Back when I had to commute from Baltimore to Bethesda via DC’s Union Station every day (don’t ask) I would obsess about which train car I should enter so that I exit just in front of the right escalator. Yesterday, a Good Samaritan and fellow commute optimizer posted the layouts of every DC metro station to the Washington DC subreddit. If only I could send this back to my 2014 self!

A tornado warning for DC, and another day of 80mph winds. The one las week was a doozy! What was the micro.blog climate emoji, again? 🧨?

Update: It was fine.

I’ve been down on D.C. recently so I’d like to make one thing clear: it is a great city to live in, work in, and visit, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (you know who they are).

One of the biggest culture shocks international visitors have when coming to the US — myself from 15 years ago included — is the tipping culture. Sure, I would round up the bill to save myself from carrying coins, or if I was feeling particularly generous leave a small bill or two, but it was neither expected nor required back home. So I cheered when DC voters passed Initiative 82 which would eliminate the “special” minimum wage for tipped workers — a whooping $5.05 per hour — as a step towards one day abolishing tipping altogether. Of course, some people are not happy about the consequences.

Walking through Hillwood yesterday was too much so I had to tone it down.

In a scene right out of The Wire, a man was shot while watching a soccer game in Adams Morgan, right next to our kids' old elementary school. In fact, had we not moved a few months ago, it would have been their current ES — this happened not 500 feet from our old back yard, as the crow files.

So anyway, if you cut the police budget, crime goes up. Who knew? (And yes, this continues to annoy.)

“A fixer-upper in Georgetown is on sale for $50,000. It’s a wall."

The perfect headline for the perfect DC story. Washington real estate, ladies and gentlemen.

Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens is a favorite spot of ours which we have visited frequently but never when the lotus flowers were in bloom. Well, until now.

And it was OK — having a new phone helped — but we have not, in fact, been missing much except for the crowds. April is still the best month to visit, especially for those suffering from trypophobia. Not to be confused with trypanophpobia, as the Wikipedia article notes helpfully.

Pictured below is Nelumbo lutea, or the American lotus, North America’s only native lotus species.

The ceiling of underground D.C. Metro stations is the rare piece of brutalist architecture I enjoy. It’s the commuters’ cathedral.

Writes The Washington Post:

Council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1) echoed Mendelson’s remarks. Bowser, she suggested, “can ask [D.C. police] why they’re not patrolling equitably across the city, or provide data on what they’re doing, or [ask] why the U.S. attorney is declining two-thirds of the cases. I want to reiterate: This council is united in addressing public safety issues and we’ll continue to do it.”

This is in regards to a new emergency public safety bill passed by the council in response to a spike in violent crimes, and if you took Nadeau’s comments to heart you would think that the problem was restricted to certain neighborhoods — you know which ones they are — and was a direct result of there being less police presence than in some other areas — you know which ones those are as well.

Throwing out words like diversity and equity has become a verbal tick for some, but if council member Nadeau said that the D.C. police were not patrolling equitably with intent, we are deeply in newspeak Ministry-of-truth territory. Because the police are, in fact, patrolling equitably: in the wrong direction. Bad decisions have consequences D.C. council cut the police budget by $15 million in June 2020; by April 2023, police staffing reached a 50-year low which came both from the cuts directly, and indirectly from the burnout of those who remained. and instead of owning up to their mistakes — the equitable policing the Council achieved meant that previously safe parts of town are now also unsafe — they double down on their bad reasoning.

But to justify the title of the post: equitable — unlike, let’s say, gaslighting is a precise word, which in my book makes it a good word. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that achieving equity is always good. “Socialism makes everybody equal: equally poor”, went the old joke, and what goes for equality can also go for equity, as D.C. Council has just shown.