June 2011
23 posts
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Going, Going, And Gone?: No, The Oxford Comma Is... →
“Love of language, it turns out, is a complicated minefield of things you care about and things you don’t, and one person’s explosive issues are obviously no more valid than anyone else’s.”
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Last weekend, my band obtained the keys to a bar...
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“Georgetown used to have a dentist, but he got hooked on the laughing gas. Don’t...”
– from The Georgetown Metropolitan, courtesy of City Paper
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“And yet in 2009, Holder overrode the views of his own Office of Legal Counsel...”
– John Yoo, “Obama is Flouting the War Powers Resolution”
I am kind of appalled at the idea of quoting John Yoo (and part of me is also reluctant to link to the American Enterprise Institutes’s site), but his dig at DC voting rights has been lingering on my mind. At the very least,...
“This city is actually running quite well.”
– Mayor Vincent Gray
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“I don’t think in the context of the world today, ‘city’ is a...”
– Nicholas Lemann, talking about his upcoming New Yorker piece.
I kind of balk at the notion of the “DMV;” although Maryland, Virginia, and the District are certainly related and intertwined. Life in Fairfax is very different compared to life in Bowie or Petworth or Suitland. The idea of...
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“the prevalence of HIV among District adults and adolescents remains 3.2 percent,...”
– from “AIDS infection rate remains epidemic in District, report finds,” Washington Post
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“NAVA, the 450-member North American Vexillological Association, conducted a poll...”
– from “Washington, D.C. Tops American City Flags Survey, Pocatello Places Last,” NAVA press release, 2004.
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“Our post-series obsession with his failure, as opposed to the Mavericks’ mighty...”
– from “The Mavs’ Win of LeBron’s Loss,” The New Yorker
I’m mostly posting this because I feel somewhat vindicated about my rant yesterday on how weird it is to see the celebration of LeBron’s failure. Thanks, New Yorker!
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“It might be called a city, if it were not alternately populous and uninhabited;...”
– from, “Washington City,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1861.
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“I was there for the riots and everything. I didn’t really take part in any...”
– Edward P. Jones, from State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
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“With the exception of that ignominious attempt in D.C. to quash Kwame...”
– from Michael Weinreb’s Top Five
I think this nicely captures the irrationality of sports, but also their allure.
On a side note: I saw Kwame Brown at a bowling alley in Alexandria when I was in high school- ninth grade or so. He signed a McDollar that I had recently won in a raffle. Chuck...
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“Edinburgh is almost always portrayed as having become a very bourgeois city....”
– Irvine Welsh, from Bomb Magazine. I went to graduate school in Edinburgh, but I think the idea of “touristy culture” defining a city (or allowing others to define a city) is just as relevant to the District.
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“In Washington, Ethiopians have been so successful in redeveloping retail strips...”
– from Ethiopian Yellow Pages: Life, by the Book
“Is one of your two jobs a fairy tale writer?”
– Sulaimon Brown
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“I’m from D.C. so I was raised on go-go and hip hop, but, yeah, you know,...”
– A guy on 18th Street, outside of Madam’s Organ. After doing three shows out in the sticks over the weekend, it was nice to play for the home crowd last night. 