Four-square black on white street name signs in Arlington, remarkably uniform across the county. Whether block number information appears on the sign is apparently a secret revealed only to the traffic engineers, not unlike the alphabetic-and-numeric grid that was overlaid on the municipality's jumble of subdivision streets in the 1950s. Eric swears that somewhere in North Arlington you can find the intersection of Vermont and Vermont.

posted: 4:58:38 PM  

Well, sir, I took one for the team.

I worked a table for Reston Community Players at this year's Reston Festival. Just a two-hour stint of smiling at people as they saunter by, making eye contact, letting people go if they weren't interested in what we had, which wasn't much: season brochures with a special insert for Beauty and the Beast and a card-in-the-jar drawing for free tickets. No free ice cream (washingtonpost.com) or illicit helium balloons (the gubernatorial campaign booth behind us).

Our booth was in a non-profits ghetto between the food trucks and the moon bounce, catercorner from an Islamist outreach organization, and the county police's "DWI convincer" truck wasn't far away (fun for the kiddies!). Farther down the road, a South American folk music group played. I'm as open-minded about world music as the next guy, but the Andean flute leaves me cold. Yes, they finished the set with "El Condor Pasa."

Traffic was slow, so we ended up talking to row mates as much as anything. People were looking for other people; we had one disgruntled subscriber. The guys at the bloodmobile were eager for donors. My tablemate delivered a series of near-monologues on a surprising variety of topics, from the luxurious public potties in Washington state, to speculation about how many of the pillars of Islam you could ignore and still remain in the faith, to carping about the one-off box office scheme we've set up for Beauty. She did ask whether I'd ever been to Madison, Wisc. (yes, I have, in 1978). It's just as well that she spent much of the time reading the brochures from the Muslims and Independence Air across the aisle (someone took a group photo of the booth employees, and they all held up an ASL pinky for "I"—cute).

But our table had a canopy that kept off the sun, and I had brought enough water. I walked over to the Hyatt to use the restrooms, and discovered that the old cafe space (late of the Allegro, a really nice casual restaurant) is now housing a Panera. So life is good. Still, I was very glad when Glenn and Heather arrived to relieve us a 2:00.

posted: 4:44:45 PM  

Dan Barry offers a prose-poem farewell to New York's Fulton Fish Market, which will soon relocate to the Bronx after more than 170 years in Manhattan. Why the move?

posted: 10:39:29 AM