Great Photographer: Sergey Gogolev

I wanted to take a minute to recommend Sergey Gogolev, our wedding photographer. We had an unconventional wedding. Having both been married before we decided that we didn't really want a big traditional wedding, but we still wanted to have a ceremony so we would remember the day by more than just a date. We reserved the Old Stone House for the date, and had an old friend who is an ordained minister perform the ceremony in September.

So we set about looking for a professional photographer in May. It turned out to be a little trickier than we expected to find someone. Because our wedding was during peak season, many photographers weren't willing to commit to our 2 or 3 hour session, since they'd rather hold out for a full-day client. Or they would make us pay the full price for an all-day photography shoot.

After making some inquiries of a couple other photographers we knew through friends of friends, and not finding someone who was going to work out for our situation, N. found Sergey through an ad on Craig's List. We met with him in Georgetown and he spent an hour with us at the Old Stone House and walking around Georgetown to find other good settings for pictures. We liked him and he had a nice portfolio. He was also willing do the work for us for a reasonable price. So we gave him a deposit and crossed our fingers. He encouraged us to have the ceremony in the morning because it would avoid the harsh afternoon lighting. Unfortunately we couldn't make this happen for a lot of reasons, so we just hoped for the best.

When the day arrived, we ended up being an hour late to our own wedding. Good thing there weren't any guests. But Sergey was unruffled and we began everything around 3:00 PM, probably the worst time of the day for outdoor photography in the sun. Sergey, and his wife who was also shooting, took hundreds of pictures of us in various settings for a couple hours all around Georgetown. As the afternoon progressed we felt good about everything, he had so many interesting ideas for settings, poses, and so on. Even though we started an hour late, we were never rushed - quite the opposite, I think we had to cut things off because we were both about to drop from hunger by the time we finished!

Barely two weeks later we were able to look at the pictures online. We were stunned. The package we had agreed to included 50 prints that would be edited and color-corrected, but there were so many incredible pictures that we literally took a month to choose our favorites. He gave us more than we had agreed to in the end, and delivered the prints in a beautiful customized box with a DVD. At every step of the way he was accommodating, easy to work with, and gave us far more than we expected.

If you need a photographer I can't recommend Sergey highly enough. His skill and creativity are top notch and his fees are fair. And if the afternoon lighting was bad, well, you wouldn't know it from the pictures. We couldn't be happier.

N. put many of our favorites on Facebook so be sure to check them out there if you're a friend.

Fenty's Alter Egos

In the wake of Vincent Gray's victory over Adrian Fenty, we are starting to see blackberries show up on Craig's List for sale, and people are wondering who's going to stay and who's going to go.

The name that comes to most people's mind is Michelle Rhee, the hard-nosed, controversial school chancellor who was the centerpiece of Fenty's reform efforts. Few expect she'll be sticking around, since she pretty much said that as far as Fenty's concerned, she's made out of glue. But anything's possible.

In order to better understand the personalities, I've delved into their alter-egos in the hopes that we might reach some clarity on how these people might fit in with a Gray administration... or not.

Michelle Rhee: Ozzy Osbourne



Michelle Rhee has been about as divisive as a meat cleaver. Some people have lauded her as the second coming of Christ and the savior of a dysfunctional school system. Others think that she's the devil incarnate, and that her reforms are coming at too high a cost. We're not here to debate her effectiveness. We're here to figure out who she really is.

The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, fits the bill perfectly. He takes no prisoners, eats his young, and is batshit crazy. The trademark of his career, like Rhee, has been "reform," though in his case, that reform had more to do with the Betty Ford Clinic than the public school institution. Both have been sued and both have legions of ardent fans and rabid foes. Both have been the subject of movies, though I think that "The Decline Of Western Civiliation Part II: The Metal Years" will have a more enduring legacy than "Waiting for Superman."

The verdict for the Princess of Darkness? Leaving on the first crazy train. There's no way Gray would keep around someone who bites the head off bats.

Cathy Lanier: Sarah Connor

Police Chief Cathy Lanier has done pretty well for herself. Of course, that's not too hard when you replace someone like Charles Ramsey, best known for beating up and hog-tying about 400 hippies having a sit-in at Pershing Park.

Lanier's tenure has been marked by some high-profile, if publicity-stunt-like efforts to fight crime, such as All Hands On Deck, and the Trinidad checkpoints, since found unconstitutional. But through it all there's been a dramatic drop in crime. Never mind that it precisely matches the national trend.

Sarah Connor, similarly, tirelessley fights for the future of mankind, even as that effort often requires some rather unfortunate violations of due process and legality to get the job done. After all, the she knows the future that awaits us: the world will be taken over by machines. The lives of a lot of innocent people along the way are of little consequence, since without her heroic efforts, they'll all be dead in a few years anyway.

The verdict: stays on to fight the terminators. The phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range will become the standard issue service weapon in 2012.

Gabe Klein: Curly

"What is this you're doing?" "The elevator dance." "Elevator dance?" "Yeah, there's no steps to it." -- from The Three Stooges, "Soup to Nuts", 1930

The DDOT director's name is probably known to far fewer than the previous two, but he's made a reputation for himself nonetheless. A tireless advocate of cycling and alternative transit, he's been responsible for the bike-laneification of DC, pushed forward on the streetcar project, brought us bike sharing, and also installed a lot of speed bumps. In many ways, he took a conventional city and turned it into something of a 3-ring circus. There are all kinds of crazy parking meter machines everywhere, a new bicycle traffic light that is, er, interesting, and something called a barnes dance in chinatown that lets people walk willy-nilly through a busy intersection, to name a few.

Progress? Well, it's different, anyway. Gabe's nothing if not willing to give stuff a shot. Like Curly, he's got all kinds of wacky ideas, and unbridled enthusiasm. To the outsider, it may look like he doesn't know what he's doing, but still, things seem to work out for him. Mostly.

The verdict? Stays, though may need to buy a new suit. Gray's been a transit advocate, and even though Gabe might look like a hipster on his way to an interactive art show opening, he's not doing an awful job. He's also been smart enough to keep out of the fray, so there's no real public sentiment either for or against him.

And with that, our final contestant.

Peter Nickles: Gollum

You know, this one was just too easy. Little love will be lost on Fenty's much loathed Attorney General. The man, in a role that supposedly represents an oversight of the DC government, has blatantly polticized this role, literally campaigning for the mayor. He's defended corruption, and he's stonewalled Federal courts.

Like Gollum, it's not clear where he lives: is it in a cave in Chinatown, or down near the Great Falls in the Mines of Moria? He always seems to pop up when he's not wanted, and when you really need him, he promises to help you, but ends up screwing you and trying to steal your ring.

Verdict: Will grab a pile of gold, run, cackling, away from DC, and trip and fall into a volcanic vent on his way out.

Larry King: One Ring To Rule Them All...

All seven of them, that is.

You know, you'd think by now that women would realize that swearing an oath on that ring doesn't come with any guarantees.

Larry King's getting divorced again, and his wife claims that he slept with her little sister. That's just wrong, and as far as I'm concerned puts him in the Woody Allen category of hooking up with relatives of your partner. Of course Woody Allen actually married his girlfriend's daughter, so he still wins, but still.

Now that he's taken off the ring, we can finally see the invisible man as he really is.




Frodo: "You swore! You swore on the precious! Sméagol promised!"

Gollum: "Sméagol lied."

Toyota, I Still Love You

Toyota's been having a rough time of it lately. The Japanese auto giant which not long ago enjoyed an untouchable reputation for quality, durability and value, has been plagued by safety problems which have utimately led to massive recalls.

And lawsuits. Because if there's one thing that holds true, it's that the moment you admit there's a possible serious safety problem with something, the number of accidents related to that problem suddenly multiply like tribbles. This isn't to say that some of these aren't legitimate, but for every legitimate claim based on a safety defect in a product, you've got 10 more shysters lining up to sue some big corporation, on the hopes that they'll just throw a couple hundred large at them to go away.

Like this guy, who called 911 beacause his Prius was accelerating out of control. Police were dispatched somehow to save him and talk him down. Since all we'd heard on the news at the time was about sticky accelerators and failing brakes, it might sound plausible.

I, being an incredible skeptic, didn't believe it for a second. I pretty much expected stuff like this as soon as the Toyota problems made news. And as it turns out, his story is almost certainly a load of manure, of the sort I might carry in the back of my Toyota Tacoma pickup truck.

The obvious questions arise when thinking about someone who says they can't slow their car down. Like, did you try turning off the ignition? Did you try to use the brake? Or, assuming your brain is not complely siezed, did you try putting it in neutral? No, instead of using any of these obvious methods of slowing down your car in an emergency, you somehow manage to call 911 instead. Isn't that what everyone does when their car is careening out of control? Obviously, this man is of stout mind and spirit, because he was able to keep his juggernaut, throttle fully opened, in control with one hand on the wheel, while making phone calls with the other.

The thing is, even if your accelerator was glued to the floor, there are any number of ways that you could stop your car from moving. Unless, of course, you goal is to take advantage of a well-publicized safety problem for the purpose of extorting money from a large corporation. And this guy had about $700,000 good reasons to try a desperate stunt like this. Oh yes - and his car loan for the Prius was in default, too.

But moving on to my own Totota. The fine vehicle pictured here rolled off the assembly line in 1995 and began it's life in the harsh environs of Maine. It passed through to another sibling's stewardship briefly, and then ended up in my posession in 1998. I have taken rather poor care of it ever since.

This nearly 16-year old vehicle has about 86,000 miles on it. That's not much for a vehicle of this age. But far from being a garage queen, she has paid dearly for every mile. Her trips generally involve: hauling trash to the dump, moving furniture, dirt, rocks, tiles, bricks. You get the idea. In fact, about the only time this truck has the rare privilege of a trip without a bunch of crap in the back, is when there's a foot of snow on the ground, and it's used in 4WD to get around when other vehicles cannot.

And yet in the 12 or so years I've owned this car, exactly two things have gone wrong that are not "routine" -- that is, brakes, oil changes, tires, and exhaust. The first was that the starter motor failed. This was the only time it hasn't started in 15 years. I replaced it myself in about an hour, the new part was $100.

The other time, one of the leaf springs on the rear suspension cracked. I can't imagine how something like that could have happened. This was the time that she's actually been to an auto repair shop. The one time. I had the leaf springs upgraded at the time so I could haul even heavier crap around.

This weekend, I decided it was time for her annual check-up. I had bought rear brake shoes a year ago and never got around to installing them. I took the brakes apart and as it turned out, they were fine. I've never changed the brake shoes in the last 10 years so that surprised me. But since the parts I bought a year ago turned out to be wrong, it's just as well.

I also flushed the cooling system, something you're supposed to do every few years, and I had also never done. The coolant, typically flourscent green, looked like dirty motor oil. That was probably good to take care of.

Finally, I crawled around under the car and cleaned up some rusty areas of the frame and sprayed it with rust neutralizing paint. The new exhaust pipe I put on five years ago was also rusted through near the end and about to fall off, so I clamped it back together with an extra exhaust clamp I had lying around. That will probably hold it for another year or so until the pipe rusts through completely.

I probably spend a total of about 6 hours a year maintaining this car. Sunday's four-hour session was the most time I've spent in three years. I think it's the only thing I've done other than change the oil. I may have washed it three times in 12 years.

I have a dozen stories about how that truck has saved my butt over the years, but this post has already grown way too long in exactly the way that I recently said my posts would not. So I will close here. Toyota haters, feel free to go buy a GMC or a Honda or an Audi or whatever you want. But when the warranty expires, I bet you'll wish you hadn't.

National Marathon from Columbia Heights

By some miracle, N. and I managed to get to 11th and Harvard around 8 AM to see all those crazy people running the National Marathon last Saturday morning. There were almost no spectators other than ourselves, which was surprising. I thought the Columbia Heights crossing would be a pretty popular place to watch, but apparently I was wrong. But the lack of a crowd made for some nice pictures of the race. You can see more pictures on flickr.

I think he's running faster than they are...




I'm Batman.




"Yeah, the race is going pretty well... I paid my taxes online at mile four, but I haven't updated my facebook status since mile 6."




No Loitering. And That Woman Is Hard Core.




Look in the dead-center of the picture. Is there nothing that cyclists won't do??




I just like this picture.

Ironic Thursday

Worst Perk Ever

DC Depot during Snowmageddon.




We Really Hate Unsolicited Faxes. We Swear.

Used the fax machine at work for the first time in at least a year, and saw this on the top of the pile of incoming faxes (which nobody ever checks since nobody ever gets one).




My fiancee gave me this.

... and the "naughties" are finally over

Note: Click Naughty Cat At Your Own Risk

Hope all you cats have a great time tonight! Catch you on the flip side.

*Naughties: Best term I've seen so far to describe this awkward decade. You know, like the eighties, but with "naught" for the zero. Funny, huh? Not so much? Well, screw you. What do you call it, the zeros? The 2000's? Whatever, I call it the naughties. Anyway, who cares, it's over in a few hours.

Stange and Wonderful Things

A collection of completely unrelated things.

On one of our routine trips to DCUSA recently, I saw this pasted to a light pole near 14th and Park. Holy dog boy, batman!! What the devil is it?




Then this morning at the office, on my way back from an urgent snack stop, I saw, perhaps, the cutest thing I have ever seen:



I found myself with a bunch of apples a couple weeks ago that turned out to be kind of mealy. Since I can't stand wasting food, I ventured into previously uncharted cooking territory. I made an apple pie. I happened to have a pie crust in the freezer from some thanksgiving or Christmas dinner past... and it was delicious.

So this past weekend, I decided to take it up a notch and combine the delciousness of apple pie with the greasy goodness of deep-frying. Apples, sugar, and biscuit dough, as it turns out, are ridiculously good.

Things I've Seen Lately

A cell-phone photo journal of slightly strange things afoot in Columbia Heights and thereabouts in the last couple weeks.

Hashers in Crystal City. Yeah, it's raining too.



For these guys, it's ALWAYS halloween. Or maybe they went to Wesleyan.



Seriously, what's up with the creepy paint jobs?



Cyclist running red light on 16th Street. Okay, not that weird. At least he's in the sidewalk.



Cyclist not running a red light. Now THAT'S weird.



People hangin' at the new Plaza in Columbia Heights. Cool.

A year goes by so quickly...

If you are reading this in google reader, the captions look screwy. Click through.

One year ago today. Presumably, before and after:







Nine months ago:








Six months ago:









Three months ago:








One month ago:

Metro: Love / H8

Seriously Metro, why the Mount Pleasant hate?

"None of the federal, Maryland, Virginia or D.C. laws apply to us," said [WMATA] Vice Chairman Peter Benjamin. "That's the way it is."

WMATA decided, unceremoniously, to shut down Metro at three Northern Virginia stations over Labor Day Weekend. This interesting move was predicated on the need to perform major surgery on the tracks between Crystal City and National Airport. Inconveniently, I was flying to Maine in and out of National Airport during the window in which Metro would not be open.

This was irritating, mostly because the public announcement was made Tuesday of last week. There was, understandably, a significant reaction from the public upon learning with very short notice that it would be inconvenient or impossible to ride Metro to the airport. WMATA held a conference call on Thursday with its top staff to discuss the communication shortcomings in the wake of this blunder. In the ultimate irony, Metro, which is a publically-funded system, decided that the conference call would be secret.

Getting There

Being able to take Metro to National is one of the main benefits of flying from National, and much of the reason why I'm willing to pay extra to use that airport. So suddenly learning that that benefit had evaporated a few days before my travel did not make me happy in the way that a bank error in your favor does.

Metro offered shuttle service to and from the airport from the Pentagon station. Since my flight left at 8:40 AM on Saturday morning, and Metro opens at 7, this seemed like a dicey proposition at best. We would not be taking Metro. Nor was I excited about the idea of finding a cab at 7:30 AM on a Saturday. The last option, driving, seemed equally risky, since who knows how many people would have to drive for the same reason, making parking questionable. Besides which, I didn't really want to drop another 50 bucks or so on airport parking. After many phone calls and emails, I found a friend who was miraculously both in town over the holiday weekend, and could be convinced to get up at 6:30 to bring us to the airport.

At the airport, we were approached by a reporter from WJLA who quizzed us about the metro closures and how it had affected our travel plans. Yes, actually, it did. It wasn't the end of the world, and it worked out. But it would have been a lot less stressful if we had known well in advance about the closure so we didn't have to scramble to figure out a way to get to the airport. Obviously they did not decide to perform this work only four days before the weekend. This sort of maintenance work is probably scheduled months in advance. Yet nobody, not even some top Metro officals, knew until Tuesday. I can think of no excuse for this, whether it was an oversight or a deliberate act. It is unacceptable.

WMATA later updated their web site to include a more detailed explanation of the closures, and an explanation that Labor Day was in fact historically the weekend when the fewest people ride Metro. You know what? I was a lot less confounded and irritated when I actaully was treated like a rational human being and given an explanation for why this had to be done. Why couldn't you just be straight with everyone at up front? And a few months ago?

Returning from National on Monday morning, we decided to save cab fare since we weren't in a hurry and see how things went with Metro. We followed the yellow signs in National to the metro shuttle pickup. At least until we encountered a sign that was pointing in the direction we had just come. Nice. Luckily, the centripital signage all seemed to converge upon the infromation desk at the airport, so when we found ourselves slightly baffled as to where we should be going, we just asked the lady. The instructions were pretty obvious. Go outside and the bus will pick you up at the beginning of the platform.

If I had been a little more coherent at that moment, after getting up at 4 AM to make my 6 AM flight from Portland, I probably wouldn't have even tried to follow the signs in the first place, but I did because they were there. The busses were exactly where you would expect them to be: on the curb outside baggage claim, with all the other busses. So why on earth did they install a baffling, conflicting maze of signs in the airport, when they could have just had far fewer signs that said "Exit Baggage Claim For Metro Shuttle" or something like that? Or just "Go Outside Where The Busses Are?"

Metro: Communicate. Really.

Metro seems to have a problem with basic communication. Here's my report card for how they did in communicating this service interruption.

Timeliness: fail. 4 days ahead of time for a major holiday weekend? No es bueno.

Quality: fail. No explanation given for the closure at fist.

Usefulness: fail. The signs at National were confusing, conflicting, and franky, unnecessary. Rather than install a maze of arrows pointing us (or failing to do so) to the same place we always go, why not just tell us to go outside?

Plays well with others: N/A. Metro doesn't have any friends left.

Once we got to the metro shuttle, the service was remarkably efficient. Metro advised on their web site that the shuttle would add about 15 minutes to the trip. You know what? It did. There were plenty of shuttles waiting, they left often, and we were at Pentagon exactly 15 minutes after boarding the shuttle.

Here's some really simple advice, which I can hardly believe is necessary. Communicate. I love Metro. It's a great system, better than most in this country. I also understand that maintenance is necessary and you will need to interrupt service sometimes.

But if you can't grasp the most basic concepts of telling us what is going on, you come out smelling like garbage. To turn garbage into roses, all you need to do is stop acting like a communist dictator and let us know what's going on.

Oh yeah, Maine

It was awesome! And altogether too short. There was, unfortunately, no stay of execution for those lobsters above.

You need to see my ID?

I was at the Red Derby last night talking to one of the regulars, C, on the patio outside. He was sitting at the table nearest the front door, and I was on the other side. As we were talking, a couple kids walked up and volunteered their IDs to C. C is black.

C politely brushed them off, informing them that he didn't work there. The girl who had first pushed her ID at him, embarrassed, turned to me and asked me the same. After they determined that there was no ID checker at the door (they just check at the bar when it's early) they went inside.

Soon thereafter, another guy did the same thing. After being told by C that he didn't work there, the guy quickly backtracked and said, "Oh, I'm sorry I saw your ID and I thought...". C had an ID badge hanging from his belt for his place of work.

C and I had a chuckle about these incidents and wondered aloud, would that keep happening if we switched spots? Probably. I've had this happen to me before if I've been sitting or standing alone by the door at a bar. C's a pretty big guy, too, which maybe gives him more of a bouncer appeal. On the other hand he was also a lot better dressed than the average bouncer.

We didn't test the theory. But what was funny about this was the reaction that the people had when they found out they'd assumed that a black dude by the door was checking IDs, when he was not.

The first girl immediately found the next closest person, me, and asked me if I worked there. She gets points for a fast recovery. If I ask the white guy next to him, it'll defuse the assumption that I asked him because he was black.

The second guy stuttered out some story about seeing his ID badge. Sorry - fail on that one. Have you ever heard of a bar that issues photo IDs to their staff? I haven't.

Both people quickly came up with a cover for their blunder, with varying degrees of success. This is not a story about racism. It's not about assumptions based on skin color. I'm white and I've had people shove their IDs in my face plenty of times when sitting or standing by the door to a bar.

Rather, it's a story about the mistaken-assumers being so embarrassed by their assumptions, that they tried to cover or explain it. I've never had that happen to me before after telling someone who's presenting me with an ID that I didn't work there.

There's no moral to this story or no judgment about the state of color-blindness in the world (or at least Columbia Heights) today. I think the most we can read into this is that people are actually really sensitive to the appearance of racism in their own actions. Their little foibles were honest mistakes. But their reactions showed that they were acutely aware of how it might have appeared once their mistake was revealed.

I found the image above on a blog called Tasty Booze while googling "bouncers" for this post, and was thrilled to discover it is our very own from the 9:30 club. What an awesome picture.

.... And It's Over

Winter, that is. Even though the weather is still cooperating fitfully, the DC entertainment season has officially begun and I had a completely packed week.

It started Wednesday on H Street. I went to the Pug with a friend and ate a surprisingly edible "bangers and hash." The Pug has no real kitchen, so everything is made either on a George Foreman grill or in the microwave. So we're talking a lot of paninis here and a few other choices. This sounds dodgy at best, but it actually kinda works out. All the food has been prepared in advance with care and the choices are oriented towards this sort of prep. I mean, this isn't haute cuisine but for quick bar fare it's really not bad. I have always had incredibly friendly and accomodating service at The Pug and Wednesday was no exception - this is a great neighborhood spot.

The Pug stop was followed by the Palace of Wonders amateur burlesque show, in which a friend was performing. This was my first time to the Palace, actually, and it's a really unique and interesting place. The picture above is of the bar facing the street. The Palace seems to have adopted a cat and I was trying to capture the mascot sitting on the end of the bar with this picture. You can only see a shadow but I like the picture anyway. As for the show itself, it's hard for me to say if it was especially good or not, because I have no basis for comparison. But the performers were all enthusiastic and the costumes were great. I was thoroughly entertained.


Move on to Friday and the first installment of the Hirshhorn's After Hours series this year. This one featured a number of large scale projections by "video artist Ricardo Rivera and the Klip Collective," which made for an outstanding and visually interesting backdrop to the party. While the off-and-on rain throughout the evening tempered things slightly, it was still very well attended and a great time. This one was structured a little differently than past events. All tickets were sold in advance, and it was sold out a week before the event. The price also increased from $10 to $18 -- still a great deal for an evening of entertainment and a chance to see an exhibit with a buzz.

Onc criticism - they really need to work on the "check in" process. For past events, only part of the tickets were sold in advance. Some were held back for sale at the door. So if you had an advance ticket, you generally got in pretty fast, while people who came without tickets (suckers) had to wait in a long line. But this time, you had to have an advance ticket. No more VIP status.

Naturally, most people buy their tickets online. But there is never an option to receive printed tickets, so the vast majority of attendees will have to go to will-call. The only way to get actual tickets is to buy them at the box office, in advance, in person. There is also a security checkpoint that is a huge bottleneck - it seems like there's only a single portal that every one of the attendees must pass through before you can even go to will-call. My group kinda snuck around the security line (yeah, it was really secure...) with a little help from one of the empployees there who was probably breaking the rules to alleviate the obvious backup. So we were lucky. But there's no reason for this quarterly event to continue to be inadequately prepared to handle the crowd on entrance. It would also help a lot if you could actually get printed (or downloaded) tickets online, eliminating the fairly ridiculous will-call line. These issues should be easily resolvable.

Finally, Saturday, my friend Sara reserved the upstairs at Stoney's for her going away party. Sara's about the only person I know who's been in DC as long as I have and has decided to pull up her tent and move to Seattle. We will all miss her, but true to form she threw an awesome party. Everyone came out and in fact as of about 1:30 AM it wasn't clear that people were willing to let her leave... much love. We will miss you Sara. I think you'll be back one day... nobody can truly resist the black hole that is DC. I'm keeping my fingers crossed anyway.

So I will close with a kind of arty picture of the bar at Stoney's, since anyone who doesn't know my friends probably won't get much out of a bunch of random people having too much fun (and probably too much to drink.) The rest of my weekend was overwhelmed with long-overdue chores, favors, and other necessities of life that have been building up. Some progress was made, luckily, though the list remains long.

So until next time. I have been meaning to post about Ruby Tuesday's in Columbia Heights. That will most likely be my next post. Ruby Tuesday's rocks. No, I am not kidding. More later.

Val Kilmer To Save Cats And Dogs, Get Drunk

Disclaimer: The primary purpose of this post is to get the goddawful snuggie picture off the front page of my blog. Since I can't come up with anything especially useful to say right now, instead I am going to make fun of bad/unlucky/drunk celebrity photographs instead.

Via facebook a friend made me aware of a fundraiser for the Washington Humane Society, a worthy cause. Unfortunately, I'm a little short with regards to the $2k buy-in for a VIP table. But I do plan to adopt another cat soon.

What is not so good is the picture of Val Kilmer. The former hearthrob is looking, shall we say, crusty. I love Val Kilmer. And I am not just making this up so I can get away with making fun of him, see this post for proof. But seriously man, what the hell happened?

This is your warning, Val. I, the ghost of Drunk Celebrity Future, give you one final chance at redemption. You have two choices. You can lay off the Jack Daniels, hit the gym, cut your hair, and become an aging heartthrob, like Harrison Ford.

Or you can stay on the party train and end up like Nick Nolte.

And if, in fact, this just happens to be a bad picture, then apologies. But you REALLY should fire your agent.

Oh, fine.

It would have been better with a light saber. What the hell is up with my hair? Thanks for looking out!!

Worst DC Road Sign Ever

I am still fighting off some kind of plague that I most likely contracted from spending all day Tuesday in the freezing cold in close proximity to thousands of disease-carrying tourists, so I don't feel like finishing my inauguration story just yet. But as a brief aside, a complaint about DC roads.

DC's network of highways must be absolutely baffling for tourists (including those who live in MD and NoVa). This in itself is not a problem; quite the opposite, it's what makes DC so car-friendly. I depend on this fact to get around town with relative ease even during peak traffic times. Seems most people have never heard of such roads as Rock Creek Parkway, Broad Branch Road, Oregon Avenue, Kansas Avenue, to name a few very useful routes that are, to varying degrees, sparsely traveled. Hey, your "lost" is my gain. Have fun sitting in traffic on 16th Street or 395, suckers.

But there is a line. My walk under the Capitol last Tuesday gave me an opportunity to photograph the most egregious of all roadsigns in DC. And believe me, from the almost-invisible brown signs on RCP or Beach Drive, to the upside-down Irving Street Westbound sign when exiting North Capitol Street, there are many candidates. But this one takes the cake, both in terms of it's utter uselessness, and the consequences when you go the wrong way as a result. Or alternatively get in to an accident trying to figure out which way to go.



Behold, the Exit from 395 North to either Massachusetts Avenue or New York Avenue.

As you will note, at the position I took this photograph, I am already way too far ahead to legally pick a side. At this point, all I can tell is that the left lane goes to Baltimore. Even as a long-time DC resident, that is still not enough information while traveling at 35 MPH (or faster) to figure out which side I should be on, since I am not typically going to Baltimore at this point.

By the time you can actually read the street sign, to figure out which way is which, you are staring down a giant concrete median and you've got a swath of no-man's road at least 20 feet wide to dart across to the other side if you got it wrong. If that's even remotely practical because there are a gazillion cars going 50 MPH all around you.

Seriously. Why the HELL isn't this sign placed, oh, say, ON THE EMPTY WALL DIRECTLY ABOVE ME? Or anywhere else that is actually at a point that can be seen in advance of when you have to decide?

And worst of all -- when you make the wrong choice, especially if there's a lot of traffic (which there often is down there) you are screwed. It can take 20 minutes or more to recover from that blunder.

FAIL.

Had enough Barackalypse pictures yet? I didn't think so.

A series of personal and logistical problems prevented me from posting any sooner so I hope you are not completely sick of seeing YABIRAPs (Yet Another Blogger's Inauguration Ramblings and Pictures). I know, an inauguration post? On Friday? That's so Wednesday morning. Well, I've been sick and my camera had been temporarily detained, but I assure you mine are so awesome, you will not believe that I was even at the same event you were.

The way in. Can you say clusterf*ck? I thought you could. We boarded the metro at Petworth shortly after 7:00 AM, admittedly a bit on the late side, but I figured the ghetto line would be all right. Curiously, it took 10 minutes for the next train to arrive at Petworth, but the station wasn't all that crowded so it was OK. The train, on the other hand, was a mess. It took an hour to get to L'Enfant Plaza, our chosen destination. Unfortunately, the train didn't stop at L'Enfant Plaza. Without so much as a comment from the driver, we cruised straight on to the Waterfront station. This really wasn't that bad, since I heard that problems at L'Enfant stranded some people there for an hour. But it is a curious feeling when you are denied egress at a station that's supposed to be open.

At left: Green line between Columbia Heights and U Street. No, nobody got on this particular train after Columbia Heights. Everyone was cheerful and civilized, though. Despite the train stopping for 5 or 10 minutes at a time between stations, and the smell of burning brakes and overstressed elecrtic motors being especially strong, it actually kinda worked.

Moral of the story: Next time, take the bus. At least you can get out whenever you want.

Metro to Mall. After wending our way to the supposed only entrance to the Silver area, where I and 7,222,353 other people had tickets, we found what appeared to be the single bottleneck entrance to the security area. After following the line back from there for at least a mile and still not finding the end, I questioned whether waiting in that particular line would be the most effective method to getting into the mall before Spring.

Fortunately, the security was fairly disorganized, and after approaching the bottleneck from a different angle (that is, Independence Avenue rather than 3rd Street) we were directed directly into the foray. At this point, the current was fairly strong and we were at the surprisingly efficient security checkpoint in 10 minutes or so.

On the way to the 3rd and Independence entrance. I wondered if they slept through the whole thing?

I have to say, I am sure that it's very challenging to manage a million people on the mall, but there were some really stupid decisions made. The security was well staffed and could have handled a volume far greater than was coming through at 9:30 AM when we got there. But the mass of people trying to get to the Silver Area was mostly being forced through a series of intentional bottlenecks that slowed down the crowd way too much. We all know the result: thousands of people never made it in.

Also, on the way out after the ceremony, all those bottlenecks were still in place. If there had been any kind of emergency, it would have been a deadly stampede. As it was, it took an hour to leave, with people climbing over jersey barriers and fences to get out. Really bad planning. All those obstacles should have been removed after 10:30 or 11, and they should never have been as constricting as they were.

On The Mall.

Yeah you seen this picture before, it was about like that. Awesome crowd mostly. There was one time when I was trying to meet up with my friends who were all of 30 feet away, so I said excuse me to a largish lady in front of me and asked if I could get by her to join my friends. Her response? "NO!"

Wow. That was a first. The lady to her right was equally taken aback and let us by her instead. Ironically, once past that wall of people, there was much more space towards the center of the field. All those people who were just being obstinate were actually making things more crowded for themselves. Oh well. With few exceptions, most people were very nice and the energy was good. Other than the one bitchy woman, I was pretty surprised at how many people thought it was cool to just spread out your picnic blanket and lay down in the middle of the biggest mob in history. What do you think this is, woodstock? Even more surprisingly, some folks were backing them up. I got chastized for jumping over someone's legs who was all sprawled out, taking up about six times as much space as everyone else. She's sitting down! You can't go there!! The hell I can't... I didn't see her reservation for that particualar 4 foot by 4 foot piece of land, so get the hell up, or suffer the consequences.

Getting Out. As I mentioned before, it was (or could have been) quite disastrous. There were barriers everywhere - fences, Jersey barriers, busses parked across the road, you name it. And since you couldn't see anything except for heads as far as the eye could see, it was totally unclear which way one should be going to avoid said obstacles. You got dead-ended constantly. A single gunshot or detontation of any kind would have turned this into a bloodbath of a stampede since there were no clear pathways out.

The satellite pic here was taken in the morning while the crowd was trying to enter. The security checkpoints are the while horizontal line between the two "mobs". As you can clearly see, the crowd is quite thin outside security, but is tremendously bottlenecked before that point. It was never especially crowded inside security compared to how it was outside - they could have allowed a much greter flow with no trouble. Once past the bottlenecks there were minimal lines for security - some entrances were wide open.


Once free of the "exit" we made our way to the 395 tunnel, which was open to pedestrians. At least they did something right - this was a relatively painless way to get north of the mall (and to glorious freedom!). And besides, walking on on-ramps and through a six-lane tunnel isn't something you get to do every day. It made for some very interesting pictures.

More to come....