Monica Hesse reports in the Post that the annual Chinese New Year parade is changing rapidly—organizers have hired an agency to help them this year.

“We would like,” [Hon-Yuen] Wong says — and he knows this is a big dream, but one might as well dream big — “we want to make it like Macy’s.”

For nearly 40 years, since its inception, Washington’s Chinese New Year parade has marched on a shoestring. Mom ’n’ pop. Dollar dreams on a dime budget for a city whose parade quotient is fairly low — Cherry Blossom, yes; Thanksgiving, no. The New Year parade had pageantry, firecrackers, crowds, all of it. But behind the scenes, putting on a parade is an exhausting business. “You need certified people to light the firecrackers,” Wong says, “and certified people to store the firecrackers, and more certified people to handle the firecrackers.” Last year, the entire budget for all of the pageantry was $23,000. The only performers to get paid were the high school marching band. The kids got free lunch.

Looks like this is more of the Disneyfication of Chinatown that Lydia DePillis warned us about.

Photo by Matt Dunn

This morning's Washington Post broke new ground in a genre most experts thought was entirely tapped out by now: Whiny ex-New Yorkers bitching about how much they hate D.C.

Style feature writer Monica Hesse chronicled a meeting of a group of nearly a dozen and a half New York expats who've formed a club they call the Fellowship of Unassimilated Manhattan Exiles, or FUME. Meeting at a ritzy tequila bar of the sort most expats like to pretend doesn't exist here ("The partying continues... NYC style," an invitation to the gathering reads), FUME's members gripe about how difficult it is to buy a newspaper in the District. Or get Chinese food.

The standard reaction to this sort of fare—"So go back to New York!"—doesn't apply here; the group's founder, former Politico staffer Pia Catton, has done just that. But it's still worth examining FUME a bit more closely. TBD has already pointed out that even New Yorkers don't like people who think Manhattan is the center of the world; Twitter has already pointed out that the Post's characterization of D.C. as "a whole city of expats" ignores the thousands and thousands of us who were born here and don't feel the need for an embassy to rally around (even an embassy that serves $80 tequila shots and boring tacos).

What no one's pointed out yet, though, is that one of FUME's stalwarts, education policy wonk Emily Anthony, hates D.C. so much that she... had her wedding written up in the local paper. (Yes, the same local paper that wrote up FUME, and the one that, apparently, no New York expats have figured out can be delivered to their homes so they don't need to buy it at CVS.) We had to figure that out by Googling her name, though, because we hadn't read about it in the Post; real Washingtonians, of course, get their news about the weddings of people with advanced degrees in the New York Times. Which publishes a Washington edition.

Leave weddings aside, though. In the end, like so many New York-beats-D.C. arguments, FUME's comes down to bagels. And while we think it's typically a fool's errand to compare D.C. and New York as if one city weren't more than 10 times bigger than the other, on the bagel front, there's no question who comes out ahead.

After all, if you want to get H&H bagels at a neighborhood deli, New York's got nothing for you anymore. Welcome to D.C., everyone!

Photo by midweekpost via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

"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.

Hit play and find out!

Let's mark the start of hostilities as mid-week. That's when, according to an informed source, Allen raised questions about a Roig-Franzia story about a woman who had undergone multiple abortions. In the back and forth, Roig-Franzia allegedly called Allen a "dick." No punches were thrown.

Peace prevailed until Friday morning, when Style staffers convened to discuss their journalism. According to sources, Roig-Franzia at one point in the meeting reached across the table and grabbed Allen's notepad, tearing a page from it. Allen barked, "Give me my fucking notebook." Roig-Franzia complied, pushing it back across the table.

After that incident, not much went according to the Post Stylebook. Allen, an assignment editor for Style, learned that one of his reporters, Monica Hesse, had been tasked by Style co-boss Ned Martel to do a funny-type story coming off the big news on the congressional ethics investigation. Allen wasn't apprised that Hesse had been so assigned and let Martel have it. "Next time you want to assign a story to one of my writers, you come talk to me. I'm right here," Allen said to Martel, according to a Post source. They discussed the matter and came to an amiable conclusion.

The story then moves from errors of protocol to errors of journalism. Allen eventually got his hands on the copy that Hesse and Roig-Franzia had been dispatched to generate. It was a "charticle" on famous incidents in which key actors in history have unwittingly coughed up sensitive information to the wrong people.

One of the headlining incidents in the charticle was how a Confederate solider had lost some military plans of Robert E. Lee in a field that later found their way into Union hands. The original story reportedly said that the offense occurred in Virginia. Wrong–Maryland.

There were other errors as well.

Allen made clear his displeasure with the integrity of the piece, proclaiming that it was the "second-worst piece I've ever had handed to me in 43 years," according to a source. The first-worst was a mistake-ridden profile of Paul Robeson that never saw the printed page. Those 43 years include Allen's 39 years of service at the Post along with a tenure at the New Haven Register.

The veteran editor gave pretty much the same sharp-elbowed spiel to both Hesse and Roig-Franzia. Hesse responded by asking for the story back so that she could iron out some of the wrinkles.

Roig-Franzia responded by saying, “Henry, don’t be such a cocksucker.”

At that, Allen leapt into action, shoving Roig-Franzia. He then popped him in the cheek. According to an eyewitness account, Roig-Franzia didn't try to match the 5-11, 200-pound Allen punch for punch, instead opting for more of a civil-rights-movementy kind of stance.

Into the one-sided faceoff jumped Chris Richards, the Post's pop-music critic. One of the first responders, Richards stood between the hostile parties. Brauchli reportedly intervened as well.

After the set-to, Allen spent some time behind closed doors with managers. Brauchli told him that the Post just can't have this sort of conduct in the newsroom. Allen agreed. They left it at that.

Then it was on to the office of Style co-boss Lynn Medford, who was apparently briefed by Brauchli on what to say to Allen. Medford told Allen that Brauchli had said that this was a new era at the Post and we can't have violence in the newsroom. (What, did the smelling-salts lady take a buyout?) Another message from Brauchli to Allen via Medford: You can't come into the newsroom again for your entire career.

That sanction is not as harsh as it sounds: Allen's last day was to be Nov. 20. He is 68, had already accepted a buyout, was working on contract at the time of his lunge, and had already announced his retirement.

Of his swing, Allen says, "The last time I threw a punch at anybody was in the spring of 1963 in Parris Island, S.C., in Marine Corps recruit training." Allen served in Vietnam for four months. Roig-Franzia hung up when called on this matter.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out City Paper's exclusive reenactment of this historic event: Allen v. Roig-Franzia ~ The Movie!

*Remember the huff over Monica Hesse's piece on Brian Brown? The one from August 28, in which she describes the NOM executive director as "pleasantly, ruthlessly sane"? Nearly two weeks later, this thing still has legs. About this time last week, Rebecca Armendariz of the Washington Blade denounced Hesse's story as a dangerous “puff piece.” Now, on WorldMagBlog—the online arm of (yes) the evangelical rag World—Les Sillars claims the controversy as evidence of liberal bias. Media Matters, on the other hand, says the Post's ombud response "illustrates fundamental flaw in 'liberal bias' claims." (Hey, guys, it's like a goddamn Rorschach test up in here!) The Awl weighed in from 20,000 feet with a post on Hesse's status as a "failed lesbian." And the better angels of our nature wept. [Seriously, though, I'll leave the final word here to Wemple—or to our very own Hess!—but having read the piece, I'd call it a.) misplaced aggression and b.) self-defeating to accuse the woman of "journalistic vandalism," or what have you. Hesse tried for a human(e) feature on an easy-to-revile fellow (with whom many of us disagree), and her conceit backfired. Doesn't make her a monster.]

*NEOLOGISM FAIL: NBC Washington (see above) gets trigger twigger happy with some regrettable twucked-up wordplay after oh God I can't go on like this:

You know how we know it's a modern kinda world? 'Cause everything starts with a Tw- these days. Sorry, did we say "everything"? We meant "tweverything."

Thanks, Twitter!

So it should come as no big shock that a mid-year D.C. Twestival is coming to the third floor of the newly launched MidTown Loft....

If this sort of badinage appeals to you, hit up the Loft (1219 Connecticut Ave. NW) tomorrow from 7-11 p.m.

*FILE UNDER "SWEET WEB GADGET OF THE MOMENT": Slate's new "News Dots" feature, a visualizer of major news stories and the interrelation between them, launched yesterday as part of the Web pub's "Slatest" aggregation thing. And it's pretty neat! See how Obama is the sun 'round which all stories turn?

*TONIGHT IN CITY LIGHTS: The Cult at the 9:30 Club. Fischer sez:

In the current age of album-centered nostalgia tours, it’s no surprise that the chameleonic five-piece is exhuming its 1985 breakthrough Love, which took from the best of that decade’s left-of-the-dial music—postpunk, goth, neopsychedelia—and made it muscular and accessible.

Lots of news about shoes, after the jump!

• This picture from Madame Tussauds North Korea is getting a lot of attention today. Turns out Kim Jong-Il, famed Manolo collector and N. Korean dictator is not dead/still has it! WaPo reports that the Dear Leader's meeting with President Bill Clinton is "the first time in years that the ailing North Korean head of state has been visited by a Western leader." He's just been lonely!

• Also in WaPo: Things that make Libby at BYT want to throw up! Apparently, Postie Monica Hesse is not only a skilled reporter but a hipster taxonomist: "For the hipsters, post-hipsters or quasi-hipsters who moved into Columbia Heights several years ago for the grit and the cheap rent and the proximity to the Wonderland Ballroom (the hipster, post-hipster or quasi-hipster bar that sponsors local music and nights like “Sundress Fest”), life can be divided into two discrete phases: Before Target. After Target." The rest of the article is about how Target has turned these independent souls into corporate soles! Read the original here. Read BYT's frothy takedown here. And per my promise of shoe news: Target sells them!
• We also have fresh content on our other blogs: Thom Yorke's lazy eye gets a little lazier on Leak Proof. Mastodon is hitting up the D.C. area again, this time with a cartoon band. Yalie Pizza!.

Happy Tuesday, y'all!