This week the American Film Renaissance Festival kicks off with a bunch of local and otherwise produced films. I want to call your attention to one of the films, the Acton Institute’s Call of the Entrepreneur. I saw this movie pre-release about six months ago and it’s one of the best short-ish films I’ve seen. Not only does it have a powerful message of individual achievement, but also societal structure and support for the entrepreneurial spirit. You can watch the trailer here, and order the tickets here.

In such a city like DC where so many people are entrepreneurial, have grown their businesses – be it campaigns, consulting firms, law firms, retail outlets, you name it – this really struck a cord with me when I saw it this spring. I’m glad that they’re having a showing here, I’m going to go see it again. At just about an hour, it’s a quick watch but with messages that will keep you thinking for days. It just might make you a little extra-patriotic for a few hours too… or maybe that’s just me.

Hopefully I’ll see you there, E Street Cinema, $10 for the showing.

Centerfield

Originally uploaded by philliefan_99.

Yesterday’s trip to RFK was, hopefully, the last one I’ll ever make for a baseball game. The field has been deteriorating through August and September, and the threadbare grass of the outfield forced the groundskeepers to move the Nats’ curly W from dead center, where the grass is all dead, to left-center where a vestige of green remains. The symbolism of the dilapidated grass as metaphor for crumbling stadium shouldn’t be lost on anyone. RFK was a terrible place to watch a game, and judging from the players, a terrible place to play the game, too. So, it was with a great deal of joy that we wished RFK goodbye.

The house, while not as packed as on Opening Day 2005, a respectable 40,000 or so were there to wish the team into the off-season, though there are still a few more games on the road remaining. The biggest cheers of the day came with the introduction of Frank Howard of the Senators, and the biggest boos when Teddy Roosevelt was gypped in the President’s Race (despite the valorous attempts to the contrary by the Nats Bullpen), and the loudest applause came when three long banners were unveiled in left center by fans, proclaiming “Short Still Stinks,” a reference to Senators owner Bob Short who moved the team to Texas in 1971.

The Nats won, though, 5-3 in hold your breath fashion. Cordero looked rough in the 9th, not quite as lights out as he was in seasons past. I was really hoping to see more of Maxwell, as his late-season callup has been full of surprises, but I suspect we’ll see him more next season. Here’s to an off-season full of good trades and pickups.

This week, the Arlington County Board took another step toward environmental friendliness by authorizing a new taxi cab fleet of 85 hybrid taxicabs. A new company, named EnviroCAB will be taking people to and from their destinations in trendy new Prius’s and Escapes.

Arlington already has over 600 regular taxicabs, so the impact will be marginal at best, but at least it is a start I guess. The weird thing is that since they aren’t taking any of the regular taxis off the street, instead of having 600 inefficient cabs, we now have 600 inefficient cabs plus 85 efficient ones. Doesn’t seem like it is going to reduce emissions to have more cabs on the street, especially since all those extra cabs will just be idling in front of hotels or the airport waiting to pick up a fare. Arlington might have made a bigger impact by replacing 85 cabs instead of just adding new ones.

And of course The big question which was not addressed by the Board: currently all the local taxicabs are charging a premium because fuel prices are so high. Since these hybrids get much better gas milage, do you still have to pay the premium? Something tells me that there’s not going to be a discount to being and environmentally friendly passenger.

Wayan’s DC Photos

Good morning random Foggy Bottom resident. This is how you’ll find you car this morning – covered in Epoch Times newspapers.

I don’t think that the papers are a specific sign to you, its just the GW student body’s way of saying that school is back in session.

If you live in Foggy Bottom, you’re used to sights like this on a Saturday already. The visualization of a long, Friday night drunk-a-thon in odd street litter the following day.

Enjoy, and please, do recycle.

I may have questioned before as to where my tax dollars were exactly going. Well this summer I found out when they started repaving S street. What used to be like driving on the surface of the moon is now one sleek, smooth, stretch of pavement. Thanks, DC! Now when winter comes, please take care of your shiny new street by plowing the snow instead of letting it turn into a giant sheet of ice. Then I’ll really be impressed!

Wayan’s DC Photos

I can understand the State Department wanting to keep a low profile, what with its shoddy Bush-led foreign policy. And I can even appreciate it not wanted to broadcast its location too far and wide.

But I have to say this crosses the line: erasing your name from the sign out front.

While they might fool a few folks by scrubbing off the white paint on the 23rd Street sign’s letters, there’s no mistaking the third largest federal building in DC. Not even re-naming it the Harry S. Truman Building will hide the block of ugly.

Nor will it stop visitors from being confused on which entrance they need or deter taxi drivers from going for one more zone, 23rd being one block past Zone 1.

Its only gonna make me want to call in my favorite sign-maker.

In case you, like me, were of a mind that trees are planted in museum atriums from seeds or tiny saplings and then allowed to grow and flourish over the course of decades, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s official blog Eye Level would like to disabuse us of that notion with this entry, “Picture This: Trees!!” showing a whole black olive tree being lifted by crane and lowered into the new courtyard.

The Reynolds Center courtyard (officially the “Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard” for its philanthropist funders) is shaping up to be an interesting architectural highlight, what with the wavy glass roof they’ve put up over it. I’m sure Whitman would approve.

More photos here.

Petworth Eyesore Photoset

Just when I didn’t think it could get any worse, the Petworth Eyesore took it to the next level.

Just take a close look at the front door. What was once a beautiful, arched two-door entrance is now a poor in-filled single door.

I really don’t know how much worse the builders can make this house. Its already a remodel job from hell, what with the ill-fitting addition and broken windows.

It’s so bad that we all give directions by it, “Take a right at the eyesore. Yeah, trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.” Even the neighbors are moving out!

And it’s at the end of my block.

Maybe it was Wayan’s recent car-free (CarFree? Car-Free? Sin Coche?) postings, maybe the ten-plus miles I walked while in Chicago, but whatever the cause I found myself in the old terminal of Washington National with my bags and a thought. Why not walk home?

Now, it’s not as much of a walk as it sounds – I wasn’t pondering a stroll back to Loudoun county. My car was in a driveway in Crystal City, so it was two miles at the outside and my bag was on wheels. It’s a fairly flat neighborhood, so what the heck?

The details of my trial are below the fold, but if you want the upshot it’s this: in the end, I took the metro.
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Now this is some cold-ass eviction. This is the street outside 2918 Sherman Avenue NW last night in Columbia Heights.

That mess on the street isn’t garbage, it’s the combined possessions of the tenants, or now ex-tenants, of what was their communal rooming house. Neighbours say that a contractor came by yesterday and had his workers toss the residents’ belongings out the building’s windows, with no regard for the lives destroyed or the street trashed.

And so we now see the result. Chaos and sadness for the former occupants, a hazard for city dwellers, and a lawsuit waiting to happen because the building owner couldn’t follow DC eviction rules or even decent street etiquette.

Good luck to the tenants, that shit ain’t right.