D.C. Revamps Driver’s License Design:

“USA” was added directly next to Washington, DC on the top left, making sure that TSA agents, bouncers, and other security gatekeepers know the District is indeed part of the United States. The cards once read “District of Columbia,” which confused some.

Only in America.

It is time to abolish Kindergarten graduations. What exactly are we celebrating here, and how low are we setting the bar for future festivities?

For my non-American audience: yes, this is a thing, with toddlers all dressed up and ready to receive their diploma. Pure madness!

Reginald Booker and Sammie Abbott are second only to Pierre L’Enfant in their influence on Washington D.C.’s urban development, and they were neither architects nor civil engineers. I would happily watch an HBO/Apple TV+ miniseries about their fight with the congressmen who wanted to pave over the capital with miles and miles of highway. I mean, just look at them:

The Man they were fighting against was Rep. William Houston Natcher (D), chair of an Appropriations subcommittee which wanted to flood the District with money in a cash for concrete program. And again, a picture here is worth more than a thousand words:

Thanks to Booker and Abbott’s good work, DC now has a semi-functional metro under an agglomeration of vibrant, interconnected, walkable neighborhoods, instead of a completely dysfunctional and congested freeway system criss-crossing a checkerboard of destroyed city blocks, à la Baltimore. The Washington Post wrote about the pair a couple of decades ago, and the story is engrossing as ever. Someone, anyone, please forward it to David Simon.

Nearly 20 years have passed since I last attended a football (as in soccer ⚽️) match, but there we were at DC United versus Montreal last night. The fans were much more amped than I expected — a good mix of DC’s many colorful communities.

As for the score… well, can’t have everything.

Topping the list of offenders is a car with Maryland tags that has 339 outstanding tickets worth $186,000 in fines and penalties.

Ban cars.

It is a cool, rainy spring morning in D.C. and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D dur sits just right.

• Pack your own things, but unless you live in a studio and have only an IKEA futon and a twin bed to contend with, you are better off hiring someone to load, drive, and unload.
• The nice people who will help you move can also wrap your closed shelves and drawer chests in plastic, and move them with all the contents still inside, so unless you have the contents carefully stacked and/or have fragile things inside, do not bother boxing those.
• Do not attempt to move a 50" plasma screen from one place to the next all by yourself. You will break it.
• That said, 2023 is not the worst time in the world to buy a new screen, now that decently prices OLEDs are widely available.
• You may find, while packing, at the bottom of a never-used drawer, hidden under a decade-old abstract book and the 2011 ASH guidelines on idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, some medical instruments you used a few times during medical school and internship for a full neurologic exam and never again after that, said instruments being a brilliant white in you memory, or at the very worst a dull gray from all the lint collected in your white coat back when you still wore one, but now appearing old and yellow, like something you’d find in your dad’s office that looked like it was from the 1960s but was actually just a few years old only everyone back then smoked so the thing had no choice but to look and smell like it was made of nicotine, which now — the look, not the smell — come to mind when looking at that medical instrument of yours, only it couldn’t be nicotine because it’s not the 1990s and you are not in Serbia, so did something else go terribly wrong with the plastic? No, it did not; you are getting old.
• The first objects to enter the new household, once you confirm there is running water and electricity, are a modem and one or more routers. Place them on the floor and arrange furniture around them.

The finalists of Axios DC’s best building bracket are the Washington National Cathedral and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. An easy choice!

I am having more fun than I should following the Axios D.C. building madness brackets. The semifinals feature two traditional versus modernist face-offs: EEO building v. MLK library and the National Cathedral v. NMAAHC. Just delightful.

If you haven’t yen seen CGP Grey’s new video in which he ranks the US state flags, please do so now. It is vintage Grey.

The DMV region is 2 for 3 in the good flag department: Maryland’s is in the so-bad-it’s-good category, DC’s is just a really good flag I’m proud to see fly every day. Virginia’s is… quite bad. The seal is good — I love to see Latin in the wild — but as Grey notes, plastering your seal over a blue background does not magically make a flag.

What would make for a good flag of Virginia is the black snake on yellow background design it’s put on its specialty license plates, but of course “Don’t tread on me” has been forever poisoned, and other than the plates it has no particular ties to Virginia. If anything, since Ben Franklin drew the original design Pennsylvania could have use it to replace its own vexicological abomination, but for the toxicity.

No, if Virginia is to lean into its herritage it should put a ball of cotton on the left, a leaf of tobacco on the right, and a congestion-priced highway right down the middle.