Fort Reno, July 28

Washington is turning on all its institutions! The Burgundy Revolution is no longer stopping at Dan Snyder's door! (Though Sally Jenkins' column is.) TO WIT:

1) Washington Post Magazine chat turns into TOTAL BLOODBATH! Readers want to know: WHY DO THE ARTICLES LOOK LIKE ADS? WHY DID YOU USE THOSE FONTS? HOW IN THE HELL DID SECOND GLANCE MAKE THE CUT? Editors stammer, run inside, toss a Chuck Brown feature off the parapets. It's not gonna work!

After the jump, more evidence the whole town is going Montecore.

2) Thomas Boswell turns on the Nats, but maybe he's turning on all of D.C. when he calls it "the only top-10 market with the gall to act like a bottom-five town." REVOLUTION!

3) Cabbies in Adams Morgan turn on drunks! This is like Jason Linkins turning on bad writing!

4) The new Washington Post local homepage causes me to turn against remaining informed! Not because of the page, which I like, but because of this animated lady with a Smedneck accent who keeps popping up every time I return. Isn't there some kind of technology that ensures I see her only once?

What's next? A mob in front of Ian MacKaye's house demanding he apologize for Egg Hunt?

BIKE COMMUTING CORNER: Soon it will rain a lot. Get yourself some fenders. There are many expensive ways to do this, and I used to subscribe to them, but these days I'm high on the "chromoplastic" SKS fenders that you can pop on in a half-hour and that do just as nice a job as expensive French or Japanese ones that you need to pay some guy at City Bikes $30 to install after you nearly kill yourself trying to get a decent fender line that can be destroyed by a stick getting sucked up between your tire and fender. These will simply detach safely if that happens. Don't be the chump with the gnarvosis stripe up your back! Buy them from REI and they'll ship them to the store for free.

I gotta bounce! My sink is broken! Follow me on Twitter!

Early this morning, I ran into trouble. I was trying to paint some corners and edges in a long-neglected room of my house. I started out at the joint between the wall and the ceiling, doing my best to cut a perfectly straight line right at the joint.

It wasn't working. The paint was either falling way short of the joint or pushing up onto the ceiling, exactly where you don't want it. I kept at it, figuring that my hand wasn't steady enough. After completing some hand-calming exercises derived from yoga principles, I attacked the joint again. Same shit–a really bad cut that will need corrective intervention once everything dries. So I tried the other hand and a different stance on the ladder. More unsatisfactory results were obtained.

So I took a step back and examined my tools and work area. Paint was fresh and pretty well shaken, so that wasn't the problem. The wall-ceiling joint was pretty even. Ladder, sturdy.

But what about the brush? Come to look at it, that brush had seen a lot of action, including tons of similar projects, numerous dips in solvents and water and whatnot.

So I decided to finally indulge myself in that $14 brush I'd recently snapped up at Duron. And the whole world opened up to me. Dipped that thing in the paint, got in position, and pulled it along the joint. Straight-edge painting bliss, Ian MacKaye meets home renovation!