Granite kissed

in progress WhitmanStone masons are scribing a quotation from Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” into the Q Street N.W. entrance of the Dupont Circle Metro station. The complete stanza reads:

Thus in silence, in dream’s projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hos-
   pitals;
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so
   young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet
   and sad;
(Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have
   cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Update: Via a DCist comment thread, WMATA’s press release on the project.

Car!

Get your spaldeen and meet me on the stoop: Timothy Williams and Cassi Feldman find a few kids still playing street games.

Last year in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, 58-year-old Delores Hadden Smith organized a street festival at the Gowanus Houses and had adults teach children games with candy-coated names that sounded like the made-up concoctions they were.

There was red devil; box ball; bluebird, bluebird through my window; hot peas and butter; a variation of ring-a-levio called cocolevio; steal the bacon; look who’s here punch-a-nella; knockout; and duck duck goose.

Market signals

Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market. The upshot: offsets are helpful (though there are skeptics when it comes to forestry offsets), but you may not be getting what you pay for.

I returned to Stanford’s Schneider to ask what kinds of offsets he might buy. “It’s legitimate to put windmills in if you displace fossil-fuel power,” he said. “It’s legitimate to put coal emissions underground if you could figure out how to make that permanent. Financing a gas plant in India if they were going to put in coal would also be good.” The key with all of these is they reduce carbon emissions at their source.

Kaplan, again

Via Robot Wisdom auxiliary, Jerry V. Haines is developing the World’s Least Helpful Phonetic Alphabet. I am reminded of a venerable Mike Nichols and Elaine May routine from the early sixties that my mother and I listened to incessantly on LP. Mike is running very late for a very important appointment, and is trying to get the phone number of George Kaplan, his meeting contact, from Information (what became known as Directory Assistance, because people kept using 411 as the public library). Elaine, the operator on the other end of the line, clearly needs to get out more. She repeats back the name he’s looking for:

That is Kaplan, George Kaplan. That is K as in Knight, A as in Aardvark, P as in Pneumonia, L as in Luscious, A as in Aardvark again, N as in Newelpost?

Now I feel safe

Commonwealth officials are cracking down on restaurants serving sangria prepared according to old-fashioned recipes, reports Jessica Gould.

La Tasca [a Spanish-themed restaurant in Clarendon] manager Daniela Schenone says the restaurant’s two Virginia outposts stopped serving brandy with their sangría about six months ago. Why? Because swilling traditional sangría is against the law in Virginia—and has been for decades.

Beth Straeten, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, writes in an e-mail that sangría has been illegal since the state’s alcohol agency was created in 1934. According to Virginia code, any restaurant with a mixed-beverage license is prohibited from “selling wine to which spirits or alcohol, or both, have been added.” Restaurants are also barred from selling beer to which wine or spirits have been added. So no go on the boilermakers, either.

Step by step

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted to pay the county’s share of Metro construction through Tysons Corner, Reston, and on to Dulles airport, rejecting the arguments of developers and some county residents that the tunnel option through Tysons warrants further study.

I can’t say that I’m with the tunnel supporters (who only got organized once certain businesses got on board) on this one. Tysons is an uncoordinated, traffic-choked mess, and I don’t have any hopes that burying the subway line will make it that much easier to rebuild the core to improve pedestrian access. The only county resident that I know personally who has spoken in support of the tunnel drives everywhere in a tank of an SUV. I suspect she’s more concerned about construction interfering with her commute than she is about trying to make Tysons Corner people-friendly.