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Dana Farrior • October 28, 2014

This morning marked the opening day for early voting in the 2014 General Election. As of now, the only poll open is located at One Judiciary Square. However, on Saturday, Oct. 25, all nine early voting locations will open across the District of Columbia. Voting hours run from 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and will remain open until November 1 – excluding Sundays. For your convenience, the District of Columbia Board of Elections offers a webpage that will show current wait times of each Early Voting Center. For more details, including directions and contact information for each voting site, click here.

Dana Farrior •

On Sunday Oct. 19, 2014 at approximately 6:00 a.m., an adult female was sexually assaulted in the 3300 block of Prospect Place NW.

The Metropolitan Police Department is requesting help from the public in the search for the assailant.

The victim describes the suspect as a Hispanic male, approximately 5’7″ in height, in his twenties, clean shaven, last seen wearing a black leather jacket.

Anyone with information regarding the assault can help solve the case by texting the tip line at 50411 or calling the police at (202) 727-9099.

Also, DC Crime Solvers is offering a reward of up to $1,000 to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for the assault.

Dana Farrior •

Sean Thompson is expressing gratitude at the George Washington University community’s outpouring of financial and emotional support in the wake of his sister’s suicide attempt.

Last Thursday, Sean’s sister, Emily, attempted suicide by jumping nine floors from Shenkman Residence Hall. Though Emily’s fall was not fatal, she was severely injured by the impact.

Emily broke her feet, femurs, kneecap, right arm and cracked her spine. She has undergone a fourth surgery at George Washington Hospital and her nerves are recovering quickly allowing increased mobility in her arm, according to Sean’s update on his GoFundMe.com account.

Recently, Sean launched the GoFundMe campaign to subsidize some of the costs of medical expenses his family will incur. He set what he believed to be a sufficient goal of $10,000 to pay for his sister’s care.

To his surprise, within the last five days, over 500 people have donated nearly $24,000 and his cause has been shared 2.2k times on social media.

“I want people to be helped by this and not scared or hurt or worried. I want whatever good that can come from it to come from it,” Sean Thompson told The Hatchet.

Natalie Koltun •

Say goodbye to takeout lunch as you know it. As passed by the District Council July 14, styrofoam takeout containers will soon be a thing of the past.

The Sustainable D.C. Omnibus Act of 2014, more formally known as Bill 20-573, was discussed without much opposition in an earlier vote in June, and has now been finalized. This means that as of Jan. 1, 2016, restaurants, grocery stores, cafes and even food trucks will be prohibited from supplying customers with disposable food and drink containers made from plastic foam.

The complete rulings of the bill will take place over the course of two years so that the use of styrofoam containers is slowly phased out in exchange for more environmentally friendly materials. In 2018, the second portion of the bill will go into effect, requiring food and beverage outlets to use only containers made from recyclable or compostable materials. This ban was part of a broad environmental bill introduced by Mayor Vincent Gray last fall.

After D.C. Department of Environment found in 2008 that a significant portion of the trash in the Anacostia River originated from plastic foam objects, the discussion to ban such containers was underway.

Despite facing some opposition from businesses worried about this expensive new burden, the ban was supported by environmentalists who have said that since the foam is not fully biodegradable, it often crumbles into tiny particles that can harm fish in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

The new law follows suit to ones passed in Seattle and California as well as the plastic bag tax in D.C. and Montgomery County that began four years ago to reduce the use of non-biodegradable materials, while generating funds to support river cleanup programs.

Robert Devaney •

The Georgetown Business Improvement District has placed about 50 chairs around town for residents, workers and visitors in a pilot program “for pedestrian respite.” Chairs are near the C&O Canal, at Washington Harbour, near Dean and Deluca and on Book Hill.

BID also begins its Georgetown Gongoozlers mural project (a “gongoozler” is an idler who stares at length at activity on a canal) Friday, Aug. 1. Artist Nena Depaz, the first of four local artists commissioned to produce a mural, will install a mixed-media work on construction barricades, covering the main entrance of the closed Latham Hotel at 3000 M St., NW.

According to the BID, “For the Bistro Chair pilot project, the BID team placed more than 50 BID-branded bistro chairs throughout the commercial district to provide opportunities for pedestrian respite. Beginning Friday, Aug. 1 and ending Jan. 5, 2015, four local artists will activate the former Latham Hotel façade with original art installations inspired by the nearby C&O Canal as part of the Georgetown Gongoozlers project.”

BID said that it “commissioned the temporary, rotating artworks to improve the streetscape during construction, discourage illegal graffiti, and to help support community efforts to maintain and interpret the section of the C&O Canal that is adjacent to the hotel.”

Here are more details from the Georgetown BID offices:

For the Bistro Chair pilot project, about 50 blue and gray chairs were imprinted with #GeorgetownDC on the seat to encourage visitors to “claim their seat” and share their Georgetown experience by tagging Instagram and Twitter photos. BID says that it plans to increase the number of chairs throughout Georgetown over the coming months.

The Georgetown Gongoozlers mural project celebrates the history and natural beauty of the C&O Canal. The murals will be exhibited sequentially on the façade between August and January (Nena Depaz, Aug. 1 to Sept. 4; Georgetown resident Sidney Lawrence, Sept. 5 to Oct. 15; Kelly Towles, Oct. 16 to Nov. 13; Ekaterina Krupko, Nov. 14 to Jan. 5). Each installation will later be auctioned to support historical interpretation efforts on the C&O Canal, including the construction of a new canal boat.

The public is encouraged to tag their best shot of Georgetown’s C&O Canal on Twitter or Instagram now through January 5 using #GeorgetownDC for a chance to win one of several prize packs. Prizes will include tickets to signature Georgetown events, including Taste of Georgetown Sept. 13, FAD (Fashion Art Design) Oct. 17 to 19, gifts from local merchants and more.

Both initiatives further action items found in Georgetown 2028, the BID’s 15-year action plan for the neighborhood. In order to establish Georgetown as friendlier pedestrian environment, and to encourage discovery, the plan includes the addition of temporary parklets, temporary sidewalk widening programs, increased programming south of M Street and a major renewal project to restore the canal and its boat.

Visit the Bistro Chair pilot program page on the BID’s website here; visit the Georgetown Gongoozlers project page here.

Gary Tischler •

Weeks and days, and seasons and news can be blue or incessant—we get floods and a street in Baltimore collapses onto a train track, and the buzz of war lingers over the Ukraine like lightning, and all people can talk about and write about is Donald Sterling, a rank racist and the contents of his conversation with his non-girlfriend, which spread like rancid mints over the internet and there are horrible mud slides and forest fires, and the plane is still missing and people are still shooting each other, it’s enough to make a body weep but out of sight of any iPhone lest we ourselves go viral.

Then comes along a weekend, and it’s not that it makes you forget everything—the net never sleeps—but that it makes you think of other things for a while, that there are stories out there with no speculative qualities, days and nights that run into each other with nothing but serendipity, full of the spirit of photographer Walker Evans, who told us to go out into the world with hungry eyes—and, we might add, ears and a spring in the step.

That’s why, even as we notice that the city is changing at a hard-to-believe pace, we also notice the rites of spring, the end of April, the improbable rise of a horse who made his own birthright, Washington residents and visitors bursting into the streets to visit embassies all over the city, and other Washingtonian pouring toward the Washington Hilton and sundry other party sites for the city’s annual rite of awkward fame and glitz. Others did other things and did not feel left out of the scheming of things, the rhythm of season and song. We blended our own daily comings and goings into the buzz around us, partook of the things we could, and read stories about the world and paid our bills, and picked up the dry cleaning and groceries and watched the beginning-last of the blossoms fall from our neighborhood trees, creating hundreds of white—but not red-carpets.

This is what happened on a month of Saturdays and Sundays—every bike rack in the city appeared empty, and everyone went out and about. En route from dry cleaning and laundry, and across Massachusetts Avenue to Whole Foods in Glover Park, we saw crowds stand in line for a very long time, mess up traffic patterns, and generally act like the inquisitive family of man, woman and child to visit the opening salvo of some 50 embassies in the city which had opened their doors for the annual rite of Passport D.C. This yearly event, which has grown from its small beginnings as an impromptu even by European Union embassies several years ago, now stretches across the whole merry month of May, and it has become a major attraction because: it is free, it has exhibitions, music, bags, and the opportunity to travel the whole world over or at least a good portion of it by way of visiting the embassies of countries not our own, and hear languages we do not speak, but wish sometimes we did.

As we drove up Mass. Ave., we the crowds around the embassies of Japan, Ghana, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is still freshly ensconced, and lines form in our neighborhood for Mexico, and the Spanish Cultural Center, and in Dupont they formed up for Argentina and a host of others. Crowds were everywhere, the sun delivering the weather goods.

That night, the who’s whos, but not the Who, of This Town, which is Our Town, but not our town, gathered at the Washington Hilton for the annual rite called the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, in which the media by now almost helplessly rounds up the usual celebrities and some new ones, to sit at tables and preen—who’s hot, who’s not, the best and worst dresses and addresses and so which cover four pages of the style section with roughly 36 photographs. The president and a comedian make jokes, Oscar winners and news folks dressed as movie stars arrive while movie stars do the same. The Style teaser headlines pretty much tell it all: Richard Marx and Rick Springfield? Whatcha got in that goodie bag? Um, I’m with the band, who was the biggest diva? Three-day blowout, and handing out the superlatives, the latter ranking the best lines, the awkward moments and more. Oh, look, the most interesting man in the world. You kid you not.

It is impossible, of course, not to feel a little envy for not being there, because this mash-mish-mash of celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood on the Potomac, swag, parties, pre-and-post-and during just sort of comes through town like Moby Dick, swallowing everything, including a lot of champagne. If you’re not in there, you’re out there, like so many people we saw gawking as guests arrived. Two country music stars were there—Brad Paisley and Bob Schieffer. But, then again, if Willie Robertson of the “Duck Dynasty” is there, how exclusive can it be?

As it was, we were 20 minutes late getting to the Kennedy Center for the opening night of the Washington National Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” us and many children dressed to the nines, along with Newt Gingrich, and opera buff and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and not one single member of the Ducky Dynasty. This seems to happen yearly now: the WCAD and the WNO opening night. Do not know whether to laugh or to cry, but we were in awe of set and costume designer Jun Kaneko, on display on stage and in an exhibition. It was a magic “Magic Flute.”

Other things happened: the Adams Morgan BID kicked off its summer season of concerts at Columbia Road where bikers stopped to listen, and the new kids on the block—the babies and the pre-schoolers and the dogs and the parents stopped to listen. I talked about the way-down-the-road election in November, and stopped by Joseph’s House, the hospice for the homeless, where they were holding a yard sale, and I saw signs asking for news of Romeo, their house cat, which had disappeared months ago, but had apparently recently been sighted. In Georgetown, the Chanticleers were at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Sights and sounds, and music and musings.

And the best story of the week popped out of the Kentucky Derby, where California Chrome, an odds-on favorite, oddly enough, rode to a smooth victory. Here’s the thing: this West Coast horse, head-held-high beautiful stallion, was brought to hallowed Churchill Downs from California, by way of parents who were bought with a grand total of around 5,000 bucks, by a couple of regular guys, had a trainer at age 74 in his first Kentucky Derby , leaving doubtful experts in the dust.

This is class triumphing over Class and breeding and big money, always a good story in these our times.

Here’s an idea: Whether he wins the triple crown or not, somebody who with a little class and imagination ought to invite California Chrome to next year’s White House Correspondents Dinner instead of Kim and Taylor, and Katie and the rest of faddists.

I might just kiss a Duck to get in there, just to sit next to California Chrome.

Joseph Park •

The D.C. Department of Transportation will start training streetcar operators in real-time traffic Aug. 4 along H Street and Benning Road, the first segment of the new D.C. streetcar system to offer passenger service later this year.

The first 2.4-mile long segment of the D.C. streetcar rail extends from Oklahoma Ave., NW, to Union Station, making multiple stops along H Street and Benning Road. Each operator will train with supervisors under various traffic scenarios as a part of the certification process to carry passengers.

D.C. Transportation Officials said that drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are advised to use caution when travelling along the H Street corridor as the streetcars will now begin operating.

“Remember to ‘Look, Listen, Be Safe!’ around streetcar vehicles at all times – look both ways and listen for the streetcar before stepping into the crosswalk, and never walk in front of a moving streetcar,” said a DDOT official.

Also be alert that vehicles will now be ticketed and towed that are parked in the streetcar’s path, including cars parked outside the white lines and illegally double-parked cars.

For more information about the new streetcars, visit dcstreetcar.com.

Robert Devaney •

Last week’s torrential rainstorm caused untreated sewerage to flow into the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, according to the National Park Service. The wastewater also flowed into the canal in Georgetown, prompting NPS to caution people not to fish in the canal and to sanitize any items that were in the water below Lock 6 until the end of Sunday. NPS said that the overflow amounted to 5 million gallons.

The canal’s towpath remains open.

Other spillage from the storm also caused the Capital Crescent Trail between Fletcher’s Cove and Water Street (K Street) to be closed. The trail will be closed for several weeks, according to WJLA.

Gary Tischler •

In this town, which is our town, the world is always with you, right outside the morning-opened door, the Georgetown streets, in cushy hotels, in front of the White House which we pass every day, in the traffic jams, from which we glimpse visiting black limo dignitaries, amid the demonstrators who come here every year, always different but always the same.

In this town, which is our town, history is always with us, our monuments are concrete paeans and poems to our shared histories and memories. We’re always remembering, commemorating, celebrating the singular events of our events, which are imbedded in cement, in the grassy knolls of our memories and cemeteries, in books and street addresses.

No other city is quite like this in this quality—our local news are national and world news, our daily travels to offices, work and chores take us through a kind of daily theme park of history. Some things occur here, rest here and our part of our routine like a backpack, the clothes we wear, the messages we retrieve from our open pads while having coffee at a Starbucks.

Yet, we live in our blocks and villages and neighborhoods, and sleep under blue-dark skies, and wake up to retrieve the morning or pore over the magical contents of a baseball box score: IP 7 H 3 R 0 ER 0 BB 1 SO 10 MNP 99 ERA 3.39. That would be the beatifically splendid pitching line on the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg in a 4-0 win over the Phillies.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, a large part of the other part of the world came to Washington as part of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, in which leaders from most of the nations in the continent of Africa arrived for discussions, workshops, gatherings, speeches and policy-making, headed by President Barack Obama.

They—political leaders and business leaders and perhaps social and cultural leaders— came from all over Africa, from Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and a host of other countries. Black cars whizzed around town, stopping traffic around places like the Mandarin Hotel. There was a particular logjam around the Four Seasons Hotel across from the Georgetowner office on M Street. Still and all, the day proceeded on the avenue: a couple taking a self, sitting on the faux cow in front of Ben and Jerry’s, a father trying to tickle his baby boy into a laugh in front of a clothing store, and fashion-conscious girls prancing in twos and threes along the avenue as if it were spring still and all.

We breathe, we dance or come out of the Whole Foods Store, slightly less richer on a Saturday when the bloody struggle in Gaza came home to Lafayette Square in front of the White House in a protest rally by thousands of Palestinian supporters, condemning the rising death toll there, the Israeli incursion and invasion of the Gaza strip to stop rocket firing by Hamas. It is one of those horrible tragedies where we all have opinions, in our town, this town.

Earlier in the week, Latinos, some of them illegal immigrants also gathered to protest in front of the same White House, demanding an end to deportations sparked by the flow of illegal immigrants mostly young people at the Texas border, streaming up from Central American countries.

The world echoes loudly here, especially if, as some of us do, or have done, we mingle with the gathered crowds, and when we do that, we seem to tumble under the onrush of history.

Life, of course, doesn’t care about the town, any town, and it moves on, and provides us with its own lessons. One day, a 69-year-old woman named Patsy Stokes Burton of La Plata, Md., a mother of four, went to one of her four jobs in Upper Marlboro and was struck by a bus and died of her injuries. Her husband Mack Burton said, “When she left yesterday, she told me to have a good day and I told her to have a good day.” The words, so everyday, suddenly turned into last words. Burton said, “I have no vendetta against that driver. Like I said, she was just out doing her job. It happened, and not a thing in the world anybody can do about it.”

One day, history comes that way in our town, old history, refreshed in the passing of someone we felt we knew who made history. Today, the news came that James Brady, the former press secretary of President Ronald Reagan, who was among those who was shot in an assassination attempt on the president in 1981, died at the age of 73. He was paralyzed by his wounds. For a time his name was on gun control legislation—the Brady Bill—which was eventually allowed to expire as law.

In this town, our town, we make our own diversions, the daily life this city gives. On Saturday, we went to the National Zoo, in hopes of catching up with Bao Bao, which we did not. But we did see the two sets of lion cubs, three by three, and their lionesses, their mothers, lounge a little separate from each other, like worldly, sanguine young ladies and women. A distance away, father lion lounged, his tail swatting flies, looking like the laziest, most regal of lion kings, black mane darkly royal.

The young cubs posing on ledges, with their mothers, looked for all the world, like feline debutantes in a John Singer Sargent painting, languid, self conscious and aware of being beautiful and rare, and pure. A mom licked the ears of one of the cub. You could practically hear the cub whisper, “Oh, mom, not in front of everyone,” as if an ordinary teenager.

In this town, our town, the world is always with us, one way or another, within walking distance, within a shout or the murmurs of hearts and minds, our hearts and minds.

Natalie Koltun •

The Ebola crisis in West Africa has put the world on high alert, forced some leaders to remain in their home nations to miss the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and caused the postponement of “The Future of Development and Business in Africa, ” a forum to be held today at Georgetown University.

Like some other universities, Georgetown University has taken action against the spread of the virus. Joseph Yohe, associate vice president for risk management, and James Welsh, assistant vice president for student health, announced Friday that there will be a temporary travel moratorium on all university-sponsored trips and programs to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, three West African nations in the midst of battling what is considered to be the worst Ebola outbreak in history. This moratorium follows U.S. health officials’ travel warning about the dangers of the virus, which kills 90 percent of those infected. As for when the travel moratorium will conclude, Yohe and Welsh intend to comply with the CDC’s guidelines.

The Gaston Hall event was to feature Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who delivered the university’s School of Foreign Service commencement speech in 2010. The forum’s focus was to discuss private investment in Africa while looking at its role in the region’s health, education, poverty and emerging business opportunities, as well as benefits of receiving support by the United States’ government and other international organizations. The event has yet to be rescheduled.

Sirleaf, along with 50 other African leaders, was invited to attend the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in D.C., taking place Monday to Wednesday this week. To contain the deadly virus that has already killed over 700 people, Sirleaf and leaders of Guinea and Sierra Leone have cancelled their attendance to the summit.

Although there have been no known Ebola outbreaks in the United States to date, residents should still take caution when coming into contact with those exhibiting flu-like symptoms. A Washington, D.C.-area man was hospitalized last month after contracting a flesh-eating bacterial disease. Joe Wood of Stafford, Va., was swimming in the Potomac River when a scratch on his leg became infected with an aggressive bacteria that feeds on flesh – vibrio vulnificus. Wood was admitted to Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg where he received skin graft surgery the following week.

This news comes just days after a 66-year-old Maryland man was treated for the same strain, characterized by fever, chills, vomiting and other flu-like symptoms. In Maryland, the number of vibrio cases reached a 10-year high last year, according to the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene