extra pickles

oh right, halloween was last saturday.  time to get rid of this goofy-turned-rotten thing.

i went to the prince of petworth’s 3-year anniversary party last night, partially because it’s a great blog and partially because i can never resist an invitation to wonderland.  amelia made the observation that (to use everyone’s favorite ambiguous adjective) it’s interesting that so many people would come together to celebrate that they simply read the same web page every day.  oh the power of community blogging!

and the power of a can of pbr and a shot of jim.  the combination may have made philly great (bob & barbara’s, anyone?), but it’s also making this morning afternoon miserable.  (wonderland serves bottles of pbr, though.  DC is so soft.)

the national gallery’s sculpture garden is a great DC spot.  next to its “jazz in the park” series during the summer (a largely misnomered event), my favorite thing about it is roy lichtenstein’s illusionary house I.  from the front it looks either flat or as if the midpoint (where the two sides and the roof meet) sticks out towards you.  but actually, the whole thing is concave and that midpoint is the farthest thing away.  it’s also cool to view it from angles where certain sides completely disappear.

i took a long DC stroll on tuesday, snapped some shots of the house, and made this animated gif.  hopefully it displays properly for you—tumblr was being fussy.

for a few weeks prior i figured that i’d spend my 5th halloween dressed as a red jaguar from nickelodeon’s “legends of the hidden temple.”  on friday afternoon, though, having an excuse to wear my child-sized dennis rodman jersey proved too hard to resist.

after seeing them on tumblr, i went out and bought these shorts.  man, are they short.  i picked up a pair of knee-high red socks at american apparel, as well as a second pair of shorts that i ultimately opted to wear out because they showed a little less thigh.  (sidenote: did you know you can’t return stuff to american apparel?  you can only get store credit?  isn’t that a little ridiculous?)

for house parties, this wasn’t the best outfit—“oh, so.. you’re a.. basketball player.  sweet.”  in past years people definitely got more kicks from my red jaguar costume than they did this year from whatever you want to call this outfit.

dancing while wearing this was great, though—it’s pretty liberating to dance (and a lot less disgusting to get sweaty) in scanty clothing.  also, my walk home on friday night was amazing.  i walked from black cat across U street and then up 18th street to the mcdonald’s at the end of adams morgan, and i swear i got no less than 25 hollers for wearing a rodman jersey.  there were several “the rest of your outfit doesn’t look like him, so why are you wearing a rodman jersey?” comments, but the majority were positive.  i even got into a game of imaginary basketball (i’m a pro at boxing out).

overall, i was pleased.

(vaughn is dressed as a hipster, by the way.  yes, it’s just a costume.)

a spammer took over dave’s girlfriend’s twitter account (it’s since been deleted so i had to recreate this screen capture) and these are the two direct messages she sent me.  she thinks i’m fat and poor.  great, just great.  i’m not denying either, but still, come on.

oh hello again, tens of readers.  i still exist, i’m still wearing gingham, and i’m still looking for an appropriately (or at least fittingly) smug tumblr icon picture.

this picture was snapped two saturdays ago at a restaurant called urbana.  its $11 bottomless bellini deal makes it the only place that i know of in DC that rivals red rocks’ $9 bottomless mimosa brunch.  the place was empty during our entire 11am to 3pm stay, which i was surprised by—aside from a truly horrible waiter and a bit of an uppity vibe, urbana is great.  check it out.

later that day we went to another fun place that i had never been to, comet ping pong.  it was filled with kids.  lindsey and i befriend a fourth-grader named jake.  he and his twin third-grader siblings were highly amused by tales of my own fourth-grade teacher, ms. moon.  they were in town visiting their 29-year-old brother and were actually from the north shore ‘burbs of chicago.  lindsey and i were excited to reminisce with them about the 4 years we spent in the same area, but apparently elementary school kids aren’t ones to indulge nostalgic talk.  anyway, comet ping pong—a place with ping pong tables and cans of old chub is always worth checking out.

after spending that saturday at these two unique DC gems, jason will be proud to know that on sunday i somehow allowed myself to be convinced to go to an olive garden.  whoops.

it’s your inner chemist’s favorite day of the year: national mole day.  to refresh, a mole is a unit of 6.02 x 10^23 atoms or molecules.  so, from 6:02am to 6:02pm on 10/23, kooks all over the country celebrate.

my high school chemistry teacher gave us pocket periodic tables to mark mole day 2000.  she was pretty eccentric and mole-obsessed (see her piece titled “beyond tradition: a chemistry teacher and her mole fetishes”), and many students probably don’t care to remember her.  she was undeniably passionate about chemistry, though, and especially in hindsight i think i really valued that.  so 9 years later, even though it has come in handy on far fewer occasions than she claimed it would, ms. phillips’s pocket periodic table still has a nostalgic place in my wallet.

my (half) transformation from a sweater wearing kanye listening prepster to a chest hair showing tater tot eating (pseudo) indie kid has now been substantiated by seeing myself on byt.

ryan, buddy, we need to work on your mugs.

oh TARP, how i’ll miss the emotional roller coaster you’ve had me on for the past 13 months.

Core TARP Programs Ending

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury will shut down two more financial bailout programs along with its main bank capital injection program by the end of this year, a Treasury official said on Tuesday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Capital Assistance Program and the Targeted Investment Program would be shut down along with the Capital Purchase Program.

The programs are parts of the $700 billion financial bailout program that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Reuters earlier on Tuesday were ready to be wound down.

The Capital Purchase Program is the Treasury’s main bank capital injection program launched in October 2008, with more than $200 billion invested in more than 600 banks.

The Targeted Investment Program was used to further prop up Citigroup and Bank of America to the tune of $40 billion, while the Capital Assistance Program was launched in the spring of 2009 to provide capital to banks after regulatory “stress tests” determined their balance sheet health.

None of the banks found to need additional funds in the stress tests have tapped the Capital Assistance Program, choosing instead to raise capital in the private markets.

In addition, the Treasury official said the bailout funds dedicated to the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility — a joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program — and a public-private investment program designed to sop up toxic assets would be capped at $30 billion each.

i’ve gone from feeling elated to disillusioned to star-struck to exasperated and finally to indifferent (although the last has been mainly a matter of circumstance) over TARP.  but regardless of those ups and downs, and even though i knew to begin with that it’d all be temporary, it’s still a little sad to realize that a thing to which i dedicated so much time is indeed starting to wind down.  alas.

perhaps i’ll get in on the single retail fund that’s supposed to come out of PPIP (BlackRock’s Legacy Securities Public-Private Trust) to keep a little piece of the ordeal experience with me for a while longer.