Are DC Molotov Cocktails cool?

Ahhh zee French Turkey. No I am not talking about French rock music or french rap, rather I am speaking of the bird. It's beautiful call "le gobble gobble" has kept me away from my blog for sometime, and I would like to apologize to you, the loyal reader (singular), for withholding my bloggy goodness from your lives.

That said, here is a pretty terrific little article about something that happened about 400 feet from the door to my office. It involves a crazy person, a child molester van, some kind of banner, and a molotov cocktail. Benjamin, my faithful intern, can’t believe he missed this incident to go home and bond with his parents’ credit card.

Now you may read this article and think “As the DC’s government’s entire tax base comes from its high sales tax on liquor, 40s, cigarettes, cheap chinese food, and high top sneakers, who in their right mind would waste an expensive bottle of liquor on trying to blow up K street?” However, it's touching little moments like these then make me thankful that D.C is home to the United States' government, and therefore all its crazy half baked semi-terrorist protesters, which again is pretty frickin' cool.

See you with a real updated post toute suite!

Is Robert Byrd Cool?

Let’s face it: the living dead are very trendy right now. There are not one, not two, but three movies coming out this fall about zombies or horrible zombie-like disease outbreaks. If someone could find a way to inject some angsty teen romance in there, zombies would truly become the hottest ticket around (it’ll be super easy because, to be fair, Robert Pattinson is about as pale and dirty as a not-that recently buried corpse).

So when it was announced today that Robert Byrd- the 92 year old senator from West Virginia- is now the longest serving member of congress ever, I got to thinking about how cool this undead senator really is. Sure, the senate is designed to be a place where members bring stability and clout to their state through long and distinguished careers (of not getting elected president), but serving for 56 years and 320 days is kind of terrifying. He was elected senator from the Mountain State was just a backwoods coal dump filled with terrifyingly obese buck-toothed incestuous rednecks! Oh how things have changed.

Robert Byrd has lived a unique life. Born in 1917, when he was one his mother died of the fucking Spanish influenza (what, too soon?). In 1942, he was elected “Exalted Cyclops” of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which despite how uncool most people are with the KKK, that title is, objectively, very cool. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1952 and the Senate in 1956, Byrd became the king of pork, famously getting a coast guard station for his totally landlocked and mountainous state. Again, a situation where what he did was pretty badass, but also kind of ridiculous and reprehensible. Sure it’s not KKK obnoxious, but it straddles that fine and embarrassing line.

Perhaps most terrifying of all, in his statement released today, Robert Byrd said “I look forward to serving you for the next 56 years and 320 days”. I’m not sure how the people of West Virginia would feel about having a 149 year old senator, but I’m sure that as long as he keeps bringing home the bacon- and maybe some of that good ol’ fashioned oxycontin or meth- the people of West Virginia will keep electing this guy, leaving one more undead politician to roam the streets of Capitol Hill in search of the intern blood that sustains his black and putrefying organs.

So while I’d like to extend the metaphorical corn whiskey jug of congratulations to Robert Byrd, I think I may have to label this milestone not very cool. I like a grizzled mountain coot as much as the next red-blooded American, and while I loved his vote against the Iraq war, there’s something about his advanced age kind of re-inforces the notion that Washington D.C is a city full of old not-quite-dead-yet-but-staring-the-reaper-in-the-face white men. Ben-Gay, Diagnosis Murder reruns and 4 p.m dinners aren’t exactly the hip sexy lifestyle that the District so badly needs.

I say it’s uncool, dag nabbit!

Random Districtions #2

Why can’t I tell who is a celebrity in this town?

If nothing else, Washington D.C is a city full of self-important looking older white men. From K Street to Capitol Hill, all you really need to look well-connected in this town are testicles, wrinkles and a cheaply tailored suit. If you’re, say, Judith Butler, this type just confirms the phallocracy that is the United States government and you don’t find these people too extraordinary. However, if you’re like me and come from a family where “guess who I saw the other day” is the typical greeting at family get-togethers, trying to discern whether or not an older man on Connecticut Avenue is genuinely famous can be incredibly difficult.

Unlike spotting famous people in such celebrity rich places as London, LA, New York or a Celebrity Cruise, the famous people in D.C aren’t strikingly attractive. Since politics is really just show business for ugly people, no one in their right mind would want to watch a D.C celebrity in a feature length film in the way you would a hot Hollywood celebrity like Paul Giammati. The most these people can reasonably be on TV for is about 15 minutes on “Meet the Press” so despite their power their image isn’t exactly burned into the back of anyone’s mind. Sure people in politics are better looking than others, and hey, sometimes elections do come down to who has the thickest hair (that Evan Bayh is as handsome as he is fiscally moderate!), but for the most part these people just look like the crotchety dean from an 80’s college movie. Maybe I’m just a racist, but it’s seriously impossible to tell which of these mistress-fucking blackberry users is 37th in line to the presidency and who is simply a lobbyist for the rodent poison industry.

This inability to discern who is a celebrity and who isn’t can be maddening. Is that John Boehner or an Oompah Loompah? Did I really just see Dennis Kucinich or did I officially take too many shrooms? Is that glory hole guy on Craigslist really a “dirty cum slut” or is it Larry Craig (actually in that case I suppose it could be both)? It’s impossible to tell! Next thing you know I’ll think my house is haunted by a banshee that just turns out to be a very upset Michelle Bachman.

This is why I am proposing, just so we know who in this town full of ugly people is a celebrity, that famous government types must identify themselves to the public, perhaps with some kind of patch or arm band. It could be in the shape of star so that we know they’re a “Star” and maybe with a bright color, like, say, yellow. What’s that? Someone else already tried that? Damn you American Apparel! You’re always a step ahead of me!

Are DC Deer Cool?

Apparently this one is.

You see, Washington DC’s Rock Creek Park, on top of being a great place to drop the dead body of an intern, extends from the District’s wealthy, bucolic deer infested suburbs into the heart of the district, just blocks from the White House. In fact in April of 1997, several deer even made it onto the south lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue –INSERT MONICA LEWINKSY JOKE HERE-, and these cervine bastards remain a national security threat to this day.

And it’s not like these deer are hapless creatures, no no, if anything the culture of the District has eaten these four legged mammals alive, both figuratively and literally. Not only are deer as ubiquitous to D.C suburbs as lobbyists are to the District’s steak and whore houses, but their flesh has received the ritzy Washingtonian style treatment as well. A year ago I was in the Dean and Deluca in Georgetown and saw that they were selling venison for $82 A POUND. If you do the math, you’ll realize that at 40 pounds of meat per deer, that would cost you $3280 for the whole animal, meaning it’d be genuinely less expensive to just go to Bethesda, run the fucking thing over, butcher it yourself and get your car fixed.

So should the nation have been shocked when on November 8th, 2009, a baby deer leapt into the lion enclosure at the National Zoo? I say no, and you want to know why? Because that deer, like every other Washington Whitetail, was BADASS. (NOTE-Apparently the video in the first link was shot by a man who was oddly named Ephraim Smethers, once again proving the Amish community’s scurrilous anti-deer bigotry)

Sure this once noble symbol of the outdoors has been corrupted by McMansions and greedy specialty food stores, but these local deer have that cut-throat spirit that makes D.C such a charming and pushy place to live. You don’t see any urban animals with this much chutzpah, do you? No instead of leaping head first into danger you only have spoiled, effeminate new money raccoons taking residence in over-priced SoHo boutiques and smarmy Los Angeles coyotes being paid off by TMZ to make Jessica Simpson’s life more miserable than it already is.

I say this deer exemplifies the American spirit in it's attempts to plunge headlong into unknown and dangerous territory for no other reason than that it wants to. Perhaps this fallen deer may even done this as an ironic protest against Obama further escalating the conflict in Afghanistan or maybe it was in celebration of the passage of Health Care reform (as it did receive mortal injuries and "being a deer" is often considered a pre-existing condition). We'll never know. And while it may have cost him his life, I think we can all agree at least one deer in Washington DC is very cool.

Is the DC Metro Cool?

Part one: Getting into the capital’s biggest hole

(If you thought I was going to write a post about the DC metro system with a “hole pun” you must have lost your fucking mind.)

A city’s public transportation is usually pretty indicative of its overall character. New York, for instance, is the capital of the world’s advertising industry, so what would a visit to the subway be without defaced posters of the Real Housewives with penises drawn into their mouths? Or take Paris: it's a city for lovers, and its metro is rife with teenagers trying to fuck each other between stops. Even Philadelphia’s crime ridden subway is a good example of how the City of Brotherly Love inexplicably manages to have both an exceedingly high murder rate and a lovely and totally walkable downtown.

Of course these characterizations merely scratch the surface of those cities’ venerable and urine soaked underground transit systems. So this is the first in a three part series about Washington’s very own subway system: the metro. Today, I’ll be focusing on getting inside this beast (tehehe).

The Washington DC Metro is the second most expensive construction project in American history, and for a good reason: Washington DC’s swampy geology means that they had to dig extremely deep to get to the bedrock. The DuPont station metro stop for instance goes down 172 feet from street level, making it the deepest and steepest metro escalator in American, and for the gays who congregate around DuPont Circle every weekend it becomes a death trap when mixed with stylish but ridiculous Prada loafers and seven vodka-soda-hold-the-sodas.

So, after a harrowing dissent into Hades, there are one of two options. First you could be in one of the city’s all white or all minority residential stations, in which case there won’t be any tourists and you can walk right to the gates. However, if you’re on the Mall at, say, the Smithsonian stop, you have to elbow your way through a baffled group of Midwestern tourists who need six xanax to deal with the stresses of basic urban public transportation.

Once you’ve hurled little McKenzie and her obese grandma out of the way, it’s now time to pay for your trip. The way most Washingtonians pay for the subway is with the SmarTrip, a brilliant little metro debit card that you wave in front of censors to open up the orange gates separating you from the platform. You can easily recharge your SmarTrip and it gets billed for every use: your balance can even go into negative dollars, which just shows you how much people love deficit spending in Washington DC! (Hahaha oh my god I am too funny. I gotta submit that to Jay Leno. It’s just the edgy humor his show is known for!)

The final obstacles in getting to the platform are the moving orange gates, which they have managed to place directly at testicle height and because been hit by a subway gate in Paris, I am terrified of them. I recently realized that the reason no one in DC is actually from DC must surely stem from the fact that no one here can have kids because of the hundreds of unreported metro ball-crushings that happen every day.

So all in all the system they have set up to get into the metro, with it's steep futuristic escalators, easy to use SmarTrip, and the superiority you feel around bloated and terrified Southern tourists makes it a perfectly reasonable experience.