Brad Pitt Has Your Secret Shit: Rolling DC

nice.

BTW did I forget to tell you guys my new master plan for getting representation? DC will band together with Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Marianas, American Samoa and the USVI to form a SUPERTERRITORY with 2 senators and (according to the 2010 Census, 3725789 + 601723 + 159,358 + 106405 + 55519 + 53883 = 4,702,677 residents) 6 reps (exactly the number we all have now, coincidentally). This is the best idea.

I like it, but only if it will be called Wapricoguamariasamaoavirginland.

The flag could be three palm trees above two half-smokes.

From Elizabeth and Philip Jennings' training materials....

http://architectofthecapital.org/posts/2016/8/6/hyper-detailed-soviet-maps-of-washington

https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-essential-guide-to-ice-cream-and-frozen-desserts-around-washington/2015/06/24/02101680-0642-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html?tid=a_inl

Ice Cream Jubilee -- Had Thai iced coffee with banana bourbon caramel ice creams in a waffle cone that quickly fell apart and it was...uh ok. I'm not as wowed by this place as some are (its opening a 2nd location in the 14th street nw area). Also, even worse is the Yards park hood the store is located in. So many private property only & no parking signs to discourage evil car drivers, plus condos and more condos coming soon ones.

car drivers are evil though

even uber and lyft ones?

Or especially?

Once safe track gets finished, I'll be taking the train everywhere.

Thanks for that link, Morbs

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/in-gentrifying-dc-apartments-for-large-families-are-quickly-disappearing/2016/08/29/b93276d6-6aec-11e6-ba32-5a4bf5aad4fa_story.html

Brookland Manor today has 134 four- and five-bedroom apartments. Yet when the new community is built, none of its 1,646 apartments or 114 for-sale townhouses will have more than three bedrooms, and a vast majority will have only one or two.
Brookland’s owner, Mid-City Financial Corp., based in Germantown, Md., told the city’s Zoning Commission that four- and five-bedroom apartments “are not consistent with the creation of a vibrant new community.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2016/09/01/amidst-building-boom-an-effort-to-save-washingtons-last-warehouse-district/?hpid=hp_local-news_digger-11am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Will this attempt be too late?

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/20832984/doors-arent-closing-just-yet-on-latenight-metro-service

Jacob Weisman, a 26-year-old line cook at Daikaya who also pulls some shifts at Bantam King, can’t afford to take an Uber home to Greenbelt, Maryland, when his night ends. And there’s no good bus route for him, either.

Already, Daikaya has reduced weekend hours to close at 11 p.m. so employees and patrons can still take Metro home before the train’s midnight closure during SafeTrack repair work. The notion that Metro would make the change permanent—and also end service at 10 p.m. on Sundays, as Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld has proposed—strikes Weisman as an assault on the city and the people it serves.

“It’s a huge deal,” he says. “For me personally, there’s not really a bus that goes directly to my place. I think there are three separate buses, and I don’t think they run where I need them to. And calling a car, if there’s a deal, maybe it’ll be $10. But during surge times, it could be upwards of $50 to $65.”

In the Sunday newsprint version of the New York Times, this article had a different title-- something about "Gritty North Shaw"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/travel/five-places-to-go-in-washington-dc.html

Here's the opening paragraph:

North Shaw is popping as a vibrant urban landscape with new shops and restaurants and more in mid-construction. Formerly a 15-acre swath known for gritty streets, parking lots, vacant buildings and chain-link fences, it’s the latest residential, retail and creative hub in the nation’s capital. On warm nights now, crowds pack the outdoor tables of tasteful restaurants on the wide sidewalks near the intersection of Florida Avenue and Eighth Street Northwest; street murals by local artists brighten building facades; and posters promote sumo wrestling and free henna tattoos.

Oy veh.

My wife does some volunteer work for the Smithsonian so we got a sneak peek preview of the new National Museum of African American history and culture. Spent 5 hours there and did not see it all. Poignant, often somber, and also inspiring.

Public opening is the 24th, and there's a fest going on at the mall Friday through Sunday.

http://dcist.com/2016/09/photos_finding_chocolate_city_at_th.php#photo-1

A bunch of Washington Post restaurant lists posted--Sietsema top restaurants one plus Tim Carman on Cheap Eats and Ethiopian ones

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-restaurants-guide-fall-2016/

Sietsema's latest list

Analysis of it by numbers;

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2016/10/13/tom-sietsemas-2016-fall-dining-guide-by-the-numbers/

Below two are from Tim Carman

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-10-best-places-to-eat-cheap-food-in-the-washington-area/2016/10/07/dbd11f42-8010-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-10-best-ethiopian-restaurants-in-the-washington-area/2016/10/12/0c38147c-8027-11e6-a52d-9a865a0ed0d4_story.html

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvOZtzmUAAAr_A8.jpg:small

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/article/20837636/blagden-alleys-last-remaining-artist-is-being-priced-out

Overview re Bill Warrell and the history of art spaces downtown, from his dc space club on 7th & E to Warrell's current status as last artist left in Blagden Alley

x-post-- Funny...but I think Dischord has already shut those items down, as no money was going to the artists not approved , etc.

The bittersweet Blagden Alley, Warrell piece has me wondering do other cities help artists and musicians via zoning and real estate laws, etc. Is DC worse than others or just the same?

Warrell’s looming departure from Blagden Alley isn’t just another example of an artist being priced out of his neighborhood. In Furioso’s view, it’s emblematic of why the arts have not fared well in D.C.

“The city of D.C. has never given one square foot to the visual arts,” he says. “You can go to almost any town—any city practically—in this country and they’ll give you an old building, an old post office, an old something.”

Furioso has tried to keep Warrell in the building as long as possible. He didn’t raise the rent until last year, when years of property tax increases made it impossible for him to charge the same price as when Warrell moved in.

Furioso wishes the city offered more incentives to developers to keep low-income residents in their buildings. “We’re not even asking the city to do anything except give that deduction through property tax.

lololol

georgetown-rosslyn gondola feasibility study (pdf)

Summary
In terms of potential ridership, the findings of this
study suggest that a Gondola connecting Rosslyn to
Georgetown could significantly contribute to a more
effective multi-modal transit system while addressing
transportation needs in the immediate study area. This
section provides an overview of the development of the
ridership projections.

Ha. Once they do this and get the trolley going all the way to Georgetown, all of the area's transportation issues will be solved (plus Metro is gonna have non-existent buses take the place of late-night Metro trains...)

I'm trying to imagine the circumstances in which I'd wait for a fucking gondola rather than just walking across the bridge, and I am failing. However, if you devise a trebuchet that can fling me from Wilson & N. Lynn to a trampoline placed at Wisconsin & M Street, then we'll talk.

http://local.washingtoncitypaper.com/event/walter-e-washington-convention-center/washington-free-press-50th-anniversary-reunion-cl

Saturday panel discussion on Washington Free Press, 1966 to 1970 DC radical newspaper that was harassed by the FBI

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/11/ted-leonsis-wizards-capitals-verizon-center

In a recent conference call with the Washington Post, Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis grumbled that his teams were “disadvantaged” because he was forced to pay more in building costs than other teams in other cities, in a Verizon Center deal he called “the worst building deal in professional sports.” Leonsis pays an estimated $36 million mortgage annually on the Verizon Center.

He also hinted that in six or seven years’ time, when the mortgage ends, he “will be a free agent,” suggesting that he could could possibly move the teams.

...This is absolutely preposterous. Yes, Leonsis may have to pay more for his mortgage than other professional teams, but just because those other teams duped cities into paying for their stadiums shouldn’t make D.C. fans feel bad about the deal here.

The Wizards and Capitals have spent plenty of money. They’ve spent an ungodly amount of money. The Wizards are currently spending more than the NBA Salary Cap, so for Leonsis to say that he can’t spend enough on his players is outrageous. He can’t spend more on his players because the league expressly prohibits him from doing so. The Capitals are also considered a “cap team,” having spent close to the cap every year in recent history.

The reason the Wizards and Capitals haven’t won a title has nothing to do with Leonsis’ mortgage and everything to do with the fact that he’s hired bad people who have done a bad job. Ernie Grunfeld, as Deadspin pointed out, is still somehow the general manager of the Wizards, even though he hasn’t shown like once in his entire career that he has any idea how to effectively run an NBA franchise. The team has wasted draft picks and signed the wrong guys to big deals and kept ineffective coaches and on and on.

so it seems like we spent about a week staring at the sidewalk and now everybody is gearing up for a long slog. Is that everybody else's take?

yeah. Although it feels like everyone's's going to be far more involved than the passive resignation post-2000 and even 2004.

Yeah, it's going to be freezing at the inauguration protests.

true.

DISTRICT II

In less serious news. Lots of exhibits worth checking out around DC. Just noticed that this opened at the Building Museum:

District II

November 19, 2016 - February 12, 2017

This poetic visual essay explores the changing streetscape of downtown Washington in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s through the urban street photography of Bill Barrett, Chris Earnshaw, and Joseph Mills

http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/district-ii.html

I saw the Van Vechten Harlem Heroes photo exhibit, and the Herman Leonard Jazz photos ones. Both worth seeing although I agree with the following:

Of the two exhibits, Herman Leonard’s jazz photographs exude more verve and cool. Van Vechten’s images, taken as much as 20 years earlier, are more historically groundbreaking and serve as a fitting memorial to Van Vechten’s role as a patron of African-American artists—but as artistic objects, his images fall short.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/museums-galleries/blog/20833380/at-the-smithsonian-american-art-museum-carl-van-vechtens-photographs-of-harlem-heroes

x-post -- there were protesters at the Reagan Trade Center Bldg Saturday protesting the "alt-right" conference there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2016/11/21/a-changing-neighborhoods-last-cheap-carryout-is-closing-owner-says-change-is-great/?hpid=hp_local-news_cheap-carryout-12pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Carryout near Hecht's warehouse

Guzman, 41, is the owner of Louis’ Restaurant & Carry Out, which has operated since 1988 at Fenwick and Okie streets NE in now-gentrifying Ivy City. ...

On Wednesday, Nov. 23, Guzman will close the restaurant’s doors for the final time, but not before giving away free food to all of his neighbors, which include a homeless shelter next door. His landlords are doubling his rent, he says, after he made an offer to buy the building that was declined. (Several attempts to reach the building’s owners for comment were unsuccessful; no one at their number picked up.)

At least Maggiano's donated 10 grand from the day the white supremacists showed up to eat and sieg heil

NY Times article on C*met P*ng Pong is not likely gonna be enough to stop crazies from harassing anyone associated with that pizza place, including musicians who have played there.

Maybe they'll move on and find a new conspiracy theory soon

We moved! Petworth is my new metro stop.

sellout

j/k obv but if you have a garage i will lol

no garage. lol basemetn is hueg tho

Warning: hueg basement, like hueg garage, leads to failure to purge/massive accumulation of crap (at least if you are me).

Luckily we are solving the garage accumulation of crap by doing this lil project: http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/tiny_house_in_cleveland_park_historic_district_approved/11740

wau

ooh can I live there

You are more than welcome there, just be warned that you may be sharing space with an elderly parent or two.

lol @ Granny Pod

Yeah that was spouse's choice of term. We're totally sneaking a roof deck in, btw, zoning be damned.

https://www.popville.com/2016/11/kramerbooks-expansion-coming-under-new-ownership-in-dupont/

free beer if you buy $50 worth of books, now through 12/31

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/food/young-hungry/article/20845471/two-wage-theft-lawyers-cash-in-on-dcs-restaurant-boom

Just three years after leaving Maryland Legal Aid and launching his practice, the 33-year-old Zelikovitz has gone from using just a single room in a Chinatown townhouse to renting the entire building. He is one of several attorneys who have discovered that suing District restaurants over wage law violations doubles as doing good and doing good business.

Zelikovitz and attorney Jonathan Tucker, who left Maryland Legal Aid last year to join the firm, benefit from wage law violations they say can often be caused by scofflaw managers or ignorance among restaurant owners. They have more than 30 active cases, with nearly 20 others on payment plans.

When a restaurant fails to pay a dishwasher minimum wage or time-and-a-half for overtime pay, that’s an opening for the lawyers to send a demand letter on behalf of their clients, many of whom come to them via word of mouth or Spanish-language Google advertisements.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/12/04/d-c-police-respond-to-report-of-a-man-with-a-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-restaurant/