SCHIP

Just posting a link to this one: Veto Threat Angers Republicans
Read through, then check out the link to the comments. I'm pretty sure you can guess my opinion on the matter.

(If you don't know what SCHIP is, check Wiki.)

I was wrong...

Reliable Source says this:
A court commissioner ordered Britney Spears (left) to hire a parenting coach to show her how to raise her children, according to documents posted on TMZ last night. The L.A. court scolded the pop singer for "habitual, frequent" drug and alcohol use -- but also denied her ex-husband Kevin Federline's request to have more custody of their two kids, now shared 50-50.

I totally thought he'd have those kids by now. Keep trying K-Fed. How long can Britney really last on twice a week random drug & alcohol screenings?

Call Laura Sessions Stepp!

"I think I do sleep better now," she said. "And it's definitely much easier to have another person in the bed if the occasion arises."

I read this article and had an immediate reaction of 'why did I just do that?'
Uhhh what a WASTE of newspaper space. Also makes me feel old in an 'when I was your age' type of way. Like, when I was your age, we slept on crappy twin xl's because that's what you do in college. I don't think colleges are supposed to encourage sharing beds. Plus, that's a good way to gain spacial perspective: how do you fit to fully grown adults into one twin bed? GRE practice, I think so!

(Anyway, Laura Sessions Stepp might want to write a rebuttal to that article, since now colleges are clearly ENCOURAGING girls to hook up with guys by giving them big beds. Watch out for grey rape.)

Update on the Orioles

We were at the Sox game Sunday, in pretty awesome bleacher seats. Our dear friend in the daisy dukes was definitely up in the stands, same seat, same shorts.... I think he kept his shirt on, but I tried to take a photo from far away, coming soon.

Meters vs. Zones vs. Meters vs. Zones vs....

In 1996, the commission voted to require meters in all cabs by 1998. The decision was made after a city-financed study concluded that the zone system charged too much for short trips and not enough for long ones. The meters were never installed.
Read article here

Well, my personal opinion is that we need real meters, I just don't understand why DC keeps trying to be different and "individual." As the nation's capital shouldn't it set a bar for the rest of the country? Isn't that why they have such a great educational system? Oh... Wait...

I have in the back of my head something we studied in econ (of law maybe) about whether the cab driver is better off cheating & wasting time to get a higher fare or taking the quickest route.
Economics says: Quickest route - may be a lower fare but then you are able to start looking for a new passenger.
(If anyone has read this & has a reference for it I'd much appreciate the help.)

"I don't need to walk around in circles, walk around in circles, walk around in..." - Soul Coughing
(Listen here)

From the station that brings you Loveline...

I ended up walking to work this morning because traffic was a little backed up and I had clearly just missed a blue bus. I wish I had been paying a little more attention to my surroundings because I could have snapped a picture on my cell of this situation:

On the sidewalk on the inbound side of Key Bridge there's a girl in a itsy bitsy yellow bikini holding a sign for 106.7 Talk radio, and a guy snapping photos.

So who does that? Come to find out that 106.7 is the station that hosts Opie & Anthony (ohhh) and Loveline. I guess it was promotional, but what girl thinks that's a good idea?

Can I get satellite NESN pretty please?

Here's the deal: Red Sox/Yankees was NOT on ESPN last night! So I called 4 Courts & of course they were playing it. Then I called the Continental (because their food's better) and the guy who answered the phone asked me what station the game was on! He didn't even know it was being played! GASP. Apparently, if I can't watch it on my ESPN at home, I can't watch it at the continental - just for future reference. Thus we went to the 4 Courts.

Now here's what I don't like:
a) No NESN here. I swear next year I am ordering MLB extra innings...
b) cigarettes! Yuck. I love smoke free DC, and smoke free Boston, and even smoke free NY, and smoke free Canada (yes, Ontario is indeed smoke free).
But the VA probably will never accept this as a good idea because tobacco is a big crop. Have you seen the Phillip Morris complex on I-95 south of Richmond... Unbelievable. (Oh yes and for those of you saying, so why didn't you just go into DC to watch it? Have you been to Rhino bar? Grossssss!)

So thank god it's on ESPN2 tonight, and I won't have to deal with the girl who smoked 3 cigarettes in a row practically on me.

Look at them girls with the daisy dukes on

Actually, look at that old man with the WHITE daisy dukes on, sans t-shirt.
OK, he spent most of the game without a t-shirt, which was a slightly more disturbing sight than this photo because his beer belly flopped over those short shorts, and yes, we were convinced those were tightie-whities until he stood up.

What a sight at the Orioles game yesterday! After encouraging us to take this picture, security guards said that he comes every Sunday afternoon in similar scantily clad outfits and that he's not even an O's fan. (You can't see the Red Nationals cap in the photo - but here he is singing God Bless America.)

Orioles lost yesterday, Nationals lost yesterday, f-ing yanks lost yesterday, but the Bo Sox won & are back to 7 1/2 games up in AL East. Yeah baseball!

Just the headline you DON'T want to see:

Thanks, Washington Post. Live Chat at 11, yay!

PLEASE give K-Fed the kiddos already!

Wow. Just read that new issue of US Weekly said Britney Spears put soda in her baby's bottles. Then you read the text and it says: Britney just shoves a bottle of juice in his mouth all the time to stop him from crying.
Juice might be loaded with sugar, but it sure isn't soda, I know that much. Also, then she tried to get a dentist to whiten the babies' teeth! She does know that those are going to fall out eventually, right?
2 things here: Clearly, Britney Spears is a train wreck, US Weekly has about as much brain power as Miss Spears.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I think K-Fed could (and should) get custody of those kids.

J. McLaughlin (again)

This morning I spotted: lime flesh green bow-tie with blue starfish.
How nautical nauseating.

I hope if you wear that in public that you are with your own kind, because I will laugh at you for looking like an absolute preppy goofball.

HBO

Part 1
OK, just need to comment, turned on HBO & found Little Miss Sunshine. So awesome. My favorite part is when Steve Carrell says "He's colorblind, he can't fly."

Part 2
Sunday night's Entourage. HILARIOUS. And such good work with the craigslist tie in. I loved it.

Yuck, movies...

I'm watching "The Last Kiss," you know, Zach Braff's other movie. It's not bad, but I just can't believe it. Not that it's unbelievable in the "irreleastic" sort of way, but that it's just fucking unbelievable how much of a shitshow everyone's lives are. Two notes - irreleastic obviously is my recent replacement word for unrealistic, yeah GREs; it's worse than a shitshow but I can't find the right word.

Maybe emotional trauma? Watching how everyone's lives play out it's totally ahh horrifying. And depressing.
HOWEVER, not in a girly sappy yucky movie way (ahem, "Catch and Release"). Thankfully there aren't any emotional relationship movies coming up on my Blockbuster queue.

Ok, and also like watching a train wreck. I'm going to have to write about Laura Sessions Stepp coming up.

Photos of RTB

ZDLR on the right in redStage & crowd

Stage bathed in yellow

Flava-Flav & his clock

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

So, I was at Rage Against the Machine Saturday night and it was fucking amazing. ZDLR can rally 35000 fans to scream along to anything he says. And generally, he's worth listening to. Now more than ever they need to come back to the scene & make noise about the political situation. While some lyrics were written 15 years ago (yes, "as we move into '92"), they're still absolutely applicable to today.
I think that people give us ("young people") a lot of grief because we fell out of the protest movement. We volunteer a lot, we sign petitions, we're generally concerned with the state of the world, but we've lost the inability to rally ourselves and protest something, regardless of how strongly we feel about it. But I think RATM could mark a solution. Just imagine a protest on the mall against the war- speakers like politicians, activits, celebs, etc (Jim Webb I'm looking at you) that brings in hundreds of thousands of people. The way to bring the young people is akin to bribery - have a band show up and rock out and watch what happens. Come on, if we had like "Rage Against the War" as a protest, we'd finally see civic involvement from those of us who seem to have lost hope.

I'm not sure why we feel that way either - disenfranchised and hopeless and like our actions don't matter.

BUT ANYWAY, MORE ABOUT THE SHOW!

So after yesterday's weather I am pretty glad that I bought tickets the minute they went on sale for the Saturday show, because Sunday was pretty nasty. And I heard that Erykah Badu canceled anyway, so it was pretty much the same groups.
Flava-Flav was ridiculous, he brought 3 of his kids on stage and sort of hemmed & hawed for a while. The Roots were good, Talib & Mos Def were good, and Cypres Hill was a waste of my time (kind of like the last time I saw them at a festival, it's like everyone here is already pretty stoned so we don't need you around to get them to smoke more, right...). Wu-tang clan wasn't nothing to fuck with, and that was fun because I didn't appreciate them the last time I saw them (at age 13).
And then... The moment I'd been waiting for for months - or longer, a long time ago I was supposed to be at the Rage/BBoys concert that got cancelled, so I hadn't seen them in about 10 years.... Rage comes on stage. The press of the crowd was ridiculous - people surged forward, mosh pits broke out to the left and right, I could have picked my feet off the ground and been supported by so many strangers that I would have still been standing. It was pretty ridiculous. Nice part was not a lot of crowd surfing during rage. Just AWESOMENESS! Lots of awesomeness. It was amazing. ZDLR made an intense statement about the White House's resident idiots and every single thing that they played moved the crowd. We were all there for Rage, it was clear. It was fucking awesome.... Ahhh, I'll post some more photos here too although they aren't that great. AWESOME!

Street Smarts

So apparently a 22 year old woman gets into a van with a strange older man who offered her a ride to Crystal City, and then is attacked and assaulted. I just don't understand how this girl's street smarts could be so non-existent...
Situation - you're at a party & drunk & the metro is shut & you need to get home. Do you a) hail a cab b) get hailed by a strange man. From the men I've seen around here he probably hollered out the window to her in a pretty crude way too.
I don't know, I guess she was from Dallas and maybe that made her a little more trustworthy, but HONESTLY?

Don't ever do something so stupid as to get in a car van with a stranger.

Read about it.

Dear Ms. Erway...

From Washington Post: "During the whole campaign, he was hugged-up on black people," said Michelle Erway, 26, a black federal government contractor from Northeast, whose 3-year-old son will enroll in a charter school this fall. "Now that he's in office, he's hugged-up on white people. I lost a lot of respect for him after he was elected."

Oh, seriously! You think he's flip-flopping on his race choices? Let Mr. Mayor choose the best (wo)man for the job, regardless of the color of their skin or whatever.

How would you feel if Hilary was "hugged-up" on women during her campaign, then wins the election (god help us) and gets "hugged-up" on fellows. FELLOWS. MEN. Good lord, but there are more women than men in this world, what is she doing? What if all the women are incompetent?

(Disc. I'm white & female. I think Hilary is shady & that Fenty should fix this city with the best resources available. They could be green kitten-eating aliens for all I care, but if they can make DC magic happen then let it be!)

Hillary

Well, here's proof of the type of woman voting for Hillary Clinton - her campaign song is by CELINE DION! (A Canadian!)
That's disgusting.
There's still some reason why HC is just a little sneaky, I'm not quite sure. My vote is with Edwards right now, but I can only imagine what would happen if BLOOMBERG ran.

Foodstamp Challenge

I think this is cool: Lawmakers Find $21 a Week Doesn't Buy a Lot of Groceries (Washington Post).
Cooler still: they are keeping blogs -
http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/
http://timryan.house.gov/

FASHION

Turn to the left?

Ohmygod, everyday when I go through Georgetown I go past that super preppy store (J Mclaughlin or something?) and see the most drunked excuse for clothing. (I couldn't come up with a better adjective.)
-Pink chinos with skull & crossbones embroidered.
No, really. They are hideous, but if you're in G-town worth checking out - the store is next door to Dean & deluca.

Another thing I read this morning: Big-ugly-bug-eye sunglasses?
They're out! According to the Express, it's way cooler to wear normal shades than ugly ones. They did in fact quote my favorite song about sunglasses (Cory Hart), which some girl sang on the street Friday night while walking into GW hospital, trying to convince someone that it does indeed exist.