The Eastern High School marching band has been invited to perform at the Pro Football Hall of Fame festivities next week.  Problem is, they’re having trouble raising funds for the trip.  According to a great piece over at City Desk, the band was counting on checks from summer jobs to pay for their bus tickets to Canton.  If you haven’t heard, there was quite an issue with the District’s payroll system and now the band has $500 total.  Unsurprisingly, the Redskins organization “doesn’t do smaller grants” and basically isn’t helping, even though the band is representing the District (what, the Redskins are in Md now, so I guess that doesn’t count?  The school’s practically in the shadow of RFK, but hey, those days are over?) and 2 of the 6 inductees for 2008 were Redskins players (Darrell Green and Art Monk - Green, as you probably know, spent his entire career with the Redskins).

Their plan is to leave at midnight Friday.  If you can, please help by contacting band director James Perry at James2081[at]comcast[dot]net

baby tomatoes @ dupont farmer’s market
Originally uploaded by gingher

Discouraged by the slim pickings at your local Safeway and Giant? Worried about FDA warnings about Salmonella contamination of fruits and vegetables? Don’t want to spend more than $1 per orange at Whole Foods?

Support local growers and buy your produce at one of DC’s many farmer’s markets this weekend.

Saturday 8:00 am - 2:00 pm
Adam’s Morgan
18th Street and Columbia Road, NW

Saturday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Chevy Chase
Broad Road and Northampton Street, NW

Saturday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Heritage Park
Division Avenue and Foote Streets, NE

Saturday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
U Street
14th and U Streets, NW

Saturday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Mount Pleasant
Lamont Park

Saturday and Sunday 7:00 am - 4:00 pm
Eastern Market
7th and C Streets, SE

Sunday 9:00 am - 1:00 pm
Dupont Circle
20th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, NW

I actually took this picture a few weeks ago when out in Chantilly to have dinner with a friend, but the Washington Post got around to writing about the pro-life pharmacy before I did. [and let me assure you, we were at a nice little Indian place a few doors over, not at any of the crap chain restaurants mentioned in the above story]

I don’t know that I have a lot to say about the matter, other than it being somewhat interesting that this kind of thing crops up wayyyyyy out in the burbs rather than in the city. I wonder who their market is, or what their necessary purpose might be. After all, if you don’t approve of Plan B, you’re just as able to not get a prescription for it filled at CVS as you are at DMC Pharmacy. Is it that important to be able to fill your prescription for penicillin somewhere that there’s no condoms on the rack, tempting you?

Perhaps it’ll all a way to get a job for a friend or family member who is a pharmacist who finds himself unemployable at the majors because he won’t dispense birth control pills. Beyond that I’m hard pressed to understand the need for this business - when you open an alternative to Outback you don’t serve everything BUT meat, you have an entirely different set of offerings. What’s DMC Pharmacy going to bring to the table other than… what it doesn’t put out on the table?

Yesterday morning, the three of us who split a full share at Great Country Farms in Bluemont hopped in the car and headed for the farm to do some picking, and to retrieve our CSA boxes. Last week’s trip had been in the middle of the pre-summer heat wave that had the mercury pegged in most folks’ thermometers, and had us sweating a ton as we picked strawberries. This week’s trip turned out to be a more pleasant pastoral affair.

We hit the fields at about 10:30 in the morning, when it was only just in the mid-70s and the breeze made it mighty pleasant. We ended up with about 8 pints of strawberries between us, plus our farm boxes which had asparagus, lettuce, more strawberries, spring onions and a small cilantro plant. Farmer Ray showed us where the peach orchard was, as well, and showed us the fruit that was setting in the branches already. He says about three weeks ’til the peaches are ready. Judging by the heavy-laden blackberry vines, we’ll be in blackberries next week or the week after. After that, it was off on an adventure.

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…is the Farmer’s Markets this weekend. With salmonella warnings out there for pretty much every kind of store-bought tomatoes, why not head out the farmers market so you can get some disease-free tomatoes, and meet the people involved in growing them? The Post has a great listing of DC area Farmers’ Markets, and also an interactive Google Maps Mashup with markets separated out by days of the week.

I’ll be at the Courthouse market in the morning tomorrow getting tomatoes for Insalata Caprese with fresh basil. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Just when I think DC Cabbies have cornered the market on assholatry, I meet somebody like this Friendly cab. Coming home from an install tonight, I watched as this guy leaned on his horn when the car in front of me took the merge on to the on-ramp of I-66 at a speed that was not to his satisfaction, only to swerve across a lane of traffic to build up speed to cut him off (passing both of us in the meanwhile) and giving us the finger.

Wow. I guess Arlington “Friendly” Cabs aren’t quite as friendly as we’d all like to think.

"Friendly" my ass. — Originally uploaded by tbridge

If you’ve been shopping this week you might have noticed a big hole where the tomatoes should be, or perhaps any eatery you’ve been in has had signs up stating they’re only serving cherry tomatoes and citing the FDA warning. While they work on figuring out exactly where the problem originated so they can tell you what is safe to eat from your local supermarket, you might want to try your farmer’s market.

Your farmer’s market tomatoes were never included in this interdiction because they’re not part of the same ’system’ as what the grocery stocks, and therefor there’s no way they came from the same currently unknown source that has shipped out salmonella-laced tomatoes. Whether or not they’re immune to the problem in general is a matter for some debate, and you might read this posting here at the excellently written and disquietingly-named BarfBlog. Professor Powell takes the scientific view that there’s no evidence that sustainable and local is any safer, but observes that at least with the farmer’s market you may have the opportunity to ask directly about production methods.

He’s welcome to his opinion, but I personally will always feel more confident overall in produce and meat that comes out of a family-style farm using traditional practices than what comes from ‘industrial’ food.

On a side note about the tomato outbreak, this recent crop (sorry) of tomato safety issues comes as no surprise at all, and the eastern shore of Virgina has been implicated before.

Picture courtesy of AHMED.

Chief Lanier doesn’t understand the problem with her new plan to turn parts of DC into little parts of Baghdad right here on US soil. In fact, when challenged about the new program, her defensive response is pretty telling: “We put check points in place all the time for major events around federal buildings and nobody cares. Now that we want to do it to stop shootings and violence in our neighborhoods, it’s as if it’s something that’s unreasonable.”

We’re talking about people’s homes here, Chief. We’re talking about hassling them at the end of their long day. And for what, exactly? It’s not like the people from Trinidad go over to Georgetown to rob the rich white folks who live there, is it? Crimes that we’re seeing are local. They’re within the neighborhoods, not without them. So the people that you’re “letting through” the cordon aren’t always going to just be innocent residents. So really, what did you think we were going to do when you decided to set up Sadr City in DC? Were we just going to sit there and say, “Good on you, chief! This is perfect!”

Hell no. Crime’s not as simple a problem that you can fix it with barriers like this. You might get more results just from having more officers in the neighborhood. Which is what you should have anyway. According to DC Law, you are never required to carry identification, yet this new law will bring that to all residents of certain (poor) neighborhoods in the city. So, really, Chief, go back to the drawing board and figure out how to really fight the crime, not just push it around the city with cameras that no one’s really watching, and regulations that make it seem like they belong in a gulag or an eastern bloc country. Okay?

…an ad on Washingtonpost.com alerts me that the New Kids on the Block Reunion Tour (otherwise known as the “Real estate market is in the toilet so Jon Knight finally agreed” tour) will be coming to our fair city on October 2.

The show will be at the Verizon Center, which seems like an ambitious choice for a flash-in-the-pan boy band that hasn’t toured in at least 15 years, but perhaps there are other 30-somethings out there who are not as embarrassed at their childhood love of Joey McIntyre as I am. They’ve already sold out in Atlantic City, I hear.

In any case, the presale starts on June 2 at LiveNation. If you’re willing to admit that you plan to see this show, chime in in the comments. We promise not to mock you. Much.

New Kids on the Block - 4/4/08

Originally uploaded by nkotbofficial

Unlike what mom said about no internet until 30 minutes after you eat, foodies and techies do mix. See tonight’s episode of Jonny’s Partay and chat with some socially minded foodie techie folks. Dig the description by DC’s very own favorite man about town Jonny Goldstein:

We are pleased to host Sean Shadmand and Isaac Mosquera, the founders of familyoven.com on Jonny’s Par-tay on May 28, 2008. Also on the show Andrew “Batterista” Wright, who will challenge us to pick the best butter out of a dairy-licious selection.

FamilyOven.com is a cooking oriented social network with over 500,000 registered users. Jonny has tried recipes off the site and loved the results. We’ll talk with Sean and Isaac about how they got the idea for Family Oven, and how it is working as a business.

We are also going to have a special bonus feature with Andrew “Batterista” Wright, who besides being a tech entrepreneur, is obsessed with butter. We’ll do a Jonny’s Par-tay Batterista Butter Blind Benchmark.

What: Jonny’s Par-tay, the interactive online TV talk show, with guests Sean Shadmand, Isaac Mosquera, Andrew Wright, and host Jonny Goldstein, with a little Scott Stead magic poured on top.
When: May 28, 9-10PM Eastern
Where: jonnyspartay.com
Interactivity: As always, you are invited to text chat us live. It’s a Par-tay!

Remember - wherever Jonny is, it’s always a par-tay.