There are graceful, majestic sports played almost every week at the Capital One Arena; and then there is Monster Jam. Oof!

From the Department of You Can’t Make This Up: the face of D.C. pedestrian safety was hurt in a hit-and-run. And not just a little bit:

Stephen Grasty was placed in a neck brace and taken to George Washington University Hospital, where doctors treated him for a long list of injuries, including a broken leg, foot and vertebra. His C6 vertebra was “hanging on a hair,” Shelly Grasty said.

D.C. could be one of the most pedestrian and bicycle-friendly cities in America (just look at these lanes!), but you just can’t get away from out-of-town drivers. (ᔥAxios)

From the archive: the author presenting some preclinical work on the cell cycle at the AACR annual meeting in Washington DC, circa 2017. Little did I know that six years later I’d be living just a few blocks down the street.

You don’t need to live in DC to appreciate Martin Weil’s delightful prose about its weather this weekend:

Both days, Friday and Saturday, innocent of haze and atmospheric moisture as they were, seemed to celebrate change and assure us that in coming days, humidity would cease to be a concern.

These two days seemed to embody the exhilaration that comes of seeing blue skies, and nothing but blue skies, everywhere we looked.

Of course, when it comes to weather reporting nothing can beat Kevin Killeen’s story on why February is the worst month.

“On the morning of 8/6/1945, the Yamaki family and their bonsai survived the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 30 years later, bonsai master Masuru Yamaki offered this tree, one of his oldest and most precious, as part of a gift from the people of Japan to the people of the United States”

When traveling through Washington National airport, looking up is so much more rewarding than looking down. Not as safe, of course, but beauty comes with risks.

Boarded then left a broken JetBlue plane, and noticed how… ugly abstract the carpet was while waiting at the gate.

Lenore Skenazy, a co-founder of the free-range kid movement Let Grow, writes about the playgrounds of North Virgina:

“Welcome! Play Safe,” reads the sign at a Fairfax County Public School playground in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. The sign also lists a few simple rules—21 of them, by my count.

⊕ Although, to be fair, the background of my favorite sign ever was green.

The accompanying photo shows the playground sign, versions of which I’ve been seeing so much they’ve become part of DC’s atmospheric noise, like ambulance sirens, or screams of people who may or may not be experiencing homelessness but are definitely experiencing a psychotic episode: crowded white text on a screen-of-death blue background trying to codify common courtesy.

Skenazy’s Let Grow partner Peter Gray had the best comment:

“The only restriction that needs to be added to make them complete is ‘No Playing,'”

And of course, at least one person in the article mentions that these signs are there to “mitigate the liability of the entity responsible for the playground (school, municipality, etc.) in the event they are sued.” This just in case regulatory creep is apparent everywhere, medicine being the prime example, and the expanding size of clinical protocols yet another. Yes, we have Choosing Wisely, but how about Regulating Wisely?

(↬Tyler Cowen)

It’s the first day of school in DC, and we now officially have a middle-schooler in the family. I need to watch Eight Grade (2018), if it’s not already out of date by now. Tempus fugit…

The mantra at the end of this back-to-school themed Washington Post column — please drive safely, please drive safely, please drive safely — should have an addition: and don’t look at your G-d damn phone. We’ve had a couple of near-missed walking through DC; each time it was because the driver was too busy texting to pay attention to the intersection.