a landmark to what the rest of America sees when they visit the District." There are eagle statues throughout, stately columns on the main floor, and the bedrooms are all named for great political figures. Same here at my joint! I am currently writing from the "Morton Kondracke Room," which looks out on my backyard and borders the "Mary Margaret Whipple Kitchen," just off the "Paul Trible Entryway."

ITEM: The Black Rooster will cock about a little bit longer! Now, on to the next cause and purpose: FREE NICK CHO!

HEY! PICK UP A PAPER! Last week, I thought Darrow had the most beautiful cover photograph I'd seen in yonks. Well, this week, he has beaten even that, with a picture of a wee Frenchman. Don't know what I'm talking about? Understandable! Find an orange-and-black box and remove the floppy thing with the writing on the cover. ALSO INSIDE: MORE STUFF.

BIKE COMMUTING CORNER: Don't use a bike computer. It'll only make you miserable. If you have one, take it off. If you don't have one, good.

FINALLY, after getting our ass handed to us by the Huffington Post in Post-PostKiller.com-Memogate, City Paper finally moves the peanut a little. Instead of employing the current revenue model here ("Hang on for dear freaking life and pray Obama outlaws the Huffington Post"), it will employ one called "Coast on rich guy's money and pray someone figures out how to make money on Internet." Actually, we're kind of doing that one, too.