walking up wisconsin avenue towards the tenleytown metro stop this evening, i passed a homeless man sitting in a bus stop that he had clearly turned into his ad hoc home. there were three shopping carts full of random books, clothes and bags surrounding him, and as i got nearer, he started frantically waving a newspaper in his hand and shouting nonsensically. he was obviously mentally disturbed. but as i passed by, i heard what he was yelling: "those politicians in southern virginia! they make crazy laws! i want to call them all up and do the donald trump and tell them that THEY'RE FIRED! they deserve to be fired!"

turns out, i couldn't agree with him more. and after seeing in the past few weeks the kind of laws that the virginia house of delegates is spending time and taxpayer money on passing, i'd rather have the crazy homeless man in office than those idiots.

see:

Lst night Charles, Brian, Matt and I went to see the Wizards beat the hated Indiana Pacers in an exciting to-the-wire victory that I'm sure was deeply symbolic for some reason. This little outing was thrown together at the last moment, but things went off without a hitch -- turns out it's easy to navigate the challenges of professional sporting event attendance when the team in question hasn't won a playoff game in sixteen years.

But this year! This year things are clearly possibly going to be different, maybe. So why the game was sparsely-attended is somewhat of a mystery to me: the Wiz (actual alternate nickname: 'Zards) are in fourth place in the East despite star player Larry Hughes being sidelined with a broken hand. Friends who understand such things assure me that (ignoring for the moment their inevitable annual meltdown) Washington will be seeded against the Heat in the playoffs, ensuring an almost-immediate loss -- so now is the time to go see Gilbert Arenas wreck house. A mere $10 ticket will buy you a seat featuring the unofficial halftime upgrade plan.

This was the first time I've been to an NBA game since the days of the Bullets, although I've made it to MCI for hockey games a bit more frequently. I was glad to see that the franchise seems to be appropriately ashamed of their insipid mascot -- aside from the logo on the court and a pointed hat on the nonspecifically fuzzy mascot, there weren't any allusions to wizardry at all. It's almost like taking the most effete bits from Dungeons & Dragons and marketing them to the fans of a sport defined by contemporary black culture is a bad idea. Weird!

Anyway, the healthy sense of shame was good to see, but rest assured I still found something to get upset about: MCI no longer sells Gordon Biersch garlic fries! Outrageous! Preposterous! And while my hot dog did resemble rehydrated jerky in an interesting and fairly pleasant way, there were no packets of onions available. C'mon Abe! Washington deserves better than this. We demand concession concessions. Can't you get the folks from Ben's to set up a beachhead?