The folks at The Peace Alliance are having a big shindig this weekend at the Lisner Auditorium, and the promo graphic looks like this:

All we need now is John McCain singin’ Streisand to make the weekend complete!

This morning during my perusal of the Post, I saw an article about Chili, and its relationship to the Super Bowl, which I’m told is on Sunday. Only now, at just after dinner time, have I calmed down enough to write about it. In their article, they mention a multiplicity of types of Chili, and that I can certainly get behind, but for the Post to claim that anyone in their right mind can include carrots and celery in their chili, they must have clearly slipped.

Chili, in its many forms, requires a tomato base, and the presence of beans, and is cooked low and slow, barely reaching much more than a simmer. Meat tends to be what defines the chili, either through its presence or absence, but really, mirepoix has no business belonging in a chili.

Post, listen well, and please find my very own native California chili below the cut.
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Image courtesy of scumbag adjerks who I’ll be damned if I’m going to give a link to. You can google ‘science club’ if you have some self-hate issues to work out.

Hey Science Club, I’d link to your website in this rant but I’m not willing to subject my readers to the same goddamned popup advertisements you inflicted on me. That’s right – I went to your website because I saw it mentioned somewhere and it popped up TWO windows advertising crap unrelated to your business. Wow, a good deal on my mortgage? I’m SO glad you polluted my screen with that when I went to see what kind of beer you had on tap.

Forget it. Ads on the coasters is one thing, but trying to make money off me when I’m deciding if I’m coming to your bar in the first place? Doing it by cluttering up my desktop? Maybe you could find someone who’d pay you to add some kind of drive-by browser infection too – I hear there’s money in spam.

Chime in with your suggestion for non-scummy places around L & 19th Street. Ie, not Science Club.

The Washington, DC Convention and Tourism Corporation has launched ShareYourDC as part of a larger research project to figure out how best to promote DC as a travel and convention destination. While I doubt that those of us who don’t own lunch counters and street kiosks would say that we feel an acute need for more tourists, it’s very true that tourism and convention business is a huge chunk of the DC area’s economy. I am also very in favor of any initiative that would lead to an influx of tourists who understand that there is more to see here than things made of marble.

So go to ShareYourDC, answer the surveys, and share your photos of your favorite things about DC. (I’d rather have an upload form than have to email my photos, though, guys. How about a Flickr group? Join the 21st century… the water’s great.)

Photo by DC Metroblogger

Do you need a need a hero? Someone you can hold out ’til the morning light?

Then this is your hero. This is the street-wise Hercules, the man to fight the rising parking ticket odds.

He is racing on the thunder and slicing with heat. He is the superman to sweep parking meters off their feet.

Through the wind and the chill and the rain, he’s gonna be larger than life.

He is your hero.

Remember when I got all temporally mixed up and mistakenly said “yesterday” yesterday about a Red Line track fire at Farragut North? Now I can say it and be correct: Fire Reported Inside Farragut North Metro Station. Third time since last Friday, and the Metro’s closed between Metro Center and Dupont Circle. As you can see from the alert ticker screenshot above, delays are affecting all lines in both directions, possibly due also to the reports of smoke at West Falls Church and the Braddock Rd Metro bomb scare. Not to mention the Farragut Square bus fire. All in one morning.

Not a good day or a good week for WMATA. Me, I think I’m walking to work today.

photo courtesy of Studio Theatre

Here’s a disclaimer, and you can decide whether or not to take it into account when reading this review. I’m fond of Neil LaBute’s work, and have been since I first saw the movie version of In the Company of Men almost ten years ago. So when I tell you that I think the play is good and worth seeing, you can ponder whether or not I’m just predisposed to like it. After all, the Washington Post’s Peter Marks was less than generous to the material and not too impressed.

Personally I think it’s got enough interesting characters and behavior to maintain interest, even if Marks is right and the character’s motivations are slimly explained. I don’t disagree with him, I just happen to think it doesn’t really matter. People often make choices based on slim reasoning beyond immediate self-interest and I don’t think there’s any behavior in the play that necessarily needs further elaboration. Show me a character handing someone they have never met $100 and I need some explanation as to why they’d do such a thing. Show me a character stealing $1 off a countertop when they know there’s no chance of getting caught and you don’t need to explain it to me – you’ve just demonstrated to me that they’re kinda slimy. I don’t think I’m revealing anything too surprising if I tell you there’s some slimy represented in This is How It Goes.
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In case you have not seen it yet, the CityPaper has an excellent cover story on D.C.’s “indigenous street food”, the half-smoke.

Photo by DC Metroblogger

Mmmmm…. Doesn’t that look good? Don’t you wanna get up close and personal to that exhaust pipe and inhale? Absorb that particulate pollution directly.

Or do you want to get up close and personal with Williams Construction Services of Manassas Virginia?

Do you want to put that exhaust pipe into their offices and let them breathe the filth they are spraying into our air?

This air pollution is the worst too, it was unnecessary. The truck was idling without driver or use present.

It’s activities like this that give us summer days in January and Code Red days in August.

It hasn’t been a good week for Farragut North on the Red Line. Just a day Four days after a debris fire on the Glenmont-bound tracks caused delays and single-tracking Monday Friday morning, we now have reports of smoke this morning at the same station, causing yet more single-tracking on the Shady Grove tracks between Judiciary Square and Dupont Circle, which is practically all of the Downtown segment of the Red Line.

(Don’t worry, Metro’s going to hire a contractor! He’ll save us!)

Watch WMATA’s advisories page for the situation. Anyone reading get stuck down there? Post a comment when you get back up into the daylight.

Update: I have just emerged from Dupont Circle, and the Red Line appears to be running normally again. Yay!

Update: I must have been stuck in some sort of temporal anomaly, because I thought the first fire was yesterday, when it was actually last Friday. Sorry, DC, and sorry, space-time continuum. I will try harder not to make your heads ache with my poor grasp of fourth dimension awareness.