Cleveland Park is starting to look like an old steel town. Last week, Starbucks and 7-Eleven closed, adding to a growing list of shuttered shops: a Blockbuster, a Magruder's, a Cold Stone Creamery, etc. WUSA's Bruce Johnson examined the corpse last week wondering why such an elite 'hood had fallen on hard times. Councilmember Mary Cheh characterized the decline as a problem.

Colbert King recently wrote a column on the racial paranoia bubbling up on Cleveland Park's listserv. He followed up our own blog post on the subject. Whether residents there are racist or not we can not say. Those stories only prove that people still live in Cleveland Park. There are always the holdouts.

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One staffer at the Mayoral Bullpen at the John A. Wilson Building walked into the office at approximately 8:55 am carrying four Starbucks beverages. The Keurig machine in the bullpen doesn't get much rotation. Says communications chief for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty: "People use it for tea a lot."

Reporting by Mike DeBonis

Starbucks is going grammar-forward. How else to explain its promotion of the adjectives warm and delicious to nouns? The last time this happened to warm, Neil Diamond was writing slightly creepy lyrics about Caroline Kennedy.

Now, your average grammar geezer would say something in a high, annoying, contestant-on-Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me voice like "A toasty warm WHAT? A savory delicious WHAT?" But I don't think one noun-deficient ad is anything to get Carl Kassel all worked up about. In fact, you could really liven up your Friday by unclenching and giving this language a try. E.g., "For lunch, I would like to get a tasty saucy and spicy cheap"="I think I'll try something at that food fair on Euclid and Champlain today."

I have tried to get in touch with Starbucks about this sudden leap forward in the English language, but all I've gotten is one rather vague e-mail from a contract publicist on Tuesday asking me to clarify what ad I'm referring to. I did, and that was that.

Which is too bad, because the back of the card raises another question (besides, you know, what the hell is a piadini). Are breakfast sandwiches not going away? In fact, they are not.