Photo by DC Metroblogger

Have you read a label on these bags of chemical salt? Does it bother you that we have so much of it covering our sidewalks and streets?

Before this last snow fall the city had a covering of rock salt and chemical deicer that was shocking – every street had a mound of it along the curb. And during this ice storm, even more was put down.

Not that the chemical deicers gave us ice-free sidewalks. The impenetrable ice + snow sheet we have now takes a whole other removal process called elbow grease.

Still, might it concern you that the EPA says “less is more” when it comes to chemical ice removal, the exact opposite of what you see in Washington DC?

And has anyone found a comprehensive environmental study on deicers? I’d like to know what will happen to all that salt & rarified chemical when it hits the Potomac in the spring.

Hermaphrodite bass, anyone?

I’m sure many of the wired in folks caught that XM Radio and Sirius are planning to merge… but how does it affect the media market in D.C.? Will D.C. loose it’s new media muscle to New York, or will, if approved by the FCC and SEC, provide for growth in this rather odd media format.

I know I abandoned the D.C. radio market once I got my iPod and WETA started playing roulette with their programming (as was the demise, the first time ’round of WHFS and other stations). I’ve cut the final thread with the gift of an XM subscription for Christmas. I’ve heard complaints from a number of people when discussing this topic about choice (limited playlists of themed channels, such as jazz and film music) to incomplete coverage (NHL games), will a merged entity do any better, or will it mirror the cable industry with a lack of choice and rising costs. I know Verizon has been kicking ass with their FiOS rollout in Metro DC. So competition, in at least this business school case, actually works. How would it work for something is a little less demand?

So, with a holiday most associated with weird sales at the mall and made up special deals at auto dealerships.. how did you, the loyal DC Metblogs reader, celebrate President’s Day?

Gen. George Washington is celebrating his 275th birthday this Thursday, and Mount Vernon is gussying itself up for the occasion. This past Sunday, an President’s Day/Black History Month themed American Dad aired with guest shots of Abe Lincoln and the fabled Smithsonian Peanut Museum.

A number of folks from the DC area seemed to drive as far away as they could in one day and headed to an almost perfect day on the ski slopes, something January (or December, November.. oh, heck you get it) never offered. Some folks probably just bummed it at home (or at work for those private sector folks) and had their own “Butt-Numb-A-Thon” watching hours of TV or Movies. (But remember kids, you can catch all the Best Picture Nominees in one twelve hour session (yes, twelve) this Saturday at selected theaters…your own personal Oscar-themed “Butt-Numb-A-Thon”)

photo courtesy of The Opus

Although Wayan has privately begged the rest of us to leave the car&snow bitching behind after this weekend, lest we become “MetroDriverBitching DC blog” I am going to throw this one last one out there. The Post ran an article yesterday on the “McMissile” case, a cute little term to describe Jessica Hall’s throwing a drink into another car on the highway. Her outbreak has resulted in a felony conviction under 18.2-154, apparently, and she has gotten the minimum sentence (according to WaPo, but not the above VA law link), two years. The Post quotes Hall as saying “Two years! What did I do?”

What did you DO? Well, with your 6-months-pregnant sister in your car, you slewed your vehicle onto the shoulder, accelerated up next to another driver, then threw something into their car. Aside from the obvious property damage, what if they’d reacted to that with shock and accelerated unexpectedly or jerked the wheel, striking another car or, Grod forbid, a pedestrian/road worker? An automobile is two tons of motor-driven metal and killing someone with one isn’t too hard.

“Now people are going to see me as an angry, road rage, convicted felon. And it really upsets me,” Hall said. Well, golly, why would they see you that way? Maybe because that’s exactly what you are. You were reckless with the lives of the people in your car, the car you threw the drink into, and all the cars around them. Your most immediate victims are more generous than I – perhaps that’s no surprise – and think community service would have been just fine, but I personally will be glad to have two years where I know I won’t be sharing the road with you. Here’s hoping the judge doesn’t reduce your time.

Today is Presidents Day, and as a result, many area businesses, including the Federal Government, are closed, and this is one of those rare late winter three day weekends. That is, unless you work somewhere that only offer the Original Six holidays, in which case you’re cursing the rest of the non-working populous today. The holiday began in celebration of George Washington, America’s First President, and the General of her armies during the Revolutionary War. Most of the time, we see celebrations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on this day, their contributions to the history of the Union are quite significant, and after all, they had birthdays this month. Today, however, I want to draw attention to a different President of the United States of America: Millard Fillmore, the 13th President.

On the death of President Zachary Taylor in July of 1850, then Vice President Millard Fillmore took office as the second unelected President of the union. Taylor’s entire cabinet submitted their resignations and went their way, and Fillmore was left to fill all the vacancies. His first choice was Daniel Webster for Secretary of State, and the two of them marched through the Capitol five bills that would forever change the United States:

• Admit California to the United States

• Settle the Texas boundary with New Mexico
• Admit New Mexico as a Territory
• The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which had significant consequences for Americans in the Northeast, and could be credited in part with the Civil War that followed.)
• The Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia (which is really why I chose him)

Fillmore & Webster did all five of these in scant 90 days, making pretty much every Congress thereafter look like a bunch of lolligagging buffoons. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was initially an attempt at settling the slavery issue between the abolitionist North and the slave-owning South, but it turned into an uneasy truce as the northerners resented the idea of returning the South’s slaves.

President Fillmore can be credited with the abolition of slavery, the admittance of California as a State (largely due to the gold strike in 1849) and the admittance of New Mexico as a Territory, further expanding the borders of the US. Toward the end of his presidency, he sent Admiral Perry to pursue trade routes with then-closed-state Japan. Much of this information was gleaned from Wikipedia, though, honestly, most of their page is word for word from his White House bio, so I figure we’re pretty safe on this one, yeah?

Today is your last opportunity to see this year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition features the work of 51 artists selected as finalists in the Portrait Gallery’s first national portrait competition.

My favorite is the Olmec inspired Large Head by Nina Levy:

Now just imagine this work as she describes it in her Artist Statement:

This head is a portrait of my son Archer at almost two years old. I originally sculpted it as a part of a larger site-specific installation called Toss. In February of 2006, the head was suspended in the center of the two-story gallery space at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn. It was flanked front and back by a male and a female figure, both headless and swinging as if on a trapeze, tossing the head between them.

Ain’t that trippy? And just one more reason to get your ass to the National Portrait Gallery now!

photo courtesy of BODIES

Great news – the BODIES exhibit is coming to our area in April and it’ll be in the old Newseum space in Rosslyn. The Post article about it was filled with blah-blah-blah about the controversy that never seems to die down around the various polymer-preserved bodies shows, but what you should really know is that this one is an amazing look into our bodies. I got to see the exhibit in New York City last fall and it’s nothing short of astounding, and that’s from someone who, as the son of a pathology nurse, probably has gotten to see more inner workings than the average bear. Just the display of a full lung circulatory system with all the surrounding bits removed is worth the price of admission. If you’ve ever, say, lurched your clumsy self across a half-frozen parking lot, you might find it hard to believe there’s that much fine & delicate machinery inside you.

With regards to the question of what level of consent may or may not have been received from the former controllers of these displayed bodies, I suggest this: get the hell over it. As far as I’m concerned, every one of you people who shows this over-enthusiastic level of interest in what’s done with your carrying case after you’re finished inhabiting are is hurting the people who keep walking the earth after you’re gone. Barring organ donation, I think education – even in the guise of entertainment – is a perfectly good use of our leftover meat.

Before I hear from a single one of you about prisoner treatment in China, where many of these bodies came from, tell me: have you signed up to be an organ donor yet?

I caught the obituary for Walter Sondheim Jr in Friday’s Post, but I was just reminded of it by an entry in a weekly email newsletter that I get called This Is True. True’s Publisher, Randy Cassingham, runs a weekly bit at the end of it which he calls his “honorary unsubscribe,” where he pays homage to recent deaths of people who he thinks aren’t getting the press they deserve in their passing. This week’s is Mr Sondheim, who I happily think he’s a bit wrong about not getting enough attention. Friday’s Post obit is of decent size and there’s a New York Times piece as well.

All the obits contain a lot of talk about Mr Sondheim’s role in integrating Baltimore, and it’s a good reminder of how far we’ve come in not a lot of time. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t so long ago we had two very distinct and very paths laid out in our society. I remember as a kid in the late 70s being in a Sears in Coral Gables and my father pointing out to me the spot on the wall above the two water fountains where you could see there used to be something attached to the wall. The something being plaques that said “Whites” and “Coloreds,” and which my father clearly remembered, since he’d been chased off as a child for drinking from the “colored” fountain. It’s been almost thirty years since he told me that story, which is farther in the past for me than it was for him when he relayed it.

Those fifty years combined can seem like a lot when you spend most of your day thinking how far off next month’s vacation is, but they shoot by quick. Cassingham’s piece has a fun quote that’s not in the Post or Times obit. When the MD school board president of the time threatened to overturn Sondheim’s integration after the fact, Sondheim told him “that he could come to Baltimore and try to unscramble the egg that we had scrambled if he wanted to.” A great quip, in my book, and a great man.

Also of note to those of us in the area is all the work Sondheim did towards the Inner Harbor revitalization. School integration in Baltimore may not have impacted any of us reading this, but if you’ve gone to an Orioles game or the Baltimore Aquarium you’ve been a beneficiary of his efforts as well. Personally I find Baltimore delightful, for all its flaws, and I’ve considered living there on many an occasion. I’m more drawn to Fells Point than Inner Harbor, but it’s not hard for me to understand why someone would want to spend their retirement working to improve the fortunes of Charm City. Thanks, Mr Sondheim, for both the product of your hard work and the inspiration.

I find it hard to believe that this driver, days after the snow fall, has no idea that his plate is completely obscured by snow. In fact I have a sneaking suspicion that he packed the snow that way. Sure, he’s probably not using it for bank robbery getaways, but it does make him invulnerable to red light/speeding cameras.

I was looking for a link so I could talk briefly about the upcoming BODIES exhibit in the old Newseum space and came across this story from January.

D.C. police believe a naked construction worker who fell to his death this week slipped and fell four stories down an elevator shaft.

Joseph Oliver, 23, of La Plata was discovered about 6 a.m. Wednesday in the basement elevator shaft area of the Newseum, which is being built at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, officials said.

Authorities said it was unclear why he was naked, according to C.V. Morris, head of the department’s Violent Crimes Branch.

No sign of any follow-ups in the Post on this one. Damned weird – of all the times I’ve been naked at my job it’s NEVER been near an elevator shaft.