In which Erik disses untrenchant Obama prophecies in the New York Times Magazine and scolds the Post for botching the your/you’re perplex. Family Magazine, meanwhile, sports a rather gruesome cover this week.

In other news, Erik gets a frio for gluing that Family Mag cover on the fuego side.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

* Read our complete election coverage or re-live the day in photos.

* New York Times recaps Obama’s morning after.

* Slate explains what happens now for the “gay couples who entered into legal marriages in California before the amendment passed.”

- WaPo’s Eugene Robinson tells us why we all lost it on Tuesday.

- In case you missed the Uncle Sam or Uncle Tom question—I love this reaction: “Really. Ralph Nader. What was that.” Also, since when has Nader invoked Uncle Sam?

- But Craigslisters are really clamoring for yesterday’s Post. Incidentally, if anyone has an extra copy, drop me a line.

* And in this newspaper:

- The fussy food issue! Tim Carman on the obsessive chef, Jule Banville on food stylists and a high-class chocolate chip, Ruth Samuelson on fake food allergies, and Mike DeBonis on the region’s fussiest menus.

- Tricia Olszewski on the latest in film.

- I shop at the nation’s newest pro-life pharmacy.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The partners of EatWell DC, which own the Commissary on P Street NW, requested and got what they wanted following Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema’s harsh early look at their new Logan Circle eatery: They got the Post to retract the First Bite article, which was originally published on Wednesday in the Food Section and is still available on Mediabistro.com. And they got this nice mea culpa in the Sunday paper:

Critic Tom Sietsema should have recused himself from reviewing the Commissary, a restaurant featured in the Oct. 29 Food section. He and one of the restaurant’s owners had earlier had a personal relationship. The Washington Post regrets that he reviewed this restaurant, and will remove the review from its online archive.

When contacted on Monday, EatWell DC managing partner David Winer said he didn’t want to comment any further on the matter. “I can’t be party in the destruction of another human being,” Winer said during our brief phone conversation. He said he had hoped to keep this ugly situation out of the media, which is why he didn’t send me (or other members of the local food media) the letter that he e-mailed to the 5,000 members of the EatWell DC mailing list. I told him that I had received a copy of the letter and would run it. Winer agreed that, at this point, the letter was essentially a public document. It runs below the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which The Hill and Pool & Spa give Erik the shivers. The Post, on the other hand, gives us a unique glimpse into the process behind their captions.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Ever since Tom Sietsema docked Citronelle a star in this year’s Washington Post dining guide, I had been dying to know how Michel Richard responded to the demotion. I mean, Sietsema took no pity on the city’s most famous restaurant, a perennial four-star performer no more. The critic wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Bruni, lead restaurant critic for the New York Times, laid himself bare in a Q&A session last week with readers. Over the course of five days, he answered some of the toughest questions that can be put to a professional eater, including those dealing with qualifications, how one selects restaurants to review, and of course, anonymity.

Whatever you think of Bruni—and he has enough detractors, it seems, to fill Madison Square Garden or at least paper the place with response ads—I think he handled these questions with the kind of intellectual finesse that you rarely find in chats and online boards. I was particularly interested in how Bruni would deal with the question of his qualifications, which, in terms of pure culinary training, are thinner than Mary-Kate Olsen.

Read the rest of this entry »

* The Washington Post on the search for a Fairfax police officer who went missing in the waters of Pohick Bay on Tuesday. Second Lieutenant Francis J. Stecco “had volunteered to play the role of a “victim” during a training session for a helicopter water rescue, though he was not a member of the dive team.”

* Attention Adobe Photoshop Elements 7: Do not fuck with Mr. T in D.C.

* Frozen Tropics updates you on recent homicide arrests North of Capitol Hill.

* Hookupmaps charts craigslist casual encounters on google maps. Logan Circle is bumpin’!

* And in this newspaper:

- Jason Cherkis on D.C.’s greatest unknown music legend, Mingering Mike. Check out Mike’s special introduction and the making of a love-song collaboration between Jason and Mike.

- Mixtec’s new Mexican-Italian take-out gets the Tim Carman treatment.

- Dave McKenna on why high-school homecoming is for nerds.

- In Loose Lips, at-large council candidate Michael Brown robo-calls the wrong guy.

- Why the death of Tony Hunter’s remains “unofficial.”

Photo by NCinDC.

* Headline of Politico’s VP debate preview makes me giggle. Plus: We watch for the crashes:

With all their potential for pitfalls and insta-classic moments, the pair has made the build up to the showdown, to take place here Thursday night at Washington University, feel more like a NASCAR race than a serious political forum: the audience may be tuning in as much in anticipation of cringe-inducing pile-ups as they are to watch the typical parry-and-thrust of debate.

* The Onion, on the other hand, makes me cringe.

* Financial bailout: U.S. Senate tries, tries again, this time with “higher tax breaks, FDIC limits,” reports the Washington Post: “The Senate last night easily approved a massive plan to shore up the U.S. financial system, but the measure faces a tougher test tomorrow in the House, where leaders will try to reverse the stunning defeat the legislation suffered earlier this week.”

* Some inside stuff: Atlanta Magazine’s Steve Fennessy, a veteran of City Paper owner Creative Loafing, lends some valuable insight into the inner workings of CL and CEO Ben Eason, who Fennessy calls “a tireless networker with a love of jargon.” The piece details a history of the Eason empire and its plans for the future. I’ll say this: Despite the bankruptcy crunch, Creative Loafing employees and alums have been producing some great work about Creative Loafing lately.

* Catch up on Wonkette’s gchat interview with “Washington’s Only Wasillan.” Spoiler: She’s a sarcastic liberal! She’s also boring enough to have to block during daytime hours to prevent that incessant gmail “ding” from disrupting your office banter. Pay $25 tonight to hang out with her at an Obama fundraiser at James Hoban’s, 1 Dupont Circle NW.

* And in this newspaper (still here!):

- Delaney, Greenwood, Janssen, and Wemple gang up on the Washington Nationals: Take my ticket, please!

- In Loose Lips: the Nats’ finances are fucked, too.

- Tricia Olszewski on Bill Maher’s Religulous and teenage love adventure Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

- The debut of our new real estate column, Ruth Samuelson’s Housing Complex.

Photo by Jeff Kubina

* In case you missed her: Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz on Palin’s Katie Couric interview. “Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in her third interview since joining the Republican presidential ticket, licked her finger and stuck it in the air, saying that Sen. Barack Obama might wait and “see what way the political wind’s blowing” on the Wall Street rescue package,” he writes.

* For those interested in competing in one of those high-stakes, emotionally wrenching reality television programs—and for those whose place of employment merely imitate them—Slate’s Joanna Weiss has your guide to how not to be the first contestant kicked off a reality show.

* New Columbia Heights has updates on the proposed neighborhood farmer’s market: At a recent ANC meeting, William Jordan proposed that the market be run by EMG Marketing Group and Change Inc. and be held three (!) times a week.

* Mr. T in D.C. bows respectfully to the employees of the Columbia Heights Subway sandwich shop:

I just wanted to thank them here today. By now, all the employees there recognize me, and know what kind of sandwich I usually get. . . . The two women who work there on weekday evenings are particularly helpful and pleasant. They recently told me they were from Eritrea; I wonder what their lives were like there? It’s not very far from lawless, violent places like Darfur and Somalia.

And in this newspaper:

* Arthur Delaney on D.C. Jail disaster readiness, terrorist threats, and the power of Google.

* Tim Carman tries to make a bagel, lies to City Paper staff.

* Mike DeBonis on the Nat’s stadium slush fund.

* … and the debut of Orr Shtuhl’s Beerspotter!

Image courtesy pingnews.

Wall Street’s in turmoil! Shareholder value is evaporating like sweat on Ben Bernanke’s pillow. And over at the Washington Post, those buyouts and departures that thinned the ranks of its elite corps of copy editors are having an effect. How else to explain this boner in Glenn Kessler and David S. Hilzenrath’s story about the death of the American economy?

Wait, did the spelling “alright” make it into the pages of the Washington Post?

No! Maybe that buyout and departures that thinned the ranks of the Post’s elite corps of copy editors only affected the Web, where we all know it’s OK to spell things wrong, as long as you’re first. Here’s a scan of today’s paper.

Convergence!

* Seven years later, a Pentagon memorial is unveiled. [Via Washington Post]

* The Examiner asks if we’re safer than we were in 2001.

* Via Politico: Republican foreign policy experts don’t have much to say on Palin; Obama and McCain call a 9/11 “truce”

* In alterna-9/11 news, Busboys and Poets kicks off the “9/11 Truth Film Festival” this evening at 6 p.m.

* In case you missed it: Check out Brightest Young Things‘ comprehensive Large-Hadron-Collider-Will Kill-Us-All Doomsday coverage from yesterday, complete with stellar crying baby photo accompaniment. And via DCist: How to tell if the Hadron Collider has destroyed the Earth yet.

* And in this newspaper:

- Arthur Delaney on winning and losing rec centers

- Jule Banville on the long, slow investigation of an Adams Morgan hate crime

- Mike DeBonis on why Kwame Brown loves Love (and the Park at 14th)

- Dave McKenna on the Redskins’ struggle to quit smoking

- And our arts & entertainment column, Show & Tell, meets its makers.

* Find your sex & gender roundup over at The Sexist.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

THIS WEEK: The Washington Times digs Democratic sex scandals; the Washington Informer misinforms; Bob Woodward writes a yawner; the Express does some textbook critter-pandering; and Erik withholds the vaunted ‘fuego’ designation.

Burned!

Trouble viewing?  Try the YouTube version.

- As Obama clinches the nomination, Slate catches up on the Biden ring tones. They’ve got “articulate and bright and clean” as well as the old favorite, “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

- Sick of the ‘ol convention twitter feed? Brightest Young Things is still live-blogging Project Runway.

- Behold: The Secret History of Pop Cesspool, Volume Eight. This time, P.C. engages in some mid-80’s clandestine pool jukeboxing.

- All Our Noise give us a back-to-school playlist inspired by Buffy.

- The Post’s Laura Yao critiques “The Re-Education of Women,” a new “guide to men” written by area man Dante Moore. “Maybe feminism is dead,” writes Yao, who fits in a number of funny Moore anecdotes before the kicker: “And so it is that in this messed-up world where relationships between men and women are plagued by misunderstandings, we are all to take lessons from a man who says his best decision as a teenager was to stop treating women well.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

* Burning question! Why employ a “guest blogger”? Get your own blog! It’s easy! Still, yesterday, Prince of Petworth debuted “The Restaurant,” a new series by a guest-blogger called Julian: a writer, waiter, and master of the simile. Writes “Julian”: “The staff, from what I noticed up front, was attractive and friendly, yet tightly knit–like a potato sack I desperately wanted to cut into with my personality and strong work ethic.” Never have I more appreciated the subtle artistry of the “Door of the Day.”

* Junior League harmonica player (and wheat-paster) Martin Thomas was ejected from China for protesting for a free Tibet during the Olympic ceremonies, BYT reports.

* Speaking of the Olympics: Despite my policy to ignore them at all costs, gymnastics events are better now, Slate says.

* Meanwhile, says WaPo, ping-pong gets the shaft!

* Local darlings U.S. Royalty have an inaugural video to go along with their inaugural EP.

* Tonight: If you don’t wear shorts, they’ll cut your pants off. Is that a promise?

Photo by S.³

Looks like D.C. police got a totally sweet makeover computer game for Christmas in 2000. “Chapter Five: A Secret Meeting” of the Post’s “Who Killed Chandra Levy” series includes an AP image of several doctored photographs the police circulated following Levy’s disappearance. The photographs show Levy’s face crudely Photoshopped beneath four completely ridiculous hairdos.

Find it here. You will not be disappointed.

One imagined makeover has Levy sporting a blonde, feathered Farrah Faucet cut. Two photos top Levy with short afros; one with bangs, one without. One photo appears to have molded Levy’s hair in the shape of a coonskin cap.

Good work, Posties. Readers, stay tuned for the next installment in “Unearthing Old AP File Photos: The Twelve Part Series.”