Your U.S. Senate At Work: Maybe it's best D.C. doesn't have any members in the Senate, after all. Because if we did, they'd probably do embarrassing things like what Pennsylvania's Democratic Sen. Bob Casey did today, which was whine on Twitter about the Nationals' plan to sell advance tickets to a May homestand against the Philadelphia Phillies only to people whose credit cards match addresses in the D.C. region. "I'm calling on the @Nationals to reverse course on a reported plan to block @Phillies fans from buying tickets to games at Nationals Park," Casey blurted. ".@Phillies have some of the best fans in the world. They shouldn’t be left out in the cold because the Nats want a stronger home field adv." Of course, it's not like the people in the Senate have anything better to worry about than how many fans of their baseball team get to travel to another city to be obnoxious in person, right? -1

Brick City: On the eastern side of the District, transportation workers have been installing streetcar tracks for some time now. And on the western end, they'll soon be ripping them up—and then putting them back in—all for looks. An $11 million Georgetown streetscaping project will involve replacing brick streets with new, more historically accurate bricks, and regrading, but keeping, long-unused tracks. The first fully finished block opened this morning. +2

Free Money Here: This morning's Washington Post seemed thicker than usual, especially for a paper without a propaganda insert from China or Russia in it. Turned out there were 35 extra pages of agate type listing thousands of people and institutions with unclaimed assets that the District government is now trying to track down. Among the names on the list: Democratic powerbroker Harold Ickes (and also my younger brother, who is finally collecting his winnings from a sports bet he placed in Las Vegas several years ago). To see if there's a windfall coming your way, click here. +3

Type This Way: When word came that the District was switching the typeface on its street signs as it replaced broken ones, it seemed like good news. But now it seems the new design isn't quite as clean as it was advertised to be. The signs, which use mixed-case letters instead of ALL UPPERCASE as the old ones do, sometimes use mixed-case letters for quadrants, too, identifying streets as being in "Nw" or "Se" instead of NW or SE. And it turns out some of them also use different fonts within the same sign. So if you spot a sign that looks wrong, no, you don't have to rush out to buy new glasses. -1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 34 Today's score: +3 Today's Needle rating: 37

A company spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Monday that New York-based Vornado is not renewing leases as they expire, largely emptying the mall in preparation for “redevelopment.” The spokesperson wouldn’t say when renovations would take place or what they would entail, but did note that some stores can remain in place while the work is done.

“We’re continuing to work hard to come up with great solutions,” the spokesperson said. “There isn’t a specific plan or framework to talk about except to say that we’re continuing our efforts … to transform the mall as it is today into something else.”

Apparently, there was talk of a large anchor retailer like Target coming to the space, but the Current observes that plan may have fallen apart last summer, when "Vornado applied to the Old Georgetown Board for permission to add windows and entrances to the mall. Some of the changes would optimize space for 'a larger format tenant,' the project architect said at the time. Board members rejected those proposals."

They may change their minds, though, if the mall keeps sitting empty. Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble space on M Street will likely become a Nike Store soon, notes the Post.

Photo by Saikofish via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Congress, Occupied: Occupy D.C. is one of the only remaining encampments in the nation, after crackdowns in other cities, and the protesters in McPherson Square appear to be making the most of it. They filed for permits today to hold an "Occupy Congress" march on the Mall on Jan. 17. But maybe that doesn't go far enough. After all, Congress is pretty inept; it's hard to see how a group of people who've been sleeping outside all winter could actually do a worse job than the ones the rest of the country (but not D.C., of course) has sent here to govern. Why not make them switch places for the day? +2

Redistricting, Not Just For ANCs Anymore: Should the dawn of 2012 on Sunday mean that, due to misbehavior on your part on New Year's Eve, the police are looking for you, exactly who you'll be dodging could be a little different. Come Sunday, new police district boundaries will be in place throughout D.C. The boundaries were last redrawn in 2004, and booming populations in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and H Street NE since then meant police resources don't match up as well with needs. Naturally, the changes yielded anxious community meetings, as any change in our city does. +1

No Edition: Underage drinkers planning to party Saturday night in Georgetown can blame some of their own if their scheme to spend the night at Third Edition has now been foiled. The club will be closed through the weekend after allegedly selling to minors. Third Edition says they'll be shut down "due to circumstances beyond our control," and promises refunds for anyone who bought advance tickets to a New Year's Eve party. -1

London Calling: Okay, yes, we get it—it's been a bad year for the Washington Redskins. The team can finish no better than 6-10, the same sorry record as last year, despite starting off the season 3-1, and a loss in Sunday's finale in Philadelphia would leave them 5-11. But still, London Fletcher can't get a break? The linebacker leads the NFL in tackles (though that may be more a side effect of playing for a losing team than a sign of his virtue), yet was left out of the lineup for the annual Pro Bowl all-star game. What he ought to do is take Sunday off and fly to Hawaii on his own anyway—since the rest of the team's been playing like they're on vacation all year. -1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 59 Today's score: +1 But Dave McKenna's leaving Washington City Paper: -10 Today's Needle rating: 50

Separate and Unequal: See a white person in D.C.? Chances are they've got significantly more money than a black neighbor. That sounds outrageously oversimplified, but new census statistics back it up; per capita income for whites in the District is three times what it is for black residents. The income gap is widening in D.C., though it's narrowing in some suburban counties. No matter how much money you make or what race you are, that's not good news for a city that's already quite divided. -4

Rain, Rain, Go Away: Turned out yesterday's storm didn't bring snow to most of the District, as forecasters originally warned. But it did bring the largest single-day rainfall in history for the months between November and March (when the thunderstorms that usually bring torrential downpours are mostly done). Had all the rain been snow, the storm would need a nickname. -2

College, Now Meat-Free: Being a vegan at Georgetown University or American University isn't so tough. Or so says a new study from PETA, which ranked the schools in the top ten nationwide for vegan-friendliness. Georgetown was praised specifically for meal plan options like "seitan gyros with soy yogurt." Which reminds us why we ditched our undergraduate meal plan when we moved off campus junior year. +2

Parks R Us: The District may not have representation in Congress, but we do have quite a few parks. A new ranking from The Trust for Public Land puts D.C. (and nearby Arlington) in the top ten cities nationwide on parkland, park spending, and park acreage per resident. D.C. also ranked in the top five for recreation and senior centers and swimming pools per capita. No word on how we're doing on bike lanes. +2

Yesterday's Needle rating: 54 Today's score: -2 Today's Needle rating: 52

Every Hoya down in Hoya-Ville liked Christmas a lot
But the Neighbors who lived just north of Hoya-Ville did NOT!

The neighbors hate the whole holiday season
And they have a whole, big, long list of reasons:
They hate the Chimes and the Phantoms’s songs
They hate the freshmen, their schmobs and their throngs.

They despise all the students that are living in houses
They even hate the cute little rats and the mouses
They hate the students who leave out their trash
They want home values to rise, they want CASH, CASH, CASH

Read the rest of lengthy poem on the Voice's site. It has a happy ending; though, one that will probably remain fiction.

Photo by randomduck via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

You Put Your Weed In There: When police raided two Capitol Hemp locations a month ago, authorities made it sound, somewhat implausibly, like a major bust. Now the police affidavit supporting the search warrant cops got to make the raid has come out, and the whole thing seems even sillier. Though drug laws require the store to claim all the smoking equipment they sell is to be used for tobacco, the cops saw through it: ""Your Affiant believes there to be sufficient probable cause that the store has no intention of selling these items to be used for tobacco use," the document says. Now that's crack policing. -3

Halcyon Days: Why buy only one historic, multimillion dollar D.C. house when you can have two? That seems to be the rationale behind the recent purchase of Halcyon House by Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno, who bought Evermay (another Georgetown estate) over the summer. Their representatives aren't talking about the purchases, but Ueno and Kuno are reportedly planning to keep both properties well-preserved. +2

Derrik Sweeney, Phone Home: For one Georgetown University student, studying abroad in Egypt wasn't just an educational experience—it was a correctional one, too. Derrik Sweeney, of Jefferson City, Mo., was arrested this week in Cairo, allegedly for throwing firebombs at Egyptian soldiers during a protest. Sweeney's parents say he was able to call home, and U.S. Embassy staffers are with him. No word on whether he plans to bring protest tactics home to Georgetown, but if so, meetings of the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission will be more exciting. +1

Turkeys, Run Free: Thanksgiving doesn't just mean the Detroit Lions on the TV, it also means an inordinate amount of press for a bunch of turkeys. (Not the D.C. Council; actual turkeys.) President Barack Obama pardoned two turkeys this year, Liberty and Peace, who were then sent off to live in Mount Vernon, Va. Considering they spent last night holed up at the W Hotel on 15th Street NW, they may consider that a downgrade. +1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 58 Today's score: +1 Thanksgiving bonus: +5 Today's Needle rating: 64

What Will Keep United In D.C.?: Baltimore wasn't playing when it decided to make a bid for D.C. United, which isn't happy, or profitable, playing at RFK. (Fans, meanwhile, aren't happy with the team's inability to make the playoffs.) Major League Soccer has been surveying fans up I-95 about how they'd feel about a soccer team moving to the city, apparently to see whether a relocation would be viable. In response, United supporters here are circulating a petition to District officials and investors, saying the team should be able to build a stadium at Buzzard Point, near the Nationals ballpark in Southwest. The cynical prediction: No stadium for United, which is the only major D.C. team to win a championship in its league in the last decade, but the city does wind up dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a Redskins practice complex. -1

Key Bridge, Don't Fall Down Now: The bridges in the D.C. area haven't gotten great reviews lately, but sometimes a politician needs a convenient prop. And so it was that President Barack Obama brought his campaign to invest in infrastructure to the Key Bridge, speaking with Rosslyn behind him about the manifold joys of public works projects. The recent Wilson Bridge reconstruction, the White House says, has cut bottlenecks dramatically. As for the Key Bridge, it's not in such great shape—Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood exhorted Congress to spend some money fixing it up soon, lest Obama give his next Georgetown speech in front of a pile of floating rubble. +1

You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here: The last time bad weather settled in during a wintertime rush hour, the city hit levels of gridlock not seen again until the August earthquake. Theoretically, that'll change this winter. Instead of letting everyone go whenever they feel like leaving, the federal government will tell workers when to leave or tell them to stay until roads are clear. We still recommend tele-commuting the next time it snows, though. +2

Boots Off: Budget cuts have left city and state governments around the country trying to do—as the irritatingly chipper phrase has it—more with less, and D.C. is no exception. The latest round of cuts, though, may be good news to anyone who has a habit of parking illegally: The District Department of Public Works has laid off 30 people, cutting in half the number of parking enforcement officers devoted to booting cars. -1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 37 Today's score: +1 Today's Needle rating: 38

Today, the Georgetown Dish posted a response from the Citizen's Association of Georgetown:

The result of students living in the residential areas is an unacceptable level of noise, poorly maintained homes and yards, unchecked trash violations, and a lack of adequate parking. None of the university's attempts to address these accelerating problems has succeeded. The 2010-2020 campus plan exacerbates the negative consequences of the previous expansions to the surrounding communities.

There's a lot more in the letter, but that graf was pretty ridiculous. I'd guess that in Georgetown, one of the most expensive zip codes in the District, any noise (well, above the clink of martini glasses at a cocktail party) is probably considered unacceptable. It just seems like some people in the neighborhood are being unrealistic about what it's like to live near a large university. And instead of engaging their younger neighbors like, say, the LeDroit Park Civic Association does with Howard students, they're just trying to beat them back.

The complaints aren't just selfish, they're also rather shortsighted. Like all neighborhoods that have good schools, Georgetown currently enjoys the prestige it has in large part because of the presence of the university. And while this tension between college and college town can be found all over the country, it's especially striking in Georgetown since, as the Post pointed out, the university actually houses a larger percentage of its students on campus than any of the other universities in the District.

All is not negative, however. The Dish posted a letter from a different group of nearby residents who praised the campus plan, noting money the university has poured into the community and resources it provides that benefit all residents.

Photo by Kevin H. via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

BYO Books: The upper Northwest rare books market may soon take a bit of a hit. Politics & Prose will introduce an Espresso Book Machine, a sort of copier-on-steroids that can print books—including those that are out of print—in five minutes, on demand. The downside, of course, is that every retired former lobbyist living in Forest Hills will now be publishing their own tomes on public policy. +1

We're No. 22!: Every year, college admissions officers swear they don't care how U.S. News & World Report ranks their school. And every year, without fail, the rankings come out and cause great cheering and/or gnashing of teeth. The highest-ranked local school on the list this year was Georgetown, ranked 22nd. The University of Virginia came in at 25th, William and Mary was 33rd, George Washington University 50th, the University of Maryland 55th, Virginia Tech 71st, American University 82nd, and Howard University 115th. Not that anyone at any of those schools is counting, of course. +1

Half Foods: There are times when the Whole Foods on P Street NW resembles someone's very carefully designed vision of the worst place on earth—long lines of entitled customers, all battling to get that one final $20 per pound tuna filet. Those times—known as "evenings"—may come even more frequently; Whole Foods and D.C.-based LivingSocial teamed up today for a half-off deal that may set a record for the most purchases ever in one day. At one point, people were snatching the coupons up at a rate of 1,500 per minute. Presumably, it's a loss-leader to get more registered LivingSocial users—and to ensure there's no arugula left unsold. -1

Hollywood for Ugly People: It's been a good run lately for the District's Office of Motion Picture and Television Development. Covert Affairs and Veep have shot in D.C. lately, and today, officials said NBC's The Firm, based on the John Grisham novel, would also use our fair city as a backdrop. Of course, the last time there was a major production in town, Autobots wound up battling MPD—so maybe the OMPTD should be careful what it wishes for. +1

Yesterday's Needle rating: 60 Today's score: +3 Today's Needle rating: 63

The story of Albrecht Muth keeps going deeper and deeper into crazytown. Via DCist, Georgetown Patch has the, uh, goods:

Muth, 47, faces second-degree murder charges in the death of his wife, Viola Drath, who was found dead Aug. 12 in their home in the 3200 block of Q Street NW. Medical examiners determined the cause of death to be strangulation and blunt force trauma.

At his preliminary hearing in D.C. Superior Court, Muth argued that as a "serving officer of a foreign army" he was entitled to his uniform and rank. Muth claims to be an Iraqi military officer. The Iraqi Embassy has denied any affiliation with Muth.

According to Muth, he almost landed at St. Elizabeths this morning because he refused correctional officers' requests to put on underwear under his orange jumpsuit.

"We don't wear underwear," said Muth, referring to Iraqi military officers.

Meanwhile, D.C. homicide detective James Wilson said several people told him 91-year-old Drath wanted her husband to be deported. As for Muth's current location, he'll be held with or without underwear until his trial, since a judge found probable cause in Drath's death, and said Muth is a possible flight risk. For now, don't bet on these court proceedings ending without the phrase "not guilty by reason of insanity" being bandied about at some point.

Photo courtesy Georgetown Patch

Georgetown Dish says a number of retailers at the Shops at Georgetown Park being asked to vacate the 300,000 square foot mall in a hurry (including the National Pinball Museum, which had already lost its lease and is hoping to win an extra game in Baltimore):

"What's the rush to get out? What's the story?" asked one resident, worried at the prospect of an empty commercial space that could attract crime. "It will take six to eight months to get any plans through the ANC. Meanwhile, Vornado has told us nothing."

One resident who had a storage area in the complex was told to clear out in two days.

Vornado also manages Springfield Mall, which Georgetown neighbors said has been plagued by crime.

While crime is a valid fear, the mall is already little more than a dark cavern these days. There's now talk of Target leasing space in the mall, presumably after some renovation. Lydia DePillis wrote about the state of the shopping center, and Georgetown itself, last year:

When the elaborate retail palace opened in 1981, it pulled in dozens of stores that relocated from nearby sidewalks—which, in turn, brought the incongruous souvenir shops that still eke out a living in the new commercial landscape to M Street, replacing the shops that moved into the mall. In the 1980s, busloads of Japanese tourists used to pull up to the mall, unload en masse to shop, pile back in the bus, and leave.

Now, though, local landlord Richard Levy estimates the building needs to spend more than it’s even worth on deferred maintenance. A big anchor retailer like Bloomingdale’s, which was put off by the ongoing litigation, may not be willing to pay the kind of rents that would pay that back quickly. And perhaps more importantly, a huge indoor mall, in the middle of a dense urban neighborhood, is out of step with what shoppers want.

Photo by Saikofish via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

We all hoped the Hoyas would break a leg in the Far East, but from the looks of things our boys went for noses and jaws, too.

This is the greatest display of American sportsmanship since the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers/Red Army hockey game, in which the Soviet squad's coach pulled his team off the ice to protest the hooliganism of the Yanks and set U.S./Soviet relations back a, well, not much at all, actually. Mirrored the Cold War mood, come to think of it.

Which is probably about what the Georgetown/Bayi donnybrook does regarding current US/China dealings.

Wonder if this is gonna make 'em call in their notes faster...

UPDATE #1: The Great Dan Steinberg has found some fight clips from Beijing and put 'em up.

UPDATE #2: Meet the new U.S. Ambassador to China: Kermit Washington!

1000 Block of Potomac Street NW, July 19

Page three photos are collected in a weekly updated "big screen" gallery.

Georgetown, July 19

Georgetown, July 19