Urban Gadabout: It's off to D.C.! ('Cause they're making me go!)

by Ken

Thanks to the miracle of modern blog scheduling technology (which works more or less like that great space-age technological innovation the alarm clock), by the time you read this (or don't), I should be back with NYC limits after my whirlwind descent on Washington, D.C. (POST-TIME UPDATE: A post-time update follows this post, which for reasons I hope will be obvious was written last night, allowing a few hours' sleep before my alarm went off at 4:50am.) That's if all went according to plan, which is not one of those assumptions I like to assume, especially when the first part of the plan puts me on a sidewalk outside a McDonald's on Seventh Avenue at 6:15am.

Now I'll bet that when you first learned I was winging off to Our Nation's Capital today (this would be in the paragraph above), you probably thought I must be going with the express determination to knock some of those wooden Village heads together and maybe knock some sense into them. This is so close to the actual facts as to make the few trivial deviations hardly worth chronicling. However, for the record:

(1) There's no winging. It's such a hassle getting all the way out to the airport, and then getting from the airport into Washington. Who needs that? As we New Yorkers say, fuhgeddaboutit! No, I'm traveling the way people who are really in the know make the trip: by a tourist bus that, according to my best information, I will board outside a McDonald's on Seventh Avenue.

I think this qualifies as "tourist class." It is, at that, a class above the transport I used for my last D.C. outing, some years ago, when Howie had traveled east on People for the American Way business and wangled me an invite to a local soirée, which would give me a chance to see him, and I had the inspiration to do the trip via one of those Chinatown buses with the amazingly low fares. (Okay, yes, and also the not-quite-rock-bottom accident and casualty rates.)

The only thing was, the schedule clearly wasn't designed for day-tripping. After something like 7pm, which was way too early for me, the next New York-bound bus was at something like 2am, if not 3am, a matter of many hours after my function ended and, not knowing anyone in town well enough to seek to impose, I was dumped back into the chilly, drizzly streets of downtown Washington. I must have found enough places open where a person could nurse a cup of coffee long enough before proceeding to the next such place until it seemed reasonable to proceed to the bus stop, or at least what I believed to be the bus stop. Leaving me to hope, as I stood there on the darkened sidewalk, that there really was a bus at the expected hour and that I was waiting for it in the right place. (Let the record show that I made it home in one kind of exhausted piece.)

(2) I don't expect to be seeing any of Those People, those creepy D.C. types you're always reading about here at DWT. I don't know any of them, and I don't want to know any of them. I would have to check the itinerary again, but I'm pretty sure it includes the Capitol, and I suppose there's the remote possibility of incidental contact with some of those Villagers, but I suspect that the highest-ranking Washingtonian I'll be encountering is our tour guide.

And the fact is, the fact that the district is infested by those people is creeping me out, which brings me to this additional circumstance --

(3) I don't really wanna go. Oh, I had planned a trip for the day. Even scheduled a day off from work (which itself has to be done, according to the employee manual, weeks -- if not months -- in advance) for it. It's just that the trip wasn't supposed to be to D.C. It was supposed to be to "Historic Boston," where I haven't been in way longer than it's been since I was last in D.C. And I was really psyched for Beantown!

I had it all planned. I had bought an Amazon Local voucher for the "Historic Boston" tour, and kept checking the calendar for a suitable Friday or Sunday, the days when it's supposed to be offered. Finally, with the voucher's expiration date looming, I figured the crowd would be lighter on a Friday, and also some places that might be closed on Sunday might be open on Friday. So I took a hard look at my schedule, and went through the whole elaborate procedure for clearing a Friday off from work -- namely the one that turned out to be this Friday.


You might think that my trip to Washington has something to do with the subject matter of this tweet from Howie's and my old pal Milt Shook has something to do with my pilgrimage to Washington. Surprisingly, no!

Only, I appear to have overthought this. Earlier in the week I heard from the company that I was apparently the only one who had signed up for that date.

I was offered some options, not just for Boston, but for the company's Philadelphia and Washington tours. But my schedule doesn't allow for much in the way of options. I couldn't do a weekend tour, because Saturday I'm cruising across New York Harbor's Raritan Bay to New Jersey for Fall Fest on an apple farm and Sunday I'm doing Justin Ferate's Wolfe Walkers train trek to Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. All I had to play with was Friday, the day I'd already scheduled to have off from work. The vision of a day off began to dance in my head, but no, it turned out that they have an extra outing of the apparently very popular Washington tour -- normally offered on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday, according to the online schedule -- going on Friday.

Oh well, what the heck, Washington it is, I guess. Assuming that this crack-of-dawn pickup outside McDonald's actually comes (or rather came) off. Which makes for three consecutive days of out-of-state schlepping -- by bus, boat, and train. Not to mention after-work outings Monday (the second part of a two-part Historic Districts Council walking tour of Park Avenue with Justin Ferate) and Tuesday (first I pop in for a few minutes of the Municipal Art Society's members' open house in their new digs, in the landmarked Look Building, en route to Astoria for an evening at the Museum of the Moving Image honoring Marlo Thomas for That Girl, moderated by Gloria Steinem, with Debra Messing also on hand). I already feel exhausted.


POST-TIME UPDATE: Yes, I actually made it home before post time! And everything indeed proceeded according to plan -- no, better. I had a swell time. I made it to the McDonald's early enough to buy myself a large cup of coffee for $1.09 (including tax), and it was extremely drinkable -- better than a lot of cups of coffee I've bought around town recently. Luiz, our Brazilian-born driver and tour guide, who has lived happily in Astoria since (I believe he said) 1984, showed up right on time in our van -- no, not a bus, a van -- and since our whole cozy little group had arrived early, we were all checked in in time to leave early, and, like I said, I had a swell time. We saw am amazing quantity of stuff, even including a swing in the van across to Arlington to see the Iwo Jima Memorial, with a glance at the cemetery proper.

And no, I didn't run into "Ted from Alberta" Cruz or "Sunny John" Boehner or Steve Israel or Nino Scalia or any of the other Village people I've come to hate so without ever having met them. I did, however, spend some time in the sensational Wright Brothers exhibit room at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. What a great place the Air and Space Museum is! It's not hard to see why it's so popular.

Now on to my Yom Kippur Fall Fest at the apple farm tomorrow.

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What happened that day . . .

by Ken

The first thing I remember hearing as I regained consciousness was somebody asking somebody else if the somebody else had heard about what happened in Boston. What with my still-woozy state and the time it took to be moved to someplace where I had even minimal media accesst, it must have taken me awhile to piece together what-happened-in-Boston that day, a year ago yesterday, but in the days that followed I had an inoridnate amount of face time with the talking TV, so along with everyone else I was able to glean the occasional bits of news out of the 95 percent that could most fairly be described as news gibberish.

When my doctor's surgical coordinator had first proposed April 15 as a date for my knee-replacement surgery, I divined the hand of destiny: Apart from maybe January 1 or July 4, what easier date could there be to remember, then and forever? Of course I had no idea that "my" April 15 would be permanently linked with such an explosive public story.

I didn't have much time to reflect on that anniversary Monday or yesterday because I was in the grip of an even more than usually terror-ridden face-off with the "real" April 15. Thanks in good part to my surgical adventure and the related medical leave, I had what was for me an unusual and confusing tax year, the consequences of which were shrouded in mystery until I got up the courage to plug all the data into the tax software. Even I wasn't ridiculous enough to leave that whole process till April 15, but April 14 didn't give me all that large a head start.

As usual I was both surprised and relieved to survive the ordeal. What's more, in these days of electronic filing, it no longer even involves a countdown-to-midnight schlepp to NYC's General Post Office on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets. (In the olden days of GPO-schlepping, there were years when the countdown cut it close indeed to the midnight witching hour. The worst part was having the TV on during the counting-down hours with live shots of the tax laggards who had only just made their way to the GPO -- still ahead of me.)

This morning there was still no time to reflect on the "other" anniversary, as I had to wend my way to my appointment for the one-year follow-up appointment with my doctor, or rather to the radiology floor an hour ahead of my appointment to have new X-rays taken first. Eventually I was sent off instructions to return for new X-rays in five years. Or when the other knee, in none too good shape, cries out for more intimate attention.

The one thing about the surgery which I was infinitely grateful for was that I have no awareness of anything, not even the passage of time, from the moment I was put under till the moment I regained some level of awareness -- and heard that question about what happened in Boston.

A year later I'd love to be able to say I have some thoughts worth sharing about what happened in Boston, or even a thought. But I don't.

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WHY ARE REPUBLICANS ALWAYS STEALING MUSIC FROM DEMOCRATS TO PUSH THEIR ODIOUS AND HATEFUL IDEOLOGY? BOSTON vs HUCKABEE VERSION

Mike & Barry sittin' in a tree, s-t-e-a-l-i-n-g

Two weeks ago we reported how dishonest Republican Senator John McCain was caught stealing 2 songs from John Mellencamp for use in his campaign to personify a third Bush term. It isn't uncommon for Republican political hacks to steal popular music from Democratic songwriters and singers. They never pay for the usage-- which is ironic since it is the Congress that sets the rates and conditions and McCain has voted on the legislation dozens of times and is certainly aware that it is a crime to just use people's music without paying royalties. Bush was caught over and over again using popular songs from Democrats in his campaigns and he was repeatedly asked to cease and desist. Even back in 1984 Reagan was caught using Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," an anti-Vietnam War anthem for his campaign, although he eventually stopped when Springsteen said he would sue him if he kept using it.

The latest GOP thief is Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, who's been stealing music from the popular rock band Boston. Barry Goudreau, who was in the band early on, before being fired in 1980, is a Huckabee supporter; he didn't write "More Than A Feeling" or any other Boston songs. The songwriter is band leader Tom Scholz, and, like John Mellencamp, he isn't amused to find his music (the classic "More Than A Feeling") being used to push the Republicans' reactionary and bigoted agenda. He wrote to Huckabee and demanded he stop. Huckabee refuses.

“You have taken something of mine and used it to promote ideas to which I am opposed,” Mr. Scholz wrote. “In other words, I think I’ve been ripped off, dude!” In response, Fred Bramante, who was chairman of Mr. Huckabee’s New Hampshire primary campaign, said: “Governor Huckabee plays ‘Sweet Home Alabama.’ Does that mean Lynyrd Skynyrd is endorsing him?”

They probably do. But that's up to them. Scholz is insisting... and he wrote the campaign and explained that "Boston has never endorsed a political candidate, and with all due respect, would not start by endorsing a candidate who is the polar opposite of most everything Boston stands for." Scholz likes Obama's positions and hopes to vote for him to be president but doesn't plan to use Boston to push him.




IT'S NOT JUST REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES EITHER...

John Amato just reminded me that a certain unethical candidate from the Connecticut for Lieberman Party kept using an Orleans song, "Still the One," even though the songwriter, John Hall, was a Ned Lamont supporter.