Randoms On My Mind

Virginia Tech ripped us off on football ticket shipping this year. For the past two seasons, tickets had been delivered FedEx 2-Day Air: quick to arrive, and easy to pick up after hours for those of us with jobs. This year, they charged us the same $15 for shipping, but chose UPS Ground instead and took a profit on the remainder of the money we paid. Result: tickets arrive 4 days later, and after their driver misses you at 11 AM, you have to throw a small tantrum over the phone to get them to take it off the truck at the depot so you can pick it up that night. If you think I’ve got experience with this, you’re right!

Disappointing news of the day: [Daryl][http://d103.com/] is calling it quits at D103.com as of the end of this month. I understand completely his not having the time to make it as good as he wants it to, as I’ve felt that way about BTN several times in the past year. A big complication for him is that, as a professional writer, a half-heartedly written blog could damage his professional reputation. For me, it’s simply a reflection of my priorities moving elsewhere; unless I do something deliberately stupid to poison my name on a Google search or start talking about work, the embarrassment of a poor effort is confined to the five or six of you that read regularly despite my slacking.

Speaking of other priorities, of the ten Nationals games I’ve attended since the beginning of June, the mediocre-at-best Tony Armas Jr. started 5 of them, including four in a row. Guess who’s starting tomorrow night?

Read More »

Bolling over Connaughton: Bad Sign for Republican NoVA

I’ve got a few quick thoughts on the Virginia Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor, where state Sen. Bill Bolling from Hanover (suburban Richmond) put a significant hurting on the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, Sean Connaughton.

Despite significant endorsements on Connaughton’s side from downstate politicians, Bolling absolutely slaughtered him in every Congressional district outside the Northern Virginia commuting zone. Bolling ran an effective negative campaign, capitalizing on the traditional downstate image of Northern Virginia as a liberal haven.

The reason this race was important is that if the Republicans retake the top two spots in the state (which seems likely, with the Dems running liberal LtGov and former Richmond mayor Tim Kaine), the sitting LtGov will be the prohibitive frontrunner for the 2009 gubernatorial nomination. Meanwhile, Connaughton’s defeat leaves no one with Northern Virginia ties on the state-level party escalator, at a time when Fairfax County has begun trending majority-blue for the first time.

Transportation makes this area lean toward slightly higher spending across the board; Republican or Democrat, you simply can’t get elected up here without trying to address traffic concerns, whether it be by road or rail. Anti-spending conservative ideologues may give the statewide party warm fuzzies, but they need our votes to win. Those votes get less and less likely to go Republican the longer the state party avoids realistically addressing NoVA issues, and running a moderate with regional credibility out of the party lineup is a bad sign.

Random Thoughts: Oddballs at the TOP

One of the constants of life in the Washington area, along with death, taxes, and traffic, is WTOP radio. From its “glass-enclosed nerve center” near Capitol Hill, WTOP broadcasts its all-news/talk format on four radio frequencies and the Internet; it’s best-known for its traffic reports every ten minutes on the 8s, around the clock.

Compared to your average American news/talk station, though, WTOP is a bit odd. One of the first jarring features is the commercial distribution. Sure, you get the usual car dealers and department stores. But solidly in third place year-round (and occasionally moving up to second) are political-interest commercials targeted specifically at members of Congress. Yes, you read that right: the number-one radio station in the Washington area, with advertising rates that match its huge, high-end listenership, is a lobbying tool. From defense contractors ostentatiously mentioning how many jobs the latest fighter project will offer in Utah, Kansas or Georgia, to teachers’ unions sponsoring anti-No Child Left Behind ads, WTOP delivers enough politics on a day-to-day basis to, as Everything2.com writer Roninspoon once described his Army orders, “make a libertarian choke on his civil rights.” If Washington is really just a big company town, WTOP is the newsletter distributed on racks outside the office door, editorially independent, yet omnipresent and sometimes even officially acknowledged.

The second facet, which you only catch after listening to it regularly for weeks (as I have since I was reassigned to a project in Alexandria, requiring me to drive the Beltway every day), is the subtly bizarre/geeky — and sometimes off-color — humor. James Lileks once called Washington the Hollywood of the high-school debate set, and nowhere have I seen this characteristic more clearly than in the off-topic banter between the morning hosts on WTOP. All-news radio is usually a sharp, serious counterpoint to the scripted wackiness of the average mid-’00s FM morning show; WTOP takes that somber tone on first listen, until a few weeks later you’re driving along the Beltway, the anchors segue from one story to the next, and your jaw drops in wonder at what they just said in passing. Then you start noticing those happenings more regularly.

Washington is a curious place, something I’m noticing much more as I get better-experienced in the area. I suppose it only makes sense that its top radio station would reflect that quirkiness.

Tom Davis: Smarter Than Tony Kornheiser

If you’ve been watching the news, you know the House Committee on Government Reform held hearings Thursday on the Major League Baseball steroid scandal, subpoenaing several current and retired players plus Commissioner Bud Selig and players’ union head Donald Fehr. The committee chairman is Republican Rep. Thomas Davis of Virginia’s 11th District, covering the central-southern half of Fairfax and most of Prince William County.

Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post and ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption has been adamant over the past few days that Davis instigated these hearings purely out of spite for baseball choosing DC over Northern Virginia as the Expos’ new home. For anyone with knowledge of DC-area baseball politics, this is a patently stupid theory on its face, and it’s rather surprising that a local writer would even consider it. But let’s take a moment to knock it down comprehensively, just for fun.

• First: Davis represents neither of the proposed stadium locations in Virginia.
  The early preferred sites for Northern Virginia baseball were clearly in the Arlington/Alexandria corridor, well inside the Beltway on Metro lines. Almost all of inside-the-Beltway VA is part of the 8th District, represented by Democrat Jim Moran. After those sites were rejected, baseball promoters proposed a stadium north of Dulles Airport in Loudoun County, part of Republican Frank Wolf’s 10th District. That location was the one actually rejected last fall in favor of the District of Columbia proposal.
• Second: Virginia probably didn’t want the stadium, and certainly didn’t want to pay for it.
  The Arlington/Alexandria proposal died very early in the game, due to (a) property owners’ disinterest in selling and (b) NIMBYs. Out at Dulles, people questioned both the traffic load (20,000 more cars on the westbound Toll Road during rush hour?) and the difficulty Maryland residents/potential fans would have just reaching the stadium. On the financial side, VA Gov. Mark Warner (D) stated in September that DC was offering baseball more money than Virginia was willing to give. I think this guy’s view is rather representative of ground-level support for a publicly-funded stadium in 703-land.
• Third: Davis doesn’t hate the District!
  Matter of fact, Davis is sponsoring a bill to grant DC voting representation in the House. He’s not a kneejerk hard-right, small-government guy; that kind of politician simply can’t get elected in this area with several hundred thousand federal and fed-contract workers. There’s no political hay to be made here in screwing the District.

Read More »

Stereotypes on the Road

Thursday night at the new members’ class for the church I’ve been attending here in Northern Virginia, the volunteer leader made an observation on her holiday driving habits that I found rather insightful. Visiting family in Wisconsin, she said it took her three days to adjust to the rhythm of Midwestern country roads: not honking when it took the driver in front of her more than a second to react to a red light, expecting farmers to be out on a slow-speed cruise around the county, etc. That echoed my feeling of displacement driving from the Indianapolis Airport to Columbus, IN last Friday night, as I realized my recently-developed NoVA driving style stuck out like a sore thumb on I-465.

So Friday morning on my commute (40 minutes, only one major tie-up at the Dulles Connector/66 east merge), I thought about how I’d characterize the driving environment in several of the places I’ve visited recently, and decided it might be interesting to poll my readers as well, whether on these places or others they know.

So, to start off:

• Northern Virginia — the best way I’ve found to describe it is moderate aggression combined with a hair-trigger temper. Bad combination. In an ordinary situation, you can expect the average 703-lander to be rather impatient about stoplights, quick to change lanes without much advance signaling, and not too worried about proper following distance. All of that is somewhat anti-social, but tolerable. But the temper problem means that whenever traffic is bad (on the major highways, that’s from 6 AM-9 PM weekdays), people jump straight from zero to psycho in no time flat.
• Massachussetts — the term “Masshole” was invented specifically for drivers here. ‘Nuff said.
• South Florida — some of Dave Barry’s best columns, in my view, were about his hometown of Miami and what he described as the “craziness” of South Floridians. That description fits their drivers like a glove. You run the gamut there, from retirees who view 30 mph as an absolute upper limit, no matter the road, to Benzes, Lexuses and import motorcycles that draw no reaction as they fly down I-95 at speeds in the low triple digits. Anything can happen and usually does, so just be aware.
• Atlanta, on the other hand, is more predictable: where South Florida drivers are crazy, Atlanta drivers are just stupid. If you’re wondering what a driver is going to do, just figure the dumbest possible thing and get ready. They run the I-285 Perimeter like it’s the Atlanta Motor Speedway; they make right turns from left lanes across 3 through lanes of traffic and think nothing of it; blind curve passing/lane changing foolishness is just par for the course. And don’t even get me started on the 75-85 northbound split, where traffic engineers contributed to the problem. Looking at a map, you’ll see that 75 goes northwest and 85 goes northeast from the split point; the obvious solution would be for lanes for 75 North to split left and lanes for 85 North to split right, correct? WRONG — if you work for GaDOT, that is. Far better to reverse them and have the exiting lanes immediately cross over one another.
• Pennsylvania — these folks are actually remarkably calm, given the roads they have to drive on.

What do you think?