Do your worst

So in just about two months, this site has gone from zero bloggers to five. Damn. It'll be fun to see what happens.

I'm Dave, and here's my little fluff piece about who I am, and why I'm writing here. Aside from the fact that I must be a self-important asshole because I write for (multiple) blog(s).

I've been reading this site for a few years now. I rarely comment because I have a strong dislike for Blogger and all the little hoops you have to jump through to leave comments. But, I bit the bullet and activated this account so I could write here. I think I had a Blogger account back in 2001, but no one knew what a blog was back then.

Anyhow, I'm Dave and I don't come from small town America. I came to DC from the wasteland that is the unaffluent suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. You know how Barack Obama did community organizing in the areas that lost all their jobs because steel mills shut down? Yeah, that's the next town over (and the city of my birth!). Sure, people in my town mostly work in the city and still have jobs, but it's not some fancy pants area like McLean or Chevy Chase.

I came to DC in 2002 for school, and attended a university completely full of the people I hate (aside from the roughly 20 people I would consider friends). Going to such a place, though, provides a somewhat decent introduction to what life has in store if you stay in D.C. Sure, there are "cooler" parts of town, but pretty much the same people. And I think the non-asshole/asshole ratio (20/~10,000) holds up across neighborhoods.

I've been in DC ever since, and have done various things at various times. I've had a couple decent jobs, and I've done the whole, life falls apart, work retail and at a rock club gig. For some reason, mostly beyond understanding, I'm still here. There are a lot of things about this city that piss me off, and I figure I might as well write about them. I'll attempt to offer some sort of constructive criticism, because I have a feeling the people in the Wilson building have nothing better to do than read blogs. Fenty probably gets email updates from this blog on one of his 20 Blackberries.

I'll be writing mostly about D.C. Government, and I'll probably be bashing WMATA a bunch as well. This town is falling apart, much like the rest of the country right now. There's a moderate chance we could see some actual changes here in DC in the next 4-8 years, even maybe getting a vote in Congress. Personally, I'd prefer just to be exempt from income tax instead, but hey, whatever. But unless all this shit that's broken now gets fixed, an actual voice in Congress isn't going to do anything, for anyone.

I'm going to bring this fluff piece to an end now, but I'll have some real red meat for you soon. In the meantime, I'm going to remind everyone, since it's been a while since Rusty had talked about it...

Estimated cost to the District of Columbia for Nationals' Park: $769.6 million
Estimated cost to the District of Columbia to buy every man, woman and child in the city a Glock 30: $382.4 million

I'll end each and every post with a ridiculous comparison such as that one.

Cheers.