WMATA on Twitter from nine minutes ago:

"Red Line: Trains are turning back at Rhode Island Avenue & Silver Spring due to a situation outside of Fort Totten station. Shuttle bus ser"

Read More "WMATA Twitter Dubs Metro Crash ‘A Situation’" »

Well, LL is assuming this is fake.

In any case, Twitter user "fentydc" is off to a strong start:

• Storms ruining my planned evening work out. May have to limit it to running 12 miles 44 minutes ago from Power Twitter
• And YES, I am driving myself home tonight about 1 hour ago from web
• @FamousDC That guy is so unhealthy. I much prefer a lunch of skinless chicken and Powerbars about 1 hour ago from web in reply to FamousDC
• Geez, Who knew those little SmartCars could go so fast? about 1 hour ago from web

Good morning City Desk readers, and welcome to an especially vapid installment of Freedom Friday. A few weeks back, yours truly ran into a friend of a friend while picking up some necessities at the CVS on 14th St. in Columbia Heights. Said friend was printing out headshots for his Real World tryout. Yet at the time, there were no Real World employees in D.C. That's changing, according to the dashing reality TV reporter Andy Dehnart, who has discovered that "Bunim-Murray [the production company behind the real world] is searching for multiple production assistants who 'have a valid drivers license and insurance' and 'live in and know DC and surrounding areas.'" Twitter your feelings on the news and tag them (your feelings!) #realworlddc. Got more to say about the Real Housewives of D.C.? Tag that shit #realhousewivesdc.

Military politics, insular media rambling, and medical marijuana, after the jump.

Read More "Our Morning Roundup: D.C. Gets Not Just Real Housewives, But Real Worlders" »

Stop me if you already read this at DCist, but Reality Blurred's Andy Dehnart reports that

Bravo is spinning off yet another series from its Real Housewives franchise: The Real Housewives of D.C., which will be the fifth in the series....

The series will be produced by [D.C.'s] Half Yard Productions, which produced Discovery’s American Loggers. Different production companies produce the different spin-offs, perhaps to keep them fresh.

This is absolutely fantastic. Would it be too much of a stretch for Half Yard to recruit Maureen Dowd?

Washington City Paper's twitter account (@WCP) is leading the hunt on this one. Twitter your guesses as to which neighborhoods are most likely to produce Half Yard's "real housewives" and tag your tweets #realhousewivesdc. Guess correctly and there may be some swag in it for you.

14 minutes ago... "6th and I SW I had child trapped on monkey bars - has been freed and transported."

Dan Snyder's Chapter 10.9 theme park chain, Six Flags, announced today it lost another $146.3 million in the first quarter of 2009 and that revenues were down 24% compared to the same period last year.

Snyder blamed the downturn on having Easter 2008 counted in the first quarter, while in 2009 it was a second-quarter affair.

Guess a lotta folks commemorate the resurrection of Jesus by paying $30 parking, eating $9 slices of pizza and riding rollercoasters named after licensed superheroes.

Who knew?

But that's not today's only big Six Flags news: Mr. Six has a Twitter account!

Yeesh.

In announcing the pedo-mascot's Tweeting venture, Six Flags spokesperson Angie Vieira Barocas declared, "Mr. Six has quite the imagination and is definitely hip to pop culture."

Really? Well, they said the same things about the Craigslist killer.

Read More "Update: SIX Flagging" »

JDLand has her own thoughts on the allegedly slow development around Nationals Park (including both Southeast and Southwest sides). She uses the Post's archives to make the point that the MCI Center didn't exactly create instant redevelopment. [She doesn't use those same archives to chart all the failed promises city leaders have made concerning Nationals Park; nor does she use those same archives to chart how much money the city has dumped into the project].

Another argument she could have made: The problem with all the civic boosters behind Nationals Park is that they are having to sell one of the ugliest pieces of city real estate. The MCI Center was built in a downtown neighborhood with obvious strengths that Nationals Park does not have. MCI Center had Chinatown, MLK Library and other civic destination spots like say the old DCRA building (ha), the courthouses, and police headquarters. Nationals Park was built in a decimated spot with almost zero charm. Anyway, I posted my two cents on the subject yesterday.

Misadventures in D.C. folds up its blog, blames Twitter and Facebook (like real media people!). They write: "The weird thing, of course, is that blogging now seems... well, so QUAINT. So old-fashioned, this idea of taking the time to construct paragraphs of text, telling a story, fleshing out an idea or thought through the process of writing about it. We've been reduced to brief one-sentence status updates (or worse, in the case of Twitter: 140 characters). It's easier to stay in touch than ever before. Yet our communication becomes more superficial with each sign of 'progress.'"

Borderstan collects early April crime stats for Borderstan.

And Now, Anacostia gives its blessing to Cherry Blast.

Bureaucrat310 mourns the crowding of Ben's Chili Bowl now that they've spotted tour buses parked outside the D.C. institution. There's tension between the old men and the tourists:

"I was at Ben's Chili Bowl last night with an out-of-town friend who wanted to "visit the place where Obama eats." It was 2am, crowded and loud! I sat at the counter next to an elderly black man and about three or four of his buddies. Yes, an old guy out past 2am! We'd already ordered as a white college-aged man started shouting his order behind me. The man, for some unknown reason, stuck his arm in between me and the elderly black man to rest his hand on the counter. He accidentally brushed against the black man who did not enjoy being touched - a small argument ensued..."

The 42 taps out a thoughtful rundown of area sports teams and events.

"What's the newest seasonal beer?"
"Where can I find my favorite Pilsener from study abroad?"
"Dammit Orr, you promised me a rare Belgian trippel but the restaurant was out of it when I got there!"

I hear your cries, fellow lushes, imbibers, and beer nerds! And I give you the Beerspotter Twitter feed, with live updates on rare and timely beers across the D.C. metro area. Just go to twitter.com/beerspotter (or City Paper Eats) to see the latest alerts on D.C.-area beer.

This is no one-man task. Spotters, I need your help -- especially you folks in Maryland and Virginia. Beerspotter on Twitter is a group account, which means I need you all to contribute. Here's how:

To post to the Beerspotter group account:
1. Create your own Twitter account, and start "following" Beerspotter on Twitter.
2. Wait a minute until I start following you as well. (Sorry but there's no way around this. I promise to respond quickly, especially in these first few days.)
3. Send a Direct Message to Beerspotter with info on the name of the beer, price, location, and maybe something pithy -- this message will automatically be posted on the Beerspotter feed for all to see!
4. Everyone drinks better beer!
**Twitter nerds: no hash tags for now; we're keeping that trick holstered for special events and such.

I hope some of you start using this right away. Until now D.C. had no centralized site for all beer drinkers to stay up on the latest draft and bottle lists. Together, we can make this community happen. Thanks to everyone, and e-mail me if you have any questions. Cheers!

Think politicians are paralyzed by Twitter? That's just the beginning.

Meet John Culberson. He's a Republican from Texas. He's on Twitter. He's also on Qik, a video streaming service for anybody with a Blackberry or a camera-phone. We missed our chance to have him feed our Average Day D.C. blog machine.

Culberson recorded an almost 18-minute-long video from outside the Capital Building last night.

He's recorded four videos just today--including interviews with a scientist talking about glaciers and with the chancellor of Texas Tech.

The best part of the interviews is the awkward part where he explains the technology to those he is talking to.

But he hasn't recorded a video in a full two hours! What's he been doing that whole time? The people have a right to know! Read More "Average Day: John Culberson (R-TX)" »

Wow. The Library of Congress has now got a twitter account. They have embraced the 100-or-so-character sound bite. They note on their blog:

"Howdy, folks! (Sorry, my Wyoming roots are showing.)  The Library of Congress finally has its own official Twitter feed.  You can follow us here: http://twitter.com/librarycongress

'Library of Congress' was too long as a user name, so in the spirit of Twitter itself, we’ve been truncated.

As I’ve been alluding for some time, we are on the cusp of many more forays into the Web 2.0, and I hope to bring more announcements soon (most likely weeks, not months).  We are going to be pushing some incredible content out to the world in new ways and in new spaces — just a smattering of the millions and millions of digital resources we have online, of course, but presented with the fantastic interactivity of these new Web tools."

Kind of funny that they couldn't use their full name for their account.

Just saw on twitter, one guy is trying to rent out his room for the inauguration. The rate: $250. The room is "two blocks from the event." Either this is just sad, a hoax (who post's ads on their twitter?), or the inaugural rental market really did go bust.

That's according to an Army intelligence report, which says that terrorists are using the microblogging service to communicate with each another.

Fox 5 News has announced that it's working on a story about this. Via Twitter.

Last night, I watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech on a neighbor's high-falutin' High Definition television. The up-close-and-personal HD technology appears to benefit no face on TV---silver fox Anderson Cooper could stand to lay off the foundation; silver Wolf Blitzer's glinty eyes make him look perpetually high. Barack Obama, however, looks somehow even more fantastic; one member of the viewing party described him as "crisper" in HD. Mmm. Crispy.

Mid-speech, however, the HD turned on Obama, exposing a small collection of saliva in the left crease of the candidate's mouth. (Spittle not pictured in the above Wikipedia-snatched photo). The development nearly incapacitated my housemate; he spent the remainder of the speech in a nervous fit, wishing aloud that one polite delegate would flag down the candidate and discretely wipe his own mouth, the telltale indication that Obama "has got something ... right over ... no ... a little to the left ... there, you've got it."

One viewer twittered the spittle, in the hopes that some party operative would intervene. None answered our call.

Near the speech's end, Obama did move to wipe the corner of his mouth, causing a grand celebration among the party. However, the move only displaced the spittle, helping it to migrate lower down the lip. My housemate hung his head in shame. High Definition spares no one.

Good luck, McCain.