photo courtesy of VDOT

Heard it on the radio earlier today – VDOT’s going to have a fair number of lane closures on I-395 between now and the weekend, when they’ll pause again for holiday traffic. Hopefully you’re taking some much-deserved time off and don’t need to be anywhere in a hurry, but if you do – plan ahead.

Well, Hello everybody, and namely those regular Metblog readers. I figured I’d slip in my “hello” under the radar of the “holidays” (and aren’t there so many of them) to all those dilligent readers who don’t have the local “use or loose” and are stuck at work this week.

As a slight introduction, I’ve been a DC area resident off and on since the early 1990s (enough to see the changes), and have firmly ensconced myself in the various roles of the area (single/married, non-profit/government/private-sector, scene-ster/old-guy) and have come to love all that was, is, and can be DC. I hope the folks here will tolerate the new/old blood. I’m not sure I’m the regular mold folks may be expecting, more of a lurker than a pontificator but definitely somebody who has something to say now and again.

I accept Tom’s and the rest of the DC Metroblog’s staff challenge to come up with those pithy three articles a week and hope my perspective on the area, it’s life, culture, and of course, politics, may be fun and entertaining. Glad to join the team, and hope to see you all in the “bitsphere” in the coming weeks.
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I’ve talked about my time Up North probably as often as… way too much, I know. It’s just when you have a place to generally consider your “roots” and the place you’ve landed is so different, it’s hard not to make comparisons – not in terms or good versus bad, just in differences.

As in past years, I’m in the Detroit area spending the days around Christmas with my family. I made the drive up the middle of last week (having to pay my own tolls, unfortunately) during a warming period for most of the north and northeast. I left DC with weather in the low 60′s and arrived in Michigan with temperatures warm for the season – high 40′s to low 50′s.

Let’s just say we’ve gotten back to normal here and are experiencing “real” lows – and the low temperatures here land on us around 4 pm. Basically I’ve determined that my blood has thinned living in DC. I don’t mind it, it’s nice to live there now after 5.5 years and not only believe, but really feel as if the mid-40′s is “really cold.” It’s not, but it feels like that to me now. It’s not even close to cold, but after a few days here I readjust to my winter skin. Some good solid mid-20′s can only do me good for another week.

DC changes a lot of things about a lot of people, but one I did not expect was making me a Winter Woos.

Happy Holidays from the Authors of Metroblogging DC. May your season be one of joy, peace, good will and good friends and family. The photos here are from various flickrstreams of our authors, and some that you have posted to our Flickr Group. Thanks especially to Max Cook, Maria K., bossa67 and Doug Clifton.

The music is Sufjan Stevens’ Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, and is my favorite version of my favorite Christmas carol.

I’ll have a writeup about our experience seeing She Loves Me later today, I hope (executive summary: very good, you should go, it’s the last week) but for the moment I’ll just comment on Arena Stage’s odd advertising.

Uh, what? Did they pick this up at a white elephant sale when the now-defunct WB network dumped their old collateral before becoming the CW? From a 2004 (when this sucked the first time) writeup: “During tonight’s shows, the WB had the words “Fresh Episode” in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Hmm… Is that just fresh as in new or fresh as in “funky fresh”?”

Seriously Arena: ditch this phrase. It was lame when it was original, ie, not now that you’re using it.

You know me, I’m not the kind of guy who likes complaining. But I thought I’d take a moment of your time this holiday season to once again point out how horrible the US Postal Service is.

I got a note in my mailbox the other day telling me that there was a package that required my signature. It said that I could sign the note and they’d deliver the package. But turns out that’s not true. The mailman merrily came and went several times ignoring the signed note. Now, I know the kind of packages people send me are likely to be baked goods or nailbombs or frozen human heads; the kinda things that don’t “keep”, so after waiting a few days I decided it would be simpler to just pick the package up from the posst office myself.

Now, god forbid the post office was actually open any reasonable hours. I guess most of the people that use the post office are unemployed hobos so Post Office managers don’t feel the need to stay open past the time normal people get off work. But I figure I can swing by on my way into the office this morning and I won’t be all that late.
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If you’re an electronica music fan like I am, and you know your DC bands, then of course you love Thievery Corporation. Even if you don’t live in DC and you’ve seen such movies as Garden State, you’ve heard their music and chances are you liked it.

I attended their concert at the 9:30 Club last night, part of an unprecedented four night, sold out performance that rocked the club down to its timbers (should have brought my ear plugs). Part of the draw to TC for me is that they appeal to so many different audiences due to the fact that they incorporate so many different sounds in their music. In attendance last night were hip hop dudes, yuppie suburbanites, and even people over the age of 50. Tell me, what concert are you going to see a mix like that? Jay Z? Kenny G? Neil D? I think not.

While the energy of last night’s performance was amazing, it slowly turned into a reggae festival. Don’t get me wrong, I like reggae as much as the next freedom fighter, but I can only take so much of it. My friend and I decided to cut it short after the 18th ear drum pounding, dreadlock flinging, reggae-esque song. Overall, there were some amazing guest singer performances and for those of you who were lucky enough to see one of their shows, how about that belly dancer, huh?

PS – Sorry for the low quality photo. Camera phones are not cut out for concert photography (or much else for that matter).

The winter solstice has come and gone, so now the nights will start getting shorter again. While I always take that as happy news, it’s hard to get too excited about. Really, you’re celebrating finally hitting the ground after a long fall for no other reason than the fact that it’s all up from here.

There’s some interesting stuff surrounding the solstice though. It should be no surprise that the math folks have formulas for all the night & day times, though I won’t claim to fully understand them – I’m a computer guy, we do applied math. I can calculate that for you, given the formula, but you’re gonna have to get someone else to interpret it. Which, thankfully, they have. There’s a neat little graphic over here down under “function graphs” showing the change in day length at our latitude (which is about 39N so you don’t have to google it like I did…)

(an hour passes…)

Okay, I just pissed away an hour fiddling with Excel and graphs. Fun! Maybe I’ll upload it later for you to fiddle with, though it’s kinda ghetto…. Oh what the hell. If you want to fiddle with it directly, here’s the excel file. There’s no fancy drop boxes and no value checking (you can type in “puppy” for latitude but its not going to calculate anything) but you can put in any northern latitude you want and see how long any given day is and what the longest and shortest day durations are. Here in D.C our longest day is 14h, 43m. Our shortest is 9h, 16m. Metroblogging city San Fran is about the same with 14h 37m and 9h 22m but our buddies in Seattle get 15h 46m and only 8h 13m at the shortest!

Yep, I’m a dork.

Captured by YouTube:

Now, granted, this may cause some controversy: Which is worse? That these jackasses got away with being jackasses, or that they got licenses like that?

You can get a lot of things in Virginia and in DC, but one thing you can’t get is Everclear. It’s 190 proof, highly flammable, and only available in Maryland. So, as I was out on a client visit anyhow, I stopped by a liquor store on the way home and picked up a full handle of the stuff. Now, before you call out for an intervention, or send the Alcoholics’ Anonymous SWAT team to my house, I’ve got good reason to need the stuff: Limoncello. We’re making a big batch for New Years’ this year, and that’s the primary ingredient, beside the 15 lemons.

It may force you to head outside the district, Wayan, but getting the good liquors requires a trip outside the District, as VA and DC tend not to sell the really good stuff in their state-run operations.