No, I am not canceling my Washington Post subscription; the free one I had through my previous federal job expired and I never renewed it, so there was nothing left to cancel. My main source of local news has been Axios DC but The 51st popped up recently and is now getting amplified. It has fewer tips on where to get the best Cinco de Mayo margarita and more in-depth news, which is great. It also lists Old Town Alexandria as the number 1 spot for a fall walk around D.C. so they’re not perfect, but then no-one is. And of course, they are opportunistic about the recent local events (headline: D.C. Deserves Billionaire-Free Local News).
🏀 The Wizards' season home opener against the Celtics was a bust, but that wasn’t a surprise. I’m actually more hopeful after this game than I’ve been after the last season’s home win against the Grizzlies. A dignified(-ish) loss against a great team versus an eked out win against a bad one.
🎭 Went to the theater for the first time in years to watch Babbitt, a well-executed dumbing down of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about middle-aged and middle-class conformity. The play took the lazy approach of taking pot shots at MAGA; a more biting satire would have aimed at the upper middle class conformists in the audience.
I’ve updated my now page. The update includes where I am right now, which is Savannah, Georgia, where I am attending a medical conference. But you can’t escape DC: I was sitting at the bar having lunch when a couple couldn’t help overhearing where I lived as I was chatting with the bartender. “Hey, we’re from DC too”. Small world! Where in DC? “Oh, we live downtown, we’re both lobbyists.”
Of course they were. One for a private healthcare equity firm, the other for medium-sized pharmaceutical. We did not delve deeper.
This morning on Axios DC:
Metro fixed its fare evasion problem on trains, and now they are focusing on the 70% of bus riders who don’t pay. That eye-popping rate is up from 17% pre-pandemic.
Yowza. There is more at WaPo. Kids and I take the metro bus to school from time to time and I can confirm that:
- School children in general don’t use their free ride cards. It improves the flow of people and drivers don’t seem to care.
- More than half of the adults just waltz in as well. That too improves the flow of traffic, and drivers don’t seem to care about that either.
A head-scratcher, that.
From Axios, PowerPoint’s comeback:
Gen Zers and millennials are using the software to prepare whimsical presentations on niche topics, dating history or vacation destinations for their friends and family.
Tight Five Pub, a sports bar in D.C., hosts PowerPoint parties where locals gather to present silly, heartwarming and informative slideshows on esoteric interests.
I haven’t been pessimistic about kids these days, until now.
DC and its suburbs have some of the worst drivers in the country (see r/MarylandDrivers), and this post from Dave Winer reminds me why: no sense of personal car space. The demographics of people trying to kiss my bumper are similar to what Dave encountered, too: middle-aged women and elderly men.
“With everyone who does that in the District of Columbia, they’re singling me out?”
Here are a few unrelated articles that crossed my inbox this morning:
This is why I hate driving through North Virginia. Maryland’s highways are somehow not as aggressively modern.
