I shant miss it

I may have found a way out. I don't want to pop the champagne yet, as I still have a follow-up interview to get through. I'm in a little bit of a holding pattern, but it's looking pretty good.

Meanwhile! A lot of stuff probably has been going on that I just haven't been paying attention to. It's definitely easier to live in this city when:

a. You don't have to commute anywhere.
2. You've stopped caring about anything going on around you.

And both of those apply to me right now. I've largely tuned out the world these last two months, and I've basically been super-busy looking for work and doing various other chores/hobbies/fun things.

But there were two deliciously stupid things I turned up yesterday that I had to blog aboot. Abooooooot.

a. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I have higher standards for civic employees than I should. Maybe my expectation that people who work for a city should take some measure of civic pride in their work is misguided.

Suspect in D.C. Nightclub Shootings Freed by Mistake.

Maybe it's wrong of me to expect the employees at D.C. City Jail take their job marginally more seriously than the lunchtime line-order cook at Five Guys in Georgetown. (Who is also, by the way, very lax on the job. You're on notice, line-order cook. Stop flirting with the ladies and gimme my fucking burger.)

Have you no sense of decency, D.C. jail system? At long last? OK, well, your sense of comic timing is spot on, at least:

According to the Corrections Department, Harris appeared in D.C. Superior Court on the shooting charge Nov. 21 and was returned to the jail with a document authorizing his release.

After Harris's release, corrections officials received documents ordering that he be held without bond, the Corrections Department statement said.

BOI-OI-OING! It's the wackiest jail in the city! They let the guy go. This could be the makings of the shortest season of Prison Break ever. You don't even need the tattoos and the corrosive liquid in the toothpaste tube and the tape recorder; all you need is a piece of paper saying "Let me go!" and they will.

But the hilarity DOESN'T STOP THERE. After they let him go accidentally, the jail didn't notify the cops FOR A WEEK.

HOLY FUCKING GOD.

This isn't even up to the level of "Bump-bump-ba-nah, wahhhhhhh." This is way worse. So of course, with a WEEK'S HEAD START, the suspect got away, and is probably lounging around somewhere in Jamaica or thereaboots.

So that's the city in a nutshell. Scary: Some dude wounds four people in a shooting, and gets inadvertantly set free. And... nobody cares. The people whose job it is to keep him locked up... just DON'T CARE. Even after they fuck up, they don't care.

Scarier: They've fucked up this badly before, or worse, and still nobody cares. This didn't even get much play in the Post... it ran on B4.

(Updated since I started writing this last night... the guy did not flee to Jamaica like he should have, but instead fled to... Southeast D.C. And was bagged by some U.S. Marshals. The escape is being blamed on "staff negligence.")

2. There's a new bowling alley in Chinatown. Normally I'd be all about this; I sort of like some of the new developments in Chinatown, and it's nice to finally have a neighborhood where there are a lot of people hanging around on a random Tuesday at 10 p.m., and you can get there easily from just about anywhere via Metro. The movie theater's nice; Matchbox is a good new restaurant. Bowling should be another plus. I like Strike Bethesda, and I'd go there more often if it were easier to get to. This looked like a good chance to add to the Chinatown atmosphere.

Oh, but for the D.C. twist, vich ve hate: the dress code.

Why?

Why is there a dress code?

Why is there a dress code... at a bowling alley? IT'S BOWLING. Bowling should not have a dress code. Bowling should be conducive to scuzziness, if desired.

Of course, the DCist readers have it figured out: the dress code excludes black people. Or, at least, black people who actually dress like black people. It reads:

LUCKY STRIKE LANES
Dress Code
STRICTLY ENFORCED
NO Sweats or Athletic Wear
NO Skull Caps of any kind
NO Excessively Baggy Clothing
NO Torn or Soiled Clothing
NO Clothing with Offensive Writing
NO Shirtless Vests or Jackets
NO Sleveless Shirts for men
NO Exposed Intimate Apparel
NO Sports Jerseys
NO Baggy White T-Shirts
NO Excessively Long Sweaters or Jackets
NO Excessively Long Shirts or T's
NO Chains

It would have been so much easier to just go with