Adams Morgan Blog

Years ago, I was exploring a City Hall building about to undergo renovation. This was in New Britain, Conn. I was working as a newspaper reporter. Joined by the city property manager, we went to the basement and worked our way through a series of tunnels and small rooms in the circa-1850s building. In one room was a stockpile of bomb shelter supplies. It included toilet paper, drinking water in cans, and food rations, mostly high protein biscuits. It was a total time warp. We really don't think today about nuclear weapons and war the way we did in the 1960s. I was a kid back then, but clearly remember a duck-and-cover drill. In class I daydreamed about a nuclear bomb going off in the distance. The government no longer prints phamlets about radiation or technical guides for do-it-yourself bomb shelters. But those days may return. Readers of Eric Schlosser know about the real risk of nuclear near-catastrophe (See his recent World War Three, by Mistake in the New Yorker), a...

Adams Morgan is giving people a way to express appreciation for President Barack Obama in what passes for the neighborhood’s town square. Thanks go to the Adams Morgan Partnership BID, which sponsored this effort, for keeping the public bulletin board at Columbia, Adams Mill and 18th, interesting. I hope the Obama appreciation is followed-up with a  “welcome” for President-elect Donald Trump because the responses are sure to be provocative. Only 4% of all of the District Columbia’s voters cast a vote for Trump. You may have better odds of winning the D-3 lottery than finding a Trump voter on the street. Trump’s White House arrival is being met with trepidation for multiple reasons, including the possibility that his administration might hurt DC’s economy. Trump may try to cut some agencies, namely Education, Environmental Protection, possibly Energy, Commerce and others as well. He intends to impose a hiring freeze. The American Enterprise Institute, an influential group...

Series of photos, circa 2013, taken from second floor of MLK library looking toward Verizon Center Google Photos automatically creates panoramas and GIFS from your uploads. There is a tool to allow you to create these things on your own. If you are a blogger and use Google Photos, this is nice to have. Google Photos assembled the above GIF without any prompting after I uploaded photos from an old SD card. Creating GIFs is a new experience, so kudos to Google for creating this image all by itself. But how do you embed this GIF from Google Photos to a blog? Wasn't sure. There are no instructions. Blogger does not appear as an option in the "share" function.  There is no "embed link" similar to YouTube. But this turned out to be really simple, and very similar to posting any image on your blog. First, went to Google Photos and clicked on "assistant." This brings up a page showing new movies, and albums and the other things it has assembled....

The Adams Morgan community bulletin board at Columbia, 18th and Adams Mill is electric  mix of images, announcements, and weird stuff.

I love my iPad. It's my main reading device, Words with Friends, etc. I once looked forward to going to Apple stores to check out the new systems. The design seemed refreshing. But not anymore. The Apple aesthetic, thick wood tables, uncluttered layouts, semi-minimalist, has reached its limit. The stores are now, basically, cookie-cutters. For sure, Apple has done some interesting things with its architectural designs: soaring ceilings, floor to ceiling windows and spiral staircases. It's Shanghai store, for instance,  is spectacular . But once inside, it's really all the same: Tables with equipment on them. That's fine in most places, but not here. Not in the Carnegie Library. The Washington Business Journal reports that Apple plans to open a "flagship" store in the Carnegie Library near the Washington Convention Center at Mount Vernon Square. It's a beautiful building on a small island of green space. A landmark building deserves a landmark oc...

I was working as a newspaper reporter in the pre-Web era, and our newspaper was receiving multiple calls about a particularly horrifying incident.  A woman, the callers claimed, was out shopping in the local mall and in a store bathroom when a robber approach her. The robber demanded her valuables, including the ring on her finger. He couldn't pull the ring off, so he cut off her ring finger.  The people calling the newspaper wanted to know why we hadn't reported it. An editor tasked me with finding out. The callers were readers of our paper.   I got on the phone with one of the callers and asked her about it.  How did she learn of it? A close friend told her, she said. Does your friend know the victim? She didn't know, but she put me in touch with her friend. The second person heard it from someone else and didn't have direct knowledge of the alleged victim. Who told her? She didn't want to say. Ok, I said. But how did she know it was true? She just k...

Martin Luther King Library, downtown, Washington D.C. D.C. libraries are unique in their design and character, and often best appreciated when empty. There's something haunting about an empty library at night. It's as if the voices in the books hold sway. The District's online borrowing system is very good. It's one of a number of library systems that enables use of Amazon's Kindle format. This means that you can download it and use it on a Kindle, Android and iOS device that's no different than a book ordered directly from Amazon. How does Amazon gain? It may sell books to readers, such as myself, who don't finish a book in the allotted borrowing time and then buy a copy off Amazon. In any event, Amazon is catering to readers who likely buy books as well as borrow them. In the end, it can't hurt their business and likely compliments it. One of the sites I use for reading ideas is Kirkus Reviews . It has this continuing mini-review section th...

I have great respect for solo protesters. They usually aren't protesting something. They are there to warn. It's prudent to take them seriously because they may be seers, people with ability to sense a future. What better place to spread their message than outside the White House gates.  People with prophetic ability exist but we don't know how to recognize them and usually ignore them. They operate in a different place.. The person with the signs above was in front of the White House in 2014. This was well before the age of Trump. I happened by and took some photos, but don't remember what he said. But his sign includes severals quotes, carefully lettered in black ink on cardboard. The photos only show the first two. "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the moneyed power of the countr...

This is a bear rug.

DC is full of 'mushy people,' said a new arrival in a postcard sent in 1910. Postcards were an early form of Twitter What the new arrival to Washington D.C. wrote in 1910: "Well I am at home here. I remember what you told me not long ago, but I've found company for there are more mushy people in this city than I ever saw before." Signed. Geo.