It’s about that time: pre-Memorial Day weekend, summer prices, all kinds of politics involved…

Where’s your cheap gas around the DC area? We did this about a year ago and got a bunch of great responses, for all different areas. Where are you buying your gas for this holiday weekend (and summer) and how much is it. Yes, I know we could all be biking or walking, but really that’s not reasonable for everyone.

So, as I gas up my gas-lovin’ machine tonight for my weekend trip, I’ll be going to the Liberty at the corner of Lee Hwy. and Military/Quincy in north Arlington. By far the cheapest gas I’ve seen in my area in the five years I’ve lived there. Tried and true, always less expensive than competing stations.

Let your fellow reader know where to go!

The Washington Post is reporting today that it’s probably not a good idea to start a fire in D.C. any time soon, whether it’s on purpose or accidental. If, for example, you leave a candle burning in your living room and your damn cat knocks it over, the fire department will have to try four hydrants before it finds one that works. In the meantime, Furball might really, really regret what she did and wonder why she’s so stupid…and then start to wonder what that smell is.

That’s right, D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin is estimating that at least 25% of the city’s fire hydrants are worthless. Please note two key words in the previous sentence: at and least! What does that mean? Are 50% of our hydrants out of order? 75%? All of them?! Don’t get me wrong, I love living in DC, but I have to question once again, “Where are my tax dollars going?”

To quote Rubin, “It’s like a sucker punch when firefighters are fighting a fire and go to a hydrant that doesn’t work.”

To quote me, “It’s like a roundhouse kick to the groin from Chuck Norris when your house burns to the ground because the powers that be have no idea how to run their city!”

I’m going to go home and throw all of my candles away, and if I had a cat, I’d throw it away too.

Fire hydrant photo by Bill Adler

Yes, some homeless people are straight-up crazy and potentially dangerous. Like the guy I walked by earlier on Wisconsin Avenue who wanted to pick a fight with my dog. However many are sane and there are even some who keep your parks and neighborhoods safer than they would be otherwise.

They don’t do this so much for community service but rather for the sake of their own survival. If they think they have a good thing going in their neighborhood of choice then they do what they can to keep the police out of their hair and tension with locals at a minimum. That means making sure the homeless and criminal element around them keep a low profile.

For example a guy I talk to who has lived on and off around Francis Scott Key Park in Georgetown for sixteen years told me how he did some regulating in his neighborhood. He said how a panhandler snatched a woman’s purse after she had refused to give him money. He said the cops came straight to him, suspecting that either he did it or knew who did.
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It’s a packed house over here at Ireland’s Four Courts as Liverpool and AC Milan face off in the finals of the Champions Leagues. Milan’s up 1-nil at the half, scoring a goal on a deflected penalty kick, causing half the bar to cheer and the other half to groan.

The last time I saw a pub this packed at half-past three was the World Cup. Irish accents, British accents, American flat vowels, they’re all here, along with the rapid patter of Spanish and Portuguese.

Skip out on the rest of the day and head here, or Lucky Bar, or Elephant and Castle and catch the second half.

Memorial Day Weekend. Blockbuster Movies. While everyone’s stuck in traffic tomorrow night getting an early start on the long weekend, I’ll be eating popcorn in the Balcony at the Uptown watching the new Pirates of the Carribean movie. You know you want to ditch the early escape traffic and do the same, so grab some tickets for the 8pm show, and we’ll see you there.

Since Friday, there have been 19 robberies in the 1st Police District, which covers the area around the Capitol, and down to the Anacostia, and as far north as the junction of New York and Florida Avenues. The 19 robberies over the weekend add up to 60 robberies, without gun, and 19 armed robberies, with gun, a 20% increase from the same time last year. And while violent crime, as a whole, is down just about a percent, without the rash of robberies over the weekend, we might be looking at something like a 20% decrease in crime across the First District.

So, what happened this past week to spike a 20% increase in robberies? We can’t blame this strictly on youth violence, we can’t blame it on much of anything, really, it seems. So, what’s with the spike in crime? If you can find the hints in the Crime Map and tell me what you’re seeing that I’m not, say so in the comments.

It’s finally here. The day has come when I’ve decided to move out to the real suburbs. I currently live about a mile and a half outside the DC limits, right across the trees from Georgetown. I live in my very city-ish neighborhood where you walk to get a hair cut, go to the market, the dry cleaner, or restaurants and gyms. I’ve lived in my little close neighborhood for five of the six years I’ve lived in the area, and it’s time to leave the nest. I’m moving…

… out to Vienna. GASP! WHAM! BOOM! I know. It was almost a shock to me when I made the decision, but I’m doing it. The place I’m moving has all the qualities of my close little neighborhood now and is located just three blocks from downtown Vienna. A cute dive breakfast place up the corner, a farmers market every Saturday morning, walk to Jammin’ Java concerts and the like.

It’s neighborhood-y and a friendly little part of town. What will now be my existence will be my commute, which for the last five years has been nothing but a pleasure. I will now have to think about extra clothes if I want to hang out after work, no “stopping home” before events or working with my AU students at their preferred time (10 pm meetings? I’m old, come on). Because the church I go to and tons of my friends are right in the middle of Tyson’s, living in Vienna will actually be a nice change in that regard.

While I’m incredibly excited about where I’m moving and why I’m moving there, I know that my DC life will definitely change. Have you done the move before? Living in DC and moving out to the suburbs or living close outside the city and moving much further out? In some ways I think of this as maturing a little bit in my life and moving out of my dinky city apartment and in to a nice townhome. But maybe I’m just making things up so I don’t think about the commute too much…

photo courtesy of Jakk6

‘Lord Andrews’ says it much better than I ever could, so I will for the most part present without comment this excellent article about persistent MySpace and Facebook profiles for people who are now long dead, the Virginia Tech victims amongst them.

An excerpt:

I have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand: a year ago, Ben, an acquaintance of mine at Virginia Commonwealth University, killed himself by jumping off a twenty story building. Before long, Ben was only the name of a person on Myspace; the real human was long since gone, but his profile was never deleted. Before he died, Ben gave the profile password to his best friend, who used it to send out news of the boy’s death and funeral arrangements to his entire social network. It was strange, receiving a message from a man announcing that he was dead. Later that summer, I encountered a memorial to him at an anime convention where he used to work – eight of his Myspace photos were printed out on 8×11″ glossy photo paper and pasted to a display board. It seemed very surreal at the time; it was the first occasion I thought to consider the implications of these funereal web pages.

Ben has been dead for almost a year now, but people are still talking to him online. His “wall” is covered in chatter: “Happy birthday”, “how are you”, “we miss you”, “our prayers are with you” and “we hope you’re in a better place” are all standard fare. A girl named Jenny wrote Ben an entire paragraph

Read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.

Photo by DC Metroblogger

Look what I found: the office candy drawer. And note that I wasn’t the first.

It seems that the office rats staff also knows where to score chocolate mid-day. From Hershey to Mars, this container of calories is a favorite of the sweet tooth.

Now that I know of its location, temptation calls that much stronger. Maybe even more than the office candy bowl.

Do you have an office candy drawer? And if you do, do you want to know where?

photo courtesy of SideLong

If you spent some of your drive in this morning cursing at your XM radio as the signal drifted in an out, you’re not alone.I did the same and so did pretty much everyone else. Apparently XM botched a software update and the problem is at the sats themselves.

And yes, I did a shout-out to a movie so dumb that it implied you could hack an alien spaceship with a Mac (on OS9 no less!) and that a space-faring race needed to use satellites for timing rather than a simple atomic clock. Sue me.