DUPONT CIRCLE CAT BURGLAR CAUGHT - AT LAST!

BREAKING NEWS! Mme. Magpie could not have been happier. At the Dupont Circle ANC Meeting tonight, the MPD announced that they had FINALLY caught the notorious Dupont Circle cat burglar, and that he was confessing his crimes with great relish!

After he had been arrested, he was driven around town and amused himself by picking out home after home into which he had broken. The MPD seemed somewhat stunned with the breathtaking number and variety of his chimney-top entry methodology, but were definitely taking notes.

Mme. Magpie recalls his antics with a certain 'je ne sais quoi", because her nest had been a possible break-in site not long ago. One 4:00 am, she heard a strange noise, and asked her hubby if he had also heard it. When he said yes, she got up to investigate. Lo! and Behold! When she carefully and slowly opened her interior front hall door, she found that it was entirely filled with blue-uniformed MPD officers. She was appalled, of course – because she had on her second-best nightie rather than her Gloria Swanson, Marilyn Monroe special. The shmata didn't even come with a bathrobe, much less any sequins or rhinestones to set off Mme. Magpie's pure white hair! She complained to the Police Powers that be, and they just laughed at her.

It seems that Mme. Magpie's tenant had heard a sound on the roof and called in the MPD, which VERY much wanted to catch said burglar. The tenant didn't call Mme. Magpie, as it was, after all, 4:00 am. So it was quite a shock for Mme. Magpie to find her very own front hall had ben taken over by the MPD hoping that this call was going to be the magic, winning bell. Unfortunately, the sound most probably came from an overachieving raccoon who had been spotted, in a previous incident, shinnying down her rain spout. Such nerve!

This time, Good Karma has prevailed, and the Cat Burglar of Dupont Circle has finally been apprehended. To put it gently, the MPD is breathing a collective sigh of relief; after all a half a year without a Victory was serious bad, not only on the MPD's overtime budget, but on its morale – to say nothing of the morale of Dupont Circlers who came home to find their ceiling stomped in or the skylight open and the little goodies that make life worthwhile all gone. . .

Happy days are here again, folks! Mme. Magpie is imagining a brass band marching this way in celebration, but will settle for the drummers of Dupont Circle. Having solved this problem, let's bring on something much harder – how to find some good mayoral candidates, or maybe how to get voting rights in Congress. Anything seems possible on a day when the Cat Burglar of Dupont Circle is finally down to his last life, which she trusts will be well-spent in a permanent suite in the slammer! .

A CRAZED DRIVER BLAZES DOWN MY BLOCK; WHAT TO DO?

What do you do when some damn fool whips his turbocharged car past you, accelerating up to 60 mph (my estimate) on the block where you live?

Mme. Magpie – a past Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner - and her hubby – the current Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner of our Dupont Circle neighborhood - and a constituent were walking back from a community meeting the other night, when we were practically blown away by the undertow when a fancy foreign car went barreling past us like greased lightning, slamming on the brakes at the last possible minute at the end of the block. It was one of the worst exhibits of unsafe, risky city driving I’ve seen on our block, and I’ve lived at the same address for the past forty years.

There was no way I could let this outrage pass without notice. So I walked up to the car and called the driver on his life-threatening deed – I used no bad words, didn’t lose my temper and didn’t raise my voice. He responded with a sneer about

• how important he is (he said he was a doctor) and

• did I have any idea to whom I was talking, and

• who the hell did I think I was, anyhow, and

•how he intended to repeat his NASCAR experience ”multiple times” now that he knew where we live.

He then proceeded to unleash a full-blown diatribe, filled with unpleasant and certainly erroneous assumptions about what people who objected to his driving must be like. He swore

• that we were old geezers who disapproved of urban street life

• that we must think that everyone living here should be and act just like us, and

• that we wanted to prevent a varied, urban neighborhood.

His final, grand point was that because we lived in the city we had no right to expect people to obey traffic laws – I guess traffic laws must be strictly suburban. He told me, and I quote, “this is the city and I can do anything I want to here.” Perhaps I should be grateful that he didn’t have a Terrible Two temper tantrum on the spot. (Actually, short of lying on the ground, kicking his legs and holding his breath, that’s exactly what he was doing.)

I responded quietly, trying to explain that all I wanted was some sane driving on the block where I live, and that this was not an unreasonable expectation. At that, he stormed off in high dudgeon, disappearing into the evening crowd on 17^th Street.

I was afraid both of what further dangerous actions he might do with his car if he had (any more) alcohol in him, and I was dismayed by his threats to rerun a Grand Prix Course on Corcoran Street. And so I called the MPD.

The police responded quickly and in force. They took seriously his potential for dangerous driving as well as his threats to return and deliberately speed on the little street where I live – a short block with plenty of pedestrian traffic due to the “Soviet” Safeway on our block. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where he had gone, and after several minutes of waiting to see if he might return, the MPD slid off to check out other urban city activities. It was another night in Dodge on a street that used to be called Stab Alley.

Dog Park Heaven

It was about time, only twenty-odd years – and by God they WERE odd years – for the Dog Park to emerge at 17th and S Streets NW. I suppose that other births have taken longer (voting representation in Congress for example), but the struggle over the future of that smallish triangle of land was titanic.

The problem was that everyone had ideas on how that precious land should be used, and the idea folk were, all of them, quite rabid on their subject. There were off-the-leash dog people, and baby/small child people, and neighbors who went to bed early, and neighbors who definitely didn't want sleeping done there, etc., etc. Everyone had graduate degrees in public speaking or lawyering or sermon delivery, everyone had taken part in college Debate Club or had preached in Hyde Park or had become skilled speakers for (or against) anarchism or Transcendental Meditation, almost everyone could outshout Ethel Merman or Rush Limbaugh. And all were willing to show off their skills. Politicians took one look at the problem and decided there was no marked advantage to be had by taking up the cudgel for one or another position, and so ran off, promises fading into nothingness as they retreated to the relative sanity of a 17th Street watering hole.

So it was a miracle that the Dog Park came into actuality. It is a classy production, and the dogs love it. They have everything they could possibly want, short of a paw-driven dog biscuit-dispensing machine. Water, a hill that soaks up dog urine, and lots of other pooches to play with. Thirty to fifty dogs can be found there in weekend prime time, swirling around to imaginary music only they can hear. Their owners look almost as ecstatic as the dogs – they get to socialize as well. Even those without dogs have something just for them, an elegant gathering spot just ouside the southwesternmost corner of the Dog Park. There, the dogless ones can congregate and chat of matters non-canine. My late Irish Wolfhound, Ború of sacred memory, would have felt he was in Heaven. But of course, he IS in Heaven now! The sophisticated dogs now enjoying the Dupont Circle Dogpark at 17th and S may view Heaven's offerings with a bit of jaundice. They've already seen the best that Washington has to offer.