The timing seemed curious to some at the newspaper because, just a few weeks earlier, City Paper had published a cover story in which it criticized DPW for failing to crack down on private trash haulers who mix recycling and trash during their rounds.

I asked Lyons if there was any connection—was this meant as some kind of retribution? "Of course not," she said. Usually, she explained, citations are issued after someone makes a complaint and an investigator goes to check it out, not because an investigator is out looking. Lyons did not know if someone had complained about the Dumpster behind 2390 Champlain.

When I told her City Paper does not own the building—the paper is just a tenant—she said that sometimes the agent doesn't know to whom the citation should be issued. In this case, she said, City Paper "just seemed like the logical choice." (The paper's name is on the front of the building; the Dumpster is in the rear.) If ever there's an error, the matter "is resolved."

Lyons said other citations may have been issued in the area on the same day; she promised more information Monday. The agent who wrote the citation, K. Jones, has gone home for the day.

Washington City Paper has been slapped with a $50 fine from the D.C. Department of Public Works for "failure to separate recycling from other solid waste" at 2390 Champlain St. NW, the address of the paper's newsroom.

Normally, City Paper wouldn't report on this as news. Except there are several curious things about the citation (view a PDF of it here). First, the timing: City Paper recently ran a cover story by Christine MacDonald about how D.C.'s private trash haulers often commingle recycling with solid waste during their pickups and how the city has been lax in cracking down on them. The story hit the streets Nov. 5 12. The date of violation on the citation is Nov. 16.

Second: While the "respondent" on the citation is Washington City Paper and the citation was sent (via certified mail) to City Paper's office, City Paper doesn't own the Champlain Street building and the Dumpster in question is not registered to the newspaper, according to Amy Austin, the publisher. She says it's registered to Stout and Teague, which manages the building for its owner, Chicago-based Glancer Properties LLC (City Paper used to be owned by the building's owner when it was Chicago Reader Inc.). The Champlain Street building has multiple tenants, including WPFW radio, a software development company, and a bike shop.

"We're just tenants," says Austin. "We haven't owned the building for over two years. Why not say it's WPFW's trash?"

"We're not paying the citation," she says.

There's no question there was trash in the recycling-only Dumpster used by the tenants of 2390 Champlain; the citation, written by agent K. Jones, helpfully included a picture of a white plastic trash bag sticking out the top. The question is: Why now, and why send it to us?

City Paper has a call in to Linda Grant, DPW spokesperson.

Yesterday, in this very space, we blew the lid off the latest listener contest for Dan Snyder's sportstalk station, WTEM-AM, in which the Redskins owner promises to send his cheerleading squad over to winners' houses and make them wash cars.

And in this week's analog edition, we blow the lid off Dan Snyder's cheerleader past, from his 2000 rackumentary "Beauty on the Beach," all the way up to his latest scheme, which tells the cheering crew to put down their pom poms and pick up sponges and service his 25-54 male audience.

And, as promised, throughout all this lid-blowing we've run the same photograph of all those sudsy blondes, again and again and again.

That's the shot that got The Great Dan Steinberg so lathered up he rudely barged into the comments section to pooh-pooh our Snyder/T&A expose. TGDS basically accused Cheap Seats Daily of hypocrisy and of being as exploitative as Dan Snyder!

Just because we ran this photo of sudsy blondes!

That hurts.

What kind of message does that contest (and this photo) send to the Little Ladies of Football? Think of the children, Dan and Dan!

(AFTER THE JUMP: Could Snyder's layoffs at Redskins Park have helped this car wash debacle along? Is it Sherm or Sherman? Dan Steinberg reveals Lewis' bingo past? Dan Steinberg conceals reveals his own bingo past? How loaded is the Skins' 2009 schedule with Snyder humiliatees? Yankee Stadium ain't the only ballpark in use this October? Nationals Park gets loaded with readers?)

Butt seriously, this new low/high in Snyder's cheerleader marketing schemes might have something to do with personnel changes.

Donald Wells, the longtime director of the Redskins cheerleaders who predated Snyder, got fired a few months ago. Wells is now director of marketing for Sweethearts for Soldiers, a cheerleader-centric charity based in San Diego.

Wells' replacement as Redskins cheerleader director, Stephanie Jojokian, told me on Tuesday that she wasn't aware that any of her cheerleaders were going to be washing cars. Melanie Treanor Coburn, the Redskins Cheerleaders director of marketing, did not return phone calls. Jojokian says Treanor Coburn is on maternity leave.

***

While there is no agreement on whether to call him "Sherm Lewis" or "Sherman Lewis," everybody agrees the Redskins hiring of an "offensive consultant" is going to do nothing other than humiliate Jim Zorn.

But only TGDS took time to write up Sherm Lewis's past as a bingo caller this morning.

For whatever reason, the ever-humble Bogger leaves out his personal past with the churchy game. In 2002, when he was Just Plain Dan Steinberg, JPDS blew the lid off DC bingo queen Vanessa Woodland in a fabulous City Paper cover story. Read it here.

***

Zorn isn't the first guy Snyder's humiliated here, of course. We've already heard Jon Jansen gloating over the greatness of taking part in ending the Lions losing streak with a win over Washington.

But there's a lot of Snyder haters on the schedule this year.

Mike Nolan is doing better than OK in Denver. Nolan's the guy who Snyder kept delivering vanilla ice cream to during the 1999 season just after buying the Redskins,  a super twerpy way of saying that he thought the Redskins defense was bland.

Snyder had  started at middle linebacker for the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers during a stellar NFL career and therefore was quite qualified to render such judgements never played a down of foootball at any level in his life but still felt qualified to render such judgements.

From the San Franciso Chronicle's telling of the Nolan/Snyder ice cream tale, which has been told a billion times but not enough:

"It happened twice," Nolan said of the ice cream deliveries. The first time, rapidly defrosting gallons of extravagant flavors were placed outside Nolan's office door with a note saying, "No more vanilla."

"I wrote him a note, saying that my kids would enjoy the ice cream and that the advice was well taken," Nolan said. "(I was) thinking he was kidding. Then I found out he wasn't kidding."

When Nolan stayed conservative with his defenses, Snyder went industrial. Nolan showed up one day to find a hand cart parked at his desk with melting 5-gallon drums of ice cream.

Fast forward to 2009...From an AP story that appeared on washingtonpost.com yesterday titled "Once dismal Broncos defense thriving under Nolan," a different image of Nolan's abilities as a manager of men emerges. As in this quote: "In this defense, I see pride, I see hunger, I see a battle for respect," linebacker Mario Haggan said.

Has anybody said any of those things about this year's Redskins? Well, when I look at Albert Haynesworth, I guess I do see hunger. But that's another story.

Denver's 4-0, and Nolan's defense is given as the reason. The Skins play Denver at Denver FedExField on Nov. 15.

Gregg Williams is doing ok, too. Dan Snyder rejected and humiliated Williams after a Gitmo-esque interview process that had the Skins former defensive coordinator shacking up at Snyder's Potomac mansion, the one with a good view of the River. No sensible explanation was ever given for bypassing Williams for Jim Zorn as head coach.

(My fave rumor out of Redskins Park, still being told, has Williams getting blackballed as head coach by Joe Gibbs because he wasn't godly enough, which would explain why Snyder ended up with Zorn, who appends a biblical proverb  to every autograph. Geezus Chrysler!)

But Williams is now with 4-0 New Orleans, and is getting a lot of kudos for the undefeatedness of his team. Michael Wilbon, who has taken to putting Williams' name in his columns about as often as Charles Barkley's or Michael Jordan's, credited the defensive coordinator with Sunday's big win over the previously undefeated Jets in a Tuesday story:

Okay, we knew the New Orleans offense was great, but how about Gregg Williams's defense? Yes, Gregg Williams. That guy. Getting it done. The Saints harassed the Jets all over the field and forced Mark Sanchez into some killer INTs.

Skins play New Orleans at home on Dec. 6.

Norv Turner ain't doing that great. Turner, the last head coach Snyder fired midseason, has his Chargers at 2-2. But San Diego's .500 seems a helluva lot stronger than the Skins' .500.

Washington plays at San Diego on the last weekend of the season in what will surely be a meaningless game for at least one of the teams.

***

Major League Baseball's playoff series are all on as of today. But Nationals Park is always available in October. So a literacy group decided to book the big room today to try to get publicity.

This morning, a crowd in the hundreds, or what a typical Nationals/Marlins game would draw, was expected to show up for "Read for the Record," which organizers claim will be an attempt to set the record for "largest one-day shared reading experience ever." Representatives from the Nationals, including Stan Kasten, did some reading.

The book everyone will be sharing is called "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Too bad Dmitri Young wasn't around for this one.

***

Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

Now, as the Prince of Petworth has relayed in two recent blog posts, the local ANC 1A will be considering a new proposal on Wednesday night.  The Mission is trying a more moderate tack for the space, which it owns: retail combined with affordable housing.

Seems like a pretty un-contentious proposal. But if PoP’s comments section is any indication, the meeting will be, well, interesting. Some neighborhood residents are rather frank about who they don’t want moving in next door. One commenter writes:

“Can someone explain to me why poor people need to get subsidized ‘affordable’ housing in expensive neighborhoods? There’s a ton of affordable housing in DC as is - it’s called NE and across the river.”

“'Affordable Housing' = artificially concentrated poverty, more crime,” another says. “Build your projects in Georgetown, don’t dump on our neighborhood just because we’re not as rich.”

Another commenter suggested that the proposed development is actually a devious bait-and-switch by the Christian charity, still scheming to slip a homeless shelter into Parkview:

“What they are trying to do is very transparent. They want to get the special exception and build the building and then change the use to a shelter for men. Georgia Avenue will be doomed if this happens.”

ANC 1A chair Cliff Valenti, who fought the shelter plans last year, is supporting the current proposal. At the meeting tomorrow, he plans to assure the concerned blog commenters that their worries about incoming “projects” and “poor people” are unfounded.

“There’s a lot of confusion with people as to what ‘affordable housing’ means,” he told the Washington City Paper over the phone. “Where people get confused is when federal vouchers come in. This proposal says nothing about those vouchers. This is truly housing for people who have jobs, who are working.”

Valenti said he also expects reassurance from the Mission that they won’t transform the building into a homeless shelter after the proposal is approved.

Darrow's post yesterday is far from the first photo of a banana on City Desk. In fact, in this blog's relatively short run, we've posted far more banana photos than seems plausible. Here is an archive.

The newspaper began charging $345 for an online subscription, and the impact has been stark: Discontinue-my-subscription calls stopped; newsstand sales of the paper surged by 200 copies a day for a paper with a daily circ. of 13,000.

Woohoo, good news for the industry???!!!

But hold on---what do you do if your newspaper has always been free
.

UPDATE 1535: Creative Loafing chain sold to biggest creditor for $5 million (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
UPDATE 1459: Washington City Paper Now Owned by Atalaya Capital (DCist)
Atalaya outbids Eason, assumes control of Creative Loafing (Creative Loafing Tampa)
UPDATE 1332: Hedge Fund Atalaya buys Creative Loafing in equity auction (Tampa Bay Business Journal)

UPDATE 1256: New York equity firm snaps up Tampa's Creative Loafing (Tampa Tribune/TBO.com)

UPDATE 1240:Chicago Reader Has New Owners (Chicago Reader)

UPDATE 1236:Tampa's Creative Loafing chain taken over by hedge fund Atalaya (St. Petersburg Times/tampabay.com)

UPDATE 1229: Atlanta Creative Loafing says Atalaya won.

UPDATE 1223: Chicago Reader calls it for Atalaya.

UPDATE 1218: Unconfirmed Twitter chatter is that Atalaya has won.

In Tampa, Fla., Judge Caryl Delano has begun the process of deciding who will own Creative Loafing, the newspaper chain that purchased Washington City Paper and the Chicago Reader in July 2007 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy 14 months later. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason is bidding for the company, as is Atalaya Capital Management, which loaned Eason $30 million toward the original purchase.

Here are some links to current stories about the proceedings; I'll update them as new information becomes available.

Creative Loafing Auction Goes to Judge Today (Editor & Publisher)

Creative Loafing equity auction is underway (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

Reader Bidder Would Bring Jim O'Shea Back to Chicago Media (Chicago Reader)

Creative Loafing's publisher may lose chain of weeklies today (Tampa Tribune/TBO.com)

Will Creative Loafing's fate be decided today? (tampabay.com)

Battle to control Creative Loafing is heating up (Creative Loafing Atlanta)

Prettying up the writing of other journalists, much like answering their phone calls, is a job that isn't making it through the recession at many publications. Here at City Paper, we used to have a receptionist. We also used to have two copy editors. You will no longer find those job titles on our masthead.

At big papers, many copy editors are older and wear cardigans and go home to their cats, so they are perfect candidates for buyouts. This has been bad for accuracy. Example: this recent utter fiasco at the New York Times, where the error-prone critic in question used to have a single copy editor assigned to her, an arrangement that was not renewed when the copy editor got promoted.

Or this bit of weirdness in today's Post: The lede of this story describes contestants in a beauty pageant who are waiting to hear who has won. The time is "[l]ate into Monday night, or shall we say in the wee hours of Tuesday morning." At the end of the piece, the author sets another scene. "It's 11:43. We have sat through three hours of smiles and glitter and acts." It is time to find out who won. But 11:43 p.m. on Monday is not the wee hours of Tuesday morning! There's probably a reasonable explanation for this---I'm guessing that the announcement didn't happen in the following 16 minutes. A fresh-eyed person might have asked about this dissonance between the piece's top and bottom.

But the job of being a fresh-eyed person is increasingly not being filled, and those who are left are often overwhelmed.

Yes, money is a factor here, but those of us who are copy editors must own up to some of the responsibility for this situation. I can't tell you how many meaningless arguments I've had over copy changes, minor things that I should have backed off from but couldn't let myself. Example: "the fact that," a phrase I hated more than the tortuous fixes I devised for it. Copy editors can get way too hung up on this sort of thing and alienate the very people who have to figure out how to staff their publications with a lot less money. Suddenly, copy-editing begins to look like a relic, like when businesses hired people to do nothing but type.

That responsibility, of course, eventually became diffused across offices. Likewise, journalists will have to take ownership of their own spelling, grammar, and factual integrity. They'll also have to figure out how to dodge people following up on a press release.

Why the whole world loves/hates the Washington City Paper, Michael Jackson's immortal soul, and some Friday zen, after the jump.

• Howie "the Howitzer" Kurtz sums up what Gawker called a "beautiful" cover thusly: "...it pushed the journalistic envelope with a three-word phrase in the cover headline, which was posted online Tuesday. The phrase--which can be rendered here only in sterile, Starr report-like language--is a colloquial term for an act of oral sex performed on a man. The headline sparked a wave of angry calls to the alternative weekly, complaints from a handful of distributors and charges of racism from Barry supporters yesterday." One of those offended was this lady, who, for lack of a name, we will call "Pinker Bell." Word around the office is that Pinker Bell lit into Jason Cherkis' ass over that cover (that blurry thing to the right is Cherkis). Is that funnier than the cover itself? YOU DECIDE! Editor Erik Wemple makes an appearance and defends the decision really well (seriously). Only problem with Kurtz's column: "City Paper trumpeted its cover online as a "collector's edition"--a bit of a joke, since all of its 72,000 copies are free." Actually, if he cared to look inside the front cover, he might've seen that we doubled the newsstand price (DOUBLE-FREE) for this special collector's edition.
• NEXT: Is Michael Jackson in Heaven? All the MJ coverage made me gag, but this Daily Beast hypothetical by the guy who writes all those religious pocket books considering Jackson's soul is just too good to pass up: "God’s pity aside, Jackson exhibited behavior one doesn’t expect from the heaven-bound, from his alleged drug addictions to his accused pedophilia. Still, those don’t automatically exclude him from paradise, says Chris Seay, the pastor of Ecclesia Houston and president of Ecclesia Bible Society. “We shouldn’t be surprised to find someone like Jackson in heaven,” he says, calling attention to biblical passages like Matthew 7:21-23. “Jesus makes it most clear that we will all be surprised to see that the beautiful and upstanding people we thought were ‘locks’ for heaven did not make it in, and the people we thought hell was created for might have the largest palace on our golden street.”" My take on Seay's philosophy is that to get into Heaven, we should all commit a sex crime right before we die; groping your Hospice nurse should do.

• And now a video for your summer, courtesy of Cinco products:

Michael Rupert, spokesperson for the city's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, confirms receiving five inquiries today about whether his agency can do something about what the Washington City Paper prints.

But spring ended last weekend, and this weekend, it's as if everyone marked their lunar calendar and said, "Yeah, D.C.'s not a summer place---I am outta here." Place felt absolutely abandoned.

Some notes on things:

Washington Post sent Paul Farhi to Los Angeles to cover the Michael Jackson aftermath. Sunday's front page brought some results: A story about how officials are seeking a second interview with Jackson's personal doctor. Not bad, but we need more, Farhi! Stay out there, and good on the Post for investing in this story.

Eli Saslow, making an appearance on the Metro desk, chimes in with a big narrative about the Metro crash. The piece starts really slowly, as if you're, like, getting on a Metro train. But it picks up pace, again, just like a Metro ride, toward the middle.

And, you know, you can never go wrong with this fascinating piece on how this whole firetruck--Dominican Republic story went down.

A short time ago, Washington City Paper called the L.A. Coroner's Office for confirmation on the rumors concerning the King of Pop's alleged death. 

When Washington City Paper asked for confirmation, we were put on hold. 

We are still on hold. 

While we wait, we revel in the memory of having watched (already) Al Sharpton's press conference, Michael Eric Dyson's faux scholarly take (seriously, this guy is a vampire), and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann interview an Access Hollywood "reporter."

Shit, we're no longer on hold.

I ask about getting confirmation of Michael Jackson's death.

"Sure. Michael Jackson was pronounced dead at 2:26 p.m.," says Lt. Fred Corral. "He died at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was transferred by paramedics from his residence. His death is a coroner's case. We will be bringing him to our facility to do an autopsy examination."

Is Jackson at the coroner's office now?

"We have not brought him in," Lt. Corral says.

Never thought I'd be scolded by a Huffington Post official for linking. But I was!

Here's a chronology that explains how this HuffPo reprimand came about:

April 1, 2009: Washington City Paper decides to give its readers a different look on its homepage. Instead of the usual lineup of images and blog links, we go with an April Fool's edition titled "Huffington City Paper." The whole thing is a rip-off of the classic HuffPo homepage, complete with navigation tabs, the ginormous news link at the top, and running feeds from our blogs. People love it. Our own staff wonders if we shouldn't try to move permanently to something modeled after this platform, which is better suited to highlight the various newsie posts we produce each day. One reader comes to the conclusion that the Huffington Post has acquired Washington City Paper.

April 2, 2009: The parody recedes into our archive, just as much a relic as any other April Fool's joke. It's history. Our tech guy says that in order to find the page, you'd have to know what you're looking for; it has gotten a barely measurable number of pageviews (around 300) since the April Fool's activity.

June 9, 2009: Washington City Paper columnist Amanda Hess writes a post blasting the Huffington Post entertainment page for using sexism to drive pageviews. An excerpt: "People—even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people—will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that’s a big part of the Huffington Post’s model." Hess's column gets some nice rotation on the Web, aided by a link on the Romenesko site.

June 10, 2009: Washington City Paper receives a request from a Huffington Postie asking us to remove the parody page from our archive. The HuffPo person expresses a couple of concerns. One is that the blog feed to this well-hidden page is still flowing. Correct: Deep within our archive, the page is sitting there, with virtually no one ever clicking on it, and inside of this dark Internet cave, it continues to update via the Washington City Paper blog feed. Again, the parody disappeared from our homepage on April 2, never to reappear. So what's the gripe here?

The second HuffPo objection is the headliner: The official was perturbed that the parody page that virtually no one has clicked on since April Fool's contains a link to the Huffington Post site. That bears repeating: The Huffington Post scolded us for linking to them.

Photo courtesy of eyeliam, Creative Commons Attribution License

PLUS: A stirring bonus segment in which Erik lobs a BIG ONE at CP's own glass house. No way are you touching that remote!

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.