My friend Nelson recently talked about how DC lives in some sort of paranoiac state, all due to an Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. Couldn’t be a bigger load of crap. I mean, heck, the author got three quarters of his facts wrong!
I love living here in the DC Area. I love seeing the Capitol, the White House, the Mall, the Key Bridge, the Potomac, heck, I even love the ugly ass FBI Building that’s three blocks from my office downtown. As my friend Lisa said to me last night, some people just aren’t cut out to live here.
I’m sure glad that I am!

Tomorrow night at the 9:30 Club, legendary guitar hero Buckethead will grace DC with the power of Buckethead’s Giant Robot, his current touring trio.
For the uninitiated, Buckethead has been a mysterious figure in music for 2 and a half decades playing with the likes of Bill Laswell, Les Claypool, Praxis and most recently Guns & Roses. A diverse group of a musicians for sure, but Buckethead has the chops to play with them all.
Buckethead is the Lone Ranger of guitars. He has built up a legend around himself comprised of such bizarre antics as hiding his identity under a KFC bucket for 25 years and doing martial arts exhibitions between sets at his concerts.
Earlier dates of this tour have delivered a powerhouse of instrumental guitar covering a variety of styles, a nun-chuck display leading into the encore set and a guest lecture on Taxidermy. I’m not joking.
I’m all over this.
$15 @ 9:30 Club 7-21-04

My favorite DC spectator sport isn’t hockey, or football, or soccer. Oh no, my favorite sport to watch in DC is altogether different.
I love watching the cops pull trucks and buses over on Route 110 next to the Pentagon.
Route 110 toward Alexandria goes within spitting distance of the Pentagon. Seriously, from the passenger seat of my VW Beetle, you could probably throw a football through a window onto Rummy’s desk as we passed by.
So after 9/11, of course, that kind of proximity to the Pentagon made the Defense Department nervous- after all, it’s the side that didn’t get destroyed, and they’d understandably like to keep it that way. As you drive by there now, there’s a guy in an armored vehicle with an anti-tank weapon mounted on top. Usually, it’s pointed up, or at the ground, but you know something’s up when he’s got it pointed at the road.
Now there are cops stationed in marked cars, blue lights flashing, up and down that stretch of 110. This is frustrating, because everyone slows down when they see them even though the cops aren’t there for speeding violations. But it’s entertaining, because they are there to pull over large vehicles.
Trucks and buses are no longer allowed on 110 because it would be too easy to pack them full of something volatile and drive them into the side of the Pentagon. I guess my Beetle doesn’t frighten them so much.
Most of the tour bus operators and professional truck drivers have gotten used to the restrictions and have found alternate routes to get where they’re going. You don’t see too many of them pulled over anymore.
They did once have to pull over the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, because it’s classified as a “truck.” It frightened the driver, too. I’m sure the officers were just following the rules, but come on, the Weinermobile? A potential security threat to the Pentagon? Driven by terrorists? Why, the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile is as American as… as… well, hot dogs!
But then there’s moving season. Kids moving into dorms. Interns moving in and out of their temporary housing. Transient twentysomethings reaching the ends of their leases. And for some reason, they or their parents think the giant “NO TRUCKS ALLOWED ON RT 110″ or “TRUCKS MUST EXIT NEXT RIGHT” signs apply to all the trucks but the ones they happen to be driving. So they rent their Ryder trucks and head obliviously down 110, and get irritated when the local constabulary tells them that they aren’t allowed to drive past the Pentagon.
So whenever I’m stuck behind some guy driving a behemoth moving truck on 110, I whoop, cheer, and let out a Nelson Munz-like “Ha-hah” as he gets pulled over.
I’m sure karma will catch up to me eventually.

No offense to you New Yorkers out there, but when they nicknamed New York “the city that never sleeps,” they must have forgotten that D.C. exists. D.C. truly never stops moving. (Well, unless you’re on the Beltway.) Everywhere you go, there’s something happening. There are so many things to do here that it’s impossible to do them all.
I’ve lived in a D.C. suburb my entire life, and I haven’t done nearly enough in the city. Through this metblog, I hope to learn as much as I teach. (Is that deep or what?) If nothing, it’ll force me to pay attention to what’s going on in the city. (That’s a good thing, right?)